Pain

 Pain is a background hum of so many lives these days.  There is so much pain out there and a hopeless sense that there’s nothing to be done.   It can feel overwhelming  

 I have an ambivalent feeling about low level pain.  It’s an annoyance, an energy drain but also a motivator to do what I can to relieve it.   I think it’s a fool’s goal to eradicate it; won’t happen while I’m in a body.  And as long as I can escape in sleep or a good story, I can attenuate to it most of the time.  I’m not clear if chronic shoulder pain led Bob to take an overdose of Lorazepam yesterday, or boredom.   I think of people with intractable pain and wonder how they can stay engaged with their lives.  I think of Freda Kahlo  how did she turn her pain into art?  Was it the escape drug of creativity?   How do I find that?  I think getting back in the harness of new habits, walking, writing and now the touch typing app,  may eventually bear fruit    

I remember a bolt of awareness when I was a teenager  that “comfort addiction” was the great danger   I feel it playing out now when I “don’t wanna” take a walk or wash my floor.   I see Bob’s situation as exacerbated by that and want to learn from his pain not waste it

This isn’t working

 Somehow leaving the writing til the end of the day ISN’T working.    I’m relying on late night, half asleep ruminations where what I really want is to built a scaffolding of habit.  For all of my going on about not wanting to be driven by the need to accomplish, I do need to feel like I’m building something in this new life    I know I’m hanging open but it can’t all be just what’s  easy and no stress.   A little daily discipline, for no other reason than because I said so, would be good for my soul.     

So I’m going to recommit to 24 days in a row of writing. And I’d like to build it into my morning. And it isn’t going to be easy,

My bro in law may have tried to commit suicide tonight   It doesn’t appear that he will die from it  but in so many ways he’d already chosen to let go of his life, to avoid effort, discomfort, engagement    I love him; he reminds me so much of Gil   But that is Not how I want to live this end phase of my life   So perhaps a little more effort, discomfort, engagement is what I can try to commit to as a response to what he is choosing     It’ll be hard perhaps, but I may feel more alive because of it

Crises

 I noticed years ago how during a crisis I feel more alive.  Slightly embarrassing, when I was 9 I remember saying to my mom that I wish I’d been alive during WW11   She shushed me, said I didn’t know what I was talking about (true) but what I was getting at was the clarity of good and bad that comes with crises and the energy, the urgency.  I definitely had a long stretch of never ending crises with Gils health, David’s prison, Adam’s GB and others at work and building the house.  And they did indeed clarify thought and add (and drain) energy.  They also gave me an intense experience of “there’s More going on than meets the eye” a feeling of spiritual closeness.   I said once that era ended with Gil’s death, that I’d become a crisis addict   Not only did they make me feel intensely alive they also gave me permission to only deal with the challenge in front of me not the day to day slog of keeping floors clean and paying bills.   

I am not in crisis mode now.  I’m rewatching  A Gentleman from Moscow  and as I watch the way life and death War time informs the characters, I wonder is it possible to have that without all the fear and pain?  I’m listening to a podcast about someone who with a devastating cancer diagnosis, is blown open with feeling connected to LIFE, with loving even the mundane day to day of it.     I’ve been there.   Can I experience that without feeling on the edge of disaster?

Many years ago when Adam was about a year+ old, Tom wasn’t sure that he wanted to stay married to me.  We were living in a trailer as we were trying to build our house and during the day Tom would take our one vehicle over to spend time “working” with his new sweetie.   I was 24 with no marketable skills and I was terrified.    I remember one night lying in Bed with Tom who didn’t want me to touch him, feeling like I was falling into a black hole.   And then.  There was a feeling (I don’t think I actually saw anything) of a bright light at the end of a tunnel. And a voice said  “ You will survive. There will an other slide of this experience and you will be stronger and wiser for what you’ve gone through. You are not alone”.  In my memory It was such an intense feeling    And it was the beginning of my experience of crises as a potential gift.  And a reawakening of my spiritual curiosity.      

Lord only knows there are plenty of crises in our world right now.  But the portal is not wallowing in the awfulness.  It’s using the fear, and….?  to feel the intensity of life,   See the beauty and possibilities.   I’m not sure the way in.  I think I thought the challenge of the downsizing and the move might do it.  Not yet.  I want to find the way in without disaster at my back.   But how? (A common refrain in my life these days)

I call BS

 Hmmm what I wrote last night has a strand of BS and perhaps some truth. Being alive in a body IS all potential energy and not doing things which feed, cloth repair and grow our lives , is a waste.   I DO like to move through my lists, checking off calls, bill paying and floor cleaning without anguishing about whether I want to or not.    Just DO It, don’t think about has been a long held mantra.

So what was I dithering about last night…?   I think it’s about balance and a gentleness of self admonitions    Some days I barely start my list (or never make one!), other days I cross off everything.   Yes it feels good but the balance for me is finding equal enjoyment from letting the list go.   And not becoming too attached to my worth being tied to my level of accomplishment as my mom did.    

I’m starting to tire of navel gazing.   I’m hungry for doing (yes accomplishing) something of value,  to me or those I love or better yet the World.  But what?

So the bored and restless phase is hitting me.   I think my chewing on the idea of doing something of?worth?meaning?usefullness? Is the start of the discomfort of no longer having a role defined by my Doing.  So I should expect BS to come out of my fingers. I am trying to shed many years’ identity as a farmer, a counselor, a crafter.    I am grasping at straws of what else I have in me.   And do I have the energy to become it?

Accomplishment

 I remember mom saying that she didn’t feel good about herself if she wasn’t accomplishing something.  It made me feel a little sad for her.  But I know the heady sense of power that comes from making and tweaking and jarring 29 quarts of Minestrone AND dispersing them to various freezers and fridges!   I DO like the feeling of crossing things off my lists, but I fear the busyness which distracts me from asking what do I want, to do, to be, to contemplate; ?  I don’t think accomplishing needs to be mutually incompatible with Being, but it def can be misleading, pointing to what was done rather than why and to what end?  

My fear is with all the silence and lack of demands or responsibilities,    that there will be Nothing, crickets, pointlessness.   But I think that’s what I need to face and find out.    “It wouldn’t be the Hero’s Journey if the outcome was safe and certain”

But having a body and breath and hands means having potential.   Potential energy is to be used.   I can scribble nonsense and crumple it up and throw it away.   Or I can try to Further the Action, make my spot in the world a better place, more kindness and order and gladness for the miracle of being alive.  Perhaps accomplishment in the service of being alive is sufficient      Blah blah blah.   Is this just pointless bullshit ruminating or am I actually pursuing something important?    Maybe both

Minestrone

 I’m making my vat of soup (only one flavor this year)(maybe). It’s my annual favorite and I truly throw every vegetable I grow into it plus bone broth. This year most all of it is from my freezer, spinning frozen vegis into gold and making room in the freezer too hopefully.  Which perhaps is a metaphor for these blogs.

I sit down to write and root around for some image or sensation, some memory or feeling that seems to have  hmmm  some potential nutritional value for my life.   I keep hoping for some order, some organizing principle to emerge, (and hopefully some improvement in writing skills) but it stays, at least so far, sort of a minestrone of thought.   I read about writers who just force themselves to write even when they have no conscious “thing to say” but I find myself wondering what’s the point?   What does it accomplish?  I assume foremost is developing the habit of writing, that seems worth having. But truly would writing nonsense syllables do the same thing?  No.   I think it might allow for something to slip out of my mind,  And I may not see the patterns til I have a vat of them simmering in my unconscious     

I am finishing the initial adjustment to The Change.  The habits are there but not strong enough to be neglected.  I’m making little adjustments to my living space and routines (have started dressing in front of the gas fireplace in the morn, surprisingly reminiscent of my fire at the farm). I gather ideas from folk I see about what’s on the menu, like cruises and traveling.  Thinking about traveling to see people I’ve lost touch with who live in foreign lands.   I contemplate finding a Cause to promote  but fear it being performative, like trying to fall in love.   If something grabs me, I’m willing to be swept up but I’m not going to fake it.    So now I really am Face to Face with the Second Step, as I’ve beaten that expression into the ground these last months.   But I think I am.  The move is done.  I’m here.   Now what??

Family

 It’s odd this feeling an underlying connection yet not really having any current involvement. I went to a family wedding, saw many1st 2nd cousins of all sorts of remove.  We share dna and certain prolivities but not much day to day connection.   What am I trying to say??? I feel a connection which is deeper than liking.   It’s an idea I’d like to explore 

I wouldn’t pick any of my family out of a line up of potential best friends.  But I’d put my life on the line for them.   What the hey?  Is it some biological thing, like the way my own baby’s poop doesn’t really smell bad to me?   Or is it the stories I tell myself?   I read a lot of turn of the century kids books when I was young, Five Little Peppers, 5 Children and IT by Nesbit,  the Little House books, the Narnia Books  They all have a very strong Given, that siblings stand up for each other, put up with phases of shit behavior, but always remain connected.    That story is deeply ingrained in me.   When I see folks who don’t have that ethos, I always wonder what went wrong?   Did they just not read the books?!? 

These cousins I saw at the wedding, some of them who were very different ages than me, I never really had a relationship with, but I look at them and know they have a lot of the same dna as me.   I don’t feel as close to them as I do to the ones I played with as kids, but I feel curious about how they used the building blocks they were given which had a lot in common with mine, how did they become who they are?  

It’s why I’m so curious about my biological grandparents.   I look at my granddaughters and see the curly hair, the ADD, and book/word addiction. All of which I feel they inherited from me via their dad.  And I wonder what I inherited from mine?   I know mom’s mom was theatrical, and creative, and she  made grapefruit candy and chocolates    What else do I have from her? Mom’s dad was a theoretical physicist, not sure I have any of that gift, but I do ruminate.  A lot.   I do try to find patterns   I think metaphorically  seeing patterns and relationships in one domain that seem to explain and predict relationships in some completely other domain.    Is that part of what my grandfather Page did in his “thinking chair” which I now sit in?   (Mom was a late child in her parents’ lives, and pretty ADHD. When she was little her mom told her that though it might look like her dad was sitting in a chair doing nothing, that he was Thinking, and that whenever he was in his Thinking Chair he was to be left alone) (I love that image).   

I know others who are not close to family so I suspect it may be less genetic and more the stories.  Which lines up with my current interest in how the stories we tell ourselves shape our experience of life and then how we act.  But genetics clearly play some role.      I told Piper that I’m writing these ruminations for her children to know some of their roots. In a way doing it for them, eases a little of my longing for some message in a bottle from my grands, and finding my dad’s parents’ origin stories

Walking in the Dark continued

 One of the most powerful perspective shakeups this lifetime was years ago when I lived on the farm in Bell Center.  Our chickens were free range and the chicken house was down a ways on our dark driveway.  I needed to go down and shut the door after the chickens went in at night.  I  remember noticing my fear walking in the dark and asked myself what was I scared of? I heard myself respond “the wild things”.  A beat and then I heard a voice in my head say “but You are a wild thing too.  You have tools and a brain to  plan with and they have tooth and claw.  You are a wild thing amongst wild things”.    Boom!

And I have never been afraid of walking in the dark since then.  In fact I prefer walking in the dark. I feel like i sense things , hear things better, even see things outside better without the blinding quality of a flashlight.    That insight produced such a dramatic change in my life experience, I would so love to have something equally powerful now      Obviously I can’t stomp my foot and demand a Damascus moment,  but I can chose to walk into discomfort and ask myself what’s going on.    Comfort addiction, safe and warm is wonderful but it does not feed the potential of  Boom!

Walking in the Dark

 I’ve been reading an article re can you trust the future you will still have the same values and beliefs and ideals as you do now.    And though I follow the logic of the author and have heard this question before, I feel a through line in my evolution this lifetime.    I was a teenager when I came up with “you’re always growing but you don’t know what to, but if you pay attention you can sense when you’re on the path or off. The point is to pay attention to that ability to sense the “furthering the action”  of a life choice  rather than the content.   The content will change but my ability to sense my Magnetic True North has been my  goal and gift throughout my life     

So, yes I do trust Future me   I don’t know what she’ll be doing or feeling or even valuing , but she will still be searching for a way to be in the world which feels honest, real and expanding what is good in the world     not sure if that is pretentious? don’t think so.  When I think back on my “stringing pearls” moments of deep awareness, all of them feel like they still come from the deepest part of a consistent me.    Content will change; I may invest energy in fruitless or even destructive ventures, but nothing is wasted if I learn that No, that’s not for me.   I don’t even hope that all my choices during these next years are perfectly fruitful and satisfying.  I just want to be fully engaged with whatever I do and keep my nose to the air re is it the next right step?   I’m walking in the dark. Sometimes it’s easier to sense things in the dark

Cleaning House

 I’ve been sloppy, letting things go.  Dishes in the sink a dirty flour, not writing as regularly as I committed to, or walking.  I’ve been feeling more pain, feeling at loose ends.  

Time to clean house.  Yes the floors, but also my head.  “Pull up your socks Ms Page”. I know what to do. One foot in front of the other.  

Swept the floor 15 mins. Vacuumed rug 5 mins. Washed the floor and started the stairs, 15 mins.   Clean floors.  Took a walk only a mile.  Writing this now then I’ll do the dishes.  Tomorrow I will feel better. Letting things slide isn’t being nice to myself   (Though it’s hard to believe at the time)  Gently 

I don’t need to be militant about things, just gently, persistently leaning toward what my being knows is Good