Just made my afternoon pot of tea, and figured I’d try to write a little something. My writing mojo has been fits and starts lately, so I figure best to start where I am to get it going again. And where I am at the moment is parked in the lounge chair again because it’s day 3 of my latest bout with Vertigo. And I’m not talking the Hitchcock movie. The last time I had vertigo, the Epley Maneuvers I did worked almost immediately. This time is taking a bit longer. I tell myself to enjoy the spells when they happen — my friends and I used to sneak into local carnivals, flirt with the carnies and then ride for free on the most terrifying thrill rides — sometimes two or three rounds on the Zipper or the Bullet before the guys would finally give us a break and let us off.It was a blast and the annual county fair was our playground for the duration it was here, so yeah, I tell myself, hey, this Vertigo thing can be just as much fun as those wild rides, yeah? And a heck of a lot safer. (As long as I’m not standing.) Here’s to putting a positive spin on things, right?
Category: ART
French Postcards for September
Stewardship
Returned home from a few days away yesterday. My dad will be back late from Ireland tomorrow, and today I sweated bullets in his flat, sorting through stuff that’s been lingering in boxes throughout his condo, gathering dust for the six years since my mother died. He has drawers, shelves, his attic — any possible nook imaginable with stuff cram-jammed everywhere. Stuff he’s been holding onto for my sisters, me, grandkids, in the event one of us wants it, or “needs” it. No one’s shown up to claim it, he simply doesn’t have the space to store it, and looking at these dusty boxes and unused home wares all the time…becomes a constant drain whether we’re aware of it or not. Old habits die hard though, he was a supply officer in the Marines, so he’s like the lady with the pocketbook on the old show “The Price is Right,” when the emcee asks for the most obscure thing and some lady in the audience waves that she’s got it. That’s my dad. Before you buy something, ask Dad. He might have it.
It’s hard going through this kind of stuff alone, representing several different lifetimes of a family’s experiences — history, travels, and varied interests — all accoutrements meant to enhance daily living and hopefully spark joy, but joyful use is not happening when it’s in boxes. My parents had lots of cool stuff — vintage and eclectic, collected from years of moving, travel, and my mother’s interior decorating passions. I’m basically curating, anything I keep must be used and cared for — I’m thinking stewardship, not ownership. “Curate!” Such an overused word of late, it sounds rathe “twee” and smug to me sometimes, unless we’re talking art and history, libraries and museums. But I love the word stewardship a lot, much more so than ownership, in relation to the things we own, the land we live on, the spaces we reside in. On so many levels, cultivating stewardship, just makes more sense to me, and is making it easier for me to part with things, as I wonder who their next steward will be.
Idyll
I sat outside early this morning in our jungle before the steam of the day rolled in around mid-morning, at which point I retreated to the atelier, where I now sit. Haven’t sat here for a week, as I’ve been away, and while I love away, I still haven’t found my go-to spot for my morning retreat when I’m away. This mini-retreat I take every morning is something I have come to need as a non-negotiable self-care (so overused that word is, BUT…it works) tool. However, while EVERY morning is the goal, it is not always the case, and that goes for when I’m home as well as when I’m away. I sometimes wonder how I can tweak it to make it more probable that it can happen consistently every day, but I haven’t yet figured that piece out yet. Of course, the other thing I struggle with is when I get to that headspace in my mini-retreat, I realize how much I love it in that place and never want the time to end. I think this is how some mystics are born. They don’t know they’re mystics. We don’t KNOW they’re mystics, sometimes until long after they’re gone. Then we may call them ancestors. These folks, they finally just plain decide to take a seat, whether on the front porch, under a plum tree, along a dusty road, or on a sidewalk bench; they sit, and watch the world go, with its drifting clouds, the wind rustling leaves with a quiet hush, birdsong nearby, a grasshopper jamboree in the distance, and scurrying people. People who pass by every day and eventually slow down a little because they’re drawn in to this character they see, but don’t see — whenever they walk by. A glance, a few glances, a shy smile, or perhaps a Cheshire-cat smile, or a tentative smile. Slowly whatever barrier between them begins to dissolve as they become curious — about a story. Each other’s story. And so something begins…and we get to fill in the ending…someday…if there is one…because isn’t that the beauty of story? The Never-ending part of it?
The Left Seat Premier
Chapter 1 is now available. If you’re interested, email me at damedishabille@gmail.com. This address is only to be used for requesting the five dollar invoice for the chapter, or requesting to be vetted for French Postcards. I will not and can not respond to anything else, including inquiries that aren’t serious.
Be aware that this erotic/satiric/melodramatic story will evolve. There will be occasions when the activity becomes extremely…erm…active, descriptive, vivid scenarios…get the picture? If you enjoy the languid, and lazy unwinding, rather indifferent eroticism of a slow seduction, this may be for you. If you enjoy the pulsating, intense urgency of a stolen moment you’ll never experience again, this may be for you. If you’re wondering, “what’s it all about, Alfie?,” then yes, this may be for you, too. Because, aren’t we all wondering…just what it’s all about?
A Good Day
Yesterday was a good day, beginning with breakfast by a window in the dining room of an old inn, courtesy of the gracious hostess, Amanda, who made an exception and allowed us to sit in a part of the dining room that wasn’t really open. Because she was right. I did help her open a can of worms — as someone else came in after us and also wanted a window table. I probably should have just waited for one of the other window tables to clear, and why I didn’t think of it at the time, I don’t know. It’s not like we have an agenda, or are on a schedule when we come here. I can be a pain-in-the-butt like that. And that leads me to the next good thing. Conversation. The deeper, rawer, could-be-can-be scary kind that turns out all right in the end because we’re listening more from a place of openness rather than our “wounded animal” selves, and we’re hearing it from someone we know in our bones loves us unconditionally, for whatever-the-f$ck reason they do. Those conversations can lead to better self-awareness, perception, and emotional insight, and I like those breakthroughs. There was also porch sitting, watching pre-schoolers lined up waving mini-flags for the Flag Day ceremony at the church across the street, and checking out the swarm of seniors on a bus tour disembarking for lunchtime at the inn. This included bearing witness to the cleverest comb-over you are ever likely to see. It truly was impressive.
All of this in the end led to some good character and story development for a project I’m working on with my favorite Manimal, and when I can feel like I am not only pleasing myself, but I am also pleasing someone else, well for me, that makes for a very good day.
Notebooks
My words sprawl across the pages of inexpensive, spiral bound sketchbooks. I’m a messy writer, scrawling and scratching and scribbling out words before I finally get a piece the way I want it. And sometimes I just have to let it fly as it is, knowing it’s not gonna be perfect but it’s the best I’ve got in the moment. It’s why I don’t like the precious, pretty journals they sell in bookstores and stationery shops — they intimidate me, the outside already looks like a finished work of art, while inside the blank pages stare back at me daring me to mess them up, and I just can’t. Give me scraggly sketchbooks filled with words spilled across the pages in my sloppy cursive and haphazard printing instead.
Wild
There was a beautiful home perched high above us on our walking route — settled on the utility pole right before our turn off onto another beach road. It’s been there for the past few years since we’ve been walking that way. Such a sweet home — I’m not sure if it has had the same stewards each year or not, but you can tell it’s been cared for, and the couple tending it work together in tandem, keeping it so. Sometimes one will fly off for some grub, perhaps while the other one nests. Monday we saw the two of them, sitting up there in their cozy nest, watching the world go by. We skipped yesterday’s walk because of the wind, but today’s we didn’t — as we neared the beach I dreaded to find what I saw was littering the road ahead. Yesterday’s fierce winds had torn through that nest, and smashed it to smithereens on the street below. I wondered about those ospreys. I was heartbroken for them, wondering if they’d found a safe place to land, while they rebuilt — hoping they hadn’t lost their babies and that they weren’t feeling as discouraged as I would’ve felt. Later this afternoon, I read in one of my newsletters about the Eastern Monarch Butterfly, and how 90% of their migratory grassland habitat has been destroyed by development.
War isn’t the only activity that decimates the landscape and its inhabitants. Home loss and violent weather systems brought on by human conceits — these things destroy lives too, both the living land and the beings who live upon it.
Poetry
I am enjoying more resistance art these days, particularly poetry. A recent favorite is a young poet originally from the Ukraine — art, resistance, despair, hope — the art and the resistance, whether passive or active can somehow help make the despair more bearable. The following is an excerpt from Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “American Tourist.”
From “Dancing in Odessa.”
“When Moses broke the sacred tablets on Sinai, the rich picked “adultery” and “kill” and “theft.” The poor got only ‘No’ ‘No’ ‘No.’”
The Monday Dash
Monday, Monday, be good to me. It’s what I said to myself this morning, and it hasn’t disappointed me. I love a slow dally into the day as much as I love old cemeteries, the hush and the reverence of a slow dawdle in a place where time stands still for an eternity for those who lie beneath There’s that dash on gravestones between the year of birth and the year of death, and the question “what did you you do with your dash?”and I wonder about those dashes. If their dashes felt the way ours do nowadays, like we are literally dashing through our days, and how aware were they of the blur that was their lives, if it was a blur the way our lives feel in the age of environmental and social collapse? Especially if we’re lucky enough to live for more than half a century? What rapid changes swept them up in their lifetimes as they sweep us up in ours, in the perpetual whirlwind of so-called human progress?