wut is wut

Loose ends pulled together
tie knots

Knots are funny aren't they? They are together, often tight, linked, the appearance of a woven element, intricate and intentional. You could be completely stuck in one too, tangled and trapped in two ends of yourself, or one end of you and another of someone/thing else, or perhaps caught held from falling down a steep cliff of reality, imagination, nightmare, dreams, futures....

Full moon, Friday the 13th. Except there is no full moon and now it's Saturday the 14th.

Those loose ends are tied, but in such a way that they really need a good pull from either end (or both?) before they really know they are tied, before it impacts how they twist tighter, unravel or hold fast.

I just want to pop.

Art needs a public. It doesn't need me there.

Standing in front of someone who isn't asking aloud, but with their eyes to tell them what to think about this work. A conversation, exchanges of words out of the mouths of others.

Skin itching in the clothes of another life. Light comes into the room.
Another chance to change the subject.

Pulled together, squeaked clean, stand still for moments. Open doors.


- -


What is next? I can't see beyond the end of my nose. Pulling thoughts out of my memory makes my eyes and the present go black. Grabbing words from the bank behind my eyes ties my tongue in knots, I nip the end with my teeth to check it still works, touch salty fingers.

What does it feel like? It's horrible, to lose yourself, to find you are ten points in twenty directions, each split end deadened and frizzing off.

The dirt smells like a drug

I have not felt this well placed in some time. Looking out across open fields, this place does not harbor my difficulties (I know they have their own) and I can freely be free. Smell the grass, watch the sun set over a low horizon.

The trees are from different generations, old oaks, young hickory, a small red bud, apples. Old pines, a few boxelder, I spot a buckthorn creeping. Blossoms fall thick and fast in an early gust of wind. It blows in the cold and wet that shapes our time, and yet I am in it every day. Like pulling on wellies and walking the coastal path, you are where you are out here. There is no need/want/desire to hide from it, to stay protected behind a screen, in front of a screen.

From here, things are built. I can imagine, the landscape opens, the walls fold down like a doll house. I can move, turn, twist, drop, pick up and shape. Must not try to do it all at once.

The wind blows, hard, constant. Jewel of the prairie. Old town, old streets. Low, wide verges.

I can build here. I can grow here, I stick my fingers in the dirt and want to push roots deep.

This is the beginning, what happens before the future happens, what happens before yesterday finishes and tomorrow is imagined.

Start again.

A missing tooth reminds you of what was and what is to come.

So is this day.

This betty be good.

I hadn't imagined I'd spend most of my time here on the computer, counting spaces, editing phrases, sorting through decades of eye witness, but I also said I wasn't to judge how I worked here 1) because I'm working 2) because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. 

And now, I don't think I'm ready to go, in some ways. In others, I will be pleased to have a space back that I can work with, that is in part mine to coordinate. I space I can collaborate with. 

Did I do this right? I don't know. But I did it. 

Today, at about 3pm, I nearly packed up the car and left. It would have taken me about 6 hours to pack and then I probably would have stayed, but that is how I felt. I am carrying a very heavy load of guilt around and it only takes a whisper to tip me over, pour me out. 

I cried when I tried to put her down for a nap. I raged when I heard the door slam 11 times in 20 minutes while I was trying to get her to go back to sleep. I raged at 2am when the hall light was left on. The worst of this is I really have no idea if these things have an effect on her sleeping. Does she stop nursing every time she hears a voice or hears the door open, yes. Did she sleep terribly last night until 2am? Yes. It isn't an exact science. Neither is making. 

It's not a tap, you don't just turn it on. However, I would think after 15 days I would have some sort of flow going. Instead I feel like a sputtering tap in a disused property, just turned on again after a long hiatus. Loud gusts, built up pressure, sometimes nothing, sometimes spurting, sometimes knocking the pipes against the wall. Am I doing it right? I don't know. 

Did I make the right choice? She asks if I was able to get a particular thing working. No, I answered honestly, I can't handle it. I am fairly confident she was just being supportive, trying to acknowledge that it's honestly too bad when you can't get something working that you had honestly wanted to do. I read it as failure. You're right, I suck I didn't get it working. It's just that I had decided I didn't care. It's currently the only way I can handle anything. If I don't do it, it really has to become something that doesn't matter one iota, or I am filled with guilt and disappointment. 

So tomorrow I'm going to try working on it again. First I need to spend at least another hour on this computer digging up some images that don't remind me of another time where I had better ideas, better hair, better better, better everywhere. 

What was was and here is

A line I have used and reused, perhaps in its vagueness it has a universal quality. Things turn over, if you compare yourself to a self in the past, you are comparing yourself to a different person. Yet, traces of self remain. We share qualities with these former selves and bring them (drag them, kicking and screaming sometimes) forward, or sideways, diagonally, however it serves us to move on from where we were to where we are. Past becoming present, or it is more accurate to say present becoming past? Are we making the future, or moving into it? Realizing it?

A record

When I arrived, there was more green here than where I came from. I have watched the undergrowth slowly build and cover the wood chipped earth. Thousands of white Johnny Jump Ups fading and giving way to ferns and Solomon's Seal. Great clumps of peonies are ready and waiting. The delicate spirea branches have quietly filled with bouquets and since Wednesday, I blinked and they are white. The blooms traveling from the sunny South side of the porch towards the shady West. Trees, bare and cold limbed in a week of gray and rain, burst into little leaf like tabs when the sun popped out, then blazed to life when the temperatures held steady overnight. A complete change - what a joy to be in a new place over the change of seasons. I am highly alerted to changes in my environment already.

In my personal environment as well. The first days here were very exciting, such possibility and opportunity. Then things didn't go as the dream desires. Every night while I struggled in tiredness to wake and feed #tinywonder without waking the whole house, guilty for making her have to respond to the needs of others when she can't understand them, then guilty for having a baby that dictates the way the entire world lives around them, not allowing others to have the time and space they dreamed about. Each night these simple feels would leave me giving up, not on that moment, but on my practice. For some reason, I had made this trip about whether or not I should continue to practice. At all.

I had thrown this around recently, should I change careers, make it more possible to have a lucrative employment experience that is also fulfilling. Should I give up this investment as a bad job, and focus on this new physical investment for a while (#tw). If I could only get my body and mind to come together and agree. Instead, one abstinence brought on an addiction in a different part of my life, as silly as it sounds, sugar. All these things being linked, the cycle was being fed and unreliable form of sustenance and I seemed to continue to spiral.  This over a period of four wet, cold, windy days in a new environment.

I suggested we had an accountability powwow. I struggled and felt unsettled after the things I said. I recognized this as a current problem. The things coming out of my mouth become false only moments after I say them even though I am a believer as they form and exit my body. This practice has been feeding a pattern of disappointment and doubt for some time.

The following day, after a particularly bad night, I awoke in such need of a plan that I just made one. Give up the current bad job and try something you can achieve, don't set yourself up for failure. You are here, be here. I wrote the goal for the day as "Stay here." While it seemed a physical request, it was 100% mental, with the physical falling in line.

"I'm not an artist anymore," I said to B when he called to see how things were going.

I visited places in my head where I had been on a roll, as they say. I pulled out something I had genuinely been interested in and was dumbfounded to discover it had been over a year since I'd really looked at it, 8 months or so since I'd thought about it. This piece of writing had given me something I'd lost and then I'd lost it.

This time and space suddenly took shape, and a 9x7in hole started to open. The walls I stripped, as much in a irritation and frustration, a bit of anger, as a need for a literal tabula rosa. Remove the visuals that are tying you to your thoughts. Give up the bad job, it won't get better by beating yourself up and crying sad tears over it (both, metaphorical phrases in this instance).

So I found it. And I wanted to write about it, but I was self editing before I wrote, and missed some of those 'live' thoughts of discovery. Even this, a draft, will be edited and reset before I commit it to my memory, but the real is getting too far away, it's turning into fiction.

I found both the project to immerse myself in, and at least a short term reason to keep trying. I discovered something I could do and not fall deeper into guilt debt with #tw, something of an achievable size to likely complete at version of in this period of time and space. It was less physical than I had hoped, not a big hands on outdoor activity, but putting the papers in my hands, placing only a stack of recycled paper between me and the world felt more real, and nostalgic in a wonderful way. I do love paper, and I do love the white world of a page space.

I still wish I could zip my mouth shut, but my brain was working again.

A lul in that work - of edting and reorganizing, and ordering and re ordering - I sent something off in other another's hands to work out for a while, and I collapsed again. The day to day seemed harder, I couldn't deal with what to do anymore, I didn't even have a short term plan. I refused to take a full day off, truly off to rest, recoup and recover, rekindle. So I struggled for almost three days, feeling useless, #tw being needy and wanting my physical and emotional responses right here, right now. I, feeling no joy in what I was trying to do, wouldn't let her take all that possibility away from me, so both parts of my life, for lack of a better term, sucked for a few days.

And so the cycle has continued.

I came here in part, and have realised perhaps my trip was entirely about this question, to discover how to continue practicing with this new shift in life. To exist as a person alongside #tinywonder, not just a caregiver and milk machine. They talk about bringing back body, getting back in shape. It's so much more about getting the mind body connection back in shape. It's cruel to suggest otherwise.

And I continue to learn, every day is still a bit of a struggle, as it was before I left our home environment, but many of those struggles I have been given time to reflect on.

I MUST remember some of these things on my return. I MUST give the time and space to solving problems, as well as to sustaining practices that are necessary, healthy, that move forward.

And, I must, as I have seen in my practice. See who and what I am as a gift, as a feature, not as a broken leg I'm dragging around. I can't be a peg that fits into anyone else's life or plans, unless they also become mine.

I must come back and tell the rest of this tale, and perhaps for the benefit of #tinywonder, tell it well.

"And so to bed, to dream on the event"

Just as soon as I feel it start to slow down, it speeds up again. Gathering speed to take the turn, the return.

The air is heavy with smoke today, a reminder of the connectivity of us all, of where we all sit on this big spinning ball.

Finishing up something which I thought was already done today, I feel the first strong pangs of excitement for the next project, for the new, for where I am moving to. I feel the transition might be something wonderful to participate in the creation of.

It's sparkly there (right now) and the rhythms are far more syncopated. The colors brighter. I hope it's more wild, less forest wild and more bazaar wild. I feel it will be louder there too, and yet I will find moments of intense quiet, quiet so loud it makes your head hurt.

Today is for dreams, and tomorrow (or perhaps the day after that) is for plans.

Editor, editing

I hate to curate as I work. There are times for this and there are times for pure release. Allowing yourself to put your ideas into the world and not judge them. To test without quality assurance, build without health and safety regulations other than intuitive pressing and knocking.

The editor this week has stifled the maker. However, in an effort to not only let practice play out but to let part of practice be the framing of practice, I have allowed this to happen and trust that it has been necessary, important to watch myself shift between roles, to recognize what I enjoy, where I thrive, where I stumble and glitch.

If I could stop vocalizing, not to stop thinking or even speaking, but to mute, so that I can watch what's going on around me and allow it a chance to speak with something other than words, this would be a feat.

To witness is to learn and grow, to self witness is feast.

There it is

The lights float across my vision silently, but the sounds are muted, maybe because my mind is full, perhaps they are loud and disruptive, but I don't hear them.

Afternoons stretch into nights here, I am remembering how to do that. To let hours pass, to let belly become empty.

I can stretch life out further on less this way.
Drop things off the plate, watch them crash onto cold concrete or disappear into dry soil.
Did they matter? Perhaps they can feed someone else's fury.

The images are slowing.
The sounds are melding.
The steps move from a shuffle to a simple march.

I'm finding that new rhythm.

Give it to me

She lifts something for me. Day, light, weight, dark.

She can stand there - for only a moment - looking at me, not for reassurance, but to share.

She gives me that part of her. With this, at the premier I can rise:

You are doing a good job.

--

I take a moment to jump off the surface of the plaent. Nothing separating me from the earth itself but my skin. I jump and pull atoms away with me. Then I lay on my back and make as much contact with the dirt as I can. I try to imagine 20,000/mph. As if.

A million seconds is 2 weeks.
A billion seconds is 32 years.

I can't tell you if it's been 2 minutes or 12 since I starting writing. It makes me wonder if there is a real difference. Also, I wonder if my questions are not wrong or faulty, but simply bad.

Speak for yourself

Every letter is pressed carefully - each one intentional and meaningful yet they mean nothing as letters. I speak and the sounds blur into words, lips move into formation. (Ok ladies.)

Offering truths or lies, facts or fictions as is necessary or needed to get you from one point to the next, one moment to another. The phase just past informs that which follows - it's best not to rehearse if you want to get it right.

Who does that?

Chase the horizon line

In my dream this was a running away, but first breaking things and knocking them over on my way out of town.

Nails, screws, bolts, pins and needles scattering and falling across floor boards spilling down gaps and sliding into corners. Old wooden legs scraping and creaking as they slide and finally give way. Upper stories crashing and cracking behind me.

I can feel blood rising to my face, angry eyes on my back turning to tears. Is this anger or a search for a fuller life? A complete and complex absence of feeling, a black hole.

Nevermind the pins and needles, it's where I'm going that concerns me now. The gray is lighter today, not in color, but in weight. I feel I could lift and duck under it - would I be going in? or out?

Another chance of rain

 Clouded. I want to remove the fog. Nevermind memory, long gone.

Right ahead of me, a soft curve fading to dust.

Tree line reinvented as horizon cuts the top fork, clean.

Telephone wires a staff for notes, or letters.

I move closer – to the day? the fog? To my questions?

To the window. I see the rain pooling on spiria leaves.

The weight is exhausting, like a pack I’ve picked up thinking it was mine only to find its that of a much more equipped being.

Over bearing. I feel the child is clouding mother. I mean there is false choice getting in the way of true selection.

<Ahhhhhhghhhhggggh. A low groan indicates I am in the midst, in medias res. This is deep, murky shit and I don’t know if I am more worried at how long it will take to wash off or if I’ll leave part of me lost in it as I struggle to claw my way out.>  

You don’t get credit for living

Spaces are opening around me and I have my head down, watching my feet make prints in the snow, sliding in the mud, watching the trail of discard behind me.

I am not running, but I am rushing. Hollow, and dull, the ideas come they just don’t thicken.

I need arrowroot, cornstarch, cream of tartar, flour. Something to gum up, give weight to my mass.

She rolls and I quiver.

I want to sit quietly and work reverently.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Don’t give up yet or it won’t count. 

You are doing a good job.

 Order.

Sequence.

Weaving. No, woven.

I feel absolutely certain of nothing except maybe that if I keep weaving these ideas, thoughts and memories together in front of me, they will begin to make some sort of sense.

Threads coming together, image or pattern appearing.

As I weave I notice how the product is the same whether I’ve pieced it together from every cardinal direction or carefully laid a frame east to west and one by one, threaded from south to north, travelling west to east until the frame is full, taught.