litbitch

staggering towards thankfulness

easy:
warmth, wind, strength and the absence of physical pain
These are my most consistent crutches. Doesn't sound so bad, right?  Some people use drugs, sex, constant social interaction, work. I've used them myself, occasionally.  These are wrong, right?  These are potentially destructive.  I could create a scale of crutches - good to bad.  On the bad extreme would be the stimulation of feeling superior to others, schadenfreude, on the good side helping others or spiritual peace.  I'm a bright girl.  I know that even meditation and yoga can be crutches.  Y'know, I think about this shit.  I've often paraphrased Alan Watts who said the ultimate goal of meditation is to get to the point where you don't need to meditate anymore.  Where everything you do is a meditation.  I intellectually comprehend the spiritual benefit to being forced to interact with people who I can't stand, the growth and love that is possible in loss, in death, in hitting bottom. I know that everyone's pain is valid.  I know there is beauty in destruction.  I know there is endless potential for growth. 

And then I have days like the last few, and I find I have little compassion for myself, and consequently little for the world. When I want nothing more than to be other than what I am at this moment.  And it started, as it often does, with physical pain.  Searing pain in my sciatic nerve that makes it hard to walk, difficult even to sit, without stabbing pain.  So there go my plans for this 4 day weekend.  No painting the bedrooms. No cleaning. No enjoying the first snow with a slippery walk.  Even reading is difficult.  Partially because it is hard to get into a comfortable position, but mostly because the fear and self-absorption that surrounds the pain is too distracting.  Not again.  Not after the money and time and energy spent on pilates and exercise. How long will I have to put up with this.  Will I spend the rest of my life in a pointless job and pointless exercises that will only bring me to this same point of pain and depression? Why me? Why me? Why me?

All that intellectual understanding falls away and I'm just like every other idiot out there. 

minus one

egads, in moments when I can see the gifts around me, I think perhaps I wilfully blind myself othertimes because the beauty is almost overwhelming

thank you for all the love of the last few years

    I dunno, I say, weeding through the past, 

    lust? crush? I don't know what to call them

    it's always love, he says
    he? always?

    i never would have guessed. cowboy poetry.

    i curl up, softened by his jagged edges. sublimated.

Why not?

Gentle, rough, brief, lingering, sweet, salty, lovely ... lovely.  How can I feel deprived? I am swimming in love. I am lost in its lushness.  I feel it vibrating all around me.  Not always, but when I open the door it, it's there.  It sneaks in.  Just enough.  It feels like home. 

A facebook update recently: "Zoe is in love."  A couple people inquired who.  No one.  Some congratulated me.  Thanks.  I was in love.  With the gorgeous day, with the warm wind, with the strength of my body and the sensitivity of my skin to be able to feel it, to be in it.  The freedom to walk through it, with it all.  I suppose this can't help but sound cheesy, hippie-y, but the feeling of being wrapped in a wind-brushed fall day and the feeling of being infatuated with a boy are virtually indistinguishable for me.  Rather than enumerate blessings today, I'll close with this from Terry Tempest Williams

I think of my own stream of desires, how cautious I have become with love.  It is a vulnerable enterprise to feel deeply and I may not survive my affections. [...] If I choose not to become attached to nouns - a person, place, or thing - then when I refuse an intimate's love or hoard my spirit [...] my heart cannot be broken because I never risked giving it away. 

But what kind of impoverishment is this to withhold emotion, to restrain our passionate nature in the face of a generous life just to appease our fears? A man or woman whose mind reins in the heart when the body sings desperately for connection can only expect more isolation and greater ecological disease.  Our lack of intimacy with each other is in direct proportion to our lack of intimacy with the land.  We have taken our love inside and abandoned the wild.

I doubt anyone would accuse me of being too open with my affections.  I fear rejection as much as the next freak.  But I'm not settling, and I am inexpressibly thankful for having the verve and self-awareness that that requires.  And I'm not staying still.  And I am going outside.  And I am in love.

2 days (late!)

mad props for:

staying out too late to blog
slow days at work when the boss is gone
fighting off SAD with the elliptical monster
the BLB
tube socks
having the self-awareness to know when I'm being a bitch
friends, after months of self-imposed solitude

3 days til turkeythanks

How did I screw up those numbers?

And the title is inaccurate anyway.  I haven't had turkey since last thanksgiving.  Other than that and a few of Caffrey's chicken & peppers sandwiches, I haven't had any poultry since sometime in September of last year.  And the Caffrey's sandwiches don't count.  I mean, really, instead of being labelled as meat consumption, it should be a controlled substance.  I swear, there is crack in that sandwich.  Since I am not powerless over crack, I haven't had one in 6 months or so.  But I can't swear I won't do it again.  One day at a time.  (god, that was a crap show)

I gave up poultry for a long time, mostly because the texture freaked me out (gave up red meat at 12 or 13 which was, well, a few years ago).  I don't like eating any meat that actually looks like a body part.  I had been eating chicken & turkey again the last 5 years or so, but lately the chicken conditions, as it were, the environmental hazards they create, and the health risks as a result of those conditions, have caused me to drop-kick the stupid birds once again.  So I'm thinking fish this year.  It seems important that something die in tribute to this bellicose country I still love. Mom & Jim are taking me to Fire Lake so woo-hoo! (I hope that Bob Seger song just got stuck in your head.  It invades mine every time I walk past the damn restaurant on my way to work.)

anyway, here are my thanks for today:
Rod Reppe Sr.
Prophet
laughter
compassion
memory

5 turkeyless days

a hatless day
Stitelers
bad auditions
Uptown
Ingmar Bergman
the Sunday New York Times

t minus 6 days

clean, white, articulate snow
Terry Tempest Williams
prairie dogs that pray to the sunrise and sunset every day

t minus 7 days to thankfulness

I don't spend enough time being grateful, and yet on thanksgiving i find myself overwhelmed with too many gifts to enumerate.  To keep myself on track during what, for whatever reason, has been an emotionally grey, and, for inevitable reasons, environmentally gray time (yes, I switched spellings - ha!), I've decided to list my blessings daily, as they come to me (and utterly without irony, of course.  sarcasm? never heard of it).
so today good on the following

3 guys - one old, two new - who welcomed me into their geek circle for a couple terribly fun hours of conversation

Raymond Carver
Simone's sweet, sexy, charming voice
Bedlam
fiber
tube socks
facebook's life lessons (don't accept her friend request; don't expect her to change; don't think you could've saved her; don't hate her for being the things you don't like about yourself; don't yell at the computer - it can't hear you over the din of self-obsession)

this country is too big

It's so easy to reinvent oneself.  To change geography, climate, dialect, culture.  Move from a high-tax to a fiscally conservative state; a poor public school system to a great one.

The downside is, we live in the same country, but we're worlds apart. 

The midwest gives the illusion of being equally close to most corners of the continent, but in reality you're just equally distant.  Equidistant.

Too distant to be touched by the one, to fall for the other, to comfort the third, to rescue the fourth.  Too far to participate or to bear witness.
The information superhighway has made the world smaller, or made our expectations larger.  If communication is just a click and a beep away, how could it still take a week for me to get to you? Our citizens used to think little of waiting months for a visit, weeks for a word.  We seem to have lost our patience; something I've never had much of anyway. When I lived in California, I had no great desire to go anywhere.  Now I work for comp time, and I charge for airline miles.  It's been nearly a year since a set foot on a coast.  It's too long.  I feel ... landlocked.

Clearly the winter doldrums are already flirting with me.  Sluts.

post secret

I'm sure most of you have heard of this.  I vaguely recall some reference on NPR, but I'm always slow on the internet train.  I've ranted in the past about my disgust/shame with people's desperate need to belong to a group, the pathetic granfalloons that we think will make us feel more loved, less aberrant, less lonely, more significant.  At the same time I recognize the necessity to feel a part of this world, when, by virtue of our clearly defined bodies, not to mention homes and thoughts, essentially alone.  I was exposed to this Dickens quote again recently:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret;  that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I  loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all…It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page...

"no shit, Sherlock" scientific study of the day

Bullies may experience pleasure seeing others in pain.

Next up: children from abusive households less confident, emotionally stable than others

and

fire can burn.  burn is hot.  hot cause pain. ow. ow.