Joseph Brodsky.

Grow accustomed to the desert as to fate/lest you find it omnipresent much too late.

~Joseph Brodsky 

Someone sent me these poems a few years back, and the second half of the audio has two of my favorite poems by Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet. There is something so beautiful about the idea that there are other people who exist in the world who understand the depth of being (as much as it can be understood, of course) and who are able to put pen to paper and make something of it, or maybe they create meaning with the writing itself. I dunno. Anyhow, listen if you like. The reader has a beautiful voice and cadence.

All is not lost, my dear

Oh man, I've been feeling down for a few days. I don't want to call myself a "downer" however, for fear this name-calling would only plunge me back into ceiling-staring-land (or as it was last night, star-staring-land). And I don't want to be hard on myself, since the temperature plunged overnight, the holidays are fast approaching (oh dear lord), and the director of the CIA is embroiled in scandal. Then there's Hurricane Sandy, legalization of being a pothead in Colorado, and the neverending depression of Obamacare. Need I say more? How can a simple girl like me go on living in all of this chaos?

But then, a dimly flickering light in the darkness: lunch at the Armenian place across the street, filled with fresh pita, tzatziki, and the most wonderful falafel I've had in a long time. Suddenly, the world was right again, my blood sugar normalized, and my days-long freak-out ended.

Peace out mofos :)

The full moon :)

Aren't these pictures funny and weird?

Tonight, after yoga, I stood by the bread factory in my short shorts, yoga mat in hand, watching the train go by under a full moon, and cried. And the train kept going, and going, and I knew I needed it to pass before I could cross the tracks to go home anyway, so I just stood there and got out as much as I could.

I'm okay. I can be big and loud sometimes, and that includes being sad, but I'm okay. People always think that I'm worse off than I am. The funny thing is, when it was really bad, several years ago, very few people saw me in my total life-stops-completely grief. Now I just cry and watch the train, then go home and make dinner, and do it all again tomorrow. I'm really doing well, and sometimes I have long, difficult days, but that doesn't change how I feel on the inside about myself.

Anyhow, having a job where you help people makes you have to constantly remind yourself that you are powerless to change other people. Sometimes I just have to say that to myself (I'm always talking to myself), and the fog lifts, my furrowed brows lift, and the world is right again.

I say "oh dear lord" a lot.

Makes you wanna go outside and ride a bike, don' it?

Today was the one day a month that I wash my sheets, clean my bathroom, wash dishes, and go to estate sales. Yeah, I'm a boss like that. Anyhow, I bought nothing at the sales that I went to. High prices + houses full of grief = Ack! Get me outta here!

In one sale that I went to, they made sure I knew that they had had things appraised. They wanted me to know that as I looked through the jewelry, they knew how much it was worth, and they weren't going to let scary 'ol me cheat them out of any money they were owed. Yikes. There was a palpable feeling in the house, a feeling of anger. And I walked out the front door, I heard one woman mention her mother who had died, and whose belongings they were hawking selling.

Suddenly, it all made sense, the feeling in the house, and I was reminded of how important it is to not get yourself into situations where you're hanging on too tight to things, when what you really want to hang on to are people (or in some cases, dogs).

So yeah, life lesson of the day.

I can't think of a title.

Shimano shoes - simple style, but very useable :)

I went to the city this weekend with my bff, saw Lori McKenna (ah, bliss), and had a silly time being away from home and getting back on solid ground.

Last week was really hard. I was faced with my professional inadequacies, and that was painful and difficult to work through. Somehow I thought graduating would make me more of a pro, and less like swiss cheese, but ah, 'tis not to be.

Have you ever told yourself (or someone else), "Yeah, I've dealt with that" or "That's not an issue for me anymore"? Well that was what I thought about my own struggles. I probably never realized that I was believing that I was whole and healed (and perfect), but my actions spoke otherwise. I've been behaving like someone who looks the part, but doesn't have all the skills yet. Yeah, teenagers can have sex, but should they? It's like that. So now that my humility has been sufficiently restored, I can go back to the business of helping people with my ego somewhat wounded, but my general safety improved.

I saw Ghandi yesterday, and now I'm reminded how he beat his wife, and how being human means being imperfect, and learning and growing and changing, becoming better, stronger, and wiser (hopefully).

Peace out :)

All the way to the end

I have taken the week off of thrifting and have committed to getting more of my inventory (i.e. overflowing box in my living room) listed. It seems to be going fairly well, if you don't include the rude intrusion of various humongous problems that shall not be listed here. I spent all of Monday photographing and listing, and that went very well. I have noticed, however, that there is a certain point where I have so much stuff that I have difficulty finding an item that has already been bought and paid for! When I had 100 items in my eBay shop, this was never a problem. But for some reason, 150 crosses that invisible line.

I have a couple dresses that need to be photographed. This photo reminds me that one of them is a vintage wedding dress. I tried to photograph it once before, but I just couldn't find the right light and surroundings to do it justice.

Now here's the important stuff that has nothing to do with the thrift store aspects of thrifting, prompted by the recent shootings in Seattle, by which my community has been affected directly: Life is really, really crappy, and life is really, really wonderful, and it's all jumbled up together in a big indistinguishable blob where you don't know which end is up, and whether suicide is a good option, or the stupidest option of all. In life, we will experience losses that will change us forever, scar us forever, and that is just how it is. There will always be grief, and there will always be loss, and our job sometimes is to ride the wave smoothly, even when the pain is unbearable.

Survive the best you can.

Don't you just wanna feed it bugs?

Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo. What a day. It began with a night of terrible insomnia, followed by interactions with the police after I found my friend's home had been broken into overnight. What a day -- not one I'd like to repeat anytime soon. My friend's already antsy, loud, and annoying dog was on point today, yelping all over the house, letting me know that something was terribly, terribly wrong. And it was.

Why do people steal from their neighbors? Why do people steal at all? My experience last year with a home robbery was traumatic in a way, and I don't ever want to experience anything like it again. But seeing the drawers opened all over the house reminded me that bad things happen to good people, and there are no warnings to the crap that happens to us sometimes.

All I want to do is help people survive the crap they get dealt. But when I see the perpetrators damage in front of me, tangible evidence, I feel a little loss of hope. Then this afternoon, I came home in the middle of a gang territorial confrontation on the corner by my house. It feels like there is no hope, like this is life, and all we can do is survive the best we can.

A challenging task

 

I am not feeling so great about myself right now. I feel like people are judging me for having a masters degree and not having a solid plan for my life. And these aren't imaginary people - these are people I love! So I'm sitting here trying to convince myself that somehow it's more important to be myself than it is to be who other people expect me to be, even when those people are the people I love most in the world. That's a challenging task.

In school, I had a teacher who scared me, and no matter how much time I spent with this person, I never felt truly accepted. I felt small, and insignificant; not enough. As time went by, I realized that even though I respected this person more than I respected myself, I had to let go of the need to be accepted by them. In order to maintain my own sanity, I had to throw away the idea that my identity somehow hinged on their perception of me, even though that perception was super important to how I saw myself as a person and professional.

So now to be faced with that same dilemma in any form is only a stiff reminder of how important it is to love myself first. I will crumble if I allow an imagined perception of someone else's judgement to determine who I am, even though my faith tells me that other people are more important than me.

Coffee filters don't degrade quickly.

 

I have begun transferring dirt from the rotting pile to the dirt pile. I have a cement double sink outside and I use it to compost my crap. The coffee filters are ridiculous, but everything else seems to decompose pretty quickly. I'm going to have to start using the dirt for something, but I'm not much of a gardener. I'm more of a dirt lover, a maker of mud pies and the like. I don't know. I guess I just feel like it's a guaranteed failure. I kill plants, so I figure I'll just keep things from dying and never try.

If you know something is going to fail, is there really any sense in trying? I started an MA program 4.5 years ago, and it was clear from the beginning that I was not going to make it. I fell apart so often that I lived in an almost constant suicidal depression. I was in over my head before I even knew what was happening, and I was a pretty smart cookie. I grasped at anything and everything, used sex to cope, and in a kind of broken-down delusional state, was still left with an intangible determination.

Now here I am, all these years later, and I am a different person. Few people got to see the transition-it was ugly and I remember little of it. But I know that it happened, because I am alive. Somehow, in the end, I got composted. And like non-food products, I was pretty tough to break down.

What are you recycling?

There's a woman on Etsy that makes envelopes from old containers (think cereal boxes and the like). It got me to thinking-why can't I do that? Why don't I do that? So I am, right after I finish writing this post. I have an empty cereal box in my recycling basket just waiting to be cut up and reused.

Last week's unpleasant feedback re. shipping made me question myself, and that's never good. Questioning myself leads inevitably to self-hatred, and that's a dangerous road for me. So I have to work incredibly hard to allow criticism in without it affecting how I see myself. Bleh.

But I took it to heart. I am more committed now to presentation and aesthetic. It's obviously not going to change overnight, and I'm not going to change who I am, but it is a movement towards allowing other people's feeling to impact my life in healthy ways. I haven't always done that. I was raised to swallow other people's feelings and make them my own. I don't do that anymore. It's difficult to protect myself and love other people at the same time. It's a constant process. It means not denying pain when I hurt. It means letting myself be truly angry, and then figuring out why I'm angry and how I can act on that anger in a productive and meaningful way.

For me, I always come back to recycling. It's the core of who I am.

It's how I see God.

A trip to the dark side

The Black Swan :)

I just read a crazy story (Note: It's about serial killers and mass graves, so go away if you're not in a good place to handle this). It takes place in my area of the world, so it appeals to me. These days, I am rarely able to handle this kind of crazy. The work I do makes it very difficult for me to cope with bad stuff that is in no way connected to me and my life. But this story gave me hope.

I have lived my whole life in the great state of California (minus a few months here and there). One becomes accustomed to the billboards on the side of I-5 advertising missing persons, some for ten years and more. These signs are so sad. There are whole families behind those signs, waiting and hoping for answers. Parents ask, "What happened to our daughter?" They grieve without end, because there is no end to the mystery. And then some crazy guy in San Quentin decides to open his mouth, and spill his guts. It may be manipulation. It may be for money. It may be honest guilt. I don't know, but no matter why it's happening, it's good.

Families are getting answers. Think of all the suffering that is going to end in this search. They will never stop grieving, but the suffering that comes with not knowing will end. It makes me so happy. It makes my eyes well up. It makes my heart feel full. Some of the fog may be lifted (oh, I hope they'll test all the remains ASAP), after decades of not knowing what happened.

Failing at fixing

 

I keep trying to fix things and then my life only gets worse. My sink gets clogged from the broccoli I had for dinner, but then I can take all the pipes apart and clean them, right? Wrong, because then I don't put the pipes back together and now it's leaking. My toaster oven's button breaks, so I bought a new button, and now I'm overloading the circuit. What the heck.

SO basically, my whole life has fallen into the toilet over these two things, because that oven made my life okay. I got into this little apartment with no kitchen, but I had an oven, so I felt like a person. Now I don't have an oven. You see what's happening? I imagine that I can fix things, but then nothing gets fixed. I even put the time in. So now I'm tired, and feeling like a failure. Does this mean I have to buy a new toaster oven? Does this mean that I'm not a person who will ever be able to really fix anything? I would like to just find out now so I don't spend the rest of my life failing at fixing.

Football and NASCAR

I went to an estate sale this morning. It looked as if the organizers had set everything up the night before, and then it rained. The children were organizing the home of their mother. When I bought my stuff, the woman at the table let me know that there was just too much work to sell stuff for what it was really worth. She also said I should come back next weekend, for the good stuff, which would also be victim to the curse of estate sales, and go for less than it's worth.

On the way home, I convinced myself that I shouldn't be annoyed by the people who act like they're doing me a favor when I take their junk. "It's just the grief talking," I tell myself. But there was no talk of death this morning, so it may have just been a move to a smaller location.

There was talk about football and NASCAR. They were all happy that football season was coming to a close, so then they could hit the track. Some were especially sad for "Junior", who just can't seem to make a go of it, and then compared the different tracks they like to go to.

It was a neat crowd. There was a neighbor walking around who admitted that she didn't really know the woman, but stuck around trying to be "helpful". There were some other guys trying to be helpful by telling the children that they should ask more for the horse trailer. Again, it was quite a crowd. Sometimes, I'm one of them, and sometimes I'm on the outside. Today, it was the latter.

Vulnerability...the true monster

Love with your whole heart, even when there is no guarantee. Be grateful; to feel vulnerable is to feel alive. And always remember, you're enough.

Those are not easy things to do, so read that list through a few times before you walk away.

Costly, long-suffering, hope

After this weekend's horrible events in Northern California, I've really been struggling to hold on to my stringent peace position. I have made my life about the work of peace and justice in the world, and for the first time, I'm wavering. I'm beginning to understand those who call cops "pigs". I'm losing my grip on my own beliefs. When I see indifferent violence being carried out in my own world, to my friends, my brain gets fuzzy.

Please recognize that I know that there is horrific violence in the world every day. I know that in my being; I have known it my whole life. And short of banging on soft surfaces with my fists and screaming alone in an empty room, I am not a violent person. I don't believe in violence. I think it's silly, that we as a species would resort to harming one another to solve our problems. I actually don't understand it. I resist it in my very soul. But something changed inside of me when I saw that video on Saturday morning. Perhaps the door in my heart, that I'd shut long ago, had been opened, and I began to see that violence is not just something I hate, but something that is real.

This is not a naive experience for me. I was not born into my beliefs; I have had to earn them. And they have come at a very high price. Violence is real to me, but perhaps I've been looking at it with compassion all this time. I try desperately to understand the aggressor in every situation, to feel compassion for them, to find empathy for the pain that they must experience as a perpetrator, and then later as a survivor of that perpetration. But to see the indifference with which that cop calmly shook that can...my soul cannot contain it.

I wish that I could give you some kind of resolution to this issue (I myself have found a little here and here). I wish I could give you all the hope you need for your own life. That is my life's work. But today, I will fail you. I'm so very sorry.

Put the gun down.

So I'm watching Law & Order, Season 1; good stuff. Less technology, but the same general script. Anyhow, in this episode, two cops are chasing a suspect. One goes into the vacant building making a racket. The other positions himself at the fire escape, and sticks his gun into his pants. Then he looks around, sees some trash cans, and picks up a metal lid (old school trash can). The kid comes flying down the fire escape, gun in hand. The cop waits, then sticks the lid out just as the kid runs by-breaks the kid's nose. Awesome (i.e. the conscious choice not to kill).

I am a pacifist, to the core. I abhor violence. I'm even having to watch myself lately so I don't let my own feelings about violence cloud my relationships in my work. It's important that we allow others to make up their own minds about things, and not assume that we should bring them over to our side of any debate. Right now, I'm dealing with the issue of horror films. It's tough to stay quiet about my own opinion, but after I began doing it, I was better able to hear what the person was saying. Instead of spending my time trying to figure out how to convince them that they should never watch a horror movie ever again, I was spending my time hearing them, a much better option.

Anyhow, the kid's nose was broken, and I'm excited? Yup. Anytime I see someone with a more lethal option at their disposal, put it away and reach for something less lethal, I applaud. Violence will never go away. Human beings will always be stupid and try to hurt each other in any way they can; this is part of being human-we mess up. But we infinitely compound that stupidity when we purchase guns. More people get hurt, instead of fewer. More people live in fear, instead of fewer. Yes, the alternative might be strange (e.g. trash can lid), but it should always be first in our minds, rather than a grievous afterthought.

Do your own dirty work

So I've been watching Mad Men on Netflix. I'm on Season 2, and there's a scene where the Draper family has a picnic and leaves all of their trash behind. It's a metaphor for all of the trash in their lives that they aren't willing to deal with; they're just leaving it for other people to clean up.

Cleaning up, or dealing with, your own garbage is a time-consuming and thankless task. All one gets is perhaps a self-directed pat on the back. Sometimes only you know what you've done. The greenbelt in front of my house is a full-time promenade for the neighborhood. It's always packed with groups of people and children, especially after school.

On a walk last night with the dogs, I noticed that there was trash everywhere. The riding lawnmower had been through, and made lots of big pieces into many more little pieces; it wasn't pretty. I didn't know how to handle it. Do I pick up other people's garbage to set an example? Do I ignore it because it isn't my problem? I thought about making signs that say "Respect the Greenbelt". It seemed like a communal message, "Let's take care of our shared space". But I know that I very rarely, if ever, am able to get someone to do what I think is right, so maybe I'll just hold off on the sign-making for right now.

Sometimes I wish I could throw my messes on someone else's doorstep. But I don't. "Why not?", you ask. Because I wouldn't go shit on someone's doorstep just to make them smell it. If it isn't productive, I don't need to whip it out and throw it around. That just causes more pain for everyone. There is no deserve. No one deserves pain. We all just kind of deal with it in the best way we can, and hopefully, along the way, we won't cause more of it.

Hopefully.

The depth of death

So, for probably the first time in my life, I went to an estate sale on a Friday morning, at 8am. Yup. I'm that awesome. There were already people leaving. Meh. Whatever.

The house smelled like urine. It was awful. I seriously thought, "How long was this person dead before they found her?" Then, to top it off, the people running the sale happened to be professionals and relatives, so I got to talking with one of the women about the deceased. She was 97, single all her life. Once, she traveled around the world in 69 days. She loved life. This I learned while going through her books on her living room floor, wonderful art, architecture, and bird books, and of course the full Left Behind series.

I started to think about how my life would look to those closest to me if they went through my belongings right now, like if I died today, and people had to figure out what to do with my stuff. I know I'm a really honest person, but I wouldn't want just anyone going through my things. It's so personal, even if there aren't necessarily things that I want hidden. I still want the deepest parts of myself to only be known by a couple people. I still want to have special intimate relationships where the other person knows me better than anyone else does. I think I sometimes come across as someone who will tell anyone anything, but that isn't true. I think it just looks like that because I'm a complex person. There's a lot to me, so there's a lot of surface material to work with. But there's a whole hell of a lot underneath that I don't bring out every day.

I hope you know that. Because I want people to see me as an open, honest person. But I also want people to see me as I am, as imperfect, flawed, and human.

And again, I fantasized today about having my own estate sale business. Ah, a beautiful thought.

I cannot let you die.

My parents' dog died. She was old. It was time.

More than sadness, I feel relief. She suffered for far too long, and now she is happily frolicking in a better place, wherever that may be. And wherever that is, I'd prefer it to wherever I will be when my time comes, because all the dogs will be there, and I do love dogs.

Sometimes we live to avoid death because it is so scary. We ignore it. We ignore our diabetes even when we only have one leg. We ignore our discontentment, even when happiness is only a decision away. We pretend that bad isn't bad, because we think that if we looked at the bad, really looked it in the eyes, we'd die from the shock of it.

In one way or another, we all avoid bad things. We ignore phone calls from people we don't want to talk to. We put on a smile because we don't want anyone to ask us what is wrong. We stay in relationships with people that hurt us, because the alternative is so much worse.

Or is it? Is facing the bad the worst thing? Will it really kill us? Is the fear of death an accurate fear? Or a lie?

[Here is the part where I hesitate to tell the truth, hesitate to say what is real. Because the truth is scary to admit. When I tell the absolute truth, I leave no room for backpedaling.]

The fear of death is folly. Death has already been vanquished. Messiah Jesus has already come and defeated it, and we live in a new reality. We live in this world knowing that death has no power over us. Death has no power but that fear we allow to clench our hearts.

So I don't know what heaven holds, or if there is a heaven at all for me to see. But I do know this: God is unending in love: unconditional, extravagant love. And all that stands between us and that love, is fear.

2. Rhodesian Memoirs

How I got hooked on Rhodesian memoirs:

1. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: I could never stop looking at the author's photo on the back of the book. She's looking out in the distance and her hair is blowing in the wind, and she looks so African.

Until I read this book, I never really understood that White Africans were a significant part of African society and culture (I know; I recently figured out what apartheid means too). Blame it on my conservative background, or on my American education. I just say, there's only so much room in a mind;  and African history isn't exactly a NCLB priority.

So Fuller, the author, is Rhodesian, and the book is about her childhood and growing up in Rhodesia. Her unstable mother serves as the perfect background for Rhodesia itself, with an uncertain path and an uncertain future. Growing up in the midst of a racially-charged civil war is enough to form a person for life, and the book follows Fuller as she navigates her challenging familial relationships and her challenge to live as a white African in a country that now does not exist. The Rhodesian civil war made orphans out of all Rhodesians, and that's why I love reading their books, I think.

2. Out of the Dark: Caine is another woman writer who grew up in Rhodesia. Both she and Fuller lived in Zambia if I recall correctly. They at least both had significant moves in their childhoods, usually because of the war. Caine also has an unstable mother, and an even more unstable childhood. Her life is shaped by her Rhodesian past, and by her gaps in memory from that time.

This can be a difficult read, especially for survivors of childhood abuse, so I recommend it cautiously. Reading this book made me begin to develop an understanding of what Rhodesia was like, and what it means to be Rhodesian, and got me hooked on finding more memoirs. The picture in my head when I think of Linda is her horse, who she loved. I think that would make her smile to hear that.

3. Casting with a Fragile Thread: What does it mean to love a place with your whole heart? This book is by another woman, with another drunk mother, and another broken family. But Wendy Kann's story is more than the sum of her trials. It's about how one can be Rhodesian without Rhodesia, how it feels to be always alone in a world with few others who can even comprehend what your childhood was like, and what it means to be you, all in the midst of terrible loss.

4. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: Godwin has another book, which is probably a better fit for this list. This book is more about Zimbabwe than it is about Rhodesia, but it's interesting to see how Godwin responds to Zimbabwe, having grown up Rhodesian. His commitment to his parents comes together with his uncertainty about this new country's identity and future, and one begins to wonder when reading about the day-to-day existence of a Zimbabwean, how this is better than what they fought to throw away.

5. Rainbow's End: This is probably the freshest in my mind because I read it most recently, even though that isn't even that recent (maybe last summer, or two summers ago?). St. John, the author, tries to live a normal childhood within a very chaotic and dangerous situation. Her father runs a farm during a time when all farms were under almost constant attack, because most if all the farmers were white and landowners. St. John is also able to paint a picture of how the farmers responded to the violence, and how they survived.

The mere mention of Rhodesia makes me smile. If you have any book suggestions, send them my way. I had a fleeting thought last night that perhaps a year from today, I will be reading piles of books in my free time. It was a very, very nice thought. Maybe a hammock could be involved, or a porch swing; a dog by my side, or some other warm-blooded creature would also be nice.