Triangular Vortices

Gifts in the inbox. I read The Writer’s Triangle this afternoon.

Wish I had read this article at age 17.

While hopeful writers soon enough find out this vortex for themselves, it is the same for anything one wants. When I have the money to visit my distant relatives, I haven’t the time because I’m making money (and writing).

Too, it needn’t be such a frustration or isolation, depending on which side of the equal sign you’re on at a given time. Every interaction or observation was fuel when I was working full time. I began using the park-and-ride, not because I had to. While I’m hermetic by nature and choice, I still get a numb rear end and a mind restless for input; I can satisfy my observing nature by making a trip to anywhere.

If writing is your life, life is your muse. In whichever stage you find yourself, know there is trading-off and balance-making decisions—and writing, always a scrap onto which we scribble.

The Matter of Trust

Today I read a post that pegged me and fostered self-examination. So of course I have to try it out on you. The post is Trust.

Ritual abuse, the sort that is in the name of religion and cult, is quite real and I am relieved to be informed without having to have had first-hand experience.

When I was young, I trusted everyone I met with everything about me. Frightening, isn’t it? As an abused child, I wasn’t a discerning adult; I wanted and craved close relationships instead of superficial ones and silence.

I’m still learning to trust and how to trust, not just whom to trust. After a particularly disastrous choice to trust, I no longer trusted my own judgment. I began eliminating friends, family, co-workers and anything that appeared to be an attempt at a relationship. I did well and soon had no one to which I could turn—or hurt or be hurt by.

After seven years of isolation, I am relearning the skills of small talk, which I despise. My counselor and I discussed having a group of friends to meet with and laugh with; this is foreign, intimidating. It was my brother who put it into perspective: Start with “hello” to the checkout clerk and “thank you” to someone who guided you in some small way. When you meet someone for the third, fourth, fifth time, it is okay to ask how their day is going.

There is an older gentleman who works at a national chain store near me. I see him nearly every time I enter the store. He speaks to everyone and I used to just nod. Then I began to respond quickly as I pushed my cart past him. One day he wasn’t in uniform; he was hanging out at the store on his day off. I immediately recognized he was lonely. He said he was checking his schedule—while standing in the middle of a main isle of the store. I had an actual conversation while waiting for my husband to join me.

No commitment there for me, and he appreciated the recognition that he was a part of the store’s culture.

I’m no master, and I’m learning.

Joys of Aging? Yeah.

When I saw the title, I knew this book is where I’m at. By no means am I an octogenarian, and I’m double twenty and some.

A collection of connections on aging, I Feel Great about My Hands: And other unexpected Joys of Aging, edited by Shari Graydon, seems just the thing when pronounced with “the knees of a 70-year-old.”

I do fit right in among these women who have come of age, the second age of womanhood and third age of life. Joys of aging. I’ve certainly not heard very many olders through the years who gushed with joy about

Marbles in My Ear

I made a comment on:

WHAT HAPPENED??? « DEPRESSION: my muse.

and his response included how he is learning to be a less private person.

I used to be, and still am for the most part, a woman who hoards her thoughts and words. I have tried to maintain an impenetrable  mind and heart because there is so little to trust in those who hear and do not listen, or who repeat what they did not understand in the first place. (I do this also and I examine myself moment by moment to try to retain understanding and accuracy, and to keep no place for gossip in my life.)

Eventually my thoughts become an enormous pile of marbles I can no longer keep. One escapes over there; I scramble to catch it, and more escape elsewhere.

Privacy is an illusion, as is safety and security.

I’ve been digging through ancestral records. For a single individual, I can find out where they lived and when just through old phone books that are now scanned and filed online. It is something like connect the dots. We have that in the digital era more so.

I have offered up my superficial sense of privacy and am now freeing (sllloooowwwwly) my mind, though doubts prevail. I suppose if I were perfectly confident that would be a warning to others. Of what, I’m not sure, but warning just the same.

Inagural Inspiration

“One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives…”
From the inaugural poet Richard Blanco’s poem

Done Deviled

My husband asks if there’s anything he can get me at the store. I shrug and say some sort of protein I haven’t eaten a dozen times this week. I’ve had food apathy for a while now.

I have never had Deviled ham or Deviled chicken before. There’s a red-and-white paper wrapper on each. Hmm, the chicken would probably be an easy start since chicken is rather innocuous as a flavor. Off comes the wrapper.

Uh. Here’s where I get stuck.

The can

No Peace

I find no peace today.

I would follow my feet through the wet grasses and walk in wind among the stone remains of the dead; there is no peace there either. They cry from abandonment. They speak of the hauntings of war. Some are buried far from home and family, caught unaware by death. A mother embraces her child no longer though they are side by side in death on the same day and buried in the same ground.

I find cemeteries poignant. Like the streams that feed the rivers to the ocean of humanity and inhumanity, I follow the steadfast families anchored in generations and those filled with wanderlust in single or in company. Likely my blood is from among the ones beneath my feet who travel no more.

No peace today.

©2012 Sandra Davidson

Cause: Mental Health

In light of Friday’s murders and suicide, citizens of the United States immediately react with fear. Their children react with fear. This is a normal response after any shock. Elsewhere I said yesterday 27 lives are as essential as one, but when you’re in the center of black you can’t feel that your life or anyone’s is touched by light.

Earlier in the week I listened to an interview with a man who has put himself in danger and has many enemies for doing and saying what he believes in places where expressing a perspective seems to be a crime punishable by life imprisonment without just consideration. The interviewer asked if he was afraid,

Greeting Seasonings

Whichever hour I woke, I would set the coffee on and get dressed. With a cup full of light, sweet brew, I’d sit on the top front step. She’d be beside me, sometimes close for warmth, sometimes sprawled on the cool cement.

I wish I could say it was idyllic. With a state highway, train tracks, and industrial river traffic, it was either less or more noisy. I came for the movement of land and sky. She came to heal me.

Artistic Goal Setting

We can achieve every goal we set for ourselves. Perhaps the timeline can be elastic. Perhaps you had setbacks unforeseen that took priority (I’m about to have my third surgery of the year).

When I was 18, I wrote down goals for what my life would look like at age 25 (I’m now 41). The list made it through a number of moves and messes to find me near age 30. Behold! More than 60 percent of the list had been completed though I had not seen the goals list for years. At that point, I reevaluated. Many things left undone were no longer pertinent or were no longer important to me.

A new list was begun, written by hand and purposely ‘lost’ in my shuffle.

I’m writing in response to Progress Report « Live to Write – Write to Live.

The goal of a poem per week is 52 poems. Fifty-two poems in two years is still ambitious. What is telling is that the goal dropped off the radar, and so it ferments, as MarinaSofia said in her reply.

I think our artistic goals are guidelines. An idea may grab you by the horns and turn you right around. Flexibility and not giving up when a goal remains important to you is as important as not comparing yourself to others.

Let your natural pace guide you and, as Deborah Lee Luskin did, find tools that motivate you.

©2012 Sandra Davidson