Monday, November 29, 2010

11/26/10 too many cooks create an awesome spread
I grew up on my mom's amazing fried chicken, bacon grilled cheeses, manicotti and rice hot dish. I also learned to cook next to my two grandmas, as did my sister. And our aunt, my mom's sister. And I've worked in restaurants, and so has my sister And we have been blessed with two sisters-in-law who have astounding culinary skills, at whose tables I would gladly dine even if they only had a $2 grocery budget. So there were five of us good cooks at the holiday meal, each preparing our own dishes, planned out ahead of time. I'll go into detail some other time.
11/25/10 squeaky-cold snow
It blows across your cheek as it falls, hard and small, little pellets like grains of sand, like mustard seeds but white. It stays fluffy, too airy and high, forms a crust on top as the freeze deepens. Sooner or later you need to leave for provisions, or to get gas or go to the post office. You step on it. Squeak. Another step. Squork. You get to the garage. Squorkety sqawkity squickety squinkety squack. You try to shovel it, but you need warmer gloves, so you go back inside. Is there any other noise in the universe like squeaky cold snow? It's like the snow has a voice and it's warning you that you need to go back inside, that it's too cold out for humans. It's the snow singing to you!

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

11/24/10 the cold dance

If someone were moving this way at the bus stop in summer, I think they would have a wide swath of empty space around them. But the woman in the padded blue jacket with the fake fur ruff on the hood was not in the least out of place or isolated as she did the cold dance at the bus stop in near-dark in late November. Shifting rapidly from one foot to another, she looked as if she were in the alto section of a highly caffeinated gospel choir. We're northerners. We do what we have to, to keep warm. The cold dance is spontaneous, universal and effective. The cold dance--coming soon to a bus stop near you.
11/23/10 a bite in the air

This is again along the lines of pain equals pleasure. Well, maybe it's pain for some people. For others it is feeling alive, piqued, love-bitten by the cold in the air. Jack Frost nipping, the bite of the North wind. I knew someone who participated in these workshops where "perverse delicious" was a catch-phrase. It meant doing something naughty that felt good because you were breaking the rules, like spreading vicious gossip, or starting a fight with someone because YOU feel bad and it would pull you out of your funk to at least interact, even if it's a fight. I'd like a similar phrase for these intense pleasures that most people don't recognize as such. Only not that they're naughty, just that they're judged as unpleasurable. That nip in the air that turns your ears and cheeks red and hot. The chill that gets your circulation going. The cold that makes you tense all those muscles you wanted to forget about. And not to the point of sadomasochism or anything--I'm not talking about neurotic pandering. But just isn't it great to be alive, and fun when your senses do what they are supposed to do? It's stupendous. It's counterintuitive. It's marvelous. It's counterstupendtuitive. It's oppolicious. It's harshelous.

Monday, November 22, 2010

11/22/10 Singing out loud for no reason - silly

La la la, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, ba ba ba da ba da ba ba da....Yes! Haven't we all done this! It doesn't matter when--age two or age 52. It's so much fun. It doesn't have to be a song you know. It doesn't have to rhyme or make sense or be in tune or have a structure. Just sing, invent, be free. Any tone, any word, any language or sentence. This is the stuff of creativity, that we all need to do sometime in our lives. La la la. The trees. Doo doo doo the grass. Ba ba ba da ba my house and my cozy pillows. Frang frang frang doo ba da boo it's cold out.
11/21/10 A slippery world

Rain that freezes on things, freezing rain that clings to twigs and stairs and pavement, an invisible icy layer of slipping and sliding. Just making it to the car without falling is a major feat. The trouble is, the world is naturally very textured, and to have a slippery coating on our smooth roads, sidewalks and parking lots reminds us of how unnatural the man-made world is. I had no problem walking on my mom's gravel driveway, or the grassy lawn. Elsewhere--so slippery.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Orange dreams 11/20/10

You awaken and you realize you have been dreaming, in close-up, of oranges. The bright skin, a furrowed landscape of fragrant hemispheres, a topography of resinous oils, tiny ridges and arroyos. You eat an orange, thinking of the tang of him, the bite of salt from skin that has been working, straining to bring you something, life, a latticework to climb, some kind of earth. But really it is an aftertaste you remember, and you lick a part of your own arm, as if his scent, his imprint lingers. Your own fragrant resins rise, and you notice that skin is pocked by stars, hemispheres, resins, in a formation not so easily eroded. You remember the taste again, and it has marked the back of your throat, the salt, and you know that you will always recognize his scent, his touch.

Friday, November 19, 2010

11/19/10 gentle encouragement

He has a gentle heart and a round face, and he encourages by telling a slanted story, a story that might be about you, or it might be about someone else. He tells you to fight, and how not to fight. He tells you to be yourself. He has brought you berries and iron and a pair of shoes, things you will need for the road ahead. He tells you a riddle, and at first you don't get the gist, then you realize that it pokes fun at everything ridiculous, and it allows you to laugh. Laughing, you put on the new shoes, which help you walk magically quietly. You take the iron and fashion a breastplate, which you use as a decoration and jingle, since the universe is such that you don't need protection, you need touch, allies, healing. He tells another joke, and you laugh louder. He has his own flock, his own field to tend, so he makes to go. The day moon has left the sky. You stain your mouth with the berries, and they allow you to tell the truth. You don't like being treated the way of the past. You are at a crossroads, a confluence of stream and river. He has been rescuing drowning souls and is pressed for time. His message to you has been an aside, he has more important things to do than to instruct you. You must find your own way. But somehow, the berries, the moon, the shoes, the stream, the rescuing, the souls you see who are better off...somehow this makes sense, and the low grey clouds of early winter lift, and you are again alone with your thoughts and your purpose.
11/18/10 neighborhood blackout

Sparks flying out of a box on the pole, and people bleary eyed come out into the night, out of their dens of electric jolted awakeness, out of their tiny message addictions, they come out into the night, where frozen chunks of dirty snow line the streets and trees dance a little more stiffly for the cold weather. Where a cup of kindness is just water because you can't boil on the electric stove, and everything is smooth, like the lines people create between one another, because people are not jangled for the moment, in the beautiful blue-black winter before the ominous truck comes to save the night from its own darkness, the neighbors from one anothers' warmth.

Monday, November 15, 2010

11/17/10 the new hat

You re-discover this old thing in the closet. Rejected by those who prefer overt gazing, your styling eyeshade makes people want to move in close, to see what you're looking at. Your head is cozy and padded, the brim slanted just so, and you know that everyone wants it. Holmes-ish, Dashiell Hammett-ish, yourself-ish, the hat keeps off the gobs of snow and drops of rain, and you bust a move or two because it is fun to dress up and be someone.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

11/16/10 Cupid pulls the string
11/15/10 Lucky in love
11/14/10 Talking shop

My friend is so enthusiastically pro-writing, and pro-personhood, and pro-get your groove on and be your best self. She's a personal coach, and she just can't help herself, the bug bites her in every conversation. So there we are talking about writing and editing and doing stuff with writing and where to publish and what classes she's taking and teaching next. And it's just so inspiring to talk shop with someone with their hair bobbed and tea-tinted just so, and to sip actual tea and talk blobs about blogs and coffee and more tea and the thousands of books on writing and spirituality that are strewn around her house as if she herself is the holy shrine and they, the books, are pilgrims come to see her. Hey, talking shop means you invite all the best stuff to make a pilgrimage to see you. And it's serendipitously, synchronistically, synesthestically sympatico.
11/13/10 The first snowfall

Quiet, white, heavy, cumbersome, slushy, white, cold, happy, white...

Friday, November 12, 2010

11/12/10 A Traveler's Curiosity

In third grade, Miss Theresa asked our class to write a few sentences about what we wanted to be when we grew up, and why. My great-grandma has recently died, and she had moved here from Sweden when she was in her thirties, which I thought was pretty adventurous. So I wrote that I wanted to be a traveler like her, as if that were a profession rather than a hobby, or a part of a profession.

When you travel, you are on your guard a little, and you need to pay attention to details of tone, character, landscape and cityscape in a way that a native doesn't. You need to pay attention to transportation, signs, languages, attitudes. There may be rules only known to the locals, some of which signify danger, or amusement, or relaxation. You need to be alert to people's body language, and their habits, and to things that look out of place.

This is leading up to why I often feel alone in the business crowd downtown in the middle of the day. A whole slew of characters, a circus, really, could go by and no one would notice it but me. Walking to the bus, these two ladies came out of the public defender building. They are obviously mother and daughter, since they have the same build, same taste in clothes, same face except one is a generation younger, and purt-near the exact same hairstyle. And actually, these two women, walking arm-in-plump-but-strong arm and leaning on each other as they cross the street, look like they could be the mother and grandmother of a circus act--the trapeze artists, maybe, or scarf aerialists. Their hairdos are giant teased beehives, and I don't mean any disrespect, but they are backcombed and shaped--each of them--to the streamlined buoyancy of teeny, loosely-moored zeppelins. The grandmother had an added ornamentation of some pulled and rosetted strands in the center-back, where the dirigible's canted gonodola basket should be. No one else on their way to the bus stop batted an eye at them, but I watched them with a traveler's eye, walk across the street as if they belonged here--which I'm sure they did.

I had to stop and think what could have brought these women here in such a retro style. I know there are probably some villages up in the iron range that are less touched by modern fashion than others, and again I mean no disrespect (because certainly my relatives are not post-modern chic, nor am I for that matter), or maybe northern Wisconsin--foreigners. I settle on Slovenian iron worker wives who rarely come to the twin cities. But it also crosses my mind that they could be time travelers, visiting our downtown from some housewifey (or circus-y) vortex in 1964. Or they could be aliens who are visiting us and who have not done their research by decade, but rather by round century, like Kirk, I'm sure, in several classic Star Trek episodes. And so they blend in, but slightly anachronistically, they don't, and the effect just makes me curiouser and curiouser.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

11/10/10 Leftovers

Yay! I don't have to cook tonight! Yay, there's something fragrantly murky and delicious in a container in the fridge! Yay, it's extra delicious because it's an amazing stew that I made 2 days ago that has been getting better and marinating for two days! Yay!
11/9/10 chainsaw

When I first bought it, I asked a bunch of men--my uncle, brothers, friends--how to use it. No one would tell me how. It was like a male code. So I called my aunt long-distance in Alaska. She's been living in a house she hand-built for the past 30 years or so, and she gets her stovewood from the beach and cuts and splits it herself. Her tips for the chainsaw: 1. make sure your body is always steady, that you support yourself with your legs; 2. Lock your arms stiff when you are cutting, so that if the saw bucks, it will fly above your head and not into your face; and 3. Consider carefully where the thing you're cutting is going to drop. Be ready to step aside quickly.
Oh, backtracking. I had to buy a lacy undergarment the same day I bought the chainsaw. Balance in all things.
Anyway, the thing is hilarious to use. I mean, really fun. And I'm the kind of person who hates noisy, mechanical toys. But you get to cut up firewood and clear paths and be strong and independent.
In college, I met the guy who wrote and starred in the original, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." His name is Gunnar Hansen, and he came to the college as a visiting prof in writing/journalism. I took his class in Environmental Journalism. He seemed pretty normal, not the kind of person who would dream up a murderous stalker to frighten people.
I prefer to use my chainsaw in the service of good.

Monday, November 8, 2010

11/8/10 Moving freight

Today I got to move cartons of printer paper--8 of them on a 4-wheel cart. The cart has a painted, cast-iron chassis, with push handle and requisite incomprehensible steering. No frills. And the bed of it is ancient 2 x 6's with about 5 generations of faded magic marker department notes, chips, dents, faded stickers, dirt, smells. And heavy. One carton of paper is almost too much for me. Pushing 8 on a cart requires my inner Amazon.

And I'm leaning into it and throwing my weight around, so fun to see what you can do. Once, when I was working at a fish cannery my first summer in Alaska, I added up all the cartons and pallets full of dungie crab I had loaded myself that night (with Tone moving it around with the forklift--lucky guy). Sixteen tons. Sixteen tons. You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Well, it's hilarious and fun anyway.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

11/7/10 Hemingway shops for sofa art

A shopper at the Northrup-King art crawl had a Papa Hemingway cropped white corona of a beard around his chin, a short, weathered face, even a cap recalling the era of marlin fishing off Cuba and Florida. He walked with a cane, like Hemingway did, and I couldn't see which group of people he rather belonged to. Last I saw him, he was sitting wearily on a bench in a hallway, third floor, outside several studios with sofa paintings.

Papa Hemingway has come across time to see what's going on in 21st century Minnesota. He thinks most of the art show is B.S. He likes the naked lady photo show, and maybe wants to talk to the Argentine photographer about bullfighting. Or maybe there's an expert fly-fisherman whose technique he wants to suss out. The fisherman needed to talk to a few artists to buy stuff for his cabin, and Hemingway is waiting to go out with him to a pub later. Maybe Hemingway is with his wife, who is shopping for bland paintings for their home--paintings that won't disturb him or his mental tranquility. Even literary legends have to sit on a "husband bench" while their wives shop.

"For some idiot reason," I told my friend about the Hemingway doppelganger, "this excites me." She told me there is a Papa Hemingway lookalike contest every year in Key West. The art shopper could win top honors. http://www.sloppyjoes.com/lookalikes-pastwinners.htm

Saturday, November 6, 2010

11/6/10 the right healer

Whether it's mind, body or spirit, you need to have the connections who can really help you. It really matters. The right person at the right time, and you might grow out of them in time and place like you wear out your favorite shoes, or move to a different neighborhood when you need to. But you gotta have that person or those people who are going to help you make the changes. Personal evolution is not for sissies.

Friday, November 5, 2010

11/5/10 Rosemary Clooney

This morning on the radio, I heard her rendition of "The Lady is a Tramp." It must have been from her later years, because her voice had that growing huskiness of weight, the smaller range and lack of sustained tone of age (or maybe of too much touring with a tired voice). But still she swung it.

Okay it's a little embarrassing for me because I like to think I love progressive, abstract jazz--world saxophone quartet, threadgill, mingus, bird, coltrane, geri allen, betty carter, etc. All the hip & cool & cats (which really, I should get more disks & study their stuff more). So it's embarrassing for me to love someone as corny as Rosemary. But I do. I hereby adopt her as my second mom. No, wait, that designation is already taken by my aunt Jan, third, no...fourth, no...Okay, I think Rosemary has to be my fifth or sixth mom, but no remoter than that. And I'm definitely officially posthumously adopting her as such. Herewith.

Rosemary is an exquisite ecstasy. Raised in small-town Kentucky, she has that homespun feeling of not-perfect physical appearance that attained fabulous glamor. And the non-perfect, non-buttery voice, but an oomph that makes whatever she sings sound like a statement. That you want to believe too.

And her dresses, the wasp-waisted nightclub frocks of her early years, all taffeta and chiffon. The caftan-y muu-muu-ey things of her later years. I want to drape myself too. I want to wear them (I know many stars of that era wore them, so it's not just Rosemary's that I envy. But her a girl from Kentucky!) And she sings so much of the songbook. The songbook. Rosemary. Awwww. (still regret not going to that last concert here in town in 2001). Love ya mom #6.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gzLQZ0PHes
11/4/10 tree-tending

The giant tree-like Ents are a weird people in the movie and the written trilogies of "Lord of the Rings." The Ents resemble trees themselves, and so totally blend in with a forest milieu. We marvel at them, but I think this fictional "invention" strikes a deep note, because it is part of our collective human experience to revere trees (oops, more than I intended to invoke--now I have to acknowledge the Druids. There.)

In her book, "Iroquoian Woman," Barbara Mann describes the physical and spiritual labor that went into maintaining the "pristine wilderness'" park-like quality that the European colonists encountered on their arrival in North America. In gender-role divisions, for the Iroquois anyway, the men would tend the forests, meadows, heaths, wild rivers and so on, by planting trees, shrubs, flowering and medicinal plants, by doing proscribed burns to control vegetation, and by befriending and taking care of the so-called wild animals.

Someone I met who had studied with the descendent of a different indigenous North American tradition told me once that the first peoples of this continent thinned the trees to no more than 40 mature trees per acre. Much less than the overgrown contemporary forests, that are stressed by insects, overuse by humans, crowding, etc.

In her book, "Behaving as if the God in All Life Mattered," Machelle Small Wright describes being in a deep meditation and actually seeing living trees on her property move without trauma, root trunk and crown, move tens of feet from a previous location.

My own story is not magic. A scrub elm in my yard, about 30 feet tall and very thin, part of a triplet trunk, started drooping in the spring. I had been communicating with the spirit of the tree for months, and finally, after this past weekend's windstorm, the trunk was doubled over so that its crown was nearly brushing the grass below. And there are small children living in another unit on the property, so it was not safe to continue to let the tree do its thing. And I only had my hand saw. So I had to choose the right place, right moment. I started sawing a few hours before dusk, but it was tiring and slow going. I asked the tree for help, then wandered into the house and spaced out. I went back, in my lazy, wise way, when it was much darker out, when the sap had stopped running, and then my saw cut through the tree easily. I'm sharing this advice: Do your tree-cutting as much toward dark as possible, and it will be easier on you(and probably easier on the tree as well)

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

11/3/10 Chutzpah

Seizing the moment, seizing the day, daring to make something happen, if only for a moment. Here in the "Sweet Land" of the midwest, we often follow such structure in our lives that it's hard to see another way of doing things. Chutzpah breaks the spell. With chutzpah, you speak up to ask for seconds, wear a loud color, run for your life to catch someone who is pulling away down the street, and have no intention of taking no for an answer. Chutzpah sometimes doesn's know what it is. It's an opinion, an action, the gall.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

11/2/10 The other options

What if being at odds and ends with the world were a conscious choice? What if choosing peace means not fighting no matter what? What if being angry about a situation is meant to teach us the restlessness and discontent that we want to change, not to emulate the behavior of people or groups we think are unbalanced.
In the wee hours of Monday morning, a sort of voice came to me. Okay I'm not schizophrenic. But this voice or thought, familiar, kind but firm, posed the question, do I want to keep fighting. Because if I wanted to keep fighting, they would give me an adversarial relationship with someone whom I see on a regular basis. In my half-asleep state before my workweek, I thought about it, considered it, considered what would be best for me (the previous two weeks, I had made the choice to fight--my ego was invested in the identity of being a fighter--opposing oppression in all forms). So in the wee hours of Monday morning, in this inner conversation with my spirit guide, I said, no, I don't really care to fight, to project my sources of disharmony outside myself onto another person or group.
For me, it feels like when I take an adversarial stance, even one that's for overcoming injustice, I get locked into a role of hating my opponent and finding everything they do worthy of derision and despisal. I can find the most innocuous actions to be hostile. Instead, if I am open to any number of meanings, I can respond with joy and spontaneity. I can come up with creative solutions, and see others' behavior as interesting, appropriate for them and their lifestyle & beliefs.
On this election night, I wish to point out that everyone wishes for abundance and safety and nurturing community and choices.
11/1/10 Getting involved, and what goes around comes around

Sometimes you need to warn perfect strangers, you need to tell them about a risk they are running, so that they take care of themselves. Sometimes you need to be a little rude or abrupt or diplomatic or gentle. Sometimes you have to make a noise in front of someone's face, to help them snap out of their little stupor, so they will pay attention and take care of a situation.
I had an opportunity to do that 2 years ago but I didn't. Not my fault, really. I wasn't under any obligation to be a nursemaid. No one could fault me for not getting involved. But the guy died of a heart attack, and I could have recognized what his symptoms meant if .... if... (and I don't blame myself, either, but I just kept thinking if it happened again, I know what I'd do).
It happened again. I met a guy who has symptoms of toxicity, probably from fish he eats from a toxic waterway. I not only told him in person and on the phone, but wrote him a note describing how to get help. There. I've done my job. In a way it feels like the karmic wheel came around to me again. I got to re-make a decision. I got involved. And now the follow-up is up to him.
10/31/10 lavender cupcakes

Hearty squash cupcakes sweetened with honey, and little gingery, lemony bits in the breading composition. Cream cheese frosting sprinkled with sugared lemon zest and whole, dried lavender flowers. Flowers that you don't feel, don't notice until you are chewing them and there are these little peppery, perfumy bits in your mouth and you think of how food is not just food, but it needs to feed the spirit, too. It needs to lift you up (and it's not just about the posh, gluttonous income-bracket thing that has been happening lately in our culture's food consumption, but just a little touch that reminds you that food is of the gods).
10/30/10 Puppet pageantry

Really, the message could be anything. Because there they are on the riverbank wearing bulky, jersey-draped boxy constructions that represent insects and people and robots and monsters and, and desserts. These giant make-believe faces and their human operators. And rapt people sitting on haybales and watching them. And eerie lights in the dark near halloween. And it doesn't matter what they say, they could be saying anything because you are wrapped in a blanket shivering on a groundcover with your straight-talking friend, and it is all a dream, a samhain night's dream.
For days and weeks afterward, you see the bare autumn trees and even the city's buildings as part of the set and scenery for a shadow-puppet production, with layers and textures and vanishing points, and back-lit by the rich autumn sunrise or the dark fall sunset.
10/29/10 Facing the monster

(okay, chronologically, this experience didn't happen until the 31st, but I need to backfill my ecstasy entries.)

What is the thing in life which you find most disgusting and revolting of all? Something that really turns your stomach, that makes you want to puke? Got it? What if you walked into a coffee shop and saw that thing? What if the thing you always went out of your way to avoid appeared right in front of your eyes? Asking for your help and a cup of Joe? And you just wanted to run?
You would need to keep your wits about you. You could run. This is your monster, your Quasimodo, your Grendel. You are a pleasure-seeking bipedal earth mammal. You want to be perpetually surrounded by joy and laughter and goodness and health. You are under no obligation to be nice to the monster. You could tell them off--tell them they are hideous and disgusting and be as much of a superior asshole as you wanted to be. You could ignore their humanity, their monsterness.
But you are also a shiny star, an earth angel with superpowers of life and light and healing. You are able to zap situations with your mind and have them change instantly. You have a conversation with Quasimodo, and tell him that he is so nice. You thank him for the wilted flowers. It does not diminish your power, your humanity to be kind to your monster.
It does not diminsh your shining brilliance to be a mensch, to treat someone decently. This monster will not eat you. And you feel that your heart has grown, that you have overcome some of your own monstrosity, that you have become more human yourself. It is an ecstasy to know you are capable of this.
10/28/10 a scar


saw a woman at work today, someone visiting the courthouse on a personal matter, who had the most beautiful scar I think I’ve ever seen. She was wearing a sleeveless dress on the coldest day so far this fall. We hadn’t spoken, but had only made eye contact; she slowly turned her shoulder toward me, leaning on her chair, as if she wanted to show me something, and there it was, about the size of a child’s outspread hand, a keloid with feathered fibers going this way and that in a kind of orderly entropy, that reminded me of tendrils of frost on a winter window, or the crystalline formations on the inside of a geode, or the plumes on the ancient brown wallpaper at my grandmother’s house when I was growing up. A strange, old beauty. And whatever had caused her scar, whatever fleshly trauma had occurred—accident or act of violence, had also excavated the outer third of her deltoid muscle. I’m not glorifying that event or saying that it didn’t hurt, or that it was a good thing or that she wouldn’t be better off if it hadn’t happened.



But there was the fact of the scar, the way the universe did its job of repaving, resurfacing the event, her body healed, somewhat, and left a picture to commemorate something. And it got me thinking again about what we find beautiful and what we don’t (perhaps she was exhibiting it to let the world know about her pain), and how the universe resurfaces our experiences, how there are layers, how there is beauty if we find it, if we look for it, if we admit it. Who is she now with the scar? What would she tell me, if I had had the time to have a conversation?
10/27/10 Coffee

Okay, maybe I've posted about this before. But it's thick and dark. I imagine it gooey and string-y sometimes. Bitter (why don't people like other bitter things?) (what if bitter were the taste we humans sought, instead of sweet or salty or sour?). But black and opaque, a mystery. Chewy, substantial on the tongue, a mouthful, but it doesn't fill you up, because you get the espresso and don't add much to it, so there are no calories. And it makes you thirsty, because you always get thirsty around mysteries, so you drink more water. And you wonder about the darkness.
10/26/10

Day of rest, recovery.
10/25/10 Going to work in the dark

Such a wonderful time of year, autumn... For some odd reason, we humans keep time mostly by mathematical divisions of more or less equal parts, the numerical hours changing their relationship to the actual day with a niggling numerical whine, over the course of the year. Get up now!!!, the round face complains, says that it's time to eat breakfast, shower and go to work, even though your body knows, as the earth and all of nature knows, that dark is the time to sleep. Go to lunch now!!! the mechanisms of the office shout, you must be hungry, and the little digital timekeeper must be fed. Go home now!!! You wish you had been cuddling safe at home with your loved ones hours ago, but it's here you must remain until the timekeepers dismiss you. But we humans know more, know deeper, and the factual evidence of darkness strikes notes that disturb the superstructure. So, in winter, here in the Upper Midwest, we go to work and come home in the dark.

Okay, that sounds burdensome, so here's the ecstasy part: Who would have thought that a rational, sentient, emotional species would have found a way and a nearly universal compulsion to get up in the dark during the coldest time of year? What a feat! We all want to sleep, but no! We all have this ability to rouse ourselves, expose our senses to artifically-generated indoor light, and dispatch the necessary tasks to pretend that it's still midsummer. What a hoot!

Oops, I really meant for this post to be about how calm and lovely and striking it is in the dark, a time we rarely inhabit during the warm months (speaking strictly for myself). How you gradually say goodbye to the light during weeks of morning bus rides, how things seem quiet, protected, compared to in the lurid bustling daylight. Sometimes an ecstasy is scattershot.
10/24/10 Playing with frost on the window

Feathers and crystallized mandalas and god's-eyes and fleurs-de-lis and diamonds and Lucky Charms and snowflakes and stars. Back when the world was a portion of a century younger, we didn't have such good insulation in our windows. We didn't have year-round windows that were so frickin hard to wash, reaching around the permanent frickin frame. Instead, we had these hook on the top windows, and brackets on the house windowframe and the windows you stored on 2 x 4's in the basement, washing them outdoors with soapy water and rags and newspaper and then ripped sheets in late September every year, as you take down their summer analogs with the screens. Wipe the spider webs and dirt out of the window wells, hook on the storm windows and lock them shut. Of course they leaked around the edges, and of course in freezing weather, they made all the little frost shapes and tokens. And then you, with your dreamy childish self, would look out into the frozen yard, and use the meat of your childish fist to make a little peep-hole out into the crystalline magic-land of winter. Or you'd make a daisy, with its petals your pinky fingerprints, its eye the tip of your thumb's print. Or a footprint with your fist's heel and fingerprint toes. And the frost sealed onto the glass like a damask weave, grey and white, and the cold shavings on your fingernails and even a tongue print sometimes, but not on the coldest days. Frost on windows. I don't think my 17 year old son has ever seen it.

A post on 10/28, written previous to this one, talks about the designs of frost, too.
10/23/10 Sex

I'm posting this topic for my friends who are actually getting it. Since I don't want this blog to turn X-rated, I won't elaborate for now, but simply wish you abundantly well and let you fill in your own blank, so to speak.
10/22/10 seed of the buddha
PSA from the Dalai Lama: He reminds us that within each person, within each soul, no matter how monstrous or seemingly irredeemable, lies the seed from which that person will eventually become the Buddha. Everyone will eventually become the Buddha. Everyone has that seed.
10/21/10 wild dandelions

People say dandelion greens taste too bitter, but you shouldn't believe them. Their tastebuds have been skewed by even the most healthful American diet, and require serious recalibration. In our culture, we cover up the bitter with all manner of sweetness--of taste, appearance, manufactured goods, travel, relationships. What if we allowed ourselves to feel the bitterness that underlies it--the selling of people and things, the dark agreements, the negotiations.

In the springtime in suburban Boston, someone once told me to look for the Italian women around the highway 93's edges in the weeks before Easter. I saw them a few times, gathering wild dandelion greens for Easter without violating the local parks' injunctions against harvesting. In dark dresses, kneeling close to the ground like figures in a religious diptych, they looked like they were making ablutions. So foreign to our lives, you don't see them unless they are pointed out to you, like the ships of Columbus to the Taino indigenous peoples, according to the film, "What the &*%$@# (bleep)" They are reclusive, arcane, their ritual ancient.

Dandelion, I've been told, is less bitter in spring before the first flowering, and I imagine, also in the fall, when flowering has ceased and it collects the last drops of sunlight with its rosette of leaves. To me, it tastes like itself year-round, and the only time it's close to inedible is when it's from a hot, drought-y midsummer vacant lot. But still, I'd try it, if the lot were clean.
10/20/10 Buckwheat honey

I had to keep going back to the tea table and checking and smelling the different things that went into my cup. I just couldn't believe that the buckwheat honey was making that taste & smell. Heavy, dark, malt-y, sweet. Like burnt sugar, like Irish cream, like the skin of a friend, brown & creamy.
10/20/10 Seeing the floodplain

A Mosaic of islands floating. How nice that the river takes its time to unbraid itself here and linger a while, a flat byway in a big, long hilly furrow. Sitting in the uplands, evergreens fur the hillsides and flats.
10/19/10 a bonfire

Gathered with friends, cups of hot beverage, earthy conversation. Pointy flame arrows flying out as the lower prairie wind blows them off the coals. The small dervish of a breeze blows the bonfire's licks of flame into tubes, swirls, tunnels. It is warm.
10/18/10 Walking barefoot

In October, the grass has started to dry, so instead of feeling wet and springy, it feels a little dry and wiry underfoot. It is comforting and warm in the sun, and a little shocking in shady coolness. Walking barefoot on a gravel drive is a massage, sometimes harsh, sometimes welcome. You want to press feet to feet in a sandbox greeting, use feet, massage feet, worship feet. Feet that feel so much coming up from the ground, and then the cold slap of concrete in the camp building. Barefoot feet.
10/16/10 Using a mortar and pestle

Carved and polished out of heavy marble, this ingenious invention makes everything about spices more intense, sensual. You drop the flakes or seeds into the bowl, you take the rough-bottomed stick and strike and strike and strike the fragrant seeds as they release their aroma. Your hand and wrist draw lazy circles, ellipses, squiggles on the floor of the bowl. To finish the spice into a usable powder, you need to increase your effort, your arm and hand working in a churning, rapid, almost frantic pace until you are done, and can see that the product is now a homogeneous granulation.
10/15/10 okay another rest day
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