You, Me, and Us

I wanted to say
something today
about our Us and our Now
and how
I cannot find words
that wrap around
this wild circle of living
we've given

the fullness
pregnant with possibility
that these leaps have taken with us
the madness
of living as if our dreams were reasonable
and reasons to live

the finding
we're safe with our hearts
and each others'
the risks of trust turned good sense
and following
that most fickle of human organs

such life!
in our freedom
with each other

The Ocean

The sea is heavy water. So salted that it feels more like a mix of fresh water and mercury, the ocean slides over and around my feet in a dance. It feels like I should be able to walk on it, with or without faith. I should be able to carry a handful of it with minimal leakage. It is substantial.

The sea is also an ocean of metaphors. The waves and depths could be emotions. The tides, the shorelines, the doldrums, the hidden flora and fauna, the creatures of the deep... what fertile substance for the imagination and ideas.

But mostly, the sea is a container. It's full of salt water, but it contains history, aeons of grief and hopes and motivations. It contains possibility. It is indomitable power contained in a lulling shush. It contains secrets and you could die of exposure on it. It contains water and salt, the consumption of both so necessary to our living, but unconsumable.

Like Africa, the ocean is a place where everything eats everything. I am consumed by the idea of it.

...and more vog

I talked with a person today who has lived on the island since the seventies. He thinks that the vog is due to drilling to tap into geothermal energy. Ooooh, a conspiracy theory. How do we believe these things?

Today by 3 pm people were driving with headlights on. It's getting darkish earlierish. Weird.

And D can't breathe. And I've got a headache. And we're all grumpy.

Paradise!!

grief

I am in another grieving cycle. Beats the heck out of me what it's about, but I'll just talk about it and maybe I'll know what I'm thinking when I read what I wrote.

Last year I had back troubles. After a diagnosis of a herniated disc, and repeated prescriptions for pain medication and muscle relaxants (both addictive, but David said we'll deal with that when it's time for it), I became unable to walk.

Sitting in wheel chairs and watching others saunter brought on a pity party and jealousy of the likes I never hope to see in myself again. Eventually, I was able to grieve the loss of my ability to walk and to get to some acceptance that this was what is next.

When the pain got so bad that I couldn't sleep without propping myself in strange foetal knots, I knew that I couldn't live this way. A trip to the emergency room, three days immobilized in the hospital, and a spinal surgery led to my walking onto a plane two days post-op and going home: walking and pain free. I had avoided surgery because of all the friends I have who were worse for it. For me, it was miraculous.

From this experience, I learned that I can survive sudden grief and loss, can move on, can deal with what life gives us.

The grief that is eating me up is a grief of regret. I feel like I have failed my husband and my kids.

When David and I got together, I was sure that our love was the answer to all the questions. Didn't the kids' mother need the freedom to come to terms with accepting herself as gay? Didn't the kids want a mother who wanted to be domestic for them? Didn't David need help with the weights of parenting? Oilah! Let's fix this thing.

I don't know if my regret is over my naivete, hubris, or just the way things didn't work out as we saw they could have. The kids immediately took a hate to me. They also loved me. Which made the hate worse. I immediately went into disciplinarian mode, which fueled more hate and I felt was the only way to give stability in their volatile, changing lives.

Oh the things I would do differently. One of them would be to stop trying so hard. I wanted to help, sure, but there was an effort in controlling the course of a river that was already well past the fork. What did I think we could do with that?

So, now we're here, with things as they are, and I keep making myself remember not to try so hard. And we're fine. We're just not where we pictured, as far as bringing peace to the kids' lives and helping them find their ways without additional pain.

And that makes us different from any other family... how?

I just wish that I knew then what I know now. Don't we all!? I would have loved the kids in a much better way for them than I was able to understand at the time. And so I grieve the lost opportunities and the damages I've done in doing my best.

And now? Now I'll just remember to love and let go. That's where we are now in parenting. It's time for us to focus on our Kuleanas (responsibilities, business) and let the kids find focus on theirs.

Paralysis by Overanalysis

I'm waiting for spaghetti squash to cool so that I can scoop it out and save it for lunch tomorrow, as spaghetti.

While I while away the time, I am thinking about thinking. Today I was reminded that the mind can go on and on. In fact, there are times that I think I'd do well to join On And On Anon. When, or if, I can get my mind to shift into neutral, such a peace overwhelms me that it is nirvhana. Or however you spell it...

Knitting puts my mind into neutral, also sometimes called the zone. I wonder what is the purpose, then, of all this thinking, if it's so much bliss to stop it. To what use shall I put the analysis?

I like to ask questions. I like to chat and toss around ideas. I like silence. But when we start talking about versions of reality and perceptions, I feel like I've stepped off of solid ground onto a precariously swaying vessel. Maybe this is why and how we get rigid in our beliefs and perceptions: because the motion sickness of changing perspectives can be quite uncomfortable.

But in all of this I wonder, is there a higher way. By higher way I mean a both/and approach to ideas rather than either/or. So, is there a higher view of thinking vs. cruising? Is there a zone where analysis also operates and timelessness informs us?

I like to ask questions.

Metaphors

Recently I had an interaction with a couple that left me questioning my skills with language. Over dinner and a discussion of exciting ideas, I enthused and barely contained my excitement. Everything I said was presented in glistening metaphors (of which I was unaware at the time.) In the time between the start of dinner and the end, I became increasingly aware that the man didn't understand what I was saying, and perhaps just didn't like me very well.

I did two things in response to my perception: I tried to communicate better, i.e. make better metaphors. Then I read him intuitively, sensing that on some level I reminded him of his mother, and sensing that this was not a positive thing. Eventually, I gave up, lost my enthusiasm, and tried to be quiet.

The most interesting part of all of this comes in the lunch I had with the wife a day or two later. She took the time and trouble to explain to me what went on. Because we potentially may be friends for a long time, this revelation was a real gift.

She said that metaphors are a signal for danger to him. (I know about psychological triggers, so she was speaking my language right from the start.) As a teen, he had been given some devasting news by his mother ...in the form of a metaphor. So when he hears or senses an apt comparison, he shuts down.

From this I was able to determine:

• anything can be a trigger
• we each have a responsibility to remove the fuse from our personal triggers
• I am in the habit of using metaphors to excess
• I was right-on about the mom association, just in a different form
• metaphors can be used for many functions (more in a moment on that one)
• this friendship would be my opportunity to consciously use or not use metaphor, to be more aware of my own communication style (a good thing)

In conversing with myself about this strange verbal wreckage, I found that I was unable to think about it all without giving myself a metaphor. I would think, "Maybe for him it is like... No, wait. Well, it's as if I were... No, no, wait. It could seem that..." And so on. Until I realized the context in which metaphor is necessary: for the unnameable and formless in our lives, we must resort to metaphor. We can give these "things" names (insight, enlightenment, awareness, relationship) but abstract nouns fly about as far as lead birds. Metaphors take wing and carry meaning all over the place, dropping seeds of potential and fertilizing ideas. See? Case in point.

I also tried practicing communication without metaphor, and found it to be revealing. As in naked. Talking free of metaphor is an embarrassing way (for me) to speak. Language without metaphor is direct, unsoftened, mono-tentional. There's no escape to, "Yes, I mean that, but also this." Using metaphor is a way to avoid blasting others with difficult truths or difficult concepts. Hence this man's mother used metaphor to break life-changing news to him in a way he might understand. I had to admit that I have often used metaphor to hide. It was as if I was saying, "Figure out what all I might mean, if you can."

It makes sense that I would communicate in such a way, being as I lived forty years with secrets of abuse and didn't reveal them to anyone. But maybe while this guy works on allowing metaphor to his ears I can take it as an opportunity to regulate the flow of metaphor out of my mouth. Maybe it's time for me to be direct and reveal my self to others. I may not become a verbal flasher (yet), but at least I can take off my down coat of ideas in a warm room.

See? It just comes to me.

Family

Is there a police force more compelling than that of family? Long after we've outgrown our childhood cohort and the authority of our parents, that culture still reigns in our thinking and our choices. The upside (per Christians) to the family culture is "raise a child in the way he should go and he will return to it." Or not stray from it, or whatever version you prefer. I strayed. I tried to return to it and strayed again.

Now I'm trying to burn the bridges to The Way so that I can't go back to it any more. But just yesterday I caught myself in my journal talking in the passive voice. I was talking about difficult times in the past and the relatively gentle stress of my days now, "I always wondered if I wasn’t being stretched to be able to handle less, rather than more." Well, it's an interesting idea: being made a larger vessel so that we can contain more without strain, but let's not miss the real point here. Who is making the vessels?

You see? I have in my mind, still, a Maker. A Stress Coordinator. Thankfully, I seem to have internalized this One as benevolent and intelligent. Ungratefully, I reject the idea of a maker. I can hear the family-police outcries at that statement. No maker? Good God!

In fact, the pressure is so great from my family to lie and say that I believe, whether I do or not, that if it came down to it, I would lie to keep the peace. See what I mean about effective police force?

That leaves me without a maker and without a family, however. The pressure is great to buy into what the family believes. Do Islams go through this? Certainly. (But they're mistaken about their religion, my father would add.) Buddhists don't seem to have this struggle. They seem to say, "Believe or not, whatever, but wash your dishes." I am partial to them just for that practicality. But I'm not an -ist or -ian or -im. I'm just an am.

vog and beliefs

More about vog.

We had a customer in the shop who told D that his fireman friends did air testing of the masses hanging over Kona and they are moisture, not vog. D had the presence to ask a most reasonable question, "If that's not vog, then why am I so grumpy?"

D got a resonable answer, too, "You're right, it must be vog."

But really, if it's not vog, what are these miserable physical symptoms about? What is the darkish haze we see right before our eyes? I like to think that the message got altered in being carried, and the air testers said, "It's mostly moisture." That I can understand to be true.

Who cares? Well, the volcanic gasses are not healthy. If a person can simply fall asleep and die in their car from gas fumes (don't worry, I understand that there are different gasses at work here), then at what point do we all just fall asleep on the island and never wake up? In fact, today is my day off and I'm thinking of just going back to sleep...

The "is it vog" question seems pretty silly to me. But I keep relating this back to some historic events that had people questioning what is real. The first is from a trip to Zimbabwe.

I was sitting at the camp with our camp manager, a woman, and I asked her how people felt about the AIDS problem and so many people dying from it. Her answer was, "They don't believe in it." Her friend dying in the hospital as we spoke went there with a really bad flu. What's to believe or not about AIDS? But it makes change unnecessary if we simply don't believe it.

The second is from my introspection regarding Nazi Germany. I was shocked to realize that many people had pre-indicators that they needed to get out of there. Some did. This begged the question of why others did not leave. I heard in my head all the reasons, "We can't afford to move; to where?; this is our home and all we own for generations is here; no one should be able to chase others away; something will change." and the most befuddling, "This isn't really happening."

Reports are greatly exaggerated. Sometimes. In Nazi Germany, they were not. With AIDS in Africa, they are not. With vog? Well, today is clear. No one is sounding sirens or planning evacuations here (that I know of). But other places on the island have already been evacuated and then repopulated, because, ultimately, we just don't know.

Voggy Daze

We're still dealing with a vog bank that makes it dusk from about noon until dark. Rains haven't cleared it for more than a couple of hours in the morning. Winds today are stirring the vog cover around. It's up there, hanging around, and making for an interesting mix of physical and emotional symptoms in me.

Physically:

• my eyes are producing pumice. I would do well to be resourceful and use it as a microscrub for my face, except that my skin has turned tender with the times.
• my lungs are coughing up pumice and acid. It's a chemical peel for bronchial youthfulness.
• my sinuses are being weather chiseled into remains of brain-supporting stalagmites and jaw-hinging stalactites. If the abrasion continues, I won't be able to chew or think about how bad that might be.
• my body is swollen with anti-allergen stuff in an attempt to take the foreign bodies out to sea.

Emotionally:

• I feel like a sack of cement is sitting across my chest and I am a slug for not doing my usual activities anyway.
• My swollen body and tingling surfaces lead me to feel alien, not at home in my own body.
• I feel misunderstood since no one is going to read this and believe that I'm a pumice producing chemical filter.
• I question my own sanity: if it's this bad, why aren't I getting the heck out of here. (Because it's paradise, doggonit.)

Back in the day, I read a book about a jungle adventure with a volcano and they encountered vog in the story and I thought "how cool." Actually, I thought that the author had made up the word and pretty much the idea. Let me assure you: vog is real. It is not cool.

And the poor folks who paid big bucks for a tropical vacation here. I think that I have something to complain about?!

For a satellite image of the vog go to:
http://www.redorbit.com/images/images-of-the-day/img/19601/vog_from_the_kilauea_volcano_in_hawaii/index.html

bookkeeping

I'm paying homage to the date, being as taxes are due tomorrow. I've been in a flurry of bookkeeping this week. I almost typed beekeeping for book... which is a fine summary of how I feel about the job: stung.

I hate beekeeping. It makes me hurt all over. I try so hard to do a good job with it, but I'm so creative that the math gets really, well, creative. I say that our books are a Monet. From a distance they're a beautiful thing. Up close, they're a mess.

I think what I really mean is that I need to keep my distance from our books.

nothing

blah blah blah

blah blah

blah blah blah blah

blah

blah blah blah

Politics

I just read the recent Rolling Stones summaries of Obama's campaign.

Random thoughts:

• maybe we can outgrow herd instincts and prejudices. Someone named Osama drops us to our knees but we can vote for someone named Obama to lead us (I got lots of early emails full of ignorance about the name issue...)
  
• bipartisan politics seem like a way to divide a country. Now I'm thinking that narrowing it down to only a few parties, out of our possible millions, is genius.
• The election system is ill. If Obama can win using grass-roots organization, I like that idea alone. I don't feel like I've had a vote for years because I couldn't just say "no" to the choices. If I could have voted No all around, would they have had to come up with better options?
• If Obama wins by getting people organized and pulling together, he's got a chance as president.
• Hilary is scary as a person. It's really too bad she's a woman because she gives us a bad name. A woman has as much a chance to win as anyone. I don't think that gender and race have anything to do with potential. I am only concerned with the spirit of the person running.
• If our nation makes note of voting for a black man, we are commenting on how we are still stuck in our prejudices about race and gender.
• I am afraid that someone will feel a need to kill Obama ASAP if he wins just because of stuckness. But then, the herd instinct is cureable...
• I haven't talked about the other candidate because just looking at the family speaks volumes about their spirits. Sorry I'm judging the books by their covers, but their covers are transparent and I'm judging what I see as shallow, privileged, and entrenched.
  

I may vote in this election, for a change. I wonder how many of us will be coming out of the woodwork to shake up the establishment?