I had a few of those days when I felt a little bit out of kilter. When I was driving from yoga on Saturday, I started making this list in my head. It’s not in any order and it’s not complete.

1. Ira Glass
2. Walking
3. Typing on a Typewriter
4. Hot Shower
5. Yoga
6. Driving a manual transmission with no one else in the car
7. Singing out loud.
8. Cut and gluing.
9. Weeding
10. Playing in the snow
11. Floating on water.
12. Folding laundry
13. Headphones, loud music.
14. Crayola on scratch paper.
15. Blue jeans.
16. Unsweetened, brewed iced tea. (Not sun tea).
17. JD
18. My Mom
19. Time at Rainbow Drive
20. Frances
21. Laying on the family room floor with small people pouncing on me.
22. Roadtripping, with Colin driving.
23. Carrying my golf bag down the fairway
24. Wine and books and discussion, combined.
25. Stairs
26. Writing a poem off the cuff
27. Talking on the phone with my sisters
28. Hiking boots
29. My passport
30. Barnes and Noble
31. Porch sitting
32. Public transportation
33. Recycling
34. Unplanned time
35. Being on my bike
36. Iowa
37. Tim and Peter
38. A full house
39. Roaring fire.
40. Water
41. Lists
42. Soup
43. Movies in the theatre
44. Watching the Oscars
45. Incandescent light bulbs
46. Going out on the weekends
47. Manual pencil sharpener
48. Shoveling.
49. Thunderstorms
50. Sex

What makes you feel “normal”? What is normal anyway?

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What’s the opposite of thinking “outside the box?”

My answer isn’t what you’d think. Come on and read it in a guest post over here at Shiny Bits of Life.

Thanks again to Paul for the space to think at his space.

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AROS #1

All the power of DAY–
Light To discern and distinguish
Light To construct the concrete world
Compose ephemeral meaning,
All pulsing
In one
Hair thin
Filament.

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#reverb10 Prompt: Beyond avoidance. “What should you have done this year but didn’t because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing?”

I should have revised the novel I wrote instead of chickening out and just taking a teaching job. Because I got positive feedback from agents on it. Because I knew myself what needed to be fixed.

Even so, I went totally BEYOND avoidance, and said “I’ll get back to it someday. Not today.”

Oh, and there was no “deterred” from doing, though many of my excuses may have made it seem like that. It was plain old terror of failure that has left it locked up in the external hard drive on this desk. With its one blue eye staring at me, day after day.

(Bonus: Will you do it?)

Hmmm. I don’t know. On a “Self-Belief as a Writer” scale, I’d give myself a 5.2. I know I CAN do it. I even wonder WHY I haven’t done it and others have.

Yet I seem to always get only halfway there, or so.

Oddly, with so many projects, the minute I flush the fear and get on with things, I seem to instantly reach the finish line.

I mean, not actually instantly. But when the glue of fear has been unstuck, it’s as if action becomes completely effortless.

Like breathing in sleep.

Unfortunately, right now I am very busy tossing and turning.

(Thanks Jake Nickell)

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Today’s #reverb10 prompt wants to know what I have come to appreciate most this year and how do I express my gratitude for it. (Thanks Victoria Klein).

One word: TIME.

With my new dedication to my work, along with my family additions, time has compressed itself into carefully negotiated nuggets. On weekends, when Colin and I occasionally stumbled across an hour or two of unplanned time, we usually find ourselves wondering around in it.

No, that isn’t a typo. I do mean WONDERING!

The Time Tango

This year, time materialized in all the small projects I desired to do and the places I wanted to be: Turkey Bingos and Game Nights and lazy summer afternoons at the pool; recycling events and coat drives and knitting groups.

Time poked at me whenever I gazed out at the weedy, overgrown garden that needed planting, and picking, and watering and just a friendly visit.

Time brushed by me and said “well I’ve got plans: places to be and people to see. Are you coming or what?”

Time goaded me into planning parties I didn’t want to have, then guilted me out of those I wished I could attend.

Time showed me middle age in the mirror, woven with lines and grey hair. Then Time said kindly that it would be OK if I took an extra bit of him to drive to Norwalk for a nice haircut now and then.

On those rare hours when we were alone together in the house, Time covered me with the fleece throw. Then he tossed his friend Caution to the breeze, lifted my feet onto the coffee table and whispered sweetly: “Go ahead, sweetheart. Waste me!”

Time dragged his feet up the hill of responsibility, then coasted madly back down the other side, remembering suddenly that youth is a state of mind.

Time plotted activities on calendars and measured itself in tablespoons and inches. It  multi-tasked: it reminded me I can fold the laundry while the pumpkin pie bakes. I can chase and play while I rake. I can knit and watch TV.

Of course Time made sure I made it to yoga. At least once a week anyway. Time gave me some space. He waited in the car for me and played with my iPhone.

Best of all, Time laid down and rested at the end of day. He put his aside the insistent, linear drive toward death. Instead he got drunk on the brain’s capacity to tumble through unbounded space.

Time went wandering in dreamland.

(My pics were captioned by an awesome app called “Photo Notes Free: Captions for iPhone and Facebook.”)

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Day 3, #Reverb10

Prompt: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors). (by Ali Edwards.)

View from the Passenger Seat

Once I sink against the leather–
GPS Daniel having accepted
Our destination–
Once we have buckled
With coffee stowed…

I become feather light with
The air of tire noise
Moving us away.
Daniel drones on in his
Automated accent,
But I hardly hear.

In our climate-controlled
Shuttle to Vacationland,
Rolling along the WPA
Dream road, I sketch myself
Into the landscape–
Just another happy
Bluebird, nesting in favored
Hiding place.

From here, from here
I can see forever:
Windturbines realized.
Acid-washed barns
Reaching into gravitational
Certainty.

Wedged into the seat
By ignored activity bags
Too busy doing nothing,
For once,
Occupied, well-enough:
Trading Oujia board imaginations
With my driver,
And snapping up the
Flashing poetry
Of sky and field.

This post is part of a daily writing project called #reverb10. Find out more & join in this creative exercise here.

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This story starts with yoga, but it is really about being gone.

Because, let’s face it, we all have the desire to be gone now and then. Sometimes more than we want to be here.

Here’s the story: So I go to yoga and I am in some inversion: sun salutation, moving through upward dog and back down, when my mind jerks me away.

And this is the place (pictured) is where I end up.

This Holborn Tube Station in London. The escalators, which are VERY LOONG. My mind and I are riding them up,  up, up.

My yoga brain does this often. I am not sure why. It jerks me around. Sometimes I arrive in the pool at the Dominican Republic. But lately, I’ve been ending up often in London.

I’m always alone. I am someplace familiar. Walking down Delaware Road. At the soup kitchen. Swaying on the Bakerloo Line In the case of the Holborn escalator, I went there whenever I went to my writing workshop. I’d take the Central Line home after having beers at the Shakespeare’s Head with my fellow writers.

We didn’t want to stay in London. It wasn’t right to be there for us at that time. I suppose some would say that was because our family was over here, waiting for us.

I don’t know that I believe in determinism. But I do know my mind has been taking me away often. To faraway places. To London, to Iowa, to the Athabasca Glacier. To places where responsibilities were much lower and life belonged to just me.

I suppose yoga (in this case) is like a safety valve. The mind splits and lets go of expectations. I can return for a moment to that one place where I have nothing to do but breathe, stand still, and maybe just people watch.

Beyond yoga, I grab for moments to do this in my life now. I knit to breathe. I sing to breathe. I bake to breathe. All of it takes me up, allows me to be gone, if even for a couple minutes.

We all need that.

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The fog and the mugginess this morning reminds me of London.
Previously posted on Jan 16, 2006


Everybody’s got a darkness
They’re not going to show it to you.

It’s Monday and grey again in London.

I dreamed of you last night. I sat in a cafe over cappuccinos with some friend. He told me the flat I used to live in on Randolph Avenue was going to occupied again soon. By you.

Everybody’s got a shadow
Following them around
Clinging, clinging to their footsteps
Dragging them to the ground.*

In the dream, I felt you coming here like a rocket shooting to the moon. I thought, in the dream, that suddenly you realized you could not be away from me anymore.

Darkness…
Shadow…
Secret…
Hear them rattlin’ bones

My friend, well, he didn’t know I knew you. He said your name like he was reading it off a marquee. I listened, then I blurted it out. Who you were to me.

Darkness…
Shadow…
Secret…
Hear them rattlin’ bones

There was silence over the wobbly wooden table, as we stared down into the dregs of our foam. It was strange to him — as it is to everyone — the thought that you were mine once. He stumbled a laugh, one that I mimicked. We changed the subject. But I wanted to leap up and run to 115 Randolph Avenue and sit on the step, petting Missy the cat, and wait for you to arrive.

Everybody’s got a little secret
Something they never gonna tell
Gonna take it right down to their grave
Up to heaven or maybe to …well,

I tried to go back to sleep after that dream. It was 2:53 a.m. I flipped on the blue pinlight of my booklight and tried not to wake Colin. He rolled over and reached for me but did not wake. I read for a while, then got up, and laid on the couch. There was a rumble, deep inside of me, pulling down, down.

I watched BBC. In the middle of the night, they rebroadcast shows with a sign language interpreter in the corner. I watched the face and the hands and didn’t listen. I watched until 4:15. Then I went back and read some more.

I finally slept, maybe around 5:15 or so.

There is a skeleton in your closet
Do you hear, do you hear it rattlin’ bones?
I think you better look the thing in the eye.
It’s never gonna leave you alone.

This morning, I walked from our flat on Delaware toward the shops at Maida Vale. I carried my laptop on my back, heavy and full of stories I am having trouble telling. A thin, dark man walked toward me. His coat was too big for him, his eyes looming large behind his glasses. The weight hanging from my heart swung and loomed, pulled down again. I walked by 115 Randolph Avenue under lead skies.

I wondered what that man, walking by me just then, carried inside him, the color of his darkness. “Tell me your secret,” I whispered to myself, a dirty proposition. I wondered what he dreamed last night.

Darkness…
Shadow…
Secret…
Hear them rattlin’ bones.

*Lyrics from “Darkness” by Kelley Hunt

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Mr. Blue, you did it right
But soon comes Mr. Night, creepin’ over
Now his hand is on your shoulder
Never mind, I’ll remember you this…
I’ll remember you this way…

– Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra

After the sound of the skull cracking, and after the soft sound of my flesh finding the desert floor, I assumed that all the world would go silent.

I lay there in the midst of my own shards, assuming the great white light would appear.

There wasn’t light, only a parade of broken memories. And their soundtrack.

I counted muffled explosions until they stopped long enough for me to forget about them and to start to wonder if I had gone to sleep or even gone somewhere where hearing wasn’t relevant.

Nothing was certain. Except shattered pieces of me — bone, teeth, memories, white blood cells and forgone giggles — dusting the strange country around me. I could move my right arm, so I caressed the hard earth, swimming in a slick of my own discharge.

I felt exposed. A gaping hole opened and music flooded out, songs that I hadn’t remembered knowing.

“I’ll stop the world and melt with you..”

“You do, something to me. Something that simply mystifies me…”

“I close my eyes. Only for a moment and the moment’s gone…”

Pairs of arms cradled me, lifted me, carried me. When it hurt, I cried, and stared into my mom’s face. She crooned too.

“Rest your head close to my heart, never to part, baby of mine.“

Terror and I slid in and out of sleep together. An alternate self, peering over at black emptiness beyond concussion, constantly poked me to revive.

I gripped the cotton sheet in the cool dark room and stroked it like skin.  The comfort of it ate at me.

I held as still as possible.

If I shook or even shuddered, the last thin layer of this strange dust on me might fall away. What held me together was as fine as a moonbeam.

All the imagined places I made to hide began to disappear.

“If you say that you are mine
I’ll be here ’til the end of time
So you got to let me know
Should I stay or should I go?”

– The Clash

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Today I was talking to some friends whom I haven’t seen much of over the summer. I shared with them a bit of the details of the roller coaster of our last few weeks.

You know, just your average roller coaster of life.

When I finished rolling out the 4-11, the friend circle was just quiet and looking at me. Nobody said anything, so I just kinda chuckled and shrugged it off with a laugh and a “well, five years ago when I was sitting at the pub drinking beers and having the easy life, I’d never had believed someone if they told me this is where I’d be five years, heh heh.”

And the crickets continued to chirp their response.

Relationships are a trick of the mind. Everyday we get up alone and spend the entire course of the day, alone, inside our singular minds. It takes a cold-mirror moment like the one I had today to remind me that what we need and get from other people is valuable and limited. And yet that which we mine from ourselves is skewed and often without perspective.

I am pretty sure that in the last 18 months or so, in the process of building one part of my life, I haven’t been as capable or as good at making my friends happy, answering calls for help, or greasing the wheels of relationships in life that make spontaneous conversation meaning-full.

The ground I walk on is unfamiliar and I feel cast away on an island of ill-terrain, where the natives aren’t unfriendly– they just aren’t that interested. So, in the midst of carrying the weight of life, I have mostly put aside trying to integrate.

I go the well myself. It’s a well I dug myself. I sit at the well alone and sing about tin roofs, Roman ghosts and the battlement of my fears.

I sleep heavy in sweat and dream of a well gone dry.

In my “Fantasy Island,” de plane carries me away to the mainland… whatever that may be.

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