At a Full Stop

Is there such a thing as GPS for the soul? I've been praying a lot lately, asking for direction, but so far nothing specific has come through. I'm not feeling blank, exactly, just stalled out in terms of where I'm headed and what I'm supposed to be doing now.

The death of Jake was very cleansing, as all loss is. I feel washed more than sad these days, I feel like a clean slate, ready and as of right now, empty. I can call up the grief; it's still in process, but it's no longer pervasive, thank God. Life is no longer about 24-hour a day grieving, but what is it about? If I were an actor, I would turn to the director about now and ask, What's my motivation in this scene?

I could get another dog, sure I could. Then I could slip right back into my old routines. I could shape my days around a dog again, oh yeah. The idea is so comforting. But something in the back of my mind/heart is whispering, Wait awhile. OK. I'm waiting, as if at a stoplight.

There's no hurry, I guess, except life is short and I believe in carpe diem. Seize the day and wait? Does that sound right to you?


Looks like a setting in ancient Greece, but it's just the Supreme Court, seen from the Capitol grounds.

Pen Pals

Ronda published a pic of her handwriting earlier this week, a meme she picked up somewhere. Oh. I love this meme. I agree with her that seeing a person's handwriting says so much about the individual. By doing it here in the blog world, we can finally become real pen pals. Very cool! Thanks, Ronda.

The above pic is a page from my personal journal, written one week after Jake died. I chose this page because it includes one of my doodles. I think of my doodles as part of my handwriting. They are woven in with almost every page of my personal journal, and often accompany to-do lists, notes to my roommates and such.

It blows me away to think that, before the typewriter was invented - not that long ago! - all books were written by hand. Think about it. Could Stephen King or Barbara Cartland have cranked out as many books if they had had to write them by hand? The idea itself is daunting. I love thinking about, for instance, Tolstoy, with nothing more than a quill and inkwell, writing every word in War and Peace. That dude was mighty!

An interview of the great comic artist Lynda Barry a few years ago included this story: when she was writing her book, The Good Times are Killing Me, she got a terrible case of writer's block. Finally she went into her art studio, picked up her paintbrush and began again. After that, the story flowed out of her. She painted her book. Wow. (It's a great book, fantastic. Not very long, understandably).

Writing by hand is slow; even I - a great lover of cursive script - become impatient with the process sometimes. I'm a super fast typist, and, too, there's writer's cramp, a very real, very unpleasant side effect of writing by hand. But when I'm creating an outline from which to teach (for instance), I can't do that via a QWERTY keyboard. It's such a different way of thinking. My personal journal would not be personal if it wasn't written by hand. Speaking only for myself here, of course.

Handwriting is a quirky, unique and completely personal expression of the mystery of the individual. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that some of you will publish images of your own handwriting. If you feel like it, that is.

Counterintuitive Advice

Rob Breszny, one of my favorite astrologers, says:

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): "Keep exploring what it takes to be the opposite of who you are," suggests psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the book *Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.* This advice is one of his ideas about how to get into attunement with the Tao, also known as being in the zone or getting in the groove or being aligned with the great cosmic flow. How would you go about being the opposite of who you are, Aquarius? According to my reading of the omens, that will be an excellent question for you to muse about in the coming weeks. As you stretch yourself to embody the secret and previously unknown parts of you, I think you'll be pleased with how much more thoroughly that allows you to be in sync with the rhythms of life.

I'm tickled by his advice this week, trying to imagine the opposite of me. I should wear a business suit, balance my checkbook, avoid reading and watch a lot more television. Or I could eat junk food, stop cleaning my room, smoke cigarettes, engage in some ruthless and hurtful gossip. Definitely I should stop writing, taking photographs and drawing, blow off my morning meditation, rent a car so as to avoid walking, maybe go on a diet. More than anything, in order to be the opposite of me, I must stop thinking.

Oh. Maybe it would be a good thing to stop thinking for awhile. And I could balance my checkbook, couldn't I? I'm not saying those things wouldn't allow me to be more in sync with the rhythms of life, would they?

Come to think of it, I could bat my eyelashes at attractive men, couldn't I? I could make another stab at shopping for clothing. I could stay up too late having fun with people I love, stop talking to the dead and start hanging out more with the living. Couldn't I? OK Rob I'm getting the idea. Thanks, friend. I'll give it a try. Why not?

Vince

Disclaimer follows post.

He comes to visit me these days when I'm feeling sad, when I'm missing my old dog (who died exactly four weeks ago today). Sometimes he sits on the couch. More often he lies on the bed next to me, staring at the ceiling, talking.

He's a young soldier, maybe 18 or 19. He has short blond hair, fair skin with a few adolescent blemishes, squarish face, dark eyes. His frame is boxy though his arms and legs are skinny. He has an accent, maybe W. Virginia or a bit further west - Tennessee or Kentucky? It's not the soft, classy drawl of upper class coastal southerners. He calls himself "Vince" and addresses me as "ma'am" even though I've told him that is not necessary.

Apparently Vince has been a soldier in many of his lifetimes, always (so far) on the losing side of the conflict. He has never been an officer or anyone removed from the front lines. This life pattern is so ingrained in him that by comparison, life as a dog was a "pass" as he says. He says it was so easy, he was amazed every day that he never had to worry about being hungry, thirsty, about being too hot or too cold or overworked in any way. Even so, he's not too interested in being a dog again. His goal is to rebirth as a soldier on the winning side of a war. I guess that's a worthy ambition. I guess.



Vince tells me that dying by way of an anesthetic overdose was "a rush," and "beats hell out of" dying on a battlefield, thirsty and bleeding, in horrible pain or numb, listening for hours, sometimes even days, to the moans and groans of the dying soldiers around him. Better than dying of the flu, or from wound infections in fly infested field hospitals, too. Dying by anesthetic overdose was like water skiing, he tells me. Strange comparison, don't you think?

When the sadness abates, or I get sleepy, he always looks at me carefully for a minute or two. Then he says, "Goodbye, ma'am," and fades away. That Vince is so sweet.

Disclaimer: I'll be the first to admit that this might be all in my imagination, or that it's a psychological technique my unconscious is using to unwind from losing my one and only dog. Since I deal with dead soldiers all the time, I prefer to think it's "real" but please remember I'm a bit looser with my definition of that idea than most. Don't worry - I'm no further off the deep end than usual. Really. I'm OK.

Blog Families

One of my favorite "real life" gathering places, the fountain at the National Gallery sculpture garden.

Because we are social predators and run in packs in "real" life, here in the blog world, we form clans, too. Family for homo sapiens includes blood family, family by way of spiritual beliefs, friendships, shared experience, as well as by way of organizations, clubs, community. In fact it's kind of hard for us to shape ourselves into groups of any kind without adopting each other. I find this human truth absolutely adorable.

Almost six years ago when I started blogging, I knew exactly how I found every blog I read. The process was quite orderly in the beginning. Today I can only remember how, and through whom, I found a handful of the bloggers I love. Especially during the past year my blog world has expanded exponentially; I lost track long ago of when and how I found most of my blogfellows.

It's OK. My blogfellows are family. How or why we have become related to each other is not important to me. An adoption of some sort has taken place: magically, digitally, cyberspacially. Don't ask me how it happens, I can't explain it. Some bloggers are sisters or brothers, some are cousins, while others are more distant relatives like cousins twice removed (never understood what that means), but all are related. In my clan we do a dance in which we are sometimes closer, sometimes not so close. I think bees do a similar dance within their hives. I might be making that up ... not sure.

One of the most interesting anthropological (or sociological?) phenomenon of blogging is the way our clans form and how individual bloggers come and go from the clans. I imagine within ten years someone will earn a Ph.D. based on a dissertation about this very thing, the migrations of bloggers from blogclan to blogclan. Mark my words - it'll happen. A Doctor of Bloggography. I'll bet you!

In this brand new Age of Aquarius, it's kind of hard to be a loner. You can still do it if you want to, but even those of us who, in "real" life, are shy and introverted, can party with our luxuriously large blog families without becoming drained as we do at "real" parties. There's something for everyone here, oh yeah!

Missed it!

The space station and space shuttle are hooked up right now which makes for a lot of reflective surface up there in orbit. Last night and tonight, as it makes its rounds of the earth, the station-shuttle will be as bright as Venus, which means visible even to we urban dwellers. Even cooler is that it will rise in the west and move to the east. Wicked cool if you ask me.

Last night it was stormy and overcast so I didn't get to see it. But tonight is a second chance. The forcast calls for more thunderstorms but I'm keeping my fingers crossed anyway.

As fun as seeing the reflected sunlight off the space station-shuttle would be thinking about the fact that there are humans up there, hanging out, gossiping (probably) and gazing back at this beautiful blue marble in space. Do astronauts still drink Tang? I'm praying for clear skies. C'mon weather gods, work with me here, please?


The black eyed susans look a bit intimidated by the thorns, don't they?

Perceptual Schematics

Everyone's favorite birdbath, outside the P & C Market by Lincoln Park.

I think we humans are dualistic in outlook for the simple reason that our physical design is about symmetry; two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet. We have left and right lobes in our brains, left and right chambers in our hearts, two kidneys, two lungs, etc. We are physiologically almost symmetrical.

The world we live in is - in the coarsest sense - a strictly defined yin/yang environment of winter and summer, night and day. We oscillate, breathing in, then out, we sleep then wake up.

OK I know - what about spring? Fall? How about dawn and dusk? Trance states, the space between the breaths? What about dark matter? Where does THAT fit in with my simple schematic of the world as I perceive it? True, I'm being crude in looking at the world as a black and white place. Maybe I should say it's easier to think dualistically. Probably that's better said.

Because it's easier, I've always thought of paradox as a combination of opposites, but lately I'm thinking more holographically, that paradox contains not only the opposites but all the phases inbetween, that (for instance) Jake's death was the saddest event of my life so far, while also a tremendous relief, plus every other kind of emotion that falls between those extremes. The paradox of Jake's death (as well as its impact on me) would look more like Steven's fibronacci clouds than any depiction of half-empty, half-full. Holographic perception makes Jake's death more interesting. Since I'm grieving like crazy, it might as well be interesting, don't you think?

The parallel rites of passage occuring within my family soul become a lovely kaleidoscope when I think holographically. It's a design in which my great nephew's birth becomes elegantly entangled with the sadness of Jake's death, as well as with the death of my sister's cat, Hobbes.

Oh for heaven's sake, what am I talking about? I think the heat is getting to me. Time for a glass of iced tea and a break from my furrowed brow and tendency to overthink. Yes? Yes!


Dualistic me, dualistic flowers ... but where's Jake?