Night before last I woke abruptly, flailing from a dream -- not just knocking over my glass of water but spilling it; not just spilling it but breaking the glass; not just breaking the glass but gouging a digit on a jagged shard in the dark. My glass isn't half-empty -- it's ALL empty, because I spilled it and broke it and stabbed myself in the process.
True story. Metaphor, too? I hope not.
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But I managed to work it into this writing exercise -- nicked from someone's MySpace blog. Write your own bio, in 500 words or less ... without using the letter "e."
Today my glass not half full but fully vacant, as I not only spill it but I bust it and jab a thumb on its shards to boot. But I want this not as my soul’s symbol. Shit occurs; glass shatt’rs. This fight stops not, and that glass will fill again. (Though might I should switch to plastic?) I stand again at my tap, awaiting my fill, soothing my own thirst from what flows down low. I'm of a mind to start acclimatizing, but it's such an uphill climb. Want world’s crossroads in my sights, its junctions in my grasp. I’m short and – why not admit it? – I’m spunky to match. Want my man but won’t wait 'round. Why, I find I’m strong as I start cultivating my own ground. I’m kind, though I too oft' unwind, ruminating my past. Now wild with might and not afraid to right wrongs, forging my own trail, dancing, vacillating, to drums of my own choosing. And if I mix my imag’ry, if I contradict my synonyms, what of it? Walt wouldn’t mind. Walt would start that party and stay to its last. Conjuring my gut’s Whitman to call out his song as my own; as with him I won’t stop for nothing, no holds barred and no bars to hold onto. Privy only to my thoughts I find it all, with and without rhyming, with and without rhythm, but always, always with spirit intact. At my last, that’s all I can ask. I'm my own vision; I'm why I stay.
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When it comes to fight or flight, my first tendency is still flight. But I'm finding that's nothing more than old habit. The fighter in me is, well, fighting to get out.
Another of the Deep Thoughts I've been journal-jotting as they come to me in the past couple of days.
Mostly, they make me sleepy.
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Miss Cellanea.
---------------------------
Say "WOOT!!" for warmer weather
Just had to make note of the fact that, at 2:12 p.m., it is a balmy 47 degrees here in Lincolntown. Patches of concrete are actually becoming visible below the sheet of ice that has been my driveway for the past month.
Bikinis and frisbee in the park, anyone???
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Estoy aprendiendo espanol
If you want to find me Tuesday evenings beginning April 3, then you, too, must sign up for Beginning Spanish at SCC. (This means you, Mizzes K and J!)
Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to a new (to me) podcast on iTunes: “Coffee Break Spanish.” Weekly lessons, about 20 minutes long. So far mostly a refresher of what I already know. It’s a European podcast, teaching Castilian (rather than Latin American) Spanish, with Scottish accents no less. Still, it’s been jogging my memory, and that’s good. Got through three podcasts on the treadmill at the gym the other day before I even knew what had happened.
(I subscribe to a lot of podcasts, then feel guilty for never having the time to listen to them. Poor podcast babies, languishing away for lack of tlc from me ...)
---------------------------------------
My latest iWant:
2007 Iowa Summer Writing Festival
Would I really get much out of it, or is it just the lure of the class titles:
-- Shaping the Truth: Fictional Structure for Memoir Writers
-- Cross-Dressing for Poetry: Poems for Prose Writers
-- Writing Out Loud: Crafting Essays for the Ear
-- Politics & Poetics: Writing Yourself Into/Onto the World
-- The Journey Within: Travel Writing and Transcendence
Finances-wise, it’s currently in line behind a new mountain bike and an iPod dock to replace my clunky, ancient stereo. A weekend workshop $25o plus housing; a full week, $500+.
Doesn’t hurt to think about it …
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A phone call, and a dream
Conversation with him the other day – the one who broke my heart so badly, more than two years ago now. Been slowly forging a “normal” friendship since last summer, when one last go-round proved we really never are going to get back together. Still a bit stilted (the discomfort of not being able to be that intimate with someone you once were so intimate with), but getting better with practice. He’s started to open up about the woman he’s been seeing.
“I have something I want to tell you,” he said, eventually.
“You’re pregnant,” I blurted out, trying to be funny.
Only I wasn’t far off. “They” aren’t pregnant yet – but trying.
The only thing that hurts is realizing it doesn’t hurt anymore – it finally, really doesn’t – and so how to define myself without all that angst and drama? I lived with it so long, I don’t know myself without it.
Now I feel compelled to share everything I’ve gone through in these past two years – really, he doesn’t know anything of my life since him – and I don’t really know why I want to tell him. My therapist would ask (again) why I want to remain “friends” with him anyway. But he’s a part of me; that past is what made me who I am now. Maybe it’s that past me I’m seeking verification/approval from? Permission to move on?
I woke the next morning from an intense dream in which Miz K and I were in an escapade with Scooby Doo and Shaggy. I am not kidding – and while I recognized, in my sleep, the comedic value of this, it was still a bit frightening. (We were our badass selves, btw – not those ridiculous Daphne/Velma stereotypes). And when Fred called from that psychedelic Mystery Machine, it was his voice. And he warned us (Miz K and I) that we’d better be using condoms. And later we realized it was because he’d been sleeping with both of us. This dream goes right to the top of the WTF file.
-------------------
Whose idea was this, anyway?
-- edited for content --
I’ve tried to hermit up this weekend to start writing my pieces. It is sloowww going. Right now it feels more like a book report for history class; no life to it. I’ve tried to start with my own gut impressions … but I think it’s time to venture into the seven notebooks I compiled over nine days. ...
Saturday, January 13, 2007
A fan letter.
I owe huge debts to columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, enough so that I want to track down an address for her and thank her properly, like a slobbery groupie hanging around backstage, hoping for just a glimpse of Mick's sweaty spandex.
Just finished reading "Buying the Night Flight," a rather dated (last updated mid-90s) memoir of her years as a foreign correspondent and columnist. She started in the early '60s, at a time when women just didn't do that kind of thing. After proving herself by traveling with the post-Che guerrillas in Guatemala, she still had to beg to be sent to cover an in-the-end minor revolution in the Dominican Republic. Too dangerous for a lady, her editor told her. Tell you what: If you're hell-bent on covering foreign conflict, I'll send you to Vietnam.
She's covered Cuba under Castro. The near-resolution of the Palestinian conflict. The height and death of the Cold War. She coaxed previously untold information out of Fidel, Arafat, Sadat, Saddam -- all precisely because she was a woman. They trusted her as they did not her male counterparts -- and repeatedly told her so. She listened. She made them feel safe. I doubt the same is true today; it likely was more a reflection of the cultural identity of the times than some intrinsic gender difference. But what an original tool to have held in her grasp! She recognized it, and she worked it. That may sound base, but I find it practical.
In addition to her work as a groundbreaking journalist, she was of that generation that paved the way for the kind of life I am fortunate to live so casually today. She, and others like her, managed to break the mold of marriage/motherhood/loss of self as the only accepted model for women to live by. To love freely, to follow one's professional passion, to live beyond accepted boundaries ... while she wasn't exactly a social pariah, with a scarlet A on her blouse, she was a social question mark. People simply didn't know what to make of her. Thanks to the trail she blazed, I can live however I wish -- and alter that life, as I wish.
Yet after reading this collection (it gets a bit self-congratulatory at the end, though the chapters on how she covered various world conflicts are fascinating), I also realize that I could never permanently live the life of a foreign correspondent. It sounds romantic -- the travel! the escapades! -- but in reality, it has to be a drive, a passion above all others. One doesn't cultivate a garden, or a home, or little hobbies, or lifelong friendships (much less a relationship) in a life on the road. I don't have that drive to put one passion above all the others. I prefer to taste a little bit of everything.
She's still writing, at 70-something, by the way:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20070112/cm_ucgg/incongruousmovesfallintoplaceforbushsnextsurge
-----------------------
All I remember of this morning's dream is that family was floating through it -- my father, my Grampy (my mom's dad). I was asked to make the salad, but when I got the bag out of the fridge all of the "good" -- young, crisp, sweet little green and purple leaves -- fixings were gone, and all that was left were wedges of dreaded iceburg and thick, water raddichio (not a fan of the raddichio). Then Grampy gave me a fresh new head of leaf lettuce, and I saw that it was good, and plentiful, but I didn't want to go to the trouble of tearing it up into salad bites (lazy, much?), and also it didn't "go" with the existing leaves.
I did go to sleep last night making a mental note to check the lettuce before I run errands today, see if it needs replacing ...
-----------------------
Closing out my current journal today. Usually I fill a 250-page, 7x11, unlined, recycled-products book in a month, two tops. This one has been in my hands for an embarrassing three months, a long stretch that went unannoted (and thus invalidated?). Not a good sign -- failure to journal generally means distancing myself from my own emotions, and that can't be a good thing. Best to stay connected at least with oneself.
I still journal in longhand, partly because I'm romantically attached to the Dickinsonian (?) nature of it, the wild-haired madwoman in the attic scrawling away with abandon, and partly because I have found that it forces epiphanies to the surface, out of my arm, my wrist, into the ink and onto the page. I cannot write quickly enough to keep up with my thoughts, which can be frustrating, and yet I am more often than not surprised by what comes out of me when I just keep going, keep hand connected to paper.
This particular journal was launched with two rather disparate quotes I'd found at the time:
"Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery." -- Chateaubriand
and
"I don't want my tombstone to read: 'She kept a clean house.'" -- Ann Richards
What shall be the theme of my next volume? Maybe this:
"Follow your love. There is no other happiness." -- Georgie Anne Geyer
-----------------------
Snow days. At their best (when not overwhelming, as on New Year's Eve), they are a welcome, forced slowdown. I can still get out today -- to run a few errands, go to the gym -- but I expect less of myself than I otherwise might. It's not lazy but practical to stay inside, curled up with a book, watching white fall from the sky. If it stays this light and fluffy, maybe a walk later, maybe by twilight. And I plan to make soup, a first for me.
Just finished reading "Buying the Night Flight," a rather dated (last updated mid-90s) memoir of her years as a foreign correspondent and columnist. She started in the early '60s, at a time when women just didn't do that kind of thing. After proving herself by traveling with the post-Che guerrillas in Guatemala, she still had to beg to be sent to cover an in-the-end minor revolution in the Dominican Republic. Too dangerous for a lady, her editor told her. Tell you what: If you're hell-bent on covering foreign conflict, I'll send you to Vietnam.
She's covered Cuba under Castro. The near-resolution of the Palestinian conflict. The height and death of the Cold War. She coaxed previously untold information out of Fidel, Arafat, Sadat, Saddam -- all precisely because she was a woman. They trusted her as they did not her male counterparts -- and repeatedly told her so. She listened. She made them feel safe. I doubt the same is true today; it likely was more a reflection of the cultural identity of the times than some intrinsic gender difference. But what an original tool to have held in her grasp! She recognized it, and she worked it. That may sound base, but I find it practical.
In addition to her work as a groundbreaking journalist, she was of that generation that paved the way for the kind of life I am fortunate to live so casually today. She, and others like her, managed to break the mold of marriage/motherhood/loss of self as the only accepted model for women to live by. To love freely, to follow one's professional passion, to live beyond accepted boundaries ... while she wasn't exactly a social pariah, with a scarlet A on her blouse, she was a social question mark. People simply didn't know what to make of her. Thanks to the trail she blazed, I can live however I wish -- and alter that life, as I wish.
Yet after reading this collection (it gets a bit self-congratulatory at the end, though the chapters on how she covered various world conflicts are fascinating), I also realize that I could never permanently live the life of a foreign correspondent. It sounds romantic -- the travel! the escapades! -- but in reality, it has to be a drive, a passion above all others. One doesn't cultivate a garden, or a home, or little hobbies, or lifelong friendships (much less a relationship) in a life on the road. I don't have that drive to put one passion above all the others. I prefer to taste a little bit of everything.
She's still writing, at 70-something, by the way:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20070112/cm_ucgg/incongruousmovesfallintoplaceforbushsnextsurge
-----------------------
All I remember of this morning's dream is that family was floating through it -- my father, my Grampy (my mom's dad). I was asked to make the salad, but when I got the bag out of the fridge all of the "good" -- young, crisp, sweet little green and purple leaves -- fixings were gone, and all that was left were wedges of dreaded iceburg and thick, water raddichio (not a fan of the raddichio). Then Grampy gave me a fresh new head of leaf lettuce, and I saw that it was good, and plentiful, but I didn't want to go to the trouble of tearing it up into salad bites (lazy, much?), and also it didn't "go" with the existing leaves.
I did go to sleep last night making a mental note to check the lettuce before I run errands today, see if it needs replacing ...
-----------------------
Closing out my current journal today. Usually I fill a 250-page, 7x11, unlined, recycled-products book in a month, two tops. This one has been in my hands for an embarrassing three months, a long stretch that went unannoted (and thus invalidated?). Not a good sign -- failure to journal generally means distancing myself from my own emotions, and that can't be a good thing. Best to stay connected at least with oneself.
I still journal in longhand, partly because I'm romantically attached to the Dickinsonian (?) nature of it, the wild-haired madwoman in the attic scrawling away with abandon, and partly because I have found that it forces epiphanies to the surface, out of my arm, my wrist, into the ink and onto the page. I cannot write quickly enough to keep up with my thoughts, which can be frustrating, and yet I am more often than not surprised by what comes out of me when I just keep going, keep hand connected to paper.
This particular journal was launched with two rather disparate quotes I'd found at the time:
"Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery." -- Chateaubriand
and
"I don't want my tombstone to read: 'She kept a clean house.'" -- Ann Richards
What shall be the theme of my next volume? Maybe this:
"Follow your love. There is no other happiness." -- Georgie Anne Geyer
-----------------------
Snow days. At their best (when not overwhelming, as on New Year's Eve), they are a welcome, forced slowdown. I can still get out today -- to run a few errands, go to the gym -- but I expect less of myself than I otherwise might. It's not lazy but practical to stay inside, curled up with a book, watching white fall from the sky. If it stays this light and fluffy, maybe a walk later, maybe by twilight. And I plan to make soup, a first for me.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
I'm embarrassed to share this.
-- edited for content --
OK, analyze this dream: I am wandering through a large, multi-storied house – apparently my house – after a snowstorm has isolated me there. I am waiting for my lover, who turns out to be some floating combination of a former boss and an adorable little Indian man who’s a friend of a friend of a friend – neither of which I’m remotely interested in in real life. We are wandering separately through this house, coming together and then losing the connection, repeatedly, until finally we are there, together, for real.
He leans in to kiss me, and as he does he’s morphed again – into Cindy Lange-Kubick.
Who I’m also not remotely interested in. Honest.
And who was one of the first faces I saw this morning. I felt so embarrassed I couldn’t make eye contact.
-------------------------
Miz K’s new issue of Vanity Fair has an article I can’t wait to read. “Is Nigeria the next Iraq?” the cover blurb blares. The piece focuses on the militants trying to take back the country’s natural resources from the oil industry – or at least debilitate the industry itself. There’s also a good piece on the nation’s overwhelming poverty and overpopulation in a November issue of the New Yorker. Strange how the world is starting to pay attention just as I’m about to embark on this trip – or is it I who have only begun to pay attention?
-------------------------
Sending love, support and a big salute to Miz N of the Big O, who is embarking on a big new journey of her own. I see great things ahead for you, darling! Will write more when I get a chance.
OK, analyze this dream: I am wandering through a large, multi-storied house – apparently my house – after a snowstorm has isolated me there. I am waiting for my lover, who turns out to be some floating combination of a former boss and an adorable little Indian man who’s a friend of a friend of a friend – neither of which I’m remotely interested in in real life. We are wandering separately through this house, coming together and then losing the connection, repeatedly, until finally we are there, together, for real.
He leans in to kiss me, and as he does he’s morphed again – into Cindy Lange-Kubick.
Who I’m also not remotely interested in. Honest.
And who was one of the first faces I saw this morning. I felt so embarrassed I couldn’t make eye contact.
-------------------------
Miz K’s new issue of Vanity Fair has an article I can’t wait to read. “Is Nigeria the next Iraq?” the cover blurb blares. The piece focuses on the militants trying to take back the country’s natural resources from the oil industry – or at least debilitate the industry itself. There’s also a good piece on the nation’s overwhelming poverty and overpopulation in a November issue of the New Yorker. Strange how the world is starting to pay attention just as I’m about to embark on this trip – or is it I who have only begun to pay attention?
-------------------------
Sending love, support and a big salute to Miz N of the Big O, who is embarking on a big new journey of her own. I see great things ahead for you, darling! Will write more when I get a chance.
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