Changing horses

I kept this blog a long time, through a lot of changes.  And for a long time I didn't keep it, then tried again.  I came back to it today wanting to start it back up, but that doesn't feel right.  I think this blog is done and another one is hatching.  It will be similar, but new for this new Jewish year.  I'm not entirely sure what it will be.  There is some excitement in that.  So, if you want to follow my thoughts, hopes, fears, memories, opinions, and fancy, try out And Now Again.

Is there value in writing here every day?

I'm not sure.  I  want to keep the habit up but tonight there is really not anything new.  We had first Monday supper with jean and Mark, which was a touch point and very very good.  I love that Bob started that tradition and that all of us maintain it.  Most of the dishes are washed.  I feel sleepier than usual and still need to walk the dog.  All of that is good, feels good.  But none of it is profound.  I don't know yet what I want to do about writing on days when I don't have much to write.  I'll figure it out.

A good day

Today the weather was beautifully mild and breezy.  Attending All Saints Day service was just right.  The Catholic words aren't my words, but the music was beautiful and the sense of blessing was profound in the church.  the priest read the beatitudes in a beautifully resonant voice and being in that church, near the campus where I went to college, and with dear friends from that era, was exceptionally sweet.  After church I helped a friend who has chronic health problems with some cleaning.  That felt good too.  Being able to help is one of the things for which I am most thankful.

It's funny how months get associated with different themes.  If October is about a mystical shift into fall and a thinning of the veil between the living and the dead, November in the USA seems to be about thanks(giving).  On this first day of November I feel especially thankful for my beloved dead and the world's beloved dead - those who have created art, literature, music, science, great ideas, as well as those who have loved and touched me personally.    

After yesterday's crazy, dangerous weather its been good to have a dry if muggy Halloween.  And after my  early sense that I hadn't put enough focus on Halloween this year, it was good to spend the morning doing yard clean up and a little decorating, then going out wiht Ruth and Liam this evening before handing out candy at tthe door. Our street has really regenerated. Ruth and Liam and I dressed up in Faire garb and walked down to a neighborhood potluck. Yum! I think the young families on our street cook better than my friends and I did when we were the young families.  A treat was meeting a neighbor I haven't met before who had her house a street away built 55 years ago when there was nothing where my house is now. We've been 38 years in this house now and the neighborhood is on a definite second crop of little ones. I love it  Bob and I. gave out a bunch of candy and watched kids and adults alike parade by. My favorite adult costume was worn by the guy who stuck a giant tomato cage over hs head and body, festooned it with bean plants, and stuck on a sign "human bean". The guy with the white T shirt inscribed with "Error message Number 476 - Can't find Costume" and the woman with "Identity Thief" written on the back of her shirt and about twenty name tags with different names on them on the front wasn't bad either. I enjoy Halloween because it gets neighbors talking and out on the street and because it encourages a sense of play in those adults who like "dress up". My dress up box was always one of my favorite playthings. Some things never change.  I still think I might try to host a witches tea next year.  We'll see.  At a  more important level, I want to see that I take more of a leadership role in my life and MAKE things happen when I really want them to instead of following along and letting others take the lead and the responsibility too much of the time.

I also am thinking about the more uncanny sense I have about this time of year.  I talk about the veil between worlds being thin and our beloved dead being somehow closer than they usually are.  jewish girl that I am, I'm going to the All Saints mass with friends in the morning.  It just feels right and is a service i have always loved.

Record Rain for one day in Austin

I think its worth recording here that we had record rainfall for one day in Austin today - fourteen inches at the airport!  I went into work truly soaking wet for the first time ever, and during my ten o'clock phone session the rain was so loud on the skylight that I had trouble hearing myself. Apparently it was better on the other end of the phone!  Fortunately the rain slowed way down before noon, but there was flooding and numerous road closings anyway.  Tracy and his trainee are still stuck in the truck on I 35 because the highway was flooded near Troy/  They were supposed to be in San Antonio by five and are just starting to move north of Austin now at eleven thirty.   Liam's school was evacuated into the sanctuary of the synagogue where they rent space (and Liam's math group was forgotten and left in the classroom for too long.  Eventually someone remembered the math group and got them into the sanctuary for the tornado warning.  Thank goodness the tornado didn't hit!)   Tonight the holding pond is full but not flooding and Shoal Creek is not as high as it was at noon.  We may have more rain in the morning.  I'm glad Sweets and I got our walk in before the rain started up again.It's ironic that we were expecting major weather last weekend because of Hurricane Patricia and just got rain.  Today it was just supposed to rain and we got major weather.  I'm one of the odd ducks who kind of likes it that weather, even these days, is not completely predictable.

Tonight I'm thinking about Halloween weeks past when costumes, mine or my kids, were a big deal and brought much joy.  I love dressing up and setting days and nights apart, but I don't seem to take a leadership role in doing it when others aren't.  At least I'm not this year.  The absence of costume plans makes me a little sad.  We'll have to see if I do anything about that during these next two days.

Mistakes

I don't know what's wrong with my hand hands and brain today but I have had three false starts on the yarn bomb neck piece I'm trying to make.  It's the fourth one of the same pattern, and the first three are lovely - exciting for me because I have not knitted with patterns before.  But today's start just eludes me.  I have something on the needles now, but it seems cockeyed.   I'll figure it out or take it off and start yet again but in the mean time I'm thinking about mistakes.  Everybody who knows me knows I collect sayings that I use as charms against perfectionism

Perfection is the enemy of excellence.

Perfection equals paralysis.

REAL IS BETTER THAN PERFECT.

I'm thinking tonight about the humility touches in some traditional art., The intentional mistakes in Native American weaving and beading are  examples of this and so is wabi-sabi, the Japanese tradition honoring the beauty of imperfection.  As I understand it, some potters but a thumb print it pottery items to show they were made by hand.  I am definitely not at a place, in any aspect of my life where I have to make mistakes on purpose.  They just happen.

"The greater light you have, the greater shadow you cast." 

 ~ Jungian Aphorism quoted by Richard Rohr

It was a beautifully sunlit early fall day and the moon is out in full glory. Makes me think about light and darkness, physical and metaphoric.  I'm focusing on trying to spread light. Bob and I voted, which felt good.  My work day was satisfying, as most of them are.  And yet my work as a therapist feels paradoxical.  So much of the work people do with me would not have to be done if  they had not been abused, mistreated, or otherwise really hurt.  Some of the hurts are unavoidable, caused by deaths, illnesses, disappointments.  But too many were cause by clear misuse of power. I work to be very careful with mine.

Rainy October Night

Wind shakes windows, roars and

croaks against illusions of protection.

Walls resist intrusion, push banging back.

Water pounds roof, knocking insistently

reminding me death will knock too soon.

OK, this isn't my poetry blog and won't usually have poetry, but I found out today that my cousin Gail died about the time I was writing this poem.  I look over at Bob writing in his chair and use an act of will to push out of my mind the knowing that death comes knocking when and how she will.  Not here in my house tonight please.  i am not afraid of death but I'm greedy for life.

I've been thinking about Gail all day.  She was a bit younger and  we never lived in the same state as girls, so we weren't really close.  I remember how distressed my mother was when Gail was diagnosed with diabetes at four.  Her mother was a nurse and did a wonderful job of helping her learn to live with her disease. I remember feeling shy when she and her siblings came to visit at our house in Houston.  I was an only child and didn't really know how to play with slightly younger, active kids.  I think I may have hidden in my room with a book.  I've done that too much in my life.  Gail and I lived most of our adult lives in the Austin area and both of us got busy on separate tracks, especially after the death of her grandmother, my beloved Aunt Tonie. I remember holiday meals together, her wedding shower, her parents' funerals, a sweet smile and warm hugs from her.  I know she loved the Longhorns just as her parents had and that her last post on Facebook was one of delight about the team winning the OU game.  There is so much I don't know though.  And yet the two of us shared some of the same laps growing up, played on the same back porch, have the same kolache recipe.

I feel sad that I didn't know Gail better, that I didn't try harder.  I want to try harder with other friends and family members, but I probably won't manage as much closeness as I'd like.  Closeness takes time and energy and both are limited.  Its such a delicate balance between " you can only do what you can do." and "if not now, when?"   

I'm going to cut myself a break tonight and feel delight in the intense silver moon light and the fact that I came up with a dinner (tiny lamb patties and pearled couscous and carrots) that worked for the whole family and in which Liam expressed delight.  Tonight is one of those nights when I need to focus on what works and know that in the morning I can work on the things that can work better.    

My cousin Gail as I  first remember her. 

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Resuming this blog

January 1, 2014 I posted here for the last time.  That is just weird.  So much has happened in almost two years that I haven't chronicled here.  I don't know why I stopped using this resource to chronicle and share.  partly I short-cutted with Facebook.  It is so easy to share a little there every day and believe I am  keeping a journal blog.  but I'm not really.  It's just notes on Facebook.  Too brief.  Too much need to edit.  So I want to start again here on this quiet rainy weekend, and in my poetry blog too.  I want more connection with myself and others, more of my life on record.  so that is the intention.

Where to start?

With  the short list I guess, of milestones past since last I touched this blog.

Both of Bob's parents died and are missed.  Family saw them through to the end as they always saw family through.  We closed their house and it has been sold.  I wear GG's jewelry almost every day and we eat from their bowls and try to continue their legacies of service, loyalty, music and laughter., 

KK was diagnosed with a stage three melanoma on her arm, underwent surgery and, after a terrible period of fainting spells and pain during her senior year pronounced cancer free and graduated.  She is working now, taking a gap year before college, gaining strength and growing up beautifully

Tracy (heart) and Joanna (sepsis from lodged kidney stone) both had almost fatal illnesses but survived and are better now.  Jo still needs a surgery to remove drainage tube and stone, but that will happen.  The crisis is past.

Bob has just finished, as of today, a fantasy novel featuring Liam and Andrea and their three cousins, Cristina, Micha, and Linda.

It was an overwhelming year, during much of which I felt very helpless, also very much loved and connected to family and community.  I learned more about asking for help (including a Go Fund Me effort when Joanna's family was so beset by health crisis and neither of them could work.)  Usually I am on the giving end. In real need, I was tremendously thankful to help my family receive.

I will stop this re-entry post short.  That way I am more likely to come back tomorrow and chronicle happenings from here.

   

 

My focus for the new Year's holiday days has been ntrospection and writing, though I've done a bit of laundry and visiting too, nd have joined the family for meals today.  i expected to come home to an empty house last night since Ruth, Chris and Liam were planning to enjoy the fireworks at Sea World.

  

I took the bus home from work expecting to find an empty house in which to write and think.  On the bus I was deeply touched by the obvious difficulty of a man about my age who was struggling with two suitcases and a need for directions and who couldn't make himself understood to either me or the bus driver.  I believe his native language is not English or Spanish and that he also has some kind of language or developmental disorder. His growing agitation scared the bus driver, who asked him to move away from her and not to yell.  i saw him visibly gather himself as he moved to a seat and made the sign of the cross several times and took a few deep breaths. He calmed,apparently recognized a landmark or a street sigh, and got off the bus seeming satisfied, even smiled at the driver.  I was touched both by human vulnerability and by human resilience. I also felt acutely aware of how much I take for granted (like being able to make myself understood). 

 

 It turned out that the family did not go to Sea World because it was cold and they were enjoying the prettied up house.  I was surprised to come home, feeling tender and open from my experience on the bus, to a small family celebration consisting of guitar music and sparklers around the fire pit, then toasts, resolutions and poppers in the kitchen. Liam, spinning with his sparkler, said he missed Grandpa. So do I, but Bob and I did have a good talk earlier and I feel like we are both where we need to be right now, and only a few days until he's home.

  

Maybe because of the changes in the house, the secular New Year seems more of a fresh start than it usually does.  I do have intentions for this year, not exactly resolutions, but tasks I want to finish, mostly writing tasks, both personal and family history writing and a second novel with Bob.  On a deeper level I resolve to work to keep stress down for myself and others especially by limiting intense immediate reactions.  I also resolve to follow through more effectively in relationships.

 

I even have a quote for the year, something I don't usually do. Albert Schweitzer said, " Sometimes a light goes out but is blown again into flame by a single encounter with another human being." One of the big things I want to remember in action for the new year is that it matters how we treat each other, always. And we can never know which action, for better or worse, has particular impact.

 

First Monday home

Today was good, not exactly restful what with laundry and the exterminator and client phone calls, but good.  I enjoyed being on my own in the house for a good part of the day.  Also, being newly home is a time for fresh starts and new experiences. I just got back from my first Tai Chi class EVER. It was offered as a free trial for a six week series at the school where Liam takes kung fu. I liked it. the price is reasonable for six weeks and I think I will give it a try. I liked the slow cleansing pace and the gradual shifting of weight from foot to foot - good for my balance. As for the specific forms, forget it! But I'm in the sweet role of being a complete beginner. I'm not supposed to know what I'm doing. Feels good.
 Peace,
               Victoria

Home again, home again jiggedy jog. Our drive back from Texarkana was uneventful. except that we were able to use it constructively regarding our book plans, which keep fleshing out. We made it back before sunset and arrived to pumpkin carving and tacos cooking. Ruth carved a scary Medusa pumpkin and Liam a funny basic jack and they tested both of them out in my closet, the darkest place in the house. Family dinner felt good, especially giving Liam his gifts of fruit stand north Carolina apples and a picture of his pilot great grandpa in full gear in plane. He was thrilled with both. At this point the suit cases are back in the attic and the trip clothes drying in the drier. Real life here I come, but with flame leaves and silver mists swirling in the back of my mind.

Bob and I also talked about life style changes we want to make - healthier life style.  I am exercising less than I ever have, and that is dumb.  I don't like the way it feels.  Both of us need to lose weight and focus on healthier eating.  I want to reduce my stress and feel safer and more relaxed.   WE also agreed to schedule at least one three hour work pereiod a week on cleaning and moving more thoroughly into our room - 2:30 to 5:30 on Mondays.  The presence of this scheduled time feels good to me.  I want more order in our physical and temporal lives than we've had of late.

      

Bob and I had a good if slightly tiring travel day. We're in our last hotel and it's a fine one. Bob gets our rooms through Hot Wire and has gotten us some great deals and a variety of comfortable, pretty rooms. Tonight we're in a Courtyard in Texarkana, happy to be off the road where football crowds from football crazed states including Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas are either celebrating or consoling themselves. Our room is gorgeous, all... very modern with reds and classy curved lamps. I feel fancy. Tomorrow I'll have to clean my own room. And also will get to enjoy the comforts of home. We listened to audio lessons about how to appreciate great music from a company called "The Great Courses." I am learning so much, and feeling reassured with what my mind can still take in. I also finished one knitted scarf and started another one in the car. And Bob and I have a decent rough outline for book two - so I have lots to be satisfied with in this moment.

Today was definitely wildlife day. Bob and I had the treat of observing a meadow full of elk both in the morning and in the late afternoon, when they were much more active. The Smoky Mountain herd has about 160 elk and a large group of them hang out in the Cataloochie Valley, which is where we saw them. It is bugling season, and we were treated to that sound a number of times, especially from ...the impressively large male who was king of the harem. Another male had clearly been rubbing his antlers against a tree and was wearing a branch eith which he had become entangled like a crown. On the way out of the valley we saw grouse, more wild turkey, and even a quick glimpse of a black bear in a tree. 

 

We also spent several afternoon hours hanging out in the group camp site where our book characters will have an adventure.  It is perfect, isolated and wildish but with bathrooms.  It also has a creek running through and  a delightful variety of trees, which we used a book to learn to identify.  We probably made a funny picture, Bob in his traveling reclining chair with books in his lap and me running around picking up leaves and pinecones to match against the pictures.  It was a blast!

 

 Tomorrow and the next day will be driving days, not quite as much fun, but we will have our audiobooks and each other's company and memories of a great family,wildlife and fall color trip.

The moon rose full over the Smokies tonight in lavender sly.  I'm not being hyperbolic.  the sky was really lavender.  I've never seen lavender sky, even without a full moon, or sky as softly silver as the clouds beneath tonight's moon.  The moon has been waxing our whole trip - now as we head home it begins to wane.  Such is life.

Fall trip - first week

Bob and I have been on a road trip for a week and a day now, visiting family, seeing eastern fall, and doing research for our next fantasy book. (We actually finished the first complete draft of the first book before we left home, just barely) I love road trips and writing and Bob's family and have always wanted to see the Smokey Mountains in the fall. so at this moment I'm a winner on every count. I've been posting a bit of our progress on Facebook, so some of this letter is old news to some of you, but I want to get it all together in one place and to those of you who don't read Facebook. I'm also adding a bit, especially about the family part..

We started out last Wednesday after work and, thanks to the beginning of an interesting Tennessee audio book called The Rosewood Casket made it to Louisiana awake, safe, and entertained.

Thursday surpassed imagination - riding down bayous fast in an open boat with Bob, our environmentalist guide, and his wonderful dog. I learned so much - including definitions. A swamp is a flooded forest and a marsh is a flooded meadow. Bald cypress trees grow two ways - wide at the bottom like a teepee and not so tall if they are mostly in water and tall, more traditionally tree like, if on land. I love the look of the "teepee" cypress trees. My peak experience was the time I spent out of the boat . feet on the spongy ground, alone in a little stand of big old bald cypresses. I loved the quiet, the smell of them, the filtered light. Both Bob and I are sad that there are no remaining stands of really tall old bald cypresses due to irresponsible logging and lightening strikes. I was also shocked to find out that people shoot alligators in the swamp for fun and just let their bodies rot. We saw two. Our guide said he loves some individual people very much but that as a species we aren't very good. I'll take that to Ruth's parenting language. I know we have goodness in us, but many of us sure aren't very well behaved a lot of the time. Many of the things I've seen on our trip confirm this feeling for me.

For example, it started out rainy today so Bob and I started inside in the Cherokee Museum in Cherokee North Carolina. It is a well done museum which filled my mind with interesting information (like that the Appalachian area is called the seed cradle for the northern American and Canadian forests because it preserved seeds that repopulated this area after the last ice age) and broke my heart with its presentation of the Trail of Tears. The scene in which a dinner table set with a chicken and carrots served on good dishes was abandoned because the Cherokee family who had sat down to dinner at that table was forced by soldiers to leave for Oklahoma with only what they could carry brought me to tears. It reminded me of scenes enacted in Jewish homes in Poland and Germany in the 1940's and in too many places, too many times. I wish that we humans could get it that we are more the same than we are different regardless of religion race or any other identifying characteristic and that none of us has the right to trick cheat or bully any of the rest of us out of land or any of the other good stuff of life.

Over the last few evenings - after dark stopped sight seeing, I've had an unusual chance to see both some of the best and some of the worst of humans - I've been talking by IM with KK about Dr. King's letter from the Birmingham Jail. I am glad that her school is using that great letter as a focus for literary analysis and I'm more glad I reread it. It has been too long. The focus on individual conscious and doing the right things for the right reasons gets me thinking hard about my life and focus now. I am especially stirred by the observation that time is neutral. It just passes and doesn't heal anything on its own. We have to work together to use time to create healing of all kinds of problems, personal, societal and global. Of course there is still the issue of figuring out what the right actions are at any given time.

The family aspects of the trip showed me how good people can be when they make good choices. It is wonderful to have married into a family that honors and delights in all its generations. Bob's Dad and mom were genuinely surprised and delighted when we turned up as surprise visitors for his dad's eighty ninth birthday celebration cousin Hazel and Jim's beautiful country house outside Nashville. We enjoyed great meals and conversations, serious and light. I even got in two visits with precious year and a half old great niece Micha who is a picture of health and joy - with curls and a burgeoning vocabulary and a sweet sweet smile. People can choose love and do it right. I'm lucky to be frequently among such people.

And then there has been fall in the Smokey Mountains - a new treat for me. It would have been on my "bucket list" if I believed in "bucket lists".

Highlights of early fall across Tennessee included bright red vines (ivy-like) climbing up trunk of tress whose leaves were still green and the way many of the tall trees started turning gold from the tops down. I also didn't know Queen Anne's lace bloomed in the fall, but I saw some near Knoxville..Fall color intensified as we drove into Virginia. I observed that the trees turn not only top down but outside in. It was beautiful to see whole huge trees green at the heart and gold around the edges. I feel that way about aging sometimes, as young as ever in my deepest places but much changed on the surface - both in terms of the wear and tear of aging and in terms of the things I've learned and the experiences I've made part of myself. I'm content tonight to be an autumn tree in good company.

Fall on the Blue Ridge Parkway blew away any expectations, even though some of the Parkway was closed because of the Government Shutdown. Nobody can shut down tees, and oh there were trees dressed in every shade of gold and flame. All the colors of the ground were warm - from softest rose flowers to brightest scarlet tree, and the colors of air were cool - all blue and white and smoke.

I really never have seen anything like the crazy quilt of color from overlooks on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and nothing like the quick and capricious way the mist can blot out color in an instant. At one point I stood on an overlook looking at a big triangular mountain covered with spruce. I walked away for a minute to look at a flaming maple and when I turned back toward the mountain it was GONE - completely erased by mist. Good reminder for me that what I have is what I have right now.

I am always happy to see wild turkeys and we've seen them every day since we left Virginia, sometimes six or seven at a time. We also saw a big bull elk today outside the visitor's center at Smokey Mountain National Park (open now).

Today after the Cherokee museum we ate local barbecue (yummy) and entered the Smoky Mountains National Park. I saw a visual phenomena I have never seen and don't even know if I can describe - sunbeams shining through branches in such a way that they radiated out from a central glow and for just the last few seconds before they vanishedd, each ray showed all the colors of the rainbow! Bob tried to catch it with the camera but it disappeared too fast. It will never disappear from our memories though.

Also this afternoon I managed to walk (slowly) the steep half mile to the top of Klingman's Dome, the highest mountain in Tennessee. I climbed it in thick fog, which made the presence of the carcases of the giant balsam firs killed by an invasive species of insect, particularly haunting. The death of so many trees among so much beauty, especially when caused by an invasive species, scares and saddens me. I mean we all die, even trees, but the circumstances of these deaths don't seem right. Even in the presence of death, it was also beautiful up there high in the fog, especially when I got off the main paved trail and walked a little way on a trail with an intriguing name (The Mountain to Ocean Trail).

So that is what we are up to - an inner and outer adventure that I am loving.

We have more ahead of us in the Smokies tomorrow before starting travel days home - hopefully listening to more novel and to a cool audio class about learning to understand the historical context of classical music. I'll never catch up with Bob in that are of knowledge, but it is good to learn more.

 

Rain today. I enjoyed an absence of heat. The moon which was new at Rosh Hoshannah is a waxing crescent now, a fat little boat sailing into tomorrow. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks and I think I have memories of that terrible day and the weeks with followed with mingling with concerns for our world today, especially regarding Syria. I keep thinking of the outward progression - peace in our hearts, our families, our communities, our nation, our world.

Tashlic

At this time of year Jews have a custom called tashlich where we leave our bad habits and defects of character in a body of moving water, like a creek or river in the form of bread crumbs. We let the movement of the water carry the old unwanted ways away and of course we have to work not to restart the same patterns all over again. I love how seriously Liam takes this practice at four and a half. At sixty three there is a lot more to leave in the river. This year I am working especially on moving away from the need to have people understand and appreciate my motivations and reasons for what I do and say. I want my message to be understood of course, but it is feeling more and more like ego to need my motivations to be understood - one more face of defensiveness and the need to be seen as right.

New beginning

This is just a gesture at this point, but hopefully a meaningful gesture.  The new year has come in
- with thunder and lightening if not rain or cooling and a gorgeous sunset tonight.  Many I know are suffering greatly, more than usual.  There is also the joy in our house of a child delighted with starting "real" school.  I enter the high holy days with a strong sense of determination to live a sweeter year, more mindful in  little and big ways, and more intentionally connected with people I love.