A year of maybe...

 Happy New Year my dears!  

Another pandemic year is behind us, but it remains part of us - deep in our bones and our psyches, and probably even in our DNA and our cells - trauma does that. We can't just "kick 2021 to the curb". We are not the same as we were when it started and we can't erase that. 

At the same time, we love fresh starts. So New Year - our collective fresh start, full of hope and promise and expectation and possibility.  

Personally, I have no resolutions to improve myself. I have no intentions. No goals or 10 point plan to live my best life or be my best me or whatever. I have a lot of maybes... maybe this year I will begin to learn how to cook without so much dependence on recipes. Maybe this will be the year I knit a sweater. Maybe this year the misophonia won't bother me so much. Maybe I'll change the name of my blog to "Controlled Burns and Forced Blooms".

At the beginning of 2021, I had such hope along with a wait and see perspective for the year. The start of 2022 feels more like a deep sigh and "I'm almost 61, and I want to get some shit done so, fuck it, I have to stop waiting". 

Nadia Bolz-Weber's  New Year's blessing summed it up for me:

"May you expect to get so little out of 2022 that you can celebrate every single thing it offers you, however small". 

My blessing for you all:

May you all have delight and disappointment and joy and wonder and boring times too. May you make regular time to rest, create, play. Do the best you can. May we all have a beautiful, terrible year together.

 

(Thank you Kate Bowler for "beautiful, terrible")

 

Not ready for the Light

 This week - this strange out of time week between Christmas and the New Year - this week that is part of the 12 days of Christmas when I should be joyous and celebratory often feels like the real waiting of Advent. This year it is even worse - I have been waiting for so long for what exactly - a return to "normal" what ever that is - an end to the pandemic - freely and fearlessly seeing friends or even just going for a walk in the park or a trip to the grocery store. We still talk about the number of cases, the transmission rates, availability of rapid tests, symptoms to watch out for. 

This week - this strange week - this liminal limbo. Yule and solstice and Christmas past - Huzzah, blessed be, Emmanuel, the light has returned. 

This week - I learned I'm not ready for the light. I want to remain underground - dormant - in darkness - an old miser counting out failures, tallying my insignificance, multiplying my unimportance, making an accounting of my incompetence  - feeling so small and defeated there will never be enough. The books never balance. 

I'm not ready for the light - yet, I appreciate the sparkle of the snow - I tend the little ember in the corner of my soul - I laugh and wonder and still love orange marmalade on toast and a good cup of tea. 

This week - this strange week ending a strange year -  I'm not ready for the light - and the amazing thing is, the light doesn't care - like the game of hide and seek, ready or not here it comes. I wonder how good my hiding place is. 

Doing my best

 Something popped up on my FB page that reminded me of this picture of the time I burned the bread for the Eucharist. 

I don't have a lot to say about this except that I'm learning that even when I am doing my best, I can wind up with burnt bread. And that is just fine.

Broken

 I am so broken and exhausted. I keep thinking that I am angry but really, I just feel broken and exhausted and out of place. 

I have no idea what happens next. I'm not waiting to exhale. If anything, I am waiting to inhale again. 

Everything broke. I broke and the dreams and ideas and plans ran out through the cracks and now what? 

And yet, I don't feel awful. I would think that I would feel awful and depressed and full of darkness and despair. (I'm not even going to quote Leonard Cohen, I am so tired of that quote!)

Today, I read this from "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer:

"Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily." 

In the midst of all of the grief and fear and anger and loneliness and isolation and violence of the past 18 or so months, not to mention the difficult times prior to the pandemic, it seems that all I am left with is wonder and joy. And that is a hell of a thing. 

Wonder and joy don't make the brokenness go away. Wonder and joy may not even put me or anything else back together. Maybe the point is to accept that they exist even here, even now. Somehow, they are beyond the brokenness, not born from it. Wonder and joy just are, and because of that, they make the brokenness more bearable. 

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Too much of...well, everything

 This is a bit of a rambling mess... but then the world, our lives, everything seems a bit of a rambling mess right now.

May 4. In Washington, this is the next reassessment date. Until then, we are to stay home, physically distance, shelter in place, only go out for essentials (or have essentials brought to us if we are so privileged). When I saw this, I was both unsurprised and I felt myself sink a little deeper into a sense of sadness and loss and gratefulness that all the staying home and distancing are maybe possibly helping.

I have looked at charts and graphs I don't totally understand. I've saved so many memes and articles and pictures and hopeful uplifting stories for "later". As a highly sensitive person, (oh come on, I'm not boasting or bragging here, anyone who knows me well knows about my horns and my spidey senses and my empathy), these are difficult days. So much beauty and loss and grief. People are sharing art and music and reading stories and sonnets. There is also a lot of gaslighting and misinformation and conflicting information and fear.

We are all doing the best we can in circumstances none of us have ever experienced before. We are digging deep into our hearts and souls for our coping skills and what we've learned. We are tapping into our courage and resilience and fear and need for others in ways we maybe haven't ever done before. We are using humor to hide as well as heal.

And there will come a day when we will be released. We will rush out of our houses like sheep and goats and lambs released from the winter confinement and we will run to the pastures. And, to borrow from Hamilton, I can't help but feel and think that the world will be upside down. There will be trauma and grief - I can't imagine how traumatized health care workers are going to be, and small business owners, and people who are unemployed, people who have lost people. And these things will exist together, the joy and the grief. As a group, we will have to heal from so much.  

And frankly, I am exhausted. If I were to draw or give color to my prayers right now, it would be a big dark scribble. It would be the unknown in the only way I know how to represent it.

If I have learned anything at all in my life, it is that the unknown contains everything.

So I have to step away for a couple of days. Away from the news and the numbers and the charts and graphs. Away from the tragically heartwarming stories of acts of kindness and holy work. Away from the gaslighting politicians and business leaders and profiteers.

I have to step away from trying to understand it all.

I have to spend some time with the unknown.

Collecting

Hey lookie, I remembered I have a blog. And since I am doing the Hugo House 30/30 Writing Challenged again this year, it seems like a good time to resurrect it.

One of my favorite writing teachers always encourages us to collect impressions and sensations and images - the quality of light, lists of things that are a certain color, dreams, and all manner of other things. I will have to look up some of the other collections and do some of them this month.

Yesterday's walk home proved to be a gathering, collecting time.

I met two British Mastiffs, Oscar and Franklin. Huge, friendly dogs. I don't remember which dog this statement was about but the owner said, "We are working on his racism. I think he was a police officer in a previous life".

The train station was full of posts and ropes and people saying "This way to the exit". It was pedestrian traffic control that reminded me of Disneyland. 

Coming up out of the station and hearing the roar of the crowds in the stadium. Mr R could also hear the roar of the crowd on his walk home and sent me a text saying "it sounds like a Phoenician just killed a Nubian". A Roman Gladiatorial vibe does waft from a football stadium.

Then there was this sign of the times:

Wish me luck for my month of writing.

Leaving Las Vegas

16 years ago, I went to Las Vegas. At that time, I was in the middle of getting divorced. I remember standing on the balcony of the room, looking out over the Strip and thinking I could go home, pack the dogs and a few things in the car and drive back and start a new life in Las Vegas. It was one of those times in life when the crossroads, intersections, and possibilities seem particularly clear. I didn't move to Las Vegas.

Now 16 years later, I returned to Las Vegas to attend a conference. It was my first professional conference. Las Vegas is still surreal - oversized, superficial, disposable. Full of flashing lights and crowds, dreams and desperation. Some things have changed - when one wins at a slot machine, the money doesn't come tumbling out. I missed that sound. There are more hotels - bigger and flasher. Treasure Island which seemed so big years ago, appeared small this time.

Las Vegas has loomed large in my imagination for a long time. I have often told people that everyone should go there at least once. But now, I'm not so sure. After this trip, Las Vegas doesn't seem to loom so large. This morning, I had a sense of feeling more whole, as though all those years ago, without realizing it, I had left a bit of myself in Las Vegas. By returning, I was able to reclaim that part of me and bring it home.

I have left Las Vegas. Fortunately, I didn't have to drink myself to death to do it. There were no flying purple bats, no fear and loathing. Mr R is glad I've gotten Las Vegas out of my system.