I've been tagged

I've been Tagged


Three things that scare me: roofing on tall ladders, losing my daughter, those big fat beetle flies that come in through ripped screens in the summer time.
People who make me laugh: dana, jim, ella
Three things I love: the ravens on laraway mountain, my bed, the sound of rain on a metal roof with low music playing from a player on the floor beside the bed.
Three things I hate: the sound of styrofoam, the current administration, feeling a lack of direction
Three things I don't understand: the political rationale, math, how the human body withstands so much toxicity and wear and tear.
Three things on my desk: my magic paperweight, the woman sculpture from brandi dear, my clay elves.
Three things I'm doing right now: listening to the Sweet and Lowdown CD, buying time with my folks out of the room (visiting hometown for a few days ~ using mom's computer), gathering myself.
Three things I want to do before I die: go to Wales (home of the ancestors), buy and drive a motorcycle through the Badlands and the Four Corners, publish my writing.
Three things I can do well: dance, listen, make killer Indian food
Three things I should listen to: my self, my daughter, the wind
Three things you should never listen to: my mother, the manic mind, Rod Stewart
Three things I'd like to learn: how to drive my tractor, how to keep a horse, how to write believable fiction.
Three favourite foods: dark chocolate, raw fish, anything thai
Three beverages I drink regularly: maple lattes (with our own organic raw milk, maple and only the fair trade organic coffee ~ total coffee snob)), chai tea, kefir smoothies.
Three TV shows/Books I watched/read as a kid: Little House, M*A*S*H, How Fletcher was Hatched
Three blogger friends that I am going to tag : the only blogger I know tagged me. I'm shit out of luck on the blogger social scene.

Voice Lessons

I've been beaten before by silence.
Old wounds are healng in the riot of my mind
and in the thunder of my feet on the ground.

The grizzled scar tissue that remains
is the conviction~
the dust that rises from the dance.

Memories are the reverberations
of second thought~
of knowing better this time around~

of choosing noise over nothing,
song over silence,
action over acquiesence.

finding time for words

The hardest part about writing is actually doing the writing. My first typewriter was an old Royal that belonged to my great uncle. When I was twelve, I received my first electric typewriter for Christmas. In seventh grade, I scored a D in reading class because I spent the duration of the class writing my first book in two spiral bound notebooks instead of tending to the lesson plans. I spent my late teens and early twenties traveling in a large crowd of friends but often times could be found sitting in a corner with my journals writing down my thoughts or the witty quotes of those around me. When my daughter was born I would write during our long nursing marathons or while she napped. Now, I find myself trying to balance old receipts on the base of the steering wheel while trying to just get down that one good thought that I don't dare forget. Those old scraps become a kind of buffet of good ideas that inadvertantly get lukewarm, cold and eventually taken out to the dumpster. On my desk in the "guest room" is a big stack of unlined paper sitting under my glass paperweight ~ a magikal gift from Ella ~ and when it was placed there, I entertained all kinds of plans to wake up early and spend at least twenty minutes every morning getting those first thoughts down.

Mornings are awfully hectic in my house.

Evenings awfully sleepy.

I've only started calling on the advice of other established writers. Stephen King's book On Writing has been an enormous inspiration. Also, Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird ~ Instructions on Writing and Life. The biggest peice of advice they offer is to just do it. To sit down and do the work. To write. To summon up the disicpline and make it happen.

My passion for it is there and I keep thinking that, one of these days, I'll start the work. I'll establish that sense of discipline. Right now, it's still a little like exercise or giving up coffee. I start off strong, stay with it for a wee bit and then it all falls to shit. It's half fear of diving in and half the distraction of life.

I remember back when I lived in the ghetto of my hometown. I shared a tall, brick Sesame Street duplex with six to ten, always changing, room-mates. I painted my bedroom walls a great shade of purple and hung red, flowered curtains and kept my Royal typewriter on the desk by the dirty window. A bottle of orange rind whiskey in the drawer to my left. The words came pouring out in swirls of sticky breath and tobacco smoke, inspired by the ever changing backdrop to my life. The people, the travels, the drugs. Poverty, even if self iduced and three quarters chosen, seemed to offer up a fair amount of muse. But my writing then wasn't born of discipline. It spilled from passion and time and youth. Throw a farm, a child, a mortgage and a partner into the mix and the passion gets muffled, the time gets swallowed and the youth turns into best intentions.

I tell myself that I'll start taking classes on creative writing. That the structure of that environment will back me into the corner of getting words down on paper while also providing the feedback and networking. I tell myself that once I learn more literary tricks, I'll find the time and motivation. Once I learn how to organize my ideas, set up the story, develop characters, write memoirs, learn more forms for poetry............

But I'm here now, sitting, still, with romantic notions of a cluttered desktop, hot mug of tea and a rising sun while the child still sleeps. Sitting with notions of page after page of decade old ideas taking shape, waiting for the dialogue with the aftermath.

Wish me luck.

"I don't want to be a passenger in my own life."

Diane Ackerman

I read this quote on a blog called Sunday Scribblings, where they suggest different themes to write about. That day, I went down to the public library, two blocks from where I work, and checked out Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses. But I'm still lingering around the quote and trying to figure out just how I feel about it. Where I find myself within it. Whether or not I am a passenger in my life, exactly what that means, and whether or not I want to be a passenger or driver. When it comes to relationships, I would sometimes opt to be a passenger, to not have to put all the thinking and considering into it, to be carried along emotionally every now and then. Supported.

To be very literal about it, I am always the driver in my life. On the rare occasions in my life that I find myself in the passenger seat of someone else's car, I am always amazed at how much more I take in of the landscape around me. I drive forty five minutes to work every day and when I take the same route, sitting in the passenger seat, there are so many small details I miss otherwise....my eyes on the yellow lines or the brake lights in front of me. I see children interacting, nests in the trees, the details in the stalks of harvested corn, tracks in winter snow. I have to imagine when we relinquish the need for constent (or chronic) control in our lives, when we pass the keys to someone we trust, we find ourselves better able to absorb the world around us. To maybe take a deeper breath in our respite from responsibility.

I understand the figurative message of the quote. I don't always feel like I'm on the track I'd like to be on. I think about the time I've spent out west, in the mountains of Oregon with EarthFirst, digging trenches to keep dozers away, building tri-pods out of fallen trees to keep the 'copters from landing, staying up in two hour shifts with a campfire to keep watch through the night for the sake of old growth and habitats. I think about the plant across the lake from Burlington in New York taking their two week test run of burning tires for fuel. During this test run they tried operating the plant with 1 ton of tire derived fuel. They learned it would take 3 tons of tire derived fuel to power the plant on a regular basis. Turns out, within less than a week's time, the emmissions were too high. They'd have to burn too many tires to keep the plant running and it just won't fly. But, like so many concerned folks, I did nothing. Just tuned in to VPR on my way to work and on my way home, daydreaming of being on the other side of the water, rallying folks to chain ourselves to the gates to keep the operation from happening at all. But god(dess) forbid the bills don't get paid.

So, yes, I understand the quote. I relate to the quote. But I think the words are conditional. I think they can afford to bend and stretch with the circumstance.

Quote of the Day

Words are small shapes

in the gorgeous chaos

of the world.

Diane Ackerman

November Rains

While there is something very British Isles about Vermont during a rainy spell~which, it seems, is most of the time~ it eventually gets so wet that my boots, while pulling them from the thick, goopy sludge in the barnyard, make this cavernous, sucking, Middle-Earth, reptilian sound and I think to myself, there is the juice of this Earth. It does get old week after week but, in all that wetness, there is root. Rootedness. The bone of home. Geographically and spiritually.
The spiders have retired into the woodwork, their bodies sheltering the egg sacs. The cottony, sinewy threads of their webs are like phantoms ~ ghosts ~ in the barn. The spiders are warm and dry, while the cows come in at night, backs dripping with the slow streams of a day's rain, falling from the many curves and ridges of their backsides.
I move quickly in the rain, tossing hay, leaving buckets of grain, head bowed, forgetting to lift it up in reverance at the mountains around me, while the cows stand out there all day, unmoving, ruminating, their lives a constant bowing toward the beauty of their surroundings. They are like female, bovine Buddhas. Solid, reverant, watchful.

Ani Difranco in Town

I had just given birth when I started listening to Ani Difranco's music. A friend of mine had turned me on to one of her Cd's ~ her first ~ and it all snowballed from there. I started with her first album, recorded when she was only eighteen years old and fresh on the scene in New York City and I worked my way up to the current album. I remember thinking how wonderful it would have been to have had this music in my teens and early twenties. The degree to which it would have refreshed my perspective on self, relationships, politics, bullshit. Here I was, with a brand new baby, letting these principles sink into retrospective hindsight. Heal old wounds. Light a new fire under my ass. But I couldn't help but wonder what this woman would do, lyrically and musically, with the wonder of motherhood. Her music resonated incredibly already. I wondered, if the time ever came, how she would put this new stage of my life into words.

I had just moved to Vermont, leaving behind many of my closest girlfriends and was having this baby with a man I hardly knew. A man that didn't make the getting-to-know-process all that easy. When I started listening to Ani Difranco's music, her lyrics replaced the good advice and empowerment I may have otherwise been getting from all those girlfriends on a daily basis over good coffee. I lived, as I still do, in the back woods and spent my daily travels listening to these songs, letting the lyrics sink into my subconscious. Ella, who sat in the backseat drooling and sucking on the heels of her hands, also listened. And I think, nine years later, that those lyrics have also stayed with her.

I've seen Ani play several times already and won't be able to catch her concert tonight in Burlington, but I picked up a copy of Vermont Woman magazine to read the cover article about the show, her recent participation in the March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C., and her pregnancy! I was thrilled. Having worked as a doula these past five years, I especially liked the following quote from the article:

"The act of reproduction, of creation, is pretty

revellating -physically, spiritually.

But these days with this combination of

technology and patriarchy and over-

medicalization of birth, women have too often

been ejected from that seat of power.

You get brought into this artificial environment,

strapped down and have it cut out of you.

That whole transformative experience

in which our greatest pain becomes

our greatest transcendence which transmutates

into our greatest power-is taken away.

.....that can be very threatening stuff for a power structure,

and therefore the controlling of it-

the assuming of the power, taking that power back

has been the quest of the darker

side of patriarchal culture. But the circumstances

of having a reproductive system

-the hormones, the emotionalism,

everything we look at as a woman's weakness-

a holistic view is to understand that it's also

a great power. The irrational perception

of women due to that biological state-is also a

great wisdom-it all makes a lot of sense

to cry when you watch the news. The supposed

rational alternative is quite insane

if you think about it."

For more on her comments on feminism, and the "cultural back-lash of the Reagan Bush era", check out that article.

Time and Space

I started going back to school a few years ago (I'm on the twenty year degree plan) and my first semester back I took an anthropology course called Alternate Realities. The professor was a little slow in his approach but the content was all there. Our course books included titles like "Magic, Witchcraft & Religion" and "Bike Lust" with a Harley Davidson on the cover.

Anthropological thinking required me to rearrange my brain and it's considerations and that semester I came into the idea that we really start to leave the world of childhood thinking and move into more cognitive thinking once we wrap our minds around the concepts of time and space.

We can believe just about anything so long as the constraints of time and space don't apply. When did you stop believing in Santa Claus? In the tooth fairy? Was it right around the time you started to realize that it might be really hard for a jolly, fat man to pull that sleigh around the world and back in the course of one snowy night?

This was part of the tooth fairy politics. In our family, Santa and the Tooth Fairy (note: I still capatilize) leave little notes to Ella when ever they come to visit. Usually, the notes are little words of encouragement or 'thank you for the carrot sticks for the reindeer. they really appreciated your thoughtfullness.' But a few months back, at the kitchen table, out of the blue, Ella asked me why I had written that last tooth fairy note. I felt like I was fifteen all over again, busted for one thing or another at my parent's kitchen table, sitting there frozen in the moment, deciding whether or not I should fess up or lie through my teeth. Saying nothing, she went upstairs and came back down with the note in one hand and, in the other, the journal from which the paper for the note had been ripped.

I found myself in the position I absolutely never wanted to be in. I was never sure about feeding her the whole Santa and Tooth Fairy story. But that was when she was very young and so was I and I think maybe my parenting ideals then were a little more grandieos than they are now.

When she was six months old and her first Christmas was approaching, I stood in line with her dad debating whether or not to raise her with the Santa illusion. Whether or not it's setting your kid up for a fall, regardless of how culturally widespread the illusion might be. Mid-discussion, in the check-out line, we started looking around at what we saw. Little Saint Nicks everywhere. We started imagining strangers asking our daughter, "What did Santa bring you for Christmas?" and our daughter feeling extremely left out of the Christmas club. So, when she was old enough to directly as whether or not Santa was real, we took the middle of the line approach and responded that "some people believe in Santa..." and we said it like an unfinished sentence, like a question mark, trailing off at the end, leaving it kind of wide open. By that time though, Ella was already a militant believer in anything imaginary and so it didn't really matter what we said or believed anyway.

So, whether it's Santa or the Tooth Fairy or dragons or mermaids, she remains pretty steadfast that anyone who doesn't believe is just a pretty sad case. Her main frustration with me writing that letter from the tooth fairy wasn't the fact that I had lied to her ~ although, that really did tick her off ~ it was more that I had intervened. I was putting myself in the way of magic happening. But I had come clean. I had told her then and there that I was the tooth fairy and she still chooses to believe.

I envy that.

So after her double molar extraction yesterday, when I put her two rooted teeth into the pocket of the tooth fairy pillow and kissed her goodnight, she looked me deep in the eye and warned me not to be the tooth fairy. So, I knew that if I opted to leave the dollar bills and herkimer crystals under her pillow, she'd wake up with a completely renergized conviction or she'd totally call my bluff. And, hours later, when it came time to go to bed, I asked my long lost child-less psychologist friend just how to deal with the Tooth Fairy dilemma. Do I go ahead and perpetuate the myth or do I let it go now? At one point do you let it go?

In kindgergarden she befriended a very sweet, Christopher Robin type of boy who was seriously into video games. The first time I took her to his house to play she was fascinated with all the posters in his room. Posters of video game, Yugi-O and Pokeman characters. They had had an ongoing debate up to this point about whether or not dragons were real and she was doing her best to argue her case. Peace had been made by the time I came to pick her up that evening and Ben had been converted to a true believer. The next time I took her to his house, a few months later, the posters in his room had been taken down and replaced by every kind of dragon you could possibly begin to imagine.

I wonder if they'll move into adulthood looking in caves for dragon eggs. They do take 100 years to hatch, you know? That would make me really proud. Ella is learning this year how to tell time. I haven't been in a rush for that to happen. We spend enough of our long lives worrying about it. I figure that if I can spare her a few extra years without that burden, all the better. But the understanding is starting to sink in. It's almost as easy now as frying an egg or counting by tens.

Ben has since moved away, down to the New Hampshire coast, but we get cards from him about twice a year. The last one was a Halloween card that read:

Dear Ella,

What were you for Halloween? I was a grim reaper.

I miss you. Dragons are real.

Love Ben

Tooth Fairy Politics

I took my daughter, Ella, in to the dentist last night to repair a cracked filling in one her right molars and to have them take a look at the strange alien growing on the left side of her gums. I figured we'd be in for about twenty minutes and back in the car for the half hour drive home and barn chores before dinner, homework, bedtime and an overnight visit from a long lost friend of mine.

The alien, it turns out, was a quick growing abscess and the molar on the right side of her gums hadn't lost a filling. It had lost a peice of itself. Tucked up into her gums on both sides of her mouth were adult molars just dying to break through the surface and apparantly using whatever means possible to make their entry possible.

I don't entirely trust dentists. I try to trust dentists but I haven't had much of an opportunity yet to put it all into practice. My first neighborhood dentist used to call me nasty names when I would squirm in the chair. I finally convinced my parents that the guy was a schlep and so they took me to the dentist in my Nan's neighborhood. This guy was great. He had big white teeth, a dimple in his chin, he smelled good and had familiar cartoon characters painted all over the place. Two years into our mouth relationship, he was arrested and convicted for murdering his wife and staging a burglary gone bad. My grandmother still swears his innocence. She obviously stands by the neighborhood dentist as devoutly as she stands by her president. It's kind of sad.
The third dentist used so much filling that he caused such severe nerve damage that I now have an empty hole where the tooth used to be. Plucking the thing was much more affordable than the root canal and cap would have been.

SO, once I found our new dentist here in Vermont, I was willing to drive halfway across the state for the security of trusting the tooth man. It was a tiny little office close to Lake Champlain. Close to the Canadian border. His wife was a black and white photographer and her beautiful pictures were hung all over the place. The front desk lady had a different hair color every time we visited and they always called the night before to remind us of the appointment and to tell us to drive safe.
Unfortunatly, he's just retired and sold his practice.
The new guy calls novacaine "sleepy juice" and I just so badly wanted to pull him aside and tell him that my little girl will probably like him alot better ~ respond to him better, anyway ~ if he just calls things as they are. If he doesn't sugar coat the bad news.

So, the long and short is that Ella had two teeth plucked by the time we left the office. Two molars, one on each side, neither of which had been even remotely loose. My stoic, proud long legged hero actually screamed and sobbed at the first pull and my momma bear-ness wanted to drop kick the pliers out of his hand. The best I could do really is to hold her ankle while he gave her more "sleepy juice" (four times as much as it turned out) and coach her through it. By the time bed time rolled around she was cartwheeling around the kitchen at the arrival of our long lost friend.

Day 1 ~ Diving In

sitting here being guided through the world of blog. intimidating but exciting. we'll keep you posted.