Breath

The ability to let go is like a muscle. If left unused, it will need to be toned, brought back to life, given attention. When that ability to let go is cramping, resisting, and refusing, breath and nurturing is often the best tool. Our bodies, like our hearts, so badly want to cling to the familiar, want to remain in the comfort zone, no matter how knarly the comfort zone might be, but it's the plunging forward and into the sticky mess of discomfort that gets us through to some other side.

We store so much old shit in our bodies. Old sadness, old anger, old insecurity. It turns to rot in there and the aches and pains we start to feel in the middle of our lives are just the first resonances of that old shit. All the words we wish we had said, all the times our hearts were broken or betrayed, our bodies respond with tension, stress hormones or just plain heartaching, and those responses, those stress hormones, if left untended, if left alone.... they ferment in our bodies like sour milk. They become those little knots of lactic acid inbetween the shoulder blades.

I'm starting to feel something palpating. It happens every spring. Every spring some of that old stored up baggage gets shed, like skin, making way for the new. It happens with the first calls of geese overhead in the morning, with the robins sprinkling their song in the bush elm outside the house. It happens when the sun starts to make a wider ring around the day and the snow starts to melt wider rings around the trees.

Exercise isn't such a chore when the days get longer. There's more time for it. Breathing and stretching releases all those old fermenting aches and pains. Clearing out the body seems possible. Almost as possible as clearing out the heart.

Chocolate Jesus

I've never celebrated Easter with Ella.

We do Christmas only because it simply can't be avoided but there's really no mention of Jesus. She knows the stories of Jesus, she thinks he's a pretty cool prophet, but that's pretty much where the stories end. She knows that Christianity and Paganism are two different religions and that, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, the church began a mission to try and erase the earth religion of the hillspeople and villagers by kind of super-imposing their holidays on top of the Pagan holidays. I mean, how else does the rising of Christ meet up with the rabbit and the egg? Or the evergreen tree and strings of light intercept the birth of him? Somewhere along the line all the symbols just kind of merged together into this weird little medium and everyone stopped asking questions.

But we've never done the Easter thing. We've decorated eggs on the Equinox for years and have celebrated the fact that our days would now be getting longer than the nights but Easter has always come and gone.

This time of year, we're almost always tapping trees and boiling sap into sugar. Three years ago, a friend of hers came over to help and be a part of the experience. She came with her brand new pale pink Easter basket and whatever cool stuffed toy came inside of it. Ella looked like the kid left out of the newest club. Why didn't the Easter bunny bring her anything?

The two years that followed she spent in Pennsylvania with my parents. She went to church with my grandma and spent most of the hour with her jaw hanging in her lap (or just drooling from plain boredom). She received the basket and the chocolate egg and the Barbie or stuffed rabbit or whatever else was lavishly bestowed upon her that day. The Easter Bunny came alive in Pennsylvania. Grandparents are always good for that.

This is the kid who caught me in the act of writing the note from the tooth fairy and still believes anyway. I was just getting in the way of magic, as far as she's concerned... so it's really no big feat for her to take on a whole new fantasy creature to believe in. So, yesterday, as I'm leaving for work, she looks up dreamily and asks " I wonder what the Easter Bunny will bring me tomorrow?"

I automatically start mapping my route to work. First to Big Lots for a basket and some of that weird grass shit, then to the chocolate store for a bunny and little chocolate eggs and jellybeans. Am I really doing this? But yes, I am. And honestly, I enjoyed it.

I found a beautiful green woven basket for $2.50 and the grass was yellow and made of paper, not plastic.... very pretty. I work right next door to an amazing chocolate store and so I loaded up on foil wrapped dark chocolate eggs and "gourmet jellybeans" (what the hell are "gourmet jellybeans, really?). I bought organic, orange spice chocolate squares and "Non Parallels" ~ toasted hemp seeds atop drops of organic belgian chocolate. Pretty groovy Easter basket if I do say so myself.

I felt like I should buy her a present for Easter. I knew she'd be expecting one after two years with her grandparents but I just couldn't bring myself to buy some over packaged Made In China Barbie or some crazy thing like that. I opted for some prettily painted flower pots and six packages of flower seeds. It's a spring holiday, right? If we lived further south, we'd be enjoying crocuses and daffodils instead of a full day of snow!

So, we've spent the better part of our day gorging ourselves on dark chocolate and lying around on the couch. Oh, and we did make eggs.... last night. They were quite lovely. We blew six and boiled six. Dyed them all. If we could find the ground out there, we'd go searching for a pretty stick to make a mobile out of the hollow eggs but that will just have to wait. In the meantime, it'll be egg salad sandwhiches and chocolate in the lunchbox all week.

She left a note on the kitchen table with a bowl of chopped up carrots. It read:

your the best.

Love Ella

gust

for

you.

can you

sine your name writ here

name_________________

And when her friend called this morning she said, "Yeah! He came! And now I know his real name. It's Mr. E Bunny!"

And there is one advantage to having snow on Easter. She was able to see his tracks outside the window making a path all the way to the neighbors house.

What a Flake Am I?

So much for one post a day. Does it help that I think about it every day? That I comprise paragraphs of my daily life while I drive or do my grocery shopping? That I hear conversations in quotation marks and visualize sentences with paranthesis and exclamation marks?

It's been a crazy week.... and I'm writing now from the new desk that Bill built in his office. Having almost the entire month of March off, being between jobs, he took that time to gut his office and build a new desk along the back wall. The desk is very nice but it's abnormally tall and in order to sit comfortably at the laptop, I have to prop two pillows under my behind and I'm left feeling like Gilda Radner in that Saturday Night Live skit where her feet don't reach the ground. What was the name of that character? I feel like I'm four and a half years old right now and I should have pigtails and an ice cream cone. But I can type exceptionally well for a four and a half year old.

Moving on.....

I don't talk much about my job (probably because most of the posting I do is from my desk there and I don't want to push my luck) but I manage a small massage department at an old historic inn and practice massage there five days a week. It's not an ideal situation for me... a bit too beauracratic and too far from home..... but it's served me well for almost three years now and I hope I have served them well, too.

This week we had our "manager's outing". It usually consists of a day on the mountain, a hike to some lookout, dinner and drinks and a night at our sister inn waaaaay up north. This year, however, it was closer to home and we skied, hiked, and ate on our own turf and then had the option of getting a room at the inn where we work....one of the "luxury rooms. Mmmmmmmmm.

I'm so glad that we checked in early, that I took a bath in the huge jet tub and then laid on a blanket in front of the fireplace and read my book. I'm so glad we enjoyed that four poster canopy bed before dinner because I drank too fucking much at the dinner party. Yes, I think I may have been one of those. I made a committment to myself to only drink two glasses of wine but somewhere between those first two glasses and throwing up before twitching myself to sleep, I somehow managed to take down an additional two glasses of red wine, two dirty martinis and a shot of something or other at the bar before we left. I then woke up at five oclock in the morning and lay there wondering how the hell it happend and fretting about the events of the night. Was I at least subtly wasted? Did I stumble or slur? Was I totally obnoxious with that water-gun? What was that I was saying about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts? Please tell me I didn't go so far as to tell my boss how much I sometimes hate my fucking job? Fuck fuck fuck fuck. If I hadn't felt so badly about Bill having to nurse me the night before, having to hold my hair back and walk me to bed, I might have woken him up just for reassurance.

I'm not one of these people who can enjoy a night of wild drinking and rowdiness. It happens so rarely anymore, and I'm so much more of a control freak than I used to be, that now it just sends me right over the edge. I wake up not only hung over but extremely anxious. The whole thing just sucks!

I spent every single night of my late teens and early twenties drinking to excess. Throw all of the other excesses into the mix and it made for a very colorful youth. But I've worked soooo hard on learning to manage all of the addictive tendencies and, for the most part, I do pretty well. These days, the only active addictions I have to wrestle on a daily basis are coffee and chocolate. So on nights like this, when that little button in my DNA that is supposed to switch to OFF or STOP CONSUMING.... when that little button defaults, I get pretty down on myself. I wake up before the sun and then spend all of dawn panicking about the events of the night before, cringing over and over again as it all comes back in waves.

Turns out, it wasn't as bad as I thought. Well, it probably was but no one noticed because everyone else was just as rosey cheeked as I. But regardless, note made:

Don't party with fellow employees anymore.
Not a good thing.

Too dangerous, too risky.

AND

it's a waste of a perfectly good honeymoon room.

Best Way to a Woman's Heart....

is definately through the belly.

I could get used to hosting a chef. Very used to it.

Last night's spread was simple....for lack of time, really. We had a flat bread pizza with fresh plum tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and some basil from last summer's garden. Beside that on the kitchen table was a simple stir-fry with red cabbage, mushrooms, carrots and zucchini. They were all sauteed in a tamari/sherry sauce and then glazed up into a pleasant goop and displayed beautifully over brown rice and surrounded by halved brussel sprouts.

I'm starting to understand why people do food blogs. I could get used to this.

Mmmm, Sunday

I spent my morning grooming horses and mucking out stalls. It's something I've dreamed of being able to do for years now.

When I was born, my folks lived in a rural town close to the Poconos. I think it may have actually been in the Poconos somewhere. They had some chickens, a pig or two, and two horses. My mom had your typical seventies mullet haircut and wore a good bit of calico. My dad had lambchop sideburns and learned how to dress roadkill. In the first house they rented there, they woke up and banged on the heaters for two reasons..... to get the heat going and to scare the mice out of the cupboards on the other side of the wall.
They lived there until I was almost three and from there we moved onto that small one way street I've recently mentioned in another post.

I guess I used to ride with my mom in the saddle and I think something happened at that young age that has forever endeared horses to my heart. After petting a horse, I refuse to wash my hands so that I can occasionally lift them to my nose and just inhale. Mmmmmm. It makes me high.

Ella and I decided a year ago that by the year 2008 we would own our own horse. We have the barn, the pasture, the routine of chores already in motion.... we'd just need to make a stall and proper flooring for the horse (and feel confident that we could afford the expense). Since we made that decision, I've been doing a good bit of book learning but one can only learn so much about husbandry by looking at books.

Two weeks ago, I had my first shift at a huge horse barn in the next town over. The woman who owns the farm is the mother of a doula client I've recently taken on. She has 27 horses ~ Morgans, Norweigan Fjords, French ponies, Percherons. Oh, and an indoor riding ring where she gives lessons and does therapeutic work with her horses. It's pretty high end.

Having had zero experience handling horses, I was sure I'd be banished to the pony barn until the owner felt I could handle a larger horse but, somehow, I ended up with the Morgans and Percherons and, in the course of one day, I feel like I learned a lifetime of experience. But still, there's so much more to understand.

Today, my second day, I was able to groom the Percherons. Percherons are similar to Clydesdales but a deep black color. She has Tiffy and Jake and they live together in a seperate barn, just the two of them. Years ago, for whatever reason, the owner was considering selling Tiffy. But one night, after they were put into their pens (with a little opening between them so they could visit), Jake got really sick with some kind of stomach ailment. He was on his side, lying in his own pee and really uncomfortable. Tiffy, somehow, opened her gate with her teeth and then opened the gate to their pen and walked up the hill 150 yards or so to the owners front yard and waited there until she woke up. She led the owner down to Jake's pen and it was all fine from there. Jake got the help he needed and Tiffy was secured her place by her mate for a lifetime. It was a like a story out of Black Beauty.

Going into the pen to groom a horse, I take three things in a bucket. A thick wired brush for brushing their manes and tails, a lighter brush for their coats and a strange little gadget for cleaning out their hooves. On one end of the gadget is a little wire brush and the other end is a metal hook to dig into the nooks and crannies to get out the funk and random pebbles.

So far, the one thing that strikes me the most about being with these creatures, the thing that leaves me just spellbound with a feeling of grace and honour, is cleaning their feet. Leaning over beside a horse (especially a horse whose back is a foot higher than the top of my head), tapping gently behind his knee joint and having him lift his foot gently into my hand. There is such trust to that. Such a relationship. It makes me think of thousands of years ago, in the fertile crescent, when the most hospitable thing you could do for a guest is sit them down and soak and wash their weary, worn traveled feet. Every time I have a hoof in my hand I feel like I'm entrusted with sooo much. And I am.

When I first spoke with owner on the phone about coming to work for her every other Sunday, and that I didn't have any experience, she kind of laughed and made a comment about how this would help me figure out whether or not I really wanted to do this. Whether or not I'd really want a horse for my own self. I'm sitting here now, after my second day working with them, my shoulders and back tired, totally satisfied and I'm realizing that "whether or not I'd want a horse for my own self" was never the question. Never never.

It's What's For Dinner

Looks like I missed my Saturday post....and after all that fuss I made about one post a day.
My excuses are valid, though. I spent Friday night at the airport until nearly 1:30am and then drove an hour home from there. Saturday afternoon was spent doing morning chores, overlooking (kind of) a playdate for Ella and then off to work for four and a half massages.

A hometown friend of mine, whose home base has been Vermont as long as it's been mine, flew in from New Zealand on Friday night. He would have been here Thursday evening but the plane he was due to leave New Zealand on was struck by lightning while waiting for take off on the runway. A bit of a setback, yes. All the connecting flights from there were long gone when he arrived in LA and then New York. Poor guy was just an entire day off from his familiar calendar by the time he arrived on this other side of the world.

Now, the upside of having this friend stay with us, aside from the fact that we love his company of course, is that he's an incredible chef. He spends most of his year, for the past three or four years, anyway, down on the South Pole at a scientist colony. He's the vegetarian chef at the base. He's even been featured in Vegetarian Times. If I had the energy, I'd link. I'm sorry, I just don't this morning. He told us, though, that if we host him while he's in town, he'll cook four days a week.

So, after my long afternoon doing massage, I came home to an absolute spread on my kitchen table. Lightly breaded chicken with apples and fresh red currants and in a Frangelica glaze, roasted beets, a simple egg noodle pasta with greens and mushrooms, a chopped green salad with tomatoes and tahini yogurt dressing and, for dessert, baked apples. Oh, and this morning I woke up to blackberry muffins for dessert. Can he stay forever? (dejavu)

Speaking of Fear.........

There seems to be a real catalyst happening among my favorite bloggers, and, it seems, within my own self. selftaughtartist, misplaced and even penelopetwist (who has been blessed with the coolest name ever) are all exuding a new kind of breath. A new kind of perception. Just new stuff. Spring?

Selftaught and misplaced, both, have been discussing fear and there are these little marbles rolling around themselves in my gut right now as a result. Logically, it's clear that diving into one's fear is a powerful means of release and rising above....of productivity and power. And while I've gone there, it's rarely without having been pushed. And right now, as a result of their inspiration and insight, I feel the little push on my shoulder. The little voice urging "go there" "go there"..... and it's like walking across hot coals sometimes. It's like psycho-analysis.

Pema Chodron, a buddhist nun, talks about Sim and Ripka. Sim is the Tibetan word for "clutter of the mind". It's the buzzing and random dialogue and come-backs one never thought to use on time. It's the hesitation and the passion and the disorganization of thought. A stumbling over and over of just too many things. Our best friends, inspirations and worst enemies all vying for our mental attention. It's the stuff that gives us headaches, keeps us up later than we want to be, and gets on our fucking nerves. It's the stuff that makes our shoulders hurt.

Ripka is space. It's the space between all that clutter. The doorway between the in breath and the out breath. It's the place where the water meets the shore, when it's neither coming nor receeding, ebbing or flowing.

When I"m getting on my own nerves with all that fear and self doubt, when I'm avoiding writing with ridiculous, mundane, useless busy work, it's sometimes just a matter of sitting down, closing my eyes and saying over and over over and over

sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim sim

and then stop

take a deep breath

notice the space between

and then

R*i*p*k*a

Thanks.

Old People

I have a thing for old people. I love them. Old ladies. Old men. I love their stories, the way their eyes tend to glaze when they tell them. I love how slowly they approach the world, how thoughtfully. I love the way their houses smell.

I think I've just been blessed with an abundance of really cool old people. I grew up on a small one way street where the houses were no more than three feet apart. You could almost reach out one of the alley facing windows and pass that cup of sugar to your neighbor. Really.
Playing hide & seek and tag in that neighborhood was a very intimate experience. Everyone's yard was free game and if they set it "off limits", they were bound to get a banana up their tailpipe or some playdough poop in their mailbox. Revenge was intense. None of the fences were taller than four feet and most of them were chain link, which made for easy hopping. The street was small enough that the only cars coming and going were usually those that belonged to it's residents.

It was a pretty balanced blend of old couples and young families but across the street lived an old man we called Pal. He was round, had a shaved head, a wood workshop in his basement and cherry tomatoes and parsely growing in his backyard. He let us play tv tag in that yard if the street lights went on and we weren't ready to go back inside yet.

But I was his favorite. I spent most of my childhood on his front porch. I'd come outside, he'd whistle and I'd cross the street to assume my place in the green canvas backed chair beside him. He worked the railroad before he retired so he'd sing some of those old songs, repeat the same old jokes but mostly he'd just listen to me talk about growing up. And he gave no bullshit advice, which, to a kid, is a real commodity.

I had a great uncle and a great aunt, who, strangely enough, were brother and sister (respectively) to my grandfather and grandmother (who died too young for me to remember).
They were lovers of words and jingles and my uncle was a naturalist (which I didn't really have the word for until I grew up). All I knew is that he loved telling me about the things that grew up alongside their woods in the yard at their lakehouse. He knew the birds' calls and the night sky. He wrote poems and could bitch the government up one side and down the other. He liked to pinch womens' asses. He refused to be old. The only photo I have of him when he was young is an image of three men standing outside a teepee. He's the tall, lean one in the center with gators on and a heart cut and sewed onto his t-shirt. I think he was the kind of guy who might have stolen my heart. And he did, but it would be years to come.

Our closest neighbor is an old man. His name is Ellis and he grew up in the valley we live in. He's an old widower, stacks his own wood, sugars every spring and has a wooden leg. Well, it's probably not wooden anymore, but it used to be, and Ella likes to say it's still so. He, like Pal, sits on his front porch when the weather allows. He, like my uncle Wilfred, keeps bird feeders and binoculars and knows the comings and goings of the creatures around his place. He likes it when Ella comes and sits on his porch and tells him how it is to be a kid these days. He'll tell her about the days they used to log with draft horses and how sometimes they'd run into bear or mountain lions on the ridge behind our farm. It was on that ridge where he lost his leg in a hunting accident. He was nineteen years old. Hasn't hunted since. He lets her know when we're going to get a storm because his missing leg tells him. And he's always right.

I love the fact that she's got his company. And that she'll know the sweetness that old people can provide. When they go, their stories go with them. If I had more time, I'd spend my days archiving old people's stories.

Post Massage

There's something like an ethereal fire between my shoulderblades right now. The mat I laid on was a heated sheepskin, covered with a flannel sheet. She found clumps of calcium deposits in recesses I didn't even know exist. She did, indeed, beat the piss out of me. But it was productive, for as much as it hurt.

I'm milking this day off. Tea, soup and a seven layer bar at the coffee shop, enjoying wireless hookup as opposed to the snail paced dial-up I deal with in our home.....

I just had lunch with a girlfriend who I used to live with. I was a doula for she and her husband's first birth (and second, come to think of it) and it worked out that around that time, I needed housemates to live with me in the big, beautiful home I had just moved into. Bill and I had just split and I probably wouldn't have thought to have a brand spankin' new family move in with me but they asked if they could and so I agreed.

Ella was only a month old when Bill and I moved into a house with a roommate.... a guy we hardly knew. We hadn't been together real long before we found out we were pregnant and there's really nothing harder on a relationship than introducing parenthood. Throw a housemate into the mix and things just get even stranger. I didn't want to be that monkey wrench for them but they seemed to think it would be a good mix.

And it was.

Except for the fact that her husband contracted chicken pox from Ella that winter and got really sick. Oh, and the fact that they had to deal with my relationship drama that just wouldn't seem to wane. Oh, and the leaky roof, and the driveway as steep as an alpine slide. And the time she came home with her younger sisters to find me in my bedroom with a girlfriend of mine, wasted on red wine and cutting out scarlet letters and pinning them to our t-shirts with safety pins (it was a theatrical kind of therapy~ long story ~ another post). We ended up on the roof that night, chanting goddess songs. I don't know. I don't remember.

I digress.

Pre Massage

In ten minutes I'll drive ten miles up the road to get a massage from a friend of mine. I give anywhere between 7-17 massages a week but rarely get one for myself. And now, with a strained rotator cuff and this kink in my neck, I'm finally taking some care of myself. I know she's going to beat the piss out of me but I am soooo excited to be laying on that table. The right side of my neck is on fire, inflamed from those two cervical vertebrae that insist on pressing against eachother.

I've been in more car accidents that I can count on my two hands (not all of which I was driving) and so my spine, all these years later, still feels the reverberations of those wrecks. I've smashed a friend's windshield with my head, which I'm sure has much to do with the cervical vertebrae bothering me today. Someday, I'll write about the time I crashed into the moving ambulance. Oh, and also about the time I had a head on collision with my VW van, landing in the floor of the passenger seat. That was a doozie. I was driving for both of them.

The sun is shining, the air is cold. I'm off with my hot tea for the drive north.

I'll drive carefully.