Debt-free and Dancing

A small celebration today. Not on the move, which I'll try to write about perhaps this weekend. But on being debt-free.

A goal since 2000 that I wished on, worked towards, danced at weekly Sweat Your Prayers™ with pain and wish for deliverance, was to be debt-free.

When I married my net worth was half a million; when I left the marriage 12 years later, I was a quarter of a million dollars in debt, largely due to my husband's spending habits (sports car, high speed boat, buying a cottage that had to have the most expensive finishing, paying off his visa year after year, itself largely composed of repair bills for the car and boat, and so on, I'm not saying it wasn't a fun ride but someone had to pay the toll). It was all rolled into a mortgage on my house, which he walked away from, not offering one cent on paying off that debt, a house I had originally owned outright. So I rented the basement, gave up my study/bedroom on the top floor and rented that, slept in my daughter's room, and continued on for 6 years, until I couldn't any more. My monthly payments were astronomical in comparison to my income. I sold my house, making almost no profit. With the money I bought computer equipment for my kids and I mostly, and financed a move to Vancouver and paid one year's rent on a house there.

After that year was up I had problems finding full time work, which I've blogged about, so accrued some debts, but tiny ones in comparison to where I'd been.

I'm happy to say that as of today I am free of debt to any institutions I owed money to. There are some debts to individuals and to family still, but the larger stuff is gone.

It's taken an extreme amount of effort to get to this point, now nine years after my marriage ended. But I've done it. I am proud of myself!

No, no money left over to go out and celebrate being debt-free to any institutions or companies. That's not the point. I'm doing an inner dance, and singing through today. The personal debts, the way I've been helped out, I now know will also get paid back. This is possible, today is living proof that it is. I gave up my credit card in the late 80s; my husband didn't. But then I gave him up. And slowly on almost no income I've managed to get back to a balance of 0, and now see that it's possible to again build equity. Maybe not all the way back to where I was before marrying, but somewhere.



Postscript: Cripes, yes I was debt-free after selling my beloved house, my home, but I was still basing my life on projections in the future - a year of writing, then a full-time job. It didn't materialize. I feel quite stabilized now in that I'm living in meagre surroundings but I can afford this. In the here and now. I'm not living 'on projections' (which I also did all through the married years). Is this called facing reality?

Whatever it is, it feels pretty darn good.

Postscript2: Do I regret marrying him? Look at my two children, just look at them. Well, this is the public internet and you can't. But if you could, you'd know that's not a relevant question.

No regrets. Only why was it at nearly the end of the marriage when I found out his family has a history of doing this to wives? His grandfather blew through his grandmother's fortune, philandering on her, even bringing his lovers into the house when she was there, and left her penniless, something his father grew up with with a lot of anger (he died just after we were married and was ill for some time before that, so I didn't hear the stories). And who knows of the generations before that. There was precedence. None of his wealthy family seemed to think what happened to me meant anything; I guess it was old hat to them. Now that's where I should have been more cognizant. I would have if it had been a history of violence towards women or children, obviously, but a history of financial abuse of wives? You'd hardly have thought it possible, given the patristic economic structure of past centuries... surely there's a story here of generations of a family.

What's happening...

Well, I had a post up momentarily, but took it down and submitted it to qarrtsiluni, where it may even show up if the editors decide to take a chance on it, or me.

Then I walked on this pressingly humid day down a long city block to buy fruit and vegetables in preparation for my children, who arrive in an hour by train. Having found all the nectarines I've purchased in the past few years to be crunchy like apples, I picked only one. After filling my cart with produce and paying, I began the trek up the street but stopped and took out the dark almost brownish red nectarine, rubbed it on my blue-hued sarong, thought never mind if it isn't washed, and bit into it.

Honeyed. Drippingly honied. Juicy and rich, the colour of the setting sun, massaging my tongue with ecstasies, covering my nose, cheeks, chin with a delicate layer of nectarine syrup that I wiped on my hands, and both arms, until I was a sticky, scented fruit flower for bees. Eating such a ripe and succulent nectarine was practically pornographic, well imbibing such a treat in public seemed like that. It was flagrantly sensuous and delicious.

When you thought you were going to have a nearly flavourless, crunchy thing, a rich medley of juices burst into your hot mouth. And then you just wanted to drop your cart and go back to the little Chinese grocer's and buy the whole bushel... you went on to the supermarket instead and bought milk and yogurt and bottled water for the move tomorrow. But you had your moment.

Tomorrow my two brothers and son and daughter and I are moving our household goods from an outer suburban storage unit to one nearby. In 35C humidity! Somehow 60 boxes of books and solid teak shelves to hold them have to come down into my subaltern abode, the basement apartment where my daughter and I currently live, and I know it's impossible and it has to be done. But, oh, how good it'll be to have access to my books again!

I'll be back in a few days...

*hugs xo

In the Studio We Paint Ourselves

I am at the door and they see me. Frightened I run up the white stairs, winding around. They are moving as a group in dark clothes across the tarmac, stark as knives in the glare of light. Their pleated black coats, heavy. My daughter flies up the stairs, "It's okay, they're here to visit, not to hurt you." Distrustful, I descend the stairs.

The foyer which is where I live has become a studio but is still a garage. Its gilded mirrors and high ceilings and brocaded ceiling and graceful wainscoting and trim seem as Renaissance as their Shakespearean coats. My paintings hang everywhere.

Where am I? This is no place that I've ever seen before. The hardwood floors gleam, light pours baroquely in through leaded glass windows. The mantle over the fireplace is magnificent white marble with Corinthian columns on either side. I can breathe in this elegant place.

A friend who emerges from the group waves her arm and shows me my space and shows me that I need not fear and leaves. I want to hover in her vision of me for it is not my own.

Another woman in black leather with blonde hair is standing astride a motorcycle at the opened garage door, so perfect for a studio, to have a door that unfolds on rollers and slides up, and I would like her to stay, to visit, to talk, but she roars off.

I wake to heavy fertile rain falling outside the window.

The Deeper Meditation

During the years I've been a single mother mostly full-time I've found that in the Summer, when I get a bit of a respite, I am always surprised at how I virtually collapse. I had things planned for this time alone. Then I realize that 'being up,' holding an emotional space steady, as well as earning money from different sources, and all the shopping, cleaning, feeding, structuring of a life all year takes its toll, and everything that was put off comes around. I worked one day this week. Last night, after spending 5 hours reformatting a Win98 laptop with a noxious virus that kept replicating as fast as I could delete enough space to run the utilities disc, I gave up on my planned projects and of trying to keep normal hours and am letting myself fall into whatever feels most natural. If that's going to bed at 2am and getting up at 5:30am and then sleeping from 11am to 12pm, okay. I eat very simply when I'm hungry (lots of fresh fruit and vegetables); go for long walks with Keesha, my dog, through the St. Clair ravine (yesterday I saw perhaps 3 people in there, one sun bather reading, two jogging women); read, and rest, and rest. I don't ruminate. I don't think. I just feel all the places where it hurts, all the things that bewilder me, and let heal. I have to be through this by Sunday...

The Deeper Meditation

I want
to lie here

and do
nothing
but heal.

I trace
the world
mnemonically,
move
through the scenes
of my life
like a sleepwalker.

Bandaging
rubbing cream
into old scars
massaging
peeling the layers
behind which I hide.

The rain
falls softly
as I lie prone.

Breathing deeply
the humid
healing air.

Morning Pages... The Dark Moneyed Heart

The business world will never open it's dark moneyed heart to me... long have I tried to understand this aspect of the networks of relationships in the world. A symbolic system rules our realities - capital enables us to survive in Capitalism even amidst the rich resources of the world. Marx died penniless and in debt. Hadn't I better go in fear of what dumbfounds me?

Making it in the world means making it economically. Being grounded means being moneyed. Yet the soil is not made of printed paper money. Rather it's in the ineffable mysteries of bank statements, stocks, numbers on sheets, endless transactions.

If I wanted to reproduce the world papered in money I couldn't have done a better job than a globally persuasive Capitalism has. Health is cash flow.

It isn't really, but how did we substitute a symbolic system for reality?

Despite what may be said, it is not plain nor simple nor easy to understand.

It is the dark moneyed heart beating at the centre of it that I understand least of all.

It is a system we've created and I accept that. I accept it as I accept the aesthetic system, in its art, literature, music. Or any of the other systems. But that doesn't mean I don't see such systems as manipulations of and overlays on nature.

It's just that the economic system is so vast and complex and all-pervasive; the multiple ways it substitutes a monetary system for reality are confounding and largely unpredictable.

I cannot walk barefoot on the earth, nor do I live in an Eden where food is plentiful. Nothing is free. We are trapped in our own syllogisms.

It's too late for me to go and do a degree in economics. But everything pales beside it. It's the monolithic, gigantic, over-arching true God of the millenias.

Terms like lucrative are appealing, aren't they? Wealth. Prestige. Success. Mammon shores us up. Let's be practical about it.

But Mammon is shouting at me through dark beating waves, "Then you make a better system of distribution..."

Computers' Befuddlements...

Today I saw my paintings on a PC, an older one I think. And was shocked to see the darkness of the images. Not only is the colour off, but much of the detail is lost. Now I'm thinking of posting two images - one for an Apple, and one for a PC. Or is it a problem of older computer models versus newer ones?

Can you let me know which one shows a range of purples in the dresses? From dark where the paint is squeezed on pure to more transparent where it's washed out, as well as a few strokes of a magenta overlay on the upper body...

The whites are another aspect entirely. The white in the lower left corner is actually whiter and brighter then the white under the right most figure's feet - which is actually quite bluish.

Oh, for colour calibration!

A beautiful interpretation of a dear friend, laurieglynn, that I certainly didn't see (or intend): "as I visit this remarkable painting once again, that the first image is rising and the second holds a sphere of Light~~as though in the Dawning, she captures the Morning Star in her hand, while the third one brings up the Sun~"

She must have been an angel on an Apple! :) Beautiy in the eye of the beholder... thank you, laurieglynn!

Lightened for a(n imaginary) PC (I don't have one here to compare):

Apple version:

Final Self Portrait: Dancing Of The Selves

click here for larger size

Dancing of the Selves

What is the self?

Peel away to nothing.

Only energies,
inner winds and flames
streams of thought
a body of cells of earthdust.

Who am I?

Am I my memories
shifting and changing like ice flows
or the sand of the desert?

We are transducers, relay switches,
cross-currents of selves.
I deconstruct in paint across the canvas.

Am I what I offer--
scrawl of words, strokes of paint,
a flash dance through the air,
a few ideas, a point of gravity
where the light bends?

My children who tumbled out of me?

I am a link
in the generations,
an ancestor's grand daughter,
great aunt of the future,
a name for genealogists.

A living person
breathing on this page
where I write quickly.

A slight tangle
in the gangalia
of cells, and
my memories,
gone.

That's not me.

I am only
who I am
loving you.

__________
For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon. Thank you, Sparky, or Wally Torta, for all the time and care that you've put into this marathon. Take a look at the slideshow of all the entries in the marathon, fabulous! Thanks to Natalie for conceiving this marathon.

Dancing of the Selves, oil on canvas board, 22" x 28".