When do you finally come to dwell in a residence so that it begins to feel like "home"? It happened today when I moved our large wooden rocking horse out of my room - the 'clothes horse' literally, where I flung my clothes to pile up - and put in a 'captain's chair' that I recovered years ago in another lifetime. Now I can take out one of the stained glass windows and look at the street and houses and foothills while I read. I know I'm not making sense, especially as I now am in the process of turning a red painted milking bench into a foot stool by stretching an upholstery fabric over a cushion and stapling it. And I can't explain this, and shall take some sort of photo shortly, but as I sit in my 'new' corner and read under the clamp lamp I clipped onto an ancient metal stand, looking at my room, which I quite like actually, in this old and rather dumpy rented house, I feel like I've finally "moved in." And I've been here, not altogether willingly, since July 1, 2003!

I came here to apply to do a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, but they changed the program, it was the strangest thing, really, how it happened, and I didn't even end up applying to Admissions, and then got stuck here, but that's a story for another time.

Or maybe I was destined to come out here to the West Coast all along. Now the psychics I spoke to before I came said it was a very good move for me and that it would all work out wonderfully and they couldn't have been more wrong. The thing is, talking about telepathy and my theory of mind-reading, is that I had no premonition about the changes going on in the program I wanted to join and so they couldn't 'read' the problems I would encounter.

Yes, this is definitely a story I will continue at another time. Here's a photo of moi in ma corner reading, if I can't live with it, I'll try to replace it with a daylight one tomorrow...

Oh, that painting, yeah that's exactly where it's sat for months waiting, someday I'll finish it, who knows...

xo

I'm here because I'm wired to you all by telluric forces. In the midst of the angles of light everywhere. Bliss pouring in the edges of the world. Way too much inner light. I want to spend the day meditating or lying in bed doing nothing. What luxury. But my kids need me, so I watch the Supersize movie with them, gross, really gross, and this just after 8mm last night, nightmares, and then make myself a pure ground sirloin burger with cheddar cheese on a whole wheat bun, sigh. I snatch a 2 hour nap. Luxury. Then dinner for my kids, not me, I only eat once a day, although I snack on & off too. Finely chop celery, onions, mushrooms, garlic, slice the chicken into small strips, put on water for the pasta, butter in the wok, melting and sizzling, then onions and garlic, watch the tiny bits cook, twirling with a wooden spoon, then the chicken, stirring, brown everything, add the mushrooms and celery, and just before its ready, the sliced spinach leaves, oh, and make a simple Bechamel sauce out of butter and flour and milk in the microwave and put in some salt and parmesan cheese and stir the sauce into the chicken and then add the pasta. Even the dog whimpers for some. Easy meal. Go back to my computer and read more blogs. Blog reading takes up the greater part of the day I sometimes fear. Issues with plagiarism at thenarrator's site today, but then, that's what sometimes happens to our most talented. My son, who turned 18 yesterday, and re-organized our entire closet of a kitchen while I was shopping, has gone out jogging with our dog, and my daughter, who was reading on my bed, is napping. It's raining gently outside. I'm living in some kind of continuum where the molecules of the air are bright with light, are bouncing all over the place like little suns, even when all the lights are out.

Photo: our dog, Keesha.

Raw Emeralds...

“I saw him, like a Titan, with all the grace & faults, all the achievements, with great love, fullness.” His heart as large as the world. I feel love for us radiating from him. In his final moment he is a powerful force of goodness. He is full and vibrant with energy. “Then he shrank back into a distance; I saw him in death; and then he was gone.”

That is the vision I received when I prayed that if I might not be with him when he died, that it occur when I was in a state of meditation. Immediately upon opening my eyes the hospital called to say that my father had passed away. I drove to the hospital, parked illegally, arrived within 10 minutes of his death. He was emaciated, shrunken, like a starvation victim, and looked 30 years older than he was. “I went to the hospital. He is gone. In peace and with dignity. He is gone. My father is no longer alive. I felt at peace, too. His body---but the spirit is gone, and the moment of separation remains on his face. Will, pain, struggle, surrender, beauty, peace. And mystery. Love.”

I wrote in my journal, "My father died this afternoon, peacefully, with dignity." May 25, 1984. And today, "Theresa Marie Schiavo died, peacefully, with dignity." March 31, 2005.

The one brings back memories of the other.

It took two days for him to die. Days of numb unreality. Days in which I do not sleep; in which I drink wine to deaden myself, to cope. He died of blood poisoning, unable to expel the poisonous gases from his lungs. He died earlier, maybe 6 months earlier, but he was resuscitated in Intensive Care, where he was hooked up to a machine which breathed for him through a tube into his trachea, a machine that measured lung pressure, a heart monitor, a tube into his stomach that fed him, tubes for urine and feces collected in discreet bags, and numerous intravenous lines going into his bruised arms carrying saline, a pharmacopia of drugs, and morphine.

He was fully conscious in this hospital bed, in this place where he was tied down like Gulliver by multiple ropes. For 6 months I lip read or he wrote notes. He agreed that it was a worse experience than being a prisoner of war in North Africa, Italy, and then Poland. He fought valiantly to regain use of his emphysema-weakened lungs after the pneumonia that he caught in hospital had stopped him from breathing. In the first month in ICU he was winning. But bodies are not meant to be kept still. A blood clot moved from his leg into his lungs and a life of any independence from machines became unrecoverable.

He went through all the stages of death that Kubler Ross wrote of. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

One day he decided he was ready to die. It was Spring, there was a profound bliss about him; he was at peace with his final decision. The hospital called in lawyers, all the affidavits were in order. He said his goodbyes to us, refusing to let us stay and be with him as he died, asking that we go home.

Perhaps I understand that wish, perhaps I never will fully comprehend.

All the tubes were removed, save for a morphine drip. We were on a death watch while he valiantly faced his own death, consciously, his eyes were open, with such bravery it makes me weep to think of.

Beside his hospital bed he kept a rock with raw emeralds in it. This is the poem I wrote 20 years ago for him…

Earthtreasures

Earth treasures you mined
The mountains that spoke to you
Call.
Your ashes become rock and sand
Tumble with the springs.

Clear as that global sky
Purified by pain,
Your consciousness
Draws inwards
To our unconscious.

This moment
Separating from the world,
From your beloved family
Moving towards peace,
And something I must accept

Your death lives
Disintegrating, integrating

Raw emeralds emerge in the rock.

Stone of raw emeralds that belonged to my father - photo today ©2005

For my father, D. Richard Clews, 1922-1984, and Theresa Marie Schiavo, 1964-2005, and all others who have struggled with the miracles of modern medicine and life and death in this way...

________________________
Postcript: Terri, her tragic story, her death, pulled deep recollection out of me, and I opened a journal from 1984 today that I have not touched in 21 years...nearly tore me apart, opening that book, those memories, and I didn't think I could, but I managed it. Thank you ... xo

What is truth...

Click here to listen to an MP3 of this post -:)

What is truth...

Truth is all in our perceptions. NickyJett has a wonderful post on this today. I also recommend ydurp, lionne, and Literature_Chick who have been posting on the topic of how our perceptions shape our reality. If that's not enough reading, there are the rich and varied comments at my earlier post on thoughts.

It is a truism to say that all we have is a perception of truth, nothing else. Whatever we see of the 'truth' is only a version of the truth among other versions. Now it's not that that version is untruthful because it is only a version, it's just not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will get caught shortly in a semantic net. Can't you see it coming?

If there is no ultimate truth but only verions of truth via our perceptions of a situation, a happening, an event, a person, a feeling, an insight how does a court of law operate?

Maybe something leans towards real 'truth' when more people agree that it happened a certain way?

But the mob doesn't rule either. Just because masses of people believe it, it doesn't mean it's true. The stark example that comes immediately to mind is how many people panicked in 1938 believing Martians were landing during the broadcast of George Orwell's War of the Worlds. Or the ideologies of Hitler's Germany. Or that the war in Iraq is justified because George W. Bush won the American election. The list is endless.

One could say that truth, legally or politically or historically, is merely an agreement among varying and sometimes contradictory perceptions.

Moving from the societal to the personal, I agree that perception is all you have, and based my unfinished novella on this premise. In it I am creating a portrait of a man I knew and loved that could only be unique to my perceptions and not like any other portrayal, and so played with versions of "truth" in their emotional complexity.

But as complex as the layers of truth that aren't true in an absolutist sense but are only vantages, or perceptions, that I've mentioned in this post, are, I also believe the world contains indissoluble truth.

The 'world' I am imagining is not just a place we inhabit but out of which we arose as conscious beings, as the consciousness of nature or the universe conscious of itself, its own beauty, its own pain, its own existential paradoxes.

As I write this, the image of 'what is true' that comes to mind is perhaps closest to Taoism. And of epiphanic moments in our lives. A flow of truth through all things, pooling like clear light, clear lenses, in moments of profound lucidity. When we feel and understand truth, I suspect, is a mystical vision of wholeness that leaves us forever changed and affirmed.

In the midst of this musing, then, I come to rest on the incandescent moment, its ephermerality as ultimate truth.

"Sketch for Self Portraits," coloured pencil on paper, 17"x13 1/2", 1997

A thought from today...

Experiment #1: a thought from today...

The brain is a standing wave. What does that mean? When my mind feels like it's turned to deep oceanic water? I can't feel my brain. It is I who is doing the thinking. I am an electrical impulse. I am chemicals pouring from one cell to another. Who am I? Am I the memories that compose me? Am I my mannerisms? My gesture in the world? Is my voice me, its particular cadence? Or is it the way my body moves, even if I am unaware of exactly how it is that I do this? I am moving bones. How is that possible? How do I understand, after half a century of living, how this energy bundle called me is me? Being a person is often so strange that I don't understand it at all. I haven't any answers, nor do I seek answers. The point is that being a 'sentient being' is the strangest experience surely of all; we're aware of ourselves in ways that other members of the geosphere don't seem to be. Or perhaps all living creatures are aware, they just don't go around muttering about it...

And yet, each moment I create this reality that I am living by living it, or it creates me.

As I plunge through the waters of my being, the days follow the nights, I never know how I wake or sleep or love or what propels me.

Many years ago someone said when I remarked how we, everything, arose out of a point of singularity, out of the 'big bang,' not to go there, not to think too hard about it...

But why not? I don't for one moment doubt that each of us contains the secrets of the universe and knows absolutely everything there is to know.

Image source

Green leafy mirror series...

I have to run out shopping, can't write, but I took these just now...it was fun to post a dusty mirror image and now a green leafy series, maybe more or maybe no more on mirrors later....

Later:

Think I will write more, but have to go eat something, anything soon - haven't had an actual meal in 3 days. Not sure why I would take these photos and then paste them together and put them in my blog. Was it because I deliberately posted a wan and tired and dusty photo and how often does a woman do that? Perhaps it was to offer a daylight image in a clear mirror. Or was it only a way of speaking to myself? The oddest thing was that I actually took a photograph of myself seated on the edge of my bed and naked in a mirror a few months ago and had never done anything like when when I was young and beautiful but modest. Then I photoshopped it so you can't even tell the woman has bare breasts. Maybe I'll come back from the kitchen and write a meditation on the body... who knows.

Or I'll just snip this out of here. Ohhh, aren't private posts great?!

Later:

After my daughter and I spent a delightful hour over dinner, being silly & laughing, which is a nice change from the tempests we've been having all week, I did snip it, but then realized I was doing it again, hiding. So snipped it back in.

The perception of the self is indeed a strange and wondrous thing. When we look into mirrors are we Narcissus?

Like most people, I barely look in mirrors. To part my wet hair after a shower, brush my teeth, put on some tinted moisurizer, a little eyeshadow that I didn't wear until I turned 52 (is that possible?). Sometimes I look in the mirror to snarl at myself. Mostly it's to see what is probably the most unfamiliar face of all...to this day, I find what I 'see' in the mirror and 'me' inside what I 'see' looking at 'me' very Alice in Wonderland, very curious indeed. Maybe I missed the "mirror stage" in my early development, because that creature looking back at me isn't me, and if I stare long enough she turns into a crone or sometimes a ghostly man or sometimes the face goes blank and there aren't any features at all. Who hasn't stared without blinking at themselves in the mirror until their face contorted and did strange optical things...

You know, I started a blog so I could write, and then I wanted to stop writing, and why is this, is it because I like it too much? And so today I've given myself full permission to write, and I felt so happy!

That's the woman in the mirror. No restraining orders. No pulling back from things I enjoy or people I really like because it gets scary, all that liking gets scary and I think I'll live with the trepidation for awhile. I might get to like the liking if I let myself like it.

This is a new resolution. Be forewarned, you can expect to be hearing from me (though image #3 looks a bit sensitive, withdrawing...).

Does anyone else tangle with parts of themselves?

Resolve: Go with green leafy plants bring bounty.

The dust wiped off,

the mirror washed,

the reflection cleared.

xo hugs xo

Free Sites I Recommend

In my right module I now have listed
these sites and will update any new
ones I use regularly.

Free Sites I recommend:
*Creative Commons: A nonprofit that
offers flexible copyright for creative work
~audio & video hosting here
*NVU: An open source website builder
*Audacity: Audio recorder/editor
*ImageShack: Hosting your photographs
*Tripod: Create a free website easily

Looking into a mirror...

This meditation in response to a "creative writing challenge" on looking into a mirror, not the most flattering of the series of photos that I took, tired, late at night...

But is it art?...

MOBA: But is it art?

Hilarious! And I've only been through 4 or 5 of the portraits. My sides are aching from laughing so hard. When I've had a rest, I'll go back and view more. I'll be back later to "comment" or maybe not!!! Bwahahaha, oh my, oh my....

I'd like to credit Heartfield for posting a link to this site.

10 Are Dead in Minnesota After Rampage at School

What pain and anger can cause a child not just to fantasize darkly in desperate moments but to kill others on a calculated rampage? His grandparents. His fellow students. Himself. Perhaps revenge on a world of defeated dreams that never understood his depths of despair or the danger of his anger? The funerary dirge is of inconsolable loss, bewilderment at those who compose the school system who didn't see this dark and bloody volcano brewing, anger at the teen himself, for pelting his fury in deathly bullets extinguishing many lives in his wake, anger at our culture of anger, its endless portrayals of violent death on the news or movie screens, and sorrow, sorrow for the loss of so many young people, for the lives that they will never have.

In our culture of violence, with its readily available guns, what we most need to fear is ourselves, our neighbours, the breakdown of a fellow citizen who lives out the celluloid glory of infamy with terrifying impunity---such bullets tear through the reality of our lives.

My deepest condolences to all those of the Red Lake Indian Reservation who have lost loved ones in this tragedy.

HAPPY SPRING RAINBOW DAY!

I saw a rainbow today! And I came home and spoke for a good 5 minutes about it, recording, and you can go listen here:

Spring Rainbow: March 20/05, 5 min

It's an experiment in blathering on without writing first (ho hum de dum)! No poem, not yet....

"The Vision of Ezekiel," German, early 16th Century, Woodcut

One of my birth paintings...

SaucyVox.com

Go check this out. It's an on-line magazine published by the one and only, inimitable, brilliant, sensual and talented Feith:

SaucyVox has featured one of my birth paintings, Lace of Light (24"x37", watercolour on paper, 1987), on the cover of the current issue.

Now that I have procured a domain name, I shall be posting the entire series of Birth Paintings (1986-89) with writing to go with them as part of my book on the maternal body. I just need to watermark them, and then embark on the process of writing a first draft in my blog. So, that's coming....

On the life of a temp worker...

I've only taken 2 data entry jobs out of desperation ever. And I have discovered I go a little crazy doing them, and so will not accept anymore assignments like this again.

One was for the Real Estate Board, and they treated the team of us wonderfully with fresh coffee and a large tray of breakfast goodies every day, and an insistence on regular breaks, and they chatted with us at lunch, etc. It was a humanizing experience.

The company I left yesterday was the exact opposite.

While the women who I was helping were great, our 'supervisor' left much to be desired. She ordered us not to talk to each other when another temp was telling me that the bus she had been on the previous evening caught fire. She later took us into a private room and said we were not allowed to come in or leave even 5 minutes late or early, that we were being watched. When I finished a huge proof-reading/data entry job, the one I was 'hired' to do, and I did my portion in about a third of the time of everybody else's, and spot-checking my entries I didn't find a single mistake in my work, I went to the 'supervisor' and asked if I could leave. She said no, that the woman who I was helping still needed me. Then my temp agency found a receptionist/babysitting job at UBC for a day and a half, terrible pay, but an escape. I was told I couldn't leave, however.

Now I'm not a very good 'worker bee.' And I don't take kindly to being trapped. I began complaining to the folks sitting next to me about the "slave trade" of temp workers, how temp companies are like "pimps," how much money they make off us and how little they pay us, and the like, and whoever the 'mole' was, they ran upstairs and got the 'supervisor' who marched over to my desk and said, "You can leave now," and watched me pack up like she thought I would steal something, and when I asked why, she said, "You have a bad attitude." I could hardly stop smiling.

When am I going to write that article on temp jobs and the need for government regulation in this industry? I have discovered many of the companies that regularly use temps actually have a 'supervisor' who could be classified as an "authoritarian" personality and who takes pleasure in demeaning the women they have hired for "service." These 'supervisors' are also wasting huge amounts of their company's money with these hiring practices. But how else are they to dominate and humiliate workers without getting sued, fired or blacklisted?

Do I make it sound somewhat extreme? It isn't, believe me.

Why am I in this line of work in the first place? That's a long story. But one of my problems is that I get bored very quickly with monotonous work, and hence the variety of temp jobs suits me. I've worked all over Vancouver since I began this last September. The work I'm given, however, barely touches my skills, talents, education, ablilites, and I'm now looking at Government contract jobs that involve writing and web design, but how to break into that field?

Anyway, I must write an article on the life of the temp worker, though don't want to go about interviewing people (for obvious reasons), and wonder if I can write something very subjective - a first person account, an insider account - and sell it to a national newspaper? My main aim would be to shed light on this area of labour, and cause enough of an uproar to ultimately bring in government regulations so that people who are temping at least get a half decent cut of the salary paid for work that they do. Any thoughts anyone?

Earth Treasures

A Found Poem from Page 17 of Luminous Emptiness

Earth Treasures:

texts
sacred images
ritual instruments
medicinal substances

Treasures to be found in temples, monuments, statues, mountains, rocks, trees, lakes, even the sky.

Of the texts, occasionally they were full length, but usually fragmentary --- a word or two encoded in symbolic script which may change mysteriously once it has been transcribed.

The treasures hidden in the world are triggers to reach subtle levels of mind. When a treaure is found and reveals its essence, it unlocks understanding, or the natural energies of enlightenmnet that compose the mind, where the teachings have always been concealed.

____________________________

Aren't artists revealers of the treasures?














Francesca Fremantle, Luminous Emptiness (Shambhala, 2001). This story is about Padmasambhava who sought to preserve esoteric Tibetan Buddhist teachings for a safer time and so concealed them in the landscape, but perhaps we don't need an intercessory, surely the natural beauty and mystery of the world is treasure enough.