Another One

Well, here we go: another day. Yesterday was lovely. Thursdays are supposed to be my half-day at work; yesterday finally *was*, and it was all sunshine and people who loved me. I went shopping for a bike with a very sweet friend of mine, and after some off-the-shelf weirdness I actually went in to somewhere that did something involving analysis and fitting and came out with instructions to return Saturday with some time to tweak the thing he put together for me. Saturday morning, therefore, I get to pick up my bike! Then I hurry to Andi's for meadmaking, then the Leo Party. Today's work, Scott Pilgrim with the mob, and Blue Erin and Bob's housewarming-- it's gonna be a busy couple of days. Sunday is Patti's wedding.

My brain is still in a weird place. It dipped down a fair bit there, and I'm still unsteady or unstable; not confident in happiness, I guess. It's not a comfortable place to be. On the weekend I slowed down enough to do the things that really make me happy, snuggling and just existing in a close orbit, but my life isn;t structured to allow me time for that much. I need to rev up again and stay revved up, to jump into action rewarding enough to be worth the energy. It's taking some doing.

The bike will help. Sunshine will help. Today at work will help-- a nice normal day, me alone tending my plants, even if I go need to wait for security etc etc. It's really great having someone to help me once a week at work but it does mean responsibility and constant awareness of another person, so it's rough on the part of me that uses work as the alone-time or downtime that I don't get at home. I wonder if there's some way around that?

One of my goals for today is to come home and water my garden again. Everything in the garden was more-or-less on hold because the guys were going to paint the porch railings (after painting the rest of the building and trashing my plants) so I moved everything out and away from my patio. They haven't got around to that, painting in two weeks, so I'm done with waiting.

I still have a ridiculously long to-do list of responsible adult stuff-- renewing things, paying things, checking up with bureaucracies, blah.

I need to spend more time in my garden. In a garden, really. Do I know anyone anymore who'd just like sitting in Strathcona community garden or in the little hill garden by my house through a long evening? Are any of those people ones I'd like to sit with like that?

Okay, time to go do this work thing. Be well, people. I will too.

Because

Something I said made me think of this poem today:

Archipelago of Kisses

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't
grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy,
like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we
shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get
older, kisses become scarce. You'll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's
red door just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss.
Now what? Don't invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey.
It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of
your body without saying good-bye,
and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it
illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a
special beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The
intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss.
Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

Jeffrey McDaniel

Rollercoaster Ends Now

I've been riding this thing for too long and now enjoying it.

Here's the thing. Rilke in his letters to Kappus said: "You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question whence all this may be coming and whither it is bound? Since you know that you are in the midst of transitions and wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything morbid in your processes, just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter; so one must just help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and break out with it, for that is its progress...

...Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you."

He said a great deal more, and right now everything he said is ringing like bells everywhere in my head. Still, here, this is the point I need from him. I've been packing away a lot of myself because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient for people; I am uncomfortable and inconvenient for people, undeniably. I've been upset at those bits of myself. I've been keeping them back until the pressure breaks and they fountain out into despised chaos and then I stuff them back in again. That's the swing of this particular rollercoaster, I think.

I'll get off it now. It may start out with not giving a fuck about anyone, but that never lasts long, and never works well; I do love people, I love them like crazy and all the time. So we'll find the place where I can love people but I can be angry too, and melancholy, and stormy and loud and boisterous and silent.

When it comes right down to it, I'm my own person. I'm the only person I have control over; the only person I can trust to support my choices, or to be there for me absolutely no matter what, now or in ten years from now or in fifty. Everyone else is too busy being themselves, too tangled up in their own life choices and their own paths, to be the absolute rock-solid sort of consistent I've always looked for in someone else, and I am too busy being myself to be there like that for anyone else. Right now I'm thinking of relationships like windchimes, each person floating and jangling in their own little orbit, intersecting with each other in a brief and beautiful chime and then swinging on. Courses are changed by that collision, music is made, but nothing stays. Everything moves on.

And so if I'm not there for myself then I can never be sure anyone will be. Maybe, sure. Given the number of kind and loving people in my life right now there'll even probably be someone. I just can't be sure. There's no other way to be sure.

And here's the problem, and I need your help on this: I see my relationships-like-windchimes analogy. I know I need to advocate for myself regardless of relationship status, need to be genuine with myself, etc-- but I do tend to lose it and get bowled over and try to please, especially, the people I'm sleeping with, the people I'm in relationships with, whatever. All of them. All the time. And then I fail, and flail around and blindly cause damage, and the world sucks. How do you guys reconcile this stuff? I know I've written, in the past, about how much I hate hurting someone I'm with, even though hurt is a natural thing that seems to come up between human beings from time to time. What I'm asking now is, how do you make decisions to support yourself, to self-advocate, to keep your self strong within a relationship? How do you reconcile that with negotiating for another person's comfort and selfness?

I'm twenty-nine years old as I write this. I feel like I should have some glimmer of an answer right now, but I've never figured it out. I'm tired. I'm discouraged. I'm not going to harvest any of my own tomatoes this year. People love me and it doesn't fix anything, it's no solution, not even a band-aid.

Nothing more to say right now. Hang in there.