giving thanks*

*tough titties, ima rant too, but you gotta go deep in to a very long post to get to the rant part I suppose

1. no, I will not recommend or push gratitude or the practice thereof on anyone
2. way I figure it is you have to be ready and you have to feel it
3. but I also know about “fake it ’til you make it,” with which I’ve had limited success in my life
4. I’d say that more than faking it, cultivation is key
5. I love my mamma
6. so much
7. The sky was incredible tonight as we were driving home on I-90 from Boston. Intense orange to the south, beautifully contrasted with gray bands of clouds, but covered by trees most of the time. Heading west, however, as we were, the sky was sherbet-striped: yellow, pink, purple, orange. No lime (whew! ’cause you know a green sky means a tornado!). A friend took this photo on her iPhone (no effects, no filters!) in Amherst, same time we were driving home. Thank you, Cathie!  
8.  exactly out of what did they make the sherbet-of-our-childhood? (long before “sorbet” became the norm)
9. this salad
10. every single green and vegetable in the above salad is local and I had the good fortune to pick some of the greens at the farm on Tuesday and it was almost full dark by 4pm when I picked and the next day it poured buckets so I really was lucky to get to harvest a bag of tiny, beautiful, sweet lettuces in mid-November in the low-lying valley where I live in New England
11. The salad bowl I purchased at The Hartsbrook School’s Holiday Fair. I have had my eye on these types of bowls for a long time because Hubby and I now eat a salad alone, just the 2 of us. Tossing a salad in the larger bowl (which sits atop the fridge and unassumingly houses chips and pretzels, et al bagged snacks) is too cumbersome and means the snacks have no where to go when we eat a salad, OMG! 
12. SPELTED MAPLE, OMG!!!
13. don’t tell someone with cancer that they are doing it wrong (or at least, don’t tell me)
14. because you don’t know
15. and you don’t want to know
16. maybe for that you can be grateful
17. and maybe, ultimately, even though it sometimes seems like there’s no second chances with a blood cancer like multiple myeloma and with toxic, harsh, intense, side-effect ridden treatments, there are second chances for someone like me at this stage in the game
18. and right now, for that, I am grateful
19. if you think you know how to cure multiple myleloma, and I do mean cure it, without toxins or chemotherapy or drugs, please, get multiple myeloma and cure yourself
20. the only person I ever really figure deserves mm is Dick Cheney and his ilk and even that seems….like a strange and twisted, but completely understandable, fantasy
21. hubris, I hate you
22. and I mean my own [hubris]
23. These words, which I encountered at the Dutch painting exhibit at the mfa today:  syndic  levade  pilaster  prunt  
24. that the Dutch word for falcon is valk 
25. spirit
26. I am grateful for my intense, vibrant, returning spirit which was buried and murdered in me for most of last year and a lot of this year and can you believe that spirit can emerge in the dark, in November, during chemo, and out of a body that houses cancer cells?
27. this Vermeer which I love tremendously 
28. my life, myself, my life, my children, my life, my Hubby, my life, my mother, my life, my dog, my life, my friends, my life, words, writing, family, art, air, breath, yoga, wood, dirt, water, quiet, peace, quiet and peace, pain-free minutes, Sanskrit, mantras, Sanskrit mantras, prayers and whispers for cures and pleas for help, pain-free hours, sleep, lack of pain, a clear mind, my mind when I am not on chemo, my self before cancer, but finding a way to live with the reality of these rogue cells, clean houses, non-smelly houses and dogs (my dog is smelly!), clean everything, my house when it’s clean, organized drawers, dejunking, my bones before cancer, my bones that remain my own damaged as they may be, hiking, food, the ocean, Provincetown, chocolate, salad, soup, bread, acupuncture, colors, museums, artists, jewelry, Bakelite bangles, really good shearling slippers, healing substances, healing, stones, rocks, heart-shaped rocks, singing, singing loud, Shape Note singing, passion, sunshine, peaceful interactions, anger, music, funny shit, my very own accurate bullshit detector, rage, my Hubby (again, always), my daughters (again, always), women, girls, intensity, inclusion, men, good leather bags, good socks, good knives, damask cotton, my mother’s laundry and the way she taught me to wash it, iron it, fold it, clean dishes, a clean kitchen, a clean bathtub, the painting at the exhibit today that depicted a linen cupboard and explained that it was often the most expensive piece of furniture in a house and how important and labor-intensive and time-consuming and highly-skilled and prized this female-only undertaking was, houseplants, excellent salad dressing, beautiful everything, beauty, bicycling and swimming if I’m lucky enough to be able to because I’m in the right place at the right time and my body is cooperating, sexy things, sexy people, sexy time, bodies, flesh, my life, intelligence, beautiful writing, my body, my mind, my spirit

Read Full Post »

what would it be to take thanks

Slowly it dawns on me that writing is not easy, that all of the voices that say this is not real work deserve to be put to rest.

I’m not the first to say this, but it is my dawning. A mechanism turning inside of me, a key, letting me know what this is, my writing.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a new poem.

I jotted down a dream a couple of weeks ago, a vivid dream of a thin emerald-green book of unusual size, leather-bound, the cover rich in color and texture.

But no poems per se and not much desire to share my thoughts here of late.

Sometimes the time quickens, sometimes it drags.

What is this calling? I appreciate silliness and I love to write nonsense. But I only want to write down the most important of my thoughts just now.

Yesterday, we drove from Massachusetts to Northeast Ohio. It had been a very long time since I’ve made this trip in the car—the last time was the summer of 2009. It is close to 600 miles.

I have never read Watership Down, but we have been listening to it in the car for long stretches on this trip. The narration is excellent and I am reminded of how much I love to be read to, how much of a pleasure to all humans this gift of stories being told aloud is. I feel thirsty for it now and I have decided that I will read at open mics even when I don’t have my own work to read.

Such is the thanks I would like to give. I love reading out loud as much as I like singing out loud. It is a great pleasure to me, like the emerald-green book from my dream. The richness of the color I can summon in my mind’s eye. How I would like you to know it, too, to take it from me. I will hand you the book so you can feel its richness, the animal skin, the creamy parchment of the pages, crisp and soft at the same time.

I want to leave politics behind, the truth of war and rape, the way humans have of tearing down what cannot be shared.

I want to take and drink and give back.

Thanks Giving and Thanks Taking

Peace

Read Full Post »

anniversary

25 years ago at Thanksgiving dinner at our family friends’ house in a suburb of Detroit, I took my last drink of alcohol. I’m sure I had a glass of wine at least. More than one glass? A beer? That I don’t know. I was never picky. I loved all alcohol. If the occasion called for wine, that’s what I’d be drinking.

I remember driving north, probably on I-75, then I-94, to their house. I have no idea what suburb. Was it still Southfield where they lived or had they moved on? I remember the barren fields, the low winter sun, the flat landscape on the highway. Did we pass the huge tire on the side of the highway, did we pass one of the first super-flashy moving digitized billboards I’d ever seen in my life?

My mother lived in Farmington Hills, Michigan at the time. Paul and I would drive up on the weekends and visit her, stay in her ranch condo, rent about a dozen movies from the arty-farty video store a mile away, lock ourselves in the den and watch movies all weekend. Sometimes we would fight, inevitably we would have sex, sometimes we’d go out to eat, even if just for lunch, sometimes take a walk in the sterile “neighborhood” that was like all of the other hundreds of condo neighborhoods in the suburb I grew up in for a few years when I was still in elementary school. The condos and sprawl came later, after my family moved away to a suburb of Toledo.

I had skirted around AA for about a year, hanging out at Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings with another friend of mine from college. After the meetings, we’d go out and get drunk at one or two of my favorite townie bars in Kent.

When I finally went to my first AA meeting, after being invitied by a woman who I banquet waitressed with at a sprawling restaurant in Hudson, Ohio, I felt happy and at-home right away; not like I felt when I was around the dragged-down energy of the people in the ACoA meetings. The alcoholics were a happy, gregarious lot; the codependents were pissed off and low.

It only took me a month to know why I was so comfortable in the AA meetings. These were my people.

Last drink, Thanksgiving Day, November 1987.

And that’s all she wrote.

Read Full Post »

Thankful Thursday–ain’t no thing

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my loves!

 

Read Full Post »

Thankful Thursday–a sad day

Happy Thanksgiving to you all, but we just found our lovely Willow dead in the street.

She is now buried under the soft soil by the back fence and we will make a beautiful grave for her.

We were lucky to have had her for almost 2 years and lucky that the day is full of bright sunshine, the earth is not frozen, and that her body was whole. Just like that line from the book “The Accidental Tourist,” though, you can see that it’s not her any more, only her body. The essential part of her is gone, it’s so obvious, and there’s some comfort in that for me.

She was the most unique and kind cat I have ever had.

We love you Willow, always and forever.

Read Full Post »

Music Monday–The Sacred Harp #318 “Present Joys”

With this being Thanksgiving week and me not being inspired by much of anything else, I turn to the default setting of the Sacred Harp…

You hear this sung periodically at the singing I go to, though more likely you hear it when someone has a specific thing to celebrate–the birth of a new baby, the announcement of an engagement, a wedding, gratitude that someone has recovered from an illness.

But, as with all songs that may be called at a Shape Note singing, someone might just want to lead it and hear it sung, without a particular occasion in mind.

I am thinking about Thanksgiving, Hubby returning from Singapore after a full seven days away, and about the fact that I’ve missed 3, maybe 4, weeks of my regular Tuesday night singing. I so look forward to going singing tomorrow night–you know the drill, right? 7-10 pm at Helen Hills Hills Chapel, Rte. 9, Northampton, Mass.

Here’s a video of the Wootten Family of Alabama, shot by none other than Alan Lomax himself (!!!). I’ve recently begun to learn about the Wootten Family, but can’t say much because, well, I am just learning.

Read Full Post »