ADIOS O.S.!

What?
Everybody else is doing it!

Besides, it is not entirely untrue.  Tomorrow morning I am driving my 19 year old daughter to Scottsdale, Arizona from Kansas City, Missouri in her tight little black Nissan.  She is going there to attend Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute having decided against Nuclear Physics as a career and opting for that of Pastry Chef instead.  For the next fifteen months she will be sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three other female students.   I am slightly concerned for their mental well-being.

Am I a bad mother because I am looking forward to an empty nest?

We've already shipped five boxes ahead to my brother and sister-in-law's home in Scottsdale, but I am quite certain that she plans on transferring the remaining contents of her room into her compact car insisting that the trunk is MUCH bigger than it looks.

I already have that familiar gastric knot in my gut in anticipation of the histrionics that will ensue once she realizes that lampshades are not collapsible and it probably isn't a great idea to strap an oversized, stuffed platypus to the roof no matter how many childhood memories it holds.

Once we arrive, it will be fine.  It is the three-day road trip that has me worried.

Out of my three kids, this one is my toughest critic.  She is bright, beautiful, energetic and independent.  She also contains enough moxie to easily run a small country and has the genetic disposition of her father in that she does not suffer fools lightly.

According to her subjective inventory, I hover in ranking somewhere between one and three.  I don't know exactly who occupies the number one and three slots, but my guess is that number one is most people in the world and three, everybody else.

But I have to give her credit.  The girl knows what she wants, who she likes and almost always has a well-thought out plan as to how she will get wherever it is she wants to go.

Up to this point, that usually involved heavy emotional and financial investments from her father and I, but we take it in stride as part of our job description.

In any case, I've noticed that it is deemed routine to alert those among the OS Crowd who care of any departure that might be regarded as permanent or otherwise lengthy, and since I have no backbone, I'm just following suit.

I am assuming that two weeks is considered lengthy.

If I am wrong and won't be missed for such a brief period of time, can we please pretend I never wrote this?  I've got enough self-esteem issues as it is without adding conjectural hubris to the mix.

Hopefully, I will still find it possible to check in every now and again while I'm away. I will be staying with my parents, whom I don't often see since moving to Kansas City five years ago, and want to spend quality time with them; time when I am not otherwise obsessing about what to write for OS and fretting about whether or not I've read and commented on as many of my favorites as possible.

I don't know that I can go cold turkey, so my laptop is coming with me and I've scanned a bunch of old drawings that I can throw up on my page from time to time just so I won't be forgotten.  I don't want to have to start over here, and I don't want to miss out on any news from my OS friends and the stellar writing I've come to count on to color my days.

For the next three days, however, I will be on the road.  I am trying to conceive of it as being a non-violent, non-sexist exploration and bonding opportunity aka Thelma and Louise, which we rented and viewed together the other night.  (No way would I ever let this kid anywhere near a firearm.)  If Mussolini and Eva Peron had a love child, I'm quite certain my daughter would still scare the hell out of her.

So, off we go!  And if I fail to resurface on OS after couple of weeks, please send a search party to the desert Southwest, as it is a certainty I'll be tied to a cactus somewhere, likely also bound to an over-sized, stuffed platypus.

RE-RUNS

Tried and True

Amazing Grace

Opening portals

Just to taste

Forbidden fruit

Behind closed doors

What's done is done

For rich or for poorer

Life is for living

Tomorrow can wait

A watched pot won't boil

The hour is late

With heart in my hand

I'll keep truckin' on

To reach for the stars

To sing a new song

The bigger the better

The harder they fall

I can't live without you

Just give me a call

Tomorrow's a new day

But heaven can't wait

Just call if you need me

I'll be home by eight

The clock on the wall

A bird in the hand

A babe in the woods

A small grain of sand

If ever you need me

I'll be by your side

And into the sunset

Together we'll ride.

a poem for K.

The Writes of Passage

There is too much to question in this world to ever arrive at a perfect understanding of why we are here, and if we spend all of our time in myopic traction doting on those larger questions, we are bound to miss the point.

Answers to big questions are almost always found in small and benevolent movements.

They seldom come in thunderbolt revelations and almost never gift flawless enlightenment.

They may inspire but rarely are they able to sustain an unabated and life-long transformation.

Answers to our questions are going to be flawed by our interpretation because we are flawed in our constitution.

When I posed the question, "Why Blog?" the comments from everyone were just as subjective and individualized as each person is themselves.

Obviously, we blog because we like to write.  Some aspire towards publication.  Many have already achieved that honor, but we write here because of a desire to measure our worth against the crowd and gauge the impact of our efforts by their response.

We blog because we don't want to be alone, which is something that can happen whether you are surrounded by a bustling family, living in a frenetic city or town, or working in a vibrant office.

We blog because we have things we want to say and wonder if others might share in our perceptions.

We blog because we want to belong.

Soon, if we are paying attention at all, we realize that this is not a vapid exercise.

Is it narcissistic?  Of course.  But so is our daily preening.  We put on makeup, shave our beards, iron our shirts, wear hats, pretty dresses, variegated ties, and classy shoes.

When we look to another and smile, we hope to receive one in return.

Saints and sinners alike have the sublimely self-indulgent characteristic of caring about themselves as well as about how they are regarded by others.  It is called being human, and it is a noble calling.

There is an ineffable fabric of both kindred and disparate hearts that becomes embellished with deeper colors and unpredictably salient hues every time we step out from behind our cluttered lives and the deep tread of our personal inhibitions and apprehensions to write and to share our thoughts with people whose names and faces we may never know but whose hearts are often as present to us as our own.

It is a pure connection, this blind alliance.   We are not distracted or disturbed by appearances, by political or sexual orientation, by race, creed or color; by economic or cultural classifications or by ability.

Yet we despair when we read that someone's dog has been hit by a car or another is longing for a peace she cannot find in an abusive home.

We cheer when strides are made in the life of a writer  whom we know is struggling with depression and laugh in conspiring delight when one calls us all out into the unflinching light of clean parody.

It is not by accident that we are here or that we glance off one another's posts like stars caught in the pool of gravity.  Nothing is random in the universe and certainly not in this microcosmic literary reflection.

We may have originally come here in an effort to understand ourselves and to find our own voices, but we soon learn that the only way we can truly accomplish that is by finding each other and listening to those voices.

And while ratings and popularity and Editorial Picks provide the occasional high-five towards our human endeavors, the nod most worthy is the one we get from those lives we have touched; the ones we have reached out to and supported; the ones we have rallied around; the ones we have commiserated or laughed with;  the ones we have said goodbye to or welcomed back.

It doesn't matter whether two people read our post or two thousand.  If we trust that whomever is brought to us is exactly the person or people we are supposed to touch that day, then we are already ahead of the philosophical curve.
 
We are employed by a firm quite apart from this terrestrial warehouse whose purpose I doubt we will ever fully comprehend while tethered to this mortal outpost.

If we can sustain that kind of faith as we write your soul to a better place, then we know why we are here.

In our thoughts, we are always alone.  In our hearts, we never are. 


So, in the end, we blog because we can.  But we stay because we care.

Thoughts

"We don't see the world as it is.  We see the world as we are."
                                        - David Lewis Anderson

That is one of the most profoundly liberating quotes I have ever heard.  It originated from the mind of Space/time physicist, David Lewis Anderson, as I heard him discuss it on a radio show several months ago.

To fully comprehend the breathing potential this implies is staggering.

It tells us that the gold standard for sentiency does not lie in the 'out there'; in the functional, linear backdrop of our objective reality, but rather that all that is emanates from all that we are.

It tells us that there is no division apart from what we choose to regard as different, as other.

It tells us that there is no existing plan for perfection apart from the one we feel the need to implement.

It tells us that the color of love is every color and that the presence of hate is seeded in our shadow side; our unexamined bitterness, envy, sloth, judgement and resentment.

It tells us that we are not the oppressed, the victims, the captives.  It tells us that we are the liberators.

As long as I can remember, I've been attempting to drive home to my, now adult, kids that the only thing we have any control over in this life is our ability to respond to it.

 We can choose to see ourselves as hapless victims of an overwhelmingly brutal outpost of celestial consequence and respond to life with reactive bitterness or fear limiting our capacity to love, or we can willingly embrace the nature of a presence beyond time and know with unquestioned certainty that whatever we face in this earthen crucible of grace is truly a gift; one provided to refine and to transmute the husks of human dross into the flaxen gold of impossible love.

My father has always advised me to let go of retributive emotions.  He warned me against 'burning my bridges' because you never know if you might need to cross them again and you can't ever be fully aware of the hurt and injured you might have left stranded on the other side.

I see all these principles as one.  It is one that speaks in the faint tongue of conscience to the often proud enterprise of the soul and it says,  "Love, forgive, and let it go."

On my best days I hold these admonishments so close to the hub of my fallible humanity I can fairly taste their transformational pallor.  On my worst, I linger too far outside myself to appreciate anything beyond apathy and confusion.

Most days are somewhere in the middle:  caught between the pressing and peevish clamoring of my pedestrian sensibilities and the cloying persuasion of my human desires and the intractable insight of a divinity within me that begs no introduction yet is too often left unaddressed.

But the larger quest continues.  I suppose that one day I may come close to grounding logic in sacred thought, but for now I just get up each morning and hope to end the day having left better moments in my wake.

I don't have anything else to say for now, but I'm not done thinking......  Don't change that dial.

SENTENCED, BUT NOT SHAMED

In a few hours my daughter and I will make the hour and a half drive to a small Kansas town and to a modest, slightly antiquated jail to visit my only son; her only brother.

He has been housed at this particular detention center for just under three months, although he has been a resident of two others previously since his arrest in early December.  So far, this one has been the worst.

I've groomed my outer sensibility to adjust to our visits ,such as they are, in these dim and claustrophobic places, and I've even acquired a sense of humor about the situation to help ameliorate the raw reality that begs my attention then mocks my attempts to sustain it.

 As I sit in the waiting area beneath the high front window where the visitors of the inmates must sign in and relinquish their driver's licenses or I.D.'s, I can look through the glass partition past the bored and mechanical movements of the officer on duty and scan the black and white security monitors that canvass the various sections of the facility.

I do this every time hoping to catch a candid glimpse of my son as he moves among the caged populace.  I want to see if he is smiling or laughing perhaps or whether he is in conversation with anyone.  I want to make sure he is not alone.

He is a very large young man standing nearly 6 foot 6 inches and weighing well over three-hundred pounds, so I comfort myself with the thought that certainly his size alone might help keep him safe.  I purposely don't make an effort to find out visually if I am wrong.

In spite of his physically mammoth frame picking him out from a grainy image among a dozen or so identically-clad men is more difficult than one would think.

When I see him we joke that far from the illusion of making him appear even larger, those horizontal stripes tend to produce the opposite effect. In this jungle that uniform is camouflage.  In this jungle, he disappears.

I have been making these journeys to various facilities for three years now with the exception of a short year-long respite between his first eighteen months and his current term.

As an addict to prescription pain medication, he cannot seem to quiet the accelerated cravings or stem the rampaging voices within him that tell him he is no good in this world just as he is; so that before too long, he is back in the crooked and loudly mad game of prescription fraud, outwardly hoping he will not get caught; silently praying he will.

I know far more about the conditions and protocols of detention centers than I ever wanted or believed I would know.

I know that when someone you love with all of your soul is locked inside, you also reside there.

I know that when you are looking through bullet-proof glass into the eyes you have known since birth and yet unable to touch the hand or face  or feel the faint trace of mottled air against your cheek after a son's kiss, holes are rent in your soul that applied optimism cannot repair.

I know that people judge; that in spite of themselves they can't overcome the grimy prejudice that those who heave in the belly of iniquitous delusion are immured by a mendacity only God can forgive.

I know that the guilt of the sinner is distributed among his loved ones like boxed meals of sorrow to be eaten without shame and carried without complaint.  It is the sacrificial supplication.

But out of reach I know lies the simple promise from the Cross.  The one that admonishes saints and sinners alike to put aside all pretension and disband the belief that in order to get to what is holy and good in this world one must be perfectly holy and good; that one must live only among the blessed and serve the meek.

I've seen the hollow eyes of ignorance as I move between the commonly accepted practice of moral living and the disturbing impenitence of those who share with my son the stagnant air of consequence in these inhospitable pens.

And I know now that these barbed and self-righteous appraisals  of who is just and who, condemned, are far more abundant outside the prison walls.

I do not fear the gaze from those others sitting alongside me in this sad institution awaiting our fifteen minutes of feigned happiness with our sons, daughters, husbands and fathers.  We greet each other in the subdued and humbled voices of the exposed.

Why we are there is never questioned.  How we survive the ride home always is.  But we don't speak of that.  It is rare that we speak at all.

But today I am making the long drive against the flat landscape of the Kansas plains and against the acceptance that I will be making many more of these sodden trips for an indeterminate period of time.

My son had court this morning and rather than being remanded to the extensive inmate rehabilitation program as was recommended by two other courts, he was sentenced to prison.

In August he will turn twenty-eight years old.  I will not know him again as a free man until he is well into his thirties.

There is a weighted measure of redemption here in spite of the staggering burden of hope denied, however; and it comes in the form of dignity.

To find within ourselves that thin offering of grace as it evolves within the purgative splendor of deep grief is crucial and is the determinant factor in a life well lived.

To recognize the inherent perfection of every soul on earth and refrain from judgment actualizes this principle.

To forgive is imperative and necessarily unceasing.

To know these things and to live by them liberates everyone no matter which side of the penitentiary walls we course.

Today will be hard, but not allowing myself to become transformed by this journey would be where the real shame would lie.  I can help carry the rest.

O.S.'s trig palin: What You Don't Know

This post was written for Open Salon in response to one trig palin had written about me yesterday evening.  I was compelled to set the record straight.  Those who read it on this site will undoubtedly be confused by it.  It was all tongue in cheek and meant to please the OS crowd.  If Open Salon is anything besides a writer's site, it is a social networking site.  I've already made some wonderful connections, and this particular one provided us with a new set of back steps as well as a new friend.
By the way, although I am sure it is obvious, trig palin is the name Steve Barber uses on OS....like I needed to tell you this....

Everyone on Open Salon knows and loves trig palin.

Okay.  Everyone knows trig palin.

For those who do, you understand.  For those who do not, you might want to think twice before revealing your true name and home address.

However, thanks to my impulsive resourcefulness, my husband and I know trig better than it is healthy for any sane human to know the insane.

But we had a problem.  Our back steps were collapsing.  It was a serious problem for me because they are just outside my studio doors and are my only recourse to our small patio and the promise of fresh air.  As fresh as it can get living in midtown K.C. anyway.

They say that desperation makes people do desperate things, and I have proven to be no exception to that theory.  Those warped and unsightly steps were having a major detrimental impact on my sanity as it relates to my ability to get the hell out of this house any day, at any hour, and for any reason and to do so from my own door.  I desperately needed an exit plan.


trig palin's expertise in that area was my ticket.  Of course, it was fairly obvious upon meeting him that the man had a few loose screws (many of which were used in the construction those back steps, no doubt), but he seemed like a good egg and after checking out his website:   Http://deckpro.atspace.com  it was clear the man knew what he was doing.  At least insofar as working with wood was concerned.  Ummm...Scratch that last reference.

 Trig arrived bright and er...um...early at nine o'clock on Saturday morning accompanied by his assistant, Nano, whom it was clear was the brains behind the duo.   For a man who stated outright that he is not used to having to get up in the morning until he was ready to do so, nine o'clock was like dawn to the poor sod; but he is a trooper and after two cups of coffee he got right to work.

Unfortunately, so did the fickle atmospheric conditions so that not long after the compressor was fired up, nail guns plugged in, saws and drills primed, the skies opened up in torrential objection.

This placed trig and myself inside the house for a well over an hour during which time I fed him bagels and coffee and let him peruse my portfolio while he feasted.  (Okay people.  Get your minds out of the gutter.  It was a legitimate portfolio.)

He asked me a lot of questions.  We discussed his music and watched a couple of his living room performances on Youtube.  For those who are not aware, in spite of his ongoing dance with insanity, the man is a wonderful singer/songwriter whose work is truly worth checking out.

But while we were sitting around the dining room table, I noticed that he kept fumbling with his cell phone.  Naturally, I assumed he had probably missed his shrink appointment or his group therapy meeting at Psychotics Anonymous and needed to reschedule, so I ignored it.  How was I to know he was secretly making photographic records of my artwork as well as my very movements?

And while Saturday was a wash, Sunday proved a very productive day for our trig, (he must have made contact with that shrink and picked up his meds.) and he, along with his helper, Nano, (who is hands-down the most adorable dog in the known universe!) worked like the madman that he is all the day long until the job was complete.

Nano palin

While I am now suspect of pretty much everything that oozes from trig palin's mouth, I must admit that he is a superb craftsman and is such a tenacious worker that I had to practically force-feed him a roast beef sandwich in between his nearly maniacal weilding of the nail gun, since he adamantly refused to take a break.  (No doubt the result of both missing the appointment with his shrink as well from guilt at having lied to me about the true reason he agreed so readily to do this job!)

And although our new steps are everything we had every dreamed they would be, having trig here for two days did take its toll on us.    

Bob and Susan before trig palin

Bob and Susan after trig palin

But just look at the end result!!  Was it worth it?  You bettcha!

I would hire this crazy artisan again in a heartbeat.....as soon as I am released from the rest home.

Why I Cannot Write Today

Last night the sky opened up and some celestial jokester let loose with over five inches of water in the overnight hours.

What does this mean to me?  It means the basement feigned the qualities of a swimming pool (which had probably been a life-long dream of the dreary little sub-space) ; a very filthy, hugely unsanitary swimming pool.

Of course, the entire aquatic transformation took place while my consciousness was wading through the deep waters of its own nocturnal delusions with these same wily gods taking hold of my attention in realms I have yet to find a map to.  So naturally, no human intervention was available till morning.  

However, the sump pump was a real champion and came to the rescue like some skinny, unimpressive, iron-based Don Quixote with too much time on it's hands...or components; thus sparing us the need for wet suits and water-wings.

Unfortunately, there remains yards and yards of oozing, black sludge, which the survivor in me keeps assuring my brain is entirely earth-based and not the blackened contaminates of raw sewage.  I choose to believe that story having spent several hours in it already.

I am sharing this because I can't share anything else.  I am too busy playing in the mud.

Yet in dealing with this natural bathospheric disaster, it occurred to me how many hats I wear.  Or, in this case, perhaps, goggles and scuba gear.  It is something we all share:  Flexibility.

So, during this little break that I am taking between doing the laundry and getting online quotes for submersibles, I went through some of my old, old drawings looking for this one.

It refers to that adaptable format of changeability, mask-wearing and the brilliantly distributed aspects of persona that have allowed me to be simultaneously both Susan, the writer/artist AND the sanitation-man's version of Jacques Cousteau.  Coincidentally, it even contains references to rubbish.

The poem is impossible to read in the illustration itself, which is why I learned how to type:

The faces that capture my eye

Pointedly fix on my need

To validate all that is human

Replete with my failures and greed

I court the world as a spy does

Varnished and fixed like the moon

Each gesture becomes a device

Befitting the face I assume

Suspect of everything foreign

I feign a contempt for debris

While secretly harvesting rubbish

To liberate remnants of me

* The drawing on the floor of the nervous smiley face confronting a gun has the caption: Go ahead!  Make me have a nice day!

The sun is supposed to return to us in full by tomorrow.  In the meantime, I'll be bailing.

OVERWRITERS ANONYMOUS

I have a confession to make:  In addition to being a word-aholic, I am an over-writer.  I write until I am so full of the words I craved in the hours before the feast that I cannot consider one syllable more without feeling decadent or risking serious intellectual heartburn.

So, I push myself away from the computer feeling a slight tightness in my head and a mild sense of bloating in my thoughts.

I worry that I probably wrote too much, that I've gained too much mental weight tasting all those rich vowels and salty consonants and wished I had exercised a little more restraint and avoided indulging in that one last sentence; however reduced in content I fooled myself into believing it was.

And then comes the inevitable and I say to myself:

"This is it.  I'm expanding inside like the universe and can't get my thoughts down fast enough to burn off the excess ideas.  I don't want to lie awake again tonight with literary indigestion; ruminating over that verbal concoction I devoured with such heady passion then tossing and turning against the burn of what was left unsaid.  I'm getting fat with ambition and if I go on like this, I'll be as big as a thesaurus in six months.  The expanded edition."

Yet by dawn, I am starving again.

And on it goes.  Day after day after day.

It is getting to the point that I think of little else.

I watch the chocolate sky before a deep summer storm and see poetry.

I listen to the velvety chatter at a party and hear the smooth blend of phonics usher in the delectable topic sentence for another blog.

I hear the buttery curl of words as they unravel in a foreign tongue and despair that I don't understand this extrinsic food.

I digest juicy, real-life stories and ponder name changes and clever obfuscations to broil a safe tale where no one gets burned.

I know I should enroll in Word Watchers, but isn't that what I am already doing?  How could watching them more make me crave them any less?

So, here I sit.  Plump with ripe options for this fruitless indulgence never minding that I often have to feed alone.

Not caring that fewer and fewer are able to stomach my distracted company and tend to recoil from the excessive girth of my ample vocabulary.  The one that I deliberately amassed one word at a time over many years through my gluttonous frenzy.

Lately, I have forced myself to consider cutting down on my intake of thoughts and the subsequent word-laden repasts that I share with such abandon.

No one else should feel obligated to ingest this much confessional food just to please the hostess, and I don't want any psycho-intestinal flare ups to occur in anyone after leaving my prolific table.

Which is why I am considering a fast.

Perhaps indulging only in soup.

As long as it's not Alphabet Soup, I think I'll be fine.

TAGGING TRANSCENDENCE

It occurred to me this morning that I have been an unwitting participant in my own life.  I don't recall ever asking to be here or reveling in joy once it became obvious I wasn't going anywhere else; at least not in the foreseeable future.

Oh, I'm sure my ever-loving soul has a handle on the larger picture, but what good does that do my conscious mind?

Okay, okay....meditation can lift me out of my body and enable me to commune with my spirit guides or my angels or whatever other disembodied entity feels compelled to take the floor; but honestly, am I willing to believe all that?  And what practical application can there be if I do?

I am no newcomer to the whole philosophy of consciousness expansion and transcendentalism, which is really seriously messed up given my present attitude towards much of it.

Since the age of fourteen when I stridently liberated my beleaguered psyche from the nuns and Catholic school, I have heavily perused, plumbed and, in some cases, propagated every belief system and metaphysical arena of thought that I could get my energetic forcefield around, with the only exception being all realms of obviously dark, satanic or just plain disturbing connivances.

 I spent untold hours in my teens and twenties twisting my limbs into yogic postures a white girl with knock knees and a D-cup has absolutely no business undertaking and totally messed up my inner ear chasing after my inner being with all that inner breathing.

And lets not forget the time I tore all the ligaments in the ball of my right foot while hoisting my top-heavy body through some yoga routine that was intended only as a meditative salutation to the sun; not as a preparatory drill prior to handling an assault weapon.  I was supposed to be finding God; instead I spent the afternoon looking for crutches.

Clearly, enlightenment was not to be found through my body.

In high school I was big into yoga and theosophy and the teachings of the ascended masters.  In college I took my turn at Transcendental Meditation.  During the initiation process (which came only after the two-hundred and fifty dollar fee was collected...a fee that has now risen up to $2,500!) I was given a mantra.  My mantra.  My SECRET mantra.

This was the sacred word that would lead me deep into those inner-space bubbles of cosmic thought; that would catapult my essence into the cosmos where I would unify with the Divine.   My mantra.

I was told that everyone was given a mantra unique to them; one whose supernatural beams were so imbedded in the soul that only God could void them.

I was instructed to repeat it to myself at the onset of meditation and strictly forbidden to share it with another living, prana-sucking soul or my vow of allegiance to my guru and ability to convene with the transcendent would be divinely revoked without any refunds.

For years I kept this evanescent blessing to myself; long after I had abandoned that particular avenue towards enlightenment.  I knew the power had gone out, or perhaps, it had never been fully plugged in;  but for whatever reason, I respected the directive of silence.

 At least until I began to understand that the only way I was going to charge my soul would be with a battery of illumination that came strictly from my heart and by freeing myself from the shackles of theosophical and dogmatic restriction wherein each doctrine and practice claim nirvana was best reached by swallowing their particular manna.

Eventually, I abandoned the notion that I could not become a more enlightened, holier person unless I became a rigid adherent of a specific belief system or placed my incomplete understanding in the Lotus-positioned lap of a highly-paid guru; someone already claiming to have tagged celestial base and is now home free.

Perhaps the first indication I had that there were more areas of separation than there were epiphanies of oneness came at the realization of one single deficit that every religion, belief system and formal, spiritual convention had in common:  The Us and Them factor.

From my early years of Catholicism to my years donning the theosophical garb of everything from Transcendentalism to Tarot cards, I found the singular thread of self-righteousness weaving a heavy garment of insolation throughout all of them.

Obviously, there were some outstanding and holy individuals within all of these churches and organizations who clearly understood the concept of humility and love and proved to be the exceptions.

 However, not in numbers enough to convince me that one way excelled over another.  In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and say that I witnessed far more examples of feint sacrosanctity within these hallowed halls of meditative plundering than ever I did at the mall or the pizza shop.

Once I removed myself from the metaphysical shackles of those esoteric rituals that seemed so foreign and out of sync with the daily confrontation of cosmopolitan artifice, I was able to finally understand unity in it's fullest sense.

 Suddenly, there was NO difference between me and them.  I had finally come within reach of grasping the blessed truth that I was, indeed, ONE with the heaving masses of pedestrian thinkers just trying to cope with whatever awaited them at the next sunrise.

I smiled with them, cried with them and reached deep into my reserve pockets of compassion to know them as I solemnly rejoiced at the fact that I AM them!

I am not begrudging anyone else the right to seek clarity by a specific path that resonates with them.  I am not implying that there is not great good in all forms and fashion of worship or that ritual is not a valuable technique in which broader doors of thought and understanding can be nudged open.  I am not even suggesting that everything, once it is confined within a regimented platform, is all smoke and mirrors.

Where God is sought, there He will be found.  He has no favorites.

However, for me, I find it best to canvass the world for greatness armed with humility and acceptance; particularly an acceptance of the fact that I am just a poor schlep like everyone else and one who claims no special edge, advantage or understanding of the game but only an unbreakable resolve and a willingness to try.

And so, when I at last spoke out and questioned others about my sacred and secret mantra, I was not at all surprised to discover that nearly everyone I asked had the same one that was given to me.  Upon further inquiry, I found that everyone of a particular age group at the time of initiation is given the same one!  At eighteen years old, my mantra was AING.

The way it unrolled for me mentally was A-ing.   'A' followed by ing, like the suffix forming verbs from nouns.  In retrospect it would appear that even then in my sincere but fickle quest for God and goodliness I was thinking like a writer.

I do find it uplifting and centering to attend mass on Sundays, and there was a period of years when I attended every morning.  There is something to be said for the tactile ignition of clean scented sanctity as it falls to earth in the devout gestures of sacred rituals, and I won't deny that transcendence is more easily glimpsed from an inviolable pew than from a gum-laden bench at a bus stop.

But easier is not necessarily better, nor is the experience always genuine.

I think that by graciously straddling despair as we steadfastly negotiate our daily truce with disappointment and struggle, we stand to yield far more redemptive graces and everlasting wisdom than could be gained from any mantra, mudra, meditation or surface investment in sanctified ritual.

So, for now, I'd rather seek God by mixing it up in the streets.


 Aight?

Tagging transcendence in the masses, yo......  Se la vie,  Aing.

DREAM ON THE SKIDS

 I've hit the fantasy skids today and am disheartened and pissed off.  At the moment, writing is the last form of distillation I want to apply.   But in the misbegotten cache of time it seems to be the only recourse founded in dignity.

It is, in fact, a sulking attempt to resurrect my heart after a life-threatening stoning by the indifference of fate to the fragile promise of happiness.  At least in a relational sense.  You know.  The kind involving bone and blood, touch and sight; the scent of hope with a kiss of heartache.

Normally, I would cry.  Or perhaps disappear for a time into the lucratively maddening crush of music and those blessed strains that pull gloom out by the throat until it wails in tune with survival.  But there is little normal about me and even less that would imply a standard reaction to a predictable end.

Are you confused yet?  Good.

Speaking in abstractions has two benefits:  For one thing, it protects the innocent and beguiles the clueless.  Secondly, it has profoundly lyrical potential.  One can vent and be poetic at the same time.  As an inveterate word whore, I can think of nothing else more satisfying.

But I had to relinquish a dream today.  Not that I didn't see it coming.  Not that I didn't know from the very beginning that there was an ending so radically apparent that it could light up the eyes of the blind.

However, denial can be one of my strong suits when I choose to favor dreams over reality, and as is always the case when facts are not fearlessly acknowledged, denial lets you know you've been had by delivering an even more brutal kick in the ass in the end.  Or maybe a kick in the end because you're an ass.  Same results:  muddled thoughts, cracked sensibilities and chipped optimism.

So, I live and learn; love and live; learn and love.  The combination is flawed but, apparently, recurrent.

Fortunately, my best ally is the unwavering application of hope as it can be handily dispensed in every life circumstance.   What am I hoping for now?  I haven't gotten that far.

My writing is going over well.  That is the one hopeful slice of my segmented aspirations.  I pick up three or four new people every day who add me to their list of favorites, and I've been told by some of the best and most respected writers on Open Salon that my writing blows them away.

This kind of praise is my drug.  It drives me to hit the streets of internal thought and turn linguistic tricks for the paying customers.

Okay.  They don't have to pay.

They just have to say, "Good writing, baby." and I'll give them all I've got.

At the moment my laptop pimp is telling me to lay off for the night, so I'm going to comply.

I can't afford to piss him off.  He's my sole hookup to the longed-for eventuality of landing in a better day.  On a safe street with lots of trees and soft vowels rounding out sentences of higher light and deeper joy.  But first I've got to finish paying my dues.

I'll write again tomorrow.  It is moving towards one o'clock in the morning.  Long past gloaming.

Even word whores have to sleep sometime.  Kiss-kiss.........

VIRTUAL VALIDATION

Yesterday morning I woke up to what I thought was going to be another semi-bland but open-ended band of hours that more than likely would not add up to anything terribly memorable by the time I couched my brain on my pillow again that night.

I was mistaken.

It would have been that kind of a day, if I had only stuck to my initial plan to clean out my closet.  I tend not to do that very often because I seldom fill it with anything new, so what is the point?

I am, what I consider to be, a very low-maintenance woman.

I don't follow fashion with any reliable interest; I don't color my hair and I wear it long, thereby eliminating routine bondage to hair salons; and as an artist, I work with my hands, which are predictably nicked and bruised from working with metals, have an uneven but curiously provocative assortment of broken nails and whose nail beds are often displaying the faded remnants of whatever inks or paints I exposed them to that day; so I don't get manicures.  In fact, I've never even had one.

But I made a strategic misstep yesterday as I was eyeing the over-sized, faded blue shirt I often wear to work in, trying to decide if I was woman enough to let go of the years of comfort I felt being artsy in the thing and get rid of it:  I checked my laptop for Open Salon updates.

When will I learn to stay on track?

It was there that I learned from Joan H., another writer on OS, that my post from yesterday had been selected as an Editor's Pick!  I was beyond ecstatic!  It had been a long-awaited moment (try fifty-four years!) for this kind of validation and was so incredibly freeing that my soul said to me, "It's okay.  You can cry now." And so I did.  Obviously, tears of great joy.

I had been told by many of the contributors that my rise in popularity and rankings on OS within such a short span was fairly impressive; that it can take writers eight months to a year before they get much notice at all from other writers and that most of them never find themselves chosen by the Open Salon editorial staff for the homepage as an Editor's Pick. To have become noticed and favored with EP within a mere three weeks was no mean feat, or so I heard.

That is all well and good, but my satisfaction comes at being recognized and valued for my writing efforts; plain and simple.  To have worked hard and earned the respect of other writers who have held the bar high is like being reborn....in an intellectual's body.

However, my free-fall into bliss was significantly tempered by my next move, which was to read all the comments following the post.  All but two were happily supportive and encouraging and that should have been enough to provide me with an escape from the sodden knot of concern as it slowly lodged itself in the middle of my throat after I read the couple comments that were not as forgiving nor as favorable.  I think it was because I really didn't see it coming.  Not in the slightest way, so it hit me hard; like being sucker-punched by your favorite cousin.  But then again, they were attacking the content of my post; not the writing.  I was good.

Still, it was upsetting because that is not how I see myself; as someone who rocks the apple cart just to watch the worms fall out.  I'm more the one who coaxes the worms out and then finds them all a new home in the potted geraniums.  It is important to me that everyone is happy.  At least on my watch.

But as much as I felt a bit stunned and, certainly, wounded to a degree; as the day wore on, those feelings had melded into an entirely new sensation so that, as early evening staked its claim on the hours, I felt grateful.  I also felt enlightened.

I had even stepped out and debated my detractors.  One was easily settled as a misunderstanding.  The other, well, she just kept on coming like a feral cat at a cheese convention.

  Actually, I went to this woman's page to discover that not only does she never post anything herself, but that I was the only one she was commenting on.  At least until another blogger wrote about beauty pageants!  Then she sharpened her claws and took off down another trail of harassment.  There will always be those for whom nothing matters except being right.

Perhaps the most salient lessons for me were that:  1.) You can't please everyone, and 2.)  It is much more difficult than I previously believed to convey honesty and humility when people think you have a better gig than they do.

The contentious blog had been the one written weeks ago about my experience growing up as a child/young adult of indistinct physical presence surrounded by the genetically graced beauty of my grandmother, mother and only sister.  (Repost and re-edited)  It was called Relative Beauty and was an attempt at understanding the role beauty played in their lives and to reconcile the childhood I knew with the emerging recognition I have gotten as I merged into my fifties.  I call that gesture of superficial recognition "shallow esteem" because it is nothing I earned and has little bearing on the person I have been fitfully crafting for over five decades.

Quite honestly, I remain confounded by all of it.

Yet I have become obsessed.  All that matters to me at this point is growing as a writer.  As and artist?  Sort of.  But not really.  I enjoy that gig but only in that it is another challenge.  I loathe redundancy and boredom.

The ramifications could be severe in terms of how my rabid pursuit of this end impacts my personal life.  But, hell,  aside from being a mother to my children, (all of whom, as of August 1st, will be out of the house) my personal life leaves something to be desired.  It could probably do with a good purging.

I've become quite good at that this year.

If anyone reading this would like to follow the thread of comments under the blog that ornamented one of my best and also, most interesting days, just look me up on Open Salon.

I'll be there honing my skills in anticipation of lift off.
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six...........

WHERE HAVE ALL THE BLOGSPOTS GONE?

If anyone wonders where I've gone, I haven't gone far.

Well, that is not entirely true.  I have.  Just not logistically.

A couple of weeks ago I was trolling through Google looking for what, I can't even remember.  In my search I came upon a link to a blog that must have had something to do with what I was looking for, I suppose; so, I clicked on it and was brought to a writer's blog site and forum called Open Salon.

I cruised the layout on my cyber wheels for about an hour and was impressed because it was so interactive.  A writer would put up a post and other writers would read and comment on it.  Immediate peer feedback!  What could be better.....or more terrifying?

I decided to give it a go in spite of the hard knot in my solar plexus and the caustic refrain, "You're no writer!  Are you nuts?  You don't belong there!" that circled the inside of my thick skull like a noxious vulture of cognition craving another morsel of despair and regret.

I listed my first post on May 10th, and I was so hungry for connections that I was cutting and pasting two posts a day, which I have since learned is not terribly smart.  There is so much on O.S. with so many, many contributors, and because there is so much there to read, they tend to read only what is headlined on your page without scanning down for earlier efforts.

Of course, unbeknownst to me at the time, this meant that half of my blogs were not getting any recognition, and the one featured was up for such a short time because of my quick turnovers that it, too, was hardly garnering more than a glance before it was replaced.

But in spite of the apparent lack of interest in my blogs, I was happy to be there and absorbed myself in reading the excellent writing of others as well as making some whose writing I particularly enjoyed, my 'favorites.  That is another benefit of this particular site.  You have the ability to select and then to follow and comment on other writers who appeal to you.  And if a comment needs to be made that is of a more delicate or personal nature, you have the option to send a 'PM', personal message.  That is also a method used to connect more deeply with another OS writer when camaraderie is evident.

But on May 13th I received my first comment and made my first OS connection.  It took a few more postings over the subsequent five days before I finally found myself receiving more than one or two comments per.  One contributor in particular was impressed enough with my efforts that he sent an email to all of the OS'ers he knows introducing them to my work.

That was on May 19th, and this same contributor notified me a couple of days later that I had done what is virtually unheard of in that I landed a number three ranking in 'popularity'; something, he informed me, that usually takes a 'newbie' a minimum of eight months to a year to achieve, if they achieve it at all, which most do not.

I read that message just after consuming the whole of a Saturday morning and half of the afternoon writing, "Hello, My Name is Susan and I am a Word-aholic" and burst into tears.

I have waited my whole life for validation like that.  Okay.  Not my 'whole' life, but certainly since my 7th grade English teacher informed my mother and father that I had a gift and was writing well above high school level.  It was the first, and basically, the only, positive endorsement from the halls of academia ever to grace me and I clung to it with the ferocity of rabid animal.  It was the only positive, the only gift, the only good that I could then honestly associate with myself.  Without it, I was invisible; with it, invincible.

The double-edged sword there is the unexpected but very real, deep fear of loss that it ignited within me.

As long as that ability went unchallenged and unrecognized, there was little risk of failure, and without failure to dim the gift or disprove it, it remained true and it remained mine.  No matter how badly I failed in all the other areas of my life, (and there is a vast array of them) I could, and did, say to myself, "But I am a really good writer."

Of course, the only ones aware of this were those I corresponded with via letters or email or the smattering of those who stumbled upon a poem I'd written here and there via those connections.
But it didn't matter.  It was my gift and it made me acceptable  to myself, and on days when I needed it to, it let me believe I was above average and special, at least in this one area.

I protected my ability in order to retain it.  Talk about backward logic.

Art was a different matter.  I have no innate talent in that area and have had to work hard to get even this far; much harder than I do with the words, which come effortlessly and need only editorial attention to craft into something halfway unique, compelling and worth reading.

I am not a natural artist.  In fact, any legitimate artist will tell you I suck at it.  Oh, I have ways of injecting enough dazzle into it to make it somewhat interesting, odd or appealing, but nothing spectacular.  My work is mediocre at best.  At worst, it is confusing and primitive.

But the bottom line is that I don't care about it.  Not in the way I do about my writing, and if someone were to say to me that they find nothing of value in my artwork, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.   I don't see anything of value in it half the time either.

However, if I were to be faced with indifference or repeated rejection with my writing, I would have to leave civilization and go live in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness.  I would have to become fiercely religious, change my name to Shanti and give up all worldly attachments.

I don't really look like a Shanti.  It would be very awkward.

Happily, my experience exposing my words and, really, my soul, to the intelligent readership of OS has exceeded my wildest dreams in terms of positive response and validation, and I am so relieved I don't have to live on that broken down bus.

Just yesterday another OSer informed me that a group of editors had anonymously submitted my latest post ( a repost taken from this blog site and written in April) to the OS Editor page, which is a page of recommended reading.  But apart from that, the comments I have been receiving are well-beyond mind-blowingly supportive, and my mind is duly blown.

Apparently my ascension from obscurity to highly-praised visibility on OS has been abnormally swift, and while I know that life is full of flukes and that nothing, even the things that temporarily seem to place us at the top of the heap, lasts forever; I am working it as though my life depended on it and as though rendering my words immortal is all I am here to do.   In many ways I believe it is.

I know that this is just a first step.  A baby step, at most.  But it IS a step and one that is encouraging in me a great run up another flight.  I can't describe it and already feel awkward and self-aggrandizing relating this much.  I have no one else to tell.  So I transcribe my joy in this blog for whomever is listening or even vaguely gives a damn.  Believe me, no one in this house does.

But I will likely continue submitting my writing efforts to OS indefinitely.  I will do as I have done, which is to compose the blogs here first, then just cut and paste them onto OS.  The reason I have not been as consistent in writing here is because I've been cheating and doing a cut and paste on pieces I have already written here then reposting them on OS.  Obviously, I'm not going to post them again in this blog spot, which means that sometimes nothing new gets posted here for a few days.

However, if you would like to go to Open Salon and type in my name, Susan Creamer Joy, you would have access to everything.  Even the comments, although I don't think you can leave a comment there unless you sign up as a site member.  It is free, but it still might not be for everyone.

So, that is where I have been.  Still right here, still attempting to craft a wordy bridge from my subjective reality to one I don't naturally trust and barely understand.  Nothing has changed.  Except that everything has.

For the first time in my life, I think I can break out of this corroded, beleaguered, hard shell surrounding me; the composite blend of everyone else's life but my own with its jagged outer layer of my  compendious regrets and failures sealing the mix tight against my soul.

Fear is not an option.  Neither is restraint.

I'm all in.

And if anyone would like to join me, please do.  But as I said, I will still keep posting the new things here as well as there.  However, during those stretches when I cannot be found slamming out prose and poetry here, just go to:   http://open.salon.com/blog/susancreamerjoy

You will likely find then, a repost of something I wrote here initially, but odds are it will have been edited and tweaked a bit.  The bar is much higher writing in plain view of the excellence on Open Salon.
It forces me to reach into pockets of possibility for the odd bits of perfection and gum wrappers I might have stashed in there.

I am sure there is the chance I may not find you there, but one thing I is certain:  I will find myself.