Some of my best guesses

Some of my best guesses:

1.  No one is as important to you as you are. You are your Number 1. If you work your fingers to the bone, your fingers will be bony. If you sacrifice your life for someone else, you lose your life. If you love someone to death, they die; you have the love, although I would guess it wasn’t really love. Actually, I guess that nothing is as important as your body is; it is the only spacesuit you are issued on this trip to planet earth. When you break your spacesuit, it can sometimes be repaired, sometimes not. I guess there are people who are so in pain in their spacesuit, they want to take it off and the pain can be physical or mental (which I suppose to be about as physical as physical pain, if not more so. (Ever had a broken heart?)). Consider the permanence of deactivating your spacesuit. You can’t cheat death. And you may not really want to. You may just want to take a vacation from your life. Since you are taking care of Number 1, you can figure out how to take some kind of break that won’t break your spacesuit. There are lots of ways we think we are taking a break that is slowly breaking out spacesuit, such as fueling it with too rich of fuel, too often. “Do not tope off” would be a good motto to fuel ourselves by. Maybe go sit and stare at the sky, examine a leaf, an anthill, or take a nap.

2.  I presume that putting you as Number 1 could be seen as selfish. But it isn’t. Putting yourself first means you come before money. You come before debauchery. It also means you get to practice discrimination about priorities in your life. If you put yourself first, you can put what is important to you right after that like 1.a or 1.1. And you will still be in your body to do that. It is awful hard to clothe and shelter the poor or feed the hungry if you aren’t in the physical plane. And as far as I know, you most likely cannot be transfixed on the beauty of a bank of pink clouds in the grey sky at sunset if you don’t have your eyeballs talking to your brain, and why, if you don’t know that that takes a body in its live state, you can stop reading right now.

3.  I try to remember what a great meditation master asked once, “Is it pleasurable or is it beneficial?” I have a bad memory or maybe it is a lazy one, so I forget to ask myself this as often as would be beneficial.

This takes me to my next guess. Lazy isn’t just a way of being. It is a big bucket of boggy misdiscription. For instance, there was a notion made by guessers that people in the South were just plain lazy (I have always been fancy lazy) but guess what? They were not lazy. They were anemic. This article explains it very well and uses some interesting and silly words: http://beck.library.emory.edu/southernchanges/article.php?id=sc04-6_002

So the next time you think you are lazy, I think you ought to, at the least, figure out what your “hook-worm” is. What has you hooked in your inertia? Because you are putting you first, you should have plenty of time and energy to figure out what makes you tick tock. Maybe what you are doing when you are being “lazy” is your favorite thing in the world to do. And that is okay as long as it doesn’t fill you with guilt and shame. If it fills you with guilt and shame, it probably is not beneficial, but only pleasurable in the shallowest sense of the word. Do not underestimate the power of habit. Maybe the road you take is always the same, the scenery the same, and you aren’t being able to look at life, and its bounty of views, instead you are dead bored. Sometimes an adventure of any kind can break your cycle of inertia.

When you get home from work, do you go change your clothes so you can go play and do chores? Do you make it easy to adventure by establishing beneficial habits?

Do you throw your stuff down in a pile and immediately do the same activity that keeps you in one position such as being one with the couch.  That is fine, as long as you know what you are doing vs. not doing, AND you are still taking care of Number 1.

4.  I guess nothing feels any worse than having nothing to eat, no place to stay and being pestered by mosquitoes, fleas and flies while being too hot with nothing to drink. You might want to avoid that situation if you possibly can. Some people (especially children) can’t. If you relatively easily have the power to take care of Number 1 and not find yourself in such a state, you are one lucky human. I know I have been bold enough to presume that you Number 1, but it doesn’t hurt to know that you are actually so important you could make a difference in the world especially if you are one of the lucky ones. You can keep up to date on just how lucky you are by visiting: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810

5.  Something that can feel like you want to be worm food is if you feel like no one in the world loves you. Here is the secret to that; you don’t experience love unless you know love and how to love. I theorize that love is like the old question “if a tree falls in the forest, and no auditory receptacles are there to hear it, does it make a noise?” I know it is slightly reworded. But here is the question that I suppose you could ask yourself when you feel like nobody loves you and maybe even God hates you too: “Can a person feel love, if they don’t love anything, if they have no idea what love feels like?” It can seem awfully altruistic, but doing something for someone that makes you feel love vs. makes you feel loved is a lot more doable than striving to make people love you. And honestly, it is usually a surefire way to make people love you anyway.

6.  Honestly, nothing beats honesty. I don’t pretend not to lie. In fact, the people who I have found to be the biggest liars are the ones who say “I never tell a lie, you can count on me to always tell the truth.” Uh huh, you betcha! Those are the people I look at and think – you poor lying idiot, get away from me!” I guess there is nothing as powerful as a person who lies, knows when they are lying and why they are lying, and then gets on with the truths of their lives. And we hope they are not evil. Being evil is never looking out for Number 1. People who are motivated to do evil are obsessed with a state of being that is hell as far as I can surmise. Have you ever known a good, happy person do something that society would deem Evil?

I like to envision a special hell for people who lie with the motive of persuading people to believe silliness; silliness that will hand their power over to the Evil liar(s). I guess you can always count on plenty of lies in wars, slavery, massacres, holocausts, and sometimes in organized religions even. Perish the thought.

Sitting on the fence and using omission to avoid telling a lie is a damn sissy way of going about taking care of Number 1 in my book of guesses about living a good life. If you don’t want to talk to someone or go do something with someone, say so, don’t make the other person wonder what’s up because you are so wimpy you can’t say what is on your mind, honestly! Or at least tell a lie, honestly, and relieve the other party of wandering in the land of wondering. Fib up a storm with something like “Sorry Charlie, my horoscope says I shouldn’t step foot out of my house and as a Taurus, I am loyal to a fault to my horoscope, which also says not to talk to anyone whose name begins with a “C”, good bye and good luck.” Putting a person off is demeaning, and will hopefully come back to haunt you or so I like to pretend. You may think you will crush the other person if you make a declaration and then you may be lying to yourself. You may just be afraid to have another person know what you really want. I guess you could think you have to be surreptitious about your motives. I am excited to break it to you; you always have motives, and in order to take care of Number 1, I speculate knowing your motives and what you want is essential. Honestly.

Empty Nest & Nostalgia

What is this sweet longing, this painful longing, a wishing for things from the past, people from the past? NOSTALGIA! And there is reason that the word ends with ALGIA - it is somewhat painful. Maybe the most painful aspect of it, is that when one is as realistic as possible, not only is it impossible to ever "go back", but many times what we are longing for was never quite what we remember, in fact is much more complicated and shadowy than what we remember. For me nostalgia is more a longing for a painful past.

And since all the longing in the world is not going to manifest the past in this physical plain, I do find that indulging in longing for my ideal past, my mythical past, is just as honorable a form of neuralgia as any other. However, sometimes to pull myself out of that longing I have to replay a cameo of the actual past, and like a sharp slap on the face, it grabs my attention and diverts my thoughts elsewhere. Then, unless I fall into the abyss of "Pissed about the Past", I can move on to an awareness of say, the present!

An example: I miss my mother and think about all of her wonderfulness and canonize her among the remarkable women in my life, and am almost to the point of cries of anguish because I miss her so much. Then I must remember her at age 72, lying on her couch, totally jaundiced from her starring role as an alcoholic. She was remarkable in that on her bad days she got more accomplished than I do on my good days. I don't drink much, but I am supremely lazy.

One of my favorite ploys to have an authentic experience of the past, is to troll for images from the years of my life. I think the Betsey McCall from 1955 is a lovely dose of my birth year I have also included a link to the page where someone has published pages of Betsey's. I remember this feature of McCall's. My family did not subscribe to this magazine, but a neighbor did and I could not wait to find the latest Betsey page. However, I hated to cut, I only liked to look, so I am not sure I was robbed of a passion when it comes to paper dolls. Plus paper dolls would just not keep their clothes on. Remember?

The Empty Nest experience is at least 1/2 nostalgia for me. Today I should go into my fledgling's room and go through more of her "stuff" - which will bring back more memories and so on. But will also get me closer to having a new room to add to my territory of my house. Wish me luck!
Keep happy thoughts and have a very lucky day

Too Much

And All. Maybe not ALL, but too much. These are the side trips of my life at the moment - little jaunts that make it challenging to "go with the flow"; things that must be either denied or dealt with on a daily basis. Husband lost job in May - in this economy - in a depressed California County. Said depressed California County is covered in smoke and has been since the beginning of June. Some days the air rates hazardous. Hazardous air that can't be exercised in. I have already expressed how it feels to have the baby girl out of the nest, however, I haven't conveyed that there is still so much of her "stuff" in the house and in particular her bedroom. There is layer upon layer in her room with nary a 4 inch square of carpet cleared. It is like a land mine. She told me not to worry about it, just put it in her room, as if that room was a permanent piece of real estate that would be enshrined in her memory forever. Hello? May I be excited about her leaving so that I can invade her room, conquer it and call it my new sewing/quilting room and make a nice nest for guests. Ummm...hmmm., who pays the mortgage, - oh hell, yes, that would be me and I can be referred to in the near future, I hope, as Atila the Mum.

I feel one of the great disservices that I did for my child was to allow way too much stuff, things, plastic, souvenirs, silly collections, etc., to come into our house and in particular into her life. For instance - Beanie Babies. Need I say more? Of course there was a great rush to invest in the BBs in order to procure a college fund investment plan via BB's value. Okay - do you know of anyone who actually made money collecting BB's? I don't. I have a rich, Republican sister who purchased lovely lawyer glass front covered book shelves in order to display her Beanie Babies. Bless China's little heart! And what about all of the toys that go with happy meals? Or should I say come with Happy Meals? Toys that come and stay and never leave without major effort. So the empty nest is full of the dreggs of a childhood in America. Too Much!

So Empty...

I had no idea that having my one and only child leave home could feel anything like this. I am not even a very good mother. I was never one to have prepared, healthy meals for my child on a routine basis. In fact a favorite line when she would say she was hungry was "Didn't I feed you just yesterday?". This has been like an amputation because I keep thinking that my "little moi" is still right here but I know she is not. I can't move around in my world anymore without feeling crippled.

Since she has left home I have had the splendid remembrances that must be similar to the crying, ancient person's memory telling them they are still Daddy's little girl. Memories so real they have snapped into my present like some weird elastic inchworm whose back legs have just hit up against the front legs, bringing with them what was. I remember lying on my bed in Hawaii and feeling her forming body in my belly and it was real. REAL. So strange to feel. Little bumps and protrusions moving underhand. My experience of this memory is as if it was yesterday afternoon.

I remember bringing her home from the hospital and wondering. Not even knowing what to wonder, but wondering nonetheless - a wandering wondering. Just a few days after we started our life together - her body outside of mine, I kept having the feeling of wanting to fling the bundle away. The bundle of this thing that must be schlepped! I can still feel how wrong and foreign it seemed that I had to carry this bundle around always. And this feeling in direct conflict with my commitment to wearing her in a baby sling as much as possible and providing nurturing contact.

It was an experience like many rights of passage for a female in my world. Dangling, bouncing, breasts that arise from wonderful, flat, secure flesh - feel so odd loosed upon our bodies and yet feel wrong snugged up in undergarments. A flow of menses let loose to stain our surroundings, to stain our clothing and leave a delta of bloody debris in our sacred space and yet to wear that peculiar object, the sanitary napkin, held in place by the odd belt with tortuous hardware - that also felt so wrong. My body becoming two bodies with such a strong, physical connection now cleaved by the departure of my girl. I know that it is the right thing to happen; it just feels so wrong.

Perhaps this is just my experience in this miraculous physical world. I have always felt as if it was all just a little to strange to trust completely and feel at one with. All of the extras. All of the extras that I have lined my nest(s) with. And now I have no fledgling in my nest and I am Raven of the Empty Nest. This is the only way I know to name the role at this time. How could I have missed out on having an inkling of what this would be like. I am so ill prepared. I look at other people whose children have flown and wonder how they can seem so happy and carefree. Childbirth was understandable and so reassuring to have that role of Mother thrust upon me with the bundle. But this me, this Raven of the Empty Nest - I don't know who she is...YET.