Wednesday, October 29, 2008

On the Upcoming All Hallows Eve

Sean and I carved pumpkins earlier today. They're sitting on the table, one wearing a Mr. Yuk face and the other looking a bit like it just experienced a very enjoyable stroke.

The house has a nice sharp brown smell to it, like the seeds that I toasted. Outside the colorful trees are lit from behind and beneath by the street lamps, and people are still out walking hand-in-hand. It's a beautiful picture.

I got to thinking, however, with my hands deep in stringy pumpkin squish: Halloween is a totally bizarre holiday. We dress our kids up like dead things and make an honest attempt to scare them stupid. We send them out on the street to beg for handouts door-to-door, and we sit back and watch as they slip into sugar-induced comas as a result.

And here I am, pulling the guts out of a beautiful fruit with my bare hands, salting and roasting its unborn children, then carving out its flesh and lighting up its mutilated body for the whole neighborhood to see.

I mean... seriously. What the hell.

I have to admit I love it, though. Favorite time of year.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Atonement, continued.

A couple comments on my last post made me feel the need to clarify a couple things. Moreover, it helps me to write everything down. Gets it out of my head so I don't make myself sick over it.

Please do not think I'm convinced that I'm all better now and everything's peachy. I'm happier in myself, sure, but I am nowhere NEAR rehabilitated. I have a lot of things wrong with me-- old, old things that go way back that I've never really allowed myself to come face-to-face with until very, very recently. The atonement of which I speak is not something that I feel I am experiencing right this minute, nor am I absolutely sure I shall ever find it. I just feel the need to stop and reevaluate my life, my actions, and myself, and put myself on a new path to healing. I need to find peace with myself. Start building a foundation to keep myself from making the same mistakes I've made in the past all over again.

I have never done this before. I've never even really asked for help before. It's a learning process. Sarah "on the mend" is going to take a long time, and I'm well aware of it.

Much thanks to those of you who have been supportive, and patient.

Monday, October 13, 2008

In Which the Writer Expresses Atonement

It is said that the heart is the seat of human emotion. The heart, as is well known, is a rather powerful muscle... and muscles are slowly becoming my specialty. Therefore, I'm finding myself rather often thinking philosophically about the body and how it functions as an appropriate metaphor for various emotional states.

Trigger points are a favorite. A trigger point is a hypersensitive nodule in a muscle that, when compressed to a certain level of discomfort, refers pain, tingling or numbness elsewhere in the body. If held over a period of time at that particular level of discomfort, the nodule is starved of blood. The referred pain diminishes slowly. When released, the point is flooded with new, fresh, oxygenated blood-- the cells are nourished, the muscle relaxes, and the phantom pains disappear completely. Other stuff happens, too, with synapses and filaments and whatnot, but it's the blood that I want to talk about.

I feel like this is a description of my behavior and subsequent healing over the past year or so.

I have been truly awful. I was experiencing so much inner pain and confusion that it spread itself out over my whole little world, referring that discomfort to my friends and family. Although I could definitely see and feel the effect my inner "trigger point" was having on my life and the lives of those around me, I couldn't (wouldn't?) take a good solid look at where that referred pain was coming from.

I hurt people. A lot of people. I hurt people I cared about deeply, people that meant everything to me. I did some terrible things, I told some terrible lies, I covered my face and hated myself thoroughly for a long time. I couldn't even begin to describe what was happening in my heart to the people who loved me and wanted to know, other than to make up lame excuses and shrug it off. Or whine. Or nag. Or distract their questions with something else.

I didn't know where to begin, how to name the bad thing inside me, so I manipulated those around me to hide my shame at being "broken."

I'm so sorry. I was wrong.

I've been taking steps, over the past few months, to find and push on my trigger point. I figure that the more I starve it of the bad blood that's been congealing over the past eight years or so, the more healing will take place when I finally release it. It's been an enlightening process so far. I'm learning how to set boundaries, how to express discomfort or need, how to stand up for myself, how to apologize honestly. It feels good to own up to myself, to confront the things in myself that I've been so afraid of. Therapy's been rewarding on that front, and continues to palpate the tissue of my soul for that point.

You all have a right to be angry. You have a right to express your pain to me, or withhold it, as you see fit. I accept the responsibility of my actions and the subsequent trust I must now re-earn.

I am learning to love myself. No... that isn't quite right; love is not hard to come by for me. I am learning to respect myself, and accept my shortcomings, which for some reason is much more difficult.

But I feel, for the first time ever, as if I'm truly on the mend.

A Lover's Quarrel

There are some to whom a place means nothing,
for whom the lazy zeroes
a goshawk carves across the sky
are nothing,
for whom a home is something one can buy.
I have long wanted to say,
just once before I die,
I am home.

When I remember the sound of my true country,
I hear winds
high up in the evergreens, the soft snore
of surf, far off, on a wintry day,
the half-garbled song of finches
darting off through alder
on a summer day.

Lust does not
fatigue the soul, I say. This wind,
these ever-
green trees, this little bird of the spirit--
this is the shape, the place of my desire. I'm free
as a fish or a stone.

* *

Don't tell me
about the seasons in the East, don't talk to me
about eternal California summer.
It's enough to have
a few days naked
among three hundred kinds of rain.

In its little plastic pot on the high sill,
the African violet
grows away from the place
the sun last was, its fuzzy leaves
leaning out in little curtsies.

It, too, has had enough
of the sun. I love the sound of a storm
without thunder, the way winds
slow, trees darken, heavy clouds
rumbling so softly
you must close you eyes to listen:

then the blotch, blotch
of big drops
plunketing through the leaves.

* *

It is difficult,
this being a stranger on earth.
Why, I've seen pilgrims come
and tear away at blackberry vines
with everything that's in them, I've seen them
heap their anger
up against a tree
and curse these swollen skies.

What's this?--a mountain beaver
no bigger than a newborn mouse
curled in my palm,
an osprey curling over tide pools and lifting
toward the trees, a wind at dusk
hollow in the hollows of the eaves,
a wind over waves
cooling sand crabs washed up along the beach.

Each thing, closely seen,
appears more strange
than before: the shape of my desire
is huge, vague,
full of many things
commingling--

dying bees among the dying flowers;
winter rain and the smoke it brings.

If it fills me with longing,
it is only because we are wind and smoke,
flower and bee;
it is only because
we are like the rain, falling,
falling through our own most secret being,
through a world of not knowing.

* *

At the end of the day,
I come, finally,
to myself, I return to the strange sounds of a man
who wants to speak
with stones, with the hard crust of earth.
But nothing listens.

When the sea hammers the sea wall,
I'm dumb.
When the nighthawks bleat at dusk, I'm drunk
on the sadness of their songs.
When the moon is so close
you can almost reach it through the trees,
I'm frozen, I'm blind,
or I'm gone.

Fish, bird, stone, there's something
I can't know, but know the same:
I hear the rain inside me
only to look up
into a bitter sun.

What do we listen to, what do we think
we hear? The sound
of sea walls crumbling,
a little bird with hunger in its song:
You should have known! You should have known!

* *

Like any Nootka Rose,
I know there are some
for whom a place is nothing. Like the wild rose,
like the tide and the day,
we come, go, or stay
according to a whim.

It is enough, perhaps,
to say, We live here.
And let it go at that.

This wind lets go
of everything it touches.
I long to hold the wind

I'd kiss a fish
and love a stone
and marry the winter rain

if I could persuade this battered earth
to let me make it home.


Sam Hamill (Port Townsend)

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Crap, now I have to take the board exams...

Act the part, Sarah, act the part.

You will become a massage therapist. It's a done deal. Actually, I've already sent out the party invitations.

Act the part,
The Universe

And in the process, Sarah, you'll touch, teach, and heal millions and millions of people... (And not just because I've invited them to the party.)