Blip
Mood:  not sure
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I was beginning to get into the stay-at-home meditation retreat state of mind, but then my life went absolutely haywire as I prepared for and attended the Surtex Show in New York.  It didn't help that I had the hemorrhage in my left eye while I was trying to review hundreds of slides of art and get visual products prepared, but I survived. 

I was amazed to realize that I hadn't been above the third floor of a building in the five years I've lived in North Carolina, so the scale of NYC was something of a shock!  The Javits Center where the convention was held is huge and full of glass and I didn't feel like I was standing on solid ground for the first few hours I was in the city.  Then, my hotel room was on the sixteenth floor.  Luckily my cave of a room looked only into the windows of another building only a few feet away, so I wasn't visually aware of the height.  The first night, though, every car horn that would honk (and they honked all night long!) woke me up and I would remember that I was alone in New York City on the 16th floor of a hotel with nine floors above me and I'd have to go through a whole routine of telling myself that all of those things were true but that I was still okay.  And while I found all the people I personally came into contact with to be exceptionally friendly, I hated crossing streets.  On the street, there is a completely different aura where it seems everyone is racing everyone else, cabs are just dying to hit you, and men can say whatever rude thing they want to you and walk on past without any fear of retribution.  I loved the idea of being able to walk around a city--the hotel was only fifteen blocks from the Javits Center--but I didn't actually enjoy the walk most days.

Seattle spoiled me with its mix of small town feel and international appeal.  And North Carolina, with its riot of green this spring, has really become home.  So, yes, I am glad to be back.  I learned a lot about licensing art and a lot about myself on the trip, but I'm glad to be home.

I haven't settled back into a routine yet, though.  I'm trying to begin the Five Factor Fitness diet to reduce my sodium, sugar, and fat intake and thereby lower my triglycerides and blood pressure, hopefully, restoring the vision in my left eye or at least keeping it from getting worse or hemorrhaging somewhere else.  It hasn't been easy.  Even though Pasternak talks about how restrictive other diets are and how his isn't, six days out of the week he is asking me to give up chocolate, Mountain Dew, ice cream, and fast food all at once.  I'm not getting hungry on his diet, but I am getting extremely fidgety! 

This post is my note-to-self that it's time to get back to writing every day and to get serious about meditating, weeding out, and calming down.  I can be successful and less stressed...I'm sure of it!

 

 

May already?
Mood:  spacey
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I can't believe it's nearly May and that my last post was in February!

So much has happened since February...how can that be?

Maybe I haven't been writing here because I have actually been honest to goodness writing with a pen and paper every day for the past month or so.  (I know, that doesn't account for the end of February or all of March!)

I am slammed busy with things at work--we're finally launching the new children's website this week, we're opening a new show on Friday, and I'm preparing to go to the SurTex convention in New York in May while Sudie is preparing for an artists' trip to Paris.  Too much to do, but at least some of it is interesting.

I am also counting down the days in April.  My fifteen-month goals end this week, and while I blew my teaching goals out of the water, most of the others just hung out on my wall and mocked me.  I'm trying to figure out why this particular system didn't serve me better--it combines several techniques from Barbara Sher's Refuse to Choose book but it didn't really motivate me the way I hoped it would.  I'm trying to figure out if the timeline was too long, the goals were too big, or if the act of making goals for things that should be fun somehow made them scary and I failed to get anywhere near them--for example, I did not write a single poem in fifteen months!  I started two or three, but didn't finish any of them.

I also have a new program that I'm beginning May 1st to help me commemorate the 10th Anniversary of the GTE Big Ride Across America to Benefit the American Lung Association and to help me clear out my life to make room for new things.  It's kind of an at-home, "real life" detox, meditation retreat.  It's going to include an electronic diet--no t.v. six days a week, Internet only for work--but it will have a blogging component that I will launch from here on May 1, so please come back.

As with all things in my life, I took what started out as a simple idea and made it complex very quickly.  I'm not sure I'm going to implement every aspect of the meditation retreat program that has occurred to me, but I'm sure I won't be able to keep myself from implementing some.  More soon! 

Happy spring, all!  North Carolina is in full bloom now and the onslaught of green is truly overwhelming.  Luckily, the allergy symptoms seem to have peaked last week, so things are good.  I hope you can say the same.

Kristine

Happy Birthday to Me
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I keep forgetting it is my birthday.  I have lots to wrap up at work so I can get outta' town, and it's hard to keep the whole "it's my birthday! aura" about me.  My six year old nephew called me this morning, taking me totally by surprise, and sang to me.  Lovely, lovely boy!  If I could clone him, maybe I'd have a son of my own....  I'm excited to be spending a week with him and his 4-year-old sisters at The Happiest Place on Earth.  Given various other circumstances of late, I also feel blessed that I'll be sharing the trip with Hans, my sister and her husband, and especially my parents.  Lots to be thankful for!

I have known since I was a little girl that I shared my birthday with Susan B. Anthony, but I learned today that I also share it with Jane Seymour (my favorite! My niece is named after her character in Somewhere in Time.), Chris Farley, Matt Groening, and Galileo Galilei.  Interesting company!

One last note: in a previous post this week, I said I got married at 29.  Technically, I got married two days before I turned 29.  So 29 with the Big Ride followed by the Big Depression was a mixed bag.  I'm thinking 39 might follow suit, but I'm hoping for more positive transformation and a little less pain and suffering!

Big, Big, Love! (to steal from my imaginary friend Mary in California)

K 

Snow!
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Lonely is the Night by Billy Squier
Topic: Daily Eruptions

We had the most beautiful, and surprising!, snowfall last night! 

Sometime after 8:00 the rain stopped and when I looked out the kitchen window around 11:00, I was amazed to see the trees outlined in white.  It was a wet, heavy snow that completely covered the grass, piled up several inches thick on the asphalt and concrete, buried my car, and made every living thing glow!  Snow happens only once or twice a year here, and this event was unexpected and magical.  I slept more peacefully than I have in weeks and woke up with a smile on my face.

Kaija, on the other hand, was not thrilled.  I tried putting her boots on her, but she hates them, so she had to go out barefooted.  It's kind of sad, and a little funny, to watch a dog try to walk without putting her feet on the ground!  When she comes back in, we play the towel game whenever she goes out in the rain or snow, though, and this cheers her up.  I try to dry off her head and feet (the rest of her body stays dry thanks to her fleece, 4-legged coat) with a towel while she tries to take the towel away from me, get it to her bed in front of the fireplace, and break its neck.  She will be happy this afternoon to find that the sun has nearly melted all the white stuff and the rain is long gone.  We're heading to Florida on Saturday--where she was born but hasn't visited since she left at twelve weeks old on a plane with Hans for Seattle--so the shift to 70 degree days is going to confuse her even more.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!  I hope your heart is filled with love and your spirit filled with peace.

 K

Getting Older
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Daily Eruptions

This week I will turn 39.

I dont feel 39!  I usually feel about 17, alternating with brief periods of 25, but definitely not 39. 

When I turned 29, I spent the whole year telling people--including myself--that I was 30, practicing for the coming year which felt absolutely monumental.  So when I actually did turn 30, it was no big deal.  I was rehearsed and relaxed and slid right into my third decade with relative ease.  Of course, I did the cross-country bike trip when I was 29 and got married when I was 29, so, at least some days, life felt exciting and fruitful (although to be honest I slipped into a pretty severe depression when the Big Ride ended).

Ten years later, I'm a little amazed that I've been married ten years, my life is definitely more financially stable, and my adventures come in much smaller doses.  But I do feel more confident, more skilled, and, yes, a little wiser.  It is all beginning to gel.

And, by all accounts, the year I turn 40 is going to be the best year of my life.  This should be exciting news, but it's also a little daunting.  It seems to imply that I have to be ready for something amazing, that I have to be mature and open and somehow stable enough to roll with whatever the something is without turning my life upside down the way I would have ten years ago.  Or maybe not.  Maybe I need to be able and willing to turn my life upside down after spending ten years learning how to be a responsible adult with a mortgage and car loans and student loans and a retirement account.  I really don't know.

I do know the grey hair I see in the mirror is a daily reminder that I am not 17 nor 25.

I do know my body is changing in ways that are sometimes frustrating and sometimes scary, forcing me to face the fact that I am racing toward a reproductive deadline at which point my body will make a decision for me, regardless of whether I have reached a decision or not.

I know I have goals and plans and am working each day to be better.

I know 39 will come whether I am ready or not.  As will 40 and all the years beyond.

And, I can continue to take comfort in the fact that no matter how old I get, most of my friends are still older!

So happy birthday to me: May I become more me each day and open ever wider to the possibilities still before me.

I wish the same for you!

More Drama
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Daily Eruptions

Tad, in his infinite sweetness, typed me out two long passages from Proust and sent them to me by email this week.  They both discussed art, one in which a writer risks his life to get to a museum to see a painting by Vermeer, and one in which a writer is so overcome by the beauty of life that he has no ability to write about it.

I am not in a particularly verbal state this week, feeling overwhelmed and fairly exhausted and a little swirly (which I think is akin to the Phoebe/Lisa Kudrow state of "floopy"), so I responded by sending him a little photo of a sunset I took with my cell phone last Thursday at the park after a short, teasing rain that filled the sky with clouds.

 

 

 

It's Raining!!
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Daily Eruptions

 

It's finally RAINING!  Real rain, not just a teasing drizzle, but big, fat, drenching drops that run off roof tops and soak the clay and accumulate in dehydrated streams and lakes and reservoirs.  It has been months since we've seen real rain and there is so much celebration going on.  The governor yesterday asked all North Carolinians to cut their water consumption in half.  This rain will not solve our severe drought, but it will help our trees and flowers.

Having grown up in Michigan, I have always appreciated a good dramatic storm (provided I didn't have to drive in it!), but I have never wanted rain as much as I have this summer.

Transformation Update
Mood:  d'oh
Now Playing: Ludwig Van Beethoven: Sonaten Opp. 27/1-27/2, 28--Maurizio Pollini
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I always imagine that there is one little tweak that will get me where I need to be, something like letting go of the rope I'm clinging to with both hands or simply changing one thought pattern.  I have, as Tad will attest, thought for years that it was "discipline" and the perfect schedule that was going to get me there.  I'm starting to let go of that idea, because even though discipline and the perfect schedule worked to help me 4.0 my last two years at Michigan, I've never been able to sustain that level of focused craziness in my life since.

The Big Ride suggested to me that it was simply the act of meditation that would get me there.  Letting go of ego and social comparisons and shoulds and coulds and just engaging in the moment.  This was AMAZING, but I cannot say I was productive by any means, and I could not find a way to bring the Big Ride home.

Which seems to be my real problem.  My last two years of college and the Big Ride were environments in which I was completely focused on one task--finishing a degree or finishing an 80-mile day.  My "real life" is not so narrowly focused, nor am I willing to make it so.  If memory serves, Diane Wakoski in the poem "Rings of Saturn" talks about the things she's had to give up to make a creative life as a poet, and the jealousy she feels that not all successful artists have had to do the same.  If I were to be a successful writer, I would probably have to give up quite a bit, too, and so far I have been unwilling.  I keep thinking I can arrange my life so that writing can be my ONE path, the one door I walk through to see the whole world, but I never seem to be able to arrange my life to make that happen.   I keep putting more into my life without letting anything go and the one thing that doesn't get put in is the writing.

In terms of the things I'm currently trying to change, I am slowly organizing my physical space (again), I'm working out more (walking, running, weights, yoga, pilates), and I'm eating food that I prepare myself (yes, Taco Bell may see a major dip in its fourth quarter earnings as a result).  The problem is, all of these things take more time out of my day as well as more energy.  If I stick with it long enough to see a truly organized house and office, to lose enough weight that I see a spike in my energy level, and to make meal preparation a no-brainer, maybe my time and energy will benefit.  But for now, I'm exhausted and my energy is unfocused and I can't squeeze another thing in.  In fact, I'm going to have to start giving up another 60 to 90 minutes of my daily life so that I can get enough sleep.  I've been trying to operate on six hours a day and it's not working.  So things have to start going out of the schedule now and that's frustrating.

So I can't tell if I am transforming and just feeling the effects of "it's going to get worse before it gets better" or if I'm not really transforming, just shuffling pieces slightly differently than before and still banging my head against the same walls.  All I do know is that I draw the death card in my daily tarot readings at least twice a week these days....

 

Assaulting the Trees?
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: "Animals" by Nickelback
Topic: Daily Eruptions
When I came to work this morning, I left my window open as I drove up the long drive after I entered the code at the gate.  I was listening to Linkin Park's "Bleed It Out"  loud on the radio.  The lyrics are weird and dark, but the energy of the music and the reference to "make it a dirt dance floor again" makes me think it's okay that I get amped listening to it.  I knew no one was at the house except the dogs, so I thought a little volume wouldn't hurt.  As I sat and listened to the end of the song, though, I noticed the trees through the open window and wondered what their response was.  I don't know how old the trees here are, fifty, seventy, eighty?  I am fairly certain they are not old growth trees that survived human expansion without cutting.  Still, I don't think they've heard loud music often, certainly not the likes of Linkin Park.  If the trees' energy responded to the music, was it a negative response or a positive one?  I'm guessing negative because the chorus is all screaming.  Unlike my aging self, trees probably don't understand the joyful aspects of screaming.

Why For Art Thou?
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Daily Eruptions

After years of being consistently drawn to nature writing and consistently avoiding reading nature writing, I have now decided to study it rigorously.  I've just finished reading Chapter 3 of Frank Stewart's A Natural History of Nature Writing and now I know why I have so strongly avoided reading the work of others who have written what I was sure it was my calling to write:

Because Thoreau lived and wrote, there is no need of my existence! 

Thoreau has said everything, studied everything, searched for all the things I would search for.  I am glad to have come, finally, to this place where I have my own feelings about one's participation in nature and art and science and how the three intersect, but it is a little unnerving to learn that I have come ultimately, though independently, to many of the same conclusions as a man who lived 100 years before me. 

If I were even a year younger, if I had not had the experience of teaching the afterschool creativity classes, if I had not worked with so many children at the zoo this summer or finally been able to teach my first, tentative class on exploring art through nature, I would stop reading.  I would not have the confidence in my own thought processes or my own experience to think I had anything to add to the field of nature writing.  But, finally, it seems I do have confidence in my own voice and in my own journey, circuitous as it has seemed to virtually all who know me, and I am excited to continue reading, with the hopes that eventually I might be able to have a conversation with this long dead man who had the vision to put forth new ideas of how a person might experience the world of which she is a part.  How amazing to find so much familiarity - that I knew would be there and yet still resisted - with someone whom I've never met.  Mary Jo McCabe sent an email to my work inbox today that included these statements, listed as Quotes from the Guides:  "Your spirit is renewed when you connect with a soul that you feel to be a part of you," and "Move slowly through your spiritual development; only then does it last."