4/20 dispatch
This is the second attempt to post directly from BBerry. When I get this working we will have a more “real time” access. Sadly, we will lose that luxurious, edited feel. Just a mode change. Let’s see how we like it!
We’re jammin’ now.
OK, all you steep learning curve techies, here’s my first slide show! If the music annoys you, try the mute button at the top of the screen. I selected something from the default list. Also, if the caption is long or you want to look at the slide better, just click on it. At least, I think this is how these things work. We’re working on one tech issue/day. Still stymied by microphone on Skype and whether a 32″ TV is really necessary for a full recovery. This is what happens when you spend two months in the same room, even if it’s your room and you have good stuff in it. You really do develop an alternative reality and it is much more under your control than you might think. Get rid of those pesky “other people” and you can rock along eating macaroni and cheese, drinking green tea or instant coffee (OMG, not really!!?) and doing what you damn well please.
The sock knitting is coming along very well. My inaugural emergence into public life should be enlivened by a very cool pair of swirly blue socks, made on a #0 size needle (virtually a pin). The PT asked me yesterday where I planned to go for my first outing. They think it’s weird that I haven’t been anywhere at all except medical offices. I’m considering the 23rd as an anniversary date, so today is three months since…what, I fell? I don’t like that description. “I broke my leg?” ….none of them quite do it. I’m wondering whether I can just record all this here and then return to the daily life and just not talk about it. Those folks were not really involved. I could pretend I was gone to Africa for six months (or four, really, which it what it will be likely to be before return to work.) I might carry the crutches and wear the brace just as reminders that something did actually happen to me. Some people won’t even notice that I’ve been gone. I can see now where that might be an advantage.
So, we’re passing the time and keeping the brain cells firing by tech challenges. Please let me know what you think of this first effort. The MO was just to select something the blog site listed as compatible. I took the top one and did the same thing all the way through, except where the default choice was just totally not OK. Remember the mute button for the music, especially if you want to linger looking at any single slide.
BE COURAGEOUS: look around for buttons that enlarge the image. View All Images/full screen works well, and somewhere about three clicks in, you can click/view the original jpeg file at something like actual size. A zoom or two in and you’ve got a nice abstract, ghosty looking thing, which I inadvertantly set as my Desktop. Took several days to get rid of that, since I don’t want to be reminded THAT much. So click around. Nothing bad happens, and you don’t buy anything. It’s kind fun.
I’m doin’ awesome!
Where we started 12/23/09-check out what surgeon meant by "crushed"
3/20/10 Facebook fans and ADD challenged folks: be warned this post is long. But we’re getting it done.
I’ve been putting this off in spite of the fact that one of the reasons I started the blog was to have a central place to collect what I wanted to say about the leg recovery.
To get to it: This week in PT I began using crutches, a huge step forward in balance and mobility from the wheelchair and the walker. I still use the chair in the kitchen and for some other things, like sweeping and mopping, when I pretend it is like a kayak. It is surprising versatile and has excellent maneuverability. It was also helpful in bridging a flexibility/strength gap in beginning to use my lower leg more normally…that is, bending while creep walking in the chair. When we started with crutches my balance was very disturbed and I stared at my feet, a lethal habit. My PT, Denise, is a hard driver, so we went immediately outside and started work on steps. I had her stand in front on me on the downhill part, just for psychological support. By the end of the second session, I was handling both the up and down steps movements well. We tried all sorts of irregular inclines on the initiation runs just to get my confidence up.
As soon as Angel Brother Bill brought me home I had him do the required supervision as I went up the two steps into the large studio space where I have not been in three months. I have been living mostly in the front room and kitchen, with bathroom trips and occasional TV watching and exercise in the bedrooms. The floor plan of the house is so open, a great good fortune, so I could see outside and watch it snow by looking all the way across the studio, but I just couldn’t get in there. The dogs could, and Stella took great advantage by spreading the toys all over the floor and sleeping in the recliner. The strangeness of being back in the room, and a kind of separateness from everything in it, made it a little dreamlike in a movie sort of way. I drifted slowly from object to object, touching and shifting, opening a drawer here, stacking a book there. The bathroom has been used as a backstage area, with depressing piles of stuff and bags of clothing and other un-used items now in the bathtub, just to get them out of the way.
When the urge to start cleaning rose up, I re-channeled it to setting up the keyboard with lamps and the violin music stand. It’s been months since I even opened it up but I’m finding a nostalgic urge to dust off these things and hopefully revive them in my life. I know I’m a serial obsessive and the house is filled with projects and objects that once completely absorbed all my attention, but I am trying not to chastise myself for things abandoned. Perhaps there is life in them yet, so I am touching them all to see what arises now. The violin in particular has the heaviest juju and I have yet to open the case. I know it is fearfully out of tune and I can’t remember where to put my fingers. I had so hoped that I would be a natural and learn to play with ease and verve. Instead it was an enormous effort with results sadly lacking in ease and verve. I had managed to get to an acceptable level and had joined a small adult beginning orchestra. I worked away as a second violin, doing well enough by leaving out several notes when things got too fast. Most of the other participants were already professional players on several other instruments and members of orchestras, chamber ensembles, etc. Another group were devoted (and well financed) amateurs. My usual money/time constraints began to weigh in and I stopped going. With my sedentary job I became obsessed with movement and outdoor activities instead. I just have to move around and breath open air. That is a fact. It turns out I just wasn’t gypsy enough to play elementary violin pieces in a campground. You gotta be a good fiddler to get away with that kind of thing.
I’ve also begun getting the sewing area cleared and functioning. Ironing board back up, workspace de-cluttered, lights arranged. I discovered that I already had about four projects cut out, neatly bagged with thread and notions, all set to go. I’ll say this for myself without equivocation: I am a capital, champion getter-ready.
I’ve been doing all this slowly, using the wheelchair to haul things from one end of the house to the other, then wedging around with the walker, which is a pain in close quarters. Now that I am on crutches, I’m practically dancing. Interestingly, the PT said specifically “NO DANCING!” when I left on Friday. I am still mighty careful of everything, of the only remaining throw rug, of the dogs, of spots of water on the floor, of random pieces of paper, of whether my balance is just so before shifting my weight forward. I had more than a few “whoaaaaa….eeeee” swooping moments at first, but it’s gotten a lot better.
The last visit to the surgeon on 3/10 yielded new x-rays and information. You can check the Leg Recovery page (look around in there) for photos. My flexion had improved to 110 degrees, but he said the extension was still minus five. This is weird since I feel like I am tightening my quads completely and pressing my knee down onto the table (where they measure). It feels flat to me but, apparently, it isn’t. The x-rays look pretty good and we talked about the major area of concern, which is the lateral (outside) edge of the tibial plateau where a large chunk of bone was removed and then replaced. Dr. Lieber referred to this area as a “divot”. He pointed out, and you can see if you concentrate, that there is a whitish shadow in that area, so he says, “that means there is something there.” That something is the bone he inserted. The questions now are: 1) Will the bone live? 2) Will it become integrated with the surrounding bone (grow in)? and 3) Will it be strong enough to support the weight of the femur at that edge? If all these issues work well, we’ve got a keeper. If not, the femur edge could slide down into the divot, creating instability. In that latter case, “knee replacement is likely in the future,” as he said in the beginning. I’m on a calcium binge and just beginning to educate myself about bone health. I’ve got plenty of advisors, friends as well as online info, but the consensus is pretty simple: diet and exercise. There are zillions of variations from Chinese herbs to ultrasonic stimulation. The major medical folks who are testing right and left don’t have conclusive data, but the snake oil folks are completely convinced.
It is disturbing to me, and should be to everyone at least all women, how many broken bone stories I’m hearing. Yesterday, I was told that a nurse describing this week’s friend’s broken wrist bone setting as “sounding like Rice Krispies.” Sad to say, that’s a pretty good description of what my own tibial breakdown sounded and felt like. I’m typically warning everyone that she should get a bone density test and soon, at least for a base line. I’m trying almost everything anyone suggests, at least while I am still at home, but I will have to become more selective when it starts to cost endless dollars.
My own conviction is to concentrate on resistance training exercise, which I hope to begin very soon. I have already begun a little wheelchair-based workout. I park the chair in the back door late in the afternoon when the sun shines warmest there. It snowed again last night, but we are promised that when this leaves we will have real spring. I moved the 3 lb and 5 lb weights to the dresser top there to be in easy reach. I park the chair facing outside and use Thera-bands and small weights. Thankfully, I have had a good amount of training and can work the muscles in a variety of ways. The real laggard here is still the quads on the injured (right) side. While standing up, I can manage a kicking motion forward and back. I’ve mastered the straight leg lift (formerly a real bear), but one motion is still beyond me. Lying down, with a support roller under my knee, I cannot yet manage to lift my foot without some assistance. This is the same motion as vertical kicking, or side lying kicking (a little harder), but maybe this configuration makes gravity heavier. This motion also hurts more than any other, with a band of actual pain across the front of the knee.
The sensory world of the knee is still lagging, but that is understandable given the amount of trauma. The medial side (inside), along the scar is still the sorest to the touch. Now that I am not wearing the brace so much this is better, since one of the brace pads covered this area. Below, on both sides of the tibia, mid-leg, there is still a lot of numbness and interior woodenness. I massage all of these areas, and especially indulge my woo-woo side in this area, channeling love and healing energy to this poor trashed tissues. The surgeon said the reason I don’t feel anything weird on the upper lateral edge is that he cut some sensory nerves. Oh. Thanks.
Ankle flexion is still limited but coming along. There is a curious feeling on the bottom of my foot, side to side, just in front of the heel. Early, in the hospital, this area felt like there was a cast, or at least caked mud, on the bottom of my foot. I can feel touch and pressure on the surface, but this hard shell interior feeling is still there. I am told that these sorts of things will sort out over the recovery period, which is estimated to be a year or two even for young and healthy folks.
My personal and home maintenance situation is also changing as well. We are burning out helpers right and left, but some new ones emerge to fill in the gaps in my own progress. Last week we had a general failure in helper attendance, the house cleaner sicked out for a week and a half, the original shopper blew out completely, the dog lady disappeared, but Angel Brother Bill remained steady in PT chauffeuring and Angel Alice met the shopper challenge with customary energy. She has been sick a lot this winter, as have many people, but that girl was Born To Shop. Edna and I bargained to trade a delivered by her lunch for elementary computer lessons. I’m showing her basic things like cut/paste so she doesn’t have to pay someone $50/hr to do it. There’s enough food in the house to support a small village so there is no hardship. I’ve only been out of milk one time.
Circumstances related to my job are also changing now. I am passing some limits that involve money, which always gets my attention. My original disability statement extended the full six months until June 23, 2010, but there is no way this will go on that long. Now that I’m able to go up a few steps, my eye naturally turns to THE CAR. I’m practicing the motions of driving and will probably hobble out to the car this week when the snow melts and mud dries up. It’s a good thing that barrier is there, or I would be out there today. My plan is to start driving (next week?) on back roads over to the gym or the swimming pool. Just getting anywhere is a workout in itself, but since I’d dig my way out of Alcatraz with a teaspoon, I’m inching toward the car. I’m also trying to sit up more during the day, like now at the computer. This is a trade-off since it’s not good to have the leg down too much. I know that a return to work, even part-time, will require upright sitting for at least four or five hours. I can tell by the swelling that this is going to be an issue, but the crutches part should help here, making getting up and moving around more frequently much easier. I’ve got things divided into vertical or horizontal activity and usually elevate and ice the leg after sustained vertical stints. Swelling has gone down a lot, but I still can’t fit my foot into a normal close fitting shoe. Tevas and Uggs are saving the day.
Lastly, and often most difficult, is the emotional side of all this. To say that this has been a lesson in self-control is a vast understatement. To be alone this much, to be confined physically this much, even without pain, is a test of inner strength of the first order. Having to accept the level of dependence necessary to maintain daily life was so over awing that I usually just do not comment or discuss it. Anyone who knows me well can appreciate that difficulty. An interesting benefit has been an almost magical release from certain kinds of neurotic obsessiveness. I simple do not have the energy. As in all things survival related, priorities sort themselves out; resources are applied in an almost natural order. This has been a great help. I don’t even have the energy to cry about things that would probably make me cry otherwise. I long ago passed the signpost marked “Desperation” and still had to keep going. I have to ask people for things or do without. I have to accept whatever anyone chooses to offer, yet still not criticize those who do not offer. The scale is so small and intimate and slow that there is actually a lot of opportunity available. The slowness especially helps and has been the greatest revelation. I do notice things that disturb or vex me, but I cannot indulge too much reaction. Everything is weighed in the balance of whether it contributes to healing and moving forward. I have done meditative work, in the formal sense. I have read deep Buddhist texts, etc. But I have also found solace in the strangest places.
For weeks I could not read. At all. Slowly, after stopping the pain meds, my mind cleared up. Angel MAT sent some books about open ocean sailing that provided the perfect diversion. High adventure, desperate situations, heroism and danger, and all about people who handle adversity and either triumph or die. This was a great help in adjusting my own stress-o-meter. It also filled my head with images for dreaming. Television has been a disappointment, not surprisingly I guess. Even movies are just, well, too short. It’s long novel time. The real oddball is a discovery I made when having to fill downtime at work and still “look busy”. I started working with the Schaum’s Outline series volume on Elementary Algebra. Now I’ve got one on French Grammar. Hours pass as I scribble exercises in French. I’ve finally gotten French Radio back on the computer, so I have my own immersion program going. There’s an endless quality to these mental exercises that defy time. I hope to break open a resistance to drawing as well. Maybe just get out the colors and scribble around. The problem I have always found with magazines (too jerky), and movies, and even sometimes music is that they are just over too soon. I much prefer the sustained endeavor. I think that’s why opera has become interesting.
It boils down to energy conservation and patience. I don’t do as much telephoning as I thought I would because it’s too tiring. I hope you will accept this long description of what is happening as a substitute for a visit or a phone call. This way I only have to say it once.
I am very encouraged by my progress and, as long as I don’t overdo and get fatigued I have just enough to do what needs to be done. I am so grateful to the many kind and generous folks who have found a way to express their concern by calling and emailing, sending things, bringing food, helping with the dogs, and sending all that wonderful love and healing energy. Each day brings a small improvement and I have the leisure to watch the weather out my window as spring and the light return. That would be today, no, vernal equinox?
Thanks to you, as an interested friend. Your care and concern have been what has sustained me through all this. Couldn’t have made it without you.
Oiseau sauvage-le premier
Buddha Eyes
Yesterday Tom M came over and installed several bird feeders in the front yard, which is what I see out the window I live in front of, providing the daily changing panorama. He also put two in the side/entrance patio, where I can sit in the wheelchair in the doorway in the afternoon and get some vitamin D dose on my legs while admiring the tulip and daffodil shoots coming up.
This particular patio was the only one I “planned” when I started the planting phase of house revival. It’s where the Bud Swell tree of an earlier post is located; also the snow drops and other spring bulbs. It is backed by a tall block wall supporting specie clematis and a Jackmanii which faces South. The snow drops were planted in the exact spot the Sun hits first in February with the other bulbs filling in around and down toward the trees in this long, narrow, strip garden. I must admit a hard lesson learned here. In spite of all my planning and thinking and soil preparation, I was too frugal and bought Sam’s Club boxed bulbs for the daffs and tulips. My mind’s eye saw a “carpet of color” as I crawled around on dirty knees (uh-0h, thing of the past?) and layered the bulbs so the grape hyacinths and crocus would be first, the daffs following, with tulips last before all drooping spent green leaf blades would be camouflaged by ornamental grasses for the remainder of the season. A low maintenance special. The lesson is similar to one I learned in horses: it costs as much to feed a bad horse as a good one. It is just as much trouble to plant a puny bulb as a premium one, but the premium one will likely bloom. Each year, for seven, I have waited for the carpet of color. Last year it was one red tulip (small) and a sprinkle of daffodils.
Most of my nature interest has resulted from injury recovery. Gardening sprang from the first broken leg back in Atlanta, and bird watching from months of being laid up with back stuff. Both rewards counterbalancing, and winning actually, the invalid part. The good thing about breaking your leg skiing is that you are getting better and starting to be mobile when Spring is coming.
It’s still very early for Spring action, in spite of my crowing, so the Montmorency Cherry, where these feeders are located, has not even begun bud swell. The fruit trees were also all planted in the north shadow so the ground would remain frozen as long as possible, delaying or preventing the bane of northern New Mexico fruit trees, the freeze/thaw heaving cycle and too early blossoming. The myriad apricot trees all over town, reported to be the legacy of Bishop Lamy, very often burst forth in a glorious pinky white froth, only to be laid low and brown by a surprise overnight freeze or snow. There goes that year’s fruit crop. This cherry, with no leaves,is a perfect little observation station, only about eight feet out my window.
In the photo below, you can see how things are set up for now. This is a morning only posting position; the evenness of light in the photo is due to the overcast pre-snow conditions today. On a bright afternoon, the sun pours through this SW facing window, great for staring out of. The skeleton trees are: horizontal, closest to window branching from right-Forest Pansy red bud, a Home Depot score, pink blossoms in Spring, with large deep purple/maroon leaves in summer; vertical, just beyond is the Montmorency, where there are two feeders, a compressed cylinder of super seeds and a small hopper feeder with hulled premium seeds (sunflower, millet, corn, etc-the “no mess” version). Mounted by suction cups to the window is a small plexi feeder as well.
A more accomplished birder would sniff about whooping over house finches, but they are the bellwether in the neighborhood. Feeders had been up about 16 hours when I saw the first pair of finches. It’s snowing now, so everyone is sheltering elsewhere. We’ll have a passel of finches when things clear up. When I was a preemie baby birder, these finches were the first I identified using a guide-book. Nothing wrong with common when you are learning the ropes. I still don’t mind, being grateful to get anything in this wasteland of pavement. Even sparrows.
Look closely for feeders; there are three
BIRD LIST – Sunday, March 14, 2010
Carpodacus mexicanus (House Finch) – a pair!! yea!!! I knew they would be first since they are, after all, common. Still very glad to see them. At feeder in tree in front. Too bad I can can only check one side at a time, but the sun comes to this tree early.
https://academics.skidmore.edu/wikis/NorthWoods/index.php/Carpodacus_mexicanus_%28House_Finch%29
thanks!
Stopping before you start
Daffodil aura
3/09/10-I remember clearly the moment I decided not to keep a diary. I was probably about twelve or thirteen, because we had already moved away from Lark Street. I was sitting in my room, facing the large casement window that was completely covered and shaded by a huge azalea bush. I could see bright sun on the front yard beyond, through the deep twiggy shadows inside the azalea. I liked the idea of diaries, I liked the physical fact of diaries, in fact I bought several because I loved the little locks and the tiny keys, the secretness of them, the smallness that fit in my hand. But the blankness of them was another matter. This particular moment it became clear to me that I had nothing to write in a diary. I did not have a life, and would never have one. Not the life of great love that I longed for even then. Not the adventures that at that point were only available to me through National Geographic. Nothing had happened, nothing was going to happen. It was all over already, right there. This was a stark realization for me, and would bear years of analysis, if that had been my leaning, but I just accepted it as true, put away the pink diary and never bought another one.
Many years later, when keeping a journal became fashionable, I tried again, this time on plain paper. Handwriting the nothingness was too slow and excruciating, but I did spend a little time cataloging my angst. Not for long. the writing mood seemed to strike when the spirit was so low and hopeless. Even then, that Finger Wagger yammered away about the idiocy of writing this tripe, who could possibly want to read this stuff, if you were to die right now and this was found among your paltry possessions what a pitiful portrait it would paint. The finder would sigh, impatiently, and toss the whole mess in the trash and move on to check the dish cabinets for Belgian china. When I left Arroyo Hondo, in an intentional purge, I burned these in the wood stove with every photo that reminded me of something painful.
I thought I’d try the blog approach to see if changes have happened, but I hit the same wall immediately. A quick check through help topics zeroed right in on tags, and hits, and articles like “How to Write a WordPress Post and Get a Zillion Hits.” I only had three posts with three friends who had looked to see what I was doing. How was I going to bare my soul to these three friends? It seemed senseless, but the urge to whine and flail was still there. I am unhappy, let me tell you all about it. I did manage to write a little, but this bulwark against expression had to be breached. The fact that I am currently an invalid, a shut-in, could easily work into this, but I just didn’t want to wallow any more. The hard facts of my current physical limitations are burden enough without making them existential. I found a copy of the dual journal of Sartre and de Beauvoir and put it on the TBR pile, but I shuddered away from it. Thirty years of mutual self-examination? Too fearful for now.
I have been fortunate to have wandered into Buddhist practice, Soto Zen particularly. I am a member of Dharma Sangha, Crestone, Colorado, and pleased to still call Zentatsu, Baker Roshi my teacher. I was a dedicated student, completely obsessed from about April 1990 through summer of 1996. A literal sitting fool. I took it all there, which they allow you to do. One day, it was time to leave. I never discussed it with anyone, but it became clear to me that I had to clean up my own mess and stop waving it in front of everyone begging for salvation. I had been fortunate to have an almost secret zendo to sit in Santa Fe, the Cerro Gordo Temple. In the course of things, this small jewel had been built and then maintained as exactly that, a small jewel. In the collapse of San Francisco Zen Center, Baker Roshi and some disciples had come to Santa Fe and taken residence at Cerro Gordo. I missed that and came much later when most of them had gone on to Crestone, or further. But this is not about that. This is about stopping before starting related specifically to writing. We’ll tell the Zen story another time.
The recent mornings, since beginning the blog, have been a little challenging. Morning would be a perfect time to write before putting all the armor of the day on. Before events took over. Before everything, but the fresh tabula rasa of morning. An interesting thing has happened which I probably wouldn’t have noticed if not for BM108. The old urge to blurt and bleed was still there. “I want to tell the world about my pain.” I’m not sure how I ever got the idea that if I did this, the world would love me. I’m sure it has to do with Dostoyevsky. Several mornings I found myself avoiding turning on the computer, I want to tell, I don’t want to tell, I want to tell. This got boring, even for me. I have had the good fortune, during my convalescence (what a lovely term, conjures up a Swiss, lakeside spa, Magic Mountain style) to realize that these many months of solitude and quiet could be put to good use. I’m not going anywhere any way. The first urges were to get the blog set up, then hide it completely, then pour out whatever it was blocking the pipes, and be free at last. But there were the three friends. They would know. I tried to convince myself that this soul baring would be like standing naked on top of the Empire State Building. It would be a big deal for me, but no one else would really see or care. I still wanted to purge, but I just couldn’t. Exactly the same moment as the azalea shaded diary. OMG, I haven’t changed emotionally since I was twelve? This is too much.
Now, part of the make-it-work-for-me strategy is that all the unfinished projects, the things I picked up and fiddled with but never got very far with that are stashed all over my house bearing witness, I would re-visit these things. Get out the violin, do the sewing, finish the knitted socks, purge the emotional backlog. Uh-oh. I asked Gina, the angel who has been cleaning my house, to help me get some books from the shelf in the Unreachable Zone. This is the shelf where I collected all the Asian influences, Zen, aikido, martial arts related, Katachi, Japanese-abilia, etc. I was looking for The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines (PW8). I tried to describe it to Gina, but she shorted out and came up with the usual practical solution of just bringing an armful of books to me in the wheelchair and letting me select what I wanted. She said she didn’t have the right glasses and couldn’t find the title I wanted. I suspected that the title was incomprehensible to her. Her first grab was the heavy hitters, collections of koans, etc. The PW8′s spine had faded from orange (which I had asked for) to a pale beige. This book is heavy going, original translation to English from Chinese from Tibetan from Sanskrit ( I think), copyright 1973 by Edward Conze, by Western standards a very early scholar of spiritual things deeply Asian. The wonderful thing about Buddhist practice is that there is the constant reminder that it is even possible to be “uncowed and fearless”. Our version of the Heart Sutra says “without any hindrance, no fears exist”, when mind ceases to be a hindrance, we are free to be fearless.
The curious effect of these years of reading, sitting, chanting, and attempting to “realize,” as in make-real-in-my-life-this-moment, there come sudden moments of actual liberation. The possibility of being uncowed and fearless will bubble up right through the muck of imposed ideas of limit, identify, self and all the rest. This morning I circled the wheelchair around the blog, trying to decide if I wanted to risk bleeding mud on my BrightMountain, or should I read some more PW8? “Get it over with,” the Finger Wagger (FW) said, “bleed the whole pitiful mess out there, make the page ‘private’ and be done with it, for chrissake, I’m tired of listening to you.” Some people will hear the FW and raise their eyebrows, clucking to me in what they think is a helpful way, “You are too hard on yourself. Don’t be so harsh.” I have not found this type of comment helpful. Instead of getting me to put down the whipping cane, they take it up themselves and strike a few blows. How to get out of this? I want to make this stop forever! It does, indeed, turn out to be simple, although not easy. Sitting and practice in general, for me, has slowly added what I can only describe as space, a type of air, an inflation, that creates an opening, one might say breathing room. I didn’t notice at first, being of the Hammer and Tongs School, but gradually it was just there. A small space, a little light, a little air, a little opportunity to choose my own response. As I grew into this space, became more adept at recognizing it, more certain and committed to looking for it, I eventually came to expect it and know it was there.
This weekend, one of my helpers came over carrying a huge pile of work related stress. I made the error of warning her of danger ahead, which triggered a massive dump of stored up frustration and the attendant bile. She was having a seizure of conflict between the suffocating daily life stress and a pouring forth of semi-digested Buddhist reading about Emptiness. She is a Zen student as well, much younger and more recently started, but committed and serious. It did not end well. A small consolation for me was that I was able to tell her this: I am not skillful enough to totally control my speaking; I see your suffering and want to offer my experience and advice; I see that you do not want that, but I can now only manage to remain silent while my mind runs through this warning/advice stage; when I am more skillful, when my understanding and development have matured, I will be able to let you vent and not allow it to drown me; or I will learn to gently stop you from this habit. This last phase is the most interesting to me from my own experience. Learning to drain that energy out long before it builds the pressure up that leans far out over the dam, threatening everything below it. Keep a vent open, you silly. The panic and electricity of hugely charged emotions make the Finger Wagger seem like a field marshal, coming to the rescue to sweep me out of trouble. But, now, I don’t think that’s so. I have taken the liberty of re-framing that concept and now imagine this manifestation in a room, a sort of Ranting Room. I am not actually in that room, I am outside it, and there is a door between me and the ranting. When I am breathing and more porous, I remember that I don’t have to stop it, but I don’t have to listen either. I do not have to do what this voice says. I do not. Now, I reach out and gently shut the door. I can still hear the babble and bumping around, the pacing up and down, but I can leave it.
I hope that beginning this blog will further that introduction of space, and that is my stated intention. I already know that in this type of writing I don’t really know where it is going. It is a sort of curlicue of discovery. I am now thinking that I will not make things private. How can anything be that sacred or fearsome? I live a small life, without romance, without great adventure. I am content with small jewels.
Dear Sam
3/06/10
Dear Sam,
You’re back in the NYT! I wouldn’t have known it but a vigilant friend read about your new play and sent me the link. By accident, Heaven’s Gate was on TCM, so I had to watch again. That’s 1978, just before you got roped and corralled. You spoiled it all for me, you know, being mustang, Mr. Open Range, a real deal cowboy poet. Not just a guy with a big mustache and a clutch of rhymes. Somehow you combined it all: midwest roots, NYC urban artdog, mountain air and dry, dry, dry. I wasn’t the only one who loved you. You had to do some serious hiding to get away from all of us. I was always late, never right there at the moment. Guess that’s because I was always staring at the sky or the ground, deep in thought, but always waiting. It’s the horses what done it, really. I mean, the real horses. That kind of thing cuts through all the trimmings, down to the core. When you know someone else buries their face in that fur, that heaven-and-earth scent only a horse has; someone else secretly, or even right there in front of everybody, goes nose to nose on the soft, velvety muzzle, waiting for the wet blow of recognition, risking the hard bone crack of a tossed up head on the front of your face. Such fine creatures! How privileged we have been to know them.
I have been a little worried about you, disappearing into domesticity and all. The NYT folks are giving you the reverential treatment, but they think you did your best work back in the 70′s. What kind of thing is that to say? That guy probably wasn’t even alive in the 70′s. He doesn’t know yet that somewhere out there on the hard ground, in the freezing wet, head to wind roaring, you hear a voice whispering that you won’t live long this way, no sir. Flat out just has its limits. Anybody can jump off a cliff. Hell bent is great, even for a long while, but sometimes you want to stick around for the third act, I mean, just to see how it all works out. Act II keeps you kind of busy, just working out all the stuff that blows up in your face.
I think the new play is on a porch. Are the guys in rocking chairs? The NYT guy says it’s about old guys and regret. Live long enough, and you get old, though. Like mountain climbing, you just have to be at a certain point to see a certain view. My brother, a big King Arthur fan (the esoteric connotations, not the anime kind), tells me that Percival, I think it was, returns from the Grail search and the clamorers wanted him to tell them what happened. He answered, “Go where I have been, and you will know what I know.” That’s an answer for you. Maybe the NYT guy thinks you should be telling him something, something that will save him, and all the rest of us, the trouble. Like, they can sit in the post-modern art bar, and hear you say something that will keep them from getting dirty, or bloody, or dead. They can meet the girlfriend, or the agent, toss back a few, take a cab home, write it up and get the check. No sweat. Ha.
This morning, while I was using the walker to get to the bathroom, creaking and cursing along, that old song came to mind, I think it’s called “Lonesome Valley”:
You gotta walk that lonesome valley
And you gotta walk, walk it by yourself
Nobody else can walk it for you
You gotta walk, walk it by yourself.
I sang a bit of it, practicing, in case I got the call to sing it out loud in front of someone sometime. I’ve got that Appalachian crackle voice which is good for this kind of song. I googled it, of course, being modern, and saw that George Jones and Elvis (among others) have recorded it, but I didn’t feel like downloading the ringtone. We also could have listened to Joan Baez singing it, but I couldn’t go that far. You probably couldn’t either, so I was doing you a kindness.
So why am I writing you after all these years? There’s one frame in Heaven’s Gate that I swear made my heart stop. It made me understand why I had loved you so much. Why you spoiled it all for me. Why I couldn’t, just couldn’t, settle, settle for less, settle down in my mind, settle the bill, settle any of it. Not while we’re still out there. Even in a cab downtown on the way to the theatre, that wind is still whipping your hair around, I can feel it.
My best to the family. I thank them for keeping you alive, I love them for it. And I love you, that you managed to look right at it, and tried to speak it out loud.
As always,
Tess
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/theater/13shepard.html?pagewanted=2&emc=eta1 [this s/b be a link; techno lapse, sorry]
Sam to reporter: “Violence and conflict are part of the music,” he [Sam] added. “There’s no way to escape the fact that we’ve grown up in a violent culture, we just can’t get away from it, it’s part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we’ve always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.
Reference to play text: Referring to his wife, he continues: “I carried her out by the highway, and we watched the cars and trucks sailing by, heading out to El Paso, south to Mexico, or limping into town with red dust from somewhere covering their windshields. We just stood there while they all floated by in every direction. One old man in a stake truck stopped, asked if we needed a ride. I told him no — we lived there.”
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Addendum 3/09/10: See also John Lahr’s more informed article under Critic At Large, “The Pathfinder: Sam Shepard and the Struggle of American Manhood,” The New Yorker, February 8, 2010, p 68 ff. (Pet dogs in coats on the cover.) Or try this link (might have to copy/paste):
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/02/08/100208crat_atlarge_lahr
It eventually opened to full article for me, without subscription.
Bud Swell
The trees tell of Spring
3/04/10-We try to make a big deal of Winter here, and I buy in as a skier, but the fact is that we don’t have that much hard winter. A month or so of dark mornings and early nightfall, walking home from work at 4:30 p.m. in the freezing dark with lots of traffic. Funny to connect traffic conditions with light level, but we are lucky there as well having what my brother, who had then recently moved from LA, referred to as “rush minute.” It’s just not Buffalo or Montana.
This maple is one of the twenty-two trees I planted after stopping the construction phase of reviving this house. About ten have survived, this the only maple. It was planted on the west patio, where I paced around watching my shadow until I felt the tree’s grown shadow would shade the entrance and walls in summer’s heat. Each year it has grown like a weed. Even in this BBerry photo, you might be able to see last year’s growth by looking at the twigs extending beyond the clusters of buds. When I was planning the roof, vaguely remembering the Permaculture ideas, I had the roofers slant about half the roof area toward this patio. (Desert Credo: No drop of water that falls on this property leaves it.) I amended the soil with multiple bags of everything available from early morning runs to Home Depot to buy whatever “broken bag pallets” were available. I was only a little selective then, passing over pine bark chips in favor of any kind of potting soil, mushroom compost, or other forms of compostable material on the pallets. I loaded them into the Subaru hatch, drove them home, unloaded them and immediately spread it all wherever I could. All before coffee. No plan, no great chemical process control, just a basic desire to feed the soil, to create soil really out of the solid clay out there.
Any hole dug was a hard fought battle. Shovels were useless. Post hole diggers just bounced off the surface. I finally settled on a combo of the long iron digging bar (button on one end, three inch wedge on the other, about six feet long) and a medium sized tin can, or small coffee can. When it came down to really custom fitting the hole, the regular sized crow bar was useful. Hose at my side, I’d pound out a small patch, scoop out the clay with the coffee can, fill the hole with water and repeat. A slugger’s way to dig a five gallon hole and when I planted the Van cherry tree, after the main planting, I swore I’d never dig another five gallon hole. It was time to hire someone. Still, I knew they would never take the care that I would, loosening the sides, allowing at least enough room for whatever additional concoction would go in with the roots. These holes could hold water for hours. We’re talking clay, the source of the famous chocolate pudding mud that the dogs are tracking into the house now with every trip outside. The massive, sucking mud that turns your boots into slick basketballs, that triples the size of your tires making 4WD a cruelty joke.
On the whole the trees lived, especially the fruit trees. This maple is the sole survivor of that group. I gave up trying to sneak in a red maple, even in the so-called “protected areas”. Maybe the pros in the gallery gardens in downtown Santa Fe can nurse along these beauties, but I’m not up to it. The Lannan Foundation has one in its atrium. Or did. But I’ve changed teams. The only loss I truly regret is the $50 gingko tree I planted in honor of my father. He used to tell me about this wonder living to an ancient and venerable age. The fan shaped leaves, the golden color, I saw it all out my mind’s eye window, but it didn’t even make a season. I mourned it, put a rock in its place and turned to the cherries for encouragement. These guys are the powerhouses. The Montmorency, sour pie-cherry, is a dwarf that pumped out a crop so big last year that I let them dry on the branches. This year I will get a cherry pitter and get to work. Oddly, the birds don’t care for these little scarlet poppers, not like the candy Bing. That’s a battle every year. Behind my high fence, right on the main street, I indulge a romantic urge to walk up to the tree and bite the fruit directly off, like a bird. Last year there were so many cherries that the ripening went on for weeks. They got softer and deeper into red, then less and less sour. I was baffled by the birds’ refusal. I took pictures. Then more pictures, nibbled some off every day, picked a pile then let them dry. I couldn’t eat them all, and the tree is hardly ten feet high. Maybe it’s the mushroom compost?
