A Monk In The Woods

 

Yesterday I walked alone in a wooded area next to the sea. A woman approached (staying 6 feet away) where the path divided. 

I asked "Does it matter which way I go?" She answered that the two paths met again further along, and each was as long as the other. I chose one and continued toward thick tall trees, stepping lightly over tree roots, hopping from small path-boulder to small path-boulder, often pausing to look into the sky, to look closely at the bark of a tree, to breathe leaf-fresh air, to listen to wind or water moving nearby. 

 

Then I noticed her, walking some distance behind me, pausing when I paused. And I realized that my slow enjoyment of this space was inconsiderate to this fellow walker who appeared hesitant to pass me along the thin trail. And I wondered why she had not taken the other path. So I stepped lightly off the trail, motioned to her that she could approach to pass, and reached for my pomegranate mask. 

 

But she did not hasten by - she stopped and looked into my eyes and said "I love your colors" which left me speechless as my leaf-filled mind tried to make sense of the words, but then she said "I thought I was following a Tibetan monk in the woods - the colors, the way you move - like a Tibetan monk" After a silence, I said

 

"Maybe you were!" Her gaze softened, then she smiled broadly, and continued along the path ahead of me. 

 

Looking down at fallen poplar leaves and gnarled path-trod roots of the massive trees all around as the softly shadowed air breathed in me, I marveled at finding a monk along this path.

The Saw-Blade Wind Chime Calls Me To Bed

Luckily, 

my late husband built this wind-chime

out of dull old circular saw blades.

In a light breeze it does not even sway,

and after a storm it needs careful untangling.

But in a steady breeze or gusty wind,

it sets to clanging, bang-bang, clanging.

And on those days it is my job to stop

whatever I'm doing. Slow down. Listen.

If I listen carefully, I can hear him swearing

at whatever project is going wrong. Or

I hear him calling to me from the bedroom:

"It's late. When you coming to bed?"

And then a little later, sounding sad, 

"I'm in bed all alone." and later, sadder,
"There's nobody here but me." Until,

finally, I listen, and stop, and rest. 

Well.
It looks like this will be my easiest place to keep a writer's diary. It won't get lost in the other bag, or used up writing grocery lists and jotted notes about errands to be done.

So the blog takes a slight turn, if all goes well, and enters a phase of more frequent and shorter notes-to-myself yet left out on the coffee table with no lock on the cover.

Today I read a short sample of a "personal response annotation essay" (whatever that is, which should become clear as my education progresses) which nearly brought me to tears.  It did bring the lump in the throat, hot behind the eyes emotion and this reaffirmed the knowledge that I'm on the right track. At Last.

It was a simple description of what a writer does before writing: the right space, the right position, the right light, the right pen, paper, whatever necessary tools and comforts (for me, a mug of tea going cold while I write) are gathered and put into play to assist the creative ... oh, that creative business, you know.

the flow.

I have called it food for the muse - and really I need to check and see if I plagiarized my muse from Stephen King and need to find a new image... the rumpled clothes, the wrinkled rug, seem Kingsian more than Lyrian. Mine should be ancient, wrinkled and dotty.

At any rate, it is clear this compulsion to creating the right environment is not some small, petty, selfish silliness of my own but is part of the identity I share with writers everywhere. It may be simply persnickety. But it may also be a way of reducing distraction by having everything the same, nothing to interrupt the flow with new attraction by unfamiliarity. Thus even the busy workplace of Le Monde provided the ex-pats a mundane familiarity through their close and daily relationship with the establishment.

For me, my attic writing room is three years old and has yet to be used for writing. So much intervened - so many detours to get here. And still here I am in the guest bedroom, not yet ready to take that twelve-step leap (the attic stairs are a dozen in number) until the paperwork clears and this anchor is fully aweigh.

I Can Take This Heat

This post is dated wrong. It was written sometime during the summer of 2013. and just found it while seeking a poem called"the plum-shaped woman"  - if you find the poem somewhere, let me know.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~summer 2013~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

-->

I can take this heat. It’s not in my genes – my grandparents routinely abandoned the living quarters of their seaside home and headed down to the dark cellar with its floor of sloping bedrock, low floor-joists and plumbing runs overhead. A pair of small ground-level windows faced the harbor, partly obscured by the flowerbed growing along the foundation. Down there, in a mid-day dusk, Papa and Meme sat at a small wooden table painted light blue on small wooden chairs painted to match. Cloth napkins, picnic stainless tableware, melamine dishes and a colorful tablecloth helped create a festive atmosphere while two folding camp cots, neatly folded and stacked against the concrete, were available if the heat did not relent at night.

It’s rarely really hot at the edge of the Atlantic in Maine, but my ancestors came from offshore islands and even the relative cool of the shore was hotter than island air. 75° would find them scurrying for the comfort of a shallow Maine cellar surrounded by tiers of next winter’s firewood, empty bushel baskets ready to store fall-dug Dahlia bulbs, a great wall of shelves filled with every kind of sweet pickle, and a few laundry items hung inside to prevent fading.

The cellar felt close and dark to me, used to spending my days outdoors on a boat or in a sunny garden. What could they find to do in this small dark space? On the table, a couple of books to read, a watch to repair or a tool to fix, the National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and Audubon magazines beside the seed catalog, and some mending and a basket of yarn being turned into mittens or an afghan. The small radio picked up the weather station and a CB listened in on conversations between boaters and lobstermen. Often, though, I would arrive to see Papa just sitting, his eyes turned toward the small high window facing the harbor beyond the tangle of pansies and nasturtiums, but he was looking further than I could see – he was watched for more than eighty years and did not need to watch anymore.  

When I was pregnant, 6 years after my grandfather died and four years after I married and moved out of my grandmother’s house, there came a night so hot that my little house in town become unbearable: no cellar, no breeze, and close to a noisy, smelly road. By midnight the heat of the day still clung to my bloated body: an overheated pregnant incubator, I smothered under the heavy motionless air in our tiny airless bedroom room in our tiny house. The old bed sagged, bodies settling deeper into the sweat-damp bedding. 

We had been camping that week, and in our camping gear was a full-size inflatable mattress. If I could not sleep, at least I could get out of this bedroom sauna. Against my husband’s sleepy protestations, I got out the foot pump and the air mattress and grabbed the car keys.

The next morning, my grandmother was alarmed to see people sleeping out on the end of her dock. I’m not sure she ever fully forgave me for the shock - though she fully understood and forgave the trespass itself.

I can take this heat. Here in the attic on a day that passed 90° with no breeze and the un-tempered sun thick and heavy on this roof designed for solar gain, the room is hot enough that my body feels cool to the touch compared to the air and the furniture in the room. Instead of noticing the heat - the heavy blanket of warm air covering my bare skin – I pay attention to the smell of heat, of attic blankets and rolled-up rugs, old papers and boxes of books, of antique baskets made by Passamaquoddy Indians and the faint electromagnetic smell of this computer. As a sailor blinded in fog listens for a change in the sound of waves signaling shore, the hairs on my damp arms are alert for the slightest breeze, the first indication that the peak of heat has passed and we can open windows and doors, pull back curtains, roll up blinds and let the last of the day join us inside.  

I can take this heat because this room is my room. The scattered papers and disorganized CDs are my scattered papers and CDs. The window-screen held in place with a ribbon and two clothespins is my screen, my ribbon, my clothespins. Out the window I can see my garden, poppies blooming, tomatoes prostrate without strings to fasten them to stakes, grass already getting thick again. Outside there are weeds to be pulled and an evening breeze starting to drift through the tallest trees: the day out there is becoming pleasant. But here in this room, soaked with sweat, sitting on a hard wood chair, surrounded by the disorder of recent reorganization, here I can sometimes hear my own thoughts – if I stay long enough and listen hard enough.

In my attic room the ceiling is low and the walls are close. A clutter of memorabilia fills boxes in the eaves: my daughter’s high-school awards, wedding photo albums from expired marriages, boxes of yarn, winter clothes, storm doors and toys for toddlers in case grandchildren or other such incidents might happen someday. Through the bi-fold doors, my room holds books I mean to read someday and books I mean to write; paintings waiting to be finished or framed and hung, enough music to last for years and years of daily hearing something new, and if that gets dull, a radio that receives public radio and, with some tweaking, the non-public non-profit stations.

My iMac breathes quietly, whirring air through its gills. But here I sit, turned toward the purple-star-studded batik curtains in the window, facing the freshly burst African lilies, thickly clustered pink poppies, hostas dripping lavender bells ringing the hydrangea massed with snow-white puffs and daylilies tangled with astilbe frothy in the border.

But I am not looking. I am not doing. I am not thinking. I am just here, sitting. 

     

Spring is truly here at last! It's been cold and wet with plenty of late snowfall such that patches are still visible in shaded copses, and yesterday Tolman pond was still more than half iced over. The days are warmer, though, and when the sun comes out it can get positively toasty.

My massage studio is working splendidly - warm and cosy and bright. Once the weather warms up, I'll choose colors and get started on painting colors over the current white primer.

I do about two massages a week - mostly trades or barters - and a few special clients who help me afford to keep up my license and education by paying with real money.

This evening I'm practicing typing and getting up to speed for a writing workshop starting next week.  Well, that's enough typing for now...   :)  Actual blogging will have to wait.

Thinking time

My brain - once filled with multiple thoughts all running at once, all cogent, intact, occasionally bumping into one another yet independently rational and explicable, likened by me to many radios playing at once - has fallen asleep. Words, those shiny, sharp tools used for holding together what might otherwise lack cohesion, now clump in a dirty tangle at the bottom of a dark container filled with parts of things once useful but now incomplete. I've read that writing by hand, as opposed to writing on the keyboard, uses parts of the brain that keep us more mentally whole by connecting the physical brain-functions to the mental composition in a more integrated fashion. So I'm doing some journaling. Maybe it will help. But it is somehow more fun - more actual Fun to type type type. And to wonder at that desire not to be secret in my fear.

Massage and More

Today I updated up my old website - tinalee.org - with links to my professional massage website. Go ahead and check it out. Yes, it's official - or perhaps it is more accurate to say "I am official." Licensed by the state of Maine to practice therapeutic massage. Now awaiting my town permit for "Home Occupation" and volunteering as a complementary care provider for the local non-profit volunteer-run Knox County Health Clinic.

I look forward to having more time to read - and to write! But that is all I have to say today.


[Much later Edit: After a few years of doing Hospice Massage, I quit to take care of my husband at the end of his struggle with cancer, and then completed a master's of fine art degree focused on poetry and haiku, and took up music more seriously -or playfully- enjoying the experience of solo performance in small intimate venues. And then the covid-19 pandemic started. And just like that, my massage career faded away as new adventures opened their many doors. So I never got around to updating the website. Yet.]

Massage and Miracles

It is times like this: this moment as fingers poised above alphabetic keyboard hesitate...

It is times like this that I know life carries on, regardless of time to write and sort events into categories delineated by chronology, emotion, relationship, place and structure.

In 15 minutes a woman will arrive at my house and follow me up to the spare room where a massage table awaits. The flannel sheets are warmed by a full-length heating pad; a room-heater is taking off the overnight chill while morning sun shines in brightly, angled through a south window.

That's all I have time to tell you right now. I must change into my massage student outfit: casual scrubs top and loose pants, flat roomy shoes with good grippy soles. Hair up and out of my face and special glasses with temples bent to stay on while my face is turned to look down. It is a miracle.

It is a miracle because I have wanted to learn professional massage, to DO massage, ever I can remember anything. And I'm doing it. And the Lyme is getting tired of hanging around. More about that later. A lot more. For now, I congratulate myself for moving on, for enduring, for being my best friend.

What I Didn't Say

I have Lyme Borreliosis. Spirochetes have been living and multiplying in my body since November 10, 2008, almost 2 years. Why was I not diagnosed before now? It's in what I did not say. It's in what I said that distracted my doctor from the problem. It's in fear, embarrassment, and finally in feeling powerless and defeated by my provider's absolute certainty that a test would be pointless. And in the end, she was right. Testing me for sero-reactivity was pointless. But for reasons quite beyond her knowledge or understanding of this debilitating infection.

[edited below during COVID-19 pandemic, Feb 3 2021]:

Is it easier to simply give up when a test for infection gives results one knows to be false or to fight it out, insist the test is wrong and risk being thought a hypochondriac or - possibly worse - to risk being proven right? Unlike the Lyme experience, this time I did eventually go back for a re-test when distant friends and a state-funded nurse on-call all insisted that my life was in danger. And much to my surprise (and the surprise of the doctor who performed the test - correctly this time) the result proved that the illness I had been battling for weeks was, indeed, COVID-19. It made little or no difference to my treatment. My doctor said "Whatever you are doing, just keep doing it. We have nothing." But it made a huge difference to my emotional state and allowed me, finally, to ask for help without having to skirt around the reason. 

The real purpose for this update is to check out the "edit" function on blogger. And it is a bit of practice to help me get back into this world of written words which has been such a comfort for so many years and which has been lost now for too long. I want to come back to writing, to the selfish, personal, useless setting down of thoughts on a page. This, my chocolate, my love, my indulgence.

Tonight I write this.

If learning new skills keeps a person young, I better lay off for a while and let myself age again.

Crawled under my sister's very low back deck with propane torch, solder, flux, steel wool, sandpaper, gloves, kid's paintbrush, and a pair of garden gloves. For 24 hours I didn't dare turn on the water, afraid it would leak. The fix appears to be good: no drips. Applause welcome.

Spent much of today in the basement, continuing cleaning up the mess left by the insulation job: foam-board particles drifting across the floor, fiberglass dust filtered over every surface and into everything throughout a huge jumble of assorted debris including 3 boxes of rotten apples, boxes of dirt, cut-up milk bottles, plastic, books, magazines, framed pictures, frames without pictures, clothes, kitchen items, cloth, curtains, wire, cardboard boxes, chunks of Styrofoam, potting soil, plant-pots, plant hangers, jewelry, old newspapers, painting supplies, pens, pencils, pins, pots and pans all piled in a heap in the middle of the floor.

In another part of the basement, several suitcases stacked haphazardly with camping supplies and pet carrier, child's chair, a great mess of large upholstery fabric pieces, lengths of chain, and some nail-studded lumber which appears to have been shelving at some time in the past. A bare bulb hangs from the low ceiling, but the switch is not evident. Darkness prevails. The air is thick with toxic dust waiting to rise.

A small bright room sports a closed window and wooden brackets: some sheets of chip-board are found to fit and we have a room full of shelves ready for storage. Over the next few weeks, photo albums, incense-burners, candle holders, jewelry boxes, Christmas ornaments, wooden carvings, books and bangles - anything that might be construed as having sentimental value is carefully retrieved from the debris and sorted into boxes here.

Summer patio furniture is carried out to the back deck; a downspout is shoved back onto the rain-gutter, drains unplugged, bathroom scrubbed again and again. Garden hoses dug out of deep weeds, rhubarb picked and cooked. Guitar practiced. Dog walked. Cat cuddled.

It takes hours, days, and phone calls but eventually all utilities are arranged to be paid automatically (at this writing, waiting for banks to open to get final numbers for credit card to go on automatic)

It's Canada Day and the neighborhood is very quiet. Thick clouds overhead, occasional rain. Cassolet with turkey in the oven. Slow.

Today I regret not taking more pictures of the work here. I was embarrassed for Terry: couldn't imagine she would want the world (her friends) to see what a state her life/house was in. The black slimy mold, thick on the fridge inside and out; grime upon grime layered on bathroom fixtures with clogged drains. Now I look at the tidied cellar, boxes waiting to be recycled and tools hanging over the work-bench and I wish I had taken fewer photos of the wonderland out in the wooded hill behind the house and more photos of the job here: from the daily and ever-ongoing household maintenance (the kitchen after a successful teen sleepover including midnight crepe-making) to the unspeakable disorder and filth in the bedside drawer (numerous and assorted pill bottles, loose pills, dirty dishes, snack-food, canning jars of semi-potable liquid, scratch paper, pens, pencils, crumbs) - a journal of images to help me remember and recognize the extent of the job I've been doing. Because the memory will recede quickly as my tendency is to diminish my hardships, to downplay the difficulties, to underestimate long-term effects on my emotions, my family, my relationships, my sense of self-worth.

Terry called me superwoman, credited me with saving her life. She relied on me so completely and I did what was needed. And i did what i had to do. Now the initial crisis is history. The day to day coping with cancer is what's left. Walking the dog, washing the dishes, helping with the things that would wear her out so she has energy enough to do things she wants to do.

So I came this time with an agenda: Betty wants to be sure a memorial service is held in accordance with Terry's wishes. Terry was pleased and made some suggestions: music - Morning has Broken; The River; some others. I should ask her again and write them down. A traditional Quaker service - with an explanation for those who haven't experienced one before, and followed by a pot-luck and singing. But not yet: she is still alive and gardening and thinking about life, not death now. She thought about death a lot last time. Now she wants to enjoy the sunny days, Oprah Show, good food.

She has no pain. hat alone is some kind of miracle: how can someone have cancer as serious as hers and yet be in no pain? A visual distortion hampers her ability to enjoy books or movies, but the only other symptom is weakness and fatigue. She naps during the day between eating and gardening, snoring gently. In the evening she watches TV while i write or read. And tonight i write this.