Drawing this evening
Tag Archives: today
Thoughts on Today
The world through my glasses today is distant and like clouded glass. I feel like I am interacting with everything from a distance, not really in my body. It feels like exhaustion but not exactly. It is almost like the mask slipped and I can see it. Motivation has been a challenge for a while as I struggle with depression and loneliness. I feel like the end goal is not in sight and I don’t know why I am doing anything. Being here, where I choose to be helps me keep going knowing eventually I will find a window to something. In the meantime I struggle with simple tasks. Being in groups is hard. I can’t separate the background noise and voices from those at my table and I must closely watch someone’s face to hear what they say and understand it. Processing reactions and emotions and understanding why they are reacting the way they are is exhausting. I need the social interaction but is so much work to deal with the people, lights, colors, sounds, smells, and activity around me. Without my training in how to move and read people from modeling and communication classes I would not be able to handle it. Pain is a constant mild presence but some of it is more numb or pressure than pain, but maybe that is just long term tolerance of it. Depression runs in cycles, some low and some high. When I think about my body I think about things I want to change, like hair or teeth, or breasts. But when I think about life my mind shies away not sure where to focus. Small details take up each moment and focus the mind away from the clawing fear of being alone until I can rebuild the mask that hides it from the world. I find that my mask is so good even the psychiatrist doesn’t see thee pain unless I force myself to tell him and try to explain. Every few minutes I clean my glasses or hands trying to breach the distance and feel the world. A cup of coffee gone and no real memory of drinking it. Soft new clothes feel good on my skin and distract my mind again. It feels like I will never move forward and never have a life worth living. My mind wonders if my husband will ever be in the same state as me and if he does do so can we get by financially together. Work is quiet and cold and I struggle to interpret interactions and know if the comment was insult, humor, or statement. I simply let it go, distance, it doesn’t matter.
—–
Another Week Alone
Hanging up Sunday night is always hard. Tomorrow I go back to work to face another week alone.
Another week I will do all the little things he does to take care of me for myself.
Another week I will eat and cook alone.
Another week i won’t feel his touch.
Another week I won’t see his eyes.
Days spent just getting by.
Days spent answering when he will arrive.
Days spent in distraction.
Finding myself watching life.
Finding myself escaping life.
Finding myself hiding myself.
Just sitting at the desk.
Just watching the waves.
Just playing my games.
Maybe learning a new art.
Maybe trying a new experience.
Maybe going somewhere new.
Purpose lost.
Purpose drowning.
Purpose only to have him here.
Silent screams in my head.
Silent about my work.
Silent in my dreaming.
Very tired with no sleep.
Very alone surrounded by people.
Very hungry for his touch.
Zone out into a game.
Zone into my art.
Zone out listening to his voice.
Another week alone.
—-
Another Week Alone take 2
Another week without his laugh.
Another week without his arms.
Another week without his support.
Busy about the distractions of life.
Calling just to hear his voice.
Distance vast and empty in my mind.
Empty of direction and purpose.
Falling quietly apart.
Gaining ground and building strength.
Having tea I made myself.
Interests intense distraction from the pain.
Just me for meals I cook alone.
Keeping my schedule alone.
Lost staring at the waves and stars.
Many distractions to fill the time.
No passions to fill the heart.
Open books I read alone.
Paying the bills without his calm.
Quiet in my room without his game.
Reading on the bus to somewhere new.
Sitting at my desk with nothing to do.
Trouble with the crowds he would keep away.
Up with the sun to start my day.
Visiting places to tell him about.
Writing on my lunch I eat alone.
apeX of the day is hearing his call.
Yesterdays stretch further as tomorrows loom.
Zoo of life like windows to how people live.
The Depths of a Mind
Sometimes when you sit composed and professional, smiling when needed and working at your desk your brain screams inside and claws for escape and release. Depression wraps itself around your mind and behind your mask you rage and cry, scream and huddle in a ball until the calm mask becomes the iron fist of cold numbness pressing you in place. The mask sinks in with each repressed scream and tear a little deeper. Loneliness eats at you even when you are surrounded because the mask is not you and they are not really with you. Sometimes people tell you all the things you have to appreciate and all the reasons you have to be strong and happy but they are not in your head and have not lived your past. The chemical soup tearing you apart is not in their body but yours. Each thing you do to try and assuage the deadness and loss just highlights that you don’t feel what you want to feel and you have failed at everything you have done. The clawing reminder s in your head that years have been wasted and lost in failure and obscurity leave you very aware of just how alone you are in your choices. But that same iron core that holds the mask keeps you moving even when it feels more like a treadmill than a road of life. What else can you do but go one? Fear has never controlled but that does not mean it was never present. Just like the fear engulfing you in free fall the fear of not being able to communicate or manage others pulls you into a hole deep inside where you spend days studying how to speak, walk, talk, read others, and understand why they do the things they do. When they use idioms, innuendo, and false statements to say something you can’t follow and assume you mean something other than what you said you wonder if there was any point to all the work. When you spend hours on a project to get all the details right and they blow it off you stare at the fruit of your wasted time and once again wonder why. When you go home alone and want to share something and just feel the touch of someone you trust you are forced to face that if there was someone that trusted you and you trusted you would not be sweating in a room alone with everything you owned in a cabinet beside you. Sometimes you look out at the ocean and the emptiness matches that inside your mind and heart with the swimmers in the deep disturbing the foundations. The breeze blowing is the same as the emptiness cleaning out your mind and covering words in white noise. Sometime the healing of the ocean can do nothing more than be there like a lost friend sitting quiet and unable to touch you but there when you are ready. Sometimes the blind escapism is your only retreat as you hide in your shell and rebuild the mask.
Ala Moana
Balance of Justice
As with every other thing that has come up recently in need of evaluation, meditation, consideration, action, or writing I find everything I read this week is tending toward justice, balance, and how relationships fare within. The recuring theme has been one of the need and requirement for balance for there to be justice and the imposition of justice. News has stories on the topic. Public demonstrations demand justice and a more balanced approach to issues. One book talks about a created entity enforcing justice but failing to head the balance and the destruction it causes. Another focuses on a god that renders justice when no other justice is availible or done and that requires a balance in his judgments. Another talked briefly about the historical divine female justice. As I meditate and try to settle my mind and emotions to know what to speak and how to act in the strugles in my own life I find myself wanting justice. Balance has always been a prime goal in my life but I fear I have of late lost that balance and cannot clearly see what balance would be justice.
What is justice in a relationship? It justice what we want in a relationship? Without it accountability is questioned and trust is eroded when there is need for it. Balance becomes a critical part of the equation when you are talking personal level issues. But no portion of our life is lived in a vacume and each impacts not only each other but our emotions, thoughts, and ability to deal with the others. Stress with friends and stress at work make home life more difficult. Add in that home life may be seperate from the relationship issues and there is another layer of question. Can you evaluate the balance of justice when you are in the middle of the maelstrom?
I speak of living alone, far from any frineds and from my husband but in truth I rent a room sharing an apartment with four other women. I am never really alone. My space is a room that shares walls with my neighbors. My work is a desk open to all and with a camera on me at all times. My volunteer hours are spent across the window from the supervisor. I travel the city on a crowded bus. I meditate in a group. I write in a group. I swim on beached full of locals and tourists. I game in a group. I share my kitchen and every space I live in with strangers. The distance often feels greater because so many strangers are always so close to hand. No one close to me is close to me. If I returned today to Texas this would not improve however. I would have space but I would have no more close companions. Family is a distant thing without my mother and marriage is a strange uncertainty hovering above an ocean we have yet to cross.
When you give up everything in your life to move to a new and uncertain life you act on a choice to accept uncertainty and lonliness for at least a time. When you do so in a relationship but find yourself alone anyway it is a difference of gradiation. How many times do you let someone hurt you before you step away? Do you let them prove they can change if they make it clear they are opposed to people changing and don’t believe people can change? How do balance and justice affect the situation? When fear has stalked you for years it becomes the overriding sense of the world. Every action is tinged with the fear that it will be the one to cost you something critical from job or home to friend or husband. Sometimes you fight to protect those things even though they are already lost because you can’t accept the loss of another thing.
But by the same token has the fear colored your judgment of things so you cannot make a balanced judgment? Stess wears you down and damages your health. After a while you are tired, sore, sick, and afraid all the time and reaching out of it alone becomes a Herculean effort that becomes almost sisepheyan. Doing so alone, without even friends is something I would not wish on anyone. I am not the type to wish ill on others anyway as that is against my sense of balance and peace. I have for some years now striven to live in the balanced and clear understanding of Buddhism. Though I did not entirely give up my Child of the Trickster place it took some time to understand that the same balance is required for both. It is not contraditory to be a pacifist that will fight to protect what is right in the same way as it is not contraditory to stand with the chaotic trickster and be a voice of peace and balance from them. The trickster has always served the good of humanity and balance over the rules and other gods. Knowing yourself and touching the divine spirit it part of the path. But what of justice and depression?
The idea of depression on either path has always been a problem for me. For a long time it made me more depressed because I was sure it was wrong to be depressed and be on this path. But at some point in my meditations I realized that it just is. It isn’t right or wrong or something to do with me but it is just depression. Depression can be a physical thing that needs addressing. Which I have, admittidly not had checked. It can also be a response to stimuli and this will abate when the stimuli does. In truth both external and internal, they are both stimuli and can be addressed not as a personal flaw and internal identification but rather as a state that must be acknowledged and seen for what it actually is not for the excess impacts it causes.
So too, justice is not my choice and action. I have no control of those things. I can act with equinamity and balance and maintain justice in myself but I cannot control others and their impacts on the world. I can see their impact on me and what is my response but I cannot change their action. I can choose to exclude them from my sphere of influence and I can withdraw my trust from them but I cannot make them act as if my path is theirs. But can we have a relationship with those of a drastically different path? In some cases yes. and in others less so.
remembering that enlightenment is a moment to moment thing and not a permenant state of being helps. I am not striving to be in the perfect state, I am balancing myself in this moment. I am aware of now and of life and am striving to reach the state of peace and calm acceptance I remember from what feels like a great distance. It is the point I have for reference at this time. It seems like so long ago I moved off my path and lost that balance but that I still know the feeling tells me it is not out of reach. But also it tells me that depression is a moment to moment thing as well. I do not need to be confused by the drastically different feelings or thoughts that come across me because all things are moment to moment. We do not live in tomorow or yesterday, in this evening or morning but we live in now. If I can accept that at this moment tears threaten to spill and accept in another moment that rage consumes me then I can accept those moments I am at peace just the same. Why does it seem harder to accept the reality of those moments and allow them to be without analysis and disruption? Is there something in all of us that rejects that or is it the fear and depression? I think it is a lot of things wrapped into our ego trying to maintain control however destructive the path it pushes us onto.
Connection
It seems every time I write lately what I write about comes up in what I read the next day and what I read about comes up in the talks at meditation. Not the topic and action that I start on, the deeper parts.
Today I wrote about a moment that changed everything. The story meandered through the past and the memories of my husband and moments of impact.
It ended with a thought about his calm acceptance of what everyone sees as my sudden decisions. I was trying at one point to explain how they aren’t really sudden even if they are. After leaving the Lanai to catch the bus home I went back to reading.
The chapter I read was The Third Thing. It talks about this very topic. That when you are torn between two things you need a third thing. Two things is not a choice. But a third will come and balance things out, offering the way forward. It appears sudden but it is the culmination of the process that the two things created.
my first meditation session with this group they talked about dealing with intense emotions and sadness. I cried on the way there and going to sleep for several nights before.
The next time we talked about what is and the whole talk meshed into what I read the days before. I had been reading Writing Down the Bones. The idea of using writing meditation as a path to not following the thoughts and emotions when sitting meshed interestingly into the talk about sitting.
The last thing I read before one session was that a well that dashes about cannot draw water. We cannot do happiness, it flows through us in our stillness. I was a few minutes late and sat in stillness with the group. She talked about ending suffering and sharing love. We talked about enlightenment being a moment to moment thing not a permanent state. The balance of mind, and the four keys. She talked about the calm acceptance of what comes that you feel in enlightenment.
Saturday we sat on the ridge through the day. I was at a crossroads in my mind and emotional state. I had one of those two choices that need a third way. I didn’t realize that is what I needed. But in stillness I found a moment of peace and acceptance of what is. it didn’t change the situation but it let me see what is and reach a new possibility.
I went to the meditation Sunday lonely and sad but more at peace. Leaving , when she hurried over, obviously she had somewhere to be she was putting off, to give me a flower it struck a light in me. I’m not alone even if I have no close connection here. We are all one and connected. It is enough.
I don’t know what now but I do know I will be here for it.
An Office Divide.
Politics, the great divider. It is interesting that the thing designed to run our society and equitably distribute power is seen in people’s minds as a way to control power and ensure their way which they know is the only right way is done. People argue and discuss, fight and work without hearing one another or understanding the reasons.
Compromise is not always the
answer, often you cannot compromise and move forward. When you continuously compromise with one that is extremely wrong you move gradually closer to that wrong. The person with the destructive plan may have other good concepts and desires, may care for their family and friends, may stand as a beacon in some things. None of that in any way changes a destructive or hateful trait that must not be allowed to dominate a society.
Early morning discussions of politics in the office almost always devolve into arguments and disagreements that fall back on irrelevant statements that misdirect from the discussion and inflame responses by sounding taunting and snide. That does not lead to understanding but people are not trying to understand they are trying to win. Politics is about wining and it is reaching into every area of life.
Outside the team is working too hard to have these discussions unless they do it on lunch. But in the office you hear these most days. The same men that talk about wanting to hang a basketball court to prove to the crew that they are better at physical stuff because they can play a sport and entertain themselves with sports all day bring that same mindset into a political or racial discussion. The boss that firmly believes each race can be categorized and slotted into a work and skill level will argue politics on any topic with no regard for human decency because in his mind they are the other. Throwing fallacies, irrelevancies, and false information into arguments is common in discussions and it prevents any of them from actually becoming a
discussion.
discussion.
Living in Texas religion and politics were intricately tied together and one rarely was discussed without the other. Here in Hawaii it is different. Not that people’s religion does not affect their political stances but discussions are different and even when directly opposed there is often a smile in the voice and an underlying knowledge this is someone I like even if we disagree. One man in my office is incredibly religious and blatant about it. His religious stance is drastically different than mine but unlike the similar stance people I was around in small town Texas, here we not only get along well and work together but we only discuss it when on non-confrontational topics. There is a customer that is of an opposing faith that brings it up on most calls and
insists there is religious discrimination happening. The interesting point is that none of us knew his religion until he started doing that and we never discuss religion in the office.
insists there is religious discrimination happening. The interesting point is that none of us knew his religion until he started doing that and we never discuss religion in the office.
I often have lunch with the crew working the warehouse that day and discussions with them are about life, working, playing, the island, families, and what we are doing to earn money on the side. We discuss the future and our goals. We discuss how people eat and live and the cost of living. Politics is a side note that is discussed only as how it impacts people. Religion isn’t discussed often. Some of the office people understand that and discuss it with an attempt at balance and compassion but that can be a challenge.
This is the difference, politics as a discussion or power or politics as a discussion of impact.
Foster’s Botanic Garden
Reading on the beach
Birthday!
Two posts this week because of a special event – my birthday!
So today’s focus is birthdays, friends, and supporting things we care about.
First for the birthday of a good friend and former boss, Director of a wonderful non-profit organization: Dr. Kathleen Hudson at Texas Heritage Music Foundation shares my birthday!
Visit her site and check out the education, stories, music, and interesting things they do – tell her happy birthday!
Mahatma Gandhi was also born on this day – one we should all remember.
As a birthday present to myself this year, I will soon be starting a new job as Office Manager at a non-profit near my home that runs a preservation garden, education programs, and is a simply amazing jewel of a place to visit: Peckerwood Garden. Check out their site if you are looking for something to visit in the area, it is pretty central between Brenham, Magnolia, Houston, and Katy, in Texas.
Now, for some other important figures from history:
Nat Turner – leader of a major slave rebellion in Virginia was born today
King Richard III of England, Isabella of Naples Duchess of Milan, Saint Charles Borromeo Italian cardinal, numerous composers and writers from around the world and a general from both the Union and the Confederate armies also were born this day in various years.
Julius von Sachs, botanist/naturalist; a German president; William Ramsay; Francois C Schlumberger; a Russian commander; Christopher Clarkson; Premiers of Austria and India, Ron Meagher; and many painters were born today.
Ruairà Ó Brádaigh of Sinne Fein; Rex Reed of Texas
Waheed Murad of Pakistan; Yuri Nikolayevich Glazkov and Vladimir Ivanovich Kozlov, USSR, cosmonauts; Lord Davies of the Welsh National Opera; Vernor [Steffen] Vinge; Jo-el Sonnier, Rayne La, country singer of Louisiana; Eric Peterson of Canada; Donna Karan, Fashion Designer; Ayumi Hamasaki, Japanese singer share my birthday.
Persis Khambatta, indian actress in Star Trek and Sting were both born today.
George Meegen, from England, who walked 19,019 miles from Argentina to Alaska (wow) was born today.
Sigtryggur Baldursson, Icelandic drumme and Aziz M. Osman, Malaysian actor and director share a birthday with me, a few playmates, many cricketers, and lots of actors.
One other worth mentioning is Bernie Merai (spelling is wrong I know) a man from my childhood that helped feed my interest in art and interest in how it could be used also shares my birthday.
There are footballers from around the world and people I could name for some time but suffice to say HAPPYY BIRTHDAY TO ALL OF US!
Art's Folly 