This is raw, uncut and precisely 100 words a section. 

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I have a work ethic around writing that makes me feel guilty about not exploring and elucidating in writing every idea that occurs to me to write about. I can’t seem to write to order, even on my own promptings. I suffer from what my brother (who has schizophrenia) calls ‘mental confusion’, though to a lesser degree than he, I believe, at least to the extent that I have avoided being labeled with a mental illness.

Except for the one I did get labeled with, but managed to escape by dint of ducking under their radar in every way possible.

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But I’m not here to write about the things I think about, not the good ideas I have or the novels, poems and articles that unfold like blooming flowers in my brain. I’m just here to fill that daily hundred words, and I’ve let myself fall far behind this month, so I’m just going to write in 100 word increments, more or less. Of course, by the time it appears in my blog it will have been edited and integrated into a single piece as if by magic. I have nearly the whole month of September to catch up on!

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If I hadn’t made a commitment to myself to finish an entire year of posting my hundred words a day, I might just blow September off. This is an old problem of mine, the pattern I have of dropping commitments, not finishing what I start. It’s like the garden, which at the moment is overrun by weeds and suffering from neglect. I haven’t weeded in weeks, but over the summer, I weeded some every day. I’ve lost momentum, I’m not carrying it through to the end. I hate that I do that. I want to change. I am changing now.

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The farthest I’ve ever fallen behind. What shall I write about? Don’t want to bore myself.

Muslim women covering their faces to vote: I’ve never been asked to produce photo ID when voting, what’s the big deal? Unless photo ID is required, why should these women be forced to expose their faces? I read a science fiction story about a future culture in which faces were an erogenous zone and women wore masks. Made me see how vulnerable exposing one’s face must be if you aren’t used to it. Leave them alone, big bullies. Why should they strip for you?

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The mail is slower since the advent of e-mail. Anybody noticed? It takes a week for a piece of mail to crawl from Hornby Island to Shawnigan Lake, a distance I can drive in five hours, ferry time included. What’s up with that?

Conspiracy: ‘They’ like to abuse their power; they make us suffer gratuitously. Postal rates rise while postal service deteriorates, because they have us by the short and sweets and they know it.

Metaphysics: What do you expect when you call it ’snail mail’? Poor critter has no choice but to respond to our collective perception and judgment.

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So which is true? Neither. Both. Reality is too fractally complex to be defined in words, even many volumes of words. So there. My problem is I know too much, I see too much. I am higher than acid. Acid just randomizes what I already perceive just fine, thank you. But I am not mentally organized. On the contrary. My mind is both stuck in old past patterns and confused by perceptions which differ radically from eye to eye and sense to sense. I am plugged in. It’s not my fault, it just happened that way.

I blame my childhood.

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As a child, I was planted with seeds of both grandiosity and humility. On the grandiose side, I was made aware that I was gifted far beyond the average. I could ‘go far’. My teachers planted this particular seed, some of them letting me know in overt and subtle ways that they believed I was once-in-a-lifetime exceptional. Grandiose.

Humility came when I got the message from home that it didn’t much matter what sort of grades you got or how good you were at stuff. Everybody is equal and the same, nobody gets special treatment. Good grades? Good for you.

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Real humility came when I encountered the big world for the first time. I wasn’t nearly the big frog I had seemed in the backwoods ponds that nurtured me. Impressive to a northern teacher with fifty or a hundred students in the school is not so impressive to a city teacher with thirty different kids in every class of the day, all in the same grade.

Woh. All those people freaked me out. I was shocked into surrendering my ambitions, that had burned so bright in my last school, competing with George Belsham for the best test scores in class.

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Poor little me (there, there), wandering lost as a cloud shoved about by strong winds and crashing into treetops and mountains, don’t you feel for that scared little girl? Of course I do, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Why should we have to be embarrassed if we loved ourselves as children and that we sympathized and commiserated when they got crap thrown at them by their lives? Kids go through hell, and my little kid / I went through more than the norm. Of course I feel sad for her / me, and that’s not self-pity. It’s self-love.

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When I say ‘Hell’ I mean extreme circumstances, the fire of intensity that we all spend so much energy avoiding because we couldn’t handle the way it felt as children. We were too young! The current passion for extreme sports satisfies the letter of the desire (extremity of experience) without satisfying the essence (to feel deeply and intensely our vulnerability to life, to others and to our own sources).

Humans want to live deeply, to embrace life fully. It’s the way we are designed, upright, heart open, arms all set for embracing. And naked skins for sensuous pleasure. Why not?

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I haven’t much of a conscious mind, I suppose. My thoughts are heavy, weighty things, and the pot gets stirred so often I can’t keep hold of one thought long enough to really grasp it. Any apparent intelligence is instinctual. Words flow through me and arrange themselves in an order that conveys what body knows without my mind having to engage much except the most basic awareness.

When I first learned to read, I commanded the letters to reveal their meanings to me. They shifted around on the page and then I could read, just like that. It was easy.

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If you look at anything closely enough, it complexifies. To reduce to the so-called simplest, most basic elements of life, you first go through many layers of ever-increasing fractal complexity. When you look at a stone closely enough, it is indistinguishable from a living cell seen at the same range. Everything lives, everything dances in its own secret heart. It is wrong, inaccurate to say that the difference between animate and inanimate is the difference between life and death. All matter is alive. All life is aware of itself, even if a vague background sense of awareness. All things matter.

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‘All things matter.’ There’s a play on words in there, but I wonder how many would grok it. Why is it adjudged a waste of time and energy to bother looking at things with love? We don’t even look at people with love, except on special occasions with special people. Why such collective heartlessness?

When I let myself know the truth of what I feel and sense, which is that my attitude toward things is felt by them, affects their experience of existence in some way, I am horrified. I want to push the idea away and call it crazy.

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It’s truly tragic that love is perceived to be such hard work. Far from it! Love is the easiest thing in the universe. Love is what happens when you surrender everything, give up every fight, agree to lose and win at the same time, embracing both winners and losers as parts of your own self. Love is the body of the Whole relaxing and releasing tension. Love is the default state of things. Why did we decide to be the resistors and battlers within this system of love? There must be something right about it, for nature is never wrong.

Since childhood, I’ve been prey to this life-wasting pattern:

I struggle to the surface of dream late in the morning, a corpse rising from the crypt. I scrape off graveyard soil, toil through fog waiting for a sign of conscious presence in my body. Through the day I slowly perk up. I retire when I must, when body crashes but mind keeps going, buzzing, elated and inspired. By next morning, it’s the same thing over again.

Rarely, I wake early and my day feels rich and full. But mostly it’s a wasteland.

Can I please be a morning person instead?

The secret chambers of the heart
Are not for public judgment
Yet the urge to spill our hidden blood
Is irresistible

Hence the blogging craze in which we
broadcast everything including
bathroom habits (I pee on the ground),
Nose-picking proclivities (yes, when no one is watching)
And lovelorn afflictions (no, he doesn’t love me enough).

Spilling our whine is good for the soul
And that is why confessionals are popular
Reading others’ purgatories
Makes us feel better about our own hell

So do tell: spill your guts
but watch for those hungry crows

Everything is privatized these days
Save the self

I’m having a hard time getting going. I wonder if I qualify for a label (like ‘Chronic Fatigue Syndrome’) that would serve to explain me? I’m tired of calling myself ‘lazy’ and variously chastising, cudgeling and castigating myself for that crime. The one-sided battle rages in my head, the loud angry voice of thwarted ambition screaming, ‘get off your butt and —–‘ (fill in the blank with some necessary task upon which my surivival depends).

It’s one-sided because the target doesn’t argue. It simply shrugs, slides lower into the seat and sighs, wishing it could disappear. If only.

My mind, the overbearing voice of authority, endlessly assigns tasks which are resisted by my body, the weak but passive-aggressive servant which shirks any work it can. I need a mediator, some neutral yet caring third party who can help me get my mind off my body’s back while motivating my body to get going, for its own sake. Both need to happen.

I’m not neutral. I swing back and forth, one side to the other, completely emotionally invested in whichever side I’m being at the moment. My psyche is a mess, which may be the human condition, but damn!

Maybe I’m still metamorphosing. Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket…

Sun slanting in through picture window
Loving this rotational global warming
Naturally blessed with reliable light
After cold spring, I despaired,
Waiting for temperature to rise.
Weather connects strongly to mood
I’m hardwired to depression in grey and cold
And my upliftment in spring’s sun is
Positively Pavlovian.

I bask, glory in rays that radiate
From nuclear furnace in the center of sky
I resist not. If cancer wants me, it can have me.
Sunworshipper, I seek shade if the sun is too much, but
Shan’t slather chemicals on my skin to
Separate self from the oldest god there is

Bare hands in black dirt, a good thing. Sinking seeds deep or dusting them gently as required satisfied some ancient gardener gene from who knows where, for I was raised mostly without gardens. A past-life thing, my Taurus South Node, or merely the romance of it all a la Green Acres (‘shoosting up into the air’).

The first thing I noticed when I went to the garden was a furtive brown form darting away at my approach, which triggered an immediate atavistic reflex. Intruder alert! Kill the enemy! Though normally adorable, that rabbit sprouted vampire fangs in my mind’s eye.

It feels (and certainly smells) like spring. Stepping outside to pee, baring my butt to warm floral winds is an exercise in upliftment. These spring breezes would waft me away if not for gravity’s annoying reality.

I’ll be surrounded by flowers soon, awash in floral scents and flower faeries. I dropped a load of stuff at the Shawnigan Lake place this past weekend, and the garden is all very neatly weeded and trimmed. This time of the year things have just started growing well; you can still see each plant for what it is, with stretches of bare dirt between.

Beauty is an incredibly delicious tonic, though it’s possible to become jaded by the same beautiful sights every day. This may well be one of the earth’s most gorgeous settings, but the thought of that lush garden is a thrill! I’ll be freshly thrilled to return here, too. Best of all possible worlds.

The most exciting thing about the garden is that I’ll be able to take close-up photos of new kinds of flowers. I love that super macro setting… I’m hungry for new things to photograph; I’ve pretty much milked this island dry of new sights. Change is good.

I don’t have a lot to say on certain days of the month. Something about blood loss brings me down, directionally speaking. Changing the subject now. Packing and readying to move on Monday is occupying all my waking focus, saying goodbye-for-now to all that I love about this place.

We weathered a lot of storms here, some more successfully than others. It’s sad to leave just when things are calming and warming. The energy is sweetening, and I am leaving, again. One day, I’ll root in and actually live someplace. Meantime, I’m practicing mobility and non-attachment to material things. Sigh.

Half the time, I don’t know what I’m talking about. No matter what anybody tells me, it’s only one perception of a story that has multiple facets. Sometimes, I make the mistake of swallowing another’s perception whole, shifting my own point of view over to theirs, which is sheer laziness, abandoning my ability to evaluate situation from my own perspective.

“Do tell! Why, you poor thing. You never… they never… really!?” This is one way that gossip is born. Then, because my own perceptions are inescapable, my judgments and assumptions warp the story into fiction, assumed to be truth.

“I got it straight from the horse’s mouth.” “I trust you, I believe you.” “If you hate X, then I hate X too.”

I’m so annoyed by the knee-jerk way I adopt others’ opinions as my own without thinking. I’m conditioned to call that ‘friendship’. Abandon my brain, abandon what I know to be true, i.e. that there are not just two but many sides to any story. How person A feels about or perceives person B is not necessarily how I should perceive that person. It is quite possible for me to like two people who hate each other.

As I struggle to break free of archaic rules of obligation and friendship, I find myself tangled in others’ mixed perceptions. Who to believe? Who is telling the truth? Is it either-or? No, it’s both-and.

Really, it doesn’t matter. I can’t know who’s ‘right’. There IS no ‘truth’, only stories. Someone tells me his story, and I can empathize with his pain and support his feelings without reinforcing his point of view or allowing him to corral my consensus. Another tells me her story and I can do the same. No right. No wrong. Just people, their pain and pleasure.

Life might be so simple if only we could find easy answers to complicated problems of human relationships. We believe that life IS simple, it’s just a question of finding the right formula, the magic pill to render and purify problems down to their component elements so we may choose correctly without fear of mistake.

Life is not simple, it’s chaotically and fractally complex. It only becomes simple in practice if we surrender to its inherent mystery. There are no sides to choose. There are only shifting points of view and fascinating stories to listen to, share and learn from.

The housing conference was ‘a watershed’, many peeps impassioned, ready for action on the sustainable, affordable, community-friendly home front. Me too. Still, am left with letdown feelings of, ‘what now’? Where is the group, where is the support, how do I do this?

Isolation is my issue. It comes from growing up in the bush with so few people around me; I don’t know how to reach out, to join in. As a kid, I lurked at the edges of whatever was happening, shyness compounded by isolation, alone in my oddity, the one piece that didn’t quite fit the puzzle.