kindness

Because there world is filled with so much hate, and it is so much what we hear every time we turn on the news....
this made me cry in a very very happy way.

kindness is *so simple*--

have you ever....

My friend Lorraine recorded this really fun song, and dedicated it to DELLA!
Love her bravery and love the lyrics.
Hope it sticks in your head (happily) like it does in mine.

Please share freely.
We could all use a little more whimsy.

otherness

anonymous shared a great comment on my infermentality post, about her feeling of otherness as she knows her family building days are coming to an end... and it really supported a feeling I've been having, an ongoing revelation maybe, that most of us, at the core, feel "other".

We may not feel it all the time, or every day, but there are always times when we feel like we are outsiders from an individual or group that we feel *should* be familiar somehow.

I know I have always felt this way with women. like there was a handbook that I did not get, and finally, so much time had passed, it was embarrassing to ask for one so I didn't. I've felt other in the arty school, other in the techie school, other in friendships sometimes when I felt less evolved, or just so different.

I think that is why community matters so much, and our support groups however virtual or distributed.
No one community, just like no one individual, can sustain all of our needs. We are complex creatures, and the person I talk tech to may not be the person I talk with about shamanic journeying, or reiki. The group that sings is not the same as the group that writes.

I realize, getting older, there are infinite layers of otherness just waiting to be explored. I am no longer the target market for anything except estrogen replacement therapies, rosacea cream, and antidepressants. Oh, and chocolate and face creams. So yeah, I take that back. I am a very targeted target market, because I have moved into a niche from the mainstream.

Which brings me, briefly to the idea of a normal curve, the idea of an average anything.

I recently came to a magical revelation that I want to share that I think has broad ramifications in the radical self acceptance movement:

no one has ever been you, living your life, making your choices, having your experiences.
you are the only expert on what it means to be you.

I know we all know this, but isn't it sort of awesome?

As a parent, I felt sort of freed up when I realized that no one has ever been me, parenting my child, with my partner in the context of my life, my work.... so to not find me reflected in a  book or expert is actually more expected in this framework than surprising.


but when I look more deeply, not at just the role of parent, but at the whole of kateness.... well,
I am rocking the kateness like no one else can, because no one else is me.
of course, somedays rocking it is quite literal in the rock and hum sort of way.
rock and hum and eat chocolate and pray for bedtime.

So, thank you anonymous! I so appreciate the comment and also appreciate the nudge to really expand my conversation about otherness.  there is a pantload of suckitude in feeling other, but then there is this little bit of magic that I hope to cultivate.  Gives envy a harder job.

Journeys: the way this has gone

Driving up north on Route 3 is a slow rewind through spring.

Back to buds and near bare branches

back to just the gentlest haze of color on the hillsides

snow in the shadows

last week I drove up, 4 hours each way through fog that broke open into ragged-bottomed clouds, the bluest sky, then the hardest rain.

I was looking for a cemetery that I did not find.

Instead I found myself pulling off the road without choosing to, into a gravel parking lot, taking a right turn at the bottom down a dirt road.  Into a smaller space, where my fingers turned the key, opened the door and then I was walking thorugh the woods on a path from my memory

through it, I guess

drawn by it

to turn down a path obscured by a fallen log

through the scent of lemony evergreens (hemlock?) 

the first time I ever walked those paths without a fishing pole, without Jeff.

down to the river, down the bank,

hands into the cold water by the falls.

A large water bird flew down the river, fast and low. Black and white and silent.

The day pulled me apart in ways and places I did not expect, and had me laughing, and swearing, as I went down each of a hundred roads, over a bridge (YES), up a hill that turned just so and opened up (YES, said my body, HERE) only to find that no, it was not the right place. the lump in my throat gathering so much unexpressed and inexpressible

sadness

frustration

loss, and lostness

I drove and drove and drove. I drove for two and a half hours, down roads, up roads, across bridges.

Rain so hard I could barely see.

Rain so hard it turned the dirt roads to muddy slides

I felt my tires slip a million times and each time felt a very different depth of alone-- I was not anywhere that anyone would find me and my signal had been lost 2 hours south.

Then I simply ran out of time.

Drove home.

Could not have been more exhausted.

***

Yesterday, I drove up again. Armed, this time, with different information. My first trip triggered memories, memories of a specific stone, one that was insanely easy to search for on google.

I went with a map, with a plan.

Back through the craggy mountains at franconia notch

back by the old man in the mountain, who fell the year Jeff died.

back up and through and beyond into the strange wide open that is the great northern woods.

I drove to the cemetery on the map. 

Found the stone of memory.

Left the twig of hemlock taken from the fishing spot. Left the pinecone. The stone is of Mettalak, the last of a tribe.

But it was not the cemetery. It is not the one, all those many winters ago, where I stood by the side of the road and threw snowballs laced with ashes over a snowbank too high to climb.

It wasn't. 

So said my body that felt no sign of him, did not feel him in the way the road had been worn down below the grade of the stones. 

So said the sign that noted the road is closed December-May 10th. 

I could not have driven that road.

It was february and the road would have been impassable.

There has been no simplicity in this journey. And that moment, there was an opening back into curiosity.

The wind was howling and the amazingly bright clouds were moving so fast their shadows felt almost tangible.

I got back in my car, and decided to drive back in a different direction, taking different roads, wondering if I would trigger more body memories that could help me navigate. 

Eventually I turned back onto pavement, and I immediately realized I'd turned the wrong way, and I heard, no it isn't. So I drove a mile at most, back to a cemetery I had found last week. One that said yes in every way except the lack of the stone that I had remembered.

But this time, I knew it was the right one. 

I got out and walked.

I looked on the ground, for what, fragments of bone? my wedding ring? I put a stone in my pocket.

I got back in my car, and turned toward home. 

It is high there, and the mountains fall away in all directions, and the light and shadows were moving so quickly with that wild wind, there was more than I could see.

Dark pines are nearly black against the spring green of new buds,

and the hillsides, that amount of open, 

I pulled off to let a truck pass, and to my complete surprise, cried a different way than I usually do about this. It was about the beauty, I guess, and my luck at the gift of just being able to witness.

Witnessing the shadows moving so fast, the light, on that hillside, that one. The one with the bright spring buds, the ones with the dark pines.

thanks dooce. I needed that.

Ok. besides being behind in my own writing...  I am more than a bit behind satisfying my online addictions of reading about other people's lives.
And when I do get online in stolen moments and I've sent comments that mysteriously disappear or send mid sentence, keep tabs open indefinitely waiting and wanting to comment and just never actually doing it, then the system crashes, and so does my mind, and there we are.

But yesterday, a momentary foray in the world of dooce, brought me to the singularly most hysterical quote about parenting I have ever read.
Resonating, no doubt, with this mother of a 2 and a half year old wildly spirited multi personality-ed spit fire of a holy moly how can That big a Soul fit in that body???

And today, laughing again just thinking about it (the quote), I spent 10 minutes finding it again to share with you.

Without further ado I give you:

"
Whoever invented parenting is the same type of fucker who would hand you a whisk and a stapler and demand, “Make fire.”
"
Excerpted with gratitude from http://dooce.com/2013/01/22/her-name/

Copyright © 2013 Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

 
http://dooce.com/

rain

in this moment, our first, real hard spring rain is falling...
coming down as if it's been thrown.
suddenly the air smells *so clean*
and every tiny new green thing is instantly impossibly greener.

I can almost hear the grass growing.
(I imagine it sounds like a subterranean version of sneakers on a basketball court)

infermentality

yesterday, apparently, was pregnant lady day at the GYN

I was the only non-spouse or parent there without a burgeoning belly
a non stress test was sending the whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh of a tiny determined heartbeat into the hallway
nurses were happily announcing, Another labor check! while handing off manilla folders bedecked with hot pink post-it notes

If I had been someone else
If I had been my earlier self
it would have been sheer unadulterated hell.

As it was, I felt like an imposter. I felt other. I felt--- I felt my infertility acutely... and felt, something like shame?

As I have said a bazillion times, I am holding the brass ring.
I know it, and revel in it, even in the midst of 2 and a half year old 2 and a half year olding....
And yet, even with the ring,
even with the best thing ever
I fear there will always be this otherness, this shame, this tentative outsiderness, this longing, this whatever-it-is. This infermentality.