Follows The Sun

I am afraid of heights, and I come by it honestly.

My father dislikes the thought of falling enough
that he feels anxious when our cat sits on the porch railing.

It’s two stories up, but still – I think she’d make it.

When I am up high, trying to be brave
like my friends who scale buildings
my fear is not vertiginous.

It’s paralyzing, and I don’t like to go forward
or backward, and I get stuck.
But I don’t get dizzy.

However, when I am lying in bed, half asleep
and my brain tells me in a flash
that the world has dropped from beneath me –
that’s vertigo.

And so is the feeling of a chair with uneven legs,
half an inch above the ground on either side.

A fraction of a second of free fall.

It’s enough to send you spinning.

This is connected, somehow, to the feeling
of community I do not have
but would like to have
and am always hoping for.

That hanging instant when the chair is wobbling
feels a little like the waiting time
when I think perhaps the new acquaintances
or the old friends half moved-on from me,
will be the ones to call me up this time
and ask me back into their lives.

It’s sad because the solid truth of it is
even if they did
it probably wouldn’t feel like enough.

The ache of renewed attempts would still be there,
the creeping notion that nobody else is lonely
or if they are
they are not lonely for me.

When the chair comes back down
from its terrible, wobbling, vertiginous half-inch height,
the ground is solid and I
can lean back and enjoy
dappled sunshine
crumbseeking birds
coffee.

When the dizzying hope that I
will be called by those who do not call me
dissipates back to solid life and plans,

all that’s left is a little grumpiness,
an irrational disappointment,
and an added effort.

I must not only call (again),
introduce an idea – dinner? board games?

I must do so graciously, gratefully.
I have not been slighted by a call that did not come.
How could I be?

In my briefly teetering chair
or bed during a phantom lurch
I don’t suddenly hope for a different
better outcome than the return of stability.

And now it occurs to me,
a little too late to avoid a few weeks
of feeling unwillingly let down,
that by connecting this hope

of being reached out to, of being asked in

to any brief vertigo
I have got hold of the wrong end of the thing.

It is because I am not always patient.

(I come by that honestly, too)

It is because I have never grown a garden from seeds.
I have never planted tiny nearly invisible specks in the ground,
knowing full well that most of them will come to nothing
except perhaps feeding birds
that do not live where there are crumbs to seek.

I buy plants small, but growing,
and let them get larger, or not.

In fact frequently I stunt their growth by failing
to put in the gentle effort it would take
to move them from their small pot to a bigger one,
and give them room to stretch their roots a bit.

Ok. The seeds are tiny.
Most of them, if we can even call them alive,
will die.

But some of them, eventually
very, very eventually,
will grow.

You are never on the verge of having a garden,
the way your chair leg is on the verge of hitting ground again.

You have a garden, or you don’t.

To push this analogy as far as it will go:
I have a garden. It is small, and I am not very good at it
but
I could be.
I can learn, from this year’s fallow and
next year’s blossoms growing into fruit.

So,
later on today I’ll make a call, and a suggestion.
If that call does not come through,
I’ll make another.

It’s discouraging.
I can learn to be ok with that, too.

I really like plants,
and I really like climbing on things,
and in fact I love that moment
when the chair hangs
in midair.

They come into my house as little stowaways,
in hair, or on your shoulder
quite unnoticed –

until they appear, seemingly from nowhere:
little pink refugees, bright against the carpet
or the broad warm wood floor.

They come here to die.

Even this they do daintily,
paling slightly, losing their softness
becoming a little crisp –
if possible, even,
a bit more ethereal than before.

Spring brings many invaders:
insects and pollen and roadwork.

I think I might like these best of all.

When one speaks of loneliness, what does one speak about?

Empty space.

When there is too much empty space around you, it can be bad.
Before you’re two months old, for instance
even having arms can be overwhelming, over stimulating.

Better to swaddle them close. Any space is too much space.

But what about those times when the space opens up
not around but within you?

Between your organs and your ribs.

Who knew your chest cavity could be
so cavernous?

A person can get lost in there.

When I am nervous about the intangible,
the spaces within me grow and grow
and I feel invisible fingers inside of me,
exploring my belly. Clutching my uterus.
Reaching up between my liver and my lungs.

Is this God?

I do not like it.

I think perhaps the whole long road to self-actualization
the one I am ostensibly travelling
(except that I wander off so frequently)
is nothing but a scheme
to keep some sort of control over

how much space I have
inside of me.

Did you know that today it is Sunny in Providence?
And it’s not even morning anymore.

It is Tuesday.
Since last Tuesday, and the Tuesday before that
I have been given a talking to
by the Universe
(My Pantheon).

I ought not forget that
I am seen
noticed
and loved.

It is Tuesday. It is sunny.
I am full of joy and grace.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Thank you.

Last year my great aunt died, and I wrote about it on Valentine’s Day.

I would like to be the sort of person who can ignore Valentine’s Day – just, not notice it, the way I basically don’t notice Groundhog Day. So far, I have not turned out to be that person.

This year I bought myself roses, to see how it would feel. It feels like I have 24 deep red roses looking incongruous on my blue-and-white tablecloth in my yellow kitchen.

I suspect it would feel different if somebody else bought ’em, but that was not what this experiment was about. They’re nice, but expensive. I don’t think I’ll do it again soon.

I will spend today in solitude. I hope I’ll get a little work done.

Last year also somebody threw rhubarb at me on Valentine’s Day, in my acting class, and I did not get to give them a hug afterwards, but I would have.

I lived in a different house then. I spent a lot of time sitting right in front of the heater. I burned the backs of some of my sweaters. I don’t do that now.

I think what I would like very much is to be loved publicly. But I don’t know if it’s true because I don’t think I ever have been (except one time somebody threw a surprise party for me, and that felt like their love was powering this whole event that other people were involved in, and that felt really good). Mostly the people who love me tell me, somewhere unobtrusive like the sidewalk or in bed or in the kitchen, that they adore me.

That’s not about Valentine’s Day, particularly, though. Just a thought, which the Internet has brought to me this morning.

I think I would be flattered if somebody told me somewhere where everybody else could see it, too. Dear world, they would say: there is this girl and I think she’s just magnificent, I think she’s the bees knees, and I hope I keep thinking so for a long time, because it’s fun as fun can be.

I used to have partners who used to do that, but mostly they stopped by the time they were with me. It was luck of the draw, that way.

One week ago exactly somebody who loves me made me a sweet dinner, and I wore a nice dress for it, and we made a watering can out of a coffee tin and some copper tubing (which we have discovered leaks just a little). In one week exactly, I think I may surprise this same person.

But today is a day for being alone, and not ignoring Valentine’s Day, and not being mad at it even though it is probably more stress and bagage than it’s worth.

It’s just a little holiday. We don’t even take off work for it. If I am not mad at Groundhog Day, it’s not fair to be mad at Valentine’s Day.

Maybe just a little lonely, in an ok-sort of way. That is how I’ll be about Valentine’s Day, this year.

We think she’s a big deal here,
just because we can’t sleep some nights
walk out restless in her reflected lights
like she is calling to us
pulling our soft tissues towards her

But this is nothing
she’s being gentle
toying with us, really

There are planets where her sisters
sweep so ruthlessly across the gas-swirled sky
that liquid is helpless not to follow

Barrenness is an end
not a beginning

the oceans know who’s in charge.

He rarely looks at you when he speaks
and not at all when he listens

He moves like a cat but
looks like a crow
and his voice
is downright operatic

He is rude

He is frustrating, and not above cheap jokes
he takes pains to sweep in dramatically
he knows how to pick his moment

In this,
as in many things
he is nearly always correct

My kitchen gets a lot of sunshine. I have been growing my sample size of kitchens over the past month, and I am satisfied to say that my kitchen is the sunniest of the lot.

I did not take pictures of the kitchensI visited, so you must take this claim on faith. However:

Here is a picture of my parents in a cave made of Michigan woods.

Here is a picture of what it looks like when a whole lot of people release balloons a quarter of an hour before a new year begins in Harrisonburg, Virginia. * #

Here is a picture I took from inside a tree in Portola Redwoods, in California.

And here is a picture of a frog showing off its toes in the California Academy of Sciences.

While I was in California I ate avocados every day. They were very good in an omelette with gooey american cheese, and they made a lovely addition to a nice BLT, but they were best of all on a bagel sandwich with hummus, lettuce, tomato and sprouts. I knew they would be.

The first thing I did when I got back to my chilly non-California kitchen was turn on the heat and go back out to get groceries. I got veggie juice (became instantly obsessed with it on the flight from SF back to DTW), cheese and crackers (reminded by my mother that this is an easy snack for people who are often not quite hungry enough to bother with an actual meal), stuff to make soup and all the fixings for an SF-style veggie-bagel sandwich.

The second thing I did was get sick.

I got home on a Thursday and took Friday off. At some point in the weekend I managed to dazedly put together a filling and nutritive sausage-escarole-chickpea soup. I even managed to eat it. My avocados and tomatoes ripened and were ignored. I snuffled, read books, drank veggie juice, slept.

Finally, on Tuesday, my avocado-guilt overcame me. I gathered my ingredients in the sunny kitchen and attempted to put together an Avocado-Tomato-Lettuce-Sprouts-Hummus-Sesame-Bagel-Sandwich. The result was quite handsom, in its way:

And it looked nice with my customary toureen of coffe:

But I can tell the difference between a San Francisco avocado and a world-weary East Coast impersonator. Also, lovely as it looked, the started to crumble before I even took a bite. I wound up eating bagel-with-hummus-sprouts-and-lettuce and mopping up bits of avocado and tomato with my fingers.

I will keep trying. And in a year-ish, give or take, when I get back to California, the first thing I will do is go out and get a sandwich.

* It looks better in person.
# Apparently the balloons were biodegradable, in case you’re the sort of person who worries about that kind of thing, which I am.

She’s terrifying.

Not because of the way she makes
it perfectly clear
how she owns the world.

Not because of the marks she can leave,
little slices. Big slices.
red red red.
blue black yellow green.

Not because she’s like me not like me a little like me
and that can be confusing
in an admiring
not admiring
sort of way.

In fact, because of all of those things.

But mostly because of her teeth.

Her teeth are so small.

They are white and they are each
individual
little pieces of bone
little bone knives.

Most people, you look at their teeth,
and they’re like the palisades
or a fence
they’re all together in a line, teeth
not a collection of tooths.

It’s that individuation
and the smallness
somehow, that makes them so scary.

What a surprise –
those little edges.

The better to eat you with.

Some things on my mind right now:

• How until someone with federal power takes notice and says something, the Occupy Movement all over the country remains a local issue. Local in from coast to coast. Dealt with in all sorts of different ways. I wonder if it’s caused camaraderie in mayors the way it’s caused it in occupiers?
• How jaded my generation is, how excited and optimistic I am, and why I’m still mostly following the news instead of being part of it.
• How even people with the right sort of ideas can really miss the picture sometimes. Example: When I was working with kids in AmeriCorps, I was taught never to use rice or dried beans or other edible products as art supplies – it was too likely to be painful to a child without enough to eat at home. Now, I teach Sunday school for a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and they don’t bat an eye at using rice in art. Why not? None of their kids are going hungry. Woah, demographics.
• What makes me claim some neurotransmitters as my own, whereas others (the ones I ingest in birth control instance) I am uncomfortable with, and try to separate. How I will feel when I can’t point to an outside source of hormones to take the blame away from me when I react to situations in ways I wish I didn’t. What I’ll do if my insecurity and sadness are, in fact, based squarely in the same place that I base my sense of self.
• Gender, gender, gender. My gender, kids’ genders, gender choice and gender presentation and how to give options and support without pushing or weighing things in one way or another. Gender is complicated. Gender is great!
• How crazy it is to base relationships on appreciation of difference instead of (or, let’s be honest, in addition to) appreciation of sameness. Whether I’ll be able to love myself a little more easily if I can stop being afraid that the parts of me that aren’t like the things I admire in other people somehow make me bad.
• How much I love America. How proud I am to be American. How afraid I am of America, and how sick I am of the way Americans set up media to speak to ourselves. Today in doctors office I caught some morning news program. It was bad. Just, really bad.
• Gradschool. Getting a masters level degree. Not getting a PhD even though lots of my friends and one of my parents are getting or have one. Trying not to feel like getting an MSW instead makes me less smart, hard working, accomplished, worthwhile…
• Syntax. Sentence structures are fun!
• How hard it is to buy clothes that fit, and how I kind of wish they didn’t even PUT misleading information like “small” or “large” or “size 6” or “size 10” on things. Also, how very nice it is to be able to buy clothes, and to have clothes that fit.
• My hands hurt. I am brave. I am not anathema.
• How totally, unutterably lucky and blessed I am to have the life and the brain and the body and the skills I do, and to be loved by so many amazing people. How biodiversity is amazing. How closely connected wolves are to domestic dogs. How much I love moss. How beautiful the world is, fences and vines, leaves and the dark shadows they leave on the sidewalk, sunshine and clouds. That kind of stuff. You know.