Piecing It Apartogether

I'm not so great around my birthday anymore since my mother died. I feel deeply lonely, no matter what, and a scrambled, frenetic energy that goes nowhere. For my 56th birthday, I was determined to make the best of a year that was divisible by eight, my favorite number. I collected all the self-portraits I've written over the years, took them to Staples, and had copies made to create a book. My plan was to make the book interactive with pull-outs and pockets with secret messages for the recipient, and collaged covers. This never happened because the project was beset with printing errors, user errors, and a general sense of "maybe this just doesn't matter all that much to anyone other than me." So I relegated all 100 (why?!) copies, and the special binding machine I purchased to the attic storage, and forgot about it. A week or so ago when I was digging around for art supplies, I opened up a suitcase and rediscovered all the copies of poems.

I left them out as I worked on another project. "Maybe now is the time to do something with these," I thought. Then I really looked them over, all these versions of me, poems I no longer related to, and I threw them all away. The spontaneity! Whee! I'm letting go of all this ego! Also, how wasteful. I felt liberated, with a coating of light guilt and melancholy.

Later that week I was looking for some drawings to show my friend, and I found yet another box of those self portraits. I must have said to myself that if I left the poems within view, I'd do something with them. But the box became part of my everyday landscape, just another object my eyes grazed over to get to the glue sticks or pompoms they were truly seeking. I ignored them.

"Those are some determined poems," I decided. Now I had to do something with them. 

Every morning I've been cutting these self-portraits apart, redacting myself. I redacted my own book of poems, Year in the Blanks, a few times over, and I have so many versions of that book now on my hard drive it's confusing. My process was different for that. I started by blacking out words and phrases on the printed pages, and then quickly went into the file and removed words, and tinkered with space. It had less a physical, visceral feeling to it. I was, for the most part, focused on a screen.

Cut-up technique is nothing new. The Dadaists started it in the 1920s, and William S. Burroughs began cutting up newspaper articles and rearranging the words to create prophetic phrasings in the 50s and 60s. Many artists use the technique now in varying ways. 

"When you cut into the present, the future leaks out."  - William S. Burroughs

I'm not exactly cutting into the present when I take apart my old poems. I'm cutting into the past me, revealing what I hope is more present tense, and less about me. It's hard to get away from yourself when creating though. There's always just a titch of you flavoring the soup. I think that's what I find fascinating about this. How much do I pare away and what do I keep?

Cutting up paper is a very tactile, focused experience. The screech of scissors from the 1970s, the little slivers of paper that I flip over carefully with a licked finger then shuffle around the desk. I trim away suffixes, prefixes, rearrange words in a puzzle that has no end goal image to follow. When I'm done I take a few photos of the poems as they rest on the desk, and then I whisk them into the trash bin. Ephemeral. That kind of letting go feels good too. It is pure play. Quiet and filled with delight.

Here's the source self-portrait I used this morning. The poems you've seen throughout this post were made from this poem. 

The Best of It

“How is the ring of my being singing through others?”

- Nora Bateson

Of course this book of poems

is me, and you, 

and the stranger who

starred in it, looped, bracketed, underlined

whole passages —

order is always

starting over

A reminder that objects

invite our touches,

just a highlight here

and there

As though the self

were eager to be wrecked

As though each of our selves

were dying to be found

and then cut out 

of our muzzy landscapes

and the chap of dreams, 

rearranged, out-of-context,

and out of order.

How messy

it is to live, all

marks and meaning

to get to some final

point of exclamation,

to feel connected.

How distance

begins to look extraordinary

and logimagical enough to abandon

this poem-book-lover-past-tense-childhood

for someone else to pick up 

and start over. 

Viewfinder

I wake.
My soul spent the night
resting on an eyelash.
It slips into an iris, 
ready for duty. 
I hear my heart 
beat again, feel 
the smoothness
of pillowcase, lift
the whole corporeal canister
to reach for my glasses.

Cool arms curl each ear,
a bridge arches nose, 
lenses tighten the resolution 
of each scene — everything 
obscured or enhanced 
by the tip of my nose, 
my fleshy cheeks. 

Our private viewfinders
draw us like dogs with cameras 
attached to our heads —
lovable goofballs
lumping through life,
gusto noses 
leading the way.

Where is my soul now
that I am awake? 

Ribcage,
liver, 
duodenum —
in the darkest places,
out of frame,
editorial.

--

I've kept an index card with a scribbled note on it on my desk for several weeks: "noticing your cheeks, heartbeat, breath, end of nose, frames of glasses." Yesterday this poem arrived. 

Wyrd Bird Always Looking for Seeds

Well, hello. It's In-betweenween! My favorite time of year, when the leaves sing opera, and the crow visits the Hackberry every morning, and the eye of day squints longer at the start and earlier at the end. Reflection requires some darkness, and silence. This time of year provides it, but you have to be willing to slow down to receive it.

Several months ago, when we were in high sun time, Dan and I stopped at an antique shop in New Hampshire. We both saw the giant letters on the porch, but he was the one who spoke up about them. "What do you think they spell?" he asked. That was just what I needed to hear (he knows me), and we were up on that porch rearranging, trying to figure out what they once read. We found enough intriguing anagrams to buy them, and then drive for hours with giant metal letters squeaking in the back of the car until we were home. We rearranged them several times before getting them to be tolerably squeaky. They wanted to talk! Probably excited to have a new home.

For awhile, the letters sat on the ground by the fence, and we had our turns anagramming. 

A couple of weeks ago, Dan built a shelf for them that is slightly tilted, so the letters won't fall off, but we can still play with them. It's genius. My favorite full anagram of these letters is SOOTHSAYER. It's just right for In-betweenween, which is also my season of life. 

*Note visiting trickter raccoon in photo below:

This past week I completed a HarvardX course in Divination practices. It was fascinating, and illuminated a lot of the work I am doing right now creatively. I'm beyond excited to share some of what I've learned, but am not quite there yet as I am building some pieces and parts. (Don't worry, there are no sheep livers involved.) But I'm verified!

The other day my instincts told me I should spend time in my little attic treehouse after work, and I did, digging through old journals trying to find an answer to a question, and also to look for an empty book to use. I found my answer, and an empty notebook, and I was also gifted with an entry in my journal from last year, where I wrote about the origin of the word "weird." It was originally a noun, and spelled wyrd.

noun: wyrd

connected with fate.

noun: weird; plural noun: weirds 

a person's destiny.

The "weird sisters" of Macbeth were not odd, they were the three Fates. Well, they were also odd, so it was doubly good. Shakespeare was like that. A wyrd bird.

Tricksters

A few mornings ago I looked up from my desk and saw a raccoon hop up from the road onto the stretch of grass in front of my window. It was raining that day, and its fur was sodden. It walked right up to the house like it had important business by the Japanese quince and the linden. Then it disappeared. It was right near the house and I lost track of it. This is the magic of raccoons. They are shapeshifters. When they visit, they are here to teach you to be vigilant, or persistent, or clever in your dealings.There's a lot of folklore surrounding them. When we visited Japan I fell in love with the sensual depictions of tanuki. Tanuki are more of a cross of a fox and a raccoon. I prefer the cheerful and benevolent rogues they turned into to their original forms, which were said to possess humans and haunt them.The rogue tanuki is a partier, with a large belly and scrotum, and usually a bottle of sake at hand.

The animals around here have more business than I do, scribbling and dreaming at my desk. The owl knows when there's the business of a loose duck, the fox knows spring dusks by the pond are her best business hours, the deer keep a quiet business of traffic across the fields, stray cats have the business of frog and field mouse hunting, the rats keep a hippity hoppity duck feed business.

My business hours are 5 a.m. to about 4 p.m. now, when the light shifts into night. I crack open a can of corn, put on muck boots, a giant, black sweater that makes me look like an ominous wooly worm, and lead the duck parade to safety. The business of the raccoon, the weasel, the fox, the owl, thwarted once more by the cleverness of chicken wire, hardware cloth, and hope.

The Raccoon Whisperer, a retired veteran in Canada who feeds raccoons hot dogs, is raccoon and human business transaction at some of its best.

A Reconnaissance of Cats

This morning I woke up thinking about cats, as the newest one in our family wiggled her way from the bottom of the bed to perch directly on my chest. It's hard not to think about cats when you have one breathing on your chin. I made a mental list, and discovered I've known and loved fifteen cats in my lifetime, not counting the ones who lived with my parents or friends.

Spooky

  A black and white wilding of a cat, she was a first cat memory of early childhood. My sister named her. I don't remember much about her except a story of her clawing Dad's back, an event which didn't go over well. She was in and out of the house, and when we moved Mom worried that she'd not be able to find her way back to the new house. She put butter on Spooky's paws, following an old wives tale that if the cat licked it off she'd also taste the dirt of home, and know where she was meant to be. Spooky must have tasted the roof in that butter because she spent a lot of time on the roof of our newly built home in the winter. Our icicles were yellow. 

Pip

    Pip and Pyewacket were a sister and brother pair who found us as kittens in our early teens. Pip was Kristen's cat. A black and white cat, similar to Spooky, I remember her sleeping on Kristen's bed, devoted. Later, when Kristen went off to college, and Mom and Dad moved, Pip found her favorite spot in the new house was in the onion basket on top of the fridge, a perch she used to swat at people as they walked by. Surprise! 

Pyewacket

    A tiger striped male, Pyewacket was really the first cat I called my own. He was a friendly cuddler; a rollicking fatboy. He enjoyed playing with chipmunks outside, which I didn't like to see. Once he got into a ground bee nest and was stung multiple times, and panted like a dog as we took him to the vet. Pye heard all my teen dramas, sadness, and dreams. I couldn't take him with me to my first college apartment. He became an escape artist when Mom and Dad moved to Ephrata. 

Poem

    A calico female I got at a pet store when I was in college, Poem was a tiny and elegant cat. As a kitten she was acrobatic, and leapt onto bookcases and mantlepieces. My grandmother Romayne was amazed by her energy. She accompanied me through college, and my early marriage. She was the cat who sat in my vanishing lap as I was pregnant with Helen, and she was Helen's first cat. We brought Helen's little baby hat home from the hospital so she could meet her through scent. She slept next to Helen's cradle and watched over her.

October

    Mom used to say "The fur fairy threw up on October." I'd  never seen a tweed cat before, but that's what October was. She was like the jacket of a literature professor. Thin and clever, she enjoyed eating spaghetti noodles directly out of the pan in the kitchen, and once sunk her teeth into a tube of ground turkey. She didn't like it when I went away on weekends though. She'd drag her butt across the carpet of the apartment, and I'd come home to poop trails. Mom and Dad took her in when I couldn't keep two cats, so she ate spaghetti at their house, and enjoyed the morning ritual of feeding the African frogs. Mom had her trained to the sound of a music box. She'd open the lid right before she fed the frogs, and October would run in to get her treat of frog food.

Mouse

    Mouse showed up one day on Buttonwood street, in the little patch we called a backyard. She was grey and white, and longhaired. A lovely fluff of a cat. Bewitched by her floofiness, I let her in, and she caused havoc. She was a storm cloud who found her way to a friend in Reading.

Edna

    Edna and Albrecht were adopted at a Reading shelter when Helen was two years old. As kittens they slept with her on her toddler bed, all curled up at her feet. They were her cats, even though I claimed Edna, and Joe claimed Albrecht. Edna was the sweetest, most tolerant female cat. The color of a latte, with faint stripes and spots of white on her chin and paws, she was beautiful in a simple and subtle way. Helen used to dress her up in doll pants, and she would walk around with a rankled look on her face. She curled up neatly on laps, and loved every visitor. In her later years she had a neurological event (a stroke, maybe?), and we took her to the vet after finding her stumbling around on the stairs. She recovered, and was with us a few more years. Her fur was as soft as a rabbit.

Albrecht

    An orange tiger male, Albrecht was named after Albrecht Durer, Joe's favorite artist. In his later years, he grew enormously fat, and loved to sleep in Helen's "critter heap" of stuffed animals. He blended in well, but he snored loudly, giving his location away.

Mango

    I adopted Mango from a Wilkes University student who found herself with a litter of kittens. It was Helen's birthday, and this cat was a birthday gift. Mango was formally named Mango Toodles Kaucher Caraballo, a collective decision of Helen and her best friend, Alex. I remember bringing Mango home, and driving over the Market Street Bridge to discover that she had escaped her box. She climbed up onto my shoulders and tried to sit on my head for the rest of the drive. Mango was white with orange spots, and shorthaired. She was similar in temperment to Edna. She enjoyed sliding around in the hallway in a shoebox, a game we played with her often. She accompanied Helen into her young adulthood and moved with her a few times, including back into our home for awhile, a "home from college" visit.

Stella

    Stella was the half sister of my mother's cat, Miss Havisham. Both of them came from a woman in Ephrata who fed all the feral cats in the neighborhood until they were friendly and less fearful of humans. Stella and Miss H. always retained a bit of the feral in them, even when they found cozy homes. Stella's thrill was discovering baby rabbits in the basement and bringing them up into the hallway for snacks. I still don't know how she did it. When we moved from Edwardsville to Lancaster, she was spooked, and found her secret hiding spot in the basement. We left food and water, and Helen brought her to Lancaster later. Then she became Marissa's confidante. 

Lucy Bob

    An adoptee from the SPCA by way of PetSmart, Lucy had a gravelly, old lady meow, as if she'd spent a long time smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky. On our way out of the pet store with her, some guy heard her meowing from the carrier and said, "Good luck with that." She hated the litterbox, and only pooped next to it. She was cuddly, and chubby, and had no troubles with her roommates, Edna, Stella, and Mango, and Muninn. I have a photo of myself at Christmas one year, sitting in a chair, covered in all five cats. Bliss.

Muninn

    A beautiful black male cat who found us by way of our friend Jack, Muninn was half of a pair of cats Jack had for years -- Muninn and Huginn -- named after the Norse ravens. Muninn didn't like living with us much. He didn't like being away from Jack. First he was first rehomed to Jack's mother, and then to us, where he had to live with four other cats, and none of them were Norse Gods. 

Steve

    Steve was the only male kitten from a litter born on the rainy day porch of one of Helen's coworker's uncles. When I went to visit, all the females hissed at me, but Steve peered up from his spot under a glass topped coffee table. When I picked him up, he purred. He's an all black ragdoll cat with long fur that mats in the summer. He gets a regular "lion cut" when he mats, which makes him look a little silly, but it's more comfortable. Steve loves all of my costumes. When he hears the closet open he's right there, ready to admire (lick) feathers, and chew on tulle. He gets the same giddiness around Christmastime when the decorations and wrapping paper come out. A lover of water, he drinks from the sink, and will also have a sip from your unattended cup, thank you very much.      

Ozgood

    Oz found us by way of the "Kitten Bush" here on our property which we think blooms once or twice every couple of years. I found him in the shed one morning, meowing behind the tools. A tiny, male tabby, he stayed outside for awhile, getting used to us and our schedule. He loved the farmstand visitors and people asked about him. He joined me for hoop practice in the barn, and played with everything I was working on. When it got cold, he came inside and was an indoor/outdoor cat, until he brought poison ivy oil in on his fur. Now he's indoor only, and is the friendliest and possibly the smartest of our cats. When Stubs joined us, he welcomed her like a big brother. When she escaped recently, scared by a power outage, he went outside to look for her. A hero. He's also a great mouser, which is helpful in an old farmhouse. 

Stubs

    Dan heard her meowing behind the rhododendron last year. "I think the Kitten Bush has bloomed again" An all black stump of a kitten, she was truly feral. It took me a long time to woo her with food, and I spent a lot of time sitting on the cold patio. Our neighbor helped too by bringing his stuffed mouse on a string, and coaxing her into play. On Thanksgiving Day last year,she walked right into the kitchen, and never looked back. We call her Kettle Bell, Stubby, Gremlin, Bunbun, Bowling Ball, and a host of other in-the-moment nicknames, and recently Dan said she looks like a whiskey barrel on four thumb tacks. She's short of stature, but has some heft, and plenty of independent attitude. She's the cat I wake up to every morning, because that's when she gets fed. 

If you're up for more cat stories, you can check out Cats I've Known: On Love, Loss, and Being Graciously Ignored by Katie Haegele. 

Unrelated and Related Fragments About Ownership

Everyone has hauled out their holiday decor overnight, and now each home dances with projected snowflakes, or an inflatable chicken dressed as Santa bobs in the wind by their front door. Yesterday I found myself in the wonderblitz of Target, considering lights. You can buy them by strings of 200, coiled on large plastic spools, for $28 each. I'd need at least three to cover the tree by the barn. That's a lot of money for something that is impermanent. I decided to not buy anything for the holiday and dig around in the attic when the mood strikes. Then I bought thirteen dollars worth of toilet paper and left, but not before taking a slow stroll through the makeup to ask myself, "Do I care about this anymore, either?" The answer was no. I do not, but part of me wants to. The sparkly part.

I tested negative for Covid yesterday morning. It's been a long two weeks of feeling taken over. I'm still coughing and tire easily, and toothpaste tastes fusty instead of minty. When no extra line appeared on my test I had the impulse to call my mother to share the good news. She would wonder what I'm talking about, gone long enough to have never heard the word "Covid." 

When I was unpacking the toilet paper, I noticed a man was standing by our newly sorted shed, his red umbrella popped like a mushroom in the rain. I pointed him out to Dan, then I saw the man punch numbers into his phone, and Dan got a call. For the next few minutes Dan politely explained that the shop is closed for the season, and yes that information is on the website, and today is Sunday, we live here, we're closed. It is obvious we are closed. The property is under a good deal of construction with a path being replaced by the house, so there are pallet piles, large stones, and heavy equipment in the driveway. The barn is closed, the farmstand is zipped up. There are no signs saying we are open. But this man was insistent in his need to shop, to browse, to consume. When I saw his wife step out of our shed, I was stunned. Who just stands in a total stranger's shed as if it is a bus stop? They sat in their car and kept Dan on the phone with questions for a long while, saying they would place an online order and then Dan could bring it out. Then they spent more time browsing on their phone, and must have decided that it was just too much to bear. They left without any announcement or fanfare. In spite of my frustration with people who act this way, the hostess in me hopes they noticed the charming ducks, dibbling in the mud by the pond.

I looked up William the Conquerer to read about him right before I fell asleep, just because his name popped up in my head like a real estate ad while I was walking down the hallway to the bedroom. I didn't realize he ordered the compilation of the Domesday book, a survey listing all the land-holdings in England along with their pre-Conquest and current holders. Adelina Joculatrix is listed in the Domesday book. She was a jester and owned land, unusual for women. I wonder if anyone ever showed up in her shed, demanding to be entertained. I wonder if she kept ducks.

The Physical World

The soul straddles time and the infinite. The soul resides in that untoned flap of upper arm. The soul, your soul, if you believe you have one, exists with all the other souls that have ever and will ever exist. The soul is immeasurable and also changeable. Your soul lives in rain and snails and tree roots. The soul frolics as a rat under straw. The soul dozes like a lowercase l. The soul is yellow, no, red, no, it's the color of that feeling you get when you peel back several layers of wallpaper and find you are holding a handful of palimpsest. The soul, your soul, found mine in all the noise of the world, all the static and yawping, and like two magnetic tricky dogs we snapped together. Even though you don't believe in souls, I sure like yours, and how it insists on the scientific, the known, the physical. The soul is theory. The soul is hypothesis. The soul is part dendrite and mitosis and the bedroom light switch. The soul loves its body and doesn't want to leave it, but when it does please leave a window open or cut a hole in the ceiling, because the soul is not all magic (that word it digests), and is given to clumsiness. This soul isn't a professional soul. It's new in its oldness.

Not One Braided Narrative from Goody Pensmith

Yesterday I rhymed "maneuver" with "leftover" and it was as forced as a piece of sky puzzle piece jammed into the bottom left corner. I have a note on my desk that says "braided narrative," and I have all the interest in writing one that I have in the following suggestion on the same note: 

20 lines where each uses three of the words beautiful, ridiculous, beautiful

Past me, a real Goody Pensmith, wants me to write these ideas out. Current me has all the brain energy of a test pattern. It's past midnight and everyone is asleep.

There are plenty of Goody Pensmiths online, encouraging other hopeful writers, sharing prompts, asking open ended questions so they'll get engagement and follows and fans. The equivalent of carnival barkers, shouting at a public that reads less and scrolls more.

Beautiful, ridiculous, beautiful.

Passing By

The greying fence that once wound around the corner of our property is gone now. Every morning I looked out at it, close range, from my writing desk. There was not much reason for it. What was it keeping out? What was it holding in? I decided we'd have more light, and I'd get a better sense of the gardens around the house without it. The wood could be repurposed into a wood shed, and possibly an outhouse. My argument was sound, and so the fence is gone and we have a wood shed. 

My morning view has improved. I see the sunrise slap the sides of trees, the frosty grass of the field across the road, and I wonder who is awake in the neighbors house when there's a light on. I also see traffic up close. Yesterday I saw a driver cut someone else off, and the victim gave the offender a solid middle finger. Not a flash, not a flicker, but a switched-on-for-good fuck you. Some drivers who stop at the corner notice me and my little green lamp. This morning there was the older man in the black pickup who shamelessly stares as he makes the turn. His head is fixed like an owl. Yes, someone lives here, and yes, she can see you passing by on your way to work.

All of a Sudden

This morning I started a sentence in my journal with "All of a sudden," and I remembered a moment when I handed my mother a story I'd written. I used the phrase a lot in my story, but I wrote it "all of the sudden." My mother corrected my usage. "It's all of a sudden, not the." I was stunned, and a little confused. What difference did it make, really? A. The. They were both articles, signifying a noun up ahead. Was sudden a noun? An adjective? I learned the phrase was an idiom, which sounded too close to idiot for me. 

All of a sudden was a favorite phrase of mine, and it still is. As someone who feels like everything in life is happening all at once, it works. All of a sudden, my pen ran out of ink. All of a sudden, the ducks were in the road. All of a sudden, my fake mustache peeled off and fell into my coffee with a fuzzy plorp.

Everything is a surprise with all of a sudden. An unexpected delight (or not).

It turns out we've been using "of a sudden" since Shakespeare first coined it in The Taming of the Shrew. "Is it possible That love should of a sodaine take hold? (antiquated spelling alert!) Sudden has been used as an adjective since the 15th century, and it was once a noun, too, meaning "that which is sudden." Today the noun form is obsolete, except in the phrase "all of a sudden."  

What a gem! 

All of a sudden, the word sudden is no longer a noun.

All of a sudden, thanks to Mom, a memory, and the internet, I know a little more.

Backstage

Don’t worry, spiders,

I keep house

    casually. 

                - Issa

Yesterday, while eating a quick lunch of ramen soup "shooshed up" with garden vegetables and a dash of chili oil, a gentle knock came to the kitchen door. Helen looked at me, and we shared a mild panic. "Who is that?" Dan stood up and opened the door a crack, and partway up the steps stood two women. "We're here to pick up an order of cinnamon buns."

Dan laughed and said, "Ah! How did you get past my camera alerts? We usually get a notice when someone is here." He abandoned his soup, thrust feet into boots and was out the door helping them in no time. Lunch is almost always, without fail, interrupted by a customer.

Helen and I stayed to slurp up noodles. It was rainy, and we'd already been out in it a number of times, getting thwacked in the face by the sodden mulberry, or slipping in duck goo. It was unseasonably chilly. The soup was just right.

"How did they even find their way to the kitchen entrance?" I wondered. Helen posited that they walked through the barn. We'd left the door open to the path, which means they went through the disaster of a prop room, where art supplies and theatre props are piled. Then they had to walk up the mangled path, where jutting bricks make a challenge even for the surest of feet. The fig and mulberry meet to combine a low soggy arch on rainy days, which if you aren't paying attention, will lick you in the face and leave your hair all combed with leafy bits. They worked through obstacles to get to our porch.

What was the prize for making it all that way? They saw all our coffee cans filled with rotting scraps for the compost heap, a muddy array of boots and shoes, an entire closet of plaid coats, pants, and rain gear hanging on hooks, a filthy rag dangling on the banister to dry (not working well on this day). Then, a few surprised faces sitting around a kitchen table.

While we are used to visitors to the farm stand and the barn theatre, we are not accustomed to people knocking on our kitchen door. I felt exposed.

All the coffee cans filled with banana peels and eggshells, loose boards, undusted surfaces, were seen by the audience. Not to mention the cast of maladroit insects we're too lazy to kick out.

 

 

Motivation, Play, and the Role of the Inner Critic

Sit down. Stop wriggling around. All of your ideas are nothing unless they are written down. It's useless for them to float around out there, or just live in your head. Stop moving. Sit down! Get it on paper. Who do you think you are, a dancer? Sit. Write. Sit and write it. It's up in your head, but that's not enough. Write. It. Down.

Words from my inner critic surprised me yesterday, and I want to give them some credence, because as harsh as the inner critics (mine are a consortium) can be, their words come from a place of caring. They are the great protectors. They are, in their own warped way, making sure I don't screw up. They want some say in my creative life. I'm learning to listen to them. To hear their side(s).

The inner critic who showed up yesterday during a clown exercise really wanted me to sit, and stop "juking about," and really believes strongly about the power of print. So do I. I love words. I'm here, sitting, writing some at the end of a busy day. I wrote several pages this morning, by hand, while it was still dark outside. I sat for that, too. I'm not all wriggly, all of the time. See? I write!

Something highlighted for me during this year of staying at home is that I have no motivation for anything at all unless I move. I need to move early in the day, and then and only then do I feel enough lightness to move forward with what needs to be done, or even what I want to do. It's been difficult to drum up enthusiasm lately, but playful movement helps me to keep going. It isn't "juking about." It's serious business. It generates energy, and gets my neurons connecting. I get some of my best ideas during my  movement practice. Functional movement outdoors, like stacking firewood or taking care of livestock also makes me feel lighter, unless the goats escape and then I swear a lot.

I'm listening to this inner critic, and considering some projects, and reflecting on what needs to be written. It's making me powerfully antsy, to be honest, sitting here and writing about it all, to essentially no one other than myself. Am I trying to just shine this inner critic on, and convince them I'm doing something when I'm not? I'm tired of sitting and thinking about it, and feeling like I need to justify my need to move everyday to feel motivation, even if it's true.

Am I losing my mind? Perhaps. This seems like a perfectly fine segue into a broken vacuum cleaner being used as a puppet.

A few weeks ago our vacuum broke. Instead of throwing away the broken part, I hung onto it. A found puppet was born, and Helen and I took it around the house for some experimenting. We did a lot of laughing. It felt good just to play without any intention of a finished product. It was energizing. It made me feel lighter. Play first, write later.

 If you can't view the video below, please click on "web view" from your phone to view it.