Everywhere There is Beauty

 As I sit down to write and cast about for a subject, my eyes are caught by the cover of this journal. The intricate pattern of silver and copper lines shifts colors as I move it and the sunlight from the window strikes it at different angles.

I bought the journal for its beauty, but other beauties come into my life unsought: the sunlight after rain, the plant life in my neighborhood, the textures and colors of a small purse that turned up in my bureau long after I’d forgotten how it got there.

Beauty is nearly everywhere I look if I’m of a mind to see it – or hear it, taste it, feel or smell it, or even read about it. Like a shy pet, it waits for a moment of calm, a sliver of attention, a hint of openness.

It’s easy to block beauty out. I can be all wrapped up in something else: a grievance, fright, or worry, a painful juncture in a relationship, or some issue with my body. Life is full of distractions from beauty, even if they are chores or other matters that must be attended to. By all means, we take care of the needful things. But then we can look up, or take a break, and see, hear, feel, taste, or smell something that feeds our soul.

Creativity and Me

Creativity is the holy Grail of writers and all artisans. In fact, we're sometimes called "creatives." However, creativity comes with being human; it is as inherent as our ability to breathe. In the beginning, God created humans in the divine image. All we know about the divine at that stage of the story is that it creates. Ergo, what we humans share with the divine at the very core of our being is the ability and urge to create.

Fine, but tell that to the empty page that sits there smirking at me. Tell that to my legs that take me away from that page more often than not, Tell that to the perfect blank that appears in my mind when I reach for the pen.

Well, creativity can be drummed out of us or suppressed, or ignored because it doesn't feel right, because it comes at an awkward time, or because it doesn't seem good enough.

How to encourage myself to just write something? The word "discipline" comes to mind, but I immediately push it away - it just makes me sad. The concept of motivation works better for me. I find that I am motivated to write by a group of friends who are expecting me to write something to share with them next week. Best of all is sitting down with a group of friends and writing with them. Their creative energy mingles with mine, and it's magical.

Darkness at Noon

 Although I use blackout blinds in my bedroom, I can tell when morning has come by the light entering at their edges. If I can’t see the lines, it’s still night and I can go back to sleep. Wednesday morning, though, I couldn’t see the lines but my body was telling me that my sleep was complete. I looked at my iThing, and it said 8:30am. That seemed weird. I went into the back hallway, and it was still dark out, but the sky was poisonous shades of orange. I checked the clocks in the kitchen, and they said 8:30. I was pretty sure it was not evening, but not sure of anything else. Finally, I checked my wristwatch, and it agreed on the time. Looked specifically for the “a.m.” on my device, then grudgingly decided it was indeed morning. But what a damn weird one! The sky was wrong, wrong, wrong.

This whole year is an adventure in wrongness: plague, economic collapse, racial strife, wildfires, and now something took away our morning! I was freaking out. I wanted to talk with another human being and see if she also noticed how weird this was. I contacted a friend, who kindly heard out my venting and confirmed that it was weird out there. This calmed me enough to seek enlightenment on FaceBook and check my email. FB was full of pictures people had taken to share how dark and orange the Bay Area was this morning. It was very comforting that others had experienced the same apocalyptic vibe. Then I opened an email with a satellite photo and explanation. A major pall of wildfire smoke had arrived in the Bay Area. At the same time, Mother Nature’s Bay Area air conditioning, the marine layer of fog and cloud, had come in overnight. It scraped the air clean near the ground, pushing the smoke and ashes up into the sky, where it filtered out the sun and all colors but the orange. So, it looked like midnight on Mars out there, but the air quality where we stood was not too bad. Goody.

My email also revealed that my doctor’s office had received this year’s flu shots, and I could drop in to get mine. My interior committee weighed in: the majority opinion was that I should get back in bed and stay there until true daylight. The minority had it that hiding out from the weirdness wasn’t worth screwing up my sleep cycle; I should just suck it up and go get my flu shot. So I did that very thing, walking a few blocks to the office on 24^th street. The last time I remember leaving my home in the dark, I was headed to a medical building for a sleep study.

It was very strange. Cars had their headlights on; streetlights were on. Lights inside buildings made it seem like late evening. The people I encountered in the office and the shops all commented on the apocalyptic look of the sky. Plague, famine, fire; every time we think we’ve hit bottom, things get worse.

Best to stay in the moment, and not borrow trouble. But the crepuscular world out there is awfully damn creepy!

A Covid Introvert (?)

When the Covid lockdown began, I thought that my introverted self would be happy and relieved to be ordered to stay home instead of being guilted to get out already. In fact, staying home is now my civic duty—to protect myself and others from this plague.

My BC (before Covid) habit was to attend events every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Nowadays, my formerly built-in excursions have turned into Zoom sessions.

Thus, I have to take responsibility to make plans if I want to get myself out of my house. Because of my introversion, laziness, and tinge of agoraphobia, I need motivation to leave the house. Towards the beginning of shelter-in-place, I was going into my backyard to harvest fragrant lilac blooms. Since then, I made arrangements to meet a friend who lives nearby to walk around our neighborhood once a week, and I’d usually pick up some tasty food while we were out and about.

I tried to satisfy my need for connection by driving to another neighborhood and walking six feet away from another friend. Then I met two more friends on one’s back deck, but couldn’t bring myself to eat, drink, or remove my mask.

After three months of sheltering, my hug hunger has grown immense. I happily chanced upon a New York Times article about how to hug safely in a pandemic: outdoors, wearing masks, pointing your faces away from each other, and briefly.

Shortly thereafter, I went to meet members of my Tuesday brunch group on a patio outside the Randall Museum. We bought coffee and pastries inside, then went to eat them on the patio. For the first few months, my mask stayed on, even outside. I raised the bottom just far enough for each bite and sip through a straw.

I saw and hugged friends I hadn’t seen in person for three months. The first drops of rain hitting my dessicated ground were ecstasy.

It’s a shame that something so nourishing is still risky, but the risk is very much worth it for me. I tell myself that this nourishment builds me up, making me less depressed, less apt to fall sick, and more willing to reach out and encourage these women and other friends who are suffering in their own ways from the plague.

What’s surprising about this? Maybe how the calculus of risk versus benefit kept me alone at home for so long, and has now begun shifting towards acceptance of more risk as we elders settle in for the long haul.

 

Carousel

According to Holly Near, Merry-go-round gonna make you smile. Hot clam chowder gonna drown those sea bottom, you got ‘em, blues for a while. Go to the slide, dime for a ride, and slide, slide, slide. Playing at the pier, the Santa Monica Pier.

I spent lots of time at the pier when I visited Santa Monica as a child. My favorite spot was the penny arcade, but I also rode the carousel’s brightly painted horses, sea creatures, and carriages. Some of the animals moved up and down while the platform circled; they were the only ones worth getting on, even with the seat belts to keep their little passengers safe. A marvel of mechanized instruments produced jangly music redolent of cotton candy and sun tan lotion.

Family lore was that my grandparents had a connection to the owner of the carousel; my cousins were allowed on special occasions to ride for free. There used to be a dispenser of brass rings suspended above the ride, and catching one would entitle you to a free ride. My cousins’ ride was already free, but they kept grabbing for the ring to show their prowess. I don’t remember the rings, and wouldn’t have been able to reach them with my stubby little arms anyway.

I could have reached the rings if the horses were like those in Mary Poppins that broke away from the carousel and cantered off into the landscape. This doesn’t happen in real life.

Carousels entertain by moving in circles without going anywhere. Our planet also moves in circles. The seasons cycle through and all of us travel through space only to return to roughly the same place a year later and a year older. Things that happened before happen again; the same, but a bit different. As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. We address the same situations and problems over and over and over again, but each time with a little more experience, a little more perspective, a little more wisdom.

That’s what I think on a good day, anyway. May it be so.

Fading Truths

There are three propositions that I know are true, but have to keep learning over and over and over again. Somebody on my interior committee must find them inconvenient, and she somehow persuades the other members to keep forgetting them. Maybe writing them down can help?

The first proposition is that the universe is perverse. This means not to count my chickens before they are hatched, because there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip. For example, if I happen to notice that a particular symptom hasn’t been bothering me lately, I can be confident that it will act up shortly. In more positive terms, to bring about a desired result I should consider acting as though it won’t happen any time soon. My mother used to light a cigarette while standing at the bus stop to make the bus come. I usually lose myself in a book.

This aversion to chicken counting may trace back to a time when school friends told me that I had achieved a much-desired honor. This turned out to be an April Fool’s trick. My heady exultation made the following disappointment twice as painful, especially when I also blamed myself for falling for the ploy. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So I adopted a protective stance towards potential good news and general pessimism.

The second proposition is that postponing a chore makes it more scary and makes my postponing it more shameful. But doing even the smallest part of the chore feels good, and can give me more impetus to tackle another piece of it. And the doing is usually much less painful than cringing beneath the pending chore’s Damoclean terror. The barrier between me and getting the chore done looks like a brick wall, but every time I dig into the chore, the wall is revealed to have been a sheet of paper. I know this, but I keep forgetting it and hunch in a corner hoping that the chore will just go away. Most chores won’t just go away, but some can be put off nearly indefinitely.

Finally, I am not the most compliant of patients, but sometimes I remember that if I do follow a doctor’s instructions long enough, they usually work. Experts in general give good advice, by definition. Whence springs my tendency to ignore advice? Pessimism, laziness, the sense that many situations will resolve themselves over time? Stubborn self-reliance? Past experiences in which following advice made things worse? I don’t know, but I have lively arguments with myself about which advice to follow, and in what way, and for how long before giving up.

So, these are the truths that I have the hardest time remembering. Ideally, I could track down the committee member who is each truth’s strongest opponent, and negotiate her into some kind of détente. But that sounds like a lot of work.

Captain Sashay

 Captain Sashay is a voluptuous merperson with long hair and a full beard. A sailor, confused by these clashing gender indicators, says to them, “Hey sexy fish person, I can’t tell what gender you are.” Sashay replies, “That’s the point.”

This cartoon urges people to accept types of gender beyond male and female. Gender is based on our chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, and upbringing, at the very least. Just in terms of chromosomes, there are many variants beyond XX and XY. Looking at genitalia, we have male, female, and many varieties of intersex. Beyond biology, we have people’s internal experiences of gender. Looking at these additional factors, Norwegian sexologist Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad adds the categories of trans, non-conforming, personal, and eunuch. After finding no English language versions of their work, I must leave the definitions of these categories to your imaginations.

I believe that people have an inherent right to define their own gender for themselves. [Please note, in this regard, that one’s gender identity is entirely separate from one’s sexual orientation. For example, some transwomen are lesbians, others are straight.] Nobody wants to be slotted into a box and be limited in how they are treated. Too many people have different behavioral styles when dealing with a man as opposed to a woman. They take gender as determining the acceptable range of behavior for each type of person. As part of the sexual revolution, though, many people seek freedom from gendered expectations. We wish to identify solely as persons, with no limitations imposed by our perceived gender.

Captain Sashay delights in keeping their bodily gender a mystery. That’s fine by me. I’m even getting used to using the pronoun ‘they’ in the singular, to cast off the gender marker of language. Nobody needs to know what organs are inside another person’s pants, most of the time.

However, a queer, trans, or intersex person who contemplates a sexual or romantic relationship with someone else owes that individual a discussion about their respective genitalia before clothes are removed. A surprise reveal has been known to result in homicidal violence. At the very least, it can really derail a sexual encounter.