In the Flow

There is a natural ebb and flow to things. In work and in life things seems to flow easily if you let them. Worry does not seem to affect the flow except to distract you from recognizing it as it happens. Opportunities for work and advancement are everywhere but they seem hidden when you are looking for them directly. It seems that when you are genuinely in the flow that is when you become aware of the opportunities you need to act on. Because the universe is always watching, I choose to keep my head down and focus on what is in front me while listening with my ears and seeing peripherally what is shifting around me. I leave expectation alone and feed intent. I enjoy the feeling of flow from my head through my hands, pushing and pulling me along. The year is flowing down into the narrow passage of the transition to the new year, where the flow dissipates into a trickle only to burst forth on the other side. There is never any time to stop and fully restock your supplies to continue in the flow, you just keep moving, looking down while looking ahead, skimming along, merrily merrily.

The Holiday Season Begins

Younger Pearl Relaxing at the Holidays

I don't know what the date is today, time is moving too quickly. I have too much work to do and I feel too full. The holidays are coming, they are in fact upon us. I miss Pearl. She is with her dad tonight. Mark and I built an outhouse this weekend which was great for our Yurt dwelling tenant, and good for us because we love to build things and it did not rain when we needed it not to. I am cranky, a little PMS I suppose but also, I miss Pearl and feel at 6's and 7's when she is not here. The holidays are upon us and I tonight I thought about an Easter years ago when Pearl was quite small and she commanded an entire room of people, gathered for an Easter egg hunt, to clasp hands and follow her in the following blessing:
Blessings on the blossoms,
Blessings on the fruits,
Blessings on the roots and stems
Blessings on our food,
and the ( insert name of what you are eating here).
Amen

I wandered in from outside and discovered her doing this, holding hands with 20 people, leading this bleasssing, and I thought this kid is amazing. Thursday we will celebrate with friends and then the whole holiday season will be kicked off. Everything is moving too fast. I have no gifts purchased, no cards made. My birthday comes the week after Thanksgiving and then 3 weeks later it's Christmas. Pearl will be with her dad, so our Christmas will be a little lackluster but we will muddle on. Did I mention, I am full, I have too much work to do in a short week and I miss my kid? Maybe I did. I am looking forward to Thanksgiving this year, I have so much to be thankful for, I am full and I have too much work to do and I have an amazing kid to miss.

A Good Sign

I wish I had a picture of this.

As I was driving down the Sorenson Road today, observing the impressive amount of water in the newly dug-out ditch I saw a salmon. It was up out of the ditch crossing a driveway, bending and flipping as they do, fin up. Once it was safely across the driveway it dropped back into the ditch. As I passed by I thought aaah, this is going to be a good day. And it has been. I mean why swim in the ditch when you can jump up and take a good look around.

Religious Experience

I think it's good to practice your religion regardless of the weather. My religion it turns out is walking. I try to walk most days as you know if you have read this blog or know me a little bit. I come from a family of daily walkers. We never went to church, we went for walks. As far as I can tell it had a similar effect on us.

Obviously it's November and the rains have come. We are in the midst of a storm. Lots of unstable air, strong wind and heavy, heavy rain. I ventured out around 12:30 today for my constitutional. It was windy and raining slightly. My favorite saying is "there is no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate attire". Today I chose my attire poorly. Instead of putting on my raincoat and rain pants, I did the old, how bad could it be move and went out in hemp pants and my down jacket. I did have a hat and gloves and I did make Luna wear her coat. Luna hates her coat, she prefers to tremble. I paid for the coat and feel strongly that I know what is best for her, so on with the coat.

We went up to the... I don't know what to call it. Centennial Park I guess. The Agri-Fair grounds, what ever. There is a series of soccer, rugby fields and baseball diamonds set well below the road level. I wonder if they built it this way to prevent balls from being kicked into the road. Anyway there are steep hills surrounding the series of fields and play areas. There is even a BMX track who's sign is an oversized bike. There is a path like a miniature road that runs around the edge of the whole place complete with paving and a yellow dotted line down the middle. Once we are down at field level I let Luna loose to run. Today she was obsessed with rubbing off her smart coat. She shot up to the top of the embankment and literally threw herself down on her shoulder and onto her back, what she failed to take into consideration was the steepness of the hill and the slickness of her little coat. She slid down, head first, her long legs kicking the air. She was hysterical, trying to ditch the coat in between running at high speed driven by fast moving smells carried by the wind.

Eventually it began to pour, really pour, like there were buckets of water being thrown at us. A flag girl we had passed on our way to the park was laughing at the intensity of the rain as we passed her in the crosswalk going home. We were both laughing. At least she had rain gear on I said. I paused slightly as we passed and showed her my soaked pants peering out from under my wet wool hat and steamed up glasses. Luna hid behind me hoping to dodge the sideways rain.

By the time we got home the rain was so heavy that the eaves troughs were overflowing creating a curtain of water, our final gauntlet. I was soaked and invigorated, two components of a worthwhile religious experience.

Obligation

Siblings

It was my eldest brothers birthday last week. I didn't call him. It wasn't a malicious gesture I just couldn't act on it. I have complicated feelings about my brother. I like him, I think he is a great guy but somewhere along the way our relationship was arrested. We were once very close but many years ago there was an incident in the family with he and his wife and this rift has held strong. I make attempts to reach out to him but these efforts are infrequently reciprocated. Unlike me, he is really good about birthdays and Christmas despite the obvious chasm in realtions, and he always gets me very thoughtful gifts which of course add to my guilt about my indifference toward him. We are friendly when we meet but there is something deeply amiss for me. We are estranged I suppose but no one really talks about it. I go for long periods without thinking about him and am startled sometimes by the notion of him. I have jokingly spoken of replacing him with a friend of mine who resembles our family and who I have a good relationship with, but it's not that funny. I wish I was closer to my brother but I am not sure what can be done to pull the two sides together, to cinch up the seams of the familial bond.

Sibling relationships are strange at best, there are many commonalities and as many deep differences. He's a union member, I am entrepreneurial. He is the oldest and I am the youngest, in some ways we were raised by different parents. His perceptions based on his birth order are so different to mine. He didn't get enough while I got everything. He saw reality as something that was thrust upon him, I saw it as something I shaped to suit me.

I keep coming around to what can be done and I just don't know what that is and I guess that is what bothers me. I want an easy clean solution. I would be happy with an admission from him that he has made a deal with his wife that he will have no contact with me as punishment for my earlier transgressions. There is a long and strange history here and when these dates of obligation come up I stumble because I can't simply acknowledge the small things without the larger fissures being acknowledged too. I guess I am an all or nothing person in this case and that is my flaw to deal with.

I hope he is happy in his life. He looked good the last time I saw him. Maybe that is all I need to say to him, there is no ill will here just confusion and leaden sadness for a deep tear in the fabric that is my family.

With this Stick

I have been suffering and those around me have been suffering too, primarily Mark. Some months ago the internal aircard in my laptop started to take a major crap. My laptop is not a mere device for me it is in fact my lifeline. It is how I make my living. Living where I live there is no alternative to the painfully slow dial-up. We have no cable, no DSL. So when I need to send some jumbo files or even just look at a website I have to venture out of the comfort and safety of my office to the public library or a local coffee shop. Of course on my weekly trips up to Mark's place I could avail myself of his wireless without effort, that was until something unseen happened to my trusty aircard. It just sort of stopped several months ago. Now I pride myself on being a fairly calm and reasonable person but step in the way of my revenue stream and I will kick your ass. Not being able to access the wonderful world wide interweb at a whim on my beautiful shiny laptop was distressing to say the least. And so it was that more often than not I found myself swearing and gnashing my teeth much to the horror of my relaxed and pleasure inclined partner.

I did what I could to try and solve the problem. I consulted people, read articles online, tried different little things. Nothing really worked and the problem got worse. This week I spent several hours in the library and the coffee shop unable to get a job off to the printer. I whined about it to Mark and then, like manna from heaven, Mark, in his matter of fact way suggested I get one of these USB "sticks" which would bypass the cancerous aircard and connect me without incident to that great banquet of treasures known as the world wide web. I had been this close (look at my fingers) to sending the laptop to Eugene of all places for a total aircardectomy. It would have cost around 200 bucks plus 2 fedex overnights, not to mention the stress of sending away this tool, this device, which makes it possible for me to walk this earth, to eat and breathe. What would I do without my computer for 3 days? What? I jumped on the stick idea. I found one online for 50 bucks, paid a little extra for 2 day air and there it was, delivered to my door today.

Of course nothing is ever as easy as you want it to be. When I sat down tonight to install the whole thing I suddenly could not remember the password required to update things on my laptop, the anticiaption had suddenly emptied my head and with my anger rising, so easily as it does and Mark getting short with me which he almost never does, I took a deep breath. I recalled my password finally and by some miracle the aircard worked just long enough to download the drivers I needed and I was able to get the miracle stick to work. So here I am once again, happy and relaxed with my adoring husband at my side surfing the web. Phew. Thanks Maxpower, you saved my marriage.

Collaboration

For awhile there I was keeping a list of topics to blog about but lately I have fallen a little short. I am writing everyday, surprisingly diligently just not here. So in lieu of some of my trademark quippyness I give you some recent work. The above sketch was the impotis for the stitched piece which will be featured on the front of the new Think Local First Coupon Book for Sustainable Connections in nearby Bellingham. I spied some sweet stitchery on the UCU site awhile back and was inspired to create a little sketch to use in my composition. I am not a stitcher myself but my fine friend and Sustainable Connections employee Michelle Grandy is. So upon approval of my cover concept Michelle got down to stitching the gem shown above. I love it. I want to wear it.

I heard an interview with Barbara Kingsolver today. She lives on her farm in Virginia now and writes full time. The interviewer described her as reclusive and protective of her privacy and the space where she works. I could relate. I could quite happily fold into myself here in my office on my secluded property. I could write all day or just putter around, pretty much what I do now I suppose just with different outcomes.

Sharing

So obviously there are a shitload of blogs out there, but occasionally I come across one that really gets to the heart of things. I know my own attempt at blogging is muddled between my design work, my internal emotional life, my skewed observations and other rants that reveal my inability to think in a linear fashion. Here's an excellent blog that is about the process of being a creative human: http://iamdesigneronline.blogspot.com/

So there, if you find me taking too long to get to the point and swearing too much try Kara.