Speed Bumps

I fear being on the bridge I commute over if an earthquake comes up out of nowhere. I've seen movies of the Golden Gate Bridge during an earthquake and the waviness and buckling that happened to the roadbed give me cold chills. Sometimes that happens in my life and then I have to stop the motor and wait it out or just gun it and hope I get to the other side in one piece. This morning I set aside 30 minutes to meditate, picked a good chair, put on the guided meditation cd, sat down and fell apart. I couldn't keep my mind on my breathing. The more I tried to focus on meditating, the more my pulse speeded up. Instead of being here and now, my mind was racing around the room touching base on grocery lists, recipes, the face of an old love, the smell of a tweed jacket in the rain (my face pressed against it in a goodbye), a scene from a tv show, wondering if I'd have time for coffee, the tick of the clock--click, click, click--my dead grandfather, that snowstorm in 1967, the woodpecker in the dead tree, a sudden urge to get up and bleach my teeth...all bid for my attention. For 30 minutes, I twitched and tried to get more comfortable, felt like my breathing was fake and forced and worried about how fat my stomach was. By the time the chimes went off and 30 minutes was up, I was so agitated that meditating had probably raised my blood pressure. But in some ways it was one of the best sessions I've had because it forced me to recognize that neither life nor meditation is always going my way. That when things aren't working according to my plan, just sitting still for 30 minutes is all I can expect of myself and it might turn out to be a major victory.

Missing the Music

It was so cold in the old city of Prague on the Sunday afternoon I took this photo that it makes me shiver to remember it, but walking through the narrow, winding streets, turning a corner and coming upon someone playing a violin was like being in a fairytale. And every day, I went out into winter with the friend I was visiting -- bundled, layered, walking and taking the tram, watching my breath make clouds in the air, stopping for wine or coffee, unlayering, bundling back up, taking photos of snow falling. I leaned into the cold, accepted it, lived it. Today at home in Charleston, it's 48 degrees, nothing approaching that week in Prague, but I am flinching from the cold, recoiling, running home to escape it. Instead of walking through my neighborhood or in the downtown city streets, I layer on pajamas, fuzzy socks, a long-sleeved tshirt under an old cashmere sweater. If I were in a fairytale, it would be about a woman who turns into a bear at the first frost. When Persephone goes underground and everything on earth is waiting and storing energy for the spring, why can't I embrace all the lovely bare, spare planes of her winter face? Why don't I expect a violinist around every corner in my own hometown?

Stop, Drop and Curl Up

I've been lying in bed for four days with a tooth implant jammed into my jaw bone and throbbing hard enough to launch itself out of the top of my head. I considered calling my friend Joe the Contractor to come over and pull the implant out with a pair of pliers, but thank god the dentist ordered up some drugs before things got out of hand.  Between doses of hydrocodone, I managed to get the cover prose written for my magazine day job right before deadline or I expired. Type type type/doze off/type type type/doze off. The art director loved it, so maybe I should always write high. I can see how Rush Limbaugh became a junkie, because I couldn't WAIT for my next dose and I loved how slow and easy it took me under and made both my physical and existential pain go away. I cocooned in my bed with a novel by Wendell Berry (Hannah Coulter) and slid in and out of soft sleep and a slow journey around Hannah's Kentucky farm that was so like the one I grew up on, only more prosperous and peopled with kindly characters who were close to the earth--okay, so it was more like the farm I wish I'd grown up on. Then being all doped up, I shed a tear or two about my vanished past and then got really depressed (more side effects of the drugs?) about how tractors made horse-drawn plows obsolete and then decided to text coworkers with garbled instructions about god knows what. Text text text/doze off, doze off, doze off/text text text/dose up, dose up, dose up. Today was my first day back at work, back to "normal," and I'm grateful to feel so very much better. But a little part of me misses locking the door on the world, with no alarm clocks, nowhere to be, no expectations to meet because I was an invalid. This little interlude made me realize that I'm so hungry for a respite from the bullshit that bombards us day and night that there was an up-side to taking sick days. Just think of how many things during an ordinary day keep us running away from ourselves. Toward what? I've always been a ferociously ambitious person, partly because I felt invisible during so much of my life. Everything I've achieved had a goal of giving me an outline--"look at me, I'm here, I exist"--and of making sure I didn't miss anything. It was the path I had to take and I learned a lot and it shaped me into the person I am, a person I mostly like. Now, though, I want to stop/slow time so that I can just sit still long enough to think. It sounds so frivolous, doesn't it? But I am ever on the move, like a gadfly, and I crave a long stretch of time to stretch my mind. I want to light somewhere and sit a spell. Do you ever feel that way?

A Long Winter's Nap

I love the orange-flavored sunsets of winter, but not the shorter days and cold mornings. Driving home from work in the dark, I start to crave tacos and chili, cornbread and collard greens, apple pie with ice cream, beef stew or anything cooked in a crockpot (and I don't even own one!). What I really crave with the onset of winter and the bleak prospect of a recession is the comfort of a tribe. I want to retreat to a cave and build a fire to keep sabre-tooth tigers at bay while my tribe cooks something on a spit and fat drips and sizzles in the flames. Afterward we might draw pictures on the cave wall or wrap up in bear skins and smoke wacky tobaccy while someone plays a flute. I want to go to sleep comforted by my family and friends gathered around me for safety in numbers, because the numbers that comforted us with the illusion of security--a rising Dow, low interest rates, high returns, 401Ks, annual raises--are gone. Can't we just hibernate for awhile?

Unscheduling

My dentist is redoing my mouth one tooth at a time. It started so innocently...she urged me to get a Sonicare brush and have my old decaying mercury fillings replaced. But it was like replacing a light fixture in an old house only to discover that the wiring is dangerously out of date and then the plumbing has to go and of course there turn out to be termites in the wall, mice in the attic and cracks in the foundation. So far I've had gum grafts, extractions, 3 tooth implants and more crowns that even a princess like me deserves, and  every morning I have to use the Sonicare until my brains are churned to butter, floss, rinse with Tooth and Gum Tonic and peroxide. At night, same thing, plus an hour of whitening trays which I never remember to use. And though I'll end up with a balanced bite and a smile I'm not ashamed to show,  my dental "insurance" only pays $1,000 a year. My calendar this year has been filled with a plethora of fear-based medical appointments: 3 hour dentist sessions; mammogram, colonoscopy; flu and pneumonia vaccines; blood work; body scan by my dermatologist. It's depressing to open my planner every week and realize there is yet more probing, grinding, smashing and jabbing in my body's future. Supplemented by festive visits from the pest guy, the heating and air guy, the cable guy, the plumber guy. Sometimes my life seems to be one long maintenance appointment. I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate dates in my book for Joy on Waking Up, Surprise Just Around the Corner, Unexpected Gifts, A New BFF or Amazing Big Ideas. To get out of a holding pattern and onto a flight path.

Good Morning!

I read a breaking news flash on the CNN crawl tonight that Madonna is going on with her L.A. show despite equipment malfunctions and technical failures. I guess we're all in the same boat, Madge. We wake up and turn on the tv and hear about yet another catastrophic malfunction in the equipment we've always taken for granted. The underpinnings of our society. The secure foundation of our everyday lives. Retirement funds--gone. Jobs--in danger. Health insurance--how long before our employers cut our benefits? The stock market--plunging deeper than a Victoria's Secret bra. Given the shaky government we've put our trust in, I'm so impressed by the bravery of Americans in getting up every day and getting on with the job of living. And despite having been fucked over by politicians and lied to by journalists and let down by the American dream, we went to the polls and voted with the heart of a child who wakes up every morning thinking the world is a gift to be unwrapped. I love that we're still capable of doing that.