Universe, Help Dig Us Out of This Mess

I have lots of Deep Thoughts, little time, a doctor's appointment and a mess of snow to get through to get there (5 seemingly unexpected inches in Brooklyn today, enough to make the subways groan and my old Dalmatian whinny).

Between the sudden snowfall, Clinton's perposterous plagarism comments about Barack Obama and allegations of impropriety against McCain, I spent my entire morning shower cringing and wincing as each news report came on my little waterproof radio.

So, Universe, while we Americans too often act as if we have God on IM, I am making my plea this morning our presidential candidates to cut the crap, tell the truth, and most importantly for the truly best person to win. Probably impossible, but I frequently want the impossible, and sometimes I even get it.

To: Universe, Bees, Rats, et al, By Request

For two friends, by request, the first two lines are taken from the request.

Ask the universe, ask the trees,
and the bees, and the rats in the subway.
Help and hope, seem far away now, faith
as well. A time when all of this made sense
or good copy -- the calendar is resolutely stuck
at today, this day, the pages won't tritely fall away.

And so I ask -- let these two lives be elevated,
like an elevated train, a thing on swooping girders
with sky and tract houses, trees and factory signs
for factories long gone, all around it, a thing that
has come to seem like it only belongs in
a dark tunnel, waiting for the platform,

and the platform after that and that and that.
Let these two lives have beautiful views, somewhere
they want to go, someplace
they want to come home, someone
who welcomes them back, spilling over
with quiet to hear of the days' adventures.

###

Universe, please let the resolution come. They've suffered long enough. What I want here is not important, other than that I want them both to be fulfilled, and whole, and out of pain, whether that is together or apart.

Hey Universe

Anything you can do to get me and my beloved RR here and make the journey a good one will be duly appreciated.

I was thinking about why I want to go. I am a survivor of violence. Many women I love are survivors of violence. Rape is being perpetrated as a war tactic around the world, which is as sickening to me as anyone blowing themselves up, it just doesn't get the same press.

But the real and selfish reason I support all womens' rights to a world without violence is my son. A world where everybody counts, and everyone has basic human rights is a world I want him to live in, and a viewpoint I want him to have. And I know how much more wonderful his life will be if he regards women as equal, and not lesser. I want to be the mom who models that for him, through action, and through deed.

Guest Post -- Please Do Your Bit

Reposted with permission from my friend YF's journal (names removed). Please pray, plea, ask, and holler as desired:


As some of you know, I'm not too close with much of my family. The one exception is my sister and her three girls. If I know anything about unconditional love, I've learned it from her.


Their lives have been joyful but full of hardship. My sister's husband took off when the oldest girl was 12. Among other things, he took every penny in every account and left them with huge debt. My sister learned, the hard way, to be self sufficient while raising three girls on her own. She has done an amazing job. The girls are smart, loyal, responsible, and fun.


The youngest is applying for college now. With her grades and activities she'll be able to take her pick of schools. She's even on the short list for Harvard.


The middle girl is an athlete with brains. She's studying bioengineering at Case Western Reserve . . . on scholarship.


The oldest has a year left at Kent State, her college largely paid for by scholarships too. She stayed near home so she could keep working every weekend. She has worked constantly since she was 12, first babysitting, and then taking any and every afterschool and weekend job she could find. You'd think all the work, having to forgo all the things regular teenagers get to do, would have made her angry teenage nightmare, but I have never met a young woman with more grace and generosity.


Next year my sister will have three kids in college. That, combined with her recent breast cancer diagnosis, means it's going to be tighter than ever for the next couple of years, so the girls are working on more scholarship applications. The oldest made the the finals for another scholarship and needs votes to win.


Sadly the voting is over, so I can't ask all of you to stuff the ballot box on her behalf, but I think I'll consider this a plea to the universe that she wins. This family needs a break.

All I Need to Hear, All I Need to Say

Happy Presidents Day.

An Answer

I had a conversation with a dreamwalker two weeks ago. In the course of our conversation, he reminded me of something that I've come across before in several different religious traditions and healing practices. That is simply, after conducting a ritual, such as a healing ritual, you are to place your hands on the ground (or floor) and send whatever negative energy you have picked up back into Mother Earth, asking her to clean it and make it positive energy again. This has a practical aspect for the healer, to keep from absorbing the illness or other negative energy they are seeking to remove. It is also a wonderful general concept, that the bad can be turned back into good, renewed and reborn into something positive in our lives.

So often my question is "What do I do?". I think the first answer is always this.

More is happening in my life, so rapidly, than I seem to be able to write, and yet all is wonderfully calm. I hope you are all well.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Make Me A Better Communicator, Please and Thank You

This may sounds N-V-T-S nuts from a blogger who works in communications. But when I think of all the things I want most, I really just want to talk to my friends more, and that's the thing I push to the bottom of the to-do list most of the time.

At any rate, I'm listening to ska and avoiding a big writing project, and I'll try to get deeper and wider and brighter and lighter tomorrow. I'll also try to can it with the Cure quotes. Happy Valentine's Day.

Universe, make everything a Cure song.

On my way to the local diner to pick up my morning tea, I had Sarah Silverman's "The Porn Song" stuck in my head. I'm not including the link here, because I have a modicum of respect for the people who raised me, and they read this blog. I can't explain my feelings on Silverman -- she lives in a realm that metaphors fear to enter.

When I went into the diner, the Cure's "Pictures of You" was playing and it blissfully swept The Silverman out with little happy guitar brooms of melancholy.

So, Universe, can you make everything like the good song that gets the stuck song out of your head. Can we just push the crap out by something as simple as changing the channel, or walking into the place where the right one is already on?

When Iris Sleeps Over

What a book she'll write.

I've always been one to ask for answers like some people skip ahead to the last page of a novel when they've barely started. I want the answers almost before the questions are asked -- this has made me so many shades of fun in most of my relationships. So it makes sense that I'm a tarot reader.

My deck depicts Greek myths (a longtime fascination of mine) and in a way can show the reader where they are in the 'story' of their own life. Over here is Temperance, which has always been my root card, and, while it is not my complete story anymore, it will always be at the root of who I am.

In this deck, Temperance has the traditional meaning of seeking or striving for emotional balance. It depicts stasis and fear of change or intensity as much as it does peace and harmony. The actual character here is Iris, a sort of girl Hermes. She's Hera's messenger and the only female messenger that I know of in Greek myth; she's the woman who delivers the word.

I have this exact picture tatooed on my back, without the wings, and got it about twelve years ago in the middle of a blizzard at Huggy Bear's old Brooklyn studio. Afterwards my friend Steve and I had cookies and orange juice with the Bear himself as he showed us his scrapbook. He was a super nice man, who legally changed his name to Huggy Bear because he was, well, a huggy bear. The whole experience was a little like donating blood at a hospital run by the Hell's Angels.

After having this wingless messenger in my heart and on my back all these years, I'm ready to get the wings. In ink, and in metaphor. But the other thing is, after spending so much energy searching for answers, partially to avoid the pain of actually living a life to get to those answers, I see that I already have them, and if I look deep enough, I already know. To my deep surprise, I don't need the cards anymore. And I don't need to pour that little cup of water back and forth for all eternity, trying to get the balance just right. I can stand in the rushing river now. I can let it go.

When It's Surmountable

I'm very lucky in that I have a job I like. However I want to do something completely different -- and no, it's not the fish-slapping dance. I found out this year that I want to design jewelry. I am slowly building the skills to be able to do that -- learning to render, learning to silversmith, designing and so on. I am also trying to suspend my disbelief that this is an insane idea. I have two great things in my favor: a husband who is completely supportive, and friends and family who draw monsters and make fertility sculptures out of broken furniture FOR A LIVING so boy am I in the best possible company for this kind of career transition.

The third thing I now have, courtesy of my lovely Tante, is the passenger records of my maternal great-great grandparents and seven of their nine children, ranging in age from 18 to an infant (the last two, including my great-grandmother, were born here) when they came through Ellis Island from Russia in 1898.

In addition to the sheer loveliness of having all of their original names on record (some of them were Americanized to the point of being unrecognizable), I have a reminder that will carry me through the next year and half -- that my great-great grandmother was the exact age I will be this year, 37, when she came here with basically nothing, survived the trip and started over in a new world, with seven children depending on her.

I would wish for her strength but I know I already have it, so I can only say bless you my wonderful ancestors. Everything I could ever want in this new world is entirely possible.

Salutations to the Guru. Over and Out.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation and guru to the Beatles, among others, died yesterday on February 5th. While I'm sure someone else has figured this out, I have not yet noticed any mentions in the news that he died the day after Across The Universe Day, when NASA beamed the famed Beatles song into space via satellite antenna in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the song's release. The song's chorus includes the mantra "Jai guru deva om" which, according to my beloved and overused Wikipedia "is a sentence fragment whose words could have many meanings, but roughly translate to "salutations to the guru", then the mystic syllable om". While Maharishi was a controversial figure for many reasons, he did believe that TM, a form of meditation using mantras, could help heal the world and bring peace.

So. . . salutations to the guru and the mystical 'om' were beamed quite literally across the universe, to unknown effect, and then he died.

Salutations to the guru. Om.

When It's Very Simple

When you have a stomach flu, it's hard to ask for anything other than the removal of said stomach flu. So there you have it.