Disaster Recovery

It's all about Disaster Recovery for me.  About having enough respect for death and destruction (inadvertant and not) that you plan for it, look it in the eye and try to understand it, so that you can conquer, so that you can survive.  We are fighting for survival: in the idea of heaven, reincarnation, and the rest that gives hope that a soul once left its body has a chance.  We want our memories.  We want what we love to remain with us.  We cannot let it go.

The song is powerful, even for a cynic, even for a non-believer.  It sways, it wraps around, it tickles its way in.

Change is instigated by allowing those who need to change to lead.  Letting them make mistakes.  Letting them learn to balance by being allowed to fall, and seeing that falling doesn't feel as good as getting higher.

By allowing them to practice, and make mistakes, and bear with the mistakes, and say nothing.  By not judging others by their mistakes.

By practicing ourselves, to be what we teach.  By making mistakes ourselves, to see that it is best if everyone else is silent in response, if we know what we did.  By being told, when we don't know that we made a mistake.  By deciding that I am strong and weak in different ways than others, and so we are all strong in different ways, and so we are all strong, and weak.

I'm always organizing for my sudden and untimely death.  I don't want things to be chaotic and a mystery when I die.  There will be enough mysteries for anyone who is interested, or has to be interested, in my affairs.  There will be bank accounts to close, credit cards to reconcile, taxes to file, announcements to be made, children to be planned for, a child's loss to explain, grief to counsel, a burial to arrange, belongings to be gone through, a body of work to be promoted (or not), questions to be answered, lives to move on.

I foresee all the worst outcomes and organize my priorities, acting upon the highest, keeping #1 priority always in sight, referred to when there are choices to be made.  I try to remember.

And what have my priorities been?

1. My daughter
2. My work
3. My family
4. My simple-as-possible-to-deal-with-for-someone-else-in-case-of-my-death belongings and affairs.

I act dumb, because I remember that I am weak.  And so I plan ahead, because I have weaknesses.  And because I want those weaknesses to have practice because, like stage fright, they can eventually become accustomed to the lights and the flashing and the distraction.  Because I want my stage fright to be sorted out, I will practice riding the horse before I enter myself in the rodeo.  Because I want to ride just a second longer, I will remember that I have to practice.  Because I have to practice, I will arrange my priorities as such.

And what have my priorities become?
1. My work
2. My daughter
3. My family
4. My simple-as-possible-to-deal-with-for-someone-else-in-case-of-my-death belongings and affairs.

Because if I want my daughter to be all that she can be, I must teach her that an individual's life work is the primary thing they have to give to the world, including their offspring.  I want my child to be a star that shines brighter than any other in the sky; the one that catches the universe's attention and where every good thing wants to live, and thrives within her.  Let her attract the most beauty, the most goodness, and let her learn that she must shine because it is the thing that she does best.  Let her learn from her mother's example, that we must shoot for the stars, and that every star will shine, if allowed.

And all that is left is rust and stardust, daddy and baby, a call to arms, and practice practice practice.

https://soundcloud.com/queenb1313131313131/touch

Hole-y

I learned to live remembering that one day I would die.

I learned to try and make the most out of every moment, to not dwell on things that could not be fixed, and to give my all to those that might could be.

I wore my best gowns, my favorite shoes, and bought pants that fit my body, whenever I no longer fit into my current pants.

I welcomed change.  I welcome change.  Change is what we do, from infancy to elders, from learning experience to emotional experience til death do we part.

I don't mean to walk around a ghost.  But I have been shot full of holes and survived.  This life is a dream, this life would end now or in 100 years, but it will end.

So here I am, a hole-y ghost.

Here: I am a holy ghost.

Approaching Doom

My life theme should be "Approaching Doom."  

A good friend once laughed out loud and exclaimed that I was so dismal.  And this was even before I was named Deth.

But I was there, live, listening to a monk of the Dalai Lama, when he said, "the glass is neither empty nor full.  The glass is broken.  And we need to be grateful that we are able to drink from this glass now in its current, unbroken state."  It affected me.  I'm not buddhist, I'm not anything.  But I identified with that.  

I lost my sister 10 years ago, and I see her now like that shattered glass: once something that was whole and capable of the task that we imagined for it, for a human.  But now she is broken pieces of a human, waiting to be re-assembled into something else.  Because everything becomes a part of something else, whether it be a mountain that crumbles to the ocean, becoming rocks on the ocean floor, washing up on shore to become part of a sandy beach, dragged out on the bottom of our feet to streets, floors, garbage cans, and pounded into dust, becoming part of the air that is breathed, lodging in bodies and melting into the surroundings.  Is that dust still a mountain?  

There are mountains inside of us.  And more.  Where does all that has been breathed in go after we die?  If we are burned, cremated, then we are again released into the air: to be breathed in again, to settle at the ocean floor as silt, to be incorporated into the earth.  If we are buried, then what is the meaning of keeping our broken-down pieces in a box?

I wonder about the origins of burial - there are religious histories behind how and why.  I wish to know more.
Wish granted.

Who doesn't love the freaking internets?

My sister:  She is dead now.  What does it mean?  She was cremated, but the dust put into a box and buried.  It wasn't released into the air to eventually become one with one thing or another.  But she had affected and changed so many even before she was gone, including me.

Some glasses get re-assembled: melted down and refashioned into another glass from the same pieces.  Wouldn't that be cool if we could do something like that with the particles of a human still contained in a burial box?  

Of course I'm talking about the resurrection here, maybe the origins of the thought.  Science could make it possible, one day.  But the chance of zombies would be quite high.

To avoid being re-fashioned into a zombie, I think I'd vote for cremation.  It's really quite lovely, when you consider it.  Well, kind of ew too, but that's just I think the whole visceral aversion to death and burning bodies.  Ew.  But they do this every day on the Ganges: a person's pieces are broken down to the tiniest particles, becoming part of the world around me, around you.  Maybe that's her, suspended in the air.  Maybe that's him: the sand that I walk on.  Maybe people are part of the concrete on the roads that I drive on, or maybe I've breathed a few thousand in.  It's a thought to make a horror movie out of someday.

And then there's the unknown conclusions: Maybe we are re-assembled into something that none of us are yet consciously aware of.  We can't forget about ghosts.  Peter Novak makes the most complete manifesto on the topic, I think.  I'd say this book was another thing that drastically changed the way I thought about life.  It is very scientific.  And science is so great.

It's good to be able to talk about all of this.

I tend to think of my sister, most of her particles contained in a box buried deep in the ground, as an entity that is waiting.  I feel her waiting for all of us who miss her to gather together, so we can all move on at the same time.  Waiting and watching.  I feel her watching, too.  I sense her in me, I feel her watching from behind my eyes.  I consider that maybe, in those last months of sitting beside her on her bed, that maybe I ingested a lot of her poisons, and a lot of her pieces as her skin and hair flaked off, as she threw up her insides

It's a bit like an idea of heaven, no?

Because we watch over those we love, in life, and so why not in death?  Especially since all our particles are trapped in a box way underground.

But then there's the whole issue of waiting for everyone to join us.  If this would be true, then once everyone you know joins you, you can't move on because they're going to be waiting on those they love, and when THEY finally die, they will be waiting on those THEY love... it just goes on and on.  And this is another reason that I think the whole resurrection en masse predicted by Christians is such a prevalent thing.  It just makes sense that at some point everyone waiting on everyone would just *poof* turn into that next thing all at once because the virtual world will have reached max capacity.  Cause that's a lot of souls.

And so it goes.

Starting Over

Recently, I went through a change of shift at work.  I was told that my new co-worker would not like me.  I was reminded by my boss to approach it with optimism, hoping for the best.  My philosophy is to hope for the best, plan for the worst, so that was the plan.

I think of a lot of worst outcomes, so I can be as prepared as possible.  But I'm not always prepared, and I know that there are a million billion possible outcomes so how could I ever imagine?  Anyhow, this kind of planning ahead for disaster makes me feel more ready, more confident.  And confidence is required in situations where one is preparing to meet her doom.

Again.

So I meet the woman who would not like me, and I hope for the best.  I am as nice and deferential as I can be.  I am as relaxed as I can be.  Still she ignores or focuses or her hostility directly at me.  Still, she hates me.

But I can handle it: I am prepared, I tell myself.

Still she snaps at me, still she says mean little things to me in response to anything and everything.

This woman is a grandmother of two.  She is the mother of two.  She is married.  She knows how to love, but she doesn't know how to love everyone.  Or she doesn't know how to love me.  I like to think she doesn't know how to love everyone, because I AM everyone, I am anyone, I am no different than any other 15-year-younger person than her who would come into her shift carrying praises from her efforts on another shift, reminding her that so many changes that have been made in the last year are to that person's credit.  I was even made lead for my shift, but I was not her boss.  We both knew that.

She hated me, I was not her boss, and she made it very clear to me that this was the case for 2 weeks.

So like a witch, I burned.  I took the heat, I dried up and molted, and my dust went everywhere.  I tried to be patient and understanding.  But finally she snapped at me one to many times and despite all my best efforts, I exploded.  I told the woman that I did nothing to deserve the way she was treating me, that I had tried everything I could but she was creating the most hostile work environment that I'd ever been unfortunate to be unwelcomed into.

Another thing I know about myself is that I am a poison eater: I take a person's poison from them.  I hold it inside and turn it into rainbows, then send it back to that person as anti-venom.  I do it selectively now, though I used to not know how to regulate and became sick in the process.  I survived, and learned.

So she breathed in her anti-venom and was calmed.  Over the next hour, she apologized.  I told her we should start over.  She agreed.

It hasn't been easy.  The injuries I unwittingly sustained in trying not to take things personally and cope with frustration over the past weeks really bruised me.  But I'm pushing through it, remembering that bruises fade.  I do cry easily at everything lately, needing to vent, to let it out somehow.  I feel heavy with something, and it's waiting there to be released whether I like it or not.  I'm always weakened and rather dull after this kind of thing.  Random crying is terribly embarrassing, but it does seem to help.

So we start again.  And although it feels forced, although I am still burning from injuries so recently given by this person, I know it's the only fair thing to do.  Starting over with a clean slate isn't easy, but I'd wish it for myself, so I have to try and make it happen for others when warranted.  We all want a chance to try again, to do things better this time, don't we?  After a certain age, we can start over with new people and places if and when we want, but how wonderful when the people we surround ourselves by will not hold grudges, or judgments, and we can just carry on where we are.

p.s. I ascribe to no religion in my viewpoint.  I am as christian as I am satanic as I am buddhist as I am rastafari, gnostic, kabbalist, and the holy trinity itself.

Turtles (or Travel Home Shells)

Here's an idea:

The Turtle Shell: the only travel home for one you'll ever need!  Carry it like a backpack, it opens up and/or down from the pack on your back like a turtle's shell to keep you shrouded from rain or sun, or to give you a nice rocking chair.  Then unroll the bottom portion to release the soft waterproof mat that you can finally lie down on and have a nice, private sleep.  Any ol' where.

I imagine this invention will unveil a whole new group of people calling themselves Turtles.  Today, we call them Homeless.

Original illustrations, anyone?  I know, no one reads this so I got to get to it myself or it'll never be invented someday.

Upon closer look, this is kind of a lot like the bear box.

Old Cars + New Engines

I love old car frames, and new car engines.  Please someone, put them together.  Stop updating the old versions into some futuristic interpretation.  Give me fins, bug-eyes, stripes and red leather interiors.  Or baby blue.  Yes, baby blue.  Plus this year's toyota engine that won't quit.

A Safe and Artsy Halloween

So I don't know when it all started, but trick-or-treating seems to have migrated to the closest weekend before halloween, and now takes place in shops, rather than homes. The exclamation point put on the consumer culture that this is the best way of celebrating the holiday makes me sad. Thusly, I propose the following creative solution to a fun halloween for you of many fears, subject to field or park availability:

Arrange for some farmland or a large swath of park to be put aside for the event, and reserved for the week leading up to Halloween. Divide the space into small plots and hold a little house-building contest, open to builders, architects, artists, whoever wants to enter. The deal is that each contestant has to have their house finished and open on halloween night for trick-or-treating, and then voting takes place. Maybe the kids vote based on the best candy offered, so the variables can be a fun factor. The contest winners are announced after the trick/treating is finished, followed by a proper party for the adults. Let the kids run around - it's a park or a field, for gosh sake.

I think this could get a whole community involved in the halloween thing, getting to know one another and the talent that exists amongst their cohorts. Plus, you'll know who's giving your kids those treats, and the little houses and nature aspect will be magical for them.

So there you go.