Angora Yarn

I’ve had a remarkable life (both first and second) and I have struggled mostly alone. Firstly because everyone I leaned upon was more interested in leaning on me. Then out of habit I never leaned again.

That has made me both strong and weak. Others can see my independence and some fear it, some admire it and many don’t have time or the interest to give a darn about it.

For a long time I used to long to be weak like all the other girls I saw around me. This started when I was in high school and first noticed many of the really pretty girls had managed to snag a jock with a letter sweater and were wearing his class ring, well wrapped with lots of pretty angora yarn.

But not me.

I carried my own books -- thank you very much! And I was in the top five percent of my class for academics. I was in more activities and groups than most everyone I knew – which was a blast when everyone had to sign my class year books and I had more stuff from more people written in mine that anyone else.

I could hop from one group to another with no difficult and got to know a wider cross-section of the population…everything from the physics club to the butterfly collectors and Bible study group.

I was lonely.

My life was a mile wide and an inch deep or so it seemed. My family life was not typical and this “hidden secret” kept me happy to stay at arms length away from everyone while appearing close to everyone. (a neat technique I fall back on even today in RL (remember real life) and in my virtual life.

The greatest amount of my time in high school was spent in developing and polishing my singing and speaking voice. I had and have the lung capacity of a trained athlete. And in high school and for many years afterward, had the most remarkable voice coach. I had a surprisingly wide high soprano range, with the ability to clearly hit notes most found completely out of reach – which helped me achieve many awards in competitions (and also helped pay my university fees).

In my senior year, I decided to change to be popular. Now that was a mistake if I ever made one. I would sneak clothing that was a little shorter out of the house under my “conservative and well accepted” clothing. For instance, I remember a wrap skirt I would be sure to wear a little open (even with a full slip under it, if you know what that is nowadays) that made the boys take notice of me.

And I flirted.

I’m sure I wasn’t very good at it, but the boys seemed interested (but then they had just noticed hair growing in all sorts of unusual places and muscles where smoothness once was).

I giggled a lot too because I was scared to death someone would actually like me and I would have to go buy a lot of pretty angora yarn.

I enter theatre and speech classes and found heightened excitement from having to play the part of a wife or girlfriend (I had no idea what a lover was and absolutely no idea where flirting was supposed to lead, although I had a clear picture of fallopian tubes and the art of sperm swimming against the tide).

Anyway, enough of those photos that still flash in my mind….In theatre class, I would get to play a part across from some really cool guy that was likely a jock and who had a class ring and a letter sweater.

Really Cool Parts

Once I even played the part of a girlfriend and had to get regularly chased off the stage by THE hunk in our school -- who not only had the ring and the letter sweater -- but his dad owned a new car dealership and he was going to be the valedictorian of our school that year. (BTW: His name was Jim Berry and he died a year later of Hodgkin’s Disease in the university hospital I worked in at the time.)

What I found out during all this time and even today –- is that some people just like me and some people just don’t like me. But what I still have not figured out was what to do with that knowledge.

I like people and always find my greatest joy is being there for someone and just caring about them. To make time for someone when my needs are screaming at me. To take abuse when I should turn away and deflect it. To make excuses for bad behaviour. I struggle to always believe the best about someone until I have bloodied my forehead against a brick wall just one too many times with trying to believe.

Someone once called me Braveheart, from the movie, but I didn’t know what he meant at the time. Now I do -- and perhaps, being hopelessly romantic and sincerely optimistic is not actually wise, but I like living my life (first or second) this way more than I would like to live it by being suspicious and distant.

Who knows, perhaps this inner passion is why I still have that ball of lovely, lavender, angora yarn.

Hard to Believe....

Robbie Burnes once said, "Would God give us the gift to see ourselves as other see us."

There is nothing this little Elven warrior-woman struggles with more than understanding the look of love in someone eyes as they stand in front of her.

Who Was She?

Do you have vivid dreams that seem to make moral sense, even if none of the events seem to? Last night I dreamed of a woman who was all of us and none of us. She was you and me and all of us, yet strangely unique.

She was poor. She lived alone except for her old, little, ratty doggy in one little room filled with all she owned. There was one chair to rest her weary body in, a footstool to rest her feet upon, a little cot upon which to rest her weary soul.

She lived in an area everyone else would be surprised to see – a place misunderstood, even condemned by some. She lived in the shadow of another huge, but tottering building, dangerous with live and hot electrical cables dangling everywhere.

It was an emergency.

I was called to help. At the scene there were many workmen hurrying about the tall building that everyone could see was nearing collapse and would fall and destroy the little homes near by.

The lady’s “house” was the closest to the building and a direct hit by all estimations. But no one could get her to leave. She stood there in the middle of her meager dwelling, embracing her little dog, with tears running down her eyes from fear and courage colliding within her.

All she owned was in that little room. It looked like a couple of strangely shaped candles and a bunch of greeting cards taped to the walls with some precious photos – a few boxes arranged neatly and in a very tidy way under her cot.

Why was I there?

It was a mystery. In the dream, I walked to this woman’s home and asked to enter. I hugged her and her dog and told her I wanted to help her. She continued to cry and embrace her only friend.

I had a large plastic bag in with me and now began to carefully gather every card and photo as if they were priceless works of art and place them in the bag. Candles, cards, photos, whatever was there. And listened to the incessant and constant shouting of neighbors and workmen outside shouting for us to evacuate before it was too late.

Still I gathered every little box from under her bed and keep asking her for direction with the search for her “valuables”. Everything was stored in the bag carefully so as not to damage one corner of any of her precious things.

I pulled up the little floor rug and carefully rolled it up and put it in the bag and gathered everything under her watchful and tear-streamed eyes.

Her fear at being unnecessary in a busy and “successful” world poured off her like the water rushing over Niagara Falls and it hurt my soul for every moment I was near her.

The shouting from outside never ceased, the wind seemed to pick up. Still I lingered there to comfort her and held her and her companion. I whispered over and over that everything would be alright and that we would find her a new place, even it it meant coming to stay with me.

Once almost everything was gathered together, she let me lead her outside to the waiting arms of a rescue worker.

I returned inside for one last review.

Bare walls, the floor bare, her cot – now stripped of it’s blanket and sheet, her little chair and footstool carefully moved outside. I checked for lose boards or secret cupboards and found little more, as I continued to listen to the shouting.

I carried out her chair and footstool and handed them to a worker and went to find her as I heard the huge building begin to fall, and knew I had done what was necessary for another who had no one to help them.

When I awoke, I wrote down the dream, so strangely vivid it was and then I lay there instead of rushing up to get on with my day, to wonder at the many messages I found in it. Perhaps you will find something of value there too.

Together, We Will Live Forever

Could it really be true...?

Together We Will Live Forever

Daddy's Secret

My Dad was twenty years older than my Mom when they met one unusually hot, sweaty day in late May. He was a man of the world, vigorous, looked like a young Paul Newman, had his own business -- that seemed to give him lots of money. He was well connected with the powers that were in those days, he was a well seasoned man who had survived the great plague in America and, by then, been in two World Wars and was a notorious womanises.

To her a good catch by all measures.

She was beautiful, youthful, and as my Daddy used to put it, “built like a brick outhouse” (I never quite understood this reference, but was told it had to do with her very ample upper body). She had beautiful, shiny, dark, almost-black hair. Her eyes were hazle and she had the most lovely smile and sense of humour (up to the last day of her life too).

Torrid was their love affair.

He was just divorced from his third or fourth wife; she had seen one husband-buried on her wedding day and three more since then that stuck for a while. She was married at the time actually to that third husband. Which goes to the story of my adoption (but I will save that for another time).

They drank together, partied hardy together with a multitude of their friends -- at a time when others were doing it very tough. She was a chef and they entertained. No one quite understood this unbalanced relationship.

Eventually, they HAD to marry (I was the problem but another time for details) and people were amazed to see this couple together. What was their secret and how did he keep her so attracted to him? For all my life until he died they were together from the moment of my birth (I was going to say from my conception but that is very NOT true).

The Secret

When I was about seven years old my Daddy told me the story of their secret for eternal youth. When he was about ninteen he went on a quest throughout Florida. You see, he had read about the Fountain of Youth and studied maps and purposed not to rest until he found this legendary spring that reputedly restored the youth of anyone who drank of its waters.

Even today stories of this hidden fountain are some of the most persistent stories associated with Florida. He told me about a great Spanish explorer, Juan Ponce de León searched for the Fountain of Youth in 1513 and he found it. My Daddy said he found it too…it was in an overgrown area and surrounded by a graveyard.

He brought a supply back to share with my Mom, but always joked they had really been drinking the water that had filtered through those old dead bodies. Even today I shuddered to think this would be true of my Daddy and Mommy.

Regardless, all my life I watched them never age as others around them did. Men and women of the same age when compared with my parents, looked their age, grew old in heart and simply died.

Seventy-Nine

It was not until they were nearly 80 that the first signs of ageing showed in my Mom or Daddy. When they reached that age -- all at once as if they had run out of this precious fluid or perhaps it lost its potency – their bodies rapidly deteriorated.

My Dad, up until that time could carry a porcelain bathtub on his back up five flights of stairs without growing out of breath. He worked every day of his life, and hard each day from morning to night and five or six days a week, rarely ever sick or injured. Mom did not have one wrinkle on her face till she neared 80. Her eyes were bright and she could still sing in her trained operatic voice and work in a full kitchen chefing (a job that is far harder than digging ditches – I tried it one summer as a favour to her !).

Then it was over. The magic number seemed to be 79. Both gone twenty years apart.

Strange. I have always had unbounded energy and optimism. My body is younger than all I know of my age. No wrinkles on my face. I have the lungs of an athlete...

I wonder what was in my special formula and those special drinks they always gave me every day of my life until they died.

White Rabbit

Thomas Merton (195 to 1968) was one of the most influential Catholic authors of the 20th century. A Trappist monk of the Abbye of Our Lady of Gethsemani, in the USA. This man was known as a spiritual writer, poet, author and social activist, writing over 60 books, scores of essays and reviews. He was also a proponent of inter-religious dialogue, engaging in spiritual dialogues with the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh and D.T. Suzuki.

In one of his essays, said:

“To surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace.”

And he wrote this before people couldn’t live a day without their computer, their mobile phone, wireless environments, SMS and MMS or virtual worlds were much explored. How did he know this when he would have used at best a pencil and paper Day Timer diary, wall calendar or the old index/palm cards to stay organised?

Real Life

Recently, I have found myself feeling tired and run down and I need some of that famous “Vitameatavegamin” that Lucy sold so long ago. I have a real life, you all know this. I write three columns every week day, am presently working on an update to my business book and working on my second novel. To earn a crust, I write and facilitate a series of 26 professional business workshops and have done so in a dozen countries now.

I race walk most days and enjoy the love of a sweet family (yet not my own), including two wonderful boys (ages 13, almost a man with deep voice and the 7 year old, who loves me to pieces and can’t wait to tell me about his latest knight and horse model.

Virtual Life

In my virtual world, I live in wonderful Avilion, a medieval land rich with beauty and diversity. It is well populated by locals and is the second most frequently visited land in the virtual world -- and all too often by many people who can’t remember to button up or wear enough clothing for some reason. There, I teach a variety of classes there during the month including role play, swordsmanship, preparation for sword tournaments, etc.

I have built a little chapel where I also perform “handfasting” ceremonies to wed people in partnerships (that typically last around 3 months at tops). I belong to 25 groups, including subgroups and attend numerous meetings and events through the virtual week.

To fit in my virtual life around my real life (something most are puzzled about) I arise typically before 3 AM each day and manage to fit in as many activities on line as I can. Then it is off to the real world for a "sanity break" and then back periodically into the virtual world for a "sanity break".

Handfasting

As you may know if you read this blog, I recently handfasted myself to “he who may no longer be named” and had the most remarkable whirlwind time of my virtual life. I joined him in his virtual world and there began to extrapolate my activities to keep up with him.

So what did I find started to happen? Well the turning point was that my Dad died (see "An Ordinary Knight Has Passed" on this blog) and I could no longer keep pace with either the virtual or the real world. Then I had an asthma attack due to some extraordinary stress and got new fangled medicine that completely anesthitised me to where I was sleeping up to 16 hours in a day.

Stopped the meds and started to reorient only to find that my lack of activity and keeping up with all my three schedules became too bloody much -- even with Vitameatavegamin. Especially when additional pressures were added to resume my “normal” pace after returning.

Under the Suns

Perhaps it is time for me to return to the wisdom of King Solomon, who said:

"All things are wearisome; man is not able to tell it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor is the ear filled with hearing. That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So, there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one might say, ‘See this, it is new’? Already it has existed for ages which were before. There is no remembrance of earlier things; and also of the later things which will occur, there will be for them no remembrance among those who will come later still.” Ecclesiastes 1:8-10

There is just so much one body, mind, heart, soul and spirit can keep up with and I have maxed out from demands of so many people. I am trying to adjust my pace and to remember that the virtual world I entered, I entered first to do research and second to have fun. I raise my glass of Vitameatavegamin to fun once more.

Is This The End?

By Lady Sheridanne Kelley

This will be the day to forget.
The one with ragged edges,
A piece of paper torn loose.

Perhaps in the corner
A bit of scribbling.
Or a smudge in the sky,

Like a cloud.
Impressions from the pen
Of the day that just ended.

It’s a grey day.
It has grey trees with grey leaves,
And thick dust still falling everywhere.

The bedroom is white
And everything is covered
In light dustings of frost.

The white hands
Of the seven-day clock
Are burrowing back into the two

Deep holes for the key.
No chimes.
You remember your husband’s face.

It winds down like a clock.
Someone’s eyes are fixes
On the white hands of the clock.

Two more minutes to the needle of snow.
Your husband lies there, bed rails up.
You lie on your bed near him.

Your hands
Pull his two eyelids down.
You close your eyes in pain.

Tomorrow, life will again blare like a radio
When the time is right.
The sun always remembers

And you re open your eyes
To the emptiness
That now remains.

How Was Your Day?

Ever have one of those days? Well today was a day to remember...not unlike Alice's mad tea party.

Satisfied Now?

No One

She purposed to need no one, not
love or thirst, not even sunrise
and the sweet amulets of water
that fall from the heavens.

No, she wanted to be an island
of self-sufficiency, to sleep
with her arms around her pillow,
a flower alone in damp woods
singing to herself
beneath her curling umbrella.

And this is how she lived for many years -
a solitary song, a soliloquy
spoken into a small mirror
that hangs beside the wash basin,
with its pink towel and basket of dead flowers.

But something remained wrong -
a dull ache whispered from below her voice
where her heart should have been. A seed
rumbled in the pit of her stomach, as if to suggest
a tree that had never grown, a stone skimming
the surface of water once and then sinking.

She grew old this way, never knowing
it had been need she had needed all along -
the sound of her own small voice
asking for a light to see by, a match
to retrieve her heart from the widening dark.