The Mushroom Umbrella

Saturnine Fog

2011-08-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Mushroom,

Things are going ok, I still cry a bunch of times a day, and erratic things break me, like microwave ovens. The microwave oven died last night and I stood there, trying to figure out how I was going to fix my dinners. With the gas oven and stove to my left. Still, a microwave isn't something I can go out and buy right now. It was a muffled loss, the universe saying, "here, take this, too," and I felt it just like a body blow, like my body answered "sure, why not." Like my body had become Eeyore. Still, it bugged the crap out of me. Mostly about how to dispose of microwaves that don't work, try doing that anymore. It's easier to dispose of a dead body.

It's funny and it's not. New loss is hard to bear these days, even microwave loss.

Each day is hard. It's hard to do the same thing and it's hard to do something different. Yesterday was hard, because I went to an all-day seminar on diversity and inclusion given by one of the better teachers here at work, Patrick V., but it was a room full of strangers and now I would have to expose myself and tell the truth about my biases and isms. For the first four hours I was fighting tears. Eventually it got okay and then it got even better than that. We went through an exercise where we had to pick a profile of a "different" person and explain why that profile would be easier for us to be than the other three. I chose an unemployed paraplegic physicist. Why? Because unlike the other three profiles all of which had various compromises to freedom and dependency on or responsibility to others which affected their abilities to express their intellect, in my profile there was no loss of freedom of the mind, control over the inner cognitive self.

Later I sat outside and thought about why that profile was so attractive to me. I realized that it was true. No matter what damage my mother and my history and men in general and Fang specifically have caused me emotionally, I can still think. The one thing they can't touch is my mind. My mind is very fine. They haven't touched it.

So that was good.

I also think that's why getting to the truth of a thing is so important to me. When I know what's true, recovery moves just an inch forward. I used to think knowing the truth was the sure path to the heart's release, but there is more work to be done after that, I've discovered. Knowing the truth opens the door; and then there is the walking through of it all.

Anyway you'll remember that I didn't go to my AJ class last month because it was the week after or just before Fang dumped me, and I was having an okay day, as I recall I'd taken the day off and I just wanted to be still inside; I had trouble thinking about managing a room full of people. Now I'm sorry I didn't go.

But they tape the sessions and you can go online and replay them. Last month's AJ happened to be about loving yourself~~ tra laa...so I booted it up to watch at work this week.

I still think JB has the world's biggest heart and is doing the world's best work and is also possibly the worst deliverer of the message I've come across in this weird little ride I'm taking on the lovingkindness peace train. Possibly LL, the depression Buddhist, is worse, but anyway. James is like a nerd mad scientist hippy. Affect like an eager beaten puppy coming back for more. It makes me crazy. "You're okay!" he chirps. "You can do it!"

But after he tried to be incoherent and super kind for half an hour in front of the crowd, he brought up this woman MJ Ryan who's written a bunch of books about self-esteem and compassion and she was great. She says instead of trying to love yourself directly, go sideways and help your brain find evidence of the ways in which you are lovable. She talked about neuroplasticity, too. She talked about the Dalai Lama's translator's compassion retreats, which have been offered secularized to the public and how she just got back from one. It's nine weeks long. Basically nine weeks of repeating the lovingkindness metta/sutra. The last one you do is the one for yourself, because in Western culture we have such a hard time allowing ourselves to embrace self-love. Somehow, Eastern cultures do this better? That's a debate for another time, I suppose. All the Western-style ego and aqcuisition is about compensating for essentially feeling unlovable, though, this I see clearly.

Next this woman named Eve Decker, who used to sing with my ex-friend Patty in a band called Midnight Radio, came up to sing. She's been up before. The last time she was awful; trembly and off-key. This time she was great. She absolutely knew what she was talking about. It was very neat to see such a change, illuminating to see how mutable the human experience of certainty is. How art comes from a particular kind of sureness. The voice, that clarity of joy, awakens, just as this seminar is trying to help us see. I am doubtful that words are really the path into it, but togetherness seems to be. Touch seems to be.

Eve's been a meditator for a long time and spoke about hatred. Hatred is not the absence of love. Hatred is the failure to accept one's own humanity. Self-love doesn't happen until one knows all one's faults and foibles and loves oneself anyway. Some of these things she said, some of these things I thought as I watched her.

I saw for the first time why Fang is so hateful, especially if he's being asked to look at himself, even more so when he's being asked kindly.

He can't because he doesn't love himself. And that's where his hate comes from.

I get it; because I know about that, too.

It's very difficult to metabolize the notion of self-love. Yet, as Cormac McCarthy says, it is the self that the coward abandons first; after that, all other betrayals come easily. That courage cannot be a thing that is subject to the vicissitudes of fortune.

I wonder if all real love comes easily, once the self is cared for...

Grace, Returning

2011-08-08T21:02:00.000-07:00

At church this week I met a beautiful woman named Helen. She showed me her aprons and her gospel songs. She has this way of moving you into the next thing, like breath.

I'd seen her the week before after services, but hadn't made her acquaintance. I caught sight of her as I was passing through the kitchen where she was wiping down the table upon which lunch had been laid out for social hour. She paused as I came in, offering plates and pointing out what had been cooked that week. She looked up at me over her glasses and smiled, gestured that I should help myself. Later she cleared my plate when I had finished and offered me herbal tea from a tray she was passing around. All of this took me to tears. It takes me there now.

Helen is tall, willowy but solid. She seems to have a look, or at least a "church" look: she wears a thick cotton sash wrapping her dreadlocks in an off-kilter, flattering way, the way that a beret sets a face into interesting angles and shadows below. No-nonsense glasses with dark blue frames and half-rectangle lenses, a hair wider than bifocals, frame her dark brown eyes. Though she dresses in strong colors, neon-bright animal and floral print skirts with matching shirts and shawls, she herself doesn't ask for a lot of attention. It feels like she's offering her presence to you as a greeting, the way a flower would, but doesn't need to otherwise take up space. If I had to guess, I'd say Helen is an introvert. One of those introverts who has a quiet secret garden inside her mind that she visits frequently. Her voice is soft and clear.

"I came here, oh, a long time ago, somehow. I came and I left and then I came back," she said to me this week

Restoration Period

2011-08-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since I've posted that I'm wondering how. Almost four years by the dates, I think. There has been a lot of grief.

Since last postings, I fell in love, or something like it, and now I'm recovering from surgery on it. I thought the second time that I tried with the same person that perhaps we could end it, if it had to end, in a way which allowed us both dignity and the chance to simply understand our incompatibilities. And I mentioned that to F., in fact, during the first weeks of our renaissance, which is to say during the early giddiness in which we fell back into bed and tried to build the foundations for daily life around that. Not easy with a man who lives 2 hours' drive away. But I thought with what we knew and had learned from the first time, perhaps there would be more ease in our considerations of each other.

Not to be.

The end was a fiery crash.

I don't want to say that F. is cruel, but in fact he is. Entreaties go ignored, efforts to find some kind of peaceful neutral ground for conversation are met with icy silence or fury. I know I have many faults, perhaps the biggest one is trying too hard. He used to call that my A+++ behavior. But he, I have to conclude, uses that space to punish me, instead of relenting. More may be revealed as I study the whys of what I do, and why I am attracted to abusive men.

Grace paid a visit today. Went back to church and met new people. Once again found the sermons uninspiring or somehow, missing the point. I stayed anyway. Met a woman named Helen who makes the most gorgeous aprons. And who coaxed me into practicing for the gospel choir. Met a man named Eduardo from Cuba. Saw Pat and Zhenne.

Belonged, for two short hours...ah! The grace of belonging.

I hope these gentle people can be patient with me as I try to find the self that I feel somehow has gone missing again, abandoned, along the way. I want to bring something of value to this place, to give back. I pray to be kept safe, please, for the journey.

Grace is simple. Grace is unexpected love.

As Annie Lamott says, "my favorite prayer is 'help, help, help, help...'"

Katie

Nappers Without Borders

2007-07-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

I want this. What does that mean?

2007-07-12T13:33:00.001-07:00

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"The entire Dog Park sits on a play mat and Dixie can walk and carry the babies and accessories using magnetic features on his back and tongue that extends when you push his tail in. "

G'night, Jim-Bob

2007-07-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

Here we all are, watching the fog roll in together.

A tout a l'heures...

The Beston Quote

2007-07-07T08:48:00.001-07:00

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.

Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.

For the animal shall not be measured by man.

In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

from The Outermost House , © 1928, 1956, Henry Beston

Bitter

2007-07-07T08:36:00.001-07:00

I have become that woman. I called the cops last night and after being hung up on three times by their automated phone tree system (it is Oakland, after all) reported a group of teenagers "standing in the middle of the street, setting off firecrackers. It's scaring the crap out of my animals."

Actually, it was just interfering with my television volume.

Yep. I have become that woman.

Out to Pick up a Gross, Honey

2007-07-06T16:55:00.000-07:00

Is there a gender corollary to the forty years of life during which a woman finds herself leaving the house only because she's completely out of Tampax?

Do those of you with male sigoths ever hear "Hey--just popping out to buy a urethra blotter," or "Be right back--discovered I'm completely out of vas deferens ointment?"

Perhaps the only thing in my life which truly can accept no substitute. Why don't they have Tampax stands on every corner? Like mailboxes, or FedEx deposit receptacles.

I mean.

Fungi: The Microbial World

2007-07-06T12:51:00.000-07:00

Question. If you leave your blue cheese in the refrigerator for, say, a year or more, and it grows hairy: is that bad? Was there a necessary mold management or mold control step that went missing?

I guess what I'm saying really is, is moldy mold a de facto bad thing? Or can one actually promulgate fungal plethora with a clear conscience betimes? In your response, please cite references. Or examples from your personal life. Please, no examples from your professional life: I'm not sure that would be applicable.

This is obviously a theoretical question--I would never have, say, things that were a year old or more in my, say, vegetable compartment. But, I think, an important one. For us all.

Fungi. On everyone's minds.

www.bact.wisc.edu/themicrobialworld/Fungi.html

Syndication

2007-07-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

"There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do."

--Bill Watterson

Divine Intervention

2007-07-04T06:48:00.001-07:00

Today I have to write four pieces, then meet my advisor, then go to a writer's party.

I need help.

I do have my shorts on with the glow-in-the-dark cat faces.

I'm not sure that's enough. I may need popsicles as well.

It will be hot. I will not leave my house all day.

Perhaps in my religion, popsicles will be a communion host.

Salvacion Tipica

2007-07-03T21:25:00.000-07:00

Trópico Verde

Verde lluvia, vertiene y territorio
Verde el especio, la luz verde.
El clima verde. Verdes las colinas.
Las hondonadas y los ríos verdes.
Un lago verde del valle. La montaña
verdeazul, verdemar, verdeprofundo.
Lo cerca y lo lejano en aire verde.
Verde lluvia, vertiene y territorio.

Roto temblor el verde de los plátanos.
Casi líquida lágrima, el verdor
del sauce. El verde
militar del café, el verdor húmedo
de junco, cana y lirio. Verde música
en el órgano, -- oh verde viento! del bambú.
La plata verde
del eucalípto. El verde silencioso
de los pastos, las malvas, las legumbres.

Verde lluvia, vertiene y territorio.
De mi sangre saltó una estrella verde.
Y verdin, verdinal y verdolaga,
mayo estira su lluvia hasta diciembre
en el trópico verde.

Bubbles

2007-07-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

The NYT reported things today that I would not otherwise have ever known. Beverly married a man going through a divorce who fought for custody of his kids back in the fifties in Cleveland, and for that, she says, “Peter was ostracized by Cleveland’s rinky-dink version of high society.”

She had two children of her own, a girl Meredith, who was discovered to be profoundly deaf at 2 years old; and a boy Peter, born with severe mental retardation complicated by it is thought now, autism. She received these pieces of news within six weeks of each other. She went back to work, and sang for twenty more years.

"[Before the children's diagnoses] I was a combination of everyone else’s ideas: the director, the conductor, the tenor. After I came back, I talked back. I stopped caring what anyone else thought.

“I began to have a good time.”

Oh! Can I please remember this forever. What is this feeling called, reading stories like this--

Families

2007-07-03T09:19:00.000-07:00

Street musician playing down the long corridor to the BART exit:

o/~ I need a twenty-dollar bill
in my hat/I need a twenty-dollar bill
in my hat
I need a twenty-dollar bill
in my hat
I need a twenty-dollar bill
in my hat
I gotta feed my dog,
I gotta feed my cat.
o/~

The Right Stuff

2007-07-03T06:56:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken at Christmastime five years ago (wow). My parents invited me to tag along on a business trip to Santa Monica with the promise of a visit to the Getty the next day. After his client dinner, my dad came whooping back to the hotel room, opened up the minibar, pulled out a pack of peanut M&Ms and started jumping on my bed. My stepmother gave us a long look, turned her back to that side of the room, and opened her Joan Didion.

In this shot, I think he looks like a cross between Denny on "Boston Legal" and an astronaut from the sixties.

More striking for me, however, is how we've arrived at being exactly the same height.

And those gams! Sexy boy.

A Wait and See Attitude

2007-07-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's best to hide out in the pink cave and let a world go about its business without the benefit of your participation.

Encroachment

2007-06-30T09:35:00.000-07:00

Walking home on Market Street I almost stepped on a pigeon that had moved on. Men were working right next to him on the windows of a closed storefront. There was nothing on the sidewalk to indicate what he died of--no evidence of violence, no weapons, no discarded coke can, no pile of tossed-out food. Everyone else kept walking. My heart jumped up to my throat and I started thinking about why dead pigeons are so altering for me. It just makes no sense, I thought. Every dead pigeon I see in the City has died before its time.

As I passed into another block, below a young ginkgo tree I saw a dead sparrow. It lay on its side in full profile and had been flattened, as if crushed; I saw it from above as if it had only two dimensions and was embedded in the concrete. It was a sparrow-mosaic. A branch with a leaf still on it lay just outside its beak. The mosaic was beautiful, green and brown and fawn and gray.

How do dead birds lie like this, on clean-swept, dingy sidewalks, in the City, people stepping over them? How do they die?

As if all tenderness had been wrung from the world for just that day.

Runcible

2007-06-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?’
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
So they took it away and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

PG and the Aby-Tabbies

2007-06-29T14:04:00.000-07:00

This tabby ghoulash pic was taken when Fiona was still alive and we had just adopted Botwyn and Diana. Or rather, I asked Fiona and she said yes; and then we posed the question to them. Botwyn was the first to agree. He had no quarrel and only wanted never to be left alone. Diana was alarmed and left immediately, escaping through an inch-wide gap between the screen door and the sliding glass at about three one morning while I slept just below. Two weeks later she returned and had dinner from a bowl of kibble on the terrace. A month later she walked in the back door.

We were all very happy together.

Agouti Women

2007-06-27T14:17:00.000-07:00

I was walking up the BART escalator in the fast lane behind a tall, svelte, crinkly-haired woman in an ivory denim jacket. She paused and shifted to the right.
She had on tight hip-hugger jeans with embroidered back pockets. She had hips the size of quarters. I take that back. Her jeans were not tight, they were form-fitting. Long, long legs. Something about the way she was made us notice each other. The air vibrated and a message was transmitted. I thought I was mistaken so it did not change my trajectory. As I was passing her, she said, "I love your opals. They're so beautiful."

My hand had been resting on my knee which was suspended over the step above. My knee was swathed in a pair of un-form-fitting, stone chinos from Eddie Bauer and below them, my feet happily rattled around in a pair of scuffed Dansko clogs in that color they call 'cordovan.' Above my chinos was a dun-colored wrinkled cotton V-neck sweater. My socks which had lost their elastic but stayed above my heels anyway, matched the cotton camisole which straps were showing from underneath the dun-colored sweater which matched my shoes, all of which were in the dark ruby-wine, oxblood-red color family.

But she didn't know any of that.

On the last three fingers of my hand there were Navajo rings, and in those rings were opals. Also in those rings wre turquoise and onyx and lapis and garnet. All this wrapped around my fingers, running along my hand, which was laid on the surface of my thigh.

As we got off the escalator, our bodies kind of leaned into each other, as if they weren't done talking.

'How astounding,' I thought, sliding my BART ticket through the turnstile, 'that such a woman would find me kindred.'

Editorial Collaboration

2007-06-24T22:45:00.001-07:00

Botwyn likes to sleep on top of my mouse. This, I can manage; I just quietly sneak the pad out from underneath his (although we never say this in his presence) ponderous belly, and move the mouse cord lower so I have sufficient range. His velvety, wet nose is usually about a quarter inch from the right-click button.

This evening however Finn discovered the little white arrow that follows the text prompt on the screen. Shades of laser light flashing before his eyes, I presume, he planted his skinny self between me and opus #1 of my master's thesis. Punctuation and narrative arc become even more opaque than they had been to begin with.

I wonder if a margin set skirting the shoulders and ears of the feline would be acceptable formatting to my advisor?

I can't possibly be the first to have asked this question. All part of the critical dialectic so essential between academic and acolyte.

Luckily, like me, Finn has the attention span of a gnat. He has just decided that my glass of lemonade is much more exciting.

2007-06-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Finn would like it if I left the house more often. It gives him time to collect his thought.