Ren Powell's Blog, page 14

Boop

Was going to sleep in this morning, but a cold nose on mine woke me. He loves routine. I wish I could be better for him. But I did get up and let him out in the yard. I push the button to grind a cup of coffee. Before it is done, Leonard is in the house again, standing next to the treat cupboard. People talk a lot about what dogs give us. I’m not sure I’ve ever read about how dogs give us a framework for our days. For time, really – their lives being so expectedly short. I have literally measured my life in dogs before. How many dogs left? It is a way of asking how many possible loves.

Every one is a lesson in grief, of course. But also love. When Kiri was stumbling at 18, her body unrecognizably thin and covered with odd lumps, she would have repulsed me – frightened me – but after 18 years (who’d have dreamt we would have so many) when she rested her snout in my hand, my chest hurt. The invisible threads of attachment were ripping from the meat of my heart. You’d think that there would be some kind of imaging machine that could show the damage done, the wound.

Puppy love is infatuation. This was a slow-grown love that allowed me to lie on the kitchen floor with her. To glide my fingers over her bones. To stroke her snout, thinking this was one of the few places that may not hurt. To take her to the vet one last time.

I suspect this is preparation for what most of us will go through with the people in our lives. Maybe one of the few advantages of estrangement is to avoid this hurt. Or maybe estrangement is its own slow ripping of the heart. So slow that the constant pain becomes a kind of white noise in our lives.

Elizabeth II said that grief is the price we pay for love. I think that when I first heard this I thought of it as a bill that comes due when something comes to an end. But for those of us who aren’t good at living in the moment, I expect it is a constant pinch.

Maybe living in the moment isn’t my goal. Maybe this really is fine. If yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all the same to the gods, then living in a moment that embraces them all must have its advantages. Depth. Contrast. Richness. The whole of existence.

When Leonard boops my nose in the morning, I am conscious of the temporariness of our routine, of its fragility in terms of choice, effort, and time. And my heart aches in the way your bones do when you wrap yourself with wool against the biting cold.

I think of friends. How my days slide by when I am not making choices. Not reaching out to boop them on the nose. If I don’t overcome my fear of needing them, of losing them – well, it is so great a loss that it makes me question what the quality of my life is and will be, if I don’t follow my instinct to reach out and stroke their cheekbones.

Metaphorically, of course.

This means, you Richard. And B. And… a small alphabet of strong and weak ties.

I’m off to take Leonard to the lake.

The Dead are Listening

I’ve had a gift certificate on my desk since my birthday in April. Yesterday I finally swapped it for four books that seem oddly symbolic. I got Autumn and Winter by Ali Smith. Fry’s Mythos, which I started last night but am not sure I like, and…

I worry about my memory.

Still. Yesterday was a good day. Easy morning coffee and writing, then a walk in the woods near the lake with Leonard. When I first adopted him he was skittish and we gave up taking him there. Now, 4 years later, he held his tail high and smiled the whole time. I’ve missed the woods in the morning darkness, so I’m glad for the beginning of a new routine. And it’s also nice that Leonard is our dog now. Whether E. likes it or not, Leonard has decided men are okay after all. And E. comes in third to the man who lives down the street. (I am second).

We can’t help who we fall in love with. And I’ve learned to stop feeling jealous. I’ve learned it is all about where we put our attention. About recognizing the futility of our will. I suppose it is the opposite of all this “manifesting” people are selling to one another. The clowns waited for Godot in the 1950s. Now they are trying to conjure him. Here are seeds for a new play: a naked dance in the woods, something burning, and words that rhyme.

I am trying to focus on the good in the days. What hope survives the hurricane and what small joys it misses entirely: the bones that are surprisingly strong, and the seemingly fragile, tiny wings of things that hide and hold on. Maybe in a world that is so arbitrary, the real good is to walk behind a storm and gather the good. Willfully accepting.

The students are playing in the park this weekend. While they pin themselves, and spirit gum themselves into their costumes to rehearse, I photograph the white mushrooms growing on a tree stump. White, marshmallow ears.

Before the News

I realized that I have made a habit of beginning the day with a news podcast. Two actually. I’ve been starting the day with worry and noise that sets the tone for what follows. I miss the lake more than I’ve noticed. The sounds and the smells. Even that, “just getting this over with” song that can run through my head when I don’t feel it.

So much has changed, gotten off track, and I am not sure how to organize new habits. I’m thinking maybe the first thing is to stop listening to podcasts continually. I don’t even know if I am doing so to drown out thoughts I don’t want to think, or if I have just been passive. There is a comfort in the noise, really. Like having the television on when I would come home to an empty house after school in elementary school.

An empty house is unnerving. Sometimes. Although during the times I lived by myself as an adult, I found the silence soothing. The quiet cicada-like buzz in my ears has its own melody. There was no one missing. No one to barge in. I was in no one’s territory but my own.

As dark as my thoughts could be, they were blunt. Buffered. And buffering – something between me and other people that I could control.

It seems like so long ago. All of it. I heard a podcast recently about a woman who had no recollection of her childhood friend – her self-proclaimed “best friend” – even after talking to her. The scientist they referenced said that it is normal when the mind is in survival mode. The brain focuses all its energy on locating danger and contemplating escape routes. There’s nothing left over to record memories.

Maybe that becomes a way of life. Even after the danger is passed. It was interesting to me to hear that there are people like me. Not only partially facial blind but pretty much without memories.

As stressful as it is to listen to the news at 5 am.- to walk to the train and sit at my desk with headphones on, podcasts droning in my ears – it is familiar. But my head is so filled with voices that I am not recording these passing days. It is like sinking into a comfortable sponge.

I am a sea creature at the bottom of the ocean. What passes by passes by.

I need to run again.

Seasons

What if I’m not a summer soul after all? What if the sunny days are meant to be spent lying on the ground, trying to find the balance between Vitamin D and skin cancer? Feeling heavy, sticky. Soaking up the heat like a loaf of bread in the oven. What if I have nothing to feel guilty about?

Because now there is a restlessness coming over me. The last of the flower petals are lodged in puddles, or wedged between branches or cracks in the buildings. The leaves are bright red on the bushes. The leaves on the trees are dry and the wind plays a slightly different kind of music now.

Everything streaming seems insipid. Summer brought back a television habit. It is painful to admit. The slow film Four Good Days, which I first took to be a play, woke me up. I want to read again. Maybe return to Annie Dillard. Or Arne Nærss.

Yesterday I had to put on my student’s costume and play a goat for 30 daycare children. Corona is still a thing that trips up what once seemed so predictable. I’ve been teaching for so very many years now, and this is the first time I had to step in because “the show much go on.” It was humbling. And still, sad to recognize again the lack of butterflies or joy in being the one on stage. I found it hard to stay in character and focus on the layer of fiction I was supposed to inhabit. I wanted to take it all in.

Maybe that’s not such a sad thing, really. Maybe it is a kind of depth, too.

Walking back from the park after the performances, I saw a wasps’ nest in an open field. It could have been a wasps’ nest. It may have been honeycomb. Tomorrow I run along the same path to the park and, if it is still there, I think it will be safe enough to get closer. To find out.

I can’t tell you why I need to know.

E.’s daughter has moved back into the house unexpectedly and (necessarily) taken over my studio space. Everything is changed suddenly, and for the next 2 years. E. is clearing out his storage room to give me a place to paint and make paper – to work on the nests. I think sometimes when the unexpected happens, and after we’ve taken time to breathe, it can be a comfort: Well, this wasn’t the end of the world.

Not this time.

Leaving Home

The photos on my phone lately are of snails: small, brown, whorling armored bodies. All summer our yard has been infested with slugs. At one point the branches of the bolted kale and the wild parsnips were covered with them, hanging like Christmas tree ornaments. It was nearly impossible to walk in the yard without stepping on one. Diligence: but not out of concern for life, really. But to avoid intimacy with all of these open-gutted creatures that live here, despite the fat hedgehog that returned to the shelter of the holly bush. A fat man at the feast. Full.

The word is the same for snail and slug in Norwegian, which I find odd. Although, really, isn’t the only difference between the two the level of vulnerability? And that – maybe – most of us find vulnerability repugnant?

They say that all the creatures in our dreams are reflections of our own psyche. I wonder sometimes if this isn’t also true of our waking perceptions of the world. If we truly are annoyed most by people who reflect our own worst character traits – by our own measure – then it might follow that we are similarly repulsed by the elements of the natural world that reflect our worst fears.

I feel guilty killing a slug. But (or and?) do my best to avoid seeing them. I have spent too much of this summer and fall so far indoors. I feel as though the last two years have torn a hole in my skin, and the pale, soft mechanisms of my life are on display. I cling to the days and hope no one will notice. At least you tell yourself that. Sometimes you reach a point of self-loathing where you want to be conspicuous. You want to dare the world to pour salt on your wounds.

Now, though, there are fewer slugs. Maybe the hedgehogs (and there are many this year) are filling up for the winter sleep. Now the snails cling to the waxy leaves of the holly bush. Sometimes alone. Sometimes in clusters. Their shells are like fragile bones that are more show than function. Or maybe their function is show. A bit of theater. A pretense of strength and decorum that make us all more comfortable? Home is where the facade goes.

It’s time to pull on the snowsuit and walk Leonard in this rain. Dawn is an hour away. The gravel will crunch under my shoes. The sparrows will rustle in the bushes that line the path. And maybe I will feel safe enough, strong enough to begin writing again.

Unexamined Hope

Getting back to work has been more difficult than I anticipated, with the old gremlins popping up unexpectedly in corners of the day.

Leonard is sick. I’m sure he caught the virus that E. and I had last week. I hate leaving him alone for the day when he isn’t feeling well, though I know he just sleeps under the coffee table or on the sofa. Maybe it is the stress of getting back to a work schedule that has all of us vulnerable to all kinds of threats. Real and perceived.

I finally saw the hedgehog that has taken up residence under the holly bush. Leonard is curious, but fortunately, he hides behind my legs while he sniffs at the air from a safe distance. The creature’s not a hare, he knows that much. It makes me happy to know there’s a hedgehog here again. I can’t even begin to explain why. We will only catch glimpses of him in the half-dark for a few more months before he sleeps for the winter. But somehow knowing he is there… like a weird kind of vague promise of something good.

Unexamined hope.

I keep reminding myself that life is good right now. I am even learning not to brace myself for bad news when a message notification pops up on my phone. T. sends snaps of their new puppy swimming in a pond way up North. I can hear the splashing, and him and his wife laughing softly.

When I think of these kinds of moments, I think of them as little ponds of pleasure in the day: oases I kind of tiptoe around, admiring, but not really daring to immerse myself in; these moments of calm that dot the stressful landscape. But why can’t I flip that mindset and see moments of stress that simply dot a calm landscape? It is probably closer to the truth of my life right now.

Or could be.

Making a Point. Or Two.

Sometimes I think how odd it is that my life is still measured in school years. How, for 9 months of the year, nearly everyone in the world is 17 years old. But I age.

Before work yesterday, I sat in the chair at the physiotherapist’s office facing a mirror while the twenty-something therapist put my shoulders through a series of diagnostic tests.

When I am confronted unexpectedly with my own image, it is always a little jarring.

This old woman.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have an image of myself as a twenty-something. Or even forty-something. I know what I look like. I know what bits of me look like in the magnifying mirror when I clean my skin or cover the broken capillaries on my nose with green concealer, and the sallow tint of the thin skin under my eyes with purple. The closer one looks, the more one observes the decomposing of the image: like a Seurat painting.

Perception creates reality. Realities.

I am becoming/have become a patchwork of colors that are as incongruous as childhood memories; where everything only creates the whole with a good deal of perspective. Perspectives. What makes sense today, may not make sense tomorrow. Today I accept the woman in the mirror. Tomorrow I will do my best to ignore her – the pathetic crone in fine clothes. (“Why are you even trying?”)

Distance. Imagination. Maybe I have become so complex that one needs to step back to take in the whole? Maybe I need to step back.

And step up.

Over the past few years, I have seen a lot of older women in the gym. The skin on their arms, stomachs, and legs tell me their age, but at some point, I stopped judging them by their skin. And by that, I mean that I have stopped looking away in fear: “This will happen to me”. No doubt because it has already happened to me.

Now I observe how they balance elegantly on one leg as they tie a shoelace. I see the taut muscles under the lax skin. One literally needs to look deeper to see the strength and beauty.

And I admire them.

Maybe it makes sense that as we age one needs to take a step back to see the beauty. Not to obscure the details, but rather to appreciate how the details accumulated over a long life work together to create a whole.

Like a Seurat painting.

The Power of Perception

It’s dark at 5 am already – again. This morning Leonard walked slowly-slowly back into the house after his morning yard duty, and he was followed by a small, white moth. I slid the glass door closed between them just in time to save my wool sweaters. Actually, I have no idea if it was the kind of moth that eats sweaters, but I do know there was something eery in its erratic movements and blinking wings.

Two nights now of sleeping well after a week of insomnia. It isn’t difficult to wake in the morning, but I move slowly. I’m still moving at a vacation tempo, forgetting that there is a clock ticking and a train to catch.

After four days of staff preparation, the students will return today. And for the first time in three years, I am looking forward to seeing them. For the first time in three years, I think I have something to give them, a way to guide them, to listen and learn from them. This is how it is supposed to feel on the good days. The calm anticipation of “in may very well go well”.

There can be a kind of ease in the everyday work day.

Neil thinks out loud about what makes a beautiful life. Maybe my problem has been that I keep looking for some kind of constant beauty rather than noticing the stitch of beautiful elements that holds it all together.

Other people, other creatures – dogs, moths, hedgehogs in the yard – these moments of interaction, these collisions, meetings, this is when we actually create the world. We do have a hand in crafting the beauty.

Holding Life Loosely

I have this “image” in my mind. Except it’s not an image—I think it’s a sensual memory. Indistinct. Life of some sort in the palm of my hand. I curl my fingers inward to hold it, but carefully. This thing is delicate. Easily disfigured.

Easily killed.

A heartbeat flutters sketching a ghostly sonogram on my skin. It’s a game of peek-a-boo and “careful-careful” and I feel like a toddler not knowing how to control my body with tenderness. I feel like a toddler confronting the wonder of it all.

But these moments pass so quickly. Something shiny just out of reach catches my eye. And “living in the moment” too often means a singular attention focused on this immediate thing. Too often the drama.

And it means something irreparably damaged. Lost before I knew what it was.

There are so many variables that it is difficult to pinpoint what has triggered a change. Sleep. Medication. Aging, and all the inevitable events that follow: deaths of all kinds. Maybe the burnout was finally so complete that I can rise again like a phoenix. An awkward baby bird.

I’ve enjoyed the quiet. This quiet. It is someone worth holding on to.

Rising from the Goo

And just touching this place this morning. Easing in.

It’s been nearly three months of quiet. Leonard has often lain here in the library, on his rug. I would think sometimes it was a gentle coaxing. But this time away from it all has been good for me.

A couple of times over the past years my doctor has asked me to consider taking time away in the hospital – to really get away from all the self-induced pressures and reset. From one perspective, I was offended she thought I was so very ill. From another, it seemed like a rich (wo)man’s self-indulgence and that made me terribly uncomfortable.

As it is I am privileged with a long summer vacation. And this year, quite unintentionally, I didn’t use it to write a book or improve myself in any way. I slept for eight weeks. Three-hour naps, early to bed, late to rise. Mindless television and exercise. All body, no mind. I shoved the guilt from my thoughts. I grieved. I properly grieved so many things.

Then I got up and cleaned house – every sock, every paperclip in place.

I am ready now for whatever is next.