Ren Powell's Blog, page 15

You Can Fly, You Can Fly…

An hour has slipped by and my body is getting heavier. I have felt like sleeping these past few days. I am a soft kind of tired now. Leonard is lying just behind my chair now, on the cold floor instead of his usual spot on the rug. When I am done writing, I will lie on the bed with the thin quilt my grandmother made when I was born. Leonard will lie on the floor in the bedroom, too, even though he usually jumps up when the dog-proof comforter is spread over the sheets. But he runs hot and though it isn’t even 18 degrees Celcius, he’s overheating easily. He won’t want to snuggle. Too warm. Yesterday on the walk, he cut me off after a half-hour and pulled toward home. Not even the rain helped.

I have a difficult time making terms with the weather these days – when the heat seems like a waste when the sky is so gray and so deceptive. The long-term forecast shows eight days of overcast skies and rain. It shouldn’t matter. I know that. And I know that the sunshine probably wouldn’t make me more energetic. It would probably just mean another nap. At first. But I believe that it would seep in and waken something within me. Something vital.

“Listen to your body”. My body is saying that fish oil is not a substitute for sunshine. That the best way to release two years of tension might not be to push through to something new. I don’t even know what the hell I am striving towards.

It is difficult to turn off panic mode, the “run in any other direction as fast as possible” mode. There is so much I need to sort through. Both in terms of objects and in terms of thoughts. I need to lift each item of clothing, fold it, and determine how to sort it. Each random tube of mascara, every compact with eye shadow. Cerulean blue? Keep it or toss it? Where did it even come from?

I need to take each memory and hold it up and disconnect it from the thrashing, toothy emotion. Where did it even come from? And what does one do with such beasts?

Maybe they are leaving me now, all on their own, as I run hill repeats, flow through yoga sequences, and nap. Maybe they are leaving me ragged. And maybe poems will seep from the wounds.

I wonder if I can convince myself that this overcast sky is the thin white sheet of a blanket fort keeping the sun off my nose. That this day is an early afternoon rest between running through the sprinklers. And that soon the world will smell like charcoal and beef, and the fireflies will rise from the grass like so many fairies. The sweet kind of fairies, with fistfuls of pixie dust.

Milestones and Omens

I’ve had an unwanted hiatus from writing. Growing is always difficult, and some things must lie fallow while other things bloom. That was “svulstig”*, I know. But the metaphor does the job of conveying the truth.

*grandiloquent – but not exactly. Try saying them out loud. Svulstig feels much more bloated in your mouth, pressing around your tongue. While something grandiloquent trips in high heels.

On Saturday I gave a short speech on behalf of my ex-husband and myself. Our son was finally able to enjoy an elegant wedding after two years of Covid kicking the can down the road.

My son has always hated it when I code-switch. He said he grew up thinking Norwegian words were legitimate English words because I tend to use the best word. What else to do but to code-switch in the speech? Kjærlighet means more to me than the word love. Most likely because it isn’t my native tongue. Love is overused, misused, and abused. What do we love? French fries and argyle socks (maybe not). I have never heard the world kjærlighet used in such a way. If it is a matter of my ignorance of the Norwegian vernacular, that’s all right. Language is private and public, subjective and contextual. Someone will always correct us when we think we have found the perfect expression.

I have to admit though, I like the Danish pronunciation better, with its abrupt K at the beginning – like a “catch”. Then the j there, quiet but like a hook. And the suffix “het” makes it a phenomenon. The Danish language is tough. I like that such a word has a toughness to it. A strength that comes from the gut.

You don’t “fall into” kjærlighet. It is something that arises. It is a different word than “to love”: å elske. To fall in love is to be forelsket. Kjærlighet is more than a feeling.

As I was writing the speech, I kept thinking about how it felt to have E. on my hip when he was small. How I’d lift him by one arm and he’d swing in like a little monkey, wrapping his legs around my waist. It is such an intense physical memory it brings tears to my eyes. It manifests a very different kind of kjærlighet. But still, a phenomenon that arises as an atmosphere and permeates the years. Still.

On Saturday night at the reception, on several occasions, my E. now taller than me would wrap his arm around my waist to comfort me. Include me.

There is a poem here that I will write. But for now –

I can’t find the word I want. It isn’t bittersweet. There is no bitterness here. Some language must have a word for this. I am not the first parent to be overwhelmed by an atmosphere that has somehow accumulated years of experiences, emotions, ambitions, hopes, disappointments, and failures. Short-comings and (undeserved) pride.

I didn’t say all this on Saturday. Lord knows they all think I am odd as it is. The day-after blues had me concerned that I was the white trash at the ball again. But the world is still settling, and I am thinking someday I might actually outgrow my insecurities.

Might. Yesterday I was notified my grant application was rejected. No explanation. That stings a bit. I am in the process of looking for the people who lift me up. Walking a fine line of clinging to old achievements and planning to forge through this current.

I saw an ad on social media this morning for decoy wasp hives. The guy said that 2022 is going to be a wasp year.

I am choosing to interpret that as an omen.

An Amphibious, Alien Creature

I am not sure where my attention was when the last two weeks passed by. I’ve been sleeping a lot. Often pinned under an 80-pound dog. I have been unraveling in a good way. Dinner with friends. Lazy evenings. Daily yoga sessions that have become more meaningful with a renewed attention to breath.

Finally answering emails. And realized I have three weeks to write some kind of mother/father of the groom speech on behalf of my ex- and myself. It’s awkward inviting someone into “the family” when the family is split. Not that the situation is unusual, and not that it is contentious, but how to spin it in a meaningful way? To tell the truth when the truth sort of flies in the face of the sentiments appropriate for a wedding.

I will just continue to spread out flat, letting all the knots work their way out of my body and mind: a pretty little map of thoughts, lyrical as loops of string caught in school glue.

School glue in an amber bottle with a rubber tip, that would open like an eye when pressed. Or a mouth. Or a seal’s nostril.

There was a smell that I can’t quite remember, no matter how hard I try to conjure it.

It is inexplicable what sticks in my memory and what doesn’t. Last night, trying to sleep I remembered when E. was small – three or four – and while his older brother pinned my legs, E. sat on my chest and leaned over my face, inhaling so that his nostrils pinched shut again and again, like some kind of amphibious, alien creature. I laughed until I peed my pants a little.

Isn’t that something? How a memory of uncontrollable, full-body laughter can make you cry?

That school glue I used in elementary school didn’t work well. Nothing ever stayed put. I’d get home and the string had come loose in spots and created its own patterns. I guess it was an early life lesson: everything unravels, falls apart, and reconfigures according to its own mysterious will.

Unraveling isn’t a good theme for a wedding speech. Maybe reconfiguring?

Maybe amphibious, alien creatures who torture humans who can’t catch their breath for their own laughter?

We should all be so lucky to have memories like this stick.

All Kinds of Somethings

It’s a religious holiday here. I slept late and wasted the morning scrolling. I breathed through yoga but still haven’t run. And I had plans for the day.

I hope this isn’t an indication of how this summer will pass. Haphazardly. Regretfully. I am already beginning to regret all the time I have spent on social media over these past years. It seems that being there creates needs that didn’t exist for me before. It plants “should”s in my mind. I should feel this way or that way, or tolerate what I would never tolerate from someone were they sharing a physical space. Or argue knowing there was no hope to convince anyone to change their mind. Or allow people to bombard me with unsolicited advice. It is possible to just leave the room, and close the door.

Stop comparing. Needing validation.

It is funny. I think I tend to hear “needing validation” and think of someone with low status, low self-esteem wanting a pat on the head. But really the leaders, who do have a measure of status are constantly seeking validation of their superiority or their expertise. They continually test their influence. I think of the American radio personalities who seem to be throwing out the wildest theories (which they sometimes admit they don’t actually believe) just to verify their power over the perceived truth. A series of little exhilarating trips for the ego. What can I get away with? They can take up so much space in a room – how is it they can also take up so much space in a virtual reality? How can untruths in a virtual world hurt so much in the real one? We are way beyond the beautiful lie, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words –

There is more to all this than I want to think about right now. Maybe because we all exist bouncing along the continuum of milksopping and dictatorial? We are validated as something by everyone really. We are validated as all kinds of somethings simultaneously.

I think I have always known this, but what is said behind closed doors matters more to me than it once did. Somehow it seems like much more of a threat. What will come barging through if I am not listening? A war, a mismanaged pandemic, another bloody piece of evidence that we are a destructive species? An accusation. An intentional misunderstanding. An unfair observation that will cost me.

I wonder if it matters at all to anticipate the worst? If it really armors us when it hits, or if it just prolongs the trauma with a kind of pre-traumatic stress? What if the traumatic event never comes to pass?

These past two years I have felt the piano wire in my thigh pull taut again. And a piano wire in my chest, incrementally tightening and winding with every perceived slight, threat, loss. I am not sure what it is going to take to find calm again. More than ujjayi breathing, more than morning runs in the rain, and daily meditations.

Maybe if I make room for it, whatever it is will come. Maybe it will validate all of the facets of me at once. The Authentic Me’s that have no place in a metaverse at all.

Fear of Exposing Oneself

Shifting towards summer now. Three weeks of classroom teaching left, a week of meetings – then a wedding to kick off seven weeks of vacation.

I haven’t worked on the wasp project for two weeks now. It is in my head, but I have not put in the work. Today I will pick up some parchment for the flexagon poems, though. Tomorrow, I will make the paper for the corsets and hives.

Last week on Instagram I saw something freakishly similar to what I am working on. It was well-executed, too. It has taken me a while to remind myself that there is nothing new under the sun and that the existence of something similar out there doesn’t discount the authenticity of what I am doing. I might keep my head down a while. I have a feeling if I go looking for it, I will find more similar work. And really, that is a good thing, right? It means there is something – if not universal – then relatable. Something that is a successful expression of human experience. So what?

Too often I am my own gatekeeper. That little voice. That bird with the sharp beak that keeps wounds open and blood flowing out of habit.

Not working is not humility. This assumption, belief, and self-deception that eventually I will turn out something stunningly, unequivocally unique is a kind of arrogance.

When I read Bastard out of Carolina, I wondered if I had ever met Dorothy Allison. If I’d drunkenly told her my stories. I felt seen/exposed/plundered/included all at once. I was grateful/angry.

We think the minutia of our lives is so singular. While simultaneously praising the “universal” that reveals truths. There is a tension in the arts that has to do with this contradiction.

I am not going to try to speak for a universal – or for anyone else. But I will say this tension is the tension of being a woman viewing a painting of a nude. Artemisia’s “Susanna and the Elders”, for example. Because there is also the tension of knowing the story of the artist who created that painting. Who dared to expose herself through the same motif that nearly every painter of the era was using.

Not arrogance. Not humility. But overcoming the fear of exposing oneself and trusting the power of the truth of a singular perspective.

Embracing Whatever

Once again, up on time and behind the clock anyway. But these mornings are easy and light. Leonard is getting older now. He walks awkwardly behind me down the hallway at 4 and stretches one leg at a time. He takes his time in the yard while I make a cup of coffee. He gets a treat, too, and we sit in the living room and listen to the birds for a while.

Then yoga, writing, and a run. It’s an easy start to the days. I can land in my body after a night of dreaming. I can forget about what it looks like. What it “should” look like. I twist it, I breathe, and I move it over tree roots and around puddles. By the time I get to work, I have made peace with myself. I’ve let go of outside perspectives. It helps. If my left shoulder hurts, I don’t need to label it and try to shove it away from me in shame, or point at it in awkward self-deprecation.

It just is.

Facts: I have green eyes and gray hair, and these bones have been growing and mending themselves for 56 years. I am not going to be ashamed of surviving.

I have also cleared up my feelings about what the shrink calls the “crisis”. I’ve been able to sort through it all and put my finger on exactly what hurt me. For a lot of reasons, I can’t confront the woman who threw me under the bus (my Norwegian friends think this is a weird and violent metaphor), so I have to find a way to live with that. Maybe I can learn from this how to sort my feelings quickly and stand my ground in the future.

It is embarrassing that at my age I still find myself in the middle of a tantrum of “it’s not fair”. Letting go is difficult. I don’t know, maybe as much as anything else, my mother’s death has taught me the value of letting go of old hurts and old “that’s unfair”s.

It is what it is. Was what it was. Whatever.

The birds are still singing. And I am off for a run.

An Exceptional Day

Yesterday sitting around E’s mother’s dining room table I had to consciously place the day. Not in “I’m losing it” kind of way. It was the Norwegian national day and everyone was dressed in yards and yards of wool and linen and decked out with silver jewelry and odd shoes. Waving flags. Everyone eats hot dogs for some reason. Hard to miss.

But while I was sitting there I remembered that the next morning – today – I go back to work, just like I had done the day before. That this was a “free” day dumped in the week like a pothole of sorts. I don’t mean that in a negative way, really. I remember as a kid liking it when the car jerked like a roller coaster suddenly and broke up the monotony of a long drive. There were lots of long drives for a while. But that’s another meditation.

The national day is always difficult for me. First, there is nationalism on display. Which is unnerving. That slippery slope of community to exceptionalism. Watching the children’s parade I have so many associations with things in history that looked like this and that didn’t turn out well. It is just the fears of an outsider tapping here. These all-too-human dynamics of grouping always feel precarious. Are precarious.

Today in the news is an article about a five-year-old boy who was sneered at and grunted at by two grown women because he was carrying an indigenous flag and wearing an indigenous costume rather than the Norwegian ones. Mob mentality brings out the ugly.

I have been here 30 years and toyed with the idea of getting a bunad (national costume) for my son’s wedding next month. But in the end, I had to admit it would feel too much like a costume in the theatrical sense. Weird how that works. I have spent more than half my life here, I have changed- been changed – and have grown here. I have no connection to America anymore, and yet… maybe it is just that I don’t want to dress like everyone else. I would feel more conspicuous in the deceit.

But it is back to work now. One thing I have noticed lately – with the new medication – is that emotions aren’t blunted, but they don’t bleed outside of their circumstances. I think it is part of this quiet that has settled.

These last mornings I have done the yoga sequence without music or mantras. I have focused entirely on breathing, as one should, but as I never could. I am content with one single focus, one train of thought at a time. My resting heart rate has dropped. When I am hungry I take the time to cook.

I don’t know what this will mean in the long run. But for now, I am going to take it one bright and shiny day, one hard, sharp day at a time. Stacking them like discrete building blocks. When I teach acting, I tell the students never to try to play love/hate at once. Like red and green, you get a muddy, unexciting smear of whatever. Play one moment of love with your whole body, play one movement of hate. Because that is how we often experience it. Give yourself over (within reason) and allow yourself to feel the fullness of each.

I have caught myself on occasion, wondering if I believed what I was saying.

Now though, I’m beginning to wonder if this is what it is to “live in the moment”.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

The Geography of Sunshine

Beginning the fifth week before summer vacation. It has been a long time since I have counted down like this. This summer will be a roller coaster. My youngest is finally able to have the wedding that’s been delayed twice. I can’t wait to see his wife in her gown. It’s been three years since she sent me the selfie in the boutique and made me feel included. I have a speech to write and run by my son’s father – to be sure I am speaking for both of us. I should really get started on that. I am oblivious to these kinds of social conventions. And the fact we are divorced doesn’t make it any easier.

Then off to see B. I have no idea for how long or under what kind of circumstances, but I know I am going. I don’t think there are social conventions for saying goodbye to someone like this. How do I allow myself the grief while acknowledging her family’s greater loss? Her pain? What kind of gift does one bring? She can’t read anymore. I start to jump ahead and think of things I shouldn’t. I want to celebrate her birthday (now seven months late). I want to celebrate her. I am at a loss.

And then E. and I will go somewhere warm. Not warm: hot, really. I want unrelenting sunshine. I want to sweat just sitting on the beach, struggling to read a book despite the glare of the pages and the cheap sunglasses’ warped lenses. I miss the sun of the lower latitudes. Something in my body knows the geography of sunshine. My skin recognizes desert air.

And sometime before the school year’s wheel begins again, I will get to London to take my oldest to a little Bloomsberry pub for one very expensive drink each. We will dress up for it. We will make it an event.

I think I want to make everything an event from now on. Oh, god, I am going to have to get a wardrobe make-over.

Now, though, I am off for a run. The soft Norwegian sun is already up.

An Imaginary Happy Place

Not feeling it today. But I’m not panicking. I’m beginning to trust the small swings in energy and interest, understanding it isn’t a signal of a permanent disengagement. It’s just rest.

I don’t really know how to rest. Hyper-focusing until I hit the wall has been my modus operandi for as long as I can remember. It feels now a bit like letting go of that rope that runs across the width of the pool just before the deep end. It’s scary and the world seems a bit too deep, too wide, and too exposed. What if someone takes the rope away?

I can actually feel the chlorine water scratching my hose and throat raw. See the blue, cloudless sky.

I can’t remember the last time I swam in an outdoor pool. Or looked up from the water into a cloudless sky. Friday I guided students through a relaxation process and had them imagine that their back was an air mattress and that they could feel the swells rolling under the length of their body.

Then I realized that may not be a universal experience. I don’t know.

I do know that when I listen to guided meditations that tell me to go to my “happy place”, my happy place is imaginary. It has to be imaginary. Sensations out of context: just a cushion of air riding on a rhythm. So maybe they were able to make it mean something to them, maybe it helped them find a safe spot to relax.

Last week I read that they are pulling bodies out of Lake Mead. I laughed just a little thinking about how I have always been afraid of swimming in lakes for fear of coming across a body. The part of my brain still stuck at year 10 wondered for a second if my step-father put them there. If something in me knew the bodies were there. But it’s quite a drive from Vegas to Lake Mead. In the heat. So, no. There would have been a smell penetrating into the back seat of the Buick. But my 10 year-year-old brain is insistent with its “what if”s. Someone put the bodies there – where families go to escape the heat of the desert, and the plastic, neon, and cement of the city.

I’m not even sure how many times we went there to swim. I do remember “going back”. So at least twice. Doing something twice was a lot for me then.

I have spent the last thirty years in a country that is wrapped in felt and damp wool. I traded negotiating the cracks in sidewalks for walking over the moorland that sinks like angel food cake when you step on it. Don’t step on it – use the planks and balance your way over the delicate ecosystem.

Once I was lying back on the moss on the plateau in Hardanger, looking up at a cloudless sky, and an ant crawled into my ear.

Sometimes it is difficult to recognize the difference between contrived demands for our attention and care, and the necessary ones. The threats and the “whatever”s.

I’m thinking I need to be more discerning with regard to what I make concessions for day-to-day. Whom I try to please. Which obstacles are imaginary. What is important.

Sometimes I still find it difficult to live in the world. I don’t really understand it. For example, this morning I was logging my breakfast into cronometer and when I wanted to add prunes, my only option was “dried prunes”.

What other kinds of prunes are there?

I’m taking my bottle of salted water and going to hot yoga now. Here, in this country, I have to go indoors to experience a good, cathartic sweat.

Ripping Up an Imaginary Map

I have been through a serious illness as an adult. There was definitely a before and after in terms of my relationship with my body. During those first months home from the hospital I went to sleep every night fearing I wouldn’t wake. It was a slow healing process mentally, even though I ran a half marathon just six months later. A year later, another trip in an ambulance and doctors shrugging and saying we’ll keep an eye on it. Who knows.

I hear that I pushed too hard. Sometimes I believe it myself. But I am pretty sure that this is just the way of things. We don’t restore ourselves to shiny and new. We do maintenance.

Now after more than two years of whatever this was: this feels like a new before and after. A wilder storm. Almost as though previous experiences were just trial runs for this change. Sometimes it makes me fear what is coming. The future sneaks up on us from behind. Jump scares.

I think it’s interesting that our culture has used language to flip the truth. To flip our mindset from what should be obvious into a comforting illusion of control: the future is in front of us. I am wondering if this isn’t one of the most profound ways in which we deceive ourselves. As though we can prepare for the future in any meaningful way.

We can gather our nuts. But we are only guessing. Predicting. Projecting. Based on stories. And there are so many stories.

Maybe it is healthy to admit that what we see in front of us is the past, and the stories we manufacture from it. It’s an imaginary map. With monsters at the ends of the earth.

At 56 my body has undergone a sea change. Even the surface of my skin is a kind of “new”. I catch myself thinking I need to “get back” into shape. And I catch myself berating myself and maybe mourning the never-reached destinations on the imaginary map I’d been carrying around.

Sometimes now I think if I close my eyes I can relax and let the future come up behind me and wrap its arms around me and lift me along the path. While I will trip now and then, but also pluck what I like along the way. Like a bouquet of experiences. Of loves.

And maybe even allow myself a moment or two of schmaltz.