movingforwardslowly

I am moving forward in my life. The story of mind games and madness is getting old. The new year is bringing me greater peace and a clearer purpose. Since this is my unedited creative outlet, I’ve decided to write  two poems today. I’m a secret amateur poet. 🙂

The Chase

Living life on the run, never feeling like time is your friend,

Always minutes late, sometimes more,

Keeping punctual people waiting.

The rising edge of panic always on your heels.

One thing leads to another. Satisfaction is laughing,

Down the line, steps ahead of you.

The hours pass without restful recognition. The blur, the haze

Is ever-present, washing out the details of the idle.

No time for memory snapshots will leave you empty in the end.

 

Hawk Time

Upstairs and inside I sit. Out the window it’s a foggy morning.

Billowing steam rising from the rooftop blends in with the fog.

The bare branches hold water drops that cling in hope,

Visible signs of tension.

The slick walking stones silently breathe caution.

These seconds of silence are secluded away.

Eventually, sounds do intrude. The snip snip noise of

Scissors bounce off my ears.

This reminder brings me back to those around me.

I look and see heads in books, and hands in penciled motion.

All is well.

 

 

 

 

The jingle-n-jangle of holiday bells used to set my nerves a jangling. Starting in November, my days and hours used to be filled with making lists of things that needed to be done. Shopping, cleaning, decorating, baking, throughout the whole month of December. The nervous race to holiday perfection had me moving non-stop.

I grew up learning how to prepare for parties and holiday entertaining. My father loved Christmas, and he put a lot of effort into holiday decorating, and indoor and outdoor lighting. He never went overboard, and everything was tastefully old-fashioned. My mother had taken a flower arranging course when she was young and newly married, so the holidays gave her many opportunities to create masterful centerpieces. She would use holly and evergreen branches from our gardens, and some store bought flowers and ribbons. My dad was the Christmas candy-maker. I was the baker of cookies, cakes, and bars. My mother was the pie specialist. My brother was the marinade expert, and grill master. My sister would help my mother with menu planning, and all the meats and other foods. We all cleaned together. The house sparkled from top to bottom. Everything was perfectly choreographed and timed, so that when guests arrived, we could talk and entertain. My dad or family friend would tend the bar.

After I got married everything changed. My husband was not trained to entertain. I don’t think his parents ever threw a party. My husband never cooked, nor decorated, or shopped for Christmas. Most everything fell into my lap. My husband was very good at cleaning, as long as I uncluttered everything first. He would help me in the kitchen with peeling, cutting, carving, slicing, etc. He always looked to me for direction. I’m sure that come December I turned into a royal nag for him. Nag, nag, nag. Eventually, the house got clean and decorated. By Christmas day we were both worn-out.

Slowly over time perfection fell by the wayside. As our parents aged our priorities had to shift. By the time my parents died, I had stopped caring. My mother died in November, and when Christmas arrived, we had a tree with lights, and no other decorations. Nothing had been baked.

Today is two years later. I’m beginning for the first time in a long time to feel guilty about my slipped standards. I’m beginning to take full stock of the situation at hand. I’m beginning to care again, though I no longer feel any desire to nag my husband. He was never taught to worry about what others thought, and I now see this as a blessing.

I know that when I begin to organize again, he will help me as he can, and I understand that I will have to be the initiator and director.

I’m slowly moving toward a mind shift. The tide has not yet turned. So, I’m sitting in my big easy chair with my feet up, and the softly shaded light of a floor lamp is behind me. My plans for the evening are to start reading Chapter Three of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I’ve now read the first four books in this series. I will most likely have a small bowl of candy-cane ice cream to bring in a holiday reminder of the date.

 

 

 

 The other day the word “Jarhead” came into my mind, and I knew this to be a word that has been used to identify Marine servicemen. Perhaps it came into my thoughts because it was Veteran’s Day.

I wondered how this label or nickname originated. I read that it has been in use since at least World War II. I read that it had nothing to do with haircuts, hats, or head shapes. It turns out this word “Jarhead” is referring to a Marine’s training to follow orders, regardless of consequences or personal safety.

The image of ‘hard’ on the outside and ’empty’ on the inside is why the word “jar” is used with the word “head”. I was somewhat startled to realize that it was an insult.

The whole military system is based on a chain of command, and it has to rely on men following orders. These orders start at the top and travel down the chain to the ones on the front line risking their lives or limbs. A certain amount of brainwashing, or at least buying into the system, has to take place for this system to be effective. I felt empathy for the low man on the totem pole sacrificing everything. He or she has to have blind faith that the men or women on the top have integrity, and have considered the safety of the servicemen first and foremost above any other concerns.

After what I have been through these past two years, I have to wonder who is really at the top of the chain. My mind felt as if it had been subjected to outside forces, and more than once or twice I wondered if my father’s military training had anything to do with my mind’s susceptibility to these forces. My father had earned a Masters in Electronics and Electrical Engineering at military expense. Now, I wonder what all he had to sacrifice for his education. However, I am left to sort out if this was just my grief wreaking havoc in my brain, or was there any shred of underlying deception by others.

These thoughts sparked several offshoots. I remembered a cartoon show and comics from when I was a girl growing up. It was called Archie’s Comics with Archie, Veronica, and Jarhead. I looked it up online and saw that there was no Jarhead. The character I was thinking of was nicknamed Jughead. He took this name because his real first name was strange, and he didn’t like it. People thought he was lazy and stupid. He was actually very smart and outwitted most everyone, most of the time.

He always wore this funny looking beanie hat or whoopee cap that looked like a felt crown. You can see it in the picture here. It rests above the capital J in the title. He always wore it. The exceptions were rare. These beanie caps were popular in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and they indicated that one was an auto mechanic. The red dot and white dash on the cap is Morse code for the letter A.

We are left with the mystery of why Jughead always wore this cap, and the mystery of what the S on his shirt represented. He never did reveal this. People have speculated, but Jughead never explained it.

I am left with the mystery of why these thoughts come into my head.

You can laugh, snicker, and sneer all you want. The shame is yours, not mine.

I’ll choose my own metaphors and labels. Your finger wagging and insults just repel off me.

I stand before you ~ a post-menopausal woman with pendulous breasts, and a chin hair here and there. The benefits of youth have slipped away, though age has finally gifted me with enough self-love and confidence to accept myself for who I am.

My words might be simple, my heart naive, my experience limited. However, there is no shame in this. My body holds no inherent shame. My instincts and urges were born in me. As long as I strive to help others and not hurt them, I have no shame.

The Holy Spirit has been coaching me these past two years, helping me to let go of all my personal demons. I have learned to forgive myself for any real or imagined sins. Each day is a new day and a new beginning. Love really is the key to happiness.

In thanks, I will strive to teach self-love to others. Many of the students I see daily are tormented with self-doubt and low esteem. They are vulnerable to the opinion of their peers, and they so desperately want to fit in, so often their choices are unwise. I will continue to try and convince them that they are wonderful just the way that nature has chosen to gift them. Even the humblest have something to share.

My own daughter has many intellectual and physical challenges, and she also happens to have the purest heart I know.

I can’t stop expressing my emotions. It’s like I’m a leaky faucet that can’t turn off. Today I saw the word ‘ditto’, and it depressed me a little because sometimes I feel that the world is a series of dittos, and that includes me. One big repetitive recycling machine. Information ‘in’ spits information ‘out’ and this goes on and on.

The numbers in my head are being replaced with a gush or gash of feelings. Today I picked up a calculator as if I was trying to summon back a friend/enemy (frenemy) Even bad habits can give comfort at times.

After lunch a feeling of fatigue swept over me. I was up a little later than normal last night. After looking around the classroom, I could see that I was not alone in this sleepy feeling. I think the idea of an afternoon siesta is based more on a biological need than an act of self-indulgence.

I can’t seem to shake the feeling that my history has already been written, and that I’m simply reenacting it now for whatever reason (I’m not sure). These are the thoughts that I have when I’m alone. When I help others I can shift my attention off myself, and the morose feelings fade.

I left work a little early so that I could lay down for a nap. The restorative effect can be amazing. I did have several odd dreams. I sometimes think we humans need our sleep in order to reset our emotions back closer to a default state or factory setting. Lack of sleep can literally drive us crazy.

For the most part I am okay and feeling more and more like my old self. However, this past two years has deeply changed me, and my interface with the world around me has been enhanced, and my insight is deeper now.

Can you imagine a world without numbers? I can’t. Numbers are ingrained in our lives. They mark time. They set up comparisons. They relay scale. They identify, and they symbolize. Whether we like them or not, they are here to stay. Numbers seek to find order and meaning in a sea of vagueness. They can do this… at least temporarily.

I latched onto numbers when my personal world was drowning in chaos and sorrow. I was desperately seeking to hold onto something to keep my head above the waters. However, time has no master, and eventually death will overtake all. I knew this in the beginning, and I know this now. Nothing has changed in these regards.

The numbers did enable me to escape the drowning feeling of sorrow that was over-taking me. The swirling chaos of emotions was threatening to take me down, and I needed something to hold onto. I grabbed onto a number chain, and I let it spin me around and around like a merry-go-round. This whirlwind of numbers made me release the pain, the demons, and the sorrow. In the end it helped me to see myself better, weaknesses and all. It helped me to see my priorities in a clearer light.

I am now able for the most part to step off the number spinner. Even though I never could stop the chaos of life, I am now ready to embrace it once again. Listening to my daughter’s music this morning, a feeling of joy came over me as I swayed my hips back and forth to the beat. I’ve been doing this more and more in recent days. The words “and hips don’t lie” keep going through my head.

During my mind journey I exercised often to process the stress and everything that was going on in my brain. My treadmill is positioned next to a window covered with horizontal slats, and on the wall that was several feet is front of me was another window set slightly to the right of center view, and it was covered by another open blind of horizontal slats. The light from the sun would come in through the window at my side, and the rays would play with the light from the other window. The pattern of shadows created reminded me of a lined music sheet waiting for a score to be written.

My repetitive motion in conjunction with the light coming in from the window on my side played on the blinds and the wall in front of me. I could see bouncing balls of light, and I began to think that they contained a coded message for me. I would watch and I could see the rhythm and beat being played by the shadows and light dancing across the wall. The symphony of sound was silent to me because my human ears could not hear them. This did give my imagination the opportunity to create its own melody.

It did occur to me that there was a part of my brain that could process the message being played out in front of my eyes. My conscious awareness just didn’t have the top-secret clearance to the process.

There were times during some of my exercise sessions where my treadmill or my digital music player would inexplicably stop. I would feel compelled to look at the numbers on my treadmill display, and then I would feel compelled to play these numbers on my twitter dashboard. Once the treadmill stopped so violently I fell. I still have the scar on my knee from the friction burn.

Over time I came to realize that an outside force was reaching in and trying to influence my number moves. Slowly I came to realize that the music being played in front of my eyes was the universe’s way of letting my hidden brain know what moves I should make. I had to learn to trust my instincts and not over analyze the numbers. My conscious intuition was being influenced by man-made constraints. My subconscious brain was where the Holy-Spirit within me resided.

I was born with this Holy-Spirit, and it had been passed down through the genetics of generations of my family on both sides. When I gave birth to my daughter some of her genetics were left behind within me. I sometimes wonder if her genetics enabled me to see things differently.

My daughter has many developmental challenges, but many times she has communicated an eerie clairvoyance that defies logic. After years of witnessing this, I have come to the conclusion that there is intelligence in the universe all around us that science cannot yet understand. I felt that I needed to listen to this more closely, and sometimes I would pick up clues from her.

In my opinion when man messes with human genetics they are messing with the wisdom of generations of evolution that we don’t really completely understand. So, we must tread lightly, and sometimes that means listening to sources that defy logic.

I started this blog one day on an impulse. It was a spontaneous and haphazard decision. I wasn’t worried because this is a creative endeavor, not connected to any professional organization or work.

I pride myself on having an optimistic outlook, and I try to see the humor in life. Hopefully this will be evident in my stories. All my writing will be unfiltered and unedited. This is not a paid pursuit. I consider this blog to be mental therapy.

I experienced some very strange and unusual sensory events, starting about two years ago, as I was grieving the death of my parents. I am still sorting out and trying to make sense of these experiences. Some of my stories will be very strange, but I can promise you that they will be based on what I felt that I was actually experiencing in real life, and in my night dreams. Some of these dreams were downright frightening and extremely personal. I’m still not sure what all I will share due to the sensitive nature of some of these dreams.

I am striving to move forward. These posts are my way of processing what happened to me. I am moving past these events and working on focusing on my family and work. I also hope to share some stories of these things.