Worth Writing

I have been enjoying what may well be the most pleasurable part of my upcoming journey: the planning.  I planned one trip, panicked over the cost, decided not to go after all and cancelled all the tickets and reservations.  Then I was so deeply saddened to lose out on a great adventure that I laid out a more affordable itinerary and booked that shorter, safer, more sensible trip.  I was still feeling sad, as though I’d lost out on something still, and realized that what I really wanted was not a specific set of experiences in any particular places but simply the one freeing experience of going on an extended journey and the even more freeing experience of knowing what is the most sensible choice and purposely not choosing it. 

Being sensible isn’t always the smartest thing to do.  My mother scrimped and saved like a Scrooge all her years for her retirement with my father.  Unremarkably, she died and he travelled around the world (pretty well) a time or two on their savings with more to spare.  She never went anywhere or indulged in anything except sale-priced pies.  Many, many of them.  She had an appetite for many things that she would never allow herself to satitate, and so she lived and died grim and fierce from frustration and endless craving.

Epilepsy and chronic bronchitis put me in the highest risk category for the H1N1 virus.  Otherwise healthy people have already died from seizures and suffocation because they had those health issues and contracted the virus.I live right across the street from the station where they are giving out the flu shots but have not yet gone.  I haven’t the patience for the line that starts forming in the morning for the station and closes at 7pm with still 50 or more people waiting in line.  Day after day.  I will go in time but for now I’ll sip hot coffee and watch the hundreds of parents herd their small children toward safety.

I may not live to the beginning of this trip, or the end, or the next one, or the one after.  but like my friend Sandra, I will continue to make plans to take advantage of the experiences of the lands my world citizenry offers.  A smart woman seeks adventure on her own doorstep, it’s there to be had, but she also knows when to go beyond and then return to her treasures with new eyes. 

Most of the places I’m travelling to I have been before, somewhat grim and certainly fierce, with both frustration and endless craving.  I believe it will be good for me to return, less grim now, less fierce now, with far fewer frustrations, still full of craving, but less voracious, more discerning.  I refuse to eat sale-priced pie.  Actually, I have developed a strong aversion to pie of any sort.  It has nothing to do with the tase, it’s just something that I can’t swallow.

Namaste

Around about October when the air had become really crisp I went out to carried away by the weather.  So small I was then.  So very small.  I would crawl under the stairs where the clothing barrels were and get my sleeping bag.  It was bright red nylon with a flannel lining, the pattern of which is just so oh barely on the tip of my memory…a yellow and brown something it was….and it had the sleeping bag smell.  Mother rolled them up like miniature hay bales and tied them with rough yellow nylon cording.  It took quite a while to undo the knots.

Making sure my mother was busy with something or other and completely distracted from me I would take a bear, a book, and the sleeping bag out the metal side door and into the backyard.  Just past the pale green aluminum shed on the right edge of the property was a row of enormous white hydrangea bushes, tall as trees, messy as hell, we call the blooms “snowballs” and threw them at each other in delight as the blooms burst and scattered everywhere.

I had to make sure there hadn’t been any recent rain because the ground got spongy underneath the hydrangeas and stayed icky sloppy for the rest of the season once throughly soaked.  Picking a spot sheltered from the October winds by the shed and just halfway under a hydrangea I crawled into my sleeping bag with bear and book.  It was so cold! The air was sharp against my face but my body was overjoyed by the soft warm flannel and fluffy insultation. 

Pulling the top tight around my chin I snuggled down onto my side with arms full of bear and book.  I would always intend to go out to read but ended up just holding the book to my chest.  I still love the feeling of literally curling up with a book against my chest, fingers jammed between the pages to hold my place, and drifting off into a fanstasyland of sleep.  And sleep always came to me there.  No matter what time of the day it was.  But first I would lie there for a long time enjoying the dichotomy of the crisp air on my face while my body was comfortingly warm.  I closed my eyes and listed to the sounds of the season.  I heard the wind shaking all the trees and bushes with their semi-dried up leaves and heard the squirrels, of which there were plenty, running through the crisp leaves on the lawn around me.  I listened to the sound of the far off traffic.  Sound carried so much farther on the clear sharp air. 

It didn’t take long to slip into a very peaceful sleep immersed as I was in the warmth and the fallish sounds and the scent of woodsmoke from all the neighbours fireplaces.  There was so little peace in my little world.  But I knew what real peace felt like.  Maybe it made the rest of the time harder on me than on my siblings because I knew how far I was from what I thought of as the natural good feeling.  Those moments were heaven where I blocked away all thought and feeling for the life I was living and slipped entirely into the delicious moment, floating sort of, free for a while, safe for a few minutes.  No matter how awful it got inside the house, I always knew, at least while I was very young, that the world around me was beautiful, that there was so much pleasure to be had if I could sneak away to grab hold of it, though never to keep, I knew that.

I enjoyed several hydrangea days when I was so wee wee small over the course of a couple or three years.  When I was old enough to go to school it became harder to detach entirely like that and just float away on the weather and the scent of woodsmoke and sound of scattering leaves.  Each time I was discovered by my screaming slapping mother who was infuriated that I’d left the house without telling her and had taken the sleeping bag without permission and dared to put it on the ground where it would get soiled.  The hydrangea days, like most days, ended very badly.  But they were important.  Very important.  They did some kinda magic on my soul, you know?  Made reality so sweet for just a while that it nourished me deep and good and long. 

Today, just a little bit ago, I wraped myself in that wool sweater again and sat on the peeling picnic table bench and lifted my face to the crisp lively air with head back and eyes closed.  Listening to the rustle of the leaves, the sound of far off traffic, the harumph of dogs playing around me, and inhaled the delicious scent of woodsmoke from my neighbour’s firplaces. 

My mother always came at me screaming, “What the hell are you doing?!”  She was always confused by my behaviour when I was very wee young.  I was known as a strange child.  I could never answer that question.  I wasn’t doing anything.  That was the point.  I was, I realize now, perfecting the art of simply Being.  It is sad that my Being was construed as something so wrong and earned so much anger.  But I got the healing experience logged in my soul first, unaffected by the following tirade. 

I am comforted to look back and realize how many ways and days and moments I did manage to escape the undeserved harshness of my life.   I was a fantasy-er.  I escaped into stories I saw unfolding before my eyes.  I watched them like movies, sitting ever so still for sometimes hours on end.  Not a way to live one’s whole life, but it preserved my humanness.

When I was a small girl I would wait until I heard my mother breathe the rythym of sleep, she was always the last one down, and then slip out of bed with a bear tucked under my arm.  By glow of nightlights plugged into the wall sockets in the hallway I made my way to the living room and felt in the dark for the heavy coffee table.  You didn’t want to run into that, boy, it’d gouge out a nice piece of flesh. I’d run my hand along the cold smoothe top of the clean wooden coffee table (mother was a neat freak, kept it spotless) to the end and from there it was one big step to the music.

I forgot about this for a long time.  Just last night the memory of the nights I’m describing to you came crashing in on me while I was half dozing in a chair with a warm knitted wrap around my shoulders, textbook open in my lap on a pillow.  It was a shock.  So real.  At first I questioned it.  Then…no…yes… remember. 

One big step toward the huge console.  It was a monolithic piece of furniture that hid inside it a radio an 8 track tape deck and a record player.  With my little feet snuggled into the pale green broadloom I lifted up the top all the way quietly making sure it wouldn’t slam down on me.  I’d reach into the dark console and by memory find the button that turned on the radio.  I had to make sure I had a hand on the volume dial to turn it down real fast in case mom had it on loud when she last turned it off.  I didn’t want to get caught.

I press the button and the console lights up.  I turn the volume down so low only I can hear it with my head stuck in there by the dim glow of the dials.  And I turn it to the country music station.  1320 CHAM And I am wrapped in the warmth of the sound of the voices of friends.  I knew all the night dj’s.  I loved to hear them talk about their lives and kids.  I loved them.  They became family to me listening there in the dark.  I longed for the sight of tall cotton and the sound of the whipporwill. 

I listened to the songs tellings stories of love and longing and regret.  It made me feel so human.  These country people loved children.  They adored them.  Children made all their holidays fun.  I wanted to be in a place where children were wanted, loved, enjoyed.  I was sure I could please those people I longed to be near.  I sang along quietly to all the songs.  I learned to talk all the different southern accents.  And I dreamed.

I concentrated as hard as I could until I could ’see’ the people in my living room and I would walk around and talk to them. I made up stories about lives I would live in the South if I could just get there.  Get away from where I was.  Where I wasn’t wanted.  Wasn’t safe.  In the night I would jump up and sit on the edge of the console leaning my face down toward the glow and take in The Grand Ol Opry and feel safe and warm and happy.  As long as I convinced myself I was one of them I had a bright happy future full of songs and animals and warm loving homes. 

At some point I would have to come back to reality. Back to the dark living room.  The need for silence.  I would quietly jump down and turn off the radio and reaching up close the lid for another day.  Me and my teddy bear would shuffle back to the bedroom and snuggle down deep under the covers, my head filled with voices telling me about places I wished to be, where I would be safe and loved.  To this day I have a tendency to break into a southern drawl while writing.  Tis the music, y’all.  Them country people raised me up.

steph

Astoundingly, I have returned to the art world at last!  The obstacle to my work was an inability to accept that I am no longer the same person as I was before my daughter died and that I simply cannot see the world the same way anymore.  My eyes art different.  My heart is different.  Naturally, my perception is different.  Art is the manifestation of what I perceive with my eyes and my heart. 

This new work was very difficult to give myself permission to create.  It is dark and bold.  It is dark in a serious way but hopefully not morbid.  This series of work is the culmination of my inner search through the Hestia’s Hearth writing project.  The exhibit is called “Soul Quest”.  I hope you like it.

This first piece is called “Friendship Remembered”.  The friend it pays hommage to is my beloved Sandra Wheeler-Dunlevy who passed away from breast cancer recently after a long and heroic battle.  We met in a Buddhism course (hence the Buddha pendant) in university when I was grieving the recent death of my mother.  The materials used are acrylic paint, gold ‘leather paper’, a necklace with charm, and found wood.

“On The Wings Of Sorrow” reflects where I am in my journey of recovering from my daughter’s death.  Past grief, I am again experiencing the lighter, sweeter, easier sorrow that is about remembering with love instead of pain.  It is made of linoleum flooring, Nancy Drew book pages, wood stain, found wood, and faux butterflies.  The butterflies were a gift from me to my daughter.  I painted them black and added the word “sorrow” to the wings.

Sorry for the terrible blur on this one.  I must have moved when I took the shot.  It is called “Soul Seeker”.  It is made of a collaged mache sculpture, acrylic paint, metal letters, fabric, found wood, and small mirrors (with the obvious symbolism intended).

“The Pattern of Creativity and Confusion” is made of acrylic paint, linoleum flooring, and Nancy Drew book pages.  I was going to add a lovely piece of found wood to it but I love it the way it is because it is an accurate manifestation of how I so often feel.

This one is called “Contemplating The End”.  The emphasis is intended to be on the contemplation, not ‘the end’.  It is made of found wood, found antique buttons, and chain.  The random scattering of letters and numbers conveys the fact that so often it feels as though death is a random, accidental act of misfortune, whereas the found buttons with the words “the” and “end” in the mix along with the piece of wood shaped by the elements over time suggest that there is nothing random about it.

This is my absolute favourite piece and was sold last night to a doctor who loved it so much he insisted on taking it with him right away instead of waiting until the exhibit closed at the end of the month.  He is a doctor of integrated medicine and will hang the piece in his clinic’s waiting room for all his patients to enjoy.  He wants me to send him my business card to place alongside the piece in the waiting room.  What an amazing stroke of luck this is for me!  In my heart, as I hung this piece for the show, I believed that if everyone passed this piece by it would be proof the public is bloody well blind.  It is called “The Pattern of Life” and is made of found wood, a small mask, and a wasps nest adhered to the canvas with acrylic gel medium.

Hopefully Heather will be able to relate to this piece personally: it is called “Warming The Stone Artist”.  It is made of mache hearts, acrylic paint, a mache figure, and found wood.

This is a large piece made some time ago called “Tearing Down The Walls”.  It is made of wooden lath taken from a wall I tore down in my new house, acrylic paint, glue, and the orginal square nails reclaimed from the project as well as some found objects and a mache figure.

This final piece was made a little while ago in response to a dream I had and is a ‘poetic conversation’ I had in my mind with my deceased daughter.  It is called “Altogether Gone” (the bargain)

Are you altogether gone?

can you whisper in my ear

were you the owl in last night’s dream

or the strange old woman seer

before I can let you go

I really need to know

Are you altogether gone?

just whisper it in my ear

Stephanie K. Hansen copyright 2009

I fear I am a one trick pony where writing is concerned.  It seems I only find new words to cover the same few topics, convey the same beliefs, over and over again.  I chide myself, “You’re always talking about the past.  You wrote the book already.  They read it.  Talk about something new.”  What’s new?  (you have no idea how long the cursor blinked away after that question)  Nothing is new since my last post about signing up for some college courses and buying a couple of books to bone up on office and resume writing skills.  I shouldn’t really say “bone up on” in regard to resume writing skills since I have none.  I’ve never written nor needed a resume.  These days you can’t get a job slinging coffee without one. 

I’m jumping the gun by about a year with the resume reference book but I like to know well in advance what I need to do before it’s time to get down to it.  Oh yes, I’m one of those.  I want to know every turn on every path before I set out on the adventure.  Just hate surprises.  And no, for your information, it does not take the adventure out of the adventure to know about things in advance; being forewarned is what allows me to enjoy the journey. 

Yes, I hear you laughing.  And yes, I am, according to what I’ve just admitted, ill-suited to Life in general.  Now you know why I’m so worn out all the time.  I take very little in stride, tripping over nearly every damn thing Life puts in front of me on a daily basis.  If I haven’t skinned my knees in a while it’s because Life hasn’t seen fit to put much of anything in my path for a long time.  There’s some argument as to whether I’ve actually moved a step forward on the path or not since…whenever. 

Well that’s new.  My darling has just come upstairs to inform me he has emptied a goodly portion of the pool into the basement.  So clever.  He was siphoning off the dirty water through the filter and pump then through pipes into the laundry sink when he walked away and forgot altogether he’d turned on the flow of water.  When he finally returned the tide was rising in the laundry room and basement.  I shall stay up here.  The cursing is muffled by the distance. 

Things are going really well for him here at his house.  Just the other day I had to call him at work to tell him the ceiling in the sun room was leaking like a sieve in the harsh downpour.  He needs to re-shingle the entire back roof.  I moved here to his place temporarily, supposedly, so he could freely work on the renovations of my place.  It’s been over a month now and he’s been so busy rescuing his own house with one pressing job or another that he hasn’t been back to mine.  Oh well. 

The novelty of returning to my old home has quite worn off.  You really can’t go home again.  Oddly enough I ground my teeth painfully because from the time I bought my house I never had any privacy.  First I had a young couple, acquaintances of mine from the art world, move in to the spare room to save them from the miserable conditions they were currently living in.  That was an outright disaster and I had to tell them to leave, and quickly at that. 

 Then another friend was looking to sell off his positions because he couldn’t take them with him into the men’s homeless shelter.  Shocked by his dire circumstances I told him to come live in my spare room.  I didn’t expect him to spend all of his waking hours installed in the kitchen or living room with me, but that he did, and I didn’t know how to tell him to bugger off after I’d invited him in. 

While I was wondering how to ask him to give me some more breathing room my long-time partner rented out his house and told me he was coming to live with me also.  He was sleeping there every night anyway, but now he came for all his time and with most of his things.  Aha.  I didn’t want to be all alone after all those years, and even wept on his shoulder over the horrid thought of it when I first left our home together, but…gawd!  Suddenly I had the one guy spending every waking moment sitting in the same damn chair in the living room playing an electronic Soduku game ceaselessly (no maddening neurosis there, nuh) and my partner installed upstairs nightly in front of the computer foolin’ around on the internet.  Night after night I stood hovering on the stairs wanting to scream “And just where the hell would you like me to go?????” 

 Now the extra housemate has moved elsewhere and my partner is back in his own home and I with him.  So yes, there sits the house where I craved privacy for so long completely empty.  Why then am I here you ask?  *big sigh* That’s why I’m a one trick writing pony.  That’s why I keep studying the past.  I’m looking for the answer to questions like that.  Questions about what makes me tick.  The biggest question being, “Why can’t you leave, Steph, even when you know it would be good for you to do it? Even just to leave for a while and come back.  What are you afraid will happen?” 

 That’s why I ended up getting so badly burnt by my second ‘familyhood’ stint.  Because I wouldn’t leave when I needed to.  Not even for a little while. 

 You see…my mother might be right.  So I don’t want to give anyone I love the chance to discover that life is better without me.  So I stayed, then.  Even when it was killing me.

It’s proving very difficult to get used to writing on the computer rather than by hand.  For one thing, the cursor keeps blinking at me like it’s impatient or something, demanding that I get on with things.  I don’t know if I’m mature enough to sit up in a proper chair and write like a big girl because I’ve already cursed the cursor, told it to just shut the hell up.  Blink, blink, blink.  Yeah, blink you, buddy.  

In some ways this room I’m in is less of a distraction than the old computer room with the view of the pool and yard through patio doors, and the new computer room that is – was – my deceased beloved’s bedroom.  I’m in the upstairs ‘family room’ in the house that is sans family now and the room is being used as a large storage space.  I’m working on the kids’ old computer on their old desk that is pushed up against a wall without windows.  Not much to distract me as I write, or contemplate writing.  

I can’t help, however, being ever aware on some level of the storage goods behind me, the debris of years past.  The well-used couch where we spent years cuddled up with the children in front of the tv is turned facing the wall, its cushions supporting a large black garbage bag full of one child’s stuffed animals and some other things she left behind sit gathering dust beside the bag.  

Stuck in front of the couch is a bookcase I found, stripped, and painted for the owner of the discarded stuffed toys.  The bookcase has a white interior and is bright yellow on the outside.  The top is painted like a crossword puzzle, the intersecting words being ultimate, understand, engage, courage, great, knowledge, adventure, esteem, treasure, top, and dream. Through all the years I raised her I tried to make her understand the spiritual connection between all the words, that I had chosen them for a reason and not just because they fit into the painted puzzle.  

On the front of the case on the edges of the shelves I painted a quite from Nietzsche: Even a thought, even a possibility, can shatter us and transform us.  I wanted her to stock the shelves with books to read that would fill her mind with possibilities and transform her throughout her life.  She told me instead that the bookcase would be much nicer without the words all mucking it up.  She asked to paint over them now and then over the years.  I refused to let her and just kept banging my head against a wall that didn’t know why I kept banging my head against it.  

Off to the side under a window is the cedar trunk I bought one year to strip down ( a laborious process, it was in terrible shape) and repaint to give to her for Christmas one year.  The background is bright apple red and painted with colourful rainbows.  In the bands of one rainbow on the side I painted the words be yourself, be kind, believe.  And within a rainbow on the top I painted the words dance, dream, dare.  She took dance lessons yearly from a young age.  This time she didn’t mind the words.  She especially like that I painted her initials on the trunk in large script.  

Besides those two gifts are all of the others I ever made for her or gave to her – me being the bearer of all the teddy bears in that bag – that she left behind when she ran away to live with her mother and escape her so-called “wicked stepmother”.  Behind me is sort of a room stuffed tight with rejection.  

Even the little stool I have my feet up on right now is one I bought and painted up pretty for her.  She loved it and refused offers of more comfortable chairs for many years.  She’s never coming back for any of these things, it being nearly three years passed now since she turned her back forever, but in my heart, if not in hers, these things all belong to her.  They were gifts from the heart.  They’re not store bought toys that one expects children to grow out of and forget.  They were intended to be memories as well as gifts, memories of time and care and attention given freely.  

I staked my whole life on the power of words, to heal, to nourish love and loyalty, to birth understanding, and to guide people toward the light of compassion.  And I lost the bet.  When and where it mattered most, with the child I was raising, I failed to prove true my belief in the power of words.  She left without any love or understanding, without loyalty, and without compassion for me.  Damn.  I mean, damn, you know?  When push came to shove the power of words was naught and now it’s like trying to move on with your life after finding out that God’s a bigot and a pervert who amuses Himself by pulling the wings off fairies. Makes ya feel like Life’s just a fixed game and we’re all worm food anyway.

 But wait a minute now.  Bear with me.  ‘Cause I’m a hopeless case.  Really.  As though helpless to do otherwise I return to the world of words, again and again.  I’m a Word Missionary still looking for my flock.  The job don’t pay well and the Natives fling antelope shit at me now and then, but I keep poking my head out of my wretched hut now and then hauling along a good book, an inspired passage, saying “You guys gotta hear this one.”  

On my mind these days are the lyrics to a song that has given me goosebumps over the years when it is played oh so infrequently on the radio.  You guys gotta hear this one. 

(by Don Henley)

You were dreamin’

 On a park bench

 ’bout a broad highway somewhere

 When the music from the carillon

 Seemed to hurl your heart out there

 Past the scientific darkness

 Past the fireflies that float

 To an angel bending down

 To wrap you in his warmest coat

 And you ask

 What am i not doing

 He says

 Your voice cannot command

 In time you will move mountains

 And it will come through your hands

 Still you argue for an option

 Still you angle for your case

 Like you wouldn’t know a burning bush

 If it blew up in your face

 Yeah, we scheme about the future

 And we dream about the past

 When just a simple reaching out

 Might build a bridge that lasts

 And you ask

 What am i not doing

 He says

 Your voice cannot command

 In time you will move mountains

 And it will come through your hands

 Through your hands

 So whatever your hands find to do

 You must do with all your heart

 There are thoughts enough

 To blow men’s minds

 And tear great worlds apart

 There’s a healing touch to find you

 On that broad highway somewhere

 To lift you high

 As music flyin’

 Through the angel’s hair

 Don’t ask what you are not doing

 Because your voice cannot command

 In time we will move mountains

 And it will come through your hands

Finally my man caved and put in the air conditioners.  Yup, we had ‘em.  Just weren’t using them.  I can’t put them in without having the things fall crashing to the ground below so I have to wait until he decides he’s hot enough.   His “hot enough” is way, waaaaaaaaaaay beyond my “hot enough”.   But this is what I get for hanging out at my man’s house instead of my own home.  My own place has central air conditioning.  (not that I can bloody well afford to turn it on, mind you)

I did go home today for a while.  I was missing my home very much.  Go figure.  Once there I found out that it is official: the house across the street from my home is now a crack house.  Yay!  There are now eleven people living in the semi detached brick crack house and one of them is a prostitute.  I know because I asked her.  She said “Yep, I’m a prostitute.”  Great.  She is often overheard offering blow jobs to teenage boys on the nearest corner.  Wow.  *sigh*

So…um…back at my man’s house in the nice clean quiet valley for tonight.  I’m going back home tomorrow to stand my ground.  I feel the need.  My neighbour informed me the people in the crack house have been going door to door offering to sell prescription drugs and cheap wine.  Charming.  Remember the days when the knock on your door revealed little girls selling cookies for good causes?  Lord now.  Well, it’s all grist for the literary mill.

Steph