Lion and Magic Boy

Kind of makes getting up in the morning worthwhile, you know?

Oh, and my Macbook isn’t doing these justice. They look way better on the pc. And it pains me to say that.

However, today, this is what I saw:

Also this:

Oh, and this (don’t blame me if you find yourself singing “Holly Jolly Christmas” today. Oh, is it in your head already?  I am sooooo sorry):

Oh, and also this. I kind of heart winter.

Stay tuned for the next Camera Event. They don’t happen often.

What do you get when you cross a selection of vegetables, hazy memories of the 2004 Olympic Games, and a knobbly purple ball?

Why, The Nassy Girls, of course.

Yes, Carley, Elde, and the ever-so-pc Chinesemens (Indy, Chiny, and Fetty, who owns a restaurant) play a variety of volleyball that includes celery throws and spikes.

And it’s played nightly right on my balcony.

I’m not sure what role Eric has in all this but I’m pretty sure it includes a lot of armwaving and chortling. And throwing random things off the balcony from time to time. And heading down for snacks on occasion. It must be snack time now.

[Pardon me while I wipe away a wee tear caused by the endless amusement I cause myself with my clever plays on words.]

Ahem.

The other day Matthew took me to a bookstore in Vancouver. Not just any bookstore, and certainly not a big-box Barnes & Noble-type bookstore. This one had spiritual-type books, and only spiritual-type books, but of every description. It was wonderful, and I was certain I would find in it The Book, something that would Change My Life. Not that I was looking for a change, really, but more that it was the sort of bookstore that had that sort of book.

So imagine my surprise to pick up a book on writing. Writing Down the Bones. Yeah, I had heard of it. I didn’t know why I picked it up. I looked at the back. “Writing class…” Hmm. I am a writer already, what do I need this beginner-stuff for?

I started to put the book back on the shelf.

What are you afraid of?

I looked around. There was no one there.

Yes, you. What are you afraid of? What, you can’t learn anything anymore? Do you really think that?

Uh, no.

I kept the book in my hand, looked at it a little more. Maybe there was something in it for me after all. I decided to keep it.

I read some on the airplane coming home. A mix of Zen Buddhaism and writing wisdom. Rather a good fit. I’m sure there is something in it for me, even if nothing else than the lesson that there is always something I can learn.

So it looks like November is a writing month for me.

Several weeks ago I weighed my options. Last year at this time I entered (and won!) National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in order to change my life. I did and it did. I don’t regret it a bit, although it was a bit daunting and exhausted my creative capabilites at the time.

Apparently I like working under pressure.

Last year I also entered (and won!) NaBloPoMo, which by comparison seemed minor, but truly, there is an art to blogging daily. And I weighed those options and decided that in addition to everything else I am doing, posting to Lion and Magic Boy every day would be more than enough.

But then there’s the whole working under pressure thing. I like that.

So when it became clear that my 2.5 year old project wasn’t writing itself in my wee cabin in the way northwest last week and the week before, I thought I may as well ride that current of November creativity and just finish the damn thing under NaNoWriMo. So yeah, bending the rules a bit, but every word I write will be a new one, so close enough, and if I come out in a month with my project completed I will be one happy girl.

So, to recap:

1. 50,000 words (only 1667 a day!) in a new-old project under NaNoWriMo.

2. A post a day. That’s all I have to do. NaBloPoMo.

3. Two! New! Jobs! Soon to be announced.

4. The already close to 50,000 words a month I write as it is in all my various locations.

5. I work extremely well under pressure.

I’ve never been much of a runner: it hurts, I can’t breathe, it hurts, and did I mention that it hurts? When I was about 12 everybody in my family (except my brother, who wisely ignored the whole thing and stayed out of it) decided they were going to run. A lot. That was the year my dad was training for a marathon, and he routinely spent a couple of hours a day devoted to thinking about, preparing for, actually doing, and then recovering from running. It was great motivation, all that sweatiness.

But damn, it hurt. So that lasted only a few months and I never found a rhythm.

Later, in the army, I found I could run. Here are the secrets:

1. Go slow. Are you running or walking? If you can’t tell, it’s the right speed.
2. Stay in the back with friends who won’t let you lag.
3. Run in cadence with 50 other people.
4. Decide it doesn’t matter.

So after all that, running was fun. 5 miles? Sure!

But once I didn’t have to, I just didn’t.

About ten years ago I took it up again. Got to where I could run 3 miles a day at a not half-bad speed. But it still hurt, and I still hated it. I was trudging, not flying.

Next was the treadmill, three years ago. Maybe running indoors with air conditioning will help! Not really; I couldn’t move past that three-mile mark. But it was definitely less sweaty.

So I got a bike.

But in my dreams, I’m a runner. In my dreams, it doesn’t hurt, and I feel like I’m flying. In my dreams, I run easily and with joy. So I know what it feels like. I know it’s possible; after all, why would it feel so real in my dreams if that wasn’t attainable in reality?

Yesterday I took a walk in the forest, looking for an alternate route to the beach. The path that stretched toward the ocean did in fact exist. Problem was, it was perched a good 100 feet higher than the beach and I didn’t feel much like jumping down. So I continued on. After a bit I was compelled to run. No problem, I thought, I’m wearing jeans. This isn’t running. I can stop any time. But I didn’t want to stop. It was easy, it was like flying, it was wonderful. It must be the forest, I thought. The trees are helping. I ran all the way back.

So I dressed a little more appropriately later in the day and went out again.

This time, I found the secret.

The first time? That had been all downhill.

I’ve purposely avoided too much detail about my trip last month to Vancouver, and mostly because there simply weren’t words that could adequately express the profundity of the experience. From my perspective back in Pennsylvania, now alone, I even have to wonder if I somehow made it all up, if Matthew and Vancouver and my eleven days there with him weren’t just some elaborate, albeit wonderful, construct.

Well, no. I do have a few pictures. Not a hundredth of the ones I wish I had taken, but I have a few million more stored in my mind’s eye, snapshots of experience combined with emotion.

For instance (you don’t really want to hear about all this, do you? you do?) there were the meals. Matthew did all the cooking, and after a few days I got comfortable enough to do the washing-up. It was extremely freeing, this role-reversal combined with, what was it, a partnership? I enjoyed watching Matthew in the kitchen, taking note of his techniques, his efficiencies, slinging lettuce about or savoring an olive or thrusting a spoonful of luscious exotic dragon fruit at me.

I’ve talked before about my food issues. I’ve been anorexic in the past. There was a time for me that food was equated with entitlement, with deservingness, with love. Plus, culturally and historically, food is life. Some of those connections don’t fade easily, so the fact that here was a man creating life for me and presenting it to me was extremely soulful and loving. No one has cooked for me like that before.

Eating those meals was perhaps the most intimate thing I’ve ever done. We mostly ate silently, connected with a gaze that spoke more than mere words could have. I could feel ripples of connection to our distant human past move through me, quiet sleeping distant half-remembered memories of a time when food truly was life, when sharing food with someone meant you were linked with them forever.

And I ate things I always knew I didn’t like, yet now I love them. How can that be? I never said a word, simply accepted what was given me, and consumed green olives and eggplant and hardboiled eggs and oh, the salmon! All things I have never liked, yet now they are part of a different lexicon. And I eat them even now, choosing them for their own qualities as well as the connection they give me to that too-short time-slice.

I’ve mentioned the hiking. Or maybe I haven’t, but we did a lot of it. I’m not sure I truly have words yet for the feelings that were evoked from the connection with nature we made together. It’s what I’ve been denying myself for so long, yet the trees welcomed me back like an old friend. It was all so…familiar. So many of my internal snapshots are from views we shared, tiny pictures I can string together to create a panoramic view of the experience.

On the way back down from Whistler we stopped at the waterfall we didn’t see on the way up. Crossing a railroad bridge to the forbidden unofficial side of the falls, we went and stood directly over them. I could feel the incredible power of the water vibrating through the soles of my feet. It was intoxicating. I stepped down to a tree at the cliff’s edge and peered over for a better view of the water, but after a moment Matthew asked me if I didn’t have vertigo. I was pleased that for once the height thing wasn’t bothering me. Hey! Maybe four days in Whistler was so magical that I’ve completely cleared up my intense fear of heights! The one that keeps me off six-foot ladders and hotel balconies, the fear I’ve had since, ever! How about that!

We picked our way back over the railroad bridge to the official side of the falls and walked the easy paved trail down to the viewing site somewhat lower down than our precarious tree-perch. I was greeted by the view of the entire falls, including the bottom way, way down there, and the enormity of the risk I had taken dawned on me.

The last day I was there held a sense of foreboding. We both knew that the next day I’d be getting on a plane and going back to Pennsylvania, that aside from a planned meeting in Colorado nearly two months later, that’s anyway a work event for me as well, we didn’t know when we’d see one another again. All day I felt a sort of mute dread, and the unspoken words between us just hung like a pall in the air.

We walked on the beach, making our way down a long flight of steep wooden steps to greet the drummers who bring in the sunset every night there. The clouds obscured and diluted the sunset, and I felt cheated. Even nature was conspiring to wring this experience from me. Then we walked a bit in the university grounds nearby, as when we had driven past I was struck by a sudden sense of familiarity, realizing that some of the buildings there had figured in a dream from a year or two ago. The spell was broken by walking through it, though, and once again I felt the magic slipping from my grasp.

Again we entered the forest, yet this time the magic seemed to be elusive. I could feel the trees chanting “you’re leaving you’re leaving you’re leaving”. There was so much I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I felt pain and didn’t know what to do with it. Matthew began coughing, clearing his throat. It dawned on me that it might be related to his own apparent inability to speak, and he asked me what I felt in him. Not as a test, but with trust that I could see into him, could sense him somehow on an innermost level.

I told him simply that I thought he had words that were unsaid. That created a space where he could say them, and the tension abated and the mist cleared a bit.

Then it was my turn. Ever attempting to give me the freedom to be vulnerable, Matthew invited me to scream into the forest. I demurred. What if someone heard me? That’s the point. What do I do? Just scream into the trees. How should I do it? Like this. And he let out a yell, half-wild, half-delight, very alive.

So I tried it. But I couldn’t make a sound without basing it on the simmering emotions that seethed within me, all the pain at leaving, and anger at my situation and my lack of freedom, and my new-found joy in just being, all that lifted from me to the very tops of the trees in one anguished sound.

I was afraid the trees couldn’t withstand it, but they did. And I did.

Then we went home and clung to one another in joy and pain. Matthew couldn’t sleep and got up and went downstairs. I lay in his bed and listened to the gentle rain that had just begun, the rain that covered the tiny back garden where Zippy the cat mewed to come in, the rain that leaked my pain in tiny drops all over the city of Vancouver. There was no need for tears when we had the rain.

[tags]Vancouver, Whistler, hiking, rain, love, forest[/tags]

So. Here I am in wonderful Vancouver with my excellent hair. What to do, what to do? Unable to be parted from my love, who I usually refer to as “Mac”, or sometimes, “the Mac”, I’ve been doing much of my usual posting over at Strollerderby. And obsessively checking my email every 20.4 seconds. So it’s pretty much like being at home.

With some very notable exceptions.

The other night we took a walk in the forest. And when I say “forest” I mean something that’s nothing like the creepy-woods that flourish where I live in PA, the kind of woods that continues to grow when you’re not looking and if you stood still more than a few minutes would curl a green ivy tendril around your ankle, soon to completely engulf you in its insidious greenness. The woods in PA spawn endless evil banks of poison ivy, the kind that lures seven-year-old girls with its lush greenery, causing them to them rub their faces and bodies with their poisoned hands, not knowing that soon they’ll erupt with itchiness that lasts weeks.

The forest here is nothing like that. Imagine welcoming, stately tall cypress trees framing a wide path that at night seems to disappear into magical mist, leaving you with the sense that you’re completely surrounded by the trees, until you get closer and can see that the path turns slightly. Imagine a forest in which you are certain fairies and maybe gnomes live somewhere, just around a corner maybe, the high silvery tinkling voices of the fairies calling you distantly, beckoning, inviting. Imagine a forest where the trees talk, their voices muted slightly in the stillness, but who at the same time assure you of their curiosity, their enduring flexibility, their innate sense of connection with all things living, including you.

Imagine a forest in which you are forever transformed after having walked there and exchanged atoms with the trees.

Yesterday I went for a longish walk in the neighborhood where I am staying. Not far from here is a largish park that later in the evening was pleasantly teeming with people enjoying the sun: runners circling the park on a soft bark path, a group of mixed-age men playing soccer, and another group playing cricket. Cricket? Indeed.

I walked through a neighborhood of very large and undoubtedly expensive homes, not like the charming craftsmanlike bungalows I admired closer to the park, and on into a real city street crawling with banks. When I was here before in 1995, my three-day experience was mainly limited to the city center, a forest of tall buildings and bustle like most cities. I had no idea that quiet residential neighborhoods with cricket-playing parkgoers even existed here. So I got my city experience this time too, but made use of it to check out some art galleries, oases of quiet amid the more energetic feel of the busy street.

Turning again I walked past condo buildings perched three stories high on the side of a steep hill overlooking the real city center. This street was all angles, shadows, and planes, a cacophony of interplay between light and form. At a strategically-placed vantage point I was gifted with the stunning view of downtown with a mountain backdrop, the upsurging energy of the tall buildings juxtaposed with the settled, knowing permanence of the mountains. Truly an amazing sight.

I so could live here.

[tags]vacation, travel, Vancouver, happy[/tags]

WARNING: If you’re bored by talk of cycling, skip on ahead. But these random thoughts keep regaling me with their uproarious tales every time I ride, so unless I download them somewhere they will continue to haunt me.

1. I have a new enemy: The Wind. Either Evil or Blessed depending on what direction I am going, The Wind has caused me some agony and joy. Mostly the former it seems, so it must be changing direction. Hate. Wind.

2. Indecisive cat at the bottom of what should be the Flying Hill of Joy That Comes before The Painful Uphill That’s Almost At The End Of My Ride When My Legs Are Shot. Causes much sudden braking and tooth-gnashing.

3. Geese are smarter than cats, either that or the Lead Goose in charge of the entire village’s brood (much grown, now) and responsible for Safe Crossing of Roads must know a thing or two about bicycles, and wisely avoided much featherous tragedy by keeping everyone to the side until the Great Wheeled God had passed.

4. Weird tan: arms (but only down to the wrist, from gloves); shoulders but only in back; and the tops of thighs only. Attractive!

5. If a fattish kid also on a bike does the head-nod thing to you and you nod back, being the polite cyclist that you are, it may cause you to notice that you’ve forgotten to don your helmet, noticing as you now do the feel of the wind in your hair. Nervousness about cars and really really hard asphalt and what happened to this guy (clearly there are genetic connections, although you don’t pretend to be able to do much of anything he does—100 miles? At one time? HA!—despite having worshipped him for years in a younger-sisterly sort of way) causes you to turn back although you’ve only been out ten minutes.

END OF BIKESTUFF

1. Eric looks remarkably grown up now in a polo short and khakis, especially when he is emptying the pantry in search of something to eat.

2. It’s interesting how fast a cat will run and for how long when it’s gotten its back legs entangled in a plastic grocery bag. (WHY IS THAT DAMN THING FOLLOWING ME???) I estimate a good 40 mph, which went on for a good ten minutes before I could catch up with him and remove the bag. No lasting damage to the cat, but the bag, sadly, was beyond repair. This may curb his penchant for crawling into bags.
[tags]cycling, biking, stupid wind, funny cat stories[/tags]

Lately I’ve had the good fortune to be exposed to some wonderful thoughts expressed by some wonderful people, who must somehow be working together because I keep hearing the same things but offered in different ways. Which gives these thoughts extra emphasis, necessary to get through the evident thickness of my old patterns and ways of responding to various situations.

One thing I’ve been doing as a result is having more fun.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And obvious? Why yes, yes it does, only it never really occurred to me before. Life was SERIOUS DAMMIT! People are JUDGING ME! Life is a COMPETITION!!

Except…it’s not, they aren’t, and it isn’t.

I’m amused that it’s taken me this long to get this message, but at the same time I’m glad I am getting it!

It is beginning to manifest in interesting ways, ways that probably only amuse myself, but….isn’t that the point?

So, to the people who smiled at me while I was dancing in Produce at Whole Foods today and balancing a package of mushrooms on my head, the answer is, YES!

To the guy at Radio Shack where I killed 10 minutes while awaiting a photo to be developed and who laughed when I had no idea where my cell phone was while it was clearly right there in my hand, the answer is, YES!

To the other guy at Radio Shack who laughed when I explained that the technical term for a part on a certain item sold in his store that we were discussing was “thingie”, the answer is, YES!

To anyone who really wonders what happiness is and how to find it, the answer is, YES!

I hope you have found your own YES! And if you haven’t, that you find your way there soon. It’s there waiting for you.

Since I do some of my best thinking in the shower, I thought I’d share with you today’s flowing and fluid flotsam of fancy:

I think I’ve finally hit on a way to ensure eternal happiness among couples, and it has a lot to do with showering together. Water-temperature compatibility is clearly a barometer for levels of spiritual communion. It’s come to my attention recently that in all my [insert rapidly increasing number here] years, I’ve only run across one person who likes a shower the same temperature that I do: that is, yummily and almost-scaldingly hot.

I’m pretty sure this means something.

Will keep you posted if there any further developments.

Meanwhile, do share with me your own research on the subject.

[tags]showers, couples, compatibility, hot water, yay [/tags]

Little did I know growing up that my birthday was actually on the date of an ancient pagan ritual celebrating fertility and spring. It explains a lot, though. And this year it almost coincides exactly with the full moon (which is tomorrow), so you can bet I’ll be out sacrificing a couple of goats this week!

Actually, this is the year I celebrate my inner Beltaine, marking the birth of the self that has lain dormant all these long cold years. I feel it there, pulsing under the surface, warm and lively and perfect, awaiting just the right moment in an early golden dawn to burst forth with soft forest greenness.

Join me? Go back in time a day, light a bonfire under your heart’s desires, and come share with me this radiant spring.

I’ll be waiting for you.

[tags] Beltaine, Beltane, pagan [/tags]