Balance; Validation from the Shadow Side

We have snow again.

I'm used to shoveling steps, porches, walkways--driveways, even. On Saturday, though, I took it to a new level--spent an hour digging out the road! I'd been having some difficulty driving in and out, and it was still snowing, and I wanted to be able to drive out Sunday. As it turned out, on Sunday I got as far up the road as I'd shoveled, but shortly after that my car was swimming in snow. Sinking in snow. Immobilized. I opened the door, and the snow was more than a foot deep. So I got to shovel some more and--best of all--the plow guy finally showed up just as I, aided by my neighbor, had shoveled my car out enough that I could back all the way down the twisty, snowy, fluffy road to let him open it up.

My arms are pretty sore today, but hey, if I can shovel a road and dig my car out, I can't be doing that bad, can I? Although I don't intend to fast three days out of this week as I did last week; the idea was to work back down to one day and then none...

I may seem weak, but really I'm strong. Yes, physically too. And I'm finding that to be so with the different parts that make up my self too--in the vernacular: things I think I suck at, I might turn out to be good at in some respects.

I'm very strongly left-side dominant. And whereas some people divide the labor so that their dominant hand is better at fine motor control and their other is the "strong and stupid" blunt instrument, my left hand is both stronger and more dexterous (and yes, dexter means "right hand"--my left hand is like a right hand, how sinister...). So I tend not to respect my right hand much.

Credit: drmahendrapratap.blogspot.com

This afternoon, though, I was using the external keyboard and mouse, and I switched the mouse over to my left hand because my right shoulder/arm is super sore (a combination of the shoveling, lots of mousing, and sleeping on it awkwardly). And my left hand was an absolute klutz! The cursor was wobbling around all over the place making the annoying Windows 8 charms and dingdongs appear randomly, the mouse itself, ridden by my hand, practically falling off the edge of the table.

I would never have guessed that my right hand could outperform my left at anything save maybe holding the phone receiver to my right ear.

Sometimes the shadow side carries strength. It pleased me that my reaction was to admire my right hand's skill rather than deplore my left's klutziness. My right hand has about fifteen years' worth of practice with a mouse and my left hand maybe barely a few hours over that entire period. 

So there, demonstrated in my own body, the "10,000 hours of practice" adage: talent alone isn't sufficient; practice is essential; with enough practice a person can achieve a high degree of mastery even with mediocre talent. 

When I was eleven or twelve, a classmate taunted me: "You are as useless as your right hand." And that was about what I believed, about my hand and about myself. So, guess what? Even the weak, even the useless...practice, and manifest strength.

I'm grateful to have had my attention drawn to this, to get to share it with you, too. It's also a good reminder about balancing left and right. Humans recognize symmetry as beauty, and there are studies showing that harmonizing the brain's hemispheres is good for mental/emotional health as well as intelligence... and I for one am asymmetrical (cattywampus? skewiff?) all the way from my face to my feet. So, off I go to practice writing with my right hand--my left hand has hundreds of thousands of hours' headstart writing. Who knows what might get channeled? 

What do you do to stay in balance?

Six Spiritual Lessons from Learning about Business

Winter has returned here. A windstorm that blew off roofs and blew in snow, and now the temperatures are in the teens, where they "should" be at this time of year, not the 40s.

My current crash course in business building is cross-pollinating beautifully with my focus on personal development. I've realized that my lifelong head-in-the-sand approach to finances, getting by solely due to extreme frugality coupled with some innate blind trust, is not just because I thought money was unimportant. There has been a certain amount of judgment of money as "unspiritual" as well as some scarcity mentality about not wanting to use up resources (who, me?) or not believing there's enough to go around. 
Time to let those go.

Wow, so part of my spiritual training right now is recognition that money, too, is spiritual. And the business training is spiritual training, too. I could go on and on, but here are six quick ones for Sunday night.

1. Abundance! You have to approach your business in the sincere awareness and consciousness of abundance. Acknowledge that there is plenty, there is enough for everyone, there is enough and plenty for you to have abundance. Yes! In spiritual development too, cultivating a sense of abundance is a consciousness-raiser.
2. To work well in business, it's essential to be in the present, aware. If you make a mistake, learn the lesson it encapsulates, and move on: now is the only time you can make a difference. In spiritual life too.
3. To build a good business, it's wise to have a daily practice that supports--and maintains--daily habits that focus your attention in the places needed. This is also important for self talk and change of personal habits.
4. When figuring out the focus of your business, it's wise to brainstorm before researching marketability--come up with ideas. And in the personal development sphere, spinning ideas is a great way to connect with a broader, one-mind reality. James Altucher talks about building an "idea muscle" as a way to access one's subconscious and become more creative and generally more productive.
5. Be your best for the greatest good. If you make your business as good as it can be, it will produce the most it can and satisfy its consumers to the greatest degree. If I am my best, I can do the most for the universe.
6. A business is part of an ecosystem, with consumers and suppliers and complex interactions on many levels. Acquire a sense of being part of a greater whole simultaneous with autonomy and personal accountability. And the same goes for my individual self. In both areas, there is a grace to the sense of being part of something greater than oneself, to being a channel, being of service.

Gratitude for spirit! I want to stay in that space. Perhaps my body can just run on pure spirit.

_____________________________________________
On a different note, RIP Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer prizewinning poet, essayist, novelist, children's book writer--and back-to-the-lander. 
In her honor, here's a sonnet of hers that proves she had a wryly humorous appraisal of death:

Purgatory
And suppose the darlings get to Mantua, 
suppose they cheat the crypt, what next? Begin 
with him, unshaven. Though not, I grant you, a 
displeasing cockerel, there's egg yolk on his chin. 
His seedy robe's aflap, he's got the rheum. 
Poor dear, the cooking lard has smoked her eye. 
Another Montague is in the womb 
although the first babe's bottom's not yet dry. 
She scrolls a weekly letter to her Nurse 
who dares to send a smock through Balthasar, 
and once a month, his father posts a purse. 
News from Verona? Always news of war. 
Such sour years it takes to right this wrong! 
The fifth act runs unconscionably long. 

_____________________________________________
much love.

Regularity in face of crazy weather; fasting

While the lower 48 is in the grip of the icy gods, it hit 50 degrees Fahrenheit here yesterday. This photo, taken today, could be from late May.

A couple of weeks ago, a little farther down the same road, a more typical scene.

I was talking about paradoxical pieces of advice for being best self/manifesting destiny/personal development. These two pictures of the same road exemplify a piece of advice on which all the gurus and advisers are unanimous, which seems to contain a paradox within itself:

Have a daily practice. How you start up your day sets the tone for how you move through the day, so be intentional about it.

and--here's the paradox--

The more consistent and stable you are with this practice, the more resilient you'll be when destabilization happens, for whatever reason, and you're prevented from practicing.

(I guess because by repeated practice, you've been diligently building the neural net, and that same net becomes a safety net that protects you from curveballs.)

This advice is sweet to me in several ways. First, because I've had experience of the benefits of a regular practice--the lived experience that life can feel more full of sparkle and opportunity when I live it with that level of intentionality. Second, because one of my favorite quotations from Rumi (Barks's translation, of course, I'm of that generation) says "Submit to a daily practice...Keep knocking, / and eventually the joy inside / will open a window / and look out to see who is there." I tend to think pieces of poetry stick for a reason. Then, because my doctor has been telling me for years now that such regularity is my best medicine against my own inherent instability. It's not that a bipolar person can't maintain a regular practice; it's that a bipolar person must work more diligently than most to maintain such a practice, which is one of her best protections against falling off the rails/the deep end/the face of the earth. Having a check-in first thing in the morning, and taking time to make a note of three or more things I'm grateful for before bed is feeling so good.

And so, when the vista looks like midsummer although it should be midwinter, tune into clues, like the absence of fireweed on the hillside...

...or the fact that the sun is nonetheless very far to the south in the sky...
And even though nature herself is one big curveball right now, stay in that winter, seed, potential energy space. 

I hope my own regularity of practice and prayer can be one small piece of stability to protect this local ecosystem, while bluff-edges become landslides, bugs and buds come out of dormancy, the ground thaws. I hold a piece of true north winter within me, watching that sky-southerly sun.

I've continued to fast twice a week. Twenty-four-hour fasts, dinner through dinner, so not a great long fast. I've been advised because of where my weight is that this isn't the best thing. I've come to agree that I probably shouldn't do it days that I have to drive, especially when the roads aren't good. But it is a form of practice of its own with much to commend it, and I haven't yet been able to convince myself to give it up. I guess one way to talk myself around might be to say that not-fasting is a form of regularity.

I'll make a few more posts about lessons I'm learning right now. And my next post will be about the big decision I was agonizing over and how I finally decided.
Meanwhile, I'll be getting up early for the Future of Nutrition Conference! It runs on East Coast time, 9am-9pm. 9am Eastern is 5am here!

Talking, Pictures

The willows are budding...

..and Bidarki creek falling to the beach is making icicles of cathedral grandeur...

I sent in my fourth of the five packets for the second year of the MFA program. Can scarcely credit I have only one more to do. This one was delightful to me, as I'd had the space, with Phil gone, with the house-sitting, to focus and get excited about my work. It feels somewhat like the picture above--falling, falling; but with such a sense of uplift. A pointer to my new life. I also read a poet about whom I'm excited in a full-blown epiphanic way, more than I have been even about my very favorite poets. His name is Andrew Joron. He writes speculative lyric, and he is auditory! I get it! And he did things around words and alphabet that I'm doing in my work right now, so there were lots of spooky coincidences. I'm in awestruck admiration, and also avid to make a connection with the poet and share enthusiasms. Now, a day or so of busyness, and then back to the writing and work...until an Anchorage trip next week.

"Why is Roxy barking so ferociously?" one morning when I'd let her out. Here's the view from the bedroom window, what she was reacting to. Moose's butt. She thinks moose are for barking at, which is scary at times. 

Do you see the moose in this one? Bedded down. They are everywhere at the moment.

Sometimes all you need to do is show someone a picture. I always seem to have all these auras and epiphenomena (ephemera?) I need to include radiating from the picture. See how monochrome all these pictures are. See how each of them is subtly colored, each with a different shade and cast. Oh, and I try to speak that, in real time talk. No wonder I stammer and backtrack.

Siri is teaching me to speak, it turns out, far more than the other way around. I'm surprised by how quickly I can type on that tiny iPhone keypad with one or two fingers, but it is awkward, put mildly, and makes everything sore very quickly. So I dictate my texts and dates and to-do lists almost exclusively. Even with the time correcting Siri's mistakes, it's quicker. I'm learning to speak slowly but not too slowly--this is a speech recognition system that recognizes words in context and too much space will lose that context. On the other hand, I have to leave more space between the words than I would ordinarily, not run words together; I have to be precise about my front and back vowels, avoid affricating t's and d's at the ends of words...Not only is Siri teaching me to talk; also making me even more self-conscious about my own pronunciations. 
But if you're saying something to a speech recognition system that's going to start anticipating the next thing you'll say, accurate transcription will be more likely if you say something predictable. Yikes, what does that say about our communications with one another? Do we WANT to be predictable? I think I need to stop this right now. Sometimes when you go through and correct, Siri will offer its own correction. And sometimes this alternative would be more predictable than what it originally offered. I was dictating a text saying that I was booking Roxy to get her hair clipped (so she wouldn't have icicles in her eyes all the time), and this was transcribed as "I'm f***ing her to get clipped..." I was horrified. Yes, there's a bit of prude in me, which is why it's so scary for people when I actually curse. How did Siri come up with that in the context? When I went to fix it, I was sweetly offered "booking." Siri, you're a twit!

The dogs are teaching me to talk, too. Alone (otherwise) in this big house, I'd rather not talk, but I talk to them, and some of it they definitely understand, good things like "Wanna come to bed?" and "Ready to load up?" as well as things like "Lay down!" (they understand that better than "lie down," which shows that this verb "lay" has extended its meaning in contemporary English). They are keenly tuned to body language, but because they have certain biases, they anticipate (like Siri), not always accurately. They are very very biased toward outings and food. 

Back to the bluff as envoi--some of those icicles are at such interesting angles, especially toward the top left. A frozen weeping mane... 

Lament for Fall

"April is the cruelest month," they say--perhaps because it fails to fulfill promises, spring struggling to break out of winter like bubbles of steam trying to break out of liquid water. As for autumn? Many people's favorite time of year, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness..."

thank goodness for the barges that allow us to ape that fruitfulness here

 In these polar regions, though, spring may be more exciting--think The Rite of Spring--visceral eruptions of fertility through ice. And here, for me, autumn may be the cruelest season. Were I still in CA right now, I'd be harvesting persimmons, just getting into oranges. Better not to even think about HI's harvest this time of year.

Here, though, fall is a paper-thin prelude to a long winter. We were harvesting cranberries in full fall colors in early September; in late September, blueberries through the ice. Before October is over, the convivial fire ring at our neighbors' (where we're house-/menagerie-sitting now) looks like this, the garden beds off to the left languishing similarly.

 And our garden beds are blanketed with thin foam (gosh this one's close to the edge!)

You see this dark cast to the light also: yes, "light" can be an oxymoron at this time of year. I like bright fluorescent light shone right in my eyes--except when I'm driving! It's true, the sun is so low in the sky that when clouds aren't in the way, it shines directly into the eyes.

 

We've been floating on the meniscus of surface water pooled over freezing ground; buoyed by warm south wind storms like in the last two days, floating from one house- and dog-sit to the next, soon to fly out of state altogether for ten days; also enjoying visitors, principally this wonderful lady: 

Phil's mom is 89, whip-smart, strong, full of wisdom and positivity around life. She brought a breath of the bounty of Oregon fall with her. 

Now, I'm trying hard to get back on track with work and, please life-force and all the angels, my creative writing, and so to pull myself out of my physical tailspin. More on that soon--I had to post my lament for fall first.

HAWMC A Stranger and a Sojourner--the Quick Edition

I'm behind on my schedule, so this offering will be a quick one. For today's prompt, I'm going to confine myself to the suggested fifteen minute deadline for free-writing from a phrase picked at random from a book. (And I hope to find time to read blogs a bit later on too.) I'm swollen with the need to get down on the page my essay comparing Charles Simic's first and most recent poetry collections. Since I've also been reading his collected notes, published under the very resonant title The Monster Loves His Labyrinth (I'm Elamonster, remember!), I'm going to pick a sentence from there. 

Simic: "Rubbing against so many strangers in so many places and aping their ways to pass for a native has made you incomprehensible even to yourself."

Some people emigrate to another country and preserve, on purpose, a strong sense of their original culture, language, and heritage. They irrigate in their soul "Some corner of a foreign field that is forever England," as Rupert Brooke would have it. But Simic and I, and many others, are more interested in "passing for a native" so that we can be better understood by the people we're now spending time with. I remember when I used to sell produce at the community garden in South Berkeley (basically Oakland ghetto), and most of the patrons were elderly Black people, originally from the South, who lived at a nearby senior center. If I'd told them how delicious the tomaahtoes were this week, they would have had no clue what I was talking about! Elsewhere in The Monster Loves his Labyrinth, Simic mentions that he no longer speaks Serbian, his native language, fluently. My favorite professor at Oxford, a phenomenal Classical linguist and philologist, was Italian, and had both an Italian accent and a weak "r" when she spoke English. But when she spoke Italian, she had an English accent in her Italian, having lived in the UK for decades--and that despite her huge linguistic capabilities. My own mother has an English accent when she speaks her native Hebrew nowadays, and she often comments on how much the language has changed in the decades she's been living abroad--new vocabulary, new slang and idioms.


On the other hand, my mother is immeasurably bothered by the fact that my own accent has changed so much in the eleven years I've lived in the US. It's not just accent--I also use American vocabulary and idioms. When I was first in the US, every time I spoke to my parents on the phone for the first several months, my dad would exclaim how wonderful it was that I didn't have an American accent. He stopped saying that years ago, and sometimes when I visit my parents, my mum says when I first arrive, "Do you think you could speak English while you're here, please?" The fact is, I can't--I don't understand British slang anymore--there are new words and phrases every time I go! My accent will migrate back in that direction, but my dad will still be echoing various oddities of my pronunciation whenever I open my mouth.


Why am I going on about this? Because, hypocritical as my mum's position might seem, she once explained the thought behind it in telling fashion. I was describing two of my professors at Stanford, both of them British women who were married to Americans and had lived in the US for 30 years, one of them with an accent almost indistinguishable from an American accent, the other sounding like she'd never left the UK--both of them linguists also. My mum's comment was that the latter woman had maintained a sense of her own identity, which was why she could still talk as she'd grown up talking. My mother thinks I've let go of my own sense of identity and allowed this other idiom to seep into my soul.


She thinks I'm incomprehensible to myself, as Simic would say. And it's true--Simic no longer speaks Serbian fluently; I don't understand British English slang from the past decade and sound "American" to British people. But neither Simic nor I ever would pass for an American in the US! 


And this permanent strangeness persists through both directions in time for both of us--Simic was born in Serbia right before WW II, at a time when national boundaries were in such flux, in a place where ethnicities meld together but often don't achieve any stable fusion. I don't look English at all, and all through my growing up years, whenever I met a new person, early on in our acquaintance I'd be asked "Where are you from?" In Israel, I'd get asked the same question, because of my accented Hebrew. Here in the US, even as much as my accent apes the native tone, my melodious British intonation always gives the game away, although no one ever guesses I'm British anymore. "Are you Irish? South African?" (I've even gotten "Indian" when I've been tanned) "Oh--half Israeli--that must be what I'm hearing!"


And I get to the heart of what I want to talk about just as I run out of time. It's not just about "aping the natives and trying to fit in" in a literal country. I mentioned yesterday my cautious and parlous reintegration with "the mainstream." Whatever country I've been in, I feel like I've never been a native of "the mainstream." I'm not fluent in polite social conversation. I don't know how to dress. Sometimes I don't know how to behave appropriately. The country of poetry-writing has a different terrain, and when I return from that with my clothes wet, for a dinner with friends, my thoughts are disjointed. From what pole am I looking at the world? For months, it might be one, or the other, but always comes a day when the world's countenance appears to change diametrically, purely because my own brain chemistry has done a backflip. 


I'm deeply enmeshed in an essay all about this theme of multiple parallel worlds and the sojourns between them, and how, from life to death to "break on through to the other side," our language and culture are obsessed with these crossings. So now I'm out of time, and I'd better go write  up Simic and work some more on that essay too!

Are you a native of your landscape, or a stranger and a sojourner like Simic and me?

Through Blizzards and Avalanches Home...

Well, we sure saw some weather on our Anchorage trip of Wednesday and Thursday...and a lot of snow fell back at home in our absence!

Yes, this is an Alaskan winter, but by all accounts this year's is extraordinary. It's only my third winter here, so I have less basis for comparison, but old-timers are saying it's been many years since there was this much snow and cold. I have lots of pictures to share.
Driving up to Anchorage on Wednesday, there were blizzards most of the way, with strong winds gusting across the road, cramming the air with powdered snow, both falling snow and blown snow. I'd never thought of air as something with no gaps in it before.

 At our friends' house in Anchorage, the snow was above the mailbox.

 Snow half as high as a house...

 See that pile of snow in the middle of the picture as tall as the building next to it? And the snow berms along the roadsides were generally well above my head, some of them as tall as the bus stops! I am in constant awe of the infrastructure and constant work it takes to keep roads open in the winter here.

 We were glad that the truck was fully loaded: increased stability and traction, you know ;) We stocked up at CostCo, and Phil purchased a used wood-burning stove at Habitat for Humanity--that was some serious weight. And so aesthetic!

While we were town, it warmed up by 40 degrees, after hovering right around zero for the whole of January. Warm-up above melting point plus all that snow, and then some rain on the snow, equates to avalanches: big ones across the roads on the way from Anchorage to the Kenai Peninsula and Homer; smaller ones onto roads and buildings in town.

Coupled with the strange concept of air as something crammed and having no gaps was this eerie monochrome light, dissolving distances and making everything feel very intimate and immediate.

 When we set out for Homer on Thursday, we knew the highway was blocked by an avalanche at one spot, and that there were avalanche warnings in many other places. The avalanche blockage was right around the turnoff for Homer, and we were hoping that it was just beyond the turnoff, so we wouldn't be stuck. But we were prepared to stop. And stop we did, for 30 minutes at one point while they let off howitzers to cause controlled avalanches up ahead.
Most people were sensible and stayed off the road. If you look at the picture below, you can see that there are no tire traces in the oncoming lane opposite ours--what looks like one to the far left is the shadow of the snow berm. No one was on the road coming from Homer or Seward!

Closer to our turnoff, we stopped again, for about an hour--this was where the avalanche was being cleared. As you can see, it was raining on top of the snow at this point, which can't have made the job of clearing the mess any easier.

 We got lucky, though: it turned out that the avalanche itself was beyond our turnoff, so we were allowed to head on after that not-so-long wait, but the people heading for Seward got turned back. We've waited six hours for avalanches to be cleared before, so this really wasn't so bad. Phil took a nap. I broke the back of one of my critical essays for my "packet."

We had word that it had snowed non-stop since we left in Homer, warm, soft, blanketing snow, drifting over everything as fast as it could be cleared. But as we headed south, the temperatures began to drop again, as had been predicted. The roads were not so slick as things froze tight again. We even had the sun in our eyes for a bit. Welcome back, colors! In this particular stretch, the sun through storm clouds looked like a celestial body, angelic and radiant.

 But when we got home, I had to plow my way out of the truck using the door!

This is the path down to our cabin. You can just see where the path should be: the snow was up to my hips.

The cabin itself looked like a model house inside a snow-shaker. But what a delight to reach home at almost 6pm and still have some light to see by! Finding our way down to the cabin through such deep snow would have been even harder in the dark.

Kudos to my hero Phil for much heroic driving. He felt short on exercise after his recent trip, so this morning while I worked out and made breakfast, he was quite happy to shovel. I was impressed with how quickly he made our path into a reality again. Also impressed by how tall the walls on either side are.

Forecast says it's going to warm up again tomorrow. Everyone's anxiously anticipating what will happen when all these huge piles of snow start to melt. Our entire bluff, cabin and all, could become an avalanche! At the very least, there will be a lot of water downtown. Ebb and flow, change of state, pole to pole with ulterior harmony all over again. I am grateful for the experience.

So many other things I could talk about, but I want to let this stand alone.
There's a major discussion on my mind about the relationship between goal-setting, body image, and success: I'll try to get out a weekend post to talk about that.
love to all!

Back in Alaska

I'm home! The journey through Black Friday was very long, but uneventful. I was frustrated that neither New York JFK nor Minneapolis SP airports had free wifi, and was unwilling to pay $8 to use it in either place. I wrote, worked on one of my editing jobs, racked up over five miles hiking around the terminal, but wished I could have been in communication.

What can I say? I live in a beautiful place.

 Phil picked me up at the airport late on Friday evening, we crashed in Anchorage, ran some errands yesterday morning, and our drive home was full of bright snow, pockets of blue sky, and clear roads.

 These sun rays are just gorgeous...

 I'm not yet completely in harmony with my surroundings. There's work to catch up on on several fronts, writing, connecting with Phil, cleaning the house, redoubling my exercise efforts (nice to be back with my jump rope!) and I need to spend some time creating in the kitchen at some point too. I'm not even quite sure where to start.

On the blog too, I have a couple posts still to share about my trip. It's shocking, in a way, being back here so abruptly, having been in such a different world, to which I'm connected so differently.

It was wonderful to get to spend some time with my mom!

I wish that I could say that recognizing myself in my grandmother's pessimistic and negative tendencies has helped me to slough off all of my own negativity and cross-threadedness. But especially with the tiredness of the traveling, all the experiences to process, I haven't been as I'd have been proud of myself to be. I'll try to share some thoughts on how to move through this funk and toward behaving better over the next few days also.

How do you recover from a long, intense trip?