"...and your life is in your hands."

When I get a line of poetry going through my head, it's usually for a good reason.
Lately:    voi ch'entrate, and your life is in your hands. -- the final line of Robert Lowell's "The Exile's Return." 
"Voi ch'entrate" is elliptical for Dante's lasciate ogne speranze voi ch'entrate, better known as "abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

And the truth is, I'm staring down a precipice.

But aren't we all, always? I take my life in my hands with every breath. That part was clear. But I didn't understand why I was getting the "abandon hope" part of the quote. Maybe it was just along for the ride.

Thank goodness I've been listening to all the self-empowerment and personal development audios. I listened to Roz Savage, the English lady who left behind her corporate life to follow passion, and has rowed solo across oceans. One of her lessons from aboard boat was don't indulge in hope. My ears pricked up. In the middle of the ocean, in a storm, with a broken oar and a waterlogged radio. hope may lead to paralysis, apathy, and a feeling of disempowerment as you try to replace your initiative and responsibility with wishing and longing.
So, actually, Robert Lowell (and little miz Ela), abandoning hope and acknowledging that your life is in your hands are two arms of the same embrace--embracing personal accountability.

My life is in my hands as I stare down a precipice and as I check my hope at the door. 
I'm learning so much right now, rediscovering my urge and delight in creative writing and translating, and throwing myself down the rabbit hole of a whole new endeavor, learning and being coached to run a business. In my ripe old age, I'm finally learning about finances! I'm finally bringing myself into participation (one of the reasons I first started this blog, participation) in one of the most potent and ubiquitous means of circulation.
And it's uncanny how well what I'm learning about business fits in with many of the spiritual/personal development changes I've been working on. I'm looking forward to sharing more detail on that.
But there is also a demand for unflinching honesty. If you're going to lay out resources you don't have, you'd better be very clear about where you're borrowing it from, and on what terms. Things have to match up. 

I have a mismatch. I'm excited, optimistic, engaged. I feel really good. And/but--I feel really good despite... When I say or think x is really good despite... is usually when something's about to go awry. But really, I feel okay. And yet, it was wisdom to decide not to go to the writers' conference at the end of this month because I'm not at the top of my notch. But I'm feeling okay! But objective markers of measurement would insist I'm not okay. And there's such a mismatch, I can hardly believe it even standing on two different scales, even getting feedback from people I trust.

Now would be an extremely inconvenient time to have to go away to treatment. But I'm back at the point of being told it's go away by choice or else I'll lose the choice.
I'm finding this pretty difficult to digest. It makes going off and studying up on LLC paperwork seem relatively easy.
And my life is in my hands.

In the Flux

I apologize for having left things hanging in a scary place!
Since I last wrote, I have returned to Homer.
I have moved from far in the beautiful back of beyond down to town, house-sitting for dear friends, getting around temporarily without my car.
I'm not running sprints yet, but my energy does seem to be steadily increasing.
I have been harvesting what others planted.

Feeling grateful for the abundance, warding myself off from the disappointment and self pity at not having planted a whole lot myself this year.

In this intense and poignant time, giving humor its space, narrow though its berth tends to be in my psychic space--thanks always to the carrots.

I don't yet know what room or apartment, and what fellow-dwellers, will be in my life this winter (if you have the room I'm meant to live in, please let me know!) and, as with everything else right now, I interpret that it's my job to be okay with that uncertainty.

Kidneys are all about water, flux, fluidity and shifting; in the Chinese cosmology they're associated with winter, the season into which we're moving now. I suppose it might be ideal if that energy were balanced with a rock of security in my life now--of warmth, comfort and safety--but perhaps the lesson and blessing here will be to sink down and find that security and comfort in each moment that I live from boxes, packed and ready to move, each time I throw out freezer burned veggies that have moved with me three times now, each time I release my habits of buying in bulk and storing as neither appropriate to my lifestyle nor actually providing of any real comfort or safety. Each time I let go another specious tie to safety, each time I invite the universe to show me real safety. Sinking means finding depth. The water bloat from the IV that troubled me so much when I left the hospital barely able to do up my jeans dissipated in less than a week--a little flag that told me to have faith (and not freak out over engorged body). But yesterday I got stung by a bumblebee (first time for that) when working in the garden, so I have a little reminding reservoir of fluid on my right wrist. Ebb and flow.

On a good day, this makes sense! What is also there for security is the writing and translating. The writing which has gotten all serious and intent and goal-oriented and "thesis year of the MFA program" titled. How did that happen so fast? And why don't I feel any less of a novice as a writer? And now I must make time to write as never before, and yet not feel that I'm up to the ankles in time's spilled milk when I sit a whole evening and morning, as I did recently, trying to 'catch' a poem and get barely a pair of consecutive words down. My dictionary translating job is marching toward its completion, and in order to stay on track, I must translate a certain number of words each day, an intended lemma on which to close the day. As time bound and time sensitive as the MFA completion is, I somehow have to admit the space for the 'get nowhere' times, the times when the blank page stays obstinately blank, the times when the scribbles stay obstinately obtuse and uninspired.

As for this blog, I intend to continue updating, more frequently than of late but not more than three times a week. I'll be musing mostly about writerly things, I suspect, but also some on sustenance of other kinds.
Thank you for letting me share my voice.
With love.

Losing, Subconscious Messages, Marzipan-Stuffed Dates

After all these extremely cold dry weeks, "snow is falling snow on snow, snow on snow" (in the bleak midwinter, here and now).

Beautiful...but the forecast warns that once again, it'll warm up again and snow will turn to rain.

Snow on the ground, and the clouds that bring snow, do something to the light. There's a softening, a dimming: an invitation to stare at that candle flame peacefully, rather than run around doing the last hundred errands, driving through the snow far faster than a one-horse open sleigh could dream of.

By the time I got home, I was without the debit card to our joint bank account, and was also pretty cognizant of having misplaced or lost the go-phone that's all the cellphone I have.
How the subconscious works! I've been receiving message after message recently that I "need" to get an iPhone. Loss of a card from a disjointing account--telling in its own way also.

It should be mentioned that, although I'm great at losing other things, I almost never lose material objects in an annoying way. And so, by today I've tracked down the debit card to the first place I suspected. The physical object returns, the question and/or message remains.

We have places to go and gifts to wrap, but I wanted to show that I haven't lost my "war on the kitchen at festive season" propensity, thanks to my grandmother in Israel. She wouldn't understand making chocolate from scratch, or marzipan for that matter, let alone soaking Brazil nuts pre-dehydrating.

But she would understand the delight in creativity and the promise of purveying enjoyment to other people through the creations.

My own idea, although I'm sure it's been done before--I made marzipan, stuffed date halves with it, coated the top with my home-made (very dark) chocolate.
I'm sure it would be really good with store-bought marzipan and chocolate, but making those from scratch made it special for me, even if people couldn't tell the difference (I hope they can)!

Piles of other goodies made already--I'll try to get some more pictures up soon.
Happy Holidays!