imtalkinghere

Waters of March

 

 

I wrote the following to a friend recently:

I believe in paying special attention to synchronicities, agreeing with Jung that these can be  messages from the soul. That said,  it's been a long time since I've had such a pressing series of symbols come flooding at me.

Part of last week's adventure: A giant money screw-up. A mistake of the snafu order.  A computer glitch. An "oops, so sorry" that threw our bank balance almost three thousand dollars into the hole and was a mess to clean up. Don't you just love paying a $35 overdraft fee on a check for under $30... times ten? The good news is we both took it in good-humored stride...once the nausea passed. That was on Monday, or - as the Greek keeps referring to it - the Ides of March.

Then, on Friday, we got a door hanger that said our water had been turned off, except our water was on. Flashback: The Greek used to own this building with a business partner, and the water bill came in her name. When we bought her out thirteen years ago, we made a written request to change the bill over into our name. Nothing happened. We made phone calls. Nothing changed. We sent notes. Nada. Then, last October, we got a notice that said, "Hey, that lady doesn't have anything to do with your address! We're going to turn your water off!" - This led to multiple phone calls and emails and assurances that they had changed it to our name at last, with a confirmation number to prove it.  Then the next bill came in December... still in her name. This is when I sent the very serious registered letter, and got a written response from the Regional Director: "Everything good to go now." ---  So I call the water office and they say, "We turned off your water because we have no account for that address." - I explained the history, read to them from the Director's letter, and mentioned that actually our water was on, not off. -- So the rep on the phone sets up another new account, gives me a new confirmation number and says, "I'll try to get an immediate turn-on for you, so you have water tonight."

I say, "Well, like I said, we have water right now."

She says, "Well, I still have to order a turn-on."

The Greek comes in the door about two hours later holding a door tag saying they couldn't turn the water on because the meter showed that water was running in the house. I was probably filling the tea kettle at the time. And guess what: Now we had no water!!

Another phone call. They sent someone else back out. But.... weird, non?

Now for some general information about the state of our house: A few weeks ago the shower drain backed up - a first - and was a bear to unstop. The washer-dryer overflowed big time a while back for reasons we still can't figure out (nor could the repair man); then last week, as I started a load, I noted water leaking at the left side of the machine. It's something that comes and goes but keeps me nervous. The refrigerator at the front of the house makes weird sounds. Mr. Can-Fix-Anything says it's the condenser, but hasn't gotten to it. The front toilet has a tendency to keep running when you flush it; this is what we get for going for the Home Depot deal when we redid that bathroom. We really must replace it or its parts. There's more, but it borders on unbelievable.

On Saturday,  I did that divination thing where you pull one card from some kind of symbolic deck (Tarot, etc - there are so many different sets) for immediate guidance.   I pulled - you've already guessed, right? - WATER.  The Water Element: cleansing, communication, emotion, flow...

                               

Water. Water. Water. - And - HELLO! - think about the common language around money: Cash flow. Liquidity. Money laundering.  Drowning in debt. Pouring money down the drain. Going under. Keeping my head above water. Staying afloat. The funds dried up. When my ship comes in. Okay, maybe I'm going overboard (!) now. Oh, and let's not forget levy/levee.

And have I mentioned yet that my ankles are swollen?

                                   

A few days later, I followed up with this email:

Last night I had a dream that was, absolutely without question, all about FLUSHING.

Then, this morning, I went to FORA-TV to look for something to play while I sorted things here at my desk, and these were the top three talks listed:

• Scott Harrison: Water as Luxury; 900 million people lack access to clean H20, half of them are children

• Dr.Peter Wothers: Why Humans Need Water

• Greg Allgood: Making Water Pure.

Neener-neener, neener-neener (Twilight Zone theme)

                  

And the next afternoon:

Just turned on the radio - first thing I heard: A poet reading her poem about THE RIVER.

                            

Well, I mean, you know, GLUG.

This explains how I ended up drinking all this water and listening to water sounds and meditating on water as element and picturing myself just flowing...

I'll let you know when I catch something...when it all starts making more sense than those confounding and inconstant Jobim lyrics.

 

And - just for... ducks - I pretty much have to include this one  (<--! first link I found) too ... because we can't have Water getting the idea that I don't realize that she is pure feminine.  So in honor of the Yin thing that rushes at me and swirls all around...

 

 

 

How shall my garden grow?

(Photo source unknown)

Today is the Vernal Equinox, my personal New Year's Day and my favorite day of the year.

It arrives this year at the end of a week that has not felt very springy. Stuff has been pretty unfun and sometimes daunting for many months now. Nothing hideous-awful, mind you; just a long, steady drip-drip-drip of "not good", oh no,  and "harder than seems right" with few signs of impending lift.  It's the duration more than the facts that give it all such weight. Well, okay, I'm not much keen on the facts either.  As a result, the two human souls under this roof struggle some mornings to do the "'tude adjustment" - as the Greek calls it - to go happily and optimistically into the new day. In short, this is not how I usually greet this - my -  auspicious, ready-set-go day.

Normally, I feel like a gardener with spring blossoms to tend. This year, I'm a worm in the dirt hoping to run into some workable seeds.

But let's not call it dirt. Let's call it soil... deep, rich, somewhat sodden and uncomfortable soil. Dark, yes. I  can't see an inch in front of me in this place. Still, a place of potential. If I can just feel my way through it. If I can just assume that, whatever this looks like/feels like, it is all somehow good. <-- See? There it is. 'Tude adjustment at work.

Therefore, Resolved On This (Very Particular) New Beginning:

To accept the immediate darkness as a brilliant friend in a weird damn get-up.

To embrace each fear that rises. Instead of fleeing into distraction, to visit the center of it, to sit there for a spell, and listen.

To maintain - at minimum - my so-far snail's pace response to the aforementioned inner call to.... Silence. Love. Silence. Love.

To keep remembering to breathe. To maybe even get good at it.

To discover this year's garden rather than planning it. (Ha! As if this is a choice!)

To celebrate royally at the harvest. And buy a new dress for it. An expensive one.  And fabulous, perhaps even ridiculous,  shoes for dancing. Shoes suitable for framing. And wear flowers in my hair for the first time ever.

    

At 7...

My nephew, Noah, turns seven next week. Hence, the following words took on special significance as I was reading last night about the care and feeding of subtle perception in a culture that too often discounts it:

If you know any small children, you will have observed their efforts to adjust to the perceptual consensus. By the age of seven, most kids grasp the difference between "real" and "imaginary" and are busy sorting everything they encounter into these two categories. A friend that other people can't see is an "imaginary friend." An ache in the physical body is real, while an ache in the subtle body is "psychosomatic" (ie, imaginary). When adults agree that a perception is real, they will tell the child the name for it. They may also interpret it by analogy to something already familiar to the child. Without this interpretive help, kids can't make much sense of their subtle perceptions and eventually come to ignore them.

This is not to imply that adults are to blame for the loss of subtle perceptions, for it happens to children even in cultures where adult clairvoyance is widespread and taken for granted. No matter how they are raised, children over six or seven exhibit a strong preference for the physical senses. During the time when we are learning to survive in the physical world, the physical senses must necessarily predominate. The renewed stirring of subtle perception in adolescence contributes to the awkwardness of our teen years. We feel crazy when we sense things that we've never learned the names for.

Think of brain-based cognition as a filing system. New items of information are filed with similar items to facilitate later retrieval. Where no similar items exist, the brain tends to discard the information rather than making a new file.

Okay, first, this is a bit of a bummer because some of my favorite Noah stories are of the times he exhibited a gift for something akin to clairvoyance. I hate to think those are going to trickle off for the next five years or so.

On the upside, I am comforted to know that Noah attends a school that values and actively cultivates imagination. Imagination extends the mental filing system, so fewer things of worth get discarded. This should be a fundamental aspect of every child's education. And of course, there are other sideways measures for keeping the back-burnered pot stirred until it comes forward again.

But what happens at adolescence? What's there to welcome and nourish the return of subtle perception? As it happens, I currently have three women friends whose sons have just hit adolescence and all of them are lamenting the "loss" of their boys. It's that most predictable of shifts: although they were always close before, suddenly these young guys want nothing to do with Mom. In two of these cases, the fathers are swamped by career demands and finding it hard to give their sons the extra Dad time they require now. How much more "conducive" indigenous cultures are for what these boys must crave, when a community of men take responsibility for initiating the boy into manhood... where wise elders can encourage and affirm their re-opening perceptions. 

It's a tall order for most American Dads - to create the sacred space these adolescent boys require in order to grow into whole-seeing men.  Why, this gap alone probably goes a long way toward explaining what ails... gee, where to start... every place where not-exactly-grown men and "power" (what passes for it)  meet.

Oh for the want of more subtle awareness... and fewer lost boys... and girls.

Meditation on Love ...3

or, Paging Dr. Jung...

                                                                                                         

...wherein I assign myself to consider every quote in Richard Kehl's Breathing Together, Quotations on the Mystery of Love, and select the ten most resonant for me.  My keepers:            

                                                                

Barbara Walters: You've been married 42 years. What makes your marriage work? Robert Mitchum: Lack of imagination, I suppose.

(Because when someone asks you a foolish question about love, it's best to swat it away...but to do it with style and humor (sigh). Well-played Mr. Mitchum.)

Perhaps that is what love is -  the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.  - Phyllis Rose

If you haven't had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature. - Phyllis Battelle

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people, that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. - Rainer Maria Rilke

Love doesn't just sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. - Ursula Le Guin

Love, my dear Gigi, is a thing of beauty like a work of art. And like a work of art, it is created by artists. The greater the artist, the greater the art. - Alan Jay Lerner

Love is a triumph of imagination over intelligence. - H. L. Mencken

(Except he was being snide. I mean it.)

The Koran wisely advises: You will be called upon to account for all the permitted pleasures in life you did not enjoy while on earth.

                                       

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. - Pablo Neruda

When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know your name is safe in their mouth. - Billy, age 4