Growing Versions

Last year on my birthday, a young friend gave me the jar on top (it contains  glitter, and lots of it, food colouring and eye shadow).  I was instructed to shake it whenever I felt stressed.  I keep it on my desk and I have shaken it a lot this past year and it has really helped. When I came home from work the other day, my son presented me with a jar full of beach stones. It is meant to help me calm down and remember the beach.  It works! I intend on building my collection.  What could be next?

A bunk bed ceases to be a bunk bed if a screw is missing. The door stays locked or unlocked if the key is broken or missing. The puzzle is incomplete without that one little piece. The winter jacket is useless without a zipper. A necklace ceases to be a necklace without a clasp. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by the small things. Vernor Vinge I have been neglecting a lot of little things.  Time to locate the proper bolts, the necessary hardware and the essential paperwork.

Spring, come now and release me from the darkness. I am weary of making slides, of conducting classes in my living room and courting cool ideas, only to let people down by sagging with mental exhaustion into the mattress to read one more chapter.  I am tired of mediating struggles about what makes a better slide and caring about education and exclusion and beautiful things and good ideas. My responses are adequate. I respond, but only just. My kids, more tuned into my tone than anyone else in my life, gauge my responses and shield themselves from rejection by phrasing their suggestions in particular ways-ways that (hopefully) elicit something more than a flat, monotone response from me, and limit the utterance of the word no. I am in need of soil and light to lean into. The dreams of being sucked below the surface keep coming.  I need to warm up out on crumbly arid sand. The only thing that releases this stress is "spring cleaning". 3 weeks before it arrives. ...

We got cracking on a big house purge this weekend.  As I have stated several times before, our clutter is always threatening to take us down and muffle our screams.  One of my biggest struggles has been with having a space at home where I can, when I am not bone tired, pull out the paints and suggest a craft project or where I can sort out the mounting photos we have in our midst, without feeling slightly sick afterwards, and  worse still, determined never to do it again.  Most of all, all this stuff was really starting to create barriers between us.  Together we finally took a big bite out of all this, and slowly but surely over the weekend, some treasures were unearthed, tons of useless (to us) things were either given away or discarded and places to work and play and eat and sleep and put clothes away in and read books and wrestle became distinct entities again.

Stress always makes me see things like one sees things underwater. It is like a buzzing, flickering fluorescent light that distorts the way I perceive things.  Tiny, manageable details become overpowering, magnified and refracted as they are through my bulging eye ball, puffy with stress. Meaningless glances or happenings appear threatening.  I struggle with keeping perspective during these periods and I am currently trying to prepare a strong counterweight in my mind, so I can have a safe place in my mind to retreat to when this happens again. Then I came across this quote and it reminded me that refraction can work for me, not just against me.  "The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it tra...

This picture kind of sums up where I stand at the minute.  I am boring holes into the things around me in an effort to see them more clearly and suck juices out of good things but I can't help feeling unnerved by storm clouds just above the horizon line.  When I took this picture I was oblivious to the stormy sky along the edges and focused on those ripe round orange fruits all around me.  It almost took my breath away when I took a look at the pictures later.  Those clouds are menacing, yet those pumpkins are so full of water and goodness and vitamins and food.  The clouds are just passing through.

Every stress leaves an indelible scar, and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older. Hans Selye

I was experiencing a lot of stress late last week.  The kind of stress that churned up my stomach all day long and loaded a spring deep inside of me in preparation for some kind of an emergency that never came.  It was  a stress that  prevented me from processing thoughts properly.  It had been coming on for weeks and it hit fever pitch on Thursday.  On the suggestion of my husband, I went to talk to someone on Friday for guidance and reassurance on dealing with it.   The woman I met was lovely. She helped me re-arrange my perspective and pick up and re-organize the tracks I had so rigidly laid out.  I started to see clearly for the first time in weeks what my role was and what it was not in relation to the matter that was stressing me out.  She helped me gather up all the wisps of doubt and uncertainty and hold firmly onto what I know and be okay not knowing a LOT of things.  My breathing started to get back in order again. Right...