“You may find yourself
Behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself living in a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself,
Well, how did I get here?” (Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime)

Leaping soaring twirling–my spirit is, thanks to warm soft day. Wild delirious bird song, smell of earth. I actually lay in the sun yesterday, going into and out of trance state–such a juicy, erotic flow. I love the sun on my skin, can feel the molecules loosening and humming. And it is not just I savoring the warmth and the red of the camellias. Tiger and Big prowl and stretch and exude good vibes.

Had a bizarre experience this week. Was sitting at a stoplight, and there was a big “BANG” and I ducked. When I looked around I saw my rear window shattering into a zillion pieces. And know clue why (still don’t know). It was very discombobulating, like mild shock. The light turned green and people were honking and aggravated, so I put my flashers on and moved ahead slowly. Tried to get the guy behind me to pull over to ask if he’d seen anything, but he thought I was a nut, and gestured angrily at me, zooming around and off. So I just wobbled along, feeling befuddled. Big chunks of the shattered glass would fall out every once in awhile, making me gasp. I called Rafe and talked to her, just to kind of bring me back to reality.

That evening I thought of the dream I had a few weeks ago: “I am driving along….and suddenly there is a snap, a pow, a feeling of impact. I know there is something very wrong, like I’ve been shot.” Later in the dream I see my face is all swollen and my lips puffed up–I feel like I’ve been loaded up with novacaine. It made me wonder again what the dream was about and how this incident related. One thing that strikes me is how “stupid” you get after a shock, or I guess I should say “I” got. Like I probably should have stopped and tried to figure out what had happened, but I just fuzzily drove along, not clear at all what I was doing. And felt weird the rest of the night–kind of vague and rattled. I wonder if it has to be that way. Like if I were more grounded and aware, could handle unexpected startling things better?. If I were an Apache in the 1700’s for instance, maybe my body would be better able to respond, to react. I’ve been reading Chellis Glendinning’s book (some of which I’m getting something out of, and some of which feels simplistic.) She talks about trauma and how detached we are all from life because of all the trauma surrounding us. She says “could it be that our very culture splits mind from body, intellect from feeling, because we as individuals are suffering rom post-traumatic stress?” She then goes on to posit that, “Original trauma is the disorientation we experience…because we do not live in the natural world. It is the psychic displacement, the exile, that is inherent in civilized life.” ( A little humor here–she starts the chapter off with the lines from the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime….”You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile…and you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” which pretty much summed up my feeling after the shatter. Synchronicity always such a jokester.)

God, that brings back a memory from the swamps of the subconscious–of a date I had aeons ago, a blind date set up by a friend. The scene–I am standing out on a deck with this guy, who is kind of creeping me out, though I can’t put my finger on why, I meand,he’s very cute and charming. We’re listening to the Talking Heads, and I comment that I love the way David Byrne makes all those wild noises with such uninhibited abandon. And he says, with a smirk and leer “Oh really–are there things you’d like to say that you’re too uptight to–”cock” maybe?” nigger”? And I felt like I wanted to scream or vomit or slap him or laugh hysterically. None of which, unfortunately, did I do. I think I reacted similarly to when my rear window shattered. Befuddled moving along. I just walked inside. He followed me and sat on the couch and pulled me down onto him and kissed me. When I pulled back up my big feathery earring had (unbeknownst to him) come off and was laying on his head, kind of dangling down on his forehead, which I found wildly hilarious and started laughing so hard I couldn’t stop. And since he didn’t know what I was laughing at, but that it had to do with him, he got pissed off. I said “this just isn’t happening”, and got up to leave, which really made him furious and got him to issue a few non-Talking Heads-like expletives. And he refused to give me the money for the expensive bottle of champagne he’d asked me to stop and get on my way there. ( I was a student at the time and he a broker).

Well, that’s a long digression. Or maybe it’s not–I think it’s all related somehow. Something to do with trauma, something to do with disconnect from body and instinct. Something to do with not living as our natural selves. We’re all kind of “stupid”, like I felt in the dream. Very few of us are like sleek jungle cats, finely tuned and attuned, alive in every inch of our beings. At one with our surroundings. Some might react differently than I –with anger or aggression. One of my friends said “if that had happened to my car, I’d have been out screaming at someone”. But I”m not sure that is any more plugged in than me.

Something, or many somethings every day more likely, send us further and further into that disconnected fuzzy zone. Add television and computers and virtual reality, and you can stay that way easily forever. Until you get cancer, or some other major event that might wake you up. That’s what I’ve been working at for years–waking up. Not working as in following some intentional format, but working as in following the clues when they arise, tenaciously at times, at times with ease and joy. And still there are vast parts of me numb, stupid, sluggish, constricted. I still act like I have foam in my head sometimes. Like yesterday when the developers came out to discuss with me and my lawyer whether they were going to cut down my locust tree when they put in my “new improved” access road. (They’re taking out my old dirt road because my deed gives them the right to, and it fits their plan better.) I was much nicer than the situation warranted. It was obvious that they think I’m a nutty old cat-loving witch getting in the way of progress, and that I think they think of nothing but the almighty dollar. But we were all smiling and being nice–with me the smiliest. And later I thought “why was I smiling so much?” Because the whole idea of this development next to me is like my window shattering–it makes my head fuzzy. And I really don’t want that anymore. I want to find a way to face whatever is thrown at me, not be in denial, not get fuzzy, not get hysterical, or driven nuts by anxiety. Rather, do what I can do–and then live my life with as much gusto and aliveness as possible. There doesn’t seem to be a one size fits all recipe for that though. That’s where I get aggravated sometimes with many books–when they try to boil it down to “and here’s what you have to do”. Glendinning says “if we are going to refind psychological and spiritual well-being, rebuild the human community, stop the technological onslaught, and restore the Earth, we will do it by making a conscious decision to seek the guidance of the beings of this Earth”. I don’t know that that as a prescription, is very helpful. I think you can read a book that tells you to go commune with nature and then go out and have a conversation with a cactus or a bear or attend a shaman workshop, and if all your constrictions go along with you, probably what will remain in charge is your mind. I think the only way something really penetrates you and expands you is when it comes to you or fromyou in a more organic way, an unfolding. You go out to talk to a cactus because you are drawn to that cactus, attracted to it. Then the work is getting your mind (Mr Poopyhead) out of the way. “No, I’m not being silly, I really do want to go hang out with that cactus”. I don’t “seek the guidance of the beings of this Earth”, I just am happiest when I am with them–I am drawn to the flowers and deer and moss growing on the bank. The key seems to be in clearing out whatever gets in the way of your true desire, rather than having more things you should do. Even that stuff about “you have to love yourself first”. Like it’s some agenda you’re going to follow, something you can do by will. Which, to me, smacks of the whole Nike “just do it” thing. I don’t know how you ever really feel love that way. To me the way is much better described by Mary Oliver when she says, “…let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s more about letting than doing, though doing may be part of the letting. Ok, I know I’m thinking too much when I write a sentence like that, so I will let my own body take over here, and go lay in the sun like it wants, seeing in my mind’s eye golden purple crocus,

drifting in that luminosity.

Last night as I lay back in the steam of the hot tub I saw a dark shape flowing down the even darker tree trunk. It was one of those magic on-the-border moments, where I feel like if I let it, everything might begin to pulse and morph–the trees may begin to dance, and Blog the gargoyle might join them. I’m getting more at ease with such imaginings. I asked Rafe the other day how she’d feel if some night a spirit appeared to her. “At first I’d be terrified”, she said. It was the “at first” part that interested me. I hadn’t thought of it that way–like maybe you could feel stark terror, but then that might move through like any other emotion if you let it. And then who knows what?

Postscript–Looking at the neon orange beribboned stakes Sally and I pulled up out of my woods ( where the developers had put them, hoping to convince me that a drainage system for their property would be a great thing to have on my land) I noticed that one of them says “ Proposed End of Disturbance”. I called Sally to laugh about it and said “Maybe I should plant that one back and see if it works.”

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