sometimes i feel so alive it just about breaks my heart

Life is really kicking my butt right now, so I’ve decided to start keeping a journal of things I’m grateful for and little joyful moments and things that really uplift my heart. I used to write these on post-it notes and put them in a special box I kept near my bed. The habits that help us through the hard times fade too easily when things are fun. I’m too exhausted to hand-write my journal for tonight, so here it is:

* Last week, I found the sweetest praying mantis. I had just found an egg case a few days before, and have been seeing little babies here and there for weeks. This one was dark green, extremely energetic, and clearly pregnant. She scrambled up my arm to the nape of my neck and into my hair….so fiesty! Her little barbs tickled, but she didn’t scare me. It made me really happy to see her. I took some photos and then let her go in the rosemary patch. She wasn’t very social–probably needed to make her egg case right away–but she brought sweet energy into my life.

* I am really grateful for my sweet friends who snuggle me and pet me and are so nice to me.

An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

This is the last paragraph of an article Howard Zinn published in The Nation magazine on September 2, 2004. I highly recommend reading the whole article if you haven’t: he offers tangible examples of radical changes that have happened over the last century. I’m grateful for his perspective.

I stayed up till 1 a.m. talking about art, medicine, and life with Ilana, who’s visiting from Santa Fe. I told her about my love of H.D. and Jon Piasecki (a landscape architect and stonemason). She told me about being an EMT, doing art, and showed me sandcastles that she and Luke made over the summer. Lovely.

The new year started with touch and connectedness and easy grace. Got a blowout just after midnight. Fortunately, two sweeties were right behind me with a jack. I changed my tire in a black dress, we left the car in town overnight, and they went to get new tires for me the next day after driving me to work.

People always tell me I’m not alone; I don’t have to do everything the hard way, by myself; I should let people help me. It’s a lesson I’ve been learning for years–often with a lot of resistance. This was a hugely generous gift and it was so easy to receive it. I want all hard things to be so easy. They usually are when I don’t make a big deal.

I want to take in the kindness and love directed toward me. I want to nurture delicious, genuine connectedness and self-love. Steadfastness. Peace. Being here. Seeing what’s really going on in and around me without judgment. Letting my heart fly. Confidence. Good communication. Trust. Really really learning to stay & be with whatever is happening & cultivate a friendly, open, soft, curious attitude toward everything.

I have so many qualities I ache for and aspire to–I am really lovely from time to time–but some are still seeds and seedlings and saplings. It’s time to help them grow stronger.

I saw “Avatar” on Wednesday. The bioluminescent forest was pretty. The story line was not.

I felt like the supposed “statement” the movie half-heartedly attempted to make was just a hat-tip to justify the same old story, the same old movie, same same.

I had no idea what the movie was supposed to be about going into it–I don’t watch trailers unless I’m already at a movie, and I don’t see movies very often. Afterward, I was told it has an environmentalist message, but weak environmentalist messages that are cozily cloaked in racism are lost on me.

Why do we have YET ANOTHER story about/from the perspective of white people, specifically a white man? WHY does said white dude get to be the hero, with the option either to betray and conquer the indigenous people with his military training, or be well-intentioned enough to take their side, do what they do better than they can (after only three months), and become their leader? WHY do the Na’vi, in their grief at the destruction of their home, their ancestral sites, and so on, only unite in hope and prayer to save the life of a white person (Sigourney Weaver)? Why is the death of a white person who wants to study them more important than the death of their own leader? Why do the white people get saved by the Na’vi diety, who “only protects the balance of life,” when so many of the Na’vi die? Why do they only get the idea to come together as a community when the white dude suggests it, when americans & the american military in particular are horribly individualistic (recent army motto: ‘an army of one’)? Why does the diety respond to the white dude’s prayer? And why do we have yet another movie about fighting violence with more violence? We’ve been doing it for millennia and clearly it hasn’t changed anything.

I just genuinely want to see movies about how we want to live, not about all the wrong ways we live already.  I want to see movies about healing and real love and good communication and transformation. I want to see movies where women and people of color kick butt (without needing a white male leader to show them how to do it). I am sick of seeing the world through hurting, fucked up, white, male eyes.

I begin my bio with, “I want to be an academic specializing in H.D., but instead I work on a farmstead dairy.” There are not words to describe the fierce passion I feel for this author. I don’t even have my own copy of Sea Garden, although I read its poems obsessively. There’s just some ineffable quality….Susan Stanford Friedman calls it “an austere sensuality, an erotic dimension of repressed yet explosive sexuality” that permeates the landscape of the sea garden H.D. describes (Penelope’s Web, p. 58). I wake up some nights, caught by the beauty of her lines, and have to scramble for light and my close-kept notebook of poems to read over and over some verse.

Much of Sea Garden focuses on thriving in bitter environments–praising the sea rose, in the poem of the same name, for its “harsh,” “sparse,” “marred,” “meagre,” “thin,” and “stunted” stature, which speaks to an acceptance of her/our own harsh, sparse, marred, meagre, thin, and stunted self/selves. Sea Garden holds a kind of worship for the broken, lost, awkward, and ugly. I revel in it.

When I say I love poetry, I mean the lines that grab me by the throat and shake: the lines that stop me dead in my tracks, breathless, tears welling up because of the fierce, sharp edge of truth they wield in my direction. When I was young and they were trying to indoctrinate me into Christianity, they said that you had to be a living sacrifice to a god (as opposed to a dead one) because it meant that, over and over again, every day, you had to choose to lie down on the altar. That’s the kind of surrender I’m talking about when I say that poetry is my religion. I won’t submit to a deity, some anthropomorphic personification of higher consciousness, but I joyfully give myself over to the words that open me, soften me, heal me, inspire me, and wake me up.

I haven’t updated in a long time. I was really busy living and loving and trying not to turn on my computer more than necessary. That doesn’t mean I stayed off the internet, I just spent a lot of time using safari on my iPod touch or reading the New York Times on a friend’s laptop while lying around in bed. I think I need to start writing here again and I was able to register my old domain and I have the WP app, so let’s see if this will work.

Life has been delicious since I last posted. I’m smitten with some new folks and playing with them has been taking up most of my free time. It’s completely yummy and I feel embodied, radiant, comfortable, and cared about.

I was cleaning up goat shit yesterday, working hard and sweating in the sunshine, and I felt profoundly happy to be doing what I was doing. It pleases me to know that we put so much effort into maintaining clean, safe, and pleasant spaces for our animals. I like that my bosses care and that we care enough to be thorough and attentive.

A friend of mine’s father has two first fresheners from our farm. They are tremendously adorable and, for weeks, I went on about how sweet and peaceful they were. I relate so intensely to the goats, but I love our puppies, too, and the cats. Ramses comes out to feed with me on Saturday mornings–bounds in from the pastures to hang out while I scoop grain. It’s adorable to see the horde of yearlings rousing themselves from chewing cud to come get breakfast and there, among them, is a small gray cat moving as if he’s one of them. The puppies are growing into themselves. They love to play fight in front of the Golden Girls in the mornings. The boys wrestle on one side of the fence and all three girls stand on the other side, watching intently, stepping back if they get too close, completely focused on the performance.

I’m really happy.

Life is so tranquil, lately.

I have been seeing a lot of Gluten-Free Maui and her Nerd. They’ve had three parties in as many weeks, so I have been spending even more time in their fun company than usual. She is an amazing cook! Recently, her carrot-ginger soup with coconut roasted shrimp (Wednesday lunch) and sweet and sour chicken (Thursday dinner) blew me away.

Last Friday, we all went hiking at Twin Falls, which was the perfect amount of exercise and soaking-in of the scenery. I confess that when I hiked the Waihe’e Ridge Trail a few weeks ago, I sat for ages on the bench at the first switchback, just staring out over the valley and listening to the forest. It’s a five-mile hike, so one of these days I’m gonna go back and finish it, but even sitting can be enough.

I love the ambiance of the outdoors more than I enjoy the exercise. I like to imagine that I’m the kind of person who hikes 12 miles just to get warmed up, or that I ride my bike 40 miles just for a relaxing day at the beach (I know someone who does this–she has very nice legs), or even that I will get up at 5 a.m. and go for a run. In fact, I abhor exercise. I shun exercise in favor of sleeping. I do, actually, wake up at 5 a.m. most days, but I prefer to lie in bed with my eyes closed for as long as possible. The work I do is pretty physical, but only in a certain range of movements, and my back has been bothering me lately. Starting up yoga again would be the smart choice. I think about going to Spreckelsville’s baby beach with my yoga mat at night and stretching as the sun goes down. I’ve done it and it was glorious. Unfortunately, I may be too lazy to ever do it regularly. Self-discipline: I lack it.

This past Saturday, I left the farm early in the morning to go to Kihei. I txted my friend who lives in Maui Meadows and we ended up meeting for breakfast and then going to Makena under the pretense of watching the skim board competition. The surf wasn’t really up, so the heats were somewhat nonexistent, but we swam a little and it was nice. While I was on the South side, I made the final payment on my car, which felt good. I love having a vehicle.

This coming weekend, I’m going to drag my lazy self out of bed early to go watch the sunrise from the top of Haleakala.

Sometimes, it’s still hard to remember that I’m not on the mainland, that this is Maui, that life is safe and sane and slow here.  It’s nice.

I didn’t get a good photo of Colt cuddling up to me before he moved to his new home. Fortunately, my boss thinks like I do: time to make a house call! In three weeks, my boy will need his vaccination booster shot. Typically, people bring their new goats back to the farm and we administer it here. In this case, however, I can offer to go to them. How very exciting. Now, all I need is a lab coat!

His new family is super lucky to have Colt as their stud. He has a fantastic temperament (thanks to me, I like to think) and his mama is our best milker. For how frantically he searched me for milk whenever I cuddled him as a wee babe, he certainly is mellow as a pre-teen.