or a bolt..

From the Suggestion Box:

2007 ... the final hours

I will admit I am not feeling the urgency to leave 2007 that I felt to leave 2004, 2005 and 2006. I feel generally grateful that for me 2007 passed without explosions, death or dismemberment, that many goals I set at the last new year were actually met. I felt I have repaired the holes in my hull, mended the sails and set the rudder. I can see the breeze on the water and soon it will pull me along into something new. I guess it is hope that I feel fully again. After so long wandering about punch-drunk, it feels rather miraculous.
I am the Fool of the Tarot. Wish me luck. Yoikes and away!

To all of my friends, you know who you are. It was your notes and calls and hugs that brought me back from the edge of the abyss, or at least gave me good reason to find my way. I have on my list for the new year to make a point of reminding you who you are and how very much you are worth to me.

To make manifest

For quite a while now I have been sending out to the universe a call for a new occupation. I have wanted to step back from patient care since the tremors are embarrassing and required me to overcompensate with a show of professional confidence that became exhausting. I have had limited opportunity to expand professionally since the home and children where always my domain in entirety. I don't know how other superwomen did it, but when I tried to I took a nose dive and had to retire back to house motherhood. I embraced what I could, but found that stir craziness bubbling up again. I want to work for the stimulation, socialization and respect. I like to feel that I am valued. I like the feeling that I have economic value. It goes with the apocalyptic leanings I have blogged about before. I need to know I can survive on my own. And last but not least, I hate asking anyone for money. I have come to understand that I am not comfortable being dependant. I also tried really hard to put on the apron and be content with that. But children and the incessant "mommy look!" s that go with it wear me down. I want to speak in big words and long sentences. I try to honor it as the most important job in the world, but ... I guess I just can't take it full time... Isn't it ironic?
So last week the universe answered. A memo went up describing what I had asked for, but the position was full time. Oh no. No way. Not again. But thanks to a life friend and college of mine, I was encouraged to throw my hat in the ring and make my conditions.
And what do you know but they offered me the position and accepted my conditions. In fact I was highly recommended by my managers. They are willing to train and hopefully I can earn a certification. !
As always there is that anxiety. But the lure of learning and growing... and all this during school hours!!!
Of course the reaction in the family is positive with a reserve. No one wants their world to be affected.
Well. We'll see. Because the other thing I have been asking the universe for is for my world to conform now to my direction, as it has been for so many years the other way around.

It's just a bunch of garbage

http://www.storyofstuff.com/index.html

If you are in my email list you got this link. This is the best explanation of what has been bothering me ( as both a participant and a rebel) for a long time. I have had this vague unease about the future and find myself craving to be viable off the grid. Thoughts like, what would it be like if the power went off for a week? Never mind just off. What would I do? What could I eat if the grocery store was closed or say-- blown up? So I have been having these kind of apochalyptic thoughts for years now, and have brushed it off as a form of paranoia or perhaps transference of anxiety from the childhood stories of my mothers hometown
being blown to bits in WW2.

I guess I deep down believe that ,yes, it really can all just go away. It is a possibility. It is the first thing I thought of when 9/11 happened. Wow. It is just a little bit of America, imagine it was a whole city. Not impossible. But maybe and what if have lead me to quiet insanity before.
Now I wonder after seeing this video if it is simply the gut reaction that there is something fundamentally wrong with our culture,and that we cannot continue the present course.I try to avoid advertisement, but it has so diluted any media that it is difficult to see what's going on in the world and not be exposed. What bothers me most is when I don't even conciously hear it anymore. Because when I really listen it is pure insanity. Spin and play on words and images. Marketing to children whose parents are to exhausted from the treadmill they aquiesce just to shut them up. Can't disappoint the children!

So as usual I will have my opinion and then promptly look in my own back yard, or gargbage can and shopping bag, as it were. So maybe I'll pledge in 2008 to not buy anything I won't use for 5 more years, or use up everything I have, or something noble like that... Drat, no more pen and paper splurges. I did realize over the last 10 years I have started and never filled at least as many journals. What made me think I needed a new one? I wonder.

The mirror of the past

All this snow and ice has me housebound. The plow guy was MIA until noon after the storm. I came to fully appreciate how wimpy I have become when walked K2 to a playdate friend up the hill. Gee, this snow is deep. Didn't look so deep from the cozy warm front window... Even the cats recoil from the cold that blasts in the door and and they scurry away with pinched faces.

In this forced holding pattern, I had a rare gift. Hubby has been in one of his mad digital conversion fits. His goal is to convert every tape, slide, film, or other "ancient" media form into a library of digital files for posterity or who ever gets a kick out of it. I have had two reel to reel tapes since forever that my mom gave me. They were labelled cryptically in German with dates of 1960 and 1970.

So on my desk was a bright shiny new CD with mp3 files of ancient history. It took a little fiddling with volume and headphones to fully get it, but suddenly I was hearing my mother's voice. Much thinner, much younger. Then my father's. Talking to the tape which was to be sent to my mother's mother in Germany. They talked of their new town and church, of the friendly people, how things compared with their home. They talked of Kennedy's election over Nixon. I heard my mother giggle with the barely suppressed news that she was pregnant with the child before me, who would die in infancy.

The last segment she spoke to her sister in 1970. She rejoiced in having a rare afternoon to herself without the interruption of children. She was explaining the current stresses of her life- inflation, layoffs, kids turning to drugs. She mentioned each of us and where we were and what we looked like. All of our good qualities she praised. My father's work and the perilous position he was in with waves of layoffs. She was taking college courses to get her teaching certificate and the mother-juggling she had to do to get that all done and all of us taken care of.

Then she said that what she missed the most was talking to her mother. How different it felt to make decisions alone with out her counsel. I heard my own voice in hers. Funny that I just told the sky last night that I missed her. It almost seemed that she was answering, 'I know, I was where you are once. It is the way of things.'

All this almost two hours of non-stop talking was in German and I understood it all as if I were still there lying on the rug of our living room in the house where I began. The language I thought I had forgotten was not even noticeable to me any more.

Our minds are amazing things.