Tag Archives: rise

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Hopes rise

Our Christmas plans are busily crashing and burning. I felt ill and tested covid positive two days before my daughter was due from her city. ALERT, ALERT, DIVERT! I called friends who agreed to pick her up at the airport and let her stay for the five days of isolation. I stay out of the car so the germs will die. I call her after her work on Friday. She takes it calmly and calls a friend to pick her up. I miss her, darn it, but well, I am not on a ventilator or dead. Doing well, right?

She stays with her friend. She plans to join me yesterday but then snow. School is canceled. She and her friend sensibly leave my car at the entrance to the ridge road the friend lives on. She has to use the chains anyhow because someone has slithered off the road right in front of my car. Still grateful, because they did not hit my car.

She makes it to my house, chains on. She heads downtown to Christmas shop but the store she wants is closed. I ordered her a present that needs to be picked up, but the pick up is Tuesday to Saturday. They don’t list a phone. I ordered it on Sunday and they had emailed “Pick up now” even though it’s not “open” on Sunday. I email back, “Can’t, covid!” Now I email again and say would they contact my daughter or me so she can pick up. They do, but well after she is home. Still grateful, because they are open today. Maybe we’ll get it!

My daughter has been looking forward to time with friends but the snow has screwed this up. Maybe to time with mom, too, but mom has Covid. I am eating upstairs, she is eating in the basement, and same with sleeping. We are both masking and everyone is sick of that. It’s cold outside and the band she wants to dance to cancels. She misses meeting a friend downtown because of chains and needing gasoline. I am still grateful. Not dead yet, right?

Now I have email from our flight saying, well, maybe we’ll go. We are supposed to fly later this week. It looks like the big storm will hit Chicago and Buffalo and Boston. Cross fingers as we head for Dulles. Might make it. We discuss going to Sea-Tac a day early but that would mean sleeping in the same hotel room and no, we aren’t going to do that. Friends say they CAN get us to the airport. Super grateful for those friends!

When things are going all awry and life seems like rather a mess, we do Happy Things. That is a check in at the end of the day where we list three Happy Things each. My son was having a miserable half way through the year first grade move when we started this. The thing is, they do not have to be VERY happy. They can be more along the lines of “No one has poured boiling oil over me today.” or “Not dead yet.” It’s complaining reframed and it can be very very funny. In first grade one of his Happy Things was “We did not have the pizza that tastes like cardboard for school lunch today.”

So my Happy Things yesterday were: “I am not on a ventilator! I am not dead! We have super nice friends who will take us two hours to the airport!” If you start low enough on the Happy Things scale, there is no where to go but up.

And a Happy Thing for today: “I think the sun will rise!”

Happy Solstice.

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The photograph is Emerald, one of the Anna’s Hummingbirds, all fluffed up in the cold and guarding her feeder. There is a bird photobombing the background. I think it is a song sparrow but it was very early and the light is not great.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: rise.

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U is for unruly

I am blogging from A to Z about Helen Burling Ottaway, my artist mother, and other women artists.

Artists are unruly. They are not obedient. They are usurpers. They are unreasonable. This is another etching of my mother, a self portrait, titled “Giantess”. She looks giant, rising from an ocean. Will she have arms and hands and legs, or is she an octopus? We do not know. It may depend on her mood.

ATOZBLOGGINGCHALLENGE2022 #art #Women artists #Helen Burling Ottaway #ATOZCHALLENGE #APRILATOZ

For more information about the #AtoZChallenge, check out this link.

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phoenix rising

Written in 2009.

Set a torch to me
Why don’t you?

It’s not the tearing sound of fabric
A small rip
And now a tear
That I feel

It’s the torch

I’ve been here before
A job where the idealistic came
As moths to the flame
Self-immolation
Because they had ideals

I watched and burned and rose

It’s the torch
The flames that rise
As the witch is burned
Tilts back her head
In ecstasy and knowledge
Eager to learn what she can
From these burning brands

In the burning we learn
In pain we learn
If we can remain open
Ashes fall to the ground
Buckets of water
Wash any remains to grey mud
Gone, punished
Relief for the frightened
An example has been set

No but what stirs at night
Moon or none
What rises from the mud
The ashes
Takes form
Takes flight
Laughing

Set a torch to me
Why don’t you?
And see what is created

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Sending love

Sometimes I wake in the morning, muscles tight and anxious.

This morning I dreamed that I was a teen, going on a trip. I packed my sleeping bag and the new pad. I finally bought a new inflatable pad for camping, last year. I still have my old one, patched and 30 years old and thin. I decided that I am old and stiff enough to have a newer one. I used it for the first time in the tree house. Yoga mat, pad and sleeping bad and I was warm. In the dream that was all I had time to pack: no clothes or books. There was barely room for that. I was worried about the trip and afraid.

When I wake anxious and feeling attacked, I send love. I send love to the people that I am finding most difficult in my life. A family member who with their spouse, have been mean since I was a teen. Not a family member any more: a blood relative, now. I will choose who is family and who is just a blood relative. In the manner of children of alcoholics, this is a terribly slow process. Raised in addiction and enabling, children love their parents anyhow, and it is a slow adult process to learn that love is not addiction, enabling nor enmeshment.

So I send love: may this person be peaceful. May this person be free. May this person be filled with loving kindness. May this person be safe. I send them loving kindness, especially if they are a blood relative who is still cruel. I don’t want them in my life any more and yet I want to forgive them. Forgive but not reconcile, if they are still in the dire pattern. No reconciliation if they continue the behavior.

Sending love.

Sweet Honey in the Rock: In the morning when I rise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAJBZXIzKcY

I took the photograph of my mother in the early 1980s. I borrowed my first real camera and took one roll. I scanned this today and my scanner is not up to the detail, but I like the abstraction. I love this photograph of my mother because it is her thinking and concentrating expression.