Adjusting

Now that my full time job is homemaker/writer/handcrafter, is it okay to just curl up with a good book for most of the day?  Or watch a movie?  Or any other "non-productive" (yet inspiring) thing simply for its own sake?  I'm new at this.  Should there be some measure of guilt when one is free from the obligation of leaving the house for work?  When weighed logically, it would seem that the $300 per month I was making is not exactly a huge loss so my level of guilt should be proportional to the amount of lost wages I no longer contribute to the household. 

Of course I know this is all ridiculous.  Middle class woman guilt. 

"It is generally assumed that a housekeeper's business is trivial and that the caring for home and family demands far less expansion of mind and vigor and intellect than the pursuits of a career.  This idea has prevailed and by some measure eroded the fabric of society because men and women, as a mass, have never been wholly educated on the matter."  Found in journal...not sure if they're my words or someone else's.

But that is my view on the matter which is probably why I took the time to carefully inscribe it...possibly to clarify it in my own head.  I'm acutely aware that most don't share that view and because I don't have any little ones to look after, I seem to be an even rarer species of woman. 

I have found that in a household of 2 or more people (when I am one of them), when everyone is working, things seem to fall apart little by little.  The laundry is always piling up and nothing ever gets ironed.  Dinners are far less enjoyable, hastily thrown together, and not always healthy.  I stash fabrics and fibers, essential oils and exotic sea salts...all for future creative projects and none of them ever happen.  Weekends are filled with the chores I couldn't do during the week and life seems to fly by with none of our hopes or dreams inching any closer and a lot less laughter and ease and a lot more malaise.  We are forever playing catch up.  The grass still needs mowing, the garage is an awful mess, the weeds are taking over the garden and all those green beans we harvested are rotted and moldy because I couldn't find the time and energy to can them. And I'll be honest.  I fail at everything that way because I can never put my full heart and soul into any one thing...there's simply too much to do.  This kind of living breeds a nasty, nasty depression in me.  Life isn't supposed to be this way.  Yet it usually is and for the most part, considered normal.  Other people seem to be perfectly okay with this.  Huzzah for them. 

My lifestyle and my physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being demand a lot of me.  A lot that doesn't jive with modern methods of existing.  But I finally gave in and agreed to follow my deepest instincts.  It'll take me a while to grow accustomed to the freedom ...to assauge the pressures of the perfection I feel I must achieve to justify my deviance from the norm. 

Hush the guilt.  If you see the Buddah on the road, kill him. (A most beloved koan.)  Embrace the possibilities.

Tuck Me Away In The Woods and I'll Change The World

I simply cannot stop dreaming of that sweet little cottage in the woods that will someday be mine.

Source: Uploaded by user via Laura on Pinterest

 Especially now that the bleeding hearts are pushing through the leaf litter and last year's kale, mizuna, and parsley have decided to stick around for another year.  It's the warm rains and the green and the mushrooms that follow that make me long for my own slice of land...equal parts forest and meadow and the most kind neighbors, living just out of sight and earshot.  In this little pocket of heaven, I will be safe from the madness of political idiocy and the sort of shocking ignorance that seems to be so ubiquitous when one isn't tucked away in their own little space of love in the forest.

I know.  It sounds like isolationism and pie in the sky denial.  But I long for community!  For neighborly visits and weekend farmers markets and local fiber shops.  Maybe I belong in other place.  Possibly another time, but I'm aware that this utopia of my imagination doesn't exist so perfectly anywhere and probably hasn't existed for quite some time.  Which is precisely what drives the push to find my domain...my kingdom of green vines and winding paths that always lead back to the hearth where a good meal is always simmering.

Source: Uploaded by user via Laura on Pinterest

It's quantum physics which leads my course of reasoning.  I've been trying to think of a good way to explain all this to someone who knows nothing about it...and knows nothing about the evolution of my mind.  Old friends seem to be stuck somewhere about eight years back for me and just can't seem to catch up or relate to anything I'm saying so it's a project of mine to try and retrace my formative steps.  How did I arrive at the conclusion that isolating myself from the madness will reign in a new era where my wistful visions of the future actually come to pass?  It's been a long journey.  It just might make a good blog project.  An odd one.  But a good one.

In Search Of Beavers

About a month ago, I went for a spontaneous stroll next to the Kokosing River and started to notice something odd going on with the saplings.

A brief search revealed more evidence...


... so Husband and I went on an epic trek last weekend in search of a beaver dam.  We found felled trees on both sides of the river...





...even trails that logs had evidently been dragged down but my amateur tracking skills weren't up to par. Those dam elusive beavers...

At first I thought this might be some kind of beaver something...

...but then last time i went to check it had been mostly washed away in the river. I'm assuming that since beavers need air, at least a portion of the lodge will be above the water. What's left of this was mostly underwater.

You'd think a lodge would be easy to spot.  Those beavers must have one hell of a stomping ground.  It was either invisible or out of our walking range and we covered a pretty sizable stretch of that river.

On our trek we found several critter holes, deer tracks, raccoon tracks, possibly fox tracks, and even a mostly bare, mostly complete deer skeleton whose photos mysteriously disappeared off my camera.

Well, it's beaver breeding season...maybe I'll find them another day.

The Theoretical End Of Poverty

So many political issues seem to revolve around the idea of poverty and conversely abundance.  And while the two main parties would like to think they're at the opposite ends of an issue, I suspect they're a little closer than they imagine.  While not being politically inclined left or right, I've been privy to several conversations between lefties or between righties and it seems my "Switzerland" status seems to lower certain armor that influences communication when in mixed company.  I've seen the tender heart of a republican and surprisingly, yes, it seems they do have hearts.  Likewise, I've witnessed incredible logic and flawless reasoning woven through the banter of democrats.  I don't buy into the stereotypes of heartless, curmudgeonly reps or spineless, weak-minded dems but so many of my friends and acquaintances seem to sling these cliches around like they're actually some kind of useful foundation from which to prove points.

And being Switzerland, I'm constantly frustrated by how easy it has been to divide us and blind us to our commonalities.  Take poverty.  Both parties (assuming they are average citizens) would solve the problem once and for all if they could.  Poverty is both heartbreaking and a nuisance.  It drives down property values, it leads to obesity and malnutrition in the same individual, it pushes up healthcare costs, it leads to more unplanned births.  The poorest neighborhoods are eyesores and hotbeds of crime and watching all this suffering take place in our own communities is very depressing indeed.  Some are afraid of the crime, the litter blowing around...maybe just the whole thing in general makes them feel uncomfortable.  Others take it a little more personally, feeling more sympathy for the underprivileged, uneducated, and the chronically ill lower class.  Whoever you are, I doubt you would want poverty to continue if you could choose.

Where we diverge is how we believe we can go about doing this.  Generally speaking reps choose tough love.  End social programs.  Sink or swim.  The strongest will survive.  Dems choose a more nurturing approach and believe we can make a difference through assisting those who can't help themselves.  To my mind, it doesn't matter which way is better.  What really needs to be brought to the forefront is this:

Until we can agree, that in order to end poverty we must first identify the cause, we will make no real progress.

It's the same kind of thinking that has led this country down the dark path of over-medication.  We simply don't address causes as a people anymore.  We prefer band-aids.  We like to fix the symptoms but we don't like to think about what might be causing them.  We are LAZY thinkers.  And although I try to avoid pessimism at all costs, I am disheartened by how ready we all are to disagree with each other, sometimes just for the sake of argument.  Even if we do suddenly redevelop our mental muscles and really get to it thinking about what led to poverty in this country to begin with and what factors still contribute, our political habits have our minds entrained to pigeonhole everything and I fear it would be a difficult task to come to any kind of consensus.   And to be quite honest, I think it would be difficult to engage the minds of our population in a non-politically aligned activity.  We seem to be addicted to this right vs left, this vs that paradigm.  

An open mind will be absolutely necessary.  We all live here and the world we are currently experiencing as "life in this country" is the cumulative result of 236 years of our "opinions".  Opinions are a reflection of worldview and worldview is what ultimately influences actions and creates the reality we experience.  It would be tempting to find what seems to be a cause and end the thought process then and there, refusing to consider others' "findings", but I think in order to get a complete view of the issue, a complete review of the populations' opinion on the matter is necessary.  I think we need to keep going and asking why, long after we think we've gotten to the bottom of it.  For every answer, we should again ask "but why is that the case?"  Eventually we will come to an "aha moment" as happens when you apply this same technique to some burning question in your personal life.  For an easy example, "Why do I sabotage relationships?"  A month later you get to the bottom of it, finally, after scurrying down a psychological rabbit-hole of cause and effect.  It's a very useful tool for freeing the psyche from limiting inclinations which leads me to think it would be useful on a larger scale.  

Is this possible for an entire nation?  And would everyone even care?  Or are we too distracted with our own busyness to consider it worth our time and mental effort?  One thing seems certain to me.  With every tacit decision to ignore the increasing destitution in our country, we gamble with the fate of our own progeny.

The Night The Beams Of Light Appeared

The parks department in my area is awesome.  There's a packed schedule of woodland activities, even in the midst of February which is a good thing considering I'm getting a little stir crazy under all this cloud cover.  Some fresh air, even without the sunshine, goes a long way.  Last night a couple of fellow good-for-nothing-winter-layabouts and I went for a night life hike, expecting to hear a few owls and maybe a couple coyotes if we were lucky.  We slogged through muddy fields in the dark following our phlegm-swishing guide (I guess the phlegm is necessary to create the proper animal calls) and listened quietly for an hour but we were met with only silence, so admitting defeat, our guide headed us back towards our cars.  As we walked along the path on the edge of a large clearing, out in the distance, a thin white beam of light suddenly flicked on, but didn't illuminate the area around it.  It unfathomably spanned a narrow space between the cloud ceiling and the ground as a pillar of pure white light and then flicked off, just as suddenly.  Then a couple more flicked on in opposite directions and flicked off again.  It happened a few more times, all in different places and we were all pointing and wondering and trying not to bump in to each other in the dark as we watched this eerie scene unfold.  And then it was over.  And I still have no idea what it was.

Coincidentally, I posted this article on FB yesterday about vortexes (vortices?) of light appearing in Latvia and soon after heard from a friend in Minnesota that it seems to be occurring there as well.  It seems to be an exclusively northern phenomenon and possibly connected to the sun cycles.  The columns from that article look natural to me.  I'm assuming (possibly falsely) that they didn't merely "switch on" and appear.  It seems they probably gathered together naturally and slowly. Yet my beams from last night seemed to have an operator at a switch somewhere.

I've witnessed so many odd happenings in life, I don't even think I can remember them all.  I've seen flashing strobes outside my window as a child, I've seen colors appear on a wave in the air, and I've seen the clear night sky light up inexplicably more times than I can count.  In fact, when I sit in my living room and look out my north window, I often seem to catch something gray (that will shine in the sunlight if it's present) moving over the roof of a house in the distance, always to the east, always at the same level.  I've walked around that neighborhood looking for some explanation (backyard zepplins?) but can't figure that one out either.  I never see it when I'm looking for it, only when I'm crocheting and happen to look up, unbidden, just in time to see it moving into the treeline and out of view.  Then there's the case of the disassembled brooch pin that somehow neatly took itself apart overnight on my dresser.  Or that one time my house shook and the dog cowered in the corner and yet there were no reports of earthquakes in the area.

I could go on and on.

So many strange things and yet none of them make any sense.  Somehow, I'm not one of those frothing loonies that becomes a channeler or a conspiracy theorist.  My mind is open but I'll be the first to say, I have no idea what any of this stuff means and to even think that I could possibly make any sense of it in certainty, would really just be arrogant.  I won't say I'm content to not know or understand but every time some new peculiar thing happens, I make peace with it.  But there is this one burning question...

Some people go their whole lives and see nothing out of the ordinary.  Why am I different?

Hedging Bets

For the past 4 months I've been talking about quitting my job.  Not quitting and getting another...just plain quitting.  As in not working.  And yet, despite all my talk, here I am, still hanging on and netting a mere 5k a year.  A job that has me standing in the same place all day with sore hips, sniffing bad perfume, toxic candles, and answering really stupid questions from strangers.

(Customer: Do you carry scrapbooks?  Me: points to big giant SCRAPBOOKS sign.  Yes!  They are actually right here under this giant sign that says SCRAPBOOKS which is directly in front of us!) 

There's the occasional angry abusive customer I deal with but for the most part it's just a simple, mostly boring job that gives me back pain and continual thirst.  (Must always be standing, must never be drinking...what would the customers think if we showed signs of being humans and not work-bots?)  The boredom is okay...I don't mind it too much.  Even this new, what I call "peon status", is okay.  I've been a jet engine mechanic, a staff sergeant in the military, a CFO for a small business, and a traveling district manager of sorts.  This is my first "small" position in awhile and I chose it intentionally for its lack of responsibility.   I wanted to focus more on my real life  and less on work.  I underestimated how frustrating it would be to be treated like a person less experienced and intelligent than I am but still...it's a bearable trade-off.  I work short shifts and shoulder almost no responsibility.  All I need to do is show up and be able to operate a cash register and restock returned merchandise.  Piece of cake.  Except for this one thing.  Or two or three.

Since I don't work very much, and when I do it's in a craft store, I should have pure liquid creativity throbbing through my veins!  I should be pumping out crocheted blankets and upcycled potholders and sweater owls and felted cat fur finger puppets like mad!  I should have at least the first 6 chapters of my book written!  I should be baking whoopie pies all day and have dinner on the table every night at 7 sharp!

I don't.

And while I've been blaming it on work all along...

My shifts are always in the middle of the day.  I can never start any big projects...I always have to stop them to go to work and break my concentration.  There's no continuity.  I'm too tired when I get home to do anything.  Working has zapped all my energy...I don't feel very healthy because I never get to drink at work.  I have something to do on every single one of my days off.  Tuesdays I do my group chi gong meditation, Wednesdays I volunteer at the organic market, Fridays I clean the house.  And on top of it all, I work on Sundays so that means Saturdays are the only day me and the husband spend together so there's another day lost.  My schedule is so screwy, I have no good blocks of time for myself to accomplish anything.


...I suspect that it's all a state of mind and quitting isn't really going to accomplish anything unless I change the way I think about my time.  I need to take responsibility for the way it is instead of blaming my unproductive days on circumstances.  I need to structure time differently.

Of course there's several other good reasons why I should quit.  I've been playing the health card lately.  I've tested quite high for pthalates in the bloodstream and in light of certain recent reproductive issues, I'm a little concerned that the pthalates slathered all over the money and receipts I handle all day are starting to do that awesome endocrine disruption thing that they do.  I'm in my thirties and I haven't had a child yet.  My clock is ticking and I want to do everything I can to make sure I'm healthy enough to have a healthy baby, safely, and without interventions.  I suspect adrenal fatigue, as well,  which is worsened by standing unnaturally all day, my inability to drink all day, as well as my inability to have my usual small once-an-hour snack that once upon a time kept my metabolism in tip-top shape.  Not anymore.  Ten pounds in the past year, which is how long I've worked at this job.  Multiple Sclerosis runs in my family and occasionally I get tingly numbness in my knees, my feet, my fingers.  Especially when I'm stressed, tired, thirsty, hungry, etc.  The fact that I'm starting to sound a little like a crazy hypochondriac has not escaped me.  The list of reasons to quit has been steadily growing for months now and it's getting quite long and ridiculous.  It would lower our income to make bankruptcy easier for me.  (That's another can of worms.)  It would give me the time I needed to write.  It would give me more creative juice.  It would give me the freedom to do that insane master cleanse where I won't eat for ten days.  It will help me be healthy enough to have a baby.  I can get up early every morning and make the husband breakfast because I can always go back to sleep after he leaves.  Maybe I'll have enough time to volunteer at the Bird Sanctuary too.  I can get a puppy and that way I'll be home all day to make sure its trained right!  Etc. etc. etc.

And what it really comes down to is the mother-in-law.  

If I quit, she will disprove.  She's already nagged me (most horrifyingly) to get another job (or 2 or 3 if "need be" whatever that means).   People say "who cares what she thinks!"  Well, it's complicated.  Once upon a time I got into some serious financial trouble and made the worst mistake ever.  I borrowed money from her.  And no...it is not paid back.  Me and the husband have our own views on finances and consider how we handle bills and debt to a private matter.  It seems M.I.L. would like our finances to be separate.  Translation:  she thinks I should be paying her with my money, not with husband's money.  At least, that's what she's implied.  And I, being totally unfamiliar with the concept of people actually meddling like this, have no idea how to handle this except to keep working and earning a measly minimum wage just to keep her from judging me and god-forbid meddling even more.  And that is dumb.

All along, I've been searching for the perfect "legitimate" reason to quit that she could say nothing about.  And then I realized...

...if I don't find my own dreams, reasons, and feelings "legitimate" enough, then I must not have very much confidence in myself.  And that bothered me.  Not being able to stake a claim on my own life is a serious problem.  All because of a M.I.L.???

I am going to South Dakota at the end of March.  I'm resolving to put in my notice before I go.  Will I have the balls?  I hope so.  I really hope so.  I'm scared of not having my own money...of us not having enough money.  Scared that I'll still have no creativity, still get nothing done.  But I feel that now is the time to take a leap.  If I change nothing, nothing will change.  Wish me luck.

In Progress

I have so much work to do on this blog.  I simply needed to start though...I couldn't wait for aesthetics.  Patience...cleaner lines and more interesting views are coming.

The Specialists

I have big ideas for this blog.

I've blogged before under various other names but always there was this dilemma...I never felt like I could really unleash myself.  Or like it was okay to be fully myself while blogging.  Although I couldn't put my finger on it then, my thoughts on the matter have led down this path.

We live in modern world of specialists...everywhere you look, there's a specialist of some sort.  And specialists, must by virtue of their nature, specialize in something to the exclusion of other things.  Initially, one of the medical professions may pop into your head, such as an allergy specialist or a cardiologist.  But don't stop there.  Keep seeking with your mind all the other areas of modern life in which this "taking apart" of things has occurred.  There certainly is specialization in careers.  Anyone in cubicle can attest to that and the mind-boggling beauracracy that goes hand in hand with no single employee ever grasping the bigger picture of their particular business.  But I urge you to go beyond doctors, beyond business...even so far as education.  School is preparation for "real" life which, in all reality, runs together like wet watercolors and yet in training for this adult thing called life, what are considered necessary lessons are delineated and compartmentalized from each other so most students never get the idea that one subject may bleed messily into the next, until much later in their in their high school career but by then, they're already preparing to major (or specialize) in something in college.  I don't dispute that obviously, they will know math is used with science or that reading will be necessary to even approach science or history.  I simply purport that this method of singular instruction deeply and yet subtly conditions young formative minds to view their world in pieces rather than the spectacular dynamic whole that it is.  What is the result of so many generations of this type of thinking?  What about our world today is a reflection of this?

Masanobu Fukuoka in The One-Straw Revolution writes of some of the frustrations he encountered on the subject.  Fukuoka was a rice farmer in Japan who radically challenged the farming status quo by what he called "Do Nothing Farming".  He once worked for the Yokohama Customs Bureau in the Plant Inspection Division and then fell ill as a young man and nearly died.  This near-death experience brought him to the epiphany that Man knows nothing.  Everything we do interferes with a pristine inter-dependent system that is designed to work beautifully without our help.  In his farming work, he did significantly less than the average rice farmer and yet enjoyed larger and heartier yields so he is still the subject of much speculation and study by several experts.  Here is an excerpt from the chapter Limits of the Scientific Method.

Recently Professor Tsuno of Ehime University wrote a lengthy book on the relationship of plant metabolism to rice harvests.  This professor often comes to my field, digs down a few feet to check the soil, brings students along to measure the angle of sunlight and shade and whatnot, and takes plant specimens back to the lab for analysis.  I often ask him, " When you go back, are you going to try non-cultivation direct seeding?"  He laughingly answers, No, I'll leave the applications to you.  I'm going to stick to research."

So that is how it is.  You study the function of the plant's metabolism and its ability to absorb nutrients from the soil, write a book, and get a doctorate in agricultural science.  But do not ask if your theory of assimilation is going to be relevant to the yield.

I have to wonder, with such narrow schools of focus on everything from dietetics to string theory, what is the yield?  We have mechanics who specialize in vehicle types, hair stylists who specialize in long hair, grocery stores that specialize in health food, schools that specialize in law, authors that specialize in economics, dentists that specialize in orthodontics...the list goes on.  I know it's unavoidable for there to be no specialization considering everyone cannot know everything.  But are we losing the big picture when we focus so precisely on one particular slice of reality?  We've seen what happens with this in politics and it is often not pretty.  In worst case scenarios, we can see what happens when we cannot bridge the gap between races and "specialize" in only our own particular worldview to the exclusion of the others.  I would daresay even religion is a particular type of spiritual specialization.  

What's so odd to me is that this all seems to be incredibly counter-intuitive.  The relationships of things in nature are so incredibly labrynthine, that even doing something as simple as trying to learn about minerals in order to bring up my copper levels was a nearly impossible task and I confess I still haven't fully grasped all the inter-dependent relationships of all the mineral levels.  As I learned about how magnesium is necessary for calcium absorption, I learned that barium interferes with calcium absorption but only if selenium levels are low.  But fairly moderate aluminum toxicity will interfere with yttrium which is responsible and necessary for selenium absorption and distribution. And I've only mentioned a few.  As you can imagine, it gets even more complex from there.  So I wondered, do I have a hard time with "cloud" thinking because I've been raised to think in linear way?  As I read more and more about minerals and their deficiencies and symptoms I couldn't help but realize that minerals are the very primal basis for life and having healthy levels of them should logically be the first line of defense in healthcare.  But it's not.  Doctors should know more about this and apply the knowledge on a daily basis...but they don't.  Why?  I can only guess is has something to do with their specialized training.  

In the midst of all these lines drawn in the sand, I find myself at the computer browsing favorite blogs.  There's the cooking blog, and the farmgirl blog...then there's the sustainable blog and the philanthropy blog.  Also the crafting blog, the apartment therapy blog, the art blog....  And here's the thing.  I am not one thing.  I am, as they say, a walking contradiction.  And my thoughts are occasionally a mess.  They don't always come out prepackaged and nicely categorized to fit right into my little class of blog.  And I suspect the same of all of you.  So since I've identified this thing as the very issue which causes me the most heartburn about blogging

the pressure of having to conform to what my blog is supposed to be about or forcing myself to come up with ideas about gardening for my gardening blog when what i really want to write about is jack white

I'm officially, up-front, saying no.  I will not classify myself.  I have a few select favorite interests and hobbies but I can't bear the thought of slapping a couple of those on my blog-forehead and living with that tattoo for the rest of my blog-life.  Warning:  I may be all over the place.  If that's cool with you, then this is the beginning of a wonderful blog-friendship.  

Preoccupied With The Sun

As I begin my very first post, I gaze out the window at the fading light and sigh.  It's been so long since I've seen the sun.  Winter in Ohio is sort of like all the time in Seattle only without the brief bouts of sun.  Almost every day, just as we approach sunset, the clouds begin to thin just a little and suddenly I can see an uncharacteristic brightness start to warm the sky!  But ... then I see the sun's already sunk below the horizon and my hopes of catching a sunbeam are dashed.  It wouldn't be an insult if this happened rarely; that would be considered well within the odds of normalcy and I'd let it go with a "shucks" and snap.  But somehow, this seems to happen all the time.  Maybe this is the new normal for central Ohio.  Weather has been changing so much lately, it's hard to really know what "normal" is.

And here I am making small talk about the weather in my first post.  That's the thing about me though...I'm fascinated with things like weather and maps and bird calls.  Which is why I'm geeking out over this.  Over the past week we've had several solar flares and CMEs

coronal mass ejections for the non-initiated

which may or may not be responsible for me feeling ridiculously dizzy.

and not in a blond way

I confess I can be a little woo-woo, as they say about us crazy people, and I've found this article from the Carlini Institute to be a little enlightening.

While I'm reeling from this latest flare and enjoying my weekend, I'll be dreaming of brighter days and maybe a winter a hike.  I've recently discovered what I think is a beaver lodge and I can't wait to go hide out on the bank on a nice day and see if I can catch them dragging a sapling into the water. Here's to hoping for some of this.