nina turns 60

gift

Look at the beautiful broadside sent to me by one of my favorite CCP poets, Alison C. Rollins! A sweet surprise on a day I was feeling very low. I can not recommend her book, Library of Small Catastrophes, highly enough. I spotted the manuscript in our submittable queue a couple of years ago and immediately read it through twice, something I've never done before or since. It is not my job to read manuscripts, but I get the opportunity to poke around from time to time. Usually my other tasks pull me quickly away. Not with this one. 

The editor rather jokingly calls this book my first acquisition, though I know that whoever would have come across the ms first would have advocated for it just as hard as I did. I find it nothing short of brilliant.

Poets and librarians and poet-librarians. My kind of people. Thank you, Alison!

single/married

When you're a single woman on the internet, you get a lot of attention from dudes, whether you want it or not. A fair percentage of that attention will be from married dudes. Lonely married dudes, married dudes who haven't had sex with their wives for years, married dudes who just want to talk to pretty strangers. Over the years I interacted with more of them than I probably should have. I got crushes on some of them. I made friends with others. 

Then there are the married dudes in open relationships. I started coming across poly dudes on OKCupid. I seemed to always match highly with them, and much about a poly lifestyle appealed to me, particularly the need for lots of open, honest communication. The thing about being a single woman dating a married man is that she is always vulnerable in a different way than if there are only two people involved. I lost one boyfriend a few years ago because his wife decided she didn't want them to be open any longer. I say "I lost" but what happened is I got dropped like a hot potato. It sucked.

Then there are guys who think your being non-monogamous means that you just want to have sex with lots of different people and have no feelings invested in anything and they treat you like a living toy. And don't get me started on the ones who say they are in open relationships, but their wives have other ideas about that. You must tread very cautiously.

But then maybe one day you get lucky...

 

 

sweet

The cravings come and go in waves like everything else. But mostly I don't have them at all anymore which surprises me. 

When I walk down the aisle at the grocery store I notice it smells incredibly sweet. I look over and see I am standing near the marshmallows. Have I ever been able to smell marshmallows? The same thing happens when I open my cupboard door, a cupboard where there is still sugar inside. I can smell it. 

The local organic carrots taste incredibly sweet. So do apples. Once, eating french fries with some friends, I got a blob of ketchup on one of mine and, well, you know what I'm going to say: it was hideously sweet. These things do not surprise me, but they are interesting.

What would I notice if I stopped drinking coffee? Is that what I'm doing here, trying to prime myself for quitting my deepest addiction? I'm very afraid of even thinking about it, which means, of course, that it's exactly what I have to do.

But not yet. 

 

my drug

Here's the thing about addiction: it protects you from something. It allows you to keep moving forward. It makes you feel good when everything else is shitty. It soothes you. It gives you the energy to go to work every day if you hate your job. It provides a structure from which to make some sense of the world. 

I have my favorite mug. My collection of espresso cups. I have no fewer than three non-functioning burr grinders in various cupboards in my kitchen. I have my trusty hand crank grinder and my aeropress. I have my fancy electric kettle that lets me heat the water to a precise temperature. I order my ridiculously expensive beans from Seattle or Portland. Sometimes I have heavy cream in the fridge. I take great pleasure in preparing a beautiful cup of coffee for myself every day. I also start to get really uncomfortable if I am awake for more than a little while without any caffeine. I will drink the shitty stuff - even the instant stuff - if  I have to, because all of my fancy-schmancy accessories and rituals aside, I need my drug.

I can be as proud of myself as I want to about being off sugar for nine months (and I am), but I am not even one tiny bit thinking about ever giving up coffee. 

someone

Seems there's always someone I'm thinking of too much and in ways that I shouldn't. Someone unavailable or uninterested. Someone far away. Someone interested but only so much.  Someone who sails away with someone else, or lives with someone else, or is still in love with someone else. Someone I want to write to but I promised myself I wouldn't. And so I write here instead.

My words don't have the right shape to hold the things I'm longing for. My words are like soggy ashes. My longing is like smoke. My heart is like a rabbit with blood on its fur running blindly. My sadness is the crow's beak, sharp and persistent, full of cries in a language I don't understand. My hunger is like a fist, all my tendons ache with it. 

cactus

It's been a tough week. Something that I thought was going to be good turned out to be, well nothing, really. I have this Christmas cactus that is a cutting from my grandmother's big giant one. And I am the worst with houseplants. Which is why people now try to give me succulents and see if at least those might be able to survive under my care. One year the cactus put out a bud! It sat in its wee pot doing its thing and miraculously not dying, but it had never had any flowers. I was ecstatic that it had a bud, and I watched it get bigger every day. I was so excited to see this thing bloom, I was sure it was going to be gorgeous. I didn't care that it was only one bud. I was happy to see it. It grew and grew until finally it just fell off. It never opened. Just fell off onto the window sill. 

I went over to my friend DeeAnn's house awhile ago, and loaded up with wine and cheese and cherries, we sat outside and drank and snacked and talked about the near impossibility of finding a relationship that is better than what we have on our own. It was a testament to the lives we've each built for ourselves, our quests for interesting and rewarding work, our creative passions, the activities we engage in and places we like to go. We aren't dependent upon men for our survival or even to make a good life. How lucky we are to live in this time when that is true. How frustrating that it seems to raise the bar so high. 

Among the many profound changes that happened to me after my son was born, I found I had a severely limited tolerance for bullshit. My priorities were suddenly very clear, and the stakes were high. By the time the baby turned one, I had left his father. Yes, you can draw a line between those two points. 

I have re-potted that Christmas cactus, put it into a bigger container, given it fresh soil, some fertilizer. I thought I might kill it during the transplant, but it has adapted to its new home. It's even put out some new leaves. I suppose it might actually bloom one day, but I'm not holding my breath. If it does produce a flower or two, the soft colorful petals will only last a short time before they too wilt and fall off leaving only the resilient segmented cladodes.

 

 

second beach

Been feeling so desperate and wild, full of longing and pain: old wounds that I thought were healed spinning back around to grab me by the throat, a new object of desire carves a hole inside me and shimmers just out of reach.

The only solution is to go to Second Beach. Even in the holiday traffic, the holiday crowds. If you walk far enough south you will be the only one there. You can then start to pry open the rusted bits of your mind, let the wind and salt and the far horizon inside of you, be reminded that you are here only so that everything can pass through you. 

The wet sand perfectly reflects the sky. Your wild mind starts to settle beneath the relentless surf. The wind there to hold your tired body. The light breaking apart and falling softly over everything. The shadow of a cloud scurries in front of you as you walk. You could walk forever. You want your bones to become sand, holding the shape of anything that presses into it until the water comes and smooths it out to mirror again.

wild heart

My wild heart. Always pointing herself in the wrong direction. Always hungry, always following along where my body takes her, and my body is even more reckless and wanting. Still trying to prove to myself that men like me after a lifetime of hanging out with younger and cuter women (ah, the older sister syndrome). So comfortable in the land of the unrequited. Spinning in place, sometimes maybe taking a step or two toward some semblance of balance, of health, but then right back to it. How I love my own misconceptions, the stories I spin that keep me feeling miserably comfortable.

Brigid used to say, "Someday you'll just get tired of feeling bad."

Brigid used to say, "Writing will save you."

I brought the piece I'm working on, the infancy of my book, to the revision workshop with Lidia and Zinn and all these other incredible women over Memorial Day weekend. People were kind. They were beyond kind. They loved my work. They responded to it just as I hoped readers would respond. When I am there, surrounded by them, I feel so much more myself, so much more a writer, than I can ever muster here at the end of the road at the end of the peninsula. I don't care about men, or whether they like me or want to fuck me, or if I will ever love one for real again. I am consumed, but by something that is real and good and true. I obsess over the work and not over a beautiful mouth that I'll never get to kiss. 

Maybe it's just a matter of pointing our damaged imaginations in the right direction, of digging a channel in the dirt to guide the water to the harvest and not the weed. Of knowing what to fertilize and what to pull out before the roots grow too deep. Remembering that you must plant every year, every season—that the work does not stop. Knowing that a wild-hearted seed might take root and bloom because the fertile soil is indiscriminate. You will be forgiven for burying your face in its intoxicating scent and breathing deeply before pulling it firmly from the damp earth.

 

solstice

Usually fall is my favorite season, but this was a hard one, and I'm happy for the psychological turning point offered by the solstice. My basic struggle right now is to simply make the shift from an outward focused sense of goodness, my own goodness and worthiness, to an inward one. To base how I feel about myself, and by extension everything else, on some interior quality rather than on someone telling me I am a good girl. Yes, it's can take over 50 years to get beyond that. And I've only just now realized in a deep way how all of my little addictions, from coffee to sugar to obsessive social media reading to getting attention from a man, are just ways of COPING with my own basic and fundamental unhappiness and keep me from really taking action that would help me find a more satisfying life that would then not need all those little surface pleasures because there would be deep pleasure, true satisfaction.

Who knew my inner resources were so weak? I can't believe in a god to pray to. Nor that I have spiritual guides or angels or any of that. I return to meditation, to Buddhist thinking, which appeals to both my mind and my heart. I think about making art, about my writing. Writing will save me, it always has, but even that ends up being a quest for approval, for love. If I write well enough, will you love me? 

And then, there's Al, and that relationship and the ways that it has been both healthy and not-healthy for me. I am still grieving the loss of my lover at the same time as continuing my friendship with him, the daily correspondence. I have so few friends these days, and he knows me pretty well, knows my daily rhythms, my joys and fears. 

One more day of work, and then a small break, the holiday, the family traditions, the family shrinking. Nothing to do know but to keep going. As Phil would say, left foot right foot.

poster child

Funny how you can get dumped in a way that you kind of always suspected would happen, but that it still takes you by surprise and you feel completely gutted.

I feel like the new poster child for smart women, foolish choices. Or maybe I'm just not as smart as I think I am.