Solsbury Hill

I am listening to what might be my favourite song ever, by Peter Gabriel (favourite song changes a lot, depending on what I just listened to, but this is an enduring favourite). He says,

"When illusions spin their net
I'm never where I want to be.
And Liberty, she pirouettes
when I think that I am free ...

"Today, I don't need a replacement,
I'll show them what the smile on my face meant.
My heart going boom, boom, boom!
'Hey!' I said, 'You can keep my things,
they've come to take me Home!'"

I just love that song. He talks about feeling part of the scenery and walking out of the machinery, cuz the Eagle comes for him and says, "I've come to take you Home." And that's how I felt before -- part of the scenery. I blended in and hid, the best way I knew how, and that way was pretty good. I'd had decades of practice. Being fat makes you invisible. And I've felt caught in machinery -- I thought it was a bad marriage and family of origin and bad jobs ... But it wasn't. The machinery was the trap inside me. The Eagle came for me, God, in whatever way I fail to understand God today, came for me and is letting me walk out of that trap. He's taking me Home.

If you don't understand any of that, don't worry about it much -- I don't either. I'm just grateful for it.

From NPR's "The Writer's Almanac", a couple of weeks ago -- as promised

What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back

by Roseann Lloyd

Find a clean cloth for the kitchen table, the red and blue one
you made that cold winter in Montana. Spread out
your paper and books. Tune the radio to the jazz station.
Look at the bright orange safflowers you found last August—
how well they've held their color next to the black-spotted cat.

Make some egg coffee, in honor of all the people
above the Arctic Circle. Give thanks to the Sufis,
who figured out how to brew coffee
from the dark, bitter beans. Remark
on the joyfulness of your dishes: black and yellow stars.

Reminisce with your lover about the history of this kitchen
where, between bites of cashew stir fry,
you first kissed each other on the mouth. Now that you're hungry,
toast some leftover cornbread, spread it with real butter,
honey from bees that fed on basswood blossoms.

The window is frosted over, but the sun's casting an eye
over all the books. Open your Spanish book.
The season for sleeping is over.
The pots and pans: quiet now, let them be.

It will be a short day.
Sit in the kitchen as long as you can, reading and writing.
At sundown, rub a smidgen of butter
on the western windowsill
to ask the sun:
Come back again tomorrow.

"What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back" by Roseann Lloyd, from Because of the Light. © Holy Cow! Press, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

World AIDS Day

I've posted this before, but it's worth doing it again, especially today. A wonderful message, powerfully expressed.

Playin' the Name Game with FranIAm and Politits and ...

FranIAm’s name game ... the one she found at Lisa's that she got from Phydeaux aka Bob.

Other Names Meme:
1. WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother’s & father’s middle names): Loftus Irwin

2. NASCAR NAME: (first name of your mother’s dad, father’s dad): Thomas Robert

3. STAR WARS NAME: (the first 2 letters of your last name, first 4 letters of your first name): Mokate
4. DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color, favorite animal): Green Giraffe

5. SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, city where you live): Laura Hamilton (I really think that one works.)
6. SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd favorite color, favorite alcoholic drink, optionally add “THE” to the beginning): Purple Sleeman

7. FLY NAME: (first 2 letters of 1st name, last 2 letters of your last name): Kaar
8. GANGSTA NAME: (favorite ice cream flavor, favorite cookie): Caramel Gingersnap (sounds like a porn star name to me)
9. ROCK STAR NAME: (current pet’s name, current street name): Yeshua Cline
10. PORN NAME: (1st pet, street you grew up on): Smokey Hopkins

A Blog Post on Not Being Seen

Well, you haven’t seen much of me recently. That’s because there’s been so much life to live, I haven’t had a lot of time to talk about it.

Some of it’s been wonderful, and some of it’s felt awful. There was the funeral, and other family things, to talk about. Things I’ve learned. Things I want. And, just no time. I’m sorta keeping up with reading other people’s blogs, but a couple of times a week, not daily.

In the meantime, here’s something to help keep you all occupied.

Friday Night Home Alone ... could be worse edition

My Cousin Michael

I was watching a news clip video this morning, at Mad Priest's. It was lovely, a lovely editorial piece, delivered with conviction and passion, about Prop 8 and love and God and everything. Thinking, my cousin Michael will like this and I'll send it to him. My cousin Michael lives 40 miles away. He was born in England, because his mother was English and his parents lived in South America, and his mother wanted him to have an English passport. (I may have mentioned that my family ranges from dysfunctional to off-the-map-lunatic -- nothing milder than that. One WOULD take a long boat trip, heavily pregnant, in 1951, to make sure one's eldest child had the correct passport.) Michael moved to Canada 35 years ago. We would talk on the phone sometimes, but the first time I met him in person was at my first stepfather's funeral in January 1993,


It was funny. He's three years older than me, almost, raised on a different continent, sent to school in England. Our grandmothers were sisters; he was some other order of relative than cousin, but he's my age, and that's how we call 'em in our family. We have very compatible religious and social and political views. We got drunk together one night, very early in our knowing each other, and had a hilarious time, describing the things about which we were totally unjustifiably unreasonable, and finding out that we both said the same horrible things to our life-partners because of them. Genetics, I guess. He's been on my mind and in my prayers a lot recently. In January he fell down stairs at work and busted up his collarbone badly enough that it took three surgeries to repair it. In one of the series of tests, they did a CT scan and found a something, a one-eighth inch something, in the top of his left lung. That was in the summer. We both knew before the test results came back -- he smokes three packs a day. Last week, he had a quarter of his left lung removed. They biopsied some other parts of both lungs. He'll get the results on the 25th.


Michael and my husband get along well, even after my marriage break-up. My husband called me just now at work, and said that Michael had called his place because he's lost (again) my phone numbers at work and for my cell. His father died in the night. Terry had a massive stroke, I dunno when exactly, and got recovered enough that they moved him out of ICU and into a ward. He saw all his kids, and I think all his grandkids. Michael saw him yesterday, and Terry died 15 minutes after he left. His wife and daughter were with him.


We don't know yet when the services will be -- Michael's mother and brother are going today to make the arrangements. Michael asked if I'd phone my mother's one remaining sister, and tell her. I did, but she was just leaving the Sailors' Memorial after the Remembrance Day service, and asked if she could call me back. I said sure -- there's no need to rush this news. I'll talk to Michael tomorrow and find out when and where the service will be. The aunt I called today may not want to go -- most of the family's been fighting with Michael's mother since 1951, when she did something unforgivable -- married Terry. As I just told my sister, "That doesn't mean one wouldn't do the correct thing in difficult circumstances." If she doesn't want to go, I'll take the train.


I'm tired again. Inside tired, not body tired. Thursday was my Mum's birthday; Friday was my husband's; this coming Thursday is the anniversary of my Mum's death. Today's the anniversary of me having her admitted to hospital, which she'd never wanted, but I had no other choice. I had lunch with an old friend last week, and it's shaken up what I thought I knew about myself and my life. Had a misunderstanding with my best friend on the weekend, and that's always an ache. I need to leave my job -- it's lost almost all of what was joyful in it for me, and I show up and endure days at work. I might find that more bearable if I was getting paid TONS of money, but I doubt it. I miss, ferociously, the kitten I left in Texas -- if you're feeling lonely, bruised and overtired (I played on-line Scrabble with a couple of friends way too late last night), a kitten's a cure-all. I miss life in Texas -- feeling like this right now, I could go lie in the hammock and look up into the trees, which always made me say, "Thank you," to the Force in the Universe that makes them, or I could go find something covered with rust and grind it off and maybe make it into something else. That's restorative, meditative too -- although I'd never have thought that makes noise and metal dust and showers me in sparks would feel meditative. It requires total mindfulness, or it'll tear the skin off your fingers. Ask me how I know. I'm sick of dead people.


What I don't feel is any desire to reshape reality -- either by doing my control-freak-drama-queen routine, or by swallowing something that'll alter my inner reality. I'm tired. Not tired, tired OF. The answer to that is to pray for God's will for me to be revealed and for the power to carry out the vision I'm given. And to share. And to be grateful. Because the truth is, if it never gets any better than it is right this minute, that's okay with me. God's giving me so much, it'd just be churlish to assume I need anything else.