Because existence is teeming with more than just us, and its stories deserve more tellings.
The Mouse and the Ladybug
Lately I’ve been trekking to Colorado to my in-laws’ to help prepare their old house for sale. In the absence of humans, other denizens have taken up residence. The first I noticed were the mice. I didn’t notice mice, that is, but I noticed mouse droppings. Lots of them. Everywhere. My mind raced to rabies and hantavirus. Being in the house, I felt dirty, contaminated. My space had been violated by nasty little interlopers. Vandals! Trespassers! They were gnawing on boxes and can labels in the pantry. Nesting in clothes and sheets in closets, they’d been running across countertops and…
Grievings
This grief is different. It took me awhile to figure out why. It is my first encounter with a loved one’s physical suffering from a violent death. Consequently, the shape and path of this grief is profoundly different than those I have experienced before. … This weekend our dog Shiloh was hit by a car.
Life Will Out
Life is the dandelion in the sidewalk crack that shrivels under a spray of Round-Up and then shoots up a new stalk next day, the lichen on the headstone, the bacterial bloom in the holding tank. It is tiny and mighty and everywhere. The sublime is underfoot.
Food for thought
There’s nothing like a malfunctioning body to smash through the fallacy of the sovereignty of the brain-self. In December, I weighed in at a nice round 106. This is a good weight for a slight-framed shorty like me. For the better parts of January and February, I was suddenly and dramatically hard-pressed to keep food down, even applesauce. It’s the latest in a years-long steady erosion of the list of foods my body seems able to tolerate (no dairy, no fatty, no fried, no sulfites or nitrates, no citrus, no acidic, no tomatoes, no onion or garlic, or seed oils,…
Puppies!#@%:)
Cute. Snuggly. Roly-poly balls of love. Sure… and royal pains in the ass. I recently made the retrospectively taking-leave-of-my-senses decision to enroll our family as a foster home for our fabulous local rescue, Laramie Animal Welfare Society. To our menagerie of 4 people, 2 dogs, 6 chickens, 2 rats, 1 horse, and 1 fish, we added a six-week-old Corgi-Pitbull mix, whom the girlios promptly dubbed “Kiwi.” Her mother had been killed by a car and the litter of eight needed refuge. We’d never raised a puppy that young, but hey, need is need. Need has teeth. Little piranha teeth with…
On Focus
This morning I couldn’t find my glasses, so I looked on things with my own eyes. My ears told me everything was as it always was: a community of birds, the fourth dimension, talking with, to, and across each other, loudening at the approach of the sun: “it comes! it comes! it comes!” A messianic morning ritual of relief and joy, bringing warmth, even if winter-slender. Everything was as it always was, except I couldn’t see it rightly. Without my glasses to focus my vision on that fence post, that bush, that downspout, I saw myself seeing. My vision was…
This is my depression: a conversation-starter
I’m just coming through a period of what I call “going underground.” It’s a phase of my depressions where I find the need to withdraw from contact and the frenetic pace of everyday life (including, apparently, blogging!). When I come back online, I find a deep appreciation for the relationships I temporarily put on pause. That ability to pull back is a refresher I need to stay psychologically healthy. In the manufactory model of the 9-5, M-F workday, however, we don’t usually have the luxury of saying “I need a couple of days” and expect to keep our jobs. Instead,…
A kick in the pants
The other day I got kicked by a horse, a recently-gelded Arabian named T’Challa. I’m sure, to him, I deserved it. I was, after all, messing with his feet, where, common equine wisdom says, a horse’s brain is really located. It takes a lot of trust, that, willingly giving over your capacity for fight or flight by letting someone hold in their power your only means of escape and defense. T’Challa is one of the Mountain Shadows Equine Revival rescue horses. At ten years old and never handled, he has to learn from scratch how to be something other than…
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Life in the Multiverse 