Sparkling Lotus Ink

.9 truth might not be simple/trigger warning

trigger warning.  FOR REAL. I'm going to post as briefly and as gently as I can about a core personal truth:  I was recently diagnosed as having lived in a state of active trauma for 90 per cent of my life.  I knew this to be true for any number of reasons but I also knew I saw no reason to let it stop me.  Pretty much on any level beyond the realm of steering clear of trigger happy situations if I had any advance warning that's what they were.

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SOMEBODY WHO READS HERE NEEDS TO READ THIS.  I'M NOT OFTEN AS CERTAIN OF SOMETHING AS I AM OF THAT IMPRESSION.  THAT'S WHY I'M WRITING IT.  and of course also because it has the same bedrock level truth about me and my days and how and why I am as I am as anything else that I share here.

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The primary reason - bundled with errands and occasional coffeehouse/girlz together time on the way home - I've been visiting the river on such a reliable timetable is because I've been going to therapy for what most people who love me tend to refer to as [my] situation.   I, in a very glib way that never hurts because I am by non-nurture very dark in my unexpurgated humor veining, like to refer to it with icy sarcasm as my condition.  The therapist I have been seeing truly felt like unshakeable proof the cosmos wished me to shine as never before.  Until something happened right before the winter holidays. She inadvertently triggered me in a way I couldn't let myself fully comprehend let alone express as it was happening.  

Timing-wise it was just then we skipped a week of sessions due to winter holidays.  During the first week I seesawed around in various levels of trigger reflection and rebound - nine-tenths of it alone up here in the studio.  I'm sure if it had been a regular week and we'd met I might have found my way around where I was headed.  At least on the outside and layers of personality focused on thinking with my brain rather than my gut and little shards of heartspace.  But on the inside I felt like a feral version of my child-self.  Every time I shoved my awareness back to the present tense I felt like Victoria Falls - heavy emphasis on falling - but on the outside I was holding it down with enough sincerity and grounding that I thought I'd be okay.  And I really was.  Until I wasn't. as in really REALLY wasn't.

When I explained it yesterday, in my final therapy session, I said the levee broke.  I looked into her eyes and she looked into mine and I made a smashed-apart gesture with my hands.  I said it just broke.  And she nodded.  She felt it and saw it.  I said  there is nothing but water everywhere.  And I saw her feel a pivotal particular trauma from a childhood crammed full of many.  She saw where I was going to take the session and I felt in every cell of my own body how difficult that must have been to take in and sit with and continue to track all the particles of meaning and grief and my stark-blind terror that were pulsing back and forth between us. 

My final words of truth spoken in a room that held me safe enough to now continue onward keeping myself safe here in another room and well beyond:  I ask a lot of myself everyday.  But I can't ask this.  It will break me.  Every time I think of - or very softly whisper just barely aloud to myself - I weep.  Have been weeping quite a lot but I think that's gotta happen.  It will have to be how and what I do for the next little while.

The oaks have known if not detail then both context and outcome.  They have spoken in their rustling firmness of the autumn season.  All of this is very temporary.  You have to be strong enough to see this before it explodes  I thought "this" referred to general life flow being safe and stable enough to be out toodling around living life as it might not stay.  Stoic to the bone but not really understanding until yesterday when I visited them.  I planned to stand between them with a palm on each trunk.  Looking for strength to do the unthinkable:  Something so counter-intuitive to 'common sense' and also everything I know and have experienced on both ends of the self-sabotage spectrum. 

oh no.  It was the greeter who threw me that just as I realized everything leading to the oak pair was a thick sheet of icy glass.  I thought the younger oak meant my intention to go anywhere but back in the vehicle. 

NO.  You KNOW that is the lie.

When I got home I realized I was going to write this post but I didn't know the turnaround time would be so soon.  Letting truth find its un-simple way into simple words has been profoundly grounding.   I hope my intuition is on track that somewhere somebody else feels that way just a tiny bit more from reading what I've shared.

Yesterday afternoon I took this image of myself as I was movin' and groovin' between activities related to the 30 day collage challenge I'm hosting on my creativity blog.  Inner wisdom suggested I would be including it somewhere in the post I'm just finishing.  I thought: the fuck I will.  Yet here I am doing it anyway...

hello i love you

Here's a look at the Beech tree I introduced with words in the last post.   You can see why my heart wishes it a devoted long term companion, no?  But just in case you aren't yet convinced -

Part of my documentation/living-of-Truth quest for the coming year is to travel to a few Beeches here in MA that I've loved in the past.    My feelings for this particular tree are very special but the overall species has magnetized and fascinated me since early childhood.  I love the way the branches form and grow to weave amongst each other.  I love the various magical and flower remedy properties Beech offers with a gracious nod towards All.   I love the fact that this particular gorgeous form of sentience is a communicator's particular talismanic medicine spirit of choice.  And that every fullblown leaf fluttering against its neighbors in an early summer's breeze gives testament to the intricacies and cumulative power of co-operative communication.

Yes.  I wish this particular Queen of the Forest a very devoted human ally.

.8 following a starry wish

Above is a slightly altered picture from yesterday's lowering sun phase approximately a half hour before sunset.  Stand still with me for a few minutes here at the Enfield lookout point, won't you?  We're overlooking a vast body of water called the Quabbin Reservoir.  This is a primary source of Boston drinking water.  The link I selected tells of towns Lost by way of deliberately sinking them.  Everything you see above, beautiful as it is, exists as a false landscape that was manufactured so that a roiling metropolis' human population 70 miles away could sustain their need for drinkable/safe water as the decades rolled by.

[as just one example the hilly peninsulas chaining one after the other as far as the eye sees are actually submerged mountain peaks.]

That said The Quabbin is an undeniably beautiful place to visit and wander around at length.  I lightened the pictures for this post because so many I know to be reading here constitute a Tree Crowd.  And there are most certainly seemingly endless crowds of trees telling the story of what has Become here at the reservoir park.  Also of note:  the peninsula on the left side of the top image is off limits to humans.  This is a place where the eagles come to nest and raise their young.   Birders with enormous scope lenses dominate the parking and first-row viewing spaces once these raptors have been spotted heading north. 

Yesterday in the later afternoon J. and I drove out to the Pioneer Valley for a seasonal ritual of great meaning to us.  Along the way I figured I'd take some pictures of the Boston area's primary water supply because even though it's not moving water it's certainly very significant water indeed.  It's also sacred ground for local fishermen and home to innumerable groves of vibrant birches and a pleasantly spooky long-abandoned apple orchard.  Since 9-11 anywhere remotely close to the water has been on lockdown or actively monitored by state employees in boats constantly on the prowl. 

I have vivid memories of what it was like here in the direct aftermath of an occasion when MA figured prominently in Security Failure news of huge magnitude.  That's because - macro to micro - in the same unprecedented window of experience I spent a great deal of time here.  This is the place - and it was the time - where/when I first began to actively merge the sciencey part of my nature interests with the vibrational certainties I'd yet to collate very effectively.   It's how I found personal stability and meaning during a time when so many people I knew kept asking me how they could/should find it.

below see the Eagle Zone in its entirety.

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As twilight fell we drove through a great many of our history's familiar haunts.  Amherst has strong meaning beginning with the sixth month mark of our initial merging together.  And - two months in between not-being and being-All - I was staying in nearby Hadley when I realized ALL OF A SUDDEN that I was deeply in love with J. and drove all over the rural highways looking for a pay phone on which to call and privately tell him Back There in the shared hometown I had recently left for good and all.)

Yesterday was once the future.  And within it - all these years later - we arrived at a stop sign directly across the road from a house and property we've kept track of in an automatically loving way for the last few arcs of our story.  In its yard is a Beech tree I've bonded with a couple of extra-memorable times.  And in point of fact I have waaay too many pictures earmarked to include in a post about The Silent Communicator sometime in the new year.  Yesterday a large truck blocked any decent view of it. So I looked at the house and how it's changed since I had opportunities to examine certain portions of it in a close-up fashion.

When we got home I looked up the listing because our price guessing had been all over the map. In the end we amalgamated everything and estimated something pretty close to the asking price.  So there's a pointless skill to hone, eh?  price is right scenarios for things that have no bearing on one's own life.  And reading the realtor's layout description gave me serious vertigo.  Just to see the place described as a normalized home-life setting as, no doubt, originally intended.  I wondered if the yard still contained a sizeable Chicken compound.

[this place is known to us because our son lived there during his college years with 9 other people.  Every semi-private alcove of space that could be used as a bedroom was deemed to be such in order to keep the individual sliding scale rent rates as low as possible.  Fourteen years ago the three of us spent Christmas day together in the otherwise empty house there.  But evidence of extensive and frenetic habitation was all around us on that switched-plans day.  One of T's roomates had their dog sitter bail at the very last moment and he agreed to stay there for the animal's wellbeing.  Shortly before eleven on Christmas Eve our family plans pivoted for what proved to be a memorable holiday tale we enjoy re-telling to this day - heavy emphasis on the dog and the way she and J. took to each other like Long Losts.]
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This morning I woke up wondering who might have the means and vision to buy this place and either make it the home and studio it once was or revert to using it as an income base for the very classic MA rite of young adulthood life lived among kindred peers in an old farmhouse loaded in equal measure with charm and windy drafts.  Every time I imagined people with the means for either I further imagined these people had a child. And the child ran straight to the Beech tree when the family first toured the [extensive] gardens.  And the way the child hugged the tree and leaned back to stare up at it made their parents smile at each other.  Yes.  This is their Place.  Screw one of their older siblings foolproof moneymaking plan of letting yet another generation of students run rampage. They'd figure it out to the bare bone - rent out the studio to a low key grad student and set about having a life they meant to live as deliberately as possible. 

I wondered if it could (still) be possible:  if a specific magnificent tree and a child not yet entirely shuttered by Devices could be destined for mutual companionship for a very long time to come.  Still.  Still.  Could that still happen?  Don't know if I'm able to actively believe it could and will but I'm certainly inclined to wish for such a lovely wish to be made real.

I am probably one of the least happy-ending dependent/Hallmark channel sort of people I know.  But far more importantly I want that magnificent tree to remain in place and authentically valued by a human companion.  And for that alliance to mean, on many levels of the deepest kind, absolutely everything to somebody quite young who has so much to figure out and survive largely because their human predecessors quite deliberately chose to drop the ball time after time.

  Last week when I visited the river I took many pictures.  In between two images of ice-encrusted river bank the above image appeared.  I thought of posting it as an Other contribution to the re-connection but also thought doing so lacked a viable context.  Then I thought: wait until it's time to make a wish publically.  Huh?  but now that quiet inner suggestion makes a little bit of sense.

shifting scenes .5

We got not so very much snowfall before and directly after daybreak.  The roads were clear by the time I was on the road and the river looked absolutely gorgeous.  BUT.  It doesn't seem likely I can get close to it to photograph until J's behind the wheel and I can jump out, walk around, and be picked up on the other side of the long bridge.   That can happen for sure but guaranteed not on Wednesday mornings.

It's become important to me to stand near trees and moving water Out in the larger world from our place - and to do so on a reliably consistent schedule.  This experience has built itself into my week the way some people cherish the same half hour to forty five minutes of Alone time to do whatever.  Or nothing.  Alone. So today I made it my business to find what I needed. 

But first.  A whole different form of water that I can visit quite easily as part of my established schedule.  The available parking that overlooks this swamp used to be private property.   Now it's county wildlife management.  I can park there long enough for 15 or 20 minutes of deeply inhaling the actual components of this familiar landmark.  Don't know much about swamps at all.  But have always felt that in some other lifetime I knew enough to get by within them.

This is a very cool place I have photographed and loosely examined from this particular vantage point.  Love the spot but wouldn't consider making it a regular thing while it was private property.  

and yet it isn't running water, is it?  however ...

this is.  I crossed the road to say hello to a large expanse of icing-up water.  Before I was halfway there I felt a kind of energetic stopping mechanism.  I am a place.  So I focused beyond the river to its bank and all the beautiful trees on both sides of the road.  "You are a very beautiful place."

On the other side of the road: water moving swift and loud. This very happy brook is just aside a confluence of roads where I have two or three options for parking long enough to get better bearings of less time-sensitive places to leave my car comfortably.  The latter option might not work due to everything there being private land with scant town/county abutment rights.  So my quest will be ongoing but for today this is where I went to reconnect with the constant pulse of moving water. 

Of course I can always go to our little stream but I like the idea of making a point of forming connections with wider landscape water ways as well.  I also like keeping that a part of my mid-week psychic/emotional groundcloth.  Last week I actually got a little bit buggy without this intentional Time With Water experience.  Like: early April still haven't seen any green yet level buggy.