faithful...

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.

from  A Midsummer Night’s Dream


reason was never mine. god knows that i have tried to be reasonable, and the more reasonable i try to be, the greater the failure. then the phone rings and across town a soft voice reminds me to believe in myself. oh, but i do. it is just that i keep on forgetting.

how on earth am i. i am on earth, but do not ask where my feet might be.

Technorati Tags: alone

seeking the absolute in a world of quantum relativity

the cat is out of the bag, and you always buy the cat in the bag. to add to my troubles of arguing that sex is overrated, i will add the thought that motherhood and motherly love is equally overrated, if not more so. call me an heretic, call me manic, call me furious, call me mad. i am as i am. i think what i damn well can not avoid thinking of.

images of istanbul flash by, and i wonder what i am doing thinking of the bosporus when my garden beacons the delights of spring and the work yells the imperatives of deadlines. it could be that it has something to do with one crazy weekend that i spent going from turkish bath to turkish bath in orhan pamuk's city just not too long ago. perhaps it is the empty and relieved feeling that came over me one day a few years after my initial weekend quickie on the bosporus that had me thinking that i had finally coped with the latest insurgency of my emotions. perhaps it was that while driving from lisbon to faro just a few weeks ago it occurred to me that dwelling into one's psychology is governed by heisenberg's principle. if you consider that there are two conjugate psychological observables, when you multiply their uncertainties there is always a constant. this constant i call human nature.

the best thought of the day blundered in when i was in the shower, it is something that helped immensely in understanding bonding in chemistry through quantum mechanics. why the fuck am i thinking of quantum mechanics so much? oh, my brother is starting to enter what used to be my most wonderful realm, quantum mechanics, and i am just a tad jealous or else just jogging my memory. so, back to the bitch that my mother turned out to be.

it is my judgement, and while on most good days the nihilist wakes up amnesiac of judgement, today i have my other hat on. i do not know what to call this hat. a friend of mine in college was fond of asking me that all too ruthless question of whether it was true love or true lust. i could never think that anything could be other than true lust, yet he always asked each and every time that i had a date or talked too much about some fellow. another friend of mine, thirty years or so down the road from those college days asks me the question if the one now is "the one." his question gets followed by one of my speeches on how i do not believe in "the one" and all that stuff of 1-1 relationships. we do not live in a desert of relationships in which each mirage of another being is "the one" or the one and only meant, predestined and fated to be ours. this is the trouble with not being possessive, it somehow does not fly too well with our societies mores and prejudices. no, not the one, yet another. then i told my faithful and loyal friend that by all the looks of it, he must be my one. it has been more than thirty years since we first became lovers and we are still talking to each other, we still love and respect each other, and we have deep admiration for one another.

it was in berlin less than one year ago that i had one moment of enlightenment. walking around that glorious city and stage to many human conflicts and dramas, all that i could think of was that it was time to let go of the bitterness. let go of the bitterness, that one voice in my head kept on repeating while i pointed my camera at all those glorious berlin monuments of the past and present. let go of the bitterness!

then, not even three weeks ago, i found myself in front of my parents. i had a question that i needed them to answer. i asked my question, and i got my answer and a token of their disapproval and moral lessons to go with it. then i watched how they disrespectfully argued with each other. when i went to see them two days later, one was sick, the other had calmed down her tone in part. my mother ate some of her harsh words, and the rest is not worth repeating. i had to think good and hard, really think, not just have thoughts as to what all of that had been about and if it meant anything to me and my life then i needed to figure out a few odds and ends about what the fuck it is that i want with this life. after all, by accident or not, this life is mine, only mine. i am starting to understand why so many people see religion in dedicating their life to an abstract god. i have no religion, and my god is very concrete. the buddha is. i own my god. small wonder that i am most amused when one of my indian friends calls me "goddess mine." in a hindu context. goddess mine is indeed appropriate. now what? nothing.

if i am an hurricane, then why is it so calm here where i am? i am at that place where i think that freud had a few bad ideas and another few worth keeping, like clinton, he had a fondness for cigars and odd definitions. remember the berlin motto, it is about letting go of the bitterness. my parents did what they could, and i fail to share their values. should i be bitter about my failure, or should i be bitter about their values not meeting my expectations? it is time to let go of that banana.

still these times are for me times of abundance and times to learn to accept. it is odd, my bank account lives in complete ignorance of the richness of my life. life is good. life is short, damn short. no, i am not in love.

Technorati Tags: abundance, acceptance, alone, ego, evolution, forgiveness, freedom, heisenberg, istanbul, love, orhan pamuk, quarteira, recovery, sex, uncertainty

not yet.

not yet. not yet period. period.

those two words are the grand sum total of a pleasurably stormy weekend with lots of fresh air sweeping across the spring meadows of the bernese plains. now let me try to answer the question of how i am and to loop you through the nonlinearities of my life.

to begin with, the good news: i am loosing control of this life of mine. yes loosing control is good news. i am tired of control. i tell my brother this, and he tells me that he hates to tell me this, but that is how mania feels like. i reassure him, i am in good therapeutic hands. i fell safe, safe and out of control. finally.

not yet were the words that one of my friends had for me on saturday when i met him  briefly at lunch time on saturday past. not yet what? which friend? what kind of friend? what on earth is going on again?

after too little sleep for two nights in a row and total indulgence i met one of my legal-brained friends at a café near the university. first i indulged in watching 5 DVDs of the first season of the "the sopranos" in one seating staying up through the night and only going to sleep at daybreak on friday. that was prompted by the fact that on thursday evening i ended up at the house of dear friends around the corner, and once again listened to myself go through my laboured complaints of how totally duped i feel, felt. my friend did not know what to say, and i had already had half-litre of beer to quench some odd impulse of mine after a long conversation with a friend in paris - the city -  who detailed to me the apparent conflicts in his marriage. in her lack of words of consolation, she thought that my description of my mother was a good match for "livia" in "the sopranos" and handed me the box containing all first season episodes in 6 DVDs. i watched spell bound, she was right. damn good match. my mother just has never conspired to get me wiped out, or so it seems. after all, my meaningless little life was her voucher to wealth. finally i am beginning to understand my ill relationship to money. i owe my very life and existence to it, and somehow i have never been able to fully appreciate my good fortune. my lack of appreciation for the abstract and real value of money has left me at odds and in the poor house. indeed, an ungrateful bitch i am.

after all this, and a week that was much too adventuresome, while on the way to do a few hours of community volunteer work at a local school, i stopped to meet my much too busy legal-brained friend while he took a lunch-break from corrections on his present opus. we are the best of friends, professionally and personally, trust and loyalty define our ties. we updated on our progress and at one point i complained again how i have not yet had the energy to go and get some rewarding work that both pays and i like doing. he said, not yet. i was stunned. yes, not yet.

just at the beginning of march when i moved from the pied-a-terre to the garden there was this one item that needed to be reassembled. this reassembly needs exactly one simple manipulation, and it is easy, super easy. in march i could not deal with it. on thursday i did it in less than 2 minutes and without hesitation. in march i was not yet ready to deal with that simple reassembly. patience is an art at which i am not especially gifted. manipulation of an object is a good thing. manipulation of a human leaves me paralyzed, but that is another story.

it is raining again, and again i am in love with every stone in my garden. patience i am learning.

Technorati Tags: friendship, the sopranos

being: being humbled

so, let's get it straight and not from the horse's mouth. the horse refuses to talk and the woman is left alone with the cavalry. ah!

it has been heaven, and it has been hell. on entering the dojo last friday i was asked how it was. i said that the weather was fabulous. it was!

they said that that was a very diplomatic answer. it was. but then i also get tired of calling it something or other. tired, yes, i am tired. i feel like i am plowing through molasses and that the end of the tunnel is in sight but that it is not getting any closer. i am tired of the struggle. i shall give up the struggle. i am not tired of life, i am tired of the struggle. most of all i am tired of qualifying it all. is it good? is it bad? is heaven? is it hell? it is.

still in the last few days i have had a very humbling experience and i find myself stunned and bewildered. stunned and bewildered!

remember 2004. or was it 2002? somehow that is when i quit my daytime job. no, it was not what one calls frivolity or levity, it was necessity. at stake was my survival. either the job had to go, or i was going to go, why?

anyhow, it is a good thing that i keep my resumé online, i tend to forget in what year i have done what. i quit my last salaried job in 2002! wow, that was a long time ago, it is time to get back to where i thought that i wanted to go. actually, back then i did not have a clue. i just threw in the towel. sometimes you have to. at least that is how i felt then, and looking at it four years down the road, that was the right decision. but then, i also do not know what the wrong decision would have been. i am frankly getting tired of this long and unbearable thread of lamentations!

i just got back home after a school board meeting where i felt a bit out of touch with it all, mostly i felt out of touch with myself. i do not like this. i like to listen to "weather report" and try to collect my thoughts, if not the scattered pieces of my soul.

it does not take much to make me happy: the rain, the sunshine, the sand on my feet at the beach, an email from a dear friend, the voice of another on the phone. i saw the cherry blossoms for a few hours four weeks ago and i fell in love with it all once more, again. again in love. why do i love life so much when i find so little sense in it?

i went through some serious pain last summer, this spring brought in some more serious pain. i call them pains the pains of growing up and opening up my eyes. i am frankly tired of the pain. it has been even less than two weeks when i finally could understand what brings a human being to consider suicide. it is like this, when on the edge of the abyss one can see that the fall would be fatal, to jump is still a matter of choice at that point provided that there is no ravaging wind throwing you over the edge. all the zazen, all the aikido, all the tantra, all the good friends and all the introspection have created a peace that keeps me aware of the abyss and that counters the stormy winds.

still, today on the way to that meeting i kept on thinking that i really wished that i did not have the ability to feel the pain of others. in 2004 i wrote thousands of words in trying to get rid of the pain of another that had gotten under my skin. yes, the pain got under my skin. do you know what it is like to have another's pain under your own skin? i felt doomed with an obsession that i did not even want.

"You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, "Who is that man?"
You try so hard
But you don't understand
Just what you'll say
When you get home

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

You raise up your head
And you ask, "Is this where it is?"
And somebody points to you and says
"It's his"
And you say, "What's mine?"
And somebody else says, "Where what is?"
And you say, "Oh my God
Am I here all alone?"

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, "How does it feel
To be such a freak?"
And you say, "Impossible"
As he hands you a bone

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

You have many contacts
Among the lumberjacks
To get you facts
When someone attacks your imagination
But nobody has any respect
Anyway they already expect you
To just give a check
To tax-deductible charity organizations

You've been with the professors
And they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well read
It's well known

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says, "Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan"

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word "NOW"
And you say, "For what reason?"
And he says, "How?"
And you say, "What does this mean?"
And he screams back, "You're a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home"

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Well, you walk into the room
Like a camel and then you frown
You put your eyes in your pocket
And your nose on the ground
There ought to be a law
Against you comin' around
You should be made
To wear earphones

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?"

Ballad of a Thin Man by Bob Dylan
Copyright © 1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music)

Technorati Tags: ashes, atelier, berne, family, freedom, friendship, fuzzy, rambling, story, suicide

the stories, the riddles, the conspiracies: sensei and i

last week on thursday a dear friend and his very pregnant wife came over for dinner. while i planned the meal it was raining outside and i had just returned from two weeks at the beach. i planned a rather winterly dish. it was however a gloriously summer promising day and we sat in the garden for dinner and conversation until well past ten in the evening. glorious!

sometimes wonder why i chose the friends around me and how in my utter naivety and ignorance i end up being a very lucky person indeed. if anything, my life is defined by my friends and the relationships that i maintain with them. these friends come from all walks of life and all the places that my wandering nature and serendipity have taken me to. one of these friends is my sensei's sensei. i tend to define the quality of friend rather loosely, if not generously, while friendship is a relationship that ripens and grows with time through thick and thin, through good times and bad times. i also have a friend from india now living in the middle east who is fond of calling me his goddess and with whom i claim to share insanity. however it is the sensei's sensei that is most on my mind right now. a few weeks ago while walking out of the dojo, bump into him and we get into a long conversation right there while i hold the door open. imagine there i was for an hour holding the door open for him while we were having this  involved conversation. this conversation has stuck. the subject matter was one that has me puzzled and the whole picture of me holding a door open for an hour may or may not have any significance. then later on sensei had to share something with me about what it is that makes irish men special, or something along those lines, but somehow i found it funny. between the banalities and the shared insights we cover a ground that is called a connected understanding of reality.

on that week of intense aikido training i learned from all there, but a few episodes have engraved themselves in my mind memory. sensei and i were discussing at one point the Celt culture, and he went on to mention some of their so claimed more horrifying rites or customs involving human sacrifice. i looked at him in astonishment at his own concern over such matters and asked him if anything had changed. do we not continue to make human sacrifice a part of our modern day twenty first century lives?

it was sensei's turn to look at me. yes, nothing has changed. the ancient celts and semites did practice human sacrifice, but then so do we. human superstition has not ceased to be, it just happens that sometimes we call it science, other times we call the victims fatalities of war or accident. whichever way you look at it, human sacrifice at the hands of other humans. humans are humans, brutal, aggressive and on occasions, rational. seldomly rational we are.

still, it was not our exchange on human sacrifice that remains seared in my  memory. it was something he shared about himself, something about his own life, something that made me feel connected in experience to him. it made me feel not unique, but a part of a common shared experience. that connection point is what is most on my mind now. it gives me strength to navigate through what is again another period of total uncertainty and utter chaos.

then, i returned home from the aikido week and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom in the garden. i left again and when i returned last week, all was green, not a trace of a single cherry blossom. i am either the sorcerer's apprentice or a lost samurai... i dream of cherry blossoms.

so, how the fuck am i?

do not ask. i do not know.

last night i had a late night phone conversation which felt like holding somebody's hand. tenderness and kindness are rare in this mad life on the planet. still this is the only planet we know that supports our organisms. this is the planet earth that we cohabit with rabbits, foxes, bees, earthworms and cherry blossoms. this is the place of tsunamis, volcanos, wars, human sacrifices, blood, sweat, tears, and ecstasy. we are all here together. did we choose it? chances are that it was all serendipity anyhow.

so, how am i doing?

frankly my dear, i do not give a damn. in the ever continuing saga of this life of mine, i continue to fall in love each day with every stone in my garden. i have more trouble with the slugs eating away at my basil, i poison those.

Technorati Tags: aikido, berne, death, life, love

happy birthday, darling!

how sweet this life is
that you have graced it with your presence

a birthday aphorism i wrote for you:

when you become the buddha
you will realize
all life has life energy flowing through it
all is buddha and buddha is all
buddha is aware of differences
buddha is capable of distinguishing
beloved ones may even catch buddha's attention
and buddha may draw those ones closer to the heart of buddha
yet buddha will not cast out even the evil ones
for buddha flows through that too

your parents, buddha knows them and loves them
buddha has compassion for them
for as they live and experience, buddha lives and experiences
as they grow in consciousness, so does buddha grow in consciousness
simultaneously buddha knows all consciousnesses, is all consciousnesses
and buddha knows infinite bliss
because buddha knows infinite bliss, buddha knows the suffering your
parents experience
they suffer because they dwell in separation from the source of love
buddha experiences their suufering as they experience it
and will continue to experience their suffering throughout multifarious
lifetimes
until they attain enlightenment and merge with buddha as one

because they have dared to sponsor your life, a life that they cannot
comprehend or appreciate
buddha will bestow them special blessings
even in their state of spiritual ignorance, they deserve to be blessed
they deserve to be blessed because they gave birth to a being
who has and will, give and bring great joy to many
who has and will touch many with her gifts of love and tenderness
who, through her heart and her searching, will create a path of
inspiration and joy
that others may follow
and thus benefit their immortal souls

the author of the above  aphorism and subsequent words is a good friend of mine, one to whom i am indebted for life. when i am lost and confused i turn to him, he listens. when i do not know what to do, i turn to him. he is always there.

Technorati Tags: friendship, love

dare to wish

may 5,  2006

some months ago in the midst of of depression begging for recovery, i set forth to look for a man who could accept me the way that i am: raw, unpolished, unsophisticated and damned to be. i thought that i was up for an impossible task, and that the bit of online dating was nothing but a bad invention. once more, experience proved me wrong in many ways.

now, for a woman with three ex-husbands to her credentials, one would think that she has no trouble in finding a man. true, there are lots of men out there, and frankly the choice is much too overwhelming. then that is exactly when the trouble starts. see, i just do not want a man at all. i never wanted a man. let me straighten this out and make it very clear: i never wanted to own a man. as a matter of fact, i own nothing other than a few debts to the income tax office and the pants that i wear. i wear pants and trousers over it, or i wear nothing at all, but certainly i neither wear nor own a man. never did, never wanted to, and still do not want to. meanwhile i have, to my surprise, discovered that there are out there a few good men, translate that to enlightened men, who are most delighted in my company just for the simple reason that they accept this scribing individual as raw, unpolished, unsophisticated and damned to be.

still, having been torpedoed into the algarve for a couple of weeks after a zen week in the alsace, it becomes obvious that i am one for the europe of the regions. i only care about nationalism when it involves some rather private and intimate practices of two cross cultured middle age individuals sharing bare life. that is to say that my other cross cultured one offered the explanation that both portuguese and italians pay higher prices for brand-new just built houses or apartments than they do for those of comparable value and quality but which have already been owned by another because of something emotional about ownership. here we are to the second-hand market, houses, online dating and the middle aged in the modern days middle ages. let me tell you, it is a wonderful world! it must be the renaissance.

yes, i dared to wish, and my wish came true. i looked for, and with or without serendipity, i found or was found according to my wishes. so here i am in the algarve alone and happy at that. it seems that the moment that possession is out of the  concept, life can be grand. but not when it comes to property. i still wish to have a plot of land where i could plant some potatoes, and keep a few goats. the plan being that the goats would keep the grass in check while i was writing the next best seller. well, that is the plan about the dream and how in the land of milk and honey... one does not need bees. goats will do, thank you.

having had the dubious honour of celebrating a little personal occasion with family on wednesday, i found myself in a rather strange film. it was not a movie. movies have action and thrill, are made in hollywood; films flicker in despair, are static and made in little boutique places of insignificance, or at least this one did. occasionally one of these films is brilliant, on most occasions they are all but brilliant. this film was a family gathering, and it was a rather old film. i heard the same conversations that i had heard on another family gathering three years ago. these creatures did not once bitch about the price of petrol, however they went on to repeat the story of how about fifty years ago one arrived late for a wedding. present, what present? actuality, what actuality? iran is very far from the algarve it seems.

during the showing of this film, my french speaking relatives and i sneakered to each other about the fact that we were going to keep our mouths shut about what had just happened last monday. we conspired to ignore the present and maintained the semblance of being thrown in full regurgitation back into a past that we could not remember, could not care for, and for which nobody else cared for except for those vomiting it. why? damned if i know, but if i had to guess, it is all about possession. voilà the true nature of conspiracy, and we all love a great conspiracy. truly yours certainly does.

that i dared to wish is new to me. that my wish came true is awesome. it has been a rough morning, really rough. i woke up at dawn and did not want to go for my morning walk at the beach. i did not want to act on the concept of what i ought to do out of some idealized machination of what it is that this is about. yes, i like to brag about my dawn walk at the beach, but it is not every day that i feel like doing it. feeling like doing it has several flavours. the flavour that i enjoy the most is what that is my wish and my body wishes it. rested or tired, when i wish to do my morning dawn walk/jog/meditation at the beach, that is what is delightful. then there are the mornings when it is sheer discipline that has automated me to do it, when not even the thought of the rewards of such joy cloud my resolve, and i want to do it, just because that is what i want to do. there is a third flavour, the flavour of this morning, my mind said that i should and my body told me that i had other issues to deal with. i have much too often vetoed my body's wishes. today i gave it a chance. damned faithful this body of mine. i wonder if i own it, or if i am just doomed to succeed in spite of my mind.

i dared to wish for sunshine. there is sunshine.

Technorati Tags: algarve, dare, dreams, plan, possession, property, sunshine, wish