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...and they lived happily ever after. Smith & Lady: poets, artists, photographers & adventurers.
Our relationship was forged to the soundtrack of Yoko Ono's magic,
frenetic, love-laden song, "Walking On Thin Ice." ( play song )
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Archive for the ‘ladymemoir’ Category
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
1. Because I care about children of homo sapiens and I wish for them to enjoy seeing Nature.
2. Because I care about animals (non homo sapien animals) and children of these animals and I wish for these children to grow in number and health and to have a lot of habitat restored.
3. Because I care for the pristine-ness of water, air and soil.
4. Because I care for the currents in the oceans of this planet and the currents in the air and I wish for these currents to be healthy. I see them as a circulatory system for this beautiful planet.
5. Because I care for my immediate family and the families of all, and I wish for all to not be impoverished, to not starve. And for people and entities who don’t identify as having families–I especially wish for these entities to feel loved and cared for and to realize that maybe they do have families after all, of sorts.
6. Because I want to feel happier, knowing that as many people and animals and as much habitat and health as possible are safe and are saved (all if possible).
~ Lady
Posted in activism, creativity, dreams, Environment, ethics, health, Lady, ladymemoir, Letters to the Universe, On Writing, Peace, Philosophy, Publications, Relationships, spirituality | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012
It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged on walkingthinice.com for anything other than a poem or some event on which I’d worked on getting out the word. I’m decided to blog here now on a weekly schedule as much as I reasonably can. I used to blog on WTI every other day, particularly when we were on our most excellent foreign adventure. My life since then has not really been less adventurous; I think I’ve taken home some of the adventure with me in terms of activism and a new-found spirituality.
In the last three years since we’ve returned to the States:
- I’ve become an activist.
- I’ve worked on my professional skills.
- I’ve had several intense, unfortunately incapacitating spiritual experiences.
- I have many more less intense, yet empowering spiritual experiences.
- I’m working on creative projects–finishing some up, starting up some new ones.
The most interesting part has been the incapacitating spiritual experiences. During these episodes I’ve not been able to work much as the experiences have been so strong with profound connectedness and bliss and yet also sometimes profound agony. One might connect some of the symptoms of this with symptoms described by the label “bipolar disorder,” but I reject this label. I know my experiences are real, not delusional. I mean, because they are relatively new to me I had a difficult time understanding what was going on at first and so there was an issue of interpretation. But I’ve got more of a grip on this now, more understanding.
The experiences have catalyzed me to become an activist. One day stands out in particular–last year, February 23, 2011. I was in the midst of one of the unfortunate, more strong experiences which had been going on for about a week. That particular day I had forced myself to go into the office to handle my work responsibilities–I feel it important to do as much as I can muster.
So I was sitting there, trying and trying to work. I’m a web developer, and so I must have fairly constant connection to the Internet in order to work. Well, whenever I’d try to go to a website to check my work, my connection wouldn’t let me do it. It would only let me go on Facebook and news sites. Also, my head would not let me handle complicated tasks–I’d lose track of where I was and could only focus on the immediate, overwhelming stimulus around me such as the sighs and creaks of the room and my iPod player and how everything synchronizes to the thoughts I have. Or perhaps my thoughts synchronize to the sensory data around me. Anyways–a bit too much Oneness that day.
So I had my iPod player running on “random shuffle,” and the songs it was selecting were more and more irritating to me–somehow ominous. My head felt like the volume of air in the room was pressing in on me, and I couldn’t get anything done for work out of confusion and being blocked when attempting to go to work-related websites.
The sensory data was overwhelming, music reaching some kind of crescendo from the iPod, pressure on my head, hurt in my heart… and then I checked Facebook and saw that someone had posted an article: the town of Christchurch, New Zealand had been struck by an earthquake the day before.
I hadn’t yet heard of this news and I figured Reality was trying to get my attention. As soon as I read the article, it was like something had been released. The pressure dropped in the room and we lost our Internet connection for the day.
I couldn’t think of a more clear signal Reality could give me to indicate, “Hey, something’s up, people of Earth. We want you to take better care of things.”
I mean, maybe it was God/Goddess doing it, maybe it was just part of God, maybe it was the planet. Because of its name, I find it particularly interesting that the planet/God/Goddess/whatever-it-is picked the town of Christchurch.
Then in March I had another intensely uncomfortable experience at the same time as the Fukushima disaster (also an interesting name). I’ve noticed that the uncomfortable experiences usually correlate to earthquakes, hurricanes, or agonizing over my expression.
So, this is where I’m at with the data as I see it: I’m working as best I can on respecting Reality more by taking care of anything it might be wanting from us such as taking better care of the planet, being kinder to each other and animals, being more spiritual and/or religious yet with less hypocrisy, etc.
So since these episodes, I’ve picked up volunteer duties with the Sierra Club and the Occupy Movement and have been working on every aspect of my life as best I can to be more attuned to Reality’s needs. And I’ve noticed that since I’ve worked on ordering my life better towards Reality’s possible needs, I’ve been much more functional at work and have not experienced confusion.
~ Lady
Tags: Christchurch, earthquakes, Fukusima, tsunamis
Posted in activism, Being, Bipolar Disorder, Environment, ethics, Lady, ladymemoir, Letters to the Universe, spirituality, weather | No Comments »
Sunday, May 29th, 2011
Grandma and have a picnic breakfast a couple times a week. This week we went to a lakeside park…
We walked up to the lake but they wouldn’t let us in.
“We are in jail,” I told Grandma. “We’re landlocked.”
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Grandma and I have this love of dressing up like ragdolls, with striped shirts, the color pink, patterns. Quite often when I pick her up, we’re wearing something eerily similar.
Her father named her after Lenin. He had two families, our family, and a secret family. He gave all his money to the communists. Grandma had to go begging to him for money. All this responsibility for a little girl.
Sometimes I call her “my little baby Grandma.”
At various times, Grandma and her brothers were in an orphanage. Her mother had periods of insanity (brought on by syphilis given to her from Grandma’s father.) Sometimes Grandma ran away from the orphanage, back home to her mother.
At one point, Grandma was living with her mother, and her brothers were still in the orphanage. She went two streets down and found a brother playing in a school playground. She grabbed his hand and took him home.
“You see this skirt?” she said. “I wore this skirt for you. I thought you’d like it.”
Lady K in 48 years? Maybe. I’d be glad to look like Grandma.
“Do you remember how I used to dress?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. You wore black or blue polyester pants and you had a couple shirts you wore regularly. You dressed this way most of my life. Then, one day, Grandpa took you shopping, and told you to buy pink for a change. You started wearing all these colorful clothes.”
Lady
Tags: grandma, lake, land, orphanages, orphans
Posted in Being, Family, Lady, ladymemoir, Photography, Relationships, Stories | No Comments »
Monday, May 16th, 2011
As the therapist visited Smith this morning, I set my coffee on the lip of the bathtub and stepped into the water. I sat down and finished the black coffee in the cup, blue water in the tub. I curled up on my back like a fetus and wrapped my arms around my legs. My attention was drawn to a drop of water hanging from my arm, then to a gentle sliding down further into warmth, further down the tub. I felt bubbles coalesce on my skin and pop as I slid. I felt the soap scum from previous baths as process art, valued.
As I lathered, I wondered about how good people can actually be. I wondered about how good I can be, when I have difficulty even controlling my appetite, deciding to bike rather than use the car, etc.
I decided that I could treat my diet as a metaphor for hope that people can learn how to behave better. Possibly my project could be to eat no more than I need for sustenance. I imagined myself slimming down to a sylph, some kind of being sustained by spirit. I imagine myself not eating any more animals. I imagine myself eating as locally as possible. I imagine myself staying away from factory foods. I imagine invisible levers that extend from me into the wheels that run the welfare of the planet.
Then I’d had enough of the water even though some warmth was left. If I’d wait for the warmth to dissipate, my energy would go with it. I decided it was time to dedicate myself to my vocational hours. I thought of that story I’d read of a Zen monk waking up in the morning as though tossing off his slippers–waking fresh and ready. I want to be fresh and ready for work. I am fresh and ready for work.
Lady
Tags: bathing, energy, process art, therapy, visualization, work
Posted in dreams, ethics, ladymemoir, Philosophy, spirituality, zen | No Comments »
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
Today I believe the universe is like a pool. I am a point on the pool. To be awakened is to see that I am a point on a wave, rippling. I am rippling in response to the vibrations of other points. And when I move, I create ripples as well. And sometimes I am the whole pool. It depends on whether I draw myself close to the idea or not.
The whole of “it” is the cloth you drape closer to yourself when you want to see yourself, the monad, closer, the magic eye picture. Part of “it” is the cloth you let fall loose when you unclench yourself from the monad. Part of “it” is remembering. Part of it is word. Part of it falls from the sky. All of it is sky. All of it is earth.
Do I resonate with the monad and receive my ripples back? It seems sometimes a big psychological mirror, a miraculous mirror, a miraculous pond. Sometimes it seems wiser than me, or perhaps this is just fruit of functionality arising blessedly from the interstitial. Sometimes it seems something against which I grist. Smith says, “Like winter rubbing against summer, each refines the other.”
I’ve been finding various rabbit holes & have been going in and out of them in some kind of recursive fractal search. The upside of it is that I’m realizing that I’m in a Mandelbrot set, a pattern. The downside is that it’s very easy to become immersed in the pattern and squirrel after new symbols like the tail of the rabbit, various repeating symbols, intimations of capriciousness or the divine–I am not sure. Sometimes when I go down a hole I forget I’m in a hole and it starts avalanching in on me.
There’s a nasty hole in Grandma’s leg & I’ve been letting myself follow my fancies to try to gain wisdom from the monad to learn how to repair it. The monad has been directing me towards jewels. I finally figured out that the jewels represent fruit. It wants me to put fruit into a black hole–her mouth. Then it will create red ruby jewels to knit her clean.
Grandma, independently of me, has latched onto the ruby idea. She asking for pomegranate seeds for the hole. Some for her black hole, her mouth. Some for her red hole, her leg. I love the symbolism of the pomegranate seeds and holes–the underworld. Yet I want to send the seeds to the underworld to knit it up down there so that she can stay floating lively on the wave with me. Pomegranates are the rubies I need to put in the mouth of Grandmother Mountain. In the immediate range, the colors and details and cuts of my parent mountains. Beyond that, Grandmother Mountain. And beyond that, Grandfather Mountain. On a clear day I can still see Grandfather Mountain.
I’m a tip in the local fractal pattern swirl of family. Connected confetti like spontaneous self arising radios gilt with sediment of universal sentiment.
Lady
Posted in Lady, ladymemoir, Stories | No Comments »
Thursday, November 25th, 2010
It’s an existential morning, this morning. We’re in one warm room and the rest are cold. We’ve cordoned off the living room from the rest of the place and it seems like a desperate little room of temporary comfort on some ship headed on a crash course of a spiritually and materially impoverished future full of gray hair, regret and woe. Smith and I are already picking up the pieces of each other like the ghosts in the movie Beetlejuice. Smith & I have crash landed into each other’s sanctuaries. Thank goodness for the sanctuary but what about the world?
It’s such a dark time of year–November beginning some kind of serious nocturnal thinking or some kind of hunkering down. The celebration is an internal one, Christmas tree fireworks in the darkness of the brainpan. The creeping of the house as though it, too, is thinking and hunkering down. The solidity of the house. The quietude of the house before Smith wakes up into pain.
Cat is so thoroughly asleep on her plush blanket, her creature eye and whiskers competent in comfort.
Me, I’m trying to wake up from numbness, the muffled coccoon I’ve swathed myself in to abey the buffeting of the rocket barelling into the future.
Dripping with the physical, mired in the physical the brain is like a swathed observer with a tinny old-timey radio voice trying to say, “Remember the dream….”
& that’s where I’m at this morn. Reality is telling me to remember to write, to remember to pursue & make the dream tangible.
Lady
Posted in Lady, ladymemoir | 3 Comments »
Friday, September 24th, 2010
Funky realistic minnows at this depth.
Head hurts. Neurontin.
Stranded on the shore where I can no longer hear the miracle, only intuit. I do not know directly the meaning of the sand, or of mouth full of seawater. I can only remember knowing.
Direct plugin disconnected.
Smith is in the next room, and I cannot discern if it seems to be in relation to my thoughts. He makes coffee.
Universal mind is capricious with the typos, or maybe it’s just me.
I am the tap tap tapping of universal mind. My keyboard taps out a message to the universal mind. My eyes tap out a vision. My ears tap out a song. My nose taps scent.
Mandy cat walks gently in as though to remind me of her epiphanies from the God-concept.
I am a good worker. I am not making art. I am useless sometimes. Sometimes I am useful.
I am trying.
I will run and I will get mauled by circumstance.
I feel abandoned by the God concept. But I am a greedy little Christ. I need reassurance for everything.
I need to remember hope and expectation and how I created this catastrophe.
I created Global Warming. I created the Bush Regime. I created everything.
The eyes and tympanies of butterflies and birds remind me of what was created by the perceivers who perceived before belief–just drop of leaf.
I would be a prophet, I would. I would write a beautiful algorithm for the God concept.
My algorithm would be an account of the raw awful beauty and redemption.
Lady
Posted in Lady, ladymemoir | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
Hopes from 2010
Tropical Cyclone Malakas is in the Pacific and predicted to hit Asia. I hope it loses steam and doesn’t cause death. I like the way Igor and Julia stayed largely away from land. Hoping Lisa follows Igor’s path. Better yet, I hope Lisa moves north more quickly than Igor did and loses steam.
Floods – I hope Pakistan makes the right decision on the dam project–whatever will help alleviate floods and still secures water rights for those downstream. I don’t know what the right answer is.
Children are still starving in Niger. I hope we can help with irrigation systems or whatever needs to happen. I’ve read dubious things about the distribution of ‘free food.’ I would like for us to distribute food in an ethical manner, possibly buying food from surrounding countries if possible.
I hope it starts raining more in Niger.
Wishing the Democrats luck. I hope they really *are* starting to protect us ‘common’ people rather than bankers and insurance companies. I like that Obama has candor and isn’t terribly sound-bitey, though.
Feedback from 2020
We’ve since learned how to moderate the effects of hurricanes and to direct rain to drought-laden regions. Although still suffering higher temperatures, emissions are down due to the many advances in alternative energy and we are working on repairing the feedback loop that had started to run amok and reinforce global warming.
World population is going down as we’ve adopted China’s saner policy of producing only one child per set of parents. We are on path to a more sustainable reality.
Ever since the Democratic-Republicans merged into one party, it’s been a lot easier to deal with issues from the inside out rather than being ‘played.’
My, what massive changes we had to make in 10 years.
Tags: floods; tropical cyclones; hurricanes; niger; droughts; democrats; obama; democratic-republicans
Posted in dreams, Environment, ethics, Lady, ladymemoir, news, Philosophy, Politics | No Comments »
Sunday, September 19th, 2010
In this episode, we travel back in time to the psychologically significant year 2010…
Blogger Lady K said:
I think Obama could do well to listen to Clinton’s advice, although I’m disappointed with Clinton’s free trade initiatives and other things. As far as dealing with the public, though, I think Clinton has a lot to say.
In the current year, 2020, we now know that Obama did well to cherry-pick the best advice possible from former presidents. Thanks to Obama’s 2010 initiatives, the old problems with the economy, weather, and the divisiveness of the world have ceased to exist. Obama was elected to a second term, and the Democratic-Republicans continue to improve the US and we are now an ethical member of the UN.
It was important that mainstream media started picking up more difficult stories–“U.S. troops accused of killing Afghans ‘for sport.’ The recognition that the US had been acting as an imperial power turned around the perception in the public of what it means to occupy and bomb other countries for resources and revenge. Thank goodness we are making reparations and the Iraqi people are now prosperous even though oil is no longer a fuel of significance to our economy. The resilience of the Afghan people through occupation of the former Soviet Union, the Taliban and the United States has been an inspiration to us all. The brave women who transformed Afghan society–who woulda thunk they’d've turned their burquas into junk? Of course, we now have burqua appreciation societies all over the world, including France.
“Lawmakers divided on expiration of Bush tax cuts”–
Lawmakers bravely decided during those critical years to stop supporting such a striated system that extracted wealth from the lower and middle classes and redistributed it to the upper classes. This article is emblematic of the turning point we made to a healthier society with more equitable wealth distribution. We soon closed the tax loopholes as well.
The Weather – hurricanes that happened in 2010. In blogger Lady K’s words:
Fanapi has touched down on land. A lot of people have evacuated Taiwan. I hope there are few deaths and that people in danger of mudslides evacuate their areas.
Igor has weakened, as has Julia. I think it is because both are heading northish, possibly into cooler waters? Seems like goodish news.
Thank goodness we all have weather control now, in collaboration with Gaia and the Sun. His and her consciousnesses continue to communicate with us to better regulate Gaia’s systems.
Tags: afghanistan, clinton, distribution of wealth, hurricanes, obama, weather control
Posted in dreams, Environment, ethics, Events, Lady, ladymemoir, news, On Writing, Philosophy, Politics, Publications, spirituality, weather | No Comments »
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