How many pages do you comfortably sit reading before your mind wanders and you want to do something else? This morning so far, I read ten pages. But I am not giving up. People grow and change and redeem themselves, and I can overcome challenges.

Yesterday, Joey mentioned to me that children from lower class families drop behind in their reading skills and that middle class children either maintain the same level or get ahead some.
Class is a convoluted mix. Education, race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, mental and physical disability, geographical upbringing, and personality all play into the equation. A person can have much money and be set back all the same because of one of these differences. Likewise, someone can be poor and from a long line of Ivy League educated family members.

Literacy can play a big part in a person's success in their whole life. The important thing there is that it is never to late to gain skills in literacy. It is never to hit the books. I think I need to become a better reader. And I absolutely think this is possible for me and for anyone else who is fortunate enough to be a free citizen near a public library.

(I used to have a bumper sticker that said "Life is Good, Eat Biscuits.")

I have been suffering from self inflicted emotional burdens this summer, but I think I am turning this ship around right now. I have been so afraid that I am not a good person, that I have drained the energy I might have used to ensure that I am a good person. In some respect, this burden has spanned the summer, but in other regards it's lasted a lifetime. So am I getting better emotionally, or am I getting worse? Good question!

Reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by John Wolfgang von Goethe I feel such kinship with the narrator, a lustful man of sentiment who ends up committing suicide. Don't worry so much about my life though, I don't think he is like me in the ending one's own life way, I think he is like me in the self pittying depressed sort of way. At the end of the day, I think about Werther and know that I am not alone. There is a history of Literature by sentimental and emotional people who suffer in ways similar to me. Wow! I so often feel so alone, I know it can come accross as self centeredness on my part. In fact, I often measure the statistics of my differences (my INFJ personality type, my bipolar diagnosis, the strange mix of identity traits that I own). All of these things seem to accumulate in a way that makes me feel like an island, but I am not alone in this. So many in Literature share these sorrows, this loneliness, our daily misery, our ups and downs, our mistakes and regrets.

I woke up in the night, yes it is 2:40 as I write this. I sat up in bed reflecting on something I have heard my family say to me, that my identity is so different from that which it was when I was, shall we say, unaware of my bipolar disorder, or unbipolar depending on your mental health philosphy. I woke up worrying that the child in me, the sweet voice inside of me might be nearly faded.

Before bed last night I tried my hand at fiction writing a story that was entirely autobiographical. I had a big idea for the story, to write about a seventeen year old woman whose Werther like infatuation with her father's twenty three year old employee is wasted on a mentally ill break down. But I will leave autobiographical fiction to the experts.

There is a part of me that fears I missed a very important boat. At seventeen, I withdrew from college to enter a psychiatric ward of a hospital for a week and then to recover. I have pressed hard to graduate from college, but today, eleven years after high school, I have no degree. I have little to show for myself, sometimes it seems. I am unmarried, I have no children, my birth family doesn't seem proud of me at all. They say I am happy when I am at Berea, which I find humorous because I think of quitting on a weekly basis, sometimes daily even, when there.

I care a terrible lot about what others think of me. I felt heartbroken when a psychiatrist dropped me as a client after I thought he was no good and who I stupidly told him he was no good. I went home and hulled up like a turtle in her shell. I don't want to be a disappointment, but I just told my sweet Asheville housesitting employer that I am to emotionally messed up to help her this time. She is one of those totally understanding people, but even she reacted in a "terse" way.

I don't want to be a disappointment. I don't want people to cross the street when they see me coming. I recenlty spent 12 straight hours with a couple friends, mostly in a car, and I left the experience hoping that I did not piss them off. I have a spotted history of being in vehicles with people who find me a bad navigator and a pain in the ass, (hi Joey). But my friends who accompanied me to Nashville and straight back were kind. They did not seem to be bothered my me. One of them even called me my worst critic.

The funny thing is, that explanation may not be too far removed from the truth. Part of me thinks that my sorrows are not my own fault. I am sad because the neurotransmitters in my brain are not working right, because my happy brain chemicals are being overpowered by the sad chemicals. But am I powerless over my physical brain? I think not. My best Berea friend, Jamie, said she was pretty sure she had bipolar disorder too in high school, but she overcame the depression and the mania.

That is hard for me to digest. How can someone who loves me tell me that she could defeat her illness? My mental health advocate inside of me gets so confused about that. My life is a long struggle against psychosis and mania, against depression and anxiety, and recently a terrible lot of anger.

But Jamie never said I am to blame for my illness, she said she figured out how not to take drugs for her symptoms. I love my medicine. I feel terrified without the meds, actually. But lets assume that the meds for me are a requirement. Jamie is still telling me the truth when she speaks this story of her life.

First of all I have a symptom called psychosis. Psychosis is powerful and needs real antipsychotic medication. Therapy can help stop psychosis, but as far as I know people with psychosis do better with medicine. The brain is like any other organ, and medicine helps.

But what about moods? I am keeping on my medicine, but what if I could fill in the gaps that my meds make with positive thoughts, with exercise, a better diet, and more therapy? I am already doing that to an extent, but there cannot be too much positive thought.

I am not seventeen, and fortunatley I don't want to be. I was not good when I was 17. I kept my body healthy, except for that part of the whole being that is the mental emotional person. I actually did not have any real friends then. Actually that is probably the biggest thing I have gained through the dark times. Friends. Friends who care. Friends who understand and friends who try but don't have the life experiences to truely know where I am at.

My family is made up of very good people too. Some of them don't seem to have compassion for me, but it is hard for my family to watch me suffer.

My voice can sound horrific. My therapist said that I am not a bad person but that I can be a fireball when I get a thought in my head and I feel I am not being heard. She hit the nail on the head with that one. I am partially a pitiful person, like a ferral kitten whose only hope is to bond with some philanthropic Fur Person. On the other hand, I am a ferral kitten. I have a wild side. I can be scary. I can scratch and bite. I used to do that physically as a child.

My life is a work of Classic Literature. The great part is, I am a protagonist with a pact with Life. I am not 100% Werther. I am a scary person because I am clearly hurting inside and because I do lash out at others, spreading pain. But I am not alone in my imperfections, and I am ready to transform these flaws into love.

Dear friends and family. Thank you for recycling this love, for taking a chance with me.

Peas and Corn

Her voice is a temple
for today's lesson
and tomorrow's test.

"Sometimes I put on my Felicia
voice when I need to be strong
or funny or reassured.”

Soft is strong.
Feminine is funny.
Riveted is reassured.

For Felicia

I have been reading audiobooks for long enough to grow tired of people who deny that I am reading. My own mother says, with stigma, "ah, you listened to another book." Yes, Mom. I read the book.

My arguement is simple. We don't tell visual text readers that they "looked at another book" now do we? I am constantly hearing from ignorant family members that the only way to read is their way. "Why must you listen to those classics? Haven't you ever read a book, haven't you ever got lost in a book?"

I did find The Sorrows of Young Werther absorbing. Just like Metamorphasis, A Doll's House, and My Antonia. Does the simple fact that I used my ears to read these books make me less than literary?

I think not!

My friends and especially my family tend to fall in two camps, and they tend to move from one categroy to the other over time. Since my feelings are almost inevitably hurt by my confusion about boundaries, I think it might help if I write this entry requesting clear, spelled out, and gently put boundaries.

When people get to know me they see that I am good - I am good - and they say, here is a sorrowful young lass, I will be her friend. Over and over and over again, I have lost friends because they and I have not been clear enough about our needs and limits.

I decieve myself that I do not burn bridges or loose friends frequently until I look back at all the relationships that have ended because of me. It is painful for me to look back when I think about my life in these terms.

I even have family members who have cut me out of their lives. The hard thing is that I have played a large part in this. When I am the common denominator, I realize that I am the problem, and it makes me feel unworthy, depressed, humiliated, and in anguish.

So I put on my blinders and pretend I am normal, when in truth I am not. I have a lot of bad habits: anger, using the telephone for therapy, rare violence. My friends and family watch me twist and turn in fits of my own confusion, and this sometimes causes them to retract the kinship that they have for me.

Do I blame these people for giving me the cold shoulder when I feel I need them most? Yes. And no!

When I think about the burden my life puts over the world that is when I fall into the deepest sadness. Life is hard for me, it seems because I am alone in the world. But so too life is hard in your presence. Your flattery helps me boost my mood sometimes. But so frequently my mood seems but a mood. Is a mood a reality or a mood a form of fiction? If I feel I need something or someone is that a fact? Are my feelings true? Or would antianxiety medicines fix all of this? Or antidepressants? Both?

But maybe my mood doesn't need fixed. Sometimes I think: depth is honesty is depth is sadness is the only truth.

Consider all of the sadness in this world: climate change, hunger, poverty, disease, extinctions. Then explain to me why you look so smug all the time? Why do I go around rejoicing bouyancy?

I wrote this in such a hopeful time, it deserves to be posted again now in the heat of summer.

Hope Comes

1.

As the rational

fades away

a new force

chaotic

architecture

emerges its

face like a

firefly

saying

this too is

The Way in.

2.

The one word

that best describes

me is poet.

Two words:

buoyant seeker.

3.

Dear Pickle, be

safe through this

birth and life

even in death.

Dear (cat, kitten)

Pickle, I can

only dedicate my

time with you

to loving you.

I love you more

than any being

has ever loved

and equally just the

same.

4.

I don’t know who you

are or why you wondered

here beside me in front of a

waiting room television turned

to FOX or as a friend on facebook.

But still, I hope you feel

wrapped in a blanket of

love, even if you would not

meet my eye, greet me, or

sing with me

in and out

loudly but impossible

in an ocean of Quaker

silence.

5.

I am a bounty -

the harvest - the

first Thanksgiving -

a reproduction of

feasts...

You are a vegan.

I am ham.

You are kosher.

This is a dirty pickle.

We float together

offering grace to

a time of Easter.

6.

I did not know

I was perfect

until today

pausing to think of you

and you are

perfect too.

Like solid colors

propped against

the backdrop of time.

7.

When I stop

making much sense... That

is when my beauty unfolds.

Stop for just one second

the “grandiose” diagnostic and call

me a creative genius

of spiritual proportions.

8.

“Enough is enough.”

But I can’t go to bed.

In my mind I imagine Libb

y tickled pink

knowing that every word to

inch off my tongue

will be poetry.

Aware that actually

the whole world WILL

ONE DAY STOP DYING.

Born

Free

Again!!!

9.

Every word I use brings

this farther from the truth

I worry. But then I

see that you have witnessed

my humanity. And humanity

IS truth. Truth is God.

God is (God) too.

10.

Am I insane?

Or just speculatively

planning my escape to

a fact, one that I am

just fine as I am

no matter what happens?

11.

Usually my poems are

more of tangibles,

visions of things that

grant me hope and peace.

Tonight I speak of

nothing but my thoughts

convincing myself forever that

they are good and right.

12.

And if ever you

doubt that there is hope

in the world, think again

of ripples growing to

waves to crash on a shore

of hopeful shellfish and twisting

sandpipers rising to the bate

of life.

I wrote Anna a love letter, in which I explained something I have been thinking lately.

For a long while I was thinking that Maggie is sadder than everyone else...

"That is the Maggie is sadder than everybody model.

For a bit lately I have dipped into the Everybody who loves Maggie is sadder than Maggie because of Maggie model.

Now the model I am trying is this:  Maggie is emotional to degree w.  Anna is emotional to degree x.  Mom is emotional to degree y.  Daddy is emotional to degree z.  x is equivalent to y is equivalent to z."

I also have another theory. I used to live with three women, Dylan, Tessa, and Lauren. Looking back, we each compared ourselves to our bunkmates.

We used the following model. Lauren is a better leader than Maggie. Lauren is greater than Maggie.

Maggie is a better writer than x person. Maggie is greater than x person. Dylan is more perverted (in a good way) than Maggie. Dylan is greater than Maggie. Tessa is sweeter than everyone else. Tessa is greater than all bunkmates.

I think about these folks because I pulled out my Mountain journal PDF yesterday and took to reading.

My new philosophy is this: Maggie is very Maggie. Maggie is the most Maggie of everyone I know... except for Maggie Barry, and any other spare Maggie I might know. But this Maggie Ellen Robin Hess, the only, is more Maggie Ellen Robin Hess than all other people.

In this model, Dylan is more Dylan than Maggie. Lauren is more Lauren than Maggie. Tessa is more Tessa than Maggie. Yet because I know these three strong women, I am more Dylan/Tessa/Lauren, than Joe Six Pack. But that is rediculously given anyway.

Back pain has burdened my life for years now, until May or June, when I made a bunch of small changes and deleted my facebook account. Permanently deleting facebook, meaning I had to nix each individual person as a "friend," is what I have been attributing the healthy lumbar feeling, though I added things to my life around then. I had forgotten how wonderful it is to go on a walk free of back pain. Take today. I drove to Wortroot Community Land Trust, where some long time back to the land friends of my family live. My intention was to be soiciable, and I enjoyed catching up with Ken, but more than that, I had this delightful time walking the path that runs beside the electric fence past the bees and stopping suddenly at the sound of snorting pigs. Yes I, with memories of wild boars in Costa Rica, I could not help imagining... Thank goodness they were just equally startled porkers, enjoying some time in the mud. The land is so beautiful there. It's one of the most beloved places I have ever trod. Walking in the woods makes me on edge at times, but not as often as many of the folks I know, people who feel comfortable only in the city. The best part of my walk was when the path curved downhill and away from the agricultural land. I have not been in the Wortroot valley for a long time, and though I was walking there to be sociable and see who was at Ken's house, I felt a hearty pull to go into that lovely low land where the creek runs through and the flowers grow wild. It is chicory season in the pasture, I noted, bending back uphill towards the road reluctantly. My back pain is gone, I held the thought in my mind like ice on my tongue in a sweltering time. When I was eighteen I ran up mountains with ease, not thinking one way or the other that someday soon I might gain weight and facebook and sedentary habits.

I talked some with Ken, out of which came a conclusion that I realized when I drove away. I have carried a gauntlet for a long time, I have had anger and resentments about a number of friends and family who love me and care for me and have endured my antagonism and other forms of my depression. I can be a fireball. That is what my therapist told me last time I went to see her. It is true. I can be like bees. I can bite. But I have a lot of regrets and inner turmoils that too often I blame on other people. Whilst I am dropping things, pains, that do me no good, I might as well drop this gauntlet of anger. Indeed I will be depressed again, and angry too. But I can do my best to make peace with the world. I am young and I need to learn to love the people I love. I get angry at people only if I value their opinion, only if I love them, only if they are important to me. I have got mad at just about everyone whom I love. While lashing out (violently) is not my custom, anger itself is not what I want to manifest.

This summer is so productive for me! Life is good. Eat, walk, and don't forget to write!

My friends,

Please comment if you are reading this. Nothing keeps a struggling artist going like a good response.

Love, Mug

Have you ever known a place so well that tresspassing there seemed more your right than the actual people who owned it? I never thought of it as tresspassing when I went to Abrams Falls, whether I went there to get tadpoles, to sit in the dry cave area under the falls itself, or to walk on the path that goes above the falls and deep in the woods. Many people in my region have come to Abrams to find a space in nature, to zone out their thoughts against the roar of the dumping water. Some find the falls area frightening, others approach it fearlessly. When I went with my Mom and dog to the parking area yesterday, my jaw fell open at the two men digging into the creek with heavy equipment, a pump and bulldozer. They actually stopped their dozing so Mom could ask them some questions. Who were they working for? Sam who owns the gun shop on Volunteer Parkway. How much land does he own? 200 acres including the falls. What are they building? A house for Sam.

As simple and reasonable as that sounds, my inner environmentalist is screaming, my secret Indian inside is saying that the land owns the land. What is this about 200 acres? What is he going to do with the falls itself? Aren't there environmental regulations protecting 50 feet waterfalls and their creeks (with natural mussels). Why must all conservation easements be initiated by the land owner themselves? I know very few people who agree with me on this, but I really think the land deserves rights beyond any one Sam or Joe who has bought the land or who has owned it for years. Things are changing at Abrams falls, and it is a real microcosm.

When we learned we could not go to the falls, Mom and I went down the road some and crossing the creek, we tresspassed in a place that Joey has been before probably up about as far as we went. It is a beautiful place with an untouched feel with high growth and a moist gully. There is a way to cut over towards Abrams falls, but we took the path to the right so as not to cause trouble. (There is mild tresspassing and then their is major tresspassing...)

I want to talk about how this Sunday walk helped me, and certainly it did bring peace into my life to walk up that beautiful gully. But on the other hand, I would have preferred to keep ignorant about Sam and his gun shop and his ownership and employees.

But I did leave with the good image of the two men digging out the water with one shovel (when the pump gave out). Glory! Nature prevails in the end.

It is no joke that the waters of youth run dry someday. I have been going back and forth between appreciating ideas handed to me by Elizabeth V about the rights of older people and listening to lyrics and words from songs and the world around of me that say children are the people group to focus on. So in my walk this morning I was thinking about how we are only young once, and what is the ultimate youth? Really I was thinking in those terms exactly, though they might make people cringe to think so dualistically, at least I know it carries that problem. So I thought about a phase of my life when I was unfortunatly hanging out with forty to fifty year old environmental professionals as a volunteer. I thought of a man named Steve L who carries a lot of unexpected impish wisdom. He said I need to enjoy my youth, to hop the next freight train and see the world, to live it up with Earth First activists, or dread my hair, or live on the wild side a little. I walk this straight and narrow road so intimidated by the idea that I might become mentally ill again. Meanwhile, as Mike B. pointed out recently, and as I used to think a lot in high school, most of the world goes would enjoy the psychotic thinking that I am so afraid of. That is why after all people self medicate, right? I try so hard to be safe and normal. But I really don't like normal people, thoughts, or ideas.

There is this common, true philosophy that people do not take to heart as much as they should. It is something like this: every day is your last, every moment with someone special however painful or insufficient is actually more of a delight than you appreciate at the time generally, so we should live it up.

Enter Elizabeth V. Her philosophy that governs her life somehow tangles the passion for life into the truth that people nearer to death are being left behind by the powers that be, the governments and the systems that run our society. Elizabeth is my hero. She forces people to think about things that they usually wouldn't. But she is not a negative nay-sayer. She is not negative nor a nay-sayer. In fact the has cultivated in her life a type of vibrant purity that is captured in the expression pura vida. When she became a grandmother she was not knitting footies (though that is ok); she was in college, getting a good old fashioned zero tuition education, yet throwing herself against a corrupted/veiled (not transparent) educational system, making use of study abroad oportunities and grants, hosting a party for the day of the dead with a shrine to the departed and lots of alcohol.

I did not know I was going to write about Elizabeth when I started thinking about age and role of life. I know it is kind of a bother to be posted about on the web, but I think she won't mind. Peace!

Where Our Spirits Meet and Converse

for Alisa

I have a habit of talking to birds,

singing to trees,

carrying a tune as I walk along.

Yesterday as I left the woods I had

sung to

I swear the forest sang back to me.

Dear Libby,

Every morning for several days I have taken Tobin on long walks, clearing his "tank" as Mom calls it and emptying my mind.  I want to write you a work of art in the form of a letter, today, when I realize that most of my conversations with most people have been monologues on one end or the other.  But the difference between talking to someone and with them is that call and response, like a choir might sing.  I remember this letter that I wrote that was by some fluke a gem classic, probably because I had just woken up after driving to an exciting new place in the dark.  That was Celo, a Quaker community, nestled gently in the hand of Mount Mitchell and the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Why had I gone for all this time without being aware of this place such a short drive from my birthplace and home?  I watched and sculpted my letter just as the fog lifted off of the highest peek, exposing the silhouette of the mountain majestic.  Dear Mom, Feel free to pass on this letter to the rest of the family if you think they'd care to read it.  The river here is called The Toe River...  And so on.  Libby, I think the point of me bringing up this letter was that something in it held an inquisitiveness open to the depths of my fellow human beings.  One time a poet friend of mine (Nell Maiden) said to me that she felt much better about her life now that she understood the art of conversation.  I think those were the last words I remember from her.  She died of cancer.  The literature in my mind runs wild but not like the Toe River, that would be great.  I think it is more of a toilet that needs fixing.  I need to let the outside world influence me more, to have intercourse with the ideas of others.  Sometimes reading is like that.  Am I a narcissist?  Why am I still talking about myself?  Even my questions are questions that beg to be answered for my own sanity not to console the reader.  All of the happy people I know, all of the good conversationalists rather can instruct a query that feels genuinely interested.  How do you seem so interested in my monologues?  Are all of my friends just humoring me?

I am posting this to my blog, a further projection of my unruly ego.  

Don't speak all at once.

In the Dark with a good candle, Maggie

Right now I feel really good because I finally got exercise today.  I did not have my usual good walk this morning and it slung me into some sad feelings.

I don't know if it is a good thing or a bad thing, but I have been very isolated lately.  Though I call people three or four times a day still, no one ever calls me.  No one reaches out by the phone.

It is my way to need to talk some to emote, to laugh, to cry. So today I called the crisis center because I needed to cry and no one will listen anymore.

I know that I am loved. I know that sometimes that love comes with reservations, usually.

So I called someone whose business is to help people like me, people with diagnosises of mental illness. People who need to know that someone out there cares about me.

And then, after a lot of good crying and letting out of emotions and worries and fear, then I went to the pool and swam like my butt was on fire.

Focus... Push. Hold it in. Don't Pause. Let it out. Kick. Pull. Flip.

Reading on mp3 is good. I have read 11 books this summer and I am working on 12. I will always remember this rush hour in Joey's Echo with Mom. Listening to Mom read Dickens aloud is even better.

Mom says Charles Dickens is not as good as some other author I don't actually remember now. She says this type of repetition is typical for Dickens.

The more I read, my thoughts increase that I am nothing yet. I am not especially tallented or skilled, maybe I have been willing. But that does not mean I am good. I am not very good.

But then Mom reads that line "the emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface."

I tell Mom she never could write anything as good as Dickens. "I couldn't either!" I catch myself.

Is it true? Now to prove myself wrong and apologize!

We'll Drop Hand in Hand

Ode to all of the sounds that our water makes, though I cannot help that I feel alone. But is a drop ever alone? It might seem like a million years of confinement, but falling from the sky might be the best thing that ever happened to me. When water is dropping from the sky, it sings a mute song. The pedestrian walking home on the Creeper Trail with a skip in her stride sees the rain coming, the layered sheets that always seem to come in her way. The woman, walking in Washington County Virginia knows the rain is coming with all her senses. The woman, whose name happens to be Betty, smells the rich smell that rises from the horse pastures. Wet hitting hard dry earth. Water splattering against humus and pies of equine compost. As the earth grows mushy, as the roots reach their tender appendages wanting dampness, I am plunging downwards, feeling like pumpkin dropped mistakenly from a produce truck. I cannot see that I am part of something larger than myself. I take this on faith. This is the lowdown on raindrops. We live a full life, collecting ideologies in our crystal identities, but only to evaporate in our solitude. The ride up to heaven wipes our memory bank plum dry. We know so little in the clouds but feel so buoyant in our childhood that we float on air. Some of us who cluster over arid zones long enough to learn the alphabet, to introduce ourselves to our friends and companions. But when lightening strikes and thunder rolls, Wind drops us loose to fall like spiders being kicked out of their web. Wind is with us, but we do not know what that means entirely. We are bright, whispers of hope in a world that could use rain, but we do not know our potential. Like a poet who does not know it, we are the single most integral requirement for Life. We were born with toxins in our metaphoric lungs and lead in our figurative brains. I try to keep my mind healthy, not awakened to the idea that I might live in the company of others. On the Creeper Trail, Betty the librarian has given up on her umbrella. The sun of the day peeps a ray through me and I see in my home grown mirror, a tear of gratitude in a woman's eye. Remain hopeful whispers a voice. Wind perhaps? Studs Turkel? Some part of my inner island I did not know I had? Remain hopeful. We are all wandering seekers: Betty the librarian, Studs, etc. A drop is to drop, I realize in a watershed moment. Hope says that all of we droplets are in the same pitcher. We are as different as snowflakes, and our conscience in collective has seen a glimmer. We are out of control, exposed to the bipolar moral energy of the land. The world is unknown. But the ray of sunshine has worked us into a collective rain sheet, that like a hundred monkeys washing sweet potatoes, the critical point is reached in elements that are right, and we now risk enough face to imagine that there are drops like us elsewhere. We are not alone! We are in the company of others! We are we! We yodel into the wind. Collectively, we all seem land on Betty the librarian at the same time. I land on a finger of her left hand, immediately pooling together in a friendly group of hopefully rejoicing water, soaking up the positive influence of Betty. As the librarian flings her good sturdy shelving arm, we fly off the joyful, bookish woman never looking up or back, gliding through the air in a clump, passing through a board of the bridge, and into the creek below. Constantly changing, collecting ourselves along the way, we follow the watershed down stream to the Clinch River, under bridges and over minnows and fresh water snails, to the Tennessee River, and the Mississippi River, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. Some of us evaporate along the way. We lie back and watch them go, letting go our love for them and growing our love for them simultaneously. We all will evaporate someday into a time and place unknown, our memories sucked dry again. Time is relative. I have traveled up rivers that flow up, down rivers that gurgle down. I have fallen so many times, always delicately dropping between the realms of hope and wonder. It is fine to wonder, to fear, to feel we are islands, to trap ourselves under dense debris in secret desire to prolong our time in the ocean. I never will see Betty again as she was, her eye so light in belief while wise in knowledge, looking at the rainbow in my mirror face, as if Wind had told her for the first time that things will be alright if we do our share and keep trying. But I will see her molecules in new places, and I can listen to Wind and the advice he must have given her.

Field of Prose

Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I'll meet you there. – Rumi

Lines that are parallel meet at infinity. – Euclid

As I drive up to the solitary man holding the stop sign, no one else is in site, though he holds a receiver up to his ear. My initial judgment is that he was possibly from a group of incarcerated road workers. Should I be worried? I don't see a reason. He spits and moves his hands, directing me to straighten my infamously sloppy parking job. Then, when I get it done good enough, he turns with his back to me as if to show off his “inmate” shirt just in case I had not caught on. I sit wondering about this unshaven man with long red hair until finally I hear him say into the receiver, “I'm sending one through.”

The compound word that comes to mind for him is one I often use to describe myself: “bad ass.” And as I drive down this country road, I am glad he gets this independent job with such a lovely view of Joe Pie Weed and Daisies; and I am glad I didn't get too much on his bad side.

Like Sisyphus, I am hauling rocks up a hill. But unlike Sisyphus, I find a wheel barrow that makes my life a whole lot easier. My grandnephew Jeremiah, who due to a sister almost fifty is a couple years older than me, is with me. We take breaks every half hour or so or when I get tired or too much sun.

When we talk, the work gets much faster, or rather I go longer between our breaks and the less lazy I feel because the more I enjoy the work. Jeremiah has been reading about evolution, which I like to talk more in detail. Then I say one of my most random comments: “I wonder what would the world be like if there were two suns?” And we pause in the field trying to bring the concept to life. Wiping my brow, I am, glad for a moment that we only have to deal with the heat and light from one sun. Jeremiah starts talking about infinity, a concept I loved in high school Calculus but haven't done much with since. “I wonder... I mean... how can you be sure there is infinity?” I ask. “I mean when you criticized evolution scientists you sounded like you didn't believe scientists should be certain of anything.” It was true, Jeremiah had been saying certainty was the downfall of the scientific method. “I believe in uncertainty as a fundamental principle of science,” he said. But I also have thought a lot about the mathematical concepts of infinity, negative infinity, zero, one and negative one, and I am pretty sure I believe in infinity and negative infinity too.”

I suppose I was just trying to challenge contradiction just in case. I let him know I am on the same page and we go back to talking about this unusual ground between fantastical and realistic worlds with dual suns, infinity and negative infinity, and the evolution of flight and feathers. Under this glaring sun I basked in the theoretical promised land of science that I walked away from taking English in college instead of math and science. Mathematics was always my best subject growing up until I tested out of it in college. Many times I crave Calculus and the frame of mind it gave me in high school.

We break from work under the shadow of oak and tulip trees. I sit beside a pile of caked horse dung, Jeremiah on a big, flat rock I had been thinking of gathering for our job. We are quiet for some time, drinking our water, then Jeremiah asks me if I hear the tapping sound through the woods and by the road. I tell him I do, and he asks who I think is making the noise. “I think it is that inmate and his one peg leg.” I kid him. Jerry thinks it's a man hammering a stake into the ground.

The intellectual world of classic thinkers and artists is becoming a thing of the past. People are atrophying their minds in front of computers with Facebook. I put my foot down and quit using Facebook a month ago and my life has been much better since. The back pain that plagued me for years disappeared almost overnight. My best explanation is it happened because I hunched over the computer so much less now without the social networking nusance.

Procrastination is a waste of time, quite literally. In this magical, infinite world, in this infinite universe, the construct of our life-time is is one thing that is so finite we can control exactly what we do with it. Every step has consequences on us and our world. There is no one right way. But procrastinating is wimping out at every hypothetical crossroads of way.

Enough to Go Around: Basho's Lesson

“Eat vegetable soup rather than duck stew.”

– Basho

Crave tuna.

Wonder what Basho would have said on tuna.

Open can of tuna.

Strain juice of tuna.

Give half tuna juice to Tobin the dog.

Alert Pickle the happily rolling cat of tuna.

Give half tuna juice to Pickle.

Mix in tuna tablespoon of mayonnaise, salt, and pepper.

Fork tuna onto whole wheat saltine crackers.

Indulge.

Put tuna bowl on floor for Tobin to finish.

Twist close pack of crackers.

Dodge sudden, uncharacteristic dog snapping at cat.

Pick up bowl off floor.

Gather evidence.

Return to scene of crime.

Scold Tobin, “bad dog.”

Wait two minutes with guilty feeling.

Comfort Pickle and Tobin respectively.

Regret tuna.

Maggie Hess

July 30, 2011