audiophilia, the abyss, the unborn

Around nine weeks into pregnancy, my dreams were hijacked. A hormonal tidal wave of chaos and nightmares tore through my subconscious, leaving me feeling a bit frazzled. I missed my usual dreams: beautiful, fluid, inspiring, sometimes lucid. This Wee One directed dreaming continued to be a bit of a bane until the volume was turned up to give the disjointedness a little more form.

I believe that my unborn child is an audiophile. Just as my primary sense is vision, and I've spent hours in museums and architectural wonders all around the world marveling at the sights (and have lost many an hour to things like this: http://weheartit.com/Xobel), I can't help but feel that my child is going to be directed through life by their ears, moved profoundly by music, fascinated by noise. The dreams that I have are now full of songs, from the totally original to the wildly popular, and everything in between. Conversations are crisp and well-paced, the vibrating intonations of people's voices full of subtlety and meaning. 

As the baby is now developing hearing and can already, so they say, hear my voice, I am finding my own (temporarily?) adopted fixation on sound expanding well beyond the dream realm and well beyond the musical realm. I have spent years laughing at my best friend for his love affair with bizarre and often grating "noise music" of all kinds, and yet now I find myself tipping my hat to it.

Each planet (and I'm sure every little thing down to random space debris) produces electromagnetic waves that can be translated into sounds for us to totally trip out on. I have never been one to want to "prove" anything. While to protect the magic and sanctity of my less conventional beliefs, I just don't talk about them, I don't feel like the core of my belief in them is necessarily threatened by nay-saying analysts. I've never developed a defense for why I am so attracted to astrology, and why I take a hefty dose of it rather seriously, albeit flexibly. It just resonates with me, and that's fine. But these planetary sounds are expanding upon that belief in a rather tangible way. I just cannot imagine that these frequencies and the subtle gravitational pulls of these distant monoliths don't affect us in some way, particularly given the undeniable power the ever waxing and waning moon wields over us. I listen to these chilling tones and think about the archetypes that each planet represents; I feel for them and press beyond, the feel for even more.

My love's favorite question is "how?" This little inquiry has led him to a very successful place in life: he bought the beautiful home that we share at a very tender age and is so esteemed at his work that over the course of less than two years he is being granted at least five, maybe even six months off in total; since the end of 2011, we've visited Peru, meandered down the east coast from Boston to West Virginia, and traversed most of western Europe, including (the ever-enchanted) Iceland, and in a mere handful of months my dearest will be enjoying a simply epic dose of paternity leave the likes of which are rarely seen outside of Scandinavia. Yes, he is lucky, and yes he is responsible, and relentlessly driven (to a fault), but I do feel that his "how-asking" is more at the root of his success than anything else. Prompted by the disturbing nature of our high-tech world, the "program or be programmed" reality of what we are weaving around ourselves, he very un-academically figured out "how" to manipulate a system that is bent on manipulating him - a skill that goes a long way in this freaky day and age, particularly when backed-up by practical passions. The frugal nature of his home-ownership is also victim to his inquiries - renovations, electrical work, plumbing: it has all become, for better or worse, to varying degrees, his forte. When he writes his strange and beloved novel, "how" seems to rule the plot FAR more than "why" or even "what."

He picks my brain often when I talk about my far-out beliefs. "How" do spirits communicate with people? "How" do planets effect personalities? "How" does reincarnation work? Thankfully, true to Pisces form in spite of his stubborn Taurus moon, he never asks, "How do you know?" He understands that sometimes you just feel things and that's OK; I wouldn't have been able to marry him (or even date him) were that not so. The world doesn't necessarily have to make sense, you just have to know how to navigate it - and, according to him, navigate it well. At any rate, I rarely know how to answer his "how's." It just has never been my question. I'm more of a "WTF?" kind of person.

Anyway. Along those lines, there are absolutely NO words - or even questions - to wrap around the immensity of outer space. Whether I look at it as a physical thing or a metaphysical thing, it's just a life-long OMFG.

bleeding heart in the islands

I have to remind myself that this isn't the only time in my life that I've risen from bed before the sun rises, and though the Wee One definitely makes it that much more frequent an occasion, other matters of the heart, residing deep within me, have filled the darkness with too much feeling for my eyelids to close over. Yes, my eyelids have failed me many times, both in holding back tears and blacking out my vision as it drifts round and round the images that spring up in the black.

Sometimes its just better to turn on the light.

I once lived on a mystic island. Honestly, and much to the disbelief of my previous incarnations, I rarely think about it anymore as it was - as a place, yes, but as an experience, not so much. Like when I lived on an enchanted mountain, the nostalgia grew too heavy and I found it too difficult to move forward while carrying its weight. You can't stay in love with bygone eras anymore than you can with wandering souls. But every now and then it creeps into my mind, and at four in the morning, I quite welcome it. What else am I going to be doing with myself at four in the morning? Dream recollection is the order of the hour, after all.

My life has become stiff and rigid the past few years. "Reality" will become calcified if I am not careful. With three (or even four) celestial bodies swimming around the 12th house at the time I was born, and a big, swollen Pisces moon, this is a very bad thing for me. My mind has stopped feeling so free since I've relinquished some of my literal freedom in the name of romance and stability; I suppose that makes perfect sense but it came as an unwelcome side effect no less. Sorrow, which, to be honest, I rather appreciate, plays much less of a role in my life. Tension of many kinds has stepped up to the replace it, though not nearly in quality or quantity - I had a real good thing going with sorrow for a very, very long time. These are things I am trying to change, but there still seem to be some missing ingredients, and whether they are or my soul or of the world is still beyond me.

But at the time that I was living on my mystic island, high up in the San Juans on the border of the Great North, I had a totally different set of preoccupations (love sickness, anxious aimlessness), and a whole witches brew of strengths that I sometimes fear I have lost (waking dreams, tentative but honest vulnerability, full on psychic powers). A rare blend of isolation and time-sensitivity provided an opportunity for me to be true to myself like never before. I could feel the build-up before the release, beginning with my first trip to Peru, and the let down following it, the doors closing up once again when I left Portland in 2010. Not even when I was in Seattle that year could I pry my heart open as much as it was. Often, in retrospect, I find much of the emotionalism, over-generosity, and esoteric sensationalism that I gushed in the islands with an almost needy desperation embarrassing, yet I know that I have never been truer and never felt better. The rewards I reaped for exposing myself to such a degree were profound levels of awareness of unseen things rivaled only by those of my childhood self, a tremendous, bitter-sweet sense of the poetry of life, and an fleeting sense of being accepted by those around me.

Because of the indescribable horror dreams of my last trip to Peru, I've been forced to see my growing skepticism and hardness for what it is: a product of living in a town over-fixated on the hard-sciences and over-saturated with atheists. One of my biggest weaknesses is smiling and nodding when I couldn't agree less; I have no idea how to break this habit tactfully. I become what surrounds me, whether I can relate to it or not. I vacillate between a wish to escape this place and the burdensome realization that the truth can only be found within and it matters not where you are and who you are with. I know that it is up to me to reconnect with my essential nature - and to be honest about it, no matter how afraid I am to expose myself now days. If I am going to be a good mother, I have to do these things, for motherhood to me, even more so than a social matter and far, FAR more than a strictly biological affair, is an immensely spiritual thing, necessitating above all generosity, vulnerability, and some serious psychic intuitive powers for sure.

My love and I are planning a trip to the islands this spring. I'll give another nod to the fact that the place is not the time, but regardless: mystic islands are mystic islands and that's good enough for me.

wee ones

I have moments, usually in the early morning, when I am possessed with a timid glee. Often, right after waking, my hand will casually brush against my belly; flat on my back in bed, a rock-hard lump readily jumps up to greet my unsuspecting fingers, giving me a thrill. As soon as I stand up, it vanishes into the soft abyss of the typical belly of a gourmand, but the mild, pleasant shock remains.

Uncaring as to whether I adopted or personally grew one, I've wanted (desperately) to have a child all of my life, but have had a rather rough go making this dream a reality. Until my first doctor's appointment at 10 weeks, I could not (and would not) wrap my mind around what was happening. Since then, despite two ultrasounds and an ever-so-slowly expanding mid-line, the experience has been punctuated with moments of disbelief.

But when these cyclones of tentative excitement and supernatural levels of curiosity possess me, any nagging fear is swallowed whole. Usually, the bitter scenarios my dark mind likes to throw out are replaced by very simple memories that make my heart swell (and almost burst): rubbing sunscreen on fat little arms before going out into the hot sun, blowing bubbles into music-filled air with tiny tots dancing all around my feet, gently stroking a small back as a child drifts off into midday dream land.

Having worked with little children for most of my adult life, I've familiarized myself with a wide-range of personalities and have been granted a rather intimate view into exactly where nature and nurture begin and end. Spoiler: nature is responsible for an awful lot. My own child is a mystery to me; all that my influence (and my much-more-grounded love's) will do, ideally, is give them a sense of calm, security, confidence, and curiosity. What they end up curious about and how they express themselves in their (much-hoped-for) self-awareness and strength is totally their thing. One could shudder with equal amounts of dread and excitement - but of course, in the reality of this moment, the dread is pretty much absent. I'm a bit prone to self-sabotage (a major influence of "The Twelfth House"), but I don't think I could pour my energy into deliberately creating new life unless I believed (with those rose colored glasses), that they were going to be among the most incredible people I've ever known.

On the youth front, there's some stiff competition. With nothing to really go on in imagining my future charge, I spend lazy moments musing over some of my favorite freshly-incarnated souls. Though countless wee ones have found their way into my heart, and there are many (such as "the healer," "the rock star," "the magical fairy" and "the genius" to name a few) that I wonder about almost daily, mostly I think about members of my very favorite class, a group of wobblers-cum-toddlers at a large but lovely center in Portland, Oregon:

AR - This little girl was a true artist, a somewhat neurotic Libra after my own heart. Before she was two years old, she would hold her face within a hair's width of her pen (or crayon) and painstakingly produce perfect spirals on the class posters - beautiful, colorful works reminiscent of fireworks that the other children would scribble on and splatter with paint like Jackson Pollock. AR would personally give these joint-projects a distinctly psychedelic touch with her spirals. She possessed an intensity that was beyond her free and relaxed parents - she suffered chronic constipation as a natural result of demanding perfection in all things she did, and often collapsed in fits if she failed to live up to her own expectations. For her, I felt a mixture of pity and admiration.

AV - One of a small handful of "linguistic geniuses" I've been blessed with knowing, a Capricorn as most of them have been (for reasons open to speculation). She was deliberate and centered and, like other such prodigies, hardly like a child at all. At only a year and half, one could carry on conversations with her. A favorite memory of AV begins with the indiscretion of us teachers complaining at work about how we never got raises. AV mistook the word for "raisins." We tried to explain the difference, but it just compounded the situation; she began to demand raisins with an out-of-character confusion and ever-increasing volume until, quite suddenly, the school cook appeared at the door with a bowl full of them. "I heard someone wanted raisins?" A more heartbreaking memory involves her chastising me for having abandoned her upon my return from a two-month trip to Peru.

E - This little boy is one reason I am excited to be, at the very least, expecting a Leo. He was the most well-controlled "wild child" I've ever known - perfectly capable of following instructions, yet giving way to nothing short of acrobatics as soon as he was given the opportunity. Literally. Before turning two, he learned quite by accident that he could stand on his hands, and even do flips. It was a bizarre practice to behold. I imagined that he'd been a circus ringleader in a previous life; if he had understood that concept I'm sure he would have been flattered. Like any Leo, he performed with gusto. Never one for crying (unless he had, say, bit clean through his tongue - the stitches from which he was quite proud of), I was disturbed one day to hear him whimpering behind me. Turning around, I found that he was inches from the mirror, enthusiastically exploring his "sad face" - when he noticed I'd caught him in the act, he became vividly embarrassed. He was enamored of a smaller girl in the class, GA, and at random times throughout the day would shout her name and run to embrace her. She hated that, and feared him.

J - A quiet and reserved Virgo with potential magical powers. he was intensely observant and reflective; one time shortly after turning two, I watched him as he stood apart from the group, toy guitar in hand, attempting to get the precise beat of the song that was playing with the tapping of his foot - and succeeding perfectly. He had a sweet demeanor and an attachment to one of his teachers that was much more mature than any I'd witnessed before. At my first job with toddlers (in the Middle East), I myself had become the favorite of one little girl, and she nearly had a nervous breakdown when I returned to Oregon. In the absence of his favorite care-provider, J would simply become a little sullen, but ultimately possessed an intuitive understanding of relationships and the ways of the world. Potty training him was a bit of a challenge, however, as his desire to succeed at the task left him ashamed were he to accidentally poo in his diaper; his efforts to hide his mistakes herein were sometimes quite messy, which only magnified his humiliation.

O - Sharing J's exact birthday, O was also an introspective, quietly sensitive little boy; with wide blue eyes and a penchant for making bizarre statements, sometimes giving the impression that he found the world around him hallucinogenic. I remember, while the rest of the class huddled in a protected corner waiting for their parents to come take them home early, O standing in awe at the room's wall of windows, his face squeezed into the narrow crack in the glass door, watching a swirling, errily warm spring windstorm descend upon the neighborhood, threatening and foreboding. I stood with hi cause that's totally my style too. How can you not be enchanted by wild weather? Above all others, O served as a great example of infamous child mimicry - I could only assume that someone in his personal life was an avid sports fan (or something along those lines), for at the end of each sing-along, when the other children would clap and cheer, O would often throw up his hands and exclaim, with pure innocence, "Ooooh SHIT! Yeah!"

I wish that I had kept records at all of the places I've worked of the amazing, intriguing, hilarious and awe-inspiring things I've heard kids say. I work with kids right now, some right around this age, but they do not speak like others I've known. I can't help but suspect it's a matter of childcare philosophy, that this is one area where nurture trumps nature, at least briefly. Even a child like E, who I wouldn't describe as a "linguistic genius," far surpasses most kids I've worked with in non-RIE centers. He would awake from his nap talking to himself, describing the fish in the tank above where he slept in as much detail as he could, usually a little too loud. I'm vaguely ashamed of feeling disappointed in little ones that cannot express themselves in our too-linear, often-inadequate world of words, but I miss the window to their world that comes from precocious mastery of that skill. The things that very, very young children say, when they can, are sometimes mind-boggling in what they reveal about infant consciousness.

Even while not working at a RIE center, the RIE philosophy has been so embedded into my mind that I apply it regardless. I cannot help but have the possibly unfair, probably unrealistic wish that this method IS what is responsible for the wildly disproportionate number of highly articulate children I've known in centers that follow it, and that my own child will be a little AV, or at least E, capable of filling my mind with their own fantasies before they even qualify for toddler-hood. I count Magda Gerber as one of the people who've inspired me the most - be it via brainwashing or not. Hard to tell some times.

http://www.rie.org/

magic house

Magic House, November 2007

I have never been good at keeping a blog. On the other hand, I used to be an excellent diarist. After taking this photo, I scrawled in one of my most tattered journals: "I had a blissful weekend in Olympia . . . fantasizing about an abandoned house in Priest Point Park that before unwittingly was and now holistically is my obsession." And that was it. Laughing in the face of well over two dozen diaries flooded with disjointed poetic prose on everything from communism to alcoholism, I have only that one sentence honoring this "obsession." It's lack of substance is an eerily fitting companion to this one almost-accidental image I captured that chilly afternoon; together they paint a ghostly portrait of a place that hardly existed. Which, in both my literal and figurative books, is perfect and true.

I'm writing this blog because I'm pregnant. I'm supposedly opening the door for an entirely new human experience, and would prefer to commit myself wholly to that project when the time comes. I promised myself that I would "finish my life's work" before taking on this kind of responsibility, but didn't take into account the crippling exhaustion, relentless headaches, or dire anxiety that sometimes comes with building other people's bodies.

What I mean to say is, I've been doing a terrifically crappy job of writing my story.

Writing about how little I've been writing just might be the first step in getting back to work. According to completely arbitrary medical concepts, I've got five and a half months to "complete" something that has been brewing since I was fifteen years old, mutating and morphing from cosmic chaos into something only-slightly-more concrete, mostly in total secrecy, for over half of my life.

Magic House is the third most important character in the story that I've been writing, and no doubt the first most compelling, mystical and real. Before discovering Olympia, Washington in my early 20's, the setting of my story had been "imaginary," a wet, watery world that I stole from my own fevers and dreams. Yet the Puget Sound negated any supposed authenticity; it WAS the water I was dreaming of. And the San Juan Islands to the north, I would soon discover, WERE the islands I wrote of so fondly. The cultural differences were irrelevant in light of the soul of the land, the barely perceptible humming vibration of the still water that was so unmistakably familiar. It seemed to me that the goings on of the strange characters who peopled my private Puget Sound were living right along side the more tangible reality, just a few inches behind a thin veil.

The first time I slipped and slid down the steep trails of Priest Point Park, I not only fell in love, but I knew that this was the very park in which I'd placed the the dilapidated, forgotten old house that my motley gang of imaginary friends reclaimed and turned into their home. Years later, when finally introduced to the house in person, I quietly accepted that my story was not mine at all, and that there was much more to the world than meets the eye. Overwhelmed as I was by the intoxicating vibes that radiated from what could be nothing less than some kind of a magical vortex, I left with only that one blurry photograph. Now, long after the fact, I can't help but kick myself for being such a tripped-out space-cadet hippie weirdo moron. I should've filled the whole freaking memory card.  

Because, once more being true to form and it's fate in the Story Realm, Magic House disappeared. I never got to see it again.

My love explores the Magic House Grave Yard

A couple I met along the trail to where it once stood told me that it had been torn down, for a long list of obvious reasons. The piece of land that it occupied had been reseeded with native grasses and wildflowers, and, with the exception of the odd cultivated rhododendrons, rose bushes and wisteria vines, the land rather seamlessly reconnected with the wilds of the park itself. Just as it did in my story. Along with the initial sorrow at its loss came a massive, second tidal-wave of enchantment and fascination. 

As of last spring, the only remnants of Magic House were along its beach: relics of its hundred year-old foundation. My love and I collected a number of shells, rocks, and hard-to-find, ever-prized bricks; I count these among my most prized possessions. He told me the other day that even these things are completely gone now. And he would know - he's been immersed in his own story revolving around his own Magic House for just as long as I have, and at one point in time his equally mysterious and strange structure sat on the tip the small peninsula jutting out of downtown Olympia. At that time, his Magic House and my Magic House could see one another across the calm waters of Budd Bay. Along with giving our main characters the same names before we met, the two of us could have used magical coincidence alone as grounds to wed, but there's more socially-acceptable reasons behind our marriage, as well.

The Beach Ruins

When the world prompts you to write with such deliberate, uncanny, mysterious tactics, you feel a little like you have no choice - like when crazy people hear the voice of God telling them to do outrageous things and they land themselves in jail or worse, only somewhat less fanatical and definitely less dangerous. But I feel for those people. And my own mild lunacy gives this whole silly hobby of mine a touch of dire desperation; if I don't do what the Puget Sound tells me to do before it's too late, surely something terrible will come of things. At worst, Seattle will be destroyed by a horrific earthquake, but more likely, I will simply lose my strange connection with the Story Realm, and live a long, boring, uninspired life. And I'd like to set a better example for my future child than either of those.

getting to know me

At ages 13 and 20, Marcel Proust answered these questions (though not in this order) with clever, thoughtful words that I can't beat. But I'll answer them myself anyway.

Your most marked characteristic?

Spaciness. At least that is how it comes across to other people. I always know exactly where my head is.

What is your principle defect?

There's too many competing for this position to pick just one.

What natural gift would you most like to possess?

The ability to make music, and hypnotize with it -- a close second to inter-dimensional travel, which may or may not be considered "natural" (depending on the audience).

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Being by the sea, on the sea, or living as a mermaid in the sea.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

A total severance from divinity, mystery and magic. (Nihilism?)

What is your favorite occupation?

Writing my stories when I feel like it, listening to children tell theirs when I don't.

What would you like to be?

A professional dream machine, and a sweet heart.

Where would you like to live?

Almost anywhere around the Puget Sound, ideally in a mildly haunted house.

Who are your favorite characters in history?

The sad ones. I can't help it.

The quality you most like in a man?

Sensitivity and emotional honesty; it shows real bravery.

The quality you most like in a woman?

Creative guts and an inspiring sense of self.

What do you most value in your friends?

In my real friends, I'm always grateful for a shared love of bikes, an understanding of magical places, and an intuitive grasp of my need for space. In my imaginary friends, everything; they're just great people.

What is your present state of mind?

Scattered. It's no good.

How would you like to die?

I'd like to disappear and leave people wondering what happened to me and if I was even dead at all. But not until after my parents died; that's just a cruel thing to put your parents through.

What is your motto?

It used to be, "If there's an exception to the rule, it's not a rule." After that it was, "Let it go." I am working on a new one right now; I don't have one and I think that's a bad thing.

I visited Proust's grave in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in October. Someone had set out a tea cup on a small plate for him. He's one of my favorite dead people, though that list is quite long.