homes of adventure

This Horse saw us ‘a coming and came ‘a running up to the car… ya I know I have that horse vibe.. I am a horse woman especially the wild Mustangs !!

Being born and raised in the same hometown had its blessings and traps. Nature was plentiful. Building tree forts, dirt fights and running wild in the wind is what the kids in my neighborhood did. When I compare this to what my kids do, it is much different. Cell phones take away the freedom we have and from the danger.

Their free PlayStation fun compared to our saving dimes and quarters to play arcade games is a revolution in entertainment. I can’t say it is better or worse just different, as different as from what my parents did as kids.

Mom and Dad both living in the same house for over 60 years seems amazing to me now; especially now they are gone. My original long-term personal home base is gone. For me it was not so much the place as knowing that they would be there.

Mom cooking and Dad bellyaching about some silly thing. Playing poker at night after dinner or maybe a game of Hearts made it home. Mom always secretly helping Dad out with the games. He is acting like he didn’t know anything but like a shark that he would shoot The Moon.

I like to think that I am rekindling and bringing in this magic and epigenesis of youth to my youngsters. Telling scary stories while walking around the block at night and letting my oldest invite his friends over to the house, might do this. Once they were little. We had lots of room now the house is small, and we have less room for the same five or six young adults.

At this time in my life, I am letting go of the place that was my root-structure known as my parents. I have no say in the matter. Home is readjusting its meaning to me. First, I have kids and I am their home, but I also think of years as homes of adventure. The different events during different ten-year periods.

I can differentiate the different auxiliary-home-structures beginning with the 60s, then onto the 70s, 80s, 90s, until right this moment. I think we all have many homes where we put our roots down. Different places and people make us want to keep coming back for more.

I think home is where the heart is. It may be found in a foundational place, but it also can be more about the people or the person. When they pass on, they are remembered in the home of our hearts.

Lets stop it and take a flip-flopping break !!

Flip-flopping between the left and right side of the brain is a life challenge for most people, including me. I tend to settle in-between, between the paradoxical place of possibilities and blackboards.

Clearly the world is made up of minds that are flip-flopping all the time as well. This may be between analytical mathematics, the economy and buildings with art, music, and rebellion. One can be reflective or critiquing or one can be repulsive or loving.

Everywhere we look one can see the cause and effect of how we think in the environment of our lives.

Observing nature is a good middle ground because it blends both sides of the brain in an amazing way, helping to inspire our imagination as it did Newton while sitting under an apple tree. An apple fell on his head and so we know about gravity.

“Be it as in the story about Sir Isaac Newton discovering gravity when an apple fell on his head as he was sitting under an apple tree might be an invention. It states that decades after Newton’s death in 1727, the French philosopher Voltaire put it in a book, claiming that Newton’s niece, Catherine Conduit, believed it to be true.”

Find an easy blissful place and rest your mind and nature has a way of revealing things to those who take the time to listen. Yet, we tend to take the route of constant noise amplified by some sort of hand-held device which goes straight in our brains.

Let’s stop it and take a flip-flopping break. How can we spend more time in the intuitive part of our brain? Look at the artists, mystics, writers and punk rockers and you may find the answer.

I hope that this does not seem as if I have a preference between the two parts of the brain: because the only time they are not wrestling in my mind is when I am sitting at the blackboard, or while listening to some music, or while listening to the birds sing. A simple singular action can bring one to balance.

Daily Prompt: Ready, Set Go

The rain is coming down today. I love the rain. I am sad in my belly about current events. Priests abusing children and getting away with it and bans being pulled for women to fight combat duty. I think some laws are absurd. I am for equality for everyone this mostly includes children and women. I can not understand any woman who would want to kill, or any man for that matter. I can not understand why a priest would abuse a child when he represents Christ on earth?

So the rain is coming down and the wind shield wipers are moving and the jazz on the radio is playing smoothly. In this movement of reflection I know what is sane and what is insane. I think that maybe our culture, maybe American society is slowly going insane. It has lost a focus of reality and is absurd and shattered. I want to help some way. I do it here by writing if I can get one person to think differently. To stop the war machine, to stop the abuse, to stop and think… then the pain is not so bad.

Several self-portraits…

I viewed a wonderful film last night on the Sundance Channel called Starting Out in the Evening last. This is not a critical review of the film but a sharing of the themes that the film inspired out of my life.

It was a film about age differences, maturity and art. It was about passion, greed and love. It is about a book that an author wrote when he was much younger, and a graduate student who falls in love with the man who wrote that book when he was that young man. It is about a picture of a young man and the real author who is now aged.

I think it is better to achieve fame and fortune later in life. For me it is a bummer for younger people to judge me by what I achieved when I was much younger. In the film this older author has moved on from the young man ideals of youth. Oh sure he talked about them and shared them with others. Yet, it was the here and now that was his real concern. I related to this completely.

We all get older and we often find ourselves in the mist of youngsters. Sometimes I do find it humorous to listen to the troubles of women in their 20s. They look at me like I don’t already know what they are experiencing. I am 54. I have had 11 lovers and my heart has been broken more than once. I have been independent, dependent: loved and hated. Nothing really shocks me anymore besides the way our culture sometimes treats children.

I think all of us, when we get past 50, should start to write our biographies and do a self-portrait before we die. (I say this laughing due to another reference to the film Flight Club) Starting Out in the Evening last clearly states that to reach maturity takes a good deal of time and life experience. Youth has its day but not for long and definitely not forever as in a picture, book, magazine or song.

I would love reading my mother’s, grandfather’s or my aunt’s biography now! Unfortunately they did not write one. So I gather what I can from others and from what’s left behind about their lives.

Not all of us will be accomplished authors… but to our loved ones we can become accomplished authors by writing our biographies for them. As I get older this is what’s most important to me…any fame or future is just a little pinch of the pleasure of sharing who I am with others, especially my loved ones.

Grasping and sharing the story of my life, for I will someday die… sounds like fun too me!!

The picture above is me. I was 18 months old. I did not want to have my picture-portrait taken. I was nervous, scared and biting my fingers nails….