how does grief look?

as i said in my post the other day, one of the things i've been thinking about is the individual nature of grief. and how grief hits you at the strangest moments and in the strangest ways. 

maybe it's just autumn, and the changing of the seasons, but i think it started a few weeks ago. i went to a gourmet knitting day that someone i know holds regularly. she's an amazing knitter and even participated in the knitting equivalent of the great british baking show. only knitting. and in denmark. and since i eternally hope to learn to knit and i like food, i went. so there, in a room full of knitters, i found myself talking about my mom's alzheimer's and how on some level i hadn't forgiven her for it. 

i know how terrible that sounds.

but there you have it.

and i found myself explaining to them the way we found, at the height of my realization of how bad it was with mom in 2016, what we thought were dad's bowling balls in mom's car and discovered instead that it was a case full of pistols and a case full of ammo. and how i still feel shocked by that. and unable to forgive her for what she could have done with those weapons. in that moment of finding them, i clearly saw in my mind's eye, my beautiful, amazing daughter, knocking on mom's door to visit her and mom not recognizing her in the throes of her diseased brain and taking one of those guns and shooting her own granddaughter. that didn't happen, but the fact that it could have takes my breath away, still to this day, as i write these words. and i can't forgive her for it. i can't forgive her cracked brain - for having all those guns, for loading them into her car, for the shooting of her granddaughter that she didn't do. and i can't forgive the state of south dakota for renewing her fucking permit to carry just days after they took her driver's license. what kind of a fucked up world do we live in that that's even possible.

the lovely knitting ladies were fascinated and horrified that such a thing could happen. it couldn't happen in denmark, that's for sure. and though i didn't know them, they listened to me and understood me and gave me space and that was a great deal of comfort that i'm not sure i've felt before. and i wonder if explaining it all in danish put me an emotional step away from it that helped me. and i think it may have been a baby step towards forgiving her, though i haven't done so yet.

i'm more certain than ever that this grief thing is a process and one of which we have very little control. 

but in the days since, i've felt pangs of missing mom. weirdly, mostly in connection with putting on my socks. which i realize also sounds weird. mom was a sock snob and i have a lot of her high end socks in my sock drawer. and enough time has passed that most of them are quite threadbare from wear and in recent weeks, i've felt sorrow about that. like when her socks are gone, she will really be gone. though she's been gone for more than two years now and because of the disease, she was gone for quite a lot longer than that. 

why does my grief manifest in a sock? i've got multiple pairs in my darning basket, but i've yet to darn them. would darning them darn my own soul? would it help? is this how my grief looks?

at least i feel i've stopped telling myself how my grief should look and started accepting how it looks. for me, in my own individual situation. right here and now.  

eddies in the space-time continuum

i found an old ring in a box today, one that i hadn't been able to find for some years. i even swear i'd looked in that box already, several times, but today, there it was. it's the black hills gold ring with the marquise cut diamond. the ring was my mom's and the diamond a remnant of my first, mistaken engagement. i would occasionally have pangs of sadness that i had lost it, but apparently i only mislaid it. for about a decade or so. i hardly ever wear gold jewelry anymore, but i'm glad i finally found it. the other ring is my mom's engagement and wedding ring. when i found the lost one, i went digging in a more recent jewelry bowl, looking for mom's ring. they kind of fit together, but also don't. but it was in a way that was pleasing to me today. i think it's part of the always surprising grief process. i even put them back on after my shower. i just need to be wearing them right now. for some reason unknown even to myself. they make me feel close to mom in a way that i seem to need right now. which is perhaps why that ring showed up today in that box that i swear i had looked in before. perhaps it was there today because i needed it to be. when things like that happen, i always think of arthur dent, stuck on that planet where he perfected the sandwich made of some strange beasts that periodically ran through, slipping between worlds on some eddy in the space-time continuum. today, an eddy brought the ring back to the box where it belonged. just at the moment i needed it.

* * *

in these days of zoom meetings, what's on people's bookshelves?

* * *

whenever i had a break today, i read some of this old interview with murakami in the paris review. that made me happy. and made me want to write. and maybe even made me want to go for a run. but not so much that i did so.

* * *

there were a bunch of great quotes in the murakami article and i want to save some of them here, capital letters and all:

"When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait. " 

”I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.” 

”When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” 

”All human beings have a sickness in their minds. That space is a part of them. We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts; that is my belief. I can see the insane part of my mind especially well when I’m writing—insane is not the right word. Unordinary, unreal. I have to go back to the real world, of course, and pick up the sane part. But if didn’t have the insane part, the sick part, I wouldn’t be here.” 

“…a sense of humor is a very stable thing. You have to be cool to be humorous. When you’re serious, you could be unstable; that’s the problem with seriousness. But when you’re humorous, you’re stable. But you can’t fight the war smiling.” 

”Experience itself is meaning.” – Murakami (i might have to have that one tattooed.)

kind of appropriate that, since the other phrase i'd like tattooed is from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "reality is frequently inaccurate." said by Ford Prefect, not Arthur Dent. and one more, from Bitov, "unreality is a condition of life." that's it, my next three tattoos.

just get writing already

thanks to my old bloggy friend, lynne, of wheatlands, i read a magnificent piece by helen brain on her writing process of her forthcoming post-apocalyptic YA trilogy. it had me thinking all day. thinking about building imagined worlds in clay, or at least drawing them as a map, maybe drawing up a timeline on the wall. you see, lynne, judith (also from the old bloggy days) and i are working on a project together - a project that we hope becomes a novel.  or rather, not that we hope will become a novel - a project that WILL become a novel.

but for that to happen, we need to get writing and i'm weirdly struggling with that. it's strange, because i actually love to write and although i'm out of practice, i feel it's like riding a bike, i will be able to do it again if i just try. but, i'm having trouble sitting down and doing it. and i'm not sure why.

i listened to stephen king's on writing on audible and he basically says that you just have to sit down and do the work, day after day. and look at all that he's produced! and he did it drunk, high and hung over for many years, so surely i can manage when i'm none of those and have plenty of time to devote to it.

so what's stopping me? fear that what i write won't be good enough for my writing partners? fear that the words won't come? distractions - the internet, master chef, netflix, litterboxes to pick, laundry to do, dinners to make. i think, "today i'll be able to settle in after i make a nice coffee for myself. or just after i have some lunch." but somehow, the settling in doesn't happen. i get fidgety in front of the keyboard and the writing doesn't come.

i sometimes wonder if i'm in the midst of a mild depression. i'm not sure i'd be able to discern the difference between it and everyday life. january and february are the darkest, most dreary months in these northern latitudes and that doesn't help me. you'd think a steady rain outside would be just what i need to keep me indoors in front of the computer, but alas, instead it renders me sluggish and uninspired and a bit grey myself and as much as it should, it does not make me sit down and write. (that's not strictly true, as i am sitting down and writing this.)

i love the story we're working on - a story of a brave, amazing young dutch woman who sailed as a man with the dutch east india company, was exposed along the voyage and put ashore in the burgeoning cape colony. there she met abraham, an aging pillar of the new community, who married her and they had a child before it was revealed that she was already married and she was sentenced to bigamy and banished back to europe. and all of this is true! we just have to weave it into a historical novel and bring her story to life.

maybe it's there that the pressure lies - the idea of telling her story and doing it justice is a bit daunting. she must have been so brave and adventurous to set off on that journey, how do we find her voice?  all i know is that i certainly won't find it by sitting here, not writing anything.

and so i turn back to helen brain's good advice to herself..."Maybe all that was needed for my book was the courage to push myself into unknown territory. Maybe I could immerse myself in my subconscious, and let the book filter up from the depths, instead of trying to force it to conform to my conscious process."

or maybe i should just get writing.

is this art? a torso project update

it's time for a little torso project update. some of the creative women from the original torso project weekend met up yesterday to show their finished products/works in progress and to discuss next steps towards showing the work.

the end results are as diverse as the women themselves. as i see it, the common thread for all is autobiography. these casts of our very bodies, frozen in a moment in time, are the canvas for a snapshot of all that we feel has made us who we are, right here and right now.

words, photos, maps, yarn, paint, drawings, color - all have been used to depict the individual lives of each of us. how we see ourselves and how we imagine that others see us. these torsos hold fragments of our memories, our lives, our documents, our experiences. they are there, written on our very bodies.

but i find myself thinking about whether they are art. we used artistic techniques - collage, paint, photography, one person even "drew" in yarn, as you can see above - but did we achieve actual art?  which raises the more complicated question of what is art anyway? it's a bit like that old joke about pornography, "i know it when i see it." and i can't help but think that what we made wasn't art per se.

but if it's not art, then what is it? it is expressive. and highly personal. it is storytelling. and a bit of art therapy, in that i think we all found it therapeutic to look within for our memories and stories. but to ask a museum to display our work would be a stretch. a big one. maybe it would be different if yoko ono or madonna had been part of our project - they would lend caché and would have perhaps lifted us all in our visions and our work. one of the most powerful things we did yesterday was that each person shared the thoughts behind their torso. and it made them so much more meaningful to hear people's stories.  but art needs to be able to stand alone, as we can't stand them beside at an exhibition and explain them to people.

but the fact is that we are a bunch of creative people in a little town in the middle of nowhere in denmark who happen to have tried to tell a little piece of the story of who we are in the form of a plaster cast of our own bodies. and while a few members of the group are trained as artists, as a whole we are not. we are teachers and office workers and librarians and nurses and consultants and physical therapists and prison guards. and those are wonderful things to be.

what we had was an amazing experience - to make those torsos together in a room of 20+ women. baring ourselves (literally) and opening up our hearts and experiences and stories and sharing them is a powerful thing, a wild woman sisterhood sort of thing. but where do we go with it? we are going to exhibit them locally at the end of august, but i wonder beyond that. they might fit well in a library exhibition, connected to other forms of autobiography, or to part of a storytelling conference. but i honestly don't think we'll convince a museum or a gallery to show them.

here's mine, i'm not done yet. it's filled with words that resonated with me - many in danish, because those are the newspapers that i have at hand. i've given those words first a wash of sepia, followed by a a wash of watered down paynes grey ink, as i don't want to completely cover them. tho' i do intend to cover them to an extent with small paintings and drawings of places and memories that are important to me. but mine isn't art either, but it is a personal expression of me. words are important to me. as is expressing myself. right now, it's darker and more foreboding than i actually feel, which is interesting, but doesn't reflect the hazy vision of it that resides in my head. and that's a big part of the process too.

in which she starts out pious and ends up her usual devious self

i'm learning - slowly, all too slowly - to let go of my expectations of other people. especially the small ones (both people and expectations). for example - if you were copying selected pages of a book that would give you an idea of what that book was about, you would find it natural to include the table of contents, right? apparently, that's an unrealistic expectation on my part. but i have realized that the level of frustration it causes me is COMPLETELY not worth the energy it takes. so i'm trying to let go of such expectations and their attendant sense of frustration. and on the odd occasion when i'm able to, i find it makes me feel lighter and generally makes my navigation through the world easier and much happier.

but it's hard. especially if the failure to meet my expectations makes the person who failed to meet them, in my head at least, seem less intelligent or perhaps downright stubborn. because those things aren't necessarily true. (tho' they are also not necessarily NOT true.)  but once i've decided someone is stupid or stubborn or unprofessional or all three, i pretty much write that person off and they have no chance with me again. this has not always been a good thing. so i'm trying to be less hasty in my judgements when people fail to meet my expectations.

the problem is that the we are FULL of expectations. it's how we navigate the world - cultural expectations, expectations towards what we consider politeness and fair treatment - our expectations guide our actions and behavior. it's so automatic that we don't even realize we have them. hence the frustration and disappointment when they're not met.

i do realize that this is all rather abstract. so here's the deal...i've recently been working with some people who i had professional expectations towards and i have been surprised several times when those expectations, especially of what i would consider a normal level of professionalism, were not met. i was surprised when i was asked to do something that i deemed contrary to my professional integrity. and in refusing to do this thing (it wasn't something illegal, or anything serious like that, it just felt unfair and unprofessional towards the client), i in turn disappointed the expectations of the person asking me to do it and it became a rather pissy vicious circle of disappointment. but i stood my ground because i felt my professionalism was at stake, as well as my sense of duty towards the client. and this wench person doesn't seem to be able to just let it go. she has actually said to me several times since how irritated she was that i maintained my professionalism instead of compromising and just doing what she asked - her argument being "we do that all time."  which frankly, isn't an argument at all. and made me lose respect for her even more, because she can't even put together a proper argument.

but i'm trying to take a deep breath, holding onto the feeling in the pit of my stomach that i did the right thing and just let go of it. being righteous about my sense of right and wrong isn't a good use of my energy either.

it makes it all much easier that i can clearly see a way to use her lack of professionalism to my advantage. mwahaha!

decisions, decisions

last week, i went to a fabric store with a friend. she's making a new bedspread for her bed and i've been helping her design it. she had bought some lengths of beautiful cream-colored silk and we had settled upon a strip of colored silk for down the middle of it. we went to the fabric store and she quickly found the bolts of silk and grouped them into two possibilities - one with bright jewel tones and one with more muted autumny colors. we talked about both possibilities for a bit. then, she took off her necklace, which has an interesting silver symbol on it that i didn't recognize. she held the chain between her thumb and forefinger and asked, out loud, whether the bright colors were the right decision. the necklace hung still for a moment and then began to move in a counterclockwise circle above the brilliant blues and greens. then, she stilled the necklace and put it above the bolts of autumn tones and asked the same question. again, the necklace was still for a second and then began to swing back and forth, as if on a pendulum. she smiled and said the circle was a "yes" and the pendulum swing was a "no." so the necklace thereby confirmed her own leaning towards the bright colors. and she bought them.

sabin was along and has said several times since that she wished she had such a necklace. and we've talked about what decisions it would help her make. she apparently wants most to be confirmed in the order of her favorite lesson horses at the riding school, which right now is zidan, lizette, felix. whereas my order of them is lizette, felix, zidan. and i suppose that's what makes her doubt her own order. so we also talked about how it was her who rides them and who knows best and how she really didn't need a necklace to tell her that.

and it got me thinking about how i make decisions. because we make decisions all the time, having no idea of what the ultimate outcome might be. if you think about it too much, you could actually become quite paralyzed by the whole thing.  and i find that i am a very quick decision-maker, especially on big decisions - divorce, marriage, houses, jobs. and once i decide, it's quite a short distance from decision to action. on the other hand, i can be pretty indecisive - especially about little things like what to make for dinner.

husband is a more considered decision-maker than i am. we went out driving past the two farm places we've been looking at yesterday. when we started out, husband was pretty sure which one he prefers, but after our outing and our ensuing conversation, it's now switched. me, i'd be ok with either one, but since we're not ready to make an offer right now (we MUST sell our own house first, we are NOT sitting with two mortgages), i don't feel any strong need to make a decision about it right now. i have this confidence in the back of my mind that the right decision will be crystal clear when the time comes. so i'm quite content to endlessly discuss the possibilities of both properties and even flirt with other properties (like one with a big riding hall and stalls you could rent out or one with a vineyard - mmm, wine).

of course, all of these discussions and husband's endless drawing of plans of the properties and where he'd build and change this and that (his father was an architect, so he has an inner draftsman), are surely part of our decision-making process. but how do you know when you've reached the right decision?  maybe in the end, it's no different or more scientific than swinging a necklace above printouts of the two properties and seeing whether it goes back and forth or round and round.

how do you make decisions in life? both little and big?