Poem – cut loose

Posted on March 12, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

This is a day of culling.
This is a day of cutting loose
and letting go.

No longer time to sow
or reap.

There is no harvest here.
Not yet.

This is a time to prune,
to trim,
to weed.

But not gently.

This is a time of slash and burn,
of cut and run.

This is a time of throwing off the rope
and sailing away.
No map, no rudder, no charts.

Just go.

Like a laser
Like a diamond
Like a scalpel

Cut loose.

No time for maybe
or might have been.

Cut loose.

This is the day not for new beginnings
or happy endings
but something in the middle.

We aren’t used to middles.
We are uncomfortable with
not being
here
or there.

But that is where we are.
The grey time
the afternoon place
the doldrums,

Better accept it.
The sooner the better.

Cut bait now
with a sharp knife and paddle on over
to another spot
because
now
that line is holding you down.

No matter if the biggest fish
you ever saw is about to grab hold.
No matter.

He hasn’t yet
and if he does now
he’ll just pull you under
or drag you along
to your death.

Cut loose
and live.

Flux (the only constant is change)

Posted on July 30, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I wake up hot at 2:30 or 3 these days. Hot in body and mind. I’ve done this before. The first time was three years ago. I was afraid I was having heart problems. Turns out a racing heart and mind is part of perimenopause.

But this is also really cool. I get ideas at this time. I get ideas on things to write about. Ideas come together, ideas that I’ve been chewing on for years and never seen the connection. I had an English teacher in college who would inspire the same kind of connections. This is that, but without the tuition fee and way too early in the day.

I’ve noticed that “Oh Mani Padme Hum” is the same as “Namaste”. It is a greeting or acknowledging of energy. It is noticing potentiality. It is acknowledging that now isn’t always. What you see isn’t what you get.

I had a vision of a small girl in my dream tonight. She came up to me, with raven black hair falling past her shoulders. She smiled an open smile and held out her left hand to me. In her hand was a glass vial, maybe an inch long. I looked and I saw two brown coils, like tiny brown worms, like strands of chromosomes, flex and twine in their pulses. I understood this. All is in flux, all is movement. The only constant is change.

I remember that it is essential to not define something as “good” or “bad” – it just is. We see it as one or the other based on our human perspective, but we don’t have the whole picture. We can’t. Ever.

God is the Alpha and Omega and we cannot fully comprehend that. We want absolutes, yes/no, yin/yang. Yes, God is the beginning and the end, so God is bigger than we can comprehend. We are just a blip, a speck.

But it also means that God is dual natured – God is also unified.

Out divided selves cannot comprehend this. We don’t have words for it and we can’t experience this.

It is satori.

It is stopping time. It is Zen. It is the right now and being OK with things as is, with no definition. No definition means no words, but it also means no boundaries – it all gets a little fuzzy around the edges, because there aren’t any edges any more.

Sometimes things are clearer if you take off your glasses.

There is a bird’s nest at the top of the hill in my back yard. I noticed the nest the last time I was trimming the shrubs up there. I looked at the nest and the eggs over the course of a week and they looked abandoned.

I was sad about the eggs in the trees when I realized they weren’t changing. I wanted them to change, to become birds. I feared that my cutting the brush in that area had caused the parents to abandon the nest. I felt that it was bad energy, especially for that area.

That area is special. It has a small patio area that my husband put in. It is a place to sit, just big enough for two. It isn’t quite big enough to do yoga. Yet.

These are the star stones. This is in honor of Madeline L’Engle’s “Wrinkle in Time” series. This is where I sit to talk to God when I am at home, outside, just like her characters did.

Dead birds, unborn birds would be bad, right?

But the “bad” of Judas betraying Jesus was preordained. It was what had to happen. It the same as Rumi’s “The Guest House”, it is the same as the Chinese story of the man, the boy, and the horse.

It just is.

And it is all energy, “good” and “bad”.

How human of us to see things only from our perspective, from how it benefits us.

I recently found a pale blue egg away from its nest, dented, alone. It would become welcome food for ants and other unknown creatures. And it caused me to stop and think, and grieve a little.

Decay leads to new life. It can’t all be all go go go.

Yoga has rests built into it. The music is the space between the notes.

We can even learn from the exhale. We can’t always breathe in.

The only constant is change.

Tuesday Buffet

Posted on July 29, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

There is a difference between seeing and noticing. We see all the time. We rarely notice. We rarely take the time to slow down and really look at what is going on. We are often in such a hurry that we take a glance and then go on, missing most of everything.

It helps to look at stop-motion animation or to take pictures of things as they are growing. I had a project once. I took a picture of the same tree, from the same spot, at the same time every Tuesday for a year. I saw the tree change and evolve, grow and decay from one season to the next. I stood in rain and snow. I changed a little when I did that project. I’d wanted to do it for a long time, and then I finally decided that it was time to start. Then I was committed to it. I posted the weekly picture on my personal Facebook page, and it turned out that my friends looked forward to it.

There was something personally transforming about that project. I don’t know whether it was because I finally got over my inertia (a common malady) or I finally actually noticed that tree, or both, but I changed. I started to look at everything this way, and wonder what else I was missing, and wonder when I was going to start other projects I’d thought about for a long time.

I almost missed being able to complete that project. The tree, a Bradford Pear, was on the lot of a Chinese buffet that I went to. I’d gone there for at least a decade. It was a fixture of the community. It was just something that was always there. Until it wasn’t. I was three-quarters through my project and they closed. They had bought the competition and moved. Now, I could no longer go to lunch there and just walk out afterwards at 12:45 on a Tuesday and take the picture. I had to go eat quickly elsewhere, and then drive over there to get that shot.

I was committed to that time, and that place, and that day. The project depended on being consistent.

I contemplated cancelling the project. I was almost done. It was good enough. My friends changed my mind – they’d come to look forward to that tree, in the same way that I had. I redoubled my efforts and completed the project.

If I’d waited a few months longer to start the project, it would have been that much more difficult to finish. There could have been a bad storm and the tree could have been damaged, or it could have succumbed to rot and been taken out. I could have missed the whole thing before I even began.

Other things happened as well, to me. I’d suddenly had to buy a different car, and I’d had to have surgery to remove a precancerous spot. I started going to the Y. I started journaling again. Perhaps it was all linked – I started paying attention.

Here is a selection of the pictures for you. (I’ve made another change – I’ve edited this to have ALL the pictures. This is a meditation on how we can always go back and fix things. Our work doesn’t have to be “perfect” at the start.)

The first picture, 7-27-10

8-3-10

8-10-10

8-17-10

8-24-10

8-31-10

9-14-10. Missed a week because we were on vacation in North Carolina, before my surgery.

9-21-10. The day before my surgery.

9-29-10. A Wednesday. Not allowed to drive for a week after surgery, this was the first time I went out.

10-5-10

10-12-10, a touch of fall

10-19-10

10-26-10. Raining hard.

11-2-10

11-9-10

11-16-10

11-23-10

11-30-10. My birthday. My husband drove. The restaurant owner bought my lunch.

12-7-10

12-14-12, a tiny bit of snow. There was a Christmas luncheon at work, so I ate quickly and then drove here to take this picture and do the recycling chore.

12-21-10

12-29-10. A Wednesday. I was off for the Christmas holidays and forgot that yesterday was Tuesday.

1-4-11. This would have been my Mom’s 70th birthday. She died at 53 from smoking cigarettes.

1-11-11, dreary day, with snow

1-18-11. Just found out that Peter, the owner of the buffet, has bought the competition that is a block away. This location will be closing. How will I continue this project?

1-25-11

2-1-11. The Tuesday buffet special price has been discontinued, now that there is no competition.

2-8-11

2-15-11

2-22-11

3-1-11

3-8-11 The buffet has closed. I ate quickly somewhere else and then made a special trip here.

3-15-11. The Bradford pear is just beginning to blossom. I parked out of frame to reference the fact that the buffet is closed now and things are different.

3-22-11 If I’d stopped going I would have missed this glorious display of beauty.

3-29-11

4-5-11. While here, I saw another car in the lot. A lady went into the building. A new owner?

4-12-11

4-19-11

4-26-11. There was a bad storm recently and the Bradford pear has lost a branch.

5-3-11 The place isn’t being taken care of – a branch that had fallen is still there and the grass needs cutting.

5-10-11

5-17-11. A “cartoon” version from last week. I was home sick, and next week we plan on going on vacation to NC. I didn’t want my friends to miss that much so I created this.

6-7-11. Three whole weeks missed. Sick, vacation, and then a going-away party for someone at work. I was starting to think about cancelling the project. The place was sold and it was hard to get here on time every week now.

6-14-11. Back on track. Recommitted.

6-21-11

6-28-11

7-5-11

7-26-11 -and we are back around to the beginning. Not a lot looks different, but a lot has happened.

———–
Edit to add – This is the most recent picture, taken at the same spot, or as close as I can determine.

The lot is now a Zaxby’s. I’m standing in the drive-through lane. The entire building was torn down and the foo-dogs were removed, much to the chagrin of the the former owner, who wanted them back. They cost $10K each. This picture was not taken on a Tuesday at 1 pm as all the others were, because I can’t get here at that time anymore because of where I work now. This was around three on a Friday. Yet another change. My father always said “You just adjust and adjust and adjust, and then you die.”

Here are more pictures of that area, taken after the buffet had closed.

The building