Personal Meanderings

  • Joining Creative Activism & Meditation - This is my need, my pursuit, my goal. To create is to make anew, give birth to an image, structure or process that is new or seems new and speaks to the needs of its time, thus segueing to the component of activism.
  • Understanding Stress and Anxiety - I’ve tended to use these terms interchangeably until my therapist partner explained their differences. Stress comes when we can’t, or think we can’t, fulfil a task or meet an expectation that is a part of our day to day life. I feel the effects of stressful situations in my body, the tensing of muscles and nerves. I am stressed out, for example, when I’m focused on writing out a thought and someone(s) keep texting me on my I-phone.
  • Feeling at Home with One’s Self - Once again, I am in a period of needing to relearn how to feel at home with myself. With the ending of a long period of work on a creative project, and without the repetitive daily schedule, knowing what to focus on, my center becomes unfastened from its mooring place. I am in new waters. I must regroup and recenter once again.
  • Feeling at Home with Strangers - If I truly believe that we are all connected, it ought to be natural for me to feel at home with strangers. But, I am limited, I should say defined, by my experiences. If I have had positive, supportive, loving experiences with someone, I will find it fairly easy to find a comfortable connection to others who share some commonalities with that original person. How do I feel at ease, at home, with people who are very unfamiliar to me?
  • Summoning Loving, Creative Energy to Rise Up in Me - Most often I have to invoke the spirits of Will and Power, Vim and Vigor to help me as I pull myself up by the boot straps implanted in me in my Mid-Western Protestant upbringing. Only sometimes can I find this revitalizing spirit in me through meditation, incantation, chanting and drumming, meant to awaken the Life Spirit still trembling inside me. And too often I want to find peace and ease within sleep.
  • Making Chicken Vegetable Soup: a Meditation of Revisiting My Self - It is time now for my weekly ritual: the vegetables and last of the chicken are waiting in the fridge. I have 2 ½ hours free. I am ready and needing to focus and be with me––to nourish, care for my well-being and that of my loved ones.
  • How can I “market” my books so as to excite others to their own creative/activist/meditational impulses and needs? - How many times have I been asked: “How many books have you sold?” which always makes me grit my teeth. I didn’t end up self-publishing to “sell” my books but to make them available to others, to share my story and experiences with those who need and want to know how artists-activists in the 60s were moved to form collectives, joining forces and skills with others. How multitudes of young people rose up and said, “No!” to bombing the Vietnamese; “No1” to the cruelties of racist segregation; “No!” to misogyny, to all the white man’s tyranny, genocide of our Indigenous peoples; “No”! to all the injustices seeping into our growing awareness.
  • How can I best enjoy, stay growing, be useful and find ease in my 87 years on this planet? - I had to subtract my birth year from the year I am in now to verify that I will be 88 in July of this year. But now, I am still 87. These are numbers I can’t relate to. Where are my 50s, my 70s?  I am still a young girl in an old woman’s body. Stop! Stop the merry-go-round. I want to get off. Stop moving. Stay with my self in one time zone––no more adding of years to my age.
  • Finding and keeping our balance: elders at the crossroads - I long for peace and ease as stress and anxiety take me over. How can I be an active part of the resistance against the fascist regime bludgeoning my people and still hope for some comfort along the way?