Deadening

Deadened Sunflowers at Sunset

Yesterday I spoke with a long distance friend of mine who I had not spoken with since June. She had no idea Wilmington flooded. Linda has been here a few times so she needed to go through it building by building. Today I go to my quarterly eye doctor appointment. He is twenty miles away and I haven’t seen him since the flood. I expect he might ask me about .

Sitting here, I can imagine some time in the future where I will be able to talk about the flood and it will not bring up feelings of shock, confusion or helplessness.

God weighed in

Here's what it looked like where Stinky and I washed off in the still dark December lake

God weighed in this morning and he took Jennifer’s side. We have been meeting at 6:15 when it is still really night. Jen worries that the dogs are going to run into something in the dark, like a porcupine or a skunk or a bear. I have pretty much ignored Jen’s worries and forged ahead, getting to the lake even earlier than 6:15 so that I am waiting for ‘Jen who hates to be late’ when she arrives.

This morning Jen arrived and said the first two sentences I could have predicted, oh it’s dark and maybe we should meet a little later. The dogs ran ahead. Rosie has one bad habit. Of course I could not see her carry out her stinky 'rolling in it' desires because it was so dark. About halfway to the halfway mark Rose came up behind me and rubbed her muzzle on me. I pet her. Only then did the enormity of the smell reach my nose. I can’t remember now if that was before or after I agreed to later tomorrow.

Swimming In December

It's not snow but it is my white flood rock

Wow was it ever rainy and dark this morning. By the end of the walk I felt just like I had been swimming. I love that feeling of being all wet and getting out of the water. And yes, I could have used a towel and my pants were all stuck to my legs but still I was grateful and exhilarated.

It is not often that we have a warm rain in December. It is not even remotely conducive to skiing, which is what we economically need to be doing these days. It is sort of overwhelming here how much we want the weather to cooperate with our business plans and how much this year the weather has said no. And how strongly.

I find myself giving in. I don’t have more stress to give to worrying about when the gallery will be ready or when the mountain will open. I’ve used up all my stress this year. And what I am learning from depleting my stress bank: next year, I’d like to remember to forget to re-up.

Wasting time and money

This morning the word was waste. Yuck. I dislike wasting time, money, food, gas, you name it, I don’t like to waste it. Some days driving to the morning walk I think I am wasting gas. Then I get there:

 

This is where I turn around:

This is almost back to the beginning of the trail head:

Most everyday it is just that beautiful. I have a deep and profound gratitude to be able to make that daily trek. Yet without doubt I question my energy commitment to the time and gas it takes to walk the walk. So too, all my adult life, I have questioned my time and energy commitment to art, to community work and to beauty. As you can imagine, Irene has put me right up against the wall  questioning those commitments and choices. And three months out, as difficult as this time is, my answer remains the same, what else is there?

When this happens

Today’s word upon waking was grace. As it is Sunday I thought that was pretty cheesy. Long as I have been doing this word of the day thing I remain skeptical. So today after my snarly thought came the phrase ‘moving through hard things today, be graceful’. Well you can guess how that went, by noon today no less than 5 people had expressed some form of upset feelings to me.

This afternoon I thought of upset feelings like a weird form of bumper pool. My upset feeling ball careens into your feeling ball upsetting you and sending your feeling ball into someone else’s space. On it can go, often enough, it seems, picking up steam.

Gosh it is hard not to get upset back! And I didn’t, but all day long little snippets and snags kept popping up in my mind and I’d go back to that cheesy Sunday word, grace, be graceful. Finally I looked the word up because when I call on something so many times in one day I start to question it’s meaning: graceful - characterized by beauty of movement, style, form, or execution

Back to my bumper pool game, I see now my work is not so much to make sure that I will not get moved or bumped but my work, my gracefulness, is what I do with the hit.

Again the flood, such a teacher.

It's Both

You might have the wrong impression. All those beautiful dawn photos of the lake and the glory hole might lead you to believe that the morning dog walk is perfectly bucolic and peaceful. And truly some of it is. But we walk with four dogs, my one beautiful Rosie girl and Jen’s three boys including Smelliot, oops typo, I mean Elliott.

We have just finished rifle season here in Vermont and the woods around the trail unfortunately have some deer remains where hunters gutted deer. Elliott quite likes the body parts. So these days the walk goes a little like this, good morning, oh it’s cold, oh it’s warm, oh it’s pretty, girl talk, girl talk, blah blah Elliott! ELLIOTT! sorry what were you saying? girl talk, (stunning beauty, jaw dropping beauty) ELLIOTT! girl talk ELLIOTT! ELLIOTT! ELLIOTT! No NO leave it, get up, LEAVE IT, LEAVE IT, LET”S GO, LEAVE IT. (Often some running towards the dog rolling on the whatever on the ground takes place here.)

To push matters over the edge, at the very end of the walk near the parking lot on more than one occasion of late there has been human stuff, you know of the ‘blank happens’ kind. Yes, Elliott again, he likes it.

On the way home today I thought about how I am, how easy it is for me to be immersed and committed to the whatever that is really good or conversely the whatever that is really bad but it is not so easy for me to hold them both loosely in my mind at once. The walk is good practice, the flood is even better.

Art

The other night the river got going again. It picks up boulders and smashes them into one another. It is a particular clunking thud sound that I could not comprehend when I was evacuating here but it is a sound to which I am now keyed.

It was 1:30 am and it woke me up. After a bit I turned the light on and I thought about a river art event on the anniversary of the flood, a piece that would last for the duration of the flood, maybe 4 or 5 hours. It seems important to me that the anniversary event incorporate the sound of the flood, the sound of the thudding, somehow recalling and transforming the sound of the raging, racing wall of water.

Art can be a decoration, an add on after basic material necessities are secured. And that banal realm has a definite significant subtle value in our lives but art can also be the source which puts our spirits, our emotions, our souls aright again, if we will allow ourselves the experience.