it's there that my heart is longing
Shockingly enough, I think I'm almost caught up with all the stuff I've needed to do for weeks now. Allllllmost.
My grandmother had surgery on her arm this past week, and she's recovering well. I've been by to visit every day except today, and made her dinner Wednesday night, complete with a veggie roast, green bean casserole, and pumpkin creme brulee, the last of which my uncle David tried and exclaimed, 'This is good shit!' Then on Thursday I made a pumpkin pie, my first ever, and took it to Mamaw's, which again got rave reviews. Mamaw said that I'm turning into Suzie Homemaker, and I beamed. I love cooking for other people. I'm usually far too lazy to cook for just myself, but I really enjoy doing it for others. As soon as her arm gets better, Mamaw will begin working on a cookbook full of her recipes, which she'll give copies of to the grandkids. I'm over the moon at the idea, since my grandmother is the best cook I've ever known. Only Mom's cooking can compete with it, and I plan to harass her into including some of her recipes, too.
Tonight as part of a slightly early birthday present Mom took my sisters and me to see Loreena McKennitt, a singer we've all loved since I was in high school. It was amazing, just jaw-droppingly awesome. Her music translated so beautifully from the albums, and in fact was better live. I got chills and even teared up a couple of times at hearing and seeing the music I've loved for so long performed live. However, when she sang 'The Old Ways,' the next to last song of the concert, I not only teared up, I literally felt my heart melt. It spread all through my chest in a warm gush, and it was one of the most amazing things I've ever felt, even more so because that was once my favourite song but since I somehow neglected to put The Visit on my computer I hadn't heard it in years. It was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. The theatre, the crisp autumn night, even the audience, clearly dominated by aging hippies. As I glanced around at the middle-aged men with long hair and fringe vests and the older women with dreads and pigtails and shawls, I thought, 'This is my future. This is what I'll look like in ten or twenty more years. If this is my fate, I embrace it.' I can think of far worse things than being an aging hippie.
And weren't we all there to embrace a little more romance, entice it into our lives? Loreena sings about mummer's dances and Marrakesh night markets and highwaymen and Camelot and trees and the gates of Istanbul and the sea. I would love to live in any one of her songs, and probably have, so strong is my pull to her ballads that hearken to Celtic landscapes long ago. I think that maybe Americans are so headstrong in their search for romance because other countries have so much of it, so many traditions that connect the people to the land for thousands of years longer than we've been here. We have our histories, to be sure, and our own way of life, and we're fiercely proud of that. But when it comes to ancient romance and the lives of our ancestors centuries ago, we're a bit lost. It takes effort to figure out who were once were and where we come from, unlike the families of other countries who have their children's children's children to tell their tales and keep alive their connections to the land of their forebearers. Maybe that's why part of the American spirit, not to mention the American dream, is about searching and wanderlust.
By romance, of course, I do not mean the mere act of falling in love with a human being. I mean falling in love with everything around you, and not only seeing but feeling beauty and magic in great gasping waves. I think that my gothy aspect and my hippie aspect converge nicely in that they both crave that romance.
At times during the concert I could feel myself pulling away from my self and my surroundings, and I yanked down hard to keep my head in the moment so that I could soak up the beauty. Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much of this life pulling away from my self, but then, sometimes I'm so heartsick for those other times, imprints more than memories and just barely in the back of my being, that I can't help it. I know that this life is a gift, I know that deep down, but I need to rise above myself sometimes to keep my connections with all of life intact, both other's lives as well as my own. But then, all lives are part of my life. This world is what I make it. But I digress.
I had a dream last night that I feared a girl who was hanging out with me and some friends as we rode around a town on a motorcycle. I feared her because she was a Satanist (which is odd, as in the waking world I've had several Satanist friends who have been perfectly lovely people). We went into an alternative tattoo/head shop, and I thought about finally getting a tattoo, despite it not being the sort of place I wanted to get a tattoo from, when I looked over at a shelf in the dim store and saw rows of tiny greenish and blueish porcelain figures directly across from the cash register. One greenish figurine looked like a bare tree grasping for the heavens with a face in it, the face of the Green Man. I picked it up, knowing that it was for me because of my connection with trees, when I saw that it only looked like the Green Man at the outset. In fact it was a figure of an elephant, trunk raised, one tusk broken, standing amidst a couple of other smaller elephants. Then I knew that I had to buy the porcelain figure for certain, since not only did it at first appear to be the Green Man, but also because it turned out to be an elephant, my new totem animal which seemed to be appearing everywhere. When I woke up I felt like the elephant totem in my dream was a culmination, an overt gesture that was the result of many subtler signs that have been coming my way for weeks now. The scene I saw of that movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer in which her date says that elephant figures with the trunks raised are good luck, but only when facing a certain direction; the elephant figure I then noticed in Lane and David's apartment; the elephant footprint my mother recently had framed from her trip to Africa; my own elephant figurine, a souvenir of the aforementioned trip Mom took; and then the dream. Animals come into your life for a certain reason. Tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, I intend to go to the bookstore and find out why the elephant is suddenly appearing in my life.
There were so many cloaks and capes there tonight! So many veils, so many furtive glances.
So much to look forward to.
My grandmother had surgery on her arm this past week, and she's recovering well. I've been by to visit every day except today, and made her dinner Wednesday night, complete with a veggie roast, green bean casserole, and pumpkin creme brulee, the last of which my uncle David tried and exclaimed, 'This is good shit!' Then on Thursday I made a pumpkin pie, my first ever, and took it to Mamaw's, which again got rave reviews. Mamaw said that I'm turning into Suzie Homemaker, and I beamed. I love cooking for other people. I'm usually far too lazy to cook for just myself, but I really enjoy doing it for others. As soon as her arm gets better, Mamaw will begin working on a cookbook full of her recipes, which she'll give copies of to the grandkids. I'm over the moon at the idea, since my grandmother is the best cook I've ever known. Only Mom's cooking can compete with it, and I plan to harass her into including some of her recipes, too.
Tonight as part of a slightly early birthday present Mom took my sisters and me to see Loreena McKennitt, a singer we've all loved since I was in high school. It was amazing, just jaw-droppingly awesome. Her music translated so beautifully from the albums, and in fact was better live. I got chills and even teared up a couple of times at hearing and seeing the music I've loved for so long performed live. However, when she sang 'The Old Ways,' the next to last song of the concert, I not only teared up, I literally felt my heart melt. It spread all through my chest in a warm gush, and it was one of the most amazing things I've ever felt, even more so because that was once my favourite song but since I somehow neglected to put The Visit on my computer I hadn't heard it in years. It was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. The theatre, the crisp autumn night, even the audience, clearly dominated by aging hippies. As I glanced around at the middle-aged men with long hair and fringe vests and the older women with dreads and pigtails and shawls, I thought, 'This is my future. This is what I'll look like in ten or twenty more years. If this is my fate, I embrace it.' I can think of far worse things than being an aging hippie.
And weren't we all there to embrace a little more romance, entice it into our lives? Loreena sings about mummer's dances and Marrakesh night markets and highwaymen and Camelot and trees and the gates of Istanbul and the sea. I would love to live in any one of her songs, and probably have, so strong is my pull to her ballads that hearken to Celtic landscapes long ago. I think that maybe Americans are so headstrong in their search for romance because other countries have so much of it, so many traditions that connect the people to the land for thousands of years longer than we've been here. We have our histories, to be sure, and our own way of life, and we're fiercely proud of that. But when it comes to ancient romance and the lives of our ancestors centuries ago, we're a bit lost. It takes effort to figure out who were once were and where we come from, unlike the families of other countries who have their children's children's children to tell their tales and keep alive their connections to the land of their forebearers. Maybe that's why part of the American spirit, not to mention the American dream, is about searching and wanderlust.
By romance, of course, I do not mean the mere act of falling in love with a human being. I mean falling in love with everything around you, and not only seeing but feeling beauty and magic in great gasping waves. I think that my gothy aspect and my hippie aspect converge nicely in that they both crave that romance.
At times during the concert I could feel myself pulling away from my self and my surroundings, and I yanked down hard to keep my head in the moment so that I could soak up the beauty. Sometimes I wonder if I spend too much of this life pulling away from my self, but then, sometimes I'm so heartsick for those other times, imprints more than memories and just barely in the back of my being, that I can't help it. I know that this life is a gift, I know that deep down, but I need to rise above myself sometimes to keep my connections with all of life intact, both other's lives as well as my own. But then, all lives are part of my life. This world is what I make it. But I digress.
I had a dream last night that I feared a girl who was hanging out with me and some friends as we rode around a town on a motorcycle. I feared her because she was a Satanist (which is odd, as in the waking world I've had several Satanist friends who have been perfectly lovely people). We went into an alternative tattoo/head shop, and I thought about finally getting a tattoo, despite it not being the sort of place I wanted to get a tattoo from, when I looked over at a shelf in the dim store and saw rows of tiny greenish and blueish porcelain figures directly across from the cash register. One greenish figurine looked like a bare tree grasping for the heavens with a face in it, the face of the Green Man. I picked it up, knowing that it was for me because of my connection with trees, when I saw that it only looked like the Green Man at the outset. In fact it was a figure of an elephant, trunk raised, one tusk broken, standing amidst a couple of other smaller elephants. Then I knew that I had to buy the porcelain figure for certain, since not only did it at first appear to be the Green Man, but also because it turned out to be an elephant, my new totem animal which seemed to be appearing everywhere. When I woke up I felt like the elephant totem in my dream was a culmination, an overt gesture that was the result of many subtler signs that have been coming my way for weeks now. The scene I saw of that movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer in which her date says that elephant figures with the trunks raised are good luck, but only when facing a certain direction; the elephant figure I then noticed in Lane and David's apartment; the elephant footprint my mother recently had framed from her trip to Africa; my own elephant figurine, a souvenir of the aforementioned trip Mom took; and then the dream. Animals come into your life for a certain reason. Tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, I intend to go to the bookstore and find out why the elephant is suddenly appearing in my life.
There were so many cloaks and capes there tonight! So many veils, so many furtive glances.
So much to look forward to.