Day: August 22, 2013

If I were a flower, I would be the sunflower plowing up through the garden, reaching for the sun, pushing aside the flowers in it’s way, taller than others shouting out that they will reach the sun and the light. The sunflowers are reaching up to the skies, inspiring me to do the same.

I am quite lucky in love, because I really had no idea what Maria was like when I married her. I thought I did, we had been friends for several years, but I didn’t, the person that has emerged over the first three years of our marriage is not remotely like the person I married. Every day, she seems to change, something different emerges. The shy, very quiet artist who was completely shut down in her work, who was afraid to create and show her art, is a very thin memory, I can’t quite recall it. She is eager to get to her Studio, not afraid, she whines, squawks and complains all day that her work is no good, no one will like it, she’ll never get done what she has to get done. Her work is always good, everyone always likes it, buys it, wants more, she always gets done what she has to get done and a lot more.

Watching Maria’s mind and imagination unfold has been a wonder to me, better than the movies, out of Shakespeare maybe, or ancient pagan and Wiccan rituals. Every night she has the most amazing and complex dreams with all sorts of twists and turns  – serial killers, donkeys, blind men with canes, chickens, cats, overflowing sewers, collapsing buildings, dogs and chickens – that evolve into potholders, hanging pieces, pillows and quilts.  All of the days senses, smells, sights, sounds, go into this whirring mixture, her pupils widen, her hands spin like windmills, her mind races like the wind. Altars, totems, strange rock formations appear everywhere.

My wife is a blur,  a creative machine, a dream factory spinning her yard, sketching her creations, running her sewing machine until it clogs and collapses.  Sometimes, her head spins like the exorcist child and she speaks in tongues. I often look up and hear music wafting from her Schoolhouse Studio, where I sometimes find her singing and dancing. She can cast spells and sic the evil eye on bad people.  It is never dull around her. Right now, she is whirring around the farmhouse, talking to plants, comforting trapped moths, calling out to her beloved donkeys, bringing gourmet treats to the chickens, chatting with Frieda and the dogs, weeding the garden, organizing the bills. You can’t keep up, you just go along for the ride.

“Let’s get up and go walk in the woods,” she announced brightly at 4 a.m., this morning. Leave me alone, I am an old man, I say, but she just laughs and smacks me until I move. Blessedly, she fell asleep again and started dreaming.

The wonderful piece above – it just astonished me – came out of a curious night we had the other night, a full moon night when Maria vanished from the bedroom and went outside to sit with the barn cats and watch the moon. She got up again to go out and cuddle Simon in the darkened pasture. It did not surprise or trouble me, such happenings are quite commonplace around here. She didn’t even bother to explain it to me, I have seen her wanderings before, she loves wandering through nature, on hikes, in snowstorms, on full moon nights, hot days. She is of nature connected to it, through the animals, through her pores. It comes out in her work every day.

It turns out my wife is an animal communicator, a mystic, a witch, a pagan. It is much more enchanting than Disney world, sometimes bright, sometimes dark, always colorful. She is warm, sweet, loving, touchy, wary and giving, all at the same time. Strange totems and rock formations appear throughout the house, and disappear just as mysteriously. She blogs at strange  hours, muttering and cursing and studying the stars. Her German side is efficient, chore obsessive. Her Sicilian side seems to dominate, a volcano of emotions, ideas, a chip on her shoulder if men give her orders, or just breathe.

I love this Full Moon Donkey, I was privileged to see it’s creation, it’s radioactive seed.

Had I known who she was when I married her, I would have been a bit wary, but even happier than I was. Mystics are a hoot to live with, especially if you have a sense of humor, never tell them what to do, and do what you are told.

I wrote yesterday that therapy seemed draining, and Red seemed tired. When we got home, he sought out Lenore’s bear and lay on it for a long time. It is never clear to me what a dog is thinking, the easy conclusion is that he was restoring himself, seeking comfort. It certainly looked like that. In Ireland, Red did not have bears or toys, and I don’t imagine he had too many in Virginia either. He has been a working dog all of his life, and I don’t give him toys either, he seems utterly disinterested in them. Yesterday, it seemed to be something he needed. He lay on Lenore’s bear for the longest time, and  Lenore, generous spirit that she is, let him have it.

In my own mind and in occasional conversation I call it “The Spectacular Crack-Up”,  I say the term but unless I stop and think about it, don’t recall the pain and fear and sadness. My emotional collapse  at the first Bedlam Farm occurred about five years ago, decades of  delusion, panic and depression and after I ended a 35-year marriage that had grown cold without my recognizing it. I remember vowing to my therapist that I would not end my life that way, and I think that is true. I don’t think of time much, and I don’t talk of it much, but I think my crack-up was important, it saved my life, brought me to reality, to Maria, to help and healing, to responsibility for my life.

I thought of it yesterday when our new TV arrived. An echo of the Spectacular Crack-Up.

I do remember my decision to share some of this experience on this blog – most people in my life thought I should not – it helped save me, I think. It taught me that many people go through emotional collapses, many people live in perpetual states of panic, drama and emotional collapse. It showed me that we are not all different things, in many ways we are all one thing, at the core.

It taught me I could heal myself without medications. It taught me I could find love if I wanted to. It taught me that fear, panic and anger are geographies, spaces to cross, neither helpful or useful and they are rarely real. They didn’t make me safe, just kept me crazy. The experience taught me I didn’t need enablers or helpers to run my life, I could do it myself. Those are big lessons, and there were more to come.

My breakdown, I think, was the primary destination of my hero journey, which began when I left suburban New Jersey and my family and bought a cabin in upstate New York and wrote “Running To The Mountain.” As Joseph Campbell has written, crack-ups are often the point of the hero journey. We leave the familiar behind, set off into the unknown to discover the truth about our lives, who we are, what we really want. Crack-ups cut to the chase, slice through the denial and bullshit and avoidance. They force us to decide if we wish to heal, to be better or if we wish to succumb to the hollow and frightened life. They definitely get one’s attention. I do remember walking in circles on the path in the woods, popping pills, slurring my speech, disoriented.

Contrary to myth, crack-ups don’t just suddenly begin, and they don’t just suddenly end, they burble and echo and roll along forever, perhaps for life. I feel little panic and anger in my life now, I have come so far since then, but there are still echoes of that time, still waves rippling along the surface. Maria and I have never been big TV watchers, I had a huge screen at Bedlam Farm that I gave away. I watched the World Series once in awhile, an occasional movie or HBO program. But I was too anxious then to watch much TV – I couldn’t handle Disney movies, let alone the news – and we  were happy talking and reading at night, so we gave it up.

This week, we decided it was time to be in the world a bit. We bought a 22-inch Samsung for $130 online and it came yesterday. We haven’t turned it on to watch any programs yet, but we are both glad to get it. The good movies are migrating to television and away from movie theaters and Maria and I both love movies, so I got the basic package and ordered HBO and Cinemax, there is a sale on when you buy the both of them..

More important, we also talked about not wanting to be isolated in our existences. We live in the country, lots of space around us, it is easy to lose touch with the culture of the world beyond the farm, we are often together often by ourselves. For a writer and an artist, that is not a good thing. If I can’t always be in the conversation, I want to know what it is.

On stormy winter nights I think we will be glad to have our little TV, it is compact easy to miss, it blends in.  I think this  weekend we’ll figure out how to use the switcher. The small screen fits nicely in our living room without overwhelming it. The big screens always remind me of being in a sports bar, this is an old farmhouse, we didn’t want it to look like TV with a room around it, as seems often to be the case. The picture is clear and colorful, a good buy for the money. There are enough machines and devices in the house, neither of us were keen to add another one.I want to be relevant.  Mostly, I think is a matter of re-connecting to the world, when you crack-up  you just double over in pain and hang on, I was in therapy and spiritual counseling for nearly four years, I am my own counselor now, I am free to live my life, I mean to do it.

I recognized right away that getting this TV isn’t just about movies. It’s about recovery, healing, living in the world around me. There is no chance it will be on a lot in this household. But I miss movies, I am happy to have them.

IAs Jesus said about his own life, I want to be in the world, not of the world. Me too. I want to connect to the planet, not be absorbed by it.