Another Sunday At The Church Of The Batshit Crazy (Or, Let's Talk About Sex, Babee)

Last night's performance went well, although it lacked the sparkle and pop of opening night. This is how you know we are not professionals. I think about those actors who go to the theater every night and twice on Sundays to do their work and how each and every performance must be the best they can do. How do they do this? I have no idea but I am certain I could not do it.
I am carried along by the nerves, by the joy of the Oh My God! we are really doing this! and if I were expected to make it my work, I would fail at it miserably.

But it was fun and the audience enjoyed it and some of my oldest friends who were visiting relatives in nearby Lamont came to see the play and I was astounded! I only see these people perhaps once a year and yet, there they were! I had told them about the play when they called to tell me they were in the area and I couldn't believe they actually came. And my dog groomer came! "Thank-you for coming out at night," I told her, because she's the same age I am and I know how hard it is to drag your tired ass out of the house on a Saturday night to drive the miles to do something when you could be at home, cozy and in bed by ten.

I think of myself as having very few friends. I do. And yet, when something like this play occurs and I am surrounded by my friends at the Opera House and then other friends come to see me, I am shocked. Completely shocked.

Well. It's a good kind of shock. And now we have two days off and I am so grateful for that. Two days to catch up on ever-growing mounds of chicken shit and maybe some yard work and yes, this blog. It has been catch-as-catch can here at Blessourhearts and I apologize for that. I am vaguely aware of the greater world around me, catching a bit of NPR as I put on my make-up, as I drive to the theater. I hear that Tiger Woods pleaded for forgiveness and that his wife did not attend the press conference. Well, good for her! is what I say. But what I really say is- it's none of my fucking business. I don't buy those sports products or luxury watches and cars Tiger gets paid to endorse. And here's what I know- men are led by their dicks in more cases than you can imagine. That's the way of it. I believe I understand the evolutionary need of this far more than I understand any man actually standing up in front of a group of people with one woman and saying, "Yes, I will stay true to you." I think it's amazing when that actually unfolds to be the truth.
Amazing.
I have said it before and I will say it again- I do not understand sex. And I'll tell you this- I certainly don't understand why every religion in the world tries to control it. What an exercise in futility THAT is. Sex is what makes this world go around because at the very bottom of it is the need to reproduce, to create more of what we are. We humans are funny about sex and try to act like we're all above the animals when it comes to our love and courtship but take a look at the great apes, take a gander at the Blue Bower Bird, just look at the squirrels or the chickens and you will realize we are hardly the only species which plans for, works for, enjoys and lives for sex.

Okay. I can barely handle a sexual relationship with one person and that's the way I am and besides that, I am old, and I am so very grateful that Mr. Moon stood up and said he'd be faithful to me and has continued to live with and cherish me and be my lover and friend and man for all these years. I know that's a miracle. I know what what a miracle he is in my life.

Funny. I didn't start out to write about sex this morning. I swear to god, I did not. Or God. Whatever. I never know whether to capitalize that "g". I go back and forth, depending on my mood, I suppose.

But it's coming on spring and I went out with the camera and took pictures of things that mostly do not have sex but are certainly examples of the way things reproduce and grow and bloom and what now looks merely like a swelling (!) bud will soon be a gaudy thing of beauty which will attract bees and thus, lead to pollination and yes, more life.

Ah! It's all gorgeous in a way, but there is that underbelly, is there not? I mean- look at Tiger. Look at Sam. Poor Sam, dead and gone and his meat part of my very bones now. And his hens do not grieve him and their tail feathers are growing back because he is not there to torment them with his constant need to wiggle his bean, as Gus in Lonesome Dove would say.

So here are my pictures from the yard and the house this morning, Sunday, February 21st as Mr. Moon works to put up a fence around the garden, and the chicken poop is piling up and I will not be going to the Opera House today but have the time to think and write this little bit, to go out and record with the camera some of the earth's silent and intimate attempts at making more of itself in this season of love for us all.

Mr. Moon's tomatoes, getting ready to go into the earth of the garden.


The open throat of an opening camellia.


The tangled wisteria, which, if you look closely, shows beginning swellings at the tips. (!)


A fern's perfect fiddlehead.


The Buckeye's sprouting before it bursts into red flame flower.


The violet, again, because I can't resist its sturdy, innocent promise.


Chickens, fanned out, and who, if left to their own devices, would give us babies in a few months, whose eggs are the symbol of Easter, which I choose not to celebrate for the rising of a dead man, but for the rebirth of life.


And finally, the little altar in the hallway where there is always something green or blooming to remind me dozens of times a day of the beauty which is outside that I can bring in and where the Virgin of Guadalupe stands always, the Mother-Symbol which seems to have chosen me. And where a little walker is parked, waiting to be used again by Owen, the very fruit of my own need and ability to reproduce more of me and my love, and that of his own parents'. Owen. My perfect little fruit, my perfect little monkey, my love squared and quadrupled.

Our Black Holes of Despair

We are all born starving for air, hungry and hurt and looking for the nipple. That is the truth. And we breathe that first breath and take that first sip and set in motion a chain of events that never ends until we've breathed and sipped our last.

I've been thinking about this hunger lately and how it relates to that vast sense of emptiness that can open up inside us sometimes. I believe it's that sense of emptiness that drives us to do most of what we do on this earth, in this life. It is for me, anyway.

Some days the emptiness is just a small tickle and one that I can easily manage with a yogurt, say, or a nice walk and a good laugh with a friend.

Some days, though, there seems to be a black hole of darkness inside of me so huge that I can easily imagine falling inside of that which is inside of me, which of course can only be done metaphorically unless perhaps there is a real explanation in string theory, which I don't begin to understand but which seems to explain a lot of weird and magical stuff.

I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. It would be interesting if we all had a meter we wore on our chests that indicated how big the hole within us was at that particular moment. Sort of like a mood ring, only for existential despair. I think we'd be surprised to see just how empty a lot of people whom we may think of as normal and relatively well-adjusted really feel.

There's an awful lot of emptiness-filling attempts going on all around us all the time. We eat too much, we drink, we do drugs, we have sex, we look to God, we buy things, we paint and sculpt and write and get married and have babies and do all sorts of things we believe will fullfill us and all of that works for a little while and sometimes for a long time, but I don't think anything really works all the time. And don't tell me God does, either. If Mother Theresa could feel an emptiness where her God should have been for a great many years of her life, then damn! I know it won't work for me.

All I know is that if I hang on during the hard, crazy-feeling times, the emptiness seems to get less and there is more light and less darkness in my heart. That's one lesson I've learned from aging- that although when this melancholy is upon me I feel that it always has been and always will be, it hasn't and it won't.

I'll wake up one morning (and probably soon) and for no apparent reason, I'll feel okay about things. Maybe not ecstatic, but certainly okay.

And until then, I just have to accept the fact that I will not fall into anything unless I let myself. I remember a thing that Stephen Gaskin, the Big Daddy of the Farm Commune said once, which is that insanity was just his back yard and he'd wandered around there a few times but mostly he chose not to.

I always liked that. I feel like I've sat on my porch many a time and looked out at what might be a really scary place but I've always known that exploring that particular part of my yard isn't something I need to do.

Not yet, anyway. And I doubt I will because as vast and deep as my own personal emptiness feels sometimes, I know it's nothing but a thimble-full compared to some people's who can't help but jump into that back yard of their Jungle of Despair. I'll never get a gun and mow down people at a mall and I'll never take too many pills and hope for death, either.

It ain't that bad.

I'll just struggle along like most of us do and I'll probably never figure it out, but I do take comfort in the fact that there are great mysteries of life and that's all there is to it.
That's sort of slim comfort, but it'll do for now. It'll do.

And again, I've used a painting by Karen Davidson here and it's called Distressed Woman and I love it. I know just how that woman feels and isn't that what art is all about? Looking at something that someone else did and recognizing our own selves in it?
I think so.
Karen- you're an artist. Send me more pictures, please.