Borrowed (Coveted) Poem

This is Lori. She is a poem.

In my email box this Sunday morning was a note from my dear friend Lori with a poem attached.

Lori and I have known each other since our teens, and we wrote together way back when. Her note this morning simply said she was in a winter-freeze funk and was sharing some writing in the hopes I would somehow offer some warmth and inspiration. What I got instead, was inspiration of my own.

As I read her words I was blown away, as I so often am, by the way she is able to balance the fluid with the succinct, the flowery with the direct, the ethereal with the solid -- and create a magnificent sense of angst and flight, hope and longing, that always seems to shine through her poetry.

I asked her if I might share the poem on my blog and she agreed. The artwork below that goes with it is also hers. Yeah, don't get me started. . .

Btw, you may also find her blog here, at ConsciousCreativity.

Lori made this; I want it. What else is new?*

Dream 4/dream for

Prelude to a dream:

Lens retracted, aerial view of snow gridded squares, boundaries etched in ink, black & white topography seen from glass iris of the camera. Land cut like fruit reveals a starry eye:

Dream 4:
is crowded. Friends from long ago roam the rooms of my past, bearing gifts and conversation. Someone gives me a straw hat stiched with knowledge, it hovers at the lip of the driveway. There is some kind of gathering. People spill inside: an old therapist, a friend from Herondale, a woman who Dream tells me is my spirit sister. Clinking of glasses, movement, open doorways. Details from my childhood float overhead like filmy ghosts: blue shag rug, crystal candlesticks. The air is palpable. Somewhere upstairs, we have packed up my son’s room. Nothing is left but the books in the shelves, and I turn to ask him what he wants to do with them and am sucked into a mysterious errand. Steep hill to climb to get there, but Starbucks is a beacon up top, inviting, its glass walls fogged golden with light and warmth, and I seem to know the way. It is snowing. Slushy streets below. No car can take this climb, so I run up the tilted face of the mountain. Arrive in time to kiss my father and three friends, who are arranged around him in triangular formation. Triangle: sacred symbol of the all-seeing eye, of alchemy, angels and anarchy. There’s a buzz here too, another gathering, but Dream tells me I need to get back to my kids who wait for me to take them to school. As if I’d been there before, I sense the hill isn’t the way back down. Zig-zag through side streets that unfold like a pop-up book into a toy-like town. Stores fling open glass doors displaying candly-like distractions: aromatic packages of coffee, bright sheer scarves that float on shelves like gossamer. Mid-dream, the phone rings in the dark room, urgently, dream flickers, recedes.
Dream Redux: light scatters and blurs. I am lying on a wood floor, dreaming a question about my son. Bear appears immediately upon inquiry, nodding his shaggy head yes, yes he’s sure, yes I am welcome. Somewhere in Dream I know it’s winter and Bear should be hibernating, but I have summoned him and he has come. Spirit guide of my son, he is Andarta and Artio, fierce defender of art, blender of intuition with instinct. Symbol of truth. autonomy. We have raised my son fiercely. Encouraged him to find his own way, then flinched when he faltered. “You cannot know what is true unless you know what isn’t true.” Bear tells me this with a human voice just before I wake to see the snow flowering everything to white


-lori landau

*if you click on the photo you can see her work in all its gorgeous detail.

Parenting by Example, Not for the Faint-Hearted

me, right side up, the way a mother belongs

To my friends and family who love me, I am known as a passer-outer. I'm not proud of it. It is, as they say, what it is. I faint when I get scared because I breath-hold or over-breathe and end up with what's known as a vasovagal response. (I know it's wikipedia, but trust me, it's close enough).

I know it's a mind over matter thing, and for a short while in my late teens, I was able to let my mind win out, but little since then, so I've mostly learned to deal with it. I bury my pride and ask to lie down when I have my eyes "touched" by anything that they shouldn't be touched by (IMHO this includes pretty much anything and everything except my own finger/contact lenses), or when I have blood drawn or any major medical work done. The fear isn't in my rational mind, but obviously it's there somewhere. I also get lightheaded if I think my family is in danger or there's a health scare.

I seriously couldn't even *look* at the photos
of real ears with needles sticking out. Oy.

Which leads me to yesterday and my son's appointment with an accupuncturist. And the part where I tried to demonstrate how simple and easy it was to get acupuncture by letting the guy stick needles in my ears first.

It wasn't just the needles, however, it was his lack of gentle delivery when he saw an "issue with your uterus" that I may have wanted to "get checked out."

Son watching. Mind racing to the "C" word, to the specialists I would have to see, to the teary videos I would leave for my children in an effort to say a proper farewell. And, of course, NEEDLES being poked in my EARS.*

Suffice it to say, it wasn't my best parenting moment, but we've learned that my son is very good in the face of an emergency which includes watching his mother turn an inhuman shade of green-white, as her eyes roll back in her head and her normal self disappears from conscious view.

Also suffice it to say, No, he did NOT choose to get acupuncture himself after that.

- gae

*and, yes, everything is fine, as far as I know, with my uterus. Turns out the dude was merely being awkward about asking if perhaps I was pregnant (no!) and/or had my period (bingo -- and kind of impressive that he could tell that from my ear).