Life is chaos, accidental, as much as ordered

“Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

A writing ramble ... 

Have you noticed that in the process of cleaning up you stir much dust and create more chaos? Well, that is what's true for us, for me as I pull the little stacks of papers, savored old photographs and greeting cards off of shelves, down from their place of display or hidey-holes. The going is slow and the dust is thick. The heatwave that warms the Pacific Northwest makes it easy to set up a table outside and rifle through the collections of six years. Later this week a pal is coming to help as much for support, it is as I told her, "Good practice for me to accept offers TO help." But really, I am making progress; making way for what is yet not clear ... a destination as in the fog this morning, on a walk at Sunlight Beach. With faith the place is somewhere. I step slowly toward it.

The woods, these woods that are and have been home for us these six years are beautiful. How do you say good-bye to beauty and comfort like this? Not easily, yet, there are reasons and inclinations that say it must be done. "Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda." Thanks to the ever enduring salve of story, that cuss written by T.H. White into the dialogue between Merlin and the boy Wart (the future King Arthur) is giving my imagination free passes to mythic time. Mythic time where cleaning and dusting, packing and saying good-bye and dealing with the chaos of uncertain next steps leave me. In chaos's place messages fall like leaves. Neatly torn, not cut, rectangles of paper with pencil-written musings fall as I turn one of the many-hundred paged novel The Once and Future King. In between bouts of sorting, and tossing I retreat to the vardo and hoist myself atop the futon where a book, or two wait to be re-opened. Sweet haven is the story, a treat that adds no fats or calories, I am happy to inhale.

James Hillman wrote, in The Soul's Code "Accidental movements neither hinder nor advance the main project. Rather they reshape its forma, as if the course and the boat itself were restructured by the soul's responses to the events of life. There is a craft of growing down; it's the wisdom of watching things with an eye to their effects." Hillman builds on his thoughts about accidents, "the accident (abuse, ptsd, etc.) may never be integrated, but it may strengthen the integrity of the soul's form by adding to its perplexity, vulnerability, sensitivity, scar tissue." 

Those messages that fall like leaves so unexpectedly, this surprise is what I sit to describe. Putting this 'accident' into this blog gives me something, maybe as Hillman suggests an ingredient to strengthen the integrity of my soul. In this space of a Quonset Hut that has been my writing place these five years (we built it a year after we found this landing place), I do what a writer does. I write and pull the chaos and sadness into a clearing. Have I floated into a Ruth Ozeki novel? Like her characters in A Tale for the Time Being, the Japanese school girl's journal floats onto a Desolation Sound shore from somewhere in Japan. I find notes written by what appears to be a Japanese reader. I imagine she is a Japanese school-girl, too. The language is English as a second language. person. The messages: commentary on the story. An invisible personal book club meeting between sessions with dust and sadness. How accommodating are the Gods. 

Yesterday I wrote rap after a walk on the beach with Pete and a priest. Tonight I sit to acknowledge, and make notations. My spiritual practice is writing, communication with the Muse and the mystery fuels this soul of mine. Oh yes how wild and unpredictable is this life held together with safety pins. Yes, circling back to our pinned together life. Effective for short runs, and amazingly enduring when those simple tools are given their due respect. They work, they take little space and one pin is worth a thousand explanations. The safety pin effect of notes falling from a library book is working its magic on my chaos. I need a shower, and across the forest just a few steps, there is one. Hot water awaits me. Life is chaos as much as order. Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda. 

"The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much by order as by chaos, but these accidents may still intend something interesting...The soul seeks to fit it into its form." - again from The Soul's Code by James Hillman 

Link here to a beautiful composition "Writing as a spiritual practice" from Terri Windling where she creates a hologram of words, images and soul food. Tucked into the photographs I found these words from a poem by Ursula K. LeGuin,

"I must learn to live drily. What to carry. What to leave. What to drink instead of water. What to wash the dust away with..." 

Hover over the beautiful art to learn its name and its creator. 

Two Pirates and a Priest: Code for Revolution

If you use your dictionary
Find us below "OH SCARY"
Got sick from that cool lotion?
Claim you had no notion

We sail below the wires
Wilt from road spray, brains on fire
If we're lucky home awaits us
Safe to live another day

Give me a knuckle bump
A butt thump,
Two Pirates and a Priest
Walk the beach just out of reach

PPAAP
PPAAP
PPAAP
Rapp'n out a revolution

Growing the story, seeking the next

We went on our first road trip in three years while the moon was moving into her New Moon holoku (phase) in the sign of Leo. The need to scout a new place to plug in our tiny home and safety pin style life is here. All the pieces shuffle slowly, as we do what can be done: clean and clear the space we occupy, heed the call to explore possibilities, keep ourselves open to magic in the everyday and, remember to ask permission and give thanks.

Safety pin: definitions

1. A holy object that can be used for multiple purposes. These uses are: Putting things together, prying things out of things, eating with, fixing one's braces with, preparing food, an ear ring, nose ring, naval ring, a fashionable piece of metal that comes in handy, and many other things.

"Do you have a safety pin? I gotta hole in my shirt."

-Urban Dictionary A veritable cornucopia of streetwise lingo, posted and defined by its readers.

2. a metal pin that is used for attaching things and that has a point at one end and a cover at the other into which the pointed end fits

- Merriman-Webster's Learner's Dictionary

3. British English: safety pin A safety pin is a bent metal pin used for fastening things together. The point of the pin has a cover so that when the pin is closed it cannot hurt anyone....trousers which were held together with safety pins.

-Collins Dictionary 

4. "[Safety]Pins never unfit you. You can wear them your whole life." - Open House for butterflies, Ruth Krauss (author) Maurice Sendak (Illustrator)

5. "A safety pin is both a tool and an effective metaphor for doing and believing there are small miracles to hold us together, the magic is common, practical, ever present, and versatile." - "About Us" The Safety Pin Cafe

Monkeying around and welcoming the New Lunar Year

 There was time to sit in the dappled sunlight of a New Year's Eve to talk story, and listen to what the Year of the Green Goat (2015) offered us ... what resilience did we experience, how flexible did we prove to be or not ?

 Warm food and conversation filled the space as we gathered under the banners made by our dear friend Ela Winstanley

 Moki demonstrated the weaving of ti leaf bracelets a way to keep the story going with the rhythm of twist, twist, over ... twist, twist, over

 The twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac spin and dangle in the breeze. We found the perfect place for the banner of The Safety Pin Cafe

 The rainbow came to fill in for friends who could not be there with us.

 There were lucky monkeys to be made ... everybody had such fun with the copper wire and colorful pipe cleaners

 And when the tide began to flow out ... just after 3:00 P.M., we chose a lid and a banger (a spoon) and walked the land blessing the old (good bye!) and sent all that no longer serves us out with the outgoing tide.

Gong Hey Fat Choy !! Happy New Year, and thank you 'prairie front', the South Whidbey Tilth

The Cafe Opens to Welcome the Fire Monkey (NOTE THE TIME CHANGE*)

WELCOME 

The Year of the Fire Monkey, 2016

Second Annual Chinese New Year Celebration

The Safety Pin Cafe

Invites you to share: 

Potluck (bring a dish to share)

 Story (Listen to one, and help tell another)

That's our friend Jodie reading the story and that is Kevin's smilin' eye looking on ... we'll re-read this Chinese Zodiac story again to welcome the Monkey

Make a Lucky Monkey 

and

Join us in a Blessing Dance 

(Up and Down and All Around the Tilth) 

Here we are doing the Blessing Dance last year

at 

South Whidbey Tilth

Sunday, February 7, 2016

1:00 TO 3:00 P.M.

(*We have changed the start time to accommodate the tide ... the Moon controls water. Starting later, we will be doing the Blessing Dance when the tide begins its outgoing movment a few minutes after 3:00 P.M. taking the old and unwanted out to the deep ocean to be recycled.)

A Free Event

and

A scent-free Event

​

Need information about being scent-free? Link here 

Please contact Mokihana and Pete to let us know whether you'll be joining us

  mokihanacalizar@gmail.com 

​

The Character of Place Part II

While the seasonal wet and dampness challenges us to find the good in sogginess, it is our neighborhood library that offers us distraction and entertainment. Our library cards (the smartest card around) allow us to borrow books, magazines, and DVDs. Ebooks and readers are also available but we are still part of the old school that prefers getting our entertainment off the literal shelf. Being a writer, I love holding a book made from the heart of trees even if I have to 'air them' out for days before I can hold a many fragrances of a former reader's hand cream or the residue of laundry products. I love the sound a good writer can make as words pack a boat load of description. The pace and the melody of story of books are still my first love. But more and more, especially during the years of living a tiny homes life, I have becoming a fan of a beautifully crafted film. More than once in a year I will be inspired by a film.

Last night we watched the 2009 French film Summer Hours written and directed by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. The New York Times review written by A.O. Scott starts,

"In a literal, almost banal sense, Olivier Assayas’s “Summer Hours” is a movie about an inheritance. Hélène Berthier (Edith Scob), a silver-haired matriarch enthroned among her children and grandchildren at the beginning of the film, leaves behind a charming country house and a cherished art collection, and her heirs, as is normal, must figure out what to do with it all after her death..." The review points to the 'eye' of the film, the camerawork "And while Mr. Assayas’s filmmaking techniques are identifiably of the moment — and his sensibility is as thoroughly French as the long, painstakingly prepared family meals that punctuate “Summer Hours” — the assurance and aesthetic poise of the film make it quietly ravishing. The camera (wielded by Eric Gautier, who has worked frequently with Mr. Assayas, as well as, among many others, with Sean Penn on “Into the Wild”) seems less like a mechanical apparatus than an organ of perception, even of consciousness. Its movements mimic those of a person’s attention, at times restlessly trying to gather information from all directions, at times observing with serene and sympathetic concentration, occasionally puzzled but never bored...the film’s clearest and most poignant insight is that this longing, which is essentially to stop time, can never be fulfilled.

The New York Times' review was good, and accurate in its appraisal of the film's value just as the theme of valuing all the art is a major theme of Summer Hours. But though the article alludes to the experiences in the home and the natural surroundings of the place, it did not embrace the place as a character. And that is what I found most enduring about it. The family deals with the reality of a globalization, and making a living at their personal passion, separating them from the place. "Longing .. to stop time, can never be fulfilled."

The library borrowed DVD we watched includes a two disc set: one disc recorded the film, the second disc includes a later recorded set of interviews with the fimmaker Olivier Assayas. In those interviews are the inspirations that fuel my curiosity about creative process. These BONUS Features are as good as it gets for a Santa Goody in my Christmas stocking. Through the narration of his motivations and his depictions, his angles and the writing and rewriting of the screen play the listener is given the addition course more satisfying than pie.

Assayas speaks of the search for the right place. A place that is not bourgeois; not big or rich. Instead, the place that becomes the character linking the three generations is a French country home that has small(ish) rooms where one must exit through a glass door, step down what looks like brick steps, and cross the lawn a short distance in order to get to the studio. The land is spacious, rural, rich with flowers (that are gathered and cut to fill vases), fruit trees and berry bushes, a small lake for swimming. Eloise, a vital character though not focused upon does hold together the place and people. She is the housekeeper who has cared for the generations of Berthier, and at the end continues to cut flowers to remember the 75 year old matriarch after death and re-distribution.

The layering of scenes and the inclusion of people, things and place make for a very full experience, I will re-watch both the discs and come to my own destinations as a result. The character of place is something/someone that remembers things about myself that I might hide from myself. In the hiding of those parts of myself I may "try too hard to control your emotions so that others won't know how you feel, as if you were ashamed of your feelings. You shouldn't be ashamed of them...You often feel that the people around you or even life itself prevents you from expressing your emotions. You may feel lonely and unsupported by your friends, brothers and sisters and even your parents. To overcome this feeling of aloneness, you must have a great deal of emotional support from your family and friends." Perhaps in the investigation of The Safety Pin Cafe's character I will see how "You must learn that your merits and flaws exist independently of what others see in you. You are not the product of what other people see, but of your own inner energies." 

There is still time to consider how another angle on the character of this place, 'The Pin', might be enriched this winter of soggy times. I may find in the end that her character is just as it should be. One of the interpretations from Robert Hand regarding her character is found in the description of the Moon Sextile Uranus. "Your strong sense of fairness urges you to work for the benefit of all. You may work to change traditions and fight against customs that have outlived their usefulness. But remember, other people may not agree with that, and you must give them the same rights you demand for yourself."