The run home this morning was superb and the dawn light is vivid on my keyboard, my fingers casting shadows going west, my silhouette a cameo on the wall.
The show went well, I got the sunrise theme started at the precise moment needed for it to end at 5:47 a.m.; official sunrise for today. It is the little things that give such joy! Then running home before the sun as it climbed the sky to show its brazen face above the hills and touch my life with gold, car gilded as though Midas had passed by and stroked it.
Off to the left, above a fresh ploughed field, a flock of sparrows swirled but what really caught my eye was not the movement but the pale lemon slashed with blue or teal of some displaced bird dancing amid the dun browns like some exotic butterfly grown far too large. Escaped from some cage and joyous in its freedom.
There was a moment when my heart ached, my eyes filled with tears, not pain but exaltation in the beauty of the day as my spirit ruled completely, open wide to light, to birds, to green all silvered with the dew, to rich brown earth, the pellucid skies an icing over all.
Then as I turned the corner a truck overtook me, disregarding life and law, a speed that shook my car like high wind bringing an adrenaline shock fast to my throat. Let's hope his destination is not final and that he is not the instrument of some other's terminus today. Such haste in all this bounty!
Back home, I boiled water for tea, fed feral cats and Furball who has pooped into my only hat despite the generous litter place provided. Came here and started to type then had to run as clouds of smoke signalled that my toast was toasted. And then some. It was actually in flames, so breakfast will have to be rethought although I have achieved a blog of sorts amid the haze.
I can feel the crash approaching, coming down from my performance high is different every week. Today's will be abrupt and total. I must feed the inner me with something before my stomach decides my throat has been cut and floods the blood with some sustaining cocktail that will make my sleepy head hurt.
I walked in to what was my bathroom twenty four hours ago to be faced with a wide pink grin, shiny blue eyes, white and ginger fur and a room I do not recognize at all. Actually when I left for work four hours earlier it still looked like my bathroom. It's all my fault. I know better than to leave a 'little' without toys. You either give them toys or they make toys.
Although I must admit I thought the feather duster made a really good toy. I also didn't know it could come apart quite so completely. And who would have thought a roll of toilet paper, which is only 200 sheets, could go quite that far?
Of course I should have remembered that a three inch long, one and a half inch tall cat with a head smaller than a ping pong ball houses more than enough strength to overturn a wicker basket carefully packed with all those things I was considerate enough to move out of Furball's way. With a ten pound weight on top. Wedged neatly (and tightly) into the space beside the under-sink cupboard. How could I have forgotten that?
And naturally once you are bored with eating the food, you use it to paint! I think we will find out if he really is too young for dry kibble stuff. I'll get the type that says kitten on it. There he lounges, one front paw crossed over the other, ears pricked up and mouth wide open laughing without even a squeak escaping.
That was two hours ago. I have pottered around organising dinner, baked chicken and cassava with assorted vegetables on the side, taking care of letters and bills just general busy-work because I cannot deal with all those darned feathers right now!
It must be a law of Nature that the very young have really big voices. I spent all yesterday bouncing around bureaucracy of one sort or another trying to find a safe haven for my fuzzy guest. Who grooms himself thoroughly and well, eats heartily and turned the luxurious folds of the towel I supplied for sleeping quarters into a litter box (but at least he can take care of elimination of his own, sometimes the very young need assistance.).
The 100% no kill shelter cannot take him so young. They are primarily a dog sanctuary with a space for cats, all of whom are older and larger than Furball by far and they fear an "incident". Which I interpret as cat attack leading to a dead or severely injured Furball.
Place number two has stopped taking in strays as the problem is expanding here, and place number three has a back log of kittens and puppies and they euthanize. So Furball is living large and high and wide in my second bathroom. Place number one will take him in three weeks when he is bigger so I will either foster him myself and try not to fall too far in love or find him a foster home elsewhere if I can.
How not to fall in love with a charming being who meets my eyes, stands on my arm and reaches up to bump noses with me? Who hurls himself at the door and reaches imploring little paws underneath it when I leave him for the day or for a moment? Who speaks to me and seems to listen when I speak to him?
I had forgotten that kittens can 'beam' themselves anywhere and be totally invisible out in plain sight. They are also phenomenal ventriloquists and can make their voice sound as though they are yowling directly into your ear in the wee hours of the night.
The strays that come around for breakfast are looking at me with a return of their previous edginess. I smell of alien cat no doubt, and the yowls and chirps and warbles Furball produces make them jumpy, looking over lean shoulders for the interloper who has taken over their space.
My managing director couldn't stop laughing as I told her why I would not be coming in yesterday. She finally choked out "I have been coming here for 21 years and have never found a kitten!" I guess I'm just lucky!
A thread in the forums on money and happiness triggered a landslide of memories for me.
For most of my life money has been fairly irrelevant. If you have it you spend it, if you do not have it, you do without. Doing without though was the superficial 'I can't go shopping'; not true deprivation and although I was aware of that intellectually it was not until I left my husband and he closed our joint bank accounts and maxed out my credit lines that I did without to the extent that eating every day was not an option I could indulge.
First to go was cable. Then the gas, as I had an electric wok and kettle and did not care about hot water or heat particularly. The telephone was next. I temped and made enough to keep just one month in arrears on my electric bill and on the rent. I cleaned apartments and walked dogs. I argued with quiet desperation that I would work at the most boring repetitive jobs despite my education and work history because I was hungry.
At least once the telephone was disconnected the creditors could not call. One I will never forget told me he didn't care if I had to strap a mattress to my back and go set up shop on the corner - I hung up at that point and sat staring at the shrilling 'phone when it rang back as if it was a rare species of snake that spit deadly venom in the ear.
The hardest thing about this time was that I hadn't seen it coming. It never occurred to me not to honour the vows I took, with all my worldly goods I thee endow. Next time I keep a separate bank account.
So was I unhappy going from considerable comfort to a negative cash flow? Certainly some of the consequences were distressing and unpleasant. I like eating three meals a day and washing jeans by hand then waiting for them to dry when it is freezing outside is hard on both hands and spirit.
It is also interesting how people try to make poverty shameful, as though some evil deed has caused it. I was foolish, not evil and I was lucky enough that while I had to sell my books I managed to stop short of selling my soul or my body. Some have had it far worse than I.
Still the question is the connection between money and happiness. The degree of happiness I felt sitting hungry in the dark was no less intense than that I feel after a perfect meal in good company. However in those dark days, there were long stretches of time when I worked a lot harder to feel happy, to find the joy than I did when money was no object.
Now is an inbetween time in my life. I have enough for my needs and can stretch to a few wants. I am happy almost all the time with very little effort and I have time at last to work to release the angers I collected as though they were some cosmic pay cheque that I could live on rather than die by.
Both my diminutive house guest and I slept through the night, warm and dry despite the blustery rain outside. Morning has arrived as it tends to, daily, this time clear and bright with blue skies that rival the kitten's eyes in clarity and hue.
I suspect some siamese in the dim and distance ancestry of this furball. The eyes are definitely blue, not baby grey, and there is a regal kink about an inch from the end of the tail. Legend says the siamese were royal cats and when, one day, the princess placed her rings on a tail for safekeeping while she languished in her bath the chosen cat decreed that hence forth the breed would have a crook in the tail as they had become ringbearers. True or not, I always love a colourful explanation for phenomena.
How does this tiny piece of fluff know my head is where I live? It does not address my foot or hand with its raucous yowls of demand but clambers up to look me in the eye, its beady gaze quite constant in its drive to get what it needs. Maybe the eyes have it?
I put it by the window, safely screened, in the kitchen while I brought food to room temperature. Such a flurry of fur and hissing as one of the ferals from outside made it clear a cat inside the house is not approved behaviour on my part. The little fluff became a much larger fluff and made teakettle noises in its turn. This teacup sized thread of life standing its ground and giving a rude what for to the pumpkin coloured fang-baring face pressed up against the screen.
I sprayed pumpkin head with water, took him off my list of welcome guests for breakfast lunch and dinner and felt an upwelling of near parental pride in furball. Such a 'mensch' at three ounces dripping wet!We have both broken our fasts, the kitten (I'm almost certain its a 'he' but appearances can be misleading at this stage) can lap and eat solids so there is really no excuse not to take it to the shelter today.
Perhaps I can arrange to do an interview on the place as well, maybe do a 'homes needed' bulletin on my show. Eventually I will move to a place where I can have a cat (or two) but not this week.
Every day driving back from the station, whether it is a dawn run or just coming home on a regular weekday, I take the highway. Every day, heading north, I reach a point where there is a gentle hill which bulges at the top making it impossible to see the road ahead and every day I sail over the top of that hill and wish I could just freeze the moment and hang there gazing at the countryside before me.
Fields flow left and right on both sides of the highway which winds down between trees that look like cypress but are not. The landscape slopes off into the pewter dappled surface of the sea, a flat and slightly wrinkled vista curving around the boundaries of the world, splashing at the edges of the sky waiting to catch fire at sunset. Further north the cement factory fumes and smokes a little, blot on the coastline sweeping in jags and curves as far as I can see.
Today there was something hot and pulsing on the radio and I flew along the road, windows open, wind blowing the words back down my throat as I sang along rushing nowhere for the sheer joy of speed and wind and wild abandon. Some moments in Barbados take my breath away. An everyday landscape that is so extraordinary there are no words to capture it. Except maybe beautiful.
Yes, that will do it. Beautiful.
a day makes! Skies are blue, the breeze is balmy and the only sign of yesterday's storm is the overnight sprouting of green where there was brown. All the lichen coming back to life at once.
In the Caribbean we are always aware of the possible storm systems rolling in and speak in measured tones of troughs and depressions; tossing around longitude, latitude and millibars as though they were cricket balls in a warm up session.
I was speaking to our chief meteorologist and was enchanted to learn that most clouds have a life span of three to six hours unless something happens to increase their longevity. It gives a whole new tragic dimension to cloudwatching. The vigil. The dissolution. The sheer fact that someone has studied clouds so deeply that we can talk with authority about their lifespan.
Human beings are at once the most amazing and most disappointing creatures on the surface of the planet. Our quest for knowledge, our curiosity and unwillingness to just accept has moved us forward from the stone to hi tech age with blistering speed.
Perhaps too fast for us to assimilate the knowledge effectively, but what is done is done. Too bad our moral compass has not expanded at quite the same rate. It saddens me that information is so thoroughly, so instantly available and yet we still slink and scheme and make snap judgments, point fingers and seek to shrug off blame onto other shoulders while whining about our rights and abrogating all responsibility.
Although I do not read the threads that are nothing more than glorified popularity contests, even I was aware of the topics dedicated to the 'winner and runners up'. Mere days later they are being sniped at from the bushes or openly verbally slapped around.
Sour grapes from those whose candidates were unsuccessful? I neither know nor care; but I learned more than I wanted to about some whose posts had been interesting enough for me to make a point of reading them. Until now. Ah well, it is all just a virtual experience anyway. I can turn it all off with the click of a button.
The average thread on a forum has a life span of a couple of hours although it can be resurrected, much like lichen. The tendencies people show on these threads, though. Can they be turned off? Are they virtual or is it who they really are? Sometimes I read the threads and weep.
I have loved and lost so many times I wonder that I still hold a spark of light that wants to love again. Glutton for punishment? No, I believe in love. I love that sense of running on empty, of having no breath left in my lungs to power words, of a heart that is determined to dig its way free and fly to my beloved to sit and pulse in the shelter of his hands.
Whether he will want my bleeding, slowly dying heart to clutch to his manly bosom is a question that, blessedly, will remain unanswered as the bloody thing has not managed to escape its bony prison once in all the times it has tried.
So why do I keep losing? Well, there are times when I throw them back before they drown in the air. I see that stunned-in-the-headlights stare and realise they are caught up in the moment and will suffer when reality sets in.
They do not want a relationship and love, they just want love the dream, the fantasy that carries with it lots of salt and sweat and tangled sheets. I call it lust and throw them back unemptied, undrained, kind vampire that I am.
Some I lose through carelessness. I don't work hard enough to let them know I really mean it when I say I need some time alone; that a lie will end it; that a broken promise, no matter how inconsequential, breaks everything. That if you say you are my friend and prove yourself wrong there is no going back to before you hurt me. I need to say it more than once.
I selfishly expect my loves to listen and to hear the way I do. Take mental note of where the stress points are and the safe pathways through the minefield of man/woman communication. If I say I do not like something, I will not like it more tomorrow. I will not change my mind.
Some I lose because I made a mistake. Listened to the dreams inside me rather than the dry, level voice that points out quietly this one is not for you. Six months or six years later I'll be sobbing out my heart as inevitable becomes current event and nothing I can do will change the path to over.
So I let go. I break the patterns I have woven with my lost lovers and reset the loom, the slate, the freshly poured concrete all ready for a footprint or a heart, and wait to love again. Loving is the best, most precious thing I do. Celebrating moments of togetherness and holding back the dark that claims us all, alone in the end. I love, a flame to nurture living in the light.
There is a tropical depression suspended over Barbados at the moment, in fact right now it sounds as though it has stalled right over my roof! No sun, just unremitting grey and the sound of rain interwoven with the jet engine growl of thunder that goes on and on as lightening eats up the air from horizon to horizon and Nature rushes in to do her vacuum abhorring thing.
I have been sitting creating images and ads, splicing words and pictures into forms that might catch imagination, call to souls and make them listen to the stations under my wing. It's a lot easier to find thing to say with Faith FM than 90.7 so the religious side of things is flourishing today, sweet irony for an unmitigated pagan to admit. Faith can bring you comfort, fill your heart, strengthen and renew you. we have the dove, the rainbow, the rock, easy images to share a message.
What the heck can 90.7 do? We keep it very simple, we bring you music, that's right, music! That was good, now I need more but rain and grey do nothing for the patterns in my mind, the green icing is doing a MacArthur's Park of dissolution... at 90.7 we keep the music cool, the rhythms smooth the way life should be. AAARGH!
Too much ozone in the air and my skin is prickling with electrcity from nearby lightening. Safer to shut down the system for a while.
I have been home from work long enough to feed the cats that do not belong to me and myself. I'm racked with shivers and chills so I have dug out the gentle comfort of a much washed, soft flannel sleep shirt in dark blue and after a brief entry here and a quick swing around the threads I shall go to bed and hope the current silence means no one is going to mow their grass this morning.
Dawn flirted across the sky in lavender this morning, disdaining the standard pink tinged panoply of cloud; the world looked slightly tilted as though the sea would spill uphill, encroaching on the fields. Or perhaps it was all my perceptions, slightly skewed from something in my blood that makes me shiver, makes my head pound and my neck a tender column no longer fluid on my shoulders.
To bed and sleep, perchance to heal as nature does her knitting bit with unravelled sleeves. Just hoping it is not dengue again.
There is a thread in the forums this morning asking what you have just said to yourself. Most of the responses are critical comments, even rude and insulting comments that most of us would think twice about before addressing them to another person.
So why is it wrong to say good, complimentary things to and about yourself? A couple of weeks ago I got a very negative reaction from someone when I commented that I do good work. Why should that be? I write well, for the most part. Am I supposed to go 'aw shucks' and pretend I have not been gifted with a facility with language?
The part of me that creates the rhythms and the passages that sing is not under my control. I have learned grammar, spelling and punctuation, rules so I can break them; I read dictionaries for fun and words will cling to all the lacunae in my brain to tumble from my pen, my fingertips some unimaginable time from now.
When I danced I moved the way I write, with everything I am or can imagine being. Should I deny that? I make love the same way. I cook, I shower, take a breath with every cell that makes up me; a-borning, living at its peak, or dying. I wring the moments of my life of all their juice and fill my greedy eyes and hands and mouth with sustenance or mudpies, whatever's on the menu for the day.
Take me apart, I am no beauty; too large, too small, too short, too long, too narrow all judgments handed down by other 'perfect' beings who do not sweat or piss or stink of farts and garlic but put me all together and I, like you and you and you, am a bloody miracle of engineering, unique and beautiful beyond my wildest dreams of beauty.
A heart that beats, lungs bellow, fill with air that flows oxygen to blood which circulates and does its job unsupervised except by the brain that twiddles thumbs, writes poetry and blows raspberries at fate. I am a testament to gods or evolution and willing to stand on roof tops, hillsides, mountains, breathing deep and shouting loud I'm good at what I do.
So why don't you? Why is it wrong to own the miracle that we are?
My mind is a factory, throwing out thoughts and concepts like a waterfall thundering over a cliff and only a very few get caught, prisms of mist on the branches of observation. Even those are winnowed to the bone, some stored for future contemplation, some discarded, some enacted on the instant backed up with half-baked sketches a scribbled note or two to channel memory so I don't lose sight of the bigger picture I am constantly adjusting, redesigning in my head and in real life.
The graphic artist at our newspaper had a visual concept of his own to go with my words and when mine was sent to his desk was going to discard the fruits of his own consciousness. I need to speak to him about at least presenting his ideas to me. Fortunately that did not happen so now I have two ads, not one, for Faith FM and with two more taking shape that gives me enough to run a varied campaign over the next few weeks.
My newbie announcer will be happy because going to print means I have locked her in the ten a.m. to two p.m. time slot instead of shifting her back to opening the station. More sleep for her and I have to find a way to cover the station in the morning as I want a live presence there.
I have misplaced one of my notebooks. The disadvantage of a prolific and tangential mind is that it moves. Each move discards the information it contained just moments before, so I write things down in case I want them later. Somewhere in a little yellow note pad is a glowing phrase I have forgotten detail of, I just retain the feeling and the memory of the upwell of tears it brought to someone's eyes when I tossed it out. I want it back. I have tried to limit myself to one notepad but it doesn't work and now the one I want is missing.
Of course there is the interesting truth that frequently my notes are as puzzling to me as the traceries of waves on sand but still, they serve as jumping off points and open up the doors to memories that have built concepts for me, pearls around the biting grit of pain, of anger, laughter in the past. Nothing wasted, everything a path to esoteric beauty in someone's eyes.
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