Painting My Life Christmas Colours

This morning I finally got around to cleaning... well... sort of. At least I got the living room tidied and vacuumed ... It is so much more cozy and Christmassy now :) I also had an email from a friend of mine who always makes me smile and inspires me. I got to thinking what a contentented and settled person she has become over the last few years... and I wanted to be the same. As I look at this slightly fuzzy picture, I realize that all I have to do is take one day at a time and slowly paint the life I want. I used to knit pretty regularly, but I have gotten out of the habit. I am going to start again.. I'm, just going to start enjoying my life.. starting right now. Peter has just gotten home from the grocery store and we're going to make french toast. There are christmas carols playing.. and Peter and Gabby are howling excruciatingly together at the front door in greeting. Then I am going to finish cleaning and go see Guster and maybe read or knit a bit tonight. I have a friend coming over to bake.. and that should be really fun. So... wish me luck.. I'm off to paint my life in Christmas colours!

Gabby the Christmas Dog

Most years Gab has a red bow of some sort for Christmas... the last few years she has been sadly lacking adornment since we haven't been together... I've been off galavanting in Sweden with my now husband and inlaws. Last year Gab spent Christmas with my dear friend Emily (thanks Em!). This year I am.. yet again... in Sweden.. but this time I've got the Rue with me, and that makes all the difference. That doogen makes my life worthwhile.

Sometimes I wonder about Christmas... I have always been a big fan of a holiday dedicated towards celebrating family and forgivness and love. I was that totally annoying person who started bellowing "Chestunts Roasting on an Open Fire" in late October and insisted that all my collage friends help me decorate the small potted tree I named Victoria. I even had a ghastly plastic felt bow on the front of Ducky, my izuzu pup truck.

Over the last few years though, I've stopped singing, stopped baking and buying presents.. and pretty much stopped feeling that Christmassy glow. This year I tried to russtle up some spirit.. this pic captures a moment when I was totally sucessful. Hugging my Christmas dog and listening to carols was a happy and cozy day.

Now, however, I have pretty much ruined the whole holiday. Peter and I had a fight yesterday and I demanded that he open his present weeks early.. he loved it, as I knew he would.. and we eneded the discussion by deciding that we'd just do stockings. I've been a bit down all year and we were supposed to re-light the magic with a rosy, cozy Christmas together in our first home. That's a bit hard with a shaky marraige, finances and health though. I guess for me Christmas is about love and family... and I've been feeling short on both.

However, I am determined to at least go through the motions. I will ooohh and aaahh over my stocking. I will make scrambled eggs and bakon for breakfast just as my grandpa always does on Christmas morning. I will decorate my tree and set out the poinsetta's I bought yesterday. I'll even bake and listen to carols with my nice new friend from the barn this weekend. And I'll hug my beloved Christmas dog until I squish out the empty, lonely little spot in my heart which is hurting.

All I want for Christmas is you Gabby Berry.

Following That Cheerful Post

I'm sure if there actually is anyone who reads this they laughed at the drama of my last post.. I think I need to add "dramatic" and "depressing" to the list of adjectives I've used to describe this blog. Fortunately, no one actually reads my blog :P

In school today I made a tankekarta (thought map) otherwise known as bubble chart, brainstorm.. whatever.. of the themes in Sun Lit Dust.. it was actually really great. Ever since I spent an afternoon a few weeks ago actully writing, I've been claiming again that I am writing a book.. and it feels fantastic.. and I kind of am.. well.. at least I'm thinking about it all the time. The actual act of writing really clarifies thing for me... often I don't really know what I think of what something I'm working on is about until after I've actually started it.. then it takes a whole life of its own and I have to start my notes and organization all over again so that it is clean and makes sense... at anyrate.. I'm really happy with the direction of SLD. Maybe one day it will actually be something that merits the title of book.. who knows.. it's fun anyway.

I didn't really have any thoughts today... or anything specific to write, but I felt like I needed to move my blog past the drama of asking the nothing and everything out there to please fuck off and leave me alone in my misery :) Righto.. I've done that now.. have a fantastic day.. mister (or misses) nothing and nobody!

Pants Around My Ankles

At least once a week my world come crumbling down around me. I feel like a little kid who has peed its pants and is now standing in their pee with their pants around their ankles wondering what to do about it.

There are so many people in this world who I love and feel close to, but right now I can't talk to any of them... I feel like I'm in a glass baloon or bubble or something and like the air is slowly going stale, and the volume of the baloon is slowly decreasing until it will surely fit around my body and lungs like a stocking and ultimately suffocate me... the end seems inevitable.

I just keep hoping to put it off long enough to save something.. some scrap of dignity... till I can speak the language of the country where I live.. where my books and my pets live... till I have landed in a situation I can control.

You.. the nothing and noone.. or everything and everyone.. if you hear me... bah.. leave me the fuck alone to feel my wretchedness... and fatness.. in peace.

How the hell did I get here? How did the things I used to love become a weight I have to bare? How can the happiness have seeped out of my life? I'm only 25 years old for fucks sake.. and my dreams seem to be sitting around my ankles, recently pissed on..

Wonderful Day

One of my best friends in Sweden, Mohammad Gedi, comes from Somalia. He is a fantastic guy who works hard, is always positive, and is one of the nicest people I have met. Over the last eight months I have heard stories now and then of his life in Somalia and the family he was forced to leave behind when he fled to Sweden. He always told them with a funny spin and made light of the gravity of his situation, but underneath his positive demeanor there was horror. Gun fights, a family of 12 he hadn't seen in over three years. He had no idea if they were alive, dead, safe, in grave danger.

Gedi worked harder and faster in school than any other pupil and always had a smile. He was helped me move my huge sofa from out third floor apartment and wouldn't even let me pay his bus ticket home. Today, I sat here writing in my blog about the loss of balance and security in my life when Gedi came into the computer lab and sat beside me. We talked for a few minutes, then he mentioned, casually, with a gleam in his eye that he had discovered his family. Safe. Every single one of them. In England. I felt like my heart would overflow with gladness.

All this time he has been working, waiting, searching. A young guy of 22 alone in the cold north and suddenly all his fears were laid to rest. Words can't express how grateful I am for his sake. This world doesn't have enough guys like Gedi. When I think about the perseverance of this kind friend of mine, it really dwarfs the issues of balance I have in my own life. Thank you Gedi.

Self Observation

Today I met with a counciller for the first time in a long time. I have been struggling with some inner demons, with my writing, with quite a lot of stuff actually. It was so nice to hear a professional confirm all of the conclusions I have come to and validate the observations I have made. I felt... whole again.

The first month that I was here in Sweden I walked to the grocery store one day. The store was about a 20 minute walk away on a normal day, but the way was unfamiliar to me and the ground was very icy. I'm Canadian for gods sake. Slippery ground should't be a problem for me. But it was. Even Canadians need good winter shoes. It was dark, and minus 30 degrees celcius, and slippery, and I was lost. It took me over an hour to walk home, slipping every step and carrying a heavy load of groceries. I fell twice. By the end of my trip I had tears freezing on my cheeks and a very very cold face. That pretty much describes the way I've been feeling over the last year.. I have had a relatively simple life, just as the walk to the grocery store was relatively simple task.. yet I have been slipping and losing my balance and becoming disoriented.

I felt like my talk with Eva gave me a good pair of winter shoes...

My Book at Last

I actually began writing yesterday. I spend most of the day in front of my computer and my book started to come alive. I decided to scrap the idea of writing fully from the beginning. Now I am just chronicaling the actual people and events of my story. This has really turned out to be the best thing that I could do. My story has developed in complexity and seriousness. I will have a skelton before I actually begin writing the scenes. I would have thought that this would be a soulless way of approaching it, but it's actually working very well. Wish me luck!

Green Growing Things

Those of you who know me well know that trees are necessary to my happiness. There is just something about the fresh green buds in the spring, the leafy splashing patterns of sun and shade in the summer.. the pungent sponginess of decay and colour in the fall... mmmhhhh... the smells and colours fill the cavity of me with life and wakefulness.

Our last apartment had a fantastic view of the lake, which I loved. This one is nestled down into a little neiche... or so it seems. In reality is is surrounded by green growing things and this makes it feel wonderful to me. I love it. There is a small forrest across the park, a white flowering tree in front of our kitchen window, and climbing roses creeping up the wall just outside our bedroom window.

Some deep peace seeps into me as I sit on the sofa in front of a very large window and see all the growing things around me. I love it.

Heart Beat

A met another ghost on Monday. The ghost of an unborn child who haunts his parents relentlessly. I have a new friend from school. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to be friends with her and had been brushing her off in a careless and hurtful manner. There goes the image of Meredith the kind. One day she asked me why I shut her out so often. I must admit that I often let a curtian fall in front of my eyes, mind, and heart whenever she started down a tangent that didn't coo to my fancy. I answered blandly that I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to be friends with a person who held some of the opinions she had demonstrated. I could see her swallow and tread carefully with her next few words. She described her life in Sweden, thousands of miles away from her family in Uganda and gave me an image of loneliness that cut me deeply. What a brute I was! When I was young and untarnished I always thought of friendship as something to be offered to those who needed it.. not those who were cool enough, or who fitted into a preconceived image of what a friend should be. Certainly one of my very best friends doesn't fit the bill.. but somehow that never mattered.. I loved her to the ground anyway. So I took her into my heart.

On Monday she called my celly. I was at school surfing on a natural high. The life was coursing through me and I was shining. Immediatley I heard that panic seeping through the phone. Contractions. The baby was only 5 1/2 months old.. too early. Way too early. I went immediatley to take her to the hospital with my heart chewing away at my throat. When I got there she was standing with a stocking covering her hair and a bathrobe on.. nothing else. She seemed rooted to the place with fear. We joked a bit and I made her life despite everything, then we drove to the hospital.

In the examination room the doctor squirted some cold gel onto her stomach then pressed an instrament that looked like a dildo to me against her tummy.

A heart beat.

It was regular, alive, unbelievable. It beat proudly through the silent room echoing in the ears of every person present. A heart beat. That was the baby.

The doctor, a thick beefy woman with stubby fingers and very wide nails smiled a hearty smile. She launched into an explanation of how in the sixth month of pregnenecy there is a section of the lower abdomen that is often over streached and hurts quite a bit... Nothing to worry about.

Then she did a physical exam and her face changed. While we watched my friends insides statically on the screen, we all saw it. A distinctive contraction. The doctor couldn't measure the cervix because it was changing size. And still the heartbeat. It was still there, reverberating trough the empty chambers of our hearts.

It is worse than I thought at first. The chance of you loosing the baby is very high.

But not certain, I said... pleaded.

Very high.

The doctor left the room to consult with a more senior doctor and my friend sat there, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her husband, who had joined us after we got to the hospital sat there stupidly, frozen to his seat. I gave him a solid jabb in the leg and pointed at his wife.

Go home and wait it out, said the doctor upon her return. We don't know why this happens sometimes and there is nothing we can do about it. Come back and check yourself in when the baby starts to come.

We left feeling desolate and a little sick to our stomaches.

And the heartbeat, that wonderful and dreadful heartbeat, echoed in our ears.

Icy Deeps

On my way out to the barn I drive by a small, dark pool. It sits on the outter side of a curve in the winding road and seems to be carved out the forrest. Last spring there was a layer of ice over the dark water long after the large lakes and the ocean were melted and now, in the fall, the ice has begun to grow like cancer. It streaches over the surface seperating the icy deeps from the outside world.

I notice this seemingly harmless pond every time I drive by. The cows don't pay any special attention to it. The birds fly over it unaware. Yet there is a feeling of darkness that seeps through the still surface.

Two days ago I began imagining a mermaid kindgom under the ice. My mermaids were not sexy sea virgins, but the stolen souls of heroine addicts, taught, streached, bony. Their luminescent skin enemated a silvery green hue and their dark eyes sucked the light from the surrounding world into their void. I shiver in my mind.

I want to write something about this lake, inconspicious and shrowded in mystery. I want to know what breaths in the frigid, lifeless deeps. Days and days go by and my book sits still.. still and lifeless as this little lake.. and I am filled with longing.. heroine? Writing? Cold?

My Unicorn

The unicorn.. a mythical creature spawned from an overactive imagination and longing. A horn that neutralizes poison and is wholey good, strong and wild... The unicorn is an untameable creature.

The one who slips away.

I wonder if we could tame this unicorn if we would begin to notice that its stall needs to be cleaned just as a regular horses does, and that its coat sheds in the spring and that everyonce in a while it gets a gummy eye infection. Or perhpas not. Perhaps it shimmers in the moonlight and awakens the lust and longing within us. Perhaps.

I have a unicorn.. a ghostly creature that lives in the periphery of my consciousness... slipping in and out of my hazy thoughts and dreams.. always functioning as a meter stick for my self worth and finding me lacking.

How strange that an imaginary creature is to thoroughly embedded in my unconscious... that a creature born of a wilderness that is untamable, the mind, that is perfect beyond conception, that shimmers with light, should be what i measure myself with. I have never properly laid hands on this beast. My sweaty, dusty, now totally white Gus is so much more real.. so much more loveable... yet it is the unicorn by which I measure myself.

Oh to face it and feel the roughness of its horn, smell the pungency of it's cloved hooves... I want it to step out of the shadows and show itself! Then I want the sun to shine throught he dust and watch it dissipate into nothingness.. the faced ghost laid to rest.

Unzipped

Every once in a while I think that the wrinkles are starting to fall out.. somehow my life has been hanging up in a steamy room.. and if I just wait a bit longer I'll notice that it is perfectly pressed... without any reall effort of my own.

Then I come crashing back to reality.

My life is a pile of sweaty clothes that have been carelessly thrown in a pile and are now starting to smell even worse than expected because they aren't drying properly.. never mind washing, folding, or ironing.

Is it possible to continue and emotional outpour, even for someone you love, if the recipient has their head too far in the clouds to have any idea of returning your devotion and care?

Bah.

After this day... this some what chatty, lazy, hopefull Friday.. I had saw my life through a glass of milk. Then the zipper on my riding boots broke. Damn. I'm unzipped again.

A Tare in the Sky

I had a day bursting with anxiety today. No reason. Life has been bubbeling along like a brooke in the spring as the snow begins to melt. But I havent' been sleeping well. Vivid dreams have been assailing me and keeping my mind from melting into a restful oblivion for eight hours a night I need. As a result I have developed a very unattractive habbit of chewing the inside of my right cheek until it starts to get sore and bleed.. and they I chew off the tender scar tissue. I'm becoming neurotic.

After a somewhat wasteful but relaxing morning, I left my cozy apartment and the anxiety fell over my mind like a veil. Nothing in particular. I felt emotionally blind, reaching in front of me with a long stick but only touching a spot here or there without getting any real pictuer of what was around me or what was going on. I had lunch with Peter and gazed disinterestedly out the window at people walking by. Then we went and bought him an expensive and very exciting new guitar. I wanted him to have it and thought it was a very good expenditure, but my ability to share in his excitement was dulled by my pattering pulse and mild irritation.

On the way home I stopped by a store to look at wallpaper for our new bedroom. We have decided to wait a little while with the bathroom renovation but I really wanted to change something in the flat, to put my stamp on it and declare to the ether that this is now me, my place. I looked for quite a while, comparing the shades of cream, white, gold, beige, silver that were blended together in various luminous striped patterns and settled on one. Then I rang Peter to tell him about it. He was still filled with his guitar and totally disinterested in bedroomwall paper. I ended the conversation and stood alone in the middle of the store feeling heavy. So I decided to buy the wall paper.

I got up to the counter and struggled my way through ordering the desired design in Swedish, then I looked at the paper up close in the brighter light of the check out counter and felt a knot of anxiety grip my throat. Were the darkest stripes too brown? Maybe they were too much colour, too much solidity, to much to much to much. I walked back to the shelf and grabbed the lightest silvery white striped paper I could find and went back tot he counter.

"I've changed my mind. I'll take this one instead."

I said that in Swedish of course and it took me a minute to be understood. Then I turned, still heavily, to wander out to my car and head home. But I never made it even to putting on my seatbelt. I knew that my first choice was right. The pale option was cold. Too cold for my bedroom. And it didn't have enough flexibility of colour. I got back out of my car and hurried back into the store. I explained to the only sales woman I could find that I needed to look again. The colour wasn't right. "Of course" she said. We then proceeded to spend about fifteen minutes snipping bits of paper for me to take home and examine in the light of my room with my furniture. At the end of the encounter I said that I'd call and confirm or alter my order and that I was glad they hadn't sent it out yet.

But they had. While I was standing talking to the woman, another sales agent had called my order in. It's all computerized now you know. After you choose there is no turning back. Don't even think about changing your mind. Or pay a 30% fee for being a pinnipanna, a scatterbrain, a woman with a cloud of anxiety eating away at her self confidence like coke eats away at tooth enamal.

Bah. "Leave it," says Peter... "It can't be too bad if it is just your second choice." So I call the store and say alright, don't worry about it. Then drive home now hosting a creature in my belly wich is circiling discontentedly around the axis of its body, hunting in vein for the perfect position to snuggle into.

At home I tape the two bits of paper to the wall. Damn. It is 2019 I want.. not 2018. Should I spend the next six years encased in four wall of silvery chill because I had an anxious day? No! I won't. I don't give a damn if every single person on the planet thinks I'm a silly feather head. I call back.. again.. and change my order.

The creature stills and the knot loosens. I knew I was right. 2019 is perfect. Every time I walk by the two unevenly taped up bits of sample wall paper for the rest of the day I feel satisified. I chose well. Warm, creamy, a streak of gold, a breeze of white.

Then I take my brown-eyed, loving little dog to the barn and spend two hours brushing and riding my horse and talking with my dog. As I'm cooling Gus off with a slow walk around the ring, I drop the reins and claps my arms around his neck inhaling his horse hair, sweat scent and soak up the sky. There is a rip in it, and through that rip is splashing warm fushia, gold, and amber. I chose well.

Fat Man Basking

Today while I was driving back to ElGargantian for the second time I noticed a very fat man wearing a bright blue tshrit streached luxuriously in the sun on the side of the road. His moped was lying at a slightly skewed angle a few meters away from him as the traffic rolled by. It was a very odd place to be basking... and a very odd time of year. I was sitting in the car with the seat heater on and my fall coat, but there he was... like a giant blue whale on a browning green lawn in the crisp early fall air. Good for him, I thought!

Uninspired

I'm having a bit of a problem... I have lost my belief in my book :(.. not that I can actually write it or anything.. but in the essence of it. Over the last year I have come to believe more and more that it is next to impossible to get away from things that were hardwired into your being at an early age. Yes we all have control over our own destiny to a certain extent.. but it is very hard to see our own weaknesses and quirkes... we're too close.. and they are so incrediably deeply imbeded into our psyche's that they are part of the way that we think, breath, interact, feel, make love... everything about us has a trace of our child self shining through.. like a ghost. I don't have much time to write more now.. but I have a lot of thoughts on this subject.. so I'm sure I'll get back to it.

Welcome to Sweden Gussy!

Here he is... in Sweden.. happy as can be :) Gussy got off the truck last night suprisingly alert and happy. His feet weren't looking so great, but other then that, he was fantastic. I was very glad that I'd bought him a new extra warm blanket and fleece.. because it was around -20 Celcius.. a tad colder than Florida!

Blogger Thrown In Jail

This is absolutly astounding. In the western world we take so many things utterly for granted. Yet all over the world, millions of people have their every move scrutinized. I feel as if my blog is a totally private thing. Perhaps my friends and family read it once in a while, but really who has the time or cares? Not many people. For Abdel Kareen Soliman, posting a blog entery was equivalent to waving a flag in the face of a tyrannical governemnt saying "Throw me in jail... for 4 years!"

Below is the link to the article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6385849.stm

Everyday, no big deal, moments...

My dear friend Beth gave me a valentines day card about 5 years ago... to this day it still defines what friendship and love mean to me. I don't remember exactly how it went, but the punch line was that our wonderful friendship was made up of a whole bunch of "everyday, not big deal moments."

One such moment was when she and I were sitting in the grass in front of the barn where Gus was living while Beth and I were attending Randolph-Macon Woman's College. We were painting her "bookshelves" (planks and cement blocks) a rich royal blue. I remember laughing, getting covered in paint, Beth taking pictures of Gus giving me a kiss while he was covertly looking into the camera... it was a great day.

One random Tuesday (dollar movie night at the cheap theater in Lynchburg) Beth and our crew (Anurupa, Sarah.. and I think there were a few other's along) dragged me off to the first Harry Potter movie.. I was a professed non-potter fan at the time. Basically I was morally opposed to anything that everyone else liked. I laughed so hard when Hagrid put a pigs tail on Dudly that my stomach hurt for a week. A solid week. The tears streamed down my face and I fell in love. Today I revel in the pungency and sincerity of the Harry Potter series.

One day Beth and I had been auguring about something.. She was feeling down, I was feeling annoyed and a bit hurt. We were in my little putzy pickup truck on the way home from the barn and the windows were down because it was a warm Virginia spring day. We'd been driving in silence for a few minutes when Beth looked over at me behind the wheel and said, "why do you like me?". I knew this was a moment to swallow my frustration. "Because when you smile, you make everyone around you smile too. It lights up the room and is utterly infectious. Because you are the least judgmental and most positive person I know. Because I can be totally goofy with you and never feel self conscious."

Beth lives in South America right now. She's been with the peace corpse for thee and a half years now. She'll be heading home to the States later this year, but I no longer live there.. I'm in Sweden, hundreds of miles from anywhere that she'll be. But we still chat online several days a week, talk about nearly everything that is going on in our lives (though hers is much more exciting than mine!) and we still have "every day, no big deal moments" which make up our friendship.

I've noticed with my husband as well that it is the unnoticeable moments that stick with me as time strolls slowly by. I remember one summer day several years ago when we hiked up to the top of a hill and ate pasta salad and hard boiled eggs. It was near the end of the summer and I'd been wanting to go hike like that for ages. The view was fantastic.. we took goofy pictures. It was great. Later that night we snuggled into our tent (me with a harry potter book) and read and talked. At about 4:ooam I woke up cold and feeling like I was coming down with a sickness.. and it looked like rain.. so I woke Peter up and asked him to take me home (we were only ten minutes away from our tiny apartment). Just as we finished packing up our tent the heavens opened and the rain came down in buckets. I've never seen it rain so intensely in Sweden either before or since.. but that night/ morning was spectacular. We laughed on the way home feeling very lucky that we were safely in our car rather than out in our tent in the rain. When we got home we had hot chocolate then went to bed and slept until 11:00am. Every day, no big deal moments.

Ghosts

I have this idea about ghosts... not ghosts as in kasper the friendly ghosts.. ghosts as in memories and impressions that follow us through our daily activities and affect the way we experience everything. Words are like this too. Peter and I had an interesting conversation the other day about the word bizzar. When I hear that word a song with the lyrics "How bizzar, how bizzar," pops into my head. Peter, on the otherhand things about Pulp Fiction. Wow. My theory about words is that each and every one is a carries with it a shadow, ghost words, feelings, memories, connotations. The difference of one word can change the whole meaning. And literature.. it is litered with ghosts... other books that have inspired ideas and thoughts, discourse between fiction both contemporary and not, private and public. Then when one deals with the idea of haunting as a specific theme in a book.. the idea of shuddering, intangible undertones can be followed from the smallest microcosm to the largest macrocosm.. just as the levels of life begin with a cell and extend to a galexy... or perhaps life begins with a mitochondria and ends with some infinitly large entity.

So many ghosts go unnoticed... we are attracted to a certain kind of man, but have no idea why. We love the colour green, but don't realize until our late teens that the foundation of our delight in this colour is vanity... it brings out the luscious tones of our eyes. We follow specific behaviour patters without realizeing that they are simply the result of thousands of years of behavioural evolution. So often, we are haunted and we don't even know it. I know many people that like to think they are operating freely, with their eyes open and their minds engaged. I seriously doubt if there is a single person alive who is actually able to do this. What colours do you like? How do you view your body? Even someone who has attempted to mentally expunge sociatial expecations of body and body image is most likely still very attached to the human image.

There was a G.I. Joe comercial on television when I was little... it would give some message to the kids, then declare, "Now you know.. and knowing is half the battle." Knowing really is half the battle. How often weakensses plague us unaware. Simply realizing it is there and seeing it. Ah. You. Weakness. Ghost. Be Gone. And it is done. Of course it is not always that easy, but sometimes sunlight is needed to display the dust that covers us all.

I sat down to write about Sun Lit Dust and my computer screen happened to be covered in this magical mythical substance. I remember the first time I ever noticed dust in the air. I was small, I'm not sure how small, and I was soaking up the warmth of the sun as it shone through a large window at our family cottage. It was penetrating my body and my breath was slowing. I lazily opened my eyes and noticed that the air was chaulked full of stuff. What was it? I reached up with my hand and tried to catch some, but there was nothing there. All this dust in the air. It must be there all the time, moving in and out of our lungs and blood, but never visable. It is a substance that makes up a large part of our environment, yet we rarely see it. After that glimps though, I know it's there. Just as it litters the screen of my computer this very moment.

Somone said once that, "We live each day in a virtual reality of our own creating." I like to think of this dust as mine. My embodiment of the ghosts that haunt me. My dust has a bit of a sparkle to it.. almost like miniscule snow particals glittering in the winter light.

In the very last scene of my book, Melanie takes Emily by the hand and lead her out of the shadows and into the sun.. where the sun shines clear through the waif. All that remains is a cloud of sun lit dust, which drifts aimlessly away in the languid summer air. The ghost, when recognized, is nothing.

Perhaps it isn't really that seeing or knowing is half the battle, but that the battle is truely seeing or knowing. I think there is a huge lag time between seeing some proof with our eyes, and understaning it in our hearts. It is the sight of the heart that really counts.

No matter how many times I wipe the dust of my screen.. it will still be there, altering my view of the words I write and the way I feel about them... but at least I can see it. I know that I see the world through a cloud of particals... my skin and the skin of those I love, fluff from the sweaters I wear, hair from my dog and cat, pollen form the plants near my home, salt and water from the sea and lakes that are near where I live.. all of these things fill the air between me and everything I think I see.

My Imaginary Book

I am writing an imaginary book... namely a book that is composed primarily in my imagination. My book has a title, I am very familiar with my characters, I know the plot, am intimately familiar with many of the scenes, and have thought extensivly about themes and ideas in my book. Sun Lit Dust. That's my title. Everyday I think things that are related to my book and blog about ideas that are pertinent to my book.. so instead of actually writing it.. I'm going to blog about it.... for a while. Who knows what the result will be.

About a week ago I started writing in my my space blog. I found that each time I did, I was flooded with inspiration and the desire to continue writing.. so here it goes. A real blog. Devoted to ideas about Emaline and Melanie and sunlight.