Power Tool Therapy Sweeping the Nation

In Erin's recent blog she refers to a previously debilitating fear of power tools that she is currently transforming. It is ironic that we seem to be cleaning out some of the same metphorical closets and naming some of the same suspects in the crimes against Self.

For myself I even went so far as to revere hand tools from prehistoric times, like the fondly remembered hand drill from grade school woodworking. It symbolized an empowerment then that I couldn't maintain at the helm of the loud and dangerous newcomers, which I held in paralyzing contempt. It was okay by me to have someone who could do it better. But that's were the whining in me began, when there wasn't someone there to do it for me.

Today I was doing some repair work on an old treadle potter's wheel.
There was no way to do this without the power saw and the drill. The drill didn't worry me, even though once long ago I got my hair caught in one and ended up with an oversized ornament on my head. But the saw...King always very kindly warned us girls "get ready for noise" -that was something else. Knowing I HAD to do these repairs, I timed it just right and tried out the saw just before Jame and Scott came yesterday just in case...and to my surprise even though I was cutting an awkward piece of warped plywood perched at a half-assed angle on top of a wood pile (my specialty -impulsive research),I really didn't hear the saw as loud at all. It was wierd, there was no shallow breathing, no weak knees, no shakey hands (thank goodness), so I cut it again -same thing, just a piece of wood getting smaller and I was in charge, and the sound just a buzz muffled by my own power.

The inner whining about having to do the project myself went on for most of the day today as I went about the renovations. I did all the things I would have rolled my eyes at King for: there was a trip to the hardware store for a bolt, a chuck key, and a drill bit; there were numerous trips to the house to find things; and the biggest of all -it took all day. The whining was really about the fact that if only I had some man here to do this for me it would take about a half an hour. Believe me I mentally panned the neighborhood and imagined myself approaching some unsuspecting retired fellow digging around in his garage. Luckily that held less appeal than toughing it out. The beauty of the whole exercise was that there was no man to do it for me and waiting until one happened along was not an option. What is going on in the universe these days? I feel like my life of thistley lessons has been put into hyperdrive. Is this a test? I can't help hoping there will be a prize.

The piece de resistance was that when I thought I was finished, the wheel didn't work and the real task still lay before me. I was forced to sit down and ponder. The first part had been easy as there were rotten pieces that needed to be refashioned and replaced but now there was the mystery of why the wheel wobbled. I'm not even going to tell you some of the things I tried in desperate attempts to find a simple solution. By this point I was tiring of the tedium of this process.

When hair-brained ideas had spun themselves to death, the miracle of thought presented itself and I saw, plainly, that this medium that required so many steps, including measuring with an instrument instead of an eyeball (don't worry I did a lot of that too), was exactly like making something out of clay, or sewing a dress when you can't understand the pattern, or probably creating a web site (no not that, PLEASE). You start with the idea, know the materials, and solve the problem according to what the materials and the tools can do. Sinchy, especially when you delete the resistance.

I'm not exactly finished but I do know exactly what to do in the morning when I will whoop and holler to announce my victory.

Station Break

Hey I finally found out that people have been leaving comments -What fun!
I, of course don't know how to reply yet. Can somebody tell me?

It's raining and cold. I have a heap of stuff on my plate and a large portion of it inticate but defusable fears. In the interest of earning dessert I'd better dig in and try to clip the right wires in the right order so my mashed potatoes don't get blown up by the mystery meat, ASAP.

Perhaps there will be adventure to report

Station Break

Hey I finally found out that people have been leaving comments -What fun!
I, of course don't know how to reply yet. Can somebody tell me?

It's raining and cold. I have a heap of stuff on my plate and a large portion of it inticate but defusable fears. In the interest of earning dessert I'd better dig in and try to clip the right wires in the right order so my mashed potatoes don't get blown up by the mystery meat, ASAP.

Perhaps there will be adventure to report.

The Golden Light Is On

I'm singing the praises of intuition today. There are always two ways to look at it but here's what works for me.

I am consciously on the lookout for guidance and serendipity and inquiring into the hidden messages. Even now my inner critic is throwing up the usual pat phrases that warn me against saying these things out loud because we all know that people who think this way are either intellectually lacking or lazy; or of murky mental health. This goes right along with the blog of a few days ago: accessing my intuition is that Oneness and in the moment thing. So enough from the voice of the small self and its silly tricks. Here's the true story of my intuition lately.

I was looking for a bottle of probiotics that I had bought in preparation for taking antibiotics for the lyme disease that I have been working on. A couple of months had passed since the puchase. Now it was time to look for the bottle. So having no luck with the slow method of locating a forgotten object I said (outloud because I was alone -but it works if I just think it) "please help me find the ...." within the next second my eyes landed on a ripe pear on the counter and, distractable as I am, I thought it should go into the fridge right away. When I opened the door it hit me that I had put the bottle in the fridge. After some minor rooting around I retrieved what I was looking for. There's more.

Just this am I found something on the computer that I had lost. I looked in all the logical (to me) places and was just about to give up when another idea of a place to look came to me (an intuitive pop-up), and there it was.

Even more recently while out on a therapeutic walk just now, reflecting on insights of a buddy on this morning's coaching group call, I put a silent question out there and stood at my post alert for a reply. In just a few steps I looked down and a perfect acorn lay calling to me in my path (I adore whole acorns for their great potential to become things like a tiny hollow box with a lid, etc..). Unsure what it meant I picked it up (of course) and kept walking, surveying the ground, noticing other acorns all having lost the possibility of ever becoming trees, (or tiny boxes) at the tread of car tires or crater of elephant feet. They were all in terrible shape, and, I mused almost unrecognizable. The messsage was clear, the line is open, and goldenrod glows out the message of abundance.

Back to Groundhog College

Yesterday's workshop on Edible Wild Plants took us to a shady stream punctuated by two water falls with a diversion through a natural looking stone and concrete swimming pool, on a farm that is home to three generations of the original farming family, each involved in supportive occupations keeping the land alive and working. There is a horse farm, a vegetable CSA, a timber framing operation, and a poultry CSA piloted by a grand mother and her son and daughter and that daughter's daughter and cousin.
The piece de resistance of the day besides the butterfly bush in full flight, the magical tent beneath a drooping ancient spruce tree, warm clear sunshine, beady wet new-mown grass, and a recently expired sulpher colored moth which we posed as a decoration on the day's salad, was the making of that salad.

Of the things that we pass by everyday scornfully referring to as just weeds, the following became the abundance of nature in full radiance, topped with a mustard vinegrett dressing:

tender parts of:
dandelion, leaves and buds
wood sorrel,leaves and flowers
sheep sorrel
knotweed, leaves and flowers
plantain, broad and narrow leaved
chicory flowers
amaranth leaves
galensoga, leaves and flowers
red clover, top leaves and flowers
curley dock
violet leaves
lambs quarters
garlic mustard
wild chives
and purple leaf purilla

The salad was carefully constructed to balance the flavors including smaller amounts of bitter and sour, rounded out by lots of milder flavors, so as not to be too intense.

I love this century, you can use your dishwasher, or go down to the local stream, grow fresh salads all summer by mowing the lawn, to produce a constant supply of new growth or go the the Food Hole and see your friends.

Clear, Partly Cloudy And A Chance Of Eternal Sunshine

I have a new thought on Bi-Polarness and Schitzophrenia. I feel qualified to share my findings as I am sure I frequent both of these conditions.
What if, the aforementioned were manifestations of the phenomenon of, for want of the real term, ego/oneness coordination. Not unlike eye/hand coordination that we can all understand as a baby's hand reaches for something and then has trouble getting those fingers to open and close at the right time to grasp the thing.

If, in the universe, everything is connected as quantum physics suggests, and we persist in perceiving everything as separate, as our difficulties with our fellow human beings suggest (i.e. the root of our not being able to let people be who they are, or reluctance to give up judgmental behaviors), then it makes sense that our difficulties lie in the infancy of the development of our faculties of perception especially the ones that reconnect us and everything else through the kind of forgiveness that sees what is as just that, not something good or bad or threatening or...whatever.

Now I realize that my personal problem with the whole notion of this kind of forgiveness, aside from it not being part of my skill set is that the implications as I understand them from the metaphysical point of view is that if we master this and become One we will not need to reincarnate and heck I love this earthly life with all its drawbacks because I still think it is like a great and wonderful non-competitive game where you get to try things and see how they turn out -not unlike experimenting with the amount of rutile I put in my last batch of glaze, and then try again at something else. So, here's the dilemma: to perfect life and achieve eternal bliss, or skip the instructions and try to figure it out yourself because it makes the project last longer.

The beauty of it all is, either way, it's not over tomorrow, and going for the apparent progressive path will still garner me plenty of re-dos. What would it hurt if every now and then I had a one-ness glimpse, there'd still be plenty of practice time. Here's another one. Practice time: when I play the recorder for fun or "practice" it doesn't invoke the trauma that would arise if I were about to go on stage. This go-on-stage thing is the epitome of the experience of separateness and the fun of just playing is the epitome of being in the moment and that is the experience of One-ness.

Oh how dumb! We already DO have lots of One-ness time -the game is to reduce the alone time. Alone time has two aspects: not in the physical company of others, and perceiving the outer world as being the stage.

If anyone reading this shakes their head to give the page a chance to untangle, it might make me sad that I'm not being cheered on in the comfort of my own language but heck, I speak a lot of languages and so does everybody else -surely my connection isn't dependent on something as trivial as the identical experience even though One-ness actually IS identical experience (on a metaphysical level)

To round out this picture. I failed philosophy in college, I don't like using a ruler, King often glazes over and says ("HELP") "they are just words, I don't really know what you are talking about", and I've had friends who wander off in search of fresh air, permanently. It's me who interprets those things as disqualifying events.

Oh Yay! Am I getting more co-ordinated? 'Feels like it. The good news is I'm only encouraged, not manic, and closer to being in tune rather than insisting I'm the real Jesus. But you can see, can't you where it could go in the extreme?

What the Fuss! (Shay says) Is Life A Pot Luck?

I am having an Erin's-Lasagna-fears-moment.
She says that sometimes she feels fine about where she is and what she's doing but then she gets to noticing that it's as if she's at a pot luck enjoying her first helping of lasagna at her own pace and becomes aware that everyone else has moved on to dessert...
And either there is no more lasagna for seconds or there will be no dessert left or... something that I can readily identify when I notice that I am busy responding to life in my own way, toughing it out, being Pollyanna, deferring to the other, figuring I must wait, thinking there's nothing more I can do, etc... when I look up and see someone else doing something that hits me like a ton of bricks and says -"shit man! I have been fooling around here, that person knows how to get what they want" Then I go back to my own process and wonder what the message is in that. I know - here it is , are you ready for this? If I was only someone else I would be all right.
Oh how stupid.
I'm going out to brunch.
And besides I know ther's enough for everybody -its just poorly distributed. Any body know of a good heavy hauler?

Looks like A Time Bank Theme and The Studio Come s To Completion

I need to stay awake for another hour to turn up the kiln. I'll try to make this interesting enough to get me through.

Well it's been a while since my last post and many wonderful things have transpired.

In summary there was the marathon weekend at Sara and TR's with some of the world's most interesting people. It went on and on starting with scones on Saturday morning and ending with Chinese take out for a recap on Monday night.
This event reminded me the value of stopping work when the weekend comes. It was so fun to look forward to the levity after a week of the usual gravity. It also reminded me that I was going to spruce up my social life but seem only to be in a passive mode about that -I leap at the chance to go where I'm invited but haven't gathered much enthusiasm for having people over. I think I feel lame about being a single person entertaining -perhaps I remind myself of my mother. When my father died at the age of 59 (the age I am now) my mother continued on in a solitary style until she was 93. It often didn't look like much fun. And it still doesn't. Hey I know maybe my Time Dollars account will get me a temporary co-host, I'd be happy to repay in kind.

Tomorrow I go for the 2nd session of the edible medicinal herbs course -gotta remember to leave a little early to get gas, and maybe a treat as Mick likes to do.

Ivy learned to roll over today. What a fun thing to watch each new marker in her little life -even though I am sad that we can't just leave her on a picnic table while we turn to look at something, anymore. As Jame suggests there will be many compensating benefits to her being allowed to get older and do more things.

I think I saw a bumble bee become lunch for a frog today while I was picnicking by the pond -I just missed a clear view.

I've had a second Time Banker come and sift pebbles for another batch of cob plaster -TR's brilliant suggestion. I think this may be the last batch I need. Imagine that -the whole building completely plastered. Next I shall spread straw all over the floor to distract visitors from the unfinished nature of the floor.

I've put out an alert on the Time Bank web for a couple of strong men to come and help me move the Potter's wheels in next Monday, so it is shaping up for actual students.

Oh, the best thing! -I installed the sink in the studio, myself! I sawed off about 5" of the plastic drain pipe, sticking up out of the floor, and inserted the metal drain pipe hanging out the bottom of the sink, into the plastic. First I sawed the thing crooked but that was easy enough to re-saw. The sink does not have the customary legs so the whole affair resembles an articulated chihuahua in the rear window of a car. It's temporary but I, once again, feel resourceful. I often wonder if my resourcefulness has contributed to my current solitary life.

I also hung as many of the rice paper globes on the bare bulbs in the cob, as I could reach unaided by a colossus, and they look darn good.

I hadn't been to my favorite Chinese buffet in weeks so I thought lest they forget me and my penchant for peach buns, I'd better revisit them tonight -otherwise what I take for my lunch tomorrow would have also been tonight's supper. I took a book (about Time Dollars) and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I just find it fun to be able to chose what I want and go back again for the same thing, like I'm in my own kitchen having seconds, but a crew of chinese Time Bank members came to cater.
Most chinese buffets have almost identical decor but I love this one because it is not oversized or rectangular, it is homey and square and the women who run it talk to the customers -think about it when was the last time you saw Asian restauranteurs make casual conversation with the customers? And they hadn't forgotten me.

Ah time to turn the kiln to high and cross my fingers that the plate that Rita ordered doesn't break like the last time -and there's another possible bad thing -was there too much rutile in the glaze? Why do I experiment in tight situations?

One more good thing. When I turned the kiln to medium I somehow ran full force into the sharp corner of the towel bar on the back of the door with my head. I immediately burst into loud sobs with copious tears. I guess I'd been storing those up -I fell a whole lot better. What a wonder the human body and soul!