I have lots of longhand blog posts here in the notebooks but I've had no time to keyboard anything, so I'll just throw out something raw now to catch up.

We're still in the midst of the slow-motion office move. Brian's room is done, the shared bedroom (that used to be the living room) is done, my upstairs bed/office is half organized. I've taken out the dining-room table and chairs and purchased a small counter-high table and two stools for drinking coffee at, instead. I still have to track down a loveseat and armchair to finish the little parlor that will serve as a living room where the dining room used to be. Skip's office has broadband installed; he still needs to get DishTV put in there.

Today I make a run to the landfill with a load of stuff from Skip's office storage space (which contained leftovers from other moves and household)--cardboard boxes and the like--and then pick up another pickup load to take to thrift stores. Then I can bring home a load of stuff to sift through to keep. As though there were room. Today is game day, so I must find my old green folding card table, too, and track down some chairs.

Here are some photos.

BrotherB's space:



Sleepy Skip in our new bedroom space:

Had a week of fallout from the brotherBrian room-shift. I was blocked and a little down. But now I'm up again, and as long as I keep knocking back the water all should be well. Today my workspace came together upstairs, and our bedroom moved into the vacated livingroom. Much huffing and puffing. We finished up the hardest parts around 7 tonight (Wednesday), had Montereyjack-spinach omelets for supper & whippedcream-blackberries for dessert, collapsed together with DVDs (after catching the last bit of the State of the Union) until a respectable bedtime. We'll continue tomorrow afternoon, tweaking the habitat and moving a couple more pickup loads of things out of Skip's office.

Brian enjoys his new pad and iPod, positive changes for him. Creatures are all happy. Weather's turning wintry again: every four-legged in the house is on the bed with me now as I keyboard this.

I can hardly wait for the disorder to resolve and for work to resume.

Saddened to learn just now that Howard Zinn has died. I am grateful for his lifetime here.

Heavy work yesterday, then a pause to regroup. Today I tried to confine activity just to reorganizing, should have stayed in bed but couldn't. BrotherB's space is done now though and it's a doozy, he loves it, photos tomorrow. My new workroom is still a jumble of stuff with heaviest things yet to be carried up the stairs, but we've time for that. B and I took a big load of superfluousities including the double rollaway bed to storage, rolled up the doors and flang and crammed it all in. Tonight I feel like I've been beaten with tiny little hammers, which is better than with great big ones, for sure. Heart goes flippityflip. I knock back another 8 oz. of H2O. Tomorrow I really must turn a blind eye to the mess and keep still. I have a passel of books to mail, but other than that I will resist the disorder and be quiet quiet. (Really? That's how you spell passel?) Skip will be home all day for his day off, and that always is good. Then Wednesday another effort, and we'll almost be done. I can't wait to have a real workplace again, apart, to set up the big computer and organize my files and get down to some serious work after almost a year of very light duty, treading water, waiting for space and time to catch up. No words today, no studies, I feel incomplete. Too sleepy to take anything in now. I waited too long. But here's a last few lines from a poem by Andrei Voznesensky (tr. Richard Wilbur) called "Foggy Street":

I trip. I stagger. I persist.
           Murk, murk ... there's nothing visible anywhere.
Whose is the cheek you brush now in the mist?
Ahoy there!
One's voice won't carry in this heavy air ...

When the fog lifts, how brilliant it is, how rare!

Lots to do this week. HusbandSkip's office is moving in. The bedroom shifts to the ex-livingroom, which shifts to the ex-dining area. My workspace moves into brotherB's ex-space and his room expands onto the walled landing. And it all starts today with the cleaning-out of the under-stairs tool-and-hardware place. Tools and hardware will move into the big woodbox bench. Then the catboxes upstairs will move to the understairs space. The rollaway bed on the landing will come downstairs and get a big tarp wrapper for storage elsewhere. I must shift back the D titles--consolidate, consolidate--to eliminate a small shelf up there, and then start moving Brian's stuff out. Big day, effort-wise.

In between, lots of study. It will be good to have a dedicated work area again to write and meditate in. And I need to get back to my forgotten chapbook project.

Rain here. Drizzle, actually.

NeighborkidKierstuhn visited me yesterday. Hadn't seen her since before Christmas. Showed her the red book I was examining. Said I wished I could read German. "Oh! My mom can read German," she said. "We're German! But I don't know how to speak it anymore." I was much surprised to learn this. Kierstuhn told me her 10th birthday will be Feb. 8. Year of the Dragon, she is, same as me and grandson Ender. I told her my birthday had been back around Christmas, so she spent the rest of her visit upstairs coloring a birthday card to give me. Sweet. Kierstuhn has a cat now, named Alice.

These are serene days, lately. Such changes underway, bigger and bigger, and yet the transitions are so smooth. A very good feeling.

Further adventures in the red book

I have greater and greater pockets of time now to examine The Red Book. What I find interesting right away is the tone of Jung's exchanges with his internal guides. I have held such conversations often in my own past, beginning in early childhood once I was taught to pray. After reading Sandra Ingerman in the mid-'90s I accompanied or replaced these dialogs with internal "journeys," where I sought images, as well, in depths of consciousness.

In an extreme such experience in 1971, my hands clenched into grotesque claws and relaxed only when I held a pen and scribbled down some 50 notebook pages of "automatic writing." In that Q&A I was told I would cripple myself in just such a way if I did not practice my craft, if I did not mine my inner world and offer up the ore. This struck me then as absurd. But when basal joint arthritis began drawing in my thumbs after the traumatic break of 2004 (a genetic trigger, I'm guessing), I recalled that early dialogue, and it chilled me.

Sifting through old notebooks recently I stumbled on observations from 1998:

Write this down, Sam: As long as you keep spinning in your current circle
as long as your consciousness is constructed as it is
as long as your aura keeps these colors
as long as your vibration incorporates these elements
you will never be free, you will always return to this spin, this vibration, this level, these colors.
Some massive shift must take place--deconstructing and then reconstructing from scratch--if you're ever to make any headway, any meaningful, sustained progress.

I felt dizzy reading this, because just such an event had taken place. Between 2003 and 2007 my ego self had burned to the ground and built itself again from the cinders.

So it is with so much gratitude and astonishment now that I page through Jung's journey here, wishing I'd embarked earlier on my own similar path, inspired to continue with new zeal. I read today a Rolling Stone excerpt from Patti Smith's just-published memoir (at this point in her life she was a poet who worked in a bookstore):

I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison. Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can't say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored that conceit.

She goes on to say that she felt some shame at feeling this way. Just so it is for everyone who finally recognizes in the great work of another the seeds of their own potential. It's a pitiful comparison, I suppose, but I feel just this way as I examine this red book.

"The Red Book is a striking example of how seeing the light in another can help us find the light already burning gently, burning brightly inside of us," wrote Lama Surya Das in his review of The Red Book for the Huffington Post. He continues, "We can find the sacred, he tells us--and as he shows us so generously in The Red Book--if we continue on our psycho-spiritual journey and plumb our own depths."

“What I do, so may you do, many times greater,” a master said once of his miracles. What any of us does, each may do, certainly. We may not have years to devote to exactly such breakthroughs, but something there is in all of us, isn't there?, that came along into this world for us to set in motion, a kind of bird maybe that only waits for us to give it flight.

Lovely morning, sunlight low through thin icy fog lifting from frosted ground. The word "frost" so often triggers memories of childhood wondering whether there really was a Jack Frost who painted the windows and trees. Knowing there wasn't, but loving to imagine what it would be like if there were. Stretchy imaginations old stories gave us.

New moon. New beginnings. Rose won't be visiting very often now. We'll miss her. Reorganizing underway here. Skip may move his office here, and artguyJim phoned from Yolo to offer trailer again, so in the spring that may happen. Meanwhile I'm setting up my workspace on the landing, next-door to brotherB and his own desk activities.

Dreamed I was a young girl, lost in the cosmos, stranded on the university steps in an unknown city. My first husband came out of a building in a crowd of others and spotted me, took my arm, and I was rescued. Later in the dream we planned our wedding and chose for the ceremony the spot on the steps where I had been found. Other dreams, strange ones, gangs and airplanes and high-altitude vistas of California's great green central valley.

Book business going very well this month: classes starting, intersessions and new semesters.

And I'm back on track, too, a bit, physically, since the needles on Saturday.

Distressing events: news of our lost brothers and sisters in Haiti. I follow it, stupified. Hit the donate button. Pray.

Turning to work, now.

This is what I'm saying ...

All by hand, hundreds of pages. Click on the photo to enlarge.