emclaire.tx's blog

This Eclipse

Eclipses are one of my favorite astrological events because the metaphor is so visually perfect. Something crosses over the light of the moon and things get dark for just a while, and then the light comes back. You may or may not realize it was only your own shadow all along. But everything is different because of the shift. Change is coming! That's what my personal astrologist has advised me about the eclipse of June 26th. It's certainly welcome. I have been looking for change in pretty much all areas of my life. Lately I feel like I'm stuck in the dark moment of an eclipse, waiting until my own shadow lifts from the moon and I can see the reflection of sunlight again, even in the dark of night. I'm ready for the big reveal, Susan Miller. I'm ready for what's next to eclipse what has already passed.

What I Learned From Saturn's Return

    The other night I watched a bizarre documentary called Off The Grid: Life On The Mesa. Netflix recommended it to me because I smoke pot and am interested in cults. It's about some folks who live out in the desert with few resources and lots of drugs and ptsd and a host of other problems. There is a sweet pig farmer, though, who seems fairly stable and sweet.  He recalls the death of his first sheep when he was a boy and what his grandfather said to him while he held the corpse and cried: If you can't stand to lose them, don't have them at all. While this isn't a particularly revelatory statement with regard to livestock, it is a bit harder to swallow when you apply this statement to other areas of life: your beliefs and opinions, your cute apartment and the things you have collected inside it, your friends and loves and feelings, and even your dreams and vision of your future. Letting go of these things is the lesson I've been learning lately, albeit rather clumsily. So I've started to think about letting go as being a mindset rather than the closing event of a relationship and it helps tremendously to consider that I can let things go a little bit before I've lost them completely. And it helps to remember that the ability to clench on to something and not let go is not a valuable skill in any context. I've considered my own stubbornness quite a bit over the last few years and have made an effort to be more flexible, but I guess I never realized that what is essential to flexibility is the act of releasing.

    My Saturn return officially ended last week and while I'm not naive enough to believe that this means it's all smooth sailing from here, I can tell you the relief is tremendous. I spent almost the entirety of those six months trying to move forward and feeling stuck in place and frustrated and actually (probably clinically) depressed. The frequent breakdowns, both mechanical and emotional, ought to have illuminated the the most obvious point to me that nothing lasts forever, and there comes a time when you just have to say that enough is enough. And you just have to get rid of what no longer serves you very well--the dilapidated truck, the apartment, the junk inside it, your clothes, the too tightly held opinions and beliefs. I've started to do that lately and I feel lighter and happier than I have in a long time. I'm trying to get to a point where the letting go is something I can do not because I've reached a point of breakdown or catastrophe, but because it is essential to being open to new experience.

    I find it interesting that I was cautioned against getting the tattoo of Saturn that I got during my Saturn return because of all of the negative astrological associations with the planet. I was told that it represents rigidity and that its rings keep it closed off and that it's nothing I want to associate with myself and nothing I should want to wear on my body. Saturn is the planet that is most prominent in my chart, though, so I felt sensitive to criticisms of it I got it anyway. It's on my ribs and it hurt worse than any tattoo I've gotten and I could feel it for so much longer. I can almost still feel a tender spot there now. I regretted it almost immediately and kept thinking about how I'm going to have to explain this for the rest of my life. I haven't really been looking forward to swimsuit season is what you could say, I guess. But I suppose what I've learned is that the choice to associate this image on my body with the six months of frustrated stagnation and constant breakdowns is my own choice. I can just as easily say that it reminds me about letting go. And it does.
 

Pushin' It

Yesterday on my drive home, my truck sputtered to a stop in rush hour traffic. I sat there for probably a solid minute in total panic before I jumped out to try push it off the road and into the Hooter's parking lot nearby. The cars behind me had become annoyed at missing the green light, having to wait through another red. They reved their engines as they passed me by like I was garbage in the roadway, a nuisance. It's pretty much impossible to push a truck, even a small one, any distance by yourself. For one thing, someone has to steer it. For another thing, it's not light. I channeled all of my frustration and fear and outrage and used it to push my truck about two inches uphill. A very nice man finally stopped and helped, and then two men appeared out of nowhere, eager to help. I managed to keep from crying until I got home later, but I've had trouble shaking the feeling of standing behind my truck in traffic, pushing with all my might and getting nowhere while all the cars whiz past me, annoyed that I am interupting their commute. I'm having a hard time letting go of what it feels like to be powerless and left with no resources but my own physical strength.

It was a traumatic day is what I'm saying. And it comes all too soon after a similar traumatic day just about a week ago when the truck broke down in traffic and three men appeared out of nowhere and decided to push my truck (with me in it) three blocks away to their house by gently bumping me with their truck. I had a really hard time collecting myself after the three men and I finished screaming at each other when my steering column locked up and their truck pushed me to the curb, and I couldn't steer myself out of the way of oncoming traffic. Fortunately, it was slow moving traffic, and the whole scene was probalby more comical than anything to the people around.

Car trouble is what I've been having a lot of lately, so I'm trying to think about what there is to gain or learn from it. Over and over I keep asking myself why this is happening to me, and other than some kind of karmic punishment for some long forgotten sin, I come up with nothing. What I've concluded is roughly this: it's impossible to push a truck by yourself,  but it's important to hold back your tears, get out of the driver's seat, and try with all your strength. And help will come along. 

We Clean Out Our Closets In Order To Live

          The other night Chelsea came over and helped me to organize my crafting supplies. I have all these tools and instruments and collections of scraps and buttons and feathers. It's been piling up, taking up a lot of space and it felt so good to lay it all out all over my floor and organize it so that I can make better use of my goods.

         Chelsea commented that the urge to categorize and containerize ones belongings is a natural human instinct. It's totally obvious to just say that, but when you are there in the moment, putting all the buttons in a jar and threads in an order and folding all the scraps of fabric into neat squares, it resonates a little differently. It's the part about it being specifically human, I think, that struck me. That the urge to take stock of one's possessions is a distinctly human survival skill feels really counter to what I think of as instinctive or animalistic human behavior. I think about cavemen organizing their loincloths, clubs, and flints on a Sunday afternoon, whistling a tune and it makes me chuckle. But the ones who did that, they survived because they listened to that instinct. I saw Fantastic Mr. Fox twice in recent months and the second time watching it I had an even deeper appreciation for what appears to be the film's overall message: we are wild animals. We can't ignore our instincts because our instincts help define who we are. We can work against our instincts, but we can never lose them.
 
         I recently read this interview with Umberto Eco about lists. His assessment of the human urge to create lists is right in line Chelsea's comment about the containerizing instinct. It strikes me as funny to connect Umberto Eco's thoughts about lists to the first line of Joan Didion's The White Album (and the title of her collected nonfiction): We like lists because we don't want to die and we tell ourselves stories in order to live. What Eco and Didion both speak to is the importance of creating order in our lives, whether that means cataloging edible vs.inedible wild mushrooms or the tendency to think in terms of beginning, middle, and end. They are telling us that we can not live in chaos and that the instincts that drive us to collect and categorize our belongings and histories are to be taken seriously because they are essential to human life and culture. When I look at my neatly organized collections of scissors and chalks and bottle caps on the shelves, I feel that sense of personal satisfaction that often follows acting out what are sometimes called compulsive behaviors, but could more accurately just be called Sunday afternoons at home. I guess it's good to know that these instincts might lead me one day to make sense of something far more chaotic than my embroidery supplies.  It's good to know that I'm not the first person to ever know that there is joy in a well written grocery list and that the only way to get through a difficult time is to think of it as a story you will tell later on, when it has passed.

        Lately, I've been feeling a generalized frustration. Who is to say if it's mostly sexual or mostly my dead end job or if it's just what coming close to the end of one's twenties feels like? What I wish I could do one Sunday afternoon is dump out every experience I've had in the last 28 years on my living room floor and patiently sift through each one. Dust them all off. Put them into a bowl or jar or stack. Like things with like things in tidy, labeled containers: False Promises, Pending Dreams, The Things I Have Believed About Love But No Longer Do, Memorable Lunches, etc. I want to take stock. I want to do this so I can see more plainly my own lists and stories that have helped me to live this far.

       I can't exactly go through with it that way, but I do have a closet full of junk that I desperately need to clean out and organize. I'm thinking maybe Sunday afternoon. If you think about it, it's a matter of survival.

The Whiskey Letters, Season Finale

dear chelsea,
tonight i was making dinner and everything about it tasted so good. it was kind of exhilarating and it made me feel really creative. and then i started thinking about how i felt like i'd become such a good cook since i quit smoking. my palate has really changed a lot this past year, but it wasn't until just recently, this fall i think, that i really noticed how much. i'm picking up much subtler flavors than i have in the past decade. it's been been pretty revelatory and i'm having a lot of fun in the kitchen these days.

anyway, this revelation about my palate was not limited to food. i know that this was going to be our fall of irish whiskey, but what i truly learned about irish whiskey is that i just adore bourbon. prior to this fall i knew i liked whiskey as an ingredient but i couldn't have told you much about the taste of whiskey itself at all other than "this cheap whiskey burns more than this expensiver one." anyway, when i got the single malt irish whiskey i started this with, i was able to hone in on the simplicity of the taste and finish. i was able to identify that it was a clean tasting whiskey, so it made me more keenly aware of the other flavors in the next whiskey i drank. and from there, i sampled all the irishes i could find at wiggy's within my budget. and they were really great and i was able to isolate different elements of the flavor and see which whiskeys shared certain attributes. i had an amazing day when i had some scotch and realized that i could identify the peatiness of it.

and then i had bourbon. and at first it felt kind of cloying after the irish whiskey and all i could taste was how sweet it was. but then i had woodford reserve and realized that i had just been drinking the wrong bourbon all along. so i started trying others and paying attention while tasting and i realized how much more interesting to me bourbon is than irish. i kept feeling this guilt over it like the irish whiskey drinking thing was some firm, real commitment. and only recently did i acknowledge just how ridiculous that is. i re-evaluated this whole list and realized that i'd barely accomplished any of it, but that i'd done all this other, unexpected and amazing stuff. fuck the list, man! there will be no list for winter, just some hopes.

in the television mini series of our lives that the whiskey letters set out to be, i guess i learned some important lessons about myself and the world around me:

 i have excellent taste and i prefer bourbon.

xoxo,
emily

p.s. when can we have dinner?

Dear Saturn,

I heard you are returning. I heard that when you come back, either all my dreams come true or I'll get my comeuppance, depending on whether I've been true to myself or not. I heard your return can be the best time or the worst time, depending. I also heard that you are the ruler of lessons, limits and burdens, and when I heard that it made sense that you also govern people born under Capricorn, like myself. I think it's fair to say that I am your child.

I had wanted to prepare myself for your arrival because I'm a little scared of what might happen once you're back on the scene. I imagine you looking over my shoulder, clucking your disapproval in my ear at every five minutes, saying that I need to work harder and set more goals and be stronger and more productive and more disciplined and stop slacking and procrastinating and daydreaming and smoking pot. I guess I have been waiting my whole life for you to come back and tell me to do and be those things, but the truth is the voice whispering at me to do and be those things is my own. So I just wanted to let you know, Saturn, that I'm working on it. I really am.

Anyway, welcome back! Looking forward to catching up.

xoxo,
Emily

Preliminary Packing List For Quilt Festival

-a nice irish whiskey and flask
-ibuprofen
-french press, hot pot, and coffee
-turntable and all my springsteen records. also flat and skruggs.
-cowboy boots
-pot
-bathing suit
-all of the socks, bras, and underwear that i own.
-dr. bronner's
-six or seven work shirts
-dress pants
-black dress
-embroidery kit
-vitamins
-enough bologna sandwiches for two fucking weeks?
-happy camper mentality

Take Me To The River

It's been years since my last camping trip, and many years since the last one that was anything other than drinking and sleeping outside for a night. I am gearing up for a trip out to Guadalupe River State Park, and even though it's forecasting thunderstorms, I couldn't be more excited.

On the drive home from my grandparents' house a few weeks ago, my mom asked me if I remembered all the fun we used to have when I was little. She started telling me about our trip to Sea World, most of which I had forgotten. What I remembered was sitting in the splash zone for Shamu and my mom telling me that buying little fish to feed the dolphins was a rip off. That is basically all I took from, what in actuality, was sort of a miraculous vacation. For one thing, we were poor. Mom said she saved for months for this vacation, which ultimately amounted to us sleeping on a friend of a friend's airmattress out in the country close to San Antonio and going to Sea World, where we did things like share a giant soda between the three of us and then keep the commemorative cup as our only souvenir. But since we had come so far, and because this was to be one of 2 vacations (the other one being by far the better story, as it was a vacation to Brownsville, TX where we spent our time walking into Mexico and reminding one another not to drink water. My brother drank lemonade and shat the bed) we would take in our childhood, Mom packed the long weekend with many other (mostly free) events as was possible. And one of the days was spent tubing on the Guadalupe.

The way she tells it, and from her perspective, it was just a little mistake. The way I recall it, this was the most amazingly terrifying brush with death known to man. For one thing, there were rapids. At times, we fell out of our tubes and had to retrieve them. The water was deep. We would get separated from each other and have to cross our fingers that we would all make it to through alive. At one point, I fashioned a rope from my tee shirt dress (stylin!) so we could stay together. It felt very Macguyver at the time. Probably because that show was still on air. Of all the adventures that we had on the river (so many turns! so many rapids!), the most exciting part was four hours later when we realized that we had continued well past the exit for tubing and we were alone on the river and completely lost. Mom says now that she had accidentally "missed the exit" but even now I'm unconvinced that she wasn't trying to save a little money somehow. It was getting dark and we had to walk alongside the river--on other people's ranches--to get back to where we had parked. The terrain was rough and there were no paths. We had on wet clothes and flip flops. I think my brother had lost his shoes in the river and so was barefoot. We banded together and walked through the woods as though we were the only people on Earth. It felt that way. It felt like we were explorers, lost in the wilderness, fending for ourselves. It took hours of walking in the dark before we got back to our car, exhausted. I felt so brave that day. I'm glad my mom reminded me about that trip, because I did remember it after all. I remembered how it felt to survive something. And I love that feeling so much and I think I have always gone to the woods or to the river in hopes of finding that feeling again.

I think that's what I'm after this weekend, back to the Guadalupe two decades later.

It's Not Cold Yet, But It's Getting There

Sometimes lately it feels like all I ever talk about are the seasons and the stars. Tomorrow is the autumnal equinox and when I heard it was, I heaved the hugest sigh of relief. I've been feeling like I've been lurching forward just here lately... trying really hard to get ahead of myself. I heard some old Southern person talk about how he didn't like eating peanuts in the shells because with all the work to get to them, he felt like he could just never get ahead of them. That is how I have felt. Knowing that today represents an actual shift--astrologically, seasonally, and probably emotionally--feels important. Really important.

I think this preoccupation with seasons and the stars has a lot to do with wanting to feel like I can navigate through my life with minimal tools and with wanting to witness changes in nature that reflect my own processes. I think we've all been missing Summer a lot because it was so good to us this year. Sometimes I felt like I had too much of a good thing--like everything was overflowing and I wished that I could hold on to all of it a little better. Summer is a season of plenty and it's hard to know it's ending.

What I am trying to embrace about Fall is that it's the time of year when you're supposed to put up your Summer bounty and plan out your Fall crops with a mind toward the coming lean days of winter. Hoarding is one of my Fall goals, but it's a little deeper than my plans to hoarde whiskey and freeze a lot of pot pies, I think. I'm looking further out into a more distant future than the weekend and trying to save up and hold on to this bounty in my life. I'm putting some up for winter.

re: Objective #8-- Progress Report on Observation of Lunar Cycle, Effect on Mood/Behavior

This moon is one of the more spectacular moons I've seen recently. It is about a quarter of the way down from full. It's larger and oranger than most. According to science, the large size and orange color of the moon are optical illusions based on the pollution level and the position of the moon on the horizon relative to my position here on earth.

According to my own observations, the extra large size and orange color of the moon indicate that right now is a time when distance is a meaningless measure of closeness, relative to my position here on earth.