for virg and her peeps

“Refuge unfailing in which conflict tempered silence reconciled.”  One of my favorite lines from another Mississippian, William Faulkner.  I’ve known these words a long time. They came when I was thinking about Virg and what I wanted to share about our friendship. I know she worked real hard to overcome a lot of external and internal conflicts. She was brave that way. It’s not easy to change. I believe she was happy; that she found refuge in her friends and family, in her professional achievements and that many of the conflicts she had were tempered. Silence is a strange bird. It can be the peace you achieve through work or grace or it can be a difficult passage through time, maybe it will show up as loneliness or an unspoken fear or something you have to accept. I believe that Virg found the whole package, ‘refuge unfailing in which conflict tempered silence reconciled.’   

What runs through my mind about her is that she called me and Lynn her peeps. I hold onto this thought like a thread that will take me through the maze of grief. There is the family you're born to or adopted into. And there is the family you've chosen or who has chosen you. These are your peeps.  Peeps don't just come in a box at Easter time; they come to you, sometimes decades after you've landed on the planet, because the spirits smiled on you. Sometimes, peeps aren't known to the person's social circle.  Or they might not be recognized in formal settings or public announcements. But their particular kind of special relationship is about souls recognizing each other as family, even if undocumented. 

Kurt Vonnegut wrote about granfalloon and karass. Peeps are like your karass. Granfalloons and karass are wonderful and beautiful groups that you belong to. Your karass are closer to your heart and soul; where granfalloon could be a professional group or the extended family you don't know so intimately. Someone you recognize as belonging to your karass could be in your daily life or someone you meet by chance at a drugstore counter, randomly, for that moment only, and you recognize your soul connection to each other.   

Peeps are soul connected.

Virg was our peeps, me and Lynn. This is why in the freezing cold of February we could bring sleeping bags and coats and sweaters and blankets to lie on the beach waiting for meteor showers that rarely came.  It’s the looking for them that’s grand. One time, the three of us saw strange lights coming from the ocean that prompted us to scamper off the beach as best we could.  It wasn’t a pretty sight.  We were simultaneously spooked and delighted. Once I saw a strange sight as Lynn and I were driving along Ocean Avenue in Avon. I texted Virg about it as it was going on.  She was our go to person for everything alien and quantum. Somehow, we built up this conversation, through texting, and my indecipherable talk-to-text, that made me laugh so hard I couldn’t even speak half the time to let Lynn know Virg’s response. Recently, I saw something alien through my kitchen window and texted her immediately. She helped build this crazy tower of fun that was pure pee in your pants, gasping for air, crying laughter. And, by the way, the alien object disappeared as strangely as it had arrived.

Peeps can make you pee in your pants.

A new article on quantum physics noted that when you really get right down to the smallest, most close up look at molecules you’ll see quantum foam. That’s it, at the bottom of everything there’s a soft cushion of foam. It’s what’s holding everything up. It’s not Atlas. So, you don’t need all those muscles to keep it together. You just need foam.  Foam is good to pack around peeps so that we don’t get damaged.  And that’s why we’ll go out this February, wrapped up in down sleeping bags and quantum foam to see the shooting stars. If it’s not a great night for meteor showers, we’ll at least have our soul connection with Virg and that is our refuge unfailing in which conflict tempered silence reconciled.   

freda

Virginia Downey January 30, 1953 - July 15, 2017

in action there is hope

what we're seeing is dogged racism, persistent environmental harm and negligence, cultural erasures, weaponized ignorance and the incredible mindlessness of an unchecked id; everything good our past, great president did attacked by strategies to overturn it, all in the name of racism. the focal point is the same with these attacks, the fear of women's blood, the constant drum of misogyny, the heartless and incongruous acts of stating you're for coal miners than allowing the waters where they live to be polluted by the industry....these are not inconsistencies that are heard above the din of hate; but the root is the same and you can trace it to the threat to all our public lands and artifacts - Dakota pipeline, wetlands across the country, New Jersey Pinelands threatened; you can trace the directed harm to all, whether an infrastructure or system like Flint's water contaminated, whether the drawing's of the native people, or when the animals that need protection are removed from those protections, or when the children and elderly that need clean drinking water and healthcare are threatened to have their resources pulled, you can trace these harmful policies and threats to the same source. all resistance and support for these causes helps. it makes a difference. in action there is hope.

Starts and stops

            I never realized that I was addicted to nicotine.  One of the only ways that I could get past the difficult beginning of quitting was observing.  They say the observer changes what is observed so I’m willing to take full responsibility for myself.  Especially under these circumstances.  I did the journey.  I found some valuable and arresting items along the way.  I recovered a large portion of my history and I’m still exploring that archival find.  Though this isn’t all about historical reality.  At least the kind of reality I grew up with.  In retrospect, my parent’s world seemed as if it were vacuum sealed in a jar.  I reserved nothing on this journey.  Everything was used.  Even the air in the jar.

            I used interpretations like a tool.  Stories took on personal meanings because I worked them.  I was able to go down that bit of road, with that tale or person, knowing how it was a part of me. I’ll be honest, sometimes I still want cigarettes.  But I crave sugar and crunchy carbohydrates even more.  I have a strong desire to chomp and chew.  The common wisdom is that this too will pass.  I love the idea of wisdom being common because then even I can have access to it.

            What I learned serves me now and served me at the most difficult part of the journey.  In observing what Nic’s pull was doing to me, I had given myself power that I never had before.  It’s like turning a light on to see it better.  He didn’t like this.  It robbed him of some of his best moves. You know he’d flourish in a nightclub atmosphere far better than a sunny room filled with healthy people and holistic, environmentally sound surroundings.  Though even there you can’t be sure that he’s not lurking.  Because much as I’d like to say ‘Nic is this and Nic is that’, he isn’t.  He’s Nic and you gotta watch out.

            All journeys have their starts and stops.  You have to take a rest now and then, fill the water bottles.  Eat.  Sleep a little.  Even dream a little to get those nourishing REMs.  REM sleep is to the brain what M&M’s are to the person craving sugar, just the right sort of nutrient to make life worth living.  Besides, some dreams, rich in symbols and reconstituting stories, make it possible to keep on reeling in the real world.

            If Nic stretched my humanity it was because I was the willing participant in the stretch.  Or else it meant that I needed to end the preoccupation I had with his pull on me and grow some on my own.  Observing my behavior and inner dialogue during the worst of my withdrawal symptoms actually diffused his pull.  This effect, opposite from what I would have expected, was something I explored and developed over the first few months.  It’s a technique that I continue to learn from when I remember to use it.  It does have that ‘dog chasing its own tail’ quality about it.  No doubt any sort of introspection can have that.  But it also gives you the ability to drop the damning cycles you might be putting yourself through.

            I’m always trying to get a handle on what it means to live in the moment.  There are so many angles and so many moments.  It’s an important part of the starts and stops because something pushes you through to the next period of your life.  Which could be just down the road apiece.  One rarely gets to see the momentum in the moment that gets you going.  It’s like the movement of a glacier.  A lot of what we experience is like a cat’s jump, difficult to see the steps along the way.  But it happens.  They jump all the time. 

http://amzn.to/14jUNUs    Nic link to Kindle copy