Mood:  quizzical

Here I am in bed with my best girl as we industriously work away on our laptops.  We both write, blog and let's face it, practically live half our lives attached to these computer thingies.  We do NOT by the way, have television...by choice.  In fact, due to the proliferation of unscupulous persons who use their broadband connections to download television for 'free' I am forced to pay  for cable television I do not use or want, simply so I can have broadband internet.  This is a recent change.  Our internet provider--incidently also the local cable television provider--suddenly raised our rates.  From a low  internet fee to a price that is now two dollars under  having internet plus cable television.  This to make it cost preventative for those folks who are using technology to try and 'get away' with something.  What a rip.

Anyway, enough grousing about things I cannot change.  Last night we watched a DVD on the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, the 'Grizzly Man.'  Boy, did that bring back memories for me!  Here was this young fellow who spent every summer in Alaska with the bears in solitude, camping out.  As the documentary progressed, it became increasingly obvious to me how my own small journey into the woods and away from civilization was mirrored by his.  He loved his solitude, he loved the wild, he was very paranoid, he was lonely for a woman to love, but wasn't willing to give up the wild for one (which is why he and his girl-friend were killed.)  Watching his life unfold on video was like seeing my own life during my breakdown.  I loved my tent in the woods (and later my camper) and the wild, edge of civilization life I was thrust into.  I loved the wild 'connection.'  Never in my life have I felt closer to Gaia than I did then.  Like Timothy, I felt as if Gaia heard every word I uttered to her.  It is little wonder that primitive man, so closely bound to nature should also have felt this 'wild connection' to the Deity.  The paranoia I watched Timothy exhibit whenever people came into his domain, exactly mimicked the paranoia I also felt.  I kept my tent camophlaged and hidden as best as I was able.  I covered my tracks when I walked.  I was fearful of being discovered anytime I spotted people near where I was hidden.  It was, looking back on it, very bizarre and strange.  Why feel and act that way?  I cannot explain it, but I did feel that way, and so did Timothy...  It was a sad and beautiful commentary on a life well spent in pursuit of love, speaking to me on my levels, but I have made healthy choices to put that life aside and live in the real world of people with a love that speaks to me everyday, keeping me grounded.  Hooray!  

Mood:  energetic

Hey, its a snow day!  Finally we get a decent snow, our first of the winter...and it all started after Punxatawny Pete said we'd have a milder winter left!  Go figure...

Yesterday was a very eventful day, and Karen and I enjoyed it to the limit.  As I mentioned in my last post, yesterday was Ritual Day as it was a full moon.  To take best advantage of the full moon, it helps to wait until it is high overhead.  Waiting for this on an empty stomach is not fun, so we decided to 'do' Gallery Walk.  If you are not from Brattleboro (hereabouts refered to as the 'Key West of the Northeast! ') then the concept of Gallery Walk is probably foreign to you.  Every month local (and not so local) artists are given space to show their work in local shops, cafes, pubs and resturaunts.  On the first Friday of every month, the whole town goes a bit loopy and has Gallery Walk!  Anything can happen on Gallery Walk, and usually does.  We have a Belly Dancing Studio where lovely practitioners of this art dance in a second story picture window for all to see.  We have Scots Bands that come out to perform traditional musics--bagpipes and all.  We have young people break-dancing and (due to the fact that Vermont has no state nudity statute) occasionally letting everything show.  Protesters get up on their soap boxes (quite literally--a young lesbian was  on hers last night, and it was labeled 'soap box' so I know!!!) and talk their cause through bull-horns.  Gallery Walk is like a street fair with attitude.  Also, the Brattleboro Art Museum (yes, we have one, and it is pretty cool for a town as small as Brat--Karen volunteers there every Monday) has open house on Gallery Walk Fridays.

This Friday marked the opening of a new exhibit at the BAM.  It is called the 'Hush/Hush Project.'  Essentially it is an exhibit of hundreds of postcards.  Each postcard was mailed to the BAM by anonymous people and each postcard contained one of their deepest, darkest secrets.  It had to be a total, never confessed before, secret.   The BAM then set up an exhibit room and put the postcards on display for all to see.   It is wonderful!  To see all these hidden, sometimes shamefully confessed secrets displayed really drives home how totally alike and human we all are.

Have you any idea how many people confessed to simply eating their own 'boogers'? (One called them 'comfort food' ewww)  Molesters and molestees, timid and bold, it is all there, and it makes you feel, seeing it all, like no secret you have is truly secret or shameful, because everyone experiences something like it.  Even Karen was surprised to see that a forty-something professional with a good job, family, ect, still felt like he/she was simply 'not good enough'.  This is a feeling Karen struggles with daily, because she hates the limitations her schizophrenia places on her.  I was glad to show her that she isn't unique, or alone in this feeling!

Then it was home, walking hand in hand through the big, falling snowflakes.  Sometimes life can be just about perfect!  Finally it was time for Ritual.  I was so tired I could hardly get the spellings and invocations out--and after we gave our thanks to the Goddess--we left our alter in place as I was just too tired to put it away. 

Still, the afterward part was quite lovely...J.

Mood:  chatty

Hooray!!!  Today is the first day of February.  A month of cruel winter gone and spring is closer!  Today and tomorrow are also full moon days--which is important only if you are Wiccan like myself (and Karen, though she is still a little undecided about her faith.)  We have decided to fast and do Ritual tomorrow night as tonight is a ritual of another sort for us.  On Thursdays we go out to eat together.  Usually it is Chinese, but sometimes it is pizza at Frankie's.  Tonight it was pizza, so Wiccan Ritual and its attendent fasting will wait until tomorrow.

Karen is still in 'recovery mode' from going all out this past month to make the deadline for submitting for the "Room of Her Own Foundation" Writing Grant.   It involved a lot of work for Karen--especially since Karen suffers from schizophrenia and is extremely limited in the amount of work she is able to do each day.  Also, while she can occasionally push herself beyond her normal limits now and again, there is a cost.  For Karen this cost is generally a period of 'shutdown' or several days where she is unable to do or accomplish much as she lets her mind rest and resettle.  For me this often means accepting a Karen who is withdrawn and unresponsive.  This is tough for a neurotypical or 'normal' person like myself to deal with.  For Karen to be withdrawn is for her to be partially in some 'other' space entirely.  She does not have the mental cohesion to focus tightly on the world around her.

Trust me, we neurotypicals are NOT used to handling this kind of withdrawl.   However, I have had some years of experience with Karen now and I am much better at accepting her various flavors of existence.  I want to say right here, you have no idea...you mysterious websurfer...how proud I am of my wife!  Her writing is magnificient (genius comes to mind) even if it is writing of a kind I tend not to enjoy.  I am an 'action' reader and writer.  I like stories that entertain as well as enlighten.  Not for me the artsy literatii.  But what Karen writes is lyrical, almost poetic, yet never stops being a story.  She has a plot and plan, but like any journey between two points, the road you choose to get you there is the real adventure, and Karen has a unique path!  Yet all she is and all she creates, has to come through and past her schizophrenia.

Today Karen was a little under the weather.

Mood:  spacey

Me and Plumpudding enjoying summer!

Welcome to the very first entry of The Rambling Writer.  For more on who I am, I suggest you check out the profile.  Right now I'm just gonna jump in with a little about my day and stuff.  

Today was chilly.  Okay, it is Vermont and it is January, so no surprize there.  I was once again treated to incredulous comments due to the fact that I once again rode my bicycle in to work.  People here in Vermont seem to find it odd that a grown man who actually owns a car and has a license would choose to pedal two miles to work everyday--even in the winter when it gets cold enough to freeze links off a logging chain!  Aside from notoriety and the simple pleasure I get from just enjoying the day Gaia has provided, my bike has come to be a symbol for me.  It is a link back to another time, a time when I was not so capable, not so sure and definately not as mentally and emotionally strong. 

You see, this is my second life--or maybe I should say--this is my second chance at life.  Not too very long ago I was homeless, living in a tent in the woods at this very time of the year, with no job, no prospects and no hope.  At forty-two years old I had lost almost everything that mattered to me.  My marraige and family, my home, my job, my child (she had to go live with my ex because I had no home for her) my self-esteem and myself.  I didn't know it at the time, but I had just suffered a nervous break-down.   Looking back it seems so obvious, but at the time I was far too close to the forest to see the trees. 

Even in Connecticut, as heavily populated as it is, there are rough and tumble woodlands were it is totally possible to dissappear...especially when you are one of the homeless folk who society has discarded.  I had lived in this small Connecticut village (Winsted, if you must know) for twenty years and I never knew that there was a small 'community' of tent persons who lived in the woods nearly all the time, until I myself was constrained to join them.

I was in a tent for four months before I found a job as a property caretaker for a wonderful, wealthy, older woman named Joni.  Joni--thank-you so much for believing in me...  Joni was introduced to me by one of my best friends (and at the time practically my only friend) in the whole world--Kathy Macchia.  Sadly, just as my own life was coalescing back into something recognizable, Kathy's fell apart.  I like to think that had she known how to contact me I might have given her the help she needed, but sadly, she couldn't, and so she ended her own life.  For that I am tuly sad.

Anyway, now as I peddle my bike along the wooded highway, I often peer into those woods, wondering if there is some poor, unfortunate soul living hidden back in there like I once was.