But out into this early April evening stride Sir Floyd and I, straight into a dozen springing drizzles, I stooping to snag blown bits of litter from the winter-neglected garden’s corners, draggled onward by dog tow…

When the doggone leash snags taut on wayward fork of ornery native fenceline (we’re constantly reconstructing after disassembling kids), and Floyd and I become of an instant equal creatures yanked sideways by momentum.

Senor Floggsbottom so abruptly displaced, dusts off dainty dog dignity, stands stoic, poised frozen til I’ve done my human part with opposable thumbs.

Stretching forth fingers and limbs indeed feels appropriately lively, bending self to touch world with actual hands, to clear away all the rubbish that’s been cluttering up my view.

Restoring myself thus by gesture, I walk the park and play a kind of catchup  stewardship. Out in open air I begin again to think outside the frame of house and windows and look around our little park with a discerning eye, noting things throughout that could benefit from Earth Day volunteer attentions–

… benches chipping & mossy & rotten in places…
… pergola marked up with graffiti…
…gardens needing dead leaves and stems cleared out & composted…
… and of course the ever-drifting litter…

Soon enough though I’m sprung delighted from my little list of ills by bursting sprouts of bloom, unseen initially on walking out with a dim squint but suddenly springing into focus–

sneaky pokes of green shot up through trodden brown like hope from rain!
sudden! vivid! daffodils in sunshine brilliant hues freshening all around the sky-grey air!

Back home I pause, considering, from time to time, the stray homely oddments I’ve gleaned while out dogwalking down alleys and parkway fences, all my little treasure trove of left-behind things reclaimed from scrap– adopted and named and sorted into drawers lettered round things, shiny things, odd, orphaned pieces.

In places they’re little more than ragged tatters anymore.

Reclaimed, resituated toys populate my houseplants, performing small scenarios of tropical and interplanetary drama in miniature.

The mourning doves are back out back– just heard one whir in for a landing.

Right before the end of day the house gets drenched with honeyed setting light, and I quite simply couldn’t be happier.

While I’ve lurked here, all underground-like, I’ve been working at last, slap-dash and pell mell through that very multiplicity of media/genre I blahty-blahed about so acedemiciously, so booooringly theoretically for so long.

[--YAWN--]

I had to, by gum, jump up sooner or later and DO my very utmost to make good one way or another.

And ta-da!  here I am, have been, doing writing, of sorts. That is, words is tough at times, poetry done wore ‘em out a bit, so I’m shaping stories otherwise and elsehow, shifting about contraptions of construction– all of which to me means writing. Or perhaps composing would be a better term.

Ensnared, I navigate a branching network of passageways hatching like roots between bunches of genre: novel, both graphicky and memoirish, comic strip so-called, picture book, cards for greeting.

I’m practicing not taking it all so damn seriously and succeeding, sometimes, in playing as directed: with drawing + coloring + cutting + stitching together stray bits that enchant or perplex. Unintended and serendipitous connections emerge.

I’m making little books. I’m making sewn dolls and quirky embroidered insignias. I’m building inventory and getting set to cut loose on Etsy.

The sooner the better in fact. I need to work and get paid for it. As I haven’t collected a steady paycheck in some time, I’m struggling somewhat with my own sense of self-worth. I’m also weighing some overarching questions about worth and value as I go my skint way thrifting and crafting and–well, it’s a tricky time of year.

At a holiday party I found myself recently arguing a case for guerilla knitters as engaged in executing some kind of craft revolution. In retrospect it sounds a little silly and pretentious to my own ears, but I meant it sincerely at the time. And I guess I mean it still, kind of. I’m sensitive to a DIY groundswell sweeping over many of us.

I’m re-valuing Things as I make things with my hands and eyes and ranging, sometimes rumpusing imagination. I’m experiencing regeneration through craft.

The next logical and necessary step is to make it all pay cash money. Queue Etsy. And I’m fishing for freelance writing and web work, honing skills through projects for the community, wrassling the gnarly beast that will one day emerge a fine, polished portfolio.

Here’s the thing about being a spud: coming out from underground is a strenuous upheaval of a process, preparing for public purview with work of several uncustomary sorts: snipping and buffing off of unseemly bits, tweezing and squeezing what wants to be unshapely and dumpy into snappy and vivid, or at very least -er. It’s tough work for a tater.

Love,
Navelgazer

This energetic canine visitation exacerbated daily and, more problematically, nightly twinges of bodily protest. Assessing the alternatives, I self-counseled: time to straighten up my act. While I’m not the world’s worst slouch, my posture could surely stand some tweaking.

Several years and countless hours spent straining my gaze toward a computer screen compounded by a bad habit of slinging heavy bags over one shoulder have resulted in an S-curve torque in my neck vertebrae that impacts the median nerve and sends pain and numbness down one arm and, most annoyingly, into my writing hand. For a decade now I’ve contended with this aggravating condition, unable anymore to keep the longhand journals I maintained religiously and waking frequently in the night to pins and needles in an appendage like an inflated blowfish.

Back in Iowa I enjoyed the nigh-magical ministrations of a chiropractor who performed delicate electric percussions and sonographic therapies that relieved my screeching nervy hand. Transplanted to Chicago, I’ve missed this expert reengineering of the all out o’ whack.

Failing to engage a local replacement, I’ve taken it upon myself to conduct an intuitive and amateur course of reconfiguration, not quite yoga, derived in part from high school era modern dance stretching routines: those patterns of ranging movement, drawing up energy from within and flowing it into configurations before the miroir.

Like my several houseplants who greenly rebreathe our apartment’s interior atmosphere, sympathetically respiring our collective exhalations back into fresh oxygen, I inhale purposefully as I incline toward the sun and drink in clear water.

Some days it takes hot cascading sheets of steam to soften and elongate all the rough and knotted places inside. As I breathe into the shoulder-drop, inevitably something pops and releases. I close my eyes and focus down the entire wired length of my being, straightening, and unkink just that much more.

Pop pop pop.

I imagine uncurling the pillbug armadillo psychic/physical self that’s clenched up incrementally over the course of preceding weeks.

Bending deeply, leaning gently and ever more inexorably into clutched-tight pockets, I can feel the letting go. Inhaling, I relish this sensation of release and push deeper into the curve. Concentrating, I make of myself a shape both vibrant and articulate.

Minuet back to bum shoulder, joints creaking like stubborn hinges, warming under the fluid of motion. The plants and I, we stretch to grow toward the light, envisioning ourselves into best shapes for living forms.

The other evening I hopped the train downtown to meet Chris so we could attend an event at Columbia College. Since the waning day proved cooler than any we’d enjoyed for awhile in this summer’s arid swelter, we agreed to walk what seemed a manageable distance from City Hall to the event.

Four or five blocks in, my dogs, as they say, began to howl. This surprised me some. My footwear, while arguably selected more on the basis of appearance than utility, was a standby favorite pair of platform sandals in which I’d lasted entire workdays without blink or bellyache. My escalating degree of discomfort on this occasion was therefore unexpected. The farther we ventured down the city’s pavements, destination failing to appear, the crankier I grew.

Now, Reisers are for their part constitutional smart asses (Chris: “Would you prefer a dumb ass?”). My darling spouse’s typical response to my too-seriousness is rapidfire delivery of quirks and jocular jabs intended to provoke a bit of a laugh at whatever’s causing undue consternation. In this vein, he declared, “I’m throwing out those shoes when we get home.”

Regrettably, I fear I’m not always the ideal recipient of a bracing spiritual tonic. Another characteristic trait of Townsendism: stone cold denial. If we don’t like it, it doesn’t exist. My shoes were fine. I was fine. We were nearly there… weren’t we?

Another few blocks spent stewing over his autocratic announcement, and I had morphed into the prickliest of pincushions: “I’m going to start throwing out your shoes and see how you like it.”

The silence of a mutually aggrieved trainride home gave me sufficient time, off my feet, to reconsider the wisdom of my snappishness.

Upon arrival home, I plopped myself down on the floor of the front hallway and took a good hard look at the real perpetrators– and discovered that my shoes were cracked right through in several strategic arch-supporting places. In point of fact the things were falling apart under my feet. Well, hell, no wonder they hurt.

Townsend to the last, I’m afraid I denied Chris the opportunity to make good on his threat, instead walking straight into the kitchen myself and chucking the things in the bin. And then I went and gave him a big I’m-sorry kiss in somewhat compensation for the snarls.

If I’m very good to him, he says he might even consider buying me some new shoes.

This old sathead’s samewise: not ungainly noggin wholly discrete to external observance, from front or back or one side or t’other indeed quite finite–but climb inside, and infinite grows the view.

Dreams attest. Entire wild universe unfurling in the blink of a closed eye. After shutting down the tightly rolled and pinned consciousness upheld so assiduously throughout the day–Et voila! Vois la, bon dieu. Quelle spectacle!

What a leaping, piping unpredictable panoply of visual display! What endless files of intrigue peopled by arrays of players in reams of guises, all improvisationally devised by our own “sleeping” selves. O, marvelous complex & confounding geographies & architectures fashioned wholesale on the fly!

It causes me inevitably to consider just what conceivable or, heck, inconceivable existences lie beyond the portals of consciousness so assiduously maintained in waking life to better– what? Live, presumably. To wit: awake & able, reasoning & responsible, actual & accomplishing.

But in truth– how fully does this way of being equate with thriving? To me it seems a greater degree of exquisite madness is demanded, a necessary dose of very inexplicable magic/spirit/whim which we fend off so sensibly, to fully engage with one’s own properly and uncontainably meaningful life.

Rocket Larkspur

Consolida ambigua
(synonyms: Consolida ajacis; Delphinium ajacis; Delphinium ambiguum)

Family: Ranunculaceae (ra-nun-kew-LAY-see-ee)
Genus: Consolida (kon-SO-lih-duh)
Species: ambigua (am-big-yoo-uh)

Larkspur belongs to the buttercup family - Ranunculaceae.

“Larkspur flowers are almost as complex as the Orchids,” according to the flower expert.

“Larkspurs are distinguished by a backward projecting spur, formed by the upper petal of the flower,” per Wildseed Farms.

Illinois Wildflowers tells us: “It is not surprising that this species is grown in flower gardens, from which it occasionally escapes…The follicles (seed capsules) of Forking Larkspur are glabrous, while the follicles of Rocket Larkspur are pubescent.” [ahem.]                                                                        

And we learn from Chinese Astrology and Precious Flowers that Larkspur’s associated Chinese Horoscope animal is the Sheep (in case you were wondering).

“Larkspur needs butterflies in order to pollinate. The plant is very toxic and can cause death if eaten in large amounts… In ancient China people used Larkspur against snake bites and stings of scorpions.”

Oh, bold Larkspur, to oppose the sting of scorpions! How so a doubtful knight, I have to wonder… For my part I shall admire your indomitability in the face of rocky soil.

It’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

Confident. Upbeat.

If not outright optimistic. Full to the grinning brim with bravado and tally-ho! O, blow ye buglers, it be mine Anthem. Animato – vivo – presto!

Just now I was busy doing the odd bit of tidying up and happened across a pretty sorry view behind the door stenciled life here in the ‘gazey old blog: ”ingrown,” “splutter”ing, “thrash”ing and so on and dreary so forth– come on, now, really. Enough is quite enough, Miss Mopeypants.

Cue those gleeful old banjos and uekeles! High time’s arrived to dust things up a bit and brush off the lagging trombones, hoist a holler out across the great dimensional effervescence in a good old fashioned L’chaim! to all the loved ones and theirn, and theirn, and theirn, ad joyous infinitim.

It’s an honor to be a part of this whole fantabulous being-here trip.

A few months ago I started volunteering as park steward, which basically means picking up litter while out on dog walks (there’s ALWAYS litter, more’s the pity!) and also tending to the native species garden that had been growing a little long in the tooth over the past couple of years.

With parents who fill their basement with grow lights and backyard with everything from vegetables to propagated wild irises and a sister who’s a master gardener, I’ve got some green in my blood, though I’m still learning. So with suburbia-bred trepidation, I attended my first local garden club meeting a couple months back and was delighted to find a bunch of unpretentious folks who simply like to grow stuff and share what they know.

I’m more grateful thank I can say for the the new friends who are mentoring and grounding me in a city life I’ve struggled for some time to feel rightly rooted in.

Today was meant to be bed-building workday out at Global Garden, but, since the weather refused to cooperate, I hung indoors with whistling radiators and got my green on making floral seed starts for alleyway guerilla gardening.

Yesterday I walked down along the L track fenceline and planted three types of morning glory seedlings (blue, blue, pink), shook several jumbo wildflower seed packs over rocky and dubious soil. I’m uncertain as well how the new starts will fare on the back railing– tied down though they be against stray gusts and birdfeet.

The busy visitors, invited by feeders, have been making a meal of my windowbox lettuces and repeatedly turning Signor Oregano on his poor head. He begs that they kindly desist. Grazie mille!

Homesickness, they diagnosed it in children– understandable in kids away from home for the first time to camp or boarding school– expected even. She was always an odd one, never homesick, not then.

In an adult full-grown and even worldly, by some calibrations, the identical overmuch yearning ranks as idiosyncratic and really rather gauche, after all. Consider only the glorious display of delights that abound in excursion! Such a trove of occasion! But no. For this one the campaign amounts to a measure of ash on a tongue craving only sweet scent of rooms with no fragrance at all.

She recalls with a pang that absolute quiet of mornings, back there, stretching so richly expansive with sheer unobservedness, downright overflowing with freedom from… every last trace of potential judgment– which is it, after all, on some level. The vise of anxiety occasioned by daily, discursive exertion of behaving just so, of shaping oneself infinitesimally toward a perceived audience framed by grillwork of projected expectation. Oh, first world headcase’s burden in simply sharing space with other bodies–for all that a felt yoking tug into place of face pieces to form appropriate expressions for Agreeable Guest.

True pleasure travel– that lark! Oh, she knows! She has done it, by god. Travel that’s actually awesome, inspiring, and actively,vitally vibrant. Ooh, la la!  Quelle jouissance! This, regrettably, entirely other occasion of travel, which should by all rights be enchanting, instead unfolds as an experience, internally, of crap. Actual versus experiential, to be sure, but here, somehow, now, all the warmth and kind hospitality in the world serves merely to rattle peevish nerves like links in a chain forged, doubtless, by her own perversity.

She feels unequal to company, unable to explain hipdeep dragging disinclination toward generalized delight, instead drifts dismal into shadow-silted corners, explores odd empty nooks in chilly cafes and cluttered libraries, hides herself out inside books, accomplishing hunkered achievements of invisibility. In this way she whiles away time, willing it to pass more rapidly onward, to bring her the sooner and faster back into arms of the beloved, back to the place where she lives as herself, known and familiar, returned awash with great gratitude, cured and home again.