Spring sneaking around the corners. Another fine windy morning and I wish I could run down the road flying a boxy red and blue kite. How fast the years fly past and turn us crochety and respectable! I’m sure I have a kite somewhere in the garage, the ball of string all tangled up and the crepe paper torn.
Steamed quinoa and scallions with a little lemon juice for lunch. I would rather bake and serve myself a dense moist coffee and walnut loaf (two helpings or more!), but there we are. My economies are leaving me feeling embattled and overworked this month. Some small comfort that last year’s capri pants fit so well.
Embrace your vulnerability, I tell myself while grumbling away in email about writer’s backache, the hours at a desk pounding a keyboard while my spine just dents and crumbles away. Here’s a forthright Texan on the power of vulnerability:
Both women and men could benefit from allowing themselves to be vulnerable. ‘I think vulnerability and shame are deeply human emotions but the expectations that drive shame are organised by gender. For women it’s “Do it all, do it perfectly and never look as if you’re working very hard” – which is a disastrous set-up. And for men it’s “Don’t be perceived as weak”.’
She makes it clear that there is a difference between vulnerability and laying it all out there. ‘Live-tweeting your bikini wax is not vulnerability. Nor is posting a blow-by-blow of your divorce . That’s an attempt to hot-wire connection. But you can’t cheat real connection. It’s built up slowly. It’s about trust and time.’
And there’s always perspective — that vulnerable, tetchy and quinoa-overloaded or not, it could all be so immeasurably worse and that each day is opportunity and gift. Then there’s always the great Charles Bukowski to help us see what’s coming around the next corner.
the suicide kid
I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed. but all I could do was to get drunk again. worse, the bar patrons even ended up liking me. there I was trying to get pushed over the dark edge and I ended up with free drinks while somewhere else some poor son-of-a-bitch was in a hospital bed, tubes sticking out all over him as he fought like hell to live. nobody would help me die as the drinks kept coming, as the next day waited for me with its steel clamps, its stinking anonymity, its incogitant attitude. death doesn't always come running when you call it, not even if you call it from a shining castle or from an ocean liner or from the best bar on earth (or the worst). such impertinence only makes the gods hesitate and delay. ask me: I'm 72.
Ms. Brown says “when backed into a corner, I come out swinging”. I related to those words on a visceral level. It took many years to see how I pushed people away at the times I most needed them. Vulnerability..it’s not a weakness. Great link.
So often Lou we develop ways of dealing with conflict that are affective at once level but disastrous at another. I grew up intellectualising, analysing and distancing from what made me feel small and helpless. But for intimacy we need to be open and vulnerable, not just focused on winning arguments or protecting ourselves. So hard.
Whoa…..”death doesn’t always come running when you call it”
Ain’t that the truth?
Pam, I know how many times I used to wish I could wake up dead, I didn’t want all the bother and discomfort of dying, just to be dead. Just like that, with a snap of the fingers –
Love Charles Bukowski! I spent my teens and 20s calling death. When it arrived on my door when I was 29, I realized I wouldn’t mind living after all. And I wondered if all that beckoning didn’t finally work. Glad it didn’t.
We’re lucky Mary Christine because we got a second chance. Many of us don’t and that is another irony.
Yes indeed death marches to its own drum.
Reminds me of Auden
“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:……..”
Cleo, that is one of my favourite poems, the boy falling from the sky (Icarus) while the ship goes on sailing by, the men in the field go on ploughing, the children skating — what dwarfs tragedy in human perspective.
Love me some Brene Brown.
I have quinoa for breakfast every morning. I didn’t know it could be steamed.
I hope you get to make some coffee and walnut loaf soon.
Hope, I par-boil my quinoa and then steam it in a Chinese bamboo steamer for more lightness and fluffiness. It is very tasty and I shouldn’t pine for anything else!
love Bukowski. and all so true — we need to embrace our innate shame so that we can move above/beyond it, and leave it in the dust.
Bukowski knew so much about human nature and alcoholism — and I do think that by revealing our vulnerability we rob shame of its secret power. Thanks for the comment.
Mr Charles Bukowski I do enjoy the raw edges of his work. Just wondering how he did it all drunk?He must of gone through incredible editing sessions. Going to a bar to die was my way of dying so I could come back to myself…it’s called bottoming out
I know that bottoming out too Dee — and Bukowski is a mystery to me, how he retained his humanity and art despite the ravages of drinking.
I have some biographies of Bukowski that I haven’t read yet. They will be interesting. He was hard core with his drinking. But his poetry is the kind that I like–brutally honest and raw.