Illiterations: Laughing At My Own Expense

Nico and Joy 2008 Although my lifelong love of dogs drew me to this week here at Cesar's, I also recognize that I am living in less than perfect harmony with my current pack.  I am certain that the sadness I personally feel around of the imbalance and lack of harmony in my own pack most certainly fueled my unwavering choice to go as soon as I could. Along with an amazing amount of physical activity and an abundance of information to fill my hungry mind, each day after lunch we are lead through a meditation.  And each day, a different style of meditation is offered for us to experience.  Guided meditation and singing bowl meditation have been offered, and today it was meditation to chanting.  I used to meditate regularly.  I have not been following that practice for many years.  I feel a dawning recognition that I will return to the habit. Today's meditation was difficult to ease into.  I don't really know why, but then without noticing, I was in a meditative state.

Seems like a simple, clear, and easy-to-follow directive, right? Here in this group of forty or so enthusiastic people whose lives and loves revolve around dogs, there is a hum of excitement, and, like the canines we love, everybody is sniffing noses and making friends all around. As I check into the hotel this afternoon, just after 1 pm, a woman walks around the corner and sees that I have Sunny and Sonja with me.  She asks if I am with the Cesar Millan group.  I answer that I am.  "So am I," she adds, and instantly we are introducing ourselves, she is meeting the dogs, and they are getting a bit over-excited.  So much for no touch and no talk.  It isn't her fault, we're both happy enough to meet that we--that I-- relax the requirements I normally have for my dogs on meeting a new person. Robin, as I now know her, had just flown in from Colorado.  We have several hours to wait for our first meeting of the Fundamentals class to begin, and we cross paths in t

 A young girl learns juggling.  Photo from Circo de Los Ninos. Some months ago, I did a multi-part post about the trip I took a few years ago to Cuba with Jeff.  I hadn’t really made time to write down my memories and the myriad emotions that visiting Cuba evoked.  Perhaps that post ran too long—or, too many “parts.” I find myself moved to write again about a little town I visited two days ago.  It’s here in the state of Nayarit, Mexico, and it is fondly refferred to as San Pancho by the locals.  It’s true name, as a few Mexican nationals have reminded me, is San Francisco (I felt they were super traditional, and wanted to make sure I knew “Pancho” wasn’t the real name).  It’s a funny thing, my first serious boyfriend was a direct descendant of Pancho Villa, and somehow, I never internalized that it was the Mexican nickname for Francisco, in spite of the fact that he loved to tell people that he was a Pancho Villa grandson.  At any rate, I suppose there some fo

Are you one of the many, many people in the world who earn their living in alternate work styles?  I've been watching the phenomenon over the past 25 years as the earliest "dot com" employees  began creating workplace environments and work schedules and even workplaces which simply didn't look anything like the IBM-blue, cubicles and offices, of yore. I contemplate this often.  I adore my own work-lifestyle, as demanding as it is.  I think most people would agree that there is almost immeasurable value in a life where a person can simply decide, for example, "Monday, I am going to my daughter's cheer tryouts," and not have to make a request to her employer for the time off.   Self-employed people have, to some degree, been doing this for a while, although many I've met are the least willing to absent themselves from their business for fear of missing a business opportunity.  But, I see many of them becoming more free to escape and to se

2018 is in it's last 12 hours of life.  In only ten more hours, the entire year will be but a memory.  This was a hard year for me in some ways.  It was a year of growth, and a year of personal loss.  It was a successful year of business, and it was a year of closure on some difficult involvements with people that arose out of business. I still, 18 months later, am working and fighting to return to the athletic, physically strong person I was before my hips developed osteoarthritis in my late 40's.  Only replacing both hips ultimately offered relief, but the toll those ten years took on my body still shows in my weight, and my energy level, but I am better and better every month. Not only did the extreme and relentless pain take a toll on my physical self, it was a constant struggle emotionally not to be impatient with those closest to me who didn't understand what I was going through.  My husband, who has his own challenges, found it humorous to make sport of me mo

To know about the story behind this painting, click this LINK There is a safe side, and a side where you are "on your own."  Be your own support system, your own boss, your own insurer, your own safety net, in all things. Live by the rules, or write your own.  Even when there are boundaries, the freedom of being your own boss is heady.  And, there are always boundaries, of course. I'm on the second half of year sixteen of doing just that.  And, what a year. It's been a strange, and painful, firey, year, and I have had to rise to the challenges of people in places I would never have expected to have done.  I feel like I'm trudging home, to my safest place, even though it's a place I've never lived.  It's a place where the home fires burn, and they guide me there, where people know me and who I am at my core.  I am neither scorned nor neglected there.  It just feels right, and I plan to return from there healed, or, at the very least, healing

An original (if conceptually similar) work by Nicola Holmes, ©2018 A Christmas Daryl Daryl woke up Sunday morning with a headache.  "Probably too much late night Fox News," he thought.  "Damned carolers were out late.  So distracting!" He punched the snooze button on his phone, gritting his teeth at the sound of Suicide Solution, his usually-favorite Ozzy Osborn song that he nearly always used as his alarm in the morning.  He found it titillatingly ironic, as he wasn't a drinker. His forever-perky wife, Anna, was already up, and he could hear the blender whining in the kitchen as she whipped up her morning smoothie.  Grrr.  Wives.  You can't live with 'em; you can't kill 'em.   He smiled at this.  It gave him a little giggle every time, in spite of Anna's hundreds of pleas not to say such things. This morning was a really good example of why he would just as soon be done with her.  He had plenty of things he'd love to be d

Annie, my mum, with Clara I've slowed down just lately, on these entries to the blog.  I am overwhelmed in my desire to express thoughts.  And, just because I have "feels" (to coin a current phrase) doesn't really mean that it's got to be written. I write because it's satisfying, most of the time, and cathartic, almost all the time.  I often sit down to write intending to write one thing, and then--as if my fingers on the keys had a mind of their own--my writing is off in a different direction than I'd even known it would be. So much is swirling around in my little world right now.  Some of it overlaps everybody's own experience, such as the emotions around the recent wildfires, being wrought from an already raw population of people in our state.  I am certainly one of those people, yet, the fires have not directly touched me and my family, blessedly.  But, all around me, people I love have been directly touched by, or impacted by, the fires. 

If most people are like me, then they must be feeling almost numb.  I do not live in Paradise, but, like all of us in the low Sierra mountains, I feel their loss in the people I know who lost homes or even family.  I feel it in the nearness of the tragedy.  I recognize the streets; the schools; the quirky landmarks and the parks. California is experiencing something new.  We are experiencing wildfires that take everything.  Everything--in horrifying magnitude.  Californians can't remember a time more than a decade or so past that we saw whole towns wiped off the map.  Now, in these past 13 months, and more sparsely spaced, events before that time, we are coping with wildfire losses that knock us out at the knees. The deadliest fire in California history is raging even as I write this.  Already, there are 6700+ structures burned, and 29 confirmed fatalities.  The acres ravaged stands at over 110,000, with only a small percentage of the fire contained, and heavy dry winds

How do you like to work on grounding yourself, when you really realize you've become adrift? For me, the things I always used to do seem unavailable to me.  I spent many years of my life as a single person.  I didn't even marry my husband until after I turned 50.  So, I have no kids.  Dogs are my kids, really.  Over time, I've enjoyed many relationships, and left as many.  But in between, I was always alone, and being alone allowed me the solitude to enjoy meditation, writing... Now, privacy is a thing of my dreamscape.  It's not that I can't enjoy meditation, or listen to Native American flute as it drifts through my house.  But, there is no space that is mine alone.  And, to ground myself, more than anything, I really need solitude.  I often walk long walks with the dogs, which presents so many gifts all rolled together anyway; I bond with these two pooches whom I adore; I get fresh air and exercise; and my mind can wander.  I love my walks! But, I

Ayala Cove, at Angel Island I miss the salt air.  I miss hauling all our duffel bags and crates of picnic supplies and extra clothes across the parking lot; down the gangway.  I remember flip-flopping along rickety, briny smelling docks, knowing where the weak spots were and avoiding them, to our beloved sailboat.  I say, "sailboat," though there were many to love through the years. When we got the O'Day, which we sailed for one day only.  The O'Day fell from grace before it could be christened when, on the open Ocean just outside the Santa Cruz harbor, we smacked off a wave that opened a large hidden crack in the hull, my father crawled in the open cabin, took a look, and stoically turned for the harbor.  Once the O'Day was returned, my father chose an Aurora, which was a sweet little boat of about 20 feet, and my father liked that he'd found a boat he could haul around behind our big International Travelall.  He was able to keep it home, and tow it