Bridging

Lately I'm glimpsing how pervasive fluidity is, how very deep is life's non-dual nature. I am no different. More than ever, I am both here and there, urban and rural, secular and spiritual, right and wrong. I am spiraling upwards and downwards at any given time, succumbing to entropy and striving for order, simultaneously.

Trying to make things into absolutes causes so much turmoil in this world. The either/or mindset failed to help me in my sexual identity, and it fails so often when applied to anything else.

So why do I repeatedly fall into the trap of choosing, or believing, or being this or that?

My way of being challenges others' binary-ness, their preconceptions of duality, their fundamentalism. Witnessing their discomfort, out of compassion I soothe them by attempting to be more black-and-white in my words and deeds. But that isn't easier on me; it goes against my spirit.

My spirit's way is the way of the bridge: resting firmly on both shores, dwelling on both as well as in between them and over the river, simultaneously. I dance across the bridge and over the river, pausing for a time on one bank or another until exploration beckons and I resume the dance of in-between. I live and I love in the places where binaries meet and caress, bump and rub together.

At last, I have understood: whenever, for the benefit of others, I force myself to align with society's embrace of the binary, I do myself harm. Perhaps I also harm others, by perpetuating a mindset that leads to conflict.

So now I am learning how to live in harmony with my nature (and perhaps the nature of all things.) I will practice allowing others grapple with their own dissonance rather than violating my self. I will practice being proud of what my way of being can bring to the world: diversity, inclusiveness, understanding - and maybe even some peace, at least for myself.

Bridging by Monica Meneghetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at monmenblog.blogspot.ca.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.monicameneghetti.com.

Recreation Guilt

It's that season where we can get to feeling we should be out enjoying Canada's brief summertime by bagging peaks, paddling rapids, and otherwise engaging in copious outdoor activity! Here's my antidote. It's one of my older poems, posted here upon popular request.
 
A Contrite Banffite Seeks Pardon

Forgive me, Rockies, for I have sinned.

It has been months since my last hike.

I could have walked through autumn leaves, yet was content

to lie on the couch,

watching through the window while aspen surrendered their leaves.

Mountain-bike trails deserved to be ridden,

not spurned in favour of Star Trek re-runs.

And how could I have danced and drunk until too sick for next day’s hike?

Twice, I failed to walk to work.

I purchased fossil fuels.

I neglected to carpool

and squandered the long-weekend

with a double-feature at the Lux.

I confess:

I long to cause wanton erosion and savour succulent berries.

I crave a blaze during fire ban.

Oh, and one more thing:,

I covet my neighbour’s

hi-tech gear. 

Be gracious to me now, O Rockies.

May your awesome views blot out  my transgressions,

may your waterfalls cleanse me of my iniquity and purge me of my sloth.

In penance, I offer a prayer:

Hail Hiker, tight of lace,

blisters are with thee.

Blessed art thou amongst locals

and blessed is the brand of thy boot Merrell.

Holy Hiker, like unto god,

pray for us lazy sonsabitches

now and at the summit of Everest,

oh yeah.

 
Contrite Banffite by Monica Meneghetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.monicameneghetti.com.

very close, very wet

very close, very wet

The river floods.

Tamarind seeds do not sprout.

Supermarket-roasted chicken falls apart.

I use toilet paper to blow my nose.

But we have a new bar of soap.

A healthy heart beats inside the dirty girl.

A silver blaze rides the haunch of a dark grizzly.

I lie awake in the glow,

the bright mystery

of who I was

between Junes.

Full moon at perigee.

Millenial flood.

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Shame and Vulnerability

I have a new lover. Meet Vulnerability. We're crazy about each other.

Brené Brown talks about having a "vulnerability hangover" after admitting her breakdown publicly on Youtube (now at 9,794,150 Views). What memoir writer hasn't experienced a vulnerability hangover? I certainly have, and I'm currently writing about one of the aspects of that hangover - shame. I hope to post some of the work-in-progress here in the coming weeks.

She also says, "Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change." These are some of my top values. So basically, I'm screwed. Me and Vulnerability are gonna be life partners.

I love my zits

I am one of those despised dermatological unicorns: a person blessed with great skin. One of those people for whom actual blemishes are so rare as to make each one memorable. Like the Great Squee of Oh-Seven,  flaring in the night with its own evil incandescence.  And, more recently, the Tenacious Tunnelling Blackhead of Two-Kay-Thirteen.

Occasionally - and I mean as occasionally as a baby elephant - a single pimple would happen. Always on my chin, within a one-inch sweet spot - my very own personal crucible of pustulence.

I would peer in the mirror at it, mystified.  A lone zit seems as unnatural as a hen laying only one egg, a cob of corn with a single niblet, a green pod cradling a lonely pea. Shouldn’t whiteheads come in crops? In festering flocks of clogged-pore goodness? In a murder of mandible-cloaking crow heads? But no. Not on this body.

Until now. These days, my skin’s threatening to unleash all the zits it horded during my teen years. After all these years of restraint, I dread a lynch-mob of white suprema-cysts. So far, production seems to be at a simmer, not a rolling boil (ahthankyou!)

But still. I count precisely two on my chin… and five on my back. My back! For the love of fuzzy baby animals, when did my back become fair game?

For me, this verges on traumatic. But those plagued with acne all their lives laugh at me. "You're freaking over a measley seven zits? I can't remember a time when I didn't have at least ten." They smirk at my primadonna horror and hand me tea tree oil.

Why oh why is this happening? It's partly to do with my age. Peri-menopause can be a sort of second adolescence, hormonally speaking. Experts also attribute worsening of acne to stress.

Knowing this brought a realization: I love my zits. Because these crimson craters mean I've survived to reach middle age. That's no small thing for someone with anxiety issues and a family history of breast cancer that makes medical professionals indulgent.

I love my white-capped wonders because they show I am brave. In the past six months, I've made a host choices and decisions.  Each has stretched me to greater levels of exposure and vulnerability. There are things I need to do, things that scare me into acne-studded alertness. And I am doing them, one spot at a time.

So when you see me, salute my latest dermal conflagration as the badge of honour it is.

I Love My Zits by Monica Meneghetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.monicameneghetti.com.

Writing Memoir

When the train sounds its level crossing in the wee hours, the coyotes howl. Why? I don't know, but I like it. I know the coyotes are always there, though I may rarely see them. But when their ruckus starts up, there suddenly seems an impossible number of creatures just outside my window.

Think of animal tracks. Summer trails show only a few traces of animal life in the mud. But winter - winter transforms and conceals even as it provides revelations. Snow reveals a super-highway of wild activity. Snow provides the evidence of abundant life. When the snow melts, you have to go back to believing without proof - back to a kind of faith.

Elk, deer, even the bighorn sheep confirm their presence regularly. It's the pine martens, mice, siskins, coyotes, wolves, lynx, cougar, and white-tails who recede and emerge from awareness seasonally. The shy. The nocturnal. The furtive prey, and the stalking predators.

And now here I sit, awake hours earlier than everyone else to make my own tracks in ink.

Writing about my life is like all that - the snow, the tracks, the train and the coyotes howling. Within me lurks a longing to share my life through words. I merely believe there is something of value to express. There's no evidence that's true - until I face a blank page.

I hitch one word to another with deliberate momentum and hear the animal cry of my authentic being. I have been placing a notebook on my lap for thirty-five years. That simple act camouflages the mundane signs of my passage - bills and "to-do" lists and schedules, trash and used tissues and dishes and laundry - and my life is transformed by being hidden. The proof of a deeper, more meaningful existence is exposed, ironically, by drifts of paper accumulating over my life. Without fail, within moments of placing pen on paper, I'm breathing deeply and rhythmically - as though I were asleep. But it's a much better rest. One that even coyotes cannot disturb.

post-MFA advice: with pants around ankles, begin again

The bathroom stall walls where I work are covered in magnetic words. For months, I've been pulling my pants down, then pairing magnets together. Two magnets to please only me with their assonance, alliteration, rhyme, unpredictability, or peculiarity. Why is this important?

When soil is very dry, it cannot absorb water. Some moisture must be present because, if I recall my biology lessons, H20 molecules attract one another thus drawing moisture into the soil. So if you have a plant that is very dry, first you must place the pot in a dish of water and allow the roots to draw some moisture up into the soil. Only then can you douse the soil surface with water and expect it to infiltrate.

Since finishing my MFA, my brain was like that dry soil. I tried to pour books upon it months ago but they pooled uselessly on the surface. But those word pairings were the trickles of hydration below the roots.  And now, it's possible to splash my cortex with the written words of others, but gingerly. I can take a bird-bath of reading, no more.

That little bit of moisture has been enough to nourish a few new leaves to share with you. I must be a cactus.

Luck has Uck in it, too

I'm busy with prying my ass from the muck of suckitude. I had been humming along for months but have recently fallen into the bog of eternal stench. As a perk, I tell myself I'll quit writing forever as soon as I get my degree. So, like, you know, nurturing the usual delusions.

In September, my friends

In September, my friends

drink deep the dregs of summer, the honey

light and backlit leaves.

Let your bones be wild

strawberries beneath the waning awning.

Let summer rise

away like dust around hooves

heading home.

Let your hands shed their tan

finger by finger

like velvet gloves after the masque.

Let these weeks like rivers

glide past as though buoyed by an inkling of oil.

Then, when frost creeps in on green grass

you may glimpse your beloved's hair

suddenly white.

In September, my friends by Monica Meneghetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.monicameneghetti.com.

Pink King

Imagine it's 1988. Michael Jackson is King of Pop. He's still black and no one's wondering if he's wacko. You're a writer in Disneyland, pregnant with her third child.  On your way out of seeing Captain Eo, you're handed a visor with flashing lights.

Flash forward to 2011. MJ is dead. You've published four books in five years. You're sitting by the banks of a mountain river with another writer, no books and no kids. You hand her the visor. Two severed wires, black and red, protrude like antennae from the flaccid elastic headband. Small yet significant feelers of support.

She takes the visor. Ignores it for weeks as she rides a creative roller-coaster and wants to get off, pukes over the rail.

Eventually, she remembers - the visor. Holds and examines the silver plastic. Is that the scent of make-up lingering on the cloth lining? Who is Captain Eo, anyway?

Googles. Okay. A male superhero played by a man who moves like a sentient ocean. Whose emblem is the inverted pink triangle...

And not for the first time she wonders about the King of Pop. What happened?

-35 Celsius at 51°10'N, 115°34'W

...and the pachyderm jumped over the natural upward projection of the earth's surface...

Sunlight emerging onto mountains outside my window. Conscious breathing. Hot cocoa from scratch. Mary Oliver's poetry. I'm re-creating my morning ritual, one dawn at a time. Sunrise dawdles in the winter at this latitude. 7:30 is early enough. I'm grateful.

snapshot challenged

Glee cozy of the week! Taken during a morning ski on the Bow River.

I'm snapshot challenged. I detest short-circuiting my lived moment to step away and deal with a machine. Also, my appearance displeases me in 99% of photos. But I do like wandering around with the express purpose of looking at the world. The digital camera I got for Christmas made me remember a fascination with textures and things that can look extraterrestrial when taken out of context.

Meanwhile...I'm developing a screenplay that involves human clones and emancipation.

gathers moss

Guess I should have kept the stones rolling...look what grew on my head during the break!

On to feature film now...Three ideas pitched and awaiting feedback. Overwhelmed by the notion of developing one into a script. Don't think about it. Just keep rolling.

a strange new compulsion

Behold, the Nipple Hat!

The Glee Cozy Project has cultivated a strange new desire in me. I find myself donning all sorts of things not intended for headware. This time, I looked at my half-finished crochet project (a hot water bottle cover) and thought, "okay now, THIS will look funny..." What do you think? Happy Solstice to you all.

It's not serious. Seriously.

My third eye tells me everything I need to know.

Bill Pollett described my screenplay as "a satirical Cronenbergian fable set in an eco-friendly dystopia that has much to say about both sexual taboos and political intolerance."

Here are some of the projects that are feeding my imagination as the story plays out on the movie screen of my mind.

Biosphere Home Farming
www.design.philips.com/probes and click on FOOD for more info.

www.ekokook.com

Toronto-based source of velomobiles. More at www.bluevelo.com

a kind of jester

Courtesy Last Temptation Thrift.

Writer warps words in her Wernicke's area. Her hat-bobs bobble between banter and bathos. She dances, dodges, dips and doodles down dangerous drive-thrus of astounding antonyms and stunning synecdoches.  Even her extraordinarily effervescent eyes exclaim "excellent". The bells of Onomatopoeia jingle. Are you not entertained?

Cozy from the past

Mom is keeping my head cozy, even though she's been gone for more than half my lifetime.

My mom knitted me this hat when I was about twelve. It's a scarf with a hat built into one end of it. I remember wearing it on my walk to ballet class. The snow drifts were high, the wind was pushing against me. I felt like a Russian ballerina on her way to the studio.

Revision is the process of ruining a piece of writing in order to make it better. The toughest, most anxious stage for me is when the piece is ruined but not yet better. I'm there now with my screenplay. Only one thing for it: keep going until it is better, or at least better enough.

Hair is cozy enough

Sometimes my hair can be a Glee Cozy all on its own.

No hat arrived from my supporters on time for this week's post. So, here I am. My bare-headed, bed-headed self. Often, writers need to funk it up on their own.

turned on its head

Queen of Glee or margarine commercial? You decide.

When a Fibre Goddess from Nelson felted this Creamsiclesque handbag, she had no idea it would be warped into a Glee Cozy. It seems like the right thing to wear during my first screenplay critique.

pandas don't hibernate

shape-shifter? or just shifty?

This week's Glee Cozy is giving me warm fuzzies while I finish the first draft of my short film. Donated by a Hip-Hop Dance Goddess, it made its way all the way from Calgary into my mountain studio! I resonate with bears in general, so this hat is giving me a real boost. I need that boost right now.