No more mental yoga for a while. I promise.

Writing night tonight.

One feels like a useless person when the thing one is best at is being alone and thinking of things that never happened and then writing them down. Why can't I be good at something like barrell racing? Or turning flour into chocolate? These things would be wildly popular with the friends I don't have. We'd wear matching cowboy boots and ride off all the calories created from my flour-based chocolate and say wahoo simultaneously at the barbecue.

...But then I'd have to own more than one phone, maybe even an answering machine, a doorbell that works, and go to more of those parties where people sell things to me I don't need because I'm so nice.

In the end, it's okay being useless. I should say comparably useless. I've never saved anyone's life (unless you count that pig incident in 2005), written a law, wielded a gun in front of an assailant, baked a wedding cake, transcribed a tribal language into an interesting set of legible markings, or even left a goat on top of a water tower. I just write things down. Amusing anecdotes, mental yoga, wowza landscape descriptions can certainly enhance life, but they aren't life in general. Just the stuff of mine. And I find this....hunky dory. I like being nobody. Nobody is never in the news - not even when we use double negatives and get away with it. My capital offense is abusing language - without that annoying background percussion - and inventing things everyone is sure they've heard before, because they really have.

Funny that such a large number of people take pride in their gift being making stuff up. If I was a con man, that might be worth something, but I'm not. I'm a mother. Okay, well sometimes those two things can be similar, but mostly not.

The promise of no more mental yoga is not looking very promising is it? They tell me this is what happens when you get a good night's sleep. Pretty scary.

I did make one very reasonable decision in the last seven days. I've decided not to pressure myself to finish my novel until the years when my child temporarily hates me. Statistically, there's still a chance this won't happen, but in the meantime I feel I can't copiously give up her willingness to hold my hand in public, or the smiles she gives when I cover her face in kisses. If the book finishes while this heaven is occurring, I'll be happy. If not, I'll wait until she's thirteen, is in her room doing homework or on the phone complaining about me, and then rush my desk and take out my fury on my keyboard.

That's reasonable, right? *sigh*  When I was growing up, people always seemed to teach that dying was the most noble thing one can do. It's not though, you know. Laying down your life is much harder while you're still living. Sitting at a desk and looking at a lifeless screen trying to talk to someone you'll never meet while your daughter is making daisy chains outside in the garden - fighting for someone else's family while missing dinner with your own - that's the kind of dying that's hardest. No wonder so few of us are strong enough to do it. For those that are, I admire you - but am not yet strong enough to envy you. I'm still far too attached to daisies.

And no, that’s not me screaming – I was actually screaming much louder when Vader came out. And more uncontrollably. This was a different night - but every bit as cool.

And the parade - although, ours featured different stars. David Prowse (Darth Vader), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), and of course, Warwick Davis, who was there every weekend.

Pictures to come....

There is terror, it is, when I look into my heart.

So many poets were wrong. But at least one was right:  Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied; and vice sometimes by action dignified.

A soul searching for light does not evade darkness. True, light illuminates it - and there it is, the soul - the heart - not dissipating in the light, but solid, casting shadows. That’s me.

Though my heart isn’t hard - it toils and bubbles like a witch’s brew, moving about in a cauldron (my body) waiting for the enchantment which will give it shape - it is still dark.

How I’ve learned that being embraced by light isn’t the same as being consumed! Nevertheless, that is the start. That is where we begin.

Years ago, I went through a period in my life of monetary generosity - going without eating for days in order to feed a child in Africa I’d never seen before - a starving child that could not offend me with his hunger - a child I could not judge to be anything but impoverished. While my body agonized for want of bread, trying to feed those I did not know, my tongue robbed those around me of things they might never get back - a sense of worth and value - a belief that their company was desired. I was a hypocrite. While my mind practiced cold logic, my heart was starved for love. Need-love. Give-love. I was a pauper bragging about his rags.

In a blessed instant, that part of me was overthrown - like a ship, blasted out of the water by cannon fire. My rudder was broken - my sails came winnowing down - I found myself being tossed about like a chicken on Sunday, after it was fried.

I did not talk to God for two whole years. After all, I had said enough to damn a lifetime and, for the first time, I felt thrilled to finally shut up.

By the way, I highly recommend it. Shutting up. Particularly if it doesn’t come naturally to one. (admission: I can still talk far too much if you are unlucky enough to discover it).

On the other side of two years, I finally saw that there were other people on the planet. Actual, real, blood-pumping folks that the universe included, besides me and my glory, in its day to day churnings. It was quite a revelation. The posters with the belly-swollen bodies and pink neon mottos had come down - not that I stopped caring about them. But my mission had changed. To live with my eyes wide open to people right next to me.

I admit, I’m still working on that. Always will be. There’s this person that frequently gets in the way. Me. And since I can’t exactly tell myself to bug off, there I am.

I understand that there is no life that is completely absent from itself. That’s, well, impossible. But I do believe self-sight can be inclusive of other people. That we can love others, at the least, as much as we love ourselves. Somewhere in that loving, I think, while self remains, darkness can finally dissipate. In that sort of love, I could stop blocking light and casting shadows, and allow it to penetrate "me" and touch someone standing next to me.

The irony is, that in stretching toward light, my logistic generosity has changed. I have digressed from feeding bodies and denying souls, to loving souls and denying bodies.

I feel like I’ve been in some sort of wilderness that I entered like a beggar who’d dragged a hot find of clothes from a Greenwich village garbage can, and exited like a millionaire who hadn’t been shopping for clothes for five decades.

So now, I’m on a mission to regain that part of me that gave physically. Why oh why did I stop?? There is no great harm, after all, in feeding someone without loving them compared to not feeding them at all.

People are strange. At least, I am. I seem to continually exchange darkness for darkness. I change shape, toiling, bubbling - but I never seem to rise out of that genetic infamy that is our sad inheritance.

But I have hope now - and, such a desire to give greatly again. I’m taking small steps towards my goal - trying to replace bad habits with good ones - always wary of the intrinsic tendency to call good works evidence of a good heart. How well I know that one can exist without the other. Good works. Good heart.

That’s what I want.

The inner cesspool has spoken.