However, it is not their place to hold me up. To sustain me…

It is my job. The are my friends, the calm hornets – during the re-positioning of the board their nest clings to, they swooped out to warn me just twice, but they mostly just watched me and tended to the business of endlessly dabbing their abdomen over the nest. Enzyme or pheromone? I’ll have to look it up, E.O. Wilson, The Insect Societies.

We are all, if we’ve any mind at all, painfully aware of our shortcomings – the parts of ourselves that don’t serve us at all, but also our inability to manifest the flexibility of bone and muscle to give ourselves a convincing hug.

There are just some things we aren’t able to do entirely for ourselves, entirely all the time.

I think I am going to have to fess up about the cloud-watching. It seemed innocent enough at first. Cloud-forms are fascinating structure and light behaves in clouds as it does nowhere else…

Then I started noticing how peculiar the cloud-forms that gather in the sky to the east of this house. Of course, I have always been prone to see a thing as something else…but, the clouds have been full of angles and symmetry that I’ve never seen in clouds before. Some convergence of jet streams that pushes the clouds into towers of thunder just waiting to happen and the towers glow golden just like in the pictures and the clouds are have eyes all punched out and wide open ovals that look just like birth. And swooping smooth with ragged edge: wings.

Adjusted only for brightness and contrast to approximate my memory of how horrifyingly beautiful and gory the sky looked night before last.

I try not to believe in god – because I don’t believe in easy answers, I think they cheat us of possibility. I wrote, earlier: ‘I don’t believe in … ‘ And maybe it’s THE NAME I don’t believe in…and the anthrocentric nature of man’s god. My higher power loves insects and ghosts and makes movies of clouds for me and just me…though anyone could see them if they sat with me and watched.

That’s why I take so many pictures. Proof of the holes in the sky. And to some the sky would be only sky…but to the lonesome it is like a friend.

It’s like every day is some new slipping down…the humility of claiming myself was difficult…

It was – however – nothing compared to humiliation that is the sense of being unclaimable to any not of my blood – my mother, my children…those I was linked to by thick ropy cords.

Smog/Bill Callahan lyric: “Humiliation is good; it means you believe in something.”

I think the believing in something part is negotiable. I believe in air and light and dust, tricks of the eye and the angle. I believe that sometimes, if we’ve needs that are woefully unmet, we find things that give us some sense that there must be some vast stupid sense in it all. If you want to believe that my clouds are from Some God With A Name – please see them as whatever evidence you need that there is something bigger and more timeless than any human action or belief…the omniscient witness, our friend: The Sky.

Whatever this feeling, that maybe watching clouds is more important than watching television, I have actually is…it is definitely Love. Maybe I seem a little odd simply because there just isn’t, in the end, enough meek love in the world.

To most people, I seem to exist only in flickers or brief comments, a momentary concern…

“Well, I don’t understand why she doesn’t just, like, go out and meet people?”

I do. I meet people and I like them and they like me, but I am – at my best an acquaintance, usually a stranger. I think people think I am aloof. I think I might be aloof. Somehow? I don’t know. I am tall. That is sometimes mistaken for aloof.

I am working on that. In my way…I need the people in my life to see me clearly and respect that the lines I draw are not prohibitory – but, protective…

It is not that I do not want to go out and lean close to talk in dark rooms that vibrate with sound. If I want to do ANYTHING I want to see people and music. I will, I may – try to go to some shows…learn how to go and just be – again – the girl who dances alone.

I think I am finding my footing around the problem.

My friend butterfly. We kept eachother entertained for at least a 1/2 hour. It’s wings were ragged and it didn’t fly well. So, it seemed okay just sitting on me until I relocated it to a sheltered spot in the garden.

Maybe.

The other day, I stopped to get a drink at the con-venience store. And I saw the plastic bowl of knock-off silly bands – rubber bands molded into thematic shapes that contort and then spring back into horses or dinosaurs or angels.

3.00 for a pack of ten brightly colored rubber bands.

And so, no – I don’t think times are as hard as we make them out to be here. And so, no – I don’t think it is unreasonable to find the sky so entertaining. And, so no – I don’t think the world knows what’s best for me. And, so no – I’m not buying it…

Cunninghamia, China Fir.
Not as spiny as it looks, but very structural.
Mine is a bit topsy from poor staking of the flexible branch-like truck.
A nice blue, however.
Glauca.

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faithrhyne@gmail.com

show details 1:59 AM (5 hours ago)

Well, what have we here? July 3rd.

17 days until I am no longer married.

Okay. .

Still no outpouring of family and friend support. My brother texted me. So, that’s nice. My mom, bless her heart, emailed me. She wrote about the neighbors cats.

I went to a few places downtown and introduced myself, reintroduced myself. I really don’t want to make cro-cloud barrettes…

Cro-flower bobby pins? Maybe.

I have really made a small mess of my vocational/wage-earning life. I have always been a lousy wage-earner. Low wage jobs with high wage demands…you burn out, lapse. Happens all the time in the fields of social work and education, the corner of which is where my qualifications put me…

I am sitting on that curb…thinking about where in the world I might go from here. I guess I will start writing stories – fiction. Perhaps re-work an academic paper on the American Chestnut into something more textural…maybe take a field trip to see if a ranger @ the Great Smoky Mountain National Park can show me one of the American Chestnut trees that is still sending up shoots from it’s blighted crown. Then they get choked by the old, old fungus and the shoots die when they are barely big enough to be called trees.

I have a very special place in my heart for the American Chestnut. I don’t know why. I have had a fondness for the species ever since I heard of it’s plight…

Did you know the trunks of the tall blight-killed trees were called ghosts?
The ghost trees, they say, stood tall and sun-bleached among the oak and poplar that filled the Chestnut void. They stood out from the mountain sides like bones in a field.

Speaking of trees sending out suckers…the blue tree had babies! I found about six baby standard peach trees growing around the old dead one. Perhaps the dead peaches sprouted. Before I realized what they were I had pulled out three. I am sick of triangles right now and so I pulled out one more. There wasn’t room for it anyway.

The garden had been a source of reassurance. My life may seem ‘non-functional’ (you’d think nobody ever took time off from their careers to examine where their energy was being spent…) But, my house is clean(er) and the garden looks nice-ish and I am not exhausted.

I guess just wait. Reach out in the ways that I can, and wait, consider work carefully. Because I tend to give a lot of myself to my employers, I need to be wary of what I involve myself in…I have, it seems, some issues.

I feel like I am reacting pretty reasonably to the circumstances…

(the circumstances are all I have written about with the addition of spooky clouds, friendly insects, ghost hands on my heart, and the overwhelming sense that I could die any day, or that something actually terrible might happen. I am not simply being paranoid.

The clouds freak me out, all the circles and mushrooms – like portals and bombs, the slashes like wings and like eyes. I know they are not. Just like I know it is highly unlikely that the world is going to end and some higher power that I have scoffed at most of my life has now chosen me to inform the world…um, yeah…sorry, dude – not happening.)

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha…ha.

My nervousness is, however, a good prompt for thinking about how many different ways a cloud can be seen and how many different stories they must overhear.

I never really had the guts to make my own way. I have been brave, yes…but, that was vain bravery for the purpose of impressing people who’s favor I sought. It was sycophantic bravery. And any sycophantic endeavor is at it’s heart self-destructive…placing another’s accomplishments and worth above your own.

I don’t have an issue with being productive. I have an issue of the value of my time. I am not – as some would like to assume – laying about in Wallowville…though, admittedly I have dipped a toe into the turgid waters of Lake Wallow.

(Thanks, Hannah for the fb usage of ‘turgid’ – )

I felt remarkably un-bug-outed today as I spoke to gallery-space proprietors and other people who may be interested in placing me as some small facet in the crown of inimitable Southern characters. Really. I am friends with insects and ghosts.

I think so, anyway. Thus, I can see how it may be hard for me to connect with people in a way that is not somehow a little peculiar – to me and them, it seems. Oh, well…

I imagine it will make some sort of sense eventually. Hopefully sometime soon. It is difficult to have these days that are filled with delightful mundane and small surprises and skies that make me want to hold someone’s hand and feel certain that I am not the only one who could see how the silly old clouds look like wings.

I don’t exclaim a lot lately.

I am trying to be as matter of fact as possible regarding the strange results of my demand for truth in my life: it seems as if people have simply shrugged, saying, “Well, in truth – Faith is great, but you know…kinda weird. I don’t know not ‘weird’ – – – but, like…”

I am just one small interesting thing in a world filled up with too much.

I am really feeling the ghost hand. I think I am going to go crochet some small flowers. I think I am going to sit outside. Yes. Air would be good on a day like today.

My kids seem to think so. Sort of. They’ve been with their father a lot. I don’t know why. It happens. It will straighten out. I can’t force any issues right now…

Well, even the Murray McMurray Hatchery weekly special has failed to arrive. (note: it did arrive in the email inbox, at 8:42 am.) (It was about Roosters.)

Murray McMurray has been the only Saturday morning email/call/contact since May.

Maybe this butterfly was sent by The Sky to tell me to stop waiting for people. It’s not just me though. Even the animals are acting a bit peculiar. Under is being vigilantly watchful of driveways and gates and the cats are all sticking together.

Dang. I know, I do need to get out more. However, I feel safe here and I feel relatively peaceful here. I am a bit apart from everything right now and for some reason, that is where I need to be…the evidence is on my nose.

And no, I’m not using drugs. Haha. Thanks for asking thought. I have kids, I have no money, drugs destroy me – I know I am thin. It is nothing so simple as a side effect.

Well, maybe I am supposed to spend the weekend sorting out my site and filing drawings and making small symbolic flowers to fasten onto bobby pins…

Finish the wall of switches, put away the laundry. Water the marigolds I planted around the blue tree yesterday. Try to be present with the kids – because, even if I am not worth much time to my peer-group…the kids are so glad I exist.

Note to Self: Pay attention to the seemingless endless blather of children re: things that you may not find terribly interesting. Actually listen. Even if they say the same thing over and over again. Especially if they say the same thing over and over again. Especially if they say the same thing over and over again.

Especially.

faithrhyne@gmail.com

show details 7:18 AM (8 minutes ago)

Oh! Why didn’t I think of this before!?

The Madonna of The Toast!

That guy will certainly have patience for clouds with eyes and with wings.

Thanks, Sky.