Unruly Collections . . .

  —From EF—    

 Anybody else having a hard time avoiding unravelling? At times in my life I have felt that I am an unruly collection of different people trying to pass as somebody with one face and one name. It was a healthy experience to use that to make a play, Dream House, bringing all those separate personae out onto the stage and eventually fuse them into one.

These days I feel more as if I am actually one person but the world around me has run whooping and hollering into a multiple-personality psychotic episode. On our weekly visit to the ocean (Arched Rock, on the Sonoma Coast), I remarked that Mama never wears the same dress twice. Last week was jade-green, today was pewter-gray, and the impressive swells kept peaked knife-edges until the moment they frothed into white. Not like the ones I’ve seen in the past with rounded tops, these were like bent metal. But it was all clearly the mighty Lady I know and love.

However, half a world away, Australia is on fire. Volcanoes are erupting in Indonesia and Hawaii. Jakarta is flooding. The permafrost is melting, while here in my back yard the garlic is thriving in spite of my being tardy with the weeding. We can satisfy our craving for greens with my garden’s collards and giant green mustard and chard. The rain has been benevolent, so far no rushing eroding streams, just a mighty purr from all the green things.

At our Sunday-morning coffee place, a lady made a friendly approach to beg a ride to the center of town, where we were going anyway. En route, we traded some snippets of selfhood on a more vulnerable level than common chit-chat, then went our separate ways. Looking at the web’s news, a large number of people are jockeying to do as much personal damage to each other as possible.

Women gather in huge demonstrations to promote what women do: nurture, comfort, nourish. It’s magnificent, but nothing has changed. Meanwhile, groups of people meet regularly to create hand-written postcards to strangers, urging them to vote. It’s possible that change can happen, one on one.

So now, this week, we begin the hard-core psychotic break of what happens in the Senate. It will be reported to us, and we will try to discern what’s truth and what’s spin and whether we can actually tell the difference. And Conrad and I will carry on with the 10th draft of the newest novel, and try to hone and refine its story to be what it really wants to be. May we all be able to make our stories be what they want to be.

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