get on the happy trail

Sighs... again your post has made me want to run away!!

I know exactly what you mean about work. After a pretty dreadful day yesterday I had fallen off the trailer big time, and was feeling pretty miserable when I got a text off a friend asking if I was still coming to dinner. Whoops thought I, I thought that was Wednesday.

Of course I am I replied!!

Set off at the allotted time and wondered up and down what I thought was their road realising there was no 121. Texted to see if it was in fact 21 and got the reply, no, 121.

But there is no 121 said I. Phonecall ensued to find I was on the Ave. instead of the road, and I had about another mile and a half to walk to where I was going. Now normally this wouldn't bother me, but just recently, I ripped a hole in the bottom of my foot, treading on the heel of a platform boot, in walking to avoid that while it healed, I now have a really swollen and sore achillese tendon - ongoing problem - so the thought of this walk was daunting to say the least, and I was feeling very sorry for myself as I walked up the hill.

After several mishaps I arrived, and suddenly, it was all gone. Friends I hadn't seen for ages and good food, good wine and good company, all topped off with a new pair of shoes. (I have the sling-back sinapse!) Suddenly I managed to float down the hill home. (It could have been the bottle of rose I imbibed, but I prefer to think it was the salving balm of good friends.)

anyway, something in the air. It would appear that whenever you are going through something, someone not so far away, or even across the ocean is experiencing the same thing and coming to the same solution.

A very long story to get to the point!

Oh! and BTW drabromeo, You may want to avoid the verb shagging for an English audience, and I'll avoid going out for a fag! LOL (Well I won't but it won't mean what it means over there!! ;o)

Till later

BHxx

Howdy, fellow trailerians! I've just uploaded a wee song, a bluegrass instrumental version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow, per BettyHill's request. If everyone likes this type of thing, I can upload other musical mayhem. This is me and my friends having fun with a standard. (Click on the little play icon above to hear it. I'm not sure how you download them!)

I spent the weekend in Albany, New York with my friends. We get together a couple of times a month-- one of us of course lives in Albany, I live in New York, another lives in New Jersey, and one lives in Vermont. All pretty far distant from each other, really. But we make a real effort to gather at my friend Rick's house at least once or twice a month. Rick has a big basement, and it is like we were teenagers again. After dinner with his extremely understanding and patient wife Anne, we go down to the basement to drink, smoke, and play music until 4:00 am. We also play video games (Gears of War at present), and do really stupid things boys (and men who refuse to give it up) are wont to do. Like making a really freaking humongous bonfire in his back yard and shagging golf balls over it. Mostly though we play music-- and playing music is such a key part of the trailer for me.

After a pretty horrendous week at work, I was feeling low and despairful. A week of not being sure where I stand in the company, worries about my department becoming redundant, frustrations with our pathetic systems, and on and on. But as soon as 5:00 hit, I was out the door with my mandolin and overnight bag. My friend Alan picked me up and we drove up to Albany (about a three hour drive). By the end of the weekend I was exhausted, wobbly (from excessive drinking), relaxed, refreshed, nauseous (see previous parenthetical aside), and 100% renewed.

At one point on Saturday, we were outside Rick's house, hitting more golf balls into the woods. The day was one of those overcast, chilly days that I love. The tree limbs waved against the bone-colored sky and a low fog hovered over the ground like the earth was sighing. The air was thick with the smell of woodsmoke and damp breezes, and the cold lay on your skin like a favorite shirt. Some geese flew over (prompting some dumb-male talk about whether or not we could actually hit one with a golf ball), and a dog was barking in the distance. The ground was damp and soft as mattresses. We weren't really doing anything to speak of and there wasn't anything particularly remarkable about anything, but it was that moment when I realized I was back on the trailer, just making music with some good, long-time friends and letting the anti-trailer events of the week sail over the trees like a well-hit golf ball.

Of course my state of perfect trailerness lasted about an hour this morning before work-induced ennui overtook me, but writing this entry certainly helped me refind a little bit of it!

Hi there

just to say a quick sorry for the edits but I don't think directions are actually blog material.

Well I've had a strange weekend and been frustrated and stressed for a lot of it, but all is now good, all conflicts resolved and it definitely ended on a high note. So back on the trailer.

My sewing machine is dead, unless you want everything gathering, which would mean you'd be in pig heaven, so after a great deal of struggle, I decided if I didn't get the pattern cutting qualification that would be OK as I came away from the course with all the skills I wanted to learn and more besides, so all is well with that, I've made my peace and am removing it as a stressor in my life, and other more important things came up and were resolved, so all is well and all is well and all manner of things are well again.

I will be back on the blog later but desperately need to do some work.

Hope all is well with y'all and love and hugs to ya. BH

I just listened to the Sydney Carter folk song I mentioned in the comment to your earlier post.  I got up a 5 in a rage over a wee work encounter in cyberspace last night, saw on the Weather Channel that it'll be in the 60s today.  Then a moment ago I heard Shem meowing and turned my eyes to the picture window.  It's Friday, April 13th and snowing great huge flakes of snow.  The ground is already covered and it's beautiful to behold.

And Sat morning browsing produced an article in today's NYT about airstreams! "AS if abandoned by a misdirected camper who parked in the dark, a silver Airstream trailer sits these days in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. A model called the Bambi, designed in 1960 with Airstream’s distinctive streamlined riveted skin, has been acquired for the museum’s design collection."

The article has a description of a particular trip that defies belief - Strom Thurmond, Dick Cheney, and airstream inside an airplane for a trip to Asia. Surely they jest?!
See,  http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2007/04/15/automobiles/1154672311723.html?8tpf=&emc=tpf&pagewanted=all

So, how can we get some of these other folks blogging ?

I forgot, no one can wear black unless they usually do, (Well I am of the Henry ford school, any colour as long as it's black!) or it's a Psi-corps uniform, and everyone has to wear flowers, but none on the coffin, donations split between RSPCA, PDSA, Dogs trust and Cat's protection league.

Well, now I've got that sorted I feel much better!! LOL

I have to say that the day is going surprisingly quickly and it does help to take a proper lunch break, something I hardly ever do but may well start!

I have to go now but will undoubtedly be back on the blog at sometime this weekend if only to stop myself going mad with sewing this bloody garment!! (... and the sewing technique samples... and preparing my portfolio... and ...... sighs ;o)

L8Rs BHxx

Bizarrely enough, just before I logged onto the site, I had a conversation with someone I haven't seen for a long time about death and dying, and the number of people recently queuing up to get off the planet, and I have to say Inanna, your post puts a very positive spin on all that.

I too have had some positive death rituals from an early age, and some not quite so positive experiences also, but all in all, I agree with everything you say.

I am always amazed that people are surprised that I have decided what songs I want playing at my funeral - current favorite Chasing Cars by Snow patrol, it'll make me laugh anyway, "If I lay here, if I just lay here etc.... ;o)- and how I want to be buried, I would prefer burning in a Viking Long Boat, but if that proves impossible, there's a great shop called Arka in brighton that sells papier mache pods, that you can decorate yourself. I'd like to buy one and decorate it, and be burnt in the pod, with my demon costume on complete with horns and long black feathered wings going out to always look on the bright side of life, or, they're coming to take me away, depending on how I feel nearer the time!

I don't find these thoughts depressing at all. Quite the reverse in fact.

Anyway as far as the fingers crossed thing is, a friend of mine had an operation yesterday, quite a serious one, and I would like to aske anyone out there who is able to send him a thought for recovery and to stay infection free. I am holding the space that this time all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well, in the words of that famous woman whos name I can never remember - now I've said that it is probably a bloke... answers on a comment please.

TTFN

BH

I'm doing a sort of hospice class and Monday night we all went to hear these two amazing people who are working on the intersections of physical death and life transitions.  Sounds grim and morbid perhaps, but was actually beuatifully happy and positive.  Meredith and her husband founded a vision quest school and Scott was their hospice doc when Steven left.  The school is at: http://www.schooloflostborders.com/lb/inter/index.cfm 
Scott's new book and more about their work is at: http://www.thefinalcrossing.com/

After hearing Scott and Meredith this week and beginning to read The Final Crossing I am so inspired. It's been a difficult year of transition, thresholds, neutral space and much pain after a horse fall. And it's opened glorious new doors. This morning I thought about the transitions now and through my life.

I thought also about how blessed I feel to have had childhood experiences of positive death rituals. I thought of the multiple family deaths in which familiar rituals were comforting - diet cokes in the downstairs room at High's Funeral Home in McMinnville, Tennessee and the unspoken permission to laugh and tell different stories from the ones told upstairs by the casket or later over 'covered dish' meals at someone's home. I thought of my favorite Aunt's young years dating one of the funeral directors and my delight that he and his partner were named Tack Hammer and Spider Web. I remembered my grandmother choosing organ music for funerals all over this small, intimate town.

I heard the laughter and tears in Scott's writing and re-ran what Meredith said the other night.  I wonder what lessons there are to be learned from all those positive early experiences of funeral ritual and conversations with the dying - what lessons for this life transition I now experience. One is about stepping downstairs where there are different customs and laughter and irreverence are the norm and enable you to climb back up and take your place beside the casket.

It's time to call it a day! Sounds like a queue for a song!!

Well thanks InannaUS. That was a good and intersting post. I have to concurr that this is the point of this whole blog. Cos when you are in it, you are in it, and nothing and no one can touch the sides. But it helps, well, it helps me, to know there are people out there, all over the world, that you have touched and that still touch your life, and are still there for you, waiting inside the trailer for you to join them again.

I indeed went through my own rebirth this easter from a very dark place that had got me, see this weeks dresden files for the perfect analogy!! And am now feeling much better about just about everything.

I'm not saying that the feelings don't surface, that the fear isn't still there, but right now, at this moment, it is all manageable, and all good, and maybe, just maybe, that's all you can ask. Respite from it all, a holiday from your head.

I find that if I can stop myself thinking and just get on with the doing and the being, it all gets better, and I mean EVERYTHING. I am such a good manifestor, (Gods I wish this thing had an automatic spell check!), my whole world collapses around the same time that I do, but somehow, I can keep all the balls in the air when I am no longer in that space.

Well on a different subject, I have applied for 2 jobs over the break, one I would love, at the apple store that is going to open in Churchill Square, but I get the feeling that they will look at my date of birth and dismiss that one. They are probably looking for trendy young men with weird glasses and strange facial hair to go with Apples groovy image, but the other which is same as I am doing now, is 21 hours for the same money, which means I could get my life back, finish those Tarot Cards, update my web sites, get more creative work and start my uniform business!! So I am holding out to get an interview for either, or even BOTH!! That would be a novelty!! One I would love and the other would give me the precious comodity of time so either would be perfect!!

Keep your fingers and toes crossed for me fellow trailairians!

Whatever happens I have given myself until the end of September to either get another job, or hand my notice in and go on an agency, whichever comes first. I want to get the natural rhythm back in my life and get creative again. Once you have smothered your creativity, that way madness lies, and I'm mad enough when operating on top creativity, without making it worse!! (Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!!)

Until later, hugs and vats of psychic chicken soup with extra fluffy dumplings BH xx

Well Easter - I almost said 'here in the US but stopped myself and shook my head at the implications of that 'slip'. Yes, it is Easter even in other parts of the world. Just been obsessed with fundies of late.

But what I want to say is that it's resurrection time - no belief required - just small acts of resurrection daily. And I've been thinking about how many rebirths, resurrections and rejuvenations I've been blessed to have.

All my Bible upbringing comes back at these time.
I'm visualizing Mary Magdalene being the one who encounters JC and his response 'don't touch me'. Yep, there are times when you have to do the work yourself and find a way to make sense of the absurd. No one can 'touch' in those deep journeys, but others can stay present and available. That's perhaps part of what we're doing here, staying presen to each other even when we can't do anything else.

So happy day to all. I'm off to make Southern green beans - cooked to beyond limpness with country ham - and go out to LadyHawke Ranch to spend the afternoon with great friends.

Cheers,