BLANK THOUGHT...

While rummaging through a box of stuff I'd put aside and forgotten I came across this bit of pros I'd written years ago. Reading through it, it seemed appropriate for some of the stuff I've been dealing with this year. I had written it after reading Ursula LeGuin's short story The Compass Rose. My copy of her book, by the same name, is yellowed and dog eared, and still one of my favorites.

Complete and utter darkness filled the little room. The blackness, thick and heavy, hung in the room's corners, like pitch on a pole. In the north corner of the 12 foot by 12 foot room sat an over sized chair. Lost in it's floral pattern slouched a woman. With feet dangling over the edge of the cushion, not quite able to touch the floor, her feeble frame suffocated against the furniture's high back, and overstuffed wings and arms.

The room was a black hole of nothingness, where light and sound escaped away from. The woman sat trying to think of only the blackness, the emptiness, the silence. In this way she figured she could shift old thoughts downward, to make room for new. She found it hard to focus on nothing, as even the smallest idea would slip inside her head and germinate. How was she to stop her brain from filling to the brim?

"What would happen if my brain filled completely up with thoughts, old and new? Would the brain explode, expand, shut down, stop all together?" Staring comatose into the black void of space she attempted to control her thinking. STOP THE INPUT! However after hours, days, months, she could not stop the thoughts.

"If I cannot stop the input, the stimuli, can I instead reorganize their placement? Can I create a place for new ideas? Can I rid myself of the old and useless information to make room for the new vibrant concepts that have been so recently collected? Yet how do I define 'old'; is it hours, minutes, seconds? Or are they days, weeks, months, years? It is a conundrum. How do I decide what has value, for what appears useless now, may surely have worth one day? Once gone what will I do?

The brain was too immense for her to comprehend. The main center for sorting and compartmentalizing information, both eternal and internal, this organ operated as the body's mainframe. A giant muscle in charge of processing all thoughts, ideas, concepts, and stimuli. It held trivia gathered from the many hundreds of books she'd read, memories from the places she had visited, conversations with people she had encountered. How was it all stored? How was it organized and cataloged? As chaos scattered about, or orderly in files and shoe boxes? Was it alphabetical, numerical, or by subject? She could not stop thinking.

Then her original question surfaced again, "What happens when my brain is full? When you're full do you start forgetting, do you begin going backwards replacing old thoughts with new? Or does the recent input leave first, the old input last? Is this what leads to senility? Dementia? Death?"

She slumped in the blackness trying to concentrate on the darkness, on the vacant void of space. Stopping the input, filling her mind with NOTHINGNESS. Her old thoughts sifted to the bottom, somewhere making room for the new thoughts that would come. Thoughts she could not stop from being collected and stored somewhere inside her head.

Daffodowndilly

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,

She wore her greenest gown;

She turned to the south wind

And curtsied up and down.

She turned to the sunlight

Snd shook her yellow head,

And whispered to her neighbour:

"Winter is dead."

from When We Were Very Young

A.A. Milne

From winter to spring, how quickly time passes.

Today I took advantage of a little quiet time, Ty's at her boyfriend and Dave's working. I grabbed my shovel and pruners, new gardening gloves and a bit of bird seed, and headed to the yard. I'm reorganizing the yard. While Dave and I were away the yard was not high on the priority list, so this year I am treating it like a blank palate, begin again FRESH. The first step is moving the raised beds from the east side of the yard to the west and closer to the house. I want a true kitchen garden. I thought why not dig down a bit and make the boxes a little deeper, I did not anticipate the number of rocks I'd encounter on this venture. At first I attacked each rock head on getting frustrated as I went. Each rock not wishing to give up its spot in the yard. If this was an animated movie the rock would grow tendrils through the soil and these tendrils would turn into limbs hugging the earth to to its mineralized composition. Or maybe the rocks would link their arm like tendrils together in a tug of war display... It doesn't matter all I know was trying to dig them out wasn't working. So trying for a new tactic I found a smaller shovel and began clearing the smaller rocks around them, and then for some unfathomed notion the larger rocks began breaking apart. As I dug around getting the rocks smaller counterparts I began to realize this isn't much different to attacking life's issues. It occurred to me that problems always seem to be huge and unsurmountable when attacking them head on. However, when I work at the smaller issues surrounding the bigger problem the one issue that seemed unyielding simply begins to break into smaller more manageable pieces. WOW life's lessons learned while gardening, very Zen.

I look forward to the reawakening that spring and soon summer will reveal to me. It reminds me of when I first moved into my house eleven years ago. The yard was a tangled crazy mass of chaos then as well, but over time, listening carefully, it told me what to do, showed me things hidden in the unruliness and it will again. Only this time I'm not a rookie, so let's hope it doesn't take another eight years for the plan to come together.

Best to you and yours,

and may your weeds be blessings in disguise.

Vanessa

MMXI

A new year brings a new look, and with good intention, new blogs more often. I hope everyone had a safe ringing-in. For us we decided to send 2010 out with some fun, setting the tone for 2011. To do this we called some friends and headed out to the desert for a bit of laser tag.

How crazy was this, with the wind chill factored in we figured it must have been around 12 degrees out there. Thankfully we had the trailer, with a nice campfire going, hot chocolate and our usual New Year fare- Chinese take away. Dressed in layers with our faces wrapped up we tucked and rolled our way to hours of running around in the snow, while hiding behind Junipers and shrubbery. With five of us and a dog we did away with teams and decided to play against each other. It was so cold the guns kept misbehaving. How magnificent it all was with the mighty hunter Orion above us brightly lit up, as we chased and tracked one another through the darkness. Predators, with only the green glow from our scopes to give our positions away. After about 2 hours we had to quit, as several us could not feel our limbs and face parts. Not even standing near the fire helped. So into the warm trailer we did pack, shedding our gear and outerwear, though not before documenting the extreme event.

back (L-R): Stephanie, Vanessa, and Ty front (L-R): Dave, Katie, and Sydney

It wasn't long until we were defrosted, with hot cocoa and Chinese food in our tummies. The rest of the evening was spent playing Texas Hold'em and telling crazy stories. While the hours ticked away we got antsy. Once again braving the cold we departed the hideaway and lit off a few firecrackers and sparklers. The wind, however, got the better of us and we had to cut our noise making short. Couldn't get anything lit safely.

Much exhausted by our merriment we all got comfortable and settled in for the duration of the evening. By the time the clock finally clicked midnight we were ready to head back home. There would be no spending the night out in the desert, until the weather got warmer. In high spirits we departed, all agreed that it was necessary to repeat this "Most Excellent" event in the future, but without the extreme cold.

We wish you all the very best for 2011. For us it starts a new chapter in our adventure book, filled with lots of anticipated excitement and discoveries to keep our hero and heroine going for awhile. But those are stories for later installments.

Take care and stay in touch...