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July 2004

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Sorry, no pictures today because I did something scatterbrained with my camera. It's not in my backpack, near my computer, or in my pocket. I haven't cleaned house since my sister left, so I've got every hope that, should I ever clean up again, it will show up.

Walked the beach looking for dead birds. First thing, found four live turkey vultures worrying away at a cute little harbor seal pup carcass. Last thing before going back home, a bald eagle flew by with a wriggling fish in its talons. We saw no dead birds, but later in the day went back to kayak and found a hefty feather. If it were a raptor feather, of course, we couldn't keep it. Since we are law-abiding and we kept it, it must have been from one of those ubiquitous Canada geese.

My niece found a bunch of scallop shells that local lore says are extinct. They're found in the sand cliffs that were put down in the ice age and continue to rise up out of the sea as the weight of the glaciers is gone. I guess landforms are a bit slow on the uptake. She speculated that there wouldn't have been much to see then, because of the ice.

"Well," I said, "until humans came along, aninmals seem to have evolved for size. During the ice age, there were several kinds of mammoths as well as giant beavers, sloths, and cats."

"Oh," she said. "So now, it's kind of like when you've run rocks through a polisher. They get smaller and better. Like elephants are awesome."

The Spink shook her head. "No. It's better when rocks are unpolished. You have to put them in water, and then you can see their beauty. After you've done the work." She did not explain how this applied to wooly mammoths, but I know what she meant.

Spent most of the day working on the beaded skull painting. Painted chairs a rather disturbing apple-green with the girls. Fiddled with Josh at piano and later with my niece on flute.

Spent a good part of yesterday evening trying to catch the third sheep to shear and to trim his hooves. David is a pretty good sheep catcher. A serious stock operation would have pens and a chute through which you could force the sheep to run one by one, and catch them as they galloped through. With only three sheep left and no permanent fencing, we have to take a more individual approach. Cloudy and Stiltoes were easy to catch. We wandered around inside the electric fence, being slightly peculiar. Eventually, their curiosity betrayed them and they got too close.

The third sheep, however, at one year old is the equivalent of a teenage boy. The people who sold him to us castrated him as a lamb, but even so, he is definitely not mild and trusting as the females are. He is far more aggressive, quick, and one-focused. He decided not to get caught, and that's what happened. It turns out that he can hop over the fence, the same electrified fence that the sheep are supposedly afraid of and are too bulky to jump. I guess that only applies to ewes.

We tried having him run around and around in the pen, but other than bowling over the ewes, who were looking slightly puzzled, and other than David leaping to catch him and missing several times, nothing happened. After he'd hopped the fence several times, and David had thoroughly lost his temper, I put them into a semi-permanent pen with a five-foot wire fence. "Ah," I thought. "I don't need a cranky husband to help. I can just push him against the pen corner and catch him and shear him right here." He hopped over the five-foot fence, too.

Luckily, he prefers to be with other sheep, so it was easy to get him to hop back in. Anyone want a sheep? You can't eat him because The Spink promises to become thoroughly traumatized if you do.

Vruba and my neice moved three panes of tempered glass that have been leaning against the side of the house for years and put a "FREE" sign on them. You may observe the process below. Please note Lucky, who is sitting directly on the path that they wanted to take, thus keeping her membership in the Cat Sorority current. Our house and grounds have never really seemed ours, at least not to me. Part of this is because of never quite understanding that I really am a grownup, with the capacity to own dirt and buildings and creatures. Also, I tend to get totally absorbed in stuff. When my children were small, they were what I did. Or I get lost in books, or an art project, or whatever. Somehow, I've never gotten really absorbed in my house as a whole. Sheetrocking, or gardening, okay. But not the big picture.

I did design our house when I was pregnant with The Spink, and worked closely with the carpenters to make it happen. We moved in when she was almost two months old. The house was 80% finished then. Over the next decade, it's gotten another 10% finished, while at the same time falling apart because of various things that should have happened but didn't, like, the skylights leak. Okay, I've finally gotten out of Mommy mode and am attending to that. But we still are threading our way around important looking piles left by various carpenters over the years. Things that simply became part of the landscape, in a kind of trailer trash dream. But today, the glass not only went out to the roadside, but somebody did take them away. One less important looking pile.

Mostly, today was spent in a froth of visitors. My personal visitor was Kathy, a songwriter with whom I'm writing a Gilbert & Sullivan-type thing on the proper way to live the rural lifestyle. Sample:
When meeting strangers on the road, be sure to stare suspiciously
And when they ask directions you may answer quite capriciously
But if they move next door to you, then welcome them most graciously
And when you come to borrow tools, they�ll act fe-li-ci-tacious - ly.
We played gospel and G&S to each other, and settled on a tune, and wrote some really silly lyrics. Our audience grew, until by the time she left around noon, the house was full of kids, seven by count (but it seemed like more).

Then my neice shoved aside my beading and painted my fingernails. Red polka-dots on yellow.

Beaded in the cool of pre-dawn, but paid for it by sleeping until 10, when my neice shook me awake, saying, "One of the sheep is out!" He was, too, bellowing in loneliness because his friends were inside the pen and he was stuck outside of it, poor guy. I refenced, and the two ewes trotted in and the one outside, our wether (castrato) couldn't find his way in. He finally solved the problem by hopping over the fence. I didn't know he could do that. He probably didn't either. Now that he knows, of course, we will have to either eat him or give him to a neighbor. There's no way that loose sheep are an option, what with gardens and neighbors and dogs about.

The Spink was in a horrible temper all morning because of having to decide how to get rid of the sheep. This only confirmed my neice's poor opinion of her; every family, I guess, has a black sheep. I am more or less the one for my generation and my daughter is the one for her generation of cousins. It would be interesting to explore the scapegoating idea more. How all groups seem to develop one, somebody who represents all the hidden desires and unacknowledged needs of the group and, because they express it more openly, they are, at some level, sneered at.

Naturally, this ties in with my thoughts about aknowledging the need for personal change. If life seems to be chaotic, often people try to control the people around them. If people feel emotions too intensely for their idea of propriety, then they find people around them who are expressing emotion improperly. The use of an external agent to carry personal sin allows one to dodge the need to change. This has obvious applications in the political arena.

I think about stuff and get these rants going in my head. Current ones have to do with political and personal lies, with why people resist personal change, with the relationship of art to commerce, with right balance of art and paid work in my personal life, with built-in gender inequities in pay, with the way thatI can do either art or housework but not both in the same day. One reason I started this blog was to have an outlet where people could read about it if they want, and ignore it otherwise. So much less invasive than buttonholing them on the street. But, in this heat, what seems to be most important is not the written word, but the fragility of life; all the squirming iridescent flies I've swatted, the confident, hard-bodied wasps I've trapped, the wireworms in the potato patch that I've squished, and the bunny entrails we keep finding at the beach house. Heat seems to emphasize how much life depends on a really small window of conditions; the temperature just so, the chemical balance just so, the sunspot activity less than what's going on now, I guess. But David saw the Northern Lights last night, and maybe that kind of inhuman loveliness is paid for in sunburns and drought.

Working on beading a picture of a sheep skull, with those magnificent curly horns they sometimes get. It's not so much the evocation of death that I'm after, but of skeletal understructure. I don't really understand how my intention gets translated into how the art looks, but now and then it does. Working on the beads is like working in Photoshop pixel by pixel.

Vruba, the in-house geek, explained to me how to fix the links problems in this website on a walk to the beach last night. Simple to do, I think, but will take a bit of time. We compete for electric power around here, and my iMac is a power hog.

I find this heat personally offensive. Yellowjackets like it, though.

David unexpectedly decided to go to the mainland to get sheep feed and hang out with the kids in Seattle. I hope he enjoys it.

Spent a good part of the day trying to clean up this website. Things don't refer to each other, but to older versions. Bk set everything up for me, and then I started doing the same, and didn't know how to undo his stuff while I replaced it with mine. Anyway, it's so hot that trying to fix it is unbearably sweaty work. Arrgh.

Vruba is still here, programming his head off, but the two younger kids and my niece went off to see "Pinafore" with their grandparents.

No silence, however. Three guys sawed and hammered all day on the woodshed in amazing heat as the generator growled along. I indulged in all the artsy stuff that I've been putting off as life intervenes.

Early morning: Put chords to Up and Down Waltz, try to make a harmony that both fits the chords and has integrity of its own.
Morning: Transplant lettuce, wash dishes, fold laundry, set up sprinkler, chat with carpenters.
Midday: Play fiddle tunes with Josh on piano.
Afternoon: Collect white and purple beads to apply to a painting of a sheep skull I did yesterday. Bead to Hungarian gypsy music.
Late afternoon: Work on draft of my mom's biography for her section of this website.
Evening: Go on a sail with David when the evening sky was pale orange and the quarter moon a rocky grey in the turquoise sky. Ahhhhhh.

Fine times were had all around this weekend. My Japanese "sister" and her family came, the parents camping out and the girls stuffed into The Spink's makeshift bedroom along with my neice. The giggles lasted until 1 a.m.

My sister is a human dynamo. She spent mornings removing stumps and flattening things, afternoons on other projects like moving our hot tub and washing my windows. Everyone needs a sister like that. Here is a picture of her crew the morning they got that nasty half-burnt stump out from beside the back door, along with a picture of The Spink with her "cousins."

Little more shall be said until everyone leaves. Sorry.

My sister came to visit us with her two lovely and charming children. Since we're so remote here, it's always a project to drop in. You have to juggle a big and a little ferry schedule, and plan for life without a grocery store, cellphone reception, or take-out. We get few visitors, but when they come, they stay for days.

My sister and I are close in age and appearance. Our temperaments are quite different - I'm bookish and snide, she's sparkly and sociable, but even so, I'm always struck by our similarities. We have the same laugh, the same intensity, the same tendency to start zany projects.

I got to be first. "Let's wake up at five in the morning and go look for dead birds on the beach," I said.

�Great!" said my sister. "Kids, you want to come too?"

�Yeah!" said The Spink and my neice.

The beach was lovely, especially since, although we found no dead birds, we saw eagles and a great blue heron. After we had bagels and brie on a log, we trotted home. It was my sister's turn.

So, the first thing is we move the hot tub. We could build a platform out of all those pieces of wood lying around and get it going. Then, do you want a stone-paved walkway at the front porch?"

"Sure," I said.

�Yeah. We'll do that Then, it looks like there still are stumps you have to get out on the worksite. And that big stump that David wants you to remove by the house.�

We didn't really get around to all of these projects, although the kids painted the towel rack flamingo pink. But, in the evening after we slumped, exhausted, over lettuce, she said, "We could get a few thousand agates and make walkways! Or windows, like stained glass!" She went on for a bit in that vein, and then we all went to sleep.

We sat on the deck, eating fresh-caught crab. As it got dark, mosquitoes replaced the wasps. The Spink was holding forth.

�When I read a book,� she said, "it always has a certain taste and a certain smell associated with it. She dipped a crab claw in the butter sauce and waved it about illustratively. "Like, for the fifth Harry Potter, I basically ate our two tree�s worth of pie cherries and a couple of bags of goldfish crackers. The smell for that was dust dust and bugs, because it was in summer and my window was open. For Eragon,� I ate Sailor Boy crackers dipped in milk, so the smell is milk. For some reason, I�ve never had a book with apples. But the Redwall series had the smell of the certain wool that I was carding for you, and the taste of the lanolin that filled the air. Everytime you opened your mouth, the lanolin flavor would get in.

�I think that goldfish crackers and gum are the neutral flavor for books. If I re-read Eragon, then I wouldn�t have to eat Sailor Boy crackers in milk, I could just eat goldfish crackers or gum.�

�When you become a famous authoress,� I said, "you could pick a strange combination of flavors and write a book to go with the flavor. Like, you could take caviar and moldy bread...�

�Yuck!� said The Spink. "That�s a horrible combination! I�d hate that book!�

�Well, what about artichoke hearts and...�

�No. Not my style of writing at all.�

�Okay. What about Saltine crackers and Brie?�

�That would be a slasher or a murder mystery. I don�t like writing those.�

We left it at that. The Spink finished her crab claw and went home to write in her journal.

Learning something new is what kids do. When they're babies, that's all they do. Apparantly, it's a process with very narrow options. That is, conditions have to be right for learning to happen without extraneous baggage such as phobias or unexamined convictions. As a teacher, I've found that kids tend to follow general patterns when they learn; holistic, by-the-rule, auditory, brute force. No doubt there are other possibilities that the human race isn't evolutionarily suited for. I make that speculation because each of the ways I've observed seem so idiosyncratic and problematic. No one way of learning gives an adequate picture.

Yesterday, I gave Wayne a beginning fiddle lesson. He wanted to re-learn Over the Waterfall, a catchy old-time tune. But, he didn't seem to have any interest in hearing the whole thing through. He did really well one bar at a time; I'd play it and show him the fingering, then he'd copy it. Somehow (I could never do that), this worked for him. By the end of the hour, we could play it through several times and he'd more or less gotten it.

My own way of learning tunes is different. I struggle against the convicion that I can't memorize stuff. It's not true, of course, but my internal critic keeps telling me that I can't. Why? I think it's a form of laziness. I learned to read at a very young age, and so haven't ever had to rely on memory to access information. I know I can look it up. I have trouble with fiddly little details (pun intended). My efforts are in understanding patterns and structure. I get what a reel is, what a jig is, and so on. Writing them isn't that hard for me (writing good ones, of course, is another thing; that seems to be governed by grace and by my having put in the hours on composing more tepid tunes.) What is hard is memorizing a particular reel or jig.

I have memorized Over the Waterfall, though. What it took was a thousand repeats, until body memory took over. My fingers know where to go. They're slow to learn but it works, eventually. The problem is boredom. Once I think I understand how a tune is constructed, I really have to struggle to keep with it. Playing chestnuts like Turkey in the Straw is physically difficult for me; my neck starts to itch, I forget where I was in the tune, I think of England (Ben Jonson's grave in Westminster Cathedral, for example, or the trashy looking kids we met at Avebury whilst paying a parking ticket in the Avebury Post Office which was no doubt exactly on a ley line).

Afternoons, nowadays, I'm spending time at the computer. Like most middle-aged women, I just want the thing to do what I want it to do. I want it to be a tool with no voice of its own, like a well-designed fork or a good walking shoe. Same with my car, same with my boat. This is clearly the wrong approach, as I've seen over and over again when I watch guys. There's a certain kind of guy, and my boys are like that, who truly love messing around with their computers. That seems to be the way to move the computer from the status of honorable foe to ally.

In self defense, I'm slowly moving that way. This will probably change when the boys move off to the Real World, but for now, this summer, I'm computerizing. Today, I had a set of Photoshop files of a book cover that I wanted to send to the printer. He suggested uploading them onto the company website, but I couldn't access it. What to do, what to do? Bk suggested uploading it onto my own website, from whence the printer could grab them. Oh. You can do that?

�No, I don't need help yet,� I said. I found the html page I've been using to make this blog with; a blodged document that is partly cut-and-paste and partly actual programming done by my actual personal self. "Okay,� I said firmly, and did a bunch of snipping, snopping, clipping, and clopping. Well. It did not work. And why? Because the Photoshop files are approximately the size of a draft horse, and so they couldn't fit onto the page I designed. That makes sense, now.

Okay, then I appealed to Vruba. "Whyncha just put the files on your website and tell the printer where they are?� he asked, reasonably. (You may view Vruba being reasonable in a thunderstorm to the right.)

"Because I don't know where they are," I said, plaintively. All things considered, Vruba is pretty patient. I got that part understood, eventually. Now, as I write this, a honking big file is uploading, and uploading, and uploading. Has been for, according to the icon, four hours; to do that I had to disable the "sleep� function. No doubt, I did something screwy with file size. Maybe not. Have to consult an offspring.

It's not that you really need to know how much I don't know about moving files around. The point has more to do with learning curves, and with the frustration of being an adult who has to go back to that child's feeling of bafflement. But, as I think David Sidaris pointed out, when you're an adult, you can't brag about how young you are and yet you are learning this thing. Instead, you're old, older than many people you know (like your own children) who can run circles around you in this particular field. You're on your own, with no snotty internal voices to keep you going.

Children don't learn faster than adults, I find. That's a myth, perpetrated by those who have forgotten their childhood, or who are lazy and hope for an excuse. Children are so good at learning (when they are, which is not all the time), because they have the freedom to obsess. An adult usually has obligations, real or imagined, that take up most of their time. In my household, we have no slaves, no household help, and the kids don't do regular chores. If I want to eat, for example, nobody cooks for me (except that The Spink makes a great tapioca). I don't sink into new material for hours and hours. When Vruba was becoming a computer adept, he spent those hours, days, months. There was little else he needed to do. The Spink, now that it's summer vacation, doesn't even get out of bed until noon because she's reading. She can quote long passages from her favorite books (Tamora Pearce, Patricia Wrede). Bkwyrm thinks, flipping forks into the air for hours at a time. I bip around, doing sixty-eleven things at once. Today, it was splitting a bunch of cedar, moving wood stacks, refencing the sheep, tidying, washing dishes, reading The Economist, folding laundry, pulling thistles, wrestling with Photoshop's disk error, planting lettuce seedlings, digging at a stump, and stacking branches. Sometimes I asked my kids really lame questions about uploading psd files.

At this pace, I'll never know everything I want to know about my computer. But it will have to do.

Over wine and cheese, we were discussing sexual harassment. Barbara, a warm-hearted traditionalist, talked about being on the jury of a case involving a manipulative bitch accusing her mentor of sexual harassment. Barbara was the lone holdout to acquit the guy; when he was convicted she cried. Later, she talked with the judge, who said there had been a lot of withheld material that clearly showed the woman had been out for cash, not justice. "Perverts, though, now those guys are different,� she acknowledged.

�You want to talk about perverts? Strom Thurmond, he was one,� said Mary, a former Senate intern. "His offices shared an elevator with the offices of my Senator. Every time I'd be on the elevator with him, he'd grab my breasts.�

�And what did you do?� asked David.

�Kept my cool. I tried to be the unflappable professional,� said Mary, but she flapped her hands now.

�Oh, come on,� said Barbara. "When I was fourteen, learning the ropes backstage at the Hamburg Opera, the bass singer took me under his wing. He was a huge man, and incredibly kindly. When I told him I only liked Elvis, he sang me opera and played me records to show me what to listen for. He was always holding on to my breasts. He said they were like apples. He taught me so much! I'll always be grateful to him. Only a few years ago, I visited him, and he grabbed my breasts, and I said, 'I've grown up. They're pears now.' He just likes breasts. What's wrong with that?

There was a long silence.

Mary said, "Yeah, Strom Thurmond didn't mean anything by it. He was just having a little fun.�

�And there was another guy at the opera,' said Barbara. "He was always snapping women's bras. He knew every kind of bra. But he kept trying to snap mine, and I was too young, I didn't wear a bra yet.� She chuckled.

I was torn between fascination at how these stories were told, and utter outrage. Outrage because to me, sexual harassment has never seemed innocent. Sure, I've had offers that I didn't want to take up. Some of them were quite flattering. I was courted rather too seriously by a few guys who didn't know what to do with a "No, thank you.� To me, that's just part of human interplay. You're seldom on exactly the same wavelength as the people around you, but you work it out. But sexual harassment is different; it feels different. When I've experienced it, I think what lets me know that it's harassment instead of one of those minor tragedies of relationships or my own neuroses, is power inequity.

The bus stop I waited at for high school was just outside a strip bar. I perfected a stony stare which usually worked as protection. Every few months, some guys (never one alone) would pull up in a car, open the door, and make a grab for me. Was this just jolly fun? Did I have narrow escapes? I never knew, but it did seem one-sided to me. I started dressing like a guy, in baggy army surplus clothing.

When I was sixteen, I worked as a summer intern at the Veteran's Administration in downtown LA. The guy who was mentoring me, Mike, kept asking me to pass notes to our boss, Mario, which I did. One day, Mario said, "You don't have to look at those notes, Sweetie.�

Having been brought up to respect privacy absolutely, I hadn't been. "What?� I asked.

�Some of them are really too much,� said Mario. "Like this one.�

The note was hard-core pornography, with me as star. What motivated Mario to show it to me, is something I'd rather not think about. Now that Mike realized that I knew what his notes were about, he couldn't keep his hands to himself. I'd look at Mario, who would chuckle and shake his head ruefully.

This was my fault for going around and having breasts.

My mother took my sweaters out of winter storage and told me to wear them to work.

Mario told me that I had to understand, Mike had had a pretty hard time in Vietnam and we all felt sorry for him. He found me stupid little jobs that usually kept me away from my desk. I interpreted this as help. If my daughter were in this situation today, I would not consider it adequate. By any standards, at any time in history, Mike was a pervert. By old-fashioned standards, Mario should have protected me. By current standards, he should have fired Mike's butt.

The usual freighted sexual advances from construction workers, co-workers, and acquaintances usually don't bother me; as I reached middle age they mostly stopped anyway. When there isn't a power difference, it's not frightening. Impolite, sometimes. But not frightening.

But I really don't think that Strom Thurmond went after Mary's breasts as an expression of delight. He was throwing his power around. She had to take it because, in his eyes, he outranked her (although, considering his jurassic politics, I might make a case for Mary, as human, outranking Strom, as dinosaur). Mike did not pick on Mario's boss, LaShondra, a very handsome woman (albeit, like most of the women in that building, about a zillion pounds overweight), because LaShondra had the power. He went after a sixteen-year-old with no allies in the building. The Hamburg basso went after a fourteen-year-old child (although, in the egotistical world of the opera, he probably figured he outranked every other human on the planet and considered every female fair game). That's what I call sexual harassment.

Maybe this one belongs in "rant� rather than "blog.� I've noticed that I write much better when I'm in icicle mode. This one is more of a fulmination; room for improvement. The perfect entry would get you, the Gentle Reader, totally steamed up about the topic and ready to go out there and change the world, without even once noticing the writing style. Come back some other year. I think I can guarantee that I'll get better (see yesterday's entry on discipline).

Just read "Caught in the Crossfire� by George Packer in the May 17 New Yorker, also at this site. As an illustrative aside, Packer describes a sixteen-year-old girl, Raghda, who had been raped by Uday Hussein as she was auditioning as a TV announcer. After a few days, Uday let her and four of his six other victims out (the sixth was dead), whereupon she was picked up by the police. They beat her after she told them her story. Parker says, "An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine in Iraq deals with virginity.� The police took Raghda to a virginity examination office, where it was confirmed that she had been raped, and then took her back. That's the end of her story.

What would that story mean if you had dreamed it? Lots of things, I guess. But if I were a therapist (and I most certainly am not), I'd start by identifying the feminine as an unacknowledged part of the Iraqi mental landscape, so suppressed that the only proper female is bagged in black.

In dreams, sometimes sex means fertilization. The son of the ruler forcibly fertilizes the feminine. Why does this mean disgrace for her but not for him? Because, in an adolescent world view, male and female are completely separate. The realization that male and female are integrated in a fully adult person has not yet been made. The woman is disgraced because she has recieved the masculine. The man is not disgraced because he has taken nothing into himself.

This idea of contamination by men crops up elsewhere in the article. In the morgue is a woman who has been shot by her "family� (surely not by her mother or sister?) for being a prostitute; this is called "washing the shame.� (No men in the morgue have been washed of shame, of course. There are compelling historic and genetic reasons for the double standard, but, as best I can, I'm looking at a metaphorical, dream-image level.)

Women's issues are often sidelined in favor of more important topics. (Future blogs may include abortion, birth control, pay equity, the glass ceiling, and the like. On the other hand, they may not.) In high school, one of my closest friends was Black (so we labeled her then; one step better than Negro which was one step better than Colored, she told me. And nobody is to say nigger, under any circumstances). I remember sitting on the lawn for endless lunches, helping her hiss and spit at the Black Power movement's betrayal of women. Chicks were supposed to wait until the men had won equality, in the meantime they were to shut up and spread their legs (Explain to me why you can't call a man nigger but you can call a woman ho' or bitch). My daughter told me today, over thirty years later, that she'd overheard some of the older boys talk about how women keep whining about discrimination even though they have the best of both worlds. My daughte listed the single parents she knew who lived below the poverty level; all but one was female. "How can they say stuff like that, when you just have to look around you to see how many more choices men have than women?� she demanded.

I think it's a metaphorical matter, not data-driven. Women represent the unconscious, the gentle, diffuse-focus, healing side of both genders. (Never mind what an individual woman might be like). In a culture with a big Shadow, where huge facets of itself are not integrated with the acknowledged portions, women will be sneered at and dismissed or worse.

Back to Ragda, the poor dear. The police beat her. In dreams, the police can be the part of you that is needed to keep the facade going. In this case, they vanish her. In a perfect religious fanatic's world, women would vanish.

What does it take to fully integrate the feminine into a culture? When the European Union started, people were astonished when 50% of the Scandinavians' delegates were female (this is hearsay, not confirmed). That's a culture where people in general are well educated, multilingual, artistic, and long-lived. In other words, metaphorically feminine fields (child and health care, the arts, and communication) are supported.

Could such a thing happen in America? Possibly. My mom and my daughter would support it. Would you?

Could such a thing happen in Iraq? Possibly. Turkey was going there for a while. The Middle East as a whole seems to be caught in some kind of self-destructive blame-somebody-else loop. The purity of the past is unreachable as long as other people keep on being so dang different.

The stories have to change. People have to admit that maybe God did know what he was doing when he cluttered up this otherwise perfect world with women, homosexuals, and foreigners. We have to retell our stories to include the compassionate side of the Divine, to include the feminine, to include change and personal responsibility.

We have to listen to our hearts.

The key is discipline. That's what they all say.

In my experience, it's not so simple as that. In some contexts, I understand and can deploy what my dad meant by discipline. I tend not to procrastinate. I've developed a sense of when I've done enough research on a topic and can keep at it until I've gotten there. I refence the sheep every day or two (portable electric fence), PMS or rain notwithstanding. I show up on time. Despite a very low income, my bills are paid and my IRA is current.

However, in other contexts, this bushido approach; sword at ready, no quarter given or expected, is more damaging than useful. In particular, I find that I have trouble dealing with small children, painting, or composing music when I'm in my efficient get-it-done mode.

That's not to say that discipline is wrong, just that the word needs expanding to include a different kind of attention. Some things need a feather touch. And, while an overarching principle helps me remember my integrity, most creative things are too large and chaotic for grim adherence to principle to work exactly right.

This morning, I awoke as if from the dead. I couldn't remember where I was. That wan Northwest sunlight was trickling through my eyelids. The balcony doors had been winkled open by the cat, and the ozone smell of fresh air was loud in the room. I had no past, no future, and barely a presence. Dead trees thrust up from a red hillock, a rather ominous sea brooded in the distance. Marmalade stuck his whiskers up my nose and I jerked awake.

Blindly applied discipline would dictate that I go ahead and have my day. Breakfast. Refence and water the sheep. Dishes. Bills. Pleasant interaction with the kids. Deep cleaning in that corner that seems to have wool moths. But my commitment is to art and music, not to farmwifery.

The trees kept thrusting up from the red ground. I went to the worksite and spent an hour hacking at one of the stumps there; axe, maul, mattock and shovel in turn. The distant sea brooded. When I was sufficiently awake, I shambled around the house collecting paint and canvas.

I spent the rest of the morning painting that dream (the CD cover you see on the right is John Fahey). For me, the discipline was in listening to it at all. Keeping the image intact without analyzing it. Pushing aside other obligations with just enough gentleness so that the force of the rejection wouldn't jostle the image. Talking with the carpenter when he came by, and then one of the summer folk when he came by with only part of my brain, reserving the other part for the image.

So, now that I have a finished painting, am I satisfied? Of course not. That's another aspect of artistic discipline, at least for me. No way do I expect to ever be able to live up to what I'm aiming for. Does that sea look ominous? Not really. Do I have enough mastery of the medium for you to believe that what I painted was what I intended to paint? Nope. But, what did happen was that I painted another picture. It's better than many I've done in the past. My trust that the next one, or the one after that, will be incrementally better is part of my understanding of discipline. That intentional trust in the value of continuing.

Woke up far too early, dug and chopped at an alder stump on the worksite. The guys came and did noisy things with generator and cement mixer. I promised them coffee but forgot.

Spent the rest of the morning on peacock feathers. My sister, who works and volunteers at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, wrote a book and asked me to do the cover. It's one of the few commissions I've gotten, and it turns out that I have a lot to learn about Photoshop management. I did several watercolors, and then found that after scanning them, there were all these fiddly little things with rotation and size that took hours to notice and correct. Now, nothing wants to save because of a disk error. Luckily I have a pair of teenage sons and the problem may be surmountable. It must be, because my doom-o-meter isn't dinging wildly, the way it usually does just before things get ugly.

To celeberate the disk error, I chopped at another stump. Now, my face is covered in dirt and the bathtub on the balcony is filling with tepid water. We've got a solar heater and it was cloudy today.

Many years ago I went out with my math students and counted spirals on flowers, cones, and sure enough, Fibonacci was right. See left.

It was one of those endless summer evenings we get here in the north; subtle shifts from clear to muted colors. By the time complete darkness arrives at around 11, the pupils of my eyes, without any prompting from me, have widened to let more photons jostle their way in. In the middle of the island the wind was gusting and the alders were rattling. At the beach, wavelets rapped against the sand. David was really excited. I was really nervous.

"I don't want an exciting sail," I whined. "Let's cool it until I understand what's going on and what the boat's limits are."

My husband was a man at war with himself. On the one hand, not only does he love me and doesn't want to scare me, but also he wants to have a willing and competent sailing companion. On the other hand, he learned to sail by racing, back in his salad days. He twitches like a retired politician at polling day when the wind comes up. "Okay," he said. "I really don't want you to be frightened. We can do the interesting stuff later." But no, it was not to be. This was to be a journey into the muted shadowlands of the soul as well as of the sea.

I fed the rudder into its supports and hooked the tiller up while David raised the jib. The wind gusted, the sun lost helium and floated down to Saturna Island's treeline. He unhooked the mooring line and we headed towards Skipjack. You can see Skipjack on the right in the picture; Saturna's straight ahead.

What with the gusts and all, I was busy pulling and releasing the jib's line to keep it full of air but not fluttering. It's possible to get a feel for it, of course, but I'm still haveing trouble telling exactly where the wind is coming from, let alone welcoming it with hugs and a small box of chocolates. Behind Skipjack, a collection of harbor seals surrounded us, craning their heads out of the water in the silliest way. Their babies, fat bobbing puppies, practiced their banshee howls. Oystercatchers, sounding like ubergulls, collected on the rocks to stare at us, and a pair of bald eagles yelled "chichichichichiiiiii," circling and nipping at each other. Courtship or aggression?

In the lee of the island, the wind died and only the tidal current kept us moving. Seals kept bursting out of the water, breathing horribly on us, and then hanging around rubbernecking. When our audience had built up to about 25, we'd gotten to the doldrums, where the wind that the island had divided reunited in a flurry of shoving, pinching, elbow jabs, and too-tight handshakes. The jib kept flattening against its mast, and as soon as I got it on the other tack, it would whumph back in the other direction. We churned around, going forwards in aggresive bursts of wind and backwards in the current as the wind turned its attention elsewhere in the melee. The sun set. My mood darkened. (Are you getting the metaphorical part here? We sure did. It's a big responsibility, sailing into a metaphor. Divides your concentration.)

We headed directly away from home to get out of the doldrums. The current was picking up, the wind slowing. With a series of rather mysterious (to me) zig-zag tacks, we inched towards home, getting closer to shore but further from our mooring beach with each double zigzag. Finally, David said, "Gotta raise the mainsail to eke out the wind, otherwise we might not make it." My stomach clenched. We'd left the mainsail unraised until now because of my skittish unwillingness to sail rail-down. And it stayed like that. Due to a series of tangles in various lines, sheets, and husbands, the rigging had gotten undone and the sail would have had a very inelegant set without the kind of work that's best done in daylight with a steady platform.

So, we got out the oars. "Don't row so hard," said David. "You'll break an oar." I eased off for maybe five pulls. With the jib helping during the occasional gusts, we began to make progress. Past Little Skipjack. Past Bare Rock. Hammond came and went. It got dark. David took over on the oars.

"Any birthday resolutions?" I asked my man.

"When we started out together, we were too broke to fix things up skookum (tidy and correct), and when we had kids, we didn't have time. This year, though, I think it's time to make inroads against life's chaos. Like, if you tack back and forth, and work the gusts with the jib, and row, you'll eventually make it to where you want to go. Do you want another turn at the oars? You're shivering."

"So, do you really want to have a tidy life?" I asked, rather spitefully as we maneuvered around each other to take up the new stations. "In the past, it's seemed to me that you've deliberately made things more difficult just to have a challenge, a way to keep life from boxing you in."

"Let's see what happens," he answered mildly.

"At our worst," I said, "I want to know exactly what is going to happen, and you want to keep all your options open. I want routine and order, you want excitement. It seems to me that we make a good pair partly because of what we teach each other."

The Widow'd lit torches on her porch. We clipped on to the mooring line, reefed the sails, and kayaked to shore. She welcomed us with hugs and a small bowl of chocolate chips.

We got 26 bags of concrete for the woodshed fittings, so, after a week of blindingly hot weather, it poured last night. Four of us moved ten eight foot logs to the site yesterday. I spent part of this morning peeling the last two, then measuring their butt ends. All of them over eight inches, a good thing. It's David's birthday, which we'll celebrate sailing. The Dragonfly is a Drascombe Dabber, a 15 foot yawl-rigged fiberglass thing. In the gusty, veering winds close to shore it's totally fun to sail.

We took her out this season after scrubbing off five years of fir needles and lichen. It was almost calm that first time, with a light tidal current. We'd just remembered about the yawl rig - the thingie that looks like a boom goes on the top of the sail (oh yeah), and dinked around for some time getting the mizzen, mainsail, and the jib happy (they like to bell out). By the time this was all arranged, we had accidentally sailed around Skipjack Island, and the water was mirror smooth. That was when the Coast Guard roared up.

Since we're at the Canadian border, those guys are pretty trigger happy. Careful to make no sudden moves, we agreed meekly that we were not wearing lifejackets, that we had no official noisemaker, and that our registration papers were on shore. This involved some paperwork, David's identification papers, and tongue-clicking. It is my boat but they dealt exclusively with David, not even asking me for ID. I guess when Homeland Security is involved, the level of macho is so high that we little ladies just vanish. Another species. I certainly feel that way about them. They escorted us back to the beach, much to the entertainment of what seemed like hundreds of summer folk.

So, the next time we went out, we had whistles, papers, life jackets, and various knick-knacks that accumulate around boats; ropes (make that lines), sweaters, a little pulley (no, a block) to attach to one of the sheets (that's a rope), oars, and a bottle of mead. We checked the crab pots (yes, it is not only crab season, but we had a crabbing license with the boat papers), and then watched the sunset and talked. The wind died completely. A magical evening.

"I thought you were the captain," I said to David.

"Hey, it's your boat," he said.

The tidal current was swooshing us right along. Sandy Point was coming along, with Canada the next stop. David rowed. Then I rowed. Then David rowed. We made Sandy Point, barely. We finished the bottle of mead. Then it was just a matter of trying to catch what back eddies there were along the shore and row the two miles back to the mooring.

So now I'm wondering how this sail will go.

In the mean time, the kids are, as usual, at the computers.

I went kayaking as the sun smudged out over Saturna last night. One of the things I like about living now and here, is that there really is nothing to be afraid of, except of course, for death and taxes. I paddled like a madwoman for a kilometer or so, then dropped paddle and drifted on black water. Huge shapes blurted out of Snell's window and vanished soundlessly. Now and then a seal exhaled, fishbreath smell cloying the air for a moment.

I was taking a break from The Widow's party, at which hilarious mid-life-crisisers were fiddling around with champagne, vodka, gin, crab with butter sauce, and toasted marshmallows. I think a lawn chair broke. One of them, the one who used to work for the State Department, called my name. "Yo!" I called back, and she yelled for me again. By that time I was almost to the Point, three km away. What could she want?

When I got back, The Widow said that nobody had called my name. She offered me some champagne, and when I said no thanks, she offered me a marshmallow.

Crafts fair at the school today. I had three tables of watercolors, acrylics, paper cuts, and homespun yarn. As though I'm some kind of third world country that churns out strange items with only vaguely understood uses. I did sell enough to buy several slices of pizza and pay half my health insurance bill for this month, though.

The two thin Chinese people there really were Chinese, fresh in from Beijing. Apparantly, they speak English, but not a variety I am familiar with. The wife is a brilliant dentist and the husband is a professor of oral biology, or something like that. I kept my mouth shut around those guys.

The library was selling several table's worth of books. Yeah, I got some mystery stories, but also a goodly amount of those books you get because you enjoy reading aloud from them in a patronizing way. Something on handwriting analysis, another something with a guy wielding a pair of glasses by the handle entitled Propaganda, 1951. Smelled properly musty, too.

Nobody drilled my teeth, none of the dogs peed on my art. I was happy.

You are a guest here. Please do not steal the silver, the artwork, the music, or any other intellectual property you find here. All material is Copyright 2004 Queen Julia. Contact me at julia@queenjulia.org with questions or comments.