Staupitz Gets Unstuck

“Pssst! Missus Staupitz! … What on earth have you gotten into now? We were expecting you at the chateau this morning.” It was my runner, sent to check on me, since I hadn’t made it to the first checkpoint on my mission.
Once again, I couldn’t talk. I was caught up in a desolate square, bound in this group by a paralyzing fog of some sort of nail salon product wielded by a small-time municipal flunky.
A lot of times I get asked, “Wazzit like bein’ a talking horse?”
“Well, I’m a horse, and I can talk! I’m much stronger than you, and I look good in the nude, even though I never shave, and really, I’ve read -- hey, I’ve probably eaten -- more books than most of you monkeys riding my back have ever read,” is kind of what I usually say.
But in truth it isn’t easy. More people than you think don’t warm up to talking horses at all. They get suspicious. I might be asking directions to somewhere, and they think that I’m escaped, and try to detain me for a reward for themselves. They rarely offer me decent by-the-by information. There’s a lot more “what do we do about the talking horse” than straightforward dealings – and the inexplicable fear of some people!
“If voice recognition software ever catches on, talking horses will take all of our office jobs!” some people actually say aloud, and I watch them massaging their precious digits together. Other times, all they’ll say to me directly are one-line statements and commands, as if they want to keep me down – and I’ll hear from some other person complaints about how that person is quite verbose. Whateves, I give it right back to them.
So, I’m saying, it’s actually kind of lonely. Sometimes I keep my head down and don’t say a word all day. Oh, I’ve gone whole assignments – I won’t kid you – but I expect in the end to have a good laugh with friends.
Tell you what, with that crazy old farmer woman sticking to me like burrs, and trying to be all in-my-face nicey-nice to prove a point to that damn vagrant, I hadn’t even had a chance to read to the bottom of my orders. But I knew it was best I didn’t go it alone. I’m always asking HQ if they can’t set me up with a tolerable partner, a reasonably good conversationalist with proper dressage, with some degree of understanding of what it’s like to be me. Fat chance. Guess one has to take what one can get when one can get it.
I couldn’t figure out what the deal was with the vagrant and the little dude. If he could either keep him on his person or just let him be gone when he went running, I might be able to count on him, but I didn’t want to go chasing them over hill and dale in some kind of short-handed foxchase. Time for me to hold my course, whatever it was to be.
The rent-a-cop and the beauty-supply woman were preoccupied, and then further distracted when the little dude got loose again.
“Okay, here,” the runner said, “apple cider vinegar’s got like 1,000 uses … plus, the inventor of the glue gun just died …” He poured some on a blanket and threw it over me, then started rubbing down my muzzle with a dampened cloth. I felt everything release at once in a nearly audible crack. I don’t know which it was, or if it was even either, but I guess sometimes just trying things will do the trick. And now I smelled like Applejack. I am used to outrunning bees, let me tell you.

Vicarious Lusts of a Bird

I told you Double-A didn’t always drive people off, but sometimes played matchmaker, in an attempt to satisfy vicariously his own avian lust, I suppose. I never knew if I was being set up with a tennis pro whose phone confessions I had already been suffering through for months out of my own charity, or maybe there was some man at the bar.
He started arranging outings with the group. I could never really fathom why, but obviously he needed a little practice socializing, and working through his anxiety, which was probably extreme even for a bird. I didn’t have anything better to do so I obliged and went.
Double-A would dare me to talk to a group of men, to kiss a man at the bar, and I did. I would report back to him their names, and what they did for a living, and other things. He’d dare me to kiss one. I would, and maybe play patty-cake with him, and have a laugh, then come back.
Apparently patty-cake is taboo in the bird world. He would get upset.
“Braaaakkk! … You played PATTY-CAKE?!?!”
“Well, yeah … that’s pretty standard where I come from – that’s how we greet one another.”
“PATTY-CAKE?!?” I suppose in the dark, hellish jungle where he originated, it was considered vile taboo to exchange elaborate and agreed-upon felicitous mutual palm-touching. From what I observed of him, that made sense.
What was I to say?
Double-A would want me to go back again, making suggestions beyond what I was willing to do; that disgusting bird. I never let it get to the point where I might find out what this really was about, whether he wanted to ride on my shoulder to some assignation – it was beyond anything I was willing to discover right then and I wasn’t going to do it at the behest of some dirty-minded, molting old bird.
I recalled a time I came in to find he had had designed a crude harness and informed me that he wanted to sell rides on my back. I humored him and let him put it on me, and I gave him a short ride around the office. I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror, and was shaken by the look of it, what I had submitted to. I finished neatly, pulled his harness off and cast it on the floor. That night, I wrote him a note telling him the idea made me feel degraded. It seemed maybe he had taken my point, but still insisted on calling me oversensitive.
“Why, Double-A, why the pressure? Why can’t we just have a good time? Here, ask me something else …”
Again, his chuffing, little chipped beak clicked a few times. We’d finish our beers. He hated when I talked, trying to shut me up and call me a liar if I went on too long, so I didn’t say anything.

Chronicles of the Tormented

At this point I feel like any time I put on a freshly-pressed blouse to go out for a job interview, he could be hiding behind the corner of my building with a squirt-gun full of shit. Because I am very much bothered by his hunger to get into what I'm doing, while professing to care, but only ever trying to get under my skin, interfere, and insult me. I really don’t believe I did anything to deserve his ambushes. I think he believes he is funny, although I have told him several times that he is not, to me. Could it be his insistence that I find him funny? As a child, I was often tickled until I had the hiccoughs. I didn’t like it.
Was a time, I wanted to connect with him – I had hired him, after all. Then, since it got me nothing but grief, I didn’t want to connect to him. He used to call me up and say, “What’s up?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s up?’ – You called me!” He never seemed to take the point. I had no trust left for him.
First I tried to roll with it.
How many times had an interlude ended in egregious insult, finding me relieved it was over, only to find him asking me the favor of creating an IM account and IMming his watch, or the favor to send photos to his cell to see if it works; or the favor to greet him the next day?
Then I tried to reason.
Then I tried to compartmentalize it by not telling him any of my plans.
Then he started openly calling me "crazy," and I told him privately to stop, and then publicly, and then he threw me out. I asked him to tell me why and he wouldn't – back to the reasoning phase, where it was made apparent that he can’t be held to, or asked to explain, anything he says ... So, fine, finally, we’re done.
Then he started posting my own jokes to me on IM.
***
And I ask you, is there anything one can have less patience for
than a person who treats you badly trying to butter your bushes?
***
I closed out of it. Where I could have blocked him, I just gave up on IM altogether, finding my IM relationships really, after all, annoying ... then he called me up, but, besides criticizing the way I answered the phone, he wouldn't speak, so I summarized our relationship to him, told him the things I hadn’t yet said of him, waited some more to see if he had any intention of squaring with it, and hung up.
Now this. I have only learned about this type of behavior since that time.
I should have left no "provision for rats." Perhaps “not blocking” is tantamount to “consent.” I suppose I still imagine he’ll want to set things right, yet he never has when I’ve put his feet to the fire previous.

Practical Advice for Dispelling Personal Guilt: Do’s and Don’ts

It seems my blog has been making its way to the party this is intended for.

Look, I didn’t realize the connection until the day I wrote about it. I haven’t been out to embarrass you; funny how things happen that way. I didn’t plan to write this, but now I’m angry, and I’m sure it’s fine advice for anyone, anytime, anyway.

Don’t:

Probably the lowest and most irresponsible thing you can do is spy on your victims, checking in periodically to see if you can either surmise that your offense is minimized by their actions, as they have managed despite your offenses or, conversely, to be the first to discover the body – that doesn’t make you “good” or “caring;” it makes you “creepy,” and you are probably not going unsensed by your victim. Don’t attribute your stalking to positive feelings for the person; positive feelings bring about honest connection.

Consider where you stand in this regard. Admit you’re spying for your own satisfaction. Note the fallacy of thinking any subsequent action of theirs mitigates your actions or that a good cry makes you a good person. If you feel personally responsible, be personally responsible for your part in things. Don’t moralize about how life should be lived, putting yourself up as a model that your victim can’t even see. Don’t think assuring yourself makes others feel assured.

Do:

(Adapted from Nathaniel Branden’s book; do you still have the copy I gave you?)

1. Own the fact it is you who took particular actions. Face and accept the full reality of what you have done, without disowning or avoidance. Own, accept, take responsibility.
2. Seek to understand why you did what you did. Do it compassionately, but without evasive alibiing.
3. If others are involved, acknowledge explicitly to the relevant persons the harm you have done. Convey your understanding for the consequences of your behavior. Acknowledge how they have been affected by you. Convey understanding of their feelings.
4. Take any and all actions available that might make amends for or minimize the harm you have done.
5. Firmly commit yourself to behaving differently in the future.

[Personal msg redacted.]

Almost worked out ...

It was my natural assumption that I could expect a basic level of reason from everyone, as long as I hadn’t observed a person clinging to an unreasonable assumption, in which case they were to be avoided. Most likely people would remain good-natured if challenged or asked to explain a thing. Of course at times one runs to the end of one’s current knowledge, into territories as yet unexplored or ones the individual finds uninteresting; or perhaps there are reasons some things are not revealed, competition, or some kind of pain or insecurity; these are all things to take into account.
But eventually I found some individuals mimicked the tone of someone who knew what he was talking about, and recycled criticisms of their own behaviors as criticisms of others, when they didn’t really fit. The effect was often bewildering. Perhaps too much booksense had led me to think there must be some truth in it – then again, it’s the less one reads that makes one believe in the phrase “gospel truth.”
Or, they might approve or disapprove of something, a small action, comment, or physical change, and this would lead me to think they had larger goals in mind and inquire as to what they were. This generally met with alarmed disapproval, the gate rattling down at the service window, as if whatever the larger plan was, it was to be kept from me. Well there was a challenge. If not now, when would it be revealed? Certainly one can hit a target much better if one knows where it is. What kind of game was this? Why did they treat me not just as a contestant, but a champion of all, and then not give me every help they had? Was there a page of the rules missing, or was I being controlled again?
I came to see it was a game I couldn’t win. Another one. I had taken to foot-dragging, to looking for the longest distance between two points, to mental strikes to protest a game I didn’t have any interest in and couldn’t seem to find my way out of, and here, my subsequent inclination to tarry, my dawdling, my desire to find an ever longer way home, a confusion between distraction and inspiration, had brought me into another drama that wasn’t any more likely to prove useful.
These were the kind of hucksters who not only took your ticket, but robbed your house and duplicated your keys during the performance, and closed the show on a queasy note while compelling you to buy a ticket to the next.

The Clutch

I told you before these eggs looked much fresher than Double-A’s usual one-offs, which he laid when he was particularly juked up. These were a range of pastels, similar to the colors of Jordan almonds, but larger, and the shells were sort of leathery. Whatever was in them was having a hell of a time breaking out, thumping and rocking and causing twists and finally rents in the shells.
Out of a pale yellow egg, a tiny hoof kicked through, and I watched as other hooves and a little head came out, and a beautiful red pony stood up in the wreckage of the shell, almost immediately.
A little yawning pteranodon, looking a lot like Double-A, knuckled its way out of the next egg, and immediately began nipping at the wobbly legs of the pony. They moved off in an ever widening circle, the flying reptile worrying the pony at intervals.
Another egg popped open. The board game, “Mousetrap” tumbled out and assembled itself as easily as a Hoberman sphere.
A starfish came out of another, its limbs all drawn together in the shell, they punched out like flower petals, and the starfish muscled itself over, its inside becoming its bottom, and looked for a surface not covered with shells and paper.
The next egg was full of butterflies, and they all tumbled out like spilled papers, and righted themselves on their little legs, and began separating their wings, airing them after the cramped dampness of the shell.
The last egg seemed kind of still; something told me whatever was in it wasn’t going to come out of its own accord. I cut the top off with an exacto knife. Inside was a folded piece of paper. I pulled it out and opened it.

City of Tomorrow

“Congrats on being chosen to design “The City of Tomorrow.””
“Not to worry, still provisions 4 rats”

We are taking care of the rats.
The rats will be taken care of.
We have foodstuffs for the rats.

At the end of an hour, the director said he’d simply state his own prejudice in the report.
The consultants said they weren’t going to keep changing things back and forth; they wanted to hear from “one voice.” I laughed; twelve dressed-up people in the room for an hour already, making noises with their mouths, and they make a point to tell us they only want “one voice.” The director reiterated that he would state his prejudicial opposition to the material at hand, and the rules would be abided by.
I asked if material prejudice would be the rule.
He said I’d be surprised.
I liked him, even with his autocratic, mid-20th century style.
I get a little freaked out when people look at me when I talk. When I sing, I like it. The meeting broke up and I collected a couple of cards, but had to run out of the room to laugh.

The café owner complains bitterly to us about slow sales, and about small-spending clientele. I did not tell him that the ex-personal-trainer to one-quarter of the ladies in town spends half the day sitting in front of the pastry case. Watching people eat traumatizes him. One night I had to help him through a catatonic fugue induced by watching two fat people bingeing at close range when we were out with the gang. He rocked on the barstool and moved his head more unnaturally than usual. I suppose he is trying to extinguish his feelings about that by watching it over and over; but of course I am guessing. Brave and hard going, that kind of self-therapy.

He’s not so much a rat as a miniature hippo. The thing about the hippopotamus, I’ll remind you, is their method of “marking.” As the hippo sprays shit out of its anus, it twirls its tail around, scattering or spattering it widely. I was not entirely surprised some had gotten on my cell phone, which was in my bag.

Perhaps I’ve taken that lesson.

Unpinching

Woop! Wrue-oop! Wuppa! The blade flexed as he tried to move the saw.
There is no deft and graceful way of backing out a pinched blade. It is all trying, tugging, wriggling, sharp edges, ominous flexing and cussing to take back time; go back to a minute before and kick out a little more sawdust as you go, not be so fast, so direct, so precise as to not leave wriggle room, tolerance.
All the worse that I was watching. Witness is the villain of the incompetent. Witness the maker of glory and shame.
“Well! … Stupid girl!”
All of the sudden a call came from the far side of the orchard.
“Randall! C’mon, we gotta get back to the cove!”
Randall shot me a dirty look, rubbing his cheek with the top of his arm. He had cherry pitch and dust on his forearm and outer palm.
Then he ran away.
The handle of the saw flopped down from where the blade held into the trunk, and bounced a little. I picked it up and started working the blade out, pulling back on one side and then the other, then again, and again. It took so long, especially because I was worried Randall would come back. But it came out and I put the handsaw in my net. If he came back, he’d have to have another saw to saw anything down.
The cherry trunk had a wan little frown, drooling shiny pitch at the corners.
I decided to find some other part of the island, away from the orchard, to explore.
I hadn’t thought about having a saw before, but now I had a saw.

… handsaw and cherry …

It was a boy with a handsaw.
“Hullo.”
“Hullo. I want something. What’s in the net?”
“Things I got. Why you have a handsaw?”
“I’m cutting down these trees – you’ll help me!”
I liked looking at his skin and the way his limbs moved inside it and especially the specifics of his eyes, if I could get a good look without him catching me, because it seemed to bother him a lot. The things he said were perplexing – more to interesting and fascinating than bewildering and dumbfounding, but not yet by any amplitude – if I could get him to say more, that would be the thing. Here was someone endeavoring to do something I had never considered. If I could only understand, it would increase my ability to draw motives, such that I couldn’t see for players in my game. There was so much more I needed to understand.
Besides, I could see he wasn’t very efficient with a handsaw. I could show him how to use it without saying anything about it, and maybe things would become easier all around.
I put the saw to a limb that would be better pruned and made quick work of it.
“There! … Want to take a turn?”
“That was just a little one – not a whole tree!”
“Why you want to cut down a whole tree?
“ ‘Cause.” He took the saw and stepped toward the big cherry tree.
“Aw, that’s not one to cut!” I said, hiding my panic as casual advice. “Here, do this one!” I said, pointing to a decrepit pear tree, its trunk half-dead, mostly ready for burning without even any curing.
He sidestepped up next to the big cherry.
“No, really, I like that one to stay!”
He put the blade against it.
“Look, it has cherries on it right now!”
He pushed the blade forward.
“You can’t cut a big, healthy trunk with a blade like that – it’ll just get stuck.”
He started sawing with a deliberateness tinged with fury. Of course the blade pinched at its depth. I could see he was angry. The air already smelled of cherry wood. I waited to see what he would do next.

… currents and tides ….

One has to understand the way of tides and the movement of currents to get around. If you look across to one point on a near island’s shore, it might be easy or impossible to get there, depending on whether the tide is in your favor or opposing. If the tide is going out, and running in conjunction with an outwardly-moving current, you could get pulled out into open water, beyond the grips of any other power. Four hours later when the tides running in again, you can scoot across to the same point pretty as you please.
So there are right times and wrong times for everything. Sometimes you just have to wait.
Starfish sleep most of the time. You can only get a good three or four hours of alertness out of them any one day, and part of that they’re goofing around, yelling and yodeling and blowing bubbles, as I’m sure you have remarked on your own. You can’t just start lecturing them any old time, and it has to be something they’re interested in, after all. It takes a few tests to find out what it is they’re about, what kind of temperament they have, and eventually you can determine the things they need to learn and unlearn, and the best way to relate. Sometimes you’ll just have a conversation like this:
“John Cusack in High Fidelity?”
“No, Ben Stiller after the tragedy in Zoolander.”
“Oh, so sorry …” You see? And now you know how to take it from there.
Sometimes you find one that is quite magnificent, but isn’t doing things in the ordinary pattern, and perhaps if you indicate the thing that’s lacking, it would do better, not founder so much, yet you sense it knows what it’s doing, if not absolutely deliberately, there’s some reason it isn’t going the usual way. So you might drop the most subtle of hints and see what happens. Maybe it’ll go your way, or maybe do something more interesting.
I did really think there was something about starfish being in the shoreline environment, and so I’d take the best of them for “walks,” bring them ashore and set them in the water for a few hours while I tried out my land-legs and investigated the myriad things there were to be found around land. The island closest to the cages had been inhabited, but was abandoned. There were buildings covered with lichens and an orchard where I could find fruits of all sorts, in season. I brought a net to haul back all the stuff I found, some to look at, some to work with my hands, some to eat. I could be fascinated just looking at land things for tide after tide. And then one day I saw someone there.

Between Wax Paper

There was a boardgame stored in the shanty on our fishpens; it was a knock-off of the game “Monopoly,” and it had been prepared for being kept on the sea. All the little colored moneys had been oiled to translucent and the board had been pressed between wax paper to preserve it, but it made it difficult to read in parts. Mother wasn’t much for boardgames, she’d say, and I never could get a starfish to deal with pieces, die, cards, and money at once.
The instruction booklet was in a folded envelope of wax paper that I gingerly unwrapped and read again and again. For a period, I read it at bedtime every night and kept it under my pillow, in the wax paper envelope. The last thing I did before turning down the lamp was tuck it back in the envelope.
In lieu of play with real opponents, I read the rules and extrapolated how the gameplay would go.
Then, I set up the board and played with multiple opponents. The hard part was forgetting what my intentions were as another player, which I did to make it fair. Other times it seemed I couldn’t recall, once it was the next player’s turn, every bit of the thinking for that particular player, what attitude they took toward risk and why, what her GO/NO GO setpoints were and by what formula they had been derived, the whys and why nots that each one might choose, ways of going about things, methods of counting. There was always a real me, and so there was the matter of if another opponent had a particularly favorable advantage, not letting the real me know, but really wanting to. But fair play was tantamount to understanding how these things were going to work.

Starfish Husbandry

I grew up on a starfish farm, on the chilly waters off the coast of Maine. Mother kept a running advertisement in the Bar Harbor Gazette, and signs posted around the Bass Harbor ferry slip that said, “Starfish – for food, ornament, or pets.” I spent all day balancing on the rim of the cages, and walking the lines like tightropes. It is a tricky deal you have to judge carefully, the tide and currents, and the timing of the swells, such that the line is taught enough to hold your weight without dropping you in the drink.
We fed the starfish different meal, depending on what we wanted them to be, big or little, blue or red or yellow, midnite black, whatever was the fashion in the gourmet, ornament, and fish fancy magazines, and whether we wanted them to be smart or not.
My schooling was training trick starfish for circus shows and the movies. I could teach them to do every trick a dog does, sit up, roll over, beg, bark; whatever I had time to get to in a season before they got sold or cut up to make starfish for the next season.
That was always a weird thing; I would think I knew “who got the brain” in a separation, and over the days of regrowth, I wouldn’t know for sure, and be amazed sometimes that the shortest stub of starfish tentacle, with just a tiny couple of suckers on it will grow back into a cartwheel-tumbling, multiplications-table mastering chameleon starfish that would steal my heart and be the pride I would have to turn over to the highest bidder at the Ellsworth Hydroculture Fair. They say you shouldn’t give bay fish names, but what else is a girl to do with her time?
Sometimes I took the dinghy and went ashore the nearby islands. It was disorienting to walk on dead granite, or the springy high moss on black dirt under the pines, in which one does not have to correct for the push and pull of the rolling water. And it was so very dirty, too. I couldn’t help myself; I followed the deer paths and climbed the trees, and I was streaked with black earth. As much as I’d have to swim to wash it off, I may as well have towed the dinghy back to the cages we lived on.

Lead Grinder

There are stories you hear that are ordinary stories, festival stories you hear every year, stories that tell you what is important and how to keep it together and how to make resolutions and exchanges and what one might expect will happen, and then there are stories you don’t hear so often, stories that are only told at initiation, stories people try to distract you from really listening to, and when they see that look on your face, they say, “That’s not about you, dummy.”
And you wonder what is about you after all and what it is about you after all and why is everyone so goddamned miserable, damned if you do and damned if you don’t and don’t think you can ever come back here again.
All I ever wanted was to belong somewhere and I never could quite get it. I’d be in the thick of things and hooray, but it wouldn’t last. People would start cycling stories closer and closer together such that soon there was the tedium of hearing the same story every single day, or suddenly they’d stop mid-sentence, and make a hand-gesture, that you finish the sentence for them – how is one to know how it ends if it is not one’s own story, and even then. I would tell my own stories and not hear a word. Not anything. One time I tried a different story every day all summer long, trying trying trying to find something to say that would make a difference, turn the key, a catalyst of untried alchemy; and then the chief came up to me alone and asked if I knew anyone who was prepared to speak at harvest council.
No, certainly I know no one and nothing at all. I was too ashamed to say I wasn’t getting on with anyone, anymore. The harder I tried, the more they stared at me dumbly. I was about to break from the pain. We were supposed to belong together, we were supposed to be the same, interchangeable, even, but I was different. I caused trouble with no mischief even in mind.
I would run away weeping in the night, run for days, until I might be consoled by another people. A new young friend would find me by the water’s edge and we’d splash each other and play tag and it would be the easiest fun I’d have had in a long time, and near sunset, he’d ask where I was going and I’d say I had nowhere to go and he’d say, “C’mon, dummy, stay with us!” And so I would, and make myself useful, inasmuch as they allowed and there were always funny rules that didn’t seem to make any sense to me quite yet and I would be reluctant to say the things that came to mind lest the chasm begins to grow again.
At times I was surprised to find a chum or group of pals who would fight for me, and say, “Watch it, he’s with us!”
Was a time I had a friend who would sit and talk and we could not stop and white light would split into rainbows around us and we both giggled like tinkling bells tied to lambs in the meadow running after clusters of daisies just a few romps forward. He liked my ideas and gave me advice and we made stuff up and it made sense. He never said he didn’t have time for me but everyone else told me so, and when he died his mother stood by me and spoke strangely, and the order was wrong. I could not correct a grieving mother, and what did it matter, anyway. The light was bound together again tightly.
What was compromise? What was belonging? Perhaps it was all just singing for supper and coffee and resentment. But if I had that kind of friend again, I would choose him over an army of others who claimed me and I would not let anyone tell me different.

Through the Automatic Car Wash

No one else ever even cops to having been conscious in a half-formed state. I don’t know what the big deal is. I remember when my front side was done but not my back; I recall when my face was only ¾ ready, I remember when I had no bones. Does it betray some weakness? Is it a gift? Is it a mistake to talk about it? It is what it is.
--
Sometimes you meet people who haven’t walked through their souls yet. Maybe sometime they’ll be going through an automatic car-wash and the soul will be hovering there in the stream of suds. Maybe it’ll drift right through the windshield or maybe it’ll be repelled, pushed up and away, like those jet blowers. You’ll see them on Monday morning, and say, “Chaz! … You look good!” And then you wonder if your sudden burst of exuberance will be misinterpreted. And you realize it’ll only be worse if you say what you really mean.
--
Yes, I went back and looked and of course I saw it; it exploded for me and fractured into an array like a firework. I don’t know now why I had to pretend to you that I didn’t see it, and ask you if you weren’t referring to another thing. It is true and not true. It doesn’t matter and it matters. It is my current project. It is the wedge I try to expel. It attempts to sever the vital side from the rote; thoughts and feelings and belief from action, and I say no, even though I don’t know what I am saying yes to. This is the thing I have not been able to see. I look every day and it is very close, I am very certain. But you know that making assurances is a big deal for the other side.
So, it takes time. Doubling back, and redoubling my efforts. Meantime, please excuse the double-speak; it is strangely necessary. And doubly thanks, from Miss Winnicott, as well.