44 dayz to Menopause: I climbed a tall, tall ladder, and stood on the very top where the warning says not to stand, and looked out over the land–toward the grassy marsh near South Pond (but it wasn’t really South Pond) where I saw 3 brothers from town proceed in order of age, but all younger than they are now, and I thought, isn’t this a little risky of them, and also, isn’t that cool; and just then a fox approached from the other end of the marsh, and scampered up the ladder toward me, and I was disappointed that I had to focus on my balance instead of the gift of its proximity, and didn’t he join me at the very top, where both my anxiety about falling and my delight in his company were heightened just as he left my perch almost as quickly as he arrived, and scampered back down and disappeared into the marsh from whence he came.
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47 dayz: My dreams continue to be filled with babies & animals–skunk, racoon, bobcat, fox, puppy. This morning I wake at dawn, rested & energized–an anomaly at this hormonal juncture–as is an overwhelming sense of satisfaction & fulfillment. I’ve just birthed a baby, breech, thin legs dangling from my yoni, my youngest son beside me, as midwife/doula, while simultaneously I film the delivery, my husband looking on just behind me. The baby is a girl, and I snap some still shots to send off to my older son, who in reality is not away at college, but sleeping in his bed this weekend, and who himself was breech, but born not at home as planned, but by emergency caesarean. The baby transforms as I photograph her, sprouting a shock of bright blonde hair, that flips up and then side to side, as if animated, suddenly looking just like a younger sister of mine.
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48 dayz: We all put such pressure on each other. To be something/do something/feel something other than what is. Pressure. Pressure. Pressure. What if we lived a single day or an hour or an entire moment without it? Without wishing or wanting or demanding something else. I could go first. I could begin with Trump. Or myself
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Afraid to rest. To release. To be caught unready?
By what?
My father?
Death?
The teacher.
The prison guard.
Our fellow inmates.
The Holocaust.
The Massacre.
The Trickster who slips behind our happy distraction.
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50 dayz: “Mom, why do you keep running away from us,” my son asks, about the way I take off to Maine every week or so.
“I’m not running away,” I say, “I’m returning–to the Mother. I need a mother as I surrender the Motherhood archetype. And I was born at the sea so that’s where I find her.”
“That makes sense,” he says, shifting from fear to science: “We all began in the sea.”
36 x 40 inches Acrylic, collaged paper and textiles on panel
Two Owls Calling 