Purple and pink. Burnt umber and grey. Who can tell what is real or dream? Last night in a dream I walked in tall grass. It scratched my legs. Today I walked through the same grass. Little white bugs flew up but never touched me. Fiona called them flies. “Mommy” she whined. “Flies are getting on my horsy”. I walk back through the flies and tall grass. A bit of asphalt on the ground catches my eye, I hadn’t noticed it the first time I passed this spot. The area intrigues me. Old remnants of structure, of road that used to be here. A strange brown bridge Jack, Fiona, and Valentina sit on. It’s old pieces of round, dark brown, wood, it almost looks like tree branches. It’s scratchy and splintery. It goes to nowhere over nothing, as if it were transplanted from a place it belonged. “Fiona, your horsey loves grass.” I say. She got a new play horse yesterday, she loves it. Memories flood me, being a kid, playing with my horses in the grass, pretending they were eating and I was going on a ride. I imagined what I did and did what I imagined. In nature. Under the sun, the dirt, red ants biting my butt, stepping on nails, getting tetanus shots. Bugs and beetles and pollywogs. Frogs and snakes and old barns, old trailer campers. Vacant rose greenhouses where the sun shines through the broken fiberglass roof and roses still bloom. We rode our ponies through, feeling what was, feeling what the space is for us. A vacation. A dream world with real spiders and scary stories. Purple and burnt umber. Pink and white. These are the colors I chose to paint with today. It was a good, productive day in my studio. Painted in my notebooks. Pulled apart tons of pages that have stuck together leaving scars. Leaving repairs to be done. Structure. But it went well. Realized I have a lot of pages to finish in my gargantuan notebook before my show this fall. I can do it. I take deep breaths throughout the day. I stay connected. I cocoon when I need to. I got what I needed today.
Category: protecting myself
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I am ready to receive, I need to nurture myself. I can’t worry about other people anymore, not for a while. Now is not the time. I need to protect myself first, to take care of Jack and Fiona and Billy. To be here for Alan, Danny, and my good friends. I need my energy for painting and writing. I don’t have energy for fixing, creating, spending time with people or family who drain me, who ZAP my energy, who take and take and take as much as they can get. I am liberated from that now.
I decide my Dad and Betty cannot stay at our house, don’t want them contaminating it, don’t feel comfortable with them staying here. My Dad and Betty need to gain my trust first. I owe them nothing. Our dad helped take care of us the first six years, but we were on Welfare and food stamps. How can I calculate what I owe him? He left me three messages the other day. “Yeah this is Dad, Please give us a call when you get a chance. We love you.” Then a few more asking if I was going to be able to make it to the TOPS International Recognition Day. The night they honor my Dad for being runner up for the State of New Hampshire. I still don’t understand because my Dads never had a weight problem. I called him back, 9:00pm our time, 12:00 am their time. They talk together on the phone, meaning I can’t talk to my Dad without Betty on the line too. They are so excited about TOPS. Betty is so proud of my Dad. They sound like they are on speed. Or like they are getting ready to pull off a heist and they’ve got it all figured out. It starts stressing me out. I tell them “I have to go, I have to go to bed now”.
I take ½ a klonopin. Don’t want to think about them, just wanted to sleep.
“A lot of us find it easy to give.” Says Grace, the Yoga teacher. “It’s much harder to receive, to be receptive”. We begin our practice, breathing in, breathing out, flowing, meditating, releasing, opening and receiving.
I’m having a quiet moment. Thursday morning, 9:30 am. The babies are sound asleep. Everything is a huge mess but I don’t care. I hear birds singing, the hum of my lap top and the refrigerator, and every so often the chimes ringing.
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 