Tawista 2025 v 3

Thursday a.m. What I wrote in the last two days (v 2) disappeared, far as I can see. The clouds here are just actual clouds.

On Tuesday, I ran into town, which published what I had written until then. Then I realized I couldn't take anything back or even reread it. There is no take backsies here. It kind of unnerved me. But maybe we would be better off if instead of trying to not-say or un-say, we just SAID STUFF without curating.

Later that day, a photo came in. There is no way to tell when it was sent. It felt like a response, I read it that way, and I responded like my writing itself had gotten a Yes. So I wrote us a series of pillowtalk conversations, his parts sketched in as best guesses. About life, work, kids, sex, pain, pleasure, time, words, beavers (not a metaphor) and birds, about broken bodies and climate change both here, hair (ingrown and thrown in handfuls respectively). We talked about Anything. As if we had that time to lie on a creaking bed with eternally green sheets. I think the best parts of that writing was the series of "Mood Swings", how we might  through a series of moods we often each feel. I believed he could hear me in his mind and feel touching tendrils. 

Then all of that writing was just gone this morning. Maybe he took back the photo - people do that, unsend like I unblog, tho I don't know how - and all my 'reply' went with it. 

Late tonight / tomorrow Ears should arrive, though with him (also) you never know if you will see him until you do. In case, I will go to town to get bread for dip, and I will wear some clothes. I stayed utterly naked here til now, inside and out of the cabin, trying to just be a Living Thing along with Everything Else here. I didn't look in any mirror, didn't even occur to me, and until last night didn't even take a (half-assed) selfie. Maybe this will publish. If so, I won't take it back even if I want to. 

>imagine removed by blogger<
 

The week @ Tawista 2025 - tagging it bc I will unblog everything I write / file it away.

Sunday. I don't feel afraid. Beyond that, I don't think I have words. It is gobsmacking beautiful here and dead silent beyond reckoning. It hurts (knife emoji) that my mother can't ever see this place again. I could not safely get her onto the porch. That isn't a hurt from the past, it's a hurt in the present and, worsely, in the future 💔. I am glad I did all that I still could while she could still see me do it. More than anything, for her to see me well is the reason I am trying so hard right now to be. "If I have to die worried sick, I just don't know Lord..." I heard this countless times. And FAIR, I have been an absolute fucking mess in every life category except maybe parenting. Out of pure endless boundless love for my children, I mostly did ok parenting if judged by how LOVED they know themselves to be. Very. They, in turn, will do everything they can to be okay, for my sake alone if life reduces them to that. But I pale in comparison to my mother. She has pure boundless love for all things Good and Beautiful, and I top that list for her, always, even when I am a clearly broken person. Maybe even especially then. I am Good and Beautiful, more now than ever for the struggle visible on me. SMIB! 

Talk about a powerful witch. 

In the wee hours. I take a photo of the Sturgeon (surviver) moon. I am not afraid of snakes or bears or coyotes. It is so quiet that I think I am as utterly alone as a person can be, with not so much as a frog croaking.  

I wonder if he feels me as a void. 

Tuesday wee hours (I am bouncing around in time. It's all about you so far so try to follow 🤷🏻‍♀️). Misses me, I meant, by "feeling the void". We have unexpectedly (to me) broken through the veil of this blog so that we are talking. He started using the comment box, so to speak, and then it was like a switch was thrown, and I was free to feel whatever and words started flying out my nipples.

I have no way to leave anything for him/you (good thing I am adept with mutable pronouns), blogwise, while I am at Tawista, which makes me feel surprisingly unsettled. Old feelings of being helpless to make him happy, turning over in their grave. This is different, though. I'm not what is making him miserable. Not directly. But I think I am making him uncomfortable, that I am doing so right now by being here. I am showing him that he cannot do that. He thought he could, but he cannot. I am not trying to upset him. But I am shoving him toward happier, pulling him towards me to fuck every miserable bastard in his head, tempting him, delving into his Dying, bothering if not stopping it. Trying to throw increasingly accurate monkey wrenches into this whole Dying by Butter thing he's got going on. 

I dunno all the reasons that I am Dying. But one reason could very well be that I am starving drooling maniac. 

"I know both the problem and the solution, and I know how much brave solutions like these require." 

"When I asked him to do this with me he said yes, seemingly without taking the time to feel the weight of 'yes' on the decaying cartilage that barely holds life together." 

But he had felt the weight of it. Mulled it, stuck to Yes, added Please. And I am figuring out where the 'yes' can get in edgewise, in real life/time (Virgo). I will free him if I can figure out how to get a bobbypin into his cuffs.  "After all, everything we are afraid of has already happened."

All quotes from same source below, which was yesterday / earlier, when I "sang" to you. 

"I find riding the edge of taking it too far pregnant grace. People who are just learning how to walk are not afraid of taking things too far."

--- 

Monday. Wake up 9 a.m. to phone ringing, water raining in the dining room at home, where my kids are "house sitting" while I get the septic that they fucked up pumped out / repaired at cottage. I love my kids obviously, they are my community. But they are my kids, even as adults, and kids crash into shit. Kid math, eldest kid = 5 kids for that ONE. I wouldn't trade them "for all the riches of Denmark," another funny phrase I have adopted, funny cz for kids you'd need all the riches of someplace richer than that.

The sale of my primary home makes it possible to pay myself back $ loss upon loss, and come out even ISH. You know the drill: work ceaselessly, allow people to abuse you for the right to work yourself to death, and stay barely above the water line. Treading water, one of my strongest skillsets. Want less, another strong suit. That is just money and there is never enough of it. This is America, also not a rich enough place.

What is much harder to quantify is human cost, such as what fucking Nebraska as part of the abuse I took just to work myself to death, what a year of that did to me. "I approach my vagina as a decolonizing project." What it is gonna take from me and break inside me to move AGAIN all by myself, reliving every other time in the process. I can't catch a break long enough to assess what all is broken in me, but it's a lot. I can afford to want less, but wanting nothing is a death sentence I feel breathing down the back of my neck. Death. You always personified it like a conscious enemy, and now I feel it like that. I do not smell like it (yet), I smell like decolonizing pussy, but I am not underestimating Death's cunning or its lurking presence anymore. 

I had thought maybe if you showed up, we might climb Goodenough again, find the geocached little book, and add the names of 5 children born between us since then. It's a hell of an achievement, those 5 adorable faces. And these years also cost(s) us dearly. Breaking us down like cardboard boxes. We are not made of cardboard. I dunno what you're made of; I am flesh, nettle, and bone.

It's a big R rescue needed. And that feels like resetting a bone, maybe a multicompound fracture.

I am scary, maybe, because I will break a life (rebreak it to reset it). I am good at that terrible thing. "I don't know how to leave." Yes you do, you loved me and the kids and left. Twice. But you did suck at it, hated it so much you'd get a return address tattoo, and technically I kicked you out last time, which broke my heart but you had to go. I remember you telling me that I had caught you too soon, you "weren't ready" but when would you have ever been ready to be gone? Ya couldn't just "ready, set..." forever, blowing through Samanthonies while I stood there - that's not healthy, and as you now know, you owe healthy (enough not to die like a drama queen) to your kids (if not to our mothers). And now you have to leave again. And here I am again, this time helping you the way I help myself. That'd scare me too. I AM scared too. I might do any fucking thing to climb out of this SHIT. 

If you are standing in SHIT, do ANYTHING but sit down. From rules to Live by.

"I am a bobcat that's not been fatally shot with a .22 and I'm still being pursued..How could he not know this about me by now?"

I will put an entire home inside your apartment so it is no longer solitary confinement, which you crave. If you can take it. What's that song, when I drink alone I prefer to be by myself lalala. I half expect you'll get rid of that apt to get out of taking the couch and blame it on the landlady by the time I get back. I will also put Tawista in front of you, yours for the taking or not - even harder than the furniture, cz here you'd be naked and far from the comfortzone of the hamster wheel. I know cz that's why I am here, standing in discomfort. And this time you are going to keep the kids, they are not just hers. Neither was Ears. It's all about the kids, right? One of yours is all grown up now and a lovely warm hearted young man, one of my favorite people; maybe if you get some Ears, the "I can't leave my kids" injury gets some remediation. Hence why he only is coming here and knows that you might-but-won't turn up.

My mom said you hugged her like a drowning man and instructed me to not to let go your hand. I mind my mother, and even a cunthair away from dead, I can keep throwing "whens" at you like dodgeballs. 

If you had a blog, what would my blogname be, Huckleberry? 

I go back to sleep a lot today. Still not sliding into my pond husband. I feel too weak yet. Not to swim, I can do that easier than walking, but of being submerged in all these feelings I am allowing, that I will drown in them in the lake, which is at this moment is glistening, sexy af. And I want to drown in my pond husband. Oh to finally want something could be more than I could resist. 

I am grieving. Just like when you cried and cried because ur daughter did NOT die. I am not dead but I am sick with the things I have gone through. Full of sick of it, head to toe. I am so full that I am never hungry. 96 pounds when I left, that's what all my sadnesses and fears and wraths weigh. If I can't figure how to add some Good feeling back in, my next step will be into the grave. I need a happy ass, and I just do not know how to.

Suddenly texts makes it through. Random fleeting satellite dump so no telling when it was sent, and there is no way to respond. He cannot come. I get it. I cannot eat, fail even want to a lot 😶, so am here trying to get some can into me. I will not text back "bummer maybe next time" to the stuckpain I know he is in. I refuse him only having to play full of shit games like that. (And anal, def on the fence.) 

I could drive out to text him back but no. Been there done that. I left the phone number, if he wants to talk he can call. 

i'll stand at the foot of your lake

i'll wait in the grass while you take it too far

i'll give you the keys to all the canoes

i'll sing to you, until you sing back

i'll sing to you, until you sing back

~This Accident of Being Lost, Leanne Betasamosake Simson

I read that today and thought of him. This blog, what is it atm if not singing? 

Tuesday. I walked into the lake in the underwear I slept in. Realize I could never drown, I FUCKING FLOAT duh, plus Disco insists on sitting in the baking sun nonstop on the dock despite the shade cover I built, STARING at me intently, preventing harm. Gonna note, naturalist Thoreau-style, even here there is algea, killer red. And no beaver. No loon. Many crows. My pond husband is getting sick too 😪.  Now my attention is on him, floating and listening and watching and trying to feel what is wrong. My feet keep sinking, and that isn't me bc they floated as usual on pink bathing suit day. Oxygen, the tiny bubbles usually all over my skin, they're not here. I am so sorry, I think at my pond husband, with what is left of my whole body.

This. 

I was 'a woman scorned', I could have talked him into this tat, then ghosted him. He could have done a lot of things, but he chose indelible. Rescuing each other by trust fall. Repeatedly. And the bigger the fall the more dramatic (sudden, indelible, exposed) the Rescue. Historically, I mean. I've been thinking about this because it's another cycle (repeat repeat) and we both need another Rescue now = begs the question of what this one is gonna look like 🤷🏻‍♀️

I am going to Tawista because we said I (we) would. I would not have decided to go alone, but maybe that was a shove I needed. (I honestly have no idea how this Yes/Rescue works yet.) I spend much of my time in soliude, but I have never driven to Tawista / anywhere that remote alone before and I am afraid that I will be afraid, fearangry, pissed about the pistol permit / smallfeeling. But. Whatever I feel, I will just feel it. And eat. Or starve to death once and for all - I packed no nutritional shakes, just food. 

Ok but just in case, a refresher: Go to North Creek, then take 28N off 28, head north to Minerva past the biker bar. The driveway is to the right if headed north, marked by a cairn on a boulder at the end, just before the stony pond trail marker. If you see that, you've gone to far. 518 251 4644

No one song cuts it today playlist. My everlasting lover, someone cut the brakes.

trying something new - leaving in a bar vino esque skirt boot combo 

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). This is the time to tweak part of your routine because the new way will stick. Daily rituals can be art. Then the joy won't just be in the outcome. It's in the grace of doing it well, again and again — the elegance in repetition.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Zg98LfSuWafKmKfk6 

like clockwork

Ears has weighed in, planning to come up next weekend. So I added another treat. 

borrow my boots - tami neilson

Medical humanities case study: Patti. In addition to the previously mentioned details that handed me human composting as a topic of inquiry, she left me a trail of encouragements. Literally. They start on the hallway downstairs and end in a cluster in our shared office suite, basically ending at my doorstep. She even left her signature with the last one. But nobody else knew her handwriting, so they didn't even see it. 💔

Think about that. She's dying. "Filled head to toe with it," you said, which was exactly right. Died of Dying. That is a real thing. And sometime during the very end she had snuck onto campus alone to do this. 

I found it when I had to go to campus today for the first time since. 

Question: what medicinal course of action did this person need? 

"blooming lotus" - mural draft

Making my mom happy is a core guiding principle for me, always but especially now. She wants to paint a new mural while she still can. On the side of the new garage / a backdrop for the pond (of course there will be a pond!). I watch the lotus bloom, working on its 4th now (never needed more than 2, but his life is heavier than just his own now by a factor of 2x humans). So how about we paint them, HUGE, feet wide each (like "GILF" in hot pink on black pavement)? Yes, Ma. "I AM SO EXCITED!" That's the road that leads to still excited at 83, so I go down it.

Closer - Scenic Route to Alaska

I was gonna unblog all this, but again I am choosing to leave the trail of thought-crumbs. I ran to my own cottage today to get my hiking hat, bare summer minimums that I've not needed once yet, too busy climbing out of the grave to do anything else all season. The septic there is overflowing, another mess/expense to deal with 🙄.

good thing I was crazy enough to move one of my trees to the cottage, and that I braved their mess to take a piss and flush the toilet 🤦🏻‍♀️

I am running around buying compost and cantaloupe seemingly (life), but I am trying to unbreak in reality (Live). "We should fix each other." Yes, please. 

-----

The appraisal came back on my new house. Upshot: my sister is right. Everyone ELSE is invested in everything going smoothly now. Sellers, agents, brokers. Nobody gets anything they want/need if it does not go smoothly. So unless called upon to do A Thing, I am going to let them all handle it all for a spell (let that spell work itself now). 

Attention turning to next steppings. I need to pause ordering skirts that look good with boots, summoning drool days, because I will need to move anything I buy but moreover I just put in a mail hold (no deliveries) Sun-Sun. 

Considering I haven't been able to pry any time at all out of his web of obligations (my mom could better than I lol). Considering that Ears doesn't know what PTO his job gives him if any (that kid is SO like me, jeezus). I have no idea how to "plan" for Tawista; it's not really up to me anymore. I did my bit. I suggested a do-over on that time we were not there together tho he wanted to be. That broken looks easy to mend in retrospect; Tawista heals, always has. "Yes!", he said. And if I could get that, even though they no longer rent it, would Ears want a day or two.. "YES!" So, I summoned Tawista back into our lives.

Now here it is, another "when" that I get to say, starting Sunday.

If he can. If he can. Two men, two wild cards.

So I am gearing up for what I think will be like a portal I've opened. It'll remain open for 7 days. I will be on the other side, maybe alone the whole time (?) Or maybe fucking and playing games after dinner. Or maybe some combo of those things on some subset(s) of days. I am thinking of what to take with me, like a tiny version of the radical downsizing choices ahead. I shouldn't bring too much, of food or loungerie, the kinda things that I would need them there for to need it. But not none either, because at any moment, either or both COULD walk through the portal. And I am a person too.

Are either men likely to tell me when or if or for how long they shall be?, she wonders. I know what "say when" means. They both know me, so that I would figure out how to say it should be no surprise. But. This little Virgo is all about reality, how it really is/feels (mouthfeel!). Especially in the case of Huckleberry, fantasy doesn't exist unless he brings it into my equation (yes, please) and he's maybe still (re)learning that I can only mean what I say. But Ears knows that when he steps through that portal for even just day, there will be waiting... 

Johnny's meatballs

Flavor of the year ice cream from Stewart's

Beaver Bite beer, also from Stewart's 

Me swimming through witchmate waters in my underwear (if anything)

🤔 so that's all I will gather, plus books/writing/weed for my own little self. I could bring other things, such as enchanted cock rings or ingredients for dip, if requested (?)

every chance I get I want you in the flesh - dan aurbach

Update: Sold. Not the HUGE payday that got me hot n bothered for a second, but I am not disappointed by that - it's enough - and entitled motherfuckers write checks with their mouths that their asses can't cash. But tiz worth noting that I am no longer the only person who thinks like that. EVERYONE in this ENTIRE process has come down to "who do you trust". Nowhere on any contract does it say that, but that's the new economy. I see it everywhere. People find jobs, work, housing - all the Maslow things - through friend networks, reverting to trading/barter economics. When offers came in, we reviewed the WHOs in Whoville and made the final decision based on the WHO factor. We accepted the offer made by and through personally trusted folks, even though the other offer looked better on paper. Since we don't know the WHOs of the cash offer, we only can imagine how that person might fuck me over. There is no benefit of the doubt anymore.

He said that for me it matters TO WHOM. He is 100% right. And that still might just be a ME thing when it comes to intimacy. My problem only (?)

But I see it applying across other vectors of life now, more and more. Blowhard is creating an ecomomy of VIRGOS. So here we are, at the first "when". I have done what it took to say when about one thing to one person. As promised. 

objectively speaking, covered head to toe in magic dickbutter atm, including thru my hair with macadamia oil, no make-up, no photo-smoother ... I think I look Aliver, little by little by little (?) - wish my mom were here to confirm 

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Your mindset has shifted. Your emotional energy has changed. Because of this, the world looks different to you. It's evidence that reflects the work you've done internally.

So I've been told. Mostly as an accusation. Yes.

Today is the aspirational "review offers day". Either this strategy worked or it didn't. If it didn't, I lost a 5-digit bet. If so, I'll survive, one way or another, but I am not going back to a 'way it was' that broke me, regardless. 

My kids are all adults now, yet with me in this waiting. If you wouldn't wish your life on your kids, don't model it for them - a touchstone rule of mine. I am praying 🙏 today is a happy one, but it might very well give me nothing but more shit. So, it matters most that my rudder is deep enough for storms. Because life hands you a lot of storms, the worst often of your own making.

My youngest kid, who does not believe in private property in the first place, is waiting it out while visiting her father. EX has not changed. He's living on a bucolic farmette that M inherited. My daughter is texting me true heartbreak about his divorce from reality, feeling sick, in real time. Your parents matter allllll your life. So no matter what, bravely and soberly is how I have to face today. And even if the strategy does work, it's not a "success", it's a successful way to face how much/many I have failed. And my children are all as aware of that as I am.

Fight is exhausting, flight has been exhausted. 

song tbd

A wave of panic washed through me, but I grabbed the feeling and pushed it down, felt it fall through my body, pool on the ground around me and evaporate. Fear could not help me. Magic might. ~Sycorax

I unblogged all (below) after writing it last night, not happy with how short the words fell to capture what it feels like to send myself out of myself like that. I'd have to be able to paint, like my mother, because tendrils of intent streaming out of me doesn't have words. It's healing - which goes both ways - and makes everything else recede to the background. 

With almost no warning, I had to flee because the buyer my heart wishes to lay a hand on, want this take this from me, suddenly reappeared at 12:20 wanting in at 12:30. So I threw on clothes (...wait did I remember underwear?),

Yes.

jumped into the truck w dogs and just DROVE. Found myself at a nursery, no shade, so sitting in the AC looking at a pink flamingo of all things. Guess I would have to buy it. 

I tried "play me a song", hit the radio button - it opened to an ad about healing hearts at CHI cardiac. 

So I'll pick. 

one more dance around the sun - great lake swimmers

Not for nothing, the man last night looked (in peripheral vision) kinda like the Mr Potential in my house atm

------------------

Last night, putting it back up for now because I was spellcasting with no purpose except pure intention:

I get there, but it's not her, the schedule just hadn't been updated to account for her leaving (it's hard to keep up with all the ghosts). The new teacher, graceful tall blonde around my age, is nervous. She's not NEW new but she's not used to a whole clutch of newbies ("home from college") who uh are about to a get a not-relaxing yoga experience and not be able to do it by half and maybe barf. The teacher asks me to practice in the center at the front so they can watch me. Sure, no sweat. Behind me is a clutch of college girls (Groupon, prolly). Flanking me are two young men, bearded both, furry - you get the picture. They are not new, they're injured. The teacher has told them all to watch me and do what I do. But they can't, I don't know them or why but they have modification blocks which are like prosthetics sorta that you use to do something for you that you cannot do. 

So. I have to do the whole class perfectly. Any winging it I might allow myself on the reg, I can't do that or I will risk injuring them. I mean, I woulda kept to the traditional practice just for the girls, but they're like green twigs at that age, you can't break em, all they need is an encouraging smile. But these dudes aren't that young, old enough to need a fix-it. They need more than a smile.

This isn't, believe it or not, an erotic story. 

It's not lost on me that they are beautiful and that's probably part of why. But it isn't lust that comes over me. A STRONG urge to be PERFECT, as far as I can be, and RESPONSIVE in the peripheral, try to understand the injury(s). Understand: perfection and responsiveness are opposite, like 'by the book' v 'what works'. In a perfect practice, you only look at your own two eyes in the mirror. That's the whole point. All the sweating is to help you beat yourself as hard as you gotta to be able to do THAT. So I can only look at me. They're shadows that I can see just well enough to know the broad strokes. So I can only utterly control myself and offer what they can follow. And I am flawless - it's been 19 fucking years doing this, flawless is the easy part. What is difficult is sending all of it outward toward them with all my attention, and to make micro adjustments as I go that might make it possible for them to do without the prop-ups. By halfway through, I have honed in on the guy to my right. Pain btw shoulder blades or maybe a chest problem, one or the other is fucked up, and it's the same problem either way: constricted. Either convex or concave. 

I can't explain the practice itself, like the specifics, except one way: with my own body. That. That thing. And it works. Small example, changing my breathing and slowing it and willing him to match it. And he does, and doesn't give up the mod but does get back up off the mat and tries again. The more he breathes, the less he gives up. And I am focused completely, everything else falls away. I am willing my body into the perfect expression of the postures, slowly, methodically, STOPPING when he does, taking another breath (I could always use one too), and so on. I do this with all my body (like how other people would say "with all my heart"). At no point am I thinking about fucking this guy, he is not in a fuckable category right now. But what I am doing is the sexless version of sex. I am talking to this man, about pain and when to back off it, push but not to breaking, find that line and accept it. You can't move forward if you don't know where you're at, and the only way to know is to push yourself until you hit your limit for today and accept it. I say all that to him with my body.

took this earlier, first of a "building back" series

We never exchanged a word, respectful curt nod only.

VIRGO

Sunday, August 03, 2025

As if overnight, somebody's thoughts about a situation (I'm happy to cat-sit for free, I love kitties!!) may well have crumbled beneath the weight of their feelings about a situation (e.g. I've developed allergies, I'm overwhelmed with responsibilities, you can pay me or forget it!). So bear that in mind as a management hint.

I am aware. "It's right there" = behind the thick glass of a hyperbaric chamber. I finished the movie (in pieces around fleeings), so I know what "say when" means now and that now isn't when I get to say it. About anything to anyone.

A Night in the Ground - Trent Willmon

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Resentment weighs too much. You're better without it. Say what you want. Say no. Say yes to your own fun, your own peace, your own right to take up space with joy. You don't need a reason. Just do it.

 

"your right to take up space with joy" sounds like something my mother would say

straight line - keith urban 

I want to go to Paradox with him and get a growler because I just want to.