Ding dong

I will admit it: I do at times resent, just the tiniest bit, the behavior of some of the rich (they must be filthy rich) folks on our road who live here only on weekends or holidays – the ones who think that keeping a nice little $1.5 million cottage on acreage in the Wine Country is the perfect way to give the kids a place to play where they can make as much noise as they want for a change, without disturbing the neighbors trying to sleep just eight feet above and below them (not to mention the ones on each side).

"Y'know," I sometimes daydream about saying, "I know it must seem very private and remote to you out here, compared with your place in the city, but in fact you are actually not the only people around. We can hear you! Keep it down!"

I guess there might be two varieties of people who go to live in the country – those who want to surround themselves with peace and quiet, and those who want to be able to make lots of noise without risking a citation. I have to say, I've had one foot on each side of that fence at different times, and I do love being able to turn up the speakers in the back yard sometimes when I'm out there – not super loud, but louder than I'd dare to have them in town. But in general (prepare yourself for the shock) I think I mostly belong in the first category – the ones who like it quiet.

I've come to really love the quiet over the last ten years or so – really, I remember first starting to love it in 1995, when I first moved here and was living way out in the redwoods with neighbors even farther away than the ones I have here. I could get KPFA out there, but we couldn't get any television – which was fine, since I wasn't in the habit of watching it – and any trip into town took a minimum of an hour ... and the guy I was married to started drinking heavily almost as soon as we'd moved in, and sometimes disappeared for several days at a time without calling, and I was still temping and had not a single friend within almost a thousand miles ... yow! I haven't gone there for awhile. That was a really painful time.

Anyway, my point in bringing it up was just to say that living way out there in that house all alone so much of the time really taught me about the power of silence to heal. Or I don't know if it was the silence exactly, but maybe just the way the lack of other distracting sounds helped me calm down and start to notice everything else that was going on around me – the whole world was just humming along in perfect order, with no help from me, and my sadness or happiness didn't really change anything for anyone except me. In other words, there wasn't any pressure anymore to try to pretend everything was okay – because nobody cared.* The redwoods didn't care. The birds didn't. The apple orchard didn't. They didn't care; they just witnessed it. And I learned to witness it. Without judging. Because there's a big difference between "I'm a terrible person who deserves to suffer because I did something stupid by marrying this person, and now I need to stay forever no matter how awful it gets, or risk exposing myself as an impulsive, shallow person who doesn't want to honor the vows she made in marriage – which she should honor," and "Wow, I'm so heartsick I feel I might actually die." The first statement is all opinion and judgment. The second one just describes what's happening. It's not an emotional statement, it isn't loaded. It doesn't demand to be argued with; it demands to be acknowledged.

* Of course I always knew that my loved ones cared – I just mean there was no person actually sitting with me on that porch who did.

Living in that silence I started learning to really listen to myself. It was also the beginning of my involvement with mindfulness meditation, and that was the other really exciting thing that happened to me during that time. Even with all the heartbreak I was feeling, I always knew that sitting in the shadow of the giant redwood in the front yard and watching big fat orange dragonflies hunting insects over the spring tank in the last shaft of sunlight ... would make me feel better. Sometimes I would hike out to the point at the end of this long, tall spine of rock that fell over a hundred feet from the top of the ridge to the bottom of the creek bed below. You could climb (carefully!) about six feet down the face of the cliff and there was a little ledge to sit on, from which you could see the whole little canyon stretching out toward the big valley floor, and the mountains rising up on both sides covered with lush, beautiful trees, and if you leaned forward enough to look down, you could see the back of what looked like hundreds of tiny jewel-green backed swallows swooping and soaring through the air above the treetops way down below, like minnows darting around in the bottom of a deep, clear pool of water. I'd love to go there again someday.

So yeah. Bleah. Earlier they were playing a game that I actually sort of enjoyed (the neighbors, remember?). No idea what they were doing, but I was out deadheading roses as the sun went down and I heard them – some sort of talking for a minute or two, and then the clanging of a bell, like an old-fashioned hand-held school bell. It was a haunting sound in the falling light ... Voices saying something unintelligible, crickets and the occasional frog or screech owl making evening noises, a warm breeze, the smell of dry roses, and then ... this bell ... dogs barking in the distance ....

Anyway. Feeling kind of nostalgic, I guess. It's September first, which to me always feels like the first day of fall even though I know it doesn't officially begin for three more weeks. Usually I buy a box of new pencils around this time of year, and sharpen them all and give them away, just because the smell of newly-sharpened yellow pencils always reminds me of going back to school, which I always loved.

In other news, I started decorating my bike today – took off the bottle cage, which is a cool turquoise blue one given to me by Mr. A as a special present, because it's a very nice one and he's had it for a long time – so I took it off and painted it with purple stripes all the way around, so now it's turquoise and purple, and on my beautiful shiny black bike it looks just so handmade and subtle, but then it's actually really well-done and intriguing, so somehow it really holds my attention, even though I know it's only a bottle cage – because the design is unusual and it somehow forces me to keep looking at it, the way you would keep looking at a dog with two tails – you recognize it as a dog, and a dog is not an uncommon thing to see, but there's just something different about this one that your brain takes a minute to register.

Well, maybe it isn't a freaky as a dog with two tails. It's still kinda cool though.

Also, I've been reading some of the new memoirs this summer (I have a friend who brings them to work for me after she finishes them) and have been struck by how much at least two or three of them read like blogs. Exactly the same kind of self-conscious blathering that I do here, and the writing really isn't any better – though their lives are certainly more interesting to write about (and presumably to read about). Still, it kind of shocks me to think of the book deals these people must be getting – two of them have been on the bestseller lists!