What Fills You with Liveliness?

 

“What fills you with so much liveliness that you want to do the work yourself?”—Jane Friedman

 

 Hawaii house

  

This morning as I stood at the sink with my hands in soapy dishwasher, an image flashed in my head. It was another day with my hands in soapy dishwater.

I was in Hawaii and worried that we were on the verge of running out of water. It freaked me so much that I get images of it to this day—and I’m not in Hawaii. I’m in Oregon where everyone in the family would laugh when I say I conserve water, for I have left the water running more than once, but hey, that’s when I left my mind someplace else.

In Hawaii we used a water catchment system where rainwater was collected from the house’s roof, shuttled into a pipe, and carried to a storage tank in the backyard. From the tank it flowed magically into faucets in the house. We had hot water too, after we replaced the rusted-out water heater with a new on-demand Propane heater that gave us instant hot water. On the first day on our new property, though, I took a cold shower in the sunshine in the yard on the glorious green grass.  (Using plastic tubs of cold water.) I left invigorated as though I’d had a brisk swim. However, I didn’t want to do that every day, and Daughter Dear said, “One of the great pleasures of life is soaking in a hot bath.”

All this water shortage was El Nino’s fault.

El Nino is a complex weather condition related to the wind and the ocean water. During an El Nino, California gets the rain, and Hawaii gets the drought.

Hawaii has a solution:

They provide a free water fill station with enormous nozzles that will fill a tank quickly—that is if you have the capability of hauling water. We put a small tank in the back of the pickup for that purpose. See why I love our pickup truck—for moving, hauling garbage to the free dump, and for being my office on wheels. It’s a general work horse.

During the rain shortage, I heard the rattling of a gigantic water truck delivering water to the neighbors on the ten acres next to ours. They had horses and thus a great need for water. That showed that you can have water delivered by the truck load to fill your tank.

We added a second storage tank on our property which Husband Dear and a helper built. After leveling the ground, adding a sand base and a plastic liner, Husband Dear and assistant built the tank up to eight feet. Husband Dear worked from inside the tank, and with the helper outside, they built up the tank using metal panels. That left Huband Dear inside a tank with a ladder being the only way out. Or a helicopter.

The ladder worked.

I wrote about our experience on the Big Island in a small book, The Frog’s Song, published by Regal Publishing. It should have a subtitle like “Living off the grid for one year.”

No, The Frog’s Song is not a children’s book. It is the story of one husband, one daughter, one seven-month-old grandson, two dogs, and two cats, who took leave of their senses, put their house up for sale, and moved to a tropical Island.

Pila of Hawaii calls moving to the Island a “Sojourn of Rejuvenation and Discovery.” 

Pila was convinced that Hawaii is where an individual must physically connect within a kind of initiation to prepare for the turbulent years ahead.

Daughter Dear and I felt “called” to the Island, we didn’t know anything about the sojourn, it simply seemed imperative that we move there. A year later, it seemed imperative that we leave. We moved to California for two years recovering from our “Sojourn,” before moving back to Oregon. We kept questioning what we felt on the Island, why we had such energy shifts, and why some places felt good while others felt odd. And then we learned that the Island is often called the Dirty Laundry Island because your issues come up to be healed. Whoa!

 (It turned out that leaving the Island was necessary for my husband’s health—more in the book.)

At the City of Refuse—one of the most tranquil places I have ever encountered, we heard an elder tell his story. As a child an elder sat down a few children and asked them, “What lies beyond the horizon?

“The sun, the water, nothing.”

To them the Island was their entire world.

“No,” said the elder, “There is life beyond the horizon.”

 I took that as a message and another reason to leave the Island, especially with a year-old child. Don’t stay cooped up on an Island when there is life out there.

More on The City of Refuge in the book.

I wanted to use The Frog’s Song as a title for my book after drawing the frog card three times from the Medicine Cards deck and learned that “The frog’s song calls the rain that settles the dust for our journey.”

To our surprise, the Coqui frogs of Hawaii sang us to sleep at night by singing their name, “Co-Qui.” To me they sounded like birds. Others on the Island consider them to be “Noise pollution,” and I guess in large numbers they can be quite loud, but I loved ours.  And I had to laugh when we returned to Oregon where at night, we heard the booming sound of a Bullfrog. (Trumpeting our return?)

“On the Big Island,” wrote Pila, “you are on ‘new turf,’ and the comfort zone known as your ordinary world no longer applies…You are at one of the few doorways in your reality where the Earth liquefies, and nothing is as it may seem.”  That is why Pila feels it is paramount for individuals to come to the Big Island and experience the energy in person at least once.

When Captain Cook asked the natives where they lived, and they said Hawaii, he thought they were ignorant savages. What they meant was that I live in Hawaii, “The Breath of the Creator.”

“Ha” = breath

“Wai” = life force, the water

“I” = I

“I live in the supreme wellspring of the life force of creation which is within me and all I behold is Paradise.”

Some say that Hawaii is not an easy place to live, for if you go there to run away from something, that something will present itself. Yep. And I know that the “call” to Hawaii, is a call not so much to a physical place, but to home—to the breath of the creator.

 

To say “ALOHA” is to stand in the presence of the breath, spirit and light, and to acknowledge and recognize all of this in another.” Pila of Hawaii.

Aloha,

Jo

All this from washing dishes this morning. 

 

Click for link to amazon 

 

She’s Got That Right!

“One of the great cruelties and great glories of creative work is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision and execution,” writes Maria Popova in The Marginalian.

Creative engineers, too, so I have learned. Their work can take 10 times longer than planned. And it’s a good thing the guys who put a man on the moon didn’t know the work that would go into that project.

But Popova is correct. If we knew how long a project that was so exciting in the beginning would take us, we might never start. So, the Muse gives us amnesia regarding that timeline.

Somebody also scrambles my brain regarding other times, but maybe I’m just unorganized.

You know how some writers try to dash off a book in a month? Well, good for them. (Sarcasm) Two years ago, I tried writing 50,000 words while the pink dogwood blossoms were on the tree. The tree beat me by four days, but blossoms were on the tree for 30 days, and I enjoyed every moment with them.

I wrote the 50,000 words that was my goal. That didn’t mean the book was complete or even readable. It meant that I had written a shitty first draft.

Now, two years later, the blossoms have again fallen from the tree, only this time, they went out in a blaze of glory along with the spring rain we had last week. Now the tree is gloriously clothed with green leaves.

And my memoir is almost complete, although each day offers up a new memory.

 

 “When we dream up a project,” says Papova, “we invariably underestimate the amount of time and effort required to make it a reality. Rather than a cognitive bug, perhaps this is the supreme coping mechanism of the creative mind — if we could see clearly the toil ahead at the outset of any creative endeavor, we might be too dispirited to begin, too reluctant to gamble between the heroic and the foolish, too paralyzed to walk the long and tenuous tightrope of hope and fear by which any worthwhile destination is reached.”

(She’s the grown-up.)

If eight years ago, someone had told me that A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (public library) would take eight years, I would have laughed, then cried, then promptly let go of the dream. And yet here it is:

It has great entries addressed to young readers, but it doesn’t look like a book young people would pick up. I think it is more for adults.

 

I love Anne Lamott’s entry:

“If you love to read, or learn to love reading, you will have an amazing life. Period. Life will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people, but books will make it all worthwhile. In books, you will find your North Star, and you will find you, which is why you are here.”

 

That’s what I wished to convey in my memoir,

 

TIME TO STEP INTO OUR STORY

From

The Painter with a Pen

Jo Davis

 

Bridge Over Four Miles of Water

Columbia, The Gem of the Ocean

"Oh my god!" I screamed!

I was 196 feet in the air, on a bridge over water. Ahead, the road disappeared as it appears to at the crest of a San Francisco Street. No, like Disneyland’s Splash Mountain: you're floating log reaches the crest where you know it will plunge down. You try to look over the edge but don't see anything but space.

"Don't look down," I said.

"Yes, stupid, look down. You're driving. And you're doing down there whether you like it or not."

So, I screamed as the bridge-road took a 196-foot dive to a depth just skimming the water.

Sweetpea, lying on the seat beside me, couldn't see over the edge of the window and only knew that I tend to have outbursts once in a while.

So, why was I there?

Well, let me tell you, the Universe wanted to give me a thrill. And me, with my propensity for making wrong turns, it was an easy task.

I was in Astoria, Oregon, having just driven 350 miles from home, and could see my motel sign, a dip down onto a street below mine.

Ms. GPS was talking to me: "Turn left at Portway Street," she said. I spun around trying to see where Portway Street was and drove straight ahead onto the bridge's on-ramp. And then the little twerp GPS was silent. Did she tell me I had passed my turn-off? Nooo.

I was on the Astoria Megler Bridge, a 4.1-mile bridge, the longest continuous truss bridge in North America. It was built to a height of 196 feet at one point, so ocean-going vessels could sail beneath it without knocking their masks off. Or whatever they have on board that sticks up to that height.  

It was also built to withstand wind gusts to 150 miles per hour and a water speed of 9 miles per hour. The citizens of Astoria thought William Buggee, the architect, was crazy and said nobody would use it, but an average of 7,110 vehicles cross it daily, and Semis no less.

I had never heard of the Astoria Bridge, one of the best ways to have an adventure. I was fixated on that span of road ahead that was jacked up over the rooftops with a little bitty car climbing up its sloping entrance. "That doesn't look safe to me," I said, and then I was on it.

 

 Those aren't bugs up there, a tractor-trailer and a car.

   

<-----------------------------------

The mighty Columbia. I would call it "Old Man River," but that belongs to the Mississippi. Instead, it's Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. I have been curious most of my life about the mouth of the Columbia, and I thought the bridge was over the mouth, but my friend, whom I was visiting, said I was over the river, you can't see the mouth as it is out in the ocean.

But there was water all over the place, first a bridge over a bay into the city, then the river four miles wide and its famous bridge.

 

I grew up in The Dalles, Oregon, alongside the Columbia River. We swam in that river before we knew Hanford Nuclear Production Complex upstream was leaking toxic waste into it. We used to watch great flotillas of logs pushed by tugboats being transported downriver to lumber mills. One year, the river froze with big chunks of ice floating downstream. We watched the building of The Dalles Dam, which flooded out Celilo Falls, an area of the river that was narrow, rapid, and created a natural fish ladder where you could watch salmon throw themselves up the rapids and thus gain access to their home spawning grounds. Folklore says that once the salmon were plentiful, you could walk across the river on their backs.

 

The Native Americans had a treaty with the US government stating they could fish there forever. Well, they got relocated. There are not many salmon in the river now, but some make their way upstream using cement-built fish ladders around the various dams that change the once tumultuous river into lazy lakes.

 

But I got to cross that bridge and the Columbia from the perch high above the river, a glorious sight, and better than a roller coaster. Sometimes the best adventures come from a mistake. Mid-river, Oregon changes into Washington State, so I had to drive to Washington to turn around and retrace those four miles back across the river. 

 

 

 

Sweetpea, my little dog, was so excited when we got to the hotel, she ran in circles around the room, up and up over the beds.

The following day, my friend told me that she once walked that bridge with a crowd of other people. Pedestrian crossing is allowed only once a year in October. A shuttle carries the people to the Washington side, dumps them out, and makes them walk up that incline (as punishment perhaps) back to Oregon. Her comment: "There weren't enough porta-potties."

I picked up a small newspaper from her coffee table called, as I remember,"The Columbia,” where an article explained the value of tugboats. The ocean-going ships—those tremendous rigs, cargo ships, and such-need moving water rushing past their propellers to make them maneuverable. In slack water, they are sluggish. The day's heroes are the lowly little tugboats that usher the big guys into the docks.

Prettier than a tugboat, this little lady escorted me down the hill from my friend’s house.

 

 

 

 

 

Which Comes First the Margareta or the Flowers?

 

One year, when I was younger than six, either Mom or Grandma and I made a May Basket, I took it to the neighbors and hung it on their doorknob.

Our May Basket was a little holder made of colored paper and filled with flowers. The idea is to sneak over to your neighbor's and anonymously hang it on their doorknob.

That reminds me of Aloha and the lady on the beach in Hawaii who told me that Aloha is a way of life. It means to do good without expecting anything in return. (Aloha also means Hello, Goodbye, and I love you.)

I don't know where the May Basket tradition in my family came from, and I don't remember who instigated it, but I thought of it this morning when I realized it is May 5 and thought it was May Day.  However, I got my holidays confused, for May Day is May 1, while today is May 5, the Cinco De Mayo—Mexico's Independence Day, and for us Margareta Day. Hey, happy to celebrate a country's independence. We used to celebrate it in San Diego, and I would rather miss hearing a Mariachi band play Cielito Lindo, Mexico's folk waltz song. (See below for the translation and to listen to it played.)

This morning, I wondered what and if I should write. I usually post a blog on Tuesday and I will be busy tomorrow.

My uppermost thought this morning was what happened to us as people. Has entropy settled in?  Is it me? Is it prevalent that many people seem not to care?  Do you?

I felt that all our hard-fought-for rights are being stripped away, and somehow we are allowing it to happen. And why are people so concerned with how people are—black or white or yellow or red, gay, straight, bisexual, transsexual, Christian, Buddhist, Agnostic, Atheist, and want to legislate it somehow?  Do we really want everyone to be the same? So, see, I wasn't on the best end of the happiness scale.

 

 Then I thought of the May flowers and called my daughter to ask about the day of their wedding anniversary. I knew it was in May when the wild Iris' are in bloom. I looked out into the gorgeous spring day, and I thought of the fun and the Margaritas my best friend and I would order at the exquisite Bizarre De Mundo in San Diego, and remembering those salt-rimmed glasses makes my mouth water even now. 

 

 

My friend would order a fishbowl-sized Margareta as I was the designated driver. Her little boy and my two girls would run around within the confines of the courtyard, and we would send them to the toy store with enough money to purchase a tiny figurine they could add to their collections. My friend and I would talk for so long we would be clear-headed by the time we left, and on the Cinco De Mayo there would be a celebration with a spread of hors d' oeuvres in the court yard, and a mariachi band would play, among other songs, Cielito Lindo.

The rousing refrain is:  

Ay, ay, ay, ay,

Canta y no llores,

Porque cantando se alegran,

Cielito lindo, los corazones.

"Woe, woe, woe, woe,

Sing and don't cry,

Because singing, darling,

Lifts our hearts."

To Listen:

 

https://youtu.be/ojghyoSxsys

Cielito Lindo   (Sweet Belle, Oh Heavenly One, Pretty Darling, Lovely Sweet One)

One person described the song as a celebration of love, life, and the human spirit.

(The translation is more like from a lover to a loved one.—but then romance lifts our hearts.)

 

 

Through dark tresses, heavenly one,

a pair of deep brown eyes,

lower as they approach,

a stolen glance.

Ay, ay, ay, ay,

sing and don't cry,

heavenly one, for singing

gladdens he...

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/cielito-lindo-heavenly-one.html

On the Way to My Blog Peaches Gave Me a Message

 

 

Since it is May 1, exactly two years since I decided to write a memoir I’m honoring our Pink dogwood Tree.

After that Peaches the Pink Party Poodle for Peace tells me: "Don't worry."

He ha, two years since May 2023. An entirely new memoir that could be stuffed into that space.

However, two years ago, on this day, I began writing a memoir and declared that I would try to write 50,000 words before the blossoms fell from the tree.

The last blossom fell thirty days later, and I had only written 48,000. It beat me.

Wasn’t it cool that I could look into that living color bouquet outside my window and type out my life?

Seven years ago, when we bought this house, the tree was cut down to its bare bones, a trunk and five branches. Nary, a twig or branch showed, no leaves either, but then it had no branches to support them, and it was December to boot. I didn’t pay much attention to the tree until it pushed out a teeny tiny pink blossom one year, and I exclaimed, “I think it is a dogwood tree!”

A Pink Dogwood is one of my favorite trees. Since then, it has grown about 20 feet and pushed pinkness out all over itself. (I think my ashes ought to be sprinkled under that tree. It can decide how long we will live, and we can go out together.)

After about 16 thousand dumb title ideas for my memoir, I am now calling it Echoes after a Ray Bradbury’s quote, “No sound, once made, is ever truly lost.”

I love that guy—he hugged me once, did I tell you? Oh, that was name-dropping, but I hoped his hug would somehow shore up a bit of talent for me. Besides, he seemed like such a happy fellow and taught like Socrates—out under a tree.

And from Barbara Davis (The Last of the Moon Girls) comes:

“At Some Point, We Must Step into our Stories and claim them as our own. It won’t be easy, stepping into the light never was, but it’s what we’re called to do.”

 

From Peaches’ blog comes: “Don’t Worry,”  August 6, 2012.

 

 Me catching a power under the steering wheel.

 

Don't Worry!

I Peaches, Party Poodle for Peace, am a happy dog. Don’t worry about the future. Future will take care of itself. Many people don’t know how to be happy, don’t roll in grass, don’t know how to dig for moles and come to house with nose stacked with dirt. Don’t know how to give high-pitched happy bark in greeting, or how to give low bark that tells owner, “Check this out.”

Worry? I don’t worry—waste of time. Well, I did worry when I accompanied Bear to the Vet.  Couldn't help it! I thought I would have to go see the doctor, maybe be left there, but didn’t. Whew!

Can’t nap and worry.  Can’t chase lizards and worry. Worry takes away joy. I live for joy.

I have a job that makes me happy. I look after my people and the house. I go for rides and walks with family. I keep lizards away from the door. I keep Obi Kitty away from my food dish too—cats are so sneaky.

 

Me

An aside from Momma: Little Peaches has Addison’s Disease which is not a disease, but a condition. It means her adrenal glands are not working properly.

Peaches lives with her chronic health condition. We take care of her, we give her medication, she maintains. She goes about her life in a positive way. If she feels poorly we give her more subcutaneous fluid. She makes a contribution to life. I love her, she loves me, and she pontificates on her blog…

 

On my way to my other blog this morning, I stopped by Dog Blog by Peaches and saw that a few people check in occasionally, even though she hasn’t written since 2021. I saw that one person has Peaches’ blog noted on her blog. Bless that girl, so I downloaded her book on Kindle—haven’t read it yet, maybe tonight.

https://monicaeuen.blogspot.com/ 

 

Did Peaches send me to her blog because I need the message?

That’s the way it works sometimes.

https://dogblogbypeaches.blogspot.com/