both

American Heritage Dictionary:

a·lo·ha

Top

(ə-lō'ə, -hə, ä-lō'hä') 
interj. Chiefly Hawaii
Used as a traditional greeting or farewell.

"...she said. 'In Quadling thinking, one plus one doesn't equal a single unit of two. One plus one equals both." 

     --Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

so often, i feel like i'm asked to choose between two things that on the surface, look very similar, but at the bottom are really worlds apart.  i feel like i get asked a lot of "mayo or mustard" kind of questions, and answering "both, please, but not too much of either one" is kind of bratty, even when that is the real and true answer.  i don't think it's any wonder my favorite color is grey--like that pewtery silvery underbelly of a good rain cloud, kind of smeared with a darker blue-grey at the edges and in the center. it's a good background for noticing patterns or pops of important colors.  grey is committed, but not immovable.  grey connotes movement, from one thing to another, and sometimes knowing whether the move is from black to white, or white to black, or any of the colors in the paint box is something we don't get to know.  the swing is still in motion. 


i made a flying trip home yesterday to check on the folks, and a less-frenzied drive back, this afternoon...a lady is tired.  the drive down was really nice, in spite of the reason.  the mowers had been doing a lot of work, these last few weeks, and the hay fields were full of round, golden bales of hay.  ranked up for acres, backlit by the sun on it's way back west, with the gold seeming to make the blue of the sky even more vivid and spring-time crisp, and edged by the green, green growth at the edges of the field and road, they reminded me of the last series vincent van gogh painted.  i love that series, even though it makes me sad to look at it, sometimes.  the colors are so vivid, and this does not look like the work of a man who's about to leave this life.  this looks like the work of a man who can't stop painting, who can't stop mixing colors, who can't keep his eyes wide-open enough.  it's funny how things look, sometimes...like those graceful swans who seem to cut right through the water.  down below, they're in constant and consistent motion.


it was nice to be in my mother's house, for how ever brief the time.  i slept so hard that when i woke up at four, with the kind of cotton mouth only real actual tex-mex can give me, i had to remind myself that i was sleeping in my little girl bed, in the guest room, and the bathroom was just out the door, to my left.  i was surprised i was that far/deep asleep.  that almost never happens, ever.  i suppose it goes to show that no matter how old i get, there is a deep and profound sense of safety and security that comes from being near my mother and grandmother.  i sleep like that when i'm at my granny's, in alabama, and at my aunt nea's house, too.  and at camp.  it's a full stop.  it's waking up with half my body asleep, and the other half bearing a sheet crease from temple to toe.  it's that muzzy wake up that takes a good five minutes and then sends you running to the bathroom to give seabisquit a run for his money. it's that gracious acceptance of the end of one day and the conscious and willful intention to be recklessly hopeful about the new day that is beginning, even when the day already looks long, and it's not even 7am, yet.  it's knowing that even while i put my waking body to rest (with the weird dreams i've been cranking out--almost all of them underwater...not like mermaid underwater, but like regular life underwater...weird...or not.  whatever..., a lady's mind is SHO not on siesta with that business...first whales, and now underwater?  really?  i'm not complaining, i'm just saying...parenthetically, weird dreams.) my sleeping body was hard at the work of resting and rebuilding, putting that guacamole to work on...something. 


and the earth was still busy spinning on it's axis, hurtling through this arm of the milky way, speeding out in space, nestled in the palm of this G-d i can't see or explain, but want to know more about and love better, who i can know because i know Jesus, because i see so much love around me in the world, but still feel like i can't really get a grasp on what all that really really means, down at the bottom, because i also see so much  hurt and meanness, too...but all of that is true, every night when i close my eyes, and it's true when i wake up in the mornings.  even so, it's hard to remember that.  i wake up so many days and believe that the universe turns on when i open my eyes.  we look to be standing still, a lot of the time.  sometimes, the movements are so subtle, we don't even notice...but we are moving, constantly. we are bodies in motion, the earth and i, and until we are acted upon by an outside force, remain in motion. 


it's hard to get my giant girl-hands around that, and most days, i feel like the bulk of it goes trailing behind me, like a little kid taking ALL her toys down the hall, and not realizing that the travois she made out of her blankie is spilling a wake of plush carnage from her bedroom to the living room.  because even though it's kind of cute, someone is going to have to pick that shit up.  and if you leave it to that little kid, it's going to take nine and a half hours of whining and poking and prodding, hauling one precious little stuffed bear at a time back to the designated rallying point, and she's going to low-grade whine about it the whole time, too.  and she might kick the wall.  lightly, ever so lightly, but she's going to mean it. she'll be moving...but it's not nearly as charming as the swans i mentioned earlier.  


bluebonnets and cactus and blue sky and lost pines, and the way my grammy smells, and sharing a bathroom with my mom while we both got ready for the day, vanilla cokes, driving with all four windows down, singing really loud and not caring i was at a stop light, having the dog pee on my feet (and shorts, this time...), clean gas station bathrooms, hay fields, big bang theory, phone charger, laughing until my face hurts, pep talks, righteous indignation, family love, old books, old songs, favorite green shirt, the brazos river, sharing stories...that was today.  i never stopped moving.  and i have to tell you, it was, in all honesty, a really nice day, even the hard parts. 


i'm super tired.  i'm ready for baby chapel in the morning.  i'll probably dream about the good shepherd, herding sheep...underwater... 


mil besos,
rmg