Not Quite Success, But NOT Failure

Trying. I've been trying... It has been trying. And I am tired, but happy.

Lots and lots of life events in the last few months  Important visit from the East Coast family branch was of major importance. My daughter graduated from college and I helped her move across country.  I also visited family and the area in which I grew up for the first time since my mother's death. Now my hubby and I are negotiating the new rules for the empty nest. So in keeping with my usual modus operandi of trying to do too many things at a time, I decided to participate in the February Nablopomo challenge on BlogHer.  I wrote some good pieces but didn't make the whole month challenge. My hosting company troubles ate up my "buffer" posts I'd stored up.  Then taxes and converting our personal finance tracking software to a different platform did in the blog challenge.  But our taxes are filed, and that is a good thing.

I write a lot, but I write in so many different places, I don't think I can showcase my writing to its best advantage because it is so dispersed.

I tried having all my blogs be scraped and posted to my business site, but with Google penalizing multiply posted content, I don't think that is such a good idea. This added to the dormant state of some of my blogs that makes me question whether it is worth my time to post new posts when I have new ideas to those that do not have an active, current readership. Plus the posting of personal blog posts on my business site just did not seem like a good idea, and I ended up censoring content I really wanted to share.

So I'm back in the search for how to blog my multiple passions, showcase all my writing, and still maintain some professional polish for my business.

I'll keep you posted on what I figure out.  How do you balance and present your different voices?

uni-verses

uni-verses

there is a notion that time exists
only within the folds of the brain
this material slice of reality perceived
dimensions sequence
times weave
me slipped through to be born
again listening too deeply to a dream
cutting through these bread slices of universe
bumping perspective
amoeboid grinding
roethke waking
stories captured by the cosmos
the surface tension of potential
glistens shifting shape on viewing

everything interacts

he is still here
they watch
she will be born
always is
and never was
a postulate
thinking makes it so
or so i like to believe

when the winds whisper at night
a friend's, a mother's
intimacy
ghosts of thought
caressing the eaves to speak
my memories
reinforce the beliefs of the Cathars
and my fathers
eyes
still pierce the fabric of time
that disappears with sleep
and merging of all that ever was
and ever shall be

© nfhill, all rights reserved

Relative-ity, Friends, and Beyond

There is a book that I recommend to almost everyone with whom I enter into a discussion about books.  It is The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.  An alternate history that looks at what  what the world might be like if Europe had succumbed completely to The Plague rather than recuperating from it.  It also looks at souls traveling together through time and space, through multiple incarnations.  I recommended it to a friend on this trip I just finished.  
.

Sometimes I wonder about the people, the spirits, we meet and and connect with throughout our lifetimes.  What random tumble of the dice allows us to be born into the families into which we are born?  After living with a hard core "this reality is all there is" type scientist for decades, I am somewhat reticent to publicly discuss spirituality as it always seems to venture into what I call woo-woo.  I thought about this a lot during my recent road trip. 

What makes us instantly connect with one person and let scores of others pass through our lives with little note?  How do we explain not seeing someone for years and years and then sitting down to talk with that person and realizing hours have passed in conversation and it is as though the years of separation have not happened?  I do not know.  I am far less of a skeptic than my husband, but I feel extremely comfortable with the peace I have with knowing there is so much more yet not having the need to limit myself to a particular set of beliefs.  Beliefs from around the world intrigue me. I think that is why this speculative fiction novel by Robinson so appeals to me.  His research is impeccable.  He conveys times and places and in this case peoples as though he has lived them.  These times, places and peoples have never existed.  He relates his connection to essences of human experience and human cultures in ways that could have happened. 

Years ago when I first read this book, I felt that the portrayal of the persistence of human spirits as well as the evocation of coherent cultures made the book one of the best speculative fiction novels I had ever read.  Sometimes writers capture archetypes.  This is what Robinson did. 

All cultures seem to have some concept of a spiritual dimension.  Sometimes members of cultures believe there are souls, for others there is a life energy to which we return, even in the scientific belief set nothing is ever created or destroyed, only transformed.  

All of this somehow combines into my occasional glimpse of the essence of my personal theology that is fueled by connections to people, gut feelings, and the occasional experiences that have no good explanation. 

Do our energies continue beyond this life?  Do they recur together?  Don't know.  I don't know that I will ever know, but sometimes I like to believe that they do.  It is great to have a literary work I can share that conveys a belief that I cannot even describe for myself.  It is doubly wonderful to share it with people who I feel as though I have a much deeper or longer life experience than our actual time together would seem to explain. 

I'm Going To Do It - Again!

This is scary.  Really scary.

I haven't had my hair colored in years.  I have so much white hair in the front, and it grows so fast, that I just could not keep up with it.  Roots always showed within a few days.   But this time I am going Bonnie Raitt and leaving the white in front.  I'm only 54 and I think my hair is making me look older than I am.  I have wrinkles and such but I have light fairly good skin that with continued weight loss (down 15 lbs from May) and slightly younger looking hair should take at least 5 years off my apparent age.  Or, that is what I'm telling myself!

Here I am now:

And another pic will be forthcoming tomorrow.

I am so not a Fashionista, but I have some vain tendencies that I have had to squelch in order to live according to my ecological and economic principles.   So this is disconcerting for me.  If you read this, tell me it is okay.  I'm serious, I have moral qualms about doing these kinds of things. 

The first hurdle I had to vault, many years ago, in my early 40s was even going to a hair salon or spa. I managed to get myself through the front door of a nice salon a little over ten years ago. 

Up until that time I had only been in a salon on a few occasions.  The first was when I got a pixie cut that was hideous.  It was way to short and sharp for someone with as long and sharp of features as I had, even in 5th grade.  The second was when I had my hair "set" for my eighth grade picture. Here is the picture - for the ages of me with the rest of my class - circa 1971.

Second row Second from right, the one with long dark hair.

The third was when a girlfriend in high school convinced me to get my hair cut for my senior picture at a mall salon in which her sister worked.   It turned out okay. Although my stoic midwestern ancestory is a bit too evident in the pic for me to want to track it down.  It was just between chin and shoulder length tapered a bit longer in the back than front and brushed under just a bit.  It was a long Page Boy.  No bangs. 

I have had problems whenever I strayed from my basic Cher Hair as I referred to the long, lustrous dark hair that I loved having most of my life. 

The next times were the last two hair professional hair cuts I had for the next two decades. 

Dorothy Hammill and her original Hamill Wedge. 

The first time, when I tried to have the cut from the senior pic  recreated and I ended up with a Dorothy Hamill haircut, aka the Hamill Wedge, that was almost as tragic on me as the pixie cut from 5th grade.  Thank heavens no images from that time remain.  That was the summer after high school graduation. 

Honey Huan from Doonesbury. 

The straw that broke the camel's back was when I was a sophomore at Purdue and some psycho stylist made me look like Honey Huan. My now Hubby still laughs and loves to recall the time went through my Vietnamese militant period as he calls it and I wore black work boots, denim overalls and had a hair cut that did look like Honey's.  However,  Honey is Chinese. 

I so hope tomorrow goes well.  I don't think I can stand another travesty of hairdom.  And after not going into a salon for decades, I had more than a bit of awkwardness at not knowing salon culture.  I felt like I was a foreigner in a strange land who speaks not a word of the language. 

This time I am more prepared for the culture immersion.  I am an anthropologist by training, I can do this.  I will never be able to replicate the favorite time and hair of my life when joy was everywhere and I really did not care how I looked -- but I think Momma and child both looked pretty happy.  

We will see if I can't find a new favorite for my I'm Done Nesting phase of my life.