Honest Crapola, Baby!

Mama Zen

http://thezenofmotherhood.blogspot.com/

has tagged me to spout more true junk about myself! Woohoo!

1. I was sixth grade spelling champion. (but a little girl from fifth grade beat me in the school bee. The word that tripped me up? "Marriage.") I won a dictionary. I believe i still have it someplace. It probably contains neither "meme" nor "blog."

2. The house I grew up in had a spirit. As in ghost, though it never made itself visible, it certainly made itself known, but only to me, no one else seemed to sense it. I thought I was all alone until my nieces confessed, years later, that they hated to stay over at my mother's house cos it creeped them out. I asked them why, and it turns out, they felt the spirit, too. He lived in the basement, near the water softener, but he came upstairs sometimes. I have to stop writing about this, it is making me remember it too well. *shivers*

3. The best dream I ever had which was not a spiritual thing, was a dream I had some years ago that i was pregnant. (I can't get pregnant.) I was so SO happy about it, just over the moon. I have never felt quite like that ever before or since, it was just....lovely. I was making all my plans and just loving every second of it, til I woke up. When I realized it hadn't been real, I felt such grief and loss.

4. I am prone to receive spiritual messages in dreams. In one, at a difficult time in my 20s when i was pretty much going no place, I dreamt that a female angel started walking beside me on a scrubby little hill where i was walking, We crested the hill and I saw a place i still believe was a glimpse of Heaven. It was a natural scene, but the colors were all far more intense, more "there" than they ever could be on earth, and there was light coming from no place and every place. I was dumbfounded, and looked over at the angel. She smiled as if to say, now you know what I already knew...that this place exists. I felt she had wanted me to realize that there is so much more than I had believed in up til then. In another dream, I met another angel, and in that dream I recognized her instantly, and thought to myself, how could I ever have forgotten HER!? (awake, i don't know who she was, though there remained a feeling of familiarity) She told me, stop trying so hard. You don't need to look for love because you already have it. Not only that, but you have always had it and can never lose it. How cool is that?

5. In tenth grade English, we were supposed to write in our journals, and I decided to start writing a story in mine. My teacher took a look at what I had written the first day and told me that after that I was to forget about what the rest of the class was doing and just write my story. I finished it and had it for years until the paper went wacky (it wasn't acid-free) and the writing disappeared.

6. I cry at the end of "It's A Wonderful Life", no matter how many times I have seen it, and even though I know what's coming. I always cry.

7. The first book of poems that made me love poetry was something called "I'll Be There In The Morning If I Live" by a man named Grover Lewis. I bought it at the Little Professor bookstore and took it to the lawn of the local library, where i read it cover to cover. It was supposed to be "beat" style poetry, but I found much of it hilarious. A friend walked up and asked me what was so funny and I read one of the poems out loud, but she just looked at me like I'd just flown in from Mars. (I get that a lot) In retrospect, I just think that I had discovered a world in words which was so different from anything I had encountered up til then (I was 18) that it made me a little giddy. From then on, I was in love with poetry.

8. I wrote poems like a fiend from 18 to 26, then took a snooze until two years ago when I woke up again. I hope to stay awake for the rest of my life. The poems here labelled "early poems" are from that 18-26 period.

9. About the same time I fell in love with poetry, I also fell in love with alcohol. I drank like a fish for ten years, tried to stop for two, then did stop, to the present day. What enabled me to quit for good? I asked God to help me, and She did.

10. Under hypnosis and in dreams I have remembered past lives to varying degrees. I was a Venetian monk, who loved to sing and bake bread. I was a Dutch servant girl. I was a Pacific island girl for whom childbirth went terribly wrong. I was a Scottish landowner whose adored wife died young. I never remarried and would go on long walks with my favorite dog. At a particularly low ebb in my life, my wife from that life spoke to me. She said it meant something to her that I had never stopped loving her. She sent me my dog back, in this life, to help me. He does, and is still my favorite.

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