Stuff Shuffler

Stuff shuffler,
Mediator,
Contact for medical alerts,
Psychological facilitator,
Mistress of compromise,
Sexual gratification placeholder,
Deliverer of goods of all types,
Hands adapted for brooms and white appliances,
Feet for kicking debris in designated corners,
Monsters play outdoors and gobble all the fresh air while...

She shuffles stuff and mediates the physical and mental health of others while lying back and thinking of another country whose exports threaten to keep everyone forever in debt as the far corners have all been occupied by virtual monsters without the need to breath like her, she finds herself stuffed.

Mounted mummy, find a wall and stay there.

But, the walls are cracking and some mummies fall off their shelves and make functionally obsolete spaces to raise many monsters in. No monster needs a mummy; they simply need a stuff shuffler to keep the path clean for more...

and more...

and more...

There is no nevermore except for a Poe poet that stuff shufflers can never be, too busy keeping the tap tap tapping, go go going for the story makers that are all pointing to the placeholder for the blank spaces the stuff shufflers create for others to write upon.

Drunk on Power

I had to attend a court hearing with someone the other day. I have not been in a court of law in say, twenty something years. I walked in and was immediately approached by the police officer on duty, and she said ‘take those off your head’ and I looked at her dumb struck.

‘What on earth is on my head that is so offensive?'

‘Your eye glasses, take them off now!'

Okay, I thought to myself and folded my reading glasses and stuck them looped into the front of my shirt so that I could locate them again. I did not understand why my eye-glasses offended her, but I thought, okay, we’ll let it slide.

I sat down with my backpack full of books, pens and writing pad as I am in the middle of writing two papers for the end of term, the end of term is now and it is starting to stress me a bit, so I thought well, in case this takes some time I will use it to my benefit and work on my papers.

I was right, it took three hours and a bit. But, as I pulled my pens out of my back pack and set my books and papers beside me, the police officer swooped down on me again.

‘You can’t write in a court of law,’ she shouted at me.

I said nothing and put the pens into my back pack and sat there for a few minutes thinking about this. So, you cannot write, perhaps it is so you won’t write down sensitive information. Okay, it’s a privacy issue, fair enough. Even though I had no intention of writing down what I heard, but simply what I was studying about. I felt I had figured out the pens, but I still felt perplexed about the eye-glasses on top of my head. Okay, I think I will just read then, perhaps she won’t mind if my eye-glasses are on my face as I can see lots of other people with them on.

I managed half a paragraph of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory and suddenly I have the same police officer in my face again...

‘You can’t read in a court of law’, she shouted at me, because obviously by now, I am looking dumber than most of the other folk all staring at me with shocked faces.

‘What pray tell might I do in a court of law’? I asked indignantly.

‘You can sit there and that’s all.’

‘Well, no wonder the world is full of illiterate criminals,’ I bellowed.

And, with that she left me alone as I threw my eye glasses back onto the top of my head and challenged her to arrest me for having four eyes ill equipped to read or write with!

This is a sad state of affairs when the world is more concerned about a fifty-five year old graduate student trying to write her Master’s theses when simply accompanying someone to court for moral support. I should have expected it though, I was a support person for someone convicted of stealing her own stuff, and that didn’t seem to matter to the legal system either...all I saw that day was an institution that has turned into nothing but a revenue generating facility drunk on power.

I remember thinking as I left...I will WRITE ABOUT THIS!

How My Garden Grows this Spring 2011 in Christchurch, New Zealand

There is a pot in my garden that reflects how radically hysterical I can feel on some days...

And then, you can open my secret garden gate and behold my neighbour's wysteria...

Or walk on out upon a trail of petals...

But, I suggest you come back in from time to time and help watch my garden grow as it appears to be a good show this season...

I have decided to use this space as an ongoing diary for the many fruits and vegetables (and nuts, of all kind!) that my husband Clark, and my daughter Kasey and I are all committed to growing for pleasure, consumption and just to watch sometimes...and, for my family and folks back home...here is a little message that never sleeps...from me to 'y'all'....

WATCH THIS SPACE from time to time...it will GROW....Love, K

FIRST GARDEN STORY: HOW MY POPPIES GROW

What if the noise you make is the last thing someone else ever hears?
Will it bring comfort, or simply make them glad it is the last chance someone has to perform upon their world?

Criticisms and over-revved engines are proliferating this world, this world we all share for however long one gets to. Sometimes, it feels too long, sometimes not long enough, but always that depends a lot on what you HEAR...

I struggle to quiet the noise of my world, living on a corner in Christchurch wherein everything has sped up since the beginning of earthquakes. A lot of traffic has been diverted to the street I live on surrounding my garden and since Christchurch was always a city wherein the birds could be heard, they are still there, but mostly muffled by over-revved engines and discouraging words.

I cannot say those last two words without hearing the song “Home on the Range” in my head, so automatically I dream of living somewhere else where the ‘deer and the antelope play’, but I take my past ‘plug-ins’ and beat them back with my hard earned education and what do I have left...

“Silence is Golden” begins to play in my head!

And, the remonstrations of my past perfect parents, “If you don’t have something nice to say, say nothing at all”...but then, who would get to talk these days?! Or, so it appears, but I say...

Take a walk in your garden and find new ways to phrase the things that make you feel negatively. Bloom a language that will make life less difficult for the hearer, water the words that will bring more growth, pluck the words that threaten the opposite by simply not using them anymore...if those things go unsaid, they seem to disappear....

And, if not, and you recognize that these things still need to be discussed, THEN, try pure description rather than critique of any kind...
For today, every time you go to criticize another person or thing, STOP AND ASK YOURSELF:

How can I describe this person or situation without criticizing at all?

It’s a new game I am playing with myself, and the few times I have managed to truly pull it off, I could actually see the poppy growing taller...of course, there will always be poppies that need some propping up...be a friend, give them a kind of descriptive place to reside, rather than a criticism and see what blooms inside your garden, the one on the busy street with all the revved up engines...

I think it more than a little ironic that my red poppy is propped up by the recycling bin...


Wed 26 Oct 2011

I would be remiss if I did not share some photos from my extended garden of Hagley Park in Christchurch, New Zealand. We have more to talk about than just earthquakes...

Though it was a grey day, and few people out, the flowers were, like most survivors of human and non-human manipulations...extraordinary!

GROW ON...CHRISTCHURCH!!! There's nothing more to say...

Thoughts About Facebook

In one of the classes I take, university students admitted to having difficulties completing their papers because of the pull of Facebook. One student admitted to deleting themselves entirely off Facebook as the only solution to keep ‘enough focus’ to write a paper. Many more nodded in agreement.

I do not struggle to stay off Facebook, I struggle to stay on it. But then, I am a fifty-five year old student of life. The students telling me they struggle to stay off Facebook are another wave, generation, workforce, next group of leaders, thinkers, contributors, actors, rehabilitators, reactionaries, respite and/or mighty mess makers of our collective future.

Is this a problem? Probably yes and no, like so many things we have begun to equalize and rationalize as necessary parts of our every day experiences. My friend that came to visit me was quietly texting someone else under the dining room table. My reaction might certainly be different on Facebook instead of ‘in your face’, to be sure, because I grew up when it was a sign of being rude to give your attention to anything other than the person you came to visit. I believe my friend now prefers to greet me virtually and not physically. Come to think of it, I do not hear anything from this friend anymore. I forged a new set of manners by telling my friend to their face what I thought about texting someone else while visiting with another.

I can share that my ‘focus’ and ‘uninterrupted periods of time’ are generally interrupted by things like friends with failing health, birthdays, deaths, children with psychological traumas, over-active children, just plain intelligent children, women, men, dogs, cats, birds, flowering plants, vegetables and fruit trees, all in need of a little attention that distracts me from ‘enough focus’ and punctuates my periods of time, but then, they don’t derail me like Facebook can to the student trying to finish a complex paper, they make me grow, expand, and create a space and time worth being in so I care enough to write the paper in the first place.

Facebook is the new hyper-active kid on the block, and it is time we all decided just how much time we need to spend with this new friend, as opposed to all our old friends like reading, writing and arithmetic, and uh, physical family and friends.

I am talking to a tune of ‘a disappearance’ from our society, that disappearance being the one called ‘solitude’. The capacity to be alone and at peace with one’s self in order to do or think about anything worthwhile, profound and not just responsive, as instant communications and quick information overload creates immediate and un-lasting results. No ‘solitude’, no class paper. No ‘solitude’, no new ideas. No ‘solitude’ no healing, epiphanies, and rejuvenation. Feeling pitted, plastered, knackered, disjointed? Then, you are too plugged in. ‘Turn off’ is the newest form of music for our ears. Seek solitude, and visit Facebook once a week or once a day, but by all means, control it, not it control us and NEVER at the expense of what is right in front of our faces, minus the electronic devices.

‘Solitude’ is a necessary environment which gives birth to ‘enough focus’ through ‘uninterrupted periods of time’ so that any student can write a paper at university level. Toss in the thousands of electronic texts shot toward the rising generation, the blinking boxes on our computers, cell phones and television sets and try to follow the translations of dis-ease caused by connecting with everyone at one time and not with one’s own mind, wherein students of any age stay off the page, otherwise known as not ‘focused enough’, creating the voids we are all beginning to FEEL, but find it hard to explain. Am I making sense? I think I am, but chances are, there is no one out there to respond with, we all just went a ‘twittering’ off somewhere else I suspect, once again.

Write. Write enough to find some new and different ideas to explore, that is why we go to a place to learn, to discuss different ideas, the place we discuss those with ourselves is in the space of silence, or while writing to one’s self, like this. I bet you thought this writing was for you, well, it is mostly for myself, but if it helps you, too, I am happy for that, but when I write, I write to find out what in fact I think about deep enough and strongly enough to WRITE about and push publish.

I care about the pull of Facebook; I care enough to have a sign in my office that says INTERNET ONLY from this time to this time, and after that, none of it!

Do I always adhere? No, but I do try and I am very conscious of the pull of not just Facebook, but anything and everything that will subtract me from myself for too long and thereby turn me into someone who points my finger toward another break in my solitude that then prohibits my showing up for myself at all.

Who amongst us can truly learn anything without deep contemplation, re-collecting all the information that has been blasted at us. We need to take the time to deconstruct, then reconstruct information so that we can achieve some kind of rational goal, like peace, like quiet.

I find that to be the single thing I desire from any experience, peace, and how hard that is when plugged into too many electronic devices that control my input and output in and to the world at large. If I cannot wait to go post the fact that I just made a new batch of cookies, the kind you really eat, and not the kind that attach themselves to me when I am online, then, perhaps it is time to take a decided Facebook holiday, contemplate and think up a new recipe to share, out there, all over the place, all at one time to everyone, this should be important stuff we stop the world in order to share, right?

And, the only reason I have for being on Facebook is that it is the major place I can find someone I know who might respond back to me. I have only one friend left who will write me an email, a letter, and, the rest of the world has simply disappeared into Facebook.

If you can’t beat them you have to join them is my syndrome I tell myself, but then lying in bed at night and the last thing my daughter says to me is ‘do you have your cell phone on you?’ and this happens now, and once, not so very long ago, like a reverse fairy story, it didn’t happen at all, I was not wired for sound but I liked the world better when I held a meaningful conversation with you, and not every day, but only when it was ‘our’ time to be together, now suddenly, we are all sick with one another’s problems at the exact same time through Facebook.

Turn this off now and go THINK about something. Write it down and send it to me, I will read it when 'I decide', which might be once a day, early in the morning and then OFF. After that, there is no room for technology in my life unless there is an earthquake to report on instantly to ease distant minds.

I am committed to being consciously alive, safeguarding my own 'solitude' and finishing this term of papers so I can come back to the wider world, but with boundaries in place, not just on Facebook, but fully present and fully un-present, whatever the case may be, depending on my own need for 'solitude'.

Enough is enough. Facebook needs self monitoring. Just do it! And, I just did.

Two Weeks in America (Not Long Enough)

I have lived in New Zealand for nine years now. And, it helps to be specific and say, Christchurch, New Zealand, as now, I live in a place that feels continuously dangerous on many levels. Any level over ground level feels dangerous when you are plagued with the mountain building a country can do when it is having earthquakes and aftershocks nearly every day, many times a day, without any way to predict, and/or eradicate them.
So, two weeks in America was sounding good for a change, and I had important people in my life to catch up with.

Needful to say, I would be travelling back to my original home during two marked anniversaries. One year from the original earthquake in Christchurch and ten years on from 9/11. It has been a shocking decade for me; it has been a shocking decade for most people. I am here to tell you it makes no difference what you are afraid of; FEAR is a democratic e-motion that propels seemingly sane people into insane head spaces, fear is now our common enemy when we take off our shoes and empty our pockets to board every airplane anywhere in the world. All our spaces have become homogenized by fear.

And yet, what I found living at grass roots level all over the United States, where ever I went, was not fear at all, but the stuff that made me realize once again, America is a truly strong country, not because of anything more outstanding and important than its PEOPLE.

I have to tell you American PEOPLE, I was truly impressed with the lot of you. And, not just because you were already important to me, as you are and always will be, but because I had an opportunity to peek into your lives rather quickly and on the fly with not much opportunity for you to change any existing situation, altercation, lifestyle choice, or the colour of your walls, your walls all seemed the same in one profound way, they were all still standing and without one single exception, built with LOVE.

I was LOVED on by ex-husbands, ex-step children, friends I had not seen in a shocking decade and even longer, taxi drivers, waiters and waitresses, my own children and theirs, strangers on street corners and even those I had altercations with due to jet lag and the inability to wear my own shoes, other Americans offered me their shoes instead.

America, you are amazing and gifted with the profoundest capacity to spread the most powerful e-motion yet. Your rootstock e-motion is not one of fear, but of LOVE. This profound capacity is your major Major, which equips you with the arms to end all wars poured out onto your mediated heads. I stand in awe of you, now from a distance and reconcile why on earth I would ever live anywhere else, if but not for a chance, to spread the LOVE somewhere else.

And, I have no fear left in me that you might not always be the greatest nation on this planet as long as you remember to LOVE all others the way you loved on me for two weeks in America.

Thank you one and all, you KNOW who you are, and you KNOW what to do, and ‘y’all’ do it better than anywhere else I have ever been. It is in this way that Americans are truly EXCEPTIONAL. Keep living it, it is not a dream, it is your reality that makes all the difference and can be the best ‘wildfire’ of all.....xoxoxo, yours always!

Thoughts on the Course of a Year

I have tried to remain faithful to writing something here every week since the earthquakes became such a large part of our lives here in Christchurch nearly a year ago. It was an act of fearlessness. To write some of my thoughts and put into a public forum, was in fact for me, a very frightening adventure.

Each time I push publish, I hold my breath.

Will I offend someone? Will I push someone over the edge of ambivalence to outright hating me or my mushy mind? It took an act of nature to make me not really give a damn. I had witnessed my own mortality, as well as the mortality of many friends and fellow Cantabrians. Life had become uncertain in the extreme sense of the word.

I still hold my breath. But, I push send anyway and hope that those who read, will read between the lines and guess that I am simply trying to discover a voice that might one day be consistent enough to write a complete version of many of the things I have only touched on.

Things like...morals (and not the prescribed ones, but those found through searching the self)...honesty (the kind that comes with confessing beliefs, or the lack of such, in the face of known consensus amongst friends, family and others)...passion (the kind that embraces activities other than sex)...confessions (the kind that reveals long withheld thoughts that I did not want to die without giving text)...

I use to be very afraid of technology and what might happen to me if I put myself 'out there'...meaning here...where others might inspect and find me lacking, confused, or worse...just plain boring. And, I admit, I am all of these things and more, but what is nice now, thanks to all the rocking and rolling with truly no where to run...

I am proud of myself for simply showing up, when the most appealing course of action was to run away and hide.

Petulant Princesses

I have seen a phenomenon that drove me back to university studies in my fifties. I use to have some very ‘airy fairy’ ways of describing this thing I saw/see/saw that troubles me even more now that I have learned new names to call it. For now, I will revert to a descriptive metaphor, ‘Petulant Princesses’, that suddenly came to mind while I was ranting about the need for lobotomies to a friend of mine who has her own Petulant Princess to thwart her family’s existence.

These are young women who openly ‘eat’ their mothers and some ‘others’ for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but most assuredly their mothers are the most palatable and the easiest to chew. Unconsciously these 'fire-y' maidens understand who is the most powerless, and I cannot say as I blame them, I am just trying to learn how to live through the uprising I have seen/see/seen happen right before my eyes to other mothers and me who cannot justify the extreme hostility that is reflected back at us.

Young women today are very angry. And, not just a little bit, but they have had a ‘bloody guts full’ and unfortunately, the only people they know they can take it out on, is ‘Mommy Dearest’. After all, if you cannot trust anyone to treat you as an equal across the game board, who needs a Queen? She may be powerful in chess, but that is the only place she is and this is obviously finally becoming a very big problem. Thankfully, but ouch!

It all began a long time ago, but Petulant Princesses do not KNOW this, they think their own mothers just now invented it, their loss of power. And, this powerlessness has some very ugly ramifications that are displayed in outright rage that clouds even the most educated minds at times, and to a childish and uneducated woman, has little if no opportunity to be expressed without many psychological slaughters, defamation of character and turmoil that will certainly finish the ‘nuclear family’, but then, perhaps losing the ‘nuclear family’ is not such a bad thing?

Personally, I am very happy for the many gay men and women brave enough to want to raise children these days. There is something to say about the strength of character it takes to come out and live authentically in a world wherein a 'fatwa' exists just as much in a Christian nation as in Islam. Unfortunately, I pity anyone raising a Petulant Princess, they have no loyalties to anyone and take no prisoners, they just leave bloody guts and mayhem, so inexperienced are they to their new powers of mobility with no real power at all.

However, even a great education does not preclude these consequences in some instances; Alice Walker’s daughter has done a good job of showing the world just how far a Petulant Princess can go to get a toe-hold within a world that is still, bottom line, a patriarchal society. I ache from and for this phenomenon, perhaps we are not so far away from collectively crying out and saying, “I will give my Petulant Princess in exchange for a Kingdom’.