The Open Empty

 by Zinta Aistars

 

 

 

I’m always feeling it, needing it, but never more than now, when space has become so packed, time spread so thin, so that my mind feels caged and claustrophobic, and my spirit bangs around inside me in silenced scream.

I need open, empty space.

That place, that space, that comes between chores, errands, obligations and duties.

That place, that space, that appears between busyness and rat race.

That vast emptiness that the uninitiated refer to as boredom, but the wise ones recognize as space to dream. Here, creativity unrolls the red carpet and invites a beautiful madness in. Vivid dreams, more than a little mad, intoxicated with possibility, dance here, in that great empty ballroom with dusky lighting.

Yes, dim those lights and let me dream. Sit by the fire with legs outstretched and arms hanging loose over the arms of the chair, in decadent sprawl. Head thrown back to stare at the sky. Shape clouds into flittering butterflies, fire-belching dragons, mustachioed tyrants and leaping sheep, caped bullfrogs riding on their woolly backs.  

Let my fingers sink into sand and play. Play as children do. Build mansions in the mind that crumble into snaking tunnels that open gates to kingdoms.

 

Let me wander in the woods, dodge slants of sunlight, pocket odd mushrooms and acorns, gather wild things in my arms, recognizing kindred spirits. See the shadows of gnomes coming out of hiding. Hear the creatures speaking in languages I suddenly recognize.

Where is that empty place where I can finally exhale?

Where the responsibilities end. That finish line. There. Free. At last, free to wander and look for treasure.

I know it’s here somewhere. I buried it myself, long long ago. A more hopeful self, a dreamer with ocean waves shushing in my ears, a scoundrel, a rascal, a tomboy.

Let me climb trees. Tall ones, scraping skies, wide-shouldered, those ancient oaks where I can sit far out on the limb and dangle bare legs, mosquito-bitten. Sing from the belly, roar from the heart, as if no one can hear me. As if everyone can.

Where is that time for nothing? That precious, sweet moment? Fallen off the calendar, swept off the clock, unrecorded by the stingy time keeper. Stolen and luscious.

To do nothing, nothing at all.

That sorely needed, longed for moment when I am needed nowhere, by no one, set loose like dandelion fluff to swirl on the drunken breeze. Unshackled prisoner, run! Dog chewed through his leash, run! Moth sliding through the crack in the lid of the jar, fly! Spark rising from the bonfire toward the night sky, circle, spin and away!

It’s in that space, in that place of the open empty, that new wonders are born. Tasty thoughts. Craven ideas. Elegant epiphanies. Flashes of stunning and rock-busting revelation.

All this crowdedness, this cramped busyness, this chasing chore to chore, knocking off to-do lists, churning out orders and projects and more, oh enough. My brain is overfull.

I long to wake up and have nothing to do. Not one thing. So that I can finally begin to discover how life was meant to be lived. In the expansive luxury of the unowned and unowning. When I grow quiet enough to hear whispers again, to go where it softly leads me.

 

 

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Weekend on Deck

by Zinta Aistars

At last, at long last, the sweltering summer has cooled to something bearable. Much of this summer has been my time to hibernate, withdraw from the outdoors into my woman-cave, and I have longed to return to fresh air and the gentler breezes of a summer waning.

Summer has been my least favorite season for many years now, as the climate has turned increasingly to extremes. Too many days of 90s-plus, the air thick and milky with humidity. News announcements tick off deaths of those who have no air-conditioned reprieve: heat exhaustion, heat stroke, dehydration. With heat index added in, a great many days this past summer have been into triple digits degrees Fahrenheit.

So I've become the summer recluse. My camping trips take place in the other three seasons, including winter. I'm counting days now to my upcoming escape to the woods in mid October. By then the summer tourists will be gone, the woods will be quiet again, the air will have gentled and cooled, the nights with a crisp edge.

Oh, I long to be outdoors again. At last, a hint of it ... the summer releasing its sweaty palms and letting go, little by little, letting go. At last, a Saturday that I can be outdoors again and enjoy.

I hit the raspberry fields on Saturday afternoon and pick three pints full. My favorite summer berry, and for this, I forgive summer much. I have real whipping cream at home, waiting. And my kitchen counter is stacked with summer vegetables, ready to prepare and process. Tomatoes by the dozen, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, jalapenos, basil, patty pan squash. It will be a weekend of cooking, I think.

But when Saturday evening comes, I take my break. This past work week has been brutal. Indeed, it has been for some time now, chipping away at a mountain of writing projects that seem to multiply as fast as I can dig through them. I'm tired. I'm worn to the bone.

Setting a bowl of just washed berries in front of me, I settle my bones onto the patio loveseat and toss a few logs into the fire pit just as the sky dims to that dusky hint of evening approaching. Jig, my old cat, and Guinnez, my old chow pup, settle in with me. We are all feeling it ... the need to draw a deep breath and release.

The fire catches quickly. A ribbon of curling smoke, a puff, then sudden flame. Sparks burst into a flare, and the logs crackle and spit. I sigh.


Not so bad here, really. I've been chomping at the bit for some time, talking north, talking escape, planning those still so far away golden years. It's the fatigue. Work, work, no room for play makes a Z squirm and restless. Keep those numbers trim. I've consulted with a new financial adviser in the past week ... can it happen? Will I ever be free? I can be, he says, with discipline. For this, I do not lack it.

Yet there is just so much one can do in a few years time when most of my adult working years were so lean. I'm trying to be realistic even as I refuse to entirely quash a dream. For now, to ease the way, to provide some reward today while I work for tomorrow, I gift to myself by gifting to my house, providing comfort and reprieve.

Such as this corner on the newly painted deck. I've created a cozy corner, and the trees and shrubbery have grown in just the right places around the backyard, so that when I sit on the loveseat, not one neighbor has a view of me. I could almost imagine myself in the woods already.

The night deepens, and the cool edge to it is delicious. I've longed for such evenings. Legs outstretched, I lean back and sip a cool something and gaze up at the stars, a glimmering between the ceiling of tree limbs overhead, so thickly leafed now I almost can't see the sky at all. There is no moon anywhere.


Glass empty, I bring out my laptop, plug it in to the deck extension, and boot up a movie channel. I pick a foreign film, French subtitled, an autobiographical documentary of director and photographer Agnes Varda, called The Beaches of Agnes. The story unfolds, the elderly Agnes walking backwards on a beach as she returns to the stories of her childhood and young adulthood, her first forays into photography. I'm drawn in, amused and enchanted by her story, and the night draws in around me.

When it's done, I'm not. I still want to sit in the cool of the night. That cooling air, it's a caress. And I love this night silence. I sit long after the last ember has grown black.

On Sunday morning, I'm back out again. Another gift, this pleasantly refreshing morning. Yesterday's just picked raspberries add fresh flavor to my oatmeal. I'm still in my robe, a blanket tossed across my lap, the morning is that cool still, and it makes me smile. Long time coming. I've had cabin fever, and now I can't bear to go inside. 

Only long enough to make a dent into those summer vegetables. Amy has sent a recipe for her tomato soup, and I know it's incredibly delicious--she's served it to me. Now it's my turn to make it. I cut her recipe by almost half, just enough to put some away but mostly so that I have some for now, this week, perhaps to serve some guests.

I don't like tomato soup. At least, I thought I didn't, until I tasted Amy's. Campbell's, what travesty. I blanch a dozen sun-ripened tomatoes, mixing types, including some heirlooms. The skins pop off and I put those into compost. I chop up the skinless tomatoes, celery, onions, peppers, and toss in fresh basil. A bit of flour, butter, brown sugar and salt, including some of my oak-smoked sea salt, and it thickens. Now a loaf of fresh, crusty bread, Irish butter, cheese made by The Cheese Lady in Texas Corners, just down the road.

Just then my parents stop by, as if called and drawn in by tomato scent. I seat them on my patio loveseat and serve. They moan with culinary delight and ask for more.

But then the patio is mine again. The world draws in to become my little corner of it. There are so, so many things I should be doing ... so much work awaits. I only give it this: a load of laundry, dishes rinsed and put into the dishwasher and set to humming, but then I'm out again.

I'm reading The Winter Diary by t. kilgore splake, and I can't help but see the similarities, even if there are so many opposite paths. I think this book has come my existential way with supreme timing. Nesting as I am, planning as I am, fingering dreams to see which ones will, should, can hold, and which ones pack away, I am reminded by this story of my own chafing spirit.

A few days ago, I shared a Guinness--delicious! first of my approaching-longed-for-fall season--with Andy Robins, news director of WMUK, Kalamazoo's NPR affiliate, and his sweet wife, Dorothy. We talked ideas for the station's expanding "Arts and More" series. I told Andy about splake and his ties to Kalamazoo, and it seemed a good fit. I'll do an on-air interview with the Keweenaw writer sometime in September, connected by Skype on the northern end with me in the radio booth here in Kalamazoo. We're working out the details now, but I'm already formulating the questions in my mind as I read The Winter Diary ...

... and wondering how many of those questions will really be my own dream-ghosts itching in, as splake would put it, my brain-skull cavity, and in silenced screaming protest of, as he would put it, rat bastard time. Stealing mine. Oh, to be in the woods, deep into the cool green silence, and hear one voice only, of that old tease Muse. What writer, what artist, doesn't dream of it?

All life working, toiling, toward that freedom that for too many, somehow, never comes. I'm determined not to let it get away in the trivia of the every day.



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Nesting Instinct

by Zinta Aistars

 

 

 

The last time I recall having this intense of a nesting instinct, I was nine months very pregnant. We had just moved south from Michigan to just outside of Cincinnati, across the Ohio River and on the Kentucky side. I’d never lived in such a big house, but there was no time to be dazzled. The clock was ticking, the calendar pages were flying away, the due date was approaching—there was no time to spare. With hubby at work in his new job, a newly minted chief of a department overseeing 800 employees, he was gone, gone, gone, and I and my round belly were the only ones in the new house to unpack and make it Home.

It took some interesting belly gyrations and heavy-load tricks to paint the new nursery, unpack stacks of boxes, and arrange the house just so. I worked at a frenzied pace, fierce in my determination. I wanted it all to be ready and perfect for our first baby. And it was. And she was.

But that was a long time ago, a long way away, in a marriage that has been long over, and I am oh too wonderfully far into midlife to be growing that kind of belly.

So what’s with the nesting instinct?

What is it, who is it, that I am preparing to birth now? Paint brush in hand, dabbed all over with dark brown paint—autumn brown, states the can, hardly a nursery shade—I am coating the deck walls and railings with a fresh new coat.

This, after a long list of other home repairs and improvements. With much gratitude to my handy son, all grown up baby #2, my bathroom is now entirely renovated, from repainted ceiling down to new porcelain floor tiles and vanity. One of the bedrooms has been renovated; the others have been prepped. The living and dining rooms were gutted and redone a couple years ago. Landscaping has transformed the front of the house.

After 14 years—count ‘em! 14!—of having a non-working dishwasher in my kitchen, I bought a top of the line new machine for my son to install. I’d forgotten it was there, felt no need, but now that I had this new purring appliance, I couldn’t be more delighted.

A renovation of the downstairs bathroom has just begun, the family room soon to follow, and I have been eyeing that living room carpet and thinking … new hardwood floors? a gas fireplace installed on the freestanding wall?

What gives?

I let the paintbrush drip into the paint can for a moment to access my progress. Just a few months ago, I very nearly bought a new house closer to work. Two weeks from closing, with the seller giving me an opening with his reluctance to make the repairs my home inspector had pointed out, I did a quick backpedal. I walked. I recommitted to my 110-mile daily commute—oh, it’s not that bad!—and starting showering my current house with gifts instead. 

And it’s not just the home repairs and buffing up. Something else has been going on with me. I’ve been cooking up a storm of garden fresh vegetables and farm-raised meats into delicious meals, freezing many for a winter day to come. Every Friday, I stop by Harvest of Joy in Shelbyville, an organic farm run by my friend Amy, gardener and poet extraordinaire, and pick up my CSA share. Every Friday, I bring home a tote full of tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapeño peppers, sweet peppers, green onions, eggplant, broccoli, basil, dill, zucchini, salad greens, kale, turnips, beets, snap beans, cantaloupe, until the bounty spills in vivid color across my kitchen counters. 

I think I’m going to have to buy an extra freezer. All week I cook and prepare, marveling at how good food tastes when it’s this fresh. What I can’t eat, I stash. Great pots of water boil as I trim beans to blanch, then freeze. My eyes water from slicing and dicing jalapeño peppers to freeze for autumn chili.  Dish after dish of diced green onions are stacked in my freezer to use in those weeks when the garden will lie fallow.

Am I feeding an army?

No, just me. And my visiting all grown up babies, and my dear friends, and my much beloved family, and that special face waiting so patiently at the brand new front door to come in, please come in and be welcome!

Yet I am struck with how much I resemble a squirrel, padding my nest with a comfortable lining, storing away a stash of yummy nuts for the winter, scampering this way and that to get all ready.

Ready for what?

All my life, as long as I can remember, I have longed for Home with a capital H. I have always found myself in various degrees of Home in many different places, notably on this shore, the United States, as well as on the Baltic shore, in Latvia, where my ethnic roots go deep. That still remains so. And for all my moving about during my life, I have left pieces of myself in many places that I’ve lived. I have roots in Cincinnati, where both of my children were born, but in some ways even more in the Keweenaw, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where wild beauty resonates in me in ways I do not feel anywhere else.

I still can’t say where the coming years will take me. On many travels, I’m sure, although I’ve been exploring nearby places more than the beyond and distant yonder in the last few years.

Certainly this house here, now, the one where I’ve lived the past 16 or so years, is not nearly the best of them all. But it’s mine. I am dutifully paying it off. If it little resembles today what it once was, it is because I have been infusing it with my own personality, my own joie de vivre, expressions of myself in terms of art and color and mood, mementoes of those other places I also love, and of those many people who matter to me.

What all that swirl comes down to … is that I can create Home wherever I am. Because no place is perfect. No one place holds me entirely. Every place on earth is temporary. Why not make this one its very best and most suited to me?

Even as I watch the world swirl around me. Such madness. Debates about debt and default, world markets crashing, housing markets diving, retirement plans turning to smoke, what’s a middling old girl to do? Slow down and get my acorns in a row. Make the best of what I have. On one hand, dressing up my nest to be as nice as I can make it. On the other, paying off all debt, trimming those numbers down to zero, so that the madness need not affect me.

If I was nesting then, those decades ago, in preparation for the birth of a baby, I seem to be nesting now for the birth of a retirement nest egg, complete with nest. Haven’t I worked toward this end all my roller coaster life? I see that golden place ahead, even if it is yet many years …. but I want to plan now, be ready, have my winter stash safe in its bounty.

Funny, it suddenly occurs to me—what I am doing is a combination of cuts and targeted spending. I am investing and saving, but I am also spending to build a future. It takes both approaches to get it right.

I dip my brush in the paint and cover one more board. The night is coming on, getting too dark to really see what I am doing. Time for rest. The old deck is looking sharp. I visualize the new fire pit, the patio chairs and sofa with welded coffee table to hold my book and chilled glass. Ah, those warm and breezy evenings … I am sure I will enjoy many to come, right here, creating the perfect place for them. Eventually, this will become a sun room, with windowed walls, but until I save for that, this will be exactly right.

Just as there is no Mr. Perfect, I’ve discovered—there is no perfect Home. We need to bring it to ourselves, create it around us, own it, make it ours. Sustainable, reasonable, beautiful, peaceful. Wherever we are at this moment in time.