Janis Joplin's unexpected death on October 4, 1970, was a turning point in my life and in the lives of many of those in our generation. I had wanted to be just like her and now I just wanted to be alive. I had just had my 21st birthday a few days earlier and could drink legally. Upon her death, I had the thought that perhaps drinking wasn't was a particularly good idea for me. I told myself I would be more careful than Janis had been with alcohol and would not use any hard drugs.
I know I've told these stories before but need to keep telling them because each time I tell them I realize something that didn't occur to me on the previous telling.
At the time of Janis' death, R was in the last months of his year serving as an Army helicopter mechanic in Vietnam. Jimi Hendrix had died unexpectedly a few weeks earlier on September 18.
In the early morning hours of December 7, 1970, the day R returned from Vietnam, we took some LSD that his older brother (also an Army veteran) had given to us and drove west in my Volkswagen to Half Moon Bay where his parents and seven younger siblings lived. R was the third oldest in that family of ten children and the last to serve in the military. His father had been in the Navy in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed on December 7, 1941. As we approached Crystal Springs reservoir, I heard the heartening sound of an acoustic guitar followed by Janis Joplin's clear voice coming from the car radio. She was singing in a way I hadn't heard before but her voice was unmistakable. That was my introduction to "Me and Bobbie McGee."
It was also the beginning of a nightmarish period in my life. My living nightmare eventually came to an end. R's nightmare went on and on until he died at age 58, having spent his last months in a VA hospital after suffering a brainstem stroke as a result of his drug and alcohol use. It's occurring to me that R and Janis Joplin had much in common in the suffering that alcoholism and drug addiction brought to their lives and in their unmet desire for peace of mind and heart.
I've had two vivid two dreams about Janis Joplin since she died. In one, she was in recovery from alcoholism, celebrating life in the company of other recovering alcoholics. In the other dream, just before the turn of the century, Janis Joplin looked at me in a thoughtful way and said, "Please kiss the 21st century for me."
Dream from January 2020: Compassion for the lizard after being told that the lizard had no choice.
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Pay no attention to the faults of others, things done or left undone. Consider what by oneself is done or left undone.
-- Buddha
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Please Call Me by My True Names – Thich Nhat Hanh
Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow — even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.
My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion.
A few nights before Valentine's Day, one of my former medical transcription co-workers organized what has become a yearly get-together at a local Asian restaurant. Twelve of us showed up. None of us work as medical transcriptionists anymore. I was the holdout until last October, when I gave up working as a medical transcription editing subcontractor for less than minimum wage and no benefits in a field that once gave us all a good income with excellent benefits. The oldest of us is 70. The youngest seemed to be in her late 20s or early 30s. She brought her 5-month-old daughter who seemed to thoroughly enjoy the social occasion. We certainly enjoyed her unguarded presence. The youngest former transcriptionist started working at the hospital sometime after I left in December 2003.
Until I received a group email with attached photos, I didn't realize that another somewhat younger former co-worker had taken out her cell phone and had taken pictures of all of us that she could see from her place at the far end of our long patched-together table, including a selfie with the woman sitting next to her. That was the only photo that was at all flattering to the subjects. She caught us all in unguarded moments, none expressing how much we enjoyed being together. It puzzles me that she would send photos that, for the most part, show us looking unhappy or tense. Although I was enjoying myself and feeling good about myself, in that unguarded moment I look distant, remote, unengaged, possibly like a sad drunk, although I was drinking water. I see myself with very critical and judgmental eyes, I know. Near the end of the dinner, she called my name. When I looked up, she had her cell phone aimed at me. I quickly put on my best guarded photo face.
In the photo from my childhood with my middle sister and my older step-cousin, I have a rare unguarded smile. As an adult, I have never been able to smile so freely in photos. I wish I could. I freeze when cameras are pointed at me. I remember being told as a small child by my mother that my shy little smile was not good enough. I would contort my face to have the "good enough" smile she desired. As I grew older, my smile in photos became guarded, frozen, tight, expressing that I felt hopelessly ugly, awkward, inadequate.
This year as Valentine's Day (after what would have been my father's 104th birthday on February 11) approached, I felt at odds with myself, uneasy, unsettled, edgy, feeling that I needed more sleep than usual and drifting into the old low self-esteem, even self-hate, that I lived with from early childhood until I was 37 years old and began to recover from bulimia, anorexia, and alcoholism. Although I haven't seen my mental health counselor for two months, something prompted me last week to make an appointment. My mental health diagnosis is related to past trauma. I have come a long way. My current counselor is the best one I've ever had. Her first opening was on Valentine's Day at 10:30 a.m.
These last two weeks have been particularly difficult. Nothing difficult happened that hasn't happened many times before, but my emotional reactions seemed way out of proportion to the circumstances. Those emotions that I guard so carefully were exposed, and I could not escape the reality that I felt hurt, jealous, sad, ashamed, and angry --very angry.
When I was a little girl, my father told me that I looked ugly when I was angry. My mother was angry on a regular basis, but I didn't observe him telling her that she looked ugly. Perhaps taking the cue from my mother, I was angry much of the time, although I tried to hide my anger. I concluded that I was truly ugly when I was angry. As much as I tried, I could not hide my anger. I could not hide what my father called ugly. I told myself at 6 years old, "Boys don't like me because I am ugly. No one will ever marry me." When we were 7 years old, a Roman Catholic friend of mine had a nun doll. I wasn't sure what a nun doll was, but the doll seemed to bring happiness to my friend. My friend didn't look angry. I wished I were as pretty as she was. She looked kind. I asked for a nun doll for my birthday. My mother bought me a blonde bride doll instead. The bride doll looked miserable. The doll was only a child, a child bride. My father used to joke that my mother was his child bride. She would get angry and say, "That's not funny." My father seemed to enjoy making my mother angry. I started thinking that my mother was ugly, too. She looked like me.
Of course, no one was ugly. It was all a lie that I believed because there was no one to tell me otherwise, and then a few years later my youngest sister told me that an older boy had told her that she was the only pretty girl in our family. That cemented the lie for me. A boy said I was not pretty. My father said I was ugly. I was convinced. When I was 10 years old, I went on my first diet, sensing that my parents were not pleased with my body that was developing earlier than most girls. Now I felt that I was both ugly and what I thought was fat. I was always on one diet or another until I was 37 years old.
At 10 years old, I was prescribed glasses for nearsightedness. Already feeling ugly and fat, I refused to wear my glasses. As a result, I could not see people's faces unless they were in close proximity. Other children thought I was what we used to call "stuck up." I assumed that boys thought that I was ugly, even without glasses. They kept their distance from me. I did not put them at ease. I was painfully shy and awkward and never had a boyfriend until I was 17 years old and met a charming 17-year-old high school dropout who smoked cigarettes and marijuana, took LSD and other hallucinogens, uppers and downers, and used intravenous drugs, all because he didn't want to become an alcoholic.
He told me I looked pretty when I was angry. He said, "How could somebody NOT love you?" He won my heart. I idolized him. I won his heart. We broke each other's hearts. I thought the problem was that I was fat and ugly. Nothing he said could convince me otherwise. I could not believe that I was worthy of love. He couldn't believe he was worthy of love. He proceeded on a path of self-destruction that ended with his death at age 58.
The only time he sent me a Valentine was when we were about 40 years old. He wrote on the inside of the card, "I love you. Always will."
I remember listening to this song on one of the first Valentine's Days after I met him:
Last Valentine's Day I dreamed a dream about him that brought me joy. My dreams seem to be a series of unguarded moments, both mysterious and enlightening, even those that are nightmares. They can bring me joy, and or they can bring me absence of joy along with insight.
May our dreams bring joy and if not joy, then insight.
I'm not sure why painful memories from the past came up this Valentine's Day, but I do know that I can't let go of what I don't acknowledge. When I tell the stories from my past, I feel myself being healed in the present. When I find myself reverting to childhood self-hate, I seek help. I am not alone anymore.
"There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance." (Olive Schreiner, from The Story of an African Farm)
The sky just cleared, and there is snow in the hills where I saw the light a few days ago.
May we all be loved and love ourselves in our guarded and unguarded moments.
My mother and I had a difficult relationship while she was alive, although today I am remembering the events surrounding Mother's Day in 1987. I had traveled from Bellingham, Washington, to the bluffs of the Pacific Ocean in Gualala, California, where my parents lived. When I arrived, my parents suggested that we all go out to a restaurant for a champagne breakfast. At the time, I didn't know that I was an alcoholic. Because of the events that followed my last drink, a glass of champagne, in May of 1987, I eventually came to understand that I am an alcoholic. On my 21st birthday, in 1970, my mother bought a bottle of champagne and said, "Okay, now you are old enough to drink. Let's go down to the basement and have a glass of champagne."
Once alcohol enters my system, I experience what has been identified as the "phenomenon of craving," the defining element of a real alcoholic. It is not a pleasurable mellow feeling. It is as if a bottomless thirst for alcohol is the only thing that exists. I had experienced that for quite some time when I drank alcohol, probably from my earliest experience with alcohol, but my solution to that was to "be careful." I had no idea that I was an alcoholic. I attempted to control my drinking. However, if one is an alcoholic, control is impossible. Impossible because of a craving that tells me that it must be satisfied or I will die.
The simple solution for me has been not to drink at all. I have not experienced that terrible all-consuming craving since 1987.
Let us just say that I didn't stay in Gualala to be with my mother on Mother's Day. I was off and running with a craving that took 3 weeks to quiet down. During that time, I felt suicidal. For some life-saving reason, I tried to address that craving and suicidal depression by eating massive amounts of sugar. However, something did give me the presence of mind to go to a florist and arrange for flowers to be delivered to my mother a few days later on Mother's Day. My mother was ecstatic upon receiving the flowers. I felt a twinge of guilt and remorse when I saw the photo she sent a few weeks later of her, radiant, with the gift of flowers. I felt I didn't deserve to be loved because I was so angry at her. In the years since 1987, that has changed.
We all deserve to be loved and we can be angry with those we love as long as we need to be.
I was so angry at my mother that I never wanted to have children because I couldn't bear the thought of a child being that angry at me. I was afraid of being like my mother. I wonder if that fear and anger kept me from ever getting pregnant. Who knows?
A few nights ago I dreamed that my mother prepared a gift for me that came in the form of a generous harvest of colorful winter squashes and pumpkins, arranged like a farmer's market display one might see in October, the month of my birth in 1949.
Below is a photo of my mother, Josephine, at Anchor Bay, California, a few miles north of Gualala. The photo was taken by my father. The photo at the top of the blog is of my mother as a single woman in the 1940s, passionate about horses. One of the sacrifices she made in marrying my father and having children was that she rarely rode a horse ever again. I remember her saying in the last years of her life that she would like to ride a horse one more time. However, she had an ankle injury, sustained while riding a horse, that prevented her from doing that in the way she had a young woman.
Reconciliation after death is possible. How? I don't know, but I am experiencing it again today on Mother's Day. Maybe my mother was an alcoholic, too. Who knows?
As I uploaded this painting today, it seemed to be out of the chronological order I thought was accurate. It was in the fall of 1984 that I began to live alone, so it seemed likely that this was painted in the summer of 1984.
As I looked closely at the painting, I saw elements of a later style and began to remember that this is another painting that had been put aside as a "failed effort" and then brought out again and finished by adding a border and words.
In the months before I began to learn to live alone, I had a dream. A few times in my life I have had dreams where I hear words which are more memorable than the visual part of the dream. In one such dream, I heard someone say, "Pelicans are the guardians of the world."
In the summer of 1984, before I had made a clear decision to live alone, I heard in a dream, "Code is the farewell bride's bible." As I recall, there was vague imagery that went along with the words, and that was what I tried to paint in 1984. What seemed most important, though, were the words in the dream. In the summer of 1984, I was not ready to deal with the implication of the words.
Looking again at this image, I notice the "oooo" marks at the top of the painting. What I remember about those marks is that they came from a book by Alice Walker, possibly THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR, published in 1989. My recollection is that they were another way of writing the word "love." I just looked through my copy of THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR and can't find the passage. Typing "oooo" and "Alice Walker" and "love" in Google in various ways didn't get me anywhere either. Now I believe that it is possible that this painting was finished in 1989 or later. Who knows?
While looking for "oooo," I came across this passage from THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR:
"You don't know, or maybe you do," said Mr. Hal, a look of deep satisfaction with the coffee and with his thoughts on his face, "how wonderful a feeling it give you when you know somebody love you and that's just the way it is. You can be good, you can be a devil, and still that somebody love you. You can be weak, you can be strong. You can know a heap or nearly nothing. That kind of love, when you think about it, just seems like some kind of puzzle, and you can spend a lifetime trying to figure it out. If you puffed up with vanity, you can't help but think what they love is something you created yourself. Or maybe it's your money or your car. But there's something . . . . It's like how you love a certain place. You just do, that's all. And if you're lucky, while you're on this earth, you get to visit it. and the place "knows" about your love, you feel. That was the love and still is the love between Lissie and me."
Yoko Ono released an album titled "Season of Glass" in 1981, a year after the murder of John Lennon. After John Lennon's death, I had a dream that John Lennon and Yoko Ono visited my home and stayed overnight. In the morning, they announced that they were going to hitchhike to Seattle. Concerned, I tried to dissuade them, but they were determined to hitchhike. After they left, I felt intense fear for their lives. Then I remembered that John had already died. He couldn't die again. With this thought, I knew we had nothing to fear. In the context of the dream, Yoko was safe, too.
When I look at this image today, I see a young woman and a young man at the beginning of their journey together. The man who bought this painting from me remarked that it reminded him of Diego Rivera's painting from 1925 called "Flower Day." I had not seen Rivera's painting before doing my drawing but went to the library to search for a reproduction of "Flower Day" and saw why he made that connection. I love Diego Rivera's painting.
How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be? -- Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Welcome to "37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE)".
The photograph currently at the top of my blog was taken from my porch before sunrise on October 29, 2023.
"OLD GIRL OF THE NORTH COUNTRY" (the earliest name for my blog -- http://oldgirlfromthenorthcountry.blogspot.com
) came to life in early December of 2006 so that I could post a 42-year retrospective of my paintings and drawings and through that action, create a new relationship with the day the man I loved returned from Vietnam in December 1970. For a while (sometime after spring of 2008, which is when he died) my blog was "TALKING 37TH DREAM WITH RAINBOW (RUMORS OF PEACE)". For a number of years, it's been "TALKING 37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE)." As of April 12, 2017 my blog was titled "37TH DREAM / TALKING 37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE/LOOKING UP)". Somewhere along the way it became 37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE).
To begin viewing the retrospective with narrative, scroll down to December 8, 2006, on this page:
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. -- Martin Buber (1878-1965)
It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.
-- Robinson Jeffers
The true end of a war is the rebirth of life; the right to die peacefully in your own bed. The true end of war is the end of fear; the true end of war is the return of laughter.
-- Alfred Molano
Enjoy every sandwich -- Warren Zevon (1947-2003)
Not in God's wilds will you ever hear the sad moan, "All is vanity." No, we are paid a thousand times for all our toil, and after a single day spent outdoors in their atmosphere of strength and beauty, one could still say, should death come — even without any hope of another life — "Thank you for this most glorious gift!" and pass on.
-- John Muir (1838-1914)
Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do? Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. Hugh Fennyman: How? Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.
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