Words, Again

I have missed this little pocket of screen that some how feels it is just you and me, Joan as a writer in small places. Face book is the posting of my work, my projects, my sending on of calls to action and thank yous to all who live there. Here I am the the aging woman, the writer who never did another book but yet it feels as if I have never stopped writing. A 78 year old woman with yet another body mystery--a mass in my left lung that is not cancer, but a rare disease known as granulomatous inflammation--a word I cannot really pronounce. An autoimmune misreading, trying too hard to protect, it has created a hardness of cells that can be systemic but for now seems confined to my lung. The mysteries of the body misreading itself, a tenderness for its fallacies, when it errs on the side of protection. How human that all is--to create difficulties from too much vigilance.

I am still in Melbourne, still with Di, Cello still walks beside me, he and I slower, more crooked. We slant like Emily Dickinson's famous line, but I am afraid no truth seeps in. Other then the changing body, the changing abilities, the changing time one remains vertical. I am deep in helping to edit the Sinister Wisdom issue celebrating LHA's 45 years of existence along with wonderful LHA-ers: Red, Shawn, Morgan, Saskia, Deb, Maxine, Flavia. From 23,000 miles away, collaboration.

A Flame Robin, an Emblem of Passion, 2017, Anglesea, Australia

Like this pulsing heart of life, my heart, my head sometimes feels like bursting as I follow Trump's bellowing, the easy cruelties, the rush of money because Capitalism does not care who lives behind barbed wires or cocked guns-the overstatements of intent--I watch my NY Yankees, a daughter of the Bronx, I still am--and the the Boston Red Sox's sweat shirts assert "Do Damage"--not just simply win or do the best you can. The new Supreme Court Judge, a strange child man whose face pouts much like Trump's when he feels wrong done by, now a life time of power. Democrats demonized as the extreme left--we predicted this so many years ago when "liberal" became too scary for its progressive attachments--the center does not hold, it does not exist. But and the but is needed, we march, we get arrested, we write and create and vote and get others to vote and will never give up this resistance. 

I am very cold often and tired but books clothe me--my watercolor pencils take me into Cezanne's world, I miss my old friends and wish they were closer-- a kind of loneliness has been a companion my whole life, now intensified by this great distance from my historical home. I fool myself, this loneliness is in my bones.

A wonderful Visit with Morgan and Saskia, 2017