I try to keep hope above despair, even when it feels like 51 to 49. As long as hope prevails, I'm good, I can say with the Anishinaabe women of the Minnesota North Shore, All is as it should be.
It has dipped below, more times than I'd like to admit, since I came here to the last valley before the Sierra Nevada mountains. My semicolon tattoo reminds me daily that the attempt to walk away from it all, back on Boston's Hemenway in 1974, still fuels a current promise: that this was not the end of the sentence but rather a semicolon stop to a horrific turn of events. I promised myself a natural death.
Now I'm not so sure. I look up at the mountains where the 19th century Donner party partially survived a brutal winter and wonder: why am I still alive?
The combination of stressors are incompatible, the trifecta that overcame me at the beginning of the pandemic, Ides of March 2020, such that any solution to one cancels out what might reduce another. My mechanical engineering of problem sets is insufficient and incomplete. Do these equations require relative space, multidimensional factoring, quantum dualities? Am I in non-Euclidean warp, where parallel lines meet and undulate by rhythm of a dark tide? Am I lost in unknowable dark matter, sailing blind through a galaxy of black holes?
I'd be happy with a probabilistic solution, really I would. I don't need necessarily true outcomes, religious or arithmetic. In fact, the humility of both scientific and mystical souls demand this, that we see through the glass darkly, i.e., probabilistically. Our senses will lie, forever reaching into empirical space at the margins of our daily beliefs...
My mother's favorite Psalm was 121: "I look up to the hills, from whence cometh my help; my help cometh from the Lord (okay, I substitute ChristSophia) who keeps heaven and earth."
My window frames Mount Rose and Slide Mountain, if I ignore the Atlantis and Peppermill casinos. In Portugal I lived just behind the Estoril Casino, so inductive probabilities decidedly factor in my life these days.
Three stressors, three generations, three bodies, female and ashamed and furious...
She moves over and I look over the cliff, down the rocks far below, at herself, myself, ourselves...
All is as it should be.
(APRIL 2024)
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