Halloween... Hello Over There...

The veil between the worlds is thinnest today.

If I remember my shamanic training correctly, Samhain (pronounced Sow-when) is the Celtic New Year. And the veil between the worlds is thinnest. Today. Hence all the ghosties and ghoulies, and Dia de los Muertos altars, and things that go bump in the night.

It's our family, and friends, coming to say "Hello. How are you doing these days?"

So today I honor my loved ones on the other side - my brother Keith. I love you. I hope you're having a wonderful time. My friend Janine - I hope you're dancing all the time. Tommy, old friend and newest crossed - I smile when I think of you, without pain now and happy, I think. Ray. You too had an October death, like Keith. Janine. Tom. Aunts and uncles and cousins, we love you and we'll see you again, we trust. Phyllis. Mother-in-law. Your son has been talking about you lately. We hope you are living in love and ease.

And now I'd like to share with all of you, those reading alive ones and those who are reading over my shoulder and whispering around me, a little glimpse of the liveliest boy and his plans for Halloween... he had a fever last night, so we stayed home from his school halloween party... a bit sad, that, but we're going out for trick or treating this evening.

And he is going to be a giant pumpkin -

With:

2 boots going clomp clomp
1 pair of pants going wiggle wiggle
1 white shirt going shake shake
2 gloves going clap clap
1 tall black hat going nod nod
and
1 big scary pumpkin head going BOO! BOO!

He's had the big pumpkin part decided since late August (although said pumpkin is really like a big round shirt - I still have to figure out to deal with his desire to have it on his HEAD) - and then he learned this story in school last week and adapted his costume to the story...

We invite you all to walk a little ways with us tonight and today. Let us know how you are, and if there's anything you've learned over there that we should know. We are listening. We love you.

Wow, the wind is blowing the tree branches outside my office almost sideways. Everything is listing north. With sun glancing off all of them. It's gorgeous.




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Simple Pleasures

The wind is blowing ever so slightly out there, outside my window. A small airplane hums; I can hear it but not see it. I can hear the saw of our neighbor next door, working on something. All faint, these sounds, quiet and purposeful.

All shades of green and gold and brown, amber, yellow, burnt orange, lime, umber - all flick and swish and quiver in the wind. Massive trees and new young trees, against the best kind of Northwestern sky. Dove grey, pale blue, soft light.

New shelves adorn my office, thanks to my husband.

Wait - holy anachronism, Batman! A ginormous stretch limo, black with a pale pearly gray top, just drove past my idyllic view. Turned down Benefit Street. Wow. Who was in there? Why are they out in a stretch limo on a sleepy fall Sunday afternoon, in our quiet little neighborhood?

Well. Now. Where was I?

Too late, I'm off on a limo wonder. It's turning the other corner now, heading out of site. Did a neighbor get a new job as a driver? Coming to show his family his new gig? Did someone get rich and decide to celebrate in a really weird way?

Anyway. Maybe it's a good reminder of pleasures that are not so simple. That take way more gasoline than that crow who just swooped by. That smell differently than the fall bouquet I had so much fun making an hour or so ago (dark green shiny laurel, fading red tree branch, orange & green & yellow & red maple, bright golden wisteria curling on long brown twisty branches, a pale yellow sunflower, a bright gold sunflower, hydrangea turning deep wonderful maroon, and one lone cornflower blue hydrangea to remind me of summer).

And now there is a house to clean, laundry to fold, a bed to make up with fresh sheets. And a dinner to make for friends coming over. Fish and sausage and chicken on the grill, squash, brown rice sauteed with red and yellow and green peppers and the last of the basil and green beans.

It is our first fall here in Seattle since 2006. Three years.

I am in love with my home.



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A letter to President Obama regarding the Nobel Peace Prize

I just sent this letter. I decided to post it here as well.

Dear President Obama,

First of all, congratulations on this honor. I continue to be proud for supporting you and working for you and contributing to you.

I know little of the details of the overwhelming issues that you deal with on a daily basis, so I know that my opinion is just that - an opinion.

But I hope that you will consider some actions in light of receiving this Peace Prize.

I hope that you will resist the urge to send more troops to Afghanistan, and that you will bring home the troops already there (as well as those in Iraq).

I hope that you will continue to support peace here at home by insisting on a public option for health insurance.

I hope that you will hold the banks accountable for the bailout money they have received, and make sure their mistakes do not further indebt me and my son.

I hope that the joyous sense of hope we all had last November will be fulfilled in a country that is better for all of us who live here.

I do not envy you your job. I am grateful that you are leading our country. I hope that you continue to follow your conscience and not give too much of our dream away.

We are with you.

Humbly,

Maria Glanz



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Lavendar sky updates...

I was going to call this post Twilight updates, but now that word has become less than it used to be. Too specific. Sad, that.

Just a quick school update, for friends who've been sending prayers. The State of Washington and City of Seattle, in their infinite wisdom and let's-focus-on-kids-first strategies, have declined to offer my son a spot in their subsidized get-ready-for-kindergarten ECEAP program. The sweet little school right down the street. He can't go there. Because he is FIVE YEARS OLD and OLD ENOUGH FOR KINDERGARTEN.

I finally got to talk to the head of the Department of Early Learning for the City of Seattle, after three + weeks of waiting. He can't go, because it's a "performance standard" and a "mandate." It's "legally binding" - whatever it is, this un-named rule that says he can't go to this free program that's supposed to help kids get ready for school.

We could pay for him to go. $560 per month for 4 afternoons - 12 hours - per week. Which we cannot afford. We qualify hands-down for this program in terms of financial need, no doubt.

So - that is my update on that.

But there is good news. We go tomorrow to visit the Capitol Hill Co-op preschool, where a good friend goes with her son. She'll show us around. We'll see if we like it as much as I expect we will. And hopefully that is where Finn will go to school. Much less money, and I get to work there in the classroom once per week.

We'll have to drive quite a ways - the co-ops closer to us are all full.

There is one closer, where another friend goes, and they do have an opening one day per week - so somehow, someway, I hope that Finn will be settled at a school by next week.

No idea how this will play out in terms of my work life. Other than I have to go buy a laptop this week. So I can sit in coffee shops and the Capitol Hill Library and work on my grant-writing and my novel.

If you need any grants written, shoot me a message. And check out my new blog -

Adventures of a Would-Be Novelist: www.would-be-novelist.blogspot.com -

and send me messages if you notice I haven't posted anything in over a week.

I need some help with this nose and grindstone business, I think.



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Elizabeth Gilbert and Me

She's wrong. Elizabeth Gilbert. She's wrong about that child thing, right at the beginning of Eat Pray Love, that part about the mom not caring about colicky crying but just beaming all the time because she loves her baby so much.

I kind of hate when non-moms write about what they imagine to be true about motherhood.

It tends to be simplistic nonsense.

I loved my son, love my son, sometimes swooningly - but light does not flow from his pores, I did not and do not beam every moment I am awake in his presence. I hated being tired all the time. I still hate being tired all the time.

On a daily basis, I mourn the loss of my solitude. I resent my descent into cliche-dom - the narrowing of my circle to these walls and these two males, the softening destruction of my body as my last big sweaty exercise fades into distant memory, the clouded and narrow quagmire that used to be a clear spiritual path.

And here is this Lady, this Liz, who got PAID in ADVANCE to TRAVEL the world and WRITE a BOOK about it. Travel for a YEAR. And now Julia Roberts is going PLAY her in the movie of that book.

I HATE.

I HATE that THAT is NOT me.

This is one of the refrains of my ill life, the unhealthy river that flows through my dark side -

"How did SHE get MY life????"

Envy.

It knows no boundaries. It has become my companion, again. I stopped paying attention to my spiritual fitness, rounded a mountain, and there she was. Here she is. Envy. She looks like illness personified, but one of those grossly attractive illnesses - Sharon Stone in Casino kind of ill, right after the glory and heading into the descent. Eyes glassy but still focused, smelling like expensive perfume put on two days ago, clothes still expensive but crumpled. Envy.

She is my best self made grotesque.

And when I am fit, she is a good teacher.

What and Whom am I envying?

For they do have something I want - something I am blocking, somehow, by not pursuing or by denying, by lazing or by....

I Want To Write.

I Want You To Read This.

I Want This To Be My Job.

I Want This To Earn Me Money.

Lots Of Money. Enough to buy a home, food, good schooling for my son, and travel.

I Want This To Be My Daily Work.

I don't know how. Or in what way - romances, memoir, novel, essays. I don't know how.

So I'll just write. That I know how to do. Like this.

And Open the Door to Having THAT Life.

I Write For My Living.

I Write.

I Live.





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I need a little kids school...

For anyone who's been reading my Facebook posts, this will probably all be old news... but I thought I'd go ahead and post on here. In hopes of drawing it all together for myself, maybe. That's why we tell stories, I think. To organize our experiences for ourselves, primarily; to make sense of our lives.

I am having some monumental mom guilt at the moment, let's just get that out there right now. Why didn't I insist/push/just-do-it find a good pre-k program for Finn last spring when we got here?

I don't remember. I tried, I know. Three co-op preschools were full. One CDSA site had space, but we fell into a weird income hole and were too poor to get one subsidy and couldn't get another unless I went to a job-searching class 40 hours a week, which was senseless to me. I guess I got tired, and then it was April, and then it was Well, let's just wait.

And he was going to pre-K anyway, I thought. Then he had a growth spurt - emotionally, communication-wise - as I posted last time.

And truth be told, I started kindergarten when I was 4. I was "smart". I always took pride in that. And all the kids Finn was born with began kindergarten last week. I didn't want him left out. So we were off to kindergarten with high hopes.

Then he started wetting his pants, right after we visited his school for the open house. He's never done that. Ever. And it was constant. And then he went to school, and he started crying. Not for a little while - he cried for three days straight. He kept getting lost in the halls, his teacher said, because he didn't know how to stay in line with his class. He wouldn't let her leave his side at lunch.

She told me all this on the playground in the morning, when the kids were lining up to go in. She didn't email or call me. I didn't have much time to process the information. It's her first year teaching. She's very sweet. If he was ready, I wouldn't worry about experience on her part - but he's a guy who needs some special care, I think, some knowledge.

And truth be told, I don't think he's ready for the kindergarten that exists now. He told me, very clearly:

"I need a little kids school."

Maybe if we hadn't moved.

Maybe if he'd had one or two years of pre-school.

Maybe if dad and mom were different people (not sure how, just different somehow - the kind of people who don't move, maybe, and who make sure they own a house before they have a child, and who make sure that child goes to preschool...)

So now, the decision is what pre-K program?

The sweet, sweet, small one a mile away, with 4 staff members for 15 to 20 kids? The one where most kids with him will be 3 1/2 to 4 to start, then catch up to being 5 along with him? The one that meets Mondays through Thursdays from 1pm to 4pm?

How will I work at all if he goes to that one? Even my work, my freelance writing and coordinating and teaching work?

Or the school program that seems somehow less desirable - the site we're considering is further away, for one thing, but not tremendously. 9am to 3pm, 5 days a week - shorter days not an option. Where they nap from 12:30 to 2pm, no matter what. Finn hasn't napped in two years. He'd have to rest quietly on his mat during that time. He hated naptime when he had to endure it at his San Diego preschool. The school with an executive director who is reviled by folks I know, although the teachers at this site seem lovely.

A lot more freedom for me. A lot more hours for me. To work, write, whatever.

What do I do?



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New Trees

A Summer of such busy-ness draws to a close... much producing, some teaching, lovely weeks of family time in Ohio - including a big family "withunion" as my son named it, a baptism, Cedar Point fun, the Henry County Fair, and more food than I probably should have eaten...

and a Fall full of challenges peeks at me from around the cooling corner...

The view from my window is sunny at the moment, trees still green, front yard browned from a summer of some blasting heat here in Seattle. There's a new tree with two trunks growing up and obscuring the mailbox, coming out of an old stump that we took for dead.

I am feeling some creative stirrings that I hope will become a new tree, or two even.

My son starts kindergarten one week from today. After a spring of research and worry and conviction that we'd wait a year, wait 'til 6, for kindergarten, he went and had a big old growth spurt this summer - not just physically, of course, but more essentially emotionally and psychically. No more fear on the playground at the park, but rather quiet confidence. Interest in other kids and openness to playing with them. Full sentences to adults, "Please may I have that, Mommy?" - "No, I don't like that, Mommy." Processing complex thoughts and questions and possible solutions. And then, after witnessing all that, a call from Leschi Elementary, that he'd leapt off the waiting list and into their Montessori program - so, one week from today, we're going to give a go. See what happens. Hope for the best.

My husband looks ahead to a new hip sometime this fall. More on that later.

Me - I hope for a new laptop, so that I can write anywhere in the world again. I look at the UW Extension Writing Certificate Programs, and I think I might just dive into a year of Popular Fiction... two years ago, I was all set to take the year-long Non Fiction courses when the job and move to San Diego kicked that idea out of commission. And now I think I have another chance - but I'm less drawn to Non Fiction these days. I want to write a novel. One that sells a gazillion copies. And makes me lots and lots and lots of money. So I can buy a house and take care of my family.

It's nice to be clear on that.

And yes, I will apply for some jobs so that I can earn money while I work on that big dream. I'm having a little trouble motivating towards those shorter term steps, but I promise I'll settle down and get to it, tomorrow. And do some grant writing, too.

But now it's time for lunch. Reading a play this afternoon. Maybe one I'll act in this winter...

I'm growing a new tree, or two maybe, I think.



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