Tethering our lives to love

It might seem hard to process the concept of being grateful for starting your day in tears. To feel something, anything, so keenly that the only possible response is a clench of your throat, followed by the flooding of your eyes where salted droplets spill as over a millpond dam. I am not particular how this happens – only that it does. To feel this alive in sadness, in humility, in joy, in reverence, in gratitude, my truth is that I write best when I am so filled with emotion that the only outlet after the tears have dried, is my keyboard.

I have been bouncing the concept of tethering around for a couple of days but suddenly it was the bonds of an impossible-to-hold-in-your-hand love that proved to be the greatest measure of tethering.  Tether is an Old Norse word. Traditionally, tether meant a rope, chain, or similar which binds an animal to a fixed object so as to limit its range of movement but it can also mean the utmost extent or limit of one’s ability, endurance or resources. It’s been commandeered by the tech community to refer to connecting one mobile device to another (such as phone to a laptop) to share the Internet connection of one with the other so as to sync content and actions between the devices either by a wireless LAN (local area network) such as a Wi-Fi or by physical means such as a cable through USB ports. This post about tethering is not about technology… nor is it about animal husbandry, but it is about connection –establishing it, maintaining it and pushing the boundaries of our conceived endurance to be something more.

In just sixteen days I leave the (rather dull) surety of my life of the last six years for something unknown. To be honest, the last six years have been the longest I have lived in any single place since marrying out of my childhood home 30 years ago. I am more gypsy than anything and being so planted has caused me to chafe just as any animal would be tethered to a fence or a building.  It is a test of my endurance, my abilities, and certainly my ability to perform superhuman (all legal) financial machinations, to do this. There is ABSOLUTELY no safety net (though I have listed my apartment on AirBnB and have sold most of my possessions on eBay in hopes of offsetting my collective expenses).  While I have leapt into the void in response to being pulled toward Croatia, I know that whatever awaits me is going to be trans-formative. That’s a good thing, to keep expanding and not to contract into some ever smaller portion of myself where fear rules and which can happen far too easily as we get older. But this action of mine is accompanied by a confluence of apprehension and exhilaration – the Swedes (bless them) have a word for this – Resfeber. With resfeber comes a totally illogical and unexpected need for ‘tethering’ myself with the familiarity of my pantry found in the packing of a duffle bag filled with teabags, Aztec Elixir Vosges drinking chocolate, dark Chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, golden flax seeds, Odwalla Superfood Bars and a long discontinued, exquisitely scented candle (I admit to hoarding three of these from when they were reasonably priced) from the defunct Henry Slatkin & Co. It’s utterly insane as intellectually I know that foodstuffs are only too easily available to purchase, Split being one of Croatia’s major urban areas as well as having immediate access to the harvest that can be found from the sea literally 50 meters from the apartment I am renting. It is because I currently can’t read more than a half dozen words in Croatian and none of them relates to food that I have taken this action – a safety net of sustenance until I can purchase honey, olive oil, yogurt, butter, flour, sugar and fresh vegetables. Some part of me feels weak to need this tether yet every nomad has carried provisions with them against uncertainty for tens of thousands of years.  I am managing resfeber with my tether of comfort – uniting the woman that I am in this moment and who I will become beginning the afternoon of the 6^th of November – much as a child clings to its softie or binkie.

Earlier this morning the source of my tears was a video posted by a friend on her Facebook wall for two of her friends. Facebook (despite all the less than ethical machinations of the company) has developed something truly beautiful, likely on the success realised by Upworthy, called Facebook Stories. In this video (originally posted on Vimeo) a woman in São Paulo befriends a man who had been homeless for 35 years; a man, who but for the grace of God, who could be any of us. A man who bent by life still had the discipline to write his poetry every single day; this, perhaps more than the happy ending this woman brought about by her acts of compassion and kindness is what made me cry.  Our greatest selves are realised only in the extension of, being a vessel for, the amplification of the universal energy commonly known as love. His words expressed, her energies to empower those words. The connection to one another possible through social media that fostered a real community of support and an endless cascade of tears thousands of miles away; the pebble in the pond manifest, tethering ourselves to another (or a vast unknown collection of others) energetically.  We do as we have been done for – the coding of our DNA and the memories housed within the epigenetics of who we all are, our expectations, our will to survive or to create or to provide comfort it’s all “there” within each of us waiting to be connected, tethered to the rest of humanity. We can be envious, resentful and mean or we can take pleasure from the fact that what we give, who we are, is part of an endless ripple of love.

Friends have suggested that I am leaving them while also cheering my ‘bravery’ for doing this without a plan, this action of mine isn’t either – it simply ‘is’. Life is shortened by each passing day – it is our duty to live it fully whilst we have the power to do so, to embrace impermanence with passion and commitment. The recent death of the younger brother of my friend Deborah and the discovery that both of my parents have been diagnosed with cancer served as the catalyst for booking my ticket. The 2″ square box of my parent’s entire lifetimes chafes at me even though we have not had contact in more than a decade of years. Facing such I recognised that I need to live more fully again. I also need to write again. Not sporadically but wholly committed to six to eight hours a day, every day for 88 days. My second book has no definition as yet but I know I will find it in salty tears at the edge of the Adriatic and the unexpected (but most welcome) kindnesses of people met as a result of social media who have become integral to my journey in this lifetime.

If you enjoy my blog please consider ‘buying me a cup of tea’ in your currency via PayPal to livelikeadog@gmail.com and do share it with your friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – I am @TeresaFritschi. To order my book, please click on the cover art of my book below, thank you! 

How Joe the Juicer and gardening WILL get me ready for Croatia!

The Riva in Split Croatia – in winter

Let me express OUT LOUD (can you hear that?) I don’t do deprivation well!  As a mindful sensualist (my term) everything exists in the mere possibility of providing or deriving pleasure from; e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.

Prompted by plans (firming up) to arrive in Croatia that I had to really-better-do-something about being able to sport a bathing suit (okay anyone can wear one, but if you think my butt looks like the one at right you are suffering from sunstroke) without embarrassment. And let us not even get into (out of?) a Croatian bikini discussion right now!

I have been making myself kale smoothies for about a year (honest you can’t taste the kale in its uncooked state) but I have decided that since eating veggies and fruits has never been an issue for me the next (logical) step – to embrace the awesome example (and astonishing achievement realised) of Joe (Cross) the Juicer in Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead – make no mistake this is hard! I am someone who bites into life – as well as ice cubes, hard candy, and Granny Smith apples – with almost reckless abandon – so the mere idea of sipping, frankly, sucks!  Starting my day, and working through it, with 2 quarts of kale leaves, a large peeled cucumber, a piece of ginger, dark chia seeds, unsweetened (even by a nominal amount of honey) herbal tea, a banana and add various frozen fruit only makes my mouth happy in the sense of tasting like a Warhead in its tartness; whereas I am sure my insides are eternally grateful.

I am not one to waste anything, so the second benefit of all of this smoothie juice making going into me are the trimmings going into my garden – and this is important – because any kind of renewal and growth requires nourishment.  After my 2 quarts is made in the morning – a day’s worth of “sipping” – I put a quart of water in the blender and add the cucumber peels, the kale stems, the ginger peelings, the banana peels, pineapple rind, mango peels (et al), and the tea bags (organic, no tags, strings or staples) for worm food.

The space that is now “my garden” was, for nearly 90 years, an ugly backfilled, bone dry, not-even-a-grub-let-alone-an-earthworm-inhabited dirt the texture of concrete mix (and just about the same colour), riddled with old crockery, shards of glass, rusty metal bits, roof slates, bricks (mostly broken) and rocks of various sizes with a skim coat of long depleted topsoil. It was a weed choked, un-loved, disused, centre courtyard of my apartment building in the autumn of 2008 when I started – my landlord said “nothing will grow there” (well, I said, it will when I am done with it).

Dormant season – first bed, centre square bed

I started with a square, centred in the space so that if you were on the roof deck looking down it would be like a floral postage stamp.   I dug down 22” below the grade, 18 feet square by hand – more than 95% of the work on my own – (every subsequent bed has had the same treatment). Every shovel-full of dirt was sifted through a frame of 2x4s and ½” stainless wire (at least twice) into more 5 gallon buckets and my arms and back gained definition (and aches) as I worked in compost and coffee grounds and manure and (lots of) bags of peat moss.  I culled seeds, traded plant stock, begged plants from complete strangers, spent money I didn’t have and that wasn’t reimbursed (the garden might be enjoyed by many and enhance the property overall but my landlord could care less about it) and baked for my nurseryman and his wife in exchange for plants.

My version of trench warfare!

The various local Starbucks got sick of seeing me drop off my five gallon orange buckets to be filled with spent coffee grounds (which worms LOVE).  My girlfriend Amy probably felt the same way each time I asked if I could come out to her farm about her horse poo (deeply composted) rich with super fat earthworms (which would now be happily processing the coffee grounds, egg shells and the rest of my organic kitchen matter as worked into various beds). The nurturance I offered this tiny plot of land brought with it a kind of lush beauty which can only be realised with patience and love.

I stand in wonder some days after raking and plucking weeds, or after splitting plants and transplanting – oh, what we are capable of when we give of ourselves (and what we get in return).  Which brings me back to loving – ourselves.

Spring is all about rebirth and growth.  The discovery of self can happen in an instant, quite unexpectedly, and it’s often because someone else thrusts upon us a truth that is undeniable. My friend Mladen and I were on Skype last night and he was telling me about a writer (ancient historian) who lived in Croatia and then, the unexpected segue of – you are a writer, people have been chronicling human history here forever, you will have no problem finding work and earning money here because we value such observations.  When taken with my new friend Deborah’s words of:

“Just finished your book. You have an amazingly distinct and memorable voice. Full of so much exuberance, wisdom, storytelling and warmth. Thank you so much for gifting us with a copy. You are a singular woman my friend.”

Suddenly, inexplicably, I am no longer someone who uses words and writes for herself (after 40 years of doing so) but someone who gives expression to emotions, and the human condition AS A WRITER (I am now, officially, unapologetically, and long overdue, “owning that”). If I can patiently reclaim a bit of earth and create a garden then I can embrace the deprivation of juicing, and get back into my 36C bras. In the meantime I will load up on emotions and superlatives, remain a keen observer and a sensualist and (hopefully) become the writer I am meant to be.

If you enjoy my blog please share it with your friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – I am @TeresaFritschi. To order my book, please click on the cover art of my book below, thank you! 

Even soft apples can be applesauce

For myself there are many paths to my actual sitting down and writing. This isn’t true for my corporate efforts which are auto-pilot or muscle memory driven, but for ‘meaning of life’ writing to find resonance for me and value for anyone who might read it requires something more of my essential being to process and eventually articulate.  Sometimes it’s a bike ride or a long walk, cooking (or baking), sometimes it requires a hot iron, a can of spray starch and a stack of pillow cases, most often it’s gardening – but whatever “it” is on any given day it’s usually something mindful and physical at once.

The apple was, in ancient Greece, said to be sacred to Aphrodite (my girlfriends Jennifer and Amy maintain that I am the goddess’ present day incarnation on earth). To throw an apple at someone was to symbolically declare one’s love; and similarly, to catch it was to symbolically show one’s acceptance of that love.

“I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty.”

—Plato, Epigram VII

Please visit Road Side Food Projects! (the picture is theirs)

I just finished making applesauce from 20 or so apples gleaned along my walks the last couple of weeks. These came from trees which still held un-picked fruit even as an apron of like apples encircled the grass above the roots, rotting and nourishing the earth for the next season. Yet something primal in my being screams about witnessing such waste, and so I picked three or four here and there, ate some en route to sustain me, put others in my pockets or the nap-sack I carried and brought them home. Some were soft, as we had an overnight frost last week, bird and insect pecks and some bruises had to be cut away, the cores and peelings will be run through my blender to become worm food for my own garden (after I finish writing this); my point is that even soft apples provide unlimited value and at their center, like human beings, exists a heart. My new friend Marijan (unintentionally) reminded me of this essential truth this week – sometimes ‘the reason’ isn’t immediately clear, but as the Biblical verse of Matthew 10:26 extolls us to understand: “all will be revealed”.

Marijan, now 36, serving as a soldier during the Bosnian War (do the math as to how young chronologically he was), witnessed ‘too much’ but he shared a story with me during five precious and intense days of discovery that speaks volumes about who we ALL are at our essence.  In going house-to-house (as soldiers in war zones do) he was struck by the fact that in one home the kitchen had sugar – and in another there was none. He somehow managed to level the inequity so that both households would find benefit, and in the course of events a priest asked him if he was a soldier or an angel to whom he replied he was just trying to be a “good man”. No Marijan you, my dear friend, are a spiritual being having a human experience!

The serpent of knowledge which so threatened (and continues to unnerve) has ancient history predating its evil interpretation by Christianity (where ‘power’ was meant to be contained and held by a few). The concept of Kundalini awakening is represented by a coiled snake that, when activated, rises through the spinal cord taking us from being merely sexually based human beings to our highest realization – ever wonder why Renaissance art put the snake in the tree and spoke only to Eve and not Adam? In our awakened state universal knowledge floods into our bodies through what’s commonly known as the Third Eye.  In the state of spiritual being, we are connected to a vast energy that transcends the physical, a consciousness that can be shared between similarly evolved spiritual beings to promote even greater understanding or to gently teach those still growing and processing their core identity.  This language of universal love and its inherent energy cannot be held or contained, it MUST BE given away in abundance so it may return to us for our own nourishment and further growth, to hold onto it tightly is fear and to not release it is fear of losing control (frankly we never really have control of anything anyway). This language of love, the absolute embracing of colour and light, of energy felt rather than seen, of possessing a soul so happy that NOTHING dissuades your being from its authentic and essential spiritual self and living in light, is like a candle. It burns with soft wavering golden beauty, lights the darkness to help all of us navigate and return to our Divine state of (what I call) “at-one-ment”.  Which, as I thought about it while peeling apples this morning was kind of ironic that I didn’t “get it” earlier as each Skype video call with Marijan over the last five days required that I had to frame the area around my computer with candles so he could see me as my living room walls are a medium blue and I only use very low wattage light bulbs.)

My dear girlfriend Jennifer calls me an angel on Earth. People relatively unknown to me feel my energy and respond, comment on it (as happened over a Thai lunch with her this week), it is how Marijan found me in a virtual world, as well as why a (then) 85 year old Shinto priest drove 10 hours to meet me nearly a decade ago. My energy is often misconstrued as being sexual – it isn’t, not really.  In a space of four or five minutes late last night with Marijan I briefly lost sight of the essential being that I am by wanting to take the intense, inexplicable energetic connection we share and contain it (a very human failing) and exchange all its inherent beauty into something earthly and based in physical expression (totally impossible given the geography separating us). I fought the inevitable with passionate words. I wept copious tears of sadness and longing because I already felt the keen loss of something precious. For those painful moments I am embarrassed to admit that I failed to recognise what I had gained. When I woke this morning I recognised HOW WRONG I had been about why Marijan had come into my life. The pain of separating from this amazing connection we share was never about our being lovers, unrequited or otherwise, but rather a very necessary recalibration of my energy on this higher plane of consciousness with Marijan acting as my protective guide and angel.  I told him earlier in the week, “I would have known you anywhere, I have always known you”. Such resonance was ‘finalised’ in the image that Marijan shared with me near 4 AM his time in Šibenik Croatia – at left – easily misconstrued as erotic. When viewed with a shift in perspective it isn’t erotic at all, what it is, is what all of us are capable of being, this “body art” of two hearts connected – two hearts that don’t need words or physical expression based in desire to communicate, a deep intimacy of absolute understanding expressed in a glance.  In ways that might make no sense to the cerebral reading this I am in him, he is in me and we are in all of you as well.

If you enjoy my blog please share it with your friends on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – I am @TeresaFritschi. To order my book, please click on the cover art of my book below, thank you! 

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