Why are Relationships Hard?

Daughter number one and I had a discussion on relationships the other day. She told her son, “Human relationships will be the hardest thing you will ever do.” Maybe she ought to had told him it will be the easiest…You know, plant the seed.

Back to the question:  I wonder why we humans, being the same species, with similar wants, similar needs, don’t get along with each other with more grace. Is it that we are like monkeys picking at each other, sniping, squabbling, vying for control, trying to be top monkey? 

We want friends then complain that they are annoying. We want a loving relationship then we snipe at them for not giving us what we want.

Is it that we, the ones with that enormous cerebral cortex (thinking brain) have formed beliefs? Now my beliefs seem right to me. Yours seem right to you. How did we develop them then defend them with such tenacity?

Perhaps one belief is as though we are all standing in single file with the goodies sitting at the head of the line. While we are rushing to get to the prize a veritable stampede of people are threatening to run us over.

If we thought that life was more circular than straight, then the ebb and flow, the give and take would tell us that there was enough for everybody.

The Party is here. The party is NOW.  Join the party.

And join the animals; they seem to live with more grace than do humans. See Peaches’ Blog, “Who Eats Carrots?” http://dogblogbypeaches.blogspot.com

P.S. Now here's a sign worth following...

Outside Thinking...

I'd like to call this blog "Moose Drool," but it's already been taken.

The temperature is in the 80’s this morning. I will stay here on the back deck until the heat chases me away, but remember Sun, I’m a stalwart soul, you will have to work to get me to go inside.

I sit at my glass-top table, lap-top computer at hand, a basket of pink petunias in front of me cascade from their lofty perch dangling from a porch rafter. Other flowers fill pots on the tiled floor. This is a covered porch/patio—to call it a deck is erroneous, I suppose, isn’t a deck built on supports? This patio has tile sitting directly on the ground. The tree house is to my left about 500 feet away, but I don’t want to climb there today.

I like sitting here among the flowers with the ceiling fan stirring the air. I asked my family the other day why the wind around here is in a constant state of agitation. It blows from one direction, stops for a microsecond, changes direction, puffs, picks up speed, whams you from behind, stirs up your hair, then goes over to shake up the rose bushes. With the wind, though, we have virtually no flying bugs—ants, we have those, they can hold onto the ground. The agitating wind keeps it comfortable here, a blessing.

Oh another blessing. We ate about a dozen apricots from an apricot tree located here in the grapefruit orchard that tasted like the ones I remember from my childhood. My family grew apricots (and peaches and cherries) on a hill called Cherry Heights in The Dalles Oregon. None of the “store-bought” apricots have satisfied me since then. There are two apricot trees here on our California property, one had fruit that tasted authentic, the other, nada. One tree, about a dozen apricots, that was it. El Primo. I didn’t know old fashioned, real apricots still existed.

I look out over the patchy grass—moles love it, dogs love to dig for moles. There was a mole digging in broad daylight the other day, head in the soil, oblivious to anyone watching.  The sprinklers in the lawn leave dry spots, I drench them by hand watering, and we fill the holes with soil. The lawn, however, is not in that lofty green pristine condition of estate gardens—or of other gardener’s yards who know what they are doing.

Beyond the lawn ahead of me is a four car garage. Not the best of views, but it is still beautiful here. We do not have access to the garage, for the owner parks his tractor there, and the other half of it contains an enormous walk-in freezer. The owner of this property planned the freezer for his fruit, but does not use it. I think it is more of an albatross.

Those of you who know me know that I am the world’s worst namer of book titles. Somehow names just escape me. I have been writing of our experience over the last three years, about our sojourn from Oregon, to Hawaii, and then to California. This memoir/narrative has been re-named so many times it is a good thing I’m not writing with pencil and erasing my entries. If I did that there would be a man-hole where the title ought to be.

After listening to the native Hawaiian Iz sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” with his lilting voice and his ukulele accompaniment, I decided to call my Hawaii book, Somewhere. The book is primarily about Hawaii, I thought that fit. Now I’m re-thinking that title.

I was told by an editor that I couldn’t use song lyrics without permission, and without that song reference Somewhere doesn’t mean a damn thing.  I went back to a previous, more provocative title choice, Escape from Paradise. Sounds like an oxymoron, but that’s the way it was. Oh, That’s the Way it Was. How about that as a title? If any of you guys want to jump in here with ideas, feel free. What book would you be more likely pick up if browsing a bookstore? (Do people still do that?) Somewhere, Escape from Paradise, That’s the Way it Was, Running Between the Raindrops, The Frog’s Song, Life Beyond the Horizon, let’s see what other title choices did I consider? Oh, my daughter wants me to call it Screw It! But I’m not that courageous.

I sent my manuscript to an editor, and that’s where it resides. She sent back the title page where she had written “A Novel.” That’s fortuitous.  I considered calling it fiction as well after an agent said I had no platform.  Essentially I don’t have a snowballs chance in hell of being published without one. (A “platform,” means you have a TV presence, a radio presence, ten million followers on the internet, you are a life coach, an expert in your field, someone who gives seminars, basically someone who can prove they can sell a ton of books.)  Whoops, that’s not me.

But a novel—with that I would need no platform. Consider the possibilities…

Wrote Paulo Coelho in his introduction to his novel The Alchemist:

“If you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.”

Awe

Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

                      --John Lennon & Paul McCartney “Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds.”

                                                                                                 The Yellow Submarine

 “Why can’t I write something like that?” I commented to Darling Daughter on a recent trip to Las Vegas.

 “I think,” she said, “they were taking something mind-altering.”

 I think it was more like talent, and skill and ability and courage and perseverance. I heard that Lennon’s inspiration came from his son Julian when he was in nursery school. When John arrived to pick up his son, Julian was painting. John asked him what it was. “Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” he said. 

When Daughter Number One was three years old we went on her first camping trip. I still remember that feeling of walking barefooted down a newly graded dirt road with the soil cool and sensuous beneath our feet. We stopped at an outlook. My daughter spread wide her arms and stood there looking out over the expanse of forest and the immensity of the sky, “The sky is so big,” she said. “It is bigger than anything…except my smile when I’m proud.”

I stopped spellbound.

Baby Darling at two years old, outside at dusk, observed the moon glowing behind the branches of the tree, and created his own poem—awe strikes at an early age. “The tree makes a net for the moon,” he observed.

 I thought about these events the other night as I watched the evening sun go down. The glow hung orange on the horizon for an eternity, and I imagined hearing a clinking and grinding of giant pulleys and gears as they drove this earth-ball through space, but all was silent. I felt such appreciation for the continual turning of the earth, and realized how fragile we are, and how much we need our planet to be gentle with us, and it is.