July 20, 2003

• A FIRST FOR ME?

  
  

  I have been working on a difficult post for KaiOaty.  It was on my mind before I left for Wasilla yesterday.  I talked to Greyfox about it, hoping for some input.  He didn’t have any, but he gave me encouragement and I inferred that he thought I could handle the job.  He is wonderful that way.  His faith in me helps me to have faith in myself, which sorta leads into this post here.

  
  

  The new, still unfinished KaiOaty post is another FAQ.  It deals with a subject very important to me.  I’m taking the writing of it seriously, taking my time, digging up quotes, references and links to support my contentions.  As this day’s supply of energy was waning, I decided to shelve it until tomorrow, and check comments here and on ArmsMerchant, Greyfox’s site.

  
  

  I’m often inspired to blog by comments people leave here, but unless I am mistaken this is the first time I’ve blogged in response to a comment someone has left at anyone else’s site.  The comment below, which inspired me, came after several other thoughtful and insightful ones to Greyfox’s latest blog, and a long comment from me in which I had picked his blog apart point by point in typical Virgoan fashion (and in accordance with my pact to help guide my soulmate through his current recovery program). 

  
  

  
  

  “There must be something really good about the Merchant, as he’s one of my favorite writers as well as persons (or should I say personages?).”
  roadrunner

  
  

  I don’t know whether this is more of a tribute to roadrunner’s perception, or to my husband’s sterling qualities that shine through even when he is writing about what a pain in the ass he is.  Either way, I am in wholehearted agreement with the idea of there being “something really good” about him.

  
  

  The things I dislike about Greyfox are behaviors.  Some of them are dysfunctional learned behavior and some of them, I am convinced, are the result of quirks of genetics and/or brain chemistry.  Whatever their source and whether he can, will or even wants to try to change those behaviors, that doesn’t matter to me.  For it’s not the man I dislike, but only his behaviors.  I love the person he is and have always drawn a clear distinction between who he is and the things he does.  I have loved him through many lifetimes and cannot imagine ever NOT loving him.

  
  

  One of the things I like best about him, the saving grace that has kept our family life tolerable through some very rough years, is his sense of humor.  The three of us:  Greyfox, my 22-year-old son Doug, and I, agree that the laughter we share is the best thing about our lives together.  Sometimes, it comes from jokes, from one or another of us saying something intentionally funny.  More often than that, though, it is just our common appreciation of the absurdity of something reported in the news, or a humorous reaction to something that has happened to one of us.  Each of us is, I think, more likely than most people would be, to find the humor in everyday affairs.  This bonds us together.

  
  

  Greyfox’s intelligence is another thing about him I appreciate.  “Intelligence” is an awfully vague term.  What I mean isn’t just what is measured by IQ tests, although he does very well on them.  I appreciate and value the way he can grasp what I’m talking about and make meaningful comments.  Another of the great things about this little household of ours is that when one of us can’t come up with just the right word to express an idea, one of the other two is sure to have it. 

  
  

  Greyfox majored in English literature, and not only has a lot of words in his everyday lexicon, but he can string them together into quotations for all occasions.  How he can remember that stuff is a baffling mystery to me.  I’m awed even more by his creative imagination, which shines through along with that bizarre sense of humor, in The Adventures of Melody Andrewsdottir, Lady Shaman, the satirical serial he wrote during the early 1990s and has recently resumed.  If you haven’t met Melody yet, you are missing a real treat.  I’ve been transcribing early episodes on an irregular basis, at www.Xanga.com/ArmsMerchant.

  
  

  I have sometimes given him a hard time about his fearfulness, mostly because his fear infects me, scares me to death and I hate that.  But I admire his courage.  In the face of fears that would daunt just about anyone, he keeps on keeping on.  He left a secure, well-paid office job to follow me back home to the wilds of Alaska, and has persevered here in the face of bad weather, squalid and primitive living conditions, bears in the yard, social and political stupidity and nonsense, and even my repeatedly telling him to go away.  Silly me.  I’m so glad he didn’t go away!  Thanks, Darlin’, for not giving up.

  
  

  This next thing, although it is something he DOES, I think comes from what he is, from deep in his soul.  He is an awesome shaman, a journeyer to the Otherworlds who can perform feats of perception and power that would impress anyone who understands them.  I am usually privileged to be the one he speaks to first when his consciousness returns to this world.  I see sometimes in his eyes the wonderment, astonishment, compassion and other feelings evoked by his experiences in the journey. 

  
  

  I work as hard at expressing and recording the things he reports to me verbally and non-verbally after those journeys as I do with the impressions I gain from my own psychic work, because I am convinced of the value of his work, too, as much as of my own.  It is not easy doing what he does.  I don’t mean only that it is tricky, hard to learn or hard to achieve, although it is all of that.  I mean that there is pain involved.  He experiences the illness of those he heals and the lives and deaths of those for whom he does past life readings.  It’s not just tricky work, it is rough and it takes a tough and macho man to ride that horse.

  
  

  Some of the best things, to me, about Greyfox, are private things, like the taste of his kisses and other things.  The strengths, graces and virtues I’ve listed here are only a few of the more outstanding ones he possesses.  He is also a dumpster-diver of distinction, and a thrift-store shopper extraordinaire.  When he had his roadside stand here in our neighborhood, he would collect castoffs and surplus food and distribute them to others in this little poverty pocket where unemployment is about as prevalent as pioneer spirit.  He loves giving things away.  Sure, it gets him his narcissitic supply, but what the heck, it’s a nice thing to do, anyway.

  
  

  I could go on and on, but don’t forget I started this thing AFTER I had decided I was too burned out to go on writing today.  And anyhow, most of the last few things I’ve thought of that I like best about him, are things I’d rather just murmur privately to him when he gets home the day after tomorrow.  He is yummy in a number of ways, and awfully sexy for such an old fart.

  • 2:07 am
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