72.

lessons, there are always lessons.

unknowingly i allowed the stresses of everyday to pull me farther and farther away from deliberate reflection and attention to doing this lil' blog - which ain't much, but brings me some sort of peace. forces me to keep up a practice that i respect and instills a sort of discipline that i hope to never lose...even amidst the uncertainty that my days have ushered into my life as of late.

i have these creative friend folks who publish a journal called Red Line Blues and they sent me this call for submissions for their upcoming issue. the theme is pretty appropriate for the times we are all living in and really got me thinking about livin. their theme is home economics and is angled towards what has been referred to as homesteading. in my case, and other city-dwellers, it is often called urban homesteading. it encompasses beer brewing, bread baking, bathtub gin (no, not really...i kind of wish though), sewing, canning, planting, and any other type of self-sufficient habits that allow one to live more deliberately and consciously. this got me thinking of my days in the gutter. also known as unemployment. also known as watching my bank account drain to the dregs. i stopped though, thinking of these aspects of unemployed life, and started pondering the points of growth i've encountered on this journey. i started baking my own bread, i started using grains, dry beans, making meals with what i got, and sewing curtains for myself, and sewing duvet covers, and upcycling and reusing more than ever. mostly i started thinking of the ideas that have filtered into my mind in this battle of the wits: court against the recesh.

my daddy, gesturing back to our founding father benny frank, used to say to me, “Honey, you know theres only two things a mans gotta do in this life. Pay taxes and die.” by “man,” I’m pretty sure my father meant all folks. i think about that now. i think about how he was right and how all i need to do is pay taxes really because dying isn’t on the agenda anytime soon. more than that though, i think about the simplicity inherent in those words. aside from the fact that one demands is bound up in cash money (see capitalist agenda), the thought that there are only two things in life that a lady's gotta do is pretty bizarre. i'm pretty mixed up about it now. so here we are: double dippin,’ scraping the last of the batter off the inside of the bowl with our fingers, recessing ‘til our smokes are smoked and our accounts are dry. so I find myself stuck in a trench somewhere between the demands of contemporary hustle and bustle and the desires to return to the simple life.

it has certainly stimulated a craftiness, a cunning, borne of necessity and a shift in living and the habits of existence. i guess when times get tough, we get crafty. we learn to dip back alongside this recession and figure out how to rediscover the richness of life divorced from the dollar. its quite a challenge really. nothings free. hell, church isn't even free these days. this journey to creating your own joy and not wallowing in joblessness, pennylessness, and directionlessness opens our eyes a little if we let it. these are the lessons i am going to look for, these are the treasures i can scavenge along this path.