Tumbling Photos Make No Sound

• 4:50am -- Water bill, scale, light, meditation, AC on, hydration, shroom

• 6:43am -- Admin, done. AC, off. Window, open. Candle, lit, eucalyptus & clove, added.

• I made THE most AMAZING vegan breakfast sandwiches with seitan and cho cheese. Yum.

• Took a dance break at 7:37am, to a Buhdist monk playing Yellow Submarine. (X2) = 7min, 15 sec. https://youtu.be/QLELtdrRyhs

• I took another 4 min, 36 sec dance break to Dennis DeYoung singing "Babe" during a recent performance. https://youtu.be/28Lj0hqGB4s

@ommushrooms

@BelovedBrooklyn123

SUNDAY -- MAY 3, 2020

I made a dramatic revelation about my family this morning, immediately after meditating. As I picked up a new-ish looking marble notebook I found during clean-up during the past few days, a bunch of old photos came flying out of the marbled composition book. These are my favorite. I buy them anytime I start a new project. I had remembered what I bought this for. It was for the people in these old black and white, or sepia tone photographs.

For the first 42 years of my life, I was told by my mother that HER mother, Grandma Bella's, immediate family was killed in the camps. We knew very little. Because even though every ounce of her was embodied with the Balabusta spirit, believing she was the boss of my mother's kitchen (argue much?), Grandma Bella was an emotionally closed off woman.

We loved each other, she and I. We used to go on walks together after nursery school. We would go to the candy store so she could buy her weekly Forvetz newspaper, in Yiddish. We would sing songs together, making up words for lyrics we didn't know. We would get home, and she would cut up an apple just so, "me, a piece, you, a piece, me, a piece, you a piece."

As I got older, and when I say older I mean maybe eight or nine, I started to ask a lot of questions about where she was from. Sometimes she would say Austria, and others it was Poland. Then she would get together with friends, who discussed proudly that they were "Galitzianas," which to my second grade ears sounded Italian.

When I started to learn about the Holocaust in school, I asked a few questions. And I would get an abrupt "my family died during the war. Stop asking so many questions. I don't want to discuss the old country."

Okay. So that was that. "Nisht is nisht," she would say. "Nothing is nothing."

I have been carrying around a lot of old family photos. Some have been given to cousins. Some have been in unopened bins which have moved with me several times, since my mom passed away nearly 10 years ago. But those cousins, every single one of them, are all from my dad's side, which I have been able to trace back five generations. I don't know many families at all, who can trace their roots back that far. But my dad's family came from a very different region of Eastern Europe. This became a source of contention later between my two older, widowed grandmothers (argue much?). But as a kid, I didn't see a difference because they were from the same "old country."

This morning's fluttering photos to me represent life in motion to me. And a lifetime filled with mosaic stories.

(1) Grandma Bella's sister: who's name I thought was Margot, but it wasn't. Her name was Susi Klahr. One is dated 7/28/35. She's either in Innsbruck or Berlin, but my best guess is Berlin. She addresses my grandmother as "Bertha."

(2) Susi had a daughter named Margo. Hand written on the back, clearly with a fountain type pen: Berlin, 1939. Margo is my second cousin.

(3) Grandma Bella's brother, Moshe/Moses, sends her a postcard of himself in 1908. I think he might be in a military uniform. He definitely has a side arm, which is not a hunting rifle. In another photo, he looks younger, more fit, relaxed, and at peace. On the back, I believe in German, it is written that the photo was taken during a travel vacation, and says (I think): "but those were different times."

In the evening, I sat in on a weekly group meditation with Beloved Brooklyn, which I have become quite fond of doing. After some breathing and stretching, we go around the Zoom screen giving a brief introduction and perhaps comment on how we're feeling. But for some reason, I couldn't get my mic to work so I was encouraged to share via text. I was planning on it, perhaps after our pre-meditation lesson. I wrote the following words in my little notebook:

• Anger

• Social media

• Friends and family shocked me.

Our discussion leader asked two rather seasonal questions, based on our overall theme of "endurance":

• What obstacles are you facing?

• How are you dealing with them?

We started with the actual meditation. I breathed, centered myself. I was totally in it when suddenly a bunch of thoughts bounced around my brain which just needed to get out. I grabbed my notebook:

I am an endurance athlete. A 52 year old young widow, who runs.

I was faced this past week with obstacles I consider "friends."

But instead of jumping over, or trampling on them, I paused, and I let them go.