Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Week Away

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Great blue heron taking flight.

Great blue heron taking flight.

A week away. It is a luxury most citizens of the world never experience. For those of us lucky enough, it seems as if we could not live without a week away, now and then. For people with enough money to live without financial fear, time often seems as valuable as money. I doubt an unemployed, homeless or starving person would think so. But for the purposes of this blog, I will proceed from the proposition that time is a rare and precious commodity, like oil, real estate with a view, diamonds, fine wine or a thoroughbred horse.

My favorite place for a week away: Chincoteague Island, VA. A barrier island with another barrier island, Assateague, beyond it, a mere causeway away, where pristine beaches and wild ponies can be found.

But now I ask myself why, when I give myself the gift of time, is it so hard to cherish every moment, guilt free? If I am doing something that seems “useless” – like watching an episode of Game of Thrones on my computer – I think, “I could do this at home in the evening, after dinner dishes are done. Why do it here, on vacation?” If I linger for an extra hour with a book in the morning, before getting everyone motivated to do something “vacationish,” I have failed at my maternal job of helping everyone drain the last drop of fun and relaxation out of the week. As emails from work and clients clog my inbox, I wonder if my “vacation response” is good enough?

Once the daily heave-ho takes place and I finally find myself sitting in a lowslung chair on the beach, brushed by the persistent sea breeze and letting only my tiptoes peek out from the edge of my umbrella’s shade, I let it all go for awhile. I can lose myself for hours. The gulls’ needle sharp caws, the shushing of the waves and the wind muffled sounds of nearby children building ramparts against the tide lull me as few things can. I love the way my skin accrues a gentle, gradual skin of sand granules atop sticky salt atop sunblock. When the sun lowers, I drag my chair to the water’s edge, nudging back against the off shore wind, holding my hat on my head, reading in the slanting light until the sand on my skin is less fun and it is time to break the spell.

And though I fear the waves, I love the feel of the ocean holding me up. I have the strangest relationship with water. I am drawn to it only on the shores of oceans. It’s the tides that draw me, but not to play or body surf or boogie board as my family can do for hours and hours. But to “bob” as we call it. To get past the scary breaking surf to where the waves just swell and pass by, lifting my body as if it weighed no more than a jellyfish. Ever since the time, about 15 years ago, when I lay on an inflatable raft and “bobbed” my way out too far, I have maintained an enhanced respect and attunement while in the ocean. But though I never quite relax in those gentle swells—I know they can become ungentle in a heartbeat—I feel embraced and loved by the universe in a way I never do anywhere else.

This past week, we reserved spots on a boat that circled the island. Because Chincoteague is bracketed on one side by the mainland and the other by Assateague, most of the trip was in the inlet waters between bodies of land. At the southern tip we entered open sea for an exhilarating 20 minutes or so. This trip provided two joys—speed and getting close to places I could not see any other way.

I no longer downhill ski with the abandon I once did, so hitting that adrenaline high of open-air speed that I not-so-secretly love is a rare event. Sitting in the prow of the boat as it zipped around the tip of the island sent me into a luscious trance. The boat slowed often, to show the sights and to edge into the circuitous lanes, called “guts,” that wend through the marshy edges of Assateague. In the silence of those moments, we saw wild ponies, herons, egrets, even a bald eagle, who perched like a pagan icon on the sea-rotted stump of an old dock foundation.

For the three hours of that boat tour, I let everything go. I did not think about my clogged inbox. I did not feel torn about where I “should” be or what I “should” be doing (what an absurd idea!). I did not think about the dinner that awaited (even though it was the best BBQ on the Eastern Shore). If I had any responsibilities in the world, I was not thinking about them at all. There was nowhere else I would want to be—ever, it seemed. As the sun set behind buttermilk clouds and the lighthouse started to send its beacon, the air chilled. Our captain handed me a blanket on cue, and I continued to simply be.

Wild pony on the shore of Assateague Island.

Wild pony on the shore of Assateague Island.

Open sea. Island tip in the distance.
Open sea. Island tip in the distance.

Pro-child-choice-life

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I love children. I love my children. I love the many children I have taught, and my nieces and, in an abstract way, I love all the children I will never meet, and the children we all once were. They see the world through fresh eyes and as they grow they taste and smell and hear the world. Their senses are open, as are their hearts, at least for awhile. And so are their minds. At least for awhile.

I also love life. All the ridiculously perfect things about life, like the smell of fresh basil and a balsam fir tree, the way fresh polish looks on toes, long guitar riffs, the sticky air at the beach, standing next to greatness at the MOMA or touching lips with a loved one. And all the other things I can’t list here. And all the not perfect things – well, I don’t love them, but I love that I am alive to experience them and think about them and accept them or rail against them, as is my wont and my right.

I love that we are alive and have free will and can choose. I can choose to drink decaf in the morning. You can choose to give a tenth of your paycheck to Amnesty International. My son can choose to live in a tent. Your son can choose to shop at Wal-mart. Or not.

We can choose for whom we vote. We can choose not to vote. We can get drunk every day or we can lie down and choose never to make a choice again.

But what I do not get about the abortion debate is that it is always about life or choice. Why doesn’t anyone talk about the kids?

So here’s what I think. Children are invited into life by adults. Because of that, we have a responsibility to them. All of us have a responsibility to all children. Because all children are here at our invitation. Not a party crasher in the bunch. That’s the bottom line. And even IF every adult in the world signed off on free health care and food for all children living in poverty, we could not give them that one ineffable thing they deserve and only one person in the world can give them. To be wanted. We can’t get Congress to sign being wanted into law.

So, okay. Sure. A woman needs to have control over her body. Yeah, she needs to have control over her life. But why is that so important? Well one big reason is so that she is not forced to bring a child into the world that she’s not ready for. Or doesn’t want. Or can’t take care of.

90% of the time, when I hear the talk on the radio, or see the rants in the paper or online, it’s about precious life vs. a woman’s right to choose.

What is so precious about a life that no one wants to take responsibility for? If that life will not be treated as precious, who has the right to insist on it? The very fact that a single life is precious is why those laws are so stupidly blind. The ones that seek to take away a woman’s right to choose to raise a child as it deserves to be raised – or not have it at all.

Remember that George Carlin rant about how the pro-lifers (and I so strenuously object to their calling themselves that) are all about the rights of the fetus but when it’s an actual child, they throw up their hands and say, “Taking care of your unwanted baby is not my problem aka the government’s job.”  I mean, George Carlin said it better, but you get the drift. The government can legislate you out of your right to choose to terminate a pregnancy but has no interest in helping you provide for the child once it’s born.

For years I had a sticker on my bumper that read: Pro-child/pro-choice: every child a wanted child. To me that sums it all up.

I know what people say and I am sure it would be true for me too, had my outcome been different. You love all the children you have, previously wanted or otherwise. But I don’t know what it’s like to live in a one room apartment, a single mom with a child I can’t feed, unemployable because I could not finish high school or maybe because I can’t find affordable child care. Does she love her child? Yes. But it is specious in the extreme to say that every woman who has had an abortion is missing something. She is simply carrying out her choice to wait. Until she finishes school. Until she has a job. Until she has a partner. Or whatever it is for her. And maybe her choice is simply not to bear children.

Maybe people who are pro-choice are wary of bringing the child into the conversation. Maybe they don’t want to remind everyone that there is a child at stake. Not just a fetus, but a future child who deserves to be wanted and have the basic rights to love, food and shelter, and also education, healthcare and the chance to get a job one day. But skirting the fact that choice is as much about life as it is about a woman’s body is just artificial. It is about the baby’s life and the mother’s life. And yeah, her body. But pregnancy only lasts 9 months – motherhood lasts a lifetime and no one should be forced to do that job against her will. It is the most important job there is, and a woman brave enough to admit she’s not ready to take it on is all right by me.

pregnant women

Moon Music

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Full moon or close enough. Saratoga Performing Art Center – known as SPAC. Late afternoon of the first day in over a week that was not too hot to breathe. Sitting under the roof in ticketed seats (as opposed to lawn seats, which is where I used to be when  my kids were with me through the baby, toddler and rug-rat years). The sun slants in through roofline gaps and sears my eyes into blindness. Ryan Bingham, young folk singer in the Dylan lineage, croaks out a string of blues tunes, sexy voice wailing.

Then the trippy, soulful music of My Morning Jacket, swinging like a pendulum from hardcore to lyrical. Jim James, with hair like a tangled halo that drips down over his eyes, pierces the cooling air with his unsettling voice. The sun slides further down in the sky and the crowds gradually fill more of the space. Outside, the lawn-sitters line up their chairs in courteous rows. Around us, under the roof, a few people stand to dance. My son had played me some tracks of the band a few times, but I had no idea how the fullness of the sound and the slightly twisted murkiness of the lyrics would work by osmosis in my cells.

The sun lowers with day’s receding tide, and the air turns that familiar blue. The sourceless daylight of dusk.  Wilco comes on stage. My legs grow restless. I am still processing Morning Jacket and feel dissatisfied with the transition. So I walk out from under the roof, away from Wilco revelers, to feel the breeze and look for the rising moon. Not visible yet. I listen long distance to the music as I wander. Wilco grows on me and in time I am ready to go back to them. I’m primed, now, for their twanging rock and roll, the thunderous undertones and the smiling high notes. The end of their set leaves me in good spirits. Outside, it is fully night.

The lights on stage come on. The bustle of the hive takes over. More amps, more keyboards, more machines, lights and those mysterious musical accoutrements that plebes like me don’t understand.

Now someone kills the lights and when they come back on, Bob Dylan and his band make beautiful noise.

Dylan, aged 71, who never speaks to us, never acknowledges the audience that stands as one, rising to his presence. He knows we are there. He sings towards us, his face a pale focal point in the gloomy stage lighting. His band faces him from one side of the stage, attentive to his gestures, small nods, forms of musical communication the rest of us are not privy to. Few of his songs are readily recognizable. He has (as he usually does) created new arrangements for each of them. “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Simple Twist of Fate” – off my favorite album – are recognizable only by a small musical phrase and the lyrics, half mumbled in that Dylan way, but so tattooed into my brain that I hear both versions, the original and this one, playing in symbiosis inside my head. “Hard Rain,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and many more familiar, iconic songs treat themselves to rebirth through his ever-restless vision.

I know many of his fans are disappointed not to hear exact renditions. But I respect him more for not resting on his laurels. A hard working man of music and words, Dylan is not ready to lie down in a bed he made 50 years ago.

I am moved to see him there in his black clothes. Dark curling hair dusty gray now and body slower. The harmonica sings just as achingly as ever. My eyes tingle in sympathy for the young girl I was when I first saw him play in Washington DC and then again, in my later 20s, newly married, at Madison Square Garden in a double show with Tom Petty. But I feel none of the pity for aging musicians that I have felt before as I watch them try to recapture what once was. Tonight, Dylan plays songs from his newest album, Tempest, and from his first, and many between. His opus continues to grow and his interest in what he does never seems to wane.

We walk into the darkness after his last song; I wonder if this is the last time I will see him play. I can’t know. I look up to see the moon full and high in the sky. She understands all of it. The music, the night, the feel of the air, the sense of lost youth, and the promise of more to come.

 

The seats were good, not that you can tell....

The seats were good, not that you can tell….

 

Creative Emptiness Part II (water)

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There is a pool. It is not mine, but for now, it is mine. I have stood under the midday sun stroking the pool’s floor with a strange vacuum that sucks up the slimy stuff and leaves clean behind, but until today, three weeks in to my month long exile in this beautiful place, I felt no affinity for the pool.

Though I’ve tended to its needs, I never put a toe into it until yesterday when the heat blackmailed me into dipping my body into the water that is clearly not my element. And my conversion was so complete that today, I was actually disappointed to hear the rumble of thunder when I went back, ready to give myself to the pool again.

My relationship with water is not altogether clear cut. No right angles or black lines about it. Though it is not my element of natural affinity, I love rain. Soft rain, steady rain, torrential rain, storms of any kind. I also love the ocean. I fear the ocean. I succumb to the ocean, but awkwardly. My children tease me for the uncomfortable way I enter and exit the surf. But when I am held up by the gentle mountains of water during the quiet tide, I feel the emptiness of space enter me.

Lying there atop the swells, I think about the way every inch of my world is full of something tangible. People, coffee pots, computers, wooden spoons, grassy fields, forested mountains, huge oceans and an atmosphere of gassy atoms that sneak in to every cell of my body without my knowing it.

Water does not change any of that, obviously, but the way it seems to defy physics by lifting my weight off my feet and cradling me—doesn’t that seem like an open door to all possibility, even emptiness?

The good emptiness of naked space and naked time.

When I was young, the future was empty, for I had not invented it yet. I still have a future and I am still inventing it, but the space that the future inhabits seems less empty. Not to mention all the trajectories of my already-lived time. They shoot out possible futures ahead of me like laser beams.

Lying in water, even a swimming pool, lets me for a moment feel the space of time yawning at my fingertips, full of possibility.

Words and color, images, music, even my spirit guides – the intangibles that fill the spaces that are not spaces – have a chance to enter my head when my eyes are closed, my ears muffled by the water and my body lifted improbably by a substance I can drink, or that can disappear into a mound of sand.

A pool and a promise....

A pool and a promise….

Creative Emptiness Part I

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The light from windows reaches hallways through half-opened classroom doors. The shadowy inner spaces of the school seem sad. A school the day after a summer holiday is as empty as a place can ever be. The skeleton part-time staff of July is at home enjoying a long weekend. The arts camp that uses the building and grounds for a few weeks is closed down, too.

When I first got there yesterday, hauling a lamp and some picture frames, a desk calendar and other supplies into the building from out of the blistering sun-baked car, a young colleague was sitting in her classroom writing a grad school paper. But then she left.

Alone is being in a place where people are supposed to be, but aren’t. Alone is also starting a new job in the same place I spent my career doing something else altogether. A new job as unfamiliar as the hallways, classrooms and libraries are familiar. I go to work, and sit at my desk, inventing myself in a new image. Bravely being new again. Again.

I have reinvented myself so many times in the last 12 months that I wonder anyone can recognize me.

Maybe that’s what alone is. The fear of being by myself in a world that can’t see me because I am simply unrecognizable. “Who is she? I thought I knew her….”

The limbo of summer meets the limbo of newness and the limbo of solitude. And something else to consider, I tell myself. I am living in someone else’s home again. Again. With someone else’s skillets and someone else’s pets.

I miss my skillets and I miss my pets. I wonder how I manage to get myself into these situations. These new-old situations. This new-old version of me. Instead of counting the minutes until I can be reunited with my skillets, I am trying – I swear – to embrace all that is new as well as the aloneness and the emptiness. I see now that being the new-old me in these empty places is quite perfect, really.

Alone is good. Empty is good. The emptying out that happens now and then inside my chest cannot be filled if I am not left alone with my thoughts and my new self loving my old self, and my old self returning the favor.

I found this photograph titled Woman in Progress.

I found this photograph titled Woman in Progress.

Responsibility Used to Be Fun

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My daughter in 2nd grade in an agony of desperate excitement. "Pick me!" One of my favorite photos of all time.

My daughter in 2nd grade in an agony of desperate excitement. “Pick me!” One of my favorite photos of all time.

Small hands wave in the air. “Pick me, pick me!” they seem to say. They are attached to little humans whose faces bear expressions of anguish combined with hope combined with glee.

They want to volunteer for the job. Whatever the job is—they want it. Little children in school long to lead the line of students to the music room or clear off the lunch table or clean the paint brushes. In homes across the world, tiny people beg to perform the tasks of life, from feeding the cat to collecting the mail.

I remember my children hovering in the kitchen as I cooked, cleaned or did something else that, for me, was a chore. “Do you want to put the silverware away?” I’d ask my 3 year old son as I unloaded the dishwasher. Picking which stack to place a fork, knife or spoon in was probably fun for him and likely a good exercise for his developing sorting skills. Luckily he was tall for his age and could peer into the drawer without a boost.

My kids would sit with me on the giant family bed amidst drifts of clean laundry. They sorted socks, folded daddy’s boxers into tiny squares and sorted clothes into teetering piles according to family member.

They loved picking up the Brio trains or wooden blocks and putting them in their baskets, especially if we sang a clean-up song.

Fast forward. Age12. Even the most conscientious child who does her own homework the minute she gets home is likely to balk at any “chore” seen as unconnected to her own immediate self-interest, no matter how-up many clean-up songs are sung.

At the school where I taught for many years, I saw the same phenomenon over and over again.

Why does taking responsibility stop being fun? Or maybe it’s not responsibility per se, but the “jobs of life” that engage and enchant us at first, and then lose their luster.

Eventually, we get past adolescence and take on jobs galore, once again willing to shoulder worldly tasks. However, we no longer leap around gleefully begging to be given more duties at work or home; we simply accept that it is our lot in life to do so.

There are exceptions to this general trend. When a young person is starting out in her own job for the first time, or when someone branches out on his own to launch a business. The new employee makes everyone else look bad, volunteering for more and more responsibilities and joyfully staying at the office until 9 at night. Everyone else may be staying till 9 too, but with a seriously different attitude. They may feel like martyrs, or just abused, or maybe get a hit of self-esteem from the superiority of it all. But that new employee, like an entrepreneur starting up on her own, is steeped in glee to be doing it. All of it.

Of course there are twenty-somethings who play Halo in their parents’ basements and don’t want to do much of anything yet. There are people who have been in their jobs for 30 years and take on every day as if they were kindergarteners hoping to be allowed to clap the erasers (or whatever the electronic equivalent of that is these days).

But I’m talking about that thing that seems to be so inherent in little kids, and in all of us when we are starting out, or starting something new. That desire to do it all, and “be grown-ups” – prove ourselves? Take on what has been forbidden until this moment?

Is it an addiction to newness? Is it simply the lack of burn-out?

The little girl waving her hand in the air, longing to be called upon to read the weather to the class feels alive as she stands up to do her job. The new teacher feels alive as he works late into the night planning a lesson on westward expansion. The entrepreneur with a great idea feels alive as she goes days without sleeping to formulate her business plan, create her website and design her logo.

I have no idea where to go with this ramble. I know there is a way to approach every day as if it were new, full of promise and possibility, a chance to make a mark, change a life, forge an identity. I don’t want children to lose that feeling so that when they are 12 years old they look at the kindergarteners begging to serve the lunch as if they are freaks. Or so that when the 40 year veteran sees the new employee bursting at the seams, he does not default to resentment at worst, exhausted bemusement at best.

Who knows? Maybe at some point we stop believing that what we do has meaning, or that we are making a difference. But every 5 year old understands that the smallest task, from being line leader to setting the table for dinner, is meaningful and important. The child who brings in the mail or feeds the cat is making a difference. Every moment and every task, every responsibility and every silly item on the day’s list will certainly be appreciated by someone, and carried out with gratitude and joy if we can look at it through the eyes of a child.

Dog Blog

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Cats have always been my animal. Well, and horses. In some ways I’m a girly stereotype, at least as identified by my animal preferences.

It’s not that I have not liked dogs. I’ve always enjoyed them, and even retained a strong attraction to German Shepherds despite the fact that I was attacked rather viciously by one when I was just three. My only distinct memory of that event was the sight of my dad’s shirt turning from white and brown check to red as he ran with me over his shoulder from Central Park to the nearest doctor’s office. Still, my brother-in-law’s shepherd, Miles, was one of my favorite people.

I feel an affinity for other animals at other times in my life, and pay close attention when one species in particular makes repeated appearances over the course of a few days or weeks. I love the book, Animal Speak, by Ted Andrews. He writes about animal medicine and advises his reader to stay alert to the lessons that can be learned, and what clues are to be found to help us step along our path toward inner knowing. The medicine comes to us through the spirits that greet us in the form of the hawk, the skunk, the bear, the heron, the deer, or the coyote. And many more.

But for me, 2013 so far has very much been about dogs. Through a series of circumstances, I have spent a lot of time with them. Different dogs. I have been moving around a lot and have ended up, several times, living with, getting to know, taking care of—dogs.

I’ve fallen in love with them. My heart has been melted by dogs. Even dogs who are complete strangers, whom I met while visiting a dog park with my sister and her pup, Dexter, have winnowed their way into my consciousness and heart.

So what is the animal magic dogs have brought to me? I’ve been thinking about this.

Live in the moment

A dog forgets the full bladder of dawn, the hungry tummy when the human dinner is cooking and no one has gotten around to feeding him yet, the hours of neglect in favor of the laptop, the washing machine, or the lawnmower. For a dog, history is gone forever and the now is everything. The smell of my flip flop. The flicker of laughter outside on the sidewalk. The sight of a favorite human. The feel of fingers scratching under a tilted chin. A dog’s sensations of the moment trump everything else. The past is meaningless. The future does not exist yet, so why bother?

Forgiveness

A dog’s forgiving nature relates to living in the moment, as I see it. The two dogs I am living with and caring for now, Nico (a poodle) and Chini (a lab mix), are dear, affectionate souls who love nothing more than to romp through the woods with me, flop in the sun at my feet as I read a book, lounge across me as I watch TV and scratch them languorously. They have accepted me into their lives as a surrogate mom they like a lot. Sometimes I have to leave them. Life happens. I try not to leave them for more than 5 hours at a time, if possible, and if I must, to enlist the help of a neighbor. One day, I got stuck. Frantic, I watched three hours tick by, over my deadline. When I finally pulled into the driveway, I heard their barking. Clearly I was not the only one feeling frantic. I ran at top speed into the house, patted Nico who was jumping literally 4 feet off the ground, released Chini from the crate (Nico doesn’t get crated), apologizing effusively the whole time. The dogs would not leave the house to relieve their bladders until they licked me, nuzzled me, received my loving in return. There was no canine acrimony. No pouting (I mean, admit it—a cat will pout). No attitude. Just love, and flat out forgiveness as the past was forgotten and the moment of love and liberation cherished.

Patience

My friend Terri has some dogs. Five, to be exact. Two labs. A bull dog. An Australian Silky. A mix of Chihuahua, Greyhound and something else. Somehow, it all works. Scout, one of the labs, is one of the most long-suffering, calm, unflappable beasts in the universe. He will lie on the floor while Lily, the mixed breed dog, inexplicably humps his head with abandon. He will romp all over the sprawling property with Daisy, the terrier, who is 10 times smaller than he is. They run; he waits; Daisy eventually catches up; they run some more. Invariably, they come home together. Rosie, the bulldog, has a temper. Scout refuses to be riled. Admittedly, he is not that patient when it’s close to meal time, but he is a dog, after all.

Unconditional love

Bodhi, king Poodle (very tall) with floppy hair and melting eyes, sits every day like a Buddhist monk of royal lineage, feet neatly aligned, waiting for his mom, my old friend Annie, to come home. He waits all day. Sometimes he sleeps on the couch. (He takes up half of it, but, when he wants to fit up there with two or more humans, can curl into a remarkably small package.) This hippie dog’s heart is as huge as Ghandi’s or Mother Theresa’s. While I was there for a two week visit, Bodhi tuned in to me remarkably fast. He sensed my sadness, and in a compromise borne of his own empathy, left his mother’s bed halfway through the night to come sleep on mine. He did not do this at first, but after he’d gotten to know and care about me, it became part of his action plan of love. Did he ask for anything in return? Not really. But he got my undying love. Bodhi loves without condition. Dogs know how to do that. They do not question, criticize, doubt, or demand. They may ask for pats and ear scratches, and surely find it suitable to be fed upon occasion, but in the scheme of things, they give so much more than they get.

Dignity

It’s true that dogs can be pretty goofy. They don’t have the meticulous standards of a cat. Dogs will roll in rotten raccoon guts. They’ll make a scene, barking hysterically at a leaf floating by. But I now see these behaviors as endearing in their unbridled enthusiasm for life. Bella, a Swiss Mountain dog, belonged to my friend Teri for ten years. I met her the day she came home with Teri and her two daughters, and knew her all her life till her recent death. Bella could be pretty maddening. For example, eating chocolate, reading glasses, undergarments, and a variety of other unorthodox, unhealthy, and indigestible items. But somehow, no matter what mischief she got herself into, Bella had inherent dignity. She embodied the qualities of forgiveness, unconditional love, living in the moment, and endless patience for the other dogs in her family too. But it was her dignity in the face of adversity that struck me at the end, as she gradually let go of life. Though she was not in awful pain, she grew weaker and more wobbly as tumors spread over her body. Breathing was not always easy, and it hurt to walk. But she roused herself each morning to walk the gardens with her mom, waited for her girls to come to say goodbye, and left life on her own terms.

Embracing the doggy lessons into my life is the task I’m grappling with this year of 2013. I can’t ignore the future and though my mind occasionally erases it, the past still has a strong hold on me. I can forgive easily, except the one it is most important to forgive—myself, though I am getting better at it. Patience. That’s a good one. My record is spotty there. As a teacher, I could have oodles of patience. But being patient about my own process? Not what I’m best at… yet. Patience goes with forgiveness in some ways, doesn’t it? And maybe unconditional love, too. Something easy to feel for one’s children—so hard to feel for oneself. And finally, I seek my own dignity in the face of egregious failures and errors. “Be patient with, forgive, and love yourself,” I hear the dogs say to me, “and live for today. Isn’t today wonderful? And aren’t you lucky to have it?”

Chini and Nico on a woods ramble with me.

Chini and Nico on a woods ramble with me.

Saying goodbye to Bodhi down in Virginia.
Saying goodbye to Bodhi down in Virginia.

Scout is patient with my daughter's hugs because he loves her!

Scout is patient with my daughter’s hugs because he loves her!

Chini and Nico -- the look of love.

Chini and Nico — the look of love.

Dearest Bella in her last days, the epitome of all the doggy lessons, patient, loving, forgiving, dignified, and living in the last moments available.

Dearest Bella in her last days, the epitome of all the doggy lessons, patient, loving, forgiving, dignified, and living in the last moments available.

The Flash

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Flash of insight. Flashback. Hot flash.

I sometimes wake up in the wee hours – well, that specific wee hour when no matter how cool the room in which I sleep, my body becomes suffused with warmth. I can feel the heat flowing down my arms and legs the way honey flows down the spout of a honey jar. Slowly, deliberately, inevitably.

This is my own gentle version of the hot flash. I get, at most, one a day, in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. I don’t really mind them. I toss a leg out from under the covers, or throw back the sheets, let the cool air hit my skin and I drift back to sleep, only to waken some time later, shivering. Nine times out of ten, the flash of heat is accompanied by a flash of insight. Or at least a thought worth thinking.

Just as my body volunteers to turn pink and toasty, my mind volunteers little jewels for me to ponder in my attenuated state of alpha brain activity, as I rapidly slide back into sleep. If I don’t have the energy or wherewithal to jot down a clue to my morning self, I lose it for good.

Sometimes, that middle night waking brings another kind of flash. A flash from the past. An image, idea or whole memory blossoms in my occipital lobe, or cerebrum, and then exists there for me to examine, peacefully, as I doze off and on and finally succumb to sleepier brain waves, like theta, or delta. (Why do the stages of sleep sound like rushing a fraternity? But that’s not important right now.)

So I got to thinking about how we humans have attached the same word, flash, to these different phenomena. A flash is a burst. A burst of light, or a burst of “an emotional mood or intellectual activity” (Encarta via Word). It is, by definition, sudden and brief.

I guess a true genius has flashes of insight even when the mind is alert. Though I am willing to bet that, no matter how wide awake Mozart, Hildegard of Bingen, or Goethe were when their inspiration came, they were smart enough to write it down before they forgot.

Why, I wonder, does the mind work that way? In flashes? Hot flashes aside, it is the flashing mind that fascinates me. The brain, in all its wave formations, wakeful or sleepy, sober or intoxicated, has its moments when insight, memory, understanding, creation flash upon it. When everyone is a genius. When we access the widely-advertised unaccessed part of our brains.

Sometimes the flash cascades and we can keep the momentum going. (Or rather, the momentum keeps going and we have little to do with it except to ride the wave.) That happens when I write, sometimes (not today, though). I feel the sparkling, flashing brain thing happen and it continues, like a very long mental orgasm that goes and goes until something stops it. I get hungry or my leg falls asleep or the phone rings. Life.

When a mental flash occurs, for me at least, it is indeed as sudden and unexpected as my body’s epiphanies of warmth in the middle of the night. I don’t seem able to initiate, control or stop it. My mind reels at what my mind can do. I have concluded that I am my own best teacher. I just have to show up, do my homework, and pay attention when the flashes come.

flash

Letting Go with Fire

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Goodbye can be so painful. Parting with something or someone we love is rarely easy. Some goodbyes, however, are necessary. They are what is right and fitting. Sometimes goodbye is what saves us. Still, it is hard.

Saying goodbye to my son as he headed home to Vermont yesterday was sad, but I also knew it was necessary. He has to go to work, to class. Live his life and play his music. I also know that I will see him in a month – a help.

Goodbye to the masses of stuff I purged recently, and gave away or sold—that was easy. But for decades I had been unable to part with any of those things. It’s funny when goodbye goes from impossible to easy, seemingly overnight.

But of course there are many processes involved in parting. Some parting is slow, as when my mother died, and a few years later, my father. Some parting is sudden. My brother-in-law died in a nano-second this January from a brain aneurysm. No goodbye allowed.

But there are ways to say goodbye through ritual. To part not only with people, but with beliefs that hold us back, sorrows that clog our hearts, fears that keep us from living fully.

For loved ones who die, funerals and memorials are crucial rituals, shared with others. Other than a ceremony like a funeral, what other releasing rituals are we taught? How do we have a funeral for our fear that we will never find love? Or our belief that we are unworthy? Or the sorrow of a lost love? These feelings must be parted with for us to live fully. How to do it?

About nine years ago, I did my first work with a shaman. Her name is Skye Taylor and she lives in California now. I studied with her, and learned many lessons about myself, and the world. How to engage with the seen and unseen, the ego and the super-ego, the past, present and future. She also taught me how to release and say goodbye using fire.

The fire as ritual. For things you want to let go of permanently. Not for your child heading off to a year abroad—for her, a hug and a debit card will do. Not for the unwanted picture frames and end tables. For them, avoid fire and consider a tag sale or Goodwill. But for all that stuff you may not know how to get rid of, consider the cleansing prayer of fire and smoke.

I did not grow up in a religious family, but as a writer and English teacher I am very comfortable with symbolism. It is not difficult for me to envision a thought, belief or emotion being embodied in an inanimate object.

Skye taught me to blow into a stick (a match stick will do for city dwellers or if the sticks are all under the snow). Blow whatever is to be released, shipped off, dispatched. A toxic relationship, despair, fear, a limiting belief that I have acknowledged and am ready to let go of. The trick is to be specific, too, when thinking about what it is to be released, as I blow hard into that stick held between my hands. Despair over what? Fear of what? What belief, specifically? This is also a good way to release someone—someone you have lost through death, or a break up, and yet are having a painful time letting them go. There is no limit on how many sticks you can use, how many things you can release with one fire.

The fire needs to be burning already. If you don’t have a fireplace or firepit there is a way to create an indoor fire with baking soda and rubbing alcohol – it’s not as scary as it sounds and not at all dangerous. It burns slowly and is only as big as the pile of baking soda you use. (Put a mound of it in a cast iron skillet or a stainless steel baking dish – it won’t hurt them. Pour rubbing alcohol on the soda till it’s saturated and light it with a match. Magical.)

The sticks that now embody what is being released go into the fire. They are burned; they are thus transformed (chemical change is so comforting in its totality); they go up to the heavens as smoke.

If you would like to replace a fear or limiting belief with something positive and affirming, round two is like round one. After releasing, you symbolically bring into your life what you want. For example, you blow into a stick the knowledge that you will find a healthy relationship, a job, a house you love, that you will love yourself, take care of yourself, embrace intimacy, be adventurous—whatever it is that is lacking. Those sticks burn too, and the smoke rises like a prayer.

It works because I believe in the power of this ritual. I believe I can release what is toxic and manifest what is healthy inside myself. I love to see the little sticks curl up, redden, become ash. Doing this with friends or family is tremendously moving for me, as we take turns around the fire pit, or just all go at once, quietly blowing, releasing, blowing, bringing in. I have done it alone, too, which has its own murmuring, resonating intensity.

Clearing energy in my home by burning sage has a similar effect on me. It is about using fire to transform, cleanse, and make room for what is beautiful and beneficial. I walk around the house, smudge stick smoldering, and let the smoke float to the corners. I bend to let it find the spots under tables and even inside closets, where I imagine negative energy may be lurking. If everything is energy and energy never disappears, every fight or sob fest leaves its energy behind. If I have recently struggled especially, or been greatly unhappy, frightened or lost, that feeling has its energy that, in my mind, lingers in the spaces around me. I have faith in the potency of the savory smoke of burning sage to evict that energy.  As far as I am concerned, it is banished, and that’s what matters.

These rituals do not erase emotion or memory, or miraculously change me overnight. But they usher in change. They confirm my intentions and begin the process of defusing the power the emotion or memory has over me. Releasing a toxic belief or emotion can be like letting go of something dangerous in the water. You still see it, but it is drifting away to where it can’t hurt you anymore.

Ritual is a funny thing. It has the power we let it have. And yet many believe that the ritual itself is powerful whether or not we believe. How many people go to church every Sunday, skeptical, jaded, but hoping that is true? That the ritual will work even if they can’t “go there.” Whatever the case, I believe in the power of goodbye rituals, releasing rituals, banishing rituals, and most important, manifesting rituals, to embody my intentions in the matter. My intention to let go. My intention to bring about change. In the end, my intentions are what matter, and if I set my intentions on goodbye, goodbye it is.

Fire

Lessons for a Klutz

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Bang. The side of my hand ricochets off a door jamb while I’m carrying a heavy box. Thud. I slam my hip into a table corner. Crash. I walk smack into the edge of a glass table top, shattering it and ripping up my shin.

Even more dramatic than the huge sheet of glass smashing into giant shards was the day I flew head first into a wall. Yeah, I know. What the hell? I was walking rather enthusiastically to open the door for the plumber, who had just solved a huge septic problem despite frozen ground and an inch of snow. I tripped. The momentum projected me about five feet. In fact, I may have gone even further given the chance, but an inconveniently located wall stopped my flight and I crashed loudly. I may have gone all woozy for a second. The pain in various body parts was not insignificant. But honestly my first thought was, “Really? I had to do that in front of witnesses?” The plumber and his assistant were outside pounding on the glass door shouting, “Are you okay?”

That graceful episode resulted in a giant egg on my forehead, a gash down my forearm and a seriously messed up finger. The middle finger on my left hand – with which I must have tried to block my impact—hit the wall tip first. Nail shattered and middle joint traumatized. To this day, months later, the joint is still huge and painful. The whole hand is compromised. Who knew one silly finger could affect strength and agility in a hand? (I bet an orthopedist would have known, had I visited one. With a $2000 deductible in my insurance policy, it did not seem important enough at the time.)

In the last 5 months, I have endured more minor accidents than in the 5 years prior. Blood, torn flesh, scuffed skin, bruises, you name it.

I keep thinking there is a lesson here. Maybe more than one. Here are the teachings of this period of clumsiness. At least the ones I have come up with so far:

  1. Slow down, you crazy woman! Look, listen, wait. Take stock. Just pause. Doing so may well protect my well-being (no more blood and gore), and it might also create a bubble around my vision, head and heart that will let me absorb more of what is in front of my face.
  2. I don’t have to be perfect. Glass tables break. They can be replaced. Bruises heal. And my vanity about having pretty hands – well it’s probably time to let that one go. I can be a klutzy idiot and still hold my head up, have self-respect and maintain my friendships. Well, except for that one friend who only loved me because of my balletic grace and ability to walk flawlessly through life. So screw her.
  3.  It’s okay to ask for help. So if I’m limping due to a pratfall, or stunned into stupidity by a bonk on the head or unable to use my left hand for a month, it’s okay to get help. This has always been hard for me. But now I find that when I ask, I receive. Odd.
  4.  It’ s okay to be the one who gets taken care of now and then. Sometimes it really is nice to have someone stand there in the bathroom with me while I drip scarlet onto the floor and delicately wrap my hand in a clean cloth.

I’m very hopeful that if I have learned these lessons well enough, the universe will now stop teaching me. I’m ready to move on to a less painful curriculum.