River

(For Noadiah, whose wisdom is gold)

Been traveling these wide roads for so long
My heart's been far from you
Ten-thousand miles gone

Oh, I wanna come near and give ya
Every part of me
But there's blood on my hands
And my lips aren't clean

In my darkness I remember
Momma's words reoccur to me
"Surrender to the good Lord
And he'll wipe your slate clean"

Take me to your river
I wanna go
Oh, go on
Take me to your river
I wanna know  --River, Leon Bridges.

Lines across the page, pen and paint dipping back and forth to ferry color in bits, I sat letting my mind wander through so many things while listening to Leon Bridges' song River on repeat. It's been a grey day full of that thrust that wants to keep things moving forward, reaching, but the tug of the grey is strong and the deep soul of this song will not let my mind rest. I've been thinking about the river all day, about friends who will observe Yom Kippur tomorrow, about the cleansing and healing power of gathering up shame and guilt and attendant sadness and casting it upon the water so it can fan out and away. Tonight over dinner, friends and I were talking about the ritual of bread taking in the quality of those emotions and, in turn, nourishing the aquatic life beneath, the movement of that energy from harmful to nutritive. There is a surrender to the water, be it nightly as I shower or sitting beside the ocean listening to her crash and call. My nightly showering ritual started in a ramshackle college dorm in Rome, Italy where I was living for the summer, two short months after Hunter died. My grief was unmanageable and unmooring, stuffed down by copious wine and a distancing from myself that had gone into overdrive with my dad's death four years before. Nightly showering was a way to strip off the day before I crawled into the twin bed in my lonely room and let tears stream into my ears while I stared at the ceiling. So many years later and in the weeks before I got married, I stood on the shore of Whidby Island and held hands with my girlfriends as they all wished their peace for me before I threw myself into the water of the Sound. I wanted that water to wash me anew, a clearing between what was and what would be. Tonight in the shower I was thinking how beautiful it would feel to be baptized now, at this age, not so much into the realm of the church, but into the light of joy. To receive the intention, to be held and plunged back, to come up for air in the shattered sunlight, cleansed. There is something I crave about that feeling. Perhaps it's surrender. My chest draws toward it. My heart has a need.

Listening to Leon Bridges reminds me that we are most resistant to coming to peace when we feel our most unworthy, when we have blood on our hands and our lips aren't clean. We want to put the pain down, to let the sins and feelings flow away but we feel too broken to ask. And this is precisely why these rituals exist, to allow us to release the shame and the shit and the static that keeps us from one another and from moving forward in our lives. My friend Noadiah told me that his beloved minister once said "Prayers aren't being answered? Well, who are you still mad at?" When he said this, a face lept to my mind as clear as day, boom. There are others, but this is the mad that is sticking the Universe in a loop for me. And it's my own atonement to do, not because I have wronged this person, but because I have wronged myself in holding on to so much anger. 

It's humbling and messy and I'm making my list of things I want to think through as I walk to sit by the water and be present to this idea of giving some of this a rest.

Join me.

At 16, We Exhale

Sixteen came and went. None of the usual fanfare, no car with a large bow parked in the drive, no huge surprise party BBQ designed to usher my sweet boy across the threshold of not-driving to driving. He can't technically drive yet, so maybe that's why this celebration felt muted and less elated than others. Maybe that celebration is one still to come.

But fifteen had been a year of holding breath. It started a few months before his birthday, his long lean frame and easy smile at times a startling reminder of Hunter, basketball held loosely under his arm at his side, his easy wave in the summer sunlight sending me right back to the day I last saw my brother in the rearview mirror on my way out of town. Fifteen was a year of a tension that sat at the back of my skull, low where the head meets the neck, an alertness of danger. Danger might come in the form of worry about how D was doing at school, whether he was happy or connected to friends and family, how he was feeling in this world of what feels like constant tension and would extend to a broader worry about the world and his place in it. This was all my tension, not his. "What if something happens to him?" my mind would ask as inopportune times of watching he and his friends play ball or when he'd walk away from the car in the morning. I'd find myself in frequent tears. I knew that my flood of emotions was unusual. It seemed at one point completely irrational and at another completely normal. There were a few times it bordered on a panic attack. Gratefully, I have good friends whose wisdom led me through those scared moments.

My therapist and I have talked a lot about the long ripple of trauma in life. When she first mentioned that losing my brother constituted trauma, I pushed back hard, "People have had horrible things happen to them, Darleen. This is life, this just happens." But she kept with it, explaining how trauma works, how my defining other people's trauma as "Big T" and mine as "Little t" was fine, but it was still trauma that required me to work through, process and come to a place of understanding the loss. I was reminded of Viktor Frankl's idea that pain has the property of gas let into a vessel, that no matter the amount of gas, it will fill the entire vessel. Trauma has these properties, it seems, and can linger longer than anyone ever realizes. You can work through it, you can observe it when it comes up and see it for what it is and, depending on where you are in your work, you can work on not allowing it to bring fear and anxiety into your every day that limits your living. In my case it was subtle and then it wasn't. My love and deepest respect to people who fight this every day.

This morning I was listening to an NPR piece on survivors of gun violence and the things that pop up in their lives. One woman interviewed noted that when her daughter contracted a disease she had to work through deep feelings of fear of losing her. That provoked this little blog post. One person's story sometimes reaches out to another to make them feel less alone.

There are a million complexities to losing a sibling, the shift of parent and child relationships, the ongoing loss felt in sibling relationships, the episodic and startlingly real feelings of recurrence and remembrance that startle the living and drive intense emotions. All during that 15th year, I would talk to David about those feelings, not so much to let him know that I was terrified something would happen to him (which I did, honestly, because I was) but because he has a gift for seeing the patterns and behaviors that exist around him. I wanted him to understand what was happening. And, in truth, he will know and love many people in his life who live with lingering trauma. We all do. We all need to know.

On the morning of his 16th birthday, I asked David what it felt like to be finally 16. "Pretty much the same," he said. And, after we'd been driving for a bit, he turned and asked me what it felt like for me. "It feels like exhaling, buddy. It feels like everything is going to be ok."

And it will be.
It will be.
Come what may.

(Happiest 16th to my beautiful son. 7/8)
/The book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vanderkolk has been a real gift./

Into the Waves

White Water was a huge water park in Oklahoma City, a place where legions of children, dressed in all manner of swim and floating gear, and adults, tugging large coolers of processed food and Capri Sun, would convene to escape the boiling summer heat. Our family would make the 40 mile trek to OKC to spend hours running wild, season passes clutched in hand, so exhausted by the end of the day that my mother would have the sweet relief of a carful of sleeping children on the ride home.

White Water had all of the features of a regular water park: the lazy river, the stories-high White Lightening slide, the kiosks where you could get sizzling hot french fries that rested salty against your chlorine-soaked tongue. But the strangest and sometimes most wonderful part of the park was the wave pool. It was enormous, hundreds of people packed into it's football-field like expanse just waiting, waiting. Suddenly the bell would ring, a scream would erupt from the crowd and the water would start moving, great undulations of waves roiling from deep within its man-made ocean.

I've been thinking about the wave pool lately as it applies to life, this wave pool in particular because unlike the ocean, there was a certain rhythm to the waves. You could sit atop of your raft and ride, or stand closer to shore and slam your body, back turned, against them. And there was that middle ground where you weren't quite tall enough to touch the bottom without the waves washing over your head. This was the thrilling, sometimes terrifying space, that space in between feeling solid and feeling the rush of danger. And, depending on the day, depending on how crowded the wave pool was, depending on the strength of your skinny legs to buoy you up, you sat on the edge of being plowed under or keeping your head above water. The rhythm of the waves had not changed, neither had your expectation of them being there, but the circumstances and your place in them became the variables of remaining above or being sucked below.

I've held this metaphor in my mind a lot lately, as friends have struggled with some pretty deep loss and sadness over the past year, as I myself negotiate my own place in the world, as we as a community lean in to lift one another up when we aren't feeling so strong. I think sometimes it's awkward to ask for help, that metaphor of being in a situation where you know that the waves are coming, but you just don't have the strength in the moment to kick yourself above them, or where how hard and disorienting it may be when everyone else seems to sit atop the water on their own raft while you can barely keep your head clearing the water's roiling plane. And, to extend the metaphor, the folks sitting atop the rafts likely don't even know you are struggling, because their gaze is shifted outwards toward the horizon, their perspective raised above what is happening below. But there is room on the raft for two, maybe three even. I know this, and I know the hospitality of that space if I just ask. Why is it sometimes so hard to do so?

I want to keep working with the raft metaphor, or to talk about the strength of pushing off of the bottom and riding the wave, that powerful feeling of not so much the wave striking your body, but the ride of catching it as it comes and not being swept under by it. To push up and engage, the timing of it coming and you being ready, the sheer thrill of knowing that something can drag you under but using your energy, your life force, to meet it and unify, to roll into it and wait for the next one.

Because the truth is that the waves stop until they start again, and they do start again because life is not static and change happens and shit happens and hard things happen all the time. But the key is this: you are not alone in the pool, although you feel that you may be, and your position in the pool is based on your own negotiation. That's the thing I need to remember most. I choose how I work with the waves.

Start somewhere, even today

For Paul, because I'm still learning (with so much thanks).
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This morning as I bent my head down to kiss Ava's forehead to wake her, I whispered "Hello, my beautiful girl. How did Mama get such a beautiful girl to call her own?" Ava's eyes fluttered awake and as I came into focus, she smiled and said "It's because you're beautiful, Mama. Where did you think the genes came from?"

"Oh, sweet girl," I said, "Mama is..." and stopped, hearing in my mind what I was going to say next.

What was I going to say next?

I was going to say something to deflect the compliment. I was going to say anything that would deflect what she had just said. "Mama is...old? smarter than she is pretty? not beautiful?"

Instead, I smiled at her and said "Mama is so thankful for that compliment, bug. I love hearing that you think I am beautiful, it means so much to me that you tell me things that you appreciate about me." Because here is this fantastic, powerful, beautiful, creative, light-filled 10 year old who doesn't get that it's not ok to think that you are beautiful, that acknowledging physical beauty is fraught and full of connotations. And, at the very end of the day, she hears time and again that we look so much alike. Who is lying, then, if I deny her compliment, her or me?

I struggle with this question of beauty, the inclination for my girl to watch herself dancing in the mirror, the tossing of the mane of hair, the emphasis on her looks. She's confident across the board: smart brain, kind personality, giving heart, beautiful face. But there is this narrow line of humility that needs to run the border between confidence and arrogance that I feel as a parent I need to enforce, lest this get out of hand. Or is there? Perhaps it's just all my own conditioning now brought to roost in my shaping of this bright soul's opinion about herself. What am I supposed to do?

Years ago, a friend told me about an experience she had with two trusted and lovely friends. My friend is a smart, beautiful, clever, funny, hardworking and talented woman. At this stage in her life, she was already professionally successful in her mid-twenties, working hard and being recognized for the great things she brought to the table. If memory serves me, her friends were running a workshop about messages that women receive about themselves and wanted to work through an exercise where they each made a list of loving truths they believed about my friend. They then sat on either side of her and whispered these loving truths in each ear, one at a time. I think she told me that she made it through maybe 5 rounds before she could no longer stand the urge to reach up and shield her ears, finally asking them to stop, tears streaming down her face.

Maybe it was because we were in our mid-20s, but I sat nodding at her reaction, my skin prickling at the discomfort.

The truth is that I think women want nothing more to than to be truly seen by the people we love and who love us. We want to that inner light to rush to our eyes because we are able to be vulnerable. We want to feel that warm comfort of trust. We want to be beautiful, not only in the manifestation of someone digging our physical form (in whatever form that may be), but beautiful in the most all-encompassing way: heart, mind, soul and personality. Stop a woman on the street and pay her a compliment and watch the smile radiate from her face. These safe, single-serve intersections put a lift in anyone's stride that lasts hours. But go deep with a friend about how much you love and appreciate her, how you love how she walks in the world, how you think she's physically beautiful and watch her squirm or, typically, deny.

It seems the only way around this is exposure therapy: the relentless and targeted exposure of authentically admiring the beauty in the women we love. It's a text to your friend highlighting something that you admire. It's a phone call where you say, with your words, that you find something about her beautiful ("cute" has no space in this exercise...puppies and kittens are cute). It's the letter you write to tell her why you think her being on this earth matters to you, why her relationship with you matters or is important. And then there is the conversation over drinks, looking into her eyes (friend to friend, lover to lover, mother to daughter, etc), where you get to say these things and react to one another in a physical way.

Exposure to her own goodness, in varying degrees of intimacy, from someone she loves.

I had this sort of experience with a friend years ago, at a time in my life where I felt lost, alone, and less of myself than I had been in years. This friend made it his job to show me to myself, to bring me back to an understanding of what I could mean to people, to boost me back up on the path. This is his gift, a source of encouragement for many people I know. I also know he saved my life in many ways by this simple gift of sharing with me the bright light he saw in me.

So who is that 10 year old inside of you that all too quickly learned to stop trusting her belief in her own beauty? And how can you love and encourage that confident 10 year old in others? Because we all love the love, even if it's at different levels and with different layers of security keeping us safe. But it's good to start somewhere, even today.

Made manifest

Today the men came to rip out the kitchen, next week the bathrooms, weeks after that the not-original built-ins and flooring. This shit is getting real, for real, now. Minutes after I took this picture, I saw one of my realtors on the street outside. "Come back and see what we are doing!" I called to him. "Oh my, go slow on that remodel, Fran!" he counseled back. "HA! This is go big or go home time, Ralph!" was my gleeful response.

And it was gleeful. All of the anxiety over the enormous amount of money I'm spending, whether I'll be in this home forever, what it all means to this time in my life had been burned away in that minute.

This is my vision, my brain reminded me.

My big, beautiful life, the home I wrote about back in June when I laid out my vision for my future. And that vision encompassed life and home and work and relationships. It is coming true in ways big and small that I haven't focused on, but have become manifest just for the sheer fact that I have articulated them. It's all in motion, big and huge and becoming. I can feel it.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to override the intellect and go with your heart. Sometimes the bravest answer is "yes", or "no" or "not this" or "hmm, let me consider that". Sometimes the decision trees are not enough, that the downward cascade of the worst case scenario is not going to save you from hurt or sadness or tragedy. Sometimes you have to run in front of the good thing to make sure you catch it. Sometimes what you think is a good thing only exists to teach you more about who you are and how gracefully you can let go of things that are not meant for you. And bless them, and say "thank you" for the lesson.

Late night last night, I got some great wisdom from a new friend about creating the life you want to live. He said that he believes that you attract good things by living the good things: to attract depth, you have to be vulnerable to going under; to attract partnership, you have to get past the need to manage the situation; to walk the path with others, you have to be comfortable with the ambiguity; to create a difference in someone's life, you have to know yourself in all of your sticky messy-ness first.

He also said that knowing the difference between suffering through an untenable situation and the life you are destined to have is having a sense of what this big beautiful life would feel like well lived.

What would that big beautiful life look like?
How would that make you feel?
Who and what exists with you in that space?
How will you continue to grow?
How will you help to make this life you've envisioned manifest?

And why are you waiting even a moment to begin?

Love makes space for everyone’s happiness.

This is a piece I wrote during my #lentinseptember days.
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I have struggled immensely over the years to come to terms with my mother’s decision not to marry again after my dad died. She not only didn’t remarry, but also didn’t date anyone. For years when I was a child, I thought this was because she loved my father so much that she couldn’t bring herself to be with someone else, that this was the essence of true and abiding love, a love that I should search for as an adult. As I grew older, I began to understand how complex having your partner die can be. I think my mother was afraid to extend herself again, afraid of losing someone again (as her mother had), afraid of rejection, afraid of what life like might be like on the other side of this immense fear. And, in addition to this incapacitating fear (and this has been true for my two friends who have been widowed), some people would not let my father die. People shared their condolences on an annual basis, remembered the anniversary of his death, sent her cards on his birthday. She was, in their minds, married to my father forever and therefore, in some small way, in her mind she was beholden to that narrative. My best friend brought this home for me when she told me about her own experience of having to leave friendships because all her friends ever wanted to talk about was her husband and how much they missed him and wished he were there. She had ceased to be a young and vibrant spirit in their eyes and was, instead, the memory of husband she’d lost. I think this, in some ways, is because people want to believe in endless love, true love, love that lasts a lifetime and beyond. That they themselves are worthy of that undying love, that they themselves may be loved in that way.

And, in reality, that love may exist and it may never die, but that does not mean that life does not move forward into different narratives. Nothing replaces that love, but beauty and vibrancy and life get added in the form of new love. It is impossible to unlearn anything in our brain, we only add new learning and experiences to it. And so goes our heart.

I remember when my friend and I sat at the coffee shop in those fragile days after her husband’s funeral, discussing what life was like now and what her future may hold. “What if I wanted to be buried with him and I get married to someone else?” she said, her tiny, grief-wasted frame leaning across the table. “What if he was my one true love? How will that next person feel?” I remember telling her that I thought this was a normal part of grief, and that her life and the end of her story were hers to write, and that story included resting with whomever she wanted to rest with, that the next man in her life would understand. People who love you have a wide berth of forgiveness of emotion, nostalgia. They understand love and loss, or they do if you’ve attracted the right human. They take what has happened as part of your living story and love all parts of you. 

From my own experience, I know there is a tremendous weight on a child whose parent does not move forward in her/his life. It creates unrealistic expectations of love and commitment that likely will be unmatched with her/his future partners. It also makes that child feel guilty at the sacrifice that the parent offered, should that child feel less compelled to be so completely self-sacrificing as a parent his or herself. In some ways, it’s a perpetuation of guilt and shame. My mom sacrificed so much by doing X, I should be able to... It’s always felt hard and raw and not reciprocal to me. It feels like too much that’s been given, a sacrifice too great. It’s fear and avoidance and nakedness cloaked in love, but it’s not love alone. Love makes space for everyone’s happiness.

Eye trained on the sky

As part of the writing workshop with Cheryl Strayed (right?!), she offered us a series of prompts to consider. Here's one...

Create a summary of who you are.

There was Leo and Cygnus and Cassiopiea. And Draco and Virgo and Libra. But most of all I remember turning my face to the heavens and finding the points that made the handle and cup of Ursa Major. Alkaid, Mizar, Alcor, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, Merak and Dubhe, names I didn’t know then, flat on my back, my skinny brown legs held fast against the earth in my 7th year.  

The sky over my hometown was always lit with stars, as far as you could see, the light pollution of larger cities far away. To my untrained eye and not scientific mind, the nighttime sky was a blur, an ocean of light, awash, save for the handle and cup, the only way I could get my bearings in the canopy of the world. 

And 7 turned into 17, my world increasingly complex. I was a failing high school student, newly fatherless, with sexual agency beyond my years, drunk on new freedom, coors light beer and the possibility contained in a thick course catalog from my newly matriculated university that I read like a bible. The stars were dimmed by the Dallas lights but vibrant on the road between Dallas and San Antonio where Sha and I steered her big gold cadillac into the night. Or Dallas to Houston. Or Dallas to Austin, fueled by our own sense of finding ourselves.

Those years felt ungrounded, unfixed, too much and too big. Unmoored, unskilled at navigating the map without an understanding of where I needed to go, 17 became 21 became 25 became 31, with mountaintops and oceans and foreign lands and jobs and wandering, so much wandering, in between. 

I did not fully know then, as I am just beginning to learn now in my 44th year, that I am capable of making sense of the stars, of orienting myself within the blur, of understanding the anchors in the sea of light. That in the universe of stars, and in the universe of life, it’s less about a roadmap and more about points of bearing. For a person who has sought the map, who has felt (and currently brutally feels) that the road is being made right before her feet, this is a revelation. Maybe it’s about integration instead of a specific direction. Maybe it’s about weaving the body, the mind and the mojo, understanding the landscape of possibility instead of a fixed horizon. Maybe the point of exploring is to understand where you are at any given point in time, but not be tethered by a specific path. Look at how well the explorers did when they thought they knew the way, but look at how they successfully navigated a way home by casting their eyes heavenward, trusting their bearings written in the night sky.

Impossibly Imposterous

I leave Tuesday for LA and then on to Hawai'i for a writer's workshop with Cheryl Strayed. I'm late on everything in my life right now, the mounting tension of work and an upcoming event and a move coupled with the emotional baggage of cleaning out my old home has kept me from really thinking about where I am off to and why.

In truth, I am petrified. I'm scared because I remember last summer at my workshop with Lynda Barry that I couldn't write, that my brain felt flat and beige, that I was intimidated by the women in the crowd who were professional writers who, in short bursts of time, could write pieces that left me feeling pale.

I also step back in these spaces, not wanting to be a fan girl, not knowing how to be in this world of workshoppiness. I am not a writer, nor do I consider myself to be. I'm a person that uses this tool to share things that I would normally share if I were sitting across from you. There's a heavy load of acceptance that rides along with it, and ego for sure, but it's never been anything more than what it is: a way to record my experiences, mostly for my kids someday, in a format that I hope helps other people process their own shit.

So why does it matter?

It feels like it's a lot about context, which is a space I've been exploring a lot lately in terms of life in general. What it feels like to get positive feedback from people who love you and wonder if it translates more broadly to a wider audience who doesn't know your story or love you or hasn't traveled so many roads with you. It's life outside of your own personal cheering section. It's this question of being confident in what you bring or wondering if you are believing your own bullshit. It's the journey understanding your own magic in the context in which you live. In short, what if you believe what people tell you about your writing, your spirit, your being...and it's not true. Enter these short bursts of nagging Imposter syndrome that make you wonder how it all works.

This may not make much sense, but they are things that are rolling around in my brain today as a friend and I talk about vulnerability, honesty, confidence and being solid in who you are.

This quote used to hang in my office. I need it tattooed on my forearm.

Between Knowing and Not Knowing

I had written this piece ages ago, didn't publish it and came back to it after a conversation with a friend yesterday touching on trust, using your words to tell people what you want, need and expect and the dialogue that has to happen after to ensure everyone is on the same page. Trust is a bitch.

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I have an image in my mind of myself in fourth or fifth grade, seated at the edge of the big pull-out bleachers in our gym-cafeteria, an expanse of collapsed bleachers a skinny ledge with a 15 foot drop creating a bridge across to the other side where on the wall I can clearly see my name written. The name appears courtesy of someone who hates me and makes my life miserable on a daily basis, my stomach a knot at what must be written there but my nervous system in full blown panic mode at the thought of shimmying across the expanse and sheer drop off (on to tables and chairs) to see. I simultaneously want to know what awful thing has been said and hate myself for the fear of heights and falling that keeps me from to finding out. So my younger self sits with the knowledge on a daily basis that something lingers out there unknown and not dealt with and she sits with the knowledge that it's her own weakness that prevents it. Even as I write this, my skin prickles and my hands sweat just at the memory.

I'm spending some time thinking and feeling through what it means to trust and what makes for a good and trusting relationship, what it means to be open to trusting someone, how you have to sit on the edge and contemplate moving across the expanse of all of your prior conditioning to get to there and then work your way back, broken or elated. Part of what I am pondering is the worry that pops up of not knowing what the other person is thinking or feeling, remedied quickly by actually using your words to ask (miracle!). But, in truth, the wounds that still hang around from my childhood lead me to need closure, that I feel like I can handle pretty much anything as long as I know the truth or another's version of it. Learning to articulate it well, to request feedback, to stay on top of things with communication, build verbal agreements. It's all part of it, but it's not the whole thing.

So much of relationships are about the edge of the cliff, moving through our fear and pushing there and back to find what we need to find. Pretty much every moment of it is not guaranteed. But it's made in those moments of moving yourself out, inch by inch, making yourself face your fears anyway. It's really fucking complicated and takes so much work and, in truth, it's work you need to do for yourself and without the aid of others. It's you, no net, nobody spotting you. It's being solid at the core so you can be solid for others, especially the person with whom you are building the trust.

[I feel like I've just written myself into a totally different understanding of what I'd started out to write. Hilarious.]

On Letting Go

The couch was a good place, close enough that I could hear what was going on in my mother's room, far enough away to sit or sleep, to think and process, to rattle around in my brain looking for answers. My mother was a few days away from dying. This time was marked by ups and downs in her mental state, her physical body crumbling underneath her as she rested in the hospital bed we'd had brought in a couple of weeks before. She'd be alert one minute and wanting to go out to sit in the sun, the next completely out of it. "She's not ready to let go yet," the short, red-haired night nurse whispered to my sisters and me. I can imagine my mom, at this exact moment of whispering, popping her head up and demanding to know what we were being so secretive about. It was an insane ride, those days.

Although we had had many people die in our lives, this was our first rodeo with terminal illness. My sisters and I would look at each other with the sad and incredulous faces of people who desperately needed the situation at hand to come to a close, while at the same time wanting to roll back time...back, back, back...to a safe space where all of everything just went away.

On one of those nights, and in a desperate attempt to find some help, we downloaded the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying on my ipad, scanning its pages in the semi-dark for a way to help my mom let go, this woman who had weathered so much in her lifetime, who fought and stood strong throughout our lives. It was there that we read a passage that would change our perspective on death and dying, what leaving means. In dying you lose everything you have ever known. You lose the touch of loved ones, the smell of your favorite meal, the soft fur of your beloved animal, the sunshine on your face, your favorite vista. Even if you are religious or ready to die, facing that loss is tremendous and overwhelming in a way that we often don't think about. It's not the not being there, it's the anticipatory longing for the parts that you love but have to leave behind.

My friend and I were talking about the similarities between divorce and death, how losing someone in death is almost easier, that bereavement is different when what you have lost is walking around in the world. And much of this same story line holds true for divorce. You miss your former life even as your new life is emerging: the camaraderie and closeness you once felt with your partner, the regularity of someone's habits, the well-worn teamwork of holiday packing, the gathering of extended family that you love with all your heart. It is stepping away from this certainty, the compilation of so many days, that provokes unexpected stabbiness as you rise from anxious sleep,  haul the bags out to the car, worry that you have forgotten something, check the tickets twice. It's cutting an entirely uncertain path, thrusting yourself in a future you cannot see and don't entirely trust. In leaving you lose everything you have ever known, even if you know in your mind it's the right thing to do, the heart a few paces behind.

Flying

For Lara, who has taught me so much about the wheel and for Sharleen, who is that determined kid who will get it.

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Round and round, death defying pace, toes scraping trenches into hardscrabble earth, someone jumps off and grabs the rust-flecked metal and starts running again, propelling the welded frame around its axis faster and faster. Sweaty, grubby hands just barely hanging on in the Oklahoma heat. Older kids with wide open faces, laughing and smiling. Younger kids clinging with terror in their eyes, trying to be cool. Flicker of kid and kid and kid and kid and kid and that open seat you are aiming for --missed it-- and kid and kid and kid and kid and--jump to it, bump off, land on your ass in the dirt as your friends howl and another kid pops off to pump the merry-go-round faster and faster. Determined, you pace it again ---kid, kid, kid, kid, kid-- bam! lucky enough to get the seat next to the frame so you can pull your skinny self up and onto the smooth-worn wood and lean out and away into the abyss of flying. 

You are not a brave kid, nor have you ever been, but you feel compelled by the sense of freedom that you believe you'll experience when you are on, through the false starts and times you've had to dart back from flinging legs and uneven ground, muster courage, learn about the pace and the rhythm and the movement before stepping back in, running alongside, hoisting yourself on with whatever strength you have, hoping that you can catch the ride before it starts up again at maximum speed. 

Years later when this metaphor comes back to you in the 5am scratching of pen on paper, you wonder what it meant to you to try, to keep at it, to land on the hardpack ground a few times, to risk. Did you even think about it? Probably not. More likely it was the possibility of movement and sound, your vestibular system afire with sensation, the action not singular but communal, your body used to meeting the dirt and the ground with so much more frequency than you would know in your adult years. And a shorter distance to fall. And less jarring.

So it's there again, that seat that flickers in front of you, the one that you know you have moments to seize before it's taken by another. Think not of the smell of metal on your skin and the ache of your wrists from leaning too far forward. Think instead of the hot wind on your face, the thrill in your stomach as you lean into space, of the excited shrieks of the people around you, of flying, of freedom, of joy and the the reward of having taken that leap.

In Ordinary Time

For my lovely sister, Sara, who teaches me these things as she's learning them herself. I love you.

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Earbuds in place, even though there was nobody in the house, my body felt the urge to get outside and walk and listen, my limbs couped up recovering from a nasty stabbing pain in my heel that made me slow to a snail's pace for a week. That pain, the most frustrating thing in a moment where I needed to walk it out, exhale breath, give my brain a chance to consolidate it's drive, said "slow down". It actually said "slow down, motherfucka, or you are going to reap 10x what you are sowing here." Slow down, sit with it, be in it. There is no avoiding it. Sit down. Heal.

Leaves falling, air crisp-to-lovely, I wove my way around my new section of my new old neighborhood, circling close to home lest the heel rebel, returning waves to people I do not know. It's bizarre to be out in the middle of the day, my normal schedule shot through with extra time, my head uncomfortable and loose in the luxury of making my own hours. I don't like this looseness, this working when I want or need to, this feeling of ambiguity. But ambiguity surrounds me everywhere, all of the conventional things in my life having turned 180, my life in the blue sky. Ambiguity, looseness, the lack of structure, the lack of a task list, no horizon or compass is like warm water, not so much like a bath but of floating. I have always been a girl with a vision and a mission to boot. Now is the preparation time for that uncovering, in these next few months. Waiting to sense the clicking in, listening for that tug at the gut, that inner compass.

Slow down, sit with it, be in it. There is no avoiding it. Sit down. Heal.

Leaves falling, air crisp-to-lovely, listening to these words.

The Gate

BY MARIE HOWE

I had no idea that the gate I would step through

to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother's body made. He was

a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,

done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold

and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.

And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.

And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.

That's it, every day.

I sit here at my computer and 10 feet away he sits with his guitar across his knees, seated on a zigzagged ottoman that accentuates how much he's grown in the past few years. He's knees and elbows and huge brown eyes and a gorgeous smile. As we were leaving the orthodontist's office today, I kept telling him how weird it was when he turned 6, when he went into first grade, that first grade was the first shred of proof for me that he was going to grow into a young man. "And, today here we are, amore," I said over my shoulder with a smile. "Today and you are a middle schooler and we are on to braces." He smiled his gorgeous sweet smile and leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder, which would have been his head if the distance of the seats had not been such.

This boy is a favorite teddy bear wrapped in an enigma. He's honest and disclosive in one minute, difficult to gauge the next. He prefers, almost any day, to recline right on top of you in the cold Fall wind. He hasn't figured out that that's uncool. He's just starting to sense what is uncool. I don't know when he's going to grow into that uncool thing and I alternately feel like I haven't done enough to middle school him up and thankful for the buying of time that his sweet nature has given us.

He converses easily with adults. He's building his own style of humor that he tries on with his sister, dad and me at every turn. He loves a turn of phrase or a double entendre. There is no bad fart joke. He cracks up when he talks about butts. To match that, I showed him Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" and he spent most of the next day commenting on the fruit, and less on the back, or being a little "uhhhhhh, that was weird" regarding the ardent appreciation of the female form through Sir Mix-A-Lot's voluptious stylings. I think the giant buttcrack was perhaps the biggest hit. So it goes at this age, I've kept reminding myself. So it goes.

This is the kid that still likes me to tuck him in at bedtime, who is happiest when he can reach across and touch your hand. He is tactile and yummy and stinky and kind. When I found out I was having a boy, I thought "Good, I know nothing about what it's like to be a boy. I can see him for himself, in all of his dimensions, without clouding my

[Ok, so he just walked over as I was typing this, gave me an enormous, lingering hug]

without clouding my view with all of my own stuff." And that's it, every day. He's still a mystery to me in so many ways, such a beautiful thing to unwrap, like sitting waiting quietly for the birds to come out. They come and you get to see beautiful things, but sometimes it's just the stillness that brings them, the moment of breathing with whatever is there. Or, the time that those same creatures catch you unawares, explode into view, fill you with delight and catch your heart with laughter. That's what D is like. He's deep and sweet and hilarious.  He is golden. I love him so.

A shot at redemption

T-10 days until I board a plane for Miami, dragging my pale skin and winter-worn smile to bask in the light of warm weather and friendship. This is no ordinary trip, but a reunion tour with one of my oldest and most important friends. Yes, this is the friend of my heart that I haven't seen or spoken to in years. Yes, we have been in contact.

In weird ways, it's as though things never changed, that the five years we spent out of each other's lives simply erased when we met at the glass door of her apartment building in Seattle. All of the sadness, hurt, bewilderment and anger that I think we both felt got crowded out by a feeling of coming home. She looks the same, has more gorgeous children, her sweet and hilarious husband is the wonderful guy I was friends with for years. We sat and drank mimosas and talked for hours before they packed up to go be Seattle's 12th man.

And this has all made me realize that I hate things that are unfinished. I used to think that the best/worst thing I could do at the end of a friendship or relationship was just to simply remove myself from the other person's world. But the truth is that it's painful, these unfinished things. It's harder to lose someone to living than to dying. Bereavement is different when what you have lost is walking around in the world.

The hardest thing to tease out is what keeps you from taking the plunge of reconnecting. Mostly it's pride, I think. At least that's what kept me from my friend for years. Pride and not wanting to be the first to extend the olive branch. That and the very real likelihood that things had changed so radically that it would never be the same. Or, like in so many other situations, it can't or shouldn't be the same. It's something impossible to know. It's only by making yourself vulnerable and by understanding what you are trying to resolve in your own heart that you will get to what you need.

Sunshine, cuban food, so many memories at the ready. Wish us luck.

circuitous routes

Steering through the small streets, squinting to remember the color and shape of houses I had seen just a week before, I used the Force to find my way back to the little white bungalow, perched in tree-lined shade on streets ordinal in number and alphabetical in line.

Ten days earlier I had arrived in Portland, skinny as an abandoned cat, grief-stricken, bereft and sad, newly repatriated after a dismal end of a romance over 9,500 miles away. I had come to take shelter in the warm home and friendship of my best friend and her husband, to stay a few days and renew, be with people that knew me best. Now with as much as I could cram into my car, I was heading back to start a new life.

I could fill up a page with words describe my friend: hilarious, brilliant, daring, feisty, creative, sharp as a whip, mischievous, unpredicatable, predictable. Equal parts beguiler and revolutionary, she had a personality that drew you in and held you fascinated. And, damn, was she funny.

We had a history of weaving in and out of each other's lives, taking long pauses after angry words, always reconnecting to be thick as thieves once again. Our friendship spanned decades, growing from the tumult of high school, through moves and loves and heartache and distance to new marriages, children and the fine crackling of expectations that accompanies a newly minted life. The many things that have shaped my life since that fateful decision to move to Portland (my husband, my career, Seattle) all hold her mark.

In short, I loved this friend. She was my constant, a phone call twice a day habit that I had grown both to depend on and to appreciate. Ours was one of the most important relationships of my life, not a girl crush but a deep and connected friendship. She was a taproot that held me fast in who I knew myself to be. I can hardly think back across my life without the best stories coming from our time together.

Five years have passed since this friendship ended abruptly and without obvious (to me) reason. For a time, I figured that we'd just run aground of something, that we would circle back into our relationship once again whenever what ever it was worked itself out. A year passed, then two, then my mother got sick and died, then I got cancer, and now I am here on another shore of living, the phantom feeling of someone missing popping up at moments when I feel most unguarded.

Because losing this friendship has been unmooring, disorienting, anxiety-provoking in ways that I'm just staring to unpack, I have decided to reach out to her, just to say hello and tell her that I am sorry if I did something wrong. I've decided to put up or to be prepared to just let it go. Thinking about this gives me a tightness in my chest that reminds of my six year old self trying to swim the length of the pool in a single, long-held, under-water breath. I feel my lungs burning and know that this is a surfacing that has to happen even though I want to continue to kick against it. But it's time to tidy things up, know where they stand, let things come full circle once and for all.

Distance

Today my mind has been tangled up thinking about distance. Distance between people, large expanses of spaces, what proximity means for relationships, how that expectation is mitigated (or complicated) by technology, time and intention.

Distance is a funny thing.

What keeps coming to my mind is my children's martial arts training and the practice of defense blocks. Fists outstretched to arms length, knuckles touching...to practice this work, you first frame yourself in space with the other person so that you are able to give appropriate berth to the action, but also not drift too far away. If you drift too far away, you get none of the benefit of the contact. If you are too close, your movements and work get too entangled to be effective. The master reminds you, "distance!" so you know to reframe your space, correct your proximity, realize where you are and what the relating to another is about.

Sometimes the refreshing of space is good.

With Practice, Will Be Lifted

My arms were shuddering like a trailer bed on a washed out road.

Chaturanga Dandasana [exhale]
Urdhva Mukha Shvanasana [inhale]
Adho Mukha Shvanasana [exhale]

Sits bones pointed to the sky, backs of my legs aching, arms outstretched and pressing to the earth, I had repeated the Sun Salutation A sequence over and over, finding its well-worn rhythm deep in my muscle memory. "Do you know Surya Namaskara A?" the instructor of the Mysore room inquired. I nodded yes, knowing full well that I had just refreshed that memory from a YouTube video perched on the edge of my thin travel mat in the hotel room just days before.

It had been eight years since I had rolled out the mat in an Ashtanga class, eight years since my friend Jenny Antony and I used to work deeply and intentionally before capping our practice with a free slice of bread from the Great Harvest store upstairs. Eight years since I lay on the mat in Shavasana, my body regrouping and resetting itself, tears streaming from my eyes while Eva Cassidy's soulful voice sang Fields of Gold. Forging the road of new parenthood, married life, and deep identity confusion, yoga had been a refuge for me. It was a time to myself to try to leave things on the mat, concentrate my mind on the breath instead of the tapes in my head and bend my body in ways that would force me to realize that, like life, some days were easy, some incredibly hard.

After the work, Shavasana brought me two incredible images today. The first one was of a fish caught on a line, leaping out of the water, flipping, struggling, working against what is inevitable but fighting nonetheless, fighting the need to succumb to what will be. There are things that I have abandoned that I don't want to pick up, even though I must. There are situations that I need to let go, even though it breaks my heart to do so, even though my breath catches at the thought of it. There are days when I feel caught by realities I know I must deal with on so many levels, but that I thrash against, unwilling, unwilling, unwilling.

The second image that rested before my eyes was that of a large, grey spirit presence, somewhere between Totoro and Stillwater the Panda from Jon J. Muth's Zen Shorts. This presence sits next to me, silent, there, looming, reminding me that I have unfinished business, that that business waits for me, it will not go away no matter how far away I scoot on the park bench. It leans in, just a bit, with soft pressure that reminds me that I don't need to be scared of sorting through this unfinished business, that I will be held well by what I need to sort through it. That it may be difficult or painful but that it will be ok.

Today the sweat drenched my body, my long-lost limberness resurfacing in the heat and incense and intensity of the moves. I lay there thinking of the work I need to do to free the fish and befriend the spirit, of the people I love and lean on, of the blocked feeling I have that, with practice, will be lifted. Some easy, some incredibly hard. Om.

What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye

Today I smell like dirt and sweaty-ness and deliberation. My feet hurt from standing too long looking at shades of my childhood spread out on tables in my aunt's new home while my lungs cough up dust from brown-filmed boxes kept in basements too long.

My sisters and I are wrapping up the final stages of the Great Dividing of Things, a summer's worth of sorting and selecting from my mother, grandmother and aunt's possessions that will come to reside in our own homes. The Great Dividing has been intense, not because we have fought or wrung our hands over these things. In contrast, we three have managed to be loving and thoughtful of each other in our system, only wincing once or twice at losing a much-loved item to another.

No, the Great Dividing has been intense because we are women who carry so much of who we knew in the things we can touch and feel. Grandma's glassware reminds me of strawberries and cream breakfasts on early morning wakings in her beautiful home. My mother's shotgun, a favorite bronze statue, the bold charcoal strokes of a favorite auntie's talented hand: all comfortable reminders of a home that will no longer be here for us in its present form. Often simple things become exceptionally beautiful for the story behind it...a sweet Victorian biscuit holder becomes even more cool knowing that Dad and Aunt Pat bought it while in Europe together and a salt and pepper shaker set becomes more valuable when it was brought from the Old World by people we never knew but who in some way relate to our present being. It's a struggle not to make everything meaningful, to not drag too much forward for the sake of holding on to people who have left too soon and to places that are no longer your own.

And through this process, I have begun to realize just how important this essential nature of things is for me. A week ago I began to re-read a copy of The Bone People, underlined and dog-eared by my 20-something self that reminded me of the sometimes-lost but fundamentally strong woman I had been then. I wear Mala beads made by my gorgeous friend Molly and am soothed by their smoothness and her power during a stressful meeting. I have my own ritual of rereading a new copy of my favorite book before I give it to a friend just to imprint my own feelings, energy and intention in its pages.  There are things that are in every way precious to me because of the thought or intention with which they were created or loved or given to me. In rough times, these are the glue, the touchstones, the cairns on the journey.

It's the feel, the smell, the thought, the history of person's imprint on an object that makes it special. It's holding something that's been held by the person you love. It's the essence of the person connected to you peering through, the heartstrings that it tugs, the feeling of knowing yourself there that it provides.

*********************
Rifling through my closet, I reached back to find an old sweater of my mother's that I'd brought home after she died. She'd been gone for over a year but her warm, achingly familiar scent still remained mixed in the soft fibers as I buried my nose deep and drew in her memory. "Mijo!" I called to David, "come here". Without a word, I held out the sweater for him to smell. Drawing back, eyes shining and face flooded with memories, he smiled and said "Grandma Suz." Oh, sweet boy, that we can hold on to that, that we can, that we can, that we can.

Our Table

Sunlight danced like diamonds on the swimming pool. Mia was doing this crazy nose-and-mouth above water thing as she traversed the pool, Jakey was all love and jumping in and splashing around. Deb's kids and my kids and Marie's kids were in the malay too, shouting and cheering each other on as they made up games on the fly. We women (and one man) sat around the edges of the pool sipping the most divine gin and tonics with extra lime made by the fabulous Lisa while Lynn's spicy concoction of meat sizzled on the grill. It could have been a scene from my own childhood...the savoring of occupied and happy children, the mellow buzz of a perfectly made cocktail, great friends and a beautiful summer day. I think back on this day, and so many days like it, with total relish.

I think of another day, a day that I remember so well because the beauty of it hit me in the moment. Lynn and Lisa and Jake and Mia were over for dinner. Crowded around the table theirs and ours were quite a whirl of animation, amazing food, great wine and fun. Our children were deeply entwined with Lisa and Lynn's children telling stories, arguing, laughing. Nick and Lynn were talking gardens, Lisa and I talking shop. I remember catching the moment, it freezing for a second and thinking "My kids know this as totally normal. My kids see Lisa and Lynn and their partnership as no different than their dad and myself." Huge tears sprung to my eyes as I looked at Lisa, my friend from so many journeys who grew up in a conservative oilfield environment like I did in Oklahoma, and thought "In a generation we've changed things, just a bit, just in our corner of what we can change. But it's something. It is."

I'm pausing here because I just don't know what to write next. I want to talk about how wrong it is that we systematically discriminate against gay and lesbian families in this country. I want to rail against the hetero community for believing they own "marriage" when we do such a tremendous job fucking it up. I want to ask why people feel compelled to mandate how other people live their lives. I want to ask all of those folks that point to passages in the bible for their bigotry to bring me proof that they follow all of the bibles other statements or "laws" and then we can talk.

My children are surrounded by loving families in this community. Their best friends are bi-racial, many of our closest friends and family members are lesbians. As much as my children know that there are many places to feel at home in this world, they know that a loving community is built by enabling people to love who they were meant to love, to partner with the individual that they choose without fear or condemnation. I hold in my heart that this "normal" for them will give them the power of their convictions. That they will have high expectations of the world. That their current shock and disbelief at laws they see as "stupid, mama, just stupid...that makes no sense at all" will propel them to tidy up what will, ojala, be a relic of a past we are eager to leave behind.

North Carolina's new constitutional ban is every indication that this is not going away any time soon. But old ways of thinking die, literally, with the passing of generations. I'm investing my time, love, energy and money in what is to come.

Lisa and Lynn and Jake and Mia, our table is set for you always. It's one of joy and love.