This is the time of year that finds me in the garden. Every morning, I am distracted from my march out the door by an inspection of flower beds. What has come up? What new thing is showing itself? What new beginning has announced itself? Max always has to yell from the car, “Mom…Mommmmm……Come….on…We are going to be late.” I am dreamy as I stumble to the car, unable to take my eyes off the soil. It is fascinating to me–this explosion of new life.
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Yet, when it is time to work in my garden, I find that the majority of the work is about clearing. Removing. Pulling up weeds, tilling the soil, turning over the ground. Clearing the space so that something new and beautiful can grow. I spend so little time actually planting. No, most of my work is about picking up dead leaves. Picking up the sticks brought down by the rain. Pruning the azaleas and the roses. Cutting back. Cleaning out. Sweeping up. Creating space so something new can be born. Isn’t this really the work of a gardener?
There is a spot in my garden where I usually plant annuals. Impatients or pansies–something that will immediately add color. This year, for a variety of reasons I don’t understand, I decided not to do this. I bought a couple packs of seeds, checking only that the light would be OK. Without paying much attention, Max and I dumped them onto the freshly tilled soil. We raked over a bit more soil and waited as it rained.
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This week our beloved housemate is leaving us. Its hard to believe it is so, but it is. It is an occasion of excitement for it marks a wonderful new beginning for her. Our home was a safe place of refuge when she needed it most. Our house was a transition. But now she has all that she needs to make it on her own–legal status, a job, resources, a community. The apartment half a mile down the street, up high on the top of the building, with the tiny kitchen and big windows, it is the right place for her to be now. It is the first home she will call her own. And this is a miracle. Something new is being born for her.
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And I know that something new will be born for us too. My dear friend Kaiya tells me that the Universe abhors a vacuum. When space is opened up, something new will grow. And I am holding onto this truth fiercely. It is a great comfort.
As we transition from housemates to friends, there is an ache in this empty place in our heart’s house where she used to be with her lilting African voice and the smells of her yummy cooking, in the place where she used to look at me with eyes that really saw. And yet, I know that out of this emptiness something new will grow. Letting go makes me sad and if I am completely honest, the mystery of what will grow up in this place makes me a little uncomfortable. But it is a discomfort I will sit with. But I have long ago given up guessing. Whatever is next will surprise me, that is for sure.
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For weeks now I have been churning on these thoughts, in the garden, with the moving boxes. I am feeling it in other places of my life too. Colleagues are moving on, our organization is transitioning, friendships that are dear to me are tranforming. I know that in my heart too something is giving way, releasing, letting go. I am letting so much go so something new and marvelous can be born. It is sad and scary and also full of wonder…
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I am drawing on the lessons of my garden. If I clear the space, something beautiful can be born. There is a cycle to this life we live, a cycle of letting go of what blossomed and filled us last, clearing the space and waiting with an empty patch of soil.
I feel I am stepping into an empty field, freshly tilled. I am saying yes to whatever will grow here in this open space in my heart, in my life. Yes without knowing where it will take me. Yes without a plan. Yes without knowing what the next step will be.
This Christmas was the first Christmas where it happened. Max sat, surrounded by a mountain of carefully picked out gifts and cried. Santa Claus and I, we had failed to deliver him the Christmas he had hoped for–or rather the gifts on his list he had so desperately wanted.
I took a deep breath, and realized that this was a moment to teach. Teach about disappointment and recovering from it. Teach about the bounty of gifts that he had, how lucky he was. Odette told him stories about what children in Rwanda get for Christmas. Slowly but surely his big old tears stopped falling and he started to happily, joyfully play with the gifts he had received, suddenly aware of the magic they represented.
Looking back at our Christmas now, I can’t help but see a powerful lesson beginning to unfold for me too.
Ironically I began my winter by teaching the lesson I would spend all winter learning. About the trickiness of hope and attaching myself to vision of what my future happiness looks like. About the disappointment that comes from yearning and longing and about how I lose sight of the gifts in my life when I am looking for that one elusive cherished desire. And I learned this winter about how while hope can leave me drunk on possibility of how wonderful it might all be one day, the hangover is an empty feeling and the sneaking suspicion that maybe I am not really quite enough.
Yeah, this winter, in very small ways hope kicked my ass. And I saw hope for the sneaky character it is, something that makes me feel warm and fuzzy now and again but something which can turn every day into the Christmas where I sit surrounded by gifts sobbing.
I have to admit, as spring time images of hope come fluttering into view, I have not done a good job receiving them openly. I have wanted to scream at the top of my lungs–OH NO PEOPLE….DON’T YOU DARE COME TALKING TO ME ABOUT HOPE. DON’T YOU SEE HOW TRICKY AND DESTRUCTIVE IT IS? YOU THINK I AM GOING TO GET SUCKED IN AND SET MYSELF UP FOR DISAPPOINTMENT AND MISS ALL THE GIFTS IN MY LIFE? YOU MAY BE A SUCKER…BUT I AM NOT!
And yet, something tugged on me and my grouchy, self-righteous ways. Tugged on me like a little child pulling on my sleeve. The child that does not give up, saying “mom…mom….mom…” over and over again until I listened, maybe a little reluctantly.
What if HOPE isn’t about the future? What if HOPE is not another word for longing? What if HOPE isn’t about holding onto something that hasn’t yet materialized? What if we have been misusing the word all this time? What if we have somehow bent it out of shape? What if all this time that I was “holding onto HOPE” I was clutching something else?
What if HOPE is about the present? What if HOPE is about recognizing the beauty and the joy even in the most mundane and ordinary moment. What if HOPE is about finding love in the midst of horrible pain and just focusing in like a laser on it–not because it predicts a better day coming, but simply because it is beautiful and perfect exactly as it is? What if HOPE is about seeing the possibility in now? The action I can take right now that opens up a whole new way of being, regardless of where it takes me? That makes joy and love present right now–regardless of what happens next? What if HOPE is about savoring every moment of life for the gifts and the joy and even the challenges and lessons that it brings?
What if I had it all wrong all these years? Well…what a wonderful time to start again, I suppose.
These are some of the things that I have been thinking about all winter…that I have been turning over in my head as spring has started to bloom.
Jen Lemen and Stephanie Roberts have this lovely project called Picture Hope. They have a proposal to travel the world looking for images of hope and capture them on film. They have been voted as the number one most popular idea and now they are going with 19 other ideas to a final adjudication. I am so proud of my friend Jen and her soulsister Stephanie. I suppose it would be easy to start hoping that it all comes together and that they win the big prize. Truth is, I know that they may or may not win in the end and I can’t let my little fragile heart go wishing. Instead I will simply sit in the joy that through daring to see the possibility and take a step forward to challenge us all to see hope–not as something abstract and future oriented but something that can be captured with a lens they are already living the dream.
“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
-Henry Miller
Ever since I saw this quote on my friend Kaiya’s refridgerator, I have been rolling it over in my mouth, tasting it, savoring it. I have been sitting with it and looking it in the eye. I have been sipping it like tea, taking it in bit by bit and letting it wash over me. I am still letting it seap into the cracks in my heart.
This requires me to be very still. And not to think. It requires me to walk and put my feet firmly on the ground and throw my head to the sky and breathe in the air, the rainy, misty, cold spring air. It requires me to play a song badly and to hear all the rough, muffled notes without judgment. To laugh heartily. It requires me to gaze into the most beautiful pair of blue eyes I have ever seen and simply see them, to recognize them not as ancient and old and from lifetimes ago, not to wonder about their past or their future, but for what they are now at this moment. Beautiful. Breathtakingly beautiful.
The other day my friend Jen stopped me in the hallway at school. “How are you?” she asked me. She knew the answer. I am working through demons and walking on a tightrope. I am perfectly fine and falling apart all at the same time. I am wrestling with concepts so simple they are revolutionary. Concepts that are both turning my insides out and stunning me with their obvious plain-facedness.
Simply put, I am wrestling with the nature of hope and love. Or rather I am awash in the wonder of these things. Honestly, on most days I am confounded and have stopped thinking I need to have all the answers. To simply sit with the questions seems to be enough, I guess.
If I had more than 5 minutes to write I would write a story about emptiness. About how hard it is to clear out all the junk and just sit. How the minute I feel that empty feeling I feel the need to fill it–with what…with chatter, with stuff, with something distracting, with color and music and flashing lights.
If I had more than 5 minutes to write I tell a fable about a girl who is trying to stop doing and create wide open spaces in her heart. A fable about what happens when you don’t rush to fill it with something comforting but let the universe instead decide how to fill the open spaces. But maybe it wouldn’t be about a girl. Maybe it would be about a bowl. Or a ditch or a cow.
If had more than 5 mintues to write I would spin a tale about how the universe abhors a vacuum and will fill it up with love if we just are patient enough. I would reflect though that we often are even quicker to fill up the hollowed out places in our heart with junk substitutions for the love the universe is cooking up for us because the emptiness just feels so…empty.
If I had more than 5 mintues to write I would confess that I feel chained to the constant practice of emptying my life–that I am so unpracticed and I am so quick to clutter, clog, fill. That I am realizing that I am being given practices every day, that so much of what I see are challenges are just opportunities to practice letting go, being empty, sitting still. That every day I do it for a little longer. That it makes me uncomfortable and weezy and a little dizzy but I am doing it anyway.
It never fails to surprise me. It creeps up on me and shocks the hell out of me. Just when I think that I have become fearless, just when I think I have overcome my deepest darkest fears, just when I think that I have done my soul work and gotten an A+ on the lesson, then I realize how terribly scared I still am.
Does it ever end as we peel away, layer by layer the protective walls we put around our hearts? It seems that no matter, how much work I do, its still there, more and more subtle but there. This fearfulness.
Shortly after my marriage failed, I found feng shui. After suffering such a devestating loss, after feeling so adrift, after realizing there was no security in this thing called marriage, I found a sense of control and order. If I could just eliminate the clutter, if I could place the bamboo just so, if I could figure out the flow of energy in this house I could be safe. I spent long hours, arranging, planning, sorting…and desperately holding on to a vision that my life would be OK.
At other times, it would be my job, my money, my community, my life as a mother, my writing and creativity, my spiritual journey, even this blog… a long line of things that made me feel anchored and safe. One by one I transform each into a security blanket the thing that would keep that fear at bay. The fear of being here. All. Alone.
And over and over again I would learn, the more that I grasp at these things, the more they slip through my fingers like water, proving to me again and again that while each one of these things delights, my security comes from none of them.
They are false idols, lined up in the temple of my heart–I deify them and doom them to failure. They will not save me. Over and over again I learn that really, its just me. And my faith.
Yup… in the ends its just me. As rich as my life is, there is nothing to grasp onto but what is here in my heart and my faith. No matter how hard I try, I cannot be anchored for life is a river and it is sweeping me along and carrying me, pulling me moving me. And that scares the hell out of me.
But make no mistake. This is not a sad or desperate post.
Because I am breathing sweet free air of liberation. I can stop looking for the thing that is going to save me. I can stop waiting for it to delivered and come along. I can stop fearing that it will all disappear if I say or do the wrong thing. I have it, have always had it, will always have it, right here in my heart.
I am the thing that saves me.
I am so unpracticed at this way of being.
So I will stumble along and when I trip, I will reach for something to steady myself but when it disappears into thin air I will not feel the bruising crash of my body slamming down, but the steadiness of my hand against the ground. Catching myself.
When my little family was breaking up, I realized I could feel adrift and alone or I could adopt the whole world as my family. I could recognize how tangled our roots are, even as we look like separate trees, even separate gardens above the surface.
Every now and again, when the whole world is contracting in, closing tight around around the nuclear and I start to drift again I need to remind myself what lies below the surface. I need to remind myself of the connections between us–the ways that you and I all share the same earth, draw from the same water. If you dig beneath our roots are entwined.
Choosing to live this way can be hard, especially when I feel like I just might be the only one who believes in life beneath the surface, the place where all this connection is at hand. Sometimes I feel like the neighborhood wacko who is caught up in a dream that is not quite real. Efforts to draw distinctions cut deep. This is mine. That is yours. We are separate.
Whenever I feel this me/you/us/them/in/out/ dynamic at work it rocks my world. So much so that I wake up at night with a headache. It breaks open my heart. It makes me gasp for breath. And its not because of some big cosmic world view of community and peace in the world.
But it’s simply because it was the knowledge that we are all connected, that my family is big and wide that saved me when the illusion of my little family dissolved.
Lately, I have been finding shining little bits of myself, from Boston to North Carolina, alive and well in the love of friendships long dormant. Just at a time when I was wondering if I was a crazy old lady dreaming of life in the earth, if the connectedness I had been counting on was yet another illusion, I am finding that the connections go longer and farther and deeper than I dreamed.
I choose to believe in these connections, even when others try and tell me otherwise. When someone wants to contain us as a unit I will simply smile. I know what lies beneath the surface. I believe in it. I do.
The front of my handmade love notes that I sent out to my neighborhood tribe today.
Four years ago on Chinese New Year, Juan left me.
The leaving was inevitable. We had talked about it. After nine long months of trying to make it work, a rest was needed. Some space. A break. An open space so we both could breathe.
He came home from work and told me that he had found a place, a room to share in a friend’s apartment. He thought he would take some stuff over there that night, after Max had gone to bed. He thought he would stay and watch a game. He might be home, but maybe he would try it out–see how it felt. He gathered his things together and after the bedtime routine was over he was gone. He didn’t come home that night. He would never sleep at my side again.
The year that followed was turbulent, scary, sometimes exhilerating. After the heaviness of trying and failing for so long, after the sadness that weighed on us and pulled on our shoulders, there were whole weeks when the freedom felt like the first warm spring day. After hoping and praying for so long, there were weeks when the grief chilled me like a November rainstorm. I honestly can’t remember much about that year, other than the fact that I breathed alot. Just breathed into whatever I was feeling–lightness, crushing saddness, giddiness, panic. I suppose really, that was all that was important, the breath.
The short break turned into a long one. The long break became official separation. The official separation morphed into a divorce. It would happen over three years.
But a turning point came as we approached the magical year mark. I realized he wasn’t coming back, that I had, really, despite my best efforts lost my marriage.
But I also discovered that I found myself.
That year, three years ago, I decided I would reclaim Chinese New Year. It will forever be for me the official start of my new year. It is a celebration of things that die and are reborn. It is my phoenix day. It is the day that I look forward at the sinewy river that is my life stretching out before me. It is the day that I look back at the good, the bad and especially the ugly…and thank them for teaching me, protecting me, bringing me here. I thank the traveling companions who have shared my journey and I send big open-hearted dripping love notes to my community. I light candles and dance around the kitchen. I write my Mondo Beyondo list.
Today is Chinese New Year. It is the start of the Year of the Ox. Last year at this time I would never have imagined all that would have happened this past year. I am thankful for what I have learned.
I feel my heart breaking open in new ways. I am terrified and thrilled all at the same time. I am standing on the edge of something new but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
And I find myself here on this page, this place where I practice. I thank you, the few who stop by here and sit with me, who breathe life into what I write here by reading it, who give my words meaning but speaking them in your mind. I wish you a year full of joy and countless new beginnings with every breath you take.
Happy New Year.
I am so happy you are.
You’re a song; a wished for song-Rumi
“Sing me to sleep,” she asked, even though it seemed like such an indulgent thing to ask for. It had been over 30 years since anyone had sung to her from the foot of her bed with the sole intention of easing her into dreamland. But lately it seemed that she needed to be indulged. She needed it badly. And without thinking, she just suddenly without thinking threw those outrageous wishes to the universe, seeing who would bite. ”I am going to nap,” she said this time a little bit firmer. “Come upstairs and play, come sing me to sleep.”
“Ok,” they said. It was that simple.
And that is how she found herself tucked into bed, drifting off to sleep, listening to the sounds of two electric guitars turned way down low, hushed to lullabye volume, the voices in three part harmony perched on the bottom of her bed. For an hour they sang, maybe more. With eyes closed, she dove in and out of their voices as sleep overcame her.
“Is our baby girl asleep?” she heard him ask the others from the edge of her bliss. ”She is…Shhh…Lets take these downstairs and load up the gear. We will wake her later.”
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Is there anything more luscious than being sung to sleep? It is just this sweetness that my baby girl heart had been craving. But asking for it seemed so out of reach–so nutty. Who sings a 39 year old single mother to sleep? And who am I, after all these years, to ask for such sweetness? Why is it so hard to ask for the preciousness of each other? For the sound of your voice as I drift into sleep, for the warmth of your hug as you leave for the night? These things are our comfort–they nourish and revive–they can be bread or water. As children we ask without fear or shame but then, we grow old and someone tells us that we cannot dare take too much: too much time, too much space, too much air. We train ourselves to live on a diet of pleasantries, and to survive on just enough affection. We worry about how we will be seen. We don’t want to be too big. And we fool ourselves into believing that the tiny sweetnesses that we crave are things we must deprive ourselves of to be worthy of this world. Why do we spend years training ourselves that we do not deserve that which we know as children is ours for the taking–pure love. Max just pushed aside my computer and climbed into my lap. “Mama, I need you to hug me. My leg hurts.” “OK” I say. Its just that simple. In fact, I suspect it probably usually is.What sweetness do you wish for, what indulgent lovely caress does your baby girl self require? Can you let yourself ask the crazy question, believing full well the answer will be, “OK”. Can you let someone sing you to sleep? It is a lovely way to wake up.
On Friday, I took Max and a friend to go see the Washington Capitals practice at Kettler Capitals Iceplex. I thought it would be an opportunity for him to see his heros up close and personal. I thought it would be a chance for me to see how fast those boys really can skate, something that never fails to amaze me.
The best moment of the morning came when Alex Ovechkin, (for you non-hockey fans he is the star player on the Caps and in many circles thought to be the best player currently in the NHL) fell down. He wasn’t doing anything all that hard (for him at least). He wasn’t even going all that fast. He was just skating, maybe thinking of something else, and he tumbled. He lay there on the ice for a few seconds and then started to giggle. Then he got up and dusted himself off and started to skate again.
The moments when we witness our heros doing something amazing are indeed breathtaking–the unbelievable goal, the leaping of a star center fielder, the slam dunk that hangs in mid air for what seems like minutes or for that matter the perfectly played song, the crowd rousing speech, the essay that makes you cry. But if you ask me, Alex’s little tumble there, was a mama’s wish come true, as magical a moment as ever there was. I was able to look Max in the eyes and say, “See that…We all fall down. Even Ove falls. And then he gets up and keeps skating.” That fall meant more to both of us, than all of the Great Eight’s goals put together.
Sometimes it is so easy, for Max, oh shoot, for me to believe that we are the only ones who stumble. And not just on the ice. It is so easy to believe that I am the only one who loses her patience or her train of thought or can’t keep the house organized. It is so easy to believe that I am the only one who has been playing guitar for over a year and still can’t play the F chord, or for that matter strum the easy chords cleanly.
Lately, the house and the guitar and the inability to form a coherent sentence are not the things that make me feels so alone. No–its other things. Its been the fact that my life feels every bit like it is on the verge of breaking open but some days just feels stuck and unmagical and impossible to move through. Its been the fact that while I am embracing the stillness and silence of winter with awe, I sometimes find myself unable to settle. Its been the fact that while I am mostly hooting and hollerin’ while I run the rapids of my life, I sometimes still break into a complete panic and even worse feel stuck, paralyzed and just so damn lonely. And at those moments it is so easy to just sit down, stop, give up and say, “Why bother”. To gracefully admit defeat. To compromise and tell myself its OK that we all fail. Do I really need to live this way? Can’t I just go to sleep, wrap a blanket around my tired body and throw in the proverbial towel.
But then, there are moments like Ove’s moment. The moment where the only thing left to do is giggle, roll over, dust off and get back on my feet.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about what it takes, what it costs, to live authentically. I think it costs a lot. Not in the way some might believe–the funny looks, the fewer resources, the people who think I am strange. Sometimes, it is so damn exhausting to put my heart out there all the time, to keep chosing to stay awake, to stay with my fear, my loneliness and my joy.
And yet I don’t know what other choice there is to make, what other place there is to go but here, this wide open place. With every breath, even when I am tired, even when it seems impossible I need to choose to get up again, keep skating.
As the holidays fade and we get back into the rhythm of every day life, my wish for you is the strength to choose to live however authentic looks to you. And whether you giggle or cry when you fall may you choose to get back up.
Its the longest night of the year. It is cold and rainy. And yet, I know, deep in my heart that the world is turning, that the sun is on the rise, that goodness and possibility and joy are just around the corner, for me and for you too. And all we need to do to get there, to the warmth, to the sun, to the bright days ahead is stay here, exactly where we are, with one another.
When the night has come, and the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
No I won’t be afraid…no I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.
