This week I was cruising through my chores. My trip to Madrid had put me behind. I had so much to do. Several weeks worth of laundry had piled up and I had no work clothes. Max was running out of socks. In a burst of efficiency, I threw a load in and went up to make dinner. After homework and bath and bedtime I went down to move the clean clothes to the dryer. I put them in, turned the dial, hit the button…and then nothing. The dryer coughed a little. Strained a bit. But it would not spin. Incedulous, I tried again. And again. I checked plugs and connections and then, exhausted I gave up. A good nights sleep would do me well. I thought the same would be true for my dryer.
The next morning I was peppy. By the dryer still made the same cough. Still whined before growing silent.
We are on a very tight budget. I have practically no cushion for moments such as these. And sure enough, when I checked, other emergencies which had come earlier had eaten what little was left. I could not pay to have someone come and fix my dryer. Not now. It would have to wait.
This was not such a crisis. I delight in line dried clothes. They can be stiff perhaps but there is nothing like the smell of the outdoors, of the crisp air, on my shirts, my pajamas, my pillowcases. When Juan and I went to Mexico, I handwashed and line dried everything I brought with me on my last day and then rationed those clothes for months–breathing in the scent of a place I loved so much, a scent that did not come from mechanical dryers but from clothes hanging, swaying and drying in the Oaxacan breeze. I returned home from every trip with the intention of hanging a clothes line but each time convenience and lack of time got in my way.
This morning, as my anxious mind worried over bills, and dirty clothes and the impossibility of having time to wait for a repairman even if I could scrape together the cash, the simplest of solutions jumped to my brain. $10 for clothesline and clothes pins, sunshine and winter breezes, a reduced gas and electric bill, and sunshine infused clothes.
I recently read that Universe is always doing its best with what it has at its disposal. Always trying to arrange the moments, no matter how chaotic and sad and tragic for the best possible outcome. I could stomp my feet at our bad luck or I could hang a clothes line and delight in sundried clothes.
I chose the later.
What crazy, horrible, inconveniences have lead you to a place you always wanted to go? This wide eyed dreamer is searching and would love to hear your stories.
2009, oh its hard to believe you are coming to a close. Feels like just yesterday that you were dawning. You have been a year of quiet shifts and changes. Nothing big happened this year, and yet, so much happened. And its all been big.
This was the year that I learned, really learned that no one knew what I should do better than my own sweet self. This was the year that I learned that no one will love me quite the way that I could love myself. This was the year, that I learned to embrace stillness and to sit, however uncomfortably in the quiet. This was the year that I learned to retreat. And to trust that it would all be OK in the end.
This is the year that I lost so many of my illusions about fairy tale endings. This is the year I learned to let go. I grieved so many friendships this year. Friends who died, friends who moved, friends who simply left or stopped showing up. This is the year that I stopped resisting Grief and finally accepted that nothing I would do would ever hold her permanently at bay. No amount of tap dancing, no amount of good girl work ethic would keep her away. She would exist always, along with her twin sister Joy. One could not be without the other. Welcome teacher, come have tea.
This is the year that I finally decided to accept my big old heart. I stopped telling myself the story that she was too much and decided to go ahead and let her feel, spill out and be overflow. I let her love. Even when that love was messy. Even when, especially when, that love went unreturned.
This is the year I learned again that life doesn’t have to be perfect or smooth or unblemished to be beautiful.
This is the year I returned again to the dance studio. And I realized that nothing makes me happier, and I wondered why I ever dare stay away.
This is the year I started to ask for what I needed and found that miraculously, mysteriously it always arrives, in completely unexpected packages. I relearned the delight of a childhood Christmas morning again and again and again. This is the year I became awake to all the signs in my life, the signs that point me home, the signs that remind me I am loved, the signs that I really know what to do.
This is the year that I jumped into an abyss, not knowing where it would all lead. This is the year that I never found out, but learned to ride the not knowing. Learned to accept I might not ever know. This is the year that I learned to accept the out of control feeling that comes with mystery and adventure. This is the year I sank into my insecurity, financial and otherwise. This is the year that the reality of all I had experienced the last 40 years hit.
I forgive myself for all those days this year that I lost faith. I forgive myself for all those days I curled up into a ball and gave up, too exhausted to give a hoot. I forgive myself for letting myself be held back by fear, for making excuses, for going back to sleep. I forgive myself for not writing, not playing my guitar, not creating, not trying. I forgive myself for not being inspired, for being blase, for disconnecting. It happens.
Yes, 2009, you were quite a year. You held many gifts. You brought many lessons. You were difficult and wintery. You were small and quiet but powerful and transformative and one day I will be like you.
And now, dear 2009, with all the love and gratitude in my heart, I declare you complete.
Welcome 2010, you round, yummy year you–here I come!
Inspired by this superhero, my soul sister Kaiya, the icey glaze on my lawn this morning and one really good plate of pancakes.
Two weeks ago, in the very moments that one dear friend lay dying, the most extraordinary thing occurred.
My phone rang. And I said hello.
On the end, from an airport city very far away, was an old friend, an old love, the one who had held my hand as I passed from innocence to knowing. It had been over 20 years since I last heard his voice which now sounded both familiar and strange. We talked light heartedly as I drove toward home, catching up on the basics of life, until his flight was called, until I pulled up at a neighbors to pick up Max. We would talk again we promised. I felt a circle drawn complete in the sweetest of ways.
I picked up Max. I talked to Jackie. I went to the grocery store. I came home and checked email. And then, only then, I learned that my friend Jenni had died, ending at long last her long painful struggle with cancer. As I wrote down time she had passed away for my journal, I did the math and realized that as I was saying a hello to one I thought I would never talk to again, another I held dear was saying goodbye forever.
And I held that simple fact in my heart. For days, I held it.
*******
This fall I have been learning about letting go. I have been mourning my friend Jen for so long, but I have been working through other changes as well. I have been letting go of old habits, letting go of my favorite defenses, letting go of my most cherished stories. Our foundation has been wobbly as the cornerstones of our life have been, one by one, shifting, transitioning, creating space. Its been hard, scary, at times heartbreaking to see things I loved so much dismantled. As we have managed the bumps and the inevitable fear, I have carried around a mustard seed, convincing myself that I only needed a tiny bit of faith. Stumble forward onward onward–a path would appear that would make it all make sense.
One day, I asked my soulsister Kaiya, “What ever happened to the burning bush? It would be very convenient to see one, you know, with a booming voice and everything. It would be lovely for that voice to let us in on the plan. I am all about the small and subtle, don’t get me wrong, but these days I am feeling so dense and tired and lacking in faith that I would like someone to please let me know what this is all about through something as concrete as a burning bush. It would be a great comfort.”
*******
I don’t think that phone call was a burning bush. But I do think it was a bell. A bell telling me that there is no such thing as goodbye. No such thing as forever.
Nothing is ever really lost. No matter how far away, no matter how long past, no matter how faded-it is there, tranformed perhaps, but accessible in some way, at the end of a ring, a simple as saying hello.
My keyboard is missing a “g”.
A few weeks ago, when my friend Anne was visiting, Max and her daughter were running around the living room while I typed away. They were playing a game that involved a magic wand made from a stick they had found in the yard. Something slipped, and the wand flew out of Max’s hand, landed on my computer and suddenly there is a big hole in the middle of my keyboard. It was no one’s fault. There was no one to blame.
Sigh.
And so it goes. Isn’t it true, that life comes at us this way. We are going along and suddenly, without warning, a hole appears right in the middle of something that until that very minute felt…well whole. Suddenly, things that felt so easy and natural, like typinG thinGs become a little bit harder. And we don’t know quite what to do, what to make of it. We work around it. We try desperately to glue the “g” key back. We just give up and close up the computer.
Why the heck am I talking about my missing G? Only because it is missing and I feel its absence. And because its a metaphor. Because writing about the real stuff, is too raw right now.
The friend I used to talk to everyday who is transforming into pure love, moving from one world to the next. I miss her voice. The friend who shared my home, who has left to build her own. I miss her touch. But more than that, so many of the bricks, the ones who formed the foundation of my life as a single mom, they are shifting. I feel a dismantling but, its not destructive. More like creating space for something new to be born.
But I miss them. I miss them all. Even as I applaud whatever positive is moving them from our orbit, I miss them. Even as I mourn whatever difficulty pulls them away I let them go.
It is scary and hard. I wonder how they hell I am going to to keep typing without the “g”. With this big hole in the keyboard of my life. I wonder how I am going to keep writing my stories. But look! I am doing it. I am doing it. I am somehow, nevertheless, quite certainly doing it.
November is an empty month, hollowed out by the rain and wind, which strips away that which is no longer needed. November dismantles leaf by leaf all that once was beautiful and green and red and gold. November calls to let go and to face the dark quiet, without knowing what comes next. November calls us to let go of everything but our most essential selves and then, even then, to let go of all our ideas about what that might be, and just be..
Dismantling, breaking down, letting go, distilling. It takes a whole lot of faith to settle into the rhythm of the clearing, the making space for something still unknown. A wise woman once told me the faith of a mustard seed would do. I hope so.
There always is a moment.
For her it came on United flight 965 from Chicago’s O’Hare, as the plane broke through the rain clouds and warm sun filtered in through her closed eyes, warmed her face and hands.
It was then she realized that the only human heart who would truly be able to love her in the way she desperately wanted, no, needed to be loved, was her own big heart. Only she was capable of the love the would fill her the way she needed to be filled.
And she wondered if it was possible to love herself so deeply, after all those years of waiting for someone to show her just how lovable she was. Could she let go of her need for proof? Could she simply given in to it.
She closed her eyes and fell asleep.
When she awoke, her realization had grown from a fleeting thought to an understanding, ancient and deep. She thought of all the other women who had woken up to this fact on journeys, on buses, in taxis, in shelters and refugee camps, and suddenly she understood where thousands of generations of brave women before her found the strength to risk everything and lose over and over again only to rise like brilliant phoenixes to risk again.
No parent, no husband, no child nor friend could love her perfectly the way she needed. Knowing that it was up to her was the most liberating and welcome news of the decade.
For everything and everyone we ever love leaves, or messes up, or fades away or simply just stops. Its the nature of being human. We go.
Everyone but one human heart will one day leave us. Try as we might, we cannot escape ourselves. Whereever we go, there we are. This is the only love that won’t ever fade away, she thought. This is the only love she ever really needed.
She held this thought as a new truth as she left the plane and walked past the man in the suit saying good night to his children. She thought of all the marriages crumbling around her for want of this knowledge. How her own marriage had crumbled under the weight of hundreds or even thousands of silent, resentful and sullen accusations that his love/her love was not perfect enough to patch the hurts in their hearts. She turned it over as she glided past the airport bar where a younger Bob Dylan sang about rolling stones, and she thought of all the energy she spent trying to prove to someone else how lovable she was, only so that they could prove it right back to her.
If she could just open up to it, be brave enough to love her big hearted self the way her big hearted self loved the rest of her world, what would open up and shift? Could she finally forgive? Let go of disappointments? And accept love, messy and imperfect for the gift that it is–without measuring it up against the holes in her heart?
She carried this new realization, like a tender new born babe into the church-like silence of the empty corridor where the only sound that mattered was the sound of her boots, walking step by step home.
“Its all bullshit”, I said as I slammed the pots into the sink. Tears dripping down my nose. Nothing had happened, so the tears seemed absurd, but maybe that was the point.
Big shifts are taking place in my heart but they are so small. They are the kind of changes that can only be captured by the words…”and then she grew up”. I am finding that unlike the divorce or learning to parent, or discovering my community in this round of the adventure there is no drama. There is no crescendo or aha moments. There is no story worth telling. I keep asking her, my teacher, WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO. She smiles at me and says this time there is no doing.
This time there is just me–learning to feel unconditionally loved–learning to love myself as fiercely as I love my tribe. Learning to be my own rock without letting that rock become a wall. Learning that I can drink my fill from a bottomless well–there is no needing to ask permission or earn my way there. Its is there for me–and it is there for you too.
Learning to receive love…Its not about doing anything at all. Its simply about being.
This can be excruciatingly difficult. And I can’t explain why. Giving up all the stories about why I can’t or don’t deserve or shouldn’t try…Giving up the conditions…”I will be lovable/worthy/accepted when…”, it can set a girl in a tizzy. Its a series of explosion that is knocking down a life time of rules that somehow made it all safe–that set up the game–and gave me a plan. Its pushing my buttons. I am resisting in every way I know how.
Getting rid of the doing as a condition of being loved. It can drive a girl to exclaim that its all bullshit and slam some pots into the sink and wash them.
And then, with tears and pots both dried, there is nothing to do but admit its probably not bullshit afterall.
Sitting in meditation a lot here this week. And simply settling into a practice of doing nothing big or bold or magical but rather simply what needs to be done–Folding the laundry. Sweeping the floor. Paying the bills and shredding the papers. Shopping for groceries and putting gas in the car. Returning the library books. Going to the pool and coming back home again. Going to work. Eating. And kissing Max goodnight.
And noticing, tiny, almost imperceptible shifts that feel like earthquakes…
How do you open up to the love of the universe? How do you stop the endless tap dance that insists we need to hit the performance marks to be loved? How do you give yourself permission to settle into the lap of the world and be held? One breath at a time. Just one breath at a time.
I am a word girl. While I love visual art, can get lost in the movement of dance and revel in music, when it comes to making meaning of the world I find myself here. At a keyboard. Or with my nose buried in someone else’s poetry. My friend Jeff laughs at me. Whenever he is playing a new song he has written, I listen once or maybe twice and then demand to see his notes with the lyrics. Moved as I may be by the music, I need to take in the poetry of his words. I dive in there to open up more space so that the music can better seep in.
For the last few weeks, I have been exploring quiet places. Covering ground that seem ordinary and extraordinary all in one. It is impossible to articulate the wild ride I have been on. If they are paying attention, I think, many of my friends are confused. I am fine, life is good, and yet, I am so quick to well up, the shut down or to just grow quiet. Normally flowing over with affection, I am not so quick to rise and hug. I am ebbing a bit now. But its not a contraction. More like a centering, a stillness, a 40 day rest and coming home and being yin. I am moved, but not sad. I am grieving but am not lost. I know deep in my heart that everything is fine and have been trying to sink into the easiness of the world.
There is no way to explain what happens when you are growing while it is happening. Its a story that can only be told with a glance in the rear view mirror further up the road. Whenever I try and explain what shifts are happening in my heart right now, I find myself wordless. I stumble thinking that it seems both so big and so small all at once and that if I even tried I would sound so crazy it would defile this growth spurt. And in these moments I love that I can stop being a word girl, even if it makes me a bit wobbly.
This song is grounding me these days. While I have long loved it, I cannot tell you what the words are. Every time I hear it, I feel an expansion in my chest and feel a road roll out before me. Blue winter light filters in through snow dusted cedars and pine, the sun sinks low. I roll down my window and breathe in the crispness. The reaction is purely physical now matter how many times I hear it. Its a tingling expansion that moves from my chest out to my limbs. It is melancholy and joyful all at once. It is hopeful and content. It is not just grounding me. It raises me up above the trees, the weeds of words in my mind.
I have been in a bit of a funk lately. I have been banging around and grouchy and feeling stuck and unsure and not quite clear on what’s next. I have been feeling so powerless.
For so so long, after Juan left and I became a single parent, the goal has been simple: Survive. Just get through it.
And then, the goal was different, but simple still: Get through it with joy. And great love. And gratitude. And peace of mind.
Learning to do both of these things rearranged the furniture in my soul quite a bit. I learned a lot about relinquishing control, riding the waves of life as it came at me, going with the flow and acceptance. I learned to breathe through whatever came and to not focus too far into the future. I have learned to let go of control and to appreciate the unexpected gifts that come when it all goes wrong. These have all been good lessons. I am happier for having learned them.
But something else happened in that healing from the divorce. An unintentional consequence of my exuberance to let go. If you would have told me even 6 months ago that I would be saying this now, I would have told you you were crazy. But now in the light of day that comes when life is stable and normal and calm I can see it plain as day. I got used so used to giving in I somehow crossed a magic line. Somehow I equated acceptance with feeling powerless and I got so used to the feeling, I actually started to believe it was true.
As anyone who has been through a divorce can tell you, it is an exercise at realizing the limits of one’s power–or to be more accurate one’s power to control the outcome. Slowly but surely I woke up to the bitter truth that I was powerless to save my marriage and my vision of how it would all be. I could try and try, but no matter what I did, we had no happy ending. No matter what I did, or what I said, this horrible thing was rolling along anyway. I felt deflated by the process. Over the course of the next several years there would be financial problems I couldn’t solve, because they required my ex-husband to do something he didn’t want or couldn’t do. There were these moments when Juan promised to come spend time with Max but didn’t show and no matter how I flung my mama bear body, I couldn’t stop the waves of grief and hurt that crashed over the tiny boy’s heart. So much has come at us, Max and me, so much that we couldn’t control, I just stopped believing that I had any power to do anything other than react. We lived in the moment, breathed, did the best we could and we survived, laughed and loved.
I have spent the better part of the last 4-5 years reacting. Riding the waves and rolling with the punches. I have done it with grace if I must say so myself but I somehow lost touch with the confidence I once had–the confidence that I could actually make something I want to happen…well…happen.
The fact that I would ever allow myself to drift in this direction is shocking to me. I am honestly baffled. I am confused about how a woman such as me would arrive in this place of feeling so unable to do more than get through each day. I had no idea it was happening and yet, here I am, with eyes wide open, realizing that all this time that in an effort to save my sanity I lost my sense of power. Perhaps I even willingly let it go.
There is a fine balance, I am learning, between feeling I need to be in control and feeling powerful. There is a difference that is subtle but critical. Needing to be in control attaches to outcomes. Power however derives from the deep knowing that what you do matters, even if it doesn’t lead to the outcome you had hoped.
Power is the belief that its worth trying. Worth doing. No matter what happens.
It took having a dream, and deciding to make it true to bring it all to the surface.
And so now, there is some more rearranging of soul furniture to do. I need to touch that power again, and practice feeling powerful, even as I stay rooted in a non-attachment to outcomes. This feels like tricky spiritual gymnastics, a subtle dance I am not sure how to master. I suppose it’s an exercise of swinging between the extremes, practicing, until the balance is found.
I am not yet sure about how to reclaim my power. What do you do to claim yours?
It often doesn’t take much of any one thing. Its more like a perfect storm of a series of small moments: a dust up with a friend that leaves me feeling wounded, a summer cold or a restless night, a parenting challenge. These wee heart aches can create a sort of cocktail that can leave me feeling weary and it can kick up the deep dark loneliness of single parenting.
For the record, I want to be clear that on most days I wouldn’t trade the loneliness of single parenting for the loneliness of a stale and miserable marriage. I know too many unhappily married parents who are so much more alone than I–who cannot avoid it, who feel trapped. I know that my designation as a single mom forces me to weave connections my married to loneliness sisters may not feel permission to create.
But its on these days, the days when I am not feeling well, when I need someone to cherish me. When I feel so alone, afraid or unsure that I just wish for someone to wrap their arms around me, soothe my tired mama’s body, brainstorm what on earth to do with that amazing, beautiful, perfectly normal but challenging child. Its on these days that I don’t feel whole all by myself.
When those days hit, I can find myself, weeping like a little girl. It happens almost spontaneously. Like a child who has experienced too much birthday party, too much first day of school, too much bright lights, big city, loud noise I can find myself involuntarily withering because it feels like its just. too. much.
I have long ago found that if I let the weariness and loneliness wash over me–if I don’t try and dam it or fight it but just let it roll it will settle back again and I will feel grounded again. And if I let all that happen and I listen to my grief I might even just learn something.
So today, when I felt it well up I took its appearance as a kind of sign that maybe its time for a walk–to wander out for 40 minutes and drink some tea and sit on a park bench near my labyrinth and be.
Sitting on this bench, I wondered “What will it take until I can feel whole–when I don’t need another pair of arms to soothe me, when I can feel the ground beneath my feet and know that it is enough. What will it take to know the solidity of my own soul not on most days but even on days like this. When I can feel secure and whole even when the bottom seems to drop out and I am left as the last grown up in the room? ”
Breathing in deeply the green summer air, my face moist with humidity and silent tears it came to me.
Forty days. In the desert. Forty days. On a mountaintop. Forty days. In the sacred company of your sisters. Forty days of a rest.
It was as if the wisdom of all those ancient ancestors came whispered in one breath. Take a break and simply go to the space where you can be. Take 40 days if you need to.
A ha! Thats why the mystics of the past left to flee to the desert. Not as some sort of punishment or banishment. Not as some sort of self imposed suffering. No–it was 40 days of luxuriating in the stillness and quiet that is found in the presence of the God-spark within. They went to listen to the quiet of their own hearts. To escape the messiness of community and the hurt that we can experience as part of human day to day life.
Forty days of Lent is not some sort of punishing self ritual–but a rest in simplicity to prepare for the great transformation of springs rebirth. Its not a ritual of denial, but a ritual of return to simplicity–to the few good things which sustain us. A release of the extraneous.
In Mexico new mothers are cared for like new babes themselves for 40 days after their birth. Those forty days after the birth of a babe provide a woman a sacred space to transition into motherhood.
Those 40 day rituals…I had always thought of it as an isolation, a hiding, a contraction…
But what if it is 40 days of protection, of sheltering? What if it not a practice of cutting oneself off not from life’s richness but rather from the hurtful distracting bits of life? What if the isolation is not an exile but a retreat so that the soul work can be done, so the blossoming can begin, so the opening can happen in a space of complete safety? What if that is what Lent is really about–retreating into the simplest, quietest, most essential place to prepare to bloom in the spring time? Its not 40 days of hiding, but 40 days of practicing opening up in the safest of space.
Maybe, sometimes that is all we need to keep growing…40 days in a safe space.
Maybe that is all we need to find the earth beneath our feet.
Maybe that is all we need to find the security we crave.
Maybe it is as simple as 40 days.
Perhaps its is the wilds of a desert. Maybe it is the top of a mountain. Or maybe it is the stillness of a daily meditation practice that had long been forgotten, the luxury of healthy food prepared with love, and the careful choice of company.
I am wondering what my 40 days could be if I could carefully choose? What harmful things would I cut myself off from–not as punishment or ritualized suffering but to enable a return to myself? What habits would I abandon? What inner dialogues, worries? What people might I leave–just for a short time–because the flow of my love to them (or their love to me) has been uneven? What burdens could I let go of to give me space to bloom?
I don’t know just yet, though I am beginning to imagine. More than imagine because I am going to find out.
I am off on an adventure.
