Facing Fear

I try not to be smashed by my fear, though it presses in on my ribcage (I picture Giles Corey in Miller's famous play). Try not to be crushed beneath the weight of this sinister extrapolation of possible life events. She smiles on me and I know she is okay (why should she visit me during my savasana? such an unexpected gift--another confirmation of the way the boundaries of time and space are lifted in the spirit world--how easy it is to move among the living when we are freed of this "mortal coil"), but I can't begin to be at peace with what her passage suggests about my own vulnerability.  About the ways I could possibly lose. OH. I try to be calm. Present. My love breaks me. They are all, these sons of mine. They are all.

The Absurd...

"All I want is the moon upon a stick. Just to see what if. Just to see what is."--Thom Yorke of Radiohead

"I never wanted anything from you, except everything you had and what was left after that too."--Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine

Hyperbole reigns. In life, in language. In all the ways we try to be okay. But it's the irony that sinks the heart (though not before entertaining it).

I love this man's intensity. His guilelessness. His impossibly honest movement that sings the absurdity of being human. Oh--alive. We are alive, and I am grateful. But sometimes I am staggered by what that means and what this life serves up to us. Just so. Just so...


 Thom Yorke...Radiohead's front man on "Lotus Flower" (yes, I'm fixating. it's cool)

Gone to Seed

We sing of dandelions
gone to seed--white
fluff in air, tipping and
sliding on wayward breezes.

Yellow light filters
through star-shaped
filaments--cornflower blue
explodes behind them.
Sky as backdrop. Sky as
safety net. Wild promise
of what remains
when one of us leaves
before we are ready
to have them go.

We chase them, catch
them in our hands,
make wishes only we
can know. Let them
go...the wishes
still ringing in our ears
like the songs we sing
to the dead. Songs we sing
to ourselves in their absence.

Fear to Grieve...

My fear envelopes me like a shroud. In darkness I crouch, hiding from the thing that might devour me. How to live with such terror? How to breathe under the weight of this slow-motion implosion? A child dies, and again I am thrust to the center of a too bright light. It is an agonizing paradox because the answer is always yes, and yes, but Oh--how to live with the ways our living breaks us?

*     *     *     *     *

How to drink you and love you up around the fear that stalks me? Tender shoots of my fertile love, you are my gift to the world, but oh, how I want you for myself.

*     *     *     *     *

Begin again, I say, begin again. I will live this stretch a million times over. Let it be my whole experience of life on this earth and in this body. Sixteen short years. They are all. They are all.

Angel Card: "Birth"

I am constantly thinking about this process. Of bringing something out into the world. It's a painful, messy and difficult process that challenges one to her very limits. And its duration, the time it takes to achieve, is really very unpredictable. The greatest factor in determining the duration of a human birth seems to be the extent to which one is able to surrender to the process. The extent to which one can let go of fear, resistance and holding. The extent to which one is able to stop tensing against the pain.

The duration of one's labor (and to a lesser extent the gestation itself) is also determined by one's readiness, I think (not in practical terms, though even this sometimes has an impact, but in the emotional sense) for what arrives as a result of giving birth: something to love and nurture, something whose existence will forever alter our own and whose life will change even the way we see ourselves. Something whose life is inextricably tied to our own happiness and makes us, therefore, vulnerable to a frightening degree.

I feel ready. But not impatient. I want this "baby" to be whole, fully developed. Healthy. I hope that it will be received with love and gentleness by the world but I must ultimately relinquish control of its reception. I must trust what created it: my body, my mind, my soul and whatever creative force entered me, seemed to fertilize the seed of my creativity and then propelled me to give it life with my words. It is perfect because of my perfect intent. Perfect because of my love. I know that typically, every gestation ends with a birth, and so I relax. I trust. I keep nurturing and I know. That is all. That is all.