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.

Summer Kiss

From my position on the lawn, in the cool shadow cast by a young tree, I look up at the veiny underside of maple leaves. Here and there a scalloped passageway toward sky--moving across that shifting space: white cloud against dazzling blue. Glazing it all with a summer sheen: yellow sunlight. It touches me, too, at intervals. Lacy patterns move along toasted summer skin. Fine powder of salt dries in my eyelashes, in my hair. Summer winds down gently, as August moves through us, kisses us good night.

Eggs and Gratitude: July 24th, 2012

It is the day of my 19th wedding anniversary, and I sit at a picnic table with a pale blue cloth; the heat from the camp stove rises idly, casting a slow and swirling shadow across the print of the fabric. Overhead: the susurrus of green leaves moving against one another in a barely perceptible breeze. Morning light is best, I think. Then sunset light. The sea is very near. I can smell it. But we arrived in the dark last night. When I have finished the French roast I am sipping, and my boys (all three of them) have come back from their 50 cent showers, we will put the dog in the van and go in search of waves.

I am aware of myself as being among the luckiest people on the planet. Not only because I am not suffering today--I am not weathering a natural disaster, not trying to shield my children from gunfire, not fending off hunger or fear--but also because I know myself as such, and this, I realize, is a vital part of the equation of happiness. Gratitude. I am grateful for the health of my family and my self. I am grateful for a job that provides housing and an unmatchable educational experience for my children. I am grateful for my husband, who is kind, capable, strong and steadfast. I am grateful for three women friends in particular, the four of us scattered over the earth like seeds, who will ever hold space for my spiritual journey. I am grateful that today I will be in the sea and play by riding waves. I am grateful for time to play--with my family--this summer.

I am grateful for the egg I carry in the hollow of my throat, perfect gift of remembering that I nurture something utterly divine which in its time will hatch, and I will be the steward of it, as I am now. In my mind's eye, I wrap my pareau across my body, twist and tie it behind my neck so that it secures the stone and drapes to my knee. I pull the excess fabric up, toward my body, and begin to climb. I have chosen the difficult way. I scale the Valley wall with ease, caprine agility. The waterfall drenches my skin and hair as I go, but the egg pulses at my throat, where it is safe and saturated with my own heart rhythms.

The strength of my limbs as I rise is unrivaled and I know it as the collective energy of a life lived well and with purpose. I am yet young, only now entering the period of fruitfulness and, oh yes, harvest. I am grateful for all of these things. For the new novel stirring in my ribcage, only 50 pages as yet but tumbling through me like a rush of autumn leaves. Of monarch butterflies. Gold-feathered birds. And I am still. I thank the spirit world for speaking so clearly to me, though at times I could not hear. I thank the divine. God indeed.

*     *     *     *     *

So...without having heard about my meditation, without having read this blog entry, this: independently of one another, my boys each bring me an egg-shaped stone from the sea. It is exactly the stuff I saw in my meditation--something between a crystal and granite--white and shaped like an egg...that fits in the hollow of my throat. I realize that this is our pre-hatch trip, during our pre-hatch summer, during which I learn that my life is perfect, exactly as it is. During which my love for my family and my husband is perfected. It is the summer in which I learn to be truly present. To let go, let come. In gratitude. In gratitude. Om.

Cultivating Patience...

"I'm afraid," I say to L., who is also a chaperone on this overnight excursion to the Boston Museum of Science, "that this is my life lesson: patience." Two kids run past us toward the next exhibit and I continue. "I mean, if I'm lucky, what do I have, maybe 50 more years in this lifetime? Like if I'm really lucky, right?" L. nods in agreement and opens her palm to receive a hit-and-run half a muffin someone abandons on their way to the Live Animals show. "I don't think that's enough time," I say in all seriousness, and the statement alone is worth a little stomach ache that blooms in my belly. "I mean, I'm infinitely patient with other people--it's not that."

"Yes," she adds seamlessly, "just not with yourself. Not with the process." She is exactly right.

"Right!' I intone and brighten slightly at this new evidence of our solidarity. "Like I can't trust the things I want to have happen to come about, of their own accord and as a result of my earnest effort. And God forbid it's something I can't control." L. nods sagaciously--seems calm about my predicament of being in danger of not learning my big 'life lesson' of patience fast enough (yes, I do acknowledge the irony but can do nothing to counter it).  For me, on the other hand, a buzzing little current of fear rises along my spine; it is a familiar sensation. "Like I can't let go," I add.

And with a gesture toward her own body, palms upward, fingers spread and scooping the air in the direction of her heart, L. revises: "Or rather, like you can't let them come." And that is the truth of it, I realize in a mild epiphany. One punctuated by the loud cracks of man-made lightning coming from inside the "Theatre of Electricity". I can't seem to let them come to me, these things that I would attract. It is as if all my buzzing and fearful and controlling energy creates a kind of shield that deflects these things that I would otherwise attract to me, and here is my truth pulsing softly, coming alive under the dim light of my infant attention. Beginning of a journey, I acknowledge, mark of a new phase. Thank goodness. Phase of gradual lightening, in all senses of the word, that follows the heaviness and struggle of a growth period. O gratitude. O relief and wash of hope!

The entire conversation is spawned by visiting the Bonsai Room of the museum, where we witness the 75 year progression in photos of a bonsai tree that sits before us now, all abloom with bougainvillea. A tiny tree that someone has groomed for 75 years. I look at the eleven-year photo. In it, the tree looks dead--I would doubtless have abandoned it then, or in the 20-year photo, where it looks small and stunted, but at 40, the tree begins to show its beauty again, and now, before me...it is a wonder. I get the fleeting idea to take up bonsai, and of course, let it go as quickly as it arrived to me, watch it gallop past on its way back to the land of ridiculous and desperate ideas. No, I think. I'll just be still.Open myself to this new knowing, cognizant that there is no time-lapse photography here. Only slow-moving time and my tacit agreement. Yes, I say. And please.

"Stillness is the altar of the spirit," said Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, and while it is true that I nearly got in an altercation with a girl scout leader first thing this morning over bathroom priveleges, I have coffee now and I feel relatively relaxed. The kids are all lined up in a row for the planetarium show, and the celestial expanse over Boston lights itself in a dome overhead, while the rest of the lights soften until all is dark save the stars and planets and the green glow over the announcer's face. I begin to practice patience by being still. I begin it now, here, accompanied by a jocular and friendly voice narrating a journey through space. I breathe and I nurture the tree of my desire where it grows, in fits and starts, here--in my earthly body. In this, my heart.