Monday, September 29, 2014

The Measuring Stick



I’m moving in a week, and I spent all of yesterday going through the very scary place that is my garage.  I was doing pretty well until I shifted a box of sporting equipment that hadn’t been used since our last move six years ago.  Behind it, wedged into a corner and warped beyond repair was my son’s height measuring stick, the one with the cheerful train at the bottom and the different markings:  Ari at 2, 2 and a half, at 5, at 8.  Without knowing how I got there, I was standing in my driveway sobbing. 

We bought this house when our landlords neglected to let us know they were in foreclosure, and we were forced to leave a home we’d grown to love.  To console Ari, I told him we were buying a house so we’d never have to move again, that we could plant trees and watch them grow, and his children could come and we’d build them a swing.  Michael had just been diagnosed and we were full of hope that we would find our way through the maze of his cancer, and my mother had just died.  It was my mother who bought the little train measuring stick.

So much information in such a simple piece of wood.  Everything I’ve lost was there -- all the potential, everything we thought we were building as a family, my mother’s support, the unquestioned devotion Michael and I had for our son, and Ari’s sweetness and innocence at 2, 2 and a half, at 5, at 8.  Michael did not survive, Ari -- a little angry -- has gone off to college, and I’ve sold our house. 

I cried until I was done, then put the stick on the pile of things going to the dump.  A friend asked, “Did you at least take a picture?” but I didn’t need to.  If I’d taken a quick photo with my phone, it would have ended up in the digital garage that is my computer.  What will last forever is the memory of recognizing that stick and knowing what it represented; in that moment all the love we shared was transferred to my body, each cell holographically storing the image.  I can make all the copies I want.  I am that stick.

This morning I looked at the trees I love all around this house and for a moment I became their patience, their capacity to witness and record everything around them without needing to interfere.  I felt their encouragement to walk through life this way -- loving, aching, celebrating, and enduring beyond smaller lifetimes.  I stood tall and let my life be measured against this stillness, tolerating the marking of events like the carving of initials, or the occasional hanging of a swing. 
           
Odd to feel grateful at a moment like this. 

With love,
Mia

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Chihuahua Medicine, Grandmother and the Infantile Ego

This week, as a summer job, my son is taking care of our friends’ four dogs: three chihuahuas and a pug/spaniel mix with digestive issues. This means that in the dream that is my life, I’m spending a good deal of time negotiating with the needs of little raw nerves.  There’s nothing extraneous on these animals.  Barely any hair, no fat, just the trembling, uninsulated response to absolutely every sound, movement, smell, emotion, or need around them.  It’s fascinating; nothing is hidden.  I watch amazed for  extended periods of time as raw experience ripples through their tiny bodies.

Alone, they would expire.  They need to be swaddled and snuggled, sheathed in warmth and love.  They bundle together on soft things, preferably something much larger and warm-blooded.  Unenhanced by other mammals’ seductive allure, they seem to be the perfect representation of nature’s raw need for connection, that root part of us that needs desperately and doesn’t have anything to offer in return except the palpable relief of being saved from the terrifying overwhelm of isolation.  They don’t know how to buy love the way we’ve been taught; nobody told them it had to be earned.

I had a vision a while back of the liminal place between what we come from and what we do with it.  A Grandmother sat tending a fire in a cave, though the night sky above was open space.  I handed her a crying baby, the child of a young friend, and immediately the infant settled, went from squalling need to serene awareness experiencing everything around her with limitless wonder.  All of creation drew a deep breath of gratitude, and Grandmother smiled and told us to go be grownups. 

My life hasn’t been working lately, and all roads of inquiry as to why lead back to this place, the part of me that is designed only to connect, the circuit fallen away from the motherboard that makes it all run.  I’ve sat bewildered by my inability to respond, wondered what I needed to do or become to make it all better, not realizing that this part of me does not have the equipment for any of that.  Without this piece in place, nothing is as it should be. 

Life thumps us and parts of us go missing, dislodged from where they are meant to be, essential links in the grid between matter and spirit.  Dissociation, soul loss, winked-out lights in the DNA chain; such terrible and bewildered sadness.  All aberrant behavior can be traced to this infantile ego exposed on a hillside, not wailing for fear of attracting predators. 

But we are designed to self repair.  In every cell is the instinct to seek the warmth and light that has temporarily gone out of us, if we would only remember it is ours by definition. Lives spent in shame-based scheming and strategizing may have taught us otherwise, but this love is our birth right, and like anything that is truly ours, we need only claim it.

So I’m here on my couch surrounded by these gentle little dogs, cherishing their shameless pleasure in the comfort offered by soft blankets and a warm body.  I think I’ll just close my eyes and breathe with them for a while, then see what I can do about this business of being a grownup. 

With love,
Mia

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

What Can I Get You?

Crow Mother, Her Eyes, Her Eggs ~ Meinrad Craighead
Last night I dreamt I was part of an espionage team on a mission that had gone terribly wrong.  We were in danger, and we broke into a dusty old mansion with heavy curtains over the windows, planning to regroup and prepare for the next assault.  Each of us proceeded to do what we do, what we were trained to do, but everyone was shaken and frightened, not sure we were going to survive what was coming. 

Then someone brought in the Specialist.  She was an older woman, Eastern European, with a helmet of dyed black hair.  She was plump and wore a short sequined tuxedo jacket with tails, and spangly tights, like a magician in Vegas.  Her overly made-up appearance seemed laughable, and a younger woman on the team sneered and said, “The fuck is she gonna do?”  But the guy standing next to her smiled and said, “Just watch.”  

The Specialist proceeded to set up and begin tending bar with a quiet professionalism and dignity.  As we looked on, enthralled, it became apparent that she was doing much more than tending bar, that she was a practitioner of great power and skill, and she was not serving what we at first thought.  The younger woman watched with open admiration and said only, “Wow.” 

The Dark Goddess.  She is not serving cocktails and she is not in service to the caricature that is her disguise.  The truth of what she serves is frankly a little scary, remembering that she has been called in because we are in danger and she is here to get the job done.  

If you were foolish enough to catch her eye and she asked, “What can I get you?” would you place an order?  Would that be wise?  Is there a single thing you could ask of that kind of power that would not have consequences?  For me I think I’ll just stand off to the side and watch.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

The Renovation


I dreamt last night that I had to leave an old house where I used to live as it was falling down around me.  Everything was moist, like the inside of a body, and I was frantically and ineffectively trying to collect everything I thought was important.  Then I was walking up the hill towards this house feeling terrible shame.  My house had been destroyed and my mother was right, I would never succeed at anything; I had failed, I was ruined.  I stepped over piles of glass, windows that had blown out from other structures.  When I got to my house, though, I was surprised to see that it had been charmingly renovated.  There were flower boxes in the windows, the façade in front had been cleared of debris and clutter, and the stairs had been moved from the front to the right side.  The place looked ten times bigger, so much more open, and I knew the inside would be clear as well. 

In 1980, I met my husband in this house.  Michael was literally the boy next door; he lived in the flat above me in this funky old San Francisco Victorian that had survived the earthquake in ’06.  He eventually moved in with me in the middle flat, and we lived there until 2002, when we finally moved to Marin, letting go of paying less then $800 for a rent-controlled, three-bedroom flat.  Our son was born there, on the sofabed, because he came early and our bedroom was being painted at the time due to a last-minute nesting urge.  The hot water was so slow it took an hour to fill the tub.  The floor had become an unintentional work of art having suffered hippies, musicians, pets and children; but it somehow worked.  People would ask me how I’d accomplished just that effect, and I would explain that if you don’t bother something for a long period of time, it will become beautiful.  

So, no, not the place most mothers would love. 

After Michael died, I made the mistake of going by that old house as I drove through town on my way to sell a few of his less-loved guitars. Seeing it, I sobbed until I made myself sick.  We lived there together for over twenty years, more than I’ve lived anywhere before or since.  We began as singles, became a couple, and grew into a family; no longer satellites of other dysfunctional systems, but the center of our own lives.  We built a place where we were safe from the disapproval outside, like refugees.  Mostly, we didn’t bother each other, and let one another grow beautiful. 

When Michael died he turned into a crow for a bit, and since then I’ve felt that crows follow me wherever I go.  Part of me suspects it’s nothing personal; crows are everywhere.  But I’m grateful for a symbol so ubiquitous, and comfort is never far away.  During a gray moment after the eclipse I heard a crow outside, and I felt so loved. A moment later, I heard the crow call from slightly further away and I got scared and said, “Don’t go!” 

Suddenly all I could feel was the beauty – of that dilapidated house, of the club we formed together that would have us as members, of this small moment in time where I could let go of making the renovations myself.  I could even see the beauty of Michael’s cancer, how it turned the structure of his limitations into a mush from which he has emerged transformed.  I felt Michael expanding beyond my comprehension, just as our 18-year-old son is getting ready to leave home, and around me there are nothing but open doors.  

I said it again, I said, “Don’t go.” 

Then I heard Michael’s voice, amused and tender, and he said, “How could I?” 

Love always transcends every form it takes, containing and releasing with impeccable precision and skill.  Love never leaves; it can’t.  It will always be the only thing left standing.  And maybe the best thing we can do for one another is to make ourselves into shapes and hold each other while we calm down enough to remember that we are free.  May it be so.

With love,
Mia