Letting Go

I took off my wedding ring Wednesday night.  It began as an experiment; I wanted to see what it would feel like.  And then I found myself reluctant to put it back on.  The skin where it had been was pink, like the new skin you find when you pick a scab.  For a day I wore the ring around my neck, but I can’t sleep with jewelry on so I took the necklace off that night.  The next day I found Michael’s ring and I placed both our rings on an altar, mine nestled inside his.

This morning I panicked and tried putting the ring back.  It slipped right on, comfortably resuming it’s place in the dent on my finger.  When I tried to slide it off, it stuck, like a reluctant dog who’s been asked to vacate the ease of a soft armchair. That made me feel even more panicky, so I worked it off again and sat with both rings in my hand.           

Michael and I knew that we are old, old friends, and holding those rings I saw what they symbolized pales in comparison to what we are and always will be to one another.  As I let go of the roles the rings represented – roles in which we were never entirely comfortable – what streamed in were all the lifetimes we’d shared, all that we’ve ever been to each other.  We’d been everything, explored every possibility, and in every possible configuration.  And throughout it all was the thread of his patience with me.

All of that became part of me again when I released us from the cramped space of Michael and Mia, husband and wife. Michael’s essence is part of everything I  have built in this life, the way water is part of a tree.  As I sat there with our rings in my palm, I allowed my parched essence to again draw him through my deepest roots giving me flexibility, heart, and strength.

A lifetime together is so short, like a stolen kiss as you dance a reel, a flash of recognition before the flow of the dance takes you away to the next thing.  The dance never stops, and sometimes you get lucky enough to share a moment with a beloved who has been with you since the beginning of time, someone who never really leaves you, and will always be back.  The memory of that kiss makes you smile for aeons, and the promise of its return is a secret pleasure that distracts you as you try to pay attention to other things that should seem important and matter not at all.

Michael’s birthday is next week.  He would have been 61.  What better gift than to give him back his immensity, to let him expand beyond the agreement that those rings symbolized. I know some part of him never goes far, that wherever he dances next there will be a smile on his lips. I love him enough to let him go, even though the human woman I am aches to feel his arms around me, to smell him one more time. 

Happy Birthday, sweetie.  Love always. 

When we were impossibly young

And with Michael's second grandchild, Leo Michael Breyman

The Divine Divorce

The night of the full super moon I dreamed it was my birthday.  I was being taken to a fancy hotel room to celebrate by a big and powerful man.  He and I were not lovers, but I was craving intimacy with him.  He kept telling me what a nice room it was, though I found it to be very ordinary and dull.  At just the moment we were going to connect in some way, I saw him do something so familiar and sad it made my teeth ache: I saw him decide to disappoint me.  I could see that he hated himself for it, and I could also see that he thought he was doing me a favor, saving me from further grief by showing me that he was utterly incapable of love.  Just before I woke up I was wondering, “Why can’t I just leave?” 

It wasn’t that he didn’t love me.  He was just broken.  Not wounded, not some injured and vulnerable being waiting for my ministrations to bring him back to life.  It was not about my being good enough, beautiful enough, woman enough, strong enough, healer enough.  He just didn’t have the parts to put back together.  Something was missing and something would always be missing.

Upon waking I realized, this relationship doesn’t work.  It never has.  It never will.  My inner masculine is a bum. 

All the years of rage and disappointment, all the struggle and effort to make him something other than what he was – what I knew he was because I created him – all that waste and shame led to this simple realization.  What if I just let it be true?  What if I listen, finally listen to the truth that’s been playing itself out over and over my whole life? 

It has taken me a few days to digest this, to let my tired and toughened tissues absorb the bitter medicine of this truth.  The masculine I have built in myself based on the parts I had available to me is never going to provide for me, make me happy, or keep me safe.  And unlike a real human being, he is incapable of change, a static construct based on subterranean beliefs about myself, judgments that I am not worthy of love or forgiveness.  He is a cage built by my ego to keep me hating myself and out of love with life.  I have always had the key. 

            So at this solstice time of year when the sun is strong and I think I am supposed to be celebrating the divine wedding, the marriage of my animus and anima, the union of the opposites at the root of all creation, I am filing for divorce.  The sad monster I’ve sewn together from all my collected failures will finally get to rest, no longer electrified into being by my fears and desires.  If I let him die, something unbuilt will be able to take his place. 

I don’t know what happens next. 

Point of View

It’s spring, officially now, and I notice a lot of my conversations have been about boxes and restrictions.  I understand the importance of structure.  Without structure we would drown in possibility.  Or, as my creative writing teacher pointed out, without restrictions, you have no story.  But I feel the need to stretch, and I’m pressing against the walls to see what they’re made of, and to test if they will still hold me in.

Something to keep in mind in this discussion is turkeys.  Really.  Apparently if you keep a turkey in a cage for a while and then remove that cage, the bird assumes the cage is still there and confines itself to the dimensions of the phantom prison that’s no longer there.  I see my life as a world I created, and my beliefs about what is possible are the arbitrary rules I’ve set up based on my past experience.  I’ve come to see that the walls of my cage are not made of lead, glass or even cardboard.  The box I live in exists only as strokes of imagination, and because life is a work in progress, in this draft I’m writing right now, the shape of that box can be revised.  The deliberate use of imagination is magic of the highest order.  

One of the first signs that there was something terribly wrong with my late husband was when he stopped reading fiction, stopped being able to read fiction.  Biographies, how-to’s, they were all fine, but anything that required him to access his imagination became uninteresting, even irritating.  When he told me this it terrified me.  The cumulative trauma of life’s losses and fears had left Michael trapped in the point of view of someone he’d forgotten he’d created. 

I would rather run headlong into a steel door than argue with stale imagination.  Without dipping the pen of the linear self into the well of the imaginal part of us, stories calcify and are constantly reinforced by a ferocious defensiveness.  The healthy imperative to refresh mutates into mindless replication.  It was not until Michael’s illness progressed and he faced his own death that he was jolted out of his frozen state and could again imagine something more.  He died at home, and after his death, as my teenage son and I sat with his body, Michael’s joy was palpable in the room.  His exhilaration at his freedom reclaimed is a legacy that nourishes us, more valuable than anything he could have owned.  

Do this:  Take a good breath and keep it for a moment, feeling the way the presence of this nectar interacts with any boundaries it comes to, like water looking for a crack or fingers feeling for any opening, no matter how small.  Still keeping that breath, just imagine that there’s more room, following the breath’s lead and feeling into the empty spaces.  Now wait for it; it will come.  With a rush your breath will find its way out of the deception that it is trapped; and your chest, your belly and your lower back will open suddenly to receive more.  Stay there as long as you can. 

There.  You’ve just changed your life. 

Shining Night

Last night I went to a screening of the movie Shining Night:  A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen at the Rafael Theater.  The composer himself was there, as was the director, Michael Stillwater.  The film was lovely and simple, beautifully photographed, and part of a larger body of work called, “In Search of the Great Song.”  According to Stillwater’s website, Song Without Borders, Lauridsen’s gorgeous works are, “. . . the most frequently performed choral music of modern history.” 

Truly a mystic, Lauridsen does a great deal of his writing on Waldron, one of the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest, the place where he says he first felt whole.  Speaking after the film was shown, he described when he purchased, sight unseen, his wonderfully dilapidated house on the island.  Seeing the structure for the first time, the realtor apologized profusely, and the woman Lauridsen was with was looking at him as if he were insane.  But Lauridsen was ecstatic.   "No, " he said.  "Look at what you can see from here.”  He didn’t care what the house looked like; he cared that from this place he could see spectacular beauty. 

This came back to me as I sat this morning.  Feeling, perhaps, a little dilapidated myself, I suddenly stopped looking at myself and began to look through me to what was all around.  Lauridsen’s house might not last many more winters, but the land on which it was built will survive a series of structures that come and go.  My perspective shifted from the view of the self to the view from the self, and for just a moment I became invisible, like a very clean window. 

While it is human to love what death will take, there is a blessed stillness in loving death itself, to stop – for just a moment – the ceaseless renovation and nestle into the arms of that which takes us home.  I felt patient and safe.  Everything I’ve built became irrelevant, and I beamed as though I’d discovered a new color, the color of appreciation.  I never wanted to come back. 

Yet here I am.  As I sat in the center of creation without words or thoughts, I suddenly felt an ache of loneliness, a desire to share this moment with someone else.  It gets me every time.  

I Promise

It is my beautiful son Ari’s birthday, sixteen years old today.  I am always proud of him, even when he’s being impossible, but on his birthday I remember how much I wanted him, how clearly I heard him knocking from the other side.  I fought with everything I had to bring him here, now here he is indeed.  I feel such fulfillment and awe to have cleared the way for this intricate being, always unfolding, so fiercely himself. 

It is also seven months and a day since his father died, and I am incapacitated with sadness and loss, knowing that the only other person in the world who knows can’t share this day with me.  Others may have had tiny windows on our experience, but no one else really understands what we went through together, our little family of three.  Of all the things I know I will never have again with Michael, the brutal realization that I will never again exchange proud and bewildered wonder with my son’s father hurts me more than any grief I have experienced so far.    

I sat feeling ruined, weeping on my couch after Ari left for school, when I noticed that my right hand was clutched tightly, as if it held the last seed of something immeasurably precious.  The feeling was so familiar.  I felt it when I answered Ari’s call to life, I felt it when I was in labor.  I felt it when I nursed and cared for Michael, and I felt it as his spirit left his body.  I have felt it all my life, each time I’ve decided not to let myself drift too irreparably far away. 

I found myself swearing over and over, “I’ll take care of it, I promise.  I promise.”  I felt privileged to have been entrusted with this, and certain I would never, ever let it go.  I don’t think I could, no matter how much I might want to, at times.  I wasn’t sure, exactly, of what I was speaking, the identity of the thing to which I had pledged my service.  But I knew, after 56 years, four months and two days of this life, that I meant it. 

The Change

Last night I dreamed of two dark brothers named Twoomy. The younger one felt the older one had betrayed him, and for evidence he held up a chessboard, so few pieces left, an endgame that dripped with corruption and decay. We had something to do, and this man’s belief in his brother’s faithlessness was holding us back. In the background a woman dressed in a white shift was carried by the current, face up below the surface in a flow of sweet water, and children joyfully steered a small wooden ship too close to the ocean’s shore.

I woke up wondering, what would it mean to discover there had been no betrayal? Life could move forward without the snarl of the bickering brothers. One direction, one purpose; flow instead of acting as a clogged trap in a drain accumulating hair and other organic debris. What would it be like to have no traps between me and my reason for being?

And if there really had been no betrayal, perhaps even the traps act as baskets, nutrient-rich nests whose sole purpose is to contain the gestation, emergence and delivery of the material out of which our world is fashioned. Each particle of us is a drama of love and betrayal, separation and reunion. The smallest bit of us cares very deeply, about itself and about what it knows. It has a will and a heart and a storyline that defines it. Miraculously it all comes together to form a leaf, a broken fingernail, the dog and the cat who share the couch with me as I write.

When we cry foul and rage that we have been betrayed, we chafe against the forward motion of an outdated plot and accumulate around us the material on which to feed and rest while a new thread of intention forms inside us. It is time for this story to move forward in the world only when the substance of the old story begins to rot and wash away, and we realize we are loved and true, and have been all along.

Can you feel it in your body? The dream changing shape? Is it time?

Let There be Frisbee

I fell in love over a game of Frisbee about 36 years ago. The game lasted for many of the light months that year, and over the season my friend and I developed a spirit of cooperation and synchrony that I’ve rarely matched since. Every morning, late morning, we’d meet in Riverside Park in New York and toss the Frisbee back and forth. Our accuracy became deadly, our devotion to each other apparent as we leapt over benches or did face plants in the dust to catch the occasional throw that went astray. Dropping the Frisbee was not an option, would have been a betrayal of our connection. People stopped to watch us, but seldom joined in. After we’d had enough, we’d go eat a revolting breakfast at the local diner. I worked at night as a waitress, and he made his living playing chess.

I ended up behaving very badly in that relationship. It was my destiny, perhaps, to keep my date with my darkness, and I went into a nosedive that brought me back up to light here in California. He ended up with someone better equipped to love him, a woman who became the love of his life.

I’m remembering this today because my husband of almost 30 years and my 14-year-old son invited me to play Frisbee this afternoon. I didn’t even think of saying no, as the three of us haven’t done much of anything besides watch a movie together in more time than I’d like to acknowledge. And it’s the day after Beltane, the date that begins the light half of the year. The celebration of Beltane is also an admonishment, a reminder to nurture and keep safe what we will want to harvest later on; for while light always cycles around, what we birth into that light can easily vanish, stolen by faeries or dead of neglect.

It is not enough to simply let life happen. Light is always available to us – seasons and cycles are holographically inherent in every breath we choose to take – but life happens as a product of our willingness to participate. Even true surrender, whether it be to darkness or to light, is more than a mere cessation of activity; it is a choice, a step we take in one direction or another: to produce or to rest, to create or destroy, to connect or retract. Wisdom, as ever, is knowing which to do when. There is a purgatory to which we default when we abdicate our power to engage in life. I know because I’ve been there.

Playing Frisbee with my family today I noticed we’re a little rusty; it’s been a hard winter. But I like that we said yes to each other, that we agreed to go out together in the beautiful sun and toss around a piece of bright pink plastic, even though we’re busy or tired or beleaguered or sad. Today we chose to engage in the simple act of catching what was thrown to us and sending it on, giving it our own spin. We chose, however briefly, to play together, to celebrate the return of possibility. It was a wise choice to make.