The Waiting Pool

When I was a small child I remember one summer visiting cousins and learning how to dive.  I stood in the hot sun with my toes curled on the lip of the pool, crouched and ready, hands held at my chest in a position of prayer shaping the head of the arrow I would become when I finally got the courage to spring into the water.  And like an arrow that is already lodged in its target, I couldn’t back up or step off. 

Days went by and I held my position.  They called me to lunch, made me wait an hour, told me to come home for dinner.  I slept.  Then I went back the next day, and the next.  The tension would build, bring me to the brink of accomplishment, and my body would thrill with adrenaline as I thought, “Now!  I’m going to do it now!” But at the last second all that forward momentum was met by a brutal wall of fear, forces colliding in midstream, and I remained frozen in place.  I was helpless to move forward or back. 

Then one day I did it.  Pushed off from the edge of the pool, knifed my body into the water and emerged victorious, screaming, “Did you see?”  But no one had.  These triumphs are often private because anyone who might have cared gave up days (or months or years) ago, sick of watching someone who appeared to have turned to stone.  But I made them watch as I repeated it again, and again, and again.  Thousands of dives into the water completing each and every aborted action that had built up in my nervous system during my endless hours of readiness. 

It’s helpful for me to remember this because there are parts of me that don’t move, unable to go forward or back.  Some of these parts have been poised and ready for generations, others for a day or so.  I have spent much of my life judging these places as failure, staring at the Medusa in the mirror and turning to stone, ignoring the aliveness in waiting for the right moment for conception to take place, for the arrow to pierce the veil. 

In my lineage there is endless betrayal and sadness, trust broken time and again.  Lately I am thinking of it all differently.  What I am struck by is the part of me that never leaves the side of the pool, that is willing to stand there disappointing myself over and over and over, all the while storing energy for that moment of personal best, most likely witnessed by no one, when I will finally break free.

The Ego Made Me Do It

Anyone on a path of self development will at some point have been told, “It’s just your ego.” The ego is always there, several steps ahead of you, waiting to co-opt your higher intentions and use them to keep you enslaved to a world of illusion and suffering.  Like the body, many traditions have taught that the ego is something inconvenient and base, something to recognize as lowly and transcend.

Most people I know would never say, “The Devil made me do it,” at least not with a straight face.  But we talk about the ego as if it’s an evil mastermind thwarting us, degrading us, always besting us in ways we are helpless to outwit.  It keeps us from our goals, robs us of our successes, ruins our relationships and knocks the ball of wisdom out of our consciousness every time we’re about to touch down into enlightenment.

I smell sulphur.  We’ve found ourselves a new scapegoat. 

Who gave it this power?  Who defined it as the Great Obstructionist?  I call it the ego, as if it’s something that happens to me.  Recoiling from the sting of self hate, I can scream at my ego and say, “See what you made me do?”  But like all the causes of suffering I blame on circumstances I actually created, this dog answers to me. 

Maybe the ego is just neutral material waiting to express all of my unconscious beliefs in a three-dimensional Sensurround display.  But I felt something else in there. Perhaps – well, of course I’m projecting, but when I felt into it, there was an underlying goodness, a nobility and dignity that had been betrayed.  Like a junkyard dog who has been trained to be vicious, you can only be cruel to yourself for so long without creating a monster, and that natural capacity for devotion becomes a servant who hates your guts. 

I don’t know if the relationship can be repaired, but from now on I’m going to treat my ego like a good dog.  I will reward its loyalty, share my food, give it a bath and pick off the parasites.  I will let it sleep in the warm house.  Instead of  “my ego, “ I will call it my Virtue, and every time I notice it doing its job, I will recognize it as something wondrous.  

I feel like I’m in love. 

Apartment 9A

My mother, Lois Runanin

Last night in the thickest part of my sleep I dreamt I was about to receive an important message.  Others were with me as I sat forward, straining to hear, lucid and aware that this was the response I sought.  The woman delivering the message whispered, “9A.”  Everyone around me mobilized to act on this, but I sank in disappointment.  I held up my right index finger to stop everyone and said, “I know what this is.”  9A was my mother’s apartment, the place I left.  9A is the Sad House. 

There is a terrible grief in the inquiry when I find... exactly what I expected to find.  Apartment 9A is the target I can’t miss.  No matter where I launch myself from, a force more personal than gravity grabs me and drags me back “home.”  I could no more avoid it than I could jump off a cliff and land on the moon. I woke up feeling leaden and let down, and even tried to forget the dream, not bothering to record it.  But it stayed with me.  It was an important message. 

This morning I wondered, what if this is not what I think it is?  Maybe I’m not being asked, again, to sift through the ashes of my childhood looking for meaning.  Maybe everyone else in my dream knew something I did not, and I’m being drawn to this place repeatedly because it is a portal, a gate.  My conscious mind thinks it knows exactly what 9A is, and so it masquerades as unimportant, surrounded by a deadly lack of curiosity, imprisoned in futility and defeat.  All roads lead there, eventually, and then give up.

Like the people around me in the dream, I got excited and went to work.  I wondered who my mother would have been if her grandfather had not molested her, if her mother hadn’t been insane, if her father hadn’t been the kind of man who sent all five of his children out to choose the willow switch he would beat them with, if her first love had not had his head blown off in World War II.  I looked at a picture of her and saw a familiar angry disgust.  Where did she land when she fell off a cliff?  I suspect it was a place remarkably like Apartment 9A. 

In the tarot, the number nine is associated with the ninth sphere on the Tree of Life, yesod, the unconscious.  The letter A stems from the Hebrew letter aleph, considered to be a maternal letter in the Western mystery tradition, that which breathes primal air into life.  It is also the letter assigned to the Fool, stepping out from the moon with nothing but instinct and the need to move, as yet unhindered by cherished laws of gravity.

We get hurt, and our bruises solidify into belief, coding into deep parts of ourselves the expectation that we can only create what we know.  Generation after generation only proves to itself what it already believes, and aliveness is forced to go dark, the purview of lunatics and fools who dream themselves awake.  

From Tarot of the Spirit

I felt 9A move through my system like a homeopathic remedy, a small dose of the sad poison that can numb me to love and to joy.  Rather than the water I swim in, it became a wisp of something held separate, an apart-ment, and my immune system held it until the fever passed and it remembered where it belonged.  I felt the Fool’s lack of definition fall through what had seemed like inevitably solid ground and found myself somewhere I hadn’t expected to be, at peace. 

It’s so easy to forget that this is how it can be.      

With love,

Mia

Only Spacelings Need Apply

When I was in first or second grade I started a club called “Spacelings.”  It was spring, and we took old chenille bedspreads and cut them up into little girl-sized capes.  We used magic markers to emblazon them with mysterious and unearthly symbols.  Then, donning these alien artifacts with pride and awe, we all ran down a steep green hill in Central Park together screaming, “Spaaaaaaceliiiiiiiings!” The pounding of our little feet hitting the ground made our voices choppy, like motorboats.  The cotton strings we’d sewn barely kept the capes attached to our outflung arms that were held aloft by the wind that we were creating ourselves as we hurtled down the hill with no concern for our safety.  Everyone was welcome, even boys, because the more of us equipped and flying down that hill screaming, the greater the magnitude of the force we generated with our glee.

I have adopted this as my business plan. 

Years ago, I dreamt of a tree that represented a network that could go anywhere in any world.  It was brand new, and something I felt I’d been building since the beginning of time. It was necessary because the old network was haunted with demons of misinformation, ghosts of past experience that would always misdirect us back into just the place we were trying to leave. 

In my dream this tree was near completion.  But before I was tempted to feel special because I had done such a wonderful thing, it became clear that this is what we’re all doing, building grids and access points to the truth of what we are. Those pinpoints leading to the Mystery are everywhere; we just need to connect the dots.  The timeless sense of this task made me understand that this purpose was hardwired into a level of self beyond what can be tinkered with by any human desire.  It’s my job.  It’s my cape. 

I know in my bones that what comes next for us all can only happen when we reclaim our interconnectedness, when we stand together in the liminal place between what we’re made of and what we create. This intersection is where it all gets designed, and from here there is nothing we cannot build.  We are designed to function in this way.  When we stand here together, we stand everywhere.

I’m shy to the point of tears to say this, but I’ve built something, and I so want people to come play with it, to fly down the hill screaming with me, just because we can.  Anyone can join, but you have to bring your own cape.  

With love,

Mia

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

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

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.

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

The Doorway Home

I began this journey in sadness, mourning the loss of my cat companion of ten years, a little black cat named Sabina.  Sabina was not an easy cat.  She didn’t like to be picked up, she swiped at family members as they walked by, and preferred to be outdoors.  Like many cats, she was devoid of humor – or else her humor was too dark to be appreciated by most.  But she and I understood one another, and she would sit by me when I worked or meditated.  When I walked the dog she would walk with us. She might run ahead a little or drop behind, or dodge into the bushes when a car or a person came by, but she stayed with us.  In all three of the houses we shared, she met me when I came home and accompanied me from my car to the front door.  Sometimes she came in.  She liked her space. 

So I was back in grief.  And while it was a different grief than the loss of my husband, it fingered the same notes.  There is something immediate about the loss of an animal friend; the full impact of it hits right away.  A human loved one seems to leave more gradually, the psyche only allowing itself to experience parts of the loss at a time until one day it all adds up and you realize they’re never, ever coming back.  Sabina’s death, abrupt and unexpected and still unexplained, landed me right in the center of my most abandoned self without preamble or the chance to cushion the fall. 

I spent a few days hoping to scramble out of this terrible place before I got too badly burned.  As I often do, I focused on the bright side of pain hoping I wouldn’t have to see the dark.  But that never lasts for long.  I pretty quickly resigned myself to the fact I was heading someplace hard.  I had no choice but to be led by the tender nose of my sorrow into the place I most avoid. 

This is the place of no-self, the mother of all soul loss.  It is a place without a fix.  No coach-induced modification of behavior, thought or diet will get me out of having to sit here, at some point, and feel the cumulative effect of all the times I have abandoned myself.  I can put it off, and sometimes it seems to disappear like a cat into the shadows, but it tracks me wherever I go.  In it is the truth that the only thing missing from my life has been me.  If I can sit unprotesting in this place, acknowledging the consequences of that truth, I have found the doorway home. 

 

This morning I was called back to life by the sight of a great blue heron landing on the roof of the house across the creek.  Its blue-gray coloring on a foggy morning mimicked the mists of the liminal state through which I’d been traveling.  It stood, elegant and certain, belonging first to the community of itself, and so very much a part of the world.  I went outside in my stocking feet to see it more closely, and we stood together in stillness. 

At the end of this journey I am left with the certainty that I am no longer willing to live half a life.  I feel as though I’ve been sitting in a waiting room not quite concentrating on magazines, glancing at the pictures and looking expectantly at the door where my next appointment will be.  It seemed this morning as though the heron opened that door and beckoned me in, and perhaps I only thought I saw a little black cat dart between its legs into whatever lay beyond. 

With love,

Mia

Medicine Dream

River-Rebirth by Sandra Mikus

I went to bed last night with the makings of a cold – a sore throat and a defeated achiness that made everything seem heavy and hard.  It felt like the perfect expression of where my grief has led me of late, moist and acidic, and not a place to linger.  As I dropped into sleep, I asked my dreams for help.

I dreamt I was in a dry South Asian country, and that an unwanted authority had taken over.  Suddenly we had no autonomy, and had to follow senseless rules.  Our lives were not our own.  I was walking someplace I was not permitted to be, and I saw a plant that was dying.  I knew the laws dictated I must leave it alone to rot, but I couldn’t.  I didn’t feel courage or fear; it was just not in my nature to let it die. 

The plant was a potted palm, and there was decay in one of the stems.  I took hold of it, and the top separated from the stem, leaving behind a glistening, bright green stump. The part I had in my hand separated again into the leafy top and a connecting piece, both dripping the same verdant juice.   I was immediately aware that all three pieces were viable new growth.  The stump in the soil would sprout new stems, and the leafy top would easily root.  The connecting piece was interesting: androgynous, undefined, and full of potential; you could plant it up or down and it would root or leaf depending on what orientation you chose. 

Frightened and controlling parts of self may want us to walk past our grieving, leaving it to rot in septic puddles of neglect.  But grief properly tended yields abundance and renewal.  We become more than what we were.  Today my body feels raw, like the glistening vulnerability of the place on the stem that let go, but I no longer feel like a conquered nation, powerless in my own land.  I have reclaimed my state, and possibilities abound.

My mother taught me how to listen to my dreams.  We would sit at the kitchen table and she would tell me where she’d been at night, and because I was a child, all I had to do was listen.  She wasn’t asking me to interpret them for her, just be a witness, an anchor in the waking world. 

Dreams, like grief, are meant to be shared. It is the means by which we irrigate our lives from the infinite pool we find when we follow the river in the marrow of our bones.  It is not enough to incubate and cradle our own dreams.  If they are to learn to walk in this world, they must be heard by another. 

Thank you, always, for listening. 

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.

Darkness and Dragonflies

The winter solstice is my birthday, and at some point during this time of year a sense of home comes over me, a settling of muscles and ease of breath. It’s as if I’m hearing my native language being spoken for the first time after a long absence. Some years it takes longer than others, but when I finally recognize it, I feel pure joy. I feel known.

I like the dark. In the dark there are no mirrors or screens on which to project. In the total darkness of the solstice, for just a heartbeat, creation winks out and I can feel the ground, the real and true ground, the tortoise that holds up the world. It is what we come from, and what we return to. Some might find it empty and strange, they might feel stripped of something they think they need; but I am grateful for the emptiness, like a gasping fish returned to the sea. I remember that I am nothing and think, “Oh.” All fires inevitably burn out or are extinguished, but darkness endures and is the source of all light.

The darkness is where we rest, where we let go of what we’ve been clutching and recombine with the “rest” of what we are. This communion with the larger pool creates intelligence in a system that has become closed. Without it, we would go mad, and think that this is all there is.

Last night I dreamed I was in a theater searching for my mother, with whom I had been seated in the front row. But the theater kept changing, and I couldn’t find my original seat. I stepped out into the night and what I was seeking became a lighted dragonfly streaking past me up into the sky. Within seconds it was met by others of its kind, and they lined up and swirled in a spiral. Then the first dragonfly went dark, and the others around it became disorganized and flew away. In the dream I thought, “Oh, I get it. Until it lights up, they can’t tell it’s there.” The dragonfly looked down at me with maternal approval and love, then lit up again, and returned to its dance.

Rest well, and may your solstice be sweet.

A Gorilla in the Midst

I was visited by a beautiful silverback gorilla a few days ago during a meditation that sought to resolve a painful recurring issue in my life. Sometimes animals in visions do talk, but without speaking a word, he modeled a grounded state of being that my body understood and mimicked without hesitation. My muscles spontaneously discharged all the stress they were holding, and I wept with the kind of comprehension that only comes from a complete systemwide shift. I got it. Breathing with him, I felt the resolution of something that had been stealing all the pleasure off my plate for as long as I could remember.

James Hillman says in his book Dream Animals, “A snake is not a symbol.” When we are visited by something alien and wonderful in visions or dreams, there is a terrible inclination to immediately try and make sense of it. The conscious mind is always trying to make itself comfortable, to keep things within the parameters of its own limitations. So instead of allowing ourselves to be moved, affected, by this representative of a more natural state of being, we immediately paste a label on its forehead, in our minds or in our therapy sessions, and overlook the being itself. It’s a terrible elision.

Imagine if you had traveled all the way from wherever dreams come from to visit someone and they completely ignored you and talked only about you -- or worse, altogether forgot you were standing there. You’d probably hang around for a while feeling awkward and disappointed, then amble on to someplace more welcoming; and the person you had visited would be left with only an incomplete contraction of the invitation you were trying to convey.

When I’m frightened, I want answers. But a mystery solved inadequately makes me feel robbed, some part of me knowing that I have missed an important opportunity. It is a terrible loss, as if poachers had come and turned my beautiful dream friend into a pile of souvenirs, forcing me to buy back cheap mementos of an experience I wouldn’t let myself have, a place I never really visited.

So the more moments I can spend not knowing who this creature is, not deciding what he means, not penning him in with interpretations that make me less uncomfortable with the -- well, the 500-pound gorilla in the room, the more I feel the hum of an immense apparatus deep inside me coming to life. The tiny point in space that is what I know of myself connects up with the grid of potential from which we are fashioned and for brief moments I feel what is available to me. This is what it means to ground.

Ironically, this is one of the lessons to be learned from a gorilla, possibly the most grounded being on the planet. But if I had been looking for this lesson, trying to figure it all out, I would not have gotten the message.

Gryphon

My 13-year-old son saw me struggling the other morning, working on my mythical blog. He asked me what I was doing, and when I told him he said, “Oh, blogs are easy. You just have to write a little bit about something that happened that day, or something you saw that was funny.” Like I’d lucked out and been given really simple homework, those great gimme assignments where you don’t have to do any research or show your work on a separate piece of paper.

So maybe a blog can be like Reiki. You don’t need to have it all mapped out perfectly and cleanly, you don’t need to be balanced and aware, you just need to start, to sit with the intention to connect to yourself and share from as deep as you can go. We’re designed for this, for sharing, for the spread of wellness. It’s easy.

Our sweet dog, Gryphon, died last week. Gryphon was – seriously, no hyperbole – the nicest dog on the planet and the kindest being I have ever met. He didn’t have an alpha hair on his body, yet seemed to have a patience, a source of strength and calm, that sat – well, okay, lay – in the middle of our family, a compass that always pointed to the truth. Back when I used to work out of my home, he would greet each client when they arrived, sit at their feet and gaze at them with wonder; they’d pet his head, and he’d gently burp, a little doggie shaman release of whatever they might have been holding.

The smell of a dog: pure devotion mixed with the most revolting thing they could find to roll in that day. Now I miss it, and in a horrifying rush I understand who he was. Why didn’t I hug him more? How could I have let him get sick and die? What is the point of all I know if it didn’t prevent me from waking up one morning and realizing too late who had been sleeping on my floor all these years? I get what those eyes were trying to tell me, that I worry about all the wrong things.

At first I felt only the slightest tug in my chest, like a large fish had taken a small sample of bait before dragging the whole boat under. I sat in that awful pause between a very bad thing and my ability to feel it. I felt as though the world had gotten bigger and scarier, my tools looking silly and childish held up to the immensity of the universe. And the universe was not me; I felt separate and afraid, supported only by the structure of all the work I’d done on myself, phantom scaffolding standing sadly on a beach long after the castle made of sand had been washed away. All the wrong things.

For some reason beautiful things happen to me while I’m riding the bus to the city. Something about dropping the reins of my own personal chariot, I suppose. But a few days after Gryphon died I was watching the rock and dirt and scrubby brush of the Waldo Grade go by, and I felt it, a pulsing web of well-intentioned kindness that is the natural intelligence making up this world. My first response was a terrible shame, an awareness that those hands have been trying to help me all this time, not push me under. And even the shame was a result of misunderstanding the nature of things; this ancient love only wanted me to know myself.

This was the music Gryphon had been listening to. This is the ground from which we spring. This is what we are made of, and it is always trying to communicate with us.

Sometimes faith gets lost so you’ll chase after it, like a dutiful dog who suddenly takes off after something wild. You stumble to follow over rocks and tangled roots and plants that make you itch and swell, only to find yourself in an eerie and beautiful land outside of the ordinary. And however long you linger – an hour, 300 years – your heart will be changed by what it has seen, and everything that happens to you from that moment on will be organized around this awareness, whether you choose to suffer in willful amnesia or surrender to the simple truth.

Good dog.