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.