Messages from Another Planet

Funny how I can remember the yellow tulips on this dress my mother made and I can barely recall what I had for dinner yesterday. This photo was taken at my grandmother's house--see the clover in the grass? And just across the street behind those trees is an old cemetery where many of my family are buried and where I loved to play as a kid. I went back there this summer and it was actually much the same, not smaller as so often happens to places that we loved in childhood. The thing that was diminished was my capacity for wonder, awe and imagination. My sense that right around the bend in the road, where it turned from tarmac to dirt, an alternate universe would open up. Just over that next hill. Just on the other side of that high stone wall. As a child, I lived in an enchanted world that lay just under the "real" one. If I made a map of that wonder land, I'd include the bank of violets down the road--a pool of inky blue that made me want to lie down on it and become the essense of violets--only I didn't understand that was what I longed for. I'd draw myself by the the lake in the cemetery whose dark waters were occasionally pierced by the dart of a red carp/koi--like a message about death, grief, foreverness seen for a moment, almost grasped by my little heart and then lost. I'd put an X on the grainy cement cistern top covered with tomatoes set there to ripen in the sun and make wavy green and red lines to indicate the mingled smells of fresh cut grass and fresh cut watermelon--so similar and so distinct. I'd show my grandfather always walking away toward toward a row of rhubarb by the fence. I'd leave space for the silences between adults that I never understood and the closed doors and raised voices. The shoals of mystery. The places on the map where a child can get lost for long years. I was reading Twitter messages on a friend's blog today--minute by minute minutiae of what she was doing, cooking, eating, watching and thinking--and I thought how sad that we know everything now and it has turned out to be so little.

Stirring Up My Stars & Stripes

I guess I'm not a real American according to Sarah Palin because I don't need to force my views on organized religion (how about those Crusades!) on my next-door neighbor who goes to all-day church, or my wild-eyed fundamentalist relatives, or my friend Nancy who is a devout Whiskeypalian and I appreciate the same courtesy on their part. I guess I'm not a real American because I don't need candidates -- Democrat or Republican -- to tell me how much they love Jesus. I guess I'm not a real American because I don't think women should have their reproductive choices controlled by the state or male politicians or celibate priests or church ladies. I guess I'm not a real American because I believe paying taxes is a good trade-off for being able to drive on the roads they build, fund teachers' salaries, turn on a tap and get clean water that doesn't make me have to take parasite medicine periodically like my daughter had to in South America and on and on. In fact, I'd pay more taxes to get great health care! I guess I'm not a real American because I believe we have screwed up the planet and we have the ability and the responsibility to heal it. I guess I'm not a real American because I want our kids to learn real science, not creationism, so they can compete with the kids in China and Europe and Russia who are studying physics. I guess I'm not a real American because I think stirring up cultural and racial resentments in order to win an election is completely despicable. I guess I'm not a real American according to Sarah Palin or John McCain, but my vote is real and I'll be in line before the polls open on November 4th to cast it with all my heart and hopes for my country.

"Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?"

That's the title of the poem I read today by Mary Oliver. It's about not living life at a safe distance, about being present right now, here, this instant to this world, this neigborhood, this street, this leaf in front of your face.  I took this photo (oops, a kind of distancing in itself) on my walk today down to an old burned-out bridge that has been turned into a kind of park/promenade that stops halfway across the water. The sun was out but the breeze had a cool serrated edge, warning that winter is coming winter is coming. I passed people walking dogs and fishing, sails bellied out like laundry, marsh opening into a view of the Intracoastal Waterway and the harbor, a few white clouds on a clean blue sky. All of us in a little snowglobe without snow, a Sunday afternoon bubble of timelessness. 

My Good Morning

I've been listening to "Midlife and the Great Unknown,"  a cd by poet David Whyte, on my drive back and forth to work. I'm so absorbed by it that I hate getting out of the car. Maybe it's simply a case of "when the student is ready, the teacher will come," and if I'd listened to it a month earlier even, it would not have spoken so directly to all my longings. After all, it's been sitting on a shelf under a stack of cds for quite some time, and I just came across it, unopened, "by accident" last weekend. This morning I started incorporating one of his suggestions into my life by reading poetry before I get out of bed. Here's how I usually start my day: turn on the tv as soon as I wake up and then switch from CNN to Morning Joe to Today Show and back again. I know it whips me into an impotent frenzy, but I can't seem to stop checking in on the Dow and campaign dirty tricks and Meredith Viera reporting on someone who had their leg/arm/head bitten off by an alligator/shark/pit bull and miraculously reattached. By the time I actually get to work, I am wrung dry by anger/sadness/disbelief and my brain has to be unscrambled by cups of bitter, badly roasted, chain cafe coffee. I am overstimulated and at the same time, my senses are dead to the world. I drive back and forth (listening to more news) to work, on the same road, taking the same route, without being present in my own life. I know there's beauty I'm missing, but I just can't seem to find it in my ordinary life anymore. I'm hoping that establishing new rituals like reading poetry will help wake me up. To begin, I'm going back to a collection called Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation edited by Roger Housden, and this morning I read "Encounter" by Czeslaw Milosz. It's one of my top five favorite poems because it never fails to send a shiver of eternity up my neck. If poetry were food and music were wine, I'd pair this work with Gymnopedie No. 1 by Erik Satie. Both of them split me wide open to an almost unbearable light and haunt me long after I've read/heard them.

Homework

I just started Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield and in the first chapter, he observes how hard it is for many of us to believe in our goodness. We have no difficulty identifying with our shadow side but our goodness? Oh no! And my Shadow is all I can see right now. I was invited to the premier of a movie this week based on a novel written by an acquaintance. It has been on the NY Times and Barnes and Noble bestseller lists forever, and my shadow side is having a temper tantrum, kicking its heels on the floor and screaming. I'm a jealous bitch. I know the author worked really hard at her craft to garner such great reviews and boatloads of money, and that is where the real envy kicks in. Admitting that I'm probably lazy and undisciplined, that I come home from work and don't sit down and write or do my yoga or read something difficult. Realizing that maybe I don't have a unique lens through which I view the world. That's why I'm in mad love with these African sunflowers that come up in my yard every year. They're not lazy, but they're not driven to bloom before the roses or the hibiscus or the morning glory. They inch up all summer and get tall and gangly and crowd up against each other and hang out by the stone Buddha and the rosemary bush, and when it's almost time for frost, they erupt in a communal yellow song that dies out like a golden om, leaving a faint vibration behind in the air. They don't brood about how to get to the head of the class, or be teacher's pet,  or get a gold star. They don't bitch about how the gardenia smells better or the amaryllis has a bigger bloom. They don't have an agenda, a planner or a bucket list. They send out silent roots underground and don't brag about what they'll do next spring. They flower forth and then they go dormant for awhile, building up their strength until the planet cycles around again. All in good time.

Ground Level

For a clumsy non-athlete, I've spent a lot of time lately dreaming about kayaking. I love the way it puts me on eye-level with the earth--it's like coming home. Instead of walking around all day in a two-legged hurry to get from the car to the coffee shop or the grocery to the car, toting bags or clicking my keys to open the door from yards away, I'm swaddled in a womb-like craft, drifting along among ducks, egrets and fish, listening to the pop and suck of water in the mud instead of an iPod strapped to my arm. For a couple of hours, my ego gets

Botoxed by beauty and the sheer absurdity of trying to work my little will on the world. Maybe if you're a competitive kayaker, all of the above is null and void, but I go onto the water to get rid of my self, to be blessed by the sky, the marsh hens, the drone of a plane overhead that mirrors the buzz of insects in the marsh, by the rhythm of the creek that irons out all the creased and wrinkled places created by living in an upright world. I only wish I could learn how to carry that peace with me when the boats have been put away, but I forget so easily and before I know it, I'm going crazy over all the things that two-leggeds think are life-and-death important: the extra 10 pounds I can't lose, the billing problems at work, the font that is all WRONG, Sarah Palin, a deadline I might miss, the boots I can't afford, the book I never wrote. Today in yoga, the teacher "wrenched" my stiff frozen shoulders into a semblance of alignment, and I realized that I need someone or something to do that to my soul on a regular basis because I can't spend my life in a kayak!

Frida Found

Maybe it's coincidence but I prefer to think it's synchronicity. Yesterday some wonderful anonymous person sent me a new Frida plate to replace the one I lost at the Outstanding in the Field community dinner -- thank you whoever you are!-- and a co-worker came back from a vacation in San Francisco and brought me a Frida magnet and a Frida shopping bag from the show that just closed at SFMOMA. A total Frida Day from start to finish, and I know there's a sign in there for me. Perhaps it's a message to walk the walk instead of just having a Frida fan site. To create something. To repurpose sadness. To think about what it would really truly mean to live passionately, a phrase that has been so overused as to become meaningless. Lots of food for thought on that Frida plate.

Bridge to Monday

After a peaceful Sunday--walking on the beach with a friend, hanging artwork, drinking prosecco at lunchtime, deadheading the roses, giving the porch Buddha a bath, dinner with another friend--I have to turn my psyche toward Monday and head over this bridge to work. In my yard, there's a flock of African sunflowers playing host to passing butterflies and just being there for the time allotted to their blooming. I'm going to try to go to work tomorrow in a sunflower state of mind. I'm going to try not to dwell on bailouts, leaky 401ks, vanishing retirement funds, an economy that's going down the drain and might take my job with it. I'm going to try and remember that when I had no money I was the most creative. That when my office was furnished with a crooked press-board desk and no fancy journals, I wrote like a woman on fire. That when I was poor, I never lost hope or stopped having fun. One life. Live it like a sunflower. Wait for butterflies. Cross the Bridge to Somewhere.

Thinking About...

* how I sometimes long for a partner to lean my back against like a big tree when I need a rest -- then I feel completely irritated with myself for being so needy when so many people are in need! Like complaining about broccoli when children are starving in China. 

* how I love the festive feeling of Fridays (Frida's Day?) even when I don't have anything to do but read People Magazine and drink wine

* how acutely I miss my old friends far away

* how long my frequent flyer miles will be valid--won't they be the next thing the airlines take away from us?

* how much I'm looking forward to Cincinnati chili and intense winter sunsets...they almost make the cold weather endurable.

* how I wish I were the type of good-hearted person who saves feral cats but there's no use kidding myself--I'm just not. 

* how my abalone shell reminds me of watching the sun go down from a bar overlooking the Pacific near Mendocino--it's an instant calming reminder of how the ocean turned pearlescent and shimmery in the twilight, with dozens of shades of color shivering and coalescing across the surface of the water.

* how the birds outside the open windows were singing their hearts out during Shavasana in yesterday's yoga class.

* how stupid I was for skipping yoga today because I was so stressed out over work I was afraid I'd cry--I missed a chance to let those birds teach me a new song.