Month: August 2011

Love and Light

Found book title: CB Talk for Goodbye.

I’m 40 years old. Time to stop acting like a cheerleader and simply act like a leader.

I’ve decided to write poems that people can understand. Regular people, not just poet-people.

One year ago on Facebook, I wrote: If I started talking about love and light and peace and healing, would that freak you out?

Handwritten sign posted in neighbor’s yard: Pick up after your dog or he/she might get shot.

The world is full of what you believe it is full of.

I am finally learning what it means to see everything and everyone as a teacher.

T-shirt idea: Your past is not my present.

There’s a pillow moving all around in the bedroom. I suspect there’s a dog under it.

Morning in Walla Walla: 4th Avenue is alive with horses.

The Larger Body

Over the course of my lifetime, I have learned and re-learned the lesson of what it feels like to be treated like trash, like something disposable. I am trying to do something with that feeling and its attendant grief. I find myself falling into the misguided desire to turn this feeling, which I need to simply sit with, into doing something productive.

I entered my teen and adult years absolutely terrified everyone was going to leave me.

I have this terrible, sinking feeling that we’ve learned to see one another as commodities. That we pick people the way we might select a bar of soap or a box of cookies and that we then expect perfection from the experience. If someone doesn’t live up to the expectation imposed on a commodity—providing exactly what they want, nothing more or less or unexpected—then we cast them aside, ignore them, degrade them, tell some lie that’s akin to “It’s not you, it’s me” and move on to any of the other 6 billion human commodities this world has to choose from.

Today, I’ve officially lost one of the deepest, most meaningful friendships I have ever had in my life, one that was years in the making. Not to death or a big move that’s created physical distance. Not to a huge blowout or anything I can easily look to for an explanation. There have been smaller losses, too, which serve to counterpoint the real loss, the central loss, the way rivulets feed into a stream.

If I were to make a map of losses, each loss constituting one circle drawn on a sheet of paper, they would be as plentiful as lily pads at Juanita Beach Park in the middle of summer, or as balloons at a privileged child’s birthday party. I could skip over the circles with my index and middle finger in feigned play that masks the pain. I could skip all the way back to the largest circle of all, a loss I didn’t expect to survive: that of my father.

But he died, he died, I tell myself. He didn’t choose to leave. Others have chosen, the way they might, without giving it a second thought, move on from a Facebook profile, or unsubscribe from an RSS feed.

Because I lost my father so young, I entered my teen and adult years absolutely terrified everyone was going to leave me. So I left them before they could go. I got the hell out of there while the getting was good. I dated people and broke it off. I even married one person and broke it off. At transition points—such as graduation from high school and college—I was the one who never wrote my friends at their new addresses, the one who never called, the one who dropped postcards I received into the recycling bin and later, if pressed, said, “You sent a card? I don’t think I got it.” I was also the one who did not speak to my mother for nine months before she died.

I’ve learned the hard way that this way—the way of leaving, of getting out, of protecting myself against what I think might happen if I stay (abandonment, death)—is not the way. I’ve spent half my life learning this lesson. I’ve also learned another lesson, which is to hold onto those I love. To just hold on. As I’ve learned this lesson, I’ve also learned to say words like “I love you” and “I care for you” and “I am here for you.”

I realize that I now have an even bigger lesson to learn, which is that I must stay with this stance and attitude, one of holding on, even as others are still caught in a mode of letting go, including letting go of me. I won’t go back to letting go first in order to protect myself. If I care for you, I care for you. If I love you, I love you. If I am there for you, I am there for you. I can’t control how anyone else behaves, and I can’t make their choices for them. I can only control my own behavior and choices. I won’t turn away from others out of fear of being rejected, even if that means there are times when I will, in fact, experience rejection, not just worry it’s coming.

Perhaps I am not trash after all. I’d rather think of myself as recyclable material. My love, my devotion, my desire to connect—these are aspects of my character that cannot be thrown away, not by anyone. They remain, even through the hurt and suffering, and they continue to have a place in the world. In this way, they continue to help me find my way.

Making Room for Attention

I shouldn’t have to do this for attention—sequester myself in the bedroom with my laptop. But that’s precisely what I’m doing. When I’m home alone, following my day as it unfolds, I can pay attention in the proper way, reaching an almost meditative state and in fact moving in and out of formal meditation several times.

I will make my way to him the way a narrative always makes its way to the next shift in plot.

The weekends change all that. For two days, there’s a noticeable shift in energy as another person, namely my husband, moves through the house with me. Though he’s literally sharing the same space as me, we are not in the same space. That is to say he hasn’t reached a point in his life where introspection seems not only healthy but necessary.

He’s not doing anything disruptive, mind you. Our energies simply aren’t in alignment. I can feel that fact when I’m in the same room with him. Susan Zwinger, a poet and writer of place, says there are “57 or so” ways we get information into our bodies. Our senses, according to Zwinger, include electromagnetism, barometric pressure, humidity and temperature (to which, as a former Seattle dweller, I would definitely add light, or lack thereof). Zwinger challenges the writers she works with to move beyond the five conventionally recognized senses and incorporate the entire suite of senses into their lives and work.

I don’t know what I am picking up on, exactly, that has sent me into my own room today, where I can write and think and pay attention without feeling divided between where I’m currently at and where my husband’s currently at. Part of me wants to drop everything and go to him, enter into his way of being, which is largely about doing things in the world, not being in the world.

For now, I continue to sit here, staring out my window at two blooming shrubs whose genus I don’t even know. Zwinger would advise me to find out what the shrubs are, to push for specificity with regard to any element that enters my writing. As she says, you will never invite readers into your story without concrete details, ones they can relate to.

“Write for the person who has never been off the canyon,” she advises.

Zwinger also says journaling is “the mind made visible.” I don’t journal, exactly, other than keeping lists. Nothing like Zwinger’s artful Technicolor notebooks whose pages are filled with facts, drawings, watercolors, clippings and other information she calls on when she sits down to work on her books.

I do write, however. I have no idea if writing makes my mind visible, to me or anyone else. I like to think writing is a way of planting a marker, like a kairn, one that signals, “On this small and seemingly insignificant day, I was here. I took part. I belonged to the world.” Increasingly, I hope my writing also lets people in—either into my life or into some aspect of their own lives.

Now the sun is moving through the room, sneaking up on my feet. My dog sits next to me. She’s a faithful companion when I write. When I’m not writing, her new thing is running up to me from across the room, licking my ankle once, and then running away. I have no idea what that’s about. Maybe it’s her kairn, her way of noting that she’s here, she’s taking part, she belongs. Maybe it’s her way of saying a repeated thank you to me for saving her life.

At some point, I will leave my room. A feeling will stir inside me, like a little storm that passes through a small, nameless town on a summer day. Who knows which of my 57 senses will trigger the stirring. It will not only move through me, but also move me: I will rise from my desk and pull the bedroom door toward my body, just enough to see my husband sitting in a chair we call “Mr. Comfy.” He might be coding on his laptop or even asleep, his legs propped up on the oversized ottoman, Mr. Comfy leaning so far back it looks like it’s about to careen into the living room wall.

I will make my way to him the way a narrative always makes its way to the next shift in plot. I might brush my hand on his cheek, or do nothing but watch him. That’s when he will be included in my practice of attention. In that moment, we will breathe in, one shared breath, the whole world breathing with us—both the parts we can name and the parts that, at least for now, remain nameless.