Sippin' on Gin and Juice: and other moments with God

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
as few human or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft
my voice so tender
my need of God
absolutely clear.
–Hafiz

I am in Orange County visiting my 6-months-and-some-change pregnant friend Carol Ann. The sky is blue, sun is out, and it's warming up for the day. Cherry blossoms are in full bloom around here, which Carol Ann assures me is alright for late January. I am listening to The Gourds version of Gin and Juice, remembering to take a nice long laugh at life.

Orange County was about a seven-hour drive from Big Sur, which I decided to drive on Saturday evening, mostly in the dark. Driving has always been a sort of passion of mine. I love road trips, and this late departure after a whole day of working made me feel like a 21-year-old version of myself. Long drives by myself have always created great containers for prayer to be formed as conversation – with plenty of time to speak and plenty of time to listen. The first two hours were spent along Highway One, in the dark, fog, misting rain, winding, curving, narrow, ocean hundreds of feet down the cliff side to my right. In these first two hours, I practiced a lot of forgiveness -- of myself mostly, as I laughed out loud at my poor judgment of departing so late, however unavoidable. I kept thinking of my bike trip, remembering the moments when it seemed impossible to continue or make it to the top of ridiculous hills, and how I had to just keep pedaling, moving forward, letting the miles roll away -- and it was easier if I didn't fight it. This drive along the One felt this way to me.

The juice of that experience was more so that I became anxious, more than a little bit, in the process of letting the miles roll away. I was talking to God, wondering why this anxiety is so close to me, so much closer to the surface than in the last few years of my life when I seemed to feel it so often. In these last few years, I truly always thought it was situational -- that it was living in Portland, having a full-time job, doing the specific work I was doing -- and all of the anxiety that was produced from those things, matched with the restlessness that I felt so strongly, which felt so often like a true longing for God and for nearness to God. What I am realizing, and what really came down the pipe on this section of highway was...well...two things:

1. However much I thought I was making decisions to get further away from this feeling in my life, I have only moved in more closely to it. It is near the surface, easily accessible, often, the only thing there is. I had to get closer to it instead of further away -- and I have to go through it instead of bypass it.

2. Active belief makes all the difference. The drive made me nervous, like the first few days of being alone in very remote wilderness. I couldn't see very well. I had never driven this section of the One to be intimate with its twists and turns, narrows and grades. I can recognize that part of this anxiety is equal parts wanting to die, pass through this thing and into the next life --- and --- being nervous that I will die. The active belief comes in, as I am praying in tears, wondering in desperation at the gravity of this feeling, and as always, what it could be for (of which there are countless possibilities). I know that we do not all necessarily get the chance to enjoy calm or peace before we die -- but I felt very strongly that in this particular struggle, whatever it is about, and however long it lasts, however many years it takes to get close enough to it to finally move to the other side -- I will get there in this life. I do not believe that I will have to die to get there, as I have honestly thought (and in moments asked for) in these last few months. That was an interesting and important moment of active belief -- which I admit, has felt at times so far away in these last several years.

Then, the road straightened and small towns began to appear. I scanned the radio for pop music and sang all the way to Orange County.

When I was a small child, I remember loving God, feeling a nearness to God. From the time I was twelve until I was 23, I pursued a relationship with Christianity, with the Church, with the Bible, with a Christian God and culture. I went to a Baptist college in Southern Missouri where I met some of the best people I will ever know. People, who like me, loved God with a deep love, the kind one is born into the world with. People, who like me, were not motivated by guilt or spiritual perfection, but by love and devotion. In the years since college, several of us have stayed in close contact, but with physical distance, we share our spiritual journeys less directly and quite infrequently. It is also quite likely that we have shared less because our views have changed, sharpened or fuzzed, and our pursuits of God have a new or different language. I do not feel as if I have been shy about sharing my ever-altering perspective of Divinity, or what I believe, but it seems that it is only in the last year or two that I have had words to begin to describe it.

On Sunday morning I awoke to an email from my friend Melissa, written to a few of us from college. She was compelled to share some recent developments in her faith journey, to which we have all responded with some of the same from where we stand these days. I admit that I have to plow through my own thoughts that I am the odd-man-out in this conversation – that my experience for many years now does not have to do with a Christian God, with Jesus, the Church, and least of all the Bible. I feel like the odd-man-out less and less, and now I am at the point where I am not hesitant to say anything. I can just let those thoughts be there and roll on past, just like miles of highway underneath my Kona or VW tires. This makes for far richer conversations.

From time to time over these last few years, I have found myself in written correspondence with one of these old friends about questions and wonderings of God. Something that I have employed is the format of the I Believe poem. This is an assignment that the 10^th graders at the Waldorf School would complete during their poetry block. I was always so impressed with their 16-year-old versions of the things they believe in, that I have been encouraged to write my own as part of these conversations where I know less where to begin and where I want to be clear that I hold no animosity as I have walked away from this certain set of beliefs.

The I Believe poem is simply what it sounds like. Each line begins with I Believe and it can exist in many forms. Though not my best example, here is a little bit of what I wrote to my friends this morning:

To be honest, I do not think of Jesus much -- which is not to say that I do not think much of Jesus.

It is also true that I have chosen or maybe most honestly, I have come to not believe many things any more. I do not believe in heaven and hell. I do believe in many lives, in reincarnation. I do believe that it takes our souls more than one pass through this earth -- not to "get it right" but to get further along, become more full. I believe in the poetry of Rumi, of Hafiz. I believe in sunsets and natural rhythms. I believe in purpose and daily possibilities for transformation. I believe in my eight-year-old self, full of an overwhelming love of God. I believe in that -- simply, and alone.

Much of our conversations a decade ago and still today are filled with playing with or trying our hand at different forms of spiritual discipline. I trust that there are countless ways to deepen ones’ soul life with a dedicated spiritual practice – but for me, I believe in mixing compost, art making, writing, physical endurance and sunsets as spiritual activities. Beyond those and a side of yoga, I feel very much like I'm at the front door of the spiritual discipline shop, looking through the windows, waiting for the sign to be flipped to "open". One of these days, I am going to realize that mixing compost is enough.

Still. There are things I have chosen, things I am trying on. In fact, I am in Orange County, of course to be with Carol Ann and the growing baby in her belly (a spiritual experience and practice all its own), but also to have a few days of quiet and clarity before I drive North to a small town near Kings Canyon, on the edge of the Sequoia National Forest for a 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat. It is with the sort of impulsiveness that I come by naturally, but also nonchalance and intuition that I have chosen this experience to explore. This will be my schedule from Feb. 3-12 -- beginning with an evening opening on the 2nd and ending with a final meditation early in the morning on the 13th.

4:00 am                      Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 am            Meditate in the hall or in your room
6:30-8:00 am            Breakfast break
8:00-9:00 am            Group meditation in the hall
9:00-11:00 am          Meditate in the hall or in your room according to the teacher's instructions
11:00-12:00                Lunch break
12-1:00 pm                 Rest and interviews with the teacher
1:00-2:30 pm             Meditate in the hall or in your room
2:30-3:30 pm             Group meditation in the hall
3:30-5:00 pm            Meditate in the hall or in your own room according to the teacher's instructions
5:00-6:00 pm            Tea break
6:00-7:00 pm            Group meditation in the hall
7:00-8:15 pm             Teacher's Discourse in the hall
8:15-9:00 pm             Group meditation in the hall
9:00-9:30 pm            Question time in the hall
9:30 pm                      Retire to your own room--Lights out

I am new to meditation. By new, I mean, barely out of the womb, or maybe even in-utero, still absorbing the nutrients of the idea of the thing. It is hard. Mostly, I have chosen to pursue meditation in these last few months, without particular diligence, and very intensely in these next few weeks, because I desire more tools to deal with myself, to recognize our interconnectedness with all things and the way that will change the ways I move through the world. This of course, first and foremost, begins with the way I deal with myself. Maybe I walk away with a remnant of something that gets me a little closer to this anxious place – the one I have resigned to go through instead of around, the one I actively believe I will move to the other side of in this life instead of the next. Maybe it will be like Hafiz says, Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. I will have endless hours to live in it, and I am only curious what it feels like, with no expectation of a particular outcome.

Do I believe this meditation experience will offer me something richer than mixing compost, watching the sunset, or going on a long drive? Unlikely. But it will offer me a new way to search my soul and touch the void – the void between me and God, a void that exists, however small or large, whether real or imagined, inside my own chest or out somewhere between the soil and the stars. And, it is likely that all my writing and all my days are about this very thing – and that they will continue to be. Don’t worry…Gin and Juice will be playing in the background.

While the Sheets are Drying on the Line

I have finally stopped being completely dumbfounded by the weather. Apparently, it is just 70-degrees and sunny on the central coast of California in January. It’s just what is. I might marvel at the weather like any homegrown Midwesterner should, but there is no sense to be kept captive by its being surreal.

No matter how lovely or how warm, it is still winter. I can tell by the way my soul feels when I try to fall asleep at night. I can tell by the location of the sun in the morning and the way the light has more of a haze at dawn. The way the full moon is bright in the thin, cool night air.

Today I woke with ideas of becoming a bike mechanic. I looked up bike mechanic school and jotted down the information in the Great Idea Book of Career Ambitions. Then I sat on my heels and wondered at the day. What should I do first? What should I do next? What do I want to end the day having done?

I feel myself be born, live, and die each day, with waking and sleeping, with the light and the sun, and the darkness of night. I do have a memory, but in being here, it seems shorter than ever before. Some days are filled with questions and uncertainties and homesickness -- where I am running forward after my juggling balls, not wanting them to drop, and wanting so badly to give them a place to land. Most days though, are just full of this being born, this living, and dying. Waking with no memory, into whatever it is that will make this day the experience, the life, the god that it is.

Monday was an anxious sort of day, the kind where I chase the juggling balls and am heavy with missing and question. I wandered through the morning, unable to let myself engage anything with a semblance of satisfaction. Frustrated, I got in my car and drove up the coast for no physical reason. There were no provisions I was in need of in town, no errand to run. As I drove on the marvel of highway that spans this coastline, curving down to the base of canyons and back up the other side, the vast Pacific on my left, it appeared that I left Big Sur just so I could re-enter it. As if it was a lover that I wanted to meet again, fresh and new. Asking, will you take me like the first time? Will you melt my soul and every piece of the past like that first time I drove into you well over a year ago?

Once in town, I bought a tube of red paint from the art store and found my way to a decent cup of coffee. I walked around, as if stunned by a life of too many possibilities. I held the paper cup in my hand.

On my return trip, I stopped at the Garrapata pull-out, looking ahead at the coming hills, curves, and rocky coastline that is Big Sur. Fog was being blown in by fierce wind coming across the sea, creating clouds that swirled up as the air met the warmth of the hills. I sat. I stared at the wind-blown waves, hopelessly blue. I cried for the ways I cannot escape time – afraid of what time can do and also what it cannot. I watched the wintered green and grayish-gold hillsides, with steep grades and grazing cattle. I felt myself as a great unfinisher, an unaccomplished monster who is terrified of growing older and never finding something I can devote myself to.

I am a series of fireworks that burn out before they finish falling from the sky.

But if I am honest, and scientific, that is the nature of fireworks – to explode, fill the sky with color, and disappear before they touch the ground. Maybe too, this is just my nature.

I tried to explain this feeling to Andy, late that night, over the phone. It had been weeks since we had last spoken. I was lying in bed, unable to sleep, and I sent him a message that said, “Do you have the time to tell me that I’ve made good choices and I’m right where I should be?”

He called me minutes later. He was laughing – which is something I have learned to love about him, because being frustrated with it takes too much energy. I began to peel back the layers of this feeling, this wondering at this time in my life. “It is hard to stay in a place that I do not know what it is for. Why does it seem like I am farther from having my shit together than when I was 21?”

He laughed again and replied, “Well, that’s certainly not true. And maybe this time is just so you could get homesick.”

It is sunny, warm, and clear in mid-January. I am sleeping with my windows open, in underwear and a t-shirt, under a bright full moon, on the cliffs of the sea. I do not even need a flashlight to go to the bath house. Is it even possible to be homesick for rain and gray? For a soggy, cold life? Of course it is, though I have to twist my own arm to believe it.

As our conversation continued, I spoke more clearly with each layer of bull shit that came off the top. He said something to me that I cannot remember the precise words, but I will tell you what I recall:

I have talked with people recently about spiritual life, and it has reminded me of the term spiritual materialism – an idea of spirituality that is not-grounded in experience, but rather in books or language. It is full of generated experiences, but not true experiences.

You are not this way.

Every day is your spiritual activity – and every activity is a true experience in your world. You do not need an explanation in a book, or an adopted philosophy of God or the world, or time. Every experience is of a spiritual quality.

I sat, holding the phone to my ear, fourteen hours South, biting my lip and crying – because it is good to be seen, and to be overcome with the kind of sorrow and passion one feels when you had forgotten what it is to really miss someone.

We sat in silence. Maybe I thought that if I let it sink in, that I could believe him – that I could believe that about myself – that I could stop long enough to believe that this daily activity of being born, and living, and dying, is all there really is. I do not remember who spoke first, but eventually I spoke from the bottom layer, the core of the big fleshy peach that is all I know of the world, saying, “Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like if I could just let it all go – all these ideas of accomplishment or this need to finish. I wonder what it would feel like to just let myself devour the world, like I am so inclined to do, and to not feel like I have to make it into anything else.”

I want to go to bed full and let myself die, each night, as the sun sets low into the sea.

Maybe life is just about what it is – I mean, what it actually is. All the tastes and colors and sensations that make up a day.

The sheets are drying on the line, and I am calm. The moon has been bright in the winter sky -- a moon I have missed in such brightness and clarity for too many years now. Earlier this week, Heather and I were walking back from the beach after the sunset. As we curved up the hillside, finally high enough to see the full moon lifting into the sky, I said out loud how I have missed the winter moon for so long. Heather just put her arm in mine and we continued walking. 

At the Hideout: Memories of a Chocolate-Cake-Filled Life

My coffee is dark and chocolaty this morning. I am curled up on my neighbors’ loveseat. They are away for a week and I am tending to things; mostly, having this quiet, just up-the-road-space is tending to me.

Their house is about a quarter mile up our dirt road, just past the goats and Daniel’s converted-goat-shack-home. I have been walking up here, sneaking away, all week long; and last night, I could not soften the urge to stay here the whole night. It seems that sleeping in any particular place, has more to do with waking up there. That’s what I was going for, and that was the desire I could not curb: I wanted to wake up, watch the sunrise in silence, and sit all morning, writing, drinking my coffee, and looking around.

It is true, this option is available to me every day, but it has a different flavor than waking up alone in your own place (however relative that idea is) – and that is the thing I have been missing.

So. Last night after dinner, I sat in my room until everyone had retreated to their rooms for the night. I waited until I could no longer hear footsteps walking along the gravel path, or antique door hinges talking into the night. I gathered a few things, my toothbrush, eye glasses, camera, and my favorite book. I am like a clever-fourteen-year-old version of myself, sneaking out and sleeping in the tree house, returning in the morning before anyone wakes up. Over the hood of my down coat, I fixed my headlamp and walked to the kitchen. I ground coffee, poured the sweet smelling grounds into the press and added it to my bag. I poured cream into a small jar. I flipped the light and walked out the door.

There is something about being secretive that appeals to me. Quite often, I find myself not wanting to say where I am going or where I have been. Maybe it is because I live with so many people, a few in close proximity, and many more on the ranch, short distances from each other. Maybe it is because I actually prefer to be alone for 80% of my days; a percentage and a feeling that I find astounding and at times, a bit shameful.

After years of living with other people, anywhere from twelve to just one other, I did manage to live alone for about a year. It took me six months to build up enough courage to give up my large upstairs room at the old Victorian on Commercial Street, where I had lived for 18 or more months with a rotating crew of folks. During that decision period, I was already gone in many ways. I worked all the time and would catch myself avoiding going home. I paid $100 each month to set-up an art studio in another friend’s house, likely, just so I could have another place to be. I really liked my roommates, so why was I staying in my office until 7pm or sketching ideas at a house across town that could have been sketched in my own living room?

It was not that I was scared to live alone – unfortunately, to me, it was something else. It was the idea of living alone that seemed wrong to me; an idea that in theory I did not believe in. I had spent my whole life living with other people – and by living, I mean with intertwined lives and purposes, sharing meals and responsibilities, sharing conversation and parties, cups of tea and occasionally, kegs of beer. Every summer from the time I was twelve, I spent at camp – and even during college and into my twenties I worked at summer camps or as a whitewater guide. These were book-ended communities, formed for specific purposes and most of us, exploding out to the edges of this country or even across an ocean to another one for the nine or so months in between.

My time in Portland was different from all of these experiences. Over the course of my first three and a half years there, I lived at four different addresses, in four different parts of the city. The first two were with one other female roommate, the third with a boyfriend, and the fourth was the large house on Commercial with 3-4 others. Each of those felt less like the cultivating of community I had felt in my younger experiences, as we were all on our own paths throughout the day and there was never a clear or counted upon meeting point. There was rarely sharing of meals – even with the boyfriend, our schedules quickly became opposite and we saw each other late in the evening if at all.

While I was staying late in my basement office, I began to examine why I didn’t want to go home, but also why I couldn’t make the decision to live on my own. Some of it was money, a thought I despised – I didn’t want to live with others just to save on rent. I wanted to live with others because I wanted to build a home together, share meals and cups of coffee. The problem was, we all lived together to save on rent; and, so we could live in a house with a yard instead of a white-walled apartment complex. The other problem was that I was finding in myself that I didn’t have the energy or interest to build community in my home – especially being a teacher and cultivating a community in my classroom and with my colleagues on a daily basis. It seemed that what I really wanted was to live by myself.

It just seemed so wrong to have all that space to myself, all those kitchen utensils, and all that energy usage. It felt wrong to contribute to the part of our culture that says we are all entitled to these things; that independently, we can own cars and houses and cookware and not have to share them with the neighbors. We don’t even have to know the neighbors. Still, I was sick to my stomach for wanting that exact thing. I wanted to come home after work, park my bike in the basement or my car in the drive, walk up my steps, not talk to anyone, and make dinner in the kitchen, alone. Maybe I would take a bath. Maybe I would sit on the couch and read a book all night. Maybe I would talk on the phone to friends in distant zip codes. It was a secret life that I didn’t have to share with anyone. I. Loved. This. And, each day, no matter how good it tasted, it felt indulgent like a three-layer piece of rich chocolate cake. I ate this chocolate cake every day, like a woman who had starved herself of sweets for decades – tentatively at first, with remnants of shame, until I could devour it with nothing but great pleasure.

The apartment, as a structure, was a dream. It was a long corridor of perfection on the inside, and a mediocre four-plex on the outside. I lived on the second floor with windows that lined all the exterior sides. It had wood floors for sliding in my socks, a large bedroom with two slender windows; one that I could climb out of and onto the roof just like my childhood bedroom on the farm. The living room was spacious and open, with only my large work table, boxes of art supplies, a stack of books and a small couch. The living room spilled into the kitchen that had tile counter-tops and space enough to twirl while baking pies. The bathroom had a tub for lounging and window ledges for candles. Off the kitchen was a door that led to the back porch; a dilapidated two-by-four structure that was encased by old storm windows and a layer of chipping paint. This porch was the selling point, and it is where I ended up spending countless hours, writing, watching the rain come down, the squirrels jump through the trees, the trees change through the seasons, and the sun rise each day.

I borrowed furniture, a tea kettle, and cookware – maybe as my way of saying, “This isn’t how I will live forever.” Or maybe, as a way to incorporate other people into this space, as it seemed too overwhelming for me to fill all of it with things that belonged only to me. There was also a form of inter-dependence about borrowing a loveseat and casserole dishes that made me feel like I was keeping my foot in the door, so I didn’t fall off the edge into absurd independence. Other people might do this by finding a therapist, or working with a yoga teacher or being part of a supper club. I just borrowed couches.

And who knows what does what in the world, but it seems to me that that piece of cake apartment on 9^th Street catapulted me into this next phase of my life. Whether it was all that space to be alone, to do as I pleased, and on nights where I felt trapped in my aloneness (like all of a sudden waking up to a body that had gained 15 pounds from too much chocolate cake) I could go on a walk around the neighborhood, among other tactics. Maybe it was the rhythm of nightly baths and mornings spent watching the sun rise beyond Mount Hood from the porch, wrapped in blankets, writing. Whatever it was, once I had made the next series of decisions in my life, I was ready to meet them.

I left that decadent apartment last April and moved in with my friend Ami and her two children for two months. There, I lived in the sunroom with glass French doors on the east and west sides, opening to the kitchen and the back deck. The walls were painted a bright turquoise. From this room, I tasted again what it was like to live with people I loved, to share coffee in the morning, to play legos at the breakfast table. Ami let me stay for free so I could save money for my unknown, career-less future, which was the beginning of a huge leap for me in accepting and receiving others freely given generosity. I didn’t have anything to prove, and I was in a situation where I had to accept other’s kindnesses – quite similar to how I continue to find myself here in Big Sur.

As I roll along in my 29^th year, having lived so many different ways and in different structures, I am finding that there is not just one that is right, and even my favorite ones are not right all the time. Secretly grinding coffee and sneaking up the road to the vacationing neighbors’ is a fine way to deal with my desire for a place of my own in the early mornings. I find, it only makes me better during the rest of the day – better at participating in life on the ranch, where giving and accepting kindnesses is the name of the game.

Every Day Feels like Sunday Baby

Last Thursday when I returned to the ranch from a mid-day trip to the beach, Sidney asked, "And what adventure are you embarking on now?"

"Oh, I'm coming back actually. Just a trip down to the beach," I said.

"How nice, what a great thing to do."

"Well, I may not have much to show for my days, but I sure know how to spend them."

I am trying to get more comfortable with this life philosophy; considering that in action, I come to it quite naturally, even if not so easily in my mind. So. The truth is, I don't have a piece to post, since I've been spending my sunshine-filled January days adventuring or following artistic rabbit holes. But! Here's a few photos of my last week. I hope they bring you inspiration for the week to come...

How I spent my entire Sunday.

Great Sparkley Toms! My Carol Ann brought these to me at New Years, as she was inspired by my entry Take Your Performance Fleece and Shove It. Suh-weet!

Toyone waiting for me at the top of the hill on the Pine Ridge Trail.

I mean, C'mon people. Short walk at Julia Pheiffer Burns SP.

Friday's dawn-breaking/sunrise from the farmhouse.

Thursday's Sunset. Looking for whales. Afterwards, we played Cow Pie Discus.

So. Here's to the days you can't stay inside. The days you can't write and can hardly make yourself read and in general, it feels like a failure to start. The days where everything seems like a failure (and maybe it is), and all of your decisions seem wrong. I have those too. I know them well.

And here's to the way that family and a good walk can save us. What a sunset can do, and how gracious the late-morning winter sunrise is...thanks for waiting to come at such an attainable hour. Here's to great music and hip hop dance parties while you clean the house or drive to work. Here's to happening into friends and seeing where the day takes you.

Spend the day. And go to bed with nothing left.

So. Here's to the Monday morning sunrise...may you rise to meet it, wherever you are. Even all of you in Portland, Oregon. I watched it all last winter from my 9th Street apartment sun porch. It's there, every day, believe me.



Light in the Separation

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

BY WALLACE STEVENS

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms,

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbirds must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1954 Wallace Stevens.

We are lying in a bed, large and soft. It is neither the first nor the last time we have lied next to each other, but it is one of the few that we have held each other, even if the holding is loose and distant in a moment, strong and tight in the next. I am curled against his back, my arm resting on his waist, my hand held under his against his chest. My knees do not quite reach his. We are back and forth, between anger and tenderness. This is not playful. This is not light. It will be a surprise if either of us can fall asleep.

My eyes are open, staring at the back of his neck, the slightness of his broad shoulder. In a few hours, I will be gone, physically, but not gone the way that he is gone from me, even in this proximity. I lift my hand from underneath his and turn onto my back. I begin to cry, a few quiet tears. I have been holding him tight to devour the distance I feel with him, and now, I am backing away because I cannot find him.

He awakens, not from sleep but into awareness, and turns towards me. I turn my face away but not my body, squeezing my eyes closed, holding my breath. He may have asked me what is wrong, he may not have. I am overcome by an uncontrollable ache, as if my heart is physically breaking apart. I may have said this to him; I may have only given expression and no words. He takes his right hand and places it on the center of my chest, sliding his left hand against the mattress and under my back. I feel only his hands and the space between them. His hands and face are tender. His body is near mine, but it is only his hands clenching this heart shaft that I can feel. He is letting me cry, letting my heart break into a million pieces. His hands hold the space, making it easier for the pieces to crumble, explode, shatter – or just separate like tectonic plates, growing a space between them to be filled with a vast ocean, deep and blue and full of mysteries.

Maybe it will take lifetimes for someone to engineer a craft to cross these oceans, just like the early explorers, like Shakelton and his men, sailing to the Arctic, and surviving in the shipwreck.

This is a man who believes that a broken heart is the best medicine; that we cannot begin to live and grow with a heart bound up, tight, locked, sealed. At first, I twist to get away from him. I do not want him to coax my heart open. I am warm with anger, wrestling in terror that my heart will explode, and that he will be there to witness it and will not be the one to build a boat to cross the divide. Soon, I forget about the space between the pieces or my idea that another person needs to swim across them. Instead, despite the pain and tearful breathing, it is as if flood lights are ignited at the bottom of the ocean, sending light through the deep sea of separation. This light is the thing the space is for. His hands are warm; hot with light, bright enough to be fire.

This story is not about a man, even if the we is a man and me, even if the events are true.

We, you and me, can kill it all day long. We can tell the story several ways – where it is about a relationship, about loss and plummeting love, about confusion and questions, distance, lies, and truth. We can act like gossiping women, out to dinner around a bottle of wine, being boisterous with our anger about the unfairness of our relationships; mostly, being rowdy with our hurt and disappointment. There is nothing wrong with turning hurt into laughter – sometimes it’s the only way to survive. These are the actions, the events, and all of these ways of telling the story can be true. None of them are wrong.

I am reluctant to say this, because there is a part of me that wants to be the game-playing, upper-handed, gossiping woman in the corner – but I will say it anyway, because that is a thought to plow through and not indulge. Two nights ago I was re-reading a section in A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield (let’s call him JK from now on), titled Necessary Healing. This chapter is broken into four parts: Healing the Body, Healing the Heart, Healing the Mind, and Healing through Emptiness. I have found that a few things in the Healing the Heart section have stayed with me. As I continue to look at this moment lying in bed with this man’s hands pressing into my chest and catching the force in my back, I chew on them and digest further:

Oscar Wilde wrote, “Hearts are meant to be broken.” As we heal through meditation, our hearts break open to feel fully. Powerful feelings, deep unspoken parts of ourselves arise, and our task in meditation is first to let them move through us, then to recognize them and allow them to sing their songs. What we find as we listen to the songs of our rage or fear, loneliness or longing, is that they do not stay forever. Rage turns into sorrow; sorrow turns into tears; tears may fall for a long time, but then the sun comes out. A memory of old loss sings to us; our body shakes and relives the moment of loss; then the armoring around that loss gradually softens; and in the midst of the song of tremendous grieving, the pain of that loss finally finds release.

Most often this healing work is so difficult we need another person as an ally, a guide to hold our hand and inspire our courage as we go through it. Then miracles can happen.

It is important to not lose context, as JK is writing about work through meditation, not necessarily moments of intimacy between friends or lovers. I am not saying that they are the same thing, though I remain to be unsure if they are not.

Maybe our Guides are not always, or often, considered great spiritual teachers, leaders, or gurus. No matter how messy and confusing it can be, I would like to believe that miracles can begin to happen when we seize the moments we have with each other. In this moment with the man, I do not know his intentions or his clarity, but I do know what I felt. It was not a transformation of our being together or of the clarity or context of our relationship or love. It was a transformation of my heart; of rage into sorrow, sorrow into tears, a softening of armor, a deep feeling of loss and the beginning of releasing it. I also believe it was the hands of an ally, holding a space, and inspiring courage to enter.

Neil Young sings, “Only love can break your heart.”Whether it is a love we feel or give, or one that we receive; I believe him, and thank God.