The Wasp

"It was good for me to be afflicted."

Psalm 119:71

And I have been afflicted lately.

Another year, another trip around the sun without you.

Last night I remembered the dream I had of you five years ago. I was crawling up a steep cliff, with the voice of a famous broadcaster from NPR who had recently died, urging me to keep climbing. Cokie Roberts kept saying, "Keep going, you can do this. Don't give up" as my muscles burned and my fingers dug into the rocks in such a palpable way that even now my hands ache remembering. Eventually, I pulled myself up onto the ledge and found myself surrounded by a circle of glowing orbs...souls there to meet me. No faces, just whitish gold auras, singing out in celebration for me.....and in the middle a tall glowing figure came toward me. Ian.... I can still feel the love as you put your arms around me and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed....tighter and tighter until I heard and felt a "POP" as your soul merged with mine, You showing me we are inseparable.

At the time I knew it was a visitation;  you showing me that forever you will be right with me, giving me the extra push to keep going and keep loving this one life. 

And so, despite my sadness, this morning I helped a wasp, stuck in my house, get a drink of water. I found her upside down; legs curled in resignation, near death. I picked her up and placed her right-side-up on the porch near the dog bowl. I dripped water near those giant eyes and I squatted waiting. In time, she moved forward enough to pull water urgently into her mouth. Antennae twitched with each long draw of water and I saw life come back. After almost an hour,  she lifted herself into the air and floated away. 

although lately all I have wanted to do is cry and rage and pull in the sky, suddenly my heart was bursting with love.

And rememberance of that dream compelled me to again invite Source into the sacred darkness of my grief, almost like a new heart or a new battery or a shot of carbonation. We are all that wasp, I guess....

I drink this in and thank you Ian and Source.

A Request

Ian,

I miss you, baby. As usual, it's sharper these days, like reinjuring a hurt limb;

familiar pain; 

bitter pain

pain I can't simply ignore.

Lots of things stir me up....weddings, friends talking about their living kids, your friends having babies.

I would love to have known your babies.

After almost eight years I have learned that there is no way to feel ok with any of what happened, at least not this time of year, so my intention is just to stay in the moment and dodge the thoughts that come. Just be happy for others and hope it keeps the sadness at bay. 

Carrie let me cry and pour it out.

I listened to a podcast on the origin of Thanksgiving yesterday while walking, and it intrigued the gloom away for a bit, especially a fun validation about a Quiji board.

The growing book of memories with the boys is growing and I love that they get me.

Jacie came over and hugged some of it away.

I say a fascinating west
ern spotted Orb spider.

Bill wrote me.

Gunnar wrote me.

Phoebe is here, as always, with just the right countenance and syncrony to be my "constant".

Elm leaves fall like corn flakes filling my yard, vexing and pleasing me.

A huge toad lets me pet him as he basks in the dog bowl.

My space heater hums with the first chill of Fall, almost like a robotic friend.

Things to do are plugged into my schedule "just so" that both fill my days and also  exhaust me. It is my daily challeng to find the right balance between too much alone time and  frenzied business that leaves me brittle as a twig.

I miss Chris. I miss Kenzie. I miss You. I miss who we were at one point in time, but I cannot write about that lest my grief overtakes me.

Instead I just try to love fiercely and delight in the lives you all are building for yourselves and release

release

release all three of you to whatever grand adventures you seek in your "becoming".

So as I go on today please help me.

Place stepping stones before me.

Help me find and delight in the small miracle of them, as they are placed before me,

I don't want to just survive, I want to thrive and I do know that you want that for me, too. 

I know that Kenzie and Chris do too.

Perhaps stay closer to me today and help me feel you there.

Look out for your sister and brother and the boys today.

We all need you and we are family. They need stepping stones too, I think.

                                                                                                     I love you,                                                                                              Mom

Firefly

Firefly

I got up at 4am this morning on a whim, and went outside to the temple of my hot tub, making sure that all the house lights were out, so I could steep in the natural light of the not-yet-dawn.

 The only light is emitted by stars, the moon, and the vaguest promise of coming sun from 1000 miles east and around the corner. My eyes dilate and receive all this as "just right" and I settle into the warm water and fade into the dimness.

 Whoever I awakened when I pulled the top off my hot tub, were likely staring at me from the undercover of trees, as I eased into the water.

Into my favorite state of being. 

Just an animal among animals of the night. I breath in being outside, floating and stretching in the water ; having thoughts of how a baby feels in the womb, or how the weightlessness of water is a little like flying.

 How quiet and unquiet morning darkness can be.

 Almost another world. Soft rustles, a humming bug, a swift flash of movement in the canopy, then quiet again. I wonder to myself, how humans have learned to live indoors.

I have the thought that humans have not had a full meal of connectedness with our real animal flesh since we closed our doors,  turned on the lights and AC. 

Of course the stars are hypnotic. I look up and they flood my eyes with remembered and recognized constellations; ones I have memorized like road maps. I see an occasional falling star. 

To me just a brief zip of light, but maybe to them a blistering horrid death?

I turn from that thought, I breath in the night air and I begin listing everything nice thats going on in my life, the smallest of nice things; 

 I say a simple THANKS...

Out of nowhere, one solitary firefly blinks, moving among the oak leaves above. It is alternately blinking and disappearing-only to show up a few feet away. I am surprised by this lone messenger. Usually they are all asleep by dawn. 

 

And from the Source of all

And from my Ian,

I hear a whimsical

YOU'RE WELCOME

I track the firefly's course and with each blink, and feel a rush of joy. 

I love it so much when the walls of physical disappear, and I dissolve into

Everything and nothing,

Everyone and no one,

Everywhere and nowhere.

I drink of Source,

And thus comes the focus that has nothing to do with my eyes....

All this is mine, because I woke up so early and went to the Temple.

As dawn comes.

Jewels

 Jewels

What is deeply hidden?

It seems I plum the depths endlessly. All I seem to have is desire and deep longing. Once again I feel it all at once, like this morning before dawn, before my head leaves the pillow. Before brushing my teeth or morning coffee, I am crying.

Tears of gratitude as I prayed the way I pray these days.

I take a breath and announce my intention to be joyful today and plug into Source. 

I set my mood, like tuning an instrument or putting on a clever hat.

I pray intentionally for a long list of people, taking my time and making it personal, calling up into my mind each one and letting their unique troubles and pain unfold in my thinking like a sock that needs mending.

Examining the holes and frayed edges of each person's life with as much tenderness as I can find and ask Source to give them extra thread. 

 I thank Source for meeting me here, in bed, every morning just as I open my eyes with a certainty that is filling.

 And I feel the absolute power and truth of such a huge Love.

This morning I added a new intention. I began to list the mind-blowing miracles I have found lately, and especially over these sad-as-fuck years since Ian moved out of physical. Cried in wonder over meeting Bridget and Cliff: for my clients, my business, my Phoebe and Henry. My children, my grandsons. The new places to hike and for the hearts I find everywhere.

I found an unexpected overflow of sweetness in finding these embers, these jewels.... floating along, even in the acrid winds of such a horror.

I let myself remember that in my darkest day recently, coming home on an airplane to the detritus of my my own making, there was such a miracle.  I sat next to Michael, a middle aged man returning from a hunting trip in Montana. He appeared at least hree days unshaven, with strange deep eyes and a huge underbite. He was a human bulldog. He sat, scrunched down oddly with an empty seat between us and stared over at me. Then on into the flight, an odd thing happened. Just as we prayed together for a very sick passenger that had collapsed in the aisle, he murmured to me gruffly, "God is good, everything happens for a reason." I was crying for the lady on the stretcher, and for myself. 

He then said, "There are good people in Texas." That one was for me.

Then he took my hand. A literal embodyment of the Archangel Michael, I thought, manifesting here when I needed a warrior beside me most.

I will never forget him. 

Isn't is grand that often, but not always, miracles come in the form of people? This morning I cried about that too.

Then tonight after a talk with Chris, I cried again, thinking about Chris missing Ian, because he won't be here to be his best man. Not joyful tears, but there was a fullness of knowing he and I share, how hard some things are to survive. The loneliness of fullness.

Why am I writing this? What deep truth am I trying to dig from the clay? I don't know, except to proclaim my truth.

To catalogue the honest bits and hard edges.

This is the holiness my truth. I am a woman alone in a hard life that is also scattered with jewels of wonder laying before my openned heart. I cry and announce to whoever may read this, that the sorrow and bitterness also comes with strange and perfect surprises, like Bridget and William and Donna and Hudson and Coy and Trappr and Nicole, and Phoebe, who takes me walking. And Chris....and Kenzie....who walk along in their own lives and in their own holiness and hurt.

And the miracle that even without my beautiful boy Ian here to hold, 

I can still love.

I declare this. The most stunning moments of awe have been revealed in my tears

And in my willingness to bow

In reverent truth

Before the pain of living.

Rabble

                                                                 Rabble

A woman who did something truly terrible (that I heard about in the local news) called me for an appointment today. She was bereft, miserable and lost, crying to me in the way people cry when hope is almost gone.

I knew immediately that I would not be counseling her myself. 

I knew it deep in me. Besides the fact that I can't work with this population, and I knew I could not take a case like this in my current predicament, I knew it was not my purpose to be her therapist. 

My purpose was triage.

A friend of mine had recently told me that she knew this 50 year old woman really well; she told me what had happened........the whole notorious, sorted, aweful story that had lead my friend to sever all ties and turn her back on the mess. 

What she did was a terrible thing. Unforgiveable. Yet as we spoke and she cried, I felt only desperately sad for her. Really sad. Instead of the emotional distance that would have been a normal response to her admission, I felt only a deep desire to help her, to let her know that I care about her pain and want her to feel better.

I related to her feelings of isolation and abandonment. Everyone in her life had turned their backs: her friends, family, even her own child....all she has is her grief and her attorney.

I have not lost anyone, there is no comparison at all, and yet I seemed to identify with her loss; her sense of of the whole world turning upside down in only moments because of a terrible, ridiculously foolish impulse. I know I am not like her, I could and would never do what she did. It was the product of avarice, but as I talked to her and started trying to find ways to get her help, all I felt was empathy and sorrow for her. 

I felt strangely close to her.

Here was one stupid human crying out to another stupid human in a world full of stupid people....blundering through this life like proverbial bulls in a china shop.

Fucking up, hurting themselves....hurting others. Burning down the house.

Yet, I just felt a strong pull to care for her and try to ease her burden.

So I prayed for her and I found her a therapist.

Unlike everyone else in her world right now, oddly I didn't feel the impulse to judge her. Which is totally NOT like me.

I am terribly judgemental

Everyday

Sometimes in direct, snarky ways and sometimes in soft, covert ways.

Subterranian and underground judgements.\

Judgy and on my high horse is my usual stance with people like this.

I make fun of people in my head who do stupid things.

I feel superior, or at least smug.....

But not right now.

It is as if this nasty habit had been pruned off of me, and the new growth underneath; 

The new green leaves

Are more tender, more bright, more soft.

Less stubbly.

As I write this, I am thinking about what Source has in mind with is pruning of me? I have absolutely had the feeling that something has been happening here in my time of solitude and reflection. In my time of longing for God. 

I am thinking about new growth that is coming (I believe it is) and how it might change the trajectory of my life. How when I help people like this who feel sorrow raining down on them (sorrow of their own making, albeit), I can be the one who does not turn away.

The lepers, the untouchables, the foulest ones among us.

The troublemakers.

Those who hurt the innocents.

I feel sure that Source will reveal what this means for me as time goes on, but for now I want to speak to this page this new feeling in me.

I want to say that we are all equally awful and equally whole and good.

What trouble one of us knits....is the thread of us all.

And when one of us feels the soothing touch of Source,

We all feel it.

Here we all sit, in prisons of our own making

And yet we all have the keys to our own dark cells.

And we can share these keys sometimes....

Or at least pass a cup of water back and forth between the bars.

Our Divinity never abandons us

Our compassion is our connector

The thing that awakens us to this fact is making the choice

Every day

And when it is not easy to do it...

To make the choice to Love.

Even when those we encounter are the unloveable

The refuse

The lost causes

That woman today was just like me in the respect that, regardless of how dirty her hands were by her own actions, she still wants to be loved and healed, and she still feels the anguish of the twisted turn of life's knife.

And Source said....."Love her" and I obeyed..... and this makes me grateful.

I am awake enough, thanks to my own pain,

Indeed thanks to my own pruning.....

Awake enough in my own Soul to be brave 

and just Love.

All this life is

All living is about is 

the machinations of us humans mucking around and sometimes stubbing our toes.

Poking each other in the eyes

But Source decrees that all this matters not.

Somewhere,

In all of us,

Forever clean and untarnished

Is our Source-selves.

Our forever pure part, 

Our Holy Spirit-generated, light-filled selves.

Our thimble full of Divinity

Never spoiled by our stupidity, toe stubbing, innane mischief and outright meanness.

Clean and sweet as the first sip from a cool spring.

It can never be ruined by anything we do down here in Earth School.

Nothing touches or ruins the Source in us. Ever.

I believe I spoke with that part of her today, I could feel that she was still clean and whole in that pool of shit where she is swimming in misery.

I tried to put my hand down into her dark place and send a little love,  from that same clean place in me. 

And I think we both came someway today.

HEART-SHATTERED LIVES, 

READY FOR LOVE,

DON'T FOR A MOMENT,

ESCAPE GOD'S NOTICE.

Psalm 51:17

To One Who Is My Tribe

To One Who is My Tribe

 I am sitting in the back seat of a slime green Corvair, with Sonny in the front passenger seat and you driving. There is a hole in the floor board as big as a grapefruit, and occasionally out of curiosity I lift the mat and  watch the asphalt scrolling by.

 It's morning 

We are going to school and we are singing...

"We all live in a little green turtle, a little green turtle, a little green turtle" to the tune of Yellow Submarine.

There is no heat in the turtle, Sonny has scraped ice off the windshield with a piece of plastic. You have to keep the window down because the fog keeps reforming as you wipe a hole in it so you can see, still singing.

We don't care. Somehow it always just feels like a fun adventure.....we crack jokes and laugh at ourselves and that silly car.

Breakfast was an Instant Breakfast milkshake we made fixed in a dirty kitchen.

I don't care about that either. That is just how it is at home, and if you don't care then I don't care.....

Our driving is the best time of my day...

Your brown hair is thick; falling in soft curls over the headrest. Earlier  in the morning, I sat and watched you at home, methodically taking orange juice can rollers out of your hair and putting on makeup. As each would unroll, a golden brown curl would fall down and you would fluff it, rat it and pin it into a beautiful mane. 

I don't remember what happens next, but most likely you dropped me at Starkey before taking the two of you on to school.  I just remember laughter and singing and jokes and love. 

The three of us start our day, and I carry  a little bit of your confidence and surliness with me into class. I know I belong there with you and Sonny.

I know you are my tribe.

I came on the scene later in our family. I missed your early years but the stories were always being told and I knew from very young that you were the glue, the rock, the one who could both hold things together and also keep the light of hope on for your brother and sisters. 

And so this is who you were to me. Almost 60 years later with grey hair and a few wrinkles added to the mix, essentially the principles remain unchanged. 

And here is what you teach me.....

Poke fun at the bad shit in life

Celebrate the wonder

Take care of each other

Turn the weirdness of life into a badge of honor

Relentlessly learn

Give more than you have to give

Lead with humor

And to the winds of pain......pitch back you head and laugh

Happy Birthday Nita 

Each and All of Us

Each and All of Us 

This is my supposition.........

All things are woven together by a Seamstress somewhere

All the songs 

Here and everywhere

Are composed by a Composer

Who has me in mind. 

Someone is keeping a journal of my times.

I am not alone here.

Furthermore, no one is alone here.

Not me, living with a heart full of holes:

 

Not Henry, who is laying in a pile of covers growing older and older;

Not Coy, pushing his truck and trailer for hours through my living room, lost 

     in the joy of his young mind's story.

Not the pretty snail that Phoebe stepped on and crushed;

Not the crab spider waiting for the wasp who is exploring a thistle;

Not the perfectly formed white mushroom we found beneath a sky of tall grass;

Not the equally perfect white crawfish shell when life has gone; 

Not Chris working to make he and Sarah a perfect home; 

Not Bridget loving her stubborn husband and painting another new room 

    at another new job he took them to;

Not the solitary sun perch who lives alone in my fish tank with three fat, dirigible

    gold fish;

Not Phyllis spending 80+ years in a body that barely works, and a voice that

    strains to speak;

Not Kenzie, with her three blonde pups wrestling in a mountain of blankets 

    and not in one moment does she deny them her love;

And not the silver back gorilla who died by a strike of lightening while sleeping

     in the canopy of the rainforest......

We all live, as best we can; we feel the joy of an unexpected good day and the the sting of suffering that comes just as quickly. And yet, we are not alone. Something, or someone, or SOMEONES, are around each of us.

Aware of us, hovering above......I think even loving us. 

If we share nothing else, us humans, snails, mushrooms and apes.....

We share a common thread or a few common notes in a bigger song.

An Ancient Choir

Or a Son, 

A Brother, Mother, Father, a Friend...around us through each step. 

This idea sustains me.