The Waking

Waking

 Ian,

     Cold winter morning. From her perch on the foot of my bed Phoebe saw someone outside move in the lavender glow of the early morning. Maybe a deer or raccoon; feral cat or just a shadow. She grumbles and wakes me up, and I open the sliding glass door. She shoots out like an arrow into the near-darkness, down the stairs and gone. Brave, she is, to dart into the unknown like that, without a thought of what might be waiting for her.  I watched the white streak of her beautiful coat move back and forth, zig zagging, nose to the ground following the scent. Completely caught up. 

Unburdened by what was

what is

and what will be.

Every moment is the only moment.

Or so her brown eyes say.

     Cold is still cold, and as the winter tells her so, she comes back in and is back on my bed again. Deep sigh, and she is quickly asleep again, as if all of this was just some dream sequence. She is a lucky girl; not to wake up every day and heave into a cloak of remembrances of all her own particular sorrows; of lost babies and lonely times.

     For almost three years (10 days short to be exact), every morning starts with me waking up and remembering what has happened to us. Starting each day in the shade of it. Some days harder than others and a few days better lately, waking up and stepping over death and going directly to business. Fairly often now, I touch the red light of my coffee pot and while it gurgles and hisses, I tidy my kitchen, feed my fish and birds, make my bed. I set things in order.

     That is some kind of bravery, right? 

To imagine life goes on

 and this old body 

can go along, too?

     

    

There are other mornings, too. I wake up with such a brick on my chest; such a dark weight of missing you pinning me down. I cannot move. I lay still and warm and silent as I take it in again. Head mashed deep into my pillow and I want to stay right here....well....forever. It is the best this particular day will be and I know it. As if all the air has been let out of me. As if I am a paralyzed bug in a spider web, after the poisonous kiss, waiting for the eating to come, no feeling at all. Waiting for the blessed end.

 But mostly it is not so bad anymore. Mostly, I have my program set for each new morning and I go about it; I get things done as humans do. Ignore my waking sorrow and push into my human skin from night-soul wandering and I go make coffee. Step over the pit, and find something that needs doing. Often this begins with me drawing my hand cross the soft back of a warm dog, watching my fish dappling at the flakes of food as if it were their first meal..... Or possibly I call to mind the sweet kindness of Chris hanging my Christmas lights or a hilarious video of Hudson. These can grab me by the shirt and yank me into real happiness again. And shoved forward I go.

     Whatever gets me up these days, these 1075 days since you left, I can glimpse a bleary miracle here. It is sewn into the hem of my clothes, so small that only I can sense it there helping me. Only someone who has carried this weight every day could recognize the miracle of endurance, only maybe Chris or Kenzie or Danny.

     The Buddha was wrong, you know. The solution to suffering is not, as it turns out, in staying in the moment. It is not in being cut off from the regrets and memories and echoes of a boy's laugh that is now gone. It is not forgetting the blonde hair or the long, tapered fingers touching the lizard's still back. No, it certainly is not this.

Suffering is to be born and to be bared in the cusp of waking. 

I wear it.

I do not transcend,

so much as breath it. 

I draw the missing of you into my lungs

air as cold as a corpse,

and feel it warm within my chest.

Missing you feeds my tissue and my blood.

Reminds me who I am 

And who you are

And who we are together.

The pain fuels me.

It is a promise

A reminder

A recognition of what I care about

 in this imperfect, perfect life.

     In spite of every fool around urging me to let go of my grief and move on, I persist in hanging on because the miracle of the paradox is so clear. Solitude has schooled me so well in this....Our Phoebe jettisons into life with no thought of yesterday or tomorrow. I launch each day powered by a soup of sacred rememberance.

     Pain shocks me into movement even on days when I don't want to do this anymore....by the stunning notion that maybe your leaving actually clarifies me and sluffs off the useless bits of human silliness so what comes forth from me is more true, more real. Curiously, pain unburdens me. 

Frees me of the impossible lie of who I AM NOT.

Rakes across my spirit

And stirs 

The wind of my soul at hurricane force somedays.

Or whispers a dirge

And I am suddenly wistful and tender.

    Like a giant eraser

Blearing my outside lines

So every sensation finds me

Strangely transparent

     I reach across my bed now and put my hand on a warm, white coat of fur. I feel the life in her and the way muscles relax into sleep after chasing the things we chase in life. After darkness draws and  the need for comfort pulls us back to bed. I marvel that after how much it hurt to love you and lose you, I can wake up on this particular day and love this particular smelly dog.

 And so, to Buddha I say 

that the end of suffering

 is not detachment from desire,

 but daring to ride the wave of all love, 

all pain,

 all longing,

all loss....

 just to see what I might find out there in the dark.

And Buddha laughs....

Love,

Momma

 

     

The Plan

The Plan

Dear Ian,

Here is a new thought...... 

Before this life;

Before you were my son and I was your Mom,

 In another place in time.

We planned this chapter of our story. 

Stood together and imagined all of this into being.

 Set our intent together toward a hard task with love and so much devotion to God. 

I lean into the ease of it,  

  Accept the missing puzzle piece.

Of Love expanding.....

I like the sound of the word "Expansion", it feels good my mouth. I like the visual of you expanding with each breath. All the lovely attributes of the person I knew as Ian. I like the idea of your humor, your generosity, fearlessness and compassion....reckless curiosity and obnoxious honesty; placed within you for a purpose and destined to grow. I can imagine you now expanding like our universe after the Big Bang. 

What an ironic thought 

Because you, my beautiful boy endured a

 Big Bang here on earth.

This is not to be flip or creepy, or dark about the nature of your leaving. 

I proclaim that great creations begin with sudden upheaval;

violent transformation,

A turning over of the apple cart......

Less a gentle nudge  than with a deep breath and a 

Painful

Unsettling

Seemingly Chaotic birth

It is an interesting and ancient notion that God allows us to craft our own stories...that He or She or We are all fired by free will, the very blood of a living God, coursing and pumping in unpredictably predictable ways.

Your story is forever changed on the other side of leaving us, Biggun. I see the truth and the power and meaning of it. I think I can begin to sense some of our plan, especially how your outrageous and unexpected act might be generative rather than destructive; a dynamic and planned event that means something. Was worth something. Was in fact, a beginning, not an ending.

In my insides

I do know you have taken me along with you. 

I gripped you as we went to warp speed

Just enough time to grab a breath as we plunged into the deep.

My insides know, too, that all this was just as purposeful as a forest fire, whose acrid char brings the popping and sprouting of pine cones. Brings forth life and is as ruefully necessary as a whale, beached and gone, feeding all manner of bird and beast and bug.

It is a more honest accounting of how this all works than fairy tales about rainbows and butterflies. These too are  beauty born of fracture and division.

So here I am, Ian, working the rubrics cube of my own remaining plan and imagining how to do this....

Trying to remember how we are knitted together.  Just let the momentum of the Big Bang move me until I find my next natural point of orbit in the service of God . Drift like the stars that float in the aftermath until laws of physics find them again. 

Agree not to judge myself or others so much,

Be kind when I can manage to be, 

Accept all of this mess softly

See beautiful things

Pet my dogs and save insects.

Kiss Hudson's head

Bow before the littlest joys

Which are expanding the true nature of God

I would never want to let you down, so I promise to try. 

And I am looking for other travelers like us.

 Those who come here determined to leap instead of crawl; those who write epics, not cliff notes....symphonies not jingles; Those who love large,

Imagine big 

Explode

Trail blaze....

Like freaking Lewis and Clark

and Captain Picard

                                                                                                     Love,

                                                                                                                     Momma

Coursing (Archived 1/2/19)

Coursing

The day dawns, 

the one rued,

  the turning of the wheel;

 A final heaving sigh. 

December 26, 2018

Dear Ian,

At the cusp of this odd day is this odd thought....

You loved an scavenger hunt; you loved Easter and Advent....the pickle on the Christmas tree....even Hangman games where you earned a letter for doing chores. You couldn't pace yourself....your brother and sister gave up as you cleaned the entire house to win the letters and scoured the freshly decorated tree to find the glass pickle everyone had already surrendered to you. Relentless, joyful, determined....if you were a young lion, heaven knows you would feed your pride (except that you might bring that antelope home and convince your people to bring her into the fold instead).

In a more macabre way, I've been on a scavenger hunt of my own for the last year. For one whole turning of the dial, I have been trying to grab up any clue that I could; tiny bits of you. Tiny hints and postcards from you. Material and earthly proof that you still hum and vibrate with some kind of life. I look.

Little bits of magic, bits of hope

Bits of you, bits of us. Colored Ribbons, my love.

Honey, in my raging grief, I pay attention because I don't want to miss one single message from you. A lifetime spent  practicing my third eye has been a help. I force my eyes open, even when I don't want to; lifting my chin toward a warm moment of sun, even when all I really want to do is tuck my head under my wing and die.

On this anniversary of your leaving, the sky raised her hackles and began to complain. Grey and blustery, wind coming in all directions at once. Misty droplets,  then sheets of rain,  and then breaks of plain grey sky. Wind. The kind that that whirls and spins, transforming entire fields of tall grass into a living lion's mane. Aunt Nita and I went south driving right through it.  

That straight road to the coast you and I and your family have driven so many times.

Instead of my darling blonde boy, curled up in a blanket in the back seat, I brought my grief and binocs along instead. We all loaded up to see where we could go; see what we could see....scavenger hunting. The weather spoke.

To say God was giving voice to my grief is an understatement. It was as if all that makes up this Earth was solemnly removing hats and bowing heads. Wind gusts as hymns of remembrance of your life lived.....your life over....gone. As strong and real as another funeral viewing.

Clouds in violent motion, not stuck still in the sky, but boiling and coursing.  More A dirge across the face of this day than a funeral. This day 365....more than a year since I last touched you.....

You told Elijah that I should "Hang stockings and celebrate Christmas, Mom, then grieve for me on the 26th." 

Mainly, I just drove and watched. Scavenger hunting, coursing myself. Memories stabbing but calmed by the dark and rowdy agreement from nature that this is the shit....No sun or hope or syrupy promises of renewal. Fuck no. Fuck that...Just weeping and sobbing from the wind. Such a sweet testament of the loss of such love. I did see so many other things, Osprey and birds and an occasional moth. I felt you there, as I knew I would.

Then between 4 and 5pm, my sister and I opened a beer and sat facing the Mother of lagoons, and watched the grey gauze of cirrus move swiftly over the still bay. Behind the clouds, shocking moments of the brightest french vanilla-colored sunlight, just before it set. And with it, an unblemished bright blue sky peaking through. Astonishing but not surprising. 

Sun punched through at the very hour one year ago, when your precious blood spilled out and that fine, solid mind and beautiful heart slowed and slowed and slowed. And stopped. I was not there when your heart stopped,  but I am now.

The sun knew, the grass and thorn thicket too; the murmuring of Chacalaca ceased their noise for a few seconds. Wind shadows moved across the water giving form and fingerprint. I didn't see angels weeping or God's hands stretching wide in a giant " amen", but I did feel every bit of the wind, I saw every particle of light, in all the colors offered. I finished the hunt on this sad ceremonial day and I never looked away.

And I never will. This little courage I offer is for you, my baby. 

I love you,

Momma

Gestating

 

Gestation

          Carrie had a dream about me dancing with two spirits in a vast azure and ebony universe with stars bursting everywhere. She said my body was fluid, like I had no bones and I was floating and flowing between the souls but not looking at them, eyes instead cast downward and a slight smile on my face. I was contented. I had found a rhythm. A rhythm.

            I have found a rhythm to these recent days, since your 26th birthday and talking to sweet Marie. I am easier; more fluid and flowing; inwardly aware of my dance steps...I stumble less, though days still do come when once again I cannot follow the dips and sways so effortlessly. 

I still trip about things sometimes

I go dark,

Forget to remember to forget.

I am set to an impossible task

    With just a swirl of a hope. 

                  

But ahhhh.... there it is.....the flaw in my logic.

That any person can make the

 Next season come. 

That any person can dance the fluid dance while white-knuckle gripping the wheel. 

Tis a lie and a fallacy.

 Seasons have their own clock and calendar;

And readiness invites change.

And I take a breath and  free myself up to catch the wind 

Should it pass my way.

Imagining into being that there might be joy ahead

Another chance to dance.

Something could capture my imagination

And I might jump again and go.

I vow to remember that

The roots  know to draw water

 imagining summer's dry heat

Remember too.....

Within the chrysalis, 

(Seeming still as death)

A pre-butterfly flashes and sparks with readiness. 

Eggs cup and harbor babes, dynamic and urgently going about feathering.

Evolution puckishly defies Entropy.

Even the summer grass, gray as ghosts

plump green as soon as the rains come.

Those grey blades are waiting, just like me.

And now again I can imagine there is more going on in this dry season than meets the eye. My own entropy (or stasis or stumbling steps) look more busy with purpose than I thought before I spoke with Marie. And I bend my body to a different view of it. I look cross-eyed and upside down at myself, the way Otis taught me in art class 40 years ago.

"Forget what you think things look like," he said, 

"See them with new eyes."

Our set of eyes can't quite get us past a certain point, sweet boy. 

 Marie says you are telling me this

 every day and all day long.....

So Ian, 

Here I am in the boiling waters of life without you. 

Trying to find and find and re-find my heart of readiness.

Trying not to focus on the chatter and clacking of my mind.

Trying to dance without any bones,

Dancing on the winds of waiting.

The dance of readiness.

Cocking my head, like Phoebe does, toward the almost inaudible sound

Of the changing season

And the next great dive in.

                                Love,

                                                         Momma

 

Un-emptiness

 

Un-emptiness

     My eyes change when I step outside my door. I look at every thing more closely, very deeply; macro level. Meadows and fields and river bed; fence line, rock ledge, tree bark. I step slowly through grass as it ages into late summer, leaving spent seed pods, husks of blooms, tromped and fringed leaf edges that were so pretty three months ago. Companions  as old as me now, but only for a season.

     I walk this  path near our house so often that I can recognize individual flowers day by day, in various stages of decay....beginning, middle, end....and gone until next year. The beating sun a metronome that keeps track of it all somehow I guess. I look at them and it feels like a visit to the hospital in someone's last days.

     Not the whole story though......In the midst of it, there are others. Some  plants  grit teeth and persist. It is a wonder to see. They stand defiant in the September heat for weeks and months with chemistry that equips them with the sugars of will.

Shoulders back and chests forward, they dare the sun for another day. Transmute the heat and bask.

And there are the patient ones.

They resist bursting forth in the Springtime, with rain all around and the ground growing warm with hope. They wait and wait. Life revving up all around,  they don't bother to elbow in until everyone else is finished; until the coming of the dog days and interminable heat. I suddenly see a single garish purple spike of a thistle. So different and other-worldly like a Phoenix coming out of the fire.

     And she is also there, a spider in her own perfect timing on this most-purple thistle. So very purple as if tagged with spray paint. She squats and waits for whoever else comes to the color. The closer I look the more I see of her...green luminescence and eerie other-worldly face, and long dangerously prickly legs. So much leg on this lady. 

    

And then this..........Yesterday the rains came again. Cobalt clouds boiled up and exploded. Slamming of water into the dry, thirsty breast of  my Texas.  Joyous and unexpected. The skunk cabbage blooms, almost spent, opened. Bees were moving about. I saw one who was still, head deep in the pollen and as I moved closer I could see a white crab spider that had backed into the bloom and waited to see what would come of it. In that moment I am the spider, still and patient, looking out from my yellow bonnet and waiting to see which pollinator comes. Maybe very hungry. I am also the Bee, hovering around, mindful to gather as much pollen for my people as I can. I see the yellow flower and I land. One last time. Hungry, too. And that was it.

These passion plays are all around me all day long, diverting my gaze from the other stories and unanswered questions of my life.

Why am I so pulled to the stories and rhythms of my meadow, Biggun? Why are these worlds more real to me now any anyone or anything? Why does this give me such joy and hope of something more and bigger than anything that I have known before? How do they portal me seamlessly into our other worlds before and after this short life?

In a second as my eyes focus on such tiny mysteries, my anguish dims down, and the noises in my head quiet. The dark ones, at least. I can immediately see lives before and lives to come with such clarity. 

I can see the vastness of you,                                               ..... and of us and of all things swimming there with a thirsty grasshopper.

      My salvation comes  like the rain storm with a wild-eyed knowing that the truth of it cannot be found in the fiction that is this life. That is a saccharine  Hallmark movie, or a slasher movie (depending on the day)....and a movie only it is. Recently I have come to think that I am waking from a dream, pretty on some days and horrifying on others, and largely false.

 I  seek a more subtle and secret truth

 only knowable by  seeing

 upside down,

 ridiculously close

 and along the edges.

 It is the unknowable Source.

 God.

 The blood that life.

 To see it, I must blear everything. The smaller I look, the more true. 

    It is a scary business.

 It requires untethering, even from you, sweet boy,

 for that was a movie, too;

 one that I have binge-watched over and over and over.

 You are the star and no matter how often I watch...

the ending is always a dark surprise.

 But it is just a story of you.

 the real truth is more interesting.

 I like to think that I am brave enough to push my shoulders back and chest forward, like the daisies..... and go forth into this new knowing. Sturdy enough to dare to imagine another way.

     Let that version of the telling of you go.

     Watching the bugs in my meadow seems to help; Watching the clouds, too. Walks help immensely, and so do my dogs. Music as well. In listing these things it occurs to me that letting go of the story of us here on Earth is a little more plausible when my eyes stay fixed on tiny things. Whole worlds emerge, entire systems of life...the leaf, the bee, dew drop. Dirt and thistle and lichen. The dark truth of the spider.....Calms me down and brings happiness of sorts.

Enter Un-emptiness. The absence of absence. Erasing all ideas from before and hearing the truth pitched to a mystic chord.

Lyrics from obscure songs; a warm dog pressed against my leg ushers in the truest comfort from the unknowable, unseeable God. Incomprehensibly real Undefinable but present. There in every black hair on a spider's leg.....I look closer and closer and there is God again, orb-like and exquisitely undefinable;                                                                                                                                       

 reflected in the remains of the rain on a Lily.........

Ian, there is happiness and satisfaction here in the un-empty space between all things. In truth I have seen glimpses of it all my life, but now it is thrust on me at the turn of things. It is a gift, a bouquet I imagine...from a loving Creator and from you, who I have known for so many lives.

And like the meadow, today I can do this life again.

  

                                                                                              Love, Mom

Erbie, Arkansas

Erbie

    Ian,

     The crows are talking to each other in the canopy of trees here at the cabin. They sound like a pack of dogs, what are they saying? Each has a different voice, a different accent...I never noticed that before. One's voice low and gravely, another with a quivering timber; some screaming and some murmuring. Are they just making it known that these are their woods or trying to solve some family argument? Is it a family at all?

So much in this world I do not

understand, things living and playing at the drama of life. 

A damselfly nymph,

Daisies,

And a tortoise wearing a horribly cracked, yet healed shell.

I envy the healing.

A whole flutter of blue Tiger Swallowtail butterflies, delicate and shockingly perfect

But oddly devouring mud......

     I saw a shell of a craw fish and looked away, thinking it dead (you know I look away from death any time I am able); but then on closer inspection found it was just the discarded shell. I felt relief imagining the newer, more colorful and brighter fellow that burst forth. It made me think of you, Biggun. I put out bird seed in front of the cabin and this morning the black wax sunflower seeds and peanuts were gone, but tiny seeds remained. This means the crows and squirrels have been here first. It is another story of the woods.

     Giant boulders along the creek in a narrow gap that I found were cloaked in lacy blue lichen and thick fuzzy moss-occasional golden blooms at the end of a single hair sticking out of their eye brows. Some of these monsters were weeping moisture. Not dripping over the top or oozing from underneath; but moisture perspiring from within the rocks themselves, like the Russian Orthodox Icon weeping myrrh at the monastery in Blanco. Impossible but true, Ian.

     Sitting with Debbie in the cold springs, I look up into the canopy above us, and then to the waterfalls, water shoots....and down to the silt and minnows and water bugs below and I think of you,

as I always do when beauty finds me. And again in my head I hear murmuring (not unlike the crows); the whisper.....

I wish I could tell you with my human voice, instead of my crow-muttering, that everything I see and feel and do and wonder about...

dream and imagine and puzzle about.....

would be lovelier with you in my woods and by my side.

                                                                                                                         Love, Mom 

 

Memorial Day (archive 5/25/20)

 Memorial Day

(Archived 5/25/20 Day 880)

     Dear Ian,

         Just so you know, I told your cousin Chelsea that you are my hero.

I told her that I have been thinking of the word "memorial" coming from "memory", and another derivative, the word "remember". Funny to think that the word "member' is in there, too. 

MEMBER:   a person, animal, or plant belonging to a particular group; a constituent piece of a complex structure. a part or organ of the body, especially a limb.

Seemed so right to think of you on Memorial Day as all of these things, and also as one a bit more patriotic; more "memorable", so to speak....as someone brave. A WARRIOR...... Yes, we are supposed to remember our warriors, are we not?  

Yet you never died,                                                                                                                                  You never die, You never will. And I am so terribly proud of you in my sadness. You were a warrior to the cause, the real cause of all this spinning craziness. And I am proud.

In this world of ideas and frames, You are real, honest and whole...always were. Still are. It is no surprise to me, at all, that You have gone out to the furthest, most ancient realms of space and time. 

                                                                    To creation times.

When you were here with me, I never saw real fear or hesitance  in your desire to explore life, every edge and corner and nook of it; never faltered when there was a fight or a cause or a principle at stake. It was as if you had just not been born with that one human gene we all have....the one that makes a person unsure of where to put your foot.

You put your foot everywhere.

So I guess all this foot-putting was just practice for where you are now, out there and here in the vastness. Same heart power you have ever had, my warrior son. I am a proud Mom and I know the uniqueness of You...which makes me a little proud of me, too.

       Someday, I want you to tell me what you are learning in the wide open spaces of creation energy at the beginning and end of all things. I was never as brave as you, my warrior boy, but I always loved and saw you as a member of everything I am.

      And I am your consummate fan.

                                                                                  Love Mom