The Soup

The Soup

Dear Ian,

    

I am writing to say things change.  

Things change. 

Its December, as you well know...... the witching month; the one I dread the most. I approach it with a mix of longing and loathing.  I have felt the weight of it laying on my heart again. The holidays are like food that I crave that has been laced with poison, and I damned well know it. And I kind of want to eat it anyway because used to be my favorite thing......my favorite time, you see? My house full of the people I loved the most..... Excitement at full throttle with the three of you and all of us infected with the spirit of Advent. 

Full throttle Christmases.......over the top.......caprice and excess all draped in too many lights....it was my heart's delight.

Anyway, things change. 

I am doing a little better every year since you transitioned. I finally tore the old puzzle apart, scrambled the pieces, cut off some edges and glued it back together in a strange new way. I trimmed off the parts that didn't fit and pushed them back together with equal measures of desperation and hope. 

I have come to accept now that even if I am on the periphery of my own kids' lives, we still love each other and we are figuring out where we all fit. I have new people who have come along and seem to really understand me. The surprise of that has been huge.

I have even felt the glimmers of Christmas Spirit; with my neighbors, with Kent at the movie ELF wearing our green hats; with Nita at the Christmas fair....seeing dogs in costumes and such. It doesn't hurt so much when I see happy children because I have puzzle-pieced Hudson and Coy and TW over the holes that you left. Your brother and sister are amazing, grown humans and I love how they have turned out. 

Things change.

New customs have fallen into my life like soft, quiet snow over the landscape. Mariana and Kam mess up my house the way you kids once did; I find leggos under my couch and it is lovely. Neighbors eat my cookies and I am making new stockings because Kenzie is coming home for a day! Chris and I hang Christmas lights. It is a bit solumn but always so magical....and that custom is absolutely for you, Ian. He does that in rememberance and of this I am grateful.

I had a bad night Saturday because I found out about a girl named Madison who used to date or sleep with you. She even came to your funeral and gave Michaela a hard time, because I think she still loved you. It twisted me up pretty bad all night and sent me into a spin of "what ifs" and memories of our terrible last days. 

I was drawn down again into the place I cannot go.

Churning and awake most of that night and then wilted the next day.

But in the morning I did something different. I stayed home and mended; just let my wound be; I asked my tribe of souls, including you,  to just help me. (I think I begged at one point).....

And then I took a nap.

Naps help when things are changing.

After all of that, last night Bridget and Jacie came over for a last glass of wine before she leaves for England. I usually host them; they eat a little food and drink whatever wine is in the fridge. My open wound was still there, I was aware of it, but somehow if felt different. I could feel it like the mouth of a cave, with cold are coming out.

There was an almost imperceptable shift in me. Instead of stacking the pain of Bridget leaving on top of my December horror-show-gloom.....I suddenly could not feel bad. In fact, this sense of warnth began to come and the chill of my pain could not find purchase. I could not feel it.

All I could feel was LOVE.

It was everywhere, all through my house. It seemed to even change the color of the room. It was as if it had been poured in through the chimney or the heater vents....It effused everything. 

Perfect, palpable, sweet-as-water-from-a-spring. 

Suddenly I could see the gift of these girls. It was as miraculous as how the three of us had met to begin with 5 years ago. Bridget gathering me up and getting me walking,,,,,

literally (and without her knowledge) binding my wounds and setting my broken bones as we walked endless miles through the ranch. Sarcasm and dogs and exercise.

Jacie loving and loving and loving me as we watched endless hours of Game of Thrones and snarked at life like two angry crows. 

Fists to the sky and chests heaving at the unfairness of our precious ones being taken too soon. Letting me love her in her darkest days after her Mom left. 

Somehow in the churn of all of this, they became my daughters.

Last night when we were saying goodbye,  it no longer mattered that Bridget is leaving or that Jacie is still stuck in a shitty place or that I am old. It did not matter that we come from different continents and vastly different times.  Everything else is just the stories we live. 

Things change. 

Stories change. 

Mine has and so shall theirs. 

I went to bed content and at peace. My tribe of souls were a witness to the love of these great women. They were around us all night and they stayed with me as I slept. swimming and rejoicing with me in the soup of life. Happy for me, I think, and excited that I found a different door out of the morass of grief again, even if just for a moment, and happy that I could let things change.

And things do change

Except love, it is the constant.

                                                                            Love, 

                                                                                        Mom

The Buffet

The Buffet

When Trapper got sick this week it sprung a coil in me. I reached out to everyone I knew for prayers 

And they all prayed - even Marcus.

Its a  strange thing, prayer.....I don't know precisely how it works. 

So much of what I believe have changed; I think I am done with church for this life.....

My days of sitting in a pew are over.

And yet I pray.

Every time I walk, I look to the heavens, or to the clouds, or the canopy of trees with light shining through. I look to the heavens and the blooming of the dawn and a calmness overcomes me.

 I feel a thunderbolt of "Otherness" arrive. I feel a great, expansive Source. I let it fill me and reset me, and point me in the right direction for another day. I breath it in and I am renewed, grateful, filled.

Surely this too is prayer

And the reliance on this power may be a sort of organic faith.

Yet, sometimes my old ways awaken in me again.

When Trapper got sick,  I pulled out all the stops and brought in the big guns....I went back to deliberate, old fashioned Biblical prayer. I asked Source directly to intervene on his tiny behalf. Instead of relying just on the buffet of delicious nature to help me, I began to order directly from the menu:

" God....Source...Ian, Momma, Glen....all of you who keep an eye on me and mine, please help Trapper." I talked directly to the cells in his little body, to his immune system, to the very neurons and white blood cells fighting for his health. I prayed for the hands of the doctors and the people helping him, especially his Momma...."Don't let them miss anything!"

I called forth all the mighty forces and it felt good.

It is like being bilingual;

Like people I have heard of who speak mainly English, but dream in their native tongue.

Except for me it is the reverse. 

Mostly now my native language, the natural world, prevails. I feel a member of a vast community of souls, 

And we are all Source belying the notion of a Father God, above and away from us.

Pieces of us are here on Earth walking around in meat suits while other pieces vibrate at a different frequency around, yet are still so near....around, between and beyond. We are many and we are One, woven of the same fabric and there for one another.

A family, a whole bucket of energy all together, moving in a dynamic sway and expanding through the fuel of love.

It may sound  like a wacky way to describe this circus of a thing we call life, but it works for me and it gives me great peace.

Yet still......

Yet anyway...... in this urgent moment I reverted back to my old religion; my old way of asking for help and turned it into a direct plea, once again like a child to her father, rather than to my Source of souls. 

And by goodness, that is ok, too.

Here's a funny thing.

In my loving and worrying about Trapper, I wanted my old memorized prayers that I relied on for most of my life. Not just the Lord's prayer or the 23rd Psalm, but two specific long prayers that I used to repeat over and over when I was desperate with worry for Ian. I needed those words again, but I could not remember the words.

It was frightening. I felt frozen and lost, like losing an important phone number.

I asked for them back.

Suddenly, the two prayers popped into my mind like an old song. I knew them instantly and entirely, without a word missing. The entire verses found my tongue and poured forth again and it was lovely and delicious.

Then is when I knew.

Then is when it became clear.

All these ways of knowing, of thinking and of grasping at the unknowable God, elusive and quiet and often so still....they are all true and ok.

Source is God.

Source is the Jewish God.

Source is Allah and the Great Spirit, and Abba and Jahweh.

Source is undefinable and will never be completely known or perfectly defined by any religion or sect.

Source is a particle and a wave, as a physicist might muse.

That is the point.

To be elusive is to be sought;

And Source desires that we seek.

As long as a small creature, such as myself, is willing to wonder and read and ask and search for Source, she will find Them.

It's ok, no matter how or where I go to get my fill, to dreink the magic in-for me it is lately the dawn sky-but it might be a pew or a Bible.

As long as I do it with love, I will be heard. 

Sometimes I will raise my arms to the sky and pull from the buffet, and dance in a community of souls. Sometimes, I will plug my cord  directly into the socket and I will be charged and solace will be found that way. It's all good.

Seek and ye shall find,

Ask and it will be given.

As the God of my parents would say.

And this little love note I raise up to Source......

Thank you for helping Trapper and his Momma......

Whoever, and whatever, and where ever the heck You are.........

I do love You.

Messiness

Messiness

The woods down the road from my house are a mess. I walk along in the August morning, before heat begins its torment, and I look up into the canopy of oak and elm; into the dense body of cedar and such,

 and I see no order.

The upper branches twisted and knitted together, like clasping fingers of really old hands. Many are broken off from last February's deadly freeze, when the weight of ice was so great that branches, and sometimes whole trees, gave way and snapped off. I could hear the sound from inside my house, like artillery fire. 

Whole sides of grandfather cedars calved off and lay down in a royal bow along the road, where they still lay dead. Now in summer's heat the trees are a mangle of their history, as if each one is trying to eek out it's own spot, tight with the others, like clasped hands.

They stand together in a tangled hug.

Underneath is an assortment of rocks and rubble, some honeycomed and ancient-looking; some recently broken from the heat, or the weight of a passing cow's hoof. Leaves, stiff and crumbly are taking their time turning to soil. Switch grass and blue stem lean over dry and tired. 

I remember them green and vertical in the Spring....

And before that....In February I would walk here, bundled up and breathing frost.  I squatted down to take pictures of this same grass blanketed in ice.

It's no wonder nature is a mess.

As I walked today, I thought about what the order should be...Oaks uniformly reaching to the sky;  Cedar round, manicured,  and as well defined as a topiary. Nature like nice movie, the Disney kind. But nope, not so.....A movie of this place would be more of a  Tarantino, full of shocks and irony.

Regular order makes no sense in my Texas...what with crazy unexpected cold spells, rain freezing on anything it can grab....rain that in the summer refuses to come and then comes with wild winds....torrential  and damning....

Plants that, if they could, would shiver at their lot.

And then with a heave, summer comes.

Heat.

Heat that brings life to a standstill, like a great moaning inhale, and drives every godforsaken living thing to the shadows, and under rocks. Heat that cooks the very surface of everything and puts life into slow motion for weeks as the color drains from grass and tree, We all wait for water, reserve our resources and hope for the cool of night, or just a cloud.

Some ways of life beg for disorder; for things to stand together in a riot of meagerness;  lean into each other......trees and briars and tiny plants too numerous to name; so dry that they are brittle as glass; so thirsty that only their roots hold moisture.

Disordered...still...waiting....

Yet I think it is really not an absence of order; its more like the math of things is bigger than we can easily see. You must step back and take the birdseye view, look down and see.....

Roots run deep in a labrynth of life beneath the still, dusty ground.

Entangled branches give shade and support.

Even fox scat shares moisture with insects and smaller creatures who feed on it.

Limbs broken off by last Winter's violent frost exposes pulp that seems to suit lichen very well.

Today, I saw a scrub jay  tilting and gliding effortlessly between the dry broken branches. It was energetic and radient. Somehow this fellow is finding food and moisture and seems to be making a good living. Another mystery.

Disorderly order prevails....

Spiders will always keep a clean house. 

Leaf cups will always grab the dew. 

Life will live in whatever manner it can.

Most trees will live to see another Fall; another rain; another Winter. The dead ones will slowly collapse in the arms of their neighbors over dozens of years, and beetles will relish and make a meal of them. 

Fox will adjust her pallet and fill up on grasshoppers instead of mice, who have learned to hide in the cool of cracks and crevasse

Grasshoppers will get fat because doing the job of cleaning up dry stems,  full of protein. Blue stem won't mind because six inches in the dirt, their roots are keeping the lights on for the next wet season. 

This is improvisational jazz, not a simple melody. 

I try to understand and listen with my heart and look with my third eye. I remember that whatever rhythm moves the clock of nature in my Texas, it is probably more vast than we can imagine.

So I just listen, and I look.....and I am a witness...until time brings around a greener season....

To this bountiful and beautiful mess.

   

 

 

Tu me manquez

You Are Missing From Me

 I don't know what to do with this feeling "tu me manquez" except to embrace it and write it down. Like a person going through a psychotic break with a scribe walking along taking notes on a clipboard, I am both. 

There are two worlds for me now; the world of regularity, of humanity and all my measurable time. People I have known, objects, symbols, sounds and familiar stories. It is the place of all my time and memories of you. I wake up and go to sleep and go about the business of the usual in this world but increasingly, I am living in a lucid dream from which I want to wake up. Everyone I know and everyone I love is here, except for you, Ian, and it feels all wrong. It feels foreign. 

Your world  is one of otherness...maybe it is an ether..... it is where I think you might be now. What I know of it is that it is a place of feelings and clues, of upside down reality with no before and after, only a bigness that can only be known by feel, not by fact. Every day at some point, I try to push my hand through and into it, searching for you. The more I think about the nature of this realm, the more I seek to know it, the closer and larger it comes. 

Living among most people feels uncomfortable now; I stand apart. Except for the few sweet people that lean in and hold onto me, I have let most everyone go, at least in my mind. Thankfully, they don't know or feel the absence of my spirit, and I don't need for them to read this vacancy. I am no longer engaged because these regular humans in this regular world have committed the crime of getting to continue to live and love while you and I cannot. At least not here.

But as my heart has shifted away from these people and this life, in nature have come the surprises. Last winter when you left, the coldness was a small comfort. It seemed apt. When Spring did come I hated it. How could Spring come with you not here? How could it dare do that....I wanted the final winter of your life to last forever. Then came this spring

     

Letting the Little Ones Go

                 Dear Ian, 

  I've been painting the rails

 On the front porch.

Along the way,

 pulling out the old staples you and Chris punched in 

To hold a thousand Christmas lights 

For the last 20 years.

It stung to pull them out

Knowing you guys put them there

In the service

Of "Christmas-ing our home.

I remember

So well

You and Chris's feet thumping on the roof like reindeer 

I remember your generous spirits.

How beautiful the light were

And still are 

As Chris carries on the tradition.

The two of you put in those staples

But with a determined will

 I pulled them out anyway, 

Trying to

Renew things,

Even just a porch. 

 It was a will in me to let change happen

 Maybe a promise to myself

 To move past the time

When seeing a bent staple 

Can still conjur pain. 

To breath;

To let some other time come.

While painting,

 I  also encountered dozens of tiny spiders  

Living in the armpits of the boards. 

There was safety there, 

And plenty of insects for them, 

Until I came along with my brush. 

Some were bigger- the size of pellets or peas-intricately colored and shaped. 

They reminded me of small robots, 

Fierce and menacing to an ant, 

I would expect, 

But embarrassingly cute to me. 

The more intriguing ones

 were as tiny as specks of dirt; their life only made obvious

 By a slight wiggle or flutter of movement. 

The smallest spiders I have ever seen. 

I also found their egg sacks; white dots deposited 

On the end of stiff and vertical chitin stalks, 

As if someone had stood up tiny Qtips in symmetrical lines.

As best I could,

 I moved them, 

Painted around them 

Or shooed them away before pulling down their houses. 

They will rebuild, I'd wager. 

I probably painted over a few, for which I am sorry.

I thank them all, 

My intrusion surely made things a little harder for them,

But we all must accomodate.

So, I am writing to say

I pulled out all the staples

But I tried to let the little ones 

Go on making a living.

My way of saying

I stand for life

And I am still trying to let you go live yours.

                                                  Love, 

                                                                     Mom

                                                                                                               

 

Fishing

 

Fish Bliss

I have this fish tank.......

I have had a few over the years, big ones;

Smaller ones; a salt water one;

Fresh water mostly.....outside off my porch and inside, tucked away in a nook in my livingroom. I have had one in my life since I was a little girl, they are essential to me as a sofa or table. Over the years I have experimented with all sorts of fish; finding the right number and type to live together, mixing big and little, colorful and camoflaged; solitary and schooling kinds.

Once I had a Lungfish. He was eel-ish shaped, and had the ability to come to the surface for a gulp of air from time to time. He ate little discs of compressed fish flakes, taking the pellet in his mouth as if playing the harmonica,  he would swim in loops and carry his prize like a puppy with a biscuit. He taught me that fish actually play pretty much all day long.

Crawfish are best to get as babies. I would find one living a solitary life under a rock in the river, snatching it up while still translucent and grey to be dropped  in my tank. At first seemingly confused by how clean the water is, soon they come to busy themselves cleaning the bottom of the tank with what seems like a 100 arms. They grow and start turning red, orange, purple, blue and magenta under the neon light. I bend down to look at the colors close up as they point their claws at my face like swordsmen. Then I turn them loose back into the river before they are big enough to cause real mischief.

I wonder if they remember the glass tank captivity?

My besties these days are weather loaches, two little guys who are long and mottled, very social, and seem to enjoy human hands especially. Often, one will crawl into my cupped hand at the surface and stay there peacefully, or circle my fingers cleaning them. When they eat, they make a furious slurping sound and whirl like dervishes around each other pretty much all day long. Legend is, they were used in Japan to predict the coming of a Tsunami by suddenly jerking and generally acting weird as storms move int and the barometric pressure increases. 

Every child that comes to my house pulls up a stool to let the loaches kiss their fingers. I don't tell them it is about the oils and salt on their fingers, it is just about kisses and friendship.

This morning I am watching them especially closely because I have just cleaned their tank. The slighly yellow, somewhat pissy water has been replaced by fresh, sweeter stuff that the tank light shines pinkish blue. My fish are swimming with new exuberance. The little neon tetras and gourami are exploring new placement of rocks and plants, even the tiny striped dania seem intrigued. It makes me happy to give them a freshen-up.

After changing the water, great care is taken to make an archway of sorts out of three slabs of limestone that Danny and I got 37 years ago for our first tank. Fish enjoy swimming around, between and under this archway and my pleichostomus loves to hang upside down under there sucking on algae. Every tank must have a pleicho.... once we had one that grew to at least half a pound. He was an ancient dinosaur of a fish, scaly and seeming to be in the wrong epoch. Alligatorish...

I then arrange my rocks. There are slabs of toothy chrystals, symmetrical and shining; striped granite discs from Puget Sound that Kim and my kids and I gathered at Deception Pass years ago;  big chunks of native chert, broken cleanly to reveal a godseye that I position to stare right back at me from the water. I take care to arrange rocks and plants a little different every time; 

Kim's granite discs,

My pretty chrystals;  

Hudson's clam shells

And  of course Ian's marbles........dropped in like rosary beads.

I have two special rocks, one pocked marked and denim blue; probably volcanic, as is the black lava chunk that sits beside it. They are my Mom's, from her tank over 60 years ago.  

I think of her most often when I clean my fish tank. She worked  the night shift at a nursing home. I would be getting up to go to school, usually laying on the carpet in front of a space heater next to my brother, sleepy and fighting for the warm spot. She would still be in her white uniform, at the end of her work shift. One of the first things she would do when she got home was to turn on the fish tank light and feed her guppies. She would move toward the tank and every guppy would move in unison to her, conditioned to associate that white uniform with food. If she walked fast, they'd follow her every move in a mass of little wriggling color. It surely was something to see.

Sonny and I would watch her and the funny behavior of the guppies.

This turns out to be one of the really good memories of my Mom.

So now I sit and watch my own fish in their new, cleaner world and appreciate the fresh color of the water and the swish-hissing of a cleaner aireator blowing out 1000's of colorful bubbles as the loaches twist and wiggle in them, like pashas in a spa. Even my oldest fish, a non-discript orange barb seems a little friskier, bent spine, ragged fins and all.

I can be wistful when I consider the blue lava rock.

Something so small draws up every memory of my Mom all at once; how important her fish were to her; how she treasured them and yet was woefully discontented with life. She probably felt trapped too, like a creature from a different time dropped into a kind of glass tank herself. Yet that is not the entire story of Mom. She found her bliss nonetheless.

She loved her yard and weeping willow tree; her humming birds; 

Taking walks with us down our country road...... squatting down low to consider a beetle or unusual plant; tipping her head back to see the clouds.

And yes, she loved her fish. Indeed she did. A love she passed along to me. I wonder if she knew that in these small rituals she taught me to find my contentment in the little fishes?