I wrote this a couple of years ago in the winter. Since it was 102 yesterday, it was a salve to go back and read some of what my mind was cooking with the air was cooler....

February 1, 2012 (dead of Winter, Texas style)

55 degrees and foggy-at least a dozen coyotes are howling and barking just across the river in the light of a full moon. Eerie and wonderful. I lay here wondering if my grandchildren who are still dancing around in heaven as we speak, will have the privilege of hearing these wild dogs in the wild Texas night?

I'll tell you, whoever you are that might be digging through the endless volumes I have written and have somehow lit upon this passage, I'll tell you this....

Sometimes the only door I can find is to write; to bear down into what laden my heart in bondage and just write.

Who the hell knows what any of this means; this one life; this brief flash that is MY life. Solomon had it SO right...."Nothing means anything". I have spent so many days trying to dig out the meaning of it all...find the root of the root and the core of the core. I have howled at life just like those dogs are baying. Tipped my head back and sent the heavens my screeching from the pit of my stomach and the bottom of my feet. Nosed around in the ground of it; brushed against every tree and rock that was my search for meaning. When meaning came, it was in a glimpse or a soft murmur; no trumpets or huge flashes of truth, but instead riddle after absurd, crazy riddle. Usually my only confirmation of having found another clue was a rush of odd knowing. A long exhale.

In the meantime life has happened; the years have fallen away like leaves in the wind.

If this were it, if I finished this last page and laid my old head down to die, what parts of my life would I gather up in my heart and pronounce significant? What memories would I take in my one-allowed carry on?

     A sunset on my bike on Arcadia Loop as I rode to get a coke and a bag of salted peanuts alone when I was 12.
     Swimming in the rapids below my house: floating there on my back, with only my nose above water, the swirls of water obscuring my vision.
     Dancing close under the stars and strands of lights swaying in the Texas summer breeze with a sweet cowboy.
     Holding Benjie, and later Bailey, and Ollie, and Henry when I was so lonely my very heart threatened to burst.
     Listening to Emmylou belt out TULSA QUEEN, feeling the chills run through me like an electric current.
     Every vista I saw when I topped a hill on a hike.

    

     That sudden pierce of wonder when I looked at a new piece of art and was again amazed that someone actually thought to do that!
     Holding my Master's Degree in my hand and rereading it so many times because I just couldn't believe I did it.
     The rhythmic sound of my scuba regulator, as I sucked cold, dry air into my lungs gliding in deep places.
     My husband's golden skin and perfect arms.
     How every single thing in my life changed the moment I held Chris for the first time.
     The little mole on his bald head.

     Feeling Mackenzie move inside me for the first time, then move in synchrony with me for 5 more months. The utter synchrony of us.
     The absolute selfish hunger I felt when Ian and I had our days alone together, little fists full of feathers, rocks, and other magical treasures. His deep sleepy hugs.
      Being a Mother and a wife.
     Those moments doing therapy when I knew YOU were leading me, compelling me to speak, or be silent.
      Moments of seeing change.
    



       Birds       
      Really seeing them.



     Kayaking.
     Music. And the sharing of it with other mystics; feeling the truth of GOD in it.
     Em-my soul companion, sister, friend.
     Thinking a new thought and marinating in the vast notions of science, philosophy and literature.     
     Falling in love again and again with authors, poets, artists and rebels.
    Poetry that always pierced me with the knowledge of eternal humanity.
     Pitching my head back in laughter with Irene, Sandra, Sonny, Nita, and my kids.
     Feeling focused when I am creating.
    



     Loving someone, felling that moment of being loved too.

    

Dear God,

I've been moving around this planet for 56 years; an ant among ants, one little cell in the body Earth; a single part and player....your child.

Last week, I went to the hospital and had my uterus removed; They just went in there with Star Wars robotic arms and evicted her. It was such an odd and inhospitable thing for a hospital to do; yet it had to be.

I woke up at 4am the morning of the surgery, heavy with the realization of it. Steeped in wondering and a little worry, I went to the bathroom and stood naked in front of the mirror one more time. I took a good long time and was fairly transfixed by the honest accounting. There she was, my  sweet, old body; better preserved than some, a lot more worn than many, I suspect. Gravity was evident, but I still had some brazen tan lines and if I squinted, I didn't look as old as all that....

There she was....my soul's vessel,  vehicle,  cup. I thought as I looked, "This will be the last few hours I will move whole and un-blemished," without a mark from the the "living" which has been done.

Not true though.

I began to see it. My C section scar-where Chris came wriggling and stretching into the world. It looked like a small "eternally knowing" smile. Looking on that scar, I was transported back to the moment they laid him in my shaking arms and I fell in love with him. It seems to say to me now, "See? wasn't having that boy a great idea?"

A broken fingertip from carrying cardboard boxes full of Lunchables up the stairs on Mackenzie's 5th grade field trip; I remember my finger throbbed all night, which allowed me to sit up in bed and notice how exquisitely beautiful she was as she laid there next to me in that hotel room, caramel-colored hair splayed across her pillow....

Little white scars on my shins that have always looked like tiny minnows underwater. Many times perch have tried to nibble them as I snorkeled. These were proudly attained when my brother Sonny and I played "Chicken" involving sharpened bamboo spears, and one still unsettling incident with a Black Cat firecracker and a coke bottle.

He also broke my nose when I was 11, which doesn't show, but is great fun to remind him of every time we drink together.....

And there is the grand scar on my knee from the day when a skinny 8 year old girl thought it would be interesting to try to shave her legs with Dad's wood plane. I didn't have a speck of hair on my legs, so I have no idea why I wanted to do that.

All of these little tattoos are snapshots of a life lived. All are moments of love and remembrance. All are precious to me. In that naked-in-front-of-the-mirror moment I was reminded by you, God, that I do love my body. It is a great and wondrously-made thing. She has run me 1000's of miles up and down my ranch road by now, past cows and coyotes and rabbits and cedar trees; carried me all about the world, to God-knows-where-all with so many people that I love so well.

She has been a trooper. A good soldier.

I love this particular body; it suits me. I am tall,  allowing me to throw back my shoulders brazenly, when in reality, I was withering with grief and uncertainty inside from some life tragedy.

I have strong legs and hips, which means I was good for having three beautiful babies....and my boobs are not too big.....a blessing and curse, I guess.

Thank you God for these old hands that have so often held another's;
touched babies' cheeks;
held paintbrushes;
examined trees and rocks, puppies and books;
seashells and insects;

For my eyes that have gazed upwards at cathedrals and art;
mountains and comets;
Looked down lovingly on tear-stained cheeks, and 4th grade essays;
They've seen so many, many beautiful things,
and keenly spotted a sticker that needed to be removed from a little pink foot.






I appreciate my ears, by the way.
As  Kurt Vonnegut said, " Music is all the proof I need of a loving God."
But also because I can hear the sighs of my dogs, and even the almost inaudible nuances of
love, pain, fear, and joy in the people I love.





And thank you God for my mind;
for the ceaseless wondering and thinking I have done.......

For every time my head pitched back in laughter at something absurd and irreverent.

For my exceptional imagination and desire that has helped me (sometimes) lose (and always) rediscover You.

In front of this mirror naked, tummy pooching a little, my vanity does sting. Its easy to want my body whole, young, beautiful, unblemished again, but if life has taught me anything, it has taught me this.....there is always some better thing ahead.  You do seem to have given me a great conciliation prize. You have given me another person with whom to cross this new threshold.

I get to feel another set of arms around me besides my own strong ones; another voice in the dark when I am scared. My body rests a bit knowing finally there is someone else there who can share the load that living inevitably offers.

And on this thought I found I could rest a bit.

Mothers Day and the Big Bang

Since college, I have subscribed to Scientific American. I know why. This is a periodical that is not like other magazines, covering Quasars rather than quick meals....Dark Matter instead of dating tips. Don't be too impressed with me. It is not out of some elevated intellect or grasp of complex scientific systems although the layers and layers of mystery in science and astronomy have always been fascinating to me.

No, it is about my Mother.  With Mother's Day coming, I have been thinking about her, and about the dog-eared magazine that I keep near my bath tub for my morning soaks. It is about freedom and choice, and how we defy our own limits. It is about what she taught me.

Like the night sky, it is all about the vastness of things.

I just finished an article called "Cosmic Dawn" in the April 2014 edition. Remarkably, it seems that our lovely universe, which banged into existence 4.2 billion years ago in fire and light and incredible power....suddenly went completely dark after only 400,000 years.....but just briefly.

In other words, the Cosmos took a short nap; just closed her eyes and dozed off for a 100,000 million years. Scientifically speaking, things had to cool down enough for hydrogen atoms to be able to form...they are like ice cream cones...they don't thrive in heat. With the hydrogen ice cream cones came cool, misty, darkness.

It was the long breath before the plunge, as Gandalf said...just imagine all that heat and fury suddenly going silent, dark, still. The dragon went to sleep and stopped roaring.

Gradually little stars began to form that began gobbling up the hydrogen (reionize) and the birth of our Cosmos resumed. You know the rest of the story....and it is a wonderful story indeed. The biggness of the Universe, the time frames, the power and force of destructiveness of creation becomes the picture frame for how I live with the mystery of an unknowable-undefinable-ironically available Higher Power.


So, back to my Mother. She did not READ Cosmo; read about the Cosmos. Fist to the sky in defiance, she fed her brain these mysteries as if to say..."You cannot tell me what I can know." Of all her qualities, loveliness, femininity, dogged individualism and intellect, I loved this most about her. She didn't think like other women. She read Scientific American, Omni, and any technical journal I would throw her way during college. Once I gave her an article on Psychotherapy and Quantum theory. It would put a hyperactive boy on candy bars into a dead sleep; literally bore a person to death.

Not Mom. She called me sometime later so excited; asking all kinds of questions....intelligent, deeply insightful questions about it.

She never did that about a new casserole recipe.

I felt such a bond with her then; I was proud and I knew that we were both different from other women. I don't have many good memories about her teaching me how to cook. She never looked at my report card, or (God forbid) darkened the door of my school for any reason, in fact, she was DOA during most of my normal childhood moments..

She was not a PTA mom. She hated that shit.....

She did teach me something more important. She taught me about the nature of God.

She showed me that reading and pondering over these big, oddly satisfying ideas would always deliver me to the doorstep of God. God in the vastness of space; God the scientist, the mathematician, the dreamer of big things.

To me (and maybe to Mom) God is just saying...."SEE? Isn't this thing I am doing really cool? It's a puzzle!" Honestly, this is what I really think God is.....a giant, immensely intelligent, impossibly and wonderfully complex, ridiculously unknowable....but perhaps lonely power....yearning for us to see. Mom was a rebel about God....hated church..loved Christ....loathed typical shows of faith.....but was a staunch promoter of grasping God in the little things....bugs, birds, flowers.....night skies. Maybe God just needs us to get what is up, the clasp hands and join in the journey of wonder.

I think she was on to something with the way she was thinking.

So, Happy Mother's Day Momma. Thank you for the walks, for the talks; thank you for teaching me to rebel and to challenge what I think I should be. Thank you for never minding if a little girl, holding her hand on a walk down to the river, made endless stops to squat and watch a bug or tilt my little head backwards and gaze into the vastness of the night.......................

And see.

Birding medium rare

Ah, Central Texas......you are an odd mistress. You are one hot mama with a cool spirit. Despite the ridiculous change in temperature in the last two weeks which probably heralds another hot year,  I have begun to throw myself head over heals into birding; and now much more close to where I live......on a lovely stretch of riparian forest south of Blanco. Throw a rock south, you hit San Antonio where this week Fiesta has left a rain of confetti on the sidewalks like Walt Disney's dandruff. Chunk a rock north and you hit snotty Austin, home of all those out-of-towners that are taking over Texas. It does have wonderful hiking trails though, and my favorite Indian restaurant out of a Wind Stream trailer called, aptly, The Garage Mahal. Yesterday I saw a t-shirt in San Antonio by someone who knows....it said...." Keep Austin..." instead of "Keep Austin Weird".

Back to birding in Central Texas. The blush of spring is full-on; I am shocked that the flowers and trees have the nerve to bloom and put on leaves knowing what is around the corner. If you listen carefully, perhaps you can hear an anticipatory groan from deep in Mother Earth as she prepares for another gosh-darn hot Summer. Those warm spring breezes at night just sigh in the tops of my trees.....like they know what is coming.

It reminds me of when my babies had a fever. They would fall asleep as normal, but wake me up in the middle of the night with curls stuck by sweat on the napes of their necks and a desperately hot breath....the true sign of a fever. That is a Texas Summer....... and the birds suffer most of all.

 Last summer I said "To hell" with my well. If Tom Benson can water his golf course all day, I can  water my birds; so I put a garden hose in a bush and let it slow-drip water into my ground bird bath. Fresh, cold, clean, sweet Texas water....all day long. It was about as much as a leaky fawcett, or a runny nose. Just enough to spoil all those exhausted warblers passing through from South America to Canada. they would come to my bath and roll around and splash like fools.....what a sight. Smuggly, I like to think of myself as the USO for migratory birds. I am Bing Crosby crooning and passing out Schlitz. Then on some days, I turned my fountain sprinkleron, way up under my huge octopus live oak that shades a third of my yard. I made sure the water hit the understory bushes,  where the birds came flocking to sit on tiny branches and fully soak themselves. No care for me nearby, or the fat green-eyed stray cat tucked up under the shade of the deck....they just sat and soaked. It was so indulgent, so sexy. One those days I was Joey Heatherton to my birds. Breathy and indulgent. I was handing out candy bars and wet kisses.

So this year, I have lots more birds than usual. Is it because word got around? Is it because I had the proper frame of mind when I mentally call them? Maybe it is the peanut butter suet and oranges I nail to my trees. Last night I saw a lovey female rose-breasted grosbeak, and my painted bunting pair that like to come every summer. I also had about 5 black-throated hummers jousting with their beaks in mid air all around the feeder. I have canada warblers, vireos, summer tanagers, little bushtits and of course cedar wax wings who come in full uniform. 

A portion of:

"The Buried Life

Matthew Arnold

1852

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;                        50
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves--            60
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 'tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;                                                70
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul's subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.

Only--but this is rare--
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,                                               80
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.            90

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

I've been rediscovering my buried life. Seems ages ago, chased like a criminal, some part of me took asylum elsewhere for a while. I guess that happens to us all when we grow up and get  family and a mortgage. This is not a new or unique event and I don't share it to wallow in my self indulgence and super-coolness. I also don't need to tell anyone how much this exile ripped at me in quiet, secret ways. You know that too. It must be one of the universal rules of human nature to....

1. Through the raging furies of youth find your fire.
2. Through the obligations of living....have it dim to a simmer.

 Of course the "Fire and Restless God-Force",  tomed  like a heartbeat; a metronome just softer than the wailing of my busy days. Through the years of children and working....and paying bills, and watching the skin on my bones begin to sag with too many memories and the tug of time. Keeping witness, just below the horizon to the coming and going of friends, a marriage, and at least 5 presidents; visiting me on occasion as goose pimples rising at the lyrics of a favorite song, lines of a poem, the smell of the air in a new place....tiny remembrances of who I was when I was true.

My " fire and restless force" never completely went out. She just simmered....and got very pissed at the world and oozed out in awkward moments and through a serious of odd attachments and fascinations. I would yearn after the life of another, rebel against convention, wait. Seeking some way to feel that feeling of wonder and perfect syn crony again.

It is the truest truth that we are all alone and that you cannot escape death. But listen closer. The true original course is there, thumping; no pounding,  within you. Listen, listen to it and nothing else. Dig deep and then go even deeper and hang onto the whimsies no matter the cost. Gypsy God, Rebel God, no matter what you call the force, love is at the core.

I am so grateful that I did not lose you; and that little whispers of You were always there....

So, this little piece of writing is a love letter and a promise; a pacemaker for my old heart....that I will caste my fears on the rocks and go deeper. If my heart were a harpoon I would shoot it into the sea!

Blue

I've been thinking about the color blue. Do you think there are some universal rules of beauty, or is it all truly in the eye of the beholder? I wonder because it is hard to not respond to the color blue, wrapping us as it often does in the vast canopy of a morning sky or the arcing heave of ocean turquoise, teal, and indigo.
I think we need blue. Perhaps it is an essential visual food that calms us and tempers our edgy human spirit more than we know...like hugging a baby lulls it to sleep without a spoken word.
As with the golden mean, blue might occur in just the correct mathematical porportion to our need. A diet of light. I know some days I need blue.

This little texas lizard perched, almost invisible, on the limestone ledge where Ian spied (and grabbed) him. Flipping him over revealed this amazing peacock blue marking.....
My friend Paul, who is a geologist and naturalist, would tell me the biological imperative this blue is designed to address...and he would be right...but I wonder about that blue. Maybe there is more to it; something more subtle in the blue.
A hidden post card from God?
I've always thought that if I were God, I would want someone to notice my work.........


This purple gallinule is a rare visitor to our parts, and I hear there is one on Town Lake in Austin. We saw him in South Padre, resting from a long migration in a marshy tidal pool. The hues and colors of this bird are impossible to ignore. Somehow, his blue is a command to my heart to look, to be amazed, to acknowledge the big-ness of the mystery that so much color offers. How can he be so blue? How can the tiny number sequences in a strand of his dna be so precisely aimed to create thousands of blue feathers that grab my heart?



And then there is the other blue. When I talk to my clients and they tell me of the sad things that have happened to them; the bitter turns of fate and shipwrecks that human life unavoidably delivers.....they say to me....."I am so blue." We sit in my little office and share their grief like a communion cup and taste it together. It is an honor and a humbling thing for me. Blue is the perfect way to describe it: the way we feel when life slows to a crawl and our pain is a metrinome; when we are forced to stop living on rote and just "be" where we truly are. To me, blue describes it perfectly...and not in a negative way...in the same vast, all-encompassing, unavoidable, sweeping way that the sky and sea and clouds bring their blueness to us.
Maybe feeling blue is our lark song to Mother God.

In my Mother's Garden

Gardners come at it much like other hobbies: it depends. I always notice people's yards: some are precise and manicured; some hapless; some forgotten. Many mean next to nothing...an afterthought or marketing idea. Plants just living along side humans and no connections between.

Not mine. No way. Mine is sentimental; a work in progress. When I moved into my house 14 years ago, I was 8 months pregnant with my youngest son. I was large. I lumbered. A young mother of two and one on the way. I had just lost my Mother a few months before and I missed her with an ache that I still cannot completely describe. She was the person who loved me no matter what; who really wanted to hear what I had to say and who adored my babies as much as I. I thought her a Cherokee princess, as she used to brag that she was; a woman larger than life. Whes she got sick one year after my second child was born, her eyes began to gaze somewhere far away and she slipped away.

I began to consider my own garden, and of course of my Mom's passion for plants. She loved them all, especially the obscure, the tenacious, the unusual. She was the plant rebel. Not the garden club woman, but the thief, the rebel, the messy gardner. Nothing in her yard was as it should be-no trimmed hedges or uniform annuals. She preferred the odd and unruly wild flower; the native shrub that did not often find itself in formal gardens. In fact she often stole plants where ever she happened to find them: at the arboretum or sunken garden. We would be driving along and she would scream for me to stop, and she would dart out of the car and dig up some plant she fancied. She would take them home and plant them and they either grew or languished, depending on their moods, in her little yard in Kerrville. I loved that she stole so many of her plants; it was a testimony of her belief that Mother Earth had her own plans; that the rules we made so silly in the grand scheme of things. As the Aboriginals say, we do not own the land; the land owns us. God must grin at such ardure.

Perhaps I am not such a brave rebel as my Mom. I inherited the spirit but not the wildness of her ways. Seventeen years after her death, I have a lovely, intimate garden. It is made up of plants, bushes, and trees. Bulbs, flowers, and shrubs. Each one came from somewhere that I actually know quite well.

Yellow irises from Mary down the road. She has lovely flowers and a terrible husband. Both show in her eyes. The Fall Asters came from Uncle Bob, just before he died of liver cancer. He smiled more that anyone I know and had wet, relentless kisses for any baby. My Linten Rose I bought. It was the year I was baptised with all my children at a small Methodist Church in Blanco, Texas. I read Annie Lamotte all year and was filled with the Holy Spirit. My lovely asparagus were planted the first year here with the help of my husband. His heart was still wit me in those days. There are so many more gifts of love that ended up in embedded in the good earth of my yard.

My Climatis came from my last home. It sprang up it the middle of a St. Augustine yard the week my Mother died. I call it Mom's flower, because I think it heralded her departure. I could go on and on. My plants are my family tree; my living lineage. They mark my loyalties and are a sure trail from my heart back to each person I love.

Oddly, the only plant that I have ever mistreated was by accident. I unintentionally ran it over with my lawn mower a couple of months after my husband left me for my best friend. She had given it to me. God may not interfer with free will, but He sure knows how to work a clutch.

Late in the evenings, on warm Texas nights, I stroll through my yard under the brilliant moon and look at my plants. I quietly acknowledge each gift and the giver. None were stolen, but all have stolen my heart. I think that my Mom would find me a bit sentimental and sappy, filled with the Cherokee spirit as she was and the native spirit that whispered quiet rebellions to her. As my aging house and garden begin to mirror my own physical changes; indeed as I walk a little slower late at night, I can see the heaving breath of nature as sure as my own breath. My plants are my story of friendship unleashed and a full life lived.