Conjuring

Conjuring

I'm almost free of September.

Almost free from the web of remembrance. The grip of its bonds.

 

Twas indeed better than last year because of this strange way you and I are evolving in life together. Physical and non-physical practicing a new dance. I am allowing myself a new frame of understanding and it has given you back to me. Sort of......

You are still you

Still Ian

still that familiar son, boy, teen, man.

I recognize the essence of you immediately and without a single doubt.

This bold pronouncement is as delicate as the most delicate;

As delicate as a dandelion tuft;

As delicate as a wisp of  the smallest part of a shimmer of sun on wings.

I conjure you up as I walk or pet Phoebe, as I sit on our couch.

I conjure your arm around me or hand in my hand hiking.

Our chins tip north when I look at clouds

And south to examine a bug, 

Both our knees bending us low.

Always you are just behind me

Or beside me.

My memory brings forth your voice and gait, and often the tenor and timber of  your humor and attitude.  It is the low, mature sound of a fully grown man.

I absolutely feel you.

All the way through

and around and within.

I am told that when I think of you, it is because you are already thinking of me.

I love that thought.

Our minds with no barriers.

I don't share you with a girl

Or a job

Or with drugs.

You ask, I am here

I ask, you are here.

Yet this wisp of a dream of knowing....this possibility....is new and challenging to hold.

Some days as easy as a dive into warm water;

Some days I balance on one foot with muscles burning

Just to hold you for one more second.

Then I topple and I am back in this world.

It is I that release you first, strange to say, I go back to this other life.

Memories do not serve. 

They burn and scorch and leave me in ruin.

A while back you and Elijah and I were talking about my need to let you go.

"You have to let me go, Mom, so we can be together in this new way. Those days are over, and they're never coming back. That incarnation of me is finished." As you said this, you showed Elijah an image of you in silhouette, walking away, dissipating into particles and becoming a part of all.

I understood. 

My love allowed me to feel the truth and peace of it.

I felt the joy of you going on a great trip or off to college and on a deeper level I guess I knew that it ok.

This is the fascinating aspect of conjuring. 

We accumulate experiences

Imagine things into form

Incorporate and assimilate and move forward as it is the only way.

Holding onto the pictures and mementos

Turns out to be for naught.

Gone, gone, gone beyond....

Gone forever and beyond.

So step on forward.

Daily now, I point my compass north, bat away memories and cast my net toward the downstream flow of this. I conjure the doorway back to you today, and accept again that there is a Source of all things...

sometimes I feel It's presence above my head. I feel sparkles.

You and I are in and of this Source,

Though I only get to have you through a different type of sight.

And so, My dearest, My Ian,

My son, my friend, my partner in this strange trek.....

Thank you for leading me 

Where I never knew I could go.

                                        Love, 

                                                   Momma

The Contract

The Contract

     I woke up thinking of you, Mom, which is something I don't do very often anymore. Not that don't love you or that the winds of time have erased your mark and measure on me....they have not. 

     Who you are..... 

     Who you were.....are woven into my fabric; into the woof and wharf of me.

     I'm 63 and you would be 102 now. 

     When you were 63, I was 23...I think that was approximately the year you finally got sober.  I am not certain, but I think you were moving to Kerrville to run the Essay House. I was moving to Houston, launching into a new life myself.

     Ten years later at 73, when you moved on to the non-physical, you had pulled yourself together and made a fresh start...with a new home.....all by yourself. Of course I was busy living, too. Busy with a career and kids and all the good stuff.

     I was alight......

     Full......

     Zipping around my world like a firefly while you did all that.

     Odd to think you seemed so serene.

     Was that hard for you? Were you lonely or feeling abandoned? It didn't seem like it at all. Of course I don't remember too much about the final years, ignited as I was by my own purpose and then the birth of my own babies. I do remember loving you so much, and being thrilled by what you had accomplished;

     So glad to have my Mom back; so glad you were sober, that the eyes I looked into were clear and had some sparkle. So glad to see Scientific American in your bathroom and humming bird feeders hanging up again. To have your homemade candy and to talk about art.

     I never told you this, but the people in my life knew I was proud of you; everyone that met you fell under your charm, even Harry Goolishian, as well as Kent and all my friends. You even won the love of Danny, oddly enough.

      I also never told you that I saw that you never lost your loving, open, inquisitive heart...even in the dark years....the essence of you still survived inside all that mess. And in your sober years, when I was no where to be found, and when your other kids had formed their own allegiances (as we all must do) you found others to love and help. I can remember them now, standing at the back of the funeral home, mourning your passing, too.  

     I never told you that I know you were also jealous, hurt and suffered from the ravages of all you lost to alcohol....how it robbed you of getting to be the mother and grandmother you wanted to be. I know you craved this, as I do now. You knew the pain of regret. And yet you bloomed some in those last few years...... the post-alcohol years......

     To me..... the clearest proof that you accomplished what you set out to do in your time here on Earth.

       Your Contract.... as I speculate it to be. 

       If you and I preplanned any of what happened here...

       As I draw my breath.......My heart says yes.

       Tis the sweetest mystery of the soul's work.....That we  create grand missions

       Before Earth.....

       Before physical form......

      But I was late coming on the scene to you, Mom. I was the runt. I can only imagine how tired and weary you were as I came yowling into the family. You had to be dry as a leaf and spent....and yet, despite all that, and the alcohol...

     I always felt wanted.

     I always felt loved.

     I always knew that our souls recognized each other. 

     The good moments were so good, Mom.

      Perhaps that is why within my life of so many regrets and moments of wistful clinging, I feel no regrets about you.

     I do not pine or cling to you....ever. I have such a delicious peace about us as we were and as we are... evidence of the full turn of the dial; evidence that we fulfilled our contract to one another. I know this.

     Now as I imagine what you were "about" here on Earth, I can see the pattern in your fabric....... a solitary soul, more inclined to turn inward and seek, than to cleave to others. As a Mom you always seemed to be pushing me to see the beauty of the little things just before me....

     To press my nose against the glass....

     To see beyond the veil.....

     To go deep....

     To ask the odd question.....Never in words, but by modeling.....you nudged me to the edge of ideas to become a rebel, skeptic, free-thinker, wonderer......

     You were often terribly bad at being a regular Mom, but perhaps that was the point of

     The Contract?

     Pulling against the reins of married life and convention; not fitting in.

     Maybe that was in your Contract, too... Maybe you said:

     "I'm going down there and not fitting in. I'm going to feel out of place, unloved, lonely.   I'm going to feel the deepest love of my life for my children, but will also feel jealous and unworthy and I will run away into the bottle. I am going to almost die from disappointment and the feeling of being lost. I won't ever really fit in, and then I will come to find my true self at full stop in an alley in San Antonio, drunk and alone. As I always planned. Every piece of my structure torn down, but the essence of my soul still intact. Then I will come back, brick by brick....not to perfection, but to myself. Authentic. In a world of humans who never take the deep dive, I will...and I will swim to the surface anew."

     Momma, 

Our contract was sound,

 Sharp edges and all and

     I am the better for it. 

     It was preparation for my current season.

     I thank you for showing me how to go deep.....

     Then swim to the surface and breath.....

     And to know in my heart the softer song

     Of the gypsy way.

    

the Mission

The Mission

 I did it, Ian.

Carried 2 bags of your favorite things on a hike to the Arctic.

Decorated a white fir tree in your honor, hiking to a perfect spot on the side of a sunny berm, facing north. Draped her branches with bits of beads, strips of fabric from your work t shirt, 

Feathers, 

Coins, 

Pictures,

Even your truck keys, 

UIL ribbons and baseball medals. 

Precious things.

Irreplaceable things.

But things nonetheless.

I put my shoulders back and decided that, if I was going to have a "letting go" ceremony, it should be as outrageously over top as possible.

Just like you.....

That's right....Go to the top of the world, jump on an obscure mining road, and walk a couple of miles into the middle of everything.....

and then dare to look even further north....north of north of north.....find a small but perfectly situated white Fir tree......

                                                                          

nondescript, 

solitary, 

  and so young.....

More life ahead than behind, just beginning to start her ascent into the sky, I then decorated her with you.

A Canada Jay came down ad pronounced himself  suddenly and very loudly, and I knew you were there.......

And I knew you were pleased by the display.

 I breathed all that in,

Said goodbye

 And walked back south.

Back at our home.

Its been some weeks now, and I see what Marie meant. She said letting you go would allow you back in,

But first was a cleansing.

I felt like I had the flu, achy, tired and sick;

Then gradually felt a loosening; a quickening, a slow exhale. Changes happened slowly, like gradually focusing my eyes to a new spectrum. I began to sense you more around me; to think less of our other life. Like particles evaporating, the you that I knew before began to disappear, as the you that is now swelled around me.

Stuckness has gives way to a quiet and unmistakable sense of movement, oddly, more external than inside. I have abandoned trudging along the rocky shore and have stepped back into the river, lifted my feet ......let myself float. Look ahead.

And I am once again being carried downstream.

It feels like the right direction.

They say everything good is downstream, Ian.

I don't know about that but.....

I smile at the thought of that tree growing for 100 years to fruition and carrying bits of you with her, and this gives me a satisfaction I cannot even describe.

 It is just right.

                                                                 Love, 

                                                                                   Mom

The Learning Time

The 
Learning Time

In the other time

In the happy time;

Time of sticky fingers,

pillows that smelled of sweaty cheeks and kisses.

The buzz of life being lived

And my skin full of touches and hugs of small people.

In the other time

When I was more happy, life was less vivid than now.

Bleared and muted by life being lived.

Not crisp and intense like now;

Not shrill or intense or sharp-edged like now....    

Less intricate.

My heart all full with filling and no yearning

To draw my gaze.

Maybe that is the point

The real point of now...

Of all this sudden intense looking;

All of this seeing.

Maybe this is the moment of reckoning; of another birth.

As I walk through this field and my eyes are drawn to smaller and more intricate things.

Hungry to see whatever I can see, to distract me from  

Clinging   to the other time 

And find what still is good on this Earth.

Every tiny bug, every winged and crawling bit of life 

Finds my eye

Captures me 

Seems important to note.

Step off the path 

Into the weeds

Avoid the flowers and webs

Be a gentle visitor. 

Kneel down

Kneel down really close and feel the other life drift away

Away and gone. Another story  and another time.

Where I used to see just a thistle 

Purple and straight

As I passed by on my way to chase a little boy down....

Now I see the purple thistle with a green crab spider 

Waiting to snare God knows what.....

And two beetles boring into the pollen up to their asses 

And one of my golden bees;

Big and beautiful spinning in a circle,

And the acrid smell of  the bloom rotting, dropping the fading lavender fronds to the grass below.

What is all this new precision in seeing for?

Look deeper

Look deeper 

Look deeper

What am I looking for?

Desire for beauty is the velvet cord

Pulling me back slowly

Pulling me back slowly

To the desire for life.

And then to life.

Mourning, that threatens to squeeze my heart to a full stop,

Squeeze my heart to silence.....

Is rattled by moments of absurd and seemingly pointless curiosity

It is an electrical shock, 

It is life support.

This is the Learning Time

The time I will remember more keenly

When my eyes and heart will align and become a laser

A microscope, a telescope, a portal.

 I am snagged by optimism

That after all it might be worth it

To stay and see who else

Might be be found in the purple thistle.

Tree Grace

 Tree Grace

Dear Ian,

The  last  logs are burning down this morning in my fireplace. It has been a  brutally cold week. I've watched the snow come and go twice; seen patterns of ice and frost form, melt, reform, and disappear. Sometimes a crack appears on the surface of a melting puddle, displaying half-rotted leaves and organic matter, framed like a perfect art piece.. As it refreezes, delicate new designs form in the fissures and cracks.

It is as if someone has drug a cold finger

Slowly along the surface                                             

Sketching lines for the frost to follow.

Snow humps up in my dry river bed on top of the ice, for some reason ; it seems to undulate like creatures alive and moving under a blanket. Round areas of mud and pebbles are magnified, and everywhere the colors have changes from the taupe and dead grey of winter to cool shades of azure, lavender, and a most pale French blue, shocking against the cobalt tones of mud and exposed damp wood. 

Everything seems to inhale and hold an icy breath.

Even the clouds have surrendered all warm tone.

 

And as if tired

Of all this cold

Sky breaks open briefly;

And the sun butters everything...

The ground

The trees,

Frozen puddles,

Dripping eaves.

The world is slowly beginning to thaw. 

Earth beneath is oozing and seems oddly warm, alive, moisturized. 

I've gone through 3 years of firewood in a week; two whole cut-up trees and some additional kindling accumulated from tidying up my lawn. 

The first tree fell two years ago in the woods headed down to the river. Chris and Payden came and cut it up for me. I remember how good it was to to have them here. 

I remember wishing you were out there helping too, hanging out with your big brother; voices and laughter rising like steam from the woods. That particular tree heard your laughter for 23 years....she was probably 80 years old. Maybe your sounds are logged in her bark and branches?

 As I think of her, and you and Chris and the proximity we all shared, I marvel that she is now a very fine log being lapped by flames; keeping my living room warm this morning.

The second tree threatened to fall this last year, dropping slabs of bark and branches suddenly...... even whole limbs along the path down to our river. I don't know what killed her; maybe age....too much water (or not enough), but she pushed her remaining energy back into the ground and died very quickly.

My friend Bill (who once held your small boy hand as you gave him a tour through the yard), proudly rendered her into fine triangular pieces in exchange for a haircut. He was really proud to help me. He loved you. I can see the two of you walking under her so long ago and wonder if she knew you'd be gone before her.

I miss that tree. She was one of my favorites, standing just to the right of my path down to the river...roots "contra posto";  one long knee draped over another cross legged, making her appear to stagger. She hugged a huge rock for dear life as kids looked beneath her for Easter eggs, and as kayaks were dragged across her bottom parts.

Dying more suddenly, her logs were fresh and moist and green. 

In my fireplace, she burns slowly, making pops and hisses....

Both give unexpected warmth in their final act of giving.

I stopped writing just now to go outside and feed the birds, and noticed how the light reaches in the holes my two trees left behind in the sky. I think for a moment of the first words you gave me through Paula three years ago....

"Everything was set in motion before time."

There are gifts in the passing of precious things.

Trees die, 

Ice storms wreck havoc 

Young men and neighbors come to help...even my English friend Jamie fixed my well so I can take a shower again. 

Gifts are somehow strategically put into place, specifically, perhaps.....for me.

Hidden like Easter eggs

More manna than chocolate candy.

God keeping the engines tuned,

Giving back when life gets taken away.

Most days I miss them, these small graces. Most days I am too buried in the minutia of life or in the weight of grief, to notice their presence. They do not populate my mind as much as they should. Perhaps the coldness and relentlessly dismal weather is whispering for me pause to clasp hands together and bow in gratitude to two trees, some friends, my living son, and my son beyond living.

And as the snow melts, and my fire burns down, and my water comes back on, and I take a shower to go meet a friend, I think of the odd synchrony of all this.

Beauty finds me and I am grateful.

I don't feel so alone.

Even though most of the people I once loved have drifted away, my real tribe is still blanketing me.....A colorful and funny-shaped crochet throw 

A tapestry 

The serendipity of

Trees that knew when to fall.

For me and for those who loved you

And are left to go on alone.

                                                                                            Love.

                                                                                                    Mom

The Immigrant

The Immigrant

 Dear Ian,

Week long ice storm, and as you know, your Cousin Courtney and her fiancé Kevin were here for a few days, skidding in from Wimberley and harboring here with me. I haven't really been around her in years, since the days when the two of you played. 

Since that time in the world.  

She is a lovely person, but it was like meeting a stranger. 26 years old and moving on with her life and her career and the promise of love and family to come. 

It reminded me of the chasm. 

The two continents of me.

There is my homeland; where I came from.

Geographic memory sparks it to life in my dreamtime...

Memories of my noisy house, children running and making the messes that I would die to see again. The land of you, Chris, Kenzie...... Courtney and her sisters...seasons when we all gathered at the coast and she ate oysters raw and you ate crackers and spray cheese...holding the sacrament of them high in the air for the gulls. Sun burned cheeks and beach walks  at dusk looking for crabs. You tied a chicken leg on a string to lure them out. The smell of sand and sunscreen and sweaty boy like incense.

 Like love. 

It's a long ago world now......

 

 A completely different language, 

Another life.

 

Talking to Courtney as we stayed inside and watched the wind howl, snow

blowing and swirling....I could see her young face in her older face but

I found I could not go there, to talking about those childhood years together.

 It is too unsettling. 

Too vast a chasm to traverse with her.

Dangerous to let myself draw a breath from that air. 

My new land is gradually taking form; the sand is filling in the years, as I know it must. The days and weeks and months and years ticking by without you have changed my landscape, without you here to breath your essence into this iteration; to add your noises and essence to my talks with Courtney. Nor your laugh. You are not here to talk about your wedding plans or career or to laugh at the things happening in our world.

The stampeding of time is happening without you to see or hear it with human senses; new music, new tv shows, new politics...that you and I will never share or talk about. Your brother is over 30, will likely get grey hair soon, and Kenzie is following, too. I meet stupid new people that I cannot make fun of with you, because you are still back in my home world, or you are in another world. 

I am an immigrant, slowly becoming accustomed to a new home, a new language for things. It odd that I know so many people now that never knew you. Bridget, Kevin, Jean, Beth, Carrie, Kathy, Hudson. They only know you through the eyes of my pain.

For a while, I tried to pull you forward with me to this place and keep the memories in my daily path. It was like speaking my native tongue in a foreign city, or cleaving to old traditions from the loneliness of leaving my best life behind. I hoped it would preserve who we were, my little family, in suspended animation or something.

But even this is beginning to slip away now. I made a blackberry cobbler yesterday and hardly even thought of you, and except for a few moments when feeding the chipping sparrows, you were not in my mind as it snowed.

 Not so much. 

hardly felt you at all, even though I love you as fiercely as the furious cold outside.

It is just to hard too live in two lands all the time. 

Too sad. 

Too fucking painful to call up the images.

Too much ache with longing. 

So I have dug a mote, I have filled it with deep azure water;

 I have put away some of the pictures,

 I don't listen to your videos or touch your clothes anymore.

 I avoid your closet and cannot stand to let my eyes meet yours in any of the photos that are scattered about our house. I am not letting myself dream of our home world anymore.

 Who knows why or for how long this will last.

Maybe, eventually I will find a way balance the love of my two different lives, like porcelain plates on sticks above my head. 

Maybe I will be that old lady on her death bed,

Who surrenders reality and retreats

Back to the beauty

And bliss 

Of her native tongue;

Her past

The Homeland...As she rides the final ship off and away.

                                                                                                     Love,

                                                                                                      Mom