Category Archives: Art Works

Not a Good Time to Place Bets

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We are on a bridge of uncertainty and do not know what is on the other side. Mr. Rogers told us to look for the helpers. We are learning we are the helpers.

. . . . .

Admit it, you’re not sure of anything right now. Okay, maybe YOU are sure of something but most of us aren’t, and a lot of us would not agree with your version of things because even we introverts are getting a little stir crazy and a good argument would cut through the fog of not knowing. There is a desire to violate.

For me that would be something like drinking a coke. Not really blasphemous, only slightly harming myself. No god will destroy the world because I drank a coke or will turn me into a pillar of salt because I looked at the destruction.

Okay, it’s not a proven destruction yet. We don’t really know what it is, and not many of us believe there is a vengeful god wreaking havoc on us because we don’t fit its description of obedient servants. We did this on our own and mythology does not serve us well.

What is real is that only a few people are overarching leaders with sharp minds, compassionate souls, and the ability to pull best actions out of scientific facts—and we need such people now. (Saluting you, Dr. Fauci.)

Our administration is not equipped—mentally, emotionally, morally—to deal with a pandemic. They stumble blind in a maze of ignorance, arrogance, and surprise that a deadly inconvenience is disrupting their presumptions they made America great again. They have put us in peril.

We are on a bridge of uncertainty and do not know what is on the other side. Mr. Rogers told us to look for the helpers. We are learning we are the helpers. 

We have become creative, turning to our friends and neighbors, and returning to ourselves—some of us perhaps going through the pains (and joys) of self-discovery and taking a fearless moral inventory for the first time.

We reach out and have come closer to others by not being able to touch each other. We slow down, turn to the arts, and try not to violate others, not to slice through the fog as a defense against not knowing.

We do not know when it will end, we do not know how many will die, we do not know how many others will be weakened, we do not know who is in trouble, who will disappear, who will have food for themselves and their families and who will not, who will be destitute, who will wake and say “I am not who I thought I was.”

We do not know if lessons will be learned and kept that will change how we live, if we will stop destroying our beloved earth, if we will be kinder to others. We do not know.

Some people are buying guns as though a virus can be shot. Who do they think will attack them? I sense these are the same people who believe in a vengeful god, and that monsters exist in all people and that deprivation will make those monsters rise against them for their food and toilet paper.

Still, it is the doctors, and nurses, and garbage collectors, and grocery suppliers that lead—and the food banks and fruit and vegetable pickers. At great risk, at great risk. They do best actions with the facts before them.

May we all do the same. May we learn—actually feel—the connected rhythms of life that include viruses and fears along with love and blossoming. May we endure and embrace and sort though to what serves best.

We will create what is on the other side of the bridge, using or ignoring the lessons we learn now. We can join hands safety. We can create harmonies that hold and stabilize through troubles.

If we do not, . . . oh, well, just one more planet in an unending cosmos that either knows itself or does not, that gives birth and absorbs death with startling nonchalance.

Elephants cry. These large beautiful beasts cry. Somehow that is relevant. I don’t know how.


Letter to a Young Woman: Is it safe to love?

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You wrote, though we scarcely know each other, entrusting me with two questions. 1) How can you go beyond past injury to love, trust, and commit to another? 2) How in our world of grief and pain can you love, how can you be happy?

Well, you said it more eloquently and passionately: “It is time for me to take risks being vulnerable with another human and trusting and ‘loving’ as best I can. The brave part of me says ‘No regrets! Love fully!! Fearlessly!!’ and that somehow makes me feel better, even though I know it could go wrong in many ways.”

You have fallen in love, and it has shaken your isolation. “It is time to take risks being vulnerable with another human and trusting . . .” A dilemma! 

You said “The more I have known and connected with other people in this world the more heartbroken I am. It is not that I am not happy, I am. But also deeply heartbroken.

“It is difficult to live and more difficult to love while living because you see others as yourself and so the pain feels SO real and urgent and many times we cannot do anything. Why do we feel if we really cannot do anything?”

Do you understand your question of being vulnerable to a loved one and your question of surviving the pain in the world are variants of the same question—is it safe to love? 

Oh, no, my dear, it is not safe to love. It is not. You will be hurt, perhaps brought to your knees. You will suffer small wounds and large. You will lose people, places, and things. You will be betrayed. You will lose beliefs, your sense of what is real, and of who you are. Oh, no, it is not safe at all.

You told me of your earliest wounds and your decision even as a child to be separate, to be a warrior without human attachments in order to be more brave in the world, in order not to have personal friends and family you would need to protect. But, dear, warriors of any value will have their armor lanced. Love will do that to you.

Love will also make you real. 

The Skin Horse told the Velveteen Rabbit, “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Do with this quote what you want. Perhaps this is not the kind of advice you were looking for. Perhaps by the time you read this, you will have already figured that out. You are meeting your lover. Perhaps I am late returning to you—expect it is never too late.

So, I will add a few meandering thoughts, important ones. You trusted me, surely I can offer you more words about being real in our world of pain.

Dear, there is so much grief, hate, violence, prejudice, hunger, poverty, illness, and cruelty that you have no choice but to love. If you do not love openly, vulnerably, you will perish, you will stultify inside your armor, and have no hope of saving yourself or anyone else in the world.

Caring for yourself—your first priority as a created living being—includes loving, and love includes laughing, playing, singing praises, and celebration. You came into this world with the right to joy.

Far from the Velveteen Rabbit, let me tell you the words of a Holocaust survivor: “I beg you, do something. Learn a dance step, something to justify your existence, something that gives you the right to be dressed in your skin and in your body hair. Learn to walk, and to love, because it would be too senseless, after all, for so many to have died while you live, doing nothing with your life.”

Those in need do not wish of you to be sad. That simply makes one more sad person in the world.

They wish of you to be touched with sunlight so you can bring to them light and laughter along with equality and opportunity. They need reminders of the truths beyond their pain. They need hope and shared happiness. You spoke to me because you believe I know something.

Well, this I know. The bravest thing you can do, what a true warrior would do, is bring your courage and talents, your innate joy, your vulnerability, and your commitment of love for yourself and for others into your actions. Bringing them into actions makes them real in the world. It helps create the reality you long for.

It took decades for me to stop vacillating between sorrow and joy as though they were polar opposites. They are not. With time and intent they meld. I carry grief in my heart at every moment for the pain in the world. It is entwined with my joy and celebration of existence. This is what comes with time and intent.

It is what is real inside the Real You. Give yourself time. Allow mistakes, they are inevitable and boundless. Do not fear difficult times or sorrow, and do not force laughter. It will come naturally from your soul when it is freed from armor. 

The same will happen with crying. It will come naturally and not lessen your courage. There may be times when your crying may be best done in private or with only a friend or two. That can be the nature of relationships and circumstances, but whenever you cry, honor yourself with those tears. They, too, are part of being real.

I realize as I am coming to a close that I feel you so closely as a young woman that I have not thought of young men or older men. It is more complex for most men, this meeting and embracing of conflicting emotions. Certainly, if you wish, you can share this letter with them. Certainly it pertains even more to them.

But for now, remember that you cannot curve yourself to fit men or any loved one. Well, you could try but such a terrible hazard to your freedom! Such a threat to your joy! Be careful with that. You may choose to give a great deal to a man, but do not let one take parts of you.

With love,

patricia

How My Mother Showed Love: My dolls’ wardrobes

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My mother had the farmhouse door painted red, a protest to something though as a child I did not understand what. She also planted one Oriental poppy and nursed it through several seasons of Iowa winters. They were the same red, both testifying “I promised myself I’d never marry a farmer.”

I too was her proof of being special. What she could not reveal of herself, the world would see through the brain and beauty and poise of her daughter. She believed in genes and hated being underestimated. She had sold apples on the street corner during the depression as classmates walked by on their way to school.  

The house was not a typical white wooden farmhouse with creaks and openings around the windows and doors. It had wooden floors, but they were narrow slats of prime grade oak fit together as tight as Puritan’s lips.

The house was a top-of-the-line Sears prefab house built by a man from Minnesota who invested in Texas oil and wanted to live out his life on an Iowa farm. Seems he invested in the only spot in Texas without oil. Before he ever lived in the house, it was foreclosed to people who put a potbellied stove in the middle of the living room. 

The house was stucco with leaded windows, built-in china cabinets, and a solarium. My mother, in a misguided attempt to be modern, bastardized it with fleur-de-lys Wall-tex and blonde Swedish furniture. The ceilings were lowered with acoustic tiles, the copper chandelier replaced by a Nordic thing of teak.  

I, the child, cringed for myself and the house. 

I look now for the ways she showed love for me, and it is difficult unless I go inside her and feel the trap that held her from affection. Then I understand, then she is young, then she is lost, then she is determination, then she is a 20-year-old teacher in one room school houses who drove up a 1/4 mile lane to ask directions and saw a young man asleep in the yard after lunch and before returning to farm work. She felt ugly and saw a handsome man in the grass. 

Now, old enough to be her grandmother, I look for ways in which she showed love for me. She took her talent for sewing and knitting, and created cloths for me that made those bought in stores for the town children look second-hand. Still, I longed for store-bought clothes in their bright colors and round skirts. My fine clothes made me stand out.

She took her talent for sewing and knitting into creating whole wardrobes for my dolls— precursors of Barbie and much more beautiful. She made skating outfits, skiing outfits, Dutch girl outfits, cheerleader outfits, and a wedding dress with lace and net. They are now with her great-granddaughter and only slightly the less for time and wear. 

She took her talent for sewing and knitting into matching ensembles for me of wool skirts and intricate sweaters that made me stand out in college in ways that set me apart and that I liked. By then, I appreciated them and wondered, as I do now, at her craftsmen. 

My closet has jackets she made for herself, some with false labels of designer fashions—one in thick golden wool labeled Dior.

Who was this woman who knew clothes, who needed an Oriental poppy, who painted the door red, who scaped decades of shellac off the oak floor, the cabinets, the window seats, and stairs, but had no sense of interior design or art. The woman who made sure I got contact lenses when the town girls did because we were not less than them. The woman who did not allow me dance lessons but made sure I had piano lessons from the time I was eight. 

I ask myself, how did she show me love that was not tied to showing me off? I remember no hugs, no sweet touch, no “I love you.” That is because there were none. The trap inside her, the fear of touch, the possible coming undone of showing love. 

I remember the ski poles that went with the skiing outfit, the skates that went with the skating outfits, I remember the skating outfit itself knit in yellow with fuzzy baby blue trim and matching cap. I remember the wooden Dutch girl clogs. I remember the skiing pants in deep blue and the top in deep red with gold double-vested buttons down the front. 

I never learned to ski or ice skate, but she dreamed something, and made it for me. 

Knowing that is not quite enough, but knowing that and now being able to feel inside of her—the strictures, the determination against insecurity and feeling ugly, her resentment towards her mother for making her tend the five younger and more adored children—her resignation to being a farmer’s wife. Those two are enough. I shelter her in my arms across time.

I escaped. I think she wanted me to. 

Laughter in the Time of Despair

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Humor has as many varieties as love, God, and the weather. It cannot be pinned down, though philosophers and psychologists have tried through millennia. Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Kant, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Kierkegaard are only a few, plus gaggles of comedians. 

Everyone has a theory. Some link humor’s beginnings to the aggressive play of young apes. Others believe it is bestowed as a divine gift of a beneficent god. Plato protested the “divine gift” theory, claiming laughter was demeaning especially of gods.

  If anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less of gods.—Plato’s “Republic,” c.380 BC

Plato thought laughter overrides rationality and self-control, but what is rational? Things fall apart. Earthquakes, floods, fires, catastrophic illnesses, financial loss, wars, ethnic cleansing, soap in the bathtub, crazy people with guns, crazy people who don’t want gun control, love turned to disinterest.

Early theories of humor include the Superiority Theory claiming the cause of laughter is feelings of superiority and the Relief Theory claiming laughter is the release of nervous energy. Freud felt we laugh as a way to release the tension in our bodies from suppressed feelings—dirty jokes being an example. Ha ha.

The most commonly held theory today is the Incongruity Theory. We expect one thing to happen and something else is delivered up, violating our mental patterns. Somehow this is funny, though mostly when we see it rather than when it happens to ourselves. Then it may take a while, or never, to laugh.

Being amused may not be rational, but it is lifesaving. Sometimes humor simply rushes in to preserve our sanity and our ability to make it through another day. 

  Perhaps humor’s largest function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss and gain, and to enable us to see it in proper perspective. It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us.—Editorial in the “American Journal of Psychology,” October 1907

The siege of Sarajevo lasted from April 1992 to February 1996. Snipers in the Bosnian Serb forces killed over 10,000 people, primarily Muslims, in the city by picking them off one by one from vantage points in the surrounding hills. I was there in 2002. A young man and I were walking along a sidewalk when he started to laugh.

“My friend was killed in exactly this spot. We were right here. He was afraid of being shot so he made me walk on the outside. Bam, he’s the one they got.”  Laughter. “I warned him he should stop being so afraid.”

Oppressed people are experts of dark humor. Humor steps in when hope is small. It is a moment’s detachment from the dark, a kind of enlightenment. 

  Humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It’s as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.—Mark Twain, 1905

It seems this writing should have more humor in it, but I’m taking humor seriously.  

When my father was dying, I slept on a cot next to his hospital bed. One night he began laughing—a rollicking laugh through cancerous lungs. I jumped up.

“Dad? Dad?”

“It’s all been a joke! The whole thing has been a joke!” 

He was lit up, joyous. He saw an ultimate incongruity. He saw love, peace, and harmony before, after, and around his life’s pains, troubles, losses, illness, even his death. It made his life with its difficulties a divine joke. The injuries were of no consequence. At least, not anymore.

There is a reason the Buddha smiles.

  A bird sings in the silence after a disaster and we do not know if it is a rejoicing for the return of quiet or if the bird is checking where the other birds are—as family members check to see who is alive under the rubble. 

This is not a joke. They are just words as I finish writing about what we do not know but find life-giving. 


The Paradox of Existence: You can’t get there from here

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Time is an illusion–Albert Einstein

The way it stands is we experience ourselves as physical beings even though time and, therefore, space are illusions. Space cannot exist without a time to put it in and, if time and space are illusions, so are we. That is the Paradox of Existence, also known as the Trials of Illusion.

Our past is not here and our future is a filament of imagination—fireflies.

Even so, the illusions of time and space are usually enough for us. With them, we experience intention, dreams, thrills, expectations, miseries, mistakes, tragedies, bliss, orgasms, cookies, poems, snails, bunnies, paper cuts, families, and sense of self. 

There are great mysteries here, and we will not solve them by believing in time and space.

Curiouser and curiouser–Alice from a place much like ours

There is a storyteller in us or beyond us, or both—and the storyteller creates stories with us at the center, which allows us to feel real because the story makes time and space feel real even though stories have no physicality of their own. 

A case could be made that we imagine gods in order to believe in an Grand Storyteller with answers to what we cannot comprehend, such as where we come from, where we are going, who we are, and what is happening.

Or the case could be made that there actually IS a Grand Storyteller, an Ultimate Intention beyond time and space that we dress up as petty gods because it is the best we can do with such magnificence—and that Ultimate Intention creates stories, our lives, so it can “see” bits of itself. Perhaps It binge-watches Itself through us even as we strive to see It through the blinds of our limitations.

  Have I made up my belief that I can think?

We are incapable of understanding the whole of It, but we inch our way like worms measuring marigolds to fleeting glimpses of what is beyond the usual resources of our illusions. Through quantum theory, mystical initiations, and exploration of the microcosm and macrocosm we inch our way to pure energy, to pre-story, all potential energy.

The Paradox of Existence, however, means we cannot “hold” these fleeting glimpses of what is behind time and space in normal consciousness. Our normal consciousness can hold only one thing in its awareness in any (presumed) moment. Beyond time and space is the whole thing at once, all time and all space as one before it presumes a separateness.

Nor can we fully know ourselves since there is no substantive “me” to capture, examine, dissect, and hold to the light. Held to the light, we are pure energy.

   . . . and who would hold us to the light? 

We are of stuff we cannot hold in our hands or minds. We cannot be labeled or contained. We are ever-dynamic energy. Few of us hear the space between lines of poetry or the silence between notes of music. 

  Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.—T.S. Eliot

Not having receptors for the non-material, we become faith-based in that we are material. We equate non-materiality with death. We want things to divert us, move fast, and assault our emotions, to lock us into the sensations of being in space and time. We ignore what is not easily sensed. We embrace what seems obvious and ignore what is esoteric.

We don’t want to ride that bicycle. “Look, Ma, no me.”

Still, there is a still place that calls us. We long for “home,” we can feel misplaced, sometimes even evicted. The untouchable essence of who we are wishes to return into its source. 

We are worshipful creatures—we worship and we are to be worshiped. There is no apparent reason for us or rational explanation for us. That makes us miracles. We may be dreams that experience themselves as having substance or we may be manifestations of an Ultimate Intention wanting the company of bits of itself. Both are okay arrangements.

I experience a “knowing”—perhaps you do too—that love is real and core to the call “home.” It connects substance and essence, and cannot be captured or explained. 

Does love come in innocent—pre-story—and, through the stories of us, is tattered and reassembled, new, expanded? Are we the Grand Storyteller’s venue to Its own love?

  Let there be light—the Great Storyteller


When Warriors Cry for Us

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We, who see teenagers cry in silence before us, remember there are warriors among us.

. . . .

We will never have an ideal world any more than earthquakes will stop and tsunamis lie to rest. Every atom moves, every thought flutters in and out of variations, everything recycles. You just cannot get rid of things. Action=reaction. Entropy=atrophy. It’s a bloody miracle, and to think you can put your hand on the steering wheel is a profound delusion, . . .

. . . and a common delusion in the face of what is real, what is beyond our control, like a cosmos that doesn’t even bother to sneer at us.

Yet we make claims. Just trying to figure it out has value. Religions, theories, intuitions, a piercing of the heart when we see a particularly astonishing sunset.

We get credit for this attempt. It is, after all, how we learned about atoms and that you cannot get rid of things. So we will keep trying.

That Overarching Principle that included us in its manifestations, like a footnote in the history of forever, must have a tender place in it. We, the fools, the strivers. We, who err over and over. We, who kill each other in vindication, or mere anger, or bad wiring in our brains. We, who cannot figure our way out of the paper bags we label “truth” and wrapped around our clan or our gang.

We, who can meld in sadness. We, who long for love, for home, who know intuitively we are not quite placed in the right place. We, who remember the Overarching Principle and want to call it by pet names like God, or Allah, or Yahweh, who demean it by pet names, who cannot accept that it is beyond names, and words, and our mind to know.

We, who see teenagers cry in silence before us, remember there are warriors among us. We, who start to see what is good, what is bad, and where to go and how badly we have failed to care for our planet and everyone in this footnote that is ours.

We, whose atoms never stop moving and whose thoughts never stop fluttering, but who know there are warriors rising among us, and we cry, too.

Beyond words we cry, and we rise, following warriors.

 

A 1.7 cm bag of newt’s eye, fingernail clippings, hag’s tooth, boar whiskers, and bits of lost socks

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Eight days ago a cardiothoracic surgeon cut a Cheshire cat’s grin 3+ inch long under my right armpit, separated my ribs and went inside to remove a substantial part of the top lobe of my right lung.

I write to you from my bed at home trying hard to concentrate on spelling, grammar, syntax. There will be mistakes, but they will be genuine mistakes like the difference between naïve artists and trained naïve artists. My mistakes are part of the message. (Spell check and my brain are not adequate to this task.)

The anesthesia will take weeks to wear off, and I stopped the painkillers two days ago when I could not remember the name of the current president. Obama and Trump were on the two ends of a see-saw vying up and down for the position.

It was only 7 days before surgery that I even heard of VATS, video-assisted thoracic surgery, the gold standard to get, ah, well, specifically, yes, ah, to get cancer out of lungs. It was only minutes before that I was told I had a 70 percent chance of lung cancer. A couple days later the surgeon who would do a pre-operative bronchoscopy (camera down my thorax to check suspected “lymph involvement”) said the odds were 80 to 90 percent. The “mass” was “almost certainly cancerous.”

I hadn’t felt sick, but my internist a month before listened to my lungs, and that started an avalanche of dominoes from X-rays to CAT scan to PET scan to an appointment with the cardiothoracic surgeon (thank you, Johns Hopkins and Sibley hospital) who said “This needs to be removed. I can schedule you for Friday.”

WHAT? WHAT? This is not my movie! I have been miscast. Nothing about this part fits. This is fundamentally “off,” not wrong so much as “off.” Even as a tidbit in the back corner of my brain said “Isn’t denial the first step of grief?”. . . and I said, yes, but, NO.

I didn’t believe I deserved less to have cancer than anyone else. It just wasn’t my movie.

In the first few days I told only a few people, but we had to move fast, and Christmas was upon us . . . jing-a-ling.

Who do you tell? Who is strong? Who is experienced? Who needs protecting? Who can help you the most? Who would you betray if you did not share this intimacy?

Is this a private matter, a public matter? Are there rings of inclusion?

Is it sympathy begging to post on FB? Or does transparency give new possibilities to this passage for myself and others?

I chose transparency. Soon after, more than 100 FB friends were sending messages, and love, and hearts, and wishes. A cascade of goodness. And the congregations of three churches in Iowa were praying for me plus a circle of high-powered women in northern California, and amazing friends everywhere.

Their strength didn’t tiptoe in. It arrived bold and present with a soothing weight that surrounded me and filled my body and occupied all space around me.

Now let’s look at something else. Today is the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death at age 96. That woman was not ready to go into another Iowa winter. She was buried in -30 degree weather. It felt like a betrayal.

It was also 8 days after my brother, then 59, came home from the hospital after surgery for advanced lung cancer that he died of a clot blocking blood from going through his lungs. This is my ninth day after surgery. He was looking into my eyes as he died.

They are with me tonight.

The kicker is, I never had cancer.

My surgeon beamed when he said “I only get to tell 10% of my patients this. You do not have cancer, never did.”

WHAT?! WHAT? . . . . Yes! This is the movie. It’s a weird part, but I can play this role, and I understand the obligations of the blessing.

The mass, examined cell by cell, was scar tissue, fibrous crap, enmeshed tentacles of arteries, and other junk held together under more fiber like a lid over a trash can. In other words, newt’s eye, whisker of wild boar, fingernail clippings, hag’s tooth, and bits of lost socks. If it weren’t in its own trash bin somewhere. . . though I suspect it was more thoroughly destroyed . . . I would burn it over a sandal wood flame and sing “Hymns to the Silence.”

 

Going Gently into the Light

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All I want is to be gentle and to have the right to be gentle. It is not my time to protest anymore, but giving it up feels like an abandonment not only of those in need and those in pain and those in loss, but of myself, of the spirit of my younger self. It is confused by my physical weariness.

Some people climb the Himalayans in their 70s or even 80s, but that will not be me.

I am not complaining, though I am baffled. Doctors do not decipher my weariness, they prescribe or they look at me slightly askance as though someone who looks as I look must be a malingerer, or neurotic, certainly unrealistic and narcissistic. They are not inside my body.

I am not a malingerer. My body and my mind are weary. Wrong, only part of my mind is weary. One part is burstingly alive, radiant, claiming, grabbing, and appalled at the other half.

Forget names, forget the names of things, forget the sequence of events over the past week, forget spellings.

Doctors say is it usual. It is NOT usual. It is not acceptable, though I try, when I am not angry or frightened.

Have you noticed how we never grow up? How dreams and thoughts take us back to childhood, and there it revamps things? It makes memories and some good guys problematic, but more, it makes some bad guys good. We come to understand those who hurt us and accept the cages that destroyed them and harmed us. We become organisms that forgive, even as some people must be written off.

And even that loses meaning too with time.

I don’t want to be the old woman in the chair in the corner, and it is difficult to imagine I will be even as I might be. “She was so vital,” they’ll say. “She was something in her day.”

I just want to be gentle and gracious and generous and to have flashes of brilliances. Strangely I do have flashes of brilliance, mostly private. They come as gifts special delivery from a bright and shining light, and they blow me away. No, they lift me, and fly me to clean places where for a moment I am where forever lives.

I just want to be gentle and know that I too will be forgiven for wrongs and errors, and that I have a right to be gentle, that the world will be safe enough for the elderly to be gentle if they need be, without guilt, that we can mourn our losses quietly and let joy flow like light through our veins without guilt for not having done more.

Perhaps this will change, perhaps my body will find a key to turn that brings it back to power and rambunctiousness, and I would accept that gladly. Who wouldn’t? Reality has always included miracles we can work towards and be open to, but not command.

Perhaps the miracle is that, as my body gentles itself, love occupies all its spaces.

 

 

My Fainting Epiphany: love and loss

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The first thing I felt, before my eyes opened, was the coolness of the bathroom tile against my cheek, as calm, placid, and cool as a forest lake—as though I’d never felt coolness before, as a baby might feel it, as someone without memory files.

The first thing I saw was a roll of toilet paper above me. How odd, and why were the walls at strange angles, like a white-on-cream cubist painting or quirky stage set—like flat surfaces that did not know they were walls, that were not yet tamed into being straight up.

It was the middle of the night. I was alone. I was flat on the bathroom floor.

Ill and light-headed, I had thought I might faint so took a pillow with me, but I missed it. I have scrapes on my forehead, a bruise above my right eyebrow, and small gash across my nose. Also a junior-size bump above my left ear and two splits inside my left upper lip. It is a Rorschach test to figure how I landed, though clearly my face led the way.

In the few days since I have rested, gardened, and questioned. What really matters? Who am I? Are politics or art more important? How many people will die without health care? Have I overcome or neutralized or morphed through the pains and betrayals of my life, or not?

That last question is one I’ve focused on for several weeks. My therapist on the afternoon before the night of fainting reminded me that trauma is cumulative. I recently opened the lid to the anteroom of my losses. One can go on, gain strength and even love through loss—including loss through betrayal and harm—but pain and loss don’t go away, they just become more companionable. Mine had become dark overstuffed upholstered chairs mildewing in the corner badly in need of cleaning and new stuffing.

This blog is not specifically about my traumas, but about the twining of love, loss, and grief. That someone arbitrarily harmed you, that they turned into a monster, does not mean you can retract your love without feeling loss. In fact, you can find your way to detach from the person, even to stop loving them, even to forgetting them over time, but you cannot cancel out the sense of loss. You loved. Love, too, is cumulative, and it remains.

No, this blog is not specifically about my trauma, but to give you a sense of my creds. I lost my child in a custody suit, suffered physical and emotional domestic violence, my “soul mate” third husband had a separate secret life complete with apartments in San Francisco and Beijing, and my childhood was an exercise in emotional stoicism.

I now live three blocks from my daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren and our lives are filled with love. I got out of the abusive marriage 40 years ago, and that husband died after 20 years living in a banana grove. The “soul mate” married someone as fraudulent as he is and lives far away. I feel no need for vengeance.

And my parents became sweet and loving the last years of their lives. I tended them both into peaceful deaths. I also was there when my only sibling, my brother, died suddenly, a loss felt deeply.

But let us return to exploring how feeling loss proves you know how to love.

Loss is loss is loss and feeling or re-feeling losses can be disorienting. It can make walls go slant. It scales away your self-definition, and tries to strip away your persona, leaving you with the choice to let that persona go and find your way in the land of no self-definition and confusion, or to try to tamp down your painful losses and lock them in an anteroom, clinging to your persona as though you think it is who you are.

We all, in fact, always exist in the state where self-definitions are constructed trappings, attempts to not be frightened by the magnitude of being alive. When was the last time you tried to perceive the cosmos? When did you meditate into bliss? When did you last see the world as a baby before you decided walls go straight up?

Besides musing these past days, I watched two episodes of “Xena: Warrior Princess” and two episodes of “Star Trek.” Both firsts for me. The acting in Xena is hilariously bad and Star Trek is, so to speak, a world of its own.

What is of most interest is that the ads are about life insurance or things needed to breath right, i.e. equipment to clean your nose, and equipment to clean your sleep time breathing equipment, and things to do so you don’t feel guilty for dying. That is, the ads are for declining baby boomers who want re-runs of vicarious thrills rather than getting off the sofa—or facing up to that they spend too much time on the sofa.

We Americans are not good at looking at our lives. It can be painful. Not one of us with any age has not at some time been in a morass of lost love. It can dissolve a persona so thoroughly that the actual person is not sure which way is up, where her feet are, or what is ahead. The walls slant.

But I prefer loss of self-definition, as least for awhile. I prefer its freedom. I prefer finding my way through the loss to the love that had, and has, its home in my cells. The love did not go away when the lover, or parent, or friend, or betrayer died or left.

As trauma is cumulative, so is love.

I prefer beauty, and touch, and taste, and colors, and music, and the twining growth of wisteria up my house, and the cool nose of my dog, and the glint of rose off the sides of wet fish, and the whiff of sage, and my grandson’s smile when he spies a joke in the air, and making love in a soft bed with linen sheets and someone who goes there with me.

I prefer not to feel the bruises on my face but the cool smooth tile on my cheek. I love the hydrangea bush I planted yesterday, and that I could help its shocked branches by staking them upright. I love tending plants.

I want to be here, alive, mucking around in the sensations of being alive, even if I lose people and things. The hydrangea flowers will die but the plant bloomed.

I prefer to have the door to the anteroom of losses open so I can explore it for forgotten gems, find what was good and what was bad and say “I am here,” even if I do not know who I am or how large the cosmos is or when my body will die.

We endure the losses in order to become love experiencing life.

Love is cumulative and it is tough, and will tend us as surely as I tend the hydrangea.

 

CUBA: Art & Soul

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The beating pulse of artistic creativity permeates everything in Cuba. I am not talking about souvenir art like papier-mâché 1950’s cars in chartreuse, red, and royal blue to be used as desktop ornaments, or Cuban flags or Che t-shirts. I am talking of art that transcends the bounds of the ordinary to reveal the extraordinary, art that draws back the veil.

A US citizen can still only enter Cuba from the US with a US-vetted educational group. My group was mainly Jungian analysts. I am not a Jungian analyst though I have my visions, and was as excited as the Jungians about the symbolism and archetypes of Cuban Christianity that overlay the African religions.

Sightings of Jamaya (Ee-mai-YA; also spelled Jamalla), the Cuban personification of the archetype of the Black Madonna, goddess of land and sea, led to ripples of excitement in our group. Her flowing robes, her golden aura, her white baby.

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It rained every day except one, but even on the rainy days we went singly, in duos, threes and fours, or as a group to museums, galleries, churches, restaurants, and concerts, or strolled through old Havana, Cienfuegos, or Trinidad. We struggled to grasp the dichotomy to our Western minds—Jungian or not—between the vibrancy of the art, colors, tastes, and sounds with the dilapidated buildings, meager goods, and government repression.

I became obsessed with the question: Is creativity expressed most radiantly by indomitable people under duress? Perhaps because it is the carrier of life itself?

Even the most “transcending” art I saw, including of Jamaya, was infused with humanity, with human emotions, gestures, and instincts—humans merging with animals, Jesus sitting on a chair after the Crucifixion looking very worried.christ for blog
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Sometime a wry sense of humor, or not, speaks to the current political situation. In the center courtyard of the magnificent National Museum of Fine Art in Havana is a sculpture that is a masterpiece of ambiguity. A rusted iron smoke stack rises as a steeple out of a small Monopoly-style church. Sitting at the top is Christ on a cloud, seemingly all of smoke. As my Jungian analyst friend Jean Shinoda Bolen said, “Holy smoke!”Jesus on smoke stack.

Yet, is it a write-off of religion as nothing but smoke? Or an embracing of the Christ spirit as generated by believers? Or something else?

Christianity has come back in force in Cuba, but remains vaguely frowned upon by some. Is this sculpture debunking religion or showing the tenacity of belief in something beyond the tangible, perhaps even manifesting something beyond the tangible? We went to a church service. The place was rocking.

We were told that Cubans have freedom of speech (and, thus, of artistic expression) but they don’t have freedom after speech. That is, for the most part you can say what you feel and think, though it might need to be somewhat camouflaged, but you cannot ask others to join you in a movement and you cannot do active protest. This demarcation holds social protest in place, supported by years of masterful maneuvering by Fidel that makes most Cubans feel grateful to him and the on-going government for what they receive, including full free health care, an excellent free education up through doctoral degrees, and government institutions that support advanced art education in painting, sculpture, dance, and music.

The poverty line has been lifted way above where it was before the revolution and the people seem happy, though income discrepancies are rampant. Hotel workers, through tips, earn more than medical doctors. (Cuban joke: A man tells a stranger he is a bellboy. His wife clarifies, “He has delusions of grandeur. He’s really a doctor.”)

To continue: housing is, by and large, very decrepit, and luxury goods are not available. There are no large grocery stores, or, it seems, large stores of any kind.
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There are many car repair service stations, but you have the feeling every Cuban male has learned how to repair cars with tin cans and wire. The cars themselves are works of art.

Our hotel had a grand marble lobby and wonderful restaurants. Still, the light fell out of the ceiling of my bathroom and crashed in the sink, my coffeemaker didn’t work, and my curtains were missing a third of their hooks, and the apartment elevators were so slow I used the stairs from the fifth floor. We rejoiced with the general manager—a woman—the day the embargo on parts from the US was lifted so the elevators, and hopefully many other things, could be properly repaired. That said, the hotel spaces were filled with the best art—beautiful, creative, whimsical, celebratory, exquisitely painted—I have ever seen in a hotel anywhere.

Perhaps this containment of artists in a stratum of life where they can express themselves fully only through their art is like a greenhouse. The art is required to burst fully open, ignoring deprivations, expressing the world of beauty and so much more precisely because it does not have access to what is beyond the greenhouse. Then again, it could just be that Cuba is warm and sunny.

Surely it is the “warm and sunny” that has fueled the exuberant music that has supported Cubans throughout their history, but what blew me away was the choir Cantores De Cienfuegos directed by Honey Moreira. choir for blog, bestWe had a private concert with this a cappella chorus of angels!

They have won international contests, which seems beside the point when you are lifted in their embrace. (You can hear them on YouTube to get an approximation of this extraordinary experience of musicianship.) 

The last day we ate at a privately-owned restaurant that had three large prominently displayed paintings of Fidel Castro. On first look, even second look, they seemed simply to be photo-realistic paintings. Yet something was “off.”

Fidel tongue copyLooking closer at the profile view, I saw behind the straggly moustache that Fidel’s tongue appeared to be sticking out like that of a silly yapper. Perhaps it was that he has a strange lower lip. Perhaps the artist was leaving the question open?hands for blog fidel to crowd.

 

 

 

 

 

In the study of his hands, I realized his left hand is in his sleeve as though he has a trick up there and the thumb of his left hand has traces of red, like blood, on it. But then again, his right fingers have the same red. What to make of that? Nothing or something?

In the final painting the viewer sees Castro’s back with his arms raised before a crowd. His left hand points further to the left. He is exhorting his audience, which the viewer sees as faceless blobs as, the artist seems to be saying, Fidel saw them also.

Is this an artist “speaking” his truth?

Our group is gravely concerned about what will happen when the international hotels and luxury stores arrive, when Americans arrive by the tens of thousands, when ceiling lights no longer crash into the sink, curtains hang right, and new cars arrive.

I’m not sure the Cubans will know what hit them. How will their exuberant humanity hold against the onslaught? What will save Cuba from becoming Miami?

Perhaps there will be help from Yamaya who protects land and sea or Jesus who rises out of the ashes, but I suspect it will be up to the Cubans to save themselves and protect their humanity through their warmth, ingenuity, and creativity. For this, they do have one more god to help them, Elegua the Trickster, a direct import from Africa.

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Elegua is a child, either male or female. Here she is in the all-white dress of the Santeria sect of Christianity, sitting in the entry room of a small temple to Jamalla nestled between shops in Trinidad de Cuba.

Elegua should not be confused with childishness. She is powerful and uses wiles to make things right. I place my bets on her ingenuity. I place my bets on Cubans. I place my bets on art. It matters. Cuba is a triumph of creativity and humanity over circumstances. We have much to learn from her.