Category Archives: Poems

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

Life, Loss, and my Dog

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Shall we talk of loss kindly and politely as though these things happen all the time, as often as tying shoes and drinking water? Shall we try to bring loss into form when it is the absence of form, the disappearance of form, replaced by a hollow that nonetheless has its own sound, a slack key guitar twang or tremolo of a loon or ache of a squeaking gate to a chamber next to your heart? We relearn the location of our heart with every loss, every major loss, the ones that rise above noise level, the ones that remain open and enhance the purple of hyacinth in May and sunsets in October. 

Yes, let us talk of such losses politely and with poise.  

My dog has had a sudden spike in the negative indicators of his chronic kidney disease. I measure the wobbles of today against yesterday. I entice him with salmon hidden under ground chicken thighs and rice. Just please eat. Please eat. He still prances when he walks. He will be with me as long as he is happy, and he is still happy, but how did that expectation go from years to months?

My friends’ friends are dropping like flies. Mostly people I do not know. 

We are in a sieve. People slip through the holes, making room for the next ones. Gravity is persistent and greedy as it cleans the slate–pulling babies into the world, giving goodness ongoing chances, eliciting poetry, song, and dance. It pulls us from origin and returns us.

If there is a time to come to terms with the rounding of organic life from beginning to end, to make sense of it, to accept it, old age is our last chance. 

Poise, hard learned over time, helps us not to panic, not to scream, not to complain, but to accept—helps us say “Well, that was a helluva thing, wasn’t it?” Helps us say, “Glad I was here.” 

When we recognize there was no reason for us to exist at all, but that we were made nonetheless and allowed to flounder, squirm, love, breed, and give, and discover that whatever that didn’t need to make us did make us, and loves us in its own way, then we can hold the whole of being loved and feeling loved against the shortness of living, the violence, horrors, devastation, cruelty, losses. 

When we can hold love and joy and surprise, and wonder and amazement against a sort of in-born rot of ignorance, greed, and arrogance, then we can feel our place as carriers of the immensity, then we know we have had our turn. 

When we can say “I understand little but know I am in the presence of a nameless force that makes flowers and welcomes poetry,” we can yield. We can yield to continual loss that is, in fact, a filling of the story of our lives and a gaining of what it is like to live. 

My dog is barking at a delivery man, not so loudly as before, not throwing himself against the door, but barking nonetheless—barking in the way I would have always preferred, though not at this cost. 

He does not think of these things, but pushes himself against me and allows me to nuzzle my face in his fuzzy ears in ways that are new. He stares at me and yields.

We will do this beautifully, my Phoenix. I promise.


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


Being at One with Rocks

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The unexamined life is not worth living. Really, Socrates?

How can an unexamined life not be worth anything? Does the robin in my garden examine her existence as she flies on yet one more mission for worms or insects or whatever baby robins eat? Does she think “Those kids will be the death of me yet.”

At rest, does she wonder if Schrodinger’s cat is in the tree or not in the tree? I doubt it. She is lovely, chirps in the sun, and chose her mate because he was capable of helping her create demanding children. Is more than that necessary?

Does my dog examine his life? I believe he often wishes he was with the dog sitter who takes him on long walks on trails with deer, raccoons, and foxes, and cooks him homemade meals with chicken, ground beef, and rice. I believe my dog experiences longing, but while longing can lead to examining, it is not in itself examining. Still, I believe if he were verbal, he would say his life is worth living. All the smells!

Pressed, I say that everything is alive, if not self-examining. It is all made of atoms, the basic carrier of “aliveness.” My last ex-husband and my daughter argued with me, saying a rock is not alive. But, of course, it is. We just happen to think while a rock probably doesn’t⏤but then my ex was an entrepreneur and my daughter a scientist, both tending towards certifiable facts as determined by humans.  

Question: Do atoms have self-sensations? A buzzing of some kind? 

You see, I am a mystic, and it’s annoying that in our society that is like saying “I am an dingbat from the 15th planet out from of the star Siegfried in a galaxy 300 million lightyears to your right.”

And I am a mystic by experience, which trumps faith.

To continue, perhaps only creatures with what humans presume is higher consciousness can examine their lives. 

Question: Is self-consciousness the beginning of a need to believe there is a higher power that will save us from meanness?

Question: Will that pint of chocolate almond ice cream I ate last night while watching that program on giraffes show up on the scale?

Whatever, we cannot not examine our lives, born as we are with raging curiosity. Even more important, when we are born, we seek out patterns in order to discern what is around us. In the process we will make mistakes. It is inevitable. We will pile misconception on top of misconception, and we will define ourselves, we will say “this is who I am,” in relationship to how we feel about the world around us as we see it and people in it as we see them.

Question: Are immigrants more criminally active than Episcopalians? 

The dilemma is, we cannot truly examine ourselves⏤our make up, history, the influence of events in our lives on our sense of being⏤without examining the make up of time and space. You read me correctly. We cannot understand who we are unless we examine time and space and their co-dependent physicality, and we cannot examine time and space without trying to grasp pure consciousness beyond time and space.

Question: Is that the most condensed complex paragraph I have ever written?

Physicality is energy in form, atoms making alliances among themselves until, pow!, at some point in some creatures self-awareness comes into being. 

Question: Has self-awareness been in the division of form out of beyond time and space, i.e. pure consciousness, from the beginning?

Question: How can there be a beginning within pure consciousness beyond time and space?

Whatever you tell yourself, you don’t really know when self-awareness comes in. You can only guess, and if you think self-awareness is assigned only to higher intelligence, you might want to reconsider. I don’t have a dog in this fight except accuracy, AND that what you come to believe makes a difference because what you believe is real determines how you live⏤not only your ethics and actions but how you feel inside. 

That is, you fit yourself into the world you create and perceive in your unique individual way. If you perceive everything in the physical world is alive in a shared “One-ness” down to rocks and atoms, it affects how you feel. It provides nourishment and companionship and strength. It expands you, you feel the hunger of the baby birds. The robin feeds you. You begin to perceive a pervasiveness of love. (Sorry, but I’m really not an alien from 300 million light years away even if you wish I were a dingbat.)

Question: Is anyone listening?

To continue: We examine our lives, but we examine them at different levels. Is the worm food, or is the bird a murderer? It depends if you are the bird or the worm. (But that is just a clever thing to say rather than being totally on point.)

To continue on point: 

Point 1) We must examine our lives at minimum because we think, act, love, care for others, and live in a world of form and we want to stay alive, usually. Whether in any moment we realize we are “examining” and determining our lives is up for grabs and depends on the person.

Question: Is this the best color fingernail polish for me? I tried blue on my toes, but it was only fun for a couple weeks.

Question: Do I have obligations to strangers?

Point 2) Curiosity and irregularities pull us to figure out who we are, the stuff of us, the alpha and omega of us. We are pulled to something that feels like “home.” We need help. Without a sense of connection to a “larger,” we feel gaps. It takes immense courage to stand in awareness of the “gap” with its profound loneliness.

Some of us choose to examine that space. Many of us try to avoid it. We are each forced to examine the “gap” when events slam us into darkness. It, too, is inevitable.

Question: It that last statement such a cliche that it needs to be edited out?

Question: Do I need to put in the part about the light at the end of the tunnel? 

We both create and perceive divisions in our daily lives, unending differentiations, some of which are only in our minds but are as real to us as our own existence. . . 

. . . and it is our existence that is at question here. Are we a higher life form than a rock or the same level of life form? If rocks did not exist, we would have nothing to live on as self-conscious life forms. 

Question: Which came first, the rock or Beyond Time and Space?

I am a mystic through experience, not through books or thinking. “I” disappeared along with rocks and time and space into pure consciousness free of time and space. It doesn’t mean I can explain how time and space come out of beyond time and space. Don’t ask me.

There is a reason why the Grand Unified Theory hasn’t been captured. Pure consciousness does not respond to questions. The whole is not the whole if divided into answers. It is being, and it is enough, and it fills the gap most of the time.

The mystery is not if the rock is alive⏤and do consider that it is⏤but that all physical existence is simultaneously beyond time and space and within time and space.

Think of time and space as a microscopic jungle gym on which unlimited differentiations (“things”) born out of beyond time and space have a field day. A jungle gym built of aliveness and overrun by creation.

Question: Does pure consciousness, i.e. beyond time and space, watch us, turn us into entertainment, intrude with synchronicity or loss or glimpses of itself to further the storyline? 

Question: Have glimpses of beyond time and space, in their reassuring peace and love, been codified by humans into a thing and named  “heaven”?

As differentiated beings, we cannot go as “Dick, Jane, and Sally” to beyond time and space. We cannot return to pure consciousness as separate creatures but we can get inklings when we feel the rocks are alive.

We have no choice but to examine our lives, like it or not, but how deeply we go seems a matter of free will. Interesting thing, free will. Think of it, your will has freedom to re-examine your life, re-examine the alpha and omega of you, to guide you to where love pervades everything.

 

Stay with me, Love

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Hold me, my Love,
I’ve lost my dreams
—sluiced away as cotton candy after rain.

Hold me, my Love, can
you stay the night?   in my dreams

The afternoon after the poem in the night, four hours before the wedding party:

The ache in my body as this poem wrote itself and woke me last night was as physical as an iron cannon atop a fort wall it can no longer protect, and as lonely.

Which does not mean my mind was not baffled. It, or I, prides itself on managing well, managing well without a man in my bed, managing to keep static interference from forming a wall between myself and what is beyond the tangible. At the grocers, others contemplate which flavors of ice cream to buy. I contemplate the flavors of time, love, space, and what the cashier is thinking as she or he tallies my groceries.

It is perhaps relevant, though, that my dog was not in bed with me, cozying up as the nights turn cold—or close enough I can reach him if I wake for a bit. His soft warm fur, his tolerance of a kiss on his sleek jaw, his peace when I hum “om” against his skull.

He was not here because there is a wedding party here tonight—I am waiting for the caterers to arrive—and my dog would spend the evening patrolling for food.

So what was it with this poem? This seeming calling for a lover? This seeming destitution? This searing admittance of need, and of grief? It seemed all of these, but made no sense to my mind.

Waiting for the caterers, I realize “my Love” is not a man (though that could be nice) but is my reservoir of Love, a well of Love that spreads to the harried or content cashier and the harried or content me, a Love that comes not so much from me as through me.

I was calling on that Love to hold me through the difficulty of losing beliefs and dreams—dreams washed away by deliberate cruelties and random happenstance. Are floods happenstance? Is abandonment of people who have been flooded happenstance? Is war happenstance? Is famine caused by war happenstance?

These things have worn at my belief in benevolence. They make me cry inside, a cave where tears form crystalline stalactites.

Humans have forced reality on me. Some people sheltered others with their bodies when the shooting started, while others were trampled by those fleeing.

It’s a mix.

The flowers were delivered this morning, a mix of soft lavenders, dark purples, whites, and palest greens, roses, tulips, hydrangeas, even baby pink cabbage leaves. When the caterers arrive I will say “The tall vase goes there, don’t you agree?” and “That is for the entryway.” They will be spread through the house like a blessing, like belief. 

This is a first wedding of a couple in their forties who have been together for some time. They have a good chance.

My reservoir of love will hold me, regardless of the slip-sliding of dreams and raining away of spun sugar.

Love will refresh me through the night as I sleep. That is not a belief, it is knowledge.

The day after the wedding party:

And so the flowers were spread through the house. One hundred or more people arrived, were greeted by chardonnay, and then they, too, spread through the house in blessing and belief, and joy and comfort.

Food was passed on trays. The bride and groom were radiant. Toasts were given, laughter cycled above our heads. Some people sang show tunes around the piano. The last left around 3 am.

In my dreams I sang in ancient keening languages, my cries ascending in golden plumes to the beyond. People didn’t know what to do with me. The teacher told me to stop. I told him he had yet to learn this language. I did not wake, but I remember, and am held.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

He Would Have Been Tested For Rabies

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The President of the United States violates every principle of honesty and exploits every crevice of divisiveness he can find. He trades in fear, bigotry, deception, and alternative worlds. He is a carrier of a malignant virus. If he were an animal in the Iowa of my childhood, he would have been tested for rabies.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, I was 13 and in civics class, second to last in the row of desks closest to the hallway door, a farmer’s daughter who had been taught your word was your bond and that we depended upon each other to bring in the harvest.

In that seat, I had an “aha” moment that Iowa was quintessentially the safest and most American state, or at least the Midwest was the most American area, and because Iowa had corn we had the edge even there. I also found it boring, which made me secretly a little ashamed of myself. How could I reject such luck to be born in Iowa?

We were at the heart of the light of freedom for the world. Each generation would have it better than the last. There was only one direction to go and that was up.

Central to this belief was the touchstone of honesty. Even our soil was honest, it showed you exactly what it was. Cows, pigs, chickens, they showed you if they were healthy or not, liked you or not. The sky was clear and endless. The wind and rains and snow were honest, taking their turns to show us exactly what they were and what their power could do and how we needed them.

And Christianity for the most part was honest in its values, though it wasn’t tested except inside one’s self. When farms were lost, some farmers shot themselves in their cellars by putting the shotgun in their mouths and pulling the trigger with their big toe. That was how I first learned women are usually better at managing crises than men. I’m not sure how much of that had to do with a woman’s Christianity or her tenacity.

I secretly found Bible stories to be fairytales but I knew the feel of good hearts and solid folks. They were my neighbors, whom I did not find boring. I found them quirky and strangely diverse, but pulled together by bonds of mutual respect and interdependence.

Christianity, however, did not discuss social issues and my civics class did not discuss minorities. There were no minorities in Iowa, so we set up our divides between Protestants and Catholics, and town folks and farm folks.

The desire to believe you are the people who are right, better, finer, closest to your sect’s chosen god is a pernicious virus.

So let’s come to the sorrowful point of now:

The President of the United States violates every principle of honesty and exploits every crevice of divisiveness that he can find. He trades in fear, bigotry, deception, and alternative worlds. He is a carrier of a malignant virus. If he were an animal in the Iowa of my youth, he would be tested for rabies.

He would have been isolated. No farmer would have worked with him because he was not to be trusted. He would not respect the farmers who rented instead of owned. He would not have paid his bills and that would be the end of that for him.

He would have been ostracized across counties. The word would have gone out among the people when the children were not listening. He would have been a fraud in a place where your word was your bond, where honesty was in the land.

They would have compared his hair with straw, but not in front of the children; they would have laughed behind the barn about his small hands.

Now, it turns out, these people voted mainly for him. Our farm was 18 miles from Mason City, the River City of “The Music Man.” The town folks were huckstered in the musical, but that at least was about trombones.

Times have changed, but that Iowa dirt is still in my heart. It demands truth, and it is not alone. It feels like one handful of loam in a field, a plain, of people rising across the United States reclaiming the heartland of who we are:

O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain!

America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood (and sisterhood) from sea to shining sea!

 

 

The Dalai Lama and My Soul are Running Buddies

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My soul insists that the 14th Dalai Lama is a personal friend, is kin. The Dalai Lama turned 80 a week ago, but my soul says the two of them are the same age, timeless. They are running buddies. They have stories they could tell each other but neither bothers because they already know each other’s stories, infinite.

If an age were demanded of them, if they were forced, they would probably say they were 11 years old because of the mischievousness. Or something over 2000 because of the knowledge they have that I cannot normally access.

The Dalai Lama and I had our moment. It was a few miles north of Santa Fe in 1995, maybe 1996, and started over a breakfast of huevos rancheros at a five-star resort in the desert.

Out the dining room window I saw Tibetan flags leading towards the mountains. Moments later, monks in orange robes walked by the window.

I grabbed a waiter, “Is the Dalai Lama here?”

“He’ll be here soon.”

“What’s happening?”

“There’s a press conference.”

“I’m supposed to be there.”

“It’s private, it’s closed.”

“I’m supposed to be there.”

“Talk to those people over there.”

Abandoning huevos rancheros and my husband, I rushed to the very official looking people “over there.” They had clip boards and check off lists.

“I’m supposed to be at the press conference.”

“It’s closed.”

“But I’m a reporter and a photographer,” I sort of, vaguely, exaggerated, even as I knew I was supposed to be there. I was.

“Show me some i.d.”

I don’t remember what I showed them. I think I rattled off places where I worked years earlier.

“Okay, but you better get in there. It’s starting in five minutes.”

I sprinted out the door to my room among the cacti, grabbed my Nikon, and sprinted back past the monks, and slipped through the double doors as they were being closed.

Not a single chair was available. Everyone was silent, waiting His Holiness.

I stood alone against the wall inside the double doors. They opened and six monks entered. Together we stood in a line against the wall.

When the Dalai Lama entered, he came in with his head down and palms together in front of his chest. He bowed to each monk in turn without raising his head.

Orange robe to orange robe to orange robe to orange robe to orange robe to orange robe . . . to levis. The Dalai Lama was bowing to me.

He looked up, surprised and curious, his head 12 inches from mine. Then he smiled.

He smiled just for me, his eyes sparkling. The Dalai Lama and I shared a joke, a visual joke, a quiet joke, a timing joke. A joke of the misplaced and unexpected. Fifteen minutes before I had been eating huevos rancheros.

His eyes have been called “laser eyes.” It is true. Their amusement and curiosity etched into my mind. It was only a moment, but it was timeless.

And the memory, the reality of the memory, returns now with good timing for I have been weighed down by the suffering in the world. Old questions such as “How can any of us be happy when so many of us are in misery?” are unanswered and seem to me to be unanswerable.

Yet, the Dalai Lama tells us we can have peace inside and experience daily joy. He shows us we can have peace inside and experience daily joy. But he’s the Dalai Lama, it’s his job description. How does it become ours?

In the last week of my father’s dying, he laughed in that time of the dark night of the soul around 4 am. It was a muffled laugh. He had only one-half of one functioning lung.

But it was enough to wake me on the cot next to his hospital bed. Well, I was in a listening sleep and heard his every breath.

“What’s happening, Dad?”

“It’s a joke. It’s all been a joke!” He was in bliss, radiant, and highly amused by his 82 years of life.

The next morning a nurse asked in that loud voice nurses sometimes use, “Howard, are you in pain?”

“Why be in pain?” he answered.

Only a week before he had been remembering every injury ever done to him. He started with my mother and worked his way backwards through time until he was in his twenties. He spoke of people and things I had never heard of. He was angry, resentful, and fed up. He was not going to leave this earth without letting someone – me – know every time he had been cheated, betrayed, humiliated.

After three days, I asked, “Dad, is this how you want to do it?” He stopped talking to me for the next two days. Then in the dark, he muttered something incoherent, a guttural sound.

“What’s happening, Dad?”

“I’m trying to get my head on straight.”

Two nights later, he saw life was a joke and he abandoned pain. Three days after that he abandoned this physical life.

The Dalai Lama and a farmer from Iowa have the same message. The difference is one has had decades to tell it to millions while the other had only a couple days and told it only to me.

But the message is the same. Everyone has a right to be happy, joy is possible, the suffering do not wish us also to suffer, it is ego to think our sadness helps their suffering. It is also ego to turn away from those who suffer.

My soul is quietly saying, “Go girl, you’re getting there.”

Joy is not a luxury item. It is as basic as corn and potatoes were to my father, and as the twinkle in his eye is to the Dalai Lama.

I think, yes, that the point where we do not belittle those who suffer by thinking they are different from us – that we are greater and, therefore, somehow guilty –  but that we realize we are all equally deserving of joy, it is native to each of us, that is the point where we have gained a little bit of new understanding.

To take on suffering gratuitously that has no benefit to others is its own hubris. It is saying I think my suffering will make a difference when, in fact, it is our joy that makes the difference.

None of us is god, and each of us is god. My soul and the Dalai Lama have this conversation all the time. Perhaps I am just starting to hear a little bit of it.

When we feel joy, we are not ignoring those who suffer, we are keeping the light bright. We are accepting our natural state, and it is from this natural state that we have something more to give than our grief. It is light that clears darkness, our own and other’s.