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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.

 

Weeding to Eden: a life

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A gathering in comes toward the end of many people’s lives, not of friends and family though that can happen too, but of what has been and who we thought we were. Not that we know when we will die, but we know when we are, at best, in the last decade or two.

We revisit our lives as a storyline, connecting dots, finding patterns, rediscovering visions, accepting failures. With luck we are able to love where we once did not. Ourselves and others.

Then we edit. What is to be weeded out? What to be given gently as gift? What to be treasured? What to be forgiven? What to be wrapped up and set aside to free ourselves for one more great discovery or great work?

. . .

I have a garden, a city garden. It’s relatively quiet, with robins, cardinals, mourning doves, wrens, and a woodpecker – and wisteria arbor, cherry trees and Japanese weeping maples, flowering bushes, ferns, iris, peonies, walls of ivy, and a pool. Over years of tweaking, tending, planting, and weeding it has become my eden. In warm weather I eat breakfast there and in the late afternoons I swim.

Homesteading in Tennessee 40 years ago, I had a raised-bed vegetable garden alongside a slate-bottomed spring-fed creek. It included several varieties of tomatoes, lettuce, squash, and potatoes, plus broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, okra, peas, green beans, cucumbers, and prize asparagus. It was surrounded by purple iris transplanted from the woods where a house had burnt to its foundation decades before.

That garden saved my life by saving my spirit when my then-husband descended into violence. 

. . . 

The vegetable gardens of my youth could hardly be called gardens. They contained tomato and cucumber plants entwined with weeds. Lettuce and cabbage were also planted but, courtesy of worms, became green lace before we could eat them.

Even so, the tomatoes and cucumbers bore fruit. My brother would snap off a tomato or cuke to eat whole and unwashed.

The garden shamed me somehow. It was theoretically a 4-H project of my brother’s, but so far as I knew no one tended it. Truth is, my memories are vague, tied up with do wives and girls do farm work or not? There was a sharp divide between the families where women worked the farm along with the men and those where women did not. Those who did were in the majority, but I’m sure my mother made clear from the get go she was not going to be among them, which is probably why I did not do outdoor chores either except for a pre-teen period when I was to give a bucket of crushed oyster shells daily to the hens and “pick” the eggs from the filthy nests. That only lasted a few months. I believe I vomited in the henhouse.

The sweet corn was in my father’s domain, weeded by machine and tended as diligently as the field corn. Sweet corn was next to God.

. . . 

My mother did have a flower garden, a sort of flower moat that provided protection for the lawn and house from the farm buildings. Roses covered the crumbling facade of the porch, lilac bushes blocked out the unkempt woods, and a single Oriental poppy stood, tall, red, and flashy among humble bleeding hearts, daisies, and tiger lilies. 

The poppy still occupies space in my dreams as I weed the flower garden, tending my mother’s and my weedy relationship.

. . . 

So I gather in and round out as I sit in an eden neither my mother nor father – nor I – could have imagined. I weed so the field is clear for one more great discovery or great work. 

 

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.

 

Cappuccino in the Orphanage

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The four-year-old boy in the orphanage in the West Bank wanted only one thing. Cappuccino. He begged my friend who had promised each child a gift. She could not resist.

This is not a story about caffeine or what children “should” imbibe. This is a story of a child’s need to be loved.

You see, the children in the orphanage watch television a lot and there is an ad or a sitcom where a family drinks cappuccino together. He wants to be in that family, and in his mind they have adopted him, or he has adopted them.

When my friend returned a few days later, the boy ran across the large room to embrace her and ask if she had brought him cappuccino. She had, a month’s worth and the means to make it, and chocolate powder to sprinkle on top.

“You must share,” she said. “No, this is mine,” he said, and clutched the package to his chest.

She showed him how to make cappuccino and sprinkle the power. He sat cross-legged on the floor and drank it, slowly, contemplatively, putting it down quietly with both hands in between sips, as though he were listening to other members of his family talk.

Then he would pick it up again and sip until it was all gone.

After that day, he would do the ritual with the family on the television at their allotted time together. He made himself part of the family.

We are social animals and, yes, he knew the other orphans were called his “family,” but he needed his own.

After the month my friend replenished his supply. It is my belief he will drink cappuccino, and the other intense coffee variants for his life. He is Palestinian after all.

My friend told me the story in a luxury apartment overlooking NYC. We had just returned from lunch in a fine restaurant, followed by cappuccino. For me, decaf, which I prefer with almond milk.

It was a superb cup, but did not give me a family. It was a moment with my friend who has changed the lives of thousands of Palestinians.

Children make do with what they can. We all need embracing, we all need connection, but children need it most.

 

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.

 

 

 

My Grandson’s Hand in Mine

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It seems such a small thing that I have resisted writing about it for a week, and it was such a small thing, my grandson’s hand slipping into mine like a piece of cool silk when we cross the street. Not any little street, but NYC streets. Without resistance, especially across Broadway.

We all have some memory of being touched gently, serenely, with not a single barrier, whether by a lover or someone we wished to be a lover. At least I hope we all have, but surely I overstated. It isn’t the makeup of the world that we all have been loved.

Actually I remember the touch, as an adolescent, of a monkey reaching through a cage, quick as a viper, grabbing my hair at its roots and pulling my head against the screen as I screamed. I feel it now, but that is not the kind of touch I mean.

In retrospect, I remember other violent touches, the first time my husband hit me, but this is not about that.

This is about a ten-year-old boy who slips his hand in mine like silk. It is about holding my hand out when he is a step behind and having his hand touch mine without my even seeing him, knowing he is there and his knowing I am there, and we will cross Broadway safely.

It is about agreement of who we are together. And agreement of going forward, of crossing the landscape, of moving through time and space in our bodies. Our bodies that hold our minds, and thoughts, and emotions. It is about trust. It is about love as ordinary as water.

I have never felt that level of trust with my arm through that of a partner. I have never felt that safe crossing busy streets.

That amazingly fine hand with long delicate fingers, not clutching, simply entwined, and continuing so after we cross the street.

Yes, he may jump and whirl and yell and laugh and roll on the rug with delight when he beats me in chess. Triumph, unabashedly competitive.

Yes, he is alert and attentive to my elderly foibles, leaving my key in the door of the apartment. He is already tending and accepting.

But when he puts his hand in mine, our palms against each other the world is somehow right. We are comrades and for that moment I am still the elder, the guard, the protector. There is no resistance, nor is there surrender.

The touch says it all, and that is not a small thing at all.

 

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.

 

 

FLASH: Elder Dog Named “Trump” Disrupts World Peace

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Among the other god-awful things Trump has brought to us—rather, to the entire world—is the prospect of even greater war. He poked and continued to poke a dog that, while not entirely sleeping, could have been contained to its own yard.

That is, Trump, too, is a dog—mangy, snarling, yapping, attacking, aged, paranoid, howling at the moon, thinking it still rules the neighborhood, thinking its bark has value when all it does is set off other dogs. A dog who believes nothing exists beyond its own block, and doesn’t even like the people who live next door.

But, . . . but, . . . but if he were really a dog, there would be a muzzle on him by now. Instead he is the President of the United States and sullies the White House and claims the Constitution is paper to wipe it up with. Oh, sorry for ending that sentence with a preposition.

Donald is an immense test for those of us who want love, beauty, art, music, poems, science, exploration, meditation, and spiritual passages as central to our lives. Do we protest? Do we ignore? Do we shelter ourselves? Do we take up advanced wine tasting? Do we turn off the news? Do we go on retreats? Do we post photos of family members and friends bonding? Do we bury our heads in the necks of our pets?

Do we try to purify or go into the trenches? Are both possible at once?

Some answers are simple. We must protest. And we must shelter ourselves. We must watch carefully how much inane racket we can endure in one day, and adjust accordingly.

We must find ways to protest that harm no one else. We must raise awareness of the ugly truths of bigotry and inequality. We must not indulge in fake news ourselves.

We must criticize horrors and quotes that are verifiable but not do wholesale debunking. Melania may surprise us yet, and Ivanka hasn’t been heard from lately. They have been tasked with walking the dog, and that is not easy.

We must ask ourselves the variant of “what would Jesus do?” that suits our personal beliefs and predilections. I ask “What would love do?”

I also ask “Why is it so difficulty for so many people—Trump and beyond—to understand that all humans are made of the same stuff. Pain and loss feel the same in all nations and races.

Should we be surprised that hundreds of football players are “taking the knee”? Of course not. Their identification with those suffering from police bias and other forms of racial bias is close. They feel it in their bones and through their relatives and friends.

But Trump does not and cannot feel the pain and loss of others, and cares so little about it that he cannot even fake it. A bop on his nose mystifies him. Humans confuse him. All he wants is to be petted and called “good boy.”

And so, the old dog barks, snarls, and attacks, boasting in proxy of his younger days when he saw himself as a Casanova who got away with it.

We are in trouble when what we want is a creative dynamic serenity. We want to explore the immense universe, the music of life, the awesome facts of time and space. We want to study life as a beautiful thing, not destroy and abuse it.

Creating harmony within the din of fear, lies, and chaos is extremely difficult, but hopefully it is possible, because it is necessary.

Do not let yourself be swamped. Take time to gather your senses, find your truths, and act upon them in ways that share and expand your visions without harming others.

Somewhere in here we can agree Trump is not only scary and bloody annoying, but a clear and present danger. Somewhere in here is a muzzle. Or fences, or barriers.

We must protect what is good and work to change what is ugly. We are neighbors, and he is a menace, a mongrel doing war-mongering.

 

 

 

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.

 

Rape Comes to Kalorama

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Three nights ago a woman was bound, blind-folded, assaulted, and raped in her home—a block from me as a crow would fly through our gardens. But we have no crows in Kalorama.

We have cardinals, robins, the occasional blue jay, wrens, and song birds. I once saw a hawk. Mallards have twice in two years tried to claim my pool. I made the mistake of letting the grandchildren give them breadcrumbs. Ducks are aggressive and seem to have long memories.

The woman told the police she did not know how the man got into her house. I know how one would get into my house. Over the garden gate, along the walk between my neighbor’s fence and my home, into the garden, and through the three glass French doors that open from the garden into my dining room. My dog would be confused, but he would bark if a strange man came into my bedroom—bark and attack. I hope. Though, when Fourth of July fireworks go off, he hides in corners and whimpers, so I probably should rethink my supposition.

I light my garden well at night now, and set my alarm for the first time in a couple years. I also moved the tazer—does it still work?—from the far night stand to the near night stand.

Still, there is a high-pitched screech in my cells when I think of her being bound, blindfolded, and raped. Also robbed, but that’s meaningless.

I watch carefully now when I walk my dog. The detectives at the door told me I had walked my dog at the same time the rapist was in the neighborhood—they have him on camera.

President and Michelle Obama, Malia, and Sasha live four blocks away, Ivanka Trump and husband Jared are three blocks away. Jeff Bezos is a block away if the crow flew in the opposite direction of the house of the woman who was raped, and Rex Tillerson is ½ block away, between my house and the house of the woman who was raped.

We prided ourselves on being a quiet neighborhood. Now we have one street blocked off by police cars and concrete barricades, and black Secret Service Suburbans along the street I drive to pick up my grandchildren from school. Tourists ask me directions.

It’s okay. I would sacrifice a lot to have Barack and Michelle nearby. That part feels cozy despite the concrete blocks.

But I write not out of coziness but because of the high-pitched screech in my cells—I write because I am one of three women living alone along my street. We are known as “the three graces.”

I write because assault against any woman feels like personal assault, and when it is a block away it stings your skin like an acidic breeze.

I remember “hit hard up the bridge of the nose so it jams into their head.” I remember I’ve always thought that the knee to the balls was “iffy.” The odds of getting that right seem minimal and I would be caught with one leg off the ground.

I remember that in the street you scream, you fight, you run. I remember at all costs not to get into a car.

I never learned what to do if the assailant is in your home and there are secret police out of reach just a block away.

I write because one of the detectives said “It was an assault, but no one was killed.”

She was bound, blindfolded, and raped—but no one was killed. We don’t do murders in Kalorama, evidently—only rapes.

I write because I am angry because rape is attempted murder of a woman’s—or man’s—soul. I write because people harm each other. I write in order to reach the place where I can cry.