Category Archives: Woman of a Certain Age

A Hairbrush for the Generations

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There was a child raised on a farm in Iowa during the Depression who sold apples on the corner as her classmates walked by. She was intelligent and skipped two grades of school. Perhaps that helped her humiliation. She vowed never to marry a farmer.

But she did marry a farmer, a handsome farmer 12 years older than she. They met when she stopped to ask directions to the one-room schoolhouse where she was to teach.

Mom, young adult

She was 21 and had taught at one-room schoolhouses since she was 19. Or was it 18? She believed she would never get married – all those freckles and that red hair.

The marriage was difficult, not a lot of fun for her or her silent husband or their two children. After the children went to college, she returned to school and renewed her teaching certificate. Then she taught for decades – special education and third grade. Her students loved her. Her daughter, i.e. me, could never figure that out.

She died at age 96 on the next to the last day of 2013. A few days ago she spoke through a medium to ask her daughter’s forgiveness, i.e. mine, for being stubborn, for being unable to express her emotions (caused by her own emotionally deprived upbringing), for having always to be the one who was right (caused by immense insecurities), for her jealousy (regarding her silent husband), and for being a difficult mother. She said she was sorry for being such “a pain” to me and others, and explained why she was as she was. I was stunned.

I wrote a blog months ago titled “I Never Saw My Mother Cry.” The medium said there were tears in her eyes and she just wanted to hug her.

Whatever you, reader, think of mediums or life after death or “other worlds” there is a realm where thoughts, history, and knowing collect and seem to be able to realign. Whether it is an individual or collective unconscious that has little to do with the deceased, ESP, or uber-intuition I don’t know, but I know this realm exists, though I’m not going to go into the personal detailed things my mother told the medium to “prove” to her and me that it was she.

I didn’t need an apology from my mother. She was long ago forgiven and has long been loved. But in appears that she needed to ask my forgiveness even so, and I felt her emotional release afterwards and have felt her happy warmth since. She feels like a little girl, finally allowed to dance, who is making up for lost time.

HairbrushIn her emotionally frozen and somewhat materially-deprived life as an adult, my mother had certain things that mattered. One was a toiletries set that included a hairbrush, mirror, comb, and glass jar for face powder. The mirror and comb are gone but I snatched the brush and jar, cherishing them as sweet pretty things that were always on the chest of drawers in their bedroom. The set had always been incongruous to me in that harsh emotional landscape where people were isolated from each other, and I treasured it.

Last night after my five-year-old granddaughter soaked in the bathtub and got the playground dirt off her knees and feet and her fine golden hair washed, she used the brush. The soft bristles didn’t hurt her.

She used it again this morning. I purred inside.

“I look so beautiful.”

“Yes, my precious love, you do.”

When we see the photographs of destruction in war zones, there are often photos of a doll, a stuffed toy animal, a piece of china, a framed photograph against the wreckage. That one thing tells us of the life that was, the warmth and caring, and tender things of everyday life – or what everyday life is meant to be, where we love each other and express it. The tragedy, the loss, is shown in the contrast – and we the viewers don’t know if those lives are recoverable or if the people are dead or wounded beyond recognition. Refugees perhaps?

My mother’s life seems in this strange unidentifiable realm to be recovered, at least through me and for me. She needed to apologize for her sake, to let me know that she – wherever she is – could unfreeze emotions and realign them into fluid love for the sake of healing – hers and perhaps mine. I don’t know how this works, but it does. I may be stunned, but I do embrace.

And my granddaughter knows I love her “bigger than the whole universe” and that the brush belonged to her Gramma Belle, and that she and the brush are beautiful. Very beautiful.

 

Ode to Thrust Bearings: getting unstuck

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Humans progressed from sticking twigs into holes in the earth and then licking off the ants to inventing thrust bearings, glorified wheels that opened the way for the industrial revolution, advanced agriculture, and travel in outer space. Can we not find the equivalent to change our human interactions and bring harmony to the world?

. . . . .

The world needs more thrust bearings. Thrust bearings allow things to be mobile and flexible while remaining stable. They allow large heavy things to turn, move, and realign. They allow juxtaposed things to stay in connection with each other while one – or both – is turning, moving, and realigning.

We need more thrust bearings in world politics, we need them for social mobility, we need them to manage the relationship between finances and education, we need them to unstick prejudices, we need them to navigate clashing attitudes on abortion, same-sex marriage, minimum wages, health care, gun control, immigrants, and housing for everyone. We need them in the U.S. Congress. We need them between religions and cultures. We need them wherever there is war, poverty, destruction, or hate.

What is a thrust bearing? It is a human invention, a thingamajig with only one purpose – to allow objects to turn in relationship to each other on a axis. It is, in effect, a flattened ring of multiple ball bearings that fits between a same-size washer on the top and a same-size washer on the bottom.

Yes, there are tools for almost everything – give me a large enough lever and a place to stand and I can make the earth move – but my heart belongs to thrust bearings.

thrust bearing

The thrust bearing that thrills me most is 15/16” in diameter with a center hole 5/8” in diameter. It is a 304 stainless steel alloy mix of iron, chromium, nickel, and small amounts of other things. (See photo of my actual thrust bearing.)

Thrust bearings are put to use by slathering them in grease between their two washers. Think lox slathered with cream cheese on both sides between two toasted bagel chips.

After this photo was taken my heartthrob was slathered, layered, and placed on a small rod – an axis – atop a stainless steel pole 2” wide by 3’ high. A matching stainless steel “top piece” of pole 3” high was placed on top of the thrust bearing.

close up of wingThis 3″ top piece is attached to a “cradle” with finger-like prongs that hold a 120 lb. angel’s wing of Carrera marble. The wing is 39″ long. The concept, construction, and installation for the support pole and cradle were all done by museum installer par excellence David Graham alongside Patrick Burke.

The thrust bearing allows the wing to turn on a horizontal axial plane 4′ high in my garden. Not like a windmill, it is too heavy for that. But I can turn the wing easily to view it from different angles.

Very few things look the same from difference angles. Very few things are not metaphors for something else.

My thrust bearing has the capability to allow an object of up to 3000 lbs. to rotate on an axial plane at 10,000 revolutions per second. Try that, junior cadets.

DSCN5285A nearly life-size terra cotta woman titled “Waiting for an Angel” sits nearby. She is serene, sure that angels exist and, if she waits long enough, one will walk in to reclaim the wing that fell to the ground and turned to marble. (The wing’s sculptor is Elizabeth Turk. The name of the creator of “Waiting for an Angel” has vanished from my records. There is more about both on my blog Returned: One Angel’s Wing.)

Her dream is ethereal but the thrust bearing that allows the wing to move is concrete. It is not a wish, a notion, or a longing. It is real. We humans need both the dream and the tool.

Humans progressed from sticking twigs into holes in the earth and then licking off the ants to inventing thrust bearings, glorified wheels that opened the way for the industrial revolution, advanced agriculture, and travel in outer space. Can we not find the equivalent to change our human interactions and bring harmony to the world?

DSCN5274

We need interior and exterior tools to bring us into equilibrium with each other so we can be flexible, creative, and work together to overcome inequalities such as food for some and not for others, medicine for some and not for others, education for some and not for others, safety and equal rights for some and not for others.

We are stuck. We confuse our selected morality with absolute truth. We trumpet the mythology of our own religion while mocking that of others. We justify killing as though we have no other option. We give precedence to one sex over the others. We favor some races and cultures over others. We imprison people unequally and label it protection of the rest of us. We think guns make us strong.

We entrench. We find it difficult to change our positions and beliefs. We close our doors and our borders and our minds and our hearts. We build walls against each other and then we bomb our way through them to kill each other. We feed our hate and fear and memory of harm done to us until it turns into harm and horrors we do to others.

We lack the courage and vision – or perhaps only the will? – to reconsider our stuck positions. We like thinking we are right, we like not questioning ourselves. But if we are to live in peace then we need to find and use our inner thrust bearings. We need to change our perspectives on what exists, what is possible, and how to get there. We need to do it individually and collectively.

So what does a thrust bearing look like? They are nouns, verbs, people, states of being, qualities.

For starters: Pope Francis, Jane Goodall, Desmond Tutu, neighborhood soup kitchens, dedicated teachers, fair trade agreements, cat videos, chocolate, inner-city gardens, deep listening to each other, forgiveness, reunions, interfaith outreach, art in our schools, nonviolent protests against injustice and inequality, paid maternity leave, respect for the homeless and poor, neighborhood libraries, smiles, increased minimum wage, diversity.

Love, education, and medicine are thrust bearings. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is the Golden Rule thrust bearing.

Many NGO’s are thrust bearings. Top of my list are Search for Common Ground, Doctors Without Borders, Bereaved Parents – Family Forum, Women for Women International, Chime for Change, and World Pulse.

Countless thousands of women in Africa are thrust bearings. UN resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace, and Security” to get women at negotiation tables and in the enactment of peace accords is a thrust bearing. Any book by Jean Shinoda Bolen is a thrust bearing, including the just-released “Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Everywoman.”

We need countless more. But to have more thrust bearings in our individual and collective lives we must first believe in goodness and possibility. We must hold tenaciously to the vision of living together in generous harmony.

We must accept we can be kind and still be safe, we can reach out and not be harmed, we can give and not be destitute, and we can listen to those we think are our enemies until they become our friends. If we do not, we will continue to grind against each other. There will only be friction between us. We will continue to be afraid in a fracturing world.

DSCN5270The woman in my garden has waited for an angel for nearly two decades. She is patient, loving, and kind. When we humans become more adept at using the thrust bearings inside us – love, patience, and kindness – heaven has a chance.

If a thingamajig 15/16″ across can hold something 3000 lbs while it rotates 10,000 revolutions per second, shouldn’t we as flesh and blood and passion and visionaries be able to find our way out of this stuck place?

I think we can. I believe it is possible.

 

 

 

My Cyber Stalker, tsk tsk

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Nearly a decade ago now a former employee began stalking me through the Internet, though she didn’t restrict herself to the Internet. When “Family Circle” magazine wrote an article about Peace X Peace, the nonprofit I started in 2002 to connect women to women for private conversations through the Internet, the article centered on an interview and photos of me. Immediately after publication, the editor contacted me because an anonymous hate note had come to them. She forwarded it and said, “This sounds like a disgruntled former employee.” That it was and it wasn’t the first time.

The ways in which stalkers can say nasty things about you and to you include by email, texts, posts on websites, comments on blogs, and more. She has used all of them.

All one needs to do this is enough tech savvy to keep getting new email addresses so you can circumvent the bans against your old ones and the willingness to use your precious time and energy to track a person and say ugly things. I say “precious time and energy” because to me everyone’s time and energy are precious and shouldn’t be squandered – exempting necessary downtime and chocolate.

My personal stalker is a master of “ugly,” laden in snark with a dose of cackle. Nothing is taboo for her to create, hinged on some thread of historical “fact” (is it real to her?), and say.

My tech people and I thought we had her banned from my ever having to see anything from her, but – voila! – a change of her email address and a comments section to blogs, and she’s back and active. Who knows how much she wrote over the years that went directly into one of those little trashcan icons with no one knowing the better.

Her comments on my blogs cannot go public without my approving them, but in the past two weeks I have read several – skimmed more like it – on how my husband told her immediately how he wanted to divorce me, what an ego-maniac I am, and so it goes. I pay enough attention to make sure it’s her with the same old same old. Then I photograph and file before deleting to provide the future option of bringing police action for harassment.

Through the years I have not responded. She’s hardly been a ripple in my life except to remind me that there are people who falsify their resumes both before and after working for you, who lie to your face and about you to others, who can hate you and rage. It’s not pleasant but it is true.

And it is sad. And I wish it weren’t true. But it is. And after a decade of silence I am looking at this a bit and with a longer lens.

I know her troubles and rage go beyond me. It should have been a signal to me that she was in two lawsuits when I hired her. Well, I only knew of one of them then, but, alas, I was taken in. Mea culpa.

It raises questions about her:

Does she know she lies? Surely she must.

Does she know she is a stalker and classic harasser? I suspect she doesn’t.

How does one hate so hard for so long? Does she not long to write me off as a monster and go on with her life? As horrid as she thinks I am, I shouldn’t be worth spending time on.

It raises questions about me:

Is there a grain of truth to her charges? It’s not popping out to me but surely she’ll remind me. Is it egomaniacal of me to write blogs that tell of my life, circumstances, and foibles? Isn’t that what most blogs do?

Do I monitor what I say or write, knowing she will read it? I hope not.

Why does someone hate me so much? My answer to this, from life experience, is that people run their own interior movies and they cast you in roles that work for them. We might want the good roles, but they might cast us as bad.

It raises questions about the people around us. Let’s look at the large scale:

How do peacemakers find techniques to bring harmony when some people don’t have the same thought processes, rationales, beliefs, values, or methods of discernment as most of us do and/or they have no taboos? Particularly when such people are most likely a disproportionate number of the rulers of nation, factions, and sub-cultures? Particularly when they often tend towards hate and harm?

This last question is the most important. That is, if there are not commonly held concepts of respect, compassion, honesty, mutual good, and trust, how do we progress? How do “enemies” move toward peace without the currency of common values on how humans should behave towards one another?

Taken to its logical conclusion, this is how wars start and continue. We cannot find a common set of values and beliefs. We are bombing right now because we do not have an answer to this question.

Coming to this understanding of seemingly impossible divides was not easy. I was a committed advocate of deep listening and seeing myself in others but we must find new answers to what to do about evil in the world. Not everyone wants peace.

Given this, how do we or our nation or our ally nations neutralize evil – real or imagined – without becoming the monsters we think we are fighting? And then embrace the conscience-appeasing rationale that our actions are justified and it is our right to defend ourselves? No nation can kill with impunity and not harm their soul.

The “me” we see in the other becomes a circle of “others” who hate, and choose to destroy.

I don’t have the answers. But I do still believe the divide is “seemingly.” This hope is reinforced because I see good people rising everywhere for better lives. I trust the people on the ground more than the people running nations.

For my little issue, forgiveness for real or imagined injuries and moving on would seem to be an answer, but that’s not up to me. I hope some day it happens.

And, no, dear harasser, I will not post your comments to this blog. Know that in advance. This is all you get. I will write no more. You have to come to your own interior peace just like everyone else. Write me a new role in your movie, maybe that of a bit part bystander who walks away, wishing you well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Air France Made Me Cry

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johnny cash with speech text1

 

Reader Notice: Any lament about being stuck in Paris is, by definition, ridiculous. I know that.This is about being stuck away from people you love.

 

 

Air France made me cry. Not sob, not bawl my eyes out, but real tears, real “I can’t cope” tears. Since I long ago learned that “I can’t cope” tears have no traction in my world – maybe in others, but not in mine, never have – the tears stopped at the point where I said aloud, “Well, that’s really going to help, Patricia.”

Insomnia is no respecter of borders and sleeping only between 5:00 am and 9:00 am probably had something to do with my fragility, as did a desire to get home and hug my grandchildren, to dedicate my life to them as the most viable thing I’ve got going.

Yes, this is a somewhat hollow lament – I am in Paris, after all! – but loneliness is not ever hollow. I have a psychiatrist friend who was in the teams that “treated” Vietnamese boat people decades ago. She said they wanted to talk about the same things everyone else wants to talk about. Not the war, not loss of home, but the intricacies of love and caring and insecurities. Why should I be immune?

So when the email notice came from Air France canceling my flight 24 hours before scheduled takeoff, I was already flirting with self-pity. It was complex and went on and on about booking options and financial transactions, and it was in French without an English “click” button.

Now, I had known for two weeks that the Air France pilots were on a “soft” strike with some flights cancelled, which is why I kept checking to see that my flight was still on schedule. It was, up to that moment. I had packed.

Action time! Call the telephone number, get a real operator, tell her or him everything, get a new booking, and arrange a straight financial exchange. The first two tries didn’t get through at all and the third time I got the “Thank you for your patience, we will be with you shortly” recording – for 30 minutes, which is when I hung up at $1 per minute.

But had I been sitting around, helpless and waiting? No! I had been online in the race with phantom leagues of people who were also rebooking as fast as they could.

Stick with Air France rather than try in foreign languages to manage the finances. The strike is scheduled to be over in two days. Five seats left on the Wednesday flight, work fast, get that information in, choose a seat, click to confirm. Now!

. . . oh, oh . . . an air message. There is a technical difficulty and my reservation cannot be confirmed. Of course, there’s a technical difficulty! There are 500 plus people from my plane alone who are rebooking. No way those five seats will be left next time I try.

This is when being alone, being sleep deprived, and wanting your grandchildren to run to you with their arms open come together in a special way that creates a stinging sensation in your tear ducts.

It’s not about reservations and flights. It’s about being connected to others. It’s about being in the human family. It’s about being loved and giving love, being embraced and embracing, celebrating each other, and having someone bring you coffee while you’re trying to get home.

I made my own coffee and went back to try online again. My speakerphone was still saying “Thank you for your patience, we will be with you shortly.” But this time when I pulled up my reservation to change it, it said I was confirmed on a flight in two days. My earlier attempt had gone through.

I shut off my cell phone, dressed in black like Johnny Cash, told myself I was one tough cookie, and I went out to lunch – a poached egg over thin-sliced gently steamed peppers and corn for the first course and wild mushroom risotto for the second course.

I can cope for two more days.

 

 

Fighting with Perfection in Paris

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kiss 23

 

(Hang in there, this blog all comes together eventually. Plus there are photos of lovers, redheads, and dogs at the end. See example to left.)

 

Fighting with Perfection in Paris

Perfection does a hatchet job on Good. She’s a diva that tolerates no supporting cast, and She has been riding roughshod over my ability to write a blog since I arrived in Paris 12 days ago.

In addition to not writing blogs, I have not been to two of my neighborhood restaurants, Laduree and Mariage Freres. They are my usual haunts and I believed they were essential to my settling into the City of Lights.

I have been taking long walks and hundreds of photographs with a focus on lovers, redheads, dogs, children, art, and the homeless that I post on Facebook every day, but no writing.

What is going on?

Let me tell you as best I understand.

For one thing the Israeli killing of 2100 Gazans and then claiming more land in the West Bank ad nauseum not only depressed me but has shown me definitively that there are people who are not only far more expert on the subject than I am but who write much better. (Un-huh, I know Israelis were targeted by Gazans firing missiles and that 50 some Israelis were killed – all except six in the military – but this blog is not about politics and I’m not in the mood to equate 50 some Israelis to 2100 Gazans and call it a draw.)

For another, I have been taken over by an internal son et lumiere show in which a cacophony of characters bide with each other for the spotlight. Inside me is a mélange of languid sexy women wearing silk lavender, clowns in cone hats with red pom-poms on top, the child I was on the farm in Iowa, an overly-sensitive female who is subject to Stendhal Syndrome, and a hawk-eyed hunter-photographer who preys on and captures the innards of innocent people.

Over it all sits the Perfectionist Judge (she’s a female, dammit!) who says that if I write something it has to have a deep and meaningful impact in addition to good grammar. Otherwise, it isn’t worth bothering with and clutters the landscape.

Also, I’m in an apartment I once co-owned with a husband we don’t need to mention except that I don’t want you to think I could ever have bought an apartment in Paris on my own. The apartment is exactly as I left it except the floor-to-ceiling silk curtains are shredding on the window side and there is a humidor on the desk and new sheets on the bed – oh, and an updated master bathroom. This is a special kind of déjà vu made possible by the new owner.

Thus, a sonne et lumiere and cast of characters goes with me through the streets, into the cafes, across Luxembourg Gardens, and into the Louvre to view 17th and 18th century French paintings. It is a pleasant but timeless experience that is not very solid, wobbly even. Writing a blog requires concrete sentences in real time.

However a deep and impactful truth (at least for me) has finally taken form. I believe that having our moorings loosened and our time sense scrambled – and losing people, gaining people, and experiencing our self as multiple people is imperative to becoming more aware of the miracle that we are here at all. We cannot know more until we give up old beliefs that we know what is what. We need to be tumbled.

Often this happens by trauma. Breakage and loss undo our world, and in undoing our world they make us look again, experience again, change. We are forced to be flexible.

We are forced to be flexible in what we thought was existence – large and small – and who we are in it. It is easiest to do this if we accept the unmooring and the cast of interior personalities and float.

The Perfection Judge says, “This is not adequate. It’s too airy-fairy. You need to say something helpful when our world is in such crisis.”

You see, the Perfection Judge tolerates that I post photographs of redheads and lovers on Facebook, but she wants my blogs to have more depth, which means the only way I can write is to stand up to Her and say, “Half-ass and mediocre are just fine, thank you, anyway.”

Even so, I will now make an attempt at depth, or perhaps just at loosening your moorings: There are as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on planet earth. Odds are beyond all reckoning that we are not the only thinking creatures in infinity.

We don’t know much of anything but we experience that we exist. That is a place to start.

Two days ago I bought a work of art titled “Paradise Lost.” (See photo. Xavier Somers, Flemish, is the artist.)

In the beginning were Adam and Eve and they discovered the pleasurable things that men and women can do together. Behold, Eve laid an egg in the nest of temporal life and free Paradise lost 010 (2)will. Alongside it in the nest is the devoured apple of self-knowledge. The beginning was the awareness that we existed. It might not be much, but it is a start.

Everything my knowledge and experience tell me is that bliss is the natural state and it is humans who f**k it up. We all know the second part of that sentence. I believe the first part is true also. We “fell” out of grace into self-knowledge. It was the only way to know we are here. Now the task is to climb back up and join self-awareness with bliss. (. . . which raises all sort of questions such as which came first the bird or the egg.)

In “Paradise Lost” the golden male has a large key that inserts in the keyhole of the golden female. It joins them into one creature, a larger egg with legs. I’m just letting you know that without further comment.

And this Adam and Eve devoured the apple. Of course! If we’re going for self-awareness, we need to get as much as possible.

And the nest is made of barbed wire. And so it is. Look around.

And because our self-awareness is still so miniscule, such a grain of sand in infinity, we harm each other and call it justified and self-protection and rational.

And I look around this apartment where loss has occurred and where beauty and blessing pour in the windows, and I cart my mélange of characters around with me and tell the Perfection Judge, “Bugger off.”

I say, “Bugger off. You, Perfection, are the scourge, thinking you know what is right or good. You, who wants life in perfect grammar and manners and brilliance. Look around, Perfection, next to the lovers are the homeless. Look, Perfection, look well, and tell me that you have a right to judge. We rejected you when we began to become aware and to care for all that fails your false standards. Bugger off.”

Photos of Parisians below, being their essential selves, even when dogs:

kiss 20 kiss11 dog19 dog18 dog15 cafe1 red head8 red hair3 homeless8 homeless3 cafe2

 

 

 

#whyistayed and #whyileft

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#whyistayed

I stayed because it was my second marriage and 40 years ago you did not leave a second marriage. Plus, the hitting did not begin until six months into the marriage and after great trauma around a custody suit.

Plus, I loved him. Plus, I thought I was strong enough to heal him, though what dangerous mix of reserve strength and delusion that came from I cannot now imagine. Plus, he was the most handsome man I had ever seen, and I am aware how shallow that sounds.

Plus, as perhaps the majority of women who have been married to abusers could tell you, every time the violence stops – during the peace lulls – you want desperately to believe the last hit or kick was the last one ever. You want to believe when he promises to see a therapist or is on his knees begging that it will be the end.

Plus, after the custody suit I had no funds. Plus, I let him isolate me in a state far from friends, initially without even a telephone. Plus, I was humiliated.

Plus, it takes time to realize the unthinkable is happening to you and that it is not going to stop.

Plus, we met through a spiritual commune and the ways in which the loving tenets of that commune confused my ability to make tough decisions in the “real” world are not easily explained – but people thought he was a gentle man, a modern yogi with great spiritual understanding. They did not believe me when I broke my silence two years later.

Plus, he never broke any bones, and bruising was rare. After the first hit with a closed fist – I still have the scar inside my lip – he slapped or hit with an open hand, kicked, threw, threw things at, and more.

Plus, he never showed violence in front of my daughter, knowing instinctively that to do so would have instantly shattered any hold he had on me. Abusers know what they can get away with.

I write this, adding my story to the emerging litany, for two reasons.1) People who haven’t been there need a lot of information to make it real. 2) Women and men who have been there, or ARE there, need to know again and again that they are not at fault, they can get free, and they can reclaim – or make for the first time – a beautiful life for themselves.

I read that women in abusive relationships make an average of six attempts to leave before they get out. I only remember five attempts. I’m sure there were more, but I have no desire to recall everything.

Once I drove an hour and a half from the valley in Tennessee and stopped for groceries. In the parking lot I saw a large snake, alive and wiggling. A man, a stranger who recognized me though I hadn’t a clue who he was, said “That snake must have followed us from Celina.” I felt then that I could not escape – oh, the mind does tricks – and I got in the van and drove back to Celina and the valley thinking I was stuck forever, that we were two children on a raft of grief instead of that he was the grief and it was okay to leave him.

A second time he was driving and hit me in the passenger seat. I almost jumped out of the van along the Potomac River under the overhang of the Kennedy Center but then I didn’t or he grabbed me, I don’t remember which, but I know the door was open. Somehow an hour later I got the keys, jumped in the van, locked him out and drove to my first husband’s law offices. Humiliation or no humiliation, I made a break for it.

But my first husband was inept and said “Maybe you should give it another chance,” and my second husband arrived – ran? taxi? – and the receptionist sent him back and he fell on his knees again and pleaded his case. (My first husband had the grace at least to step outside.) Without money or a place to stay, and only a modicum of pride left, I went with him and we drove out of town. After hours of silence in the dark, he told me had no intention of keeping his promise to see a psychiatrist.

People don’t want to know, they don’t want to hear. Abuse is emotionally inconvenient. Four decades ago people particularly didn’t know what to do with it. (This is my way of saying that I don’t blame my first husband. He was just desperate to move the scene out of his firm’s law offices. By the time he might have been able to process everything, I was gone.)

At that time there were also no hotlines for battered spouses. I still remember an operator’s voice as I begged for a number to call, without actually calling the police. She felt helpless.

Now, I do blame. NFL officials shouldn’t have had to see the video inside the elevator before they acted appropriately. Period. No excuses. No. Excuses.

#whyileft

I read that it averages two months of preparation from the time you decide definitely to leave and when you get out. I knew in a moment of revelation in my garden in April, but I didn’t get wholly out until the following January. I went public a few months before then. One friend called every day to make sure I answered the phone. Most of the others didn’t believe me.

It is a godawful business.

The final ending wasn’t pretty. I had gotten him to leave the valley, but, insanely, I tried one more time to make it work. I flew to Marin, California where he was with friends. I thought maybe he wouldn’t be crazy if we weren’t isolated.

Within 30 minutes of arriving I became desperately ill and was confined to bed for two days. When I got up, he began non-stop verbal abuse.

Somehow he was willing to drive me to the San Francisco airport where he threw my clothes out of my suitcase at me and screamed I was a whore. That is one impressive way to shock people at the check-in line. I called someone who let me book a ticket on their credit card and I flew out on the red eye.

Months later I was in a bookstore and picked up a book on physical and emotional abuse. It had a checklist of characteristics. Every single one of them pertained to my situation. There was no “special case situation” for yogis and mini-gurus. There was no separate category for educated people who had good intentions and meditated. I was just a run-of-the-mill abuse case. There was nothing special about it at all. Not a thing.

A couple times I realized he was capable of killing me and making it look like an accident. Cold ice goes through your veins at those moments, but it may not the moment to leave.

Instead you become feral, you sniff the air for change, you register each vibration, you don’t show strong emotions either happy or sad, you never criticize, you exude being calm, you do not turn your back, you watch if he’s keeping the car keys in his pocket because that’s a signal that pressure is building inside him, you manage to get an extra set made and hide them outside near the car, you always reassure – you reassure the person who harms you that you love them. Yes, that’s what you do. You pretend, and you better make it lifelike to both of you.

And you grieve because you did love him, because he was gentle once, because you know he was beaten as a child and told he deserved it and he believed that, because he has a beautiful face that belies what is damaged inside, because in some way you believe he still loves you and needs you, because he is a tragedy.

#inthegarden

April half my lifetime ago, propping up baby romaine lettuce knocked down by a rainstorm, I heard a voice: “You who know so well the value of lettuce, of how much more value are you?”

It wasn’t often that God spoke to me, but I recognized the voice.

I stood and said, “If I leave, he will kill himself.”

The voice: “Not your first concern.”

In an instant I realized I was created out of the Divine Source and that my first obligation was to care for me. I had a responsibility to the force that created me.

In that instant I knew I would leave, that I would build my strength silently, get straight enough inside to leave.

That is what a miracle looks like.

I will never judge a woman, or man, who has not yet found the power to leave an abuser, but I would warn them in advance if I could, I would help them if they asked, I would rejoice in their courage when they did.

You are weaker than you realize. Do not allow abuse.

You are stronger than you realize. Do what you need to live your one life with joy and happiness.

 

 

Adultery and the Clock: tick tock

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This Labor Day weekend is the sixth anniversary of the day my ex-husband invited me into our garden to “show me something.” I assumed it was a flower or a hummingbird. It was, instead, a 2 1/2 page letter telling me, first, that I was his soulmate and he could never love anyone else as much as he loved me. Second, it told me about the other woman and the apartments he had with her in San Francisco and Beijing. Third, it told me that from that moment on he would spend half a year with her and half a year with me.

Fourth, it expressed that he understood I might have an “initial period of upset.”

What he did not understand – it had never crossed his mind – was that I might leave. I was out of the house with a packed suitcase inside of 30 minutes.

It turned out he had misconstrued my nearly a decade of work advocating inclusiveness across cultures and dialogue across differences. I pointed out that meant between rebels and governments, not between adulterers and spouses.

It went downhill from there.

Yet, I would not be writing about this except for an odd thing that happened. Yesterday, at a birthday brunch I was placed next to a stranger. When we went around the table to tell how we first met our mutual friend, I realized she most likely had worked in an academic program with the second husband of the woman my husband chose and presumably is still with. After the chocolate cake infused with raspberry juice, while people were leaving, I asked.

The shock on the face of this mild-mannered woman soon gave away to not only did she know him but she disliked him. She also knew the woman (the one presumably still with my former husband) and felt the two were a match in duplicity, fraud, and opportunism.

Fourteen years after experience with either of them, she became visibly upset. While I referred to them and my ex-husband as “bad news bears,” she used more explicit words to describe the two people she knows as “deserving each other.”

Their saga reached across to China and he wrote a critically-acclaimed book of their “love affair” that this woman, and others, say is filled with fraudulent information.

While I’ve never met him face to face, he found me on Facebook five years ago. His version of that story (he used even more explicit words to describe his ex-wife) is that he trusted his interviews with her, and that when the book was questioned after publication, they had already separated. She, however, asked to get back together, spent the night, and when he returned from buying groceries the next morning, she was gone and his computer was stripped of the interviews. (There was a second copy with his editor.)

The cast of characters is both juicy and boring. Three people who met her with my husband – people who did not know each other, two of them his friends more than mine – contacted me separately to say she was wearing see-through blouses with no bra underneath and combat boots, which sort of tells you her approach to life.

Note: she was in the first small group of young Chinese women trained as spies, I was told, against American men. While in the group, she secretly and against the rules married a Chinese soldier, had an affair with a married military Colonel, and became involved with the future American husband who would write of their love affair. She was also kicked out of the group. (One touch I like is that she told the American that the Colonel and his wife were her parents and that he should buy the Colonel a watch.)

Point is, if you, dear reader, male and female, are contemplating adultery there are four vital things to do first.

1) Deeply and thoroughly examine if you’re ready to chuck your marriage.

2) If you do not wish to chuck your marriage, then do the work of telling your spouse of any malcontent, and have real conversations. Force the issue. Be a grown up. Good and exciting things might happen.

3) Do due diligence on any prospective “adulteree.” My husband was apparently the only person in Silicon Vally not to get the memo. The number of strangers, including ex-lovers, who found me in order to warn me and to vent about her was impressive. In fact, I had avoided her for years as bad value after I realized she was trying to hook me in with fabrications. At the same time or shortly after he privately committed hundreds of thousands of dollars to her even before the affair began.

4) Get a medical examination to make sure your mental capacities are up to snuff and you’re not predisposed to bad decisions and moral slippage. I am serious.

IF you have wended your way through the above, check in with your moral compass. I am not against ending marriages that are harmful and painful, but I believe ethics have substance and to abuse them can damage not only someone you vowed to love and honor, but yourself.

By the way, her third husband was offered the same deal a few months before me. Half a year here, half a year there. He declined. He didn’t tell me because she told him I knew my husband was having an affair and didn’t want to know who with.

This is actually a sad story. It is a King Lear story, and “King Lear” is a sad play. It is a “power corrupts” story, and power corrupts silently, insidiously. I think it is hard to discern when it is happening to you.

She is unimportant to me, except in that I wish he had chosen more wisely. Strange, huh?

It is a story of lust and greed and privilege and betrayal and love lost. I try to make it a comedy, but the best that can be done with it is a tragic-comedy, one too often played out in one form or another around us.

He was my college boyfriend returned to me after decades of absence. We were together for 18 years. I’ve seen no evidence of that person for the last six years. Betrayal has a strange kind of grieving, but it does run out of steam.

I no longer believe in soul mates. But I believe in love – and feel love – more than I ever would have thought possible, and it is partly due, in ways I cannot decipher, to expecting to see a hummingbird and instead meeting the end of what everyone, except my husband, thought was perfect. Or maybe he did, too, but he wanted even more.

The clock keeps ticking, and things come round. I was less upset than a stranger I met at a birthday brunch.

Compassion is a choice, and pity is unacceptable.

 

 

Forever, today

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“Forever.” The woman in the street called me “Forever,” proving everything you have ever been or done, or been known as, is still alive. Be careful, girls and boys.

photo 1

She said “Forever” and I turned like an old dog hearing its puppy name. No one has called me “Forever” in more than 30 years. The decade before that everyone did, except my family in Iowa who called me “Patti” and a few others I had abandoned years earlier.

She was probably aided to identify me by my clothes. My wrinkled white linen Eileen Fisher pants and shirt do resemble yogi clothes. (That’s not a typo. Yogi, not yoga.)

But I was wearing sunglasses and walking a large black poodle in a neighborhood that would have a fit-conniption if someone tried to live here in a cabin, yurt, lean-to, or tent, all of which I have lived in – plus a van, once parked outside her house for several days 35 years ago.

She nailed me at 8 feet and had the wisdom to follow immediately with her name. Otherwise, I would have been in that “my, she looks familiar, but from where” limbo.

photo 3Point is not that I lived in a religious commune in NY state and then a valley in Tennessee among musicians and craftspeople for a decade but that . . . what is the point?

I think it is not that people keep track, but that people share histories for instances or years, and those memories are alive in Now.

She and I both long ago divorced our husbands of that time, but we didn’t discuss them. Why bother? My ex-husband, a faux mini-guru, became violent and was a jerk. Her ex-husband tried to fraud me by paying back a loan from me to my divorced husband. That makes him a jerk too. The two of them grew cannabis somewhere in Virginia. For the record, I had nothing to do with it, though I saw the field once. Impressive. Tall plants loving the sun. What happened to the plants after I saw them, I have no idea. I swear.

So the point is, I think, that life is sort of like sour dough bread, the starter contains elements from the beginning of sour dough bread. Stuff continues through time and re-emerges, like, ah,”Forever.”

I may be walking a dog, she may be in my neighborhood to park her car before lunch with a friend. We could have passed each other. Surely we pass people every day who . . . six degrees of separation and all that.

I last saw my ex-husband in a banana grove during a visit to Maui 21-22 years ago. He was looking thin. I’ve heard nothing since. I don’t know if he is dead or alive. His family is all gone, there is no one to ask.

Nor do I know anything about her husband.

Perhaps she and I will meet for lunch, but no reminiscing. They were jerks. It all comes around. I think I want her to continue calling me “Forever.” It has something about it.

 

Waiting in the garden for lightning

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garden at night

I sit in my garden at 1:30 am waiting for an epiphany,
longing, Saul on the road to Damascus, to be relieved.

Even though I don’t believe salvation comes through lightning,
I long for quick and fast.

I believe salvation comes through knowing and accepting,
though I do not know of what or how.

Not tonight but the night before I met a man
who has lived twenty-five years under a large tree in India
where there is snow and a trail to Tibet
where Chinese soldiers have orders to shoot you on sight.

The trail, narrow as a snake, winds along the side of mountains.

The Chinese soldier who saw him, wearing no shoes,
asked his blessing and gave him his combat boots.

He lives off wild strawberries that look like raspberries –
I saw a photo on his friend’s cell phone – and a kind of wild spinach.

And mushrooms that grow only after lightning strikes the ground.

I wait for an epiphany.

In a US city he wear shoes, soft sportive clothes, and a white newsboy hat.
He smiles without end, and seldom speaks.

He glows as someone might who eats mushrooms that grow after lightning strikes.

I wait in my garden with my dog, discomforted.

Three days ago I had lunch with a rare beauty in her early 70s,
enthralled by a rocker, singer-songwriter – enthralled!

They whirl and dance, enchantress and enchanter.
He has wings tattooed on his back.

She calls him panther, he calls her slow burn.
She is famous, on the cover of a magazine right now,
wearing a hat made of a nest with golden eggs.

She writes of their sex life, real and imagined –
she will create a perfume for them and the book.

The perfume will be named “text.” He is 37.

She removed her large black straw hat and blue sunglasses
under the mottling trees. Our lunch was salmon with avocado
and chia seed pudding with raspberries.

I had not seen her in over a year.

“You have ‘Z’ on your forehead.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is a tattoo.”

“You have been struck by lightning.”

Two night ago, I saw my own young lover after months of parting.
He told me he missed me, us, talking, being.

That was not an epiphany, except in being stated.
It was getting things good and right.

He will help “Z” find a perfumery.
Perhaps we will create our own perfume,
something for what we cannot have.

I wait, in the garden, discomforted, for lightning – and rain.

I look to a man who lives under a tree
and a woman who loves madly
and a librettist who may make an opera of a play I wrote
and a once lover who will be a friend forever
and a widower who flees grief, likes bullfights, and touches my heart
and a phalanx of delicate and mighty women who fight demons with me –
and a singer-songwriter (not hers, but mine) who breaks through reasonable living
by the ruckus of his untamed genius.

These people and more sit with me as I sit in the dark,
knowing there is no lightning of reprieve,
understanding, or accepting of what has happened
to the others now with us –

children beheaded in Iraq,
people turned into body parts in Gaza,
the dead from plague in West Africa.

Numbers beyond immensity dead in Syria.

And this is the crux:

How do we dance on the head of the pin during slaughter?
How do we create perfume?
How do we eat chia seeds with raspberry topping?

I cannot put their suffering in a drawer
for after my vacation or rendezvous or lunch.

Symphony of friends and lovers – simplest of lives,
most stylish of lives – lift me lift me lift me.

I am split between ecstasy and pain.

Did lightning already strike? Was I torn apart silently?

A rabbit, a first, just hopped across the end of my garden
– not poetic license. It is a city garden, it is 2:00 am.

Two of us awake in this strange land,
searching for a kind of wild spinach or berry,
or mushroom that grows only after lightning strikes.

A Death That Knocks First

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[Moments after I wrote this blog, I received word that Egypt was working to negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine. The first deadline for that ceasefire passed as of this morning, July 15. I am sharing this blog as originally written with the undying hope the violence will end. At this point the word to me is that Hamas is reluctant to agree without guarantees of the opening of the Rafah gate between Gaza and Egypt (which seals them off from the world) and the release of the more than 500 Palestinian men arrested in the past three weeks.]

. . .

God speaking, Isaiah 55:3 – Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.

The third slaughter of Gazans in under five years is happening now. The total number killed in Operation Cast Lead – what the Arab world calls the Gaza Massacre – in the first days of 2009 was around 1400, the majority of them women and children. Thirteen Israelis were killed.

The number of Gazans killed between November 14-21, 2012 in Operation Pillar of Defense was 168, the majority of them women and children. Six Israelis were killed.

The last total I saw for the number of Gazans killed so far in Operation Protective Edge is more than 170 (plus another 1000+ injured), the majority of them women and children. Netanyahu says that with “this kind of enemy” Israel will take any means it needs to defend itself. So far no Israelis have been killed. If they do a ground assault, there will be Israelis killed. It is a guarantee. Everyone is crazy.

Thanks to Facebook I have seen things – body parts, emptied faces and skulls, spilling guts – that will never leave my mind. Ever. I do not regret it, I want to see it, but so far I have not reposted these realities of death as an explosion that tears your body into pieces on FB, and I will not here.

Seeing these things – the redness of blood, the same redness of everyone’s blood, flowing over the grey of concrete reduced to a powder that covers even the body that still bleeds – I am shocked to see my immediate world look the same as always. There are birds in my garden, photos of loved ones on my desk. I have a piano, it is intact and can be played.

People walk by, eat in restaurants, laugh. The world has become surreal, a stage of normalcy while on the other side of the scrim people kill each other. It is not just in Israel and Palestinian, it is many places, but this is the barbarism that has delivered itself to me in video after video at my door.

The IDF and Israeli citizens – the majority judging by what I see – say: “We warn Gazans where we will strike, we give a “knock” ahead of time with a warning shot. We are humane. Hamas is not humane, they don’t warn us where the missile will come” This is posted in varying ways as though it makes sense.

NOTE 1: the IDF only gives warning “knocks” sometimes, and when they do, it provides only a teeny window of time for everyone to evacuate that building before it is destroyed. A “knock” is a smaller, presumably non-lethal bomb launched to a rooftop. That is, the occupants hear of the impending destruction of their home, if not members of their family or themselves, a minute or two in advance.

In one video I saw the “knock” hit one building but the real-deal bomb landed next to that building where the people would have evacuated. Deliberate? I don’t think so. I think the IDF really thinks they are humanitarian by sending warning “knocks” – and pamphlets telling people to flee before the ground invasion. They even occasionally call residents in a building and tell them in Hebrew (huh?) that they have five minutes to flee. Of course, this method of protecting people is not fail safe. Extended families are being wiped off the map.

NOTE 2: Hamas cannot give warnings because they cannot pinpoint their missiles. Hamas launches missiles that go more or less willy-nilly, which along with the effectiveness of Israel’s anti-missile system, Iron Dome, is why to date not a single Hamas missile has killed an Israeli or seriously injured one. Iron Dome has been 90% or more effective, fortunately, in shooting down any missiles coming to populated areas inside Israel.

I am not saying Hamas operatives are, or are not, humane. I am furious that they used funds and time and energy and intent to obtain missiles instead of strengthening the infrastructure, health care, facilities, and education inside Gaza. I understand the boycott on materials, but they got missiles in. I understand the isolation, containment, limitations, and humiliation. Or maybe I don’t. No, of course, I cannot, I have no idea. But to use what little you have to bring in missiles is, as I see it, wrong-headed, even unconscionable.

I think the people launching missiles from Gaza would kill many Israelis if they could. Yet, I do not believe it is sufficient grounds to kill someone – and the innocents near them – on the theory that they would kill you if they could when, in fact, they cannot. There have to be more clever, not to mention more ethical, ways to disarm someone’s desire to kill you. Being a good neighbor for one.

The underlying fault line of the “right to protect yourself” argument is that, when you apply it equally to Palestinians as well as Israeli, the whole premise is exposed as absurd. It is an invitation to cyclical slaughter. It has no applicability towards peace. It shows no inclination towards the creativity, healing, and courage needed to achieve mutual beneficial peace. (It is, bottom line, why most women are better peace builders than the many men who believe bigger and harder is the answer to everything.)

NOTE 3: There are demonstrations against the assault in the UK, Belgium, Australia and elsewhere, and even inside Israel. Haven’t seen anything much in the US.

I have been inundated emotionally and psychologically. I have precious friends – Palestinian and Israeli – who are too close to danger, including Rula Salameh, whose article as a Palestinian mother living in East Jerusalem was in the New York Times last week.

I have read article after article documenting in detail the sequence that set off this opportunity for Netanyahu to continue to destroy the peace process (even Kerry placed the blame at his feet), to destroy a unity government that would have brought Hamas into a moderate coalition with Fatah and the West Bank, and to further weaken Gaza.

For one thing, the Israeli authorities knew within hours that the three kidnapped settlers were dead. They had a phone tape of the shooting and the boys’ blood was found in the kidnappers’ abandoned car. Yet for a week, even without telling the parents, they used the excuse that they were searching for the youth to arrest and imprison more than 500 Palestinian men, demolish and invade homes, have confrontations that led to several Palestinian being killed, and to stir up – unleash? – hatred against Palestinians. It didn’t take much.

Among the things I will never forget are the videos of young Israeli males in the streets of Jerusalem chanting “Death to Arabs” and stopping taxis looking for Palestinian drivers or passengers to beat up. My friend Rula told me by phone that she is scared. This is a woman who has maneuvered me in the West Bank, without bothering to comment, around IDF gun shooting and tear gas. She has a television program on which she sometimes calls Palestinian Authority ministers on camera to help out people in need immediately. She has nerves of steel and decades of experience.

Now she is scared. She lives with her parents and son in Beit Hanina in Arab East Jerusalem only two minutes from the home of the Palestinian boy who was kidnapped and burned to death. Her son is the same age. She told me Israelis are beating shopkeepers.

What can one say? How does one say it? If bombs don’t bring peace – they don’t – then can words?

This crisis has taken me to the Bible, a place I have not visited since I was in high school.

God speaking, Isaiah 55:11-

. . . so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

He’s speaking presumably to the Jews, and He states that He desires a place that will: bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater.

He – I’m ceding to the masculine just to be super-nice – says: Isaiah 55:9 –

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Are we not to emulate God’s ways, to take the high road?

The hatred I am seeing on Facebook, from people on both sides, is essentially telling God to go to hell. There is a valiant minority – and oh the courage and oh the grief – that calls for an immediate ceasefire and for listening to each other, for tending, for examining one’s own culpability.

We must watch our words so that they are as free as possible of self-delusion, so that they recognize that we are equally human, and so that they have the intent of peace.

I don’t think a “knock” before you bomb people is Yahweh speaking. I don’t think Hamas launching missiles into Israel is Allah speaking.

If our words truly were emulating God, they would be for peace and caring and forgiving and getting our facts rights and not deluding ourselves about our favored status and not denying harm we have done.

Then God says, if you are good boys and girls: Isaiah 55:12 –

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

I read this as that to deliberately kill someone else is to deny the God you profess to worship.

And, yes, I know that both the Koran and the Torah can be interpreted from select verses to encourage you either to fight or to reach out in peace. Shouldn’t we choose the verses that bring good to the world – ourselves and others?