Fishing and Flowers

She is sitting on a humid swing.  The air is full of cicadas and a smell of white flowers.  Her body rocks in the gentle seat.  Back and forth.  He is on his way home.  She hopes he is in a happy mood, but it's a shallow attempt at conjuring joy.  The truth is, it only affirms her expectation of his state of arrival.  Years it has been and always she finds herself trapped in the waiting.  Driving down 465 without air conditioning, imagining a lake and the fishing boat and the bass bigger than his arm, he pushes aside the tone of voice he knows is waiting for him.  Meek (when did it become so falsely demure?), concerned-sounding (when did she think this expressed love?), imploring (at what point did he stop talking to her?)

The weight of summer quiets everything.  All living beings within a ten mile radius, cease to emote, drop their patterns for this one moment each day.  It is a dense twilight, so big it cannot be measured in units of time.  Mostly it passes unnoticed, in fact the very nature of its existence is ephemeral, impossible - a snowflake in August.

On this particular day, high above them, a swooping gull split the snowflake with an eager angle of flight.  The gesture sent one half through the window of his car and the other piece down past the willow tree from which the swing hangs.  A tiny ice crystal landed on her nose, slid down the nape of his neck.  On this particular day, the invisible moment was mutually recognized.

The meat of their thoughts did not disappear, but all the residue - weeks, decades, generations of ways of thinking, washed through them.  He continued to drive, she, to swing.  Fishing was there, the heady scent of a garden, but nothing more.  Nothing else pressing against the moment, twisting it.

She gets up from the swing.  He pulls into the driveway.  They look like children.  She grabs a lemonade popsicle and runs to meet him.  He gets out of the car grinning.  She is tiny next to him.  He lifts her up under her armpits and licks the frozen treat in her hand.  “Fishing?” he asks her.  She wraps her legs around his waist like it’s a tree, kisses him on the forehead.  “Yes.”

Story Monster

There is a Story Monster inside me.  But I have not seen her for a while.

Oh why did I go for it?  Did I say yes to everything?  Why did I do these things that make it so difficult to find the monster.  The shy monster who loves time and loneliness and empty space.  Plans scare her away.  She buries herself, makes a nest in my throat and stays there indefinitely while I busy around and do stuff and check things off of my list.  

Who wants to be busy like this? 

I suppose I do.   Because I’m scared of her.  I’m scared of the monster.  She grabs me and I lose myself.  She moves me for her cause which, in surrendering to it, dissolves a part of me. 

Where are you Story monster?  You scary, scared being?  You brilliant wave, who takes me for your vessel.  I miss you.  I know I have not been a great house keeper.  The room smells like caffeine and importance.  I could clean up… Talk less, do less, worry less.  

Talk less, do less, worry less.  

Love more.  Thank people more.  Play more.  Rest.

Or I could stay here casting words around a unknown space, making desperate attempts at finding you, at seeing the invisible by scattering the glitter of language to reveal a negative image.  The Words point to you, suggest your whereabouts.  

Words are the lingerie for a truth that forever changes shape.  I could lose myself as a fetishist - obsessed with the form, mistakenly stroking leather and lace, forgetting about your body underneath.  

Beautiful Story Monster.  I’m sorry.  

Death Makes Me Beautiful

Death makes me beautiful.  The the bad decisions, hateful love handles, giant worries and failures - these become pieces of lint, with mortality near.

We think we’re grown-up.   We think now that we’re in our 30’s and 40’s and 50’s and 60’s, we know life.  Then Death walks up - gets all close.  Suddenly the everything that seemed to be important dissolves.  All that stuff was so easy compared to this.  This, this, this… immense nothing.  This too-big-to-make-sense-of disappearance.  You were here a moment ago - gorgeous vessel for my love, stunning light that shone in my sky.  You were here and together we made a constellation - even when you were billions of miles away.  But now you’re gone.

I burn more brightly trying to figure it out.  Trying to find you.  Listening for your voice. The others don’t matter - I want you.  One more laugh.  One more bear hug and wandering conversation. 

Somehow - the magic in you has turned to tears and grief. 

I don’t know why, but there is also gratitude.  And shame for that.  All I want to do is cry and celebrate my body.  I’m sorry I am grateful for your passing.  It’s confusing.  I want you here, but death makes me beautiful.  The flaws and imperfections are alive and radiant. 

I thought I was all grown-up.  But I’m not.  There is still so much I don’t know.  Information is everywhere.  Understanding is endangered.  But it begins to grow in the wake of you. 

Unless we open up, we never get to see or share the parts that come to life with the stimulus of grief.  Just as birth catalyzes that which cannot be known before parenthood, death awakens something.  It puts in motion the maturation of imaginal cells, those that sprout wings as we let ourselves go and expand into something new.

I undress:  every sensation is divine.  Every “could-be-better” is perfect. 

To the living:  Sit in the sun with me.  Let me smell you.  Let me hold your face and touch your skin lightly, like a whisper.  Let me know the parts of you I didn’t get to see in them. 

Death makes us all so beautiful.

Icarus and the Giant Clitoris

If we were all so open...maybe pain wouldn't be called such.  Because it would be shared.  And when it is shared it is somehow more comfortable, sweeter, unpainful.  It becomes a medium for connection. 

Happiness is Icarus flying skyward, on his own, delighting in the experience of individual corporeal incarnation - the freedom to be one.  Pain does not have a specific archetype (in this metaphor).  Pain is the mother of experience.  It is the impetus for surrender and the terrifying truth that we are all one, little nerve endings on the end of a giant clitoris.  All sensation is shared, regardless of the walls we build.

Why would it be terrifying that we are all one?  Because I am no longer... The reality of oneness suggests Katrina, in all MY beauty and insecurity and invented importance, is not real and never was.  All that righteous self-making, for what?

Who is the me that possesses the idea of Katrina anyway?  Could it be that happiness exalts the self, while pain dissolves it?  Does Icarus know that his elation pulls him to the sun, the heat, the perpetual orgasm that melts the wax in our wings and swallows our joyful bodies?

Strangers Die Every Day

I'm struggling today.  With death and birth and trying to understand.  Trying to do a good job.  Trying so hard.  All this gratitude and all this suffering at once.  I feel big and bright and lonely.

I'm giving a presentation tonight.  I'm proposing and working and all those things... but I feel  stuck.  What do we do with life?  There is so much to feel and explore and make - we stumble around in our glorious imperfections and get triggered and yell at our friends and then someone dies and it hurts so much because we opened up and then we ask, “Do I just keep opening to this pain?”

Strangers die every day.  (I had friends at Naropa who were in a band by that name).

Thank you for being someone I can write all this to.  Thank you for sharing dreams and searching for potatoes.

Sly's son jumped out of a window.  He was having a nightmare...that's what Sly thinks.  He didn't jump out of an open window.  He jumped through it.  Now his brain is dead and his body is alive because his organs will be someone else's organs soon.  Sly thought the crash from the other room was a painting falling off of the wall.  Then he felt a breeze and opened the curtain to see his son crumpled on the pavement.  His spine was crushed.

And who am I in this momentary, star-muted world?  What do we do when the ineffable happens for real?  I write a lot of manifesto-ish stuff, but now I feel so distant, so impotent to help my friend or even help myself understand emotionally what is happening.  I want to hug everyone...No, I want everyone to hug each other and hug me and why did I even put on mascara today?

Strangers die every day.

And I worry about love handles, bags under my eyes, whether to buy kombucha or kevita, if I'll ever make a lot of money...

And I realize that humans are superheros.  Because how do you suffer through suffering like this without being a hero?  This happens, terribly painful things, brilliantly painful things happen all the time and we keep going.  How is that possible?

Suffering, fear and pain are the stimuli for heroism.  It's what triggers the hero inside and what makes us such incredible creatures.  We love even when we know that as love deepens so too does the potential pain of loss.  It is a risk we can't not take.

People fall...in love all the time.  And strangers die every day.

Don't Be Worried

Everyone is a Hero

In the heat of late Oklahoma summer, in a beige 1983 cadillac, my Oma suffered the weight of a poorly placed wig and a broken air conditioner.

It was July 13th and with two broken wrists, Oma had elbowed her way into the clunky vehicle.  Her injury was the result of a drunken slip at the mailbox earlier that week.  She wore casts from knuckle to forearm and was crippled to most activities with her hands, so I don't know how she drove to the liquor store. 

Without the use of her fingers, she was unable to release the car door handle.  So she laid on the horn until a kind, Ma'm-speakin' fellow came out.  “Be a good boy and bring me a case of Jonny Walker Red,” she said.  And he, or someone, did.

Maybe she enlisted the help of a good samaritan to light her Newport.  Or perhaps she had a reservoir of energy set aside specifically for that task.  When the whiskey arrived and the exchange was satisfied,  she fore-armed her way back through the town, steering wobbly toward a happier afternoon.  Though her exit from the vehicle was awkward and untimely, her journey ended successfully.  She made it  to her bedroom and to the sweet sweet sound of Alex Trebek's voice, with all the answers.