Catbird Scout

Small

2012-01-29T10:12:00.000-08:00

The checker was young, friendly, fresh-faced. She came to help me after I'd already unloaded my groceries onto the belt, apologizing for making me wait. While she scanned my spinach and oranges and baby food (old cats, I always point out), I studied her.

The ring on her left hand ring finger caught my eye. Not for its size or beauty, but for the lack of both. A promise ring. Band so thin I couldn't tell whether it was silver or gold. Stone so small only the slightest widening at the center of the band indicated its presence.

She seemed old to be wearing such a ring. A ring a high school boy might give his girlfriend - a promise based on meager resources and a heart not yet fully developed. I wondered. Considered asking about the ring. Wanted the story.

Before I could ask, as she explained her delay waiting on me, she shared she'd been at another checkstand where the scanner wasn't flush with the counter. "Every time I'd scan an item, I worried I'd catch my hand and maybe even lose my diamond," she said.

Lose my diamond. That ring was clearly so much more than a sliver of a promise. It was a diamond, and all the permanence it symbolizes. Her pride was a glittering, glorious thing - reflecting a light only love-filled eyes could find in such a tiny chip of carbon.

Such a small thing to bring so much joy.

Yesterday when I was walking Toby, I came around the bend where God seems to be waiting for me on a regular basis these days. The inner tube of last week. Three eagles in the snag across the river the week before. One lone beauty posing in the sunlight on another day.

On this day it was a young bald eagle, last summer's fledgling I'm guessing, flying directly toward me, maybe twenty feet above the river. Then, just in case I might have dismissed the gift, he swooped a gentle turn right in front of me and headed back the way he came. He might even have looked at me.

It was enough, that almost look and the perfect u-turn, to make me stop and offer a prayer of gratitude. A bit grudging, reluctant, resistant, still; but at least recognition and thanks.

I've chafed myself raw against the little chips of grace and glory that have been God's presence in the last few months, wanting something that dazzles. Something significant enough for me to know without doubt I'm not as lost as I feel.

On Friday my brother Mark directed me to the family Shutterfly site. Told me there was a video I needed to check out. There was a problem with the loading, so I didn't get to watch it until this morning. I anticipated it would be in some way connected to Angelwings Antiques, and I was right. What I didn't anticipate was that it was a gift of love created just for me:

A ten minute collage of the history of the antique business that is Mark's dream, but that we've built together in the last fourteen months. The accompanying music started with these Coldplay lyrics:

Look at the stars.

Look how they shine for you

In everything you do.

They were all yellow.

And ended with these:

Nobody said it was easy.

No one ever said it would be so hard.

Such a small thing to bring so much joy.

A bunch of pictures. Some beautiful Coldplay music. A thin band with a tiny chip of light to some. To me on this day, a miracle of love and generosity and understanding. I am seen and understood. I am dazzled, and for this moment at least, feel led by the warmest of yellow lights possible. Not quite found perhaps, but most definitely not abandoned either.

Winter River

2012-01-21T11:09:00.000-08:00

Coming around the corner of the trail, the place where I often see eagles in the snag on the other side, I looked up. The river roared past, surging over banks and swamping the trail just ahead. No eagles on this day, but the power of the sweeping flood made me stop in awe. Movement upstream caught my eye. Before the object fully registered, my brain assumed log. It took a second or two for the inner tube to come into focus.

Orca black, bulging at one end, racing merrily along the surface of winter-swollen waters. A summer memory refusing to submit. I could almost hear a yee-haw, almost see a child's glee-filled face and scabby knees, almost feel hot rubber against sun-stung thighs.

I tend to forget from year to year how challenging January and February are for me. No holidays to distract. Cold gray wet days that even increasing minutes of light don't ameliorate. All the sunshine memories I managed to store away during summer months grown dusty and lifeless, too far in the past to warm anything.

To make matters worse, I didn't get nearly enough internal bits of summer squirreled away this year. As though this were a famine and drought year. For me, in many ways, it was. And now I'm tired in whole new definitions of the word. I can't get warm no matter what I do. My spirit feels hypothermic.

Eagles visit often. Earlier this week, one flew by the restaurant window where we ate breakfast. Catkins hang in abundance from delicate hazel fingers. Robin chirps slice through frosted air. Small offerings of hope, promises of change, that I want to embrace. And can't quite.

Snow dresses naked trees in beautiful furs, chases gray to the edges of awareness, turns air into healing medicine. I see it, get it, but feel only restriction which I resist, and the brittle cold which I resent.

But there's something about that inner tube. Steady in the frantic frigid current. Barreling along not caring a whit what season the river is, because it is summer. I can, even days later, imagine myself riding it beyond the limits of the river, right out of winter and back into sunshine and freedom. I hold on, to the fat circle and to the hope of the softer, slower, warmer river of summer it came from and rushes back toward.

A New Year's Gift

2012-01-02T12:09:00.000-08:00

As I stood on the patio getting ready to take Toby for his first walk of the new year, the branches of the large fir in the back yard began waving a wild invitation. The deodar cedar next to the fir picked up the motion and passed it along to the pine at the corner of the yard. By the time we were walking toward the road, the branches of every tree within sight danced a tarantella, and the air was so full of invisible movement I felt pulled, pushed and lifted all at the same time.

The gusts ebbed and flowed like an airborne tide. Each new flurry washed over me in cleansing waves.

Christmas was one of the best ever. Seated in my living room surrounded by abundance in the form of heart-felt gifts, the company of family, and so much love, I experienced a complete sense of enough. Not the enough of sufficient but wishing for more. Or the enough that is so much more than enough the fear of losing it makes you miss the moment. This enough was warm, clear and easy.

It was also tinged with sadness. A sadness that curled around my heart like tule fog, yet did not diminish the joy of the day. My awareness of that, my acceptance of and surrender to that, is the biggest gift last year brought to my life. Sadness and joy, two sides of the same quilt.

While we opened gifts and laughed and cried together, my brothers and SIL and husband and I, Cooper lay at my feet clearly in her last days. At almost twenty this magnificent cat had been stalking birds just three weeks prior. Her decline, while not unexpected, occurred with a speed that was both merciful and terrible. With our help, she died on Tuesday.

Moments after I felt Cooper's heart stop under my hand, the vet, as she used her stethoscope to make sure, said the most amazing thing when I asked why she was checking. "The heart operates separately from the brain. It can even work outside the body."

While she was speaking physiologically, I heard the obvious metaphor. The heart will have its way no matter what. We love, even knowing there is no way to love deeply without pain. There is no love without loss. And the more the heart feels one, the more it will feel the other.

Walking in the wild wind with my spirited dog, I blessed the memories of those I enter this new year without: my daughter, a nephew, my mom, one beautiful cat. I celebrated my heart and its steadfast refusal to choose anything less than love. I breathed in new air, breathed out old pain, and moved forward with eyes and heart wide open.

Sky Gifts

2011-12-18T16:45:00.000-08:00

A raw early November day, my birthday. I enjoy the day as much as I've enjoyed anything in the last year. Which means I'm as fully present as possible around the grieving that's taken up residence in my body since last December. As we walked toward the restaurant on the Tacoma waterfront, where I anticipated a wonderful evening with family, the sky caught my eye. I gasped gratitude, both at the incredible beauty, and for the flare of joy the view ignited.

It was as though I hadn't seen the sky in months. And it's not that I didn't look. I love the sky in ways I love little else in my life. It's where I meet God, find answers, see birds. It's what lifts my heart and stirs my spirit. It is both constantly changing and constant. Even when I can't see it, which is often in the Pacific Northwest, I know it's there waiting for me.

Sky has been there every single day for the last year, yet it has seemed beyond reach in some way. Muted, veiled, distant.

When it spoke to me on my birthday I accepted it as one more gift of the day, and then forgot about it. Although the picture I took stayed with me, pushing itself into my consciousness at odd and random moments.

Then a couple of weeks later I was up at my regular predawn hour, doing my usual morning tasks, when a faint glow caught my eye. I looked east to see the palest infant pink behind the half-century-old douglas fir sentinels that surround our place. It's a common sight for me, one I almost take for granted. One I've seen and turned away from without praying gratitude for the last year. On this day, however, that tender light found its way through a crack of my broken heart, and something new stirred.

Since then the sky has showered me with gifts, as though to strengthen our renewed connection: A full lunar eclipse viewed alone in holy stillness. A young bald eagle flying directly overhead. My owl perched on the flagpole for the first time in months. Bright blinding sunshine filling an afternoon with gold. A whiskey-throated raven flying up the river, then back again, offering some message I can't quite grasp, but don't seem to mind missing.

On this first anniversary of her death I am able to imagine my daughter held in the arms of the sky, freed from gravity in all its forms. I long to grow wings and search for her among the stars, to bring her home. Yet I accept Sky's timing and the grace of its wisdom. I look upward to stars made brighter through my tears, and breathe gratitude.

It's been weeks since I've been around to visit my virtual friends, and I want you to know I miss you. Walt is recovering from shoulder replacement surgery. Work has been insane. Christmas is at our house this year. I'll be back to a routine after the holidays, both as a blog friend and as a blogger. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your lovely wishes, your prayers and your understanding. It helps more than I can say.

Tradition

2011-12-04T15:12:00.001-08:00

I sat at my desk, hoping to get two hours of work done in an hour of planning time. The room was blessedly still and I was in a groove correcting, planning, organizing. I barely heard the faint knocking, but looked up to see a pair of eyes focused intently on me through the thin rectangular window of my back door.

For a brief second I considered ignoring the face and the knocking, but experience told me that seldom works. So I waved a welcome to two very small children. First graders as it turned out, bearing cupcakes. The leader, a spunky red-head who told me her name was Cheyenne, extended the plastic grocery store cupcake holder in my direction.

"Do you want a cupcake?" she asked.

"Is it your birthday?" I replied. I've had this conversation a hundred times or more in my teaching career. I know my lines well by now.

"No. It's his," Cheyenne said, pointing to the solemn pale boy standing eyes-down behind her.

"Happy Birthday! What's your name?"

"His name is Igor." Clearly Cheyenne had her own script.

Igor looked up at the sound of his name, but didn't seem concerned that he wasn't being allowed to talk. He stood quietly as I selected a cupcake as pale as he was, except for the lime green sprinkles. His expression didn't change even the slightest as I lavished birthday happiness on him. Cheyenne was also not interested in my chitchat. She was on a mission.

They were in my room for kindergarten last year and wanted to know (Cheyenne did anyway) where their former teacher was. She would be the next recipient of a birthday cupcake. It dawned on me that my cupcake was a toll willingly paid for directions.

By then I was so intrigued by the six-year-old woman in charge, I didn't mind losing the desperately needed work time. I enjoyed her confidence as much as I wondered how much Igor understood what was going on. I stood and walked the two to the other door in my room, and pointed them in the right direction with clear instructions. As I turned back to my desk I heard her say to him, "I told you her nice!"

I spent the rest of that planning time pondering this weird elementary school birthday tradition. Kids bring cupcakes (store-bought—homemade is not allowed) to school to share with classmates for their birthdays. The birthday child and one chosen friend scoot around the school at some point with whatever is left over to share with teachers. It doesn't seem to matter whether they actually know the teacher or not.

Although I never eat the cupcakes, I never refuse them either. I've always loved birthdays particularly, and there's something about being even a small part of celebrating the lives of these incredible, still-forming beings that eases my heart. For the moments of our exchange when they get to see an adult happy for their existence and when I get to see potential in all its brightest glory, nothing else matters. And for the rest of the day as I work around the sticky cake with lardy frosting decorated in colors never found in nature I hold that child in all the light I can bring to bear.

Occasionally the cupcake ritual will give me two kids instead of one to celebrate.

Photo from blogs.dallasobserver.com

Layers

2011-11-13T11:17:00.001-08:00

No Indian Summer this year after a summer that was barely summer. One of the shortest autumns I can remember. November has become everything that makes winter so hard to bear here: cold, gray and bone-gnawing damp. Days begin in darkness, and fade all too quickly back into deeper darkness, with more than a month before the light begins to assert itself again.

So much in my life to be grateful for. A long list easily accessed and appreciated. Called upon as a shield against winters: the season coming and the year just ending.

Like the black depths of tidal waters, winter threatens to pull me under. It's only November. The month of my birth. This year a significant transition in more ways than the new decade might account for. Usually I enter winter saturated with the warmth and light of the previous year, enough to get me close to spring when I can feel new light beckon.

Not this year. I'm tired. And cold. And try as I might, the shield refuses to hold.

I've read about anniversaries, held friends through theirs, prayed for comfort for survivors facing the end of the first year without loved ones. This is my first. Like so many of life's biggest events, there is no preparing for or even describing what it feels like.

Kathleen's death date is a bit more than a month away, yet every day now it's as though I just heard the news for the first time.

The night of my birthday celebration, my SIL, the one whose son took his life two weeks after my daughter took hers, gave me a book. Privately, out of the glare of the family gaiety. A memoir written by a women about her sister's suicide. While it might seem to be an inappropriate birthday present, it was my favorite. Both because it was the first real acknowledgment she's made of our shared loss, and because she knew exactly what that book would mean to me.

With the early onset of winter weather, most of the leaves which light the darkness of November have fallen prematurely. For days last week the wind whipped foliage from trees in blizzards of dying color. Yet there remains in our yard a maple in full flame. It's been aglow for more than a week and continues to pulse red through the fog that clings to everything from sunup to sundown.

At first I looked at it, admired it, then turned away, certain it's beauty would be stripped away as quickly as it has been for every other tree in our yard. But it continued to beckon from the edge of the yard until it pulled me outside with my camera. I tried to resist. I have lots of pictures of more fall beauty than this year could ever hope to offer. But I found myself drawn, in bathrobe and rubber boots, hair spiky from sleep, into the cold morning mists.

I'd moved around to shoot the tree from its most symmetrical angle, still not sure what I was looking for, or what it was offering. Then I realized it wasn't just the fiery maple I needed to see. It was the maple behind her sister, already stripped bare for the winter, and in front of the sequoia, which will never be anything but lush and green and strong.

The layers are a perfect metaphor for my life right now. Seeing everything through the filter of death, the light of dying flaring brighter than ever in the time left, the constant shape and color of life that doesn't die. No one more true or more real than the other, all existing together in a tableau that offers comfort. Not warm quilt, hot cocoa, warm fire comfort. But a small, significant flame of comfort, like a pilot light - enough I believe to hold me through the winter ahead.

Alive

2011-11-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

Today's the day. At 3:53 this afternoon I will be 60. Mom used to try to call me at the exact time of my birth—one of the few rituals in our life together that let me know she celebrated my presence in her life.

As you know, this last year of my fifties has been difficult. I came to the end of it shaken and unsure of my path. The dream I'd spent the last several years in pursuit of was as tattered as storm-torn foliage after a level 5 hurricane. Instead of asking myself about next steps toward fulfillment, my questions became more and more about whether I'd been fooling myself all along.

So, this is the birthday present I'm giving myself: the reclaiming of my dream. I do it here with you all as witness because I know you understand more than anyone could.

I will write. I will be published. I will teach and edit and coach.

My words will matter, will be a force of light and healing in the world. I was given the gift of words and the gift of the dream to offer those words to anyone who might benefit, or simply enjoy. I claim it as my privilege and responsibility.

I sit here at my computer, the place where I meet my Muse and the place where I unfurl the wings that will carry me toward the dream I didn't ask for, but that is mine nonetheless. There are feathers everywhere, and birds and angels. A lush peace lily provides backdrop. A huge picture window lets in light and gives my eyes hundreds of shades of green to rest on. The picture of my mom gazing with such love at my newborn self is to my right. On both sides and behind me are hundreds of books—my inspiration, my guides.

This is the place where time ceases to have power or meaning.

On this machine I have your words and wishes, your love and support, which mean more to me than a thank you could possibly express.

And on the small bulletin board hung to hold artifacts for current work are these words from Ernest Hemingway:

From things that have happened and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason.

Here's to immortality. Here's to a new decade and dreams come true. Here's to you, dear reader, for being here and sharing this incredible adventure with me.

Compatible Numbers

2011-10-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

Toby's birthday is tomorrow. Four years ago, in a kennel in the country, he was born on a day that was ordinary for us in every way. We hadn't gotten serious yet about searching for a dog who would fill the still tender hole left when Riley died the winter before. We didn't even know that there was a breeder of golden retrievers twenty minutes from our house. We had no idea, six weeks later, when we chose the biggest pup in the litter, and the one who seemed the least fazed by anything going on around him, just how extraordinary he would be.

Four is a good number. Round and compatible. In a dog's life, four is no longer puppy—even for a golden. After many months of thinking perhaps he would never soften into legendary golden mellowness, one more time, he's fooled us. Four is the perfect number for him.

Toby is still playful. He loves his walks. He gets neurotically focused when we play ball in the back yard. He offers toys for tugging.

He is still self-possessed. He does nothing without a reason, never just out of obedience. He chases squirrels, barks at deer both real and imagined, and often decides he'd like to go outside in the middle of the night. No is not an answer he understands.

But more than anything now, he's affectionate. Finally, he's become something resembling the dog we thought we wanted. He frets if one of us comes home late, and grins with glee when the missing person finally arrives. After two years of having me home mostly full time, this fall has been hard for him. When I am home now he'll sprawl where I have to step over him, or follow me around and do his head-bury in my legs every chance he gets.

My birthday is Saturday. Sixty years ago in a hospital in Spokane, I was born to a nineteen-year-old girl already divorced from my father. While she didn't pick me, and her life definitely was not following the path of her dreams, she loved the baby who was me.

The girl I became was not what my mom expected or even understood. Outspoken. Curious. Fearless. Always asking questions and frustrated if the answers didn't satisfy. A nose for truth and not-truth. Challenging. Strong-willed. Impatient. Everything she was not.

And by the time I had mellowed enough to reach beyond the walls we both erected to survive our relationship, she was lost behind hers. I wonder sometimes, even now, if there might not have been a way for her to have found her way back to love.

Sixty is a good number. Round and compatible. Someone said recently that when we turned fifty it was easy to still believe we had half our life to go. It's not out of the realm of possibility to live to one hundred. That's not as easy to rationalize at sixty. One hundred and twenty seems neither possible nor desirable. I've spent this last year knowing it was coming, and uncertain how it would feel. It turns out sixty is the perfect number for me.

Like Toby, I still possess all those same qualities from my youth. And, like Toby, more than anything I've become the human version of a loyal and affectionate dog. I'm ready to be here, and eager for the adventure that is this next leg of my journey. Full of gratitude to have arrived healthy, surrounded by love, and able to love. Grateful for dreams demanding fulfillment. Joyfully grateful to be sharing this birthday season with Toby. My gift. My buddy. My teacher.

The Opposite of Sharp

2011-10-18T04:34:00.000-07:00

It was one of those times when I knew as the words left my mouth they meant more than I intended. Sitting across from my counselor, soaking up her optimism and wisdom, talking about the struggle that is this year, I said, "I'm just not as sharp as I was a couple of years ago."

I meant that it's harder to remember things, harder to hold large quantities of information in short term memory, harder to make the hundreds of decisions an hour the job demands. I spend my days worrying I'll forget something important, let my team down, hurt a child in some way because I'm just not at the top of my game.

In a life full of loss and disappointment, I learned early on to rely on my brain. It was the one thing I could trust to provide answers, even though it's taken me years to realize not all of the answers were helpful or even completely true. I was one sharp cookie. I felt special for being so smart, for being a step or two ahead of everyone else. It was the one thing I knew my mom valued in me. The one thing I was encouraged to develop.

Aging (I'll be sixty so very soon) has been a definite factor. The early days of menopause were a nightmare of forgetting, and a new inability to find the right words for anything. Hot flashes were a walk in the park compared to the frustration of losing the one thing I had always been able to rely on. Over time I got used to the softening of my thinking, and clung to what remained. Worked at sharpening my remaining faculties so I wouldn't hit old age with a brain dull as river rock.

Then this last year happened. The losses. The grieving. The new demands of a job that was hard when I left and has gotten harder even for people still sharp and in shape for it. The war between my head and my heart. Head furiously trying to find sharpness again and thwarted at every turn. Heart wanting gentle quiet, slow movement, time to heal.

Pat, always honest even when I'm not sure I want her to be, replied, "I know you're not as sharp. But you are much more wise. Isn't that what you've always wanted?"

Well, yes. But I thought I'd get wisdom and still get to keep what I had before. I didn't realize the price for a life lived more gently, with more kindness and tenderness, was going to be my sharpness.

In the days since that conversation I've thought a lot about being sharp. The picture I get is of honed knives, paper edges, pointy objects. Things that cut, sever, separate. My own sharpness keeping me safe from the unknown and possible hurt. But also keeping me alone, lonely, isolated.

My heart has been waiting a very long time for this. Unlike my brain who has always demanded total control, heart is willing to share. All she wants is a chance to be heard and trusted. To have her language understood. Her timing valued. So this is wisdom: trust, acceptance, surrender. No sharp edges allowed, or more importantly, needed any longer.

Working in the Dark

2011-10-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

Friday morning. An hour or so before sunrise. Cold dew clings to my toes. It's a work day, but I'm in my back yard, hanging sheets on the line. There's so little light, I'm working by feel. Square corner to square corner, pegged. Pillowcases snapped out, my fingers doing the dance of setting them against the line and attaching the pins, all without conscious thought.

The forecast said rain for the weekend, and for the forseeable future. I need to have one last week sleeping surrounded by the scent of outdoors, on the soothing scratchiness of line dried sheets.

It takes less than ten minutes. Toby wandering just out of sight, happy to have company, not needing more than that. The air holding a distinct bite. I look up at one point, survey the sky. Big Dipper, summer companion since childhood, to the north. Orion, a winter constellation, to the south. I take a deep breath that tastes like mountain streams.

My task done, toes beginning to numb, I move slowly toward the house. I'm reluctant to let go of this feeling of connection, freedom, mystery. Reluctant to step back into this life I've accepted, but that I still don't see the purpose of. Not the larger one - the one that holds my dreams at its center.

Wishing to stay a while longer in this moist glittering darkness that seems to understand. Delaying the return to artificial light, soon to be the primary light available for months to come.

I send a prayer to a friend who died this week, and to her family. She'd lived a long and full life. Even so, it's too soon.

Summer fading into fall, the season of dying. Not death itself, which is winter. But the season of transition from one form of life to another. Days shorten. Nights lengthen. Sunlight visits from time to time as a reminder that it will always return. Darkness beckons, offering a place to heal, a safe protected nest for transformation.

On this morning, for maybe the first time, I release my longing for the light. Trust it will come to dry my sheets when I'm gone into the world . Trust it to return as summer in due time as I set out to explore what the darkness has to teach me. Orion will travel across the sky in the months to come, my companion for winter, my reminder that beauty and meaning exist even in the darkest of nights.

Shreds of the Sun

2011-09-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

Driving away from a Friday morning coffee date with Walt, my eyes were drawn to one particular cloud in the predawn sky. A pure glowing white-gold, it sat on the eastern horizon just above the hills that embrace this area. The light was so clear and bright it was as though a piece of the almost-risen sun had broken off and flown over the treetops on its own.

My heart lifted. I was reminded of other shreds of sunlight this week that somehow managed to sear away the darkness of exhaustion, a suffocating workload, and enduring shadows of grief.

A friend stopping by school at the end of the day, just to visit with me, to see how I'm doing. We both knew I could have used that time to chip away at the massive pile on my desk. However, those fifteen minutes of laughter and connection mattered much more than a batch of corrected papers. Patricia's words about remembering to have fun helped me refocus. When we walked out together my step was much lighter than it had been all day.

There was a parent night this week. One I didn't want to attend because of the time: 7:00 to 8:00 P.M.—my bedtime. We go to outdoor school next week and this was the informational meeting. I had no part in the program beyond being a familiar face for my families. The energy in the packed gym was intoxicating. Families seemed genuinely pleased to visit with me before things officially started. My kids came up to me beaming, as though we hadn't seen each other for days instead of hours. More than once I turned to a tap on a shoulder into the grinning face of a former student, and savored the warm unrestrained hug. I smiled the entire drive home, even though it was close to 9:00.

A morning in my classroom. The day hadn't officially started and I was checking to see who was missing. The desk next to Joy's was empty. Grace hadn't yet arrived. I said something about hoping she'd be there soon. Joy said, "I hope so, too. We'll all be clumsy and falling down if she doesn't come." It took me a minute to get what she was saying.

When I did, I laughed and replied, "You're right. Which means you can never be absent, because we couldn't get through a day with no joy."

These shred-of-sunlight moments don't drive the darkness away, any more than my bright cloud this morning was responsible for ending the night.

But they do fill my eyes and soul with hope and life when my principal asks me at lunch if I can have my data matrix done the by the next day even though no due date had ever been stated, and I'd never done one before, and it would not be a short task. Or when a team meeting is co-opted by a special ed teacher full of advice so disconnected from the world of a regular classroom we might as well have been from different planets. Or when I spend hours collecting data to be told I need to do it over because the directions I was given were wrong.

Today is the fall solstice, when darkness begins its season of domination. I love this time of year—have always loved the soft quality of the lingering light and the colors of dying leaves that imitate summer sunsets. More than anything I love the promise held in the air—a smell, an energy—that leaves no doubt that light will never be completely extinguished no matter how deep the darkness.

A single golden cloud. A caring friend. A child's brilliance. Shreds of sunlight in the darkness. Promises. Reminders of where the power truly lays.

Teacher Toby

2011-09-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

My early morning routine has changed little since the beginning of this school year: I'm up at 4:00, greeted by a wriggling, grinning Toby who acts like we've been apart for much longer than a night. He goes out, gets fed, then I put water on for tea. By then the cats are letting me know they just might expire if they have to wait another minute for their food.

Once they've all had their breakfasts, my tea (turmeric ginger green) is ready and I settle into my rocker to journal, read, and meditate. That's where the routine has taken on a new twist. Until earlier this month Toby almost always went back to bed until Walt got up, leaving me a lovely space of quiet time with which to start my day. But because of the long lonely days he faces now with both his humans at work, he considers every minute I'm home to be his.

It's challenging to be prayerful and meditative under the weight of his beseeching eyes. It's hard to write in a journal holding a tug toy in one hand while Toby does his best to pull me out of the rocker. It's almost impossible to follow a thread of an idea in whatever book I'm reading (Brene Brown right now) with the background music of his soft insistent growls for attention.

So we play. Sometimes that's all I get done. Sometimes Toby will wander off after a bit and leave me to my time alone.

As I get ready for work, he's never far away. Usually he ends up sprawled in the hall outside my bathroom while I do hair and makeup. Or he'll lie on the bed halfway between his two humans. When I move from one room to the next, I feel his eyes follow. Frequently I'll turn to leave my closet (originally a very small computer room) only to find the way blocked by 80 pounds of sad-eyed dejected retriever, looking for comfort.

When Toby needs comfort, he'll butt his head into the tops of my legs (or the legs of anyone else who will stand still for what at first seems very weird behavior). He stands that way for as long as I'll allow, often breathing like an asthmatic Darth Vader, pushing against me if I try to pull away. He never ends this stance first. I have to hold his head and push him away, or say "treat" to break the hold.

I love those times with him because he's incredibly sweet then. I can lean over and hug him hard. I can play in his fur and inhale his warm toast scent to my heart's content. The cost of all that loving is dog hair and slobber on the front of my legs. Which is not a problem unless I'm dressed for work.

So I accept his love. Sometimes I change clothes afterwards. Sometimes if he's not too liquid I can brush the hair off and be good to go.

Toby has the power like nothing and no one else to keep me from getting completely lost in the demands of a teacher's life. I make myself leave school close to the actual end of my workday, knowing he's waiting at home. His needs are a priority in our weekend planning.

He simply doesn't accept no when he needs attention. I come home in the afternoon foot-sore, heart-weary, and ready to curl up like a sowbug against stresses that follow me home no matter what I do. And there he is, ball in mouth, tail going gangbusters, ready to romp and run and receive enough love to make up for the empty hours he's just slept his way through.

So we walk, and I'm renewed. Sometimes that's all I have time for before dinner. Sometimes Walt takes a shift and I can get some housework done first.

One of the hardest things about being back at work is enduring the tight box of scheduled days. Every minute counts, and there are not nearly enough minutes to be an effective teacher and continue the very full life I was living before mid-August. Much that I love—most of my writing life, leisurely visits with friends, antiquing with my brother, taking a day to read a book, time to just be—has taken a huge hit.

Toby keeps me connected to what really matters: play, love, the spiritual and physical energy that walking creates for me. When we brought him home almost four years ago, I could not have imagined what a powerful teacher he would become in my life. Or how much my heart would soften and expand in response to his headstrong loyalty, and simple exuberant joy.

Vulture Encounter

2011-09-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

The honeymoon ended on Thursday. Right on schedule. Except it was one of many things I'd forgotten about, and caught me completely off-guard. So instead of feeling like a normal part of the process of beginning a school year, the day felt like a confirmation of all my fears. Fears I'd kept at bay during the happy sunny beginning as I fell in love with my class.

I went home Thursday night shaken, my limbs leaden, my heart protesting. Sad that the new self I'd brought to the classroom seemed to last only last six days. Wondering how I was going to get through the next 174.

Then, as I have so many times in the last weeks, I decided to take fear on.

Yes, the kids wouldn't stop talking. Yes, I spoke to them sternly. No, nothing I did seemed to work.

However, I have good systems in place. I wasn't using them because I didn't want to seem mean or too strict. Too many chances, too many warnings, with the result that we were all frustrated.

Yes, it was a long day for us all—three hours without a break in the afternoon. Yes, it would have been better if I'd taken them outside for a bit. No, I didn't think of that because I was too busy trying to push through.

So the bigger problem was a too long stretch of time without respite. Easily solved.

Yes, I'm behind in just about every way possible. Yes, the workload is unrelenting, two new demands appearing for every one I manage to meet. No, I'm not going to be able to live this way for an entire year.

I brought work home for the weekend, and spent most of yesterday slogging through the piles of tests and standards and unfinished curriculum maps. Walt made forms for me, and self manager badges for the kids. He got groceries. He held me. At the end I could feel my breathing ease and my whole self loosen.

Friday was as good a day as Thursday was not. Returning my focus to having fun and building connections (as opposed to the pressure to catch up, to teach more faster, to do it right), I planned a day of community building. We did math, but we also had our first auction and the kids got to change their seats for the first time. We practiced vocabulary, but it was a game. The silent ball game we always end the day with might have been a little longer than usual. Everyone left for the weekend smiling.

Yesterday morning as I sat by the river while Toby dived for rocks, I watched a vulture sit uncertainly at the top of a tall snag on the other side. While I couldn't see clearly enough to know for sure, he seemed young. Maybe it was the way he kept throwing his wings out for balance. Or the way he edged himself gingerly out on a branch before flapping himself to the next snag over.

I enjoyed his antics for a long time, thinking as I often do with vultures, how misunderstood they are. They symbolize and live on death and decay. Yet they're highly social and curious. On the ground they look like giant pin-headed chickens, but if you don't look too closely at their heads they are incredibly beautiful, especially in flight.

Maybe fear isn't so much different. It definitely peddles death and decay. No one's happy to see it arrive. But examined more closely, confronted and studied, fear's just another bird with a job to do. It's not nearly as powerful as its appearance would lead us to believe. Information is provided. I have the power to choose what to do with it.

I'll go in early again tomorrow. As I sit here writing I remember I need to do my parent letter first thing, plus there's copying and setting up for the day, and, and, and. And my stomach contracts—fear, sneaky and silent in its approach, does a fly-by. I breathe, enjoy the beauty of its black wings, and allow it to soar out of sight. Today is for playing. Tomorrow is for work (with generous helpings of play). I can handle both.

At Home

2011-09-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

Sitting on a mottled mossy rock by the river, Toby diving for rocks and a pair of pintails paddling in the eddies, I find myself thinking of home. It may be the utter stillness: only the faintest hint of water rushing over stones farther up the river stirs the air. It may be the annual autumnal longings stirred to the surface by the tiniest hint of chill in the breeze. Or it may just be these thoughts are born from what feels like a new open space in my heart.

Open House, the night before school started, was packed, chaotic, and deeply satisfying. I felt completely at home greeting and shaking hands with my new families and gathering hugs from former families. But something was different this time. I've always loved this night, loved the celebrity aspect of being the center of so much attention, as well as discovering the first chapter of all the new stories to be written in the months ahead. This year, even though my room was full of people curious about their new teacher, it didn't feel like any of it was about me at all. I was able to let go of worries about how I was going to be perceived, and to focus completely on my kids.

From the moment the kids walked in on the first day until I sent them home on Friday, I felt at home. As though I'd never left the classroom. And my first priority was to make sure the kids felt at home—safe, happy, cared for.

Those were things I did not feel in my own childhood home, especially at ten. Instead I was afraid, sad, and certain I was the reason our family was so broken. School was the closest I came to feeling at home. But even there, because I knew in my bones I wasn't acceptable to my own family, I felt I had to be on guard to present what I thought was an acceptable version of myself.

It's taken years of work, and most likely my mom's death in June, for me to make the connection between my belief in my acceptability and my sense of home.

So as the first week of school passed in a blurred series of snapshot moments, I knew with each one how at home I was feeling. I realized the person who left two years ago was no longer present. She's been replaced by someone with serenity and optimism and faith; someone who laughs easily and ruffles almost not at all; someone who can and does choose to release resistance.

The eyes of this new person brimmed with tears repeatedly as love for my deliciously varied crew of ten-year-olds swept over me time and time again.

Lovely names, each a prayer: Angelina, Sterling, Joy, Grace. Shy smiles and dancing eyes and invitations to conversations. "Hey, Mrs. Shucka, you know what?" An offering of a homemade peanut butter cookie. Hundreds of questions: one boy needing to ask every minute or so with great sincerity and intensity. A girl hiding under her desk, separating herself at lunch, wearing a winter coat zipped to the chin. Another child wearing dirty hole-spattered clothes, and smiling at me through grime that would require some serious scrubbing to conquer. Playing games, celebrating our first birthday, setting a strong foundation for this new nine-month family.

I am at home in the world of ten-year-olds, in the classroom, in school. In going back, I've discovered I'm at home in my own skin, my own soul, where true home exists. While I still prefer the home of sharing a sweet September afternoon with Toby, or wrapped in Walt's arms, or in the company of my brothers, or sitting at my kitchen table watching goldfinches feed, I can't help but think feeling home wherever I am is one of the greatest gifts I've ever received.

Photo by Walt

Pinnacles

2011-08-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

In the two weeks since I stepped back into the world of public education I've heard one question more than any other: Are you excited to be back?

Well, no, as a matter of fact, I'm not. But I don't say that. Not because I'm avoiding the truth, but because being excited is not the point.

The art teacher, my across-the-hall neighbor, was in my room last week introducing himself. Hired the year I left, he's young and clearly loves teaching even more than he loves his own art. He lives and breathes creativity. As I worked to express to him my belief that returning to the classroom will ultimately sharpen my writing, he said the perfect thing:

"Creativity works best under pressure."

It's not a new idea. A John Stewart quote with identical meaning found its way to me early last winter as I struggled to make peace with having to return to teaching.

But it was just one of many moments that are standouts as I've prepared for the first day of school, which is Wednesday.

The teacher desk left in my room was a small blond desk-wannabe that would have held my computer and phone with no surface left to spread out and work. While hunting for other furniture, I noticed a huge scarred dark wood slab buried under a pile of tattered books and torn borders. My desk! The one I had before, and loved. Set up in my room now in all its aged battered glory, it greets me every time I step into the room with a broad welcoming expanse and drawers enough for a paper addict's needs.

Vinnie, our district maintenance guy, was in my room fixing cupboard doors. I asked him if he'd seen the work order to move my projection screen (the focal point of the classroom), the thing I needed done much more than I needed doors tightened. He hadn't received that order yet, but took the time to move the screen while he was there, which made it possible for me to finish setting up my furniture.

I returned to my room during a break from meetings on Friday to find a newer computer on my desk. The tech guy, Chase, has months' worth of work that needs to get done before school starts. He can't walk down the hall without a teacher following him throwing out lists of urgent needs. Despite that, he took the time as he set up my computer, without having been asked, to enlarge what shows on the screen so I no longer have to peer through squinted eyes to read.

Sitting in meetings (five days worth in two weeks), something that usually brings out every resistant bone in my body, has been mostly a pleasure. I hadn't realized how much I missed being surrounded by the wonderful quirks and stories and energies of my fellow travelers. I've laughed more (cried more, too), talked more, absorbed more, in the last two weeks than I have in ages.

Yesterday morning I wrote post cards to my new students. The list changes on a daily basis, but since the first time I saw it early last week, I've already begun to love the names. I've also begun to form pictures of some of the kids as fourth grade teachers look to see which of their kids I got. I have siblings of three former students, all families I'm eager to work with again. As I finished each post card, I would set it aside with a blessing and a prayer for that child, our relationship, and their fifth grade year.

Tomorrow is another meeting day. So is Tuesday morning. Tuesday afternoon we have "free" to prepare for Open House Tuesday night. Wednesday morning at least 26 ten-year-olds will step into a new year with me. They'll see this quote by Douglas Pagels on the back bulletin board:

"Each new day is a blank page in the diary of life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can."

While I may not be exactly excited to be back, I am confident this year will be full of the best stories I've ever experienced, both mine and my students'. A year of pinnacles to be celebrated, admired, and grateful for. And under all of that, a glimmer of hope that one story in particular will find its way to the surface, and grow into a reality that exceeds my imagination.

Photo of The Pinnacles at Crater Lake taken by Walt.

Growing into the Light

2011-08-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

My brother Mark and I were walking into a building together when I noticed the row of neatly symmetrical deciduous trees lining the sidewalk. Their unfamiliar tissuey pink flowers, more suited to spring than the hot August day, caught my eye first. The tremendous leaning of the trees toward the parking lot and away from the wall—like ladies in a row looking out together for the bus up the street—stopped us both.

"Do you know why plants lean toward the light?" Mark asked.

My mind immediately went to my elementary school answer. But I know my brother, who used to teach high school science. This was a trick question if ever I heard one.

"Isn't it to reach the sunlight? For photosynthesis?" I answered. "Is there more to it than that?"

And it turns out the answer is yes, to both questions.

I've taught kids for years that plants need light for photosynthesis. It was a relief to know I hadn't somehow been teaching the wrong thing. There is, however, another process called phototropism in which cell growth occurs on the shaded side of leaves, pushing the plant toward the light.

As I marveled at the fact that growth was happening in the shadows, which seems so counter-intuitive, Mark tossed out, "Yup. Growth requires darkness. Life requires light."

We both recognized the power of those words the minute they left his mouth. My brother is experiencing his own time of shadows and intense growth. I'm not sure which of us needed his message more.

Growth happens in the darkness. Growth that nudges a plant toward the source of life. Toward warmth and light that provide nutrition and strength which in turn creates more of the hormone triggering more growth in the shadows.

We're finally having the summer that usually happens in July, or at least much earlier in August. It's hot and sunny. Bright air is full of life-giving light. My life right now feels much like the dark side of those trees. Shadowed with so much inner growth it's nearly impossible to find a comfortable way to be. As the cells on the backs of my inner leaves stretch and expand beyond their previously comfortable walls, I find myself leaning. Off-balance. Seeking the lush light of summer that seems just beyond my reach.

This design offers me much comfort in these days of my return to public education. It gives purpose to the shadows that lurk at every turn, and reminds me that only good can come from what now feels not-so-good. The sun meets my upturned face with a radiance that fills me with all I need to nourish a full flowering, driven by the growth of these dark days.

After our day together, I asked Mark to write about this same experience. He told me this morning that he had (I love it when my brothers listen to me!), but I didn't read his post until after I'd written this. I encourage you to read his story. His explanation of the science exceeds my elementary understanding. His wisdom and heart shine bright in every word.

A Different View

2011-08-15T17:17:00.000-07:00

When I drove into the parking lot of school this morning, I was grateful to see there were no other cars. My first day back after two years away, and I struggled to quiet the fear and anxiety that grew louder during my drive from home, like a geiger counter approaching uranium. I pulled around to the back of the building, just outside my room, and let myself in as quietly as possible. Almost like I was sneaking in, shy to be there.

I'd been prepared for the worst. Expecting dregs as far as furniture and supplies, knowing that all the good stuff would have been scavenged by other teachers at the end of last year. It wasn't the worst, but neither was it good. As I stood in the middle of the room, adjusting to the reality of what I had to work with, I noticed the floors weren't clean.

My original plan had been to go in last week and get started with set-up and planning. I wanted to work my way back into the groove slowly, a few hours at a time. That was derailed by a last-minute directive from our principal to stay out of the building until today, because the custodians needed the extra time to finish the floors.

My initial reaction was to ignore the message and go in anyway. I was mad at the restriction after having been told I could go in early, then upset that my first contact with the new year resulted in my being mad. After listening to the calm counsel of a thoughtful friend, I decided it was wiser (and easier) to accept the change. The result was an extra week of freedom: time with friends, soaking up sun, reading, finishing home projects.

Today I expected to put in a full day to make up for the time I lost last week. But uncleaned carpets and unpolished tiles meant I was stymied. At first I considered moving in anyway, pretending I didn't know the floors weren't done. There was a time when I would have done just that, justifying my actions with my need and the promised completion time.

Instead I went in search of the custodian and information.

As I tracked the sound of her footsteps, I reminded myself to stay focused on what is important and what is not. What matters is relationship, balance, and kindness. Anything attempted or gained through any other means is poisoned. It's not personal. Not about me in any way. None of it. The only thing that's about me is how I respond to what's presented.

When I found her, she seemed surprised to see me in the building, but was friendly. She's new since I was last there. Her name is Glinda (yes, like the Good Witch—I asked), which made me like her instantly. I had to restrain myself from interviewing her on the spot, but I look forward to learning what has to be a wonderful story, both about how she got her name and how it's influenced her life. Instead I asked about the floors, and learned the crew had lost three weeks of work time this summer because of circumstances beyond their control. I explained my time issues. She told me she'd get my carpet done today. I can move in tomorrow.

So I got my soft entry back to school, found the start to an intriguing new story, and gained one more day of freedom. More importantly, I got to see what happens when I shift my view of things just a little. When I choose not to listen to the voice that tells me to fight, and instead seek understanding and connection.

Tomorrow, I'm sure there will be many more opportunities for me to choose the softer view as I begin my search for furniture.

Change in the Air

2011-08-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

Walt and I were just gathering our lunch things, preparing to return to the canoe and the rest of our journey through the refuge, when we heard voices. A large rowboat beached and we watched a younger man help an older woman step onto shore. Our mutual greetings became a longer conversation in which they revealed they'd been out wocus picking. Members of the Klamath/Modoc tribe, they were gathering the seed heads to make a traditional cereal.

Our conversation turned to the perfect day: sunny, balmy, no wind, no bugs.

"It feels like the time for hunting and gathering," the man said. "There's change in the air."

And I knew that to be true, even though I'd been trying not to know. I had been sensing the smallest shift in the color of light, feeling the first inner stirrings of restlessness, seeing the first yellowing of big leaf maple.

Despite the fact that we've hardly had summer, autumn's breath is making itself known.

This is the flat time, neither fully one season nor the other. Summer not quite over, autumn not quite here. Still more summer than not, but past the time where it feels like summer might last forever.

I'm finding feathers everywhere these days, in unusual abundance it seems to me. Owl. Eagle. Jay. An egret feather floating next to us toward the end of the canoe trip that felt like an omen and a gift. As though the birds preparing for migration are sending me invitations to join them.

In the hours we spent paddling the flat water of the marshy refuge, we saw hundreds of dragonflies. At least four different varieties. I considered the contrast between that abundance and the huge numbers of turkey vultures we'd seen as we drove south from home the day before. Both are beings that have always touched me at that intersection of spirit and heart. The vultures whose job it is to clean away that which has died. The dragonflies who symbolize change and spiritual renewal.

A lone bald eagle soared overhead, close enough that his white head and tail, deep brown body, and golden beak were sharply defined against the Crater Lake blue of the sky. Just in case, apparently, I needed the reminder that our day on the water was both love letter and extended hand from the Divine.

A love letter that included a pair of otters playing on the bank, two deer swimming not far ahead of us, shy egrets peering at us through the reeds. A gentle hand that held us for miles of perfect stillness in amiable companionship with each other, ourselves and the world around us.

Change is in the air. It comes in its own time, at its own pace. But it comes. Full of promise, hope, and songs of waiting adventures.

Photos by Walt

Showers of Light

2011-08-03T05:47:00.000-07:00

Like scouts for the Perseid meteor showers due later this month, bits of light flash across the sky of my life. At first I notice one or two shooting stars and they barely register as extraordinary: several days of sunshine in a row, the scent of petunias playing around my head as I relax on our patio.

Then they start to occur with regularity, streaking through with little time between, impossible to register anything but wonder and joy.

A breakfast yesterday with a fairly new friend in which the conversation was deep and satisfying—vulnerable and intimate. As I left the restaurant, running into two former and beloved students and their mom and a sister I can hope to have in a couple of years—hugs and happiness and warmth. From there to coffee with a friend with whom my relationship has grown this summer from an occasional pleasure to a constant source of comfort.

With time to spare before an afternoon appointment, I decide to get a pedicure. My first in two years. A luxury I'd decided to forego along with many other luxuries to better afford my leave time. Sitting in the big black throne of a chair with a breeze dancing through the open door to Enya's voice while my feet and legs are given gentle care. Walking out with a lighter step and purple toes.

More time to spend as I wish. An awareness that time freedom is the greatest gift of all, and soon will be even more precious to me for its rarity.

I go to an office supply store. The fall of my first year of leave, this is what I missed most: having a reason to lose myself in the world of paper and pencils and post-its, and to bring home an abundance of treasures from that place. Yesterday I gave myself that gift. Meandering each aisle as though visiting a familiar trail in the wilderness. Grinning with delight at new choices and products. Starting with a basket, which I quickly trade for a cart, and fill.

At my appointment, finally, hearing myself say, "I have hope." Surprising us both with the words and the depth of the truth underneath.

Coming home to a frantically happy dog and complaining cats, Walt gone to a day of golf, sitting on the patio in the last of the day's warmth and feeling nothing but gratitude.

Each event a clean flash of light, barely faded before the next one follows. As though I were actually lying in the grass of my field watching the shower of miracles, I feel held by the earth. Safe. Grounded. One with it all.

The Perseids are at their most spectacular in the darkest hours of night just before dawn. Bits of rock, distant cousins to the sun, ignited by the speed of their travels, announcing like the Star of Bethlehem the arrival of a new beginning.

photo by Mell P from Planetsave

Blueberry Meditation

2011-07-27T15:26:00.000-07:00

The soft soil under my bare feet is both damp and warm. I stand rolling plump purplish pearls between thumb and index finger, one at a time, dropping them into the bucket belted at my waist. The one lone chickadee whose lunch I interrupted when I came out into the garden has long since flown. My mouth is full of blueberry nectar. My teeth wait patiently for the next frosted orb to pop.

One of the gifts of this strange summer is a very late crop which has somehow fooled the robins into leaving me the first picking of blueberries. Every other year I've had to wait until they got their fill and make do with the second or third round of ripening. I never mind sharing, but still enjoy the rare treat of the best my blueberry bushes have to offer.

The sun plays hide and seek behind the clouds, and the wind seems to be in on the game in gusts that reveal the light in increasingly long stretches. I absorb the heat into my skin, through the top of my head, like parched earth soaking up rain. And for the first time in days, I'm able to release my breath fully.

The reality of the next chapter of my life grows larger and more certain with each day that falls away. I look at the bright side, count my blessings, don't borrow trouble. I embrace each new day for the gifts it brings. I focus on the positive: being with kids, an income, the fact that I'm good at this thing I thought I'd never have to do again. And still the sadness works its way to the surface, and it will be heard no matter how hard I try not to give it power.

In the stillness of my blueberries I remember a June day two years ago when I was so full of joy and hope and determination. I was surrounded by an abundance of love and support; there was no way I wasn't going to fly where I meant to go, and beyond. I remember a year of adventure: agents queried, classes taken, classes taught, learning about the world of publication, making new friends, writing every day and feeling like a real writer to my bones. I remember a second year, this last one, that held as much darkness as the first year did light: realizing it's going to take longer to write this book than I'd ever anticipated, coming face to face with economic realities, a series of deaths, and now living with the impending loss of both freedom and the original shape of my dreams.

Popping a handful of blue sugar into my mouth I recall the long conversation I had yesterday with my friend and new teammate Kelly. Her presence in my life is one of those incongruities that leave no doubt about the presence and intervention of the Divine. Our story started this way. And now she's my guide back to a place I don't want to be. I couldn't ask for a better companion for this leg of my journey. We talked about kids and calendars and projects. She answered my many questions with patience and humor. We laughed—a lot.

My fingers gently tug berry after berry into the bucket. Wind stirs the tops of the trees and the clouds are magically gone. Sun keeps me company. Earth holds me, grounds me. I hold it all in this moment: gratitude to my generous friend, grief at one more loss, a flicker of anticipation at what the unknown future might hold.

Faith

2011-07-21T15:13:00.000-07:00

"Deb, come here." The tension in Walt's voice told me I was being summoned to see something I'd be sorry to miss if I didn't move. I hurried into the dining room where he was looking out the bay window through binoculars. On the far end of our field, perched in a large Douglas fir, were two owls—my owls. Out in broad daylight, pretty far from the meadow where I usually see them.

Walt had come in just a few afternoons before with an owl feather he'd found in our yard. (I do know how lucky I am to be married to someone who offers me gifts of sightings and feathers.) And yesterday, not too long after watching the owls preen and perch, as I was looking for a gift to offer a friend, I realized I have an abundance of owl feathers. Enough that sharing didn't feel like a sacrifice (although for this friend, I would have made the sacrifice gladly).

Spotting the owls for the first time last summer was one of the highlights of the season for me. Since then they've become a regular part of my life. I listen for them whenever I'm outside, or for the screeching jays that tell me they're near. My summer days start with their sleepy squawks. My winter days start with their mating hoots and calls.

I'm just beginning to realize that owls have joined the ranks of eagles and hawks and the myriad of songbirds that provide color and music to my days. No longer a novelty. A regular every-day occurrence. Still thrilling to behold.

When I catch a glimpse of one flying away from me, just a second or two too late for the full experience of owl flight, it no longer feels like I've missed something irretrievable. I know there will be another time, another sighting, and probably sooner rather than later.

The sheer glory of living a life in which abundance is measured in feathers and wings and avian variety is a gift beyond measure. To know that whenever I step outside I can expect to have my breath swept away by some small miracle of life. Each one is a tiny explosion of joyous light in the darkness of this grieving time.

Seeing my owls, knowing they're nocturnal and not that easy to spot under any circumstances, makes me consider what else exists in the trees and air around me. Birds, critters, possibilities that are just beyond my sensory grasp.

A fine definition of faith. A certainty of the existence of that which you can't actually see or experience sensually. Faith made stronger by the unlikely, unexpected, but regular appearance of my owls. If I know such wonders as great horned owls and their babies, bald eagles soaring over my head, hummingbirds peering into my eyes with curiosity, it seems easier somehow to trust in the existence of all the wonders I haven't yet met.

Wondering

2011-07-18T06:35:00.000-07:00

For twenty-four years on this summer morning I awoke not seeing the unfolding day. My vision turned inward as I wondered: What does she look like? Who is she with? Is she happy?

Did she miss me? Did she wonder where I was, what I looked like, if I was happy? Could she feel my love and longing from whatever distance separated us?

Happy Birthday, my daughter, I would whisper throughout the day. And while for the rest of the year I wouldn't allow myself to dwell, on this day my heart would open as fully as possible to knowing my child was out there somewhere. Blowing out candles on a cake prepared by another mom.

I imagined her at one: chubby legs, gleeful smile, reaching arms. A darker-skinned, curly-haired version of myself at that age. I imagined her at five, starting kindergarten: eager to learn, bravely facing a world away from home. I imagined her at sixteen: beautiful, spirited, on the cusp of an easier life than I could have given her.

On Kathleen's eighteenth birthday I imagined her beginning her search for me as she prepared for college and a career.

When she really did find me the spring before she turned twenty-five, I was certain we'd spend every birthday together from that time forward.

By July of that year she'd already begun the reaching out and withdrawing that would become the hallmark of our relationship. There was always a good reason she wasn't available to spend the day with me. One involving her children or her parents. One I couldn't argue against for the simple reason I had given up all rights to her and could only accept what she was willing to give. There were always promises of next year.

For her twenty-fifth birthday, our first in each other's lives, I bought her a ring. A ruby. Her birthstone. I wanted her to have something she could wear every day that would remind her how much I loved her. How much I'd always loved her. When she cancelled our plans at the last minute, I put the ring away, thinking I'd give it to her the next year. It sat in a drawer for a number of years before I finally mailed it to her. Still hoping that next year would be different.

Sixteen years of hoping. Sixteen years in which I could at least picture her clearly, and hear her voice or see her words.

Last year when she turned forty I wrote this and emailed her and told her I'd like her to read it. I meant it as an offering of understanding and love. A reaching out to embrace her. She saw only the acknowledgment of her mental illness and pulled even farther away.

I woke up this morning to a dawn in which I once more wonder where she is. What happens to the spirit of a young woman who feels too much pain to continue to live? As I send my heart out into the pinking sky, searching for some sign of her, I find only emptiness and sadness in the fog softened air. To have come full circle in this way leaves me spinning.

I wonder now how her daughter is, and her other mother, on this day. Her two sons. Her ex-husband. I wonder if she can, wherever she is, finally feel how loved she is. If she sees how much she's missed. If she knows peace.

A Friend in Flight

2011-07-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

It's one of those friendships where you can't remember ever not being friends, even though you know the beginning wasn't that long ago.

I knew her first as a parent. Sandi's older daughter was in my (all time favorite) fifth grade class. Sometime in the two years before I had her younger daughter (whose class I also adored), we discovered a sisterhood that has only grown stronger over the last dozen years or more. My first clear memory of us is a lunch during which we shared Readers' Digest condensed versions of our stories. I can still feel the delight I realized as so many of our life experiences overlapped.

She was working as a teaching assistant, and was one of those helping and involved parents all teachers treasure. Then she became a teacher herself, was hired before the ink was dry on her certificate, and eventually became my teaching partner.

We had so much fun. We shared ideas, supplies, solutions to problems with each other. We held each other up when the weight of the job got to be too much for one person to bear alone. We pushed each other's buttons from time to time (much like sisters), but never lost our connection or our desire to work together. Then I changed districts and we lost touch for a time, except for a random email now and then and an annual antiquing expedition.

Sometime in the last couple of years, our emails became more frequent, and we found our friendship waiting for us right where we'd left off. It hasn't lost any of its magic, and has perhaps even acquired more. She asked me the other day if I'd read a particular book, one not that well-known. I had just ordered it from the library, and neither of us was that surprised because it's not the first time that's happened.

Sandi wanted to start a blog, so we spent some hours together as I helped her set it up (one of my favorite things to do). For a long time, she was shy about having anyone read her writing, even though she's a brilliant writer with amazing stories to tell.

Finally, my great friend Sandi is ready for a larger audience. She's housebound right now recovering from knee replacement surgery, and the writing she's doing about that experience will make you wince and laugh and be very grateful for limbs that work well.

I hope you'll give yourself the gift of her stories and visit her at Flying into the Light. I promise you won't be sorry.

Companion

2011-07-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

His needs are few: a ball, shadows to chase, the companionship of his pack. He finds ecstasy in the scent of deer, swimming for a stick in the river, and belly scratches. He grins wildly when one of us returns after a long day. He is the picture of abject defeat when an invitation to play is not responded to with enthusiasm.

Like Dug the dog in the movie Up, his weakness is squirrels. He'll explode out the back door, into the bird area, ready to chase, before he's even checked to see if there are any squirrels there. Since there almost always are, he's rarely disappointed. He's never caught one, but I'm not entirely convinced he couldn't if he really wanted to.

It's all or nothing with this dog. Full tilt or catatonic. He still will not obey automatically—there's always a space of time, sometimes long, in which he decides for himself. He'll do anything for a treat, though, whether commanded to or not. Sit. Lie down. Sit. Speak. Lie Down. Sit. All in a dizzying routine during which his bright eyes never leave the desired treasure.

He's the earliest bird in the house. His inner alarm is highly accurate, but has no adjustment for weekends or mornings I might want to sleep in. My day always starts with the sound of his ninety pounds hurtling down the stairs and his nose bumping whatever part of me he can reach easily.

He is single-minded—persistent in a way that defines faith. If he wants a thing, he believes it will happen if only he waits long enough or asks loudly enough. He seems not to know about impossible. It doesn't matter whether it's convincing me it's time for his walk, or time to play, or he needs loves—he's certain it will happen.

This is a dog who has never met a stranger or an enemy. Every new person is both his friend and a potential playmate. He willingly shares his toys, even with the canine companions of human visitors. He never lets rejection interfere with his friendliness, and always gives people as many chances as it takes for them to recognize the gifts he offers.

Sharing a home with three cats is not something all dogs could do with as much forbearance as he. He tolerates Emma's romancing of his face and curling up between his front legs. He avoids Cooper (won't even look at her) because she's been known to hit for no good reason. And when Grace decides she wants his food, he backs away (and looks longingly for me to rescue him).

Just looking at Toby lifts my heart. His magnificence, his quiet power, the light he radiates. His smell feels like home. Stroking his ears, still so much like angel's wings even in adulthood, soothes all the way to my center. It's impossible to be with him and not smile. The comfort he offers, the joy he creates, just by being his grand doggy self is a gift beyond measure.

Gifts of Light

2011-07-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

Part of the trail Toby and I take has become so overgrown I only know it's there because we've walked it so many times. Bracken ferns tower over my head and wrap me in a soft embrace of fronds and pungent, almost-sweet perfume. Sunlight filters through just enough to illuminate the green, but the wind that keeps me company like another playful puppy doesn't follow me into the thicket.

There's no room for anything else in this space except sound: a soft insect buzz; the gruff gronking conversation of the raven pair who showed up in my sky earlier this summer; Toby crashing through the brush in search of scent. I am cocooned, and very very still.

Walt and I have spent the last few days trimming trees in our yard. Old Douglas firs whose lower branches block light from neighboring planting areas. A newer sequoia, one of the first things we planted when we moved here twenty summers ago, grown far beyond our earlier envisioned boundaries. A red twig dogwood that exploded from a one-gallon clump into a small forest of its own.

I've always been reluctant to remove even a few branches from our trees, unwilling to give up the shield and security they provide. Pruning has always felt so brutal to me. The removal of living parts. Going from lush wild growth to controlled cut angularity. But things have finally reached the point where I recognize that if the trees don't get trimmed, other plants will die from lack of sunlight and overcrowding.

The work itself was pleasant and satisfying, even with sore muscles and the unavoidable scrapes and bruises. The results were surprising. Because we'd been intent on creating light for smaller plants, I hadn't really focused on what else was being opened up. Our view beyond the fence line has been expanded considerably. In the back yard, we can see a neighbor's place clearly at the far side of our field. A place of cute outbuildings and bee boxes and a huge garden. A sight that both soothes and brings smiles.

In the front yard, for the first time ever, we can see the top of our immediate neighbor's house just behind the cedar fence that backs the sequoia. It was that sight that got my attention.

I love our neighbors, but I don't love seeing their house. For a few minutes I wished hard that we could put back a few of the branches we'd worked so hard to chop off. This was exactly why I'd always been so against trimming. And I couldn't even blame Walt because I'd been right there with him.

As I stood staring at the offending housetop, my focus shifted ever so slightly. I saw the rich red trunk of the sequoia fringed with sword ferns at its base. I saw the smoke bush already reaching toward the new light. I saw open ground ready to receive new life. I realized that eventually I'll see only green again, but it will be healthier, more diverse, richer.

Caught in the spell of the prehistoric ferns, a part of me wants to stay right here in this moment forever. No pain. No loss. No fear. Nothing but now. But I get restless, and I haven't heard Toby for a bit, so I move forward into a clearing that is as blue and open as the trail was green and enclosed. Against that brilliant backdrop that opens to forever is a trio of leafless twigs, upon which rest two dragonflies. My old friends of a couple of summers ago, here now reminding me of their message of renewal and insight—the end of illusion and clearer vision into life's realities.

Gifts of light, given as grace, received with gratitude.

What Remains

2011-06-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

The early days of my grieving for Kathleen were done in the cold dark of early winter. There was comfort in the starkness of weather that matched my interior. Bare trees and hard ground. Biting air driven into bone by fierce winds. Clouds, deep gray and heavy with moisture released in torrents of rain or damping blankets of snow.

Now in the lush green moistness of June I adjust to a world without a mother. And I find equal comfort in daily reminders of the irrepressibility of life.

This is the season of fledging. There's a new baby owl in the meadow below us. The bald eagles that have nested somewhere to the north spent a recent Sunday teaching a dark and awkward eaglet how to fly. Stellar's jay babies chase parents around the bird feeders, demanding to be fed in pre-teen boy voices.

Our wildflower area surprised us this year with a profusion of foxglove. The rich exuberance of color, texture and sheer abundance offers a visual delight that never fails to lift my heart, even on the harder days.

Although this has been a cooler and wetter year than normal, the world around me seems not to have noticed. Mornings are full of wild birdsong. The river chuckles and chortles its way to the ocean. Deer visit. Coyotes claim the night with their yips and howls. Rabbits graze the lawn.

The wind is warm and gentle, so full of promise and hope, I long to be carried away in its arms.

After Mom's service last weekend, my youngest brother drove to our old home while the rest of us began the long trek back to our lives. He posted pictures on our family site, and I wasn't far into the slide show before I realized something was missing.

The place was sold to a large corporation whose plans for it never materialized. So it has sat for years just as it was left, a tiny ghost town consisting of house, garage, barns and overgrown trees. A caretaker lived in a trailer at the back of the property, but it was always possible to visit and step easily into childhood memory.

I drove out just two years ago—walked through the house, wandered outside a bit, and knew for the first time ever that I would never find the answers I was looking for there.

Still, it was a shock when I realized, looking at Geoff's pictures, that the house had been torn down. Nothing remains but a crumpled pile of aluminum roofing and flat ground. Something about the finality of the razed house drove home the finality of Mom's death, and the death of those remaining childhood hopes and illusions.

I watched picture after picture of bare ground surrounded by trees, a disorienting array of proof that our childhood home was really gone. In the background were the barns and old garage, all soft around the edges, slowly melting into the ground. Then, toward the end, there was a shot of yellow roses that seemed out of place with all that evidence of destruction.

Mom loved yellow roses, the wildly fragrant climbing kind, and Dad had planted these outside the milking parlor where she spent so much of her time. Here they were, untended and undaunted, growing into June against cold gray concrete, as they had every summer for decades. Hardy enough to withstand the cruel North Idaho winters. Hardy enough to thrive in the short summers. Hardy enough to survive from a beginning that might have preordained them to die without the care so many roses require.

My daughter is gone. My mother is gone. Someday, I will be gone. But until that time, I journey in a world that sings life at the top of its lungs. That shines light so bright the darkness has no chance to win. That reaches into my heart and releases love, gratitude and hope.

Closure

2011-06-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the living room of my brother Geoff''s Seattle area home I noticed the copper box on the mantel. "Is that Mom?" I asked my sister-in-law. We were leaving early the next morning to take the ashes of both our parents to their final resting place very close to where we grew up in North Idaho.

"No, that's Dad," she said. He'd been stored away for the last twenty years because Mom wanted him close and then buried with her. I looked at my brother Mark, sitting next to me, then back at my SIL.

"Where's Mom?"

SIL turned ten shades of pale, shrieked, and went for the phone. Mom's ashes were at the funeral home and they'd forgotten to get them earlier in the day. By the time of our conversation, the place had been closed for over an hour.

It looked like we were going to have a burial service for Mom without Mom.

Mark and I looked at each other again, and had to look away because we were both on the edge of giggles. And it was at that point I knew I'd finally let go of my last lingering expectation for how the weekend needed to go.

In the previous days I'd found myself wondering if I was going to have to retract all I'd said about the legacy of love that was our mom's best gift to us. During the planning of her burial service, every lingering bit of family dysfunction popped to the surface as we struggled to communicate through our grief. My hopes for the weekend of our saying goodbye to Mom were first tipped off-kilter, then turned on their head, and finally shattered completely.

I had struggled to accept the changes, to resist declaring big sister edicts, to hang on to my belief that none of us were really in control of how things turned out. Once I grasped that the fantasy weekend I'd created in my mind was more about my little girl need than anything else, and that I could take care of that in other ways, I began to let go and look forward to the surprises.

My ability to laugh at the possibility that Mom might not even be at her own burial told me I'd achieved the equanimity I was working so hard for.

Of course everything turned out better than any of us could have hoped for.

Ten people: Mom's four children, two daughters-in-law, two grandchildren, a favorite cousin, a friend. Each of us there because her life mattered to us, and because we loved her enough to drive the many miles and brave the blustery weather to gather and say goodbye.

Mark led the ceremony, and as he told stories about Mom's life that made us laugh and cry, I thought about what a gift he has for speaking. Frank, the older brother, had organized the tent and chairs and flowers in addition to making all the reservations for the weekend. He reserved a room for the dinner afterwards and created a game involving facts about Mom's life that had us talking about her and our growing-up for hours. Geoff had taken on all the responsibilities around Mom's care for her later years, including the end-of-life jobs of the last days.

And he managed to get someone to open the funeral home and give us Mom's ashes on Friday evening.

My role was small. I read a letter to Mom at the service. I asked tons of questions and shared information. I stood back, and looked for ways to help. I released my expectations, stepped out of safe roles, and kept my whole and best self as present as possible.

As we placed the ashes of our parents side by side in the small hole, and left them with two roses—one white, one red—there was a definite sense of completion. Mark had shared with me a vision he had of Mom walking away from her old body into the light—radiant, forever young, joyful. I walk forward now in a world without a mother. Missing, perhaps always, the lost possibilities, but free in ways I'm just beginning to realize. Backlit by the place of all Love where she is finally at rest, and walking in the company of my beloved brothers.

Webs of Memory

2011-06-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

As I sort through the box of old pictures and papers in preparation for Mom's burial service on Saturday, my history takes shape like glorious and intricate spiders' webs revealed in bright sunlight. New images surface. Pictures appear that I would swear were not there before. Or I'll see something in a familiar picture that weaves an entirely new connection.

There are contradictions and confusions. A last name spelled three different ways. Two different wedding books with two different dates and locations for one marriage. Evidence that the stories heard in childhood might not have been completely true.

Mom's mom, always more legend than human, reveals little of herself, even after a thorough focused search through the box.

Velma LaJene Conley Cain Williams. Mom used to tell us she'd died when Mom was eighteen months old, of alcoholism. In the childhood stories my grandmother Velma was half Cherokee, the daughter of royalty, a princess. Mysterious. Wild. Romantic. She and my grandfather Mahlon had loved each other deeply and he was devastated by her death. I used to stand and stare at her picture, hoping beyond hope that I might grow up to be that beautiful. Wishing beyond reason that she had lived, certain she would have been the one person who truly understood and loved me.

There is no information about Velma's family. No way to know for certain about her Cherokee heritage. No explanation for the fact that her last name has a number of different spellings, or why she had a second last name before she was married to my grandfather. No explanation for the two different wedding dates. And of course everyone who might be able to answer those questions is gone.

The fact that Velma was twenty-two when she died really hit me for the first time this week. Married at seventeen, mother to Mark at eighteen, mother to Joyce at twenty, and gone less than two years later. Twenty-two is so young, and seems too young to me for alcohol to have been the primary cause of her death.

I also noticed that there are many pictures of Velma with her first-born, her son, and I only have one of her with Mom. It's a haunting picture—she had to have died not too long after it was taken. What stands out even more is the gleeful grin on my mother's baby face. A smile none of us ever saw from the adult version of her, and that isn't evident in any of the pictures taken as she grew into womanhood.

I wonder at the webs of memory Mom wove to create a mother for herself. She wouldn't have remembered much beyond what her body held from a year and half of whatever love and attention Velma gave her. Any stories were told by her dad's family: the grandparents who raised her and the aunt who big-sistered her. A family who felt their son had married beneath his station. A family who did not approve of his half Indian wife. It seems likely her best pictures of her mom would have been woven of imagination and longing.

I hope a circle has been fulfilled with Mom's death—that she's somehow with the mother she needed so badly and learned to live without. That she's bathed in the maternal love she spent her life convincing herself she didn't need. And maybe even that the two of them are caring for my daughter until it's my time to join them all.

Legacy of Love

2011-06-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

The two men worked side by side in a state of perfectly synchronized concentration on the job before them. Both in their fifties, their mirrored hairlines and mustaches marking them as brothers. I stood by as invisibly as possible, thrilled to be witness to their closeness and their ease with one another.

As we worked throughout the day setting up Mark's expanded antique space, I felt such gratitude for the relationships the four of us have forged in the last few years. Our older brother had been there helping the night before and would check in with us repeatedly throughout the day.

As adult siblings raised in a home where we rarely got beyond survival, the fact that we've grown so close is a blessing beyond belief. It's not always easy to find common ground, and our differences often create challenges that require a strong inclination to forgive. However, these three men, my younger brothers, are the people I love the most and feel the safest with (except for Walt). I know without doubt that they'd do anything for me, as I would for them.

Our mom died on Monday, two days after we set up Mark's space. She'd been in a nursing home for years, and just recently been placed in the care of Hospice. So her death wasn't unexpected, but neither were we prepared for it to be so soon.

In the hours after we were notified, I was amazed at the flurry of phone calls between us. Everyone talked to everyone else, and some of us talked a number of times. Through the physical shock of the first onset of grief I was aware and deeply grateful that we were reaching out to each other automatically.

As many of you know, I had a complicated relationship with my mom. One which I've spent most of my life reconciling, and one that I'd come to accept for what it was. I discovered in the last few years that I'd forgiven her to the point of loving her and feeling compassion for the difficult life she endured.

She was 79, and had been lost in the canyons of dementia for years. Before then she was reclusive, shy, and intensely private. Her childhood was a nightmare we only learned the barest bones about well after our own childhoods were distant memories. She was an equal partner in our dairy, kept books for other businesses, raised four children, and cared for her sick husband in his last months. She loved flowers and puzzles and little dogs. Giving gifts made her happier than just about anything else. She was a bad cook who still managed to create memorable meals that continue to speak comfort to us. She believed God would provide. She had beautiful hands, and when I was a girl I thought she looked just like a young Elizabeth Taylor.

There weren't many calls to make, and there won't be a public memorial service or a funeral. There aren't many people for whom her death holds any meaning at all.

Except for her four children. We are her legacy, and I hope that she can finally enjoy what she created and shaped. We are resilient, productive and resourceful. We are creative, amazing problem-solvers, and easily generous. By a number of different measures, we are successful and contributing members of society. And we love each other.

As we've spoken in the last couple of days, it's clear we're all grieving. And that may be the greatest part of her legacy. That somehow, in spite of enduring all her wounding words and coldness and mercurial moods, we emerged as adults who love. Somehow, in spite of the crooked brokenness with which she loved us, each of us has found a way to encircle her with love. Somehow, the love she felt for her babies, and lost hold of along the way, was enough for us to remember - was the seed from which a stronger softer love could grow in each of us.

The first picture of Mom as a mother.

Shooting Star

2011-06-02T13:41:00.000-07:00

We arrived an hour early and discovered the parking lot to the high school was already full. By the time we parked at a church a block away and walked into the gym the chairs on the floor were full and the bleachers nearly packed. By the time the minister began speaking there wasn't an empty seat in the house.

I sat in the midst of those hundreds of people and wondered how it was possible for that much love and caring to miss the mark so completely when it might still have made a difference.

The 18 year old daughter of one of Walt's colleagues took her life on May 23. She was athletic, beautiful, and known to be a person who sought out ways to help others. Her radiant smile in the pictures of the slide show was its own form of sunshine beaming out into the darkened space. In many of the pictures she was surrounded by girls of equal grace and gorgeousness. She belonged and was treasured. She had a loving boyfriend whose speech at the service was heartbreaking. She was headed to college in the fall on a soccer scholarship. She was a hero, a role model and a young woman with everything to live for.

She also had an eating disorder, and deep wounds referred to but not identified as the minister worked to both celebrate her life and to help those sitting before him begin to mourn.

I thought I could see pain in her eyes in the most recent pictures, but wondered if I was projecting.

The minister called her a shooting star. Her time here so short, but every minute of it burning bright and leaving a trail of light that changed the lives of everyone she came into contact with.

Hers is the fifth suicide of a young person in our county in the last few months. It's the third in my life in the same amount of time. While I didn't know this young woman, I feel this loss as though it were my own. And maybe each death like this does belong to all of us just a little bit.

I find myself asking the same questions I asked when Kathleen's death was so fresh: How can a much loved person not feel that love? How is it possible for a person surrounded by people who love her, knowing everything about her, to still believe she's that alone? What makes one person able to walk through despair and another not? And where is God in all of this?

Still no answers. Only sadness.

At the end of the service, the minister asked the family to stay seated and just absorb the round of applause that was about to be offered to their daughter/sister/niece/cousin/granddaughter. In seconds every other person in the gym was standing, clapping, and focusing their love toward the front rows. It sounded like a heavy summer rain on a tin roof—cleansing, intense, enveloping.

The very last thing we saw as the service ended was the parents hugging. In itself not unusual except they've been divorced for years, and not amicably. Dad sat on one side of the aisle. Mom on the other. So even in her death, this shooting star managed to be a healing force.

And perhaps that's all we can do: Allow the pain of loss to soften our hearts. Enlarge our capacity to love in the soft soil of that new vulnerability. Seek ways to share the healing light born from that tender love.

Turbulent Air

2011-05-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

I ripped the envelope open and scanned the letter for one particular phrase. When I found it, feelings collided with one another like two opposing weather fronts. I read through the entire letter then—slowly—and when I got to the phrase it had not changed:

Fifth Grade.

I'll be teaching fifth grade in the fall. There is nothing in that sentence that would be my choice. I don't want to return to public education. I don't want to spend the fall cooped up in a stale-aired building tied to a bell-driven schedule. I don't want to go back to fifth grade.

Of the twenty-two years I spent in the classroom before my leave two years ago, I spent all but six years teaching fifth graders in some form. When I switched to third grade for the last three years, it felt like I'd graduated somehow. Like I'd learned all I needed to with tweens and was ready for a new challenge. Third grade turned out to be a challenge for sure, but not the place for which my particular set of talents is best suited.

Last Thanksgiving when I made the decision that going back into the classroom was the most effective way to create income and still continue my writing career, middle school English seemed a good compromise choice. It would allow me to share my passion with a new age group, and to focus on one subject which would free up more energy for writing.

The letter said fifth grade. It didn't say why, or explain the thinking behind my placement. It doesn't really matter. I don't believe the district is in charge of my future, or my life in any meaningful way. Nor do I believe it's an accident that I'm returning to such familiar territory. I'm still working on what it means exactly.

Without my searching, or even paying much attention (since I'm focused on absorbing and appreciating every minute of every day of my remaining time of leave), gifts have appeared like rare bird sightings in the last couple of weeks.

A surprise encounter with a former student, now a graduating senior, who has grown into a handsome, poised and accomplished young man. The warmth of his smile and hug. Remembering how I enjoyed the tender ten year old he was.

Running into a former parent at the grocery store and hearing that her daughter still talks about her third grade year with me all the time. A long and happy visit that left me radiating validation.

In Costco, bonding over field guides with the guy standing next to me, answering his "what do you do?" question with, "I teach fifth graders." And finding I didn't mind the taste of the words in my mouth.

My counselor saying she was glad I was returning to something I knew so well because it meant I wouldn't get caught up in the adventure and novelty of something new. That meant I'd have more energy to continue answering my soul's longings.

Here's what I know to be true: I love fifth graders, and always have. There's something about their being on the cusp of so much, and the resulting vulnerability, that brings the very best of me to the surface. At odd moments now I find myself remembering the fun, magical and transformative moments of previous years. I'm looking forward to creating more of those.

Here's what else I know to be true: I am a writer. Wings unfurled and strengthened in the last few years will not suddenly fall from my shoulders. The dreams I left the classroom to pursue, while still not accomplished, are no less compelling, and more sharply defined.

Although I wouldn't have chosen to either return to the classroom, or return to fifth grade, I am choosing to trust in gifts yet to be revealed in the wide blue sky of my life. I'm choosing to allow bubbles of excitement to the surface as I begin to let go of my picture of how this was going to go. There is loss here. But not of my dreams. Only the route to them. I choose to keep flying.

Picture from Google Images

Dancing in the Streets

2011-05-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

She was on the sidewalk catercorner from me as I waited at the five lane stoplight, waiting to turn left. It's not unusual to see these kids on street corners, holding signs for various businesses, but she didn't fit the mold.

She wasn't wearing a drab and wilted Statue of Liberty costume and waving a sign offering help with taxes. She wasn't listlessly push-pulling a tall pole covered with bright signs inviting everyone to come to this open house or that blow-out car sale. She wasn't staring at the ground and flapping her sign as though it were stuck to her hand and she was trying to get it off.

This girl was dancing.

At first I reacted as I almost always do: with pity, and wondering about the circumstances that would bring someone to need money so badly they're willing to stand that exposed, and to do whatever is necessary to draw attention to themselves and the business they're representing.

My pity quickly turned to intrigued curiosity.

She seemed to be completely absorbed in her dance, and radiated a fierce clean energy. Petite, pale skin, dark unkempt hair. Clothes looking like they'd been picked blindly from the floor and thrown on without thought. Even with a knee brace (How, for someone that young?), she moved fluidly to a choreography clearly well-practiced. She dipped and bounced and spun and marched and pounded the air with her fist in perfect rhythm. She waved the sign (for pizza) as though it were an important prop, an integral part of the dance.

I found myself moving, just a little, to her rhythm, even without the beat of the music only she could hear.

This intersection is one of the busiest in our county. All too often, I find myself stuck at the light there. I'm usually taking deep conscious breaths well before green glows and traffic begins moving, especially if I'm at the back of a long line of cars. On this day, I was at the front, and wishing the red would stick. I didn't want to move away from her super-nova presence.

While I won't know the circumstances that brought my dancing girl to that street corner as a human billboard, I do trust in her ability to get herself eventually to the destination of her dreams. It's simply impossible, with that much dancing in her soul, for her to be stuck anywhere she doesn't choose to be.

Photo from Google Images

Value

2011-05-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

At the auction preview both Mark and I noticed the miniature castle, complete with drawbridge, pennants in the turrets, and dozens of tiny medieval figures. Although we usually don't buy toys, this one was tempting for its intricacy and for that Christmas morning feeling it evoked as we stood admiring it through the glass case. My fingers reached of their own accord for the little knights and I might have left a nose print in my efforts to get closer than the glass allowed.

When that lot came up for sale, Joe, the auctioneer, mentioned it belonged to a ninety year old man who'd had the set since childhood. He was giving it up as part of his move to assisted living. I imagined him coming downstairs on a cold December morning eighty years before, exclaiming in joy that Santa had left the one thing he wanted more than anything. I imagined the endless pleasurable hours of play he enjoyed protecting his castle from marauding invaders. I imagined what it must have been like in adulthood for him to be able to reclaim those happiest of childhood memories whenever he looked at his treasure.

The bidding for the castle was intense and it sold for about the same price as a beautiful deco era wardrobe brought later in the auction. Clearly the old man wasn't the only one who found value in that toy.

I'd like to think that the love he had for the castle and its knights, the depth of his value for it, soaked into the set, and that was at least in part what made it so attractive to all of us there that night.

I often find myself wondering at these auctions what it is that makes an item valuable. Clearly it's not appraised value, since art work often goes for a small fraction of that. It's not size - I've seen a baby grand piano sell for less than an original Coca Cola tray. It's not even about aesthetics - WWII paraphernalia consistently brings far more than the most delicate crystal or most ornate silver.

For the original owner of the castle, I would guess there is no amount of money that can replace the value of his childhood toy. I wonder if he'll mourn the loss, or if he's refocused and found value in different things. Maybe both. I wonder if he got so much value from the castle during the time it was his, that he no longer needs its presence. As he approaches the end of his days, I wonder what does hold value for him - if it's memories, or his family, or the great mystery that awaits him.

Photo from Google Images

Swift Rescue

2011-05-15T13:12:00.000-07:00

I'd heard the tell-tale rustling and chirping behind the mirror over the fireplace for several days in a row. The swifts were back and setting up housekeeping in our chimney. I don't remember the first year they discovered the brick nest at the top of our house, but they've claimed it as their own for long enough we no longer feel safe to use the fireplace in winter - even for emergencies.

That morning as I sat in my living room journaling my way into the still-dark morning, it dawned on me that the manic peeps I was hearing came from the fireplace itself. The only other time that's happened was with a baby who had fallen from the nest and couldn't yet fly. I figured this time, since it was far too early for babies, this was an adult who could go back up whatever opening it had descended through.

I just needed to give it time.

Several hours later, it was clear the swift was going nowhere on its own and would need rescuing. So I formed a plan and said a prayer and got to work: Put the dog out. Clear the hearth. Check the location of the cats (all three sleeping and uninterested). Open the living room windows as wide as possible.

Best case scenario, the bird would fly straight out a window. Worst case, the bird would fly frantically around my house breaking things until a cat awakened and decided to have some fun.

I cautiously tugged the fireplace doors open, expecting a flurry of feathers to come flying out. When nothing happened I stuck my head inside, a little bit at at time, and looked around. Nothing. I figured the bird had escaped back up the chimney to get away from the noise I'd created, but went to get a flashlight just to make sure.

And there it was, clinging to the sooty bricks, nearly invisible. It blinked at the light, but didn't move (allowing me to take pictures) until I reached for it. Then it flew out the window, just like that. I put everything away, satisfied at the successful rescue.

Shortly after, I heard a soft rustling in the fireplace. No chirping, just the faintest whisper of a sound. I convinced myself it was my imagination until one of the cats started knocking things over trying to get through the glass of the fireplace doors. So I repeated my earlier preparations, this time putting the now hyper-alert cat outside with Toby, hoping to get the bird out the window before the cat made her way back around the house.

There it was, on the opposite side, a mirror image of its partner. Except its eyes were closed.

This time the bird didn't move, even as I reached for it. I decided it must have been there all along - that both birds had found their way down the chimney together. After hours of no water or food, this bird was out of fight. When I wrapped my hand around its body, it came to life in a frantic flurry which I scooped toward the window. How it managed to fly through and past the returned cat waiting at the sill, I'll never know, but I was so grateful it did.

They haven't returned to the chimney, this pair, although I hear them as they swoop for food above the house. I wonder what they tell each other about their adventure. I wonder why they didn't just fly back up through the damper that had somehow come open over the winter. I wonder about the survival mechanism that made it a better thing to stay still and risk capture by a giant, over escaping in any way possible.

I think about how similar we humans are when faced with a fearful situation. How we'll freeze and take our chances with outcomes that hold the potential for far greater disaster than risking a push into the dark unknown. How even the threat of death is not enough to make us break through the fear. Still, with all of that - we, like the swifts, respond to a helping hand. It doesn't seem to matter whether we recognize the hand. Somehow the help of another being reaches past the barriers of fear to give our wings lift we can't find for ourselves.

I Remember

2011-05-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

Balsamroot

I remember the first time my daughter called me Mom. I remember my surprise at her decision to give me the title because she’d called another woman Mom for the twenty-four years before we met. I remember the thrill of hearing that dormant part of my identity named by the one person I was told I’d never meet. I remember responding to her “Hi Mom” with “Hello my daughter."

I remember our first hug, how each filled the curves of the other like they had never been filled before. I remember the strength and conviction of her embrace, no hesitation or reserve. I remember hugging her back, absorbing the warmth from every contact point, and telling myself to feel and remember. I remember her kissing me on the mouth, and her laughter as she explained that she’d waited her whole life for that hug and kiss. I remember our pulling apart to study each other and then falling into another, longer embrace.

I remember we didn’t disconnect physically—that some part of us was always touching except when we were in the bathroom—during the twenty-four hours of our first contact.

I remember the Red Robin parking lot in which we stood, surrounded by the ocean rush of freeway traffic and the tantalizing smell of cooked meat. I remember the heat of the May morning sun on my head and the remnant chill of the previous night on my sandal-exposed toes. I remember the tremor in my knees that worked its way up through my heart and into my voice, a vulnerability I so didn’t want her to see.

I remember searching her beaming face for evidence of my own. I remember recognizing my wide smile, the Cherokee curve of my cheekbones. I remember delighted surprise that our chin-length pageboys were so similar. I remember wondering (and not asking until much later) why she straightened her hair. I remember marveling at her velvety Afro halo, her father’s legacy, in the childhood pictures she had sent me in the weeks before. I remember sparkling cola eyes and soft fawn skin.

I remember thinking there was something undefinable about her that reminded me of my own mother, and wishing that weren’t so.

I remember the musical meadowlark pitch of her voice. I remember her laughter, a summer creek over rounded stones. I remember she laughed often. I remember laughing at funny stories from her childhood that made me want to weep for all I’d missed of her.

I remember walking into the restaurant holding hands like elementary school girlfriends. I remember wondering if anyone noticed us and somehow knew what a miracle was occurring right before their eyes. I remember the waitress telling us as she refilled our iced teas how nice it was to see a mother and daughter enjoying each other’s company so much. I remember asking how she knew we were related. I remember her saying we looked so much alike. I remember the thrill of pride I felt and my daughter’s delighted smile. I remember telling the startled waitress our story, needing someone to be witness. I remember asking her to take our picture. I remember posing next to my daughter, arms entwined, heads leaned together, her musky perfume blended with my floral.

I remember our remaining time that day as a carousel spin of shopping, walking and driving to the constant calliope song of our words and laughter.

I remember our room in the Motel 6 where we started the night each in our own double bed. I remember her little girl voice asking across the darkness if I’d mind if she cuddled with me for a while. I remember waking frequently during the long night, feeling her in my arms, marveling at the fact that after twenty-four years of waiting, I had finally soothed my daughter to sleep. I remember opening my eyes to her sweet face studying mine, her smile a mirror reflecting my joy, her greeting: “Good Morning, Mom. I love you.”

Written in response to the follow-up prompt to "I can't remember" for Lisa's class (and for #1Nana).

Photo by Walt, taken at Catherine Creek.

I Can't Remember

2011-05-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

Bitter Root

I can’t remember much about the last time I saw my daughter. I can’t remember the date or precisely how many years it’s been. I can’t remember if we both had frappuccinos at the Starbucks where we met, or if she had something else. I can’t remember if we indulged the sweet tooth we shared by choosing something from the pastry case.

I can’t remember what she wore, or what I wore. I can’t remember how she wore her hair, whether it was kinky or straightened, long or short, in spite of her comments about my newly gray hair. I can’t remember for sure the shape of her figure then; she wouldn’t have been happy with it no matter what. I can’t remember if I was in a skinny place or a chubby place myself.

I can’t remember what we said to each other once we’d covered the summer weather and condition of the I-5 freeway traffic as we journeyed from our respective homes to that central spot. I can’t remember how much time passed after that meeting before she stopped driving altogether. I can’t remember when I realized, much later, just what it meant that she no longer drove.

I can’t remember clearly the feel of her hug or whether we kissed. I can’t remember the texture of the curve of her face in my palm. I can’t remember the precise shade of brown of her eyes or her skin or her hair.

I can’t remember her scent.

I can’t remember whether our greeting hugs and goodbye hugs that day felt anything like our very first reunion hugs when she was twenty-four. I can’t remember what she said about why it had been so long since she was willing to see me. I can’t remember what she said about future visits, whether she promised more or hedged her bets.

I can’t remember whether I was convincing when I told her I loved her. I can’t remember whether my words reflected my fear of being hurt by her and my reluctance to impose myself where I felt I had no right to be. I can’t remember if her face told me whether she knew just how much I loved her.

I can’t remember if she asked questions, if she wanted to know about my life, or just needed to tell me about hers. I can’t remember what she told me about her children, or her husband, or her adoptive family. I can’t remember which medical crisis she was in the midst of for that visit. I can't remember which previous ones she might have shared stories about.

I can’t remember what her hopes were for her future – she was young enough to still have unlimited possibilities in front of her. I can’t remember if she might have hinted at the inner demons she lived with. I can’t remember if in her laughter and cheerful banter there was a darkness I didn’t want to see or know.

I can’t remember her last words to me as we parted at the end of a long afternoon, the summer light begun to fade. I can’t remember my last words to her. I can’t remember the exact time she was no longer there, the exact moment her face was gone from my sight, the exact second that was our last.

I can’t remember why I didn’t work harder to remember every detail of what felt like a second reunion in the same way I claimed our first reunion. I can’t remember having any sense at all that there wouldn’t be more time, more days and years and visits in which to experience everything that was my daughter.

Written in response to an assignment for a Lisa Romeo class I'm taking where every sentence was to start with "I can't remember."

Photo by Walt, taken at Catherine Creek.

May Day

2011-05-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

For the last half hour a bright golden sphere has kept me company here, climbing above the distant hills and burning away shadows. As it slowly moves upward, playing a game of peek through the thick branches of our bordering firs, our eyes meet from time to time. I feel promise and playfulness as though the sun were as young as this season.

It's May Day. Distant childhood memories surface: dancing around a maypole as an elementary class activity, and pretending I was a young maiden of olden times; making paper flowers that would become Mothers' Day gifts, hoping beyond hope that this gift would bring light to Mom's eyes; based on a story from her childhood, gathering tiny bouquets of wildflowers, and dropping them on the front steps of our closest neighbors, thrilled to share an ancient tradition with her.

I'm aware of warm softness around the edges of pictures that used to surface coated in icy fog. I love the little girl trying so hard to be or do something that would make her Queen of May in her mother's eyes. I love the mother believing the only way to keep her daughter safe was to turn her into a meek, obedient and silent wraith - exactly the mother's chosen survival cloak in her own sad childhood, and exactly the opposite of her daughter's nature.

In my North Idaho childhood, spring didn't really arrive until May. This year, in my Pacific Northwest adulthood, that seems to be true as well. In this moment as I sit in the still and birthing glow of this new day, for the first time in weeks I feel light in every sense of the word.

Today we're going to Catherine Creek for our annual wildflower pilgrimage. While I hope for glorious surprises, I'm also happy to the point of tears anticipating the certainties of the day. The sun will keep us company for hours ahead. The air will be soft and alive. The sky will beckon with blues that seem new each spring.

Walt and I will be our best connection for the greatness and grace of the day, and for whatever might create shadows.

Breath comes easier. Worries lose their sting. The world feels fresh, new, and full of promise. The sun has that much power, May's gift to us all on her birthday.

Shooting Stars from last year's Catherine Creek pilgrimage.

Peer Pressure

2011-04-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

When Kindle first came out we had a long discussion in book group about whether it was a good thing or not. The consensus at that time was that the four of us loved paper and ink books and the multi-sensory pleasures they offer far too much to switch to electronic. Our homes were full of treasured volumes, many of which we had borrowed from one another. Trips to book stores and book festivals and book signings were among our greatest pleasures, both as individuals and as a group.

Lou was the first to change her mind. She spent the better part of one evening extolling the virtues of her new best friend: the portability, the instant and relatively inexpensive access to nearly unlimited reading material, the fact that she could share all her new purchases with a number of other people on one account. It wasn't long before she began clearing all but the most important books from her shelves, and refusing all offers of loaned books.

Patty joined Lou on her account soon after. With two of them switched to Kindle, and sharing their purchases with one another, they began to pressure the remaining two of us to take the leap as well. Their logic was sound: the four of us could share books again, just in a different format. Their emotions were strong: they never imagined feeling so attached to an electronic device (and both own smart phones). Their campaigning was relentless.

Deb (there are two of us), the other writer in the group, swore she'd never get a Kindle - at least not in the foreseeable future. Her logic was sound: she already had more books to read than years left to live. Her emotions were strong: there was no way an electronic device could hope to replace books in her affections. She was immovable, and even a little cranky from time to time as Lou and Patty leaned harder and harder on us to join them.

I've been as close to neutral on the subject as I think it's possible to be. I love my books, but I love the act of reading more than anything. So I can't hate a tool that would allow me to read the way a Kindle does. Besides, as a writer, I'm fascinated at the impact e-readers are having on the business I hope to have an active stake in sooner rather than later.

I've said I was holding out because of the cost, not just of the Kindle, but also of the downloads. But just last week as I passed a big display ad at a local one-stop-shopping store I realized that even if I had unlimited funds, I'd probably rather spend them on travel or a class or a charity. While I'd be tickled if someone gave me a Kindle, it's just not high on my list of wants.

Book group met on Sunday. I hadn't been there long - we were still settling in - when Deb said she had something to show me, and that she hoped I didn't hate her once I saw it.

Given her strong stand previously, it took me a minute to register what the slim black rectangle in her hand was. It took me a lot longer to understand why she changed her mind. In fact I'm not sure I do understand. Deb said she had the money in hand and it was an impulse. Except she's not an impulsive person, and it's never really about the money.

Not that it matters.

Except what was once a split vote has now become three to one, with me as odd man out. And while the pressure is for the most part friendly and playful, it's also sincere and steady.

I found myself thinking of junior high when it really mattered that you not be the one different one in a group. And then high school when it mattered just as much to stand out from the crowd in some rebellious and unique way. Adulthood has been about learning to accept and tolerate and value differences of all kinds, both within myself and in those I share the path with. It seems odd to be dealing with peer pressure at my age, and even more odd for that pressure to be that I conform.

I don't want to buy a Kindle just to fit in. I don't want to not buy a Kindle to prove I'm my own person. I want, I think, for the stories to matter more than the method of delivery. I also want to matter more than my choice to stick with the library for now. I'm happy for my friends and their satisfaction with their new toys. I'm hoping they'll be happy, too, to have a group member who chooses to hold off a while longer before joining them in their electronic bliss.

A New Light

2011-04-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

Fragments of the dream follow me into waking. During that space of time when I'm not fully in either world, I feel the fear and urgency as though they need to be attended to in the daylight. While unsettling, the feelings and images are not new. This dream comes to me often.

It's always dark, nighttime, and I'm always searching for something, on my way somewhere, needing to meet a timeline, none of which I'm ever successful at. The circumstances shift from dream to dream. In this one I'm in danger and being hunted. The people who are after me want to hurt me, maybe even kill me, at the very least imprison me. I'm with a male companion who is trying to help hide me. We're outside, concealed in a hole in the ground, and then in the way of dreams, I'm suddenly standing alone in an empty field surrounded by the night, the sound of my own frightened heart and the distant voices of those who mean me harm.

Because the day was sunny and promised all the gifts of true spring, I shook off the dream. Frustrated at not ever quite understanding its message to me, and determined not to allow the darkness of it to dim the light of the rare day, I proceeded with my morning routine.

Sitting at my computer, reading my favorite daily message, the end of the dream flashed through my consciousness with all the illumination of a shooting star.

I'm standing in the darkness alone, and then I feel a presence that I know without doubt is God. Only this isn't the God of my childhood or many of the churches where I've sought him in my life.

I had the opportunity last week to share my story with an older woman. Of the many great questions she asked were, "What about God's love? Where was that? When in your life did you feel it?" And I realized that the most honest answer I could give her was that I'd never felt it. Because at a very young age I believed I'd ruined my chances to deserve anything but God's wrath and disappointment.

In the dream, for the first time, I feel the love of that presence. Without words it tells me that no matter what happens to me, even if those men catch me and hurt me, I will be okay. Nothing can happen to separate me from the protection and completeness of his love. I feel like I belong. I know the safety and protection from pain I've spent my life seeking are illusion, and that true safety, the exact rightness of my being in the larger scheme of things, has been there all along.

It's been two days. The new awareness persists. Evidence supports the new knowing. Yesterday Julie, who from time to time offers visions that come to her during a massage, saw this picture: An Indian woman standing on the edge of a canyon, a long loose braid hanging down her back, watches an eagle soaring in the updrafts close by. The feeling of the scene is one of freedom and peace and connection with all living things.

The curtains have shifted. New light shines in. The darkness will never again hold quite the same power.

On the Wings of Angels

2011-04-21T13:28:00.000-07:00

Sitting in front of my computer, my finger poised above the touch pad, I watched the seconds count down. I'd already bid and was waiting for the seven to flash before I confirmed. I considered whether I'd bid enough, whether I should make a last minute change, whether there was anything else I could do to guarantee the winning of the item on my screen. Seconds later, after the figures on the screen shifted and I held my breath, I learned I had won the bid.

Actually last night I won three bids, after a number of unsuccessful attempts in the weeks before, and my sense of accomplishment and glee was way bigger than buying opera glasses, a Victorian parasol and an asparagus plate might account for.

As Mark's antique business has grown, so has my involvement. At first I was the cheerleader and decorator and sounding board. We'd prowl shops and shows and find the most unusual and arcane Victoriana at amazing prices. He'd send me pictures of his case and I'd offer feedback. I'd drive friends north to show off his hard work.

Before long I found myself driving two hours each way on a Tuesday to go to auction with Mark where he acts as though I'm a full partner instead of just a helpful sister. I get so caught up in the excitement of the auctioneer's yodel and watching my brother acquire merchandise for his business, I find myself wanting to applaud - which is of course not done at auction. Every time Mark wins a bid, it feels like a game won at least as much as an object purchased.

Our fellow bidders provide another source of pleasure - each one offering the promise of story: the bald man with his head completely tattooed; the old man who comes every week carrying his pomeranian; the mysterious couple who seem to buy everything without caring about the cost - one night alone spending over $10,000 on little things. The culture of auctions and antiquing draws an interesting assortment of characters, which deeply satisfies the storyteller in me.

One auction Mark surprised me with my own Angelwings Antiques business cards (I'm officially a buyer now).

At my suggestion he started a blog for the business, and then signed me up as an administrator (I may have hinted at the benefits to him). While there's little I like better than having my fingers in a bloggy pie, I enjoy even more reading my brother's stories and watching him in his glory as he teaches us what he's learned about the Victoriana he loves so much.

At some point he invited me onto his eBay site. I was encouraged to add items to his watch list and even to bid if something caught my eye. One of my favorite things is to find arcana that he hasn't seen before. If you go to the blog, the sardine box was my discovery. We found the pancake warmers together. He spotted the condensed milk containers.

Just a couple of weeks ago he called to tell me a space opened up at the antique mall where he rents his case and asked what I thought. The expansion means a shift in focus, and more work, as well as a bigger risk. He moves in (we move in) the last week of May. Our conversations are now full of planning for this next step, and excitement that it's actually going to happen.

For me this experience is one of pure and simple pleasure with no risk, no pressure and no pain. I get to indulge my love of antiques in a unique way. I get to shop and spend someone else's money. I get to immerse myself in the learning and people and language of a new culture. Best of all I'm watching someone I love with all my heart follow a path on which he thrives and glows with success. A success that not so long ago seemed impossible. A success measured by the heart and soul, not by mere worldly standards.

I invite you to visit us - Angelwings Antiques - either on the blog or at Tacoma Antique Center. Stop by the end of May and grab a paint brush as we create the perfect background for Mark's treasures, or be one of the first to shop our new home in Space 24. An endeavor begun with such faith and grown in the soil of deep joy is sure to bring light to anyone who enters in.

Finding Solutions

2011-04-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, I've loved word puzzles. My mom did, too, and always had half-finished books laying around the house. Although money was so tight we couldn't afford a washer and drier, she managed to find a way to add the latest edition of Dell puzzles to the shopping cart on the Saturday grocery and laundromat trip. And when I was home sick, which was often, she'd allow me to pass the time working puzzles she wasn't interested in.

I would start at the beginning of a book and work my way page by page through it, solving those she hadn't as I went. If a puzzle was too easy or too hard, I'd leave it after a bit and move on. The diagramless puzzles were beyond my ability or patience. I loved word searches and word mazes, but crosswords were always my favorites, especially if there was a theme or a puzzle hidden within.

When we moved Mom to assisted living and I was clearing out her house, I found dozens of partially finished books, mostly word searches. Even there evidence of her decline showed in the shakiness of the lines circling found words. Tempted to take the books home and finish them, the smell of old cigarettes and mildew was too much to overcome, and I tossed them as I'd had to do with so much of her stuff.

In my early adulthood I followed her pattern, and always found a way to throw the latest issues of Dell puzzles (always Dell, never the other kinds, like it always had to be Best Foods) into my grocery cart. I graduated to logic puzzles for a while, then moved to Sudoku.

I don't remember when I first discovered the NY Times crosswords in the paper. I'd read about them and assumed those puzzles were way beyond my solving ability. After the first one, it didn't take long for me to be hooked, although it took a David Sedaris story for me to understand about the increasing level of difficulty. Monday's puzzle is the easiest. Saturday's is the hardest.

I don't do Monday or Tuesday (too easy), work steadily and happily through Wednesday and Thursday (both of which usually have the extra kick of an inner puzzle), and sometimes take days to complete Friday and Saturday. Once in a while there will be a Saturday puzzle that I can't crack, so I turn to Google and Rex Parker for help. Admitting defeat is hard, and doesn't come easily, but not knowing the answers is nearly unbearable. I need to understand how a clue and an answer fit together.

Some weeks I'm willing to allow a puzzle to unravel in my subconscious for a while. If I leave and come back, answers that weren't there before, appear almost magically. Some weeks, I just need the answers any way I can get them, and concede defeat after a couple of hours of trying to solve on my own.

This morning as I breezed my way through Thursday, pleased with myself for solving the inner puzzle fairly quickly, I realized that my relationship with crosswords is the same as my relationship with most of my life.

I need answers, and as long as things make sense, I'm fine. I'm generally impatient, but allow myself the satisfaction of challenging that urgency from time to time. When I can't seem to solve life's bigger problems, my ability to solve crosswords gives me at least the illusion of power and comforts me.

Words delight me in a way little else in my life does, and word play tickles my soul like a stroking hand elicits purrs from a cat.

Even when I'm frustrated at my inability to find a solution on my own steam, or get to the core of a certain challenge without help, eventually I find a way to acquire answers. And always, I'm happy to sit with a fresh puzzle and my favorite pen, looking for just the right word to fit into a defined space with nothing more to go on than some obscure and tricky clue.

I wonder if it was the same for my mom.

Resilience

2011-04-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

I think about Japan, the Mideast, Haiti, Africa. The front page of our newspaper tells the story of a beautiful young woman who applied drain cleaner to her face, claimed it had been splashed on her by a stranger, and now lives disfigured with the course of her life forever changed. I read a memoir about women in prison, many there for long years as punishment for crimes in which they were the biggest victims.

So much suffering. More, it seems, than historically usual, although how would we ever know?

Most of us live lives of relative ease and some semblance of security. We're mostly healthy, surrounded by abundance, love and are loved. We have suffered, do suffer, will suffer - that's the thing about being human. And while the comforts we take for granted today could all be gone in a blink, we tend to move forward with optimism and grace.

Mostly we choose to be grateful for what we have, to pray for those less fortunate than ourselves, and to embrace whatever comes as part of the adventure we signed on for when we were born.

This spring that is more winter than winter was has worn my optimism to tatters, even knowing how small this suffering is in the bigger picture - a tiny prickly bush in the larger forest of sad and pain-gnarled trees. The damp chill seems to have somehow frozen hope, and drained energy like a battery left outside on a below zero night.

For the first time in my life, I check the weather forecast in the mornings, hoping beyond hope to see gold among the gray, and temperatures that would render my breath invisible. Finding gold to be an extreme rarity in the last two months, I pray for weather experts to be wrong, as they are more often than not. The problem this season has been when they are wrong, we get snow instead of sunshine.

The usual gifts of spring have been arriving since February, not in their customary lushness, but present nonetheless.

Crocuses and hyacinths and forsythia bloomed and are now gone. The flowering plum hesitantly blushed its way through March, and is beginning to lose its pink before ever reaching the full glorious glow it offers most years. Birds mate, nest and sing the arrival of day as they do every spring. Trilliums announce the coming of Easter. The neon green of cottonwoods buds flickers itself into gray air. Thatch ants take advantage of every dry or warm second to swarm and build mounds that will double their current size before the end of summer.

I marvel that so much life abounds in conditions that are colder and wetter than most days we had midwinter.

And maybe that's what keeps us all going, no matter the level of our suffering, discomfort or loss at any given time. Life finds a way, even in the chill of grieving or the shift of climate or the predictability of death. We hold and celebrate the rare warm moments of sunlight, offer our inner light to those sitting in darkness, and learn to wait, to simply be, without despairing.

Grounded

2011-04-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

I was getting ready, fresh out of the shower, legs just shaved, thinking about doing what I could to make the massage I was scheduled for that day a more pleasant experience for Julie. It's one of life's greatest opportunities for humility that in order to take care of my body, I have to make it available in all its lumpy, knobby imperfection to the caring healing hands of others. Since Julie often starts her therapeutic massage at my feet, I considered what she sees.

My feet have never been pretty. Not even when I was a child and my parts were fresh and new and smooth. Wide and short, hard to find shoes to fit, most of the year so calloused (and dirty) they often looked moccasin clad even when bare. Bare was always my chosen state for those feet, because until adolescence and an awareness of peer-defined beauty, I enjoyed them and all they allowed.

Almost all of my best childhood memories involve those bare feet and summertime. The tickle of soft wild grass. The soothing wash of the creek current. Even the squish and warmth of cow pies. I knew a friendly world through my feet, one that offered endless variations of sensation and pleasure.

I learned early that without my feet, life was much more limited. Stepping on a nail. A bee sting between toes. The weight of a cow. All slowed me down, and made me long for lost freedoms. But none were enough to convince me shoes were a good option.

During the vanity years, aware I didn't meet the standard for foot beauty (long and thin and white and smooth) I covered mine with shoes that were fashionable. I ignored their cries for mercy, only allowing freedom in the privacy of home or at the beach where I saw other feet perhaps uglier than mine.

Then there were the years when I ignored them altogether, acknowledging neither pleasure nor pain, just expecting them to carry me where I wanted to go as they always had. Even then, however, bare was my preference, and bare feet on summer grass always had the power to make me feel connected to life in ways that nothing else could.

The feet that Julie so gently manipulates have not grown magically beautiful over the years. They spread like river deltas, creating a whole new definition for wide. Bunions moved into the big toe joints. Heels are a cracked desert landscape. Toe nails are odd sizes and shapes, and even the occasional attempt at decoration with color does little to disguise their quirkiness.

And yet I present them to her in all their gnarled glory. And something she does wakes them to a former sensitivity I didn't even know I'd lost. They loosen under her touch, and release, and respond to her understanding and non-judging attention. So when I ask them to hold me again at the end of my time with Julie, I feel the ground under my feet in ways I haven't since childhood. The contact feels alive, humming with energy that reaches up through my soles to the center of me.

Finally, I am at that place where I wouldn't trade my beloved and hard-working feet for even the most beautiful. After a lifetime of wishing for so many things to be different, including much about the body I was given, I'm content and grateful - glad - for the parts that connect me with home.

Old Women

2011-04-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

It started in the beauty shop where Nancy, who has cut my hair and been my friend for over three decades, was just finishing with me. A sturdy old woman walked into the space with a look of mischievous expectation on her face, and dumped her purse and coat into the one empty chair. Nancy looked at her with an expression I'd seen before - Betty had shown up for her appointment at the wrong day and time.

In the course of the negotiations that resulted in Betty hanging around until Nancy could fit her in, I saw confidence, spunk and a spirit that seemed to make room for everything. Betty's substantial body, her quick wit, the smile that didn't once leave her face all stirred some deep longing I hadn't felt in a long time. We were left alone for a few minutes while Nancy went out into the waiting area to explain to her other client, this one 90, that she was early and would have to wait a bit.

I asked Betty how old she was - rude, I know, but I needed to know more than I needed to be sensitive, and I knew she'd tell me in no uncertain terms if she didn't want to tell me. "I'm 87," she answered with some pride in her voice.

As I left to the background music of Nancy's and Betty's laughter, I noticed the older woman who had shown up early. Tiny, perfect posture, immaculately groomed, she looked as fragile as Betty seemed indestructible. We made eye contact and she surprised me with a soft warm smile.

Driving home that day I found myself thinking about old women in general, and how for a while now I've longed to have one in my life. Not a mother, although I'd consider it a gift beyond measure if my relationship with mine had blossomed into something sustaining. More like a grandmother, a mentor, a role model to show me the way into this last, hopefully long, chapter of my life.

Demographically, I'm considered to be in early old age (or I will be in November when I step officially into a new decade). I don't mind. Especially when I see women like Betty who get to later old age with so much style and life still radiating from them.

My fifties seem to have been about facing and accepting a new direction. Life is more about loss than acquisition, which offers amazing opportunities for gratitude and sunbeam focus on what remains. Forgiveness - both of myself and of the people I share this journey with - has become more important than ever in order to move forward in gentle grace. Maybe tolerance is a better word - a greater willingness to live with the frailties of being human so that the time remaining can be lived as fully and joyfully as possible.

As I've studied old women in the weeks since that beauty shop encounter, I've observed that whatever they are is easy to see and know the minute you meet them. Somehow the layers of persona and protection have been worn away, and what's left is the purest manifestation of soul still held in a human body.

In New York we shared an elevator with an elfin woman, hunched hard into her walker, exuding quiet dignity with her permed gray hair and her perfect pink quilted robe with the wide Peter Pan collar trimmed in the tiniest edge of lace. Two much younger women stood with her, I guessed daughters, allowing her space and the freedom to get herself out of the elevator, while at the same time doing their best to help her without being obvious. I wanted to follow them onto their floor and ask questions, both of the older woman and of the youngers. What is it like for you to be this old? Do you see your future in this frail being? How do you live with the many losses and indignities of old age? Are you aware of the gift you have in the time you have together?

Grandma Dee, my biological father's mom, the one I knew for only a year, was 89 when we met for the second time. Our first meeting, when I was an infant, exists somewhere in my cells, but nowhere in my memory. She was sharp, independent, and a great story teller. The sadnesses of her life were acknowledged, but she wasn't willing to dwell there - instead spending our time together admiring the flowers around her retirement apartment, asking about my life, talking about memories of her husband whom she clearly still missed deeply even though he'd been gone for years.

It's her path I hope to follow into my own old old age. Living full tilt as long as possible, and when it is no longer possible, to leave as quickly and quietly as possible. She turned 90, then stopped returning calls and within the year was gone.

I'm still looking for a day-to-day grandmother. Still feel the need as though it were hunger or thirst. Perhaps Betty will show up for the wrong appointment again and I can ask.

City Cowboys

2011-03-31T08:57:00.000-07:00

Yellow cabs as far as the eye could see, lifeblood coursing through New York's arteries, all driven by men of color with names like Geronimo and Mohammed and Elvyss. Both cars and drivers seemed battle weary, and battle ready. When I stepped into the first taxi of the trip, I wasn't thinking about all I'd heard over the years about the wild rides people received at the mercy of these men. My seat belt wasn't completely fastened before it all came rushing back.

Two speeds: all out and stop with no transition between. Lanes and lights and pedestrians seemed to have little impact on the drivers' decisions. The idea of using a car length as measurement for caution was clearly not in their vocabulary. If the front bumper didn't make contact, with either metal or flesh, that was good enough. If there was an inch or two between cars, a driver could easily, somehow, merge into that space. If a light still held even the memory of amber, that's the color the drivers would see as they coaxed a little more speed from their taxis.

A surprising number seemed to not know their way around, often needing directions, not just our address. I found myself wondering what would happen if Suzy hadn't been able to provide the information they asked for. We were told, by the guide on the tour bus, that only tourists use the yellow cabs and that the drivers are always looking to pad their fares on the backs of their passengers' ignorance. He also offered to take us, after hours for a fee, to the places where designer goods could be found for dirt cheap, so he may not have been the most reliable source.

Some were friendly, including one man who asked us what we were grateful for on a particular beautiful morning. After Suzy and I had given small-talk answers about the weather and our adventure, he said it was his turn and proceeded to tell us he was grateful to be alive. This just a few days after the tsunami in Japan, and we spent the rest of the ride, the three of us, talking about the state of the world and how fortunate we are in our lives.

Many were mute, making the whole trip feel like a long elevator ride in which everyone looks ahead and no one makes a sound. Our friendly greetings were often met with silence, and the understanding of our destination indicated with a grunt. Not even a thank you for a generous tip, perhaps because the cab was already in motion the minute our bodies were completely out.

There were lots of conversations on cell phones, spoken in whispers or other languages or accents so heavy they might as well have been another language. One driver ate his lunch with the hand that wasn't on the steering wheel. Another laughed frequently in the front seat, and it took me most of the ride to figure out the source of his amusement was my oo-ing and ah-ing at the sights blurring past us: Times Square, Radio City Music Hall, Grand Central Station.

We rarely had to wait long for a cab to stop, although I never did get used to the fact that all that was necessary to secure a ride was to stand conspicuously on the edge of a street with an arm in the air. A couple of times, drivers wouldn't take us because they didn't want to leave the uptown area. And there were times when it seemed no cab would stop no matter what. But that was balanced out by times like the driver who stopped even though he was on his way home.

Ironically, I never felt afraid. I'm not entirely sure why, just as I'm not clear how we got through every single one of those rides without being in an accident. I looked forward to each new driver and each new ride as another great part of the whole adventure. The cabbies seemed like city cowboys to me: independent, unconcerned with convention, and beholden to no one or nothing beyond the trail and its call. And that's a life to be admired, whether lived in the manmade canyons of Manhattan or the ones born of the elements in the West.

Happy Birthday, Desiree!

2011-03-28T07:56:00.000-07:00

Blog button designed for Desiree by Carol.

In the four years I've been blogging I've met a number of people here whom I've come to consider friends. Women I've never met face to face, but whom I'd be willing to do just about anything for. And much like life in the real world, the virtual world offers a continuous array of new friends just waiting to be met. Often one friend leads to another, which is where I'm headed with this post.

I don't remember how I found her, but I've been reading Carol's laugh-until-you-cry funny blog, Facing 50 With Humor, for months. I look forward to her posts, certain I'll be entertained, and that I'll find something to relate to in her stories of life with hubby and son and mom.

And through Carol, I met Desiree, whose birthday is today. Her blog, Driftwood Ramblings, is both funny, and offers amazing photography as well.

Because we've not had the chance to sit over tea and learn each other's lives, I'm not sure how well Carol and Desiree know each other. But in the tradition of all best friends everywhere, Carol wanted to give Desiree a special gift for her birthday. She designed a blog button for her, and invited Desiree's blog buddies to join in the celebration.

So, Desiree, I wish you the happiest, most joy-filled day ever. May your celebration exceed all expectations. May this year bring wishes come true and more love than your heart can hold.

For those of you reading, I hope you'll give yourself the gift of checking out the blogs of these two lovely women. My friends. You won't be sorry.

New Beginnings

2011-03-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

In the weeks before my trip to New York, when I knew I'd get to see the Statue of Liberty, I found myself thinking often about the millions of immigrants whose first sight of her marked the end of their voyages and the beginning of new lives. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for people who left everything familiar behind, who traveled for weeks in conditions few of us today would be willing to endure, and who arrived with little but what they could carry and as much hope as hearts can hold.

Did their first sight of Liberty bring tears of joy?

When the ferry dropped us off at Ellis Island (as it would have all those steerage and third class passengers remaining after the richer folk were allowed simply to disembark onto U.S. soil), I could feel the ghosts of anticipation and fear swirling around. A beautiful place, both the building and the site, this was where vulnerable humanity met implacable bureaucracy. In the huge registration room on the second floor, the course of people's lives was set.

What must it have been like to be in a place where you most likely didn't speak the language - tired, dirty and disoriented?

Some were sent back because they were deemed insane or chronically ill or not able enough to contribute to the country they sought to make their home. Some were separated from family while paperwork problems were worked out. Some were hospitalized so they couldn't infect the mainland with whatever illness they brought from across the sea, and died on the island.

Most made it through, however, all but about 2%. Given entry to a country where they believed life would be better than whatever they'd left behind. One journey ended with another scrolling out before them waiting for the ink of life experiences to write a new story.

And isn't that the way for us as humans? We're called to something new: escape from what has become intolerable into a fresh start. We're willing to suffer great discomfort in our quest for the new life, even to the point of facing a greater fear than we thought we could endure. We reach a point where the pain is great enough we leave everything behind that isn't absolutely essential to our being. Sometimes the cost of the new journey is paid in prized possessions or the comfort of status. Hard to part with, but not so hard as to be willing to sacrifice freedom for them.

Each new immigrant who entered this land of hope and opportunity must have believed their possibilities were endless. Some found their way to riches and fulfillment while others died in sweatshops well before their time. I imagine, however, that each of them carried in their hearts forever the first sight of Lady Liberty and her promise of freedom to choose; that no matter where life took them from that point forward they had a moment when they knew without doubt they were as free as it's possible for a human to be.

Meeting Liberty

2011-03-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

I've just returned home from a working vacation in New York City.

To be able to write those words seems such a miracle to me. For New York to now be a part of my being, with real memories and amazing experiences, instead of merely an exciting character in stories, seems the stuff of fairy tales come true. Like all good adventures in my experience, this one has shifted my equilibrium ever so slightly, and in ways I expect to continue to discover for some time to come.

My friend Suzy invited. She had access to an apartment on the Lower East Side and vacation time coming. We had writing work to do together. I'd never been to this legendary city. Yes was the only possible answer.

In the weeks before I traveled, as we planned how to spend our four days, the one thing I anticipated with the greatest pleasure was getting to see the Statue of Liberty. Time with Suzy, two Broadway plays, lunch at the Algonquin, bus tours of the city, the library and its lions, the Top of the Rock, and a visit to Ground Zero were all eagerly looked forward to (and greatly enjoyed in real time), but it was Lady Liberty who called to me the strongest.

Drawn by the symbolism of her solitary green presence in the harbor and the thought that I would actually get to experience her first hand, I've carried Liberty with me like a new friend since Suzy's first mention of the trip. Sometime early on I decided I needed to ascend the 354 steps to the crown, both to meet the unique challenge, and to get to see the world through those twenty-five windows which represent each of the gemstones known to exist when she was built.

One small problem. My SI joint issues, which I've been working so hard to overcome, were not healing as quickly as I expected or wanted. As the time grew closer to my departure, I came to accept I might have to, probably would have to, give up that part of the dream. I couldn't walk up the steps to the second story in our home without pain. It didn't seem reasonable to think I'd be able to manage the 22 stories to Liberty's crown. Not without undoing all the significant progress I've made in the last six weeks.

So I flew across the country and spent the first three days of our vacation enjoying each gift of new experience to the fullest, and deeply grateful to be immersed in the life of a city I've spent my life both fearing and longing to be a part of. Thursday, the last day, and our scheduled Statue of Liberty day, dawned clear, sunny, and promised the first genuine warmth of the season. That it was St. Patrick's Day, a sort of big deal in NYC, held little relevance for me.

I'd spent the previous days admiring Liberty from the windows of our apartment, far off in the distance. From time to time in our travels, I'd catch a glimpse of her silhouette, dwarfed by the immensity of everything around her. When the ferry pulled away from the dock that Thursday, my eyes locked on her majestic form, and stayed on her one way or the other for most of the rest of the day.

After landing, Suzy found a bench for basking in the sun while I went to check in. I intended to use my crown access (only 240 granted a day - we had ours thanks to Suzy's great planning) to go only as high as the top of the pedestal. There were two women in front of me, also with access to the crown, who were close to my age. As I listened to the ranger explain the process to them I became aware I had decided to go as far as I could. That I would move forward, literally, one step at a time, and decide whether to take the next step when I was there.

I got my special orange wrist band. Found the lockers, put everything except my camera inside. Walked through security for the second time that day. Pushed through heavy glass doors to find myself inside the very bottom of the pedestal.

The ranger explained about going to a certain point before another ranger would check our wristbands and then send us up inside Liberty. She grouped me with the two women I'd eavesdropped on earlier. We began climbing steps, laughing, chattering and looking around in awe. By the time we got to the top of the pedestal, and the last place I could have chosen to turn back, I realized we'd already climbed half the steps.

At that point I saw the dream I'd released, reborn right in front of me, waiting to be reclaimed. My hip felt fine. I was on my way to the crown.

We began spiraling upward, each narrow step curved tightly toward a center that would end at the top of the world. I followed my new friends, pleasantly surprised that I was keeping up with little effort. And completely shocked when the woman in front announced we were there. I was just getting warmed up.

The view itself was limited by the size and shape of the crown, but I have never enjoyed a panorama more. I haven't felt so alive in a very long time. Some little girl part of me jumped up and down with glee. I know when I found Suzy back on the ground I was beaming with an intensity to match the sun shining on our bright spring day.

A gift. An answer to prayers for healing. A wish granted. Grace. However that day might be named, I wear the light-filled joy of it with gratitude. I hope the glow of it travels out from me as the glow of Liberty's torch has found its way to countless longing-filled hearts.

March Refuge

2011-03-07T14:46:00.000-08:00

The forecast was for rain, as it is most days this time of year. We drove north anyway, willing to get a little wet to experience a new-to-us wildlife refuge, to have a late winter adventure in celebration of Walt's birthday, to get out and move.

We weren't long into the trip when sun patches began to dot the woolen sky like golden clouds. Soon we were driving into more blue than gray, and the farther north we went, the more glorious the day became. By the time we arrived at Nisqually NWR, the clouds were doing their best to hide the sun again, but the air was dry and at moments held the blessing of true warmth.

As we meandered along the boardwalk, enjoying the paired off honkers (and our own partnership), stopping to watch herons pull wriggling things from the fertile muck, and scanning the sky for eagles, I was aware of feeling simply happy. While Walt shot pictures, I searched the tangerine branches of willows for songbirds. We walked directly into the wind coming from the Puget Sound and were both chilled by it and energized. The primal scent of ocean and exposed tidal mud warmed just enough to release a deep salty tang broadcast the coming of new life as clearly as the birds clamoring in courtship all around us.

The longer we walked, the more alive I felt. More than I've felt in months. A true March day, the weather shifted wildly and without warning: sun extinguished by black clouds that spit rain which gave way to a downy gray sky that cleared into forever blue, all within a matter of minutes. Often the sky would hold so many different weathers, rain fell magically from a cloudless cathedral ceiling.

It was in the shifting I recognized what I love about this month. It's not only the promise of new life that has grown from whisper to shout; it's also the constant surprise. After a winter in which I worried nothing would ever change, the adolescent mood swings of March are exciting and full of unknowns that promise at least new perspective and perhaps even the next great insight. Everything is possible all at once.

When we drove home later in the afternoon, the weather continued to offer opposites side by side: apocalyptic black clouds trying to devour Easter blue skies. For miles we were surrounded by rainbows: a brilliant double that followed us for a time; a half arc flashing neon from behind; pastel chalk smudges of pillars nestled in hillsides.

March is the time when darkness and light exist side by side in a way that doesn't happen at any other time of year so vividly. Color, breath, and hope are all sharpened by the unique and particular configuration of life and death sharing equal space. Because this month's gifts are offered full blast, feral, and raw they have the power to change a heart with all the impact of falling in love.

Photo by Walt

Blessing

2011-03-02T14:27:00.000-08:00

I was furious Monday when the snow started. Knowing there was nothing to do with my fury that would change the weather didn't help. It felt like a huge and very personal last straw and I'd had it.

But it turns out the anger burned away the last of my waiting for the outside season to change in hopes my inner weather would change as well. While the winter has more often than not reflected the journey of my grieving these last months, it is not my grief. It's not in charge of my grief.

It's a trap I fall into often: I know the outcome I want, and decide it would be much less messy if I could just skip all the parts from here to there. No matter how profound my understanding of the need for and power of process, or how often I experience the magic of a cycle completed, I find myself still deciding it's okay to skip ahead. Or just to wait out whatever discomfort I find myself in until a season passes and something new arrives.

Perhaps the hardest lesson I've had to learn lately is that no matter how careful I am, no matter how perfectly I follow the rules, no matter how patient I am - my soul has its own agenda, and life does, too.

On March 20, Kathleen will still be gone. My heart will still be broken. Spring will arrive with its warm days and abundant light, its vibrant colors and new life. I will embrace it, revel in it, roll around in the moist fertile soil of it (metaphorically anyway). Yet some part of me will still be winter, and I'm beginning to understand may always be.

As has so often been the case on the dark days, when I most need it, someone will offer me the blessing of just the right words and a corner of a warm heart to rest myself in. Often it's been here in the comments of my virtual friends. Often it's been in the gentle persistent presence and concern of flesh and blood family and friends. And every now and then God's voice comes to me in the form of a poem.

The one I'm about to copy below came from a newsletter I receive regularly, which is in itself a great source of blessing. I'm reading it at least once a day, and it helps. I offer it to all of you here, that you might be blessed in your own lives and troubles and broken hearts by its message.

Beannacht  (Blessing)

John O’Donahue

On the day

when the weight deadens 

on your shoulders

and you stumble, 

may the clay dance 

to balance you.  

And when your eyes 

freeze behind 

the grey window 

and the ghost of loss 

gets in to you, 

may a flock of colors, 

indigo, red, green 

and azure blue 

come to awaken in you 

a meadow of delight.  

When the canvas frays 

in the curach (boat) of thought 

and a stain of ocean 

blackens beneath you, 

may there come across the waters 

a path of yellow moonlight 

to bring you safely home. 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours, 

may the clarity of light be yours, 

may the fluency of the ocean be yours, 

may the protection of the ancestors be yours. 

And so may a slow 

wind work these words 

of love around you,  

an invisible cloak 

to mind your life.

Photo by Walt

February Winter

2011-02-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

I'd forgotten February winter. Some years these late winter days are mild, but often the season saves its biggest bite for the end. This is one of those years. We've had snow and more snow, and now the thermometer on the patio hovers at 20.

In spite of bright blue skies and even brighter sunshine, the air feels like acid. Ground crunches like broken glass underfoot. Exposed flesh reddens, numbs, then burns. Bones ache as layers of body and fabric do little to keep the cold from burrowing like some determined rodent.

More snow is predicted.

I've accepted the gifts of this dormancy, been grateful for the time of rest and recovery, been intentional about receiving each new day for the abundance of grace it has to offer. As my own inner life reflects with near perfect synchronicity the onward grind of this season of death, even recognizing the new life it reveals in the darkness, I find myself wondering when the rising of sap will explode into spring green leaf.

I am winter weary. Thinking enough is enough, and it's time to move forward. Thinking I'm ready - as cleansed and healed and rested as I need to be.

Then this morning as I stood outside at sunrise to bask in dawn's pink smile, surrounded by the deepest stillness possible, as though the air were so frozen no sound wave could move, a new awareness sparked. All around I could see that what had seemed stripped before by weeks of rain and wind and snow, was even more bare after days of brittle cold. What had seemed as revealed as it could be, stood more open and thus more ready to bear the fruits of a new season.

And even as winter offers its last burst of cleansing, my front lawn was full of robins yesterday afternoon, the air vibrant with their declarations of territory. The calendar says March is days away. My heart whispers, soon, soon enough. I draw the cold fire deep within, and trust it to burn away the last of my own dead leaves. I trust. I breathe. I abide.

Six Eagles and a Drunk

2011-02-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

The first half of our trip around the refuge was uneventful. As is our custom, we had windows down, the heat cranked, and seat belts off for ease of movement. Walt drove with his camera and its big lens resting across his lap. I rode shotgun with the good binoculars which I'd bought him for a birthday a few years ago (and which he rarely gets to use). The wind blasted through the car with what seemed like malice, but we just buttoned coats and ignored it.

There were the usual coots and mallards and shovelers. Distant calls of redwing blackbirds. Canada geese and tundra swans flocked by the hundreds.

More cars than we usually see on a Sunday afternoon strung out in front and behind, creating a beaded necklace encircling the wide throat of the refuge. We played a slow game of leapfrog, passing a car pulled over to study the nutria grazing on the nearby dike, being passed as we stopped so Walt could shoot a solo snaky-necked egret.

While Walt focused his camera on the egret, my eyes were drawn upward to soaring wings which tipped just enough to reveal the flash of tail white that could only belong to a bald eagle. I craned around to watch him circle behind when another flash of brown and white hurtled right at him mid-flight. The two flew out of sight, one pursued, the other pursuer.

Just a few yards up the road, we noticed several cars bunched together, and arrived just in time to see another baldie lift up from a branch and disappear into the skim milk sky in the disconcerting way of eagles, like animals in a magic act.

For another long stretch there was no more excitement. We noted the dearth of herons and harriers, usually abundant for our visits. Walt started to speed up a bit through a stretch where we've only ever seen the chewed evidence of beaver presence, geese in the distance, and the occasional grebe, when we both noticed brake lights filling the curve in the road just ahead.

As we sat in the line, no room for leapfrog in that narrow spot, waiting to move forward, I began to hear the high-pitched whistle that could only belong to a raptor. I saw the white head in the midst of bare branches first, then the red meat between talons, and realized I was seeing a mature eagle feeding. We watched for a few minutes before I spotted movement a few branches above, which turned out to be a yearling: dark streaked brown, fluffed feathers, with eyes that begged to be given a turn at the carcass below.

Suddenly from out of nowhere another yearling shot into the picture, causing the perched one to topple. Somehow they both ended up on the adult which resulted in a frantic flurry of feathers and wings. When all three had resettled themselves on separate branches, I noticed the door open on the car in front of us. A woman was trying to see the birds, one of which was peering down just above her head, so when she stepped out of the car, I tried to tell her to look up.

Instead, she staggered toward me with a loopy grin on her face and alcohol-pink eyes, almost tipping over when her foot caught a soft rut. The driver of her car was yelling at her to get back in the car now! which she blithely ignored. She apparently needed to point out one of the other eagles to me as the one she and her partner had rescued earlier in the day. I smiled and nodded in response, wondering if she really believed such a preposterous story, and more, if she expected me to. Her smile grew wider in the telling of her tale, which made her head bob which threatened to topple her. For a moment she looked lost, uncertain, but then her smile returned and she turned and lurched back to her car, which took off like the getaway car at a bank robbery.

In the days since our visit, I've found myself thinking about that woman even more than the wonder of getting to observe such amazing eagle behaviors.

Part of it is the incongruity of running into a drunk person in the refuge that is our sanctuary. People are not supposed to get out of cars there this time of year, so we rarely have contact with our fellow birders anyway, but when we do it's usually to share a smiling nod or the name of a bird or to point out an interesting sight. There is a definite air of dignity and holiness about that wild place.

Mostly, though, I think I can't quite get her out of my mind because she could easily have been me twenty years ago. Needing a drink to feel the glory around me, to feel safe, to feel anything at all. Unable to face a Sunday afternoon without the false fluid warmth of alcohol to soften the ever-present edges. Telling stories that I believed made me look important to smiling strangers, and not realizing how obvious my altered state was.

I wish I could save her from herself, and convince her she is beautiful and appealing and enough. I wish I could tell her to stop listening to the lies that keep her imprisoned, that she has the power to break free. I wish I had been able to say, "It's possible to find your own light. I'm proof, in the same way these eagles are proof that you can come back from the brink to flourish and thrive."

Believing

2011-02-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

My cousin Sal and I were in the midst of one of our frequent, and deeply satisfying, conversations about the nature of God, how religion does or does not reflect that nature, and our own experiences of the divine. Just naming the topic of our conversation is often interesting. "God" was used in my earlier experience as a weapon and a means of control. It was a synonym for shame and judgement. But after years of trying different names, "God"is the only one that really works for me.

I'm never really sure what I mean when I talk about God. I've mostly shed my childhood picture of the angry old man with the big white beard - sort of an anti-Santa - who was just looking for me to mess up so he could punish me. I've never not believed in a higher power, but in the last few years, my understanding of what that means has expanded to the point of my having to simply accept the mystery beyond human understanding.

In this last conversation with Sal, one of us (or both - we often have some of our more brilliant insights piggy-backing off one another's ideas) said, "You can't believe God into existence. He exists with our believing or without."

I knew right away we were saying a version of, "Bidden or not bidden, God is present." Most often this quote is attributed to Carl Jung and I remember feeling a huge sense of relief the first time I saw it. Partly because I've always thought Jung's wisdom came from a soul-deep place, and partly because it felt safe - like I didn't have to work quite so hard any more.

But it was the believing part of what we said that felt different and significant.

While I chose not to use AA in my path to recovery, when I first became sober I was thrilled to know the only path to freedom from the grips of alcohol involved relying on a higher power. Some being who knew more than I did, who had unlimited capacity for patience and understanding, and who apparently loved me just as I was.

From the time I was old enough for any awareness, I knew God existed because of the colors, fragrances and wild lives that flourished with no human intervention. I wouldn't have named that experience God, in fact couldn't for years, because the name was already taken by the punishing old guy. However, those times when I was outside, warmed by a gentle sun, stroked by a playful wind, watching deer graze in a meadow surrounded by the simple light of daisies - those were the times I felt a certain rightness and connection to life that didn't exist at any other time. That has not changed in nearly six decades.

I have a number of friends who believe in no God beyond their own ability to be good or to live a full and meaningful life. I can't quarrel with that, or even argue them out of that belief. I don't want to. It's not my place. But when I'm in conversation with them, and consider what it might be to live that way, I can't - not really. Any more than I could consider living without breathing.

You can't believe God into existence. But, for me, believing in that existence is what gives life meaning, power and substance. To know that love exists in a bigger and deeper form than I'll ever be able to grasp offers not only comfort, but also a safe place to rest. I can't say exactly what I believe, but when a stranger smiles at me, or responds to my smile; when Walt looks at me with his kind and loving eyes; when the robins return declaring spring has to arrive because they have, I feel without doubt a love far too large to be simple human.

Snow Day

2011-02-16T10:59:00.000-08:00

As I sat here this morning working and waiting for the sliver of pink I so often see in the east just before day truly breaks, what I saw instead were flashes of white against the clinging darkness. It was snowing. I figured it would be a few random flakes that would turn to rain soon, as is often the case here.

The lighter it got, however, the heavier the snowfall. Soon the ground was as white as the air, and not much later I found myself surrounded by winter.

There have been many times when this snow would have been a burden to bear, an occasion to escape into some warm comfort. Today, I'm finding a deep and healing comfort in its presence. The cold of a snowy day is much different than the cold of a rainy day. Snow cold is clean and alive and rushes into my head like the scent of lavender in the summer.

The world is two colors right now: the purest white possible, and everything else muted to a dark green. Simple and soothing.

Kathleen's death, her absence, has been close this week. Somewhere I read that you never get over losing a child, it just becomes more permanent over time. It feels as though another line has been etched in stone. I don't know why now, and I guess it doesn't matter.

For a time the snow fell in thick sheets, filling the air with what looked like little tissues sent directly from heaven to honor tears spilling from a broken heart.

Later I stood on my front porch, trying to capture something of the magic with my camera, and just stood for a bit. Bare-footed. No coat. No protection at all. My feet grew quickly numb and I didn't mind. It made me think that some numbness is necessary to allow space for healing, to give rest. Paradoxically, the cold also brings feeling into much sharper focus.

I absorbed the weighted stillness, a silence only possible under snow's sound-damping blanket. A vast empty space big enough to hold all my sadness and all my gratitude in one embrace. And it felt like such a gift, that absolute nothingness containing the promise of everything.

Delight

2011-02-12T09:56:00.000-08:00

Just like that, light begins to return in random sparks. The weight of my long winter is eased by the flashes of golden grace that suddenly seem everywhere. I know they've always been there, and more I haven't yet felt, but in the last few days I've found myself delighted at every turn.

The awareness of the feeling first came on a walk with Toby (no surprise there, right?). It was a rare morning walk, below freezing beneath a lively blue sky. I was enjoying the particular freshness only to be found in morning light and air, following the trail, when I looked up to see what I thought was fog blanketing the clearing ahead. When I broke through, what I found instead was a breathtaking display of diamonds liberally painted over every surface for as far as my eye could see, sparkling like life under the bright morning sun.

Later it was a video of babies laughing, found as I scrolled Facebook. I'm rarely there, and even more rarely willing to take the time to watch the many videos linked, but that time I did. I can still hear the music of those four angelic voices crowing in delight.

And then like fireflies at dusk in the Midwest, a couple of sparks became a skyful:

A new massage therapist with warm hands and a warmer heart.

A phone call from my older brother, which always makes me happy, but this time I could hear my own joy at the sound of his voice, and was surprised by it. Frank's grief over the loss of his stepson is still fresh, and I think our shared losses this year have opened something new for us.

Shiny, velvety, new-green foxglove leaves whorled against the ground, the first step toward the brilliant brave spikes that will wave in summer breezes.

On the edge of a meadow, plum blossoms festooning a baby tree, clearly not aware they're meant to wait for warmer air.

Lunch with a friend that felt as soulful and satisfying as the soup we shared.

It's not the events. I know that. And each is something I am always aware of feeling grateful for in some way. This new sense of lightened, light-filled delight is a very different thing. A return of an old friend, but more somehow. Stronger and more precious because of the shadows from which it's emerging.

Winter still holds here, even with the many small signs of spring. We could still get weather, often do into early March. The cold still grips like there's no tomorrow. I'm prepared for even more frost, and won't be relying on the warmth and light this week has given as proof winter has been defeated. But for now at least, my spring has arrived.

Small Gifts

2011-02-06T18:01:00.000-08:00

Gifts are offered, not to bring change or even to ameliorate what is, but to remind that change is happening with every breath in and every breath out.

Walking with Toby, taking a trail we avoided all summer because of denning coyotes, I looked up. My eyes searched for eagles, as they always do, but instead they found an odd looking lump of a bird resting on the branch of a dead tree. I was struck first by the beauty of the tree, perfectly triangular but stripped of everything but the cones hanging like ornaments from every branch. The bird didn't fly, even though I stood and studied him intently.

At first I thought it might be a sort of sparrow, puffed up against the cold. Right size, right color, right kind of tail. But the longer I watched, the more convinced I became it was something else. So I stepped carefully through brush until I stood right under him. It was the wide head and the way he swiveled it that made me realize I was seeing a northern pygmy-owl. The first in my experience, ever. We watched each other for as long as Toby was willing to entertain himself, then I reluctantly headed home, my heart lighter than it had been for days.

The next day's gift was a sound. One I've come to know and recognize - itself a small miracle. The chuckle and whistle of two bald eagles, in what I assume is a courtship conversation. I was in the same clearing where I'd seen the owl the day before, and the sound seemed to be circling me. I strained my eyes, stood as tall as I could, searching in vain for the telltale flash of white. I finally gave up, decided the music was enough, and continued along the trail.

Movement in the air brought my head up just in time to see the pair fly directly above me.

I almost missed the next one. Driving into my driveway, my mind already in the house and onto the next thing on my list, I registered a spark of yellow where none has been for months. One single fully bloomed forsythia blossom. A promise of abundance to come, yet a powerful and beautiful light all by itself.

I was at a friend's house yesterday. Her crocuses are blooming, her daffodils about to burst, her tulips forming tiny tepees in a clump by her door. And while I appreciated the gifts they offered, the proof that spring will come, her flowers did not move me in the same way that one bit of yellow in my own yard did.

As I do my best to embrace each new day of this very long winter, I've been reluctant to accept what feel like false comforts. The old stand-bys like summer memories and a breath of warm air. Even occasional breaks of sun have done little to ease the cold that will not be melted easily. Yet somehow a tiny owl, an eagle courtship and one small flower have the power to reach into my heart and begin the spring thaw. No reaching for them, no intention, no seeking - just openness, presence, and now a releasing gratitude.

Middle photo by Walt Shucka. Bottom photo from Google Images.

Winter Green

2011-02-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

Branches are as bare as they're going to get and new growth is weeks away. I can see the river through green-furred skeleton arms. Singers in the bird choir are still winter wren and flicker, nuthatch and chickadee, kinglet and junco.

Air is cold, moist and gray, somehow gray even when the sun shines. A still, quiet gray; breathless, waiting.

River runs strong and clear - liquid jade revealing smooth stones. Often freezing on Toby's fur after an exuberant swim, becoming glittery diamonds adorning his broad chest.

There is a surprising amount of green everywhere: moss and sword fern that thrive in these exact conditions. Cold and damp - a time when not much else moves, let alone grows into newness. Green glowing the brightest on the grayest of days, somehow creating light out of the shadows. Looking dusty and almost invisible in the half-hearted light of winter's sun.

It's hard not to think about what's missing, what the spring will bring soon enough. It's hard to breathe air that holds not one kiss of warmth and to allow the cleansing cold all the way in. It's hard to love winter green when a heart longs for just one moment spent lying in sweet summer grass.

Memories stored away throughout the summer to pull out at such times are faded like fir branches in lifeless light, offering no more satisfaction than shiny magazine pictures of tropical places where people romp without care at the edge of the ocean.

I walk and breathe and search - eyes ready to catch the first violet, ears ready to hear the first robin song, shoulders ready to feel the soft comfort of a sun whose power is returned. Winter green within and without, holding me still in a life that feels stripped of all but shadows, skeletons, and gray waiting; that also promises spring will arrive at exactly the right time.

Going Slow

2011-01-26T13:14:00.000-08:00

My new chiropractor was walking me out to the front desk, noticed how I was walking, and stopped to give me one last bit of homework. "You're throwing your hip," she said. "Let that right leg push back."

I'd just spent one of the most amazing hours I've ever experienced in the presence of a healer. The right side hip area pain that's been my regular companion for over two years now had reached the point where I couldn't walk anywhere without limping. Clerks in stores would stop me and ask if I was alright.

The pain would ebb and flow, even stay away for short periods of time, but never left completely. In the weeks since Kathleen's death it has moved in to stay, refusing to be distracted or appeased or calmed. I hurt. All the time.

I found Susan in the sort of roundabout way that made it clear she was exactly where I was meant to be. From the moment she walked into the adjustment room, the air was filled with her gentle chatter. She's a chiropractor, but started by wanting to know about my psoriasis, and from there went into a discussion about fish oil and inflammation. Before she'd even seen me stand or asked about my pain, she was writing down homework for me.

Her focus on inflammation was the final confirmation I was in the hands of the healer I'd been praying for. I've know for a while there was a connection between the psoriatic arthritis in my hands, and the inflamed SI joint that has me walking like Chester from Gunsmoke. When she started talking about coming at the inflammation from all angles, including the inside out, I nearly laughed. In early December I had done research on anti-inflammatory diets, but never got farther than thinking it might be a good idea for me to try.

As she showed me how she wanted me to walk, I said, "That would mean I'd have to slow down - a lot. I don't know if I can do that."

She reminded me I've been protecting that pain for so long, my whole gait is wrong, and I'm going to have to retrain that leg. "It's good you want to walk," she said. "That will help loosen things up. Just remember, going slower will get you there faster."

That stopped me in my wobbly, and by that time very tired, tracks. Going slower to arrive faster. I know she meant the healing of my leg, but I heard so much more. I have to return to the classroom in the fall - have known since Thanksgiving. The time between now and then seems beyond precious to me - my last months of freedom to finish my book, enjoy the solitude, find whatever healing I can. I've felt like I needed to fill every second of every day with meaning and productivity so as not to waste a bit of my time. In a hurry, needing to move faster than the calendar.

"Going slower will get you there faster."

And just in case I didn't quite get the message: I'm now eating anti-inflammatory foods as part of the inside out approach to my pain. Coffee is not on the list of permissible foods. I love coffee and have started my day with two or three cups, with cream in recent years, for most of my adult life. Slow seems to be the only speed I'm capable of today. My brain is muddled and trying to figure out what happened. The cup of organic decaf I was allowed this morning seemed like coffee, but the results were nothing like what coffee usually delivers.

Since I can only do slow, and have a date with ice every two hours, I'm going slow today. Trying not to crane my neck too hard toward the future to see if I am in fact getting anywhere I want to be faster.

Closure

2011-01-19T10:29:00.000-08:00

Reunion, 1994

Flipping through the pages of my notebook yesterday, I scanned for a specific story I knew I'd written, and that I thought would fit with the new direction of my book. I didn't find that story there, but what presented itself gave me chills, and brought me a sense of peace and closure. In a class last year we were given the prompt to write a letter to someone we wished to empower. Once that was done, we were to continue with what their response might be. This is what I wrote - months ago:

To my daughter,

If I could give you the answers, I would, but even if I could, I know at this point in my life my answers won't work for you.

I know life hasn't been easy for you, beginning with a mother who gave you away, then growing up the only child of color in a remote Alaska town, then throwing everything stable away with a Mexican boy at the end of one wild summer.

What none of us knew then was the inner demons you fought - some chemical aberration that allows you to fly higher than humanly possible, then exacts payment in depths few can survive.

Even with all of that, I wish I could give you the certainty that you are loved. Not one day goes by that both of your moms don't pray for your happiness. I risk speaking for the mom who did what I could not, knowing how hard she's worked to keep you safe, knowing she loved you enough to give you me.

Even with your illness, even with your wounds, even with the mess you've made so far of the life you have - you are loved. Deeply and without condition. It's not too late to do one thing to move closer to the gifts you came her to express. The one thing - the only thing I've ever asked of you - is that you tell the truth.

In that, healing can and will happen. In that, you can be helped, even in the worst depths of the chemical chaos that cannot be completely compensated for. If you could say, I'm ill, I need help, I believe you would then be able to absorb the love that has the power to heal.

I hold you in my heart - have always held you there. Maybe if you would trust us both with the truth, we could finally be a mother and daughter whose love for each other holds them both firmer when the ground shakes.

I love you.

Mom

Dear Mom,

I would if I could. I can't. If I tell you the truth of myself, I will lose the one thing I've clung to since I knew I had another mom - the possibility that if you had raised me, I would be okay. I don't care that you couldn't - I don't blame you, I'm not mad - but I know you would have helped me be okay.

I can't bear the thought that you know I'm mentally ill. I'd rather pretend and be only your cute loving daughter who shops and cooks and plays with kittens with you.

I know how much I've hurt you. I'm so so sorry. But this is the best I can do. A phone call here. An e-mail there.

And the hope that my own daughter, with the help of my second mom whom I hate so often and can never love enough, will be spared both the life that forced you to give me up and the life of insanity I created that nearly ruined her chances. I raised her, but really my other mom is the one who made sure she had what she needed to be ready to face the world.

So we share that, you and I, the not being able to raise our own daughters. And I do know how much you love me - have always known that.

The truth is - that truth you're always pushing me to tell you - the truth is I would be so much worse, so much less stable, so much more wounded if I didn't have two mothers to love me instead of one. I know that on my good days, which we both know grow fewer and fewer. But when the time comes, when I don't know anything else clearly, I will always remember your love.

I love you,

Kathleen

The last picture she sent me, sometime last fall.

Grace

2011-01-15T19:56:00.000-08:00

Grace has been showing up in a no-accidents way in the last few days. The word seems to be appearing everywhere. That's probably why when my cat, Grace, sidled onto the crossword I was trying to finish, instead of bumping her off like I usually do, I sat and studied her.

I've always loved grace - as a word, as a concept, as a name. If I'd had another daughter, she would have been Grace. I had to be satisfied with a cat to carry the name so I could say it and be with it on a regular basis.

As I watched the old, half-Siamese cat purr and shed and try to watch me back through eyes that rarely track in the same direction, I laughed at how many different ways she's actually like the grace of God.

She's always there. No matter how much I ignore her or how often I shoo her away, she's always right under foot, or under chin, or following me from room to room.

There is a soft warmth to her love and it's given without regard to my mood or my desires one way or the tother. She is also capable of inflicting pain, kneading away with claws that have lost their capacity to retract well. Often she is completely silent, almost invisible. Other times she's louder than the coyotes traveling through at night and impossible to miss.

John Ortberg says, ". . . grace always and only consists of what will help someone come home and be immersed in the love of the Father." Which means sometimes grace appears as pain. Or loss.

Anne Lamott's experience of grace led her to say, "I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us."

My favorite discovery is this by Samuel Rutherford, "Grace grows best in winter."

In these weeks of grieving I've been aware of something missing. For the first time in my life I'm not blaming God for this pain, or for my daughter's death, or my nephews, or the death of Christina Green. I don't understand, but I don't blame. I would choose for them all to be alive, for the pain their deaths have caused to be erased, but I don't get to choose. I only get to choose whether I'll rest in God's grace, which is abundant in my life beyond anything I've ever experienced. And I can choose to allow that grace to flow through me once the thawing of spring arrives.

In the meantime, I hold a bony old cat with claws stuck in my shirt and whisper, "I love you, Grace."

Prickly

2011-01-12T14:58:00.000-08:00

The subject line said simply, mom. The late afternoon e-mail from my youngest brother could have been about our mother or his mother-in-law, both of whom are fragile. Since the law of threes is one away from being fulfilled, I expected the news to be bad. What I didn't expect was the feeling of almost overwhelming irritation that swooped in when the news involved social services, an insurance company, and a time limit, all of which required my attention because I hold the PoA for our mom. Mom was fine, but that didn't make me feel any better.

I went to bed fuming, just a couple of notches away from ranting and raving, and completely puzzled about why the feelings were so strong over something that, at the most, a month ago would have elicited a shake of my head and a rueful grin at the way my baby brother operates.

Sleep managed to overcome my state, until the phone rang at 2:00 A.M. The voice saying it was a wrong number was not that of a stranger, but that of my cousin who hung up before I could ask what was wrong. I thought about calling her back, but didn't want to wake up any more than necessary, so instead spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, falling back to sleep just before my alarm went off at 4:30.

I stayed in bed, settled into real sleep, until the phone rang at 5:30, and rang and rang and rang. So I stumbled into the kitchen to hear a recording tell me Walt had a late start today. When I found him outside and told him about the call, he looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. When irritation found its way to my voice and I mentioned I'd hoped to get some sleep, I got the same blank look. When I took a breath, and was just an exhale from making everything his fault, he took me in his arms and just held me.

A few minutes later as I sat here reading a second no-more-helpful e-mail from my brother, hearing Walt rummage in a drawer for a thing he'd put there himself, listening to cats yeow and Toby demand attention - and wanting to scream at all of them to shut the f***k up and leave me in peace, I realized the problem wasn't with any of them. In fact that was a pretty normal morning for us. The only not normal event was the way I was feeling.

Then I received an email from my friend Jan who often sends me links to amazing blogs. The one she sent me today was nothing short of miraculous. Jen Gray talks about grief, applying her own experience to the Kubler-Ross stages. It was what she said about the anger stage that went straight to my soul: I would have to say Im more irritated and impatient than angry.Not so tolerant of things that normally would roll off my back.

And then the rains came. Somehow seeing those words, understanding that I've just found myself in a new room of this house called grief, broke my heart all over again. It was like all the prickliness of the previous hours left me more vulnerable than before. A vulnerability that was held and honored by messages from friends (and my sweet husband), a series of surprise gifts of love spread over the morning, from people who couldn't have known their words were exactly what I needed today.

This storm has blown over, leaving me tired, beyond tired, and for the moment at least, free of irritation. Feeling sad, not just for my loss, but for all the senseless loss that seems so abundant right now. And feeling more certain than ever that love will win in the end. That love does in fact win every single time one person opens her heart, every time one person returns unkindness with a gentle hug, every time a choice is made for peace.

Another Battle Lost

2011-01-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

The soldier handed my sister-in-law the triangle of a flag he'd just moments before pressed against his heart, thanking her for her son's service to his country. As I stood in the damp and cold Pacific Northwest winter air, leaning into my seated brother, trying to offer him warmth, I reflected on how we found ourselves in this place just a week into the new year.

Joe, 26, always troubled, often trouble, bright and charismatic, put a gun to his temple while his girlfriend was upstairs in a friend's house, and killed himself on the first day of the new year. My brother and his wife came home from their Christmas travels to the news of her son's death.

The shock of Kathleen's death had just begun to scab over when Frank shared the news. Two suicides in one family, weeks apart, both by young people who had every resource at their disposal and who were loved.

Joe had a military funeral because he served in Iraq. His service there was neither exceptional nor exemplary. His life was neither of those things. Yet his funeral was packed with people who loved him, whose hearts were broken by his death, whose lives are left with huge holes because he's gone.

I have no answers. Only questions. And deep deep sadness.

I wonder at the pain these two young people were feeling that made living seem so unbearable. I wonder at the paradox of them trying to numb their pain with drugs and alcohol, yet those substances smoothing the road to their deaths. I wonder how they could not feel enough love to ease the pain and make staying worth the struggle.

And that's what makes me the saddest. They were loved and they couldn't feel it. They were not alone, yet they got so lost inside, they didn't understand. There were choices, many other choices than the one final and irretrievable one they made, and none seemed possible to them.

I know pain. I've experienced my share of suffering and loss. I've considered taking the path Kathleen and Joe did. I come from a family where alcoholism (both maternal grandparents), suicide (my biological father, the one I never met, shot himself on Father's Day) and denial (my mom escaped into dementia ten years ago with no obvious physical explanation) are standard methods for escaping pain.

Yet here I am at almost-sixty, healthy and thriving. The pain of losing my only child eased by the love and connection I feel from every single person in my life. I don't know why I'm here, and they are not - all those who chose oblivion over the messy wonder that is life. I only know that their passing leaves me with a more tender heart and a renewed determination to shine what light I've been given as brightly as possible.

Frost Heave

2011-01-02T12:25:00.000-08:00

The ground of my front flower bed is soft, fertile, well-worked. For most of the year it supports a soul-satisfying and always shifting array of color, texture and fragrance. From crocuses to hyacinths to yarrow to lavender to bee balm. The alchemy of combining rich soil, warm sunlight and rain results in a treasure chest that rivals any collection of jewels anywhere.

For the short time the soil lays fallow in our climate it remains soft and receptive, waiting for warmth to return. But once in a while Arctic air moves down from the north bringing such intense cold that the moisture that once offered gentle liquid sustenance transforms into a harsh frozen solid.

Crystalline trees form and grow upward, strong enough to hold rocks and a complete layer of soil. What was once a smooth and serene surface becomes a terrible forest straight from a fairy tale enchantment. It takes over the landscape with the promise that even when the magic kiss of the sun breaks its power, its effects will remain. Nothing will be left in quite the same place. The soil will be even more porous than before, more tillable. The newly unearthed stones will be removed in the spring planting, leaving the ground cleaner and even more receptive.

The ice forest reflects light on the grayest of days, but offers no warmth. Its harsh beauty, capable of drawing blood, refuses to hide anything, exposing everything.

There is no way to prevent an Arctic blast or the resulting frost heave, beyond the creation of protective layers so thick they keep the cold out at the expense of allowing any life in at all. And so I stand in this frozen forest, kept warm enough in the quilt of the many prayers and kind words and shared stories offered in these last days to surrender to its cold cleansing fire knowing it will leave the soil of my heart even more fertile than it was before.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of you who have left messages of comfort and shared your stories and offered prayers. You are warm sunshine in this frozen landscape of grief and I will be forever grateful to each and every one of you.

Gone

2010-12-27T16:32:00.000-08:00

It strikes me as odd now that I didn't expect the news I received when I returned her call. Her voice on the message was neutral, and since I'd only heard it one time before, I didn't have a frame of reference for reading anything into her tone. I've wondered if some part of me already knew, and was protecting me.

"This is Shirley, Kathleen's adoptive mom. Would you call me as soon as you get this?"

I remember thinking that it was interesting for her to be calling the Monday before Christmas. Maybe she wanted me to be a part of a surprise of some kind for Kathleen. Or maybe Kathleen had ended up back in the hospital and wanted me by her side badly enough to ask her mom to call me. Maybe even one of Kathleen's children was ready for contact, and Shirley was the messenger.

I called back right away, my voice cheerfully friendly as I said, "What's up?" still thinking it both odd and cool that Shirley was reaching out to me. Shirley, the adoptive mother of my daughter, Kathleen. Shirley, the woman I love, fear and owe an unpayable debt to.

"Kathleen took her life on Friday. I thought you'd want to know."

The human body is an amazing entity. I could feel mine flood with feeling that was quickly surrounded by a blessed blankness. Questions flooded that space. The ones you would expect, and many more I've been holding all these years of watching my daughter reach toward me and pull back before my reaching toward her could complete the connection.

I asked as many as I thought I could and still respect the great loss of the woman who had spent the last forty years trying to keep our daughter safe from herself and (in Shirley's words) the profound and insidious illness that she had battled for many years.

It was hard to stay with the conversation even though I wanted to know everything. My mind kept bouncing away from our words to another phone call. The first one from Kathleen sixteen years before - the call I'd been hoping for for twenty-four years. The miracle of hearing the voice of the woman I'd relinquished at birth and had been told it would be as though I'd never had her. She was no longer mine, but from that point forward, someone else's daughter.

Except she was always my daughter, too. Every birthday I saw her at that age in other children and wondered about her life. Every milestone I saw in my students, my nieces, characters in movies, I wondered about hers. I looked for her in every chocolate-skinned, curly-haired smiling girl who crossed my path.

And even after I met her and fell in love with the reality of her, as wounded as she was, and she could not deliver what we both so desperately wanted, I waited and hoped and prayed for her healing and the possibility of a real relationship with her. I stood with open arms and a mother's heart and a fierce desire to somehow lighten her burden.

My daughter is gone. Just turned forty in July. The mother of three children she loved. A woman much loved by many. Beautiful. Bright. Kind. Funny. Haunted. Mentally ill.

She left me without goodbye, without ever allowing the relationship she initiated reunion to have with me, without ever really feeling how deeply I love her.

I'm surprised at the depth and strength of this loss. I can't imagine how her other mother is managing, except she has Kathleen's children, both to be strong for and to turn her love toward. I have what I've always had: love and sadness. It's just magnified and without possibility of being anything else. What I also have is a family and friends who accept that I am a mother who has lost her child - for the second and last time - and who hold me gently in my grieving.

I am so sorry there was no way any of us could give Kathleen the power to feel that very same unjudging and embracing love, to feel her value, to feel anything that would have allowed her to stay.

Chickadee

2010-12-18T13:55:00.000-08:00

As I tucked suet into the feeder, I could feel tiny eyes watching. I looked up into our sweet gum to see a chestnut-backed chickadee perched on the slimmest of branches, clearly waiting for me to get out of the way. He flitted down the minute I stepped back, scolding as he came, grabbed food and disappeared back up into the depths of the tree.

I was so engrossed in his antics, the whir of wings zipping past one ear startled me. A second one darted to the sunflower feeder, grabbed one shiny black seed, and sped away. My eyes followed him up into the tree where I saw an entire banditry of chickadees scattered among the branches waiting to drift down like wind-driven leaves for their turn at the feeders.

With a million things calling to me from the house, and Toby at my feet wondering why I wasn't throwing the ball for him, I almost moved on. Plus it was cold, nose-running cold. But the sky was blue and there were shadows and I felt such pleasure in the moment, I simply stood where I was and watched. Nothing I did - laugh, shift for a better vantage point, exclaim in surprise - seemed to impact the birds' behavior at all.

Chickadees are social, sociable and very vocal. They're as common around here as robins or juncoes - all-year residents. Yet there is something so uncommon in the delight I feel in their presence. Their size is a part of it: both local varieties, the chestnut-backed and the slightly larger black-capped, would fit nicely in an egg carton. Yet there seems to be an impossible amount of life and energy in those compact bodies.

The richness of their vocabulary also tickles me. From the classic chickadee-dee-dee to the one-note chipping declarations of presence to the cheeseburger song that announces spring, the sound track of my life is full of their voices.

The most incredible thing about them, though, is their lack of fear. No other bird in my experience is so willing to allow my presence in such an easy way. They go about the rhythm of their feeding, and it definitely has all the rhythm of a well-choreographed dance, regardless of my position.

I'm comforted knowing that wherever I might find myself, I'm most likely going to find chickadees, too. The mountains. The ocean. The city. They're resourceful and adapt to an endless variety of environments. I'm comforted by their constancy, no matter the season. I'm comforted that a being so simple and so common has the power to make my heart sing.

While not as majestic as the bald eagle, or as romantic as a hummingbird, chickadee's gift is to remind us that even ordinary contains magic and power and beauty.

Photos by Walt Shucka, taken in our back yard.
A group of chickadees is known as a "banditry" or a "dissimulation" or the much more pedestrian, "flock."

Becoming Human

2010-12-14T10:23:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in a pew, alone, enjoying the final rehearsal for the Christmas program I'd come north to see. My brother Mark sings in the choir and it's become a tradition for me to be in the audience for him. This year I went a day early so we could do some antiquing, which is how I found myself at the practice. Because it was my fourth year, as I watched, many people were familiar to me. I know outlines of their stories. I'm happy when I learn about their successes, sad when I hear of their suffering. I like these people.

I have an uneasy relationship with church. It's very difficult for me to feel anything but judgement, shame and not enough in the formal company of people who follow the religion I was born to. It's not their fault, mostly. Raised with a God used as my mom's hit man and enforcer, baptised into a church where the pastor did not practice what he preached, a decade spent in a small Bible-based cult where obedience and fear were everything - there was nothing in any of those places of love or relationship or simple acceptance.

Some have suggested that I should walk away from trying to believe in any God, but that's never been an option. It sure would make things easier if it was. However, somewhere along the line I decided that the only chance I had of experiencing the light of his love was to be very very still and to separate myself as much as possible from all that made me human: my passion, my body, my temper, my impulsiveness, my heart, my impatience. If I could be good enough, then - I'm not sure exactly what, but it seemed the only way.

A quarter of a century of being good, respectable and careful left me with not much but exhaustion. Still no closer to feeling completely accepted or acceptable, loved or lovable.

Don't get me wrong, it's been a great life. I've felt love and loved. I've felt joy and success and pain. I've experienced moments of pure light where there was not one doubt of God's presence or care. It's just that I've felt all of it through so many layers of separation from my humanity, it's been like listening to glorious music through a fortress wall. That wall grows thinner with each new insight, each new miracle, each new stirring of my heart.

As I sat in the dark watching the band and choir practice for a program meant to celebrate God become human in the form of Jesus, I noticed how very human these people were. They talked when they were supposed to listen. One of the soloists looked like he should have been in a studio recording rap music. Another, the pastor's daughter with a voice of angels, wore clothes that spoke rock concert much more than church. People didn't follow directions, wandered off stage in the middle of a song, dashed in late. There was silliness, laughter, and occasional sarcasm.

All shapes. All sizes. Each person a story filled with all the same elements that mine is, just manifested in different forms. And each person on that stage was there in relationship with a God unavailable to me because I'd always felt too human.

Becoming human, as I've worked so hard to do in the last few years, turns out to be the only path to a relationship of any kind. It's only by first knowing, then accepting, all that I am that I can be willing to reveal enough of myself to be available for relationship. The irony of having spent so much of my life doing the exact thing (trying to be some form of perfect) that kept me farthest from the exact thing I wanted and needed most (love and acceptance) is not lost on me.

There is a Buddhist parable about an old blind turtle living at the bottom of the ocean who swims to the surface for air once every hundred years. A golden yoke floats around in the waves, never still for a moment. The likelihood of the blind turtle swimming up and putting his head through the hole of the yoke when he surfaces is the same likelihood of our being born as a human being.

It's a story that's stuck with me since I first read it years ago. Being human is a rare and wonderful gift, not to be taken lightly.

This month we celebrate a birth of a boy given to the world as proof God loves humanity. For the very first time, sitting in the joy-filled, song-saturated dark last weekend, I began to understand with more than my head. Becoming human, being what I was born to be, embracing it all, is the only true path to everything I've ever wanted.

Dormant

2010-12-08T09:53:00.000-08:00

The edges between the seasons are never clean or straight or even easy to find. It's officially fall for two more weeks, but little in the weather feels like anything but winter. All that makes fall a time of reflection and celebration of harvest and abundance has been replaced by bare branches and cold hard rain. In the same way spring will arrive on its own time, not driven by the calendar, but an early arrival of spring is so much more welcome than early winter.

I resist winter, both as a season and as a natural part of a life's process. I can't go barefoot or feel the kiss of warm air on my arms and face. Blessings are simpler and require more attention to find. Beauty hides in shadows. Light comes sideways and for such short bursts, if it can even break through the thick weight of wet gray wool, that it never feels like quite enough.

I resist the dormancy brought on by cold and dark. I don't want to rest and wait. I want to grow and soar. I'm tempted by the sweet escape of hibernation, the turning inward and avoidance of winter's stark lessons. But, I'm not bear. Only human. And no cave will protect me from the rhythms of my own life.

So I bundle up, follow Toby's excitement into the forest, and face the cold. On our walks I notice buds on trees and bushes. The minute leaves fall, buds appear. Fat, juicy, tightly packed buds. It doesn't seem possible that these tiny eggs of leaves could survive the harsh rigors of winter, but they do. And they serve to remind me of just how entwined life and death are.

It helps me to accept the dormant darkness, to surrender to it, knowing the potential for whatever comes next grows out of sight. It helps me to see that even as one thing dies, new life is already finding its way to the light - waiting for the time and conditions that will allow it the best possible chance of thriving into the full expression of its being.

As I study the buds it's also impossible to believe that death - even as the closing of a door - is a punishment. New life, unseen possibilities and gifts, cannot happen without the passing of old.

The red oak that stands strong and visible from my window does not release its dead rust leaves until spring. It clings to the old until compelled to let go by sap rising from its roots and sun calling from above. And even then I can find buds at the very tips of branches, promising new life to be born from cold dormancy. So even stubborn holding on cannot stand against the cycles of the seasons.

Sanctuary

2010-12-04T07:02:00.000-08:00

Returning home on Monday, imprisoned in a space so small contortion was required to fit my body into it, breathing air both stale and sterile, and working to share the narrow armrest with my sleeping neighbor, I escaped into the memory of the day before. A day full of everything missing from the airplane.

When Suzy picked me up on our second bright and sunny morning, she handed me a packet with the most wonderful grin on her face. It was directions to and promotion for the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Newport, Rhode Island. I looked a question at her.

"You said you like birds, right? And we were going to Rhode Island anyway, so I found this online."

It took some mental searching before I remembered I'd been commenting on the Red-tailed Hawks that patrol the sides of the highways, just like home, only the east coast birds are a lot lighter. I'd done it often enough to prompt Suzy to ask if I liked birds. Because of the stereotypes surrounding bird watchers, I don't often tell people that I own enough bird guides to fill an entire shelf on my bookcase, that I always look and listen for birds in hopes of discovering one new to me, that one of my favorite places in the world is the refuge near our home where we see some new avian delight every single time we visit.

We filled the travel time with a continuation of the conversation that hadn't stopped from the minute I first got in Suzy's car at the airport. We got lost and didn't care. We laughed at ourselves, saw some amazing old homes, a lot of Rhode Island, and eventually drove across the long bridge from the mainland to Newport.

Suzy is a city girl with no real interest in birds or the outdoors. She really wanted me to have this experience (and I really wanted to have it), and she really wanted to not have it with me. An interesting test of a fairly new friendship. She had phone calls to make and a book to read and maybe a nap to take and promised all three were exactly what she wanted. And so I trusted her, accepted the gift, and walked into the sanctuary alone.

Sanctuary. Alone.

The sun shone. Colors vibrated. Song birds chattered in the brush. The wind played hide and seek. Each new turn in the trail I followed to a place called Hanging Rock so I could see the Atlantic offered some new visual delight. Bright berries against blue sky. A deer's presence revealed by the rustle of leaves under foot. The trail beneath my feet first grass, then gravel, then dirt, then boardwalk, then stone called puddingrock. I found myself scrambling along a ridge of both rounded and sheared rock, wondering if it was really a trail at all, until the end which revealed a glorious view of the ocean.

Not many birds. Wrong time of year. Some mallards. A sparrow or two. Chickadees. One hawk.

I didn't care. As I walked back, thrilled at the perfection of each step of my adventure, I breathed in air that held hints of sea and oak and rich earth, savoring and storing away. I was almost back to the entrance when a flash of red caught my eye. I sought its source in the berry bush just off the trail and laughed out loud when I realized it was a cardinal.

Cardinals don't exist on the west coast. I saw my first one last summer in Iowa, but didn't have the opportunity then to just be with these bright red wonders. On this day, I stood for the longest time, just watching a pair feed and flit. When I finally turned to go, another flew directly in front of my face. A little farther along, I'd stopped to take pictures of the stone fence, one last shot of beauty, when I saw one more cardinal perched on blackberry brambles in the sunshine like a king overseeing his realm.

I don't think it's ever failed me. I find what I'm looking for, eventually, even when I'm not exactly clear what that might be. Adventure always. Beauty. Gift after gift of magic and wonder. The love and generosity of fellow travelers. Fun. One new bird.

In the days since my return, there has been a bend in my path that could make me doubt all of it. But I can close my eyes and be in that sanctuary and feel the presence that promises wings and lift and sky to soar into. I believe. A friend asked me last week what I thought the trip meant. And without hesitation I replied that it was irrefutable evidence that I'm held and led and loved, even when the path becomes rocky and seems to be going in the wrong direction. All I have to do is remember one bright bird, one amazing friend, and four magical days.

Taken by our server at the French restaurant where we celebrated our last night together and where we were treated like royalty.

Body Work

2010-12-01T13:43:00.000-08:00

I woke up that Saturday in my beautiful blue room, in Connecticut, to a day that promised blue skies, sunshine and adventure. After breakfast we headed north toward Massachusetts and ultimately Kripalu in the Berkshires for my spa day.

The trip went fast, as time does that's spent full of rich conversation and beautiful sights. The leaves were mostly gone, but the arms that held them still reached skyward from softly rounded shapes. Suzy and I laughed together about the difference between the hills in the Northeast (barely distinguishable bumps) versus the hills of the Northwest (peaks exceeding 10,000 feet). We talked about writing and life and traffic. I was as happy as I know how to be.

It wasn't until we arrived at the nearly hidden entrance to Kripalu that I first felt the stirrings of anxiety, and by the time we'd pulled into the lot outside a surprisingly stark and unattractive building, I wondered how the hell I'd allowed myself to say yes to this day. Except I knew. Suzy's generous gift was an answer to prayer, the perfect bit of serendipity at the perfect time. And in that moment I wondered if there was any way at all I could nicely decline all the body work and maybe just walk the labyrinth and eat lunch.

I arrived knowing my day would consist of a yoga lesson, a Thai massage, lunch, and then an Ayurveda Vishesh massage. I'd done a little research, so had an idea what was coming, but no more than you can get from reading a description meant to be as inviting as possible. I'd been looking forward to the yoga lesson in particular, grateful to have an expert to consult about recent concerns that had developed about my practice.

The massages (two in one day!) I had convinced myself to be brave about and was even anticipating the amazing relaxation that follows body work like that. The fact that I'd only had two massages total before that day, made this a bigger leap of faith than it might have been for someone else.

Here's where the serendipity enters the scene (and God laughs). I was an abused child who grew up believing sex was love. As an adolescent, my childhood belief and the hormone floods of puberty drove me to finding sexual pleasure at any cost. My young adulthood was adolescence carried into the world, until I joined the cult, which put an end to all physical pleasure and in an ironic twist, sex as love was replaced by obedience as love. I learned to detach from the body that had caused me so much emotional pain - from its desires, its warnings, its uncomfortable messy truths.

Years of therapy had brought the detachment to the surface, yet somehow I'd never gotten beyond an acknowledgement that, yes, I preferred to operate as far from the physical realm as possible. Beginning my practice of Bikram yoga over a year ago was a step toward being willing to repartner with my body. The pain that I started yoga to heal and that had grown steadily worse in the last few months made sure I listened to my body, or pay the price in immobility.

So the thought of having an hour of private instruction with a yoga instructor seemed like an answer to prayer. And the thought of expanding my massage repertoire sounded sort of cool. Until I was walking through the doors of Kripalu, feeling like an interloper, and aware that I was going to be the focus of conversation - that my body!, my lumpy overweight out-of-shape body!, was going to be the center of attention - for the next several hours. Somehow shaving my legs didn't seem like enough preparation for this.

I was caught, though, in the loveliest of traps. My sweet friend had given me this day because she knew I practiced yoga and she knew I'd always wanted to see Kripalu. Our friendship is new enough that she didn't know the strength of my aversion to any attention paid to my body. Turning back or away was not an option. And I am so very grateful I really had no choice at all but to thank my fear for its warning and to show up for my first appointment with a smile.

The amazing Jennifer Reis quickly turned my yoga lesson into yoga therapy. She answered my questions and concerns about my Bikram practice (another story for another day), saw immediately what was going on with my pain, and gave me a series of moves to do to realign, stretch and strengthen my out-of-whack pelvis. Her approach was gentle and caring and respectful. She said, "Let the weakest limb decide how far your body goes." She helped me realize that my threshold for pain is much lower than I've ever believed - I don't even register pain until it stops me (literally in this case) in my tracks. She said, "No pain. If it hurts, stop."

From her I went to Tara who loved my bird earrings and talked easily about what she was going to do with my body lying fulling clothed (whew!) on the ground. As she stretched and pulled my limbs and applied her feet to pressure points, she would gently encourage me to breath, or to push against her so she could help me relax more into myself when I released the pressure. Every so often I could feel her brush away old energy and I could hear her breathe, as though the work she was doing on me was a meditation for her.

Lunch was next and I was like a stranger in my own body. This vessel was relaxed, almost fluid, and seemed friendly. I liked being there, and enjoyed fueling my new friend with the healthy vegan fare of Kripalu's cafeteria where the energy was serenity personified. Suzy was happy with the amount of writing she'd accomplished in the morning, and I was ready to see what surprises my last appointment had for me.

Lauren, the therapist, was soft-spoken and gentle. She asked about any issues I had, explained what her particular form of massage was all about, and casually slipped in, "Did anyone tell you your breasts will be exposed for this?" And before any little voices from the inside could argue, I replied that no, no one had mentioned that, but I was okay with it. I lied, but it was a lie with the hope saying the words would make them true. She put the oil on to heat and left me to get undressed.

I was on my back, covered, barely, by the towel she'd left for me, when she returned to the room. "I invite you to rest in the silence," were the last words spoken until the end. Then she proceeded to fold that towel until it was the smallest of rectangles covering so little it seemed a pointless symbolism. After which she proceeded to oil and massage every square inch of my body, with the exception of my nipples and the tiny territory covered by the towel, front and back. By the time she left the room for me to get dressed, my head was full of the scent of lavender and my body was purring louder than all three of my cats put together. I floated, glided, soared back to Suzy.

The drive home was a bit quieter than our morning journey. I sat in the car, enjoying the scenery and Suzy, slightly stunned by what had just happened to me. Dinner was a comedy of Suzy reacting to all the lavender radiating from my body and me barely articulate. I slept that night for ten hours, straight through, and woke the next morning feeling more rested than I have since sometime in childhood. My body liked the attention, didn't mind the exposure, was ready for more. Is ready for more. It may be time finally for me to hold up my side of this friendship, and to listen to the voice of my body over the voice of the shame that has kept me disconnected from it for all these years.

Suzy wasn't done surprising me. The next morning when I got in the car she handed me a packet of information she'd printed, telling me where we were headed for the day. Come along with us for the ride in the next installment of this most amazing adventure.

Abundance

2010-11-27T14:43:00.000-08:00

Suzy: friend, chauffeur, host, writer, generous spirit, maker of dreams come true

When I saw an e-mail from Suzy in my inbox in October, I expected a friendly note, or a writerly exchange, but not what I actually received. It was an invitation to join her in Connecticut,where she lives, for a long weekend to celebrate my birthday. She would fly me there and put me up in a bed and breakfast and we would do whatever I wanted.

As with many of you, I find it much easier to give than receive, and especially difficult to accept such unearned generosity. But it was a chance to spend time with this amazing friend I'd only seen in person once when we met at a writing retreat four years ago. And I can't actually imagine the circumstances under which I might refuse the chance for a travel adventure.

So I said yes. From the very first I was aware of the enormity of the gift I was receiving and the hugeness of the heart giving it. All of which made my own heart swell and my mouth curl into smiles of easy delight. Our plans were open-ended - there was a lot of talk about writing and talking about writing and just hanging out together. But a week before my departure, I received another e-mail informing me I'd be having a spa day at Kripalu.

Suzy spent the weekend before our visit in a workshop with Natalie Goldberg at Kripalu. She knew how excited I was for her. She also knew Kripalu was a place I'd read about and intended to find a way to someday. She moved up my time table.

I traveled on the Friday before Thanksgiving, in the midst of all the hoorah about airport security. I'd convinced myself that being scanned was a small price to pay for the adventure and the friend waiting for me on the other side of the country. I mostly believed myself, but was relieved to discover that going through security, at least in Portland, was no more challenging than when I last flew in July. It might have been an omen, except I was determined that there were not going to be any bad events this trip - only interesting experiences.

Suzy greeted me at the Hartford airport with a great warm smile and before my passenger door was closed we were visiting as though our conversation was the continuation of one conducted over years and years of friendship. Even jet-laggy after a twelve hour day I soaked up all I could, from the drive to Branford, to our first meal at an Italian restaurant, to the incredible comfort of my room.

As she left me for the night, promising to get me in the morning in time for breakfast and our long drive to Massachusetts for my Kripalu experience, Suzy said, not for the first time, "I'm so glad you're here." And by the time I returned home the following Monday, there was not one single doubt about that.

When I woke up the next morning to clear skies and crisp air, I had no idea how much the next hours were going to change my life, or how they'd reveal the hand of a loving divinity with a sublime sense of humor.

Queen Ann Room at By the Sea Inn, Branford, CT

There's too much to tell, too much magic to share, to try to put it all into one story. So, you'll need to be patient and come back. Next post: Kripalu Saturday. Sunday is a whole other set of wonders to be shared in yet another post.

Sharing Gratitude

2010-11-21T04:06:00.000-08:00

I'm doing my very first guest appearance today at Laura's wonderful blog, Shine the Divine. Come visit me, and while you're there, spend some time getting to know this most creative and spiritual and kind woman. It's a month of gratitude at her place, each day a different guest - a lovely inspiration and reminder of all that we have to be thankful for. Namaste.

Alone

2010-11-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

I've been at the beach. Alone. Three nights, four days. I had a purpose. It wasn't meant to be a vacation, but instead a space in which I might get closer to finishing the first draft of my current WIP. No dog wanting to play, or cats wanting in/out/up/down. No husband to greet or feed or visit with. Just me. And my words.

I've been alone a lot in the last year and a half, and enjoyed the solitude for the most part. I enjoy my own company and even more, I enjoy the freedom that comes from no schedule and no other human's immediate needs driving my decisions. It wasn't until this weekend, however, that I considered how distracted I've kept myself, even without the outer distractions found in the busy life I left behind when I stepped out of public education.

Pema Chodron talks about how we all live with a feeling of edginess and anxiety, although often at a level so low we're not even aware it's there. We want solid ground under our feet, which is an impossibility, and the insecurity feels so unbearable, we'll do anything to not experience it. That's where addictions are born, in our desperate attempt to not feel so lost. And alone.

Because I'm writing a memoir, I was not only alone these last few days, I was also alone with the very deepest parts of me. And when I wasn't writing, I was walking in the vast openness of sand and ocean and western horizon - from the depths of as far inward as I could go to an outside as wide as forever and back again. And no other human for witness or comfort. Or distraction.

Something in the intensity of my focus and the lack of distraction (except for occasional e-mail, I stayed offline) helped me understand on a new level that the answers I'm constantly seeking are all tucked away in my own heart. It's where God's voice whispers. It's where the wisdom of my ancestors pulses. It's where the clearest, brightest truth lives.

The only way to access that, however, is to be willing to stand alone and turn inward. To, as Pema Chodron reminds, be Ulysses suffering the voices of the sirens to ultimately break their power. So this anxiety that is my constant companion and that is at its loudest when I'm alone, will not be distracted away. I don't need to feed it, or ignore it or worry that it means there's something wrong with me. I only need to stop resisting its existence.

I'm learning I can hold awareness of the edge, and not be any worse off than I was before. I can be alone with every aspect of my interior exposed to the light, and still be okay. Somewhere in childhood, feeling alone came to mean feeling unloved, which felt like falling forever in complete darkness. To survive that, I found a multitude of ways to avoid the one state of being which, paradoxically, was the only way to access the spark of divine love necessary for all other love.

As I've written this, the old hymn, "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," kept coming to mind, so I did what I usually do when words are talking to me - I Googled it. The verse from the Gospel of Matthew that provided the inspiration for the song holds this wisdom: "Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?"

A single bird has value and is known and seen, an important spark of divine light. And so, too, a single person. Alone.

Happy Birthday

2010-11-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

I love birthdays. Always have. It doesn't matter whether it's mine, or the special day of someone I love, or a celebration of a character in a movie. Birthdays make me happy.

Childhood birthdays were a complicated mix of anticipation, thrill at being the center of attention and disappointment that the day was never quite enough of something I couldn't quite name. There were visits from grandparents and cakes and memorable gifts. I still have the topaz heart necklace that was my first official piece of jewelry, given the year I turned seven - a year that became one of those that alters the course of a family's life. There were also always the days after the birthday when life returned to a normal that seemed bleaker for having experienced the light and magic of one special day.

The one constant, from my earliest memory until my mom lost her way, was her saying on my birthday, "Ten (or twenty-nine, or forty-five) years ago today, at exactly 3:53 P.M., I was bringing you into the world." Even when I'd left home, even in the years when I couldn't bear to breathe air that had been in her lungs, for one day of every year she reached out to me to declare our connection.

I don't think she ever did that with my brothers. I've not asked them, and now I'll need to, but there are no memories of them sharing similar stories.

As this year's birthday approached, the last one of my fifties, I found myself thinking about why I still get excited. At this point in life, birthdays bring a burning away of illusion and a diminishment of potential. Death, which at twenty seemed impossible, begins to take shape as an inevitable reality, showing itself in new wrinkles and pains and memory losses. Not something normally celebrated.

I miss my mom's calls, even though many times I could hardly wait to get off the phone and back to a life safe from her. The year I entered the decade I'm about to leave, our family was split down the middle, a fracture that meant she (and one brother) didn't get invited to my surprise party. Even then, she called and left a message.

It's only now I realize her tradition was a way I knew she loved me, even when her actions often indicated otherwise. All those years she swore she'd done the best she could, it turns out to be the truth. And although that best wasn't nearly enough for a developing child, it was love.

And it's love that makes me thrilled every year at this time, thrilled at every birthday for anyone besides me. Birthday celebrations are a concentration of all the love that exists for a person in their life at a point in time. Cards, phone calls, Facebook messages, parties, lunches - each person's expression of birthday wishes is a spark in what becomes a brilliant light of love.

Each new year now, that light seems to grow brighter and brighter, even though my expectations for the day have diminished along with my eyesight and flexibility and stamina. In a life that started on a starvation diet of love, with barely enough to sustain a spirit, I feel rich beyond expression to experience such abundant love on my birthdays. An abundance that stays with me from one November 5 to the next.

Last Friday as I was helping my middle brother, Mark, set up his new antique business, he mentioned in the most casual of ways that we'd be having dinner with our other two brothers and their wives. I was excited to get to celebrate my birthday with all my brothers (and I love surprises), but it wasn't until the six of us were seated at the restaurant that I became truly aware of the unfolding miracle.

Five people went out of their way to spend an evening in the company of others that just a short time ago they couldn't share air or space with - to celebrate me. For the second time in a year, Mom's four children sat together in laughter and ease, teasing and taking pictures and sharing food and bits of lives with each other. This time, for the first time, we were joined by the two brave and beautiful women who married brothers whose paths diverged to the point of estrangement for the last decade.

I love birthdays because they are a time, like the brightest summer day, when it's impossible to not know that love exists in unlimited abundance. It's a time when I get close to understanding in a concrete way what God's love means. To be loved - there is no greater gift to receive. A gift from which even more love grows and finds its way back into the world. Light that releases even more light until the darkness is reduced to shadow with no power beyond what light allows.

Toby Turns Three

2010-11-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

Our magnificent and goofy boy turned three yesterday. Because it's fall and because I'm a year and three days away from sixty, the passage of time has been on my mind a lot lately. There's nothing quite like having a child or a dog to remind you just how fast time goes.

Having caught on to the trickeries of the calendar, I have been determined not to let a minute with Toby slip past without celebrating the wonder of him and his presence in our lives. There's been a special magic about him from the day I met him, and if anything that seems to be getting stronger. I'm certain he's here to teach. I'm even relatively certain he knows that.

He is a study in paradox.

Greeting each new person who comes into his life as though they are long lost friends, he expresses his pleasure with tooth-baring grins and wide plume sweeps of his tail that have managed to significantly thin the leaves on a house plant in our entry. Then he'll run to me (or to Walt) and bury his head against our thighs, looking for reassurance, pushing so hard he breathes like Darth Vader and I have to lean on something for support. Confident to shy in no time at all.

Bred and born a bird dog, he adores things with wings. However, not quite in the way one might expect from a retriever. He loves playing outside, especially when the sun is out and there are bird shadows to chase. He'll gallop after them for hours without stopping. But his game only works, apparently, when one of us sits on the patio while he runs. We're not invited to join him, but neither are we free to go. He doesn't actually retrieve anything, unless he wants someone to throw it for him, and then he may or may not bring it back. Independent but needing connection.

His hearing ability is sporadic - coming and going without warning. If he's found a nice fresh cache of deer poop, he goes completely deaf. On the other hand, he could be upstairs, sound asleep, and hear the rustling of the treat bag downstairs on the other end of the house for which he'll make a run and sit perfectly, just like he learned at school. Stubborn and oh so sweet.

One of his new habits in this last year has quickly become a favorite. At bedtime, he'll get up on the bed with me for a while, then move to a corner of the bedroom, then to his favorite corner of the kitchen. At some point, he wakes up, comes into the bedroom to check on me, goes upstairs to check on Walt at his computer, then crawls into the big blue chair that has become his to spend the rest of the night. It's the fact that he needs to check on each of us before he calls it a day that just takes my breath away.

At three, there's still a lot of puppy in Toby. If he wants to play and I'm not paying attention (trying to get some work done here) he'll stand behind me and make noises like an engine trying to turn over until I turn around. If I take too long, he throws himself on the floor and sighs a sigh of despair, whimpering until I can't take it any more. It works every single time. Cesar Millan would not approve.

As Toby helps me end this decade of my life, reminding me daily what's important and what's not, insisting I laugh and play and love, I wonder if he realizes what a truly great teacher he is.

Autumn Dawn

2010-10-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

One of the best parts of any day is early morning when the light first breaks through the trees. I'm often sitting here at my east-facing window, beginning my work for the day, when night surrenders. The view of sky and beyond is mostly held prisoner behind the bars of cedars and firs that line that side of our place. But the light always pushes through eventually, and some pink almost always glows from behind, and new day always arrives no matter what.

Some mornings, like today, the view is further muted by thick fog rising from the ground like memories, drawn out from a place of dark stillness. Blocking panoramic vision, but allowing shape and color through. Cool fingers of moisture playing guess-who against my eyes.

I feel both comforted and constrained by the gray mist and gray-green sentinel trees that cushion me from the vast unknowing and freedom on the other side.

The world on this side is soft and cocooned, silent, safe. Since all is shadow, there are no lurking shadows to fear. Dim light allows for just enough vision to promise night doesn't last forever. It's a soft nest of gray down held in the protective arms of Mother. No longer asleep, yet not quite fully awake in this time, a part of me wants to stay here forever.

The world on the other side tugs at me with its tourmaline blush and sapphire promises. Light sparkles through my eyes and pulls from within - inviting, urging, singing. "Let go." "Come play." "There's lots of room."

"You can't fall."

With the rising sun, light continues to brighten the sky, scatter the fog, and declare victory over darkness once again. It won't be denied, but neither will it insist I step out of the shadows. The choice is mine.

Bear in the Woods

2010-10-23T06:55:00.000-07:00

The phone ringing in the kitchen woke me up. A bleary glance at the clock told me it was after 9:00, which meant the call wasn't going to be good news. I'm an early-to-bed-early-to-rise person, and all my friends know that. No one calls that late unless they have to.

"Debbie, it's Courtney. I wanted you to know there really is a bear. We got pictures this time and caught him in the neighbor's garage. Be careful when you're walking Toby."

Courtney is one of my favorite people in the world. Twenty something, she lives in the neighborhood below us, a group of lovely homes strung out along the river farther along the small peninsula where Toby and I have our adventures. Because she's been our critter sitter since she was eleven, she knows our routines, and she loves our animals.

She had mentioned the possibility of bear on the peninsula before, but there was no real evidence and there were lots of other possibilities to explain the knocked over garbage cans and noises in the night. That neighborhood is full of dogs, for one thing. Plus there are raccoons, opossums, coyotes, deer, and bobcats here. The likelihood of the culprit being a bear seemed slim.

Her last message was not welcome news, and for days after, I found myself frozen with fear and frustration.

The thought of losing my walking route with Toby was deeply upsetting, and made me realize how much I treasure every bit of the trail and every minute I spend there with my dog. It's my church and my meditation and my best entertainment. Whether it's spotting my beloved eagles or allowing the sound of the river to soothe my heart or simply soaking up the beauty of Toby's unfettered joy - the best part of my life happens on our walks.

I was left with a huge dilemma. There is clearly a bear in that area and he's probably been around for a while. We've walked there for over two years without incident, rabbits and deer the only four-legged life we've encountered. But now knowing about an ursine presence changed everything.

My first thought was that I couldn't risk walking there again. You can't un-know a thing, and now if we did run into the bear, and Toby got hurt, it would be my fault. Toby hurt under any circumstances would be difficult to endure. Toby hurt because I was wrong would be unbearable (pun unintended but perfect).

I spent hours and hours going back and forth in my mind exploring reasons on both sides of the argument. I decided that it was silly to give up the trail. The bear had never been seen that far up the peninsula. I looked up black bear scat, and knew I'd never seen it anywhere Toby and I walk. I know bears are shy and will run (unless cubs are involved, and that's not the case here). Even at that, I found reasons not to walk for several days.

The fear was a real and physical force and it was not going to let me move.

So yesterday, I moved. Toby and I returned to our trail, without incident. I stayed aware, not letting myself drift inward at all, kept him a bit closer to me than usual. Fear kept me company, but her voice was a whisper, not the heart-stopping scream of days before.

I'm not certain I'm making the right choice. All I know is that I can't let fear of anything choose for me. I can appreciate her concerns without allowing them to be the only voice in the room. I'll stay informed and alert and careful. And later today I'll thank fear for her help, and head out with Toby for another adventure in the woods.

photo from firstpeople.us

One Perfect Pear

2010-10-20T12:44:00.000-07:00

The rhythm of the seasons is reflected in the produce available at my favorite farmer's market. Starting with strawberries in June, through the summer's abundant variety of fruits and vegetables, to the pumpkin patch this month. Each visit offers me something new, some delicious treasure I've been waiting for since the year before. The arrival of the first cherries, or the first sweet corn, or the first new crop apples makes me as happy as an eagle sighting.

Some of the produce is from other parts of the state - areas known for the perfection of the conditions for growing orchard fruits in particular. So when I walk into the market so see huge wooden bins in the center, I know I'm in for a treat. Recently one of the bins was full of Bartlett pears - huge hard green knobby things holding nothing more than the promise of sweetness available only to those willing to be patient.

With my hands caressing the new fruit, I traveled back fifty years to my childhood home where Mom would wait eagerly for the truck from Yakima carrying crates of peaches and pears - fruit that couldn't be grown in our short North Idaho summers. I could smell the simple syrup and the pressurized steam and the hot pear perfume created as we canned what would be our winter desserts. I could see her usually stern and angry face softened by the heat and contentment.

I remembered getting to choose one pear from the boxes, which we'd been watching for days to catch the fruit at its perfect point of ripeness. It was not an easy choice. There could be no bruises or green showing - not too ripe or too unripe. I wanted the biggest one I could find. I wanted perfection.

The first bite was always the best. Teeth sinking into flesh that resisted only slightly and then a mouth filled with sweetness that was too much to contain and that flowed down my chin. Not chewing exactly, but pressing the fruit against the roof of my mouth so that the flavor filled my head. Then bite after bite, not waiting to completely swallow the previous mouthful, until their was nothing left but a stem with a clump of seeds hanging from it. And a deep deep almost drunken sense of satisfaction.

In the time between that childhood and now, I found myself living with a group of people who were as self-sufficient as possible as part of our belief system. Canning pears was a different experience shared with three or four other women in a kitchen meant to be common ground but really the territory of the eldest in our midst. We put up enough - not just pears, but peaches, cherries, beans, tomatoes, applesauce - to feed four families and visitors through the winter.

As the newest member, a handmaiden, it was my job to peel the pears just as it had been in childhood, which I didn't mind. In part because it allowed me to quietly choose and set aside one perfect pear for my own enjoyment. Personal pleasure was frowned on, as was anything that wavered from a strict set of rules. But somehow no one ever noticed my claiming that small jewel of delight as we worked in obedience to our calling.

The resident cat, a young marmalade tom, strolled through the market bringing me back into the present and scattering ghosts like so many mice into the fall air.

I don't can any more, haven't for years, so didn't need to ask for crates. The women who were my guides, for better or for worse, are gone from my life now. Mom reduced to a crone-like body in a nursing home conversing with ghosts of her own. My fellow followers gone to lives far from my knowing.

But still there is the power to choose one pear, to bring it home and set it in a place of honor where I can watch it ripen into perfection. And where I can indulge in the singular pleasure of losing myself in the sensory wonder of fragrance and juice and flesh, the experience a spark bright enough to carry me through to next year.

photo from healthmed.com

A Moment

2010-10-17T07:42:00.000-07:00

The happy warbling of goldfinches as they hopped from sweet gum to feeders brought me out of my book and back into the sunny fall afternoon. Bundled against the distinct bite of air already owned by winter, I was surprised to hear such a summer sound. When I looked up, I could see the finches only after a search. Their distinctive golden breeding plumage was replaced weeks ago by drabness meant to camouflage as they travel to warmer climes.

As I watched them feed, only a half dozen or so, and listened to their musical chortles and murmurs, I realized I hadn't seen our grosbeaks for a very long time. And I couldn't remember when I'd last been aware of their presence. They were with us all summer, mixed in with the finches and jays and chickadees and nuthatches and doves and sparrows. I marveled every day at the simple beauty of the particular arrangement of their orange and black and white. Their tails spread in flight reminded me of the flared skirts of Flamenco dancers. The fledglings, and there were so many this year, made me laugh in wonder and amusement as they learned to fly and feed themselves.

How does that happen? One day life is a certain way, nicely drawn in reliable lines of comfortable familiarity, colored in a reassuring rainbow of the season. I savor and observe and immerse myself in the magic of everyday. And still one afternoon I realize I've missed an important shift.

I used to comfort myself with the belief that there was always next year. If I didn't take the time to appreciate the wealth of finches so thick they dripped from the feeding tube like molten gold, there would be another time. But over the years I've begun to realize the danger in that thinking. After several summers of finches so abundant we couldn't keep the feeders filled, the last couple have given us only a couple dozen.

This year the abundance came in the form of grosbeaks and jays. Next year - well there's no way to know or predict. And not only about the rhythm of the birds.

I don't mind the changing of the seasons. I don't mind getting older. I do mind how much faster the whole process seems to be with each successive year. Just when I finally understand how important each moment is and how I can't count on a second moment to absorb what the first has to offer, time has seemed to accelerate.

On another day recently, a very different warble brought me out of my chair and into the yard, my eyes searching the sky before I was even completely on my feet. Sounding for all the world like someone whistling their dog home, with a plaintive and urgent quality, I recognized the voice as that of a raptor. What I saw was a bald eagle, mature female judging from size and color, leading two other eagles across the sky. They were smaller, their plumage just beginning to show the distinctive white. All three were close enough and low enough for a time I could tell the whistle came from the bigger bird.

I stood, watched, listened. I opened up every part of me to absorb as much as possible, not entirely certain what I was seeing, but knowing without doubt this viewing was a once in a lifetime event. The trio wheeled and soared its way across the sky until all that was left was the faint chuckle of the bigger bird's call. Finally the empty sky and stillness released me to ponder the message, which eluded me until now.

Without exception, whenever a bald eagle is present, I am the most fully present I'm capable of being. Every moment they're available to my awareness is complete and focused. The result is that I am full of eagle moments. Vivid pictures with sound, scent and color that are as much a part of me as my eyes.

And that's the answer. Full presence without worry about what's being missed. Each moment absorbed and completely lived becomes a part of me, regardless of the speed of its passing. Each moment intentionally embraced slows just long enough to be captured.

No moment claimed is ever lost. Every new moment offers itself as a gift. We have the power to live those gifts - starting with this single moment.

Invisible

2010-10-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

"Deb, would you like to demonstrate a sit-up for us?"

It was toward the end of my most recent yoga class, well into the floor series, and I was in a groove of knowing the hardest was behind, and a nice long savasana and cold water were within reach. At first I thought Eric was asking someone else. There are two other Debs who practice often at the same time I do. But then I figured out I was the only Deb in the room.

The second I realized he meant me and he was serious, I found myself back in seventh grade, the first year of junior high.

The year I turned twelve. The year my period started. The year I knew for certain I would give anything to be someone else.

P.E. was required. Uniforms, full participation and group showers were mandatory. A complete nightmare for a girl miserable in her own body whose favorite physical activity was turning the pages of a book.

Memory transported me from cute stretchy yoga clothes into the junior high P.E. uniform, a royal blue short-sleeved, short jumpsuit with snaps and elastic waist that binds at every possible intersection of body parts. I'm praying the snaps will hold as I throw my torso forward from the floor toward my bent knees, hands behind my head, elbows flapping like the wings of a desperate bird. A classmate, someone as overweight, out of shape and uncool as I am, holds my feet and counts. The teacher, who after all these years is nothing more in my mind than a whistle and harsh judgement, walks around making sure we keep trying and don't pad the numbers on our recording sheets. Sit-ups aren't the worst thing we have to do. I can at least approximate those, unlike chin-ups which are as beyond me as the cute boys in ninth grade.

The problem is that I'm trying not to sweat, and I can't get a decent count without sweating. I've figured out that if I make it to the locker room after class without sweat, I can usually slip back into my school clothes without showering. The chaos and steam and fact that I'm not a part of any group work in my favor. If someone notices I'm the first one dressed, I just say I was fast.

I will do anything to avoid exposing my round body with boobs barely more than bumps in a room where all I see are beautiful, thin and shapely girls. I will even choose to be less successful than I might otherwise be to stay as invisible as possible.

Invisible. That thought dropped me back into the heat of the yoga studio where at least I've learned to sweat comfortably. While I've accepted that I'm not ever going to catch up with my mostly younger, and incredibly flexible classmates, and I've gotten good at focusing on my own practice, I've also shown up every day with an invisibility cloak draped over my yoga uniform.

I don't want to be noticed. Acceptance, at least the way I've managed it so far, does not include wanting to be seen attempting a practice I'm not that good at in a body I'm still, after all these years, trying to learn to love. And until the last class, except for an occasional gentle adjustment or word of encouragement, the teachers have honored my cloak.

"Deb, would you like to demonstrate a sit-up for us?"

Lying flat in savasana on my mat, I rolled my head toward Eric's voice and with my eyes asked, "Are you out of your mind?"

"I'm serious. Everyone, watch Deb as she does this sit-up. Pay attention to how she exhales."

And so before my brain had a chance to offer me any advice at all, I pointed my feet back toward my face, raised my arms over my head, joined my thumbs, breathed in pushing my lower back to the floor, sat up, grabbed my feet, and exhaled sharply twice. Eric praised. The class clapped. I grinned.

One of the most amazing things I've learned in my life, is that as alone as I felt in childhood and adolescence and young adulthood, I was not alone in that feeling. The world is full of people wearing invisibility cloaks, some wearing many layers of them. What I think I'm still learning is that when a person is willing to shine light on their invisibility and to risk exposing what is vulnerable and tender, the resulting glow reveals beauty beyond any previous definition.

Image from virtualdali.com

The Mystery of Enna Scott

2010-10-09T09:32:00.000-07:00

I love a good mystery. Starting with Nancy Drew, through Miss Marple and Rebecca, to Kinsey Millhone and Harry Bosch - the characters in those books were as real to me as the people or situations I was reading to escape. They became my friends and my models and my heroes.

So I'm thrilled to find a new mysterious character has entered my life.

It started with an e-mail from an address I didn't recognize, inviting me to visit a new blog. The name of the writer was intriguing: Enna Scott. The fact that Enna is a fictional character, created by a writer who prefers to allow her narrator to hold the stage alone, does nothing to diminish my interest in her, or my curiosity about her story.

Even though it took me years to get over the news that Carolyn Keene was not a real person, after time to reflect, that actually made Nancy seem even more real in some way. Her being was not dependent on one person alone, but was in fact so powerful she still finds ways to be alive in the world. Some characters, while not in a human body, simply need to be in the world.

I think Enna is one of those characters. She's young. She's searching for something she can't quite define. She's spunky.

The story is still new enough that you can catch up in one easy sitting. Then you'll have new installments to look forward to when you're hungry for story or missing Enna, much like the serialized stories of times past. I hope you'll give yourself the gift of Enna Scott. She's eager to be known.

Weaving Reality

2010-10-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

In the absence of information, I fill in the blanks, usually without much awareness that I've woven a reality out of nothing more than some impulses in my brain. Because of that, I often reach conclusions about people and situations that are wrong, and I never fail to be surprised at how one small brushstroke can change an entire picture. As is often the case, something will trigger a wondering for me, then life provides an abundance of answering.

The webbing was strung from one bush to another across at least twelve feet of open space. Its weaver hung at eye level, the sun illuminating the silk and her body so I saw in time to avoid destroying her work. At first she was alone, but after fussing with my camera, determined to get a shot of this arachnid in the air, I looked up to discover two spiders, face to face with each other.

I stood watching them for the longest time, expecting the smaller to end up in a tightly cocooned bundle to be hauled away for the larger spider's dinner. I assumed the web was the work of the larger because I'd seen her there first. I assumed the smaller was at a disadvantage and could not figure out why she stayed, or why she wasn't consumed. I assumed they had to be enemies.

But aside from some leg waving, the two spiders did nothing to confirm my assumptions. Neither gave ground or seemed to try to push the other into retreat. I finally moved on, finished my usual circuit with Toby, and when we came back, the web was empty. I was left to write my own ending. Which I did, trying out multiple scenarios, but the not really knowing still haunts, just a little.

The spider encounter still fresh in my mind, I was at Costco checking out a few days later. The young man at the register was not one I'd seen before and he seemed much more interested in talking to the guy who was doing the boxing than he was in customer relations. He didn't look up once, or greet me in any way. I studied him, deciding he was probably a snotty narcissistic hotshot who was mean to his mother, and thinking Costco made a huge mistake allowing him on a register.

He scanned my items with skilled efficiency, all the while keeping up a running banter with his friend. He stopped with the latest issue of People Magazine in his hands, and inspected the cover as though it held the secrets of the universe. I amped up my stare, willing him to notice. He finally looked up, made eye contact for the first time, and said, "That obvious, huh?" The grin on his face made me laugh out loud.

We ended up talking about fame, laughing over a headline that declared an actress's big comeback as an appearance on Dancing With the Stars. From there he said something about how today's movies just didn't tell stories in the same way they used to. How nothing is like the old black and white films, like his favorite, Of Mice and Men. As I agreed that it was one of the greatest, he went on to say he not only watched it a couple of times a year, he also reread the book every year.

A Steinbeck fan. A literary man. With a wicked sense of humor. Maybe the other things I decided he was earlier weren't wrong - those could still be true. They just weren't all of him. And the new information turned him from potential enemy into a connection that has the power to make me smile even now.

I don't get to know the ending to the Costco guy's story any more than I'll ever know what really happened with the spiders. What I do know, if I can remember to remember, is that people, situations, and stories are always more complex and more interesting than anything the threads of my imagination can possibly weave.

Indian Summer

2010-10-01T15:27:00.000-07:00

Restless. Edgy. Like a goose getting ready to migrate. The particular quality of light, and touch of sun that is both warm and cool, the urgent whisperings of a south wind. I feel longing, a yearning, for which there is no name. Wings push against the skin of my shoulder blades like new teeth breaking through, wanting to carry me up to join the wind in her travels.

This aching in my soul happens every year at this time, on days of unusual warmth and brilliant blue skies and air full of mysterious and unpredictable motion. I used to think I needed to be somewhere else, to be loved more, to take action about something - anything at all. Except I don't really want to be anywhere else, I am loved to overflowing, and if I've learned nothing else, I know action for the sake of movement is not going to ease the pressure for long.

One of my first childhood beliefs was that the wind came to me bearing words of wisdom and comfort and hope. Even though I could never hear the message in my head, my heart always seemed to understand exactly what was said. I remember standing in a field, little, my arms outstretched, wishing with every fiber of my being to be carried aloft and away. With eyes squeezed shut, face lifted skyward and the wind at my back I knew flying. I felt the companionable wing winds of my fellow citizens of the air. For long stretches of time, gravity released me.

Much like the spring and summer just past, those seasons of my life were dampened and cool and not ideal for flourishing growth. I approach sixty (in another year) knowing autumn has arrived, a time of glorious letting go and muted colors and surrender to the inevitable turning. Winter is next and with it death. Death, both the little dyings of loss and physical diminishment, and the big final transition, is no longer hidden in fresh green shoots or bright flashy blossoms.

I've spent a fair amount of time worrying that I found my way to healing too late. Like the cosmos I planted late in the season, waiting for the rains to let up, just blooming now. The plants are not the lush growth of summer, but the few flowers that have managed to bloom are fragrant and beautiful and perfect cosmos. It's easy to miss that in my disappointment at what isn't.

After days and days of cold rain and nights and nights of cold air, we've had a short stretch of perfect weather. I wander my trails with Toby, marveling at mushrooms and the cast of light through the branches. I go to bed at night with windows wide open and fall asleep under the warm breath of the wind billowing sheers into the room like angels' wings. I wake up in the morning and step outside into balmy air with the Big Dipper taking summer into the north and Orion bringing winter from the south.

In North Idaho where I grew up, we had true Indian Summer - unseasonable warm days late in the fall after a frost. In the Pacific Northwest where I live now, frost doesn't happen until very late and some years doesn't happen at all. But it's the surprise of summer's gifts at any time in autumn that makes my wing buds itchy. And my heart yearn. And this year for the very first time, my ears hear that mine is an Indian Summer life.

The dictionary says it perfectly: " [Indian summer] A pleasant, tranquil, or flourishing period occurring near the end of something." It's not too late. Flourishing is still possible. The wind is waiting and my wings are growing.

Making Lemonade

2010-09-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

When he first got out of the car I could see a difference. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, totally missed the new glasses I'd been gently (mostly) urging him to get for months, thinking maybe he'd lost weight.

"You look great." And I meant it. He couldn't return the compliment (I'd just returned from yoga), which left my words to fill the air with more meaning than if they'd merely been part of a social exchange.

I'd been looking forward to Mark's visit all month, knowing it would involve deep conversation, new spiritual insights and some great antiquing. Plus, because he's currently single, when he's here I get to spoil him a bit, to cook favorite foods, to provide space and sanctuary. And as our relationship has grown in the three years since he returned from prison, I've come to love my brother, and feel his love for me, in ways I didn't know were possible.

The last decade of his life has been difficult. Difficult isn't the right word, but I'm not sure what word to use to describe the devastation wrought by decisions he made borne from deeply buried wounds - decisions that cost him everything that mattered, and that sent him to prison for three years. Decisions he takes complete responsibility for, but that are not him. And the man he's become on the other side is someone with the power to heal a family, someone with a clear and certain connection to God, someone whose suffering has burned away all but light and truth.

In some ways the time since his release has been the most challenging of all. While he never ever complains or indulges in self-pity, the losses and restrictions are a reality that hurt. Freedom from the walls of prison did not restore his life to its former abundance. Yet he only looks forward. He's built a respectable life. He laughs. He loves.

I've marveled at his ability to be grateful and to allow God to work through him. He's often my evidence of a loving God - one who understands, forgives and creates wealth from poverty. And the news Mark brought with him last weekend, the reason for the looking great, took that evidence to a whole new level.

Once I showered and we got settled at my kitchen table with coffee, and apples, cheese and bread between us, he started pulling items from the box sitting on the bay window behind him. The first was a small cardboard cube, which I needed his help to open, and which turned out to be a mug. A pretty ordinary mug, as mugs go, except this one had writing on the side: Angelwings Antiques.

And I knew, without him saying a word, that I was witnessing another miracle. He directed me to look inside the mug, where I found business cards that confirmed what my heart had just told me. My brother Mark, who has lost so much, had claimed a lifelong dream. He is now an antique dealer.

Our mutual love of antiques and the treasure hunt aspect of antiquing has provided hours of pleasurable wanderings during our visits together. It was one such adventure that provided the miracle of my yellow vase last summer. Recently Mark went beyond the store level of shopping and began going to auctions and playing in eBay. I mentioned once that he should consider setting up a booth in an antique mall so he could fund his habit. As his big sister, I'd like to take credit for the nudge that was the catalyst for this dream-come-true. But I know, while I get to participate in the miracle, it wasn't my hand that guided him to this path.

Besides the mug and the revelation, Mark had brought several other gifts, treasures from his hunting chosen just for me. Several new pieces for my collection of yellow American pottery. A sweet snuff bottle with flowers and a dragonfly. "I saw the dragonfly and thought of you." That statement a huge gift in itself.

Then two boxes brought in from his car. "You have to choose one. You might hate me after this, because you have to choose." As I opened the first, I knew from the shape under the paper protection what I was about to uncover. Last summer Mark and I discovered lemonade sets - beautiful old pitchers and mugs designed specifically for the service of lemonade. Like wooden screen doors and the scent of lilacs, these porcelain vessels evoke all that's best about summer and a Pollyanna past that was slower, easier, gentler. They're also very hard to find, and usually far beyond the budget of a casual collector of memory-bearing artifacts.

So the fact that there were not one, but two sets in front of me, that in itself seemed something of a miracle. It turned out the choice was easy. One set had been more loved, and its colors were deeper and richer - the purples and sky blues that speak soaring and possibility to me always. While he was very careful to allow me a clear choice, I'm pretty sure Mark's preference was for the other set. The one that is his now, a visual reminder we'll share that lemonade will always be the outcome when a heart is clear and open and surrendered.

Value

2010-09-23T13:29:00.000-07:00

When I took this picture a few days ago, I was so enthralled with the gemstone glitter of waterdrops woven in spider webbing, I saw nothing but the jewel-encrusted quilt on the monitor of my camera. I took several shots from a variety of angles. Even then, it wasn't until viewing the photos on my computer that I saw the spider herself. Big as life. In every single picture.

It made me think how our brains settle on one thing at the expense of unlimited other possibilities. I have always had a strong inclination to assign value to, to define, to decide about things, and people, and situations. Good/bad. Pleasure/pain. Strong/weak. Pretty/ugly. Happy/sad. Almost always in opposing pairs - one or the other. Black. White.

Once I've defined a thing by whatever value seems to fit in the moment (usually the one that makes me right or safe or energized in some way), it's very difficult to see anything else. And almost impossible to allow new information in. I was so focused on the beauty of the raindrops, I missed entirely the wonder of the spider.

Assigning absolute value in relationship, ceasing to look beyond the first glimmer, often leaves me backed into an emotional corner with no easy way out.

For better or worse, Walt, whom I love more than anyone else is also the one whom I've judged harsher than anyone else. A habit of old survival defenses I'm trying hard to break. With some success.

We've been having a problem with mice in the pantry. The cats are no longer interested in playing Cat and Mouse, and so the rodents have become bold. First a few black specks, then the discovery of a bag of almonds nearly emptied, and before long the sound of rustling during the day and the surprise of a face to face meeting upon opening the pantry door. Enough was finally enough. I emptied the pantry of everything so Walt could plug the holes, denying the mice access, and life could go on. Except plugging the holes didn't work. Morning after morning we woke up to either a dead mouse or traps licked clean of their peanut butter lure. For weeks.

In the meantime the contents of the pantry, which is in my office, have been stacked on the floor of my office. For weeks.

My old habit would have been to be mad at Walt. For weeks, or longer.

And I would have justified the anger with a litany of his past behaviors that proved (to me, only to me) he wasn't trying hard enough. That anger would have blocked my view of the fact that this was happening at the beginning of the school year, the most intense and exhausting time for any teacher. He was already spending every spare minute trying to fix his recently broken tractor himself to save money and to get the lawns mowed before the fall rains made it impossible. I wouldn't have heard the unbelievable sacrifice he offered when he asked if I wanted him to do the new walls and shelves we've been talking about forever, since the pantry was empty. I wouldn't have been able to share the victory with him when, two nights ago, he found out how the mice were still finding their way into a completely sealed off space.

Because no value was assigned this time - Walt was not the bad guy - the situation was inconvenient but without emotional suffering (beyond my angst over killing the mice). The problem was solved in a way that means it will be unlikely we'll find mice in the pantry again. And best of all I'm seeing my husband in multiple beautiful shades of gray - neither black nor white.

A whole picture that includes both the living center and the magic webbing spun outward, ever-shifting to catch moisture, light and sustenance.