Intention (number one)

I will make time for breaks today.

I will stare out the window and attend to plants and flowers.

I will go to yoga

I will do a run at the gym, or run in the desert, or just move my body in lots of creative ways.

I will take care of me before the needs of others.

So it is.

2014-08-26

The Amazon tarot

I drew three tarot cards before bed last night.
Asked them what I should do about us.
I got Ixtara, Kali, and Kwan Yin.
Ixtara told me that I was a healer and that I should
continue my practice
something was healed in me or someone else
by my immediate past situation.

Well, yes.

Kali said that "it's time to move on."
Couldn't get much clearer.

Kwan Yin said I should have
compassion for myself, and others,
for the mistakes of the past,
and keep compassion as I move into the future.

I think of surrender
Look across the vast white expanse of my bed
and think of what it feels like to sleep alone.
I thought I would hate it but it feels better.
I'm able to stretch out and pull the covers around me
and wear my lavender eye-pillow and relax.
I am alone anyway.
Why can't I cut the cord?

My soft white nightgown is my flag-
I wave it,
furiously.

Try not to think of the mid-term I have to take today
Think instead of the price of rocks-
Which is to be the name of my novel, if I ever finish it.
I realized the other day that I need to write it now
("She has a book inside her and it needs to get out")
not wait until conditions are perfect
because they never will be
but these words will keep bubbling inside me
creating unsafe conditions
if I don't put them down on the pavement and
let the cars roll over them, smoothing them into
something. If not perfect, at least born.

This thing does not have to be born already
fully grown, it just needs to be allowed to be
borne into existence. Labored
and pushed out of me.

What if I was fired and given six months severance
and could just sit and write my novel?
What if I could focus on nothing but writing and
the ocean, being alone to think my words out
instead of having to jot them on napkins while
passing between classes
and work and picking up the kids from school,
transporting them to football practice
and paying for college?
What if I just dropped out of school again,
to 'become a writer?'

What if I just allowed myself to write it
into the cracks between all of the rest of
the stuff? What if it was getting written right now?

Asleep to Dream

Woke with the taste of blood on my tongue
cat scratching on the screen
Don't remember my dreams, but I keep thinking of
the one I had
where I asked my doctor for a prescription
to break up with you.
Reach for the two black rocks I sleep with now, 
next to my pillow,
place one in each palm
Then carefully the larger one
on my belly, just below my navel
and the smaller one in the depression
where my ribs meet.
You would know this is called the xyphiod process.
Hands over rocks, I think of Adam's rib,
of Eve's sacrifice
I think of surrender--
what would it feel like to surrender?

Cat scratches glass 
and flops across my pillow
It's 5:00 am.
The light from my son's room shines 3 stripes on the hallway wall
like steps leading up,
I should have switched that off last night. 
Going to bed each night by 7 pm
I've adopted the sleep pattern of a toddler.
Continuously think of how this feels like I am birthing something. 

(written on 03-16-2014)

Woke up to think that I was young, with an aching

Woke up to think that I was Young, with an Aching in my Heart (9/11/14) Wake up feeling like I am being tumbled in a box of rocks or one of those red rock polishers that we had when we were kids putting the jagged stones in- supposedly so that they would come out all shiny and smooth a few days later maybe that is the problem I expected to be tumbled for a few days or years but not decades
I want to be smooth
but I'm realizing maybe it is better to have some edges

The jagged parts are where we grow. “What if it was easy” is a refrain I use a lot nowadays What if it was easy? I say to myself as I struggle to get through another reading assignment or a fight with my girlfriend or myself What if it was easy pops into my head as often as a Christian teen says “What Would Jesus Do?" And then I understand, suddenly, it’s the same thing. Friends of mine say “What would love do?” And it’s simple. Love would let it be easy. Love would take a deep breath and close the books and take a break Love would check Facebook or take her dog to the park and run around for a few hours. Love would drive to the river and play, letting the water sparkle off her eyes like fairies, and letting the sun soak into her soft skin, sand at her back looking up into the vast sky watching birds float over and let it be easy. II Saw a gravestone with my father today at the cemetery. Words worn away from the years but on the bottom I read the phrase "Christ is in all, All is Christ." I am not religious, but I know this to be the same meaning that I wrote before, love, Christ, all is love. All is Christ. In the service for my grandmother the priest spoke about how she was at peace during her final days because she had love. And he said that was her legacy. Love, love, love. My dear friend Laurie signs all of her letters this way, three loves. All is love. I've spent this trip with my sister and we had such a time. She held my hand during the funeral. Dad's cousin, a male relative around my father's age held my hand and cried, and I wrapped my arm around him even though we had never met before the wake. My dad was so proud that he had not cried yet. I found solace in my dad's cousin, when my dad could not comfort me in the way that I needed. 
I was comforted in the way that this stranger—
my second cousin— reached out his hand to me
after he took the Eucharist. That I could also offer him solace gave me a feeling of peace and rightness in the world. Although my dad won't be the one to give me that feeling of comfort and love, I know that I can find it in other humans, and in my connection to my god. III A whole soccer team got on the plane when we were boarding in Newark. My sister joked that she wanted one of them to sit between us. None did. But the one across the aisle from me is watching his soccer game on his laptop and crossing himself, taking notes about plays as I write this. I found so much comfort in the Catholic mass for grandma although I am not Catholic. It all comes down to love.

Untitled, for Cile

Grief, in all its woolly and animal ways

Is such a disgusting process.

You have to throw up your own soul. Let it be chewed and then spit back out.

You have to roll it up in a big black ball of tar and throw it in a fire

And then rapidly

Force yourself not to reach your hand into the fire, which never works.

Always we reach in, thinking that there might be

Something else useful for us

If only we could grab it without getting singed.

Grandmother's Passing

Passage premonition peace community struggle acceptance

Peace

These are the worlds I am sitting with these mornings

Praying

Not pursuing

Allowing acceptance love mothering maternal

Mother's love

Grandmother's life gratitude

Peace

Transition

A life

97, a number

A century

Almost

A life

mattered, measured in years

Measured in gratitude,

measured in children nurtured

Measured in memories

A waiter with a formal suit, towel draped over arm, takes your order

A child, wide-eyed, visiting the big city for the first time

Attends a Broadway show

A mother tells the story

A daughter records it on her iPhone

A sister listens in her ear phones, quivers

wonders

How do you measure this? What was she trying to tell us

Or is it just the misfirings of an old woman's addled brain?

Aunt texts me that now she's hallucinating, speaking of things rolling,

I try to think of what she is seeing, hills? The earth and the planets? Years rolling on,

my mind knows that brain cannot conceive of what she sees now

Only hands to hold and hearts to tenderly wrap with love in that tattered blue Afghan,

The soft one that she made me when I was born.

I will wrap her up now and hold her through this

Wishing for peace in her journey across the veil.