We were hit hard by a hurricane at the end of August and are still reeling from its effects. We lost the roof over the kitchen veranda which covers the major part of the house and we lost the roof over the veranda of the second floor and also the roof of our yellow Hummer - all a great big dent in Wally's World! The worst for me was the loss of my veranda - a kitchen garden of 18 years, my eco-playground of tropical plants, a collection of succulents, herbs, and tree-top creatures - iguanas and fly-through birds, dragonflies and butterflies. Without a roof it is not fit for plants or creatures. The sun is too, too hot. The whole house is vulnerable to the heat, the kitchen being the worst. As it is now, the heart of the home is an oven.

What are we to learn? That destruction clears the way for new, that beauty depends on order to rest on, that when the order is gone, another order evolves, that chaos is uncomfortable, temporary and necessary, that we too are in the way of being reordered. My spiritual exercise:  accept this wreck, inhabit it, create again. At the core of my home-maker-heart, make everything belong again. That longing fuels me even though I'm tired. 

Wally's list gets longer, not shorter and the bulk of the work falls on his shoulders. He's worked like a young bull his whole life and was looking forward to more ease. My heart aches to see him have to rebuild just as he was savoring what we had made. 

Resisting the tyranny of the urgent, we ask ourselves a simple question: what is the right action needed today? Do that thing well.

Life unfolds, into what we don't know, but we trust that the movement is always in the direction of more life. As we look up and out, from within and beyond, this is the pattern of love.

Beginning again...

 It's been 4 years since I've posted.  Life has been full of changes but we're still moving in "a long obedience in the same direction". Slow living has a lot to teach.  Commitment to a personal evolution that expands and carries me deeper is unknown territory. I don't know where I am going but I have said "yes". The ground of knowing is here. 

Wally and I are growing old together. It's been 18 years since we came here with our secret hopes and dreams. They have evolved too and now we marvel at this place we've made together. 

I want to get back to sharing our stories again. Part of my impulse is to hear what my heart has to say in response to these days, to adjust my bearings for what may lay ahead as the world changes irrevocably and rapidly, to pick up the thread of where we have come from and what we see on the horizon.

Wondering the Grand Canyon

This week I have literally stood on the edge of the world, my self just a miniscule particle-part of the vastness of time, force, beauty, death and life. Such a wonder, the Grand Canyon! It took 5 million years for what we see on the surface and 2 billion years of earth history at the bedrock. When you ponder time and the forces of change, eternity is evolution infinitum. 

When I last visited the Grand Canyon with Wally 10 years ago, his response was shocking! He stripped naked and stood on the edge with his arms open and his face lit from within.  The contrast of his uninhibited aliveness stirred a longing in me. It felt pure. I clearly did not share the same impulse, in fact, it was forgotten until I visited the Grand Canyon again with my sisters this week.  

Walking along the edge I felt waves of electric charges in my groin - fear, protective and contracted mixed with intensified awareness. It heightens the preciousness of being, of flesh, and also the fears of suffering pain that annihilates. It's a thrill - one that draws and repels like both sides of a magnet. 

My inner landscape of late has been more like a tropical jungle. It's easy to get wandered-off-lost and lose track of time and meaning in busy-ness. It's necessary to cut away at the overwhelming jungle-growth, to clear a way to see. I resist taking on more and instead shed the weight of stuff that slows me. I feel the need to get on with it before I'm too tired. What is it to pound the jungle to discover that the threshold I'm on is actually a gaping chasm! My toes grip the earth, vastness blasts my face! Ay, Dios!  - hold onto life by nail and toe and maybe fall? Or let go of fear and hope and fall into the Wonder and Mystery? What is it to die before dying and live this way? Isn't that the pattern in the Grand Canyon scheme of things? 

I'm feel the transforming forces all around me. Below my feet are miles of time and matter, invisible, intelligent, the ground of my being realized in new materiality, and above me a spaciousness as great and grand and unknowable. I make a turn and walk the rim in a new practice of living- an act of active surrender. 
 

Deep calls to deep - a psalm

Carve me deeply.
Make of me a canyon
where your life moves.
Let it be known
God was here,
is here still
in this scoured place,
purified for genesis,
seeding creation,
cycling through seasons,
making all things
new by ancient forces:
one a cataclysmic undoing 
the other
a steady, slow polishing.

Shape me by the tenacity of your constancy.
I cannot know yet
what glory a canyon can hold
but I rise to kiss the sky,
bow boughs to the waters edge,
sink roots to the drink from the source,
move in time
to an irresistible force
of alchemy
making of me 
an ark of God. 

Ava

Our little dog died during the night. Her name was Ava. We do not know the cause of her sudden death, possibly a poisonous bite. We tried everything to save her but she went quickly.

Yesterday she woke up with the exuberant energy of a girl on Christmas morning.  She played with the other larger dogs without fear. Although she was small, she thought she was big. For this reason we loved her, her confidence in the friendliness of the world gave her a  large and joyful presence.

Dogs can easily reveal things about us. How do we face the day? How easily do we go with the flow of what life brings us? They effortly teach us  to accept what it is to be fundamentally happy or just to simply be. A dog does not try to be beautiful, or intelligent or rich. A dog is simply happy to be in the present moment. Her only focus is what is in front of her nose, not in the past or in the future. She assumes that the world is generous and that everyone loves her. And why not!

When we choose to love, we do not know the whole story. We hope for more joy than sadness but there is always both. One must love bravely and when there is suffering pay it with gratitude. We do not have our little friend by our side but her love-lesson is always with us.

I want to be like Ava - small on the outside, big on the inside, eagerly ready to love again and again.

The ark...the inside story

I've been wondering about Noah's ark. It occurs to me that our home is an ark

of sorts during the tropical storms of the rainy seasons - Wally's ark! We head for the house when it rains. The dogs make a bee line, anxious to have an excuse to be inside. Even the varmints: mice, termites, ants and scorpions escape the wet wheedling their way inside. When there is a storm everything looks for shelter. Inside, we huddle together watching the light strobe, bracing for the thunder, feeling its rumble, listening to the wind and rain pound the windows and roof. Inside it is still and we wait. We sense the wild, destructive force of nature. Who knows how the storm will play?

God told Noah to bring all the animals into the ark - the opposites, male, female, wild, tame, clean, unclean, crawling, flying - and once inside they are locked in together. The differences between one human to another, between people and animals, between kinds of animals are mind boggling. So the ark becomes the place where humans and animals must do the messy work of living together.

It's not a children's story, and it's more than a story about a flood. It's a metaphor about living in relationships. That's the pattern I'm seeing in everything lately, that's why ecology feels so important. Learning to live locked in with differences, learning acceptance, being willing to change for the sake of survival...it's a veritable laboratory of relationships! 

Forgiveness will be necessary to make the connections. Fr. Richard Rohr says, "Forgiveness is the only way to free ourselves from the entrapment of the past. Nothing new happens without it."  He thinks that the first forgiveness we experience is to forgive reality itself for not meeting our needs. There are some things that can't be reconciled. We will have to find a way to live with them. It will mean holding together that gathering of contraries. Again, connection, the Divine Mystery that holds all things together - call it ark ecology. 

What happens in the ark doesn't stay in the ark. It seeds the earth.

Kind of interesting when you think about it: the ark was built to save the world. Maybe the work of living together with what is inside the ark, the relationships, is the real story of salvation.

after the ark, a rainbow...

Counter-culture

The first thing I managed to do after summer school was fall down the stairs. I bonked my head, back and elbow hard enough to be a gimp for a week. Not the form of rest I had in mind...

So much for my plans. Life happens and Who's to say that's not part of The Plan. I'm hinting of God of course. It seems that's the usual meeting place, when there's no control and no help in sight...."uh, hello, God (Higher Power, Universe, Life Force)  uh, it's me, uh, ...down here."

It doesn't have to be an accident. I hear it from all my friends, the insistent changes that come with aging.  The old bod doesn't get up and go like it used to. The cumulative effect of not enough exercise, or flossing, too many cocktails of diet coke and ibuprofen finally undercut the temple of God.  Or like yesterday, when the power was out for 10 hours and the temperature and humidity were 100 and big ants were cutting a highway from the ground to the 3rd story veranda where me and the dogs were panting and praying for a respite. We would have settled for a breeze but the wonder of those ants distracted us!

Seems like everyone I know is going through some version of unwelcome change.

Our society hasn't prepared us well for change or for the third part of age. We're being sold youth as the highest aim of desire. What an upside-down world! Please, let's be counter-culture!

As our bodies soften, why can't we accept that as a good thing? Years ago, a man that worked for me said that his sensation of being loved was getting smothered in big flabby arms and breasts because that's the way his mom, aunts and grandmothers were built. Our bodies are not ourselves. Our bodies are sacred to those who love us, to children, dogs and lovers, in ways we never think about because we see ourselves only with our own eyes -  and not just ourselves, but everything else too. We see the world as we see it, not as it truly is in it's magnificent, glorious LARGENESS.

Mimi is 16 - 112 dog years

This week I couldn't be productive, instead I was given the gift of being at home with my dogs on a scale that they crave. I used to think that ticks were a plague but now I see ticks as one-on-one time with each dog - connect as I dis-connect... ticks that is. Weird, heh? This small, humorous joy comes as joy often comes: in unexpected ways and places.

We need to slow down to experience the gratitude and wonder of being alive in this extraordinary world, to notice the minute and exquisite details in the ordinary. This is stuff that a retirement nest-egg can't give you.

I want to grow old together with my friends and savor these capstone years for what they are - a gift of age.


"Grow old with me, the best is yet to be..."

Counter-culture

School's end, begin again...

Today was the final day of summer school. Our theme was Ecology and Me! The week was full-isimo! The children were good, enthusiastic and sweet. This evening we had an awards ceremony with 100 children and their families attending. My heart felt full looking out at those eager faces, feeling the newness of connections that could last for years.

Lizzy, our yoga teacher, taught us a hand signal in class that encapsulates the week's teaching perfectly. For each of your hands put your index finger and thumb together (connection), now touch the points to form two eyes and touch the remaining fingers tip to tip (together). Turn it upside down and you have a heart (love).

Ecology is about how organisms are connected and it also deals with their environment. Isn't that the pattern of everything? Our micro and macro world is relational no matter the species. Another way to think about this symbolic gesture is see the world with the eyes of your heart and be amazed at the endless unfolding of connections. Maybe one day science will discover that all things are held together and have their very being and evolution by an invisible force. 

We could call that love.

For Love of the World

by Charlotte Tall Mountain

For the love of a tree

she went out on a limb.

For the love of the sea

she rocked the boat.

For the love of the earth

she dug deeper.

For the love of community,

she mended fences.

For the love of the stars,

she let her light shine.

For the love of spirit,

she nurtured her soul.

For the love of a good time,

she sowed seeds of happiness.

For the love of the goddess,

she drew down the moon.

For the love of nature,

she made compost.

For the love of a good meal,

she gave thanks.

For the love of family,

she reconciled differences.

For the love of creativity,

she entertained new possibilities.

For the love of her enemies,

she suspended judgement.

For the love of her self,

she acknowledged her worth.

And the world was richer for her.

Ecologia y yo!!!

There is a tradition here that the rainy season begins on June 24th. It's connected to a legend that the Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado prayed for rain on June 24, 1540, the feast day of St. John the Baptist, and after his prayers, it rained.

And so it was this year.  The rain began steadily and gently after dark. During the rainy season we have rain and thunder nearly every night until November.

Our farm is on the hill behind the smoke 

The morning after, the veranda was wet with what looked like coffee. That has never happened before but then we have never had an asphalt plant in our village. A renovation of the plaza and a new road along the coast is the new busy-ness overwhelming our town. A gray cloud of smoke hovers over the asphalt plant alongside the river and meanders up the valley to the foothills where our farm is, causing the air to reek of asphalt and tint the rain black.

I think it's driving the mosquitoes up the hills to our place too.

The dogs have forgotten what rain is after 7 months of dry days and nights. They are loathe to get their feet wet, clumping up on the porch in front of the fan. I'm hoping the rain will kill off the ticks which seem particularly bad this year. Recently, I noticed that there are tiny spiders around with shiny, blood-red balloon bodies, their webs dangling mummified ticks. I've decided to receive them as allies and accept their part in the balancing act on Slow Living Farm.

The plants respond gratefully to the rain, brightening, baptized and washed from months of dust. It is an eye-feast of greens. The datura I thought was a goner begins again as a young upstart. The twiggy poinsettia from Christmas is flush with new green leaves veined in red.

Prior to the rain, la chicharras, our cicadas, sing the rainsong. It is one of the sure sounds of the season. The frogs sing too and in the evening they come to the windows of the office to feed on insects. They sleep during the day under pillows and in pottery on the veranda. Walking at night with the flashlight, I am overwhelmed by the dense insect-life in the air, on the ground, in the trees - the night is vibrating with humming, buzzing, clicking and clacking.

The view into the orchard below is a strobing lightshow of fireflies.

Silent, with one eye open to the frogs and mice, a large boa rests wrapped in the bars of our window grill.

A young rooster has found his voice. His crow is the first 5 notes from the old sitcom "Get Smart". I hear it all day long as a playful tease, get smart!

Wally and I are are witnesses to the complex balance of our ecosystem on the farm. It's a relational world, one thing linked to another. In tropical Mexico it's more vivid and apparent than any place I've ever lived.

Summer pickins' from the farm 

I'm preparing to teach summer school in two weeks. The theme this year is Ecologia y yo! - (Ecology and me!)  Raising the awareness of digital-addicted kids to seeing themselves as connected and related to everything in this richly diverse universe, and to get them to see this as a pattern that informs everything will take a transformation of consciousness. 

I know, I know, sounds too, too...ambitious. But it occurs to me that a simple starting point is to learn how to see.

My mother gave my sisters and me the gift of deep seeing. Her enthusiasm for the wonders of nature in the tiniest details were our first exposure to pure joy. They were awakening moments. I believe that might be the magic key:  to be startled awake by beauty is transformative. For me it was the spark that ignited a blaze of love for the things of nature that has fueled my whole life. When you love something you naturally care, naturally want to protect, naturally strive to live up to your part in the relationship. This heart-driven ecology feels like it might hit the mark of a true-love marriage between the sciences of the cosmos and evolving human beings, or as we say on the farm: human beans.

I'm not a scientist or an educator. I'm a romantic - a believer that beauty, like love can save the world. It saved me!

Junko's birth-day

Circle Dance

My mother birthed us into this life

Her daughters birthed her into death.

Now she carries us again in her spirit-body,

her wisdom flowering out 

filling the spaces and gaps, closing the arc

begun as a tentative love

 now ripe, stretched,

this time in surrender to the light

the one-longing

hers, mine, ours - since the beginning.

Peace-able

Punkin, Spec, and Wally

Yesterday some men came and stole our mango crop. They penetrated the fence the furthest side from the house into the north orchard where a deer lived a protected life. We don't know what happened, whether they tried to catch the deer or taunted him, but the deer escaped from our refuge by ramming a hole through the wire mesh fence. The terrible force caused internal injuries. We discovered him in the yard at the gate, in shock, bleeding from the nose, his head and horns battered. Our young dog, Punkin was curled up next to him, clearly empathetic. 

This morning the deer was still there, but gone.

My emotions traveled the range of wanting to booby trap the perimeter of the farm to shooting at the feet of the violators, making them dance in terror. I wanted the perpetrators, yesterday, today and tomorrow, to bleed too. But then, in my journeying around hate I came to an impasse.

Blessed are the peacemakers. 

I'm too sad and riled to think of peacemakers as defeated martyrs. I don't want cruelty to make me cruel. I want to be a peace-able, human being to spite cruelty and stupidity. I want to become genuinely free so that in the midst of violation, loss, persecution, whatever - they cannot find me anywhere - whered'd she go?! Talk about liberation! Can a slow distillation of these terrors and turmoils of life turn my journey into one of transformation? 

The wabi sabi is that there is sense to what looks senseless but you have to look and keep looking. We can see the pattern everywhere and in everything in this material, earthly world and even in ourselves:  birth, life, death and then something else. I believe the pattern was incarnated to bring the reality home to us. "I am the resurrection and the life"- it's the same thing! The catalyst is love, the love remains and the love is the spark of what follows. The pattern will continue to unfold ever wider and deeper until, until, until everything is HOME.

One day our grown up deer-seed- huanacaxtle

Wally journeyed his grief by digging a generous, commodious hole. He positioned the deer-seed with a view to the ocean and we covered him with dirt. Wally's words were simple: Go back to the garden...  

He circled the place with rocks and a huge wreath of almond leaves, and planted a young huanacaxtle tree at it's heart. 

Peace -able

More scenes from my kitchen...

Lucy waiting on lovin in the oven...

It's a surprise to realize I haven't blogged in over a year... Just goes to show that sometimes the current is swift as we allow the river of life to carry us.




Today is baking day - the best day of the week for me. Tomorrow is market day. I put the satellite radio station on the music of Hildegard de Bingen and cross myself, asking the kitchen Virgin to bless these hands as I mix love into the flour and sugar. I'm not waxing poetic, I'm serious. The things I create come from the flow of God. I breathe in God and breathe out cake, or something for art's sake. What a magnificent economy that the Creator would perpetuate creative evolution by making us creators too...that's the flow I try to move in. How can it not be glorious when you throw in butter and chocolate - that feels like cheating.






It's Spring and the iguanas are wooing. The sounds on the roof are dramatic and exciting. Large bodies are scrambling and power-lunging themselves with nary a care of the slope, pitch and slickness of the roof. The sounds make the dogs howl and the chickens jump and squawk. This energy charges the kitchen.

Wooing dragon energy

Re-arrangement for love

When I came up the steps to my kitchen on the third story, an iguana dressed as a dragon flew from the landing to the veranda wall and climbed the coils to the top of my freezer. Oh great, I think as I ponder that enormous tail and the pottery carefully arranged to adorn its top. I get the stepladder and with my face inches from the amorous dragon I remove as many clay pots as possible.  Already, he has swept off a lid and a ceramic ball.  Stuff I'll save for a mosaic or mobile. Even the creatures are making stuff for art.



Where is St Francis when you need him - out mending a hole in the fence to keep the new chicks from becoming food.

All souls and stuff

An altar in our kitchen

All Souls Day, the Day of the Dead has passed. We drank, ate, laughed and cried with the company of all souls. The cemetery was filled was a cacophony of people, children, dogs, boom boxes and roving musicians. Graves were piled high with flowers and tables were laden with food and drink, braziers wafting the smoke of roasting meat. In the late afternoon, mass was celebrated. People gathered to sit on graves and to stand in groups awaiting the part where their beloved's name would be spoken. For many of the elders, the names read out loud are as familiar as the backs of their hands. Here, everyone knows one another for a lifetime. There is a complex interconnection of marriages and relationships so that the corporate memory is exponentially broad, wide and deep.



When people stop to linger in memories the dead return to us in their essence. They rise again in a tender, more merciful re-collection. Death awakens us, hopefully, to live like everything we do and say matters, that the ripples of our lives continue forward in time like the ripples of the dead that move through us. We are imperfectly-holy saints abiding alongside those who have gone before us. When we think we are separate there can be no healing.



I

Nest and nester...

Lucy has a nose for chick-care

My husband, Wally's rough hands cup a chick.  The rainy season is a harsh environment for the little ones. He has brought the hatchling for me to keep warm and sheltered, to give her a chance of surviving this setback. We've done this countless times. Sometimes I put the little life in the front of my shirt in the space between my breasts and move about doing my chores as the little chick sleeps as if under a wing of different sorts. Sometimes I make a nest in the pocket of my apron with a torn piece of t-shirt to catch droppings - a chick diaper. 

The noise of the chicken yard is our soundscape. At times the chick I'm carrying responds to its sounds. Maybe she hears her mother's cluck or the cheep-cheep (pio-pio in Spanish) of her siblings. It's a good sign. Her low trilling is the sound of content like a baby's gurgle or the purring of a cat. She feels safe. 
I am a nest.

Caring for her is not just good for the chick, it's good for me too. I do things more slowly and finally sit to marvel for 20 minutes at the perfect markings on her wings and back, a collection of finest feathers that makes a unity of design in a rich array of browns accented with ink black calligraphy. If only I could decipher its message. Who says brown is drab? Brown becomes more than a color but an experience of velvet-soft darkness.  Brown becomes worthy of a long study into weightless, ephemeral, featherness. 

Are we any less a wonder? 

How much do we miss by hurrying?

Contemplative-worshiper-chick of the chicken species

My hands today are good for chick care and little else. Stung by hornets, my hands are like two inflated gloves on the ends of my arms. It's a reprieve from my chores, I can take ease without guilt. Like the chick, I let the full weight of my being rest in the shelter of this day, this place. It can be a gift to be small and helpless. I can still multi-task as nest and chick-care-giver, a contemplative-worshiper-chick of the human species.

Body theology...

Capable Flesh

The tender flesh itself

will be found one day

- quite surprisingly - 

to be capable of receiving,

and yes, full

capable of embracing

the searing energies of God.

Go figure. Fear not.

For even at its beginning

the humble clay received

God's art, whereby

one part became the eye,

another the ear, and yet

another this impetuous hand.

Therefore, the flesh

is not to be excluded

from the wisdom and the power

that now and ever animates

all things.  His life-giving

agency is made perfect,

we are told, in weakness -

made perfect in the flesh.

 - St. Irenaeus

adapted and translated by Scott Cairns

This message is brought to you by your body.  Your sensory system is calling for a sound check...can you hear this or are you ignoring your body's attempts at communication? 

We know the things you put into your ears and your brain and what comes out of your mouth. The hope is for a dependable connection from your head to your heart - that's why we make this appeal. 

Pay attention to your body.  It's talking to you.

Listening is something everyone assumes they already do, but just because you have two ears doesn't mean you hear.

You say that all things are connected and are a part of a great wholeness of one, that the universe with all its multiplicity is ultimately one essential reality. Do you really believe that? Your very own body is integral within that wonder-world universe. You have a part to play.  

It's basic.  When you ignore the messages of the body eventually things go a wry, disorder ensues and can spread faster than repair! You become lost in feeling bad. It can result in a paralysis, like an impassive response to the news of climate change, you do nothing.

This is not simple aging, and please, stop bemoaning it.  Of course there's wear and tear that comes with the years, but in fact, a large part is due to the natural consequences of regular neglect over decades.  To make things worse, you speak with such impatience of your body, the body that has served you faithfully and remarkably well.
  
This probably comes as a shock to your good opinion of yourself.  You think yourself a peace-maker but you act like a slave-driver to the body, making demands, never listening.  

It's time to make peace with your body.  This body wants to enlighten your soul, be a God-house, save your life for heaven's sake!

Be receptive. You already have everything you need. Listen to your body with your breath, not your ears. Breath is the basis of language and creation. In the beginning, God spoke the world into existence and breathed life into creation. Nature knows what to do. There is innate wisdom in every cell. It's a dynamic system! The maps of that wondrous circuitry are marvels of art. 

Minister, like a priestess or a doctor, loving intentions with your powerful, creative, healing imagination. That's what it's there for - it's part of the design. Attend the aches and pains with an intuitive probing. Initiate healing with an empathetic hand over the body's weakness. Repair is a reflexive response of each cell. Your body will know what to do. Be healer and patient, for who knows your body like you?

Practice this each day and you will begin to feel like your standing on the bright, red X of life again. Be thankful for all your parts and their service.  It's a body wonderland of love.  Give thanks to the kidneys and bladder, thanks to the stomach and intestines, thanks to the shoulders and wrists, hands and fingers, knees and toes.  

Peace.

The joy of gentle motion

My mother's passion was ballet.  She began taking lessons when I was a teenager. She was a "natural". Her body and soul responded to music like a sea anemone in a tidal pool.  The discipline of ballet was the firm bed of sand on which her art rested, turning the things she felt into poetry of motion.  

Many times, when I visited her in Washington DC and later in Tucson, I accompanied her to ballet classes. I loved watching her. For more than 40 years she attended classes multiple times a week. Even at the bar, she warmed up with a goal to perfection.  She approached each class as a serious student. I understand now how she set perfection as her goal.  She was straining to gain the skill that matched her art and depth of feeling.  She was that way about many things. Perfected skill was the medium that expressed what she could not say with words.  Everyone could see that Junko had "it". It defied age or the limitations of her body.  It was innate grace - the pale, pink petal drifting to the ground, the effortless lift of the butterfly's glide, the sea anemone in concert with microscopic algae.  Her impulse was as uninhibited as any unself-conscious creature of nature.

Once while sitting in a restaurant with friends in Kyoto, my mother wowed us with a spontaneous, joyful dance of classical ballet.  Who knew that the sweet joy of that moment with friends could be so beautifully embodied.

On her 90th birthday, Wally sent a link to Earth, Wind and Fire performing "Woogie Wonderland".  Mom and everyone jumped up to dance, spun and flung into motion by the force of celebration and joy.  It wasn't ballet...

Acupuncturist and friend, Larry, would come weekly to give her a treatment - mostly he came to hang out and talk with my mother. One visit, they danced together, mom in bed on oxygen and Larry sitting in a chair across from her. They danced with their upper bodies to a music they alone could sense.  It wasn't sound that moved them, it was feeling. I believe it was healing for both of them because I too could feel something of what they shared soothing me.

In my mother's last week she had a dream.  She wanted to thank hospice for their goodness and proposed to teach people in hospice care "the joy of gentle motion".  In her dream, she taught people to move their arms, hands, head, eyes, in whatever capacity they could, to move gently to music. She believed this would help them to feel better.  The next morning when hospice came, she excitedly asked if she could teach the joy of gentle motion to their patients.  She was told that most people in hospice were in no shape to respond to her teaching, much less move.  So, she asked if she could teach the nurses and caregivers...they just smiled. Mom seemed stunned.  It hadn't occurred to her that there was a point of no dance. I could see that death was becoming real.

 Steve Baranovics, and Junko at 80 
The Washington School of Ballet

Not everyone has clarity, as my mother did, about what moves them passionately.  I believe everyone has the capacity for it, which makes me think that passion can be cultivated.  My mother was in the middle of her life when, with minuscule joy and an ocean of longing, she began. Her pursuit of ballet grew into something that eventually spiraled and propelled her up and out of herself into a much grander movement, then slowing gently, manifesting in dreams until it was simply a final bow. 

I cannot imagine that the dance ends there. All movement is energy and energy doesn't die.  I'm still in the orbit of my mother's dance. I'm following it's motion through a door into another realm of reality where there is more to know and learn, where death is closer but without fear and there is more joy to discover. 

Take a moment to be infected by Junko's joy. Clink on the link below and dance, dance, dance...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=god7hAPv8f0

Threshold of a journey...

My mother's death was a threshold and now grief is ancient journey to something new (?)  I don't know.  I'm in a state of grace, not knowing, just being, not doing. It's not what I expected and that's it exactly!  I am embraced by mystery, a mystery which is at the heart of everything. 

Pausing on a threshold...

It's good to be dry when the rain is coming down hard.  The sound of rumbling in the distance, the closeness of the rain on the windows, the leaves of the vines shimmering-shiny against the glass. Everyday the dark clouds build to a crescendo over the mountains and the ocean.  It's a dramatic visual development, the greens darken and intensify, the hills become antique-purple and the clouds leaden blue-silver - a visual symphony of undulating value and contrast. We've all seen those time-lapsed videos but when I rest slow in the afternoon I find that the storm's movement lulls me into productive contemplation. 

The contrast of the rainy season drama and the coziness of home especially resonate in me.  It seems  I've been away a long time.  My mother died in June. After a few years of focusing on my mother through the end of her life  I've come home with her ashes and belongings to merge them with my things.  It has evoked much thinking about our relationship - in what ways we were alike and how we were worlds apart.  Now our belongings are juxtaposed into still lifes in every room, little vignettes that are a tiny spotlight on our story. In this new, harmonious order I can carry on with my mother. I can also look up and out ahead and know that I'm on another threshold.  

It turns out that caring for my mother was not an inconvenient interruption of my life, it was life, an important work for myself and my family.  It enriched me in ways I didn't imagine.  I had hoped in her last days for a deeper connection and it didn't happen the way that I had hoped, but it's not over. Death is not the end I thought. Connections hold and are still in the making.   

Three weeks after my mother died, Wally had a near-fatal accident.  He was testing the voltage on the main transformer and was shocked.  Before losing consciousness he saw the proverbial tunnel of light.  He has no memory of falling 20 feet.   It took me 2 minutes once I heard the explosion to find him. He was on his back staring at the sky, speaking softly of how beautiful it was. He said he felt ok.  I knew he couldn't be. After a few minutes he began to feel aching in his bones, swelling in his head.  He was burned in a few places and one hand was black with a small crater burned into one finger.  In a few days he recovered and was fine, but not the same. He was peaceful, sweeter. To try to explain what happened is to leave out the sheer wonder of it.  The shock stopped his heart and the impact of the fall onto his back started it again.  It was a perfect storm, but for us as a couple it was a miracle on par with the annunciation, so powerful its effect on us. Wally says he feels as if God hit his reset button... And what gets reset in Wally is a reset for me. 

It is a privilege to share the whole of life with someone, especially to the end. There's a rare and open vulnerability especially at the end or at the near-end. It can be a tangle of good and bad. I use those terms without judgement. To take in the full picture there's always a complex mix. It's genuine in its wholeness, that's what's important, and to judge it by a moment is to miss the key to the hidden treasure of understanding.  I realize that I knew too little of my mom and she knew too little of me. Ninety years are not enough.  Humans are complex, one-of-a-kind miracles even on the most ordinary day.  It's the mystery that compels me to make art, to be art, to love in wonder.  I have a stake in learning from my mother. The challenge to meet her with acceptance and love goes for myself and others too. We all have a heritage of gifts and deprivations, but they're both gifts. This was what I see as I look back after the stresses of these recent months.   There's gold in the gleaning.