Sometimes a Cold is Just a Cold

Now and then my process painting teacher used to say to us sometimes a cold is just a cold. We were a group of women who loved to find symbolism and/or meaning in everything, which she was into also~especially when it came to things that showed up unexpectedly in our paintings~but she also liked to point out that sometimes, every now and then, something might actually mean nothing, i.e., sometimes a cold is just a cold.

In the past couple of weeks, I've had three close encounters with some sort of wader bird most likely either a heron or a great egret, both belonging to the same bird family. Now in the world of everything has meaning, when something in nature shows up three times in a relatively short period of time, it is very deserving of close attention. My first encounter was a gorgeous pair of large white wader birds that took off and flew low directly over my windshield startling me with their sudden appearance, their grace, and beauty. The next was a few days later when I rounded a curve on a small country road I take to avoid traffic and there, quite unexpectedly was a tall, elegant white wader bird standing all alone on the side of the road. The third one happened a few days ago when I was out for my early morning walk, taking pictures of the beautiful clouds and suddenly this one flew into the frame. It's not that seeing these birds is unusual. I'm accustomed to seeing herons and/or egrets often when I walk by a creek nearby. But these were unusual and unexpected sightings and so that morning I went home and looked up heron/egret medicine and found welcome words like calm, grace, solitude, patience, independence, resourcefulness, self-determination, and self-reliance. 

As I've mentioned before, I'm in the middle of a five week online course about writing your heart's desires into manifestation. Too late I found out that the writing part is journaling. (Hello... What did I think it was going to be?!) And more specifically, a lot, but not all of the writing is morning pages. My dislike of journaling is surpassed only by my disdain for morning pages (so named by creativity maven Julia Cameron, morning pages are three large notebook pages handwritten~a big fat brain dump~first thing every morning).

Unlike my oldest daughter who has compulsively journaled since she was ten years old (I feel sad today... my little ten-year old would write, unbeknownst to me until recently when she came across some old journals and shared with me, oh my aching heart), I've only sustained journaling for one period of my life, the first few years of my first therapy when scribbling all that had been locked up inside for so long felt like the only thing that kept me sane. Since then I've tried countless times to sustain some sort of journaling practice only to fail time and time again.

From Cameron's "morning pages" to Natalie Goldberg's "first thoughts," to Kim Klassen, my current course facilitator's insistence that journaling is what has made the difference in her own dreams manifesting, to my daughter practically yelling at me to just go journal for god's sake, there is insistence out there that stream of consciousness writing is not just a great thing, but the only thing, The one thing that will help you with basically anything you need help with. Everywhere I turn, it's the dogmatic end-all-be-all, it's the bees knees, it's the thing you simply must do no matter what.

So I tried again. Picked one of many mostly empty notebooks from my shelf, opened it, and wrote. Once. It was like pulling teeth.

Then, the day before the third bird sighting, I had a relatively big epiphany: What if it's just not for everyone? What if because it works so well for some people, they mistakenly assume it's the right thing for everyone but it's not? For many this might seem like a no-brainer, but I've become aware lately of how heavily influenced I am by certain people in certain circumstances claiming to know the truth. But what if, I mean really, what if it's just not for me? And, not just that, but I won't come to any irrevocable harm by not making it a part of my daily rituals; and also, my dreams can still come true!

Self-determination. Self-reliance. Thank you, herons/egrets.

Early yesterday morning I was trying to replace a broken glass drawer pull when the power screw driver caused one side of it to spin around forcefully and dig into two of my fingers. Three hours later I left urgent care with three stitches and a big bandage on the index finger of my left hand, my dominant hand, and a second cut on my middle finger that is bandaged but did not need stitches. Now writing by hand (and mostly by computer but I can wing it enough on the computer) isn't even an option, and won't be for another ten days to two weeks, basically the rest of the course.

I can't help but wonder... is it a sign or, is it just an ironically well-timed cut and some stitches?

Another Moon

Not last night's moon but a full moon I will never forget.
Setting over Molokai's west side as the sun rose in the east.
One of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.

There are so many things that I could be writing about right now, but for the life of me, no matter how many hours I sit at this computer, not one of them has come to fruition.

I wanted to write that I got a completely unexpected phone call last week about an upcoming 50th high school reunion. That it was really wonderful to talk to the woman on the other end of the phone that I had been friends with in elementary school but whose friendship hadn't followed us to middle school and high school. And that when she wondered aloud why that might have been, the curtains were suddenly pulled back on my life back then; things I've never seen about the disconnect between my home life and my school life; the secret shame and isolation standing there naked in the light.

I wanted to write that a week ago yesterday I spent at least five or six hours happy for no reason. And how it was so patently obvious in its unusual-ness that it astonished me. It was like I was standing outside myself marveling at this oh so rare happening, mouth agape, as though watching a once a century total eclipse. That it didn't even dawn on me until days later that this may have something to do with being in the process of focusing on my heart's desire, which is, as I wrote a couple of posts ago, to wake up each morning with purpose, eager and excited to get up and see what wants to be created that day.

But then by the next day, the confusion settled like thick fog back in around me. And with it the constant loop of hope and hopelessness that springs from the multiple facets that make us who we are: both form and not form, pure light and also physical bodies. From the light springs this heart's desire; the profound yearning to live with excitement and creativity; in essence, to live fully. Then there is this body, my body, that lives so much of the time with pain and exhaustion and limitation. And my brain, with pathways worn in deeply challenging ways by life and experience and trauma, in a tizzy trying to figure out how this all might even be possible; how these twain shall meet; as if it were up to it in the first place.

Then last night's full moon. Big and bold, making me think about the time that I fell in love under another moon. Gigantic and swollen and bright yellow, it was just revealing itself over the hills when I picked a new friend up from the BART station the day after Thanksgiving. It lit the way as we wound through the canyon, parked, and walked onto the property where Amma, India's hugging saint's ashram is. Later, it was high overhead as we sat side by side, shoulders and thighs touching, heady music and chanting and incense wafting out from the temple into the night air as he told me his remarkable, heart wrenching story. But even before that, before that night, before he told me about being gay and HIV positive and isolated and terrified as a young man twenty-some years before that, being told he would be dead within six months, watching friend after friend die, telling no one, not even his mother, in the end not developing AIDS; even before that, from the first time he walked into a class I was taking, bringing with him a cloud of fresh early summer air, and sat down opposite me in the circle, I was a goner. That night, that moon, that story; those shoulders and thighs and startling blue eyes, just cemented it.

A year and two months later~ten years ago this year~I left my marriage. Not for him, obviously, but for me. Because in my marriage I felt as though I was suffocating and all I wanted, even if I couldn't have Matthew, was to breathe again; though mostly, profoundly, what I longed for was to feel fully alive again, to have the dying embers of my heart stirred and burst wildly back into flame~which I then knew, after so many arid years, was possible.

And here we are again.

Except that last week~mysteriously~ I was happy for no reason.

So Many Doors!

First rays of morning light on these fantastic landscape roses

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.
~Germaine Greer

Looking back over some of what's been written here in the last ten years, I am unpleasantly surprised at how many of the same issues seem to remain; body pain, soul pain, and the perennial unfulfilled dreams.

There's a wise Japanese philosophy about resilience: you fall down seven times, you get up eight. Even if you fall down one thousand times, you still get up. It's safe to say that in these last ten years there has been a lot of falling down and getting back up.

But there's also been a lot of not getting back up. For long periods of time. No choice at all but to let go into what is and let life have her way. There's wisdom here, too. The wisdom of the feminine, of the yin energy; of surrender and laying yourself on the great lap of Whomever it is you name and then just being; resting in the dark and fertile quiet, giving life time and space to create itself anew. The transformative power of the archetypal descent, the inner sojourn, which is quite often a fundamental part of the spiritual journey for women. It's gifts can be plentiful and deep; mystical and soul-filled, heart wrenching and opening.

Oh, the longing this morning. Walking at sunrise, rounding a bend and there, along a great row of landscape roses were two bushes right in the middle set aflame by the light. That started it. Then I pick up Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves looking for a particular quote and I am instantly transported back~I can feel it in my body~to a time when I first met this sacred scripture and through it, the sweet reunion with my own wild and sacred woman self, and how this, too, set my world on fire.

I am tired of the back and forth, the up and down, the wake and then sleep and then wake and then sleep. I am torn between my trust in the intelligence of life to deliver me where I need to be and trying to force it; force my heart's desire, my dreams into being, paying good money for a course that I am now not at all sure is the right thing for me. I do this time and again, forgetting that it's so much more complicated when there is serious trauma that paints everything, when the body aches all over and is exhausted, the spirit just trying to survive; when I can't quite find and then grasp for any length of time the light, the fire.

Oh, but the roses. And the words. I've had to buy a new copy of the Wolves book because my old one is completely worn, a la Velveteen Rabbit style. But the new one doesn't have all of my underlinings and scribblings and love  woven into its pages so I haul the old one off the shelf and I fall into it like I would the arms of a cherished old friend, every cell remembering our precious time together. It takes me half an hour, holding loose pages in, trying not to break it more, but finally I find it.

If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. 

If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. 

If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door. 

Illness, Wellness, Hawaii, and Birdsong

This is a picture from Kauai's north shore, the view from where I was staying when my oldest daughter became ill last September and I had to leave after only two and a half days.

But this is actually a story about birds-- well, birds and illness and wellness and how deeply touching life in its most raw forms can be.

For weeks after my unplanned whirlwind return home, when I was at the ER, at doctor's offices and labs, taking care of her, I very often didn't know where I was. It was like somewhere over the Pacific on the rushed flight home I had slipped through an invisible crack in space and time; in the middle of the fear and unknown and stress and cold clinical smells, I could still see Hawaii. I could still feel her. I could smell her. Every part of her that I love with my whole heart; her surf, her tropical winds, her flora, her sand beneath my feet, my body held in her deep, warm ocean, all still palpable.

But what I remember most, what I missed the most in those first few weeks, was the birdsong. The absolute cacophony, the riotous near magical symphony that is those island birds beginning at dawn and into the early morning hours. If I close my eyes and am really quiet, I can hear it still, like a jukebox of melodies lodged inside my being.

Fast forward almost nine months. My daughter is still ill, with what is now believed to be chronic Lyme disease, which can be difficult to diagnose but that explains all of her many, weird, random symptoms, and the fact that her life as she knew it has been obliterated. She has been catapulted into her own healing journey and I am awed daily by how she is handling the wholly unknown of it all.

Which brings me back to birds. One morning, driving her to an appointment, tears stream down both of our faces as she reads me a story from a book called Radical Remissions about a man who had a spontaneous remission from "terminal" cancer that had to do with dawn and trees and photosynthesis, and YES, birds. It's a spectacular story where he noticed that birds began to sing at the same time each morning relative to the sunrise, exactly forty-two minutes before, and in researching, he learned that the birds were singing in response to the trees releasing oxygen at the first rays of light. He began to spend those forty-two minutes outside each and every morning, day in and day out, oxygen and birds, birds and oxygen, and months later, when he had a scheduled scan, his cancer was gone.

I am so blown away by this story. Then it hits me. She, my daughter, cannot take a walk. She can barely walk between her bedroom and the kitchen, and then needs to lay down to recover. But I can. Not only that, but I am awake, always, before sunrise. I can walk for both of us. So I begin walking before and as the sun rises. I walk beside the redwoods and the birch, sometimes with the crescent moon peeking between their tops, beneath the oak trees and willows and liquid amber that line and dot the spaces where I live and I listen to the beautiful birdsong. Yes, it does pale in comparison to the absolute host of birds where I was staying on Kauai but what I hear here, while tamer, is sweet and elegant and lovely; to even compare does it all a serious disservice. One bird in particular, the common purple finch, has captured my attention. Small birds, they place themselves at the highest points possible, the tops of all the tall chimneys, the highest little twig on the ornamentals and they sing their hearts out, and because they are oriented in a circle around the large grassy area near my home, it is like a concert in the round and it is enchanting.

Birds and birdsong and trees and how all of nature is such a complex mystery moves me intensely. Recently I learned another part of the story. Yes, the birds begin to sing in response to the oxygen the trees release at the very first light, and also, the frequency of the birdsong creates a vibration in the leaves of the trees which causes its stomata (breathing holes) to open more fully to receive moisture and nutrients. Full miraculous circle.

Wow. Not being at all scientifically minded, I can't say this for certain, but it does strike me that perhaps not only the leaves on trees respond to the vibrations of birdsong, but also, the cells of animals, including us, and that is why being out in the oxygenated air and the vibration of the birdsong is so invigorating. That maybe this was in fact part of what helped heal the man in the story.

Now we come full circle - again - as it reminds me of a wonderful book I once read about our cells (Secrets of Your Cells, Sondra Barret, PhD) and how our cells have strings, like a violin or a cello, and our cells love it when their strings vibrate. It is their destiny. It is what keeps them healthy and thriving. And what makes them vibrate are things like movement and music and dance and singing and chanting; and maybe - most likely even - birdsong.