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Love is the answer

June 26, 2015

I’m not religious, and I hope I don’t offend anyone by saying what I believe. I believe in a higher power. I believe that higher power is manifested most purely in love. I don’t mean only romantic love, though that is one form.

In our culture, that kind of love is held up as a commodity or a prize. There are even television shows about finding love by a process that looks like an extended series of job interviews, with marriage as a prize for the winner.

No. I mean the kind of love that doesn’t judge or control. It is that feeling that shoots through you when you hold someone you care about, it is that feeling you find when you journey through the dark and discover you never were really alone. It is about faith in the better part of the world, and in yourself, in spite of seeing the worst parts of both. Or maybe because of seeing both sides?

There’s a poem I love by a wonderful poet named Deena Metzger. It rolls around in my head sometimes when I walk, like a prayer of sorts. I think it helps me to be open to seeing signs, like this leaf on the sidewalk on the day the Supreme Court decided they cannot control love. Now I’m sure there will probably be shows about gay people searching for partners and getting married as the prize, but the bigger take away for me is that expressions of committed love are now open to the LGBT community, and freedom to love, in the end, really is everything, and should be open to everyone.

Song
There are those who are trying to set fire to the world,
We are in danger.
There is time only to work slowly,
There is no time not to love.

–Deena Metzger
Speaking in (lamb’s) tongues

Grateful for lamb’s tongues abuzz with bees on a late-spring evening.
It was one of those days where a fog I didn’t know was lingering blew away in the breeze, and all the colors burned brighter.
Stones and shells (thoughts while preparing to move)

Poem-sword in one hand, packing tape in the other, recycling bin in my third hand and tissues in my fourth.

(For the dust. It makes me sneeze.)

My fifth hand is clutching a steaming mug and my sixth hand is wasting time on Facebook. My seventh and eighth hands are clasped in some kind of prayer, for forgiveness and strength, and all my other hands are clapping a rhythm to keep the rest of us on task. (Futile).

Later, the right hand will order pizza while the left opens a beer and the others will rest, their weary knuckles lined up still as the stones and shells collected along faraway hills and shores, the useless stones and shells that I tell myself I do not need in this next life.

Stones and shells held in younger palms once, stones and shells cold now, but once warm with the energy of discovery. Every stone, every shell: the most beautiful, the smoothest, the whitest, the thin-as-a-dime, translucent ones, the one black as the cold Pacific on a moonless night, the round one full of holes and light as a bite of sponge cake, the tiny snail shell spiraling the way my heart does, these last days in this home where I spent more years than any other.

(One of my sleeping hands wakes, shakes a finger at me, silently chastising me for being so impossibly sentimental. I tap it with my Ikea hammer—not even that hard, just a little tap—and then feel badly as it recoils in pain. Makes me think of the witch’s foot when the house falls on her in the Wizard of Oz.)

Back on task. My extra hands snap softly, whisper-snapping a nice quiet beat, ceremonial sort of, as I plunge my two hands into the bowl of stones and shells.

It’s a big heavy bowl, overflowing with memories—the brightest, the shiniest, the darkest, the ones dyed ugly purple-pink with my own shame. A few marbles are mixed in: a topaz one, cat’s eye, like the cat who doesn’t live here anymore. There’s a pointy triangular piece of sharp-edged sea glass and an orange gem from a Mancala game, shiny as little girls’ laughter. I have to stop. It’s time. They are only stones and shells.

Such a rattle in my heart, settling and unsettling, as I move on at last.
Peonies remind me of being pregnant

That May the peonies were my countdown—
I knew they would bloom when she did.
That heady hot spring of unfurling expectation,
of watching marching ants making their incredible journeys across Planet Peony
while I marked the days.
Oh, the heaviness in my ankles, the humidity, the wonder of my belly
swelling like a bud about to burst.
Neurons

Like star charts inside my brain
extending to the edges
of me; electricity—
constellations conducting
current, leaping synaptic
gaps to link thought to action
in my dark interior
Letting go

A moment arrives.

You let go and suddenly, nothing is the same.

But the sun shines still,
even on the fallen.
ten thousand flowers in spring

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

– Wu Men, 12c Chinese poet
(transl: S. Mitchell)
letting joy surface

I’m realizing the things I liked to do as a kid are still the among the things that bring me the most joy–drawing, writing, exploring. Untimed things. Things with no real point or purpose, except to be free and alive. And they were the things I seemed to think were ‘frills’ when I entered adulthood. I let them go, or (worse) tried to make them things I controlled, like I thought grown ups should do. Isn’t it an adult’s job to worry, after all?

Anxiety for me happens when I try to control things that are beyond my control–which seemed the whole theme of adulthood, until I figured out it didn’t have to be.

What brings you joy? Give yourself permission: make some joy today.
Walking home from CVS

night suddenly pink
under streetlamp moon
drizzle wets black mulch
fragrant as perfume
heady cedar, pencil-shaving,
sandalwood scent

a half-gallon of milk
swinging in my hand
I drink darkness,
taste the sky, swollen with
tulip poplar blooms waving
in the wind
Or maybe it is just too much iced Starbucks?

Every time I travel I am energized and struck by new possibilities. As the plane begins its descent, I wiggle in my seat and think: I could live here (or there or there). The world brims with sparkling promise, the way ocean waves shimmer and dance all the way to the blurry far off horizon on a blue June day.

As the plane lands, I feel so full of life. In a flash I understand completely why even tired old horses prance so excitedly on windy fine mornings. They smell change on the wind.

Suddenly anything seems possible.

I want to run to the edge of the boundaries—those fences I built or the world erected to contain me.

And then to push past that, and find the elusive place where I can live beyond old fears. Where I can revel. And completely relax. It could be anywhere. It could be inside me.

Will people think I’m strange if I prance in this spring wind?

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