Writing

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When Matter Doesn’t Matter Anymore

When matter doesn’t matter anymore, it changes into energy.

I first wrote that some fifteen years ago in an essay about Sally a friend of mine who had taken her life. She had planned on it for at least the three years I knew her; told me that she didn’t want to live past 70.

“The women in my family don’t do well after 70,” she said.

That’s when the vagueries of aging seemed to get them. Being a gambling woman, she wanted to fold her hand while she was still ahead.

Sally had an antic sense of things. She took the pills a day or two before her seventieth birthday, just before mailing out (snail mail – email was still in its infancy 15 years ago) a farewell letter to her friends. An afficianado of eros, her letter concluded,

“And those of you familiar with my birthdate will recognize that the timing of my exit allows me to claim as my epitaph:

Toujours soixante-neuf!”

Always 69.

I neither approve nor disapprove of what Sally did. I had decided when she first told me of her plans that I would do neither. I knew it would be of no use trying to talk her out of it and I wanted to keep the lines of communication open. Instead I would say to her that if she got to 70 and decided she wanted to give herself a bit more time, that would be fine with me.

About a week before Sally’s birthday, we had dinner with our mutual friend Jeanette who was slowly but surely declining into Parkinsons. I knew the deadline was approaching so I asked Sally as we headed our separate ways into the San Francisco night, “So, is this goodbye?”

“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” she said, and smiled her Sally smile.

I thought perhaps she had decided to give it more time. But, she stuck to her plan. I got her letter a few days later: the salutation: “To those I love –“; the closing, “Love and goodbye, Sally”.

I did not really understand what Sally meant – about having to live with the debilitation that can come with aging until I watched my mother’s struggle with emphysema. She went very quickly from being physically vital, to struggling for each breath she took.

She had her idea of when to fold them as well. For her, it came when she had to face the prospect of recovering in a nursing home from a broken hip, her health already so compromised that whatever life was left to her would most likely never happen outside an institution. So, since death was inevitable, she eschewed the antibiotics and welcomed pneumonia as the friend who would save her from what was to her a humiliating end.

Both women took matters into their own hands. Took control of their final destinies. Determined the difference for them between what was living their life and merely surviving it, and acted on it.

It was difficult for me to watch my mother’s struggle, for I knew that somewhere in the back of her mind was the question, “Well, when is enough, enough?”

For Sally, I don’t believe that was a question she wanted to ponder. I think she was afraid that once she went down that path, she would hold on too long; that she would not do well in the dance between fear of dying and fear of living. So, she took action before she had to dance that dance.

Sally appeared to me in a dream shortly after she died. She was laughing at the paramedics who were trying to revive her. She had no regrets about her choice. I wondered if she, as an atheist, was a bit annoyed that there was some kind of “life” after life. She wouldn’t say.

About a month after my mother died, while sitting on the patio of a local restaurant, a truck lumbered by towing a speedboat with the name Betty Jean – my mother’s name – painted on its side. It’s not exactly that I think she got reincarnated as a speedboat, but heading out of town for a good time on the delta was not out of sync with who my mother was.

Here is what I concluded with Sally many years ago: She asked that her ashes be added to a friend’s compost pile. Very much in keeping with Sally’s antic let’s-get-real sense of things (Did I mention that she took her vibrator to Mr. Fix It in Mill Valley when it stopped working?), so I assume they were.

My final image then is of life feeding life, even after it’s gone.

When matter doesn’t matter anymore, it changes into energy.

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Something Out There Somewhere

A writer’s prayer. Please, something out there somewhere, find me.

I have several decks of tarot cards. The deck I am currently most fond of is the Animal–Wise Tarot. I use the Tarot to give myself a three-dimensional picture of where I am. It provides me with metaphors to understand what is not immediately clear to me.

I suppose I am most fond of this one because it incorporates nature into the metaphors — and the accompanying book has a wolf on the cover.

Five years ago, I got a tattoo. A howling she-wolf tattooed on my right forearm right below my elbow: a local Livermore artist, Linda Ryan, did the original artwork.

The tattoo artist, and she is quite an artist, started scraping my skin away, embedding the ink as she went, waxing poetic about how once people get a tattoo, they want another, and then another.

All I could think was “Get this over with quick. I’m about to slap you it hurts so much.”

About a week later, I noticed that the wolf wasn’t washing off my arm. It’s not that I had thought it would wash away — I just wasn’t prepared for its permanence.

Then began, my odyssey to accept my forearm. This is not a small tattoo, as I had planned; it takes up about half my forearm. It cannot be ignored. It’s just so there.

I wore long sleeves, made jokes about it, endured shocked reactions by a few people – including my mother, who had trouble accepting my piercing my ears my senior year of high school. “You’ll always have holes,” she warned. “They never grow closed.”

My mother was big on certain dire warnings. “If you don’t wear a bra, your breasts will end up like those women in National Geographic!”

One can only imagine what she thought would happen to a tattooed forearm.

At some point, I remembered why I decided to get my tattoo. I asked a friend, who has a lovely Om character tattooed on his wrist, if it hurt to get one, expecting him to say no.

“Pain is a part of it,” he said. “Not because I enjoyed it, but because it marked a turning point in my life. It’s part of the sensory memory.”

Oh.

Then I re-read this passage from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves:

La Loba (Wolf Woman), the old one, the One Who Knows, is within us. She thrives in the deepest soul-psyche of women, the ancient and vital Wild Woman. She describes her home as that place in time where the spirit of women and the spirit of wolf meet, the place where her mind and her instincts mingle, where a woman’s deep life funds her mundane life. It is the point where the I and the Thou kiss, the place where women run with the wolves.

And I understood permanence in a new way: No turning back. Once you recognize the wild woman in you, you can’t ignore her. This is no out-of-control-woman-on-the-verge wild woman. This woman is wild because she is in sync with her nature, a nature that for years cultures have tried to destroy: by burning women at the stake; by mutilating their genitalia; by corseting their organs until they began to fail; by turning crones into frightful creatures.

I think that the she-wolf on my forearm howls to remind me to banish shame from my writing shed and from my life. Dismissing shame opens the door to compassion.

Who knows how much we can accomplish when we walk through that door.

I am writing this in Moody’s Café in Mendocino. The proprietress set a mug filled with wonderfully fragrant flowers next to me, asking me if their fragrance was too much for me. It wasn’t. Soon, other patrons were burying their noses in the flowers. None was disappointed. One woman came by for a second dose, and then went back to writing.

The flowers were wild azaleas.

Take a few minutes to be wild today.
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A bit more from Mendocino:

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Over Time, This will be More Graceful

Twitter.

I’ve avoided it, almost resented it because I feel like it’s just one more thing I can be distracted by (by which I can be distracted – okay, Ed Brush). I mean what do I care about the minutae of someone’s every day life?

And then there was this from my friend Judy’s blog – a twitter (tweet?) from a friend of hers:

“I just changed over oxygen tanks for my father. My first time. A lot of dictations from both sides. Over time, this will be more graceful.”

My heart slowed down when I read this, as if time itself had slowed down so the words could embed themselves in my heart, between its beats.

Over time, this will be more graceful.

It isn’t true that roles get reversed as a parent’s aging makes them dependent on you. You don’t become the parent and they the child. It’s just a new and confusing relationship, for both sides – a dance for which there is no choreographer. You make it up as you go along. You improvise.

I’m beginning to think that most of life is improvisation. Fred Astaire strove for perfection. Gregory Hines used his mistakes to take him to the next step.

I had to improvise a lot in my mother’s final years. She was fiercely independent, but depended on me, just as her mother was fiercely independent and depended on her. Your job is to lead the dance, but not seem like you are.

My mother died right in the middle of a misstep in our dance– a particularly graceless moment. And so I thought that grace would be forever denied me.

But, death ends a life, not a relationship and it’s up to the survivor to carry it on. That’s a paraphrase from the film “I Never Sang for my Father.”

My mother died three years ago this July. At first I felt kind of numb. But then the numbness wore off and I fell into a vortex of questioning – particularly wondering whether or not I had been a good enough daughter. Could I have done something to make the dance more graceful?

Finally, sometime over the last year the answer came to me in the form of forgiveness – no, there was nothing I, or she, could have done to make our final dance more graceful. There was no choreographer. Just the two of us finding our way through. It was up to me use the misstep to create a new dance – one I would have to dance solo.

I had to improvise. Work with what I had, not what I had hoped for. And trust that I had made my choices based on love, my love for her and myself. And assume that she had done the same. And then I had to forgive us both for not being perfect. Our dance was more like a Gregory Hines, than a Fred Astaire dance.

But I like Gregory Hines dances more than I do Fred Astaire’s. I think they had more life to them. In forgiveness, I found the grace I thought was not mine to have.

Over time, this will be more graceful.

Sometimes, great wisdom is found in the minutae of everyday living.

And now for something different . . . a bit of grace from Mendocino

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Improvising with Words at the Edge of the World

edgeofworldAt the Edge of the World . . .

Improvising with words. That’s how Tom described blogging – improvising for writers.

So, that’s what I’m doing. Improvising at the edge of the world.

We arrived in Mendocino about an hour ago, and whenever I get to the ocean, I feel like I’m at the edge of the world.

The thing I think I miss most about living inland is proximity to the ocean. I spent 75 days on the ocean when I was a kid. We travelled from Saudi Arabia back to California on a Dutch freighter. I guess that was more like being beyond the edge of the world. vastnessreally

But the point is, I miss the ocean. I miss its cool wetness. Looking out over the ocean helps me put things in perspective. Walking on the beach, never being able to predict the pattern of the waves, helps me see myself in relationship to the world.

A grain of sand, perhaps, but I suspect that one speck of sand might affect the pattern of waves.

And then there’s being on the ocean. There were days at a time, once we got past the Phillipines, where we didn’t see land or even another ship. At some point, we ran into the tail end of typhoons and waves crashed over the top of the ship.

vastness3I don’t remember ever being afraid.

I don’t think vastness frightens me. I actually think there might be something comforting in it for me.

Improvising with words at the edge of the world on a Sunday in May.

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Writing is My Dowsing Tool

I’ve wondered whether or not I should write on this topic as I’ve been in hot water for four years because of it. I don’t want to roil the waters. But a narrative about me seemed to have developed in my hometown that took on a life of its own. So this is my attempt to change the narrative.

I love poetry. My mentor, my high school English teacher with whom I remained friends for over forty years – I was with him the day he died – was a wonderful poet. He taught me to love Shakespeare and other poetry. He wrote a poem for me after my dog of 16 years died; he wrote one for my wedding; he wrote a house blessing for the first house I owned.

His name was Ed Brush. He’s the Ed I refer to in Karen and her Writing Shed.

With all his love of poetry and commitment to the craft himself, he never once claimed that poetry was a higher art form than any other literary art.

So I have been absolutely dumbfounded to learn that there exists a group who refer to themselves as “the” poetry community, who claim the authority to determine what is, and what is not, a poem, and who seem to believe that writing poetry sets them apart from – well, I’m not even sure what it sets someone apart from.

And here’s why that baffles me.

I believe we are spirits learning to be human. And for me, epiphanies come in those moments when the sacred meets the profane – when the spirit feels the full impact of what it means to be housed in a mortal body, and simultaneously, the earth-bound self recognizes it is part of something bigger than itself – part of a continuum of human experience.

That’s what I write about. I write about the connection.

A writing prompt led me to remember four-o’clocks, flowers that bloom late in the afternoon. I remembered them from my childhood. That gave me the seed I needed to write about something I had wanted to write about for a long time – how it felt to lose my father to dementia – before I lost him to death. I thought it would be a short story. Then it turned into a poem. But it only took on the right emotional tone for me when I wrote it as a prose poem.

I think of writing as my dowsing tool. I use it to find what’s below the surface. Exploring the form, and then crafting it using my knowledge of the language is how I get to what I want to say.

I think writing is too big to limit it. Good writing is important. And by good writing, I mean the writer has a command of the language (or is willing to learn it) and uses that knowledge to craft it well.

But it’s up to the writer to determine the form, and then to make the commitment to use the craft of writing to get it right.

My husband, Tom, is a composer. He offered me this: “Blogging is improvising for writers.”

I like that.