A Short, Bright Life

My grandmother, in her upper 80s, having strokes, has now been struck with anxiety. Her mother died of strokes. She is now on the precipice of her own demise.

When I imagine what it’s like to be my grandmother, in her body, in one of her 99 pairs of shoes, I feel her panic as young as my own, the hot volcanic fear of that door being shut, your mind buried and blacked out.

I learned about fireflies this summer – that they live underground until they appear in June, rising with the heat, and then live for maybe two weeks, tops, a short, bright life during which they signal to possible mates, urgently blinking on and off, Let’s procreate!

It’s a two-week long orgy of reproductive sex. And then the light goes out.

This makes me think several things:

1. No matter when we die, whether after two weeks or 88 years, our lifespan may feel like it was too short. It is never enough. So while I might conclude that Gee, at least I live longer than two weeks! it’s really not that much of a helpful contrast.

2. I’m so glad that a human life is more than a speedy rev of mating lust.

3. Is a human life more than a speedy rev of mating lust?

4. Why do I have an internal reaction of disdain that the pretty luminous flickerings of fireflies is nothing more than a dance for reproduction? Why do I find that kind of vulgar? Why do I want the patterened pulses to be discussions of flower art? Why do I resist the idea that biologically, Life wants to reproduce as its main mission, and to acknowledge that force within myself as well?

I guess I would like for us to have ‘higher’ goals at the core of existence – spiritual evolution, not just physical reproduction. I’m reading Mother Nature right now, and so many male primate behaviors are explained by the desire to promote and protect the passing on of one’s own genes. That kind of disgusts me. I want human beings to transcend genetic transference. I want us to practice agape and compassion for others of our species, whether or not we share genetic material. I want there to be an inherent generosity of spirit in the human DNA…

But then I run into a conflict with myself -the part of me that balks at any notions of the abstract/spiritual layer of a person as rising “above” the physical realm. Instead, I believe the physical and spiritual (mental, emotional) parts of a human are interlaced, and you can’t untangle one from the other. And one is not better than another…

Thinking this way butts against centuries of gnostic and Christian dualism, however, that are deeply imbedded in our language and thinking.

5. Is it ‘firefly’ or ‘lightning bug’?

6. Whatever our goals in life, whether we manage to mate or not, reproduce or not, live for a week or a year, our lives blink with radiance and beauty. There is, for us human beings, no real set amount of time that we are ’supposed’ to live. There is only the time that we do live. And for me, there is no external comfort to offer my grandmother regarding her death. There is no invisible god waiting to catch her when she jumps off the cliff of her life. There is only the joy that comes from what is, the time that we have at this very moment, which is special precisely because it is not eternal.

7. Sometimes the meaning of our lives, the beauty in them, is found, not in our own limited perspective, but in our part within the whole. I don’t care so much whether firefly X manages to sire a next generation. But the light of his bulb delights me, makes an evening magical – another instance of nature’s effervescence that kindles a flame in my heart.

How lovely my grandmother is to me, for she is similarly bright.

Of course, I am a product of her successful reproductive efforts – so I am grateful – but more so, happy to have been around her, witness to her smile, the way she eats off other people’s plates in a way that’s charming and not annoying…

pen park

today in the park
of moss thickening and fog rising
to the occasion of our grey star
everything falling apart
damply, calmly, without protest
against the frost’s definitiveness

i knew it would be easier to be empty,
the cold offers the comfort
of the hard ground – but what is it

about this desire that it fights
for its own existence so strongly, even
when it will surely never find its
object? giving in, all would be peace.
clinging, the chaos.

though, to be honest, this wanting
under the shameless trees and the crisp moon
on the cusp of a darkness – it is its own solace,
a kind of company to keep,
a warmth between my hands, standing
in for you -

and it will do -
it must, it has to -

taking the park inside…

Autumn Mobile

maple trees: two

maple flaring

I’ve not been a fan of maple trees.

How can anyone confess such a thing?!

But their shapes, so easy to identify, seem too easy; they seem like the Sears brand of tree, kind of generic, servicable, ubuitous. The five fingers of their leaves so much like hands, waving around saying “we’re a metaphor! use us!”

I promise, this isn’t a kind of snobbery-induced distaste, though – the Sears/Walmart aesthetic repulses and frightens me – particle board bookshelves terrify -

My parents – oh children of the sixties – stored their heavy books with the adaptable-modular ‘bricks and board’ method – but at least they were real, raw materials -

I don’t mind, in fact I relish, fakeness and pretense when they are self-aware – acknowleding theselves – owning up to their superficiality by making it concretely excessive – drag queens, for instance – taking real to the limit -

When a bookshelf is faked to look ‘real’ with no admitting of the pretense, it degrades the ‘real’ object it is mean to simulate or evoke because it implies that the ‘real’ can be imitated/faked and therefore is, itself, superficial – fakeable – without a substantial value – a stripping of integrity – disconcerting on several levels -

It’s like when I worked at Peebles my senior year in high school, having to dust the “furniture” of the men’s department where I worked – the hollow desks and wardrobes, meant to look expensive, rich, but really just set pieces – if they had lived on a real theater stage, they would have worked – but providing atmosphere to pants and sportcoats cheapened the store and the world they were meant to evoke -

Oh, it’s all so silly. And so is my annoyance toward maple trees.

maple trees: one

unleaffed tree

We go to the park and – oh my goodness – our maple tree is naked.

“Our maple tree lost all its leaves,” I say. It’s a tiny tree standing sentry-like, right at the beginning of the park. It’s still got a loop of rope around its neck – like it escaped a hanging. Like it’s been leashed, but ran off, is still running. We always pass it – and the last time we did it was still in the thralls of being fantastic and red red red, belligerently. The stripped sight is slightly shocking.

“Our tree?” My daughter asks.

Her question is apt, and it makes me think yes – no – yes, because we pay attention to this maple tree, we pay a kind of homage, darsan to it, like entering a temple and bowing to the doorway goddesses, dipping our fingertips to the cool edges of a holy pool.

(So many goddesses hold up temples with their bare hands – literally arches carved with their arms – holding everything together- )

Is love ownership? I love you, we say to the beloved. You are mine.

Yesterday I heard the Flamenco singer Concha Buika say this:

“I sing against emotional dictatorships,” she says, “and against the imposition of one person over another, in the name of love.”

Yet, when we love, we make a claim – our love claims – we declare ourselves – and the beloved, she or he, sometimes is treated like a deserted island, a flag stuck through her throat…

But this love we offer this maple tree that makes me instinctively call it ours, it is saying that this tree is within our hearts, an echoing space within the temple has been created, and this is why love and art are so tightly joined, because to worship-adore-just notice and respond to person- object – idea with art-movement – piece is to enter into a conversation in which we are honoring the occurence of beauty with our own attempt to capture – is that the word? – to express our own incited joy -

And this is something like what I told my daughter when one day we were in the park and talking about art, and why people make pictures, and then why do other people want to see them.

Because there is beauty in the world, and we want to reciprocate, and offer beauty in return, a form of worship, an entering into, a collaboration -

what I said was simple, at the time, and perfect; and lost.

No, not ownership, oppression; but yes, a claim. It is our maple tree, because our love for it, our attention, has claimed it as part of our landscape, our inner territory of the cared for, the garden we tend. The inner Eden.

Lord, I get gushy over trees.

leaves, leaving

The leaves fall, fall as if from far away…
And through the night the heavy earth falls too,
down from the stars, into the loneliness.
And we all fall. This hand must fall.
Look everywhere: it is the lot of all.
– from Rilke’s “Autumn”

This is what the leaves teach us:

To preserve is not to live.

(someone says under her breath: take a look at a mummy, dummy)

You can’t save them. They fall and fall, ignited colors, red, fuschias, oranges, golds – leaves striped and swirled and pockmarked with the handwriting of disease – my throat constricts with desire to hold them, to consume them into my body, to shallack them, to keep them, make them stay exactly as they are, so over-the-top gorgeous -

but, as a pocket in my pocketbook attests, leaves drain of their color and crumple into papery flakes. The glory cannot be saved.

The art preservationists pipe in at this point, to protest their worth, the aching hours of time they spend restoring and maintaining Great Works of Art, the air so hungry to eat away at the painted genius on the chapel ceilings…

And the monks sifting colored sand into wispy mandalas -

I am enough of a child of the Western World to want to explain why Art exists, why we want it to persist.

Word association takes me to preserves – to canning. My mother’s shelves.

And I think: certainly, nothing we attempt to Keep Forever will. However, like peaches or tomatoes, blanched and prepared to last way past their natural edible prime, we have developed the skills to keep some things for later, for when we need them. Food, of course; art as well – beauty, that is. And experience of.

Not all things. And not forever.

A picture of fallen leaves is a way to preserve their shape and color till and through and past the winter.

Still, the picture itself will fade and follow the disintegration. We all go the way of the leaves.

leaves

But that is life. That is living. Living is change, change includes dissolution, dying. We know this. The opposite of life is not death but stilled life (- a Still Life – art not life? -) preservation – Snow White in the glass case; a frozen cryogenic head; the waxed bagel. Clinging to the version of the thing we love in one form, not accepting it will become another.

Not accepting that the monk, the wind, will take a breath.

And we will feel it. Cool and sure.

And we will fall away.

Cheating at Azalea Park

We went to a different park today, and I missed having my camera with me. Brown sunflowers sullenly hanging their heads in a frozen posture of depletion; a cracked white bucket sprouting the wreckage of a garden hose.

S & M tree

It’s autumn, glorious and full of loss; always feels like the first time; always feels another layer is being pulled off, and I’m even more tender than I was the year before. The winter will come, bluntly.

Thinking about grief and sadness, I realized that there are people I have lost that I don’t mourn any longer. But if someone asked me, “How did you manage to get over your grief?” I wouldn’t have a self-help mantra or a five-step easy soul diet to share; the only agent at work on the various broken places in my heart has been good old Time.

Seriously: Time heals all wounds is one of those true cliches that describes – well, what happens.

You don’t have to DO anything about your grief; you don’t have to fix it, change it, nix it. Let your grief be what it is, and eventually, it will seep. Time will suck it out, like poison from a snakebite. Sure, you can resist this very natural process – feed off the poison, so to speak. But you don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything.

I was reminded, as we picked our way through the shambly community gardens, that I appreciate Taoism because this kind of Let it Be attitude negates the ego’s pride in human efforts without any snarky finger-wagging.

The trees will let their leaves go.

This loss is not a trauma.

Pain is not an aberration.

And so, it is easier now to think of my father, ten years’ dead this year. I will always, always miss him. Something will always feel Not Quite Right because of his absence. I still have moments of thinking that I’ve forgotten to call someone, and I wrack my brain trying to think who I’ve forgotten, only to realize it’s him.

But it has been ten years. The pain has lessened. It went of its own volition. In some ways, I did want to cling to it, because I didn’t want to let go of him, and the sadness of his loss was almost comforting, it was a way to think about him, to make him keep existing.

But he does not exist. Even his effects, his papers, notebooks, crosses, ink pens, books, the box of ashes – the physical evidence – they are scattered, and drying up. There is no cohesion. Because there is no him.

Hiking a year ago

There’s more open sky at this park; a creek; a dog park. We take it all in.

This current sadness, I wish I could take a picture of it.

But really, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Darlings

I made a conscious effort with my children to call them My Darlings.

I love the word “darling.” I find it darling. (Add a syllable and it’s a kind of tea.)

And yes, I did swipe it from Peter Pan.

Anyway, unlike other attempts at an idealistic grace painted in full Disney color, this one seems to be a reality, as today, in the park, my daughter went up and down the slide with her doll, whom she was calling Darling!

I’m coming for you, Darling!

I’ll rescue you, Darling!

Darling, here we go!

As I heard her address her little purple friend in this manner, all the sweetness and tenderness I feel for my girl slid forth from the rocky parts of my heart.

The trees were black and yellow, grey and saffron, etchings of charcoal sparkling with glitter.

“Sadness, in this context, is not the opposite of happiness. The opposite of happiness is a closed heart. Happiness is a heart so soft and so expansive that it can hold all of the emotions in a cradle of openness. A happy heart is one that is larger at all times than any one emotion.”

- Elizabeth Lesser, The Seeker’s Guide

This, I feel, is the essence of autumn. Loss and beauty colliding, colluding together to make our hearts beat faster, and live.

What to do With a Pokeberry (Pain in the Butt)

This plant freaks me out. There’s something evil and indignant about its magenta veins – the color sears into high octave pitches the colder it gets, singing, “I’m a weed! And you’ll never get rid of me!” Yes, definitely, if the pokeberry had a voice, it would sound like those cross old women trilling in angry registers in the dusty Episcopalian churches that can’t seem to live without them.

They are both poisonous to humans and apparently of interest to AIDS researchers.

I am not an AIDS researcher. I want other things growing in my garden. I have pokeberry poking a-plenty, and all sorts of digging and yanking and shouting (ok, so I talk to plants) (at least I don’t play music for them) and hacking accomplishes beheadings that only lead to stronger, thicker eruptions.

And people have told me the following about how to deal with them:

1) “Cut that thing down, get it out of there: it’s dangerous!”

2) “Oh, leave it up for the birds; and use it to teach your kids that some things aren’t to be eaten!”

So, there’s two approaches to dealing with something you don’t want.

Now that I know what they are, I see them everywhere.

I scowl at them.

I consider my options.

Nemesis

(On the edges of the park, they flaunt themselves, and it doesn’t matter what I think of them. Are they beautiful?)

Turning Cartwheels

When I was 8, I lived in London with my family; one of our favorite haunts was, of course, Hyde Park.

Grass

Well, one day I was doing cartwheels there, goofily, gaily, galloping head over heels, when smush! one hand landed in the center of a large pile of horse manure.

If you have been to Hyde Park, you know how large it is, how hard it can be to find a place to wash one’s soiled hand. If you’ve seen horse manure, you know how large that is, too. I felt utterly debased.

Such an episode does not bode well for me and the park, does it?

Or does it tell something about the nature of – well, nature? And life?

And then there was the time I was 6 and singing happy birthday to myself, just skipping along in glee, and a bee flew into my wide open mouth and stung the tender roof, flew out, and died.

I can still taste the flavor of that sting.

I am thinking now about all the precautionary measures we are warned to take to avoid pain and hurt and accidental demise with our children, ourselves – every thing posits a possible danger, it seems.

And also a possible treasure – a possible pleasure – a possible delight, no? Can you imagine if the headlines read, “Beware – that seemingly innocuous heap of leaves could mean an hour of thrilling crunching if you’re not careful – walk at your own risk”?

Perhaps the lesson is: Cartwheel and sing your song.

If you land in crap or eat a bee, you will recover.

Take delight where you find it. Scoop it up in big heaping handfulls. Don’t cut back out of fear. You’ll miss the fun – the drama – the story – don’t live a safe, dull life.

That reminds me of how one of my favorite poets, Frank O’Hara, died: In a dune buggy accident at a very young age. My first reaction on reading that was to think, “What an idiot!” (It’s always easier to think someone an idiot and thus make oneself immune to the very same outcome – I, of course, would never subject myself to such a silly expiration escapade, would I?) My second reaction was a sincere desire to go back in time as the Angel of the Future and warn Frank to avoid moving vehicles.

But seriously, he was living his life. Death is not strange. Pain is not aberrant. Poo and bees and dune buggys are part of the experience.

Sometimes, as the bumper sticker, shit happens. But I hate that bumper sticker, and it’s sister, “Life’s a bitch.” Sometimes, I want to say, just like I want to say to the Buddha: Okay, yeah, Life is suffering, sometimes. Maybe more or less depending on where you live and your personal outlook, but yeah, okay, but yeah, no, not totally.

Life includes suffering and joy, and we need to take both lightly, and fully, honoring both, for they make up who and what we are.

I wonder about that noble truth a lot.

The trees, of course, don’t need to wear bumper stickers.

They just extend to the sun, to the clouds, to the lightning. They don’t flinch. They are static cartwheels, grounded in the motion of being.

Branches in sun