out of the park – onto the trail

I moved

away from The Park.

Now my Outside Space is The Trail.

So the question has loomed: Do I change the blog name? Do I leave it all together?

Certainly a trail is a bit different than a park, both on the literal level and the metaphorical one. My experience has completely changed.

My relationship to the park was about entering and reentering a space with somewhat static boundaries – clear edges – a contained green, a circle or square, meant for playing, sitting, reflection. Kind of like playing hokey-pokey. Or diving in a pool. Or drawing a chalk circle and stepping inside to test if it really will protect you from scary witches.

The trail near my new residence requires a totally different type of engagement. It is, of course, a path; linear, it leads to hidden trails, unmarked gutters and ditches, footpaths, streets, a park. There are many entries and exits, some obvious, some hidden. People here are usually in motion. Going from A to B. Appearing, passing, reappearing, on foot, bike, scooter, with gear like sticks and headphones and water bottles. The trail feels more serious. The trail has a more direct purpose. An outcome-based focus.

The park was often the scene for a shindig, with fried chicken or balloons.

The trail is not so much a destination as a place of process, the scene for sweating, walking sticks.

The park had the detritis of litterbugs.

The trail has the stashes of homeless folks.

The park had graffiti on the play equipment.

The trail has graffiti on the walls under the overpass.

The park had rolling hills.

The trail has a rushing river.

The park had rabid squirrels.

The trail has snakes and turtles.

The thing is, at one end of the trail there does happen to be another park. It’s not my park; it’s not the park I fell in love with last year, that incited me to blog.

But the trail and the park together does, like my park, serve as a space where I go to encounter myself and my relationship, my private study of my relationship to the world. The parts and wholes, my juxtaposition to reality, my belief in beauty, to refresh my humility, to resize my ego.

Maybe it was time for a different way to move through the landscape – at a quicker pace -

It is an interesting thing to contemplate, a shift I haven’t quite figured out how to address here, and to be honest, elsewhere. The park had a communal feeling to me. The trail, populated as it is, is very much about my singular journey.

I’m off on a path; following my bliss; running down a dream -

- missing the park, though.

April

Looking out the window (apparently something poets do much of)

Watching this wind, these tender flowers

that aren’t tender at all, but started over

who knows when beneath us as we tromped and glowered

in our various furies, (getting  smashed, divining fairies),  as snow crashed

against the breathless ground from a car’s hot speed -

toward what was I driven? -

Everything is about to open now;

why not me?

Certainly, I shouldn’t liken myself to anything

less than

the leathery-lipped tulips joyously puckering up from the grass,

or the grass itself, chin-upping in plump clumps,

or the pricking corners of the holly tree -

all glorious and unhidden -

The wind is slapping us all awake into life

And I, too, am red and raw and ready

to be, for it is all, when you think about it, risen.

they called me ma’am

Here’s an interesting test of my cultural assumptions. My dog breaks his leash loose from my hand to chase the taunting squirrels he so desperately detests. We are right near a pickup football game taking place on the blacktop. The dog is a scream of poofy fluff – and these big dudes guffaw in surprise “woa, look at him go!” They laugh. One of them calls to me, “Ma’am? Ma’am? Can he actually catch one?”

And I reel, internally at least. Ma’am? He called me ma’am?

I am so OLD.

Suffering

Life is suffering.

We can cushion our rooms till they’re soft as coffins, but we will still suffer.

We can swath our children, pad them, wrap them in bandages and casts as if they are already hurt and broken so that they won’t be hurt and break – but we will stifle and smother them, they will suffer.

I kept thinking the question was Whose suffering should I be attempting to stop or prevent? and How much suffering should I allow in my children’s lives? and Is there such a thing as ‘natural’/okay suffering and the type that is just too horrific to be considered the normal part of life and so should be prevented?

It came up in the discussion with other parents about public schools. I cried everyday after school in 7th grade. My parents didn’t do anything about it. I think I would intervene with my own. Then I think, Would I?

All of these questions of amounts and kinds, as if I’m a chemist in a laboratory, or a cook in a kitchen, with burners and measuring cups, and the power

The issue of power and control and choice, and people who say we suffer for a reason, or talk about the default deity who allows us to suffer so that we can realize things. The idea that we only learn through pain.

I don’t believe we only learn through pain. I think we learn all the time.

I don’t believe suffering is a means to an end. I don’t believe we’re being taught lessons – or that we should teach them, allow suffering, as an educational tool for others.

If suffering is natural, part of life, why would I try to prevent it happening (to my kid, to my fellow humans in Darfur)?

Yet however part of life it is, I don’t believe we let suffering happen when we can stop it.

I think I’ve been asking the wrong questions.

I’ve been coming at this from the direction of to suffer or not to suffer – from an either/or construction -

“…The opposite of happiness is not sadness, but a closed heart”- Elizabeth Lesser

There are not happy childhoods, free from pain and suffering and challenges and disruptions and unhappy childhoods full of them. There are happy people who have suffered tremendously hard things and unhappy people who have ‘had it easy.’

Happiness is not a function of not-suffering; it correlates to the ability to live openly, fully, heartily, to live with suffering in a graceful and truthful and real way. To spend energy avoiding pain, to mainline anesthesia, is to invite death into life, to mummify oneself while still breathing.

Life is suffering. To live is to suffer. To live fully, to live happily, is to invite pain to have its way with you.

My goal, then, with my children, is not to prevent their suffering, to plan circumventions around hard things, to control the hard edges, to pad the coffee table’s corners. My goal is to teach them – emulating, coaching, encouraging – how to live with eyes arms heart and minds open to the experiences, the sweet and the sour, the tender and the hard. To teach them how to suffer without losing their ability for joy.

I can’t commit the fallacy of considering myself as ‘above’ the plane where the play of the world takes place. I am not playing chess, moving the pieces around. I am an actor. And as such, I do my part to avoid committing harm or causing suffering – I use the rounded coffee table, for instance – where it is in my jurisdiction to so, that is, within the truth as I know it .

Life is suffering, but it is joy, too, and as a part of the whole, my role is to enact what pleasures and warmth and comfort and delight I can for my fellow beings – we find comfort in each other, in our shared experiences, in our stories. This is not the same thing as immuring oneself against pain, or protecting others from living, or interfering with the natural course of things. For we bring the greatest joy to others when we share with them, not try to fix them; when we act with compassion, not with purpose.

I don’t think ‘do no harm’ is the phrase I want to live by – I think of the Buddhist nuns with the filters on their faces to prevent breathing in and killing of dust mites when they sweep – no, that is not my aim. I want to be care-ful, but first I want to be live fully, with the pads off, so that every punch and caress hits me where it hurts, where it gives. To be vulnerable is to fully live.

A Valentine for Snow

The ice twinkles – what a lovely word, twinkles – twinkle toes, my mother used to call me -

the ice in the sunlight twinkles, sparkles, flickers, the way stars do, bright with flashes of red and blue, minute planets – they are sputtering out signals, codes of their unbecoming – the sun is dashing them to the ground -

a mocking bird just crashed against the branch and shakes a crowd of snow -

this beauty out of my window and I am of this same world and that is my eternally springing joy -

oh, at the base of my spine, where the bony nerve-wrapped ending sits, that’s where I can feel it – oh world, oh lover, are you truly mine, am I one face of your multi-valentine?

My mind leaps to the gopis, those Hindu cowgirls flush with love for horny blue Krishna – the rapture of worship -

Romantic love is not the same as Worship Love, but the compelling sense of one’s humble adoration in the presence of a powerful beauty is the same -

A slice of ice flamed into a ruby three times, then streaked to join the slushing -

I remember stepping into the woods in thigh-deep snow in the Sierra Nevadas on a camping trip with my church youth group. I wasn’t familiar at all with snow and ice, being a native of Southern California’s dry, omnipresent heat. The holiness in that silence was palpable. The beauty stung coldly against my tender face. I felt the breath of god in the sweet, crystalline air, and sunk in the heaviness to my knees, undone by it all, by the All.

Love does that to me.

But seriously – how many must ask it – I know I am not the first one – do we need to mine for diamonds when these trees offer freely their encrusted shining selves?

Wrap me in the melting cuts of  ice; adorn me with precious frost. I am sufficiently bedecked.

Seasons Change

I love the Bangles. Rewind to me at 14, and you’ll find me and three of my best friends at Magic Mountain in Southern California, in one of those Make Your Own Music Video studios, belting out Eternal Flame in an exuberant cacophany of swelling adolescent emotion. Don’t laugh at our big hair.

Anyway. I’ve noticed that we – or maybe I should say I – tend to think of Fall and Spring as seasons that lead to other seasons. That is, autumn is getting ready for – leading up to – Winter. Spring is the opening act for Summer. But why?

My theory is that Fall and Spring are more overtly active seasons – they seems restless, windy, full of change. Trees change daily, from nothing to bright somethings, or later, from ubiquitous greens to crazed shades of tie-dye. And in Winter and Summer, changes are much slower, if evident at all. In Winter, it’s cold and dead. In Summer, everything’s limply hot and slow.

Of course, the world never stops changing.

I am trying to change the story in my head about the seasons. I am trying to think of Fall as a permanent condition. Loss, loss, loss. It’s constant. It doesn’t lead to anything else, any resolve, any final kingdom. Or taking the whole cycle into consideration, it always leads back to itself.

How you see it depends on how you tell the story, I guess. Which season do you see as the first one? Which one is the last?

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