To Be Lit Up From Within ...

Some time between finishing Pacifica and my heart attack, I had a dream.  In it were my classmates, together again for a reunion.  In an alcove, was a woman, losing minute by minute, hour by hour her humanity, growing lighter, glowing, until all I saw was her soul as blinding as the sun.  There were dramas within our group, loves and losses, but what fascinated me throughout was the woman, dying to become living, her end her beginning.  And I can remember thinking in the dream, that I wanted to be her.  I wanted to be light and bright as the sun.

It's hard to find the words.  I've tried, but nothing ever quite captured it until today.  Somebody posted on Facebook a Margaret Atwood poem, Eating Fire, and I stopped, thinking "this is it."  So here it is, my dream in words.

Eating fire
is your ambition:
to swallow the flame down
take it into your mouth
and shoot it forth, a short or an incandescent
tongue, a word
exploding from you in gold, crimson 
unrolling in a brilliant scroll

To be lit up from within
vein by vein

To be the sun

Legendary Lands: Where We Truly Find Ourselves

     I have not posted here for a long time.  I have not written much fiction either.  I have woken up, lived my days, laughed and loved, cried and ached, and laid my head down fully expecting to wake up the next day and do it again.  I am living each day, or learning too.  I am shaking off whatever lethargy or habit made my daily life and being present tense more akin to sleep-walking, to living death, as opposed to the building blocks of a life.  Each day I get the chance to practice being fully present in waking and sleeping.  

     To be honest, I'm not sure I was ever totally present in my life, not since I was a child, not since I began looking more toward the future than the unhappy moments at hand.  I used to escape to the future from an unhappy present and sad, sorrowful past.  I time travelled, chose alternate realities.  My disassociation was an abandonment of the body for the mind.  The future became the only thing worth living for.  The only problem with living for the future however, or last least one problem, mine, is that by it's nature, tomorrow never comes.  We are always living today.  And to force myself constantly to the edge of tomorrow, required that I be a ghost in both worlds, this one and that.

     I am not sure all the reasons for the why of this long and particular silence.  I keep the peeling away the onion-like layers of reasons, hoping to find the heart of it.  Today, I might have stumbled on the true, deep why of it.  It came while reading a quote from a book by Umberto Eco, called The Book of Legendary Lands.  I have not read the book, although I think I must.  Legendary lands as metaphors for love seems perfect for my history and nature.  It is my story, the quest for a true and fitting love.  It has always been my tomorrow.

       "Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself. Out of a hope in a possible future, many people are prepared to make enormous sacrifices, and maybe even die, led on by prophets, visionaries, charismatic preachers, and spellbinders who fire the minds of their followers with the vision of a future heaven on Earth (or elsewhere)."

     My guess is that this quote may not have hit you as it did me, as if the gods themselves were whispering in my ear, as if I at last had an answer to a puzzling question.  It struck me, that I loved a man, exactly in this way, created a legendary land of him and us that became far more real to me than the reality of him and us.  And then came the realization that perhaps love for me is like this.  A lifetime of fiction making and story telling has made me prefer the written to the real, the fiction to the non-fiction.  It becomes a flow, takes on a life of its own, and you become willing, more than willing to make huge sacrifices in order to achieve that utopia, whomever he might be.

     My current relationship was no different in its beginnings.  I leaped believing I was going to sail into the sunset, into happily ever after.  It is how I have always leaped, love taking me where I would normally fear to tread.  I didn't really make changes unless I had a love to prompt me.  I didn't love myself enough to do it for me.  I always had to be driven by another.

     My heart attack forced me into the present.  Suddenly the future was less possible, less probable.  I could count on now but I couldn't really count on the future.  I started to re-inhabit my body.  I started to live each day in all its mundanity and its glory.  I gave up my legendary lands, not even knowing I did so, and faced reality with all its messy miracles.  I will confess its depressed me, the loss of the imaginary that was more real than life.  And I suspect my slow stirring to share here again and to write my stories suggests I may be coming to terms with abandoning utopia for something more real.  Maybe this is growing up.  Or  maybe it is just one more step in the process of individuation.  I will know more I think when I read the book or perhaps when the gods deign to speak to me again and whisper truths I cannot yet see.

A Slow Thing Stirs in the Shadow of the Bougainvillea

I love the line above, from a poem, In January, by Lorna Dee Cervantes.  I think it would make a perfect short story title for some sort of weird Florida story, full of magical realism.  For pure strangeness on the Wierd-o-meter, Florida wins hands down.

In the poem, that slow something is the end of a man's life.  Since death is inevitable, there is a certain acceptance of that finality.  That slow something is neither good, nor bad, or perhaps it's both, but it's there nevertheless and inexorable, inescapable.

Of course, it doesn't have to be death in the shadow of the bougainvillea.  It can be love, awareness, joy, sorrow.  It gets to a sense of anticipation, the waiting that sometimes takes over when your life isn't quite what you want and you feel change at your edges but it moves at its own perfect pace, beyond you and your influence.  Which, as I write it, reminds me of another brilliant line, this one from an Auden poem, For What is Easy: "fate is not late."  I found that poem after my heart attack and understood perfectly, in that moment, how all things come at the right time, even if you are sure they haven't, are too full of what ifs and if onlys.

The Face of the Man She Loves

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.  Honore de Balzac

The World As Meditation

J’ai passé trop de temps à travailler mon violon, à voyager. Mais l’exercice essentiel du compositeur — la médiatation — rien ne l’a jamais suspendu en moi … Je vis un rêve permanent, qui ne s’arrête ni nuit ni jour. — Georges Enesco

Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.

It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

Sea Grapes

Sea Grapes

by Derek Walcott

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like
the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in
every gull's outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility will
never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now
wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since
Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from
whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the
conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Those last lines.  They pull me up short today with Mercury retrograde exactly half-way, Saturn turning direct in Scorpio, a Grand Water Trine activated for the next week, emotions spilling everywhere, mine and everyone else's.  How many times have I turned to the Odyssey to soothe me, to help me navigate some rough water?  And always it has consoled, but the rub is, not enough.  In the end, I have to find a way to live with uncertainty, insecurity, and failure.  At least that's the hypothesis of Oliver Burkeman and his recent book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.  And looking back over the last few years, that's exactly been the lesson for me, at least one of them.  You can't be certain; you can't always work with a net.  And Lord knows, it may not always look like success, although 'failure' may be a much more relative term than we often think it is.  

The classics can console but in the end, it's not enough, they're not enough.  They can provide wise counsel, those classics, but ultimately it's our lives and we are the ones that must do the living - good, bad, indifferent.  

This Place We Call Home

I long, as does every human being, to be at home  

wherever I find myself.  Maya Angelou

Now that I've been in Florida for a year, I'm beginning to think of this as home.  The boating life is, by it's nature, a vagabond life.  That doesn't mean that people don't find the dock and stay there.  In this marina there is a couple that has been here twelve years, the boat never once leaving the dock in all that time.  She's ship shape, built to cross the seas and more than capable of it, and yet, she's landlocked and will be for years more I suspect.  Other boats come and go.  There are a few year-round live-aboards here, but mostly it's boats, here for a while and then gone, which is the nature of boats.  

Susurru is my home now, truly, not just in name as she was in the beginning.  I have even begun calling her that - home.  I talk to her before I go to work and when I come home, when winds and water make her dance or shiver, when she's feeling frisky, or nervous, or sad.  Houses speak in their way, I suppose, but they play it close to the vest.  You don't always know with houses; they can keep secrets.  Boats are more loquacious.  They wear their hearts on their sleeves.  You know what they're feeling.  There's a quote about souls and songs in the wood of boats.  I think that's true of boats like this one, boats who are more handmade.  

The marina is becoming home too, though frankly that has been a harder sell.  Calling Florida home has been an even harder sell.  I'm reluctant to let go of California.  I don't want to get use to this warmth and humidity, this flora and fauna.  And yet, the truth of it is I might be here for a while and I can either stay a stranger or begin to learn about this place, the good and the bad, the beauty and the horror.  And I only know one way to learn a place, to make it home, and that's walking it, learning it step by step, block by block, watching it through the seasons, discovering the plants, which is what I'm doing.  I'm trying to figure out this place I  may call home, someday, maybe.   

Strawberry Moon

Apparently the full moon in June was called the Strawberry Moon, named by the Algonquin tribe who knew this moon as a signal of the short harvest of strawberries.  In Europe, where strawberries are not native, it was called the Rose Moon.  

This moon was at perigee, its closest point to earth this year.  They called it the Supermoon - bigger, brighter, more potent.  It's pretty but not noticeably bigger.  Maybe a little brighter.  For me, with a Capricorn moon in my natal chart, it can be a very grounding moon or it can be dark, playing on my fears.  For me, this one is dark, her harvest poor.  Last year she was more steady and sure, the slow, hot burn of new love.  Next year, who knows?  The wheel turns, round and round, down is up and up is down.  The one thing I can count on is that it will be different yet again.  For the first time in many years I am experiencing the vagaries of life personally as opposed to vicariously, through my daughter.  It is not always pretty, but it is living and I want to live.  I decided that after my heart attack, fought for it, for normalcy, for what other people take for granted. The highs and lows are a given.  I can wait for the wheel to turn.  And while I wait, there's this, on of the first moon songs I remember, one of the first I learned, to remind me what I love about the moon and life and living.

Place park, scene dark, silvery moon is shining through the trees;

Cast two, me, you, sound of kisses floating on the breeze.

Act one, begun. Dialogue, "Where would you like to spoon?"

My cue, with you, underneath the silvery moon.

By the light of the silvery moon,

I want to spoon, to my honey I'll croon love's tune,

Honeymoon keep a-shining in June,

Your silvery beams will bring love dreams, we'll be cuddling soon,

By the silvery moon.

Act two, scene new, roses blooming all around the place;

Cast three, you, me, Preacher with a solemn looking face.

Choir sings, bell rings, Preacher: "You are wed for evermore."

Act two, all through, every night the same encore.

By the light, (By the light, By the light),

Of the silvery moon, (The silvery moon).

I want to spoon, (Want to spoon, Want to spoon)

To my honey I'll croon love's tune.

Honeymoon, (Honeymoon, Honeymoon),

Keep a-shining in June. (Keep a-shining in June)

Your silvery beams will bring love dreams,

We'll be cuddling soon,

By the silvery moon.

Your silvery beams will bring love dreams,

We'll be cuddling soon,

By the silvery moon.