Getting to the Heart of Things

     Since my heart attack, I pay a lot more attention to hearts, mine and others.  I wonder if I had listened more closely to mine, if I cultivated its wisdom and followed it, if I would have found myself at age fifty with my heart broken, the cage of my body opened, bypassed, mended, and re-started, good as new, at least for the time being.  Regrets?  Yeah, I have a few; who doesn't?  The thing about second chances (or third or fourth or fifth, etc.) is that you learn from them.  And maybe, if you're lucky, you get it right away, the big "a-ha" that changes everything, sets you on your path.  And maybe, if you're like I was, you take a while, getting a series of progressive revelations of increasing urgency until, finally, life has to hit you upside the head with a large mallet, or in my case excruciating chest pain, for me to get the message.


     This week two heart messages came.  The first quote is attributed to Colette, whose book Break Of Day, written in her fifties as she took up residence on the Cote d'Azur after the break up of her second marriage, came to me in my early fifties, contemplating the end of my second marriage, as a revelation:  I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.

     I cannot find the origins of the quote, so I don't know if it is truly hers, or whether it was from fiction or one of her autobiographical tales, but it struck me as I read it as exactly the promise of my leap to a watery life with a watery man, which, like every promise, hosts both joy and fear.  We know who we are, or at least who we think we are, but are we prepared to learn who we might be?  And as I've pondered in previous posts, since we all have baggage, can we truly be born again with a new face and an untried heart?  Would we want to?  I'm not really sure I don't him to love me as I am right now, with my white hair and my aging body, my scars, visible and invisible, my seriousness, my packing always just a little more than I need.  Just as I am, whatever that is, not despite of, but because.  I suppose I want it all, an unconditional love that accepts what I am and what I could be.  Now the question is, am I capable of the same?


     The other quote comes from Thermae, a prose-poem by Matthea Harvey: He shivers, jumps in, starts swimming. When his fingers hit the pool-end he surfaces. His hair, brown and curly before, is sleek. Squint and he might be the figure whom he will describe at the start of his poem--Triton, man from the waist up, fish from the waist down, with a heart that can’t tell the difference.

     When there is such a gap between two people - miles, times zones - you tend to live a double life, or at least I do. When he and I talk, I try to host that, and, since I can't always meet him where he is, we tend to blur into virtual realms, the only place we share right now, which is no-place at all. He has been re-acquainting himself with his watery nature, finding his place with Mother Ocean. He is living day and night, every breath, with the imaginal. I'm unraveling myself from the mundane details of my current life to join him. He is steeped in the unconscious; I am steeped in the conscious. And while soon we will be sharing space and time and place at last, for now all I can do is try to open to his journey as well as my own.

     It was our joke the week I sailed with Bryan to sea how I would handle a life on the water, that he was becoming Triton. Triton is the son of Poseidon and his wife, Amphitrite. A merman, he raises and calms the seas when he blows his conch. He is also a messenger of the sea gods. Bryan was spending more and more time in the ocean, not just sailing her, but snorkeling and swimming. In true Pisces fashion, it was re-invigorating him all that time in his element. He was growing stronger, is growing stronger, and more and more himself. I am not sure I am doing the same, although it has always been hard for me to see myself truly. As would befit a Libra, a daughter of Venus, I need a mirror, a lover's eyes, to see myself. I need to be in relationship to learn my topography and map my changes.

     So when I read this bit of poem I thought about my Triton and what it might mean not just to be half man and half fish, but to possess a heart that did not know the difference between them, accepting both, honoring both, being true to both. Frankly, it seems almost incomprehensible, living as a hybrid, accepting all of you as you. Of course it's what we all are, bits and pieces, welcome guests and frightening strangers, some of whom we accept, some of which we don't. Ego though helps us create and live in the illusion that we are something cohesive, one thing and one thing only. Ego encourages us to pass judgement on those parts we don't want to own, those bits of alien DNA or animal DNA that mixes with what makes us homo sapiens. For years we called it junk DNA, garbage, useless and only now are learning it has its place and is as much a part of us as what we choose to own.

     Bryan is finding those fishy places in him, and we can joke about it and create fanciful tales, but he's finding his way to accepting himself unconditionally, living authentically. He's doing the work of therapy living liminally on and in the water, open to what he finds there, the 'good' and the 'bad.' He seems to be practicing active imagination as meditation, as life, working his dream as he's living it. Not everyone can do it; not everyone would want to. I find though, as I would, something wise and wonderful in his journey, and a possible healing of my own dual nature. 


     When I was young I labeled it father and mother, Puritan and Mediterranean, Massachusetts and Greece, civilized and elemental. One side conformed the other always sat at the edges mucking things up, a sort of guerilla warfare with my soul as the prize. Pacifica began my journey of reunification. The heart attack facilitated the process, a kind-of Camp David boot camp if you will, where live and die forced the two to find a way to get along at long last. I'm not sure I could have come to this love otherwise, which is neither Puritan nor Mediterranean, logical nor ecstatic, but something marvelously in-between, not either/or, but both/and all the points between. So while I cannot quite imagine a heart that understands both fish and man of you, I would like to, and I think I'm coming to a place where I might just be able to love the fish and woman of me unconditionally and completely. For the first time in my life I'm not wondering if I'm on the right path, I'm making my path as I walk it. I'm living the Machado poem, which is right where I need and want to be.

“Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road–
Only wakes upon the sea.”
–Antonio Machado

Baggage, Part 2

     This poem arrived last week as a poem of the day and it got me thinking as I pack for my change of life: Does it really matter what shirts I take and which ones I leave?  Am I practicing discernment, or is it all merely a foolish exercise?  Do we really leave anything behind?


     I'm counting on it.  I'm praying change is truly possible.  I'm trusting that I'm leaving here in Sacramento at least some of what no longer serves me.  I'm leaping, like The Fool in the Tarot, because life, even at nearly 54, deserves that kind of hopefulness and faith and I do too.

    Still, I wonder what baggage I'm taking with me on this particular journey.  I'm no Victorian, so the starched shirtwaists and long skirts aren't in my valise.  I'd like to be a friend of witch-doctors, living on native chop, but only time will tell if that's in my luggage.  There is a wildness in me I am only beginning to guess at, and I suspect for all the things I leave behind, there are things within me I am only now discovering, that I will be bringing with me, things I don't remember packing but are part and parcel of my unwieldy baggage that can't be checked.

The Luggage

By Constance Urdang

Travel is a vanishing act

Only to those who are left behind.

What the traveler knows

Is that he accompanies himself,

Unwieldy baggage that can’t be checked,

Stolen, or lost, or mistaken.

So one took, past outposts of empire,

“Calmly as if in the British Museum,”

Not only her Victorian skirts,

Starched shirtwaists, and umbrella, but her faith

In the civilizing mission of women,

Her backaches and insomnia, her innocent valor;

Another, friend of witch-doctors,

Living on native chop,

Trading tobacco and hooks for fish and fetishes,

Heralded her astonishing arrival

Under shivering stars

By calling, “It’s only me!” A third,

Intent on savage customs, and to demonstrate

That a woman could travel as easily as a man,

Carried a handkerchief damp with wifely tears

And only once permitted a tribal chieftain

To stroke her long, golden hair.

A Wanderer's Song

To all those who wonder why, who say "I don't understand; it's so unlike you," who fear this leap as if it is a plunge into the abyss as opposed to a dive into the waves.  And for Bryan, who knows the wind in the heart, the fire at the heels, and the ocean in the blood.




A Wanderer's Song

A WIND'S in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels,
I am tired of brick and stone and rumbling wagon-wheels;
I hunger for the sea's edge, the limit of the land,
Where the wild old Atlantic is shouting on the sand.

Oh I'll be going, leaving the noises of the street,
To where a lifting foresail-foot is yanking at the sheet;
To a windy, tossing anchorage where yawls and ketches ride,
Oh I'l be going, going, until I meet the tide.

And first I'll hear the sea-wind, the mewing of the gulls,
The clucking, sucking of the sea about the rusty hulls,
The songs at the capstan at the hooker warping out,
And then the heart of me'll know I'm there or thereabout.

Oh I am sick of brick and stone, the heart of me is sick,
For windy green, unquiet sea, the realm of Moby Dick;
And I'll be going, going, from the roaring of the wheels,
For a wind's in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels.

John Masefield

All Rivers Run to the Sea

"All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again."  Ecclesiastes 1:7

    I may have been born in the Midwest, but water has defined me. Milwaukee, my birthplace, is located on the Southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. From my beginnings, I bathed in those waters. From there, we migrated, like so many in the early sixties, to sunny Southern California. It would be a few years before I found my way to the Sunset Beach at 7, and in the time between I spent hours in the pool whenever weather permitted, braving wrinkled fingers and chlorine-red eyes for a chance to be a water creature. It is said that I so loved the water that one night I slept walked out of the apartment to the pool and fell or jumped into it. There's no way of knowing whether I would have swam in my sleep; I was "rescued" and the story became one of my apocrypha. Still, when my mom started dating a man who lived on the beach and my weekends became filled with sand and sun and ocean, I think that was when I was truly born.
     
          I don't when I began to remember my watery origins. Maybe it was when I began to follow an old friends journey back to himself. I missed the start of it, caught up with him a month or so into it. He had bought a sailboat, one that needed a reminder of what she was and could be again, mired in fresh water, poor thing, anchored, still, in a way a sailboat is never meant to be, not for long. Sailboats are born to wander as are the people who call them home. She needed work, lots of it, to make her seaworthy again, and bit by bit he gave her his blood and sweat, trusting her to help him find himself, she trusting him to do the same, working on each other the way we do in the best and truest loves. In his tale of seeking and finding, of making "his vessel," the literal ship, Susurru, and his body, as well as his metaphorical heart and soul seaworthy, I found deep resonances. And I vowed I think, in the wordless way we sometimes do, to make myself seaworthy again, to sail as I hadn't in 30 years.

     Bryan's journey brought me to a new understanding of myself and my path. If we are water people, then a land-locked life, even when it's willingly chosen, demands a heavy price from us. If you are a water creature then you understand the little mermaid's curse when she assumes human form -- "But every step you take will feel as if you were treading upon knife blades so sharp that blood must flow." The sea called. I felt it at Pacifica, not just the beauty of the ocean, but how it brought me back to myself, put me in perspective. Being at the edge of water and land, I found a peace I rarely knew in the city I called home the last 30+ years. Nothing seemed too much; ebb and flow became the rhythm of life. I felt myself turning through the wheel of the seasons and the wheel of life and knew a peace I hadn't for so long. 

     

     I think all of us are elemental. We possess natural proclivities that draw us toward land, air, sea, fire. And I think our goal as we move toward individuation is to live as each for a span, growing comfortable with each, so we can call on them as we need to. It's not so far off from Jung's typology, actually, the goal to be able to circumnavigate the bowl of Self, to call on our superior and inferior functions as needed to become whole. I was born of air and fire (Libra with Aries rising), and came during my first 30 years to water and land (Scorpio, Taurus rising). Now I am in thick in air and fire but it won't be long until water rules my rising, probably for the rest of this life.


           One thing my fifties are teaching me is this: We forget ourselves at our own peril. I found myself so lost in a dark wood, so unsure of my way, unsure if I wanted to take another step, tired down to the very heart of me. That was my wake up call. That was when I realized things needed to change, I needed to change. It took me a while to find what that meant for me. And I will admit that more than once I found myself treading the same well-worn path I had been traveling, as if nothing had happened, as if everything was the same, as if I was the same.    

     Perhaps what has made living in Sacramento tolerable for so long, is the way it is situated between two rivers, the Delta where fresh and saltwater meet, the Pacific Ocean a mere 90-minutes away. I could be a river, like the Sacramento and American, and it was almost enough. I forgot the hyrdrological cycle, the evaporation of us, the rain of us, the watershed and fiver flow of us, the ocean of us. At some point, I'd have to find my way back to Mother Ocean. It seems, I have. Yes, this river has run, like all rivers, back to the sea and I know the ocean's calm, and the ocean's power, and the ocean's peace of being. May it always be so.

ODYSSEUS' DECISION

By Louise Gluck

The great man turns his back on the island.
Now he will not die in paradise
nor hear again
the lutes of paradise among the olive trees,
by the clear pools under the cypresses. Time

begins now, in which he hears again
that pulse which is the narrative
sea, or dawn when its pull is strongest.
What has brought us here
will lead us away; our ship
sways in the tinted harbor water.

Now the spell is ended.
Give him back his life,
sea that can only move forward.

How And Where We Find Ourselves

     During the last few days of my time in the Virgin Islands, I found myself on Caneel Bay on St. John, at sunset.  As you tend to do during those times of near perfect joy, you don't focus on the end, on the leaving, at least you don't if you want the hours and days left to have just as much potential for joy, perhaps even more.  You stay in the moment, like this one, and then the one that follows, and the one after that and so on and so on.  At least that's what I do, or try to.  Conversation ebbed and flowed as we watched the sun find the horizon, punctuated by peaceful silences, the kind with plenty of space for reverie.  


    A year ago, sailing in the Caribbean during Easter Break was possible but so improbable that I couldn't have wrapped my head around it.  I wouldn't have known the me that would have flown to the Virgin Islands, spent days and nights on a sail boat, let alone loved and loving.  I flew to Alaska in February.  I went to Santa Barbara.  These were my edges and there so much life beyond them that I felt more island than continent.  Six months ago, it would have been beyond my imagination.  Even three months ago, when this was the course I set myself, it still seemed the stuff of dreams.  And yet here I sat, watching this sunset with a man I loved deeply, on the boat I will call home.  I felt like myself, but in some ways hardly recognized this woman who had moved so much out of the safety of her head and smack into her heart and into life.  And it struck me, a believer in soul and in our essentials, that the Existentialists might have it right.  While I can't quite give up my Platonic forms, I do think Sartre was right when he said, "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards."  I was so sure I knew myself and here I was at the end of a line of unaccustomed actions, reconsidering everything I thought myself to be.


    The mind is a great gift and a terrible burden.  This sense of self, however it comes, through soul, through actions or perceptions, of merely in multiple brain systems independently churning away, making a space we call consciousness and imbue with personality, desires, hopes and dreams, gives us the awareness and the ability to contemplate our actions, give them meaning through story, place ourselves along the arrow of time.  Yet it also limits us.  We live so much in that space of self we forget that we can change, that in finding new wheres and hows, we ourselves can be reborn.  Normandi Ellis, in her book Awakening Osiris, breathes life into the Egyptian Book of the Dead, fills it with a lyricism historians just can't seem to manage.  She speaks of human becomings, suggesting that rather than being fixed, our essential nature and what the gods want of us, is an unfolding petal by petal, or story never done, not even in death.  When I first read her translation in the late 80's, I found myself transformed by just this one thought, this sort of constant evolution of ourselves.  


     At the end of last year, I wasn't feeling much like I was becoming.  I felt as if rigor mortis had set in and bit by bit I was calcifying, dying.  Working again at the same place I started at the beginning of my career, living in the first house we bought, married to a man I knew well, cared for, but had no passion with for 18 years. I saw my life stretch before me narrow and fixed, my ending inevitable, my life growing smaller and smaller until it conformed to the dimensions of a coffin (yes a bit morbid, but your own near death experience and a parent's sudden passing within a short span, does tend to make one ponder endings and death perhaps a bit more deeply than he or she might do otherwise).  And the thing was, I couldn't see how to get off this path, to open instead of close, to hold on to possibilities.  I couldn't see how to make the end of my life as expansive as my beginnings were and it seemed, more and more, that this was the only right way for me to age.  I wanted to die, whenever that was, saying yes to life instead of cowering and insisting another "no" in a long, long line of them.


     So in November, on 11/11/11, at 11:11, amidst all the metaphysical hoopla that surrounded that date and time, I spoke aloud, "I'm ready life fir whatever you bring.  I'm ready for love, to embrace life fully, to live and to live well.  I'm ready."  Now I'm of the camp that magic is just energy, that we set our intent, put will behind it, dare when opportunities come, and then see what unfolds.  I think "magic" occurs when we decide to collaborate with life, not so much make lemonade out of lemons, but find ways to say yes and then to take action.  Living the life of the mind is fine, but you can live and die there without ever living at all.  Sartre wrote: “Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action."  (There is no reality except in action.) and I have come to think he is right.  


     In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl suggested that we take a more active role in life.  Our expectations of life did not matter as much as life's expectations of us.  “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” I think I might have finally come to not just understand this with my mind, but to know deep in the soul and body of me, to live every day in collaboration with life, learning what it wants of me and then acting on that without fear, or at least with a little fear but determination.  Which is how I ended up sitting on a sailboat named Susurru with the man I love, watching a Caribbean sunset, prepared to change my life completely to be the person I think life wants me to be, the kind of person that says yes, that even as my remaining years dwindle, still says yes with joy and an open heart.  And I can say with complete certainty that this is just how and where I need to be.