À Suivre (to be continued ....)

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end – Seneca

I’m a writer.  I pride myself on being able to take another’s viewpoint, to put myself in another’s shoes.  If I am guilty of hubris, and what human being isn’t, this is where I challenge the gods and where my lessons in humility come.  Even as I consider Bryan’s experience of this great leap to a life together, my focus has been my own transition and adjustments.  As I have worked with a craftsman’s dedication to mold my old life into this new one, I have seen the hard work of my own journey while seeing his as easier, somehow.  What was he ending but a single life?  I was the one with home and family.  I was the one moving from land to sea, from three to two, from California to Florida.  The fact that Bryan so often supported this view of my big leap and his relatively small one, only added to my blindness.  He was beginning too, which meant, as Seneca so wisely said, he had his own endings to endure and while they might be occurring in the beauty of the Caribbean, they were still endings and therefor, still painful.  That he would be brave enough to endure that end of whatever dream drove him to buy the boat in Savannah, ready her, and sail her down to the Virgin Islands, for our new beginning, rarely crossed my mind.  I was so focused on all my losses, too focused to consider his in the way they deserved.

Falling in love at a distance and coming together at last is a bit like an arranged marriage.  Once you finally share the same space, all the things you would have done had you begun the relationship in close proximity must now be experienced – cooking for each other, sussing out each other’s rhythms and preferences, learning how you each like to watch movies, read, love, etc.  Apart, all your energy goes toward bridging the distance, maintaining the connection, each helping the other hold on to the thread of love you’ve found.  Together, the mechanics of actually sharing the same space become paramount.  I’ve had years of habits, an ease in the old life which I have yet to establish in this new.  Edges are rougher than I’m used to, rougher than I might like, although those rough edges are also powerful opportunities for growth.  I am learning after all these years to take some responsibility for my relationships, to allow for magic but also for good, old-fashioned conversation and negotiation.  Instead of saying, “this must be bourn,” I’m thinking nothing is set in stone.  Changes can be made.  If I need a goodnight kiss every night, then I can ask.  If he needs to be cared for when he’s low so he can be strong when he is not, then he can ask.  We can pick our way through this reef and any others we come across, for good navigation is as much by eye as by chart, as much by hands on the wheel as auto-pilot.  You need to know your ship, your parameters, and then you need to have faith that you can find your way to safe harbor.

We both of us are learning this new life.  We chose to do this on the water for many reasons, mostly I think because be both have come to be elemental in our older years and both have been stripped to our essentials, the place we want to live, honest and open.  There’s no place to hide on the high seas.  And, more importantly, you are urged toward, and sometimes forced into, a bit of perspective, the ocean vast and you so small.  Things that on land would have grown monstrous and overblown with importance, seem more human-sized when you’re out of sight of land and underway, the boat racing beneath you, the sea meeting and matching it.  And the days off shore feel precious and temporary, like life itself, and the nights endless and full of you and more than you, boundaries thin, non-existent really.  This seems the perfect way to find our way, to be made strong and whole by the sea. 

À Suivre …. To be continued.

Now What?

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

This Tuesday past, at 12:40 pm local time, I landed in St. Thomas.  I stepped off the plane into a wall of humidity, a California girl suddenly transported to another world entirely, an aging, white-haired Alice in a new Wonderland.  I had gotten what I had wanted – this life on the water, this love, this chance to be myself as I had never been, to know myself as I never had.  Adrenaline and single-mindedness, along with the surety that I wouldn’t survive the old life I was living for more than a few years, a decade at most (longings for death do tend to be realized when the heart is broken in the ways mine had been), got me here.  I stood on the tarmac to get my bearings, moved resolutely with my carryon because that’s what one does, but at the core of me, beating the rhythm of my own heart was this simple question – “Now what?”  What happens when you get what you want?

I suspect you know the answer already.  However, the Sue that stepped off the plane at the St. Thomas airport was emotionally drained from leaving her marriage and her beloved child, college-aged it’s true, but her primary focus for the last 18 years.  For the first time in years she chose her own happiness over everyone else’s in what still feels to her like the epitome of selfishness.  That Sue wasn’t so clever.  She boarded the boat, which was now her home sleepy and stunned.  She went through the motions the next few days, sometimes almost feeling a part of it, at other times feeling like someone on vacation, heading away after a specified span.  And beneath it all her heart beating in this new rhythm of “what now,” “what now?”

Fast-forward to Friday morning.  An intense squall and an open port have led to wet clothes and a mess of spilled heart meds, somehow opened (thanks TSA) and now dissolved onto pants and shirts.  I start to cry, all the joy and strangeness of the last few days, the frustration that always comes when you are on a steep learning curve trying to master a new life (sailing) by immersing myself in it, a foreigner trying to become a native speaker, finally let loose.  These are happy tears and sad ones, tears of frustration and anger, at myself, at the open 

port, at the TSA.  I cry as I have seldom cried these last few months except the few days before leaving Sacramento for good.  I can’t seem to stop myself.  Tears just keep welling and rolling down my cheeks as I try to deal with the mess and stow for our journey to the other end of the island.  I don’t Bryan to see me like this.  I have pretended for months I am not at my edge trying to tie up the loose ends of one life so I can move to this other.  Now here is the clear evidence of that edge and my own fragility.  I so want to be a strong woman and am never as strong as I hope to be.

Of course he sees the tears, comforts and calms me, telling me things I know but which sound a lot more reasonable coming from a third party.  This is how it’s going to be for a while, I think to myself.  And underneath all the tears and the soothing words is that heartbeat of “now what,” “now what?”

Somewhere along the sail to Christmas Cove, the answer comes to me at last.  I know what you do when you get what you want – you live, and you do your best to be grateful, the key way of that being to enjoy it.  For the first time in years, there’s nothing on the horizon to long for.  Besides visits from my daughter and possibly having her make her home near, there’s nothing else I want.  I have a man I love and who loves me.  We are well matched in every way, a rare and wondrous blessing.  I have the ocean and the wind, the beautiful islands, the strange music of it that is carried in the voices of the people.  I have months ahead without work, three of them, the first break this long I have had since my heart attack recovery.  There’s nothing else I want.  Besides my early childhood, has there ever been a time I could have said this and meant it as completely as I do right now.  All that is required of me is to live this life, to be happy, and to appreciate how blessed I am.  My heartbeats become heartbeats again and a peace settles over me.  If I can make my heart’s desire come true, if I can manifest love and this life, then surely I can learn to appreciate my blessings, be happy, and thank the gods for all I have been given.

There will be days I lose my equanimity.  There will be days of sorrow over the good things in the old life I gave up, even as I try to make them a part of this new life.  Sometimes it works, mixing old and new, and sometimes it doesn’t.  But mostly, I get to be happy and the wise thing to do is to enjoy it fully.  May it be so.

The Owl and the Pussy Cat

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
by Edward Lear

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
    In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
    Wrapped up in a five pound-note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
    And sang to a small guitar,
'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
    What a beautiful Pussy you are,
            You are,
            You are!
    What a beautiful Pussy you are.'

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl,
    How charmingly sweet you sing.
O let us be married, too long have we tarried,
    But what shall we do for a ring?'
They sailed away for a year and a day,
    To the land where the Bong-tree grows,
And there in the wood a Piggy-wig stood,
    With a ring in the end of his nose,
            His nose,
            His nose!
    With a ring in the end of his nose.

'Dear Pig, are you willing, to sell for one shilling
    Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'
So they took it away, and were married next day,
    By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
    Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
    They danced by the light of the moon,
            The moon,
            The moon!
    They danced by the light of the moon.

When I was a child, I loved this poem.  I love it still of course, but not with the complete delight a child does, reveling in a world where cats and owls can fall deeply in love and spend their days sailing the seas and their nights dancing by the light of the moon.  There was something in this poem that went past the daily drudgeries of an adult life of work and my child's life of rules and chores.  It seemed to me it pointed to what truly mattered and to a life where magic permeated everything, was a given.  Why not talking cats and singing owls, and why not love between creatures of air and creatures of earth?  Why couldn't they love and call home another element entirely?  What better place for air and earth to meet and merge?

Yesterday this poem arrived as the poem-of-the day and took me back to my childhood.  And I realized, this poem had become my story.  I'm going to see in a green-hulled boat.  Okay, not pea green but allowances must be made for poetic license.  He serenades me, surrounding me with music, gifting me with song and his beautiful, beautiful voice and at last I am at a place and living a life where music is part and parcel of it, like breathing.  I've never had that and it takes a toll, the music that demands to come forth and the will that must quiet it, silence it because those around you do not feel the pull of it, the necessary nature of it, as I do.  We will get married, he and I, have pledged it already, so early on to be rather shocking to the more practical me, but so perfectly right what else can be done but to say yes, and I will, and whither thou goest, I go?  And we will dance beneath the canopy of stars, beneath the ever changing moon, in all the ways two people dance.  I'm going to say we may dine on quince, but probably not mince, although who knows.  Bryan is an amazing cook and for the first time in my life I will not be the sole provider of sustenance for those I love.

What do you say when your life takes such a wondrous turn, when the stuff of nonsense and dreams becomes your magical reality?  I suppose you just keep sailing and dancing and loving and seeing where that magical boat takes you and hand in hand what adventures unfold.

"Loos'd of limits and Imaginary lines."

     I was young when I discovered Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, maybe eleven or twelve.  I was one of those straight and narrow kids.  My mom is French so there was wine offered at dinner, but I never touched it.  I didn't party.  I didn't take drugs.  But Whitman, my God, I read him and grew rapturous, ecstatic.  He taught me you could grow drunk on words.  Whitman was my gateway drug and poetry, even now, after all these years, undoes me.  It turns me Victorian and I literally swoon  I swoon.

     This week has been filled with endings, although perhaps that's that's the right word.  Maybe partings is a better one, not good bye but au revoir, until I see you again.  As I finished work, I felt a great lifting.  I love my vocation as Speech Pathologist and this job was a good one, but letting go of it was critical to move to the new.  I think it was Seneca who said, "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."  My days since, the few left before I go, have been filled with myriad tasks large and small.  You understand as you unravel one life to weave another just how many ways you lash yourself to the mast of the life you are living.  And with task accomplished, I could feel it, myself expanding; the limits I have spent years believing I possessed, my certain edges, were not true edges at all, but self-imposed.  I can fly in dreams but as a creature of air, I swear I feel as if I could fly in my waking life as well.

     Which of course lead me back to Whitman, my initiation into poetry, into the ecstatic possibilities of life, my mentor to living life fully and feeling with all of me, not just my own body electric but the bodies around me and the beloved body of the Earth, of Mother Ocean, of Father Sky.  My road is open before me, replete with possibilities and I am not pre-ordained or forced to walk a particular path.  The road before me is open and I can sing, full throated and lovely, a song of rapture, of determination, of courage, of joy.  My symphony is not finished but still in progress and the song of the open road fills my heart and throat.  There have so many gifts in this change of life, one of the most wondrous this return to possibility and a hosting of it, not in fear, but in delight.  When I board that plane at Sacramento International Airport  , there will be the deep sorrow of parting, but beneath that, and hopefully forever part of the fabric of me will by the profound joy of being loos'ed at last of limits and imaginary lines, my own master, total and absolute.

From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,	55
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space;
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.	60
I am larger, better than I thought;
I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me;
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to me, I would do the same to you.
I will recruit for myself and you as I go;	65
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go;
I will toss the new gladness and roughness among them;
Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;
Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me.

Dive For Dreams

     For a time I stopped collaging, but the last few months, knowing I'm going to be on the water, knowing a profound transformation is occurring and I am becoming and becoming and becoming, I've been collaging up a storm.  It's almost as if I want a heart full of images to feed upon as I sail Mother Ocean.

     This little 5 by 7 collage came the last few weeks.  A simple thing with only 4 images, I knew it immediately as complete.  Only today did I find the e. e. cummings poem that seems to be its perfect match, as if the poem was waiting deep in my soul for me to dive and discover it.  I wonder sometimes at all we know but do not know, and how we walk our lives like a labyrinth, twisting and turning through the maze of us, only to find at the heart myth and magic, angels and demons, heroes and heroines, astonishing stories out of what we thought was ordinary.



dive for dreams

dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind) 
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward) 
honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at the wedding) 
never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for good likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth) 
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neating each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds 
-before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were. 

silently if, out of not knowable 

silently if, out of not knowable 
night's utmost nothing,wanders a little guess 
(only which is this world)more my life does 
not leap than with the mystery your smile 
sings or if(spiralling as luminous 
they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams, 
less into heaven certainly earth swims 
than each my deeper death becomes your kiss 
losing through you what seemed myself,i find 
selves unimaginably mine;beyond 
sorrow's own joys and hoping's very fears 
yours is the light by which my spirit's born: 
yours is the darkness of my soul's return 
-you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars 

by e.e. cummings

The Meaningful Spaces in our Stories

     As I writer, I choose whose story to tell and whose to let go, what to say and what to leave out.  I shape the narrative so by the end my reader reaches my conclusion, or close enough, the World according to Sue, or at least a world according to Sue.  Perhaps there was a time when I believed 'The End' was truly the end and that happily ever after was a place like heaven, a location, a destination.  No we are creatures of movement, of change, and our stories change as we do, an expected ending not an ending at all, or at least not ours.  Of course now I question endings, having gone through one of my own and found my story still evolving, me still becoming.  And I write myself as I read these days, page by page, moment by moment, so few things cast in stone.

     My stories have become more spacious too.  I always believed that stories needed space, pockets of emptiness that the reader could slip into and inhabit, just enough left unsaid that he or she could fill in the blanks and make the story his and hers.  And that spaciousness in writing can be calculated, placed by design, or it can become your nature, your given, an unconscious graciousness, an invitation to co-creation, this is not my story but ours, come write it with me.  I don't when it came to me that this is how I am living now, with these same spaces, letting life work with me instead of tenaciously filling every detail in so there's no space for serendipity, for magic, for anything but my own rigid beliefs at what is possible.

     I think I realized how I had changed as I began to tell people I was leaving this life and beginning another.  People want to know, not all of it, but enough to make sense of it.  And I could have told the story of an unhappy marriage and the man of my dreams, but I didn't.  Not because it wasn't their business.  Those that know me, know I'm not afraid to use my life as fodder for rumination and growth.  If individuation is the goal, then all of it, at least for me, should be examined under the harsh light for wisdom.  No, I didn't tell a set and detailed story because I don't know the whole story and because I felt the kinder thing, the greater gift, was to give them enough space to write their own tales, come to their own conclusions.  If it made them feel better to write the tale of "there but for the grace of God," or "thank God that's not use," then fine.  And if they wrote a tale of their own shadowed heart and unfulfilled longing, then that was fine too.  I gave them the bones of my story and let them sing it to life into whatever form they wanted.

     By nature we want to know the whys of things.  Unpredictability makes us nervous.  I get that.  On the savannah it was a matter of life and death.  You kept your eyes open, looked for patterns that said you were safe or you were prey.  But this need to find patterns, to fit everything into the boxes what we know, what we can understand, leaves no space in our lives and without that space, for me at least, a kind of hopelessness came because the world was only what I could imagine it to be, all the other possibilities falling away.  In the world I found myself this last December, sick, working at a place I had spent much of my adult life leaving and coming back to, my daughter getting closer to heading off to her own life, my marriage not really a marriage but two lives lashed together with history and fear of alone, my future stretched out before me, each and every step, and I found myself thinking dead was not such a bad thing.

     It wasn't love that changed everything, at least not in the way we traditionally think.  It was the space love made, that first tiny hint of possibility that entered my life story that was followed by another and another, until I could no longer see "my future" at all, didn't want to see it, just wanted to live it day by day, step by step.  Love brings many gifts.  I suspect each love brings us something we need at the time.  I suppose, best-case scenario, it's progressive revelations; we love as we can, and are loved as we can be loved, each time hopefully deeper, wider, longer, fuller.  It's the space of this love that's the gift of it, beyond all the other blessings it bestows, for in each and every gap and span, hope resides, and worlds dreamed of and yet to be dreamt.  This is the magic of that gap between God and Man on the Sistine chapel, myriad futures, chances and changes, loves known, guessed, and out of the blue.  This is how I want to live the rest of my life; this is the story of me I want to write, full of holes where life can bestow upon me miracles.  And this is how I will live, step by step, and with each backward glance will I know my path at that moment, understanding that every step, I know it anew.

Three Hours Difference

     Since December, but for a few weeks time,  I have lived in two time zones, not quite here, not quite there.  For someone used to living at odd hours, pre-dawn risings, wee-hour noctavigance, it's not a physically taxing way to live.  I can manage, connect, have an almost 'normal morning, noon and night of a relationship.  I realize though, as I near the end of it, as I make the leap toward a new time and place and life, that such a life demands a price.  I have always been a threshold dweller, my liminality part and parcel of every hour of every day.  Still, I've had a foot in one realm and have, despite that small corner, claimed myself a citizen of that place and time, even if I felt like a visitor.  

     There is a price to every happy ending.  We see that in fairy tales.  The Goose Girl loses her beloved horse, Falada.  The Handless Maiden loses her hands.  Snow White looses her father and her rightful place and for a time her life.  I think if we knew all we would face, all we would give up, we might never venture out our front doors.  The 20-20 perspective of hindsight is a gift because it only comes in retrospect.  We might be plotless creatures if life didn't throw us curves and dips in our paths.  

     I've known some of what I will lose by making this particular leap.  One thing, perhaps the most precious thing I've put at risk, is my relationship with my daughter.  For 18 years my primary identity has been her mother.  As the bits and pieces of my other identities like wife and lover fell away, I turned that energy to her.  Knowing the risk of putting so much of my happiness in the hands of someone whose destiny is to leave and to find her own life, i did it anyway, happy to be handless, heartless, willing to pay what ever blood price for some sense of the deep connection I did not find in my marriage.

     My leaving has been hard on my daughter, as it would be.  The thing I had hoped I would never put her through, I am putting her through.  She has, for the most part, put on a brave front, not letting me see her own inner turmoil.  This is a hurt I can't really help her with since it is a hurt I am causing.  This last weekend she suffered a string of health issues - a pulled muscle, an unknown rash - and I took care of her like I have always done.  The muscle healed but the rash got worse, requiring a second call to Kaiser and a doctor's appointment.  She may have shingles.  We find that out today.  I know stress can be a factor in shingles, depleting the immune system, allowing the chicken pox virus to attack the nervous system.  I have played a part in this and she will pay her blood price for my decision.  Ripples are inevitable, no matter how hard we try to prevent them.

     "I don't want you to leave.  Who's going take care of me when I'm sick.  No one can take care of me like you," she sobbed as I held her.  

     She knows that shingles won't make me stay, that things are already in motion, that mid-leap there's nothing to do but fall and wait for your landing.  She understands that the fierce resolve I have always used for her benefit, I'm using for myself this time.  And so we talk about how beyond the time we are offshore, I'm just a phone call or text away.  I can fly here easily, and she can fly to me, a few hours time span.  I'm not here but it doesn't mean, I'm not here.  I've spent a good part of my life living in different times and places.  I lived with my father every other weekend.  My heart was with a man, 500 miles away for a span of years although I do not think his heart ever resided with me.  I went to school for three years, a week away from family every month.  Loving across time zones was hard, is hard, but something I've had some practice doing.  She will learn that these few months, learn that mother-love is a forever thing, strong and sure even when you, the child, are so thick in your own life you hardly feel it, forget.  

    This I wrote recently, wrestling, yet again with the time zones, with the vast span between us.  It never ceases to amaze me how large a chasm three hours can be:

Three Hours Difference

There you are lying in velvet dark,

deep in conversation with the constellations,

your old friends from this neck of the woods,

and new acquaintances borrowed for a time

from southern realms,

a friendly reminder of a world beyond this,

of a looking glass you can step through,

perhaps already have,

Alice in your own Wonderland,

as large as life and twice as natural.

Here I am sweltering in this preview of summer

in the thick of spring.

I am browning, stirring, thickening,

feeding everyone but myself.

This house is stuffed full of familiar smells,

of memories, good and bad,

and I am re-membering every day,

over and over,

the brittle bones of a near happiness,

my life, I thought once,

a life still,

but not mine at all.

There you are gregarious in your tropical way,

warm, open, fragrant as

sandalwood, frangipani, and night blooming jasmine,

your skin salty

from daily reminders of

our watery origins. 

You were not born here,

but were reborn,

and every day

you slip from Mother Ocean.

regenerated,

yourself at last.

Here I sink into my hermitage,

a person of the desert,

even living as I do

between two rivers,

in this City of Trees.

My skin smells of dust

And the faint scent of

the dried flowers of happier times,

and I have nearly forgotten

my watery origins,

only my dreams,

full of the sea.

I was not born here.

but I died here,

near enough anyways,

and I’ve waited years

to be resurrected,

woken to life at last,

by a kiss.

There,

you talk to the woman you love,

coax her through the ethers,

through the hedge of briars,

through the glass coffin,

through every unhappy ending,

to your time,

to your place,

to your watery life,

to your waking dream and

your happily ever after.

Here,

I talk to the man I love,

will myself through the ethers

through the hedge of briars,

through the glass coffin.

past this unhappy ending,

to your time,

your place,

to all the marvelous possibilities

of a watery life,

of a waking dream,

of love

of happily ever after.

“Soon, Baby,” you say.

“Soon, baby” I reply.

You wondering maybe,

me wondering too,

why it took 30 years

to span three hours,

to share one time,

one place,

one life,

one happily ever after.