Whom We Love

"In a relationship, one mind revises the other; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors [coteries of ingrained information patterns] activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love."  From  A General Theory of Love 

It was this last line that stopped me in my tracks.  If it was the only thing I got from the book it would have been worth three-, four-, five times its cost.  Here was the essential truth about love, what no one told you.  It made perfect sense to me, perhaps because my leap was so recent and I could see how such a change in choosing who to love would alter me as well.  It rung me true, that line, and I'm reverberating still.  

A day earlier, I found this quote which summed up, in many ways, the last 10 years of my life or so.  It takes courage to take off the gloves.  It's scary and then wild and then joyous.  And it's so necessary, if you want to live life as opposed to having your life live you.  Here's the quote from Mark Nepo and The Book of Awakening:

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable."

Loving Bryan changed me and is changing me.  I am no longer quite that woman who felt more dead than alive, who bound herself tight to keep herself safe and looked out her window at the world but never really was a part of it.  And all sorts of unimaginable things suddenly seem not just imaginable, but possible.

By the Light of the Moon, the Moon

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.
The Owl and the Pussycat,
     Edward Lear


I never thought I would have a man in my life who possessed a relationship to the magical world, a man who understood that if we came to things with a pure heart, with joy, there, within reach, was all we could ever want, all we could ever ask.  I work with the seasons and the moons.  I set my intents and send them on fire and smoke.  I held close the dictate to do no harm, and I try to live in gratitude for all that has come to me.  I have done all this quietly, not secretly, but alone.  I've been able to talk about this intellectually, but I've never had a partner who spiritually matched me.  I've never really understood before the promise, "where two or more are gathered...."

In our beginning, Bryan and I both claimed Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat as a favorite childhood poem.  It suited us, these two different creatures who had fallen in love and set sail to find a place where they could marry and be together.  As for dancing by the light of the moon, it seemed a sweet little device but nothing more than the delightful stuff and nonsense that was so much a part of the poem.  I never thought there was anything more to it until just recently.

The last few months I've grown a little more open with myself with Bryan.  I tell him what kind of influences are at work at large.  I remind him of the moons and their energy.  I have returned to working with herbs and Bryan has embraced them.  I am more myself spiritually, than I ever have been.  It seems I've unfolded slowly, the physical, the emotional, the mental, and now at last, the spiritual.  We are both sensitive to the moon's influence and we use it, he and I, beginning from our start, but more and more as we go along.  We dance by the light of the moon, Bryan and I.  We have from our beginnings and will, I suspect, for all the rest of our days. It still feels a little strange, but wonderful too.  And I wonder what I can become, at last having body, heart, mind and soul touched, treasured and loved.  May all of us be lucky enough to dance by the light of the moon.

For a Year and a Day ....

At the Jaffe Center for Book Arts was an amazing display of collage/ pop-up books.  The form of the pop-up element was often lost in the battle between figure and ground.  They are whimsy with a touch of malice, a dose of medicine with just slightly too little sugar to make it go down.  They are disorienting in an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way, and I loved them.  Each were made as an artist in residence in a different place.  One of the books had images of a meatpacking plant and steak, another, a mountain of toilets.  I think I may have to go back and study them again once summer comes.  They are a lot to digest.  Do I want to do them?  Hell yes.  Will I?  Probably not.  They're require a type of vision I don't have but in words, and even then.

This one puts me in mind of the Edward Lear poem, The Owl and the Pussycat, which was one of my favorite childhood poems.  Can't exactly tell you why this ship makes me think of their pea-green boat, but it does, in a dream-kind of way where it doesn't look anything like it but you know it is.  I think this kind of book would be perfect to tell the story of that year and a day, all the highs and lows, the romance and the ordinariness, the thrill of romance and then the steadier thrum of a truer love.  Anyways, here's the poem:

The Owl and the Pussycat 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 we have 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 a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, his nose,
With a ring at 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 Oracles Speak

For most of my life I've paid attention to the world around me, looking for signs and symbols.  It's in the blood I think.  My grandmother was full of mysteries and meanings.  I may not always know what they mean, the things I see, though I often know they have meaning even if I can't decipher it.

Yesterday, I went to the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the Florida Atlantic University campus.  I had the opportunity to take a lot of pictures but I had to do it quickly since our time was limited.  Many I took automatically.  This was one of them.  When I came home and uploaded the photos I recognized the words.  It seems a both a reminder and a command and the deep kind of wisdom that comes to us at times, seemingly from beyond us, something we know but have forgotten.  So, I encourage you too to:

     "Go Get Amazed By The Day"

Connections, Missed and Otherwise

Today I learned about this particular artist, Sophie Blackall, and her project, turned into a book,  Missed Connections.  The illustrations are sweet, nostalgic picture-poems about almosts and if onlys.  They set you to thinking about the slender threads that link us to one another, fragile things really, the difference between touching and not, knowing and not, loving and not.  There's no telling really why sometimes we let the moment pass and others we must say something, do something.

The young man of this missed connection saw a woman he thought stunningly beautiful and was filled with desire to ask her out, but didn't.  There was enough juice in the attraction that after the moment was missed, for some time, maybe for a lifetime, he regretted it, but there wasn't enough to make him act.

They get me thinking, these captured moments of nearly and almost.  It wasn't that long I made a choice to reach out, to forget what if and say 'yes!"  I might just as easily not have.  I could have sat days, weeks, months down the line wondering what I missed, trying to make the connection I denied.  I might still be where I was, but for an action made and answered.  What makes the leap though from nearly to yes?  That still eludes me.  And why is one call manifested, the other just a dream?  It's hard for me to imagine that someone could look at a picture of me, read my words, and fall in love enough to brave years, distance and circumstance, and yet this is what happened.  Of course, I did just the same.  Actually it was just words and voice for me, and I moved mountains.  And maybe it's projections, and maybe it's chemistry, and maybe it's just magic of the most potent kind.  I don't know and I probably never will.  In the meantime, though, there is life and its myriad connections, missed and otherwise.

I Walk the Line

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you're mine, I walk the line.

                      I Walk the Line, Johnny Cash


This is a Soul Collage card, made around 2011, I think, when I was still making them and just beginning to think they were more, maybe even art.  It was made post-heart attack, after my father's death, when I had found a certain peace with a road ahead and walking it alone.  I was married, not unhappily but not happily either.  

According to Seena Frost, the woman who created and trademarked the concept, they are "a creative and satisfying collage process. You make your own deck of cards - each collage card representing one aspect of your personality or Soul. Use the collage cards intuitively to answer life's questions and participate in self-discovery. Joyfully deepen your understanding of the relationships between your personality parts, you and your family/community/world, and you and your dreams, symbols, and Spirit."  They are definitely works of the unconscious and while they may represent parts of my personality or Soul, they also are art, and perhaps even prophecy.  You can use the cards as a kind of Tarot, not so much foretelling a future as revealing the forces within you being called on either positively or negatively.  They are kind of a wisdom school, part magic and part psychology as all good wisdom schools are.  I came to find though, the cards themselves can be a kind of oracle.  One card actually predicted my coming heart attack a month before I had it.  Another, Wolf of my Heart, predicted the man who would come into my life who would encourage me on the path hinted by this card, I Walk the Line, made a year after.  

Of course when I made the card, it made perfect sense the road the color of fire and blood, a little arterial, the ocean, actually a Santa Barbara Beach, reflecting a hope that I would end up in a way where I started, by the water.  The planet, I was never sure of, maybe a new world, certainly a distant future, definitely an adventure.  The angel, isn't so much hubris as it is reflective of a certain alienation that was always mine, but so much more so after the heart attack.  That she is black and white against such a vivid background only amplifies the difference.  I see her as becoming, not quite giving up flight, not quite embracing the earth.  She is nearly grounded, but not quite, nearly of this world but not completely.  This was how I felt, how I still sometimes feel although that is changing.  I am coloring myself in, letting life paint me, and not the cool blues I prefer but vivid oranges and reds, fierce yellows, the colors of ocean sunrises and sunsets, of flesh and blood.

When I rediscovered it the other day, it struck me that this is exactly what happened to me when I left Sacramento and flew to the Virgin Islands and completely new life.  I suppose you could say, what I did with the body I now repeated with my heart, or the physical healing was now echoed by an emotional one.  It's not Google Maps, exact location, possible routs, and estimated time of arrival (as well as traffic conditions), but it's eerily exact.  The unconscious loves its symbols and prefers a more sphinx-like approach to prophecy.  I find I like that a little better than a psychic's predictions.  I like the frisson of realization, that look back that Machado talks of, the one that reveals the path we've made by walking.  It makes me wonder what card I might make now, for what is to ahead and I think I might almost be ready to find out.

One day ... Some day ... If only ....

"If only I could feel about sex as I do about writing! That I’m the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself."  Susan Sontag, 11/1/64

I've sat with this quote for a while now.  It felt too revelatory  to share in any venue, but especially this one, even as it seemed somewhere, somehow, it must be written down and shared as a truth, in any venue, especially this one.   I recently came across it reading Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks.  I've always thought her brilliant, but there is something chilly about her that never quite sat well with me.  I know my own tendencies to intellectualism and emotional distance.  I am not a better person when I give myself to cold logic.  This might have been Sontag's path, but it is not mine.

These days though, I feel a little easier braving the element of air.  Life on the water keeps emotions on the surface, keeps me emotionally engaged in life instead of the spectator I had become.
I can read a little Sontag, dwell for a while in the heady heights of mind she called home.  Which is how I came to the quote above that stopped me in my tracks.  

When I write I do feel inhabited by something more, vehicle or a force beyond me.  It's not that I'm merely a scribe to some greater power.  No, it's more that I am somehow fully what I should be when I write, more than just this body, this self, but a larger Self, maybe even a Soul.  I suppose I understand when I write, the personal unconscious and Jung's collective unconscious.  However, I haven't that way in my life for a long time, maybe ever, but certainly no the last 20 years or more.  There have been moments, not no real surety, not until this last year.  It struck me, reading Sontag's quote, that I do feel this way about sex these days.   I feel it still about writing, but feel it about going to work too now, and coming home and the hours between.  I feel it sitting at the table having dinner with Bryan.  I feel it nearly every hour of every day.  I have gone from a distant observer to a full participant to something more.  I can't tell you what that more is, just that it feels the way Sontag describes  writing.  I wonder if this is how life and living should feel, andI wonder how long it's been since I felt that way, if I ever felt that way.  The heart attack, a lost love, a found one, a change of venue, a sailboat and the ocean, they all brought me to this place.  They turned me on, lit me up, and I pray to any and all the gods that my light never dulls and dims again.  

We, Unfolding.

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.
                               Max Frisch


One of the gifts of a mid-life change is the opportunity to watch a life unfold, your's and if your lucky, maybe the life of another, the one you love.  We come to it with our children, that little bit of distance necessary to see the broad picture of where they've been, where they are and hints of where they might be headed.  In my primary relationship though, I had long lost the ability to see much and, to be honest, to want to see much.  He had so set himself on a path, was so set in who he was, there was no unfolding.  He kept himself tightly closed, shut down; there was no becoming allowed.  And I came for a time, a long time actually, to believe that there was no becoming for me as well, just small, meaningless accomplishments, mere busywork, really, as I made my to the end of my days.

My mother has asked me on more than one occasion why my life change had to be so big, why I couldn't keep everything of my old life but that one that no longer fit -- my marriage.  There was a time I would have told her it was the man I came to love, and that was part of it, but it wasn't all.  It's never about that person although it's easier to think it is.  They become a convenient vehicle, the outward form, but not the soul of the change.  I felt around the edges of why, kind of knew, but it wasn't until a few month ago that I realized I had to make this big of a leap, I had to move across the country, I had to change everything so completely there was no going back.  For me, a small change would never be enough.  I settle into grooves.  I follow trails already made and so small changes would have ultimately been more of the same.  I guess my own 'blue screen of death' had come up and I knew I needed a complete reboot if I was going to actually live my life.

I don't know if I ever explained it enough for my mother to understand.  I'm not sure she has to understand although I'm not sure I'll tell her that.  I've found the kind of changes I've made make some people uncomfortable, especially my mother.  It doesn't fit the societal narrative of success I grew up with, my mother's narrative, and if you can turn your world and other's worlds upside-down, if everything people knew about you or thought they knew wasn't true at all, then what can be counted on?  The world is shown as the astonishing and unpredictable thing it is.  But more importantly, there are no more excuses for compromise and making due.  You can change, even late in life and you can watch yourself unfold (and what air sign doesn't want that little bit of distance and the wisdom it brings).  You can write yourself and re-write yourself.  It is astonishing really how that one chapter changes all that came before and opens up worlds in all the chapters that will follow.

I'm growing used to unfolding. It was an odd feeling at first, not particularly comfortable, but not completely unpleasant either.  It's a catch in the throat kind-of-sensation, a yearning in the gut, the pull toward something more even while you have no idea what that more is.  It's like that first touch of love, that is it or isn't it point when you're still on the edge, just at the beginning of falling but still have balance enough or think you do, to stay right there, not fall at all. It's not for everyone, unfolding.  Which doesn't mean we get out of it as much as it means we have a choice whether to be aware or not, to be conscious or not.  It reminds of that Anais Nin quote:  “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”  We can fight the unfolding; we can deny it.  We can live whatever prescribed life we think we should be living, and if we need to unfold, that life will unravel one way or another.  We don't always have to be aware of the unfolding, but unfold we must.  We were born to bloom and question is whether we manage just a few petals, staying mostly bud, or bloom thoroughly and completely, giving ourselves up, living gloriously and ending just as gloriously.  I want to be that bloom, that rose, that lives it's life so completely and ends it so completely too. I think Bryan wants the same and I think that too is part of the gift of this.  It is hard to stay a bud in the company of flowers.

For Most of My Life ....

.... I followed the safe path.  

A few days ago I came across this first line of a commencement speech made by Debbie Millman to the graduating class of San Jose State University.  From it she wrote an essay titled "Fail Safe," which is part of her 2009 anthology, Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design.  What follows would be inspiring to anyone just on the edge of starting out, at his or her beginning, but for someone like me, someone who made the kind of leap she talks of at mid-life, the one she gives words to, practical, 21st century words, not Dante's Italian or Shakespeare's English, well it sent me reeling.  I felt nothing short of wonder to see the last year of my life in print, to realize I was not the strange creature some people seemed to think I was.  Even I wondered now and again how I found the strength and hope I found to do what I did.

Unlike Millman, I had never stood at a crossroads early in my life choosing possibility over surety.  I too had wanted to be a writer, had believed I might have talent enough to try, but bravery enough to consider that risky, possible path.  I chose certainty.  I chose practical.  I limited my possibilities for many reasons, and I blame my father for not believing in me, but the truth was I didn't believe in myself.  I suffered from an extreme case of lack of imagination, which plagued for many years.  I couldn't believe in the possibility of a life doing anything artistic.  From there I stopped believing in the kind of love that meets you in all the ways you want and need it to.  I stopped believing in change.  My world narrowed to the narrowest path I could imagine.  In this narrowing, my imagination proved all too powerful.

Millman writes: "The grand scheme of life, maybe (just maybe) is not about knowing or not  knowing, choosing or not choosing.  Perhaps what is truly known cannot be described or articulated by creativity or logic or science or art - but perhaps it can be described by the most authentic and meaningful combination of the two: poetry.  As Robert Frost wrote, a poem "begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.  It is never a thought to begin with."

She continues with the advice for those at their beginnings or those, like me, at midlife in a dark wood and reconsidering, that we take Robert Frost's advice to heart.  She continues: "If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now."  Which is exactly what I did.  

It doesn't mean the path is suddenly easy.  It doesn't mean courage and strength aren't required of us, more perhaps late in life than would have been required earlier at our start.  I would say there really is no other choice, not if you want to truly live each and every day of your life.  I was lost and now I'm found.  I was the walking dead, and now I'm one of the living.  It's never too late.  And I could tell my daughter that, or I can live it so she comes to it as real and true and embraces her many amazing possibilities.