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.

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.