All That Is Not Gold

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it

all that is not gold.

 --Leo Tolstoy

We make major leaps.  We transform our lives.  We feel, perhaps for the first time, centered and peaceful, right and true, completely ourselves, happy.  Maybe it's hubris, but I think it's more finding yourself on your path, where you should be, and you slip, at least I did, into thinking all of this is a destination, a point to achieve, an equation that leads to happy, something that can be known, repeated, proved they way they made us prove things in math all those years ago.  You open your mouth, expecting diamonds, and you get toads.  

Now you're smart.  You close your mouth, take a breath, center, fill yourself with peace and love.  You open your mouth, sure something perhaps not marvelous but at least enlightened will come forth.  And there they are, more toads and nasties.  I can remember in therapy asking my therapist if I had to deal with my father issues.  "Not until you're ready," she said with her sweet, motherly smile.  And then my dad died and I was thick in my father issues.  Apparently there's no hiding from the work of ourselves.

So here I am in Florida.  I've found my way back to water; I've found my way back to love.  I've learned to leap, to risk, to collaborate with life and live as opposed to letting life live me.  I'm beginning to understand my worth, not in pride, but just realize the gifts I bring and in the job area, how I have a right to have that honored and to be renumerated commensurate with that experience.  I'm understanding the difference between standing firm in my truth and fighting.  But I still can't talk to my mother and she still can't talk to me.  So much growth, but not here.  Here I am still a child, looking for the "good" mother instead of the "good enough"mother I have.  I keep looking for the big hug, for the comfort and consolation, for the unconditional love.  At some point, don't I have to let go, stopping looking for isn't, and come to peace with what is?  

We manage to get through the call, to end on a relatively happy note, but memory of the conversation tastes rusty in my mouth.  Is it time to deal with my mother issues?  That is the question.  And for the first time I'm not sure of anything, which perhaps is just where I need to be, at the wisdom place of Socrates, knowing that I know nothing.  

For many years I believed in the Platonic ideal, in The Truth.  Now, I think, I may be finally willing to let go and let life wash away everything, and leave the gold.  May it be so.

With Eyes Open

"The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself."  Henry Miller

I could tell you that I always paid close attention to the natural world.  My first memory is of the full moon streaming through the high window of my bedroom, a converted walk in closet, back in Milwaukee.  My second memory, was standing on a screened back porch, watching dust motes dance in sunlight, riveted by the magic of that slow, glittering dance.  But attention is a funny thing.  First regard, or second, or third, or tenth or a hundredth might reveal some truth, surprising or not, but not the only truth.  To know this is begin to understand the wondrous mystery of this material existence.  

It wasn't until my heart attack though, that I began to take a more particular notice. Sometimes I used my camera to capture the individual perfection of a rose, the same bush captured day after day, each rose its perfection, ear similar but none ever exactly the same.  Sometimes I just used my eyes.  Sometimes I passed by a tree and let my hands explore the marvel of trunk, discovering its valleys and hills, the rough and smooth as personal as a fingerprint.  Sometimes, I knelt and observed a bug make its way across the concrete, clamber up a branch, hover and settle.  There were times I leaned in, head cocked to one side, given lichen my most intense scrutiny.  This was how I pieced my world back together after it was ripped apart, brick by brick, flower by flower, day by day, month by month, season by season.  

I'm not sure that I was expecting answers or truths, although I will tell you I got some.  Mostly, I think, I needed to rediscover the mysterious, the wonderful in a world that seemed neither.  I wasn't dead from my heart attack, but I wasn't alive either.  I suppose if I wanted to label what I was, I'd call myself Undead, not vampire but zombie, going through the motions of living, nearly alive, but not quite.  Don't get me wrong, I wasn't clamoring for brains, but there was something automatic in much of what I did, it was the semblance of life but not the actuality of it.

And still I walked, observed, took pictures, scrutinized.  I regarded the turn of the day, the passage months, the seasons coming and going, one year chasing the other.  I paid close attention to blades of grass, the petals of roses, the clouds, reflections in puddles, trees, leaves attached and fallen.  I listened to the wind through bare branches and newly leaved ones, through full green glory of summer and brittle rustle of autumn.  And somewhere, in the midst of all this, I understood where I was, what I was, and I prayed, the only way I ever prayed, with the fierce yearning of my heart, now new, for a real life and all that entailed, both the joy and the sorrow, the wondrous and the mundane.

I got the real life I prayed for.  In the last few months I lived more than I have in years, and I've felt alive, a zombie no more.  I have marveled at the world around me, at the places I've been, at the people I've met.  I haven't made the detailed observations I did.  The world is mysterious and marvelous, but I have come to a place where I'm ready to take a breath and go deeper, to see what more is waiting to be revealed.  I've started walking the beach of the place I now call home.  I'm beginning to pay close attention to the water, the sand, the wind, the sun, the clouds, the sounds and smells.  I don't know what I'll learn or when it will come, the revelations that arrive when we spend time contemplating the mysteries.  I can't wait though, to find out.  

Einstein said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. Those to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; their eyes are closed." May all of us experience the mystery in a blade of grass, in a grain of sand, in a wave, in anything and everything.

Arriving Where I Started ....

...We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.  T.S. Eliot,
Little Gidding, Four Quartets

I love T. S. Eliot.  I've been reading his Four Quartets since Sophomore year in college, each time his words ringing me like a gong.  They're magical those words, the way good poetry is, reverberating with the kind of truth you feel in your belly and blood and bones.  I've read the stanza from Little Gidding before, loved it, shared it.  Other sections from the Quartet have struck through out my life, but his seems to be the refrain of whatever song or poem is mine, the words I recite over and over, the words that ring me like a bell, bring forth a clarion call.

Today, with back to school fast approaching and Bryan far away in Trinidad, I found myself walking the beach near where we're docked in Fort Lauderdale.  We've been here since June 9th, but we haven't really been here.  There was a trip to Dallas to meet Bryan's family and for him to work.  Then here was the return to Florida with his car.  After that, there was a few day span and then I went to Sacramento for a week.  I was back for a few days and then Bryan left to take a boat from St. Thomas to Trinidad.  You see what I mean?  We've been here but not long enough to find our rhythms, to learn the place, to see how we are here together.  So I decided it was time to learn how I was here, in this place I am now calling home.  And since the sea calls me on the West Coast, offering up wisdom, peace, and courage, I wondered how the Atlantic would treat me.

I will tell you, when the ocean is in your blood, the water works its magic wherever you are, beach or far from shore.  When you're a water maiden, whether mermaid or selkie or ondine, the ocean talks and her words fill your ears with a shush and a roar and your heart beats to the rhythm of waves on shore, or swells against hull.  You can be on land, but your soul is underway, and the places you go ....   All the important things I have learned about life, about myself, about the heart and soul of me, I have learned in the company of Mother Ocean.

So I walked the Fort Lauderdale beach.  I let the waves sweep over my feet, that warm, clear water of the Atlantic.  I let the ocean fill my ears, the waves dictate the beat of my heart.  I let thoughts come and words find form.  A year ago, at the start of another school year, I had no idea where I would find myself at the start of the next.  Oh I thought I knew.  I saw my life stretch before me, year after year, a terrible sameness.  And yet, here I was, in the span of 12 months, on the other side of the continent, my feet wet with the water of an unfamiliar ocean, my life not at all the same, the surety that I would never have love again replaced with the surety that love is everywhere, well within my grasp if I just opened my eyes and my heart.  It was hard and yet it really wasn't, this change of life, and it was much more wonderful than anything I had conceived of, could have conceived, so trapped I was by what I thought was possible.

On I walked in the gentle surf that marks the Atlantic in South Florida.  I stopped, looked out toward the horizon, remembering the time two months before I sat at sunrise just at that spot waiting in that vast ocean to come into the marina of the city I would now call home.  I felt so much like I had as a kid walking along Sunset Beach, my feet splashing in the Pacific.  And it struck me that I was back where I started, back by the water I hungered for.  Not the Pacific, but the ocean is the ocean.  Pacific or Atlantic, it didn't matter.  It just mattered that this water maiden had found her way back a watery life.  I was the same, but I wasn't.  That adolescent beach girl was yearning, hungry, waiting for life to find her and take hold.  This water woman is centered, happy with where she is, co-creating with life and living it as opposed to it living her.  Back where I started, but with new eyes, seeing it all just as it was, me as I am, for the first time.  Hard, but not really, to come to this place.  Yes it took time, but it needed to, nothing wasted, everything perfect, everything in preparation.  In the end it doesn't matter how long a took, only that I have returned to the sea, and this place, to me, truly, for the first time.

You Don't Always Get What You Want ....

... But if you try sometime, you just might find

You get what you need. - Rolling Stones

     When I was young, I was ambivalent about this song by the Rolling Stones.  I never could understand why we couldn't get what we wanted, especially if it didn't hurt anyone.  Of course things were a bit more black and white for me back then, direct cause and effect the rule of the day.  Chaos theory hadn't found it's way into popular culture yet.  We hadn't heard of that apocryphal butterfly in the Sahara causing a hurricane on the other side of the world.  Maybe the world wasn't simple, but I sure thought it was.  In those days I focused on what I wanted and never wavered.  And not getting what I wanted, well that was second best, at best, and who could be happy with sloppy seconds?

     Age taught me compromise and adaptation, but I'm ashamed to admit that every now and again, even as my head grew grayer, my heart still set itself on something and there was no appeasing it but for the getting of it.  I found the intensity of my grieving at 48 over was as strong as 18.  I even broke my own heart over a man who proved with his good-bye that he was not the sweet, true soul I thought him to be.  The words passed my lips on finding out I had been suffering heart attacks?  "Damn, he really did break my heart," although, in all honesty, I did much of the breaking myself.  God how I wanted what I wanted, my happily ever after with that man.  No other would do.  He was perfect.  My one and only.  And as time went on, I found my way to a kind of grudging acceptance but never grace.

     It was a year or so after my heart surgery that I finally found forgiveness.  I let go of that particular dream and accepted, truly accepted, that we don't always get what we want.  But I hadn't gotten to the point of believing that if we're lucky, we get what we need.  It was in the midst of getting on with my life, a full-time, year long effort, that life gave me a gift.  Now you may say, and I would almost agree, that bypass surgery and recovery were the life's most precious gift.  Yet, life wasn't enough.  I was existing but not really living.  I wasn't courting Death, but He and I were certainly doing some flirting.  I had come to the place of thinking that if I had another heart attack I'd let go, pass on, die.  I was so very tired of life.

     As gifts go, it was rather innocuous looking.  Just some kind words and a glimpse of something authentic in a world that seemed mostly show.  A man offered me his story story, an amazing tale full of highs and lows, a work still achingly in progress, and I have to say, there's really no gift more precious than someone's story, offered freely, especially to a writer, but not just.  Such a magnificent gift requires a gift in kind, which I gave, freely, without pause.  I was so ready.  And for the first time in years, I felt I was still a work in progress, with blank pages ahead, waiting to be written, my small tale suddenly glorious, maybe even epic.  My Odyssey.

     Those of you reading this blog know what happened next.  You also sense, at least I hope you do, all my blank pages ahead, waiting to be filled.  You know that love came for me out of the blue and that I have a life I may have dreamed of but never thought would ever be mine.  I didn't get what I wanted, but I did let life call some of the shots, and I got what I needed.  May we all of us be wise enough to let go of what we want and open to what we need.

 

Boat In The Sea

     "It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture." Emerson, Nature, 1836

      From the first time I read Emerson, I understood my inherent need to look at the natural world as a metaphor for my inner world.  As without, so within, as within, so without, were my watch-words long before I had heard the name Hermes Trismegistus.  So, for those who know me, it wasn't hard to guess that my journey the last few months - the boat, the islands, the ocean - would find their way into my musings and my understandings of this of my life.  I called this new love an Odyssey from the beginning, paying homage to a book that has influenced me most of my life.  I called it that before I knew that I would be actually sailing the ocean, through islands, trying to make my way to my new home.  


     Boats have been a physical part of my life since I was young.  Even after I found my way to the river town, Sacramento, boats called to me and I felt a continuing hunger to find my way back on them.  Bryan and I reconnected over his purchase and refurbishing of his sailboat, a Kelly-Peterson 44.  Then of course there was the sail from the Virgin Islands to Fort Lauderdale.  Boats apparently had a deeper meaning for me, given the role they were playing in my life.  And so I began to think about boats and they're meaning for me, especially as  was making a sailboat my home.  Jung believed the house a metaphor for the psyche so it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine this boat was a metaphor for Bryan's psyche and mine.


     The Sufi's used the boat in the sea as a metaphor for escaping the mundane atrocities of daily life and floating peacefully on the Sea of Spirit.  Rumi, the Sufi mystic, uses the boat as a metaphor in his poems, but took  further.  In his poetry he often talked about the fact that the sea is not always peaceful, that it is sometimes a Sea of Chaos, and that the boat is a metaphor for our physical and spiritual strength, the integrity of our "boat" telling us much about our own state.  Rumi called every man to learn if his "boat" is seaworthy, if he will sink or sail.  

     Living on a boat, making my life on the sea, I think more and more about the state of my "boat."  It struck me the other day, plugging leaks and sopping water up during a Florida deluge, that holes in the boat are necessary, how else to find your way into the cabin and out, to let air in and out, to help water found the right way in and the right way out?  But there are holes that don't serve,   And in the case of the boat I'm on, undergoing deck refinishing and therefore full of holes, some un-patched necessary holes and some manmade holes awaiting repair, what did that say about me who now calls this boat my home?  What is the integrity of my vessel?  

    I suppose I'm saying that this search for a boat was not just a physical search but a spiritual one too.  And refurbishing it, getting it to suit you, reflects I think, getting your Self in order.  For the Captain of this boat, it all started when he was at the hard, horrible place of getting through each hour, each day.  Then there's the cleaning up, the getting into order. fixing the essentials, hosting the dreams of what you might do until you can determine what you will do.  And there's the sailing, which is what sailboats were born to do, for they are themselves as much as they are reflections of us.   Ships have souls, worked into the very wood and fiberglass of them.  Sail on them, make them yours, and the souls, yours and its, join in an alchemical way, like the divine marriage. 


     The storm passed.  The leaks dried.  I'm still waiting for the decks to be finished and in the meantime, I"m making my life on a 44 sailboat with the man I love.  I think I'm still discovering the ships I'm sailing, both Susurru and the ship of my soul.  I'm still refurbishing and refreshing, determining what repairs are needed, what I need to make my boat seaworthy and what I need to make my ship the ship I want it to be.  I suspect this is what all of us are doing, every day of our lives, making ourselves seaworthy and testing the waters.  The seas are not always smooth, but a good vessel, one with good bones, can navigate even troubled seas and help us find our way home.  May all of us have good ships, worthy vessels.

For Every Bird A Nest -

     When it came to leap, I didn't hesitate.  I left the home that had been mine since 1991 and moved onto a boat, a space already claimed by someone, his home, which I would have to find a way to also make mine.  It wasn't that I didn't love the boat.  I've loved the boat since I first saw pictures of her last fall.  She spoke to me, with her lovely bones and the soul of her, the soul every boat possesses, worked into the wood and fiberglass, whispered through the cut and span of her sail.  Sailing on her from the Caribbean to Fort Lauderdale, I fell even deeper in love with her, if that was possible.  She hungers to sail.  Under loving hands, she flies.  She's strong and sure, bravery, brains and beauty, a triple threat.  Sail on her once, and I guarantee if there is any sea in your blood, you'll fall in love with her too.


     The thing was, is, that she's Bryan's boat.  He found her, saved her.  He poured sweat, blood, and tears into making her seaworthy.  She is filled with his things, except the spaces I have claimed.  He has decided what has gone where.  She's my home too, a home as chosen as the one I lived in all those years, more my home because it's Bryan's home too, but beneath it all is the feeling they're the couple, and I'm the third wheel.


     For me, people are home more than places, and the boat, Susurru, is this wonderful nexus of person and place, why perhaps I feel so comfortable aboard her.   Still, I found it difficult to make my mark on her without Bryan initiating it and weighing in.  And so things have stayed pretty much the same as we've been at the dock.  We've been getting her decks redone, but the inside has stayed as it was when I first moved onboard.  


     When Bryan left for St. Thomas to take the Antillean to Trinidad for hurricane season, I stayed in Fort Lauderdale to look for a job.  That meant Susurru and I were alone together for the first time, for a long time.  It would almost be a month before Bryan returned.  I was going to have to find something to keep myself busy besides sending out resumes and sopping up leaks (long story).  So I began to slowly make my mark on the sailboat I now call home.  Which put me in mind of the Emily Dickinson poem:


For every Bird a Nest—
Wherefore in timid quest
Some little Wren goes seeking round—

Wherefore when boughs are free—
Households in every tree—
Pilgrim be found?

Perhaps a home too high—
Ah Aristocracy!
The little Wren desires—

Perhaps of twig so fine—
Of twine e'en superfine,
Her pride aspires—

The Lark is not ashamed
To build upon the ground
Her modest house—

Yet who of all the throng
Dancing around the sun
Does so rejoice? 


    I may not be the Wren anymore, with her home amid the boughs.  Frankly, I'm not the lark either, given my new watery abode.  Perhaps a gull or a frigate, or maybe the pelicans that frequent the docks, or even the Grackles which showed up in June and have staked their claim, I'm far more likely one of them.  The thing is, now that I'm a creature of the water, a selkie returned to the sea, I need a different nest from the one I had all my years on land.  And I'm building it, bit by bit, the way nests have always been built, depending on instinct, going with my gut, making this place, my place - home.

"Heaven" has different Signs - to me

"Heaven" has different Signs—to me—
Sometimes, I think that Noon
Is but a symbol of the Place—
And when again, at Dawn,

A mighty look runs round the World
And settles in the Hills—
An Awe if it should be like that
Upon the Ignorance steals—

The Orchard, when the Sun is on—
The Triumph of the Birds
When they together Victory make—
Some Carnivals of Clouds—

The Rapture of a finished Day—
Returning to the West—
All these—remind us of the place
That Men call "paradise"—

Itself be fairer—we suppose—
But how Ourself, shall be
Adorned, for a Superior Grace—
Not yet, our eyes can see— 

Emily Dickinson

     Some time in my thirties I was told to start greeting the sun.  I am a child of sunset, born at 5:11 PM, a month past the equinox.  The gloaming is my time; Fall my season.  

     "Why the sunrise," I asked.

     "The sunrise opens the eyes to the world.  Greet the sunrise every morning and you are prepared to see heaven all around."  

     She was right, although it took more than sunrise to bring me to that place.  It took hip surgery and heartache; it took a heart attack and bypass surgery.  I had to come close to death to understand heaven all around us, to see with those kind of eyes.  But even wasn't enough.   It wasn't until I found myself longing for death two years later, that I finally made the leap and changed my life, at last choosing life over death. 

     Now, like Dickinson, I am coming to know the signs of the day.  I am coming to understand what they tell me, the heaven they reveal.  And I come to sunsets differently, as gateways to the rapture, not something to put off, but here every day if we only stop and look.  Every night now, I stop and look.  The ocean gave me that, a month of sunsets so spectacular, so matter of fact, they have woven themselves into my very being.  Love gave me that, days which start in joy and end in it.  There are people who know this instinctively,who see heaven on earth every day and find ways to record it- my friend Kathee and her photographs, my friend Arturo and his paintings, Emily Dickinson and her poetry.  Some of us have to learn it the hard way.  I don't think it matter how we come to have clear eyes, to see the signs of heaven all around, just that we do.  May it always be so.