Hail to the New Year

I woke up at 4:00 am (again), and after an hour of practice and an hour of writing, I opened Facebook to see how the world is bidding adieu to 2016. Some are happy, most are mourning the things we lost in 2016, like Prince and Bowie and Reason. Some of you birthed babies this year, some of you lost intimate relations, and some of you are drowning in a sea of grief.

I have to say, I am with you.

While I didn't birth a baby or a book in 2016, I made a significant number of mistakes, several of which I'm still learning from. My yoga teacher friends keep asking me, “What is the lesson in all of this?” and I want to both thank them for asking, and hit them with my car. Because some mornings the lesson is that I have survived things I did not anticipate surviving – yay me! And other mornings the lesson is that the world has added a few bonus pitchers to the mound, and I simply cannot keep up with the swinging and avoiding, and I keep getting hit – hard – in places that haven't healed yet.

What I wouldn't give for a slow-mo button on life tonight.

Instead, I remind myself that I came here, to this exact moment, in this exact ocean of grief, with these exact tools to prepare me for what is next.

When we heal from suffering – when we remember that pain is unavoidable, but suffering is a choice – we become present for the rest of the people. We become a lighthouse.

I feel that tonight.

Old, beaten by waves. Sundamaged and a bit weather-worn in a few key places. But my light is still shining, and if I can guide your ship to shore or give you a beacon of light when you are floating in the oceans of grief, or allow you to swim with direction away from the sinking ship that you've been holding onto for dear life? So be it. I cannot save you from the weather, from the unruly waves or the undertow, and I cannot force you to leave the thing that is pulling you under.

But I'll be here for you, and you'll be here for me.

Or someone.

Let's take turns in 2017, ok? Let's share the wealth when we have it, ask for help when we need it. 2016 has taught me that pride is indeed a deadly sin. That solitude can be medicine, and isolation poison. That love can exist in a vacuum of trust, and that it doesn't always make sense. That I have a lot to learn, and a little to teach.

The Lesson has two sides, if you ask me. Two paths. We can become angry, resentful, and bitter – and that is ok. And when we're exhausted by the negativity, the loathing, the second-guessing, we can turn our backs to it and look towards the light.

Let's fly together, tonight, into 2017.

Second star to the right, and straight on 'til morning.

Santa Baby

Dear Santa,

It's been a rough few years, I'll be honest.

It's been sixteen years since my last confession, 30 since my last wish list.

A hundred since I last slept well.

In thinking about where I must be on your list... I'm feeling pretty even between naughty and nice. Sure, I've done a few things against my better judgement, but life has already dealt me the coal that I earned in those transgressions, and I've lit it up. Paid penance for my sins. And there were times when I've been nice, or mean for nice reasons.

You know what I mean.

You should know my chimney's stuffed up, and I think the HOA has welded a cap over the top, what with the wind storms here on the bluff. The same thing has happened to my heart, unfortunately. I've tried to seal it off, to batten down the hatches during the emotional tempests, but it seems feelings are getting in anyway.

So you shouldn't have any trouble.

This year, I'd love for you to explain a few things to me. No need to gift-wrap, just tell it to me straight.

You've done some miraculous shit before, and I'm not talking about the flying reindeer or the tricks of quantum physics that appear to allow you to gift all the Believers in the span of a single night. I can't tell if you're ubiquitous or scattered, but you do seem to get around.

I'd like to know how we got here – this election, this defection, this eruption of evil. I'd like to know why there isn't a food bank collection at the grocery store by my house, why there was a man in his pajamas walking home last night in frigid temperatures. Why good people can't get or stay pregnant. Why no one is doing anything about Aleppo. Why the truest source of news these days is Saturday Night Live.

What I'm supposed to do with my life.

I'm wondering what kinds of cookies it will take to get a solid answer out of you, or if I have to sit on your lap, or if you even still exist.

How did we twist this story around you anyway? Isn't there a virgin somewhere below, laboring, scared shitless in a barn full of livestock? Isn't the real story a cascade of miracles that started with a woman giving birth? I imagine Mary crying out, as I imagine I would, Sweet Baby Jesus make this pain STOP.

Huh.

The whole thing is perverse, if you ask me. Heads up: the Holy Spirit will come upon you? That dirty bastard. I'm pretty sure that's still a crime in all fifty states. Well, at least for the next month.

English and the double entendre ruin everything.

Or maybe that's my dirty mind.

Dear Santa, even Jesus gave up when he was three years younger than I am right now – how do you do it? How do you persist, in the face of Scrooge and the Grinch and the Zombie apocalypse in Washington? It's got to break your heart to fly through the smog, to leave sick children in the dust, dropping plastic crap fabricated by toddlers in China under the shrine to environmental destruction.

I'm sorry, I know I'm circling the drain here. Let me be frank.

Santa, baby, what we're all wishing for this year is a recount. An asteroid. A miracle.

We'd even settle for the second coming.

Oh.

Wait.

Huh.

Gethsemane

I drove past the cemetary on the way to the airport today. The air was so clear, warming from the desperation of the cold – the beauty that has kept us inside for the last few days. And I blew a kiss. I don't always, sometimes I drive right past, but your memory is dancing all around me these days as I consider working in the world of addiction, returning to California. As my best friend is burying her brother, who shared your struggles. I called 911 two days ago, after a mama locked her little in the car in 10 degree weather. It wasn't a panicked phone call, it was calm and calculated, because I don't know how long it takes a fifteen pound baby to freeze to death, but I know that it was more than twice as warm the night you did.

I don't know how long it took – how long you were down before you were out. Whether you suffered or simply slowed as your blood turned to ice. In the dark, cold month between the anniversary of your birth and the anniversary of your death I often wonder what song was playing in your mind, what images were dancing in the fog of your last breath.

Where you've gone.

Why your memory returns without warning.

How to forgive myself for our last meeting, when my attention was lost in a triangle of men, when I ran away into the arms of someone who didn't deserve that kind of reward. I wish that I could go back to that moment and say something – anything – worthy of a goodbye. Or better, something that would remind you that I still cared, even though I wasn't sure how to say so.

I'm cautious with goodbye now, cautious with saying what I mean, even though it isn't culturally appropriate to do so, even if it has lost me some friends or affections. Even if it closes some doors, this is something that I've learned from losing you.

My driver this morning was named Jesus – auspicious, for sure – but also a harmonic of you.

The sweetest Gethsemane, birthday buddies. My lost boy who slipped through my fingers.

Lost.

Dear Jon, I wish I could have saved you. That's my sickness, the shadow side of my gift. A lesson I didn't learn until it was too late. Something I had to relive to truly learn, a darkness I barely escaped.

This year I'm going to learn how to drive a stick (again); I'm going to say goodbye with compassion and the fullest expression of honesty that my tiny body will allow me. I'm going to write a book, and in it, I'm going to call the chapter about you Buford, because that's the word that keeps your memory alive in me.

I'll keep blowing kisses, keep remembering.

Because my curse is loving too well, too often, without the ability to disentangle my heart from the places it's been.

And this year, that will also be my gift.  

Home, if that's a thing

Let me start by saying that you will not understand a single thing I'm about to say – you cannot. You weren't there, and even though I'll do my best, what you'll get is the syrupy post-massage haze, where you try to explain an epiphany without full use of all of your faculties, as your body, mind, and spirit reintegrate into the same space-time continuum.

(See what I mean?)

Tomorrow I go back.

Well.

Tomorrow, my body, mind, and spirit fly to the States United by Disconnect.

But not back.

There is no way back.

You cannot backtrack through a hurricane, through the loss of your spiritual teacher, your partner, your president, the sanctity of unions, the freedoms on the line. As it appears, this is a one-way wormhole and resisting the ride is the definition of futility. This has been my experience so far – like doula-ing a scorpion out of my room, complete with gentle, supportive words – first for the scorpion, second for me.

It started with an exploration of what it means to be a woman – the power of a woman is in her prayer. Whoa. An invitation to return to some form of spiritual path, to have a semblance of reverence for something higher, something that has consciousness, if not a plan. And a song – the chant that started this invitation years ago.

Akaal. Dearly departed. A safe return to the union of souls.

Home.

A homeland, glowing red, connected by spotty internet and trapped sobbing on the floor of the kitchen, my head in my hands, my heart in my throat. Comforted only by a scorpion in the corner, as afraid of me as I was of her. Shit, girl, she said. That is not what we of the jungle thought would happen.

Choking up the lies I had swallowed, while learning how to breathe a new kind of truth, in the arms of a jungle shaman. She called me a jaguar seer – magic will have no choice but to dance with you.

And then isolation – a shipping crate in a rainstorm, a resolution to evaluate which decisions I was making out of fear, and where I might start to uncurl a finger from the curtain rod and come back down. Where I could say yes, or find a new answer that defies the binary of yes and no.

Practice saying yes – and no. And humbly asking questions, rather than assuming. Courage.

And then, the calm in the storm. Peace in the certainty of the hurricane. Alone in the night with my fear of the destruction that would come, once the lights were out and no one could see me. Staring into the darkness, having closed so many doors all at once.

Death.

The great crossing of the greatest teacher of my life.

My sweet Hunter, my angel. He wasn't mine, per say, but I was his. You could tell. The questioning look when I hadn't seen him in awhile – as if to say – why haven't you called? A little bit of contempt, and then without warning, he would grab my nearest arm and start chewing on my wrist, working his way up as high as he could get, giggling the whole time. Cara Mia. Forgiven.

When I lay on the floor, broken by a migrane, exacerbated by too much sun and not enough rest, he would pet my face. Get quiet. I understand deep pain, my love. It is palpable. But we're in it together. You hold me in the darkness, and I'll comfort you.

And his laughter. The sweet song that calls to mothers everywhere, but sweeter it seemed because of his pain. His dark abyss so deep that the joy upon overcoming it for a moment or two? Unlike anything I've heard since.

He taught me that there is nothing worth complaining about, that laughing in the darkest moments is the only way out. That humor doesn't always beget happiness, but it is medicine.

And finally, a temporary community that got me, that didn't ask me to gut myself, but lovingly invited me to let the light in. Who said, we see you, even if you're crying, even if you're holding yourself together with duct tape and a safety pin. A frantic photo in a white spiderweb. A paradigm shift. The piercing truth of what intimacy could really be, not the black and white chessboard I had always assumed it to be. An angel, holding me in the darkness.

I don't want to go home.

I want to find it.

To stop sealing a business deal, to approach a romance with it's own magic, rather than the same business tactics. Because that? That has been a recipe for disaster.

Unless there is sex involved, which there isn't.

Sex paves over a myriad of imperfections, files down ill-fitting puzzle pieces so they nestle as though they were always supposed to, even if the picture they create makes no sense. Fuck it. And so you do, and what happens is something fits when it shouldn't. Something stops seeking because it is wedged where it wasn't supposed to be, but why would it seek a better fit – a match it can no longer accept?

I've punished myself too much, too often, with too many negative words and mirrors of things I'm not and will never be. Things I'd never desire to be. And I think in part this is why. Because in the dark, under the influence of chemical messengers who have motivations of their own, we force a fit that is illogical, and then we use our wits to rationalize it in the light of day. Rather than forgiving our transgressions, we try to relive a moment – or make something fleeting last.

I am guilty of this. I've made things last in the hopes that some point I would feel like a grown up – like at some point the “faking it” would turn into “making it” but instead – instead the sick waves of self realization have crashed over me and I limp back to shore, a half-drowned rat who has spent 30 years faking it to fake it.

But no more.

For three decades I've looked for a home in someone else – since Mark Havens carried me across that footbridge, I've never asked what my country could do for me, I've only asked what I could do for it. What can I do for you? How can I cut off pieces of myself to fit within your puzzle? Tell me what to cut out, what to add on and I'll shape shift.

I am coming home in pieces. Ready for assembly.

To meet me where I am.

Haseya. She rises.

Like I said, you had to be there. The food was great, the sunsets amazing. Time expands and contracts in the jungle, and so, it appears, does spirit.

Magic will have no choice but to dance with you.

Sat nam.

Silt

Anne Lamott says bird by bird, but this chapter has been the kind of metamorphosis that typically exists in science fiction - no birds existed at the start or finish - rather, it has been completely bizarre, with full discombobulation and incomplete or incalculable recombobulation. I’ve become something totally unrecognizable, which seems to be par for the course these days, in these United States.

I’m in a state of mourning and grief, which I’ve tried to skip by paving over with more mourning and grief, inappropriate sexual relations, some stress, a few automobile accidents, some codependence, and a little bit of accidental home amputation.

Oh, and work.

I think I’m one of the fortunate few who doesn’t turn to the typical - the alcohol, the drugs, the evenings full of monotony: Netflix and News. It seems my preference is to attempt to transcend the pain and personal loathing that comes from the collapse of one relationship by immediately patching over it with another. And this worked - sort of - maybe - for a portion of my life, but in my vapid attempts to escape myself through the cunning use of other, I’ve never quite sorted out how to fully escape from myself.

Peter is escaping from me now - or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself. He’s going to India on a spiritual journey of the Self, amid the ashrams and meditation holes, the slums and cremation stations. If you’ve asked me how I feel about it, I’ve sometimes said sad, or abandoned, or angry. And these are all true. I have felt a variety of things, mostly at the same time, mostly on the 10 end of the 1-10 scale.

Intensity is something I do well.

My instinct is to jump into something else - seek out someone to fix, or someone to fix me. To be half of a unit, even if I have to do More Effort than would reasonably be my share. Because being alone is something I cannot tolerate. It’s a place I’ve never really known, a place my parents never warned me about and every movie of my childhood told me was the source of all suffering in the world. I’d like to paint over the bloodshed and the tears of this last chapter with a fresh coat of paint - maybe some stucco, to hide the places where I kicked through the wall. Spackle for the mortal wounds we each inflicted in an attempt to set the other free.

Except I think that this will keep happening, and eventually, the walls of this cave will swallow me whole.

I know that Peter isn’t doing this for me, even though he sometimes says he is, sometimes with nice words and sometimes with the sharp words that no one who knows him could ever imagine him uttering. I like to fight back, not promising fidelity or even that I’ll meet up in India with him at the end of this chapter. It isn’t exactly what I want to say, or what I mean, but I’m not sure that even the writer in me can fully express the simultaneous gratitude and rage at his decision. Gratitude at the time and space, rage at the abandonment.

It is difficult to admit that I’m a difficult person to live with. That the baggage I come with is that annoying-ass present that continues to yield box after gift-wrapped box, the sadist’s matryoshka doll of all of the Things I never took the time to feel or unwrap myself. An insidious gift for anyone who gets too close to see. I’ve recognized that this is not unique to me, that we all have various sorts of unusual baggage at the backs of our closet or up on cinderblocks in the front yard. We have this mistaken belief that we are here in this life to learn and take on, to earn more, make more, create more, have more. But I think that’s a modern mistake, compounded by our access to Stuff and our unwillingness to let go. I have it. I feel the inner hoarder in me, who has carefully and skillfully packed away all of the emotions I chose not to feel into matching rubbermaid containers in the basement, amid the original packing material of the things I haven’t decided belong to me, the dust, the erosion, and of course, the layers of sentiment. Or sediment. Grief, the silt that completely obscures my vision as I dig through treasures forgotten at the bottom of my emotional ocean.

I have withdrawn into the smallest room of my house: a nest I built for myself over the last seven years. It overlooks the canyon, the mountains, the sunrise. It doesn’t have other people’s shit in it, nor is it more than I can handle. I’m retreating into the tidiest corner of my mind to slowly and methodically unpack Jon’s death, my divorce, the infidelity and incredible and shameful compromises I made in order to fit into whatever identity mattered to be half of a whole. The incredibly old baggage that simply will not disintegrate on it’s own, like sexual abuse, relationship abuse, and The Ones That Got Away.

(I keep typing hole, by the way. Like I’m half of a hole, which is the most succinct way to describe how I actually feel right now.)

I suppose this is where the gratitude for Peter exists. That he’s escaping the mess that I’m in because he’s got his own baggage that he’s tried to outrun in his own ways, and boy does it feel cramped when everyone is unpacking and feeling. Wouldn’t it just be easier to drink, or gamble, or fix absolutely anyone else?

Yes. Except that it’s completely impossible to fix someone else. I know this. It feels like birth. Instead of doing the work that is needed, we have to do the surrounding work. Defend the door, the space. Bring cool towels and dangle precariously around the edges of the bathtub, applying the healing touch that reminds the animal body - the body that has no use for words - that as messy and as incredibly terrible as each feeling may be, the way is through.

And the way is alone.

This last chapter has felt most like transition - the angry, incessant and unyielding phase before one decides to walk through the fire. The chapter where we hang on to the life we lived, complain about the pain, lose direction and perspective. The rabbit hole that cannot be understood or explained to anyone on the outside: cracked-out caterpillars, unbirthdays, and all.

This chapter? I have a sense that this chapter is the pushing phase. Potentially equally long or longer, with sustained effort in a particular direction. Wasted effort as the path is paved, two steps forward, one step back. Better to conserve the energy and allow the body to push than to intellectualize the process.

Sweet Jesus, that’s terrifying.

What I’ve noticed about the pushing phase from watching birth, is that it feels as though it will never end - and then it ends. Almost as a surprise. With disbelief that something has been born – that something which occupied you has escaped.

Sat Nam

Synchronicity

In the wild word of modern yoga there exists a significant amount of bleed-over from the world of the New Age, almost like someone tried to paint the Venn diagram in watercolor, during a gentle drizzle.

I’m not sure that you can define New Age, just as I’m not certain of the definition of yoga. I say yoga is like music - many traditions, backgrounds. Some with explicit rules, others without. But generally recognizable. Distinct. New Age is harder - the melting pot’s self-aware decision that every tradition has something to offer, and the pioneering spirit to move away from dogmatic and puritanical roots. Exodus from the flames is all the direction needed.

That feels comforting, I think, to people raised with rote memorization of Thou Shalt Nots, but it is also inherently directionless. Nothing to work towards, just clear ideas of what to run away from. Spiritual bumper cars. Except in the dark, without the aid of gravity.

And sometimes, when running in the darkness, people stumble onto the path of yoga. While tending to a scraped knee, they hear the music and start to follow. Direction for the directionless. It soothes their aching backs, gives their monkey minds something to chew on, and starts to shine a light into the broken places.

For many people, this instigates a revolt, because the broken places should be healed - ignored - paved over - not highlighted. Deeply engrained habits, desires, wounds? This is not the kind of yoga that makes it onto the cover of a magazine. Except this can be a teaching of yoga: get quiet, look around you, look within you. Examine the wound that would be so easy to airbrush from the historical records, the mental instability that you can cleverly hide within the four walls of your bedroom or in the tomb of the couch. The unfulfilled longing. What is really happening? Why are you doing this? And: are you sure?

In the great bleed from New Age to yoga, synchronicity is like breadcrumbs along the path. Reassurance that you’ve chosen wisely.

A sign.

For me, synchronicity is different. It’s a glitch in The Matrix (they sure got that part right). It’s a signpost that you’ve been here before. That your’e walking a path you’ve been down, and while it can feel familiar, it only becomes home if you spend your life retracing those steps over and over. To me, synchronicity doesn’t say you’re on the right path - or the path out of here - it says, pay attention. There’s a curve up ahead and you have a chance to break free. Or loop back around, if you’re not ready to leave this well-worn part just yet.

There’s always next time.

And here I am, dear friends, on the doorstep of next time. Breadcrumbs having bulldozed a path straight through the forest, illuminated by neon signs and a searchlight.

Yet something is different - eerily different - as this time, I’m not following a path. My eyes are closed, my gaze inward.

And the path is rising up to meet me.

The Law of Attraction

I think I was in college the first time someone mentioned The Secret and Vision Boards and Drawing the Life You Want Towards you. It didn't sit well with me, but I was skeptical of gravity in those days, so less-established phenomenon didn't get much play time among the reruns of anxiety dreams and catastrophic daydreams, fantasies, and contingency plans. I believed in something subtler, and I suppose a felt an emotion more subtle than “believe.” My grandmother used to say “inkling,” which may not be an actual word, but that's what I had – an inkling that there was something true about the Law and something equally wrong about The Secret.

A paradox, of sorts.

Now it's unlikely to surprise you that faith and trust aren't getting their fair share of my brain sugar, either, but I do have a sense of The Way Things Work. For instance, I don't so much think that everything happens for a Reason, because Reason doesn't appear to drive on most winding wet roads late at night, and there's quite a lot of action there. No. If some higher power, or network of higher powers, or subset of anyone with enough wherewithal to balance a checkbook is in charge of this rodeo and splashing in a dash of Reason every once and again, then I'll stand corrected. I even get that you may believe this, and you may be right! But in my many odd years of experience, even Reason herself hasn't always made the best decisions. Instead, I feel that we can – I can – I choose to – make meaning out of things. We look at the odd collection pulled in from the garden this morning and cook up something glorious – or useable – or passable. We do our best, making sense through the rearview mirror that distorts and fades, whose image grows smaller each time we glance back.

As it is, some people are better painters, other better cooks. But no one gets a package of perfectly selected, pre-cut ingredients delivered to their door or the set of their cooking show. Nope. God and The Great Hereafter don't send Blue Apron boxes with secret instructions just to see if we can do exactly what they had intended, or at least, that's not what I believe. I think – I almost believe – that we get this box that would have been perfect for our recipe, except it has no eggplant. Or because it has an eggplant. Because it didn't all fit in the pan, or there wasn't enough to go around. And we can sink into moaning, as I have done, despairing the parmesan that God left out, leave it on the porch for the bears and the mice to dive into, or we can fucking make something out of it.

That's where I am right now, although i'm not sure what the hell I'm making. I've been taking instructions, half-following too many Pinterest recipes, chopping and sauteing, but God help me, I haven't a clue what the fuck I'm making. The Reason hasn't appeared yet. Sister Meaning is still out to supper with friends while I feel the resounding click of the clock as this produce does not get any fresher. I've gotten lost in wondering what my parents would do or want, my partner, my friends. How I could coerce this recipe based on a friend's allergies or preferences, and I've forgotten to ask myself.

As in: self, what are you doing here?

And, what would you like to do next?

I'm in the no-man's-land of the northern Pacific right now, halfway between the two places that feel equally like home to me. Wondering what's in season on that side of the world? Answers? Belief? New prayers?

(Sharks?)

What will be waiting for me when I get back?

I'm hoping to dance in the waves with Sister Meaning, make friends or have a casual fling with Reason. But I also know better. I know that these things don't happen to us, they don't happen because We Set The Intention or put up magazine cut-outs on our vision boards. The Secret isn't halfway through the Pacific, in a magical group of islands, no matter what the advertisements told you while you were scouring for pictures of People Riding Horses on the Beach. Spending $800 on an airline ticket against your better judgement is not evidence of the world conspiring to make those dreams come true, it is a persistent reminder that money doesn't buy Happiness, but you can throw it and see if it sticks anyway.

Money, that is. I'm not sure if you can throw happiness.

I'm still just trying to find it.

And maybe that's just it. If you've found happiness, get out there and throw it around like it's a football and you're a cloudless fall day, full of crisp leaves. Perhaps those of us seeking will wind up there, gaze turned down and in our own world of mental sorting. Hit us in the head with it – pull us into the game. Help us realize that Brother Chance will tag us in at any moment, whether we're seeking happiness on our vision boards or not. Our job is not to have the blinders up.

And then, to make meaning.

And dance.