I've written three books, each a part of my journey to elderhood. Now with this blog my intention is to give a moment to moment accounting of my life as it is now, and now, and now. I'm a leader and student of Sensory Awareness, and a practitioner of Rosen Method. I believe in the connective and collective power of Love.
My brother passed away at the age of 65 and this is the 65th day since he passed. I wake at 3 and rise. The Strawberry moon is hidden in fog. I meditate and what comes is my own transition as we move from spring to summer, as I honor my own maturing process and ripen.
Today my friend Terry and I are meeting along the coast near Half Moon Bay. We’re going to explore the beaches in the area. My brother was a surfer and loved the ocean as do I. I brought back half of his ashes from CT. and on Friday a group of us are gathering to spread his ashes in the surf. He was an East coast-West coast kind of guy, so ashes spread on both coasts feels right.
Yesterday I was talking to my son about the weight of grief I feel with my brother’s passing. I know it’s related to him and also to all passings. It’s the weight of knowing life is finite.
I was lying in bed this morning listening to birds singing. I don’t know if there are more this year or if I’m more aware of noticing as I’m grateful for the preciousness of blood moving, marrow living, breath swaying.
Lying there, I found myself doing inner pole-vaults, little ones, but powerful – running and jumping in my cells, or maybe it was imagination, but it was fun. I felt the lift. I remember when my brother spoke of “rodeo snails”. I loved the image of snails on tiny bucking horses waving tiny hats in the air. I felt the lift when he said it, and I feel the lift now, the lift of a horse on a carousel, the lift of a smile, as I rise and swing on inner pole-vaults.
We all know the Beatles song, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four? Ho!”
Well, here I am sixty-four days after his passing, still feeling grief, still needing to be fed, and so I remember when I was 15 and the Beatles were first on the Ed Sullivan show. My best friend and family gathered around the TV in 1964 to watch four youngsters sing, and young girls scream.
My father always wanted to give me everything, so he went out the next day and returned home and proudly handed me an album he’d purchased. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was the Beetles, and not the Beatles, and the difference was profound. The point is that intent counts, and I still carry that memory and lift it in the air, a gold medal for my heart, and I keep on jumping, my pole, a star.
I rise and look out at the trees. It’s cold and the heater is running. I sit with the concluding words of Mary Oliver’s poem “Today”.
Stillness. Out of the doors
Into the temple
Contemplating the branches of an Ash tree, I wonder about the curves, the rise, dip, and reach. I see a woodpecker approach first one part of the trunk and offer a few pecks, and then another part, peck, peck, and then fly off.
The May National Geographic has an article on a study scanning the craniums of cosmonauts before and after six months in space. Scientists found that “their gray matter – responsible for things like muscle control, memory, and sensory perception became compressed by an increase in the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions it”. Sitting here on earth, I nudge my gray matter to expand and receive a massage from the fluid surrounding it. I suggest we make tender waves.
And speaking of waves, though I prefer my ashes be scattered in the temple of ocean waves, I learn I have options. My ashes could be made into a diamond, or a company called And Vinyly could make them into a custom-made vinyl record. Who knew there are ways to continue in somewhat permanent form even after death.
It’s been sixty-three days since my brother passed and I miss him. The grief is deep and maybe that’s why the woodpecker and cerebrospinal fluid intrigue me right now. How do I peck at and cushion grief?
Years ago, when my children were young, I read A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech. He writes of how children enter school as question marks and come out periods. I want to stay a question mark. When I die, I’ll become a period, well, an ashy one, but right now, I want to keep questioning and learning. I’m inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. I may not have his genius, but I can keep looking and asking, delving, pecking, probing, waving, and receiving.
In Ursula le Guin’s book Left Hand of Darkness, she asks if we lived on a planet where we never saw anything fly, would it occur to us to want to fly. I have no answers but I find myself feeling my gray matter expand to play with the fluid that surrounds it as though it were a branch looking to curve, or a trunk calling “come” to a beak.
Yesterday I spoke with a woman who after her best friend died, her four year old daughter saw the woman who had passed planting seeds in their yard. The mother explained to her daughter that couldn’t be so, but summer came and their yard was blooming with thick-stemmed sunflowers, the flowers her friend loved most.
Years ago I had a tiny basket that held three tiny foil-wrapped chocolate eggs. It sat on our wall system near a sliding glass door. One day I returned, and there were three watermelon seeds filling the basket. The colorful eggs were gone with a gift in exchange.
I can imagine a blue jay or crow came in and made the exchange, a fair exchange for sure, and this with the sunflowers is different, and yet, there’s something about the surprise in it, the joy, that lifts my heart on this day of fog.
What moves beyond the veil?
This morning I spoke with my son. Baby in the womb is moving along and my son told me of the many decisions to be made. Yesterday I was with two women in their forties, who were speaking of how overwhelmed they feel with lists of things to do, with obligations, and “shoulds”. We discussed whether it is a cliche to say that some lives are so over-scheduled that a person in the ICU appreciates the time with nothing to do.
I find myself wanting to sit and reflect, to be the still lake into which people look to find moments of peace. I want to be the mud through which the lotus rises. I want to be an example what it is to know enough.
My brother passed 62 days ago. Our father viewed life as play. I feel them both waving wands over me, wands sparkling and spraying bubbles of love and kindness, contentment, acceptance, joy, and play.
I’m reminded that in fourth grade, I was the fairy in the play Sleeping Beauty who waved a wand and said, ”I give you kindness.”
I want to wave a wand of kindness over a world that seems shaken with division and fear. I trust there is a place where seeds are planted and placed, circulating love and kindness between the folds of the veil. Children can see them, and so can we, when we allow ourselves to be like a child, open to the seams.
I continue reading the Kathryn Geurts study of the Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. When the children are born, they are ritually bathed, and their legs and arms are stretched and pressed at the ankles and knees. The idea is that flexibility in the body is flexibility and adaptability in life. It’s a way of living imprinted on the newborn child in the presence of the tribe.
Entranced, I sit here moving, massaging, bending, and stretching my elbows and knees. I stir my passage and play with waves. I incubate, hover, and reach.
Fog has blown in like the wind in a fairy tale. I’m reading today at The Hivery from my book, Airing Out the Fairy Tale. I went through the book to choose what might most entice and stimulate, stir the elbows and knees of my audience and me.
The section on the Yaks is a given, as well as the shower scene, so I’m sitting here, both in Nepal and the past, and in my home and the present. My heart reveres companionship shared.
It’s been 61 days since my brother passed. Grief is there but it’s more like a flag waving in the fog, aired in the wind. That’s the feeling today.
Another book has been recommended and I’ll begin reading it later today. The book is, It’s Okay that You’re Not Okay and Meeting Grief in a Culture that Doesn’t Understand by Megan Devine and Mark Nepo. My friend who counsels with hospice feels it’s the best book on grief she’s come across. I look forward to reading it. Meanwhile the fog invites me to swim beneath.
It’s sixty days since my brother’s passing. What’s here for me now?
I ruminate. There are sixty seconds in a minute, and sixty minutes in an hour. Has his passing led me to a deeper knowing of the passage of time?
I know I’m pounded with desire for each second and minute to be fully utilized and absorbed. I’m super-sensitive, as though my skin is laid bare, my guts seen in their vulnerability and a churning need to know and connect.
This morning I was outside watering, and the hose kept kinking. I had to unkink it so the water could flow. Is that what happens when we don’t allow ourselves to fully feel what is true for us right now?
Last night, it was still hot. I sat outside with the increasing moon and felt the night as I listened to the sounds of creatures moving around, nuzzling as they settled, or perhaps just venturing out. A range of critters dwell here, and there’s much going on around me that I don’t always see, hear, smell, taste, touch. I don’t always allow myself to sink into the entry and exit, the inner and outer landscape I inhabit and share.
I read yesterday that women who live with greenery have longer lives. I’m surrounded with green, embraced, though a few of my plants took a hit with the heat, and I was out early this morning cutting off roses, geraniums, and lavender flowers that were hanging limp. I was trying to be generous with watering but must have slipped, and then last Monday I found a tick on my chest. I was in the shower and brushed it off, but still seeing a bump a week later, went to the doctor yesterday.
I learned that black ticks which I thought didn’t carry Lyme disease and smaller brown ones which do, look the same once they’ve settled into our skin to suck. Therefore, I’m on antibiotics just in case. The doctor said it can sometimes take five to ten years for Lyme Disease to show up so why risk it. I agree. I’m reducing my willingness for risk these days. I want more days and nights, more phases of the moon, more playing with balance and light.
My brother had Lyme Disease about fifteen years ago, and because it wasn’t recognized and diagnosed soon enough, he almost died. I’m happy to be on antibiotics and I see that means no sun, which is true for me anyway, with my fair skin, but I forget, and now I will be more diligent for the next two weeks.
It’s cooler today and as I was outside with my plant friends, I thought of how we all have to adjust, each moment, hour and day. One constant is change. My plants need me to offer water. And I need support from friends.
I’m with the dynamics of friendship these days. What is it to be a friend to ourselves, to others, to the earth?
Balancing on the question of friendship, I watched a Ted Talk by Pat Samples. She speaks of using our body for guidance and a bodywork session where she got in touch with the loss of her father.
Rosen sessions allowed me to cry and release the passing of my father in an accident when I was 19. We can change our lives, no matter what our age. We can release and unkink traumas of our past. There we live engaged, evolving the seconds that are our life.
I suggest you watch and participate in Pat’s Talk.
In the evening, a breeze moved the leaves. Though cooler, I still slept on top of the covers on the bed, until about four when I pulled a light blanket over me. Sandwiched between, I felt like leavened bread, and thought about two things, limbic brain and gravity.
First, I wondered what it is to be a snake; life is simple. But then we mammals added a layer that nurtures and cultivates emotion which connects us to the living vitality and adaptability of relationship.
Feeling that, I gave thanks that I could appreciate the blanket, comforter, bed, and then I thought of this play with gravity that orchestrates my day. I can notice, or not, but when I do, my life, my living, is enhanced.
In a Sensory Awareness workshop recently, a woman made a discovery for herself. She lifted a chair into the air and felt joy. Something about the weight lifted her cells, lips, heart, and eyes and laughter ensued and her feet and legs moved up and down in a dance with the floor. She was in play with her relationship with gravity.
We play with the weight of gravity all day. I lift my coffee cup, feel the movement of my arm touch my heart. The coffee swirls down my throat. Because of a friend’s accident, I know that I have two vocal cords. Together, they allow me to swallow. I can’t swallow without the two of them working together. Relationship. What a gift!
This morning on the 59th day of my brother’s passing, I feel peace and gratitude, trust. Perhaps yesterday I needed to sink into the gravity of his passing.
Today I feel a bounce-back response.
In Writer’s Almanac, I read about Leo Tolstoy, the author of Anna Karenina in 1877 and War and Peace in 1869. When he was 52 years old, though he had everything, wealth, respect, honors, fame, a loving wife, and ten children, he felt so empty, he contemplated suicide.
One day he took a walk in the woods and “found God”. He wrote: “At the thought of God, happy waves of life welled up inside me. Everything came alive, took on meaning. The moment I thought I knew God, I lived. But the moment I forgot him, the moment I stopped believing, I also stopped living.”
He used the word God, a loaded word for some these days, but I do see for myself that when I pause and feel all that’s going on in me and around me, when I feel relationship and exchange, I feel oneness, a place beyond words, and there, in that, my brother’s passing is simple; it is.
The difference between blood and chlorophyll, the green blood of plants, is one atom. Though the structure is the same, in hemoglobin the center atom is iron and in chlorophyll, the central atom is magnesium. Plants and animals exist together; we need each other. Perhaps the same is true of life and death.
It’s unusual for where I live, but it’s hot, oppressively hot. I feel it like a weight, and wonder if it is the weight of grief, or simply heat.
Last night,I lay on top the covers on my bed, listening to crickets, knowing the frequency of their chirping gives the temperature, but the chirping was too continuous to count, and I already knew it was hot.
In case you’re interested though, you can get a rough estimate of the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit by counting the number of chirps in 15 seconds and then adding 37. The number you get will be an approximation of the outside temperature.
What I noticed though is there an early morning time when the crickets stop chirping and the birds haven’t yet begun their morning call. There is a pause.
I sink into that pause today, sink into the darkness that precedes the dawn and there is grief. It’s the 58th day since my brother’s passing. Shouldn’t I be moving along? And there are layers in grief. Layers, and of course that word reminds me of pastry, Danish pastry, and so I Google to learn that Danish pastry is made by rolling out layers of dough, placing thin slices of butter between the layers, and then with folding and rolling, there are 27 layers. Well, if there are 27 layers in a Danish pastry, how many layers are there in grief? Maybe I’m right on track.
My son and his wife just returned from two weeks in Portugal. This morning, he regales me with what he knows will interest me most, a bookstore, one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, the Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal. People stand in line and pay to enter this monument to words and books.
J.K. Rowlings taught in Porto from 1991 to 1993. The staircase in the bookstore probably inspired the moving staircase in Harry Potter.
My son says maybe we could have an architectural marvel bookstore like this in San Francisco. In my downward, layered spiral of grief, I respond that we can’t even deal with the homeless on the streets. Shouldn’t that come first?
I think today’s grief is related to all grief. I don’t need to divide it in my brother’s passing, my mother’s, father’s, climate change, poverty, politics, greed.
My friend Elaine notes I’ve been honoring my Chinese horoscope animal the ox. She suggests I allow myself to lie down today with lambs. She is wise, and so today, I honor the fatigue that is grief, and sink into the pause between the sounds of birds and crickets. I rest, holding grief treasured in my hands like a pastry, a friend, a book.
This Sunday is eight weeks since I received the early morning call that my brother had passed away.
This morning, windows and doors are open, and the songs of birds are floating into my home, and into me. I’m touched with the different notes, struck like a violin or drum. I’m rung like a windchime with the vibrations in their songs.
I’m with sound and feeling, pulled in as though the tide within is tenderized with knowing there’s so much more than I see. The song goes on and on.
Iris that appeared one day in my yard and flowers regularly now
The day is clear and still. My cells come out like gophers their holes, look around. Hmmm!
Yesterday, the grocery store was filled with flowers, especially pale peach roses and white hyacinths. When I asked, I learned the bouquets were for the many graduations in the area.
I breathe in considering my own graduation. I’m awake, alive, celebratory for this 56th day of my brother’s passing. My brother loved the Yankees so I ordered Yankees cups to hold his West coast half of the ashes when we spread them at a surfing beach or two or three. The gathering is less than two weeks now. Will it bring closure, or opening out?
Today I feel him guiding me to open out, like a flower. The bud of grief has petals now, layers of them, open to the sun, and when it’s enough, they’ll fall apart, return to ground.
For now, I hold my petals open, receive and celebrate my central hold of light.
Garden Color, Celebration, and Reception of Light!
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