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.
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!
This post is going to feel like a sidetrack but I find myself seeing how it all comes together.
My book “Airing Out the Fairy Tale” is not just about airing out my personal fairy tale of getting married and intending to “live happily ever after”. It’s about the things we ignore in our lives. It’s about speaking up, saying our truth which is known anyway. When I came to Rosen Method, I learned the body doesn’t lie, and I know now neither does the energy. We know when someone is upset, angry or in love; we can’t hide.
When I was in my Rosen training, someone mentioned Marion Rosen, the founder of Rosen Method, walked up to a woman and said, “I don’t like you.” Those surrounding were shocked, but both Marion and the woman were relieved because it was the truth and both women knew it. Maybe it allowed a shift. I don’t know but I appreciate the honesty of it.
I’m wondering how it would be to open up to a world where we first allow ourselves to feel what we feel and then speak it with kindness and intention for better understanding and communication. Wouldn’t something new blow through? Certainly there would be a breath of relief as the energy of holding released.
On a similar note, while reading Jia Tolentino’s review of Ocean Vuong’s new book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I found myself feeling I have nothing to say. I don’t have the immigrant experience. I haven’t experienced violence, poverty, fear, lack, but then I came to the end of the article.
“But while Vuong’s story seems exceptional, much of his experience is not unusual. “I always insist with a little mischievousness that I’m writing something very normal, very common,” Vuong has said. “In fact, perhaps the middle class story is the exotic, is the rare, privileged gem that very few people get to experience.” The world’s refugee population is at its highest on record: sixty-eight million people, one percent of the global population, have been forcibly displaced.”
Can I even absorb that currently one percent of the global population have been forcibly displaced?I know I have a life of privilege. Where and how do I reconcile the two?
At my brother’s memorial, I said we had the perfect childhood, my brother and I, and I believe we did. One man heard that and said to his wife, “A perfect childhood. Imagine that.” Maybe I do have something to say and share.
We each have a story to tell, a story to share, and today is a day to reach to another, and say, “I have something to say; I have something to share.”
The cover of the New Yorker this week shows a couple in bed, and on each bedside table is a tower of books. It’s titled “Bedtime Stories”.
Let’s read books, of course, but may we also honor our own story. We all have joys and sorrows, hurt and pain, and maybe in sharing our perception and reception of the world, we can begin to twine as one. May this be so.
I wake, lay on my side, palms together and feel myself pulled out, expanding as though the Big Bang is me, and I’m pulling/pulled out.
It’s the 55th day since my brother passed and I feel him inviting me to explore with less seriousness, with more play and laughter. Laughter – well, now, that’s a big order and yet when we gathered for his memorial, we laughed hysterically, but that was a different kind of laughter. This is more grounded in joy as though my collar bone extends outward to hold balance with a bucket of source on each end, and my shoulder blades reach outward and down, dripping like honey, and my heart opens with more room to breathe.
I breathe, breathed, souled with delight.
Yesterday, Neal Stephenson spoke about his latest book FALL: or Dodge in Hell.
The book is influenced by John Milton who in the 17th century wrote the epic poem “Paradise Lost”. I knew Milton dictated the words because he had gone blind, but I didn’t know he was a swashbuckler in his youth. The poem shows the fall of the angel Satan who then tempts Adam and Eve. I’m curious to read this almost 900 page book of Stephenson’s as “Dodge” is the name of the main character, and Satan in “Paradise Lost” says “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
Stephenson, like many of us, is struggling with this last election which is pulling us into dystopian times. He’s concerned with the loss of facts, which he suggests if we’re interested in knowing the evolution, we read Barbara J. Shapiro’s book,A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720.
This is the synopsis of the book from Amazon’s site:
Barbara J. Shapiro traces the surprising genesis of the “fact,” a modern concept that, she convincingly demonstrates, originated not in natural science but in legal discourse. She follows the concept’s evolution and diffusion across a variety of disciplines in early modern England, examining how the emerging “culture of fact” shaped the epistemological assumptions of each intellectual enterprise.Drawing on an astonishing breadth of research, Shapiro probes the fact’s changing identity from an alleged human action to a proven natural or human happening. The crucial first step in this transition occurred in the sixteenth century when English common law established a definition of fact which relied on eyewitnesses and testimony. The concept widened to cover natural as well as human events as a result of developments in news reportage and travel writing. Only then, Shapiro discovers, did scientific philosophy adopt the category “fact.” With Francis Bacon advocating more stringent criteria, the witness became a vital component in scientific observation and experimentation. Shapiro also recounts how England’s preoccupation with the fact influenced historiography, religion, and literature―which saw the creation of a fact-oriented fictional genre, the novel.
Because we’re currently inundated with a masterful and disturbing manipulation of information, it’s fascinating to consider the origin and importance of facts. Can we have a democracy without an agreed upon source of information, an agreed upon meaning of words?
Okay, back to me as I look out on the ridge.I woke today aware of expansion but also balance. Since reading Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community by Kathyrn Geurts, I’m more aware of the essential nature of balance in my life. For the community she studies, balance is the most important sense, so today, I balance expansion and contraction, and seep into the sky as it balances on the coming light.
Today at 12:30 Steve and I saw Neal Stephenson interviewed by Kevin Kelly at The Interval at Fort Mason.We then looked out at the Golden Gate Bridge and watched two sea lions frolic as we enjoyed Meyer lemon fettuccini and spring rolls at Greens restaurant.
This evening I started reading some of Neal Stephenson. The book starts out in Iowa which makes sense since he grew up in Ames, Iowa. My mother, father, and I moved to Ames from Chicago when I was six weeks old. Later we moved to Des Moines, and then to a house on the Mississippi River near LeClaire, Iowa, home of the Buffalo BillMuseum.
Something of my brother’s passing has memories percolating through, dropping like the ladybugs that are currently swarming and migrating to drop down and eat aphids and lay eggs.
What’s the connection, you might ask. Well, for the last few years I’ve been working on my book Airing Out the Fairy Tale: Trekking through Nepal & Midlife, which required a great deal of memory retrieval since the focus was on my trek in Nepal twenty-five years ago. Though the book has been out for over a month, today there was a shift and I recognized it’s done. My brother has passed and the book is complete, and my head is shaking to clear all its been holding, to let it go, and open to spaciousness and what will come.
I’m letting go, and in that letting go, I pause to even more clearly and rapturously notice the vibrancy of the nature I am and of which I’m part. Memories float down like blossoms, ladybugs, and ash. The pause gives me strength. I birth.
On the fifty-fourth day of my brother’s passing, I look out on a morning, still, quiet. Overhead, in the distance a jet streams by in the blue. I picture people traveling from Asia getting ready to land. Sometimes I find it hard to hold in my head all the lifestyles on this planet, all those who travel and those who stay still.
A friend just spent five weeks on the island of Sardinia. She said the people there consider themselves a family, and families spend their days together. It’s hard to imagine where I live when there’s so much distance between families and ages. There, she said, you see children helping grandparents up and down steps. It’s not a duty; it is.
Families gather quietly together during the day, eat dinner around eight, and are all together in the market squares until eleven. How is it to live like that?
I don’t know but I do know we are on this earth as a family. How do we then more clearly honor and cultivate all the stages of life? As we explore the possibilities, perhaps we better understand what appears to be separation, as exchange, as we bind and unbind the passages and transformations that clasp and unclasp life and death.
I look at a rose, the grip of petals before they let go, feel the beat harvest gratitude in my chest.
Yesterday my friend Elaine who is a sports fan, specifically a Warriors fan, taught me something new, a sports term, GOAT, Greatest of All Time.
I considered how I’ve never had a desire to be the greatest of all time, and I came up with my own: JOBM – Joy of Being Me.
As she took delight in JOBM, I came up with another: JOBU – Joy of Being Us, because, after all, we are intertwined.
This morning I woke from a vivid dream. I was holding a baby boy, a beautiful baby boy, and then, he was a toddler, and we were learning together. Then, we ate sushi. I don’t know how to interpret the sushi part though I do love sushi, but what I felt at first, and what I’ve been feeling is that my grandson, who is still in the womb of his mother, communicates with me though dreams. This is not the first, but then, I thought, perhaps it is my brother reborn, but it is only the 53th day since his passing and that would be a quick transition, so then, I remembered we’re everyone in our dream. The baby is me. Each day, each moment, we reincarnate; we are reborn.
I lay in bed this morning feeling like phyllo dough, folded and coated with butter, and folded and coated over and over again.
My heart is huge with JOBB – Joy of Being Born, knowing that though my brother was born in 1953, and I in 1949, we’re continually being born.
Yesterday I saw a hummingbird hovering amongst branches of a tree. A closer look revealed her tiny nest. I assured her I meant no harm and walked on.
I saw five baby goats snuggling together at Slide Ranch. The two mothers stood nearby watching. Two months ago one birthed twins and the other triplets, but the little ones cuddled as one.
There are places of peace. Watching children with goats is one of these.
Overseeing the ocean is another.
My brother passed fifty-two days ago and I find ease.
It’s Steve’s birthday. He’s 71. We wake at 4:30, grateful for our lives.
I snuggle in, lie flat on my back in bed, feel myself as a garden, feel myself as soil. My brother’s passing 51 days ago is fertilizer, liquid fertilizer, liquid love, seeping into the soil of my being, blood and bone, circulating. Plants hold roots as we hold hands. Life and death do the same.
I lie in bed allowing the space in my head to open. Eyeballs breathe, nourish on roundness. Legs part like legs of a frog. The soles of my feet touch.
I lie there receiving. My legs make a heart with soul, pelvis a cauldron receiving what comes now.
An owl calls who, who, who, and insides reply, “all here”, and outside fog holds a veil of mist, and ridge and ocean, though unseen, are here.Gratitude completes.
Though I’d intended to hibernate on the 49th day of my brother’s passing, I walked down to the end of our street and then another street to attend an outdoor neighborhood meeting. We live on a county non-maintained road, and 100 years ago a map was drawn up of “paper streets”. Now, living in different times, we navigate the issues of overcrowding, drainage, fire danger, and unethical developers. The silver lining is we meet our neighbors. The downside is it can be unsettling.
As I walked back the woman who organized the meeting invited me into the magic that is her garden. They have an acre of land, and as do I, she feels the vibration of the Native people, the Coast Miwok, coming through. She wants to honor the creatures who live here with us, the plants and microorganisms in the soil.
She has done all the gardening work herself, and I see how it fuels her energy to fight development that would take away even more land from the creatures with whom we share this land: deer, possums, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, and even a mountain lion at times.
I walked through a tunnel of flowers and a fairy garden paradise. Pictures can’t capture the magic, but I offer a few.
I post the above and see it as enough but as I read a book on grief called The Grief Recovery Handbook by James and Friedman, I see I left out where I was most touched. It felt too tender perhaps but I look at that word compassion and realize it’s important I share a little more.Lee pointed out an amaryllis that hadn’t been blooming at 8:45 and yet there it was at 9:45, like this.
Love Light
Then after an hour or so of winding paths, she showed me where a redwood tree was cut and where it now comes back. Renewal speaks.
Young redwood tree
Hearts form where the trunk of the redwood tree was cut. Spread Wings – Trust!
Today is the 49th day since my brother passed. I’ve been wondering how this day would feel as the Buddhists honor this day as the one who has passed makes a choice as to whether to return or move on.
Yesterday I felt my brother on a boat tossing a rope to a dock on which I stood. I woke this morning knowing that’s not it at all.
First, I noticed my breath was/is everywhere. I’m being breathed.
There’s no inhale, pause, exhale, pause. Breath is everywhere, in all the cells, and expanding out. I’m breathing through my whole head, allowing separation between my eyes and throughout my head and heart, and I realize all this with the 49th day isn’t related to him or me. It’s like when I was at the Everest Memorial only in this case rather than feeling impersonal, and grounded in cold, this is a feeling of warmth and knowing. I am the boat, the dock, the water, the earth, the universe. There never was, and is not now any separation between my brother and me, between life and death.
Perhaps that is what people risk at altitude; it’s one reason they keep climbing. They want to touch this knowing, Less air and less oxygen allow one to live knowing an expansiveness that can’t be found at sea level, and then, this morning, it’s here. I’m here. I am.
People are dying wanting to get to the top of Mount Everest. People wonder why. Perhaps I give a taste in my book, Airing Out the Fairy Tale: Trekking through Nepal & Midlife.
In my book, I write about stepping into the circle of stones, the sacred site where those who’ve died on Everest are honored, the Everest Memorial.
“Celeste, Sante, and I separated, each drawn to explore different sections within the circle, each needing to find our own way to honor and grieve. The wind blew icy cold. Something new entered my bones. Not fear or even grief. I stepped out – or was brought out – of humanness, into something more elemental.”
I say more in the book and then come to say: It’s as though those who’ve died “were winging there way through stars, as though the expansiveness of death was impersonal. I could believe we sing the universe into being as we tune into the vibrations between the cells. We are tuning forks.”
We continued to walk outside the circle of stones and continued along and up. and as we did so, I felt my “steps were elemental like candle flames, ignition for prayer”.
In this moment, sitting here in my chair as the day is softly lit I feel my breath elemental and rich. I know all is one and my brother is here.
The word healing is about wholeness, feeling whole. In this moment, I am whole: tree, seed, root, air, water, soil.
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