I slept like a log which may have had a great deal to do with traipsing to different beaches yesterday, getting a sense of which one would be the place my brother would best like his ashes to float to sea.  I learned the high tide at Maverick’s is at 3:30 PM on Friday, the solstice, the longest day of the year. We will gather, and as the tide goes out, wade out into the water, and set or toss the ashes into the outgoing waves as though they are seals and otters released back into the wild.

I’m a bit volatile these days.  I know it’s about grief, the weight of grief which sinks and rises like a bird in flight. Happy, sad, happy, sad, as I look to balance like a log left on the beach by high tides and storms.

When I found Maverick’s Beach – not on the beaten path I learned – I looked for a sign it was the spot.  Three pelicans flew overhead – mother, father, brother. Then, I found a heart rock. I sat and learned it was a pelican conference center.  The tide was low. I felt the convergence of water and sand.

Then I went to a more private, local beach.  The sand was silk. A harbor seal floated along the coast.

I’m leaving Friday open as to plan.  I know I go to the airport and meet my niece Kate, flying in from Boston, and her mother, flying in from Hartford, through Chicago.  Then, we go over the hill to the ocean where we have a place to stay and will meet people coming from north, south, and east. Nobody is sailing in from the West, and that makes sense, since that’s where we go when we come to final rest, and for now, I’m still here.   Like Ram Dass, well, not quite like him, since he’s more evolved, but I am still here, open to change and waves, even as I appreciate the stillness of a driftwood log when it’s up above the reach of the waves for now.

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.

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 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.