Epitaph

Life isn't really very long.

It seems that way, but it's fairly short. And goes by quickly.

I'm not really afraid of death. I'm sad about the idea of not living anymore, but I'm not afraid of death. As Mark Twain said,

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

It's life that's hard.

My parents have the kids this week, and it's given me time to really let the thoughts flow uninterrupted. An old friend from PNG came for a visit who I hadn't seen in 18 years. And it felt like I had forgotten what it was to breath fresh air. I wanted to trap her and not let her go. Eighteen years of life had to be summed up and sorted through and told. It was magical and amazing and so enlightening.

We only get one of these things, you know? We only get one go that we know of on this little blue dot. We get maybe 80 trips around the sun, hopefully more.

I've come to realize that I have thought of life as having a bare minimum of requirements. I have this concept that every life is given this sort of scavenger hunt list. There all the things we get to have and do and be. And we all get them. But you have to go get them. And every missed opportunity or wrong turn or illness or disaster causes us to miss out on all the items on the list. And then there's sadness. I've come to realize that I think of every event in life as either Good and an item on the list or Bad and taking away an item on the list. You fail a course in college and that means you miss out on some future financial gain. Call it my crazy way of understanding Karma or the butterfly effect. But it plagues me. I cling so tightly to what I think I should get or want or feel I deserve. I mourn lost opportunities. I often see illness and disability and storms and broken cars and forgotten appointments as being all bad and having no merit. They are BAD things that happen.

I look at my twenties as this time of great loss. I look at it as failure after failure. I carry shame with me about my choices and all that wasted time. It's like a whole section of good things got scratched off my list. Gone. Forever. Fail.

But then my niece sent me an email with a blurb from her journal when she was in fifth grade. She wrote about her long conversations with me and about how I understood what she was going through. She, as a little girl, felt heard and loved by me during a time I think of as a big waste.

And then Marco and I were telling our story to my friend, and I could see it all from her perspective. She kept remarking on how beautiful it was. She helped me see how unbelievably lucky I have been. Through all that darkness, through years of bulimia and battling my weight and depression and making bad choices, I had Marco. And I had my sister. And I had my nieces and nephews. And I had great friends. And I had a lot of fun too. Sure, I partied too much and made bad choices, but I had a lot of fun with friends as well.

It's not good and bad. It just is. Everything comes to us, terrifying and amazing and heartbreaking and joyful. I can keep telling myself that time is lost and bad and carry shame. Or I can just accept those years as part of me, building me, creating this life I have now, a life I wouldn't trade for anything. And sometimes things happen to you and sometimes you make choices. But even the bad choices can be met with shame and anger or just treated as a moment in time, a lesson learned.

Fuck having nice furniture. Fuck having nice clothes. Fuck having a stellar resume. Fuck having a Hollywood body. Fuck being perfectly organized. Fuck being all. Fuck being nothing. Fuck breastfeeding perfectly. Fuck loving being pregnant. Fuck getting perfect grades. Fuck all the things I thought had to be just so.

Maya Angelou said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

So, my scavenger hunt list is changing. I want to hunt down moments with friends. I want to check off being honest and brave with my words. I want to know that people leave my home with a full belly and happy heart. I want my kids to remember that I hugged them and wasn't too busy pursuing perfection to stop and listen. I want Marco to look back and say, "We've had a great life, you and me."

I want my epitaph to read,

She loved greatly.
She dared authentically.
She cherished deeply.
She laughed often.

"Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that's all that's happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness - life's painful aspect - softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody's eyes becasue you feel you haven't got anything to lose - you're just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We'd be so depressed and discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn't have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together."
- Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are

Joy On Purpose

“I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood.”

Bill Watterson, the author of Calvin and Hobbes, wrote that.

It suddenly occurred to me, after a few weeks of feeling like everyone is deliberately trying to ruin my life, that I might (just might) be a little low on light. The winter really gets to me. I begin the winter knowing this and attempt to do things to keep the tide from overtaking my picnic. But then it does. And every February feels like the longest month, the bleakest time, sand in my sandwiches.

And what also occurred to me, in an instant as I was bending down to load the dishwasher, was that I have been savoring my bad mood. I’ve been feeding my meanness and negativity and sabotaging my own efforts to improve. This happens. I start the winter empowered to affect change and not be taken down. But then the serotonin drops off and I begin to think that everything really is that bad and the only way to change things is to sell the house, force the children to age quickly, divorce and/or kill my husband, begin a PhD, go to art school, run away to New Mexico and/or Portland, Oregon or become a screenwriter. All totally feasible options. And all clearly would solve the problem.

I don’t want to acknowledge the secret. (The problem is me.)

Shit.

Stupid shit. Life shit. Me shit. Fucking darkness shit. Stupid fucking low house sales shit. Stupid spacetime shit. Fucking snow. Fucking stupid rainy sleet on my face winter shit.

And this coming from the woman who spent a month in Mexico this winter. Holy Jesus spoiled brat shit.

Life is certainly not what you expect. Marriage takes real work. You can’t kill them. They can’t kill you. You have to figure out how to live together and take care of the people you made and pay the bills and get the work hours in and move forward in your life and remember trash day and somewhere in there fit in some sex (preferably every day, say some).

And these early years are long. And there is a lot of fecal matter. And crying. And fighting.

It’s hard to sort out what you really want, what really matters, from all the things you think you want, all the things you think will make you feel better. I do want to make changes and find a career I love and fill my life with passion. But is that what I’m doing now? Or am I seeking immediate gratification?

At the core is this restless craving for satisfaction and greatness and esteem from others and attractiveness - it’s all the problem. Here is your life, that you made, that came to you by fate (or divinity). It is complex and not without confusion. The person you married is different than you (extremely so). Your house is colder than you like. You bruise more than you expected. You get two babies at one time. You moved too far from your sister. Many of your best friends live too far away too. Time doesn’t stop. Fat is hard to lose once on the body. The earth tilts away from the sun. Children fight with their siblings. People get sick (sometimes fighting for their lives). You didn’t go to grad school earlier in life. All these things are just true.

“Reality continues to ruin my life.” (also Bill Watterson)

There’s nothing I can do to smooth out reality. It is bumpy and jarring and startlingly beautiful and radiant and grimy.

So, what am I going to do about it?

It’s hard to resist the urge to want everyone and everything to change. It’s so much easier to distract ourselves from what we really need to do to be here in this life. For me it’s wasting time on my phone, leaving the dinner table (full of crying and fighting) to go do the dishes, blasting loud music, eating candy, making phone calls, volunteering to help with everything, television, books and checking Facebook.

Bill Watterson also said, “I’m killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.”

We have to be deliberate about our joy. Nietzsche used the Latin term Amor fati which means “love of fate.” It’s having an attitude not just of accepting what comes but of truly loving it.

He said, “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. and all in all and on the whole: someday i wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

Lately, as those negative thoughts have been playing on repeat, I keep thinking of all those neurons firing in my brain. They’ve got that pathway down. They know that circuit of thought. I’m doing a good job of making anger my default.

Can I switch it off? Can I let it go? Can I stop and take snapshots of reality and see the freaking forest instead of all the horrible trees?

Yes. But I have to actually do it.

I have to say Yes.

The Least Light

It’s an auspicious day. The older I get, the more the winter solstice means to me. The darkness closes in with a suffocating, threatening oppression. I yearn for light. I eat cookies to bolster my fortitude. Today the tide turns. Today we have the least light. But tomorrow we begin our ascent.

Quite a few things have happened lately that have left me feeling acutely aware of my own ineptitude and impotence. I’ve had friends make permanent decisions about their marriages that I neither understood nor could control. I’ve had sickness that lasted over a month and culminated in a week of complete wipe-out. And then a young man killed twenty-six people, mostly children. It’s dark. It’s deeply, dankly, desolately dark.

I am not in control.

Maya, my five year old daughter, reminded me this morning that the world is not going to end. She said, “Remember? Matter can’t be destroyed. It goes on and on and becomes something else.”

It made me realize that I think of the world and existence in terms of me. I look at everything through my filter of existence. The world’s existence, according to me, is really just as long as the lights are on in my own mind. But the world will actually keep going on without me. She’s right about that. And I see other people’s relationships in terms of my own experience. I am angry that I can’t fix them. I don’t understand how they can’t just use my suggestions and get things back on track. I have really good suggestions. Of course, fixing my own marriage has been difficult, often harrowing work that I was equally ill-equipped to tackle. But that doesn’t keep me from wanting and trying to fix other people. I have trouble sitting with distress, even other people’s distress.

The illness was just another bout of body over mind control. The Celiac, the anxiety, depression, illness, physical pain - it’s been a year of enduring and shifting my view of my body as a tool, a tool I need desperately to care for and not take for granted. It is a thing of beauty, true. But it is also my only mode of transportation on this earth, so I need to treat it as such and honor it a great deal more. And, sometimes, no matter what you do to prepare and take care, viruses and autoimmune diseases come along and just really fuck you up something silly. My tendency has always been to assume guilt when “bad” things happen. But sometimes they just happen. And my reaction to them is the only thing I can control.

This year Maya started reading. Watching this unfold was an act of letting go of control and allowing her deeper motivation for understanding to grow rather than forcing my desires upon her. But she is reading. And the beauty of witnessing another human being begin to read is one of the greatest joys I have ever experienced. The world has opened to her. It breaks my heart with its simple beauty.

Plants - another example of something I cannot control. Not surprisingly, if you know me, I had anxiety that my paperwhites would not bloom before we left for Mexico (priorities clearly in order). I watched them each day shooting up tall and green and beautiful. And I told myself, “It’s okay. Just this is enough. Watching these shoots is enough beauty.” But I longed for the blooms as I stared at them while washing dishes. Come on little buds.

Well, today my paperwhites bloomed. I came up from the basement thinking about this dark day and the hope of more light, and there, smiling so pretty, was one tiny little white bloom.

Things unfold. They come to us all crumpled up and look like trash, but they unfold. And the hardest to discern are usually the things of the most value. But we can’t just forcefully rip them open. They are as delicate as blooms. We just have to sit and wait and do our watering and let the sun shine. It’s sheer torture.

But we can spend all that burning energy, that craving desire for satisfaction - we can spend that on wonder. Whether it’s “Holy shit. The bottom is falling out,” or “no one will do what I want them to do,“ or “this is the most beautiful experience of my life,” my reaction can be the same. Miracles are not always good. But they are awesome. The jaw drops just the same.

It’s hard to see any beauty now or imagine any beauty coming from the horrific events of last week in Newtown. It’s hard to find miracles there. But I hope we’ll eventually find some. And that the families will find that they unfold, like precious little blooms that they never expected and desperately needed. Perhaps we can water their growth with our love and compassion and making changes in our own lives. Perhaps more will grow from this - a systemic change, a national consciousness shift, a Gandhian non-violent revolution? I have hope.

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it - always.” - Mahatma Gandhi

Wherever you are, whatever you’re waiting for to bloom, I hope you find peace in the wonder and hope in the least of light.

“The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.”
- Abraham Heschel

Happy Solstice!

Let Go and Let Good

My nerves have been raw lately. Two weeks of sickness and PMS and darkness descending have exposed them to the elements, and my reaction has been less than graceful. But I’m hopeful, not so gloomy that I’ve lost that, which is all I can ask for during this time of darkest days. I’m hopeful that I’ll feel well soon. My dear friend Melissa gave me wellness herbs that I am putting my faith in to boost my body into fighting off this illness. I’m reading two Anne Lamott books at once, so that is boosting my ability to give myself a little grace. She just makes being a crappy human so okay. And I put up the twinkle lights. We aren’t decorating a tree this year because we leave Christmas day for Mexico, but the kids kept begging that we do something. And, lo and behold, how I needed the twinkle lights to boost my mood. So, I’m hopeful that I can turn things around and be fun mom instead of just barely tolerant mom. I think Maya’s not as hopeful. She’s pretty fed up with me and has said so several times. Fortunately, she’s forgiving and accepts book reading time as penance for my sins of grumpiness.

Every year Marco and I enter into the same discussion of Christmas. You’d think by now we’d have worked it out, figured out where we stand. I know you’re probably thinking that we way over think everything and belabor very small points. Yes, indeed. That’s how we roll. Just when I’d come to peace with my enjoyment of Christmas as a tradition I grew up with and an enjoyment in itself, he started suggesting we not call it Christmas. “We don’t believe in Christ. Heather, you know that the church just hijacked someone else’s holiday to force Jesus on them.” Yes, I know. But it’s basically been hijacked right back - by gluttonous consumerism and conspicuous spending. “We don’t subscribe to that either.” Well, no. We try not too. But we do believe in hope in the darkness. We believe the light will return. We believe in generosity. We believe in taking time to show people you love how much you care by making or finding small tokens of joy. And there’s something kind of cool about the mystery of Santa. Neither of us believed in Santa, so it’s an unfamiliar concept to us, but our kids have soaked it up. And they’re asking all sorts of questions. Maya is on the fence and always looking for clues as to whether she’s right about him not existing, but I can tell she’d really like it to be so. I’m familiar with that feeling. So we pose everything as questions such as, “Do you think he’s real?” or say things like, “They say he lives in the North Pole.” We never say whether we do or do not believe he’s real - just try to further the mystery and lead her in the direction of solving while maintaining a sense of awe. That’s the goal for it all right. Last night she said, “How do we know if he’s real?” We can’t prove a negative. I said, “Some of the most important things in life we can’t prove.” I’d like her to come to her own conclusions about God and all the characteristics that people attribute to him: grace, peace, hope, love, compassion.

So, we decorate with Christmas decorations. I love the family time of hanging ornaments and listening to music and cinnamon and cloves and orange and peppermint. I love creating warmth and light and hope in our home when we can’t be outside in the sunshine and bounty of nature. We bring it inside. I like those traditions - really from the Norse people - of warding off the evil winter spirits of darkness with the magical properties of the evergreen, plants powerful enough to stay green even in the harsh winter. I like how all of the traditions of Diwali and Bodhi Day and Saturnalia and Solstice and Yule and Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa are all about celebrating light. I need that. 

Yesterday the minister at UUCSS spoke about Artemis, the Greek goddess, and of what it meant for the Greek people to believe in this goddess of protection and chastity and fertility and safety. She was honored in hopes of good outcomes, yet she was understood to be, like all gods, mercurial. Things did not always go in your favor and not necessarily because of something you did. But the young virgins served her in hopes of protection and health and safety in childbirth. She spoke of a time when she had, when things were so dark and difficult, asked for help from Artemis. And something changed for her. And she said that maybe it was something that changed in her by letting go and trusting. Maybe Artemis was a model of who she wanted to be. Or maybe, just maybe, there had been a hand of help and strength.

I like when people say, “I know there’s a god. And I know I’m not him.” To me, that moment of release, surrender, and admittance of inadequacy is the tender moment when compassion and love come beaming in through the small cracks. I am so hesitant to surrender because, if there is a god or goddess, he/she/they are mercurial. I don’t trust in good outcomes. I don’t believe in a personal deity looking out for me personally and caring about my sickness or Zoe’s constipation or our upcoming travels or any of the things I hope will turn out okay. But I also believe in the Henry Ford aphorism, “Whether you think you can or you can’t - you’re right.” There’s something about letting go and trusting in goodness and having a positive hope in things and people and in the light.

Yesterday was the start of Advent, the time of anticipation and preparation for the coming of a savior king, and this weekend begins Hanukkah, the celebration of the provision of god in the clutch, when we least have hope. There will be enough oil. There will be salvation. We have hope.

So, with trembling arms, I open my hands in hope. I’ll light a candle to represent my hope in the great mystery, in the goodness of mankind, in the tenuous anticipation of Spring warmth and the return of light. And I’ll say a prayer to the universe, the forces at work that are greater than me, of thanks. Thanks for my babies. Thanks for my husband. Thanks for my house. Thanks for so many, many things coming up roses for me. Because, wow, it could have gone a really different way. I did nothing to deserve all this goodness, that is for sure. And I’ll lean back and surrender myself to not-being-in-charge. I’ll let go of thinking that the bad things are my fault and the good things are my merit. They are all part of the mercurial nature of existence. And really, they all end up coming up good when my heart is in the right place. My friend Melissa would say that it’s all light. We need these challenges to grow.

“When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something. We might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way. We can shut down and feel resentful or we can touch in on that throbbing quality.” - Pema Chodron

New Mercies and Nothing More

“Mercies are new every morning.”

This popped into my head the other day as I was walking upstairs from my morning work session and headed into a day with the kids all home. It’s a verse from the Old Testament.

Lamentations 3:22-23 (KJV)
“It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”

My first impulse when verses or hymns or little god-phrases pop into my head is to push them out. Gah! Stupid! There is no god. There is no faithfulness. I’ve been turning away from thousands of years of ancient wisdom in an effort to rid myself of the remnants of belief. And it’s left me feeling annoyed - and sometimes condescending.

But mercies are new every morning. That’s true even if I don’t know how or why. We all get a new day to start again. Every. Single. Day. Every single moment, in fact. And we need mercy. We need not to punish ourselves. We need grace as well. We need to feel loved and cared for and nourished even when we feel unworthy, terrible and mean. We need to just be with our poor old selves, struggling as we do. We need to drop the hope that we’ll be better or do better and just love the hell out of ourselves in our grumpy, unhealthy, grasping current state.

I don’t have hope in a personal, intercessory god. I truly do not believe there is a hand to hold or a promise of a bright future. My portion is in the love I receive from others and from myself every day even when I don’t deserve it. I lift my arms to the inexplicable patience others have with me. I praise the mystery behind the Japanese maple that glows red out our window. It nourishes me in ways I don’t understand. I dance in celebration of newness when I listen to Mumford and Sons sing, “I really fucked it up this time.”

I’ve been in a self-pitying funk for about a month. Well, truth be told, it started back in June. June was when everything went haywire. Something steered my body completely off track. I’d like to solve the mystery - figure out the chicken/egg dilemma, but I’ll never know. But the results were crippling anxiety, an irregular cycle, depression, abdominal pains, bloating, canker sores, brain fog, confusion, deteriorating energy, irritability, severe allergies, and fatigue. I stopped exercising. I lost track of my plan for the year. I had trouble even planning the day. Marco’s cousin was living with us and was constantly trying to talk me through anxiety that left me paralyzed and immobile. I’d never suffered from anxiety before. I felt lost in my own skin. I stopped writing.

Finally, I ended up in the ER in September with severe abdominal pain. It seemed ridiculous that I was there, and, after eleven hours, they gave me a clean bill of “no emergency surgery needed” health. But something was wrong.

After many tests, my GI doctor told me that my gall bladder is functioning low and my antibodies, specific to Celiac, are high. Do I have Celiac? Well, he says, we know you can’t eat gluten. 

I actually smiled with joy when his office called with the news. An answer - perhaps an answer to years and years of digestive problems. I got excited. I’d go off dairy and gluten and charge full force into a healthy future! Ha. My enthusiasm lasted a few days. Going off of gluten and dairy, it turns out, is a pain in the ass. And I also shouldn’t have beans (or really any legumes) or beef or caffeine or sugar. That rules out soy, lentils, peas, and chick peas. I haven’t stopped eating them, but I know I should. My body loathes them. It also seems to loathe casein, the protein in dairy. Or is it lactose that’s the problem? I don’t know, but when I eat cheese I regret it. Every. Time.

I’m angry about this. My food history was already sullied, to say the least. And I felt like I’d finally gotten a grip on eating and exercise and taking care of myself. Now I feel like I’m starting from scratch. I’m starting new. I’m...wait? Didn’t I say I wanted that? Didn’t I just say that I wanted a fresh start? Each day?

Dammit.

Can’t I get all the newness without everything being new?

No.

“To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by the way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know,
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess,
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not,
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know.
And what you own is what you do not own.
And where you are is where you are not.”  
- T.S. Eliot

And what I am not is loving of my body and of myself. I don’t take proper care of my body, yet I expect it to do things it’s not capable of doing. And I wonder why I end up in pain. I wonder why I’m so tired. I’m not treating myself as a dear friend. I’m not giving myself measureless grace. Yet I expect that I’ll have a cheerful disposition and measureless grace with the kids. Nope. Fail.

You cannot get out what you do not put in.

So, today, after getting an encouraging email from a friend with Lyme Disease, who is so much sicker than I am and writes about it with eloquence, I’m starting fresh.

I know this will be hard. I know that taking away my vices is going to be a struggle. I want so badly that immediate comfort. I know that changing from seeking immediate gratification to desiring long term nourishment is going to be tough. I’m going to want candy. I already do...right now. But I’ll have some ginger tea instead. Because I’m sick. There’s no denying it anymore. I need to treat my poor body as I would treat a friend’s body - with good food and exercise and water and every vitamin I need to get well. It needs mercy instead of punishment. I need a ton of sleep. I need to stop pretending that life is any different than it actually is and just get on with the business of living it here and now.

“One can appreciate and celebrate each moment - there’s nothing more sacred. There’s nothing more vast or absolute. In fact, there’s nothing more!”
- Pema Chodron