Moonlight

The moon woke me the other night. It was 3 am. Its beams streamed through my window. The rest of my house was asleep. It woke me and worked on me, making it hard to fall back asleep until it passed by my window frame moving through the night sky. The moon beams filled my heart with dormant dreams that I am waking up to more fully. Writing, claiming time and space for it. Being a present mom. Person really. 

I thought of our travels as I laid in the tousled sheets and how the places we lived felt like bases on an infield, and like we had been rounding them stopping and waiting at some. Even playing hotbox running back and forth on a baseline between two trying not to get tagged out. Rounding the base literally to home in the dark of night underneath the moonlight, the moon seemed like home base to me. And as I dreamt about this I thought of Kieran, and how he is beginning to venture out of homebase, into the wide expanse of school days and activities more and more away from me. When my first began this journey, this happening, I sobbed for days it felt like mourning the loss of his time with me, cocooned at home. As Kiki does it I am aware, not sobbing but aware of what is happening. I feel his palm slipping out of mine as we walk toward his school line in the morning. I feel the shadow of his imprint linger there for a moment and then absorb into my palm. I watch him line up. And in he goes as I walk back to the car. This time round it is he who tells me he is not sure he likes how long school is or how every day it is, and when can that change? I look at him, aware that his deep brown eyes already know a door is closing behind him as this one cracks open. More time structured, less time to play. My heart aches a little for him. Childhood feels so short some moments. This is one of them. He still wakes every night and comes to my side of the bed and stares at me until I open my eyes--waking me like the moon, and asks to snuggle in. Most nights I let him pull me from my slumber and make room. I wonder as I lay there how long this ritual will go on with him. I know one day it will wan like the moon, fade away to a crescent memory. 

So I allow the moon to wake me. Pulling me from my underworld of sleep. Allowing me to let the tides ebb in my life that I no longer need, in order to bring in greater flow. I feel the urgency to get to work. I feel it like I feel the itchiness and tingling sensation in my scalp before the hair follicles wake up and grow in a certain area. There is an urgency to get down to work. Like a veil is being lifted and consciousness is streaming in to bring more peacefulness and love to the world. The nocturnal animals wake up in the darkness and so must I. I run my hand through my hair sometimes amazed at how much has emerged, and as the moon slips past my window leaving its faint memory of light there I return to slumber, to let the magic of the moon integrate and settle in my system. Only the streetlight peaks up from below into our second floor window now. I bid it goodnight as I roll away from its intrusion. I need the darkness now like a seed needs the dirt to grow and sleep. As I drift off, I wonder about the long name of Goddesses in every culture that have been inspired from the moon, I mark it as something to return toward tomorrow.

Cat-Walking from Child's Pose

I lay in child's pose this morning feeling my breath enter my hips that were tight from sleep and lack of exercise these past few days. With the start of school my running and yoga schedule have yet to settle into their new routine. Feeling my spirit floating above my physical body I willed it to come back in, as I came into crescent lunge and returned to child's pose this time sinking a little deeper, feeling my breath circulate into my legs out of my contracted spine. And flashes of walking and my childhood catwalk came to me, the call to write flooded me and with a few more yoga poses I rose and begin to type as a recent post of Pema Chodron floated in my consciousness.

Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

–Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

***

I sat up in the hospital bed nursing Seamus, the pediatrician on-call entered, rubbing her hands enthusiastically with the foaming soap as she asked how I was doing, and introduced herself. I asked my midwife to note on my chart that no I did not have cancer and yes I was ok, even though pregnancy had left me nearly bald, with only a few strands of dark hair on the top of my head, the strands of hope that one day my locks would return. Bob, my teacher of SourcePoint Therapy and Healer and friend, suggested I shave my head when it was happening, but I couldn't bring myself to do it I was so attached to having hair. In hindsight, I think it would have helped me get over it quicker. But here and now that no longer matters. What it shows me is how much I struggled to accept my reality that I was losing hair. That pregnancy and hormones and sleepless nights and many moves was taking a toll on my physical body that I thought I could continue to ignore. 

The pediatrician began looking over Seamus from head to toe, checking his reflexes and listening to his sweet heartbeat that earlier I had heard through the intermittent monitoring the midwife was required to do. What was once audible in the hospital room was now only heard through her stethoscope, and what was once felt on the inside of me was now felt against my chest as I nursed him on the outside. She turned to look at me, my head wrapped in a turban, and asked, "Are you ok?" Her eyes scrutinizing my body from head to toe. The unasked question lurking beneath the ok.
"Yes," I replied with shaky confidence.
She said, "Is your cancer prognosis good?"
Had she not read my chart? Keenly aware of the power of a doctor's words on a person's psyche and reality when it came to healing, I wondered. The one scenario I hoped would not bring itself into reality was being played out, like through my fear I had called it forth. I curled myself around my now nursing newborn son, to shield my heart from her, and try to shield her medical stare as she assessed what was happening in this baby's postpartum mother. I faltered and glanced up as I wiggled his body flush with my stomach for a better latch. "No, I am good. No cancer," wincing as he clamped down setting off the post birth contractions again deep in my uterus. "It's alopecia." At least that was the western term they named unexplained hair loss. I was yet to unearth my low ferratin levels, extremely low, those iron stores hidden beneath my ok hemoglobin. I was yet to realize my Vitamin D deemed ok by western standards of medicine was borderline low and that these two culprits can play key role in fatigue, hair loss etc. I was also yet to admit that I was hard on myself, harder than I would wish on any one else. And I was yet to realize how much stress I carried within my thoughts and body and daily reality.

Doctors I would seek counsel from would offer generously are you stressed and I would reply no, not me. I was so stressed I hadn't realized what not being stressed felt like. On some levels, I had grown up in an environment of stress and anger. It felt like a natural backdrop to being. To existing. I asked if she had read my chart as the information was in there.  The doctor apologized, blushed and excused herself. I was relieved she was not someone I would need to see again as she was only a ped on-call and returned my focus to Seamus long sweet sweeping sucks from chin to jawline letting me know he was properly attached. Wishing I could make my hair grow like his sucks made my milk let down. I thought of Medusa's snakes emerging wildly and quickly out of her head. Not knowing how much compassion I would need to nurture for this to happen to my scalp. Wondering how much worse it could possibly become at the four month marker when I typically had a shedding and knowing there was nothing left to shed. Also wondering what I could do to shift this reality and feeling lost in the pool of my emotions that flooded me post birth.

I remember walking the morning Seamus was born, 9 months and 13 days into being pregnant with him, a light mist fell and I wore Peter's chartreuse colored Patagonia rain jacket the only thing that would fit around my expanse, and a white hat. I walked the streets of my neighborhood up and down and felt myself filtering between the sublime world of here and the majestical world of how things become; transform into life. I imagined how God may have felt as he built the world each day out of something into form, how the blueprint for human health was informing my child's being and becoming and how connected I felt to it within me and around me pregnant. I felt the crescent moon waxing beneath my belly and the pull of its tide for him to be born growing stronger as I walked and the contractions, the surges picked up pace, until I returned home, knowing deeply within that this would be the last morning I would know my baby as I knew him, cloaked in darkness absorbing the world through sound and taste and emotions moving through me to him, and the sound of my heartbeat and its rhythms against his feet that now pressed up under my rib cage and the breath patterns I was consciously and unconsciously passing his way.

The midst and the colors of the world seen through the light April rain bridged the world of form emerging and I felt calm and blessed to know intimately the power of motherhood, the power of the great mother that informs our world if we only pay attention, take heed. Know that each moment there is  a present playing out and storyline of past and future unfurling with thought and action and breath. From my studies of SourcePoint Therapy I have heard this definition of karma form Padmasambhava, " If you want to know your past life, look into your present conditions. If you want to know your future life, look into your present actions."  Someone said to me that an embryo needs karma to come into form. It has me thinking about all that comes into place to make us come into being. It deepens my desire to learn more about the mystery that unfolds through conception and pregnancy and birth. To bring health to the now, and to how we live is a calling I feel deeply. I only fully grasped this call in me from my own health journey to live better to fully embody this body, this soul, this calling into the deeper call to be joyous and loving--moving away from the small scared sense of self into the larger S of Self.

What do our injuries, our dis-eases wake us up to? What do they stand to call our attention toward? Is it for more suffering--I think we can fall into that thought and nurse it, but I think it is to awaken that deep sense of wonder of reverence. Do we need disease and suffering and injury for this to happen? I would like to think no. We are living in a time where we can get weighed down by the fear, suffering and anger present in the world. I by no means am suggesting to ignore that, but to be aware of it and to call ourselves toward love, toward healing and wholeness is a practice and one that takes dedication and energy and perseverance. Considering what the great mother energy of the world is asking of us is no small feat, but something we can heed and nurture.

quietly...

I have taken to writing shyly, Karen Maezen Miller. It started by a casual invitation to her FB followers for some good old fashion letter writing. I took the leap and she wrote back. I wrote her a second time. (I appreciate her vision, her voice, her subtle awareness and acute sensitivity.) The other day it was her birthday so I wrote to her and said, "Happy day! On this day and each. Thank you for sharing your gifts, voice and sight with the world."
She replied, "Ah the world gave them to me and so I return with gratitude."
"Lovely. A now of gratitude, " my autocorrect at work when I meant a bow, but now works I write her.
"Always works," she replies.

And like that I learned a deep lesson. A lesson I first heard when I listened to Annie Lamott speak of on C-Span books nine years ago. I laid in our bed in Santa Clara nursing my first born son, watching her speak to a crowd of people in Washington DC, she said, "We all have brilliant ideas, stories, thoughts on faith and life and world, only I listen to them and write them down." She cajoled her audience to pay attention. To respond to the muse. At the time I longed for that spaciousness to do just as she said, pay attention, respond with writing, gift it to the world. It is only now nine years later, that I feel its urgency pressing down on me like an apple press, squeezing the juice out of its autumn harvest. I am trying to suck the marrow out of the growing awareness I am building through sitting meditation, writing practice, SourcePoint Therapy Meditation, yoga, and the deep reservoir of faith I was gifted with as a child that grew through my Catholicism and my studies with the Jesuit priests and Salesian nuns. Yes, I suddenly feel the swell of a dam breaking and the currents rushing out into the flow of the river. And so I write. I write to record and understand how to be fully alive in the present.

There was a time I could not write because I felt it catapulted me too far into the past and I lamented that past, it drained me. Now I trust it will come each day and every day like manna from heaven. No need to horde things and stuff, no need to stock up for what may be, and just like that there is absolute freedom and grace in being. I read my boys an entry that Glennon Doyle Melton wrote on Momastery about Church and it really made me realize how much hoarding comes from being scared, and lonely and tired. I was all those things as we moved us and our stuff and learned to live with less. But I worried during that time that we might need more. So I moved boxes, boxes that had not been opened in quite some time and now I am purging those boxes and my 100 year old basement of cinderblocks looks beautifully empty. Really empty. And the grace of dancing in the emptiness makes me full again. My boys replied that they are all of those things often, tried, scared and lonely. This makes me pause. Growing up while fun is work. A dance between fullness and emptiness. My second boy asks if I am friends with that writer, chiming in thoughtfully that I ought to be.

I watch my 5 year old and 7 year old compose pictures and art with abandon, and do well to encourage them. I watch my 9 year old love to print and cursive and play with fonts, and recognize the art form of calligraphy in him--something that with activities is being squelched. How do I nourish their call to create? Allow space for them to head the muse within?

I went to bed last night after a day of composing and writing and recalled my love of running downhill at my cabin, a steep hill that spilled into the lake. Our shoreline was weedy, with spots of sand and clarity, and the steps unevenly grooved and ridged. But that is the place I first learned the brilliance of letting myself fly, of letting my legs tumble feet over feet and soar down at full strength and speed playing with my balance. Landing on the dock with echoing thuds sometimes continuing to run until I jumped right into the lake, other times stopping short at the edge, plopping down on my belly and hanging my head over the dock hands plunged up to my elbows in water, smelling the algae watching the fish beneath the surface as the sunlight streamed into the cloudy water below given half hidden views to all the life that existed beneath the dock, underneath that steep hill, floating up to the surface. I learned on that hill how to run without holding myself back on the declines, how to let gravity do its thing; we must go down to go up, the beginning glimpses into flight.

When I ran down hill as a kid I loved the feeling of my hair flying free in the wind like feathers--I imagined. Locks whipping in my face. Or the weight of my pony tail bobbing behind me like a horse's tail. As I lost my hair in the height of motherhood, when women grow thick hair and lose less, I felt the failure in this. A betrayal of my body. I felt the confusion and the anger, and the helplessness, and instead of wanting to be seen, I longed to hide. To hide under hats, and behind emotions, I willed myself to not be fully seen. It is only recent that I have begun to find my stature again. My composure. It is at a time when I do not long to have another baby. My babies feel like they are all here. I loved being pregnant otherwise, but the thought of the hormonal rollercoaster sends me into a fetal position. And while I am choosing to no longer have kids, I feel the weight of that too, but not how I would imagine I will when peri-menopause sets in or later when menopause comes--and biologically the option is stripped from me.

My attention now shifts to the long locks of hair I notice on women. I saw a girl yesterday with hair down to her lower back, splayed out, blond. Hair I have never had, bleach blond, nor that long. Hair I used to gaze on with envy, but now look at in amazement, and I notice I have shifted. I am healing. This past summer I felt the presence of the Mother Mary come close to me, she has danced with me since I was a child. Coming in and out of intimacy and in different forms from the Black Madonna to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and this time she came to me in her virgin blue robes and I felt her presence behind me inviting me to shed literally my old belief systems and grow compassion. As I felt this significant shift within myself I saw image of hair pouring out of my scalp like long locks of compassion, like a river overflowing with love and the heaviness of old beliefs leave me. As soon as I became aware of being in this vision like a tranced meditation she left me, but the visceral feeling of that moment remains and when I notice myself falling into old thought patterns I do well to reconnect to that gift of Mary coming to me. Strega Nona made spaghetti like the compassionate hair I saw in my vision, never stopping spilling into the room around the house and out the door into the towns people feeding them. Rapunzel's hair brought freedom. What does my hair bring?

I lay in bed last night, reading Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd, and vow never to let the voice of the muse go ignored anymore. I have spent too many years, hearing her voice and shushing her. But only after learning this lesson one final time, the night before I hear the voice, and told myself I would remember the inspiration in the morning. Only to wake and recall a figment of it; something about spiraling toward myself again, and nothing more. And, so as I lay in bed tonight and the muse comes to me, about listening to the small interior voice, that gives me scents of story on a trail, I listen. I rise, and follow its scent on the winds, and I write. A new practice, to replace the old habit. To give voice to what the world gives me, and run downhill again with abandon.

Alpha & Omega

When your last name ends in Z you know where you will land in the pages of the morning obituaries; the last page. And quite possibly the last person to be announced that you died that day. You know that your obit will be called up by clicking page 5 of 5, like you did the day your friend's dad died, to read about him--and learn more about her. You know this because with certainty, no letter comes after Z in the English language. But what comes after death?

Maya Angelou's obit would loom before the section of the obituaries. Her death announced on the front page of newspapers would also come on the first page of the obituary section because of the luck of the draw her last name had when it began with the letter A. So many letters fall in-between. You rooted further down the line of letters when you married, going from E to S.

You wonder about the in-between, the pause between the exhalation and the inhalation, the pause that gives rise to the next movement of breath you take for granted until it is no longer present, and what remains is your life settled in print on page. You wonder will you go out on the in breath, or the out like your writing teacher, Natalie, once asked. And the dramatic pause that lives between the inhalation and the exhalation, how big will it be? (And yet, in your study of breath, you learned a little trick if you want to lengthen your inhalation focus on a longer exhalation it will happen without force on the inhalation and you will feel calmer.)

Sometimes like today, the ferns blowing in the wind with the summer sun shining on the greenness of the earth you wonder at yourself and how much you take being in a body for granted. How you just presume your life will follow day after day. Sometimes this presumption when it rises to the surface catches you off guard, takes your breath away, and your heart aches at how much you will miss this life when it is no longer your life. It's sometimes a dull ache and other times quite sharp. You feel your breath, and your body spiraling into form and light and pattern, and you can feel your heart center opening to receive more of what your life has to offer, and you think you are preparing to fly. Yet, some voice inside says humans don't fly. You are told yogis do, and can and you wonder its truthfulness? You feel that sacred soft space at your back body between your shoulder blades where they meet your spine, and you imagine your wings growing out from that soft heart center and expanding like angel wings--shimmery and strong, shades of white iridescent light. And you sit a little taller while you sit on your front stoops watching those ferns sing in the wind.

You sit, amazed at all that was hidden in the winter months from your view, all that slumbered beneath the thick sheets and layers of ice and snow and polar winds. These ferns you think would never survive that howling wind that whipped through the landscape carving out crusted snow dunes, yet they laid buried beneath snow and ice and soil. And you remember your delight when your footing fell through the snow's crust in March giving way to the promise that the greens of the earth would once again reveal itself, because you began to wonder if it would. Your winter so cold.

When your seven year old boy returned home from school angry at being left out and hurting himself on the playground during free time, you were certain that some sunshine and grass on his bare feet would reconnect him to his goodness, his shiny self, his body. And so, you knelt down as he splayed himself defeated on the douglas fir porch floor and peeled off his shin high socks inviting him and his bare feet back outside to the earth's green carpet. Reluctant he went. And you watched him, and wondered about the final retreat back to the earth's soil is it met with reluctance? Do you return to your body with resistance? Do you find your breath with revere? Does loving yourself mean as Thich Naht Hahn states you come back to your body over and over again, saying "Hello body, I will take care of you....You're body is a wonder." And like that your heart wings grow.