Falling in Love

Falling in Love

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Falling in Love

Falling in Love

I had to surrender a beloved Westie I’d had for almost 10 years. The Westie cringed whenever our rambunctious 4 year old moved. Finally the Westie had had enough, and she lunged with teeth and claws as my little one knelt in front of her. The result: deep scratches beside my daughter’s eye, and worst of all, puncture marks two centimeters from her eyeball. A trip to the emergency room later, we knew what had to be done.

Fortunately, the Westie Rescue people are lovely. They’re warm, kind, fiercely devoted dog people. I can not say enough good things about them. They took in the dog who could no longer fit with our family and found her a wonderful new home.

But, for me, a home isn’t a home without a pet. Research combined with my husband’s experience owning a labrador retriever convinced us that a lab was a better choice for our family. More research introduced us to a few breeders. We ended up with a yellow lab puppy.

His name is Gabriel and he makes us all laugh. He’s smart and adorable and funny, loving and sweet and rambunctious, infectiously exuberant, tolerant, playful, and always willing to snuggle. Puppies are magical. We are all enamored of him.

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I Still Support Gay Marriage

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I support gay marriage.

It doesn’t matter whether the bodies of the betrothed couple are both male, both female, or one of each. We’re going to discard the bodies anyway, after 80 years or so. And what is left is the journey: gay, straight, or bi, people have an inalienable right to the dignity of a journey that includes marriage.

Any two consenting adults over the age of 18 should be allowed to marry. Moreover, they should be congratulated and supported on this momentous undertaking. Marriage is unfathomably hard. It’s painful in too many ways to articulate. You have to live it to really grok the exquisite mental, emotional, and relational agony that is marriage.  Two people committing to it need all the help they can get from their community. They are co-creating a fundamental unit of society, and should be bolstered and praised for that effort.

I suppose some people object to what is perceived as an overly promiscuous lifestyle that can be part of the gay community. I never liked that either–if it was true. But I don’t like excessive promiscuity in straight people, either. There’s a point where healthy sexual exploration becomes soul-numbing, heart-deadening–that’s not good for anyone, whether straight or gay.

But gay people who want to get married are acting, it would seem, to settle down into a life of open-hearted, soul-united monogamy. So how could a promiscuous gay lifestyle be used as an excuse to oppose gay marriage? I just don’t understand.

Are people really that concerned about which body part goes where? Why should it matter?

On Beauty
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On Beauty

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On Beauty

I have been reading Rumi.

I do this whenever I am heartsick, soulsick. Usually it’s for something I can’t identify, though there’s always some exterior thing like a convenient hook to hang it on: my dog bit my little one and had to be surrendered; my 14-year-old told me a great big whopper; my in-laws have rejected their own grand-daughter and disinherited my husband as a means to communicating their supreme dislike of me; my husband is cranky with exhaustion and overwork and a long string of fourteen hour days; the publishing industry is in a stupid place, and largely, in my view, because publishers publish the same damn crap rather than searching out interesting work, and then they wonder why people don’t want to buy it; our financial situation is fraught, as is our situation with our two former spouses…. There’s no end to people and matters that will serve as an excuse. Rumi says, “Everyone chooses a suffering that will change him or her to a well-baked loaf.”

But I think that is preferable to avoiding the suffering, and failing to rise. That happens, too.

So there is all this stuff amenable to being blamed for my anguish, not to mention that it is that time of the month. But is the body or its relationships or its contexts really the reason for this melancholy seeking without an end?

Yesterday this poem of Rumi’s manifest itself to me, in a moment of bibliomancy, or at least I like to think that the Divine was smiling wryly at all my flailing about, and granted me this mouthful of grace.

Coleman Barks calls it THE MOST ALIVE MOMENT:

“The most living moment comes when
those who love each other meet each
 
other’s eyes and in what flows
between them then. To see your face
 
in a crowd of others, or alone on a 
frightening street, I weep for that.
 
Our tears improve the earth. The
time you scolded me, your gratitude,
 
your laughing, always your qualities
increase the soul. Seeing you is a 
 
wine that does not muddle or numb.
We sit inside the cypress shadow
 
where amazement and clear thought
twine their slow growth into us.”
 

(THE SOUL OF RUMI, translations by Coleman Barks.)

I cried after I read it. I found excuses to cry all day. It’s something I rarely do. And then my husband showed me this photo on his iPhone of his Apollo’s outstretched arm. Even in process, it was beautiful: gesture and form, a supreme example of artistry. I cried some more, alone, in my bathroom, so no one knew I was being so silly. And I remembered why this man, this life, this set of choices that has led to this moment in all its bittersweet, empty fullness.

3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN
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3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN

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3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN

My friend Gerda is not only a gifted healer and psychic, she is also a friend who understands. We have had this discussion many times, to whit: What are we doing on Earth? We don’t belong here. This place is crazy.

I maintain it is because of Chocolate. I was happily zipping around the cosmos as a gas being, all cool and free, when I approached a pretty little blue and white planet with its sticky astral plane, and someone waved a gooey piece of hazelnut-filled chocolate. BAM! I was caught, like a fly on glue paper.

“Oh, yes, chocolate,” Gerda sighs. “That would do it. Have you tried Milka?”

I am lucky there is someone else here from my unit…. And that 3rd Rock can still be seen on dvd. My children gifted me with seasons 1-4 for Christmas. I laugh and laugh watching it, the laughter of truth and understanding. The laughter of, when is my mission over, when do I get to go home?

Meantime, this planet is rich in pleasure. It wasn’t just chocolate that lured me here. There are also hugs from my children, swimming in a warm sea, lying in the sun, stretching into trikonasana, love-making, beautiful clothes, the scent of lilacs and white flowers in perfumes like DelRae’s Debut or Yosh’s White Flower, an old ripe amarone or brunello di montelcino (I’m partial to the 1997’s), sliding between clean, crisp sheets at night, Krishna Das rocking out to Hare Krishna, or the Dixie Chicks wrenching my heart with Landslide, walking through the Vatican Pinacoteca….

It’s worth it, even with all the accepted, institutionalized insanity, even with all the suffering and loss that come with this bipedal flesh bag with opposable thumbs and uncontrollable emotions. This mission is valuable in and of itself.

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On Transparency

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Of late I’ve been thinking about karmic entanglement. Maybe it’s because 2008 is drawing to a close; maybe it’s because Ketu, the moon’s south node & the keeper of the book of the past, is transiting the ruler of my chart. The past, and my past actions, are much in my consciousness.

I think it comes down to mutual forgiveness. Meaning, forgive the other person, and forgive yourself. Send forgiveness to neutralize the acid of interaction that’s fraught with hurt, longing, anger, pain, or even with the alkalinity of love and kindness. Peaceful forgiveness, so that the interaction returns to a clear state without the varnish of meaning, without the binding of a bond, any bond. Transparency. Liberation.

As a believer in reincarnation, I have a sense of the occlusive stickiness of the wheel of birth and rebirth, and how action and reaction, cause and effect, desire and fulfillment play out, over and over again. I wish to stop riding this wheel like a caged rodent. I think a lot about how to get off the ride. It’s also scary. What will happen to my precious individuality when I merge with all that is?

But the first step is to release. May all conscious beings be released from their suffering.

The Prom
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The Prom

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Last night my step-daughter and oldest daughter went to their prom.
There were the usual concerns in the breathless anticipatory hours: dress, shoes, hair, make-up. The day before, my daughter decided her original dress revealed too much, and texted me to ask if she could exchange it. Text is the medium of communication of choice these days, I’ve found, and become adept at it myself, for that reason.
“Course,” I texted back. “B comfortable n happy!”
So she found another one, at a different store: the perfect pink concoction. And last night a bunch of parents were invited to a pre-prom soiree hosted graciously by the parents of a young woman in a delicious gold-print gown.
Present was a group of about 12 kids, young adults, who stood with splendid, nervous grace while an assemblage of parents snapped thousands of pictures. With my usual thought to backups and redundant systems, I brought two cameras, in case a battery died. (One did!) We parents were in a poignant, jovial mood and joked with the kids about the Hollywood red carpet.
It wasn’t just my daughter’s sudden and shocking maturity that caused a lump in my throat. These are great kids, some of whom I’ve known since they were 4 years old. I remember one young man as a skinny little boy in leggings. Another young woman climbed the monkey bars in the park while her mother read the newspaper and I chased my oldest daughter, who was 6. Now they are all going to college in two months. They stood before us in their finery, which made them look even older than 17 and 18. Where did the time go?
And how does it redefine parents when their children leave?