I get so tired sometimes that I just want to step in front of a bus. I try so hard to pull my life together, be positive, move ahead and thrive and everybody around me seems to be trying to pull me back down to that place of constant struggle, pain, despair and hopelessness. And then I really feel that way myself.

Life is just so hard and painful and shitty. Why do I keep trying to make it anything else?

Then I get impatient. I hear new age philosophers droning on and on about how we create our own reality, how we are the only ones to blame for any unhappiness in our lives… how we have the responsibility to f’n evolve the species…

Holy smokes: no pressure there huh?

First of all, life does not happen in a vacuum. The idea that we create our own reality is only valid in so far as our choices reflect the current state of affairs in out lives. For example, if I were to go ahead and, say, get liposuction with my divorce settlement (which I have considered as my genes are asserting themselves way too much for my liking) instead of, say, spending my divorce settlement on a law education… or a down payment on a mortgage, well life would be different in each scenario.

Even the latter two choices there, clearly both good choices would send my life on to two very different trajectories. And the liposuction? Well- I guess I can’t even seriously go there *sigh*

So there you have it- the extent to which we create our own reality… significant mind you, but not “otherworldly”

And I will concede, that we do tend to attract a certain kind of person with our own personality…. Sometimes… maybe. For example my roommate tells me as we commiserate about the sad shortage men out there,  she tells me… strong women attract weak men. True? I don’t know. God knows, maybe. Maybe.

But the bottom line is that we have zero control over other people… zero control over whether or not our landlord decides to sell the house we are living in-  zero control over whether or not  someone we love has bipolar disorder and is doomed to a life of intense pain and suffering … no control over the decision a lover makes to leave us… or stay with us…. no control over whether or not we just happen to be standing in the line of fire when a liquor store is robbed and end up in a wheel chair….

Sure… in a few of the afore mentioned examples a person could assert themselves… say their piece, maybe even try to force a measure of control over the other person involved… but inevitably we have to let go.

What we do with that determines where we are and who we are. It is my opinion that a belief system that blames the believer for the suffering around them is counter productive to a well lived and healthy life.

This new age way of thinking that we can control the levels of pain in our lives… or who is in our lives… or the path of a bullet in relation to where we are standing … or that we are responsible for the trajectory of evolution… ouch… could there possibly be any more weight to carry? It’s regurgitated Christian victim blaming. God punishes you because you have too little faith, or too much ego take your f’n pick.

Good grief. When will we learn our relative place in the universe? How can it not be enough to look up at the winter sky and observe the vast galaxy, the unending universe of uncountable galaxies and not know that we are dust?

And there is such beautiful peace in that.

I know that that I stand on one of those swirling sparkling heavenly bodies and that I am as much a part of the universe as any of those heavenly infernos whose light pierces through the frozen,  dark expanse. And just like them, someday my flame will die.

But I am here, now. And I burn.

When I think about this I don’t feel hopeless anymore. And I can deal with the despair. And I can muster compassion for the people around me who sabotage their own lives and appear to want to pull me down with them…

But only when I have the humility to recognize my own limitations and stop trying to control the world, stop assuming responsibility for the pain around me and stop trying to fix everything for everyone who is close to me and in pain (and they are all in pain) and just focus on things like: liposuction or law school….

Then it’s a no-brainer.

Then I thrive and I can hear the children laughing again.

I have a wild creature sitting on my shoulder right now. She is green and pink and purple and she has wings. She could leave anytime she wanted to. But this morning she came to me and tucked her tiny head under my chin and allowed me to cover her body with my hand as she nestled close to my neck.

My little bird is a wild animal. Yes, she was hatched in captivity, but as prey animals that have only been breed in captivity for the past 30 years or so, one could hardly call parrots domesticated. I read somewhere once that it takes about 4000 years to really domesticate a species. Dogs and cats co-evolved with us.

George is a parrot and she is wild and….  she is flighted.

And yet she chooses to come to me, she gently and affectionately tweaks my nose with her beak,  or preens the peach fuzz on my ear, or nudges me with her beak and looks for a kiss.

When she allows me to take hold of her head and rub it in between my fingers, or when she voluntarily snuggles under my chin and rest s under my hand, I am humbled and in awe that I have earned the trust of this tiny, vulnerable wild animal. She could take flight any time she wanted to but she chooses to be with me.

It is one of the greatest honors I have ever experienced.

I wrote this a while ago, while reflecting on the end of my 22 year marriage.

I have modeled it after a book where the author would have a page of poetry then an essay discussing, or touching on the theme of the poem from the previous page:  

In the dark, I wait.

The clothes drop to the floor,

And I wait.

We say good night.

I wait quietly.

Then it happens.

Again.

He turns

The silence seems to emanate from his back

A wall between us.

Suddenly,

without warning, a new happening.

A hundred butterflies shed their cocoons.

My chest is filled with the transformation.

Bursting from my heart, they carry my prayer

Into the universe.

I am done waiting.

                                     ********************************************************

“In conclusion, I’m done.”

My friend giggles as I tell him how I plan to end my paper for my “Feminism and Judaism” class. Of course, I don’t really end it that way, but in a way, I do. I am done. I have had it. I have struggled with the agony of women, spirituality and a patriarchal tradition until my head swims.

Time to move on.

Stan’s giggle turns into a chuckle and then a belly laugh. He is a manager and he says most of the time his job is comprised of going around telling people when they are done. He says to them, “yep, this looks good, you’re done- move on.”

He admires this quality in me. I don’t quit; I just know when I am finished. The job is completed and I have done my very best. Any more would be overkill (as if it isn’t already). And when I am done, I am really done.

 I let it go.

I do not worry about the grade. I am satisfied with my work, sometimes I love what I have produced. I like it so much I send it by email to my friend so that he can read it.

It is also a wonderful trait to carry over into the studio art world. Knowing when a painting is finished is as important as any other fundamental element like composition or movement. I am less adept at discerning when a painting is finished, but I am catching on quickly. It is no different than a paper, really. One just needs to pay attention to the voice inside, it never trips you up. The trick with painting is pushing the perfectionist, the ego aside so one can hear the voice, so it is not drowned out by the whispering of the old demon, who tells me, more, give more…

So I listen. I push the ego aside and I am learning to be as satisfied with my progress in painting as I am with my academic work. I know when to finish. I can feel it, most of the time it hits me out of nowhere. Other times the entire process is painful, physically painful (like the paper on feminism and Judaism). Those times the finish washes over me like a wave of relief.

But most often I just look down at my paper and think, “oh look, it’s done.” Just like that. All that is left is the wrap up. This is never a problem, it flows and usually it is fun. Often I get dramatic, preachy even, as inevitably my thesis is in disagreement with the professor or the academic genius who wrote the article that I am picking apart like a vulture. 

However, I am not sure this quality- this flip of the switch that tells me something is over- I am not sure it’s always a good thing.

People are not papers.

Relationships are not paintings.

But how can I go back into the dark room once the lights have been turned on and I have seen clearly?

I will not shut the lights and go back into the darkness. I have done my best.

I am done.

I would have to choose. I read through the book trying to decide on only one poem to write about (how to choose?)

                To help me decide I read some of my favorites to my friend Tina.

I read her “The Poet”, by Jane Hirshfield. Hirshfield read this poem for us at her poetry reading. When I heard it I caught my breath a little. I read it several times as I tried to decide which poem to write my paper on.

Then I read it out loud to Tina, and I couldn’t finish.

I tried again and I couldn’t read through the poem with out choking on tears:

The Poet

She is working now. In a room

not unlike this one,

the one where I write, or you read.

Her table is covered with paper.

The light of the lamp would be

tempered by a shade, where the bulb’s

single harshness might dissolve,

but it is not, she has taken it off.

Her poems? I will never know them,

though they are the ones I most need.

Even the alphabet she writes in

I cannot decipher. Her chair-

Let us imagine whether it is leather

or canvas, vinyl or wicker. Let her

have a chair, her shadeless lamp,

the table. Let one or two she loves

be in the next room. Let the door

be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.

Let her have time, and silence,

enough paper to make mistakes.

It’s so powerful. But what is it really that makes me cry?

Is it the woman writing or the woman who is thinking of her and sending her a blessing? Notice in line 12 the poem shifts dramatically (this is where I choke up) it becomes a blessing- powerful and straight from the heart.

Imagine that an unknown person, maybe right now, might be out there, sending a blessing, maybe over my work (or your work). And she knows how important it is and she sends her heart. Is this it?

Or is it the image of the poet? You know she is out there. You know we will never read her poems and yet when Hirshfield conjures her image and blesses her we know the great importance of her work. Whether we read it or not, her poetry is a gift and a celebration and we are all better off because of it.

as a post script: in any case, this poem moves me with great power- every single time I read it.... and  it is a good two years since I first wrote these words about Hirshfield's poem.... I still cannot finish reading it aloud without choking on tears.

There are a few moments in life that really, really blow most other moments right out of the water.

I get to experience one of these moments almost every day coming home from work. 

There is this train conductor on the commuter rail- and you can tell he must have had train sets as a little boy. When the train rolls into Porter Square he leans out the door with this vibrant look on his face and this sing song in his voice he says… “ traaaaaaain to Fitchburg, fiiiiive thirty traaaaaaain to Fiiiitchberrrrrg”  

Or when the T emerges from the underground and pulls into Charles MGH and for a few moments the city glistens in its reflection on the Charles. Or at night- at night when it twinkles.  

Or that time the old man started a conversation with me about the weather and we talked for two stops until he got off at Central. 

Or that time on the horrendously crowed train when I had nowhere to hang on and these two women from LA laughed and said, “hold on to my sleeve- we won’t let you fall!” then we talked all the way to Harvard Square.  

Or the time coming home from the Museum of Science and this smiling German man who was looking for the Symphony stop chatted with me about the virtues of the Boston public transportation (he had flown in from Germany to see one of his students perform)  

My commute into the city takes about 45 minutes every day, and then 45 minutes home each night, most people I know hate the train, figure you are either young and just starting out or broke and in a crummy job if you are riding it… most would rather drive… 

March 21, 2006, Spring

Fathers

there are so many ways to serve…

I went to my friend Kate’s father’s funeral today. Kate’s dad lived a life of service. He was a Pearl Harbor survivor and WWII veteran. He spent the last 20 years picking up day old baked goods from grocery stores and bakeries and filling his car and driving all over the state to homeless shelters delivering the food. Food that would have seen the inside of dumpsters became sustenance for the needy.

I lost my dad when I was 19. He was a WWII veteran too. He saw action in the Mediterranean. And true to form for most men who actually saw the hard reality of war, he never once talked about it. But I heard from my mother that when he was on leave in Italy he would buy shoes for the kids who besieged the US sailors begging. My dad always did have a thing about wearing shoes. It was a huge priority. He once saw a kid bleed to death from a foot injury on the beach on Coney Island and it had a lasting effect on him.

It’s coming up on the second anniversary of my father-in-law’s death. I married young and Dante, my father-in-law, guided me through my young adulthood. I miss him more than I can say. He was a political activist, did voter registration in the south in the 60’s, marched on Washington with MLK, organized migrant farm workers in Ohio and began a college program for prison inmates in the state of Massachusetts, all in his spare time while teaching as a college professor and being a great dad and father-in-law and eventually, an amazing grandfather to my children and to his other grandkids. I realize now how terribly important he was to me. I wish I had been so keenly aware of this before he died. It’s not like me to let something like that get by me. Of course I knew how deeply I felt for him and that our relationship was quite special, but how I relied on him and how he shaped me and influenced my life, these things I greatly underestimated until he was gone and this vacuum appeared.

Before he became a professor (and atheist) Dante was a minister. He never renounced his status as minister for the UCC and he performed our wedding ceremony. This is what he read to us at our wedding- a good choice- from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)

My signs are a rain– proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,

No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,

I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,

I lead no man to a dinner table, library, exchange,

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

My left hand hooking you round the waist,

My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, nor any one else can travel that road for you,

You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,

Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,

Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds dear son and daughter, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,

Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both your burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,

And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,

For after we start we never lie by again.  

From Dante’s eulogy:

True to the words of Whitman’s poem that he read as a promise to us on our wedding day, twenty long years ago; his position was to challenge us, to point to the horizon and tell us to get busy, not with his work, but with our work. And true to the spirit of the poem, he was always there to support and encourage us in any way he could, urging us forward, each on our own road. He understood very well that there are as many different ways to serve in the world, as there are people.

As it happens the only two times I have traveled immediately followed situations that blew my heart wide open. I had an incredible opportunity to go to India last January. Now I know some people travel extensively however, I was born into a working class family and such world wide travel was unheard of… this was the opportunity of a life time. And just 3 months before I left, I lost the love of my life… never in my life had I ever experienced the kind of intellectual, spiritual, emotional and physical connection with another human being… and it ended.

My heart was blown wide open. Going to India opened my heart further. I was in so much incredible pain – leaving a 22 year marriage, losing my lover of a year, venturing out on my own never having supported myself financially in my life- I was terrified- I mean I felt abject terror at what was ahead of me in my life….

And then I went to India.

The first thing that hit me is- don’t tell me it’s a small world- it’s a really, really big world. It took two days to reach our destination- two days on planes and trains. And when we finally got there- well- reality check.  It’s a big world. I am not even sure how to explain the transformation that took place- why or how…. Except that I was transformed.

The cultural immersion, the need to adapt, to expand, to be humble, to be a good guest. How to process being in a developing country for the first time, how to walk past the lines of beggars because you can’t possibly help them all, how to process the starving dirty ragged 3 year old girl at the train station who put her forehead to my friend’s foot begging for food, the funerals with corpses wrapped in red on the shoulders of family members running through winding narrow alleyways to the burning ghats…. the burning ghats, the dancing in the streets during weddings, painted red feet, chai, chai and more chai- absolutely filled with chai by shopkeepers, women clucking their tongues and rearranging our bangles because we put them on wrong, school girls giggling at the funny white lady in the salwar kamis shouting “hello, Madame, hello” reaching out to touch me and squealing with delight when I say “namaste” ….so much hospitality so much good will… so much joy, so much life amidst the pain and suffering….

And then, there is the Ganga…

No two ways about it, I am a changed person and a better person and I am eternally grateful and forever in love with India.

I am a poetry reader, a novice and an amateur to be sure, but a reader just the same.  i once went to a poetry reading by Jane Hirshfield. She recited a 10th century Japanese poem:

Although the wind blows terribly here

The moon also leaks through the roof planks

Of this ruined house.

 
.....it gave me shivers and when she talked about it and told us that the house means the self and the moon means love (or enlightenment, but I prefer love) I knew I had to try to remember it. It’s just the kind of sentiment I like. I love the open- hearted, risk taking element and the confirmation that there is pay off for being willing to risk. If the house is wrapped too tightly- nothing gets in. If the roof leaks, we are vulnerable  wind and rain get in but also, love and light .....

Keep this in mind when reading Changing by Barbara Meyn:

It happens quietly. A maple seed

blown here by a sudden, random wind

sprouts beneath the bedroom wall,

grows before I quite know how it grew,

tops the eaves, seeking afternoon

as well as morning sun, and fills my life.

Leaves unfold like ragged green umbrellas

waiting for an April rain.

I tell myself it’s just another tree

that could have been dug up when it was small

and planted farther from the house.

If I don’t cut it soon, if I keep on

watching as it reaches for the sky,

delighting in it’s gray, sinewy trunk,

the soft touch of leaves when I walk by,

the way it gathers light on winter days

and pours it generously through the glass,

it won’t be long until it moves

my house off the foundation.

The room is full of curious, precious things,

skin of mole, hawk feathers, moth cocoons,

deer’s foot rattle, dry seed pods

of zygadene, racemes of saxifrage.

And now across the walls maple leaves

sign to me in shadows. Though the tree

is not yet in the room, in the dark

I hear it whisper, know it’s coming in.

This isn’t about a real tree, although I suppose it could be.

But in the first section of the poem in line 6 after she describes the tree reaching for the light, reaching for the sun there is a comma. She says, “and fills my life”. When I read that aloud I say those words almost prayerfully in an exhale.

The feeling pours into the center of my chest and simultaneously radiates out of the very same spot. This tree could be a dream or a hope or an idea, even a person.

Some things we allow to creep into our lives while we are not watching or maybe we do watch but we let them grow anyway, too close for comfort. Pretty soon the dream becomes so large that we can no longer deny it. It changes us (thus the title of the poem eh?) We must change or we cut it off at the base.

How many of us are willing to allow a tree to move the foundation of our house?

Only those who can hear the incessant whispering.

Only those who know the tree has already taken root and has grown

- we have let it- and there is no going back,

 the foundation is cracked.

 It is already altered and will never be the same.