Her eyes are haunting me tonight with the soulfulness that made us respect her, the eyes that had my dad and I talking about souls tonight. Sometimes when my dad and I talk we have minutes of long silence where just being on the phone with each other is comforting enough. But there are words of truth from him tonight too about all kinds of things that remind me how much I love my dad.

I can’t believe that she’s gone. I don’t understand that she went in to the vet today with her beautiful, otherwise healthy, strong body, her beautiful fur, her soulful eyes, and that a cold slowly hardening body now lies on the concrete in the garage near the laundry drying rack and the work bench where tools go to collect dust.

I will say that this modern world is strange to me, that keeping people alive on ventilators for 20 years or continuing to resuscitate an elderly person who is ready to pass is the height of our immature avoidance of death in this culture and yet tonight I find myself asking with a mix of desperation and defeat: isn’t there anything we can do to keep her alive for longer? Yes. But, one way or another this dog is dying in the next 3 months and in this situation it would not be uncalled for to put her down today. Put her down? It seems so awful, how could we choose to let her go? How could we choose to put something in her body that would make her precious little heart stop beating? How? How could we not go to the ends of the earth to make her just live? Our beautiful sweet one…. here I sit mired in the muck of my often contradictory and illogical humanness. Yes death comes, but does it have to come tonight for her? Please say no…

Somewhere in me I think I understand this… but for now I’m confounded and aching in my heart again with loss and denial.

Princess how is it we’ll never cuddle again… and that I’ll never see your back legs flying over the front fence escaping into the freedom of the neighborhood when someone left the front door open a little too long, that I’ll never catch one of your aloof glances before you saunter off upstairs to dream of killing rodents?

And where did you go?

Under the pepper tree next to where Rudy’s mound of earth has been slowly becoming indiscernible. This losing that I’ve been doing, all this loss, these deaths-with each death this year, I find the mundane becoming more precious, all of what fills our lives when we aren’t busy thinking about big stuff. The mistakes, the idiosyncrasies, the habits-as each occur to me I see in a moment-

all of what we think is so important, all of what we spend so much time thinking about and working for, it all means nothing and yet it all means everything because it’s all expression of our humanness as we play with these physical bodies which is what we’re here to do…such insignificant things become these love notes from life, these reminders that it’s all in our heads, it’s all just a movie that we’re getting to play in, and I remember when these shoes were my favorite shoes, I remember when you were my best friend, I remember when I thought I would do that for a living, I remember when I thought I was this person, I remember when we drove under the moonlight not talking and just listening to it all, I remember when you were a puppy, I remember when you hid under the deck because the fourth of July fireworks were loud and you got scared, I remember when I last saw you, I remember saying goodbye to you before I left because I love you, so so much. I’ll remember these tears and I’ll remember the chapter in our lives that was filled with you. Every thing great and small is reduced to a pinprick of light and everything we know is there, always and never, nothing and everything, it matters and it doesn’t, and at the end of it all in the great mystery I come to rest…finally… in love again. My aching, passionate and beautiful home.

My chest feels heavy and I’m tired. I want to be alone and I want to collapse in a loved ones arms and sleep for 14 hours. I’m not hungry.

Death is happening all of the time and every time you see anyone or anything it may be the last. So be courageous, be loving, be fierce, be direct, be ruthless and for the love of god enjoy it. Enjoy the soulful eyes, enjoy the nuzzles, enjoy the bad behavior, enjoy your life, and say so. Say it to people. Let everyone and everything know what you feel when you feel it and never let an opportunity to love someone or something well go by.

There is motion in me right now, uncertain and alive, it’s new eyes seeing, new body sensing, new heart beholding… Some something ness, an enrapturing sensuality that makes every texture reason enough to smile, to fall in love. I feel an inner beat, moving slowly, confidently… a sweet tenderness that feels strong. Looking out the window into the daylight… I notice that the yard I grew up in is a completely different place now, it’s grown in to itself; it’s become something new. I see myself reflected there too, growing into myself, ripening, filling in, finding my own meandering way, seeing the way time has grown me. Something in this culture wants us to be young forever, these shallow love stories that end at the moment when in reality it all begins between people, when it all begins with ourselves.

I thought I was one kind of flower for most of my life, even after waking up I was living a story that was half other peoples, and now I see that I am another kind of flower and I’ve always been living my own story. All these other stories have been falling away like petals for years-I might have even thought for awhile that I knew who I was. Yet the last months have steadily, with miraculous support and love from everything in my life, eased me through shedding of what seems like the inner petals I didn’t know were left to be shed. Whatever is shedding has been near to my heart for a long time because somehow I’ve never been so raw, so vulnerable, and so strong, at the same time.

I step in closer- with the bewilderment that goes along with never having could have planned this- circling in closer to what I love most in the world, what is closest to me, to the source of love and all that moves through me in this life. There must be some precious truth here to have brought me so gently, so softly, so lovingly to the truest me I’ve been. It’s so simple, beautiful and precious to me; I feel I’ve found these pearls of self and the sacred gift of knowing how to hold them. It doesn’t make sense, I feel I’ve been gifted myself. Somehow because I claimed my wholeness I’ve been eased deeper into that wholeness to see what perhaps I wouldn’t have known how to take care of or accept before. So involved in independence perhaps I couldn’t have seen the reality of interdependence, so identified with strength perhaps I couldn’t see the beauty and truth in vulnerability and emotion…

Is there any gift greater than circling closer to your true self? I feel the quiet of being ultimately humbled- beyond what can be held out in gestures of words. I know this revelation goes on, in each moment for my whole life, there is more to see than I know, discovering creation inside of my own heart…

It was such ecstasy when my heart first opened, but now…. now now now there is something so secretly sweet to life. It just keeps… unfolding, deepening, and opening. It’s not ostentatious, it needs no affirmation, no poetry, no additional sparkle- just watching my mother tear up during a movie, my brother feel his disappointment at not getting a job, my friend spend time with her two-year old daughter preparing for their first flight together, a past lover with his new love- these gems, these humanness-es, all this beauty, there’s infinitely more of it than I can say with all these silly words-all this love I feel needs no conversation. It is finally so whole. Speechless in the waves rolling.

Listen to the Feist version of Islands in the Stream, it is beautiful…

Baby when I met you there was peace unknown
I set out to get you with a fine tooth comb
I was soft inside there was somethin’ going on
You do something to me that I can’t explain
Hold me closer and I feel no pain
Every beat of my heart
We got somethin’ goin on
Tender love is blind
It requires a dedication
All this love we feel
Needs no conversation
We ride it together, ah-ah
Makin’ love with each other, ah-ah

Islands in the stream
That is what we are
No one in between
How can we be wrong?
Sail away with me to another world
And we rely on each other, ah-ah
From one lover to another, ah-ah

I can’t live without you
if the love was gone
Everything is nothin’
if you got no one
And you walk in the night
slowly losing sight of the real thing

That wont happen to us
and we got no doubt
Too deep in love and
we got no way out
and the message is clear
This could be the year
for the real thing

No more will you cry
Baby I will hurt you never
We start and end as one
in love forever
We can ride it together, ah-ah
Makin’ love with each other, ah-ah

Islands in the stream
That is what we are
No one in between
How can we be wrong?
Sail away with me to another world
And we rely on each other, ah-ah
From one lover to another, ah-ah
Sail away
Oh come sail away with me, with me

I actually sent this text message yesterday. It was fun. Ridiculous? Yes. Dramatic? Yes. Accurate representation of how I was feeling? Absolutely. And even as I was rapt in the powerful drama of how I felt I was simultaneously watching with amusement at how silly the whole scene was.

I awoke from a dream that morning in which a good friend had died suddenly and unexpectedly. The experience of losing him so suddenly had me truly unsettled and even though I had tons to do, I kept crumpling into tears in random parts of my room, unable to get much done or think clearly. My housemates reminded me lovingly and with complete sympathy that I was on my period and that they had been that way a week earlier, which made it more funny, but not any more productive.

I threw clothes from the closet into my suitcase in some senseless, order-less, fit of anxious panic. “I have to pack!” I thought to myself… “But I don’t know what I’m going to feel like wearing in a day or a week; I barely even know what I want to wear right now. What if I get down there and I don’t have enough black… or yellow, or if I don’t bring the dress I’ll really feel like wearing for Christmas? This is important! I don’t even have the energy to roll my clothes or do this properly, what is wrong with me?!” I shed a few tears of despair… (back of hand to the forehead, sighs of exhaustion at the mere thought of it all…)

At some point on the way to the airport I realize I’ve brought no shoes. I have fuzzy boots on, and a duffle with high heels, climbing shoes and running shoes. I am prepared to sleep, go out for a drink, and exercise. That’s apparently all I’m doing this Christmas.

Finally I’m on the plane; it’s a beautiful day above the clouds, and I have a row to myself. As I listen to the Rolling Stones, eat chocolate and drink free scotch courtesy of Southwest Airlines I realize that everything is just effing great right now. Hey everybody, drinks on me! I got coupons that are about to expire! The plane gets a little more into the holiday spirit.

The sun is shining on the ocean, the clouds cast dark globular shadows on the glimmering plane of salty brine.

For lack of a better word I was feeling homely when I left the house, but as I thought about and appreciated all the different parts of myself, even the crazy, melodramatic version that I played with today, I felt beautiful, alive, unique and blessed. Here above the ocean in the sunshine I’m writing, I’m going home, my life is yielding me incredible lessons, beautiful new depth and intimacy with friends. And the kind and handsome airline steward just asked for my phone number. Life is crazy! I love it…

It strikes me that I have nothing to worry about. The insanity weaves itself deeper and more intricately. The time between  experiences of darkness and the joyous elation and ecstasy of flirting with destiny grows shorter and shorter as I become more fluid and fluent in riding the wave of my changeable self without judgment. The darkness isn’t as threatening and I have no reason to attach as much to the elation either, there is actually a pleasure in both. I’m seeing in an even more radical way how each aspect of my life, each nuance of emotion, each thought, and each sensation is wholly a part of the flow of life that is manifesting me. I’m steeped in elation and ecstasy with playing at all of it, at everything. With who I am, with what I do, with love, with movement, with life.

Alan Watts says “You are something the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.” As far as what I call self (this local place of embodied experience) can see,  the universe is having fun playing with embodiment of the feminine today. With what felt like a wild range of experience, that I was both in and witness to, I saw the last shred of notion that emotion and experience are correlated to logic and/or reason playfully deconstructed and laid bare as fallacy. I feel as though I’m discovering a new world through a doorway of a different kind of integrity, an integrity to express everything as it arises without judgment. I feel excited and in love.

When Laurens van der Post one night

In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen

He couldn’t hear the stars

Singing, they didn’t believe him. They looked at him,

Half-smiling. They examined his face

To see whether he was joking

Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men

Who plant nothing, who have almost

Nothing to hunt, who live

On almost nothing, and with no one

But themselves, led him away

From the crackling thorn-scrub fire

And stood with him under the night sky

And listened. One of them whispered,

Do you not hear them now?

And van der Post listened, not wanting

To disbelieve, but had to answer,

No. They walked him slowly

Like a sick man to the small dim

Circle of firelight and told him

They were terribly sorry,

And he felt even sorrier

For himself and blamed his ancestors

For their strange loss of hearing,

Which was his loss now. On some clear nights

When nearby houses have turned off their visions,

When the traffic dwindles, when through streets

Are between sirens and the jets overhead

Are between crossings, when the wind

Is hanging fire in the fir trees,

And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove

Between calls is regarding his own darkness,

I look at the stars again as I first did

To school myself in the names of constellations

And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,

I can still hear what I thought

At the edge of silence where the inside jokes

Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,

The C above high C of my inner ear, myself

Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:

My fair share of the music of the spheres

And clusters of ripening stars,

Of the songs from the throats of the old gods

Still tending even tone-deaf creatures

Through their exiles in the desert.

–David Wagoner

This was written on the final night of my 3-day vision quest solo. The three days are spent alone in the desert with water and some personal belongings. On the final night we’re advised to stay awake all night, and then we return to base camp on the fourth morning. When we return we’re asked to consider a give away, a song, a poem, a lesson, something that we can offer to our people. This is that give away.

When time travel is created please send:

1.  A furry fox cape/hat thing for use at costume parties
2. Enough money for me to learn how to make a bow and arrows, go to private David Deida seminars, take sexual qigong classes, have a membership at the athletic playground so I can take handstand classes, singing lessons, guitar lessons, Arabic lessons, buy land, solve the world’s problems, and …?
3.  A hovercraft so I may command the respect of middle school boys and science nerds everywhere and create an evil army, albeit a wimpy one, that is loyal and highly susceptible to coercion
4. A lifetime supply of fake mustaches (see previous justification)
5. Whatever other magical tools that you know I’m gonna need, cuz the future is gonna be rough!

Other than science, quantum physics, hovercrafts, and the way things are going to go down when the shit hits the fan (dude, man!) I don’t think too much about the future. But, today, I thought about it.

In the future my grandparents will die. We all, including my three remaining grandparents, die- but theses losses seem to loom with a threat of reality that I cannot forget or put off. Thinking about them gone I feel devastation, and combative as well as though I could negotiate them back to life, or to win the right for them to live forever. This would make only my grandmother Ginny very happy, Melba would be pretty pissed were she “granted” the right to live forever. I’m not sure how grandpa Bill would feel, he really enjoys WWII documentaries, and with his memory as it is he actually could enjoy watching them forever.

I see the truth of them living their long lives written in their wrinkles and in their eyes. The future without them is close. Did I know them as well as I could have? Did they feel fulfilled in their lives? Did they know how much I loved them? Did I love them well? When I think of my grandparents I have thoughts that play like memories. Though we never lived these moments, in my longed for past present I’m around this age sitting for a moment on grandma’s lap in the kitchen, having her saucily, and laughingly, chastise my boyfriend Eric. There are neighbors coming in and out talking about their minor dramas and sharing morsels of food. Friends are family and family is friends. We share tables and bread and land and streets and walks and stars and simple life. In this fake world of my memory my people are together one seamless tapestry that inhales with birth, exhales with death, and loves it all with fiery devotion.

I want this place to be real for my beloveds, for my glorious, glorious future ancestors. I want them to age all the way into the next world with their joy, with their fire and passion, with their human dignity- so that elder homes are as far away from possible as they actually are from acceptable. But that isn’t the future or the past, that’s my longed for future past.

The future is a place where I hope certain things have happened. In the future I will be running around with my best friend/lover making plans, traveling, scheming, sharing, making love, and laughing to the point of it being a form of exercise. In the future I will be living on the land. In the future our community is weaving itself together in incredible, brilliant, and profound ways. We are incorporating wisdom, technology, poetry, art, justice, and the sacred into a real tangible place. We are continuing to be awesome and are getting better all the time at manifesting that awesomeness through everything that we do. There are still problems in the future. The future does not cease to be the realm of imperfection, ugliness and pain. But I think in the future we’ve been getting better at doing those things beautifully too.

In the future I will be pregnant, with belly smooth, taught and round, and skin emanating vitality, warmth, and ecstasy. I will be experiencing inside of the heart of my body the slow unfolding of a new form of life, an actual creature that hasn’t yet been here on this earth. I get to feel that process happen inside of my own body, as though it were my own process, even though it will unfold in it’s own way, in it’s own time, and according to it’s own magical truth. I will get to experience knowing that other creature so sweetly and intimately that I may lose myself for moments in it. I will also get to know myself in a way I could never imagine now, but in the future I will live it into my bones and my body heart.

In the future I have no idea what I’ll be doing, except that it has to do with loving people, and building community. That is what’s most important to me. Looking into the future I see that what moves me are change, the revelation of truth, the ebbs and flows of relationships, community patterns, and some kind of progress. I care about progress. I want to contribute to it, I want to play my part. I care about a deeper more profound flow of human love, and human brilliance, and human wisdom. I am so excited to see the things we’ll create and the lives we’ll live. Sometimes I think I want to live forever because I want to see how the story ends. Then I wonder if I would understand it, like how an older person just doesn’t understand the music these days.

There are questions to ask of a future self: Are you giving your greatest gifts? If you’re not, are you seeking to dismantle the obstacles that prevent you from giving your greatest gifts? But these questions are actually much the same as I have for myself now.

Does time go in a circle or a line, a spiral, or a chaotic Jackson Pollack spray? Is this message going forward in time, or backward in time?

Were I writing to a younger self I might have lots of advice, wisdom to share or experiences to avoid because the trauma I experienced maybe seems to outweigh the learning. But in reality, as we’ve learned through such insightful films as “Back to the Future” 1, 2 and 3 and the Terminator, changing anything in the past threatens the fabric of existence in the future. Likewise I imagine that a future self won’t need advice from me because I’ll have already incorporated it. So what else is there to say to a past or future self other than I love you?

P.S. The future is a place I’m also very curious about. I have lots of questions. What shifts will take place in the major systems we rely on? What will the effects of global warming be like? Will future trends confirm my suspicions that the right sequence of large and yet manageable natural disasters will have compounding negative impacts on financial systems leading to crashing markets, political and social instability, fast spreading epidemics of primarily preventable waterborne illnesses, and a lurching (hopefully nonviolent) awkward return to more basic, if still value-based (rather than gift), local economies? If that does happen, could that return to local economies and self-reliance actually facilitate widespread social transformation? How will people choose to act? Will alternative models already in place actually ease transitions? Will people be resistant to a return to the dysfunctional systems of the past? How many will awake? How many will angrily fight to return to sleep?

While here we’re asked to spend some time alone with the oak covered hills, in the fall leaves, the green grasses, the irises and dried brush. We’ve gone out during rain, sun, tempestuous winds, and a calm so still I was frozen in peaceful ecstasy in the elbow of an oak for hours. I slept high up in that tree in the afternoon summer sun and I wrote and sung a song that no one else heard, I crunched awkwardly over hillsides without paths and moved like light through the trees- barely touching the ground. This land has been the perfect metaphor and stage for me in all my changing needs and desires, and it has always guided me effortlessly to the wisdom I’ve needed.

The 2nd reason I love these days is that each time I return to a small group of people with whom I have only shared deeply intimate conversations. Conversations about things I don’t talk about with other people, the gentle vulnerable parts of me, my unworked through pains and traumas, startling discoveries of personal truth, and the unveiling of deeper and deeper layers. It’s also a place where I have experienced, without inhibition or doubt, my power, my strength, and the beautiful flow of love from my core. These people know me perhaps better than anyone in my life, and love me truly, as I do them, for how deeply we’ve let each other in.

While this circle has seen me both high and low, and my life tends to be pretty awesome I was recently made aware (via my writing group) of the bias of my writing, and people’s writing in general. The assertion was that people in general don’t write about happy people or happy things, unless something terrible is going to happen to them or unless they want to make you feel bad about yourself. Sure every story has it’s moments, and many end on a happy note, but not before some poor sod has been dragged through the existential muck. I realized that this more or less holds true for me as well. I write about my broken open moments, and not anywhere near as frequently about those moments of perfect bliss. Thus our assignment for this week was to try to write about happy people, or a happy person, with nothing going wrong.

But I don’t write fiction… so here’s my day today

I set out from the house knowing that I was headed away from where the others were headed. I wanted to get to the sun, and the glorious hillsides that would be baking in the advanced afternoon. The path emerged as though it was being created in that moment for exactly the desire I needed fulfilled. I walked up through the yellow dry grass, vaguely concerned about ticks, though not enough to really monitor my gait or my pants. The path seemed to head right up towards a barbed wire fence, which seemed strange because the land on both sides belongs to Mike and also obviously because it was my path, and I didn’t really feel like climbing over a barbed wire fence so why would it be there? Anyway, I still felt that this was where I was supposed to go so I stuck with it and at the fence the trail turned to the right, went 20 ft, and moved through a section of the fence that had been removed. *Maybe* this trail was here before I had the idea….

The feeling of slick Oak leaves and Madrone bark sliding and crunching beneath my feet and the warmth of the air evoked all the yummy senses of fall experiences to come: family dinners, pagan ritual carving of faces into pumpkins, inside activities with friends, lying in bed listening to the sound of rain, playful cuddling and oversleeping with lovers, and the drinking in of the fragile fall sunlight post the bustle of summer. The fall sun can make a whole day feel like afternoon, a slowed pace and an inexplicable desire to find a porch to occupy.

I turned a switchback and looked over my shoulder to catch some sun on my face and saw only glitter in the air. Between me, the sun, and the back-lit oaks the air thickened and breathed, squirmed and swam with golden threads floating in and out of visibility. I stood transfixed while the flaxen fibers filled everything with some sort of quiet magic, a still and earnest seeming clarity about the universe at a level below, beyond or without words. Some sense, some humble, pure, quiet, unostentatious truth.

The air was so still I had no idea why and how the threads moved that way, but they did.

Anyway- I continued walking on the path, though part of me wanted to head up the hill in the direction of the sun, up under the limbs of some previously unappreciated oak tree that’s sat anonymous in this forest since it was an acorn. Go sit and admire the crook of its limbs, the arc of its canopy. But my gut had me on the path so I stuck to it…

It was a very minor conflict, but my job on these walks is to listen to myself and move following what I hear and feel so I was paying attention to this minor inner conflict between the sun over there and this path right here that was taking me to the other side of the ridge. I became aware that walking with this tension made my core muscles feel stronger and it struck me that strength does not develop by simply willfully toughing out hardships or making some hard decision, but rather the willingness to keep putting one foot in front of the other even when the path is uncertain, doubtful or scary. I don’t think this is any great wisdom, or any new wisdom at least, but at that moment it filled me with a sense appreciation for myself because this has been one of the lessons I’ve been choosing to learn recently. If a decision isn’t obvious, instead of forcing it I’m sitting in the uncertainty and the unknowing. I’m walking along the path asking the question, what is this new place? Just being in it without making it into something old and familiar.

Each step on the path I was feeling this tension, this desire on one hand to be on the other side in the sun and the greater sense that I needed to stick with my path and some even deeper knowing that this path was eventually going to lead me to everything that I wanted. Walking with the tension felt good to my body and a tenderness began to flow in me.

So here goes the part about the happy person with nothing bad happening to them, this is my happy ending today.

You know at least part of the end: the part where I continue walking and eventually the path leads me up and over the ridge into the most beautiful glorious sunlight I’ve ever seen and a golden field of white gold grass. From atop the ridge the green hills below are rolling off into the haze. As I walked out into the sun I literally shed a tear and felt my throat constrict with joy for how beautiful it was. In everything was clarity, warmth, and beauty, an extravagant beauty, the most sincerely beautiful view of hills and forests a person could want. As I walked into the sunlight I felt beautiful myself, filled with light, and one of the deepest and most powerful loves for myself I’ve ever felt. It was like everything in my being clicked and I just felt like in each step I was making love to myself, this moment, this place and this life. I strolled to the edge feeling sensuality emanating from my core as the wind moved my hair and the sun sank into my skin. I lay on my jacket on the ground with a piece of summer-dried grass in my mouth and thought to my self “I love myself and I think that I am awesome.”

I love my body right now, I love how I feel in my body, I love being touched and I love feeling such love for myself that I don’t need anyone to touch me right now to make me feel sexy and delicious. I love how my mind and my heart work together, I love what I’m doing with my life, I love my weaknesses and vulnerabilities, I love the people I’ve chosen to surround myself with. I love to laugh, and I love my sense of humor. I love how witty I am, damn I’m funny! I love how good I am at most of what I try to do, and I love how spectacularly I can fail with enjoyment. I love that I can forgive the people who have been a part of the moments that have hurt the most in my life. I love that the power of my yearning for love is pervading more and more of my life. I love that my devotion to love, for myself, my partners and others is the most important thing in my life. More important than any job or success will ever be. I love how letting go into that love has been opening me. I love how I can cry in front of strangers. I love my ability to change myself. I love my ability to commit to my dreams and goals and follow my own intuition about how to achieve them. I love that I can reassess and let go. I love that I want to love people so fiercely. I love that I’m willing to question my own thoughts, perceptions, and beliefs. I love that I’m committed to living true to who I am, and getting better at knowing what that means in every moment. I love that I’m choosing to put myself in unfamiliar situations and I love that I’m choosing to develop a love that is strong without need for approval, security or safety. I love that I can love myself in the face of all the mistakes I’ve made. I love that I can release other people with love. I love my spirit. I love that I’m trying to build a society that is large enough to contain all of what we truly are, all that greatness and all that terribleness, with complete love. I love myself so much, and I think that I am *freaking* awesome. I love that it feels more daring to say all of this out loud than it does to fess up to my deepest fears, I love that I’m doing it anyway, and I love that it feels juicy, joyful, sweet, devious, and deeply, deeply satisfying.

Classical music can, for me, have the precious quality of stirring my mind to interest and focused curiosity while my body is soothed into the peace of a moment. Even with work tomorrow. Even with demanding clients. Even with more to do and the magic it will take to weave it all into something for others. Even with this- I am here expanding into some quiet hours of myself and remembering again- how delicious the sinking into stillness after movement. I had a massage today and my skin feels soft, my body feels lithe and relaxed. Amidst what feels like a lot of pushing and pulling from work and friends I’ve found a few hours of blissful retreat to swim in my own skin and be infatuated with this…this…this sensual pleasure of surrender to the choice my body made for peace tonight. Peace. Peace. Peace. “Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself. A white flower grows in the quietness. Let your tongue become that flower.” Jelaluddin Rumi

Oh quiet night, my love, make love to me like the silence of time and the distances of my life.

The narrative you convince yourself is of course your own and reflects the story you are trying to tell yourself. Perhaps it includes you as a victim or someone that nobody likes. Perhaps it includes the other person as not caring at all about you and being a jerk. The truth is that while we can learn about people from how they deal with conflict and change, we often add in our own assumptions and logic to fill out the story instead of accepting the fact that because we aren’t in as much contact or aren’t sharing as intimately with this other person that there is actually a lot we don’t know and won’t be able to understand. Furthermore, because of our vulnerability we need to be careful of making up stories, because this doesn’t help us see or feel clearly. I think what has worked best for is to continue to dismantle those stories as they form and remind myself of the things that I don’t know. Then contiue by bringing my focus back to what matters, which is what am I actually feeling and what do I have to learn and take care of for myself. What is real. What is real. What is real. What do I have control over. What can I change. What can I learn. What can I do to love myself and take care of myself while I’m feeling so strongly the absence of another’s care.

The process of analyzing and creating storylines to fill in the gaps of knowledge has never led anyone to any better understanding of what actually happened. Hearts aren’t rational and relationships rarely follow logical trajectories. Why does one person get over something quickly and the other take a long time? It’s better not to concern yourself with why because You’ll never truly know the truth of another person, even if you do end up spending the rest of your life with them.

In my ideal world when people break up they would continue to meet up and help each other process and learn from what happened. Both would be open to it and also want the other person to feel loved and supported through the grieving process of allowing a relationship to pass out of one’s life. But often in this actual world that we live in, people are incapable of such presence, openness, humility, vulnerability, and courage. It’s easier to shut it off and either repress the uncomfortable emotions or blame the other person.

It’s hard for me to imagine going through something like this without a spiritual perspective. I imagine it would feel quite bleak and lonely. That was one of the ways that she described how she felt: alone. When I was younger and on fire with interest in the opposite sex I experienced a lot of painful rejection. I remember how much relief I felt when I finally allowed myself to listen to Billy Holiday and feel the pain and discomfort rather than trying to avoid, ignore, or deny it. Listening to those songs about heartbreak and abandonment was difficult for me until I developed the emotional depth and maturity to hold that pain and discomfort, but as that happened what I found was the comfort of the shared experience and the release of my own judgment around having the experience of rejection and hurt feelings. From that eventually the seeds of recognizing our oneness were planted. After I made space for myself to actually feel what my life was bringing me I was able to step beyond that to realizing that Billy and I shared some experiences, and probably a lot of other people had as well. The commonness of our human experience has been a great comfort to me. In that pain is the ecstasy of life, in each person’s eyes the reflection of our own self and what we share.

I think one of my first spiritual experiences was listening to Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah. If you haven’t heard it, do yourself a favor and listen to it now. Leonard Cohen wrote the song originally (of course, didn’t he write everything? Him and Bob Dylan…) and there is a section of the lyrics towards the end that goes like this:

It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

*******

The Hallelujah of this song is not about celebration. What I think he’s saying is that Hallelujah means something when you can say it from your most broken and vulnerable place. If through your tears, your mistakes, your foibles, and all that didn’t go the way you would’ve liked, if you can muster a “cold” and “broken” Hallelujah, that is a real Hallelujah. That is a praise that has some weight and depth to it. That is a profound understanding of the divine. It’s easy to say Hallelujah when everything is amazing, but can you find yourself in the profane, in the disaster? Can you know that you stand on the same sacred ground in your moment of sacred terror as you do when you think you’ve been blessed? This has been an incredible lesson for me, and one that has moved me through many hardships. If you can say Hallelujah then, it’s like truly understanding that this too shall pass. And this too shall pass. And this too shall pass. And in every moment I can say with my full heart and body Hallelujah. Even when Amy died, even when Julie died. The best thing that I can offer is not that this is “good” or “bad,” holy or unholy, but merely my sad and pained hallelujah. My recognition of spirit, and thus oneness, and thus the existence of all in this moment, all good bad and unholy. It’s all in that one word said in such a moment.

In the second to last stanza he says “it doesn’t matter what you heard, The holy or the broken Hallelujah” because “there’s a blaze of light in every word.” Part of what I love about this is that he’s taking on the issue of our limited human perspective and saying “It doesn’t matter what you heard.” It doesn’t matter what you think of me. It doesn’t matter if in your eyes I wasn’t doing something right. And the word Hallelujah is just a metaphor for all of human doings and sayings. You experience my way of being in this world as profane. The opinions we have on that don’t matter ultimately, because in the eyes of god there is a blaze of light in every word. Every word. Every breath. Every atom. Every tree. Every thing. Every terrible event. A blaze of light. A hallelujah. Sacredness. It is all sacred, all of it. So remember that this person not loving you back, or not understanding you, or thinking there’s something wrong with you, doesn’t touch the blaze of light and life in your words. There’s a blaze of light in it all, in the holy and the broken Hallelujah. That is a grace that is always available to us, always. In your darkest moment say hallelujah and don’t worry if it comes out holy or broken.