I’m learning slowly this week (read: lifetime) about how to love people without bearing too much of their weight. I’m not sure how to get my mind around this one, though, because I believe we’re all interconnected, and that lives don’t have definite starting and stopping points so far as the space we each take up. We’re not paper dolls. We’re more like, maybe…universes.

So what do I do with the notion of “healthy boundaries” and the reality that though I’m interconnected with everything, and most particularly those I love, it doesn’t do anyone much good for me to stymie in other people’s mire? I’m a big believer in the power of solidarity, of standing with others in pain, and have experienced quite personally how this makes way for hope to break through. But there’s a certain quality of standing alongside, I think, that doesn’t multiply the yuck, that doesn’t make two people now feeling awful, but rather two people both feeling better. Or four or sixteen or a hundred, depending on who’s standing.

I want to find a way to be moved by the suffering around me, acknowledging that this movement is good and natural and part of living an interconnected life, while not being drawn by it into orbit. Standing alongside others cannot mean losing connection with my own sense of gravity, my own sun, with the struggles and tremendous joys it has of its own.

Yay!  It’s not raining!

Cheeks

Two weeks ago I had a minor meltdown about this book I’m writing.  The fear that I could get to these last, most important chapters, and they won’t say what I want them to paralyzed a good half my brain.  The other half I used to email my writing group to say the sky was definitely falling, most probably because of my own bad writing, and gee, it sure has been a nice ride.

Welcome to my life as a writer.  (I hear I’m in good company.)

Luckily a week away from the project and a good conversation with N got my gumption back up, and I decided to try and just write without thinking so much.  Just sit down, and let whatever comes out splatter onto the page.  The day I decided that was one of my best writing days ever.

So to celebrate this small victory, I’m gonna post a chunk of what came out that day.  You have no context for this, but you probably don’t need it.  Let your own imagination fill in what this character’s dream can mean.

*   *   *

I had a dream that night I felt guilty for having.  I shouldn’t have had it.  I don’t even want to tell you it, I loved it so much; things you love that much can disappear if you look at them directly.  Let’s just say it was sort of like this:

I was on a plane, going somewhere far away from where I live.  There were lots of people on the plane, and none of them had clothes on.  It wasn’t gross, though.  It was normal.  It was like we were all in Eden.

So I’m on this plane, going who knows where, and I look out my window, and there’s the MOUNTAIN.  It’s in front of us, stretching way up into the sky, farther up than I can see.  I’m assuming the plane will turn sometime, we’ll curve away from IT and go wherever it is we’re going.  But the closer we get, the more we pick up speed.  We’re picking up speed.  We’re not turning at all.  I start grabbing the arm of the person next to me, shouting we’re gonna hit, and the person looks and notices, too, and a ton of us are just yelling our heads off, trying to get someone to figure out what happened to the pilot, and whether there’s any hope at all of us surviving.

I’m looking back between the people—some of them don’t seem worried, for some reason, but most of them do—and the window, feeling myself absolutely panic, my adrenaline hitting toxic levels in my veins.  And in the middle of all of that, we’re just BAM!!!.  We hit.  We hit going a million miles an hour. 

The plane explodes, and all of us go flying.  Metal and glass and fire and flames missile and plume and shatter my eardrums, and I know I’m about to die.  I close my eyes and just wait.  Wait for when my body hits something or gets hit by something, and I’m a total goner, smashed dead to smithereens.

But it never happens.

The plane’s a wreck.  Parts of it are burning.  People have dirt and blood and cuts all over.  But no one seems dead.  We’re all just walking around, dazed, feeling actually…good.  I feel good, and somehow I know everyone else does, too.  We’re shaken to pieces, scared out of our minds.  Probably half of us pissed our pants.  But we slowly realize none of us is dead.  That it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but it’s true.  All we can do is look at each other and try and figure out how we can do even that.

And then the MOUNTAIN starts doing something.  That or the air, or some other kind of magic I guess.  There isn’t any sound to what it’s doing, no sucking or crinkling-up noises.  It’s the same kind of quiet as fog.  But it isn’t still.  It’s a moving quiet.  We’re looking at what’s left of our plane, all broken up, strewn everywhere, and it’s soundlessly shrinking and softening. That’s right:  shrinking and softening.  In front of our eyes all that plastic and metal and upholstery—I even saw a coffee pot and the lid to one of the toilets—is turning into what look like deflated balloons.  And we’re all just watching it happen.

And it finishes. 

The quietness is still now.  So quiet you can practically hear the sun drop.  It feels like the pause in a joke before anyone starts to laugh.  It feels exactly like that, actually, because someone does start laughing.  We’re so high up, the sound is huge.  Pretty soon we all can’t help but laugh too—the kind that isn’t really laughing, so much as saying I’m so, so happy, and I can’t believe this, I cannot believe this.  We crashed smack into the MOUNTAIN and lived.  It’s the kind of laughing that’s almost the same thing as crying.

I woke up doing it.

It’s good to be home again. The trip went well, despite waking at 1:45am to the sound of Elijah crying (he was 400 miles away; I must have been dreaming), and again at 6 from a dream in which my husband had called to tell me something awful had happened to him. I think I won’t plan another over-night separation anytime soon. (huband and boy did fine, by the way)

But like I said, the trip went well. It was good to be present, no matter what was said or unsaid, felt or unfelt. Death is such a strange animal. It comes as a sheep to some families—gentle, expected, sweet. To others it’s a wolf, tearing off with something we never imagined it could take. At least not like this, not now. I think it comes with many faces—maybe as many as there are people—and there’s no rule-book on how to deal with each one. How to love the people left behind. How to pick up pieces of broken relationships that don’t have a chance of getting mended anymore—mended in this life, in a tactile, face-to-face way. There are analogies all over this with what it is to face God-concepts dying.

Ultimately we do what we can, loving how we’re able, grieving or standing alongside those who mourn. And this is what makes us human, no?—human in the best sense. That we try. We gather, and we give a go at it, at dealing with whatever animal death has become to us. We gather, hoping that maybe in that act, in our trying, something important will get done, or at least get started. Hoping even if we have no idea what we’re doing, our trying somehow will.

I could be wrong, but it seems like far more often than not, the trying is enough.