I’m sitting in my living room, the sparseness somewhat jarring. An hour ago a truck rumbled off with our piano. Our closets are overflowing with other kinds of friends, books boxed suffocatingly “out of sight”, but the time finally came when we had to choose between them (and all the others scattered on every surface in the house), and this mammoth Lovely, who has languished in our living room virtually silent for over a year. I can’t play while Elijah is present (true, duets are possible, but E’s taste in sound is startlingly, jarringly different than my own), and I’m never here without him either in the room, or sleeping ten feet away.

So…not 48 hours ago I posted a picture on Craigslist, and within minutes had good as sold the thing. The buyer came hours later, paid for it, and arranged for movers to come the next day.

I’m shell-shocked, to be honest. I walked to the park when the buyer left, tearing up the whole way. What have I done? What have I done?

Al, the granddad there each day, was kind, and listened to my woe. We talked about instruments and music. He has a guittar he likes to play. I told him on my list of things to do before I die is learn to play the cello. But, mind you, I said, that diminishes nothing of my love for pianos.

I love pianos. To me they are like ancient trees; they soothe me, ground me. I started lessons at age 4, I think, and played my heart out daily until high school sports and a boyfriend took all my attention away. But I mean that part about my heart. Somehow, through all those years of practice, my heart got wound into all those strings. Maybe pressed into the pedals, the benches, the keys. And not just of only one piano. It’s all of them. The one that just got lugged down our steps walked with me through some very dark times. She gave and gave and gave when I had no words for what I was feeling–only notes.

I still have dreams of more composition, dreams of playing the blues, dreams of finishing the instrumentation for this song.

But…I have a toddler now, and I live in a paper-thin apartment, and even if there were no toddler involved, I would feel strange barging with music into all my neighbors’ homes uninvited.

So I’m sitting in my empty living room, imagining a wall full of books, trying to be happy that I get to see them all again.

As the truck drove off, and Elijah busied himself in the dust from where she stood, as I gazed nostalgically out the window and the smoke from the movers’ cigarettes wafted toward the sky, I thought, “Go well, dear friend. Go well.”

My first brush with death happened on a Wednesday night in 1987. I was eleven years old, and I know it was Wednesday because my sister was at youth group. I’m not sure where my mom was, but when I answered the phone and heard my aunt ask to speak with my dad, I knew by her voice that something was wrong.

There are very few memories etched as deeply in my mind as the moments that followed her question. I sat in the dark of our dining room, watching my dad in florescent kitchen light take in the news of his mother’s imminent and unanticipated death. I didn’t know what he was hearing, but I saw his shoulders curl forward, his hand cover his face, and the tears of one who was loving and grieving deeply fall. I hadn’t ever seen him cry before that day.

My grandmother was tall and beautiful. She had snow white hair and “laughing hazel eyes,” as was written of her in some paper in her youth, and quoted often by our family. Her kitchen was constantly filled with the smells of her marvelous meals.

My two most vivid memories of her are both filled with light. I’m five or six, and my sister three years older. It’s morning, and my grandpa has already been up for hours. We’re snuggled, the three of us girls, in my grandparents’ bed, morning sunshine filtering through gauze curtains to dance on the bedspread and the familiar picture frames adorning their walls and bureau tops. We’re laughing and talking and warm, and if love were light, the room would have dazzled with it. The room did dazzle with it.

My second memory is in my house–the house of my youth. Again I’m quite young, and grandma is putting me to bed. It’s summer, so the room is still light, and grandma is rubbing my back softly and singing. The memory is soft, like her touch, and cool whites and grays–her hair, the fading light, my pillow on my cheek. I feel safe and loved and the relief from desert heat that only desert-dwellers know.

I loved my grandma, and love her still. I knew her for eleven years, but that was long enough for her love to get inside of me and stay there, to be a kind of spring I still return to. I feel held in the web of my ancestry by her and by my grandpa, their kindnesses an encircling softness that joins with other loves to challenge my fears that life is dark and rough and lonely and cold. I love it that she lives inside of me, too–in my genes, in my memories, in the habits and phrases that got passed down to me from her.

In 1987 I began a lesson that will surely last a lifetime, of learning how light changes when someone you love dies. How their light can feel completely gone, like my eleven-year-old self sitting in all that darkness, watching a different light than I had ever known reveal the world in harsher hues. Death is a fluorescent bulb sometimes, chasing away the subtleties, the filters, the mists that often hide the things we don’t want to see: unanticipated darknesses, dads weeping, beloved things getting taken away.

But time, and the persistence of a love that does not die along with death, have been teaching me a different way to see. They’ve been teaching me that grandma’s light isn’t gone. It’s with me always. It shines in my memories, my body, her children, my son. It shines as I remember her this day, along this path.

To continue along this grid blog path of remembrances, click here. To read my initial post describing what a grid blog is, click here.

Last night I went to my fifth Wild Goose Qigong class (pronounced chee-gong). Qigong is an ancient Chinese healing art, and looks a lot like the fluid, choreographed moves of Tai Chi, like you see people doing on magnificent hilltops and sunlit oceansides in the movies. I do it at night, in old sweats, in the dance studio of a junior high school down the street. But still.

For the most part, I love it. I love the slow, underwater-like movements. I love that our instructor says almost 15 times a night that you should only do what’s comfortable, that this art is not about pushing or straining or forcing, but learning to listen to your body and flow gently where it wants to flow. I love it that I showed up last week with the worst devil’s grip in my neck that I’ve ever had in my life–so bad I had gone to the doctor that afternoon thinking surely I’d have to have surgery to put something back into place, thinking how in the world will I ever make it through another day of lifting and bathing and changing and playing with a toddler when every movement hurts so bad–and left Qigong without an ounce of pain left in my neck. The prescriptions with which my doctor had sent me home were for super-charged anti-inflamatories and muscle relaxers, which she said I’d likely need to take for 2 weeks, and to this day they sit in the bucket at Walgreens, not picked up.

So I love Qigong. It’s been good to me.

Last night I showed up more tired than usual, though. I even debated not going, and stayed flopped on the couch until I knew I’d only barely make it for the first instruction after warm-up. When I showed up, as a kind of unplanned punishment, I had to traipse across the middle of the circle of classmates to get to an open spot, classmates who were all silently watching while swaying like sea kelp. I almost felt like I should walk in slow motion like them, and wave my arms back and forth at them, but that would have only made me laugh and ruin the mood.

So there I finally was, so tired that even the wood planks below me looked soft. I needed to see what they felt like on my belly, my arms, the left side of my face.

But I stayed standing.

But here’s the thing: the whole rest of the classtime, rather than flowing like kelp, or wild geese for that matter, rather than listening to the movements of my body, I had this running commentary going on in my mind.

“Oh God, she’s going to repeat that part again. She is. She is, I can tell. Oh God.

“Are you kidding me? FIVE MORE TIMES???

“Why does that guy keep getting in my way? I can’t see through you, dude. Yeah, you. Okay fine. Yes, this is me moving so I can see.

“Was that my sternum popping? Has that ever happened to me before?

“Let’s see…when I get home, I’m going to have cereal. No, fruit. No, cereal. Fruit and cereal. With yogurt. But water first. I’m so THIRSTY.”

And on and on. And the worst part was people kept farting all around me, too. That actually happens every week. There must be something about Qigong that gets the air flowing, if you know what I mean, and it is only by sheer will power that I save mine for later.

But most of the time this is fine. I actually feel about it like I feel about Elijah ripping off: great! Good for you! It seems natural, somehow, and not annoying.

But it was just too much last night. I simultaneously felt like laughing and glaring and saying, “Can everyone just tighten up a little bit??”

At one point someone asked about a move we were learning, and the instructor explained the way the movement helps energy flow up your back side, over your head, and down your front side, repeating like that in a circle. The classmate said, “Would it be a good idea to visualize that as we do the move? Would that help the energy flow better?”

The instructor paused for a second, and then said this: “The beauty of Qigong is in the way the movements themselves cause the flow of energy, and the way your body, over time, can learn to help that flow just by repeating the movements. In Western culture we tend to spend so much time in our heads that we can actually hinder the positive flow of energy by trying to force it this way or that way, or by analyzing it too much. It’s fine for you to understand why we do these movements, but probably better, when you do them, not to get stuck in your head. Just let your body move. Focus on breathing and moving with it.”

As I was just finishing deciding which book to read when I got home, I felt a little bit sheepish. And also thirsty.

But I came to this conclusion: Flowing with life–with the movements of our bodies or minds or souls–is good. Getting stuck too much in any parts of ourselves–whether focussing on our bodies all the time, or our spiritual or intellectual sides–probably means a dam is being constructed there, and the energy that wants to do it’s natural cycle is turning stagnant, getting stalled up. But–and this was the real crux of the lesson for me–flowing with anything, in a healthy way, is a lot easier to do when you’ve had enough sleep.

Qigong = good. Qigong while sleep deprived = annoying.

Maybe this formula applies to everything there is, and the first way any of us can start making the world a better place is to get to bed early tonight.

You think?

Bob from The Corner has invited anyone who is interested to participate in a gridblog inspired by Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead). He writes (and invites to be shared around):

I am emailing you to ask if you would consider joining a gridblog to share your own experiences with the loss of a loved one – a gridblog entitled THE MARIGOLD PATH that would be across the Internet on Nov. 1 & Nov. 2. This gridblog is inspired by the experience of Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead)…with the gridblog name inspired by the practice of children carrying yellow marigolds as they follow the procession to the cemetery.

I thought of Trish, who has been thinking and writing and composing in honor of women who are dying or have died, and of others I know who are grieving the deaths of people, and also the deaths of dreams. If any of you are interested in joining this blogwalk of reflection and remembrance, whether for a person who has died, or for some other thing in your life that has passed, go here for more details.

I’m in.

I got tagged by Christy for this meme: Five Things Feminism has Done for Me. Let’s see…

1. I grew up believing that when I grew up, I could do whatever I wanted to do. Vocationally, I mean. :) I didn’t think that because I was a girl, I was automatically excluded from anything. I had no idea that the Christian denomination I was a part of would not ordain women or allow them to be lead pastors of churches. I assumed that women were just not choosing to do these things, like being president, and that if I wanted to do them, they were open to me. I’m guessing this latter assumption had a lot to do with my parents’ views on men’s and women’s roles, and a little to do with my churches not being particularly vocal about the limitations that women had in them. Or maybe I was oblivious to the vocalizations there were? In any case, feminism helped make vocation an open field in my childhood mind.

2. Leading up to and throughout the ten years of our marriage, N and I have worked hard to be conscious of power imbalances between us, and to do whatever we can to lessen them. This has been the hardest long-term project that either of us has ever worked at. The hardest, but the most rewarding.

3. I’m a writer, giving a significant number of prime time hours (after 8am and before 6pm) to writing each week. This while also being parent to a one-year-old. And having no money for childcare. N is in school, so we’re in a unique situation in that he has a schedule that can flex for shared kid-duty. But I think feminism has made this set-up conceivable at all by helping both of us see my writing, which at this point has no dollar signs attached to it, as a real vocation, and my pursuit of it as equally important as N’s pursuit of his. (The fact that there will be dollar signs attached to his in a few years, and that his is what will enable us to pay our bills (and loans!) and eat food that we actually buy at stores makes us give a lot more hours of work-beyond-home time to him each week. But that’s a pragmatic more than philosophic choice.) The task of coordinating work-at-home time and work-away-from-home time for both of us, and being as present to Elijah and each other as we want to be, is probably the second hardest long-term project that either of us has worked at. And of course, also totally worth it.

4. Increasingly I’m able to feel–and this beyond just knowing intellectually–that the entertainment and make-up and clothing and hair-product and skin-product and teeth-product industries are bankrupt in the ways they define feminine beauty and sexuality and life force as narrowly as being 18-25 years old with smooth skin and straight, white teeth and thick, highlighted hair and large, firm breasts and designer clothing and gym memberships and curves here and not there and fingernails that look like they’ve never seen dishwater. I feel the narrowness of these definitions, the way these industries have not stripped women down in their adds to expose our true beauty, but rather stripped beauty itself down to expose the ugliness at the heart of machines that would want all of us–as many as is inhumanly possible–not liking ourselves, wanting bodies that aren’t real, funneling huge portions of our incomes into becoming ever less so.

I feel the evil of this. And I feel the beauty and life force and sexual attractiveness of people–men and women–in things far deeper and broader than any ad will ever convey.

5. Number five is a catch-all drawer: I’m happy most of the time. I don’t feel like the world is only depressing and that an oppressive God exists. I haven’t had an ulcer for a very long time. I feel gentle toward my body. I like wearing feminine clothing and don’t have dreams anymore where I’m trying to pass as a man. I take intuition seriously. I take art seriously. I don’t feel obligated to fit my spirituality or metaphors for God into patriarchical frameworks. I’m a mom, and this by choice.

None of these would be true or possible apart from the feminist thinkers and writers and artists and theologians and mentors and friends who have helped me in my work of healing and self creation/re-creation in recent years.

Okay…I tag Jen, Adam, and Trish. And Adam’s wife, Sarah. :)  Okay, and Trish’s husband Richard, too.  Jen?  Heck…and Jen’s husband Dave!

Everywhere I turn now, I see Fall. Pumpkins and decked-out leaves and cooler air and sweaters. People are buzzing about snow, even, in some parts of the world (I won’t tell you what our highs have been here this week). And alongside all that change, we people just keep changing too. For the better, in so many cases. And sometimes neither for better nor worse, but just becoming happier or sadder, or more reflective, or wishing for less change. Or for far, far more of it.

Here’s to all of us, in every stage of Fall there is.

(and a few photos of a very sweet pumpkin)

It’s Saturday, and I’m sitting on a bench on Stanford’s campus, surrounded by palm trees and ivy and massive stone buildings.  Memorial chapel is to my right and I hear the bell tower bong in the distance, water from a fountain cascading endlessly nearby.  Jet black squirrels bound across pavement; birds flit through morning routines.  What does this do to me, in me?

Since Robin sent me this link I’ve been thinking about land and space, about the ways these get inside of you, providing threads for the weave that is how you think about life and self and God, how you see yourself in relation to them.  The link is to a sermon that deals, in part, with the ways the natural world shaped its writer’s life.

I grew up in a desert in California, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley.  We had two seasons there:  hot, and gray.  The grayness was fog that was a lid on our valley through winter.  Often it descended to the ground, making visibility no farther than the tullip tree on our front lawn.  While other regions have snow days, we had fog days–school delayed or cancelled because of the challenge fog posed for safe travel.  Seriously.

But summer was nearly the opposite.  From May through most of October temperatures hovered in the upper 90s, often staying near or surpassing 100 for long stretches.  It was dry heat, and fierce.  Bare feet were only for grass.  There were no clouds in the sky, save the accumulation of dust and exhaust and pollen and the various sprays the farmers used to work their fields. 

Which is one of the ironies, I think, of my early desert home: it was shockingly furtile.  One of the hugest exporters of produce in the world.  Nectarines, peaches, plums, apricots, apples, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, grapes, cherries, tomatoes, melons, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, tangerines.  The list really does go on.  And it was furtile not because these things could grow on their own, could just spring up and stay there, happy.  This was a desert, after all.  It was because people worked night and day to make it so.  The irrigation system there alone inspires awe.  The human power it takes to plant and pick and prune that list is breathtaking, no matter how many machines are involved.  And the machines!  I went with some friends to a county fair one time and felt like I had been transplanted to another universe, walking through rows of metal giants engineered for every kind of farm need imaginable–a show for farmers, apparently, to elicit the lust unique to that trade.

So this rhythm, this hot and gray cycle with the relentless backdrop of turning desert into food:  this was the natural world that joined the shaping of me.

I think about all of this as I ponder my spirituality, and my early thoughts about God.  I think about how hot it felt to be under God’s gaze.  How wide open my life seemed to Him (my early God was male)–no mountains or hills or forests in which to hide.

I think about how hard I understood the Christian life to be.  How much work it took to learn about God and to nurture the fruits of God’s spirit. How His fruits didn’t come naturally, and required constant planfulness and attention, including practices that weren’t spontaneous to body or soul’s terrain.  But how diligence usually paid off.  How satisfying the rows of tended thoughts and prayers and plans and relationships could feel.  Mine was not an untamed heart.

And I think about the quietness I loved about the fog, the way I felt hugged by it.  How I liked to feel hidden inside of it, even as I worried about its effects on my bangs.  There is safety in fog, even with its danger.  Safety in feeling a cushion between oneself and the directness of an exacting God.  People get killed in the stuff–huge pile-ups along Highway 99–but there are trade offs, too.  Sometimes danger is worth a little quiet anonymity.

My heart has had seasons of growth since then, seasons of new lands and new threads added from those lands.  I lived in Oregon and now near San Francisco’s bay, and my heart is learning what it means to grow a little more wild.  To have flora and fauna natural to it flourish.  To think of God with the subtlety of gentle sunshine, like we have a lot of here; with the playfulness of our on and off breeze.  I don’t think early threads ever get unwoven, though, so I carry in me desert, too.  Always.  The promise of much fruit and the understanding that a lot of work may be involved in cultivating it.  I carry in me stark, open land that is a kind of inescapable honesty, and a yearning to be wrapped up in the danger-comfort of something soft and accepting and mysterious and quiet.

God isn’t my desert-God anymore, though, and I’m not sure how that happened, how the threads that were my early God became a garment that lays on the ground now, God clothed in other things, or sometimes all the way bare.  God seems a kind of mystery that resists the clothes I offer, that seems to be taking of my desert threads, and my wet, green Oregon threads, and the threads of my current space and weaving from them something I can’t yet recognize, and don’t feel in much of a hurry to be able to.

So I sit here wondering.  Or filled with wonder, maybe.  Breathing in these granite stones, this wide courtyard of interwoven brick, the expanse of air and sky above my head.  It’s getting inside of me.  It’s doing something.

For the longest time I’ve had a picture of a sunrise as the background on my computer.  Orange and gold pouring over choppy sea.  I put that up about the time I had a surge of things to write–on my blog, and in the fiction I’m working on this summer.  I felt bold and full of words.  Active and free.  A healthy dose of yang, you might say.

Just after finishing up that series on bodies, I had a dream.  I was in a building with a group of some kind, and I thought we all were leaving.  A swarm of crows was attacking us, and I knew it would only get worse outside.  Feeling like Harry Potter, or some other child-on-a-mission, I quickly ran ahead to distract that swarm with some sweets I had made.  To save the group.

But when I got outside, there were no crows.  In fact, the group that I was with wasn’t there either.  Turning back inside, disappointed that my grand aspirations weren’t required, I discovered another group of folks rehearsing for some play.  They were dancing.  And it was beautiful.  I recognized dear friends among them, and after a moment of feeling way out of place, way underdressed, I realized I fit perfectly in.  The dream ended with some shady, unkind characters telling me I had bad breath and me determining I wouldn’t say one more word until I could brush my teeth.

My therapist would be all over this one.

But here’s the thing:  I think she would be right if she said it was calling me back inside, back to the dance.  And by dance, I think I mean something archetypal, something about expressing the self–not because one has to, or because one is trying to set anything right or look good in anyone’s eyes, but because one can.  Or must.  I think the dream is calling me back away from taking my external life too seriously, back from trying to address my own demons everywhere else but where they actually reside:  inside.

So I had this dream, and I slowly grew more quiet.  Not because I’m afraid my breath stinks, because I think the characters who said that were "demons", and precisely the kind of crows I must confront inside.  But because I feel drawn inward, to listen again, to wait.  And to practice the dance.  I wonder how many of us on an inner path of healing get right to the point where we’re learninig our authentic dance, right to the point where things are coming together inside, clicking, falling into place, and then move outward.  Move quickly on to extrovert the things we’ve learned, not realizing we haven’t yet mastered our dance, and that all our outside doing might actually make us forget the few steps that we’ve learned. 

I have a night scene on my computer screen now.  A hillside watched by the moon.  As I drifted to sleep last night I pictured myself dancing on it, moonlight soft against my skin.  I pictured dancing long and gracefully, round and round, arms up and down.  And I finally rested on that hilltop, alone, my heart calm and also full with the memory of the dance.  Full with knowing I’m here, and, here is good, and there is day and there is night on this day of creation.

I’ve been feeling quiet blog-wise lately.  Lots has been going on in my off-line life, but I think there’s more to it than that, and I’m trying to understand what.  I think it has to do with that last series on bodies. 

For one, I need time for what I wrote to sink more deeply into me, to not rush too quickly on to something new.  I’ve learned that I’m not a skim-tons-of-ideas-briefly sort of person, let alone writer, so I’m comfortable sitting long with a limited number of things.

But there’s more than that going on here, too, I think.

I think I’m craving feedback.  I feel like I imagine public speakers often feel, where they launch their words into a crowd, knowing that ears are listening (my site meter tells me that), but then afterwards not hearing how those ideas were recieved, and so having no idea whether people agreed, disagreed, had other important insight on the matter, etc.

I would love to know who you are, and what you think of what I write.  I’d love to hear when you disagree or when you have something to add, or recognize an angle I’m leaving out.  Or what it is that resonates with you.  I want the chance to grow through this type of exchange.  I’m guessing that my writing style doesn’t always communicate this wish, so I want the chance to say it outright.  And please feel free to email me privately if public commenting isn’t your thing.  You’re always welcome to communicate that way.

And for now, I’ll go practice what I preach…

Okay, so here I am again.  I’m soul searching this week, trying to figure out what mix of things is sustainable for me, and so far I’ve gotten one clear answer:  not this one.  I’ve packed every minute to the brim lately, and feel something deep inside of me, some important place where children run barefoot and there’s time to watch clouds and what you do isn’t groomed for resumes, was never meant to be–I feel that place wilting and shrinking and getting overshadowed by this other place, a place that isn’t bad or even something to be wished away, but a place that must be held in check.  A place that wants badly to produce.  To matter to lots of people.  To have tangible things to show for my time, and not just things, but really wonderful amazing wiz-bang kinds of stuff.  Stuff that impresses people.  Lots of them.

And guess who suffers, besides me, when that place starts growing beyond itself?  The people who matter to me most.  Isn’t that ironic?

I have a non-fiction book I want to write.  I have a new and more complicated blog I want to start.  I have a novel that’s itching to see the light of day.  And I also have an 8-month-old who needs me quite a lot at this point, and deserves to be seen far, far differently than as a roadblock to some race track I’m trying to ride.

I’m realizing that life isn’t something you wait to live until the kids are grown or even just in school.  Life isn’t something you put off until your resume is long.  It isn’t something you hold like your breath, or keep locked in a cage, feeding but once or twice a day. 

It’s here.  Right now.  It’s this week, and this spring, this night with all the trees in bloom, and the crickets cricking, this lamp spilling golden light across my lap, my hands, the little scar where I accidentally poked myself with led in seventh grade.  I don’t want to fill this glorious life I’ve been given so full that the glory fades, and it doesn’t even matter because I don’t have time to notice anyway.  I don’t want to be so preoccupied with the next ten things I’m trying to accomplish that the one right in front of me gets only half of me.  The little boy whose eyes are so blue and smile is so big and heart is just bursting with eagerness to be mine right now.  Not half-mine, but all the way.  And that goes for N, and the other dear ones in my life, too.  My own face in the mirror.

Be still, I hear, and I feel that place inside of me expand.  I feel my feet on cool, green grass, and see clouds start billowing by.  There’s one the shape of the book I’m writing, and it’s whispering all in good time, and another the shape of the book I hope to write next.  There’s one the shape of fear, the fear that I’m losing time on a race I need to win, and if I don’t catch up now, today, or at least by the end of this year, some important thing will get lost forever.  Something I really want.  That cloud is shifting into some new thing, a new mist that looks like gladness, and it’s coming down to catch me up inside itself, catch me up and make me laugh like Eli, when all he can do is glee (if that’s not a verb it should be).  Because glee is what a lot of life calls for.

When it finally sets me down I see the landscape of my life, and realize I don’t want to get everything done I set out to do if that means missing out on here and now.  I don’t want to if it means not living in the fullest sort of way, thinking living will have to happen later.  Because later sometimes never comes.  And even if it does, there will never be this night again, this season, this dear one on the phone or at my neck or lying next to me in bed, at this age, with this sort of love.

So I’m here on my blog right now because it makes me happy, and because speaking publically helps call a thing to life.  I’m trying to imagine my way into a lifestyle that’s slower paced than the one I’ve lately tried to live, that still finds ways to honor the hats I truly love to wear:  writer, soul-nurturer, mother, wife, friend.  I want to honor these things in a much more liveable way.  As far as posting goes–here or on a new blog–we’ll have to see what this might mean.