This is My Body, This is My Blood

Round Trip

Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light.
Did it take long to find me? and are you gonna stay the night?
Cat Stevens, Moon Shadow

The moon hung like a broken pendulum from an abandoned grandfather clock outside my window last night. I tried pulling the covers over my head but the white noise crawled under the sheets and played a busy highway against the mattress. I closed my eyes and tried to turn the roar into waves the way I do when I stay at a cheap roadside motel, but it didn't help any more than when I stay in an oceanfront inn and the pounding waves turn into cars on a phantom freeway. It's all the same, isn't it? Coming and going. Going and coming.

So I got up. I got up and yanked the blinds, let the light all the way in. Stood there naked in front of the window, daring the moon to drown me in his bluewhite rain. I know it's been coming just as sure as I know winter's buried beneath my feet and one of these days it's gonna burst forth and turn Cerro San Luis green again, so why not welcome it? Yeah. Why not.

Because I'm tired of this swinging door of seasons. I'm tired of saving daylight and holding onto mornings when the evening is inevitable. I'm tired of the goodbyes and laters and maybes. I've had it with watching my life unfold in a rear-view mirror, one hand waving as he shrinks in the distance. The sun does its best to shield me, burn the memories into a smile, but with the darkness comes oblivion--a million pieces of me scattered in the sky like so much nothing.

I stood there anyway. Let the lump of sad fill my lungs then wind its way up my throat, where the soft tones of denial turned into a howl that shook me to the core. I became the highway, the ocean, the nothing and the everything.

I don't know how long it lasted, don't remember the walk back to bed where the cats curled themselves around my legs like bookends. The only fragment that has stayed with me this morning is the last arc of curved light as it rose above the window, leaving behind a soft dent in the sky where I suspect that howl must have landed. I woke feeling hollow, quiet, strangely stoic against the weaving of heart and head as they rally for tactical positions.

I give myself over to my feet instead. They take me to the kitchen, back to bed, to the window, back to bed. Coming and going. Going and coming.

Technorati Tags: relationships, perimenopause, menopause, cat stevens,  essay, blog, self image, baby boomers, writing, writers, poetry, prose, women, hormones, endings

Watsu Matter With Me?

A few weeks ago I signed up for a Watsu massage from a woman referred to me by my friend and fellow member of Massage Sluts Anonymous, M. She thought I'd love the waterwork but I found it difficult to surrender to the process given my drowning issues. What I did love was photographing the practitioner as she worked with a young woman who's recovering from nerve damage after doctors accidentally knocked her leg out of the stirrup during hip surgery. Watching her was like attending a birth, the way she completely gave into each finite movement in the dance between her body and the body of water that cradled her.

Have you ever felt as though you were swimming against the current, trying unsuccessfully to best a hidden riptide as it pulled you further out to sea?  As though you've completely forgotten everything you'd learned about swimming parallel to the shore until you're out of danger rather than use up every last bit of energy on a futile battle with the forces of nature? The last few weeks have left me keening like a boat with a torn sail. Today it was all I could do just to get out of bed and feed the animals, let alone myself. I don't know if the fatigue stems from emotional backwash caused by recent  transitions or it's a physical manifestation of my tendency to overdo/give when I know damn well I'm running on an empty tank, but I haven't been this tired since I had mono in the tenth grade.

I continue to push myself through necessary tasks but it's like trying to hurry honey off the spoon. Perhaps I need to revisit that pool, take a lesson in the art of flow instead of dog-paddling my way through yet another day of Things To Do. At the very least, I might benefit from sitting in a chair under an umbrella with a view of nothing but my eyelids.

Technorati Tags: watsu, perimenopause, menopause, fatigue,  essay, blog, self image, baby boomers, writing, writers, poetry, prose, women, hormones, massage

Clash Reunion

Memories, they can't be boughten.
They can't be won at carnivals for free.
Well it took me years to get those souvenirs,
And i don't know how they slipped away from me.
~~John Prine

Sunday morning John Prine was singing in the next room when I caught sight of my shadow as she danced a little jig, sang along with the music while I cracked eggs on a cast iron griddle. I almost bumped into her when she twirled past me in the kitchen, the creases in her smile lines like tiny bird tracks on a morning beach. I saw her again later in the day as she tip-toed barefoot across stepping stones, holding her skirt, laughing at the water skimmers skiing across the surface of the pond we dug in the back yard. Just before bed I glimpsed her between sleepy breaths as my eyes fell upon a photograph of her lost in a sensual kiss, swirling in limerance. She disappeared with the lamplight, left me counting the turns of fan blades as they quietly passed over the woman who used to sing and dance and laugh and love like they were all stolen.

Has it ever happened to you? Have you ever reached for a fragmented memory of joy, only to have it fade before you can trace the outline of a captured smile? It's not a sudden thing, this losing oneself layer by layer until all that's left are ragged footprints. It happens gradually, like the slow recession of water at low tide, until you've forgotten the lush lapping at your ankles and the gulls calling over your head. You walk on, your pockets heavy with pinkswirl shells, toward an island that doesn't recognize the shape of your bones or know the fullness of your cupped hands.

Then one day you pull a jacket from behind the door and as you're moving through the paces of a lackluster afternoon your hand rests on something familiar, a crusted curl of beauty carved by the past. You hold the shell in your hand, finger each fine feature of its delicate history, spit-shine it to embellish the iridescence of perfected imperfection. Closing your eyes, you hear the squeak of your feet against wet sand, feel the rhythm of unseen waves against your chest, taste the pungent exhale of your own salty breath. The ocean rises to lick your knees, hug your waist, touch your shoulders until she finally washes over you, reuniting your soul with her lost body, becoming the water itself.

Technorati Tags: aging, perimenopause, menopause, hot flashes, saliva test, relationships, body image, depression,  essay, blog, self image, baby boomers, writing, writers, poetry, prose, women, hormones, massage

Rain Man

He tried to sneak in the back door, between second and third helpings of rainpuddles and matted clumps of wet dog hair, but I pushed a pile of soggy towels under the dryrotting crack. Crouching under a muddy sky with clouds bursting from its many secret pockets, he poked holes in my roof until the ceiling bowed.When I made a slit in the drywall to relieve the darkwater pond, let it spill, then plunk, plunk, plunk, into a dirty white bucket, he left spores of mold in the attic to march up my nostrils during the night, now blocked by a sliver of silver duct tape stuck over the opening.

 

Failing an above-board attack, he slithered into the crawl space, taking eight inches of water with him, just high enough to cover the electrical box that serves my washer and dryer so I'd have to bag up all those wet clothes and feed shiny quarters into somebody else's machines.

While I was at the laundromat, he huffed and puffed until the tarp I'd planted on the roof in the howling storm lifted at the edges, forcing me back up the rickety ladder to batten it down again. While I was up there, I found all the leaves he'd stripped from nearby trees and planted in my gutters, causing the water to back up and spill into my tenant's light fixture. He laughed as I struggled to clear the damn, bloodied knuckles, my eyes covered with strings of wet hair, but I beat him. Standing at the peak I raised my fist, cursed him as rusty water found its way through trenches and raced down the driveway toward the street to become one with the rain.

He said nothing, but I'm sure it was his laugh I heard as I reached for the handle of my camper to retrieve massage sheets, felt the surge of electricity charge up my arm and down my bare feet before making it's way to my brain. Let go.

 

For three long weeks he hounded me, tried to break my spirit. He blew out a transformer, took out my phone lines, flooded my apartment, and terminated my broadband connections, yet I refused to let him take me down. Not this time. Not this year. Sure,I was shaken, weakened to the brink of S.A.D. but I held out, knowing my Savior would return, and I was right. She showed up two days ago, kicked Depression's dark and dreary ass to Kingdom Come (or perhaps the east coast from what I hear) and kissed me awake. Hand in hand, we walked outside where she led me to the chair by the pond in the back yard and tenderly wrapped her arms around my trembling body until the color came back into my pale cheeks. While I basked in her holy presence, she sucked the moisture out of my house, my yard, my soul--replaced it with dappled light. We spent the whole day together and then she danced on my walls at sunset before saying goodnight and promising to return tomorrow and the day after that for as far as the weatherman can see.

 

Last night I dreamed of His return, the cold, damp eyes and heartless rendering of wicked winds. I woke in a sweat, breathless, shaking. From the windowsill I heard a whisper.

"Let there be light," she said, and there was light.

And I saw the light; that it was good, and that it divides the good days from the bad. And together we named the light, Bliss and the darkness we called Depression.

And the evening and the morning were the first day of recovery.

Bye Bye Miss American Pie

There we were all in one placeA generation lost in spaceWith no time left to start againSo come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quickJack Flash sat on a candle stick'Cause fire is the devil's only friend.As I watched him on the stageMy hands were clenched in fists of rageNo angel born in hellCould break that satan's spellAnd as flames climbed high into the lightTo light the sacrificial riteI saw satan laughing with delightthe day the music died.

My dad used to tell me that hardship builds character, yet waking to the results of yesterday's election has left me feeling as if I am made of sandstone. I've been walking around in a daze, unable to concentrate, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.  I only heard part of Kerry's concession speech on the radio but it just broke my heart when he said he wished he could wrap his arms around all of us.  Then some guy yelled out, "We've got your back!" and he responded, "And I've got yours."

That did it.  My body sagged like a limp pillow under the weight of one too many heavy heads and I cried. 

I couldn't even stomach the first sentence of Bush's speech. The man makes me physically ill. So I switched over to Air America where the day's mantra was to hold each other through the shock and awe of a nation gone mad. But even Randi, Al, and Janeen couldn't cheer me up. I switched off the dial and drove in silence under a gray sky that matched my mood. Along the way, hundreds of Kerry yard signs, bright and hopeful, stood like faithful soldiers in the rain. I thought about Kerry's words, thought about pulling into one of those driveways, knocking on the door and opening my arms, not saying a word, not needing to.

I am so scared and sad for this country--one I hardly recognize anymore. And I am seriously thinking of leaving.  We have to stay and fight, you say, but when the youth can't even save us with their fresh, untainted enthusiasm, what's left but a bunch of tired ideologues and graying hippies clutching faded protest signs?  Face it. Miss American Pie is full of rotten apples and the good ol' boys don't care if there's water in the levees so long as there's oil for their chevies.

*I usually use my own photos when possible but found this perfect one via google, with no credit to the copyright owner. If you know where it came from let me know.

Dreamcatcher

Last night I wandered to the back yard with three-year-old A on my left hip. When we reached the bush next to the pond, my tiny daughter stiffened and clung to me frantically. I asked why she was frightened but she refused to answer, burying her blond head in my neck. 

I tried again. "What happened here?" 

No answer. I knew if I closed my eyes I would see what she saw so I did. Instantly images of an entire village flooding then sinking into the earth filled my head. I watched as people and houses disappeared into the ground, frozen in time. There had been no warning, whatever it was.

Sensing something sinister, I opened my eyes to find a snake slithering toward us, an evil grin on his warty face. He slipped behind me then sunk his fangs into my right hand. I held tightly onto A, refusing to let go of her no matter how badly it hurt. Surprisingly, (though I wonder why I'm surprised since I'm the one making up the damn dream) the snake released my hand just long enough for me to run into the house, but I knew he would beat me to the side door, and he did. This time as he again approached, I held out my hand and said, "Go ahead, but I'm not letting go of her." I woke myself screaming in pain as my hand disappeared into his mouth.

And so it goes, another night of terror, dreams filled with shadowy creatures and menacing men who threaten, chase, and taunt me.  I keep wondering what they are trying to tell me and why I can't seem to make them go away. I've taken all the remedies, kept journals, tried to interpret them--and still they haunt my nights. Some days I wake more tired than when I went to bed. Today is one of them. 

Yet I refuse to take a pill. I know my subconscious is trying to tell me something. Any day now a hundred bells will go off and I'll get whatever it is I'm supposed to understand. Until then, I sleep with the lights on, which probably only makes the Boogie Man more interested in fucking with me. Not that I believe in a Boogie Man.  I'm just sayin.

Note: Photo of grumpy rattler compliments of Bill.

Angels Here Now

We are, each of us angels with only one wing; and we can only fly by embracing one another. --Luciano De Crescenzo

A few years ago I told a dear friend that my only god is wonder. I still consider that to be true. Yet despite my agnostic tendencies, I do believe in angels. Not the kind with haloed heads who announce messianic births or save humans by reaching through the flimsy membrane of afterlife to pluck them from certain death. I'm talking about those who have reached through the tender veil of my heart and plucked me from uncertainty itself. People like Anthony, who ask the kind of questions that force me to think (and who better start writing again soon or I'll kick his toga-wearing ass). People like M who believe that love is its own reward, generously rewarding me with his. People like I, in whose laughter I've nearly drowned. And people like J, who called on Easter morning to say she was thinking of me, knowing what it once meant, what it no longer means.

J and I grew up under different cloaks of religion, but both our young lives were heavily influenced by men who hid behind a thin curtain of theology. She walked the Halls of Kingdom while I sweated under Tents of Revival. Our fathers were holy men whom we loved deeply, though each of us eventually lost our respective religions*. Though we hadn't yet met, J and I both refused to swallow spoon-food doctrines that included shaming and condemnation. Each of us walked away from religion in our teens to begin a private search for that which is sacred. We didn't yet know we would someday recognize it in each other. Or find it in ourselves.

When I was a child, Easter was the day my dad gleefully shouted, "He is risen!" from his place on the pulpit. Pastel-robes sang amens and hallelujahs in perfect refrain to my fathers praises while they patiently waited their turn to shine. Although the congregation always enjoyed their pastor's Easter sermon more than the fist-pounding, hellfire and damnation lectures, it was the latter that filled collection plates to overflowing. Guilt fetches a high price but so does a new Easter ensemble. Tithe envelopes were lighter, thanks to people shelling out shiny J.C. Pennies for the annual Easter Fashion Show.

One of the things I most loved about Easter was that every year Mom sewed six new dresses to match her own. Not quite as nice as store bought, but at least no one else had worn them before and that was something in a family our size. I got a new bonnet as well, though often it was recycled from the previous year, whereby the elastic cut a line under my chin. (Several if I got too close to N, who would snap the string like a Wiley Coyote Acme slingshot before I could get away.)

But the best part of Easter wasn't the new outfit. It wasn't the coloring books we received in Sunday School either--I preferred the huge green fronds we got the Sunday before, which we'd bring home to take turns on the sofa as queen while our sisters obediently fanned us. It wasn't the ham dinner, eaten on the "good china" with utensils usually saved for company. It wasn't even the colored eggs we were allowed to paint--as long as we renounced the Evil Pagan Bunny and his profane insult to the celebration of Jesus' resurrection. No, the best thing, what I loved most about Easter, was by far the music. Happy songs like Break Forth, O Beauteous Heavenly Light, Christ the Lord is Risen Today, Alleluia! and my absolute all-time favorite church song, Up From the Grave He Arose! I sang louder on Easter than any other Sunday of the year, belted those hymns like nobody's business, despite N whispering at me to tone it down lest the whole cemetery rise up to join Jesus, sinners and all.

God forbid.

I sometimes blame my recurring low-grade depression on the feeling I get when I'm no longer able to imagine a net of faith to catch me if I fall from the daily highwire I walk. No one to pray to other than my dead relatives. No Rising Star to save me from my sins. Not that I fault my upbringing for creating a disdain toward organized religion--frankly the multitude of deities and mythology handed down throughout the centuries is awe inspiring. I'm fascinated by the way people claim their god is the biggest, strongest, most powerful--and the onliest. But just like the Easter Bunny, there came a day when I no longer believed in an almighty god* who ordered children slain or chose sides between men at war any more than I believed in a god that would choose to heal one person and not another, despite both having prayed in equal doses of unbridled devotion.

For a while I tried swapping my Old Time religion for a New Age religion, but it still boils down to giving my power away to some unknown, unscientific thing rather than be accountable for my own life.

Which is why I choose to believe in angels that are here, now. People like J, for instance. Lots of girlfriends have come and gone in the last 40 years and only two have remained steadfast in our mutual love for one another regardless of time, distance, or the interweave of romantic relationships. J is one of them. To reach for her in my darkest moments and feel her loving presence is to touch the face of god. I'll take that soft human cheek, that warm hand, that soothing voice, over an empty tomb any day. Because this savior is real, and for me, the only who has ever made me believe I could fly.

*Please know that I respect your right to your beliefs do not fault you for having them, so please don't leave comments damning me to hell or trying to convert me. If there is an afterlife, my Dad is already at God's feet, begging mercy upon my wretched soul. (You can bless me when I sneeze, though--I happen to like that little ritual.)

Chasing the Sun

It's February in California. A few days ago my plum tree gave birth to tiny white blossoms like the ones above, heralding the coming of Spring. When I walked to the store the other day I felt myself unfold under rays of sun that were warmer than just a few days earlier. Like a canary who has survived another winter in the mine, I sensed a change in the texture of the air, felt it lift me as if I were cupped in the arms of an unseen airstream. My pupils shrunk, my lungs expanded, and my pace quickened.

This is what I've been waiting for-- biding my time behind closed curtains, beneath a down comforter, inside a layer of skin stretched over sad bones.  Though the date may change, the signposts are always the same: longer days, warmer nights, and tiny white flowers with pink centers whispering to the first butterflies. Here, over here...

It won't be long before my toes find their way back to flip flops and my body to a blanket by the ocean, face tilted toward the sun as the waves reach for the sand. Oh joy. Oh rapture. Oh yeah.

Dancing in the Dark

What Depression Looks Like:

Looking forward to when it's dark enough to crawl in bed without feeling guilty

Crawling in bed while it's still light and not caring

Saying no when you mean yes

Not answering the phone

Wishing someone would call and stay on the line without talking, just so you feel connected

Not washing your hair for three days

Cutting your hair short to match your sexless mood

Going alone to a sad movie so you can cry in the dark for a reason

Forgetting to eat

Eating to forget

Hiding behind sunglasses, as if the world can't see you when you've darkened it

Not dancing when you hear music that used to move you

Moving behind the music to let it dance on you instead

Realizing that you haven't absorbed a word of the last several pages you just read

Realizing you haven't heard a word of what someone just said

Knowing that you missed the above two because you left your body a while back

Watching movies every day to live someone else's life rather than your own

Straining to remember how it felt to dance wildly, laugh from your belly, celebrate the light

Knowing that in time, you will remember, it will all come back to you and you'll forget how this felt

Praying that it is soon

Remembering that you lost your religion a long time ago

Praying anyway

Buried

Every fall when the light slips out of reach earlier and earlier each day, I slip inside myself, forget my summer sister and become a bear in my cave where I pound my bones against the wall of time, waiting. Tick, tick, tick.  Tap, tap, tap.

Even here, in sunny California where I escaped to from the Midwest six years ago, I couldn't outrun the shadows.

I was born to water, a Pisces fish, swimming in two directions.  The sound of waves  beating against my heart on a hot summer day fills me with a boundless sense of power.  I kick off my flip-flops, run along the shore in my colorful sarong like an actress in a douche commercial.  I'm a braless Marlo Thomas with an attitude, tossing her hat in the air, la-de-da!  I feel as if I could kick winter's ass in a west coast minute, bring him on.

Until he shows up unexpectedly, like a period between cycles that ruins your favorite pair of underwear, hey, what the hell?  Summer can't possibly be over yet, can it? Wait!  I'm not ready! But its too late.  He's swiped the smile from my face, stolen the dance out of my bare feet, filched my pink cat-eye sunglasses, and draped me in dusk at 4:00 in the afternoon. Go on home, Honey, he says.

So I do, hanging my hatless head, beaten again. Damn.

But this time I have a plan. Not Lexapro.  Not St. Johns wort.  Not even one of those expensive lamps that shower you with rays equivalent to a day in the sun.  No, I'm meeting the icy demon straight on this year. Got me some mittens, a pair of cross country skis, and a full-blown down-armored jacket because I've got a date with winter smack dab in the middle of Gods hand: Yosemite National Park. He's meeting me there at 6 0'clock sharp on the day after the solstice, in a cabin with a brick fireplace and beamed ceilings. I'm calling his bluff at Badger's Pass at first light.

And one more thing. I'm wearing a batik sarong under my coat and sparkly pink shades. Because you can take summer away from the girl, but you can't take it out of her.