A Thank You For The Love Within the Ethers

"You aren't supposed to pick the flowers," she said to me. My ebullient and golden, near-perfect friend said something so strange to me.

"But you are. You ARE supposed to pick the flowers. Papa taught me to pick the flowers."

I was standing in her driveway having this conversation, looking down the gravel road at the fields of flowers.

And then I wasn't.

I was somewhere else staring ahead at the sidewalk in front of me.
There was  a grey vertical cloud a bit of a distance away, almost planted on the sidewalk.
It began to take form, shifting itself, shifting itself, ethers into human.
Clearer and clearer.

He stood there with his white hat on,  big as the benevolent, beneficent, broad and face-splitting glorious smile on his face.

He covered a mile in a moment.
He wrapped me up, a hug as deep as they come, the kind he'd always given me.
He poured his strength right into me, filling up my cracks, crevices and gaping holes, all of the dark and scary places.
I hung on for dear, sweet  life.
I hung on to the shared, the remembering, the now, all that is good, all that is sacred.

And then, he was gone.

I woke up, I could not remember where I'd been.
I breathed, it was easier. I laid there, it was quieter. I looked at the day, I had enough courage.
I remembered.

Papa had come to visit.
He had shape-shifted ether to form.
He had heard my only call, the one a few weeks back when I had finally whispered to him, "I need you."
He had wrapped me up in the big "it came to pass it didn't come to stay" hug and made me right. 

Like always.

Spirit world "come" home to me, a visit in the guise of a dream.

I do not have enough thank-you's.
Not this day, not any day.
There are never enough thank-you's for the love of this world, of the spheres and for the love that never ends.

She is pure-out, full-on glory and grace

Some people are just born with grace in their beings, blood, breath. Maybe not enough people, but enough to remind the rest of us of the path that is possible and the way of that path.

I watch her. She walks toward me, it has been months since I have laid eyes on her. I see first her beauty. Her hair is a new color, but it is rich and deep like her and it must be the color she was born with because it not only becomes her, it is her. Her beauty reaches out in front of her and trails behind her, it reaches softly like her being and like her smile. I feel that first, I see it second.
I look harder.
And then I see her now.
She walks with what is more than an imperceptible limp, an almost awkward gait. She walks with that delicate precision that is the giveaway of the too careful, it is the sign where anything less or anything more, is far too painful if not impossible. She is fighting a new battle, one of many and this one the hardest, this one is to keep walking and keep moving and make the impossible, possible, it is the one that is her statement, "I am winning this round."

We hear  about and see diseases, the kind that eat away, the kind that destroy, the ones of the mind that leave the silent, the ones of the body that bit by bit take it all away.  I have watched my mother, my sister, my sweetheart battle pain that I can't comprehend. I have watched one friend die with cancer and when she left being so transparent, weightless and changed in body, that there was nothing left but her bright and shining soul.
This friend has battled one illness after another, she has opened the door to death, smiled graciously as is her way, had the requisite conversation and gently but firmly closed the door with a firm, "please come back later." Death and death's dark friends the ones that challenge and hone, scare and silence us, have stood watching her, too often. They took her mother, her grandmother, her aunts, all the women, a decade before they were as old as she. She is determined to fight the fight of her ancestors and her own at one time and win the battle for all of them.

She is one of the truly brave and beautiful. Her childhood scarred and scalding. Too much of the never-knowing, the unexpected grief and pain, the judgment, the dark corners, everything but the comfort and the consistency, everything but the grace and graciousness that are her inherent being, everything that would challenge her young and make her want to be normal, because she believed normal would be where she would finally find acceptance or safety. At 60 she has finally begun to accept, normal is not, and has never been, her path. She has had a string of successful careers and businesses, and a string of disappointments. She has been the outspoken speaker for the underdog, the downtrodden, the abused and the scared. That voice of truth cost her a business and a home she loved, those in power bent on taking it all away from her not realizing that all to her was her boys and her own heart and they had no power over those. They had come to tell her the night before, "you leave tomorrow, we are evicting you in the morning, it is over." Quietly she had closed the door, turned back to the music, smelled her just-picked flowers, continued baking and cooking, feeling the softness of the home she loved, determined that until the last conceivable moment she would immerse herself in all of it.

She raised those boys alone, no help from their father, she worked, she nurtured, she never missed a chance to empower them or support them or encourage them to be everything a human can be. And, they are. Now they are men that we all long to know and meet, kind, compassionate, smart, successful and fully devoted to their wives and children, doing it all, just like she did.

She would go on and earn degrees in her spare time and use those to speak for herself and for those who most needed  to be spoken for. She would reach out her hand to help someone to and over the bridge that they could not even see.  At some point she began to understand her work was other-wordly---that it was about energy seen and not seen. She became the student of the shaman's path.
Beware.
Physician heal thyself.
Go to the place that is the darkest place within you, the dark place of the spiritual, of the emotional, of the physical and find your way back. And when you have done it, do it again, and again, and again.

She has. Her body born fragile, has continued to be challenged every year, always with more to come. And now on top of all of those challenges, the little tick that bit her years ago and left its poison to wreak a demolition derby in her body for the next five years has almost won. The views are split and many, how do you heal those with this type of sickness, what might work, or has the best chance of working before everything quits working. She has taken the only path for her. Wholistic and careful and non-traditional. Expensive, more than she makes in a month. She walks, she drives, she works, she takes care of the animals, her doctor unable to understand how she can do any of it, but it is who she is and she will do it.

She tells me, "last week I began walking into chairs and tables and I cannot control the direction of my steps, the pain is unbearable and I am scared."

I am running out of words, I am running out of hope to spread, I only can find a little humor and a true, real question to share. "WHAT were you f--ing thinking when you wrote the blueprint for this life? what were you thinking to become a saint in one go-round???"

She laughs. She nearly always finds a laugh. But the laugh itself is quiet and thoughtful. She has lived so many miles of challenge, of fight. She has always found her way and she has always found her way alone. The moments when most she has needed anyone, they have not been there. She has not complained, (I try to think when I have ever heard her complain) but she has suffered and then she has gone on, to heal herself and do it. It is as she says, her path.

I watch her walk towards me. I see her pain. I see her heart. I hold her heart in mine.
I have faith in her.

I see her glance behind her at darkness and his friends, she waves to them and keeps walking towards me.
She is nothing but beautiful.
She is one of the strong, one of the Amazon strong and she is pure-out, full-on grace and glory.

Liquid Brain, The All Out Snotty Crying Strength, "It Is What It Is"

Four years ago it was always the same. I'd go see the Healer, he would look at me and I would begin to cry, not just a little crying, not the sissy kind of crying but the big-full-on-broken-down-full-on-wearied-out-full-on-worn-out-gone-to-hell-in-a-handbasket-full-of-snot-crying. The hiccuping kind. The kind you most often feel stupid after. The kind that if you "pride"yourself on strength, makes you mad as hell you "showed" weakness. The kind that after it happens more than three times you finally give in to the learning and say, "It is what it is." Sometimes it might be the quickest way of getting to "It is what it is."


Meme told me she'd had a full-out-hiccuping-day-long-cry and she was really upset with herself. That's the way strong women are until they aren't, until they get to, "it is what it is." Or, until they get to the place they realize that in certain moments we don't have a clue and we can't define what it actually is: bad, indifferent, educational, life-changing, beautiful, funny, awful, awfully good, what it is or  the opposite of what it is. Sometimes it really is about silver linings, things that are illusions, grace on the other side of that waterfall of challenge, strength in the middle of the snotty nosed cry. Sometimes maybe oftentimes it is about how when life shifts up our lessons we have to shift up our labels and our semantics to keep up---and most often we do this with a WTF planted on our faces, our bodies rolled into question marks and all if it, right before we hit our knees.


Meme's long ass hiccup day of crying had taken her straight to that place and the place we find ourselves loudly saying, "this isn't me, this isn't who I am. I am stronger than this."


I'd said to her, "But it is. It is who you are, it is who we all are. We are all the pieces and all the parts and it is always what it seems and what it doesn't seem and most especially when we say, it isn't who we are..."


 I told her that the year of liquid brain had brought me to a clearer understanding of things like who we are and what we take for granted about ourselves and how we think about ourselves and the pieces that make it all up, that with liquid brain it all goes melting down the street in front of us and we can see it but it has all run together and so we stare and wait until it solidifies a little bit and forms any kind of new solid whole that once again spells out life. Liquid brain is like throwing ourselves up in the air in pieces and watching as they float back down and happiness is catching some of them and putting the some back together. The some back together becomes the new story and new stories mean change, mean we've moved on from the old and the letting go and we are free to write the new challenge, with new humor and new sweet. We can trade the old weak for a new strong, the old job for a new title, the cancer for the grace, the family can expand with in-laws and the story can grow as long as we need it to, until it is time to throw ourselves up and catch the rewrite, again.


Liquid brain is like snotty nosed crying, it brings you up short and just pauses you and you go on living as best you can and in a way that usually people only get a glimmer of how far you have melted and how far you have to go. Sometimes they see a together person when all you see is that liquid running down the street in front of you. Perceptions, perspective. Damn if it doesn't make you strong while it softens up all your edges, and damn if when you put your Humpty Dumpty self back together again you don't discover that you are no longer made of something hard, something rigid, something really defined, but instead, something sweetly, strongly soft with blurred and open spaces and something that  if you fall, will only crack, heal and then be whole again.


She repeats. "This isn't me, I don't wallow, I'm so strong, I never cry." And I think how all that crying and all that liquifying and all that letting go only made and makes me stronger  and how it is making her stronger too.


It is hard to pick up one illusion and discard another, hard to become everything we believe we are not. But if we can find that place inside that recognizes or gets the slimmest math glimmer of parts of the whole, we can maybe get to the loving of each of the parts. And whether the part is the big snotty cry that takes us straight to strength,  the big shout of whoohooo that takes us straight to heart, the big glue of laugher that holds it all together or  the big sigh of surrender that takes us straight to where it really all happens, it is what it is and what it is, is all of it.

Moving Through Hatred

We have had this talk more than a few times these last two decades, the Healer and I. The talk about the times to come, the earth changes, the changes in consciousness that have to happen, the big fork in the road, and the way home. In the last few years each time it becomes harder and harder for me to understand human behavior and judgment I have found solace that it is in the moving through we get to the other side. It is in the suffering, we find Grace. It is what it is and within that there is a way.


I dread going downstairs to Mama's today. It is all I can do myself to get out of bed. My heart is like a boulder. Last night for the first time in 20 years, my Sweetheart went outside and screamed into the sky, not once but five times. He screamed. What else can you do at times but send it  up to to the angels. That is my take on screaming into the sky. His was knowing full well that neighbors on all sides but one had probably voted For this day. He wanted them to know how he felt. He wanted them to know he hated them. I feel like crying, Mama will have cried already, I believe my Sweetheart has cried as well, although he will never let me see that.


Last night as he screamed I went to the place of eerie quiet where it is all there is to do. It is the place where helplessness and hope meet inevitability and shrink into nothing. And nothing is what it all becomes in that moment until it re-forms and guides me someplace different.


I tell him I cannot bear to hear the word, to not say the word, I am almost shouting myself, silence to shouting can too often come quickly.


"DON'T say HATE."


"I hate them all, all of them who voted this way, I hate all of their ignorant, stupid, uneducated, self-righteous, Christian selves."


"Don't make like the Bible scholar you aren't. It is not all the Christians, so don't blame the Christians.
And.
DON'T SAY HATE. HATING THEM MAKES YOU THEIR EQUAL. HATING IS HATING. PERIOD. "


"You tell me what you want me to call them and I'll call them that."


I don't have the answer. I am not sure in this moment how to define without labeling how to explain without judging, how to even talk about it.  It is the calling each other anything except the sweet and good where the walk becomes precarious, it is only in the love we are safe. But in this moment I'm faltering. I think of Billy and Franklin and spending money on the bill boards for hate. I know they didn't speak for God even if they are so misguided they believe they did. My own anger boils up and it is all I can do to not scream at the sky myself. It is like that with hate. Hate begets hate and it multiplies as fast as rabbits and rats.  I think that the religious leaders of Iran who foster hatred and the religious leaders of America who foster hatred are no different. I think about how the "right" is to me so wrong and the label in that. I think about governments built on religion, wars raged for religion, and the narrow views of the few. I think The Handmaid's Tale is not a work of fiction, of the 1,000 bills in legislatures across this country legislating women's activities, health, behaviors, of the fear, of the need to be right, of the hatred driving it all. I think of the  Dalai Lama who said it would be the Western Woman who would change this world. I think it is time to dress up, get out of the house and start the world changing. I wonder which state I'll be living in next. I think it was easier when I moved from NC to Seattle the first time, it was me, Milda and the pick-up truck. Now how to get us all there and how would Mama adjust.


I think about it all and try to find my hope. I think about it all and try to keep my faith. I think about it all and know that love is always the only way out and through, around and over, the only thing and way that makes the big changes, brings about the big healing. I think about it all and step clear and dead into the center of the hatred that boils and spews and wounds and kills. I step into that center and know that this is the path of healing, this is the path of finding our way home, this is the way and the place we all go back to love, but only, only, when we all get sick enough of hatred, we can hate no more.


(Note: This is written on May 9, 2012 the day after North Carolina passed an amendment to their Constitution. An amendment as I understand it funded by a hate group and 12 years in the making. An amendment that will take away rights not only of homosexuals but heterosexuals, the 2nd amendment to the NC Constitution, the first being against interracial marriage. A sad history and a sad present.)

                                             

She Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of Seeming Ease

Every day I am astounded by the women around me. By their strength and beauty, determination and limitless, if sometimes faltering, courage.


They are often the women who have been the mothers not only of their own children  but of their own mothers. The ones who have been the caregivers from childhood, have weathered the deep dark, have waded in scalding streams and swum against a waterfall. And every single one of them is beautiful, each differently so, their light shining and to me in often moments, gently blinding. These are the women who have surrounded my life, the ones I reach out to, embrace and speak ever and on-going thank-you tos. Their hair silver, and blonde, white and rich brown, almost maroon, uniquely colorful, but always covering heads full of the real of wisdom. Their clothes, conservative, or trendy, cutting edge or simple, cover the scars, the  muscles, the  layers, the pieces that have carried them through decades of illness and angst, their own and the ones they have  healed or stood beside.
All of these women laugh--- loud, long, soft, wide, appropriately and inappropriately. All of these women, I am convinced, giggle and snort with the angels.


These are the women who every day, change their world, my world, this world and we all whether we know it or not, count on it.


I have sat in the long dark tunnels with them, each of us looking for the thinnest stream or miniscule pinpoint of light that will give  guidance towards the next place, or step, or movement forward, squinting towards and for the light that will symbolize the hope and the going beyond.  I have held them tight through their tears and my own and sat in belief and disbelief, in the waiting, in the dance, in the heart splattered yet singing. I have seen when transformation comes, the blessedness of patience, deep devotion, prayer, the blessedness of suffering held within grace, held within it all. 


Yesterday she flew.


My friend who will soon be 50. She flew through the air in a dance on fabric, her blonde hair hanging towards the ground. She waltzed in space, with wings of giant turquoise. Her strong arms, walking her up the blue and up the yellow into the air, towards the sky. Her smile hiding her fear of performance, hiding anything else in her heart, just showing us the luminosity of challenge when challenge is met and befriended and takes us to new heights. This friend of mine who has supported and lifted my soul, shared life's sweetness and blessing bowls, the best of sunsets and giggles; this friend of mine who somehow unthinkably, improbably, impossibly, traveled with me a few weeks ago to the most cutting, jarring and soul-shaking place in our relating and who matched me step by step finding our way back out, blessedly walking through melting the hard and jagged into a liquid stream and back into the golden heart of love.


She is alone, or a part of 2 or 3, dancing in the air with  those 2 and 3 decades younger, and she is outshining them all, golden, luminous and smiling.
I watch her, I am inspired, I am profoundly thankful, I am in the heart of grace.


She is one of the women, one of the strong, one of the beautiful.
She is a weaver, she is an alchemist and she flies,
with the greatest of seeming ease.

               http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr-wkqv8tR8

Feet Don't Fail Me Now

In that two hour stretch of too early morning I find myself thinking,  if my feet could shout up at my head how many times would they be shouting,  "Please don't make me!" or "I'm NOT going there!"


If I heard them, if I listened, how many times would I change my course, back it up, how many ways would I miss every place I needed to go.


 I reckon had that feet-shout been heard in my head  I would have missed most of the Holy Moly, Holy Sh**, gobsmacked, WTF moments and subsequent enlightenment.  I would have missed the bulk of what has taught me, made me smarter and brought me here --- even if here is with my mouth hanging open until I hear that voice from childhood saying,  "Shut your mouth or the flies will fly in."


It is a new year and my feet are twitchy, they are no doubt talking to me in sign language and responding to a yesterday written in the oddest of odd, to a day ahead that holds God knows what, and to a year that was often, a trudge dance.


I'm not sure how nuanced the understanding of my thinking feet are,  but  I'm guessing like the rest of me, they are just hoping to land on solid instead of squishy ground and hoping to find their way through and home.


 If my feet could talk and I heard them calling out,
"squishy surreal upfront"
"don't make me"
"backwards, go backwards"
what I would do.


I'm hoping I'd just have enough faith to look down and keep saying "don't fail me now," keep my eyes pealed for the WTF's and remember to periodically shut my mouth.

Early morning and what is and isn't in my head

Yesterday and it is  2:38 in the morning. Sounds like a line from a country song, who knows if it's  a good one. Two days in a row, I'm awake and thoughts are running  like a clear, mountain stream. Thank God.


I am grateful when the lunar lunacies spend the night away from home and when the things that talk to me in the middle of the night do so quietly and calmly. Quiet and calm beats the hell out of unruly talking children thoughts who get up in my head, shout, laugh and poke at me, who get scared and scream at me. Spending  early morning with thoughts that run on quiet power and speak to me like I have good sense,  are easy. Early morning with screaming unruly children thoughts is when a five minute conversation lasts 10,000 years and  being run over by a Mack truck would be a kinder thing.


I get up and write my emos. For whatever reason, the last two weeks all the memos have been emos. That is what keeps popping out of my mouth, "I'll write you an emo." I need to remember to look emo up---maybe there is a deeper meaning to writing emos than writing memos, the thought at least entertains me, more than the actual emos do. I write the emos and send a pile of them off and climb back into bed. It is 3:38.


I can't find a place for my legs because Gratefulest Dog has decided my absence means he can stretch out horizontally and he has left me an inch. I move my legs. He ends up off the bed and on the floor. Immediately his Dad wakes up.


"Why are you shoving the dog off the bed?"
"I didn't. I moved my legs and off he went."


"WHY are you shoving the dog off the bed?"
I didn't, I swear I moved my legs and he went off."


"Right."
Gratefulest is back on the bed by this time, half-horizontal and half-vertical. We are awake.


He tells me it is all my doing that the dog is on the bed to begin with. I refuse to own that one. I remember when he came and he slept on the sunroom floor and stared in the windows at us, and we stared back. He had his bed and we had ours. We were not so unified at 3:38 in the morning.


"Every time I went out of town, he slept with you. You started it."
"That's different."


It doesn't seem to be a productive conversation but it makes us both laugh. We start talking about an art project in Georgia, Perceptual Control Theory, the emos, the printer, the offices, the studio, retrofitting plumbing. We start talking about something else, he says, "You remember?" As usual, I don't. I used to always remember.


 I tell him, "You know I don't know what is in my head anymore but I sure as hell know what isn't." Country song 2.


 It is a long conversation ---probably the longest one we've had in weeks. It is real and it is us and it is funny. Thank God. The gifts 3:38 and a dog flying in the morning can bring.


There is a loud, low noise that hums above us and hangs out. "What the hell is that?" It lasts about a minute. Both of us are too quiet and run through our heads anything it could have been. It comes back and hangs and lingers again. It shakes us up and we can't come up with a single, "good" explanation.


Sweetheart gets up. Time for early coffee and pondering the fact that he wishes a UFO would come and visit. He has wished it for a long, long time. I lie in bed and think how it would be to run downstairs and tell Mama. To tell her that the world she believes has gone crazy now has  a UFO and real ETs in it. When I tell her later in the day, she laughs. And then she ponders what that means.


It is almost the New Year, and tomorrow night I will probably be wide awake again in the middle of the night, listening for Sweetheart's UFO. I will be grateful if the thoughts are quietly conversing and not the unruly children screaming, it would be a good way to have a new beginning. I will lie there and  feel Gratefulest up against my legs and maybe if I'm lucky, hear Sweetheart laugh in his sleep and I will not so much care what is or isn't in my head.

We Take Blessings Too

He is standing a bit away from the front doors and ringing a bell.  Each person he sees, near or far, he shouts to,  "Merry Christmas". Like everyone I see, I avert my eyes and scurry past.

I leave the store having forgotten to get the cash back I'd planned to get because once in line I couldn't remember why I needed any. I knew there wasn't any point in just "having" some. Sweetheart would find it and he would need it more, not in the wishful thinking way, or the made-up kind of way but the real kind of way. So here I was back outside the door, without so much as a nickel, looking at the man and his bucket, and as usual remembering later what I'd wished I'd remembered sooner.


This time I looked at him.


"I'm so sorry. I meant to get some cash. I don't even have a dime or a quarter in my purse." But to be sure, I looked, I stood there moving everything around hoping that something would materialize. He kept ringing his bell and looked at me and smiled.


"We take blessings too. Most people don't know we take blessings too, most people just walk past and don't say 'nuthin so I can't tell 'em."


 I think how I'd just walked past and said  'nuthin. I think how I'd looked at him and immediately gotten  caught up in the thinking of everything I couldn't give, didn't have or what was expected of me. When  all I needed to do was say Merry Christmas  and let him give me his gift. 


"Thank you for telling me, thank you for reminding me. Bless you, bless you for what you are doing and bless you in the days to come. Merry Christmas."


I touch his shoulder, look him in the eye and smile.


As I drive out of the parking lot I watch the people flooding in and out of  the store doors and I listen for someone to return his Merry Christmas. I don't hear a single one.


Sweetheart said yesterday everywhere he drove people were in a hurry and just plain mad, they were in a hurry so that later when they weren't, they could stop and say, "Merry Christmas" and by then maybe mean it.


Today I have been reminded of the simple, the important, the moment, of the need to slow it down, look and listen for the stranger bearing merry and bearing blessings.


Today I have been reminded that


"We all take blessings too."

The Stories That Come and Go Like Water

I am held in the stories that come and go like water. Standing still, watching and feeling.


Challenge. Suffering. Challenge. Suffering. Weakness. Strength. Humor. Hope. Grace.
Coming and going.


I stand still within the stories that are layered and nuanced, subtle and unsubtle, that scream and cry, that whimper and whisper, that beg and demand, that rip out the heart and then slap on the laughter.


Mama's face looks paler every day. There is the pain that is her constant companion, but mostly there is her heart that feels it all.


"I have lived through wars, and a Great Depression, I have lived through ugly politics and soldiers coming home to have no jobs. But this, this is crazy. It has never been quite so bad and quite so crazy and I don't understand this crazy."


Mama's story this day will be followed by five or six, or ten more that all are held in suffering, in seeking, in not so often, understanding.


I only know how to reach out my hand. I only know how to reach out my heart. I can steady with my hand and wrap them all up in my heart.


I can listen.


I can honor each one and its storybringer. I can one day, write them.


I look for a flash of the  iridescent, the glimmer that signals the wings where the quiet quiet quiet giggle rides piggyback with the quiet quiet quiet hope, where for a moment the suffering will ease, the story will change  and where the page will turn.


I stand still
I am held
in the stories that come and go like water.

Dreaming Abundance, Dreaming Grateful

I woke up this morning and for once remembered the dream, vividly, all of the images and all of the conversation. Usually I only remember pieces, morning blurs the pieces and quickly quiets the real and scary,  real and joyful,  the colorful that is filled with live people and dead people.  Morning usually sends the gifts and journey of Mother Moon away.


Today, I remember.


We walk across a breezeway into a different room---away from what I think is  familiar to what I think is  unknown. As we walk towards one from the other I realize that we are going from what belongs to us to another part of what belongs to us.


"I don't remember we had this room."


I spot the bathroom.


"Look at that bathtub. It is huge. It has JETS. I can soak in lavender. How could we have a bathroom with this tub and I didn't know it?"


I walk out of the bathroom and into a great room that has a kitchen, room for a bed, room for a living area, floor to ceiling windows except for the places that hold the bookcases and the fireplaces. Beautifully small in the way-big-enough-kind-of-way, minimalist but having everything we need, want and have wished for in the place we have wanted to live these last umpteen years. I look out the windows, see the big green, the Grandaddy Spirit trees and stand in awe. I spin around and count the fireplaces, not one but three, each beautiful, each different, each big and lit and pulling me into their warm, into their light.


"We have fireplaces? How did I not know we had fireplaces? I just told someone we didn't have a fireplace? And we have THREE."


"We could live here---in our place. In the place we've always wanted, in the place that holds our dreams, in the place that already belongs to us."


Everything we wanted, dreamed about, was already ours.


I am astounded. I am thrown. I am thankful.


"Oh."


"So."


"Wow."

Crackle, Rustle, Happy Birthday

Crackle, crackle, crackle, crackle.


I moved.


Crackle, crackle, crackle, crackle.


I lifted my arm.


Rustle, rustle, rustle, rustle.


I shifted.


Crackle, rustle, rustle, crackle, crackle.


I opened my eyes.


I was covered in a few hundred little pieces of paper.
I lifted one up and looked at it. I squinted and read the tiny writing.


I love you.


I turned my head. He smiled and said, "I love you."


It was the spring of 1974 and the man I was living with but not living with not according to if you'd asked my parents, the man I would later marry and later divorce had covered me in hundreds of I love you's. It was one of the reasons I  loved him and one of the reasons he claimed a piece of my heart and one of the reasons he still has the key to that piece of my heart. It was one of the reasons that it is always worth loving, even when we change, even when we walk apart and away. It is one of the reasons that as we continue to become who we are, the people who have loved us or shared with us become even more important.


It is your birthday today Wingfield.
Close your eyes and imagine that I have sent a shower of hundreds of little pieces of paper floating down on you, some of them say, I love you and some of them say Thank you and some of them say, Happy Birthday and some of them simply crackle and rustle for the remembering and for the fun of the sound of it.

Brian's Masked Sunrise

I stare at the painting. Its reds, oranges, yellows and flight move me as they have for 27 years. All things being equal, odds are, based on everything else I no longer have, that I would not have this either. For a good while it was 90% of everything I owned. It traveled with me from Seattle to Santa Fe, from Santa Fe to Dallas, back to Seattle, in the cargo of the plane to New York, and in the back of the mini-teeny truck home to NC. It traveled to Las Vegas, to a small apartment in Hilton Head and on to Atlanta, then to the NC tobacco barn, the log cabin and finally, this home where many lives and stories, merged.  I  have left clothes, furniture, books and most other things behind, but Brian and his Masked Sunrise have remained a constant, the first thing in place no matter where I landed, like my own sacred cornerstone, a sacred cornerstone and a sacred knowing, as long as Brian was with me, I could rise free as his birds into the sunrise.

Masked sunrise, maybe it was a metaphor for his life, the potential, the glory, and the mask. For me it was and is always about the sunrise as metaphor for possibility, goodness, love, sustenance, awe, for the true in nature and the true in us, for the palpably beautiful and the palpably real.


I see the blackbird winging towards the heart of sunrise and I think how much it is like Brian. Always in motion, always striving, determined to make it even when the depression, the suffering, the callousness, the disrespect and inhumanity tried to crush his beautiful soul, he was always seeking to fly, he was always seeking glory in the morning.


He has been sitting company a lot with me these last days. It has just been his birthday and mine.


I see him as I first saw him, leaping across the stage in the hot pink stretch pants that he later  gave  to me, the ones that defined him and later defined me, the ones I wore with hot pink stillettos, funk, bad taste and full-on "this is who I am." They were "who we were," shared.


I remember the first Thanksgiving where he invited all his alone friends and he cooked for us from his heart in his gourmet way.  I had not yet cultivated the taste for chestnuts, and brussel sprouts, or seaweed, I was longing for  thick gravy, stuffing made with butter and a pile of mashed potatoes. In memory it became two things, the Thanksgiving of trying to swallow what I'd rather have spit in the napkin and the Thanksgiving where alone hearts were embraced in a day of giving thanks for all the hearts. It is why each year, the tables and borrowed chairs grow and Mama's and my plates merge and each year it is more challenging to feed the growing Thanksgiving numbers, but it is why the Blessing Bowl overflows. It is Thanksgiving as ritual and heart, and as Brian defined it in 1977.


Brian was deep and deeply committed, a deep thinker, a deep feeler, a deep everythinger. He was deeply healthy and deeply working on staying that way, in either a slim and lithe dancer's body or the body builder, muscled and strong one. When he was training he'd think nothing of working out for 3 hours and ending the work-out with a visit to see me, running up the 46 flights of high-rise steps to get to my office. Most often, he'd walk in barely breathless and giving me "the look." The one that came when he saw my croissants and bacon and butter that he knew I'd either taken the elevator to get or sent Tina to get while my own butt stayed parked happily in my chair.  I would meet his look, reach for my bacon and we would talk. One day he waved his arm at me when he walked in, his hands held a rolled up  sheet of paper. An almost perfect likeness of me drawn from memory. The frame has long-since disappeared, the offwhite paper is smudged and dirty, but it hangs between my office and bedroom.  It is signed by 4 fingerprints turned into hearts that I remember he said he had blown kisses into.

He called me early one Saturday, he had a borrowed car, and took me to a  beach on the peninsula, a picnic basket of feast treats and a bottle of champagne and we sat and stared at the wild ocean and huddled together in appreciation of magic.  It was one of many Brian surprises, he delighted in giving and he delighted in surprises and he was master at combining both.  I was often the recipient of full-out serendipitous goodness.  The first gift ever I found on my pillow. He'd taken a bus from Seattle to Kirkland, broken into my house and placed an inscribed copy of The Red Balloon on my pillow. He'd locked the house back up and quietly left.  Years later when he came to visit he would leave behind more gifts or mail them after he left. The green bowl, the weaving he'd done on his grandmother's loom, "Things Not Seen" a painting I"d fallen in love with from the slides,  As I finally quit traveling and most of what I owned was not just my sunrise, as my possessions began to grow again, so did the gifts from Brian. He delighted my heart and my home.


The last thing that came a handmade book, each page a page of his last vision quest, each page a short poem of his soul that day, each page one day closer to when he decided that he wanted to live and not die. It is a beautiful book, fragile, delicate and unmeasurably strong, it is him. His grandmother's teachings about life and art had mostly sustained him, he had made peace with the love of his family and the love of his family removed. He had found partners and left partners, had had successes and the many lean times when having been the first Barista for Starbucks he would always return to that for making the money to pay the rent when the stretches between one man shows were too long. And he had doubted himself, his life and his gifts more times than a human being should, but finally, had found some peace.


Sometimes we would lose each other for a year or 2 or 3 but always we would find each other again. His last trip here he stood over the pool in the woods imagining his next one man show and beginning to draw figure after figure swimming, diving, flying, leaping, all of the figures in a place of movement but also all in a place of surrender  (just like him). He would cook our dinner, and draw, he would laugh at Jeff not smoking smoking and the curiously funny way that Papa broke his leg, he would talk of his Borzois and how he missed them. He would come upstairs to tell me he would be sleeping on the couch in the den because the spirits in the basement were way too active.


He would leave. For the last time.


I knew he had moved to a small town north of Seattle, had finally found a partner he was happy with, that he was teaching and working on several new shows I knew he was finally almost as close as genius can ever get to being happy.


I lost him for 2 years, I googled him. I couldn't find him and then one day a review appeared, of a one-man show of figures leaping and moving, dancing and flying off into surrender. I finally reached the gallery to ask  them to have him call me.


"Oh." She said.


"I don't know how to tell you this...
 That show was 2 years ago...
 and well, Brian died."


I hung up.


Over the course of the next few days I would learn about an opening night, a mosquito bite, a headache that started and wouldn't quit, a hospital that said nothing was wrong, a return trip back a few days later too late, a coma and then his death. I would learn of a family who did not want his paintings but finally took them anyway, unhappy with what they perceived as a burden.
I would never learn about his partner, the end of his life, his final almost happiness.


I would learn about fleeting, and about too sudden. I would remember big generous and big love.


These days he has been with me. His birthday August 28.
Telling people I love them is something I do, every day, and as often as possible. For whatever reason, I never told Brian enough.


I place the Red Balloon, the green bowl, the poster, the card, his handmade book on the woven throw, the throw that is  on the guest bedroom bed,  the one he wove with love, the one that adds his love to mine and reaches out in welcome to the one who comes to stay. I look at what is symbolic of the person who so enriched and continues to enrich my life. The soul I believe still paints the sunrise, while sitting in the middle of it.


I wonder if he knows how big he was, how gifted, how loving, how powerful, how beautiful. I wonder if he knows how much I loved him, how much he gave me, how much because of him, that glorious sunrises and flight free as a bird have always been and always will be, my possibility.

Things Not Seen

A note to me, a poem sealed with a kiss.
 "We fall & climb again into arcs of radiance fill the sky with vibration
 impelled like summer birds."

33 years of gifts that traveled in one small box across the country and back again.  The Red Balloon inscribed in 1977, the last handmade book from his 2004 vision quest, the weaving made on his grandmother's loom.

The article on Brian in 1996 New American Paintings: A Quarterly Exhibition, Open Studios Competition Number VI

Finding Beautiful

I think everyone should be told they’re beautiful until they believe it. 
- Unknown

Mama taught me more than a few things that stuck. One of them has to do with taking that extra moment on any given day, no matter where my head is, (and most especially when it is out of the world or up my ass) to say a few kind words to a stranger. It used to embarrass my ex, she would stop at a stranger's table to say,  "What a beautiful family you are," or, "the parts of your conversation that carried over to me that I should not have been listening to, were perfectly delightful." (The latter we all felt a little embarrassed about.) On the hot days of summer at her old apartment when the Hispanic crew were worn slap out, Mama would fix trays of ice tea and cookies and walk outside and motion to them to come and she would serve them a little respite. I have seen her stop a stranger on the street to tell them what a beautiful smile they have, a beautiful blouse they are wearing, how pretty their hair looks that day, something, always finding something she could compliment them on... sometimes reaching out her hand to touch them softly on their shoulder as if she knew they needed reassurance. This was and is Mama's way of telling the people she knows and doesn't, they are beautiful.

I try to remember. 


I might have been the other pea in my Father's pod, but in many ways, I am my Mother's daughter.

I try to combine Mama with me.  I try to find my own way to voicing kind and beautiful. 

There is no end to the ways of telling each other we're beautiful, if we trust ourselves to do it, step outside the comfort zone, reach out and down and say loudly in the quietest of ways, "You are beautiful." That one moment of our spontaneity births another moment of serendipity and maybe a little mirabilia. That one moment is an extra, the kind of extra that deep inside we all need and sometimes hope for, the kind that could change a life and the kind that in the end, will be what changes a world. 


The water, the breath, the food, they sustain us, being told we are beautiful gives us back our hope. The think tanks, the physicists, the philanthropists, the groups doing all the big and small of changing the world, somehow or way they began when kind met beautiful out loud and then they grew together.


Or,  maybe they met Mama. 

It is time for me to start the "You are beautiful" list, telling at least one person or one more person a day they are beautiful, and trying to see the beauty in at least one person I don't find beautiful at all. It needs to be a footnoted list, where every time I don't notice and should, I think about it and don't, and where every judgment that stops me seeing, will write itself. It needs to be a miles long and world traveling list, where its numbers grow and the footnotes shrink. 


Banjoel says it will take a long time, the telling everyone they are beautiful until they get it. It isn't just that enough of us might not be saying it but it is also that most people might not be hearing it. Beyond that he says it is doable. 

So I don't know who you are and when you read this, but when you do, I have this to say. 


"You are beautiful."


 I mean it. 


And if you don't think so, sit down and stay there until you figure it out, all the ways or any of the ways, you are beautiful.

Then sit with your own beauty or any part of it you can own.


And when you are done, go tell somebody else.
And mean it.

Blue Green Venus and the Stuff They Say

Ninety degrees. He has to mix and pour in daylight. Mixing by hand, buckets of tint, sakrete, stone, he starts the process he cannot stop, he lays the base of who she is.  He tints, he mixes, he fills the 50 pound buckets, he pours, he makes her real. 

He has taken her apart, and put her back together on paper and in steel. He has changed her butt, her legs and twat, three times,  Like the nails, the water bringer, the thought, she is talking to him and  she has stuff to say. He is listening like he always does. The wood, the metal, the steel, the bronze, they tell him stuff, he tells them stuff,  most times they work it out, together. 

Sometimes they tell him stuff before, sometimes after, it is easier before.

Blue Venus. She is, he thinks, blue and modest, it is what he saw in that place where he sees.


He mixes and blue-tints, carries and pours, then leaves her to become what she is.


Turns out she had stuff to say, after. 


He laughs.


She is not blue, she is not modest, she is green and full of attitude.
He knows that when he grinds, polishes and lacquers she will have the final say.





He tells me his story, he tells me her story, as he sees art.


I tell him his story, I tell him her story, as I see life.


Sculpting life and sculpting Venus are close to the same. The getting born-poured-shaped-put together-taken apart-put together-taken apart-hammered out-ground on-chiseled at--buffed up-polished smooth-textures-colors-attitudes-befores-afters, the saying stuff, the not saying stuff and the sometimes working it out together.

The Gratefulest Dog and Perfect

It was about four weeks before Papa died. The house and those of us in it, were held together by a fragile thread. Every day I was juggling hearts and trying to keep them from slamming to the ground. Every day  I was trying to hold center when center had gone.


I had stopped to stare out the window and just breathe. The phone rang.
"Honey, I think we have a dog."
I stopped breathing.
"Did you hear me? I think we have a dog. The people behind the studio are gone and abandoned their dog, left him tied up, left him. I'm bringing him home. We have a dog!"
I still had not breathed.
"Honey? Are you listening?"


Sweet Lord. Three years since we'd lost Belle and Zeus, followed by two years near hell. My sweetheart's heart had a big hole that needed filling, and the only thing that would repair it was a  dog. I knew it was absolutely what he needed and absolutely what I did not.  It was as timing goes, perfectly imperfect. I could see the need and feel the impossibility. Now?  No.


The sliding door opened and in he came, a black and white border collie almost stuck to his side.  I looked at him, I looked at "the" dog and I waited. He looked at me and he waited. "The" dog looked at both of us and waited.


I got it out in a whisper.


"No.  We aren't keeping him. Not now.  No. Sorry. So sorry, but no, not now."


He looked absolutely stricken and he had just looked happy.


"But he came to us, he was left for us, right by the studio. Right at my back door. He was left for me... All you have to do is look, and you'll see he's wonderful. Can't you see?"


"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But No. "


I started to cry.


"I know you need a dog, I know you really need a dog. I know he came to you, I understand. But you, you have to understand. I can't love any more right now. I can't ask my heart to take on loving any more right now. I can't bring another being, another spirit into my heart. I can't take care of another living thing, I can't love another living thing. My heart is as wide open as it can be and all of it hurts. I wish I could, I would if I could, but I can't. I.....Just....Can't."


He got up, walked over to the sliding door and out. With the dog. He was angry, he was sad, he hurt.


An hour passed, it is a long drive to the studio and I was sure he was explaining to the dog as best he could, what he really couldn't explain to himself.  He called me. "I let him go."


Click.


I felt bad, but I could't feel any worse than I already felt. Bad was bad and sad was sad. End of story.


Three hours passed, the phone rang. "He came back. I let him go. I told him not to come back.  He came back. I took him away again  and he came back. We're keeping him. That's all there is to it. He's ours. His name is Presley, they named him Presley. And Presley and I are coming home."


I walked back over to Mama and Papa's.


It would be awhile, more than a month before I got to know Presley. A month where I was steeped in how the living, die, and we die with them. In sitting vigil,  picking nosegays to place by the bed, in singing and softly holding hands and hearts, in the very gentle, sad, quiet.  Presley did not intrude, but quietly wrapped his heart in grateful and his Dad's heart in his own while my heart was wrapped up in the rest of it.


A few months later I was watching him, wondering about how he lay with his head upside down devotedly staring at  his Dad and me. He had mastered that, just as he had mastered complete devotion to his father, and earnest, grateful and adoring to the rest of us. It was about that time when the hugging started. If I reached for him, he would sit on his haunches and wrap both his paws around my arm and hug me. I couldn't touch him that he didn't hug me. He was hugging me all of the time and hugging everyone else, most of the time, he still is. Except for Mama. He knew instinctively about her paper thin skin, he knew that she required, gentle. Instead he would put his paws delicately on the edge of her chair, lean in towards her face and look at her as if to say, "I love you."  In the last few days he has become her nighttime guardian. She says, "I am going to bed" and he will stand by her side and wait as she puts on her pajamas, he will walk beside the walker as she goes into the bedroom and wait patiently while she climbs into bed and turns off her light. And then he will stick his nose on her hand, say Good Night and leave her safe and sound.


He has befriended the world, the people, the cats, the squirrels, the deer, the other dogs, every creature, every size, every age and every number of legs. He has made willing and earnest a part of his grateful, asking permission to venture to places unknown and high-tailing it back the moment he hears his Dad's whistle. He is kind. When friends come to play he greets them with his favorite toy and drops it at their feet, if they both are catching whatever is thrown, he will catch his, bring it back to them and add his bounty to their own, and if the all-out-one-to-one- chase is on--- he'll pull up and let them have the glory.

He is the consummate Wal-Mart greeter at home, the beach, the sculpture shows, the studio, everywhere he goes. And he lives the way of  kind, earnest, friendly, grateful and perfect.


ABH says to me,  "He is perfect you know, he is the most perfect dog I have ever known."
I said, "I know."


I tell her I've been having regular and frequent little talks with him.
Eye to eye, face to face, nose to nose, I stroke his head and tell him how much he has saved his Daddy's heart and built up the rest of our own. I tell him how we love him and how he has made us grateful.  I tell him life is a  sweet-hard story especially the part about the road up ahead. I tell him that he is perfect and that probably next time he will be a street urchin child. That when that happens he will feel differently, he will think differently, he will be lost differently and he will be found differently, but no matter it will be OK. I tell him that if he forgets the good, kind, sweet, grateful and earnest, that sometime he will remember them again. I tell him that next time he should look for his friends because they will be there and he will know them. And I tell him to keep his eyes peeled for angels because they will always show up when needed, although he may not recognize them by their look. I tell him they may be standing tall or upside down hugging but one thing is for sure they will arrive when the timing is perfectly imperfect, but imperfectly perfect.