Declarations

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation...."

Bless their subversive hearts! Our founding fathers were cheeky, they were. I always like to imagine the King's reactions when he read the Declaration of Independence. I'm betting he was surprised in a royal How DARE They? kind of way, you think? Right after that, I imagine his face getting very red. I "see" him saying out loud - or at least thinking - the 18th century version of, Those little shits. I'll teach them a lesson!

The founding brothers weren't perfect - far from it in fact, but they had a lot of nerve, they had conviction. Wow! I wish I had that level of faith, that degree of self confidence. Oh yeah.

May we all be liberated from the things that oppress us: our fears, our worries, guilt, bouts of the shoulds. May each of us muster the nerve to declare ourselves independent and interdependent, may we find within ourselves the confidence to get out from under the thumb of whatever weighs us down. May freedom ring. Cheers!

Thanks, Walt

Thus in silence in dreams' projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all dark night - some are so young;
Some suffer so much - I recall the experience sweet and sad...

--Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1876

Labors of Love

George Washington's Masonic temple in Alexandria, Virginia.

A friend and I were talking about love recently. She was saying that the word itself is inadequate to explain all the different strains of love in the world. She mentioned that Arctic indigenous people use 37 words for snow. Seems to her that we should have at least 37 words for love. The people I know use adjectives in front of the word to further define it: romantic love, motherly, brotherly, etc. I have to agree with her that none of these attempts to put words to the situation of love are in any way up to the task. Thirty seven words for love? Might as well have 37,000 or 37 million. Right?

Of course I've prayed for guidance around love many times in my life, because encountering love is always strenuous. It's possible I've tried to figure it out at least 37 million times, maybe more. I'm not the first, nor am I by any means the last, to try to understand the mystery of love. My heart has felt the force of love many times, so many times. I have loved people I'm not supposed to, failed to love people I should love. I have tried hard to make myself love (that never works) and have also tried to NOT feel love. Sometimes I feel love for a person the second I meet them, sometimes love grows slowly. Is it any wonder I can't wrap my mind around it?

One thing I know for sure is that no one can control love. I often think of it as a force of nature, like the wind. Who can control Brother Wind? Please. All those phrases like falling in love and swept off her feet refer to its power. No one can control the way love flows or the emotions that come up around it. Sometimes love is blissful, other times it really hurts or creates intense sensations of hunger, thirst, longing and lust. I have experienced love that's like a huge emptiness (both the "good" and "bad" kinds of emptiness) but I've also felt love as a sublime fullness - sometimes simultaneously. Love stretches the heart and renders us more humane. Is that true? I hope so.

Don Shapiro, a writer with an interactive fan page on Facebook, says, Love is a spiritual state, not an emotion. He had some other thoughts about love, but it's the above that caught my attention. Taking love out of the emotional range, lifting it up into the realm of spirit, is a really intriguing way to think about it! Thanks, Don.

Love, love, love. I am soaking in it these days, feeling love 37 different ways, minute to minute, for friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, animals, this beautiful, wounded city, stars and planets, guides and God, for the Sufi acupuncturist, my soon to be ex-housemates and my dear deep soulmate as well. I don't get it, but I feel it, I do. All I can say is: wow.

Now What?

June was a long month for me. Did it seem that way to you? The fabulous Dr. Brian Cox, as well as Dr. Brian Greene (hmmm ... are all physicists named Brian?) like to explain that the way each of us cuts through time/space in the course of our daily activities creates a serious impact on our perceptions of "reality," including our perception of the fourth dimension. Ain't it the truth?

June was a month of huge internal shifts and changes for me, so no wonder the first part of the month flew by, while the weeks surrounding solstice dragged. Solstice was a bitch this year. Whoa. I was a wreck for awhile; lower than a snake's belly, as my friend Lisa used to say. She also used to say sometimes that she felt lower than dog's breakfast. You can't get much lower than that, can you? Lisa was from Austin, Texas, where she picked up many charming colloquialisms.

During the past few days, at last, time is moving faster again. I guess that's a good thing. Now it's July. For the next couple of weeks, all that internal movement will shake out into the external realm as I make the transition into my new apartment.

Cheryl, of the blog Lizzy Frizzrock, suggested that I place boxes in a spiral around my room, one for papers and art supplies, one for clothing, one for books, etc. In this way I am now able to literally dance the spiral as I unwind this chapter of my life. Cheryl, you are a genius. It's really working!

Fall down once, get up twice. Will do! My optimism is returning. Shalom.

Starts and Re-Starts

Loved this! I haven't seen anyone carrying anything on their head since I was in India. Well done, I thought when I saw her. Just then the pack of paper towels fell, which is why she's reaching up, to catch it.

Life as a human being is so complicated! Well, at least it is for me. I could take this post in so many directions ... but today what I'm thinking about is that there is no such thing as a hard re-start for the heart.

Life itself is full of hard re-starts. People die, move away, change jobs, end relationships. Jake died one year ago today. Even though he was ready to go, it was still inconceivable to me that he could be here one minute, then completely gone the next, never to return.

I had a client who suffered terribly from cancer for four years. I was at her house for a quick visit, surrounded by her family and dear ones, when she died. As anyone who has witnessed this kind of death can tell you, it is such a relief when the person suffering passes away. And yet, the event is emotionally inconceivable.

About twenty minutes before she died, my client turned to face me and said, "They all know you, Reya." I thought it was an interesting comment. I wondered what she was tuning in to. I thought to myself, I'll ask her about that in a little while. No one knew she was about to die. We knew it was close, but not that close! I was talking quietly with her sister a few minutes later when the room cooled suddenly, and got very quiet. I'll never know what she was trying to tell me. Even now, years later, I feel confused by that experience.

After bad breakups and following the deaths of (for instance) my parents and sister, also when I left San Francisco, my strategy for dealing with these hard re-starts was to take a big ole psychic broadsword and slice through my heart connections all at once. SWACK. I figured it would really hurt to yank the plug, as it were, but in my mind, at least, a sudden and complete break seemed like it would be easier than surrendering to long-term grieving.

Of course all attempts to break free by brutal whacking only made me feel worse. What was I thinking? Heart connections do not consist of just one big, solid cord, nope. A heart connection is all about millions and millions of little threads. Like fiber optics, the threads of love are strong but very fine. They can't be cut. At least mine can't.

Last year when Jake died, I gave myself permission to get deep into the grief. I was a serious wreck for several months, then a less serious wreck for awhile. Today, a year after his passing, I'm OK. I'm done with it. Not that I'll ever forget my dear, beautiful, psychotic on occasion, fearful, sweet, powerful Vietnam vet of a dog, oh no. But my heart has healed from that terrible day. It really has! All I had to do was dive deep into my feelings, and trust that my heart knew what it was doing. And so it does! Wow.

My human heart is not capable of hard re-starts, but it is so resilient, given time and compassion - and acceptance. I am in awe.

Shalom.



From the window of the Chesapeake Room on 8th Street SE.

Curves

I haven't moved house in a long time, so I forgot about the chaos that attends the final days before everything gets transferred to the new space. I forgot about cardboard boxes and packing tape, piles of things everywhere. It's all part of the unwinding of the life I've lived for nine-plus years.

Yesterday I was thinking about how even galaxies unwind as they evolve. In my mind's eye, I imagined the arms of the Andromeda galaxy spiraling away from its galactic center. Unwinding isn't just about spin, it isn't just about expansion. If that were true, then galaxies would look more like star clusters, the energy of the expansion would be more like an explosion than a spiral dance. Gravity, the most mysterious of the fundamental forces, reminds the expanding stars where they came from. In fact it occured to me that if unwinding is going to be graceful, it requires memory. Centrifugal and centripetal force are as much about gravity pulling inwards as what is spinning and expanding outwards.

Yeah, I know. I was waxing philosophical, a nice euphemism for my brain going off the deep end. Overthinking is a coping technique for times when I am emotionally overwhelmed. You know in the cartoons when one of the characters has been whacked upside the head and there are stars, exclamation points, bells and chirping birds flying around? That's what my head looks like these days. My goodness I can get so way out there.

Just as I was "philosophizing," I looked at the sky and saw the scene above - an "arm" of cloud unwinding from a central core of thicker cloud, or so it seemed to me.

Though it's impossible to superimpose a spiral shape on the total chaos in my room at the moment, I've decided to imagine that at least the energy of graceful unwinding is a part of the process of getting ready to move. This kind of crazy thinking helps me cope with the mess. Whatever it takes, yes? I say yes.

Onwards and Upwards

The bicycle pictures are not exactly relevant to the content of the post, but I like them.

My great San Francisco era doctor, Elliott Blackman, was the voice of common sense. When I would drag my sorry ass into his office, feeling lower than a snake's belly (as my friend Lisa used to say), he always asked straightaway, "Have you been eating well and getting enough sleep?"

I was in my early thirties at the time, quite bohemian, a par-tay kind of gal. When my answer to his question was NO, he always shook his head and gave me a look that seemed to say, Well, then, what do you want ME to do??

Since that time, I have been shown, over and over again, just how important simple things like adequate sleep are. In fact, getting enough sleep is a huge component of my Plan to Stay Sane. The fact that I hardly slept over the weekend, and have not had many good nights of sleep in the past couple of weeks, has contributed in a big way to the roller coaster mood swings and bouts of near-insanity. I can't blame everything on the moon, can I?

Last night I got a solid nine hours of deep, restful sleep. I am feeling so much more balanced this morning. Plush is the right word, as if the myelin sheaths surrounding my nerves plumped up overnight. Getting good sleep provides a healthy insulation from all the annoyances of a life fully lived on this beautiful planet.

Here's a gorgeous moon poem that my blog brother Steven left in the comments section of yesterday's post. Steven knows better than anyone how crucial beauty is. His blog is always a work of art, and I learn from him every day. Thank you, Steven. I say that all the time, but let me say it again: Thank you!

drinking alone with the moon

from a pot of wine among the flowers
i drank alone. there was no one with me --
till, raising my cup, i asked the bright moon
to bring me my shadow and make us three.
alas, the moon was unable to drink
and my shadow tagged me vacantly;
but still for a while i had these friends
to cheer me through the end of spring....
i sang. the moon encouraged me.
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
as long as I knew, we were boon companions.
and then i was drunk, and we lost one another.
...shall goodwill ever be secure?
i watch the long road of the river of stars.

li bai