What Color Are You Today

A friend asked me that title question. Yesterday I was sleepy siesta yellow (she asked around 4:00, nap time). The warm autumn sun through my bedroom window seduced me into a rare afternoon nap before gearing up to start the second coat of mud on my drywall project.

Today is a crunchy orange day like the crisp on the side of the baked mac and cheese casserole. Crisp cold, crisp bright, crisp leaves under foot, I'm anxious to get outside and take a walk around my new neighborhood. I choose a different route each day, sometimes with a destination like Safeway, or to Pam's house to teach her daughter how to use the sewing machine I gave her. Sometimes I just explore; the other day I discovered a stone mosaic "door mat" in front of a house on Siskiyou. I have to remember to show Donna, she'd want to make one with all the stones and pebbles and rocks she collects. But not until the drywall/paint job is done in the study, I say. Turning the corner on 46th, I was amazed by the professional front yard garden with a manicured lawn winding between well cared for triangular flower beds. Usually those urban front yard attempt-at-an-English garden look really trashy this time of year, but this one was well planned for a fall showing with asters and mums and stalks of burgundy somethings.

I'm relieved to be in a neighborhood again where I can walk to the store, help out a neighbor with her construction project, or be pleasantly side-tracked from daily chores by a visit from Jackson (see Donna's blog) and his mom looking for the Toys R Us catalog in Donna's Sunday paper. I'm relieved to be an active part of every day living: laundry, cleaning up after territorial cats, taping drywall, mudding, baking cookies, reading, going for a walk, studying, not just numbing out on television and wine, waiting for my house to sell so my life can begin.

Since Sunday I begin again to access the sacred within the every day profane, the every day mundane. The dictionary defines profane as irreverent, vulgar, course and secular in contrast to what is sacred. Mundane is also defined as secular, common place, ordinary, typical of this world. In the last 3 years or so I've been exploring the sacred in Christian religion, practicing lectio divina, daily centering prayer, breath meditations, reading the Bible, reading other theologians trying to develop a more intimate relationship with God. For some reason, throughout this process I started doing less gardening, had fewer walks in the woods, hardly ever baked or rubbed fresh basil between my thumb and index finger before simmering it in a pot of pasta sauce. For some reason, I took less pleasure in the scent of freshly washed sheets and the tidy, satisfactory folds of laundry day. I stopped noticing the chatter of squirrels, the phases of the moon, or even the passing seasons. I stopped noticing God as I have always known God.

Sunday, a small clan of us were invited to visit my friend Gerry's farm in Oregon City. Five year old Maude had a saddle and no horse to ride. Gerry is an equestrian, professional carriage driver. Gerry has horses she calls ponies. The threatening clouds from the morning broke open just as we pulled into the driveway. What was a gray day became an easy baby blue, soft as the colt's nose on our dispositions. Gerry, the consummate hostess, had prepared rare roast beast, oven baked mac and cheese, apple cobbler, and a raspberry martini "hooha" for the adults (it was Sunday after all and we could drink before 5:00). After a leisurely meal, a climb up the hay bails in the barn, and a few fly-bys of breathless, red cheeked children chasing the Guinea Hen around the house, Gerry saddled up Comet for Maude and Ellory to ride around the yard. Despite the carrot treats, Comet was less than cooperative while the kids tried to ride, tugging at the lead line until he could crunch a mouthful of grass. Gerry scolded him, "Come on Comet, be somebody." We all took to that expression rather quickly and I decided I would use it to scold myself when I would be tempted to zone out in front of the television. Come on Wendy, be somebody!

Finally, Ellory decided he'd much rather sit in the lawn and let the cat's tail tickle his chin while he sang the Little Pony song. We brought Comet back to the barn and Gerry offered the kids a ride on her tractor, with wheels at least five feet tall it was a sight to see. I thought I was in some Disney movie, "Day at the Farm," it was so ideal. Driving back, Maude's mom, Buff, commented on what an amazing woman Gerry is and what a full life she leads. I agreed and thought about my life and how I keep trying so hard to make it fuller without recognizing how full it can be just as it is: the fullness of witnessing Ellory trumpeting with Gerry's fox hunt horns through autumn storm clouds, urging the tentative sun to stay one more hour in our day. And towheaded Maude perched on Gerry's lap, steering the tractor with all the confidence five year old girls should have. My heart was full while I noticed Genevieve with the opportunity to see fearlessness in others and also the unconditional right to hold on just one more day to her own cautions. Just by being, we could be somebody. This is the stuff of a full life...that a horse can eat an entire carrot in one feeding, that we can scrape the side of the mac and cheese bowl for the coveted toasted brown crunchies. That strangers can meet on a farm and become friends, that is a full life, a full day.

Sunday, I saw how I spend too much time wishing for something more, waiting for the house to sell, the perfect time and conditions to begin to write, the right person to enter my life to help me feel complete. I've spent too much time seeking the sacred in something outside me, outside my mundane life, and not appreciating the miraculous in every moment, the God of each ordinary, common place day. Today is crunchy orange, and in order to be somebody within the day, I will not wish for the day to be anything other than what it is. I will step in, bite down, crunch, crunch, crunch as lively as I can until I intimately know about a simple, common, crunchy, orange day.

What it Means to Love

I'm reading Kathleen Dean Moore's book titled The Pine Island Paradox. She made a list of what is means to love a person and place. This list struck I cord with me and I wanted to quote her for all of you:

"What does it mean to love a person? What does it mean to love a place? Before long, I discovered I had made two copies of the same list. To love -- a person and a place -- means at least this: One. To want to be near it, physically. Number two. To want to know everything about it -- its story, its moods, what is looks like by moonlight. Number three. To rejoice in the fact of it. Number four. To fear its loss, and grieve for is injuries. Five. To protect it -- fiercely, mindlessly, futilely, and maybe tragically, but to be helpless to do otherwise. Six. To be transformed in its presence -- lifted, lighter on your feet, transparent, open to everything beautiful and new. Number seven. To want to be joined with it, taken in by it, lost in it. Number eight. To want the best for it. Number nine. Deperately.

Love is an anchor line, a rope on a pulley, a taut fly line, a spruce root, a route on a map, a father teaching his daughter to tie a bowline knot, eelgrass bent to the tide, and all of these -- complicated, changing web of relationships, taken together. It's not a choice, or a dream, or a romantic novel. It's a fact: an empirical fact about our biological existence. We are born into relationships with people and with places. We are born with the ability to create new relationships and tend to them. And we are born with a powerful longing for these relations. That complex connectedness nourishes and shapes us and gives us joy and purpose.

I knew there was something important missing from my list, but I was struggling to put it into words. Loving isn't just a state of being, it's a way of acting in the world. Love isn't a sort of bliss, it's a kind of work, sometimes hard, spirit-testing work. To love a person is to accept the responsibility to act lovingly toward him, to make his needs my own needs. To love a place is to care for it, to keep it healthy, to attend to its needs as if they were my own, because they are my own. Responsibility grows from love. It is the natural shape of caring.

Number ten, I wrote in my notebook. To love a person or a place is accept moral responsibility for its well-being."

Community

Come Unity
for Vi

We sing
wind beneath wings
and rub sandalwood oil
into her too tired old feet
tucked beneath hospice blankets
blue
while not far beyond
thousands of russet and gold leaves
turn and turn and turn until
silently they all fall
to the cold ground
released.

________________

morning
comes unity
intimate as crystal
dew on her lately woven web
vast, too
the view
Crater Lake blue
deep and high and nearby
generations beyond knowing
hold truth

___________________


Relish community
like a spoonful of homemade applesauce,
cinnamon rich,
made of apples gathered
from last year’s barren tree

Stories

Last night a group of us told (in ten minutes or less) our spiritual, religious, faith, journeys of truth. Stories revealed shadows of humanity, doubt, misgivings and missed directions. This morning, as I read and wrote, the neighbor man, a confirmed schizophrenic, was shouting his story to nobody in particular. Some how parts of what he said, what I could hear, what I understood, pieces of his "rantings" made sense to me:

"We're gonna keep going down a dead-end street. We have power to do it all over again, make it right. What are you doing? I know a fucking hoax when I hear it. Well it's about time. No, I'm staying. What are you doing? Too good for Words (Works?) You're gonna have to find some better lingo when you start giving out the um, the uh explanation of feelings. And the fucking story goes on and on and on. I wanna kick your shadow."

Confessions

Don't kick my shadow
such a shady story
in the bright light of day
elongated like an El Greco painting
pained in purple gray
or stumped into secrecy
my shadow
is as much a part of me
as the detail you see
in the face
facing you
in all honesty

Irony

Just as I remove the final framed artwork from the wall, I receive news that the buyer's financing fell through and the house is going back on the market. I had intended to sell that final art piece at a church art auction this week. Nobody bid on it, so I brought it back to the empty house to resume it's place above the mantle. The piece, titled "Flight," just doesn't seem to want to fly. I refuse to believe that means I can't fly. Maybe that artwork stays with the house. Maybe it needs to be returned, with grace, to the artist. My head swims with 'how comes' and what's up with this, and what, damn it, is the lesson I'm supposed to learn in order to move on!!

Grace is in the Return

This weekend I removed the last framed artwork that hung over my mantle in my Vancouver house. Painted by a lover of nine years ago, the work is a simple 3' by 4' line drawing of an open poppy (or some such full-petaled blossom) with one red streak across the bottom of the otherwise white canvas, a crimson river of femininity. In the center of the flower is a sweet but somewhat phallic stamen and a real live dead bug caught between the canvas and glass on its journey to pollination. My lover and I laughed about that bug's aborted effort to consummate even as we wept about our own inability to fully realize our relationship. We were an affair that would never reach fruition. I started writing poetry as a result of her artwork. I wrote several pieces about this painting, but can only find this one:

Rapid thin streams,
thin crimson streams rush through ~
Petals thrown back, hotly back
on throated stems.

Does she
remember the flower?
The orchid?

The flower grows in its growing from hour to hour
while the Master flame
Destroys the dry mountain pine.
The dry
mountain pine.

At the appointed time,
a cry from the morning crow will come
Will come.
Does she know when? Do I?

Only then, can she
remember the flower.
The flower trembling
from root, to pistil, to petal.
And
Oh, the fragrance!

She can
remember the flower.
The orchid.
Again,
this hour, this instant
She can.


It was appropriate for this painting to be the last piece of art to come off the walls. I designed my entire living room around this painting...White fireplace, white carpet, white furniture, pale yellow walls, splashes of red accent throughout the room. Her artwork was a focal point of my living space. In fact, I bought the house eight years ago with the vague hope that she would eventually move in with me and we would have a life of co-creation. I painted my garage a high gloss red with the thought that it could be an art studio...Something she didn't really have in her house. My bedroom was a convent white in readiness for a new life with her. Over the years it became apparent that she wasn't going to leave her marriage and even the fact that she called me "the other side of her face" wasn't enough to liberate her from what I saw as a possessive (yet socially acceptable and secure) marriage to build a life with me. I'm acutely aware that selling this house is the final letting go of that relationship. Not that I've been mourning, moaning, and mooning away here in this house for the last eight plus years (I've had other lovers since and maintain a realistic sense of what is (and isn't). But we never really said goodbye and I've always wondered what I'd say if she showed up at my doorstep. Would I close the door in hurt and resentment and bitterness or would I welcome her return with grace?

In my spiritual direction class we practiced a breathing meditation for about 30 minutes. I found myself, as usual, drifting out of focus and coming close to nodding off to sleep in that state of relaxation. I asked the teacher how this practice could lead me to higher consciousness if I kept drifting into unconsciousness. She said that the discipline is in the return. It is not about getting to a place of meditative transcendence, it is not about judging our perceived failure and giving up, it is about recognizing that we have drifted (as we all inevitably do, often) and exercising the discipline of returning to the breath. Grace is in the return.

This week I've been reflecting on the parable of the prodigal son. I used to be annoyed by the father's reaction and would take sides with the resentful (but faithful) son who never left. I was the one who did everything right, or at least gave the impression that I was good and responsible and faithful. Then I swayed, I had an affair. I became lost to myself, my community, my family. Through this reading of the parable I was reminded of our inclination to seek what is lost. We don't focus on the $20 in our wallet, but the $10 we knew we had and can't find. Jesus searched for the one lost sheep, not the ones in constant view. I don't write as much poetry about the love that is steadfast and present in my life, but I do write volumes about lost love. In the parable, the focus and attention isn't on the one that is lost, isn't on the going away, the celebration is about the return. The return home, the return to God, the return to one another, to self.

I never noticed the title of my lover's artwork until I lifted it off the wall last week. It is called "Flight." As I leave my cocoon of a home, spread my wings and take flight in a return to my own artistry, I have hope that by removing her work of art from my wall, no longer claiming or possessing it as mine, giving it up to the church art auction for someone else to be nurtured beneath its simple strength, that she will fly home to her artistry, she will return to Grace. As I write this blog entry, revealing my secret affair, seeking release, forgiveness, homecoming, and renewal, I open myself to a return to grace. And I know now that if she finds me again, stands on the threshold, facing me in humility, I will welcome her return to my life with all the celebration and open heart of any lost love come home.