Down to the River

This has been a very hard week. I miss my Dad. I cried when I had to leave home last weekend, when my visit was over. I cried just like I did when I was 17 and had to move to college when I didn't want to go. Ever since I've gotten back, I feel so permeable and sensitive. I'm bruising easily, and I fantasize, at least once a day, about running home and hiding under my bed. Me, a 25 year old woman with a credit history, a lease, and a near master's degree. Yup, that's the woman who wants to slither under the bed and lay down with her teddy bear sitting gaurd.

Tonight I finally started crying. It all just became too much and I finally felt like letting it out. I was at a school function- an informal group meeting of colleagues and a faculty member. We're supposed to be there for a research support group. But, the typical semi nastiness is going on. Academics at their most collegial can only be described as young lion cubs, biting and nipping and pulling, just enough so as to not quite break the skin. I am in no mood or condition now to play this way. Not that I commonly am anyway.

The evening, which I exited early, left me in tears. This was due mostly to some rough handling that was not meant personally, but certainly felt that way when one of my suggestions resulted in peals of laughter and eye rolling.

I realize that I do not let go of things well, and that I search for things to take with me- good or bad- because I seem not to be able to NOT do that. I'm like an experiential magpie.

I came home and what to do? How to cope? Nothing seemed like it would help. Even tea could not cure this. And the book that had recently been my refuge was finished this afternoon.

I decided to see about reading one of the poems excerpted in that book- Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, A Woman, and the Wild.


The poem was by Rumi. I googled, and found two that felt important.

Rumi says this-

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

A Star Without a Name


When a baby is taken from the wet nurse,
it easily forgets her
and starts eating solid food.


Seeds feed awhile on ground,
then lift up into the sun.


So you should taste the filtered light
and work your way toward wisdom
with no personal covering.


That's how you came here, like a star
without a name. Move across the night sky
with those anonymous lights.

These poems did some amazing trick in me, and now I am better. It's like they struck a match inside me, and in a few moments, all the ice encased around me slid away, melted and completely innocuous.

I feel that books come to us at certain times for certain reasons. This has always been the case for me. Shadow Mountain changed my life. Other writings have offered comfort at the right moments, too. In considering this, I see a narrative to my life, a progression and a story. Things are interwoven. I know it. Other poeple that don't view life that way, well...I don't know what keeps them going and I don't exactly care. But they belong to a group outside of my understanding, as I lie outside of theirs, and thus often, their approval. The room in which tonight happened, was only two hours and a finite small amount of cubic feet. Real life for those hard bitten academics happened in that room tonight. For me, real life happens everywhere else and in many places and times. My universe is infinite.

Oh Sisters, Let's Go Down. Let's Go Down, Come on Down. Oh, Sisters, Let's Go Down, Down to the River to Pray.

This is an excerpt from an email I sent to one of my best friends about my recent visit home. I went there to meet my new nephew, who was born this summer. Historically, I have been alternatively put off and terrified by children, and have feared that they would somehow make me mutate into the thing I feared being the most- the shadow of my mother's violence.

But this is what actually happened....


I have decided that I would make a good mom. I told my dad that and he said, "I always thought so. I'm glad you've accepted that about yourself." And later he said, "it would be hard. It is for everyone. And it would be hard sometimes for you too, but you wouldn't screw it up." And I actually, for once, agree. I wouldn't screw it up, and I would do a good job. That made me feel really differently about myself. I wonder, if in some way, the last vestage of the concept of myself as someone potentially dark and dangerous has crumbled and quietly dropped away. The last piece of me blaming myself, as seing myself as somehow irreversably flawed or at fault seems lost and floated away.

I heard something on the radio this weekend, in which a woman said this about any act of recovery- "there is a point where recovery becomes an act of faith. Where you say, 'Okay. I will lay down my sword.' And you trust that something good will happen to you."

I wonder if I have finally laid down my sword. Am I in the middle of my leap? Suspended in mid-air, excited and uncertain? Am I myself laying down my own body, spreading my legs, and trusting that the miracle of life and love with inspire itself within me in this vulnerable posture? And if that is so, I wonder: How do I now live my life as a woman finally made whole, soft and open.

But I mean, you know, I Luff you, that is to say I Lerv you.

On the radio this morning, a woman was reading love poems about her husband. She said she was practicing the art of "wabi sabi," which is the desire to see beauty in flaws. At first I thought this was vaguely insulting. Kind of that New York-y intellectualizing of emotions. Things are bad, but that's sexy or vaguely spiritually eastern in some way. But then she breaks between poems about greying chest hairs and socks left out in the bathroom, and answers this question the interviewer asks her. It's a dull question- why do you think when people write about love, they write about it in poetry? Yawn. But then the woman states that this has to do with concentration. And that's what love is, she says. Love is not rules, or promises made for things you will or won't do in the future. It is one person asking for, wanting, and getting just a little bit of concentration from someone else. She goes on to say that this is especially true for women, and throws in many more gender stereotypes masquerading as thoughtful opinion. But by then I've thankfully tuned her out. I just like that idea. And I like the idea that is borne out of this one.
That in all the loud roaring of life, the stress, the turning and turning of meaningless maps, the fog- That there is someone that makes me go quiet, and makes me look right ahead and see clearly if only for a few feet. In those moments of seeing, things become more familiar. Perhaps this is part of that feeling of un-aloneness that love promises to afford us.