Day 100

empty

There is so much to take in. The sounds alone, in any given day, are like a flood. We create as a way of making sense of it all, but also to expel it back out into the world. Sometimes the way we do that is helpful, nourishing, enriching; and sometimes it is just noise.

My favorite moment is just after the last sentence rides off the tips of my fingers. My pinky strikes the period, and for a split second I am empty. For just the tiniest moment, following the exhale, I do not yet feel the need to take anything in. I notice this moment a bit more every day that I write. I notice the peace that follows.

I have always loved the desert for the way it holds emptiness. Everything that moves in a desert is disrupting a great and beautiful silence. I want to hold emptiness with that same beauty, with a great heart, with an entire sky, horizon to horizon.

All these words, they hold so much, like cactus holding water. And we slice them open and quench our thirst for meaning and connection. Language is an oasis, where we sit for hours and talk and talk. I love the space where we share words.

Yet, I say again. I want to hold emptiness. For a true friend will be quiet, will follow you out into the desert of your silence, and love you.

As much as I have to say, and want to say, most of all I want to love you, and for that, I have to be empty.

Day 99

writing

It is not always the easiest part of my day, or even the most rewarding. But, for the last ninety-nine days, it has been the most exciting part of my life. Even on the days when I barely pulled it off, so distracted, or tired, skeptical, or just over it; I still surprised myself.

It isn’t so much that I have a lot to say, but I am learning how to open up and just let things happen here. It is not so important to be quotable, or original, only to be myself. Each sentence is my teacher, and if it speaks in a voice other than my own, I do not hear it. So, first this practice has taught me to use my own voice, to say things in a way that I will hear them.

I wonder if composers learn of themselves when they make…and then hear…their music. I’d like to think so. To think of Miles, the echo of his trumpet in a room, telling him who and what he is. Nina and her piano. Jimmy and his guitar. Maybe because they were so good at playing as themselves, not mimicking, just expressing themselves—maybe this is why when I hear them, I feel as if I am reading their diaries. I’ve always thought that Little Girl Blue and Kind of Blue were the most intimate pieces of music. Listen to them, headphones, in the dark. There is so much intimacy there.

If I could sing like Nina Simone, or play like Miles Davis; not in the same way, but with the same authenticity and vulnerability, then I would be sitting at a piano right now, or breathing broken-hearted sounds through my trumpet. I am a writer. My voice comes through stories, little metaphors, collections of words that draw pictures in your mind…in my mind.

Tonight, I am in a dark room; the sun has left a purple haze in the sky behind me. I can see it in the reflection off the glass that covers a dark painting on my dining room wall. I am writing. I just heard the first of the nocturnal birds, an owl perhaps, an omen. I am entirely in my element.

Day 98

friendship

I’ve been holding off on this one. There is so much to say, and I have been blessed with some of the best friends I can imagine. The line between friends and family in my life is often blurred; and the those who I call friends are also teachers, aunties, sisters, brothers, mentors and companions.

When I was in my early twenties, I met a few women that have literally saved my life multiple times; caring for me when both of my legs were broken, talking me through divorce, helping to raise my children. Beyond that, they have taken me on spiritual journeys through their art, their passions. For a short time, I met with two of these women each week to dance. We just turned on two hours of music and moved our bodies however we felt like moving our bodies. We moved around each other, safe, warm, loving, nurturing.

The woman whose art is shadowing these words is one of my most precious treasures. She has taught me how to give myself to what I love. She has accompanied me through these last ninety-eight days, faithfully. I trust her, and she has been a good guide in this world of creative discipline.

I have two sisters who are also dear friends. One of them has been with me through nearly every year of my life. My soul is her soul is my heart is her heart is my breath is her breath. We are true and forever.

I read today of Friendship, that we need to “recognize and practice it as sacred, as sacramental, as the presence of God on Earth.” and I was full of joy and validation as I realized that I have recognized and practiced it this way, and that it has been one of the great spiritual gifts of my life.

Just so Kari has something to grasp here, through her tears, I will end with this: When I think of my friends, I think of women gathered in a river washing clothes. I think of women singing, laughing, cooking, painting, making books, making blankets. These are the archetypes, the symbols, which we still embody when we come together.

In the end we will sign our names to each other’s lives, as the artists we are.

Day 97

almost

Day 97 is almost day 100. Almost, but not quite.

I heard myself say, out loud, today that “at least I know now that I can produce something, every day.” And this is true. I have produced something nearly everyday since April 7. In a sense I am not surprised, I am pretty good and stepping up to a challenge. At the same time, I am amazed at myself. The writing has been relatively easy, actually, but what is amazing is that I was able to open up and be vulnerable so many days out of the last 97. This is not typical of me.

And now, I am almost done meeting this challenge. A new thing is cracking open in me, a new fear, that I will stop writing, being vulnerable; that I will stop seeing myself in these words, and knowing those things that I cannot know until I write them down.

So many times I have almost rewritten, almost deleted, almost hidden from you, from me. I don’t want to hide though, not really. Like all of you, I want to be seen, known, discovered and cherished.

Once again, my eyes are drawn to the beauty beyond my window panes. The world, laid bare, its beauty so ready to be seen, known and cherished. Ah, if only I could abandon this fear forever, open my chest as this valley has opened the meadow to the red tail hawks and my hungry eyes.

Day 96

family

Lately I have been reversing my idea of how I fit in the world. Instead of being the one call to Love the Enemy, I am the Enemy who needs to be Loved into a real and vital community. Instead of being the Mother, I am the one who needs mothering. Instead of being the one that needs to include all of nature—plants, animals, the elements—into my family, I am included by nature as one of hers. This last one is the most profound for me. It makes me feel most beloved, most validated and most integral to life.

A lot is said about the way we treat each other, and we often look to other humans we see as wiser, kinder, more loving, to teach us how to treat each other well. More and more though, I am looking outside my window. I am astounded by the generosity and kindness of this planet, that knows how to do its thing in such a way that countless members of a family are supported, loved, birthed, grown and buried. I could spend the rest of my life learning to love and nurture and support life, simply by watching things grow, die and grow again. Not only does this inspire me to care more deeply and meaningfully for the life that is not-human, but it elevates every breath I take because I understand that with that breath, I am being given life and have a place in a thriving family of living things.

A plot of land can certainly become part of a family, if that family works with it, performs sacred rituals such as marriage and burial on it, and if they love it. Amazingly, despite the fact that our very life is sustained by land that supports us by giving us dirt to grow food and raise animals on, we tend to think of the land as “ours.” Our little bit of work, our habitation, our money, makes us believe that the land can be rightfully and meaningfully owned. So much land has been appropriated through acts of terror and evil. Even today, in this country we completely lack any true understanding of the cost of the little plot our house sits on. Yet, we are permitted to keep breathing, and taking; because the Earth does her work regardless of the human cost, the way we treat her, whether or not we “get it.”

She is a true mother and has so many mouths to feed, that even though we are the spoiled difficult children who ought to be deprived in order that we might learn our lesson, she keeps giving to us, as if there is no end to her generosity and commitment to all life. And perhaps, perhaps she is so busy being a good Mother, that she just simply doesn’t have the energy to discipline us as well as give us every means of survival. Perhaps she is like the best mothers among us, who know that life and death itself will teach the hardest lessons. Perhaps she knows that she cannot force us to love her, only wait, her every exhale a prayer that ebbs from a deep awareness that we can never be separated from her, no matter how deluded we become.

It is our lack of imagination and our need to centralize ourselves that causes us to think that all living things but us are “just” existing, and that “just” existing does not include the most important aspects of existing, such as love. What is love if not the tree taking in my exhale and returning it to me in such a way that I might continue to breathe? What is love if not a desert flower? What is family, if not an incomprehensible, interconnected, glorious effort to sustain one another?

As I come to the end of this project, I feel this strengthening rhythm in my body. Writing has given me the opportunity, not to create new things, to say important things, or to cultivate a way of making money. No, it is just the opportunity to begin to understand my place in a family. This family includes all living things…everything. From the steps of my porch, I listen to the birds in my family sing, I smile. They are the true and best artists in our family. “Just” existing, that little red-breasted robin gives voice to our joy. She is my little sister, and I hear her song.

Day 95

shifting

I love stories and language, because within the words there is an attempt to still the universe so that we might see, for just a quick moment, the nature of things. At the same time, our words betray the shifting nature of things, the constant evolution.

I have learned over the last ninety-five days of writing that there is no true stillness in language. I can nail down one insight today, only to watch it wriggle away the next.

Looking back over all these essays and poems, I see the shifting light and shadow-play. One thing comes into focus, then another, then another, and at the same time other ideas and wonders become lost in the shadows. My thoughts, ideas and words dance in all directions to a melody and a rhythm I can only hear when I stop trying to name it.

There is no way to create without acknowledging that you are created, in every moment, by the incessant transformations taking place within and around you. The evolving beauty, the reasoning mind, the aging body…these are just some of the elements and forces that create the artist and that the artist uses to create.

Kari, who once told me that figure drawing is not her thing, has drawn so many bodies, especially hands and feet, that I can not help but feel that she is confirming this intuition as well. We are embodying the shifting world, the flickering light, the evasive wisdom that we are attempting to manifest with our art. And what is most amazing is that it feels so ordinary. The creating and the being created, it is just the regular, everyday movement of life; all we are doing is making room for it.

The less attached I am to the product, the reaction from the “public,” the hope that I might say something amazing or the fear that I might fail to say something remotely relevant, the more I creating I do and the more created I feel.

If I can name one thing I have learned with certainty during this project, it is this: We are dancing. We are spinning and leaping and falling. The artist simply draws attention to this fact, and ironically does a better job when she does her best to sit still and observe. But even sitting still, she falls in.

 

Day 94

limb

I love the expression “out on a limb.” It is how I feel I have lived most of my life. I love heights, and wind, so the idea of hanging by my knees, out at the edge of a great tree, swaying thirty feet above ground, and alone, is not necessarily a bad thing for me.

I like a little risk, and a good vantage point. Close to the trunk is shelter, structure, and all the advantages that come with being at the center of things. It’s crowded there though, all the branches running into each other, nests and skittering squirrels; moving as if they have a drug-induced craving for acorns.

Out on a limb, I see the other trees, the vast community of the forest, the sweeping horizon, the shifting sky, the rising, setting, warming, radiating sun. I feel exposed and raw, like a ship at sea. The tide is a wind, the wind is shifty and sometimes fierce. But the branch does not break, not often anyway.

In time, all things become dry and brittle. In time, all the boughs break. Dropped to the soft mulch below, I will grieve the loss of this vista, of this tenuous life out here on the edge of things; but God-willing, I will sink humbly into the dirt. Tree food.

Day 93

failure

I strongly dislike this word. Like all people, I fail frequently. I try. I fail.

Failure is like a fog. It settles on you and you can’t see anything. You cannot locate yourself because you have always used your successes as the signposts. What you are good at, how you want to be perceived, what you want to become; these are the markers by which you locate and navigate. Then suddenly you are in this fog of failure and though you have not moved and the signposts are still there, you cannot see them, you are lost.

Do you drop to the ground and belly-crawl out? Do you wait patiently for the sun?

At a certain point, I experience failure as a common weather pattern that rolls over me. “This is failure” I think to myself, not always even sure where or how I have failed. It is just a sudden sense of loss, of confusion, of fear.

Sometimes I fumble through with my arms stretched out in front of me, fingers searching. Sometimes I wait. Lately, I have taken a more sensory approach. Instead of reacting, afraid, I try to see where the fog is thickest or thinnest. I open my mouth and taste the dampness of the cloud about my head. I smell the rain, I wipe the wet confusion from my face. I close my eyes and dive into the feeling of loss. Lost in the fog of my failure, I am not distracted, for I cannot see what is around me. Yet, I can go inward; and un-tethered to the material world around me, the markers of my success suddenly vanished, I discover something new. As the fog dissipates, the sun breaking through and making spiderwebs of color through my eyelids, I resurface: wiser.

Day 92

Community

This is a loaded word for me. Like “family” it seems to be something we both choose and do not choose. It is a word used loosely, tossed around like a bean bag, dropped, splitting, beans everywhere.

I suspect that at the heart of this word, if it could speak for itself, community would be one of the most complicated words we encounter. A concept that encompasses people you don’t even know as well as those people that you are closest to.

Community might say that, like love, it is more of a verb than a noun. It is something enacted, something always on the verge of becoming, something that is at the heart of creative process more than at the beginning or end of it.

It might be less manageable than we imagine, less organized, less aligned with individual ideas and worldviews. Community might be more of thing that we wrestle with than a thing that we manifest. Already there, community is what is happening in a place where you feel you don’t fit in. In that case, it might be a community that is wrestling hard for control, wanting to create a space that you are not welcome in. Community can also happen in a way that draws you toward others, that enfolds you, so that you wake up one day holding hands with people you do not know, but hold you nonetheless.

Our most intimate relationships are just microcosms of community. Marriage is perhaps a conscious engagement with the concept of ever forming and developing community. In these spaces we consciously and unconsciously participate in the evolution of something that we are just a piece of, but without which we cannot be entirely whole. In these contexts, love itself is manifested by the practice of community between two individuals.

Rather than trying to force the creation of communities that align with our ideals and ideological positions, perhaps we could open ourselves to the idea that we are already part of many intersecting communities. Not just with people we agree with or love, but with the people who share our roads, our post offices, our favorite books, our questions. The planet is small in the context of the cosmos, and truly, from space there is but one community. It includes all beings held in the atmosphere of earth. Under that blanket we are one community of life.

This is a lot to speak of, but it is no less true for that. Let go of the belief that we can create and manage communities that reflect our fear of what is too big to take in. Embrace the community that you are already creating, and that is creating you. Engage in love, as if you are a part of something without which you cannot be made whole.

Day 91

underwater

I have always been fascinated by the fact that there is an entire world of creatures and space underwater on this planet. Space we have not explored or experienced; where life exists with a purpose we can only imagine. There are so few spaces like that left, at least that is what it feels like.

The ocean terrifies me in a certain way, because it is deep, it harbors the unknown, it has its own rhythm that I do not understand.

At the same time, I had the privilege of experiencing snorkeling in a beautiful tropical place, twice in the last five years. I was enchanted. I could not stop swimming. I felt like a child for the first time that I can remember. The ocean was thin and clear, carried me gently, wooed me. I fell deeply in love with her.

Sometimes I wonder if exploring my inner thoughts, feelings, desires and fears carries the same element of terror that I feel at the thought of being dropped into the deep ocean. I am not sure I know where to enter the sea of me without the fear of being swept out into darkness. I do not trust that there are thin places full of color and joy.

What a wonder that engaging the depths of myself draws the same quick breath of fear that stepping in the ocean once did.   

Day 90

right

I have made much of the middle ground. As a person who clings ever so humbly, but tenaciously, to pacifism, I struggle to “take sides” because to do so seems to press me into a fight rather than peace. It is one of my greatest challenges to know what is worth fighting for, and when. I love pacifism because it offers a way of resisting that does not capitulate to ways of being that create more harm and isolation. It seems idealistic, but also true; nearly impossible, but also a more sustainable solution to our divisiveness and pain.

I have realized though, that sometimes, there is a true right and a true wrong. We will not always agree on what it is, universally. Even when we do agree on what is right, we often find that there are those of us who work tirelessly to advocate for what is right and those of us who believe that what is right is an unattainable ideal which we must talk about (lest we slip forever into degradation,) but that we can never really hope to embody.

Embodying what is right is difficult, because most actions, right and wrong, are convoluted by the histories, the intentions, the agendas of those committing the actions. i.e. one can give endlessly to the poor out of guilt and/or a desire to seem righteous, without ever really seeing the poor or engaging gratitude in a way that transforms charity from an act of guilty-conscious to one of true sharing. One can commit terrible abuse as a result of a history of abuse endured by themselves, never having felt at all empowered to do the right thing, only to perpetuate a cycle of pain that they cannot see a way out of.

While articulating what is right seems somewhat easy (caring for the poor, creating equality, being kind, at the very least,) I have struggled with how to hold myself or others accountable to doing the right thing, knowing how complicated we are and how challenging this can be, depending on our own complex experiences. How can I ask a person who was abused daily by their own parent, to embody the right thing as a parent? How do we demand justice and equality from a system that both dictates and reflects our own desire for individual success at any cost? How can you begin to mount the soap box and cry out that you have been wronged, that you know the right way, when you are always enmeshed in your own messy compromises?

Here is one small insight:

When you are right, you feel the weight and grief of the perpetrator’s actions; and you feel it not just as something done to you, but to them and to your shared community as well. You realize that the pain you are feeling is just one part of what is happening to them and to the world that you both live in. You see how their brokenness is perpetuating more brokenness and how you both are caught in that together. This person, or system, or community that wronged you, so that you want to destroy or escape it, is inescapable because we are all connected by our humanity and the planet we share. This truth is the one that cuts deepest, and is also why we must sometimes take a side. Not the side of this person or that person, this or that ideology, but the side that seeks to acknowledge our connectedness and serves the interests of all for the sake of all.

When you have been wronged, and you know exactly how, and you feel rage and fury and pain like a tornado inside, but you know that you have been truly wronged because mixed into those emotions is the deepest heartbreak that those who have wronged you didn’t even see you as you are in the first place. You are right when you know that the judgement brought down on you has little to do with you, and everything to do with the pain and spiritual, emotional and mental poverty of the perpetrator.

You are right when you know that you cannot completely extricate yourself from that perpetrator’s actions or reality, even if you never speak to them again. To see and know and articulate what is right, is not to transcend this world—it is only to see it for what it is. But here is where hope lives: if we can see and know what is right, even if it is only when we are deeply wronged, we can use our pain, we can begin to live into what is good for everyone by abandoning the idea that we alone, individually, are whole.

Day 89

job

Returning to the kind of work where I use my body all day has left me exhausted. I feel the years that I have added to my bones since I last did manual labor all day for days and days in a row. The lifting, moving, crouching, scrubbing, vacuuming…

There is a particular kind of satisfaction though. In every office job, desk job, or administrative job I have had, I asked the question “What am I doing here, besides making money?” Most of the time, my answer to that question felt a bit weak. It isn’t that I wasn’t doing good work, or taking pride in doing the work well. It is more that I just wasn’t fully invested in whatever I was doing for my employer.

In the work I do now, I think I am often too busy, in a physical way, to be preoccupied with the same questions. It isn’t that the work is more important (certainly cleaning condos for tourists is not, relatively speaking, important.) But the physicality of it keeps me in my body, and in my body I understand work differently. I understand the simple exchange of my energy, strength, stamina and work ethic for payment.

For most of my life I have felt driven to do “important” work, and important was defined by my boss, by the culture I live in and by the expectations people had for me. Behind a desk, working for someone with a lot of money, I was just automatically more important than whoever was cleaning the office. I still have a part time job, and it is the job that rolls of my tongue easily when someone asks me what I do. The fact is, however, that I feel, in my body, more useful and more satisfied when I am cleaning. Using the whole body to do something completes me and keeps me grounded.

I have also started noticing that I look at folks who do physical work with a measured respect. I understand that not only are they doing work that many of us do not want to do, but that they are firmly in their bodies, that they are using all of their energy and strength every day. It is so important to remind ourselves of this when we see someone lifting something heavy, working in the hot sun or the cold of winter…doing whatever we dismiss as just manual labor.

Day 88

martini 

Lately I’ve been trying to not drink, but the last few days I’ve been making myself one dirty martini of an evening. Smooth gin, dry vermouth and lots of olives and olive juice. The only thing missing is a friend to drink with.

I miss my ladies who drink with me and who talk about being women and trying to be with men and mostly making it work. I miss the evenings on the patios of miscellaneous bars, the soft light, the bright conversation. I do love me some trees and mountain sunsets, but they don’t laugh as loud at my sarcasm.

I hope I get to Portland soon, to sit with friends in a place I used to call home. I probably don’t know which bars are the hippest anymore, but if Portland is still Portland, I should be able to find a descent cocktail.

Day 87

compromise

It is not living with my mistakes that is proving so hard, it’s living with my compromises. Mistakes are the objects of preterit verbs. They happened, definitively in the past, are done. We can only examine them from the present, and while we may suffer the consequences, we can yet remove ourselves from the mistakes and move forward.

Compromise on the other hand, is a choice to live into something that continues through the present and into the future. It is a choice to continue to accept, engage and work with something that you are not naturally in alignment with. Very literally, my choice to work at a computer for many years, which has paid me well, was a physical compromise for which I experience ongoing back, shoulder, neck, arm and wrist pain. My acceptance that this was the best way to support my family, my engagement with the system that rewards this acceptance, is a deep compromise.

Where I feel most compromise in my life is in my relationships and in human society. I feel that I have compromised my deepest sense of what life could be, and who we are, in service to the status quo. I even feel that in my most intimate relationships, I have compromised the idea that love can be manifested in such a way that it transforms us. Instead of working to manifest this love, I consciously work in service to ideas about sex and marriage and friendship that serve to maintain a way of life that makes us comfortable, rather than deepens our sense of love.

Living with these compromises has created a spiritual, emotional, mental and even physical tension in my life that is sometimes nearly unbearable. I long to be passionately and deeply connected to a friend or lover, but this can be so demanding and uncomfortable, so I subjugate my desires to a kind of love that allows the other person, and often myself, to remain comfortable, that asks very little of them. This is a deep and abiding compromise that taints our pleasure and stifles our growth. I can sometimes feel the relationships going sour, but feel paralyzed by my continued compromise.

On a greater scale, I have compromised in the ways that I engage the neglects and injustices that we collectively perform against each other and this planet, by accepting it as inevitable, as intrinsic. To not compromise here would be to truly ask myself how my way of engaging the community I live in perpetuates injustice and neglect; how my material needs are met by my complicity in a system of takers and those who are left with not-enough or nothing at all. I would work against a religion that has never learned to balance the preservation of tradition (preserved for the sake of those who seek the security and identity that tradition offers,) with the ever reaching, dynamic energy of Divine Love and Creativity, which seeks to continually bring us deeper into a life where we become accustomed to change, growth and epiphany.

I have made plenty of mistakes; they are like tears in a tapestry where the threads are exposed. But, the compromises I have made, or have inherited, are woven in; they are so deeply embedded that sometimes I think they must serve some purpose. My soul tells me another story though. It begs me to unravel whatever must be undone, and then to weave a wider, richer, warmer tapestry that tells the whole story.

Day 86

mystery

Let go
the world cannot be escaped.
So your letting go will only free your hands for other tasks.

Let go
live in the wild space between things.
Even your death will only be a releasing, as far as you know.

The mystery is so small and also so large, that you will never conceive of it whole. You can crouch down and examine through a glass the tiniest spiders on your path, and it may inspire awe, but it will only be the scurrying extremities of mystery. You can reach out with your rockets, or your telescopes, or wait for the satellites to return with their pictures, and still you will only be seeing slivers of infinity.

This is okay. For the most part, you will only see what is right in front of your face and I hope that it is someone or something you love. I hope that as you hold that beloved person or pen or instrument or tool; I hope you feel the mystery breaking through. Loving draws mystery out of the shadows that you might catch a glimpse of something real.

Do not stop loving, whatever you do.

Day 85

approaching

This is it, just fifteen days to go. The cleaning business is going off and Corey and I are both working long days. I am also still assisting at the office job, and now working on a new retreat center with my family. Work here in the tourist economy is like a wave that overtakes you, and you must learn to surf it or it will literally crush you.

The daily writing has become every other day, or in this case, three pieces on the third day (because if I wait one more, I’m not sure I’ll still feel any integrity about the project whose purpose must be at least partially to create a disciplined daily practice.) Somehow, almost magically it seems to me, I am not too worried about it though. I feel the effects of eighty-five days of writing in my bones now. Throughout my day, I feel my imagination working in the background, telling stories, building metaphors, writing poetry. I just let her do her thing and I know that when I sit down she will tell me what to say.

This morning I woke at 5 AM, unable to sleep another minute, feeling the need to get the words out. It is very nearly like needing to pee or being so thirsty that you will stumble to the sink in the gray hours of dawn. Not very glamorous…but, to respond to the urge to write as if it were a bodily function that must be attended to…well, it is nothing short of a miracle for me. We are not slaves to these urges, they are simply the mechanisms of life, they are how we process and keep alive. I am grateful for my thirst, for my ability to empty myself, for the insistence of the body.

The end of the project is near. With all the work in my life, I know that day 100 is right there. Somewhere in my mind, all fifteen of the words and their stories are already taking shape. I trust this.

 

Day 84

rafts

There is an invisible river that carries me through my life. It is wide and the current is generally not too quick, though there are moments when it picks up and I have to hold on and hope for the best.

I spend a lot of time maintaining my raft, making sure that it is holding together, gathering floatables from here and there; plastic bottles, Styrofoam, whatever will keep me afloat. I have a little room on the raft where I keep my books and sleep.

I sometimes get in the water. For whatever reason, I am mostly too scared to do this. The water is not particularly cold, and while there are definitely dangers there, I can swim and am aware that if I make no sudden movements, I will not draw the wrong kind of attention. The raft feels safer though. In general, I think the prudent thing is to sit on the raft with just my feet in the water, dragging behind me.

One thing I have noticed is that the water, while deep and mysterious, makes me feel things that I just do not otherwise feel. My senses are heightened, not just by the fear, but by so many other things: the silky currents wrapping my limbs, the long river plants tickling my feet, the stones and boulders that I pass quickly—near misses. Sometimes I do not understand why I cling to the raft, why I cannot just be more fish-like.

I have spent a lot of my life talking about the river, arguing about whether we are all in the same river, or if there are many different rivers, whether or not the rivers are all headed to the same sea. I have debated with others the fine points of river travel, what you must have with you, what you must leave on the shore. Mostly, we compare each of rafts to the others, wondering whose is sturdiest, admiring craftsmanship, pitying the tiny floatation devices that keep some folks above water—just above water.

Lately though, I have noticed that there are some pretty good swimmers out there. They seem to have abandoned the whole concept of needing to float. They dive down and wriggle through the rocky places. I see them sometimes stretched out on their backs floating, eyes to the sky. They laugh a lot, blowing water out of their noses, and their fingers are permanent prunes. It looks terrifying, but their movements and faces look like liberation itself; as if fear and joy have found a way to coexist in their bodies.

I keep looking down at my raft, wondering if I really need all this protection, when it seems I could just swim. Also, I am tired of talking about the river. Its nature and course are not as interesting to me as how we are travelling and what gifts the journey has to offer. I do in fact want to be free.

Know what I’m saying?

Day 83

perspective

I’ve been learning to kayak on the giant reservoir near our house. It is much longer than it is narrow, about a mile end to end. I am learning in a large sea kayak, built for waves. It’s amazing. I’m in love.

Tonight, I was working in some nice rolling waves, uncapped but big enough to wash over the front of the kayak. I like getting right up against the shore, where the grass is taller than I am, sitting low on the water. Geese are hiding their young, small brown birds somehow find a foothold on a single tall blade of grass. I try to stay quiet, to enter their sanctuary with the appropriate amount of awe.

I have been lately trying to grasp and articulate how it is possible to be so far removed from the chaos and pain, but still feel it so deeply. Tonight, my hours in the kayak gave me the words:

Out on the water, you are not so much removed from the land as you are just seeing it, well, from the water. The shift in perspective offers a unique view of what is happening there. Whether you are drifting against the shore, pressed there by the wind, or out in the open water, you are not truly removed.

My spiritual life is like the water, connecting me to the land below and beyond me. It offers a bit of buoyancy, a way to move more fluidly through things. It also requires strength to stay afloat, to move forward or to the side. It does not protect me though; not when I’m seeking authenticity or leaning into reality. I’m in the wind, exposed, and somehow anything but separated from what is happening on land.

There is in this world a myth that to engage the Mystery, to enter into spaces we can not explain, to seek wisdom, comfort…something more real than the real…we have to “escape” the reality around us. We transcend. We close our eyes to pray. The truth is that God is in the waves, in the unstable boat that we use our entire beings to enliven. Once we enter this space, we do not leave the world, we are not sheltered or protected. We have simply shifted our position and gained a different perspective. And while I can see the armies gather on the distant hills, the mobs obsessed with gaining the advantage; there are precious lives in the marsh grasses, humble lives surviving in the shadows of red-winged blackbirds. I can see them. I reach out to touch them as I drift in my prayers.

Day 82

awake

I decided to write on the word awake because this morning it is more than just a simple state of being, but a process.  As I was getting out of bed, I moved through the space between asleep and awake sluggishly, with a mild irritability. I usually love mornings and waking; it is absolutely my time. I’m physically tired though, and feeling the pressure of the day before I even open my eyes I think, so I’m not very encouraged to get up.

To be fair, to be awake is not just to not be asleep. You can not be asleep and still be so checked out of the present moment that you might as well be sleeping. The word woke has become such a popular adjective because young people are recognizing that while their parents and grandparents are awake, they are not aware.  But saying “she’s so aware of injustice” doesn’t have the punch of “she’s so woke!”

The problem I have with the word woke however, is that it sounds like a static state. It is past-tense, technically, and when our brains take it in, we hear that something has happened. I’m sure this is exactly why it is used this way; to describe a person that has gone through an event and is now present and aware.

I am awake, not woke, because my awareness is always deepening and becoming. I am awake, not because I now know something I did not know a year ago (i.e. that racism is rampant and the justice system is corrupt,) but because I am feeling the injustice and the pain in a way that I was not a year ago. I am unable to hit the snooze button, or sleep walk through the day, doing only what I have to. To be woke, would imply that I have arrived in some place where I am operating in a permanent state of awareness of true reality. The problem is, I do not ever want to arrive there. I would rather be awake: becoming, taking in, in each moment, whatever is happening, whoever is hurting, whoever is giving life and joy and hope.

I do not want to arrive; because there will always be more awakening to happen, and so I want to learn to be expectant.

Day 81

wildlife

I deeply love this word, which combines two spectacular words: wild, and life. We quickly think of bears and foxes, elephants and tigers, apes and toucans. Wildlife is a word for animals that live in the spaces we have not infringed upon, too much, or not yet. It is a form of life that still lives within habitats that we can imagine are untouched by our far-reaching hands; though this is increasingly not true.

I not-so-secretly long to be them. There are mornings when I stand at my front door and look out at the woods across the road and imagine the temperature of the ground, the moisture in the grasses. Using the memories of this ground and grass against my bare feet, I place myself there, curled against the base of a massive pine, ready to sleep after a night of hunting. The simplicity is what I long for.

My husband told me last night, as we were falling asleep, that he saw two young bear cubs running across a nearby meadow a couple of days ago. We always report our wildlife sightings to each other; as if to remind ourselves that by proximity we are not altogether tamed.