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I’m sitting at the window counter at Huckleberry’s in Spokane, rainy Easter morning.  Yesterday I flew back from the East coast where I spent a few days visiting my family.  Our mother is dying, not imminently but surely, progressively from the natural process of the body’s dissolution.

It is always a gift to be with my sister and her family, their busy, multi-generational lives. It’s a textured experience of love. Being with her now grown children, my 18 month old great niece.  Aligned with the time spent watching my mother sleep, knowing that she is passing and that her passing will likely come while I am back at home in Washington. 

At home. I moved here permanently almost two years ago after half a decade of seasonal visits.  And it is so completely my home now. Just getting into my car at the Spokane airport last night, my body dropped into a deeper place of rest.  Spokane is my airport of choice for flights East. It’s marginally closer than Seattle and more manageable.  A few trips under my belt, it is its own kind of home with its various tree filled neighborhoods that belie their easy access to and from the Interstate. I know I will find a good meal and coffee and friendly, helpful people.

After a good night’s sleep, a bath, a pile of French toast and a triple shot latte to go, I can set my GPS for “Home,” and drive without heavy traffic or stop lights or towns, even, West to my Beloved, the dog, our home, familiarity.

In Jersey, church is finished, dinner is cooking, the branches of my birth-family tree come together to celebrate not just  resurrection but the deeper, pre-Christian holiday of birth and fertility with bunnies and colored eggs and new clothes. Our mother sleeps, partly from pain management, partly from life’s exhausting regimen. The baby gets passed from one set of loving arms to another. The circle is complete: birth, life, death, birth.  We all cycle through.

The sky’s clearing, sun burning through clouds. It’s time to get back on the road home. 

After the Solstice

Chest deep in fresh powder,
clusters of deer eat the tips
of Summer’s golden grasses,
not waving now. Patient. Roots
sleeping deep under three feet
of snow. Heart-shaped tracks
stitch a trail from hills to house.
Nothing here to threaten them.

Even the dog, who barks in place
like a windup toy, barely stops
their thoughtful chewing.  She who
snores undignified upon the chintz
chair placed–just so–for this.

Dark-eyed Juncos flit and feed
on scattered millet. Their tiny
formal morning coats and black caps,
their silver waistcoats stretched
over rounded breasts and bellies.

We all fatten in the early dark. Pillowed
and insulated by layers of crystals.
Precious, rare, one of a kind, merged
into this one body, undulate, frozen,
shimmering in the lengthening light.

Came down with a case of the blues this morning.  The “I can’t handle the material world” blues.  What a huge pressure it was.  Aching in my head and heart.  I was lucky to be able to speak it to my beloved.  To speak the crazy “fix it” energy and hear her sane response.  This helped me to drop into the hurt, the wound of self-blame.  Then the tears that wash out that wound and let the healing come.

I headed into town to do some shopping for our family Thanksgiving gathering tomorrow.  How good to be out in the cold blue day.  The streets are empty.  Each shop offered a friendly greeting.  And a Blue Star eggnog latte in the sunshine, afforded by the  wait for our boy who’s at basketball this morning and needs a ride from town in an hour.

The wheels turn and carry me, carry all of us from place to place, inside and outside.  I’m thankful for that.  For this golden moment of freedom.

It’s 9:00 on a Tuesday morning, October 6.  I’m sitting by a window where the sun, recently risen above the hills, shines golden and warming, glinting off the black roof of my car.  Blaine Harden’s book, A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia, sits on my lap.  It’s quiet.  My partner is in the kitchen making cereal.

I clicked onto Facebook to check for a message from a friend, and what I found was a post from a former colleague at the Community College of Philadelphia: “Gunman in my building at CCP. Class is on lockdown mode.  Not getting work done. SWAT just went by.”  That was an hour ago. The gunman’s been caught.  Class extended an hour.  Students want to get to their jobs and so on.

I’m trying to wrap my head around the whole scenario.  The apparent normalcy of the situation.  Yes, the college clearly handled it well, but I must be missing some essential starch in my Being.  I can’t imagine being on lockdown with an armed person roaming the halls and then getting back to the business of teaching composition.  

The shooting last week in Oregon brought this phenomenon closer to home, home being rural north central Washington with its small regional school and where guns are a common element in many homes.

I haven’t the space, time, energy or wisdom to draw any conclusions about the frequency with which we are under armed attack by our neighbors.  There seems to be an epidemic of misery and misplaced aggression that can only be released through mass killings.  I’m remembering a Chris Rock riff on gun violence in which he suggested pricing bullets out of affordability.  “You better watch out, because I’m saving my money to buy some bullets, then I’m coming after you.”

Annually, according to the CDC nearly 25,000 people die from prescription painkiller overdoses.  We are clearly a nation of suffering. Maybe someday someone will successfully run for the presidency on a platform of human wellbeing. Maybe then we will lay down our arms, breathe freely, walk in safety in our homes, streets and schools.  

Until then, be as safe as you can.

One of my earliest memories is about the way words, the way their letters form so many meanings in various combinations.  It’s been a lifelong habit of mind to play with words, taking them apart, pondering their origins, seeking the paradoxes they often contain. Like the state named connect i cut.  Or instability.  It occurred to me recently that when we think we are in stability, we are actually experiencing instability.

This, too, is a lifelong habit of mind.  The constant search for stability, for the bubble in the spirit level to hover just so, in a state of balance.  I’ve learned that the deeper my inclination toward a condition, the more profound the lessons that Being will bring forward to disabuse me of them.  It’s one thing to recognize intellectually that there is no stability and quite another to know it in the body, the belly, the heart, the very cells.

No matter how good or strong our intentions, we are not in control of outcomes.  I remember some years back teaching the Bhagavad Gita to college freshmen and grappling with Krishna’s teaching to Arjuna to “do without doing.”  Over time, I was able to inhabit a way of being that allowed me to act without attachment to the outcome.  But even this is only a stage in realization.  Outcome is a process.  It’s very name suggests its flux.  It is an out coming.  An on going.

Daily living is a process. Its very nature is unstable.  It is porous, fluid, untamable and unnameable.  All of our myths and much of our science point to this.  When one strand of Indra’s web is plucked, the reverberations travel through all of them.  When we identify a particle, it’s already a wave.  When we set goals and intentions to bring about a product, it’s like pinching smoke. Ideas, actions and intentions live in a realm of unpredictability–literally, they cannot be spoken before they are spoken. un–pre–dict–able.  The philosopher Martin Heidegger said in Poetry, Language, and Thought, “What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said.”  It can not even be dict-ed, let alone pre-dicted.

This will either make sense to you or not.  I don’t know.  But I do know now the truth of it.  We are all surfers on the ocean of Being.  Sometimes we are the wave, sometimes the water.  We are both of it and in it.  Rolling, breaking, reemerging, Broken and whole.