An End and a Beginning

Bees dance when they have something to say. They came to my yard one day to show me how they speak. In this photo, a bee dances in the center of a crowd of listeners. Guided by some sort of spirit, a hive nearby knew it was time to split the community, and the queen took half her servants in search of a new home. They rested for a few hours in one of my rose bushes, and they showed me how the scouts direct the swarm to a suitable new hive, an amazing display of sustainable choices and a great mystery in the natural order of life.

In contrast, we humans tend to be rigid in our beliefs, convinced that our brains know the way of things. We often don't question our knowledge and indoctrinations, mistaking our judgments and opinions for a Universal Truth.

For the past six months I've been on an expedition, like the bees. There have been upheavals and discoveries, sadness and epiphanies. I wondered if my stories here had reached their appointed end. Today, like the bees that paused at my house this past spring, I'm going to dance my story.

What in God’s Name?

You can call God Max if you want to,
says the woman who mentors me
in matters spiritual and guttural
between phone calls to her oncologist
and shopping trips for still more hats
for yet another season of baldness.

I don’t mind being juggled between
the specialists and their repercussions,
a sunny yellow ball shining among
the dry-blood spheres of toxic doctors
and the baby blues of her infant head.
I have her here now, and laughing,
certain she won’t die today, not before
she finishes the job I handed her:
Find a God for me, the newly godless.

On the Fourth of July, she told me
God might dwell in fireworks,
a pyrotechnic atom all crackling red
and shimmering gold. Before that,
she said he dallied in the roses
for my clippers to unleash him,
and before that, she said he bided
at my mother’s, humming in the
sprinkler lines I mended, mourning.

I seek wherever she sends me because
I fired the irascible Judge with a clipboard
the day I found my mother up to her elbows
stirring turds in her toilet with a conviction
only the demented can muster. As I begged
the God of my mother to release his
faithful servant from her shitty life,
the scales fell from my eyes: Suddenly
I knew that old Curmudgeon suffered
psychological disorders, eons untreated,
and I forsook him on the spot. But I
was groomed since birth for God,
the fear of blasphemy embedded deep
in my reptilian brain. To be godless is
to be legless, sightless, hopeless, damned.

As my mentor fights for life, she leads me
through her curious garden, pungent with
the scents of anarchy and heresy, assigning
my tasks: Glean that field of God particles,
rake the fallen leaves under Tolstoy’s vine,
take cuttings from the tree of Martin Luther.
Here she has planted every rotten thing
that ever came to her, and made it bloom:
the young and dead, the broken, unjust,
the bitter losses and the insidious cancer
that tries to claim her every few years.

Here each stone and growing shoot
holds meaning, a miniature magnificence
that speaks of something so immense,
it can’t be grasped. But I reach anyway,
oh puny hand, for some divine, redemptive
purpose in my mother stirring turds
and all the other shocking shit of life.

You can call him Max, my mentor says:
Think about that. So I consider this
ludicrous thought: calling my new God
the name I circled in red ink in a baby book
so long ago, chosen for a son I never had.
Would I be free at last, I ask, of the tyrant
who ordains impossible standards knowing
I will fail, my eternal, horrid, raging father?
Hello, Max, I say, reaching out my hand,
and something brushes against my palm:
a weightless kiss of wings, or lips.

One Week After the Disaster

I seem to have misplaced my head.

It has been a week since my computer was destroyed by a rogue water sprinkler. There’s some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that my printer resurrected itself from the dead. I had the new one out of the packaging and ready to go, when something made me try the old one again. It must have dried out following its dance with the water sprinkler, because it worked again. Yeehaw! Back went the new printer into the box, happily returned to the store.

The bad news is that I’ve lost my email program, Outlook Express, along with everything that was in it. After many frustrating hours, I can’t seem to get the new Outlook email program to work, that is, to find my server, log on successfully, and so on. The hours I’ve spent on this endeavor have driven me into a dark depression. I’m forced to use a yahoo thingamajig which is annoying. I curse it. I curse many things. Oh, well, tomorrow is another day.

The good news is that I managed to salvage my document and photo files. I’ve spent the past week working madly on magazine assignments and got them all done and submitted. This is a big deal, and worth celebrating, especially since the subject of one story had her husband go and die on her right before my copy deadline. This threw her whole story out of whack, not to mention what it did to her life. But with a little sympathy and rewriting, the story was written, approved, and submitted. So there’s cause for celebration. However, I’m stuck in the dark depression of the email fiasco, and that is all I can think about. I’ll have to work on that.

The bad news is that my office is still topsy-turvy, with everything moved and stacked and out of its usual place, letting the carpeting dry after its assault by the rogue sprinkler. Oh, well, tomorrow is another day.

The good news is that I have a new computer. My documents and photos on now on its hard drive. This is a blessing, one worth celebrating, if I weren’t so busy being annoyed that it isn’t configured for me. There’s a special circle in hell for training computers to mind, to find their servers, to refrain from pop-ups that one doesn’t want, to behave the way you want them to behave in general. I hope when I die I don’t go there.

My old computer is finally on its way to get an autopsy at its manufacturer. I’m praying for it, as if it were a living person who is deathly ill. I would like to have it resurrected, along with my email program and all its contents. It seems like my life has gone on a strange diversion this past week. And in the hubbub of the past two days, as I worked around the strangeness to get my last three stories finished, I forgot to do my morning meditation, pray, and work on my gratitude journal. That has no doubt contributed to my sense of depression as the day has ended.

Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day. For now, I’ll go make a few entries in my gratitude journal and remember that every day above ground is a good day. May God’s blessings be with all of you.

This Bud's for You

Breaking news in the California wine country where I live: The vineyards have experienced "bud break"! That's what you see in my photo above...the new shoots have shot forth and the grapevines are reborn. It's cause for celebration in my region, makes the news and everything.

It IS wonderful to witness the renewal of things. It makes me downright cheerful, a state of mind I sorely needed after the pity-party I threw two weeks ago. Here's a snapshot of how things stood then:

I haven't been a happy camper inside my own soul. In that quiet place where I've found contentment through the years, a few words from a few unhappy people and a few sad situations wormed their way in and started putting down roots. [Here's the rest of "Hanging Pictures in the Sewer."]

Titanium over at Element 22 had something to say in response to a remark I made in that post, i.e., if I fall in a cesspool, pretty soon I start hanging pictures because I start feeling comfortable there. Here's what Ti had to say about that:

"There’s something in these dark places, too. Like bulbs wintering over in a cool cellar, devoid of sunlight, all we can see and smell is the desiccation, the decay, the frailty of our own wintering-over. It is a season of the soul, this dark place- and one that will feed the source of the green shoots that are soon to come.

"Without the winter, the dark, the stink- there couldn’t be new growth. Sometimes we have to be cut back and cut down completely in order to return full of life. The green shoots are coming through the soil with these words of yours and soon the sunlight and gentle rain will coax flowers like you’ve never seen.

"In truth, if each one of us is NOT a troubled soul, we are not stirred in any way. Try to see ‘troubled’ as a transitive verb. See it as the transition that it is, the agitation of soul that stirs change and growth. Sometimes even the unkind messengers are prophets unknown, harbingers of change that was already blowing in the wind."

What are your thoughts on Ti's equation: agitation = growth?

Living with Sorrow

One thing you can depend on is that nothing will stay the same. Life will throw you a curve ball, a slider, a fastball you never saw coming. And everything will be different all over again.

My family got hit with a triple whammy this month. To respect the privacy of others in my clan, I can’t talk about details except to my trusted advisors. I haven’t known what to say in my blog. So I’ve said nearly nothing. But the itty-bitty-shitty committee in my head has been blabbing nonstop. I was told by oldtimers early in my recovery from alcoholism that my head is a bad neighborhood and not to go there alone. But at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., it’s just me and the darkness and the chatter in my head. It’s a form of torture.

I’ve tried: counting sheep; counting steps on a green path in a forest; guided imagery; breathing; prayer; telling myself imaginary stories; herbals like melatonin, valerian root; tryptophan; wrestling with God; making gratitude lists; reading; even watching late night science programs about recycling. Nothing shuts off the committee.

A nasty bug has been making the rounds here in my town, and many people are falling ill for two weeks, a month, at a time. It settles in the chest and results in pneumonia in some people. I caught it and have stayed home for nearly three weeks trying to fend off another bout of pneumonia.

I’ve resorted to watching television, catching up on films I missed in their theater releases. So far I’ve seen “Revolutionary Road” (what a wrenching movie!), “Julie and Julia” (Meryl Streep’s tour de force), “In the Electric Mist” (James Lee Burke paired with Tommy Lee Jones!), “Nell” (give Jodie Foster an Oscar!), “The Duchess” (wow!), “Secondhand Lions” (loved it!), “Flawless” (another wow!), and “Masterpiece Classics” on PBS. I haven’t watched TV in years, being an avid reader instead. But reading has become difficult. I have, however, worked my way through one-third of award-winning David Brin’s “Sundiver” sci-fi classic.

Being ill, I’ve hit maybe four or five AA meetings in three weeks, and I’m accustomed to six a week. At least for an hour in a meeting, the itty-bitty-shitty committee falls silent. So I browse through what we call the “Big Book,” AA’s textbook, and the “Good Book,” my other “textbook for living.” I’m trying to concentrate on a few passages they contain:

First, on the subject of the “magic magnifying mind” that enlarges whatever it dwells on, there is this:
“When I focus on what’s good today, I have a good day, and when I focus on what’s bad, I have a bad day. If I focus on a problem, the problem increases; if I focus on the answer, the answer increases. … I must keep my magic magnifying mind on my acceptance [of things as they are] and off my expectations [of what things should be], for my serenity is directly proportional to my level of acceptance.” [Pages 419-420]

And this from the Good Book, as it has been quaintly called:
Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. … And the God of peace will be with you. [Philippians 4]

I’ve heard it said (by Robert Louis Stevenson) that any man can carry a burden until nightfall which would overwhelm him if he tried to carry it forever. Therefore, focus only on this one day, doing the next right thing a moment at a time, and leave the future in God’s hands, where it rightfully belongs. In my life at this moment, all my needs are cared for. For that, I am grateful.

Lame Things the Brain Thinks

This is a cross-section view of my brain first thing in the morning and after several hours of Electronic Hell. Just kidding. It's a thing I made to honor my youngest daughter one day when we were not getting along.

A funny thing happened on the way to the store....

Someday I will start a list of the odd things I think of first thing in the morning. Waking up sleep-ridden, mindlessly making coffee, and opening the shades of my office, my brain isn't engaged until somewhere down the line, maybe about the thirtieth cup of coffee.

The morning before last, all I could think of for the first, oh, two hours of being awake was the line "A funny thing happened on the way to the store...." And nothing funny whatsoever had happened on the way to the store the last time I checked. I was so obsessed with that line, I Googled it. And nothing funny ever happened on the way to the store. On the way to the Forum, yes, and on the way to the theater too. But there is nothing funny about American stores at this time of year. They're crowded and parking is a pain.

Thursday morning, the weird thing that was stuck in my head upon awakening was a word: Imatropium. I'm a tropium. It's meaningless. I looked it up. My goofy, sleepy brain got a big kick out of saying it over and over again at 4:30 in the morning! The dumb word made me get up! I had to track it down, because I knew I'd seen it somewhere. And I found it: It's a misspelling of a chemical that I've been inhaling for the past month as part of my post-pneumonia treatment. And I'm not going to look up the chemical, either. I find myself in an obsessive state of mind, and Lord knows where that investigation would take me.

I got stuck in TECHNICAL HELL all day Thursday. Since I had so jolly much time in the morning, being as I woke up before the crack of doom, I decided it was a great time to address some digital technical difficulties. It turns out to have been an utterly insane idea, on all fronts.

First on the list was the satellite company, to whom we just paid a gazillion dollars to have a guy come to the house and "set up the system" for our new enormous flat-screen TV, which is my beloved's long-awaited Christmas gift. Oh, how happy he is! But we needed a new piece of furniture for the TV, because it no longer fits in the old-fashioned, beautiful oak entertainment center we've had for 20 years. And I discovered this proposed new piece of furniture was hideous, as my beloved perceived it in his dear head: a piece of laminated plastic crappola from one of those close-out super discount kind of places. That would mean the monolithic new focal point of MY living room would be the new enormous TV balanced upon a piece of shit. No!

Have you bought what one might call a "substantial" piece of furniture lately? I'll just say that it's more than half our mortgage payment. And then, come to find out, you don't just plug stuff in to an outlet. There now are multiple cables of various types and special surge protectors and "connectivity," and one must have surround sound and that means installing speakers all over our dinky living room, but wait, the surround sound dealy-bob happens to be a piece of crap, in the technician's eyes, and he advises us to retain the fine old HUGE speakers that go with the (now INCOMPATIBLE) stereo, which will have to have its own remote control device, as will the DVD player, because it's ... what? 15 minutes older than the new humongous TV? It will also need its own remote, so here are your three remotes, sir, see ya.

And the first thing that happens after paying this technician, who has been sent to our home by the national satellite company (accessed by an automated 800 number), yes, well, the first thing that happens is that we can't get the DVD player, which is playing the little DVD merrily, to communicate with the gargantuan TV, and so now we can't watch movies.

A simple thing to fix, no? When I called the automated 800 number and finally got to a human being, I learned that the satellite company doesn't "do" DVD players. What about the billon dollars we paid the guy to "set it up"? That was just to hook up the new satellite dish they said we had to have, and make it talk to the new satellite receiver boxes they said we had to have. I made her go talk things over with her "manager" but the answer was the same: Not our problem.

That was my first technical failure. My second took many, many hours longer. I decided, because of some crazy wild hair, to sort out why my computer doesn't recognize my digital camera. After spending all day and all evening sorting it out, I discovered that it's a simple matter of incompatibility between Canon and Microsoft Windows 7. I did find a "patch" on Canon's site and wasted, oh, maybe three hours doing every sort if iteration you could think of, to no avail. So sorry.

In my leisure moments, I idly poked around the computer, looking for reasons why my printer isn't recognized either, why I can't do scans, why I have to go in a back door to get things to print. Alas. No answers readily available there.

So I've spent the entire day attempting to solve difficulties associated with my purchase of equipment that won't even nod at each other let alone communicate. I fired off a couple of snide emails, but what will that accomplish, if their geeky little heads couldn't figure it out and avoid the incompatibilities in the first place? I don't mean to inply that all geeks have little heads. Just the geeks at Canon and Microsoft.

I knew I should have thrown all of this aside in order to decorate our brand-new Christmas tree. Had I done so I would have felt fulfilled as the evening came to a close. Instead, I felt frayed and dog-bitten by the hounds of hell. But a sweet little rain began falling, and I'm warm and dry and I have stuff to battle with even if no one's talking to each other.

If I wake Friday morning obsessing over another meaningless phrase, I'm getting up and decorating the tree.

****************************************************

THIS morning, I gave up trying to sleep at 5 a.m. but without a stupid phrase in my head, praise be. And this is how masochistic I am: I picked up the printout of Canon's camera-driver "fix" and read it again, and I felt my fingers itching to just TRY IT ONE MORE TIME, in case today the "fix" would work when it failed 504 times yesterday.

This is insane behavior, the definition of which is "to do something over and over again expecting different results."

Here's today's happy thought: On this date in 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright had their first successful airplane flight at Kitty Hawk. For some reason, their "insane" behavior, attempting multiple times to fly a motor-driven aircraft, was rewarded with SUCCESS!

Tomorrow, I think I'll address fractal geometry, which I learned all about in the wee dark hours this morning....

My Scars

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

Kahlil Gibran

I was out in the garden yesterday, attacking the weeds. It was a pretty spring day, a great day to be outdoors.
Armed with a tool or two and special weed-gripping gloves, I worked hard. I lost track of how nice the day was in my focus on the weeds.
I came in and wrote this poem:

Weeding

Why do the roots
descend so deep?
They grip the soil fanatically
hell-bent on survival
while the precious flowers
press their roots
to the earth like polite guests.
Weeds will release
their crowns but not their guts
the sacrifice a lizard makes
in giving up its tail
So resolute a thing inspires
not respect or awe
but fiercer dedication
to their eradication
foul fiends

Here’s what I noticed about the weeds, a variety of dandelion in particular: The more often in the past I had tried to rip it from the ground, the thicker and stronger was its root system today. I’m not kidding; there were dandelions out there that I have been fighting for years, and they are stronger than ever, because they have suffered at my hands.
This time I went after them with my long pointy dandelion digger. We’ll see how that works.
Gibran with this quote makes me fear that they’ll just grow more massive characters.

I like to think there’s an up-side to adversity. I like to think that all people in recovery are stronger souls because of the suffering, that survivors of all kinds of trouble have greater character than the ones who’ve never faced pain.

For decades I thought the scars I bore marked me as messed up for life. Only in the past few years have I realized, thanks to great help, that I can wear my scars with courage and dignity. I didn’t get them because I was bad but because innocent people get hurt like anyone else.

I think the roots of survivors grow deep. What do you think?

Ed, You Talk Too Much

"Women of 20 are as mature as a man of 40," Ed declares
in his red and gray running suit.
But I wonder," he continues, "when she says
"Ed, you're just not mature enough"--
"Alex was sure cute, wasn't she?" he asks.
I stare at him , feeling the pen
like a sword in my hand.
"I don't want to talk about that," I say
and take a long puff off the fake cigarette
I made: a shortened straw, a bit of tissue
(for drag) and a bright red highlighter tip.
Ed goes off to the other side of the patio
where he rides the stationary bike a while.
Schizophrenic, he had spent the better part
of the afternoon wailing in his room, two doors
down from mine. When he returns from the bike
he doesn't talk, just stares at me, puffing on my
straw cigarette, as I write about him.
I feel a little bit of guilt: Should I listen
to his placcid rant, now the drugs have kicked in,
or shall I just feel the air, the cool, sweet air
Santa Babara Air, early October, a hint of salt
Shall I rest my puffed-up eyes on cypress
trees through the window, a procession of palms
running through them, and just admire
the red flowers on some species I don't know
a soft bloodred against the rich green bushes:
Shall I drink my fake spiced chai tea
and sense the peace of this quiet place
ignoring Ed; ignoring all attempts at mindless
union, even the girl who wanders in to start
a load of laundry, tears puffing up her face
like mine, soul sisters of the broken mind.
Ignore them all and understand
sometimes the silence matters more
than contact with humanity, even mine.

Cracks in the Ground

One of the oddities of the 6.5 earthquake we had here a few years ago was the humongous crack in the ground that opened up in the countryside. It was two blocks long and about 15 feet wide.
Cracks in the ground open up interesting possibilities. A child might ask: What if you fell into a crevasse and wound up someplace like China or Wonderland?
People fall into crevasses far more often than you might think.

Uncle Otto at 90 years old was a spry, wizened man smoking a pipe at a family reunion. Right in front of my eyes, he fell into a crack in the ground: a time warp in which decades drop away. Suddenly he was a boy again in Montana:

“In the dark before dawn, it was 20 below. I walked behind the wagon to keep warm, a young boy feeling sorry for myself. I can still hear the sound of the iron wheels crunching in the snow.
“In the manor where I live, there are 135 old people. I gaze at their faces. The women, they must have been beautiful once. Now, like the rest of us, we aren’t so attractive. But the beauty was there…”
Time is a crack in the ground that you can pitch headlong into, and you find yourself being somewhere different from where your body stands. Memories are like that.

Sometimes cracks in the ground open up when you’re walking through hard times.
One minute, for example, something troubles you, weighs on you like an iron wheel around your neck. You’re shackled to your worries. Then suddenly you fall into a wonderful crevasse.
You open your eyes, and beauty is there. Trouble has vanished in the soft sloughing of waves on the sand…the wheeling flight of sea birds…the irresistible desire to run your fingers through the pebbles on the beach in search of sea glass.
If you are worried today, may the ground open up beneath you, and may you tumble into a blessing.

Trial by Fire

My marriage, 18 years strong, has not been all sunshine and roses. Both Joe and I had our fair share of failures before we met (in an AA meeting), but those prior failures proved to be our greatest asset when we were courting.

"I don't know how to have a healthy relationship," Joe told me. "Maybe if I do everything the opposite of how I've done it in the past, I'll do the right thing for a change."

We made an agreement: We will not run, stuff our feelings, or lie to each other. In the early days of dating, that agreement kept us going when old behaviors and old patterns of thinking threatened to do us in.

Our 12-step program gave us a good model to follow, and our agreement gave us compelling reasons to stay and tell the truth, as well as to be responsible for our own thoughts and feelings as we inched through the minefield of courtship and then marriage.

When my lifelong battle with depression struck again, and I went through a bout of drinking after 14 years together, Joe stayed and asked the most loving question: "What can I do to help?"

We survived, and I got sober again. Our agreement stood us in good stead through the perils of step-parenting, the death of Joe's parents, the normal disagreements of two married people. We have grown together and independently. Joe has said that the real secret of a happy marriage are four little words: "Honey, I was wrong." We have learned to practice forgiveness, of ourselves and of each other.

One of my meditation books this week used a sailing metaphor for the ups and downs of life. In sailing, one of the worst enemies is the dead calm, which leaves you dead in the water. Every bit of "turmoil" in the air is the sailor's friend. Our faith, said the meditation, is always at its greatest point when we are in the middle of the trial--the tumultuous wind that sends the boat scooting along to its destination.

Joe and I enjoy our periods of becalmed waters, when life is utterly serene. Then the wind of a trial stirs the air, and our sailing skills go to work. These trials make us better sailors and carry us further along on our journey. The storms exercise our faith in each other and in our Higher Power.

I remember that as I cope with my demented mom, with clinical depression, with an eating disorder, and with the other trials and turmoils that beset me.

Here is a poem composed when I was beset by problems caused by living life on life's capricious terms, and when my marriage and my faith were my sources of strength:

Powem

oh your smiling face
zzzts like a spear
into my chest
strikes my heart
stretches it
wide as a smile
I feel it
in my toes

Chris Alba (c) 2009