Former Friends

Photo by Mandoline Whittlesey

 

Today I woke haunted by those who are no longer.           

People who passed through my past

ghosts before they were gone:

a Jessica, a few women named Amy, one Virginia, and many more.

As if they are states I once visited

but no longer possess a visa for.

They litter my contacts in voicemail and email:

I type in someone new,

and there they are, their former selves

smiling at me.

They are not smiling at me.

I am not smiling at me.

Last night I dreamt of a host of them,

a gaggle of them approaching me in anger. I felt shame like a virus,

gangrene infecting my leg, bacteria spreading

organically, as if this is always

how it ends.

I know forgiveness.

I know how to give it for another.

Where can I cauterize my self-inflicted wounds,

these dangling ends that stir in me

amoebas of what could have been

invisible spikes

of what I thought

was a beautiful and safe cactus?

My own mind became dangerous, found land mines

in these interactions. I cannot seem to let the hair triggers go

drop the reflex to defend

let myself really never understand

let myself know that I will never really know.

Smiling Like My Mom

Last night I dreamt my mother, now dead for seventeen years, was alive and happy.
This is an unusual dream - meaning, I can't recall it happening before, though I am sure it has.
Usually we are in conflict, fighting, or she is distant in some way.

In the dream, there was no plot. Simply the image of my mother smiling, happy, facing me, sun on her face. It was glorious.

In fact, she looked quite a bit like me in the photo above, from almost a year ago. Our faces are very similar, with notable differences, but especially our noses with the line in the middle...and because the camera was above me, you see my glasses below my eyes. She often did this in order to read. And our smile - a bit mysterious, no teeth, turned up at the edges.

For years, when I took my glasses off to eat, when I caught a double chin in the mirror, I'd do a double-take. I did not. Want. To. Be. My. Mom. What woman wants to be her mom? I know a few, but they are rare. Most of us want to be our own person. When my mom died with me so young, nineteen years old, it became panicking-ly difficult to remember: who was she? Who am I not being?

As I grow older, instead now I want to know: who was she? Who am I becoming?

Slowly, bit by bit, I play out the same irony so many people do as we age: increasing interest in our families, who are already gone or fading. It would be convenient if as teenagers we wanted to know all that geneology our parents might be researching. But that's not how it works most of the time.

So, instead, I look to my dreams. And there I see that when I am happy, I look a lot like her.
And that is good.

a few sounds take me there

a poem came to me while doing yoga this morning...

a few sounds take me there

chickadee dee dee turns into

the twits of

bats on a cool fall evening -

the impermanence

of sonar.

i cannot sleep

up like the cicadas

long after midnight

long into when the day

has finally cooled

off enough to rest

so i rest.

all my tiny children inside

curled up under the creaking tree

of me now

adult

awake into the wee

hours.

i only know i have slept

because at some point i wake

and think:

those were only dreams, sweetie,

nightmares.

that place never existed -

where he touched me -

that time is outside time.

but then i realize before i went to sleep

i was awake

very awake

and knew full well

what was happening--

the crickets

my witnesses.

Dream/Reality

Last night, before meditation at the Shambhala Center, I finally did one of the practices I was given at the 10-day retreat I did a week or so ago. I hadn't made space for it at home yet, and we had the supplies at the center, so since I was a bit early for setting up, I settled in and did it.

A practice I had done again and again for a week in a tent full of 100 people became, for me, intensely concentrated with just me alone in the silence of my local center's shrine room. In just 10 minutes of practicing, a LOT changed, shifted and I felt completely opened.

After meditation and cleaning up, I went home to do ordinary household things with Dylan - mow the lawn, weed, water our fruit plants/trees (strawberry plants, raspberry bushes, pear tree), etc. It was a cool evening, few mosquitoes, and the yard felt utterly alive to me. I slept heavily, fed by the hard work, though it took me awhile to go down, so entranced with the perfect evening air.

After the cats woke me at 5am, I went back to sleep and had this dream:
The Sakyong, Jamgon Mipham Rinpoche, who's the main teacher in Shambhala, was staying in our house. Even in the dream I thought of a story Diana Mukpo told us at the retreat - that she and Chogyam Trungpa (Mipham's father and former head of Shambhala) used to drop by their senior students' houses without warning for dinner, to see if they were uplifting their lives for everyone, including themselves, all the time. So here he was, in our house, currently without a bathroom sink, with tumbleweeds of cat hair and dust rolling around, and dirty dishes in the sink. I was mortified, but also so glad he was in my house. I went to a talk and saw him speak there, but then went home early and stayed up late cleaning. When he came back he seemed happy but said nothing about the difference in the house.

The important thing is that *I* felt it. When I told Dylan about the dream, about the stories of dropping in on their students, he looked mortified. "Too much work," he noted, and I tried to explain again - this isn't some outside standard, this is making your home as good as you want it to truly be as often as you can so that you can be your best - most alert, most rested, most supported. He got it, then. The Sakyong appeared in my dream not to bless me, not because I am special, but to remind me that I can be as prepared for myself, as honoring of myself, as for him. That I want to be. That there is no difference between me and him.

So I cleaned up my office today, put the shrine together with new supplies, and everything somehow found its place that had seemed homeless before. Putting together the books and texts from the retreat, a photo of the Sakyong fell out of my bag and landed face up on the floor. A slight smile, eyes directly looking at me, he reflected my own state - cleanliness is next to godliness, yes, but not some external god. Our own internal god, our own internal basic goodness, beyond good and bad, can land and open best in an uncluttered space.

The practice opened me up to this, I know that for certain. It, ironically, instead of taking me back to the retreat, brought me more here - into my home, into my life, into my "stuff" (of literal and metaphorical meaning). It's about time - as the retreat becomes more of a dream in my mind, a memory, the past, I don't want the teachings and their effect on me to fade. Last night was a reminder of how quickly it can all come back, and then some.

Here's to tasting just enough of the dream to sharpen up reality.

Mysterious Productions

A couple of nights ago, I decided to drive by the house I grew up in. I was in the area, teaching the last of my Junior High creative writing program (through WCATY) and it was late - post-drink with a new friend, pre-hotel return. The times before back in the area are sometimes overloaded with emotion and I can't go anywhere near the north side of town. But this time, everything closed down but me, it was ok. I drifted along the streets, through blinking red lights, tracing the paths of 18 years of life, followed by a few mixed ones after - dating someone back in the home town, brother still living in parents' house after mom died - and it felt wonderfully stimulating (wish I could predict things like that! such good writing time) as opposed to traumatizing.

A block away I saw the for-sale sign on the house next door, then, as I got closer, yes, a for-sale at 1414, the house I grew up in. Without thinking, I took out my iPhone and entered the information for the realtor and sent it to myself, before I could judge anything. I knew I probably wouldn't call, that it, in fact, might be bad news to do so, but I did go back to see my grandmother's house years after she died, and it did resolve at least this feeling like her old place wasn't haunting me anymore.

When I am ready, it will be good to call on the new owners, whomever they are at that point, and walk through this house where I grew up. It had already changed around a lot before my brother sold it - totally re-done interior: wood floor where the green matted carpets used to be, exposed brick where plaster used to crack. Then, all of a sudden, it was sold.

Last night I had a dream along the lines of two kinds of dreams I've had about that house for many years. The first sort (not what I had last night) is more of a waking dream - lucid, lyrical - in which I think of "home" and what comes to mind is not the house I have owned for nearly 6 years, but *that* home, my childhood home. The two lay over each other in a strange, very dream-like way, sometimes as I sleep and often as I am awake. But what happened last night was the second sort - I dream of the house, of living in it, visiting it, and it is wholly different than could even physically happen. Once I dreamt a woman had turned it into a ballroom dancehall kind of place (the ceilings are stuck at a firm four-square frame house height of ten feet) and last night, that some incredibly hip and lovely loft-building couple had turned it into a place of total light and sparkly corners, completely altering it to its core. It was hard for me, in the dream, to be both happy for it and also sad to have lost the simple place I recall - often, now, in memory exercises where I make maps and lists of what was in every room. They told me they were trying to sell it for a million (Why would you fix it to your desires then sell it? I asked, and they had no reply) which wouldn't work for the location in my hometown the house is in.

But I loved it this way, too. I tried to take ideas and think of bringing them back here, to the home I actually own, the one I am in right now, writing. I couldn't shake this desire to buy that house - that new version of the old house - in toto. Maybe I wanted to freeze it from changing, or maybe I just loved that it was new and old, even as it was hard for me. I told them about my childhood neighbors and what I knew of the history of the neighborhood. They were delighted but also not committed to staying there.

Like me. You couldn't get me to move back there, not to that house, or that town. I don't hate it or find it a bad place - I think it's quite a good place, actually - but it's not my home. Madison is my home. Right?

I called Dylan and mentioned the For Sale sign, debated whether I would call the next day, whether I should tell the truth (I used to live here, saw it was for sale, and wanted to look but am not looking to buy it) or fake it. I don't think I could have faked it, and Dylan agreed, but also warned me that the truth might not get me in - it might with a current owner, but not with a realtor.

I didn't call. In the end, it was too messy emotionally and I was too tired. Instead, I went to Horicon Marsh on my way home, one of my favorite places on this whole earth. I found a new place to enter in and drove along a quiet road, listening to peepers and barking geese. Finding "home" out in the middle of the marsh, looking out over the flattened cattails and sharp blue waters really re-centered me in a way I am certain going to 1414 wouldn't have done. And by the time I did get *home* much later last night, I knew I was where I am supposed to be.

Waking this morning after the confusing dream, I fell into a fog for an hour or so. Where am I? What do I need? What is home? I opened up the images I took at Horicon - the place my subconscious directed me in the middle of my meanderings - and felt re-honed, re-centered, at home.

Wisconsin. Yes, both that home and this home - 1414 and Madison - are home. Horicon is also home. I am home all the time. I carry me with me all the time. The dream is the truth, and right now typing in bed is also truth - a much bigger truth than the stories of where, when - a truth that is also much simpler.

I am home for me, and all of my memories are fodder to keep the homefires burning, as are fantasies and now-moment realities. All my mysterious productions - plays on words, dramas of the mind - all of them point to the same thing, not contradicting things. I just had to back off enough to see what they were all pointing to in their chaos. Many thanks to Horicon for bringing that truth home to me.

Weather Report

The cats are very wiley today. Aviva got up every half hour or so after midnight and played with a large mirror that hangs on my bedside wall. Her tactic is to futz with it, pull it a bit so it fidgets on the wall, then stop, paw usually still in the air, and look at me in the moonlight to see if I see what she is doing. If we aren't awake, she keeps doing it until we are. And when I spray her with a spray bottle, she keeps doing it on and off, indignantly licking her wet butt or face first.

A student came into class this week and said that she's been having a rough few days. "I choose to believe it's a full moon. That and I am PMS'ing, too." It's been rough for me, too, and also not. Stirring old pots lately, to try and bring the brew to surface so it can heal, so the pot, me, can heal. Juicy things, floating up, sometimes bobbing below surface. I am tired of rowing in all of this stew but I know it will be better this way. Eventually. In a way it already is.

The cats remain crazy. I came in and they both woke up from apparently a long nap to make up for a night of nagging me out of my dreams, and now they are running around the house, playing with things, popping objects off the dresser to get my attention. Feed us more! Play with us! Open the windows and doors! Part of me, too, wants to go run around, break free and expand. An equal part wishes as much stillness as I can find, to keep the boil at a tolerable level.

Outside the weather echoes us all. Windy, cloudy, always on the edge of a storm. This morning it was stormy. It may be again. Then again, in between bouts of wind, the sun peeks out from between two clouds and lights up a yellow changing Honey Locust. Impermanence in action.