Homage to Love and Magic

On December 16, 2021, Dylan and I chose to put our beloved fifteen year old Burmese cat, Drala, to sleep. It was a hard decision, as it always is; even though the doctor made it clear it was the right decision, as his kidney disease had accelerated rapidly to a place of no return. 

Drala was a beloved being, quiet, shy, and easily startled; snuggly, affectionate, and soft. We miss him a great deal.

Love Doesn't Always Make Things Easier

I am humbled to admit that for a long time, I held this against my mother: she struggled to raise me the rest of the way to adulthood alone. 

I have only realized this recently - meaning - I was aware I was angry with her, and upset/disturbed that some things went (on occasion, horribly) wrong in my adolescence. But recently I've come to understand I also associated those feelings with an assumption that somehow she loved me less.

Because if she had loved me more, wouldn't things have gone better?
Wouldn't it have been easier, for both of us if she had loved me more? Enough?
Luckily, just in time for me to see that these beliefs exist, I am able to let them go.

Class Chorus: Lessons in Love

(I am bringing back something I used to do for my classes each week - write a new piece that threaded in all the experiences from the classes I had. Each week's writing has a theme.)

Why oh why does English only have one word for love? Intimacy, sexuality, romance, none of these are verbs. You can have sisterly, brotherly, friendship love but these are only adjectives, adverbs to describe the verb of loving, which attempts to describe something so profound and instead gets so overused as to become cheapened.

Romance, of course, appears most. First loves - heart breaking and rejuvenating. Spontaneous, raw, intense. Snapshots and short strips of film lodged in memories like symphonies that begin all over again with a simple cello tuning.

Leaning that fairy tales aren't real, unless princes can be girls and have paws. Not betting on anything related to another human, hurt, hurt and so much need for connection. 

And yet when you can grow where you are planted - marriage, children: saying I love you a million times a minute so it will soak into your spouse and children's bones. Is it possible to love too much? Is it possible to give too much? Can loving the self really help someone else? The most complex love of all - that which we try to grow for ourselves, without feeling selfish. "How can I be me and love someone else?"

Animals. First dogs and cats, wet paws and snouts that lick broken up wounds. Some kind of unconditionally, simplicity, like most have for their children and few have for their parents. Teaching us how to love, then, because they die so easily, under card or of cancer, so young, how to let go. Love of land and nature go here, too, love of most places, especially those without people - farms and cabins, lakes and hills or mountains.

And trying to make what once was one love into another, under the public gaze of your friends' opinions. When do ex's become friends? Have we really let go of they are the one thing we regret? What we hoped to leave behind, to blame, that follows us into every other relationship to come. Trying to answer complex questions with simply leaving, and yet, sometimes leaving must happen.

Yoga, dance, running - for some the simplest love of all, and for others a fear-based festival. Sweat and trust, knees and feet thrust just so. Who made you feel good? Is sometimes less a who and more a how, just like studying the patterns of how we were hurt, the furrowed brows, we can feel when a skull was held just so in another's hands. 

"I love deeply, steeped in the people around me," the sacredness of sacrifice when in the right context. Looking at religiosity - when is surrender not about paid for sins but about a fundamental forgiveness. An erasing between the boundaries of icons and myths and into the deep earth experiences we all share: bliss of connection, sharpness of rejection. Being together in groups, simply working or laughing, a thousand eyes looking back across the Willy St parade. Sometimes easier to feel it for or from hundreds of others than the one right in front of you.

So excited to get love. Then, shit. Now what? Habit and grasping, lust and disappointment. But after that, love again, from a friend or from the same companion, a re-working it out. When er can't hold or hug, when what our other needs is something we can't give, how can we trust they know they are loved? Letting them soak in it in any way we can. 

Focusing on breathing, again and again: falling asleep on mama's belly, listening to a lover or partner or pet snore, feeling in your own body enough to feel love or a longing for love. For life. Love is our oxygen; drink it in. There are depths of love possible that we aren't even aware of, and chances are they won't come from those we know best. Stretching to meet different families, different languages that can express these feelings with their bodies or faces or words we can't even pronounce. 

Exciting, exhausting, pacing ourselves because the best love is constantly discovering, finding comfort in discomfort, being willing to be unsure for just a moment longer. 

Being willing to put a stake in the ground and choose love over death means active work. Resistance, resilience, resonance.

Fear of Dying

Bandaged heart graffiti by Beni, Paris 2015

Travel takes me close to death, but not in the way you would think.

When I board a plane to Europe, when I find my seat on the Eurostar, when I climb down the steps of the Metro to ride the No 1 line to La Defense, I am not thinking about death. Not even remotely. When the metro car stops mid-tunnel when it is supposed to be moving, when the train slows down for a moment and the lights go out, when the plane jostles through some rough clouds, maybe I think of death just a bit. Never conscious, always under the surface, some sense of knowing the truth peeks out and makes itself known.

But when I really really think about death is when I am with the people I love. When I look at the face of a friend across the dinner or breakfast table, when I take my wife's hand on the sofa and share a smile, when I tightly bind myself to a heart another in a deep hug, at these moments, often something fleets across my awareness: this may be the last time. We never know.

This is the thing: we never know. If having lost my parents when I was young taught me anything, it taught me this. It did not teach me what to say to others when they have dramatic loss. It did not teach me how to feel or what to do to assuage grief. But it did show me that we really never know.

This is an odd kind of knowledge. Unfortunately, unlike memorizing the conjugations of the verb "to be" in a foreign language, it's not the kind of knowledge that comes back easily. When it arises in my consciousness, as it did this morning in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, I want to bat it away. I want to know what happens next, even if I know that that knowing itself causes me more harm in the end. 

Choice and Victimhood

$5 directions Portland December 2010

Dylan had the following written on our wipe-off board in our room for awhile. This is a place at the foot of our bed where we keep important reminders. This one was given to her by her therapist.

The Choice: Where there's conflict, I can go either way. 
A. Pragmatism - DOING
"Hey, it's cool. I'll do this other thing to try and make it better."
This is: dynamic, active, decisive, assertive. I am not a victim/Agency.
VS.
B. Self-Pity - BEING
"I am a disappointment and I suck."
This is: static, passive, relinquishing control. Victim hood.

I've been exploring victim hood a lot lately, since it became clear this last summer that the victim/rescuer/perpetrator triangle is really the main theme underneath my Bermuda Triangles memoir. It's painful stuff - especially because of course I'd love to say I am all over that now, but I am not. These are deeply embedded habits and they pop up every-fucking-where - in my marriage, and intimate relationships the most, but even at the grocery store, waiting in line to ring up.

My Heart on My Sleeve

Love, NYC 2011

This week is a post by a student, Barbara Samuel. She describes so well the process of sharing, what we are looking for from others about our writing, as well as looking for from others about ourselves. I think it really fits my last post about not using writing - or anything else - to get love. She really shows the mixed bag of connection and fear. I am discussing a lot of how this relates to writing memoir in particular over at Memoir Mind, in case this piques your interest in that direction. She also begins to explore how hard it can be to depict a particular time in our lives and share it with others without them seeing us as just that at that time. What do we do when the era we are depicting is so different than who we are now?

We just read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which she refers to in the piece.

This is a rough draft, as always is the case with my students' pieces here.Actually I prefer to call them "raw drafts" instead of rough drafts - it better depicts why I find them so powerful.

-Miriam

When I visit my son and daughter-in-law I take a flash drive with me that contains
everything I’ve written in the last year and a half. Every time we are together, there
or here, they ask me to read some pieces. That’s one benefit of having a close child;
there is one person in the world who actually wants to hear what I’ve been writing.

Don't Use Writing To Get Love - Or Anything Else

Heart on Fire, Austin TX

I have been haunted lately by one of Natalie Goldberg's classic mantras:

Don't use writing to get love.

A few weeks ago I got a reminder on yet another even-more-subtle level, that I can't use teaching - nay, anything - to get love, either.
I don't know about you, but I can use just about anything to try and get love.

I am not talking about consciously seeking acceptance or being wanted. I am talking deep, deep down in crevice, corner, inner-child seeking love missile. Empty whole in belly quality. I think I have taken care of it but then I get stressed out and LO! this issue is still there.

So many forms of Impermanence

My brother Alex got married this weekend. It was a Halloween wedding, resplendent with major crafting done by my now sister-in-law, Patty, and many images of love mixed with impermanence. Bride and Groom skeletons, for instance, held up pumpkins with their names carved out, and a ghoulish butler invited everyone into the reception room.


Witches, goblins, zombies and ghosts attended the wedding, along with, of course, living costumed creatures: Mr and Mrs Potato Head, Masquerading Bridesmaid (that was me), a few devils and belly dancers. Some kind of goliath, a few goths and a secret detective who gave his ID away right away. One baby pumpkin, and so on. But the first list - witches, goblins, ghosts and zombies - struck me in particular because for my brother, sister-in-law and me, another set of ghosts attended the wedding: Alex's and my dead parents, Michael and Tricia. Patty, my sister-in-law, suggested that they place a white rose on each chair for our parents in the front row during the ceremony - and so in the front row at the ceremony (attended by other ghosts, goblins and ghouls) there lay their ghostly traces. Later, I carried the white roses with me everywhere - they sat at Dylan's and my dinner table, and visited the DJ table where Dylan made sure plenty of Thriller and other celebratory scary music was played to dance to. Now they are home with me, where I will dry them and add them to my Dio de las Muertos shrine.

Everywhere I went this weekend, I saw skeletons and skulls, and not just in costumes, in places I wouldn't expect: in art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, on the streets imbedded in concrete. Impermanence, sometimes in a joyful way, other times in complete sadness that overwhelmed me and threatened my careful makeup job, reared its head completely this weekend. Ostensibly we say that the wedding was Halloween themed because Patty is a Mortician - technically, a County Examiner - with a license plate "Morticia" and Halloween stuff all over their house any time of the year. But for me, the theme was perfect and quite healing, actually, considering how much death Alex and I have lived through in our family: our parents, all of our grandparents and great aunts and uncles, and a godparent all gone by our twenties. What better way to invite our whole family - not ever as big as Patty's, but once more sizeable than now - than to invite the dead as well.

And not just the kindly ghosts, but the haunters, spooks and zombies, too.

To invite impermanence itself to one's wedding is to do a brave act of acknowledging this short life. During his speech at the reception, Alex spoke of how our mother had cried for a month after our father's death. Then, he admitted, he thought to himself "Just get on with it," but now that he has so much to lose - Tyler, his son, and Patty, his wife to name the big ones - he understands her grief so much more.

To love is to know what it is to lose, to lose is to know what it is to love. A risk. Life is a risk.
A Halloween wedding acknowledges this. I thank them both more heartily than they could ever imagine for not only throwing the most fun wedding ever, full of bagpipes and dancing sausages and moustache props, but also for letting the sometimes-difficult truth of our existence dance in its skeletal form alongside our joy and laughter.