Pulling a 180 (60)

My horoscope says, “You’ll become more conscious of your triggers and start to develop plans to avoid unwanted states.” First I want to laugh, sarcastic and scoffing. Yeah, right. Then it creeps up on me, this matter-of-factness I am making fun of. And all of a sudden, it opens up for me in a different way. I believe it can be as simple as this, and I have made a zillion “plans.” But these words are assuming my success is taken for granted. And I want that. I grab it in a loose fist. Here’s to avoiding unwanted states, in all their awful glory.

Tough Love (47)

I trim the bushes on my little road
tecoma, bougainvillea, Mexican birds of paradise
so wrong this time of year
but so needed
to repair the butchering done to them
in my absence and
without my permission.
Now I am ruthless, but
each cut is made with love.
(After, I wash them with the hose
and pray for new growth.)

Flight (32)

It is two months now since I fell. I returned to my yoga for the first time yesterday. Today I do four sun salutes. My hands hurt when I lower myself to the green mat from plank pose, when I push up, when I move into downward dog. I am slow, careful, feeling into it to be sure I’m not causing harm. After, in chavasana, I let out all my air, relieved and grateful to be here again, the place I come to after my yoga, even after this little bit. I open my eyes and watch the turkey vulture glide by above me, skirting the ridge. “Be safe,” I whisper to her. “Be careful in this wind.” Earlier today I walked out into the street to see if I could see Catalina. The long, curving shape of her was there, downtown L.A. close enough to touch, the sea shimmering between them. My red-tailed hawks’ offspring was there, too. He wavered in the wind, landed on the ridge, seemed to be eating, though I was not close enough to tell. I think of him now when I open my eyes again, lying on the yoga mat, and there are two ravens playing high in the sky.

Becoming (22)

I’ve never been good at this, but I’ve always wanted to be. So when I get the sense for the first time that she has a message for me, I try to be able to receive it. I am surprised to get words. “Dissolve and blossom,” she tells me. I know right away she means my habit of fear, the armature that’s lived inside me all my life. Days later, in an almost dream when I am curled up in bed crying, wanting to forgive myself for being unkind to my mother in the unlooked for hours of the early morning, I see chicken wire in my heart and throat. After my fall, for a moment I understand she meant more than my fear, that her message was more akin to the sense I’ve had that I am being asked to surrender completely, to let go of all resistance, maybe, or allow all my holding on to dissolve, to slip back into the earth to become good things. I know this is impossible. But more and more in small moments, quiet tears sometimes sliding down my face, I believe in it, the incremental, invisible little bits of it, one unexpected moment here or there, and then the next.

Welcome (21)

I sit, wordless, wondering what will come. Welcome, she says to me. Do not worry. All will be well. Words come, my self reassured by my self. All will be well. Don’t worry. Be happy. (Like the song says.) So simple. So true. So damn hard. I am weird and wonderful one moment, pulled into shark waters the next. But always, always find my way back again, tears drying on my face, something eased or healed inside me, blessings raining down, wetting my head.

Dispatch (13)

I sit beneath the lime green umbrella in the corner of the yard and drink my yerba maté. I remember the moon and look for her in the sky. She is right there, only a turn of my head, not behind the neighbor’s tree or hidden by the umbrella. My daylight moon. I turn back to study the top of the ridge before me in search of movement or the silhouette of a hawk perched on a shrub or the bare branch of a dead bush. Once I saw a deer grazing at the very top of the hill. I’d always wondered if they climbed the steep rocky sides. I let my mind drift, drink my tea. Later I wonder if I can still see the moon, and I turn to look again. There is writing in the sky where the moon was. For a moment, I think it is a message from the universe. It startles me to find it there, but in that first second, the possibility doesn’t seem odd at all. Why shouldn’t there be a message in the sky for me? In the next moment, I realize it’s skywriting. “Narek,” it says. Or maybe “Marek.” The word is moving north, the letters beginning to come apart. I see the moon then, the waning crescent just beside the “k.” Behind the name is a perfect heart, holding its shape as it follows Narek across the sky.