Category Archives: Love

Grateful (37)

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For the way our palo verde flung herself at a diagonal when she blew over in the last fierce wind so she didn’t hurt my neighbor’s carport or our wooden fence, and she didn’t block my front door. The mango and palm trees in pots beneath her felled form came through unscathed. The vet didn’t find an ear infection. Two people have responded to the writer’s guild post about doing spontaneous writing. I’m spending Thanksgiving tomorrow with Mami and Auntie Gardi and her family for the first time ever. I get to choose a new tree to plant, maybe that one I’ve had my eye on with the big pink flowers in the fall. For the bare branches it will have in the winter so I can see the mountains. For the mountains themselves. For my new yoga teacher and the new meditation center I can ride my bike to, sidewalk all the way. For the good headlight on my bike so I feel comfortable riding in the dark. For my zafu. That I finished grading all the summaries and essays late last night, so the next four days sit clear. That cleaning up the shambles of our courtyard after they cut our tree in pieces and took her away had me paring everything back to pure clean beginnings. For time this weekend to put the Christmas solar lights up, lay down a few small pavers, put the sweet finishing touches back in new places, life breathed into it all. For this afternoon when I hauled Boo back to bed with me, and he stayed on my belly and let me pet him for a long time, tears rolling down my face. For the promise of belonging to the sangha, the promise of Sable becoming well again, the promise of a wet winter. For the house finch and the goldfinch at their feeders today in our naked courtyard, flitting, chattering bits of sweetness in the warm, clear day. For the big full moon rising out my shower window in the cold night, water hot against my skin. For you, for me, for words and meaning, for long lives lived well.

Altar Peace (34)

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my altar with candles and pumpkin and marigolds

My day of the dead unfolded without effort, my altar growing little by little over the past week, my ritual organic and unplanned. I bought a big bunch of orange marigolds at the farmers market, and yesterday I plucked them from their stems, added them to the altar. Now it is a living, breathing thing beside me, candles at the heart of it. I wish I could let you see it the way I see it. The changing light adds a kind of sharpness, a clarity. It makes the colors dazzle, the flames dance. Every time I look at it it makes my heart dance, too. I have a big grin on my face, and I feel so lucky I could burst. And the smell—that spicy, earthy scent. I won’t need food if I can just keep breathing it in. Sunday in the late dusk I watered the plants here in the courtyard, went through the long list of my dead. They’d been coming to me bit by bit, but this time I started at the beginning, worked my way through each one in order, from my dog Grunt and my Oma almost 50 years ago to my cat Sofia, my newest dead. I ended up standing in the dark beside the glowing altar talking to each one, wanting them to know they are well loved and well missed, asking for blessings on them at this time when the veil between the worlds is thin, midway through these months when the moon holds sway. Today while I write a bee comes to grace the altar, touching each blossom in turn, messenger of the gods. Feliz día de los muertos. Happy turning of the wheel.

Goodbye, Part Two (29)

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Sofia on a pillow on the patio with her arms crossed

I think, I hope, I am done agonizing over Sofia. Did I miss some signal? I knew she was close to the end. I asked her about it every day. “Are you ready to go?” Oh, my love. There were two times in the last few days when I saw that glazed “I’m enduring” look in her eyes for the first time. She was lying under the bed in the hot afternoon. Was that my cue? I can’t count the number of times I traced those grooves in my mind, replayed the weeks, the months. Did I miss something? But then I remember her face when I opened the closet door on that last morning and she looked up at me. I remember her clear eyes, the look she gave me. Calm. Matter-of-fact. Here you are again. Good morning. I’ve heard the vet say the time comes when there are more bad days than good. But who is to say life isn’t still worth it, isn’t still precious when all days are “bad” days with good, good moments. Morning on the chair in the courtyard. A bowl of tuna water pressed from the can. Sitting in the sun in the corner of the garden beside the marigolds and bougainvillea. A visit in the middle of that last night, head firm beneath your human’s chin, fingers stroking the edges of your mouth, a purr rumbling deep within you. Oh, my love.

The Girl Next Door (28)

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Last week I began to read Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing for the second time. I tried to resist, read pieces of the Bonnie Friedman, the Annie Dillard. But they didn’t move me. The first day I read the Bradbury it made me cry. Goldberg’s work makes me cry, too. Today I read Bradbury in the courtyard in the late afternoon with the sun in my eyes. He says in order to feed your muse, “you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child.” I wonder if this is true for me. I kind of think not. But maybe so—just a quieter version than I feel from him. And I have imagined for a good while I’d like to be more avid, more eager, more vibrantly alive. Might I be on the road to that even now as I move my pen across the page? I think, too, he grew up in a different world, one I was lucky enough to touch when I was a little girl, like the last sip on the tip of my tongue. The carnival came to his town, real people who talked to him. The magician sent him home with the rabbit from his show. The world was smaller then. It makes me wish I’d been the girl next door—oh, that’s Ray’s friend Riba. I wish I’d felt the silky fur of that magician’s rabbit underneath my hand, that I was sprawled on the ground with the other neighborhood kids listening to his father’s voice in the dark, telling stories of his own childhood when there were no roads heading west, only dirt tracks and the new railroad, or lying on our backs looking up at the sky filled with stars and tasting awe for the first time in our young lives.

Goodbye, Part One (27)

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Sofia under the chair

Today I finally build a small altar for my cat Sofia on the table in the courtyard. Tomorrow she will have been dead for one week, but I spent a good part of that time agonizing, torturing myself, replaying things over in my head. There was a lot of blood, too, on that last day. It took time for the shock to fade. So only today do I feel clean grief. It makes me grateful. I want to write about it. I have a lot to say. But I am vulnerable and exhausted and not ready. Still, I can’t say nothing. The first day or two after she died, I kept thinking I could smell her terrible cancer breath. (I wanted it to be true.) And there is that weird presence, that lit up place she used to fill, that keens her absence like a ghost. She is not lying under the bed. She is not in the closet. (The door is no longer ajar.) She should be here, but she’s not. “She’s never coming back,” I tell my boy cat. I think it’s sinking in. I still can’t walk into the back room without checking the floor to make sure I don’t step in pee. I want to go back in time and tolerate every annoying thing she ever did. I want to remember the clear look in her eyes on that last day when I slid the closet door open to say good morning. I want to kiss her soft furry head again and again and again. I feel like I have a whole book to say about her inside me. Here is the first snippet. Know you are loved, my darling girl. We miss you. Be well. Oh, please, be well.

[Photo courtesy of Marylou and Richard, shot the last time they tended my two little ones when I was away. Thank you.]

Just as I Am (12)

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auqua aura pendant on black cord

Going to the dentist makes me vulnerable. When I lived in Sebastopol I endured a long stretch of dental work. After each visit, I walked to Putto and Gargoyle. (It is now P&G Art.) I would breathe the sweetness and whimsy of this airy shop, take home a fat round mug or a big glazed candlestick to comfort me after my ordeal. It became a tradition. So when I had pre-crown work done earlier this month, I went to Crystal Fantasy and bought myself a pendant, an aqua aura, clear quartz infused with gold. They gave me a black cord, so I can wear it around my neck. Today I do my sun salutations in the courtyard. When I hold plank pose, the aqua aura dangles below my face. It has never looked so blue. I wonder if it’s picking up the sky, or if it’s the way the light reaches it when it hangs free like this. I move to downward dog and the crystal comes to rest against the tip of my nose. I want to giggle. I am a little kid with a magic stone glued to my nose. When I surrender to chavasanah I’m in tears. I am crying and laughing at the same time. It comes to me that I am doing good work. I know I am okay, even though I didn’t get up early to weed the tecoma bed beside the road, even though I still haven’t started my fall prep. I am crying and laughing because these things are true and still I know I am okay. I am doing good work. I am finding small ways to be easier with myself, kinder to myself. And maybe all my tiny efforts have added up to this small window of knowing I am enough just as I am. I sit up on my knees, my feet tucked under me, hands together in front of my heart. “Namaste,” I say. I touch my forehead to the mat, bowing to the light in each and every one of us. After, I roll up my yoga mats, and I am singing. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” I sing. My voice is quiet, tender, dear to me. I am enough just as I am. I keep singing. “Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”

Morning Kisses (11)

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I like to wake up slow. When Sable is beside me, I turn over for morning kisses, pettings and rubbings of his soft furry face against mine. Today he takes off before kisses. Sofia comes instead. She never used to want to be touched, but now the cat she has become will present herself for affection in rare moments. (These times tend to be when I’ve just begun to work on the computer or have just sat down to dinner, and she’s pushy about it. I remind myself I don’t know how long she’ll be here because there is something about the way she invades I don’t find at all endearing.) This morning she is quiet. She gets in my face but then sits down. She lets me kiss the top of her head, stroke her cheeks. She stays for a long time. I talk to her about not hanging on for my sake, remind her to let me know when she’s ready to go. “I’ll help you go night-night,” I say. It makes me cry, good tears. I’m not open to her as often as I’d like to be, so this feels right. Then she decides to run off the bed, quick, jerky movements. She knocks my mini iPad to the floor. I yell at her. I remember I don’t want to yell at her. “Arrrgggghhhhhhhh,” I say, sotto voce, like the whisper of cheering baseball fans on the radio. But then I tell her she’s a creep. If I remembered to stop yelling, couldn’t I not call her names? Still, maybe it’s progress of a sort. I will add name-calling to the list, I think, as I walk to the door. I let the cats outside, step out into the courtyard with them. I say my little morning prayers. I try to forgive myself for yelling at Sofia (yet again). When I “come to,” when my eyes focus, I’m staring at the big waning moon just setting behind the San Jacintos. It is framed, postcard perfect, between the smooth green limbs of our Palo Verde. It makes me stop, this miracle, this affirmation of life, of magic in the world—this big gift. I stand there, grateful, and everything else seeps out of me. I watch, not moving, until she disappears behind the ridge. Goodbye, moon.