Category Archives: People

Something Big (19)

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I asked the woman who was doing a reading for me about her gift. I didn’t think she was clairvoyant, someone who sees things about us. She told me she’s clairaudient. I looked it up later in the dictionary:

clairaudience |kle(ə)rˈôdēəns| noun: the supposed faculty of perceiving, as if by hearing, what is inaudible

But in the moment I asked her if what she heard was actually audible. “Do you hear it with your ears?” She said she wasn’t sure. She was just so used to it, I think. She’s been doing this for over fifty years.

“I just hear a voice,” she said. And she told me we are in a key time for the ability to change. It seems between the winter solstice on December 21st and the summer solstice in June, we have a chance to truly change, to “flip the switch” she said, “once and for all.”

It’s good news–of course it is. But because of who I am the first thing I did was worry I might not succeed in spite of this rare chance. “Are you saying,” I asked her, “that if we don’t manage to change now we may not be able to later?” She said no, but it would be much, much harder.

She talked about how the universe is set to support us now. I balked, the disgruntled child, still stuck on worrying about failing. I told her it seemed to me the universe always supported us. “Not like this,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” During this window the universe is poised to support us like nobody’s business.

So. I wanted to be sure to pass this on. It feels big to me, capital B big, as though we might each step into who we want to be more fully than ever before. Happy new year, everyone.

Too Hard on Yourself? (9)

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My friend’s voice on the phone is quiet. “I wonder if you might be too hard on yourself?” she says. I’ve just admitted my recent sloth and debauchery, my recurring impossible transition from the end of the academic year to the summer. Her voice is all whispery and kind, as though I am a horse who might spook, the words an answer to prayer, I think later. (I have asked for gentle lessons.) I know I am too hard on myself. I gauge my efforts harshly, often fall short. But something in her voice makes me think my friend is talking instead about what I ask of myself, what gets put on the list to work toward to begin with. How do we decide where to aim? How do we know if we’re asking too much of ourselves? I plan to take it slow, this putting back on of my list of expectations. I want to let myself slip into it like a well worn sweater, or soft shoes, nicely broken in. But I am thinking I may not want to don the list again in its entirety. Maybe I will cut off the sleeves, wear new orange socks. Maybe I’ll just go to Stein Mart and poke around a bit.

Lean In (5)

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I have an ailing cat. She keeps losing weight but on most days will still climb the fence to go exploring. My godmother has a beloved older dog who is undergoing one thing after another. She hurts her wrist and her shoulder grinding up Annie’s pills. She’s been through this before. My friend Audrey has a friend who may be heading into the last stretch of a long debilitating illness. She isn’t eating enough, so Audrey brings her to her home and cooks her an omelette. She thinks she’ll only eat a few bites, but her friend polishes off the whole thing. Another friend falls apart when one of her sisters calls to let her know their mother has broken her hip. It stirs everything up, sinister foreshadowing, the beginning of the end. I think the unknown is the hardest part. She feels the death of her parents looming, then makes the jump to the ailments and death of all her friends. “It all looks pretty bleak,” she says. Wait, I think later. Come back. We may have decades of healthy lives ahead of us. I buy organic liver cat food, and my Sofia licks the bowl clean. The next day she won’t touch it. I worry when she leaves the courtyard and doesn’t reappear for six hours. When she comes back in the late afternoon, I fall in a heap and cry, the sun spilling across me on the kitchen floor. We all know this, are on one side of the equation or the other. We’ve been through this before. Our hearts sink and soar. Our courage, our hope, ebb and flow. Life becomes moments. Savor the taste of the cheese omelette in our mouths. Thrill at the sight of the red glass bowl on the floor licked clean. Rejoice in watching your too-thin friend enjoying the breakfast you made her. Lick the last piece of liver off your paw. Bury again and again the part of you who wilts inside at the way the ribs show through the woman’s skin, the cat’s gray fur. Breathe. Lean into laughter when you can. Kiss them on the forehead every chance you get.

The Layers of You (3)

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Today I can feel myself getting better. I hope I can sleep tonight. I don’t think I’ve had the stomach flu since I was a child. I have a hard time believing it now, even after three nights of little sleep. And being who I am, I can’t help but wonder. Why did I get sick? How did I catch it? I think of the blackberries I bought at the farmer’s market. They looked dark and succulent. I was disappointed when I pulled them out of the narrow cardboard flat where they nestled with the two baskets of strawberries. What a gyp, I thought, seeing how shallow their container was, a third of the depth of the box, if that. I ate one unwashed. It was sour. They were all sour. But did I allow in that snatch of thought, that maybe they were unclean? Is that why I got sick, because I didn’t banish the thought? Is that how I got sick, from someone with this crummy flu packing blackberries? Or was I vulnerable because of my intense day of writing last week with Laurie, over six hours of writing and reading our work, and the stunning voicemail waiting for me when I got home that evening? Or even better, did I get sick to somehow mark my transition to the next thing? My spring break felt like a passage in itself, this accidental holiday filled with big days. Semana Santa. Passover. The lunar eclipse. April 18th. Then our big writing day embedded in the heart of it. Was having the flu a way to mark the changes, the ending of my big week, to begin again anew? A cleansing, both the figurative and the literal, the universe’s odd sense of humor? Because there is something unmistakable about recovering from even so brief an illness. A sense of returning to yourself, the adding on of layers that were stripped away, until you feel like yourself again but not quite the same, as though the layers were placed back at different angles, or as if they stretched or shrank in the peeling off process. Today I wriggle in my new skin. I hope tomorrow I wake up fully me.

The Visit (2)

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I dream of cats and hummingbirds. I am in a small walled outdoor space where a cement slab overhang juts out from the building. There is an airy gap between the overhang and the top of the wall, open sky visible to the southwest. I meet a skinny Calico girl cat who makes me want to love her. Reluctant, I put her down. I don’t want to collect more animals because one day I need to be free to walk the Camino de Santiago. There are many of us in the walled space, mostly birds and mammals, I believe, though besides meeting the cat I don’t focus in. I sense this place is a shelter for all life though maybe not of this world. I am with a younger woman who I don’t know. She lives here, I think, or works here, and is showing me around. She has a pale, narrow face and dyed black hair that falls straight and glossy below her shoulders. There is an iridescent purple near her left cheek, a big metal earring catching the light, or maybe a streak of color in her black hair. I watch as a hummingbird alights near her right shoulder, makes itself comfortable against her neck. The woman is unsurprised. “Oh my,” I say. I gape at them. “Never before,” I breathe. And then I feel a fluttering near my own shoulder, my left. I know without being able to see it is a hummingbird. She nestles into the dip above my collar bone. I know by the quick movements of her beak she is preening, supported by my body. The feel of her reminds me of the same trusting way Boo will lean against me in bed, his gentle weight rocking as he licks his black fur clean. My heart goes soft with memory and with the tiny bird cradled against me now, the honor I feel, this gift of surrender. After, I stand awake before the bathroom mirror curious to see how much room she really had. I rub my fingers back and forth along the curved space behind my collar bone. I can still feel her soft fluttering against my skin.

Egret Tryptich Finale (55)

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I am riding across the bridge on Sunrise in the afternoon weeks later. I glance down toward the golf course and see a handful of egrets wading in the shallow water. It takes me by surprise. I’ve only seen my lone egret all this time. I try to find him in the cluster of birds, but no one looks quite like him. They all seem smaller, less regal. I am flabbergasted in some odd way. Where did they all come from? Does he know they’re here? Could these guys become his friends, his family? Later I see my neighbors on the creek path. They ask me if I’ve seen the egret. Yes, I tell them. And I tell them about the ones I saw by the overpass. They seem as surprised as I am. I think about the photographer, about the man in the red hat. I wonder how many more we are, imagine scores of us each having a relationship with this one exquisite bird. What did our egret think of all our attention? And then for a moment I wonder if he is more than an egret.

The Woman in the Waiting Room (50)

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I am not so naive or so bigoted to believe all doctors are assholes or all nurses are saints. I know both groups have their fair share of both. But when my stepfather was in the hospital, it was the doctors who were the challenge and the nurses who helped to get us through. It was the nurses and the other family members of patients on the floor. There is something that happens between strangers sitting together in a room when each of you faces losing a loved one. I remember sitting in the little alcove on the eastern side of the oncology floor in the Newport Beach hospital. And I remember a short blonde-haired woman whose husband was dying. I remember seeing recognition when our eyes would meet across the small space. I think we came to love each other a little bit sitting in that room together.

I was sitting there one afternoon, slouched against the blue fabric chairs, when I heard her voice and looked up. She was standing in the hallway, head tilted up toward the oncologist. “You want to understand?” his voice now, loud against the white tiles. “Then you go back ten years,” he growled at her, “and go to medical school.” I don’t remember what came next, only the way the bottom fell out of me for her in that terrible moment. I knew it had already been almost impossible to remain upright, to keep limbs and torso stitched together, and here she was bludgeoned now by his mean, defensive arrogance. I wanted to scream at him on her behalf. I may very well have gone after him, spoken my mind. I was 24 and had a habit of doing so. But I hope I went to her instead. I hope I offered comfort when she needed it. And I hope my eyes spoke those same volumes to hers whenever we met in the alcove or passed each other in the hallway. Brave, kind stranger—que le vaya bien.