Last Sunday I saw the female red-tailed hawk closer than I’ve ever seen her, flashes of both belly and back, the dark outline beneath her wings, the red tail fanned out, translucent, lit by the sun. She landed on a shrub at the top of the ridge near the spot where the row of seven yuccas bloomed once, my companions and my comfort in an earlier stretch of time here. I imagined her studying me. I’ve never been so aware of wanting to be found worthy.
Years ago my friend Richard talked about how we can shine a light on any aspect of ourselves, bringing our attention to it, and that’s all we need to do for it to transform. (I’m sorry. I don’t know if this should be attributed to a particular teacher.) I remember telling him you would have to have a lot of kindness for yourself in order for that to work. I knew it wasn’t working like that for me. The other day I was sitting in my corner of the back yard beneath the lime green umbrella, thinking about my anger, my reactivity, my yelling. I was deep in my thoughts, the pool, the pots of succulents, the bees, even the lizards all receding. I am always paying attention to some degree when I’m acting out, I thought. But my observer isn’t curious or kind. My behavior isn’t okay with her. I think if I want to be able to rein myself in more quickly and more often, I need to develop a better relationship with my observer, fund more kindness, foster more genuine interest in my goings on. I can almost hear her. Oh, look, she whispers, fascinated, look what you’re doing now. Isn’t that interesting. Oh, see how it isn’t working for you? Let’s see what we can do, she says. I can dream up a version of me laughing at myself, brimming with self-acceptance. I can almost touch her. But I am too far away. Still, the sense of possibility is heartening. I look up at the ridge, my little bit of mountain here, scan the edges for a sitting hawk. I don’t see one today. But hope sits inside me. Maybe if my observer can be kinder, she can talk me around.
I am in the center
of very hard things
I feel like I fail
again and again
but the truth is
I am still here
still finding ways
to return to myself
every
single
day
so today I will
stop
and open
and be proud of myself
in this moment
the thirteenth time
today that
I came back.
These days
I don’t always know
where to go
how to be inside myself
all sharp jagged edges
I dissolve
on the floor of the garage
I keen
into my pillow
I want to put my fist
through the wall
(how do people do that?
the drywall must be very thin?)
but now and then
I find that sweet spot
where I know beyond doubt
how lucky I am
I find my grateful heart
in a quiet moment
in the midst of it all
and I cry tears
that don’t hurt.
I’ve just had three days with hectic-ness, ongoing exhaustion, plenty of anger. I’ve been so tired I’ve let dirty dishes sit in the sink, dragged my mother to El Pollo Loco, read a new fantasy novel by Naomi Novik (she of the dragon stories). There has been genuine laughter and odd, goofy, hunched up prancing through the house, a weird grin on my face. Decades ago as an undergraduate at Cal I was daydreaming on the grass when a young man stopped. “You look like you have all the answers,” he said. I laughed. “No,” I said, “but I have a lot of questions.” I remember the unexpected, happy intimacy of the exchange, and how underneath the memory I can point to that day as the day I first understood letting go was the secret to everything in life. For months now I have refused to surrender, have resisted every damn inch of what is. These past two weeks on top of everything that’s been going on, both the next door neighbors and the people across the street have been breaking up cement with a jackhammer, hour after hour after day. If I am not being asked to surrender, I don’t know anything. Maybe my default lethargy is a good sign? We’re not in Kansas anymore. Be easier with it, my dear one, if you can.
I am still not used to days of going and going, still finding my way in this, wanting to touch down more, palms to the earth. But there are pockets in most days, places where I land, even if only for moments. Some just rise up in me, like sitting in the car in Montrose drinking my yerba maté the other day when I felt so incredibly lucky. Some pockets meander over, like the hawk that swooped in and sat on the electric pole when Asterik and I were talking in the street. Sometimes I reach for these places, like stopping with my tea, sitting in the back yard taking in the ridge, the mockingbird singing in the leafed out liquid amber, the California towhee on the wet ground eating millet. Taking in whoever shows up. And the moment late at night when I turn off the last light before going to my room. I look through the living room to the solar Christmas lights outside on the succulent, the corner of the San Fernando Valley lit up in the distance, cars moving in slow motion on the freeway. I stand still in the kitchen doorway, this silent evidence of life happening out in the world, and the lush echoes of it alive in the dark quiet of the house, memory of the day just lived, and holding tomorrow.
I have two paper bags and a USPS bin of mail sitting untouched in the spare room. Seven empty bags of yerba maté scattered across the big wooden table in my room. Eight long lists of things I need to do littering the floor, herb books, my scribbled up calendar folded open to April. But when I have a free hour I do not clean my room or sort my months-old mail. I do not spend hours on the phone lining up appointments or checking tasks off my lists. Instead when it’s quiet I read in the afternoon. In the morning I sit in the sun with a cup of hot yerba maté and let my mind drift. When I make effort beyond the basics or the unexpected, they are small moments, small things, planting cat grass seeds in the patch of dirt where the cherry tree used to be, watering the pots of succulents beside the pool. Three days ago, I cut a window in the big ball of ficus tree and hung the bird feeder in the hole. You can see the trunk, the branches, the feeder like a little house in a cavern of leaves. It feels like a real tree now, and birds are coming. House finch, white crowned sparrows, towhees. When I watch them I think the veil between me and the world might be thinning. Nothing is easy in me, but I think it might be easing.
No Holds Barred 