Category Archives: Spirituality

Agradecimiento at the Kitchen Window (52)

Posted on by
2

view from the kitchen window (palo verde, mountains, lime green umbrella)

I am standing beside the pine table in front of the kitchen window mixing the tuna and medicinal herbs for Sofia. My own watermelon juice was first, the jars full of pink clustered together now on the top shelf of the fridge. I move the blender through its speeds, my body on automatic with the familiar steps. I stand looking outside but not seeing. I am glad I’m finally taking care of this. I’d put it off for too many days, something always getting in the way, robbing the time or the inclination. I flip the lever to slow the speed, turn the other to shut the blender off. I am still staring out the window when I come to. I see Serena, adorned with her yellow palo verde blooms. I see the lime green umbrella, the mountains in the distance, doves in both the tray feeders, late morning snack. Pleasure washes through me. I take it in all at once like a song. I really, really love our new home. Gratitude pours out. This appreciation comes often now, slipping in at odd moments, seeming quieter and deeper than I’ve known before. Maybe that comes with age. Maybe it’s tied to the fact that this one belongs to us more fully than before. Or maybe it’s just her own magic working on me, her spot on the planet, her mountains nearby, her birds, her sky, now her palo verde, her bougainvillea, her human, her cats. I feel like we belong here. And so lucky. I hope she’s glad we came.

A Jolt from the Universe (47)

Posted on by
2

When I am posting the little flyers I’d made for the drop-in writing circle, I send off little hopes and prayers with them. May it be sweet and safe, I ask. When Laurie tells me she felt safe in our first circle, I hear that echo, send my thanks. And before we begin yesterday, the universe gives me a bit of a jolt I am pretty sure is tied to that same prayer, that same hope: sweet and safe. We’d opened the back doors of the hall, moved the big round table in front of them, sun and air beside us. It is just before eleven. I light a candle in the center of the circle. Laurie and Sharon are sitting at the table, and I’m standing beside it. A woman marches across the long hall, plants herself near Laurie’s elbow.

“Are you coming to join us?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. She stands where she is, a soldier at attention.

“Well, did you think you wanted to watch us?” I ask.

“Maybe,” she says.

“Well,” I say, “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.” I’d thought about this earlier. We were not looking for an audience.

I haven’t finished my sentence when she does an abrupt about-face and marches back across the hall. She has her arms at her sides, and she is flapping her hands back toward me as she walks, as though she can swat away my words, keep them from following her.

“Um, what is the flapping of the hands?” I ask. And, “Are you really not going to talk to me?” She keeps walking away, keeps flapping her hands in my direction. “I’d be happy to have a conversation with you about this,” I say.

She reaches the door at the other end. “Maybe,” I think I hear her say as she walks out again.

We are all a little stunned. I have to check. “Was I inappropriate in my response?” I ask. They say I wasn’t. I have to shake it out of me then, a kind of invasion I feel in my body. I wave my arms around in the air above the table. “Whoosh whoosh whoosh,” I say. A different flapping of hands, I think now. As best I can figure, this odd jolt is a message. I take it as encouragement and a reason to trust. Maybe it says we can keep our space safe no matter who comes along. And maybe it says, “Certain beings will be led away.”

Sit—Write with Us (45)

Posted on by
4

Thursday we’re going to meet at the community center to write. I’m thinking short, timed freewriting, what Natalie Goldberg calls “writing practice.” She’s known for saying, “Shut up and write,” though maybe more to herself than to others. I don’t like the shut up part, but I like the process. I’ll bring my collection of popsicle sticks, mostly Goldberg writing prompts and a smattering of others. I’ll bring my timer. We’ll write for ten minutes, or maybe eleven. Then we’ll read what we’ve written and go for eleven minutes more. I need to make a flyer, but I don’t worry about it. Laurie and I will begin on Thursday with whoever else hears about it and shows up. A drop-in group, I’ll call it when I write something up. I need this. I’m pretty sure I need this almost as much as I need sleep. So I’m glad we’re just going to begin, the hell with planning. I get to sit in a room with other people writing, our pens making scratching sounds as we scribble across the pages before us. I get to read my unedited words out loud, listen to what others have written, performing together the alchemy I may not have words for but believe in with all of me. Change both visceral and ethereal, the magic of spontaneous writing. I thank you in advance.

Who Are Your Angels? (31)

Posted on by
2

Without thinking, take a leap. Who are your angels? Name them all. Go.

My angels? Without thinking??!!? Oma, maybe. Lassie. Sanji. Bonnie. Daddy. Even Jarv? But oh goodness–how do I do it without thinking? Angels are not supposed to be spirits of loved ones who’ve died but their own “species,” so to speak. I have a hunch it is because of angels I no longer feel alone the way I used to, though maybe growing up has a part in that, too. I imagine angels disguised as birds in my life–the beat of the raven’s wings near my head, the kestrel’s call, that silvered moment when I watched the barn owl’s silent glide in the night, lit by the lights shooting up from the ground at the house on the corner. I imagine a fat angel in a white dress perched on the wooden fence between my home and my landlord’s. She has yellow hair, like the felt angel Mami gave me years ago with the wild yellow curls who hangs on my front gate at Christmas.

[Editor’s note: This is another writing prompt from before I moved into my trailer. Things, as you can see, will be a bit of a hodgepodge while I work toward still meeting my original commitment of 55 posts while I’m 55 in spite of my huge lapse this year. ;-)

I am thinking of working with prompts for going forward, too. I think this is the last of the older ones. I thought some of you might enjoy having the prompts themselves, though I’m afraid I don’t have attributions for these last few.]

Buried Alive (23)

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve always been a little claustrophobic. I want a window cracked when I drive. I remember fighting with Kay when I drove her to work. She wanted the window closed. I never had a good enough reason for insisting it stay open, only the vague sense of not being able to breathe. During the mountain fire last summer, I was driven inside for a week, windows closed against the choking smoke. My claustrophobia mounted as the week progressed, ash like thick gray snow coating the trailer, the courtyard, my sense of not being able to breathe pulsing through my days and nights. Then it came to me, the source of my claustrophobia. When I began sitting zazen in the early 1990s, I dreamed a past life. It’s the only time it was ever more than snatches, this one whole cloth. I was a priestess, or maybe royalty. I was expected to sacrifice myself for the good of my people. They were preparing to bury me alive. I had long brown hair, maybe seven feet of it or more. I lay down in the open grave, the dark, moist earth warm breath beside me. There were helpers who handled my hair. They gathered and folded it with care, laid it with gentle hands in a long narrow box above my head. Then they began to cover me with dirt. I remember being afraid, not of dying but of shaming myself by resisting, of struggling against them at the last moment. The earth got heavier and heavier, and somehow I was able to hold still. I remember my relief when I realized I was going to just lose consciousness from my lack of air, just drift off, not humiliate myself or my family. In my stifling hot tin can this summer when I felt like I was suffocating, I remembered my dream. “Of course I’m claustrophobic,” I mutter. No wonder. I laugh at myself for not putting it together earlier. “Duh,” I say. I roll my eyes. Being buried alive just might do that to you.

An Earthling Beholds (21)

Posted on by
Reply

Tuesday before the little wooden bridge I glanced back over my shoulder as I walked and saw a big bird flying in my direction from the southwest. I stopped to gawk, and the dark, animated silhouette became an egret. She was flying too high for me to hear the sound of her passing, but I stood and watched the long, silent strokes of her wings until she disappeared. She was still in my head moments later when I rounded a curve and came upon the moon, almost full, peering through the lacy winter branches of the old palo verde beside the path. And so, in the way of things, the two images were linked inside me: the slender, graceful bird, the large, round moon near the horizon, their white shapes both luminous in the late dusk. Words can’t do them justice, I know. But maybe that doesn’t matter. Because the overlapping moments live in me now, their wonder, my awe, clay feet planted on the earth, all of a piece in our fragile, fleeting world. If I might be so blessed, may they live in me all the rest of my days.

Sitting in the Dark (20)

Posted on by
Reply

light spilling out from kitchen window

This is something that needs saying. I’ve thought so again and again during the intervening months. It happened to me over and over through the long, grueling months of summer. Even though I was kind of a mess from our move. Even though my first foray into home ownership was riddled with distress. Even though in the bigger picture during that time I couldn’t have told you how glad I was we’d moved, couldn’t have said in any unequivocal way how much I loved our new home. Even though I’d crumbled in it all, I would still sit outside at night, and it would come to me in these small moments. I’d glance up at the kitchen window of our new old trailer home and see the light spilling out from it, and it spoke to me of welcome and all things good, all things inviting. “Look,” I’d say in the warm dark. “Just look at what we have.”