Tag Archives: forgiving myself

My Own Milagro

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This morning, in that first light of the sun when our desert mountains turn that lovely orange for three long moments, the waning gibbous moon hangs near them on its way toward setting. The air is clean, the mountain ridge crisp, each small jagged rock defined against the sky. I stop in the open sliding glass door, communing, grateful, quiet inside.

I had good sleep and woke to a kind of softening, I think. I’ve had whole days of late swimming in my own muck, impossibly impatient and crazy icky with my mother and even my auntie, unable to step outside of it. By yesterday, I managed to forgive myself. With this morning’s softening, my sadness—for my mother’s latest mental plummet, for myself, for our world—sits easier in me again. And my heart seems lighter, sweetness returned, my own milagro.

[Editor’s note: I have been committed to doing “real writing” each day in my notebook since December first. In my latest effort to return to something more robust than a haiku I have begun using my own three-word prompts again. Today’s were sun, swimming and sleep. And I owe this little piece in part to my dear friends, Marylou and Richard. I sent them a text update this morning that wended its way into today’s “real writing.”]

Letting Go Is Hard to Do (23)

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Chris Erskine, one of my favorite columnists at the L.A. Times, was kind enough to reply to my email years ago. I remember he talked about how writing a column or a blog can be hard because we’re dependent on what happens in our lives. It was the first time I understood the contrast for me, how it moves between plethora and dearth. Because today I want to come back to those two hummingbirds in my living room whose visit I completely missed when I was having a difficult conversation on the phone the other day. And the last time I was on my bird walk, how I was focused on a woodpecker in a nearby oak, when the man beside me said, “Oh, look, a deer.” I glanced up only long enough to see him, to note his short antlers, and went back to looking at the woodpecker. After, I felt terrible. I went looking for the young buck but couldn’t find him. “I’m sorry,” I told the man later when I’d caught back up to the group. “I shouldn’t have let bird trump buck.” But two weeks later, I still feel sad about it, lying on my back in the courtyard after my yoga. I feel sad I was unable to transfer my attention in that moment. I adore deer. If I’d made a real choice, I would have stopped, breath caught in my chest, and watched the deer in wonder. It is still a grief in me, no ease in forgiving myself, in letting even small things like this go. It comes to me I may need to allow the sadness in more when it first arises. Maybe even one brief full moment would do the trick. Maybe an apology to the buck? I coax myself in letting go. I am only human. I’ll miss moments. I’ll mess up others. I’ll get good at forgiving myself. May I rejoice in the times I remember to stop.