Freedom to Be

Today the blogosphere is waking up to a call from one of its own, a woman. She has received death threats on her blog for speaking her truth.

For whatever deep, deep, deep reason, women speaking their truth sometimes evokes tremendous fear in others. Unable to own, to hold, to reach out about that fear, the powerless react with anger and hostility. Petty tyrants threaten.

Raise a hand for empowerment and courage and a steadfast practice. One-pointed focus.

May we embrace our light, in all its beautifully subtle and raging ferocity of truth. May we find our voices, extend ourselves to others, and join hands together to strengthen our resolve.

And may we pray for the lost souls, that they accept the invitation to examine their inner and outer worlds and return victorious, love at the helm.

Please join us in standing up to support those who have been threatened.

The Sky Turns

All I can think of this morning is a Rumi poem, after two hours of sleep. After the hardest twenty-four hours of motherhood. Who knows why the combination of factors makes me want to jump out a window at 3am, or why the recent 'episodes' of outrage from a two year old push me so close to my edge.

I had to take her out of a restaurant in the first ten minutes of sitting down, full screams and flailing limbs trailing behind. Refusal to get into the carseat had me restraining her so that she wouldn't hurt herself, while she hit me in the face and head, while parents stopped on the sidewalk to stare, stared out windows from restaurants. Disdain in their eyes. I was sure one of them would call 911.

More cries and screams from 2 - 5am. I hit the wall.

How do we bear those first moments of shutting down to our own children? How to we look at dread straight in the face?

I sit in the car after dropping her at daycare and cry outside of Peet's. On the radio, NPR, a show about the traffic of women and children. Strange and tragic, but I begin to gain perspective.

The annual sexual trade of women and children is a $10 billion dollar industry, in line only behind arms and drug trade.

1.2 million children are taken and sold and traded every year, a large number in our country.

Ok, my child is safe and loved. I suck in many things of mothering, but I love my daughter fiercely.

I hate coming undone. But I see that I need help, so I'm going to look for help. Levels of violence in my childhood make it impossible to function through the raw hours of mothering a daughter. So scary.

My prayer today, my prayer for River and me and making it through....

Rumi is worth repeating:

BIRDWINGS

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
if it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

- Rumi



* Thanks to my dear friend and doula, Carolyn, I found out about a therapist in Berkeley who wrote the book When Survivors Give Birth. I just called, she answered the phone, and I'm going to see her tomorrow.

Emanating Light

"The yogini sees herself in the heart of all beings, and all beings in her heart."

Suddenly, how we can awaken!

The rain stopped sometime in the night and first thing this morning, glancing out the bathroom window, sun touches leaves, brilliant and bright. Catching the cadence of that meeting, light upon its subject, lifts something heavy from me.

River refuses to take off her jammie top, demands to wear her flowy skirt again, no change of socks, big-girl pink underwear pulled over her diaper. Ready to go.

Independence everywhere this morning.

The wind is up on our streets. Swaying to Lucinda Williams as we drive - River bobbing in back, hipster that she is, catches the wave of my moves from the front. I'm in slow circles, following the lead of wild Cherry trees, dipped down in the arms of furtive winds, hair free to the ground.

And then I feel like a woman. For a moment I feel just like a woman. Flowering from the limbs, all the trees wave their color to my passing color. At a stop sign I drop my head, thankful tears.

The kindness of flowering trees - that souls so old should take a moment for my upliftment, opens a door that I have stood outside of for days, knocking, no one home.

Moving down the road, every turn a woman's curve. She opens me to appreciate and accept voluptuous form. The belly softens and I breathe again. Redwoods in line surge to the sky while surrounding palms part at the top with a far-reaching embrace. Even in my car they carry me to the sky, and I see anew.

Everybody's lover as I stand in line at Peet's, silent. Looking down at floor tiles I wade through variables of grief. A decade of living and loving, friends and lovers and teachers and trees lift a hand to wave good-bye.

I am leaving this place and everything around me is looking so alive. As it always was, but I am waking up, the way we do when we lift from the roots, and I notice the light emanating from all these things...and from me, too.

What We Cannot Change

Every now and then I take down two books, both by David Richo. The first, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook for Psychological and Spiritual Integration, sounds simple. I tell you, I learn something new every time I crack the page. His latest book, The Five Things We Cannot Change...and The Happiness We Find by Embracing Them, has a permanent home next to my bed.

1. Everything changes and ends
2. Things do not always go according to plan
3. Life is not always fair
4. Pain is part of life
5. People are not loving and loyal all the time

Nothing earthshattering right? I know that.

What's actually true is that one part of me knows it, and other (younger?) aspects of self do not yet know. These ones believe that circumstances (and small people) can be controlled; my plans should automatically flourish without impediment; people, especially those I invest in emotionally, should be fair; life should be pleasurable if things are going well (according to plan); and that my loved ones should always be loving and committed.

It's so easy to avoid patterns of behavior. Rather, it's impossible to avoid patterns of behavior, so easy to blame everyone else. A two-year old is the ultimate trump card. But I find myself going there anyway: why does she make me feel so angry, even rageful.

The time it takes to light my fuse? Seconds. And that's the humiliating part.

Guilt and angst get me nowhere, it's not even satisfying. So, what then.

After I kick the wall (my favorite thing to do as a kid) or hit the wall (ouch) or throw something down like a (ahem!) two-year old, I pick up these books and become a student again. I reach for teachings, a thousand times, again and again.

I never understood how my mother could experience that kind of anger. I get it. And I think it's not so horrible. It's just very important for some of us to stay close to our teachers, come to the teachings every day, remember our vows every day.

The Namesake

I went to see this movie alone last Friday. With ten minutes til showtime, only one seat left in the theatre. It's got my name on it. And I find myself sitting next to four people from the ashram. As I make my way across their feet I say, "You're Fred, right? I remember you from the ashram. 1989." He looks at me sort of stunned. "Yes, I was there."

Beautiful movie. I love Mira Nair, her eye, her depth and sensual clarity. If you liked Monsoon Wedding or Mississippi Masala, go see The Namesake.

Very poignant for me as the topic of my name is making strange things happen.

The next morning I drive River out to Stinson Beach, over the mountain from Mill Valley to the coast. I'm an hour away from home waiting outside a cafe for my friend when an Indian man walks up with his baby granddaughter. He tells me her name and I spell it back to him correctly. Surprised, he looks at me wondering how I am familiar with Hindi. "My name is Prema," I say, "I lived in India."

He wants to know where but I just say Bombay. He wants to know exactly where. I tell him the name of the village. He throws his arm up smiling and repeats the Sanskrit greeting of our teacher's lineage. He escorts me to his table to meet his wife. She asks, "Were you in India in 1989?" I nod yes. "Me, too. You look so familiar. I know I saw you there."

The joke is not lost on me. I start thinking about my teacher intently and suddenly meet two people from India in two separate locations. It's like that - you get hit over the head with synchronicity until it becomes ridiculous to wonder.

The Great Mother

Driving backroads in Maine, ruby-red sunrise passes a fading full moon. Late July, 1986. I park. I board. I fly over that redness until yellow reigns in the sky; and me, I've got my face in my hands. Just like when I was a kid, playing with shards of light through fingers. I need to sleep but I can't sleep.

"Are you going home?" a woman in the middle seat asks.
"I'm going in that direction." But I don't know anything.
"I bet your mother is excited to see you," she smiles.
"My mother is dying. She may already be dead." Together we look out the window, clouds flat and grey.

Chicago O'Hare. I speed across a stretch of road where lines of black soil extend to the horizon. An hour later I arrive at Rockford Memorial, where I was born. Now I'm 19 standing over a hospital bed. Down below, gauze wraps her head to the brow; eyes are swollen shut, black and blue. I don't cry. I stopped crying about her a long time ago.

Despite the nurses discomfort, I set up my boom box and select Kitaro's India, continuous play. I unpack large pieces of amethyst crystal and place them in four corners. Two-day vigil.

We stand around her holding hands, my sisters both nine months pregnant and distraught. My father says good-bye to his wife of thirty-seven years. It's awkward - we don't know what to say really, what to do. But it's time to pull the plug.

The last time I saw her she screamed down the steps after me, "The only thing you're good for is to work at a Hallmark Store. You idiot, come back here!"

It was my first visit home from college in Vermont. In the living room together for an hour or two, I tell my parents that I want to go to India. Just like that she was at my throat again.

Since leaving her house I learned how to walk, and I walked out.

A month before she died we spoke on the phone, made amends, and I told her about numerologly - how the number 23 had been following me. Everything 23. I explained that it would be auspicious to see the number 25, an indication of soul growth. She thought I was weird. The last thing she ever said to me: "Well, I guess you'll have to keep an eye out for 25."

She fell over on July 23. Brain aneurism. She died on July 25 at 2:05pm.

I was motherless.

****


I felt motherless for most of my life. I didn't understand that feeling until I met my teacher. As a young devotee it became clear that I had found my spiritual mother.

And it became clear that somewhere in the beginning, way before this time, my mother and I agreed that she would simply get me here. That was the deal. I felt stranded for twenty years, waiting for one who would show me a true reflection of myself. And really, a split second later, she did arrive.

I was mothered.

****


In the past week, as I revolve around these two women, River has taken to calling me both names. In the mornings, first thing out of her mouth, "Prema. Prema....Pray-maa." I say, "To you I'm mama!" But she doesn't listen, just smiles and looks straight at me. "Prema. Prema. Prema."

I don't know which mother is trying to reach me....

Driving around the past few days River asks, "What do-een, Mama?"
"We're going to the park."
"No, mama, drive-een."
"Yes, you're right, sweetie, we're driving now."

Incessantly, she asks me what I am doing, moment by moment. And moment by moment she pulls me into the present. Soon, my words are present, too. As soon as my answers are accurate, she stops questioning.

Through forgiveness of the one who left me, and with a constant prayer to open to the one who raises my soul, I am becoming a mother.

Calcutta. Now.

I found the videos. Charging the battery to the video camera, searching for the cables to plug it into the TV.

Pilgrimage. Eight hours of footage cracking open now.

In the midst of packing the first box to move from Berkeley to Portland, I ask myself why, suddenly, the journey seven years ago is so important to look back at now. That's the thing. I don't understand the non-linear web, just enough to know that I won't be looking back at all.

Something awaits that has to do with the beginning, all those childhood journals, the sitting manuscript on my desk, and the disassembling of one house in preparation for another. All now.

I turn this time thing in thought moments ago, as River stands on her step stool. She extends a hand and calls to me by name. But not by my name now. My childhood name. I stop. With my back to her, chills up my spine, I am caught in the web. I turn to face the smiling two year old (who has never heard that name repeated ever, anywhere) and stare. A bit frightened, I ask, "What did you say?" Still waiting for my hand she reaches out, "Step, step, jump," she says.

Grasshopper sees mama in ways mama can barely see.

Good Soup

An image of a steaming bowl of soup follows me this week, taunts at my heels. Really, the last time I cook with any gusto I'm eight.

Spring Creek Road crosses the Rock River at the heart of my town. Keep going east to the laid out neighborhoods, up the hill some. I'm at the top of Northview Road, behind my garage, knee deep in mud. I smoosh fat berries in dugout holes with a stone pestle. Black purple streaks for the cheeks. Pummel dandelion heads enough and that makes yellow across the biceps. Old ketchup from the glove compartment, red dot in the middle of the brow, even then. In the lap of the conservative Midwest, I am a native Indian - Blackhawk, from the encyclopedia. Loincloth and spear, I run between wood-paneled station wagons, parked symmetrically along the block of driveways.

In the morning I shape balls of dirt side by side by side along a grey foundation wall. When I'm ready I sit on each one, flatten, giggle, and then finish with a rolling pin. Pancakes. Some are plates, pinched with thumb and first finger. A few cups, shaped from plates wrapped around my fist and cinched at the gaps. Smoothing cracks from the surface, I lay them out to dry, as the sun peeks around the corner of the roof. Timing is everything.

Dirt remains become ears of corn. With my tools - whittled sticks - I carve kernels, plump as possible. I crack open mustard from the glove compartment, and with watercolor brushes change the fate of brown to ochre earth. By mid-afternoon I put a few in my satchel, run across proper lawns, over back fences, through spindly bush trails, down to the creek. Time to catch fish for dinner.

Fifty throws from all the surrounding boulders, my corn searing in the sun, I never leave with anything except sunburn.

Some time later, around the pregnant pause at dusk, where the sky turns a shade of lavender, I run home in soft light, hungry.

I don't know what my mom's doing all day. Gardening, painting, drinking with the ladies. Hit or miss, but she's mostly always drinking and laughing with the ladies, like they've been there already, wherever there is, done that already, but I don't know what's done. Not dinner.

I know every configuration of Swanson's TV dinners. Stouffer’s, too. The way the side corn spills into the pudding, and the apple pie thing dries out at the corners. Salisbury steak is always funnier to repeat than to eat. But the peas make everything worth it - if you have white bread with butter. Dump the hot square of peas and watch butter run. Outrun that by folding fast, then bite.

Tricks of the trade.

Between the styrofoam style of Lucky Charms, soggy Fruit Loops, and the decorative potential of cheese whiz, I don't see my mother ever make a pot of soup. She delivers dinner to the table, heavy clanks, pissed off about something, and we don't look at each other, my dad and me. There's a stiff price to pay for laughing at frozen food.

She goes to her chair in the corner, small salad plate balanced on grass green robe, and eats her portion of Lean Cuisine. Sometimes fancier frozen: Chicken Kiev.

Illinois has lots of black dirt, and, used to be, farms from here to there. But I think that vegetables come from a can at the Highlander grocery store. I shuck bags and bags of corn on the back stoop every summer, but I still think it comes from the can.

The only thing that grows from dirt I make with my own hands, and that never fills my tummy.

When I leave home at seventeen, led to a Native American clan, I instantly become a vegetarian, then vegan. New Age practitioner extraordinaire. When I'm not on the land building sweat lodges, I'm holed up by the din of TV in the dark, scarfing Pringles, and microwaving Stouffer’s Tuna Casserole for nostalgia.

I try to cook for my first husband. I even make Pad Thai (whew hew). But when I drive away from that, tail lights over mixing bowls, cooking takes another back seat.

Now I feed my kid organic packaged food. Perfect. Did I mention the middle door?

And remember the voluptuous black woman whom I have passed a few times on the sidewalk in front of my writing cafe? She passes outside, drops something in front of my window here, and glances at me with a smile. Her T-shirt says Take Off the Mask. And suddenly, she is that cat from the Matrix. (Orpheus yells: Did you see it once or twice?) I'm about to catch something meaningful but can't do it. That road sign is in the rear view mirror already. I'm just laughing, listening to Springsteen impale: The door's open but the ride it ain't free.

Ha. Just remembered that my father used to always say (in response to my explorations), "If it doesn't grow corn, I don't want to hear it." Tip my hat to dad this morning (bless his soul). What good are all these words when I don't know how to make good soup?

The Vagina Monologues

At the Vagina Monologues the other night, first tears. The story - a seventy-two year old woman is interviewed about her vagina. She has never, in all her years, had an organsm. She finds her way to therapy, and with the compassionate encouragement of her therapist, goes home one night, lights candles around her bathtub, turns off the lights, undresses herself. Entering the water, she sits. And then....she enters a world she did not know was there before. Her body.

When she finds her clitoris, finally, she cries. Cries and cries and cries. Pleasure.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change
The courage to change the things that I can
The wisdom to know the difference

Can't find the words, feeling so saturated in the sensation of being. I just let India Arie guide my boat. Over and over and over, she sings, I want to love with an open heart.

On my fifth bladder infection, now down with a sore throat. Physical pain is a doorway, too. All the great texts say: pain and pleasure, the same attachment.

So I contemplate the middle door. Open this one and, ah, relief. Acceptance of what is. That's not denial. Great action is happening, it's all about the source from which it comes. Swimming into the presence of this moment, just this one, I am at peace.

Clear presence, possibly the highest expression of love. Self and other, no distinction. And the pain recedes - whatever that story is, a resolution is writing itself.

For all the sexual violence, may we take back our bodies one day at a time. Without waiting for someone else to give the gift, may we find ourselves with incredible generosity.

Kali Temple, Calcutta

The last twenty-four hours, I'm turning in a tunnel, world kaleidescope, looking at the center piece of glass, red. That's the Kali Temple in Calcutta. I'm there. I've been there since the crux of 1999, just as it turned to 2000. On the top step of a back entrance, not where I want to be, but I follow directions from the priest. Why is he waving me to the step just above this goat? Why does he want me to be in direct line with that baby girl, held by her mother, whose father looks to me?

Nothing is in English, it hasn't been for weeks. Ritual looks the same everywhere; I'm deaf, but the drumbeat reaches through marble, up through my smoothly shaven legs, wispy silk, feathery against the back of my knees. In that hint of sensation, just like that, the guantlet drops, and what I have forsaken in thought rolls to the ground. Blood at my feet. The goat's eyes are still open, soft look, nothing ever happened to this creature to inspire fear - I can see that in the file of the iris. It was never afraid.

I'm wondering if some creatures come into form simply to participate in someone else's ritual. Could sacrifice be this clean? If not, what have I entered, in the blood-dripping jowls of Kali's house?

A few days earlier I stand in line at another Kali temple. If you could call it a line. Indians push eachother through a small doorway, as if they want to be taken. They want to be eaten. Pulled apart. Not gently, politely changed. They want that kind of death that only the dark goddess can deliver. They want that kind of liberation from the mind. Shoved into the grinder, I move like a snake through the internal passages, and only for a glimpse of a moment do I see her face - gilded, wild, tongue fully extended, eyes striken with full seeing. Just as fast I'm spit out, stumbling down the tail end of the temple steps. Under my breath I spew, Jesus f'ing Christ! This is crazy.

Crazy and great, I feel good. So good that I stuff my bandana in my bag and walk down the street, open-mouthed, the stench of old fruit, dust, fuel, and the hanging homeless kids stepping on my feet. We smile (how crazy is that) and we are free - these kids and me. That's when I'm ready for the next temple.

So now, the priest leans over the dead goat, "You want baby?" Already stepping over into open space, "Yes, I want a baby. Yes, I do." Orange robes along the temple floor, caterpillar leads the way, "Come then, I show you the tree."

I hear the wailing before I see the branches. And then I can't tell because the branches are drenched with red. Long-haired women with arms over head tie strands of their hair, entwined with prayer threads, frenzied screams, onto extending tree limbs. With sheers in hand, the brahmin priest says, "Down." I bow down, so far from Illinois I cannot remember my birth name anymore, so close in prayer to my dream that I kneel just for the feel of dirt on my skin.

I wrap blonde with red, blonde with red, some dirt in there, too, for luck. When the traces of my being hang beside countless others, I raise my wrist so that he can tie the remaining thread into a bracelet. He asks, "Did you pray?"

Yes I prayed. I called them by name, my unborn children. Inside, I bellowed into that canyon, "OK, hey, ok, I'm ready now. You can come now. I'm here. Please, come now."

I thought that was it. You know, it was a pretty big gesture, the wide-sweeping kind. I thought I could return to the US, resume my life, and like the Virgin Mary, receive the seed in a sacred dream.

But Kali. Ha. You can't visit that many Kali temples and expect to remain intact (tho I did expect just that). She had other plans for me. The kind of take-you-further-to-your-knees plans. Makes me think of my friend Holly (hang in there, honey). That part is another story.

Yesterday, Kali hovering, I drag down boxes, riffle through files, search for the video of that fertility ritual. I've never looked at it - but seven years later I'm ready. I have it documented somewhere. River plays with her baby dolls on the floor, so attentive with beautiful blankets, "What do-een, Mama? What do-een?" There she is, looking red and blonde, "It's ok, love, I'm just looking for some pictures."

Before bed, ten pages into Monica's amazing book, I fall into a dream. And then it's all night: Monica and me, we're running down back roads, dirt roads, and I don't know if it's India or Ohio. It's us as girls and we laugh, so happy to be running, so happy for dirt, driven by something so old that tear streaks turn to smiles. All I see is her bangs, short bangs at ten, and, half-dirt ourselves, we laugh hard.

I know this morning that I have found the beginning of my book. Finally, stewing for a year over low fire, I know it's that temple, that goat, that tree, my hair, and that prayer. The beginning of River's Grace.

In the Body

Oprah's laughing it up with a panel of women over fifty. Fabulous. Woopin about aging and real beauty and luxurious sex. Seasoned women. Four marriages, more laughter. They all laugh at every question. Oprah asks whether they care what people think about them anymore. Silence. They all crack up laughing.

A woman asks, "What's going to happen as I age?"

"It's all coming. It's all coming down the way."

A doctor says, "Yes, you will eventually lose your pubic hair and the hair under your arms, too." Oprah throws up her arms and they all cheer, "Yea!"

They move on to vaginal dryness. Bent over laughing now, the doctor says, "Astroglide is a great thing, and it's just exciting to have it by your bed...if no one is there to help you, it's ok to help yourself."

It is advised: You have to approach the second half of life with gusto.

Anne Lamott says, "When I'm eighty I'm going to regret every moment that I didn't love myself sooner." Dreadlocks and beautiful, so clear.

Today, all day, circumambulating my calling, I call it closer. And it's all about the body. Being in the body and being awake since the beginning. Transcribing it all inside for a day when I would finally unpack it and let it be beautiful.

The Path

This work, the work, it takes it’s toll. Searching now for words, sun on the back of my head as I sit on the couch, dappled leaves dance across the coffee table. It’s takes just the right music (thanks Tracy) and I am walking that road to find new words. So many levels to hold at once, but that’s not what bothers me.

Carrie said it best. It’s a fog. Sometimes the best kind of contact is so impactful, everything rearranges internally, and I walk around in a fog for days. The writing workshop was way more than a writing workshop. It’s becoming something deeper. A path is widening out before us that we can hardly see, but we know we signed up for this wholeheartedly. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be than with this circle of women.

We scale a mountain where each step in traverse, every problem resolved, affects all of us, and together we ascend, agreeably connected. It takes a village.

And yet. The body aches, perhaps from crying in a way that I seldom allow. And that’s good, right? But the kick is that healing is not pleasurable, not comfortable. Really uncomfortable and really satisfying all at once. And for some reason, because I was raised like everyone to expect clearly delineated feelings of good and bad, striving for the good feeling, rejecting the bad, it takes awhile to accept that there is sometimes a very good marriage between the unpleasurable and the good.

Surviving abuse is a gnarly business. Some places in me – hard as steel, stubborn as silence. That’s what got me through…and now, it takes skillful finesse to open those doors for all the best reasons.

Last night, the tyranny of terrible twos asleep upstairs, I sat alone, feeling into the fog, and then, suddenly, I heard it coming. Before I could run to the doorway, the earthquake rolled under me, the boom in the belly of the core far below came alive. If you live in California you always know it’s there. Terrifying to watch your favorite photograph of yourself thrown off the shelf. River screams through the monitor, “Mama, cared…cared!” I’m scared, too, and I leap the stairs, three at a time, to comfort my little one.

That lifts the fog – good when the outside movement matches the inside movement. I dream that I have twin girls and I search for hours to find the right names, study them like math equations – Talulah and Imogen.

This work, the writing of things I do not want to say, leaves me bereft of feeling this morning, as I push my husband off. Not a shred of pleasure. He says sorry. At my back, arms around me, “I want it to go the way you want it to go.”

In the shower, after small limbs make their way out the door with Daddy, I rest against the wall. Water helps. And I know I am ok. Where there were always empty lots of land, now seedlings sprout. I realize that it’s not his fault, and not only that, it’s my responsibility to find the pleasure that’s missing. So I do. And that makes me happy. The unpleasurable with the good - healing happens. No beginning, no end. Healing is as close and alive as my next breath – a spiral of lifeforce spreading into realms, a thousand directions. I’m on my way - always and continuously, devotedly, unabashedly, on the journey.

Perfect Post

I nominated Jumping Into Nothing for a February Pefect Post award. My friend Holly wrote an amazing post about womanhood, motherhood, and the ways we find to take care of our most essential needs. I simultaneously cried and laughed out loud.

Please check out her post, Batteries Not Included

It offers us the best of humor in the hardest of times.

Also, head over to Perfect Post headquarters to view other perfect post nominations.
http://www.petroville.com/
http://www.suburbanturmoil.blogspot.com/