misplaced mama

i have long loved this woman (www.starvingartistink.com) her sweetness is like sugar on a day full of kale salad.  her photography is my favorite kind, loose and tight, bold and bright, dreamy and whimsy.  sometimes even a little sad in a happy kind of way.  her journey is nurishment.  she reminds me to love the life i have, to hold those Three Sisters tight.  she likes to inspire the uninspired.  she wants us to share our dreams.

my dreams today:

to have community, like really, really have it. 

to know what i mean by the above statement.

to curl up cozy with the girls tonight and watch a movie and eat chocolate chip cookies.

to heal.

to heal.

to heal.

to release the energy that is trapped in the top of my head.

to take some time for myself to buy some pants that fit.

to lock eyes with my lover for an hour.

to write with abandon.

to write with honesty.

to write without shame.

to write with spirit moving through me.

to sell the writing i just finished to the right people.

to fully tell my stories so that my girls can create their own stories.

to let go of my parents story to i can fully create my own.

to climb the mountains of life without carrying too much weight in the backpack.

to travel without the fear of flying.

to go to peru. alone.

then to go to peru with my girls.

to be part in creating ceremony for my sisters and brother.

to let go of our house [if this is the path] with ease and grace.

to find another place, affordable, easy, weightless.

to see my partner more and more with the light in his heart.

to go hear music next week and dance until my thighs throb.

to watch cloudy the horse go into labor and her baby be born.

to know in my bones that the shifts in the world can only bring us happiness and a fuller life [as L said to me today: the universe is conspiring to bless us]

to remember to keep dreaming.

and let me tell you that’s not a hell of a lot.

i sat down to write here tonight because i really wanted to, i wanted to connect with this space and my words and who ever you might be.

and nothing came out except a storm full of complaints and desperation to be put of of my misery.  something along the lines of how being a mother of two still felt really sexy, new, exciting and how being a mother of three feels like the green slimy shit i squeezed out of the kids bath toys last night.  you know, one of those kind of days where if you asked me if i was happy i would very simply tell you no.

and so i sat there with some words i wrote down and i looked them in their i’s and o’s and u’s and asked if they were my truth, where they the shape of myself, my life and my kids. was the sarcasm and witty delivery and the two paragraph description of my feet resembling an old homeless man’s who i am now or then or ever?  i don’t know. i hope not.  i hit delete.  and instead this is what i know and what i like. it’s what they like and what they know.

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she likes to waddle outside and pee.

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she likes to eat clovers fresh from the land.

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she likes to hang out down by the water and write her name with her toes in the sand.

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she likes to daydream about a land far, far away where little children sleep in until 9.

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she likes to gather stones.

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and then eat them.

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she likes to hang out with horses, talk to them and whisper secrets in their ears.

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she likes to take photos of herself inside mirrors, checking to see if her baby belly has went down at all and to examine the color of her hair.

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she also likes to chomp on oatstraw.  [he just loves them, loves them so much].

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she likes to make my heart skip a beat.

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she likes to climb apple trees [he like to help her]

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she’s learning to just be with what she sees.

How utterly extravagant..

How dare I do this.

I can’t afford this.

To do yoga? Seriously.

A babysitter?

Neglagent.

Should be buying food for dinner.

Should be home sorting laundry.

She be working on The writing.

Should be able to lift…foot…a…little…higher…and…twist…just…a…touch…deeper…

Should be breathing deeper.

Should just shut up already.

And than an exhale in competition with a lion after a bloody, satisfying feed, and it was all gone. My body limply melting into nothingness. For a moment.

Those mountains, those pesky words, those seemingly judgmental mind-fucks that try to interupt my body stretching forgotten corners and tacky tissues and lubricating dried up joints and free up blocked meridans, how often I want them gone for good. But really, in my practice today, I honored them. They are mere mountains to climb, each emotional snag is a place to stop and check out the ethereal scenery: the where, why, what, who and how. And then I can choose. Keep it or release it.

And as I was twisting in Bound Triangle, deciding if I wanted to go deeper, lingering in my comfort zone, contemplating floating around there because, well, it’s comfortable and there wasn’t a lot going on, I could space out on the easiness of it all. And right when I thought it was safe my teacher says, go on, go deeper if you need to, if you need to feel more. All we’re looking for is something to feel, right? We all just want to feel.

What she didn’t say was feel good. Or on the flip, feel bad. She just said feel. And it hit me, I’m not on the mat for any other reason but to feel the yoga to then feel what it’s like afterward and to even feel what’s it’s like not to practice month after month, to feel a body that is compressed and a spine that has shrunk and breath that is shallow.

I suppose this is why for all those months when any normal individual was experiencing post partum episodes like I was they would have gotten some pharmaceutical help and yet I refused. I wanted to feel it. Every last bit of it, I wanted to feel it until I didn’t need to feel it anymore. Time does seem to heal and specific blessings entering my life (new people, new practices, the owl that swooped down and pretended it was going to fly directly into my windshield late that once night but instead, like magic, lifted up past the roof of my car) can slowly change a course, physiological and otherwise. But to deny the feelings to emerge and live not just inside me, but as me, would be doing my self a great injustice. At least that seems to make sense.

And as I type this now I remember a question someone asked me a while back when I mentioned I was going to start attending Sweat Lodges. Why on earth would you want to be trapped in a pitch black little hut with a pile of volcanic rocks hot smoldering inches away from you?

I dunno. I just want to see what it feels like.

And for many years I heard the question why on earth would you want to give birth without pain meds?

And the same thought would pop in my mind. Not that it’s better for the baby or that drugs just ask for more intervention. No, none of that. I wasn just thinking no way in hell am I going to miss out on feeling that happen to me.

And as I type this, I am trying to feel this day. All alone and swamped with writing to do and grocery shopping and a dinner to prepared for friends and nettle to be harvested before the dinner because it’s going in the dinner. I am feeling lonely for the friend up north and the friend down south. I am feeling annoyed with the media. I am feeling hungry and tired, but that’s nothing new.

And so it’s been my practice the past few mornings to ask myself that question as soon as my eyes open to the (finally!) bright sunshine through my window while I lay in bed. How do I feel today? And then I go from there.  And then I extend it on to the girls and I honor what they have to say.  I am getting that feelings are like our own inner-journalist, telling us the news about where we are and what we may need. 

(a love letter to all the lovers who walk in the truth)

Last night I only sort of meant to hurt you, just the tiniest, most subtle passive bit. But for the most part it was to hurt me. You know how that goes. And I won’t say that love is funny like that because that is not love. Love fades every moment I slam that door in the middle of my chest shut. I feel it pound to the back of my tired body and to the pit of my gut. That is abusing myself, to shut out love. Love is the source of my life. Of Life.  So the hurt lays in here, too. We both ache in pain, ripped up to shreds inside. We walk with a wall between us and it has just gotten so easy. So easy to keep slamming. It may seem crazy to want to rip down the walls, especially the ones between the kitchen and the bath and the ones that hold up the stairs, but it’s not crazy, really. Let’s just tear them all down. See how it feels. Exposing all the beams and the mold that grows on them and maybe even a mouse turd or two. So what if you’ll be able to watch me pee while you fry an egg. I have nothing to hide from you anymore. Let’s rip down the walls. Sometimes when we become that open and aired out things hurt a bit less.

While I was dancing with our daughter, the youngest one, a thought came to me. Maybe it’s because she was smiling so big as we bounced up and down, lightly and liberated, reviving the roots that grow on the bottoms of our feet so that they can stick to the earth again, like we used to be able to do. It came to me because for a second I really saw you in her, a flicker of transparency within her sea of matte ebony. I saw your charm and mystery in the curved little joker smile she wore for me while Reggae Joe sang to us, one of the songs you picked to carve in the stone, engraving sound into matter. I saw you and I was inspired by how perfectly she is each of us, and neither of us, all in the same spark that is only her. The graveling voice that first sang the song back in 1968 brought me to the  hours when she made her way out of me. A true transformation from life to death to life and death. And I see now how that birth should be my guide as a lover to you, and how grateful I am to be taught to rise up from my own burning body. My first thought was how I must thank you, immediately, for sharing all this with me, for somehow ending up as my other half, my best friend, my babydaddy, my soulseeker my karmic companion, my domestic partner. Thank you. [sorry about the 47 missed phone calls in a row. Where were you? On a ferry? An Island?]

And that thought brought me to here and that here brought me to this:

Not wanting

to want

to not want

those questions

like the hurricane in your eyes

are why

you are my heart

my art

my blood

no.

I would not still be with him now.

Or maybe ever

since I am sure

I have always been with you

from before

and even before that

and then some.

Let’s just fill up

on this Love

that sits

waits

knocks

patiently

right here

on the verge of getting offended

but always forgiving and never in misery

A gift.