Shout Out to Mom

As a human my mother was a teacher
As pure spirit she teaches through my child
As a human my mother liked to worry
As a spirit she knows no fear
As a human my mother could be stern
As spirit she is always very calm
As a human my mother never quite believed in herself
As a spirit she is only potential
As a human my mother cooked with reticence
As pure spirit she cooks a lot of love
As a human my mother showed me pure love
She gave it freely, softly and sometimes magically
As spirit she is all magic all the time
As a human my mother taught me not to pick up feathers because they are dirty
As spirit she sends me feathers every day
Even the crusty, broken, rotting wing of a hawk
As a human my mother took care of me
As a spirit she whispers, take care of yourself

Ocean Kiss

I was pulled to the beach like a magnet to metal
My escape from dinner preparations, unplanned but smooth
I slipped down the stairs of the gargantuan rented beach house
Where a large family gathering was in its last day
My sister had just come into the kitchen from a run on the beach
And her sweat reminded me how badly I needed to get out there myself
One last time

I pulled on my boots by the pool and watched the sky for birds
I jogged down the steps and trekked across rough ground cover
The sounds of kids screaming and adults laughing faded behind me
And against the crunching of thick stems under my shoes
I climbed up over a railing
And stepped onto the boardwalk that smelled of wet wood

The sky burned orange and the clouds puffed up yellow mountains with golden edges
The sun lowered itself into a fireball over my right shoulder
And the waves drew me to them in thick lines of white
Folding over in slow curls
They were crashing and sending me messages that I never knew existed
They were pulling me out to them like a lover who wanted me to drown in their beauty

I stood on the sand
It was late and the beach that had been broad as a football field this afternoon
Was swallowed by the tide that left only a narrow edge to stand in
I considered running or walking down a ways but the waves made me stand still
I listened

The beach was like an open book with different pictures next to each other
The right page was a burnt umber mist that looked like orange rain over the ocean
Making edgeless the distinctions of land and sea
On the left the colors vibrated from the other end
The sky was still blue
But the dark blue of dusk with uncommon clarity that carefully outlined
A runner in the distance
Shimmering silver on the water

The waves were breaking in long rows marching in with big swells coming up behind
A sandbar was making them break out there
Perfect curling tubes of blue gray with white furled edges
I was talking to them
Saying goodbye
I said I love you

I started to feel all the abuse the ocean takes and a wave of sadness rose up
It passed through my body and disappeared into the orange mist that was overtaking the whole scene
This is the moment that counts, I thought
Rain was coming

Then a big wave broke
And I knew it was headed for me
It was already pushing me with its significance
And I thought I ought to step back a bit or get ready to
But I stood there

And the wave sent a long finger of foam up to me
That reached only my toes
Glancing down the beach I saw that it was the only part that came up that far
And I melted with the humility that comes from being kissed
By the ocean

A Recipe for Self Love

A cup of attention

A cup of gratitude

A cup of patience

A cup of affection

A cup of humor

A cup of humility

A cup of awareness

A cup of compassion

A cup of strength

A cup of perseverance

A cup of tenacity

A cup of discipline

A cup of reverence

A gallon of love

Start by pouring the cup of attention over your thoughts and beliefs. For instance, notice what you are thinking when cleaning the cat box. Is it: Why am I the only one who ever cleans the cat box? Or, Why do these damn cats have to make such a mess? Or, I should have gotten one of those self-cleaning boxes but I can’t afford it.

If you notice negative thoughts like these coming up during routine activities and chores, take a cup (or two if required) of gratitude and mix it with a cup of love and pour it over yourself until you find you are saying something like this: How I love to scoop the cat box. It feels so good to keep it nice and clean so my little lovelies have a comfortable place to relieve themselves.

Next, look at how you talk to your family, or others that you are close enough to that you don’t bother being polite all the time. Are you short tempered? Do you snap at your children or bark orders at your spouse? Get out your patience and mix it in a small bowl with affection and humor. Now you have a nice sauce for getting along. Next time you find you are losing your grip and nasty sounding words are just waiting behind your lips, take a deep breath, grab the sauce you just made and drink it up. Now do or say something funny and watch how cute they look when they smile and let any annoyance or irritation you had slip away. Take another cup of love and spill it all over the floor in front of them and while your wiping it up, think of all the qualities you love about them.

After this step, preheat your heart. Get it slightly warmer than normal. Keep it nice and warm as we look in the mirror at how you see yourself. Do you feel 100% satisfied with your work or whatever you are doing with your life? Do you criticize your efforts on a daily basis as sub-par or never good enough? Could it be that these attitudes are covering up an alternative view under the surface that you are the greatest thing to ever walk the earth? Is there a tiny piece of you that thinks you really should be a billionaire by now or that your picture ought to be on the cover of time magazine instead of Michelle Obama’s? This is where humility comes in. You need to be careful with this ingredient as it can be a little tricky to work with. Sprinkle it over yourself each morning. Just a light sprinkling and then more throughout the day each time you find you are underselling yourself or thinking you are much more talented than the person next to you who just got a big grant for their work researching carpenter bees. Sprinkle it and say, I am no better or worse than anyone else. I am just perfect and complete in myself.

Next look at your body. What gives you trouble? Do you have a stiff neck? Poor eyesight? Back trouble? Warts? Constipation? Get out your compassion and stir it up with an equal part of love and apply it liberally to each area that bothers you. The trick here is to love any parts of yourself that you have long cursed, neglected or worked hard to “fix.” This step is not about fixing you, it is about accepting you as you are, bumps and all. Then as you are applying the love and compassion mixture, ask your body part what it needs or wants. Listen carefully. Then pour on more love and compassion.

Now that you’re about halfway through this recipe, it’s going to get a little harder. The parts of yourself that are determined to keep you down and only dipping your big toe in the bath of self-love are going to start fighting for their survival. It is time to get out your strength, perseverance and tenacity. You will need all three. Keep them separate but close together, applying the correct ingredient in the right moment. Are those nasty words trying to get out of your mouth and attack the ones you love again? Pull out some strength and add it to the mixture of patience affection and humor described above. Having trouble at work believing in your abilities to do the best job possible? Get out perseverance and apply it to any mistakes or missteps or even blunders you have made and remember you must take risks and be willing to fail to get anywhere in this life. Are the warts still bothering you? Wondering if they will ever go away? Are you giving in to voices that tell you there is something wrong with you? A fatal flaw perhaps? Tenacity is your secret ingredient. Use it to combat these voices, remember that they are your teachers and keep at least a quart of love on hand to pour over the trouble spots in weak moments.

You are almost home. The key to keeping all this love flowing in all areas of life is discipline. Use your discipline whenever you slip or even after you’ve fallen back into the old habits of negative thinking for long periods. You can always get back on that horse. All it takes is a little discipline. Take at least a cup of it every morning when you wake up.

The icing on this cake is reverence. To revere yourself and all of life is to be truly and fully in love with yourself and your life and the moment you are in. Use it liberally and enjoy the results.

Congratulations! You are now in love with yourself. Lucky you!

Windy Today

Today I saw a bird circling high above Lake Av as I drove down it with the kids in the car after a day of school. It caught my eye because it was performing some unusual acrobatics on the wind. It was hovering like it was suspended on strings, not circling, not flapping, just hovering. Then it swooped dramatically sideways so that if there was ink on its wing and the air was paper it would have drawn a broad and shallow U. Back to hovering, now on the right side of Lake, still high above the street lights and low buildings, and then another sideways swoop. It was so high it was hard to see what it was at first, but by the time I slowed for someone in the cross walk I could see it was a crow or a raven. It was black and looked big so it was probably a raven since I read somewhere that they tend to be daredevils and usually fly solo.

The wind was also unusual. There was no sign of it down at street level but up at the tops of the trees it was almost wild. The long hair on the lady crossing the street wasn't moving but the branches up above her were being blown in great gusts. Strange, I thought. Like two different worlds right next to each other.

I like to pay attention to the birds. They seem always to show up in interesting moments and to occupy a different world. They live in trees. They can fly. They eat worms and small animals and pick up trash. They are urban dwellers like me. Like the lady in the crosswalk. But they manage without all the things we think are necessary. Houses. Electricity. Cars. There are so many of them, you would think the trees would be overcrowded with nests, but its rare to find one. Even rare to find their cast off feathers, or corpses. A friend in New York pointed out recently that you never see small pigeons. They must somehow keep their young protected and hidden until they are full grown. But where?

Birds are very adaptable. Especially the city birds we know so well. The pigeons [my daughter likes it when I refer to them by their 'real' name: Rock Dove], the house finches, starlings and crows. We humans are pretty adaptable too. But we take up a lot more space.

Leaving

Sadness flows upwards. From the base of my torso it moves in waves, up through my chest, neck and shoulders, pushing saline out my eye sockets and tingles down my arms.

Is it the text message from my sister who I already miss and don't ever feel I had enough time with? Or

Is it the gruffness with which my husband and I address one another when tense from moving weighty bags and children through an airport on five hours sleep and getting us parked into our tight little seats.

I believe it is the former set off by the latter since now the sadness is expanding like a mushroom cloud, its energy extending down my legs as well as arms all the way into my fingers and toes accompanied by images flipping like cue cards through my mind: My father gripping the back of a chair; my step-mother's smile; my sister holding Frances on her lap; Jane cooking pancakes in the morning.

I feel it in my chest, cool and lively like the first breath of winter air biting at my nostrils, early on a school day. Each day I stepped out onto that same sidewalk this week I felt my history held in the cement under my feet, in the trees singing at the tops of their lungs, their branches in full chorus blooms. It was even in the air, warm with spring and hanging on the faint scent of the East River.

weeds

It is clearly spring here and there is a lot to do in the yard which makes me excited but also puts me under some pressure. The clock is ticking and I have to get my seedlings started and in the ground soon! There is soil to prepare and plants to remove and gosh I really need to get serious about building a better system for my enormous compost adventure. I wish I had already drawn a picture for this post of the tiny buds and the delicate pink flower like leaves busting out of them on the Japanese maple, but time is in short supply. I am working hard on publishing the first book, writing a second, setting up a website and or course raising the two enchantresses I have, not to mention all the housewifey things I do every day.

BUT the garden has been calling me and I did manage to get the girls out into the dirt over the weekend. We started by pulling some weeds. There was something gargantuan growing near the compost pile that I had let get big and as I pulled hard at the root, the girls were cheering me on and poking at it with their little pink shovels. I managed to pull the thing up with one hand. They told me I was really strong and danced beside me all the way to the green bin where we deposited the monster. But if that one was going to go, there was another to face. Something had grown up among my Calendula flowers that for some reason I actually thought (or convinced myself) might be some Snapdragons that I had planted which had never come up. Clearly it was a weed now that it was almost my height and flowerless. (Duh!) But this sucker was harder to pull. It hung on for dear life and I had to dig around it to try and loosen its powerful grip. Its roots were wedged in under my studio where I meditate every day and I started thinking about the weeds that have been growing in my consciousness and how there are these terrible voices that try to sabotage me all the time and I used that image to fight the good fight and I pulled and pulled and grunted and screamed and the girls were telling me, "Give up mommy!" because they could tell I was almost in tears but then it gave a little and that got me going, pulling with every last drop of strength, my fingers burning from the tiny prickly hairs along the main stem of this beast. I felt it give a little more. Then, before I was ready it released all its tiny tendrils from the earth at once and with that jolt I lost my balance, falling back on my butt with the beast in my hands over my head raining dirt on my face while the girls screamed with excitement and fear. "Are you okay Mommy??" Yes I was fine, better than fine! I pulled that &#(^#(%*& out and I was feeling pretty good. Next!

I was determined that we would plant a few seeds during the equinox and reluctant to go to the nursery for supplies because I knew I'd spend more than I wanted to there, so at 4pm I was scraping together whatever I had on hand, which turned out to be a few packets of vegetable seeds and flower seeds left over from winter planting, some corn kernels I collected from last summer's minute harvest and some potting soil that was suspiciously damp and slightly foul smelling. It had been sitting out in the rain and I guess the dirt got wet and the wet was trapped in the plastic bag for a while and maybe the soil had gotten moldy or something. I don't know. But it was all we had so we used it, the girls gently tucking tiny seeds under thin blankets of it and I thought: if nothing comes up it doesn't matter. It's the act of planting the seeds that is important. It is symbolic, and my children especially respond to the symbolic gesture more than the outcome. So imagine my surprise when watering them this morning I saw that the tiny green beginnings of new life are springing forth. I guess the soil was okay after all. Either that or they will be sickly and die and we will learn some lessons that way.

This Hotel is Like my Brain: Step Outside and it's Beautiful

The carpet in the hallway is a dark forest green with mustard yellows squiggly designs that run along the edges like the lights in an aircraft guiding you to the exit. But the yellow lines don’t get you out, they lock you in, unless you know how to escape. The hallways all look the same and there is always something humming, some white noise to keep you blind from the sounds outside. The birds chirping, the rain falling, the wind rustling the leaves of perfect palm trees that were grown somewhere else and transplanted here.

The sun is shining outside. Minutes ago I realized the potential of a rainbow. The sound of rain coupled with sunlight on the carpet next to my foot. I found my shoes in a hurry and rushed out of the room, patting my back pocket for my key card as I sped out the ungainly door to my room. I have two long hallways and a staircase, all windowless with the dark green carpet, to get through before I am outside. But once there, I am met with magnificence. No rainbow, but the sky is full of bright, puffy, yellow tinged clouds highlighting the snow covered mountains in the distance. I just have to ignore the forest green construction fence across the street where they are building yet another sand colored cement building. Can you still call it the desert when no part of it is deserted? I almost go back upstairs, satisfied that I can escape the confines of my mind/hotel room anytime I want. But I decide I need to find something untouched. Just a patch of real desert earth, before I can go back in.

The sidewalk is manicured but done in a way that makes some sense. The small trees and shrubs are all natives, nicely spaced and planted with little clusters of succulents and cacti arranged around rocks every so often. The cement path I am following is not a straight line like the road beside it, but instead follows an S curve so that you can’t really see how far it goes. At first I think it will end at the next driveway but after passing that I realize it is not part of any golf course or condo complex. It actually belongs to the municipality. Nice.

I want to see some birds and just then I hear a little buzz and look up to see a hummingbird perched on a branch a few feet away. I am standing next to a golf course and the salmon stucco wall around it is low enough that I can peer over into the rough edges where they have let nature take its course to the extent that a lot of birds and other animals are finding it habitable. There are a slew of little brown birds with black stripes on their heads running in and out of a thorny bush. The golf course is so big I can't see how big it is. Lots of pretty rolling green. Some movement under a bush gets me to stay a bit longer and soon a large desert hare is staring at me.

I need to feel this connection with nature to get back to what I need to write. Some writing is like pulling teeth out of old gums. Other writing is like skating on a frozen pond. Smooth and gliding, like the birds. It’s the connection to the larger world that I am craving and that the hotel seems to block. Like dark thoughts that come up and question the validity of what I am doing, I have to escape to this. Trees and birds save me every time.

I keep walking and following the pretty curving sidewalk, trying to ignore the sound of traffic flowing by me at high speed. The desert people are all insulated in their cars and I am out here, unnoticed. I stop to admire the delicate leaves on a tree. I love its low branches with the very tiny leaves hanging in neat rows off long stems. The light moves right through them so their pale olive color glows. It has gorgeous seed pods that are long and thin with little babies nestled inside like a pea pod, but flatter. This one is brown and elegant.

I walk by a low wall that is containing a small patch of empty dirt. It is maybe 10 by 10 feet. I wonder what it is for. Maybe there are no plans for it. Maybe it didn’t fit into the plans. Maybe it exists in some no man’s land between two plans, but looking around that doesn’t make sense. I am still alongside the golf course and the little wall that surrounds this bit of nothing is the same color and thickness as the taller wall that surrounds the golf course. No idea.

I am tired of the constant flow of traffic. It's keeping my mind from relaxing and the birds from getting close. There is a sign for something called “Freedom Park” and I wonder how far that is. This city is different from the dusty wasted towns a little bit further east where civilization falls off just a few yards from the side of the road, and the storefronts look like plywood cutouts, and the empty lots behind them are littered with abandoned projects that the wind and the sun have destroyed. This is Palm Desert and it's like a mini Palm Springs. It’s all done with a lot of cement and stucco so all the buildings look new. I pass another entrance to yet another complex of condos on the left. This one has a water feature made to look like a mini waterfall flowing over a rock staircase. It is lined with blooming flowers that would never exist here on their own: Bright pink Impatiens and Snapdragons that drink water like marathon runners. All the lush greenery they use as edging makes it look fresh and alive but in a cynical sort of way. I am still hoping to find that bit of earth where I might see what was here before they built and planted all this stuff.

I come to a corner. I can taste the disappointment of finding that Freedom Park is a garden of cement and commemorative sculptures or something, so I turn right. And there it is. Could it really be an empty lot? Just being away from the constant traffic is a big relief and I start to see where I am. On my right is the golf course. To my left is the back side of a shopping complex. Where the stores end there is just a bit of cement with two dumpsters on it and then just open space. It has the remnants of a fence made of thin wood slats and wire around it, but most of that is lying on the ground like an old tee shirt, half buried in the sand. I wonder if it belongs to some holdout who refused years of lucrative offers. I am so excited. The street I am on appears to go no where so there's no traffic on it besides a large truck, the kind that is basically a big rack for carrying cars, idling. I try and ignore it but the engine is so loud it's spoiling my pathetic attempt to escape civilization.

I cross over to the empty lot and walk around. It looks exactly the way it's supposed to. The earth is sandy, and the bushes are low dusted greenish mounds that look like they could survive anywhere. There are giant ant holes with droves of large ants climbing in and out of them, performing incredible feats. Some are working together. One is dragging a small stick that for him is the size of a large tree trunk. He drags it a while, working tirelessly to get it up and over a small pebble and finally abandons the project. There is some trash but most of it is the same color as the sand.

There are a few trees with the lovely leaves I like and I gather some twigs. A few bushes are covered with tiny bright pink flowers and I pick a handful. There is another tree that has little tiny yellow flowers in the shape of puff balls that fall down along its leafy twigs. There are little thorns protecting it but I choose a branch that is small and struggling and bravely tear it from the tree, saying thank you as I pull.

I turn around to see the truck is finally leaving but I don’t care. I got what I came for. Even if it was a little disappointing. Even if I had harbored hopes of making it to the edge of all the development, I could see now what a foolish hope that was, unless I was willing to sacrifice the entire afternoon. I had found the patch I imagined. Just this little piece of untouched earth gave me what I needed.