In memory of my beloved Rajah

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He has been gone almost two years now. My dear beloved orange one. Love of my heart. I didn’t know I could love a cat so much. I miss him everyday. This poem came at the time of his death. I wanted to share it in honor and gratitude for all he gave me. img_0316-edited

For Raj

This grief, in my body, is not tame
This grief is wild grief, it makes my bones feel heavy
And my heart hollow.
This grief of mine is not small or pretty
It is not concealable, its open wide.
How can it be that powerful love means powerful loss?
How can it be that to come and to go is built into the divineness of the one?
My grief has no room for philosophical platitudes.
It pounds on the door, whining.
It pleads for answers, again and again
While knowing there simply are not always answers,
And when there are, usually we don’t really like them anyway.
My grief consumes every square inch of my torso, my throat, my eyes.
It is too large to be boxed up for later
Too messy to be “to go” wrapped.
I must eat it now.
Right here, right now.
This is placed upon my plate
Remember- there are not always answers
Remember- this too shall pass….
And what will remain??
The love
It is all that ever was
Anyway.

THANK YOU RAJ, for loving me, for knowing me, for blessing me with the brightness of your spirit, and finally for teaching me about loss and separation. My cat guru..I am forever grateful.

 

My Hungry Ghosts

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Sikkim - Land of Discovery

I have been roaming around the house. Aimlessly cleaning, wiping surfaces and loading dishes in the dishwasher. I ate two paleo truffles, dark chocolate and with maca and cardamom, and six pieces of bacon. Dinner. I was full but still searching for something to fill me. I came home from work on the late side today. It’s dark and rainy. My dog still wants to walk but I don’t. I am all stirred up. Restless, irritable and discontent. I know this place too well, it should feel friendly by now but it does not. These feelings are not welcome, but still, they are here. My ghosts are hungry.
Gabor Mate, in his incredible book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, tells of a Tibetan Buddhist story. Of ghosts with small throats and large swollen bellies. Their throats so small that never enough food can pass through to alleviate their great hunger. They can never be filled, are always hungry, always craving, longing, wanting. This is a perfect  analogy for addiction. The hunger that never stops, can not be filled, and takes many forms.
I haven’t had a drink in two years, two years, it feels like a along time to say it. In reality it feel like no time at all, its just my life now. The first two months of sobriety felt like  a way bigger deal than the two year mark. I was like a baby those first months, everything was new. How did people do life without alcohol? So many firsts. My first sober dinner out with my husband, his martini was painfully distracting. My first sober beach trip, who knew, you can actually have fun at the beach without wine, and yet still long for it with a gut level ache that words cannot due justice. Every new experience felt like a big deal, yardwork (look at me working in my garden, sober!) hiking, hanging with friends. A hundred firsts. Learning a new way of being in the world.
Somehow, quite sneakily if you ask me. Alcohol had woven itself into nearly every area of my life, settled in and made a home in me. So cunning that I did not see it taking up occupancy until it had become so deeply  entrenched in my daily life that I felt I needed it to survive. Can people really do laundry sober? Boring. I had somehow come to believe that in order for life to be fun or fulfilling that I had to have a glass of something in my hand, better yet a bottle of something. A glass didn’t last nearly long enough.
Addiction is such that once seen it cannot be unseen, you can hide from it for a while. Most of us do, but the knowledge that something is not quite right will not ever really go away. I tried to hide for a long time. I tried everything under the sun to get away from the fact that I was dependent on alcohol, that I had lost control. But truth is persistent, and usually wins in the end. For me the truth was, I could no longer drink alcohol. I still  cannot drink alcohol. It is a hard truth to see, especially when we live in a culture where it is the common currency of social bonding, the sweet lubricant of conversation, the easiest way to connect with other humans. To not drink is to choose to learn a new way of living and connecting. Not an easy task, but truly a worthwhile and rewarding endeavor. I may write more about my process of choosing and working for sobriety in another post. Today this feels like enough. I have never spoken so openly about my recovery before and I feel vulnerable in doing so here, but it feels right as well, and most importantly, true.
So here I find myself, sober, having learned so many new ways to be. Yet still suffering. My ghosts are still hungry. They still will not let me rest . Some days I am tormented by longing. I just want something to make me feel better. I don’t always even know what it is that is hurting, what I am running away from. It can manifest as this aimless restlessness, almost a feeling of being lost, of despair. This is where I found myself today. In the realm of my hungry ghosts. I want to put things in my mouth, just for the sensation of tasting. I can get away from me for as long as I am consuming something else. I can fill myself up, if only for a moment… food never really fills the hole. There simply is no physical solution to a spiritual problem. Addiction doesn’t go away because you sober up. It still lives here. I still have all the pathology living inside of me that lead me to drink. Yes, it is better. Much healing has happened here for me. Still, there is a lot of healing yet to come. Maybe it will never be completely over. Maybe I will always have days where the ghosts roam through me, hungry and longing. I don’t  know, but I imagine this is so.
I do know that I can survive this. I have survived much worse. I do know that I can sit right in the seat of my own discomfort and still find a way to smile. I have learned that I do not have to be perfect or happy all the time to have value. I have value simply by the virtue of being born here in this human form. And maybe some of that value truly comes from weathering the storms of this messy imperfect life. The perfection of my imperfection.
I can let go of any ideal of what my life needs to look like. I can rest, I can surrender my need to control, I can eat bacon, I can let the ghosts howl hungry all night long….

Oneness, Separation and Super Bowl

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It is Super Bowl Sunday here in the US. I found myself at the grocery, shopping for a few veggies to add to a delicious roast leg of lamb I am making in the Dutch oven, it is starting to smell divine…
There were so many people at the store, carts and baskets full of cheap processed game day goodies. The bakery tables overflowing with stacks of commercial grade cupcakes with colored frosting. Shut up tight in plastic clamshell containers, with list of ingredients of unknown origin, unpronounceable and unfit for human consumption. People stop and look at them, shove them busily in to their carts and go on, fast, fast, fast…must get home before the big game begins.
It all makes me feel sick inside. Is this how we celebrate? By tuning into some sports match that has no real effect on our lives and shoving processed crap down our throats and those of our children? I found myself feeling more and more triggered as I wound my way through the produce. After being there for no more than 10 minutes, I was terribly glad that I only had a few things to purchase and I left feeling  anger, sorrow, and of course, judgement.
As I drove home, after eventually making it out of the parking lot, I could not help but see that my mind had hijacked me in to “us” and “them” thinking again. It happens all the time. A simple trip to the store had turned me into a churning mess of thoughts and resentment. How could they…What a terrible way to celebrate…Sports are so fucking stupid!….What an absolute waste of resources, we could be doing so much better…
And while all these statements on their own do seem on some level seem true to me, I saw so clearly that I had fallen in to the old story of separation. A story where I know better than others and they should be doing better. A story where there is a clear black and white, right or wrong, good or bad meaning to everything. This I know to be untrue, life is much more nuanced than that,  thank God.
So I pull myself back, I look for the similarities rather than the differences, I remember that judgement and resentment ALWAYS lead to suffering and that I get to choose which thoughts and beliefs are welcome here. The question I have to ask myself is; What is really going on here??
When my mind lists off all the things that are “wrong” with Super Bowl, what is the root of that emotion? What hurts? Because truly all anger comes from some unspoken, frequently unseen hurt. So what does hurt me when I react in such an inflamed and emotional way?
A sense that we could have more. We could have real celebrations of connection and community. We have been robbed of these things by the commercialization and monetization of the modern sports world. It hurts because my heart longs for a way of living where all life is celebrated. I cast judgement on the wasteful excess of Super Bowl because my heart longs to live in place where the care of all beings comes before the betterment of highly paid professional footballers and the glut of advertisers that reap the benefit of the huge amount of money made by events such as this.
The danger is that in creating this division between those that love the Super Bowl and those that find it garish and wasteful, is that I fail to see the root of desire that is shared by both parties. I fail to see the similarities and emphasize the differences.
When my heart hurts as I witness the American family gathering round a TV set to root and cheer for teams that seem so arbitrary to me, what I am really feeling is a desire for families to come together in sacred connection that is healing. What the families gathered around their TV sets today want, is I am sure quite similar. They want to come together, to be close, to have fun and to, in their way, celebrate life. If I can see that, I can find connection where there was separation and understanding where there was judgement.
This inquiry into my own reactivity is a healing path for me. I am able to see why my beliefs cause me to suffer and I am able to see what values I hold true, that I perceive to be compromised by this national day of sport worshipping. I can find acceptance without disowning my feelings.
I believe there is a better way to live and celebrate. A way that honors all beings who live on this earth. I believe that our massive overconsumption of food, television and goods is a symptom of a deeper illness, a social sickness that has set in and separates us from living in harmony with life. And I know that if we are to heal this sickness it will not be through separation, judgement or condemnation of the “other.”
This Super Bowl example is a micro of the macro. How can I contribute to the healing of the world if I can’t even get through the grocery store without hating people for their choices? Simple, I can’t. It has to start with me, home base, my life, my thoughts. I have to do the work.
I know I am not the only one who is dealing with a mind that separates “us” and “them” with alarming frequency. Our whole culture is built on this premise. In fact colonization itself is an impossibility without this belief, and we are products of colonization through and through. To change the way we live on the Earth we will have to become willing to learn a new way of being, a way that does not condemn and separate, but rather connects and supports. When we see someone as “other,” they have no choice than to be other. When we decide we are right, we leave no choice than for the “other” to be wrong. Can you see the sickness in this thinking? Can you see the suffering?
We are in times of great upheaval and strife. Political, environmental, social. These are just the tip of the quickly melting iceberg. What is to come may drive us farther apart. It is so hard to stay grounded in love when all you hold dear seems to possibly be going up in flames. I want to stay, and to urge you to stay, in the new story of connection and cooperation. I want us to remember we are more alike than we are different and to hold ourselves to a code of conduct that reflects that. I know there may be days of war ahead, I know we must stand strong and fight misogyny, racism, environmental terrorism, fascism and fear mongering. I just want us to remember that we can fight without sacrificing love. That we can grow without hating those that grow more slowly, that we can lead by example and spread truth. I believe in a better world, a more beautiful world. I believe it is possible and that it will take a lot of work and a lot of heart, It starts with me, and it starts with you. It starts with offering all that you meet a place at the table. Whoever you are, wherever you are….I offer you a place at my table. We will find what is common between us and let it grow, I will speak my truth and invite you to do the same, I will open my hard heart a little bit wider, enough to let a beam of light into my darkness. I will remember, all flourishing is mutual.

My Ancestors

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There has been a deep well of  thought swirling around inside of me since my reading of the incredible book Die Wise by Stephen Jenkinson. The depth and sincerity of his inquiry in to what makes a good death, and what makes a good life, have unfolded layers of possibility I have not known prior to this time in my life. I am sure I will be unpacking this work for a long time to come. He discusses at length the historical and cultural need of humans to know their ancestors. The terrible poverty of spirit we suffer in the loss of this connection to people, our people, and place. Truly knowing our roots, let alone having any type of tangible connection to the land of our people is a foreign concept to most of us here in the west. This touched a chord deep in me, as sense of loss. I knowing only bits of my family history, nothing past my great grandparents and of them truly not knowing much. There is no blame here. My parents have shared with me much of what they know, and I am blessed to have a family that is quite intact and connected. Yet, I know there is so much more that I do not know than what I do.
I certainly do not know where the bodies of my dead lie. I do not know with any certainty, even in what countries they are buried. This feels like aching loss to me. What were the names of these people before me? What words were native to their tongues? What songs did they sing? These feel like questions of great importance to me in this moment. There is a sense that a part of me is missing ,an integral piece of who I am just not there. If you don’t know your past how can you know your future?
This is the plight of the immigrant, and we are almost all children of children of immigrants to this land, here in North America. We cannot leave our homelands without leaving our homes and without leaving the bones of our ancestors behind. This was their greatest fear, all of our greatest fears..to be forgotten. To be left behind. The hurt of this abandonment runs in my blood and if you look deeply I would imagine that you will find it runs in your as well. Though you may not have seen it  there before and you may not feel its deep ache at this moment. It is there, a rift, a space, a longing for something so old we almost forgot it existed, our history. 

As often happens when I am in process of something that feels big to me, a poem erupted out of the space of this inquiry into ancestry and belonging. Poems are healing balm for my human soul., maybe your soul as well. I leave this one here to share with you and with all my own ancestors, back and back and back. May they know my gratitude.

BONES

I have lost my ancestors.
Their bones lie buried in the ground
many miles from here,
many miles from me.
I do not know under what earth they lie,
Nor where they breathed their last breath
That memory is lost to me, if ever I had it at all.

 My ancestor’s lives are shrouded now,
cloaked in fog, mostly gone,
whispers of that time before
heavy beneath stones in some land that I do not call home.
I know not where they are
Nor what of them I carry inside myself.

 Yet I know I am born and built of the same material,
and I am here due to their surviving
Again, and again and again,
Generation on generation.
They must have been good hunters, good mothers, survivors
with strong bones and sharp teeth.

My ancestor’s bones lie buried in my bones
I carry their blood in the rushing of my blood
I sing their songs in my own voice
I feel the cool earth in my hands,
it is the same earth that came before me
Earth made up of the bones of ancestor’s
Earth made of life
Earth made of death
I call this family.

                                       

                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                            

 

So I begin…

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Sitting down to write, to begin this blog. It seems my mind is grasping for a perfect introduction for you, dear reader. A perfect way to express my intention here and sum up neatly what is to come and what the purpose of this endeavor shall be. But that won’t be happening today . For truly, I do not know what is to come to life on these pages, only time and inspiration will reveal that. I know only now, that I want to write. I want to write because the words and feelings inside of me need a place to live an put down roots, a place other than the folds of my mind. I want to write because life is desperately beautiful and equally horrible and somehow, someway, I am trying to make sense of it all, if there is any sense to be made. And if there is not, there is at the very least ample opportunity for growth and learning. For this I am grateful.

I will be exploring many facets of the growth and learning that come across my path. As well as many, many questions. Of the small nature such as ” are lemon peels good in compost?’ as well as of the larger nature “what does it mean to live a good life?” I can assure you now that my inquiries are broad and varied and that there are few things I enjoy as much as a delicious pondering.

I will as well be sharing of my heart, my experiences, my dreams, my poetry and artwork. I hope to create here a fertile ground for my discovery of self and life, a place where I can grow and share my deepest wisdom and my most beautiful aspirations. I am a born maker. I love to create something from nothing. I love to lose track of myself for a while in the process of midwifing something new into the world. Sometimes that something is tangible and solid, sometimes as transparent and subtle as these words on a page.

I welcome you to join me here, as I explore life, learning, my own mind and my joy filled heart. I welcome you to reach out to me if something I say touches you, or if you wish to connect with me. I am dedicated to being of service to my community at home as well as abroad, wherever you may be. May we all be happy and free, may we all be wondrous and wise and may we GROW!