Dear You

Dear You.

Your beauty cannot be argued, built up, or destroyed.

No compliment makes it true.

And no one can rip it from you through wounded remarks.

You are not responsible for it - it is your natural, innate essence.

God blossoms flowers in remote desert canyons.

Many are never seen.

But that is not their purpose.

Their purpose is to be a flower.

And yours is to be you.

That is so very, very enough.

Pockets

In elementary school - sometime early in kindergarten - my table-mate, Dana Arnold, told me that it was against the rules to chew gum at school. I had no idea! So I did what any gum-chewing, teacher-fearing five-year-old would do. I pulled the offending gum out of my mouth and shoved it into the pocket of the bright yellow dress I was wearing. I am sure my mom had a fun time with that after I got home!

I was in junior high - the summer between eighth and ninth grade, three weeks after my family moved from Kansas to Colorado - when my mom told me that Leslie, my best friend, who for years had been my fellow explorer of life and rock stars and the coolest clothes, had died. Mom told me the news while driving me and a new Colorado friend home from the neighborhood swimming pool. In the backseat of that car, with a girl I barely new and my mother telling me the saddest news I could imagine hearing, I didn't feel that I was in a safe and supportive place, so I did what any death-fearing, feeling-burying fourteen year-old would do. I shoved the crumbling pieces of me into some invisible pocket in my body and psyche.

Over the years, many more griefs have been put into that invisible pocket. It's getting quite heavy.

I love pockets. I feel lucky if, when pulling my coat out of the closet as temps fall, I find a surprise of money or a movie ticket memory. I don't like carrying a purse, so my jean pockets carry my driver's license and credit card.

Because I'm a pocket stuffer, I have to be careful to check all pockets before throwing clothes in the wash. But my invisible pocket has never been emptied or washed.

Up until recently, I had not looked at its contents, let alone accepted them into my life. Every once in awhile, the loss of something or someone dear to me - or just an intimate conversation about loss - has opened that pocket, and an impressive amount of power has rumbled out. It was a recent over-the-top explosion of tears that motivated me to ask my therapist to help me look at what it was that caused so much crying over something that happened long ago.  The work I've done with her has helped me to admit to myself that this private holding place even existed.

The thing about these invisible pockets that most, if not all, of us carry is that they beg to be explored.  Kindly investigated.  Still, we can ignore them - until we can't.  If and when we do go mining into the depths of our pockets, it is good to have someone to join us in our exploration - just like we might need to employ the help of some major cleaning products to de-gum a yellow dress pocket. We created the invisible pocket because at the time of our loss or violation, we weren't able to grieve it, and now we need a trusted person to help us stay in our functioning adult mind so that we can hold and support the places in us that still feel so very young and vulnerable.

I love what Stephen Levine, in his book Healing into Life and Death wrote about a woman who was in physical pain - and this can be used for emotional pain, also:

"So each morning, at whatever time she awoke, she would whisper into her pain, 'Good morning, sweetie, how are you today?' she talked to it with loving kindness, recognizing the necessary balance that did not invite it to stay but no longer pushed it away. She greeted it as one would a colleague at the breakfast table. Not wishing her occasional pain to become a chronic difficulty, she did not make it the love of her life, but instead allowed the love in her life to exclude nothing. She used her pain as a means of focusing compassion on the predicaments of the world. Sending forgiveness and mercy into the pains of the world, she felt that no pain in her body was unapproachable by love."

Thank goodness for pockets - to hide unlawful gum, to carry our prized possessions, and to contain our wounds until we're ready to heal them.

Chasms

Last month as I rode in the shuttle on my way to the airport, I glanced out my window and saw what I can only describe as a chasm in the clouds.  Just as the road began to curve away from the sky chasm, I snapped the photo below. Then at the airport, I wrote the first draft of a poem.  

Some background:

When I was an adolescent, I used to walk around the house holding a big square mirror in front of me, mirror side up.  Frameless, this mirror was the perfect tool for me to practice walking on the ceiling. When I looked down into the mirror, I saw ceiling as my floor, so as I moved around the house, I needed to avoid stepping on lights that were now growing out of the white painted drywall beneath me. I also had to step over high thresholds in order to go through doorways, and I enjoyed noting how low the windows hung. 

So, with lots of upside down walking under my belt, it wasn't a big stretch for me to fantasize about walking on clouds and falling through the chasms between them.  I invite you to turn your view upside down and explore chasms with me now.

Chasms

in earth

and sky.

between people, too,

              though the cold, human chasms

              aren’t quite as obvious…

or maybe they are.

if i miss-stepped

while walking

upside down

on puffy white

trails and shores,

would I fall

through the chasm

between clouds

into sky,

forever and ever?

there really is no such thing

as a bottomless pit

of dirt or depression

   but I am told

   that the sky, stretching

   into outer space

      and beyond

         might just be

bottomless,

     edgeless,

         endless

             wonder

i can’t remember

ever really knowing

no end -

              roads,

                           lazy afternoons,

toddlerhood

and

              time spent with you

                           all end, especially when

i’m not ready.

infinity, eternity...

surely they’re more

or maybe less

than just

continuous repeats

of what we know now,

not planets and suns and daily life

stretching out over and over

in ceaseless choruses

of human imagination.

i would call that hell.

this chasmic exploration

is quite an

undoing -

there’s nothing

to hold onto,

the parachute fails,

and

     i

       fall

            into

                azure

                     abyss

it’s quite peaceful here.  really.

Carol Barrow

January, 2016

Till the Moon and Stars are Gone

Michael and I are going through everything in the house, one closet or drawer at a time.  We are throwing away and donating.  It is amazing how much lighter things can be.

Right now I am sorting through a box that we found in the closet we visited yesterday.  I am having too much fun.  This is how I am (you may be this way, too):  I love being a little pack-ratty, because at some point, I will visit a box or a file or a coat pocket, and I will find FUN!

For instance, I just found a biography of ME written by my daughter when she was fourteen.  She wrote it for school.  It is bound in a stiff paper binder, and the front looks like this (but without the messy cross-outs I added for privacy's sake):

I have had so much fun reading this!  Noticing the spin from a fourteen-year-old's perspective.  So beautiful.

When Jamie mentioned her own birth, she didn't say a thing about how gorgeous she was, and she didn't mention the daffodils that were showing themselves in the park as we drove home from the hospital.  But she included a poem that I wrote for her shortly after her birth:

Jamie

You wake each day as

the sunshine rises,

Smiling to greet the dawn.

You laugh and sing with 

the birds outside,

Till the moon and stars are gone.

And I know each time

I look at you,

I see all that is and was

and will be.

The oceans and mountains,

the young and old,

are all within your eyes.

And this is what she wrote about me at the end of the biography:

The virtues she wants her children to have are kindness, self-esteem, and respect for others. 

She doesn't know what the future brings, but has high hopes.

Twenty-three years since this bio was written (wowzers!) and now I can take a look at a big piece of the future that young mother, Carol, was facing.  If time travel were an option, I would go back and tell her that her future will be interesting and challenging and rich and wonderful.  I would let her know that her children will truly grow to be kind, with sufficient self-esteem that continues to grow and, they have sincere respect for others. And all that is and was and will be - the oceans and mountains, the young and old - will always shine within her beautiful daughter's eyes.

Who Dies?*

This last week was a remembrance of David Bowie and his impact on music and on our lives.  His death brought up great memories for so many of us.  His songs.  And, for me, memories of an adventure which culminated in seeing him in concert.  

I had just moved into one side of a duplex, when my friend and I decided one evening to follow a new neighbor who I had heard was in a rock band.  Patti and I waited on my front porch until this neighbor left for, we assumed (correctly), his Saturday night gig, then we hopped in my car, and I followed him for miles.  One of my smartest moves was when, in order to avoid being obvious, I continued on past the parking lot where he had stopped and parked.  I planned to turn around and come back after Neighbor was in the bar setting up.  Then Patti and I could go in and listen to the band.  But as we drove past the parking lot where Neighbor was getting his guitar out of the back seat, he waved at us - he had known all along that we had followed him.  I would not make a good detective.

After we arrived at the dark, smoky bar, Patti and I sat at a small table immediately in front of the stage, and I drank my usual, bourbon and coke (this was another lifetime ago).  At some point, it was announced that I had won the door prize.  With the $50 I won, I bought beers for the band, then I told Patti that I was going to buy us tickets to David Bowie's Glass Spider Tour.  And that, my friends, is how I got to see David Bowie.  (I have no idea whatever happened to Neighbor.)

Many beautiful tributes to David Bowie have been shared. It has been fun to re-live younger days when Bowie songs were a bigger part of my life. I wasn't really a Bowie-aholic, and I can't add a thing to what has already been said about him.

But today I found out that Stephen Levine died, and I was/am a Stephen Levine-aholic.  I loved that man.  I consider him my first spiritual teacher.  I didn't know him personally - I only read his books (over and over), and I took a couple of workshops with him - but his writings and his presence changed my life.  He taught me how to "be with" life and death.  Because of him, I healed a lot of the pain and mistaken beliefs surrounding the loss of my baby.  I also owe Stephen Levine a deep bow for helping me to have the courage to volunteer at hospice for years. My family's legacy of "death is a failure" stopped with me because of what I learned from that beautiful man.

Now the teacher is gone, and the Beloved which he pointed me to, over and over in so many loving ways, remains.  Really, the Beloved was all that was here all along. It has sometimes showed up as Stephen Levine - and as David Bowie, and as you and me and all of this amazing experience called life.  And, still, right now, my heart feels broken.

From Stephen Levine's Breaking the Drought:

The light has been left on for us, p. 61

[final verse]

I am the imaginary hero of my hopes

lost between verbs that require I know

who I am, but I am just a passing thought —

yet somehow, somehow — as close to a

miracle as we get — the nature

of the heart — the Beloved

has left the light on for us all night . . .

Lorca and Whitman deas as Basho, and just as alive p. 142

[final verse]

The sun follows the superstition of blue

across the arc of summer

and the world comes to an end

just the way it began yesterday.

There is a silence between breaths, p. 77

There is a silence between breaths

when the heart becomes a sacred flame

and the belly uncoils which reminds me

how remarkable it is to wake

beside you another day.

Between deaths we dreamed together

between breaths, in that stillness,

which has joined us ever since.

In that first breath

we step onto the dance floor,

and waltz unnoticed through the void.

The sacred everywhere we turn

and turn again, as form so generously dissolves

and only the Beloved remains.

In this moment which lasts a lifetime

there is nowhere to stand

where you are not beside me

where you do not accompany me within.

*Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying is a wonderful book by Stephen Levine

Death of What We Don't Want to See

Not my most uplifting piece, for sure.  I am feeling sadness at the destructive things that are happening all over the world - many of them the results of the lives we've lived for decades and centuries - and I'm noticing that, at best, we put band-aids on the problems, just like we often put on make-up and dye our hair, while our bodies suffer from lack of care.


Death of What We Don't Want to See

i'm sorry.  i can't help but noticing
   the news is not all that good.
your towns are burning, flooding; their
governments corrupting,
and the weather all crazy.

but who am I to say 
   that this is wrong?  the trajectory
        was launched so long ago.
        as sex will at some point hit
              the jackpot - then diapers, 
              rebellion, and empty nesting,...

we've dug and cut and thrown away, and
   it's natural that this trajectory
        launched so long ago 
        will at some point hit
             the jackpot - then hunger, 
              rebellion, refugees, and ???

is it too late?  i wonder why i
sometimes forget grief.  it's like my soles
        and the arch of my back 
        are dying, all that's hidden breaking
              down, while i paint my eyebrows, 
              dye my hair and smile.

Carol Barrow, 2015