Sitting With Mary Oliver

 Sitting With Mary Oliver

  Sometimes someone drops

  words into my life that break

  my heart so thoroughly I can

  barely breathe. And I must live

  in pieces, with no hope

  for the life that came before,

  until those same words love

  me into a new wholeness.

  I admit to jealousy, wishing that

  I, too, could paint just a few words

  capable of turning a woman like me

  inside out, but my life has not yet

  gone that way. For now, maybe

  you and I can sit with Mary Oliver and

  share a cup of awe.

  - Carol Barrow

  Everything That Was Broken

  Everything that was broken has

  forgotten its brokenness.  I live

  now in a sky-house, through every 

  window the sun. Also your presence.

  Our touching, our stories.  Earthy

  and holy both. How can this be, but

  it is. Every day has something in 

  it whose name is Forever.

  - Mary Oliver*

*Everything That Was Broken, from Mary Oliver's latest book, Felicity, which you can buy here or at your local bookstore.

A Snowy Spring Squirrel Saga

It has been snowing today.  And blowing.  And two people I know totaled their cars in accidents on the crazy roads around here.  It is the kind of day where everyone needs to just stay home. In their jammies. In bed. With a book. Only I don't know anyone who has done this. We have messed up priorities.

As I was not in my jammies and not in bed, but instead I was moving a table in my bedroom so that I could VACUUM under it and wipe down the baseboards for the first time in...

Anyway, I happened to glance out the window to see a squirrel moving along the top of this fence:

He was scurrying on the snow on the top of the fence under that tree, and then when he got to that higher place of snow (right arrow), he burrowed under. It looked like he just vanished! But then he reappeared at the left arrow, where you see the break in the snow. Yep! He had tunneled through all that snow and didn't knock off one flake. Until... he scrambled and almost fell (notice the break in the snow). But he didn't fall. He caught himself. Oh, but then he lost his grip and, Kerplunk! Right into the white powder below him. I didn't see anything moving, and I imagined him face down in two feet of snow with no arms to help him get out of there. But it wouldn't matter that he didn't have arms to push himself up and out, because even if he had them, they wouldn't be two feet long so they would be of no use in that deep stuff. I never did see him get up. I got interrupted. Maybe he's still there. Oh, I should have gone outside and pulled him out of the snow and given him mouth to mouth. Big human mouth to little squirrel mouth. But I didn't. If he truly never got up, he would be dead by now. And frozen. But I think I saw him running around in the tree just to the left of this photo. If it wasn't him, I swear it was his twin. What an amazing little trooper!

Next time it snows like this, maybe he will stay inside. In his jammies. In bed. With a book.

I Shall Remain Maneless

A few months ago, I had reached perfection. For most of a year, I had been designing and redesigning the cutest hairstyle I had ever worn. Asymmetrical, flattering, and fun.

If you do the astrology thing, you may appreciate that Leo is my rising sign. I love a mane. Ever since I was old enough to make my own hair decisions, I have put a lot of energy and identification into my hair.

But one day, under the influence of deep introspection, I knew that it was time to cut it all off. As in bring out the clippers. The day I went in for my regular haircut, my cute and perfect 'do was amazingly cute and perfect.  My stylist asked why I was there since my hair looked so, well, perfect. But Emily is a flexible, wide-open type of woman, and she didn't blink an eye when I told her I wanted her to take it all off.

I love having almost no hair. I am not completely enamored with the look, but I am madly in love with the freedom I feel from within. My mom ignored me the first time she saw me, and a man at exercise class said he thought I was a guy. But there have been a few compliments here and there. I don't really care about the opinions of others because, like I said, I have this secret and immense freedom within. I love inhabiting a hairless head.  And I never thought I'd write or say those words.

Yesterday I accompanied Michael to his biannual oncology check-up (the cancer is staying pretty status quo). Before going there, I didn't think about the fact that people are seen very differently in a big oncology clinic. They can be seen as "patients." At one point, I was standing in a hallway waiting for Michael to talk to someone when a nurse going past me touched my arm and said, "Your hair looks really cool!" She was past me when she added something about "I know you didn't choose it..." Or something like that.

Oh, yeah. I forgot that I look like a woman recovering from bald chemo head.  But I am undeserving. I have not paid the price for having post-chemo baldness. There are so many people who have had cancer and would trade me places because I am cancer-free (as far as we know). They would trade me places and then grow out their hair because having hair would be a sign of health, a message to cancer of goodbye and don't come back.

Once, at Christmastime, I went to the mall with a hijab covering my hair and neck. I was with a Muslim friend who, like me, is a white American. She converted to Islam years ago, and she goes through life with everything covered but her face and hands. I walked the mall in hijab because I wanted to feel how people treat women dressed that way. Everyone was kind. I don't think that's always the case, especially when the women dressed in hijab have darker skin than mine.

So far, I have been lucky. Instead of having my hair fall out from chemo, I have willingly paid to have it taken off. Instead of wearing a hijab because of cultural proclamations, I freely decided to wear it out in public. Nothing bad came about while doing these things. Even so, my experiences have been sobering. Sobering, because while wearing the hijab, for the first time in my life I felt worried about how I would be seen by the person in the next car as we waited at a stoplight. Sobering, because I doubt the RN would have touched me on the arm and complimented me if she didn't think I had cancer (I could be wrong about this - that would be nice).

We are so very much related-to through our outward appearances, while what we are is much more complex and interesting. And hidden.

Remember those advertisements for x-ray vision glasses that could be found in the back of comic magazines?  I knew you wouldn't - you're too young. Anyway, wouldn't it be liberating if we could all own a pair of glasses that revealed the inner qualities of every living being, including the astounding beauty of the wearers? I'm talking about being able to see not only beyond the surface appearances of clothing and tattoos and cute, perfect hair-dos, but even deeper — past beliefs and behavior — to the place where we are more alike than not; the place of innocence, untouched by the judgments and expectations put on us by our culture.

Maybe we're already equipped with such vision. I think it comes through our presence and our hearts. I'm experimenting to see if this is true. I'll get back with you with my results.

Nature is a Mirror

Nature is a Mirror 

Nature is a mirror that reflects my face 

more accurately than the glass 

on my bathroom wall. It doesn’t highlight 

my wrinkles or remind me it’s time 

for a haircut. This mirror whispers 

You are This,  

For all Eternity.

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.