TRANS-GENESIS

I’d like to go back in time and talk to myself about longevity. About the gift of organs, for instance, like the liver and the skin.

“A hangover doesn’t just steal a day,” I’d say, “There’s a hidden surcharge, like an insurance hike after a speeding ticket.”

And what of the adrenals.

Sure, I could burn the candle at both ends in my youth, but what if I knew then these overextensions came with a cost—tapping my immune system and reaching into the future to compromise resiliency.

And what of emotions. I was praised for not letting them get in the way of productivity and responsibilities then, but now I sit across from the therapist processing all that pain because encrusted, it blocks the flow of joy today.

Shouldn’t our early Ed & elementary & high school & college curricula be infused with the study of Anatomy & Physiology, Psychology & Consciousness so that the systems of our bodies might be revered, protected and nourished rather than neglected and abused?

Because neither the Earth or ourselves are commodities to be spent, but gifts to be treasured.

Imagine if, each life, like each body of water, flourished with respect.

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What if we prayed not just Mother-Father God, but child God, Sister-Brother, Daughter-Son God and even great-great grandbaby God?

What if we prayed Water-Sun-Air-Fire God, Soil God, firefly-mosquito-tick God, traffic-shooting-gardener God, immigrant-racist-misogynist God?

What if Our Father wasn’t in the sky but in Everything, 360 multi-dimensional degrees of Creation–Dear Mother/Father/Daughter/Son/Great-great grandbaby…

How would we love? How would we care? What would we ignore? Who would we hate?

My mother’s lipstick

Several months ago, Casey repainted our bedroom–the last of the rooms to receive a fresh coat since he built this house more than a dozen year ago.

We agreed/he surrendered to a faded, earthy shade of rose.

And it’s been my pleasure–a daily dawn & dusk meditation–to notice to subtleties that arise in the changing light–from morning to night–autumn to winter–and now into spring.

Sometimes it’s too peachy or too pink, other times it’s more a creamy-rosy-mocha, like the lipstick my dark-eyed, dark-haired mother used to wear (before she went blonde), or the shade of a top that lent itself beautifully to her equally dark complexion.

Over the year, I’ve lightened the curtains from fawn to sea glass to alabaster in an attempt to better commune with the walls.

It may all be too soft come summer.
Or just right.

The light will tell.

the legacy of shame

Shame. Disappointment. Burden.

With SpRiNg comes renewed attention to my insides as I recommit to what I want on the outside.

I’m curious about your relationship with disappointment.

In a New Year chakra clearing, I gained some clarity around the way I linger with and lay  disappointment onto the men in my home.

It was a painful visual, but it also leads me into compassion for the disappointment I must carry inside. My sense of my father’s almost constant disappointment in me. The weight of disappointment that my mother and grandmothers carried.

I’m no longer willing to be the legacy bearer for that burden.

This sweetly complements my intention to cultivate satisfaction–inside–with a moment to moment practice of saying “Yes,” to what ever arises–on my path, or in my psyche–as an invitation instead of a problem, as something I greet without abandoning, rejecting or shaming myself as “wrong.”

I suspect the practice will be a daily one for the rest of my days.

 

Incision

8 days. Until the full crossing. The threshold. Mother to Crone.

In my morning practice of oiling the body, my hands find their way to the incision that brought my first born into my arms, 22 years ago.

I move my fingers first up and then down, then left to right and right to left, and finally clockwise and counter clockwise in the way I was shown, hands over mine, over the incision, releasing the adhesions formed inside the body.

Adhesions:

A year earlier it was Deb who again helped release a different kind of holding in the womb–the pain of two miscarriages in my late twenties, two abortions at 16, sexual trauma, heartbreak, childhood terror, pervasive fear.

As I lay on her table, under a soft blanket, with the November sun lighting the room, Deb asked:

Are you ready to let it go?

And tears, held so long inside, streamed down my face.

November:

Both my boys were conceived in this month–my first son just two weeks after Deb placed her hands on my womb.

November also holds the anniversary of the birth and death of my beloved grandfather–11/17/19-11/17/91.

I’ve felt my Poppop’s warm and effervescent presence this week, and he lives on in my sky-eyed youngest. And in recent years he arrives in the warm and loving presence of a new friend, whose company, “coincidentally,” I’ll share this weekend, as she leads a retreat at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, entitled Writing down the Light.

It was decades ago that I began writing down into the deep, dark cavernous loss, but it is only in the last handful of years that I zeroed in on the tragedy that irrevocably rocked my world at 14.

Lila, my paternal grandmother, died two decades before my grandfather, in an accident on a bridge that crushed everything that stood at the center of my life.

My father’s tears are what I recall from that July afternoon when we met on the tarmac where I had been sipping a McDonald’s shake while waiting for his plane to taxi without knowing why he had come or that I’d be leaving. Vanilla.

We flew back in that small plane and arrived at her house–filled with family–but forever vacant to me.

Two summers ago, on the anniversary of the accident, I returned to that airport, and found my hands trembling so badly, as I approached, and my  mind so frantic, that I could have easily crashed the car.

I lost more than my grandmother and my aunties to the Mac Truck. I lost the Matriarchy under whose wings I had been protected and nourished and promised a future.

I lost something else too. I gave it up actually. Spit it out.

My belief in God.

And tears.

I refused to ever cry again, and met that resolve, until a handful of years later, when I received the news that the house would be sold, and then I balled like a baby on my boyfriend’s lap on my last day in my grandmother’s kitchen.

Lila was the age I am now in our last year together, and I am finally writing down the light that meets me here in the last days before becoming Crone–a year in which the wise blood remains inside, offered not to the earth as it has been for 40 years, but to the heavens ever more until I, like her, like each of us, leave this world.

This morning I woke in a spontaneous meditation at the crown. It unfolded, like a warm woolen shawl, once tight with abandonment, now open and unfurling toward the sky.

Lately, I find myself able to weep, easily–at desires once held, and desires still aching to unfold–and at the way the snow releases from an iron sky.