Monthly Archives: November 2010

Reflections

Thanksgiving

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Sometimes “gratitude” seems overused and trite to me. It comes out sounding like I’ve been sitting at a table with a drill sergeant. “You’ll eat your gruel and you’ll be THANKFUL for it!” Yes, yes. I’m grateful for my gruel, because I know that so many others are going without gruel and they would be thrilled to be sitting here with you. Sir.

Borage

Gratitude is not something you can rationalize yourself into. It feels so cliche to write about gratitude. But it’s Thanksgiving, and sometimes you’ve got to write something. And I’m almost embarrassed to find that gratitude is on my mind.

I spent some time this week with my brother, sis-in-law, niece and nephew. They live on the peninsula, which is a world apart from the ranch here. Everyone moves fast, everything is kept so clean. When I walk Laika, she looks for overgrown patches on the infrequent run-down places to do her business. The manicured lawns of the CEO mansions we pass aren’t fit for defecation…that can’t be real grass.

My brother and his wife manage to keep a house full of love that is a sanctuary from the hum of silicon valley. Chickens in a neat coop greet us in the driveway, and dinner often includes something out of his garden. This little family has taken care of me, probably far more than I’ll ever know. Somehow I landed in a high place last year when I was ready to bottom out.

Laika and I came home to the ranch yesterday. I had a commitment to keep, otherwise I might have stayed through the holiday instead of making the drive back and forth another time. But as soon as I stepped out of the car, waves of gratitude hit me. The cold air was clear and fresh; there was real earth beneath my feet. I headed into the yurt and was almost giddy to go inside. This place is more “mine” than any other place I’ve lived. It’s held me, allowed parts of me to grow and expand within its radius. It holds some kind of energy, something that flows through me but is not me, not mine.

Sometimes my brain holds up ideals about How I Should Live. I remember reading adventure stories as a kid, stories about people who understood or had to learn how to survive in the natural world. People who understood the ways of animals, who hunted them or even trained them to hunt for them. People who understood the herbs to gather for healing, who knew how to ride a horse or read the land and the weather. The cowboys, the indians, the castaways, the explorers, the pioneers, the naturalists. I was entranced by those stories and tried to act them out in secret….always in secret, because I thought everything else in my world was telling me that was all silly. We don’t do that anymore. And you’re going to scar up your knees and won’t look pretty when you grow up, and then the boys won’t like you.

Eventually, all of those stories that seemed so real to me as a kid became like cardboard pictures. They flattened out with distance and seemed as lifeless to me as the picture I was trying to live, the one I thought I was supposed to want.

When I moved here, to such a comparatively rustic place, I was enthusiastic but not confident. I worried (I still worry) about being cold…it turns out to be one of my greatest fears. I worried about the drudgery of the inconvenience. I worried that for all my bragging about how I liked the outdoors, I wouldn’t really want to live like this. I had lost my ability to know what is right for myself. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. But I took a chance on a feeling.

When I stepped out of the car yesterday and breathed the air and felt the earth, I was overcome with the feeling of gratitude. But it was less for the air and the earth itself, and more for the glimmer of courage I found last year to give this a chance. To reach back into the feelings that those stories stirred up in me as a child, and give them a chance to be enlivened again. To trust a tiny feeling that said, “this is what you need to do now.”

Those tiny moments of courage aren’t born in a vacuum. They grow out of love. And sometimes, the most pivotal points of courage happen in the tiny place where we are most unable to love ourselves. They catch us in our fall, like a tiny hook, and its not until we surface that we see that the tiny hook is attached to infinite lines of power…the love of friends, family, and people who know their place on this earth and have the strength to reach out.

Gratitude, yes. Overwhelming gratitude. It flows through me, through everything, an energy that can’t be stopped and held in a moment. Every expression of it fails; it must be lived.

Reflections

Altered States

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I almost drowned as a child. As my dad tells it, we were at the kiddie pool with relatives. They were sitting right there, keeping an eye on us, but suddenly he looked down to see me laying on my back, under the water, a sickly unfocused smile on my face. He leaned over, grabbed my suit, and hauled me out of the water…but also submerging the camera that was hanging from his neck. It was a nice camera, and it was ruined.

I remember it differently. In my memory, I’m swimming underwater, belly down. I taste a little vomit in the back of my throat, and the light changes; everything becomes brighter, the refracted ripples in the turquoise water.

Then the fish appear. Animated cartoon fish, swimming by me, then a friendly big black whale with a big smile. It is delightful.

Then I am yanked out of it, and the grownups are yelling.

………………

I remember a feeling that used to come over me as a kid. I didn’t have a name for it, but I associated it with the feeling you get when you push a sewing needle through the top layers of the skin on your thumb…it doesn’t hurt…there’s just sort of an odd pressure of something there, under your skin.

When it happened, my sense of time (if you call it that; this is hard to describe) became stretched out. It was as if part of me was moving along slowly, like molasses, like slow motion, while another part was moving quickly. Physically it felt like I was in the back top of my head, with a lifting sensation.

I knew that what I was experiencing was internal; it wasn’t something others were feeling. It scared me. I didn’t know if I would come out of it, and I was fearful of surrendering to staying in it. I knew better than to try to explain what was happening to anyone; I didn’t have the vocabulary to do it.

It was as if, had I stayed in that state, I could have moved among people so quickly that they couldn’t see me, darting around like a hummingbird while they all moved in slow motion…not physically, but in a part of my mind that maybe was now separate.

Sometimes this would come over me at night; I remember once going downstairs to use the bathroom and being overcome by this surreal feeling, hyper-aware of the sensation of my feet and hands on the wood steps as I went back upstairs on all fours, slapping the steps with my palms as I went.

………………

I’ve never tried to describe these in writing before, and it’s interesting to see how they appear when it is all set down. You would think that we know, then we write down what we know. But I learn about myself by writing. Sometimes I have to write it to know it.