Blog

This morning is day three of a much-needed cleanse the Earthquake Man and I have started. It isn’t particularly rigorous. Just long (one month). We already eat pretty well, but we love our glasses of wine, the EQM loves his coffee, and of course, we love chocolate. Nope. None of it...not for now. It’s already having it’s way with us.

I am the 4am daughter of the slippery epiphanies

the unspoken-come-back-and-haunt-you truths from the days before

Of the wailing until sleep comes

Of the innocent backing-into-it love making

I am the 4am daughter of the secret songs and talking tales for how the universe got here

Today it is frigid cold. With the little bit of sun that peers through the high clouds here and there, the finches have finally dared to come out of their tucked-away nests to eat at the feeders. Our elkhound, on day three of no proper exercise (because I have been fighting a virus and have had no energy for our usual routine), is sitting just feet from me on the couch, staring at me and sighing heavily every few minutes.

Last night I went to Chasing Ice with The Earthquake Man and my two children. I sat between them in a sold-out theater and beheld images of ice...ice others...like individuals...so full of story, like jewels beneath big skies, calving glaciers which are now simply leaving. Falling apart. So much has happened in the last 100 years after a millennia-long dance of becoming and falling apart. Overnight.

We are such a clever species.

"There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground"

even if one lives in the trees my belly aches to hear their dreams

Just moments earlier in bed with the Earthquake Man his big careful hands run along my body

"You must ask for what you really want"

It’s time. My dear friend Pieter Van Winkle has started a practice. He is writing a song a day, posting them on the internet just moments after he puts the period after the last word of the last line. It’s brave. I have another friend, Sheila Foster, who has reverently plucked the Roman Catholic term “novena” (which refers to a series of prayers, devotional acts or services spoken/offered in nine consecutive days). Sheila invites women to craft unique practices based on their particular loves and devotions.

Here is something that is a mystery to me

That we cannot truly understand the fact of death and go on living ourselves

We can accept but we cannot understand

Only the dead understand

We are creatures of this world. We are not here to transcend our planetary existence. We’re here to fully immerse ourselves in the miracle that is this planetary existence: the Life and the Death, the ineffable reality of consciousness that dances with mortality; the beauty and ecstasy of Life unfolding, co-existing with the reality of necessary disappointment and endings, partings, grief and....then....beginnings again...the never-ending relentlessness of beginnings that follow directly on the heels of endings. The ebb and flow, like the tide in flux with the moon. The constant contraction and expansion that is our inheritance; that is this human experience.

Currently in the United States, more than 2000 of our young people are serving life without the possibility of parole. 45 of them are dying in prisons right here in Colorado. America, "the land of opportunity" whose Pledge of Allegiance states, "with liberty and justice for all" is the only nation on Earth that sentences its children to life, housing them with serial adult offenders in maximum security prisons, often located hundreds of miles from their families.

I have come to see everything around me as my relation. I mean everything. It took some practice on my part not to separate out the plastic bottle that I’m putting in the recycling container, the 'garbage' I throw away, the pen I hold to write this piece or the computer onto which I transcribe it. It took some work to see these, too, as having a spirit, as being natural, earthly, and therefore, my relations.