Blog

One early weekday morning when I was 7 my mother called my sister and me to the back door of our family home. With a particular euphoria I have only ever seen in her, she said “Shhh....just listen....” I leaned in, and in that space I heard, in the distance of the thick New England woods, a hollow rhythmic high-pitched staccato hammering. I had no idea what I was listening to but its effect on me was profound.

The elkhound and I are out at the time of the morning when the grass stalks are still frost covered, but their tips have already thawed. They are dripping and drooping with the weight of dew. We are sopping from our ankles down. The sun is already warm and insistent in its springtime relationship with this earth. Like a new courtship. Remembering something Martin Prechtel said, “don’t go home the same way twice,” we turn right in the field where usually we turn left, and come upon a stand of old trees with which we have not yet acquainted ourselves.

We are not taught how to have broken hearts. And this is a human catastrophe. The heart needs to be broken open just as much it needs to feel full and expanding. It needs to feel the unmistakable sensation of halting, breath-sucking awe and the necessary momentary place of certain-death doubt, just as much as it needs to feel joyous delight and ecstasy. It needs to be given the opportunity to choose to open, to choose to say Yes. The muscle of the heart, the miraculous organ itself, does this every second of every day of our lives though its insistence to beat and pump remains a mystery to us.

Two weeks ago, I was out with the elkhound at sunset, while my relapsed son was sleeping on the elk-hide bed in my office. There was medicine there, even if I couldn’t remember mine on that particular night. He slept, stirred by fits of rage that didn’t wake him up but caused him to throw things around the room. In his sleep, he was held by the very thing that held me but which I could not feel in that moment.

Tonight I am prostrate to the Beautiful Death. For two years I have been apprenticing to Her, in the form of a sculpture of a Catrina of Frida Kahlo. The Earthquake Man and I found her while exploring along the borders of Arizona and Mexico, in an artists’ colony where She was rather innocuously resting. Waiting. She stood about 5’ tall, her dream totems of the black irreverent monkey and the brazen red parrot, resting on her glorious boney shoulders. She was covered with a fine layer of dust.

This morning I am in love. I have been given a gift. Like a sip of water in the midst of a necessary desert crossing. My dayworld mind (the one that was trained by my isolationist culture) continues to tell me I’ll do this journey without provisions - alone. But that’s not true, and this morning, once again, I’m reminded.

An offering to this night.....

It is a crystal clear morning. The sun has made the flatirons brilliant pink. Glorious clarity of a new day abounds. And I, and the elkhound, are out marveling. Though the larger journey of this dismemberment follows me like an accomplished stalker. Never more than ten feet behind me, my new and unshakable friend, seems a little less present in this moment.

When all else around us fails, when the ground itself decides, too, to go away out from underneath us, there is nothing left to do but return to the one thing that will never go away. The One thing that watches us through it all, without judgment and with so much love. And that is, our primary relationship with this world.

This morning our elkhound is in a state of euphoria and reunion. He awoke to the ground lightly covered with two inches of snow.