Blog

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.

Last Friday - April 15, 2011 - marked the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I have been eagerly anticipating this moment when the circle/cycle comes back around on itself to simultaneously close one chapter and begin another; quite selfishly hoping (praying) that it would allow me a sense of completion with acute grief and a natural shift into a place of more overt productivity. In the way this miracle of a process that is Life/Death naturally unfolds when unobstructed by human hubris, my extraordinary sister gave birth to her second child this morning. Beautiful, vibrant dark-haired William Field Shenstone Eddy, was born in a paradoxical flurry of certainty, speed, ease and pain (and more pain!) insistent upon his arrival while his parents bundled an unflappable 3 year old off to day care, attended to last minute business and parked the family car in a legal spot.

Somewhere around my 36th birthday I crossed a slippery imperceptible threshold. Deposited on the other side, I found myself in a land where nearly everything that had previously felt like mine, now no longer fit. At the time I focused on the necessity of redefining my marriage. But truthfully, the redefinition of my marriage was only one (albeit impossibly painful) necessary step in a much larger process that had already begun, a process in which everything - now actively dying - would fall away, leaving only the barest of my essence; the core of me.

I still carry shame. After all the work I've done with others, still....perhaps always....I have my own shame. In the first light of dawn my husband takes his powerful hand and guides my own to my breasts. He says, "...these beautiful breasts that have nursed two strong boys into the world, the soft skin and curves of this belly and the marks on it are proof of your full womanhood...tell me you see how beautiful you are."

Yesterday my 16 year old son, Henry, got his driver's license. Really, this is huge. In this culture there isn't much available to our young men in the way of rites of passage so this one, this first moment when the culture turns its attention on him and says, "we see you as a responsible young man" (or something like that) is monumental. In reality, the process isn't nearly as dramatic or noble. The DMV is a wild place of 'neither here nor there' where folks whose lives have been shattered by alcohol, are contesting DUIs or meeting with their attorneys to plead with the Driving Magistrate rub shoulders with people perturbed by the mundane requirements of changing addresses, getting licenses and permits or updating information.