My head is filled with a refreshing new sense of Mag, as I remember a rich conversation with a friend yesterday about the choices we make in our lives and how and why we make them. I found myself saying things like, "Even though a voice inside tells me to go out and walk on the beach, I really find I don't want to," which is followed by the voice that says, "but, oh, you know it's good for you, my dear." And there we have it. The fascist train of thought that has been lashing me about all my life, instructing and driving me to do the right thing. As though someone up there was keeping score! So, I said to my friend, "what my body is telling me is that it does NOT want to walk the beach today … too many aches in the hips and knees … and let's face it, walking on soft sand is a real challenge even if you aren't facing deteriorating knees at age 70." And we laughed together, thank God, that we can finally get to the truth of things, and not be so hardwired to perform. We can just be. The truth of things yesterday was that I preferred sitting in my living room gazing at the ocean, listening to Bach, reading, and talking with a true old friend. No harm done, right?
The roots of this strange habit are deep indeed. As my mother pursued a career as a painter, and my father put on his gray flannel suit and went into the city to work, I tried like crazy to figure out the right path to get people, MY people, to recognize me, to see me as good and smart and worthy. I was about six or seven at the time. Shored up by my grandmother, I studied hard in school, took piano lessons earnestly, and figured out my table manners. This became my career. Develop my brain that lived inside a head that my mother had pronounced "too big for your body." When I became an adolescent and then more acceptable in my mother's society of hard drinking intellectuals, I remember feeling grown up and proud. I felt I had worth and that I was seen through the haze of cigarette smoke. I think by then I had given up on being hugged and kissed and cherished. And when I met a similarly brainy young man in college whose brown eyes reached out and who loved getting lost in conversation with me, I thought I was in love. My innocent shipboard romance five years before was now a dim memory, and I plunged recklessly into loving and being loved by this man. I had no clue. All I knew was that I needed someone to listen to me, to see me.
Many years have passed since that time, years in which I have continued to drive myself to improve my mind, and my life in general. Relationships did come and go, and it appears I wasn't very good at them, and only with a great deal of patience and determination was I able to find closeness with my two beautiful daughters, as I kept reminding them that I came by my maternal deficiencies honestly, raised by a woman with no clue how to give love. Deficient -- such a cruel word, really. And I held that close for a very long time…. My brain was always just fine, and I fine-tuned it by reading James Joyce and Tolstoy, and training to be an English teacher, but my heart didn't seem to know how to navigate the complicated relationships I had entered into. The Buddha teaches us that we are all complete and good just the way we are -- that we are NOT deficient. But I didn't learn that until I passed the half century mark in my life, and even then it proved to be a tough lesson for me.
Last night at my local tavern in the Old Valley Ford Hotel I was drinking a margarita and reading Being Mortal on my Kindle as people around me noisily delighted in each other's company. A man sitting next to me at the bar with a worn and friendly face commented that he thought I was reading grim stuff. "That's kind of a downer, it seems to me, " he said. "Oh, no, not dark and grim … really inspiring," I said as I read about muscle and bone deterioration, and the shrinking of the brain, and withering of eye muscle in the aging human. "I work with dying people," I told him, "and I find this interesting… we need to see what is going on, not pretend that we're not aging and falling apart. And besides, this guy who is a doctor is advocating for honest realistic care of the old, sick, and dying." And my rancher friend with the leathery face drank his rum and coke and nodded, his face softening. He got it. He then went on to tell me about the passion of his life: raising cattle. He talked with pride about how well he cared for his cows, and when pressed by me, he admitted that yes, he raised them not just for the milk. And as he began to speak the truth about his work, he also became more interested in learning about why I gave my time to work in hospice. And even though I could never imagine killing animals to make a living, in that moment I saw his respect for the cows he was tending, and I trusted him. We were telling each other real stories about ourselves. We were people "of a certain age" sitting around on a Saturday night drinking and doing something else we both seemed to enjoy: telling what was real for us and being witnessed.
I went to bear witness to a dead whale on a nearby beach the night before last. This was the eighth whale to be washed ashore since April. I got close to the 27 foot creature in the early evening light to take some pictures, and my heart went out to this young wild animal who had died before her time and lay there decaying before me as the sea gulls started to do their job. And I thought about the seven others who had mysteriously shown up on our shores in recent months, and I wanted to know WHY. Of course I did. That was my brain trying to do its job. All sentient beings -- human or animal -- are born, grow up, age and die, we know this to be true. But some, like this poor beast, don't get to grow up all the way… My rancher friend and I had done some growing up, we were around the same age it seemed, and I'm sure we both felt the age in our bodies as we talked last night, and I wanted to imagine each of us offering gratitude now and then for our physical selves that have carried us this far.
When I left the beach and the dead whale, I walked slowly up a steep hill of shifting sand, and my knees hurt and my ankles hurt, and yet that felt secondary; I had been a part of something magnificent. Life's enormity, and its darkness. And it was all good. That was one walk on the beach that I would take again.
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