I Love the Fog

I woke up this morning in my little beach house by Salmon Creek and everything was bathed in pale gray fog.  There was a hush in the air and yet I heard the ocean roar in the distance ... maybe not roar, but rather gently rumble.  All the green plants close by were covered in dew as the fog shed its moisture, and the outside wooden deck felt cool and wet on my bare feet.  I can barely see the ducks in the estuary and can locate the snowy egret only because he is dramatically white amidst all the gray.  There is a little convention of wild birds on my deck pecking away at the the food I left them, the red wing blackbirds looking particularly elegant and dramatic in the mist.  This is just another Saturday morning at the beach.

When I was five or six I trudged to school in the fog, holding on to my Winnie the Pooh lunchbox, and I loved the feeling of camouflage that I experienced.  Ever the loner, I felt safe in this cloaked state.  I fell asleep at night at my Grandmother's listening to the song of the fog horns, which always seemed to be in a minor key.  I remember feeling that the moan of those horns was meant especially for me.  When I was older and living in North Beach on the eastern end of the city, I recall watching with excitement as rolling pillows of fog poured over Russian Hill to the west, coming toward us like the ocean in slow motion.

Though fog generally evokes the many years of my life in San Francisco, I've experienced it in England and Ireland, those beautiful rolling green landscapes bathed in moisture and reeking of the earth and placid sheep, and out on the water in Vietnam as we cruised Halong Bay in a junk exploring ancient islands, and obviously in places not clear in my memory at the moment.  This beautiful blanket of moisture has always conjured comfort and safety for me, a sense of being held in a benign cocoon.  And then there is the mystery of fog.  Think of a Sherlock Holmes film where the undaunted detective strides through the foggy wet London streets as the street lamps cast their eerie light here and there and remind us of danger.   Yes, comfort and mystery all in one ... The shades of gray in our lives.

I've always believed in the shades of gray, I think, perhaps because the confusion I was raised in offered no clear and safe points of reference.  And so I lived through days, months, and years of the gray, no anchor.  Eventually I got used to it because I had to.  A certain trust in the gray mystery came to influence my intellect, and became part of what I saw as true.  I remember numerous conversations with daughter number one when she was little, and later when she became a young adult, heated words about right and wrong and the great mystery in between.  She wanted to settle the questions of her world in black and white, and I kept telling her no, that was not the way the world worked.  The world was filled with mystery (which I continued to see as a benign fog), and that was o.k.  We could still find our way because we had reason and a determination to seek our own truth.  But of course she didn't come to wisdom because her mother pronounced it to her ... the path is more complicated than that.

The older we get the more we see the ambiguities and confusions underneath the big picture.  As I grow old and struggle with loss of vitality, connection, self assurance perhaps, the more my mind tilts inward, examining and weighing the quirkiness and complexity of my life.  I see how many detours were taken, promises abandoned, and points of view shifted.  At age twenty it is much easier to feel certainty and conviction about right and wrong because the world is narrower, less life has been lived;  by the time you get to sixty or seventy you see just how many different rights and wrongs are possible.  I think this has something to do with relativity, but I'm not going to  journey there.

The blackbirds are still doing their dance outside around the food dish, crimson red paint strokes flashing through their black wings as they flutter and argue.  The sun is beginning to push through the gray mist.  Pretty soon the ocean will be visible again and the water on the creek will be sparkling in bright light.  The soft fog blanket will eventually disappear and become a memory.  This makes most people smile and rejoice.  They want into the light.  And it's not that I don't want to see the sun, or feel its warm hand on my back.  It's all of a piece, really ... I (we) need it all:  inky dark night for our rest, fog shrouded morning where we hunker down with the thought anything is possible, and the sparkling day arriving, offering its unknown gifts ....  Just another Saturday at the beach.

A Heart that Closes and Opens

We expect a lot of ourselves we humans, especially in times of ostensible defeat or difficulty.  When we stumble, are knocked down and fall on the ground, we tend to expect the universe to be normal and safe when we get up and move on.  When our hearts are broken, we often brush ourselves off, and will ourselves to return to normal as soon as humanly possible so we may find love again.  When we fall into disagreement with someone we often grit our teeth and summon our determination to prove ourselves right.  Our mind works so hard trying to run the show, driving us forward to be normal and good, to prevail, do the right thing, and be in control.  But when someone we love dies, our brains don't find it that easy to cloak the heart so we can simply soldier on.  Death - one of the few unavoidable truths of human life - does this to us, helping us crack open in the face of what is real.  It shows us, I think, that the heart and not the brain is our essence.

I recently learned of a degenerative condition in my right ankle that has been brewing for some time and will change the way I move out into the world in the future.  It appears there will be no long hikes in Africa, or exploration of Tibet, or squash playing, or just plain marching up and down the hills of San Francisco...  Arthritis is a disease (I first called it a beast) that usually affects those "of a certain age" and is in a way symbolic of the aging process.  Here it is in front of me now, and I can feel my heart and mind contracting in response, as though to forbid its presence.  No such luck, of course.  It is alive and present in the body and cannot be cut away or made to disappear.  So, what is one to do? Can I welcome it as an another "guest," as Rumi wrote in his classic poem?  And just how is it possible to welcome something that makes you wince when you take some simple steps?  I am not sure.  What I know is that my problem solving brain is working overtime to try to figure out how to walk and move about in a different way, and what supplements or aids might be effective in diminishing the pain, and whether the great bug-a-boo of surgery is actually an option for someone in my position.  I do know that a few glasses of wine soften the body in a strange way and momentarily blur out the physical stress, but so does a good movie, talk with a dear friend, or a nice meal lovingly prepared. And still ...  there it is... While my mind is working away with the laundry list of solutions, I feel my heart shrinking around this new assault on my person.  The heart withers and the brain goes on to imagine a dark and dingy trajectory of disability and limitation.  It dares to tell me the story about becoming seriously disabled.  Yes, it is a story, and it lives in the future which of course is not known.  And instead of comforting my vulnerable body and forgiving myself for getting older, I get caught in a whirlwind of doubt and anxiety.

I experienced loss of another kind this last week.  A dear friend of mine who lives in my old home town of Taos, New Mexico, has died after a valiant battle against late stage ovarian cancer.  When I received the news I remember feeling a warmth and a softening in my chest, an ah-ha moment that reminded me of the preciousness of human life.  I have no idea where my mind was - perhaps taking a well deserved rest -  and that was a good thing!   I recalled my last evening with this beautiful woman and the radiance I felt coming from her as she bravely offered her heart and mind through a long evening with close friends, wine, and conversation.  She was very clear about where she was on her journey and didn't need to talk about it.  Candles flickered and glasses were raised and life was all around us.  Now she is gone.  This is what happens to all of us.  And the mystery of it all defies the powers of mind ...  When I think about this lovely lady who was a shooting star in the sky, I realize that we all are just that:  shooting stars or comets or great soaring birds winging our way across the heavens. We are fragile, we humans, and life is uncertain, whether we are seventy, thirty, or sixteen.

If I could see myself as a magnificent shooting star making its way through the air, then perhaps I could hold my physical difficulties with compassion and love.  And why not?   This body has done a great job getting me this far and it is unclear how long we'll be doing this together ... it's only fitting to show it some respect.  Show it my open heart, not the twisted cruel one that resents my mortality.  I am now taking refuge in my house that overlooks the grand and mysterious Pacific Ocean and there are snowy egrets in the creek foraging for fish, deer in the meadow beyond prancing through the brush, and as I look out at that landscape I come closer to seeing myself as a very small piece of the grand puzzle, one little player who searches for grounding, acceptance, and peace of mind.  And none of this has anything to do with the power of the mind.  I am grateful.  I thank the universe.

The Body Speaks to Us

• Yesterday I had an adventure in awareness. This woman who is a healer held my feet gently and then asked me to allow my mind to travel inside my feet, to feel what it was like inside that complicated mechanism of bone, muscle, and tendon.  I did my belly breathing and shrunk myself sufficiently so I could actually fit myself inside my foot, and when I had landed, I was amazed at how crowded and busy it all was. I did this for quite some time, just breathing and feeling the busy universe of the foot, and gradually I sensed a strong pressure at the top of my left foot, a dully aching sensation that persisted and brought to mind the late afternoon four years ago when a lady in her car ran over my foot, knocking me to the ground and breaking various foot and leg bones.  Oddly enough, I had thought I was "over" this trauma which sent me into emergency surgery for a badly broken elbow, but the truth of the matter is that our body holds everything we have experienced, and in some cases holds the experience with a remarkable persistence.  I lay on the table and remembered my day going from light to dark, my memory of subsequent events blotted out by the sheer pain of the broken bones and the terror I felt through my whole being.  There were tears that rested in my eye sockets that soon dribbled down my face.  Yes, pain and fear had returned ...  And yet I was safe and whole on this bright sunny afternoon in August, though my heart held layers of sadness for people I love whom I cannot help, for myself who yearns for more self-compassion.

Our bodies hold everything.  There's a scar on my left index finger that calls up the morning I was with my grandparents in their country cottage and whittling on a stick with a cute little pocket knife.  I was careless and I cut my finger badly.  I cried, but not for long, because I was with two very stoic people and I needed to show I could rally quickly.  The story is still there in my finger:  the little girl who was hesitant to really feel her pain.  A scar on my knee recalls the summer in Yellow Springs Ohio when I helped my husband bottle his home brew, as I lost balance and fell over on a broken bottle and then saw blood gushing from a deep wound.  Looking through layers of flesh made me queasy, I can still remember.  I was a young mother of twenty one, and I soldiered on ... of course.  There are two vertical scar lines on my left and right cheeks where I had taken a razor blade to my face at nineteen in order to punish the man I lived with for not loving me enough.  A stupid, frightening move...  Happily, I don't notice these lines much anymore, though I can trace the old wounds anytime with my fingers.  That story of suffering is something I still have a hard time revisiting.  I don't think I want to "breathe into" that experience, though my healer friend would tell me that by doing that I can let it go.

My lungs hold fear and anxiety.  When I walk the streets of the city and feel the steps of someone close behind me, I become immediately fearful.  My heart starts to race, I pick up my pace, and feel my breathing speed up.  There is a memory here which takes me back to being a five year old whose stuffed animals were taken away because I was asthmatic and couldn't breathe very well, and also to the time when I had to outrace an large old man who chased me up Green Street when I was nine.  I hauled myself up the hill and breathed heavily, and finally reached my house safely, and now have no memory of why this character was after me.  Strange and surreal, and yet this fear that came forward is terribly real.  I simply don't want anyone moving in on me from behind ...  I have this strange feeling that the lungs that I breathe through in my seventies are those of my uncertain childhood.

There are other stories that come from outside our own bodies.  I am thinking of our domestic accoutrements like refrigerators, cars, record collections, and the pets we have as roommates.  How many times have we named and boxed up another person because we noted their refrigerator filled with pure organics, their glossy BMW, or their French Bull Dog?   Clearly these are NOT who we are, but rather examples of our quirky choices in the moment.  The scars we carry from trauma, such as knife wounds to the finger or broken glass to the knee or slices across the face, are also NOT who we are, but again mindless and sometimes cruel detours from the path.  And the way to let them go and see who we really are is to see them clearly and hold ourselves in compassion.  We must breathe into our bodies and see that we are really and truly o.k.  Beautiful as well...

From Dogen:  "To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.  To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be one with with all beings.  When one with all beings, body and mind and bodies and minds of others drop away."  Forget the self.  Yes.  Great idea.

Fifty Years a Mother ...

On August 5, 1965, just fifty years ago, I entered St. Elizabeth's hospital in Dayton, Ohio, and gave birth to a beautiful dark haired little baby girl.  I was only twenty years old.  I had been waiting a long time for her arrival, walking about my life in the middle of a sticky humid summer feeling a bit like a miniature elephant, and on that very day I found myself helping my husband and some friends move our furniture from one apartment to another closer to the center of town.  Certainly an odd thing to do when you're about to give birth, but then my life up to then had been anything but normal or by the book!  That evening my husband and I went to the Little Arts movie theater on Main Street and watched one of Ingmar Bergman's impossibly esoteric films, called "Wild Strawberries," I think.  And then, miraculously in mid film, I felt my body talk to me, and I said to the man next to me, "it's time."

The birth ended up not being natural as I had wished, simply because I didn't have it in me to do the breathing properly, I was suddenly terrified, and in dire pain.  She popped into the world looking perfect.  And I remember thinking, "well that makes sense .... she took her time getting here!"   In a surreal gesture of maternal love, my mother had arrived from New York to be in attendance, and I remember her staring out the hospital window and laughing at the nuns romping about playing tennis the day following the birth.  I was so hot and so exhausted during those few days that everything felt like a slow blur.  The next thing that stands out in my memory is standing over my daughter's bassinet and staring at her late at night, night after night, watching her breathe. I had a first mother's anxiety about her survival, I expect, and I kept up this vigilance for what seemed like a long time.  She always breathed perfectly, and so I adjusted to diaper routine, sore breasts, and a killing fatigue.  This was the beginning of my journey into motherhood and as I write this it strangely doesn't seem so terribly far away...   On that day my entire life changed dramatically, and I now often struggle to picture who I was before this amazing event.

I am interested in reflecting on just how bringing a baby into the world changes us.   I suspect there are all variety of transformations, since women are all different and come to this in varied states of mind and heart.  Some women prepare diligently, reading Dr. Spock and books on child development, and some spend decades just waiting for the right time in their lives, some must work extra hard to make it happen, and some bravely choose to go it alone.  For some it happens to them.  That was what my life looked like.  I had not put motherhood on my to do list at age eighteen or nineteen, and thus when I found myself facing it, I plunged headlong into it without any map to help me.  I was scared mostly, and unsure of myself and my marriage.  But I possessed a will that was formidable, and I put my head down and eventually figured out a way to respond to the helpless little being before me.  She was a delightful baby, not too much fussing or crying or illness, and that was her first gift to me.  It all felt rather magical and surreal, and I learned how to cherish her; my earlier aspirations to become an educated woman with a career in international diplomacy went "poof" and vanished in the steamy midwestern air. All of a sudden I was a mother.  When a child arrives, all else becomes secondary.  And that meant my marriage too, I guess.  Friction and frustration arose in those first years between my husband and me because neither one of us had the energy to tend to one another, and we were too young to see that everything was terribly out of balance.

I think the first thing I was taught was self sacrifice, and then came love ... oozing from her cherubic face with the dark dark eyes.  I felt it and I felt sure I could give it.  For a while anyway.  And then some three years later, in a different place entirely - my hometown of San Francisco - I brought another little girl into the world.   She was very much on time, she came quickly, though her actual birthing involved some physical trauma and difficulty, which caused her little infant head to appear banana shaped, a fact she frequently mentioned with regret.   Of course that didn't affect her stunning good looks as she evolved from chubby roll-poly little thing into a wiry and feisty little blond haired girl.  It was the late sixties in San Francisco and the hippie movement was in full swing with all the flowered Indian dresses, patchouli oil, marijuana, and the devil may care attitude about life.  I didn't every choose to be a hippie - it just happened to me.  Like becoming a mother for the first time...   And so my daughters had to navigate a sometimes murky landscape of too many adults, drugs, strobe lights, and loud music.  Far from the "Leave it to Beaver" or "Ozzie and Harriet" families that had inhabited our television sets in the early days.  She became sick right after birth, but recovered quickly and grew into a strong and willful little person.  Clearly she was not destined to be the "good one" in the family!  She didn't care, and neither did I.  Her first gift to me, beyond her strong spirit and beauty, was the challenge of meeting difficulty with compassion and patience.  She was my teacher in this, as her sister had been a teacher about love and cherishing.  These lessons, like most important ones in life, took a very long time for me to learn!

My adult daughters have taught me a few wonderful things in this life:   the profound place that family occupies in our lives (I had never known this, growing up in a fragmented unattended family of my own), the importance of holding our differences with love and understanding, the need to live in the moment, the importance of really listening, and the joys of being playful while eating mouthfuls of whipped cream.  These are things I didn't have in my tool bag at the age of nineteen when I married their father.  But growing up with these beautiful little beings took me on that journey of learning.  I went on their camping trips, I created sprawling and celebratory birthday parties, soothed fears in the night, learned how to sew halloween costumes, became involved in their elementary school, and I tried my best to witness and understand their individual struggles.  I didn't always succeed, and after about fourteen years of marriage my sights started to expand outward and I knew I needed to return to school and the possibility of finding my way in the larger world, as both my girls were involved in high school and social lives and I thought the time was right.  Eventually our family dissolved and pain and suffering came, and we struggled for too many years to understand why people cease loving each other, or run away and do confusing things.  The good thing was that none of us gave up on each other really...

The motherhood path was not always a smooth one for myself and my daughters .... Perhaps most mothers could say this as they looked back at their families.  We have what is most important, though, and that is a willingness to look each other in the face with love and understanding.  I think we have been teaching each other this for all these fifty years.