My Mama and Grande

Aging is an interesting thing.
I see my Grande outliving her desire to be here. I watch her as her body becomes frail, halting and withered. She laughs and tells me, "Getting old is a bitch". She is ready to leave, but can't quite find the exit. I watch my once spry Mama creak and crack as she slowly rises from bed, taking longer than usual to make it to her once impressive stature. I watch time change her face and hands. I look into the mirror and see the furrowing of lines across my forehead and the crinkled edges of my eyes.
Aging is an interesting thing.
You can watch it happening and still feel so disconnected from the whole process. I see women rage against time with undaunted gusto... botox, implants, lifts, tucks, peels and products. Groping desperately for a face remembered in the mirror of an eighteen-year-old many years ago...And yet, age is also beautiful in the same way that a canyon worn from years of trickling streams is beautiful, in the way that the sandy shore is beautiful, whispering of ebbs and flows too distant to be remembered. I see that too, in the lines that grace my once smooth skin and the wrinkled face of my Grande' Cia.
Age is beautiful too.

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tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much. It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall. The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep. But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy. I am a woman who loves the spring. I nearly live for it. When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis. I gorge. This year has been hard. Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally. The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment. It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float. It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within. It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains. Eyes closed. Eyes opened. A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being. It takes courage.

the way of the sunflower

A few weeks ago, I sat holding a sunflower seed in my hand, just prior to the mouth popping, mastication phase, when it's perfect elegance floored me. I stared in awe at the tiny seed nestled in my palm and saw it, in all of it's possibility, for the first time. A flower, a million seeds, a million flowers. Each unique, each the same. And suddenly I was dumbfounded by the arrogance of human. A small seed, with no big beefy brain to catalogue, categorize, prioritize, conceptualize, quantify, qualify, justify and deify, had within it the flower it could become. Dissect the seed and there's no flower, nor any glimmer of the life that will unfold when the seed surrenders to soil, light, water. I wondered. What arrogant assuming is it, to think, with our over indulged brains and narcissistic lens of "self", that we need "do", "think", "struggle", "fight", "hustle", "cajole" and otherwise dance our way...

angelbirdflies

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