Family First

Wow what a vortex we are in right now, our little family.  My dad is very present, in my memories and nature, and in our collective heart.  He is present too in the passing generations, in our mannerisms and our faces, our names and at our gatherings.  This is a comfort.


Just about a week after the funeral, we all set out to float the Salinas River.  Kids, dogs, various floaties, sunscreen, and our bodies, we parked the car and hiked down to an inlet.  We were excited, tired, and feeling close, and then, just as we set off into midstream, a bald eagle swooped over us.  Right down the middle of the river, right over our heads, close enough to see his face, and he looked right at us, his big eyes direct and sharp.  Hi Dad!!

Kevin is very present too, in my memories, and the children's memories and in our family heart.  We remain a lovely little unity, continuous; what a blessing this revelation is!  The four of us, me and the kids, we are still a family first little group.  I still hold this value for myself, and it runs parallel to everything else which blossomed with Kevin by my side.  Maybe the blossoms fall away, maybe there is a winter, but after the hardest winters the cherry blossoms are simply prolific.  Prolific and fragrant and tender and beautiful.  This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do: to continue on, superwoman with kids in tow, the men I have loved most both gone.  I'd rather not, and then I think of a great modern dance sketch by a young Czech choreographer.

There is a body bag onstage, the dancer is inside, they roll and thrash about a bit, find the string and undo it, roll out onto the floor, scuffle around a bit with lots of newspaper flying everywhere, stand up, look around, and get back into the bag.  As the story was relayed to me, the audience sat there for a moment in silence, and then another young choreographer exclaimed, "I get it!  You are born, you come out, life is not what you expected it to be, and you go back!"

The river she is flowing, the people we are flowing, the spirits they are flying, the earth turns.  Shalom~

White Light

At my father's funeral my brother gave a long eulogy, which did not glamorize my father's life, but instead set bare the threads of courage and grace woven through his harsh existence.  It made us all cry, and especially for me, appreciate the tenderness he cultivated over the last 20 years. 
One of many memories I hang out with these days is the several years of family meetings we had when I was  teenager.  In these meetings my father read to us from the bible, spoke of his family history, fraught with anger, failure, and alcoholism, and encouraged us to pick up the pieces to create blessings out of them. 
When I was 12 my father stopped drinking and made a truly conscious effort that "the sins of the fathers" would stop with his generation.  He wished so much for the blessings of the fathers to be what got passed down, and so he began living those blessings.  He educated himself, talked to us, listened to us, and was present as only a turtle can be.  He often reminded me of a turtle, sitting there smiling, not judging me, just listening and talking late into the night...

In this upside down time of change and healing in my life now, I remember that the piece of the family are there to pick up, that the blessings are there for me to pass down.  The courage of my father is within me.  A potent image which comes to mind is that of a fractured heart, torn down the middle, lying on the ground.  From inside of this heart a white light begins to pulse, to grow,until it is so smelting hot that the suture is welded clean, the light is brilliant, and the heart is crystalline in its array of rainbows. 

Thanks dad, for loving yourself enough to heal and to grow, for loving me.  It is good to be here, in the vast warm California desert, a bright milky way looking down on us at night, soft pink hues cradling us in sunset, ocean breezes tumbling our hair, sunlight to tickle our feet and stitch us together. Ohm.

Shakespeare

Numb.  Sunshine.  Children laughing.  Children crying desperately.  The bark of dogs. 

I am smiling, laughing even at some moments.  I am on the floor of the shower with leaden bones.  No time for carrot cake, no garden started this year to weed in. 

His old recliner to sit in, his old coffee cups to drink out of.  I am driving his truck.  His pictures hang on the wall.  My children's pictures too.  My pictures - I was a cute kid.  We are Family.  Hugs - lots of delicious hugs.  Soft breezes and pink sunsets.  Meteor shower tomorrow.  Birthday to make happen this weekend.  Phone calls forever on the horizon, the yucky uncomfortable ones I don't want to make. 

Alone.  Not alone.  Turning.  Not turning.  I don't know what to write.  I can only be present, and take some small action each day.  A good friend says, she is who is not busy being born is busy dying.  Another friend says, you will be in winter for a little while.  And yet another, I don't know Hannah, I don't know what to say.  I only hope that Shakespeare was spot on...it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. 

My dad would not have read Shakespeare, but he would have encouraged me to love against all odds, to love being here and being alive.  Hugs,

Changes and Love

Us women how wait, sometimes how we wait forever.  Us women how we hope.  And then, love's shattering brings us home-to the center of the universe.  

At the moment of my fathers death I was speaking to him, the phone held to his ear, and this is what I was saying:
I love you Dad, thank you for bringing me into this world.  Everything is going to be fine, the children are growing strong, and Mathias is so much like you....
The atmosphere shifted, almost imperceptibly, and I continued:
There is no pain, no deceit, no harm. There is love, there is love, there is love, there is love, deep joyful love at the center of the universe.  I am with you, I am with you there.
And he passed!

I didn't know I could cry so much!  I didn't know of tears like a waterfall unceasing, day after day and night after night...
And then comes peace.  Why not?  Rest in PEACE.  That's why we say it, that's what happens.
Last week, strong currents of peace interspersed with the waterfalls of tears.  And today, this is Hafiz's gift to me:


Today love has completely gutted me.
I am lying in the market like a
Filleted grouper,
Speechless,
Every desire and sinew absolutely silent
But I am still so fresh.
Everything is now the same to me.
Listen:
The touch of a beautiful woman
As she lifts me near,
Drawing my scent into her body;
She thinks about taking me home.
The touch of a wondrous fly
Drinking my vital fluids
Through a strange shaped flute,
The sun laying its radiant gaze against my cheek,
Human voices and the breeze from a passing
Horse's tail,
All send miraculous currents into 
My world.
God's beauty has split me wide open.
Throw Hafiz on a scale,
Wrap me in cloth,
Bring me home.


In three days time I fly out to California for the funeral.  My children will come along.  We will stay a long while and rest.  We will cook, we will read, we will dance, and we will sit.  I especially, will make carrot cakes and weed his garden, and listen to the birds he loved to hear as they whispered truths to each other among the eucalyptus trees. Peace.

Dad

My dads green eyes are twinkling at me, the creases around them thick with laughing.  His chest shakes and his belly sounds fill the air.  With childlike simplicity, he rocks back and forth, laughing for a full 5 minutes or more.  He has told a bad joke.  
Digging patiently in his garden, he attends to the bugs populating the place, the texture of the soil, the quality of a stem.  He has plowed and read and shopped and sorted for months preparing this garden, later in the summer it will produce lovely beets and eggplants.
Lying in his hospital bed, his body pushing for just a few more minutes of life, he hangs on with his particular sense of humor.  He hangs on until we are all present, and then he slips away, just like that, into the journey of a lifetime.
I see him in the clouds today, I saw him there yesterday and the day before.  He is still laughing, he is a jolly old elf, a dragon spirit, and there are hearts flying past in the sky.
I love you dad.

 

Skating Back

As I reflect on the past two years, the original length of our intended stay in Cambridge, I simply see spirals layered upon spirals over circles reflecting circles, skating back to places we have been, are going, are at now.  
The term skating back comes from a reading on the artistic process of poets, and I like it, I like the feel of the word skating in this context, as if the effort is simply a pelvic initiation and nothing more.  It implies following, following the natural flow of energy: spirals, circles, seed dots.
Love is huge, really huge.  Life is hard, not what we expect.  Beauty rests among the weed patches everywhere. 
Some things never change, such as the child's proclivity to imagine the world as they wish it to be.  I like being a child for some of the day each day right now, in a purple saffron sky beneath the earth.  I like being a grown up mother and dancer too, rockin' in the kitchen.


We, as humans, can focus on our derelict qualities, as consciousness does, in order to transform them.  We can also focus on our simplicity and love.  Two sides to a penny, two ways to skate around a circle.
The grief and horror are so profound right now that I am sometimes in hysterics.  The joy so real that my eyes are once again shining with fire; my kitchen dances get crazy fun :) For the next few posts, I leave the process of consciousness behind, and focus on the innocence and wonder of a chocolate garden.  This, I think, will sustain me over the next two years, the new intended length of stay.


In the sky home and turquoise palace of the west, I am dreaming with you.
Remedios~

Weaving Beauty

Life is for living!  I am done now, with all the work of trying to love and fix this relationship into being all by myself. It is time for me to receive love everywhere it shows up, and it is showing up!  Our show, our being the dancers and I, is opening on Sunday night in London; we have been selected to take a part of it to The Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August too; in September I am presenting a performance and a paper at Oxford University, and in October at Cambridge; there will be many many installations and performances that grow out of these seeds!  
And, my children will come along with me, on this creative adventure.  They are learning about real love, full of pain and full of blessings, and they are learning to weave a world of beauty.  They are learning that life is full of wonderful friends who are full of love, and that the heart is so strong in its unbelievable tenderness.  I am learning too, how to be the woman I am!  
Thank you from the bottom of my heart, all of you who are sending me endless messages, sessions of reiki, prayers from the bottoms of your hearts!  They are working, they are working.  
And now, another poem from Hafiz:

The moon came to me last night
With a sweet question.
She said,
"The sun has been my faithful lover
For millions of years.
Whenever I offer my body to him
Brilliant light pours from his heart.
Thousands then notice my happiness
And delight in pointing
Toward my beauty.
Hafiz,
Is it true that our destiny
Is to turn into Light
Itself?"
And I replied,
Dear moon,
Now that your love is maturing,
We need to sit together
Close like this more often
So I might instruct you
How to become
Who you
Are!

In endless Gratitude,
Remedios (I like that!)