Burnished, Deep Splendor

What Life Does To Us

Yes. I said it. Life does stuff to us. I am not of the point of view that we cause ALL our own troubles. I admit we do a good job on ourselves by our choices and habits, but life does a good deal to contribute to the messes we find ourselves in on a larger scale. There are these surprises...earthquakes and accidents...depressions both emotional and financial...unexpected brain tumors. There are genetic tricks that turn into addictions and brilliant savant-ism. There is rape. There are children with cancer. There are starving children. Don't bother writing a comment that those children are paying off past life karma because I don't buy it. We are already forgiven for all that so let's just say that I do not explain what life does to us as pay back.

It would be easy enough to extrapolate that I must harbor some ill will.  You might assume I am resentful. That would be wrong. In fact I am amazed, impressed and marveled by the stuff life does to us. I am unusually humbled by the dings I’ve gotten from a life I hope is only half-way through. There are some doozies, as you will know from this journal of sorts. I view them as the experiences that make me human.

I watched with my kids the Kennedy Center Honors awards show last month where they were celebrating some of America’s finest performers in music and drama. I bring this up because here is a group of people I truly admire for making this world more bearable with their contributions (yes, even Neil Diamond). One would think from the glowing love they got that night that they are an unblemished, untouched sort. I was familiar with four out of five of the artists, Neil Diamond for his amazing collection of pop hits, Yo-Yo Ma for his adventures as a Cellist, Sonny Rollins and his saxaphone, and Meryl Streep the endless Oscar Winner. I had never heard of the fifth, Barbara Cook, though it turns out I was familiar with her work on a few of my grandparents’ “Original Broadway Cast” albums. Not one of them had truly escaped hitting the proverbial wall of life, though, and Barbara Cook may have hit it even harder than Sonny Rollins (though he also hit a wall called “da Man” and landed in prison for a time).

Barbara somehow said the thing that struck me and has stayed with me for several weeks now. She was filmed giving singing lessons to a group of talented up and comers and someone was singing what sounded like a silly, romantic song  in her voice, and then Barbara took the same music and made it downright sexy. She told this girl, “This is a song about sex. Remember that and you’ll do all right.” She’s 83 or 84 years old and she said it just that bluntly. Then the next clip she was speaking to the whole class and she said, and this is the thing that stuck, “These songs, this music is about what life does to us...” and  she added something like - you have to bring it, all of it to the music, to your expression.

“...this is about what life does to us and you have to bring it...”

Here was a woman, that as a young person literally wrote her own ticket on Broadway with this incredible voice that became the model of Marian the Librarian (my first theatrical role as an earnest and unlived fifth grader), but then drank herself into anonymity. Yes, she had that habit and she paid, but the circumstances that drove her, the genetic make-up, the loss of boundaries all piled up together and that is life. Life did it and she complied...for a while... in a soul-destroying, sopping drunk choice. Then she stopped, and that was her choice, too, and she turned her life around and she went on to win the Kennedy Center's Award in 2011. So. It wasn’t just the words she said in that one sentence that impressed me, but that her devotion to sharing all of the dings, scratches and bruises through music is her gift to humanity, and she does it so intimately that you feel you are with her alone. Like this song, that I think she sings to life itself and of what we do to life: 

And, this makes me think of the author, Oriah Mountain Dreamer, who also has this same kind of relationship with life, a love affair that sometimes forces uncomfortable questions that she so generously shares with us even in the midst of a crisis. These two, of many of artists I have met and admired, leave me stunned with a clear idea of who I hope to be in a year or fifty years...something I call “burnished, deep splendor.” The tender yet incredibly resilient quality that acknowledges what life does to us and polishes it until there is a way to see all the way to the core is what I want to be.

Picking Up Where We Left Off

Remembering presence has been the work lately. It has been absolutely right for me not to focus so much on the benign meningioma in my skull. After seven weeks of working with a wonderful allergist/immunologist, Dr. Michael Volz, we have induced my body to tolerate the anti-seizure drug, Dilantin, so that I may have surgery. Today I had my blood work done to find out if the medication is at "therapeutic" levels that are acceptable to the neurologist and neurosurgeon in charge of my case. I have a good feeling about it, enough so that I'm willing to share that my surgery is scheduled for a few weeks from now.

What a quest! I have learned so much already. By diverting my attention away from the little-dirty-gray-ball-of-laundry in my skull, I managed to start a few projects that I can imagine picking up again with eager joy as I am recovering from surgery. Yay! This is the smile I was looking for in "Resting in Ambiguity" - knowing that there was something in me that was left to express and be in this world. I felt I had to have some sort of baby to birth, even knowing that the baby would have to be myself. I knew that simply looking forward to recovering from having "Titanium Snowflakes" adhered to my skull was not the fuel of living I count on. Now, I know without a doubt that I have work to do, people to meet and stories to tell, and I'm looking forward to getting there no matter what travails I have to wander through on the way.

If you've read any of my earlier blogs, from say 2010, you will know that I've struggled to come into my life meaningfully. After years of  having the main goal of fixing others around me, and, of course, of course, failing miserably, I had to sit in some "fallow fields" and accept there was nothing to do in that moment. In a sense, my journey with the benign meningioma was already well underway, though I was unaware of it. I had a great deal of fatigue, a constant headache, hearing loss, and a general feeling of malaise and I thought I had spent all of myself already on the failed pursuit of my first marriage, and career misfires. My field was full of rocks and permafrost, and from what I could tell, fully depleted, and all I could do was plant a cover crop of experimental writing that I knew wasn't really going anywhere, just to put some nutrients back in the soil of my life. I have to admit I had doubts that it was working even up unto this fall. Truly it felt like a last ditch effort to save my dreams.

When I had the clarity that actually there was something physically contributing to my sense of hopelessness, it managed to actually pull in my focus, like a closing aperture, to find what it is that I do love about living. Besides my children, my husband, and my dog, I knew there was something else. I admit it. I love writing. But, what I love about writing the most is not what I thought I loved. I saw a PBS special in December about our Poet Laureate 2010-11, W.S. Merwin, and he nailed it: "Poetry expresses what cannot be told." Now, I do believe this is what has interested me about poetry for so long, but I also have seen it in the best films of our age.

The intangible quality of fine art that communicates underneath opaque structures and reaches into our hearts rather than into our minds is what I have always wanted to pursue, and what I have always denied myself by trying to write acceptably, commercially and with the audience in mind. In fact, as a writer I have gone down all the wrong paths for my particular longing. Grin. It's all right. I don't have to wonder anymore whether I could be a social media maven, a content provider extraordinaire or a Rom-Com dudette in Hollywood. I can't seem to pull it off. Those are not in my bag of seeds.

Here we revisit the notion of trust. Can I trust this knowledge and pursue, finally, what I am truly capable of producing? Ah. You may rely on the fact that the question emerges nearly everyday still, and so it is with effort that I hang onto, "Yes," as the answer. Brain surgery is not cheap, nor is having two kids. I struggle with the notion of letting my husband carry this weight while I seem to be namby-pambying around with "creativity" rather than practical pursuits.

It so happens with all the effort I put into trusting that "yes," something has happened. I wrote 78 and more poems since September last year. You may see some of them on Kosmic Egg Tarot, and on Kosmicegg and even still I wonder if I can accomplish anything this way. Then as I was devoting my heart to poetry I realized that even that is not enough for me.  I've taken up landscape photography, oil pastels, co-writing a novel with my daughter, futurism and more. I used to say "more is more," and frankly it was a rebellion against my father's mantra, "less is more," but in the field of creativity it turns out that the more diversely I let my talents express themselves, the healthier the productivity and consistent the flow of ideas is for me.

I have a talent for extrapolation that thrills and entertains people and finally looks like it could be a business in futurism for me. This is funny to me since I had such trouble figuring out my own future for a long while, but like me, the world is sort of in a "fallow field" state with glimmers of hope coming and going with each nation's debt crisis. Indeed having a vision for a prosperous future seems to be a battle for more than just me alone. So, as I'm recovering from brain surgery I now have abundant plans and things to work towards. I don't know for sure that it's all going to work, but I do know that I must have this bridge to my future because fording the river Styx is not so wise if one is keen on remembering presence.