Sinking back on my heels for a moment and pulling away from the task that had me breaking a sweat, I became aware of the constant but variable cool breeze coming through the window. Mid December, now, was unseasonably, unreasonably warm, even for this subsiding area on the south side of Houston. As the wind currents stirred about inside this storage container where I was emptying Natalie’s toys and books, it occurred to me that this part of town from which I'd moved away when I was seven, was close enough to the gulf to get that steady, comforting breeze that consistently blew in on summer afternoons along the coast of Texas.
This realization immediately spurred a recollection of afternoon naps in my mother’s room in the house just a few blocks away from here. Her bed in that room had been shoved up against the open window facing south, and the stiff breeze activated by the daily pressure shifts on the coast would blow across the bed and wake me from my sweaty slumber with its cool relief every afternoon. Immersing myself in the memory and drifting in its rich sensory flow, I acknowledged the security I felt in its dependability. It occurred to me that during my youth nearby the coast, I had actually learned to tell time by it. Laughing silently to myself, I thought about how most often in those years, it had signalled release from the daily afternoon nap-time incarceration imposed upon us by my mother .
I hadn’t been in this declining area of town for many years, but being here now, I reacognized it as a place of high impact for me in early childhood years. Many of the old houses and stores had already been torn down or had fallen down, perhaps even vandalized or set on fire for the insurance money. John had recently purchased two lots in this broken-down part of town, trusting the investors who believed this area would be the next big attraction for urban reclamation. He was moving his and Natalie's things into storage here while finalizing plans for the studio he would build on the property, a place where he would begin his life again following the divorce from Natalie's mother.
Now, looking out the window of the large storage container placed here just last week, the hazy patch of sky visible within its frame appeared broken and torn by the gnarly black branches of the old oak tree left standing in the yard after the clearing. Empty of its leaves on this balmy winter day, it remained as a landmark to some young couple in the fifties who had planted it as an attribute to their new suburban home. Today, the ambient temperature had brought sweat to my brow, and now, a breaking wetness under my arms and between my legs began to evaporate as I sat back and allowed the stillness in my spread-eagle posture and the motion of the breeze combine to cool me.
Showing posts with label prose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prose. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Mama -- A Day in the Life
I stared at the faded green aloe vera plant, long and twisted as it reached for the highly filtered light coming through the sliding glass door of my grandmother’s breakfast room. The backyard beyond the door's algae spotted base, though lovingly landscaped with azaleas and ligustrums, was shady and dense beneath the canopy of east Texas piney woods. The sunlight and bright blue sky found only pinholes for entry through its canopy.
The overgrown plant crowded the big yellow pot where it had grown for what must be twenty years or more. (Does an aloe vera even live that long I wonder as I write the words?) The jelly filled cactus plant had been a necessary component of every kitchen my grandmother ever established. Good for minor burns, she always said, and surely enough, her granddaughter’s first kitchen, and those that came after, also required the spikey horned plant with its soothing balm to be growing in the kitchen window.
My grandmother now sat on her perch, her face between the folds of her newspaper with her long, thin Benson and Hedges cigarette placed neatly into the corner ridges of the gamboge-colored ashtray whose angles were wedged between the sections of the morning newspaper. The ashtray was an accessory made to match the ultra-modern look of the chartreuse wrought-iron framed furniture standing boldly aslant in trapezoid shapes throughout her custom-built kitchen and dining area. A soft thin stream of smoke was slowly curling and flowing up from the tray's cool ceramic base to find its spot in the yellowing ceiling.
How ironic, I thought it was that my grandmother, born in 1901 before even the invention of the automobile, refused to be associated with antiques of the past, choosing to surround herself, instead, with this ultra-modern look of the early sixties. How many times had I sat like this in her breakfast room, my forearms cooling on the smoked glass table, taking in this very same scene? It must in these twenty-five years or so of repetition, by now, be impressed upon the ethers.
Mama, the name she invented for her grandchildren to call her, had been a maid of the twenties—the Roaring Twenties. She was the oldest of five Cox children living outside a saw-mill town where farm yard pigs often wallowed or slept underneath the pinewood planks of their kitchen floor. She loved to tell the story about the time she baited her younger brothers and sister into bad trouble with their tight-minded Baptist father by finding just the moment when her mother had vacated the kitchen leaving the pears cooking down to syrup for the preserves she was making.
Seizing the moment of opportunity, she enticed her sibs into the kitchen with the promise of a fun and daring adventure then showed them how to use the big ladling spoon to hold the boiling syrup over a knothole in the pine floor and call the pigs. The pigs, greedy for table scraps would come grunting and snorting, expecting gifts from heaven to be dropped to them through the holes in the floor. Then Mama would coach her little tribe to pour the sticky hot syrup through the knotholes onto their eager, hungry faces, sending the poor creatures squealing and scrambling out from under the kitchen, shaking the house as they tumbled over each other. The kids, of course, would fall all over each other laughing and rolling in the kitchen floor and never notice she had sneaked out of the kitchen long before. The tale ends with the other four being caught and promptly punished for their cruel play with whacks from their father’s razor strap while my grandmother went scot-free.
Mama was quite the story teller. I guess it came from her Irish background—it ran in the family, so it seems. She loved being the center of attention, so she would tell a story, always with herself as the central character, the one who cleverly made the joke fall on someone else. Though there were times she would tell the story on herself if it made a better story, she was the chief instigator and the main benefactor of every tale. The telling was always rolling-in-the-floor funny at the time, but later it surfaced to me as a cruel style of humor, maybe a bit like the "Uncle Remus" or "Peter Rabbit" series.
She married an older man with an income at age sixteen, she said, to get away from the restraints of her strict “papa” who made dating and dancing forbidden, and straight on, began to live the high-life. She was a looker—blue violet eyes and thick dark hair with olive colored skin—she told us she came from “the black Irish”. She loved to dress in the styles of the movie stars and always told me it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.
It wasn’t long before her husband became jealous and overly possessive. The stories she told me about his drunken fits of jealousy were a dramatic shift from those she used to entertain us at family gatherings. They separated during the Depression when my mother was five and though they made several attempts to reunite, when he died of a sudden heart attack seven years later, he left a widow. She had already found work for supporting herself and my mother as a secretary at one of the companies growing fast on the oil boom in a cow-town-become-oil-town in Texas. Here she met my wild-at-heart step-grandfather—the only one I ever knew—16 years younger than her.
My great aunt, her sister, used to say, “here comes the White Roach!” when he was coming up the walk to the front door. He’d made his first appearance "calling" on Mama in a white, Havana style suit which hung loosely over his tall, thin frame. His pasty white skin and slicked-back platinum blonde hair added to the ghostly insect illusion Aunt Mil was spinning. By the time I heard the story after a decade or more of family tellings, Mama (or even my grandfather) had managed to make it sound like he was an awkward albino boy coming to court my more refined and socially established grandmother. Their war-time marriage might have alienated her from her daughter except for the fact that my mother was fused fast to her mother’s hip, then, and for years to come.
Mama in her eighties was still a striking woman--though the deep blue violet eyes had faded, they still commanded attention when their icy blue focus was fixed to those of her listener. Her long thick black hair had thinned and was now covered with hair salon color that was befitting of her age—a warm, chestnut like color with tinges of gray, it was now short and permed to add back the body that the years had taken away. Though her once smooth olive skin now displayed a variety of moles, the regal way she held herself insisted they were marks of beauty.
Her five foot two and a half inch frame (which always seemed larger in the aura of her presence) was now rounded and her pear-shaped hips mimicked the jodhpurs she wore in pictures I’d seen of her as a young woman. Her belly was full like her breasts which hung braced against it when she hunched over in her reading posture, thin cigarette to her once full and red-lipsticked mouth. It was still easy to see the flare of her powerful appeal in the flash of her flirtatious smile.
Now peering over her newspaper at me, her eyes weary and jaw slack, she continued our earlier argument, once more trying to win me over through the force of her will (a willfulness for which she’d long been known, but which was today, clearly waning). Her tired words formed an ugly reality with which I was all too familiar, a reality born out of her own life and its long and painful relationship history. She wasn’t admitting what was clearly visible in the weakness of her posture and the tremulousness of her voice, and I wasn’t either. Perhaps registering the condition of this aging family matriarch was just too painful for us both to acknowledge.
In keeping with my own stubborn stance, I responded to the words themselves rather than acknowledging the gestalt from which they were spoken, making it easy for me to refute her rather weak argument. Instead of hearing the wisdom of her warning and trusting in the earnestness of her appeal above and beyond her history of attempts (with some success) at controlling and directing my life to her satisfaction, I chose to use my prime of life advantage to her advanced years in standing her down. She had no room to talk, I told myself--I could continue in this charade without shame.
The overgrown plant crowded the big yellow pot where it had grown for what must be twenty years or more. (Does an aloe vera even live that long I wonder as I write the words?) The jelly filled cactus plant had been a necessary component of every kitchen my grandmother ever established. Good for minor burns, she always said, and surely enough, her granddaughter’s first kitchen, and those that came after, also required the spikey horned plant with its soothing balm to be growing in the kitchen window.
My grandmother now sat on her perch, her face between the folds of her newspaper with her long, thin Benson and Hedges cigarette placed neatly into the corner ridges of the gamboge-colored ashtray whose angles were wedged between the sections of the morning newspaper. The ashtray was an accessory made to match the ultra-modern look of the chartreuse wrought-iron framed furniture standing boldly aslant in trapezoid shapes throughout her custom-built kitchen and dining area. A soft thin stream of smoke was slowly curling and flowing up from the tray's cool ceramic base to find its spot in the yellowing ceiling.
How ironic, I thought it was that my grandmother, born in 1901 before even the invention of the automobile, refused to be associated with antiques of the past, choosing to surround herself, instead, with this ultra-modern look of the early sixties. How many times had I sat like this in her breakfast room, my forearms cooling on the smoked glass table, taking in this very same scene? It must in these twenty-five years or so of repetition, by now, be impressed upon the ethers.
Mama, the name she invented for her grandchildren to call her, had been a maid of the twenties—the Roaring Twenties. She was the oldest of five Cox children living outside a saw-mill town where farm yard pigs often wallowed or slept underneath the pinewood planks of their kitchen floor. She loved to tell the story about the time she baited her younger brothers and sister into bad trouble with their tight-minded Baptist father by finding just the moment when her mother had vacated the kitchen leaving the pears cooking down to syrup for the preserves she was making.
Seizing the moment of opportunity, she enticed her sibs into the kitchen with the promise of a fun and daring adventure then showed them how to use the big ladling spoon to hold the boiling syrup over a knothole in the pine floor and call the pigs. The pigs, greedy for table scraps would come grunting and snorting, expecting gifts from heaven to be dropped to them through the holes in the floor. Then Mama would coach her little tribe to pour the sticky hot syrup through the knotholes onto their eager, hungry faces, sending the poor creatures squealing and scrambling out from under the kitchen, shaking the house as they tumbled over each other. The kids, of course, would fall all over each other laughing and rolling in the kitchen floor and never notice she had sneaked out of the kitchen long before. The tale ends with the other four being caught and promptly punished for their cruel play with whacks from their father’s razor strap while my grandmother went scot-free.
Mama was quite the story teller. I guess it came from her Irish background—it ran in the family, so it seems. She loved being the center of attention, so she would tell a story, always with herself as the central character, the one who cleverly made the joke fall on someone else. Though there were times she would tell the story on herself if it made a better story, she was the chief instigator and the main benefactor of every tale. The telling was always rolling-in-the-floor funny at the time, but later it surfaced to me as a cruel style of humor, maybe a bit like the "Uncle Remus" or "Peter Rabbit" series.
She married an older man with an income at age sixteen, she said, to get away from the restraints of her strict “papa” who made dating and dancing forbidden, and straight on, began to live the high-life. She was a looker—blue violet eyes and thick dark hair with olive colored skin—she told us she came from “the black Irish”. She loved to dress in the styles of the movie stars and always told me it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.
It wasn’t long before her husband became jealous and overly possessive. The stories she told me about his drunken fits of jealousy were a dramatic shift from those she used to entertain us at family gatherings. They separated during the Depression when my mother was five and though they made several attempts to reunite, when he died of a sudden heart attack seven years later, he left a widow. She had already found work for supporting herself and my mother as a secretary at one of the companies growing fast on the oil boom in a cow-town-become-oil-town in Texas. Here she met my wild-at-heart step-grandfather—the only one I ever knew—16 years younger than her.
My great aunt, her sister, used to say, “here comes the White Roach!” when he was coming up the walk to the front door. He’d made his first appearance "calling" on Mama in a white, Havana style suit which hung loosely over his tall, thin frame. His pasty white skin and slicked-back platinum blonde hair added to the ghostly insect illusion Aunt Mil was spinning. By the time I heard the story after a decade or more of family tellings, Mama (or even my grandfather) had managed to make it sound like he was an awkward albino boy coming to court my more refined and socially established grandmother. Their war-time marriage might have alienated her from her daughter except for the fact that my mother was fused fast to her mother’s hip, then, and for years to come.
Mama in her eighties was still a striking woman--though the deep blue violet eyes had faded, they still commanded attention when their icy blue focus was fixed to those of her listener. Her long thick black hair had thinned and was now covered with hair salon color that was befitting of her age—a warm, chestnut like color with tinges of gray, it was now short and permed to add back the body that the years had taken away. Though her once smooth olive skin now displayed a variety of moles, the regal way she held herself insisted they were marks of beauty.
Her five foot two and a half inch frame (which always seemed larger in the aura of her presence) was now rounded and her pear-shaped hips mimicked the jodhpurs she wore in pictures I’d seen of her as a young woman. Her belly was full like her breasts which hung braced against it when she hunched over in her reading posture, thin cigarette to her once full and red-lipsticked mouth. It was still easy to see the flare of her powerful appeal in the flash of her flirtatious smile.
Now peering over her newspaper at me, her eyes weary and jaw slack, she continued our earlier argument, once more trying to win me over through the force of her will (a willfulness for which she’d long been known, but which was today, clearly waning). Her tired words formed an ugly reality with which I was all too familiar, a reality born out of her own life and its long and painful relationship history. She wasn’t admitting what was clearly visible in the weakness of her posture and the tremulousness of her voice, and I wasn’t either. Perhaps registering the condition of this aging family matriarch was just too painful for us both to acknowledge.
In keeping with my own stubborn stance, I responded to the words themselves rather than acknowledging the gestalt from which they were spoken, making it easy for me to refute her rather weak argument. Instead of hearing the wisdom of her warning and trusting in the earnestness of her appeal above and beyond her history of attempts (with some success) at controlling and directing my life to her satisfaction, I chose to use my prime of life advantage to her advanced years in standing her down. She had no room to talk, I told myself--I could continue in this charade without shame.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Boulder
It is dark now looking out my window, and still my keyboard warms my thighs. I close my eyes and breathe myself into the ripples that float me back to Boulder where I began my day watching the light play on the folding currents of the creek—some winding round and some sliding over rocks that break them into voice and song. The air is dry and cool here though the summer sun at peak presses on me persistently, ignoring any pale resistance raised by the atmosphere of thin blue sky. It heats my insides—burns my indoor skin.
I pull my plastic bottle from its pouch and gratefully suck down into my dry throat the water still cool from the air-conditioned car I left parked in a shaded space on the visitors’ lot. I climb back up to the trail, slipping once on the rocky slope, and as I step onto the rough edged concrete, I feel the sun’s reflected heat jump up at me—and yet the air I draw into my cramping chest is cool. Am I a visitor here, I wonder as I look over to my car in the lot, or could this place of such paradoxical ambience be my home?
Several yards away from the rushing tumble of the water, the voice of the creek changes its quality and tone. Further up the hill and across the road in the shady yard of a yoga center, the creek’s presence below is a well kept secret—here, its voice imitates the sounds of freeway traffic during rush hour. But on the trail, where I am walking now, it lilts and tosses the currents of sound softly across the drums of my ears in pleasant percussion.
I look for another break in the trees where a navigable bank might offer an additional view, one from an angle that looks down the tangled ribbon flow for a distance, revealing secret shiny satin billows everywhere the shimmering light breaks through. I never bring a camera, always relying upon the pictures my eyes press precisely into memory. I seal them safely into sensory pockets laced with glistening light, crispy smells of earth, water, and cool sun-burned air. I store the stance of my body which is feeling the pull of the slope towards the cool wet air rising off the shady shallows. I capture a wave of sound and bottle it to carry with me for my soothing in another life far away from here.
Back up on the trail, I walk a while, musing about my situation. I had made this trip with such enthusiasm and anticipation of what potential for a new life I might have here in this part of the country that had always invoked in me such awe and inspiration. A part of me seemed to have always felt at home here, as if these majestic mountains conceived me and birthed me through a spring source in their headlands, freeing me to explore the lands below, walk among those of my kind.
But a cloak of heavy darkness had been weighing on me ever since the blow that had shaken my senses loose and taken my breath away on my third day in Denver. I sigh deeply seeking to recover my lungs’ capacity for capturing air and drawing its life support into my blood and body. I tune into my body’s center and reassure myself of its connection to the larger economy of life surrounding me, pulling, as best I can, my remaining scattered senses into the sustaining medium of that holy essence.
By now, I’ve made the circle back around to the creek again and I begin to formulate a deal with the damaged part of me fearing the 1100 mile move. Actually this part of me was bordering on, or already pushed over the edge, into full-fledged panic. I was in the early stages of shock and denial—frozen in my fear and pain so that my sensory acuity was dull, my awareness, dim. All the wealth of nature’s beauty surrounding me was massively dumbed down, experienced as if I were encased in the padded armor of a deep-sea diver— sealed tightly away from the pressures of a life-threatening condition.
I tell myself that I will sit in the magnificent presence of the living waters before me and move into the stillness of deep meditation, asking my most loving source of wisdom for a sign that will give me resolution. I tentatively agree with this more faithful part of myself and settle into a pose of inquiry on a flat rock that appears to promise temporary accommodation.
I breathe deeply into my center and surrender into the great presence of all I am in that passionate essence and release into it all my fears and doubts. I release my pain as I am able to know it in this moment and ask for the great one who loves me most and wants all the best for me to give me a sign if I should choose to make a major move at this time of my life—if I will be safe and secure here, blessed with the joy and pleasure I seek.
I take another deep breath, knowing my prayer has been delivered as I have felt the energy of it leave through my hands and move into the medium of which I am a holy part. I hold a knowing in my gut that an answer will be forthcoming. When I open my eyes, they come into focus in the center of the stream on the hovering of a hummingbird—I see nothing else but its crystal clear form and color—all else fades into shades of gray.
I am not surprised that I am not surprised, and yet I am astonished at the magic of this manifestation. Can it be real, I ask? How unexpected, how defiant of practical experience is this reality I am clearly witnessing, my senses fully intact. How such a tiny and fragile creature could even reach midstream over what must be torrential currents of air thrown from the tossing, breaking waters, stuns my sensibilities, and yet his little body hangs, seemingly suspended—the natural ability of his wings hold him steady far away from any safety of landing for rest or respite.
Only my inner spirit knows that hummingbird is my secret symbol for “yes”. He is, for my inner child, the ultimate symbol for joy and passion, for love and harmony, and yet he is being displayed for me in the outer expression of the natural landscape, in the reality of my physical experience. How much more vivid, how much more affirming could a message be? And yet there remains a nagging pull in my stomach from the fearful one. I am ashamed of her doubting and quickly ask the universe for her forgiveness lest its gift be taken back from me.
It could be a trick, she whispers to me—you know how energies sometimes conspire in a strange place to trick you into choosing wrongly and leading you into great danger. It could just be the power of your wishful fantasies creating for you what you wanted to see so that you can be supported in making an irresponsible choice—so that you can run away from the difficult life you have created for yourself far away from here. After all, wasn’t the disruptive experience in Denver an attempt at demolition of the dream?
Then I wonder if this may be the voice or reason rather than the voice of fear. How ever am I going to KNOW? Is there some form of meta-knowing I may tap into? Should I believe my eyes and my sensory experience, or my inner voice of caution? Which has served me best in my past, I ask—then answer myself saying these days in which I’m living now are outside the range of my normal experience. Otherwise I wouldn’t be having such difficulty making a decision. I never have before.
I’ve gotten up by now from my sitting rock and am standing back up on the trail. Frustrated with myself now for letting the magic of this moment be disrupted by doubt, I am still unable to quell the queasiness in my stomach. I curse myself for this split state of being and, throwing up my hands, ask the sky what I may do to have peace in me! Clearly some force at work in me is trying to sabotage my peace and happiness. How could I tempt and torture myself so?
Was the shotgun-like blow to my gut in Denver another of my projections into real life—this one of self-criticism, ridicule, humiliation? How cruel could I be to myself to ferret out, find my most secret self-doubt, my most well-protected secret shame, and blast myself with it at the most unexpected moment? A moment of being completely open and trusting in just the place I would expect safety and support on this journey of discovery—a place for acclimatizing, like the base camp at Mt. Everest—the shelter of my oldest daughter’s home?
I pull my plastic bottle from its pouch and gratefully suck down into my dry throat the water still cool from the air-conditioned car I left parked in a shaded space on the visitors’ lot. I climb back up to the trail, slipping once on the rocky slope, and as I step onto the rough edged concrete, I feel the sun’s reflected heat jump up at me—and yet the air I draw into my cramping chest is cool. Am I a visitor here, I wonder as I look over to my car in the lot, or could this place of such paradoxical ambience be my home?
Several yards away from the rushing tumble of the water, the voice of the creek changes its quality and tone. Further up the hill and across the road in the shady yard of a yoga center, the creek’s presence below is a well kept secret—here, its voice imitates the sounds of freeway traffic during rush hour. But on the trail, where I am walking now, it lilts and tosses the currents of sound softly across the drums of my ears in pleasant percussion.
I look for another break in the trees where a navigable bank might offer an additional view, one from an angle that looks down the tangled ribbon flow for a distance, revealing secret shiny satin billows everywhere the shimmering light breaks through. I never bring a camera, always relying upon the pictures my eyes press precisely into memory. I seal them safely into sensory pockets laced with glistening light, crispy smells of earth, water, and cool sun-burned air. I store the stance of my body which is feeling the pull of the slope towards the cool wet air rising off the shady shallows. I capture a wave of sound and bottle it to carry with me for my soothing in another life far away from here.
Back up on the trail, I walk a while, musing about my situation. I had made this trip with such enthusiasm and anticipation of what potential for a new life I might have here in this part of the country that had always invoked in me such awe and inspiration. A part of me seemed to have always felt at home here, as if these majestic mountains conceived me and birthed me through a spring source in their headlands, freeing me to explore the lands below, walk among those of my kind.
But a cloak of heavy darkness had been weighing on me ever since the blow that had shaken my senses loose and taken my breath away on my third day in Denver. I sigh deeply seeking to recover my lungs’ capacity for capturing air and drawing its life support into my blood and body. I tune into my body’s center and reassure myself of its connection to the larger economy of life surrounding me, pulling, as best I can, my remaining scattered senses into the sustaining medium of that holy essence.
By now, I’ve made the circle back around to the creek again and I begin to formulate a deal with the damaged part of me fearing the 1100 mile move. Actually this part of me was bordering on, or already pushed over the edge, into full-fledged panic. I was in the early stages of shock and denial—frozen in my fear and pain so that my sensory acuity was dull, my awareness, dim. All the wealth of nature’s beauty surrounding me was massively dumbed down, experienced as if I were encased in the padded armor of a deep-sea diver— sealed tightly away from the pressures of a life-threatening condition.
I tell myself that I will sit in the magnificent presence of the living waters before me and move into the stillness of deep meditation, asking my most loving source of wisdom for a sign that will give me resolution. I tentatively agree with this more faithful part of myself and settle into a pose of inquiry on a flat rock that appears to promise temporary accommodation.
I breathe deeply into my center and surrender into the great presence of all I am in that passionate essence and release into it all my fears and doubts. I release my pain as I am able to know it in this moment and ask for the great one who loves me most and wants all the best for me to give me a sign if I should choose to make a major move at this time of my life—if I will be safe and secure here, blessed with the joy and pleasure I seek.
I take another deep breath, knowing my prayer has been delivered as I have felt the energy of it leave through my hands and move into the medium of which I am a holy part. I hold a knowing in my gut that an answer will be forthcoming. When I open my eyes, they come into focus in the center of the stream on the hovering of a hummingbird—I see nothing else but its crystal clear form and color—all else fades into shades of gray.
I am not surprised that I am not surprised, and yet I am astonished at the magic of this manifestation. Can it be real, I ask? How unexpected, how defiant of practical experience is this reality I am clearly witnessing, my senses fully intact. How such a tiny and fragile creature could even reach midstream over what must be torrential currents of air thrown from the tossing, breaking waters, stuns my sensibilities, and yet his little body hangs, seemingly suspended—the natural ability of his wings hold him steady far away from any safety of landing for rest or respite.
Only my inner spirit knows that hummingbird is my secret symbol for “yes”. He is, for my inner child, the ultimate symbol for joy and passion, for love and harmony, and yet he is being displayed for me in the outer expression of the natural landscape, in the reality of my physical experience. How much more vivid, how much more affirming could a message be? And yet there remains a nagging pull in my stomach from the fearful one. I am ashamed of her doubting and quickly ask the universe for her forgiveness lest its gift be taken back from me.
It could be a trick, she whispers to me—you know how energies sometimes conspire in a strange place to trick you into choosing wrongly and leading you into great danger. It could just be the power of your wishful fantasies creating for you what you wanted to see so that you can be supported in making an irresponsible choice—so that you can run away from the difficult life you have created for yourself far away from here. After all, wasn’t the disruptive experience in Denver an attempt at demolition of the dream?
Then I wonder if this may be the voice or reason rather than the voice of fear. How ever am I going to KNOW? Is there some form of meta-knowing I may tap into? Should I believe my eyes and my sensory experience, or my inner voice of caution? Which has served me best in my past, I ask—then answer myself saying these days in which I’m living now are outside the range of my normal experience. Otherwise I wouldn’t be having such difficulty making a decision. I never have before.
I’ve gotten up by now from my sitting rock and am standing back up on the trail. Frustrated with myself now for letting the magic of this moment be disrupted by doubt, I am still unable to quell the queasiness in my stomach. I curse myself for this split state of being and, throwing up my hands, ask the sky what I may do to have peace in me! Clearly some force at work in me is trying to sabotage my peace and happiness. How could I tempt and torture myself so?
Was the shotgun-like blow to my gut in Denver another of my projections into real life—this one of self-criticism, ridicule, humiliation? How cruel could I be to myself to ferret out, find my most secret self-doubt, my most well-protected secret shame, and blast myself with it at the most unexpected moment? A moment of being completely open and trusting in just the place I would expect safety and support on this journey of discovery—a place for acclimatizing, like the base camp at Mt. Everest—the shelter of my oldest daughter’s home?
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