morethanenoughtruth

Is it enough to forgive,
or must I forget as well?
If I dwell on it,
chew on it,
reduced to pulp of mind,
surely I will swallow it
in one great gagging gulp.
Where then will it be,
stuck rumbling in my gut,
a toxin to true thought,
that ruminating mind,
a bovine chewing on its cud?
Most surely it will stay,
inured to reason’s blade.
Would that I could cut it out,
Excise all pus and pain,
drain that obsessive swamp,
and free myself this day
and evermore… but no.

It’s not enough to forgive;
We must forget as well.
Open the cocoon of pain,
so it may flutter-flit away
a butterfly of love,
forgiveness giving birth
to all that can become.
We know in some clear place
that forgetting must ensue
if we would be truly free.
We reach for dementia’s hoary hood,
Knowing oh so well that forgetting
Is the path to not-knowing,
and forgetting near so fine
as never having known at all.
I forgive you, and you, and even you.
I forgive all that ever was,
and more loving yet,
I promise to forget.

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As wishes turn into kisses
And longings turn softly to sighs,
The lust in me stirs and remembers
How tender, how sweet were our cries.

Our lips touch gently and linger,
While our eyes meet and shimmer and shine.
The earth stops and waits in its turning
As our hands and our hearts intertwine.

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The magic mists of morning
Rise to meet an azure sky.
Grass, dew-sparkled, waves
In hushed wind-worried sigh.

Rolling fog casts shadows
On meadow flowers below
While spectral rays of sunrise
Stripe hills with rainbow’s glow.

To God’s capricious artistry
Etched in filigree above
I add with joy the cadence
Of this paean to you, my Love:

A song that wants to hear its singing,
A melody with more than tune to tell,
Text whose words spell more than meaning,
And speak in rhymes that dare not tell

Of moonlit nights with smiles remembered
When all but lovers go to sleep
And prayers of children heard at twilight
Pray the Lord their souls to keep,

Lest reporting jar the meaning
Of quiet thoughts that need no words,
A song that rings in children’s laughter
And scolds bright mornings with the birds.

Come, my Love, and meet the dawning.
Breathe and savor all you may,
For the magic mists of morning
Rise to greet our wedding day.

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It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
To trust the soul’s invincible surmise

(George Santayana, 1863)

I have long prayed, since when my pajamas had feet, to become a wise woman.  Every selfish entreaty with the Divine that began with passionate requests for intervention and salvation ended with the quiet whimper of acceptance: nevertheless Thy will, not mine, be done.  I begged only to become a wise woman.  Prayer after all consists mostly of positioning our lives to catch the holy wind.  Setting sails with love’s pure light will surely take us home.

He who seeks for Heaven alone to save his soul
May find the path but surely miss the goal,
While he who walks in love may wander  far
But God will lead him where the blessed are.

(Henry Van Dyke, 1852-1933)

I wonder in retrospect if I was harboring a suspicion that God will not answer prayer.  Maybe I’m only a cynic at heart.  What if I were to speak to the God of all creation expecting to be heard, to be answered, to receive bread… not a stone?  What if I made room for a simple faith?  It might be a life-changer.

“The feeling of done-and-done-and-done is so much fun.”  Binge-watching Fixer-Upper has planted a bug that plays on endless loop in my head.  Wayfair and HGTV have no idea how pervasive is their contribution to the collective consciousness.  The only cure seems to be replacing it with something more grounded.  I have found a rendition of the Mozart Requiem that is made to order.  Arsys Bourgogne is a French choral group that is everything a choir group should be.  They are pitch-perfect, and express their music with a lovely integrity that reaches into my very soul.  Their soloists embody the composer’s pure intent.  Always tuned to the soprano line, I appreciate her pure vowels, crisp consonants, tonal clarity, and sure sweet arch of phrase as melody becomes meaning.  European vowel production promises and delivers choral singing at its best.  I am enthralled, and hope my Wayfair bug will be extirpated and expunged.

My plan is to watch the Arsys Bourgogne Mozart every night before bed in hopes of getting some sleep.  It’d better work.  I am tired of lying in an attitude of sleep, counting ceiling tiles, and listening to Wayfair’s jingle play in my head.  God help me.  Clarity of insight is cool, but I really need to cut some zzz’s.

If that works maybe I can carry it a step farther.  Sleep knitting up the tattered sleeve of care is a must.  Shakespeare knew that.  With some restorative sleep I might actually dare to pray for a good death rather than lying abed and worrying, glassy eyed, about a slow and painful one.  Am I wise yet?  Just asking.

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Will, as determination to be everything that you are, is complex.  My mother and I locked horns over this problem from the beginning.  We each were vested in our own version of truth, she with her favored neuroses, I with mine, and there was no compromise.  She often called me a willful child; I replied, “So what.”

One afternoon when I was three she forbade me to visit my friend down the block because it had rained.  Mud was a problem.  She insisted that I go upstairs and take a nap.  I wasn’t sleepy.  I wanted to visit my friend, but… I wanted to be a good girl and mind my mother.  A conflict.  When she was asleep in her bed, I crept downstairs and rummaged up two flattened cardboard boxes.  Starting at the end of our pavement, I stood on one box and placed the other one a calculated distance from it with a heading that advanced my bare feet toward my goal.  I jumped onto the other box.  Then I moved the first box to an improved strategic location and jumped yet again to the twice relocated box.  Repeating this tactic brought me to my friend’s doorstep without muddying my feet.  I congratulated myself at having resolved a conflict in service to the needs of all concerned, but hadn’t counted on my mother’s hidden agenda.   Her need was to control.  I was her creature who must obey.  It was ugly.

Another afternoon, banished to the ignominy of my childhood bed, I was told to take my nap.  I didn’t want a nap.  I wanted to go abroad, to explore and to frolic.  I needed to be my creative playful self.  Who was this person to so thwart my existential quest?  I slipped out the door and ran right into a Texas dust storm.  Mommy hadn’t told me about those.  I couldn’t open my eyes and wandered about the yard, running into tree-trunks that bloodied nose and forehead.  I howled in agonized affront.  Who were these trees to so abuse me?  “Mommy,” I cried.  “Help!”

She heard my loud mouth and came running, saved me but took my disobedience personally.  A good girl minds her mother.  “You are the Devil, she shrieked.   I can see it in your eyes.  He has taken over your body.  That’s why you do these things.”  I knew she was crazy and broke my life in two__her half and mine.  Mine was the better half; Hers was insane.

Will created a folie-a-deux for my mother and me, but it focused my healthy child narcissism into the ego strength needed to prevail.  Everybody won.

***

Will is a neutral concept, and serves both for good and for ill.   Living creatures share this feature.  How else would baby birds peck their way out of eggshells?  Cows decide if and when to let down their milk, when to deliver a calf, and when to hold back until a safer time and place conspires to bless the birth.  I saw this play out knitting in anticipation of incipient labor, waiting for no apparent reason for my daughter to be born.  Finally I understood.  She was waiting for me.  I put down the knitting needles and sweater-in-the-making, lay back, and determined to have a baby.  An hour later Melanie Rae Taylor entered my world.

Control of fluids is a ready example of harnessing will to good effect.  I have known since childish scraping of knees and elbows that we bleed when we allow ourselves to bleed.  I practiced telling myself not to bleed in response to a fresh injury.  As long as I remained attentive to the situation, no blood would exit the wound.  As soon as I tired of the job, capillaries would release, and blood would be everywhere.  Wait long enough for the clotting mechanism to work, and I could save a Band-aid.

I have always been a hard-stick, a lab tech’s nightmare.  They would complain that the needle was in, but no blood would flow.  A question!  Finally I decided to apply the converse of my childish determination to hold back from a wound’s right to bleed.  I blessed the needle and gave my permission for the blood to fill the tube to provide the results I needed.  Since that day, I do fine with lab techs.  I am no longer a bad-stick.

Once in New York’s Grand Central Station tagging along with my dad, I saw him reach for a cigarette.  He looked at the pack of Pall Malls and threw it in the trash.  “I don’t want to smoke anymore,” he said to me and_more important_ to the cigarettes.  He explained that with sufficient will we don’t need to be controlled by our bodies.  Addiction is for other people.  I never forgot that lesson.  He never smoked again.  When I got a Hashimoto’s diagnosis I set out to lose unhealthy weight and reclaim my thyroid, dropping fifty pounds in a year.  Daddy would be proud.

In 1963 a West Virginia byway claimed the life of my daughter.  She was too young.  She should not have died; I should have prevented it.  After the funeral I chose to return to my college classes without waiting for the grief to play out.  I sat in the lecture hall and watched the walls heave in rolling waves.  The only explanation that held was that we live in a holographic construct where everything that is, is determined by our hallucination of its existence.  In such a world I could have created a better future for Melanie.  I would have if I had known how.  The Ultimate must have a reason, a purpose, in her death.  I can accept that understanding for losing what I could not, should not, cannot bear to lose.  In such a world, she waits for me to learn all I must and move on to what comes next.  What lovely irony that she began by waiting to live, and now she meets herself coming around the curve of time waiting for me to die.

If self-determination is so predictable, we should be able to die when we want.  I have an ascending aortic aneurysm, a not-off-the-chart-but-getting-there condition that I don’t monitor.  I should, according to my cardiologist, but I choose not to.  A dissected aneurysm is a clean painless way to die.  I choose that for an exit strategy.  It bothers me to be alive when more viable people die.  I should not be consuming resources given my diminished capacity to contribute.  They owe me?  No.  They owe me nothing.  I gave from love, the only way to give.  All else is commerce.

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When our ancient ancestor first slithered onto a Silurian beachhead, it wasn’t breathing in and out.  Water flowed through evolving gill slits in a continuous flow.  The practice of breathing in and out was an adaptation, rudimentary at best, a compromise that resolved its embarrassment at being caught without a reliable source of oxygen.  Now we are committed to a silly batch process to get our fix of ambient O2.  In-and-out is a fitful start-and-stop that never really gets going.  With two spots in the cycle where nothing absolutely nothing happens, we are caught in a rat-a-tat of top-dead-center hiccoughs.  With no timing light, what are we to do?

Every Industrial Engineer knows and is glad to tell you that inline process is superior to batch.  Henry Ford was famous for inventing the automobile, but it was his genius concept of the assembly line that cemented the magic of his place in history.  If only air could flow through us in an uninterrupted stream like the flow of intelligent thought, we would be happier and healthier.  Eventually as we morph into the cyborgs we will become, we will correct that ancient error.  Until that time when we will no longer need to take a deep breath to express relief, we will have to make do.

In the march of the ages, Silurian moved into Carboniferous as giant forests held sway, raising their lofty crowns in competition for sunlight and air.  Oxygen content climbed to a 35% high in the raging explosion of photosynthesis.  What better time for water life to find the land?  Our present 21% level gasps in comparison.  It was that intensity of oxygen that lured our primitive ancestor onto that ancient beach turning the tide of evolution toward the modern era and man.

What does that early action say to my present dilemma?  I must continue to breathe at all costs.  I must be consumed with the need to claim air for myself, suck it of its life and dump it.  There is no respite.  No timeout for rest.  I breathe in.  I breathe out.  I do it at the necessary rate.  No more.  No less.  The amount of oxygen must be titrated to the level of energy expended in order to maintain balance.  All this is done without me even thinking about it.  In fact, if I do think about it, the action doesn’t work as well.  It is a parasympathetic task, best accomplished by muscle memory, not mind.

The alternate horn of that dilemma presents as the reality of meditation.  We have a history of tinkering with breath.  Fact: Paying attention to breath is the hallmark of Buddhist meditation.  Can the tail wag the dog?  It can.  It does.  But it is not a natural activity.  No three-year-old takes kindly to assuming the lotus position and focusing on in-breaths and out-breaths.  Play is a preferred choice.  But I concede that meditation does its best to make the best of a bad situation.

A recent psychotherapeutic encounter introduced the suggestion that I undertake the practice of meditation a-la Jon Kabat-Zinn.  I stiff-armed that approach.  Who wants to just sit and breathe?  Not me.  Boring.  I don’t do mindfulness well.  Just-do-it is the superior approach.  I-know-better is of course a slammed door to other-good.  It’s so easy to become one’s own all-time-best enemy.  I resurrect the book, unread, spine resolutely pristine.  I open it.  It falls open to the chapter on stress-reactivity.  A smarter person would have read this when it was suggested, several years ago.  I waited until I was desperate for this new and better truth.

Now I am a treed creature, terrified, clutching the armpit of fractal branching I have attained.  I don’t sleep.  I respond to gentle stimuli as assaults.  My I-phone dings a text, and my chest accepts the sound as a blow, adrenaline an impact, a kick to the heart.  Life has become one continuous anxiety attack.  I lie in bed counting auricular/ventricular beat.  Too fast, too fast, too fast.  I breathe too fast.  Way too fast.  Way too fast.  It’s time to read Zinn’s “Full Catastrophe Living.”

Not later.  Now.

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