morethanenoughtruth

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.

Body is a fine instrument,

tuned to frequencies

of time and light.

It plays.

I rise, ungainly cobra that I am,

uncoil from warmth of bed

to clarity of smallest hours,

wishing for, anticipating dawn.

 

Together-music fills

what’s left of time and night.

We sing with morning stars.

No bouncing ball directs the song,

but lit on lacey screed of mind,

northern lights sweep aura,

fade to pink, then purple,

mauve, then teal to green.

 

It’s time to dance,

a two-step urged by frequencies

of light and sight,

slip-sliding round the edge of night,

the bend, the lip,

the definitive event horizon,

of that deep-deep-darkest

of black holes.

Cringing back from what must come,

I pray, “What’s next?

Am I rugged-individual-ly alone?

Should I ally myself with All,

or invest in beingness of things,

Toll-House-cookies, roasted-beast,

gluten-free-non-GMO-apple-pies?

How is is is?

Can I trust it to be real?”

 

Who would be incarnate

should live solidly,

safely fixed aground,

hidden from that lovely light,

inured to spirit’s mad delight.

Granite shoes are safe,

a resolute embrace.

 

Silly poet that I am, I flit,

a winged dragon,

gadding to-and-fro,

an aerial do-si-do,

way too charged with life.

Hijacked by beauty,

like Hubble snaps

of Magellenic clouds,

my eyes are full of stars,

and stars are full of me.

Lucky stars!  Lucky me!

 

When morning comes at turn of day.

Realities of breaking-fast intrude.

Oatmeal pines for hot and spoon.

Teeth hanker for a brush.

Throat wants salty gargle.

The throne I sit deserves a flush.

Quotidian ilk demand their due,

as toll I pay to even play

the silly stupid game.

Well worth their price,

these gentle gauche accoutrements

call me back from

tantalizing edge-of-mind.

“Put feet to floor,” they bray,

and join the lively fray.”

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.

When it becomes dangerous to live in your own home it is time to leave, and leave I did, taking with me my cat, my Collie dog, and my Sig Sauer P239.  Yes, I had a permit to carry, so I was legal in case it might have become an issue.  It was early October in Roanoke, Virginia.  The weather was seasonably delightful, and my green tent blended well with the autumn color at the local campground nestled in the foliage alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I should have left years before, but had nowhere else to go.  I had no savings since my retirement income always got sucked up into the expense of running house and farm.  The bruises got worse.  I was fed up with being punched and slammed against walls.  That hurts.

My ’89 Acura Legend had a capacious trunk with a small seat-back door that folded down to allow access to the main interior.  It was designed to provide for carrying 2×4’s home from Lowe’s,  but I used it as a cat door for Espresso, my black Domestic Shorthair, so he could visit his litter box in the trunk.  He loved to ride shotgun with his front paws on the dashboard so he could see with those lovely golden eyes where our adventure was taking us.  Maggie, his canine counterpart, preferred lounging in the back seat on top of all the pillows, blankets, clothing, camping gear, food, and water.   She had a twelve hour bladder, so I only needed to walk her morning and evening.  We managed.

My YMCA membership provided exercise, a hot shower every day, and a place to change clothes,  which I kept clean at a Franklin Road laundromat.  It should have been doable, but things kept happening.  First somebody stole my tent while I was on my daily rounds.  At least I had the foresight to empty it every morning, stowing sleeping bag and other gear in the car.  That forced me to sleep in the car tucked into my sleeping bag , not nearly so comfortable but doable.  My ex-husband and I had always enjoyed winter camping (no tourists,  no bugs) so my sleeping bag was certified down to zero degrees Fahrenheit.

October gave way to November, then December.  The campground closed for the winter, and I was on my own to find a place to park every night for shuteye.  First there was the requisite stop at Mill Mountain Coffee to slip in the back door and fill my hot water bottle, preventive for icy feet syndrome.

My State Farm Insurance agent had a back-of-the-office covered carport;  I began appropriating it nightly, especially on stormy ones.  One bitter cold evening, after pulling into my spot, I ran across the street to a Seven/Eleven to pick up breakfast makings.  I left the car running to keep it extra warm to start the night off right.   Of course Maggie had to protest.  She wanted to go, too.  Barking and pawing at the window, she managed to step on the back door lock, which on the Acura automatically locked all four doors.  Now I had a car parked, locked, and running with a cat and a dog inside.  What to do?  I ran  across the street again, this time to ask for help.  There are times when I’m sure God is watching out for me.  The local emergency squad team had also stopped there to coffee up, and they came to assist.  One of the team was a young very thin woman who was able to slip an arm through the narrow opening I had left to provide fresh air for Maggie and Espresso.   She reached in,  pulled up the slick knob-less locking mechanism, and all was saved.  What luck!

I managed to live through a bout of food poisoning and was feeling pretty puny, having also run out of vitamins.  Christmas was the loneliest ever, and in January the jet stream conspired with Old Man Winter to send sub-zero weather.  One bitter night, as I lay trying to fall asleep, the Slumberjack bag failed me.  I began to shake, and my teeth commenced chattering.   It was then that my sweet dog Maggie, rose from her accustomed place in the back seat and carefully climbed to the passenger seat where I had been spending my nights with the seat-back fully reclined.  She placed her paws carefully as she crawled forward, careful not to hurt me.  When she was satisfied she had just the right spot, she covered me with her hairy body and remained there the entire night, while slowly I warmed and slept.

Another January morning I woke locked in the deposit of an ice storm.  We were frozen in all day waiting for the parking lot, where I had chosen to spend the night, to be cleared.  There comes a time to admit when you are beaten.  It was time to go home.  Some beatings are worse than others.  Knowing the difference leans toward wisdom.

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.

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.

I am a certifiable genius in one specific area.  If there is a way to alienate a group of people, I will find a way to tap into that knowledge and make it happen.  I do this because?  If I don’t do that, they will beat me to it.  They will do it first.  Better that I should pre-empt the inevitable and leave me to the gratification of being the prime mover.

 

Chugging along in a quiet contentment is something I can do, but it is not basic to my nature.  It feels like something contrived, like something undertaken as stasis between significant events, a balance achieved but precarious at best, and waiting for chaos to assert dominion.  Being overstimulated always brings fluidity to the balance.  Stimulation, whether for good or ill, can bring down a house of cards, a suspension of Junga blocks, or a period of insightful self-control.

 

Stimulants are legion.  Positive ones include music, poetry, writing, conversation, human touch, happy faces, good food, warm mittens, cool breezes.  But any of these can be turned on their heads to yield inverses.  Consider hard rock, cop killer rap, political propaganda,  hateful diatribes, beatings, smiling rictii, lip-smacking gluttony,  global warming to extinction, a jet stream gone amok yielding violent weather events that ultimately usher in global dystopia.  Point made: stimulation is wonderful until it isn’t.  But good or bad, stimulation tips balance.

 

I need people but do best socializing one person at a time.  Two generates a triad with the inherent tension of the construct.  Who gets attention?  This one or that?  Him or me?  More than two is a group, and all bets are off.  If I am a different person depending on whom I am addressing, who am I in a group?  A problem.  Just sitting in a room with multiple persons is a potent stimulant.  I will never be whole in a group with every aspect of myself engaging disparate faces.  In a choir, singers all face the director, a benevolent autocracy.  One of my mother’s favorite questions was, “What will people think?”  Corollary to that was, “If you act like that, they’ll think you’re not quite right.”

 

My typical reply: “Good.  I don’t care what they think.  What people think of me is none of my business.”  Of course that is a lie.  I do care.  I worry that I will say the wrong thing and offend.  A nice old woman would remain silent.  I resent that I must be silent when I want, even need, to be known.  Anger builds.  If I am addressed I will say the very thing that will be sure to offend, even alienate.  Better to reject you before you can reject me.  Proof that it is I, not you, who is in control.  Lose control and die.  All this before anybody even says a word.

 

We have come full circle.

Now where must I roll?

Chugging down the track,

again I ride the rails,

I can do it.

Yes I can.

I can do it if I think I can.

I think I can.

I think I can.

Will I do it?

I know I can.

I will!