More Than a Meme

photo: @dtait_photography

I have always talked about my life, the life of my family, in terms of the kind of year it was. Some years are giving years, and when I say that, I usually mean that we are the recipients of great abundance. It is the universe that gives to us when I use this language. Some years are saving years, and when I said this to my boys when they were growing up, they knew it was not a time to ask to buy things or spend a lot of money. These were the lean years, though also some of the best—the year on “Auntie Basia’s” property comes to mind, when we didn’t have much at all, but we could see from Mauna Kea to the sea from our lanai, and we had chickens and tilapia in the pond and a stream that gave us fresh water and a swimming hole with a good jumping off spot. That was a year we were able to share what we did have with friends every week for Tuesday Night Tacos (not always Tuesdays, not always tacos). It was a saving year but also one of great adventure, and it was the year my first novel was born: Inertia.

Some years have been years of transition, and many have been the years before such a change…the ones in which we have felt settled and whole, like we had all the things we needed and had garnered incredible people to us—friends who would be in our hearts for all time. Strangely these were always the years it was time to go…on to the next adventure. Mostly we followed the snow, and specifically the halfpipes, because after that first family adventure in Switzerland, our two-year stint on a goat trail hanging over the east end of Lake Geneva, we knew we had to put our boys in their element, and indeed Rakai followed that dream until, well….just this year. This one: 2020.

How to characterize this year? I hear so many people wanting to be rid of 2020, calling it the year from hell and expressing the hope that once it is past, what ails us all will be suddenly gone. So many memes and offhand comments about 2020. Clever jokes and comics about how terrible it is, and indeed, some unspeakably terrible things have happened this year. But in the end, as we approach its final month, I find myself at a loss to name it. Partly because I have always thought of the years on an academic calendar. After all, being a teacher and a parent, I have never not followed one. In that sense, we have more to go. A lot more, actually. And yet being in New Zealand, suddenly the calendar year aligns with the academic one, and I find myself on the verge of summer as the academic year closes out…in December. Mostly what I feel is that the changes that have been precipitated in 2020 are mid-bloom. I feel that for all the disappointments and tragic revelations, this year is not a period that can be characterized with a single word.

2020 is not the pandemic year…that will most certainly continue. In some ways I feel like we are all anticipating the New Year like we did Y2K, when there was this expectation that something huge (potentially devastating but mostly just unknown) was going to happen. But Y2K, the 2000 New Year, came and went with little fanfare, and life went on pretty much as it had done before that fateful date. I am preparing myself for this kind of let down. 2021 holds out the promise of a new presidency (some of us are still holding our breath, but it seems pretty clear that this shift was secured by an election that was efficient and accurate despite a global pandemic and a shit-storm of conspiracies around its execution), and we will indeed see a change of power in January. Whether that shift is peaceful or violent (or just full of more embarrassing press) remains to be seen.

What I do believe we can foresee, however, is that not that much is going to change. Not right away anyway. The U.S. has entered a new kind of movement where everyone seems to be tacitly agreeing that there is not much that can be done until a vaccine is finalized and distributed. People are generally getting tired of giving up the things that make their lives their lives, things they’ve “worked so hard to get/do/achieve” (I think of Justin Turner of the Dodgers, out on the World Series field moments after news of his positive Covid-19 test because he “deserved to be there” among all of his celebrating teammates and their families, maskless and grinning for the camera. I love that guy, and I know that most people were sympathetic, but mostly I just felt let down). Even those who understand the danger and have typically embraced their responsibility to their communities, who have adopted and maintained careful and mindful behaviors—they’re over it. With the holidays upon us, we feel this is the last straw. Certainly we are entitled to some quality time with extended family and friends after such a long bout with this relentless year.

That’s the thing, though. This year is not going to compartmentalize itself just for the sake of our memes. What threatens us now, what swells around our ears like a flood, will continue, even when the clock ticks midnight on the final day of its calendar. It is now, during our most exhausted and languishing moments, that we must push on. It might seem easy for me to say from here in New Zealand, where the leadership has been clear and compassionate from the beginning of the pandemic and where, quite frankly, the systemic racism has not come to a head the way it has in the U.S. (I suspect that day is coming, but perhaps not for a long while, but we won’t see that on screen in Hobbiton). It’s easy and it’s not, because my son is there, in California, and so are my parents and my brother and his family. We have friends in Tennessee, Colorado, Vermont, North Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, New Mexico…I could go on and on.

My son, like so many others, is there pursuing his dream—Olympic qualification is still happening, they tell us, even as FIS snowboard events are cancelled one by one. Copper Mountain is still building its halfpipe, but states are shutting down, as not just cases but deaths from the virus soar. And who will travel to China in this chaos for 'Olympic test events’? And if they do, will they be safe? Will it be a mistake? And there is my son’s girlfriend—in California. The love of his life, I can see it. In any other time, they would be learning each other, taking it slow, enjoying being together in different places on the planet as he traveled and competed to consummate a young lifetime of snowboard training and competition. But in this year—this year. Their hands are forced. One dramatic decision or another clamors to be made. My heart is heavy. And it is grateful. For today and for their love. For the health of all my loved ones and even myself up to this point. Good health can be fleeting (if this year has taught us nothing else, it has taught us this), and for now we are strong. Fear sniffs around at the door, but inside we embrace and warm ourselves by the proverbial fire. I am far away, and some days that makes it harder, but I still feel so deeply connected to what happens.

So 2020, I don’t have any off-color-but-funny thing to say to you. I say let us move with grace and determination through the turn of the annum…may we merit the light that shines on us, and may we be generous. So generous that we forget what we are giving up to make the world safe for our elders and our more vulnerable counterparts. Safe for ourselves, lest we be taken by surprise with our own bodily response to this unpredictable plague. Let us breathe through these weeks of waiting for a medical miracle that may or may not be the answer to our prayers…and let us love one another harder than we ever have. Because we need that. We need one another, and we need to see our lives as a continuum. There is no seam between 2020 and 2021. There’s just us and our actions and a truth that is unfolding every moment as we live days that challenge us in ways we never could have imagined. 2020 has been fierce. It has been brutal. It has been beautiful sometimes, too. And hard. Very hard.

I will not attempt to reduce 2020 to a meme, or even to name it, but if I had to name the something larger, of which it is a part, I would maybe say that it is a “growing time.” All growth involves at least a little pain, and the faster it happens the more it hurts. This is a time of intense growth. May we meet it without resistance, have patience as it unfolds, and may we know the value of its unfurling.

Dear 2020 Baby…

Dear 2020 Baby,

Welcome beautiful one. We are so happy you are here. We know it has been a bumpy arrival, but we promise to do better for you. While we were waiting for you, we weren’t so sure. How, we wondered, could we usher you into your life on Earth during such a chaotic and frightening time and do it fearlessly? How could we be sure that our love would outweigh our anxiety and apprehension? How could we make your nest a peaceful one amid all the wild energy spilling in the street? But we needn’t have worried, for the moment we saw you, heard your fledgling voice, and held you in our arms, we knew: our love is more powerful than any fear. It wraps around us like a rose-quartz-colored blanket with you in the nucleus of our embrace. Your warm breath against our cheeks is a promise, and we have some promises for you, darling 2020 baby. They are many.

When you are bigger you will learn about all of the things that are swirling around us this year…the way many people lost sight of love and of how important it is to nurture our connection with others, no matter how different they may be from ourselves. You will learn that lots of people were sick, and some even went back into the ether the way you came…maybe you saw them on your way. They would have been the ones sending you a wave and a blown kiss, but their expressions would not have been doleful, because they (unlike many of us) know that 2020 is a turning point. They know that it was an honour to be among those who left their mortal coils to contribute to the great knowing that is being born right now, just like they know it is an honour for you, dear one, to be taking a body and beginning your life during this, the dawn of what comes next.

Those spirits, lifting on air, probably bowed to you as you passed by on your way to be birthed, touched the thumbs of their palm-kissing hands to their foreheads as you went…to show you that they know. They who were also brave, whose spirit choices included leaving their bodies in a way that was painful and even lonely—those moments have vanished already, for those spirits now know a kind of joy and freedom that the rest of us can only guess at. They look on from the beyond and know that time is an illusion and that in the end it will be a great nothing that separates us from each other in this way that feels so permanent to us now.

But of course you know these things; that joy, that freedom—you just came from it. It will continue to fill your heart and mind until it is slowly replaced with words and thoughts and memories from this lifetime. You will spend much of your life trying to remember it, and in many ways you will be successful in that, but that is a story for another day. Those departing spirits, they know of your bravery and your light. Of all the ways you will be better even than they were and better than we are now. The bravery of a spirit who chooses to be born in the middle of such tumult is awe-inspiring—and the bravery of a spirit who chooses to mother such a one, to raise a baby in such a time? Tenfold so. Those many spirits know that you are extraordinary and that we, too, for all our feelings of inadequacy, must be extraordinary somehow too.

In a couple of years, we will perhaps return to some of the “normal” things we did before this year, but with you in the world, nothing will ever be the same as it was before. With the awakening that has been ushered in by you and countless other 2020 babies, who also braved entry into human bodies on this human plane during a year that frightened us all—nothing will ever be the same as it was before, and that, my love, is a good thing. Because of you and because of what we are learning, even now as the year comes to a close, we will be better. We don’t know how, but we will be stronger too. We know this because when we look into your eyes and see the worlds pulsing there, we see something so alive and so indomitable, and it reminds us of what we can be. What we must be.

We must be full of love for the other. For the ones who are different from us and suffering—not just for our own suffering loved ones. We must be kind—above all, kind. To each other and to ourselves and to the ones who would deny us. Everyone is just doing the best that they can, sweet baby. Sometimes it’s a lot less than we would hope for, but that’s what it is. So we promise to receive that ‘best’ with grace and in a spirit of amicability. It’s the only way we can live ourselves into the ‘better’ that we have promised you. And we promise to stand our ground. There can be no more wavering. It is time to stand for what is right and decent in our world, your world, for it will be yours long after it has been ours. You will have clean water, darling baby, and trees. Healthy, alive oceans and fresh air. You will have unity and equity, which are born of love without conditions. You will have institutions that represent what is perfect and light and divine in us all. It’s a tall order, but it is what this year is all about. This dawn of what comes next.

Thank you, 2020 Baby, for reminding us that if we want these changes, it has to be us. WE have to make them. We will do that with our votes and with our voices. With our purchases and with our choices. With every word and every action. We will do that with our every breath, because you are more precious to us than anything we have ever known or will ever know. You are the convergence of every meaningful thing in our lives, and we love you more than we can speak in words. We know you feel this with your perfect baby heart…that is why you are so angelic when you sleep, your face suffused with the glow of serenity. Love is like that. It’s that blanket, you know? How we carry you in our hearts and wrap ourselves around you, cocoon-like. We promise to nourish you and love you up, so that you will also know how to be strong and to stand for what matters most.

We love you, 2020 Baby, and we are already beginning the process of healing this broken world. You must have agreed to be part of that shift…out there in the ether, in spirit as you waited to take this body and be born. We celebrate your courage, and we vow to hold you now, walk next to you later, as you move into the great knowing and give yourself to the change that must be. What a wild time to be alive—for all of us, but especially for you whose perfect, infant love is blooming even as you rest in nest of our hearts, in the nest of our home.

Election Day: Bloom

“First time voters! You taught us well!”

This week, two of my former students sent a photo of themselves with this little missive: “First time voters. You taught us well!” and “We miss you!” It was on the 3rd of November (the 4th for me)…American voting day. The message was received with infinite joy and gratitude…that I was remembered, that my efforts to convey the power of one’s voice and vote to my students in California had been preserved in at least two hearts and that these two, beloved to me, were still hopeful—still smiling, still looking to be a part of a positive change in their world. I would be lying, though, if I didn’t add that there was an undercurrent of achey fear running beneath the surface of this response—what if their first experience of voting, their foray into civic responsibility and exercising personal power for the good of all, ended with the re-election of Donald Trump? What if they saw their votes to remove a demagogue who has for the past four years not only failed to serve them but actually cultivated hatred, fear, and discord, much of which has been aimed at people who look like them and share their family history of migration to the U.S. with hope swelling in their collective breast?

It was almost too much to contemplate, and as the day progressed and it was clear that the race would be close (something I think in my heart of heart I really didn’t believe could happen), I dropped into a kind of silence. It wasn’t depression, because the emotion was fairly suppressed—I didn’t feel particularly anguished (which I know I would have if I actually believed that it was over and Trump had won). It was more of a quiet concentration, a holding steady and gathering of strength to face whatever the outcome would be. In our house we have been saying, since around March, that whoever wins this election, there is going to be fallout. We anticipated Trump sowing the seeds of mistrust around the handling of the election (things narcissists do when they are faced with a reality that doesn’t match their own) and actually encouraging his followers to behave badly in the wake of an “unfavorable” outcome (it’s not rocket science).

I knew that I needed to conserve my energy. If the American public did choose to re-elect someone like this, there was a lot of heartache on the horizon—my own and that of others. And even if it didn’t, I needed to brace myself for what might follow—because we’re talking about a man who is quite frankly trying to avoid prison, and that means he’s desperate (and getting more so by the hour). I have to say, I am still lying low, waiting to see how it’s going to play out, but as I watch the last four states to report their ballot counts turn, one by one, from red to blue on the digital map, there is a kind of buoyancy rising in my chest. I see my many family members and friends in the U.S. rising on that wave, as if in a beautiful boat that is pointed toward redemption and change. The rest of us in the world, we stream behind like colorful flags and ride along on the wind. We have been glad we’re not there, but we know that what happens in the U.S. trickles out to us all, and for many like me, it means potential shelter and safety for our loved ones. This buoyancy, this lightness? I feel it in my body, in my spirit, and I don’t even care that this sounds “hippie dippy”—I have embraced these monickers anyway. After all that we have all gone through this year…sticks and stones, man. Sticks and stones.

So looking at this picture of my two former students, I can only describe the feeling as elation. Yes, there is still so much to overcome. American hospitals are full of people suffering from a preventable disease. I know, because I live in a place where it has been all but eradicated. American streets are rife with disenfranchised people who believed, for some reason, that life would be better under the “leadership” of a man who would leave them in the freezing cold while he flies away in Air Force One (true story: Georgia, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania). Neighbors are suspicious of one another, and the racist, bigoted, sexist underbelly of the country has been exposed, coaxed out from the shadows by a man who never deserved anyone’s allegiance and whose own carelessness blew a thousands seeds of hate into the air where no one could catch them or prevent their dissemination. But now the dust is settling. When we look around us we see that the power is shifting, one way or another, and those who previously aligned themselves with the one who would destroy the American democracy (flawed as it is, we still want it to exist), they are suddenly going quiet and looking for a place to ride out the storm. Heaven help them as the light is shone on the error of their past alliances.

The best part is this: as this shift occurs, and the American people look to address those things that have been so grievously neglected, starting with the crisis of the pandemic and the absence of care for the ‘other,’ they are also poised to see and address that dark underbelly that is so profoundly exposed now. People like these two students of mine, they are ready to fight for the change that needs to take place. It starts with the vote, and yes, it may be that this was the pinnacle of my students’ civic action this year…but they are young, and they are still learning and growing, and there are millions of Americans who voted like they did—for change and for unity—and these they will have as beacons for moving forward. Nothing is going to be easy now. That was never the thing. It’s just now there won’t be the hurdle of a “leader” who rejects the very concept of equality and who actually works to disband those who would ally themselves with one another and share what is beautiful and light in their world. That is no more of an oversimplification than is the statement that Donald Trump was on a course to ruin the American democracy. The statements are equally true.

These two former students, their bright, shining faces—I cling to what they represent, because they are why I have done what I do for over 27 years now. My hope to guide students toward the best versions of themselves, to guide them to think for themselves and to reject the forces that would deny their worth—it blooms into a little sticker with the words, “I voted.” These two young people hold them between thumbs and forefingers, and their smiles say all of the things that I have ever spoken in front of a classroom: they say of themselves, wordlessly, I am worthy, I am powerful, I am grateful, I am love. Thank you, dear ones, for sharing this image with me. It has been a boon to me in these tense days and it has renewed my hope. May your actions always align with “the higher authority of a personally valid way of life.”

Soft

So I find myself in the position to teach kids who are deemed at-risk again. Kids who have been let down and even betrayed…by “the system,” by their “friends,” and even by their own families. Now they have lost their freedom, too. As is always the case with a new group of students, but especially with this population, I have come up against a great deal of resistance—some posturing and refusing to engage, yeah, but also some profanity and even storming out of the room. As always, I work at cultivating what in buddhist philosophy is called a bodhicitta heart, but one thing is new: a kind of question has imposed itself on that cultivation, and it has to do with the privilege that gives me the space, time, and energy to do it. And such a question has its inverse: is it even plausible, let alone fair, for me to ask my students to do the same?

I don’t remember when I first learned about the bodhicitta heart. It had to be at least ten years ago. I just know that when I did, I settled into it like a little nest, because it validated an aspect of myself that I’d often tried to hide or even change. That aspect is softness. The concept of the bodhicitta heart celebrates a soft heart, one that is completely open—“vulnerable and tender as an open wound” (Pema Chodron). To open oneself unabashedly to another, the heart as open wound, is always an act of courage. It is an act of fearlessness. But while my relative privilege has allowed me to nestle into the nest of the bodhicitta heart, my students, young offenders caught up in the youth justice system, don’t have the luxury of nesting down into anything, let alone allowing themselves to be seen as soft. I don’t know what is going to happen when they step back onto the street, nor do they.

I have them for such a short time—two months? two weeks? While they wait for the judge to hear their case. But I need them to—they need to—be soft when they’re in this learning space that we share if, in fact, they are to learn anything at all. It’s a total contradiction, because I would never advise them to walk out and show their soft hearts to the gang members waiting to suck them back in or to those thugs who would challenge them or hurt them. And yet it’s what I ask of them every day in the classroom, and while it’s what I model to them every day too, no one is looking to hurt and exploit me in the ways people are looking to hurt and exploit them. It ends up not being about transforming their hearts from hard to soft, but rather about teaching them to soften their hearts when they can, without compromising their safety on the street. It’s a bit like walking a tightrope.

For my students, whose lives take them to places most people, including myself, would never choose to spend time, the courage denoted by a bodhicitta heart is naive foolishness, the kind that gets you maimed or killed. So the question that arises is this: is the bodhicitta heart a matter of privilege? Contemplating one’s spirituality is arguably the domain of the privileged—who can think of ethics, let alone their spiritual condition, when they are simply trying to put food on the table and find a place to sleep for the night? Who but those who enjoy abundance and safety can afford to spend time and energy on the abstract? One might answer that an individual always has the choice to be “good.” To have integrity and do good in the world, even if it has not been modeled to them in the home. But what if it’s more than a lack of models? What if the very people and institutions who were meant to protect and provide for you are the ones that have hurt you the most? What if the people who are meant to be the safest to love are the ones putting their cigarettes out on your skin? Bodhicitta heart indeed.

My bodhicitta heart may be inadequate, but it’s all I have—that and my 27 years of teaching experience and trauma-informed training—and I don’t see anybody else stepping up to do this particular job. Still, I am aware of my shortfalls. So I just keep being soft. It’s my job to do that. But it’s also my job to see that the hardness of my students’ hearts, especially those whose lives have let them down and left them in a place of uncertainty and fear (in this moment as wards of the state) is a legitimate response to it all. That my softness comes of being in the lucky social and economic position to make enlightenment a goal in my life. It is my position of privilege that allows me to let my heart to be completely open, a “raw wound.” I will continue to cultivate my bodhicitta heart for these students, but I also need to check myself when it comes to what I ask of them. I know (I have seen it) that they will eventually yield; the speed with which one arrives at knowing, finally, that the softness they see means care and not weakness—that varies. But it always comes. The patience is all.

And when it does come, those students will recognize the opportunity afforded them in learning, not just from me, but from every person, animal, idea, or object they encounter. They can transform the first question. What I mean by that is the first question raised when encountering someone/thing new. Rather than asking, “Why are you here, bothering me, impacting me?” they can begin to ask, “What do I have to gain by knowing you, and what is the exchange waiting to be had here?” They will, of course, have to maintain their protective shell on the street and even (for some of them) in their homes. My care and steadfast guidance change nothing about what they face out there. But I can hope, fervently, that something about being exposed to my bodhicitta heart will give them the courage, when one day the time is right and they judge it safe, to open themselves up to another human being, to a new situation, to a new experience.

Commander in Chief

photo: @ttaitphoto

Okay, so yesterday I stumbled across an NPR post about Demi Lovato’s new song, “Commander in Chief,” and I thought, Wow. Good for her. Good for us. I love it when I see young people using their platform to send a positive message, one that represents their truth, one that represents the truth. I watched the video and the familiar wave of—what is it exactly? Disheartened pathos mixed with equal doses of fervent hope and spiralling fear—this wave rose in my heart and broke inside my ribcage. Not gonna’ lie, there were a few tears. I shared her video on Facebook with a caption praising her courage, her consciousness.

It drew a few likes. No comments. Whatever. I notice these things, but they don’t determine what I share on my page, which is generally just a collage of the things I value. I’ve long ago unfollowed (in the rare case unfriended) anyone whose messaging would add stress and distress to my life. You might think that’s weak or an act of denial, a way to avoid real discourse. But it’s not. Facebook is not the place for that discourse, in my opinion. You can post what you want. I have the choice to follow you or not, and vice versa. When I want to have meaningful discourse, I do it in person. I incorporate it into my teaching and writing. I engage, face to face, with people whose words and actions impact me and others. When I feel strongly about my own messaging, I write it. Again, people can read it or not.

But here’s the thing, when you’re talking about tyranny, bigotry, corruption, and lies, which together are being wielded as a weapon that is literally destroying individual lives, as well as America’s democracy…well, I kind of think there is no discourse to be had. Either you believe it has to end, or you don’t. And those who don’t believe (emphatically) that it has to end can only be understood (by me) as wanting it to continue. You can’t like a misogynist for his tax policies and call it good. You can’t like someone who endorses (and sends encouraging little missives to) white supremacist groups because you like how he subverts what’s stagnant in our system and justify yourself to me. And you certainly can’t say you’re voting for him because he’s “pro-life” when he’s putting children in cages at the American border and systematically removing the supports that would lend aid to people whose living and breathing children are going hungry. I guess I’ve arrived at this: there is no gray area here. It’s a funny thing for me to write, because that’s been my whole schtick as a teacher, both of English and of American History—it’s all gray. The way we see the lot of American history and its characters. But not today. Not now. I take it back.

I have to say, I’ve somewhat thrown in the towel. It’s only history unfolding that’s going to change the minds of those who support the current president. They don’t seem to believe anything that hasn’t happened to them personally (thousands of bodies in refrigerator containers mean nothing to them if none of them contains their own mother; scores of women sterilised against their will at the U.S. border in a repetition of some of our darkest history can be ignored if none of them is their daughter, and their own skin colour precludes them from ever being faced with such despotism (or so they think—this ‘safety’ will certainly be challenged by the newly reconfigured Supreme Court); and climate change can be a fiction if it’s not their own home swept away in a flood or incinerated by a raging wildfire.

It will only be when Trump leaves office, and it will happen, that the truth will begin to come to light. Then those people will find themselves on the “wrong side of history.” There will be no saying, “Ah, no, not me. I didn’t support that,” because it will all be documented on their Facebook pages and their Instagram posts. Their tweets will betray them. Their children, and their children’s children, will see unequivocally that their own family not only did nothing to stop the destruction, abuse, and violence, but that they participated. By posting a photo of themselves wearing a broad grin and a MAGA hat at a Trump Rally while the country was in the throes of a devastating pandemic—while real people were experiencing real suffering. The kind for which their religions say they should drop everything to kneel and help alleviate—and the truth will be that they turned a blind eye.

Maybe their children won’t see that they did things like attend a group event (while asymptomatic or, worse, symptomatic), never knowing who they exposed that might take the virus home to an elderly or immunocompromised loved one. Their children won’t see the people who were hospitalized or, God forbid, died as a result of their actions; even they will likely be sheltered from that. But there will be no denying the “comic” post ridiculing those who had the wherewithal and community mindedness to wear a mask; hard to hide the meme they posted celebrating the president’s denigration of a woman/minority/physically challenged individual. And there will be no escaping the post that supported the racist approbation of a misguided young white man who was allowed to walk away, military-style weapon slung over his shoulder, from the scene of the murder he’d just perpetrated to go and sleep in his own bed. No, these will have to be lived with. Reckoned with. The shame will burn inside them, maybe until they die, because here’s the other thing: most of them are not bad people. How they landed where they are is hard for me to get my head around, but they won’t be there forever. I don’t believe the unfolding of this story will allow it. And then it will just be time to pity them.

So today my husband and I bought “togs” so that we could go to the public pool and swim laps together (an activity that is infinitely easier and more enjoyable for him than for me, but I’m game—and don’t forget, we’re living in New Zealand, so people can do these kinds of things). Right before leaving I pulled out my phone. I stumbled across the Lincoln Project’s video for the same Demi Lovato song. “Commander in Chief.” Watching it on my phone, I was moved. I thought, Good for them. Good for us. Republicans who have seen the truth and are using their energy and resources to fight what is truly destructive and dangerous, even if that means breaking their staunchly partisan inclinations. I thought about posting it with a caption like “Try to watch this and not cry” or, better yet, “If this doesn’t make you weep, then you might as well unfriend me now,” but of course I resisted. It’s not the emotional response that matters. What we need is change. Such limiting captions would only make me part of the problem.

I mentioned the video to my husband, and it piqued his interest. He dropped his gym bag on the floor and used our Chromecast device to pull it up on the television. I don’t know if it was the larger screen or the better sound or maybe just the repetition, but this time, it wrecked me. I did the head tilt, so that my tears would slide unnoticed out the sides of my eyes and take with them the minimum amount of my mascara. I kept quiet and put my hand up to my temple, so that it was discreetly between us. But by the time it was over, it didn’t really matter what I did. I was sobbing. Big, mascara-streaming, ugly-crying-face sobs. My husband was sweet. Didn’t try to make light by laughing at me crying over a music video. He just gathered me in his arms and let me weep. He kissed my hair. Offered me water and a tissue. “I’m sorry, honey,” is all he said. Because he knew.

He knew it wasn’t a non-specific kind of despair over a pandemic or a broken law enforcement system or hopeless division in a country that I love. It was a very specific kind of despair—a complex response to it all, yes, but it was complicated by something else that in that moment I was able to name. “It’s like I have survivor’s guilt,” I said to him, and he could only nod and agree.

“That’s exactly what it is,” he intoned. “I have it too.”

It’s not literal, I want to say, but it kind of is. Here I am in New Zealand with my whole nuclear family, living basically free from the virus (and with the assurance that should it resurge, there is compassionate leadership and a mindful citizenry to address it) and free from the mounting civil unrest that is evident in so many city streets and communities in the States. I walked away from the country that grew me but which I have felt building to this crescendo for many years. It was largely so that my husband and I could be in one place with our sons (without first waiting for an incalculable and uncertain period of time to pass with us on two different continents). It was because it was always our intention to return here, to the place of my husband’s birth, to make our forever home. But our timing? That was largely because we saw which way the wind was blowing, and we wanted (with our boys) to avoid what was coming. The guilt of not staying to fight, even if it meant risking our lives, will be something that I will live with, probably until I die. I’d choose it again. No question. But that doesn’t make it easy. It doesn’t mean I don’t think about my loved ones—friends and family, former students—every day. It doesn’t mean I don’t think about perfect strangers in the same way—yes, every day. It just is.

“We don’t have to go to the pool,” my husband says, smoothing my hair. Squeezing my shoulders. Sweet man. If only a change of our plans could ease this hurt or, more importantly, change anything that is happening in California or Colorado or Vermont or Hawai’i—or any of the other American states where we haven’t actually lived. Of course he doesn’t think it could. He’s just trying to minister to my immediate wound which, at the moment, is quite raw. Maybe it’s in part because we watched On the Basis of Sex again last night. I went to bed (and woke) with the thought of what an utter shame and travesty it is that Ruth Bader Ginsberg had to die with Donald Trump in office. What that must have meant for her. How heartbroken she must have been. She held on for so long. And what is at stake now. What is at stake. Oh.

“No,” I say. “Let’s go.” And we gather our things and forgive ourselves, for a hundredth time, for the decisions we have made and for the blessings that are ours. And we don’t talk about the fact that our older son will likely need to travel to the Covid-ravaged North America right in the middle of the melee that is the post-election U.S. to pursue his Olympic dream (nor do we talk about what percentage of my tears is derived from this). We can’t.

I don’t share the Lincoln Project video for “Commander in Chief” on my Facebook feed. I’ve already shared two music videos, both pretty politically charged, in the last 48 hours, and this one will be seen. I don’t have to be the one to put it out there. It’s the one that will break people, I think. But I’ve thought that about so many moments before. I remember thinking that when the “pussy-grabbing'“ audio/video was released…before the 2016 election. “Oh, that’s it,” I remember saying to my family. “That guy’s done.” I was wrong then, to my utter consternation, and I’ve been wrong every time since.

Here’s hoping this is different. Here’s hoping something is shifting among the Trump-lovers within the American public…as the man unravels before us. As his desperation exposes his frailty and the way he has weakened the country he never deserved to lead. It wasn’t “great” before him—God knows this militant, civil-rights-loving, feminist, activist educator knows that—but what he’s done to drag it down. Expose its wounds and exacerbate them with the salt of divisiveness and deceit. These things will come to light. And then will begin the period of healing. The profundity of the healing that needs to happen, the magnitude of that process—it overwhelms, for sure. But it’s coming. And those who lost their way but come around in the end—they will be received with love. Their own guilt will punish them. The fact that their progeny will never be able to erase the shame of their lineage and its participation in this wreckage…it is enough.

I’m happy that I am on the right side of history with this whole thing, that I can be proud of my own integrity. That I don’t have to wonder if I acted in a way that endangered anyone. I did my best. And my own guilt? Over escaping wildfires and choking smoke; protests turned riot; the crushing witness of more police brutality, mismanaged disease and its attendant griefs? That guilt—it’s mine to carry. Life is like that. The bitter with the sweet. The bitter with the sweet.

Hippie

Today I sit in infinite gratitude. Aware of every blessing that is mine and of the utter beauty of the Earth. It’s probably because I just finished doing yoga and right now the sun is making perfect squares on the carpet where the window panes are letting it in. Man I sound like a hippie. Without really being able to define that word but acknowledging that it does conjure some very precise images from the 1960s (which, by the way, were before I was born), I have to admit I don’t really mind that monicker. Recently my son called me a hippie in a podcast he was doing.

He was telling a story about when he and his brother were 12 and 10 years old respectively. They had begged me for some time to buy them these little black pellet guns. After a lifetime of not being allowed to watch commercial TV, play violent video games (they’d only been allowed to start playing sports-based ones in the previous two years), or buy/have any toy even remotely resembling a weapon (yes, that included Nerf guns), it was pretty gutsy of them to even make the request. They wanted to make a movie, they told me, and they needed these as props. “We won’t even shoot them, Mom. We just need them for the film. We’re being creative!” They definitely knew my soft spot. I would do almost anything to foster their creative endeavors. It did stand to reason that purchasing such a thing for the purpose of art, rather than to feed some desire to pretend to kill or maim someone, had merit.

After a fair amount of cajoling on my sons’ part and a substantial amount of time dragging feet on mine, I caved to the prospect of my boys embarking on yet another creative escapade in the woods behind our house. These toy guns potentially represented hours of creative play and likely a final project that would carry a memory, as well as a chronicle of their creative development. “Okay,” I said. “But they’re going to be kept in my closet, only to be used for this project. And we’re not going to shoot them. You won’t even need the pellets.”

“We won’t even need the pellets,” they confirmed.

On his podcast the other day, my older son proceeded to tell the story about how, after making the 75 minute drive to Rutland, ironically called “Rut-Vegas” by most Southern Vermonters, where there was the kind of “superstore” where you can find such things (stores I normally avoid when I can), we found ourselves in the mass-production-oriented, hyper-consumerist, warehouse-style shopping complex that is Walmart. Even entering the aisle that offered these guns made me self-conscious. Was I really the kind of mom who would buy her children authentic looking toy pistols? I’d spent my whole tenure as “mother of two” avoiding this very moment, and yet, here I was, walking toward the register with my sons each wielding one of these toy guns.

Just as we were about to complete the transaction and abscond with our shady purchase, two people, a man and a woman, approached us and essentially berated me for buying the pellet guns. I was shocked into silence. Granted, confrontation is never my forte—my best comebacks are always thought of an hour later as I bemoan my paralysis in the moment—but I was truly shocked. This older couple (probably in their fifties at the time) felt unequivocally entitled to critique my parenting in the middle of the Rutland Walmart Superstore, and the thing was, I agreed with them! It occurred to me to defend myself, to try to explain that we were using the toy guns for an artistic project, that I normally didn’t even shop here, that I too disapproved of providing kids with life-like prototypes of killing machines…but I just stood there. Dumbfounded.

The crux of the story for my son was that the man quoted a Buffalo Springfield song (you know the one: "Paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep…”), and he wasn’t able to think quickly enough to identify it and vindicate himself from the narrow box into which this random (“hippie”) man and his wife were placing him. Again, for me, the “evidence” was in the visible. I didn’t even feel there was a way to justify (to strangers) the purpose of our illicit mission, so I didn’t even try. For my son, the assumption that his mother was without values didn’t really enter into the equation; the fact that this man had made the careless assumption that he was so “uncultured” as to not be able to recognise a classic American pop culture icon and lyric was unconscionable. That he himself was unable to conjure the name of the artist and the title of the song fast enough to disprove their prejudgments…well, that was just too much. The man’s self-satisfied grin as he walked away has haunted my son ever since. Of course I’m dramatising for the sake of the story, but seriously—he laughs at it now but it still bugs him.

“Sorry about that, Mom…you don’t mind being called a hippie, do you?” he said with a smile when he came to visit me the day after the podcast dropped. And really, I didn’t. But I don’t feel like the kind of hippie that was represented by this presumptuous and contentious pair in the Rutland Walmart. For me, it is not inherent in being a hippie that you judge other people and make assumptions about their lives and their values. I think that maybe that’s why the disdain—this tendency to judge others is often assumed to come part and parcel with the other, more redeeming qualities of hippiedom: valuing love over hate, inclusion over alienation, earth stewardship over destruction of our home planet. Eating and dressing in a way that treats the body like the temple that it is and the planet like the precious resource that it is. Yeah, I’m down with these aspects of being a hippie.

Perhaps the most ironic part is that hippie and liberal have become all but synonymous in the U.S. and beyond…and these monickers are used with equal contempt. It’s a shame, really, and I’m not sure there’s anything to be done about it. Hesse’s Siddhartha said, and I seriously paraphrase here, that all this division, this divisiveness, is an illusion. What causes and reinforces it are the limitations of language. As soon as something that is true, authentic and real, is spoken, it becomes a half-truth. For the human experience is so profoundly complex that when an attempt is made to express it in words, we are automatically catapulted into confusion. So where do we go from here if words are so inadequate and yet all we have? I think art. Music. Dance. Sculpture. You know, all the ways we express ourselves and give ourselves to the world…without words.

So indeed it is true with film. Of course I wish I could find those two random people from Rutland and show them the fabulously funny, intriguing, and creative film that resulted from that day’s Walmart purchase, but I have to also let that go. As my son has to let go of one man’s baseless judgement of him. We can’t do these things or make these things to try to get people like that to be other than they are or to think otherwise of us. We simply have to continue to create (with whatever controversial props are needed) and then hold those creations up to the light. So that people can see them, feel them in their bones, and maybe understand something that words might fail to convey. Something of us, yes, but also something of what is shared between us.

I think I’m probably both a hippie and a liberal. All that remains to do now is embrace those two “dirty words” and keep on creating. Keep moving on the planet in a way I can live with and which will continue to make and hold sacred space for others—all others—to do the same.

Namaste, bitches.

I Am the Prayer

So I took a yoga class today. Online, of course. The pervading mantra as I worked pretty hard to move through postures that twisted and challenged my body was: “You are the prayer, you are the one who prays, you are the one who answers it.” Sometimes an idea that is not in any way new (to me or to anyone else on the planet) strikes me as incredibly profound…in a very new way. This little mantra hit a nerve this morning, for sure. It spoke not only of the great Whole of which I am truly a part, that ocean in which I am a drop that can’t ever truly be extracted (and in whose power and beauty I share), but also of a fact that I have been trying to integrate into my belief system for over 25 years now. That fact is this: I don’t need the approval of anyone outside myself. There is no one—not an industry or institution, not my family, not any individual—who has the power to determine my worth. Only I can do that. It sounds so simple.

But today, on my purple yoga mat, the one selected by my sweet brother-in-law who delivered it to me while we were in managed isolation in Auckland (via the doorman, along with Pineapple Lumps, my favorite NZ candy)—today, I believe, without fanfare or any kind of ruckus, it happened. I believed it. Not like, I realized it was something I believed, but rather a moment happened in which I shifted from not believing to believing. It is the “man in the arena” kind of thing. In case you don’t know it, I’ll share it here. A dear friend shared this quote with me years ago, at which time I printed it out and put it on a vision board. You see, it’s been my intention to believe it for a long time. But you can’t rough hew your beliefs. They come of their own accord and in their own time. You can “fake it till you make it,” but the “make it” part is on its own schedule.

Here’s the “man in the arena” quote. It’s Teddy Roosevelt: “It’s not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to the the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of worthy achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

I am the man in the arena. I have strived my whole life…to be better, to be more. To be the very best version of myself. I have certainly failed at times, God knows I have. But man, have I tried. And I keep trying. Sometimes I feel like I’m running into a brick wall…again and again and again. But I don’t give up. And if I do it’s only for five minutes or so, so that I can give myself fully to my frustration and despair for that brief, tearful, indulgent moment; and then I get back up again. Give it another go. Of that I am infinitely proud.

But here’s the thing: it has been my heart’s desire since I was a child to be an author. It’s not even a word I allowed myself to use before this past month or so. I have always said, “I am a writer,” because anyone can say that, right? But there was some nebulous threshold I thought I had to cross before I could say, “I am an author.” A certain number of books sold? Accolades from the right entity? Recognition from the traditional publishing industry? I think that even when I chose to publish my novels under my own imprint I still hoped that once the books got into the right hands somehow, I would be “discovered.” I believed that this magic recognition would happen because I have talent and because my endeavor is pure…not as the result of any effort on my part to promote myself but because of a prevailing order to the universe. Bit of a crock, I know, but I believed it. And secretly hoped for it.

There were years of this secret hoping (but not really any doing—instead I was raising my beautiful boys, pouring my heart into being an educator, writing wherever and whenever I could squeeze that act (a form of prayer itself, according to Kafka), into my life. I said many times that I would rather write another book than market the ones I had already written. And that’s exactly what I did. Five books in total so far, if you count my chapbook of poems. My interest in getting these books into the hands of more readers rose in fits and starts and never really amounted to anything. But I don’t blame myself for this (though I can see the absurdity of this approach to being a writer now). I am who I am. I have always been in the arena. I have longed to be an author all these many years—and it was only today, on my yoga mat (thank you, Elena Brower), that it became my belief: I am the only one who can deem myself anything, author or otherwise. It’s been happening lately that I have been flirting with that monicker—I have said it aloud to new folks I meet here. Yes, I am an author. But today. Today in my living room. I opened into that belief.

So the mantra…“You are the prayer, you are the one who prays, and you are the one who answers it.” It is about manifesting, of course, but I hate using that word. People think I’m “hippie” enough. But there it is. I am the only one, me—tapping into what is light, divine, perfect inside of myself—who can take my longing and make it real. For myself. I am the prayer. My body. My mind. And that thing that transcends both—spirit, prana, soul, chi, mana—whatever language your lineage gives it. I embody the prayer. I live it and I breathe it. By moving within my belief that I am the longing and the thing I long for, I can manifest it. I am the one who prays—who puts it into words, whether that is in a poem, a supplication, a song…even a posture. And I am the one who answers it—with my action and with my belief. That is how a thing is made. How it’s born and then transformed.

It is the concept of the “Great I AM.” God, the Divine, that which is perfect and light—this entity resides in me, yes. It’s why I utter the greeting “Namaste”…to recognize that this very thing exists in the other. Every. Other. But it’s more than that. I am that Divine. As is every other human I come in contact with, indeed every thing, animate or not. We are the collective divine, and if I am to BE any thing, it is I who must acknowledge that I already am what I long to be. Herman Hesse, when he wrote Siddhartha, attributed this thought to his character: “The world…is not imperfect, or on a slow path toward perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in it, all small children already have the old person within themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life…Therefore, I see whatever exists as good…everything only requires my consent, only my willingness, my loving agreement, to be good for me…to be unable to ever harm me.”

So yes, I am completely mixing up my doctrines. It’s how I like them. Intertwined and inextricably linked as they most certainly are in every way but the linguistic. I am not imperfect. Not on some slow path to perfection. I am a prayer. The Divine itself. I am. Everything that I ever could or ever wanted to be is already there. I am an author, and I know that it is a large part of my purpose on Earth to use the music and meaning of my language to help people heal, grow, even to shift their relationship toward death, which has always figured so heavily into my work. I will put my books into the world with that in mind. It is all according to my own “personally valid way of life” (shout out to Kierkegaard on that one). I determine what I am. I become, again and again, the thing that I long to be. I am not imperfect or on some slow trajectory toward perfection. I am this thing that I am. I am this thing that remains. What else could I be but this?

What I’m Not Writing About

I’m not writing about Donald Trump, and I’m not writing about wildfires that have ravaged the land that I love and the homes of many of the people I care deeply about (and of a ton more whom I don’t even know). I’m not writing about the passing of heroes, famous (RBG) or otherwise (countless), and I’m not writing about Breonna Taylor. The topics are so powerfully charged, so capable of sucking me into a vacuum into which I might be forever lost, that I have chosen for some time now to slink around them like a ghost. Instead I post a photo of a lovely landscape. Write about my efforts to be, as one very dear friend said, “true to myself as an author.” I gaze out the window at a stunning view of the sea, go and collect seashells in memory of a loved one, let my husband practice his portrait photography (so many pictures of Kim, God help us). But I don’t write about these things that break me.

I can only handle one tragedy at a time, and this week was pre-booked. Plus, what new thing could I possibly say about any of these things that are so enormous, so unwieldy, and so deeply terrifying to pretty much everyone around the globe? And where, in that vast field of terror, does that leave my guilt? My singular contrition over having had the opportunity to escape some of the madness—and taken it. How can I say one word when I live in a place where every single life impacted by COVID-19, every one, is written about by the government daily. Today, the New Zealand government is sad to share that “two people are in hospital with COVID-19—one each at Auckland City and Middlemore hospitals. Both patients are in isolation on a general ward.” It seems that all lives matter here. It seems so easy. To value the aged and the poor and the brown and black and disabled and female among us. To speak in whispers when one of them dies and to honor them with our love and our prayers for their families. To seek justice when they have died at the hand of another. And yes, to change policy when it can prevent further suffering.

I am not writing about the dizzying feeling of being embraced by people even though they can hear in an instant my American accent. My voice alone is redolent of an administration that seems to be wrecking the planet in concert with other, equally and openly sinister world powers. My accent is redolent of an administration that hates its own people so much that they begin to believe it’s love. Redolent of people who openly support a ‘leader’ who flaunts his violent exploits of women, denigrates minorities, tortures immigrants, incites division within his country, and ridicules the disabled. My accent is the same as that of this man who generally destabilizes the democracy of the United States of America through a sinister agenda of discrediting all media sources and then openly flouting the very Constitution of the republic with complete impunity.

And yet these people here, they are kind to me. They fed me and housed me for two weeks so that I could enter their country with my husband, their countryman. They did this in order to diminish the risk of us infecting them and their families with a pandemic virus that is raging out of control where we’ve come from. It was a risk to receive us at all, and they took it, because they take care of their own. My husband and sons, and by extension I—we are their own. These people here, they welcome me and express their gladness that I am able to share in the beauty, both concrete and abstract, of their country, which is for now well and conscientiously governed by a woman of integrity. By a Parliament that is, while imperfect as all human-comprised endeavors must be, functional and representative of their contingencies, which are mostly people and not corporations. For me, the gratitude manages to outweigh the guilt on some days.

The U.S. is a country that was once aptly named “a grand experiment in democracy.” As I watch from this distant arena scenes of civil unrest, stories of greater and greater travesties committed against the American people, and more and more blatant examples of abuses of power, I have to wonder…is this where the experiment draws to its conclusion? And who will be safe if this administration succeeds in dragging the U.S. into a second civil war? My family? My friends? My former students? Strangers to me who number in the millions? Mostly, the people I love, those who are family and those whom I have garnered to me as friends, share my desire for equality and justice for all humans. They share my outrage at the manipulations of governmental power and calculations intended to rob women of their reproductive rights, incite violence against minorities, undermine democracy, and further broaden the gap between rich and poor.

But a handful of people I have loved become more and more vocal about supporting this debauched bastardizer of all that I value in American government and culture, and there is no polite way to say that I find it harder and harder to continue to associate with people who, in this way, compromise their integrity, their actual moral sensibility. When I talk about ‘moral sensibility,’ I mean valuing things like love and acceptance for all; respect for diverse members of a society; generosity that doesn’t discriminate; kindness and compassion toward those less fortunate; equality and justice for everyone…you know, things that—and I hate to pull this card, it’s yours, not mine—Jesus advocated for? It’s not politics, friends, it’s humanity.

And how can I write about Breonna Taylor, shot in her bed—innocent of the innocents? What words could I possibly say to move those who see every issue as red or blue, who hear in the patriotic raising of concern over a brutal and corrupt law enforcement system the vitriol of the uber liberal? This vitriol rages so loudly in their ears that they no longer hear the cries of a mother. A sister. A partner who couldn’t save this beautiful young woman. I’m convinced that no one even knows what this word liberal means anymore, because its origins are quite lovely. But as reflected in the actions of extremists, both conservative and liberal have become dirty words. How can a single syllable that I might construct impact what I can only describe as a failure of humanity? A failure in the grand experiment, yes, but also a failure in people to be the only thing worth being: full of love. And because it would break me to do it, knowing how little impact it might have…why would I?

I suppose I do it now because it’s all I have. All I am, on my own. I am the mother of two amazing humans and the partner of an extraordinary man, which is more than I will ever achieve on this earth; but alone, I am a writer. That is all. I do it now because there is nothing left to do. I do it here because I am too broken to receive the abuse I know I would receive on social media. It’s too painful to have my message of woundedness and hopelessness, of genuine fear for a country and people I love, overshot in an attack of my ‘political’ views. I don’t have the energy.

Love and Seashells

Aramoana Beach…after Casey.

Today was the service for our dear friend Karen (a.k.a. Casey). It was on Zoom (of course), but her three children were together for it in Los Angeles. My husband and I watched them each speak from our chairs in our Dunedin home, both of us crying our eyes out. They were so broken by the loss of their mother, but we could also see that they were healing already, in the different ways each of them needed to heal (who doesn’t need healing?). It was because of Casey.

I know we had all wondered what precise thing she was waiting for…living totally still and silenced in the body that had failed her could not have been easy. There were years of this, but her eyes were alive with her love and wonder, and when friends and family came to visit her, there was that light that had always shone from within her. So what was it—that finally let her give herself permission to make her crossing? No one can know for sure. But in sitting there today, longing to hug and be near my friends who had lost their mother, I knew that her timing had been perfect and that she was now somewhere in the ether, smiling broadly down on the three babies she made, at peace with even the tears, because they were a part of the growing and the living that she has wanted these three to do, probably for some time now. Moms are like that.

I felt her in the air around my ears, and I could smell her, too—soapy clean, lemony, mommy, cinnamony yum. I could hear her voice, that little scratch that gave the verve to her utter grace. And best of all, I could feel her warm embrace; if you knew her, you know the one. It enveloped you completely and meant that she loved you to the moon and back, even though, unless you are LJ, Denny, or Nicki, she didn’t give birth to you—no matter. She loved you just the same.

Dwaine wept softly next to me. This man who has been my partner for over 28 years…I have only seen him cry a handful of times. I held him around his shoulders, put my hand inside of his. I felt Casey’s love wash over him as he watched his friends speak, her vivacious portrait smiling over their shoulders…he too wished he could be there to hug each one of them. Brothers. Sister. It’s funny how much love can hurt sometimes. Love for those who have passed on, for those who are still here but just out of reach (as so many are during this bizarre time), for those right in front of us.

After the service we drove out to Aramoana Beach. On a lovely spring day, we were the only ones there. We walked and walked and spoke very little. There were several seals sunning themselves on the sand, and one penguin who was hightailing it up the beach from the water, probably toward his nest in the tall grasses. We quietly collected seashells (Dwaine’s pockets were full of them, and sand, and water). I’ve never seen so many on one beach. And while we did this, with the understanding that they were to memorialize Casey, I kept thinking one thing: I have found a good place to die. It sounds strange, but it was a simple thing to think. And a right one. I feel it in my marrow…I have come home. At 49, I’m not ready to go yet, but I have landed in a place where I can be still. Grow as old as I’m going to get (may it be VERY). This place is so full of beauty. So full of peace for me. And it has my children in it. At least for now. I am alive to it and to every perfect thing, and I do not intend to waste a single minute.

When we got home we put our shells, all of the same spiraling variety, in a jar with a cork top. They are for Casey, and we will never, ever look at them and not remember these moments when we slowly said goodbye to a woman we loved deeply and who loved us with the fierce kind of love she had for her own children and so many others. I know it’s not goodbye in the total sense of that word—only to the body, to the visits, to the mama kisses and bear hugs (that’s hard enough to bear). Casey is here, she is near, and she is marvelously free. I can only hope that my love will touch so many and so profoundly, because at the heart of today’s service (and our own quiet, shell-collecting beach walk) was that perfection of a life lived well and wholly.

Dear Casey…

Dear Casey,

  I will always remember you the way you were on my wedding day. Of course we saw you a gazillion times after that, but whenever I think of you, even now, I see the Karen Rivas of July 1993 in that purple wrap dress. I see you with your head thrown back, those thick red locks framing your smiling face—you’re dancing with LJ or Denny, and your laughter is contagious. It’s that belly laugh where your eyes scrunch to a close and the ripples of sound infect even the most morose in the company.

  It’s impossible not to see you this way, though there were years there at the end where you were far from us…I wondered what lake you were carousing on, what distant meal you were cooking or enjoying, what moments were being lived again in the castle of your memory-imagination. When I came to see you last summer, you looked so intently into my eyes. I tried to tell you then, with my heart and through my expression, that it was okay to go. I knew that freedom awaited you and that you clung to the body because you were perhaps still needed here. I wanted you to know we all love you that much.

  There were worlds in your irises that day, whole chapters and arias dedicated to a life lived well and filled with love. They swirled there as our eyes locked, and I hoped you understood me: my love and the love of my children that I carried for you like a torch. My infinite gratitude for mothering the love of my life, for being for him what you were to so many: a beacon of unconditional love but also a boundary, a border, where a ‘no’ speaks the language of your care.

  When we heard the news that you had closed your eyes and went on your way, we cried together in our car on a street in Wellington. We knew you would go, of course we knew. But you’re never ready to say goodbye to your mother, and you were a mother to Dwaine and, by extension, to me. You were Grandma Casey to our boys, and you were that throaty laugh that spilled around us in the best of times, that cloak of warmth and generosity in the worst.

  In recent years I have come to believe without even the tiniest doubt that we live on, beyond these bodies, not just in some distant place men have named, but here, where our planes intersect, and you can see and hear us when we call upon you. It sounds far-fetched, but now you know it too, and I write this here for your children…for Nicki and LJ and Dennis, and yes, for Dwaine. We will try to know you when you grace us, try to see and hear the evidence of your presence when you make yourself felt. We promise.

  I know I will see you again one day…one day that for you is a moment away, being free as you are from the constraints of time. For us, however, we will carry the lessons you taught us—about loving fully, living without restraint, laughing with gusto, and sharing all that is ours—through all the years that are left to us. We can’t know how many they are, but we know that when they come to a close, and we too close our eyes to this world, you will be there, and we will be reunited in the beyond. It is the perfection of the All from which we come, and you, dearest friend, will light the way for us.

Love,

Kim

Circling the Sun

photo: @dtait_photography

It kind of amazes me how much the sun can change me…my comfort level, my mood, my entire outlook really. Yesterday the sky was gray, and playing all across my social media platforms was an eerie, apocalyptic-looking orange sky totally devoid of sunlight: 7am, 10:30am, 4:30pm in Santa Cruz, California, and a murky orange-brown darkness had fallen over the town (and, it seems, the rest of the west coast). Here in Ruawaro, I was alone for the day. There was no sunshine, and I had just received news of a loved one’s dubious diagnosis following some routine testing. We didn’t have any real news about his health prognosis yet, but the color of the sky weighed on my heart, so that while I Skyped and internet searched away, there was a pale cast to my emotional state, and I felt very much alone…alone and afraid in a nebulous kind of way. When my husband and his brother came home and ate dinner with me, scarfing up the homemade tortillas I had busied myself making that afternoon, the air felt lighter. But things still didn’t feel right.

Today I woke to a blue sky. I am alone again for the day, but there is movement in the air, the birds are making their sweet racket outside, and I have the sliding door wide open. Fires continue to burn on the west coast of California (and Oregon and Washington), but the air, my mother says, is clearing some, and today there is light. While there is still no specific news about our loved one, I feel somehow that there is a non-specific kind of hopefulness that I can begin to nurture. Maybe it is the effect of a decent night’s sleep, the approach of our move to Dunedin, or even the fact that it’s Friday, and while my life has hardly been demarcated lately by weekend and weekday, I know my brother-in-law will be happy and eager to embark on his cherished two days off, but I have to say…I kind of suspect it’s the weather. I feel completely different today and, as the sun swells in a blue sky flecked with fluffy white clouds, I feel fully equipped to believe every fear into goodness…in my life and the lives of those I love.

Today the sun alights on the backs of my hands as I type. They are small brown birds flitting over keys, basking in the warmth and energy they’ve found there. I write of change and of anticipation, of preparing to embark on the final leg of our migration journey. We have come so far, it seems, by way of Hawai’i, Switzerland, Vermont, Colorado, and California. There were stops and starts in our travel between California and here: San Francisco, then (unexpectedly) Thousand Oaks, then L.A., then Auckland (for our two-week quarantine) and then to my brother-in-law’s country home in the Waikato. We have been at his house for eight weeks, gratefully drinking in his generosity and companionship after a lifetime apart. Here, my husband and I have incubated our dreams of ‘home’ and of the life we came here to make for ourselves. We’ve busied ourselves with plan-making and arranging, phone calls and emails, and general dreaming, and finally, it’s time to go.

On Monday we will be making our crossing from the North Island to the South Island, taking one gentle sleep in Picton, and then buzzing the rest of the way down to our new home in Dunedin. We are excited beyond measure, as are our university student son who is already happily ensconced there, and our eldest, who will now have a ‘beach bach’ to come to from his mountain home. Today I submitted the revised interior and exterior files of my first novel, Inertia, to publishers in the U.S. and in New Zealand and ordered a modest press run to be delivered to my new address in Dunedin. I already did this with Kealaula, and that press run may very well be waiting for me there when I arrive. It’s moving, it’s going, and I am on my way. The next phase of project “Pull my head out” involves marketing and working to make sure that these books are in every bookstore and library in New Zealand. It’s going to happen. I’ve got this.

I can see that the sun is finishing its low arc across the sky now above the hills that roll away from Karl’s house toward Auckland. This is the expansive landscape that has been my inspiration for the past two months. Tonight will be a lovely sunset. The doves on the roof send their soft cooing sounds down through the ceiling, and two wild parrots (yes, there are wild parrots here) land in the delicate branches of a still leafless tree outside my window. Spring is coming, and there is change happening every moment. I am among those blessed to call this place home, and the gratitude overwhelms. I know the sun feeds all of this—the greenery of this landscape, these winged animals, the cows that low and graze in the distance, and not least among these things, me. I am nourished by its light and its heat, and today, because it shines on me, I breathe a little easier and can believe that maybe we’re all going to be okay.

Are You My Home?

When our children were little, we used to read a book to them called Are you My Mother? It is about a baby bird who is going from animal to animal asking that question, until finally, he finds the one that can answer, “Yes, Yes, I am your mother,” only it doesn’t happen exactly like that. The very last entity the baby bird appeals to is actually a front loader (you know, a tractor sort of thing) whose only answer is a loud “Snort!” But, just when the baby bird is losing hope, that front loader lifts it up and drops it right into its nest. At that moment the mother bird arrives back at the nest and asks the baby bird, “Do you know who I am?” And of course the baby bird does. It enumerates all of the things it has learned she is not (a dog, a hen, a kitten, for example) and says, “You are a bird, and you are my mother.”

On our recent trip to the South Island to visit our sons in their respective homes, I felt a lot like that little bird. I felt that, beginning on the North Island with places like New Plymouth and Paraparaumu, and even Wellington proper, we were saying almost that very thing: “Are you our home?” Indeed the idea of the trip was this…that is, besides seeing our younger son whom we hadn’t seen since he left California in February to come back to Uni, and also to put our whole family of four in one nest for the first time since December 2019, at least for a visit. The quest continued down along the east coast: Moeraki, Karitane, Dunedin…and then on over to Wanaka, where our older son lives, and on to Queenstown.

Of course, home rather landed on us as we garnered our boys to ourselves and ate food together, visited beautiful landscapes together, and enjoyed each other, grateful to be back in Aotearoa where some of the world’s madness seems to be being kept at bay for now by community-minded humans with profoundly compassionate leadership. The gratitude was a bit overwhelming at times. And plus, we have always said that home is where we are…our little family, together. The boys are grown now, and I know that there is more travel ahead, more distance (if you raise your kids like gypsies, they will live like gypsies), but it didn’t keep me from savoring every moment of that visit, being grateful for having them near, being able to sniff their hair and kiss their cheeks and squeeze them hard, my heart against theirs.

Still, there is the pragmatic business of rooting ourselves somewhere. I had brought up a lot of factors, not least among them my predilection for warmer weather and the fact that so much of our extended family is on the North Island, but being down there with our boys, it was clear that there could be no ‘setting up shop’ very far away from them, even knowing that they will likely shift and go away from where they are now at intervals. Both of the places our boys live now spoke to us in answer to our question, and because they both love both places and spend rather a lot of time traveling between the two, it felt quite right when one of the places did truly seem to emerge as our “home.”

“Are you our home?” We spoke it into a clear blue sky with puffy white clouds on a winter day. The waves lifted themselves wildly; we were at the edge of the earth after all and in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The yellow grasses bent and swayed. The seals napping on the sand wriggled to adjust themselves, glanced toward us indifferently. And home settled on our shoulders like a shawl. “Do you know who I am?” it said.

“Yes, we know who you are…you are the Otago Peninsula, and you are our home.”

Starting from Scratch…

The view from my writing desk…

Today I sit down at my writing desk, which faces an enormous window looking out onto an even more enormous view. It is of the Waikato farmland that fronts the home where my husband and I will be staying with incredibly generous family while we get on our feet here in New Zealand. We’ve been away a LONG time, and I know I speak for both of us when I say we are humbled and grateful to be here. We’re truly starting from scratch, and it’s a bit daunting, but it’s also very exciting.

Yesterday I attended an awesome workshop at the Trust Waikato in Hamilton (believe me, even the opportunity to move so freely and connect with other humans in a fearless, meaningful way is a joyful kind of liberation for which I am deeply grateful). As a guest of Hamilton Book Month, author Kirsten McKenzie spoke on the work and art of promoting oneself as an author…something with which I need a lot of help. I have resisted this work for over ten years. I have always laughed and said I’d rather write another book than promote the ones I’ve written, but Kirsten, fairly gently, shined a bright light on that statement and showed me that it’s not really funny. It’s absurd, actually. You could write the most brilliant novel ever, and if it never gets into the hands of readers, it’s almost as if it never happened. That’s enough of that.

So for whomever may be with me here at the inception of this journey (you’re small in number, whoever you are, but so appreciated), this is where it begins. A commitment to promoting myself and my books…and to writing the new book that seems to be arriving with some insistence after a lengthy hiatus. I wrote the first 24,000 words of The Minturn House while living in Minturn, Colorado. It got filed away somewhere for two years while I struggled to build a school program for at-risk youth in a gang-ridden town in Watsonville, California. My students there were broken in many ways, all of them having experienced some sort of trauma, all of them having found it impossible to continue in a comprehensive school system that was failing them. But they rose. Man, did they rise. I could write for days about the ways in which those kids discovered themselves and their talents. About the way our little school became a nest to nurture the very best versions of themselves, and I could write for more days about how difficult it was to make the decision to leave them.

But I realized that directly teaching them was not the only way that I could inspire and guide those students. I want them to see that even someone like me, a lowly teacher whose backbreaking work yielded devotion from a group of kick-ass kids but no worldly recognition, can create something, and market it to the world. I have a lot to say and share and give (as I was always saying is so true of them), and I have given myself permission to do it through my writing. To fully commit my time and energy to my language and to my stories. And I’m not just going to hole up in this room and write more (though that’s the part I’m most excited about); I’m going to shine a light on the work that I’ve already done: a book of poems and three novels that have the power to transport readers, to heal the grieving, and to transmit truths that mean something. There are no glamorous vampires, and yes, even the young adult readers of Kealaula are asked to think, but I think readers want to think, and I have never shied away from asking them to do it. I’m not going to start now.

I am returning to the page and to the endeavor of making myself and my words known. No more ‘playing small,’ no more being quiet, privately writing the stories that breathe me and then sitting on them. Introducing myself as a teacher, an editor, a yoga instructor…anything but as an author. I am the author of three novels and a collection of poetry. For the poetry I waited in the wings for the acceptance and approbation of the industry for a long time and was finally published traditionally, but for the novels I chose to publish independently. I am proud of all four works in equal measure.

The Minturn House, you’re up. And Inertia, Bend the Blue Sky, and Kealaula, buckle up…you’re going for a ride! The latter two are getting new ‘clothes,’ and all three are being invited to the stage. Now is as good a time as any, and just having turned 49, I think it’s time. I got this.