Sweetpea

Sweetpea was the color of an Arizona thunderstorm, cumulus clouds of fur curling and shaking over a desert-flowered shirt. He held her close, a small smile perched on his lips, stubble sprouting from above and below the threads of his voice whispering to her. The bus filled with tourists and teenagers as we rolled down the hill of Queen Anne. Most passengers stopped to stare briefly at Sweetpea, at the man with a bunny on his chest, at the cage balanced precariously on a duffel bag on top of a plastic seat. He’d said yes to the picture that two women had asked to take of the furry heartbeat of a creature, all fluff and ears filling the frame. After the photo was clicked, he held Sweetpea out across the aisle. “You can hold her if you’d like. She loves people,” he said. The woman reached out and cradled the bunny in two hands, little gray paws trembling between palms. The bus bumped over asphalt. The woman held on more tightly. The man said, “She can feel your tension. If you sit back in the seat she’ll relax.” The woman did as she was told, settled into the subtly cupped backrest and exhaled. “You’re right!” she beamed, the small bundle against her shoulder like a baby. “How old is she?” she asked.

“She’s eight. She was abused. They killed her boyfriend, hit him on the head, threw him around. Both of them. These types of animals, people see them as disposable. They aren’t respected. So I make up for all that and love her up for the rest of her life. And all she wants to do is love. See, she likes you.”

After a few minutes the woman peeled Sweetpea from her chest and handed her back across the aisle. The younger woman asked, “Do you leave her at home alone?”

Sweetpea stayed still and silent back in the man’s arms as he tumbled his story into the aisle.
A cancer diagnosis in April. Lymphoma. An unexpected three days in the hospital without Sweetpea while chemicals swam in his body. Sadness and longing and obligation. Her inability to leave his side when he got home. “She holds it for six hours” he said, “if I fall asleep with her in my arms. I have to put her on the ground so she’ll go to her litter box, she won’t leave the bed. I have weekly treatments but I’m only gone for eight hours. But I’ll make it. I need to stay alive for her.”

He hadn’t heard when the older woman said at the same time, “Sweetpea’s there to take care of you.”

My back ached with emotions. I didn’t need to turn around to feel the tears in his eyes. Or hers. Or were those mine? Everything blurred. He was talking about his pet but he was talking about himself. The need for love and respect and a place to call home. To be healed. To be held and needed and missed. I thought of how we turn to animals for affection and give them love we cannot show to those of the human sort, to those who may hurt us. And by hurt us I do not mean throw us around like Sweetpea’s boyfriend. I mean leave us, lie to us, love someone else, change their minds, die. Just die. Bunnies can live for 16 years, he said. But they go, too. I wondered what this animal thought; was this affection unconditional love or simply a befuddlement about where all the other bunnies had gone and this warm human in the night would have to do? Either way, they helped one another. Acceptance, respect, easing of loneliness. That was their love. So be it.

The man was telling a story of his life to those that would listen, a small rabbit hole of words and images that ended with a dark nest in a crumbling apartment: a man with cancer in his veins and a silent bunny on his chest. Or was the image a sunlit meadow with a luminescent cloud of fur against of fuzzy, smiling cheek?

The bus jerked to a stop. Our stop.

He wasn’t talking to us but I heard him anyway. “Thanks for giving your attention. All Sweetpea can do is love. She is pure love.”

And we got off the bus.

My Reality

 

A plume of salt and spent air and force crystallize the sky.

Inhalation. 

Focus on the curly edges of the kale leaves, I told myself (over and over) when she said, “You keep bringing emotion into this. Just stop. This is reality!” She listed off all the ways in which I was CLEARLY not within the realm of which she spoke. The leaves blurred into the wooded horizon as my anger and resentment welled up and overflowed in a tirade of words. 

 

This was not my intention.  

Teeth clenched, fins in motion.

I wanted to be calm, non-reactive, mature, but in the heat of the moment the thirteen-year-old in me leaped into (re-)action. The thirteen-year-old that was grounded for unfounded reasons and spent weeks writing dark poetry in her room. The girl that was told she was a spoiled brat for being independent and doing what she wanted. That was full of vitality and creativity and wide-scoped dreams and was (is) mocked for “being dramatic." 

Deep buried resentments spy-hopped at the surface. An ocean of relationship rippled and shook.

Instead of breathing into the pain, doing my shadow work and all that woo (goodness), I yelled back, teeth bared. I accused, I cried. I’m not proud of this, but it happened. My head spun with all that I wanted to say, how I wanted to be understood. But how can you be heard if the other doesn’t want to listen? How can I keep my heart open to others who have closed theirs so tightly, especially when my throat is tight and my hands are clenched and I'm yelling and I really really really don't want to be but I can't seem to help it? 

And what the fuck is reality? 

I am breathing, feeling, living every day and every day is real. My dreams, thoughts, and emotions are real. Even my fanciful imagination is real. So when I am told that I am not living in reality, I am confused. This confusion has been happening my whole life. From theater school to traveling around the world to living and working on boats to living on an island and growing my own food, I haven’t lived a particularly mainstream life, but this has no bearing on whether or not it is real. 

I am real therefore my life is real. Reality.

Flukes in the air, diving deep into the dark, thoughts swim and circle around reason. 

After the pain and sadness slowly receded alongside the anger (not disappeared, but ebbed enough to breathe), I have been able to see this flood of emotions as a call to contemplation: what do I believe about myself and my world? I know that what anyone else says or thinks about me is none of my business, that accusations strike a nerve in this way only when there is doubt within myself about my skills, intelligence, about how I live my life. 

What a gift to have this brought to light, I say through gritting teeth and tears.

So. What do I believe? What is real to me?

Here is the reality (in this moment) that I create:

People are good. I don’t want to believe that everyone is out there to fuck me over. If that what is supposed to make me a good business person, then I don’t want to participate in that kind of business. I’ve built my businesses on love, connection, and beauty. There is no need to be nasty, just honest. If we could all just be honest about what we need a lot of the nastiness would be avoided. This is what is real to me.

I live in a place where I can grow a lot of my own food and buy/trade for the rest from neighbors. This is not an idealistic or a hippie lifestyle. I’m not sure what being a hippie actually is. I do wear dresses in the garden and have potlucks and craft nights on occasion. Does that make me a hippie? If growing your own food is hippie, I’m not sure what the opposite of that is other than co-dependent capitalistic matrimony (in which I am woefully still engaged to a degree). Growing one’s own food and buying locally is much more practical and sustainable than relying on the industrial food system for far less nutritious food. It is also far more “traditional” than how the majority of Americans live presently shopping at Target and Costco and buying strawberries in January. Growing food is not a luxury. It takes hard work and planning and effort. The callouses on my hands are real. The kale and garlic on my dinner plate are deliciously real.

I enjoy my work. Whether it is sailing or cooking for other people, I like how I spend my waking hours. Not 100% of the time, but much more often than not. I have worked hard and created this way of life for myself instability (flexibility) and all. Sometimes it feels like I just fell into these passions. I believe that is what happens when you say Yes to what you love. And it is not that simple and easy and the bumps along the way are reminders of this, but those bumps are meant for refinement and growth. I want to spend my time doing something I feel strongly about in the way that positively affects the world. For me, cooking with food from my garden and from smaller farms in my area is revolutionary. I start and join in conversations about nutrition, local economies, self-sufficiency through my job. And I eat well, too.

I am not in the camp that JOB must equal SUFFERING. This is my reality.

I love what and whom I love. I might not get society’s approval but I cannot follow what this society implies I should love. Or whom. Age, gender, profession, appearance…my heart chooses and I am learning to follow, to let the judgments fall away and keep my heart open to the infinite possibilities of love. Why impose restrictions when the world is infinitely generous? This is realistic.

My reality is based on love and emotion. This is what makes us real, just like we learned in the Velveteen Rabbit. This is what children inherently know. I don’t want to shut my heart off in order to be “successful” because in my eyes that is a very empty success. And unnecessary. I wouldn’t be able to write or connect with people or cook beautiful food without this love, without this openness for emotions. This is my reality.

I’m sailing to Alaska in a month and, I admit it, am scared about dying. About my life changing. Of leaving a comfortable farmhouse for rough seas- what's the point? This is what is bringing me alive in this moment. I am immersed deeply in the contemplation of my life, realizing what is most important to me, accepting who brings me alive and who drains my vitality and how I can release the latter. I could die, this is the reality, but this is also the reality every single (safer?) day of my life. Or your life. My question is: can I die with an open heart, whenever and wherever that may be? Death is real.

I surface again, nicked fins, broken teeth, full belly flopping into oncoming waves. 

I am in love with my magical, fantastical life. It hurts sometimes, too. But I choose to believe in the full range of feelings and possibilities, that we are here to create and love and play and swim through it all. This is my reality. 

What’s yours?

Breathe and float

I cannot catch my breath and so I sail forward into the day,

my exhalation fueling momentum, 

my inhalation creating the calm before the storm.

I cannot finish my list, so I up-end the table with a simple lift and push. Over it goes, a listing ship of to-dos and not-dones; a n’er-do-well am I. 
I feel better when the wooden legs are broken, the chairs upset, the cutlery and pencils scattered across the tile, papers fluttering as my breath grows ragged and then (spokes of the hurricane) quiet.

I cannot quiet the looping in my head and so I run the opposite direction from where I sit on the field of floor, my dreams distracting me from the anger and fear sprinting throughout. 

Yet I return, out of breath, to my thoughts in this memoried track meet, a meeting of mind and heart and all the places my feet have been. We choose our loops or they choose us.

And the clouds gather.

I cannot gather my thoughts enough to choose between tasks and so I curl up in bed and read and read and read. I pull my laptop close to me and words spill out in barbed clickity-clacks and dripping pauses, a river of sentences full of jumping commas and gnashing dashes waiting to be caught, gutted, filleted, and devoured.

I am the hand on the pole and the hook and the jaws clamping down. 

It starts to rain.

I turn to look at myself and the words play dead in upturned palms.

My to-do list flops around, breathless, on the floor.

I am moved to stay still in this flood of not-enough, obligation circling at my ankles, pant cuffs wet with guilt and perceived failure. The current pulls me, it is too strong to resist and I am soaked in old tales. They rush into my lungs as I go under, commas and dashes thrashing about my head, sharp-toothed numbers sizing up my longevity and worth, jumbled letters clinging to my thighs. 

It is the words that untangle and push me up to the surface. Buoy me with susurrations of truth. I take a breath and feel the sky clearing and see the shore and taste the wind. I am floating. I can feel the turbulence underneath the surface but these words keep me afloat, above the flood, below the storm, in the soft dampness of the in-between.

I cannot catch my breath and so I sail forward into the day,

my exhalation fueling momentum, 

my inhalation creating the calm before the storm (that washes the sky clean).

Into the Light

Sometimes 

I hear the past rattling along behind me. 

I am startled to look back and see my own arm leading to my very own hand grasping thick cloth and rope, a bag of memories and distant passions and former selves clunking over the torn up sidewalk below. I can feel the pull, the strain of fullness against white knuckles and scarred skin. 

I want to release. 

I want to walk ahead without looking back. 

I want to uncurl tendons and bone tense and habituated. 

But somehow my fingers grasp more tightly with each step when I contemplate dropping this heavy load altogether. 

So I trick myself. 
I shuffle along and dip my other hand deep within the folds to bring into the light (one by one so as not to scare the rest hiding in the dark) each memory tarnished with age and failing synapses. How it’s changed since I saw it last! Softer at the edges or wilting at its core or brighter than the brightest star in this beautiful, blinding hindsight. And so I cradle each notion in my one free hand, I place the memory up to my lips, my eyes, to my heart. I wish it well, I cry, I laugh. I recognize the goodness and the pain. 

I feel. 

And without glancing back at that shadowy fabric I let my memoried hand fall to my side, soft images and liquidy dreams falling to the earth below, a seed to grow into something new, perhaps a shelter in my old age with leaves and flowers and fruit. And I shuffle on, my load becoming light, my path more clear as I spend more time looking ahead than behind. I feel each step, each pebble beneath tender feet and each raindrop and kiss on my upturned face. 

I start to skip. And run. And laugh at the falling leaves and petals lining my way.  

Barn craft

The planks are soft beneath my feet. Bits of sunlight scrub the splinters and wash the webs underneath a crumbling slant of roof and sky. Smoothed through decades, painted with wind and dust, the barn exhales into my breath and leaves me bathed in silence. 

Needle and thread, fabric and bits of the land. I stitch, I sing, I tie knots in string, tugging to secure every emotion to golden brocade, burying the loose ends in indigo and cream. There is love in this work, in this lack of thought, in the rays of warmth on happily worrying hands and weaving heart. There is closure in this craft, the spill of place into folds to take. 
It is done; it is now in a motion of its own.

I tuck away needles and brush feathers from jeans. I stand into the possibility of rain, the closing curtains of sky. I amble down a ladder, walk barefoot through the brambles to a house that has howled for my body. 

Meet me here, I say to the emptiness surrounded by wood and earth and water (full, content, infinite). I hold fabric and intention in my hand. Be my everything and let me go. Be my art and my tension. Be the dream and the now. The work is being stitched and loved and pulled taut in these gently calloused hands. I promise: though I walk, I will not leave.

Freewrite Fiction: Stars

In case you’ve been wondering, we have sailed through skin and sky. 

We reach up to where the two meet and cannot feel the difference. 

You hold a star in your hand, fingers cradling dust and light, waiting for me to blow at the universe, waiting for me to create a new milky way against the dark path we have traveled. 

Instead I lift my other hand to meet the first and cup the brilliance in my palms. 

 I don’t want to let go. 

You put your arms around my waist, tell me drop it all. You know it won’t last. Or it will burn through my fingers the older it gets, the longer it sits and invokes what we thought we would never say. There is a silence in the night that we can’t wrap ourselves around and so we walk on, afraid to be still, afraid we will disappear in the nothingness we have sewn from the sky. 

Where else can we go? We ask over and over as we fall down hills and run down valleys. Past the old cabin where you loved me so deeply, rough against pine floors and cobwebs, black widows watching us from clouded windows. 

You held my hand, fingers intertwined, you lifted me up and over the threshold and led me over the beach, mussel shells crushed beneath our feet. 

 It all seemed so easy then. 

You whisper to me: Let go of the stars. Stop reaching so high. 

All that you need is right here around you in perfect constellations for your happiness.

We Flutter-bys

I want to be at home with you in this skin of ours, the mutual cocoon that forms between lovers. We are wrapped in silk and grace. I want to nestle the valley between my chin and mouth deep into your collarbone, my lips resting in that gorge between bone and muscle. I want to trace the moles and scars and creases of skin with a fingertip that knows the way. I want the nest of our tangled hair to be the home to fluttering thoughts and chirping dreams.

I want it to all be OK.

But our cocoon has holes we’ve yet to mend. And I can’t see the tiny tears behind your back. You capture me with your eyes and even with needle and thread (words, glances, truth) in hand I am unable to reach, unable to pull the fabric tightly between my hands and plunge the needle through this living breathing warp. You know that when I do that, the scar is still there. The seams will never fully merge, heal, replace cells with new like skin. There will always be a weakness there. 
And in my desperate pulling to mend and forget I will distort, rip, destroy other parts of our otherwise totally perfectly imperfect cocoon. We knew this when we started weaving it under the stars, hands and feet into the dirt, talking over riveted roads. We knew then that the chances of survival for such a being as this WE was slim but that trying anyway was as noble and necessary as birth and death. 

The veil is thinning and I am left with myself. I want to trace stories of us on your sternum, near the heart I love. I want to breathe in your spent breath and pick out the molecules you have used so well, full of memories of your lungs and all the other breaths you have breathed, every moment you have spent filling yourself with joy and grief, ecstatic wonder and deafening pain. 

There is time for this all. 

Allow us to be, to break through silk and grace and emerge as long winged flutter-bys, huge hearts swollen with hope and new beginnings we have woven together.