On Fear

I have been reading about fear. I have been absorbing the notion that what we fear most is not necessarily the harm that could befall us, but more so the bodily reaction to fear, that anxiety and sense of losing of control. I have read that we need to accept the actual feeling of fear because the circumstance doesn’t really matter much. You cannot stop potentially painful things from happening (car crashes, violence, falling off a cliff) just because of your fear of those things happening.  I mean, sure, you can lock yourself up at home, but what if there is an earthquake that takes down the house or a brown recluse hiding under your pillow? You are still full of fear, even hiding under the covers. 

We are a fragile fabric of skin held up by breakable bones and powered by a mechanical system programmed to eventually fail. So why did this finite system program fear into the mix? For our safety? Or so that we can learn how we move through the world?

And in this book I am reading it also says that we have basically the same physical symptoms with fear and falling in love. Fluttering heart, lack of breath, time stops. They are the same. It is simply the perception that differs.

I think of sailing. How I push myself every time I step onto a boat. How the loss of absolute control has become a standard in my life. Perhaps I compensate in other areas on land for this lack of control when I am at sea. The ridiculous thing is that I am no more in control on land but it is not so immediately obvious among the houses and cars and perfectly ordered cans of beans on grocery store shelves. The straight lines and speed limits lead me to believe there is order, that we have covered Nature over with smooth dominance and therefore we can function in predictable ways. 

There are no straight lines at sea. The horizon is curved, flying fish arc above and below the surface, even becalmed water holds circular movement. Fear is transformed into alertness as every moment changes the course. Out there it is visible. Out there, I have been scared, for sure, but the ocean doesn’t allow for the what-ifs to accumulate for very long. The blank canvas of the sea makes anything possible and so those what-ifs spill over and color the sunsets with their oranges and reds. In a place that may seem more dangerous, fear is replaced with a horizon-less love.

Then I think of living on land and all the complications that arrive with this choice. Taking care of a house and animals. Having a job to pay for such things. Making time to do the things I love (like writing and cooking and sailing). And the fear creeps in. How can I be more scared of this ‘stable’ life than a squall at sea? Is this why I need my dose of sailing, to remind me of that fearlessness? Is this why I am so adamant about sailing to Alaska, something that truly scares the shit out of me? Or will this simply be another adventure in a long line of adventures, a way for me to feel alive, special, but no more the wiser or stable? I sit and stare and worry, brain spinning, hands still.

So I go into my kitchen and cook. I go to my laptop and write. I go work on the boat or go for a swim. Instead of standing on the cliff and fearing the fall, sometimes I actually jump. Not all the time, but I am learning to jump, fall, release and let the love rush in.

When we face our fears, be it a rogue wave or a husband waving me home, we face death and we face life. We are always alive…until we aren’t. And no amount of fear will ever change that reality. So jump. Live.

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).

First day of spring

Ruby bodies unfurling

stretching soft green leaves towards firs

What seems to be a knot in the belly of damp ground

is actually the birthing of spring apparent

The heir of last season’s rhubarb that pleaded to travel

in hand and belly

in pies and crisps and pickles

This yearly unfolding a reminder that every generation

comes from the earth

comes from the sun

comes from the one before

Moving the mulch aside with silent chlorophyll-ed wings

while we barely watch from across the garden

digging, pulling, planting

There is no beginning to see

No end to witness

when these seeds I carry eventually bloom back into earth

when tiny firs spring from under the nettles

when crimson arms of the rhubarb yawn into the season

Counting the Ways to Live

Black rings of pigment soaked through the newsprint and rendered his astrological forecast on the opposite page unreadable. Two sides of fate unknown. On his side, the obituaries bled sadness in words like “survived by”, “gone too soon”,  “memorials” but these, too, were buried under ink. Some photographs- men in WWII uniforms, women with bee-hived coifs- remained unblemished. The wedding pictures with couples in pointed collars and polyester slacks, poufy dresses and long middle-parted hair, the ones that edged up to his generation, (imprints of the 70s in blurry black and white. His 30s) those were the ones blackened with spirals of ink and underlined numbers.

When my dad was slowly dying of an incurable, unknowable, unyielding degenerative brain disease, when he couldn’t actually comprehend much of the daily news in his hands, he reduced his search for meaning to solid numbers. Greater or less than. Or equal to. 10/03/1941. Circles for greater than. Circles for younger than. Circles for sicker than. Or run over by a truck. Or killed in Iraq (but those were the really young ones and almost didn’t count). 

People were living longer. But not him. Terminal, they said. Those guys in white coats with the listening pieces and pens scribbling on white flatness. Those guys that were the thing that he was. Doctor. That thing that seemed to his family, maybe to him, like a lifetime ago.

He was in his late 50s in a time when 80 was the new 70 and terminal only seemed to mean “try harder”. But there was no trying harder to survive, no fighting, no recovery. Just research drugs and brain scans and proven degeneration. He knew he wouldn’t live to 70. Maybe not even 60 (the new 55?).

He would lose his mind and die. That was the only certainty, they said. No why or when or how (exactly), but a certainty about an end that had been easily ignored before the diagnosis. The circles proved it true. Death could happen.They were younger. He was already losing. He stopped taking the medicine that could have slowed the progress of glucose digesting his frontal cortex. It made him feel sick. Yet which sickness was worse when death was so clearly imminent? He wanted to control something, get even somehow, even if the pills equaled zero.

I would find the thumbed-through, marked-up newspapers on the coffee table and shudder. What was the point of keeping score?

Now I understand.

There are pillows propping up my head. I have lost track of what I am reading because I am doing calculations in my mind. The author says her son is 22 and she is 44 and therefore she was pregnant at 21 or 22 and that is 16 years younger than me. My sister was pregnant two years ago at 37. My friends have newborns, toddlers, teenagers. 36, 34, 19.

Shit. 

I do not circle their kid’s names in thick black ink in books I’m reading, on baby-blocked birth announcements, on my computer screen when the posts of little fingers and toes and poop reports outnumber the political musings of the singles. I do not cut up my diaphragm to speed up a process that I somehow feel caught up in from the sidelines, unsure of whether or not to play. I do not throw around possible baby names with my partner (that is a lie. I have. I do. Not all the time. Not much recently. But it happens). But these numbers haunt me. Each moment seems to be simultaneously a lost chance and an artistic project saved. I want to have control. I want the death of my un-familied life to come at just the right time. After I have done things, become someone, published a book, sailed the world (or at least to Alaska), lived fully. Because somehow I think that a child would bury my current way of being. That I would lose a part of my mind that creates stories, that dreams in nautical miles and waves and whales, that thrives on long walks and slow drinks and sleeping in. I tell myself I am not quite ready for the death of this life. So I wait for a perfect time that I know may never come. The doctors say that I don't have much time left. Where is my courage to lose all that I know and discover something else/more? And really, I'm not even satisfied with the amount of creative space in my life as it stands! Time is running out to change, to be, to publish, to procreate! And I do nothing. 

When my dad lost his mind and even those numbers on newsprint became a jumble of incomprehensible shapes, the pictures un-tellable stories in his inaccessible thoughts, he became happy. Un-recognizably (to me) friendly. Not all the time, but more than I had ever seen. Or felt. He seemed to be another person. And even if I was embarrassed when he licked ketchup bottles at restaurants or pet every dog we passed whether or not the startled owner consented, I could see the joy and curiosity bubbling up and taking the place of all the self-criticism and grief and anger. He was at home in the present moment and did not seem to comprehend the past or have any thought for the future. He became outgoing and talkative (as he had been decades earlier) even if his speech was limited to a few words repeated over and over and over again.

Do That. Do That. Do That.

He was living a different life in the same linear, bodily lifetime. 

One where he would Do That without thinking of the outcome or consequences, where expectations had little room to squirm and disrupt the present moment in his disintegrating (enlightened?) mind. 

Like a child.  

And in so many sometimes-subtle, sometimes-dramatic ways, this is what we do: live many lives within the parentheses of this body in ways that we do not (cannot) cognitively understand. Whether or not we consent to let go of the control we think we have, we are constantly dying and discarding, growing and layering, and always carrying forward. 

The story is not over, even when the numbers stop making sense. They are always just incomprehensible squiggles on a page even when we think we know what we are looking at. Maybe that is where the next story begins. We are not a chapter but a novel. None of this is calculated. No amount of adding or subtracting, comparing ages, comparing lives will mean anything. I know this. Or I think I know this. He was 61 when he died. I was 25. I am 38. 23 years to go. All numbers, all dreams, pages to turn. What if I let go of the concept of knowing and figuring and simply breathe into this day the desire of my body to live, to give life, to survive and be survived?

Who will I (we) be then? More than a photo circled in ink, more than a number filed into a hospital database, more than a ma.ma.ma? Or less. Greater than, less than. Equal to what? 

This is not an equation. There is no formula to figure out dying, birthing, living.

There is only space and time and body and love. 
>Do That. 

Waking to Here

The trees shake the sky into lightness.

The bows sway, the roosters crow, the wind hits the Airstream aluminum and rumbles the quiet of the night into waking.

I am already awake. I can’t sleep. Again. Thoughts ricochet around what it means to love, how to communicate with truth and empathy, about the necessity of touch and home and safety.

I sigh.

He stirs. 

He turns his body over towards me and talks in his sleep. He giggles (not even laughs; it is a bright boyish giggle) and murmurs about games and flight. I smile. My hand crawls onto his shoulder from my side of the bed. I can't not touch him. He is soft underneath the sheets, his skin a sea of pale warmth and subtle movement. It strikes me that much of what I see and feel is no longer living yet still attached to beauty: this shock of unruly hair, those fingernails absently scratching at a chafing layer of dry winter skin. What is alive? I stare at the small smile on his full lips, at the line of his jaw underneath a scruffy beard, at the thick lashes caging in those flickering, dreaming eyes. 

I want to know this person so deeply and I am terrified I never will. 

I actually know I won’t. 

I can’t. 

I’ve tried before, with this one, with others.

I’ve failed.

I’m over here and he’s over there. Inches away.

I breathe in his discarded breath and feel the atomic exchange giving me life on a different sort of cellular level. My lungs may not appreciate what my heart absorbs in the warm scent of him. 

This will have to be enough. 

I turn towards the light. I can see the trees clearly now, trunks reaching for frosty blue above. The birds orchestrate the early hours with song while we speak in whispers and gazes and touch. We eventually yawn and blink the day into being. Turn the insides out. I pull on my wool coat, my mud-crusted boots, a bag full of books and journals (unread, unwritten in the night before) and step down onto the dead-nettled ground.

“It feels like Maine!” I exclaim. He doesn’t respond, just stares at the brightening sky. 

A part of me shudders.  

I think he doesn’t understand. Doesn't care as I do. Doesn't know me.

Reminder: he doesn’t. He can't. He is not me.

I am over here and he is over there. Feet apart.

I constantly forget this. That this life I have lived can never be translated in a way that makes perfect sense to anyone else. That expecting anyone to fully know me (and me them) is as impossible as hearing and understanding every note of the birds' morning cacophony.  

And what the hell does that mean anyway, It feels like Maine? Because in this moment, right here in Washington, it actually feels like Washington. It can’t feel like anywhere else because this is where we are and that other place would feel different in a way that I will never know. That is what I think he would say even as he stares at the sunrise and maybe thinks of chickens and doesn't speak of Maine.

I am over here and Maine is over there. Thousands of miles away. 

I sigh again. I want to breathe in fresh winter air in a field of nettles surrounded by cedars and firs in the Pacific Northwest with a person I love, dammit, and stop my mind from spinning to different places and faces and times. Memories of memories. Quiet this mind that strives to identify and compare and quantify. Control.

This could be the most beautiful moment I have experienced in my life! And I could do that over and over again, every moment new and incomparable and inexplicably beautiful. 

(Is this what he would say next? Or is he still thinking about chickens? Nope, this is what I say next.)

I remind myself over and over that even if no one will every truly understand this inexplicable beauty circling in my heart I will keep communicating and continue to be curious about what is swirling in their hearts even if I will never understand the intricacies of their particular song. I will continue to bring my own version of this life into the world through words and images and voice. I will read and listen and ask questions to tease out meaning in what others carry and know that how I interpret it is unique to me. 

This is not pointless. This trying, this struggle, this unfolding of myself for others to see and feel even when I know no one will ever reach the core. I will live and dream and wake up at five in the morning to witness the sunrise of another day and I will try my hardest to be here, actually here in my own body next to another body, as the sun rises over the trees on a windy island in Washington. I will cultivate the curiosity to wonder at what the birds are saying and enjoy every mysterious and never-to-be-known note. And that is enough.

Re-membering the Gears

The gears are blackened with old grease, flecked white with deck paint, crusty with remnants of salt. Springs broken, plastic collars worn. I lift metal off metal and bathe it all in paint thinner. My lungs burn. I can feel the brain cells dissolving with the grime.

Along with the tension.

When I was asked to clean the winch, I froze, heart pounding. I haven’t done that in years…if ever (by myself). Is this something I can do? But I’m not detail oriented. I might lose a pawl spring, forget to put that gear thing back into the gear holder thing, neglect getting all those paint chips out of crucial crevices. 

We need these to work. Without these, we can’t control the sails. If we can’t control the sails we can't sail to Alaska. If I don’t sail to Alaska I’m not sure what else I can control in my life, not like I can control what happens there. 

This tiny winch feels like so big right now, all these levers and springs and gears in motion. 

Or not. Why is this winch seized?

A moment later in my head, gears cracking into motion: This is bullshit. I've sailed tens of thousands of miles offshore. I can fix a goddamn winch. 

Yes. Bring it.

The metal feels good in my hands. Smooth and circular on the outside, sharp edges of screws and springs inside. I retrieve bits from the stripping liquid and brush off old uselessness. I swipe on fresh grease, a promise of motion in tiny slippery particles. Help me out here, OK? I whisper to the solid teeth of gears and the forgiving push of springs. You are not lost. You go into your places and I reassemble your body into a clean new you. 

Reborn.

Circular clips over shiny metal plates. In place. It (I) feels secure when I fit the handle into its grooved home and spin. My arm knows what to do. The lightness that fills my body is unmistakable. This is home, this feeling. With each revolution I am revitalized, spinning in memories of oceans and wind, trimming in energy and making fast this knowing. 

I know. My body knows. My heart knows. Revolution. 

No fear, just spinning and motion and yes.

Remembered.

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.