By Sam, Uncut

Sam escaped off to his room tonight and wrote this, which sounded an awful lot like a blog post to me:

"I was playing basketball in my bedroom when my brother, Trin, called for me. I wondered if he wanted to talk to me about a giant spider that I saw a couple days ago. It turned out that he wanted to give me tips on how to make a good picture. I said that I didn't want any tips, exept for money tips. Mom laughed."

I have printed it exactly as Sam wrote it: spelling, capitalization, grammar. I am delighted with his ability to express himself at barely eight years old!

This is what he had to say about writing afterward: "When you play video games, you get done and you always want more. When you write something like this, you go 'oh, now I got that out!' and then you [feel ready] to do all kinds of other things you like to do. Because you got it out. And it feels good."

What an important point to make! I had been sharing with the boys my joys in witnessing their art for the evening (Trinidad was drawing landscapes with the guidance of an art book from my mom while Sam drew or wrote) and told them that one of my concerns in making computer games accessible is that they would always use the time doing that instead of using their imagination and (in my mind) growing their souls. Then Sam pointed out the above.

Wow. The difference between hungry and full, yearning and content. I had never thought of it that way.

Trinidad, on the other hand, earnestly argued for full reign of all of his faculties with computer access included so that he could grow his ability to choose and discipline himself.

I think he has something there, too, and as usual, it asks more growth from me. :)

Wise

Tonight is Sam's last night of being seven years old.

"It's not healthy to hurry," he told me quietly as I rushed around gathering food, water, shin guards, and shoes for Trin's soccer match.

I laughed as loudly as I agreed. Then I rushed on.

We picked up Trin, and I lit into him (translation: earnestly expressed my feelings and unmet needs) about not calling me after school as we'd agreed this morning. For almost an hour, I had chewed my nails waiting for the phone to ring so I could tell him to walk the 2.5 miles home alone -- a new independence for him -- but when it finally rang, it was a friend's mother who had taken him home with her son as rain was pelting the soccer field where they had played. If only I could instill in him awareness, that invaluable notion that (m)others have needs at the same time we do....

We talked and listened and talked with each other, and in the end I could see how he saw it and he could see how I saw it, and both of us were moved to tears that we could be seen, really seen by one another when there had been such tension only minutes ago. What precious relief and hope filled us both as he wiggled into my lap for a snuggle, long legs dangling shoes nearly as big as my own off the end of the car seat.

Later, Ben offered him a book from the 1950's that showed a pictorial progression from a woman with a cat outward into the cosmos until the Milky Way itself was only a speck in a cloud of stars.

Awareness, I thought. How insignificant are my efforts to cultivate family-oriented awareness when I am missing so much: the young man with the sign on the corner who is shivering in the cold while I drive to a soccer match (borrowed car), children eating chemicals that are marketed as "hot lunch," kids being crammed thirty-six to a classroom. How much am I willing to take responsibility for in a given moment?

How big is my cosmos?

"It's not good to hurry or worry," said Sam.

And he should know, being nearly eight years wise.

Turning

Did I tell you that I tried to stop the world with my shoulder?

It's been aching for a year or so, inflamed to crisis point twice. How did that happen? Hard to say.

This is what I know: people have been dying left and right in my world for the past year, all of them mothers or children. I am not opposed to death, not opposed to the sun setting. I am not against that which is most predictable, lightness and dark, and how could I be? I am sitting inside it.

All the same, I think that I wanted it to slow down a trifle, give me time to say goodbye in my own human way, uncatch my breath. I think with that in my sub-mind, I set my shoulder against it.

The physical therapist, Erik Verdouw, master of the art, smiled knowingly when I told him this. Think of the speed with which this planet revolves, he told me. Think of how everything that appears to be still is yet in constant motion. If you lay on your back in a rainforest when there is not a breath of wind, the trees will creak and lean gently at all times, repositioning themselves with the turn and tilt of our planet. You cannot stop it, he said.

In fact, I do not even think I slowed it down, me with my shoulder. But maybe that's not so. Maybe the pain of withholding scraped into my art so that all that lay before me for a year was blank canvas. There have been precious few blog posts. So much has felt private, guarded. I did not wish to harm anyone in my attempt to capture moments with words.

Our bees have died, too. I am embarrassed to say it, shocked, and sad. I know things die. It is in my picture of the world. Every rotation is complete; we greet the dawn and the dusk each day the same, and still the sadness turns me in my tracks across the yard. I lean against the rabbit pen and cry with a dull moan like tall trees moving without knowing why.

I understand nothing. One hive has honey, more than twenty-five pounds left, I think, and the other needed feeding. But now, it's hard to say whether even the light hive starved; the marauding bees are filling the air around it, and they have been swarming it for a time, I suspect, looking back.

Between the frames, the bodies of my bees are piled light and paper thin, softly coated in mildew. They have been dead awhile, and it has not been wet.

All of this stopping things with my shoulder hard against the turn of the world, this effort to pause, take things in, has rendered me blind, I see. How did I not notice that the bees were not my own?

I am a stillpoint in a sea of color, some cosmic kaleidoscope spilling perfect prisms into one another at every rotation. Something always sticks and holds within the glass, but still the colors change, falling all around as if the stillness itself demanded motion at its edges.

I am breathing again, and that is something toward letting go, moving along. At dusk, I will check the hives in my full bee suit to be sure my colonies have indeed collapsed. Then, I will bring the boxes in so that the spring swarms I plan to catch will have a meal waiting.

What else is there to do?

How To Fight

Let me tell you how to fight.

It's not the way I was taught: tough lady pushing or pleading with words, sometimes sharp like daggers, and slammed by a fist or the flat iron back of a hand nearly as big as her head.

Not that way.

Not the way I did as a child either, screaming all the right words inside my head fierce as beach wind but only shaped by it on the inside -- a thousand steep dunes with cryptic passage to the sea.

Not like my father who shreds those around him without realizing that he is always right behind each, bearing the scars he has left on one and all.

Let me tell you, it is much softer than all that, and still it is deeper and darker than I ever thought possible.

This is how you fight: you listen. You crack yourself open and you let the other come rushing in until you know how they taste, how they smell, how they move in the world. You open your pores until the other seeps into you and you can feel how they feel because they are not outside and other at all.

You soften because all those holes leave you open and full at the same time, moving, jitterbugging with the electricity of connection.

And then you can speak, and when you speak, your words don't belong to you anymore. They are words of love, because it is love to listen like that. And you speak from deep down where you broke yourself open. You speak from that brokenness and there is a chance you will be heard from that place because words from down there, they echo. They sound different like a song in a narrow red canyon, and that music is rare and demands an ear.

But sometimes not. Sometimes the walls just shake all around and there is no ear, and that is no time to stop trying.

That is no time to be silent.

Into that canyon, you pull the ear, you bend it and teach it how to listen, how to crack itself open. You sing into it so it cannot resist, and the more that fight means to you, the softer you sing. How can you resist me?

I have you in me now, and you may be right or you may dance with me here.

Being right is lonely.

Being right does not echo or shine or even break through walls. Being right is a dull thud in our favor, and we want more, by nature we want more.

We have to fight for it.

The Mixed Yes

A week before my last post, I learned that my mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Two weeks ago, she passed on, thin, frail, and resolute on completing her journey whole-heartedly.

My mother did not talk about the fact that she was dying, not if she could help it. She chased the doctor from the room when he came to tell her that there was nothing more they could do for her. This dying thing was her business and her business alone, I imagine she was thinking. The doctor found her tenacity endearing.

She did not say much in those last days as we sat beside her, captivated by her passing. What she did say mostly appeared disjointed and dreamlike. When she spoke with us directly, her eyes widened with childlike presence and singular clarity.

"Oh! It's Kristin Ann." My arrival seemed to both delightfully surprise and meet expectation.

In the last year of her life, my mother found herself remarkably at ease with much of her world. She rarely argued with her husband. She looked at the lavender, lambs, and donkey in her fields and proclaimed herself happy despite economic challenges. The boys and I spent over a week with her at harvest without a single conflict -- unheard of and fulfilling in ways that left us both in wonder.

She had relaxed. I had relaxed. We were both trying to get used to this, looking at each other sideways and smirking. "Just sitting here staring straight ahead," she'd say as we surveyed the valley at cocktail hour beneath the buzz of summer cicadas.

I look back now and wish I could have earlier released all of the strifes of our relationships, all of my worries about her responses that I held long after the volcanoes of menopause had gone dormant. I wish I could have enjoyed her more.

I hold the mirror so that I can see the front of me from behind. I hope that I can enjoy my children and family now for who they are, that I may open my heart to them wholly in this moment, releasing them from the roles I perceived them to play in the past. I hope that I myself can find my grace in present time so that I may proceed with compassionate attention that is not minefield careful, not clinging to armistice for dear life.

I want at least some of my yes's to be whole-hearted if not open-hearted, embracing the joy of embarking rather than the complete consciousness of all needs met and unmet. I want to say "I will!" with excitement and take the hands of my comrades for better or for worse in every commitment, whether it's soccer, dance, ritual or art.

I celebrate the 'yes' of abandon. Analysis can be made, inner reflection spent, but once decided, may the expression be ecstatic -- I'll do it!

I see the price of a mixed yes as a lack of riotous color, and that color is what paints our view of the past. When I survey my life from that pinnacle, whenever I may find it, I want to look back on what I left behind in vivid splendor. I want my children and loved ones to recall the color I added to their world, the times I said "yes!" with all of me, never looking back.

It's too much to expect that every time, I know. Perhaps I could do it just often enough to leave an impression.

Rattle

I am echoing inside, today, rattling like a key in a can.

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?

******

"Look at that bird up there," I tell a young friend I am trying to distract from her task of pushing Sam off my lap. She stares up into blue.

"It's you," she says. "It's you in the future. Hey, Sam, look, it's your mom in the future up there!"

I swivel my head to take her in. Is it true?

I can't tell if it's vulture or a hawk.

******

I struggle at times with disappointment, sadness, frustration. Are these feelings authentic, or do they spring from my attachment to people, ideas, understandings? If the "understanding" is mine alone, where is the truth under what is standing? Which is an authentic feeling if so many arise from the way I think things ought to be? If I perceive my needs to be met, I am content.

I am a center of perception, a mirror, shiny and round. What is the sound of me in this hollow place?

********

Sam came to me three nights ago and told me his brain was going to burst.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I am me. But Trinidad is also "me." How can that be possible?" He groaned and held his head, falling to the ground.

The echoes are not all mine.

Last night, he told me that he wrote a story at school. It goes something like this:

There was a boy named 'I Don't Know My Name," and he'd just moved to a town called Me. He went to school on the first day and his teacher said, "What's your name?"

"I Don't Know My Name," he said.

"Oh. I'll call you 'George,'" said the teacher.

"But that's not my name! My name is 'I Don't Know My Name!'"

The boy went home and told his mom, "I hate Me."

"What? Don't say you hate yourself," she said.

"I didn't. I said I hate "Me" [the town]."

That is all that Sam had written so far.

And me? This is good enough for today.

What's For Dinner?

Tonight, I wavered between the temptation of "going out" for a burrito or .... I couldn't even imagine. Hungry, tired, I collapsed into a chair announcing that dinner was beyond me.

"That's okay," said Trinidad cheerfully. "I'll cook. You two just rest, and I'll take care of dinner."

Seda swung around and gave me the look only parents can share that says, "Wow, did you notice that we just peaked Mt. Everest? Check...out....this...view!"

I made myself horizontal and offered to write Trinidad a recipe for quinoa. Sam said he would help by making instant pudding (thanks to Trader Joes) for dessert. Wink, wink.

Trinidad picked greens in the garden. I only saw because I couldn't find him when I delivered the recipe. I am under strict instructions to stay out of the kitchen, and by Golly, I'm up to the task.

It's been 30 minutes.

"Boy, I don't get a break!" says Trinidad, running between turning off the timer, stirring the potstickers, and setting the table.

Sam informs him he can take 30 seconds, and Trinidad jumps at the suggestion, chasing his brother around the house with the stirring spoon and swinging at him dramatically with sound affects.

This must be "growing up." This is our household getting old, the tip of the Collier/Krebs iceberg with its wide bottom so far under that I can't consciously recount the stories of my ancestors, each of them struggling with growing old and raising families, each of them wedged wordlessly between past and future in the features of ten and seven year old boys manning the kitchen alone.

I will be fed by this work.