You can only lose what you cling to

La Jolla, CA 1996

The thought crossed my mind the other day that Sophie's epilepsy is a beast, a monster, and she is not her epilepsy, not a beast or a monster and I'm always fighting it and not her. I cannot can't can not accept it push against and never through it over and over and over year after year after year. This is contrary to Buddhist thought. The harder you push against the more you resist the strength of your hate is the measure of the intractability against which you push resist and hate. I just can't do it.

What do the religious say? Something from Ephesians, I think. Something about now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.  Of course, there's that power which is a Him, capital H, I wager, or God.

We are all asked to do more than we can do.

We are all given way more than we can handle, saith I.

How We Do It, Part (Lost Count) in a series

photographer: Carl Jackson

When I was a small child, I lay in the grass or up in the cherry tree and stared up at clouds, floating. I did more than imagine shapes when I was a child, a rabbit, a snowman, a man shaking a stick. I called a tree, flower and a flower, tree. Cloud, sky and sky, cloud. I thought Smell and then pick that tree. Climb up into that flower. Words. What they meant when I said them, how I made them up. It was the same with God. How I made Him up. Or wondered if I was making Him up. I imagined Him like the clouds, floating, shaped. And what of it and what of Him? Were we His dream? Were We his dream? Had He made us up? I saw the world through God's eyes, made up, a ball, a sphere, a reflection. Trees, clouds, flowers, grass, me on my back, ground, perched on a branch, bark, cherries. I had a lover once when I was very young and when we left one another (we left one another, over and ever), I was certain that I'd made him up, yet I made another again. Another lover. God is now god and He is he or him. I made a baby that we named Sophie. I made her up. She has no words and yet is made.


When I sit in meditation, breathe in, breathe out, my thoughts are words. I make them up, I make them clouds. I watch them float. On by.

Continued Squirrel Girl Imperil

So, this morning I walked outside to get in my car and drive the two blocks to CVS in my sexy Mazda to buy a cool mist vaporizer that might help alleviate my and Sophie's terrible coughs that I guess I'll blame on a virus worsened by the incredibly dry air that's accompanying the drought caused by global warming. Did you get that? I was immediately made aware of something angry chittering at me. I looked up, and there she was -- The Mother Squirrel. She stayed on that branch for what seemed like minutes but was probably a few seconds, and the whole time kept up the most angry racket of mutterings and growlings. For a split second I felt terrified, certain that she'd come leaping off that branch like some kind of Monty Pythonesque beast and splay herself all over my guilty face, but then I remembered that as a human, the world is under my dominion***, so I pretended bravado and looked down for a moment to adjust my phone, took the above photo and then attempted an Instagram video as she scampered away. Basically, I got away with a scolding, but I'm certain she was pissed at me for not taking care of her baby. I have no idea whether her baby is even alive, but when I got into my car, my other least favorite animal appeared from under my car -- a big, fluffy black cat -- which makes me a tad suspicious that she was waiting around for another baby to fall from the nest.

In all seriousness, if there's such a thing as karma, this might be a testament to its veracity. Baby squirrels falling from nests, black cats lying in wait, sexy Mazdas  instead of legs, a persistent cough and headache, no rain for eight months -- what does it all MEAN?









***Just kidding. I don't really believe that the world is under my dominion. I was only quoting a very well-known Mormon blogger who years ago poo-pooed global warming with that Biblical imperative.

Casting my mind back to George Herbert

He was one of my favorite old poets. I still remember The Collar, reading it for some English class or another in college, sucked in and sucker-punched by the last two lines. I felt faint in church as a girl, saw the black dots floating in front of my eyes as I stood and sat and stood and kneeled again. What did I love in such seriousness? Where did it fly? 

Prayer (I)

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,

         God's breath in man returning to his birth,

         The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth

Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,

         Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

         The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

         Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

         Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

         Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

         The land of spices; something understood.

George Herbert (1593-1633)

Secrets and endurance

Jacob, wrestling with the angel, while viewed by Breton maidens
Paul Gauguin 

Sometimes, after Sophie has a big seizure, and my back is aching from holding her and my lip is smarting from where her hand accidentally slapped it while jerking, I pray in a whisper to God. Please take these seizures from her. Make them stop. Give her -- and us -- peace. I don't feel better when I pray, though, because the thought crosses my mind that God might answer the prayer and take her from me. Perhaps that's why I endure.

Blue is the color of the sky

I unrolled my mat and sat down next to a goddess today in yoga. I haven't been to yoga in probably nine or more months, which is stupid because just entering the room made me feel relaxed and peaceful. The goddess is a Scottish supermodel, and she lay flat on her back with her eyes closed, her long yellow hair splayed out, a tiny gold ring on one of her toes, a tiny tattoo on the top of her slender super-model foot. I hummed yellow is the color of my true love's hair in my head because the goddess is married, I think, to Donovan's son and that's my favorite Donovan song, one I first heard when a boy I loved sang it to me in much the same type voice in a room at the top of the stairs in a house in the woods. The goddess lay perfectly still beside me, a pale angel, breathing in and out, and I wasn't put off, I wasn't intimidated, despite my cumbersome form, brown with gray is the color of my hair right now, and I settled, rather, into her energy and that of the kind people around me, the wooden floor, the soft voices, Ganesh on the wall. Yesterday, one of my college friends posted on Facebook her alarm that God was removed from the Democratic platform, and I commented that some people of faith didn't think religion had a role in politics. Someone I don't know also left a comment that sounded as if she were terrified, terrified of God-language being removed from a political platform, terrified of where the country is going, how different it is. I stopped there (good for me!) and thought the rest of the evening about fear, people's fear, and what are people afraid of and why aren't I afraid? I thought it again last night when I watched a bit of the Democratic Convention, the colors of the people, the beautiful brown-skinned mayor of San Antonio, the beautiful black skin of the First Lady. I thought about it again as I sat next to the pale white goddess and another woman with long magenta-painted hair and yellow men's long johns, whose crotch sagged to her knees, carefully place her yoga mat in front of me. Green is the color of the sparkling corn, in the morning when we rise and blue is the color of the sky, in the morning when we rise. What are people afraid of and why? Why aren't I afraid? I stumbled through the yoga class, barely able to do most of the exercises except the breathing, the deep in and out, and whenever I peeked through my closed eyes at the goddess next to me, the long-johned woman in front of me, they, too, were breathing in and out. Mellow is the feeling that I get, when I see her, the boy I loved sang to me many years ago. That's the time, that's the time, I love the best. What are people afraid of and why? Why aren't I afraid? Freedom is the word I rarely use without thinking, without thinking -- of the time, of the time, when I've been loved. 

Seizures, the universe, humor, grace and God

God, Blessing the Seventh Day - William Blake, c. 1805

My last post got many kind comments, some nearly over the top in praise of both my writing and miracle-creating abilities. I'm so thankful for this incredibly supportive community, and while I'll admit to being a kind of comment whore, I am, most decidedly, not a holy person with a direct connection to God and miracles. I'm not sure I even believe in miracles -- other than those tiny moments of grace when despair and worry and trial lift, effortlessly, and leave peace and humor and relief in their wake. I've experienced many such moments of grace and feel it's my duty, in a way, to be open to them, to acknowledge them, to give them attribution, and while I hesitate to use the word God in these over-religious, political (as opposed to spiritual) times, I am deeply grateful to what is, apparently, an abundant universe, where divine love always balances out its opposite.

When I interfered with Sophie's seizure, I was really only practicing the advice given in one of my own bibles, a book called Epilepsy: A New Approach by Adrienne Richard and Joel Ritter, M.D. I bought this book in the late 1990s and believe there's a newer edition, but its subtitle - What Medicine Can Do, What You Can Do For Yourself explains its initial appeal to me when I was just beginning the godforsaken journey of uncontrolled seizures, when Sophie was a bitty baby, drugged out of her mind quite literally, and I began to realize that my daughter's brain was perhaps as dark a space as the heavens, before God made some order, and that it might, perhaps, be up to me to create a bit of light. That book, along with Anthony Weill's Spontaneous Healing wasn't handed over to me like tablets, but rather appeared on a pitiful shelf of books in the Alternative Medicine section of the Barnes and Noble on 86th Street in New York City. Yes, it was a moment of grace, and I'm deeply grateful to Richard, Ritter and Weill for opening my eyes and helping to set me on a path that perhaps afforded more potential to Sophie than were I to follow the traditional one.

Here's the passage:

STARTLE-AND-SHAKE

A team of researchers from the University of Utah Medical School set out to test the possibility of stopping seizures in a population of developmentally delayed schoolchildren. In almost every case, the children had no more seizures.

The method the researchers used was startle-and-shake. It requires the existence of an observable preliminary behavior: staring at a flat surface, raising the arms, a strange tone of voice, hyperactivity, and so on. The support person acts to interrupt the sequence by following these steps:

1. Shout "NO!" loudly and sharply to draw attention outward.
2. Grasp the person by the shoulders and shake him or her once. This changes the body's preseizure mode.
3. Give a little reward, a hug, an excited "You stopped it!" Offer any sort of praise or love for arresting the seizure. Let the good feeling, not candy or whatever, be the reward.

As for Oliver calling me a miracle-maker, it was said with great irony and therefore another moment of grace -- that my children can rise up and up and up and find humor even in the darkest moments is a wonder, something I am so grateful for that I'd venture to say it sustains me.

Say it's true

The secret of happiness is in your power to sacrifice and uplift others. Happiness is in giving, not in taking. God will give to you. Trust in the fact. The fact of life is that you and God are one identity. There is no place for duality.

-- Yogi Bhajan