Soaring With Sore Abs

Like a Phoenix I am rising on the wing

Up from the ashes hear me sing

Like a Phoenix I am rising on the wings of love

Soaring through the heavens high above.

The birds I see here in Petaluma are mostly Turkey Vultures which are deemed ugly by our cutesy Tweety Bird-loving culture. Back-lit by a brilliant sun they appear graceful enough and are so large they cast large shadows over the landscape. This week, while attending a workshop on Memory and Emotion in this pastoral setting, I feel the impulse to duck when a Turkey Vulture temporarily blocks the sun. It’s as if the sky is falling.

They have naked faces - designed to plunge into dead animals without getting all the icky sticky blood and sinew clinging to them. That would be really unsightly. So they have these unsettlingly bald faces - a little like orange Teflon or basketball leather. If they were cartoons the artist would draw them with gawky necks and large adam’s apples. I shudder and try not to look at their faces, but rather remember that they have an important scavenging job to do to clean up the landscape.

I enjoy watching how the very ends of their wing tips curve upward like five human fingers as they navigate the wind currents. They have made an impression on me because Friday night I dreamed I was flying. In the dream, I’m a huge bird - soaring over green rolling hills dotted with grand old oaks. Another bird is beside me and our wing tips are giving gentle five-finger traction to one another. Solid. Good support.

Flying is not a regular feature of my dream life, so when it happens I welcome it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Part of me is ready to get on with life and the task of reclaiming and rededicating our home to our purpose. Another part of me is still wrestling with grief attendant to Mama Barbara’s death and the absence of her beloved care-giver Ellen, who moved out a month ago. April First will mark two months since Mom breathed her last while we, her family, sang to her. The house feels very empty. Mark and I have lots to talk about regarding our next steps. 

Grief is a bit like molasses or like being under water. I feel as if I’m moving very very slowly and carrying around lead weights on all my limbs.

The flying dream portends new stirrings and new possibilities. 

I look forward to lightening up in every way possible.

Leaning into the support of a colleague, Mary G. of NYC to do a session of grief work during lunch time yesterday was a good next step. There’s something about just being held (met and listened to and literally held in the arms of another human) while I cry. Sobbing and laughing are both really good for the abs! I'm a little bit sore today from yesterday's grief work-out! Sorrow and joy seem so close. I cried ‘til I laughed and vice versa. Mary’s sage advice was just to slow it all down. Truly, it seems to be the best way to get the most juice out of this healing time... slow it down and go with the flow.

Like a Phoenix... I’ll keep rising on the wing

Up from the ashes you’ll hear me sing

Like a Phoenix I am rising on the wings of love

Soaring through the heavens high above.

... and with strong abs to boot!

Makes Scents to Me!

There’s no question that my hearing is not what it used to be. Sometimes it’s funny when I repeat back to the person who is speaking to me what I thought I heard.

In late December, just before my husband’s January third birthday, I heard my daughter say to me on the phone, “Mom, they have black beans with pesto.” I was cooking at the time and somewhat hungry, so, what she said made sense to me. I asked her, “Where do they have black beans with pesto, dear?”

When she stopped laughing, she said, “NO, MOM! They have BLACK JEANS at COSTCO... the kind Dad wants for his birthday!”

“Oh.”

So, when I was listening to the radio and heard a discussion of a local “SMELLING BEE”, I knew it was a SPELLING BEE but began a whole riff in my mind of what it would be like to have competitions to identify smells. The idea of a smell-off appeals to me in part because, even though my hearing is going, I still have a really good sniffer. 

It used to drive my college roommate crazy when I’d complain about the garlic wafting into our small bathroom through the medicine cabinet that was back to back with the medicine cabinet in the apartment next door. She couldn’t smell it. In fact, Judy suffered from anosmia and couldn’t tell the difference between lemon pledge and chocolate cake. I told her it was because her “ol’factories” were on strike.

When I taught nursery school, I assembled a “Sniff-kit” of film cans filled with different scents for the children to identify without looking. There were lemon peel, orange peel, chocolate, vanilla bean, mint leaves, cinnamon, garlic, onion, Eucalyptus oil and ground coffee among other substances.  Kids do pretty well on these “ID the Aroma” challenges. 

Why couldn’t we have local competitions to see who had the most discerning nose? A Smelling Bee might be perfect to boost inclusivity because it does not take physical prowess, hearing or sight.

There was a child who fell through the cracks at my children’s elementary school. Jono had an undiagnosed hearing loss. He wasn’t getting anywhere near the amount of instruction the other kids were. Years later, it was so gratifying to hear that he had found his niche as a taste chef at an exclusive restaurant outside Seattle. He has a rare talent: He can identify and make changes in the taste of food quite elegantly. The popularity of the restaurant is a testament to his gift.

The olfactory nerves are the only ones that take their message directly into the brain. All other senses have long circuitous routes to travel, while branches of the olfactory protrude directly out of the brain through the cribiform plate of the ethmoid bone directly behind the bridge of the nose and into the upper most parts of the nasal passages. Think of a flat plate with nerve fibers hanging down through the tiny holes. Smell is immediate.

Have you had a scent bring on a whole gestalt of remembered experience? Bread from the oven, perhaps, may trigger a childhood memory of being in your grandmother’s kitchen. The smell of new mown hay may bring back an entire summer spent on a farm.

Scent can have many primal and emotional connections. Our noses have the capacity to discern information way off the usual radar screen of sight or hearing. We can smell fear. I remember the early morning hours of January 17, 1994 when the Northridge Quake brought all four of our family members, one over-night guest and the two dogs together in the hall way and the wreak of adrenaline our dogs brought to the party. Whewh!

Evidently, men can smell when a woman is ovulating or on her menses, providing she has not masked all the biologically imperative pheromones with cologne. I wonder if we’re pissing in the gene pool (my husband's line) by ignoring (masking) important information about potential mates whose DNA may or may not be suitable to mix with our own DNA.

Chemistry is a funny thing. Is it love or is it Channel No. 5 or Axe Cologne? 

Just wondering.

The Nose Knows! We had a dog named "Marvin Gardens" who could find a rock UNDERWATER at the Little Sur River when we camped there one summer. We’d show him the rock, throw it and he’d put his head under the water for several seconds and come up with that very same rock! Now that’s some ethmoid bone/cribiform plate/olfactory precision, eh?

Empty

Sunday Night

Empty House

Blog Night

Empty Head

Empty Garage, Empty Mom Room, Empty Ellen Room, Empty dressers, closets, pantry where the special Mom & Ellen food used to live.

Sunday Night

Full heart

Blog Night

Full head.

Full of too many thoughts to write about how the shadow of death brings into dull ache and sharp contrast - all the deep and petty, shallow but pretty images of how humans love one another. I love(d) my mother. She’s dead

I love my honey. He’s so alive.

Mark’s the anchor as my ship sloshes and turns, a tear splashes and burns... I stall out and sputter to start-up again. 

Take down the condolence cards. Writing thank-you notes feels too hard.

Financial T’s to cross and I’s to dot... the survey from the mortuary is at the bottom of the pile. Do they really  need to know they were fine during the selection process (Mom did all the work back in 1968!)... right through the cremation... up until the time when the actual service began  on February 26 and we discovered the sound system wasn’t working? The folks in the SRO back rows couldn’t hear - until... UNTIL... UNTILLLLL... they figured out they had to plug in the microphone. Go figure.

Perhaps I should simply direct them to my blog so they can know and I don’t have to bother with the form and X-ing all the Xs, crossing all the teas and dotting all the eyes.

Word play is fun. So is my hon. 

Gotta run.

Ta Ta fun-now.

It's Oak With Me

My bare feet remember how prickly oak leaves feel to walk on, but my eyes perceive fluffy Persian cat fur softness in the stately and serene specimen of Oak tree at the bottom of the ravine. 

From my vantage point, squatting on a grassy knoll that is rabbit’s territory, the oak looks as if it would feel so good to embrace if I had similar leaf-fur. We’d be like two cozy oak cats snuzzling together or maybe like two fluffy bunnies.

This largest of the oaks before me is solid, symmetrical and silent. All the others down there are dancing in the buffeting bluster. 

I sit between, hopefully not on bunny poops, feeling the wind whip my hair while the sun warms my black coat on this just post-rain chilly-wind afternoon in the hills above Petaluma. I have found this quiet place to let my tears flow into Mother Earth. I am sad and I don’t want to be among people right now.

Observing the trees, I realize the very hill I’m sitting on blocks the wind from hitting directly that majestic, magnificent oak. Similarly, the whole pastoral scene blocks the winds of grief that currently threaten to blow me away - or at least make me dance to their tune. Resisting these winds is futile and exhausting. I’m learning to bend rather than snap. Allowing my feelings to arise and flow in such a beautiful and nurturing surround, is sweet, easier than being with people and fitting. 

My mama Barbara loved the out-of-doors. She taught me botanical Latin for all the plant brothers she knew by name. We earthlings have a large family of brother, sister and cousin trees, bushes, grasses and flowers. I’m happy to know many of them by name - even though, when I was in Junior High School I couldn’t STAND that my mother’s language was so flowery compared to that of other mothers. The fact that she was so smart and educated was a source of embarrassment because it made her different. Goddess forbid I should be different from all the Cindys and Susies and Tammys in my school. In fact, that’s why I changed my name from Melinda to “Mindy” from seventh through twelfth grade - to fit in. 

No longer worried about being different, I now use my birth name and celebrate the knowledge my mama passed on to me. I miss her. It’s OK to feel the sorrowful tears falling onto the ground-cover whose name I do not know.

After several minutes of full-on shoulder-shaking sobs, I feel relieved, lighter and grateful.

In the ravine the big tree ruffles. As if embarrassed by being caught off-guard by a cross wind, it quickly stills again. 

We nod to one another in recognition. I feel gratitude for the silence. Gratitude for the wind song. Gratitude for my tree brother. 

Along comes a rabbit criss-crossing the hill. Perhaps she’s skittish of the big black-coated blob hunkered down in her dining room.

Along comes a deer. With the most ungainly and graceless plop she curls her legs under her and sits down so that only her head and back are visible above the deeper grass in the ravine.

Rabbit and deer pay me no mind.

This is what I long for. Being part of the flow - not impeding or deterring it - but rather just IN the flow of life all around me.

The timing of this worksop I’m assisting in Petaluma is awkward in that it came up so quickly after Barbara’s memorial service. I miss my family. I miss my Mark. I miss home. The blessing is that IONS, where the workshop is being held, is such a beautiful place. I’m leaning into the natural world and it holds me. Room mate Shel has been a wonderful holder of space for me too. One morning, driving the 45 minute distance from her friend’s house where we’re staying to the workshop space, I cried at virtually every thing I saw... sheep, wild turkeys, mama cows with their calves, and raptors riding the currents. We laughed a lot between the waves of my sobbing.

Like Arnold Lobel’s book Owl At Home I am as content with my portion of Tear Water Tea as Owl was. Even if it is a little salty, tear water tea is always very good.

I gather myself and bid goodbye to the deer, the oak and the hill and find my way back to being with people again and to the work I came here to support - students of Somatic Experiencing learning to facilitate their clients’ renegotiation of traumas.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if all earth’s children had access to her wild beauty, clean water and  learning how to resolve their difficulties? We might feel as rooted as the oak in the ravine - able to bend in the breeze without losing ground.