melancholy in the desert.
remembering mama barbara this mother’s day - my first in 63 years without her.
lucky me, to have had her a good long time.
my life has been settled back into my own hands.
i am free to decide what i want for myself, what i want to do with my remaining years
including where and with whom i want to live.
here at shakti fest in joshua tree i have an epiphany under the owl tree. i’d like to tell you about it.
last year this same luminous pine housed four owls. maybe owl was my mama’s totem animal. she had quite the collection. you know, perhaps, the experience of inadvertent collections? someone gets you an owl. dutifully, you display it in your surround. a visitor sees it and surmises you like owls, so next occasion gets you another, and so it goes.
mom had owl paintings, pins, sculptures and scarves.
so, in an effort to connect with the spirit of my mama, who may or may not have loved owls, i sit under this owl tree on a rock ledge - in the posture of an ancient egyptian hieroglyph - with my hips higher than my knees - nearly standing - and feet in the sand. my back is erect.
i’m contemplating a teaching i steeped in this morning about shruddah - the sanskrit word for 'faith' that really means where we place our foundation. i take it quite literally. where do i place my butt - my physical foundation? here i am at the base of this great tree that gave me some juice -or at least entertainment in the form of owls last year.
the contemplation leads me to muse what do i want to do with the rest of my life, now that i’m not bound to take care of my mama who died in february?
it feels as if i’m waiting for the bus. the bus carries all of us out of this life into the great unknown. the bench is populated by persons of every age - new-borns to centenarians - as well as every color, nationality, custom, belief, gender, and status. in short, every human in the whole world is sitting on a bus bench somewhere - waiting. when it comes right down to it, perhaps the only free will we have is to choose where we put our butts - our foundation. what do we have faith in?
i flash to a recent time of playing a game with my soon to be three-year-old granddaughter. we like to sit on her mama’s exercise bench with our backs against the wall and read the paper while we ‘wait for the bus.’
here, under the owl tree i do some grief work. after some belly gripping sobs borne of just recently being made a “motherless child,” because my mama’s bus came for her, my eyes look up from writing my thoughts to behold a lone chair sitting in the middle of the dry river bed directly in front of me, about a short city block away.
how utterly absurd! who would want to wait for the bus there where water hasn’t flowed for who knows how long? that chair, that bus bench is saturated with desert heat - sun bleached white fabric with faded red flowers. basic lawn chair with skinny black arms and legs just there where some person sat for some purpose i do not know.
blessed owl tree in whose shade i sit, please give me some wisdom.
waiting for the bus at the bottom of a lifeless riverbed - thinking it a prime plot of foundational real estate - would not be my first choice.
the absurdity of that chair gives me giggles which become gales of laughter flowing like fresh water, welcomed after salt tears.
contemplating further, i realize some advantages to the metaphor of the desert scape. there is something so primal, direct and bare-bones essential about it. life that can sustain itself with so little nourishment is life which inspires. if such beauty as these joshua trees, ocotillos and blossoming nopales cacti can be born of such dearth, then what the hell is my problem?
perhaps it is only a problem of perspective. i have to go sit in the chair - let my butt “sit a mile” in its moccasins.
aah, it is soft and enveloping - the mammy’s lap. I can melt, reassured. all will be well. earlier this day i could find no comfortable place for myself. my bony butt was sore from sitting on overly hard surfaces for too long a stretch of time. this chair is so different from my yoga correct-filled-with- striving-to-be-loved for following protocol and custom and what everyone else wants. i’m in want of nurturing. this chair is the prescription. i slouch into its comforting softness.
i sit and feel the heat bake and bleach me. i see why someone placed it precisely here. there is a notch in the distant trees where the sunset can be viewed to best advantage. still, it strikes me as a funny piece of real estate for a bus bench to wait out the end of one’s life. laughter feels wonderful.
my mother’s death does not come empty handed. the gift held out to me is an invitation to do my own heart’s bidding, for no other reason but for the LOVE of doing whatever i want to do.
the epiphany is that i get to place my foundation where ever it pleases me. the challenge is to decide which parcel of real estate is just right for my butt... or, to put it more delicately, what do i really and truly want to do??? the answer(s) will come.
