Birth, Death and the Love in Between

I attended a brave mom in labor and witnessed the birth of her second son on Tuesday.

Our daughter and granddaughter arrived for a whirlwind (too short) visit on Wednesday.

The mother of my oldest friend lost her beloved man friend to cancer on Friday.

In the wake of our family's departure Sunday morning, we feel the variety and vulnerability life hands us.

It's been a full week.

My attitude of gratitude is overflowing.

Alive, Alive, Oh

He was completely focused and filled with grace as he ran down the hill with a shovel in his hand. Using that shovel, he smashed the driver side window and reached in to unlock the door. In one smooth move, he jumped into the car, released the emergency brake and rolled the black Caddy out of reach of the flames which were licking the passenger side already - threatening to engulf the entire car.

We’d seen the smoke while clearing the South Forty next to my mom’s hillside home in Echo Park. We were preparing the field for our up-coming April 30th wedding. Maybe someone flicked a cigarette at the bottom of the hill, but the dry spring weeds were the perfect meal for the voracious flames which fanned up the hill faster, and with more deadly power, than a speeding bullet.

The Fire Department having been called, my beloved streaked into action. My hero! Later, he would recall the feeling of being totally alive in those few moments. 

I know those moments. I’ll bet you, too, can recall a time of feeling absolutely alive - all your senses engaged, a-tingle with vitality and radiating life force. Great sex can bring on that feeling of being fully engaged, all cylinders synchronized... or maybe you’ve felt that aliveness during a performance of music, dance or theater, or maybe in an emergency or disaster you have felt “in the flow” or as if on “automatic,” doing everything exactly right. Are we not meant to feel that aliveness more often? How do we get numbed out? Is it all at once or does our life-force leak out through the holes Life pokes in us? Or, is it that we’re not challenged enough... because we’re always in climate controlled buildings or cars, have enough (or too much) food and the saber-tooth tigers are extinct? Maybe Aldous Huxley was right. In Brave New World, he suggests we should occasionaly swim in pools with mechanical sharks - just to get our adrenaline flowing.

Hearing veterans talk of their war experiences and how each would lay down his/her life for buddies, I sense their conviction is related to knowing the importance of life, and to using his/her keen sensory awareness and survival skills for a good outcome. 

There’s a brilliant scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s film, The Hurt Locker, when the newly-returned-home-Iraqi-vet is in the cereal aisle of a fluorescent-lit American super market, lined floor to ceiling with way too many choices of (non) food. The aisle is empty and eerily silent. For me, the scene evokes the huge contrast between living with all senses engaged and living in a way that seems so divorced from what is real, and so numbed out as to be unrecognizable as LIFE - more zombie-like than alive!!

“How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Par-ee?”  I think the lyrics of this WWII song refer more to the adrenaline rush that’s missing when the GIs get home than to the actual City of Lights, it’s sights, sounds and scintillating soirees. I think it’s fairly easy to become an adrenaline junkie. 

Many of my clients are survivors of some pretty harrowing traumatic impacts - from incest, abuse, medical procedures, falls, car-crashes, bullet wounds and accidental poisoning, to neglect as infants or a birth gone awry - all of which got their fight/flight/freeze responses all dressed up. Without being able to complete the actions required to slough off or use up the excess adrenaline that spikes when our body/mind perceives something as life-threatening, we’re left with that excess trapped in our muscles. The body's always going toward health; looking for a way to discharge the excess adrenaline, and to complete what it got prepared to do but got thwarted from completing. Agents of the thwart include anesthesia, seat belts, being held down, social mores and being too little to run or fight.

Unresolved trauma may show up as frozen shoulder, IBS, fibro-myalgia, migraines and other painful syndromes, anxiety, insomnia, depression, anger management problems, or lead to full-on PTSD which can color every day with intrusive thoughts, heavy-duty somatic symptoms and inexplicable behaviors. 

One of my clients was a Viet Nam vet who was in a tank when a grenade was thrown into it. Not only did it rupture his eardrums, leaving him with  many profound and troubling hearing problems, but it left him with pretty severe PTSD. His startle response was off the charts. When he first came to my yoga classes, he could tolerate only thirty seconds of Shavasana (deep relaxation pose) before going into extreme anxiety. Over time, he was able to re-learn how to relax without spiking into a full-blown hyper-adrenalized state (anxiety attack). In his office, in his place of business for over twenty years - where you’d think he would have felt safe - there were times when, if the phone rang, he’d dive under the desk. This behavior was embarrassing and hard to explain to his customers!

His behavior, actually, IS explainable.  His hyper-vigilant startle response was due to never having completed the defensive response of running toward safety. He was inside the tank with the grenade when it exploded. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t fight. His body still wanted to get the hell out of there! All his muscles were tensed and ready... forty years later! 

In addition to teaching him some yoga and self-regulation skills, I helped him to feel the impulses, however subtle, that his body was showing. The body is so smart. It knows exactly how it needs to move. We’d watch the tensing muscles and ask, “What movement is wanting to happen here?” We’d follow the body and support the completion of that move in a very slowed-down way - wringing all the juice (adrenaline) out of it.

His wife was very happy with the way Somatic Experiencing helped her husband to sleep more soundly, reduced his extreme startle reflex and made him happier, less angry and less anxious. To hear him tell it, all he knew was that the yoga helped his golf-game!

How lucky am I to have been led to a job where I can witness the incredible aliveness that is our birth right as humans? I get to hang out with some very brave folks who are coming back to themselves - beyond the numb/dumb and humdrum and into the light of their own true life-force.

How lucky am I to have married my hero at our “wedding in the weeds” in 1972! We're lucky to be alive, alive, OH!

At Seventeen

My roommate Judy and her mama Katy Cool dropped me off in Westwood at the Veteran’s Cemetery.  It was easy enough to find my father’s grave, given the “address” by the gal in the kiosk at the front of the memorial park: Section 95, Row H, Site 015.

I run my fingers over the smooth marble headstone. The noonday sun glints off the shiny flecks as I read the marker: 

Howard Wilbur Maxwell

PVT First Class

May 13, 1911 - August 6,1965

Plopping down on the grass, I’m surprised by how loud my sigh is. I look around. Not a soul to be seen, and not a bad view. All around is green interrupted only by row after straight row of white head stones. I like the view to the north, which is the way Dad’s and thousands of other soldier’s markers are facing. The looming Santa Monica Mountains are comforting - dark and cool aginst this hazy summer glare. 

Since my brother Mel and I chose not to attend the small memorial service last year, this day feels like my first opportunity to find some sort of closure around my dad’s death.

When he died, there was so much hatred between Mel and me and Howard’s ex-wife Eugenie, that we feared Mel might have murdered her right there, on the spot, at the service... so we didn’t go. She had burned all of Dad’s things - including his films of us as kids and his full set of Edward Weston contact prints signed by the now famous photographer. It’s amazing how badly drunks act when they’re angry. Our dad and Eugenie were both drunks.

I remember during the spring semester of my eleventh grade year of high school, visiting Dad, who was dying of cancer of the everything, in Long Beach Veteran’s Hospital three times a week - driving surface streets to get there because my mom wouldn’t yet let me drive freeways.

As I sit here on the grass, imagining his body laid out in the coffin below me, I lean into the cool marble and review his dying process, his tobacco stained fingers so yellow against the white sheets, marveling that, although he was in a coma, there was no way we could have known whether he was in agony or ecstasy inside his mind. 

I’m in a surreal state when I get up and leave the cemetery. My cheeks are wet; my throat is dry. Walking south on Veteran Avenue, the rhythmic slap, slap of my red Keds on the sidewalk soon brings me back to myself and I feel the heat of the day pinking up my cheeks and pooling sweat under my shirt at the waist band of my blue jeans.

At Wilshire, I go east and just keep walking. I have no intention of not getting on the bus to ride back to the apartment I share with Judy near LACC, but I just can’t sit still at any of the bus stops, so I keep walking. Where the split with Santa Monica comes up, I follow it. Now I’m in Beverly Hills and there’s a wide swath of green belt on the north side of the boulevard - with fountains, flower beds, swings and a jungle gym. I steer toward a drinking fountain. Looking up, I see two young children hurrying toward me. He’s ten-ish; she’s eight-ish and they’re both blond. He’s carrying what looks like a Kleenex box. I see very few people around - except for those whizzing by in cars.

“Look what we found!” he says in a Russian accent. It IS a Kleenex box, but inside are a wallet, a car key and a knife. 

“Wow,” I say. “Where?” 

“In car over dere.” the boy gestures across the busy boulevard, with both hands still holding the box. “What we do?”

“Will you show me where you found these?”

“Yah! Sure!!” and they run toward the crosswalk.

This looks like an accident site, where a car has struck a tree behind a wall almost completely obscured by great Oleander bushes. The black car is covered with white and red blossoms. Now, we are too. It has come to rest very near the railroad tracks that criss cross this area where Wilshire and Santa Monica criss cross one another. There is nothing I can discern here. There are no signs of violence or vandalism, no skid marks on the dirt. Only an empty car - totally empty - with a small dent on the bumper where the tree impeded its progress. Even the back seat and trunk are empty.

“Did you find anything else here? When did you find it? Where are your parents? Where do you live?”

Anya and Petrach fill in the blanks. They live in an apartment on the other side of this cinderblock wall. No one is home for them.

I remember the urgency of solving mysteries from my own childhood. These young ones have made a discovery in an adult world. They have found something significant and mysterious. There are three one-dollar-bills in the wallet, but nothing else. The key is unremarkable - other than it fits the ignition and the trunk. The knife is a switch-blade with a pearl handle. The kids say that the knife was on the floor of the car. I look around to get my bearings and remember that there is a BH Police Station a few blocks away. I don’t want these kids to get hurt. We lock the car.

“Let’s see if the police can help.”

Their eyes go wide.

“Maybe someone has lost these things and wants them back,” I suggest.

We walk. The boy, at his sister’s insistence, allows her to hold the box. She gets a couple inches taller and her smile broadens.

“Here we are,” I hold open the glass door to the station waiting room. Approaching the desk, I tell the officer behind the glass what the children have found and where. Without really looking at them, he holds out his hand - to take the treasures from Anya. She’s short of being able to reach. Petrach hands up the box to the hovering hand visible to them above the edge of the high glass-enclosed counter.

“Mmmm... Chevy key. Empty wallet. Bowie knife.” He catalogs the items on a form and puts them in a large manilla envelope. He hands the three dollars into Petrach’s hand. “Here’s a reward for helping out.” The officer stands and looks down to see Anya and thrusts his arm out far enough to shake hands with both children through the slot at the bottom of his window. “I’ll send a squad car to check out the site of the accident. You did the right thing. Thank you.” 

The children are beaming. I walk them back to their block. When we get there, Petrach pulls one of the dollar bills from his pocket and earnestly holds it out to me. “Here. You help us do right thing. Thank you.” 

Taking the paper bill, I reach into my shoulder bag and find four quarters. “Here. YOU are the heroes. Fifty cents for you and fifty cents for you. Now, you each have $1.50.” 

I put the change in each sweaty palm. Their smiles are my reward.

Waving ‘til I’m out of sight, I hear their “Thank you, Lady!” as I turn east again onto Santa Monica. 

My need to integrate the day’s events makes me walk all the way home. I arrive about 8:30. It’s nearly dark. When I take off my Keds, I see that my feet are bloody. A year later, I will drive my ’54 Chevy along my route and discover that I walked seventeen miles at seventeen.

Catch a Falling Star...

Did you see it? Did you SEEEE any of the meteor shower brought to us by the tail of  the Swift-Tuttle Comet? Hearing earlier in the day Saturday that the Perseids would be visible over our fair city, I made a plan to take a look.

A house guest, Elle, and I decided to watch from yoga blankets on the patio. I saw what turned out to be the BEST of the bunch of small streaks across the sky within the first five minutes of watching. It was huge and arcing from zenith toward the southwest corner of my visible piece of sky. Just as in the Christmas Carol, “Do You See What I See?,” this shooting star had a “tail as big as a kite!” Wide, colorful and the slowest of the bunch to burn out and dissipate in the overly bright night sky, it was truly breath-taking. I took a breath in and after a long while exhaled a satisfied, “WOW!!” At that point, I was alone outside in the back yard and yelled into the house, “I SAW one!” My beloved let out with a muffled, exhausted and distracted, “Mmmmm....” Elle came out a few minutes later. Truly, I DID see it! Shortly before eleven P.M. Anybody else witness it?

Trouble with trying to see anything in Los Angeles’ night sky is that the throbbing life of this luminescent metropolis outshines the subtle more delicate radiance of celestial bodies in motion. Something so self-important about that - insinuating ourselves into the spectrum of visible light with our gaudy neon and comforting incandescents.  

The last time I remember seeing stars with any clarity in the city was just after the 1994 Northridge Quake when the electricity went out for a few days. Our family and two others slept out in our back yard because the aftershocks were just too shocking after the initial temblor knocked us all around. Our friends’ homes were in pretty bad shape, so they came to us - where the damage was only cosmetic (including the earring that Marvin Gardens the Golden Retriever ate while we were sleeping on the the grass) - and we were having fun camping out.

This past Saturday evening, Elle and I tried to coax another great show out of the sky by singing, “Good Morning Star Shine” from the musical Hair and eventually devolving into Mozart’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Perhaps Mozart should never be considered a devolution, but that melody has been associated with the nursery school crowd in the last fifty years or so, and our culture takes it for “elementary.”  Elle and I settled on sounding, “Uuuuuuu” on C sharp, which, as everyone knows, is the preferred frequency of ET beings - multitudes of whom, at any given moment, are circling the globe. Did you know that? Neither did I! Survey says...

I awoke at 4:56 a.m. Sunday with a familiar need and decided, while I was up, to look again, as the best viewing was said to be just before dawn on the twelfth. I took the yoga blankets up on the roof - easy access through the bathroom window - and lay down at a perfect angle to see the eastern sky. There, above the huge pine, I saw the prettiest configuration of Jupiter, the crescent moon and Venus

(photo by Matthew Henderson of Perseids 

over Lake Berryessa, California)

                       

I saw seven “shooting stars” in thirty minutes and a small and rapid satellite in its orbit. How refreshing to revel in my insignificance in this grand cosmos. I love feeling this perspective... that I’m only a small bit of matter on a splendid planet spinning through a quadrant of a medium sized galaxy of the Universe (or is it a Multi-verse this week?), quite willing to suspend disbelief and hold onto the idea that there’s rhyme and reason to this whole She-BANG! 

I sang softly to myself a song I wrote in 1996 while watching the constellation of Orion rising over the coastal mountains on my way back from Santa Barbara:

Orion, wear your triple-star-belt, and stride across the sky

Teach me of humility and pride. Seeking balance am I.

Time-out-of-mind, you died for love when a scorpion stung your heel

Artemis punished you for your pride... Humble Pie your last meal

Artemis guarded the young and small; your job to hunt and kill

You piled high the bodies of her critters dear to show the goddess your skill

Artemis wailed, despaired then turned and caused that scorpion to strike

Hubris your crime, not merely pride... she flung your bones to the sky.

When I look up and see you there, the stars on your belt count to three

Betwixt groveling and hubris - appropriate pride...  seeking balance am I

Orion, wear your triple-star-belt and stride across the sky...

To share my excitement about the Persied event, log on to science@nasa.gov

To view the event in person, put on some long sleeves or herbal insect repellent and go outside about four a.m. Monday or Tuesday...

See ya, sky-watchers! YOU are a STAR!!

Blue Moon Target Practice

Did you SEE that Full Moon last Thursday? The second day of August is Lughnassadh on the Celtic Calendar, and it is the cross-quarter Celebration of the Harvest (between Summer Solstice and Autumnal Equinox). What a Harvest Moon it was! There’ll be another August 31.  The second of two full moons within the same month or the third in a season is called a “Blue Moon!” I wonder why.

A few days before the full moon is the perfect time to rid ourselves of what’s no longer needed. In the garden it’s a time for weeding out. Ditto the closets, drawers, storage units, garage... even the mind clutter can be hacked away to good advantage during that window just before the full moon.

Not sure exactly HOW to make a dent in the mind clutter... other than diligent meditation practice... but that’s an on-going project, not a once-a-month-endeavor. I missed doing any real “clean out” last Thursday, so I’m glad to have another opportunity at the end of the month! Just setting the intention to diminish what’s not serving us may set the ball rolling. As the moon wanes, it’s said to take into the darkness with it, all we release with intention. Some folks write down what they want to be rid of and burn the paper!

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Sunday evening, I delighted in celebrating some birthdays of Buddies from Belmont High School. We were eight gals who gathered and pot-lucked and shared the bounty of our personal harvests since the last time we were together. Swimming, BBQing salmon and sweet corn, story-telling, eating way too much and waaay too many sweet things. At least I know WHAT I’ll be releasing to the waning moon about August 29! My sugar craving has got to GO!

I am developing more compassion for those I love who suffer from some sort of addiction - including myself. Addiction is as strong a force as the tides, magnetism or true love, only it is a false love and leaves us crippled; less whole and ravaged in the wake of its grip. I awoke Monday morning with aches and stiffness completely avoidable... except that the damn brownies and peach pie and (even gluten-free) cookies that my thoughtful friend brought to the feast tasted so GOOOD!

While walking one of my guests out to her car we chatted about the compulsion to buy STUFF and how it comes up when we’re feeling “empty” inside. Compulsions, addictions and habits that numb us against the angst and pain life deals us are perfect projectiles for lobbing at the full moon. I think I’ll imagine a bullseye on it and pray for accuracy and that the moon fulfills the promise of taking away my weakness as it ebbs.

Cant’ wait for August 29!

Meanwhile... back to mindfulness. One moment at a time.