Ancient Love

“Gra’Moose, could you tell me another story that you know?”

“Could you sing me another song... what OTHER songs do you know, Gra'Moose?”

It’s 9:30. Mama says Miss D generally gets to sleep by nine. Maybe it’s the chocolate Paleo brownie with nut milk whipped cream which mama prepared for all of us to enjoy for my 'early birthday' before going off to her book club. Maybe it’s missing mama. My three year old granddaughter shows no signs of winding down. We've already talked about Wynken and Blynken and Nod, which my Grammy used to sing to me. 

She asks, "Did your Grammy die after Bubelah?" 

"No, I say, "She died a long time before Bubelah died and she lived to be almost a hundred years old!"

"Rip Van WinkIe fell asleep and slept for a hundred years," she confides earnestly. "Could you tell me that story, Ga'Moose?"

"I don't know that story very well, D." 

"He fell asleep and he grew a really really long beard." She crinkles her nose and lifts her upper lip revealing perfect pearls.

I memorize the moment, etching her astonishing beauty on my retina.

I haven’t really run out of songs and stories, but we've read two, quietly looked at four more library books, made up three tales- one each of  girl, a princess and a butterfly and sung countless songs. She's told me one story - incorporating many details of the ones I told her and the purple flowers from Lilly's Big Day - the first book we read tonight. Also, I’m exhausted from the weekend at a Pediatric Brain Tumor camp and have set the task of blogging tonight and, much as I would LOVE to stay up all night talking and sharing songs and swapping stories with her, I know she has school tomorrow morning.

I resort to Ujjayi breathing, suggesting we make the sound of the wind together.

Eventually, Miss D does close her eyes and begins breathing deeply and evenly.

Watching her pat the purple downy-soft fur of the gorilla she’s hugging to her chest in a self-soothing ritual, and seeing her touch her own silken fingers so close to my nose, as she settles in - finally - for sleep, is utterly fascinating to me. How could I be so lucky as to share in this miracle of listening to her soft breathing, feeling the rhythmic kneading of her toes against my shin, and smelling the fragrance of warm dreams rising in her head? 

I must’ve stepped in the biggest pile of dog poop in another life to deserve so much delight this time around.

Great Spirit... I thank ye and ask ye to keep her safe from big ugly nasties and things that go bump in the night.

Of Leap Frog and Heart Blessing...

Petaluma is a lovely place to spend eight days working. The Earthrise retreat center at The Institute of Noetic Sciences sprawls on ooodles of acres of oak-tree studded rolling hills. The sheep I mentioned last blog made a big impression on me and on all the students and assistants at this final leg of a three year training program. The drive home afforded me that "doodly-doo" time to think and noodle with ideas. I jotted some of them down while driving. Maybe next time I'll use a hand-held device to record thoughts rather than try to write 'em! We'll all be safer for that!

To the anonymous drivers on the freeway: 

Nice playing leap frog with you down the FIVE - 

skirting around the Big Boy Tonka Trucks 

who lumber along behind one another

like elephants holding one another's tails. 

You, the green Lexus SUV, 

we've played do-si-do a dozen times in the past two hours - 

not once nodding in recognition that it IS all a game.... 

yet there's comfort in the familiar and this truth is stranger than friction on the road 

where tires worn thin by miles of black stone and tar shred and shed their skin with a BANG!  

leaving behind their hide for others to avoid rolling over

and catapulting into the air like heavy black crows

and, though I'm hungry for something to munch, 

I don't dare stop for lunch on the hunch that the truck 

that's full to the brim with garlic and seems to be 

the slowest moving elephant of all,

will catch and pass me and I'll have to pass it all over again... 

plus I'd miss trading glances with the Lexus Lady and comparing my vanilla white Escape SUV 

with her greenie sexy Lexy 

yes, indeedy...

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

“Bless your Heart” is a phrase I picked up from Dr. Nelson in 1995. Saying it to people I meet steeps me again in the warmth of his slow and expansive manner. He made quite an impression on me during a three week intensive yoga teacher’s training. He was 82 at the time, and I 47.  He was learning yoga for himself - to straighten out his body and immerse himself in the divine through meditation.

He told me the history of how he came to be the first African American dentist admitted to the New York Associaion of Dentists - back in the day. One lunch hour, he entrusted me with the task of removing his extensions which were long white and black braids woven into his own black and white hair. He felt light-headed once they were removed. It was odd tossing it all in the trash as he asked me to do. I thought it could've used a ceremony.

His southern drawl fell cozy on my ears like a warm shawl on an October evening, so I have often wanted to share that cozy comfy feeling with my circle of familiars periodically over the intervening 17 years. I have said, in an admiring tone, to someone who has just innumerated to me her various volunteering venues, “Well, Bless your Heart!” I always mean to conjur that all-accepting, warmth-exuding true appreciation that Dr. Nelson’s exclamation carried. I realize it has truly become one of my favorite phrases.

Imagine my slow to build laugh when, the last night of my work week in Petaluma, I witnessed a skit which was part of the culmination of the three year Somatic Experiencing training which I’ve been assisting this year. At Stage Night, a Southern Belle of a certain age explained that very self-same vernacular expression as she gave us a tour of Southern Bell Speak - which is similar to Valley Girl Speak - only with fewer “like”s and fewer “you know”s and a lot more batting of eye-lashes. 

“When I want to say to someone,” she elaborated, “‘Well, ain’t you just wearing the sh-t ugliest dress!’ I simply bat my eyelashes and say, ‘Well, Bless Your Heart!’  Or, if I want to say,  ‘F--K off’, I say, ‘Well, Bless Your Heart!’”

Driving home, I wondered out loud if Dr. Nelson was using this sweet phrase to convey a big ol’ F--- Off! to everyone he met. I laughed and blushed at the thought. I doubt it, because he said it almost as much as he said ‘Namaste,’ and he was such a polite and gentle man. Namaste, roughly translated from Sanskrit, means: 

I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of love, of truth, of light, and of peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one.

Butter my butt and call me a bisquit! Ya learn something new every day! (I learned this one from the Southern Belle... NOT Dr. Nelson!)

Namaste to aaaall y'all! and Bless Your Heart... Dr. Nelson style.

Baaa, Baaa, Baaa

Tonight, the coyote’s call makes my hair stand on end. Their laugh is inocuous enough, as a vague concept, somewhere out there on the hillsides. But I’ve grown fond of these little lambs and their family units traveling as a community of ecological lawn-mowers - munching down the hillsides of this retreat center where I’m staying in Petaluma.

Earlier today, at lunch time, I walked by the flock and noted one sheep had a wound - like an open gash on its flank. I wondered if it had had a too close encounter of the tree kind. Hearing the coyote’s yip yip at midnight and linking it with that visual of torn sheep flesh, gives me the heeby jeebies.

In our workshop assistant’s meeting Saturday morning I heard that one of the students  was particularly tuned in to how different one lamb’s bleat sounded from the others. Following her ears and intuition she found the little one trapped in the fencing and terribly dehydrated. The mother had gone in a different direction. Another lamb nearby was dead of dehydration. She picked up and carried to the caretaker the living lamb and one other who was in trouble. Cindy saved two lost lambs! There’s an upwelling of tears through my core at the thought of lambs lost and lambs found... and saved from the brink.

These third year students of Somatic Experiencing are doing such profound work with one another around resolving trauma, that I am moved to tears several times a day - just to witness the depth of grief, terror and rage we humans can endure, embody and process - with enough awareness and enough safety. To know that we have the equal and opposite capacity to soar to spiritual heights of ecstasy is cause for hope.

Lost lambs coming home.

This is one of the songs my mom used to play on the piano and sing all the lyrics in her rich alto. It’s by Cole Porter.

We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way, baaa baaa baaa

We’re little black sheep who have gone astray baaa, baaa, baaa

Gentlemen songsters off on a spree doomed from here to eternity. 

Lord, have mercy on such as we, Baaaa Baaaa Baaaa

Punning for your Life

“For my next trick...” thought the three year old grand-darling, “I’ll single-handedly wrap three adoring adults around my little pinky finger, by saying something so disarmingly cute, yet still in keeping with the genetic imprint of obligatory punning that they’ll know they are MINE... and I am theirs!”

And so she did... with this line: “Gran’Pun and Gra’Moose, I really like being here with you in this ‘Ja-COZY.’”

“TA-DAAA!!”

(Sounds of one mother and two grand-parental-units melting and slooshing down the drain of the hot-tub.) 

“My dada has a JaCozy too,” she reminds us, “only his is smaller.”

Which leads me to remember the pun-run between mother (who reported this to me) and daughter while riding in the car... 

D: “Mama, I like this lollipop!”

M: “If it was doggy flavored, it could be a ‘lolli-pup!’”

D: “And if it was DaDa flavored, it could be a ‘lolli-papa!’”

OY! My cheeks are hurting from smiling too much. I hear my mother-in-law, (may she rest in peace), saying, “Oy! I LOVE it!” I see her biting the heel of her own hand because we won’t let her bite our children’s tuschies. Were she alive today, we’d have to hide her amazing great-grand daughter D, so Freidabel, affectionatley known as ‘Mama Freddy’ or ‘GranMa Frimmit’, wouldn’t bite D’s perfect tuschie!

Our list of ancestral PUN-tificators is long. My step-dad asked, "What kind of a nut is this?" 

"Cashew." 

"Gesundheidt!"

At just two, our younger daughter took her thumb out of her mouth long enough to hold her father’s earlobe and tell him, “Daddy, you’re EAR-resistable.”

Of course, her father’s name at camp is “Pun” and he gave me my nick name, “Moose”, because I’m too big to call ‘deer.’

Most often our family’s humor is used to fortify the bonds - that feeling of belonging and having something in common. It’s an easy opener when we’ve been parted from one another’s company for a long time. It’s a way of picking-up where we left off. Sometimes, under stress, our humor is an attempt to stay just a half-step ahead of despair or other yucky feelings. 

Laughter is a very high-toned emotional discharge. It’s very warm. For me it’s easier to laugh than to get angry. I laugh a lot... and discharge the heat quickly, instead of doing a slow burn.

Hearing things out of the corner of my ear, sometimes makes for some comical interpretations of reality. I may have written in a previous blog of my mistaking what my older daughter said to me in a phone conversation earlier this year - just before my husband’s birthday. I knew he wanted some special trousers and she had seen them at a store. When she called, I was cooking and had the phone cradled on my shoulder. What I heard her say was, “Mom there’s BKACK BEANS with PESTO.”

“Oh, sounds good... where, dear?” was my distracted reply.

“What?”

“Where do they have Black Beans with Pesto,” I asked.

I had to hold the phone away from my ear because her laughter was ear drum splitingly loud.

“No, mom... They have black JEANS at COSTCO!!”

It’s all good. We miss the children when they’re out of sight, cherish every moment we have with them and savor the sweet memories of visits past.

May you savor every moment of this Labor Day and the entire month of September. 

Enjoy the Equinox... On September 22, try balancing a raw egg (in the shell) on its end. S’posed to be able to do that at both vernal and autumnal equinoxes... when the days are EGG-zactly as long as the nights...