The Letter

She’s the last sentient, salient speaker of my parent’s generation left in my circle of kin. She’s 87 and dying of liver cancer ~ as her husband, my Uncle Bob, died 30 years ago. What do I want to know before she goes? What stories can possibly soothe my incessant enquirer? What keys do I think she has to understanding my father and mother and brother before I was born?

What I really want to say is: 

Dear Auntie Nora, 

Stick around and tell me all I want to know!! They’re all gone but you. Mom’s still alive but cannot speak, damn the stroke eight years ago!

Dad’s gone since 1965, Bob since 1978. Poor Brother Mel has been inebriated or otherwise absent since he was ten in 1952.

Everything is in divine right order for Uncle Larry, mom’s brother and he would never dare to rumple the surface of his Lake Placid of emotions. His wife, my aunt Mickey, lost her mind over the decades, little bit by little bit. As her teeth dropped out one by one, so did her ability to think, remember or make any sense.

So, how’re we going to sneak in some conversations here, dear, while you still move teacup from saucer to lips; while you still rub your forefinger absentmindedly against your thumb as you think and remember? Your mind is so sharp.

Could my insatiable curiosity be quelled by one of your recollections without taxing you too much? Do I really WANT to know all that happened between Bobby and Howard?

All I know is I want to give it a go, while there’s still life in me and in you, dear Auntie. 

See you Sunday.

Love,

Melinda

Stinky Start

Perhaps it’s the Skunk of Christmas Past.

Every year on the twenty-third of December, since our very first weekend here in our new home, we’ve been treated to the powerful but not overwhelming odor of essence of skunk coming through the heater vents.

That first year was a doozy. It was twenty-eight degrees outside. Both daughters and their beaus were here helping us unpack moving boxes, hang curtains, and organize the kitchen. During a well-deserved after-dinner rest, we watched a movie on a small black and white TV in the partially furnished living room. A movement outside caught my eye. I saw a black cat digging in the dirt between the Juniper hedge and the French door. “It’s just a cat,” I said. “Oh, how darling! The kitty has two white stripes down her back,” I reported as I stood to get a better look. “She’s turned her back to us and is digging furiously in the earth, sending dirt our way… and oh, she’s lifting her tail and, oh, no! We’ve been skunked!”

I don’t know where she lives, though I suspect she’s moved in under a garden shed we had installed soon after the last moving boxes were flattened and passed along to someone else who was about to move. I’ve seen her (I call her Skunky) only a handful of times, but have recognized her aromatic presence innumerable times through the heater vents. 

Maybe she's still upset that we encroached on her territory. She had the house and yard to herself for almost a year and a half after the former owner died here. The children didn’t get around to selling their childhood home for quite some time.

Shortly after the move, we had a heater duct cleaner service come. Using a camera on a long flexible cable, Mr. Oren showed us pictures of the inside of one of the ducts. Evidently, it had been appropriated by Skunky as a nest for her family. The fiberglass insulation inside the duct must have made for a scratchy beginning for her newborn kitts. They’d all made quite a mess of the duct. Mr. Oren said the best thing to do was to make sure they’d all moved out (they had) and crimp and seal off that duct so no air would move through it again. This he did.

When I see her lumbering along at dawn or dusk in the back yard, I smile. I like that she feels at home. I do too. Is it possible to live amicably with such a powerful neighbor? I think so. It requires getting accustomed to the scent that is akin to marijuana smoke, but stronger, and hoping she lives up to her job description: Good ratter. Blessings on your sleek black and white body, Skunky, and may the Source be with you and the wind blowing the other way.

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Oh, dear. It’s been nearly two weeks since our annual scentual bath and the skunky scent is so over-powering that my eyes are streaming and my nostrils and trachea burn. I'm in the master-bedroom, where humans sleep! I’ve made a circuit of the outside and see there are no openings. She is not under the house. We can see the entirety of the well-lit dirt and floor joists from the boiler room. Also, there's no smell of skunk there. 

I surmise that she’s living under the stairs that go from outside our bedroom door to the lower garden. The scent is strongest inside downstairs, not outside the house, and it’s strongest of all at the bottom of the indoor stairs. In fact, I’ve narrowed it down to the top of the wall at the bottom of the stairs. 

Early on, I hung a photo of a Kiva ladder on that wall. The earth tone photo used to hang in my healing room at the old house. Just above the frame looks to be about level with the landing of the outdoor steps. I think she must’ve burrowed under that landing and has built a cozy nest right up against the foundation - just on the other side of the Kiva photo and the wall above it.

At the end of the hallway downstairs is an intake filter for the heater for the bedroom side of the house. EVERY room smells of skunk from that one stinky wall!

We had an estimator come give us a bid for closing off the under-the-stairs-access to critters. The fellow said he could see her nest. My hunch was right. The nose knows.

We have to trap her humanely and be sure there are no kitts in the nest before sealing off access. I left a message with animal control and vector control and expect a call back this week.  We hope they may be able to relocate her to Knowland Park or somewhere comfortable…. and far away.

Not sure if it helped, but just to follow-up on a suggestion I saw online about spraying predator's urine around the yard, my husband and I both peed near the entry to Skunky’s burrow. I hope she takes the hint. Not that we'd treat her as prey... although could we eat prey and still love?  (*g*r*o*a*n)

It’s been a stinky start to this new-fangled year of 2019. 

Here’s hoping yours is less dramatically aromatic and filled with JOY. 

(Now, THAT makes scents!)

Hope, Cherishing, Kindness, Compassion, and Love

Happy Healthy 2019 to youse!

My Monday Muse is takin' a snooze.

See you in the New Year, dears, right here!

<3,

Melinda

Up & Out Or Coffee

What is the sound of one hand putting down the cup of coffee instead of bringing it to lips?

(What is the sound of anguish?)

Coffee has crept into my life and crevices of consciousness since May, when I was asked by The Shift Network and interviewer Tonya Pinkins, to join the national #Me Too conversation. In titrating my visibility and vulnerability during the videoed interview, at first I complied with Tonya’s request to share some simple bodywork techniques for getting back into our bodies when we may be feeling overexposed after speaking aloud something that heretofore was unspeakable. Very little of my personal story came through until late into the thirty-minute conversation. When I did allow that I was molested as an infant, repeatedly so as a young child, and gang raped at eighteen, I began to feel the familiar flushing of cheeks and tremble of limbs.

I spent much of my growing up time circling the field because my body was dangerous territory to inhabit. I believe speaking the truth of my history gives me credentials also to speak about how to get back into one's body. I spent a lot of years healing to make the bod habitable again. It is important to note that it’s OK to lift up and out when need arises. It is as much a grace to dissociate from the body as it is to fight or run away from danger to protect ourselves from a predator. Only babies and young children have no escape except to go deep inside, which looks a lot like up and out.

Around July of this year, when the interview was released on the internet, my coffee consumption increased. I was suddenly selecting darker, tastier brews; buying espresso blends and adding a cup to my cooking oatmeal as well as drinking two to three cups a day.

In September, I was contacted by The Shift Network. They let me know mine was among the top three videos in terms of number of viewers and asked me to write a guest blog. I did so, and shared a bit more about my personal story. Another uptick in the caffeine intake.

I’ve shared in my safe and loving writing groups some of the nitty-gritty of my Adverse Childhood Experiences. Being visible is still a challenge. Out of habit, I cringe while waiting for the other shoe to drop. Therapy helps. Yoga and meditation help. Writing about the writing and the symptoms that sometimes replay when I am recollecting those maladaptive misadventures helps.

Thursday, while in receivership of aware kidney/adrenal listening, thanks to a friend and fellow body-worker, I recognized the kafoogeldieness of my heart-beat and hyper-adrenalized buzz in my system as I lay on the table. That's when I began to trace the recent history of the coffee addiction to the visibility piece.

Alcoholic families have a primary rule, but it’s like water to a fish: Secrecy is so pervasive we don’t see it. We only sense it viscerally as life- sustaining.

Breaking secrecy feels life-threatening.

I can cut myself some slack for being addicted to coffee which keeps me in the familiar sensation of ready. Absent was the default setting of my adolescence. Braced for fight or flight is a preferable sensation to my system than to being dissociated. It’s easier to do life speedily than not to be present for it.  

Plus, I get so much more done in a day that includes coffee!

Good news: Singing my Solstice Song at Saturday's writing group of ten folk made me shake only a little for a few minutes.  Progress!

If coffee gives me embodied presence, I'll take it. Maybe I can cut the caffeine just a little?

Start With Onions + Bone and Smile

I overheard my Jr. High School aged daughter say to a friend who'd asked her, Is your mom a good cook?"

"I dunno. Whenever I ask, what's for dinner, she always says, 'I don't know yet, but ya gotta start with onions.'"

A couple of years have passed since that carpool over-hear experience. That daughter just graduated from a 200 hour yoga and meditation teacher training event.

Tonight, in preparing a celebratory dinner, her quote of me came to mind. It's true, once the aroma of browning onions fills the kitchen, I think about what else we have on hand, then I begin to assemble ingredients - tempeh, beans, tortillas, eggs, greens, ground turkey or fish.

I think the tantalizing scents that rise from the old black cast-iron skillet tickle my gray matter and help me think about what to create.

Sometimes it's surprising. I was hungry a few nights ago and didn't want to wait the 45 minutes for Red Rice to cook, so I threw it raw into the Vita Mix to pulverize it to smaller kernels. It took only twelve minutes to cook once stirred into the sautéed onions, coconut oil, and broth I poured over to cover it. I threw in a couple hands full of raw spinach near the end of the cooking time and it turned out really tasty. Pretty too with the reddish rice laced with green  leaves.

Organic riced Cauliflower with fresh grated ginger and turmeric has become a new staple. It comes up so colorfully yellow and aromatic with garlic and ginger that kind of caramelizes  The little hand-held grater retains the ginger skin and the turmeric skin, so it's quick work to grate it in. No peeling required, by my fingers turn yellow! It's one of the dishes we had to celebrate Yoga Graduation.

Another  favorite main dish is frittata, which always gets started with sautéing onion - either red or yellow. Then a hand full of greens - either fine threads of kale or quicker wilting spinach, then the beaten eggs mixed with salt, garlic powder, onion powder, grated nutmeg, a splash of vinegar, and mustard powder are poured over. Once the eggs begin to congeal, I heat the broiler and grate some Gruyere on top (or not) and pop the cast-iron pan under the heat coils until the frittata rises up and turns golden. Delish for dinner or Weekend Brunch!

About the only time I don't sautée onions is when baking banana bread. Maybe I'll have to try it! Or not...

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Bone and Smile...

Meera Ramamoorthy is one of my heroines. 

In her thirties, Meera has accomplished incredible things in support of many children, all the while being chased, like Peter Pan by a his crocodile who swallowed a ticking clock. Meera's croc is a life-threatening disease with which she was diagnosed ten years ago during her second year of medical school. It keeps pursuing her. Yet, even when she cannot move, feed or dress herself, she is at her specially rigged computer churning out content for her newest book.

She solicits, edits and assembles camp stories from campers, counselors, and medical staff who contribute stories about their experiences at camps for medically fragile kids. Her latest tome arrived by mail Friday. My beloved husband "Pun 4 Phun" contributed six stories to the mix. 

The latest edition, "This is Serious" is second in the series of "Stars In the Sky Bring the Summer Right Back to Me," and contains over 280 short stories with custom created black and white cartoon drawings illustrating each one. It came with a box of scented colored pencils. Interactive! We ordered twenty volumes. Proceeds go directly to the Serious Fun Network of camps. Meera threw in a hooded long-sleeve shirt showing the logo of fourteen year-round cost-free Hole-In-The-Wall-Gang camps started with Paul Newman's seed money. (Keep buying Newman's Dressing!) There are now more than thirty such camps worldwide where kids get to be kids instead of first being identified by their disease.

My desire is to have Meera, who is a medical doctor, and all medically challenged kids everywhere be completely healed. I'd like to see them boot their pursuing crocodiles in the teeth. Until that day, there's camp. 

May Meera continue to triumph over adversity for a long time to come. 

Dressed in her Wonder Woman costume and radiant smile, she inspires mightily. 

Recollections of Sayulita and Farewell to Jonathan Skow

SOMEbody has to be HERE in Sayulita!

Looks like I'm the designated body. 

I wholeheartedly accept the task of breathing moist palpable air. Touch the air, it touches back! The sound of surf underscores birdsong and Henrique's velvet baritone as he prepares the ceremonial space for this evening's welcome when all fifteen participants will be present.

Last night several of us walked to the central plaza to see the remains of the Día de Los Muertos festivities. Sayulita is known for this grand celebration.

Imagine Tibetan prayer flags hung in rows two-feet apart across all the major dirt and cobblestone streets, only the images cut out on each colorful square are of skulls, human and animal skeletons, suns, moons, and stars. On the streets closed to vehicle traffic, mandalas of pollen, amaranth, dyed rice of all hues, and fresh flowers mirror the themes and motifs of the fluttering flags above. 

Whole families are dining outside on the sidewalks. Most shops are closed as it is approaching midnight but we see through a window many statues encrusted with Huichol beaded designs. Rainbow colored horses, jaguars, and turtles.

The night is SO hot and humid, the dirt covered cobblestone one-way roads are alternately dusty and muddy since the tail of Hurricane Willa lashed Sayulita in late October.

Ana, Janaína and I linger longer in town trying to order a small taco for Janaína to taste the local flavors.  It takes a  L - O - N - G  time. When her Brazilian tongue meets the hot Mexican chiles, I see smoke rising from her ears! Tears fill her eyes. I taste the taco. Ouch! I say to Ana, "Please tell her how courageous I think she is."  When Janaína responds she says, "ALL mothers are courageous. We have to be." I think she's right and there are many more reasons ALL women are courageous and have to be. She tells me she has a daughter who is eighteen and a twenty-two-year-old son. She asks about my family. I name my beloved husband, both daughters, and the nine-year-old grandie. 

Ana, who has known me for fourteen years, translates for Janaína and me. I lament that my Portuguese has rusted to the point of being creaky to virtually useless. By this time we are on the bridge walking back to Corazon, the compound where we wiłl hold ceremonies for the next two weeks. The others must have gotten back long enough ago that we three were missed because right behind us come our hosts Billie and her husband Tim in the golf cart that drove Henrique and three others of our group earlier into town.

''We were worried,'' Billie says. ''Everyone else is back so we thought we'd better make sure Ana didn't get lost again.'' We all laugh. Ann's default setting is ''lost.''

We three "lost souls" hop on the back of the golf cart. WhenTim tries to start it, nothing happens. It is as dead as my Portuguese language skills. Four strong but travel-weary women push the cart up a small hill so Tim can give it a jump start on the way down. After three such tries, we leave the fickle cart parked near the all night pizza place and the five of us walk home. It's a sweaty, steamy walk... the best antidote to cramped seat airline and bus travel.

What a perfect first day I've had!

About day seven into our two week stay, I got word from the last resident of my childhood home that Jonathan Skow died as result of injuries sustained in a surfing accident. He and his wife, clothing designer Trina Turk, purchased the John Lautner designed home from my brothers and me in 2014. They loved it from the ground up, renovating it back to Lautner's original intent: Bring Nature IN. 

I'm heart-sick that Jonathan's vision, joy, and dedication to supporting the arts is taken from the world too soon. My heart aches for Trina. Together, she and Jonathan have made such a positive difference in this sometimes sad and often sorry world. I will miss him.

Here's a re-link to the NY Times article about Trina, Jonathan, and the "Long Lost Lautner."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/fashion/lost-john-lautner-house-trina-turk.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/fashion&action=click&contentCollection=fashion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0 

Sayonara, Sayulita

It was a shock to leave 85 degree moist air on Mexico's Pacific Coast to come home to "Smokeland" where it's 53 degrees, dry, with thick apocalyptic smoke from the fires in Northern and Southern California.

Looking over photos of the trip, puts me back in the mind-set of gratitude for all I got to experience in twelve short days.

Henrique, my favorite shaman from Brazil, with whom I've studied since 2004, is very brave to set foot out of the country of his birth for the first time in his life. Accompanied only by translator Juliana, and Janaína, a helper person from the huge community there in Belo Horizonte, he comes to Sayulita to teach us, guide us and heal in us what he can. We are fifteen participants from British Columbia, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Minnesota, and Washington. Another translator, Ana, joined us for eight of the twelve days.

We are hosted by a couple who have been going to Brazil to work with Henrique since 2010. Their compound is called Corazon (Heart), and is

comprised of innumerable luxurious white-washed casitas on a hillside overlooking the Pacific. The dusty and muddy roads into town are the only residual evidence that Hurricane Willa lashed her tail at Sayulita in October. Luckily, the timing of this very special gathering was perfect.

Palapa is a new word in my Spanish vocabulary. There are at least two on Corazon's property. One is the main outdoor room where we nineteen folk meet, work, sing, and learn each day. Seventy feet long by thirty feet deep, the main palapa has roofing made of palm fronds secured only by weaving them in and out of cross beams made of a particular wood that must be harvested on the new moon, which is low-tide for sap. When fronds or trees are full of sap, they attract the termites which can devour the palapa in a matter of months because they're sweet and tasty to the hungry buggers. 

My two roommates and I stayed in a casita called Tres Amigos. Here we are under the circular palapa between kitchen and pool. 

 Janaína and I speak Portuguese very slowly. She is Henrique's helper, singer, and arranger of ceremonial objects. My refresher, on-the-ground-crash-course in Brazilian Portuguese this trip allowed me to translate many conversations for students into English, and into Spanish for the wait-staff at Corazon and English into pigeon Portuguese and Spanish.  

On our first night as sun drops into the Pacific, students gather to bask in the glow and look at mandalas chalked onto a roof-top floor. Some of us then go to see the remnants in town of celebrations of Día de los Muertos. There is a large Huichol population in Sayulita and one street off the plaza is decorated ornately in their particularly colorful traditional designs. 

On another street, Ana,  Henrique and Janaína stop to admire store-front decorations. Doing my best to understand and join in conversations.  Portuguese is pure poetry.

 Yet another roof-top. Where students Melissa and Tom rented an Air B 'n' B further uphill from Corazon, showing off  magnificent sunset views over the bay where Sayulita nestles on Pacific shores. We sing along with Andrea Bocelli on the iPad.

Off the top of my head selfie with Juliana, Henrique, & Janaína.

 With Juliana.

Jaguar watches over all.

Hearts appear everywhere!

Dining al fresco.

Good food too!

Hard to say Sayonara to Sayulita, but it's good to be home... in Oakland/Smokeland even with its cold, dry, and smokey air. There's no place like home.