Moorings

Emily gets the prelude

 We never know how high we are

Till we are called to rise;

And then, if we are true to plan

Our stature touch the skies—

 –#1776, reprinted without permission, but with much gladness–

view from the crown chakra

Laborific

The baby slides out and I catch her.

I’m kneeling on the floor with a creature in my hands.

Her birth is slick, but her skin is clear of vernix, labor-grease, or wastes.  She looks like she has been sleeping in a fairy-tale, awakening to this one.

That is: I decide the baby is a her.

[For a sweet, short and informed read on the importance of vernix— not extraneous yuckie stuff to be washed off!]

In the dream, I am not ready, but I do my job anyway: protect birth and the birth mama, who is just as surprised as I am, at only four months gestation, to see the perfection of this newborn.

The hospital room tries hard to be bland and sterile.  But the infant doesn’t allow it:  She has so much life in her it leaks into her surroundings.

unlikely birth buds

Reality Has Windows

When I look out the window now, from my empty apartment, autumn is shaking in the trees, stately things that have grown up as innate wealth in the yards of the affordable housing complexes.  Their branches, behaving as if terrified, or as if attempting to terrify, move every which-way, like the gaze when one is first learning yoga.  These movements are pre-death choreography; the winds come through with purpose and everything that lives becomes simultaneously riled up—where will I bury my nuts?—and internal, looking for the bunker at the depths.

Unlike us, the seasons abide with their changes, not resisting themselves.   Are humans distinct in resisting who we innately are?  Hmmm.  I’m still waiting for the day a tree blogs about me.

buddhas abiding with drying

This time of year, when we put garbage in the cans on the avenue, the wind plucks it right back out.  Putting waste in a can is a temporary way to hide the tremendous amount of refuse we leave in our wake as we carry forth.  We may temporarily fool ourselves but the earth is not fooled.

Not fooled at all.  Strong rains brought in the fall, and they have yielded to a chilly shroud.  The last weekend of “summer”, after chanting to a multiplicity of Gods upstate amidst the poo-poo-pauperism-cuz-we-‘ve-got-Lululemon aesthetic of Omega, I returned with my spirit posse on the winding Taconic through an all-night storm.  We rolled onto 4th Avenue, even the GPS tired, at 4AM.  From the car, we saw a disheveled man on the street corner smashing a vacuum cleaner apart with all his might.  He stooped over beside the public trashcan and had his way with the appliance.  The traffic light, despite the fact that no one pedestrians were about at this hour of the almost-morning, blinked its monition overhead: DON’T WALK.  Don’t worry, the vacuum cleaner assured it.  He’s raging against materiality right now.   Its nozzle flew off.

SMASH.

The closest tree, thin and staked into place in its patch of dirt so it would grow up right, like a good urban tree, not bothering the buildings, burst out laughing.  Its glee was louder than the hundreds of voices at the Kirtan calling to Ganesha to move the obstacles already, move those obstacles already, baby.

ganesh in a sultry mood

By Shook or By Crook

Other things shook this week.  An Ortho Jew in his determined glory walks towards me in the subway station—that weird birth canal between Wall and Williams Street, below Tiffany’s and the anti-establishment protests occupying something.  The Jew has the Big-Mitzvah look on his face: this blessing is going to positively tackle you.

Are you Jewish? He asks me.  (To quote my friend John: Yes, Jew-ish.)

I’ll give you two guesses, I say.

He whirls around, his psyche already tasting the virtue accruing in its spiritual piggy-bank.  His pranic tentacles register a high Jew-meter.  He dutifully holds out the accoutrements of miracles: the lulav and etrog.  Take this, he says.  Lulav is a beautiful word—the bound palm leaves, myrtle, willow.  The etrog, which sounds like a genetically engineered toad, is actually a citron, an Israeli species of lemon.

I hold out my hand—these are my people, the fruit and the branch.

lucky mimesis

Shake it, he says.  For some reason, I remember my first year of ballet class, as a three-year old.  I spent most of the class plucking free the massive wedgies my underwear created under my leotard and watching myself perform this delicate action in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

I’m doing the shaking wrong, which I can tell by the way his eyes try to take refuge in his septum, appalled by my violation of the ritual, but I don’t care.  YAAAAAY, I shout.  I shake my branch not just in four directions, but in every direction I can think of.

Repeat after me, he says, and begins the Prayer, stopping at prayer-novice intervals so I don’t mangle the Hebrew.  I’m so excited to be holding a lemon in the subway.  I feel like the Citrus superhero.   I want to cut it open and squeeze it and make the space smell like something fresh, invigorating, edgy.

Big Mitvah!  He crows, walking away hurriedly and with the natural elation that comes from accruing spiritual brownie points.

For you, that is, I call back.  But what do I know.  The lemon is not forthcoming.

Later that night, I catch the baby.

mitzvah dilating

Not Knowing That

I didn’t know birth could be like that, I exclaim.  The hospital room impassively witnesses the ordinary and impossible.  It’s all beige to me, it declares.

This baby, premature and yet fully developed, sits in my hands as if we are a sculpture of Rodin’s, cut from one stone and still connected in that elusive place where form yields to formlessness.  Our rough edges and poor chances at survival are smoothed by the generosity of the dream until these two disparate manifestations of life—the creature and I– are returned to a single continuous muscle, breathing.

The night before, I died.

Marie-Louise Von Franz, the heiress of Jung’s work on dreams, teaches: Pay attention to your dreams, for therein “a self-regulating tendency in the soul comes into play which counterbalances the one-sidedness of consciousness or completes it so that a kind of wholeness and a life’s optimum is achieved” (Dreams).  What about those somnievents wherein you’re taking old cream cheese–Philly, whiter than fake teeth– out of the refrigerator?  Whatever.   Cosmic consciousness is like a good vacuum cleaner: it can take in everything, no matter the size of the particle.

So it was.  A brief, nocturnal trip back to Thailand– which cost me no air-miles or jet-lag whatsoever.  I entered a white-walled room in the big, empty house where my old friend, Dha, sat, grinning and chewing on unfurled and twice-brewed sinesia dipped in salt.  Life is the Leaf, he said, nodding.  He caught my eyes as the ground rumbled, a terribly hungry stomach.  Get outside, something is wrong.  The jasmine rice, soaking in huge plastic vats, wobbled.  It had the nonchalant equanimity of a thing that has survived many such quakes.

but nothing looks wrong

In the unreasonable logic of dreams, I copied the example of my befuddled boss—also inexplicably there–who was trying to protect herself by climbing into a kiddie-swing, the kind that looks like a stiff, plastic diaper and feels about as comfortable.  As we waited suspended in the black diapers, a tidal wave of earth swung up over its own rim.  My end came at me like my premature birth: I was prepared and yet unprepared in every way.

This dark wave of earth blacked out everything except its own presence, which bore down over my body.  I fell backwards into my death thinking—that’s all this is?  A plunge?  Really?  But I only just was born!

with catcher's mitts unto the sky falling

Birth and death are like that– BFF.

I woke up disturbed, feeling clods of dirt in my hair that weren’t there.  But the strange miracles runneth over, the fish eyes of Unconscious blinking in the shallow pool of daylight.  The creak of the toilet seat, the drip of the showerhead, the bubbling of the water as it boiled. The lemon wedge, the triphala pill broken open and covered in warm liquid.  As if God turned on the lights too quickly in the theater of being and everyone ran for the candy stand for a sugar refill.  I had to growl through my morning practice—prostrating myself before the dust mites in my carpet—because there are dawns when one must bow before something, anything, everything.  And you?  For what miracle will you fall to your knees shaking, if not the one you are made of?

things that keep me here

Birthiness

Birthiness

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” –MLK Jr.

inescapability

I’m more often than not in a stupefied silence on the Monday dedicated to MLK Jr.: a man who knew how to use his words, to pack them with an indomitable spirit.

That “single garment” he speaks of is our true—albeit metaphysical—receiving blanket when we come into this befuddled world.  His accuracy squeezes out of me a tiny, Monday prayer: may we have the ability to recognize what surrounds and connects us.

Speaking of.  At the crowded Food Co-op, where no one is, in fact, cooperating, I spend most of the afternoon making up a missed shift.  This involves wearing an unsexy green smock and unloading other people’s shopping baskets.   It means I get to touch a lot of vegetables.

like these european counterparts

A kid with wind-burned cheeks and messy hair holds up her would-be dinosaur and roars at the check-out worker, who pays no attention.  She digs the creature’s mouth into her dad’s butt, through his coat. RRRRRRRRRRRRRR, she exclaims, emoting for the glutivore.

Yikes, I say, you brought your dinosaur!  That thing is scary and it looks hungry!

Excuse me, says the little one.  It is not a dinosaur.  Someone left it at my door this morning.

Well, what is it then? I ask, always ready for a new fact from a young person.

Not a dinosaur, she insists.  So don’t call it a dinosaur!

Ah: to call a thing what it is is a delicate art.  She lets out a great roar, while the co-op members mostly keep their own inclination to roar quieter than persimmons.

Being Fruitful

Keats said:  I feel more and more, every day as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.

Do you too sense the thousand realms nested inside this one or inside which this one is nested?  Winter shakes its fists, holding its mood-rings up to the dim light, and the realms knock into one another like Matryoshka dolls.

In the center of the dolls, in the center of the realms, is the tiniest, carved from a single piece of wood, which cannot be opened further: an amaranthine infant, eternally fresh.

It Ends with a P

My goddaughter, M, sneaks into the guestroom just before dawn.  I have a candle lit, as I have already done a little practice in the throaty dark, and awaited the interruption of her bare feet and four-year old pajama’d squint.

M stands in the doorway with one hand on the knob.  She’s all business:

Can we do what we do when I get in bed with my Mommy and my Daddy in the morning? She’s at the age and height where her eyes are level with most doorknobs, and so everything is an opening.

Of course, I say.  What’s that? I pull her into the room.

Pretend that I’m being born. M is precise, as if tracking a blueprint for play in her mental toy box. I’m in Mommy’s tummy and then I come out.

from the cover of BIRTHING FROM WITHIN. a ladder i long to climb.

We climb onto the futon agreeably to embark on the adventure of birth.

Why do you have a candle? She asks.

To prepare for your birth, I tell her.  And because it is so nice and cozy.

O, she gives an appreciative nod.

She doesn’t know that I’m a parturition junkie, always, somewhere, in a fetal state of mind.  Is it the bursting forth? So, do you want to get under the covers in a little ball and we can pretend you’re in Mommy’s belly?

Yes, she say, as royally as Marie Antoinette accepting Louis’ giddy, misguided proposal.

Do you want me to show you what we did when you were in Mommy’s belly?

What did you do? She says from under the covers.  To feign a time when you only half-existed is—apparently—instantly exhilarating.  She’s already drunk from spelunking in the womb.

We talked to you, I say, just like this. I put my mouth close to the curve of her back and call: Come on out, little baby, it’s the end of August, we’re ready to meet you, come see us out here in the world!

She giggles. I feel her belly shake through the connective tissue of the sheets and blankets.  O.K. M agrees, much more quickly than she did before labor, her voice muffled by the bedding. I’ll come out now!

Your Mommy pushed and pushed you out, I tell her.  Mommies work very, very hard to help babies come out.  And babies work really hard too.  Everyone is excited.

She nods as her head slips through the invisible cervix, as if this was all very obvious.

dilating post facto

We talk about her first hours in our company in the hospital room, while Ernesto the Hurricane spat rain all over the city and pawed at the trees. I run an APGAR test on her, which she passes with flying colors: but her grip is the grip of one who is already familiar with the world, and its sometimes-partings, and the slightest flavors of uncertainty.

M leaves no self-stone unturned, inquiring about what we did on her first night in the hospital (um, slept?), when had grandpa arrived, how babies know how to eat.  We make it all the way through her first months of life in about ten minutes, as dawn is showing some muscle between the slats of the lowered blinds.  Lots of diaper changes happen lickety-split, with no fuss and no mobiles offering their rotating solace.

When you were a baby, sometimes it was difficult for you to poo. I tell her. So we helped you by rubbing your belly just like this. I make gentle circles on her tummy with three fingers.  Her gaze rolls to the right, where memories of babyhood live behind her ear like a barrette, the deep temporal zone.

Her little eyes light up with digestive glee.  You squirmed a lot, I say.  But when you could finally poo, you felt better.

Can I ask you something? She wants to know, with all the openness of a tabula rasa.

I prepare myself for a whopper while she contemplates her budding question—Where do babies come from?  Why do people die?  Why is there a hair on your chin, are you turning into a man?

Instead, she asks: Why do you say ‘poo’ instead of ‘poop’?

O, I reply, caught off guard, sure we were about to veer into the realm of the kinks in the mortal coil.  Well, they are really the same thing.  Sometimes I forget the ‘p.’  It’s like a nickname.

A fecal one?

Well, can you just say ‘poop’? She requests, solemn eyes like synchronized full moons.

Of course, I say.  But if I forget, I need you to correct me.

O.K., she says.  POOP.

Since life must go on, we go on.

allies in continuance

Going On

Before this year, I’ve had an allergic hatred to this season, where you can feel extinction in your bones like a stone in congee: inarguable and hard.

windowscapes

If that picture isn’t proof then…

But now, I’m making it my business to practice absolute loving-kindness towards winter.  When I can do this successfully, a kind of meteorological metta, I notice that winter is not so bad at all.   And since weather, like other humans, is a complex thing ultimately out of your own control, to extend goodwill towards an unbearable season bears fruit.  Strange fruit.

Look: there is ample light behind the clouds.  Sure, it has to push through a bunch of gray to be counted in the census.  But.

I return from the Park, where I am gradually teaching myself to jog by asking, “What would Gandhi do if the End of Suffering were just one lamp-post further?”

Keep going.

Sweat beads roll beneath my layers.  The Buddha-fairies in the shrubs chuckle: Dude, End of what?  The Four Noble Truths pull on their cross-trainers with arch supports and their maroon, nylon track-suits.  They jog beside me with perfect form and their shoe-laces, unlike mine, never, ever come untied.  The park yawns.

Dusk.  Park Slope families are dragging sleds back to their houses for the dinner hour.  The sound of plastic over salted sidewalks. The kids, by and large, are trudging dramatically.

Approaching me on the street is a man in full snow gear, his head covered in double hoods.  On one side of his chest, a tiny baby is prone, protected from the weather by a tan onesie made of animal hide and pelt.  The man is stepping so softly along the sidewalk, as if each fat snow boot is asking the ground for permission before its tread touches down.  Not to wake the baby. The baby rests the way only a held creature can.

To be held like that.

a lap as big as a mind