Moon Eyes

Seven minutes: My eyes have changed from gaudy kaleidoscopes to half-moons

that witness the world as a dream.

There is an angel in my hair

who guides my fore-thought, my wisdom,

my knowledge of body and the pearls

that rest within it.

Enigma angels offer questions

and warn me of

my Pharisee tendencies,

my judgmental stance,

my narrow focus at the hem of

the Jehovah angel, who has sternly restricted my breath.

Have no fear for there are flowers, and the devil with the pitchfork

is small like a gnat.  Mama Angel love me, make me feel loved and blessed.

Make my moon eyes trigger the flowers.

Purple Cashmere

Seven Minutes:

My present today is a nubby purple cashmere sweater that has been regulated to pajama wear.  Blazing hot sun disappeared and it’s cool again.  I would love to live where the weather never saw ninety degrees, much less 110.  Give me fog and wool sweaters, a knit cap, drizzle.  The type of weather where a hot bath is appreciated.  The long cloudless summer is approaching.  Sometimes cumulus clouds appear on the far mountains on the other side of the lake. But here, it is endless blue skies from June to October as a rule.  Monotony.  The rattlesnakes are coming out as they do each year at this time.  It’s common for one or two to be seen at my school.  Friends are reporting their presence at their homes.  If you walk at Anderson Marsh, you can hear them in the rocks in the early mornings.  They could be the rhythm section for a mariachi band.  Trato de apprender castellano en mi coche en la manana cuando manejo a trabajo.  The nice lady and man with the beautiful Spanish diction never get frustrated with me.  I feel my head is very small.  My brain is at least.  But I need big hats.  So I’m back on that drizzle day in my large comfy cap walking along the beach with my hands in my pocket and breathing.  I can wear my ratty purple sweater.  No one will care.

What is My Present?

Seven minutes:

What is my present?  The leafy maple outside my window?  The sun casting its last light on the trees lower on the hill?  They had warmed with gold light just before I wrote the last sentence, and by the time I typed the period their illumination vanished.  Six seconds of splendor as the sun descends behind the mountain.  Is it the slight pain I feel in my back as I sit here?  The tightness of my legs?  Or is my present in the breath and striped fur of my tabby cat stretched along my thigh?  The open notebook next to her?  The feelings of frustration in trying to market a book? I saw one of the pileated woodpeckers for the first time today, though I’ve heard their hammering for over two weeks. That is the present I want.  Writing thoughts and making images, that is the present I desire.  Selling and searching and looking at Amazon rankings, not.  My present is my struggle with faith.  The laundry in the dryer and the new load to put in.  In hearing my husband’s car door shut and his feet on the steps. The opening of the door as he comes home.  The opening of the book I plan to read tonight.

My Heart is at the Window

 My heart is at the window.

I lean with longing on the sill.

I am at the edge of expectation,

Waiting, waiting

to see the future form, the grace

I have wished for, the humble steps

of hope, the whirlwind ready to kiss my cheek.

My heart is at the window,

I have been here so long,

the horizon has been hidden by the leaves’ ornamentation, by pages of years, by my too small courage.

My heart is at the window.

I pray that love sweeps down the lonely road

and breaks open my heart, so sadly patient,

into the seizures of a streaming sun,

shattering me into the light that taunts my vista.

When I Was My Grandmother

Seven Minutes . . .

Last night this strange feeling came over me that I was my grandmother Parala.  Never knew her as she died in 1922 at the age of 42, mother of Lois, Leslie (my father), Mary Ruth (dead at two), stillborn babies, and my Uncle Darius who is still alive at 93.  I saw a post card she sent once when I visited my uncle.  She signed herself Para.  I decided her mother was playing with language and came up with her name because they were sounds she liked, like a song.  She had a hard life, wife of a sharecropper who made moonshine, who wore her husband’s shoes, who saw her children die, who moved to Detroit and didn’t last long.  Did she miss Arkansas, and Mary Ruth, where the legend said she planted a white and a red rosebush at her child’s grave that never stopped blooming? The child whose head made a feathered crown on her death-bed.  My father, 12 years old, 1918, having quit school to pick cotton, remembering he did a somersault in the fields hearing the news that World War One had ended.  All in one  year, little sister he could not talk about even as an old man.  Was it the flu? No money for a doctor.  And his grandmother, Sarah Winn Johnson Eason, who buried half of her dozen or more children, whose life stretched out to old womanhood.  As a young woman in Mississippi, she buried a child and gave birth to another two days later.  I have Parala and Isaac’s wedding picture when they were both fresh and young.  I have his eyes and her thick hair.  The other two pictures I’ve seen, she has become this Grapes of Wrath woman, so thin and weary with life.  And I had this feeling last night that I was her and walked in her thin dresses and loved her children and how that for all them, save my uncle, did not save them from the darkness ahead of them.

Breaking Rules, Breaking Through Feeling

   I’m breaking the rules.  With Intuitive Painting, or the Zero Point Painting, sharing work is discouraged because the practice is more about process than product.  My teachers say that comments, either positive or negative, may have an impact on what wants to arise from within.  If someone says they like an image, it might stop the painter from modifying it.  Up to this point, though, I don’t feel for me that’s the case. Now with writing . . . watch out!   But I’m freer with painting.  What is powerful for me is to watch my own judgments and feelings about the work.  There’s a tide that I experience as I paint.  I may loathe an object, be disturbed by another, fret over my ability to paint something inside me that wants birth.  Michelle Cassou says we need to stay with our discomfort.

It’s a powerful lesson because that discomfort does transform if I let it be.  I’ve done this enough to know that images or “mistakes” I absolutely hate when they first appear end up what I treasure most.

Being connected with the brush means being connected with myself.  As I worked yesterday,  I was obsessing over her face.  I still do not like the nose.  I wanted both eyes bright, but no matter what I did the right stayed dark.  During the last-minute of class I applied the coat on the two lighter triangles and now, at least at this moment, I don’t want the eye the same shade as the other .

My teacher observed my spending a lot of time dabbing the paper with my brush.   See the line from where the Mama Angel is emerging?  She suggested I make strokes, feeling the paint, feeling the movement.  This line was the first stroke I did.  Speaking of tides, I immediately felt my bottled emotions come up.   As I drew the Jehovah Angel in the left corner, I started having an anxiety attack.  More emotions, and they emerged through moving my hand, the color of paint, and because I was beginning to breathe.

I’m working on a novel I put away years ago about the nature of Hell, which I really should pluralized . . . literal ones on Earth, the fantasy hell my characters fashion for the afterlife, demons, redemption, angels.  Hell was very a literal place for my quasi-Southern Baptist parents, and I worry that my more traditional friends make judgments about the state of my soul.  In the past this has kept me quiet about my less than fundamentalist beliefs.

So, being seen, being judged, the dis-ease of being worried about, a track record of  feeling I don’t express myself well when I speak and am confronted, and BAM! Panic, anxiety, a wonderful demon Jehovah God is born, but one whose heart shows my real feelings about the Divine.  The source of Love who we have made into our own vindictive, angry, jealous projections.  Here’s a judgment: the panic is actually a good thing because it shows my need to feel.  I have a very hard time crying.  The tears almost came as I painted.  They’re all suppressed as I write once again.  But that’s the path I need to open in me.  To allow feelings to blossom, to be okay with being afraid of their power because that is where I am. Stay with the discomfort, eh?

There’s the fairy angel, the enigma angel, and the Mama Angel, the last to appear.  The flowers in her hair came late as well.  I worked on her for about three hours, and when time was up I groaned because I was in a place where I was feeling and alive.  She is not done.  I’ll take her back next month.

Art From the Body

The second picture I did in the Painting Alive! class I took (see June 9th’s post for details).  Much less thought, more just painting from intuition and body.

Painting makes me happier than anything else I do.  I believe it’s the wordless state that I get in, something so rare for me.  And I feel.  I’m hoping my body someday will feel like a safe place.  The physical world has always been a challenge. Perhaps due to left-handedness, a difficult birth, parents who hated their own bodies and obsessed with safety.  I’m not sure it matters anymore, but negotiating the physical was the hardest part of growing up.  Sometimes walking and talking is hard (really), or knowing which hand to use.  I break the lead of every mechanical pencil I’ve ever used.  Yoga makes me edgy. But when I paint, I feel my heart open, my head clear, and I feel free.

Forgiveness

Last Sunday, a week ago,  Gail and I went out to the Bogg’s Bog, a wetland the Nature’s Conservatory protects.  Summer had come down in the beat of a day. Needles in the grass  bloomed and stuck to my socks. I thought of rattlesnakes.  The tules, within just a few warm days, were now brown, and the water in the marsh had already receded to where only birds can reach.

Redwing blackbird sentries surrounded the nesting area. These birds were a military force, the males  in uniform with the red chevrons on their wings.  They vigilantly protected their breeding grounds from predators and kept the females within its confines, forcing them to stay with their eggs.  Canada geese honked in the distance.  We could see them resting far off.  They breed here during their long migration, something that I hadn’t realized.

When we first arrived, Gail and I sat on a log in the shade and just listened.  We told our stories to each other.  I shared what I thought was a bit of darkness on my soul, but brought to light with a trusted friend, with the words spoken over the colors that were descending with summer so that they rose with the bird talk, I realized that there was no darkness, just confusion and missteps.

Yesterday I went to Mary’s.  To get there, you have to walk down six or seven switchbacks on her path.  It’s steep and makes me winded each time I climb back up.  But the descent is wonderful, and you wind up at her wooded house, built circa 1940, that rests right on the shore.

We sat on her porch and listened to the water lap and watched the birds fly and settle in the oaks, skirt the lilac, buzz around the feeders, and swim in the shallows.  What a feast . . . we traced one call, a single note that kept repeating, from her deck and up to her bedroom window where we found  a male mountain quail  hiding in the upper branches of  the scraggly oak tree.  Black head and top knot, gray body.  The females were foraging below him.

We looked down from her window and found a mallard and his mate paddling in the water right at the shoreline.  A Bullock’s Oriole flew by. We went back to the deck to follow him as he flew up to the taller trees.His bright orange belly caught the afternoon sunlight; he and the tree leaves shimmered gold.

The finch’s necks were bright yellow, and we caught the iridescent red of a few hummingbirds.  Then as we sank down in her lawn chairs, a pelican circled.  Even when he was several hundred feet out on the lake, we could see the profile of its mating bump protrude like a big pimple on his nose.  It will be there through the end of next month and then disappear when the mating season is over.  There were two small birds doing a mating dance of sorts, the circled around each other too fast to know if they were hummingbirds or finches, or some other species.  They rose twice while we were there in a small whirlwind of joy.

Mary and I shared a few hours of grace. I’ve thought a lot about grace for most of my life; I’ve only experienced it in small amounts on a conscious level, though I know if I became more centered I would be aware that I am actually drunk on it.  My reality is  steeped in it, as is yours.

Grace is found with the quiet mind.  My monkey mind is the absolute monkeyish.  If I “heard” this correctly, Course in Miracles says that we continue to crucify Christ with our thoughts, our lack of forgiveness for ourselves which then creates tension with the world.

Brother James commented to me: You are loved  . . . and now I can’t remember the adverb.  Passionately? Exquisitely?  If the world experienced that love, would the kingdom of heaven, which is here already, form solidly among the shadows?  We could touch it the way Thomas did Christ’s wounds, find that it is real, and that we have always belonged.

.

March 24, 2012 Great Awakening

I fly in dreams, blue sky painting

my feathers. I drift like a primitive

tale over the shallows.

My harsh voice shows I’m crazed,

and my eyes hold the shadows

my fierce ancestors left.

I swallow and devour, a nightmare.

And a blessing wading in the glory of marshes

and in the great awakening of my flight.

Fully fed, a terrible angel.

But so smooth is my exhortation

blue wings in flight,

 Hallelujahs in the air.

Herons

There were times I would walk on the dock at Innisfree and look out at the great bowl of Clear Lake.  The water would slap at the dock, the tules would sway between the pillars, a wind ruffle small waves.  I would hear life everywhere.  Bullfrogs in the rushes, ducks chattering as they bobbed up and down, grebes farther, their miniature necks shaped like the Loch Ness Monster until they would dive down and shake their butts like cartoon birds.  And once in a blue moon, I would see a heron wading in the tules near the boathouse, a small rickety apartment made from a wooden fishing boat.  The birds looking like sorcerers in gray and coal blue feathers.

My Pomo friends have told me stories of beings that live in and near the lake.  The Squishy, a creature they could hear rise from the lake when they were children, the Bird Man that appeared to their nephews outside their bedroom when they lived in Clearlake.   When the boys described him, the family knew who they were talking about.

My herons would always surprise me, and sometimes, I’d see them more than once while they were hanging out for a week or two. And what a joy to see them cast off from the ground, a different creature even then, more pterodactyl than bird.  At times, I have seen them fly low near Rodman’s Slew as I drove along the cutoff.

I have decided I haven’t had enough mornings like this.  So much of life gets stuck in the day-to-day of work and of “reality,” Amazon rainforest producing more carbon than oxygen, quagmires around the world, the moral sickness of so many politicians.  We all need healing, from trauma, from traumas generations past, from the grinding down of our souls with media and the white noise of the 21^st century.  A glimpse of a heron is a miracle to me.