Now.

Start with the silk masterpiece of a spiderweb tenaciously spanning a doorjamb, and shimmering with flecks of mica–luminescent diamonds of mathematical precision that have never known dust. Later it becomes grime made linear, a blemish to be wiped away by an impatient broom. Splendor descending into lowness. Chalk paintings blurred by rain. Spring blossoms scattered by the wind. Feathers, scales, butterfly wings–all washed colorless by time, desiccated by age and decomposition.

Beauty happens now. In the instant someone calls for you to look at a rainbow or passing butterfly. Blink and you miss the passing of the dandelion seed catching the light and bursting into supernova. Close your eyes and the shooting star rains by unnoticed.

It's O.K. Open them up again. It will all happen again in a minute.

April.

This morning finds the world covered in wet snow as heavy as the hand of fate. Trees bow under its mass, reaching down into the duck yard as if to tenderly lift up a duck. Bulbs, yesterday arrayed in brilliant splendor in the grass, today barely emerge from underneath the sodden blanket. Raspberries, not yet planted, had to be unearthed in their pots and placed next to my house. Strawberries in a small greenhouse were covered with a living room blanket and hopefully survived the ordeal.

Snow was forecast, but I hoped for a dusting. My song to welcome in April two days ago would have been of days balmy enough for May, shorts brought out of the closet, and a fierce desire to plant. It seems the world wants to remind me to wait a bit.

While outside snow falls heavy on my dreams of gardens, inside my body is a turmoil of pain–not a new thing for me–and nausea, which is. It cannot be that each flare is the worst flare I have had, but this feels almost like it.  Sick enough to lie in bed all day, I am too sick, in fact, to lie in bed all day. The bed is like a torture device, but then so is a chair or a couch or standing. I cannot hold food down and so I cannot decide if taking the medications that combat my condition is a wasted effort. I am running out of things to try, running out of hope, for the moment. The act of being awake simply hurts and sleep is elusive.

I somehow vested a great deal of my joy and aspiration this spring in the gardens that surround my home.  I know that I am stronger than I think. I know that I can always start anew. There are actions to take, requests to make, new plants if these ones are frozen, and I will do all these things. But just for the moment, I feel buried.

It All Comes From What Died Before.

Photo Credit: Flickr by Vanessa Vancour 

I have been very productive today. The sun is out, my yard seems ablaze with the possibility of springtime, and I am shrieking with childlike delight at each earthworm I discover in the leftover decay of winter. Because I practice permaculture–or try to–piles of leaves that have fallen on everything and degenerated under a heap of snow and ice are not a problem for me. Rather than coming in like a maid after a drunken party to clean up the vomit and broken bottles, I am an archaeologist searching for treasure that was left by the world while I waited, snug in my house. Winter has been sitting on my eggs.

Underneath the thick mulch of rotting aspen leaves which I laid on my vegetable bed last fall, there is soil as dark as coffee grounds. And as I lift a handful, worms thick as small ropes slide out from the loam, tiny soil organisms writhe in the embarrassment of sudden light. I am laughing, jubilant. I get it. All possibility is born of decay. It all comes from what died before. I am full of life, writhing with the inner action of soil-turning worms making my waste into fodder for new growth. The world knows, for the most part, two paradigms–rot and cultivation–but this speaks to another.

Putrefaction. The smell of wasted talent, days of usefulness that lie behind one, dreams that will now go unfulfilled. The necessity seems that I lie rotting on the ground, overcome with my pain. "Tara is ill now. Tara is in pain. She can't be asked to make this difference, contribute this service, offer this opinion. She has fibromyalgia and suffers with it terribly." Born of compassion or born of the easy, simple neglect we often show a friend whose illness has taken them from the sphere of our common activities, these thoughts turn me to something corrupted by my illness, unusable as a piece of moldy cheese left too long in the refrigerator. I want very much that the world should notice my need for a comfortable chair, or a call to ask how I am doing, but I never wish that the world would leave me alone to wane quietly in a corner. I am not ready, at thirty-six, to rot.

Cultivation. The tilling of soil, the turning of earth to loosen it for planting, to add fertilizer, to remove rocks, to rake. We have all been doing it as long as we remember, we know how to do it and know that it is right. The work of it seems somehow to be God's work, in particular. And yet, and yet...Just the same as we know, we know the necessity of a positive attitude, a forceful insistence on taking the bull by the horns, conquering indecision, being the author of our own lives, advocating, pushing forward, coaxing the plants to produce. And yet...

I let things lie. I let them compost in place. I cut down the vegetables of last year's garden and leave them scattered about the soil, as messy as the floor of a child's room. I layer down compost, manure, straw, leaves, water. And I practice faith in Nature, which has been making things grow, unaided by humans, for time immemorial. I simply help by moving Her ingredients to the right place. The mistakes of last year–the odd tomatoes, the funky asparagus, the Brussels sprouts that didn't produce in the first year–they are all still there, making that soil richer and wiser. That soil will have a history that can be read in the deep blackness of its crumbly soft meal.

I let myself lie. I makes decisions slowly, letting all of the scraps of consideration slowly turn into something fine enough to use. I am composting everything I ever was, wanted to be, or planned and failed at all the time. No dreams are swept away, just tucked under a protective layer of mulch. The girl who wanted to act, the woman who first married then divorced, the mother who thought she could protect her firstborn son from the world through her vigilant insistence on wooden toys, the runner, the vixen, the addict, the student. They are all in there, steeping in the mingled history of my terra firma.

Because I have swept no parts of myself into the corner of a landfill, I remember what it was to be a teenage addict, and I love addicts, as well as teenagers. Because I have not scorned the twenty-two year-old child who brought my first son into the world, full of ignorance and theory, I remember that I do not know how hard the parents of my failing students may be trying. Because I remember living through a divorce, I stop, catch my breath and try again in my current marriage, over and over and over. Because I have failed and not forgotten, I have humility in my roots, nourishing the leaves and flowers I dare to put forth anew.

I am not better than I was. I am just a product of the power of sunlight and water put to organic matter. I am proof that humanity always moves, transforms, wakens, alters, when we make full use of ourselves.

The Tide.

I suffer from fibromyalgia, for which I have receiving treatment for about a year. Despite multiple tests and many medical interventions, for now, my fibromyalgia is not well-managed. Perversely, it seems in some ways to get worse whenever something new is attempted to treat it. This weekend, I suffered a horrible flare–one of the worst I have had, and all of the mental preparations made ahead–the attitudes I intended to take, the help I planned to ask for–all of it was wholly inadequate to weather the barrage of severe pain and incapacitation. Although my usual penchant is for humor writing, I also write my way through this illness. Sometimes what you see here is nothing more than sensations lobbed like globs of paint at a blank canvas. I write to keep me sane, but I hope it might help someone else stay sane, too.

---

Saturday night finds me plunged into the solitude of complete exhaustion, senses only just submerged, my own voice an unfamiliar reverberation rippling around me. I can hear all of you, amiably chattering around me, but you are faint and garbled. The need to reply seems distant. I am aware only enough to be bored, but not enough to meaningfully engage my mind. I lie submerged, aware distantly of embarrassment, regret and great sadness. For a time, it seems right to simply remain here, under the weight of the water and be still.

Finally, though, regret becomes too large.

Pulling myself up to break the surface, pain crashes on me. Spikes hammered and thorns wound and bands pulled tight around me. Nausea. I can hear you clearly now, but the pain makes me angry with you, driving sharpness into my nervous system with each unheeded request to get ready for bed. The cold on my wet skin raises goosebumps, my teeth chatter. I find myself yelling.

I rose, with great effort to give love, and gave you only concern and bitterness.

So I sink back down, and now the embarrassment is greater. Pain has chased me underwater, with its torturing vines of thorn that wind round me as I shift. It is profoundly lonely to be in pain. Lonely for the love I can't give properly and the words I cannot find to say.

I must remember that I am not a village flooded and laid waste but a shoreline, awaiting what I am made to attend. I have only to experience, give voice to, and remember that the change will come.

Weeks now, they ebb and flow, and bring with them the gladness of a day when I can go walking or a series of days, like precious beads on a string, that feel purposeful. Joy and gratitude. Love and acceptance. These things come. They are there now, starfish under the heaving, dark wave, merely clinging to a rock, to be found later when the tide is out. The tide always goes out. And I will be full to bursting with love again, for the gifts it leaves me in the shallows.

For now, for today, I am submerged again, my world distorted by the wave I could not escape. So I wait, remembering the gladness I will feel at the onset of its ebb.

March.

Photo Credit: Flickr: Johnny Grim

Morning brings pain and purpose.

Joy floods into me through the cracks left by grief, like light through broken glass. Springtime feels full of promise, winter full of loss. They are taking turns, one day and then the next, crocuses and sunlight then sleet and chill winds.

March can't make up its mind and neither can I. I am halfway into the future already, setting foot onto fields of bright flowers, full of the flawlessness of imaginary things. I am halfway in the past, watching the world I loved, frozen over, black and misshapen with cold, and desperately hoping a thaw will come to return it to its former glory.

Each sharp edge of pain gleams with the brilliance of being alive. The world can't make up its mind what to take from me, and I can't decide whether to give it gasps of bliss or ragged sobs.

Caught on the whipping breath of the wind, they both sound like music.

Decisions: They Drip on Your Hand and Kill Insects

I hate decisions.

This is one of the pitfalls of  faith in ambiguity. Ambiguity does not lend itself well to resolution.

I live from a commitment to question myself, the world and other people. It's like a spiritual practice. So I always knows that any choice I make is not "right." It's just the choice that I make. I then can't help wondering what I would be giving up in making that choice over another one. If I choose vanilla, I have to give up chocolate. I will never, ever know what chocolate would have been like. I have forever consigned myself and my life to a future full of vanilla-based consequences. What if I regret it? What if I know immediately that  vanilla was a lousy choice? The ice cream case of that moment is closed forever.

"Decide" comes from the same root word as "pesticide", "homicide" and "suicide". To kill multiple alternatives in favor of one. Decisions are asshole psycho killers.

Clearly, some decisions are more fateful than others. What do I eat for dinner? That will have only minor consequences, unless I choose to eat something which later kills me. What do I wear today? Same thing. It's these big choices that dog me–the ones from which it is hard to turn back–more significant but just as permanent as the cutting of your hair. It will grow back, but you will have to live with it for a long time.

It's funny, because I am not at all prone to regret. I save all my energy for worrying about whether or not to make a move at all. When I do, I tend not to look back.

Our family has some big decisions on the table right now, and I am dithering about them. I have time to dither, so it is O.K. But the moment will come when I have to choose and I will either be holding chocolate or vanilla in my hand.

I need to stop taking this shit so fucking seriously.

Missing the Moment

Photo Credit: Flickr Snow Fall by James Jordan

When you are passing into a new part of your life, do you know? Sometimes, it's obvious because you are sent home from a hospital with a squalling infant that you never had before, or someone declares you "husband and wife." Other times, maybe you know only in retrospect.

The other night Mike and I were driving out for dinner, in falling snow, when suddenly there was no snow, and the road was wet with rain. Neither of us could remember at what point it had become rain. Life happens like that, I think. I also think that, just as there is a place where the road is snowy and a place where it is not, there is a moment when we begin to change. We just don't notice it at the time.

I have spent the first part of my thirties being driven as if by a horde of biting flies. Not necessarily in a bad way. This driven-ness has not produced any real money for my family, or worldly success, but it has caused me to bake Christmas gingerbread cookies from scratch year after year, assist my children in assembling craft creatures for Valentine's Day with hot glue, and drum up numerous behavioral systems for the management of AD/HD, defiance, and general laziness successfully. I have cooked. I have menu planned. I have re-organized. I have gone to work twenty minutes early almost every work day of my life. I have worked harder than I have to. I have done all this with a sense of purpose, and direction, as if, in some invisible way, I am going somewhere. Somewhere important.

And then I got sick.

There is something about ending up with chronic illness that makes one into a sort of unintentional Buddhist. At first, for a long time, I felt like there was there this maddening energy pulsing within me, and my body wouldn't cooperate. There were things to do and I couldn't do them. My thinking centered around how to make sure these things got done anyway, come Hell or high water. I was aggravated and angry.

Somehow, subtly, this has changed. I still think a lot about what has to be done. But somehow it occupies less importance to me, as if suddenly Life and Death do not hang in the balance of the completion of my laundry. I have started to let go of the idea that I will have everything that a healthy person has, that things will be the same as they were. Instead, my thinking centers around what choices I need to make given the reality of my condition, and what the consequences of each choice will be. I think with more patience and less agitation, although the choices are just as hard to make.

I could regret the muscle tone that I have lost, the friendships I have no energy to spend time on, the job I may not be able to keep. I dislike the pain and exhaustion. But I don't mind the change to my pacing and perspective. That part, I think, is good. And my cat is very grateful that, after all these years, suddenly I sit long enough to be a good lap person.

Somehow, driving snow melted into rain without my seeing and I became a subtly different person. I blinked and missed the moment when it happened.

February.

February.

The light is not yet spring yet not merely winter. A golden brightness casts the mountains in shades of promise, slashed with sheets of snow.

Northern New Mexico hangs onto winter forever, like a child who won't let go of an outgrown toy. Snow flurries cancel May picnics and high school graduations are suffered in freezing winds. Children change from tank tops to snow pants to shorts to jackets. Fruit trees bloom and are killed by frost. Winds blow the new growth down, as if challenging only the strong to remain.

But this mid-February day, I can feel spring coming, though I know it lies yet months away in its arrival.

Small Things I've Noticed

Photo credit: Flickr

I love the sound of fresh coffee pouring into a ceramic cup. It sounds like salvation. 

My cat looks like he has been airbrushed by someone who illustrates absurd children's books.

The beauty of Northern New Mexico in the early morning cannot be overstated. Our sky is like a gasp followed by a Hallelujah and yet I still stay inside because it's cold and I am lazy and sore. If the sun-soaked ponderosa mountains don't call me out of my fibromyalgia hermit-hood, I suppose nothing will.

I miss the ocean when I think about it, but I almost never think about anything that I could miss. Does that mean there is something wrong with me?

I cannot sit in stillness. My legs are always tapping, my mind always roving, my fingers picking at something. But I get up in the still hours by myself so that everything else will be quiet around me, like a tranquil blanket enveloping the scurrying of one tiny mouse. That is what I do instead of meditate.

It is 7 AM Saturday morning. Everything is still quiet. Coffee is brewing. The cat has been fed. Now let the maelstrom begin.