Farrah Fawcett, Brave Woman

Farrah Fawcett lost her long battle with canc

Shiva

There are houses we think we will live in forever, then suddenly these are not our houses. There are summers we believe will be one in a long endless daisy chain of summers, but the chain breaks in the hand--fragile all along, though it looked strong. You must be the pillar at the center of chaos, even when the psychic ether rips apart and the person you knew from aeons ago, from centuries, falls through. It is a cycle: birth and destruction, the lamb born in freezing rain and sleet on the cusp between a season of cold and a season of brightness, the tyger who springs forward like a scream made from shadow and fire.

"You're back," I say. I knew where you were all along, but I could not find you.
"You were here all along," you say. You thought maybe the cogs would not mesh this time around. Disappointed, you had said, "What's another twelve centuries? I'm patient." Then you saw the rivers in my open hands. When we talk, our words tumble over both our voices. Hard to hold back everything we haven't been able to say for a thousand years. There's a lot of catching up to do, and meanwhile the moon "turns in its clockwork dream" still.

Why are you here, now? So many riddles, so many untranslatable sutras whispering in the imagination, songs of small gods in the chambered nautilus of the outer dark, a shell that pours forth dreams in wild and fragmentary spillage.

The world will collapse time and space to bring these two together, when the time is right. So write. The Book of Life is falling open to the proper page. Trust in the process. It is written in letters you once thought were barbed wire, but whose true meaning is the heart of peace.

Love Abounds

Missing my dear departed sister today intensely, I switched on the radio and the following song was playing (you have to sit through an intro, but it's worth it):



My sister and I saw Cindy Lauper perform this live.

Love you, sis.

Watching It Happen

I'm tempted to start out my Creative Writing class next semester with a disclaimer that the decision to embark on "growing" one's creativity, particularly through writing, is a dangerous and a courageous act, because it changes one's life, subtly or overtly, in nearly alchemical ways. I saw so many of my students' lives change during my summer course (and it had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with their decision to open up their willingness). I am getting like a kid in a candy store as I think all I want to teach, all the writing exercises, and a semester of absolute wonder and fun (hard part is getting them to buy into it at first, but they warm up quickly).

Yes, I Turned 50

I turned 50 years old on June 7th, and am really quite happy about it. When I was young, 50 seemed "old"--and of course, I could never imagine that the day before my odometer rolled over, I would be participating in my first African dance recital! Which is precisely what I did. My friend Nonah from my dance troupe, almost 80 years young, has a slogan on the frame of her car's license plate: "Screw the golden years." Damn straight.

I feel younger now than I did in my thirties. That was a difficult, questioning decade for me. My forties were better, but I look forward to the next decade with joy and curiosity. I leave you all with the following quote:

"People do not grow old no matter how long we live. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we were born."

Albert Einstein

Over the Weekend, A Cloud

Coming to terms with things over the weekend, there is sadness--really enormous sadness--but also a sense of what is real. I feel that perhaps life is always about trying to see through the fabric of illusion. I was saddened by an answer this weekend; it was not the one I wanted. We all get answers like this from the universe, so it doesn't matter what it was. I felt like a woman walking barefoot through the desert today, and yet I did not feel so sad after a while. I went to restorative yoga (the type in which one is supported by pillows and blankets, as if in a cocoon). And remembered something my myth professor Harvey once replied to a student, that in the end, it is all love, no matter what. And love cannot always be quantified, which is good.



If You Forget Me

by Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.