I sang yesterday for a woman who lay dying. I sang with three other women who all sing their heartsongs, and as I sang I looked out at the sparkling blue-gray bay beyond, hearing our voices lift to carry the breath of one whose breaths can be counted now, so slowly. As I sang I thought of humility. Lift me up, I sang in silent supplication while my lips sang other words. Lift me up. Let me be your instrument.

Words like those do not come to me often, or easily. I have come so far in owning my wants, my desires, and here I was asking to release them into the breath-space beyond me. Humility. Releasing my desires into the larger space around me. Releasing my hold, my death grip, on creating my What Comes Next. Slipping into the warm current that will carry me into the tides of tomorrow and tomorrow. I felt my body, my heart, relax as I still sang, still looked with love and wonder and gratitude at the wild white hair scrawled across the pillow above the slight bent form curled into a u-shape, and the soft careworn faces lifted in song around me.

I thought about what it might be like to release into nothingness, into the space around and beyond me, and to let go of trying and simply be. To let go of needing to be perfect, or even good. To instead offer myself as a gift gladly received wherever there is need. To breathe life into the spaces between my cells, and let them float up, up, into the wideness of All That Is. To release into softness, and to allow that softness to carry me, lift me, and form me into my What Comes Next.

I am writing my story, the bigger story that is me, and in so doing will discover who I am and how to be in the world. It feels already like humility, humus, the Earth, is a part of that. My bones are shaped from mud, after all. My heartbeat stirs far beneath my feet in the warm wet wild earth. I am writing and also mindful that each breath I take also stirs the air of seven billion throats. Each step I take reverberates around the globe under seven billion pairs of feet. Each song I sing adds to the music already resounding through seven billion ears. What I do affects you. I write my story knowing this, and it makes me feel not small, but humble. Aware. I have the power to change lives. It amazes me to think this. I need do nothing, nor perhaps should I do anything other than Love and Be.

I am cold. I miss the warmth. I long to feel it permeate my limbs, my skin, my heart.

I’ve used a cliff metaphor perhaps too frequently in the past for it to fully fit now, but I do feel that I have at least dipped a toe into the waters of change. Change happens slowly sometimes, stealthily, without us noticing, like a cat climbing into your lap: one paw, one whisker at a time so you will fail to notice movement at all until there are four paws of purring goodness curled contentedly where a few moments ago there were none. I feel that cat now, or one of her paws…

A friend tells me I know what is right for me. The next step. I look to the gods for reassurance, to the winds, to the stones, but they remain silent. All I notice is growth. Movement. All that is required is to step into the flow and let the current add its weight to my own. Exponential. Like breathing. I send my own green shoots deep underground where they grab hold and grow into exploding brilliant stars overhead, magnified by the rains and winds of my soul’s longing.

I know what I need to do now. The song of it fills me, warms me, exposes me to the soft warm breath of spring.

My car flew silently on redbrown wings. In two minutes I passed another hawk, having entered a new dominion. Hawk #2. A sign? How could there be TWO hawks sitting silently in the median of I-5?  If this is a sign, I thought, let there be three. My thoughts continued flowing ahead in the river borne of the ancestors, our shared ancestral past, my shaman-selves. A river of anger, flowing into words of creation. I am a pioneer.

Three minutes. The wings beneath me flew higher. Faster. My thoughts grew stronger. THREE. The third hawk spoke as I passed, telling me all the secrets I have ever forgotten, reminding me to breathe into the punctuation wrought by ONE, TWO, and now THREE hawks, breathe IN your destiny, breathe OUT your story, tell it high and pure, sing it into the sky.

I am writing.

Not-writing.

I feel Resistance in the act of Googling. Now I know that Ganesh is associated with the first chakra, called Muladhara, and that mula means “original, main,” and adhara means “foundation.” Great. I needed to know that. I feel complete now. There is recent relevance to this information and Resistance tells me, Go ahead and write a nice little email explaining that bit, and then I realize I’ve walked into the trap again. Not writing.

Google was invented for people who Resist.

My mother, inching ever closer to a permanently childlike state, used to called it Procrastinating. For her it looked and tasted a lot like making chocolate chip cookies, but we all knew it was more that there was something she didn’t want to do. Resistance.

I tell people that resistance is an invitation to look more deeply within. Great. I’m not-writing about a not-something that I can’t yet see. It all comes clear now. Thanks. I look within and see the Cheshire smile beckoning. I can find a million things to do other than write. Breathing, for example. Did you know that most of us fail to place adequate attention on our breath? We breathe shallowly. I should spend the next hour, or perhaps the next month for good measure, breathing. Just to be sure.

Okay. Deep breath in. Tomorrow it’s Morning Pages. Pinkie swear. Let’s see what’s inside.

gasping sobs tear her body into pieces that

float above her, waiting to be sewn back together

One thread drawing them tight and snug again,

a sweater she can thrust her arms into gladly,

wrapping warmth around her icy bare branches.

Inside her, alien flesh pricks with tiny knives,

razors opening sealed wounds that cry scaly tears

and glue their eyes tight shut, denying their misery.

Above her his spiky breath covers her hair, her ear,

dripping down her neck with a snail’s undulation.

She rises, tasting ashes in her mouth, and floats,

now lost in a sea of misty grey,

now lifted above the clouds into brightness.

Her eyes close against the sudden blindness of clarity

and she sees her tiny body far below, broken.

Stars burst, gasp and die.

Colors collide, crayons melting.

The ancestors mourn.

The flurries began that day and it started snowing harder in the days afterward. Sad, lonely, desperate people who wanted fixing or at least hope that they could be fixed. They reached black lonely tendrils to me, tendrils that I should know better than to accept, and soon I was Atlas holding up the world on my narrow shoulders, unable to speak or breathe.

Or sleep.

My childhood was populated by monsters and witches who lived under my bed and in my closet, coming out at night to masquerade as shapes that became chairs and other mundane items when the lights were switched on. It didn’t help that somebody thought it was a good idea to take me to see a bad B-movie sci-fi flick called The Lost Continent that featured seaweed that would reach in through ship portholes and grab people, making a weird rattling sound.

I heard that seaweed this past week, those black tendrils reaching for me choking out light and air until all I felt was the song of the unburdened.

Having dispensed with the seaweed with the handy axe the witches had left under my bed, I noticed that I was snowed in. Six feet of snow covered the front door. Cars looked like hummocks. The air was crisp and still. Nothing moved.

I took a shovel the size of my thumb and shoveled the city free. When people awoke in the morning, there was no trace of white.

And I slept.

The snow started again today, flurries falling on my face and eyelashes. Soon I’ll be sleeping under a warm blanket in welcome darkness. I reach my green seaweed tendrils toward the light, waving tentacles that could twine around a hot air balloon and lift me up, up from the snow, carrying me over pristine high white glistening mountains.

Free to fill my year with the wishes I began with a snap and a bang.

The skin of the man’s face was surprisingly smooth, as if all the cells of his body had ceased their normal work and instead concentrated on making his skin look like a teenager’s again. His eyes looked out from inside deep dark recesses that were two small caves in his face. His eyes spoke. I know everything. I remember when I was a tiny jumble of cells, a zygote. I remember the feel of the wind on my skin, of the sight of birds flying overhead. Once I wanted to fly with them. Now I have become part of this sheet, this bed, this room. I feel myself getting bigger and smaller at the same time. Hold me.

I held him. Softly I sang, surrounding him with song, and the notes became bigger and joined with his spirit, his life essence, that stood just behind him. Together we kept expanding, my clear high notes and his eternal life presence, becoming as large as All That Is, spinning into the heavens. The memories in the room applauded. This is what they had come for.

Gently I placed a hand over his that lay beneath the sheet. His body-shell trembled. His shrunken chest rose up and down, guiltily, tiredly. I felt the nearly-constant tremor in his hand soften. The notes rose and fell in rhythm with his chest. Sleep, his eyes said. Sleep.

Soon, promised the notes. The memories in the room swelled with appreciation. Soon. The body-shell sighed. The mouth spoke but the words that fell out were from another time. The notes receded. Cells quivered. Soon.

[A further note on Andy Raskin: Andy, if I may address you directly and at this point I don't see why I shouldn't considering everything you have meant to me this past week, I have to report that I sort of hated you through about the first half of your book. You were kind of a jerk! But then you got all vulnerable and I started thinking Maybe he's on to something here, and I especially liked the technique of letting that horrible inner voice do the talking for awhile so you could really hear it and from where it comes, and then I started thinking that despite your unfortunate inside back cover photograph — the one that makes you look alarmingly identical to the Party of The Other Side in the aforementioned divorce — I'd almost sort of want to meet you. (Not in a creepy way or a stalking way, I promise, but more like in a I think I get you and you seem like a cool guy kind of way.) At least, if it weren't for the fact that semi-famous people are almost always a disappointment in person, I mean, cough, so I've heard. (Not you, of course.) You understand. No offense. Your book rocked, really.]

Dear Anne LaMott,

A few years ago someone commented on the blog I was keeping at the time. You sound just like Anne LaMott! Through the osmosis of such things I knew that Anne LaMott was an author who wrote books. Score! I Googled you. Oh, bummer. I saw references to “God” and “Jesus.” Since I am a person who frequently and liberally sprinkles words like “reincarnation” and “chakra” and “aura” in her conversations, I figured we couldn’t have much to say to one another despite what my well-intentioned commenter thought.

That’s where I was wrong. I adore being wrong.

Last week one of your books jumped off the library shelf into my hands. Well, we say that, books jumping off shelves, but in reality it’s unlikely, I mean seriously, show me the legs that cause all this jumping. How about, the book took my notice? Became magically brighter while everything else fell away? Sure, okay. I was in the Biography section, where, apparently, the lovely librarians in my library have seen fit to stash your books, or some of them. I don’t know, I’m not an expert in library science (but I love that it’s a Science, I mean, Books and Science are two things one doesn’t expect to be combined, you know?), and I don’t even know if there are other books of yours in other locations. I just know I saw A N N E  L A M O T T along the top shelf and something made me stop. Anne Lamott. Well, fine. I guess it’s time to see what ol’ Anne Lamott is like for reals. So I chose a book after scanning the three or four titles that were there. Plan B. Sounds good, I could use a Plan B myself. So I took it home.

I started reading. Interesting. I liked you immediately. I liked how you looked at things. I liked your passion. I liked your cadence, your use of words. The way people use words — which to me are like living, breathing, feeling beings — is important to me. I judge people based on their use (and abuse) of words. Yours were spare. Bare. Frank. Honest. I liked that.

I flipped to the back inner fly leaf. The words tumbled out and the sudden sound of my voice surprised me, “Oh, she’s beautiful!”  Dreadlocks. Hippie-ish jewelry. A warm, slightly self-conscious smile. Someone is taking my photograph and I find that a little ridiculous, your eyes seemed to be saying. A woman growing comfortable with her skin. I liked her very much.

I decided, too, while I read, that we think very much alike. That we’d probably like one another. That we do share a similar writing style. I liked the forthright, tender, compassionate, human woman who emerged from your pages.

Thanks, Anne LaMott, for the gift of you I received through Plan B.

Oh. I can understand your question. What does she want? Well. I wrote to another writer once. I was twelve. His name was Ray Orrock and he was a columnist for a Bay Area newspaper. I adored his writing. His column about driving around the block an extra time just so he could watch the odometer turn from 99999 to 00000 made him seem like just the sort of person I was. At twelve I wasn’t driving, but if I had been that’s just the sort of thing I’d do. So I wrote to him. Poured out my heart. About being misunderstood. About wanting my life to mean something. And you know what? He wrote me back. Took about three months, which in twelve-year-old years is nearly a lifetime of little deaths, but he wrote back. He was kind. He was understanding. He gave advice. Keep your chin up. You’ll be fine. I was embarrassed that I had taken up the time of a 50-year old man and I hid his letter away in a drawer.

So what do I want, Anne LaMott? Writers write to reach people. That’s what they do. It’s why they — we — write. To be heard. To connect. So consider yourself heard and connected. Sure, I don’t know you, but I got a sense from those pages. And writing — reaching, connecting — seemed like a good idea.

Hi, Anne LaMott.