Juxtapositioning

Oh, Haiti

Like many people whose eyes, ears, and fingertips are connected by the vast Interwebs, I heard the news of yesterday’s devastating Haiti earthquake via Twitter.

7.0. OMFG. I’ve been in a 5.5. I know that 6-point-something is pretty damaging. Every point-something is a factor of 10 in magnitude. So this 7.0, in a country where most people are painfully poor and (I imagine) live in the kind of rickety shack housing I’ve seen elsewhere in the Caribbean, is huge.

And it is. According to what little I have read (and I avoid TV news like the plague), 100,000 people could already have died. And the inevitable deaths from disease due to damaged water systems, lack of food and shelter, could raise the figure precipitously.

I am trying to figure out how I feel about this. What I feel.

In 2001, when we all saw surreal footage of airplanes flying into tall buildings that had become part of an iconic skyline, I felt something. That night I lay in bed and imagined helping herald 2000 confused souls into a warm light-filled embrace, and helping tens of thousands more through those first days of shock and outrage. In the days that followed, it became easy. All that shock and outrage got funneled into hating someone and something that someone else decided we should be hating anyway.

That’s how wars start.

But how do you hate an earthquake?

We can’t hate the earth, because it’s our home. It sustains us.

Less than two weeks ago I channeled information about people — many people — choosing to exit their earthly lives this year. In working with this kind of information, I try to remain a little distant and not feel the pain and grief associated with such an eventuality. When just one person dies, many grieve. I’ve protected myself from feeling that on a grand scale. My fear is that I’d be overwhelmed by the immensity of such pain on that large a scale. Many people transitioning? There are 7 billion or so on the planet now. A few thousand here or there doesn’t make much difference overall. Many people would have to be … many.

People.

100,000 beautiful, alive, loving people in Haiti died yesterday, ending lives that had love and pain and laughter and tears. And it wasn’t an ethereal Rapture, where they simply got lifted up into some alternate reality. No, a good many of these people likely died in pain. That’s twice as many people as live in the small city that is my home, and it’s pain that I am afraid to feel.

What is compassion?

I think about Haiti, just as I thought about the Christmas tsunami a few years ago. I hear a big ‘should’ in my head. I should be feeling this, because I can. It’s my job, my livelihood, to tap into a global consciousness, or into the energy body of a single person. To me, it’s all the same.

And yet, I don’t.

Last night I approached a woman, older than me, who I knew had been having some physical issues. I asked how she was. I could see how she was, could see where there were energy blockages. I asked her permission to touch her, and I briefly touched points on her shoulders and down her back. I asked about her feet because I could feel immense pain there. I wept, not from the pain but from the sense of it.

I can feel pain without feeling it. Strange, that.

And yet I don’t go to Haiti. This makes me smaller somehow, less human, I fear.

Last night I also wrote a column in which I cried about some of my fears. Fears of my own fragility. In the light of the new day I can see that this was, in some way, an expression of my response to Haiti. I know we all process everything that comes into our being — from near or far, it’s all the same — through our personal perception lenses. That’s not being selfish, it’s being human. We can’t help it. So I transferred the cries of tens of thousands of throats into one cry from a single throat, crying, “Who will help me when I have need?”

I could rationalize that just as children are better off when you let them make their own lives and their own mistakes, that I should keep my virtual hands off Haiti and let things transpire there as they will. I am not Atlas and I cannot hold the world on my shoulders. I have trouble some days with my own piece of the world.

At the risk of sounding trite, or incomplete, I can love. In the end, that’s all any of us can do. For some, love will be a $10 donation to the Red Cross. For others, it’s being airlifted along with dogs and rescue teams to pull people out from under buildings. For still others, it’s prayer. And for others, it’s a blink in the daily crush of living. Who am I to determine which facet of love has more merit?

If it’s Tuesday, it must be haiku’s day

From My Window

Gray-blue sky, still wind
Buddhist prayer flags hang from branch
Monday morning cars

~~~~~

Sing Us Peace, They Said

Lapping waves at feet
wheeling seabirds cry above
Sun warms driftwood seat

Snowed in

Last week the flurries started. They really began on New Year’s Eve, the day I drove away from a warm heart and to a cold empty house that I wanted to fill with all my wishes for the coming year. Wishes full, I lay down at ten minutes to midnight, not realizing that the standard way to bring in a new year around here is with all the leftover July fireworks. Someone even torched a minivan just a block away that night. I’ve considered torching minivans myself, and might have had I ever actually owned one, but likely not as a way to bring in wishes for the coming year.

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.

Dead boy emerges

The boy looks at the woman lying ragged in the hospital bed, her breaths coming like rocky chunks of asphalt, filling the room with the out and in, out and in.

You are not of me, he said. I never came from you.

The woman, restless, moves her legs from side to side in her sleeplike state. Can’t keep a sheet on her, the nurses had told the boy. A chasm yawns in the space where her legs met. Sagging flesh swims there, shapes and color. The boy looks away. I never came from you.

A nurse bustles in with some supplies. A breathing treatment, she says. To keep her lungs healthy. The boy looks on. For what, he wonders. Blood clots in the brain, they had said. A coma. Why treat the lungs? Free. I want to be free.

The staff speaks to her like she is a child. They try to wake her, get her to wiggle toes, to nod yes. Eyes open briefly, looking at the faces in the room. They close again, no change. No recognition.

At last you can’t touch me. The boy stands at the side of the room. He won’t go near the bed. He doesn’t take her hand. He has come to be released of the chains that bind him to her, of the relentless presence in his mind all those years, probing, commanding, all-knowing, all-seeing. He whispers cautious syllables, like sending tiny snowflakes into the room one by one, knowing they will melt immediately in his breath.

Free.

The boy melds with another boy, a boy who has come from a deeper place, an older place. This boy is grey, with dead grey eyes and a dead grey face. No expression. No hope inside, just a dry walnut where his heart had once been. Dead boy looks around the room and sees the future. Sameness. Grey. No life.

I have been waiting for you.

Dead boy surveys the broken landscape of his world. He feels nothing. Is nothing. The woman stirs again, breathing louder, ragged. Her eyes open and close again. Her mouth lies open, a trap. Dead boy climbs inside and dissolves on her dry tongue.

The woman swallows, chokingly. She coughs.

The boy turns away, his heart safe in its velvet box. The woman’s face is someone else’s. He has seen what he needed.

Outside, the cold bright moon is ringed with ice. Birds fly overhead. The boy drives away into the night.

Longing

I long to travel where my body cannot go;

through doors and walls and windows

to unseen worlds of dizzying possibility.

I lie awake, willing a single silver cord

to emerge from my body like an astral umbilicus.

At the mirror I chant I AM

and wait for the reflected worlds behind me to unfold

like petals after a spring rain,

worlds that will swallow me into nothingness.

One day I will scream for an hour so shards of my

shattered heart will break my brain into halves

and I will disappear between them.

Float away, Self, I whisper in my dreams

that follow me like twisted shadows.

Float away and unwind the becoming,

banners at rest and respectfully waiting,

all time suspended.

Vancouver redux

Late last year (snort. I crack myself up) I went to The Land Up Over, also known as Canada. The Great White Something-or-other. (NOTE: There was no snow. None. Also no polar bears or igloos. Damn.) I hadn’t been there in FIVE MONTHS, which is odd considering its ridiculous proximity to me, something like 30 minutes. From my house. To the border station, where I get (politely, because this is Canada, after all) invited inside to discuss my “situation.”

This time, I was helped by a 5-foot tall guy with a French accent, who shrugged Gallically at me when I said I might be staying there 10 days or so. Ten days? What is zees ten days? You not like our charming contree? No? Okay, zhen I stamp zhis. Be on your way. And he stamped my paper and I handed it to the guys outside watching a drug dog sniff the inside of a car’s engine and was on my way. Of course, this was Christmas Eve, but it was a far cry from the last time when my car was searched THREE FREAKING TIMES and my papers were copied and I was yelled at by a woman in a strawberry blonde ponytail wearing a bulletproof vest.

I was really really really looking forward to the won ton. There’s a place on Broadway just east of Main that has the best won ton IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. I am not kidding. It has scratched white Formica tables and exactly zero ambience. Decorations do not exist here. Two surly Chinese women truculently wait tables of serious lunchtime eaters. They set big bowls of broth down on the tables, each bowl containing exactly five of the most delectable won ton ever to exist, filled with fat prawns and tasting like what I always knew perfect won ton taste like. I was so looking forward to going there once, or even twice, in those ten days.

The place BURNED DOWN.

The roof was charred across the entire building that housed a pizza joint and who knows what else (I only had eyes for won ton), and a chain link fence kept passers by from getting too close. A tiny woman walked past us as we stood in the street, staring unbelievingly at the charred remains of won ton perfection. She turned to me. Her black eyes were tiny, like buttons. “Monday last,” she said in an eastern European accent. “In the morning.”

“I hope no one was hurt,” I thought to say. That was beyond her language capabilities. Hurt. She shrugged. “Monday. In the morning.

Last year at Christmastime it snowed buckets, feet upon feet of whiteness. We threw snow and each other, shaking it off branches into the backs of one another’s coats, melting snow dripping down our backs. Someone made a real live igloo (SEE???) at the park down the street and we crawled inside it, grinning.

This year, no snow. Christmas Day was relatively warm and unsesonably sunny, so we hiked up and down some back trails at Lighthouse Park. A tree had cracked in the middle, leaving shards standing sharply upward from what was left of the trunk. Someone had come with a chain saw to move the tree off the trail, and had made a little bench from one end of the fallen log. Nearer the lighthouse, and on huge rocks jutting into the northern part of the harbor, the rest of Vancouver gathered, a chaotic chorus of languages, no one bothering to speak in the hushed tones that such a place of beauty cries out for.

It turns out that I am sensitive to noise. I have said before that I can hear a cat’s soft footfalls on carpet from several rooms away, so the plumbing sounds overhead at all hours of the night kept me from sleeping. Year before last, when the place was my home for awhile, I would get up in the night and read downstairs, away from the gurgling and clicking and toilet lid dropping.

I forgot to go to Lush and restock my dwindled supply of Karma soap.

I now have a huge handful of Canadian change, because I keep forgetting that the big ones are worth $2 and the other big ones are worth $1 and you can use this for money. To buy things with. So now I have like $20 worth of change.

We won’t talk about the price of gas. But it’s in liters, which is a trick of some sort.

I have still not been to a Tim Horton’s. I know, I know, hard to believe.

I do, however, now own a toque*. And I really like it.

*There appears to be some debate, even among Canadians, about the proper way to spell the word pronounced “tewk”, which is actually a hat. But I’m sticking with “toque”. And at last I understand what Bob and Doug McKenzie were singing. Five golden TOQUES.

Oh.

Eh.

2009 in the rear-view mirror

A year ago I had just moved from a country that didn’t want me to a bare echoey white place hidden under a stifling canopy of tall dark trees. I adore trees, and loved lying in bed looking at green branches, but the bare echoey place had an inner emptiness that rang loudly in my ears.

Plus it had weird carpet.

In the spring I discovered forested trails and alternate universes. I sat, motionless, sometimes for hours, staring out through a skylight and eventually emerging into a giddy, childlike state, a person who thought lakes were oceans and wondered whether she should be driving real cars.

A year ago I had a job, a sort of a job, a full time gig for part time pay, plus a promise of a someday full time pay for the time I was putting in, so I wrote and I wrote and I edited and I wrote my little heart out. In February that world exploded and it limped along through May, and then I was done. No job, no pay.

I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and found my way through a maze of fears. Later, a motorcycle fell on me.

In June I moved to a smaller place near the water and near the trails and across the street from a banyan tree and in a community. The Magic Bus drives up from time to time and takes people places. I look out my tiny window and see a slice of ocean. The place isn’t hidden, is sometimes a fishbowl with the world looking in, but it fits me better. I have an easel and paints, and I write. The sun shone on this place and now the rain falls gently on my sari-clad zen room and my bicycles smile through their gears.

In July my intentions caught up with the world.

In August I brought my heart-pieces closer and together we walked my world, now theirs. We ate 18 pounds of blueberries. We laughed. We parted with new paths woven between us.

I discovered a box.

Summer tumbled into autumn and soon the bright crunchy leaves became dank and moldering and slick underfoot. Outward turned inward. Not being a joiner — ever — I joined and joyed. I sang. I found a home, at least for now.

Now, inward, I sing. I joy. I raise silent lips in inner song, singing my heart into wholeness. I breathe and become one with my heartbeat, and with yours. I walk and feel aliveness in the dirt under my soles, in each sparkling raindrop on my face, in each leaf and sound and sigh. I touch hearts and they touch mine.

What do I wish for 2010? More. More of what comes next.

I can smell you

I was born with superpowers. My birth was heralded by the trumpets of a thousand blowing noses. A thousand throats cried, “Ah!”

I can smell you.

As you approach and before you even walk past me, I have already decided what you smell like based on your appearance. Dryer sheets in the grocery store, sweat on the hiking trails. I know this with the inner sense we all share. We lift eyes and greet one another kindly, or nonchalantly, or not at all. We continue our separate directions, you one way and me another. After you pass I am bathed by a wafting of your being, an air current bearing with it a tide of your essence. My superpowers engage. Try as I might, I cannot help what comes next.

I inhale. Deeply. I can smell you.

Here is where I am proved wrong. Dryer sheets on the hiking trails. Cinnamon and vanilla — or is that coffee? — in the grocery stores. I had it wrong.

Dryer sheets are an evil surpassed only by cigar smoke. They asphyxiate. If you use them in your house and you happen to be running your dryer as I cycle past, my throat burns. I cough. Petroleum, get thee from my lungs!

If we happen to get close enough for a hug, I will know your shampoo, your soap, your secrets. I inhale you deeply. You fill my cells with your essence. We become one for that moment. I can smell you.

This superpower has other uses. I know when things are burning that shouldn’t be. I can tell when cakes, cookies, and toast are done to perfection. I appreciate a new book, its pages crisp and ink fresh. I remember the scent of newborn babies.

Scent memories run fresh. I once had a yellow blanket, one corner browned from being pressed nightly to the underside of my nose in comfort. When Blankie was washed it took days to get it right again. I remember places by their smell. Paris is perfume and the Metro, and tiny quiches and baguettes wrapped in colored paper. The paper wrappings all smell the same. Ireland is damp green, warm with conviviality. Germany smells of steel and rain and sausages. Finland smells of ice, clear and crystal cold, tinged with warm cedar.

I can smell you. Walk by me now, dare me to lose myself for a moment in the swirling cells that surround you.

People with big heads freak me out

I’ve often wondered why human head size isn’t more standardized. After all, we can be pretty sure that head size isn’t related to brain power, so what other reason would there be not to base natural selection on head size? Getting your head stuck in the neck of your sweater is a serious and life-threatening condition.

Smaller heads use fewer resources and are more environmentally sustainable. Big heads need big hats. How many sheep does it take to make the wool in just one big-headed hat? I can imagine that three or four sheep devote themselves full-time to the making of just one hat. This is tricky because sheep are not easy to convince to do the knitting. Also, unless naturally bald, people with big heads have more hair and therefore use more hair care products, take more time for a hair cut, and use more wattage in blow-dryer time than do people with small heads. If they shave their heads, big-headed people require more razor blades per year. Large heads weigh more and therefore will wear out a pillow much faster than a lighter, more streamlined small head. Having a big head just isn’t environmentally conscious.

We need fewer choices, not more. How many times have you been flummoxed in the cereal aisle at the grocery store? There are now at least 1,100 different types of boxed dry cereal. None of them contain actual food. It’s the same with heads. Do we really need size XXXXXL hats? For that one person whose head is the size of the Concorde?

It’s not the heads as much as it is the faces. I met a guy with an enormous head the other day. His face was like a dinner plate with eyes and I kept imagining trying to stick my cheese and crackers and barbequed chicken wings onto his face and of course they kept falling right off. Kissing such a person must be terrifying. I myself went home and had nightmares about being licked by a huge dinner plate that turned into a Saint Bernard. If it had been the type of Saint Bernard that carries the little jug of brandy under his chin it would have been all right, but this wasn’t that type of Saint Bernard.

Stoning is a viable option. Big targets are easy to hit. You want to prevent global warming, don’t you?

*No sheep or Saint Bernards were harmed in the making of this post.

Transition

A hospital bed stood in the center of the room, once a living room. Now it was a dying room, its walls covered with loved ones’ artifacts and memories. The man in the bed was tiny, shrunken, his body barely visible beneath the sheet that covered him. Only his feet and one hand created small hills in the otherwise nearly-flat landscape. His face was turned to one side and his eyes never left mine. Hold me, they said, I know everything. Hold me.

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.