crazy ass shit.

I have done some things in my life that I am not proud of.  There are probably things I have done that I should be ashamed of that I don't even know about.
Growing up, watching people around me be incomprehensible, trying to absorb and make sense of it, and adjust, I made a lot of plans for the future.  None of which have materialized, by the way….
For a long time I had the idea that if I was careful, I could manage to avoid making any mistakes that I could not reverse.
I kept the tiny little space inside that was me away from everything, unexposed and unexamined.  I reasoned that if I could keep one corner clean, I could dust off the rest when I had time.
It was a childish plan, not allowing for  how we are all Life's Bonzais.
A secret once exposed feels like an explosion, or on a good day, a hot air balloon, and yet the objective view is that whatever the secret is, within some parameters, there is someone in the room with something so similar as to include you back into the human race.
From "Who has a life that has turned out as expected" to "How in the hell did this happen", there is no escape.
Industries are built out of hiding the visible signs of tragedy, sadness, disappointment and poor choices. There isn't anything that works, no plastic surgery for life, no cosmetic effect, no vitamin, no diet, no makeover that is going to mask the simple truth of being human. It hurts.
Schadenfreude can't really take root if empathy is present.  If I know I am connected to everyone else, that when I meet a sorrowing person, I am connected to their sorrow, and even if I am pleased with my life that day, I may well not be tomorrow, or even in a minute or two.  Anywhere you may go, I may find myself, conversely, if I have found my way through, so can you.
Someday I hope to be able to move through change elegantly, adjust quickly without complaint or fury, to let go of the gone time and step into a now without drama.
I suspect that is as realistic as a hope I had as a child, though.

Sing thee to thy rest

Taking it with you - you can't, you don't, and really, it doesn't get left behind either.
Everything of my mother's broke, deteriorated, disappeared or died shortly after she did.  The family she tried to believe would reconcile and care about one another fell apart.  Her cat ran away, never to be seen again, her clothes went off somewhere, the antiques had been sold, very few of her personal effects held together once she left the planet.  Even her intentions about where her body would wind up were scattered on the breeze.  There was an autopsy which she never would have wanted, there was resistance from the church where she wanted her ashes left to having them left there, even though she had paid for the privilege.
I got a run around that lasted years about planting flowers in a spot and putting her ashes there, they told me I was only going to be allowed to scatter her in the forest behind the church and if I wanted to plant something there, they had to take it before the committee in charge of what got planted where.  I needed to stop carrying the box of ashes around, so I planted bulbs and blueberries with her ashes on the property she lived and died on, some went to a memorial garden I have near my house and the last handful I kept in a pouch thinking I would take it to France where her father was buried but after 7 years I decided it was time.
My daughter and I went out to the back of the church one day when nobody was looking and put the last portion of ashes under a euonymus that had been climbing up the back of the Lady Chapel for decades.  We sprinkled her in a star formation for the pagan ancestors placed a crystal there and said  some things that we needed to say and left.
I don't believe that people hang out after they leave, and that if you go to a graveyard to talk to someone it is just to bring your attention to the encounter, but that really, they are as much everywhere as anywhere.
Still, I found it jarring and another reminder of impermanence when I went there today to talk to her and saw the euonymus gone, the earth all around the church covered with chips, as though they dug everything up to install better drainage.  The place had always been damp.
About 8 feet further back there had been installed 2 raised beds with seasonal flowers and a statue of St. Francis in between them.  I suppose it could have been St. Joseph, I'm not really up on the statuary.  
I remember trying to get the pastor to come up and give her communion the week before she decided to leave and for some reason it was inconvenient and he didn't return my calls.  There was no money to be gotten from this old lady, so why bother to see that she got communion?  Not important to me, but important to her, and watching her pretend she wasn't hurt by it was pain enough.  The church betrayed her in the end, just as many people in her life had done.
In Tibet, there is a sky burial, in which the dead are taken to a mountain, and a priest dismembers the body, hurling it to the vultures who are waiting expectantly to devour it.  I have always thought this was a beautiful idea, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be legal in this country.  Failing that, planting blueberry bushes over cremated remains provided berries for songbirds who took my mother's earthly spirit to the sky where they sing, and lay eggs and raise young who eat more blueberries.  A good way for her music to go on forever, or at least for as long as there are birds.

A Failure of Curiosity

In 2006, one week before my granddaughter's first birthday, My mother killed herself.
She was 93, she was at the end of possibility of living in her home, she had worn me out to the point of collapse, and used up my daughter as well, who was trying to raise a baby without a clue.  She had come to the end of her money, and on her behalf, I had run up debt amounting to about a quarter of a million dollars between our 2 credit cards to keep her at home, to pay for her medication and to keep the household going.
Now, nearly everyone says how brave, how good that she could choose her way to die, and part of me agrees with them.  But there still dwells within me the little girl who watched her being carted away in a straightjacket after a drug overdose, and being gone for the summer.  There is the 11 year old who had to call people to break down the door to her room after she had overdosed, and then went to live with a father she hadn't seen much of for the previous 6 years in another town.
Mum had been "sober" = not drinking, for a lot of years.  She had taken plenty of uppers in the 60's and 70's, switched to pot and hash, and finally, regular prescribed anti-anxiety, antidepressant medication when she had been ripped off by her connection for thousands of dollars, and was too sick to be able to grow her own anymore.
She wrote a note, melted her meds in vodka and went to sleep.
It was what had been recommended by "The Final Exit".
There was plenty of drama in the family after this, I'll save that for another time, but the point of this today is that she ended her life in the manner that had most traumatized us all through our childhoods, and that echo remains.
I have her pistol in my house [hard to get at] and there have been a couple of winters during which I have thought about that every day.  As I move through the cement that likes to form around my feet sometimes, I have the conversation.
When Robin Williams spoke of the evil little voice, the one that says "just one"  or "jump", I know who is doing the talking.  I do not pretend not to hear that voice, because I have found that more dangerous. I ask the voice, how does it think it knows the future?  How can it tell me I am useless, how does it know?  Even if it were true, there is never a reasonable answer to the questions I ask.  So curiosity keeps the cat going, how will the story turn?  What will happen next?  Who will come on to the stage and tell a joke?  Even if I don't care at the moment, I remember that I might care in the shortest time it takes to not do something I can't change.  This is only depression, this is not profound depression.  This is only sadness, maybe grief, even, but it isn't devastation, despair, being sucked down the black center of oblivion.  Circling the drain is not the same as going down the tube.
So, I understand ending it all as a momentary failure of curiosity.  I don't want to imagine what happens to those for whom that's a killer

The Gap

Tonight as I climbed up the ladder to my loft in nearly total darkness I thought of how many times I had climbed up there to sleep.  I thought of the stairway, really more like a ladder, illuminated by the Full Moon, dark in an overcast sky, polished and light in color when new in 1978, company sometimes, many climbs up to the loft in solitude, baptism of cold in winter and all the times I have managed to get a piece of furniture up there, or down from there, that didn't seem as though it would fit.
The images of my years in this house, in this life flickering like film clips gone before I really saw them.
It certainly isn't an original idea that when you are 3 years old, a year is one third of your entire life.
A short time is an entirely different construct than it is as one moves along.  It doesn't hold, though that at 40, a year is 1/40th of your life, or at 60, 1/60th;  moving along the continuum reveals it to not have been a continuum at all, or even a spiral.  It is all happening now.  I'm still that young hopeful girl who insisted it was possible to live here, until eventually it was.  I suspect somewhere in here there is, a lifeless body on the floor, waiting to be found by the smell, betrayed by the uncollected mail, unpaid bills.
In Greek Mythology, Khaos was the great grandmother of time, The goddess of the great darkness from which emerged all created phenomena,  resolving into harmonious order.  She was the original source of all manifestation, a spouseless goddess, the abyss, the gap, and for a moment, the tiniest of temporal slices, I had the curtain of the illusion of separateness, the dance of dualities pulled back, and the experience of the mysterious presented to me.
Eternity, timelessness, no ground, no reference point no picture to hang on to.  In the gap of the great source of all possibility there is an invitation.  No fear.  No thing.  Something I can't know from here but that dances through the fabric of the universe we are designed to be in as long as we have a nervous system.
 I have had a thread laid in my hand that I know will lead me home.  I am a visitor in this life, a traveler and am intimately connected to everything I am, everything I am not and have a simple [but given my habits, perhaps not easy] task of choosing peace over conflict, love over indifference, generosity over aggression, forgiveness over ego.  Today I am sure that this is the only way the world may heal.