Valuable States

Last week I visited my demented mother, now 95.

She sat alone in the big dining room of the facility where she lives, her little white head curved forward. As always, she occupied an otherwise empty table for four. No one with their wits about them wants  to dine with an Alzheimer's patient. My mother is always the last to be wheeled from meals because the staff know she can amuse herself for an hour with her food and napkin. She has no real appetite but food still holds some interest for her. There are so many things you can do with it.

 Before her are the remains of an entire meal but it’s the cake that she’s pulled front and center. It’s half eaten. She pushes it away as if finished and sets down the fork, folds her napkin a time or two or ten, thinks about it for a minute then pulls the cake back to center and resumes the process. The shaking fork is hard to guide so she employs a smooshing technique that bunches up and condenses the crumbs between the tines. They can then endure, or some of them can, the uncertain trajectory over the vast bib, toward her mouth, just a few crumbs falling off like debris from an astroid, as it approaches a gravitational invite. 

This can go on for an hour without complaint and the napkin-play can take another 20 minutes or more. Other residents have moved, or been moved, on. They have plans. Activities to attend.  My Mom is being in the moment.

I sit down to her left at the table. She does not look up or show any awareness that she now has a companion. I can observe her in her natural environment without my presence altering her behavior at all. I was a naturalist observing from a blind. Her behavior is fascinating.

At work my boss is excited about a seminar he wants us to attend which explains how staying focused, relaxed and in the present moment, not planning ahead, not worrying about outcomes, not seething about the past, or clinging to it nostalgically, can radically improve our experience of the day and boost our work effectiveness. My boss is young. Twenty two years before he was born my friends and I were Being Here Now with Ram Dass. Sort of. In 1997 When Eckart Tolle’s The Power of Now changed so many lives, my boss was 11 years old. But, I digress. Suffice it to say that CEO’s everywhere are all about their staff staying present mentally. Looks like science must have gotten into it. And money. Relaxed, focused alertness; not just for the cloistered and the fringe people anymore. And in fairness to my boss, we all want to proselytize when we discover something wonderful; even Buddha, after he got the big ‘ah ha,’ and Jesus, who said “Truly, before Abraham was, I am”.

Mental acuity, forgetting stuff and remembering to be fully present have been concerns of mine for a long time; especially, lately, the forgetting part. When you forget books you’ve read you lack erudition. But when you forget conversations with people they think you don’t care about them. And that’s worse.

When I spend hours each week trying to track down misplaced items, it foments an ongoing curdling despair. Social embarrassment is a constant threat. I worry about it a lot. I never know when I am going to need to introduce two people close to me and suddenly not be able to remember one of their names. Since Mom’s diagnosis it’s harder than ever to be here now—what with all the worry. But I’m aware that my worry does impact my quality of life as well as that of others around me. I wonder if there is any part of our essential self that doesn’t disappear along with cognitive function. How would we know, looking at a sagging and non-responsive woman, curved like a question mark in her wheel chair, that something important isn’t going on in there? Or that something important isn’t going on in us as we care for this refugee from youth?

I know my mom spent her life worrying. One of her most frequently expressed sentiments was: “If I can just get through this . . .” She applied it to grad school at 40, every holiday in my memory, my sisters and my weddings, writing an article for the church periodical, making dinner, all presidential elections, putting a man on the moon and her 90th birthday party. She was an equal opportunity endurer and she always assumed that it was a situational problem that she could outlive.

Today there is less pretension in her interactions and she is very vocal about her wishes.  Her favorite injunctions are 'If you wake me up I will kill you,' which she has trained herself to say in her sleep and 'I won't do it and you can't make me!' Aa she is being moved to the bathroom or having her hair washed.

My point is a question: ’What am I being right now, at this table, in my last quarter of estimated life span? And which matters most; what I remember or what I am when I no longer remember? I keep noticing and evaluating while I can. But I’m beginning to suspect that, all choices aside, if we live long enough, our trajectory through life may well cover several valuable states of being without much effort on our part.

Mother is so tidy and precise in her business of the moment. I love that in a person. The plate surrounding the diminishing cake is free of crumbs. One stubborn pecan rests temptingly on the litter-free surface. With every bite she attempts to procure that nut but can’t get quite the right angle on the fork and has to carry on with the smooshing and cosmic travel.

I counted 15 failed attempts at nut acquisition. My mother does not exhibit frustration, never resorts to using her fingers, does not promise herself a brighter future if she can just get through this.

So on the day I am describing, last week, tired of my observational mode, I stopped scrutinizing her behavior and noticed instead my own processes. I decided to come out of the clinical arena. I let myself sink into my love for her; that beauty who lit up every room she ever walked into, that solid mid-west independent spirit that carried her through terrible losses, grieving but ultimately triumphant and enhanced, the poet who never missed a sunset if she had a choice, the Mom who read to us every night until we left for college. I let my gratitude for her shatter the distance I was maintaining. I felt we were laced in a fragile temporary one-of-a-kind moment of love and luck and gratitude and individuality.

“Well,” she said pulling me out of my reverie. You’re here! And there she was, looking at me with such a smile of pleasure it was as if my ship were orbiting the sun. She had tuned in to me. She did not have a clue which of her daughters I was. I could tell. But she knew we belonged to each other. And she was suddenly all joy.

There was a little awkwardness born of vestigial inner prompts that she should now be entertaining me in some way but she could find no way forward with that in an upturned hotdog, rejected after one bite, and a dozen cold french fries. 

“No, no, Mom, I just ate. Go ahead and finish your cake.”

She examined her options for conversation and then, after a few false starts said cagily: “So, you came all this way . . . ummm . . . how is? ummmmmm. . . that big . . . ummmmm . . . thing you were working on? This could have applied to any of us. So we conversed in a very insane way while she returned to the cake.

But I noticed that within a minute she had secured the miscreant nut and had it moving unerringly through space. Something had changed. I kind of sagged with a release of a tension I did not know I was carrying; the frustration of the resistant nut. And she was all confidence now.

“Some of these don’t belong,” she gestured toward her french fries.

Okay. This was a game. I was charmed. Mother had never played with us.

“Which ones?” I asked.

She jiggled two long ones into a parallel format and looked at me expectantly? I studied the board then pulled two more into alignment. Her fork hovered like a bird of prey, like a drone, and then dropped to skewer the tiniest of the french fries, about an inch long, formerly hiding in the pile and she ate it. Delight radiated. Check mate.

Almost 100 years of achieving, committing, planning, weeping, appreciating, creating, loss and longing, praying, after all the enduring we are both finally just here, my Mom and me. We are playing. Maybe she can’t notice and remember, but i am doing that for her. And for myself. Just in time. She slowed down and waited. I caught up.

What!?: a muse on projection

This mid-July day is starting to cool. Time to do outdoor work. I am preparing my home for sale and there is so much to do that I can start anywhere. It won’t matter where. There is an entire estuary of sucking need, rampant growth and entropy around me. The time I spend on any one task will drain into the quicksand of numbered days and jobs beyond number. So I slow down; way, way down to "notice mode."

“Baby, Baby, Baby just talk to me. Where does it hurt?” I ask, showing the quiet, positive regard a mother might show her child, or a nurse a terminal patient. I am sitting in the front yard, peering under the hood of the little tractor trying to figure out what his reluctance to get up and get going is all about.

A cardinal, the cardinal, is checking his reflection in the side-view car mirror, hopping victoriously on top of it, bending over to look again, “Damn, still there,” I can hear him say as he flies down for another face-off. He’ll do this for hours. I wonder when he eats, fights with his wife, goes to the movies. This bird has no life.

 The ritual has been going on since mid-February and is only one of several ways he has been obsessing with interpretations of his own image, which he finds everywhere. They are the enemy. He protects his family from his image at my bedroom window, my office window, the car mirrors, car mirrors of all my guests and the sky lights in the living room ceiling. Five months now. 

I’m trying to learn something from this.

The oil in the tractor is perfectly clean. I changed it last week. Filters, air and fuel; all fresh. There’s Sea Foam in the gas to dry any water and keep the carburetor clean. I diagnose spark-plug crud and go in search of a socket wrench and new plug.

 On my way I see not the beautiful view, nor the simple handsome house, not the wild flowers: nothing but work that needs doing claims my eye. How have I managed this house and all this land for 30 years? More importantly, why? But I know why. The knowledge is like distant music, just slightly subliminal, repetitious, sung in a language I don’t speak.

I find a spark plug box in the sparkling clean, newly painted tool room but the box contains only a used spark-plug. Now why did I do that?

Yesterday that tractor and I had one of our near death experiences where I lost control on the edge of the hill and it began slipping sidewise. I got the blades turned off but the motor was still on and the transmission engaged when I jumped from the high side, again. Some things just don't bear repeating.

 In hindsight I see that the tires, wet from mowing over newly watered grass, just lost purchase on the hill rim. Thirty years of mowing this place and I had not encountered that particular scenario before. Who knew? I stood above watching it claw and crab its way to a lower altitude.

“Please don’t roll.  Please don’t roll.”

 It didn’t. We both got off lucky this time.

I’m tired. And I regret picking this particular job today. The cardinal woke me up, “tap-tap, tap-tap. tap-tap. . .” on the bedroom window before dawn.

I observed him and his two-tap message, accent on the second beat, over the rim of my coffee cup. Five months ago, against a late winter snow, he’d been glossy with birdie health. Since then he has double-pecked his own image in the glass a conservative three million times and he looks it. His beak is blunted, the handsome black accents around his eyes have taken on the sunken quality of a late life heroin user. And maybe, I’m projecting here, but I think his color is fading. The light in his eye has changed from a spark of life to the small empty bowls of the suicide bomber.

Don’t tell me I’m imagining this. I can hear you. Just look at the pictures. It’s obvious he’s homogenized his brain. How does he do it? And why?  But we know.

“Whit whit whit whit, birdie birdie, chew chew chew chew chew chew.” That’s his favorite refrain. There is no trusted translation and I will not assign them meaning, though I’ve had to de-fuse a few responsive verses of my own involving BB guns, you know, when he just goes on and on and on. It’s his message and he’s sticking to it.

It’s obvious I need to get out more. All I can think to write about is equipment and wildlife. I imagine myself at a gathering of friends, having exhausted the uses of positive regard and the listening skills I practice with the tractor, my turn to actually contribute something to the conversation, and I find myself standing straight of spine, fingers laced at chest level, doing a medley of bird song. How did I get here?

I got here the way the cardinal did. We were drawn by pretty much the same things. And I stayed, as he has, driven to finish what I started. You know you are done when you’ve made something beautiful enough, rich enough, to walk away from with a full heart. That feeling is the fuel that nourishes the  next work of art. It sounds like “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” and when you are full-up with yes, moving to a new work of art is just the thing to do.

“Just so, just so, just so,” I sing. “And that, and that, and that.”

I clean off the old spark plug, skinning my knuckles as usual putting it back in. My poor hands! I think about a manicure. Heels. I imagine a red dress. The tractor starts.

“Whit, whit, whit, whit . . .” I will wear this red dress on a date with a kind man. We will have a leisurely dinner. He will hug me. We will dance slowly, slowly, slow. I will rest that night. And then in the morning I will make something new, something really good. What, what, what what . . ?

That's What I Saw

It was night time. I was lying on the concrete floor, my nose six inches from the glass entrance. It was below freezing outside and it had been that way for weeks. The wild things were hungry and coming up on the porch in search of food. I’d been alone for days and days and I was beyond bored.

 

Six inches on his side of the glass a possum was nuzzling the cat’s dish. His sensitive flexible snout was searching out every leftover crumb. From my recumbent position I was keeping him company though he didn’t know it.

 

A day later, remembering all the details I wrote of his fat pink tapered fingers that seemed to be emerging from soft grey driving gloves; white understory fur with occasional long black hairs that waved in the cold gusts of wind. I thought those flexible hairs must give him a lot of information, almost like antennae.

 

I wrote about his darling ears; the thin curved pink hearts with grey arches above, really his finest feature. Tactfully, I did not to mention his tail.

 

I’d begun leaving a bit of extra food in the cats’ dish for him and any other creatures that might be in need.

 

This week, I saw a possum at the dish in full daylight. I got out the camera and zoomed in.

 

What a shock!

 

Only his hands were as I remembered them. His fur was not dense; the understory was black, not white, and it looked more like a bad perm on a balding head than fur. The longest hairs were white, not black. And the ears! The heart shapes I remembered so fondly were dark grey and only the tip above them was pink. Did I get it totally wrong or was this a mutant brother to the first one?

 

The camera has recorded the truth about what I am calling Possum #2. I’m still on the lookout for #1. I can’t believe he, she, exists nowhere but in my mind. She was darling.  But #2, well, you can see for yourself.

 

 

I know that humans are sloppy and clueless observers whose left brains fib constantly to fill in the gaps in memory. I know that the way we interpret what we see is a reflection of our needs our fears or our beliefs more than reality. But still, I don’t think I could have been that wrong.

 

 

 

Here’s an example of that from earlier in the week:

 

I heard a noise I could not identify. ‘It’s a hawk,’ I thought, ‘hunting,’ but I wasn’t sure. Outside the office window I could see Fluffmudgett turn her head sharply to the east and focus on something. I went to the front door, though I thought that by the time I got outside, whatever it was would be long gone. Still I was curious enough to be hopeful.  I heard it again as I emerged onto the porch and I could see Floyd, slinking in killer-stealth mode, directly east. Focused as a laser, he slipped beneath my car.

 

So, me, I looked up. I believed it was a hawk and was still believing as I scanned the empty cerulean biosphere. More clueless and blind than a possum, who can at least find food even if he fails to detect the human being 12 inches from his left ear, I was looking in the direction of my belief, not my evidence.

 

When I lowered my mystified gaze easterly to the edge of the hill 20 feet in front of me I found myself in a staring contest with a big red fox. The first thing I thought was, ‘Wow, mystery solved.’ The second was, ‘Good show, Floyd, you hot dog, but I know there’s no way you were thinking of taking on this bad boy. Confess! You’re under the car licking your tail.’ I did not, however, take my eyes off the fox. He was flame on snow. He was focused yet detached.

 

Apparently, like me, he needed a little time to process changed circumstance. He was thinking:

 

1.     No danger here. She’s looking for me in the sky.

2.     Damn! (His vision of breakfast disintegrating.)

3.     But I gave them my double bark warning! ‘Everybody off the porch.’ ‘Everybody off the porch NOW! Jeesch!’

 

That fox was laughing all the way down the driveway, shaking his head in amazement.

 

That’s what I saw. That’s what I think. That’s my story. The search is still on for Possum #1.

How Come?

Fluffmudget and Floyd share a little house I bought and positioned for them atop the heat pump. From there, I reason, they have a guard-tower view of the mousey side of the house thus discouraging any rodents intent on home invasion and saving those rodents from a more lingering death by De-Con. I’m compassionate that way.

Lately, however, Fluff’s taken to having her post-prandial nap with her back stuffed out the door of her house. The mice parade by unmolested. And I feel personally responsible.

                  

On January 10th it was very cold and still, there she was, chilling her winter coat in the rain. Why would she do that? Perhaps she was having a hot flash. She is 14 years old. That’s, what, 74 cat years?  Well, really!

But I can only make up stories about what I’m seeing. I can’t know. Fluff and I have a language gap and cognitive limitations. She’s smarter but I’m the one who tells our stories.

People make art in the absence of fact. We all do it. We also make nothing but art in the presence of facts. When we open our mouths, or pick up a tool, the only thing that CAN come out is art. From an incalculable array of limitations and partially understood events we select what we will bring forth. It’s always art. Even a Ph.D. thesis. Even the best designed scientific experiment. Even your daily ‘to do’ list. They are art and can never be anything else.

It’s all relative, it’s all subjective, it all fails as fact because it is not all the facts. And no matter what our intention, or where we are pointing our finger, it’s all always about us.

Could that cat be mooning me?

Well, okay, that story won’t fly. I am not that important to Fluff in this moment of time. Besides, she has much more effective ways of expressing disdain. I flash to her behavior yesterday where upon examining the contents of her breakfast bowl, no canned meat, she walked directly away from me with her tail held up like baton, like a curser, like an exclamation point.

I get it. I really think I do. Of course when my old lab, Dina, began surreptitiously burying her chow in the flower bed, mouthful by mouthful, hauling it slowly across the porch and shoving it into a hole she’d made,  I thought she was just sick-to-death of Purina when, in fact, she was just sick to death. I’m so sad remembering how casually I wondered about the dirt on her nose those last few months. Instead of investigation I just told myself stories. When she died I told myself other stories; like that she had just been too good-hearted to risk hurting my feelings with an untouched dinner.  Again, I don’t know. She was an extraordinarily prescient and kind dog. My point is that whether I had investigated or not I’d never have known the full story of Dina’s reality.

                       

I got the following inquiry from a reader a year ago: “Your blog is very self-revealing. How come?”  I responded to this person who so generously gave me feed-back.

I wrote, “That’s an excellent question. When I know the answer I’ll post it.”

It’s been a year since my last entry though I’ve lived with that question in the back of my mind as events have unfolded. Serious illness, the near loss of an adult child and a bio-hazard that left me homeless over five months have been distractions but still, all the while, I’ve been thinking about self-revelation and life commentary, art and story. I’ve been thinking about compassion and accountability.

It feels like love of life, this desire to use what I am, what I notice and what I can never know, to tell a story. It feels like the desire for communion with my tribe, wherever they are. It is an expression. It is human. I hope it is never hurtful. I aim for art.

As an untrained artist I made my living for 30 years. I never called myself an artist but others called me that.

You see things. You see a bit of how things are and you want to demonstrate your vision of the underlying connectedness that you sense. If you are being commissioned you usually have to incorporate what’s in your client’s head and wallet as well. Okay, that was a challenge. Maybe it was art, in its fashion, what I did.

The story teller or artist is at the center of what they see. It can not be otherwise. My ‘art;’ those thirty years, was fussy, tight, pretty and full of longing to be more than it was. The ‘more’ kept leaking out in little tributaries. It showed me where I needed to go.

It is in relationship that I have to look for my stories and it is in my stories that I look for clues about how to be a faithful and compassionate storyteller. That begins with my relationship with myself but it is about everything. I hope it is not too fussy, tight and pretty. I’m aiming for something closer to compost and the kind of energy you find there.

The practice of relationship or story is only as effective as it is honest. Never honest enough we plug on with our limitations and that leaves all our stories and relationships full of mystery and error. Yet still, through those practices we are enhanced. We find that we are not exactly alone. Both less and more special than we thought.

Everyone I’ve ever loved, I’ve loved for their struggles, not their perfection. And I’ve been pretty up-front about my own struggles and lack of perfection. I see no reason to stop now.

Let there be no unseemly displays. Let there by no unkindness. But light, we need light. The concepts of home, communion and simplicity continue to come up for me and are difficult to explore. The way toward veracity is not as the crow flies and I don’t see how to do it at all without transparency. The inherent risk in first person story is that it will come back to hit us in the face with a scary value added; more revelation than we intended. But putting it out there is how we get to better art. It’s how we get to being a better person.

Love much. Create. Give the world a lot to forgive you for. Things we make secretly and in the dark may be unforgiveable, they won’t accrue interest and they may stink. Jesus said it all the time. "Don't hide your light under a bushel unless you're stalking your dinner."  (from the Fluff Edition of the New Testament. Matthew 5:15)  Stir the compost. Give it light and air. Something good will grow.

So I show the wart. Wrestle with how it fits the whole gorgeous horrifying picture. Fail without shame.  If the mark is missed, recalibrate, get better lighting, take another shot. Don’t look back. Always be looking for a better way of making it happen but do make it happen.

                   

      “Now we see through a screen-mesh, darkly; then face to face:”

 (fragment from the Fluff Edition of the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 13:12)

Stepping Out of the Arena (Part Two)

Maybe there is a guide book for parents whose adult children have asked for their help in getting sober. I don’t know. It never occurred to me to look for one any more than I scoped out books on how-to-have-a-baby or how-raise-a-raise-a-toddler or how-to-parent-a-pre-teen-through-the-dissolution-of-their-family.

Such books might have been helpful, or they might have further cluttered up my already faulty information gathering faculties. I’ll never know. I went into childbirth with no knowledge or preconceptions, only a promise I’d made to myself not to fight the process. That's where I learned to focus. I was a quick study. I taught myself how to breathe as though my life depended on it, as though the life of my child depended on it. That is where I realized for the first time just how alone we are: each of us.

Breathe in.
Breathe out. 

Focus on the breath.

Somewhere along the line I should have read a few how-to books. I should have reached for outside help. Instead, by the time my daughter was four I was getting high several times a day, every day. The next eight years of our lives had some serious distortions built in because of that. When I emerged from that nightmare into the clarity of a fully sober life my child was twelve and my marriage was on its last legs.

Of those years my daughter says this: you and Dad never fought. Everybody was always having such a good time but then I’d have to go to bed. I lay up there listening to all the laughter and music. I couldn’t wait to grow up so I could join the party. But by the time I was grown up the party was over and everyone was gone.

A year after I got clean she was already getting high. That ruinous running-away has lasted thirty years for her, not the mere eight I suffered. It cost her plenty.

We had 12 days of total sobriety here outside the arena of intoxication. We believe this is the first time since she was four that we have been sober together. [See prior post: Stepping Out of the Arena (Part One)]

My daughter and I got a second chance at living her growing up years, the years of my parenting and her developing autonomy, and we made a better job of it this time though it was brief.

The first two weeks or so I didn’t take my eyes off her, as you would with a baby or a toddler. The third week it was more like she was a young school-age girl--- under my constant care except for school and authorized play dates.

This last week was more like middle school years going into high-school. And she made a few bad decisions.

As I said, there is no guide book. And if there were, I doubt I would have referred to it.

There is just this center of peace to guide me. And for her, there are just the first 2 steps of 12.

I want my daughter to connect hook, line and sinker with life: its beauty, brevity, certainty of losses, opportunities for compassionate action and creativity, its nature as a playground where all-that-we-are can intersect the all powerful divine. Does that seem like a lot to wish for?



Breathe in (God's)
Breathe out (love.)

That said, I do not want any co-dependency between us. I do not wish to use her in any way, not even for company. Not for a source of meaning for me. Not to live out my vision, no matter how good a vision I may believe it to be.

What we did here has been an island of joy for both of us. She got sober. She experienced peace. It has shown us that the remorse and regret we've both felt for decades can be healed. The fact that we've lost Eden to the snake again doesn't change that. I had told my daughter she could not stay here and drink. I felt clear on that. But why? People slip. They get right back up. You don't punish them. You encourage them, you shine a light on the path for them.



If she was using and I was monitoring, if her drinking, or not drinking, had become an issue of trust between us, then I think our life in my home would have become as chaotic as her life in her home. I think I’d have become her next stumbling block and we would have become each other’s next terrible addiction. You can't stay in Eden and eat apples. It's not a rule to jerk us around, it's a fact we need to know to our bones if we want to stay in a happy place.  Apple ingestion removes every Eden from us.

God's concern and intervention did not appear to become engaged when I was 'smoking pot every day' and 'not wanting to be' simply because I begged and pleaded. Such prayers left me feeling self conscious and alone and no magic resulted that I could see.  There was a lot of flushing of substances and burning of substances and then buying more. I'd white knuckle it until I lost my grip. I don't know why I didn't lose my faith over this, because I was pleading for help the whole time, and no help was coming, but somehow I didn't.

 

What seemed to be the catalyst for active entry of the divine into the situation was to know my helplessness as FACT. When every quark of me was convinced, when I was toking up while praying for mercy in utter helplessness, Something entered to save me.




Now they are legalizing pot. I don't know how I feel about that. It's complicated.

This last few weeks I 'saw' my beautiful, my shining daughter for the first time since she was four. Now I have seen the power and beauty of the soul that is struggling under the weight of this terrible, poisonous oppression of alcoholism. No one can take that vision of what I've seen with my own eyes from me. She is not lost. She is in there. And now she knows it too.



What could be more convincing of the depth of our helplessness than to watch ourselves obliterate our own peace, hope and happiness but be unable to stop our hand from raising the poison to our lips and gulping it down?



That's why the first step in the AA program for recovery is to acknowledge our helplessness. I came to it my own way outside a program but I can tell you that nothing good happened to me until I lived, moved and breathed with the knowledge of my helplessness. That one lesson has never left me.



In this world the crossroad where magic happens can be accessed from anywhere. It can be found in Eden. It can be found in the worst hell hole imaginable. It is that place in our inner space where all that we are intersects the divine. Unilateral surrender seems to be a requirement for miracles. I think God wants no fuzziness around the issue of who's who.



From there we can cry for Mercy and be heard. We do not tell Mercy what it should look like or how it should be delivered. We do not tell Mercy what it needs to do. Mercy does not need our vision for its execution. It needs our honest knowledge of our limitations.



And so the second step is to know that, what we can not do, God can do.

I can not keep my daughter sober. She can not keep herself sober. The essence of this dynamic for receiving help can be found in every spiritural tradition. In mine it looks and sounds like this:

Breathe in: Lord Jesus Christ

Breathe out: Have mercy on me a sinner.

Breathe in: Lord Jesus Christ

Breathe out: Have mercy on us sinners.

Humility isn't groveling. It is a sign that we've grasp the lay of the land.

Oh, I am sad. And I am frightened. And my daughter, wherever she is, is sad and frightened too. I know this. But she knows what to do to find the crossroad, that lonely intersection, where salvation will come. And so do I. There is hope.

If you are reading this, and you feel so inclined, pray for us.

Stepping Out of the Arena (Part One)

It was my first opportunity in 7 days to have a drink. My daughter had asked me to help her dry out and, with her doctor’s supervision, I'd agreed. I'd asked for two weeks vacation time from work. She'd started dragging herself to AA meetings. We'd made a plan to begin in one week. We did and this was day 7 of the  plan.




The trunk of my car had a box of old bottles of vermouth, vanilla extract, liquors in various unpalatable flavors, one open bottle half full of red wine, some gin and some vodka. . . oh yeah, some Listerine and a few designer beers a friend stores at my house for when we have a movie night. I had planned to drop them off somewhere but there hadn’t been time.

On the evening we began I locked the car and started carrying the keys belted to my body. I slept across the exit to her bedroom like an old hound wanting to protect her though I knew in that regard I was helpless as she. At least she’d have to crawl over my body to get out and maybe something about the sight of me there on the blow-up bed across the entrance, head lamp illuminating my book, water, Chapstick, alarm clock, battery-operated candle beside me would remind her of how much she was loved. Or at least give her a laugh. This was definitely an amateur operation.



The first week I attended daily AA meetings with her. She was titrating off alcohol (from her maintenance dosage of 32 oz of vodka a day) with a starting dose of 7 oz the first day. I gave them to her with water every 2.5 hours. After that we reduced the amount by one ounce each day and increased the time between. The seventh day we were in a new world. The first day of sobriety.



We’re moving through our two week island together in a hallowed state. It’s impossible to describe. A scenario that would be ill-advised under almost any circumstance, a mother providing detox services for her adult daughter, a process that could have gone wrong a dozen ways—even way wrong—turned out to be, as my gut was telling me it would be, supported by a mysterious and holy Something.



So sometime after the first week I felt I no longer need, or should, accompany her to meetings. I dropped her off. By then she knew people who were truly happy to see she’d made another meeting and who embraced her before she even made it through the door.



“Did your guard dog let you off the hook?” one of them asked. “Yeah, I think she’s having a kind-of hard time with it,” my girl replies as they walk in together. She has no idea. It was easier to let her get on the school bus for the first day of kindergarten than this. My vision was obscured by my own rain as I drove on to Wal-Mart for supplies we needed: E-cig’s, club soda, AA batteries. And I kept thinking about the little glass I’d stuck in the box of booze just in case I wanted to have a congratulatory toast to us while she was in the meeting.



I know. I know.



But, I rationalized, I could have it. I am not an alcoholic. I have my two glasses of wine or my martini at night before dinner but that’s all. And not every night. It’s a pleasant habit, a quick relaxer after work, a social lubricant when I’m with a friend. I don't drink during dinner. I don't drink after. I enjoy it but I hadn’t missed it at all during the last week. Still, the habit was there. And the question popped into my mind the minute I was alone.



If all this inner angst was happening to me the first minute I was by myself, what would it be like for my daughter?



I thought about it all the way to the store; thought about pouring that little glass of wine and enjoying it, maybe in the parking lot. The image of that scenario didn't do much to make it seem like a good idea. Then I thought about how wine smell would be on my breath. I’d have to get breath freshener. Did I think I’d have to hide it? That's not me. I also had this niggling sense that I would be breaking the bubble of whatever subtle protective energy, whatever synergy, we’d been floating through the whole last week.



I decided to shop first then see how I felt. As I locked the car I popped the trunk for easy access on my return. Crossing the parking lot the two ‘sides’ of the argument—because it had become an argument—were duking it out in my head.



I got a cart, pushed it into the store and stopped, listening to the sounds of combat. That’s the moment I recognized I was in an arena from which no one can ever claim a true win. Standing frozen with my shopping cart, as oblivious of the external world as a street person with delirium, I took tally.



Suppose the side of the angels won a round and I exercised my will power to refrain from drinking that glass of wine. I’d still think about it. The opposition would make certain I did. I’d feel virtuous, which is always trouble for me.



Or if I did drink it, would guilt launch the old self-hate tapes I can always tune into if I make a mistake? Likely so. Either way I would fall from the state of grace my daughter and I had been living in for 7 days. The rich, supported calm in which we'd been moving would be violated.



Still the fight raged on. “I deserve. . . I shouldn’t. . .Don't do it. . .I can if I want.”



No, this argument can not be won. Frozen, people pushing by me on both sides, I saw this struggle for what it was, a tragic form of entertainment. . . a tiny tug of war in a tiny arena in which I’d let myself be trapped. I decided to step out of the arena and not participate. I shopped. I didn’t win. I didn’t lose. I didn’t drink. I shopped in peace and carried my silence within me.



In AA when you reach a point like this you pick up a phone, make your connection and a person more experienced than you will pull you out of that arena. I am dumbstruck by the beauty of this organization. It's an amateur operation too, and as I have found, we are safest, and perhaps our truest, when we remain that way.



On my way back to my car with my purchases I closed the trunk lid.



Maybe all obsession is at least a mild form of addiction—something we prefer doing, no matter how miserable it is, rather than live our lives. All I know is that this time I was able to open an ongoing program in a new window, one with a wider view. And it made a difference. And while I’ve not had these debates over alcohol before I’ve certainly had them over other kinds of issues.



Obsession is an arena, just an area of inner space that we cling to instead of facing the next thing in our life. Even when it’s killing us, that obsession, even when it’s a massacre, we're there because we don’t know how to get out, because we keep thinking we can win, because we lack the imagination to live.



I know that my daughter and I are still moving in this state of grace. Still expanding into the quiet times, still swinging to The Commitments while we clean. Still making good food to eat. Sometimes this week, looking at each other, it seems like the first time we gazed into each other’s eyes all those years ago, before the heart breaks and the hundreds of betrayals. It is the naked look. “There you are. Who are you? You have my heart."

Turtleing Toward the Light

As I understand it December 25th is the first day after the winter solstice in which the position of the rising sun can be discerned to have shifted from the day before, at least with the naked eye. In the northern hemisphere we are gaining daylight now but in the few days between solstice and Christmas, there seemed to be a pause in the length of days. I like that pause.

I thought it must have snowed when I woke up in a dark, hushed world this morning. Snow had been forecast. The top on my head was pounding so I knew the barometric pressure was low but it was too dark outside to see through the windows and I dug deeper to try to ease my aching head and to await the tipping point when desire for coffee would outweigh the disinclination to scuff through a chilly house and brew it.

Silence persisted and so did the sense of benevolence that wrapped me in the soft darkness. The electricity was on. I could hear a fan running. What was the silence?



This year I traversed the winter holidays as though on foot, as though I were a turtle. I moved as slowly as possible. I hosted one large potluck party (but all I did was decorate, which I love doing) one dinner party for six (but I started preparing two months in advance), Christmas Eve with just three others close to me and no gifts, and on Christmas Day I slipped gently across the 60 miles that separated me from my mother in her assisted living facility and enjoyed just being there and taking it in.



I think partly in response to this slower pace there has been a sense of openness in my heart that I have been hoping would appear if I did less and attended more to the moment.



Like the turtle in the garden, I stopped frequently, before and during the holidays, to reflect, doze, snack, stare into the distance. This spacious quality to the days hasn’t been a constant though. It has flickered in and out in the wind of excessive thinking.



Thinking and feeling in obsessive circles is, I think, endlessly seductive and building a habit of presence may be the work of a longer life than I have before me. Moving fast from thing to thing, thought to thought, seems necessary sometimes and yet is numbing. I see that the more I am able to expand thoughts and feelings into a sense of inclusiveness of other people who might be thinking and feeling things similar, the more this sense of spaciousness and peace prevails. The more compassion I feel for all of us and the less lonely I am.


It’s not easy to remember to do this, and I am not skilled at it when I do remember, but the amazing thing is that even small, unskilled movements in this direction bring a good result far in excess of our efforts.



When we expand our preoccupation with our own emotions to include a sense of the emotions of all others, who also suffer and rejoice, and when we pass on to ourselves and these others a healing peace that is beyond us but which can come through us to that place of suffering or rejoicing, we are participating in a holy magic. It is a true entry point into a transformative life. Or so I now believe. You can get to it a number of ways but first you have to slow down. Way, way down. There must be at least 100 traditions of faith that teach how to do this but in the end, the practitioner is still alone slogging it out in his own inner cyberspace.



Twice during this holiday I woke up laughing, bubbling over with an hilarity that stayed close to me all day and which, from time to time, would recur without reference to whether or not laughter was seemly in that moment. And that was funny too so it started me off again. I was seeing with fresh eyes the humor of  behaviors of the day before; mv vanity driven gestures, mostly. It's been way too long since I had a great laugh at my own expense.



There are reasons for dark feelings. Everyone has reasons and, big or little reasons, they seem to fill us up. Someone near me is caught in a life threatening addiction. The suffering I glimpse on her face haunts me with the need to think and wrestle and grieve and act I-know-not-how. But I'm trying to stay slowed down and and quiet rather than flash into a well meant action that will not help. There are memories and judgments that grind like broken glass through my psyche, unresolved though I work on them every day. And there is sadness. And there is disappointment. And there is desire. We can practice with what we are given.



But in the slow pace I’ve set this holiday season there is enough silent time to entertain these difficult feelings with creativity. I wish it for everyone.



I have provided myself with a fire in the stove, good wood, a comfortable armchair and a few gentle tasks that are close to nature. There are plants to attend. Their requirements are communicated in meek silence and their gratitude for care is seen in their thriving. There is sweeping I can do or polishing, if I’m so inclined, and these tasks might be done with silent mind and open heart. As the joy of this sometimes overtakes me, again, I wish it for all people.



On Christmas Mother spoke at length about a memory she was going to record for posterity. In halting starts and silent moments of visualizing the past and making sense of it, she told a long story about her courtship by my father in their college years. It was a creative combination of things that happened in her twenties and things that happened decades later and which my sisters and I still remember, seen and remembered by her as a single event. When I found myself holding my breath, not wanting to take in this fabrication, I adjusted and breathed my way through an acceptance of the fictionalization of our lives.



Well, what I told her was true. “It’s a wonderful story, Mom. Anyone would enjoy reading it.” But what I'm now thinking is that in some way, her version may be truer than fact.



She smiled with pleasure. “Do you think so?’



“Yes,” I said, thinking ‘I’ll add it to the stories I make up about my own life. And then I'll forgive myself for being human.’



We held each other when I left, or I held on to her. I do not want to let her go. But I am. She has a destination she is slowly embracing as she creeps around, stares into space remembering her fictions, having little snacks, and I cannot go with her. She is leaving piece at a time.



As I write now it has been three hours since I woke up and still my part of the universe is hushed and pregnant with something very good.

And I still don’t know what it is. But the snow has finally begun.

I am so glad to be old  enough to finally be capable of slowness. I no longer hurry for any reason but I attend more fully, I believe, to the moments as they scroll by and everything they bring with them. I try never to hold my breath to avoid taking in what is happening, though anything that can happen will happen at some point and I'm still thrown into chaos by unkindness, perfidy, fear and regret but when that happens I sometimes have the opportunity to remember that it’s the same for us all; that we all travel the same road and are endlessly meeting ourselves in each other as strangers, only to recoil or embrace and maybe learn.

In that spaciousness of discovery we can wish the happiness and forgiveness to each other that we wish for ourselves.

Joy, peace and generosity of heart to all.