Out of the Cube

All or nothing

Only connect. ~ E.M. Forster

I live for connection. Not the email/facebook/twitter/cellphone/texting kind of connection but eye contact, non-verbal connection, a sense of honoring and feeling honored by another human being. Wordless, deep, true.

When my granddaughter was 3 weeks old, her parents left her in my care so they could have a rare half-hour alone over lunch. I sat on the sofa and lay her on my lap on her back, her head at my knees, so I could talk to her, and as soon as we looked into each others' eyes, we knew each other. There she was, brand new to the world, and we had barely met, but all the knowledge of each other we needed was in that look.

I have had the rare good fortune to make such an instant connection with only a few other people in my life - grown-up people - and I'm wondering tonight why we don't do that more often. Why don't adults make real eye contact with people all the time?

I know why. We're scared. What might someone see in our eyes if we didn't shutter those windows? What if someone saw into the real us? Sometimes I think about how much energy I expend trying to feel safe - and I should know better. One of my favorite books is Pema Chodron's Comfortable with Uncertainty, and I've read it many times. After years of reading the Buddhists and throwing coins for the I Ching and really getting the concept of Tao, I still sometimes find myself desperately grasping for something to hold onto, when deep in my heart I think there is nothing more likely to prevent human connection than trying to find safety. 

We think it's smart to be cautions when in fact we are the three no-evil monkeys, unable to speak what is true, listen with heart, see another as an extension of self. And that is not living. I know that the biggest risk I can take in my life is to actively seek connection with other human beings, to build intimacy, to allow myself to be seen. I'm starting to really see other people, and when I do, I'll be damned if I don't see beauty - physical beauty where I hadn't seen it before because I hadn't bothered to look. In that look, if our eyes are open to see beyond the surface and we are willing to be thrilled, we can see our own naked vulnerable selves facing the unknown.

What would happen if we were to strip away our protective facade, go out into the world with our soul showing? Would we be swallowed up in terror? Or would we soar? Only one way to find out.

 

All you need is love

Don't forget love. It will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself
across the universe. ~ Mirabai

I'm going through a spell of wondering about being in a relationship again, after many years of being single (I just accidentally typed "simple," which is also true). Just taking this on as an exercise in contemplation feels like poking a sleeping giant with a sharp stick.

What is it about being single that makes people ask if I ever consider being in a relationship again? We don't ask someone in a couple, "Hey, you ever think about being single again?" Well, maybe we do, but mostly we don't.

It's as if "couple" is the natural way of the world and "single" is not just an anomaly but something to be overcome. In my family history, it was always the unhappy aunts and uncles who prodded the young adults to get married, as if every marriage were a confirmation to the unhappy ones that at least we're all in the same boat; at least my choices aren't that strange: no one is really happy in a relationship. See?

Many years ago I took a semester course on Virginia Woolf, and one of the first books we read was To the Lighthouse. I remember what happened the day the instructor asked what we thought of Mrs. Ramsey (the Uber-Mother, the Earth Goddess, the Mother of all Mothers). I said I thought she was the most unhappy character in the book because she was least aware of her real feelings. And I said that she pushed her daughters to marry because their marrying would confirm her choices, and their marrying would end their independence as it had ended hers and that would be OK with her. I said I thought she was passive-aggressively subversive and I didn't like her.

First there was silence in the room. Then one young woman turned in her seat and looked at me, eyes narrowed, "That is an awful thing to say. Mrs. Ramsey reminds me of my own mother - kind and gentle and only wants what's best for her daughters." Uh-huh. Did I mention that at 36, I was the oldest person in the class except for the instructor? Did I mention that I was in a very unhappy marriage and have two daughters? I guess both of us were projecting - me and the defensive young woman. Even so, I still think I was right, but I do wonder how I would feel about Mrs. Ramsay today were I to reread To the Lighthouse. Maybe I could find compassion this time around. But I doubt it.

Maybe I'm thinking about this subject because it's almost Valentine's Day, that stupid Hallmark holiday that requires people to get all sappy and/or wounded over getting a diamond necklace/vacuum cleaner as a gift from their beloved. Do I have feelings about this? No, of course not.

Or maybe I'm thinking about this subject because lately I feel the winds of time whipping my gray hair: am I too old to find true love? (Put that on a Hallmark card.)  Do I even want to? Or should I wait until I'm, say, 70. Maybe by then I'll know what I really want. Or not.

Dad was married four times, and we laugh when he tells me about the relationship advice he gives to his youngest son - my half-brother - the one who was born when Dad was 60 and his ex-wife was about 30 (men!). I hope the poor kid knows that Dad's not serious (he isn't - is he?), or he's going to have a lot of problems with women.

At the end of the day (and it is the end of this day), all I can really do is let it be - release all expectation, make no plans, deny no possibility, and continue to invite love into my life. Motto for the day: When you hear a knock at the door, don't answer. No no, that's not right. Try again: Motto for the day: Always wear clean underwear. I don't think that's the right motto either.

What ever.

Just curious

If I were to get a tattoo, I think I would choose a spiral pattern, something like a chambered nautilus, the one that's sliced in half, you know? So you can see the whorls. Did you know that the creature that lives in that shell (before the shell divers catch it and kill it and sell its shell for profit) uses the chambers to propels itself though the water? I don't know what it uses to steer . . . .

What's in a name?

That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet. ~ Shakespeare

But then, what did Romeo know about a woman's sense of identity. What do we ourselves know? I had no notion who I was, what I thought, how I felt until I left my husband when I was 38 years old (and I'm still discovering things that thrill me). But about 18 years ago I went through an exercise that was very illuminating: I decided to change my name. I was divorced, my daughters were married and had taken their husbands' names, I was really angry with my ex, and I realized that carrying his name around felt like the weight of his hand holding me back.

I started by considering my birth name, but I just wasn't her anymore. So who was I? And that's when I realized what a big deal it was to choose a new name. Let me say that again: I was choosing a new name! My god, where could I even start?

I started by thinking about places that had meaning to me.

Verna Pacific Ocean? Nope. Verna California? Huh-uh. Sequoia? Beach? Sand? Golden Gate?

Then I turned to literature.

Verna Woolf (as in Virginia)? Sounded like a cat coughing up a hairball.

I asked my friends.

Verna Van Dyke (I had just discovered I was a lesbian). Oh, puh-leese!

I wrote to my parents and asked for some family names.

Conway (the way of a con?) and a string of others that didn't work until they reached back a few generations on the German side of the family: Blueflever. 

The day I got the letter with the old family names in it, some friends had come over to celebrate some minor event, and we were drinking champagne. Not a lot of champagne, but enough that when I tried to say "Verna Blueflever," I couldn't get it out of my mouth. So I gave up on family names.

Now I was on my own with this new name thing, and it felt huge. In my world as a tech writer, I tackled big new projects by chunking the information into manageable pieces. So I decided that I would keep the letter W from my married name. I liked my initials: VW. Then I decided I wanted a long vowel, so names like Webster were out. No more than two syllables. OK, now we're getting somewhere.

At the time I was going through this name transformation, I was reading (I admit it) Women Who Run with the Wolves, and in her introduction, Clarissa Pinkola Estes defines wild like this: not domesticated. 

Not domesticated. That was me all right; it was the me I was just stepping into and the me I wanted always to be. I flipped through the phone book, saw Wilder, and I had become. Just. Like. That. I wrote out my name over and over, like a school girl with a crush, swirling her first name and his last name over and over in the back of her spiral-bound notebook. By god, I was Verna Wilder: Why hadn't I seen it before!

So I made some phone calls to find out the legal procedure for changing my name. I called some California State office and the woman I talked to stepped me through what sounded like an awfully complex process for such a simple thing.

Me: What will that cost?

Woman: $325

Me: What?!

Woman: $325

Me: But when I got married, changing my name didn't cost me anything.

Woman: $325

There was no way in hell I was going to spend that much money to get rid of a name that I had acquired free of charge (monetarily speaking). So I found a book on how to legally change your name without spending any money. Turns out that I could do it by simply filling out a form at the DMV, the only stipulation being that I could not change my name in order to commit a crime. I was OK with that. So the following week, I told a friend I was changing my name that day, and she said she'd go with me and change hers (honest - this really happened), so we went on an excursion to the California DMV, having as much fun as if we were two kids playing hooky.

I've been thinking about my name-changing story because I have a friend who wants to change her name, and I want to tell her what a powerful thing that is to do. I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope she does too. But I didn't do it lightly. In fact, when I didn't choose my birth name, my father stopped speaking to me for two years - that's what a big deal this name thing is.

Even today, whenever I sign my name or say it aloud to someone, my name - my name - resonates in my body. And my name matters very much to me. I would even say that changing my name was a way to come to terms with my past, to be gentle with myself for a married lifetime of giving up my identity, to say no to a father who wasn't willing to see me. It's one thing to understand with our brains that we are in control of our own lives; it's quite another to break away from a past that we think controls us. Changing my name was a first step.

Rowboats and dreamscapes

The edges of any landscape - horizons, the lip of a valley, the bend of a river around a canyon wall - quicken an observer's expectations. That attraction to borders, to the earth's twilit places, is part of the shape of human curiosity. And the edges that cause excitement are like those where I now walk, sensing the birds toying with gravity; or like those in quantum mechanics, where what is critical straddles a border between being a wave and being a particle, between being what it is and becoming something else, occupying an edge of time that defeats our geometries. ~ Barry Lopez from Arctic Dreams

I came home Monday night and had a post-California meltdown all day yesterday, accompanied by fever and coughing. Today the virus has settled in my ears and in my chest, and I'm sorting out the source of the meltdown.

I wrote once a long time ago about a place being able to break your heart. And I wonder a lot about the power of place in our sense of self in the world. When I first moved here to Colorado many years ago, I met lots of people from other places who said they felt like Colorado was home. I never did and still don't. I don't look at the mountains with tenderness and think, "Oh, look! It's the Rockies!" But when I'm in California, I do think - with great affection - "Oh look! It's the Pacific Ocean!"

I've been in Colorado for 26 years, and I don't want to move back to California - it's not that. Here's what I think it is: nostalgia for a place that no longer exists. The physical place is there, of course, but not the temporal place. I can fly there or drive there, be there physically and drink in the feel of the air and the sight of eucalyptus trees and the taste of calamari straight from the ocean. The landscape says "home" in my heart, but I could drive around for days and days and never find "home."

A few years after I moved out here, I was leaving work, my head pondering something other than the route home, and I looked up to see that the light had changed to green but I couldn't move because I had no idea where I was or where I was going. Where was home? What was this intersection? Street names flashed into and back out of my brain, San Jose streets and Boulder streets all mixed into one. The car behind me honked, I drove through the intersection, got my bearings, drove "home."

It's a little Alice-in-Wonderland, isn't it? This thing about home and place, time and space. On one visit to the Bay Area, I drove past my childhood home and saw that the street is not nearly as wide as I thought it was - and the house is tiny - or am I just bigger?

"Why, when I was a kid, 101 was all orchard between San Fran and Redwood City!"

"Why, I remember when we used to pull into a roadside stand and buy 2 pounds of cherries picked right off the tree, 2 pounds for a quarter!"

I don't really think there's anything to figure out here, no deep meaning to a past embedded in a now. I do think I over-think things. Is there meaning to life? Or not? If life has meaning, are we meant to know what it is? Or is it better to just keep one oar in the water at all times and get ready to paddle like hell (but wouldn't that mean going around and around in circles? Maybe I should keep both oars in the water).

Here's the only thing I know for sure about my past: I got here from there. But I can't get there from here.

Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream.

A little rain

If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life. ~ Siberian Elder

The family met tonight at a home in San Francisco where a four-course meal was prepared for us and all we had to do was move from one conversation to another, sip wine, seat ourselves, and eat what was put in front of us. I am not related by blood to any of this family; I am related by love - and history. There was movement in the room as compelling as the tides, a rocking motion as stories crossed the table, as we turned to lean in close to the person next to us so we could speak our own stories and hear theirs. The bride-to-be shone. We whispered to each other, almost lip-reading in the room where conversation reached to the corners of the high ceilings.

I remember my first adult-to-adult meeting with Mona's daughter when I had moved back to California after living in Colorado for 6 years. We met at a restaurant near Apple Computer where I worked, and there she was - all grown up. You'd think we'd get used to children growing up; after all, my own daughters were the same age as this young woman. But seeing her there that day was startling. She wasn't just Mona's daughter: she was her own woman, and during the hour we spent over lunch, I had to adjust my inner vision so I could really see her, not as the sweet child I had known or the more recent troubled teenager, and not as Mona's daughter - definitely not that.

Mona was one of those people who was larger than life (which is why her death took everyone by surprise: if Mona could die, the moon could fall out of the sky, right?). And to be Mona's friend was to be in her shadow. But to be her daughter? Oh, you would have to be strong to be her daughter and find your own way. 

I remember a friend telling me about a therapy session when the therapist broke the news to her that all of her problems with her mother would not go away when her mother died; they'd just be harder to deal with. I remember feeling appalled that I might have to come to terms with my own mother before her death and feeling anxious that she might loom in my psyche even after she was gone. Mona is gone and her daughter has a firm hold on her own life, on her identity - with or without her mother.

My mother has been gone now for 10 years, and I like to think she no longer holds sway over me. But sometimes I hear her rattling around in my brain, trying to rearrange things to suit her.

"Really, you'll like this thought much better if you move it over here with the others."

"Mother, please!"

"Well I was just trying to help!"

Mona was in the room tonight, her very absence echoing her name. Her daughter has no illusions about the mother who lived or the one who now lives in her and in all of us who knew her. Our stories keep her alive - and they give us leverage over the legend she has become. In the telling, we get to decide who she was, and we assign her a place in the order of things. We live out new experiences that will become the stories we tell and re-tell years from now.

My wish for the couple getting married tomorrow is a life filled with stories that will keep them alive for generations.

Mazel tov!

Sunshine and lemons

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle. ~ Ursula Le Guin

Sitting in the backyard of this house in San Jose where I'm staying for a few days - sunshine, 63 degrees, birds, palms, jasmine. Why does it even sound like the Bay Area to me? Maybe it's the constant hum of traffic that accompanies just about every backyard experience in this part of California. This house does not back onto a freeway or even a highway, but drive a few blocks in any direction and there we are - coming up to an on-ramp.

I've lived in Colorado for so long now that I've forgotten how people here talk about distance in terms of freeways: "I live only three exits from work," for example. Or, "Oh, it's a quick hop - Capital Expressway to 680, cross 101, and go west on 17, but be careful or that interchange will dump you out on 880 and next thing you know you'll be in Oakland." OK, I made that last part up, but it could have been true.

In this little peaceful spell in the sun, I remember with some curiosity how unhappy I was when I lived here, and I remember how much I suffered over my suffering. I was raised to it.

"Hey, Hon, how ya doin' today?"

Sigh. "Not so good, you know? I mean, I'm OK really but . . . " Another deep sigh.

"It's OK, Hon. You can talk to me. I've got my share, I'll tell you . . . " Head shaking, sighing.

Funny how you can leave a  place, really say goodbye, think you've let it go, and no matter how long you're gone, the place holds a little space for you. I make up this story that I'm sitting in the little space that has my name on it, and I can look around and touch the painful spots if I want to. For the first time since I left here in 1984, I don't want to.

The woman I was when I left here no longer exists, and the woman I am can pass back and forth through the permeable veil that is memory. Memory still lives, but it's not solid. It's Penelope's woof and warp, building and tearing down and changing and reweaving. And like Penelope herself, all memory is story, and what we make of memory is another story.

 I'm sitting in the sunshine, and this is what I have, and this is all I want: this moment, the smell of  lemon, and all of my memories lined up to tell me the latest story.

Only in California: Waiting for the light to change, we see this black and white car in front of us with this message across the rear bumper:
#69 Erotic Enforcement
District 666 Department of Deviant Discipline

I lived here once

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
~ Umberto Eco

I’m in San Jose. I know this because from my seat at the dining room table I look out at lemons hanging from the branches that droop over the back fence, and behind the lemons, the shaggy head of a palm, and next to the palm, stretching well beyond the second-story roof line of the house behind this one, a row of Italian cypress. The only way this view could get more San Jose is if there were a bougainvillea a-burst with magenta climbing a stucco wall, and I’m not sure if they’re even in bloom in January, but in California one can never be sure. This is the time of year for bare branches of fruit trees, yellow mustard in bloom at their base, and acacia flaunting yellow blossoms.

I’m in a parallel universe, slipping between past and present, experience and memory. And that’s just for starters. Everything here is familiar; nothing here is familiar. Everything here is the same as it always was; I am not the woman who lived here once.

I flew into San Jose between storms. California has been getting hammered with rain rain and more rain, so it’s very green here. Mona’s husband picked me up in his Corvette, not the yellow one I thought he was still driving, and when we parked next to a slate-gray ‘Vette at the P&W, he said, “That’s the color of my next Corvette.” The concept of a “next” car is something I never think about except when I’m hoping my current car will last me into my next life. But Mona’s husband has had many Corvettes over the years, and I think that in the 40 years I’ve known him, he’s always had at last one Corvette in the garage.

Mona’s first Corvette was teal green, and the first time I saw it was in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Saratoga, California, where she parked way out where no one was likely to park next to her, and she climbed out of that brand-new car wearing a white shirt, teal green skirt, shoes, jacket, hoop earrings, and bangle bracelets, blond hair a-tumble, and she was probably lighting up—she would not have smoked in a new car—and pushing at her hair with the hand that held the cigarette.

Here’s the thing: Mona—gone now for more than five years—is everywhere, even in the rev of the car engine when her husband drives us to La Azteca for dinner. She’s with us in the way the tires grab the pavement and the way we zip through traffic (the only thing to do is zip: in the anarchy of Bay Area traffic at dinner time, it’s zip or die)

Today we will run errands, see a movie, have a quiet day together before the family gatherings start tomorrow. We’re easy together. Last night we watched a movie in the living room, me in my flannel pants and Harley tee shirt, him in his sweats. He was cracking walnuts. “Hey, honey,” he says during a quiet scene in the movie, “remind me to the call the bank tomorrow.” Such a domestic little thing, innocent, and yet I almost feel vertigo for the strangeness of it: his familiar voice saying just those words to Mona many years ago in some other living room in some other domestic scene. But no, I think. Mona would have been the one to call the bank.

When I think about it, I’m struck by the oddity of this intimacy between me and Mona’s husband, between me and her children. What had been a close relationship became an intimacy when we sat together in Mona’s hospital room easing her out of this life and grieving together when she was gone. We all carry her spirit. Tomorrow when we gather with Mona’s brother and her son, more of Mona will come together. We’re like a jigsaw puzzle, all of us part of the same picture, and it occurs to me now that together we bring Mona to life.

We get to have her back for a little while when we open our hearts and stories to each other. I’ll take what I can get.

Sleepless

I see the twin bed in there
all crisp with new flowered sheets
so cozy in the corner of the room
waiting to be slept in.
~ from Single Bed Pantoum, Author Unknown

After an all-day workshop, I came home exhausted, dropped onto the couch and tried to check email, slipped into and out of sleep with the warm computer on my lap. At 8:00 I woke enought to stagger upstairs and go to bed and (this line comes to me) "It was no dream: I lay broad waking."  I tried to sleep. And there we have it: I tried to sleep. I have better luck trying to wake.

So I got up, came downstairs, and am looking for a poem that I know I put into my commonplace book - but it isn't there. How could I remember a line from a Sir Thomas Wyatt poem (written in the early 1500s) when I can't find a poem I was sure I put into my computer less than six months ago?

Then I find the poem, "Single Bed Pantoum," not on my computer but in a blue folder with other poems that I haven't yet typed, and there are so many good poems that I want to stand and read, holding each under the light of the small desk lamp, taking care to move the pages quietly so as not to wake the sleeping housemate in the next room.

It's an odd thing, this inability to sleep, this mindful/mindless waking and stepping through the brain's commands to find this poem - I know it is printed on pink card stock and the word "bed" is in the title and it's written in a verse form similar to a villanelle (the name of the form starts with the letter "k" I think, but when I Google what I think the word is, I'm reading about the capital of Sudan) and I am certain I typed it into the computer. But I didn't.

I am certain I am now awake. My eyes are gritty, my stomach growls. I'm awake, right? Frankly, I have no idea. It's night, of that I'm dead certain. But so many things I've been sure of over the years I can either no longer remember - or remember wrong - or see with midnight clarity what was invisible to me in the light of day.

My certainties, like Wyatt's long-gone loves, "flee from me that sometime did me seek," and all my Buddhist reading tells me that this is a good thing, that not having "dead certainty" leaves me open to see beyond what I have so tidily circumscribed. Certainty, like sleep, is elusive. And when I look at the words "dead certain," I shake my head in wonder that I didn't see this before. Dead!

When I bought the single bed - when I gave up a queen bed and bought a single bed and moved into the smaller bedroom and tuck myself in at night, all movement cramped and tight and small - I "knew" that I had moved into a time of my life when I would, from now on, sleep alone, dream smaller dreams, take up less space. As Dad would say with finality, "That's just the way it is."

For several nights I have lain "broad waking" in my narrow bed, nothing certain but the shadow of the honey locust tree scrawled on the wall I face in the dark (a shadow that will, by the way, be gone with sunrise). I follow a trail with my thoughts, tracking the scent of the poem I knew existed somewhere in the clutter of my dark room, and if I let go of everything I think I know, the trail goes on - not to a fixed horizon but past this bend in the road and beyond that hillock between the enclosing trees. In the distance I think I glimpse a light: I bought a narrow bed just when I was on the verge of opening to a wider life.

Dad is wrong - nothing is "just the way it is."