Nostalgia

 In the name of nostalgia I am posting this journal entry from april 2006. I am of a mixed mind sometimes of the benefits of returning to the past. Is it valuable to see how we have grown? or is it just taking us further out of the moment? Regardless I hope you will enjoy the pensive musings of a 23 year old me. 

Venice 4/29/06

   My solitude is peopled strangely by yellow pickups that go in and out of the warehouse that juts awkwardly from the octagonal lookout. This structure stands quietly on the beach it's faded paint belying years of silent guard over zealous surfers and curious tourists who wander too near the finger of rocks. The occasional runner passes by, each windbreaker more colorful than the last as I sit here writing trying to forget my heart-sickness. I snicker inwardly at the futility as a tear slips down my cheek surprising the midnight blue velour of my London coat bunched on my knees. Kids playing on the beach, a yoga class to my left, the disappointed surfers waiting for more than a half-foot wave, and still I am sad. Amazing how self-absorbed we humans are. We all wander around content in our bubbles. The organic coffee I drank is starting to hit my empty stomach and I nestle my cheekbone in the palm of my hand thinking how odd this passage is. I suddenly feel like if I dont stop writing, I can hold at bay this feeling of desperation that has surprised me this Saturday morning. My words sound trite and dramatic even to myself. A surfer finally gives up and climbs out of the tiny pocket of sea he was occupying patiently. The concept of knowing when to call it quits relates glaringly to my situation. Hearts are tricky things. They seem to rarely actually agree with Minds but they play along for awhile until one day Mind realizes Heart was being facetious and the joke is on Him. Heart is cunning, complex, yet thoroughly genuine all at once-much like the women who cling to Her every hope and dream. And there we go; a moment of catharsis. I close my eyes and let the feeling trip over me like those silly blustering half-foot waves. I look up and see the one surfer, who determined, finally caught one of those little waves and rode it for all it was worth and again parallels strike me. I have a choice. I can sit out there mid-way between shore and deep sea armed against the chilly waters in my wetsuit and hope and wait for a wave to ride as far as it will take me satisfied at least that I have tried. Or I can head in now cut my losses call it a day. My cheekbone returns to my palm as I try to hear Heart through Mind's instant rebuke and painful constriction. "Dont lead me out there to wipe-out on a half-foot wave." My one successful surfer climbs out and considers calling it a day. I think true courage must be loving someone With the knowledge that they do not love you back in the same way. What does it take to, knowing that, be brave enough to love anyway? Is this true courage or just stupidity? Which flimsy category do I fall into today? My meditation is interrupted by my need to pee as the coffee has shot through my system and now is weighing heavily on my bladder. I am so reluctant to leave. While I am here on this little patch of beach it all seems okay. The wind and the waves catch my silly neurotic thoughts and play with them, careful not to take it all too seriously. I continue to ignore my now more insistent need to piss. This is a beautiful vacuum and the sun is just starting to peek out and warm my back. I grab a curl and stretch it vertically down my face as I stare out to see and my stomach drops out. Any fantastic revelations today? I check the "No" box. Did I momentarily feel wonderfully alive? I check the "Yes" box. It seems appropriate that my lone wave-catcher is heading back out to sea for another go, as I prepare to leave my insignificant yet strangely meaningful section of sand.

November: Death as it proceeds rebirth.

   There is something about this time of year that is always filled with a desperate intensity. As one reality is dying and fading into a ghost, the specters of the past seem to drift forward to witness the last rites of yet another phase of life. I find myself watching them lined up transparent, sad, and wise.

   We have all lived many lifetimes, each one with a different starring cast. Sometimes I think my heart is just too big, too sensitive. I look back on the characters from these past lives and my heart still bleeds a little. I miss them. I have the misfortune of once loving, always loving. My heart is filled with these names and tastes of lovers, and memories though faded can still overwhelm me with a subtle sadness. Especially in November. 

      I have noticed that people seem to break up between October and November......maybe I am just seeing patterns where I am looking for them. But every year.....around this time the heartache abounds. This is the month of Scorpio, whose corresponding card in the Tarot is Death. Many people associate fear with death, because they know with endings come pain. The Death card speaks of the absolute ending of one cycle, to allow for the birth of a new one. We humans like the familiar, the known. We fight subconsciously the change, we anticipate the hurt, and generally have to be forcibly dragged to our own 'death.' Yet, in nearly every case, I find the painful ending was necessary for some crucial growth only appreciated in retrospect.
  
  I sit here on an oddly balmy November night, and still in my mind there is that winter chill. The breeze seeps into my bones and makes it known that things are never going to be the same after this month. It lends to melancholy, fanciful notions of headless horsemen, and hauntings. So in honor of my uneasy reflections, I line up my ghosts--all oct/nov casualties--starting five years ago..........
     Five years ago, I left everything I knew, hometown, friends, a boyfriend, to move across the country to Los Angeles. Four years ago, I found myself recovering from my first big city musician heartbreak and gratefully putting to rest the me who didn't respect herself. Three years ago, a dramatic ending of a friendship, perhaps the ugliest I have ever experienced. Two years ago, the deepest heart wound I have yet experienced from a relationship I hadn't even expected in the first place. One year ago, I was planning my trip to India as I learned my father was dying. Every year another little death. From each of them I am changed. Perhaps sadder, but hopefully also wiser.
       
         Somehow reflecting on them makes me feel comfort, but I am still pensive. Knowing you will live through the pain and be a better person, does not take away the fear of the pain. It just gives you a little more courage to face it. Next year I will know what it was that died this November.......from my new lifetime.

Choose your own Adventure

I used to think all you needed was a string to find your way out of the labyrinth. Even when it was dark the answer was as simple as a one yarn solution. Age has taught me better. Sometimes you follow a string certain it will lead you to salvation and instead you end up at a free-standing ball of yarn. Or maybe it leads you straight to the minotaur. There are layers and layers of tangled string. Each one represents a possibility. Like the dime book mazes you used to do as kid with multiple ways to solve them. Though one path seems more direct, the bottom line is no matter how you get there, you are either stuck in the maze or liberated  from it's boundaries.   One way is no better than the other, just different.  

           I think human lives are like this. We build our own labyrinth, a choose your own adventure. Sometimes we end up dying early, and everyone around us wonders what would have happened if we just made one decision differently along the way. Would everything change? Is destiny as precarious as a one bait card trick?  

        I like to think that just like the choose your own adventure stories, we have multiple lives and chances to make choices that will eventually lead us to one of the happy endings. I always used to skip ahead and read all the outcomes so I could be sure to pick the option that would lead me unerringly to a glorious finish. It is odd how little changes in our personalities and minds as we grow and yet how drastically different our circumstances are. If I am being honest with myself the grown woman imitates the little girl in the big game of life. I try to flip pages ahead to the outcome of every choice, disregard the 'projected' unhappy outcomes, and make the one decision that leads ultimately to riding off into the sunset.   

              In my effort to control these outcomes and "write" something that cannot possibly be written, I lose the point. We can write our choices, not their outcomes.  We pick the long way or the short way out of the maze but ultimately out is out, dead is dead. The shorter path out is not somehow less fulfilling. That is the ultimate fear though, that we will die with something left unfinished; a life we do not judge as being filled with the tears, joy, and accomplishments of hollywood movies.     

          Somewhere in trying to lump together the moments of my life into some elegantly written plot, tonight I am capable of stepping outside of the usual patterns I see. I can in this unexpected flash of insight,  identify the tiniest seconds of my journey that impart meaning enough even for me.     

       I am thinking of this past year and trying to write the story of my time in india with my Dad for my stepmother who is writing a book. She is a woman of action and I admire her courage. I have begun writing the story many times in my head but even now am procrastinating on giving it a tangible life by writing this blog instead. As I try to craft this journey of trials and tears, two moments stand alone in my head. Moments that make the rest of my time in India make perfect sense. Everything I went to india for is summed up in the look on my father's face when I first arrived, and the look on his face when I left. Amidst my angst, my searching, my 'sacrifice,' are just two glances. Seconds when the mind labyrinth ceased to exist and there was only pure love.     

        People write movies in airports for these glances. The split second when two people first see each other and everything they feel is naked on their faces. When I first arrived in india and my father opened the door and saw me for the first time after seven years, the only thing on his face was pure excitement and love. Two things went through my head;

1) I had never seen my father look so old,

2) I never knew he loved me so much.

The bookend of this moment was captured on camera the day I left india. After my father passed a month later, my stepmother sent me the picture she had snapped with her phone, and I cried. Because it was that look again. I could not see it because I was hugging my father but in that photo is once again the most obvious open expression of love.  

      We are all human and we get hopelessly tangled in our balls of string that we are hoping will lead us out of the labyrinth. Sometimes we sling our strings like rodeo cowboys into walls and around minotaurs. In the moments when we embrace the darkness and drop the string we remember the way out lies not in our minds planning and scheming, but in remembering what "is." There is not one but many paths out of the maze, to find them we just have to know they exist. They are illuminated not in logic or attempted projections of future, but in finding the answer in love that lives beyond the limitations of 'wrong' choices. That love just "is." Choose your own adventure.

A final goodbye. At least in this lifetime