a chapter closing

My birthday is next week. Another year, a marker of time in which I look back upon and wonder how it is possible to get from there to here, how strange it is to look at passages of time, when it is experienced only in the moment. Still, I pause, I glance back over my shoulder. I celebrate. The life given, the life lived, the day after day after day.

What has changed? Nothing. Everything.
I look back at that first entry I wrote here, how all was in transition. And I am here, again, having come full circle.
I am sitting right on the cusp of things, of endings moving into new beginnings.
I am feeling a momentary sense of completion, a pause, a waiting for the change to come, the change that has already, even now, begun.

Leo is a boy now, no longer baby, or even toddler. Just tonight we went roller skating. Roller skating! Is he really big enough for this? Apparently so, because though I offered to hold his hand as he wobbled about, he would have none of it. “I’m fine mom. I’m fine,” he said. And he was.
His questions stun me. His words surprise and amuse and delight me. Like this. At night, tucking him into bed he looks at me and says, “mom you are as cute as a rhinoceros.” “Well, thank-you Leo.” Then, as if he thought about it and changed his mind. “No,” he says. “You are as cute as the way penguins look when they walk.”

I have been writing with a renewed passion and love and curiosity. A year ago it was writing here, writing in a regular way again, returning to my love of words. Now, it is writing in my journals, pages and pages of longhand interwoven with pictures and sketches and snippets of dreams remembered upon waking. Writing my stories, my memory, my truth, my hands typing fast to keep up with the words that come. Words that seem to come not from out there, ideas and images for which I seek, but words that come from within me, that have been forming for some time and now have their say.

This past weekend I was present as doula at a birth of twins, two new little boys, twins, healthy and pink and eyes squinting up, searching for mom. And I was very aware of it being a last. Not that I will never be a doula again. I will. I love this. But I am no longer doing it as work, for work, building a career, a birth business. It has been a slow leaving and this birth marked the official “end” for me. It felt very right, and as I walked out of the hospital I knew something was ending, had already left.

In less than two weeks I leave to go to Vermont for ten days, the beginning of my return to school. I will be doing my work at home, with week long residencies once a semester. It’s been quite some time since I was in an academic environment. I honestly don’t know how it will be, the ways my days will change, when or exactly how the work will get done, how I will feel with my nose in books and my mind stretched and my creativity entering new expressions. I only know things will change, I will change, and I am ready for this. It has been a long time in coming and the time is right. So I begin.

I begin. I end. I circle back around. I say good-bye. I say welcome. And in all of it I say thank-you.

And I don’t know how else to say it except I feel this chapter closing of writing here Beyond the Map. It’s time. Ending time, beginning time, the two inseparable. So I say good-bye to this space that has held me well, a space for my words, an emerging self, a longing for a unconditional relationship with life. It was important to me and I am so grateful. Grateful for the way it helped me begin to write again. Grateful for the people I met, many who have become friends. Grateful for the container it offered me, a womb of sorts, allowing me to speak my truth and find my way back home.

alignment with myself

"Kairos"

As part of my, still very successful, care plan to treat and help prevents headaches I go to see a NUCCA chiropractor. It is all very exact, taking x-rays and measurements and the adjustment is not at all invasive, but precision is everything.

I’m still going twice a week and the good thing is, I seem to be holding the alignment for longer periods of time, and soon, I will move to once a week and then once a month and there will come a time when I will be going in once every few months or so, just to get checked, make sure I’m still holding the adjustment and staying aligned.

In my love of words, I find great meaning in this: that these adjustments re-align me, that this headache has re-aligned me, bringing me to a much deeper place with truths I have been walking and circling for all my years really, the story that is my story, the one I am in some ways always writing and that remains living.

When faced with such pain, all day every day, I had to stop, to listen. I had to check in with myself several times throughout the day, asking what I could do rather than just telling myself what I should do. I had to let go of the “agenda”, the “plan”, and find my way through very bit by bit. And this is, of course, the way I want to live, the way I feel most alive, the way I know to remain embodied, in alignment with my truth and heart and loves.

It reawakened this in me, all over again, this experience I had in the months following my surgery and cancer and recovery nearly two years ago. That there is a time for things, all things, and that I can listen to my own body and rhythms and cycles and seasons and they tell me where I am and what I need or what to do or not do, what is being asked for, called for, what I have to offer.

I am very much here right now, this listening deeply to what my body and internal knowing, “intuition” is speaking, and then moving from that place. And patterns do emerge, cycles of and for things, a sense of routine or rhythm, which feels to me a kind and grounded container for the rush of sensations that come into me, the dream world of psyche, the juggling of demands and needs and desires. It’s all there, all belonging, all having its place and home. Just not all at once. And this is what I am learning, all over again.

It’s a strange world I live in. A world where I can eat strawberries in the middle of a Chicago winter, where I can trick myself into thinking it is not the darkness of sleeping hours but instead turn on all the lights and work through my bodies limits, where I can buy just about anything at just about anytime, where everything is always there, always available, and I’m told I should in fact have it all, all of this. And this way of being leaves me, and I sense a great many others, very lost. A sense of disconnect. An absence of being in alignment with the seasons of things and cycles of myself, with responding to what wants to be done here and now, in this moment, and not trying to do it all or do it all at once or do it because some arbitrary thing “out there” told me I should or must or have to.

There are so many energies that live in me, that manifest.
Times when I feel a building energy, when I’m on fire and ready to get shit done, when I feel all slow and sensual.
Times when I am in the throes of creation or at the door of destruction, when I feel mentally clear and everything seems to fit into place and times when I’m cloudy and all is murky and I must stay here and not seek explanation.
Times when I’m gestating or birthing or protected in cocoon.
Times with I need to withdraw, to turn inward and be quiet and still, and times when I need to be active and doing and lost in the task at hand.
Times when I’m watering and tending, times when I’m planting, times when I’m uprooting.
Times for grounding, for flying, for letting the water hold me.
Times for puttering and rambling and roaming, for nurturing and for challenging and stretching; times for celebration and for storming and for taking Leo to go play miniature gold and out for swirled ice cream cones.

It’s all in me. And yet not all at once, and I want to live in communion with myself, my flesh, my heart, my knowing, so I might live in alignment, not going against my grain (and yes, the wording again makes me pause: migraine - my grain)

When I try to force something, to make myself fit some mold or arbitrary schedule of when things should happen or be done, I start to feel stiff and brittle and I get grouchy and bite people’s heads off, or else I shut down or get sick as way of trying to restore and find alignment once again.

How much more life giving to honor this knowing inside me, to follow where it leads, trusting that there is a time for all things and I can only be right here where I am, in this right now. And to do so, to live this, it requires I listen, which asks I be still, and silent, silent enough to really hear with my body and see with my heart. It is just too hard for me to listen when I am going at full speed and forcing, pushing, plowing through the list of to dos. So I stop. And I listen. And the answer is always there.

To know this, really feel it the way I have been in my headache recovery, sinking into it and celebrating it, it transforms the moments themselves, the days. All of life becomes a way of offering devotion, of loving what is, of compassion and go softly and finding myself, again and again, having entered so deeply into things that I understand what it is to be present, as if for the first time.

everywhere is falling everywhere

Photo by Collin I. Mills

My poor flowers on the porch have all withered and died and I will need to go and buy new ones, planting them in pots and watering them to life.
I have not washed my hair in too many days and it sticks up in strange places and looks like a birds nest.
The pipe underneath our kitchen sink broke, spewing water everywhere, leaving warped damage in the cupboard and on the floor.
My refrigerator is empty and when I go to make a salad it is of wilting lettuce and a few found sunflower seeds and shriveled green onions.
I’m supposed leave for school in just a month, to be gone for ten whole days, and I have no real idea what I’m doing or how it will all work itself out or what I need to have done before departing.
The cd in Leo’s stereo skips at song nine and I have to go in and fast-forward past that song three times every night.
It is summer so there is no good tv on and I just finished watching the last of Weeds on DVD and have to wait months before the next season comes out.
My car is filthy and cracker crumbs are ground into the seats and there is likely a cup of juice rotting somewhere in the back.
There is a tickle in the back of my throat, like I’m coming down with a cold.
I’m behind in pretty much every area of my life and there is hours of catching up work to do.

But right now, I do not care about any of this.
I am choosing to let all this go for now, for the moment.

Because today, right now, I do not have a headache.

After fifty three days of pain, I now feel a hollow in my head where the ache once was.
I do not have a headache. I do not have a headache. I do not have a headache.
And right now, it is ok that nothing else matters.

Some things happened which I believe had a direct affect on the pain level going down, resulting in me having these whole stretches of time in which there is NO pain. And yet, I honestly can’t say how or why or what. I did everything I could. And something, likely many things, worked.

Slowly, I will decrease the “treatments”, until I am, I hope, living a more normal life rather than consulting the calendar every day to see what doctor and healer appointments I have.

And some things have shifted inside me to, during this whole process.
I feel like things I am here on this earth to do, that I cycled through them again, on a deeper level. And so new insight will emerge. New, deeper, integration of my stories, my myths, my images and symbols that have been winding their way through me for the past two years.

But not now, not yet. For now, I just know something happened and shifted and feels alive and I need to not know. To just rest in the not knowing, how this loosens control, the ways in which I want to claim control, that I get to know and decide and determine.

Then my horoscope for the week.
Always crazy, in the best sense of the word, when it aligns so much with where I am.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): "Everybody experiences far more than he

understands," said philosopher Marshall McLuhan. "Yet it is experience,

rather than understanding, that influences behavior." This is always true,

but it will have special meaning for you in the coming days. You're about

to be inundated by a flood of raw perceptions, sensations, and feelings,

and only a fraction of it will be namable, let alone comprehensible. That

shouldn't be a problem, though. Your job is simply to marvel at all the

novelty that's flowing in, not to be in an anxious hurry to define it.

This is what I plan to do, to enjoy my pain free periods. To marvel at all that has poured in, without rushing in to define or even understand.

***

There is going to be a fall out from all of this, from so many days of being in bed. Things got lost here, in this maze of pain. I really quickly start to feel overwhelmed, as if the pain lets up and then I am expected to just leap back into life’s doing. There is a shadow cast by so many days of debilitating pain, of being in bed, and it will have its due.

A friend sent me an email this morning. She said to me that maybe now that I’m not in pain all the time, I still need to recover from the headache, from what it meant, from what it took out of me.

Yes, this is it. I need to recover. Though not in pain, I need to recover from the pain.
And I don’t know how long this will take, only that I must go gently, listen deeply and offer myself the space for the fullness of my experience, all the crazy contradictions of emotions and the desire to be doing again and the exhaustion in my body and heart. And let all of this be, without understanding, just being in it, with it.

Recover.
Go gently.
Say thank-you, again and again for the pain that has lifted, has lessened, seems to be leaving all together.
Rush nothing.

This is the poem I felt come to me the last two weeks, in some way capturing for me my headache and what it has been for me and meant for me. Falling up into the bowl of the sky. Watching as the bowl breaks all together, shatters inside me and outside in my days. Falling towards something else all together, a different way of being, a Presence with no name.

And now, in ways I don’t understand and need to understand (again, this letting go of understanding), the poem is showing me the way to Return back to myself, to my daily life, my family, my world. To weave things back together, to settle in, to do what needs to be done, refusing to rush and clamor, to be gentle in the days to come, as if to offer balance, tender container, for the severity and fierceness with which this has been teacher to me, teaching me about myself.

“The New Rule”
Rumi

It's the old rule that drunks have to argue
and get into fights.
The lover is just as bad. he falls into a hole.
But down in that hole he finds something shining,
worth more than any amount of money or power.

Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.

Here's the new rule: break the wineglass,
and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

I’ll leave with those words I think.
I plan on being off line for a few days, maybe longer, as I recover and sort through what got left behind as I was in bed with a headache and everywhere was falling everywhere, to go gently as I find my own way, falling again and again toward, and into, the glassblower’s breath.

two paths make my whole

Sometimes, sitting here on the couch or lying in bed or en route to one of my many appointments, I think I can actually, quite literally, feel myself stretching, becoming more, an expansiveness splitting open old ideas and bringing me so close to another way I can feel her breath on my face.

The old, familiar, known, well-rehearsed, comfortable routine way: either/or, this/that, black/white, right/wrong.
The new way: I will do anything, try anything, open to anything and do so all at once.

Which means, as this headache continues and remains and does not leave, I am choosing to come to it, to treat it, to tend to it, from many different perspectives and angles and supportive therapies. I am allowing myself to open to the truth that maybe I need all these things and it is ok to use all of them, to accept what they have to offer and give thanks for the way it helps, without saying that one way is the way or the answer or the cure or the fix. Just to say yes, to open and say yes and keep going, day after day, starting over again and again.

So, I am going here twice a week.
And in two weeks I have an appointment here.

I am taking herbs and I am taking medicine made in a laboratory somewhere, a medicine I had hoped to avoid but now just hope will work and make a difference.
I am opening my body to be cared for by those who believe who my body has everything it needs within it in order to heal. And I am opening my body to be tested and examined and perhaps helped by those who believe my body, my headaches, are a puzzle of sorts and nothing more than chemicals or physiology and if we find the right combination, I will be cured. And on the surface these two don’t fit, don’t go together. But for me, for now, they do. And this is good for me, the me that can be quite rigid about one way or another, this way or that, that finds some kind of comfort in passion, in all or nothing gusto, in believing with religious zeal. Now I am being opened to letting both ways be present for me, a part of my path. To not pick one over the other but say yes to both. This is, oddly, exactly the place I need to be.

I don’t know what will finally help. I don’t know if I will ever know what it is that finally helps or if it is simply the collection of things that seems to, over time, lessen the headaches until they are again manageable. Maybe I will know. Such as, I went the Botox route and now my headaches are gone. Or maybe it will be much more ambiguous: I got Botox and acupuncture and swallowed pills and had craniosarcal massage and somewhere in there, they began to lessen. The old me would be crazy with the not knowing. Now, after being here for as long as I have, this headache for fifty days now, I feel it has worn away some of my rigidity. I’m open to anything, to all of it, in moments even open to being here and nowhere else but here, at this place where I have a headache that won’t go away.

I remember when I was going through menopause and felt I was spinning in a cyclone of treatments and therapies. And it was upsetting to me and hard on my body, harder than the symptoms of menopause itself. I felt in my gut, I just knew, that I needed to walk away, to go off all the supplements, to stop the therapies, to do nothing but give myself space for my body to transition, all on its own. Without interference. Which it did.

And this time around, I know, just as clearly, yet it is a different knowing. I know I need help, that this headache is not going away on its own, if given space and time and nurturing love. I know that this headache is coming from somewhere, in me and my body, and I need help, from many places, to tend to it and alleviate its pain and find a way to live moving forward. I know it just as clearly, as fully, and I trust this knowing. So I proceed. I change my diet and I go to see another doctor. I feel my feelings and I research new medicines. I invest in good ice packs and peppermint for the nauseas and the very expensive alternative treatments that are available and I invest in medicine for pain and a clinic my insurance will not cover and doctors recommended by those I trust. I do this. All of this.

Yes, and. Both.
Seeing and accepting and embracing the life giving qualities in all of it.
The way through, my way through, not clearly marked and hedged one either side but a sprawling path that takes me here and there, and here and there some more, that asks me to open my mind, leave behind assumptions, and say yes to the healing and support offered.
To trust, above all else, the voice in me that knows what I need.

Today is a yes/and day, a thank god for all of it day, a refusing to settle for just one way day.
Today is a good day.

reading and other things

This is how I’m coping, making it through, hoping to alleviating pain and learning to live with pain.

1. I go to see the chiropractor once, sometimes twice a week.
2. I go get acupuncture twice a week. There, I lie on the table and stare at the octagon in the ceiling and I notice how the light from the small lamp hits each angle differently. I imagine the pain in my head leaving my body and being sent up to the eight sided container. I feel things tingling in my body, my left foot and wrist, my right temple and eye socket. I feel the soothing oils of peppermint from the cloth she puts over my forehead.
3. I take six scoops of Chinese herbs, ground to a powder, twice a day. They are bitter and smell like root vegetables freshly pulled up from the ground. I mix them with orange juice and chug them down, three bug gulps.
4. I sit with my feet in hot water in the bathtub, with a bag of frozen pees on my head.
5. I rub the soles of my feet. I have Todd place pressure right in the center of the arch. I paint my toenails: bright red and black and deep purple and the palest pink.
6. I take a medicine I did not want to take but have come to accept as needed medicine for me, for now. I swallow the tablet at night, feel an achy sadness, pray for relief.
7. I fall apart and weave myself back together.
8. I save up my energy and do fun things with Leo: going for walks, eating our Popsicles, going mini golfing, making pictures, watering the flowers on the porch that are starting to whither in the heat.
9. I take pleasure wherever and however it comes: memories of dancing on the porch with Todd and eating watermelon, summer dresses and bare feet, drinking Dr. Pepper with crushed ice, connecting with friends when the moments allow, listening to the insect orchestra at night, eating peaches and plums and fat grapes.
10. And I read. I have done more reading in the past weeks than I did all the other months of this year combined. There are times when even reading is too much, hurting my head and eyes, and then I put the books down. But as soon as the pain allows, I’m back with my books. They are offering me such solace and escape and joy right now. I’ve read The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy, Stand Facing the Stove by Anne Mendelson, The Name by Michal Gorvin, The Book of Salt by Monique Truong, The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison, Psyche in a Dress by Francesca Lia Block, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, Best Friends by Martha Moody. I’ve gone back and re-read old favorites: Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Carl Jung, A Passage to India and Howard’s End by E.M. Forrester, all the poetry books by Marie Howe, Pilgrim and Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, A Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I read in bed, on the couch, sitting on the porch in our broken wicker chairs, in waiting rooms to see doctors, before sleeping, in the morning after Leo is at school and I’m sipping my morning latte. I read waiting for dinner to cook, waiting for Todd to come home from a trip, waiting for the headache to go away. I am not really that picky, the way I usually am about books, searching for just the right book to fit the spot, the need, the sate I’m in. These books are bought cheap, under a buck a piece at garage sales, pages upon pages of story and words that transport me, take me to other worlds, offer me reprieve. I gobble them up. Then I open another and begin again. So, if any of you out there have recommendations, particularly for rather easy reads and good story telling, do share. My rather large pile is now dwindling and I may be here for a while, asking books to keep me company. Which they do. And I am so grateful.