ouroboros

I used to think of myself as a series of uncategorized items. Undefined, out of color and alphabetical order. Bourbon and cigarettes, and unwashed lucky socks. Second hand combat coots, and mixed tapes with  names like Heartbreak. I suppose I used to think of myself as a junk drawer. I am none of those things anymore. I have none of those things anymore.

I have this shell that feels nothing like me. It hasn't in four years. It is like I walk through the earth in a machine, bumbling and inoperable, left moving me right. My body turns against itself, and the pain that plagues me feels finally like the manifestation of years of anguish. And that is what my body did to me, or rather I did to my body.

In the past few months, I have felt sick. Arthritis, depression, weight gain, exhaustion, lethargy. I can't remember to return calls or emails or thank you letters. Perhaps, after Lucia's death, I just couldn't muster too much sympathy for me. I grieved and felt sorry for myself, yes, but I also acted out, and retreated and pushed. Those two Angies, the one of good and the other of evil, I hadn't reconciled. It makes me sick. One swallows the other, like the Ouroboros devouring its tail. I am one, not two. I draw it, like an enso, in a few strokes a circle, and a snake eating itself. Then I sage it, say a prayer, meditate on the image. It is not an image of destruction and self-sabotage. It is about rebirth and recreation and primordial unity--that which was, is, and will be. 

I no longer want to feed myself the storyline of her death and of my responsibility. I don't want to feed it to my ailments and my dis-ease. I don't want to give it strength anymore. I wonder if I caused my sickness to find a cause of her death, then I shoo it away as overthinking. I don't want to speak its name anymore. Even when I think grief is over, it comes back, like a mobius strip, the beginning is the end, and the two are a moot point anyway. But the grief and the action of blame are too different things. I release the blame, release the hatred, release the guilt that I didn't even know was there anymore.

I open, open, unfold the turns and twists of me. I, maybe folded into a swan, am still just a piece of paper. The words, melodramatic and wordy, run around me like the rings of a tree. Each description a year, telling the story of me. The song I call out into the night, my song, as I journey into a world where time lays easily on top of itself, and the dead live again. I pocket the paper away, fold it into an elaborate fortune teller game.

Eenie, Meenie. Miney. Moe. Catch a Tiger by the toe...And then it reminds me:

"2008, you were the happiest you ever felt, most contented. Your daughter died."

"2009, You wept for a year. You walked through the underworld. You mourned. You alienated. You survived."

This upcoming year, the one ahead, I envision something magical, important. The path before me has changed in 2012, a hair pin turn back to a spiritual center I had before the marriage and babies and jobby jobs. It was covered over the decaying leaves of grief and alcohol and self-loathing. I sweep them away as I find my footing again.

Remembering.

Remembering.

Remembering this way of beauty and strength and surrender and unconditional love of everything including myself. There is moss on the northern facing parts of me, the shadow parts. I must turn toward the sun now, open to the air, water, fire, and earth. I emerge from the machine that has trapped the storyline of Lucia's death. I emerge from the sickness that I imagined killed Lucia and Michael into the strong body that brought me to this place right here. I emerge from self-loathing into a place of unconditional love and acceptance.

I have been meditating on a word to encapsulate my year. 2009, Grieve. 2010, Create. 2011, Recover. 2012, Open. 2013...what word can you be? I create another fortune teller. This one with words that encapsulate what I hope for--love, blessings, miracle, opening and counting until we reach the fortune for next year. I write on the inside all the words that I hope the next year will be: Balance. Self-acceptance. Open. Clarity. Growth. Trust. Heal. Spirit. But I know the word as I write it.

Emerge.

What is your word for 2013? What does it mean for you?

becoming

A few years ago, Petra sent me a postcard from New Zealand of two fiddleheads formed into a heart. I always keep the postcard on my desk, tucked into the painting I did of an enso. It is a strange, otherworldly image, like two Shinto embryo bowing to each other.

I honor the sacred in you. In the honoring, we become love.

That feeling of unfolding, or unrolling oneself, branches curled inward, aching from the only position we think we must keep, I know that feeling. Those future leaves like hands praying to soon unfurl, to soak in the shadows of forest. To protect me from garden pests.

I curl up in a fetal leaf position. There is a distinctly different part of me, the part you cannot see, that is mired  in the bog underneath, the dark and cold, moist and uncomfortable. I believe I am depressed, but I don't know. I felt this way when I was pregnant with Thomas. Not the same way, but similarly. My head and body contort into the painful clawing of allergy and celiac attacks. I eat wheat to be definitively tested for celiac and rheumatoid arthritis, but it affects every part of me now. I feel soul sick and body sick. Not with a touch of extra mucus, but a dying kind of sick. My whole body aches. I don't want to walk. I want to sleep all day. It sounds dramatic, but it feels dramatic. So, I trudge on, making breakfast, watching movies, ignoring the pain, grumbling. Always grumbling.

I listened to Comedian Tig Notaro on This American Life the other day do a set three days after she found out she had cancer. I am telling you this because I bought the whole thing for $5 on Louis C.K.'s website and listened to it, and it is profound.*

Deeply, overwhelmingly profound.

It isn't simply that she had been diagnosed with stage two breast cancer, it came on the heels of a devastating intestinal bacterial disease that almost killed her, then her mother died, and her girlfriend broke up with her, then she was diagnosed with cancer. When she speaks of this bad news, you can feel it. And yet there is the feeling that you are listening to her unfurl herself, slowly rolling those branches out, even as she is rooted in swampy darkness. She is changing as she is performing her set. I can't quite explain it. You have to hear it, laugh with her, tear up with her. And there is this point, she keeps talking about a joke she had written before her diagnosis that seems stupid now. And I kept flashing back to this point when I sat in a prenatal yoga class and I said, "All you need to give your baby is love. Everything is going to be okay."

Remember that? Remember when you felt like the first thirty some odd years you thought babies lived? You were stupid, but you meant well, Angie.

I barely recognize that woman. I am in this huge unfurling process right now--figuring out who I am, what I want, who I need to be. I like who I am becoming. I can feel her, see her, embrace her. Sit with her. But the becoming is a bitch.

*Ironically, I have been writing this short post all week, and TracyOC wrote about this piece too on her blog.