mother and fawn

I read this Buddhist adage that says, "The cause of death is birth."

Yeah, unless someone isn't born yet, then the cause of death is sex.

I have this outpouring of appreciation for the support we received this year around Lucia's birthday. There is no rhyme or reason to grief. It stalks, pounces on its time, not yours. I reached out and said I wasn't doing well. That act itched me. Eczema stretched the length of me. I jittered and rubbed myself against old bare trees. Scratching the vulnerability away, but it stayed. I needed to feel it to remember my strength.

One Thursday in the middle of the month, I was cooking arroz con pollo for a friend, which is very much like paella, except with chicken instead of chorizo and seafood. And the thought occurred to me that I need wine for the rice. Wine goes in paella, and arroz con pollo and my mouth. At least it did before I quit drinking. Back then, I began drinking when I began cooking. I was alone with the children, and I searched the cabinets and found a bottle of unopened pinot noir.

My heart opens like a lotus, calls for vulnerability as her food. There are moments when only faith stands between me and a drink, or me and an angry word, or me and my death. Grace surrounds me as I stared at the bottle. I don't know if I would have drank a glass or the bottle or nothing. But it caught me up, suddenly afraid of slipping. Suddenly aware that wine is not necessary in any dish I cook now. Cooking and drinking. Drinking and cooking. They are all tied together for me.

Later in the day, I went into a church basement, too overcome to speak, I cried, buried my face in my hands, deeply grieved and full of want.

My daughter is dead four years.
My daughter. My sweet sweet girl.
And sometimes there is nothing to do but drink. And I cannot drink.

Women held me. All week I cried into women's shoulders, in their hair, on the phone, in their inboxes. This year the grief lessened. I felt a lightness of being that seemed so far away in the last three years. There is magic in my life now. A seed of connection to the Divine, a moment of breath between declarations of her state of mortality. Then the week of her death and birth came, and it was like it happened yesterday, or perhaps even that very day. But I feel protective of me right now. I mother myself now. Care for me, allow me to rest, give me the space for solitude and vulnerability and bad behaviour, yet let me curl up and weep. I feel worthy of protection and grace and connection to the Divine.

January 10, I will be sober two years. My daughter dead four last week, and my body creaking into year thirty-nine on the fourth of January. It all makes me feel old and brand new, like a fawn, spots like code across my back, and my legs not quite strong enough to hold my own weight and yet hours away from running.

the end of the world

Tomorrow is the end of the world.

The calendar ends. Well, the Mayan one, and the dawn of a new era. It is the same day that my daughter died. She would be four on the day after the end of the world, if her world didn't end.

I remember what that feels like. The end of the world. The rug is pulled out from under you. Tumbling, nauseated, insomniatic, fearful, like you can suddenly see all the poison, juts, knives, umbilical cord accidents, guns, cars as weapons of mass destruction, televisions untethered to walls. You don't know you are dead. You are the hungry ghost, walking the circumference of the earth, looking to eat something that makes sense. It drops out the bottomlessness of you. Nothing nourishes. Nothing stops the pain of change. You float along and bark at people in your chair (they don't hear you, so you slam a door) and yell at people who bring in white flowers and mourn with you. In the blackness, you wait for instructions or an answer, or a white light, but mostly you wait for the end, but there is no end, no beginning, just a suffering of your own design.

The Izmana, the invisible sky god, swallows the earth. He creates it, he destroys it. The light points shoot out his hair follicles and his eyes, but you are stuck somewhere behind a sinus cavity. It is all darkness there, and you doubt a God could even swallow the earth, even though you saw it happening. I bought some extra cans of beans this week, and an extra loaf of bread. Maybe we can outlive the end.

They say we are on a path of ascension. I sat in circle, meditating. The information downloaded into my subconsciousness as the channel stood over me. I sleep to access the records. I am chilled to the bone, and excited, afire and alit, grounded and flying. Suddenly, Grief clears his throat.

Remember me? 
How could I forget you?
I am part of your ascension. I am part of your growth. 
You are part of the problem.
There are no problems. Perhaps I feel part of your regression and meditation right at this moment. But time is meaningless. What was is what is and what will be is what has happened.
It's been four years, certainly this raw grief is done.
It is and isn't. I am part of your enlightenment. Feel me for all of them, for her. 

Lucia stands in a white gown, hair cascading down her shoulders, and she reminds me of a magnet I have. My guides stand around her. And angel walks with her. She is fine.

My sweet girl. My sweet girl. My sweet girl.

She is fine, and I am suffering.

+++

I wept in a circle of women. Cried into my friend's hair, and she held me like a child. I flushed and wiped my tears.

STOP IGNORING THE GRIEF.
STOP IGNORING THE GRIEF.
STOP IGNORING THE GRIEF.

Even if you don't understand it.
Even if you can't figure out how four years later it can rising again, like the oceans.
Even if you think she was just a baby who hadn't breathed yet and what could we miss.
Even if you think other people have stronger, more justifiable grief.
Even if.

Honor the sacred grief. Bow to it. Sit with it. Have tea with it. Bring to the market. Cry on it, baptize it with those tears.

There will be a bonfire. I am wrapping a little bundle in black fabric. It will contain sage and lavender and dirt and mugwort and all those things that no longer serve me. I will pitch the earth into the fire until it becomes air later pour the water on to the coals. I will tell the story of Lucia's birth, how light was born into darkness, and the longest night served me as well as it could. We birthed her in dimmed lights, and I saw purple. I wept on her torn skin and held her close, and walked to my car five hours later. My vagina pulsing from the pain of releasing her. My womb contracting still. Leaving her in a hospital to be dissected then burned was the hardest thing I have thought I would do in my life. I thought they may have made a mistake, even as I held her lifeless body and pushed her tongue into her mouth so she didn't look so dead. But every minute without her has been just as hard as that way. In the earlier days, it was harder even.


I belong to a circle of women in my everyday life and another one in my on-line life where we talk about the sacred, magic, other dimensions, meditation, the divine, ascension, the hard spiritual work and the easy. We create divine crafts, and offer our gifts to one another. But I miss grieving people. I want to create a circle of grieving women, to honor the elements, to honor the seasons, to honor our spirits bruised and battered and still walking from the sunset. If you are interested in something like that, let me know. Leave a comment, or send me an email. 

glow

Like everyone, the mass murder of innocent children in a primary school in Connecticut has me questioning everything in which I believe. Reading Dr. Jo's piece on her blog, No Words for Such a Tragedy, I felt compelled to write about it, open a forum for the community to talk about revisiting grief on a public and large scale, and to talk about our personal grief. She wrote, "Be attentive to our own losses and how this type of trauma reignites our sense of vulnerability and grief."

And yes, our vulnerability, our grief, our fear. When grief swallows me up whole again, I write my way out of its deep belly. But it's hard to write any way out of this horror. And anyway, we shouldn't. We sit directly in it. We must. We must know what guns do, what sick people do with guns, that these children have families grieving now. They are people. And that our powerlessness can be transformed into effective change, if we want it to. Grieving people are amazingly resilient, strong, compassionate. I wonder what we could do if we tried.

We find a path of compassion anyway we can. May this path of compassion drive us to a furious passion to change the things we can change, and call things by their proper name.

I am over at Glow today. Comfort.

frost

Frost covers each blade of grass. Each blade of me.

There is a frozen impotence around me, a sense of rejection and awkwardness and tension. I miss not caring about connections. I fall back on isolation like the drink. It comforts me. Or rather it once comforted me, but now it aches in me. And I cling to sloppy communication like the ice on the world around me this morning. Unwelcome, it slides over everything. It appears more hyper the more it is ignored. I just crave connection. I become self-aware and retract again in daylight.

I brought a packages of goodies for strangers to the post. And my return address stamps smudged and my paper was too loose and the ink stained the postal worker's hand. She said, "You are my problem today."

I swallowed and thought, "I'm everyone's problem today."

I understand why my children believe a fairy paints each petal and blade of grass with ice. I step into our southern facing three season porch. The world is crystalline and silent. I stand in awe, as my stomach retracts into itself instinctively, and I blow into my hands. I want to say, "This is so beautiful." But no one is around to hear it. And anyway, I need to just be present in the beauty and silence. I keep filling moments with talking.

The frost will leave late this morning when the sun rises over the treeline. The porch will heat up. There is a difference between solitude and isolation, even if I am alone in both. There is sadness in New Jersey and the planets align and affect the magnetism of the earth and the birds shit right on my windshield and I will always still want to fit in somewhere. There is a postcard pinned to my inspiration board:

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED

It is the week before her death and her birth. Four times around the sun and I still have nothing close to wisdom. I have ornaments with her name and rituals I can't bear to do some days. And a promise of her kisses in my sleep, which I won't remember or feel, but remind me that I am not just two someone's mother, I am three. The way we are all connected is grief and loss, I remind myself. And love too.

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?

mourning moon

Every so often, I paint a picture of our family.

I draw it in pencil, then I stain it with watercolor. My old paint dries to my plastic palette. I reactivate it with water, and it gently spreads across the paper. I love the process of making this dried old smear of paint come alive, and useful again. I fall more in love with all of them when I sketch them out. It doesn't seem possible, but my heart center expands. I try to capture Thomas Harry's little mouth just like him, his smile which is both sweet and shy. And the way Beezus always tilts her head off toward her brother every time I pull out the camera. I put the lost babies on my dress like appliques. The raven and the ladybug.

My husband barely acknowledges it. He likes photographs, honestly. I'm not offended. But I like art, stacked together, making something like a symphony of images. Maybe he has made that concession for me, but he never questions the ever-changing art wall in my living room. Artwork from all the people I love, pieces I adore, and work that is significant to us as a family. When I explain it to people visiting, my husband seems just as interested in hearing the whys of each piece.

The process of painting our family has become an inadvertent yearly thing, or maybe every other year. I replaced the painting of me and the children from when Thomas was only two weeks old with this new one. There is Sam and the dog. We are all smiling and Sam's arm is around me. I almost put no background in this painting. Us on white, but in the end, I painted all that negative space yellow, because it is positive space too. The space of possibility. In the last painting I did, Spring 2010, everything was grey and mostly colorless. There was no Sam, or Jack the dog, or Lucia or Michael. It was just me and the kids, but mostly me. Sad, but grateful.

There is a circle of women that I have joined, both a virtual circle and another in real life, and my soul feels alive again. I see images for them--goddesses, angels, vistas I cannot control, pictures that have no context. As this sight opens in me, something else closes. Doubt and attachment, I suppose. I resided in a place of rejection, or rather, perhaps, I sought to paint the negative space around everything that I actually have first. Gratitude an afterthought. With this opening, the fear of alone closes.

This month in the healing circle, all the women chanted our own names, staying on the last sound.

Angieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. 

Like an Om. The vibration of our discordant names together resonated through my spine, my cheeks burned with the truth of it all. It felt close to the sound of God, or compassion. Many years ago, I remember my friend Sid and I reading poetry to one another. And she said, "When a poem is really good, my cheeks vibrate and I can feel it in my jaw." And that is what this felt like the vibration of truth.

I have never felt so free to be Angie, a person that I cut off for years with booze and resentments. The uncool believer in things unseen. The joyous clapper in a gospel choir. The psychic who believes in her gifts. The weird little kid who cannot wait to go on vision quest.

I admit that depression has seized me the last few months, crippling despair almost, but not quite. I couldn't keep up with everything, or anything, really. The process of letting go seemingly a paradox of impossible odds, almost Sisyphean in its absurdity. My health issues gripped me too, and then I was all body--injured and unsteady, weak and damaged. But the letting go was simple once I let go.

In the last thirty-almost-nine years, I have needed confirmation and witness to every single thing I have felt. Love. Friendship. Anger. Resentment. Fear. Kindness. Hurt. I sought it from everyone around me. It is only now that I have realized I do that. Tell my sad story, or my happy story, paint a picture of it for judgment, for a nod of understanding, for justification of my solitude.

I think of the end of the Prayer of Saint Francis as the talisman behind the talisman card I draw this morning, (perhaps I should see that one as the joker).


Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort that to be comforted,
To understand than to be understood,
To love than to be loved.

This last moon, the Mourning Moon, comes on me strong. I wrestle in the night with sleeplessness and exhaustion. They grapple, roll over me, kick me in the jaw. Athena asks us to look at the moon in June, what happened then. For now, you should see the completion of that cycle. What have we released?


The new baby was just dead then, and my breeding years died with him. (I am not lamenting, just stating.) I spent these months releasing one lousy resentment, understanding it, letting go. But it was a much bigger process than just that one resentment of that one person. It was about letting go of judgment of myself, of that person, of the situation, of Lucia's death and the repercussions of grief. I forget what the resentment was about some days now. That is magic. Truly and completely magic. But it is more than that.

In June, I went to a spiritual counselling session. It is not exaggeration to say that she changed my life. I didn't see it then, but now I can see this path she laid out in front of me, suggesting I take it. When I asked her about my circle of friends which seemed depleted and gone, she told me that those souls needed to leave, so that resonant souls could come in. She told me to release them. And I skeptically smiled. I got what she was saying, but the last few years of grief had still been an deeply painful process. I didn't have to release them, I thought, they left.

I needed rituals, prayers, candles, sage, meditations, dreamwork, and conversations with them that ended in hugs and a letting-go. I needed to truly release them, so I myself could be free. I sent them off with prayers of everything I wanted for myself. Those rituals of release and opening have brought friends, resonant vibrations, I suppose, people I love and trust and laugh with, where I can just be corny and psychic and recovering from the spiritual malady that has plagued so many of my people. I can see the cycle from the Flower Moon to the Mourning Moon as this journey of less of becoming who I am and more of releasing who I am not.

My cheeks vibrate with the truthiness of it all. When I paint my family, it is the beginning of the circle of trust and love and non-judgment, and it spirals out into the world. This is the talisman I draw--protection from painting what isn't.

protection from cynicism

I rub my finger callouses along the table.

These old fingers peck and strum and emote. I always sing, even though I am a terrible singer. Gilda Radnor took singing lessons in the last year of her life, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She always wanted to sing and so she went to a teacher. She didn't do it for a role, or to sing for anyone. Just for herself. Some weeks, I sit and fantasize about that. Would singing be my wholly selfish indulgence? How self-conscious I have always been about my voice, but how deeply satisfying it is to sing loudly. And in the end, I think I sound fine when I'm alone and no one is listening. It is an ego koan.

What is the sound of Angie singing alone in the forest? Beautiful.

In the time before mirrors and you tube and the eternal quest for self on the internet, did we judge what we looked like? Were we wrinkled and hated it? Were we too fat? I look at myself without mirrors and feel beautiful, fine, goddess-like some mornings, then I have a conversation with an angry someone about fat people, and realize how susceptible I am to the mirror of other people's words. Frankly, I'm embarrassed about that too.

I took my guitar with me to my mother's and unself-consciously sang songs with my daughter, or alone. It felt delicious. My family was emotionally tender and my daughter and I made the room cry. Even I cried. Grief singing. I couldn't go on. It had been ten years since my mother heard me play and sing. Back when I could only play Doll Parts then Jane Says on an unplugged electric guitar, and I whispered the lyrics, if I sang them at all. I admit now my punk rock roots have morphed into songs by Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Leonard Cohen, Stones, the Velvet Underground. 

These rough fingers run down my husband's cheek and he smiles. 

I love when you play guitar.

You do?

Yes. It feels like home.

My soul callouses are worn down, softened. It makes hurts more hurt-y, but it is for the best. I'm not going to work on those cynical chords that recreates the hardness I wore proudly. Sam comes out of left field right after the dude and the conversation about fat people, just when I am feeling shitty and isolated, and says something amazing. He kisses me and tells me that I am gorgeous. Then he asks me if I feel lucky that I am not married to that man.

Oh, you are a mean old daddy, but I like you.

My husband is growing a beard for me and took next week off. After months of sixty hour weeks, I will scratch his whiskers and sit on his lap and call him our Old Man. I keep singing these songs about heartbreak and none of them are about what I think they are about. They are about something beautiful and hopeful.

We wanted to take a trip during his time off. Iceland, we begged. Then just to drive west. To California. The sequoias that swallow cars. Or into the cold rain forest, bed down on some mossy nook, make a sad fire, and sing songs about how we are each other's sunshine. I guess it is kind of square to talk about Joni Mitchell and making a fire. I don't care anymore. I gave up feel self-conscious about squareness when I turned thirty-eight. It didn't work out. The trip, I mean. Travel and gypsy campers, but the thought was enough. We have bills after all, and Christmas gifts. We have this home we built with its strange long horns and collection of small dead insects.. 

I pull a talisman card and it says, "Protection from cynicism." I need that more than any prayer. Maybe that is the prayer:

Help me release cynicism and cranky irony and sarcasm.

Help me let go of the bitter ennui that is the bedfellow of the eternally cool. 

Let me release the cynicism about where I fit in. 

Help me remember that I fit in here. With the bearded man and his barefoot kids dancing to Joni Mitchell's love songs, the ones that sound exactly like break-up songs.

I bought a horn pitcher at an antique shop. It was for my husband's birthday, but on the day, I didn't give it to him. It seemed a little strange, and besides what will we do with this thing? I put it on my altar, and today I had the strong urge to give it to him. So I did. He told me it was perfect to have in our collection of weird antique things. 

I didn't start out writing about my husband. I read the Shack this week. I cannot tell you how many times it has been recommended to me, the pluralist babylost gypsy. I'm not sure what I think of it, but forgiveness and love and the ideas of judgment were more than appealing. And yet there was this deeply cynical part of me that felt self-conscious reading that book at all. It is the wanting-to-be-cool part of myself. Can I divorce that from what I felt about the book? As I read, that part reared up and wanted to tell the book to Fuck off, and throw it, and listen to music that no one has heard of yet. And so I am still parsing out what I think, but I keep the talisman across my chest.

This week I began meditation paintings other than jizos or about grief. It felt strange and liberating and fulfilling. In that space of letting go of cynicism, it made me feel like I was finally be authentically me. And a year ago, painting angels would have felt like anything but the me I thought I was. I am working on releasing cynicism, and non-forgiveness, but it is a long hard road. I keep singing California, even when not at the guitar, and it makes me miss a place I never loved, and a woman I never looked like.

fortune telling

It occurred to me this morning that this day is our fourth child's due date. It seems strange at how much has changed since we miscarried. I have such tenderness there for that missing person. My body woke up bleeding again, another new moon after all. Just noting that the baby was missing, a little blood shed today to honor him. I wouldn't have remembered the day except it is my husband's birthday. Yes, our fourth child was due on his birthday. Lucia was due on my birthday. Both of them died.

A few weekends ago, I had a medium tell me that our miscarried baby was actually a boy, and his name, which was actually the only name we had chosen for the baby, if he was a boy. I am writing about psychics and fortune tellers at Glow today, because I consulted a few (thousand) since Lucia died. Not actually, but more than I admit in mixed company.

photo by an Untrained Eye.

In the past, I have been a farm girl. In the future, I will be silver and bald and eat beer pellets for breakfast.

Go over to Glow now, and talk about your experience with psychics and whatnots.

mothers

My mother' home bursts with magic. Pheasant feathers and gourds in an antique glass vase. Moss growing in the sacred circles of her brick patio. A skull and a broken pitcher near the garage. The pitcher used to hold spider plants growing long tentacles in water on their way to earth. Somewhere between a glass of water and a pot of soil. There is a cauldron with a dead plant coming out of it under the nectarine tree. She has a makeshift altar above her sink. It has a chalice of water for her spirit guide and Buddhas she finds at flea markets. One looks like ivory and she tells me how she bought it for a few bucks.

The sunrise here is a marvel and the coffee tastes different, like cozy socks and a hug, even though the robusta beans coat my tongue with extra caffeine. My mother and I talk and talk about psychics and spirits and grandmothers, Of emigrating, moving, changing space. We talk about retirement and staying home and my childhood. Then, she mentions to me in passing that mother-daughter relationships are complicated, and I chuckle. Heh heh, yeah, Mama, I heard that once.

My children run through the yard like wild things--they climb trees and track rabbits. My mother tells my daughter she used to kill birds with a slingshot and roast them in the cemetery. She grew up poor and my daughter's mouth gapes open in amazement. My daughter spots a woodpecker in the valley. We sit by the stream, tossing red leaves into the current as the visiting neighbor's weiner dog barks. We climb over the weeping willow the hurricane tossed out of the earth. I used to sit under that tree and play guitar in the summer. My stepfather is non-nonplussed. "I'll put another one in. This bank was too loose. In spring, I'll put in a cutting up a few feet in sturdier ground." I strum my daughter's favorite song there anyway, while she sings.

Oh, my Mama. 
She gives me 
These feathered breaths. 

I made my way here on Wednesday morning to pick my mother up from the hospital after surgery. My step-father received a call when she was rolled into surgery that his mother was not going to last much longer than a week. She could no longer eat, or drink, and the morphine was all they could do. She died an hour after my mother and I arrived home from the hospital. She is the last of the grandmothers in my family. The last of that generation. Sixteen years ago, my paternal grandmother died at 67. My mother's mother died at 95 two months after Lucy, now my step grandmother at 86.

While I mourn for my stepfather, cry with him, his mother suffered from the death that most of us fear. Forgetting our husband and children, experiencing the indignities and humiliations of rotten people and a body betraying its soul. She was surrounded by love, though, and she was never want for anything. I wonder if there is a good death and what that would look like.

The children and I tramp through the woods, and my daughter points out that in the summer this place is filled with poison ivy. She tells me a story about my own childhood. It is the story about poison Sumac. I couldn't see well because my face was so swollen. My aunt had to take me for the day, while my mother worked. My Titi, as I called her, had no idea what to do with me, so se taught me to dance the cha-cha with a record and a mat with feet prints. My mother waits for the children and I at the top of the hill, right by the sweet cherry tree. My children call to her, "Abuelita, Abuelita, we walked through the poison ivy." I want to be an abuelita some day.

My daughter's death was as good as it gets. It hits me. She died in her mother. She never feared. And we loved her like she was going to live forever. There was never pity or grief in the love. But still, how good can it be if you never really got to live?

Being in my mother's home soothes something broken in me. My mother rubs in salve and aloe when she makes white rice in the same pot she's been making rice in for forty years. She puts on another pot of lentils, despite my protestations. She just had surgery. She doesn't have to make my favorite meal, but she insists. We talked about making rice. She taught me when I went to college, but it still took me many years to make it like her. She breaks off sofrito from the freezer and adds a can of tomato sauce. She tells me about being the second youngest of twelve and learning to cook Panamanian food in America. I watch the birds out the window beyond her shoulder, and think that this land is the land of my mother, even if it is far away from the land of her birth. But it is both for me. I feel attached to this land. I dug my feet into the dirt this morning, the dew almost frozen hurt my feet, but I refused to move.

This is the land of my people.

As I stood there, I realize that the hardest part of writing is learning you are mediocre. And in that mediocrity, you still sometimes nail a good phrase or two. You sometimes write something amazing. But mostly, it is just mediocre. But the world is constructed of mostly mediocre. It is part of the suffering. You feel the extraordinary bubbling underneath its surface, but it hasn't (or perhaps never will) quite burst through you. It is like rice-making year three. The phase in which you change from mother to grandmother.

protection from leaving a trail

We raked the leaves from the hurricane. Rather than having the tree drop them all, the hurricane winds pulverized the leaves in the backyard. Bits of yellow and green, like herbs seasoning our land.  Granulated tree.

Everything I start to write seems useless, trite, redundant. I stand arms by my side, looking west, like an Easter Island head. There is something there beckoning me. What comes out of me lacks color. I sketch everything in vine charcoal. Nothing color, just grays. It is all easily smudged. And yet what is inside of me is bubbling and vibrant. I just cannot translate it. It is indigo and violet and smells of cedar and sage and pinecones. Between inside and outside, I feel restless, depressed, because writing has always come easily. I don't have writer's block, per se. But the past few weeks, I have felt stuck in my language. It is not enough. I need twenty-four words for the idea of identity and restlessness. Nothing is quite right. When I meditate and sit still with my discomfort, I see corn fields spread around me. Signs of fertility and prosperity, but to me, it is a sign of home. While I love many things about our town and neighborhood, I miss wide open skies and spaces to run. Though place has never meant a terribly great deal to me, the suburbs are driving me gray and fat. I can't muster the energy to leave the house anymore. I cannot get excited about the farmer's market and the dying lake.

Wherever you go, there you are, as the saying goes. Or not matter how light you pack, you always take your shit with you. That's another saying. But I don't want to run away. That is not my goal. I am tired of New Jersey and no left turns. I crave wide open swaths of land in which to roam. I have nothing to offer here, and here has less to offer me than before. I want to watch the children run, learn the land, tend a large garden. I want them to learn to track and build lean-tos. To have moonlit rituals without people asking me what the fire was for and why we were dancing. I pace my cage. There is a fish aquarium quality to the suburbs that unnerves me. Our dining room windows look out on our neighbor's unfinished house. From the windows to their driveway is fifteen feet. I must pull the blinds if I don't want people to wave to me inside my own house. I hear the idle gossip from Facebook and texts and who gets invited where, and I just want to opt out now. 

My feet crave earth beneath them. My fingernails call to plants to break them down. I chew them now, because outside work used to keep them short and sweet. I want to talk about canning food and chopping firewood. I want to talk about existence rather than boredom. I want to help raise barns, if I have to interact with my neighbors, not hear fat jokes, and chitchat about who has what and how much. Around here, the trees are all being removed. It makes sense. Our land is too wet to support such large trees, which uproot in hurricanes and winter storms. I mourn each one, even as I know the necessity of removing them. It is this place that demands it. And I think I want a place that can handle large trees. I crave a surrounding that venerates solitude without whispers or fear of depression. I don't want to fit in. I just want to be. These suburbs beg for peering out curtains and drawing conclusions. I engage in it too, and it is a part of myself that I hate.

I read this book recently called the Snow Child. It opens with a stillbirth. Set in 1920s, it is about this infertile couple who decide to homestead in Alaska, because they can no longer handle the world after the death of their only son. They want to be alone. Completely, utterly alone. Until they make a snow child who comes to life.

It took me months and months to read this book. I would start it. When the stillbirth was mentioned, I would place it aside. I no longer want to read solely about this heartbreak I know intimately. No longer. And yet, the book was not about stillbirth at all. Just one part of their story. And the rest of it, I got it. I wanted that self-sufficiency of an Alaskan homesteader in 1920. I understood the way stillbirth makes you crave mere existence, rather than the idleness of wealth and comforts. As I read, I coveted the harshness of winter, the land that runs for months around that. The part that is most decisive and positive of what is needed and important. I am mostly indifferent, and wishy-washy here in this life, because nothing seems that important or life altering. Do I want to eat at Cheesecake Factory or Applebees? Do I want to shop at Lowe's or Home Depot? 

I move through this life after Lucia's death. Stillbirth is just one part of my story, but it is the bend in the road. The thing that reprioritized everything. That part of me, the one before Lucia, falls on my soul yard pulverized. I keep thinking of that Pema Chodron quote, "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us." And maybe I am ready to move past the annihilation and into that which is indestructible. That part of me that seeks aloneness is getting louder and louder. May I not leave a trail.