The Lesson

Jill is a big hearted woman, too much so. She has a knack for finding a lost cause and devoting herself to it until she gets used up and spit out. The universe gave her a brilliant lesson in this pattern as we went floating down the river last week.

There was a bee in the current, who was more dead than alive. Jill spotted him immediately, and began devising ways to enact a rescue. She decided a leaf could make a good life raft, so I paddled over, snatched a dogwood leaf from a gentle eddy and gave it to her. Jill placed him on top, but he had other ideas. He might have been a suicidal little guy cause he kept working to get back in the water. I was eager to continue our float but Jill had abandoned the idea and was now completely obsessed with saving the life of the bee.

Here is the way Jill saw it:

“He clung tenaciously to the stem of his life raft, waterlogged and exhausted. I was slightly unnerved, paddling to shore against the current, belly flop style with one hand, while holding a leaf with a very possibly irate bee in the other. I made it to shore and because it was an extremely hot day, searched the bank for the perfect spot to deposit him. I gently placed him in the shade of a cool river rock, so as not to scorch his little bee feet. Yes, I actually went that far. I know.

Karen felt the need to point out, in an amused sort of way, that my behavior with the bee was strangely reminiscent of my behavior with men. I find them drowning, struggling and then I, as rescuer, spring into action. Not only do I make the save, but I make the save my life’s work. We giggled at the analogy, but I had to agree. How many men have I gone out on a limb for at my own peril?  

The bee was now safely deposited in the shade of the river bank, so I continued the float. I was relieved as I basked in the hot sun, the cold water and the knowledge that I had done a wonderful deed. But not for long. Barely 15 minutes had passed before another bee spotted me, singled me out in that vast landscape, and out of the hundreds of people who lined the shore, landed and plunged his stinger deep inside my arm!  

Karen roared with laughter at the irony of it, because the story always ends the same! But I learned a valuable lesson, so the next pathetic creature that floats my way, be it animal, mineral, vegetable, or cute guy, I will look into the depths of my heart, and find that cold spot that I know must be in there somewhere, suck it up, turn a blind eye, and for once in my life, paddle by and save myself. Sometimes, the life worth saving just might be my own.’

Jill is currently looking for work in the court system where her desire to serve can be directed towards a more positive outcome. Let’s wish her well.

Feed Yourself Beauty

Robin was a fellow performer from Storefront Theater who taught me to use a loom.  Her weavings, like many of her paintings, looked like she had reached into the sunrise and convinced every shimmering hue to come to life through her hands. Threads sparkled, wools blended, and fuzzy threads adhered to make a radiant representation. Anyone fortunate enough to own one of her winter scarves could plan on being stopped several times on the street, so strangers could touch and admire her work. There has never been an artist who could touch my heart and sense of wonder the way Robin could.

When I first started lessons, I wanted to purchase inexpensive threads because I was a beginner. I reasoned that no one, including myself, would want my products for some time, so why waste money? But Robin stopped me immediately. No, she counseled, buy yourself the most beautiful threads you can find, no matter the cost, because part of weaving is nurturing your senses with what you see and what you touch. Feed yourself beauty. You will handle each thread several times, beginning with the warping board, then while dressing the loom, and finally passing the shuttle back and forth to completion. Everything you feel and think goes into your work. Your products radiate your touch and energy, so it’s important to understand the unique power of each weaving.

A friend knew of a loom stored in a studio space. After several phone calls the owner agreed to let me use it. I had a studio and loom without cost. I’d tune in Oregon Public Radio and fill the space, and my spirit with classical music. It was an uplifting time with Mozart drifting back and forth among the fibers, gently encouraging both inner peace and inspiration.

Weaving was one of the few places that invited my voice into song. I was comforted by sitting alone and filling the space with the years of music I’d learned but rarely sang. It was in one of these precious moods that I reached inside my apron and opened the letter I’d stuffed in my pocket, as I ran from the house in the morning. It was from my mother. She had enclosed an article about brain tumors and strongly suggested that I have a physician look at me. It would explain your behavior, she wrote. You’ve never been quite right.

I was on the verge of tears for a week from the innocence and malevolence of such a letter. My weaving was full of sorrow for days. I couldn’t look at it when I cut it from the loom, and didn’t feel it was fair to place such energy in someone else’s hands, so I walked outside and placed it in the garbage. 

Although never approaching the majesty of Robin’s work, my skill became marketable. I fashioned purses, scarves, table runners and wall hangings. Robin had a tailor’s skill, so her fibers became jackets and dresses displayed in Portland and Seattle galleries. I used my weavings to trade for health care and fire wood.

I took an expensive class at the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts, but never finished. The faculty made weaving business-like and mathematical. I realized that if I had begun with formal instruction, instead of Robin’s loving hand, I would have never become a weaver. I could not follow directions. I could create a free flowing design in my head, but following a pattern laid out on graph paper in tiny blue colored boxes was hopeless. 

I stopped weaving when my allergy to wool became unbearable. Tiny flecks of fibers floated in the air whenever I worked, and wearing a mask felt wrong. I changed to cottons threads, but felt too limited. It was a sad day when I sold the loom I had finally managed to buy, but Robin’s lessons remained. Feed yourself beauty at any cost.

Neville – my view

I used to work in a small studio space near 20^th and Hawthorne owned by my eccentric friend, Neville. His ancestral home was next door, taking up most of the city block. When Neville retired from teaching, he decided it was time to experiment with the illegal substances he’d read so much about. He talked freely about his discoveries, taking his professors mind into each expanded reality. 

Roses bloomed full, red and fragrant outside my studio window. As my evening client wrote my check and carefully tore it from her vinyl checkbook, I gazed out the window at Neville. His hands were gloved as he pruned blossoms from the bushes that climbed the wire fence. He’d left shirt and tie behind long ago in favor of loose fitting cottons. His eyes were full of light, an ear-ring dangled from his right lobe and the smile on his face rested satisfied and deep.

I walked my client out the door, down the cobbled path and through the gate. We parted with a hug and words of appreciation.  Then I turned to 70 year old Neville who continued trimming and grinning in his own blissful realm.

What are you doing today, Neville, I asked, enjoying his approach to discovery. Today I’m trying mushrooms, he said, and I’m pleased with the result, very satisfying. I should have done this long ago. Neville’s face shone with round contentment. He was fully present and in the moment without fears, baggage from the past or sorrows.

In that moment, he defined everything I hoped to accomplish with my clients. I found myself envying him. I wanted to trim the roses, I thought. I want to go where he has gone.

Neville performed my wedding ceremony when I lived in The Columbia River Gorge. White flowing robes matched his white flowing hair as he readied himself for our service. Do you need a changing room, I’d asked earlier. No, he replied, I have nothing on under my robe. I prefer it that way, the wind feels so good.

Dear Neville, coming to see me session after session, but always content spiraling in his own unique orbit. His experiments doing more for him than I ever could.

 written 7-9-08

Neville – his view

Neville studies the old school clock above his desk, measuring time in his familiar practiced way.

Ah, another clear, crisp afternoon, he thinks. Martha is off to the accountants office, then to her women’s meeting, the kids and grand-kids aren’t bothering me. I have quiet. If I get my article written for the British Journal before 5, I can continue my experiment, then cross the street to Lena’s café and listen to poetry.

Neville lifts the latch on his desk, pulls out the worn composition books stored inside and runs his fingers down the dappled black and white covers. The books have preprinted labels that read Name, School and Grade. They are left-overs from another life.

On the first book, under Name, it reads Marijuana, under School, he has inked the year his experiments began, 1990, and under Grade the word, Private. The second book is called LSD, the third, Mushrooms and the fourth Peyote. He is opening the mushroom book today, placing the date inside and book marking it for later documentation.

He looks at his Underwood typewriter, the keys round and predictable, just like his life. Maybe, he thinks, he will wait to write the article for the Society. Karen is working in the studio today, it would be nice to talk with Karen.

Thinking of her, he walks to the window and pushes back maroon drapes that have hung there for the last 30 years. Yes, she is there on time, greeting her client, the tall woman in the BMW, who wears tight clothes and has trained her hair in long blond dreadlocks. Oh well, maybe I’ll talk with her when she’s finished. Maybe not.

Neville goes downstairs to the kitchen, pulls a stool from the corner and reaches high, into the top shelf of the cupboard. His fingers touch the cool porcelain surface of a cookie jar, the one shaped like a pig, the one that belonged to his mother in 1940. He removes its round pink head and dipped inside, where carefully weighed mushrooms are stored in small plastic bags. Neville is proud of his perfect divisions, a necessary element in understanding how much was taken and the result produced. He counts the remaining packages, each labeled and dated.  Satisfied, he puts the top back on the pig, climbs down, and replaces the stool in it’s corner by the Frigidaire, unconsciously making sure each leg is perfectly aligned to the patterns of the squared linoleum.

He pulls an oak chair from the table, remembering the way the designs on the back had come alive when he used LSD. He’d written pages that night. The carved designs seemed to deepen and reveal the woodcarvers life. The chair became the tree; the tree traveled to the woodcarvers shop and the woodcarver chipped away for hours making perfect designs. He imagined his father meeting the carver and buying his chairs, sitting in them, testing them, admiring the craftsmanship in his work. It all lay out before him as if he were there, as if he could know, as if his father had told him before he died.  Neville sat down, unrolled the plastic and slipped a piece of dried mushroom in his mouth.

He liked these discoveries. They were transcendent somehow and infinitely more interesting than his work as a professor. He used to be excited and intrigued by his students and research, but what was safe and predictable had become dry and dull. He bore his discontent quietly year after year until he could retire.  These new experiments were different, they were never the same.

Neville wanted to know God. He wanted to know God’s mind. The Gnostic Church had educated his intellect but left his body and spirit behind. Now he’d found the drug ticket just like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. These journeys were freeing him and he craved them.

As Neville’s vision began to soften and expand, he noticed the luminous, lavishly petaled blossoms in the studio rose gardens, his gaze out the window transfixed. The roses were alive and vibrant, swimming in afternoon light. They swirled in large blooms of blush and sweet generous scent. Were they calling him? Suddenly, the darkened kitchen seemed repressive and impossible. He had to get out of there, he had to be with the roses. He wanted to know them, smell them, put them in his bed. Martha would like that, he thought, coming home to a bed of freshly cut roses ~ but maybe not. He didn’t care, he would gather them anyway. 

He got up from the wooden chair, leaving his shoes beneath the table. Remnants of his professors intellect telling him to be objective, all the time feeling in a deeper part of himself that the professor should be left behind; that the professor was the one who was trapped, outmoded and in the way. Neville moved through the darkened hallway to the front door. He reached below the church pew he had placed in the entryway and found his gardening box. The red handled rose clippers were on top, neatly closed and oiled.

Neville tucked them in the pocket of his pants and moved down the wide cement stairs into the light. It was a short walk to the studio. He noticed a candy wrapper and fast food cup near the tire of his Hillman. He must pick those up, he told himself, but not now.  Getting to the roses felt urgent, like his life depended on it.

He climbed the two short steps to the garden gate and felt immediate relief. There they were, waiting and inviting him in. Neville cradled one full head of fragrance at a time, disappearing into its irresistibly fresh scent, then he continued clipping, making a little mountain of discarded roses below him on the ground. They fell in heaps of pink, pale yellow, purple, and garnet. Each ruffled petal a unique shade and scent. He lingered over the next and the next, willing to join and dissolve, willing to become the world of roses.

The door opened to Karen’s office, his lovely friend, Karen. He must talk with her. He must share this moment, later, when she was free. Now she seemed worlds away, now she was talking with that tall woman again whose shoes made too much noise when she walked the cobbled path.

I’m glad that session is over, Neville thinks. I’m glad that woman is going. She doesn’t seem to belong here with the roses.  She seems busy and in a hurry. Oh, there is Karen, coming over. Smiling. She looks at me and knows. She understands what I must do. I’d like to talk with her but the roses are really important right now. They are everything. I can smile at her. I want to talk with Karen, but not now. Really, I can not do it now.

written 7-12-08

The Writing Group

I am liking myself more these days.

I am buying new clothes and wearing brighter colors.

My eyes are softer and hold more tenderness when I look in the mirror. I believe it is because I’ve been stripped down like the walls in Gail’s kitchen, taken back to lath, beam and purpose.

I know this birth is a result of being in this group. This is the only place in memory where I have felt free to express all of me. I am held here. I have a blanket to wrap around me in your warmth, acceptance, love and language.

I did not expect a birth. I never came expecting such holding, but it was given none the less; the perfect place at the perfect time. I bow humbly and thank you from the remodeled walls of my heart.

written April 16, 2008

Multiple Personality

Today I was a:

Housekeeper

Bed maker

Shower taker

Laundry woman

Therapist

Psychic

Dream consultant

Safe place for children

Typist

Correspondent

Care taker for dogs

Care taker for cats

Burial person for a bird

Radio audience

Motorist

Library patron

Grocery shopper

Check writer

Postal patron

Mother

Ashram visitor

Dinner Guest

Friend

Gift receiver

Student

Artist

Writer

Traveler

Chef

Wife

Listener

Sleeper

written May 28, 2008