Image by Will Cares (Acrylic on watercolor paper 12 x 9)

Death Benefits

Part of a public panel, "Successful Aging and Thinking About Death" Village Library of Cooperstown, NY May 2014

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”--Kafka

My husband Sandy and I have taken to joking about the endless stream of letters we now receive from the American Association of Retired Persons begging us to join.  He’s been getting them for years, but mine have just begun-- a flood of red and white envelopes with membership cards already made out in my name. “I’m not even close to retirement,” I tell the envelopes, dropping them into the recycling bin, “So stop teasing me with it!” But the other day I got a new one that said, in blaring script across its front, “Have you thought about Death Benefits?” I laughed out loud, then waggled the letter in Sandy’s face, 

“Death benefits? What are those?” I crowed. 

At first I meant that we don’t have much life insurance; and then in an instant I began to giggle, imagining a comic using this phrase ”Death Benefits” as material for some very dark stand up comedy about a month’s worth of free casseroles, flowers, and funeral fans. And then in the midst of all that mirth, I suddenly stopped and said, 

“Oh!” 

“What?” said Sandy. 

And I replied--sort of blinking internally, not laughing anymore, the gears in my brain beginning to turn-- “But of course there ARE Death Benefits, aren’t there? I mean benefits to death.”

As a Buddhist, this wasn’t a new or surprising idea to me; it is at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching that coming to terms with death is the doorway to enlightenment. But I was struck with it anyway because I hadn’t thought of the play on words before--Death Benefits--and also because, though our culture has gotten better at thinking about the business part of death--the putting our affairs in order side of death, the life insurance and death benefits side of death--we haven’t gotten any better dealing with the messy truth of it: the body failing, the human hearts breaking, the legacy we leave behind by how we leave this world. And we haven’t wrestled with its finality and its ubiquity and its immediacy. We pretend death is going to happen to the other guy. Or if we admit that we are going to die, that it will happen sometime way off in the future–but not today, not this moment, not now. And even if we have spent some time thinking about death, and realizing that death is going to happen to us, and preparing for it as individuals, as a culture we haven’t done these things. We don’t like to think about it, we haven’t learned how to talk openly about it, and we haven’t taught our children to live well in the face of it. And it hasn’t even occurred to us that learning to live well in the face of death might possibly mean not just seeing it as something to accept, but perhaps as something to embrace as our teacher and even as our companion on life’s journey.

No. We have not done these things.  In our culture, death is pretty much invisible, we don’t like to admit it happens, and when it does, like pooping or pornography, we do it in private with the door closed and we keep it out of the reach of our children. Our culture is youth obsessed, death-denying, and in a multi-billion dollar struggle to create our own immortality. But what might it mean to stop this craziness? To accept aging and mortality, to turn around and look Death straight in the eye? It seems the time is ripe to do this: According to the Stanford Center on Longevity, by next year, the number of people over 65 in the U.S. will be greater than the number of children under 15; and by the time our kids reach old age, living to 100 will be commonplace.

When my husband and I first went to India, I had a small taste of what dropping this denial might do for us. India requires a lot of one. It’s an intense place in so many ways--colors, smells, people, animals, sounds . . . and death. In a single day one might see a dead dog pulled to the side of the road; a dead pig with vultures already set upon it in a frenzy of feasting; and a human being, propped against a building, sick and dying, or already dead. People and animals live on the streets, so they die there as well. Varanasi (also known as Benaras or Kashi) India, where we lived for some time, is the seat of ancient Indian culture and learning, and it is also the place where Hindus believe liberation from the wheel of suffering is guaranteed: if you die in Varanasi, you will escape rebirth. Thus, people come to Varanasi to die.  Daily funeral processions snake down through traffic to the burning ghats on the sacred river Ganges where the bodies are publicly cremated and the funeral pyres burn day and night. There the dead are placed on heaps of wood, just more logs for the flames. The city of Benares is filled with the smell of burning human flesh. 

Unsurprisingly, given this fact, there is no denying death. Not for the inhabitant and not for the visitor. One must make a decision: Go crazy from trying to pretend death is not real, or acknowledge it, work with it, and let go to death. I “chose” the latter and to my surprise, it was a great relief. I had never realized how much mental and emotional energy denying death was costing me, how subliminally preoccupied with death I was!  Once a lot of that mental energy was freed up and available to me, I found that  I could move more deeply into living. (Many people have written about this since the time that Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his book, The Denial of Death–two months after he died– but his book remains one of the best explorations of the costs of denying death. I recommend it). 

 

In India "the Trimurti" --the three main gods worshiped by Hindus–are Lord Brahma the Creator; Lord Vishnu the Sustainer; and Lord Shiva, the Lord of Destruction and Death. Interestingly, Lord Shiva, the Lord of Death, is revered as much as the other two gods. Together birth, continuance, and dissolution are one, a great trinity, representing the life of the cosmos, the three principles of creation. In my view, Hinduism acknowledges something profound: We need to stop fearing death and learn to respect it because we NEED death; it’s an essential part of the whole. We need it to complete the cycle of life: this is the breathing in and out of things, the sea tide coming and going, the seasons turning, the recycling of our linked creation. In Indian cosmology, Lord Shiva releases one from life’s suffering as much as he brings suffering into life. At some point, one can have too much of life and just want to lay one’s weary head upon the ground . . . 

From the perspective of another Indian religion, Buddhism (5th Century BCE), death is also intimately bound to life. In Samsara--this world of physical phenomena--there is no up without down, no light without dark, no good without bad, and no life without death. There cannot be one without the other. They depend upon each other utterly; this is Dependent Origination. In fact, in Buddhism the very existence of this self that dies depends on all of you--I am wife because of husband, sister because of brothers, teacher because of students, speaker because of audience. Thus all things, our very selves, are linked, and bound, and dependent, one upon the other: The Liz and the not Liz; the “is” and the “is-not’; our Life and our Death in an endless dance. Also, from the Buddhist perspective, birth and death are happening all the time, moment by moment, a hundred thousand time a day: As Buddhist Dharma has it “death is the continually repeating dissolution of each momentary physical-mental combination.” In every moment, in every second "I" die and "I" am reborn, a new "I" taking over from the old one that is gone forever.  So, from the Buddhist perspective, we spend a lifetime practicing death, we just don’t know it. That could sound a bit morbid, of course. What about birth and growth, the surge of sweet, green, ripening that comes before? What about life?  Well, the secret is that if we allow ourselves to let go of an attachment to life as something that doesn't include its essential partner death, we will find that we are part of something much more beautiful, more peaceful, more interesting, and more sustaining. All of our wisdom traditions tell us the same thing: as the Saint Francis prayer goes, “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” 

So what do I know about death? Not much, really, but perhaps enough: Death frames our life, and there is Mystery on both sides; we are born out of Mystery and we die back into it, and we don’t know what’s on either side. That’s what gives life its sweetness, I think, its meaning: death.  Death is something to work with, to wrestle with, to make sense of, and to make peace with. One might even say that the struggle to do so is the birthplace of everything we most value--art, philosophy, poetry, science, religion, dance, music, and loving compassion. Without its brief beauty, where would the rose get its sweetness, its poignancy, its perfection? Where would we get our own? Death is a lifelong companion. We live curled up against its skin, twinned with it, forever joined--our living self, and our death.

So, our lives are bracketed by Mystery--two hands cupping time. Death is the begging bowl we carry, and life is what falls in. How we arrange the contents in that bowl, what sense we make of it--what narrative, what story we tell ourselves about our life and death--seems to me to be vitally important. But in order to do this, we have to look at the bowl a while; we have to look at the silence that holds the sound, the mystery that holds the known, the death that holds our life. As every story-teller knows, a good story requires a beginning and a middle and an end. We all know the tragic curse of a life story without an ending: ghosts that can’t cross over; vampires doomed to an endless existence; and even in our modern day, life without death is seen as curse of tomorrows (the movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, is a classic example). These are cautionary tales reminding us of the gift of death and curse that endless life might bring.

So let us not deny. We are ALL terminal, we are all going to die; let’s look at this life, and our death, and try to find the meaning there, the tasty morsels at the bottom of the begging bowl.

The Dharma of Everyday Life--

Part of a public panel, "Buddhism Through Local Eyes," hosted by Friends of the Village Library Cooperstown, NY.  March 9, 2014

I encountered Buddhism for the first time in college, 35 years ago, and frankly, at first, I thought it was depressing and nihilistic: Everything is suffering? The self isn’t real? It’s all illusion? It appeared to me then that the Buddha’s teaching was to leave the world, as he left his wife and child, become a wandering ascetic, give up sex, food, all pleasure, and stop thinking . . . to basically check out. I thought at the time that the teaching was simply to deny the world and its claims on you so that you could pretend to be above all that. I was wrong, of course, or I wouldn’t be here now on this panel speaking as a self-identified "Buddhist."  At that time, though, I misunderstood the tradition's main teachings, and the last thing I wanted to do was check out and abandon my life and my self and this beautiful world. At 19, I was just figuring out what life was, and who I might be; and I was trying to gather the courage to go out and discover answers to these questions.

I don’t think my misunderstanding is unusual. From the outside, Buddhists can either look like they are worshiping the Buddha (or worse, their teachers) as gods, or they can look like they're trying to wreck everybody else’s party!

Still, it wasn't long before I realized that the central concerns of Buddhism dealt directly with the fundamental problems of living (and dying) with which I was increasingly concerned:

• At the heart of our lives is the intractable problem of suffering--of discontent and disappointment--and it seemed to me we are very often the cause of that suffering, both for ourselves and for others.  Buddhism promised an end to suffering.

• There is a human hunger to know how the world works, to know one’s place in the fabric of things, to know who one REALLY is (or at least I had that hunger). Buddhism seemed to have tools for examining these questions and finding answers.

• I was sure that we aren’t born as sinners; we are simply born with misconceptions--and we can change our conceptions. Buddhism offered a tradition and philosophy which supported that perspective. 

• Further, I was quite sure our “salvation,” if you will, is something we ultimately have to work out for ourselves. The Buddha said, “Be a lamp unto yourself." In other words, don’t just take my word for it; check it out! I liked the autonomy, and the objective, scientific approach. Buddhism didn’t require a set of beliefs. You just had to be willing to look at yourself. Essentially, Buddhism promised a toolkit for self examination rather than a set of beliefs that one must adopt. 

• And finally, and maybe most importantly to me, Buddhism had the figure of the Bodhisattva:  a human being who vows to postpone his or her own escape from all this pain and suffering--postpone his or her full and complete enlightenment--until everyone, every last sentient being everywhere, has come to full realization and an end to their suffering as well. To me this meant, that at its heart, Buddhism recognized we are all in this together: all equal, all worth saving, all of us with Buddha Nature, and all of us essential to untying the knot of human suffering.

So, I began to study Buddhism--alongside other religious traditions (I was a Religious Studies major in College)--and to practice simple forms of one-pointed attention and mindfulness meditation (Shamata and Vipassana). After that, I participated in several 3-10 day retreats in the Zen and Burmese traditions which deepened both my meditation practice and my commitment to Buddhist philosophy--mostly because I could see, first hand, substantive, concrete changes in my own thinking and behavior (It wasn't pleasant, but it was instructive, and in my personal world, growth trumps "pleasant experiences" every time . . . which is sort of annoying, but it makes for good "compost" I guess).

Then I met my husband, Sandy, who is a Buddhist scholar, and given his training, interests, and personal sitting practice, my own relationship with Buddhism continued, unsurprisingly, to deepen further yet. We spent a lot of time talking about this spiritual tradition, especially its philosophy, a conversation we've been having now for over 30 years!

However, perhaps the most important event in my own journey toward claiming Buddhism as my path occurred when we'd been married only a short time: we traveled to India where we would live for two years. There, Sandy taught on Antioch’s College Semester in India Program, and through this program, I met and took teachings with many Buddhist teachers--in the first year alone, Manindra and Thich Nhat Hanh, in the Burmese tradition; and Kalu Rinpoche and Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche in the Tibetan Tradition. This last teacher, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, is the uncle of Gomde Cooperstown’s main teacher Phakchok Rinpoche, and is also the brother of Chokling Rinpoche, Phackok Rinpoche’s father, who has taught at the center as well. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche would become my main teacher, but this didn’t happen easily or all at once.

I was raised Unitarian by a father who said, “I never had a need for religion” and a mother who, when I asked her when I was nine years old, "What happens when we die?," replied, “You’re born; you live; you die; you rot.” End of story. (One might ask why these people even went to the UU Church! But that’s a different panel, I think . . . )

The point is, I wasn’t like my parents--I seemed to be obsessed with religions questions, and I thought there was more to the story than the biological facts of our birth, life, and death. And yet I was like them too: I had a healthy skepticism; I distrusted the dogma of organized religions; I did not believe in an eternal heaven and an endless hell; nor in a man-in-the-sky-with-a-long-white-beard creator god, and I absolutely knew in my bones that I had to figure out my relationship to the Divine for myself.

So when I met Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche in India, one of my first thoughts was, “Why are all these people following him around? Don’t they have lives? If this tradition requires one to leave their homes, lives, and families--if it’s not for being IN the the world and solving the problems of daily living--I want no part of it!” One of the central reasons for this strong assertion was that, just as I had somehow always known I had to figure out the answers to life’s big questions on my own, I also somehow knew in my bones that I was meant to be a wife and a mother.

Still, in India--

• I went to the teachings.
• I learned.
• I gained respect for the many Buddhist traditions that I encountered.
• And I had experiences which proved to me that there was something to these philosophies and practices: I was changing in positive ways.
• Slowly, I was beginning to be drawn to the Buddhist perspectives and practices of the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, especially the simplicity and power of Dzogchen, with its striped-down heart.
• And finally, I felt a trust in, and affinity for, this particular teacher of the Dharma: Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. And I could see that others whom I respected felt the same--his students were sincere and dedicated, many of them with busy lives back home who had saved money and taken time off from work to be with him and learn from him in India.

Still, I wanted to hear (from the horse’s mouth, so to speak) whether or not this was a path that a householder could walk with full confidence.

So I asked for an audience with Rinpoche. It was a casual meeting on the guest-house roof of the Burmese Vihar in Bodhgaya, India where he was staying during a portion of our program. We sat drinking tea in the open air. I told him of my dedication to a householder’s life and asked whether or not one could follow the Vajrayana and still be in the world, so to speak.  His reply was this: “It’s a harder path, and you’re going to cry a lot.” I don’t think we spoke of anything else. I remember bowing to him, saying thank you, and leaving. And then asking myself, for years, “What did he really mean?”

I still don’t know from personal experience if what he said is true or not; I can’t. I’m not a mendicant with a begging bowl, nor a solitary yogi in a cave, not a nun waking before dawn to sit with my sisters in silence. I am a wife and a mother and a teacher and tutor  . . . and also a student and practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism. I’ve come to call this “The Dharma of Everyday Life.”

What I DO know about this path I have chosen (or has it chosen me?) is that there are ample opportunities for practice and that it’s hard to lie to yourself about being equanimous and compassionate and having overcome your shit. There are people around every corner telling you how mistaken you are. You have friends and neighbors and parents and a spouse telling you that you are NOT the Dalai Lama, but actually a complete Ass Hole!!!

And you have children . . .  Yes, children. My children have been my biggest teachers in this Dharma of Everyday Life. And I’d like to tell you about the day I learned one of my most important lessons from them: to show up and say yes; to be brave and choose love.

There was a period when our kids were little that was particularly challenging:  I had just finished doing my graduate degree in Marriage and Family Counseling (while pregnant and nursing), and I had just found out I couldn’t use my brand new degree after all. I was faced with the prospect of going back to school again or taking a job as a teacher and tutor at SUNY Oneonta. I chose the latter, but so far in that work I was feeling inauthentic and overwhelmed, and my lovely, sweet, intelligent, and intense children were intensely being just that--children: they were in the terrible twos and threes and fours, and I found myself saying every day, like a mantra, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t do this!” And then one day I saw what I was actually doing.

It was the middle of the night. I woke up hearing Katie calling for me, “Mamaaaa.” She’d been sick and was recovering now, but I hadn’t slept in days.  Sandy was snoring lightly beside me. I lay there listening, holding on to edge of a dream, praying she wouldn’t really wake up:

“Maamaaaa.” she called

And I thought,  “I can’t.”

            “Maamaaaaaaa!” she called again.

And again I thought, “No. I just can’t.”  

But I saw myself swing my legs out of bed anyway.  I heard myself feeling, “I can’t. This is too hard,” but saying anyway, “I’m coming.” I watched myself cross the hall, and go to my daughter, and gather up her crying body in my arms--all the while thinking “I can’t”--until I heard myself saying, “Shhhh. Mama’s here.”

And that was it. I was. I was there. All this time I’d been saying I can’t, but I was doing it anyway. And in that moment I realized that all I really needed to do was to show up in my life, to raise my hand and say, “Here,” to be present, and then to work on being fully present to each moment.

So I stopped saying, “I can’t.” and started saying, “I can.” I found I didn’t resist my life as much. I began to lean into the suffering, to be present to it and for it, and in doing so, I found I was more present for and to everything: others, myself, the whole world. I began to experience more joy! I could see that I might live more fully this way: by not resisting, by saying yes to what is, by not judging the moment out of fear but embracing it--whatever it was--with curiosity, patience, kindness, and unconditional love. That’s what all the child psychologists say kids need; that’s what all the great religious traditions say the world needs; that’s what the Buddhist tradition says we need in order to end the suffering: diligence, and patience, and kindness, and unconditional compassion.

When we ride the waves of a strong emotion during an argument--watching it start and build and crest and fall away--instead of being pulled under by its force to a place where we can drown or be crushed against the rocks, we are practicing. When we begin to see the weather of our lives--the stars and sunshine; the clouds and storms--coming and going, we can also see the aware, awake witness to all of this that is our true home and nature: our Buddha Nature. When we make friends with our failings and fears and strong emotions, they become like tantruming children who dissolve into soft, hiccupping sobs in our arms when we embrace them, finally letting go of whatever it was that caused all the trouble. Whereas, If we ignore these things, or fight these things, or run away from them, they rage and eat up all of our attention and energy.

In the end, I found out for myself that authentic Buddhist practice doesn't happen only on a cushion through formal meditation and mantra and prayer and visualization, doesn't happen only in the peace of solitude and of retreat; the householder’s life offers so many opportunities for authentic, diligent practice: traffic jams and changing diapers; crying children and doing dishes; paying bills and committing to others--each morning and each night and each morning again,--as we find ourselves still there, doing the hard work of loving, saying the daily mantra of Yes: "I can, I do, I will, I am."

Indeed, it is a hard path. And I've cried a lot. But this, my training ground and home--this householder's life--teaches me daily how to be with and for the world: to not deny its claims on me but to work with them as tools to ripen my understanding and soften my heart; to not turn from the pain of living, but to lean in toward it and be curious about its causes; to say to myself when I feel doubt, "You are able, here and now, to be present to whatever arrises, good or bad. You are doing it anyway, so let go! You can be brave and choose to love whatever life brings to your begging bowl."

Happiness is

Happiness is overrated.  Or maybe I just tell myself that because I’ve never been very.  Happy, that is.

 

Or maybe I have?

I think I need to know more about what happiness IS in order to know what I mean by not being it.  If you know what I mean.  Which I don’t, obviously. 

Happiness is a warm gun?  Not.

A bowl of cherries?  No, that’s a life that’s happy if it’s like a bowl of cherries.  Or is that like a box of chocolates? 

I’m not getting anywhere. "We must start from where we are"; somebody said that. So I will.  The “we” will be the royal kind.

For me happiness is sporadic--off and on--and not the off and on that a bi-polar individual is off and on.  I mean like five minutes of happy, forty-five minutes of miserable, an hour and a half of so-so, and then three minutes of bliss, followed by a giddy social free-fall and two days of self-consciousness.  Sigh. 

I think that I used to be happy long ago when I was very small and there was less of me needing to need to be happy, or more of what is NOT me just being, or less of me to get in the way of happy. I don’t know for sure, but when I go there into the way-back of my tiny person memories I feel a sort of all-around pleasure at being in the world that might be happiness.

There are things that make me happy to think about.  Little things, not the "world peace" kinds of things that make me anxious because there is just too much at stake.  Soup.  Soup makes me happy.  And puppies—especially puppy ears and puppy breath and the way their feet smell like saltine crackers; check it out and see, they do!  And speaking of crackers, those little round oyster crackers floating in milky tomato soup remind me of coming home from lunch in the old days when there was still enough time in the day for kids to come home  (and there was somebody at home to come to) and how I think I was happy sitting at the Formica table with the little silver specks and swinging my legs above the floor and blowing on the orangey-red in the shiny bowl of my Campbell’s soup girl spoon and watching my mother flipping the toasted cheese sandwich to go with it in the big metal Farberware skillet.  The world was pretty shiny back then.  I guess that was happy.

Pudding makes me happy: chocolate, not butterscotch.  Casseroles too.  Ice cream is good, but it is too cold to be happy.  But the sprinkles are happy and the hot fudge.  Hot is good.  Hot baths, fires, sunshine.  I like hot.  Too hot isn’t, though.  Hugs are warm and happy.  Silly is happy.  Too silly isn’t; it’s an accident waiting to happen; it’s “somebody’s going to get hurt. . . “

Happy requires the in and out of happy and not.  The up and down of life.  I’d rather be growing and learning than constantly UP, wouldn't you?  My mother is mystified by this attitude.  We sat at the kitchen table last summer and we had this conversation:

Mom:  Of COURSE you want to be happy!

Me: Not really.  I think I’d rather be learning and growing.

Mom:  I don’t believe you!  You’re being psychological again.

Me:  I mean it!  And whatdaya mean, “psychological?”

Mom:  (SIGH) You always complicate everything.  Why do you do that?  Do you WANT to be     miserable?

Me:  No, but I don’t want to be bored. Maybe I AM happier being miserable!

Did I really say that?  Something like it, anyway.  See what I mean?  I have no idea what “Happy” is.  It’s a non-word.

Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness and a big dude in the Positive Psychology movement says that you can’t really change your happiness setting all that much.  Some of us were just born miserable  ("and we like it that way, MOM" ).  Like the Jews, for instance.  I don’t mean the suffering as a people thing.  I mean the suffering-because-life-is-just-sort-of-disappointing-and-God-doesn’t-seem-to-care-all-that-much-about-you-even-after-he-chose-you-and-what‘s–the-advantage-of-being-the-chosen-people-of-a-God-who-ignores-you-when-you-talk-to-Him -anyway kind of suffering.  The Job kind of suffering.  Look at him.  He’s a famous unhappy Jewish person.  I can really relate to Job.  I’m not a Jew (wrong kind of mother, though you wouldn’t know it to listen to her, “What a daughter, you’re breaking my heart).  But I don’t know from happy already.  You hear that God?

I don’t think we’re supposed to be happy.  We had Eden.  We lost Eden.  Real estate happens; foreclosures for bad-faith contracts;  things go to hell.  Literally.  If God had wanted us to be HAPPY, He/She/It  wouldn’t have given us a self, or free-will, or (says my mother) “children.”  Enough with the children bit, Ma!  My kids are one of the few things that make me happy . . . and miserable (why do I feel more like my mother every day?)

Jesus said, “Consider the lily.” 

OK.  So I’m considering, but I’m not seeing that we have a lot in common (That free-will, personality, children thing . . . I wonder if seeds count?  “Couldn’t you have fallen on fertile ground?  What is with this rocky soil bit you're pulling?  You’re breaking your mother’s  green, heart!” )

But, maybe the lily. Try again  . . .

Sunlight provided. Water. Soil.  Doing her pretty plant thing, turning toward the light.  Living in the present.  In the now.  Day lily. Only for a day lily. (Does it know?)  Maybe Happiness isn’t the point, but that kind of trust is, and growth is, and becoming what you are (whatever that is) is. Being ready to die whenever that happens because you are, in fact, basically, happy? God looked at creation and said, "it is very good." That? Yes, that's a kind of happiness I can get behind. 

Empty Rooms

"Sun in an Empty Room" by Edward Hopper

I think of yellow light pressing against dirty windows, falling into nearly empty rooms, pooling on bare sloped floors: wood, yellowed linoleum, dingy blue carpet tiles. I think of the dry scuff of feet. A couch being squeezed back out through a narrow door the way it came in, somebody saying, “I’ve got it. I’ve got it. Now watch the corner,” their footsteps down a long hallway, a pause at the stairs, a thump, then another, and then slow footsteps going down.

I think of you, alone in those empty rooms where even your breath is too loud, and of the closet where your clothes hung, now yawning like an empty mouth, still holding your smell, but already fading into wood and plaster and air . . .

I think of you turning a slow circle in silence, wall to wall to window to wall. Remembering where the pictures hung, remembering the luminescent green of your aloe, your ficus, back-lit in sunlight this time of day. The way the curtain hung there--hung there just this morning yet--before you slipped it from its rod, the way the curtain lifted in the warm May breeze as gently as a dancer’s white hands, and then fell, sucked suddenly taut to the screen, a dress in the wind, a woman holding her breath.

And you turn again then, surprised that no face is in the mirror, that isn’t in the place where the mirror was, above the dresser, that you have emptied out--socks and underwear, slips and night gowns--into black garbage bags--and then stacked the drawers---woody and splintered and lighter than you would have thought--one atop the other, and rolled the dresser on its squeaking wheels into the hall.

Does it seem somehow, that your face still hangs there, where it always was? Where you found it smiling or crying or tired? And your image brushing its hair, twisting it into a clip, clasping a necklace or earrings. Hooking or unhooking a bra. Letting a dress fall. Standing there naked before the glass watching gravity happen, taking its time?

Now the walls are too naked. Walls, once white, now their shame is yellow. And the places somebody painted over. The place where somebody--you?--nailed into plaster. Injuries, patches, scars--dark holes going in. There are cobwebs and cracks and fingerprints--notice--there are bubbles and seams.

The empty space where your chair sat. The place in the corner that took the bed. The echoes it holds of pleasure. The place where you held him. The tears. And even the ghosts of all your unremembered dreams.

The times you bent to put on your shoes, sat on the bed to take off your socks, sat on the bed and stared at the wall, rose and went out. Key in a lock.

The car is waiting, or the truck, or the van. It is full. It is half full, and the motor chugs, impatiently, a smell across the open screens. The white silence ticks and the house waits like a cocked ear.

But you cross the room and take the glass knob in your fist and turn it, open and pull like the end of a sentence. The stutter of the window shade, the splash of sun on the green carpet in the hall. Gently you close the door behind you, hiding the sunlight, putting the silence behind you, where it pools and waits, like memory.

You travel down the musty hall, touching the chair rail, imagining the stair’s dark tread, feeling the keys in your pocket, gathering speed.

Image a Day Project: Gray Self at 25

Gray Self at 25

Blue Moon

Image a Day Project: Art Class

Art Class

Image a day project: Psychedelic Om

Psychedelic Om

Tangled Up

Image a day project: Nudie II

Nudie II

Image a Day Project: Tulip Girl

Tulip Girl

Image a Day Project: Cat of Many Colors

Cat of Many Colors

Image a Day Project: Snow Day

Snow Day

Image a Day Project: Sick Day

Sick Day

Maiden with Mandola

Degas: Lost Oeuvre

He cannot see the lift and fall of their limbs, 

the slow adagio turning their wrists, 

cupping shadow, then light.

The inverted palms,

and elbows following, 

one by one,

like white lilies

tilting in the wind.

Losing sight is a slow process.

First the colors dim, 

then the lines that hold the colors in. 

And then all things dissolve 

into a sameness 

that is neither day nor night--

no edge to this shrinking circle,

this inexorable fading light.

The notes still come

one upon the other,

canvases of sound erupting

on the edge of his vision

sketches of pink, russet, a band of mustard-yellow--

their exhausted beauty 

molding now in the damp spring rain,

curling frightfully,

like an old man in a beaten coat

leaning on his cane.

In dreams he can see again.

Three notes stagger out of the darkness;

shoes tracing arcs in dry chalk. 

A shuttered cross-hatch of tulle netting.

And legs, firm stalks 

to hold them,

ribboned round and round, 

as they turn to him, and turn to him, and turn

offering their throats,

their lovely white arms, 

circling,

as they lift at his hand, 

once more, 

into the light.

Sound Sketches

Here's the link to a few "sound sketches" I posted as One Hand Clapping on Soundcloud. I'm a cellist, not a guitarist, and some of these were captured waaaaay back in the 1980's, but it's fun to write songs and sing them, so I do!   https://soundcloud.com/onehandclapping

Shoe

                                                                                                                                   Image uploaded by Pinterest user Cindi Bruni

I see a shoe down there. In the dry leaves by the back door, a black party shoe with a bow. I know it is mine, but I can’t reach, not even with a stick. It’s wedged between some windows. Maybe with a bigger stick; but it is too heavy. There is a mouse trap too, and some pieces of cloth which make me think of my doll Ginger, but it is not Ginger, because Ginger is in the car.

“Dad,” I call, “I want my shoe!” And when he doesn’t hear me, again, “Dad!!” The cows are still here, right by the house, and the cow’s skull is on the post where it always was, showing the black holes of its eyes, and the apple trees are still here too-- but not apples yet, only teeny green ones. I look back at my shoe, then down at my feet. My shoes are bigger than that party one; I can see that. Bigger, but I bet it will still go on. My fingers remember the leather strap, and the poky metal buckle which I can’t do yet, and the little holes in a row, and which to choose?

“Dad! Daddy, I need you!” And then my dad is there--my dad comes--and puts his big, warm hand on my hair. I can hear him breathing.

“My shoe’s down there.”

“What?” My dad is looking at my feet like he doesn’t understand.

“My party one. Look!” and I point to where it is.

My dad bends down by the broken storm windows and the foundation stones of our white house—our used to be house; we don’t live here now--and he says, “Oh,” and we can both see it, a shiny wedge of black patent leather.

“I want it,” I say.

“It won’t fit, Punkin. It’s an old one.”

“Please, I want it.”

My dad uses his hands and his shoulders to hold the windows apart, leaning them, one by one against himself until he can reach in sideways and tweeze the shoe up with his fingers. It feels like I can’t wait, watching him. But I have to wait, so I do a little bounce on my toes and remember a piece of black velvet ribbon that I used to have and can’t find, and I think how my shoe is like a treasure I forgot or a secret I remember.

When my dad gets the shoe out, he pushes the windows back against the house with his stomach. Then he bends over holding the heel of the shoe, and he knocks the spiders out. Then he hands it to me.

I grab his baggy pants leg for balance and pull my foot out of my red puddle boots. I put my toes in the opening and I push. Only my toes go in. I think of Cinderella and her step sisters. I tug up my sock and try again.

“It won’t go,” says Dad, “You’ve grown.”

But I want it to. I remember how these shoes felt on my feet, flat and thin on the bottom, and the clicky sound they made on the floor, and the swirly dress I got them to go with—it has a bow in the back and yellow polka-dots on it and blue flowers.

But now the shoe won’t fit. How could I have ever fit in there? I was a littler me and now I am a bigger me. I see my dad’s shoes, so big. He was a baby that grew, and now he is huge man; he is a daddy, but he used to be a boy. And I don’t like to think of that at all. He has to be HIM: Daddy. Always just the same. I want the smell of him like this, and his red hooded sweatshirt with a long pocket for my hands to meet each other in, and his bristly face, and his daddy nose poking out, and his high shoulders to ride on and his hair on my face when I lean to see him, and his ears to hold onto up there.

I hug his legs very tight, one sock foot on his shoe.

“Come up,” he says, “Punkin.’” And he swings me to his shoulders--the “uppest place”-- for a ride, bending over for my boot, holding my legs, while I, for the littlest bit of time, swing out sideways, tipping into space. Then we are off into the milkweed with the sun on our heads and the clouds wheeling over us.

Dad
Robert C. Cares
11/19/1930--9/19/2015