French Christmas

The Messengers

I started seeing the dragonflies a few months after my Aunt Kathy passed away.

My Mom was the first to notice them. She was at the grocery store one day, picking up soy milk and toilet paper, when a woman walked past her in line. In her arms she held a stack of brown grocery bags and above her hovered one of those giant, helium balloons shaped like a dragonfly.

Next it was the tiny plastic dragonfly peeking out from a crack in the driveway, just waiting for my Mom to see it while she was weeding. After that, it was an actual dragonfly, one of those emerald green beauties you’ll see skimming above the lake in the summertime, big as your hand. It found its way into her car in the middle of the day, waited for her right under the passenger seat, even though all the windows were shut tight.

It was too much to be a coincidence.

My Aunt Kathy, you see, loved many things. She loved Alice Cooper, seven-layer taco dip, scary movies, and snowmen. But one of the things she loved the most was dragonflies. 

All of us, her nieces and her nephews and her seven siblings, knew how much she loved them. We bought her dragonflies to hang in her kitchen; we bought her dragonflies to hang in her garden. We knew about the dragonfly pendant she always wore around her neck. So when the dragonflies started showing up after she left us, we all had a good idea who was sending them.

She was the baby of the family, my Aunt, and doted upon. My grandparents almost lost her when she was 6 to a serious case of chicken pox that took a wrong turn towards epileptic seizures. Lucky for all of us, and lucky for me, the Universe blessed her with 40 more years, and I got a chance to grow up under her watchful eye. To me she was my young cool aunt, the one who let me watch horror movies I wasn’t supposed to be watching, the one who let me eat too many tostadas at Taco Bell, and when I got older, the one to take me out and give me advice about boys.

Now that she’s gone, there are some memories that stick out more than others. A thunderstorm one July afternoon, the rain so thick you couldn’t see out the windows. I was in the passenger seat and my Aunt Kathy was driving, terrified but determined not to let her little niece see it. Family parties, when we’d sneak out in the cover of darkness to share a smoke, me too young and she swearing to everyone she had quit.  And of course the last time I saw her, when she was too sick to care about the doctor’s rules anymore. I had just graduated from college and felt like a big shot, so I bought her lunch. She said “to hell with it” and ordered a kaluha and cream with her salad, and while she drank it she warned me with a wink that she’d be keeping her eye on me.

Now that she’s gone, we all have our memories, those pieces of the past that we replay over and over again in our minds.  But we also have the dragonflies. They are the breadcrumbs from the great beyond, little hints from my mischievous Aunt letting us know we’re not alone. Letting us know she’s still around. Letting us know that someone is watching out.

We all see them at different times. My cousin Anna found one in a bar of lavender soap on a cross country road trip. My Aunt Bev was in a pottery shop in Vermont when she spotted one hiding on the side of a coffee mug. (She subsequently took five of those mugs home with her.) My Aunt Fran sees them flitting about her countryside property. My Aunt Mary bought little dragonfly sun catchers for her sisters as Christmas gifts.

For me, the dragonflies typically show up in moments of crises. The first time I saw one, I was stuck on the Chicago skyway, late for an apartment viewing and sick to my stomach about moving to a new city. My traveling companion (read: ex-boyfriend) was being no help with the situation whatsoever. But the little blue dragonfly hovering outside my window, just waiting for me to look up, was.

Since then, I’ve seen them in many places and in many forms. As pins, as skirts, as decorations on a cake. Always someplace different, always when I least expect it. Like I said, they usually show up in the toughest times. That’s how I know it’s more than just a fluke. It’s a sign my Aunt is watching out over me, over the daughter and husband she left behind, over all of us.

No matter who you are and what you believe in, we all have moments of doubt. Moments that make us wonder if we’re on the right path, if we’ve made the right choices with our families, in our careers, with our partners. Moments that make us question our reason for being.   

For me, it’s during these times that I usually see a dragonfly outside my window.

Note: This was originally an article I submitted ... let's see ... a few different places that was never published. It came to mind last night at a wake for the family member of some dear friends. These rituals are necessary but so hard, because your words seem so inadequate, because your hugs or cups of coffee or cigarettes can never fill the hole that's so fresh and left behind. So all that I could really think of was the way I find comfort in these moments, and to send it out into the world.

It’s very brown and gray, but that’s all right

We like ribbons and we like bows. We like brightly striped paper that says “Happy Birthday!” or “Congratulations!” We like our presents to be easy, when the hardest part is ripping off the wrapping and discarding it to the floor.

But the best gifts don’t come in a pretty package. They might be covered in mud and roots, because they came from some deep and buried place. They might be sharp and spiky, in order to cut something down that’s been standing in your way. They might be wrapped in matrix of twine that you have to unravel before you can get to the heart of the thing.

Because the best gifts aren’t things that we asked for. They are the battle call, the early morning alarm, the unexpected misfortune. They are like spring itself, brown and gray and very cold at times, all masking the warm beating heart beneath.

Spring Eve & The Supermoon

(Sounds like the name of a movie, doesn't it? Or maybe a band?)

But really, tonight is Spring Eve, and there is a Supermoon riding high up in the sky. I can't help but think of them as intermediaries, shifting the lighting, setting up the stage for the change of seasons. Tomorrow, after all, marks the official debut of spring, although 60 degree breezes and the honking of Canadian geese headed north already foreshadowed her arrival.

I think about the Supermoon, and I think about it as Winter's last act. She tends to get kicked in the teeth a lot this time of the year, and booed off the stage by people throwing cabbages and rotten tomatoes. So tonight she brings her stillness and her silvery light out for one last big shine, she leans close in, almost close enough to touch, and whispers goodbye until next year.

 

 

Everything I Need to Know, I Learned on the Oregon Trail

We talk a lot about change. We talk about it in books and in movies and on the interwebs, all that “Just Do It!” and “Carpe Diem!” and “Be the Change You Wish to See in the World!” stuff. These mantras are usually accompanied by a photo of a product that will help you make said change. As if changing ourselves were really that easy. As if you could just buy a new pair of shoes or some cold cream and BOOM! That would be it. Mistakes undone. Bad habits broken. Progress achieved.

We talk about it a lot because we all know we need to change, in some way, to move forward. We talk about it a lot because change is really the human condition, even though our brains seem so ironically hard-wired against it.

So lately I have been thinking about what change must be like internally, for that one pioneering little neuron who has to forge out in the wilderness of our brains alone to plant the flag. I think about how first she’s got to hack through all those layers and layers of thick underbrush to build some kind of path for the others to follow. And once she’s reached that far away land, that unpopulated and uncivilized part of the mind that needs conquering, she’s got to find somewhere to set up shop. She’s got to chop down trees, start a fire, and build a house. All of this she does, while fending off attacks by the beasts and demons that prowl around the perimeters.

When I think about all of this, maybe I have a little more patience and compassion. Maybe I understand why change doesn’t happen overnight. And I hope she meets some other settlers along the way, who’ve got a got big store of beef jerky and buck shot in the back of their covered wagon.

Seedling

After all, they told you the heart is a muscle, but it's really more of a seed, and will not be forced, under any circumstance, to bloom before it's ready.

#Reverb10 Prompt/Ash Wednesday

March Prompt: If March 2011 was your last month to live, how would you live it?

The cross on my forehead isn’t as big as I thought it would be. But nonetheless it makes me think about death and dust. It makes me think about my body and my flesh, and how they are like a warm jacket borrowed from an old friend. It makes me think about the time to return these things, and how we must all eventually return to where we started, and how that is what makes life so heart-achingly beautiful.

Because after all, everything is fleeting; every moment will end and pass into another. That’s why the Greeks believed the Gods envied us so bitterly, because our own mortality heightened the senses and they could never experience that. They could never experience the best things, the best moments, which come in the ever-so-brief passing of opposites. Like the moment when you pass from fear into relief, or from work into rest, or from hunger to fullness. These moments may count as mere seconds and minutes in the course of a human lifetime, but they are the substance of it all. They are the pinpoints the axis revolves around.

In my returning time, when my clock is winding down, I don’t wish for regret or sadness. I don’t even wish for happiness or a sense of accomplishment, a satisfied sense of a live well lived. I wish to spend my ending time wholly inhabiting my body, not fighting with it, or being annoyed by its needs, or feeling frustrated with its slowness. I want to feel the hot sun and the cool breeze on a spring afternoon. I want to hear the voices of my family in the next room. I want to see the color purple in a field of green. I want to taste warm cider on a cold winter’s day.

At the end, I want to live in those moments.

 

Progress

It’s overwhelming, really, the parade of numbers that rain down on you like a hurricane in this excellent Judi Dench-Daniel Craig video. Numbers like 70 million (the number of women denied education) and 60 million (the number of reported sexual assaults) and 1 percent (the total amount of property owned by women).

When I think about all these numbers, I feel very small standing next to them. Here it is, International Women’s Day 2011, and all these unfairnesses and injustices are still happening. And I want to write about it here, I want to say something that is meaningful and that will knock those numbers over and send them tumbling down. But next to them, I am just me. Like I said, I feel very small.

So instead I think about what someone small would do when faced with a very big machine. Maybe you couldn’t climb to the top, and maybe you couldn’t blow it up. Maybe you couldn’t lift it and throw it away in the garbage. But you could take out your tools and loosen one of the screws at the bottom, where the footrests are. And then maybe you could take the foot rest off, so it wobbles a little. Maybe you could unscrew one piece, or file away at one stubborn bolt, every day. Maybe it wouldn’t be enough to bring the whole machine down overnight.

But then again, maybe it would.

As part of my daily unscrewing, I’m making a pledge to keep abreast of initiatives like this one (the fight to keep federal funding for Planned Parenthood, an amazing organization that gives women affordable access to birth control, cancer and STD screenings, and lots of other health services every day!) What will you do?

PPS
Happy International Women’s Day to all the mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, cousins, godmothers, grandmothers and girlfriends!

 

Snapshot

I want to remember today
And the little white snowflakes hovering outside
Like fairies
Knocking on the window of the yoga studio.

Stir

Creatively Sensitive said it best here:

And the sky.
It was unmoving.
Like a wall with nothing beyond it.

That is the thing about winter: the stillness. And we need it, we need the stillness to simmer, to let the flavors sink in. It is a time not to do, but to sit and let all the small miracles and revolutions that happen when you are still take place.

But after several months of low heat and steady marinating, I start to grow restless. Spring does not come fast enough. My body craves movement, my mind needs a good kneading to move around the dreams and challenges it’s been cooking up.

And so in absence of sun and breeze, I go to yoga.  I go to yoga to unfurl like a new fern, I got to yoga to root the dreams and intentions of winter into the ground. I go to yoga to prepare for the growing season.

In the stillness of winter, in the quiet prelude to spring, yoga becomes my stirring spoon.