On grief, time, nature, and connection
Mourning
a voiceless lament
for edges, for lines, for those
close by and long gone
The souls of Aunt Saretta and Grandpa are possibly skipping together in the ether at this moment. Lillian, my grandmother, her sister, his wife, grieves, contemplates, reflects, makes peace. She is good at that these days. Markers of change, so many lately. Infusing my being. Soon, nothing will be as it was.
Samhain/All Soul’s Day
The moment doesn’t know what it wants to be. An intense and balmy Fall day, with notes of Spring and Summer both––holding symbols of possibility and renewal, yet on the day where darkness is present more than ever and the veils between here and there are at their thinnest. We are exactly halfway between the Fall equinox and Winter solstice. We are inbetween. Both literally and figuratively. It is noon, yet the color outside my window is closing on sunset. A funeral procession leaves the corner church. And the bell continues to ring.
1000 Cranes
driving to and fro in silence these days, the familiar country landscape with its repetition moving by me in a peripheral blur. the mounds, the radio tower, the hand-painted sign for honey, the terriers greeting the day. i turned toward them to catch a glimpse at 60 miles per hour. 1000 cranes point the way, and the death card, while Latin guitar emanates from the room next door.
i float. pluto enveloping me, saturn beneath, and uranus is the sky.
A recollection
I watched the cast shadows of leaves rain down upon the knoll. Appearing like butterflies in a hovering dance above the clearing, clumsy in flight. An embodiment of the sacred pause.
Always, tension in the inbetween sun and moon
in the interval
meanwhile, wearing away
Sunday
the arrival home
greeted by a swarm of moths
The gruesome always accompanies the lovely
echoes of grey ghosts
scratching between walls
and scurrying
a reminder of Idaho
where the headless circled my farmhouse
where their bodies burned in my oven
(the charred melancholy aroma still lingering in my nostrils)
and where they did win one battle with Frida, under the pine tree
kindred spirits, they and I
This weekend, I feel lucky to have inhabited the lodge with the mice.
MJ
a west wind moves
by way of the golden wheat
and dissolves in salt
Eclipse
What does a crescent light yield when choosing stillness? From expectations, we harvest restlessness…and myopia.
One year anniversary
August arrived carrying hope, potential. August arrives again, and with it brings the advent of what is. The creeping jenny continues to fill the gaps. Even better this year. And it points me to the missing limb that was inside my own body this whole time.
sigh
a sharp tear, from which
an intuiting blood flows
toward wholeness
so much of us stuck in a state of waiting… only gazing at reflections.
What does the wind mean?
I am wired to hear only whispers.
Haikus
a longing for ground
a hue, a scent; collisions
that break sweat. Today.
lightness cast on limbs
tracing butterflies movements––
a washing away
sorrow breathes into
tight spaces that lie waiting
river tumbles on
the wind dances, in
hot, humid air, not breathing
but holding…lightness
the withdrawal home.
sugar, respirator, and
whole salted blossom
vacant swings, a vast
rolling river of ground, and
a missing of parts
rain wakens currents
navigating erosion
to a homecoming?
remembrances swarm
fractures in time not mending
home sinks into sand
sipping salt water
mind contracts body tenses
narrow wants rule life
Lunacy
when the moon is undressed
a weight
Day who knows what: not counting anymore
Hades visiting
evanescent chemistry
naked, white, sleeping
A gorgeous fall day, filled with images.
After a hiatus
Smoothness in flight. But only on the way back, the return.
I ruminate on the red cardinal, who lately has not crossed my path. I have been looking for other signs. Gesticulating onion skins, do they whisper a promise of intimacy?
Now, suddenly, turbulence. Mid-air, after acknowledging its lack. Reminding me…. Do not get too comfortable.
In the interludes
These deep long spaces, held open for moths to drink. Ones that pollinate. While nectar accumulates, I wait. Congruency disappearing in the gaps.
Having flown away
remembrances swarm
fractures in time not mending
home sinks into sand
Currents
the wind dances, in
hot, humid air, not breathing
but holding…lightness
Phantasm
I am haunted by the presence of a limb gone missing. This rapacious want, this dire craving, makes for a dark mood. I am only half.
Friction in Eden, at the farm. And in the cells.
Swirling. And killing the butterflies.
Commencing
moments modified
a spiraling into red,
gold. a resistance
moths swarm the cat litter
Fitting
a congruency
under skin, and out of hair
no weeping,
only
Coming into being
Stillness steeping. A merge into sky, stars, vapor. The distanced view of rain provides a new perception, a deeper understanding of my spiritual agoraphobia. An observation anyway. In the old growth, largeness. A reinforcement of self-importance, of ego. Here, vastness, smallness, inconsequentiality. And therein lies the discomfort.
But a concert mounts. Between myself, and the lightning, and the itinerant rains…between the pines, the Sufi spirits, and even the hard ground.
In the desert
A serene view of limitless ground. Of canyons, buttes, mountain plains. I sip coffee while shrouded in a cloud and the sun touches down ahead, onto the rolling green river. An intense ocular sensation.
I come to understand my preference for the old growth rainforest. Cutting out vision heightens other senses. Here, it is impossible not to gaze upon the immense earth with winded veneration. Though a separation exists within the distanced view. Here, there. Me, mountain. And I too much feel my selfness when walking on firm ground and when such immense blue swarms overhead. Exposed to sky, and not sinking into land.
when my vision is masked,
an openness. With vastness,
an uncertainty.
Of my place. But all of it. An illusion.
Clearly there is an elegant energy here. The legacy of Ram Dass and other spiritual teachers who have inhabited this land over the years…their presence passes through the morning vow of silence and other rituals.
Wu wei
Acquiescing, while gently asserting. Gently asserting, while acquiescing.
Moving fluidly. Upright, poised, limber, malleable. Strong. A beautiful thing, a surprise. Moments emerge here and there like little fish. Flecks of gold swimming around me.
A memory from Costa Rica… of white herons:
tributaries, green
buttressing ghosts that hover
amid light shadows
Convergence
Another day in trees on sanctified land. But marked by dissimilar intentions and a distinctly different community…. Worlds merge and tension mounts. My pores bleed out the inner, and the outer holds an inaccurate reflection.
Though the red cardinal keeps crossing my path. An indication?
And so I seek water…
Wetness
a tomato seed
stuck under neck, and winds that
assume, bearing rain
Swimming
Floating in imaginary waters. The lagoon in Akumal. The pools from my childhood. A bath? No…. It doesn’t matter. What matters is feeling space beyond head, beyond fingers, toes. And being held by warm atoms.
Outside thunder crashes and the rains surge. It is a nestling. A forest of water. My feet swim in the air.
The full day of rain leaves such a lushness in its wake. Reminiscent of Costa Rica in summer–bird calls and yellow. Behind a wash of grey, colors pop. I swim in a cool quiet and inhale soothing wetness. Though the tree in the corner of the yard remains dead. Naked branches among full green.
The Great South Bay
Sylvia and I fill buckets with wet sand. Past and present communing.
This morning water carried abandoned seaweed, clear plastic, and assorted opalescent jewels onto the shore. I rescued two crab claws and a hot pink balloon.
Walking through sand today felt different than my memory of it. I invited the inevitable slowness in process, preventing me from getting ahead of myself. The earth was merely pulling me closer in after all, so I let it.
I left this place behind over ten years ago. Traded it in for ferns and tall trees and rivers where I could disappear. Despite the hurt of discarded cigarette butts and other refuse dotting the sandscape, I think I could inhabit this place again. Today my bones were not unsettled at all by the exposure, by the absence of bark. The sea calms.
East to West, West to East.
Coming back
I tend to hurl myself toward ends. In the last two houses I tried to grow gardens. I would throw my mania into the ground, with little regard. Hastily reaching out to an end-ideal held in the mind. In love with the idea of the garden, despising the inbetween. A reflection of the interior hollow. So often in love with ideas of things. But I have visited those gardens, wild and tall, and have suddenly felt time moved too fast. A loss at what I missed. The longing for completeness replaced by a longing for the inbetween.
A balance here in the big green house. Moving beyond longing to simply what is. Sangha is being in the now.
Tea
Suffering. Stop. Separate. Self-ness.
Staying. a Sanctuary.
Recorded words. Words that breathe into my ears as basil comes to me in a warm wind. A scent. And then pine cones tumble. A piano, a woman’s voice, drifts through the open door. I ponder my essential self, but through skin, not mind.
What is missing? A mound of petals.
Lethargy
A haze. A relinquishment to not doing. But a delicate boredom persists.
I paint a swash of blue. Swirl it with glaze.
Too much drama.
Now… bathing in yellow. There is quiet even amidst the many hums.
I get up to cut vegetables.
And notice the lightness punctuating.
Sensating
A commitment to ten minutes of sitting. I monitor the breath. I count. I come to stillness. Then sensation. Tingling in hands and the feeling of floating. A capacity on one hand to keep going, on the other, an anticipation. For the sound of the bell, of the call for “mommy” to yank me back.
Though stillness does carry through further into the morning, into the garden, where I measure.
Until friends pass by without words and stillness turns into uncertainty. Suppleness in muscles becomes ache. Though I am aware of the second arrow. Of the mind’s tendency to interpret. But this is a heart hurt. That transcends today and yesterday.
Many have come and gone, still come and go. Leaving a gorge that cuts into my middle.
But this evening, perhaps a new beginning.
The out there and the in here… How to marry them?
Towards lightness (reflections on yoga class)
I’m a Lacanian cliché. Seeking the real. The stage of the imaginary, in infancy, when we experience a whole, undivided self, is disrupted by the acquisition of language. A new birth… into duality. This that, you me, us them. Lightness, weight. The symbolic pulls us towards the earth.
I have memories of floating, upside down, no gravity. Weightless.
My inversion practice is a kind of retraining. Back towards a buoyancy. I handstand my way to Sangha.
Asking
My proverbial question. Why? So often coming back to it. Why in one instance does ease flow, allowing peace and silence to enter? A communing between “self” and “non-self” that is as involuntary as sneeze. And in most others, a stiffness and a wanting.
It seems to be an issue of porousness and letting go. How to maintain porousness without leaving oneself vulnerable and open to the gulls that could peck one’s underbelly to bits?
I am like the moon, waxing and waning. Ease, dis-ease, peace, strife, releasing, holding.
This week I am sucked into my tenth house habit, evidenced by shorter missives. But soon the paint will arrive. And when I paint walls I enter into a process trance. Enter into my fourth house.
A shimmering
Newness. Things sparkle. It seems each time I sit down to write, in my room of windows, a cardinal joins me. Strong. Red. Out there, but in here.
Maintaining
I am maintaining, but it flows with more effort. How easy it is to form an expectation based on a magical moment. I try to write today’s entry like yesterday’s, but it feels dishonest. Some days will yield large gifts, and some days will yield small. I have to celebrate all of it.
There were things. Are things. The lava walkway is a deep blood red from yesterday’s rain. So lovely. And the spider web. An accidental encounter, but a sensual experience, enveloping me warmly. Not at all a hostile uninvited attack. And there was the sand. Yesterday’s excursion to the park. Lowering myself into the box for the first time, allowing myself to sit in the grit, among the sad sea of worn shovels and pails. At what point does sand become more of an irritation than a joyful encounter? I wish I could trace myself back to that moment. Yesterday, in the box I invited my daughter to pour sand over my legs. It tingled when it touched my skin, as did the spider web. I feel porous. More open.
Though working hard to maintain openness. How easy it is to close up. I seem to be developing some resilience however. Not unraveling at the site of mess. Not allowing chaos to enter into my consciousness. Staying within the whole that is right now. The process, not the end.
My daughter exists within process and it amazes me. She scoops and she pours. Scoops and pours. No goal. My teacher.
Pulling
Among golden moneywort, creeping thyme, and flagstone rocks in various shades of blue and grey, grows bermuda and crab grasses, competing for ground. Feeling awareness of the duality I assign to this space–“good” plants, “bad” plants, plants that deserve space, water, and air, and those considered “weeds”–I pull anyway, envisioning cascading tendrils of yellow and green that will emit an aroma upon a step. An ideal I strive towards: no pointy blades, no ugliness. Again, aware of the duality I capitulate–beauty, ugliness, perfection, imperfection, yes, no. I pull as a kind of meditation, breathing love into the plants I deem not worthy, knowing that this is all a metaphorical process for the sangha that I seek within. The community of plants I want in my garden, the community of plants that I do not, become a part of that journey.
Community, home, peace, balance. Amidst complexity.
I do not wish to be exclusive, but I also know that what sustains me, softens me, allows me to inhale more deeply and exhale without effort, cascades. Is soft. And possesses many hues and smells. So, I make room for it to grow.
The process is exhaustive. Continual pulling. On knees. I hear cracking. Feel pangs of sensation in my back. I could pay Monsanto for the appropriate weapons of mass destruction. But the very idea of eradication implies there is an end. And that there is a battle to fight. There is no end, only continuous relationship and process. And no battle, only surrender to what is. So, I breathe love into the process and make friends with it. Wear no gloves. And venerate the dirt under my fingernails.
© Samantha DiRosa
Samantha DiRosa 
