 [Note: Right after I wrote the first draft of this, some friends had the tragedy of losing their daughter. Suddenly, everything I’d written seemed so dumb, and so this has been revised to honor my friends in their grief]
What a busy summer! I don’t know if it is Mercury retrograde or just decompression from such a relentless work schedule, but I’ve hit a wall and the last couple weeks have been more indulgent: visiting with friends, catching up on and scheduling doctor and dental checkups, going to concerts, and I’ve resumed writing poetry after months and months of scholarly nonfiction (which sort of deadens the creative impulses). For me, there is nothing lovelier than lying out in the sunshine, reading and writing poetry (my new go-to poet is John Rybicki). This is my recharging time before the big Halloween crush of events. I’ll have some TV and radio appearances coming up soon for which I will post links. A week ago, I was feeling overconfident about my fitness when I decided to move a wood pile from our wheelbarrow into our rolling garbage cans. I didn’t want to bother Tom about it. I thought rather proudly that I’d get this out of the way for both of us and together we’d marvel at how strong and efficient I am (ha). Stacking the wood from one container to the other was a breeze. No sweat, if a few splinters. Then I went to do the rolling, which of course means one must tip it backwards. There’s where I got a bit careless, and the whole thing, which probably weighed as much or more than I do, came smashing down upon me. I fell hard on my left hand, I cut up my left arm with some impressive gashes, scraped my nose and chin, and it looks as if someone beat my left thigh with a baseball bat. Not my finest moment. I’m starting to scab up now, and the bruising has gone from deepest purple to shades of yellow and plum. People ask if I was in a car accident. What did I realize about all of this? I wasn’t paying attention. I still think I could have successfully maneuvered the trash can IF I had concentrated and not been so careless. Lesson learned. Another lesson: Ask for help when it is readily available. I didn’t have to do it myself. It’s hard to believe we are past mid-September. If you pay attention, you can hear the seasons change: there are different insects, wilder winds, and the rustling of tree leaves beginning to dry out. The daylight has shortened and shifted. I try to remember that I am connected to this earth. We forget our oneness too often, busy in individual efforts and drama, like fighting with woodpiles. We forget our bodies, in health, sickness, and aging, are a part of the whole universal organization. We forget our efforts are a part of some greater momentum we cannot see. We forget that our feelings are in the sea of all feelings, that there is nothing that has not been experienced by some other, somewhere. Oneness can keep us sane, if only in not feeling alone. When I came into the house covered in blood, I went downstairs to Tom’s office choking back tears and said, “Tom, I f**ked up.” He immediately got the first aid kit and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide to clean my wounds. Then, without a lecture beyond “why didn’t you ask me to do it?” he went out to pick up the big mess I’d made of the wood. He made me so glad to have someone there. That’s another kind of oneness. I don’t hate the woodpile, or even this experience, because I did learn a few things and there’s no permanent damage. The picture above is how my leg looks today (the first photo was too ugly to post!). We can’t always change the circumstances, but we can change our reaction to them. We can evolve to adapt, or we can blame and rage, or we can die. Those are pretty much our choices in this life. And then, this tragedy happened to one of our favorite personal trainers, C. and his wife, J. We had plans to double date at the Alice in Chains/Bush concert tomorrow evening. C texted and told us they couldn’t go because of this terrible thing. In my oneness, in my empathy as a mother and a friend, I crumbled. I laid awake most of the night in grief for this young woman I never met, who I will now never meet. In my fascination with the human body, I’m watching my own healing but the pain in another’s heart is something that I cannot heal. As a mother, I can’t imagine a way to ever heal such a thing, and maybe, like a lost limb, you just learn to endure, to survive for everyone else who needs you. I am glad to reach out and to be there for them in our oneness. Being one with nature is something else again: the overwhelming beauty of the magnitude of the cosmos, with its repeating patterns of fractals and Fibonacci sequences that go from the birth of the tiniest atoms to the expansion of universes. There is movement and life to all of it–even the stones beneath our feet. But sometimes nature surprises us and sometimes terrible things happen, and no great pattern is evident, or not for a long time. The universal energy is within all matter. Energy doesn’t die. It all matters, and because we are here, or were once here, so do we. ACCIDENTS, DEATH, ENERGY, FALL, GRIEF, HEALING, MERCURY RETROGRADE, ONENESS, TRAGEDY, UNIVERSE, WOUNDS
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