Animal Growth, Plant Growth

Last week I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend. She lives in Japan but would be visiting the States for a convention, and as Los Angeles is considerably easier to get to, I took the opportunity to spend some time with her. As with all the best friendships, it was as though no time had passed, though it had been three years since we’d last been face to face. And though we live in vastly different cultures, on different continents, doing different kinds of work, as we talked we found that we both faced essentially the same core issue at this point in life: not enough time.

I’ve written before about the tension between wanting to live many lives and wanting simply to live one life well. There is also the awareness that our time here is finite and will ultimately run out. That’s been underscored for me lately by the birth of my two nieces, who grow and change so fast at their young age that I can hardly recognize them from one visit to the next. The time that acts on them also acts on me. It’s easy to forget that this is so when I see essentially the same face in the mirror each morning. But it’s why I suddenly feel old when some kid I used to babysit for gets married, or goes to college; suddenly I’m left wondering, what have I done with all this time that has passed?

My friend from Japan had done a great deal since the last time I saw her, at least in my view. She’d changed her career, moved to a new city, and essentially started a new life there, a more satisfying life in many ways. She’d also found a way to come back to the U.S., if only for a short visit, something she’s been wanting to do for a long time. To me, it seemed like a great deal of accomplishment for three years. To her, it seemed to fall drastically short. 

When we first come into this world, there are things we must learn and ways in which we must grow, fairly immediately, if we’re going to thrive. Growth at that age is animal growth, dynamic and physical. As adults, we grow more like plants, which don’t appear to move observed but are slowly, over time, stretching their leaves out towards the sun. It was easy to see this in my friend, how over the last three years, her branches had all grown so steadily in that direction. It takes others to see this kind of growth. It takes friends to encourage us to move, inch by inch, towards the light.

 

 

Promises to Nora June

During a family gathering a couple of years ago, I found myself talking with the Nurse and the Artist about baby names, and what they might name the children they hoped to have someday. 

Some time later, I had a vivid dream of sitting with them at their kitchen table. In my dream, the Artist was pregnant. They told me the baby was a boy, and they told me what his name, first and middle, would be. Back in waking life, I told them about the dream, and they replied, wow, that’s something – we were sitting at the kitchen table last night, talking about the possibility of naming a boy with those very names (though in their version, first and middle were reversed). 

Nearly a year later when I heard the Artist was pregnant, I wondered if the baby was a boy, and if so, if they would use the name. I thought about what a fun story it would make to tell the kid as he grew up, a little piece of family mythology. It’s amazing how quickly and easily we transfer our dreams onto the next generation, creating expectations for them even before they fully exist here with us.

Yesterday, Nora June made her entrance into the world. It was an unexpected kind of entrance to parents who had spent months actively preparing for a natural birth, and years more thinking about how they would start and shape their family. Nora was a breech baby, who, despite all efforts to get her to turn, remained staunchly in place, feet down. We all assured the parents, only half jokingly, that she knew how she wanted to come into the world, that she was simply insisting on doing this in her own way. It was a powerful reminder to us all. Forget the plans and expectations; this baby has her own reasons for being here and her own things to do. 

When my first niece, Elisa, was born, I made some promises to her about the support I will offer in this life she’s just starting to live. Already these two have different ways of coming into and being in the world, so I think different promises are in order. My promises to you, Nora June: I promise to always dream beautiful dreams for you. I promise to support you in finding your own way of moving through the world. I promise to read you your favorite stories over and over again, and to listen over and over to the stories you’ll love telling. I promise to teach you everything I can about this beautiful world we live in. I promise to remind your Dad of all the crazy and stupid things he did when he thinks something you want to do is crazy and stupid.

Rattlesnake Prayer Beads

A few years ago, the Artist made me a string of prayer beads. Near the end of the string, she included a single vertebra from the skeleton of a rattlesnake.

At the time, I was about to head out into the wilderness of New Mexico alone for awhile, and one of the fears that surfaced, as fears do at such times, was a fear of snakes. As the trip grew closer, I had vivid dreams, and when one night when I dreamed about a mongoose, the fear of snakes began to fade away.

In the last year, I’ve encountered more snakes than probably in my entire life prior to this point. One showed up in the parking lot outside my office building. Last month I encountered four on a three mile hike to the bottom of a small canyon and back. Another appeared in a dream and bit me, directly over the heart.

It’s said that working with snakes in the way that snake handlers do is about developing the ability to transform or neutralize poison. There’s a powerful magnetism in that idea for a would be healer/therapist, cultivating the ability to handle virulent stuff that would otherwise paralyze, inflame or kill a person, the way trauma and abuse tend to do. The catch is, to develop or discover this ability, one must at some point be bitten, and some don’t survive. It’s a mistake to brazenly tempt the snake, to ask for the bite out of egotism or  bravado. Best to cultivate a relationship, to handle the snake with respect and let the snake choose what it’s going to do.

There are many types of prayer, and many ways of praying. The rattlesnake prayer beads are for times when I know I’m going to be picking up a snake. They’re for prayers about wisdom and courage, and the ability to survive a poisonous bite. They’re for handling the old stuff, the dangerous, poisonous stuff that has caused wounds before, the stuff I can’t help but go back to, again and again, until I learn how to change its poison into something meaningful.

Photo by Timo Balk

A Dream About Atalanta

In my dream, I had a beautiful friend, a strong, independent woman who carried a pineapple with her, which, in the dream, was a symbol of strength and independence. A man who admired her and wanted to be with her took the pineapple and sliced it in half, thinking that he had to get rid of it before he could approach her. I was furious. My friend was distressed but tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing, she said. Perhaps he didn’t understand the significance.

I thought of the story of Atalanta, a strong, beautiful athlete who would only marry a man who could beat her in a foot race. But any man who raced and didn’t win would be beheaded. The suitor who finally won had to use trickery. He enlisted the help of Aphrodite, who gave him three golden apples with which to entice and distract Atalanta. It worked; each time he was in danger of being outrun, he rolled a golden apple towards his opponent. While she slowed down to pick them up, he won the race. But the resulting marriage ended in disaster.

I looked at my strong, beautiful friend. I looked at the man who had sliced her identity in half in an effort to get close to her. I wanted to tell my friend the Atalanta story so she could see for herself what was happening, how sometimes, what is most attractive in a person is also what is most frightening and dangerous, how easy it is to think that killing off something in the other person that seems bigger and more powerful than you will make things better. But that’s an ego fantasy. To be in true relationship means engaging the whole person and risking losing one’s head.