Slow Down Feel Love

My Lily-face made it through sugery splendidly. I am so ridiculously relieved. It will be a long two weeks of healing now, and hoping she doesn't pick out any of her stitches, but I am so hopeful. : )

Tomorrow will be another day for writing. I intend to send out a package to my parents and one to my friends in North Carolina, both including love notes. I also intend to write a belated birthday letter to my sponsored child, Mostakin, congratulating him on turning nine years old.

I’m hoping to be able to finish my yoga sculpture tomorrow, and to be able to do more studying of the Italian language. I’ll be working on the chapter about introducing yourself and talking about where you come from. I’ve mastered everything up to there, I just need to take time out to proceed. I’ll be spending all day listening to the Makepeace Brothers, and soaking in their love and sincerity.

I also plan on donating blood and cleaning my room… but we’ll see where that goes, haha.

In the mean time, I’ll be writing.


Last night I had a sudden revelation, spurred by Stumble Upon, my latest resource for inspiration and beauty. I can spend hours stumbling from webpage to webpage, finding everything- ingenuity, music, art, beauty, community, and culture. Last night, Stumble Upon showed me something that wrenched me open, and let everything I didn’t know I was holding in way out into the open. It was a video, set to emotional music, of a cat trying to revive its dead friend. You could clearly see its confusion and distress, and from the moment it started, my heart began to break. I thought about stumbling away, but I couldn’t. It would have been wrong to. You can’t just look away from the suffering in the world and pretend it doesn’t exist, then walk around like you understand it all… you have to let it in, you have to experience it; otherwise you’re just numb and naive. A minute into the video I was crying. By the end, I was sobbing uncontrollably. The worry of the past few days for the comfort and health of my rat, Lily, which I had assumed I had overcome, came bubbling back to the surface, bringing with it all of the loss I had ever felt in my life. I relived the deaths of every single person and animal I had loved with emotion just as raw, feeling the desperation, the misery, and the hopelessness to help. The guilt. Then, beyond that, I felt the loss and devastation of the whole world. I felt every person affected by death, starvation, humiliation, and suffering; and I wept for all of it.

Then, suddenly, gasping for breath and wracked with sobs, tears soaking my face and shirt, I sat up. A realization struck me. This, that I was feeling, was love. Not romantic, heart-fluttery, butterfly-stomached love. No, this was unabashed, untainted, pure, all-encompassing LOVE. This was the love of the entire universe that I was feeling. It is impossible to feel grief without first feeling love, and in that moment I could feel the underlying magnitude of all the love existing within every single living thing all over the world. And my capacity to embrace this love, I then realized, was the evidence of my connection to all of it.

There is a type of tree, a Quaking Aspen called Pando, which appears on the surface to be a forest of trees. However, if you look under the line of soil, there is, in fact, only one root system. These trees that look as though they are simply standing near to each other, are actually just appendages of one SINGLE plant. They are all connected.

They are ONE.



As are WE. Our root system is LOVE. We may appear to be alone in our lives, moving from one place to another, unaffected by those around us, but in reality we are surrounded by love. And like that plant, if one of us is affected, it can be felt by others very far away.

Yesterday I felt all of it, and it was a beautiful and affirming thing. It was the exact experience that I needed to help me cope with feelings I’ve been holding onto. Sorrow is such a tricky thing, it can follow you at such a distance that you believe it to be gone entirely, until the day it pops up out of nowhere to overwhelm you. My guilt, over so much of the loss in my past, is one of those types of sorrow. But now I know that the only thing that keeps it tethered to me, following so resolutely, is love.

For one example, I still feel so guilty for what happened to my little kitten, Eve- something that I know deep down was just an unfortunate accident. I realize now that the reason this guilt will never leave me is that I still love her. I will always love her, even though she has been gone for longer than she was ever here, I loved her as much today as I loved her when I held her in my hands the day she died. And now, despite the pain I may occasionally feel, I am so immensely grateful for my capacity to love so enduringly, and my grief and my guilt and my sorrow are all constant reminders of my beautiful capacity to LOVE.

I love with such a passion, it sometimes takes my breath away. Last night, I realized that I love so much more strongly than I thought possible. Today I love even more. My heart bursts with it, and I give it freely. Take as much as you need. I love you, so.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

Love for My Lily-Face

I’m on the verge of tears tonight, weighed down with worry and memory. Just less than two and a half years ago, my sweet baby Delilah was lost to a battle with a facial tumor. She was just a rat.

No.

She was a friend, a comfort, a confidant, a companion, a ceaseless fountain on love and support. She loved me unconditionally and she was torn from me violently over a three week period after a three year friendship. She suffered and I can’t help but blame myself. I feel like I let her down. I have let down so many…

It was a tornado of events even before she got sick. I was homeless for the first time. Ashamed and beaten, I was already planning on going home. I then lost my store as well as I discovered that my manager didn’t like me and was transferring me out. During a nearly shattering blow to my recently built up image of my own self-worth, then a careful period of reinforcement, both at subsequent music venues, I also had to deal with the falseness of a supposed good friend, and the heavenly appearance of a new friend. Then- tragedy, my Delilah was torn from me unceremoniously. I didn’t even have anywhere to bury her. And, as if I didn’t have enough on my plate, just days later, the car accident that sent me packing, spirit broken, tail between my legs. I’ve never been as shaken as I was that night in the Arby’s parking lot with my bags over my shoulders, tow-truck disappearing in the distance, and no one answering on the other line of my desperately punched phone numbers. I couldn’t stop myself from letting go the wrenching sobs born in my chest. I have never been so low.

Now, two and a half years later, the scars still run deep. I don’t notice them until moments like these. When I brought my Delilah into the vet after first noticing the tumor on her cheek, they were confident that surgery to remove the mass would be a successful solution to our problem. They were very very wrong.

I have to bring my sweet Lily-face, dear friend for the past year and a half, to the vet in eight hours. She has a mammary tumor larger than a tangerine and the vet said she was confident that surgery to remove the mass will be successful. Logically she’s right. The tumor is run of the mill. It is most likely benign, as most rats’ mammary tumors are, and there is no evidence of any other tumors growing in any other region of her body. The tumor does not seem to have infiltrated her chest cavity, and will most likely take half an hour to remove at most.

Nevertheless, I feel a deep seeded sense of impending doom. I am terrified to the pit of my being. I can’t sleep, my stomach churns, my hands shake. I am reliving every single moment of those months I spent in Phoenix, the rollercoaster ride of emotions, the loss. I miss Delilah too much to express, and I worry even more for the safety of my baby, Lily. There are so many things that can go wrong, and there are so many loved ones that I have lost tragically and unexpectedly: My Nonno, My Grandpa, Prince, Eve, Tulip, Spunky, Delilah, Thumper, Shamu, Steve. There is no line for me that separates family from friends from animals from strangers. For me, love is love, and I love with undeniable, undying passion.

I love Lily.

I am so scared.

Like Language

Music is like a language that I can understand perfectly, but that I cannot speak. It is so frustrating to hear a wonderful conversation that I cannot join. The language I speak is one of a different dimension. I speak the language of subtle curves in the fabric of space. I speak a language of patient silence and aching back muscles, of frustration and repetition and bandaged fingertips. I speak the language of sculpture, and for this I am grateful.
But the only language I have ever truly wanted to know has always been music. I want so badly to let beautiful sounds erupt from my throat and melodies to strum their way from my fingertips. I’ve wanted to add bits of myself to a drum circle or an open mic night, to make people’s toes tap and lips curl upward as their voices rise alongside my own. I have always wanted to stand alone before ten thousand people and to share a melody with each and every one of them, as personal as if we were soul mates.
The language of sculpture has the ability to tell beautiful stories and to withstand the tests of time; even to affect the masses among the best of us- yet it is quite a solitary song, to be sung alone and viewed alone and interpreted alone. It is a wonderful thing that I have and I want so badly to appreciate it fully, but I cannot help but feel as though I am missing one of my senses, and the world is incomplete.
Maybe I’ll learn to sculpt music, and then I’ll be whole. Until then I’ll listen and dream.