"Maturity has a fragrance. It gives a tremendous beauty to the individual. It gives intelligence — the sharpest possible intelligence. It makes him nothing but love. His action is love, his inaction is love. His life is love, his death is love. He is just a flower of love."
~ Osho (Maturity-the Responsibility of Being Oneself)

"The Only emperor is the emperor of ice- cream".
~ Wallace Stevens (The Emperor of Ice- Cream)

A difficult week — lots of constriction, armoring, anger, grief, confusion. Not sure how it all started. I think I was so revved about getting this site going and enjoying putting it all together, that I didn’t notice something else was going on on a different track, and then it had built enough power that it surged in and I was awash in it. A combination of things — mostly related to endings, deaths, responsibility, need, love.

I think I am starting menopause — which is weird enough to think, let alone write. I can’t quite yet identify with that happening to me — but that doesn’t seem to be stopping it. I did not have a period last month or this (no chance of pregnancy) and am waking up several times a night feeling like high voltage is surging through me. Also, throughout the day, every so often I will break out in a sweat. It really does not feel good — am going to see a nurse that works with it from a holistic vantage, so maybe that will help. But I think it is the symbolic rather than the symptomatic that is most disturbing. The menopause, combined with thinking of visiting mom one last time, combined with the hurricane anniversary, combined with launching this site — all that mixing in a turbulent brew where things have deeper than just their surface meanings.

I fee like I am moving more deeply into maturity, but still now sure what that will mean for me and how I can flow in it. The in-between zones always seem to be both the most difficult and the richest. When you transition/transform/change there are deaths and grief and anger and confusion, but also all this feeling of potential and complexity and depth. I feel like screaming and wailing and exploding, and at the same time, at a deeper level, (or maybe a farther out one) feel the current carrying me along.

"Fun". That’s the word that came to me this week again and again in waves of grief and heaviness. Thinking of a much younger me (this includes me even a few years ago) for whom life was primarily about fun. I did not think about meaning and soul —I thought about fun. And had quite a bit of it actually, over the years. Was it a house of cards? Yes. Did I sense, without being conscious of it, the abyss beneath the thin veneer I walked on? Yes. But often it felt like fun, even if Twinkie like in how fast it was consumed or how it left me empty and wanting more. Would I trade it for who I am now or what I have now? Absolutely not. But feeling so clearly lately that that way of being is gone forever has really stirred up a lot. Images come to me as I work out or lay in the sun, images of past times. One clear one is of me on a fall mid-western night at the high school football game. I’m standing, elbows on the metal railings of the bleachers. A clear cool night, the dark sky glowing from the bright lights, the field vivid green, the boys’ uniforms so white. Smell of popcorn, fountain Pepsi, sound of the crowd and cheerleaders cheering, pompoms swooshing. I’m wearing my dark brown corduroy/velvet hotpants and jacket, with dark opaque hose and leather boots, scoping the scene and feeling like the hottest thing imaginable. Knowing Jim D. was out there somewhere, a senior (to my freshman) with a bad rep who drove an orange and white Camaro. And who was rumored to be interested in me. That feeling of power squiggling through me, the power and excitement of being an attractive animal. When you are so young it is effortless and seemingly without end. Did I feel safe or satisfied or was my heart engaged? No. But it felt fun. Like the swimming and skiing and minibiking all day every day of the summer, or dancing at the teen club. That didn’t stop for me after high school — I kept it going a long time. And now it truly feels gone. Because I, in a way, have killed it or let it die/lose energy. The deeper I have touched into my heart, my core, the less energized is that part of me that lived in a kind of irridescent bubble of "prettiest/hippest/funnest", where need was abhorrent — my need someone else’s need. Where responsibility was a drag and commitment claustrophobic. Where the only "relationships" I could tolerate were with men who didn’t really want to get too close.

Which brings me to the Mother part of this entry. My mom is in an Alzheimer’s home nowadays, and mostly out of touch with this world. I don’t know how much longer she will be in this world at all, in fact. And so I have been thinking of going to see her for what may be the last time. To try to write about all that is my mother and me would be a book (and probably not one lots of people would want to read) but what is haunting me right now, what I"m wrestling with, is if I could be with her, for once, in a real, grounded way — staying connected to my heart, my core, while being in her presence. It’s hard to convey the magnitude of that to someone on the outside of the dynamic. And it fills me with doubt and grief and shame when I wonder, even now, if I could. Her need has always been so vast — sometimes when I sink into thinking about it, it seems like it was really the only thing genuine left in her. Like the rest of her was shattered and scattered to the wind, but her need (and concomitant fear) remained. And I was the primary focus of it a good part of my life — unconsciously collaborating with her in that for years, being her shining star . When I became "conscious", when I began to coalesce my true self, all I could feel in relation to her need was repulsion and pushing away and running away. But I didn’t get completely out of her orbit — just danced at the edges of it where she couldn’t really get a firm hold on me again.

In the last few years, as I have broken the pull of her gravity, I’ve been able to love her more and feel compassion — but this is easiest at a distance. To be in her energy field, be physically embraced by her, is still something that sets my own energy to blanching and withdrawing. And I don’t like that — I don’t want to feel that way. I feel grateful to her for all she did to make me life better than hers, and I know she did her best. I feel, in a way, I stand on her back to reach another level. I was feeling a lot of shame this week about not being able to easily imagine going to see her and be with her and love her. But talking to Christopher helped some. He reminded me that you can’t be heart to heart with someone when they are not in touch with their own heart — when they are trying to control you. You can have compassion, or a kind of disengaged love, but not the heart to heart. Their own "connector" is not available. I think of mom and , as I said, cannot even get a sense of who she might have been if she hadn’t been so devastated early in life — what she might have been in her core. Even dad, who was messed up in a different way, had things that were truly meaningful to him — his fishing, baseball. But mom was like a chameleon, constantly shifting depending on whom she was with. Always it was the need that drove her — to wear mask after mask, trying to get someone to make it ok for her.

So need has been a tough one for me — hers, mine, others’. And fun seemed the antidote, the escape. And responsibility too similar. And love too intertwined. But as I move into the territory of maturity, I feel the edges of the possibility there. It feels heavy right now, at times, in the initial stages. But what Christopher and I also talked about was my moving more and more into a different way of having "fun". I already have the experience of something that feels deeper or more satisfying than "fun" as I knew it — being in nature, my bodywork, creating beauty in my home. Those are deep nourishing sources of pleasure. I’ve spent the last years really exploring and connecting with my self. And I think now, as I move further into maturity, I am feeling the edges of more complex areas that may be "fun".

One thing that I know is critical right now is to stay aware of my body, be in it , experience it, tend to it. I had forgotten how much it can impact my emotions and psyche when the armoring kicks in. My neck and upper back have become fused into a solid board this week. Which creates anxiety, anger, or the desire to start playing bumper cars in traffic. Which then makes the muscles tighter, which then………and on and on in a building negative loop. When it finally dawned on me this was going on, I got myself to the hot tub every night and focused the jets on scapula and neck, letting my body go limp in the rippling currents — letting it be rippled by them. Also lots of ball work, draping over it on my belly and letting the shoulders and neck hang and slowly let go. I felt much better by Friday after tending to myself this way, looser, less constricted — more of a sense of flow.

On a lighter note, it was Rafe’s birthday this week, and I gave her her favorites — alchohol (scotch), chocolates (Neuhaus), and cooking toys (Dean and Deluca spice grinder). She wrote me an email that night after spending her day piddling and cooking things with her birthday bushel of crabs. A section read, " The next time I tell you I am buying whole crabs, remind me that they have eyes and will creep me out — a can of crabmeat is so much more removed…my roomate says maybe I need to be more in touch with my inner hunter, but my inner hunter can barely handle potato eyes…so now I’m sitting here eating chocolates, drinking scotch, and have a purring Lilith curled next to me, looking like the lima bean of love. She is very smug and self-satisfied, having escaped outside to explore in the dark for a full 20 minutes."

In resonance with my internal endings (and hopefully beginnings), my flowers are mostly dying, going to seed, though there is one vivid patch of color left.

Zinnias are so dear — simple, bright, and keep on giving. I also found a huge pod that had fallen from the magnolia tree, with seeds the likes of which I have never seen. Big glossy red tabs that look like candy.

Bursting from the rough honeycombed brown. How such flashy red-hot frivolous seeds can create such a cool elegant flower is just one of the mysterious delights of nature.

LATER

I almost hesitate to post an entry like this because it embarrasses me when I go back and read it. Like I worry people will think I am a shallow to write such things about "oh, I was so pretty" and "oh I just can’t stand it when mom needs me". But one of my aims in writing here, is to be as real as I can — being pretty ISN’T my main focus nowadays. It’s also frustrating to write and read this because I think I"m only getting it partially — like there’s more that I will find out in time, and so this feels incomplete right now. Also, what still amazes me, though I’ve experienced it again and again, is that I can write something like this and feel it intensely, and then come back and read it the next day, and not feel nearly as bogged down by it. Like right now, I read this entry as I sit on a cool fallish morning, eating a piece of cardamom coffee cake and sipping rich coffee, and I feel more at peace with it all. I really do think that being whole means you accept the dualities, the cycles — that you can segue from bursts of creativity to emptied out lethargy to heavy grief, and not be convinced that each will last forever. I was listening to a Marion Woodman tape last night, and she talks about keeping one foot in and one foot out. Meaning that being whole and mature means having one part of you in the experience, whether it’s wild joy or furious anger, and another part out — the part that knows "this too shall pass".