Old post from both a sliver in time and forever

I didn’t expect to be crying when the knock on the door finally came so the lady passing me the vase with a “Good morning! Here are your flowers! Have a great day!” got to play an eerily-gleeful role in an emotional breakdown.“

They’ll be re-delivered sometime between 8-12,” the flower shop had told me the day before and ends up “8-12” was too broad a range to predict I’d be standing in front of my computer at my bar-height table watching 10,000 Japanese sing Ode to Joy, newly-aware that the only outcome for any of us is to fully ingest the suffering of the world.

For I’ve been going through some times lately. Darkness embedding itself so profoundly into my days that it’s not that I don’t want to see the end of them as it is that I don’t know who I am or why I’m even crying; I don’t possess the clarity to determine what to say, or how to feel, or what to do to change it; and all of the distractions that have always worked, do nothing; it’s like I’m nothing and everyone else is too.

And in better times, my tears might have felt shameful trying to escape the bright light of this soul delivering flowers, who’d be left now to navigate out of this awkward scenario. But when better times are closer to the forest edge than where you’ve been parked, you don’t care. The flower shop couldn’t tell me who the flowers were from and it wouldn’t matter; while many folks have gone out of their way in this lifetime to make sure I felt unloved (or punished, or insecure, or judged), that isn’t the case lately/right now; many folks have been wonderful and generous during this trying time.

And yet something grabbed onto me when my cat died 12/7; the event becoming the pulled Jenga block representing the final traumatic event after which I moved on inside a brutal and cruel honesty. Where I don’t want to beautify this rotten pile of barren psychological capitalist shit or believe things will get better for me; because they haven’t gotten better and they won’t and it’s too painful to believe otherwise. The common thread in all of my heartbreak/hardship now cutting off my windpipe is me, and my yammering on in Libra naïveté about love and resilience isnt gonna help self-care my way out of this. For (I can feel this even though i also know fucking nothing) there’s nothing more loving than this soul of mine making me look and understand the hunger and the weariness. There’s nothing more resilient and caring than watching Japanese sing Ode to Joy—a beloved tradition since 1918 brought to them by German WWI POWs—and weeping at their love while also weeping for the inhumanity who dropped atomic bombs on their grandparents.

And I’ve met love; I know what it is. I give it and I feel it; love is exuberance, unpracticed, spontaneous, an epiphany so joyfully experienced nothing stressful or discordant has ever existed. Love preaches from a dimension where “you/me/us” doesn’t even exist because “separate” is a word we suddenly have never known. But love is also everything, and everyone; it’s the screams, it’s the singing, it’s the forgiveness of racist war crimes. You don’t get love without the brutality of empathy; you don’t get to “no separation” without fully ingesting all of the horror. Holding out comfort from pain is how we love one another; it is The Lesson; it is the shackles we agree to bind ourselves to in order to merge with the fullest understanding of freedom.

And I have surgery tomorrow—on 1/11, I sent 125 texts to families whose animals I care for informing them I’d be out—and I’m scared they’ll find cancer (we won’t know for sure until tomorrow), I’m broke, disappointed, foggy, and folks have been so kind and loving to me, informing that they see my kindness and my love; saying it and trying to help in the manner they can. “Maybe the car accident happened so you’d find the cyst.” And text messages revealing their own vulnerabilities (“those chapters when it rains and pours are tough; sending love and fortitude”) along with surprise money sent over “to help while I’m not working;” so many messages of support and clear tenderness. These flowers (sent by I’m not yet sure who) being carried now towards my table joining me as I take all that folks have been and scrape nails against chalkboard with “or maybe the accident, and the escape, and the MRI and my cat dying, are my prep for going;” Maybe this brutal honesty I’m typing right this second is me offering the counterpoint of: being loved and being loving isn’t enough to justify avoiding hardship. In fact, unless my science is mixed up ;), every impeccably loving and loved soul that’s ever existed has gone on to pass, some purportedly doing so in the youth of a too-short earth experience.

And I’m not gonna pretty this post up. Don’t necessarily want my girls to read it before tomorrow but I’ve never lied to them about hardship. How could I? We’ve lived in the brutality of cold motherfuckers and grew up in the clout nation amid a PR machine spinning our actual/real human stressors into “❤️💕😘❤️💕💕❤️.” And so far I’ve made it our brand to extract from fucked up experiences epiphanies so beautiful we are the lens, the filter, the instrument qualifying the timbre of the song.

I myself sat with historical moments of fucking depravity—Truman: “we dropped those bombs to save lives”—because every human on this planet is goodness in the process of becoming.

But 12/7 I couldn’t live there anymore.

And I won’t resolve it for this post. Truman “Saved lives!” yet killed us all by tainting our human awareness with the collective depressive episode known as “not fucking caring.”

I’m only stating the facts. Are we even here for love or what the actual fuck?

*******

Last Saturday, a friend—who I’ve used as a medium—and I had tea.

I sit for her—her two cats and, now, her newly-adopted senior rescue dog—and after she received my text to sit families detailing all that had happened to me over these months culminating in me needing time off, she’d asked if we could have tea.

Tea Zaanti, Saturday, 1/28 at 1 pm.

And some folks can handle the truth. I told her where I was at; that I can’t unsee the misery and don’t know if I want to; don’t know if I can; don’t know who I am, don’t know why this is happening. Merely all I know is that I’m inside a painful awareness, with brief moments of clarity on flower delivery days; avoiding the casual apathy of this busy world and not doing what I’ve always done: tidying to see the patterns, the beauty, the love. I told her about the Japanese singing, the origin of the tradition of doing so, and the flowers. That the flowers had been from a couple I sit for, who’d adopted three senior cats who went on to all pass within months of each other; their newest middle-aged Ginger rescues, Sam and Moose, entertaining us all with their antics. The card on the flowers had read: “We are so sorry for the passing of your cat. Seeing how much love you have for all animals, we can’t imagine the depth of loss you’re experiencing for one of your own.” Bringing more tears.

And my friend told me she knew that I was in some major times; with so many things happening so close together movement coalesces into the completely unavoidable. You either move or you will die. She then offered her own life experiences and lessons, adding that what she knows is that the pinnacle of all of our process here is to be inclusive in awareness of each and every aspect of our human existence which includes both love and pain. And that for anything to be one, and for love to be felt in every heart, that those experiences have to merge and exist as something.

And this isn’t the place where I wrap all this up. And good for me for not doing so; good for me for having a soul that forced me (violently) to live outside of clout-chasing. So I told her I don’t have that awareness yet and that I won’t rush it, that it felt false to do so.

Then I sat in the warmth of our esoteric compatibility and I told her what a joy her kindness is and that I’d let her know how my surgery went and, once outside the restaurant, hugged her and said that I loved her before I dashed off.