The Artist no. 3
Hidden
Used with permission of the artist.
Grandmother knelt in front of her loom by the fire. Her fingers danced across the strings like a harpist. A beautiful pattern grew into a tapestry from nothing more than the tidy balls of colorful yarn beside her. She came to the end of a white strand and worked in a thread of black until I couldn’t see where one began and the other ended.
A log caved in two, and the orange flames of the fire leapt higher. The light caught the age marks of my grandmother’s hands. I turned away to look out the window. Was my life destined to be like her life…endless work until I was too old to wonder anymore?
Her house perched on the ridge of a mountain as solitary and stubborn as she was. Only the moon could climb higher than grandmother’s house, and that night it hung silver and round and pregnant with possibilities. Below the window was a thick forest of evergreen trees and beyond that a bog. The bog was usually wrapped in a thick mist, but that night everything was clear. The land lay barren and unprotected, vulnerable as a secret in an open palm. I thought if I were a decent sort of person I’d look away, but I couldn’t.
On that night, in that brazen circle of moonlight, a woman appeared from the forest and into the bog with her hair wild and silver in the wind. Two wolves loped behind her. One was white and the other black. If they followed her or chased her, I couldn’t tell. The wolves stopped at the edge of the tree line and took up a fight. The woman dropped to her hands and knees and clawed the dark earth with the her bare hands. The wolves rolled and bit until they fell into the bog in a patch of black and white as seamless as grandmother’s weaving. The woman took no notice. She left the hole she’d dug and crawled forward to start another.
“Who is she?” I whispered.
“Ach,” Grandmother kept her weaving in and out in steady rhythm. “The moon is full and you’ve grown old enough to see the world as it truly is. I’ll wager you’ve caught your first glimpse of the bog woman.”
“Where does she come from?”
The wind moaned. The wolves howled. I felt the chill of the night move across my skin.
Grandmother took a ball of yarn from floor and weighed it in her withered hand. The yarn was as dark and rich as the peat soil of the bog. “That answer is buried in the past, all the way down to the first women who ever lived and loved and wished she was better than she’d been.”
“What is she doing?” I asked.
Grandmother cut her dark yarn and took up a line of red.“Long ago, my grandmother told me the bog woman used to meet a man out there at the edge of the forest. It has always been a clandestine spot. When he was young, that man had found a bag of gold on a bench in the courtyard of the market. It had a name on it, but instead of finding the owner, he concealed it in his pocket. On his way home, he saw the hat maker. A hat! He’d never bought a hat before. He’d never needed one.
“The thrill of the purchase made the trees greener, the sky bluer. For a moment in time, he was full of a power he’d never known before. He told the hat maker that his father had sent him to pick it out, because he would need it for a journey they would take together. He wasn’t going anywhere with his father, of course. In fact, the hat would never be any use to him at all. If he ever wore it, his parents would know he hadn’t come by it honestly. When he got home, he hid it under his bed.
“That silly, stolen hat tormented him. Every time there was a knock at the door, he was sure it was the owner of the gold come to tell his parents what he’d done. The shame of his parents knowing his wrong doing frightened him where the theft had not. He buried the hat and the empty bag in the bog like dead men. Even when it was lost in the earth, he feared the owner of the bag would find him and give him away. He’d not minded being a thief, but he couldn’t stand to be known as one.”
Grandmother ran the shuttle through her tapestry. “Of course one day the man left the woman in the bog too. He married a wealthy girl and never returned, but a stolen heart can’t be left behind as easily as a hat. Whatever became of the man, I’m sure he met his fate. The woman stayed in the bog ever since, digging for the lost burdens of someone else’s shame. While she digs, her wolves fight untended.”
“Are those wolves good or evil?” I asked. They both looked wild and dangerous.
“Neither. Everyone lives with their own two wolves, but the rest of us keep them hidden inside. One wolf is called Forgiveness.The other is Fear. Our wolves must fight to the death.”
The woman was bent and old and desperate, but I still saw the beauty in her. If she could find solace from such a battle, certainly I could too.
“Which wolf will win?” I asked.
“That’s her choice. “Grandmother tied a knot at the end of her work. “It will depend on which wolf she feeds.”
Let Her Fall
Witold Pruszkowski (1846-1896)
National Museum of Warsaw
She will live to fall again
In a leap across the cracks
To greener pastures
(or a dance along the edge)
Over nowhere places
Lost in time spaces
She will fall
From the apple tree
laughing
From grace
singing
For him
believing
The ground she fears
The end she knows
Worse if she holds on
To the memories
laughing
With regret
singing
In emptiness
believing
One last leap
Her footing lost
Balance gained
To catch herself
Cracked open
Not broken
Resurrected
She will live
Let her fall
Beginnings, Endings and the Surprises in Between
When I was a little girl, I had a recurring dream that a beautiful woman with dark hair smiled benevolently down at me.
“Would you like to see your life?” She asked. “How you live, and how you die?”
I can be a bit on the impatient side. I’ve always struggled with the urge to read the last page of the book first, so I let the woman take me by the hand. She led me into an ornate theater. Twin angels stood on either side of red curtains.
“Just say the word,” she waved toward the angels, “and they will open your life for you.”
As I sat in my velvet seat, I began to have my doubts. I was curious, but to lose the anticipation of Christmas mornings and new school years might be a terrible price to pay for having it handed over upfront. Eager as I’ve always been to know how everything turns out, there is nothing I love more than the surprise of a new beginning. To have loss and fear and hurt discovered at once didn’t sound so great either. And death? I didn’t want to think about my life ending at all.
“No,” I said.
And the dream disappeared. Every time.
A few weeks ago, I was standing in a little Chicago toyshop buying stocking stuffers for my children. My cell phone rang, and I dug through my purse for it. As usual, I couldn’t find it under all the mess, and I missed the call. It was the doctor’s office, and I’d been waiting for the results of a recent CT scan of my kidney. When I called back, the receptionist transferred me straight to the doctor.
As soon as I heard her voice, I knew something was going to be wrong.
“The good news is that the CT scan shows it is only a benign cyst on your kidney.”
I let out a huge breath. It wasn’t a tumor.
“The bad news is that the CT scan also picked up the lower half of your lungs, and they are covered in the same cysts.”
“What does that mean?” I dropped my basket of gifts and stepped outside, surrounded by the noise and the wind of the city. That will always feel like home to me.
“Well, it’s very abnormal. I had to consult with the pulmonologist. He thinks it is consistent with a very rare lung disease called lymphangioleiomyomatosis. We need to schedule you immediately for a CT scan of your lungs, and the pulmonologist is clearing his schedule to make room for you as soon as possible. This is urgent.”
Urgent.
Nothing about my body had ever been urgent. I’ve had colds and flus, a broken nose and plenty of torn muscles. I’ve given birth twice. Never urgent. I was a dancer. I thought my body was under my control.
Urgent
I heard the word over and over in the rhythm of the train ride back to where I was staying. I heard it in the hum of my computer as I waited for it to turn on. I heard it in the click of the keys as I typed LAM into the Google search bar.
8-10 year life expectancy
Diminished quality of life
Lung transplant
Suffocation
Those were the words that stood out as I sat alone and tried to comprehend how what I read on the screen applied to me. I couldn’t. I went out and drank far too much wine instead. After that, I went for lashing out at people I care about for things that didn’t really matter. Everything seemed so immediately important. Every happy moment was ten times happier and every hurt feeling ten times more painful. My skin and heart and mind were supersonic and there was no way for me to control it. Why was everyone else so healthy and willing to thoughtlessly waste my time?
I know that wasn’t reality, but it was my reality.
At 5:00 pm on the night before Thanksgiving, I sat in the pulmonologist’s office for my official diagnosis of lymphangioleiomyomatosis. I actually beat some odds. I passed all the breathing tests, and I am still in the very early stages of the disease. Researchers have learned a great deal about LAM over the last few years, and I am in a great place to beat those 10 year odds. No one knows when or if I will ever suffer the debilitation of LAM. It’s too rare a disease, only 1500 cases diagnosed in the US.
And I’m still dancing in The Nutcracker this weekend so it doesn’t have me yet.
I haven’t gotten over that immediacy of life part yet. I’m still quicker to happiness or anger or sadness. I still feel the need to say what I might have held back before, or do what I might have left undone. I’m not the same person I was before that Tuesday afternoon phone call. I suppose it’s going to take some time to discover this new version of the best and the worst of me.
I’ve been going once a week to the Chinese acupuncturist. On my first visit, he flicked his needles all over my body and dimmed the light.
“Sometimes life brings us a challenge that is bigger than we think we are,” he said. “But we still fight.”
He patted me gently on the knee, closed the door, and left me alone to do just that.
As I lay there, I thought…this is my life! The one that waited for me behind the curtain when I was a little girl. The moments between beginnings and endings that I’ve been able to watch unfold with the precious gift of time.
This is my life.
Maybe it was just a little girl’s dream, but I’m glad life didn’t fall into my lap all at once. I’m glad I’ve been able to collect my memories and carry them with me one at a time. And I do carry them. All of them. The people I’ve met are precious to me. I used to think love was my greatest weakness and that when the world stopped amazing me I’d have an easier time of things. Now that I know how fleeting life is, I’m glad I still have a sense of wonder.
Last night, I had a new dream. I was in my backyard spread out on my back in the snow, but it wasn’t cold. There was a white cloud above me, and I watched it give birth to new snowflakes. They fell toward me, taking shape as they got closer, each one a beautiful, individual surprise. Every flake landed on my body. Some felt wonderful as they melted against my skin but some of them burned too. I knew if I got up and went inside, I wouldn’t have to feel anything at all…but I wasn’t ready. It was worth it to witness the beauty and wonder between the beginning and the end.
I’m sorry lymphangioleiomyomatosis. I know you want to take my breath away, but you’ll have to get in line. Life already got here first.
My First Anniversary in Three Stories
Once upon a time, I slipped away from my friends and ended up walking all night through the streets of Chicago. As dawn softened the sky, I sat down on a set of concrete steps and looked up. A solitary, tenacious star still hung between two buildings in spite of the city lights and the strength of the sun. That star in the sky and me on the concrete ground, both of us searching for the lonely courage to linger where we didn’t belong. I tried to share the feeling of that moment with somebody once. I wanted to turn it into a story of the deepest part of myself, but all I came to was a medieval map of the edge of my world. The great mystery of myself beyond what I can explain, an unexplored ocean written in ornate and ancient hand…here are dragons. Travel there and you will be lost.
Did you know that carbon and oxygen are attracted to one another? If you don’t, you aren’t alone. It turns out carbon and oxygen aren’t aware of it either. Oxygen might rub right up against carbon, and they still won’t remember they’ve bonded before. It takes something earth shattering, catastrophic or wild for them to change their solitary perception. A bolt of lightning from the sky crashes into a tree. The carbon in the tree starts to tremble. The oxygen in the air begins to shake. They move faster and faster until they collide and …snap…they remember how good it feels to connect. A flame born from the heat of attraction. Maybe that’s why stories are best told around a fire. Those burning embers of carbon and oxygen match that strange inner light of imagination. In life we knock around forgetful of one another. In stories a sudden spark of creativity reminds us how good it feels to be found again.
And speaking of found…a group of tourists once embarked off the California coast for a day of seal watching. They found the long, dark shadow of a great white shark lurking beneath the boat. A nervous chatter spread through the crowd. The captain reminded them that sharks eat seals, which means seal season is also shark season. Things calmed down until a mother orca and her baby where spotted alongside the boat. The orca are top predators, but would this mother be any match to the cold, calculated powers of a great white? Mother and child disappeared below the dark water. The shark’s fin circled ominously above. The mother orca burst through the surface and crashed against the side of the shark. In the blink of an eye, she had the great white turned on his back in her mouth. When a shark is turned upside down, he falls immediately into a catatonic state. Unable to fight, the great white was easy prey. The orca killed him in an instant before the amazed and horrified eyes of a group of tourists.
How was an orca able to defeat the primal king of the ocean? A shark travels and hunts from the instinctual information of his limbic system. Orcas live in ornate and complex communities. They learn and grow through language. Orcas tell each other stories. It was the creative use of her ancestral tales that made the orca the victor that day.
When an orca tells a story, does she ever come to the end of her song and fall into the inky dark of her own great mystery? I wonder if she resonates with a language that can reach beyond the dragons to the beauty and destruction of a life well lived, to the freedom of being lost and the wild, catastrophic pleasure in being found.
That would be one great story.
One year ago today, I wrote the first entry to this blog. It has taken me on quite a journey. Here’s to the uncharted mysteries of life.
A Letter to my Daughter on Life, Love and Growing Pains
To My Beautiful Daughter,
You will be the hero of your own story. ..
Your best friend will be the hero of her story. Your teachers, coaches, boyfriends and rivals will all play the lead role in their own adventures too. We are heroes among heroes, all of us living out our call to adventure. That is the most brilliant and the most confusing part of life. Our villains aren’t always villainous, and while we might accept that there are dragons to slay, it’s harder to admit that once in a while we become someone else’s dragon (which doesn’t feel very heroic). At some point, wonderful as you are, you will love a worthy person or two who will not find it in their heart to love you back. How can the hero not be loved by all? If you are anything like your mother, you will occasionally rage at heaven for such injustices. Isn’t the journey hard enough?
The truth is that your heart will be broken. It will hurt like hell, you will swear never to do it again, but I hope you will. I am 41 years old, and I’m still capable of a broken heart. I wouldn’t have it any other way. My heart breakers have been some of my best teachers. That doesn’t mean they were all at their best. Some were wonderful but just not right, others were real shits. I’ve been lied to, fooled, had a man claim he was my friend only to leave right when I needed a friend the most. I spent a long time trying to discover why, until I realized that what matters is the lessons in myself they gave to me. I have been a fool for love. Astoundingly foolish. Silly. Obsessed. Shy. Frightened. Blind…but if I’d never been any of the above, I wouldn’t have discovered that I am also sexy, smart, funny…and abundantly willing to take a risk. I love a great adventure, and I will dust myself off (eventually) when I fall. Remember when you lose someone who was special to you that their leaving doesn’t mean they weren’t a gift. Remember that no quality can be special in someone else unless it was special to you first and foremost. Let them go and pray they find everything they are looking for.
You will break hearts too. You will be someone else’s lesson. There are times in my life when I have not been at my best. I’ve been wonderful but just not right, and I’ve been a real shit. At some point in your life, you have to take a look at that part of the journey as well. I have lied, and I have fooled, and I have left a man right when he needed a friend the most. Those were also lessons in myself.
All it takes is one look at you to realize how short I’ve fallen in my definition of love. It isn’t simply that I would give up my own life for you. At the end of the day, that’s as biological as it is spiritual in nature. The amazing and incomprehensible part is the unconditional gift you have given me. Yes, I know we fight, but I know I can be unreasonable, nutty, tired, a failure or a success, and you will still love me and count on me. Of all my gifts, that is the most rare and precious.
I won’t lie to you. This life, this growing up can be painful. Do you know what else hurt like hell? The day you were born. Opening a body up, stretching it to its extreme in order to birth a brand new person is unavoidably painful. I can’t think of anything more symbolic of every new stage in life. Our hardest and most painful days are the days we stretch and open. The natural process of a new creation. There is a moment in childbirth when a woman doubts her ability to make it to the end. That moment is called transition, and it is an age old sign that the last phase has come. A baby is about to be born. Those moments in life when you are sure you can’t do it anymore…wait, and remember that it is a sure sign that the miracle is about to happen. Trust me, it will be worth it.
Be the midwife to your own life. See your pain as your ability to create something beautiful and new and never seen before. Remember that love is as much about letting go as it is about holding dear. Life is a great adventure. Sometimes you have to fall in order to discover the path to the top. In love and life, take the risk and say what you mean. You don’t have to live with anyone else’s regrets but your own.
And always, above all else, always remember that this strange and wayward soul you picked as your mother loves you with all her heart.
Love,
Mom
Find Your Story 