episode 265, in which rachiepoo attempts to leave town on vacation...

down this road

after a cup of coffee and a treat,

with the top down, so i can smell pulp wood and magnolias,












i will see this face

and this face...













and this face...

and faces that remind me of this face...

and then see this face,

and then, i will come home. i'll have the phone fully charged...be ready.

mil besos,

rmg

me and the Lord...we have an understanding...

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. "

--norman maclean











when i was in middle school, i went to camp every summer. my camp was at the beach, and we did all sorts of field trips, outings, and sleep-overs away from camp. that place changed my life. those experiences crafted a whole life for me, and i am still applying all those lessons, all these years later. i still go to the beach expecting to see amazing things. i sit on the waterline, and i hear the song the waves sing, watch them clap their hands in the foamy crests, and marvel at the life that teems under and over all that water. the rhthym of the waves, the sets they make, the pull of them, as they follow what's on the bottom, the way you can read them after you've watched them every summer of your life, and how after a day in the water, when you lay down on your bed to sleep, you can still feel their pull and push, that rhthym that beats a four-count measure in my head in the pool, and a four-count measure in my heart, sometimes that's all that gets me to sleep at night.

i remember being in the water off key west, marveling through my snorkle mask at the beauty of the reef. i remember the overwhelming compulsion to close my eyes. and i did close them. i relaxed into the water, warm as a bath, and soft as silk. i have no idea how long i floated there, above the fish, and below the sky, bathed in salt water, rocked by the gentle waves, with the sounds of the boat and people around me muffled by the sea. and i remember this overwhelming feeling of being home. i was so taken aback with that thought...i had never been here before. and then i remember that i certainly had been someplace awfully similar. in that flash, i remembered my mother's womb, and the waters of my birth. this was a profound and cataclysmic realization, and just as soon as i grasped it, it slipped away, again. i understood why i had been pulled to the water, why we are all pulled toward it, why it must be the sign of our birth and re-birth. and all those days of camp, all the family trips to the beach, the pools, the rivers, the tanks, the lakes, all the drops of all the water coalesced into an ocean of such size and depth and width that i was left speechless, crying into my mask, overwhelmed at the scope of such love.

at camp, we used to go to the aquarium every summer...we went to two aquariums, one in port a and the other in corpus. the one in corpus was my favorite. it was brand new the first time i went, and to this day, i still associate the smell of new carpet with that building and those tanks full of such strange and wonderful creatures. i remember standing in front of one of the big amphibian tanks, and seeing this massive kemp's ridley turtle swim by me. the counselor standing next to me said that she loved turtles best of all, because they looked so wise and gentle, and that they reminded her of God. that comment has never really left me, and i have rolled it over and over in my mind, sometimes looking at turtles, sometimes looking at other things, and sometimes looking at nothing but the back of my eyelids.

my first pet was a turtle. his name was jeremiah, and i think i was about three when my dad brought him home to me. i remember that he lived in my room, in a big bowl. and i liked him. at some point, mom and dad convinced me that jeremiah needed to go live at the park, by the creek. i don't know if this is because they were tired of taking care of their three year old's pet, or if jeremiah died and they didn't want to traumatize me by burying him in the box my miss piggy tennis shoes came in. at any rate, what i remember of jeremiah is good. he was green. he was my friend. he was familiar to me. i always think of him whenever i see a turtle, big or little.

i started reading the "dark tower" series of books when i was in junior high. i know, stephen king novels in junior high...what can i say, i was advanced. a turtle plays a large part in the stephen king cannon of stories, and until i tried to read stephen hawkings "a brief history of time", i never put that into perspective, thinking that the turtle was just a nice, comfortable, familiar writer's device. hawking relates this story: " A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"


being the curious person that i am, i did a little research about this quote, because when i read this story, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. (it was a similar experience to the one i had when i was putting a four-year old suzy jones to bed, when she whispered in my ear, "sometimes i dream about God's wife...she wears red." but that's another story...) come to find out, the second avatar of vishnu was a turtle, who carried the elephant who carried the world on his back. under him was nothing but the sea of primordial milk, which contains the fourteen most beautiful and spectaular gifts ever given. that's a pretty interesting story, no matter how you slice it, i think.

do i believe that God is a turtle? ...no. am i converting to hinduism?...certainly not. all i'm saying is that sometimes, i think we forget things that should not be forgotten. we burn books that should not be burned. we declare heresy where there is none. we forget that God is much bigger than we can ask or imagine. and that God is everywhere, and in everything, calling us into communion, into community, into wholeness and holiness, just like the ocean calls us to come and swim and be made clean, and remember what it means to be home.




that's what i think, anyway.


mil besos,
rmg

midnight ramble

the girl sat on her porch early in the morning, seeing the streetlights and the palm tress...hearing the little wind that snakes its way through the neighborhood, blown by the traffic on the loop...believing that there really is something more to this than meets the eye.



she's tall. sort of. sometimes, she adds an inch, because it seems to make her feel above average. she's funny. she's mostly pretty smart. she works too much. she sometimes doesn't sleep well. and when she does sleep, she has strange and vivid dreams. sometimes, she thinks she puts off sleep, because lately the strange and vivid dreams have taken a familiar not-especially happy turn. she remembers. yes, she remembers. she remembers things that she would rather not. she sees new things that blend into the old. she fights to keep the center, because this is not hers. not any of it is, really, when she takes the long view. and when she remembers that, she takes a deep breath, and walks away, feeling a little empty and a little tired, and if she's honest, maybe a little lonlier than she would like to admit.



oh, she'll admit that some of the lonliness is her fault. probably the great majority. she has real trouble telling people what she's thinking. she feels like her venting is sometimes too much, or that people listen out of obligation instead of "want to". she's not always good at saying whether she's simply giving you information, or asking for help. she says she's working on that...but it's hard. she's also apparently trying new things like actually telling people how she feels, of trying not to be suzy sunshine with the good news hose plugged in the pooper. she's supposedly learning that it's ok for her to have a bad day, send out the s.o.s., and learning not to over-inflate what the response should reasonably be. she's also working on those nasty little inarticulated expectations...they sometimes make her cry, and she's kind of over crying these days. she's finally figuring out that putting your cards on the table isn't such a bad thing...people seem to treat folks who are honest with a much gentler hand. even though it's hard for her to be honest about what she likes, or wants, or even freaking needs, she's trying to get better. she's trying to kill cinderella, but still finds herself watching silly romantic comedies that have nothing to do with real life, and everything to do with cinderella. she is frustrated by that. and while she's reasonably sure she's not one of the ugly step-sisters, she sometimes wonders if she's not the second-cousin who gave up to become a nun in a children's home up to her eyeballs in babies. she tries to remember that age is nothing but a number, and that wisdom has nothing to do with age.



she is trying. she is praying more, again. she knows she's going to make it. she's learning that frustration isn't always such a bad feeling. she's remembering that hope is a sweet and wild thing, and one which almost never makes any sense. she's trying.



the cars keep zooming by the little faux tudor style condo on the side street, just up from the hospital. it's sunday morning, already...she needs to sleep, to be ready for work. she's trying to remember that sometimes work is worship. she's noting the need to be fully present, most especially present. she's pacing, but has no real idea of the duration of this epoch. she is trying to get ready...for whatever she needs to be ready for...prepared. her therapist tells her this is called "situational anxiety". she at least likes that the phrase is poetic. her therapist also told her to lay low...that she could be kate winslett, clinging to the floating door. funny bit of synchronicity...one of her thursday ladies is the child of a man who almost sailed on the titanic. she thinks how she would have missed hearing that thursday lady tell her stories and show her photos and tell her to stay off the streets every time she left her house. but then she wonders how she could ever have missed something she never would have known about. she thinks about parallell universes. she thinks she may have the beginning of a tension headache when she thinks those thoughts, so she rations them out, just like how her therapist told her to ration out her anger. only 15 minutes a day...she thinks this is ample, until she starts to write things down, or talk on the phone. she is thinking she should start setting a timer for that, but it feels to much like the "2 minutes hate" from "1984".



she wants to be an idealist, but pragmatism just suits her better. and she's learning to realize that's ok, too. she knows it's time for bed, for what dreams may come, and that if she listens hard enough, maybe she'll figure it out, this time.



the girl on the porch looks sleepy, in her green and white baseball jersey that she never wears in public and the boxer shorts she stole from her grandfather's clean laundry (wierd, yes...endearing, absolutely), with her wet hair pulled back, even though she's painfully afraid of split ends. she is going to bed.

she says to tell you that she loves you. expect a phone call...

mil besos--rmg

sometimes...

i am grateful that i can feel much of anything.

i am glad that people worry, even if it's worry over me.

i am glad for latenight/early morning phone calls.

i am glad that i live alone.

i still want to bite my nails.

i wish my hair was short.

i stay up all night and work on projects.

i wish my cat could talk back to me.

i wish the book i'm reading now were 500 pages longer.

i want to grow up and be a doctor, so i can make people better.

i want to grow up and be a hospice nurse so i can help people have a good death.

i want to be a midwife so i can help bring healthy babies into the world.

i want to make cds all day long.

i regret eating a salad for lunch.

i wish people didn't tell me so many secrets. they are sometimes hard to carry.

i wish i could sleep for a week.

mil besos--rmg