Karmic Dance

I can’t believe how much pain I am in some days. I can’t even handle how clear the memories are coming that are now reminding me that perhaps I have not even begun the journey of true grief. At 20 months, am I saying this? It’s like I sort of live with Koa as a distant sort of memory. My system only allows in flashes, moments where it’s intimate. The fact that my baby boy died. Days like today where it’s so close. I can feel his body laying on mine and his hair falling across my chest. I can’t let myself feel it too deep although in those moments I don’t have a choice.

I ask myself what would it be like to just let it in. Let myself feel more of him during those moments he comes to me. Open to them! Then, I seem to have a sensation that says NO. It would be like spending time with him, then you have to awaken to the fact he’s dead.  The moments he comes are so real. It’s like I am remembering him as he felt in real life only I can’t have him. I would rather just keep myself as distant as possible so I don’t have to come to consciousness again that he is not ever coming back. 

I don’t want to have to let him die again after I spend time with his memory penetrating my heart. 

Disbelief still comes to me often. What has happened? Koa is dead? How? What? It is clear to me that I am still in and out of total shock. It’s not fight or flight kind of shock like after the accident. It’s more like everyday life shock where I am only in the present moment then suddenly sent backward to pick up my pieces of fragmentation. It’s the act of incorporating the past with the present. 

Today I began contact with Coral in a new way. I sat on the beach and called in her birth angels and the sacred combination of energies that are there to unite her with life outside of me and her heart with my heart. It was a calling in our sacred agreement. It then dawned on me that I am about to love again. I just didn’t think I would ever love again deeply. I think this might be the only way it could have happened, the birth of another child. I will love her as I have my boys, different no doubt, but once again a mother's deep love for her child will be born with her. 

I aligned my third eye with her third eye and talked to her about our karmic dance. A little girl. How foreign this feels to me and yet how familiar she is and always has been to me. I have dreamt of her since becoming a mother. I had her name and her energy. I miss my boy and now I must go on. I don’t know how I am to do this and I call in the help of all sentient beings to assist this process.......Aho.

FIRST & Last Breath

Any moment my beloved little girl will make her way through the birth canal and arrive into this world. Last night’s dream was a moment between her and me.  I was communicating with her that she would be leaving her watery warm home in my belly and making her way out into this world. As I imagined this for her from a place of deep motherly love, I was aware of the grief that began to overtake my heart. How beautiful she feels the world is as she is all tucked into this body of love and how startling it must be to feel that water break around you as you begin spiraling through a dark tight space, body morphing into a long narrow slippery form as contractions push you through into this outer world of human existence. All the lights, smells, and new energy that is outside of Mom’s body with Brother and Dad, swaddled onto baby blankets, a hat on your head. Air!

She and I shared an energy of sadness that our unity of body was ending and we would soon be two separate beings. Lately these last two years there’s so much of me that wishes I could have another chance to return to the safe watery shores of the womb, before life, before breath, carried around safe in the belly of love with no experience of what it was to be a human being living a life. I have wanted to just go back and start over with that first breath and the feeling of total hope and innocence.

I am just simply unable to take the adult journey through the mind and expend all of the energy of what it has been to live through this tremendous life to get there. I’m too experienced now. I’m too shaped by life’s askings of me. That level of innocence is not mine to have in this life again except through my children.

Today is February 4th. I have had many nights now of contractions that have come and gone and disappeared into mysterious symptoms. The night has been a time of working through the energy of my resistance to opening again to life after death. Alone I sit, feeling it all. My truest underactive self interfacing with the way time is moving my life forward. Birth leaves me no way to stay stuck, no way to turn away from my deepest work that must be done to become fully alive once again. As the sensations pulse through me, I am waking up to being a mother, to being a vulnerable human being again, to living with openness and faith in life. One contraction at a time, my body takes back its desire to trust this life, to believe I am worthy of good things, to smile into the heart of life once again. Anxiousness comes laced with full-blown moments of panic. 

The question follows, Do I have to? I’m scared. I know now these little humans I make in my body are not mine and that they are living a life of their own. I know now that I cannot save them from death, from life’s hardships, from pain, from their private destinies. I scream inside as I feel the cruelty of this. That I make them in my body, love them more than anything in this earthy walk, and yet I cannot save them from this fate they have set before them. The star they are born under and the great mystery of life combined hold their destiny. 

I was such a good mother before becoming a mother. I knew if I would just do it all "right" and believed that my kids would grow strong and tall and have promise in this life. If I fed them organic homemade food, they wouldn’t get a disease. If they wore soft organic clothes and I didn’t vaccinate them, the chemicals would never harm them. If I held their hand at every street crossing, took them to Waldorf school, returning them home daily to the wafting smell of Mom cooking in the kitchen, they would know the safety of daily life.  If I nursed them until age three or four and slept with them in the family bed sandwiched between Mom and Dad after chamomile baths and oil rubs on their body, they would know security. I could go on and on about all the ways I would do what was right, believing that I had control over how my children lived and grew. 

Now I know that yes, these amazing ways of raising kids, wholesome and energetically sound do indeed make a difference in their lives, but they do not ensure a damn thing. After seven years of solid homegrown life, my son died in my own driveway by a car I was driving and my older son witnessed the death of his little brother. Life, death, and everything in between have their own path, their own agenda, and their own fulfillment into destiny.

Now I hold space as this little girl is moments away from her destiny forming. My body must open to let her through knowing what I know now. I still have all the cloth diapers ready, soft organic blankets washed and sterilized, and organic foods pulsing into her through the placenta, but one thing is very different now. I am not able to birth her with the same joyful blind naivety that my boys came through with. I am startlingly aware of life’s fragility, of my fragility, of life’s mysterious unfoldings of the primal strength takes to mother, knowing that children are not ours to keep. I am awake. I am aware. I am present. The distant dream spell that took me through my first two births is not available to me any longer. I must open my whole being, cross the threshold of life on life’s terms and pull her into this world knowing I have very little control of that first breath and when her last may come. 

Age Of Aquarius

I awoke this morning at Koa’s gravesite. It’s like I was in one dream state then it took me straight to him six feet under, picturing his body, trying to remember what he was wrapped in and what he had with him. From bones to flesh and back to bones my mind ran through the visuals of his evolution under that pile of dirt. Memories of him now are sharp and direct. They do not come often, but when they come, they start from this earth's reality and pierce deep into my whole being. It used to be they came from some ethereal distant place and floated above like watching a movie like the angels were carrying the visuals around, showing me slowly, perhaps tenderly the life I remembered with him. Now I am in a place to pull those memories up and view them directly with very little censorship or help from the angelic realm. 

Yesterday I got a Vedic reading from my midwife’s astrologer on the big island. Over and over again the information from the ‘energy workers or ethereal people of this earth’ tell me Koa was a great Bodhisattva and he lived the life he was meant to. He died just how he was meant to and suffered not at all in his passing. Sometimes I feel deeply into this information for stability and other times I am just in a place where I don’t care. I just miss him and want him so bad. I don’t want to be a part of some spiritual earth place or expand my understanding into past lives or life after death. I want my child, my warm, sweet, round, beautiful, cuddly, laughing boy.  I want to raise him and live life with him.

The other thing that stays with me from the reading is how she expressed I am here on a shadow path and will survive things that would kill other people. A true teacher and mystic for the people. When life proposes what it will, my challenge is to flow. To let go of the shore and be water. 

Another day has come and the sun has risen. Is it all I can count on? This moment to say I am here and I’m ok? Every day feels like a day I have to set aside what I want and just take what comes and make good decisions in between the predetermined and what I want from life. 

We are now in the age of Aquarius. Baby girl will come soon. Her due date is in just a few weeks. She will bring something with her that will catapult this life forward for me. The details, I do not know. My hopes are an open heart, and the ability to love and feel love again. Today I arise and feel bitter, stifled, and angry. I am not inspired or motivated to do this thing.

Aho.

Blankness

Lately, a lot has been coming up about allowing feelings. It’s not coming in the traditional psychological ways I am used to. Its not empty  philosophies based in helplessness that say “there’s no way out of the pain. It’s coming in more like a spiritual path in which allowing the feelings to be exactly as they are, with no attempt to shift them or close the door on them through the distraction of busy work or avoidance, is actually the very door that opens to life itself. Perhaps the worst feeling of all for me is that of stagnancy, where the pain is at a simmer and a dreaded feeling of dullness and inability to move takes place in the extremes.

We refer to it in our culture as depression. The place where life has lost its meaning and nothing sparks the energy needed to re-engage, leaving a flatness that settles all the way down to the bones. Restlessness to take over and discontent is the storyline.

The teachings I am hearing right now are referring to this "depression" as a resting place. They are saying that it’s not depression at all, but a time of deep descent into quietness where creativity and ones true gift begins to generate. Depression occurs when someone in the "waiting state" becomes fearful that perhaps this state of dullness is all they will ever feel. Compounding the fear on top of the retreat from the ability to feel vitality, creates a secondary issue where the actual retreat becomes a torture chamber one locks themselves into (true depression). Note: it is said that nothing can bring someone out of depression. Only oneself can remedy it.

Why do I give such enormous resistance to the blankness I feel right now? This purgatory doesn’t feel restful to me. Instead, I feel I am wasting away. I want action. I want fireworks and joy. Have I not suffered enough?

I am gestating in every way. Pregnant, dull, and only able to sleep, eat and show up waiting. To the outside world I appear to function, but it’s only out of habit that my body continues to move at all.  I hate this life! Its so full of challenge and unanswered questions.

I will now start to do ‘nothing’ more gracefully. I set my focus towards withdraw so that I can allow what inspires me to enter, and move me from that deep well within. The issues that arise around the hours of wanting something to happen will inform me of where to even rest deeper.

I name the fear without allowing it to swallow me. I’m afraid nothing will come for me and I will just fade away, deeply into the mist of life- wasted, heartbroken, depressed mother two who lost her stride. I will never feel anything other than this. I will waste away in the eyes of the world. Oh, what she could have been.

Ceremony...I will set up ceremony and altars to remind me of my connection. Ritual, nature and symbolism will help bring me back if I go too far away to remember! To far to remember that I want to be here. To far to remember that I have love in my heart for this mysterious, crazy ass existence.

WINGS

My only choice these days is to expand enough to let something else exist alongside death. I seem to be starting to understand why they say the pain of loss never goes away, it just changes. I was always curious when someone would say that, it never goes away. What a devastating thing to hear when you’re in the most pain ever.

Now I am seeing that when this sort of pain carves its way through the soul, it leaves a deep cavern a lot like water raging through a canyon. Once the water makes its way through it forces the shape to be different and the canyon changes forever. Just like the canyon, when the loss of a loved one makes its way through the human soul, it changes things forever and there’s no way to forget this enormous forging or the one you loved who sent the water rushing. You are forever changed.

I keep waiting to have a shift out of this immense heaviness of grief. I am starting to realize grief doesn’t shift. It is dense. It is permanent. It is in all things. It doesn’t leave once it enters. It just expands one’s capacity by pushing against the walls of the self until there is more room for joy and acceptance to join in. Grief, joy, acceptance, and love coincide within the same soul.

It’s amazing how life is so fragile and yet the human soul can endure so much.  It is truly amazing. All through life, I have gotten to experience the preparation for death. Life sent me a series of experiences that I now know were actually dying practices. The pain and disappointments life naturally brought were moments of letting go. They are small in comparison to the letting go I am doing now and the one I will do in my final hour. Every heartbreak, every disappointment, every sadness was carving me out deeper to accept and learn the ways of the larger death I am learning about now and the death I will face myself someday. I am grateful that when those pains of life came for me I did not turn away or numb myself or become bitter, closed, or angry. Through working sincerely on my own deep discomfort in life I have welcomed these preparations that have been provided to help me survive this moment. 

The painting that Jennifer did for me of Koa as my angel is really really working on me. It says to me that I must expand enough to let some light in. I must be open to letting him take his new form in my life. So much needs to cleanse to do this. It is a complete metamorphosis. I can no longer remain naive or unaware of impermanence. I am shedding my most precious innocence. As I expand, my old ways of being and thinking are too small. They are transforming, expanding with every scream and every tear. This sort of metamorphosis does not take place through effort. There is NO energy for effort where I am now.

Like the butterfly in the cocoon, I am shelled in, learning to liquefy, letting myself be pulverized. I must just simply be with every moment and allow expansion to take place, accepting its timing. Every belief system, everything I thought was MINE, every hope or dream….. If I am able to successfully transform this energy, it will mean that I have completed the greatest surrender imaginable. I will have pushed against the walls of my soul and made more space for life to bring me back into its loving embrace.

It physically hurts to open enough to grow wings, to grow beyond my own imagination. It’s like being ripped apart by a great force of nature. It is a true dying practice. I am dancing in the polarity between the reality my boy is gone forever and the reality of death’s permanence and the promise of the spirit realm that I can now be with internally and eternally. I feel peace will come closer when I can expand enough to incorporate both understandings and just rest in the mystery. Again this expansion makes me feel like I will die myself. In those moments when it all comes into awareness, I can’t make myself believe I am going to survive. I just must breathe and wait until once again I see I survived that terrible moment or hour or day or month or year.

Sometimes I am in so much agony, I really really don’t think it will ever end. Then it does end and somewhere off in the distance, far away I can see a butterfly. A blue butterfly that took the time necessary to go within, allow, trust and break down the old form of life to begin anew. 

It’s amazing how life is so fragile and yet the human soul can endure so much. 
Truly amazing.

Bathing suit and peaches

I am under the constant challenge of trying to put words to a wordless phenomenon. Today I just feel like not finding the words for this deeply profound dance of life and instead telling you about a fun moment in my world!! Today I needed a break. I just needed OUT of the house and wanted to be with the earth. I headed out with my bathing suit and my running shoes with no destination in mind. As I was driving, I passed the "peaches" sign to a local farm. That’s it!!!! Yes. Peaches. 

I took off my shoes and picked peaches, little blossoms of sunshine from heaven.  One by one I picked them off the tree and into my life. One for the bucket and one for my tummy. One for the bucket and yes, another for my tummy!! On and on the exquisite moment of realizing how beautiful this planet truly is.

How did this happen that the tree grew from a seed, produced leaves, and branches that produced flowers that then became this round ball of miraculous mysterious delight we call a peach? Somehow, I felt so lucky to be in its presence. The presence of a miracle. The sun shone through the leaves, dancing around the peaches to make sure they were ripe all the way through. Ahhh, nature is so perfect.

The trees had decided to shake free the ripe fruit and drop some peaches to the ground. It’s like the tree was saying “I am done, you must get off now.”  I need to recover and just be a tree. I have done my work and I must rest. I related to her immensely. Below the tree was round, lush, juicy balls of pure earth love squishing between my toes. One for my toes and one for my bucket. I liked stepping into them as much as I liked eating them. Ahh, it was like a combination of an easter egg hunt and a childish game of hide and seek - me and the tree's peaches.

Some the birds had eaten bites, some bees had eaten them and some had even gotten stuck inside due to their great enthusiasm for the sweetness. Some, the mold was taking care of them. Then, there was me. A part of this great solution is for the tree to be free of its fruit and hibernate until next year's calling to wake up and give again. I giggled like a little girl unwitnessed and in love with this beautiful earth. Tears streamed down my face as I just worshiped the earth for her bounty. Ninety-one pounds of peaches are now with me to keep me company. Oh, lord help me! Anyone want to can some peaches? 

Love V.

Finding the Root

Grounding back to this earth I have been delivered by the angels. My root is that which I took birth for, which is me without my story. I look for writings about what is most helpful or the things that create recovery. Did they get stolen?

There are actually chemical differences in happy and sad tears. They found that "happy tears" are made up of brine, salt water, and not a great deal else. However, the "sad tears" were found to contain the very same chemicals and enzymes that are found in tumors, ulcers, and other such lumps, bumps, and sickness throughout the body. This test concluded that the body, when crying in sadness etc. is literally flushing out all of the toxic chemicals that accumulate in the body and are a part of sadness and the experience of heartache.

I am finding it so profoundly amazing how much the human body is designed to hold grief. It has its own systems for cleansing the toxins from the body and soul, its own management system called shock that regulates the amount of emotion a person can handle at the onset of trauma, and an incredible ability to ‘want’ to heal even in the face of the worst tragedies.

I have screamed out many times, "How will I ever get through this?" I feel sure that the breath I am breathing right then may be my last. The pain seems unlivable, unmanageable, and never-ending, yet one breath falls into another, into another.  They make a chain of breaths that then lead to an hour, then a day, then a month. I am now marking 11 months of those breaths, some only half breathed, some breathed through by a total force of my own will to survive and some only came because the body demanded its right for survival. Most of the breaths this last year came from the deep hyperventilating that comes during or after a good, long, hard, and excruciating cry.   

People always say to me time is the great healer. It just takes time! I know plenty of people who get worse over time or who lose their precious grip on the desire to be here on this earth as time passes. I am beginning to understand now that time will not heal me, but what I do with my time is essential. Mostly I know to do ‘nothing’ intentionally with my time except that which serves the moment I am in. I know not to keep up with the ‘ time’ others in the ‘normal’ world are honoring as it will surely take me beyond my ability to honor my own timing.

I am not afraid of the quiet anymore. I used to be such a busy woman. Most friends couldn’t keep up with all I did in a day and it seemed that I was highly celebrated for how much I could accomplish. Mostly moving around in the world and being “on time” was my way of fixing my low self-image and distracting myself from my feelings.

Well, now I  do not have the luxury of distraction from my feelings as they are a mighty force that is bigger than me right now. To even try to distract from them could mean total emotional collapse. This energy of grief has no patience or timing. It wants what it wants and it will not be set aside and consoled by busy world work. There is no more congeniality with friends or showing up on “time”. Empty “time” slows my breath. It allows me to integrate and honor this rite of passage I am undertaking. Today, I was out walking in the sunshine and the beauty of spring. I found a still point inside for the first “time” in my life.   Deep in the heart where the trauma met my true soul, there was a place where there was no movement, no time, no breath, no grief. It was a place where rest finds rest.  I imagine it is the place that the great ones speak of and call peace. Once the moment of communion passed and my mind re-engaged I knew I had touched the beginning of my recovery.

Time has taught me a few things. I know now I am not going to die from the pain. What a relief that is in some way.   I now know and trust that my body, mind, and spirit does indeed have a way it takes in grief and loss and that if I can learn to harmonize with my inner system, I will indeed not only survive the pain but grow from the beauty it holds. 

Somehow the most huge and painful ‘disharmony’ I can imagine life putting me through is teaching me the secrets of stillness and true inner harmony. Somehow leaving my body and crossing the veils with Koa is teaching me more about being "in-bodied" than I have ever felt before. Opposing forces seem to have such a power to bring balance.

For now, I am not only a human walking this earth, but startlingly aware of how short and fragile life is. I am also extremely, deeply aware that humanity was absolutely designed to handle this pain. I am even aware through “time” that perhaps this total abandonment of how I wanted my life to be is birthing the opportunity to be open to what life is. 

I feel the profound shedding of innocence and willfulness as it is replaced by a stillness that feels like a secret only given to those who dare to touch their pain and “breathe”.

I suppose “time” will tell.

Aho.

Doors to a Mortuary

As we drove back into town, the question that I began to ask on a level subtle to the outside world, but more like a deep scream on the inside, "Am I going to be able to rejoin my home and world here without Koa?” As we drove past the mortuary, it seemed my car almost slowed down involuntarily. Everything became silent and surreal as I looked over at the doors to the light tan, unobvious building. It seems that this is the first time I have looked at those doors since I walked through them to prepare Koa's body for burial. 

Was I as brave as I remember myself that day? Basket in hand full of essential oils, smudge, baby Pendleton blanket, bolo tie his Grandpa made for him and a waterbird fan meant to be for women’s medicine. It was as if I knew what to do and had the strength to do it. It didn’t seem to phase me that his body was cold as an ice cube and stiff as a board. His lips were dry and his once full-of-life face expressionless. I hadn’t seen him since the day he died in the hospital. I just marched to continue to do my job as a mother. My baby needed me to do his final preparations, to leave this human body behind. He needed me to adorn him like a little king, a master, a person of deep honor. I felt like it was my sacred duty to him to see him all the way through until his body was planted like a seed for the earth to take care of.

I don’t know why I never looked over at those doors to the mortuary the last year and a half. I have driven by daily and some days never thought to look and other days chose not to. Tonight was different. It was like I was finally able to look. Like it was time in my recovery to look. The entrance was well lit and the building surreal, but erie. IT LOOKS LIKE ALL THE OTHER MORTUARIES I HAVE SEEN! Sort of like it’s designed for old people to be there when they die. It looks inside and out like an old person's home who hasn’t owned anything new since 1970. 

The man who keeps it is tall. I mean really tall. His eyes are kind and dark with hollow deep sunken sockets to cradle them. He, too, wears clothes that are outdated and stale in smell. He blends with the environment well. I wonder how he felt washing the blood and shit off of Koa knowing the mother would soon be coming to see him. This big giant man and this little boy soul in an agreement made after death. I pictured them quiet in a room together doing the work they needed to do.

I was relieved to arrive and find Koa cleaned of the blood and other body fluids that came at his time of death. I was prepared to do this work myself, but all of the sudden, it seemed so appropriate that this man who holds these agreements with the deceased had already cleaned Koa. I thought to myself, "He’s much more suitable than I to do such things.” It seemed it was finally something someone did who didn’t ask me first, freeing me from at least one moment of having to face this tragedy. There were so many decisions to be made and now I had one less task to dread.

As my car creeps past, with all the memories of this place, I wonder how many tears have been cried in that building. How many people’s dreams have been shattered under the roof of that one place on earth? How anyone was ever able to walk in the doors and back out again? I am home now. Ten days away felt more like a month or six years. Nonetheless, I sit here immediately drawn back to the intimacy of Koa’s death and this grief. I must own and transform it into medicine. 

Aho. 

Flashes of Koa in real life are getting closer to my awareness. It’s unbearable. It makes me dizzy and unable to breathe. Literally, if I take another breath, I feel like it will bring the memory closer to me and I will implode. I am aware in those moments that I have yet to truly meet the memories square on. It’s like this otherworldly fog has kept a veil between me and Koa. Once in a while, the fog clears, giving me a full view of the little boy I lost. A visceral full-body experience of seeing him in front of me. My system only allows a flash of him to enter my consciousness, then the fog comes again to ease the impact. When this first started happening about five months back, I claimed I was coming out of shock. I see now that I am not out of shock. I come out for moments of clarity, only to feel my system pull me back into the protective shell against such trauma. The one thing that is now different from five months ago is that I am aware that UNDERNEATH this shock lies a moment or many moments I must face sometime. Moments of the truth of his death that collide with the immense love I have for Koa and the unending desire and longing I have to hold him in my embrace. When the two meet, death will tell the Mother that she will never ever hold that boy again.

Why do I still expect him to come running around the corner making this whole thing a bad dream or just my imagination? I think I lose track of reality. Time and Space. Sometimes I allow myself to imagine he was still here to see how it might feel. Bad idea!!!  

It seems that whenever I am embarking on something fun or trying to create another family moment of joy, one part of my heart is opened only to be met by an immense and inevitable heaviness that will counter that joy. The heavy feeling is the one that seems to win. Koa’s gone and I don’t know how to make an experience feel joyful in my family anymore. I go ahead with the motion but it becomes just that - a motion to try and keep the family bond and create happiness for Banyan. Family movie night, ice cream, cuddles. It’s all empty for me. It’s like one part of me is going up while the other part of me is going down. I become paralyzed and distracted. 

I don’t know how I could hold my son when he died, clean his body, bury him myself, love without him for one and a half years, and still have parts of me not know he died. I want to call it fragmentation, but my sweet midwife just keeps reminding me it is just parts of me still in other worlds not yet fully landed here. Am I still dancing across the veils? Are the feelings of reality that I feel impending just moments when the angels set me back down here on earth? Is mercy allowing my consciousness to make a slow transition back to my daily life, knowing that if I faced Koa’s death all at once it would kill me? Strange there are moments I feel I am recovering and parts of me are met a short time later with a feeling of insanity and the fear that I am going to go absolutely crazy from the immense pain of missing my little boy. People die I tell myself. We are all going to die, but when I realize it was Koa who died I just shake my head in disbelief. The ways he was alive were so alive. How could he just be gone???? I want to scream, “Fuck you life! Fuck you!”

I am in a moment tonight where I must pray for the angels to be with me. The grief is building into a necessary release. It will just keep flashing in and out until one of the flashes turns into a memory that I can’t turn away from. At that moment I will not be saved by this fog, the shock, or by the angels. It will be a moment where I am truly on my own as a human mother who lost her precious child, writhing, crying, letting whatever fire that needs to burn envelope me entirely, just waiting for mercy to come back for me and say, “Enough! She’s had enough!” 

Although I know the spirit of light will come for me in these moments I can’t remember when I’m in it. The only thing I can see and feel is the destruction of a life I loved and the missing of a child I nurtured with every cell of my being. My Koa. My long-haired, sweet smiling, joyful, laughing, screaming, demanding, big boisterous boy who came as a gift and left leaving tears. I am doing all of the right things: ceremony, writing, talking, grieving. Even these things will not save me in these moments of pain. It’s like the gods have left and I am on my own to face life’s truths. The bitter realities are met by a baren inner landscape followed by cries for help and pleas to be spared. I have this house that I love so much. It’s a graveyard here for me now. A place where I can have all of this comfort and security that is full of discomfort and insecurity. The spirit of this home for me died with Koa. I can’t let it in, this house and its gifts.

Goodnight life I am living.

Aho. V 

Tonight, I went to a Jewish baby naming ceremony. The amount of song and celebration was uplifting and touching. Outside of the Native American ceremonies I have attended, I have rarely seen or been a part of ceremonial life in our culture. Ceremonial life that is both spiritual, musical, and honoring of ancient energies. There was such reverence for new life present in all who attended. The prayers were laid down to protect, bless and honor this child in a way that connected her to her lineage and her heritage. As they laid her little body across the Torah table and chanted, I remembered a teaching I received some time back. The exact teaching eludes me, but the meaning of it was that when we feel a sense of belonging to something in this life, when we are given a path and people to walk that path with, then we can feel our roots here on the earth and the risk of losing oneself greatly decreases. Tonight the parents, grandparents, and congregation came together around this little one to make sure she does not get lost in this life. Their words and love will guide her and the feeling of the container around her, right from the start, being so strong will guide her confidence. Like a silk thread, they sewed a cocoon around this little one with song, dance, prayers, blessings, and sacred numerology, giving her a name that tied her to her parent's name and that tied her to the ancient texts. 

I thought to myself at one point, as the tears fell from my eyes, “How anyone has ever made war against this beautiful walk of Jewish life?” Memories of all of the holocaust stories began to race through my mind and heart. Were these people and their religion a threat because they held such great spiritual power and joy in their worship? Why? Why? Why? I allow myself to leave those mysteries alone and take in the great beauty I am seeing before me. How time and history changed and brought us to this place with these families, completing each sentence with amen and other Jewish words that seem to mean "yes" to this life and the spirit of the Holy that resides within our breath.

At the end of the blessing, the Rabbi closed the ceremony by honoring those who have passed with a song and then honored our ancestors, those whose lives have come and gone, that led the path we now walk. The food represented life. It was flavor-filled, plentiful, and simple. The tables are decorated with mixes of people from all walks, races, and religions. Everyone was eating, laughing, and greeting each other with awe of what was witnessed. I left feeling blessed and realizing I had never been to a ‘life celebration’ in this tradition before, much less any celebration within the Jewish religion. My eyes were opened to a new, beautiful way of prayer and an old and cherished teaching. Aho. 

It’s building up. I am flashing in and out of the pain and the memories. Right now feels like the memories of Koa living, alive and well are coming in so close. I am angry. I am sad. I am feeling a plea with life. “Please save me!” If I touch this amazing pain in its fullness, I will not live through it. I am dazed in a way. A sort of distance between me and Koa’s death has been so necessary and I now find myself begging for it to stay. I keep imagining what it would feel like if he was still here. Simple things like going to sit at the dinner table. “Oh Banyan, please eat your veggies.” “Koa, don’t throw food!!” I miss desperately the feeling of fullness Koa brought to this family. I am deeply lonely and feel this huge void, a deep hole in my life. Some moments, I will just be doing life and I will think of Koa. My body ceases to move anymore and my chest literally feels like someone just sucked the life force out of it. It’s heavy and dark all through the middle, where my heart once lived. Instant depression takes place of any vital movement. I am paralyzed until the grief releases me once again to my own voluntary movement. 

I am beginning to feel homeless. These walls are not holding me in a good way any longer. The beautiful life I have built represents loss and pain in every direction. I do not value this house, this life I live within it, and the sustainment of life here. Everything a human needs to live and even be happy exists on a material level here. People are working daily to obtain this picture that I no longer can love. It has died. This house and its beauty, buried deep, six feet underground with my baby boy. I can not claim this as my dream any longer. I must let it go. It’s my next place of grief. 

There are ten days more until we leave for Kauai. One way tickets and no need to return unless, of course, the life here calls me back. I am feeling so lost in a way and so confused. All of the luxuries of ‘thinking I know are gone. The moments of truth are upon me and illusion is not welcome here. I am on the other side of that fence now. The white picket fence where the perfect life and home sit on one side and reality, death, loss, and surrender into the unknown sit on the other. I suppose the life I am now looking to build must include both sides of the picket fence. 

Another night. Another day. The feeling in my chest grows heavier. My anxiety is building. Mental confusion is starting to make its way in. I invite a healthy way to release. Tonight, I will call in Koa and ask him to help me understand. Breathing deep is not easy, but, on the other side of that breath is release. I pray it in. 

Love V 

Dancing with the Stories of Our Lives

The basic instincts of humanity are to be wanted, needed, and loved. Believe me, when I say that all of us who have touched the raging river of grief know that the numbness and shock that takes place of your once loved person doesn’t even reach the ability to feel any of these places within the heart.

For a moment picture a wasteland with a small tree growing out of the center,  it appears to be an incredibly beautiful tree. A promising tree that looks somehow like it found a way to obtain its nutrients from a deep, deep source, ensuring its survival. It’s a tree that gives hope and proves to sustain shade and a respite from the starkness of the wastelands. This tree represents the idea that not all is lost. But one might observe the wasteland and wonder how this one tree, of all things, could survive or even want to. 

There lies the deepest understanding of grief for me…

Desiccation of a life I once loved so deeply. 

Off in the distance, I see my life, it is barren. I can see it’s all still there but it is drained of life force or the ability to feel its support. The initiation has begun into the dark lesson. The quiet scream of grieving has begun.  I am turned from mother to animal with the stopping of my boy's life force. His heart stopped beating and I stopped pretending he wasn’t going to die. 

When my boy died it was still years before I realized he had. I remember the day well. I was just walking as if I had been aware of his death all along and then boom, I was on my knees. Down, from 1,500 layers deep, came the words from my mouth, “Koa’s fucking dead!” It wasn’t that my mind didn’t know he was gone but at that moment I realized I was feeling it for the first time back in my body. I was back only for that moment; but, there I was standing as a mother in full realization that Koa, the boy I gave birth to and was raising, was indeed dead. Dead. Dead. 

Even now, writing the words I can hear one part of myself saying to the other parts, “Yeah, he died. Didn’t you hear?” 

The little parts that are answering are fragments of my soul that have shattered and taken refuge. I almost have a picture of them scurrying to hide their faces so they don’t have to look or feel what just happened. The work of this year is one by one, to summons them forward as they come. I have to tell them yes indeed Koa died and we didn’t. 

Straddle nine the threshold of living and dying