Curiosity Killed the Cat

Right now at this moment it is hard for me to believe in eternal happiness in relationships.  But as a wannebe die hard romantic to love and monogamy I am conflicted.  

Yesterday I decided to tackle my moms office and throw away that which no longer has a place in this house and begin to make the space mine.  I was full of energy and gratitude as I looked at some of the work she had done in her years as a human, but it wasn't long before I fell into a crumpled mess of tears on the ground, asking the extended family across the street to come over and soak in the sadness with me.  

Finding journals and notes, some from only days before she passed sent me into a frenzy of "give up on love, back away slowly, and jet set across the planet and refuse to ever commit your heart to any one person".  I am not sure that anything but heart break is inevitable and in the moments of reflection I have had in the past few days I am beginning to understand on a different level that either way we will lose the ones we love.  Whether it be through the diminishing of a relationship or the ultimate end... death.  All love stories will end with a great amount of sadness.  Hopefully somewhere in there is more celebration than heartache.

I hate this.  

I shared this grief with a few friends, and they lovingly asked me why I opened her personal journals and read her thoughts.  "Why would you do that to yourself?".  Hahaha funny question, so excuse my honest and somewhat frustrated retort.  You know why I do it?  Because I miss her.  I do not have the option to call my mom and hear her heartbreaks or laughter, share our stories, watch her write notes, and listen to her laugh or cry.  So if you think that I can not be the cat that gets killed by curiousity reading through years of her personal thoughts please remember that you can do these things with your mom.  I can only get to know my mom deeper by reading her journals.  I am not so enlightened or strong that I can simply dump them in the trash, because seeing her handwriting is a way of connecting to her.

But that rant isn't even the whole purpose of this post.  It is about love and inevitability of loss.  I don't mean just intimate sexual relationships and marriages, but friendships, partnerships, family.  We must learn to do the work on ourselves and tend to our needs so that when we are gone our friends and family do not riffle through our things and discover the unbelieveable heartbreak we inflicted on ourselves.  

Worse than this is that I am frsutrated that the woman I idolize was not perfect, because in her wake I would like to believe that she was, that she was a hero that went down fighting, and now I am faced with the truth that she went down tired, fatigued, exhausted by the effort required to maintain connection.  In her passing I created an idol of her, believing in her perfection above and beyond anything else.  

My belief system about relationships crumbled yesterday, along with the remaining pieces of my heart.  And I am left to know that we as humans continually struggle with the same things, that love is not eternal and perfect but messy and destructive, and yet we still choose it.  Unless we choose plane tickets to far off places and random sexual partners in place of long term monogamous relationships.  I wonder which i s more or less fillin than the other.  

If I could have with a clear conscious and a controlled manner I would toss a match in the room and burned it all to the fucking ground.  I didn't want to know some of these things that I now know.  Curiousity killed the cat, and though the brazilian and a sister advised me to not be that cat, I still was.  Because it is easy to say "don't give in" when you have a mom that you can call, who you can still memorize her movements when you see her, commit her to your memory in this way... but when she is dead and gone and starts to fade from your memory her smell, her facial expressions, and her handwriting begins to look foreign, her voice is hard to access then the strength it takes to not be that cat is impossible for me to imagine.  

In the midst of everything that I am saying I can recognize the drama of it.  I still believe in love.  I still think of my mom as an incredibly strong and powerful woman that laid down her life for me over and over again.  I will still commit to people and connection, and to monogamy and the work it takes.  I will still open her journals and read them.  I am not seeking sympathy or to pull at your heart strings, I am writing to remind you to engage in your life, to do the work, make the changes, create the shifts, and take charge of you.  Be happy.  Create happiness.  

Settled....

What does this even mean?  I have been unsettled for so long, continually planning the next "get away" or trip or move that I do not think I have been settled in over a decade.  

When we decided to move to Thailand I could barely wait to sell everything.. dresser, bed, couch, tables, speakers, bikes, tools, clothes, camping stuff, books, kitchen stuff... I got rid of shit recklessly, and it felt good.  For the two years that followed I pretty much lived out of a backpack and a small suitcase moving 6 times (not including the moves from America and back to America).  

All that moving and shaking across borders and thresholds solidified the "get up and go" desire that nags at my soul, and now it seems as though I really cannot get rid of it.  It presents itself at every turn, creeping in in the middle of the night, interrupting my slumber, reminding me that it is still there, lurking to move, go, get, run, flee, travel, bounce.  

Thiough some of that started to change once I lost my mom.  I felt conflicted, I wanted to feel settled, yet I didn't.  I wanted a home to fill the gap of her but I also wanted around the wolrd plane tickets to distract me from that same gap.  I thought feeling rooted would come in the form of a house with a dog and a yard, but oh how surprising it is that things are not working out the way that I planned them.  The reality... Settling is hard when you own nothing and want to roam around the globe. 

Well I guess I do not own nothing....  

I have two bikes and some locks for them.  

Camping gear.  

Some climbing gear.  

A yoga mat and a few accessories to match.  

An essential oil diffuser.

A himalayan salt rock lamp.  

Some books.  

A speaker.  An ipad.  A phone. 

Pants... so many pants...

Shirts.. A lot of those as well.  

Essential oils.  

Dried herbs to blend teas.  

A few very small decorations.  

And some bad ass jewelry.  

I would need so much more to settle in the way I envisioned at one point.  Like a house which means a lease or mortgage, which is a little too binding for the itch that drives my soul mad.  A car would be good too.  And what about furniture, a couch, a bed, a chair, a table, a book shelf.  Kitchen supplies.  Towels and bathroom stuff.  Sheets and bed linens.  Speakers.  Lamps and lights.  Curtains.  Decorations.  The list goes on... and the thought is daunting.  

Maybe I will never own stuff again.  Maybe I will gypsy around and live with my "wife" in Montana who already has stuff.  That way I can zip away when I like, buy a plane ticket, and not have to sell or store the things I do own, and disappear into the ethers for as long as I want or need to.  That sounds like freedom, or escape.

The settling I want to discover is that which comes from within and is shared in a community.  Settled in my friendships.  With a lover.  With my family.  With who I am in the world.  This is the settling that I have been searching for.  To me it offers more stability than the possessions that cause me to feel stuck, tied down, and restricted. To me it is the ultimate, the number one most important thing to be deeply connected to those I meet and know.  We can sit on the grass and share a meal and stories.  I can snuggle with a lover on the floor.  I can practice yoga anywhere.  I can build a fire and throw some food on it to make meals.  We can eat out of tin foil and drink out of our water bottles.  We can build initmacy with out the walls of a house, with out the comforts of a couch, with out the convenience of a kitchen...  We can be connected in these ways.    

My priorities have been simplicity for a very long time, and selling everything to move to Thailand made me the happiest thing ever.  I felt light and free.  I also believe in creating peace within myself, rather than externalizing it in the form of material (unless of course its yoga pants... those are an investment into your future), things.  It was easy for me to get swept up in the American idea of settling, only to remember after some heartache and confusion that it really doesn't align with what I want or believe is important in this world. 

Live well.  Live simple.  Converse.  Sit on the floor.  Love.  Communicate. Share.  Know what matters to you, because ultimately comfort lies within your own soul.  We can handle anything in the world when we are settled within ourselves.  

This is a rant....

My emotions are currently out of control.  I tend to sit on the quiet sde of things, even if I am spinning.  I think...  "No one wants to hear this shit, and my spinning is my responsibility", so I just shut my mouth and say "I am fine, thanks".  Which translates to I want to rip my fucking hair out of my head and scream until my throat goes raw.

Okay that may be a dramatization, but these days I am actually not to clear on the what is to be discussed and what is not to be discussed.  See, that is what suppression does, it confuses you.  Thanks Jeremie, I appreciate that you were to chicken shit to discuss emotions for 4 years, I feel like this scarring will last a while.  So, That was fun.  

Okay, but let's be real.  Thanks to myself for thinking that it was okay to be in a relationship that was emotionally void.  In a relationship where we said I love you less than a handful of times in 4 years, where I had to cry and scream to get him to be in Fort Collins when my mom had just died, in a relationship where he asked me ten months later why I wasn't over her death, and that when I was getting blood tests and ultra sounds, he said shit like... you are always in chaos.  

What the fuck was wrong with me?  Why would I think that was a partner?  Clearly, I am the dillusional one, I stayed, even when I knew better.  However, as a disclaimer, he is a cool dude and we had so much fun and adventures, but if it wasn't fun, he didn't participate.  It was all on his terms.  And I let it be.  Because it takes two for that shit to happen.  

I was in a yoga class the other day and I flashed back to my mom saying "We have a bedroom set up downstairs for you and Jeremie to stay in when you visit", and Jeremie saying shit like "I don't want to stay at your parents".  I just wanted to get up and start smashing shit.  Fuck you for not participating in my life, her death, our relationship.  

This is clearly a rant.  

So the origin of this rant is that while hanging out with this cool Brazil dude, I do not know what I can talk about and what I cannot talk about.  I have been tip toeing for 4 years and now I have lost my footing and am in a puddle of limbs on the floor.  Can I's or Can't I's swirling in my head.  And he just wants me to communicate.  But I do not know what that means, or if he really wants to hear what is in my head....  

Oh the joys of relationship and communication.  Can't live with out it really.  But these heart pounding insecurities that someone might not really want to know you... well that makes me sad that I sometimes think I do not have enough to offer a person that they would want to know me.  And as usual it comes down to myself, and peace coming from within.  But I cannot help feel a little jaded at the last four years.  

So, that is it.  Thanks for listening.  All my harsh words mean nothing about who he is, it is mostly about who I let myself become.  And the end of that relationship was inevitable the moment I had to explain why he needed to come to CO for my moms funeral.  

Love has no fear and no vengeance. So go love fiercely and listen carefully to others. 

  

Coconut Fruit Bars

It was an innocent enough night, as I say in what used ot be my moms chair and ate ice cream while hanging out with dad.  He was eating a fruit bar.  And when I realized what he was eating it was like a nail to my heart, and it hasn't stopped pounding since that moment. 

I want a cigarette.  I want it to slow down.  I want to be under the stars.  I want my mom back.  I would trade the whole world for her physcial human existence again.  

The night we took her to the hospital for the last time she was in bed, the bed in which she hadn't left for about a week.  She stopped getting out of bed when she fell in the shower because her left hip would just no longer work.  It was a downhill spiral from there.  Which led to bed pans, hospice, medications, and endless silence.

I came upstairs to check on her and touch her hand and offer some food, which she had just not been interested in the past week or so.  She asked me if we had any coconut fruit bars in the freezer.  I would have flown to fuckin Egypt to get her one, lucky enough, we still had some.  I brought it up in a bowl so that she could rest it when she was too tried to hold it up.  

I sat with her and watched her struggle through.  Her left hand had quit working, or maybe it was her wrist, or maybe it was the whole arm.  Either way, she would be holding the bar and then it would just drop, hand and all, onto her chest.  Typically this sent her into a frustrated frenzy of "What is happening to me"  and "I do not understand what is going on".. but that night, she just picked it up and took nibbles while she could.  

I have never seen anyone enjoy something so much.  

Normally I would have pestered her and nagged her to drink carrot juice or have something more substantial, but I just knew, there was a peace to her eating this bar, and I was just happy to see HER so happy.  

It was both gut wrenching and joyful to see her in this process.  I knew what was coming, though nothing could have prepared me, and I seemed to be the only one in my immediate family that understood that she was leaving us.  I had known for months.  And here we were sitting together, her half aware lost in the delicacy of a coconut fruit popsicle, and me lost in the simplicity of it all.  

It was not too many hours later that she asked to go to the hospital, which became the desperate turmoil that loss like this is in those fucked up, confusing, hectic moments.  The ups and downs, the really fuckin hard conversations, the even worse decisions....  

And until now, I had forgotten about that sacred coconut fruit popsicle, not that banana coconut one, (which I had mistakenly grabbed first), but the simple, single flavor one...  over a year later and out of the blue it hit me like a bus to the chest, and now I am a mess of tears, in my room writing this recalling the depth of pain that is her loss.  

All over the memory of a popsicle.  

Regress to Progress

I want to go back to Thailand.  Shit was easy there.  And it was warm.  

And I am here now.  So really, I need to be present here.  I am evaluating, calculating, witnessing.. this is how my construction zone of a head works.  Analyze, process, act.    

Needless to say, I am in that uncomfortable stage of regression.  The stage where I want to tear off my skin and disappear into the ethers, or buy a ticket back to Thailand.  Neither of which I can really justify doing because I would just be prolonging the process of my growth.. and I am not into dragging it out.  Get in.  Get it.  And get the fuck out.  To progress, we MUST regress.  We must look at how far we have come, and process how much further we want to go.  WHO do I want to be to this world? 

Don't get me wrong, I am not in a crisis, I am just growing.  My life has crumbled around me and I still stand erect most days.  Though cigarettes, lorazepam and an occasional drink before noon do seem to be staples for this erectness some days.  Survival.  

I like to run.  When I am comfortable I like to scamper off to what is uncomfortable.  And when I am uncomfrotable I like to freak out and demand my comforts back.  Ever satisfied?  Hmmm deeply satisfied with my life, not satisfied with stagnation though.  Fuck. That. Shit.  

   

2.0.1.5.

Thank fucking god.  Though that is what I said when we rolled into 2014 as well, and I am still not sure which year was the worst.  The flames of transformation are hot as hell, licking away at me from the inside out, tormenting everything from my guts to my ethers, demanding that I do more, be different, trust, and progress.  

We all have these moments, we all experience the demands, and we all go through shitty times graced with thoughts "It couldn't possibly get any worse", only to be proven wrong.  

I do not know how I got through it, I tried to lay down and die, I really did, it didn't work. So I just picked myself back up off the floor and worked it out.  But I do not know how.  It is still a mystery.  Though I think it has to do with introducing some reckless abandonment to my interactions.  Moments of "Well, fuck it, I don't really have anything to lose".

I see people who never do this, never picking themselves back up after tragedy.  I suppose it is easy to get lost in the endless streams of emotion that you who still have your loved ones cannot imagine until they too have left.  

I am off track though so let me pull it back.  See, lost in the endless streams of emotion.  Fuck.  

I have a best friend, actually, she is more like a wife.  Actually she is a wife, we just don't get all sexual, we both like men too much.  We have conversations that I have never even had with a man, we get tattoos together, we have talked about the business we will open, the bank accounts we will get, the possibilities and the way that our lives will look 40, 50, and 60 years down the line.  We are committed to each other and each others growth and progression in life.  She came into town for Christmas, we both had twisted and demented years that tried everything in our lives but our friendship, so it only seemed appropriate that we be together to celebrate survival.    

To feel a bit better about ourselves we dressed in one of our 15 new pairs of recently purchased yoga pants, painted on electric blue eyeliner, and glitter bombed one another.. we drank some beers and headed out for whatever randomness that the night held.  African dancing.  Saisons.  Midnight yoga and meditation.  Martinis.  And an endless supply of those confetti explosion champagne bottles.  We rang it in right.  Neither hammered nor completely sober we just couldn't have given a shit less.  It was likely the best new years I have had in a long time, maybe even ever.  

The yoga class somehow seemed surreal, the things I saw... the things I felt, the way I feel now.  Somewhere between the likes of deeply wounded and iron man super hero, I feel at rest in this space.  Indifferent to effort because I know what is to come, and more importantly I know it is not going to kill me.  As long as I do not lose myself in the desperation that is the desire to be loved by friends and lovers alike, reminding myself over and over again that I will be okay.  

I feel like that is the hardest thing, to remind ourselves that we will be okay, because we always have been.  And as we jump on the boat of risk for love, work, and community, we are constantly gambling with loss, we have always been okay in the past so why would it be any different now?  The only time we are truly endangered is when we believe that we have arrived, that we know it all, or declare what we know as though it is permanent.  This is spiritual suicide, and if you don't have spirit, what do you have?  Translate spirit as you wish: god, buddha, south park, soul, nature, self, wisodm.. whatever makes you grow.  Personally I choose South Park, it doens't let me get away with thinking that anything is more sacred than another thing.  

I hope you find some humor this year as you look at whatever inspires and defeats you, that you can laugh in the face of it and know that you too will be okay.