Do I believe in God?

Posted by | April 26, 2010 | 16 Comments

Once upon a time I tried to die. But it wasn’t my time. Too much was unlived, untapped, unknown. So much not yet done, if it had even begun, so busy had I been stuffing and hiding and numbing to not feel the ever present sense of far away from love, from home, from myself and from all that mattered… frantically trying to fit into the box I thought I was supposed to, not for not having tried and cried and prayed and lied, and finally, despairing of ever mending the gash that I felt had been rent in the fabric of me, I gave up.

It ain’t pretty to try and not succeed. You wake up not to oblivion but to shit, which I wish I only meant metaphorically. But no. We’re talking violent shit: your body screaming NO from every orifice and pore, every which way out, with no consideration of letting you make it —in your dizzy semi-consciousness— to basin or bowl in one’s one-room studio apartment.

One. One so young. So 26. So sad. So homesick and greedy, above all, for connection. For a lap. For cool hands on a forehead. For arms around. For laughter. The smell of home. A kiss. One.

It ain’t graceful, either, how you grope on hands and knees, the world swirling about madly, and manage not to fall to your death —suddenly now, for some unfathomable reason, you care about not dying —managing somehow to make it down the ladder from your sleeping loft where you’d closed your lids the night before but not until after swallowing the pills and falling asleep oh-so-un-Snow White-ly.

—-

If you were to ask me if I believe in God I would now be honest like I wasn’t then, and tell you that no, not as such. Certainly not in a man with a beard in a heaven, ordaining for things to be such and such, calling this bad and that good, this one right and that one wrong. And not a God narrow and circumscribed enough for us to really grasp. And certainly not a God who’d send people who don’t fancy him to his arch nemesis’ lake of fire.

“But I do believe in Morning Glories,” I might add. “Does that count?”

—-

When the Morning Glories learned that one of them had tried and failed, they came to visit the state-run facility where she was. And they sat with her. Quiet. Then crying. Then laughing. Then holding hands in a circle saying the Serenity Prayer. But all the while there, with her, keeping company. And when they learned that she was to return home alone in a few days to the one-room shit hole she’d been carried out of in the wake of 44 pills that had not wanted to stay down, they asked her for her keys. And then they went to clean.

I lost touch with the Morning Glories over the years. They were an Alcoholics Anonymous women’s group I attended in Harvard Square 16 years ago, and, as much as I could relate to what it was that made them or anyone pick up a drink or a drug or a whatever, my whatever had never been Jack Daniels. My pints had not been beer but sweet fill-me-ups like ice cream, nice cream, smooth cream, comfort cream, love cream. And people. But not alcohol.

Truth be told, I also felt shame. Even after they cleaned, upon my return, the smell of the wreckage of my past, lingered. The thought of them there cleaning what I had left, was more than I could bear.

Today, the thought of Morning Glories invariably makes me cry. Words barely touch what is there. This here is a try: it’s something like gratitude. And humility. And love, oh my, love. They were kind enough to clean my shit so I could have a fresh start. They knew, I am certain of it, that it’d take everything I had to pull forward, and that I’d have to do it —the real middle of the night and ’round the clock work of it— on my own. Not without help, but yes, on my own.

So do I believe in God? Maybe. But only if I can call her Morning Glories.


[I love comments! Love notes? Your own stories? What this makes you think of? Bring it on. But I kindly ask that you refrain from advice or preaching or Jesus-saves kind of talk.

Oh and too? Just so no one worries, what I write of happened 16 years ago. Much has changed since. Life can still feel hard sometimes, but I love it far too much to abandon it before my time.]

Categories: Food, Once upon... | Tagged: , | 16 Comments

Once upon a potion…

Posted by | February 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Once upon a time there lived a wee girl in the southern part of Chile. She could while away hours grinding up nuts, grasses and wildflowers with smooth river stones on the steps of the country church where her dad was the pastor. The sky and the fields were endless; the skirt of her dress was her basket; the stones were her pestle, and the tiles of the church step her mortar.

One day time entered her world, bringing with it many stories. Wheeeee… more things to love and explore, including– joy of all joys–a whole world of ideas, written words and language.

But with time also came along all manner of assumptions and expectations, and not far behind, beliefs.

Have you ever picked up a belief? Whoa. It can be a back-breaking thing, I tell you. Some beliefs are happy and those are all well and good while they last. But sometimes happy can go and turn on you, leaving you all, hunh? wha–? That wasn’t supposed to go and happen, now was it!

Except for the part where it did.

Over the years time’s bag got rather heavy for the girl. At some point the hard stuff got so cumbersome and awkward to carry she had to trade the little knapsack in for a suitcase. But oh her gosh! A suitcase of hard stuff and beliefs sure did make it hard to explore the sky and fields. And eventually, she totally forgot that she’d ever gathered the world in her skirt and made creations with river stones from grasses and wildflowers.

And one sad day it came to pass that she could move no further for the weight of her suitcase. It was so heavy she wanted it all to be over. But she couldn’t make life stop and it just wouldn’t come to an end, for all she thought she wanted it to.

And that’s a good thing. Because now, years later, with a still-biggish bag but no longer a suitcase, she loves nothing more than grinding up the hard of life—the stuff that makes her and people cry, the stuff that makes people say, “I can’t! I just can’t no more”—with the magics of the earth and the endlessness of the sky.

So that’s the story of how this girl grew up and how she started with this business of mixing up potions for people: all because she loves to and she knows how heavy the suitcase can get. Which is no way to live.

The End. Beginning.

Oh! Except for the part where one day an aardvark comes along to help her. But that’s another story.

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Mona Lisa Eyes

Posted by | November 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment

In longing you close your eyes,
but in wonder you open them…
-Myra Shapiro (full poem here)

I started writing—really writing, like my life depended on it—when I was 11 and went off to boarding school for the first time to a country a 10-hour drive plus a 5-hour flight from where my parents and little brother and sister remained.

It was the height of Summer in Chile and in my mind’s eye they were at the lake everyday. Or picking raspberries, which surely they were plopping straight in their mouths rather than saving for dessert. Or roller skating down our street, the cracks and bumps of which I knew by heart. Or playing hide-n-seek well into the evening of late-coming darkness in the Southernmost part of the Southern hemisphere. Pretty much anything I had ever loved, they were doing. Without me.

It was more than jealousy. It was about belonging and wanting to stay a part of it, of them, of what had been us. Writing became connection.

On my first morning not at home, I woke up early. The smells were odd. The sounds were odd. The equatorial light coming through the window was odd. Even I, myself, felt odd. I spoke English with a Spanish accent, and Spanish with a Chilean accent and my clogs and knee-highs looked dorky.

Quietly —so as not to wake my odd roommate— I found a pencil and notebook and began the first of what would become, over the years, hundreds of letters home. I have no doubt that letter was filled with all sorts of details: an obsessive and agonizingly accurate accounting of my brother Karl’s and my first trip alone by airplane.

What I left out, in my desire to prove myself the trustworthy oldest daughter and responsible big sister, the one any parent would be proud of, is that I’d gotten on that jungle-painted airplane and cried and cried and cried. And for all the trying in the world, those tears had not ended until long after my madly-waving parents were the merest fraction of dots in the distance where they stood with white handkerchiefs on the rooftop of the Aeropuerto General Arturo Merino Benitez and I had to close my eyes to make the waving handkerchiefs continue materializing in my mind’s eye.

And so began my closing of the eyes to remember and to make gone things linger a bit longer.

At boarding school I was assigned a light blue metal bed, like a big tin can, with a shelf on the headrest. That’s where I put the picture. My dad developed all his film as slides, and so, snapshots were hard to ever come by. The family portrait at the head of my bed, taken in the States 3-and-a-half years earlier, was the only actual picture my mom had been able to find for me to take.

But I would come to find out it was oddly special: not because we were all posing in our Sunday best; not because a formal family portrait like that only happened every four years; not because my little sister Judy and I were in our very special matching red and white dresses Mom had stayed up sewing for us into the wee hours so we’d have them to wear to church on Christmas; not for any obvious reason, really.

Its specialness was only something a girl that stared at it from every angle could have discovered: my brother Danny’s eyes followed me magically around. I experimented. If I moved to the left, he was there. If I moved to the right, same. Up. Down. All over. Anywhere I went, there he was, looking me right back in the eyes with his silly little half smile.

Years later, at the Louvre in Paris, I would discover that Danny shared those superpower kind of eyes with the Mona Lisa.

Maybe I have Danny to thank. Maybe Leonardo Da Vinci. Maybe my preacher dad with photographer’s eye. Maybe boarding school. Maybe every single thing that ever happened in my odd life, but at some point I started opening my eyes, curious to see what might be looking back at me.

Categories: Growing Up, Once upon..., Re-imagining | Tagged: | Leave a Comment