The Flower That Killed My Car

This morning, Jenny Stevning's post, because of its use of the word "enough" reminded me of a particular event in my life from a couple of summers ago. I was going to leave a comment summarizing this event, but as I began to do so, I went back so fully in my memory to this time, that I had to pull out what I wrote about it back then. Reading through it, I was overcome with emotion, since I have recently withdrawn myself from the relationship involved. And I see that it's somehow part of my healing to bring forth this writing. So here it is:

My boyfriend Justin and I are driving across coastal Texas in Henrietta, my maraschino red Ford Escort, who was named as a tip of the hat to Mr. Ford himself. We've been camping at Goose Island State Park and are now headed to Austin. As we cruise down quiet green Highway 35, the sun is just contemplating setting. Suddenly, Justin stops the car next to a tall golden field and wanders off into it. When he comes back, he hands me a huge bell-shaped flower, tissue-paper pink with a deep crimson center and little ridges running through the petals. You could easily imagine one of Cicely Mary Barker’s fairies living inside.

While I'm admiring this flower, Justin turns the ignition and a horrible grinding sound punches from the engine. We don't know it yet, but this is Henrietta's last word, not counting the pathetic gasp that occurs when Justin turns the key again. We momentarily enter that state of denial endemic to the first moments after a death. Henrietta has faithfully escorted me for ten years, over many miles and across many landscapes, never showing signs of illness. This is the equivalent of a major stroke.

We are between two tiny towns in rural Texas during dinnertime on a Saturday. There's no answer at the first towing company. I'm elated when a warm female voice greets me at the second. She assures us that someone will be sent, but from the larger town of Victoria a couple of dozen miles away, so it will take “a little while.”

I admit, I’m not great at dealing with little annoyances. They often seem a personal affront from a god with a mean sense of humor. But when larger obstacles come along, I tend to view them as meaningful, so I'm quick to accept them. Such it is with Henrietta’s death. Justin, however, doesn’t know this about me yet, and I can see him bracing himself for my grumpiness. But I hang the flower from the rearview mirror, dig a knife and perfectly ripe cantaloupe out of the back of the car, and turn on public radio. A show called Art of the Song is featuring a young musician named Meg Hutchinson. Justin and I slurp cantaloupe and listen to this delicious woman speak of her childhood in New England, of attending a little Waldorf school with a garden. How this school gave her “a sense of the interrelatedness of things.” She performs a piece called, “America Enough,” inspired by the notion that “anything taken to its extreme becomes its opposite.” The song is mellow and contemplative, and sends a quiet thrill upon my skin, as she sings:

If there's noise enough, it turns back to silence
If there's crowd enough, it turns back to solitude
If there's pain enough, it turns back to something almost bright...
If there's time enough, there's no such thing as an hour
If there's love enough, the rest of this won't even matter.

And I understand. There is love enough. Justin's face aglow, our flower and fruit, the field, the sunset, and the warm moist air. I am not waiting for anything. Sometimes being forced to stop is the only sweet relief from going on and on. Broken down becomes whole.

But...

It's Sunday now, auto shops closed. We're stuck in Victoria. On the Comfort Inn's lobby computer, I look up the flower that killed Henrietta:  it's a Swamp Rose Mallow. I discover at 2become1weddings.com that the meaning/sentiment of this flower is “Consumed by love.” I also learn that Pliny claimed, “Whosoever shall take a spoonful of the Mallows shall that day be free from all diseases that may come to him.” Well, apparently this magic does not extend to the next day, because yesterday's joy and wonder has shriveled like the flower still attached to poor Henrietta's rearview mirror.

I've learned that the feeling of doom is fleeting and illusory, but if indulged, will bring reality into its pathetic clutches. And so I do what I can to escape it, generally by changing the scenery, getting physically out of where I'm psychologically stuck. Even if it’s just sitting at the top of an outdoor stairwell at a Comfort Inn in a gulf coast thunderstorm, fifteen feet away from the room I share with my boyfriend, who I temporarily can’t stand because he’s chosen the Sci-Fi channel over adventure. Over me.

I'm considering a line from that song - If there's comfort enough, it turns back to sorrow. Last night, when we sat in our broken down car, plagued by humidity, mosquitoes, and ants, I was more comfortable than I am now, lodged in an air-conditioned room with a king-sized bed and cable. There were physical discomforts then, but they weren't important. We had a juicy cantaloupe and great radio. And each other. Now, only partially sheltered from the furious rain and earsplitting thunder, I find more fulfillment gazing over the soggy parking lot of the Comfort Inn than lounging on one of its cushy beds.

An old boyfriend once said I expect too much from daily life. It's true. I want moments of magical transcendence and communion to define my days. This is deeply connected to my desire to travel. In moving from place to place, everything is extraordinary, fluid, and thus primed for moments of transcendence. But just taking a trip is not enough. As Paulo Coelho has said, “God is always hiding hell in the middle of paradise.” Traveling with loved ones inevitably reveals roadblocks within the relationship, the self. And this is a special kind of hell because there are less channels of escape when you're sharing a small hotel room. The swings between transcendence and pettiness get closer together and more distinct. It's alarmingly easy somehow to go from sharing awe over a sunset to cold positioning on opposite sides of a king-sized bed.

After three tense days of coming to terms with Henrietta's demise, we board a bus home. The last leg of our journey is by train, and as I'm gazing out the window another train passes. The view becomes a rapid and chaotic alternation of train, landscape, train, landscape. And a voice inside me says: Don’t strain to see, just let it all pass before your eyes. Let it all be there, and all roll away. I think back over the past few days, about how in relationships, as in travel, it's necessary at times to give up the itinerary and creatively face roadblocks, seeing in them the opportunity to expand limits and face fears. What travel acutely offers is the opportunity to surrender to movement, accept and even embrace unpleasantness in the context of a larger joy. If there's love enough, the rest of this won't even matter. It suddenly hits me that this shift in perception is the true movement of travel.

I reach for the hand that picked the flower that killed my car.

The Grim Reaper of Angel Fire

I have a horrible confession to make.

Until last Friday, I hadn't been to the dentist in twenty-two years.

When I was growing up, I went every six months, because that's what you did in my white bread, middle class world.  My last parent-paid visit was when I was nineteen, and that was also when I got my first cavity and had it filled.

Out on my own, as a young idiot adult, I tried very hard to forget that I even had a body for a long time.  Then I started having babies and sort of was forced to remember.  But I had my first three kids at home, so was still on the trajectory of avoiding medical personnel as much as possible.

I still think we're too health-obsessed in this country, and we give medical entities way too much authority over our bodies.  But I've mellowed in my old age, and am not quite so radically against the medical establishment as I was in my twenties.  I've been meaning to go to the dentist for years, really I have, but somehow it kept getting pushed down my to-do list.

It was my oldest daughter who finally convinced me to go.  Another confession:  she made the appointment for me (and one for herself the same day), and called to remind me about it the day before.  I, of course, had completely blocked it out forgotten about it.

So off we went to Angel Fire, because the Taos dentists aren't taking new patients.  I'd never been to Angel Fire before, and it had snowed quite a bit the day before.  It was one of the most treacherous journeys I've made in a vehicle.  The road there is consistently narrow and winding, and the last stretch is the narrowest and most winding, up a steep mountain.  At one point, there was a "curve," actually a ninety-degree turn, without any warning at all until you're right up on it.

I have to admit, I was freaking out a wee bit, driving on a slick, unplowed road such as this.  I inched almost the entire way.  Thank God, at least, that no one was tailing me.  By the time we finally made it to the dentist's office, I was sweating bullets, had a nasty headache, and just wanted to take a nap.

We went in the office and were greeted by an undead receptionist with a massive head wound, and I suddenly realized it was the day before Halloween.  She was wearing scrubs splattered with fake blood; it was a good costume.  A little too good.

I recently went to the doctor for the first time in a while and needed to have my ears flushed out.  While not painful, this was an extremely disturbing experience for me, although in a strange way it bordered on the mystical.  It made me realize that I've become a total wuss about having foreign objects and substances forced into my orifices.  So my already addled state created by the drive to Angel Fire was heightened by the nervousness I felt about having my mouth poked around in.  If you can't imagine the state I was in, here's a visual aid.

I look drugged, don't I?  Well, I wasn't.

When the dentist appeared dressed as the Grim Reaper, that was the last straw.

No.  The last straw was having the Grim Reaper poke an extremely sharp and pointy instrument around my incredibly sensitive gums to clean out twenty-two years worth of nastiness.

To be fair, he was very sweet and gentle (and tall and handsome).  He had ski equipment placed decoratively on his walls,

and provided a lovely view from the very comfortable reclining chair I was in. 

Plus, he has the coolest name ever:  Strider A. McCash (I wonder if the A is for Aragorn.) 

But he was too quiet.  And that instrument was too much like a tiny scythe.  I was too scared of him to ask for a photo.

And then there was the assistant.  She too was in costume, which was basically just an orange shirt and black pants and creepy black eye makeup.  She proceeded to tell me that this was her fifth day as a dental assistant, and that when she'd had her hysterectomy, she'd almost died of an infection because they left some kind of medical foreign object inside her.

Somehow I made it through all this, with my whole body tensed and my eyes squinched shut, and, lo and behold, it turned out that I have no new cavities.  I think Dr. McCash was a little disturbed that I've been such a dental delinquent and still have healthy teeth.  I may have detected a note of contempt when he told me, "Yeah, well, you're teeth actually look good."  He was probably also wondering what kind of freak takes pictures at the dentist's office.

The drive back was fine; all the snow had melted.  When I got home I inspected my teeth in the mirror.  They're so clean and shiny now!

And I swear - I'll go see the dentist again in six months, like a good girl.

Well, maybe in a year.  Next Halloween.

Ghost Ranch Gathering: Into The Heart of the Desert

A time to gather
myself to myself.

A time to gather sacred life
into silent landscape.

A time to gather heart to mind
and back again.

A time to gather in the heart
of the high desert
with twelve brilliant women,

contemporaries and ancients.

My home for the next three days

is Casa del Sol,

a hacienda,

the spiritual heart

of Ghost Ranch.

 My room is small and simple.

Some previous visitor

has left seven-day candles

in the hearth.

We begin each day walking

the labyrinth.

Mornings

and evenings,

we study

the Desert Mothers.

In the 300s,

when Constantine made Christianity

the state religion,

many rebelled, saw it as sellout.

They retreated to the desert,

against the status quo.

Some, especially men,

became hermits.

But often the women

created communities

where they shared
and prayed
and taught.

Syncletica
was considered very wise.

She taught about living
an authentic life.
She said,

It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind 
while living in a crowd, 
and it is possible for one who is a solitary 
to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.

Mary of Egypt
was a probably a prostitute
or at least quite promiscuous.

She left that life
and entered the wilderness
where she lived
to the end of her days.

Macrina was the woman
behind the famous brothers,
St. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa.

She was compared to Socrates

for her wisdom.

Gregory said she was:

A woman who raised herself by philosophy

to the greatest height of human virtue.

Mary C. Earle,

in her book, The Desert Mothers,

 says the lesson of these women is:

Daily practice, 

focused on what matters 

in the long run, 

shapes each of us

into true human beings,

marked by the glory of God.

  

My practice,

afternoons at Ghost Ranch,

is solitude and silence.

Just me

and the desert.

This huge silence is

the Word of God,

living and active,

listening, alert;

not even a bird

breaks into it.

 

Unadulterated sunshine

holds hands

with a breeze,

and they both

hug the rocks.

 

A single plane

passes over

the daymoon.

 

I crawl on my belly

up soft windswept mounds

of red dirt,

 

immediate geology,

cracked

like an old elephant.

 

In this overflow of solitude,

I think, What if

my longings

are God's longings?

That could be my soul

turned inside

out,

these monuments

of rock,

 

 

these fractal branches,

 

this perfect pentagon

of white stone.

Resting with this Earth,

I receive

her healing.

She is the greatest

Desert Mother

of all.

No agenda but to love

this self

in this body,

on this earth,

my own monastic cell.

The Desert Father, Abba Moses said,

Go to your cell

and your cell

will teach you all. 

Nothing that isn't,

nothing to escape,

when there are no walls.

The final morning

brings first snow,

a perfect symbol

of renewal,

purification,

 

an unexpected alteration

from beauty to beauty,

movement

from earth to earth,

home to home.

Ghost Ranch Gathering: The Journey There

The open road leads into storm,

through mists and mysteries.

 

Rain patters on the windshield

as I peer into bluster.

 

Skyline rolls along,

 

into varied landscapes

and shifting skyscapes,

tilts and turns

as sun begins

to surface.

 

Through valleys of trees
in their autumn dresses

into canyons and

up and down hills,

on I journey
until I come into the heart
of the high desert.

I meander along
the gravel entrance road,
entranced.

I am
hushed,
beyond words
for this beauty
to which I have arrived.