MP3 recording: hi-fi, or lo-fi.

How can I take the reader's perspective into account when I write? I write from excess, from overflow, from abundance, a plethora, a cyclone of words. Aren't we all on journeys, discovering our way as we go? Mine isn't a journey of logic, nor do I know the path or the map that'll finally result from it all. I don't have a specific set of interests to write about. Though I do favour prose poetry and exploring emotional landscapes. My lifewriting is often hidden in metaphors, obscured with fictions, offered as a tie-dyed garment of brightly coloured silk, fragile and soft as the morning sun, or as dense dark broadcloth heavy with grime and flung before you. For I don't know who you are. I can only guess. With your writing at your sites, in comments, I create a sense of you that is surely only a part of who you are. We dance together, oh, yes, we do this, in our writing, our interconnections, and it's fun, most enjoyable, but I wonder about the intersections, parallels, curvatures, and parabolas of our intertextual writing. We share our core values, deeper selves, revealing who we are in ways that we might not in social situations, we let each other overhear us, our soliloquys, yet we are always cognizant of each other, and each other's perspectives. We love the dialogues we have. Small sitting rooms for writers writing on writing, where the style of the saying counts, not just what is said. Let's share fine champagne and fresh strawberries and talk of art and literature and philosophy and each other's joys and travails with the perfection that a purely writerly existence affords. It's a luxury, living through words like this. We can be true to our most generous, loving selves. Posts fall like golden leaves, etched with our words, disappearing into the world, a world that is surely far richer for what we are sharing.

I write out of excess. I write because
I'm too full. Over-ripe. Spilling out.
The corset of silence too tight.

I write because I'm pregnant and have
to give birth.

It's the extravagance of living.
The fertility of words.
Because I carry around
a wild dictionary in my head.

Because of the aesthetics of expression,
how satisfying it is to compose, to share.

A thought, a heart motion, a poem, a gift.

From me, but to you.

Why do you write?

Push-pull confuses me. Especially the push-away.

We hurt each other with rejection.

The force with which we can expel each other. Turning the other into an object of non-importance, an unwanted essence. The ability to savour, to honour, to love: the self, others, the world, damaged. But love doesn't happen in isolation. Maybe some have their lists of good and bad. But it's not that easy. It's not that this person, or people, state of mind, area of interest is safe, acceptable and all else needs to be distanced. Isn't that possession? And possessions can be lost. If they're people, they can leave; if they're belief systems or areas, we can become profoundly disenchanted. Then where are we? In angry rebuttal to the world that we clearly divided between acceptable and not. Between people who counted and those who didn't. Between an arbitrary definition of the good and the not-good. So what do we do? Do we cling more tightly to our safe constructed categories of who is and who isn't even when they might betray us, or do we give way and open out to the mystery that has no name, is amorphous, all-pervading, without judgement? A light that shines everywhere without discrimination. If we could spend one year of our lives not rejecting what would happen? Would it open out in magnificent ways, this ability to love?

Or would be we overwhelmed? Is the push-pull, rejection-acceptance, necessary for homeostasis, for balance?

Breathe in; breathe out.

As I tell my yoga students, make sure your in-breath and out-breath are equal - that what you take in and what you give out balance.

But. Push-pull. Wound-heal. Why do I do this? Is there no other way?

An MP3 recording of this piece:
Rose Mandala, or the Whorls of Angels: Lo
Rose Mandala, or the Whorls of Angels: Hi

I am with you like an angel. Can you feel kisses, a caress of breeze perhaps, or a sudden warmth that lightens your spirit? I hold you enfolded in my wings when you weep, inconsolable, disappointed. Can you sense a blessing of radiance about you? My wings, woven of sun and moonlight on veins like leaves. Surely you see their shimmer breaking through what separates us. You are my prayer, my vigil.

But I am an earthy woman who laughs, storms, cries, rants, pesters, and loves.

And I am unable to settle, come into being in one place, crystallize. Can I play in the garden palaces of the heart? And retire in solitude when the day is done, to rest?

Even as I sweep across the sky of your consciousness, a roseate sunset, mandala whorl of sun, the choral clouds, like a hymn, a sacred song, something ebullient and therefore holy, I am racing away into the night and disappearing.

I offer you a guardian, a keeper of the flame of your heart, a high priestess who holds your innermost secrets, a temple to honour your prayers on love, but it's ephemeral, Akashic, in the place where everything is recorded, where what we are, our memories, our dreams, are held safe. Nothing you could hold onto, nothing at all.

I am here; but you cannot see me.

One set of beliefs though which you define yourself. Is this fundamentalism? That set of beliefs is also a formulae. A code in a sacred text; the ordinances of the ordinated; a belief in the reward of rightness. Happiness to be on the one path to salvation, whatever it may be. In every movement, surge of social beliefs, group with a purpose, religion, are fundamentalists. Those who place whatever doesn't agree with their creed into a category of evil to be opposed with all force, vehemently. Fundamentalism is the opposite of acceptance. Fundamentalism takes the complexity out of living. It replaces a sensitive tuner, an ethic of compassion, a cognizance of difference, shades of infinite grey, with certainty. Instead of the vast and perplexing mystery of living, one set of beliefs through which a person defines themselves and others. One path to walk. One goal to achieve. One perspective on those who follow the "illumined path" and those who don't. Fundamentalism is an escape from the responsibility of living. Of living in the impossibility of time, with uncertainty, in the flux of ideas, events, emotions, unpredictable happenings with a mass of people who are equally unknown. Fundamentalism is like the virus that invades to overtake the whole system and make it its own. In its success it kills the very spirit that gave it life.

We always knew it was a mix of what you were born with and the life you lived: genetics and environment. In a world of perpetual change, of nature's endless recycling of everything, how could there be any absolutes? It turns out that even our DNA is not absolute. Our genes have switches that respond to our living in the world and in turn affect our lives, their unfolding. If we didn't have philosophical underpinnings, a knowing that we're born with certain predispositions but that our environment shapes much of what emerges, would our epigenetic scientists have known what to look for? This is exciting research; I was riveted: even when an environment has not been conducive, a smoker's lungs, toxic metals in the water system, and there is disease, it might still be possible to heal the person by fixing the genetic response to the maladaptation. To go in and 'fix the operating system.' Turning back on the gene switch that stops tumor growth, thereby preventing metastasis. Medical science appears more and more miraculous. One hopes the techniques are used wisely and not ever for a eugenic agenda...

A meme, at Body Electric, which I couldn't resist:

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don't speak often or don't really know each other) please post a comment and tell the story of a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory connecting you and me . It can be anything you want - good or bad ("good" is better for me, however) - BUT IT HAS TO BE FICTION. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you!

I'd love to meet you all! Imagine stories for us...

The palette in each frame, stark Modernist canvases, pillars, ground, simple, clean. The colour of the moon. Light as a wash over the world, the way water catches the light, the figures of hidden women, what moves across the landscapes of muted colour, women who dwell in colours of the Madonna's veils. Trapped in a caste system as rigid as the iron bars through which scenes are shot.

The women always framed in boxes, closed in, shuttered away.

The gigantic-limbed tree where the lovers meet like a blossoming, flow of the heart. She carries the light for him, visitation of a vision, where freedom may be, the candle she holds at her breast, the light of everything. She is a Religious painting of divinity, beautiful; Durga, Mary.

Ghandi who would free the enslaved of a rigid ideology. Riots and refusals in India for filming, for showing. Thirty one million widows today.

The widow is the virgin; beggar, or prostitute. Where acceptance, love is not possible. Who would not drown themselves? Who could not accept the warm caress of infinity in the waters when the ravaged heart beats like a wounded bird who's fallen out of its cage?

Finally speaking after 22 years about why my birthday is so difficult and the grief it holds enabled me to acknowledge, accept and perhaps release it. It's been a significant birthday for me. On the inside, where I shape my perceptions. I'm sure it had something to do with you all. After posting with an unusual openess, a warmth began radiating and it spread and spread even to illumining the evening with its kindness and gentle happiness.

Two dear friends took me for dinner at a superb Vietnamese restaurant, Ginger, on Yonge Street. They are both 'chanting buddies' from yoga. Jean and I did teacher training in 1995, and Moira was one of the first people to attend my classes and when I taught in my home she came for years. She belongs to a choir and has a wonderful voice and carried our chants. These two women came regularly to my house for about 5 years once a week for a two and a half hour "Long Chant," the one that has a seed syllable, or bij mantra, for each chakra, and we used to go, round after round, hour after hour, cleansing our memories, minds, hearts, emotions of whatever we were carrying. Afterward we ate chocolate poppyseed cake, a chai or yogi tea that had simmered throughout the chant, and laughed and laughed. I eventually moseyed into a moving meditation dance practice, Sweat Your Prayers, and left the rigorous yoga practice (except for my daily private meditation) but they kept on chanting. Jean, who is 62 and glows, does that woman glow, now hosts a Prayers for the Earth in her home once a month, and they do Long Chant, and an Adi Shakti, or Divine Mother chant, each once a month at the Ashram on Palmerston. I am going to try to make it to the Adi Shakti chant this Friday. They are such beautiful friends, how can I not go? The flowers, their bright ebullience, are a gift from Moira. The evening was a reunion and I don't think I've laughed so hard for over so many hours in a long time!

We hadn't seen each other since before I went to Vancouver, almost three years. I'm glad I'm back because having friends like these is worth everything.

On the way home my cell phone rang. It was my son wishing me a happy birthday, and he had a surprise too. He'd be coming to Toronto to see me, to stay for one night. I was fairly dancing down the streetlight lit streets I can tell you!

He arrived the next day, yesterday, we had a wonderful visit, and he took us to a movie I wanted to see, Water, and then to Future Bakery for cake and wine for me, and milk for him and his sister; he said with a glint, he'll be able to have a beer instead in a few weeks when he turns 19.

The warmth of friends and family, their generosity, what could make me feel more special?

It's been simple, but beautiful.

Today is my birthday. It's hard for me to celebrate my birthday, and it's something I have tried to do since my marriage ended, not altogether successfully. There's something raw about this day for me. My ex said I was just plain weird around my birthday. I think it's because I miss my father, and my birthday, with gifts, a gathering of family, dinner out, was the day he celebrated his daughter. I felt honoured in ways that he could never know growing up because other things were going on at home while he was on all those business trips. There have been many years when my mother didn't give me a present at all, but hey, I've done that back too. She didn't want a child, neither did he, their marriage in crisis and about to end, but then me. She wished me out of existence many, many times, he fell in love with his little daughter, and treated me like an exquisite human being, and always did, the whole time he was alive. My brothers and I have never really recovered from losing him.

Anyway, it's my birthday, I'm supposed to celebrate this day that I was born 54 years ago, and I find I think of the wonderful celebrations my Dad had for me on this day, and I feel blessed and sad. My brother and his beautiful children dropped by on the weekend. My mother sent an email from South Africa where she's wintering. I've received a couple of emails from friends. Tonight two dear friends who I know through yoga, one of whom I did teacher training with, the other who came to my class for years, both of whom I've chanted with, are taking me out for dinner. I haven't seen them in about 3 years, so that'll be wonderful. I don't know if my daughter wants to do anything, we'll see.

I wish I could just forget about my birthday, really. Grieving never ends, it's cyclical, and my birthday triggers memories of a time that's long past. My father died 22 years ago.

So, Dad, thanks for all those birthdays, for honouring me, my life, and I am trying hard to bring that within so that I can celebrate myself in all the ways you would have wished.



Photos: The top one was me at 3 months; the middle one is me at 20 in front of the maternity wing of the hospital where I was born in Sinoia, Zimbabwe; the last one is my Dad and I in 1980.

A piece published at qarrtsiluni.