What has been most significant? While still in process about everything, I would start with

• growing up in a loving family
• finding my love, getting to keep him
• receiving my children, letting them go.

***

The most important thing involving my inner life happened when I stopped fearing my death.

For a decade I have not feared dying. This you would know is very significant, if you could only know the grip its terror held on me, before.

I’m not saying I don’t fear anymore the process of dying, the uncertainty about how it will happen, the lack of control. Put me on a cliff with slippery stones underfoot, I’m still going to freeze and wail like a treed kitten.

What I stopped fearing was the end of living. The end of my story here. I used to be terrified of what it would mean

• if I hadn’t gotten the details right
• if I let everyone down
• if (here’s the biggie, I suppose) nobody really noticed.

***

I couldn’t escape the conclusion that 20 years past my demise no one would notice, because that’s what we experience with others who’ve passed on. The world moves forward.

What changed was a new sense of the story that maybe, just maybe, we’re all part of (a.k.a. the meta-narrative). I recognized the possibility, and began to believe, that this existence is not the main event. The one who made possible this living we do is not, anymore, in my mind

• just a construct
• a limited being like me
• a hand-wringer over the way events turn out.

Instead, this one, this other, is

• responsible for everything in reality
• the cause
• the great artist
• the author of the story being played out, of which I am only a small character, albeit a character as significant as any other in terms of being created magnificently by the one.

***

Ten years ago, when my thinking started making its shift, I grasped this thought about myself: Even if I was caused by the creator I believe in to be dark, to reject the one and go against the coming grand narrative conclusion — even if that turns out to be true sometime after I croak — this story is still a good one. The shadows will only enhance the light. There would be exquisite meaning even in my role as one destined for destruction.

I think that’s when I started seeing how much I truly loved the story and its author, and I began to grasp morsels of hope. Because the creator, so it’s been revealed, will not punish or destroy a single one who embraces the story. These beings are drawn to truth, though it slay them.

***

And so for a decade I’ve lived here. Not afraid to die, to be gone. No longer worried about what’s marked on my tombstone. Sorry that people will grieve, but hoping they will not despair. I’m really looking forward to finding out what comes next. I’m believing it’ll be good. Such belief defines “faith” for me.

I’m embracing the next stage of the adventure, the actual symphony or story. This part, though good in its way, has been only a prelude or prologue.

I like it here, most days. I really do. But the main event is coming, and I think I’ll like that, too.

As you read this, I hope you will understand that when I speak of the long night that preceded these days of my happiness, I do not remember grief and loneliness so much as I do peace and comfort — grief, but never without comfort; loneliness, but never without peace. Almost never.
~ Marilynne Robinson, from Gilead, loaned to me by Ann. Thanks, Ann.

The slow sense of
softness,
like being followed in spirit,
haunted,
melted just an inch or so,
changed.

Art quietly proclaims
the value of the flame’s dark border.

For me, those days in the late 60s pulsed with freedom. I saw the sanitized, variety-TV versions of what was going on. But I had known the restraints, I thought, that were now loosed: girls no longer had to wear dresses to school; boys could have hair cuts other than crew-length. And I liked guys in longer hair. Oh, yes.

I hadn’t come from the 50s or the 40s. Didn’t really get the first-hand anger of those older kids who’d felt repressed by previous generations’ rules that lacked meaning for them. The ground had shifted under everyone, because it somehow had to. The kids had broken free; their way was so cool. And yet, the world wasn’t everything it should be, still.

We new crop of teenagers just needed to dance wildly, swing our long hair and macrame accessories, and hope the draft would end soon.

Young adults today, at least the ones I’m closest to, tend to think the peace-out children of the sixties had the right ideas, in some ways, at least. But they’re not going to react the same vociferous ways in the public arena. Times now call for lower case typing online and movie-watching etiquette. Subtlety. They don’t wish to expose every body hair on stage. It’s been done. Disillusionment was, I suppose, unavoidable.

But hair’s still long, and for this gift, usually, I say, “Right on.”

I’m struck by the beauty in Orthodox rituals – from decorous clothing to music to incense. They’re at once simple and opulent. The people regularly practice fasting, as in abstaining from meat, dairy products, olive oil, and alcohol. Right now, during Great Lent, the fast holds fast for around fifty days. And to this cloud of witnessing faithful I have lent my husband.

You might reconsider inviting us out for pizza until after Easter.

Many Protestants decide on something to give up for Lent. The reasons appear to range from wanting to achieve holiness to a remembrance of the sorrow Jesus’ disciples felt after he died. (One of the better articles I’ve read, here on Wikipedia, contrasts and compares several Lenten observances.)

I like what my daughter told me, about the purpose of the fast being preparation for the feast, for the joy to come. In such a sense I tend to look at life, because, you know, life is hard and then we die. But if one has a view of the hardness bearing eternal purpose, well, then, it might just all be worth it.

The only thing I’ve given up for Lent is shoes. I’m trying out barefoot jogging on my treadmill. Apart from blackening my soles, I’m thinking this might be okay. Better than what Asics has bestowed. I need to strengthen muscles in new ways, but first thing I lengthened my stride. Not the same texture as when striking smooth sand at the beach, but I liked it. I remember wanting to run like this while dreamily staring at fields we drove past on vacation.

For me, perhaps, the motivation has ever been freedom. Let’s give up the shackles that have bound our thinking. Let’s dance across the dunes, wind in our hair.

But I did first need to see myself stepping so intentionally onto a path that destroyed me and those around me. I hadn’t believed I could really be bad. Until I saw it, those years ago, I couldn’t mourn. And mourning was good.

It still comes to me in organic ways. When I need it, I guess. Before the feast and joyful exercise, the darker actions of blessed loss and good grief.

Though on the outside, wasting

(perishing, decaying, you fill in the blank),

the inward me is renewed day by day.

~Paul of Tarsus

What has renewed you?

Brindy had lived a good life, a really swell batch of days spanning nearly 18 years. This day she suffered. My mom had told me (from her experience with our 17-year-old doggy from my childhood), “When it’s time, you’ll know.” She was right. I called the vet’s office. They kindly scheduled an appointment for 4:30, the last slot of the day.

As I return today to blogging, I conveniently look back not only on my dog’s life but another year of living, and I’m very thankful for it all.

This past year I lost bets with myself. Starting in ’07 (the year this picture of Brindy was taken), I’d said I would do certain things with writing and life. You know, goal type stuff. But I knew and was reminded anew that reality is as reality does. And in the losses and failures arrive gains sometimes most amazing. Gifts.

Last Monday, Mom went with me and Brindy to the vet’s office. The two of us talked while waiting in the exam room for the first shot to take affect, the anesthesia that lets the animal drift into sleep. I stroked Brindy’s fur and felt her trembles lessen, her muscles finally relax. She’d fought for so long. I called her little iron dog, because she’d survived things in younger years like slug-bait poisoning. And she’d been my running buddy. Always ready to accompany, to protect.

The vet returned to give Brindy her second injection, the one that would end her suffering. But my dog was already gone.

I didn’t cry. I’d done that. Likely I will again. I was grateful for her easy passing, and so was Mom. We hugged each other. We hugged the vet.

Eighteen years ago I wasn’t expecting to raise a small canine. For me, one would have to be Beagle size or larger; I was done with little dogs. But my grandma, Edna, had been given a teeny puppy, and she recognized the first day that she couldn’t keep her. As Grandma Edna’s caregiver, I agreed. At first sight my little children loved the doggy. And I admit I was smitten fast. We were too much for Tim, he gave in quickly to our pleas, our promises.

Tim, though not a dog person, was kind to Brindy. She became his companion at the woodpile. I caught glimpses of them playing, chasing one another back and forth over the grass in late spring. Tim would grin as Brindy raced, a dark streak on the lawn. She flipped her curled tail, her tongue lolled; she was gaining.

The writer-learning this past year has become exponential. I’m in school for the blind – those who grope with longings for word songs, expressions of the literary, or simply to craft solid sentences. It’s been coming along.

From the first, though, probably ever since long, long ago when “Deanna and the Alligator” formed at the dull point of a chunky pencil on paper huge-ruled, with dashes between the lines for help forming lower-case “e”, I have sought meaningful content. A few times over two past decades, what I’ve wanted to show and tell has worked for others. But still I reach for that original idea, one that’s good for me, good for you. Not that I’ll ever hold it firmer than a grasp of sand.

But yesterday morning, settling back into a Newport, Oregon hotel’s fourth-floor comfort, I welcomed a clue. While the sky pinked and the moon-cast swells donned leopard patterns before breaking, I savored a new possibility. Maybe I owe my life to this. To these. To all of it. My life, no one else’s. Shaped, as it were, by elements unrelenting under moon and stars.

It’ll be something to see if these perhapses given this December morn will survive the earth’s turning and further illumination.

But one drear morning, a wise old trout, twenty-five inches at least, appears and travels beside me, tipping a shiny sliver of insight toward me with a flick of tail.

The tenuous possibility remains, newly-minted, like the handful of difficult notes I’m supposed to spill with charm from my aging flute the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

This morning’s insight regards my grandma, the woman who spurs me, through anger, to limn her failings on paper and maybe even take revenge. But now I pause. The grace of that grandfather rainbow-fish reminds me…….there’s a notion I’ve heard about reasons for actions being rooted in an individual logic. A particular wisdom possibly motivated the woman I and so many have misunderstood.

Whichever proprieties you and I hold, she violated a portion of them. But have I ever asked why? Good grief, yes, I have, and yet always from the outside. Never imagining the inner girl, who may have looked a lot like me, deserving more leeway than I offered. Could this be because I didn’t yet see I could offer such compassion to myself?

Hm. Grandma may not have only sought to please her varied passions. A fear, born by moonlight and sweat and a stranger’s perversion, may have warned her early on not to trust her little children to a stepfather. Thankfully, for my dad’s sake, she forced him to grow up, safe, with her caring mother. No way existed for her to spend time treading water, explaining to the family why she did these things. She like all of us was locked in cycles, seasons, emotions, rivers of apprehension, the ravages faced during storms. She may have done the best she knew.

At dawn’s breaking I scuff along. My river’s empty, except for a memory of flashing tail, and I note the accustomed calling to practice a new discernment.

What else can be said for a woman nearing 50 who posits motives for her actions 30-plus years ago, on paper, submitting them for critique? Yet I’m pleased about this place and these doings. I’ve come to understand that my motto in this season is, to quote the great Weird Al Yankovich, “Dare to be Stupid.”

This morning my love, my only, about whose care, concern, and humanity I write so much lately, left our home with the proverbial weight of the world on his shoulders. Though I have done everything of which I’m capable to relieve financial stress, it’s still suspended above us. We wait for what comes next. And in the meantime, we have everything we need. Only when, it seems, my over-thinking and what-ifs get through to him, does the anchor drag.

So, for a positive thought. Finally, years into this, I can picture almost exactly the person I’m writing my memoir for. She’s like me, in her 20s or 40s or 60s, but living her unique story, not even necessarily over-thinking anything. She’s someone poised on the overlook, or maybe scrambling down the craggy cliff-face, but in any case she has entered a season of trial. Maybe outside forces brought her here, maybe, like me, she plunged into it herself, but within the maelstrom brewing she will be given a test, as were biblical Hannah and Mary and Jacob and Abraham.

I’m writing for her, but not to teach her how to decide or overcome. I’m simply sharing a story, my own. She can slurp it up in an afternoon, or come back for sips over many days. What she finds will be me finding out what I’m truly interested in, such stuff as will make me ponder, decide, and dare for decades hence. Because that’s what a story does. She might forget it tomorrow, but she may remember points of it for ages and draw strength from them, when she sees herself choosing the pathway everything is showing her she was always meant to take.

One morning on the way to the busy street’s crosswalk where patrol boys stood holding yellow flags, I narrated to myself, “She walked quickly and efficiently.” I’d found those words in a recently-read book, maybe in Lassie, Come Home or in Lampo, the Traveling Dog. Anyway, I liked them. I was quickly moving my saddle-shoed feet. I guessed to be efficient was like being quick, though I wasn’t sure. The phrase just sounded neato.

Years passed, and though I recalled the phrase often, I did not become either quick or efficient. By the time my daughter pranced, sock-footed, over hardwood floors to our table for her second grade lessons, I was facing the reality of my pace in life: slow. Sometimes very inefficient, too, according to standard life benchmarks. Yet I would see, or think I saw, again and again, things moving forward despite my meanderly ways.

Maybe the high pain tolerance doctors have told me I have translates also into patience. Maybe not. My shoulders ache, my chest tightens in middle-of-night memory probings and regretting of actions and inactions. Missteps – ah, I wish to do them over same as anyone. Waiting to see reasons can feel pretty fruitless.

Perhaps, though, it’s an individual, interpretive dance I’m seeing in myself, rather than a failure to keep step with flashy Flamenco types I can so admire.

In any case, last week I spent two nights and most of three days all by my lonesome, and I have to confess, I enjoyed every moment as it wended its way forward. At 1:30 a.m. Friday I awoke and got up to write until 5:00. Heaven. Then, after a snooze, I sent out my weekly submissions. I remembered, as I wandered through my home, why I harbor every minute alone these days. I’m sorry if it seems miserly, and I’m grateful to those two patient people who understand, who came home to me after their own adventure “out there.” Those times to think about things, to be thoroughly inefficient, are just so essential.

But thanks to my son’s clear-headed planning before the trip I stayed home from, my camera went along and performed its job well. May you be inspired by the meandering Oregon coastline and riverway he captured.