Essence

I've been trying to commune with the essence of Gil,  I write as I watch the sunrise hit the western    fog above the blues and white caps of the Pacific.  I've come to a seaside haven called Sea Ranch for a week long  ?exploration? of what is essential to me.
I remember wondering in the early days, as I was learning what lay under the skin of my oh so foreign new love,  what his essence would have been without the culture of Jewish Bronx youngest son of an overpowering judgemental, loving and abusive father.  Gil was one of the most courageous men I've ever known, but it hid under passivity so as not to attract wrath.  Some of his impulsive generosity was to mask his neediness but much of it was his true delight in sharing the largess of the Universe, and his playfulness and profound joy in mastery of his body were all of his deepest self.  Now that that husk is powdered ash in the box by the stereo, I can focus more easily on who he was/is? on that more essential plane.  I would love to meet this most truly Gil in a dream and tell him how I saw him, and loved him and needed, needed, needed him to make me whole.
As I write the sun is creeping up from the blue, over the rocks and into the ever  green.    So    who is the essential me?  As I fuzz my eyes and try to see my deepest self as I have been seeing Gil, it's so much harder.  I've always thought of myself as an introspective, reflective sort, but I think I've been so preoccupied with care taking my tribe these last 40+ years, that I've neglected my inner sky.  That is my task now, this week, this year.  As I practice this eye fuzzing, it's so interesting to see friends and new folk and not get distracted by their packaging, their stories about who they are but just to feel their under the skin pulse.  I have no illusion that I am seeing all, but my nose is tuned to the essential.  
I look forward to the sun hitting my ever green essence.

Exploring

I'm living in the land of "I knew a man called Gil Miller, years ago", yet still mist up when I think about him.  What's up with that? One foot in getting on with life, another not wanting to leave the moisture of the loss.  I've gotten a few more days where I get an appetizer of the solitude in my future, enough to know I'll like it.  My mantra of "yes" is taking me out to a ??somatic/body workshop?? in California the week of my 63rd birthday.  It seems auspicious as I try to find the way into being more "embodied".
The WHO are you, WHY are you, WHAT do you WANT? still plays in the back room of my mind but it seems to need less thinking and more tentative exploring what's possible, tuning into how I feel as I try it.
Grieving is the oddest experience I can recall this lifetime, but perhaps there are many others equally surprising if I can just stay open and risk trying them,

Wake up call

I feel like I've been sleeping my whole life and am only just now being called to "wake up, wake up, this is your life, what you do makes a difference".   I used to say that about my middle schoolers, why it was that they were at that "ripe moment of desperation" where true change was possible.   I hope real change is still possible for me too.

I've noticed that I have a body, and that it's mine and that it's not in very good shape for the home stretch.  How to take care of it? Why to take care of it? Do I really want to live?  I have so little sense of what I (which one? the farmer, caretaker, poet, house designer?) want, in contrast to unconsciously gravitate toward (chocolate, giving away too much, imagining and then {exhaustion} trying to actually do it).

An old refrain, "WHO are you? WHY are you? WHAT do you WANT?"  is playing on the radio in the back room of my mind.      I don't know.      And I'm not sure how to find out, except to have patience with my patience.  I am still newly born to this single life where everything is newly experienced.  Newly, the same old with a different perspective.

This I know
I want to want to wake up; I'm willing to risk discomfort and put in effort to wake up.
I don't want to waste this ephemeral act of breathing.

The Gil Celebration is over

I just took Chris to the airport.
And now I'm facing the rest of my life without him.   I knew this would be one more level of realization but it still is knocking me off my feet. I know this is normal, I guess.  But not for me.  I'm not the emotional type. Has he changed this about me too? Am I ever going to get back to my old normal?  What the hell is normal? What am I going to do with all this left over food? He's not around to eat it!!! What guiding principal will inform my use of Time?  Will it ever get easier!?! How long? How long??
I just woke from a dream fragment where I found him in an attic apartment and he called out my name.
I want to go back to sleep and not wake up.

The Gil party is ON!!

My invites have been scattershot, apologies.  For those of you still reading, pass it on.

I've been focused on getting ready and may get back to musing on life and the hereafter,  after.

Getting ready

I'm getting ready for the party
and for guests who are coming
getting ready for a mortgage appraiser to say what our house is worth
I'm getting ready to start exercising and losing weight, learning a new relationship to my body, my only true responsibility right now
I'm getting ready to get my financial house in order, and to do my 2011 postponed taxes, to figure out if I can live on my retirement or will I need to use savings or go back to work.
I'm getting ready
to think and write and explore what's important about my living my life, to me
Perhaps mostly, I'm waiting like Ferlingetti in Coney Island of the Mind,
waiting for my rebirth of wonder
I have days of dry busyness
dreams where I'm hoping, searching for contact
wondering is it possible?
I'm in Limbo, not quite here or there, somewhere else instead
I'm waiting, getting ready for the next phase, the next step, the next "right thing"
but loath to leave the "vale of tears"
I know I have a precious resource, me, my mind, my body my idiosyncratic way of being and digesting my experience.
but I'm still just getting ready, I'm not there yet
waiting
waiting
for the rebirth of my wonder

Family

I just returned from a week out East with family.  It was an odd mix of overstimulating and busy and quiet  and slow.  It was good.
I found it interesting to watch the reflection of our family's genes, in all their different permutations, over the generations.  I saw my dad, almost 87, rigid and anxious yet wanting to want to get back on the self care wagon so he can continue caring for and snuggling his wife, and the marriage of a nephew who is obviously willing to give his soul to take care of his new bride who is recently blind.  We Pipers love to caretake, and vary in our skill levels of self care.  Each family member has his or her own take on the themes of creating projects, often around food and self sufficiency, athleticism, music, but with a large dose, for the most part healthy, of being of service to others.

But my Family is not only my root stock, it's also the folks I love who I've chosen to graft onto my life and share my life force with.  Gil's family has become mine.  Though we are very different by our nature/nurture inclinations, they profoundly enrich and feed my life, as I hope I do theirs.  Sometimes in my busyness I haven't relaxed into the openness and acceptance/curiosity to fully experience their world, but I want to; they're my family.

I returned to Wisconsin, and immediately was struck by how loving and generous my wonderful circle of Friends/family are.  Friends are the family I choose and though we don't share the same inborn life habits, their gifts support me, shift me, strengthen parts of me which may not be as strong as theirs are.

I became aware out East, that though we can get on each other's nerves big time, and though it's so easy to be critical of each other (it's so much easier to judge our own weaknesses in our sibs), seeing our family themes played out through many lives is comforting.  Just as I've been thinking that I need to shift from focusing on Gil as a particle, with all his specific in time attributes, to Gil as a wave, rippling through all the lives he touched,  so too I can feel all of my families influencing and carrying me forward into the future.
Progress.