Catching the rhythm

Gil was an "outside in"dancer.  When he fell in love with Latin dancing, back in the hayday of the Paladium dance hall in NYC, all the best Latin dancers emphasized, started on, the 2nd beat.  Gil would watch their moves and then practice looking at himself in a mirror.  He watched himself and counted the beats 'til he looked, when he danced the way he wanted to.
I'm an "inside out" dancer.  When Gil was teaching me, I tried to count so I'd start on the 2, but it just made me trip on myself.  So I just danced with him, let him lead me (oh, he was such a strong lead, I felt like I could totally let go and he'd carry me)   and my body learned, to feel the 2, how to respond to his subtle hand pressure "here, spin, there, break out".   If I tried to watch myself to see how I looked, I felt vaguely vertigo-ish, like my body was a moving car and the driver, me, was outside, not in the drivers seat.  I had to trust that my body would respond to the rhythm and to let it.

I feel like I'm learning to dance with me.  The background noise of crisis and anxiety are largely gone. There is a soft cotton like feel, not unlike my first encounter with a soundproof booth back in my research days, sort of like some motor noise has just stopped and I can feel it's absence like a pleasure in it's own right.
I'm trying to catch the rhythm of living me.  Odd, since you'd think after 64 years I'd have gotten it, but I've been so juggling crises and so working to survive, that I haven't really been in the driver's seat.  I'm still in the awkward stage of stepping on my own toes every now and then, but I have the space to feel, "who do I want to spend time with? Is this activity something I still want to spend energy on? What do I feel , right now?  Who are you? Why are you?  What do you want?"
I can pick up a subtle level of sensing that I haven't tuned to in years, if ever.  It's changed how I live day to day.  I've left some friendships, fed others.  I'm trying to set in place a much reduced farming operation next year....  I'll know I've caught the rhythm of me, now, when I can feel the ease and joy I used to feel dancing with Gil, and trust it

Dancing in the dark

I've had this blog idea rattling around in my head for a month or more, but have been too busy and not sufficiently centered to write it.
I'm in the midst of a relapse of the "too much"s.
Last year I sailed through the summer/winter on the food I'd already put by and committed to no garden or animal responsibilities.  This year I hoped to enter back in to that world,  just a little.   oops, need to recalibrate.  How much is enough?  Why do I want to spend the time/money on gardening and raising our own meat?  Is it the strangle hold of my lifetime identity as a producer (I don't buy at farmers markets,  I grow my own)?  But how much of my life force am I willing to give it?  Knowing that that life is becoming more and more finite?  I think I want to spend more time/energy with words.  Let's see if I can remember and change the pattern next spring.
So the blog idea.
I had been listening to the Gil music and turned the lights off as I was heading to bed.  The music was still going and a great latin song came on.          I could feel him.   There was that magnetic pull to move.  And I started to dance,  with him.   When he had his shoulder/arm surgery he was no longer able to use his right hand to lead in dancing as firmly as he had.  So I had to just tune in and anticipate where he wanted me to go.   And that's what I did; I let him lead me and I flowed loose and hot.   Dancing in the dark is such a great experiential metaphor for what I'm doing right now.  I'm trying to listen to "the beat" of what's happening.  I'm trying to trust and let it lead me.  And I'm trying to feel the joy/pain of engaging and letting loose.   I'm recently going through a wet stretch of weeping to certain songs.  It's good.  I'm harvesting moisture.  It's keeping   him   close.

Partnering

I'm watching, it seems like most everyone is engaged in partnering, where most actions, decisions, plans are in the context of what works for the significant others, spouses, loves, children.
I'm learning to do that with me.
It's perhaps the biggest change since Gil's death; my job is to make decisions based on what will further the action of me and (who knows?) what I'm becoming.
It's very disorienting.  I've always had a partner who I've been tuned to.  I miss the ease that having someone else's needs to use to make decisions,  gives.  It's so much more work to have to stop and think, "so what do I really want?"  And it's liberating.  The background noise of my life is still there, but I am emerging, as if from a great sleep, so much more solid and strong than I was in college, the last time I was truely a single.   I'm tired and it's a lot of work setting boundaries with folks or saying "no", but I'm learning.  I have no fear of becoming selfish or a narcessist (anymore than we all are) and I don't seem to miss being in a partnership, at least so far.
I'm just surprised at how different the world looks to me seen straight on through the lens of just my own life.

I'm still here

The garden is in, the chicklets clucking, big goats about to be joined by some kidlets, and then there are the new pigs.   My sister is a force of nature. By her sheer persistence and the grace of cardboard and wood chips (why did I never do this before? Oh my God, what a difference it makes!) there are less weeds and more clear spaces than there have ever been here before, both in the garden as well as the flowers and walkways.  
And there's more clear space in me too.
There's plenty to do, but I'm clear none of it's life or death because the death has already happened, there is no need for anxiety, he's already gone; I can survive in one form or other, anything.
I'm not lonely, but I am ready to reengage with folks.

When I was traveling crosscountry on the train, I sat with a woman whose husband had died a year ago.  She asked me if I'd noticed folks pulling back from me.  She feared that they didn't want her around them as a single.  I'd noticed the pull back also, both from others to me but also from myself in response to death or great tragedy in friends.   I told her I thought it was from discomfort, what to say, how not to impose, an unconscious fear of being too close to that pain and having it rub off.  I've kept distant from folks and also felt the distance grow from them, but I don't take it personally.  It's an organic reaction and must have some evolutionary benefit.  When I reach out, friends have been wonderfully responsive.  And I like being alone.  I like it a lot.

I am surrounded with delicious empty spaces.  I notice certain birdcalls (have they always been here?), faint scents, a small shift in my inner emotional weather front.   Flooding hits, my driveway washes out, Adam and Kate's newly carpeted basement ruined, and I feel the pain, but somehow I don't feel panicked by it.   Just curious.        I'm still here.
In some ways, I'm more here than I may have ever been.

Planting

We planted a big sugar maple, atop Gil's ashes and Isaac's placenta, in a beautiful spot on the rock outcropping behind the house. Chris and Miya (and of course the delectable morsel Isaac) Gil's brother and best friend Bob and his wife and Adam and Kate et al, we all shared, held ash, let it go.  One more step into the future after Gil.

I've been thinking about loving.  I remember chewing over the Bible line "Love thy enemies" and wondering how the heck one could feel the way I thought love should feel about your enemies.  ??  And then it hit me, love wasn't about focusing on the characteristics of the moment, it was being open to, awash in, the best possibilities.  It might be a baby, or an idea, a project, or a lover.  Love was allowing yourself to see the best potential  and by seeing it, feed it's actualizing. It is able to be chosen.

When I met Gil, he didn't have many of the characteristics that my Yankee, academic family looked for in men, so I decided that instead of looking at the bottom line of all his qualities that perhaps I should fuzz my focus on them and instead look at me.  Did I like the me that being with him was bringing out?  Did he open up potential in me that without his touch wasn't possible?  Yes and yes.
So I married him and changed the trajectory of who I am and the life I'm leading.

Planting,  an act of hope, an openness to what will emerge, a day to day slog of work.  I allowed a different part of me to grow, by marrying Gil.  He continues to bring out  the potential me I sensed when I agreed to marry him.  His tree and I will continue to grow together.

Humbling

We had a prairie burn on Sunday.  Gil had always organized them in the past, lined up the people and waterpacks; I'd made the food and manned the "flapper" or fire rake.   Somehow I just didn't hear back from many folk, and the places he'd borrowed the packs from in the past didn't respond either.
Sunday seemed calm, we had barely enough folk and then 2 didn't show up, barely enough waterpacks and then a couple malfunctioned, our burn meister's plan was perhaps misguided
and then the wind came up and changed direction.
As the fire took off, I was so focused on saving my neighbor's woods that I sent everyone over to help contain that boundary.  I was alone, surrounded by fire with only a rake.
It's times like this when I realize how easy it is to be a fool, full of pride "we've had 15 successful burns in the past", impulsively responding to the immediate and losing the big picture.
I was very dehydrated which seems to be associated with my vertigo, surrounded by smoke, and I panicked.  "Call the fire department!!"  I crumpled, couldn't stand up any more.

I learned a lot. I have a visceral understanding of what needs to be prepared to be safe. I'm more willing to go ahead and be a bossy broad and say I don't feel comfortable with the plan.  But mostly, I feel humble.  In the face of big forces, of which FIRE and Gil's death are only 2 of so many, I am small, small, small.  Which is just fine. I am not responsible to make everything turn out right; I'm responsible to learn as fast or slowly as I can, to deal with the consequences, and to keep trying.  
And to drink enough water.
I'm missing the guy.

Held in place

For What Binds Us

by Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.



I seem to be held by these forces.  The scar tissue that stitched Gil's and my lives together ties me to old ways of caregiviing, managing, indulging. Habits, inertia,  I'm having a hard time changing these patterns, for good or for ill. The bond I feel with the farm, family, friends keeps me rooted and nourished , it sustains me.  And held to the way I've been.

I don't know what is next, but I feel more as though the decision has been made and no one has informed me.  I am listening for the urge for something more and to what the forces are, which hold me to this past, (I don't want to be dismissive; this "past" may well be the rest of my life).  If I can't sense and then name what  keeps me so rooted, how will I ever become aware of what new lives I may have yet in this lifetime, and be able to let go and step into them???