Feeling Hot. Not in that way.
I am hot. Like explosion hot. Like young racehorse cooped up and ready to burst out of the gates hot. There is energy, and then there is the fear that I can not harness the energy fast enough to do anything meaningful with it. There is a patience in typing a quote at the old typewriter on the desk, and holding thoughts in my head until it’s time to get to the words here, to let them tumble out upon the page. Like boisterous kindergartners at the warmups of a gymnastics class. Before that there was the time at the computer, scrolling and reading. Research. The kind you don’t want to stop because it’s full of being enthralled. That today’s quote literally jumped at me and grabbed me by the throat last night, even though I don’t like the idea of ‘God’, and sometimes I don’t like the idea of ‘man’. But it got lodged somewhere, somewhere like a thistle thorn between my sock and my boot. A sharp poking that becomes more tolerable until it becomes somehow soothing, analgesic. There is this grace thing. I tell ya, this grace thing. So after re-finding the quote and before the now I got lost in all sorts of scrolling and reading through Anne Lamott on grace, and let me tell you that woman has written a lot about grace. In the way that her passages and titles use the word grace, but also in the way where you know that she is delivering it to you like the IV fluid dripping from that clear plastic sack directly into your veins. Because her words, her words are like the holy infusion transcription of grace. And after that, but before the typewriter. I poured the last of the wine in a small jelly jar, the quilted one, and set the bottle for the recycling. But the red, plastic recycling bin is full. So the bottle was set on the floor next to it. Just the briefest enough of a pause, for a lightning bolt thought that was not more than just a feeling that says this marks something, but do not mark it on your heart because it does not merit. And then I said goodbye, and the last inch of wine tasted like grapes, like fruit, and not the way that I remembered it, but only because I can not remember it. For effect I clapped my hands together in the way of dusting the flour off of them, in the way that says I am done with all of this. Of the way that chooses to say goodbye. And I think back to slinging the sledgehammer pounding the For Sale sign with Dad today. At the top of the grass, where it meets the asphalt of the road.. And having that same moment of pause. For my sentimental heart that likes to snap a memento of everything (period. everything.). Just in case. And in that split second the feeling and the irony of a SOLD sign disappearing off this lawn almost exactly two years ago and accompanying that split second of feeling — the flicker of film footage of everything that has accrued in these last 725 days whipping through my mind. And shouldn’t it be a holy thing to be selling this place? Should I stop and take note? And all I did was catalog the thought, because it is just another thing that happened. And let me tell you, we hardly know the meaning of things as they happen. So instead of injecting it with what I suppose to be its meaning now, I will just add it as a split second video snip to that file and one day in the future I will be able to tell you the importance of this day. And with the Mason jar of one inch of wine that tasted like grapes, I sat in the cool office and tore off a piece of divider paper from my address book. With the quadrille-ruled-lines I adore so much. The last of the unwritten on scraps. From the trip to Venice with A more than ten years ago. And I typed a precious, giant, feeling-full quote, and my jockey held tight to my reigns as I lurched at the gate because all I wanted to do was explore. With words. With feelings.
And then the empty Mason jar and I ended up here, at the kitchen table, with the new plastic tablecloth from Grandma. And we are exploding. This feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure. That’s not true, it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like there are two parallel threads and they are knitting the same sweater. But since I don’t know anything about knitting, I don’t know how to finish the metaphor. When I saw this quote yesterday, it kicked me. It kicked me because 1) I feel like I am starting to barely understand grace. And when I say barely, I mean in that way that you can just make out the way a dream you were having seconds ago while you were sleeping made you feel, but now in your awakeness you can not remember the shape-shifting characters or the setting of the action. It is just a fuzzy feeling as a stand in for a real thing. And grace, it’s a feeling that is starting to tickle me. Lingering even after I wake up. And I’ve felt it all this week. And the closest thing of the human existence I can compare it to is unconditional love. And this is the thought I had sitting in the car in a very hot parking lot last night waiting for my parents before dinner. The parents who, although I don’t ever feel like I deserve the extent to which it is showered, bathe me in unconditional love. Who else comes to stay for a week and eagerly, gleefully mows the lawn and buys you small pieces of art and cooks you dinner and cleans the dishes and even asks if she can do your laundry and then folds it and puts the laundry basket on the chest at the foot of your bed (the antique chest that they gave you nonetheless) and then they drive the eighteen hours home and then they send you a thank you card stating thank you for letting us come visit? It’s that Catch-22 of unconditional love that both makes you feel inevitably like you are not enough, and that there is no way you can ever repay the debt — but that it is also one-hundred-and-ten-percent OK to sit back and accept it and relish and bask in it and never have to feel one iota of worry that it will be rescinded. I need to practice this. This second half of the equation. And believe that it’s OK to do so. And that is how I know that I may be able to start to barely understand this grace thing. And that tiny thread of grace, it turns out that it’s spun from love, and that now all I can think about is picking through all of the fibers of this love thing. And in reading this quote, it sort of made all of those feelings explode. The feelings that, at their core, are really just questions. The kind of questions that make you want to live to find the answers. The kind of questions that make you want to hunt for rocks in the middle of the desert. The kind of questions that make you just a smidge worried that there aren’t enough hours left, or that there is something to hurry toward. There is exploding happening right now. But I do feel like it’s the kind that helps you put all the pieces back together so that the image on the puzzle makes just a little bit more sense. Which reminds me of my sweet friends A & A who invited me to their house for Thanksgiving this year. Which also felt like a small act of grace, as I sat among their family table looking for the puzzle pieces to make up the blustery image on the box cover. And so now, now all I want to do is write about love. Not romantic love. Because that is just one kind of love, one tiny kind among all of the different varieties of love that are out there to explode and bolster you. Instead, the kind of love that makes us all human. The kind of love that we have for our friends and friends. In which case, friends come to sit at the table of family. So we can just say family. Which, quite frankly, as far as I can tell is really the only kind that matters in the long run. The kind that makes your last thought when you are sitting on a bench outside of a hospital slowly losing consciousness from your toes to your head say out loud (or maybe it was in your head because at some point nothing was making sense) Make sure Brian knows I love him. Or the kind that makes you want to practice saying love you too when a super dear friend ends a phone call with OK, love you dear, but you don’t quite know what that love is and what you are committing to when you say it back and that you are out of practice (but that in truth you may never have been in practice) — and that all of the happiest seeming people seem to be so comfortable swimming in whatever pool of love this is.
The feeling that I think is love that you feel for the people you call first when life shifts slip-shod off its moorings and you know you are no longer OK, and that everything is going to explode in a matter of hours and that their love, the kind of love that people radiate like microwaves, will ground you and re-tie your ship to the nearest dock in that figure-eight knot as the water starts slopping in tall waves over the sides of your boat. The kind of love that ties you to your chosen family, of people that you have known since high school and people you have known since January and never met in person. It’s the same love that I feel for this slow, old black dog who is roused from the living room by my crying, and slowly meanders into the kitchen to check on me, stopping in front of the fireplace to shake her long black fur all over the floor, and stops short of me in front of her water bowl. The kind of love that rouses her, but doesn’t hurt my feelings that she stops short of me at her bowl. The kind of love, or just an abundance of it, that casts a wide and glowing net around your heart, to hold a broken heart together, to lift a heavy heart, to collect and reflect out its own glow. I think today of my yoga teacher who is getting married. Today. The one I wrote a blessing poem to way back when. The one who told me, seven years ago that she would never get married again. How she knows how to love. And how her loving gives me hope. Hope in the long view. Someone sent her this message today.
“I will reveal to you a love potion, without medicine, without herbs, without any witch’s magic; if you want to be loved, then Love.” Hecaton of Rhodes
So maybe that is where I start. I think I have a ruthless new mission. Tell me friends…
