A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Tag: children

April 11, 2014

Lucky Stones

As a young adult, I wore a boxy Liz claiborne purse, gray or light tan with a thin leather cross-over strap, filled with pencils, erasers, flavored lipgloss and a few lucky rocks. I had collected a gray skipping tone, the size of a big grape, and a smooth hematite. I was shy and when I felt challenged, my fingers would turn over the stones in my bag, infusing me with providence and power.I was an animist; my stones had souls. I cannot quite remember when I grew out of them but it was not an obvious transition. In high school, I shoplifted crystals from nature stores at the mall. In college, I collected frogs.

Finally I abandoned the needs of childhood to ground myself with physical objects and instead retreated to the colorful recesses of my mind, where fantasies trumped the day. For years now, I have hedged on reality. Even when two beautiful children have presented me with magic beyond human imagination, I have maintained my own dream life, a foot-out-the-door of this world, a vague morass of happiness and drama where no decisions need ever be made, just possibilities, endless possibilities.

I have my own versions of lucky rocks, ideas that help me get through it all: moving to Los Angeles or even better, Bali, irrational crushes, careers I could never pursue, hobbies that remain out of reach and things I have no intention of acquiring. At my wedding, I felt terrorized by my own uncertainty not so much because I lacked in love but more because I lacked the ability to live within the compass of regularity. Happiness was something for people that understood what this game of life was about, I reasoned.

Yet as I pursue mindfulness,I must let go of the notion that something outside of myself, be it a rock or a distant dream, fulfills me. And for a dreamer like me, this is bittersweet.

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March 18, 2014

Where do the Balloons Go?

Today I saw an deflated aluminum balloon land in the surf. It wafted down slowly until it was an inch above the ocean, swayed to and fro by a skimming wind. Finally its aluminum skin was gripped by the fingers of the sea and wrenched to the bottom of the breaking wave. How will circumstance make use of this aluminum intruder -how long will it roll along mountains of underwater sand before wrapping itself around a sea fan? A clown cluster floats into the sky, long filaments hanging behind to catch the wings of eagles and rubber to choke the great leatherback sea turtles.

I wonder if they all land in the ocean. Do some have enough gas to last them to the upper limits of the stratosphere? Do they just explode? Where do all the pieces land, the torn Spongebob faces and Happy Birthday letters?

I read recently that our world’s helium supply is dwindling. In thirty years, we will ration balloons to the rich only, fifty dollars for a single Thank You balloon, twenty thousand dollars for an MRI. What will the brave new world bring?

My one-year-old celebrated his birthday with a three-foot wide aluminum balloon. It’s still hanging about the playroom bouncing dutifully when his chubby fingers pull its string. The smile on his face is so wide, it is worth an uncertain future.

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February 21, 2014

Memories of Koi

Behind the Episcopal church of my youth is a walled memorial garden and a koi pond. The Neo-Gothic structure dates from the 1920s, a booming era for South Florida architecture and opulence. After Sunday service, the church served refreshments under wide palm fans and the twisted spines of guava trees. I savored the cheap orange juice and the sugar cookies we were never allowed to eat at home. Crouched on a stone bridge in a white  smocked dress with a handful of pellets, I fed my orange, black and white friends over the broken surface of the black pond. The fish bustled for a turn, slipping around and over each other in exuberance.These memories surface like bubbles of unbridled rapture. Childhood time is frozen, crystallized into eulogistic forms. Back then, were they just the fish I loved visiting after the constraining horror of Sunday school?

Sometime in my listless twenties, I found the garden again flattened by the midday sun, sweaty and bland. There were less flowers and the fish were like bullies, a grotesque ball of wrestling pythons. I had lost my wonder.

I return to this concept again and again. The lost wonderment of childhood, the “growing up” that damaged my spirit. While joy is not the sole property of the past, it is something we must recuperate. It is not our lost youth. It is our lost soul. We can leave no stone unturned or else we all die the quiet deaths of adulthood.

In the garden once again, I rest in quiet contemplation.The longer I sit in stillness, the deeper and wider the garden becomes till voices rise once again from the dark waters, koi older than time itself swimming calm circles around the lily pads. How many wide eyes have they seen from their vantage point below the surface, cherubic faces gazing at them with the wonder of a billion earth-bound years?

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December 13, 2013

Friendships of a Different Kind

The first days of college were a period of great possibility. We had finally arrived, survivors of parental dysfunction, high school theatrics and the ragged adolescent investigation into selfhood and drugs.

From across the country we had travelled, all different colors and sizes and textures, drawn together like pilgrims at the pinnacle of a spiritual quest. The University of Chicago. Within the fifteen block perimeter of this cathedral campus were stone dormitories, eating halls suffused with that particular Aramark smell, a classics building and humanities library, a radio station with a beaten up couch, an underground maze of corridors and basements – clandestine repositories of erudition – an old lap pool with its hexagonal tiles, muddy lawns under blooming canopies, snow drifts and icicles in winter, mosquitos and humidity. We congregated at the overheated student center, in beer bars with black painted floors, and on the back stairs of student apartments with their crusted windows and clanging radiators.

We trudged through the four years, forming friendships unlike any others we had known before or would know after. As teenagers, arriving fresh from the nest, we imprinted to each other like baby birds. Except we did not know that then. We could not possibly realize how unique college would be in the course of our lives.

And four years seemed like forever. But then it all came to an end, tapering off ever so slowly. Senior year. Countdown to commencement. Some of us were voracious planners – interviewing, assessing, paving small pathways toward a larger goal. Some of us just waited, a light anxiety fluttering in our hearts. We were beginning to disconnect from each other, to draw inwards. Some of us left our significant others and bade farewell to the minor friendships.

First we graduated. Then came September 11 and afterwards, our twenties continued for one long decade. We struggled through the process of maturation as we disassembled the staggering passions of youth.

Some of us walked this pain together, moving to New York or San Francisco or London or China, choosing similar careers and exploring fresh avenues together, reformulating and reinventing our friendships, strengthening them with each passing of the year.

Some of us died young.

Some of us drifted apart never to rekindle our former bond. We had each mapped a different route to cope with this thing called life, which in no way resembled what we thought life would be when we were eighteen years old and shimmering with the thrill of beginnings.

Maybe for some, our twenties buckled to cynicism as we realized that reality could not be manipulated like a teenager who constructs his own universe. But certainly and hopefully, some of us realized that within this staunchness of life was a different kind of joy. Now some of us marry. Now we have little children too. Some of us settle down to career. Some divorce. We stand at the dawn of another great era, another realm of simmering promise, albeit different in kind.

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November 17, 2013

A Mushroom in the Cupboard

[excerpt from middle grade children’s novel]

I am not making this up, I promise. There was a mushroom in my cupboard, more specifically behind the cupboard. Even more specifically, there were two of them, and they were in cahoots! But I only found this out later, when it was too late to point fingers and throw wild accusations.

After all, who would have believed me?

Growing up in the French countryside, I learned to fear two things: Gypsies and Merules.  (Socialism was the thing to fear later in life – but for the moment it was Gypsies and Merules).

Gypsies stole children. This we all knew. When their distant bells tinkled through town, our neurotic nanny, Genevieve, would whisk us from the garden. We were untamed, my twin brothers and I – Gypsy children were probably better behaved.

Genevieve had the annoying habit of picking her teeth when she was nervous. During caravan-jingling-through-town times, up shot her left hand to scratch a front tooth and down shot the right hand to drag us to the basement kitchen. We were promptly set to some menial task like de-stringing green beans. Elbow deep in vegetables, Genevieve would launch into frightful tales of Gypsy thievery. Dogs, horses, children, cars, watches, wallets, you name it, they had stolen it. Storytelling soothed her because her tooth-picking hand would creep out of her mouth and dip into the English cream.

Merules were the other thing to fear – though I was not exactly sure why. I just knew that adults were terrified of them. These secretive mushrooms lived in the walls, and if they appeared, the roof could fall on your head. At night, I spent hours staring at the ceiling for any sign of collapse. Merules claimed their territory wherever they lay spore and did not discriminate in their destruction of the old homes of France.

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November 12, 2013

Impasse

You whisper under breath
that life again begins to pass,
the image flickers like Muybridge’s horse.

And the weight that brought you born to air,
the weight that taught you how to breathe,
stops breath again.

You start to pass.

The ticks of time of waiting stretch
and the waiting waits for you to fall
The waiting waits.
It’s what it does.

You wait with it for none to pass.

The flicker of the running horse
starts and stops in false pretense.
Because life begun, it never ends.
It never ends.

You wait with it
until the weight that brought you to this pass
lifts

and in the space breath left behind
the waiting stops.

[One of my first poems, 2006]

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October 29, 2013

On Jadedness and Magic

I began feeling jaded during teenage hood. As the magic of childhood faded and life started to appear in all its glory, a wretched unjust affair, I experienced the common symptoms: eye-rolling, sarcasm, over-sensitivity, unfounded hatred of existing power structures, a thirst for independence occurring alongside a pathological desire to feel part of a group (my peers – unfortunately also teenagers). Then freedom! Graduation! And all sorts of new things started pouring in again. College. Undesirable behaviors. After experiencing everything there was to experience in a short span, and then moving to New York, activity and boredom capital of the world, now I was jaded again. My twenties were a decade of ugly shiftless feelings, disappointments and ebbing wonderment.

Much has already been said about my generation’s inability to grow up. We have squeezed the last drops of collegiate experience well into our thirties to thirsty, spiritually bereft results. We wait till almost middle age to have children. And to what end? Now a mother of two, I understand that psychic reconciliation with one’s own mother and father can only occur after a few years of interrupted sleep, bathroom floods and crayoned walls. How can we forgive the twisting directions of our own lives if we cannot understand our own incapacity as parents to shield a child from the arrows of existence? Since we cannot forgive, we cannot move on. We remain stunted teens with crow’s feet and graying hair.  

But more importantly, we remain jaded. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs children to perceive magic again. For others, a dog (or three) will suffice. Maybe a pet armadillo. A backyard teepee. Or a scuba tank and a fish-eye lens. But let’s just say: the magic has always been here. We just closed our eyes. And jadedness is this willing escape from the whole picture of life into the comfortable womb of resentment. It is a momentary death as we turn from brilliance to count circles on the ceiling.

Maybe the only way out is not through but on top of – flip it, turn it backwards, throw your life on its head. A call to all fellow werewolves, midnight flutists, bird whisperers and underwater stargazers (you know who you are) –  to paraquote Ghandi – be the magic you want to see in the world.

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October 8, 2013

An Orgy in Heaven

I love the rain. The thick oily rains of South Florida, the long growling baritones of thunder that roll off the ocean. As a child, I wanted to run wild through the lighting with bare feet, splashing through knee-high flood waters. I wanted to sit in the pool and face the heavens, the big beautiful metallic raindrops soaking every last thing on this good earth. Nothing was safe. Nothing was saved.

In high school, my favorite time to write was behind the wheel of my 1994 Saturn coupe after a tropical downpour, the slick black road reflecting a world under this world, the translucent Florida sky slivered below a band of storm clouds. I imagined stepping onto the asphalt and slipping into another dimension.

Yesterday the winds whipped up the palms, twisting them in angry caricatures The sky turned purple gray. From under my front porch where I sat with my two children, I watched the rains come a few pulses later, a wild-abandon dance-naked happiness surging in my heart.

I hope the rainstorms in heaven are terrifying and savage orgies, blasting and exalting the angels, demons and strange heavenly furniture.

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