A Time for Everything

There is a time in life for everything.

Watching your lover sleep, that perfect bud of a mouth resting against the pillow, vibrant hair like a halo around an angel’s face.

There is such beauty in youth. Such radiance. We can hardly help being captivated by it.

But there’s a trap.

And we have a culture that keeps feeding us into it, like pressing pasta dough through a chute.

We want to stay young forever. That’s the mandate. We want to look young forever. That’s the trap.

Instead, we could appreciate how things change over time.

That tiny waistline. It seems we all had one. It thickens over time. The skin softens, the contours shift. The body begins to tell a different story.

That baby you chose to bring forth changes the body forever. Some of those changes don’t become obvious until after menopause, when we undergo yet another transformation.

There is a toll exacted from nurturing another human life within our own. A profound expenditure, physical and otherwise.

Do men even know this?

And when did the allure of the model on the screen become the standard against which a woman measures herself? Or discovers that someone else is measuring her?

Youth does not last forever.

Part of this seems regrettable. Of course it does. There are things about youth worth missing. The ease of movement, the resilience, the seemingly inexhaustible energy. The uncomplicated pleasure of inhabiting a body that hasn’t yet begun to make demands of its own.

But trying to recapture that glow, that radiance, can keep us distracted from the more important work of recognizing that our time on Earth is finite.

Instead of embracing our changing perspectives, the deepening understanding, the growing wisdom that could serve the world so well, we keep trying to pedal the bicycle backwards.

And we double down on the effort.

Hours at the gym. Madly walking, running, swimming our way back toward a version of ourselves that no longer exists.

Instead of enjoying these activities for their own sake, for the sheer pleasure of moving through the world in the bodies we have, we turn them into labor. Another obligation. Another contest with time.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be strong, healthy, capable. Quite the contrary. But there is an enormous difference between caring for the body and declaring war upon its natural progression.

And what do we sacrifice in the process?

Attention, for one thing. The very attention that might allow us to recognize what is happening within us as the years accumulate.

We become so preoccupied with what is disappearing that we scarcely notice what is arriving.

A different kind of beauty. A different kind of intimacy. The freedom that sometimes comes with having less to prove. The ability to see through things that once dazzled us. The recognition that tenderness has little to do with the firmness of flesh.

Years pass quickly. All the more quickly when we are distracted.

And perhaps that is what troubles me most. Not the aging itself, but how much of our precious, finite time we are persuaded to spend resisting it.

I return to that sleeping lover. The softness of the mouth, the hair upon the pillow. I understand the impulse to hold that moment forever.

But the lover will change. So will the one who watches.

Perhaps the greater beauty is not in preserving that moment, but in remaining present for all the moments that follow. To witness the changes without withdrawing our love. To recognize the beloved in every incarnation.

Including ourselves.

I wish I had known more sooner.

But I know it now.

Catalina

Sometime around 1965,
in the wee hours of morning,
all nine of us, including my mother,
who rarely joined her children
on forays into nature,
piled into the metallic tan station wagon
with the backseat facing the rear window
and headed for the harbor at San Pedro.

Spilling out of the car
with our requisite straw hats,
Sea & Ski, and dark glasses,
as we called them then,
my younger brothers and I headed straight
for the sea lion pool,

while Dad and John,
our eldest sibling,
launched the Chris-Craft
into the foggy brine.

Catalina bound,
in the days before the island
was built up and overrun by tourists,
it was a child’s delight.

“Twenty-six miles across the sea”
emblazoned itself
into the minds of our generation,
though few actually made the journey.

And if they did,
it was in the safety
of the Big White Steamship,
cruising into Avalon Bay.

Taking my place atop the bow
of the overloaded boat,
one hand on the line cleat,
the other dragging through
the crested blue-gray wake,

few things back then
granted me freedom such as this.

The ocean was the one place
I felt utterly free.

It still is.

We disembarked
on the leeward side of the island
and promptly fell into the clear water,

returning again and again
to sift silver dollars and quarters
from the fine sand beach.

How they arrived
at that little-known shore
remained a mystery

until, decades later,
I came to better understand
time and tides.

Athene

It was 1974. I needed to get away.

I was working in Maine, in a country inn. And I met a woman who actually lived nearby. We met because she had a small green MG convertible sports car that I desperately wanted to purchase.

She was experiencing life-crisis times, and said she was going to go abroad. Did I want to travel with her and go to Scotland, to a castle her diplomat friends’ parents had bought out in the countryside?

So it was either the car or the trip.

I needed the trip more.

We got along fine on our journey. Traveling along tube stops in London, staying at local B&Bs. Or at least as I recall, that’s how it went. No obvious signs of a mismatch.

She knew how to make plans and she seemed fine taking the lead. She knew where she wanted to go.

I just tagged along.

We took a train to Edinburgh, stayed at the university, which rents out dorm rooms for summer lodgers.

Then met her friends, who collected us in their little two-banger Citroën.

And off we went to the countryside.

It’s hard to remember much that transpired. I must’ve looked out the window, but I know I was blown out as well. I wasn’t very in touch with myself in those times, and I am painfully overwhelmed when out of my element.

I think I was still shell-shocked after leaving my family and hometown, years before.

Still, once the friends entered the picture, I started feeling uneasy, excluded from the group.

I tuned to my finer senses, and I could hear them laughing.

It was I who was the butt of their humor.

I retreated into myself, but didn’t have far to go without being forced to interact with these women, who very much reminded me of Cinderella’s stepsisters.

When I found myself asking permission to go out in the walled garden, take a walk in the countryside, I felt every bit the outsider.

These were city girls after all, from Washington, D.C., diplomat’s daughters. Clearly pampered in a way that I had not been. And they called each other by their last names, way too cool for school.

I lived in the woods of Maine by choice. Spent my time alone in a log cabin where the water froze in the winter.

Not their sort at all, though unbeknownst to them, I had grown up in an upper-middle-class family in the foothills of Pasadena.

But apparently, I was not up to their fake class standards.

After all, I had come dressed in Sears jeans and a flannel shirt.

They wore satin blouses and skirts. Scuffed but clearly expensive boots.

Despite the disparities, I remember clearly sleeping in a feather bed with metal springs. A walled garden outside of my window.

I remember the comfort, alongside the extreme awkwardness of sensing I didn’t have a lot of options.

I was beholden to these three women just to get from one place to the next.

And thus our monthlong adventure began.

(Note: we were heading for Greece for a month. Thus the title.

And the photograph as the featured image is of the two girls from DC.)

Epstein

Who is this man, standing so smugly, his arm around the bloated carcass of some billionaire male?

To make one’s fortune by treating the bodies of innocent young girls like chattel, products to offer the unfuckable — men for whom lovemaking has become transaction, who can enter a body but cannot discover their missing souls there. Young girls with the blush of ripeness on their cheeks. Innocence offered for a price.

These very well could be the same men I see in this picture now, smarmy smiles on their faces, guns slung over their shoulders, grinning at the fresh kill of a young elephant, lying like the baby she is, limbs gathered into herself. A small defense, protection against the vagaries of a life winking out.

But such men do not consider youth, theirs having been spent already, quarters in the slot machine, stuffed full time and again for only puny returns. They pull the lever and pull the lover, forcing it finally to pay out big.

It’s time for the jackpot.

And then even that won’t be enough.

I would imagine they don’t consider the girls or the young elephant as anything but tools to serve their unquenchable desire to be filled by something that can make up for the yawning chasm within.

Two Mile Ramble

Indigo, ocean,
emerald valley,
the algae green
of a seasonal stream.

Burnt umber earth,
too long without
the rains that nearly always
sweep through this gulch.

Underfoot now,
powdery soil
laced with ironwood needles.

You know how quickly it goes.

One day,
you’re excitedly strapping on
your roller skates,

memorizing a book
to recite in third grade,

trying on your mother’s
poofy-sleeved blouse
to play Shakespeare
in sixth.

Before you know it,
you need somewhere to stay,

a way to remain there,

a car,
a way to get to work,

a way to get to the beach.

The warm wet sand
between your toes
has you unconcerned
with futures.

You land in the woods of Maine,
the opposite shore now,

trees ringing a lake
so clean
you drink the water
and don’t get sick.

Your hair,
long and thick and wavy,
has never felt so soft.

You raise kids
the best you can.

You see them
into adulthood.

You question
what is next,

having had your life
abruptly
handed back to you.

People come,
people go.

People love,
people deceive.

People die.

More people die.

And you remain,

no longer interested
in socializing
or parties,

soaking in the quiet,

wondering.

Every day,
wondering

at time
and place

and human absurdity.

Living with Eyes Open

The devil is,
as so often,
in the particulars.

The nuances,
the fine tuning,
the discordant elements
we try to bring
into harmony.

It is simply
living with eyes open.

Being awake means
accepting life
on its own terms,
meeting things
as they are –
forever changing,
never static –
and somehow
remaining at peace
within it.

Some of us are blessed
with long stretches
of isolation,
but solitude alone
is not what teaches us.

There are passionate encounters,
the tug and pull of other lives,
the emotional highs and lows,
as we struggle,
like oboes and strings,
to attune to one another,
to discover harmony
in the midst of chaos.

The Silent Teacher

I have learned
there are very few people
I can confide in.

Once I thought,
quite generously,
that I might have been mistaken
about one particular fellow.

He had shared
deep confidences with me
over painful things
that had happened
long ago.

I had listened,
allowed him to speak
without judgment.

These things were not his fault
in the context
of that place.

So many years later,
I thought to share
something very private
with him.

He promptly dusted me off
like some foreign object
lodged down his shirt
on a forest path –

centipede
or harmless bit of bark?

He projected ahead,
certain it was venomous,
toxic,

unable to summon
even the smallest compassion
for a fellow soul
in deep grief.

He said
he had no space
for the drama.

His own family
was enough,

presuming drama
was what I had brought him.

It was humbling
and threw me back
on myself,

as these things
so often have
in my life.

And now,
nearly ten years later,
he is clearly devastated

by a loss
almost impossible
to speak of.

And so
he seals himself
in silence.

It is interesting
how life keeps flashing mirrors,
lenses that refract
and reflect

elements of ourselves

back to the source
within.

Rainbows and Robots

All of us are born without armor,
but somehow, somewhere
along the line,
we begin to suspect life,
and thus other people,
are unsafe.

Instead of remaining open
to what we can discover
in a situation,
we back further into ourselves
until we no longer trust
what we perceive of another
well enough to respond
authentically
or appropriately.

Instead, almost robotically,
our inner hard drive scans memory
for the loop that has been reinforced
time and again
over a period of years.

The trouble is,
patterns alone
are not human beings.

Like waves in winter surf,
no two are alike.

There is a danger
of becoming confused
about who we are,
or denying ourselves
the freedom to change.

Nor is anyone else static,
unchanged over time.
We do others a disservice
by holding them in a form
they have likely outgrown.

Much more like rainbows
than robots,
we run the risk of losing
our full spectrum of colors.

Lonely

If I had you beside me
walking this ocean path,
and we could laugh and talk
about things
we had understood differently,
turn ideas over in our minds
and laugh at how naïve we were
to proceed along certain lines
all those years ago.

If I had you near me, my friend,
I would not be so compelled
to the page,
writing my ideas
to channel them along.

I wonder,
then quickly dismiss,
the idea that all writers
must be solitary.

In my case, however,
it is true.

I have always been drawn
to places where there are few people,
and even fewer
with whom I have much in common.

I have had to accept this.

I have had to arrive
at the understanding
that it is a choice
between being awestruck by beauty
and being comfortable
in the companionship
of like-minded people.

After I graduated
from Vermont College,
my husband and I considered moving
to the town where the college resides,
to be around minds
creatively questioning,
stimulated,
asking more of life
than closed-circuit systems
usually consider –

family,
workplace,
tightly knit community.

And yes,
it gets lonely.

That is a word
that deserves far more embellishment
than I can give it here.
That is a word
that lives with me daily.

And I understand
it is the only descriptor
I have.

Time Warp

I find myself wistful
about northern New England.

If only I could live
in the deep cold anymore.

If only my heart
would not break
each time I saw
the desecration
of wild land
I remember in my bones.

Clear-running streams
with flashing brook trout,

even the shiny green
of poison ivy
along the banks –

forcing my eyes to remain open.

If only I could bear it.

But as with so much change
recklessly accelerated
by overdevelopment,

what I remember
is gone.

Fifty years
collapse into dust.

The absolute stillness
of the lake
as evening settled in,

loons cackling
over the long water.

If only my heart
would not break.

Because I cannot live
without loving the land.

And even now,
walking this ocean trail
in Hawai‘i,
our home
for more than twenty years,

I witness
what a hurricane
has done.

I do not use the term
devastation lightly.

Wind scoured the shoreline
like a careless giant,

grabbing and twisting trees
rooted in lava,
shallow in the earth,

upending them
as easily as a child
sweeping dolls
or puzzles
from a table.

That abrupt.

Roots exposed,
shade gone,

the familiar path
altered
for a very long time.

And so perhaps
I am built
to witness

the massive changes
our precious mother
is enduring,

much of it
at the hands
of my own species.