Team Guate 2011 in La Antigua, Guatemala

Today would have been my friend Ellen’s birthday. She would have been 79 years old. Had she been alive, had I died instead, I would be almost 34 years old and somehow it would have seemed less of a practical joke the universe played on both of us. I welcome it, this dance with death she left me to grapple with for the rest of my life, every year as I think on how fleeting life is when we love the people we love and when they love us back. I leave you with a poem from her partner, Rosemary Hyde, who I love as dearly as Ellen:

Birthday Thought to Ellen Jan 26 2011

Tomorrow would have been your birthday.
Web reminders say that I should send a card;
I wonder how to do that from this earth to where you are.
So here’s my birthday card to you, my Love –
An imagined nosegay:
I’m picturing it fresh and pure and white,
With smell so sweet;
Each flower is a precious moment
That we spent together;
Reminder of our songs, our laughter, even tears we shed –
All more special in the love we shared.
I tell you now, again,
How very glad I am that you were born.

I run to stand still. I pray the bus will be late, but knowing the driver, I lock up the house fast, head on into the sun and unabashed blue sky – my only witness to my lateness.  I speed up and run when the hand lights up red. The sun is beaming and suddenly I feel fully in my body, but there is no time to waste and so heel to toe I arrive at the underpass before my bus stop and see the pink wreath of flowers, candles and pictures at the foot of the Martin Luther King, Jr. mural under 580. I stop and think of these words:

“Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”

I stood there and felt it in every pore.

I want to be at this end holding fast to the present and welcoming each passing moment, facing that music and dancing with the fleeting moment, instead of ignoring it, repressing it, or letting it go unnoticed.

On the first day of the year, I had enough of waiting and “No”. It was coming from within and it just was’t working for me. I also knew the hardest thing about saying yes to the universe meant accepting everything life puts in front of me. “Most of us have a habit of going through our days saying no to the things we don’t like and yes to the things we do, and yet, everything we encounter is our life. We may be afraid that if we say yes to the things we don’t like, we will be stuck with them forever, but really, it is only through acknowledging the existence of what’s not working for us that we can begin the process of change. So saying yes doesn’t mean indiscriminately accepting things that don’t work for us. It means conversing with the universe, and starting the conversation with a very powerful word — yes.” – DailyOm

It’s the conversation I longed for and it just needed me to welcome it now and not tomorrow or the next day. Time is relentless and the sunsets remind us so with that painful beauty of passing.

If you saw it coming, then why did you do it? Why did you wait? The four boxes of pizza fell from heaven, slipped right through your fingers while you pecked on your phone, it, too, tumbling to the ground along with your slice half-eaten, the grease making a profile against the brown bag crumpled at the top from your clutching. The whole thing just rolled into a corner and it was the first thing you reached for as the phone and the boxes flew in different directions. Things slid in their place, except for one slice that fell unprotected out of the box and onto the dirty, cracked pavement by the bus stop where everyone walks and no one notices. You looked around and quickly tucked the piece back into its place before the fall broke its perfection.

“I knew that would happen!” you said when you noticed I rushed to help you up. We had five-seconds to pick up the pieces. I didn’t want anyone to see your shame and the confusion of how things so quickly just fall apart.

It’s this contact state of balancing moment for moment, atoms crashing into each other, colliding, colluding, bouncing and returning to freer states. Perhaps they are the molecular angels of grace and gentle encouragement that things cannot perfect. They can just be as they are, in their true and present state.

Is it possible that a dream can slip and fade away? Like fortune and the winged ankles of Hermes is it something that needs to be grasped on its way in and not on its way out?

The sun and blue skies of the San Francisco Bay welcomed us to the New Year where we still find ourselves in a “holding pattern,” waiting for our next step. “Recuerdate, mija, que Dios dice, “ayudate que te ayudare”. Help yourself and I will help you. It’s good we kept our home in Oakland for incremental weathering of storms and transitional periods. It’s been our life raft, our vessel of sanity, that unlike planes in the air, has provided us a harbor where we can still have some will over our destiny. Planes in the air, hover, run dry and eventually must land regardless of the terrain.

Can a dream drift and float away? Can you watch it fade away with the passing of each day and then suddenly one waking moment notice its distance like the spec of dust on the outside of that bus — the same bus you take to work each day and look out into the now gray horizon of winter where sea meets land and sky? At what point did you go from “holding pattern” into “passing pattern”? How can you tell the difference when you’re in between? Fear and anxiety grip your insides and your next breath is like the shutting of a door. I think of “The Great Gatsby” and America rising from the ocean to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and that mysterious green light. Lucecitas.

We power the dimming of our lights, illuminating our own paths. Just sometimes the mire of obstacles makes the dock look much longer than I imagine it is. One foot in front of the other, one breath after the next.

I have this paranoia of missing the bus. It’s more a fear of being left behind to be honest. It’s not something I experience when I’m driving anywhere, late and harried, and somehow my fear of missing something at the other end kicks in. Of course, the show can’t start without me, so that mitigates any anxiety. As a result I’m always early for the bus, super early, like half and hour early sometimes.

I bask in the sun of the bus stop eating my lunch early and show up at work much earlier than required. It’s a small thing really, a tiny crevice of a thing that leads me head first into that first feeling of being left behind as a child. The first feeling of my mother leaving Guatemala, leaving her mother, her country, her home and leaving me. Leaving to find another life for herself, for perhaps us, somewhere so far way past the horizon and the silohuette of the shacks lined up against the steep hills of Zone Three’s grime, bracken, a place we called La Limonada where you make lemonade out of limes. It’s hard for a child to imagine deserts, endless blue of sky, terrains that linger in the back of that dream as you waken in the morning. I take a breath and am transported back, to easing into waiting, into trusting.

“The same laws that govern the growth of plants oversee our own internal and external changes. We observe, consider, work, and wonder, tilling the soil of our lives, planting seeds, and tending them. Sometimes the hard part is knowing when to stop and let go, handing it over to the universe. Usually this happens by way of distraction or disruption, our attention being called away to other more pressing concerns. And it is often at these times, when we are not looking, in the silence of nature’s embrace, that the miracle of change happens.” -DailyOM

I see the NL bus which takes me across the Bay and this time, just once, I decide to wait for the next one.