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February 2020

When the sun begins its late winter burn, that’s when it might be at its most dangerous. After a winter of darkness and gloom, the days have been growing longer. It began almost imperceptibly, right after the winter solstice, and only now, with the benefit of hindsight, can we see the progress. The brilliant bookend of a Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter cactus, which had its initial flush of blooms when the light first leaked from the sky at the end of fall, recently started its re-blooming period, indicating that the light had returned.

As lovely as that may be, I feel we need to slow down and take the universe’s gradual progression to heart. At this point in life, I can step back and not rush into anything. That’s for the young and foolish, and there’s a time when that’s right. I’ve passed that point. Luckily, the universe has its own way of doling out lessons and warnings, and it’s powerfully effective at slowly but persistently making sure we heed its signs. Like the slow trudge to spring, it warns with almost unseen form. In fact, it may dangle something tempting or exciting in front of you even if it’s not right. Or maybe we simply ignore such warnings when we want something. At those times, the universe steps in with small signs and blips – maybe a recurring cold or other issue. If you fail to listen, or if you don’t want to listen, you might be able to ignore it a little longer. Fear not, the universe will continue to work to correct the path.

It may knock a little louder, and things may get a little rockier. Perhaps other systems fail, perhaps everything else seems to go wrong. That’s the universe nudging a little more forcefully. If you still don’t heed its signs, it shines its sunlight of truth with relentless intensity. It’s the kind of sunlight that only comes in late winter, before the leaves are on the trees, before the haze of warmth and humidity. It’s this sunlight that can burn, and the universe bangs on your front door, waking you from whatever spell holds you blind to the path you should be on, to right the wayward turns you may have taken.

One must have faith at such times. It’s possible for the world to be both too bright and too dark to see clearly. 

The usual time for forcing bulbs has already passed. In many parts of the country, the real deal is already poking through the ground. Spring and all her requisite beauty will be upon us soon enough. Typically, I do most of my bulb forcing starting in November, when the days are grey and grim, and I need a jolt of hope and the promise of greenery and blooms. That’s what I did late last year, just as the holidays were getting underway. It was a rather piss-poor batch of them though, as if dark forces were stymying their growth. Many buds were stillborn – the saddest thing a plant can do – and a number of bulbs didn’t even bother sending up buds. Sometimes that happens. I’d purchased enough bulbs for several rounds of plantings, but after that initial dismal showing I didn’t have the heart to start over again.

The holidays passed, thankfully, and then the bulk of winter. The days weren’t as harsh as they could have been, and could still be, and at the time I gave in to the darkness at hand, forgetting about the resort the bulbs that were stored on a shelf in the unheated garage. It wasn’t until I painted and needed to do some work requiring tools that I stumbled upon the bulbs again. This late in the game I was surprised to find them with buds of green. Little tiny hints of hope at the edge of winter. Still, I was hesitant. Perhaps too much time had passed. Maybe too much damage had been done. It hadn’t been a particularly brutal winter, but there had been days and stretches of ultra-frigid weather. We just came off a twenty-degree day, for example.

I held their brittle shells in my hands and wondered if it was worth a try. Part of me wanted to throw it all away. My heart had been broken by the first batch already, why should I risk more pain? I felt them in my fingers, pressing into their bodies a bit, trying to decipher if they were still intact, still solid enough to put forth any buds. They felt all right. They still felt substantial. I decided to give them a chance.

Resurrecting the glass container that had housed previous failures, I covered them with gravel and warm water, then placed them by the window in the dining room. Within days they perked up, sending a few straps of leaves into the air, and immediately following that a heavy crop of buds. I don’t know if they will bloom. I had such hope before, only to be left with disappointment and disaster, but I’m hesitantly optimistic. At the very least, there is already the essence of hope. That’s more than some of us ever get these days. The only things to do are wait and gauge their growth and progress, keeping them watered well but not too well. The precarious balance between life and death. For now, there is new life.

We still have one more week of this awful month to go, and Mercury remains in retrograde, so it looks to be a trying one. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday this week, not that it means what is used to mean for a lapsed Catholic/former altar boy such as myself. All sorts of vexing traumas are rekindled with this time of the year, and new ones are being born every day it seems. On with this recap so we can end it sooner.

There were winter warnings because the season is far from over. 

My new iPhone is a pleasant shade of seafoam. 

When the world swerves out of focus, get into your underwear.

The best way to bear a burden is to share it. 

Sniffing around memory triggers.

The #TinyThreads resurfaced because of a bathroom incident. 

The unmindful shower (warning: minor male nudity).

How to inhabit the body in downtown Albany.

Boston beckoning.

The kind of coat you can’t wear.

Saddest coupling of words: Author Unknown.

It took me three decades to finally learn how to do this. 

Hunks of the Day included Nick Pulos, Duayne Boachie, Rick Cosnett, Erik Steinhagen, and Markus Thormeyer. 

Thirty years ago I rode to Ballston Spa to meet with the woman who would become my oboe teacher. For our first lesson, I barely got to play a note. Before I even took out my instrument, she made me lie down on my back. The key to playing the oboe, she explained, was learning how to breathe. I thought I knew what she meant, but I didn’t, and even when I approached understanding, it was just going through the motions. At the time, it was a difficult lesson that didn’t open itself up right away.

She told me to lie back on the couch and relax.

In case it isn’t obvious, the moment someone tells me to relax, I tend to do the opposite, resulting in all sorts of additional tension. Shoulders bunched up, shallow breaths into my upper chest, and the wish that she would just tell me how she wanted me to relax made for an uncomfortable set of circumstances. I lied there for a while doing my best imitation of a relaxed person while she waited and watched. My mind scrambled to find the way out of this, the magic thing she was looking for me to elicit. Should I yawn? Should I feign sleep? Should I fart? What did this lady want from me?

She pushed my shoulders down. “You’re not relaxed yet,” she told me. No shit. You are telling me to relax and I just met you ten minutes ago. I’m lying on my back on your couch and you’re hovering over me, watching every intake of breath. How in the hell was I supposed to relax? It was at least the fifth circle of social anxiety hell, and every which way I looked was just another circle of it.

I stayed there and she instructed me to close my eyes, because whatever a relaxed person was supposed to do was clearly not in my lexicon. I’d always impressed every teacher I had and within the first few minutes of this oboe lesson I was letting her down. If I couldn’t do something as simple as relax, how in the hell could I play an oboe concerto? Well, I didn’t quite make that connection at the time – I only knew that I was failing and flailing at the whole relaxation exercise, and that made me even less relaxed.

We stayed that way for about ten more minutes, at which point she indicated I still wasn’t relaxed. Detecting a note of amusement in her voice, and guessing that it usually didn’t take this long for other students to relax, I implored her with a little laugh of desperation. Patiently, she waited for whatever sign she was seeking that would indicate my desired state of relaxation, but it never came.

I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t relax.

Not under command.

Not while being watched.

And all I wanted was for her to tell me what to do so I could pretend to actually do it.

Was all my tension and unease written on my face? I tried relaxing the muscles of my forehead and jaw, I tried letting a soft smile spread to the corners of my mouth, and I tried to slow the erratic blinking of my eyes.

This was an excruciating exercise for a kid like me. I don’t know how long we waited, but I knew it usually didn’t take this long. Already, and forever after, I would be slightly different from everyone else. My mind began to wander because I was at an impasse, and whenever I find myself with nowhere to turn, I let my unconscious mind work its own way out of the predicament. In this instance it was just enough, and my breathing went just the slightest bit into my stomach, at which point my teacher perked up and said I was finally relaxing. She put her hand on my belly and asked me if I felt the breath going in.

Oh my sweet Lord in heaven, that’s what she wanted? Why didn’t she just say so from the damn beginning? I can breathe into my stomach and look like the most relaxed person on earth! She wanted something genuine and real, but I was in no way ready for that. In fact, I wouldn’t be ready for decades. But I could feign a physical state of relaxation simply by slowing my breathing and letting it fill my stomach. I knew it was pretend, but it was a start. And it got me up off the damn couch.

I would not be able to truly relax for many years. From my outward appearance, most people couldn’t tell. It wasn’t that I was a high-strung person – I didn’t usually act jittery or tense or nervous (unless I happened upon excessive caffeine or sugar), and I didn’t have the typical persona of someone who didn’t know how to let go. In fact, the majority of people who encountered me assumed I was more relaxed than most, living a charmed, easy life with nary a care or concern. Unfortunately for my health and well-being, I kept it all bottled inside. My tension, my anxiety, my crippling doubts – they all held up within my heart, hiding there and wreaking havoc in other ways.

For a long time I thought it could be solved in another person – the perfectly supportive set of parents, the loyal and trustworthy set of friends, the caring and tender romantic partner – and those things helped in their own way, but they also hindered finding it on my own. Only recently have I begun to see that it doesn’t involve a husband, a family, or a support network of friends, it doesn’t involve a job, a career, or a creative outlet, it doesn’t require fancy clothes, expensive cologne, or material accumulations. It was within me, just waiting to be unlocked, waiting for me to figure out the way to access the calm serenity that is possible when you look within and face whatever truths you’ve kept inside. That may mean accepting the unease when someone commands you to relax. That may mean acknowledging the discomfort that comes with worry and fear. That may mean lying on a couch and realizing that you can’t always be perfect for everyone, and that it’s ok not to be. Because if you’re ok with yourself, you don’t need all those other things.

Today, I breathe into my stomach when things are falling apart around me, and it helps. It doesn’t solve everything, but it changes the dynamics of perception. Most of the time that’s enough. I breathe in slowly, then breath out slowly. Repeating this a few more times, I shift my focus from the bad things at hand to the singular effort and action of the breath.

Two words, otherwise innocuous and innocent, when put together can become the saddest thing in the world. ‘Author Unknown’ is one such pair that has always struck me as supremely sad. Coupled with the sadness is a mystery, a tantalizing hint at something still left to be discovered, a puzzle that can never be fully solved. Banished to a blank background, without a known author the only thing we can go on is the words themselves, which is how writing should be read for the most part, even if it results in a disembodied voice. A voice that exists on its own, without history or source or baggage, speaks to us differently. It demands something more from the reader, and only the strongest among us will truly attempt to engage. 

Comes the Dawn

After a while you learn the subtle difference

Between holding a hand and chaining a soul

And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning

And company doesn’t mean security –

And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts

And presents aren’t promises –

And you begin to accept your defeats

With your head up and your eyes open –

With the grace of a woman – not the grief of a child

And learn to build all your roads

On today because tomorrow’s ground

Is to uncertain for plans – and futures have

A way of falling down in mid-flight –

After a while you learn that even sunshine

Burns if you get too much –

So you plant your own garden and decorate

Your own soul – instead of waiting

For someone to bring you flowers –

And you learn that you really can endure—

That you really are strong

And you really do have worth –

And you learn and learn—

With every goodbye you learn

~ Author Unknown

Over the last long weekend, I painted a pair of bathrooms – one in a shade called ‘Summer Sky’ and one in a shade reminiscent of the summer sun called ‘Wild Daisy’. You may guess where my mind has been. As Mercury shifts into retrograde motion, we need to ground ourselves with safe rituals. Painting has always been that for me. I may not like it, but it helps.

According to my Uncle Roberto, who was a house-painter when he was alive, painting is all about the preparation. It was the prep work that was the most difficult and time-consuming, but it made all the difference in whether the paint job was to be successful or not.  My Uncle was best at showing us how not to live, mostly with warning tales of his storied past and questionable decisions, but when it came to painting he knew what he was talking about, and I took the lesson to heart.

These days painting often signifies a rebirth, or a cleansing of some sort. It was literally that for this round, as I couldn’t get some candle soot off the walls and ceiling so I simply threw new paint at the problem and here we are. We were due for a change, and as we enter the final throes of a winter I’m all too ready to forget, it’s time for something new.

It had not been a good morning. Though the sun was shining, it was bitterly cold. It looked a bit like spring, but the air was decidedly entrenched in winter. I hesitated when looking out at the world. The wind was blowing the detritus from smokestacks at a stiff horizontal. Flags fluttered in taut formation and the Hudson River was ruffled in waves of all sizes. I decided to venture out in spite of it.

At the local coffeehouse, I sat in a seat by the window and soaked in the bright light. My spirits lifted, as they tend to do with an influx of light, and I felt a bit better. The server had given me the wrong cookie – I ordered a Blackout and when I got back to my seat I saw it was a regular chocolate chip. Initially I resigned myself to eating it, but I realized my heart was set on the Blackout cookie – it’s the only reason I was breaking my eating-well streak (ok, mini-streak) – so I went up and asked if I had been given the right cookie. The man said no, and he gave me the one I ordered and said I could keep the chocolate chip one as well. The day was turning around.

I sat and slowly ate both cookies, while reading more about mindfulness and monks. The passage I was on described inhabiting the physical body, and how monks are always completely aware of where the body is and what it’s doing. If they are sitting, they are conscious of themselves sitting, if they are standing they know fully that they are standing. It sounds silly, but how many times do we actually acknowledge and realize what our bodies are doing unless something is going wrong?

I took the idea with me as I left, and focused on the fact that I was walking. My legs were moving – one foot in front of the other like the animated Christmas special says – and I saw the footfalls of my monk-strap shoes. Everything happens for a reason. Across my mouth, covered against the wind in a pink and gray scarf, a slight half-smile appeared, and maybe it showed in my eyes because I passed a woman who gave me the broadest and most genuine smile I’d seen in a while. It was almost disconcerting, in a very happy way, and I thought back to the adage that the Buddha may appear in anyone at any time. If we approach strangers with that in mind, it makes for a much more peaceful existence. I thought it was a fluke, but then I passed another woman whose fuchsia jacket caught my eye. She too had the biggest smile on her face and directed it right at me, as if waiting for a response. I was too shy to do anything, but I felt those smiles and I took them in.

The wind was not so brutal now, even as the temperature was dropping. Fortified by a hot cup of coffee, or the friendly visages of sweet strangers who may or may not have been manifesting the Buddha, I felt the warmth of the universe.