Tsunami, torrential rain, mudslides, upheaval in the world, in Ojai and in me
as the excruciating new home search goes on and I help bear witness/offer comfort to my ex-husband as he journeys to death.
Such a strange time it’s been these past seven weeks since last I wrote. Out in the larger world, here in and around Ojai and, as well, in and around me: The barely conceivable, monumental devastation and dislocation of the tsunami. The more fathomable mudslides that decimated nearby La Conchita killed several people with locally known faces/personalities. They closed off Highway 101, our major north-south freeway. The local mudslides that closed all three roads into and out of Ojai, essentially cutting us off from the outside world for three days. Then the re-closing (because of fissures discovered in the roadbed) of one of the two finally opened lanes out of the Valley. Endless hours of delay for everyone trying to leave or enter the Valley as pilot cars ferried 5 cars at a time, first in one direction then in the other. Closer still to home, the flooding in my tent during the first storm and the flooding in my patio, kitchen and bathroom during the second one. Then, of course, the huge, overwhelming, mind-boggling blizzards in the Midwest and Northeast.
The forces of Nature stunning us all, repeatedly and in such extreme ways. Reminding us of our incredible vulnerability, the fragileness of the balance. All of us having a chance to taste our own vague hint of the overwhelming devastation wrought by the tsunami.
After the raging, roaring storms, a sudden wave of spring weather here calls forth peach blossoms and daffodils outside my desk window. The rains force the last leaves from the sycamores in the driveway and the walnut in the back yard. In the same moment, the acacia outside my front door erupts in a riot of vibrating yellow blossoms while the nearby aloe plants flower with succulent coral cones
The trails have been full of mudslides and soupy footing, the creeks all torrential roars of boulders and mud slicing broadened paths and undermining both orchards and roadways along their banks. The warm days without rain have slowly diminished the intensity in the local rivers and creeks, given time for various neighborhoods to dig themselves out of the mud. Given time for road crews to open some of our streets and roads. We now again have two lanes on one road open to in- and out-of-the-Valley traffic. The two other routes will take months to open.
In me, these weeks have been filled with corresponding surges and recedings. Parallel fragileness in my own inner balance. After four months of house hunting, it doesn’t feel like such an interesting adventure anymore. I go through surges of feeling grumpy, despondent, irritable and sometimes despairing. Even as some deeper part continues to hold the faith and trust that Spirit will provide me with what I need by the “deadline” of April first. I’ve seen so many impossible, unlikely and just plain hideous places being offered at outrageous rents. Been taken on so many roundabout tours of “main” houses, their surrounding property and the intricacies of the landowners’ lives before finally being shown to the guesthouses that I’ve actually gone to see. So many times it takes almost an hour to finally get to see the cottage that usually isn’t even close to something I’d consider.
I leave feeling sad, despairing, disappointed, drained, irritated. Some part of me simultaneously feels relieved not to be having to leave my little corner of paradise quite yet. But, I’m fast getting to the end of my patience with looking. With “kissing so many frogs.” With trying to imagine myself fitting my “life” into so many so unlikely places as I “try on” each place that I look at. Sigh!
Tonight was one of the hardest moments in the searching. An amazingly sweet little adobe covered straw bale studio on the side of the very top of a mountain with a spectacular 360-degree view of the wild mountains surrounding Ojai. On a glorious 80-acre property including citrus orchards and a collection of alpacas, llamas, goats, sheep, cows, chickens, a zebra and an emu. Little red stone patios from which to watch our famous pink moment (the blush of the sunset reflected on our glorious Topa Topa mountain ridges) in the east and the sunset itself in the west. Access to a beautiful pool on the rim of a cliff. Gentle seeming people managing the property for their parents. Heart-stoppingly perfect in so many ways. But, sadly, incredibly tiny inside the cottage, with no storage space, only a miniscule coat-closet sized closet and not enough wall space to bring in shelving/storage units and still have space for my bed, desk, couch, chair and my masks. (Forget the small piano and oversize stereo speakers that I’m already prepared to let go of!) I wept and ranted my way down the mountain in utter despair. So close to perfect yet so absolutely not workable.
Some wiser part of my being softly whispers to me that this is a sign, a hint of what’s to materialize when the time is right. That this is to let me know that wonderful spaces are out there even though lately I’ve been seeing only sad and desolate, poorly cared for spaces. Still, the unhappy, upset, despairing, fed-up-with-the-quest part seems just to need to feel her misery and frustration; her not ever wanting to leave here. This bereft and exhausted part has been around a lot these past two weeks. Having meltdowns, sobbing, ranting, feeling unable to roost anywhere inside herself that feels comfortable.
That part of me thought that magically our new home would appear just as we’d finished all the yearly rituals of ending and beginning. But then, we finished all the paperwork for the change-over to the new year, all the preparations for an early February tax appointment, all the pruning and cutting back in the gardens and all the year ending/year beginning cleansing and winnowing inside the cottage and nothing happened. Just the messes left by the big storms and some of the most abjectly forlorn, ridiculously out-of-the-question places we’d ever seen!
Two weekends ago when this part of me was so completely inconsolable, I sat on the ground for hours pulling weeds out of the wood chips covering the back yards. Then picking gravel out of the walk-on bark in my patio (after raking bark back over the river of mud and gravel that had covered much of my patio/side yard). Sitting in the dirt, getting all muddy, becoming completely engrossed in these very tiny acts of making order out of the messes left by the storm, engaging in the process of “emptying the ocean with an eyedropper” seemed incredibly calming. Such a very narrow, immediate focus: one weed, one tiny bit of gravel, one small stone at a time was enormously and magically comforting. A profound, embodied reminder of the “way,” the process of the journey, the movement from just this moment to just the next moment.
I do, deep inside, know and trust that I’m being led by Spirit every step of the way. I know, too, that I’m doing all I can from my side to help the process unfold. Checking all the few ads each week, putting flyers up wherever they may catch someone’s eye. Starting to run an ad in our local paper, telling everyone to be on the look out for my next home. Feeling all the so distraught, so stirred up, so despairing feelings that come up in the middle of this deep trusting. And, too, feeling how hard it is to be feeling these feelings so much of the time just now!
In the middle of all of my own stirred-upness, I’ve been riding the waves with my dad and step mom as they’ve been dealing with their own anxieties. They’re also getting ready to make a major move (at 88 and 86)–from their private home in Southern Florida to an assisted-living community in Maryland. A move for which my step mom’s son and daughter have been doing the “heavy-lifting” of initiating the process, of finding and evaluating places and of figuring out the financial and legal logistics. Endless calls with the folks and her daughter and my sister as we sort out how best to support them through this. My dad’s stress level causing havoc with his diabetes. My step mom’s already off-the-charts stress level being enormously increased by fear and worry over my dad’s scary experiences of disorientation and dizziness from incorrect medication levels. Me hoping and praying and asking Spirit to please, please arrange the timing so that I get myself moved and settled before I take a bunch of time out to help them pack and move and settle!
To add to the ongoing intensity, as my ex-husband has been moving into the very late stages of bone metastasis from kidney cancer, I’ve been becoming more of a part of his support system. Until this past week it’s been essentially by phone. Now as the end seems to be coming nearer, I’ve been driving down to Los Angeles to spend some time with him in person. Unlike B, my other former partner who died indigent this past September, L has the finances to provide for himself the 24-hour physical caregiver coverage that he now needs. And, he has competent attorney support for doing a final sorting of his financial affairs. Unlike the months with B all summer, time spent with L will be for moral support and caring company. No being called upon to provide physical or financial care or “case management.”
So strange that my only two long-term, lived-with partners should be dying within a year of each other, both from metastatic bone cancer. There is in me the same deep sadness for both of their sufferings, the same strong impulse to show up, to bear witness to their journeys to leave the physical plane. A very similar and poignant awareness of their respective struggles with becoming helpless and dependent. Yet being with L as he moves toward his death is neither fraught nor tangled emotionally as was being with B as she moved toward her death. Mainly there is with him simply the enormous sadness for years he will not live to see and feel, for the inexorable and terrible way that cancer ravages a body and turns a life on its ear.
The ending of our marriage some 30 ago was, for the most part, a gentle and amicable one. Our connection over the years has been as friends and family to each other. Yet, as my journey took me deeper into my own spiritual path and he became evermore the skeptical rationalist, there seemed less and less that we had to share with each other in any ongoing way. Still, there’s always been an abiding sense of connectedness and caring that we’ve both felt for each other. Some desire to “catch-up” with each others’ lives once or twice a year or at major thresholds. Certainly his cancer and the subsequent chemo and radiation treatments were such thresholds. And, as the progression has unfolded, we’ve had more and more frequent and ongoing telephone contact. And, now, this feeling drawn to be of comfort to him as he gets ready to leave.
It’s odd to find myself feeling so much compassion and concern while noticing that, as with B’s dying, I seem to feel no sense of loss or grief in myself around his approaching absence from the planet. Only the sadness for his pain and his losses as these increase day by day. As he discovers that he wants to live as long as possible, even in the states that he had earlier planned to avoid by leaving before he reached them.
There is something I don’t quite understand about how I seem to be “wired” about death and the departures of so many of the people that I’ve cared about deeply. Sometimes I think that perhaps I don’t really ever let anyone in deeply enough for them to occupy a space in me that will feel bereft when they “leave.” It continually puzzles me that I can weep and feel intensely empathic with the losses and grief felt by characters in books and movies. Yet, it’s only when I contemplate my dad’s death that I feel that same kind of unutterable bereftness. Over the years of being, in yet one more particular, so “off the usual continuum,” I have learned to embrace rather than judge my differentness. To accept that whether this comes from unhealed woundedness or just my own organismic nature, it simply is what’s so for me.
What else seems to be so for me, as one of my dear friends recently remarked, is that my past seems to be disappearing from me while my future remains still shrouded in mystery. Waiting and feeling all the feelings, following the energy wherever it leads me and living in the thinnest slice of now that I can define. This seems all that there is to do. This and asking the Grandmothers for their continued support and presence.
Originally published February 2005
