Time, Space and Love Collide

    It is four and a half days away from Amery's wedding. He is the youngest of my 2 sons, born the day after Christmas on 'The rez' of the Lower Elwha Valley, named after my dear Grama, Amy.  We thought maybe he would be a girl. He was an on-time birth, 9 lb 12 oz boy, all boy.  My big family was still in town, and so was at our house to celebrate dinner together, passing this substantial babe around an hour after he was born.  That must be why he loves to connect to people.

    A week after, I took baby Amery out to see the baby loving neighbors (Indians love babies).  Grandma Sampson, one of the two main tribal matriarchs, declared him 'the little chief'. Chief green eyed child of this mother's heart.
I am trying to be a good mom of the groom.  In this age of weddings as big business, I feel like I'm walking a tightrope.  I live a simple life, if I didn't, I would not be writing this now, or spending the summer making 95 jars of wedding jams from fruit I picked, processed and canned by hand. There is no way to get around the spending of money though.  So I walk the the line of spending a little more than I really have, knowing this is his day, this is only once, this is my kid. Yet, I know the bottom line is always love, like John the Apostle wrote:
" I can speak with the tongues of men and of Angels, but if I have not love, I am but a clanging cymbal or a loud gong."

    That is the only part of the Bible I have committed to memory. It is poetry and wisdom. It speaks more to the longings and lackings of humanity every passing day. I want to carry myself into this weekend buoyed by the pure joy of the celebration, the warmth of family and dear ones all gathered for a great occasion.

    Yet even as I spend these weeks preparing for a wedding, my dear Uncle Lee, the only sibling of my mom's, has died. His funeral is the day after my son's wedding, and 3000 miles away in Maine. Time and space collide.  The west coast family is unable to attend.

    Yesterday I sat with Amery over a Thai lunch at one of our favorite old hang-outs from the days he was in High school. (How lucky I realize now, that both my kids like Thai food). I gave him my wedding ring, the Navajo wedding band his Dad put on my finger when I was really but a girl, only 21. I looked into Ame's eyes, to see the same green of his father's, like an ocean, like sparkling water, the eyes that drew me in.
    Ame's love, Kirsten, has deep brown eyes, maybe from her Osage Indian Heritage.  He has looked there and found his own warm ocean of love to commit to. How much more could a mom ask for? Knowing that your child loves and is loved is the ultimate comfort to a mother's heart.

    Kirsten is in her final year of law school.  She related to me that in this month of planning the final stages of her own wedding, she has also been working in family law, on divorce and child custody cases. The universe collides.  How grateful I am that my sons and their romantic partners were responsible.  Amery and Kirsten have Tahoe, the wolf-like husky dog to assuage any current needs to parent.  How intelligent and responsible this generation is.  How grateful I feel that birth control is the norm now, not the exception. Oh young women of the world... don't let them go backwards on that issue.

    So even as the universe collides, it also gently repeats the seasons, now fall and the harvest of grapes. My own love, Curtis and I went grape picking in the brilliant afternoon sunshine of the day, as we had a year ago.  Except a year ago we had a very new relationship, and now we have passed two whole summers  together and are entering our second autumn. The universe collided the day I met him, when he attended my oldest son's double bass recital just as a supportive fellow bass player. (Now I have two bass players in my life, which Curtis translates as my life now having a lot of low notes).

    As I worked today on rendering my garden acorn squash for rehearsal dinner pies, doing laundry, picking grapes and packing my car for the weekend in Bend, the wedding venue, I thought... maybe all this cosmic collision would be better done as a poem.  Ah, but I need more time, and that is another song. Maybe the next post reviewing my first wedding as part of the elder generation, mother of the groom, will be done as a poem. Where the love shines over the words, the cosmic families converge in celebration, I dance with my own new love and watch as my baby dances with his new and forever wife.

   There is always reason to celebrate.

Bricks and Mortar

"Bricks and mortar sing us no audible tune; the heart opens only to the human chant of being."
        ~ Paramahansa Yogananda's teacher

During a recession, these words offer a different way of knowing life.  Sages are like the lilies of the field.  They neither toil nor spin.  I believe this does not mean one should not work.  It means one's work should be indistinguishable from other parts of life. This wise man was a yogi, and the 'perfume saint'.  I like that name. If I could be a saint, I think I would be the flower saint.  What would your symbol be, if you were a saint?

My Feast day approaches soon, on October 17, the feast of St. Margaret Mary of Alcoque. The Feast day marks the day the saint died. My namesake was a nun, who, I recently learned, was anorexic.  She became so weakened from not eating that she saw visions, namely, the sacred heart of Jesus.  The ruling clerical bosses decided this was useful to the cause, and so she was canonized.

I have a copy of a painting depicting the miracle.  It is taped above my computer in order for me to be inspired as my parents wished when they gave me the name.  When I was little my mother often reminded me how special my saint was, and therefore how special that made me.

In the painting Sister Margaret Mary, dressed in the same black garb my first teachers wore, is kneeling in a chapel praying earnestly. Reportedly, the actual heart of the man Jesus is what she saw, the organ red and beating, as though the skin were pulled apart to reveal internal organs. I wonder what would happen to a young woman who claimed something similar today.

Yet, I feel somehow connected to this woman who lived a very short life and spent it in the quest for spiritual enlightenment.  I share the fever to find the meaning in life.  To see the real heart of people, and not the 'bricks and mortar' of the material world, only an illusion reinforced every day in the story we are told, the story we tell ourselves.

When we practice yoga we ask ourselves to soften the heart, open the heart to the pose, to life. In practice I like to think of chants, deep red love music of the heart, harmony in the world.