The Spider

There is a spider living in our meditation room.  It wasn’t a meditation room when she got started there, just a utility room we didn’t know what to do with, empty and dark with an unused door leading outside.  She spun her web between the bottom of the door and the floor, spanning a thin crevice of daylight.

She seems to do well there, dining on wayward ants and gnats. She is not a large spider, just a little grayish one, speckled like an egg with a bulbous, slightly pointy abdomen and graceful legs; about the size of a nickel, legs and all.

The spider lived there in the unused room for a month or two.  I watched her web with interest.  When a spider stays in one place and one can observe her habits and rhythms, it is endlessly entertaining.  The life of a spider is a fascinating thing.

Christmas gave way to New Year’s.  My mother, who was sick, grew sicker still.  We needed solace.  My husband suggested that we convert the utility room into a meditation room.  And so, on New Year’s Day 2012, we carried in candles, pillows, and crystals.

I was sure the flurry of activity in the formerly forgotten room would make Charlotte – for that’s what we named her in a fit of originality – depart.  It’s a small room, cozy at best, cramped at worst, but we respected the spider as best we could, and there she stayed.

We bought a silk rag rug that stretches from wall to wall.  Charlotte scarcely waved a leg when I carefully slid it under her web.  I hung a decorative scarf across the door until it nearly draped in front of Charlotte.  She expanded her web to incorporate the new piece of fabric.  She even ducks behind it at times and seems to enjoy the added privacy in her newly public space. In my pack of Native American medicine cards, I found a spider card featuring a drawing of a spider that looks so much like Charlotte it’s uncanny.  I placed the card in Charlotte’s corner.  She leaves that alone.

I don’t know how long spiders live.  She lets the husks of her prey fall to the floor but leaves her shed exoskeletons in the web.  There are several.  Apparently she is thriving.

Mom has since died, and my family seeks refuge in the meditation room often.  We light candles and burn incense.  Charlotte does not seem easily disturbed by the new décor or our activities.  I like to think she feels honored, though that’d be ascribing complex emotions to a simple spider. Of course I cannot know how, or if, a spider thinks and feels.

What I do know is that her presence pleases me.  That she has chosen to stay feels like a validation and a blessing of our special space.  Each morning I check, and I am glad to see she is still there.

Reconstructing Faith

I have had ample opportunities recently to consider the precarious balance in which we hold our faith.

Faith takes maintenance.  It is not something we unwrap one breathless Christmas morning as children and keep for always.  It is more like a model airplane, delicate and fragile, painstakingly assembled using toothpicks and glue.  Then along comes an accident or an illness – or a mischievous little brother – and our faith is nothing but a pile of sticks and must be rebuilt.

I’m not talking about faith in a religious sense, although it is that for a lot of people.  I mean faith in a more general spiritual sense.  For those who are deeply contemplative, faith is intimately personal.  We may be given the model kit by our parents or other respected adults, but we choose the paint colors, the embellishments.  We make our faith our own.  Later, when it is knocked down and needs rebuilding, perhaps we paint it a different color than before.  We make it new.

Hope is another story.  I’m still struggling with hope because at first glance it seems so fundamentally selfish.  Webster’s New World Dictionary defines hope as “a feeling that is what is wanted will happen; desire accompanied by expectation.”

For this reason hope is a slippery slope.  It assumes a lot – for one thing, that we know what we want.  I have concluded, though, after much careful thinking (deep contemplation, if you will), that the selfishness of hope depends on what it is we have decided to hope for.  This is what I believe: if we are attached to a specific outcome, such as having an illness cured or winning the lottery, then we are impressing our naïve human will upon the wisdom of the universe and are likely to be disappointed.

If, however, we hope for something broader and less defined, like inner peace or my perpetual vague favorite, “the best possible outcome,” then there is hope for our hope.  It is still just a tiny raindrop on the surface of a vast lake, but there are those ripples to consider.

This version of hope is congruent with the spiritual concepts that make sense to me.  As for my faith, I’m working on it.  It’s been through a violent storm (or at least a terrible temper tantrum from a destructive little brother), but I’ve repainted the pieces, and they are drying.  I probably can’t put them back exactly the way they were before, but that’s okay.  My relationship with my faith is evolving.  Change is inevitable.

Putting my faith back together is an endeavor that cannot be done in a hurry, and it can’t be done out of order.  Painstaking.  Deliberate.  Frustrating.  Rewarding.  Ever-changing.  Faith is all these things.  It may be constant, but it is also dynamic.  At least, this is the way I see things right now.  Even that may change, which will, of course, be okay, too, when the time comes.  I have faith that it will.

Cloud Pictures

Last night, when I squeezed some lotion into my palm, it looked like a perfect little alto saxophone.  I made note of it, admired it, and then rubbed it in.  Such a minor phenomenon (it wasn’t like I saw the face of Jesus on a tortilla or anything, after all) was forgotten until tonight, when I applied the same lotion.  This time it didn’t look like a saxophone; it was more of an abstract curlicue.  But that’s when I remembered the cute alto sax lying there in my hand the night before.

Seeing random musical instruments in mundane applications of lotion is oddly comforting to me.  It means my imagination is at work, a very good thing for a writer to have at her disposal.  The appearance of the saxophone also represents a bit of a victory to me, a recovery of some form of innocence.  It just so happens that since my mom died a couple months ago, I can also see cloud pictures again.  They’re effortless – obvious, in fact – but it hasn’t always been this way.

I could reliably find shapes in the clouds when I was a little girl, but then this ability ebbed.  My creative mind would try to see shapes in the clouds (which was the problem, of course – that I was trying), but my overly pragmatic adult mind could only see clouds.  They were gorgeous, billowing, cotton candy, pewter-shaded, rain-heavy clouds, but they were still just what they were.  Clouds.  Once in awhile maybe I could extrapolate popcorn pieces or a wad of cotton candy, but that was as distant an analogy as I could muster.

My inability to see shapes in the clouds left me feeling rooted, weighed down by the concrete shoes of my literal mind.  Sometimes I felt like a fraud calling myself a creative person, a writer, when I could only see what was in front of me – in the minutest detail I could see it, but still without metaphor.  Isn’t metaphor supposed to be second nature to a writer, an essential tool?

The other day, though, a friend changed her timeline picture on Facebook to a panoramic with billowing clouds.  Plain as day, I saw a water buffalo.  (I’m not sure this was the image she was hoping to display, but that’s what I saw.  It couldn’t be helped.)  Today, I looked up into the sky and saw two polar bears sanding up on on their haunches kissing, a stubby-tailed alligator with its jaws open wide, and the profile of a man with a suspicious-looking moustache.  So it wasn’t just the isolated water buffalo incident.  Something in me has shifted.  I can see pictures in practically every cloud.

I’d like to draw some philosophical parallel, to find some explanation as to why this small revelation would occur now.  Perhaps the recent loss of my mother has caused me to sit deeper inside myself, in a place of knowing rather than trying.  Perhaps my mother’s disembodied spirit is flying around up there pointing the cloud pictures out to me, saying, “Lookit!  An elephant lifting a dumbbell!  Do you see it?”  Perhaps handling her illness, death, and estate has left me less attached to the outcome of things and more invested in the process, which is course where cloud pictures live.  They are impermanent, ever-changing, and must be enjoyed in the moment (unless captured and posted on one’s Facebook wall).

Whatever the explanation is, if there is an explanation, I’m sure I’ll never know it.  But as a writer and creative person, I have to say I’m very relieved to see a seal with a whiskey bottle balanced on its nose cavorting in this afternoon’s otherwise impeccable blue sky.  Very relieved indeed.

In the Gaps

I’m focusing on living in the gaps. It’s been a little over two months since my mother died, and when she was sick everything was gaps. She was hanging in a gap as if suspended over a gorge, halfway between earth and sky. Nothing was clear-cut when Mom was dying, and oddly, that somehow made sense. As if that’s what dying is: slipping into the gap.

Here’s what I mean by gaps.  Recently I e-mailed a poem to someone. The poem was called “Trying to Raise the Dead” by Dorianne Laux, one of my favorite contemporary poets.  My reader replied, saying that he found the poem, like most poetry,  “cryptic.”  I have never been of the mind that Laux’s poetry is circumspect or obscure with a difficult-to-delineate meaning. This reader was hung up on the details. The narrator is at a house. “Whose house?” my reader demanded. She’s at a party and she doesn’t know the people that well. “Why is she there? Why doesn’t she know them?” She’s outside, and the others are inside, singing. “How come? Why doesn’t she go back inside with them?” (To this, I answered, “Maybe she was smoking a cigarette.”  Geesh.)

Poetry leaves gaps. I’m comfortable with them. Not the esoteric, overly academic puzzle poems people love to praise, probably because they figure something so convoluted must be intelligent. Laux’s poetry isn’t pretentious or overworked. It just leaves open space so that when I read it, I can make it mine.

My mother loved poetry, understood the gaps, was in her element in them, actually.  But she loved music more.  She used to say that music speaks to that for which there are no words. So does poetry, I say. Good poetry, anyway.

Now that Mom is gone, I’m left trying to articulate to people what made her special, what it is that I miss. What I miss is that she knew a deep truth. That knowing was her unique gift. I will miss her facility with gaps.

I suppose my mother can be found only in those spaces between things now.  Wherever, if anywhere, the essence of her exists, it is not on this physical plane. At least, this is what I tell myself so that I don’t keep looking here. I look there – in the gaps. I listen to song after song, read poem after poem, trying to find one that makes me feel just the right way. Makes me feel like she is still here.