There is Dark and then, There is Light

The sadness creeps in like a silent army advancing in the darkness of the night.  It rolls over the sunshine in my soul, covering it in a blanket of blindness like the San Francisco fog can do to its twinkling city.  It’s all-consuming and it paralyzes me.  Thoughts race around in my head like fireflies on a summer night, appearing, lighting up, and then fading before any sense can made of them.  Songs are being played in the cacophony of sounds in the dark cave that is my mind.  When I try to make sense of these, why this one or that one they too fade away, the next one taking the last place.  Thoughts of opening the car door at 60 mph and falling sideways, sideways to dust. Maybe they’ll never find me.  Maybe my dust will arrange itself into an angel and I’ll soar skyward without a trace.

She leans in close to me and snuggles her forehead against my right temple.  I can feel my tears falling one by one in a rhythmic pattern.  I imagine the temperature of the tears and the slight tickle they may be triggering as they reach her flesh.  And then I imagine the sadness, the toxic release, the grief, the DNA, all of the stories from the past, that those tears are transporting.  Those tears are a tell-all.  My first impulse is to fling my head away from hers.  If she knew me the way I know me, surely she would not love me the way that she does.  

I stare at the window blind in our bedroom.  It's made of an organic material, a reed of some sort.  Reeds are slender, delicate grasses that grow in mucky marshy waters.  Seems an appropriate vantage point at this juncture.  The sunlight pierces its way through and I can faintly make out the graceful ballet of the tree limbs in the garden, their leaves all feathery like tutus on the hips of ballerinas.  For a moment, in my paralytic state my mind wonders off to nothingness, to a sort of peaceful silence.  And then I pull focus again and the madness resumes.  Faces begin to appear.  First Van Gough, then Einstein, then Darwin…what are they trying to tell me?  Those faces fade and are replaced with gaunt ghostly images.  These sad souls have eyes that roll upwards and backward in their skeletal heads.  And then those skeletal images morph into fully animated Hitchcockian screaming faces.  These motherfuckers are frozen with their mouths wide open and extreme terror in their eyes.  Silence comes from their wide mouths like invisible, poisonous, gas.  I think to myself this is how it goes in my nightmares when I open my mouth to scream and no matter how hard I try I can’t push my sound into existence, no one is coming, no one can hear me. I drift off to sleep.  I dream I have the courage to be vulnerable and authentic and I write my book.  I tell my stories in all their muck and glory, the successes and the failures.  The book is published and the sheeple with their finger-pointing, criticism, and judgment extinguish me.  

And then I wake up.

There is a standard poodle that looks more like a tiny pony with a curly snout and an even curlier tail sprawled out in the bed next to me, my love just the other side of this stately beast. The pillow is soft beneath my head and my body feels relaxed and held in the cozy bed I am so blessed to crawl into each night. The morning dew glistens on the beauty of mother nature just the other side of the reed window blind.  The sunlight pierces its way through the blind with luminous displays of rainbowed glitter. The Meyer Lemon tree in our garden is ripe with young fruit for mixing pitchers of lemonade.  The birds are singing.  The ants are marching.  The sun is rising and the moon is retiring.  The clouds are organizing themselves in the sky as the curtain draws on the stage of a new day.  I am at peace.  I am in love with my life and I too am organizing myself; mind, body, and spirit to take center stage in my glorious life for another miraculous day.  

And then I take a moment to honor the madness of the prior day, to give thanks for the darkness and the messages it brings.  To viscerally know and understand that the darkness is here to serve me not to throw me from that speeding car. As I reflect on the hours not so long ago I realize that all of my thoughts, the dark ones and the enlightening ones are all part of my experience as a whole, as a humble human, a mother, a daughter, a friend, a sister, a wife, a writer and a lover of myself and of every living thing.  As a child of stardust I come from explosion and so understanding that explosion is part of my evolution is an important concept for me to remember.  

So here I am, floating down the river with her by my side.  She sits gracefully to my right and is lovingly holding my hand.  Her blue eye winks, triggering my girlish laughter.  Our boat is making its way through the slender delicate reeds with a promising blue sky, a blanket above.  The clouds are re-arranging themselves into stories, the stories of the new day.  The river laps at the sides of our boat making the same playful sounds of a puppy at his water bowl.  And in this moment, this moment of my future becoming, there is more light than there is dark.  I am grateful for the gift of the paradox, the dark, and the light, as I feel into the balance and the inevitable right of the world when I practice my humanness and lean into love and most assuredly, acceptance.