There are more healing things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .
Good evening.
I am sitting outside, in the yard of the home we rent and maybe could someday own.
Who knows.
I’m working on getting comfortable with “who knows.”
See, I’ve had this crazy belief — — for many years that I could KNOW
all the unknowable shit. Like the future.
This kind of irrational thinking has never
led me down good paths.
Today, during our weekly Trader Joe’s run
(I swear to you — Trader Joe’s is NOT a sponsor
of the views expressed in this blog . . . yet!)
I turned to my beautiful wife and said, “You’re the only healthy relationship I’ve ever had in my life — outside of friends.”
And maybe it wasn’t the most romantic thing, but it was the most honest-to-my-higher-power truth.
Ours’ was the only romantic relationship of my life not built on booze,
or drama, or suffering, or chaos.
Ours was and remains the only truly healthy
as-close-to-normal-as-it-gets
love affair I have ever had.
“You can stop there,” said my wife when I reached the “I have ever had”
and I shall amend the statement here,
as I amended it from the cabin of our Honda Fit,
“and ever WILL have.”
In line at Trader Joe’s, I cracked us both up doing my best (terrible)
Greek accent (my wife is of Greek ancestry),
“Is boring match. Is good. Marriage is for tasks, not for fun.”
And isn’t it also funny because it’s kind of true?
Isn’t life just easier with a good person who can be YOUR person?
And whose person you can be for them in kind?
Life is easier with a person.
I hope you, reader, have found or do find your person.
Note: no person is perfect.
My wife, for some unthinkable reason,
loves me anyway.
Find a person like that.
I did not want to wax Dr. Phillian about marriage to you, reader.
The mind, though, does wander on days like this:
the palm fronds rustling, the sunshine, the big blue sky.
Billy Ocean in my headphones telling me
that he wants to be my “lover, lover boy.”
(Chicago people: do you remember Dick Biyondi’s “forgotten oldies”?
They’d be these shitty songs from the 50s and 60s, best rendered to the trashpile of tepid early white people rock music history.
Anyway, I’m bringing back “forgotten oldies” of the 80s.
Billy Ocean is getting A LOT of play.)
The mind wanders. It is Saturday.
I am letting the mind wander.
I started my morning with my home group AA meeting.
The first time I saw them, twenty-one days ago, I was too ashamed
to turn my camera on. My face was bloodied, bruised.
My retina was detaching (didn’t know it then).
This morning? I was early to the meeting and my camera was ON.
My skin was clear of bruises or scratches, flushed as always
when I am a little nervous (and if I’m being honest: I’m always a little nervous and confused — just the way the universe cooked me.)
So in the middle of this writing, a family from my early years at FALA showed up on our doorstep here in Tucson:
mom and happy young women in tow.
They came to bring me a hand made scarf, fabric from Israel, dyed in turmeric for healing.
I first wrapped it around myself like a blanket (#alwaysconfused)
and the mother of my former students laughed and said that while I certainly could wear it like that, it was more intended for me to wear as a kind of scarf. “Like a girly thing,” my wife — quite helpfully — translated.
But a scarf has no gender.
A yellow scarf, dyed in turmeric and
other colors from nature, is for healing.
I don’t know about you, reader, but I need all the healing
these days
that I can get.
Earlier today, a package from my friend Carina
arrived from Georgia holding stones for healing.
I put one on a bookshelf and the other in my pocket.
I like the feel of the smaller stone — smooth, glassy,
tumbled as though crafted with the human thumb in mind.
A stone for healing.
I used to believe nothing was “just for healing.”
I used to believe there was no such thing as “healing.”
Used to believe the world was just mean and unfair and shitty (and it most definitely IS all of those things) and that was that. The world
will break us, and so fuck the world.
And maybe this is the AA talking, but I am starting — for the first time in my life — to really believe in my bones that with a little effort and good faith intention, healing really can happen.
We can’t go back and “fix” all the shit that came before,
but we can definitely go forward with healing and
healing things in mind.
As the family of Annie and her kids (no longer kids at all) sat around my living room (vaccinated and distanced) I had a memory of childhood.
Of being in a room with books and basically the same color scheme (our coffee table IS an 80s classic) and feeling happy and safe.
I don’t know where I was.
Doesn’t matter.
Can’t go back.
So heal.
Find the healing things.
Eat a jellybean (seriously, I need to stop but I have given up so much vice this year that I have to have my fucking jellybeans — and Lacroix.
The coconut kind).
