the joy of her work

Prince Wen-hui’s cook, Ting, was cutting up an ox. Every touch of his hand, every ripple of his shoulders, every step of his feet, every thrust of his knees, every cut of his knife, was in perfect harmony, like the dance of the Mulberry Grove, like the chords of the Lynx Head music.

“Well done!” said the prince. “How did you gain such skill?”

Putting down his knife, Ting said, “I follow the Tao, Your Highness, which goes beyond all skills. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox. After three years, I had learned to look beyond the ox. Nowadays I see with my whole being, not with my eyes. I sense the natural lines, and my knife slides through by itself, never touching a joint, much less a bone.

“A good cook changes knives once a year: he cuts. An ordinary cook changes knives once a month: he hacks. This knife of mine has lasted for nineteen years; it has cut up thousands of oxen, but its blade is as sharp as if it were new. Between the joints there are spaces, and the blade has no thickness. Having no thickness, it slips right through; there’s more than enough room for it. And when I come to a difficult part, I slow down, I focus my attention, I barely move, the knife finds its way, until suddenly the flesh falls apart on its own. I stand there and let the joy of the work fill me. Then I wipe the blade clean and put it away.”

“Bravo!” cried the prince. “From the words of this cook, I have learned how to live my life.”

When I first read this parable, I thought immediately of my Tam.  It describes perfectly what I haven’t been able to put into words about her way of loving me.  I’ve never been cut like she cuts.  I’ve been hacked on, I’ve been stuck through.  I’ve never had someone who danced over me, in perfect harmony with such loving precision.  She loves me with all that she is.  I am so lucky.

to tammy

Violet Ward and partner, photographed by 19th C.lesbian pioneer Alice Austen (1866-1952)

Body of a Woman

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant’s body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.

I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.

 

But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

 

 

Pablo Neruda penned this and I couldn’t say it better.  He wonderfully captures the wonder and complexity and resonance I feel loving a woman, body and soul.  Loving Tammy … and in return being loved so well and so completely, with such tender compassion and fierce grace.

In each other, all along

Tam surprized me with a present. I won’t call it a Christmas present, because it is so much more than that. I’ll call it a soul present.

Anyone who knows me at all knows how much I love Rumi. I adore his verses and even the story of his life is amazing to me. This is a quote from Rumi that she found on a peice of paper. She ripped the edges, matted and framed it for me. Here is what it says:

The minute I heard my first love story

I started looking for you,

not knowing how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.

They’re in each other

all along.

I cried. I cried because it is so beautiful and I cried because the verse is so lovely. But most of all I cried because of how amazing it is to be this well known and this well loved.

I’ve tried several times to put this very thing into words for her. It is exactly how I feel – like we have been in each other, all along.

pillow talk

I’m afraid I’ve become a terrible pot-head. Again. I was young in the 70’s, when it was the law that everyone must smoke pot, but this time I started smoking for pain. It’s the only thing that helps with the Crohns pain. I tried it after a friend of my mom’s suggested it, thinking that if it helped with pain from AIDS and cancer, it might help me. And it does. However, I found that I like it. Quite a bit.

So, last night, as I lay near sleep, I mentioned that I might need to slow down on the herbage.

“I need to slow down on my pot smoking. I’m not getting anything done…the house is messy and I’m turning into a slug. I know, ’cause my Aunt Gertrude just told me so.”

“Aunt Gertrude?”

“Yeah, you know – the fussy old lady that lives in my head and tells me when I’m lazy or stupid or fat and won’t let me use double negatives.”

“I don’t have an Aunt Gertrude.”

“You don’t?”

“Naw, I have an Uncle Oscar.”

“Uncle Oscar? Well, what does he say?”

“Nothing…he just sits around in his underwear all day.”

Transmigration into another soul

Life is funny sometimes. The way it takes hard things to grow, adversity to gain strength, hardship to learn appreciation for small goodnesses.

I’ve noticed this thing women do. You see it when there is a round of flu or virus milling about. Her family will get sick, she’ll minister to them until they’re well or nearly well and then fall victim to the illness. Or there will be a family emergency and she will sail through with composure only to fall into pieces after the crisis has passed.

I had a similar experience tonight. Tam and I were sitting idly at the kitchen table, talking of this and that, as we seem to do so often. We were daydreaming of the places we’d travel to if we were rich, beginning to the places in Europe we’d love to experience, then on to this country from an RV. I mused that this kind of daydreaming was more fun when younger and the possibilities of them coming true holds more hope.

I began to feel a sadness. Tam got up to tend to something, but as usual, reading my mood, she tarried for a hug. I need to explain about Tammy’s hugs. She refers to herself sometimes as a “big kid”, as in wondering if a place has tables instead of booths for big kids. She is big, beautiful and strong. Her heart, especially. Her arms are big and when she holds me they surround me softly like velvet steel. I feel safe. Her hugs hold such love. Tonight, as her arms enfolded me and I sank my head into her soft chest, I felt the full force of sadness strike.

I’ve learned not to hide when moments like this happen. In the past, I would have scolded myself internally for being silly, or for being sad over nothing. Instead, I rode the wave and waited to see where it would take me. This I was able to do partly due to learning to listen more carefully to my truer self instead of the inner critic and partly due to the warm, soft safety of Tammy’s arms.

It was then that I realized that it was only now, safely engulfed in her arms and love that I could let myself feel the sadness of my life. By that, I mean the way I’ve lived in a survival mode, keeping myself going, keeping my children and I safe but losing the wider, freer life I longed for. Thinking of how I’d always loved to move about as a young woman and how that was curtailed after the second and then third child. How I became trapped, or at least felt trapped, here in Florida for 30 years…with the last 20 being unwilling of soul to be here. Yet I stayed, kept first by poverty and then by an unwillingness to separate child from parent.

But it’s not just the living here for so long. It’s also the dreams that got put on a back burner to the more urgent tyranny of parenthood and survival. Things I’d thought I’d do that I realize now I will never experience directly. And a life lived without the fullness of relationship I now am so happy to have with Tammy. I’m not sure how to put it into words, really.

I guess I just felt the sadness of a life not lived to its potential. A life where too much of myself was sacrificed. A life constrained, a life lived partly.

It struck me as interesting that I was able to experience the full sorrow of my disappointment with my life only now, sheltered in this place of safety, as I felt myself entering into honesty on a level I was unaccustomed to in the past. I felt a familiar tug as I realized I was to be learning something here.

To truly begin a new life, the old one must be killed. To begin a new thing, the old must be destroyed. For me to live fully in this moment, I needed to face how muted my living had been in the past. Face it, look at it and determine where my fear had held me, where my own insecurity or lack of courage had enabled my entrapment.
Tammy held me for long moments. I held back my tears. She is so great, guys. When she asked me what it was and I wasn’t able to tell her, she let that be alright. She made sure I was okay, that I couldn’t talk about it right now, then left me alone to sort my thoughts. Just one of the hundreds of ways she shows how wonderful she is to me every day.How many times have we heard that it helps in the grief process to have a funeral or memorial, to have something concrete to commemorate the passing of a person from this earth? I think it is the same with us as we pass into new territory on our life’s journey. Sometimes we need a reminder to look on the old life, to look at it squarely and honestly and say good bye. Maybe it’s only then we can turn ahead and forge forward without the turning back that can waylay us and cause us to run off the path or become stalled.

So whether it is mourning the passing of a marriage or the passing of a season of life…Whether it be sadness over a life lived less than honestly or passionately or the tender farewell of good things that have now come to an end, saying good bye is a necessary step in the process of forward motion. It’s only then that we can come to the happy place of being prepared to engage in what Ortega called the highest form of civilized sport: the transmigration into another soul.