What Happened

What happened was I let my own fiercely independent mind take a roller coaster ride outside the soothing walls of the meditation this morning, so I missed the first half of what I was supposedly meditating on, and this is almost the theme of my life.

Curious enough to hop back into the circle, I saw I was making choices and begging freedom to slap my feet with sunshine as I peddled down the summer path to play.

My decisions are the root, the root of the root of the

of the bulb and also the word deciding taking out the other side as an option oh the sweet bittersweet impossibility of this if only my acupuncturist said i'm a small intestine this forever balancing of the pure from the impure this analytical carnival of taking in every fleck of possibility when ordering a goddamn burrito as if the mind should know how to prioritize

What happened was I was born into a modest home of big dreamers whose age did not become them.

I mean to say not that I was born before my time, but that they were, my father at least, so that being the best swimmer in my class didn't behoove me.

What happened was I was born already knowing something that most of the people around me didn't seem to be troubled by.

and that it was both a terrible burden trying to carve out chasms in a day big enough for an adult to fall into so they could see this thing that was happening, this terribly beautiful aliveness, but it was also a gift, an already built-in forgiveness for the human beingness of us all.

The not-so-inconsequential nuances that just near missed the mark of understanding.

When joy and life and worry and disappointment got a hold of the hand that grasped the bottle one too many times, day after day, always, I fear, declaring a celebration that did not end with party hat.

When this happened, and my father, my larger-than-life-almost father with the hearty laugh and the wild blue eyes, the guy with the cowboy hat and the alligator-skin boots, when he broke, broke but never poor, he'd say, and still to this day when someone says to me, poor thing, rich thing, I say, if you must, when it happened that he did eventually actually break,

and the agitated flesh inside him got into gangs and grew into mass mobs that took over all the sweet cells where his living was.

When this happened and he died, I decided not to cry again. For some reason, that seemed fair enough to me to withhold the magnificent love of real feeling and turn it into a doing with a hard hat.

And what I did was drink.

Now I've told that story a thousand times and I'm old enough to know that no matter how hard I try to string the works together in just such a way as for you to see inside this tender heart of mine, it will cast shadows and doubt and disbelief.

In the same way I've learned to read you way before you'll ever speak about what you see when you look at me.

What happened was I learned that hard shit happens and people die and you will be hurt and hurt others.

But still there's this mighty sword inside that if you let it, will cut through all the bullshit until it's just us.

What happened was at 26 years old, when I became tired of apologizing for who I'd become, I hung up my whiskey lips and put on a mouth of wonder.

How curious then. 24 full 24 hours in a day and nearly none of it gobbled up like so many cookies that forgot they'd been eaten.

What happened next was I learned to wear a different costume, not quite as fun as the childhood pirate I portrayed, my long pink scarf over my head and my, this is my for real ponytail head.

Now it was kitten heels and polyester blazers, wild uncontrolled locks cut to a coif, straightened, tame, makeup, nicer words.

I became a business woman, homage to the little girl who at age three banged on doors with a ukulele and a tip hat,

waddling along in my dad's enormous boots door to door, how they came all the way up to my thighs and I had to drag myself there to sing and bang off key to be heard.

What happened was when I traded in my curls for my bangs and my cutoffs for my pencil skirt, I also traded in my most curious and important tools, my satchel for a briefcase, my journal for a Franklin planner.

What happened was I wrote contracts and emails of persuasion about things that only matter in a way that it matters someone turn off on the sun.

But it's not me.

I took to doing work the best that it could be done, but that anyone could do.

I took to wasting my words and my tender heart and maybe even my gift.

Because I was good at it and people liked me and they said yes.

What happened was I had two boys and I could no longer joke about how when I drank I put too many things in my mouth or how when I woke up too many times I had no recollection of entire days.

What happened was somebody married me because of who I was committed to being instead of who I had been.

And I thought that meant I had to keep moving in this one direction where there are dry cleaners and assistants and nannies and grief.

What happened is I realized I've been grieving over the loss of this little girl for so long that I pinched myself for maybe losing my own kids.

Waking up with

waking up or coming in halfway through this meditation called life, called what happened, what is.

My son Ben is a math genius who has hung up his advanced numerical whispering lips for a silent stint, walking quietly toward a monastic life in a forest somewhere.

I know he's seated perhaps in meditation, the still serenity of Redwood Valley pulsing through his 21-year-old veins.

I thought to be worried for a minute when he so cavalierly walked away from what I worried was his dreams.

But then I remembered that at his age, I was doing beer bongs and blow. So suddenly Buddhism didn't seem all that risky.

And how my younger son Jonas is just an arm's distance away, hitting dingers on the big screen, but far enough that I can't touch him or run out to catch those balls and put them in little boxes with time stamps and dates.

What happened was I went to work one day and when I got back, my little boys were off to college and I hadn't even learned how to say goodbye yet.

I have worried that I will waste an entire second chance, not on not changing, but on not being who I am.

Just some little pirate poet who knows some things that actually matter.