Hearts & Flowers

“Sometimes I’m a heart girl, and sometimes I’m a flower girl!”

My daughter was about three years old when she made that delightful declaration. Her words came back to me last night, for no apparent reason, and I saw in retrospect that it was the beginning of the lifelong process of discovering various modes and ways of being, the menu of possibilities, the exhilaration of not being static.

I too can be heart and flower. But sometimes I’m a vessel of yearning.

I said that to my friends Ming and David the other day during a visit to our “church” up the canyon, a sandstone rock formation where we sit and talk and send out postcards to the universe. We’ve been doing this for years, but this expedition was special, our first since the pandemic, and Ming was visiting from Santa Fe. We felt grateful and reflective, but I was a little bit sad. “I am a vessel of yearning,” I said.

“A vessel of urine?” said David. He happens to be a veterinarian and tends to interpret things in a clinical way, focused on symptoms, diagnoses and cures. Also, the wind was howling, and none of us has good hearing. Many consonants and meanings are lost or misconstrued. He was dismayed. Humility is one thing, but this revealed a disturbing lack of self-esteem.

Yearning, I said. Not urine. I am filled with yearning.

And so many other things.

Ming, meanwhile, decided to focus not so much on what she was, but how she hoped to change. She spoke a brief monolog into the sky, paused, and added, “And I’m going to try not to be so much of an apple in challenging situations.”

An apple? What could be more pleasant than an apple?

She repeated the gist of what she had said, enunciating more crisply: “An asshole. I’m striving not be an asshole.”

And so it went. We are an odd trio. We’ve known each other for nearly thirty years, and Ming was just a child at the start. David is the father of friends with whom she carpooled to school, and he remains a gentle and kind father figure to this day. I was Ming’s sixth grade teacher. One of the amazing things about this area in which we live is the sense of community and continuity. People stay connected to one another, perhaps because they are so connected to the land itself.

But even in the context of continuity, the potential for reinvention is vast, and we have each morphed into many forms, acquiring new skills and new wounds, getting old but somehow feeling very young inside. What thread persists? What true self endures? I think about this a lot lately.

I looked down and saw my shadow cast on the pale dusty stone of a circular concavity, a pool when it rains, now bone dry. I raised my arms, playing shadow games, and felt the urge to dance…not so much a yearning, as an urge. Alas, I don’t know how to dance. I never learned to swim or dance, which perhaps says more about me than I care to tell. On the subject of dance, however, my daughter offered another quotable tidbit long ago. “You don’t need to know any steps,” she said. “You just get out there and flail. You certainly know how to flail.”

Indeed I do. I am a veritable pail of flailing.

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It’s a new day. The wind has not subsided. The leaves are trembling, their own form of dance, and the grass on the hillsides is rolling along in currents and waves, and a lizard is sunbathing on the deck, and everything is so urgent and provocative, I don’t know quite know what to make of it, or how I fit in.

Sometimes I’m a pilgrim. Sometimes I’m a clown. Sometimes I’m a mean girl and sometimes I’m a martyr. My cup runneth over with sorrow sometimes, and sometimes the nectar of joy. I am a chipped dish, an eroding sea wall, a spark that might ignite. I am more than my mistakes but ineligible for pardon. I am a flower and a heart.