Searching for The Key

Today I spent an hour or so standing in a parking lot with my hand on a supermarket cart filled with various items including melting ice cream. It was my shopping cart, my home base in a world of shifting sands. (I hope this wasn't a foreshadowing of my future.) Somehow in the brief distance and span of time between exiting my car and shopping for groceries, I had lost my car key.

I had in fact lost my key so entirely that retracing my steps through every aisle of the store, poring through the produce, peering into my car windows and even poking around beneath the car all yielded not a trace.

I asked the store manager, the woman who rang up my groceries, random customers and employees...absolutely no one had encountered my key. I searched until I could no longer re-imagine myself tucking it into my purse or even recall what it felt like in my hands. I would have doubted its very existence if not for its crucial role in my automobile's undeniable presence in the lot.

These things happen, I know. But lately they have been happening to me a lot. Objects vanish into thin air. Attention and intentions meander. Commitments slip between cracks. Things go bump in broad daylight. Facts fade away. Words fail me.

I don't want to bring up the Mother Thing again. (You know, death and all that.) But these disconcerting brain fails I've been experiencing lately do fill my heart with new compassion for how my mother used to be. I would wonder, how in God's name does she lose her teeth? Or how can she not remember that she ate lunch just an hour ago? Or...seriously? Her hearing aid is missing again?! I'm afraid my general posture was often one of exasperation. But how disoriented and vulnerable my mother must have felt, and how brave she was, the way she always tried to smile it away, the way she kept on moving through the fog.

Suddenly I am the one veering off course, forgetting, losing, getting in the way of folks who know what they're doing. Perhaps this is a temporary condition, or perhaps it's just the beginning of a steeper decline. Either way, I hope...oh, I earnestly hope...that it will render me more patient and forgiving forevermore.

Because living is hard, even for the privileged.  So much to understand, so little time to do so. So much losing. So much loss.It's been a strange week or two in many ways. On Monday I went up to Santa Rosa for a birthday reunion with three good friends.  (As far as I know, I only left behind my bathrobe and a water bottle.) While I was there, in a hotel bar...a most unlikely setting...I saw the news on television about the oil spill at Refugio along the beautiful Gaviota coast. I feel mournful about that, and angry too, and I hope we can turn this into a catalyst for accountability and real action. Again.

The morning after I got home, I went down to the beach to contemplate and reconnect. The tide was low. A sea lion watched me from afar, pelicans in low flight seemed to skim the glassy surface of the sea, and a lone heron stood attentively, then grabbed a small wriggling fish in its beak.

Everything is just trying to be, I thought, taking its place in the cycle. I wish our human impacts were not so disproportionately damaging.I even tried to pray. Maybe I did pray. I stood there asking God to forgive me for doubting and to please, please, really be there, and I prayed for the souls of my beloved dead, prayed for the earth's healing, prayed for peace, prayed to be an instrument of love and good will...oh, little things like that. It was quite a list. And then I looked up just as a certain belligerent neighbor of ours happened to be driving by, and my first thought was: asshole. The irony did not escape me.

My poet-friend Dan (yeah, him again) wrote to me and said, "I’m sending someone over to see you, someone you need right now. Actually, I’m exaggerating a little when I say I’m sending her. I’m reminding you that she’s already there. Standing right beside you, right now. You may have forgotten that she is listening quietly when you are chewing on your feelings of guilt and your sorrows, and she is forgiving gently when you hate—especially when you hate yourself. She would remind you, as you know, Rilke suggested, Give your heart a sign that the winds are changing. If this is perceived by the gods, hope is unsurpassed."

Rilke and Dan are right, of course. I don't have to keep replaying the stories. I should try to hold onto my keys, yes, but maybe I don't have to hold onto all this pain. Besides, does holding onto the pain change anything that has happened? Most assuredly not. But letting go of it opens up the very present in which the universe exists.Letting go. I'm working on that. At the same time, I must learn to slow down and pay attention, or at least that's what Monte advised me today when he came to rescue me with a spare car key.

My friend Vickie half-jokingly mentioned the idea of the two of us attending a retreat–someplace where we peacefully meditate by day and actually sleep at night?– and I began half-seriously to entertain the possibility, but we would probably place too many expectations on ourselves, and that would only give us more anxiety.

Meanwhile, let's face it, things disappear. Names elude us. People leave. The step is lower than we thought, the wall much nearer to the nose, the rise in the pavement stumblingly abrupt. Certainties we counted on turn out to be sketchy.Yesterday I had coconut cake for breakfast, and I stopped by to say happy birthday to a gentleman I know who just turned 95, and I heard the canyon wren, my favorite song. Life is very lovely sometimes when you're not rushing through it. Funny, too.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I had a little girl, and in a week or so I'll travel across an ocean to be the mother of a bride. I hope I won't be standing outside of myself watching. I hope I don't get teary-eyed and tongue-tied. I hope I don't lose anything too crucial.

And as you can see, I'm trying to write, not because I have very much to say, but because writing sometimes guides me to the self I want to be, and this fuzzy-headed, baffled me is in dire need of an answer key.