The gates of spontaneity
When my Gramma died, I grieved for two weeks. Then August changed to September and I wrote her a long love letter and burned it with the brown fall leaves. When my penpal of many years died I cursed the war that stole her son and I ran ten miles along the Pacific Ocean and stopped every mile to throw rocks into the riptide. When birthdays and holidays came around I sent silent thoughts to the skies, wishing for peace, for surprises and disembodied fun. I didn't continue to mourn. It's the web of life, I thought. We pass into the earth and some memory of us continues, infects the air the people we leave behind breath.
But when my best friend, Patrick, died, I couldn't let go. I knew he was dying. I had time to prepare, to begin my stages of grief, but I stayed stuck in stage zero, and ants built colonies through my veins, carried raw bits of heart and liver and kidney to my face for me to contemplate in horror. Damn you for leaving, Patrick, I thought. Damn you. I miss you. I love you. It's not fair!
I cursed that man up and down my street, my county, the whole blasted country, but the ants kept their bloody parade. I made new friends, continued building old friendships, and though everyone I loved was gentle and fun and kind and spirited in the ways I love, no one lept to my side the way Patrick would. No one offered to run away to the meteor-puckered lands of Idaho for a potato eating contest or to the potholed roads of Chaco Canyon for a mystical campout under the Anasazi stars. No one matched my wild thoughts with ones three steps up heated white. I even pushed people a little bit - poked them with my psychic stick to see what great patterns they were willing to disrupt. No one took my bait.
You're not being fair to your friends, I whispered. They are great people, perfect in their beautiful unique ways. Patrick was one in a zillion. No one is as nutty as you. No one. No one runs like antelope water through sage canyons. It's not meant to be. You need to love everyone for who they are, just as you expect them to love you. YOU'RE the nutty one, girl. You are. Stop being You against the World.
I prayed for relief, to a God or Great Spirit or Goddess, any deity who would listen, asked for taro or cayenne to kill that crawling colony of despair. Each time I thought I felt the wind move through me, tell me to wait just a little bit, just another day, maybe a week, a month, a year. I waited.
Last night I attended a sacred sweat lodge ceremony in an arid town Patrick and I once visited. I parked his old green convertible - the one he left me in his will - under a desert willow and entered the circle with offerings from my work and small talents - a plum cake, two bottle of Avon Skin-So-Soft, a poem, a bit of tied lavender from my backyard. The Shaman accepted my gifts and led me to a patch of swept dirt, asked me to sit. Four people - all Native American - sat near me. I saw their offerings of cookies and bread and plants and even two bottles of motor oil.
We took turns holding the Talking Stick as the air heated between us. I held it carefully, turning the willow wood over and over in my hand, caressing the eagle's feather and leather adorning one end, and told them the story of my dead friend, of my inability to let go, of my trying to force new friends to be fantastically spontaneous and strange. They nodded, didn't speak.
The heat rose to 110 then 115. I don't know where it stopped, only know I stopped, my thoughts, my worry, my attachment to something old and gone. I sat for four hours, for four lifetimes, let my memories drip from pores never used. The Shaman rose and fell, tended the fires, burnt herbs and bits of the food we brought. He watched us carefully, and I felt him take my hand as my body shook with grief.
"Let your Spirit Guides show you. Don't block them." He grunted the directions, and I tried to breath slow and easy, tried to call us some kind of phantom to water my thirst. Nothing happened. I pleaded. I gave up. I opened my eyes. And the room wasn't there - no walls or fire or people sat near me. I was outside, in the forest, alone, and a great horned owl swooped down in front of me, then rose into a twilight mist. It only lasted a second. And in that moment, I heard Patrick's voice, not with my ears, but with my mind, and he told me a secret. I wish I could explain this better. I wish I could take you to that place, let you hear the voice, feel the fan of the owl's feathers in flight.
I left the lodge in the early hours of the morning. I drove the hour home under the pitch of night, no stars, nothing to light my path but my memory of the road, my memory of Patrick's simple words.
"I will live on in your life through a new friend. It's time for me to leave. Don't be afraid of the big changes. It will be alright."
Today is Patrick's birthday. I don't mourn him the way I did yesterday morning. I let him go last night. I'm grateful for everyone I know and love. I look forward to his presence in new friends.
8:43:29 PM 
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