Self in the Sun

Brothers in the Rain

A Mother's Meditation

Sipping a thoroughly steeped cup of Ceylon tea, a pleasant semi-daze occupies me at the breakfast table. Moby’s Natural Blues plays from the laptop (I have a need for hip music in the mornings; it breaks up the monotony of the cereal-bowl-juice-cup-assembly line – I think of T.S. Eliot here: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons).* The three boys have already devoured the morning spread; charged with a baffling excess of energy, they are wrestling in cardboard boxes one room over. I am alone as it gets.

Beyond the finger-printed, sliding glass door, the suspended, empty-paper-towel-roll-turned-totem-pole tickles the morning air, powered by a subtle breeze blown in from the San Francisco Bay – a sliver of which can actually be seen from our balcony, if you really challenge the eye. I study whatever catches my glance with pensive interest – the blue jay, shamelessly stuffing coco moss from my planter into his beak…the yellowing pines, not quite tall enough to hide the houses across the way. I examine the blackened windows in the houses and wonder about the bodies behind the glass: what other mothers are doing with their mornings; what they are sipping on…thinking about; if they measure out their lives with coffee spoons.

Outside, the shadow of the lattice railing sleeps on the deck’s splintery surface, filled with a hundred parallelograms of sunlight. A reflection of watery light from our inflated pool in the backyard licks the ceiling tirelessly in a movement like flames. My totem pole twists in on itself, then unfurls at twice the speed, like a dancer’s perfect pirouette. I painted the totem pole in an inspired afternoon of recycling projects with the boys (they didn’t want to hang their poles, but naturally turned them into swords instead). Admiring my totem pole, a simple truth occurs to me: I like seeing the work of my own hands sway in the wind for a change. The kids’ masterpieces are everywhere – the fridge, the walls, the doors…even our entire garage has been converted into an art gallery. While I adore the consecrated strokes of my children’s earnest hands, and while I savor the privilege of gazing on the expressions of holy secrets in their budding souls – lately, I have been looking for the secrets in my own soul; because they are, it occurs to me, no less holy, and no less destined for expression. One secret reveals itself in the morning’s solitude: whatever else I do (change diapers, pack lunches, put on Band-aids, drive, cook, clean, unpack lunches, fold laundry, drive some more…) I must write! I must photograph and create; because it makes me happy, but also – because how else will each of my children learn to value their unique existence and contribute their one-of-a-kind gifts to the world? I must lead by example.

Between the morning’s fleeting epiphanies, the music, the intriguing light-forms, and the indigenous, watchful eyes of my totem pole, I enjoy a small sense of transport – like a simulated Burning Man experience for a woman and her tea at the breakfast table.** Recently, my free-spirited, semi-nomadic, twenty-something, fairyesque cousin made her annual trek to Black Rock Dessert for Burning Man, an event in which people come together for the purpose of radical self-expression – to sprinkle, like sand grains, the secrets in their artistic souls over the one thousand square miles of desert. This strikes me as the ultimate unattached woman’s thing to do, now that I am married with a family. Sometimes, attached or not, I think of going. I think:

I Could Go

I could stretch out,

layered in gauzy

skirts and scarves,

hair tangling with

feathers and beads

in desert breeze –

all ten of my

toes propped and free

on the rear view mirror

of a 1976 Volkswagen bus,

catching the warm —

the fast wind;

I could hula

in a ring of fire

on the playa,

the dry balls of my feet

pressing into alkali

salts in sand. I could play

my palms on a drum

under a muddled hue

of silver and orange

spotlight begotten

from fire and moon:

a hue I’ve not seen

in a long, long time –

if ever.

But alas… while I may head for the desert someday, for now, I am here in my hometown, Castro Valley, doing the important work of existing in a chair at the breakfast table – the work of considering my life: as it is, and as I’d like it to be. The moments of solitude I find sustain me; they are soothing, like small handfuls of warm, desert sand. A mother of three, constantly in motion as I tend to the endless needs closing in all around me, the importance of this time to think and reflect, to be taken captive by a moment of dream in which the mysteries and possibilities of self can spin freely across the limitless expanse of desert – cannot be underestimated.

-This post is dedicated to my cousin, Megan, whose artistic soul has long inspired me.-

*This line comes from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

**To learn about Burning Man, visit: http://www.burningman.com/

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