optimist in a broken submarine

Unbelievably, it's raining. I leave my bedroom window open just enough for my cat to come in and out. Sometime past midnight I felt him curl up next to me, his fur wet and cold. I thought I was dreaming, but woke later and realized different. Steadily, softly, it's been raining all day. The grey is pervasive. A rainy grey June day. Our world and weather are changing.

My son leaves for New Mexico on the 13th and we are still aiming to close on the house business by the 15th. We have a fantastic loan agent working for us, but there are several balls still in the air. The only person who can release an important document is out sick, and we're waiting to hear back from two other people on other stuff before we can go forward. It's all nerve wracking and stressful, Patti and Karl's new house deal contingent on this one being done by the 15th. I've been living with uncertainty regarding the house for more than a year. It's all now down to the wire, and that wire feels quite abit like a garrote. The house is thick with tension. Even the spirits are jittery.

As soon as my son flies out on Monday, I'm checking into a hotel. I used the internet to get a good deal for a nice room in an entirely different neighborhood. I'm staying there next week. For some reason, this is alarming and upsetting people close to me. I've had two offers of other houses I could stay at. Three, if you count my ex's insistence that I stay at her house while her new girlfriend and she are in Yosemite. She's worried I'll be too depressed in a hotel. Imagine an indredulous look on my face. And one of those laughs that is the sound of frozen tears shattering.

I need to be away from other people's stuff. Literally. At both my office and at home I'm surrounded by boxes, people's stuff in transition. I work with the stuff of people's inner lives, their stories, their emotions. The human drama in my inner circle is the stuff that television rating wars are made of. I need a break, an intermission.

Hotel rooms are a place between the worlds. Every night is a new vignette of human drama, but each day they start anew, devoid of individual personality, all evidence of the story removed, cleansed and purified. I long for the emptiness, the blank slate of the closet, the bedside table , the chest of drawers. The sanitary wrapper around the drinking glass awaits me, I'll savor the moment of breaking it. The clean bland whiteness of the towels, the sheets, the pillowcases, oh that feels so restful! At a hotel, I'm free to be passing thru, a tourist, a weary travelor. I can be quiet or I can strike up a conversation in the hotel bar, taking on another identity completely. Maybe I'll be a seminar leader on increasing sales performance, or a romance writer doing research for a story set during the gold rush. I long for this place between the worlds, an interlude in the action of my amazing and wondrous life. I can for a brief time be simply a visitor to this world. My bag is packed.

dream life

Strangely, this allowing myself to be depressed has opened up my dream life. My good friend Anne Hill is a dreammeister....she gives workshops in dream incubation and helps people explore their dreams. I work with people too on their dreams, but my own rarely seem to warrant much exploration. I've tended to have dreams about showing up to my favorite restaurant and my reservation being lost, or finding myself at an elegant gala wearing purple hot pants. Epic dreams are rare. Epics seem to be the stuff of my waking life.

I'm still immersed in paper work and the stress of house transition. Things have not been going well. I've learned lots by letting myself sink down into grey. There has been moments of respite, but right now, things are grim. And my dreams are haunting me, in a way that truly is new for me. Last night I had two dreams I can't shake.

The first: I'm traversing thru a huge construction that seems to be underground. It's a concentration camp that has been buried, and as I go thu it I keep thinking "this has got to be brought to light!" There's bones and torture devices and lots of bars and big locks. Then I realize that some rooms/sections are full of water, and I want to figure out how to open the doors, but not drown. It feels imperative to get the water moving. Suddenly I'm in a little boat on a big rush of water. I look up and go thu what looks like a trapdoor to an attic. I'm suddenly in a light filled house and there's a woman there who looks like she's out of a commercial (all shiny teeth and hair) and she has a baby. I'm pissed off and yell "don't you know what you are living on!" She is part of a group that renovates concentration camps and sells them as nice condos. I'm all raggedy, wet, and outraged.

the second: I'm crying and crying in the garden up at my land above Cazadero. The sun is shining and everything is beautiful but my heart seems broken. Suddenly D. is there (a heartbreaker herself) and she says "it's okay, I'm here, let me get you something to eat."I realize i'm famished. She offers me a big bowl of salad, but all the greens look really old, the cucumber slimy, the tomatoes moldy. There's fresh greens all around me, and tomato plants and cucumber vines heavy with fruit. I say, "let's make it fresh" and she argues with me about wasting food, that it's still good...and something about KPFA saying we should eat everything, no matter how rotten, it's good for the world. I lay down on the ground and taste the dirt. I want to sink into it and the taste of it in my mouth is vivid...even now.

So that's the dream life of last night. A far cry from hot pants. Jeez. I guess I now have some juicy stuff fraught with meaning to take to a dream workshop. The more grey in the waking life, the more vibrant the dreams.

what goes up

What goes up, must come down. Last weekend was a festival of the senses, a decadent dip into the most intoxicating currents of the life force. There is a kickback to running the Feri current, or at least there is for me. I returned to work on Tuesday and found myself traversing the rivers of loss and grief. Two clients lost parents this week. One had to make the decision to pull the plug/ cut the cord of life support for her father. Once removed, he died in a few hours. The other sat with her father as he lay dying. She sobbed as she told me that he spent his last words on telling her that he loved her. In the midst of this, 48 hours before papers were to be signed on Ilyse buying out Patti and Karl and becoming a co-owner of our three-flat building, we found out our loan had not been approved. It’s been a painful week.

Already we are in process of getting a new loan. The deal will eventually go thru. I’m familiar with the rivers of loss and grief; I’ll be a good guide for my clients. And meanwhile, I’m allowing myself to sink down into depression, something I usually set about scrabbling out of as quickly as possible. I'm decsending into grey, a grey which muffles the vibrancy of the living world. Some people call this the blues. Holly Golightly termed it “the mean reds”. I appreciate these monikers, they resonate with me on some level, but for me, this sinkhole is a grey one.

Time and time again, I’ve used every wit and wile to run from this terrain, to seek higher ground. Not this time. I’m going to stay put and let the sinking feeling pull on me and I’m going to give in. I’m going down, trusting somehow that I’ll come back up. Or maybe I’ll go so far down, like the hole to China I optimistically dug as a child, I’ll come out on the other side. How bad could it get? Well, there’s the rub! Having a father who committed suicide, I know just how bad it can get. It struck me hard, as my client sobbed, just how precious it is to hear a parent say they love you as they approach the gates of death. That surely wasn’t on my father’s lips as he threw himself headlong at those gates. Love was not the current he was swimming in. He was swirling down in the grey sinkhole. I can sit with clients who have the grey around them, patiently exploring methods of climbing out. But, my god, it scares me to go into this myself. In the past, when I’ve started to feel this way, I’ve become franticly busy, or forced myself to do art. The truth is, even writing this I’m staving off the sinking down. But somehow, as I type these words, I’m finding the courage to sign off and sink down, with no escape plans, especially the kind my father hatched. Weekends like the last one have made me strong enough to face weekends like this one. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.