Lying there
Lying
There
Listening to my breath
Or telling myself
I am listening to my breath
When I am really not listening
But trying to control
What is coming in
And going out
Listen
It’s okay
To just listen
To your breath
Try
Just listening
Breathing in
Breathing out
You know, I tell myself,
You will breathe anyway
Even if you are not listening
So get in touch with what your body is doing
Not what you want it to do
Not to breathe to your schedule
But simply let your body breathe
In response
To everything it knows
About the way you are
Just listen
What do you want?
I ask myself
What I want
Really
Is to breathe
Just breathe
At one
With myself

“Jane, from now on, I want you to call me Mutte.”

“Why,… Mutte?” I asked. My mother had decided to learn German and had enrolled in a local language school. She had not yet been to the first class, but had the book and was learning to say her first words in another language.

“Because that’s what German children call their mums,” she said. “It means ‘Mummy’ in German.” I had never called her “Mummy” in English and was amused she wanted to be called “Mummy” at all. I agreed to call her “Mutte.” In her rather overly-optimistic assessment of her wished-for capacities, she claimed she would speak German exclusively by the time she had finished the class and, if I wanted to talk to her when she was fluent, I would have to learn German, too.

I did not ask her why she wanted to learn German, but my sister was also taking German in high school at that time. My mother did not like to be left behind and was acutely aware of not knowing things her children were learning. She would not ask my sister to help her, but charted her own course.

Over the next few weeks, she practiced what she was learning with me and I learned some basic phrases from her. When I came home from school, she would greet me at the door.

“Guten tag, Jane.”

“Guten tag, Mutte.”

Gesturing towards a stool in the kitchen, she said, “Bitte nehmen Sie Platz.”

“Danke, Mutte,” I would say obediently as I sat down.

She would pretend to offer me a pack of cigarettes and ask, “Rauchen Sie?” I would reply, “Nein danke, ich rauche nicht,” even though, by then, I was smoking like a chimney.

Once she realized she could actually learn to speak German, she lost interest very quickly. I stopped calling her Mutte and she went back to being Mum again. She just needed to know she could do it if she wanted to. Since those few phrases comprise the extent of my German vocabulary, I know her passion did not last very long. And neither did mine. Like a zephyr of interest in something wafting by on the wind, it simply floated out the window never to be heard from again. Nie.

I live my life on two planes in my cerebral city.  Above ground, on the busy streets of consciousness, I go about my day-to-day life and I am engaged in what is going on around me. On this plane, I love living and what I feel feels like life. I bustle along the streets of consciousness, in the 10-second window of consciousness, and there is no other time. Living in the present, being present, is all there is. In this plane of living, there is no death. There is only now. I busy myself, dropping in to familiar places, saying hello to my friends, exercising, organizing, engaging, being. My feet are firmly planted  and I am sure of myself, conscious and alive.

My awareness of all that lies beneath my feet is variable. Sometimes it draws me down to a place where it is hard to think, hard even to breathe freely. I let myself be dragged down sometimes into states of stillness and cloying stuffiness where nothing happens. It does not feel specifically like death, but it is a kind of deadness. In this place, I become merged with my mother’s half-life.

So often, it was hard to know whether she was dead or alive. When she was moving and breathing heavily, or her body was convulsing in some throes of trying to stay alive, I knew she was still with us. It was not really living, though, but not really dead either. As she grew older and became less and less alive, she became more and more exhausting. By then, her mind was slowly succumbing to the years of diabetic comas, periods of unconsciousness she consciously created.

I still do not know how she collapsed into us so frequently without any sense of whether she would survive. She left her survival up to us and we were way too fragile and uncertain to do anything but go along with her deathly provocation. I know there is a way I do the same thing. I hate that part of me because that is what is dead inside me.

Years ago, people told me I breathed weirdly in my sleep and it still makes me shudder. When my mother slipped into states of unconsciousness, her breathing changed and became intermittent, labored, puffing and forced. The news that I breathed this way in my sleep was the worst news I ever received. The breathing itself is irrelevant, but being invaded like this is an overwhelmingly repellent idea. I am not my mother.

At the same time, I can go there and I do go there when certain feelings take hold. I slip into states where I do not care. In those states, I do not care what happens to me. I do not care if anyone knows. I do not care if I survive. Not really.

Putting these words on paper puts me back in touch with how intractably the deadness has resided beneath my streets of consciousness. There are manholes and underground staircases I pass and feel the breeze of seduction inviting me down into the dark, dead spaces.

My mother’s deadness was a secret and, in some ways, I am grateful for that. It forced me onto the streets of consciousness where, like a scrappy unwanted child, I had to learn to survive. When I was growing up, death was a secret.

Now, on the streets of consciousness, my home town, death is no longer a secret. It makes me toss my head back and laugh. Death has never been a secret. Death is the truth of life. Even my own deadness is not a secret. By writing this, I drag my deadness up the dark stairs, out of the holes, out of the muck of the musty rotten stale stuff that lines the underground.  I drag it into the light where it shrinks away. The light is too bright and deadness does not do well with oxygen.

My first memory of money, actual money, is when I am six years old and am standing at the counter of the local candy store, spending all of my pocket money on candies. My partner in crime is my next-door neighbor, Pete, who is the same age as me. We had made a secret pact some time before, since we were coincidentally given our pocket money on the same day each week, that we would ride our bikes down to the candy store and spend it all on candy.

I vaguely remember our pact but not how we agreed to the terms. But I remember vividly the candy store clerk looking over my head out the front window of the store and asking me, “Isn’t that your father out there?” I turn and look and, sure enough, there is my father sitting in the car parked right out the front of the store. I immediately blush and feel caught red-handed.

Pete and I walk out of the store trying to minimize our giant bags of candy and my father apprehends us before we can get on our bikes. He confiscates our spoils and tells us he will meet us at home. We ride our bikes solemnly back to our respective houses and, by then, my father has given my bag of candies to my mother who, over the next two weeks, doles them out minimally in my school lunch. I want to believe Pete’s stepmother does the same thing or, at the very least, that’s what I tell myself to keep things even between us.

This situation is, of course, much more complicated than it first appears. Although the money is mine, I am clearly not allowed to spend it however I wish. I certainly cannot spend it on candy, since candy causes diabetes and I should know that. Now I wonder if that is how my contempt for money started.

My mother thought money was dirty. She would often say emphatically, “Wash your hands” after I had handled money, either coins or notes. Sometimes she would follow it up by saying, “You never know what dirty man has been handling it.” She always said it was a dirty man of some nationality or profession for whom she felt contempt, but it was never a woman. For some reason, I associate that kind of money with the greengrocer, with his dirty apron and large knife chopping the stalks off cabbages and the outside lettuce leaves. He reaches into the grubby pocket on his apron and takes out a roll of filthy lucre, peeling off faded, limp dollar bills and digging into the pile of loose, tarnished coins rattling around at the bottom of the pocket to give my mother her change. I can see her recoiling as she gingerly takes the notes and coins between thumb and forefinger and I know she cannot wait to get home and wash her hands. I suppose that is how money becomes associated with excrement: through contempt.

At the other end of the scale, though, she pined for money. She would often sigh loudly and say, “Oh, if only your father was not so stupid with money.” She kept her hope alive by regularly buying lottery tickets and, although she never won more than a few dollars, would allow herself to disappear into her fantasies about how she imagined spending her fortune.  Her dreams would send her into a certain rapture when she envisioned freedom from the bonds of domestic servitude. She would no longer be bound to the ordinary and hateful demands of motherhood. She would flee from my father, sister and me and travel by herself to exotic places. She would get a faraway look in her eyes as she described how she would use a big chunk of the winnings to buy herself a beautiful new wardrobe of fabulous clothes and would open herself to the wonders of the world, unencumbered by such chores as unsavory interactions with the greengrocer and others like him who make the ordinary world go round.

I never understood money. I think I had a savings account but did not understand the concept of it and neither of my parents spent any time helping my sister and me learn to have a good relationship with money. Money was already confusing and too hard and it was not until I was 21 that I learned how to balance my checkbook. Prior to that, I could not grasp the concept of a check register. The actual balance seemed to ephemeral, too hard to pin down. What was in there today may not reflect the actual balance and the whole idea seemed impossible. Now, it seems silly and obvious, but then it made no sense.

In spite of my mother’s pining for great wealth, we seemed to have enough. As I grew older, I became more aware of my father’s tendency to keep his knowledge of our money to himself. He made the money since my mother never worked and I think he managed it without consulting much with his wife and certainly never with my sister and me. How things happened was mysterious and we never talked about it. Even at the level of the currency between us, nothing flowed and we were not linked as a family or even as individuals.

Another windy day

Whips up the dead leaves of my old life

They swirl and flutter

As if some trick of time

Makes me believe

Just for a second

They are alive again

But you see me

You know things are not the same

And you brush away the dust

The wind throws in your face

To blind and trick you, too

I know you love me

I trust you

Time holds us both to the truth

The wind tries to blow away

I know you know

The wind is ephemeral

It is the wind of change

My skin reacts to the gentle in and out

Of the earth’s breathing

A light summer breeze

Drifting through the doors

From the trees outside

Rustling the leaves

Tickling the day’s minutes

Time sighs

While a breath of fresh air

Wafts through and over my mind

Life is good right now

I was coming home on the ferry yesterday and stood on the upper deck watching the clouds. I was trying to understand how they were lit by the late afternoon sun since the sky was scattered with big, puffy white cumulus clouds against a background of streaky and shiny stratus clouds. I remember my father telling me about the different types of clouds when he was a pilot and I was six and I feel glad I still know them all, not as a matter of forcing my memory, but because I can look up at the sky and just know them.

So today, I am looking up and trying to understand the direction of light and how, even though clouds are just water vapor, they vary so much in light and intensity. I watch them and wish I could paint them: the subtle variations in shade, texture and light and soft, barely detectable hints of grey, blue, yellow and red.

That night I went to bed and dreamt about ice, of all things. I dreamt I was skating on ice, maybe even thin ice, and I skated over to a small hole in the surface. Someone who was with me asked me to look into the hole and tell him what I could see. I bent down and looked inside the hole. What I could see opened out into an underground landscape of subtle variations of shades of grey. I tried to talk about what I saw but could not put it into words. I felt in awe of the vastness and, at the same time, ashamed I could not talk about it. I was also aware of the subtle changes in color and detail, in much the same way as I had been looking at the clouds.

I felt I was trying to see into my unconscious mind but all I could see was its frozen surface and texture but not its function. I wished I could paint it, too, or least find a way to express it visually. But what would I be painting but shades of grey: the clouds and the ice, the vapor formed by the earth’s breathing or ice crystals frozen over an old, old landscape?

I wonder what is trapped and preserved through time under the surface of the icy landscape, although I actually do know, at least in principle: ancient tundra, geologic aeons stretching back through time and forgotten in a silent, frozen world. I have not forgotten the events, but I have forgotten the feelings, at least the warm ones and now they are frozen at some time back then, back when I felt them and then had to make them disappear. Feelings are so ephemeral. I think I felt something warm and then, pfft, it disappeared almost at the instant I felt it, snap frozen and quickly lost among all the centuries of frozen feelings preceding it.

These thoughts have another effect. I feel close to the ineffable essence of life on earth. My spirit feels diffuse like vapor and my thoughts are clouds, billowing and drifting, sometimes heavy with moisture and sometimes light and barely there, wafting by on the wind.