Letting Peace In

Drizzly day and it's almost as if it's forgotten how to really rain here. We get this water from the sky in slow, patient amounts and it's soothing, it's lovely really but I miss a good storm coming in. Not a bad storm, a good one. There is a difference. But this is fine, this constant pat-patting of the earth by the water, like Mama is patting the baby's butt, sweetly, softly; she is easing the infant spring into life. It is a gentle birth. A water birth. It is somehow perfect.

That's my buckeye up there, fixing to open up a red blossom. I thought it had died back a few years ago when we had a tropical storm that sent branches crashing down everywhere, including one on that spindling thing and it was broken, but it was not killed. It's a native plant and that always means a strength and a hardiness which generally comes through. I am not making a metaphor. I am speaking a gardening truth.

Last night was going so well. We had such a fine audience. One lady actually kept dialoguing with the actors. She was talking to us! And it was awesome. It cracked us all up. We were having fun! We get dressed for this event in the offices of a lovely woman who has an acupuncture and wellness business in the downstairs part of the Opera House and she needled me before the performance to calm me down because I was a little nervous. It helped, three needles, one in my forehead, one in my wrist, one on my foot. Sitting still for five minutes with the needles in me didn't hurt anything either.
Oh yes. It was fun.
And then I made the stupid mistake of checking my e-mail before the second act.
Bad mistake.
My brother had sent me one of his hurtful e-mails, short, nasty, to the bone hurtful. One of those where-did-this-come-from things? I immediately teared up and Jon hugged me and we went on but it was all altered for me. Like sand had been thrown in my gears and I lagged and I skipped and I lost my way and thank god my castmates had my back and it was okay, it was and when the kiss came at the end, the dialoguing woman shouted, "Thank-you!" which cracked me up again but when we went offstage, I cried again.

I felt like I'd let everyone down. I felt like a stupid shit.

I still feel that way because why do I let these things bother me? The things he accused me of being are not true. Or no more true than they would be for anyone. I think that most of all, I know that deep inside, he is hurting and has been hurting for a long, long time. That's the bottom line and just as I wrote yesterday, our sorrows connect us and in this case, the sorrows are so deep in our shared-blood hearts that I can't help but cry, not just for the hurt but mostly for his pain from which the hurtfulness springs.

But. Still.

I came home and ate some supper and washed dishes and went to bed and read for a good long while. I'm reading a completely mindless and sweet book which is exactly what I need right now.

And I have now this whole day, complete and open before me. No one needs me until tonight when we perform again and the rain has, for the moment, ceased, and I think I'll go out with clippers and gloves and trim up some of winter's debris, get dirty and muddy and take a shower and hopefully a nap before I have to be in Monticello. I have the chicken waterer soaking with bleach and dish soap and Elvis has been mounting the hens, fancy-dancing around them, then taking his pleasure with them. Chicken sex is not especially pretty but it is honest. And brief, which I am sure pleases the hens. They are walking around the garden right now, trying to figure out how to get in. They spent half a day in there last week and pulled up every one of my baby brussels sprouts. Oh well. I don't like brussels sprouts that much anyway. And what's with that "s" at the end of "brussel"? Do we really need all those esses?

No. Yes. I don't know.

Do we need pain and do we need sorrow and do we need rain and do we need storms that lash and crash the branches to the ground and do we need the sweet peace that follows, those moments after the storm when the earth seems to pause and take stock of the damage? To survey itself for injury and for change?

Yes. We do. Of course we do. It is all a part of the whole messy way of it. And I feel so grateful right now for that- for the way the peace does come, especially, that I feel I could light candles all over this house, this temple of my life. The Virgin candles, the soy candles, the rose, the pine, the lavender. Go from room to room and light them all, let their tiny flames flicker and let their scents fill the air inside and maybe light some incense too, just fill it all up with pleasing musk. And then go outside where the smell of dirt and wet wood fill me and then come back in to that sweet musk and light and be at peace and let it all go and wash the dirt from my hands and wait for the rain to come again, knowing it will, and that it is all part of the messy, unseeable, unpredictable pattern of life as we know it here on this earth in this time in this place where I live, where I am so blessed, as I so often say, to live.