Wild Women Wisdom: De dos mundos. Which IS Life.

Erika and I met in grade school.  She was in band and I wasn't because of some bad shit going down at my home, that's all I remember about our real young connections.   Red and green plaid jumpers thick as cardboard, white button-downs peter-pan collars and cable-lined knee high socks that were soft kellygreen and that I used to collect the knits off of to make my own little version of fuzzball friends, because in the eighties they had these pom-pom stickerhead things on big feet that my Catholic School gave away once a year as some incentive for some scholastic long forgotten thing, and I thought they were the cutest little creatures ever.  By middleschool it was the words--stuffing sheets of frazzled loose leaf thin blue lines in to one another's hands under the desk in Ms. Fouse's class.  Maybe this only happened once and I remember it because of the adrenaline scar--doing something we weren't supposed to be doing in the back of class.  The trick light that put on in my eye.  Erika's large curly cursive and the characters with all the traditional old-fashioned names.  My loosely-costumed accounts of people we both went to school with, making stories out of the lives of people we knew.

I was a bitch as a teenager, suppose I still am or can be.  Erika and I were teens together too but I wanted nothing to do with her because of her friends.  I was doing drugs by then had pink hair and black cat eyes, purple combat boots.  I drove junk yard cards I'd buy from my granddad's brother for a hundred bucks and thought I knew more about real life than the pretty preppy girls that she was one of.  My dad lived in California and we didn't speak.  I was tuff.  At least to me.  

Every January I think about these things, I think it is because my parents sat Sean and I down in January and told us they were splitting up.  Dad'd been living in Manahtten by then for three months so really it was just about them having to say the words.   That was 1989.  It sucked.  In January the past several years my pop and I spend his birthday weekend together at the beach, except that for now I live at the beach and it is January already and mom is in Mexico for the month and so he and I have been together just us when he comes down every weekend.  We are watching the series Weeds together, the dvd goes in after the Ravens game ends and then we just scream and laugh and look at each other with shocked expressions slack-jawed speechless but in giddy commiseration the dark humor and insinuations in our eyes.  That's dad, who used to cover for me when I was a teen and he'd come home from Cali for the holidays or for the McMullen gatherings.  He came home this Saturday empty-handed after looking for a replacement pan of mom's that I burned up accidentally.  I didn't ask him to but he did it and we didn't need to discuss that it he was trying to find a new one so that mom would never know.  We cuss and laugh and shake our heads over what we see on the TV.   He's taking my suggestions about changing his diet.  As of last night he'd lost 12 pounds.  We bitch about not being able to eat steak and the fluffy breads and creams together and the sugars we love so much.  When he's not looking I sneak candy bars and fries, tacos with creamy melted cheese.  We are so alike.

There is a pyschic term that I first read in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women Who Run With the Wolves.  It is de dos mundos, or of two worlds.  And to me this term is about the angelic, the demonic acts of not only the holy creatives, but further and even more importantly of those who embark on the authentic path.  Which I guess really is the most creative thing one can do.  The older I get the more I realize it is this, this Real Work that matters most--all else, all acts of art and creation thus evolve out of the struggle for ourselves, evolve out of the substance of who we are and those strides we take towards that person.  To be of both worlds is to take the devilish plunge:  to walk through the day by day topside world of work, family, friends and to likewise be willing to, at the same time, go inside our burrows, the tired winter pockets of gnarly filth or snuggly warmth and pull back the boulders we put there and investigate the little chemical nightmares or dreams that wait with knowledge for us behind all of that.  The knowledge of our roots, of our healing, of our true-selves that inside of each and every one of us look like the devil sitting there.  Those sad or scary or numb or deadened spaces are full with vitality and angelic lifeforce if we persist persist persist to shed light on them and winkingly clean them out.  Erika is my writing partner now, my solace, my only shining angel lately and I told her last week on the phone--ever since Joe died the week of Thanksgiving I haven't been able to write.  I told her the stories of what was emotionally consuming me with each tired step I took as the holidays washed us over.  Erika too had hers.  We agreed, it is time now only for stillness and reflection, it is this de dos mundos, this Real Work that right now in the darkest part of our season truly counts. 

But it is hard to be here at the beach supposed to be writing, and not.    And it is funny to me, and maybe at the end of the day why I write is because life is just so damn miraculously-fucked-up-AND-amazing that I feel I need to mark my own holy amen proof of appreciation of it all--but here I am, January again kicking it with my dad at the beach in his home, laughing and living with him in the topside world.  And inside in the inner terrain circling back over the old old tracks with all the faces of him and me then, too, all the little demon-angels and angel-demons that live inside.  And this precious funny fusion.  Which is life...