The enormity of quiet gratitude

The keys for my studio in Laguna were in my hand like a talisman, some octagonal  proof of all I'd been running towards, all I left behind.  When did it change from that to this, to heading towards from leaving behind...Every throttle and instinct that propelled me dangling on a quarter-sized metal ring.  Two little keys pushed me out of Anngar Farm, out from my six year love affair with the boy with the honey eyes, pushed Josh out the door that sickening Sunday at Choptank, pushed me and Brooks to leave the Talbot County Employment Center because we knew, we insisted, convinced the other even when we didn't believe it ourselves that it had to be the Muse holding tight to those two keys.  Pushed me around Oregon in Gretchen's beater pick-up, pushed then paused, sighed deep in me, nestled me under conifers big as cities, tucked me in the mists of the Cascades, bathed me naked with Beth as I vowed, as we vowed yet again start again.  Held me tight as it cooked me clean the year and a half I moved back to Ocean Pines.  I stopped with Jayden at Rudy's Shake Shop where it looks out over the Pacific just south of Crystal Cove those keys still in my hand like a dreamscape whose designer I'd finally, finally finally! just met. Arrival!  All I could think.   That's when I got the message I was accepted to gradschool. I have done it, I have finally, finally arrived! I just kept thinking you did it Kel, you finally got here.  You have finally made those dreams come true.  It was the oddest feeling, so plain but also still.  It was right about then, that very day, when aunt Mary went in the hospital.

It switched then, my voice in my head.  Would only say this too, this too, this too.  Which is from Dani Shapiro.  I called my mom and sobbed then my dad and uncle Tim and did the same.  Then I talked to Aunt Mary, I wanted to be strong for her, I really did.  I wasn't.  It was bad I couldn't breathe.  My greatest fear about being so far from home, come true.  What happened from then to the end isn't so much private as it is a blur.  By Thursday I had a ticket home by Friday I was on the plane.  I never got to see her though, in our last conversation I was selfish and told her this sucks, exactly what I said was this effing sucks but I used the real word.  She was honest with me and direct about her pain and every little thing going on, which she knew I needed to hear because for so long she just lifted up from love and made me laugh on the phone or wanted to know about my life.  She knew I needed to hear where she was at though, to be able to have peace with her letting go.  At home it was my amazing cousins her kids who are stronger than I will ever be.  Erin my amazing sis.  Ed and Tim.  They are heroes and inspirations and I am honored they are my blood,  a testament, fully, to their mom. The pit bull in me wants to pummel something, some big shadow portion of life, for doing this to them.  I want to take them up like the puppies they are to my heart, I want to shield and shelter and take this all from them.  I am selfish and had to tell myself if they can do this so can you.  We all of us fell in line behind my uncle this amazing gentle man, we followed my dad,  they moved us gracefully through it all, we let the strength of  family lead us on.  What we've always done.  The Irish twins, eleven months between dad and uncle Tim they're calling themselves the Odd Couple since Mary's passed and it's only them in the house now, the Uncle Dad's.  Uncle dad!    All of my cousins and aunts and uncles every single one and every person ever touched by the enormity of love that comes from the combined McMullen heart.  It was homage to Aunt Mary's quiet steadiness, there and painting our edges with softness all those years, we could still feel her glow in the air.  The whole family together, all but Bernd who was unable to come from Germany.  It was the only family event since the 80's where everyone was there.  I am just so, so proud to see so clearly who I am, who I come from.  It's a hard way to come by it, but here, now, keys to Laguna and future in hand: it helps me so honestly and gratefully see where I will aim to go.

My aunt Mary was sick for three years and suffered silently until the very end.  She was an angel, the kind of person whose each day is a  triumph because she added to it the best of who she was.   She made manifest, daily, parts of the infinity of spirit within.  Irreverent but with the loving patience of a natural teacher's heart. So few rise up to that, few even try.  She did it her whole life, but especially at the end.  She raised me and my brother with her peace and easiness all those summers in Ocean Pines and those quiet nights at Shady Hill Lane.  The unconditionality of her and Uncle Tim.  She raised three awe-inspiring kids.  The safety.  They, she inspired in me absolutely some of the finest parts of who I, if I choose to step up to it, can be.  I can not take a step since she passed without seeing the footfalls left I feel now so compelled to trippingly try and fill.  When I got back here, used those keys to let myself in at midnight on Sunday, the boxes and bags packed but half-opened all around, I could do nothing but sit and soak in the shock.  Brooks said she was a Matriarch of the tribe and he told me you are, too, and when he said that it finally felt like someone got it the enormity of responsibility, the enormity of quiet gratitude at hand.  The loss.  I finally let out the twists of pain and shatter all stuck inside.

The days are passing now, will.  Life goes on.  Yesterday driving down Irvine on my way to the beach between my classes, I looked up and realized oh my gosh this feels like home to me.  Like in that merciless, taken for granted way.  This is my home, now.  I haven't said that about a place as an adult, not once, except for in Ocean Pines.  But that's what happens I guess when you walk through the open door.

When the women get together...

We laugh until we are crying. And often the laughter is from the grotesque, or bizarre, the banal, made by us delirious, and profane. We laugh until we are gasping for air and yelling at one another so hard because ultimately someone has started gagging from laughing so hard, and this will have a chain effect on us all, and then we will be laughing and gagging each of us, and tearstained and sweaty, and praying in the thinness of breath left to us that we dont get kicked out....

These are the women, my women, the women from whom I came. My grandma, her daughter Karen my mom, Karen's two sister Coni and Lori. Lori's daughter Chelsea, my gorgeous cousin.

In our family, it is the women. The men are periphery, we take care of them. We feed them, we house them, and at times it is clear the approach is that we simply put up with them. I never understood this tolerated approach, but I didn't have words or sight for it, either, and took it for granted. But this year I spent the time, and listened, to get to know why, how this started, where it came from, who we are and where we came from. Where I am headed.

In my family it is the women, and we sustain. We raise children and table the home full of food. The men come and go. When they are present they take center, become large enough to not see us chaining things together, keeping it all moving. Rising and falling in our natural undercurrent. We keep things warm. And while we break the air always with our laughter, we also dont raise our voices.

I think back to my quiet writing room in the slanted attic at Mt.Royal. The time in the fall, just prior to creating my little litmag LaCantalma, that I came out of mediation to the St. Francis feel and rosewood and frankincense smell of my grandmother, dad's mom, the smell and buoyant feel of silence and peace and rosaries that she took on when she would come to me after her death. The fall, time of ancestors and memory. And I stayed quiet and from within said, what would you want from me, Grammy? And she said sure as a whisper on my own breath Your job, Child, is to be heard...

In Gram's family it is the men, five of them, my dad and his brothers. Two sisters, one in Germany far away as she could get, and the other the youngest, the baby, married to her sweetheart from 16, he the man the tribe took very early in. My uncles used to coach him in school, and teach him history, and phys ed.

I've always known the McMullens, the overarching Patriarchy, the men.

But this year, the blessed, the broken, the laughing til were sick, the distinct: the women. The women are who, is Who and How I've learned.

The women that shape the other half of who I am.

Later, after that Fall when Grammy came and reitiated my Call, I was coming over the Mexico border in to California when my mom called to say Grandma's sister Mary died. I had befriended this Irish dude Cahall and he wanted to see the Hopi Indian territory and so he was riding along and it worked out because Aunt Mary was from just south of Sedona, and so we drove to Arizona. And Grandma, as I told her of my travels and the spirituality guiding and gracing me--Crow and the Medicine come to me in Colorado, Durango and Mesa Verde--she grabbed me to her chest to say goodnight and held me, she was chesty and her grasp, tight. She whispered in my ear KellyAnn you better write this all down.

The women the women the women from who I Am. That plain straight dicey humor I get from them. That unanticipated eyeroll of sharp wit. The seeing it all, and letting it pass.

I'm going to Gram, Grandma. I'm staking out and finding my self now. I've been watching and listening, laughing and praying for a long, long time. I've been voiceless and crying, too.

But I found Her, the voice, my voice. And the deep Voice, s/he the great I Am.

I found Her. And I'm writing it all down.

50 Instructions: Imagination

1.Trust in deep sense, no matter what. Friends will doubt you, family will pigeonhole you. Trust harder.
2.Do not be afraid to cry. Cry a lot. Forget how not to cry. Wonder if anyone ever died of crying. Think you might die.
3.Wonder what you were trusting in in the first place.
4.Hate what you were trusting in in the first place.
5.Get furiously assheaded about trust. Realize, slowly at first, that all mistrust is self-mistrust. All hate is self-hate, all anger is self-anger.
6.Realize one day that instead of crying you are actually giggling. A little bit at a time. At your self.
7.Start to remember trust.
8.Forget a lot.
9.See the network of serendipity that is helping you remember. You are It, It is You.
10.Fall in to fear again. Think you have no energy left.
11.Be amazed by your strength.
12.Celebrate you. And your strength.
13.Realize the friends that are still with you. Celebrate them.
14.Start drawing.
15.Rediscover music and how it charges you from Within.
16.Start to note that the Coincidences really are endless. Celebrate coincidences as they are Imagination made real and revel in the reminder: Imagination is your religion.
17.Fall in love again with the earth. Recommune with the sun, sing long songs at night to the moon.
18.Start to eat your lawn. It is full of Imagination.
19.Start to trust what before seemed like absurdity. Absurdity is a code word for Imagination.
20.Slow your flow at work because it causes you to be blind by your own overdose of self-importance. Self-importance gets in the way of your Imagination.
21.Realize you are laughing a lot. For no reason at all. Laugh at your self. A lot. Laugh with yourself. Love laughter because you think it is the singsongy foreplay of Imagination.
22.Tell your DS (deeper self) you think you know what you love...
23.Notch an eyebrow when It responds are you ready to grow?
24.Find yourself awake for the third night in a row at 4am and finally get in to the Real Work your mentor’s been using to quietly challenge you.
25.Realize in wonder some several days in to the Real Work that all your ideas, all your several years of life-fretting, all your planning, all your wheel spinning has slowed to a sweet gentle hum. All these worries and silent demands and false necessities have been proxy to your Imagination. You can almost taste the richness of the most precious word: Halt. You are empty inside. Deliciously empty.
26.So this is what Gretchen’s words meant The Willingness to Insist Upon Nothing.
27.Celebrate! This is just where you’ve always wanted to be.
28.You didn’t even know this when you set out to head for here.
29.Continue this Real Work with nothing short of profound awe and revelry. Everyday it is something New!
30.Fall in love not only with this Big Empty but simultaneously with Choptank, or place.
31.Watch outside-self start to fall away.
32.Realize you have nothing to prove.
33.Find the weather to be resolute in glory.
34.Delight as you see some of the deepest parts of who you are become more and more commonplace in your day to day world.
35.Allow for others the room to honor them selves.
36.Be ridiculously, lavishly in love with Choptank.
37.Realize the earth loves to hold you in the most tenderest spoon.
38.Realize swimming in the Ocean must be just like being inside the moon.
39.Sit quiet at night outside under the stars.
40.Breathe with the land.
41.Need nothing more than this.
42.Trust in the Process.
43.The process is Grace. Grace is Within.
44.Grace is unestimatable, limitless.
45.Recognize the grandness of this.
46.Laugh at your self some more because you are so very grand that the only word for this is Small. Realize too that grandness is very different from self-important.
47.Continue to forget this a lot, but smile because memory helps you laugh more!
48.Keep doing the Real Work. Take lots of time out to Play!
49.Imagination is just a word grown-ups replaced with Grace. Grace is the only Reality there is.
50.Live this Reality, gently, openly, sparklingly, day by day. Remember to laugh when you forget.