Opening the Door

Last fruit and flower gathering before going.

Today we leave the California farm. Next up: Nearly two months in the Pacific Northwest.

A friend of mine asked if I ever feel sad about leaving a place I have fallen in love with.

It can be bittersweet. I think about leaving our routine of berry picking and animal feeding and  pie baking. I think about saying goodbye to the beauty of the redwood trees and local friends and comfy couch where I read each morning.

And I realize in two short weeks this farm morphed from foreign to familiar. From unknown to home.

That's been the case with most every place we've stayed in the past year.

So when it comes time to go, I acknowledge the impulse to cling. Then I ease myself into letting go, softly, through appreciation of everything we experienced. Then I turn my attention to curiosity and excitement about what lies ahead.

What's ahead?

Always a new adventure. Always new doors opening. Because change is the nature of life.

If I'd known this when my marriage of fifteen years ended, I could have saved myself a lot of grief. Can you imagine letting go of a person you love? Accepting that the person wants to move on? Accepting that we own no person, no place, no object? Accepting change--meaning the nature of life?

Can you imagine fear morphing into excitement?

Yet the clinging and rending and devastation taught me so much. Nothing is wasted.

This nomadic life teaches me more and more every day about letting go. About what serves me better: viewing something as an ending, or a beginning. Viewing an obstacle as a hardship or an adventure.

One of my greatest teachers is this regard was my mentor and other-mother, Gabriele. She viewed her dying experience as an adventure. Her heart was not filled with fear. It was filled with curiosity. Even joy.

I've always been a creature who liked change. But that was on my own terms. Now, I'm more radically embracing "letting go" and "letting be." Life feels more rich that way.

As Mark Nepo says, you have to put down what you carry to open the door.

What I Learned This Epic Year

Swimmable water in Cerritos Beach, Baja California Sur

Breathe in the precious moments and love fiercely.

This has become my mantra during an epic year--a year in which I stared down life and death.

It was a year that reminded me how way leads onto way. How everything is a catalyst. How what we focus on blossoms. How it's not about what happens--but what we think about (and do with) what happens.

Funny how I thought retiring after spending my whole life in schools would be 2013's "big event." But then my mentor, friend and "other mother" died. I was blessed to witness her profoundly graceful transition.

And then months later--when I myself was perched on the edge of dying during my seizure--she visited me. She told me that the veil between this world and the next is thinner than we think. She said if we look closely, we can penetrate the mystery's deepest beauty. She said never to be afraid of death. There's nothing to fear. Even from the next realm, she continued to teach me.

Even though I've been witness to the death of many beloveds--including my parents--the thought of my own death seemed theoretical. But 2013 brought me this gift: a deep, bodily knowledge that I'm transitory in this form. That everything changes. That I will die.

So what to do with this gift? Breathe in the precious moments and love fiercely! I was already on this path in August when my brain tumor was discovered. Months before, Dave and I had packed up everything we owned and traveled to Australia, Southern California, Boston, Cape Cod.

And then the experience of brain surgery and healing--enveloped in vast love and support from family and friends--intensified my desire to live my most authentic life. I launched Operation: Seize the Day!

Living your truth is not for wimps. It involves taking risks: emotionally, physically, financially. It involves being comfortable with spontaneity, with unknowing.

It requires loosing the moorings. When I let go of my job, my house, my neighborhood, my town--indeed, my identity as a Santa Cruzian writing professor--I plunged into a free-float.

I decided to embrace the fertile void.

I decided to reside in a rich space of unknowing.

In this space, I watched my monkey mind. It scrambled around like a kid desperate for a parent's attention: Hey! What are you doing? You're no longer a teacher, you're not a parent, you're not anything! What are you contributing? Aren't you being aimless and irresponsible?

When that happened, I'd gently turn toward my larger self, the sky mind, the god-voice in me who is always deeply present when I open my heart. It always says:  No need to worry, no need to fear. You're valuable, just like everyone else, because you exist. And the more you're YOU, living your truth, the more you inspire. Don't set out to have an effect--just be it. Trust that the fertile void will reveal your answers.

Because we no longer had a house, I was curious what my experience with "home" would be. My deepest realization so far: my home for this lifetime is my body. If I want to be truly alive, I must unconditionally love this marvelous, self-healing spacesuit.

Especially after having my skull cracked open and resealed with glue and staples, I can feel myself reaching new levels of bodily appreciation. While I don't have this love-thy-body-thing totally in the bag, I find it easier and easier to release criticism of my body. To relax into myself and feel life from the inside out. As a result, I'm experiencing new levels of sensory bliss (as well as relief from my occasional claustrophobia).

And wow was that infinite intelligence right-on when it said to trust that answers will appear. In late August, a thought popped into my head:

I want to live within walking distance of swimmable water.

That thought wasn't a conscious creation of my construction. It was a fully formed object like a stone, a heartbeat, a breath.

I have always loved water. I'm a spiritual mermaid, a former synchronized swimmer, a snorkeler, a lover of boats and kayaks and plunging into seas and lakes.

When I pondered my "swimmable water" revelation, I found myself wrangling with it: Did this mean when we decide to settle down again that I'd want a swimming pool? Did I need to join a gym with a pool? Was it a call to buy a place in our beloved Hawaii? But we'd have to win the lottery to afford a Hawaii pad within walking distance of the beach!

I decided to let it go. To trust. To allow the answer to appear as easily as the desire did.

All I have to say is this: releasing to the universe is magic!

Organically, the perfect opportunity arose: to buy an outrageously affordable casita in El Pescadero Mexico (near Todos Santos in Baja California Sur). Yes, it's walking distance to a lovely, swimmable beach. And it's in a small resort that has a swimming pool and a jacuzzi. Water, water everywhere!

The icing on the cake is that some close friends have bought the place next to ours. Built-in community.

We don't know if this will be our temporary or permanent residence. We don't have the details nailed down. We are trusting our guts. We want to ride the wave of the unfolding.

As 2013 comes to a close, we are back in California after a trip to Hong Kong, India and Sri Lanka. I'm looking forward to processing that transformative adventure while I focus on writing in the new year.

It looks like we will be headed to Mexico in May. Before that--for the first four months of 2014--we will live in Tahoe. We are thrilled we can host family and friends there who have opened their homes and lives to us.

In a cozy house sheltered from the Sierra cold, I intend to write the first draft of my memoir about transformation. During that time, this blog will be on hiatus, and I will be less of a presence on Facebook.

I will also improve my skiing and yoga, practice my Spanish, work online with my writing clients, judge a book contest, and allow whatever else rolls my way to perfectly unfold.

Happy New Year to all of you. May you breathe in your precious moments and love fiercely.

Guardian Angel

My guardian angel.

Since so many of you wonderful people are asking:  My surgery is Thursday August 8 at 7:30 a.m. at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. All loving thoughts of healing, ease, and flow accepted!

I'm clearer than ever that it's not only the living who are looking out for me. As I mentioned before, when I awoke to a seizure last week, I'd been dreaming that my recently departed friend and mentor, Gabriele Rico, had been talking to me. She was telling me that the veil between life and death is thinner than we think. This was a comforting conversation. She was saying there's nothing to be afraid of. She was saying that moving from one state to the next is like lifting a gauze curtain. She was saying if we relax and allow it, we can experience more of the mystery than we might imagine.

These reassuring, beautiful sentiments resonated with me even as my body was seizing, even as part of me was thinking I was certainly dying.

A hummingbird, one of Gabriele's favorite creatures, at her bird feeder.

Fast-forward a week. Dave and I are not in Hawaii as planned, but in California for my medical treatment. Because of this change in schedule, we are able to attend the gathering to scatter Gabriele's ashes.

Gabriele's family and friends are assembled in her magnificent house in the Cupertino hills, a place imbued with her loving energy and creative spirit. I'm talking to one of her daughters about my brain tumor, when a women standing right next to us says, "Did you say you have a meningioma? I had one of those!"

With Eddi Lynn, wearing scarves made by Gabriele.

Turns out her name is Eddi Lynn.  She's also a longtime friend of Gabriele's and a writer. Her tumor was diagnosed when she was 50, just like me. She had the tumor removed five years ago and quickly was able to get back to her normal life.

Watching Gabriele's ashes being buried
from the deck overlooking her beloved canyon.

So there I am, reeling at this synchronicity, when Gabriele's husband, Rich, pulls me aside.  He asks me if, as part of the evening's ceremony, I'd read a poem. I say I'd be honored, and here's what he hands me:

Let Evening Come (by Jane Kenyon)

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

This poem is like another version of Gabriele's message in the dream. When the night comes, the stars appear. Allow the rhythms of life to unfold. Do not be afraid.

She told me this in my dream, right before the seizure. She told it to me in her home, on the day of the scattering of her ashes, through her longtime friend. She told me through a poem. If those aren't the actions of a guardian angel, I don't know what are.

Affecting Eternity: Thoughts Upon Leaving Teaching

Teachers affect eternity.  They never know where their influence ends.  - Henry Adams

*

When I was student teaching high school in the mid 1980s, a student asked me to the prom.   That's how young I was.  (I told him he had to wrap his mind around the fact that I was his teacher.)

*

When I was student teaching in a middle school, I was so baffled about how to fill up a 50-minute class session that I read aloud all of Call of the Wild to the students.  That took at least a week.  (Who knew one day my sister would marry Jack London's great-grandson?)

*

When I was teaching in Japan and my six little charges couldn't sit still another minute, I'd do one of two things:  1) Turn on Madonna's "Holiday" and dance with the kiddies around the room, sing-shouting the lyrics together, or 2) Take out a long rope, tell each kid to hold onto one of the knots interspersed down the length of the rope, and then take them on the three-block walk to a convenience store where each could pick out one snack item, as long as they asked for it in English.

*

"I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger.  I just felt like a freak.  ... I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world." - Lady Gaga

In one of my frosh comp classes, students were writing about important events in their lives.  One guy wrote about going to a Lada Gaga "Monster's Ball" concert wearing exactly what he wanted to:  a sparkly blue dress.  He was scared at first, but then dancing to her music made him feel more and more brave until he felt, bursting with happiness, that he was one of her "little monsters."

*

In my Queer Arts course, one girl in the class talked about how she came out as a lesbian as a sophomore in high school, and then was elected homecoming queen her senior year.  We loved looking at her yearbook pictures of homecoming:  the homecoming queen, escorted by her girlfriend.

*

Last August, on the first day of the semester, I checked my phone during class break.  My sister had called to tell me my mom had passed away.  I knew it was coming.  Mom had Alzheimer's and hadn't spoken in over a year.  Two days prior, I'd spent the day with her.  Lying next to her on her bed, I massaged her, I played Hawaiian music (her favorite), and I talked to her about all my good memories of my childhood.  I also told her the new semester was starting.  A retired school nurse and writer, she liked that we had in common educating and writing.  Perhaps that's why, after the break, I finished teaching my class.  I was kind of numb but I couldn't think of what else to do.  I didn't have my car with me (I'd taken the bus to work), and Mom was in good hands with my sisters 45 minutes away.  I told my T.A.--a graduate student--what had happened, just in case I needed to step out.  I made it through the rest of class.  Afterward, my T.A. said, "I'm so sorry about your Mom, Kate."  I looked at his young face and thought about how sweet he was, and how being in your twenties is a different animal than being in your 40's.  Then he said, "I understand what you're going through.  I lost my mom when I was ten."  As we walked across campus, he told me the story of her illness, of his taking care of her.  What a gift he gave me that day--a reminder that we all have losses in our lives, and that some of us have our mothers longer than others. 

*

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." - A. Einstein

My mentor Gabriele Rico--the woman who sparked a flame in me for teaching, for writing, for poetry--died last week.  Everything I do is "stitched with her color."  My office is in the building where hers used to be.  I often feel her presence in that building, and in the classrooms where I teach.  Especially when I'm having my students do clustering or re-creation to awaken their inner geniuses. Gabriele believed everyone had powerful potential.  Her life was devoted to inspiring people to let their unique creativity shine. 

*

I'm retiring from teaching this year.  It feels like such a fitting time.  Recently I came across this "Love Letters" website and thought about how I would use it in a writing class.  This is how my mind has worked for years:  everything I encounter gets sifted through the how might students respond to this filter.  I sent an email to a group of my teacher friends telling them my ideas and giving them the link, and several wrote back enthusiastic about this new teaching idea.  One wrote:  "Oh Kate, you'll never stop teaching, a very good thing."

*

During my first year of teaching high school, I saw a former English professor of mine who had been so enthusiastic and knowledgeable about Hemingway and Fitzgerald that I couldn't help but fall in love with them.  In fact, I had just taught "Hills Like White Elephants" and felt like I knew how to hook students into the story because of his teaching.  I had an impulse to run up and say something, but I wavered.  And then I thought, what the hell and did it.  I could tell it took him a minute to remember me.  And then I told him he'd had a big influence on me, which had enriched my teaching.  To my surprise, his eyes misted.  Then he said:  "Well, this is interesting timing.  I was just going to sign my retirement papers.  And before you stopped me what was going through my mind was this:  I wonder if what I've done all these years has really mattered."

*

Here's an email I received last week from a former student:  I hope you remember me. ... I haven't seen you in quite some time, so I would like to offer my congratulations, as I know you were recently married! ... I am thrilled for you! Kate, you may not realize, but you have taught me so much about what it looks like to be an individual, to be unique, and to be comfortable in my own skin. My growing process could not possibly have been complete without your encouragement along the way, so thank you from the bottom of my heart.

*

Other Mother

I was a deer-in-the-headlights graduate student in my late twenties when I first met Gabriele Rico.  She walked into the classroom the epitome of grace.  And then, over the course of that semester and years to come, she became my mentor, my friend, and my other-mother.

Gabriele when I first met her--in her early 50s (about the age I am now)

Her work on creativity was intellectual and profoundly intuitive.  She seduced me!  Because of her, I fell in love with literature, language, writing, and teaching.  She prompted me to honor--and really see--the amazement of my own creative possibilities.

Gabriele developed "clustering."  This book changed lives.

Gabriele invited me into her home to work with her on writing projects.  I remember looking at her life and thinking, this is what I want.  A life filled with people who thrived on creativity.  A home inspired by art, and infused with books and plants and love.  And flexibility of time:  to teach, to mentor, to write, to travel, to exercise the body and mind. 

And truly:  this is who I've become.  Gabriele is woven into the fabric of my life.

Gabriele has always been open to change and growth.  In her 50s and 60s, she learned to wind surf, to rock climb, to snorkel--and she became a true yogini.  She stretched herself physically, mentally, emotionally.  She led creativity workshops all over the world.  She traveled to more and more exotic places.  And when she was diagnosed with life-threatening cancer eight months ago--at the age of 75--she dubbed the experience an adventure.

With Simone, Gabriele's youngest daughter; check out the bracelets!

When I visited with her today, in spite of the pain medications she's on, she was still her loving, funny, astute self.  Two of her three daughters were there.  In the midst of a hug, she called me her "sixth daughter."  I said, "Wait a minute, I thought I was the fourth!"  And she laughed.  Her daughter Suzanne (who has written a lot about about her family's journeys) said, "There are at least a hundred daughters."  Now there's a legacy. 

One thing I come to expect being around Gabriele is that nothing is a surprise.  There are always serendipities that arise--"coincidences" that are a given when Gabriele is around.  Today's was this:  I was wearing a bracelet my long-time friend gave me last year on my wedding day.  It has a bead on it that looks like a blue eye.  Simone was wearing a bracelet also given to her by an old friend; it incorporated the exact same bead.  Simone said the bead wards off the evil eye.

 

Today I realized that Gabriele is the one person in my life who has always seen most clearly the veil between this world and the next. In fact, it's not even a veil for her.  It's a continuum.  As she once wrote:

"When human beings grow creatively, they learn to  step out of categories such as 'either/or' and begin to see the world in terms of 'both/and.'"

Here's the both/and of the situation:  Gabriele is dying, and Gabriele is living. Gabriele will be gone but she'll always be here. I know I will continue to learn from her throughout the rest of my days.

In German

My friend and mentor, Gabriele Rico, has translated my poem "Elephant" into German for a book she's doing about angels in poetry.

When I see her tomorrow, she's going to read it aloud to me. I can't wait to hear it.

Elefant

Ueber deinem Ruecken den Hauch des Wassers zu spueren,
dir vom Gesicht die Huegel-getrocknete Erde zu waschen,
von Elefanten zu traeumen, Ohren gespreitzt

wie die zerknitterten Fluegel eines uralten Engels.
An den Baptismus von der Natur zu glauben,
Dich in den Verlust von Allem zu vertiefen—

nicht nur in den Deiner Mutter, nicht nur deines Liebhabers,
doch auch den Deines Gottes. Es ist alles
Nichts in dem kurzen Grass,

es ist nur das Nichts der Luft—
wir erinnern uns wie Elefanten, dann verschwinden wir
endgueltig.

Wir verwehen nicht auf dem Atem des Loewenzahnes,
"Wir fahren nicht aufwaerts. Wir landen. Fest wie Steine,
in Huegeln begraben, unbeweglich und stumm."

(by Kate Evans, translated by Gabriele Rico)

Yes, I Will Take You

"Hey Mom, do you want to eat in the dining room?"
"No, there are a bunch of old people in there."

Words from my 74-year-old mom, who is now in a rehab facility for about a week or so for rest and physical therapy. She'll be released when she is less of a fall risk.

Who can blame her for not wanting to identify as an "old person." Up until my father died in March, she was going to the gym, writing articles and books, attending a weekly writing group, making dinner every night, tending to my father's varied and many needs, and being active in a variety of ways in the community.

After he died she had two successive falls, and suddenly she has lost her husband, her home, her health, her independence.

I'm whirling from it all. I know my sisters are. My mom? I can barely imagine.

Grief? Loss? What are the right words?

My friend Gabriele Rico sent me the perfect Ellen Bass poem, with the perfect words. I'd read it several times before in Mules of Love, and re-reading it re-reminds me that what my mom and my family are enduring right now is ... well ... the human condition.

Here's the poem:

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs.
When grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, how can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you,
I will love you, again.