I don't know how to talk about the things that are really happening, the things that are bigger and deeper, the things rooted to deep lines of blood and family, and the ways we've loved each other all our lives.

I found words—What if we do nothing and then she's just gone?—tumbling from my mouth, into the phone receiver, falling through the ether and backhanding my mother's soft open face. The words as I type them bring instantly to mind that terrible time I slammed the door to my bedroom in a dramatic teenage fight with her, how she was in the doorway, how the door hit her head, how her glasses hit her nose, her wince and gasp of pain. Nothing is worse than injuring my mother; nothing is worse than my mother injured. But this is what is true. My mother is injured, and I cannot fix it. She is in pain, and I cannot fix it. Her little sister is sick. My aunt is sick. Saying it, even here, sours something deep in my gut. a little stone turns over, disrupts some peace. It feels like I am betraying a secret. Why is illness a darkness, a hidden secret thing? Cancer. The word is ugly. We don't like it. My mouth has said it too many times. And I am not yet old. My mouth is not done saying it while formed into shapes of shock and sadness. There will be more. Cancer. Words like metastasize fall easily from my tongue now. It is in her stomach, her spine. It has metastasized. This is what we know. Metastasize is a bad word; it is a worse word than recurrence; I know that now too. 5 years ago she had aggressive breast cancer. After a litany of surgery and poisons and radiation, she came through still on this side. And now it is back. She told us she thought of it as a bird, a bird she had to get out of the house. I liked that. I liked it because I always hated the war and battle metaphors. This is a body, a person. Soothe and tend always seeming more appealing to me than wage, attack and fight.

But now I understand the urgency to fight. I want to fight to make my mother ask the questions none of us want answers to. I want to fight to protect her from those answers. I want to fight to make everything ok for everybody.

I want to fight for my aunt, fight to always be able to hear that belly laugh coming from the woman brushing my hair with her hairbrush—the one that was SO much better than the one my mom had at home—on the couch at the beachhouse. I always took pride in the way family thought that I looked like her, was like her. You have your aunt's hair, and I puffed up just a little. 6-year-old me just wanted to be her. I remember visiting her once, in Seattle, before she was married. I think she married the summer I turned three, so I must have been very young. She was a single woman, living in an apartment (in a city!)—so exotic. There was a mystery and some secretiveness surrounding it, something I can't quite place now.

Cancer. It is such an ugly and plain word. It doesn't suit the woman I looked up at wide-eyed as a child, the woman of cities and world travels, the woman of opinions and convictions as brash and unabashed as my own.

She was tough. She was tough, and she was like me.

And I don't want to soothe and tend. I want to be—and I want her to be—the woman that 6-year-old me saw in both of us; I want us to be tough, and I want us to fight.

This morning I went out into the warm blustery day, rain and wind, and that deep grey of autumn. Fall's first real rain. I remember that rain years ago, arms slung over the railing on my patio. We had waited all day for it to come, Michelle and I, and then we watched the sky open up, felt that rush of release as the crackle in the air broke, the warm smell of summer dust rising up damp from the pavement. I don't remember what we did that day—some 8, 10 years ago—but that moment is burned into my memory. Elbows slung, sense of possibility, that feeling of coming alive. Yes, I think I remember now. Harvest, et al. There is different and richer kind of magic to fall. Yes. Everything is going to be just fine.

I have been struggling for days to write my artist statement/ project description, my bio, even to title this project that's trapped inside itself, a kernel in the center of its own stasis. I somehow don't want to name it, pin it down. I want to keep it perfect in my head. What if it falls flat in open air? What if that perfect shattering and falling against concrete sound that rings in my ears is dull and disappointing in living breathing space? Brokenness and repair.

I am still thinking about the closing of my gifting project, that Rumi poem.

how long will you make clay pitchers / that have to be broken to enter you?

There something I am afraid will be lost in translation. I talk about it in its mundane details, but it is not that for me. It is an opportunity to glimpse into the possibility of a new organization of meaning. It is the way things are always breaking down and building up at the same time. It is the making and remaking of meaning. It is systems that no longer work in their wholeness, things that have to be pieced together from what remains, from what has been worn and torn and shattered, loved into loose strands.

There was a way in which the gifting project started a conversation within me, of attachment to objects, of the relationship between object and meaning, the way the story and the thing weave in and out of relationship with one another. The object, relieved of its meaning, the meaning bereft of object, the meaning feeling its way toward new object, the object birthing new meaning. The way the stories live both within and without the vessels we use to carry them. Something. There is something there. It is only whole and complete when I close my eyes and don't put words to it... but it's there.

I had a dream I finally returned all of my library books and the library forgave me.

Today I woke up early; the alarm went off after less than 5 hours of sleep, and I crafted excuses in my head as I continued to fight my way in and out of dreaming, drafted conversations through the hour of pressing the snooze button, finally hurling myself from bed with the phrase fuck it on my tongue. I threw an assortment of random things into my suitcase: arugula, a bikini, 3 beers, 2 dresses, what else do I need? And boarded the bus for the coast. Today I learned the lineage of my family in a more deep and direct way, found this photo of my paternal grandmother’s maternal uncles. Yes, This is from whence I came.

I met my grandmother’s cousin today, on her 92nd birthday. She was a real spitfire in her youth, they tell me, and I see it in the twinkle in her eye. They remember her for her love of adventure when she came to live with them in St Croix, her wigs, her lovers. Yes, this woman is of my flesh and blood. Later, my father and I sort out family stories, immediate and extended. I am so grateful for this time here with him. I find myself closing my eyes, trying to draw out the family tree, connect the stories to the branches, sew in all of the connections.

This afternoon in my father’s old bread truck, the one that was once his brother’s, gutted and refitted like a boat—a place for everything, neat and tidy systems, a love and careful attention paid to each inch in a way that most homes never get—we drove in the screaming van, past flashing lights, a car plowed straight into the fence. That just happened, I say out loud to no-one in particular, meaning nothing in particular. I watch as people converge around the car. We are headed toward a lake we used to swim at when I was a child, a lake I have no recollection of. I expected that I might remember it when we arrive, but I don’t. We circle the parking lot, then turn back. When we pass by the accident site again, there is a swarm of ambulances and firetrucks, men in uniform. I look closer and the entire roof of the car has been peeled back. There are people working diligently and there are stretchers. In the time we are abstractly exploring memory, men had peeled the roof from the car, like a sardine can. In a moment, I am overcome with emotion. My hand flies to my chest; tears burn at my eyes; my breath catches in my throat. Death. I repeat something akin to prayer. Please let them be ok. Please let them be ok. Strangers. It wasn’t long ago I was having a conversation with a friend about the moments that everything changes, the moments where life will never be the same. What was playing on the radio moments before that car needed to be peeled open like a sardine can? What microdrama was being played out inside that car? Was someone in the backseat causing a disturbance? Was everyone lost in thought? Where were they headed? Was it someone travelling alone? Were they thinking about where they had just come from, where they were headed? Now, instead, a sea of flashing lights, stretchers, curled back white metal.

I hold my hand to my chest for a long time as we continue to drive, and then we arrive at dinner. I sit across the booth from my father and we don’t talk about it. We talk about family, about relationships, about the nature of knowing self, knowing other. In some way we are exactly talking about what we saw. We are talking about what it means, the fierceness and immediacy of life, the urgency. How do we navigate the ways we love each other, the ways we hurt each other, while holding firm to that there may not be a tomorrow? There may not be a tomorrow. I remember all of the times I thought I might lose the people who I love. I have received too many of those phone calls for how many years I have been here. I remember, too, that moment of spinning, on the road not too far from here, the car careening across the highway, my hot chocolate making an arc across the car, the fear and amazement in both of our eyes as we acknowledged our nearness to the edge of something, our powerlessness against it. In the end it was nothing. It was an encapsulated moment where we got to walk away with nothing to show for it but our stories, some scrapes on a car that wasn’t even mine. Still, the closeness to the edge stays with me.

Fragility has never been a hard concept for me to grasp.

So, when I look at my father, I remember what he looked like in a hospital bed as well as what he looked like with his hand on the tiller, the sea and the horizon behind him. Yes, we are all of these things, all of us. Today it is easy to remember how much I love humanity, how much we are all a part of one another, how lovely and poetic are our struggles. Today I love them—our struggles—yours and mine, the particular ones. Today I love this beachhouse, even the fights we had in that yard, along with the memories of my feet reaching just to the edge of that chair as my mother’s hands tied my shoes. I love every bit of it, the ways we loved each other, the ways we failed to, the ways we are all working and making it better now. Yes, today I love every last inch of it, and as for the people in that sardine can car, please let them be ok, let them have another day, let them find a day where they can love every last bit of it, every inch, and then sleep, in peace, and wake to another good day; let them have gratitude and peace. Let us all have that. Let us find a way to love unfettered, to see clearly, and to know how lucky we really are.

I spent the morning with my hands in the dirt—what little of it there is out back behind my apartment, the cracks of earth breaking through the concrete, enough for dandelions and morning glory to push their way skyward, enough for me to come upstairs with dirt under my nails. I miss having a garden, a yard, a place to feel like I really inhabit this world, a place to cultivate roots that dig their way deeper and deeper toward the center of something.

I am grieving today, feeling the loss for my hometown, for the world. Still, I know I am grieving in that privileged way where I can afford to abstract, where I can draw connections and think about things like love and nostalgia, where I can wonder why the ways we take care of ourselves and each other are all so tenuous, so grasping.  I never knew him well, not well enough, not as well as I wanted to. He worked at the record store when I was a teenager, and his smile was enough to make me stumble for words and blush. Later, we knew each other casually, a conversation here and there, a nod on the street, but the details of it don't really matter.

They found him floating in the harbor.

That detail shouldn't matter either, but it's all I can think of, his eyes, his smile, and the reduction to a body floating in the water, an article in the local paper. Short dry sentences, body of liveaboard man found floating. So I pull weeds this morning, under the beginning of the warmth of spring, and I think about how we are all so entangled with one another, but yet so far off, how life and living and moving through this world together are so messy. I think about how I'm pretty sure I'm doing it all wrong, but somehow I am alive and strong enough to be pulling weeds in the sunshine, how my own dark nights have always given way to morning, how I feel undeserving and grateful, and how cruel it seems that so much of this is just luck. And then I just feel sad, so deeply sad for this man, sad for those who loved him, sad for people I love who are feeling his absence deep in the marrow of their bones.

Hurricane

It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to 
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

--Mary Oliver