Finding My Wings

Yesterday, three weeks after my hip surgery, still early in my healing journey, I ventured out to an afternoon concert in the Santa Ynez Valley Botanic Garden, organized by Bear Erickson for his newly launched nonprofit, MAS (Music and Art Support). The performers were Mariachi Mestizo, a youth group from Delano, and they opened with a haunting and familiar piece, Pachelbel’s Canon.

“I bet that’s not what you expected,” said the young spokeswoman afterwards. “But we do it all. Mariachi is not a genre; it is the band itself. And this music is the cornerstone of our lives. For anything important, from weddings to funerals, we bring in the mariachi.”

 So why not Pachelbel’s Canon? It was a tender and exquisite use of the violins, guitars, and trumpets. There followed other, more traditional songs, Paloma Cucurrucucu, for example, and another described as a song about love beyond death, surely the underlying theme of everything.

 I love this music dearly. I love its extravagant, overwrought, gorgeous melodrama. Somehow, it expresses what we are all feeling, no translation needed! (I was similarly fond of the old Neapolitan songs my father sometimes listened to: “Italian schmaltz”, as Monte once described them.)

And boy, are these kids good! When they begin to sing Bésame Mucho, I am moved to tears. This was a song from the early days of my parents’ romance in the 1940s. I knew it as a child because my mother hummed it still, and I pictured them dancing, young and hopeful with no idea how many things would go awry. And I wonder, is this the way it always is? The joys and sorrows, and even the music, of our parents and our forebears are absorbed into our souls. I lean back and ride on the waves of sound, unconstrained by time.

Meanwhile,  I'm making progress...walking, healing, figuring things out...but it is a slow and tricky journey. Sometimes I feel like my mind has been shaken up in a cocktail mixer and all the elements are floating about in random ways: odd memories surfacing, strange dreams, new insights appearing. I guess my head is restructuring along with my hip.

 It seems to me this experience has caused me to dismantle my life, all the pieces in disarray, and I must rebuild some kind of structure and meaning. It’s hard to explain, but the building blocks are different; even the nouns of my dreams are novel and odd, and characters enter from far-flung corners of my life with strange appeals and storylines. What will I make of this?

 In one dream, a woman named Martha whom I knew in Laguna Beach forty years ago reaches me in a staticky telephone connection; she is stranded in Solvang and wonders if I can find her a ride to Reno. (Never expect a dream to make sense.) When I wake up, I think about Martha for the first time in decades. She was an elegant woman, a philanthropist, generous with good causes, and she lived in a beautiful mansion at Crescent Bay. Awake, I grab my phone and do a search, intending to contact her and let her know I am remembering her with respect and fondness, but it’s too late: I learn that she died in 2025.

In another dream, my eldest brother appears, standing in the dusty work site of the house we are remodeling, and everything is unresolved. It has been many years since we stood in the same space together. In the morning, I write him a letter and mail it from the post office the very same day. Not too late.

 And of course there are the Daddy dreams. My father has been gone for nearly fifty years, and I am a little girl again, desperate to see him. When does this longing end? Never. It is a default state of being for me. I was intrigued when I came upon this insightful passage on the topic by the writer Devin Kelly: To long, I think, is to practice a kind of impossibility. It is to know, with almost certainty, that the distance between where you are and what you want will remain, and yet, to long is then to continue, forever, to imagine a kind of narrowing. It is to fill that impossible space with possible things. It is to make of your life a kind of dream and to make out of your dreams a kind of life.

 Exactly. I’ve never seen it expressed so clearly. Kelly has given me the words to help me understand my perpetual condition. I inhabit a habitual yearning rooted in my earliest sense of wonder and love, intensified by loss, drawn by possibility and the sunlight of imagination.

And I still recognize magic: it comes in flickers and cannot be paused; it is a sweetness that leads into longing, and there in the longing you are left… but the longing tends to prod me into action, even when my ability to act is hampered as it is right now.

I am observing, not doing, although I still have hope of new insight, if not enlightenment, that I can carry forward.

 This apartment is small and alien and has no views. I am in a recovery hole. But when I go outside, the glorious world is delivered to me in scoops, measured out like protein powder, each scoop a marvel. Like the crows! Is there something making them drunk? Fermented grapes, perhaps? They are reeling about in boisterous crowds. Or the familiar mountains wrapped in the sheer scarves of cloud. Three little girls holding hands. The artfully mottled bark of a sycamore tree. The sky. 

 I can’t bear to speak right now of the bigger hellscape, but I have to say something. The shock of it, the terrible betrayals, the depravity and destruction and corruption and cruelty and bizarre narcissism and vulgarity, all indulged and supported by the entire GOP and the Court and to a great extent the press, not to mention the millions of idiots who thought this was a good idea.

 And yet, we can and will prevail. If we don’t, it will mean that nothing really mattered in the end except money and vanity, that everything we ever loved and believed and aspired to was for naught. And that cannot be.

 A friend wrote to me: “I’m so exhausted. I can’t take it any longer. How did this happen? Where does it end?” These are feelings and questions I understand. We must acknowledge these and ride out the bad moments and perform the magic we possess to transmute that defeatist energy into defiance.

The beloved Irish poet, author, and philosopher, John O'Donohue, wrote that one's identity is not equivalent to one's biography, and that "....there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's still a sureness in you, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary."

 It comforts me: a place where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness and tranquility in you. It acknowledges the miracle-ness of each of us, the core and spark that we contain.  And it makes me want to try harder, be better, never give up. As wounded as I am, physically and emotionally, I have access to that unwounded place.

 Another wise voice, Reinhold Niebuhr, reminded us what is required:

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”

 I am not sure how to apply all this in the context of the dystopian times we are experiencing right now, but may our longing motivate us, and may our decency and dignity demand the governance and society we deserve. My sutures are healing, my gait is getting steady, and I can see that this scraggy-haired, barely dressed old lady is still me, maybe even tougher. I believe this is my season of being real and true, whether I like it or not.

Meanwhile, the world is dazzling me and breaking my heart, all in the same moment, and that’s the way it is and always was. I am in a Mariachi mood: struggle, celebration, and love beyond death. Let us not hold back.