Sunset of the Yellow Years

June, 2003 of the Yellow Years--photo by Krista Karels

This morning I awoke to a voice in my head yelling over and over at me: "I can't do this any more!"
"Do what?" I inquired. "And who IS this, anyhow?" Total Silence. I continued to lie there, not moving, not wanting to disturb this ... whatever it was ... this awfully uncomfortable thing inside me.
By this time in life I know what to do with the uncomfortable things. Observe. Gaze. DO NOT MOVE FROM THAT SPOT! Look it straight in the eyes (or, in this instance, listen to every vibration) until it yields up its secret truth. Something has pushed it from its comfort zone out to the edge of consciousness. Don't let it fall into obscurity. The temptation to think of something else--to forget--to avoid--to fight with someone/anyone--to grab the Kindle and click onto the latest book--to focus on anything but THIS which is so obviously overwhelming.

I kept my eyes closed. I knew what to do: go to that place where dreams arise. I'd been dreaming something, hadn't I? Yes.

I make my way through a complete dark.

The Way has no delineation.

The Yellow Years are gone.

I must leave this yellow house.

Ah. The house again. The deconstruction. The re-construction. The color of the paint. The whole thing is a metaphor for a powerful and essential personal transformation. Suddenly I'm aware that "this" which no longer can be done or be in charge is the "old me." I'm no longer in my "yellow years." They were beautiful years of roses and song and dancing. They were years of intense creativity--of writing all the books. They were the John Weber years of romance and dreams coming true. We found this house in those years, a sunshine house on a hill. The yellow years were a gift beyond words. But even the most beautiful that this world has to offer cannot be enough. What does sunshine do, after all, but penetrate the earth to transform what is living but unseen within and make it grow? 

John Weber became ill in 2003, just before the lovely picture of the yellow house was taken. He died in 2008, and the yellow began to fade. With John Sack I am beginning to find a deeper self I haven't yet completely come to know. It seemed to come upon me suddenly, the requirement I spoke of yesterday when I said the skin needed to be ripped from the house. Even then I hadn't awakened to the passing of the yellow years. I haven't wanted to let them go. But the new self in me was becoming claustrophobic in this yellow house. (Can you know what I mean? Have you experienced this? It's such a paradox, don't you think?) But yellow is but one color on the spectrum, while brown contains them all.

I read a poem the other day by Lisa Ciccarello that may also have contributed to the intensity that drives such experiences to the surface. Let me share it:

Here is how I control my heart: I string each thought one behind the next, like beads.  I wear the answers I am waiting to give. The jewelry becomes heavy as soil.  My long blink is a scream & a yes. There are things I have to say, but they do not yet know the questions they must ask. & a blink is no word; if they misunderstand— A heart is just soil. Ask anyone. A heartbeat is a blink. A long blink is a scream. A longer blink is sleep. All night I am screaming.

John Weber and I at sunset of the Yellow Years--taken by Krista Karels

Most Recent Book by Ciccarello

At Night

(Black Ocean Press, 2015)

House as Body

Casa Chiara House in 2004

When workers found rot in the siding they began by tearing off the skin. We could feel the shuttering of the house from inside. We agreed to trash the yellow. Wasn't the sunshine on the hill enough? When the house stood naked they ripped deeper. We could hear the power saws and drills. The house became a tooth under the dentist's drill. The house became a body in an operating room. I opened Pandora's box to empty music through the tunnels of my ears. Outside now the pounding reverberated through skin and bone to heart and mind. Our skin picked up vibrations like drums.

A day arrived in three weeks of this that I didn't recognize the house in its new skin awaiting paint. I couldn't choose. It wouldn't have mattered what color the paint might be. The color wheel spectrum gives us options now that only Dante imagined before while giving words to Paradiso. For some reason I still don't understand, the house no longer could be yellow. Green, perhaps? Like leaves, like moss, like grass before it turns. A swatch of green on new siding--but no. It appeared artificial on what had always been a living thing: this hermitage.

We turned the color wheel and both chose brown. We chose earth, the lightness of it, the dark. We chose brown, and still I woke in the middle of the night wondering, worrying--where would the sunshine be if the house were brown? Not brown, the swatches say: Briar. Khaki, Smokehouse. Virtual Taupe, Cobble. Sable. Down Home. Angora. Poised Taupe. Otter. Van Dyke.

Years ago when my dear friend and soul-sister, Alla Bozarth, asked me about my favorite color, I told her brown. "BROWN????" The decorations in her home were Russian Red and gold and black, intense blues, silver in some paintings on the wall, purple, mauve, a feast of color. Over the years I worked to make my imagination more colorful.

But we will paint Casa Chiara Hermitage two shades of brown with white trim, and it will be as though wearing the simple, earthy garb of Francis and Clare. When I think that the house might disappear from view up on this hilltop, no longer the yellow landmark it once was, I remember that fifteen years ago I was not so comfortable with the yellow until it came to have a meaning beyond itself. Brown tones have that meaning for me already.

For all this, I realize I sound as though I'm making my "apologia." You're right. I'm not comfortable with any of this at all. All my life I've been in awe of people who build their own houses, choose the shape and size and form and colors they most like. I'll never do that! I proclaimed with (now I see) a rather arrogant and simplistic certainty. Be careful of such certainty. I've seen too often how certainty is toppled and crushed under the earthquake of reality. We fall back then into the all-inclusive brown, the humus of earth, the shadowland of self we call humility.

Under Construction

THREE PEOPLE AND A DOG

A leaf of the Madrone collects drops of rain these January days. It is a forest shell. I bend and snap the image up into my phone's camera during our walk along one of the trails near Casa Chiara. We've had a guest with us these days--a friend of John's from college years at Yale. Imagine over fifty years of stories, aspirations, loves and losses needing to be shared. I am filled up to the brim with all of it, the immensity, the endurance, the radiance, the laughter, and the tenderness (oh, the tenderness that a long life can bring towards all that is upon the earth.) Mo feels it, dear little Mo who keeps as close to our friend as possible. We all absorb each other's life like rain falling on thirsty souls. We drink each other in like moss drinks January rain, needing little else.

What is in us that cannot be said? "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for words," as the poet Wordsworth mused. But all three of us are writers, multiplying words in the never ending task of bringing form to the formless. There is so much love in us this day there can be no denying it, but no word can capture it either. There's a clue in the leaf that captures rain, in the moss that drinks.

All through my life I have been loved, and yet I am like moss in my yearning. There's so much of it, you'd think it hadn't already been fulfilled. The rain is right now falling! I remind myself. Why aren't I satisfied? Is the yearning a holdover from a former lifetime, one in which I was deprived of love? But this morning it came to me that my yearning is not my own alone. It is the yearning of Form for Essential Being/Existence. In each fragment of matter, even in me, is felt that yearning for incorporation into the Allness. It is the Love that grounds all love. The psalm came to me, “Like a deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for You my God. My soul is yearning for God, the God of my life; when can I enter and see the Face of God?”

This is a universal yearning; that of Form for the Formless/the Formless for an adequate and perfect Form. This is the Fire that rain can't quench. This is the Passion of the Spirit as well as of the material form. This is why nothing else satisfies. Even if mind insists (and rightly so) that the Divine Fullness is the heart and pulse of all form, of the micro and macrocosm, still even the most minute of forms longs for the realization IN ITSELF of that universal consciousness. This is the Fire in form that consumes the heart and trans-forms. “The whole universe groans in a great act of birthing,” says St. Paul. (Romans 8). It is the thirst of all creation for the life-giving rain.

We walk. Our voices form the words for stories, ideas, descriptions, and the words combine with the sounds of rain on leaves, and the songs of birds when the sun breaks through. We are all together a symphony of being. Each movement brings back the same theme, introduced/intensified/made more complex/combining complexities/weaving the tonal poem together/unifying/rising towards simplicity/made One in what we imagine as the Fullness of Love. A single Tone in which Being is Form and Form is Being in an Eternal Instant.

Such a mystery--because from the outside it looks like a walk in the woods. Three people and a dog.

Ocean Calling

Humans have deserted the beach, but the gulls seek out the sands for protection from the storm that has the surf crashing high, layer after layer. All I wanted was to stand there. It was my birthday. All I wanted was to dissolve into it...each water drop whether rain or mist from the waves. All I wanted was immensity to echo through my own waters of blood and tears, the fluids of spine and brain, of lymph -- Mostly we are water and air. Ocean flows through us all.
I take a deep breath and listen. "Be still and wait," my dear, dear sister told us all in the weeks before she passed from this world. She's been so close these past few weeks, and today she seemed to be walking the beach with me seeking out the smallest, most worn-to-a-circle stones.What did she hear in her stillness? Can you hear "round" as you pick up the stone? Can you touch sound? Is what we call God or Heaven simply a dissolving into everything? One could hardly do better than the swell and ebb of the ocean which I sometimes believe could be the nature of that Divine Silence that draws us, that Word out of the Infinite Silence of which the author of the Cloud of Unknowing speaks: "The drawing of that Love and the Voice of that Calling..."

Ebb and Flow

Liz's stones and seaweed

Rain

The Great Sorrow

A dream from the other night defies description, but it also haunts me, so I have no real option. This is the best that, without poetic genius, I can do: It was a dream about love of life--the marriage of the soul to cosmic being--and it was shown to me as light. Every possible moment of a person's earthly life was, in the dream, a wave or particle of light's full spectrum, a minuscule beam of pure color and transparency. It was perfect in itself. It was also drawn into every other particle, and with each penetration the color of every other particle was transformed. These were an infinite flow of light particles that were, in their individual perfection, penetrated over and over by infinite others in flows of light that while already perfect, continually changed. There could be no end to this. But also no soul could hold such beauty as it entered, transformed and passed, only to be entered yet again.

And I was filled with a Great Sorrow which I think arises from the inadequacy of the human soul standing in the presence of the Ineffable that can only be glimpsed before it reaches the seer's point of blindness and gives way to invisibility. I'm reminded as I write this of the lament of Jessica Powers in her poem about homelessness. I believe I've quoted her here before:

...It is the pain of the mystic suddenly thrown
back from the noon of God to the night of his own humanity.
It is his grief; it is the grief of all those praying
in finite words to an Infinity
Whom, if they saw, they could not comprehend;
   Whom they cannot see.

I did wonder, though, as I awoke to the darkness of my bedroom whether the dream might someday be reversed, and I might awaken from the darkness into that unending Light.

Clare in Smoke and Lavender

Sometimes things happen, visions arrive, even years before you have the capacity to take them in. This year on the feast commemorating Clare of Assisi—Chiara, to whom this house is dedicated—smoke hung in the sky like old lace. It was August 11th. Lightning tore through lace and let loose rolling thunder. At my feet the transplanted lavender had turned a ghostly white. Well, I thought, you can’t just pull such fragility up from the darkness of its chosen ground, even if the roots remain intact, and expect it to survive. Something torn like that ...

In the crypt below the cathedral in Assisi that honors her, Clare’s body lies entombed. Four years ago I walked slowly in a line of other pilgrims past the waxed effigy and reached with my soul towards whatever remained of her actual beauty and her loveliness. She had expanded far beyond this small space, this gated garden, this darkness under wax. Despite knowing that, my heart shook, torn loose by a something larger than the mind that tries to make meaning of things too fragile, that tries to find images in smoke.

At the back of the crypt, behind glass, hangs a garment made of lace. Its length is out of proportion to the rest of it, like the train of a wedding gown. The threads are barely thicker than spider webs. With what tool did Clare weave this lace? What desire drew her on? What yearning kept her alive, planted as she was in a space so small with only a cloister yard for her feet to feel the earth and a bird or two to bring down the sky? Lace like smoke, became my answer this year to the yearning. She wove an alb for her beloved Francis, who for her embodied all the contradictions of Divinity in human form. She must have woven like the sister of those seven brothers in the fairy tale who had been turned into birds, frantic to restore them to humanity before they flew forever away. Because she hadn’t the alacrity to finish his shirt in time, one brother was left with a wing for an arm

We are flawed.

We can’t quite get the garment finished enough to hold us. Her alb hangs behind Italian glass. Francis flew into eternity a bird made of smoke. She is planted like lavender. The lace alb tells the story of her yearning for something beloved and forever out of reach.

Another woman enclosed by cloister walls found better words for it than I:

 It is the homelessness of the soul in the body sown;

It is the loneliness of Mystery;

of seeing oneself a leaf,  inexplicable and unknown,

cast from an unimaginable tree;

of knowing one’s life to be a brief wind blown

 down a fissure of time in the rock of eternity.

The artist weeps to wrench this grief from stone;

he pushes his hands through the tangled vines of music,

but he cannot set it free.

It is the pain of the mystic suddenly thrown

back from the noon of God to the night of his own humanity.

It is his grief; it is the grief of all those praying

in finite words to an Infinity

Whom, if they saw, they could not comprehend;

                Whom they cannot see.

                                -Jessica Powers

I’d intended to blog on Clare’s feast, but smoke and lavender prevented me for reasons I couldn’t name. I still can’t quite write it as I want to write. The metaphors won’t come together. The metaphors are threads still unwoven. Unable to write or honor her in any other way, John and I resorted to a cultural tradition: mid-afternoon we went out to eat. We’d just sat down when a woman at the bar who had her smart phone in hand said in a loud voice. “Robin Williams is dead of a suspected suicide.”

What?! I pushed back my chair and went to her. It was the contradiction, the irony of laughter meeting death that moved me. A homelessness linked Clare and Robin to an incomprehensible Mystery.  It was thunder. It was lightning rending the dry ground. It was smoke--torn lace.  It was laughter as prayer flung almost recklessly into the Unknown. It was humanity’s face in wax that melts and changes, melts and changes, trying to take the form of what is beyond all form. It was the torn lace. It was lavender turned white.

It was Clare, barefoot in lavender, letting loose a one-winged robin into a smoky sky.

Nature Rhythms Are Good For Dancing

Our wedding anniversary arrived perfectly timed for a week of sunshine and full moon on the Pacific Ocean. Flowers bloom among the stones and in clusters that cling to the gigantic bluffs. This morning it came to me that all my efforts (in younger years) to "overcome" nature were just so many steps in the wrong direction. Nature has wisdom far deeper and more whole than any human efforts to improve. Nature has rhythms I want never again to resist -- I want to dance to them.

I woke in the middle of the night -- a brilliant night. From the little balcony I watched the full moon dance.

 

A dance up such a cliff requires wings or else good sturdy roots.

Dance like Mama Cass--feet firmly planted in mid-air

Folk-Dance

Dance where emptiness makes a meeting place for darkness and light