A Few Wild Things…

The dream I had last night where I spooned with a baby possum, right up against my spine. It was tiny like a child, and we slept so cozily all night. In the morning I quietly lifted myself from the bed so I wouldn’t wake it, but when I turned around a cat had the possum in its mouth. It wasn’t a bloody thing, just an animal thing.

And the raccoon that walked into my living room in the middle the day last week. That was real, surprising my friend Nan who’d just gotten out of the shower and who shouted, “Get out of here!” as it whooshed past her in the house, and out the front door, turning around on the porch to look at her before it ran off.

I thought raccoons only came out at night, when I am sleeping or trying to sleep, like the other night, waking at 2 in the morning, eyes wide. I turned on an hour-long Yoga Nidra meditation where a woman spoke very softly, asking me to imagine myself drifting, drifting, drifting to sleep, and how I did, waking sometime later to a video of Kamala Harris asking for money.

And how drifting is like falling, which means trusting, and is not so unlike the buoyancy of swimming, which I do a lot these days. And how counting laps, and being underwater for 45 minutes is it’s own kind of meditation. “One, one, one,” I chant as I move through the water. “Two, two, two,” I say as I take another lap. When I’m counting, I can only keep one thought in my head, like what I might have for lunch or a reminder to call my mother. I’m not multitasking, I’m not holding my phone and checking Instagram or email, or keeping track of what Joe’s doing, what Kamala has said or what Trump has done now.

95 days, 16 hours, 8 minutes and 58 seconds until the election.

“One, one, one…”

When I’m swimming I’m making a pact with the pool; I’m going to give myself to you for 45 minutes. I’m going to focus on breathing and pulling my arms through the water, kicking and counting, and I’m going to let go of what is happening outside of this pool that I don’t always know how to be with, like…

the way I hurt my daughter on the phone last week. She’d been telling me how sad she was, and as I listened, I stopped breathing as her hurt became my hurt and the next thing I knew I was plowing in with advice, even suggesting that her situation was her own doing – which is something I know about, this ability to over ride my own sadness by swallowing it and pushing harder.

It was the look she gave me when she quickly ended the call, cocking her head a little, like she was seeing something more clearly about me. It was the note she sent the next day, “You’re harder than me,” she wrote, “I’m softer.”

And how the lines get blurred, mother, daughter, daughter, mother. How I’d FaceTime’d my own mother during the republican convention, and the way she’d held her shaky hand up to the TV so I could see a screaming Trump, and then shifted her phone camera over to the tall eucalyptus trees in her yard so I could see the trees, then back to Trump, then back to the trees.

The note she texted to my siblings and me after Biden’s debate with Trump weeks ago, “My children,” she wrote, “you are going to be living in a very different America.” And the memory I have when my father was dying 14 years ago, this thought, like a child, “how can you leave us here alone?”

And now here, alone, not alone, with my own children, and even their possible children in some future I squint to imagine. The fantasy of buying a house in the country for all of them to live in, a way to protect them from I’m not sure what.

How I’ve preferred the illusion of certainty, the promise of a list, the design of a day. How certain I was that there were three things you needed for a creative life; Ideas that you cared about, the time to make them happen, and the energy to get them done. I knew that you could make things happen with two of those things – like ideas and time – but you couldn’t make something with just one of them – like just ideas or just energy.

And yet, that is mostly what I have today – time. And which is why I’m on my porch waiting for the raccoons, dreaming about possums, and wondering which wild thing will come next.

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