During
Covid, when things shut down and leaving home was permitted only for
necessities, I did more living than I had ever done-visiting the Isabella Gardner
museum in Boston, traveling to Miami to visit my children, going on a moose
safari in Waterville, Maine, with my sister and her family…, even though such
activities were not condoned or permitted most were willing to turn a blind eye
to those who ventured out anyway, especially establishments in the Old Port part
of town, who welcomed the business, Covid or not, as I witnessed by its open
bars, restaurants, and patrons who drank and partied anyway.. It was as if the pandemic was a challenge,
opportunity, test to live anyway, even if death and full-blown apocalypse was
not only threatening but raging in nearby hospitals, homes, towns, counties,
cities, states, countries. Like I
experienced when I lived in Miami during hurricane season, the end of the world
came in bits and pieces, to one family, street, county, and no one could fully
appreciate or understand what that ending meant until it knocked on their door, as
Covid was now doing.
At some
point during the pandemic, I also left Maine and moved to California after
taking a reconnaissance trip out to one of the state’s most northern counties
and securing a one-bedroom for myself, which I planned to return to a month
later. It was time to leave my old life
behind, the anger and suspicion of fellow Mainers, who treated others as if
guilty of secretly carrying and spreading the virus, even while wearing masks
and keeping distance, was too much to bear. The place had become sullen and
angry, and I survived months of collective fear while listening to Cuban
artists who made me wiggle my tush while walking around the streets of downtown
Portland. Willie Chirino, Celia Cruz, Gloria Esteban… played constantly on my
Pandora station and earphones.
On
Halloween, 2020, I started driving cross county with plans of arriving in my
home in Northern California ten days later to a place the locals called The
Lost Coast, The Emerald City, and Behind the Redwood Curtain (the place is
surrounded by redwood trees). No one came to Humboldt County (the region grew
most of the marijuana in the United States) unless they intended to. Driving up Route 101, traffic got thinner
after I left San Francisco until I was the only one driving into the mountains
and redwoods of Eureka, California—name and cheaper cost of living attracted me
to the place. According to online research, “in 1848 the cry “Eureka”- we found
it—went out from California and within weeks a little place called Sutter’s
Mill became the famous site for the California Gold Rush. Tens of thousands of
fortune seekers rushed to California by sailing ship around the Cape of South
America.” My other intention for moving out
West was to visit the national parks.
On the
road, I spied prairies, deserts, cliffs, mountains, canyons, rivers, red rocks,
and star -filled skies until a fatigue of eternity’s landscapes made me realize
that Dorothy wasn’t looking for the Emerald City but signs of other human life
and construction to stop the endless horizon of land (by the way, I saw the
most congregation of stars filling up every space in the sky in Platt, Kansas but
was so frightened by the sight, I got into my car, drove to the next hotel, and
slept it off).
My trip proved
I was a city girl at heart, longing for overly lit, congested highways, and
overdeveloped, busy streets that gave me a sense of geography, landmark, and endless
choices of nonstop activities, but city
life and it’s highways were hard to find; instead, my GPS took me through the
country’s back roads, insisting I drive day and night on unlit-two lane
highways; tight-winding, long-stretches, or mountainous solitary roads; and
past endless semi-trucks that rattled me and my rented mid-sized Toyota
Corolla. Sometimes, I calmed my frazzled nerves by downing a shot or
two from the bottle of the Canadian Club Whiskey I kept on my passenger seat.
Some sights
were ghastly, though, like the roadkill caused by speeding trucks and cars that
brought down buck, deer, squirrel, fox, rabbit, possum, coyote… that got in the
way, contributing to a disturbing slaughterhouse of blood-spattered highway
roads, mostly in Missouri and West Virginia, which didn’t post road signs about
crossing wildlife. Those two states were also more God-obsessed than
their Midwestern neighbors with tall crosses planted in the ground and more
religious-talk radio stations than I would ever want to hear in any lifetime
(Missouri was quite conflicted with God on the radio and adult entertainment
and gun advertisement on highway billboards). Now, I also understood the
Midwest's fascination with race car driving cause you had to speed across great
expanses of land if planning on getting to a destination at a decent time.
I birthed a
brand new me driving through the moonlit skeletons of the Allegheny Mountains
in West Virginia; the green, soft rolling hills of Kentucky, with generous
sprinklings of grazing cows and healthy-looking horses; endless prairies in
Kansas, where for five hours I screamed every fear, anxiety, regret, mistake… I
ever made (the next day my throat was so raw and hoarse, I thought I caught
Covid because I forgot about screaming the day before); arid lands of Oklahoma
with distant, empty, windowless houses as if fortunes were stolen overnight;
high roads of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Taos, also known as the City of
Light, where ordinances mandated minimal use of street lighting at night to
“promote energy efficiency and reduce or prevent light pollution… to protect a
historical legacy and provide enjoyment of “the night sky“ for future
generations,” and where I stopped my car and tried making it up to the stars by
giving them a good, hard, brazen look but even their bright congregations
weren’t as powerfully looped, dazzling, or touching my face in vines of broccoli
bunches like those in Platt, Kansas; Red Rocks of Sedona (while getting a full-body
massage in town, mask and all, the stars showed up in my mind’s eye doing flips and
summersaults; this time, I said to them in a loud voice, “you are starting to
freak me out,” which startled both my massage therapist and me); mountain roads of the Mojave Desert were it
was too bone-chilling cold at dusk to stop to take a decent picture.
Before I
left Maine, I requested from the universe a spiritual journey, but I thought it
would be a direct route to my guru Maharjii’s temple in Taos, New Mexico (after
learning years ago about Ram Dass--a Harvard professor who in the 60’s turned
spiritual guru after a trip to India-- building and dedicating a temple to his
guru Neem Karoli Baba in Taos, I was determined to visit). My goal
was to go on my pilgrimage with clear-cut results, like in a documentary I
watched about an American follower who traveled to Maharajii’s temple in Vrindivan,
India, where the now-deceased guru appeared to him in ghostly form and gave him
an answer to his question about his destiny. Yet, my inability to
face a sky full of stars in Platt was evidence I wasn’t ready for anything supernatural.
After
arriving in Taos, I learned the temple was closed due to Covid, and I was
heartbroken, so I spent the afternoon downtown eating $30 dollars-worth of
chocolate--candied apples, caramel turtles, and fudge—bought at a candy store
recently purchased by a retired couple who during the pandemic shucked their
old lives in a remote part of New Mexico, took a three-month online course on
making chocolate, and purchased a candy store in downtown Taos, where the
husband’s greatest pleasure was every afternoon making his delicious batch of
fudge in a copper kettle baking dish. “Who knew,” said the wife, “that after 35
years of being a such good electrician his real talent was making fudge.”
When I left
my guru’s picture in my Taos hotel room, I was further convinced he was trying
to dump me. Driving out of New Mexico, depression, and confusion
overwhelmed me, but not for too long because the Rio Grande, red
rocks, Indian villages clinging to sides of mountains, Apache and Hopi
chants I heard on the radio, and the Petrified Forest distracted me. “Okay,
Maharaji,” I said out loud, “I let you go. Just let me know what’s next on my
spiritual journey.” When I got home to my new apartment in California, I found
his picture and realized that another lesson in surrender was letting go of preconceived
outcomes.
Even with
its hiccups and horrors, my trip was wonderful--and one of the bravest things
I’ve ever done. From my first Halloween night drive into Lewisburg, West
Virginia, on scary Route 60 with its winding mountain roads and construction,
where I tailgated a semi-truck lit up like a cheap temple in Asia because the
roads were too dark to see much of anything, let alone the road, I staved off the sadness and confusion of once
again leaving a quiet, safe, and familiar life behind, this time in Portland,
Maine, by listening, on a local radio station, to creepy bluegrass about
pickers made from pig bones, husbands who with their swords beheaded cheating
wives and their lovers, and beautiful
women who got murdered and chopped up by strange men who made sudden appearances
in town or, maybe, by bears that lived on mountaintops and might have also made
sudden appearances in town—my favorite Halloween night ever.
In Kansas,
I saluted a freight train chugging along open prairies with red and yellow cars
as if it had appeared out of thin air and intended to disappear right back into
it. The conductor’s sounding the horn at my salute gave me
goosebumps. When I stopped to breathe in
the air of an of an ancient, biblical-looking Flint Hills with its endless
threads of long golden grass, I imagined an ancient scene with Jesus walking peacefully
across the landscape. At the
Dalton Gang Museum, an Old West gang that specialized in bank and train
robberies, the museum’s guide told me about directing the local theatre/dinner
group who performed their plays on the open prairies while the audience ate hot
chili served from a chuck wagon, while emphasizing his actors weren’t as good
as the ones in Dodge City.
In Taos,
the local young beautiful teamaker apprentice who had moved from Florida and
refused to look back even though her family insisted she return, said Covid had
closed the Taos Pueblo, where locals practiced rituals with the Indians, a
practice I assumed contributed to the now elegiac, beautiful grieving felt in
the town and its people for the universal pain and loss caused by the
virus. Like perfectly balanced scales, they grieved in their sad eyes,
soft smiles, and meditative walk while moving their daily lives along--a
herculean effort executed with perfect grace. On a local radio station, I
heard eulogies and life stories about those who had lost their lives to the
pandemic the day before, and it was all too much to bear because I did not have
mastery over my emotions, enough grounding in the place to share with others
their sense of compassion for all, or the practice, strength, or understanding to
embrace life and death in equal measure, so I skipped town one day before I was
supposed to.
In my
travels, I had seen many reactions to Covid. In Portland, Maine, people fighting
at the local grocery store when others got too close; in the Midwest, signs
posted on storefronts that said you didn’t have to wear a mask if you didn’t’
want to; in states further out West, socially distancing, wearing masks, smiling
anyway, and wishing everyone a good morning and wonderful day. I was
starting to understand that people’s reaction, or lack of it, to the pandemic--
whether right, wrong, inconsiderate, reckless, political, along party lines…were
inspired by the freedom of living and dying their terms of their American Dreams,
even if that meant shucking pandemic wisdom, safety, rationale, and etiquette
to do it. In a gas station on Route 66 in Williams, Arizona, an
elderly Midwestern man with beautiful, shoulder length white hair and a wool
Outback Fedora said to me that you did what you could but trying to stop a
pandemic from taking its toll would be like trying to stop the Great Flood from
making the world new again.
I was also
new again after spending seven years in Portland, Maine, disentangling myself from
a harried past that stemmed from a violent childhood, marriage, divorce, and single
motherhood, followed by falling madly in love and experiencing a walloping
heartbreak that made me shuck it all, get on a plane, and move to Maine, where
I took a deeper and wide-eyed look at all the psychic debris that kept me grounded
with no possibility for take-off. Week
after week, month after month, epiphanies rushed at me until I thought my chest
would explode with knowing. Silence, reiki,
meditation, contemplative walks, rituals, prayers, burning candles to gods and
goddesses, Guru talks on Youtube, books about Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism, hot
baths, dancing in my Maine apartment were methods to help with releasing and
healing my past.
To my
unawares, I had created the perfect setting for transformation in an attic
studio apartment with hardly any furniture or curtains, just a futon and cheap foam
mattress on a wire frame. Mostly, the changing
seasons kept me company. Even friends and sex were non-existent. There were some external distractions,
though, like meeting up with a gay, male friend who I had drinks and conversations
with every three weeks, and with the people I enjoyed chatting with at the
YMCA, where I did my spinning workouts. Mostly, I spent my time alone. As I wrung past hurts, confusions, and fears out
of my life, time became all mine. Then I had to figure out how to spend my hours
wisely, so I watched over 1000 films rented at the library; read over 100 books;
listened to over 300 hours of Ted and Youtube talks on Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism,
meditation, being in the moment, forgiving, moving on; burned candles and
incense to gods, goddesses, saints, and guru; worked on my online classes;
tried to write at least 3 hours a day; stared at the Maple outside my window;
took hot baths; chanted; meditated; listened to music; and danced. But even
with such daily goals, I was still distracted, still pulled away by phone calls
with people from my past who dragged me into their daily dramas, of which I was
too glad to take part instead of completing all the tasks on my to-do list. Even after finding my moment, I didn’t have
the courage to be in it--not fully, not wholeheartedly. There was still work to do.
During quarantine,
I thought I was more expert than most at being alone or being confined to a
small space without external distractions, even though not having the option of
going for coffee, gym, or visiting the library was difficult to bear. Then came
another unexpected challenge-- a three-month illness I, at first believed was
Covid, but later realized was a digestive disorder my mother’s family had suffered
from later in life. My guts twisted and ached,
and my neck and head hurt all the time. I could not sleep, and it didn’t matter
whether I ate or not: In forty days, I lost 30 pounds. Doctor’s visits and endless tests were inconclusive,
except at some point, I was told one of my tests came back positive for colon cancer,
but the specialist’s office was closed until after quarantine, so I could not
confirm the diagnosis with further test until then.
After many
days of sulking in the horrors of the possibility of having cancer, I came up
with a two-part plan to take on my illness: fight it while preparing to die.
Fighting meant ordering herbs, teas, and ointments online that might soothe or
heal my symptoms because doctors did not prescribe anything for lack of a confirmed
diagnosis; preparing to die involved listening to talks about the afterlife and
reading books I ordered online about near-death experiences and the different states
of the Buddhist Bardo, the in-between states that determined the soul’s next
destination.
I drank teas
of black licorice, bergamot, ginger, turmeric, and lemon for their gut-healing
properties, took long hot soothing baths, and red- light therapy from a lamp I
ordered online. Even doing cleansing fasts did not help the wrenching pain in
my gut, which made me feel light-headed and dizzy. Solitary walks around the Deering Oaks Park
with its spring flowering trees, maples, and oaks provided some distraction.
I kept
silent about my illness and thought I would wait until necessary to deal with
the concerns, fears, and drama from family members if diagnosed with cancer.
Really, I imagined dying or preparing to die in secret, in a sanatorium in
Europe like the character of Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain,
one of my favorite books, and I researched online places in Germany and
Switzerland where I would spend my final months, but my goals were far-fetched,
wishful thinking, and I did not have the money, energy, or time to entertain
them. Feeling as dreadful as I did, I figured
I’d be dead sooner than later with not much time for any kind of planning.
If my
cancer diagnosis was confirmed, I also decided to also forego conventional
therapies, such as surgery or chemotherapy, if offered, and opt for alternative
treatments, such as Rick Simpson oil, a pure form of cannabis oil I learned
online was having miraculous results on people with the disease. To this end, I researched places to buy the
medicine and learned of a medical dispensary in Westbrook, Maine, which I
called often, speaking to nice young, brilliant men who said I would have to
meet with them to consult about my illness and dosages of the oil they would prepare
to my specific needs. There was consolation
in my plan to fight cancer, taking shape, but my gut-wrenching pains and cramps
persisted. Out of desperation, I called a medical marijuana dispensary in town and
asked about their local CBD (I had tried the oil before with no result after purchasing
it from an online dispensary in Oregon, but I would not give up my fight to
find pain-relief).
The label
on the bottle of Maine-made full-spectrum CBD was nondescript, and I held no
hope for it doing much of anything, but that first 10 mg dropperful of the 300
mg bottle coated my stomach and soothed my pain, a bit. I was shocked. For the first time in months, I had some
relief, so I started taking the medicine religiously, every four hours. At the
recommendation of one of the clerks at the dispensary, I added the 1:1 THC to
CBD oil increasing my dosage as tolerated until I was taking over 50 mg of both
oils daily (I leaned from online research that it was pivotal to increase the dosage
when a past dosage became tolerated as a way of reaping the most benefit and
healing from the plant). Sometimes, I
accidentally overdosed on the cannabis oil giving myself unbearable highs,
filled with terror, anxiety, and fast heartbeats, with no recourse but to walk
the length of my 200 square foot apartment in circles, and for hours, saying
God’s name in vain.
During my
three weeks of cannabis and healing, I was silent and detached from the world Covid-related
madness, as if hanging mid-sky between earth and heaven, below fast-moving
clouds. My thoughts, bland or hysterical. My needs suctioned solely into healing
or feeling better, as if doing highly complex anatomical and metaphysical
calculations. Letting go demanded brazen,
singular attention to the exact location of my suffering, sometimes gathered in
tight knots at the fleshy red mouth of the duodenum of my small intestine; or
ache in my navel, at the hollowed area where my umbilical cord was once
attached; or cramp of my Ileum where the small intestine broke away from the
large one; or tightness at the nape of
my neck where the spine came to an end; or throb in between my brows where the sinus
cavities converged -- and breathing it all out, as if I had found the exact
anatomical location of the pain, gathered its red heat and black smoke with
focus and mental prowess, and expelled it back to where it came from. All difficult to accomplish, so I mostly kept
distracted by watching movies, pacing the apartment, and surfing the
internet. Like a never-ending picture
show, my mind wandered with memories of a healthy past, sick present one, and future
dead one, yet I didn’t surrender to any of it. Mostly, I craved my health of
three months ago which I could no longer recall in its entirety. My daydreams consisted of spinning at the
gym, having a full-night’s sleep, and waking up feeling well. Really, my new sick life required embracing
living and dying in equal measure, like I would later sense in Taos, New
Mexico, but I wasn’t brave enough to allow such magnanimous experience during my
illness. I still had work to do.
Three weeks
later, and just in time for my birthday, I felt better, as if by magic, even
though I knew my holistic approaches had done their job. Also, a visit to the specialist confirmed I
did not have cancer. My doctor’s diagnosis was IBS, a catch-all diagnosis for
digestives disorders, and she handed me a list of foods with complex carbohydrates,
which she recommended I avoid. When people
asked about my weight loss, I said it was intentional. By then, I was filled
with the fire to get going in a new direction, to throw away the old and move away
from the Covid-fueled resentments of a gentrified Portland, Maine.
California called
(three years ago, I fell in love with place while visiting a friend in San
Francisco and making a mental note to move to the state one day), so I
researched the best and most inexpensive places to live, which led me to Eureka,
in the most northern part of California.
After flying out for a visit, I rented a one-bedroom in an apartment
complex where most tenants were students from Humboldt State University, up the
street from my new home. My new plans were
to drive out on Halloween day and be there in time to celebrate Thanksgiving.
As I drove cross-country
day after day, I started to feel, taste, see, smell, and hear a brand new world
of songs (Americana, Honky Tonk, Mexican ranchero songs, Bluegrass, and Navajo
and Hopi chants played on radio stations) birds (falcons, caracaras);
landscapes (deserts, canyons, prairies, lagoons); people (cowboys with real
hats and boots gambling at the Apache’s Cliff Castle casino in Camp Verde,
Arizona, and the homeless Hopi Indian who asked for my water and my prayer in
the parking lot of a grocery store in Williams, Arizona); dangers (open range
fires, dust storms, flash floods, earthquakes); rivers (El Dorado, Rio Grande);
ocean (Pacific)…I realized the world was lovelier, friendlier, more mysterious,
and magical than I could ever imagine, and it all recalled my favorite poem by Herman
Hesse, “Stages”:
As every
flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slave of permanence.
Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.
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