Thursday, January 21, 2016

זַיִת


And God said, "Let there be light, and there was light. ~Genesis 1:3

The Universe is made of stories, not atoms. ~Muriel Rukeyser

 


Are words strong enough to carry the soul of a human being? To hold it up to the light? To allow us to see it, to know it, to become entangled with what resides inside? Words are all that I have.

I played him Tom Petty, placing earphones on my belly. He danced.
I read him my story. Every chapter that led me to him.
The day I heard his heartbeat was the day I started believing in fate and karma and destiny. 

On the day he was born, he stopped a blizzard and the sun shone as it must have on that first day. The day after the big bang. The explosion of carbon into the universe that gives us the right to say that we are made of stars.

In the nursery they nicknamed him peanut. A tiny little thing all curled up like he was trying to fit himself into a shell. We could not sleep. We didn't want to miss a single second of this journey. We stayed up and held him all night. We sang and we read and we stood in awe of every little toe and every magnificent yawn. Everything that had to materialize to bring us to this event in space and time. All the mutations and contemplations, the coincidences and occurrences. Love manifesting itself in the form of a peanut.

 I watched him like a hawk. His breath became my breathe. His heartbeat, my obsession. I refused to put him down and then panicked when he was unable to crawl. Every new noise necessitated a call to the doctor and every time he cried, I joined in. We went for a walk everyday. For the first time in my 16 years I was seeing the world in its pure and simplest form, undiluted by preconceptions or biases. To know a tree is to see it through the eyes of an infant. Everything became an expression of the eternal.

When he was 9 months old, he became ill. I was terrified. The doctor scorned me like a child. It was just a cold he said. But I knew that something was wrong. Animals can always sense the looming approach of chaos. That night I dreamt of the ocean. I sat cross legged in a tide-pool. The waves sauntering to and fro, covering me in Venetian blue. I was playing with a starfish. Feeling its suction cups against my hand. When it attached itself to me, I became a starfish too. I did not see the water coming to take me. I was dragged under. I lost track of my starfish. Oxygen vanished, I inhaled salt. I couldn't tell where I ended and the water began. I awoke, gasping. He was lying next to me, lips like sapphires, struggling to get air into his lungs. I wrapped him in a blanket the color of sky, clutched him to my chest, and ran to the hospital.

His first word was 'Baba'. It is Arabic for Father.

He got into the refrigerator and smashed every single egg onto our carpeted kitchen floor. Then came the chocolate syrup, the cream pie, and the butter. He was so proud. His first work of art. He flushed everything he could down the toilet, giggling as it swirled out of sight; keys, watches, jewelry, toys...He was flabbergasted at his ability to make things disappear.

He couldn't sit still. Life was too abundant . He couldn't stop screaming. Life was too electrifying.

He possessed an ardent love for the sound of ripping paper. Books were his favorite. By his 1st birthday, every book in the house had evolved into a new story. Stories of our own making. We filled those missing pages with our lives.

 Sometimes life imitates art far more than art imitates life


Then he lay down close by and whispered with a smile, " I love you right up to the moon - and back." ~Guess How Much I Love You 


When he played in the ocean he filled his pockets with agates. Soon, with pockets bulging, all his efforts would become focused on holding his sodden pants against his tiny frame. He would grab the Gaia's skin. Handfuls of minerals and gases. Countless life giving organisms. And pile it atop his head. He spent a lot of time engaging in activities, in practices, that furthered gravity's purpose. Fixing himself firmly to the ground. If it wasn't rocks in his pockets it was acorns. If not acorns it was garbage. Precious treasures disguised as trash along the side of the road. To him, everything held meaning. Every object was accompanied by an ethereal twin. He would have made the early Greek philosophers very proud. 

I hold an image in my mind. His pants are falling to his ankles, the waves on his tail. He is running towards me, arms outstretched. He is laughing. 

In the first grade he went on a field trip to a farm. An innocent red barn. Feed the goats, milk the cow, live in a time far existed from now. But it was there he uncovered the ugly truth, humanities separation of spirit and food. Unable to pull asunder Plato's two parts and betrayed by a system without any heart.

He never ate an animal again.

He berated a boy in his class for using a hole punch on a leaf. 

He despises people for destroying the Earth. He tells me that he can feel it suffering. It's too much.Show and tell turns into lectures on pollution and recycling. He spends his birthday at a mink farm protesting the killing of animals for their fur. He refuses to cut his hair, his nails.The neighbor boy steps on a snail and, as fire rages in his eyes, he tells me he hates him. After the rain, he runs outside to rescue the snails from the immoral feet of  human boys. He holds them in his hands with the same tenderness as I held him. Everything holds meaning. 

We lie in the grass together, heads touching, making pictures out of clouds. 


"Whenever you feel lonely and need a little loving from home, just press your hand to your cheek and think, 'Mommy loves me. Mommy loves me'". ~The Kissing Hand

He wants to be a superhero, He knows everyone of them by name. He knows their powers and their stories. He knows their struggles and their triumphs. If he could become one, his power would be the ability to make his brain hold still, to build walls around it like a fortress.

 He can't do homework. He holds his hands to the sides of his head, tears dripping on his Batman shirt, trying to keep the world at bay. He says that it feels like the world is screaming at him. He can hear the enthusiastic conversations taking place amongst the birds. Can he make out what they're saying? He can see the sunlight dancing around the room, finding a new partner with each object it touches. Is light a living thing? He can feel his weight against the Earth. How secure is his place on it? The tag of his shirt, the one that I forgot to cut out, is attacking the back of his neck. His nose gathers the smells that have clung to his skin; play-doh, cut grass and chlorine. Does grass feel pain? If he thinks about it hard enough, can he make his play-doh dinosaur come to life? A superhero could.

Every morning, his face still awash with dreams, rubbing the last of them away with a swipe of his hand, flexing his beanpole shaped arms with everything in him,"Mommy, have they gotten bigger?! Am I fuerte?!" Of course they have. Of course you are. He runs off to climb the highest thing he can find. The blanket that he had me tie around his neck, his cape, soaring behind him. He's off to his job. He fixes doors, like his dad.

We played Pokémon everyday that summer. He cried every time he lost.

 I walk by the stairs and find that he has put himself in timeout. Quivering chin tilted to chest. Watery brown eyes focused on tightly clasped hands. His posture dripping with disappointment. Just like a superhero, he has a very strong sense of what is right and what is wrong. He can't help but to tell the truth.

He refuses to take his cape off.

In first grade he's asked to write a story about a real life hero. He writes it about his dad. He tells me that when he grows up and gets big, he will marry me.



 "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be." ~Love You Forever

His hair grows long. he tells me that he hates material things. He loathes money. He wishes that he never had to buy anything ever again. I'm afraid that he's growing up too fast. That his soul is too old for the rest of him. It's bursting forth. Reaching for enlightenment. it's left him open, exposed. He's four feet tall. A Buddha in a boys body.

We can't watch the news. It lifts him up and places him at the heart of human suffering. 

He's kneeling beside his bed. Bumper, his beloved stuffed companion, held steadfastly in his grasp. He's praying. Praying for the child that was kidnapped. Worried that she doesn't have her Bumper, that she's scared and doesn't have her mom to tuck her in. He's praying for the sick. The homeless. He's praying that the war, just a word to him, will not come to pass. I can feel the quakes. See the fissures. His fragile foundation, built atop a world that does not deserve him, is coming loose.

His best friend moves away. We're not allowed to say his name.

He gives all of his allowance to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. He marches for miles through the streets of Salt Lake City protesting the use of child soldiers in Uganda. He tells everyone that, as a child himself, he feels the need to support other children. I notice that toys are disappearing. I ask him if he happens to know where they might be wondering off to. He informs me that he's been giving them away to his friends, friends that have less toys than he does. I beg him to stop. And then I feel ashamed because I know that he's a better person than I am.

We mount our bikes and embark on grand adventures. He documents his world with a camera.

He doesn't understand why boys want to play war games, why they want to hurt one another. He says that they make him feel sad. He decides that he wants to be a girl. He wants to write and draw. To build instead of destroy. To cry when it comes and hug when in need. He has come to view boys as disheartening enigmas. All his friends are girls. He is adored. He becomes a God among mortals. 

At parent teacher conference I am told of his heroics. I'm also told that he can't sit still and he won't shut up. If he is not jumping up and down while yelling out everything he knows about a certain subject, he may be adamantly standing up for an underdog. He might also be staring at a butterfly and tracing its flight pattern in his mind, instead of working on an assignment. At lunch, he can be found sitting next to the kid who had previously been sitting alone. Or he may be using the tables as lilly pads.

I feel unworthy to be his mother.


 And the boy loved the tree...very much. And the tree was happy. ~The Giving Tree





We taped ourselves singing to one another. You can hear the river humming along with us. Its tune is much faster than ours. I can't make it slow down. 
.









I have my preconceptions.

When I see you, I don't.
I see myself, graphed and stitched to you.
I see me, trying to be you.
I will not see you.

But you will not see me.
We share our selfish eyes.
In yours, I am not me. And can't be.
In yours, I am you. Graphed and stitched.
You will try to be me. And I you.

I have my preconceptions,
And they are me.

~Olive



He makes a wish on every dandelion he sees.

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