I feel queasy. A heater warms my calves. The kitchen clock ticks like a battering.

Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1899)

Roses bloom faint yellow on the kitchen table in the gray dawn. How am I even alive? I don’t really know whether I am. Okay, I am. But I’m already fatigued here at the starting point of my day. Up too early, I breathe and feel my body as I sip the warmth. Thoughts from the week fall like gentle snow and sort themselves. This spacious reexamining of my life is my second or third, no 10th favorite thing. Before it: Reading a novel, writing! Dance, eating a good meal, tea with a friend, time with my beloved, making love and lying afterward and dosing in one another’s arms. Time in nature. Playing music. I am a lucky woman blessed. Thank you.

That last paragraph launched in complaints and alighted in devotion.

I must write of the sadness in my bosom, though, if only because avoiding it makes it loom large as a growing elephant in the room. I breathe infinite tenderness for all life.

Last night I dreamt a duck who had one dried-up and barely attached arm made her way to an oval of death on the lawn at our now-demolished family home on 10th street. She laid down and seemed ready to die. I opened an animal healing coning for her and was directed to sit up by her head. Thick black ants began to swarm her body. When my hand passed her beak it opened as if to reach for me, I couldn’t tell if in hunger or thirst or to bite me. My options all seemed difficult. The most compassionate would be to offer her water with a little sugar in it for sustenance. But perhaps it was better to allow her to die? The ants were chewing at her body. Wouldn’t that start to hurt soon? I thought of buying her a giant wading pool and filling it with dichlorinaized water. Overwhelmed, I did nothing until later, when I realized that the sugar water was compassionate, and that compassion cannot hurt a situation. I was partly awake when I changed my mind, solving the riddle by the soft light of morning. She drank and then trusted me and then lived a happy life after that.

I’m trying to just forget about my ex-husband, Steve, and daughter Hannah for the day, which means that’s all I can think about to write about. I acknowledge you. I feel the ache of my meandering heart learning how to both love and let go. With compassion. You see I’ve solved my own riddle.

Perhaps the female duck is the me who mated for life. I could let her die, but I could also nourish her with compassion, meet her soft needs. She can live happily ever after missing a limb. What duck has arms to begin with?

Photo by Pinke on Flikr

Strong and happy, the CU Boulder female basketball star smiles at me from my hometown website. Lately I’ve been launching myself in space while trying to grok the fact that every other human being here on Earth is equally important, rich, valuable, living a unique life of their own. I feel all the billions of us, some waking and taking our waking slow. Others celebrating halfway across the world as evening falls. Some in peril, starving even, while others cry out in ecstasy. Each one precious. How can I live with myself in this world? How does anyone ever live with anything? It’s too much to take in. All I have is my compassion. And I offer it, even if it’s not until after the dream and I wake and write my own ending.