This weekend, I got a lot of help untwisting my brain.  Friends emailed me, drank tea with me, took me to make collages and meet a greyhound (Gyro’s brindle colors match this picture).  Their kindness generally gave me to understand that my troubles didn’t seem so abnormal to them.  We made up the right things to say, such as the slogan, “Hi!  I’m Snippy.  Get over it.”  I fell asleep while meditating, and decided that a nap must have been just what the mental doctor ordered.

Standing up for the integrity of my own tangled self feels pretty good.  I’m just a lady dressing mannequins as fast as she can, to keep a roof over my head and pay my library fines.  If you are afraid of me, I say welcome to the club.  No one’s more scared than I am of how I might mess up next.

But sometimes the Queen Anne’s Lace gets in the corn and man, it is so beautiful.

“Geez,”  my friend said, “can’t people just give each other a break?”

And that is it, exactly – no fancy practice, no earth shattering news that changes the world one person at a time.  Just this old fashioned way of pointing out compassion is always ours to give, and rarely costs what we think.  I found out yesterday, because I stunned myself and gave Nemesis a break.  In the end, the fact it was Nemisis didn’t matter.  I am the one who benefitted.

And the characters who insist on holding your feet to the fire, when whatever you meant to say or do isn’t what they wanted?  Maybe just be willing.  Give them a break when they need it.  Maybe being willing is enough.

The rain on the roof sounds airy, like wind, and even though all I can see from my worktable are concrete walls and white mannequins, somehow I still know that outside the sky is as dark as twilight instead of as bright as lunch-time.

Rain has always, and will always, grant me permission to be quiet, and sad, which is at least an improvement on having to be happy when you aren’t.

Sunflowers have become another guardian for me, like rain, protecting a precious inner state from the expectant demands of discouragement.  They proclaim the necessity to stop and be full of summer – to be overtaken by breezing and chirping and butterflying, and not wanting anything but to stay outside a little longer, even after Mom has told you it is time to come in.

We all recognize it when we see it – a series of short, horizontal hashmarks, irregularly spaced, graduating vertically up the edge of a doorway.  Most homes have a spot where children have stood, still and tall and hopeful, to answer the question, “Let’s see how tall you are?”  In our apartment, it was the kitchen doorjamb, and it was a competitive event.  We not only wanted to see how tall we were, the constant vexation – how much taller is she than me? – loomed over the proceedings.  I remember how we would turn to look, consulting the wall where my father had written “PAM” in his distinctive all caps hand next to the line a good distance below mine.  Still, as our two heights crept upwards, it became harder to remember which line belonged to which twin, just as the thrill of seeing our feet and inches faded in light of more complicated aspirations.

It occurred to me this morning, what I could use right now is that doorway, with pencil and knife scrapes dividing the increments of change, always forward with time, inevitably growing.  The growth of our bodies comes to an apparent halt, a camouflage of stasis that lulls us into believing we have become what we were meant to be.  For a long, long time, even as the body ages, we resemble ourselves – only plumper, stiffer, grayer.

But inside, in all the invisible places of heart and soul, change accelerates to a break neck speed.  Change drives ahead in ways no one can measure, and I change yet again before I have even caught up to what I last thought was true about me.  It’s that happiness in the flow of becoming different – of growing taller – that I long to feel.  No 6 year old ever says, “Gee, I was I was still only 3 feet 4.”  She always says, “Let’s see if I am taller today.”

The sunflowers at Pope Farm Conservancy are nodding off.  Some of them have done what they came here to do, with seeds forming in the wake of bees and other pollinators.  Many are withering still in bud – stuck in mid-sentence, the thought of liberating tightly curled petals somehow lost or forgotten.  “It’s called farming,”  Mr. Pope explained on the early morning news segment featuring the sunflowers.  Sunflowers are not a sure thing.

As we walked around the ragged field of golden survivors, we were accompanied by a performance of bird and insect chirps, the singers perched in clouds of rudbeckia and bee balm, and of course, Queen Ann’s Lace.  You don’t always get what you came for, but that doesn’t mean nothing is there.  You could just wait and see.   Maybe the songbird who overlooks the field from his twiggy, weedy perch sings again, in syllables pure and clear, cutting the air into someplace eternal and new.

Walking around the sunflower field, I heard people express the thought I was having myself.  “It’s so neat how they turn toward the sun,” a woman said to her friend.  We feel we share something with the sunflower – a yearning to be filled with as much life as we can absorb, pulled like magnets toward a constant star of pleasure, or hope.   Even on overcast days, the sunflower’s heliotropism persists, driving the growing leaves and flower head to follow the arc of the sun as it rises and sets, hidden by clouds.  By dawn, the sunflower faces east once again, anticipating the flash of daybreak on the horizon.  Perhaps this starting over is the most symbolic gesture of all – an act of trust and belief that there is work yet to do, and the day will provide the means to do it, no matter that night is dark.

The sunflowers are a little sparser this year, but no less delectable.  Birds blast out of the golden stubble of last year’s crop, staking their claims to the coming flush of seeds, which the bees labor and bumble upon – tirelessly, painstakingly dragging pollen from one tiny pistil to another across the center of each glowing orb.

The sky is big, and the birds seem somehow freer here, as if abandoning the wary self-consciousness that burdens them in parking lots and city lawns.  This place has belonged to them always, leased from their ancestors, season after season by humans who scraped and turned the earth under the blue, and brought to the surface a feast of seeds and insects as payment in kind.

By process of elimination, maybe I could see the changes coming.  It didn’t seem to me that I wanted too much –  employment enough to pay my way at the doctor, keep fuel in the car, furnish myself with thrift store belongings. Locating my little spot on the Earth at Verona, Wisconsin didn’t look so ambitious as to be unsustainable.   My mind and my heart are so hungry for belonging, and I have tried to feed them, too – sending out friendship wherever I can genuinely give it, finding help taming the hunger where it needs too much.

Still, these qualities and hopes keep slipping further out toward the horizon, an under-current of change like water taking sand with it from around your toes and ankles, as it runs back to depths you cannot see.  Dazzled by hope, you stand there as the tide rises, stranding you in deeper and deeper water –  or at the very least, you get an awful sunburn on your scalp before you notice you are the only one left on the beach.

My friend the writing teacher pointed out to me that I need to be writing, and this made me realize that I had stopped.  Stopped, I imagine, because I can’t see the whole pattern right now, and I mistook that for the purpose of writing – to record the observed.  That can happen sometimes, but it is a side-effect.  The purpose of writing is to observe what hasn’t happened until it is recorded – to tell the pattern from the inside, where there is nothing to see  but silty clouds washing against feet sunk in the mud, not knowing where the waves will crash to next.

I can’t always tell the whole story the way I want, even here.  To some extent, this fact alters the story irrevocably.  Tell, don’t tell – it can be hard to know which path will make the story evaporate into clear morning air, and which will encase it in a nice new pair of cement shoes.  Suffice it to say, when someone offers twice to fill me in on my short-comings, with brutal honesty and nothing but genuine concern for me, it’s a sign things have deteriorated in the relationship.

Anyway, Damon Runyun has already told the story, and I will just add this – my ears remain un-cidered.

“Son,” the old guy says, “no matter how far you travel, or how smart you get, always remember this: Some day, somewhere,” he says, “a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is never broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son,” the old guy says, “do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going to get an ear full of cider.”  Damon Runyun, The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown, 1933

They seem like a kindness, don’t they?  So I am hanging on to them today, as evidence that proves that I am beautiful, too, for no good reason other than I am.