Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 3 Comments

Crowning

It’s 5:28am and today marks Jeb’s official eighth birthday. His excitement will rouse him from bed early, I’m sure, which means there’s not much time here for me to wax poetic on that auspicious day eight years ago.

Besides, I’ve written about it before. Various versions, that is, as there are always more than one perspective on an event, especially one like birth.

Last year produced two accounts. “At the Threshold” (which my dad said was a bit hard to read) and “Getting the Darkness” which was a combination of heartbreak and spiritual crisis.

Ok, ok. So where’s the joy? The story of the miracle of birth? It’s actually all part of the tale, just complexly woven in, like most things in life. But yes, my journey through motherhood, beginning on the day the pregnancy test strip went pink, has not been all white in a world of b and w. There have been shadows of blackness. Definite greys.

But there, too, have been crowning moments of exhalation.

Playing with the verb (the majority of my birth experience was with Jeb’s head just short of crowning but not fully coming out into the world) I thought I’d gift both Jeb and myself with an honorary crown today. Acknowledgement of the Divine Yoga we experienced together on December 5, 2003. That we lived. And continue to live this life together. Learning, growing, loving through all of the whites and blacks and greys of in-between.

We are royal in our efforts. Regal in our path as mother and son in a vast world of shadowed doorways and opening skies.

courtesy of Jeb ~ all rights reserved

This morning I come across this featured photo. Taken by Jeb when he was six years old. I love his photographs because I get to see the world through his eyes.

The location, Polihale. Roughly translated as “the house of the dead”, where it is said that all human souls make a final pass through the earth plane before going on to the spirit world.

With a theme of the full spectrum of black to white, it seems fitting to include a rainbow. A burst of color and sunlight among the shadows in the place where life meets death. To feature the house of the dead on my son’s birthday. Mix all of these symbols and metaphors into one big potpourri of Everything.

This is Life, I think. All of it.

I’m still learning.
We are still living.
Maybe we are all still being born.
Crowning.

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer

Potpourri

Jessica Dofflemyer ~ all rights reserved

I sleep in past nine
waking just in time
to see an insect
drown in mango juice

I guess I moved too slowly
in the kitchen
I try
to let myself
embody
rest
a concept
to feel
the way I move my hands
pour water in the glass

last night under moonlight
I spoke to the writer
about submissions
how I get to submit
to detachment
how we both got ours in
just at the deadline

I come home from starlight
fire smoke and red wine
with an armload of harvest
from Mary’s garden
chard and kale and basil
three ripening papayas

this morning
by the basin
marigold and gardenia
hold velvet treasure
in their petals
so unrelated
they are perfectly paired
in Saturday sunlight

I’m a potpourri
just settling
mango juice and coffee beans
midnight work projects
and art submissions
swim lessons and poetry
womanhood and mothering
a body in motion
this morning
rest

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 5 Comments

Getting the Darkness

It’s one of those mornings.  When you’ve already brewed a second cup of coffee and the sky is clouded over.  You are not sad, because you like rainy weather.

You are not melancholy.  You aren’t crafting a story to be accompanied by violins.  You are curiosity embodied as thoughts stream in about all those epic moments someone let you down.

Not just unreturned phone calls or a rain check on a dinner date.  No, more like when your boyfriend proposed marriage only to renege after you started talking about the ceremony.  Or that note, hand delivered by a local villager in India, penned by your travel companions, telling you that they’d left town and are sorry they couldn’t find you to say goodbye.  How about the time your water broke at 1am and when you called the midwife she told you she was on another island and wouldn’t be able to reach you for at least 6 hours?

You think about how you spend your life setting up everything so as to depend on no one.  Maybe Buddhists would say this is an illusion, since we are all interdependent in this connected universe.  Still, it seems that you have worked a lifetime at being self-sufficient.  Taking any extra someone offers as a bonus, not expectation.

Yet every once in a while, in those key moments, when a sweeping gesture has been extended, you’ve reached out your hand to trust.  Let go to rely that someone’s words, their invitation, their very presence would be there to meet you.

And there have been those times when you grasped for that extended hand and found it had been retracted.  That sinking feeling of falling.  The body attached to the withdrawn hand becomes smaller as you plunge further, left to hold your own.

Maybe they meant no harm, they simply could not be what they thought they could.  You may understand this as you plummet.  But the fact is, you thought you had a hand so you didn’t bring a rope and now you’re falling swiftly with no back up.

This was the case when giving birth to your son at home without a midwife – but that’s a long story.

So long of a story that it becomes a piece that evolves at a recent writing workshop.  The crux of the event wasn’t the fact that it took forever to wake your son’s father once contractions started.  Or even that your midwife was unavailable for the first half of your labor.  It was that after hours of pushing, your son’s head engaged but not emerging, you were instructed to call upon god, “…or whatever you need to call upon to birth this baby.”

And that when you did call upon every saint and deity you’d ever come to commune with in this life, not a single one of them were there to meet you.  This was quite disturbing.

At the workshop you share your rough draft with one of the writers (a Buddhist teacher who had once been blind and then regained sight) expressing your confusion and dejection at having called upon god and only experienced darkness.  For the seven years since your son’s birth you’d been grappling with the fact that you had somehow birthed wrong.  You had prayed wrong.  God had not come to you when you counted on it most.

The teacher says to you with awe, “You got the darkness?!”

“Yes, that’s all there was.  Just nothing.”

“Oh, not everyone gets the darkness.  That’s a gift.”

courtesy of The Chopra Center

She explains the story of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree.  How he sat and waited for enlightenment, determined not to move until he finally knew god.  He waited and waited, to no avail.  He became utterly discouraged.  He broke down.  He gave up.  That’s when the darkness came.  So black, so vacant, that despite all will, he simply surrendered.  And as the story goes, it was in this moment of the enveloping nothingness that he became enlightened.

In your little parable, your child did eventually reach your arms in healthy perfection.  Though you were overwhelmed with the fragility of life and death, you did not achieve enlightenment.

Perhaps each time someone has let you down they are offering a gift.  One more chance to free-fall unexpectedly.  One more time to feel the annihilating sense of fear and doubt.  One more chance to let go completely.

Perhaps they are an unwitting messenger, bestowing some hidden opportunity to know Grace deeply.  Beckoning you to rest into the nothing.