Herbavore
MAY
The wheel of the year is turning as it always had and always will and the arbitrary division that we have named May is once again shimmering on the horizon. My relationship with this month is so intense and that intensity does not fade with the passing of years.
February and May, the months that brought me my sons.
Pregnancy is such an amazing time. All the senses are heightened. You cry easily, laugh easily. Wonder fills you and you feel connected to something much greater than yourself; less ego as you begin the shift from thinking always about yourself to thinking always about someone else first.. And then there is birth--such a primal human experience. Right from the first contraction you are slapped with the biggest hit of existential
alone-ness you have ever experienced. No one can do this but you. No one will feel this pain but you. Surrounded by nurses or midwives or family or out by yourself in a field this is on some level all yours and for now, no one else exists. So you enter into this separation from the oneness of
carrying your baby to the reality that your baby is no longer a part of you but is about to take his first breath as his own self. It is all a bloody, animal, physical experience on the one hand and a transformational, miraculous and spiritual experience at the same time.
So for me the months that held my sons' births are sacred months. I've always been a gardener and I have an intimate relationship with my garden; a relationship built like all good relationships over time, with observation and knowledge that builds and deepens with the years. I know when bulbs are swelling underground, when seeds should be sprouting from last year's scattering, what the gophers have decimated and what the birds have dropped. February, Tyler's month, holds tiny violets and tall elegant calla lilies, camellias and paper white narcissus. Most of the garden is asleep still even though these winters are mild. But Caleb's month, May, is a riot of blooming plants, new green on the tips of everything from the oaks to the honeysuckle. It is lush and alive and overwhelmingly beautiful. There is not a place in the garden that is not alive with bees and hummingbirds and flowers unfurling.
Here comes May again. Glorious month that was glorious before your conception or my conception, glorious before this garden and any other garden, glorious whether or not either of us ever lived or died in it. I've always thought that your birthday contributed in some way to your death--that turning twenty scared you because of where you were in life--and how harshly you judged yourself for it. It's a big year in a young person's mind. It was for me and I assume it was for you. I was just starting to come out of my own cave at twenty; you were going in further. I did not want you to die in that cave. All of May was still happening right outside the entrance. All of who you were when you and I entered into the birth dance as partners, was still evident, still intact, still there for you to use: your courage, your determination, your thirst to be born and get your show on the road.
I try not to dread May, not to dread the arrival of your birthday and all the flood of grief that brings, not to dread the day of your death just three weeks later and all the horror that wells up inevitably. The garden is a savior. There are vines to cut back, weeds to pull, roses and alstomeria to deadhead, beds to clear, seedlings to squeeze in. It's not the garden it was when you were alive. It's overgrown and messy and half wild. The Tibetan prayer flags are only tatters on a string. They make no noise in the wind anymore. Neighbors still ask when I will take them down and I shrug. Probably never, I think. I moved into this house and started this garden one month before you were born. I was heavy with you when I planted the first bulbs, the little saplings, the roses and ferns. They will outlive both of us then. There is a strange comfort in that, one that you used to talk to me about. You said so many things that stay with me. You said we don't matter at all. True. You also said not to miss the chance to love while it was right in front of you. Truer, I think.
So, I do love May. Still. But it is not an innocent and happy love as it once was. It is the kind of love that is so deep that there is room for those huge hideous creatures that swim around in the shadows far from the penetration of the sun's rays. Still, on the surface, sun dancing crazily, shimmering geometry of color and light. Remember how we loved to touch the bottom of the river? Down through the layers of green light to the dark and back up again. My favorite part was the middle--just enough light to make a milky sage color--the knowledge of darkness under you and warm peridot sunlight above.
Think about that river. The river that I dipped you into as an infant, your little legs kicking and wild joy in your face; the river that you splashed in as a toddler in your little blow-up water wings, the river that you flew into from the arc of the rope swing, the river that you kissed your girlfriend in, floating downstream in the little boat, the river that I put some of your ashes into. For now, I am that river. Here before you, here beyond you. Holding onto nothing but carrying everything.
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. I have met the Smartest of brains on Bluelight, and also a strong wave of strait retardation. I'm not going to mention user names. Coxenormous, was actually a name I jokingly made up in highschool. We were playing some trivia game and had to pick a username, so with my Wits I came up with Coxenormous. The class loved it & I kept it & used it for all my accounts except pornhub. It was taken go figure... I'm high on Meth right now so if you want to read all this you can, but it's sorta just rambling. There will be more posted soon
