The rawness in my heart

Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again.
~Rosa Parks

I call myself an optimist. It's something I most adequately believe about myself, despite my own strong dramas and emotional rides occasionally, and I have thought it for many years. When a friend is down, I feel that I always have it in me to pick them up. And even moreso now, my life is so sweet these days. My forest home in the pines is amazing. I don't work too hard but I don't work too little. Life is filled with music, art, wonderful friends and family and beautiful lakes and rivers for to swim in. Money matters little, just enough to eat delicious meals, buy good music, know what to cook next, and pay the bills. My family is crazy and awesome, my four younger siblings, all of us still in the young but adult phase of our life, all of us trying to be experts at living richly in the face of semi-poverty, all of us promoters of love. The hardest thing that happened to me this year was my own lack of self courage and confidence at times, a couple bad shows, and an EXTREMELY long winter. Other than that, my life is sort of a simplicity cake. I am a pretty much spoiled, sometimes bratty, but hopefully SOMETIMES wise child of the universe. If I wanted more THINGS in my life... like a flat screen TV or a fancy laptop or shirts that cost even 25 dollars, I might not think of myself as "spoiled". But that would just be the good ol' American consumerist monster at work in my brain. Instead, I am spoiled by simplicity and luck (and whitey-white privelege) and in finding beautiful clothes at thrift stores, my stupid Iphone, Pony Espresso (the nearest cafe) having actually good espresso, a giant cassette tape collection, a husband that gets every new album that comes out that we want on vinyl, the words of Edward Abbey, a thousand different awe-inspiring artist friends whom all love nature as much as I, the sound of the stellar bluejay's screeching cry, the tweeps of squirrels around our house, the sight of foxes carrying food in their mouths weekly, my two sweet children pets- Grabby and Owl the cats, delicious fresh food that my husbie Art can whip up into a Yumminess Delight in minutes, a turquoise lake just five minutes away, a father I can call at 3 in the morning if I get scared...............and the list goes on.

But this week, despite how silly and small it may sound to anyone else, I went through a small tragedy in my heart, and the hole there just doesn't want to shrivel up. I lost a silent and tiny friend, a giant-eyed but blind, wiggling, funny, perfect little goldfish whom I called the Googler.

How he made his way so deeply into my heart is beyond me. Frankly, I didn't even know it had happened, I could never have predicted that when he died I would be so upset. But his death was as though someone took a strong sweet healthy root in my chest and ripped it out with both hands. Perhaps it was the way he died. It was pretty much my fault.

Two other goldfish, whom I have had for over 3 years, whom I moved from their 18 month home in a pond in our old house to a 30 gallon tank, preceded Googler in death. They all looked the same so they never had names, but I did love them too. One of them had gotten a dreaded sickness, some kind of horrible bacteria or something, and I was treating the tank for that sickness. During the whole time, Googler seemed happy as a lark, still eating, still almost playing with me when I would come over to the tank, and the disease did not affect him. As I treated the tank I was unaware that the ammonia levels in the tank had become quite deadly, even though I did a major water change and was following instructions on the medication to a T. And I was testing for ammonia, I was just testing with a major mistake in my procedure. I know I did everything I could, but what gets me is that it wasn't the disease that killed my telescope eyed love, it was MY HUMAN ERROR. I found out just a few hours AFTER his death that I wasn't leaving the test vial for ammonia filled with liquid for long enough. When you test for ammonia you are supposed to wait 5 MINUTES after putting the test drops in the water, and somehow, MY EYES HAD SKIPPED OVER THIS CRUCIAL PART OF THE INSTRUCTIONS, so I thought the ammonia levels were ZERO. Googler died within 36 hours or so- and to my complete confusion- because HE, unlike the others, was still healthy looking and golden. He went from eating and dashing about happily to sitting at the bottom of the tank gasping heavily until the time came that his soul left his tiny wet body. Googler didn't die of a disease, he died from ammonia poisoning. And it was MY FAULT.

Again, I know it may sound so small and so silly, just one goldfish... but the well in my heart is so deep. Perhaps it was because he had a handicap and I had to care for attentively and specially. At first for a while I thought he was just a normal goldfish. But then a few months after getting him it came to my attention that he looked very very thin, for a goldfish. I realized he wasn't getting food when I fed the others. And so I began to feed him specially, dropping the tiny pellets right above his head, and making sure he got 2 or 3 pellets. When he got one, he would sink a few inches and just sit in the water looking full and digesting, and I always would watch him satisfied with my caretaking job well done. It didn't take long for his tiny belly to grow, for him to look healthy and happy again. And somehow he knew me. He knew when I would come over to the tank that it was me, that I fed him and loved him. He would swim up to the right-most corner of the tank whenever I got near but not if it was someone else. When I was away I would always instruct the people that came to watch my pets, Mom and Em and Heather, to feed him specially as well, and one of those times Emily told me that Googler was most likely blind. I payed closer attention after that, and though I believe he may not have been COMPLETELY blind, he definitely couldn't see more than just shadows or blurs.......Perhaps it was all this watching and feeding and adoring of his sweet squiggly funny bodyshape that planted that seed of love in my heart.

Romantic love is one thing. But over the last few years I have realized that true love is FAR FAR brighter and bigger and wonderfuller and stranger than JUST romantic love. As a 20 year old, I would never have known it. But love is a thing that goes out to and comes back from a certain direction and circles through you, even if it is only in your own heart and mind. It can come from directions as small as a goldfish or from directions as majestic and nameless as a mountain or a desert sky, and there is not even one speck of meanness involved in it's stuff. It is just like what the friends who stood with us on our wedding day said.

"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

And another quote from one of my favorite books in the world. I used to have this written on a piece of paper that I carried in my wallet for years. I may write it down again now.

'The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose. "


Googler is the goldfish on the right in the picture at the top of this entry......the other one didn't make it more than a couple weeks when we first got him, as can be typical when getting fish. Googler made it a few long months swimming deep into the cavity of love that is my heart. I hope to meet him again one day.

And here he is with his own reflection in the glass.




As soon as forever is through, I'll be over you.
~Toto