Grief

My mom & Poppy lost their beloved cat Calvin Tuesday night. This is for them.

We all know how this story ends, yet death, as inevitable as we try to forget it is, surprises the shit out of us when it takes someone we love.

A pet.
A parent.
A sibling.
A close friend.

Pain is pain—because love is love, is love, is love, is love, is love, is love. (To quote Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant sonnet.)

But I believe that the risk of a broken heart is far outweighed by the innumerable rewards and blessings that love bestows.

Maybe you needed to hear this today. I did.

Carry on,
xox

“Grief; it covers you with the weight of a wet blanket and smothers all other emotions, most especially joy”

~J. Bertolus

Here I sit, internally pummeled by the ebb and flow of grief.

It was just a dog, I tell myself, as the terribly underutilized rational part of my brain gets its chance to craft a reason and attempt to soothe me.

Doesn’t matter, moans my heart.

I loved her with all I had. I loved her without boundaries, deeper and wider and bigger than I could have ever thought possible.
She was my baby –– That thought just makes me cry longer and louder.

The rational brain, not used to seeing me like this, ups it’s game, taking a different tack—
You knew how this story would end, it reasons. Everybody dies, that’s the exit strategy we all agreed upon.

You’re right, I answer begrudgingly.

She was old and sick and you could sense the end was near… That’s funny, my rational brain doesn’t usually acknowledge intuition. It was clearly pulling out all the stops.

So why the sadness and the tears? It continued. The question actually had an air of sincerity –– my brain searching, seeking a viable answer.

Love…it’s about love. When you love someone or something with ALL your heart and soul…well, the pain of its loss is equal in measure.

I could feel it contemplating, reasoning –– love sounded dangerous.

Then why love at all? When you know it will end this way, with so much pain –– why risk it?

How do I explain?  Deep breath.

Because without that love, without opening your heart that much, each time more, then more, then more again –– life is colorless, black and white, and in my opinion not worth living. The reward is worth the risk.

So…I’ll cry and I’ll feel bad for a while and time will carry me through this; and when I’m on the other side of grief I won’t forget her, I could never do that. It will just start to hurt a little less each day until her memory makes me…smile.

Then I will have forgotten the pain enough to love without borders, ignoring all reason.

All the while knowing how this ends…

xox

This is a post from early last year when we lost our beloved ten-year-old dog, Querida.
She died on her own terms, instantly in the back of my husband’s truck after a rousing game of Frisbee. She had been sick with a brain tumor, but it was still a shock to find her lifeless after a twenty-minute drive home.

But it’s always that way, isn’t it? We all know how this story ends, yet death, as inevitable as we try to forget it is, surprises the shit out of us when it takes someone we love.

A pet.
A parent.
A sibling.
A close friend.

Pain is pain—because love is love, is love, is love, is love, is love, is love. (To quote Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant sonnet.)

But I believe that the risk of a broken heart is far outweighed by the innumerable rewards and blessings that love bestows.

Maybe you needed to hear this today. I did.

Carry on,

xox

“Grief; it covers you with the weight of a wet blanket and smothers all other emotions, most especially joy”

~J. Bertolus

Here I sit, internally pummeled by the ebb and flow of grief.

It was just a dog, I tell myself, as the terribly underutilized rational part of my brain gets its chance to craft a reason and attempt to soothe me.

Doesn’t matter, moans my heart.

I loved her with all I had. I loved her without boundaries, deeper and wider and bigger than I could have ever thought possible.
She was my baby –– That thought just makes me cry longer and louder.

The rational brain, not used to seeing me like this, ups it’s game, taking a different tack—
You knew how this story would end, it reasons. Everybody dies, that’s the exit strategy we all agreed upon.

You’re right, I answer begrudgingly.

She was old and sick and you could sense the end was near… That’s funny, my rational brain doesn’t usually acknowledge intuition. It was clearly pulling out all the stops.

So why the sadness and the tears? It continued. The question actually had an air of sincerity –– my brain searching, seeking a viable answer.

Love…it’s about love. When you love someone or something with ALL your heart and soul…well, the pain of its loss is equal in measure.

I could feel it contemplating, reasoning –– love sounded dangerous.

Then why love at all? When you know it will end this way, with so much pain –– why risk it?

How do I explain?  Deep breath.

Because without that love, without opening your heart that much, each time more, then more, then more again –– life is colorless, black and white, and in my opinion not worth living. The reward is worth the risk.

So…I’ll cry and I’ll feel bad for a while and time will carry me through this; and when I’m on the other side of grief I won’t forget her, I could never do that. It will just start to hurt a little less each day until her memory makes me…smile.

Then I will have forgotten the pain enough to love without borders, ignoring all reason.

All the while knowing how this ends…

xox

After reading my post the other day about our majestic ash tree,
http://www.theobserversvoice.com/2016/05/earthquakes-rings-and-singing-ash-trees/
many of you asked me to reprise this essay about that very same tree—and his pal JAWT—who we murdered.
And just so you know, a year later finds Ash thriving as is our garden with all of the newly available sunshine (my bougainvillea has never looked more beautiful).
Yet…RIP, ‘Just A Weed Tree’, know that you are missed.
Carry on,
xox

We are all connected.
And not just by the proximity and outreach that is available to us via our devices.

It goes way beyond that.

I believe that everything is alive and has a spirit.

There is another web active in our lives besides that World Wide one. It is a web of life, of energy that connects everything and everyone on this earth.

We are all interconnected and anything that suggests the belief that we are separate is an illusion.

Nature is the supreme example of this web of interconnection. The bees need the flowers. The flowers need the bees to bloom.

And I fucked up and cut down a tree in our front yard, apparently upsetting the delicate balance of nature throughout the world, or at least Los Angeles, California.

We are the custodians of a one hundred and fifty-year-old ash tree. And he is our giant, grounded guardian.

Of that I am sure.

I remember a psychic predicting that I would live in a tree house one day, (which at the time seemed absurd), but when I purchased this house a few years later my friends all remarked “I see you got a little house with your tree.”

It is massive, one of the largest trees in Studio City and we are so blessed to live under its majestic canopy, feeling its energy, enjoying its shade.

On the curb, just adjacent to Ash (we’ll call him Ash) was a nondescript tree-thingy.
The arborist that came to the house ten years ago during our remodel educated us, telling us all about Ash, and when asked he informed me that the other tree wasn’t any species that he was familiar with.

“It’s just a weed that someone let grow into a tree a long time ago” he told us.

Just A Weed Tree was a lot of trouble.
His canopy was dense and…ugly, even after the annual haircut we gave him, not light and airy like Ash’s.
He cast too much shade for anything to flourish and the birds loved to congregate inside that dense, dark green foliage and shit all over our cars.

He had the bad attitude of an overgrown weed. He was pushy. And greedy, lifting the sidewalk, and getting into our pipes on a regular basis.

Just A Weed Tree always appeared to be crowding Ash, vying for light; and in the severe drought that we’ve found ourselves under, I feared he was chugalugging at the water table—and I knew Ash was too polite to say anything.

I LOVE trees, I do, ask anyone. I absolutely adore Ash, but I was not fond of JAWT.
He wasn’t a tree. He was a garden variety pest.

So this past Saturday our gardener cut him down. It took two guys and they were fast and thorough, even grinding the stump.

We both forgot that it was happening that day so when we got home the whole look and energy of the front yard had changed dramatically.

There was no sign that Just A Weed Tree had ever been there. But you could feel a HUGE void.
That weed had a presence.

FUCK.

We both stood at the curb, “Wow” was all we could say.

Now you could really see the front our house, there was the added sunlight in our yard that I had craved (for the plants) and with JAWT gone you could fully grasp the wonder of Ash.

“It looks like they trimmed the big tree too,” my husband remarked as I went around picking up leaves still on their branches.
It appeared as if they had been cleanly cut and they were EVERYWHERE.

Except they hadn’t been cut. They had been dropped.
I’d never seen anything like it. They covered the entire front yard, the driveway and even parts of the roof. In the fall, Ash drops single, dead, brown leaves, never bright green leaves still on their small branches.
What was up?

My arms were full, carrying the leaves to piles I had made on the driveway
And it suddenly occurred to me: Ash was showing his shock and disapproval at the death of his friend Just A Weed Tree.

I walked over to him, closed my eyes and rested my hand on the rough bark of his truck—and I could feel his stress and despair.

Oh Fuck.

First of all, I had always felt Ash was a female. Wrong. He has a very pronounced masculine energy.
And he was pissed. And under extreme stress.
Apparently the high pitched whine of a chainsaw has the same visceral effect on trees as a dental drill has on humans (yeah, okay, got it) plus he had known JAWT for over sixty years since he was just a tiny little weed that had somehow been spared. They were buddies.

I could feel his despair and it felt awful. I should have known better. Trees do have feelings and I had callously overlooked that fact.

We had basically murdered his friend right in front of him.

FUCK.

We are all interconnected, residents of this web of life and I needed Ash to know that I could feel his anguish, so I stood with both hands and my forehead on his trunk, apologizing and conveying our sincerest condolences for the loss of JAWT. I also explained the water situation and the fact that his health and stability were of the utmost importance to us. Then I played to his vanity telling him over and over how gorgeous (handsome) we think he is.
“You Mister, are the star of this neighborhood.” I think he was flattered.

Raphael watched from a distance, he could sense what was going on, and he added his sympathies from there. “I hope he’ll be okay,” he said with genuine concern, gazing at the piles of leaves.

“Now that he understands and knows how sorry we are—he’ll be fine.” I replied.

And he is. After our little talk…he never dropped another leaf.

Carry on,
xox

Oh, I know (Jim), you don’t like reprises! Don’t get your panties in a bunch, maybe you missed this one and besides, a couple of readers requested it in lieu of the surprising exits of some beloved public figures this past week.

“It feels like a gut-punch,” one of my friends wrote me in a text on Monday. And it did.
Why do you suppose that is?

I guess it’s because neither Bowie nor Alan Rickman gave us any warning— no pale and sickly paparazzi photos or death vigil countdown after a prolonged hospitalization.

That sucks AND good for them!

My friend and fellow blogger Angie and I were writing back and forth about that yesterday. What a wonderful example they left us of having a conscious death. Creating all the way up until the end.

Happy, Healthy, Dead.

It may leave the rest of us reeling a bit but, come on, isn’t that the way we all want to go?

Happy, Healthy, Dead.

That is the clarion cry of the spiritual community I belong to. The one that lost Wayne Dyer this weekend. By the way, he isn’t really lost…but that’s another story.

I can’t remember where and when I heard it first, but it made one hell of an impression: happy, healthy, dead.

Irreverent I know, but just irreverent enough for me to embrace it wholeheartedly.
A new idea about the transition of death and how you want to leave this earth. The day you depart you want to be healthy, happy, dead. Lights out. Just like that. In a chair in front of the computer (right after you hit “send” on the best thing you’ve ever written), in your sleep (hopefully in clean pajamas, or at least pants), or sitting at a stoplight singing to your favorite song on the radio (at the end of an amazing road trip).

Boom. Gone. Sayonara. That’s that!

And that’s exactly what he did.

Transition. Why is it so fucking hard so goddamn always?

September is a month full of transition. Fall begins, the days get shorter, the nights get cooler (in theory), my big, fat, flip-flop feet have to squeeze themselves into shoes; and as the summer begins to wind down we all get a little bit squirrelly.

School starts. The nest empties. The time changes back to whatever the hell it was in May, and fucking Christmas decorations show up in the stores.

I like to say I’m pretty good at transition. But I also like to say other things that I know deep down aren’t completely true. Like: I’ll only take a couple of bites of your dessert or female politicians don’t lie.

I’ve discovered I’m okay with transitions as long as they look, feel, and taste EXACTLY like what just ended.

When I move, the joke is that my new place will be unpacked, with pictures hung, and fully decorated within twenty-four hours of receiving the keys. Everything will be in its place and it’ll look as if I’ve lived there for a decade. I even break down the boxes and drive around until I find a back alley dumpster. Anything to keep the place from looking chaotic and temporary. THAT my dear friends is not an example of someone who has a facility for change.

It is the white-knuckled fingers of control around the neck of my anxiety.

Why can’t transition be easy? The next logical step? The next great adventure? And since it’s a necessary part of life—why can’t we just chill?

How come we can’t remember what it felt like to graduate? To get our first job? To fall in love that very first time? Those were all transitions. Big ones. Ones that formed us. And they were pivotal in the unfolding of our life’s narrative; they were uncharted territory; fresh, new, and exciting!

Have you got an empty nest? Fill it with all the things you’ve been putting off for…Oh, I don’t know, almost twenty years!
Listen, now you get to look forward to college graduations, foreign travel, potential new family members, and maybe, eventually, the patter of little feet that go home when you’re tired of them.

I love me some summer and dread its ending, but then I remember that I also love fires in fireplaces, the smell of burning leaves, cozy sweaters, hot mint tea and rainy days. So what’s the big deal?

Transition. Happy; healthy; dead. Easy, peasy, Parcheesi.

Excuse me while I go wedge my paddle foot into some sexy black boots.

Carry on,
xox

This would be funny if it weren’t so freaking sad.

Screw you 2016!

In just fourteen days you’ve taken two of our best and left us with…well, Donald Trump and that creepy Burger King with the plastic hair and psychotic smile.

Earlier this week I was shocked and a little pissed at the loss of David Bowie. I walked around the entire day in a fog, almost as if I could feel the creative void he left behind. I was just getting my groove back when this morning I woke up to the news that the delicious Alan Rickman had passed.

Wait. What?
Things have gotten out of hand, this has just got to stop!

Both were sixty-nine years old, which from over here at fifty-seven seems really young and waaaaaayyyy too close. (Uh, oh, now my own mortality chip has been activated), AND they both died from cancer.

Fuck you cancer!

So now we all know what happens—we wait for the third one to go. It’s some kind of weird numerological anomaly that always proves itself to be true: celebrities die in threes.

When Raphael came home from the gym this morning he was met with my sad-sack face which stopped him in his tracks. I’m sure for a second he assumed I was upset over the fact that my ticket had not won us the  1.5 billion dollars (which I was), or simply that I’d finished my coffee—but he asked me what was wrong anyway.

“Alan Rickman died,” I sort of half sobbed.

“The guy from Harry Potter? The guy with the voice?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed with genuine shock. You see, my husband is so bad at remembering names, movies, actors, and anything pop culture that this was like a fifth grader correctly answering a $1000 Jeopardy question about life on our planet before computers. (As he explains it, he doesn’t want to waste the brain space.) Ouch. That always makes me feel like I need Will Smith to put on his sunglasses and flash that light in my face to free me up some brain bandwidth. (See what I did there?)

“Yeah, yeah, he was in Harry Potter. But oh my gawd, what about Love Actually, and Truly, Madly, Deeply* and Die Hard; oh, and we just saw him in A Little Chaos, remember?”

“Not really”.

“Ohhhhhh, I loved him…and now he’ll never know. I always wanted to meet him so I could ask him to record the outgoing message on my phone.” (Sigh) That voice…I can’t even…”, I could feel a lump growing like a goiter in my throat.

“Oh man, you’ve had a rough week. All your favorites.”
Awwwww, that was nice, some real sympathy. Then he turned on me.

“You know they always go in threes—I hope the third one isn’t Jean-Luc Picard—that would suck.”
He had a slight grin on his face as he ran out of  left the room, “Uh oh, what if he’s six-nine?” he shouted from a safe distance.

Okay, now he was just fucking with me.

I had made a dark secret of mine public knowledge a couple of years back in a speech I made at Raphael’s 60th birthday “roast”— the fact that I had a mad crush on Jean-Luc Picard and had used him as a husband template. Not so much the actor Patrick Stewart, although don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t throw him back. No, more specifically I had the hots for the French, bald, serious, thoughtful, smart, capable, man-who-could-solve-any-problem that the Universe (literally) threw at him and dare I say sexy, Captain of the Starship Enterprise—Jean-Luc Picard.
And I came damn close with Raphael. Except for the Starship, I nailed it.

“Natalie Cole!” I screamed down the hall. “She was the first. Jean-Luc is safe!—Natalie Cooooooole!”

“That was New Years Eve. Doesn’t count. It was still 2015.”

Shit, Game on.

“What about the Motorhead guy?” I was grasping at straws, my brain was scrambling, Google! Google!
Fuck that, “Siri! How old is Patrick Stewart?”

“Motorhead guy was still 2015”.
How did he know this shit? He must have been Googling as fast as his fingers could type. I could hear in his voice that he was trying not to laugh. Jerk.

“Patrick Stewart is seventy-five!” I yelled, filled with genuine relief. “Oh, thank God, he’s safe,” I muttered to myself under my breath, not realizing, because of all of the brain space filled with useless trivia, that that only meant he was six years closer to the pearly gates.

“Why are you yelling? I’m right here,” he said, standing in the doorway wearing only a smirk. (Not really, he was wearing pants, but it makes for a better story.)

All of this to say: Why are all of the great ones dying? Sixty-nine is middle-aged, people play stupid guessing games about who’s died instead of crying, it’s starting to suck being a baby-boomer, death is not the end, and considering who joined the general population this week—Heaven is going to be a blast!

Its been one-hullava week—wanna weigh in?

Carry on,
xox

*”Truly, Madly, Deeply” which came out in 1991, is one of my all-time favorite films and so I went on Amazon to order a DVD so I could watch it this weekend and cry my eyes out—and there was only ONE copy—for $200! WTF?

After years of exhaustive, mind-numbing, soul-crushing research and a lifetime’s supply of tears—I have found this to be true.

Sadness is pretty much at the root of anger. And jealousy. And insecurity. And, and, and…

Are you mad? What are you sad about waaaay underneath all that rage?
What is anger protecting?
What is so raw that you’ll pick a bar-fight in order NOT to look at it.

Hey, listen, don’t kill the messenger!

Tell your bodyguard to back off.

Love you,
Carry on,
xox

I stole this from Liz Gilbert because I LOVE words. The odder the better—the only thing I love more are my husband, my dog…and bacon.

Because, come on! Bacon has no calories, it isn’t bad for us and goddamnit, apparently it cures grief!

BLT.

Mac-n-cheese with bacon.

Swiss bacon burger.

Bacon wrapped hot dogs.

Comfort food.
Yeah, I might know something about that. I ate bacon as a Vegan.
Oh, relax! I also had sex before marriage as a Catholic. Clearly I can’t be trusted to follow the rules—anyway—how did this get to be about me and my questionable boundaries?

This is about BACON.

Enjoy some levity on your Sunday and indulge in some Bacon!
xox

*This post is from a couple of years ago, but it is forever intertwined with our wedding anniversary, so I can never forget. I don’t think we should.
xox

It is ridiculously dark in a hotel room with the black-out drapes closed.

It is a trip over stuff because it’s a strange room; blink, blink, blink for your eyes to adjust; bang your shin and stub your toe, kind of dark.

I experienced all of those things on the way to answer my phone which was shoved in my purse, somewhere under piles of room service napkins, magazines, and assorted other crap.

La la la la la la, my phone chimed its little heart out.

Who is calling me? Everyone knows I’m on my honeymoon and judging from how dark it is, (forgetting the drapes) it MUST be the middle of the night. How rude!

Five minutes earlier the ringing had woken me up, and I had stumbled like a drunken sailor, half asleep in the pitch blackness, to the bathroom. ‘Wrong number‘ I thought, still half asleep as I felt my way like a blindfolded mime, back to bed.
I heard it go to message. Now I was awake.
Hmmmmmmmm…that’s weird.

It started to ring again; this time, I could swear it sounded more insistent.
LA LA LA LAAAAAA!
Curious, I quietly slid out of bed and started moving heaven and earth to find it, only to hear it go to message a second time.

Not even a moment later, as I was finally holding it in my hand, it started to ring again.

At that same instant so did my husband’s phone charging next to him on the nightstand.  Then the hotel room phone on my side of the bed. It became a cacophony of three different rings, each one of them trying desperately at that point to get our attention.

I heard my husband’s voice behind me in the bed, “Shit, this CAN’T be good”. He was suddenly wide awake as he grabbed both the room phone and his cell, putting one to each ear.
“Hello!” he announced tersely into both.

I had just flipped mine open only to listen to my best friend Jen, mumbling and weeping. At the same exact moment, we both lunged for the remote as three different people screamed into our ears “TURN ON THE TV!”

We were two days into enjoying our post wedding coma. Ensconced in a room overlooking the Pacific at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara, still feeling giddy from the excitement of such a magical night.
Exhausted, we had given ourselves a couple of days to decompress before we were to fly to a friend’s party in Chicago and then on to Italy to have a motorcycle honeymoon.
None of those plans would come to pass.

My brand new husband pulled open the drapes with one swipe to reveal bright sunshine; it wasn’t the middle of the night, it was after six in the morning. This must be a movie, I thought, as we both slowly sat on the edge of the bed; watching in stunned silence as the second plane hit the tower.

I think I screamed. I know I screamed. A movie scream.

Everyone we loved was calling; apologizing for bothering us, but wanting us to know.
Because that’s what family does. They share bad news.

Just thirty-six hours before, they had all been loopy from too much champagne and wine, laughing, toasting and celebrating love…now they were crying and asking me, Why?

I couldn’t wrap my brain around what was happening. Everything felt surreal, like a slow motion disaster film.

I certainly didn’t have any answers.

My husband is an architect/builder. He knows about steel and fire and in his most serious Bob The Builder voice he didn’t pose a question or wonder aloud—he made a statement:
“I hope everyone’s out of there, that building’s coming down.”

And right on cue, as he finished that sentence…the first tower fell.

“Shit, shit, shit!” he yelled, sitting up straight on his knees.
I was screaming and shaking, “No, No, No…Oh MY GOD!”

Peter Jennings’ solemn voice said something to the effect of, “This has turned from an act of terrorism to an act of war.”

Time stopped. The planet shifted, and in my mind, that was the moment it happened. There will always before 9/11 and an after.

It was impossible to look away from the TV and I could not stop crying.

My mom called to tell me that Pam, who is like a big sister to me, and had flown in from San Francisco for the wedding, had to deplane on the tarmac at LAX and run for her life. The pilot had directed them all to run as fast as they could, away from the terminals and the airport.

Really. He told everyone to RUN!

No one knew what was going on, and where the next attack, if there were to be others, was going to take place. Lee and my mom picked her up as she ran east on Century Boulevard with a whole crowd of other panicky and confused thwarted travelers.

Many of the women had ditched their heels along the way, running in bare feet and business attire.

They had no idea where they were going.

How far would they run?

How far was far enough?

Where could you go that day to feel safe? I sure as hell didn’t know.

If you had told me a place—I would have run there with you.

After the second tower collapsed and the news went into that perpetual recap mode, I couldn’t watch another second; so I pulled on some sweats and sunglasses to hide my red swollen eyes and walked like a zombie downstairs to the lobby.

My inner historian/collector had kicked in and I went to see if they had the newspapers in the gift shop without the headline of the event, and the later edition, with it.

The adrenaline of the past few hours had subsided, which had dropped us both into a kind of numb stupor—so we also needed coffee. Bad.

The lobby was a ghost town. Everything was closed. No gift shop, no Starbucks, nothing. There wasn’t a soul in sight…this huge hotel felt deserted.

Back upstairs, I called room service.
It rang for what seemed like an eternity, then the voice that finally answered sounded out of breath and off of hotel protocol. She didn’t say Hello, Mrs. Bertolus, (which I was loving by the way), like they had been doing for the past couple of days.

“Yes? Hello, I mean, room service” she said.

“Um, are you guys open? Is it possible to get a pot of coffee?”

“I’ll try my best, I’m sorry ma’am, but no one has shown up for work this morning.”

“Oh my gosh, I completely understand—it’s just so terrible…”

“Yes ma’am,” she said, “it’s so sad.”
She started to cry, which set me off.

“Don’t worry about the coffee” I sobbed, feeling like an ass. “Just forget it, I’m sorry to bother you.”

“No ma’am, don’t be silly” she had composed herself, now the epitome of professionalism, “Your coffee will be right up Mrs. Bertolus.”

Ten minutes later a young man brought up a pot of coffee and some croissants, and after some caffeine and food, the shaking stopped and I started to feel a little better.

The government had halted all air travel until further notice. Planes were finding a safe place to land and staying put. It was unprecedented and I was relieved.

The absolute LAST thing I wanted to do was get on a plane.
We had a lot of phone calls to make and rescheduling to do.

Against my better judgment we kept our reservations that night for a seaside dinner. The place was beautiful… and depressing as hell. Everyone seemed to just be going through the motions. I sobbed like a three-year-old through the entire dinner, having a hard time forgetting those faces we’d seen all day of the people who were missing.

“How can I enjoy any of this? People lost husbands and fathers, brothers and wives and sisters. So many people died today!” I put my head in my hands, I couldn’t eat.

“How can you not?” my husband whispered, resting his hand on mine.

“Those people would give anything to be here, where we are right now, enjoying life. We don’t join them in death, that’s an even greater waste. We enjoy our lives. Every minute. Every day to the fullest. I think that’s what they would want. That’s what I would want.”

Damn, he’s good.

Just writing these memories makes me cry. It instantly brings me right back.

I think it’s important to tell the story. To never forget what happened.
Everything before 911 feels different, simpler somehow, like as a country we lost our innocence.

It just happens to coincide with my wedding. I can never think of one without the other. I celebrate the ninth of September, and I light a candle on the eleventh.
In my life, they are forever intertwined.

Just like our parents had the Kennedy assassination, this is our generation’s “where were you?” moment.

Do you have a 911 story? Tell us.

much love,
xox

We are all connected.
And not just by the proximity and outreach that is available to us via our devices.

It goes way beyond that.

I believe that everything is alive and has a spirit.

There is another web active in our lives besides that World Wide one. It is a web of life, of energy that connects everything and everyone on this earth.

We are all interconnected and anything that suggests the belief that we are separate is an illusion.

Nature is the supreme example of this web of interconnection. The bees need the flowers. The flowers need the bees to bloom.

And I fucked up and cut down a tree in our front yard, apparently upsetting the delicate balance of nature throughout the world, or at least Los Angeles, California.

We are the custodians of a one hundred and fifty year old ash tree. And he is our giant, grounded guardian.

Of that I am sure.

I remember a psychic predicting that I would live in a tree house one day, (which at the time seemed absurd), but when I purchased this house a few years later my friends all remarked “I see you got a little house with your tree.”

It is massive, one of the largest trees in Studio City and we are so blessed to live under its majestic canopy, feeling its energy, enjoying its shade.

On the curb just adjacent to Ash (we’ll call him Ash) was a nondescript tree-thingy.
The arborist that came to the house ten years ago during our remodel educated us, telling us all about Ash, and when asked he informed me that the other tree wasn’t any species that he was familiar with.

“It’s just a weed that someone let grow into a tree a long time ago” he told us.

Just A Weed Tree was a lot of trouble.
His canopy was dense and…ugly, even after the annual hair cuts we gave him, not light and airy like Ash’s.
He cast too much shade for anything to flourish and the birds loved to congregate inside that dense, dark green foliage and shit all over our cars.

He had the bad attitude of an overgrown weed. He was pushy. And greedy, lifting the sidewalk, and getting into our pipes on a regular basis.

Just A Weed Tree always appeared to be crowding Ash, vying for light; and in the severe drought that we’ve found ourselves under, I feared he was chugalugging at the water table—and I knew Ash was too polite to say anything.

I LOVE trees, I do, ask anyone. I absolutely adore Ash, but I was not fond of JAWT.
He wasn’t a tree. He was a garden variety pest.

So this past Saturday our gardener cut him down. It took two guys and they were fast and thorough, even grinding the stump.

We both forgot that it was happening that day so when we got home the whole look and energy of the front yard had changed dramatically.

There was no sign that Just A Weed Tree had ever been there. But you could feel a HUGE void.
That weed had a presence.

FUCK.

We both stood at the curb, “Wow” was all we could say.

Now you could really see the front our house, there was the added sunlight in our yard that I had craved (for the plants) and with JAWT gone you could fully grasp the wonder of Ash.

“It looks like they trimmed the big tree too,” my husband remarked as I went around picking up leaves still on their branches.
It appeared as if they had been cleanly cut and they were EVERYWHERE.

Except they hadn’t been cut. They had been dropped.
I’d never seen anything like it. They covered the entire front yard, the driveway and even parts of the roof. In the fall Ash drops single, dead, brown leaves, never bright green leaves still on their small branches.
What was up?

My arms were full, carrying the leaves to piles I had made on the driveway
And it suddenly occurred to me: Ash was showing his shock and disapproval at the death of his friend Just A Weed Tree.

I walked over to him, closed my eyes and rested my hand on the rough bark of his truck—and I could feel his stress and despair.

Oh Fuck.

First of all, I had always felt Ash was a female. Wrong. He has a very pronounced masculine energy.
And he was pissed. And under extreme stress.
Apparently the high pitched whine of a chain-saw has the same visceral effect on trees as a dental drill has on humans (yeah, okay, got it) plus he had known JAWT for over sixty years, since he was just a tiny little weed that had somehow been spared. They were buddies.

I could feel his despair and it felt awful. I should have known better. Trees do have feelings and I had callously overlooked that fact.

We had basically murdered his friend right in front of him.

FUCK.

We are all interconnected, residents of this web of life and I needed Ash to know that I could feel his anguish, so I stood with both hands and my forehead on his trunk, apologizing and conveying our sincerest condolences for the loss of JAWT. I also explained the water situation and the fact that his health and stability were of the utmost importance to us. Then I played to his vanity telling him over and over how gorgeous (handsome) we think he is.
“You Mister, are the star of this neighborhood.” I think he was flattered.

Raphael watched from a distance, he could sense what was going on, and he added his sympathies from there. “I hope he’ll be okay,” he said with genuine concern, gazing at the piles of leaves.

“Now that he understands and knows how sorry we are—he’ll be fine.” I replied.

And he is. After our little talk he never dropped another leaf.

Carry on,
xox

“As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you”
-Jon Kabat-Zinn

How did you feel when you read that?
Did you want to reach through the computer and strangle me…or give me a hug?

You know that says a lot about you…but no judgement here, I’ve been there and I totally get it.

If you’re in the thick of it you want to kill me. If you’ve survived you’re more inclined to hug a fellow survivor.

Believe it or not I hate clichés and saccharin sayings that leave that bitter/sweet taste in your mouth.

But you’ve got to agree — if you’re still breathing, well, that’s half the battle… that is unless you have a migraine, then even breathing hurts.

Or unless you’re grieving, in which case you keep sighing not really breathing per say — long mournful sighs, at least that’s what I did.

Or you’re struggling with a broken heart, mind numbing stress, chronic pain, or Spanx that are one size too small. All of those things facilitate short, shallow breathing which doesn’t really count because little or no oxygen gets to your brain and you walk around in a kind of half conscious stupor.

A bit of advice because I’ve experienced all of these: You will regret any decisions you make at this time – so don’t.

Are there more things right with you than wrong in that moment?… that’s debatable.

I could argue this ad nauseam because I’ve had years days where I felt as if breathing wasn’t such a gift, and if you had asked me to compile my lists of things going wrong and the ones going right, — the former would be a mile long and the latter would have one word…breathing…I’m fucking breathing.

But you guys, if you are breathing, which I’m presuming you are, then there’s always tomorrow.

Not to sound too callous here, but if breathing is annoying you go make yourself a sandwich and take a nap — otherwise known as the Universal Reboot.

“Despair — The belief that tomorrow will be just like today.”
~Rob Bell

Ask anyone who’s having their best-day-ever if tomorrow will be exactly the same.

Hell no, I wish, will most likely be their answer.

It’s just the way the world works — so keep breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong.
I swear.

Hey, hands off the neck…

Deep breath…and Carry on,
xox