Death in the Wood

Posted on May 25, 2015 by noellevignola Standard 8

Beetles were still picking at the bones. I came upon it returning from, oddly enough, a dead end trail I’d taken. It was maybe a hundred feet from a service road and maybe two hundred from the interstate. It looked to be a coyote. It was such an odd location I suspected a trooper had pulled it off the interstate and tossed it here to decay. Fur was sinking into the earth and the bones had been partially scattered by scavengers.

I stared at it. One day I will seep into the earth, I thought. I sat on a nearby log and thought it a good omen to consider death for a bit. There are many meditations for pondering death, one in particular, in which you allow yourself to see your body decaying into the earth, like this coyote. So I sat and imagined I was sinking into the earth with him. It wasn’t unpleasant. The day was warm, sunny and there was a breeze under the tree. After a time, I found his bones comforting, and with that the idea of mine vanishing into the wind, too. The whole eco-system benefitted from this death. Tree roots to small weeds grew from the carcass. Green iridescent beetles thrived in the marrow and took what they ingested back into the dirt. I’d have photographed him from a lying position, but for me there’s a line in my creative hunger at lying in a bed of beetles. Still the sun would catch the red of a ladybug or the green of a scarab taking off and I felt not the least sorrow or loss. One day I will be part of all of this beauty.

After a time, I felt less and less as if my body was sitting there and more and more as if the spirit of the coyote had taken a seat next to me. So we sat. My spirit and the spirit of the coyote and we watched the beetles take his body back into the earth. It was a lovely spring day.

For Steve and Juan. Lovely to chat about death….

Spring Cleaning

Posted on May 22, 2015 by noellevignola Standard 4

Photo Painting by Noelle

By accident, really
I was pulling out something else
Didn’t realize bits of an older version of me
Were just stuck back there in my brain attic, waiting to fall out

I was looking at one thing, but got another
Imagine my surprise to find that squirrely me
Just gnawing away at the old pine rafters, full of pitch and tar
I was thinking it was all cleaned out, dead and gone, buried like the past

Alas, no
Such is not the case
It’s a damn shame seeing as my boots are new and white
Still, I have a decent broom, and more, a heart that knows it’s worthy

Spring cleaning
Sometimes it goes right into summer
Sometimes, you’ve been doing nothing but bullshitting yourself in top soil
I’ve been messing around with nothing but fat tar-babies that suck you in, before spitting you out

Rendering of Fat

Posted on May 12, 2015 by noellevignola Standard 8

Painting by Gregory Summers

The first stages were huge rents and gashes in my inner landscape. Hurricanes that tore away known shores and earthquakes that ripped open the well-tended lawns and careful cities I’d built to hold in, both what worked and what didn’t. Just in nature where such events alter the courses of rivers, so too, they altered the course of my deepest waters. Changing direction caused dams to crack open and field breaks to give way, no more than twigs. Tributaries formed for miles filled with mud, fertile and rich that would be ready for life. But in the beginning I only saw snapped off moorings, crushed homes, barren lakes and sandy shoals with little more of life than minnows.

Hundreds of suns, snow and autumn leaves have passed hence. New sprouts have broken through, green and lush. Like tree buds hungry for life, I turn toward the sun. It warms and stirs long forgotten pools of energy, but it’s impact has nurtured more change, subtler and more curious than the first. As shorelines ravaged by storms reshape and build new dunes and forests spring up on land once scorched and burned, I am someone else strange and new, yet never wholly stable. I am melting, it would seem, as rendered fat, strained for impurities without seeking perfection. An alchemical mix of old stories retold, cleaned of sorrow and guilt. Still more floats to the surface to be skimmed off, detritus of costumes torched and gone. Each round less to find and the oil grows more golden and clear. There is a tension, but less struggle. Resistance half hearted that dissolves more quickly to surrender. Each day more leaves me with little fanfare or grief. Even as I weep comes joy and welcomed release. I ponder how easily I have come to the ocean, nearly naked and with so little in my hands. It seems odd how much we carry to define who we are, when what we are can never be defined.

What Matters

Posted on April 27, 2015 by noellevignola Standard 2

Uploaded from a 2011 TED talk “The Rediscovery of Wonder”

In the things that matter there is a hunger
It arrives, first, as desperation and fear
But like stages of grief it changes
Initially, it comes and is denied
Then raged at for its lack of presence
Finally, pleaded with to come soon
Then silence

Eventually the things that matter
Arise out of us to be fed
Not by another, but by our own heart
This is met with mild disbelief
Then curiosity
Finally, delicious amusement
Then silence

Night Rain

Posted on April 18, 2015 by noellevignola Standard 14

From the roof of my hospital: Photo by Noelle

The hour is late and sleep should have long since found me, but instead I lay and listen to the steady rain upon the roof. It had been snow earlier, but now the temps hold above freezing and it comes down in taps obliterating any evidence that winter once lived here. I feel an odd sorrow for her passing, but know it will be brief. By weekend’s end this same rain will fuel an eruption of life that this dark, wet night hardly can ponder.

In the the light of my neighbor’s window cast upon the ceiling of my room, I see the rain drops running down the windows as shadows moving above me. I am reminded of old grief that once felt as heavy as the vanishing wet snow, but now, like rain to the irises in their beds it is the fuel to a heart breaking through dirt.

The bed is warm and dry, the cats snuggled close and asleep. It seems a shame to drift off to sleep in this cozy cocoon, but even butterflies must rest to break free.

On the Hours Go

Posted on April 15, 2015 by noellevignola Standard 12

In the long hours, I pace
Magazines finished, reruns watched
And on the hours go

Windows peered at, mail opened
Cabinets closed, dishes stacked
And on the hours go

Apps clicked, messages checked
Empty food wrappers, pitched
And on the hours go

Closets cleaned, laundry folded
A second cup of tea, dirty in the sink
And on the hours go

Who am I in all this restlessness?
Who stands before the fridge, again?
And on the hours go.

Like the old widows of old
I wait at this house, for whom to come I do not know
And on the hours go

Not Broken

Posted on April 13, 2015 by noellevignola Standard 8

Sunset storm over the Rockies: Photos by Noelle

Fiery warrior
Sweat covered face
Bitter salt in mouth
Broken
Broken
Again and
Again
Dirt in nails
Bloodied thighs
Will not break!
Broken
Broken
Again and
Again
Thirsty for more than water
Desperate for more than home
Bags of tricks all gone
Broken
Broken
Again and
Again
Spirit crushes there is only gnashing
Sprirt tears away there is only wrapping
Spirit loves and venom comes spitting
Broken
Broken
Again and
Again

Broken
Nothing left, such tragic weeping
Confusion consumes a rotted mind
Broken
Broken
Again and
Again
Bleeding out old stories
Quiet, a battlefield stretcher
Blindness and fear pool in the dirt
Broken
Broken
Again and
Again

Love, a silent dawn
Sleeping, an old hound at the feet
Reliable, loyal, persistent as the sun

Fiery warrior
Sweat covered face
Only salt in mouth
Rising
Rising
Again and
Again
Not dead, just empty
Not lost, just arrived
Not broken
Not broken
Again and
Again

Happy Easter

Posted on April 5, 2015 by noellevignola Standard 9

I do not celebrate Easter, as I’m not a Christian, but I am a huge fan of resurrection. Rising from the dead. All of us have been there. Losses, traumas, unexpected tragedies – that laid us out. Laid us out flat. Destroyed the life we once new and left us completely lost and hopeless. In those moments we think we’ll never get up, never live again, but then something happened. We got up. Maybe shaky and wobbly at first, but we got up. We started walking. Maybe we didn’t even know what direction to go, but we started walking anyway. We survived. Many of us did more than that, we began to grow and thrive. We recovered and made ourselves anew. Like the Phoenix we built ourselves from the ashes, turning the gray soot into colorful wings.

Resurrection is not so much an event, as a process available to all of us. We each can resurrect our lives no matter how battered and torn up they may seem. So I wish you all a very Happy Easter. May this day bring hope to the most beleaguered souls out there, that you can live again, even if right now you feel your life is dead.

Defiance

Posted on April 4, 2015 by noellevignola Standard 12

I started thinking about this post when I was dangling from the bar in the playground. I wasn’t supposed to be dangling, I was supposed to be doing chin ups, but the up part… well… it was more complicated than I first expected. There were a couple of guys putting some new paint on the pool house trim at the local rec center where I am dangling, slightly defeated. I pretended I was stretching my arms, as if I intended to be hanging here unable to lift myself. I may be weak, but still proud. I’m no triathlete, but I pride myself in staying in shape. Hundreds of flights of stairs, yoga, push ups… I mean… I put effort into this. An inch shouldn’t be too much to ask. Seriously, an inch up. How hard can that be? Apparently, much harder than it looks.

I flip over and dangle by my knees off the bar, upside down. Though absolutely no health benefits in doing this, it still provided a brief acrobatic feeling that took away the shame of no chin up. I swung back and forth looking at the slides and jungle gym. Kids play here all day and they use these bars. When I was a kid I used these bars. I bend backward and grab my ankles. If I had a popsicle hanging out of my mouth the scene would be complete. I commit to returning here several times a week. One pull up. One chin up. Anything. That is my goal. My defiant Holy Grail.

I get back on my bike and head off down a trail that winds through neighborhoods and hugs a creek. I haven’t ridden in years, but like the chin ups, feels like the next phase somehow. Nothing makes you feel younger than riding a bike. In two seconds you are ten years old and it’s summer. It does not provide the steady attention to nature I enjoy while hiking, but the feel of the wind in my face, and the speed… oh that feeling of flying down a hill. The thrill is no less wonderful to me now at age 52 than it was at 10. I’m rusty, but I don’t care. It’ll come.

I try some of the dirt paths made by local children. Some are steep down hills, while others have little bumps for rocketing your bike over. I delight in being one of the neighbor boys dashing over a hillside for just a few moments. There is a curious fear at lifting off the ground on a bike that daunts me a little at my age. “Broken bones and hips”, my ego whispers. “You could fall or crash”, the small voice whines. So I do it again and again. Fear be damned.

As I ride along, I realize there must be a way to get through a neighbor’s yard to the field beyond. A child would’ve figured that out. So I begin to look and sure enough, a slip of a pathway passes between two houses covered in bike treads that leads to the larger field. A man is heading out with the trash from one house and I dash down the passage quick as lightning before I can be flagged off. I laugh out loud as I hit the field and race across it through tall grass and hard packed trails. I am the opportunistic thief Oliver Twist would’ve been proud of.

Here’s the thing about falling in love with yourself. You are constantly looking for ways to enjoy life. Ways to entertain yourself. Ways to make yourself laugh. I laugh mostly at what I’ve been told about aging. When I turned forty the women at my office gave me black balloons and my cake in a wheel chair. They meant it to be funny, of course, but we don’t realize how much we tell each other it’s over when really its just begun. How much we share the passed on story of decline and decay that was given to us by someone else. That life is like some creepy, slow crawl to the grave. I don’t want to give that to any of you. I want to give you vitality and joy. Laughter and hunger to learn new things. To be plotting your next re-invention, not your retirement.

I want to give you defiance of what everyone has ever told you about the laws of the body and death. Death is coming. It is as certain as the sun rising. So what? That isn’t even interesting. It’s predictable. What’s interesting is what we are doing with the time we’ve been given. That’s fire. Ask yourself, what do I value above all else? Then chase that with the power of a lion. Today, for me, it’s freedom. It’s remembering the promises I made to myself in my youth. It’s remembering to keep the fire burning in my belly for the life I’ve been given. It’s defying everything I’ve been told about how things should be.

Worth a glance, a short list of those who defied age.
http://mindvalleyacademy.com/featured/never-too-late