my moonwalking bear

Watch the clip first, quickly. Go right in, don't think, just do it.

All right.

Today - after a goodly break - I was smacked in the gut with the understanding that I had a miscarriage, and what that means. A baby, a baby, our baby, the baby that we so wanted - it came and went. It, I guess, died. I guess it died. It had begun living. That's pregnancy, right? Living thing, right? Died, then. Stopped living.

I ran into a dear friend today who is teaching Pilates out of her home, and I told her that I'd love to take classes with her. Later I was telling Dave about it and I began to say casually, "I think Pilates would be great as a healing thing, with the miscarriage, to strengthen that-" and I was going to say "area" but that's when the gut punch came in and I began sobbing. I was talking so casually about healing, forgetting that it's actually really true that I need some.

Where has it been? Where has the grief been? That's what the clip up there is alluding to. The baby we lost is the moonwalking bear of my life. I can't see it every day. I see Finn and his needs, and I see our new house, and I see everything we need to do to settle in properly, and I see writing, and I see the present moment because I'm trying to see it - the present moment is like the team in white, passing the ball. It's my self-imposed assignment. It's a good assignment, seeing the present moment.

But where does the grief go? Where does it hide? Where was I stashing it? I honestly thought it had left. No. I still have some.

Maybe it reared up because we had been planning to try for another baby again in about a month, and I decided a couple of days ago - on my birthday, actually, which was a strange birthday* - good, ultimately - I decided that I am not ready to try again for another baby. I'm not feeling it. I'm just feeling the idea as pressure. The idea of letting go of another baby for the time being was so freeing, so appealing. What if we only ever had Finn? What would that be like? Oh, the places I'd go! As Finn gets more self-sufficient, I can go here and do that and take this class, and oh! The relative freedom! Sounds like riding in a convertible with the top down on a sunny day on a tv show in the 1970's, with my big shiny Breck hair flying behind me and a silk scarf fluttering around my neck and a handsome man in a white suit driving us to a cocktail party at a penthouse apartment with thick white carpeting and a view of Los Angeles.

I met a baby, today, too. A baby girl. Miss Nora Somerville Jorgenson. Approximately six months old. Soft and silky and smiley. Milky silky translucent skin. Little dimpled chin. It's not nothing to meet a baby girl, after all my Oona business, after all my imaginings. I met her at a reunion brunch for my old sketch comedy group, and I borrow and transpose a line from an old local news parody sketch of ours here for you, entertainment/human interest division:

Thanks, Ian! Ian, I am over here by this BABY and I have to tell you, this baby is shooting up FROM the floor, all the WAY up TO the ceiling, and it really is an amazing sight, just really something, and I think I can speak for everybody here near this THING, this BABY when I say that nobody here thinks that this is not nothing. Ian?

In the actual sketch, the baby was a wall.

But yes. To meet a beautiful little baby girl had to go shoveling into some of my deeply packed emotional soil and loosen it up a bit. That's a good thing. It's good. And it's nice - Finn and his rockin' wee friend Miles were digging in the garden with little shovels today at the brunch. Thanks, buddies. You were doing a little ritual for me just at the right moment, concretizing it all. It's good to get access to the grief. The not feeling of the grief felt eerie and also weirdly irresponsible. Like it's irresponsible not to be aware of and feeling the sorrow of your lost child, however briefly they were yours.

And I was really getting comfortable with the idea that maybe I didn't want another child. I thought maybe the miscarriage killed not only the little life form but also the wanting, like the wanting was an innocent bystander in a fatal drive-by shooting who was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead along with the intended victim. But maybe the machines are starting to beep and boop a little for the wanting.

We're in intensive care. We'll see what can be done. I don't know about heroic measures, but if there's life in the wanting, there might be other life that wants to follow it.

*I was going to have a small birthday party, and I invited people, but then I called everybody a couple of hours before it began and called it off. I'd been weeping all day with no rhyme or reason. And...thinking here...I post about being on edge and snapping and crying. Just how subterranean did I think this grief was? Just because it doesn't come ringing a bell that that has an "I WAS YOUR BABY" flag on it?! Moonwalking bear, all right. Now it's hard to miss. But you really can miss a lot if you set your mind to it.

about that thing i'm shy to talk about

I haven't really talked about spirituality on this blog, but I think I want that to change. I've talked about it a little bit on my other blog, Bloomerang, the blog that lives and dies and lives again and is in a dead period. Is between worlds. Is hopefully enjoying its little afterlife.

I rarely talk about spirituality here because I'm shy about it, my dears. But it's important to me, and I think I would like it to be even more important than it currently is. Yes, yes. I don't talk about it here, though, because I'm afraid of alienating people. I've given myself permission with Bloomerang because it's tucked away where nobody knows of its existence, whereas The Gallivanting Monkey hosts literally dozens of visitors a week! (I know, it's crowded here. Feels crowded. This place needs a door guy. So busy.)

I don't know who I think I'm going to alienate that I won't already have alienated, though. I have this cynical, skeptical reader in mind who thinks that spirituality is the lamest word alive and that anyone who uses it in earnest is a sappy featherhead. Something tells me that reader has other places to go on the web than this cheery little enclave. So I don't know exactly what I'm worried about.

It's residual, I think. I grew up in a sort of offbeat, spiritually inclined family, but none of my peers had the same kind of background. All of the kids I knew came from more traditional religious backgrounds. (Everyone in New York was either Jewish or Catholic, and in Seattle it branched out onto the Protestant scene.) My parents were Theosophists...which...I will either explain later or you can go ahead and google it because I ain't got the strength to lay it out for you now. I will say this - it's Eastern religion-friendly. My grandmother was clairvoyant, and wrote a few books stemming from her abilities: The Real World of Fairies, The Personal Aura, The Chakras and the Human Energy Fields. I grew up hearing a lot about Buddhism and Hinduism and different Eastern-flavored theories about the soul and its evolution, about karma and reincarnation and all of that stuff. I don't know. It's such a big question, what we're all doing here, and how you grow up with that question is so formative. I felt embarrassed that my backdrop looked so different from other people's backdrops. It lingers a little. There's my shyness.

But what a question, no? What the hell are we doing here? What is going on? What is the point of all this? I just don't think this is a skippable question, even if it seems farfetched that we're going to find the answer. I don't think that's a good enough reason to skip it. I want to try anyway. I think even just thinking about it, staring at the question with curiosity, is worth something.

I was walking through the parking lot of QFC today, and it struck me: where am I? Where am I, other than in the parking lot of this Quality Food Center in North Seattle? I don't quite know how to put the question that emerged. It was something like, where is this parking lot in relation to Reality? Oh, man. OH MY GOD SHY ATTACK. Shy attack.

But I go on.

Then, yesterday, I was outside a Barnes and Noble with a very fakey fake stone exterior, and I had a funny epiphany: I like places that are obvious in their fakeness. I really like, you know, faux-Roman this and fakey French that. I like it on a large scale. It makes me feel like the world is this big stage set, and makes me remember that this Tina is just a character, and that the actor deeper in me is very real. Something about the contrast of a sense of realness inside with the fauxness outside is satisfying. Feels like a wink. I like it.

And what's this God business? Who is that? Is there one? Divinity - I love that word. What is inside there? Something draws me on to look into this. I don't have devotion to some kind of singular, figureheady God. But the word divine...that pulls me along somewhere, hints at something gorgeous that I would like to know about.

So I would like to get a little serious about this, and since this is the place where I come to talk to the people, I will maybe be talking about this some more.

P.S. I want you to talk to me, too. I would love it extremely. What do you think we're doing here? What is your relationship to these things? Are you curious? Uninterested? Satisfied? Repulsed? Bored? Attracted? My ears, they are so open.

P.P.S. This is a post I wrote a long time ago at Bloomerang about meditation.