Lava Lamp

“The brain is like a lava lamp, “says my friend Angie. I am literally stopped in my tracks on the trail, bent over in a belly laugh. I think this is the funniest thing I have ever heard.

A lava lamp?

I envision my soft, viscous brain, and as a matter of fact, wanting a better brain is mostly why, on this first-of-June morning, I have, as if by some strange survival instinct, leaped out of bed, fumbled for coffee, fumbled even more to find running shoes and headed for Devisadero, a nearby trail outside of Taos that is like an old friend. It has saved me when, almost to the day four years ago, my baby sister died of a brain tumor. It saved me when I got a divorce ten years ago. It saved me when a boyfriend (or two) left me, and it saved me through a doctoral dissertation. Maybe it will save my brain, my life.

As if by magic, when I arrived at the trailhead, there was Angie, a friend, who has hiked this as her morning ritual for years. She’s about my age—late fifties, and we are trying to figure out what to do for our next act. She’s a well-known artist, but suddenly found herself caring for a grandchild. She uses the time to get her bearings before she goes home for another day of caregiving. “I adore him,” she says of the two-year old boy, “but this is not what I thought I’d be doing at this point in my life”

Together we head uphill. The morning is green and cool, and smells of sage. Some people, like mystics, and meditators, have minds that they can quiet, which I fully intended to do today. The surface of my mind was to be like a lake, mirroring a serenely blue sky. But no. The mind is like a lava lamp, bubbling up and boiling over, illuminating this worry and that. Another one comes up and then another. My worry today is one son, who is severely depressed.

She asks where I’m going and I am asking that of myself, too. If this is always the first day for the rest of your life, some are more so than others, and this is one of them. It is the first day of summer after Memorial Day weekend, the kind of day where birds sing and kids sleep late because school has just ended and summer’s just begun. I have left my boyfriend at my house on the computer, my oldest kid has gone back to his job in Aspen, and I have just passed my middle son’s car in the parking lot of the call center where he works. My 19-year old will not wake up for hours.

Angie asks about my family, and I, of hers. Though we meet on this trail, we are like women at the well gathering water in some ancient community, which Taos is, too, come to think of it. Stories are the currency of exchange, part of all there is, what will get us through.

She asks what I am teaching at the local college, now that ski teaching season is over. I tell her just one class, in October, part of the town’s new “sacred places” theme. “The class is called “Sacred Narratives as Told by Water,” I tell her. “We’re going to make site visits along the Rio Pueblo, from Taos Pueblo to the Rio Grande, studying everything from cosmology to geology.” Sacred narratives? Gossip, too, is from a word meaning “Holy Story.”

Poet Gary Snyder writes: “The earth gives us a stride, and the lake, a dive.” Maybe this place will give us yet another piece of the puzzle, helping us to know who we are by where we are, by the lay of the land and the flow of the water. What, I wonder, if my life asking of me now—in this place and time?

It’s The Question, and as we head uphill at 6:30 a.m. instead of sleeping, we skim the weekend’s news: Memorial Day. My kids were gone and I was an adult woman with my own house. Tom and I went to the kind of party where people drink champagne, lapse into French and plan their futures. Surely the world is divided into people with children and those without. I went to ballet class and garage sales and cleaned house. We hiked a canyon to the Rio Pueblo, and I jumped in: Baptism.

And so I am too, trying to reclaim, or lay claim, to my own life. A few days ago a dear friend came home from a trip feeling low and lost. She found my letter waiting, and with it, an essay I had just written, called Every Little Thing, about surviving an abusive marriage. She has done that, too. But the essay was there, waiting, in just the right moment. But this is what we have given each other, through trading our stories back and forth, over long years.

I woke today, wanting to get some fierceness back. I need it and I will find it. I guess I am beginning this blog out of a need to make my life real to myself, which is what writing does. So when Angie says, “The brain is like a lava lamp,” I know what she is talking about: You plug it in and it provides a little heat and a little light, for yourself, and maybe for someone else. And you never know what’s going to come up.