Give Your Heart A Sign

I’m feeling more tolerant of myself lately and therefore more favorably disposed toward the world in general.  And, well I guess this is a no-brainer, but I am noticing again that when you open yourself up to experience and assume a friendlier posture towards life, interactions with others are more satisfying, the day holds more delight, and good things just seem to happen.  One of the gifts that rolled onto my path last week was a wonderful email from a friend that included this verse from Rilke:

Give your heart a sign

that the winds are changing.

If this is seen by the gods,

hope is unsurpassed.

Rise up and hold still

in the great relatedness;

rigidity gently melts,

mildly the knot disappears.

Cracks appear in the walls

of your long-inhabited Fate,

and a more compassionate moon

shines in the strongest prison.

Those were the perfect words for me, because the winds certainly are changing, and I do feel as though I have given my heart a sign — and maybe, just maybe it has been noticed.  In short, I am hopeful, and that hope is irrational and amorphous, as hope often is, but I can feel it lightening my step and giving me license to try my hand at being happy.

The week was filled with funny little moments. How about the elderly lady I saw in a parking lot in Buellton the other day, sitting tall and straight in the driver’s seat of an avocado green Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight?  She had cat-eye glasses, red lipstick, and wrinkle-etched skin covered with pale pancake makeup. Normally I would have marveled at the car and walked on by, but I stopped to say hello to her and ask her about it.  She immediately brightened. “Oh, I love this old boat,” she said. “I’ll never drive anything else. Can you guess the year?” I stepped back and assessed its length (easily ten or eleven feet) and those upstart tail fins, the vinyl roof and vintage color. It reminded me a little of a car my father used to drive, and the one I came to California in, which was a ’73.  I guessed this one was from the late 60s or early 70s. “1971,” she said, “and still going strong. Ten miles to the gallon, but I don’t go far.”  How I wish I’d had a chance to hear that engine roar! And how I wish I’d taken a picture of this lady at the wheel. She was captain of her ship.

Or how about the phone call I received from local rancher Bob Isaacson yesterday? “Highway patrol says there’s cattle on the railroad track in Gaviota, about eight miles to the west. I don’t know why they thought maybe they were my cows, but I figure they’re Hollister or Bixby.  Can you get a’hold of John McCarty?” It felt like a message that might have come in 70 years ago. And how weird is it that a girl who grew up in Brooklyn, New York gets calls like this? That’s the thing about life. It just keeps surprising you.

I went for a bike ride in the Valley with Kelley the other day and we coasted along Ballard Canyon, still among my favorite rides. Mauve and magenta roses have bloomed and are dropping their drowsy petals from a blue vase and making the room fragrant.  A brown bear went stomping around at the neighbor’s house last night, Jeanne had a run-in with a snake, and our place has been a smorgasbord of oranges and peaches for raccoons, coyotes, and jays. (The remnants of the nightly feasts are scattered all about each morning.) Earlier today a roadrunner hit his head against the windowpane and stood there dazed for a long minute looking in. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is playing on the music computer right now and Bob Dylan is doing an amazing harmonica riff that is taking me away on currents of dancing spells and jingle-jangle mornings.

So I’m thinking that life is like a high risk game that goes very, very fast, and the object is to figure it out before it’s over, and if you’re lucky the blur around you resolves itself into coherent shapes and wonders…and you lean out and grab onto a few before they pass.

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