Love You

A note on a few things I have been grappling with - from depression, to gardening, to fame, to presence, to being present

Marieke In Venice by Harry Gruyaert

On Tuesday there are men on my roof and I find myself again wanting to live near the water. Folding my daughter’s clothes and putting them away, running load after load of laundry into the morning.

It has been one week since the election and I knew that Trump had won when I woke up at 3 am and saw an email from my best friend in college simply titled Love You. And at 3 am I knew that Trump had won when my daughter let out a wail to beat all wails and I wrapped myself around her body, not sure who was being comforted and who was doing the comforting.

I just keep watching how people are drawn to her. My girlfriend who met my daughter for the first time this weekend said. And I don’t share how often it happens, at the park, or in dance class, or early on in parent and me, that some dark energied child will get right up in her face. Often, running from across the sand or across the room to disrupt whatever she is doing. And that the unnatural thing at a year and a half, and at two years old, is how my daughter will often step aside. How once when my mother witnessed under a grove of oaks a girl shove my daughter out of the way, she said to me Is it terrible of me that I just want her to shove them back? Noting the streak of cruelty that ran through all of us, that desire to dominate, that did not seem so innate in my child. That I found myself encouraging her in her gentleness, in her generosity, not because she was acquiescing but because I saw that she was often times being wise. She knew when something was and was not worth her fight. She knew how to let go.

For days and days and days I think about rain. How badly we need it. I think about the snow I saw in New Mexico. I think about fishing and wanting to slice and gut and stuff a body open. With lemon and garlic and rosemary. Roast it on a flame, put potatoes into the coals to char them. To fall asleep under the stars, to wake up next to the Russian river. In a better mood than when I last woke up there. That what I believe people responded to about Trump was that he was making some sort of promise to return to some sort of promisedland of the past, but without any of the attunement to what that meant. That instead what they voted for was to lose. And that according to the ancient texts we were in a time of great re-ordering. And we must reorder.

How does one begin? I ask my girlfriend. Planting their own garden? When really the question I need to ask is - how does one begin to override the depression that makes planting and tending and weeding and watering seem so untenable. That in the last week what has become so clear to me is that I am as scared of my living as I am of my dying. And it is making me miss out on the great pleasure of digging my fingers in the dirt, of throwing my body into the surf, of being exactly where my hands are.

Yr a charmer. An old boyfriend wrote me once when I wrote a handful of people an email after watching Chris Marker’s La Jetee for the first time. The same year I saw Hiroshima Mon Amour, and was haunted by the water, the same year I saw Olmi’s I’fidanzati, and was haunted by the face of a man I thought I once knew. The same year I saw Uncle Boonmee Who Could Recall His Past Lives, and was in awe of the way someone could make all the facets of time appear in one fell swoop, the seen and the unseen, and it was the year I saw Portrait of A Lady on Fire twice and god all that desire, and it was the year I saw Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and the infamous and never seen Spring Night Summer Night. My husband and I before we were married, leaving the movie theater almost speechless, wandering into the rain to get apple pie and ice cream. The movie’s music staying with us for years. What was left off the screen. It was also the year I met the man who saved Barbara Loden’s Wanda from being destroyed.

There is something about growing up in Los Angeles and fame. There is something about growing up in Los Angeles and the proximity to fame. There is something about growing up in Los Angeles and the promise that whatever you desire could be found here. That you could be found drinking a milkshake at a soda shop just off Hollywood Boulevard. That you could be found, serving a coffee on the right day to the right person, and giving them the exact smile that they had been looking for. That you could be found serving a director at a corner restaurant with a train circling above your heads, asking about a script that he was reading, and he in turn asking to read something of yours. And giving you your first job. That in Los Angeles something could always happen. And before I got sober I was trying to be an actor, and for a few years after I got sober I was trying to be an actor, and the only thing that was missing was my belief. That I once wrote an old boyfriend three months into sobriety that I had the horrible thought that out of all of them, I was not going to be famous. And out of all of us, he ended up being the one that was becoming well known. Putting the work into something that mattered, learning how to feed people.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about desire and the internet. How the internet like Los Angeles holds some promise for the known. How the thing about desire is there were steps that needed to fill it. That still in the early years of motherhood and reorganzing I have found myself asking. Is it okay to just live a very good life? To just be a very good person? A good mother? A good friend? Would that be enough? That for the first time in my life, I realize that desire is not the thing, everything else is. Missing a community, you have to take steps to build one, to finish the script I would now have to build in the time, turn my eyes before the hands on the keys. Even though what I wanted my daughter to learn most was how to continue to be kind and open, that if a friend needed something and we had it we could provide it. A meal, a pair of sneakers, a dress to replace that one that got wet. How last night my daughter went singing down the hall to her girlfriend Do you need a dress? Come get a dress! And one could just die happy in that lilt.

This morning thinking, the horrors will come, in this time of Kali Yuga, but what I can control is how I organize my day, that I can turn over and over again into the light. And that this is a gift of mine to share.