A Many Layered Bordeaux Essay

Fall or Winter 2009

    My friend the Word Smith and I wandered out of the cold into Damiana’s Wine Cellar and back into the small dark bar, all cozy and intimate, with room for us to sit down, and Damiana attended us with warm dark eyes and ready conversation about any bottle of wine.  After we decided to have a glass, she suggested we try a Bordeaux.  I didn’t catch the name.  “It’s wonderful,”  she said, her eyes magnifying her confidence,”Many layered,” and some other adjectives, and poured us out some dark liquid.  And it was.  It was the best wine I’ve ever had.

    I’ve been lingering here. On this property I have called home for the last 10 years, I have been clinging to some semblance of homeostasis, by insisting that I love this property and my garden, insisting it is an asset I won’t easily surrender to the catabolic process of splitting apart two lives.  I have been purposely resisting the inevitable, because I can only take just so much change at once.  Over the last 4 years, almost everything in my life has changed.  Letting go of this land is the just last material phase of divorce.

    This week I had two conversations with Morgan Man that gave me great clarification and took me much farther down the road to closure.  They were conversations of depth, scope, and consequence, and we were not angry, sad, or impatient.  And when we were done, I had the distinct feeling that I was living in the wrong place.  Like, a holding center.  All of a sudden it was clear that I need to move on.  Now.  There was a release.  New things are moving into place. 

    That was a relief.  But now also, pent up grief which has been tethered in deep recesses.  So also, a choking depression that wants to bury itself and cry endlessly.  This, playing against the desperate economy of being turned loose to fend for one’s self in bad times, with a bag of script to compensate for the home one has left.  A nice baseline drama.

    And against this operatic backdrop the hand of God lightly conducts, and the dance of friends leads me through the lines.  Here, a hand.  There, twirl and promenade.  Cross the set and curtsey, circle and away.  Sit out the next dance, and watch the play.

    All around life is spinning it’s great, spiraling galaxy like a grist mill, throwing out the sparkling dust of stars and diamonds.  The metabolic life takes things apart, down to to their simplest elements, and builds them back up, in many layered systems.  It’s all going on at once, and nothing is ever the same; because it is a dynamic homeostasis, always adjusting.

    Last night my friend the Word Smith and I talked until early in the morning.  He leaves to go East in two days, and weeks and months will go by in this great spiral.  Knowing this we were both loathe to say goodnight.  An easy companionship settles its mantle and I begin to see through the errors of past failures to the possibilities of future successes.  We are complicated beings.  But we do not have to be hostages to failure, neither prisoners in solitary.

    My tendency might have been to stay home, and burrow into a denial, but instead I joined a family for an evening. I might easily have faced sorrow at a book, or pen and paper.  By walking instead through the terraced and oblique pathways of friendship, I came home in the breath of the wine.