The great derailing

These days are wildly up and down. One minute a breath of fresh air from a visitor who brings organic chocolate truffles and a renewed faith of our situation and the next despair over the gigantic tangled mess of our life. One minute I'm crying the next Phil is crying and the next we're so excited to be folding something called "onesies" (this is a little one piece baby outfit with snaps to change the diaper for those of us who are not baby literate including me). One day we're able to both physically walk on the beach in Maine on a 50-degree day and soak up some sunshine and salty air. The next day we're both lightheaded, limping, and struggling to get through a busy Boston street for a neurology appointment. The roller coaster doesn't cease to exist. I know we're all collectively on this ride, the ride called life, but we're just in "heightened awareness mode" as a therapist puts it. This awareness is the stuff the Buddhists are trying to teach us, to just be present to each sensation, each moment, no judging, just a presence to life breath by breath. Our new kind of awareness is spiked and fed with shots of on-going tentative emergencies. On three different occasions I have had the phone in hand to call an ambulance for Phil due to an obscene amount of pain in his head, or him describing buzzing in the brain that just doesn't sound right? But alas, no more ambulance rides yet. As far as major life experiences go, I am also very near my natural "birthing window". After March 11th (four days from now) I could go into birth at any moment, and it would be perfectly normal (although early, normal) hmmm...

I have thanks for this edge, this awareness. I recognize I'm not sitting around complaining about a customer's behavior at the restaurant where I used to work or bitching about a driver on the road, I simply don't care. This awareness has its beauty because life is raw, so real, and you can let the small stuff slide off your shoulders much more easily. You cherish a decaf cappucino with a friend, petting a cat, or simply reading a book with a fresh perspective and appreciation. This is all good but I'd love for this awareness to flow from a place of balance, rest, and peace rather than sitting on the edge of a cliff of trauma and stress.

Lately when I can't sleep or relax an image of a train keeps arising. Someone mentioned the grief factor we must be experiencing arising from this significant derailing of our lives. I keep thinking about that image. It's like we were on a train heading down the tracks on a specific route chugging along. All of a sudden the train had an accident and each car teetered and tipped and screeched to a halt and time slowed down and stood still. Luckily the train didn't completely crash or burn (so close, so close) it just was derailed and has to be rerouted, on a new handbuilt track. This train derailed in a desolate field somewhere in India or Mongolia. No one has any control over the situation, at all. At first there is a lot of action, people running around, screaming, crying, finding their loved ones. Then you figure out the food situation. You suss out who's got the goods like chocolate, booze, and cigarettes and meanwhile others settle in and start signing and rocking their children and accept. Some run up and down the tracks pulling their hair out and freaking out burning up their precious energy. Mind you, this is the kind of place that cell phones don't work and nor do iPhones or blackberries, we're out in the middle of nowhere in a field. In the middle of this chaos others start slowly fixing the tracks. This is going to be an agonizing, grueling, slow process -- pulling and prying up each old railroad tie (with an inadequate amount of tools) and moving them over to place them down by hand, one by one. Each tie takes what feels like FOREVER! In the crowd of passengers you realize a very pregnant woman stands and a baby is coming any moment. Knowing babies don't care if you're in the middle of a mess, a nowhere field, or the perfect clinical hospital setting -- when they decide to come, they're coming, you have no control and it’s NOT on your time, it’s their time from now on.

So here we are in that field. The resources are being shared, the work is being done of laying down a new track by hand tie by tie, the acceptance and nurturing comes in fits and spurts, the praying and meditating and music is happening, the food is being shared, and the baby is still coming -- on their own time. The days and nights roll by and we know a completely new life, new track, and new destination is being laid. Right now we're not so sure what tools we've got, what resources are around, what food is there, when the baby will come, how our life will unfold (but we do have a house full of chocolate thank god!) (For those of us who know Phil and I, well I think we were on the Indian railways to begin with. It was a pretty funky ride, pretty inspiring, pretty colorful and loaded with street food and chai and had it's fair share of ups and downs. Maybe in our next lifetime we'll jump on one of those Japanese bullet high-speed, efficient and organized kinds of trains.

What is your experience of a great life derailing? We've all had them (or will I promise...)Was it a loss of a job, a death, or even a birth, a divorce, a big move, enlightenment? I'm curious.