Lynn Rankin-Esquer's Blog, page 5

What Would You Stop For?

It was a sunny Saturday morning in Mitchell park, an expanse of grass and picnic areas and play structures and courts for pickleball and tennis and basketball. Tucked into a neighborhood in Palo Alto the park is green and spacious, dotted with sculptures, bordered by a beautiful newish library and a manicured little league field. Its span more than accommodates all the people doing what people do on days off, walking, playing, eating, swinging.

I was on a run, grooving to my music, in my head winning one argument after another with people I’ve never even talked to. I shuffled past a protest organized on a long section of grass, not really seeing what the protest was for.

I’ve been alive long enough to witness a lot of injustices. I’ve lived in Berkeley so I’ve encountered my share of protests. I’ve participated in a few. These days there are so many issues to care about, but our brains can only take so much anguish at one time. Our eyes learn to slide past protests when we have seen too many, when our brainpan can’t fit one more travesty.

My eyes slid past this one, until they didn’t.

I stopped, turned around, went back. What was it that pierced my insular trance?

Stillness.

There were maybe ten protesters standing in a carefully spaced grid of rows and columns, all facing the same direction.

Just standing, staring straight ahead.

Not speaking.

Not looking around.

Not making eye contact.

Not shifting around or fidgeting.

Unmoving.

Resolute. 

In a world of constant movement and stimulation it was the stillness that got my attention.

Without words they were speaking, using their motionless bodies to say this is the issue that we care about right now. In this moment, in this place, nothing means more. Getting closer I found a sign and a little table with a petition on it in protest of the Chinese Communist Party.

Like the sculptures scattered through the park they stood. A moment of immobility while all around them children played soccer and people danced in an outdoor hip hop class and couples held hands and dads chased toddlers and moms worked on their large Philz coffees.

A refusal to participate in life, for the moment, as a way to point to injustice on the other side of the world.

It turns out I had room in my brain for one more injustice. Maybe caring about injustice expands, like love expands. Like a parent with one child relieved to discover that there is more than enough love for the second child too. Plenty to go around. Love growing without limits.

I signed their petition.

I went back to my run but their stillness stuck with me. Several weeks later it still is with me. In a world of twenty-four hours a day ‘news’ cycles, of a fire hose of stimulation coming at us almost constantly, interrupted by phone and computer notifications all day long, I found myself almost jealous of their one-pointed attention. One issue. Standing still until people noticed.

It’s got me thinking. What is my one-point issue? What would I stop everything else for to stand still while the world continued its business around me?

What would you stop for?

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Remembering Mazi – 5 Years Later

Mazi -my son’s soccer coach, center in back. Copper Select tournament team win 2015

It has been five years since the world lost Mazi Maghsoodnia in a tragic car accident. I imagine that simultaneously feels like a moment and like a century to his family. I was thinking about this upcoming anniversary and by chance happened to watch an incredible movie that spoke to the grief of losing someone. It has been out for a while but for the first time I watched Coco, the Pixar/Disney movie about the Mexican holiday of Dia de Muertos, the day of the dead. In this tradition, once a year the living invite the souls of those who have passed to come back in hopes of feeling a sense of connection with them again. In Coco the main character, Miguel, learns that the only way there is a chance of the souls coming back is if the living keep the dead alive in their memories. In the movie the biggest heartbreak is not that someone has died, it is when the person who died is no longer remembered.

If you are one of the few, like me, who haven’t seen Coco yet I highly recommend it, but have some Kleenex handy because you’ll cry. You’ll also have this very odd sensation of feeling your heart slipping out of its protected vault in your chest to come sit beside you on the couch, and snuggle with the hearts of the people you are watching with because theirs slipped out too. Don’t be surprised if those hearts dance around the room together, remembering what it is like to be connected, remembering that this connecting of hearts is the thing in life that truly matters.

Mazi could never be one of the souls in the afterlife who is wasting away out of being forgotten. Right now, in this time of Mazi Remembrance, I am imagining the hearts of all those who loved him slipping out of chests and snuggling with each other and dancing together to celebrate him and the joy he brought. I imagine him right there in the middle of it all, still beloved, still dancing.

I’ve put all the stories I wrote about Mazi onto this one post for anyone who wants to spend a little time keeping his memory alive.

Remembering Mazi

(originally posted March 21, 2016)

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
– Lao Tzu

Sometimes breaking the law is the right thing to do.

Growing up, in my east coast town, angry teenagers looking for a way to express themselves would climb the water tower and paint something on it.  This weekend a band of suburban moms did the California version of a water tower, triumphing over barbed wire and steep hills to paint the big rock that looms over our town.

Six broken hearted angry middle aged women climbed a hill (several hills actually, it was like the Sound of Music out there.  If the Sound of Music was set in Northern California, at night, eerily lit by a bunch of PGE lights that surround our community sinkhole.)  We slogged through a mini river, prayed that the cows were off in another pasture, sopping the bottom of our yoga pants, climbing ferociously up STEEP grade hills, sliding uncontrollably down the back side of the hills, backpacks filled with spray paint and light beer.  We became goat-like despite wearing Nike Free runs that were a poor choice of tool for the task.  With head lamps borrowed from our boy scout sons we levered ourselves like lithe mountain climbers (which we are not but our mission made us into) to paint the town rock.  A rock that is normally commandeered by high school students and the occasional crazed swim dad pod (you know who you are, M).

Do you know why this set of suburban moms met at 10:15 pm (yes, I said pm, as in at night) to commit this mayhem?  A group of women who for the most part would have already been asleep, if not raging at their teens/tweens to be asleep?  A group of moms who, at least half of them would never consider breaking a rule (the other half long out of practice at breaking rules)?  They, we, were out there out of the desperate love for a man who changed all of our lives before leaving this earth too **** (insert your own swear word here) early.  MAZI.  Mazi Maghsoodnia.  The Man.  The Man who could get a bunch of law abiding moms (not a few of whom have anxiety issues) off their butts and out of their houses to climb what felt like a mountain to spray paint his name on a rock.  In the dark.

We scrambled around the bottom and sides and top of the rock, one of us even hung off the top of the rock, with two people desperately grasping the back of her sweatshirt, to write the name MAZI on this rock.

And to add a soccer ball and a heart because, well, Mazi.

We were so desperate to make this work we took advice from teenagers.

Yes, we asked our teenage children what they knew about making the rock message stand out and, yes, hold on here, we listened.

And we were told how to access the hills and trail to the rock.  And we were told to ‘make the letters BIG’ and we did.

After reconvening on the side street where we had parked our cars we drove into the gas station at the bottom of the hill to yell confirmations to each other like we were the Seals team that just took out Bin Laden. We yelled and gave each other thumbs up as we looked up at the dim hillside with a big rock on top that clearly, even in the dark night, said “MAZI.”  The man we all loved and admired and appreciated and missed.

Mazi. You are perhaps the only person who could get this group of women out past 8:00, and not only out of their houses but climbing steep wet hills, with paint!  At 12:30 we were all still texting each other in excitement, sharing pictures, imagining what you might have made of this.

You are gone but the powerful passion for life that you brought to everyone around you lives on in all the lives you touched.  It fueled us all that crazy hill-climbing night, made us greedy to live large in your name.   Thank you for inspiring that kind of fiery joy.

I know God has already blessed you, I know God has blessed us with knowing you, I only hope that God blesses those left behind with some ways to get along until they are with you again.  With you again to play your beloved soccer, watch you dance with your beloved family, to once again stand in the light that was so uniquely yours.  God bless and hold you for us all.

Mazi Belongs to the World

(originally posted March 28, 2016)

It turns out I have more to say about Mazi.  I thought I had done my bit with my first blog post trying to capture the experience of painting ‘Mazi’ on the town rock and then going on about the business of private grieving, but it isn’t over.  I can’t stop thinking about him and the fact that he is gone from this form of interaction (I suspect there are other forms, beyond this earthly existence, but not knowing for sure I feel sad right now).

I don’t what the exact definition of something online going ‘viral’ is, but I know that my blog post about Mazi has gotten way more traffic than I usually get.

It has been read over 1600 times.

It has been read in 32 countries.

I know this is not due to my writing skill because up until the Mazi post my readers were in the high single digits at most (I was so under the radar my own mother didn’t know I had a blog).

Mazi knew a lot of people.

The 14th Dalai Lama said, “One family can influence another, then another, then ten, one hundred, one thousand more, and the whole of society will benefit.”  It is as if he was talking about Mazi Maghsoodnia.  The family he and Lida created is the best way to understand what a great man he was.  They are his legacy, are loving and generous and full of life and fun and dancing, just like their dad.  Mazi greeted everyone with a hug and a smile that made you know the world was going to be okay and his family is doing the same thing.

In the midst of the most painful experience of their lives they are doing this.

This family influence, this love, is literally spread throughout the world – I know this when I look at the map of where the blog piece was read.  Everywhere from Iceland to Kenya to the Phillipines there are people who shine brighter from knowing Mazi.

I have had people contact me to ask where the rock is so they can go see it.  I got a message from one person who reported her family ate dinner at one of the restaurants below the hill so that they could look up at Mazi on the rock while they ate.

It is as if we all want to be close to him again and are using the rock as a proxy.

Eventually someone will paint their own message on that rock and I’m already angry at them.  Angry at those self-centered insensitive teenagers (see that?  They don’t even know who they are yet and I have already made them villains.  Excuse my reaction to teenagers.  I have one.  A new one.  And maybe like baby rattlesnakes the new ones have the most venom?).

I started planning another bit of midnight mischief to take up a little sign to post by the rock.  Something explaining who Mazi is and asking these future delinquents to paint the smaller rock to the left, the one we left alone (you can only carry so much paint up those hills).  I keep driving past the rock to make sure the bright white ‘Mazi’ on its red background is still there.

And then it hit me, even once it is painted over Mazi will still be there.

No one strips the paint off the rock before painting it, they just paint over it.  So he will be there, forever one of the layers of the history of this town. Just like he will be for the rest of our lives, there, inside us when we do something kind, feel God’s love shine through.  As Antoine Saint-Exupéry said in The Little Prince ‘what is essential is invisible to the eye.’  And the essential Mazi will never go away.

When I look at the map of people reading about and remembering him I know that just like his name is forever preserved on the rock, the name Mazi Maghsoodnia is forever written on the world.

Mazi and the Meaning of Team

(originally posted April 13, 2016)

Glennon Doyle wrote that “compassion is not your pain in my heart.  That’s pity.  Pity helps no one. No, compassion is your pain in my heart and back out through my hands.  Feelings are just energy.  Eventually we have to make something with them.” (If you haven’t checked out Glennon’s blog do it as soon as you are done reading this http://momastery.com/blog/).

I was sitting there feeling the pain in my heart of losing Mazi Maghsoodnia and I hadn’t done anything with that.  We so often don’t. We talk to each other and repeat, over and over, ‘I can’t believe it.’  Talking is helpful, and then, as Glennon said, you need to go beyond the pain in your heart.

So when Quinn S. called me one night and asked me if I wanted to go up to the town rock and ‘paint away the pain’ (so eloquently said, Quinn) it felt like the right thing.  And then more pain came back out through my hands when I wrote a couple blog posts about the experience.  But I wasn’t the only one making something with the pain and it feels like it is time to reveal the other Sisters of the Rock.

Amy, on the far right, came up with the idea to paint the town rock in Mazi’s honor. This wouldn’t have happened without her brilliant idea.

Quinn, second from right with the devilish grin, organized the entire op, including the 7-11 run for tall-boys. This wouldn’t have happened without her desire to do something with her pain.  

Christie, in the middle, outlined the letters (beautifully big!  You can see them from way far away) and created the soccer ball (repeatedly checking a picture on her phone, while we all worried the police would see the light).

Prab, second from left, filled every spot with paint, soldiered over the top and bottom making sure nothing was left uncovered.

Karen, on the far left is the one who had two people holding on to her sweatshirt as she hung over the top of the ‘M’ to get the top of the letter just right.

I’m the historian, taking the picture and struggling to put words to how the pain is coming back out through our hands. (Apologies for the blurry picture but it was late.  And dark.  And we are perhaps, like Barbara Walters, enhanced by a bit of a blur to a photo.  Plus we can deny participation if anyone tries to make trouble for us.)

Those of us with blond hair woke up to pink bangs, the red paint that stuck on our hands ending up somehow in our hair (I liked it, wished it had lasted longer).  We also woke up to blackened pillows because we used eye black to paint ‘mazi’ on one side of our faces and a heart on the other.

Each time I write a blog post about Mazi my husband reminds me that I haven’t actually mentioned how we know Mazi.  So, third time’s a charm,  Mazi was my son’s Eclipse soccer coach along with Miguel Camacho (aka ‘the Soccer Whisperer’).  Mazi and Miguel were a great team.  The whisperer and the vocal cheerleader.  The loud positive and the quiet positive.

This U12 soccer team was a team that took its time coming together.  When you put kids from different towns together it takes a while to gel, and this team was no exception.  When you play soccer for an organization that, gasp, values kids playing multiple sports, it takes even longer to get to know everyone, because they weren’t all always there at practices, or even games.

Mazi and Miguel worked their magic and the team started to play well together.  And they won a few games.  And lost a few games.

It was all fun but they had never won a tournament.

And then, in August of 2015, Eclipse played in the Copper Select tournament in San Ramon against the mighty Mt. Diablo Arsenal.  In retrospect I wish had been taking notes, wish I had a more fact based description of that tournament (but then again, it was never my goal to be a sports reporter).  What I know is that the Eclipse team that weekend somehow kept winning.  What I know is that Mazi’s whole family was there to watch Nader and Mazi.  What I know is that, against the odds, the Eclipse team ended up in the FINAL GAME!

I remember hearing the whispers up and down the sideline as that final game started, Arsenal usually creamed their opponents.  They always scored a bunch.  They were unbeatable.

The game was the most intense I had ever seen our team play.  Every kick, every pass was contested by both sides.  Our kids played with a fever we had never seen.  They played like the future of the world hung in the balance, like if they lost, nuclear bombs were going to start going off in the parking lot and continue going off all over the planet.  They played like they would lose their phones and video games forever if they lost.  They were sweating, they were running until they were breathless, they were sticking a foot in where they couldn’t make a steal.  They were dogging the other team, hanging close to their defender/offender and doing whatever came to mind to win that moment.

Mt. Diablo Arsenal shot many many times on our goal and somehow, the ball never went in.  We could hear the parents on the other team exclaiming in disbelief, like a spell had been put on our goal protecting it.  The ball hit off of the cross bar, the side bar, off the tip of our goalie’s finger, off the side of our other goalie’s toe.  And our defenders seem to literally be giving pieces of themselves to every ball and defense.  Everybody watching knew there was something special going on.  No one wanted to say that, no one wanted to jinx it, but it was special.

So often in these kinds of battles parents along the sidelines start to be snipey at the other team’s parents.  But this didn’t happen. There was a grudging respect because the game was that good. We were all yelling for our team but when the other team did something good there was an appreciation for that.

The game, improbably, unbelievably, against all odds, was tied at zero at the end of regulation.  It is hard to describe what a triumph even that was.  It shouldn’t have happened.  It had never happened before against this team (and never has again, and we’ve played them multiple times).  But there it was.

And with the waning daylight they went straight to penalty kicks.

My son was the goalie who would be receiving the penalty kicks in the biggest game of his life, the biggest game of his team’s career.  Knowing he was a reluctant goalie at best, I had to fight off the urge to run across the field and snag him and take off for the parking lot at a fast run, worried what a loss might feel like to him.   And then, I saw someone standing in front of him, hands on his shoulders, leaning in and talking.  I saw my son’s head nodding.  I saw him nod again.  Even from a distance I saw his shoulders relax. It wasn’t Miguel.  It wasn’t Mazi.  It was Kian.  Mazi’s older son, a guy who knew something about being a goalie.  I would later learn that Kian gave him calm instructions.  Told him to watch the hips of the the player as he kicked, know which way the ball was going to go, know which way to dive.  Made him believe he could do it.  Made him trust himself and his team.  Kian wasn’t a coach on this team but, like a Maghsoodnia, jumped in to do what he knew to do.  Quietly, calmly, he gave my son confidence.

Parents on both sides were yelling, grabbing each other, looking to the heavens for help.  Each kick and goal or save resulted in gasps and screams.  There was no heartbeat that was calm at that point.  No player, no coach, no parent.  Well, maybe Miguel, the Soccer Whisperer was calm, but the rest of us were shaking with adrenaline.

Back and forth it went until we were tied.

Each team had one last chance.  Eclipse kicked and scored to put us one ahead.  And then it was up to us to defend one last kick to win.

“Watch the hips,” Kian had said and he did.  He stuck his hands out as the ball shot toward him, and the ball flicked up and away from the goal.

Eclipse had won.

The first tournament win for this group.

The most exciting, ecstatic dancing (and we know Mazi can dance), the dog pile, the screaming, it was, in that fading twilight, a pure joy.

Who was to know that the fading twilight also described Mazi?

Maybe that intense joy spoke of an awareness, in some subconscious part of all of us, that this win meant something more.  Looking back it feels like maybe it was a gift, a perfect day for the Maghsoodnia’s to keep in their memory bank.  Because Lida was there to watch Nader, Auveen was there, Mazi was there, Kian was there and helped coach.  And one of the best pictures ever is this one:  Kian and Auveen with Nader on their shoulders, their parents there to share in the joy.

The feeling of team, it is so special.  We all desperately strive for winning, for great performances, for great stats for ourselves and then our kids.  But maybe what we are really looking for, with all this sports hoopla, is to feel like part of something.  Maybe this is the real trophy, to feel part of a team.

Isn’t this what family actually means, that you belong to something? Someone has your back, someone cares about you, someone is working with you to make life better.  My husband coaches for a living and it is the thing he strives for the most, to give his players this feeling of being a family.  Of a brotherhood that goes deeper than batting average or wins and losses.  When you feel that connection to others you realize how much more you can achieve than if you were just working on your own.

People may think that winning makes you feel like a team, but it more often works the other way around, when you are a team, a true team, that is when you start winning.  We all felt it at that tournament, this team that Mazi and Miguel created. Those boys were playing like they were brothers and their brothers’ lives were on the line.  It infected the sidelines, the parents all felt connected too. There’s nothing like a rush of adrenaline and a wild hug after a penalty kick goal to bring people together.  We weren’t just hugging the people we knew best, we were all hugging everyone. It was such a shared joy.  

This concept of shared joy, it is just so Mazi.

I am deeply grateful that my son got to be part of Mazi’s Eclipse team, and that  I got to be  part of the team that painted Mazi’s rock.  We called ourselves ‘Sisters of the Rock,’ and I’ll tell you this, you didn’t have to be one of the people up there that night to belong to this team.  There are many more Sisters out there, and Brothers too.  Which is another way of saying that Mazi left a worldwide family, and that family will take care of its own.

Beautiful Lida on the rock

Mazi’s Gang

(Originally posted March 20, 2017)

What kind of parents invite their 13 year old sons to join them in a little illegal spray painting? And encourage gang signs? Late. On a school night. Aren’t we supposed to be lecturing them against that type of behavior?

Mothers who miss Mazi Maghsoodnia, that’s who. Mothers who one year ago climbed this same damp, dark hill to let the world know that a great man was going to be missed.  And mothers who understand that the pain of missing Mazi has barely begun and his family still needs reminders of the community who love them and will not let Mazi be forgotten.  This time it seemed right to bring our sons, the boys from his soccer team, along.

We painted up our faces and commenced operation Mazi.

The moon was so bright, yet the trail still so dark.  Hiking single file along the narrow cow path left us fighting for who would bring up the rear, because even before stepping over the broken barbed wire fence we saw an animal we were sure was a mountain lion. This is how much we love Mazi, we went anyway. The last two of us in the line held hands the whole way, sure each rustle behind us signaled the launch of a pouncing wild animal.

We slipped and climbed and shushed the boys and finally made it to the top of the rock (did I mention how steep those hills are? Like, a foot slips and you hear pebbles go tumbling, tumbling, tumbling down towards the sinkhole).  Even though the moon was so bright the rock and surrounding hill seemed darker than last year, which of course it was.  The sinkhole below the hill is still there but the lights that blazed through the night last year are gone (maybe it just isn’t in the Moraga budget to illuminate a sinkhole for a whole year.  It clearly isn’t in the budget to fix it quickly).

The boys were ecstatic to be out late, on a school night, spray painting, for crying out loud.  The moms tried not to ruin the fun by pointing out that they were doing this cool delinquent-like thing with . . . their moms.

Excited to begin their tagging careers the boys quickly pulled the tops off of the spray paint cans only to find that at least half of them lost the nozzles upon opening.  Just try to find a 5 millimeter nozzle on a dark, grassy hillside (hint, can’t be done, you’d have better luck finding $10 front row seats to Hamilton).

We heard laughter float up the hill and looked down to see a couple of figures moving carefully up the path.  It was Lida, Auveen, Kian and Nader coming to join us, arriving full of smiles and jokes.  “Mom, are you talking in Farsi? While scaling the cliff?”

13 year old boys are at an interesting stage of life, simultaneously enjoying and rejecting the nurturing of their mothers. Some of the moms on this trip get at most 3 syllables at a time out of their sons these days, but this night was like stepping outside of time and stage of life.  We all worked together, we talked, we laughed, and traditions were passed down from moms to sons, like the cliff hanging.

The only way to get the top of the letters painted correctly is for someone to hang out over the top of the rock, and the only way to do that with any degree of safety is for one or more people to hold onto the cliff hanger.  Here is last year’s cliff hanger passing the tradition along to her son (with a mask for good measure, isn’t it just like a mom to take her son spray painting and yet insist he wear a mask?????).

The tradition of getting the soccer ball painted just right.

The tradition of an adult beverage toast was not passed along to the sons. We aren’t that depraved.  They will have to discover Fireball all on their own, hopefully far in the future, in their own dark field like the rest of us did.

A new tradition of initials added to the bottom.

A new tradition of including Lida, Auveen, Kian, and Nauder.  Last year we painted the rock for them, this year we painted it with them and that felt just right.

A new tradition of a prayer, right after the Fireball (or was it before?).

A new tradition of a gang sign in Mazi’s honor (hand pointed downward with an “M” of middle three fingers).

Perhaps the most important tradition to pass down. An ancient tradition of gathering around a family in grief.

I want to write about grief but am finding it hard.  I have not been struck with this level of loss, so my imagination fails me when I try to truly understand what Mazi’s family has gone through this past year.  I feel the urge to focus on how well they have coped (they have) to allow myself to step back from looking into that abyss of pain that they still face every single day.  My mind flinches when I try to think about what it must be like for Lida to wake up in the middle of the night alone. My mind rushes to reassure itself with images of her smiling and hugging us all up on the hill.  See? My mind says to itself.  She is okay, she must be, she’s hugging and smiling and laughing.

Even while part of me knows she must still have very dark moments.

Even while a part of me feels helpless to do anything about those moments.

It feels cowardly, like a failure of compassion, to hide from the pain, so I try again to put myself in their shoes.  I try to imagine what it must be like to wake up and face the knowledge all over again, every single day.  And again the sadness drives me towards trying to find something reassuring.  Perhaps there is a deeper richness to life once something like this happens?  Perhaps Mazi was needed on the angels soccer team?  Perhaps they are stronger people now? Surely there is some meaning to this.

We all want to know that the Maghsoodnias are doing okay because we care about them, but also because we would like to believe you can survive tragedy.  It is too hard to imagine the long days and nights of pain so we would like to cut to the end of the movie, the laughing, smiling family who have triumphed, who have remade their world into something good again.  And people do survive, but are altered so profoundly that it is a whole different world that they are now living in. A world where the presence of the one lost has to be created in new ways, ways that will, inevitably, sometimes heartbreakingly, fall short of what they used to have.

I read Kian’s exquisite FB post about meeting his dad in his dreams.  I look at the picture of Mazi’s headstone that Lida sent me, surrounded by flowers, bright sunlight shining off of it. I see a hint of the ways that they are remaking their world and it is, as Glennon Doyle would say, ‘brutiful’ (brutal and beautiful all at once).

The painful moments will exist no matter how much other love and joy comes to their lives. Those moments are part of the landscape now.  Part of our job as a community is to not pretend those moments out of existence.  To be ready with the happy hug but also with the courage to acknowledge the pain that will never completely go away. To hold hands and stand vigil in the dark night so that no one has to feel completely alone.

So the trip up the hill this time was a way to circle around the Maghsoodnias and allow all the messy feelings to coexist, joy in the presence of grief, beautiful memories in the face of great loss, connection alongside loneliness. To say we understand that joy and grief may stay forever intertwined for them. What we tried to offer is what the poet David Whyte calls solace.

“Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind.  Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part.  Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp nor make sense of.”

Mazi’s Gang did something hard and scary in the darkness of night, our only illumination the full and luminous moon.  Instead of the blazing warmth of the sun he used to be, maybe Mazi is now more like the moon, a steady, encircling presence, not always visible, but with luck, revealing himself as an incandescent glow in a dark night. And what we discovered was that the brightness of that moon was, in the end, more than enough light to get the job done.

The Maziar Cup

(originally posted June 26, 2017)

This past Sunday I got a chance to attend the second Maziar Cup, a soccer tournament created to remember Mazi Maghsoodnia, who was lost to the earth community March 13, 2016.  It was a gorgeous day, sunny but with a breeze and a hint of cool that made it just perfect for soccer.  It was on a hill, which, being closer to the sky, was just right, somehow feeling closer to Mazi to me (I don’t know why this image of heaven being above us lingers, but it does).  There were the occasional high floating clouds, which seemed almost like otherworldly observers.  Like soccer players on the other side were hanging out up there with Mazi, like he was elbowing them, ‘look!  That was Auveen who crossed it so perfectly!’

There were athletes of every age playing with such a fierce intensity that my knees cringed at every twist and fall.  Only the young bend and don’t break, and these competitors weren’t all young.  There were young men and a little bit older men and men a little bit older than that, and women and girls, and they were all having fun, and no one gave anyone an easy time of it.

I wonder if Mazi was there watching, moving among his friends, slipping around his family, smiling and adding his kick to make a ball go just a little harder. I wonder if the breeze that kept lifting Lida’s hair was Mazi’s touch. I wonder if he stood in awe looking at his family, all of them broken hearted and thriving. I wonder if he saw how Nader has grown, and how he and the other boys not quite big enough to join in the fierce competition on the field found an unused net and started up their own half field game, taking turns in the goal.  I wonder if he saw Ollie the diabetic dog hunt down any sliver of shade, standing in the shadows of spectators as his eyes kept track of Lida.  I wonder if he heard Auveen tease Kian for taking off on his trip too soon. Did he love the shirts with his name on the back?

Did he love the shirts with his name on the front?

Who knows why someone is gone too early?  Maybe it’s just random.  Maybe there is a reason. Maybe all we can do is hold each other’s hands and share the memories about the one that is gone.

In the end it was a gathering of people with a common interest in an uncommon man. A man who was, so clearly, so abundantly, loved.  And isn’t that what we’d all like, in the end, when we leave? To be loved and remembered.  Like the Raymond Carver words:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Looking around at the people gathered at the Cup, at the rich network of friends and family spending their day honoring him, I have no doubt Mazi would answer, “I did.”

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The Path of Failure (The Short History of a Writer)

I recently saw a Twitter thread started by a writer that posed the question ‘who was the first person who encouraged you to write, who said, hey you are good at this you should pursue it?’ and it was a fascinating read. I did not have a quick answer to that question.

I remember wanting to write almost as soon as I learned to read. I wrote little stories and illustrated them and lived very happily among the Wild Things. I must have showed those stories to people but I don’t remember much about their reactions. Probably something along the lines of the ‘I love those colors!’ kinds of comments you say to five year-olds when they bring home yet another finger painting from preschool.

I wonder, did I never actually say it out loud? Never say I was thinking of being a writer for a career? But surely my actions, writing and reading and writing, surely that signaled the desire. 

I went off to college, a premed major. LOTS of people praised that choice, lots of encouragement when you say you want to be a doctor. At college discovered I could pretty easily double major in Biology and English. I couldn’t believe I got college credit to read books and write papers about them, it was so easy it seemed like a scam. I got all A’s in my English classes and not all A’s in the rest of my classes.

And sophomore year I won a writing award. I didn’t even know there was one, just got a letter in the mail after I returned home that I had won the Bucknell Prize for Women for excellence in English composition and literature.

I had gotten lots of good specific feedback on papers but that is the first time I felt encouraged in any significant way to write beyond class assignments, and I don’t even know how I got picked. There is no face to attach to that encouragement. I’m going to pretend it was Professor Michael Payne who singled me out, I took every class he taught. If he had offered a class called Old White Male Authors Pontificate on Their Prostates, I would have taken it, he was that magnificent of a teacher.

The award was presented at convocation when school started again. My boyfriend did not come me watch me receive it. He was majoring in mechanical engineering and fraternity hijinks. No encouragement for artsy-fartsy types in that group.

I’m pretty sure I heard a lot of ‘what job do you get with an English major’ type comments from my family and my friends at college (it’s a fair question), and when I decided I didn’t want to go to med school I switched to psychology. I ended up in graduate school for that, and it turned out to be a worthy career, full of interest and challenge.

 Flannery O’Connor said about writing, ‘I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,” and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there—showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.”

Psychology gave me a deeper understanding of how (and why) some folks will do in spite of everything. And it made me even more curious, and that is never a bad thing for a writer.

There is a lot of failure in writing, it can be a lonely process where you are faced, time after time, with falling short, no one to blame but yourself. It occurs to me that I lucked out, that I would not have handled a writing career well as a young woman, as someone in my twenties with too few failures under my belt. Or maybe more accurately, too few triumphs over failure. A soft and privileged person, I was then.

I’m not sure I handle failure well even now, but psychology and age brought me some gifts. I have way more fortitude, more resilience tricks up my sleeve, a thicker skin, and enough failures to know there rarely is such thing as an end. There is the beginning of things and the middle. The end is just the beginning of something else. A rejected manuscript is not an end, it has many more lives to live. It can be submitted to someone else. It can be revised. It can serve as the footstool that lifts you up enough to write the next story, better. It can show you that the rejected story was the thing you needed to create in order to get to the thing that you wanted to create.

The past few years I’ve had people encouraging me to write and I deeply appreciate them, but I have realized that the person who encouraged me the most, from the beginning up until this very minute, was the wild little girl in love with words.

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Midday Moment of Peace

I’ve read so many books on how to calm one’s brain, on meditation, psychology, self-help, brain structure. I studied it, got several degrees in it, taught it, have been paid to lead people through it. There is a big area of my brain devoted to the understanding of how to calm oneself.

Funny thing though, having the knowledge doesn’t translate into calm. You have to actually do the things.

I read once that if a psychologist was presented with two doors, one labeled ‘heaven’ and the other labeled ‘lecture about heaven’ the psychologist would choose the one labeled ‘lecture about heaven.’ We so often prefer to analyze something instead of just experiencing it.

I meditate every morning and sometimes the calms lasts as long as through breakfast. Nothing left of it by lunch and usually I just plow on through with the day. But today, for a few moments in the middle of the day I walked the walk. Well, I breathed the breath might be a better way to say it.

Put my phone in another room.

Did some deep breathing, the kind where your stomach moves in and out, not your chest.

Intentionally put my attention towards little good things. A cool breeze through the window at night. The birds tweeting to wake me up. Good coffee. My dog following me around the house all day. An unexpected compliment from one of the teenagers in my house. (“Mom, mirrors are weird. When I see your face in the mirror I see wrinkles around your mouth, but when I look straight at you, no wrinkles.”)

It was, for the moment, a comfy-cozy-smooth moment of peace. It was, for the moment, enough.

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Pillow Fight – Grown Up Edition

There is a belief around my house that the magic elixir to a good night’s sleep is the right pillow, that one exists somewhere, an enchanted amalgam of height, weight, shape, and materials. Legend says it will smooth the way to a restful night, restoring all mental and physical functioning while you snooze. Assuming of course one remembers the melatonin a half hour before bed. And keeps the TV volume down low enough that the one who didn’t want to watch TV at all could still fall asleep. And if you don’t have to pee too many times in the night.

But I digress.

In his search for the holy grail of neck support Husband has tried soft pillows, hard pillows, memory foam pillows, hollowed out pillows, a rolled up towel, a thicker rolled up towel, a thinner rolled up towel, and sleeping on the floor.  This has been going on for years. I’m mildly amused by it, and periodically check in on the effectiveness of the most recent contestant.

Recently Son started complaining of neck and back soreness in the morning, presumably (in my non-expert opinion) related to the newly installed squat rack in our garage (a lot of weight lifting going on out there, usually accompanied by grunts and pounding rap music, it’s like, as my friend Ann likes to say, our very own prison yard). Son being such a mini-me to his dad (their baby pictures are distinguishable only due to dad’s being printed on Kodak paper) Son is sure the right pillow will cure it. He asks for a different pillow and the second generation holy grail quest commences.

My own search is over, I found my pillow groove a couple of years ago. A mid-weight memory foam, molded pillow, the kind that has a minor dip in the middle and a lightweight regulation size pillow for my knee pillow (if you are over 40 and don’t use a knee pillow, who even are you?). This combination sends me to the land of dreamy dreams and back again unscathed, neck and back aligned like a twenty-something yoga teacher.

This is how much I love my son. I gave him my pillow to try. From his collection he traded me back a pillow that was similar, a lighter version of the dip in the middle but less memory foamey.  That one worked for me too (supporting my claim to most adaptable in this family, at least as far as pillows go). I’m no princess and the pea, like people who shall remain unnamed.

The other night Husband looked around his side of the bed and started frowning. What happened to all his pillows? He is now down to a little knee pillow (that used to be my knee pillow until I decided I needed more heft and size and traded up).

“How did I end up with only this little knee pillow?” he looks at me, bewildered and then accusing.  “Where is my pillow? I used to have at least three good pillows and now I have this.”

He flings the little knee pillow (that started life as a couch decoration and was already flattened before it transitioned to knee pillow status, if we are being honest) towards me. “How am I supposed to sleep on that?”

I shrugged. “That used to be mine. I haven’t used it for a while. I don’t know how you have it.”

I looked at his area of the bed. “What about your towels?”

“They aren’t working.” He looks closer at my pillow and before I can stop him, he grabs it, pulls the pillow case loose and stares at me with full on accusation now. “This is MINE!”

I snatch the pillow back from him. “No, this is mine now. I traded Son for it.”

I pull the pillow tight to my chest. “I’m not giving it up. My back feels fine when I wake up in the morning. My neck feels fantastic. I’m not giving it up.” Who would give back the holy grail, I ask you?

“That wasn’t his to give!” Husband yells.

We both charge into Son’s bedroom, interrupting his gaming.

“What the –?” Son says, “What do you want? I’m playing. It’s late!” Son manages to convey outrage and disgust without even a flicker of a look away from his game, his fingers clicking wildly on his keyboard. (Apologies to his future spouse, he has reached Jedi level skills in the art of discussion without eye contact.)

We ignore him and start flipping covers around on his bed to find all the pillows. There are at least eight, most of them castoffs from the holy grail search. I triumphantly find my old pillow and brandish it to husband. “See! I told you. I traded this for my pillow.”

“It wasn’t his to give you!” Husband insists again. “I wasn’t done with that pillow.”

“Get out,” Son says, still laser focused on his game.

“I’m taking the pillow,” Husband says, grabbing my old pillow.

“No! I need that to sleep!” Son says, head never moving. “What’s wrong with you two? It’s 11:30, go away.”

We shuffle out, clutching our pillows.

Here’s the thing. I said I’m the most adaptable, but I was really happy with my current pillow set up. I didn’t want to adapt, again. My back and neck were just fine. Why mess with that? Why take the chance of two people misaligned when you could just have one?

“Let me help you roll your towels up again,” I offered, sitting on my pillow so he couldn’t grab it.

“Hrmff,” Husband said, neck propped up by a towel and the old little knee pillow.  I noticed that the volume on the TV was set extra high that night, but it seemed a moment made for adaptability so I let it go.

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Friendship

Our lives can get crazy so fast and in the hustle to work and take care of your family and yourself and your house and your pets it is easy to forget what is really important. This quote reminds me to be still and being still reminds me what is truly of value to me. The picture is of Lake Tahoe in winter and I took it a couple of years ago while out on a dock with a dear friend, Karen Coane. Not much of higher value than a friend. Not too many things more worthy of your attention, your time, or your heart, than a friend.

Bending Toward Love

I’m sitting at my desk in the bay window at the front of our house, looking at the tree across the street. We’ve lived here almost three years and this is the first time I’ve really looked at that tree. It is winter and the leaves are all off it except for some clumps in two different V’s that look like nests. The morning sun, coming from the south, is shining so brightly on the whole left side of the tree, lighting up every branch, outlining them like a half halo. I’m enjoying this beauty, this light on the ever dividing smaller branches and then I realize something else.

Many of the branches, especially the ever-smaller ones, bend towards the left.

They grew towards the sun! It makes the tree seem even more alive, like it has a preference, a longing for the sun, like I long for God, like I bend towards love when I allow myself to perceive it. I can imagine a cell dividing as a tender little branch grows and it feels warmth in one direction and cold in another so it unfolds itself near the warmth. And then the next division does the same thing, cell by cell building towards light and warmth.

These days of pandemic fatigue and political unrest keep my brain always whirring, unpleasantly. But as I look at the tree, watch the sun shift around its branches, imagine the imperceptible but continual reaching of new growth toward the sun, the whirring slows, stops.

I am reminded of a quote from the novelist James Caroll:

“We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things… [but] there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.”

I watch the birds, moving in and out of the sun in the tree as they peck at its trunk for bugs. I watch an elderly man and woman shuffle by, masked up, heads facing forward as if they don’t see me sitting here in my bay window staring out at them. I see the man slip his hand into his wife’s hand as she takes an unsteady step.

Today, the breezes are whispering that we are all bending towards love.

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Breaking New Year’s Resolutions

I’ve been thinking about New Year’s resolutions and how quickly they get broken. For example, who, starting dry January, could have predicted a Jan 6 insurrection? I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions because I don’t think there is anything magical about that day and in fact I think making a resolution and failing can make things feel even worse than you felt before you tried. That said, I think there are lots of things that are worth trying to change and I deeply believe change is possible. I also think that that some changes are really hard to make and might take many, many tries. And how sometimes the thing that really allows us to eventually do the thing or break the habit is grace, being welcomed back for yet another attempt.

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Magic in the Midst of Upheaval

Not long ago I took this picture walking at the Baylands Nature Preserve, a protected marshland along the bottom side of the San Francisco Bay. It was just a normal day, the sun dropping in the sky over the Santa Cruz mountains like it does every day. It was dazzling, like someone tossed a handful of diamonds and fairy dust across the water. If it isn’t cloudy, this is what you can see any day of the year. Looking at it filled something in me. Even looking at the picture fills something in me.

Which is a good thing because this year has torn more than a few holes in me. Most days I can’t keep up with mending or filling them. But this day, looking over the water, watching the peaceful ducks who had no concept of politics or pandemics, I felt full.

Most of us are just hanging on, waiting for those moments that soften the jagged edges of this year. Realistically, moments are all I can get these days. I don’t expect long hours of peace, let alone days of it. Not yet, anyway.

But I’m finding that if I get myself out into nature, even if it is just walking in my neighborhood, I can remember that great W.B. Yeats quote:
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

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Holy Night

Craig and Karen Coane have hosted a Christmas caroling party for over a decade. They have the perfect house for entertaining, open floor plan, cool back deck and back yard, a stunning kitchen. Everyone brings food, mostly crockpots of chili, every variation you can imagine. It is festive and fun and everyone is chatting and enjoying each other and then Craig tunes up his guitar and starts the caroling practice. People are slow to stop talking to each other but eventually we are all pulled in to the music. And then it is time to head out into the neighborhood.  I’ve noticed that over the years, more and more people forego the caroling part of the caroling party, lagging behind inside, enjoying the warmth and the food and the good conversation.  This year, of course, it didn’t happen. But last year, it did. Last year, it had rained on and off all day and it was dark and foggy outside. Their beautiful house felt even more cozy. Fewer people than usual headed out to sing.

Karen sent a messenger inside to remind people that this was a caroling party, after all. Someone grabbed the microphone and shamed everyone into heading out to sing. We love Craig so much that we all went. The first house or two had people welcoming us. Then we hit a run of houses with babies sleeping, the parents at the door wide eyed in their pleas for silence. And then some houses where no one answered the door. And then a couple more welcoming folks. We sang, chatted on the way to the next house, sang again. The fog gave an eerie look to the world, everything fuzzy, all sharp edges gone.

Eventually, we got to a house we go to every year, one towards the end of the route. There is an old couple who live there, they are slow to open the door but the festive wreath and the porch lights signal they are home and we should wait. Eventually the door opens to reveal them in their robes, beaming and happy to see us.  Last year when the door finally opened it was only the man. He told us that his wife had passed away in June. And then tears started to slide down his face.

The group went silent. The laughing and chatting that had accompanied the whole trip stopped. While the rest of us stood tongue-tied, Craig seamlessly shifted from gregarious to compassionate. In a soft voice he told the man he was so sorry to hear that. The man talked about how much they looked forward to the caroling. How much his wife had looked forward to it. And Craig offered more kind words, shifting the whole group into a supportive mood. And then we sang Silent Night. Everyone cried. Even the man as he sang along, his face crumpled in grief, his voice cracking, tears streaming. Even the pack of sixteen-year-old boys who, surprisingly, were still along, still singing, seemingly forgetting for this one night that singing carols is uncool.

For the length of that song we were with that man in his grief. I’d like to think it offered him some company in his sadness, a lessening, for a second, of his profound loneliness. I loved every person in that group in that moment. I felt connected to every person, to the man, to life itself in all its gifts and losses. Singing with that man was a reminder of what life is really about, being truly present with each other in all the parts of life. I will never sing Silent Night again without thinking of that man and that night. I’m not sure I’ll ever sing it again without tears.

Craig has been a musician his whole life. He brings the music wherever he goes. He has a relentless cheery outlook. Without being the least pushy, he inspires people to enjoy life, to sing even if they have no great voice, to dance even with poor moves. Even people who don’t know him are pulled into his charisma, as evidenced by the bartender at the Field of Dreams in Manteca who said ‘you do you Boo!’ to him, as evidenced by the ski resort employee who sold him lift tickets and said, ‘here you go, Craig-a-licious.’  People are drawn to him and it is fun to watch.

Although he is an accomplished musician, it wasn’t Craig’s skill with music that made this moment – it was his skill with people.  He inspired us to get out and sing, which brought us to the very place we were most needed. And he responded with compassion and tenderness to a heartbroken man. He turned an awkward situation into a holy one.

This year in particular we are all in need of a holy moment. My family just watched a Christmas Eve church service online. The songs were beautiful, the message was meaningful but the separation and distance of not physically being in church left me a little cold. And then the last song of the program was Silent Night and I was transported back to that foggy, damp night singing to the grieving old man. And just like that, the magic of Christmas found its way back to me. We will find a way to love each other despite distancing and illness and political divides. We will find it, through music, through empathy, through the mundane conversation, through extending extra grace, through taking turns being the ones to find a path to empathy. It might come in singing a song, or it might come from telling the checkout girl you like her pink hair, or it might come from showing understanding to a misbehaving teen instead of anger. It will come from looking for moments of grace, of that I’m sure. It will come from allowing fate to find us, which requires an openness that isn’t the default option for some of us.

I believe that fate found Craig that night, inspired him in the exact way to comfort the old man. I believe fate can still find us all, in big ways and in small ones. I believe love and inspiration is still here, looking for us. It could find me today, or you. It isn’t gone from the world. It’s just waiting for an opening.

[this story was originally part of a longer post https://wordpress.com/post/lynnrankinesquer.wordpress.com/321 ]

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