Guess how many times a woman with injured feet can hobble up and down steep steps to replace a fuse (yes, a fuse. my home was born in 1949.) before her sister’s wedding? 4 times. I have yet to fully identify which outlets rely on which fuse and just when I think I have it all figured out, just how much can be required of one fuse, someone comes along and plugs in a cell phone charger AND the iron and…phhhhhhtttttt….wrong.
I think it was the 3rd trek and the trip to Lowes for more new fuses that had me thinking about how this is a picture of what imbalance does to us, images of the whole person, maybe 50% physical, 50% “spiritual” (etheric?) and all the circuits of activity, requirement flowing out and coming in swirling in my head. Mind. Body. Spirit. And. We have limits, no? Ask too much of the same fuse/source/account and something, if not everything, on that account disappears, falls through the cracks or otherwise shuts down until a change is made. See ya later…
But you have to get to the wedding on time and with dry hair, if not curled, if not straightened, if not ironed clothes, if not the least. The job. School. The committe meeting. How much can be asked of one circuit? High blood pressure, strokes, diabetes and my parents. Circuits and weddings and winding mountainous drives on a Saturday epic, quick sales, foreclosures and financial meltdowns. Oil spills and cleanup disasters. How much was BP losing a day? One million dollars. So they hurried the process, asked a bit much of one line, the safety valve broke and they kept going. Then it all blew up. Millions seeped, oozed, spewed and otherwise hurled into an ocean not invulnerable.
I sound like the voice of doom. But my modem is still running and it’s been longer than 5 minutes. Wow. (The modem is not connected to the same fuse that kept protesting overload. It’s just had enough and has been dying after 5 minutes.) Where is this ramble going? Out the fingers and onto screen, energy pouring piles of words. My heart is stuck on circuits, fuses and overload as my parents are entering a phase of their lives I’m not ready for just yet. (Are we ever?) And I’m discovering new circuits of strength past the overused, shutdown modes I once relied on. My divorce is going to be finalized before the final fuse blows or I’ll crack, ready or not, financial complications or not. It can all just fall apart before I do (ah ha). My eldest, Downs, sister wants to know where my husband (former) is and I have to hush the words of truth that try to fall on her ears as her face freezes, desperately shutting out the information coming at her from across the table. My own face furrows something fiercely protesting, head shaking a big fat HUSH and then quick smile at a sister with only so much capacity. No, don’t tell her that. Tell her he’s at work. (How horrid, right? But what else do you say to dementia? She “knows” her sister’s marriage is over but she refuses, just as she said over and over during her other sister’s wedding “shut up! shut up!” when the minister spoke a name not the name she has known for years. Her mind can only take so much. Reiki, touch and some pretty intense whispers shut the shut up fest. Why does life ask some things of us? It’s a wicked ride sometimes. Wicked winding wooly weird.) A car has died too. Yes, that must be replaced with the funds that do not exist. My education may have to wait a semester because of it all. One class, maybe. The door knob (glass) to my sons’ bedroom finally gave up the ghost. The porch is protesting the rain and my little cottage is fast becoming this weird twilight zone reflection of generational backlash lashing out, insisting on a fitter house or else. There are no accidents, right? And I co-create. I make my world in the wake or wreckage of whatever I had little control of before (yes, there are times in a life when one has very little control, this does not make us victims as much as it makes us living, breathing humans responding as dynamically and creatively as we can to life.), I make my life now. Ohmmm. (how many ohms to run the computer?!)
So, I I I…do have some say here but there are these things called…limits. One person, while walking out of religious insanity, out of the marriage that was born in fear, out of the programming of shame and oppression, out of the mental incarceration, out of the resulting financial backlash, out of the physical chronic manifestations of environmental toxicity, out of decades and into now has only so much she can nurture, build, blaze, prune. So…
Limits laugh at me lately while the oracles call sweetly and orgasmically (some of them, especially brezsny) of how bountiful booming great it all is, assuring me the universe conspires to bless me and. i. laugh. It’s true. But the blessing is not so much in the smoothly running circuits or the fuses forever humming or the longevity of life itself. It’s in the resilience and the fragility, the laughing and the weeping, the embracing of the value of it all, the knowing of how so much falls apart when blithely neglected in transcendent blissful lah tee dah, how some things and people languish while others receive their long overdue trauma unit care, how precious the holding, hugging, nurturing, releasing dance that never quite grasps but always resonates profound grace and trust that to live
just for 5 minutes more
is blessing supreme. And worth the investment now, the stopping now, the cultivating, planting, feeding now, repairing, re-wiring, restoring now, creating a humming spiritual circuitry of richness of living reaping richness of living (whether the fuses say so or not!). It just might not look so great in the very mean time. When you feed one field, the other must wait. Pretty basic, right? But we don’t often give ourselves this much, do we? We expect, in our “convenient,” drive-through culture, to get it ALL done now. But.
At what point do we map out the life that embraces limits and possibilities and asks what the individual, the person values most and how, how s/he will go about growing it gradually, relentlessly in spite of the spills and collapses and maybe even because of them, how will s/he plant seeds for later while living now without being lost in the dream of fields abloom with promise? I’ve been mapping for a while now, plotting, planting, planning, growing, implementing some watershed change, waiting while holding to now-as-all, as destination supreme and yet. I didn’t plan this year of “disasters” but I knew it was coming. I couldn’t head it off at the pass, couldn’t fill up the gap. I could only wait. And live on the circuits provided me for now. (And run to Lowes when I must!)
I’d like more. More than 5 minutes and more than 4 fuses for a home begging renovation. And more than a world indifferent to the preciousness of it all. One of the things about us humans that I love…we’re not exactly like those fuses. We may have to lose a few activities but where there is life, where there is resilience and creativity and capacity, there is a way. When one way closes, we get to re-route a path to a destination not only beyond but within, unfolding fruit regardless of the seeming disruption of plans upon plans upon…
Life, relentless.
J. Ruth Kelly 
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