This morning I woke up to the scent of baking bread and literally floated down the stairs on a cloud of cinnamon. My house guest, Alma Luce is a stress-baker, meaning this morning, she made three loaves of braided cinnamon-sugar challah bread, black beans and rice and molasses cookies. Alma Luce is a blue-eyed eighteen-year-old girl who is 6-feet tall with waist-length blonde hair that is currently dyed red and a smattering of new piercings and tattoos, all appearing in the last few months since her mother left this world. Lulu’s mother is/was my friend and teacher, Laura Kali, who left this world five months ago after a long battle with breast cancer. Lulu is heading to an East coast college on a full ride scholarship to be a physician’s assistant, and she is currently quarantining in my home and baking in my kitchen.
And I am currently eating challah bread so light it is melting in my mouth as I write.
If you know my writing, you know I’m often thinking about the cruel dialectic of parenting. You give your heart and soul and life to these glorious souls, and if you do it well, they leave. The entire purpose of loving your children to the moon and back is so that their wings are strong enough to fly away!! WHAT?? That seems insane! Which is what I added “cruel” to Hegel’s dialectic.
But I think it works the other way as well, as I watch Lulu reach into the far recesses of my cupboards to bake anything and everything, and I finish a Facetime call with my own mother, who is currently living in a home in Utah, cared for by strangers, unable to see family due to Covid, except through Facetime. Since my father died a few years ago, my mother has entered a dream state, and during the call she was funny and making unusual neral connections that only she can understand, but when she saw a photo of my Dad, she burst into tears and said, “Oh is he with you? How is he?” Which made me burst into tears. I miss him too, and I miss her. My brothers and sisters and I tried to care for her ourselves after my father died, but when she broke her knee, neck and hip in quick succession, we finally surrendered that maybe her care was outside our scope. But I can’t bear not being able to care for her myself, so maybe the daughter dialectic is devoting everything to caring for your mother, watching her disappear, by cancer or dementia, and loving her so deeply you want to wrap her up and carry her around with you, but knowing you can’t.
I learned about Hegel’s dialectic in a philosophy class at UCLA and it felt like a gong struck in my mind. I devoured books on the subject and explored it from every angle.
A year later, my poetry professor, Stephen Yenser, quoted similar thoughts by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In a 1936 Esquire article, Fitzgerald wrote an essay called “The Crack-up” which contained the following quotation: “…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible” come true.”
And quite frankly, I could write an autobiographical essay today and the title, “The Crack-up” would fit nicely, although I might change it to “The Crack-pot”, as both are quite true. Meanwhile, I’ll crack open another warm melted buttery slice of challah while I ponder.
So for the past twenty years, I have thought a lot about the dialectic and its cruelty, and I was researching various philosophies recently when I came across a third piece of the dialectic I had never learned.
What is it? Drum roll please…
SYNTHESIS!
What? Can this be true? How did I ever miss the third part? I thought I was left hanging with the conundrum of two opposing sides being true at the same time, and never the two should meet, but if this theory is true, in any dialectic there is synthesis!
What the hell does this mean?
According to the Oxford English dictionary, “In Hegelian philosophy, the final stage of dialectical reasoning, in which a new idea resolves the conflict between thesis and antithesis.” “It is also noted that the dialectical process is not simply from thesis and antithesis to final synthesis; it is an eternal, open-ended spiral of development.”
And again, what the hell does that mean? Are we on an endless loop of pain and suffering, like Dante’s seven circles of hell, falling through the roaring fires of bone-burning loss, screaming for lost love?
Or is this spiral a gorgeous fiery goddess symbol, not endless pain but boundless love, and learning that boundless love is found in loving and letting go, over and over again?
Or can both be true at the same time?
Jesus, I’m blowing my own mind.
But I do love a spiral and an infinity symbol, as they are the sacred shapes of belly dance, and nothing makes me feel more centered and empowered and connected than belly dancing.
You can go back much further than Fitzgerald in ancient texts and find the same theme explored over and over. For example, there is a 2,000-year-old poem called “The Thunder: Perfect Mind”, discovered in the gnostic manuscripts at Nag Hammadi, and it speaks in the voice of a divine feminine power that unites opposites. “I am knowledge and ignorance… I am strong and I am afraid… I am war and I am peace… I am the mother and the daughter…” (I just had a vision of a woman reciting the poem while someone belly dances. How gorgeous!)
The poem is shining marvelous example of the quest of the human soul to make sense of this world, to unite opposites. It has inspired countless research and gorgeous art. Recently, the poem was the foundation of Sue Monk Kidd’s current bestselling novel, “The Book of Longings”, and just this morning I came across the poem in a beautiful Prada ad from 2010, directed by Jordan Scott and her father, Ridley Scott. I never knew Prada was tapping into ancient texts to make art. (See short film below)
After experiencing staggering heartbreak, I am constantly searching for people who have made it to the other side. Many spiritual teachers tell us not to run away from pain, but to run towards it, invite pain in and let it teach us its lessons. That sounds like a terrible idea, but maybe a beautiful idea too. I don’t know, sounds a lot like a dialectic.
I shall take a bite of a molasses cookie and think about it. And in a lovely piece of synchronicity, my mom used to make molasses cookies all the time, and she’d give us a little bowl of sugar to roll the balls of dough in and put on the cookie sheet. They were delicious, and for years I thought they were called “Alaska cookies”. I think I was 15 when I finally realized they were called molasses cookies. Also, my Dad and Henry’s favorite joke involves some moles climbing out of a hole and the little one saying all he could see was “mole asses”. Also Lulu’s entire name is Alma Luce which means “Light of the Soul”.
At this point, the one thing I’ve learned is I don’t know a damn thing, except maybe I know everything because I know nothing. Probably the only thing I know at the moment is Lulu makes a damn good molasses cookie.
And thinking about all of this feels a lot like wrestling with a rainbow unicorn, which coincidentally I just did (see photos below).
So, to synthesize, we have dialectics, spirals, uniting opposites and knowing all can be true at the same time?
So I guess we can establish I haven’t figured out the synthesizing part yet.
What I do know is that for me, the one thing that makes life worth living, is Love (and cookies).
Loving deeply, while KNOWING that all great loves leave, in one way or another. Children grow up, lovers leave, soul mates die, mothers forget who you are, fathers die, furry teachers move on… (my daughter said I better clarify what a furry teacher is, so to clarify, a furry teacher is a pet); and even knowing that, knowing my bones will feel like they are on fire, maybe for years, knowing I will feel like I’ve been flung off a cliff into a dark abyss, knowing the lake of tears I will shed when that great love, that gorgeous shining soul leaves, I still choose love.
I always choose love.
I am the Mother and the Daughter.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am the wrestler of the Rainbow Unicorn. (And yes I did get wet and have to be towed to the steps by my son.)
(And now, a few hours later, Lulu is making peach pie with dragonfly cutouts!! In her hands, grief is magic!! (And delicious!)
