Lactose intolerance

Dear Complaint Department,

My damned stomach doesn’t like cheese. This makes me sad.

Dear Intolerance,

We all love what wants to kill us in some way. What a wild trick of life. We all are drawn like a moth to the proverbial flame of what will first cause us blazing pain and then what will take our last breath. It’s the dance of remembering we are alive. Have you ever had times in life where you felt numb and distant and not very real? I have. And in these seasons we begin to pray for pain. We begin to ask for anything that will prick the armor that keeps us safe but dissociated within a dull and drab world.

Be it cheese, be it love, be it that dream, or those paths—what we can’t have haunts us daily. People say to be present, but how can we, haunted as we are? What you want but can’t have takes on a monstrous presence and waits outside every window and knocks at every hidden door you’ve stashed it behind. Welcome to longing. Welcome to living. Welcome to pain.

I too love quite a few things that only bring me harm. I have no idea how to quit. I have no idea how to forgo the longing. I have no idea how to stop courting what only wants to destroy all the good things of spring I come with around the corner of winter.

You can’t choose between love and living and pain. It’s the same bouquet.

You just have to love yourself enough to survive all of it.

So perhaps a bit less cheese and a bit less not letting all the monsters in. Or perhaps it is letting all the monsters in and giving them dinner and listening to their complaints. Then send them on their way.

—with love for your own love for what causes you pain,

with love and grace for all the things you want, but can’t have,

The Complaint Department

Oh my DEER!

Dear Complaint Department,

The deer in my neighborhood are a menace. They saunter across the street right when I am late to work. Whole families of them in NO HURRY WHATSOEVER. They stare straight at me through the windshield whilst taking their sweet time just to “get to the other side”, as it were. I must have lost half a lifetime waiting on them over the years and don’t get me started on how they knock over the rocks on my retaining wall as they waltz through my yard setting off my Ring doorbell 20 times a day. I mean, why can’t they hang out in the forest like they are supposed to?

Dear Deer,

Perhaps the better question is why can’t we and why can’t you hang out in the forest like we are supposed to? We too are animal and we too were meant to live in community with deep-rooted trees who have been around for centuries and who can teach us how to live. We were meant to learn to love from all the wildness of the oaks and the dirt and the coyotes and the fungi who survive and thrive and take the time to create and recreate the world time and time again.

So it’s all wrong.

The deer who peer back at you are animal lives you were meant to live. It’s annoying. It’s like bumping into an ex who has somehow done better and gotten more free and attractive since you left them. It’s pain. It’s a living and embodied regret of all the missed canopies of trees we were meant to dream under.

In losing half a lifetime locked eye to eye with the wildness of your own mirror self, you might have found a portal to your own true animal.

But yes, of course, so annoying too. Things can always be both.

To the forest we go.

—with so much love for what annoys you and calls you to wildness

The Complaint Department

This b*tch

Dear Complaint Department,

My father has been dating the most passive aggressive, angry, unkind, horrid woman for the last 8 years and I hate it. She makes every family function tense and strained.

Dear Tense and Strained,

Oof. You are so brave to just say it and to say it clearly and pointedly. The Complaint Department doesn’t dispense advice, but, RUN. Run for your life. Run toward love and safety and kindness like your life depends on it, because it does. Have you tried burning it all down? Have you tried screaming your lungs out until all the windows shatter?

There is no answer here of course. Which is why a steady complaint into the wild, into the wind, into the forest, into a strange website is about all you can do. We hear you. We hear your compliant, you anguish, your rage. We will scream out the windows here for you.

Everyone we hate, even if we are justified in hating them, are mirrors to show us what is unloved within our own selves—this we know but too they also show us what we are grateful for in ourselves and others. How wonderful that you are not also a horrible human being. How wonderful that so many people you know are not passive aggressive and angry and unkind and horrid. Can you imagine if everyone was? Can you even imagine?

To borrow a clique, kindness makes the world go around, and yet, what of those who do not participate in this kindness? What of those who just take from it and drain the life force from everything beautiful growing? You can’t love people into the light unfortunately.

So you do what you do, you complain and you love those who are good, and you keep adding to the kindness that propels every planet’s turning and if you can find a safe way to do it, burn it all down.

Thank you for being you.

—with care for what is awful, with love and appreciation for who you are,

The Complaint Department

Selfish Dads

Hello,
I would like to submit a complaint about my dad. He’s the most selfish and entitled person I’ve ever met. I try to see the good in him, but it’s difficult. I feel like he doesn’t even actually care about us kids. I don’t understand him. I do love him, but I just wish he showed that he cared more.

Dear Trying to see the Good,

People we don’t understand are just these distorted mirrors showing back to us all the parts of ourselves we don’t have the grace to understand and let be. But it’s also like a fun house from hell. I don’t understand your dad either. It’s all just an invitation to you, from you, about you. You have to turn toward love. The kind of love that is made from nothing. The kind of love that is for you, from you, despite having a father who doesn’t care the way he should. This empty space is so painful and awful and you just have to survive it.

Selfish and entitled is just gonna be selfish and entitled and you don’t have to spelunk those caves, wearing your fingers down to the sinews and bones trying to find a sliver of gold or something worth while. You rather have to just hold your breath if you can as you drive through the tunnel. Did you every play that game as a kid? When you would drive through a tunnel you were supposed to try and hold your breath all the way through. What a strange game. A bit of micro-dosing death. A bit of playing with mortality. A bit of pushing the body to the limits.

Also though, the joy of the inhale once you have made it through the long and dark tunnel.

There is no answer here, but I think this is the answer. Just an intuition of mine.

Hold your breath through the cave and get through it as fast as you can. And relish that big inhale like a lost treasure finally found.

It’s all so painful and it’s a horror really to have the person who is supposed to love you unconditionally not even care. Maybe that’s why those silly games were invented in the first place. It’s a bit scary to drive through a tunnel—the light goes away and time and space make less sense and until you are almost through it’s just dark and windy and haunted. So we come up with games to survive it.

So play. So dance. So hold your breath and celebrate your victory when you emerge into the light.

—with love for all the places in you that aren’t being loved

The Complaint Department

People are driving me Crazy

Dear Complaint Department,

This time of the year there’s so many people out and about. The lines are long everywhere there’s no parking spots and I’m terrible at parking. People are cranky (including me) and I’m just trying to go out and get the necessities! It takes twice as long just to go anywhere and people are driving crazy!

- overwhelmed

Dear Overwhelmed,

I won’t tell you to embrace the magic of the season, but rather the magic of necessities. You are indeed among the living, what a nightmare. You are also indeed living among the dead. Not in the proverbial ghost haunting of tv’s and movies where a spooky figure appears in moody, smoky windows but rather how every space you inhabit has been inhabited by many who are no longer present. Every presence is filled in by absence and every absence is filled in by a rich inheritance of presence.

What does this have to do with anything?

You walk the aisles of Costco where many have walked before you and who are no longer living.

It’s all so solemn and sacred and also it’s all so stupid and noisy and overwhelming and everyone is everywhere and we aren’t our best selves so much of the time.

There is another realm here. It’s just beyond the veil. It’s just right there waiting for us to notice the whole host of ghosts who are present only in their absence.

Maybe it’s just noticing all the roadside memorials marking where someone died with flowers and notes and crosses.

Maybe it’s noticing how everything is a memorial.

Maybe it’s bringing flowers to the all crowded spaces and saying a prayer of goodbye and thank you and why and help.

Feeling overwhelmed can be its own abundance of riches.

It’s also a bit awful—like all good things.

—with tenderness and love for your own noisy mind and crowded spaces

The Complaint Department

I ate too many Cookies

I ate too many Christmas cookies at the cottonwood open mic night and now I have a stomach ache.

Dear Cookies,

Haven’t we all been there? Some of us live there—that space between want and regret. Everything is a push pull along the thinnest wire of life and death. This is why everything that seems small reverberates with such loud, monstrous echoes, because under all of it is a pulsing mortality that beats with each resonating heart beat.

So even cookies and even stomach aches and even love and even grief—they all remind us we are so frail and human and we are frail and human because one day we will die and we also have to say goodbye to people we can’t live without and it’s a hellscape of unimaginable proportions.

But at least there are cookies here and there.

Ah, but see the circle we find ourselves in?

Sad at our impending doom we eat too many cookies and then we pull up and out of the despair only to find more cookies and more death and the cycle repeats and its so hard to be so kind to ourselves in the whirlwind.

Everything has a cost.

And we aren’t made of money.

But hey, at least there are cookies and places like a community open mic where we can come together, sit in a room, eat too much sugar, and re-wallpaper the walls of existence and what it can mean to suffer and to love, all together, all the stomach aches in tow.

—with love for what you consume that brings your agony,

The Complaint Department

I am so Angry

I'm so rarely angry, but this week my bones are rattling with rage and it's like being constantly over-caffeinated. I'm angry with a person, but it's never really just that person, is it? Because they are a product of their people and the system and society they find themself thrust into and when you start thinking about it there is just so very much to be angry about. And then I'm angry at my own reactions, or lack of action, or lack. I don't really even know how to be angry, but my hands shake around my morning coffee all the same.

Dear Angry,

Who was it who said, if you aren’t angry then you just aren’t paying enough attention to the world? There is anger aplenty. It is sort of the heft and thrust of the world and how all things come to be. Fire is angry and it destroys and yet it also creates and it restores and it can be what scorches the forest and also what prepares the forest for what new growth is to come.

Maybe anger is not ours personally, but rather a great energy that exists and pulses and sits there waiting for us to step in and be struck like a match to go out and scorch what needs to be scorched in order for the forest to begin growing again and again and again.

Maybe anger is like a shared world of fire—meaning, you don’t have to take it home with you. You are so right, there is so much to be angry about. Anger can be just a cleanse and often is a potent spark for what is right and good and true. So don’t lose the anger. But maybe think about it like a well, a world, a place you can clock in and out of. You can step in to it in order to keep the embers burning. But you can leave it too when you need to, in order to rest, in order to have the morning coffee without the hands shaking in rage. It’s a longevity game. How do we get through the long days? Anger is an ancient warrior who comes along side to help. So let it be a companion, but let it be not you. See her for who she is and what she wants to show you.

You’ve been right all along, its never about the other person, we haven’t even talked about them. It’s about us. Everything and everyone is a mirror. Which can be a nightmare too in its own way. Most of the time we just have to get out of our own heads and prisons we make of what we feel. It’s always more simple. We have to pull weeds or help the neighbor or clean the fridge. Movement. Movement. Movement.

It’s often grief.

And it all arrives to rattle us clean.

It all shows up in order to shake our bones like a maraca.

It’s movement.

It’s grace come bursting through the heart’s door her hair lit on fire.

That space of lack you speak of, light it on fire.

Let the forest burn and while it does keep the roots of your goodness safe.

And then find the movement the body needs.

Come spring, the landscape will be both exactly the same, and completely different.

—with love for your anger,

The Complaint Department

Too Cold

It’s too cold. Too damn cold.

Dear Too Damn Cold,

I know. And it is awful when you step outside and feel as if the world was created just to badger you into submission. When the wind howls you into a frenzy. But we were indeed made for change. We were made to survive—but survival is an art, a dance, the grit in the teeth. Winter reminds us we have to fight for it—like we have to fight for everything good we want to see and be and do and love. Winter teaches us how to love. Winter teaches us how to love what we believe can grow in spring, even though we see no evidence of it. I’m cold too. It’s just hard to be alive and it’s hard to be alive within being alive—you know? We can so easily numb out and check out and slip under the covers but to be alive means to let the cold bite the fingers and awaken us to the mystery of pain and love all around. This always hurts. Maybe it's all a lesson of loving what arrives for us, especially when we hate it. Or maybe it is just cold outside. I always look to how the wild does it. How do the wolves survive the winter? I am not sure of course, but I know it has something to do with surviving together. Maybe it’s less of the cold and more of what the cold shows us we need.

with warm and care for all that chills you to the bone,

—The Complaint Department

Recycling & Changing the World

Dear Complaint Dept.,
There is a large bucket in my kitchen meant for collecting my family's recycling. When it's full, we bring it to the larger recycling bin outside, which then is rolled out on Wednesday nights for pickup. This bucket is almost never less than 95% full. Every time I try to add a scrap to it, it takes some effort to cram it down, and then, the next time, my cramming displaces some other scrap on the other side of the bucket, falling to the floor, my only rational response being to take the bucket to the outdoor bin and start anew. Except, it's never new. It's always 95% full. The 'we' that brings it to the outdoor bin is always me. I am so tired. Why can't someone else (there are two someone elses) take out the godforsaken bloody hell mother effing bucket? I hate complaining because it feels weak. But also I suspect that I am the problem here. Like, what would happen if i just let the recycling fall on the floor for a day, a week? Here is my complaint: I think people don't know that I take care of them, and how do they live with that?
~Bucket-half-empty, I wish

Dear Bucket-half-empty,

Complaining is weakness and this is the whole point. And there is nothing weaker than being human, because we all have to live and love and get our hearts broken and hope and die and it all leaves us like mush on the doorstep of what we call life. We already have to die, and then on top of it, we have to wrestle with recycling. And of course, its about the recycling and also about the tangled web of all the someone elses that we have to live with. The little things just are the very big things because they are all peeling back the curtain of what is behind all this living and its death and all it takes from us. I’ll never understand the everyday aches and pains and irritations we are meant to withstand. Maybe we aren’t meant to withstand them—maybe its all a lesson in howling at the wind. Maybe it is to learn how to rage and to rage properly. There is a lot of change needed in the world, isn’t there? How else to imagine change than to begin right in our own kitchens fighting with the recycling bin and with all the other someones who also are responsible for the bin and the waste and with what comes in and with what goes out. It’s a bit like caring for a body. It’s a bit like caring for the world. Sometimes we wrestle with that which is not meant for us. What do they say? Let the chips fall where they may. Or you can fight it. Or you can let go. Of course all of these things are just practice fields where we learn to how stay alive and where we learn how to howl and rage and how we learn to fight against injustice and how we practice building worlds we can actually live in. The small things really are the big things and that’s why fighting with the recycling, in the end, will make you the strongest of all.

with love and care and gentleness for all your battles today, may you be fierce in your weakness. Howl away oh fighting one

—the complaint department

Muffins & Grief

I got so distracted selecting a vegetable oil substitute that I completely forgot to mix the poppyseeds into my poppyseed muffins. I've been looking forward to them all week.

Dear Missing Ingredient Muffins,

Perhaps you are meant to take a drug test later and the poppyseed absence is a blessing from the universe. But forgive me for attempting to read the positive in a situation of depletion. But hear me out, what if, just what if, the universe really is pulling for us. What if we believed that, all evidence to the contrary. We could live this way. We could rejoice over the missed poppyseeds and the spilled milk and the lost ring. But of course to fully rejoice we must fully grieve. Perhaps every occasion is a moment for deep grief and also deep gratitude. Perhaps you aren’t upset enough about the poppyseeds. Perhaps you aren’t enraptured in joy enough for the muffins and what they are lacking. Perhaps we have all gotten a little stunted at both ends. We can’t numb selectively. So if you can’t throw yourself onto the chase lounge in tears over the missed poppyseeds then how can you shout in joy the next time a pastry arrives to you with everything exactly in it that you need and want? Let them call us dramatic. Often we wonder, am I happy? Am I happy enough? When how can we be if we don’t let ourselves marvel at the absolute sadness that arrives for us each day? The forgotten poppyseeds remind us that we can lose what we most treasure and still live—which is horrible news really when you’ve lost something you can’t live without because there you go on living. There you go on living having lost and wept and anguished and raged and the muffin can still be good, even though it is missing its namesake. It makes no sense.

Or maybe it just all means we are often worried about the wrong thing. Maybe if we had just used the vegetable oil and not gone seeking we would have found what we truly needed all along. Or perhaps I am making too much meaning of it all. But it does mean something, each and every complaint, because it is the recipe for our concoctions of joy and too of grief.

—with love and mercy for what has been missed and what will be found,

The Complaint Department

Tired & Tried

Tried, soooo tried. I could sleep for two whole days if i could!

Dear Tired. I hear you. How I hear you. We all howl at the same moon and the moon is life and death and our howling is our persistent exhaustion of trying to stay alive and afloat amid of sea of things that are calling out to us. Dear tired, your tiredness is an ancient ache passed down to you from all the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers who have come before you. Of course you are tired.

Every task and every decision and every smile and every wince and every apology and every ‘I love you’ and every ‘I’m sorry’ and every ‘oops’ and every ‘excuse me’ is a rock you have to carry each and every day. Everything has a heaviness. Even joy. Even love. Everything costs something. Everyone extracts something.

Dear Tired, your tiredness is the body aching to be with you again. We give ourselves away, don’t we? I know how the dishes need to be washed and how the kids can’t watch themselves and how the emails don’t send themselves and the snow doesn’t shovel itself but your heartbeat is your own sacred oath to yourself to not only stay alive but to breathe in and out with rest and joy every once and awhile. A friend of mine always says, “those weights aren’t going to lift themselves”—and we know this, yes? What is heavy must be picked up and yet what is heavy always returns back down to earth quickly and heavier than before.

So see, there is no solving the riddle of tired.

I love your perfect typo Tired. Did you notice how in writing tired it became tried. Perhaps it is in the trying where we get wiped by the world. How beautiful it can be to try. How beautiful it can be to let it all go. Perhaps all of us are trying at the wrong things. Perhaps we pick up boulders not meant for us and then we haul them around all day until the back gives. All I know is that there is a lightness of being for each of us, but how to get there, tired and tried as we are?

Perhaps it is like magic or mercy, we cannot earn it—rest, you cannot earn it. These things wait for us to put down the heaviness not meant for us. These things come along and help us carry the weight we cannot put down. It’s all about how we carry things, right? And if we have some company along the way. Maybe if we tried a little harder for the beauty within us and tried a little less to be perfect in the eyes of the world. Maybe if we just asked one friend to do us one favor. Friends love doing favors. Every burden was meant to be a shared one. Notice already how light it can feel, even as it all presses hard down on your back.

If I see you on the path, I will offer you a hand, just as I know you will offer me yours.

—with mercy and love and rest for all that tries you, for your sacred tired-ness that connects to all the bodies of being,

The Complaint Department