Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

We've Moved!

2009-06-09T22:59:00.001-05:00

I just moved this blog to CarynMirriamGoldberg.wordpress.com, which gives me the capability to have multiple blog pages. This is an important feature since I'll soon be posting podcasts and links to High Plains Public Radio on "Write From Your Life," with the new feature of inviting readers and listeners to respond to the writing exercises on this site.

So come on over to www.CarynMirriamGoldberg.wordpress.com!

Press Release for Book Launch and Poet Laureati Party

2009-06-08T10:25:00.003-05:00

Come to the Lawrence Arts Center at 7:30 p.m., July 1 for the following event. Denise moves out of the poet's mansion that night, and I move in (I hear it has a hot tub, but then again, I hear it's an outhouse). Drop on by for a wonderful time.

The Committee on Imagination & Place announces the first publication of the Imagination & Place Press, Imagination & Place: An Anthology. This eclectic collection features poems, essays, and fiction by writers from coast to coast, broadening the conversation about place and its relation to the natural world and human culture.

Also, July 1, 2009, is the first day of the two-year term of the recently named third Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and represents the conclusion of the term of the second Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low. Both Mirriam-Goldberg and Low are members of the Committee on Imagination & Place and from Lawrence.

Consequently, the public is warmly invited to attend a combined celebration taking place on July 1, launching the anthology and paying tribute to Mirriam-Goldberg and Low. The event will occur at 7:30 p.m. at the Lawrence Arts Center, 940 New Hampshire, Lawrence, Kansas.

Admission to the event is the purchase of a copy of Imagination & Place: An Anthology per household. The books will be available at the door for $12.95 each plus tax.

A booksigning and readings by area contributors to the anthology, as well as readings by Mirriam-Goldberg and Low will make up the July 1 program. A poem by Mirriam-Goldberg is included in the anthology; Low serves on the Imagination & Place Press editorial team. Books by Mirriam-Goldberg and Low will be offered for sale as well. A reception will follow.

About her position as 2007-2009 Kansas Poet Laureate, Low said, "As a new poet laureate, I planned to make appearances and to create a series of electronic poetry broadsides to disseminate to poets, arts organizations, libraries, and publications. I did not expect to take on such a broad role as an ambassador for poetry to colleges, arts centers, libraries, social service organizations, and churches. I spoke on radio and television shows. I judged contests and ran my own series of contests for Poetry Month. In this time I discovered the profound hunger Kansans have for high-level communication. Poetry is not an easy art form, as it requires concentration, skill, logic, and heart. It is the most intense form of literacy. I appreciate the chance to be part of the Kansas Arts Commission-sponsored effort to bring arts into daily lives of my fellow citizens."

On becoming the 2009-2011 Kansas Poet Laureate, Mirriam-Goldberg said, "Over many years teaching and leading writing workshops in communities throughout Kansas and the U.S. and Mexico, I've continually witnessed how powerful our stories and writing can be when we speak in our own words and tell our own truths. My Poet Laureate project -- "Poetry Across Kansas: Reading and Writing Our Way Home" -- offers communities opportunities for not just readings and writing workshops, but support for ongoing writing circles facilitated by local writers, teachers, artists and community members. Building on the good work of our first two Poets Laureate, Denise Low and Jonathan Holden, I'm also bringing communities writing prompts based on the poetry of Kansas writers featured on the website Holden started and Low's Ad Astra project, which also, in turn, helps the people of our state get to know the poetry of our state, and how such poetry can help us see where we live and how to live with new eyes."

Who Knew? I Enjoy Being a Girl!

2009-05-13T19:27:00.007-05:00

If you saw me at this moment, you might have a hard time reconciling my black satin with silver rhinestone high heels, silver sparkly jacket, silky black dress, make-up, hair piled on top of my head and jewelry with the uniform I wore for most of my adulthood: black jeans, oversized t-shirt, sturdy sneakers, short hair I never glanced at let alone comb.

Something happened in the last few years, something I made happen as a way to bring back to the surface who I always was: a femme in hiding. "But you would make a great diesel dyke," a friend of mine used to say me. Fair enough, but not who I am.

When I was a kid, I used to draw for hours each day, and what did I draw? Women in dresses, skirts, evening gowns. I had secret ambitions to be a fashion designer. Put a catalogue in front of me in 1969 or a clothing website today, and what I look at first are the dresses, especially the frillier ones that feature black lace, gold silk or hot pink ruffles. As I got older, I tended toward dresses and skirts whenever possible, even going so far as to camp regularly in denim dresses or corduroy skirts.

But then something happened: I gained weight, and decided I didn't look thin enough in anything that flared from the waist. I hunted down princess cuts with that v-shape waist that gives the center of the torso the illusion of narrow girth. Yet it became increasingly difficult to find things that fit well, flattered and were comfortable, and so I succumbed to jeans. Black jeans, with a hidden elastic waistband or stretch fabric, and over them, t-shirts large enough to give coverage. Three pregnancies, two graduate degrees, many teaching jobs and thousands of dishes later, I didn't pay my appearance any mind, to the extent that a former rabbi once told me it was great that I didn't ever think about how I looked. Or was it really?

Eventually, and fairly recently, after living through cancer and then with low-grade chronic illness for three years, I realized that there was a direct line between health and beauty, and following it led me back to who I am. I've gone through various passions since then, all of them sticking: first exercise and especially yoga, then clothes cut to fit and full of colors and textures I loved, jewelry -- which I started making myself, make-up even (right before a show with Kelley Hunt, when I saw her applying bare minerals on her face and asked me to put some on me too), shoes, and lately, even comfortable heels, and of course, dresses.

While I wouldn't doll myself up this way too often, tonight, right before I give a joint poetry and song performance with Kelley, I put on the dog, and this dog likes being walked, groomed and aiming itself toward what flows, shines and delights.

Bar Mitzvahed!

2009-05-04T15:46:00.016-05:00

The weekend was a wheel of people and joy turning through our time. We began with a pie-making party Thursday night -- the Weedle Caviness Memorial Pie-Making Party -- to try to replace what can't be replaced: Weedle's amazing pies she made for Daniel's and Natalie's Bar Mitzvahs. The joy, however, and humor were there in full-force as about a dozen friends and family came over to mix and roll dough, cut fruit, and gingerly lift the pie crusts into the pans.

On Friday night, we had regular Friday night services at the Lawrence Jewish Community Center with a twist. Instead of just doing the normal candle-lighting prayer, Ken called up six other men important in Forest's life -- his uncles, Mark and Brian; family friends, Jerry, Jack, Herb; and his brother Daniel -- to join Ken in honoring Forest's crossing over into adulthood. Each man lit a dark green candle in a blue glass candle holder and said his wish for Forest as a man. It was moving, gentle, strong and beautiful.

Saturday was Bar Mitzvah central -- the actual event began at 10 a.m. at the LJCC, filled with over 130 of our friends and family. So much was moving about the ceremony, but what stands out for me and what others told me they loved include the blessings of both his Grandmothers, Alice and Barbara; our family carrying around the torah while all of us singing; Forest's wonderful speech about the importance of kindness and listening when it comes to living a holy life; Ken and my talks (mine is below); the gorgeous duet sung by Susan Elkins and Natalie, our daughter; the throwing of the candy and how, just beforehand, Daniel and the torah scooted off to one side of the Bema and the rabbi to the other side to miss the onslaught of Tootsie Rolls.

In the evening, about 80 friends and family came out here for a pie party -- 15 pizza pies and 16 fruit pies, plus all the other dishes people brought. People spilled out onto the newly-finished front porch, and the back deck, in the drive and throughout the house, visiting, laughing, eating, telling stories. About 9ish I got suddenly tired and actually took a 10 minute nap, then found myself rejuvenated until 11 when the last people, dear friends we had a blast visiting with, left.

Now it's quiet and peaceful as I type this on the front porch, all the cats and the dog out here with me, focused on the singing of a bird nearby.
*******************************
Dear Forest,

Here it is the night before your Bar Mitzvah, and I can't help thinking of the night before your birth. It was a windy, rainy May night as I sat in your grandfather's heated car at 2 a.m. while your dad ran back and forth from house to car to load up everything, including the other kids. Throughout contractions and the all-too-short-space between, I was held in the most beautiful choral music playing on the radio, women's voices entwined in multiple harmonies that poured through me like the wind poured through the trees I watched in the dark.

The next afternoon, you were born, and the first look on your face – just like the first look of total intensity on Daniel's face and total joy on Natalie's – conveyed your temperament. You simply looked around casually and seemed to shrug. If you could have talked, I think you would have said, “So this is life? Oh, well.” You were present, accepting and interested in all your encountered.

Since that time, you've brought the most amazing enthusiasm and whimsical curiosity to whatever you find – whether it's basketball follies, the economic crisis' latest flurry of bankruptcies, or the cat sleeping in a basket. When I pick you up from school or downtown, you always both ask me about the news – “Mom, what happened with the Dow today?” and your trademark question, “What's the plan?” You follow music, film, news, sports, and all manner of quirky information widely and deeply, telling me something you found on The Washington Post site or Rotten Tomatoes. You listen to radio, television, read papers and magazines, updating your acute sense of where we are as a country. This world is interesting to you, and you bring to it a wonderful ability to take it all in, apply critical thinking to evaluate and integrate what you really believe, and then tell us about it.

You've also brought your big heart, always present and always accepting, to all you encounter, which over your life, has been full of fierce challenges – the car accident you survived, in part due to the love and support of this community; my cancer; and some difficult-to-shake illnesses you're enduring – and heartbreaking losses, mostly in the last year, of both your grandfathers, your namesake, and a good friend. In all of this, you've shown up – in all senses of that term – to learn, mourn, find, and carry on as well as to share your wide pool of kindness with whoever else is hurting. You know well what it is to just be with someone going through a hard time, how to listen, and how to listen for what would really help. It's no suprise that the words you wrote in your speech about how to live a holy life came so easy to you – they are words you live everyday.

What's the plan? The plan – I hope and believe – is for you to simply keep being who you are. For all of us who know you, you're a shining light of all these qualities: kindness, presence, curiousity, enthusiam, patience, earnestness, and many times, joy. For a long time, I've believed we become more of who we always were as we grow older, but you were born that way, and already, you live guided by your desire – besides to play the wii and watch countless episodes of “The Simpsons” – to help others and celebrate the amazing gift of life.

That night, nearly 14 years ago, before your birth, I was about to receive one of the greatest gifts of my life. Of course I'm proud of you for all you've done at this Bar Mitzvah, but I'm even more proud of you everyday for how you live. I love you with all my heart forever.
Love, Mom

Spring and the Bar Mitzvah Express

2009-04-27T12:18:00.007-05:00

Spring has sprung wildly in the last few days thanks to several days of fast, hot wind and the several more days of intense rain. Meanwhile, we're working in the yard continuously, riding the Bar Mitzvah express which is high-speed, expensive and has frequent breakdowns.

What this translates into is a lot of yard work, including putting in some shade gardens, spray-painting rusting folding chairs, making pots of mixed flowers for table center pieces for the actual event, and outrageous amounts of weeding and mulching.

The great part of this is how much time we have outside. The not-so-great part is how the chiggers have sent out a few scouts, way before they should be out in force. There's also some poison ivy, seed ticks, and large startled snake (plus many nests of baby ringnecks).

Meanwhile one of the most lush times of the year unfolds quickly and vividly -- irises ready to break open, leaves unfurling at the speed of sound on the Cottonwood, and lilac in full bundles of blossom. I keep reminding myself to step off the train and take this in.

Prairie Fire!

2009-04-14T10:50:00.018-05:00

Saturday around 4 p.m. when we were at the hardware store, Ken said, "You know, I think the only window to burn is about right now." He was right: it had rained for days beforehand, the morning was barely dry enough, but the winds were too high, and more rain was coming. Considering it was April 11, and we were supposed to have the fields burned the first week in April, it was time for action.

Luckily for us and maybe not so fortunate for him, I ran into Mike Caron in the check-out line at the hardware store. "Want to burn some prairie in an hour?" I asked him, and after juggling his schedule a bit, he said yes, and he even brought a friend. We called the guys who lived on the other side of our hill -- Monte and Brent, and they also showed up along with Brent's girlfriend Amy. Ken's pal Dave came out, and within an hour, we were lighting matches, dragging pitchforks of fire (it works best to wrap up the loose grass like spaghetti on a fork and then drag it), and hauling water in case things got out of hand.

They didn't, and the wet ground made for a good safety valve although we did see a few cedars go up like, well, Christmas trees (but that always happens). The burn was also very fast -- we burned over 15 acres, broken up into about five fields, in less than two hours.

Why do we burn? Prairies need to be burned to bring more nutrients to the soil, clear out the invader trees, and make way for new growth. The history of the prairies shows us that lightning was a great fire-starter, especially during a time when prairies weren't 99% replaced by farms and concrete. There's also evidence that many plains tribes regularly burned the prairies. We also burn because we're required to by the law -- it's a condition of the USDA program the farm is enrolled in to restore and maintain these native grasses.

But there are other reasons to burn: it's outrageous fun, a great way to get to know fellow-burners, and for me, always a ritual of spring -- clearing away the falling over remnants of an old season, preparing the ground of this land and my own heart for what's next to come.

Pictures: All from the burn, plus Ken afterwards, catching up on some sleep.

I Live In Big Wind Country

2009-03-24T10:50:00.008-05:00

Kansas is windy, often, and not just a little. When spring comes, the big wind comes with it, and yesterday was a vivid illustration with gusts up to 90 mph in some parts of the state and ordinary old 45 mph gusts regularly around it. It's hard not to tilt a little when you walk, and when we did balance poses in yoga -- in a room in the country, second story, windows all around -- it was hard not to fall over (but then it's often hard not for me to fall over).

Yesterday, semi-trucks overturned on the turnpike, mailboxes left home, our bird feeder flew the coop, and the top of a hard-plastic child playhouse unfurled itself. It was the kind of wind that made me and everyone around me feel a little crazy, off-balance, agitated, confused and overwhelmed.

It reminds me of a good wind story too -- and in Kansas, many of the good weather stories (and most of the good stories do involve weather) are obviously wind-related. When Ken, my husband, was but a lad, his family had a mean attack rooster named Chip-Chip, who attacked (using his nasty spurs) everyone but Ken's grandpa, who had basically trained him to be a the rooster equivalent of Cruella DeVille. One day a tornado, with accompanying big winds, came to the area, and Chip-Chip mysteriously disappeared. Days later, his wasted body was found a few miles away. When humans didn't, out of decency, exact revenge from Chip-Chip, the wind did.

So now the wind has settled down, and it's good to be back in the saddle, crossed over to spring with the grasses seeminly scribbled bright green and the trees budding. Yesterday's big wind is today's sky all bright baby blue and pristine white clouds, all the debris blasted free from our minds.

Hanging Out In The Giant Parking Lot of Grief

2009-03-12T19:41:00.005-05:00

In the month since my father-in-law died, I've revisited the giant parking lot of grief, the one where you can never remember where you parked or even what car you were driving at the time. What I mean by this is that grief seems to be the most unmappable of all emotions. If fear, depression, joy, boredom and other day-to-day feelings we move through are seasonal weather, grief is more like those wild card days when it can change over a long afternoon from a dainty day among to tulips to a blizzard to a thunderstorm with a small tornado on its back end.

My family, like me, tends to not act as I would imagine. Sure, there's stretches of quiet sadness and that big gaping hole in the center of our lives, what a large meteor would leave once a large yellow crane lifted out the rock. But how grief manifests in us is variable and unchartable. My youngest son goes from characteristically chirpy to sullen and slurring his words when I ask him questions. My husband hurt his back about two weeks ago, and can't easily shake, work, rest or walk through the pain, which recedes far slower than usual. My teenager daughter goes from one overwhelming sadness to being a cool customer. My oldest son had a long flare up of digestive issues. And I'm struggling with the draw to cozy up with some bad old habits (mostly workaholism, thank heavens there's not chocolate in the house) that just die hard.

Meanwhile, nothing seems to have changed. Meanwhile, everything has changed. Through it all, I know two opposite things to be simultaneously true: this is a huge loss, and as Theodore Roethke wrote, "What falls away is always, and is near."

"I'm Sorry" and "Congratulations": Death and Poetry

2009-02-21T18:29:00.003-06:00

All week, I've experienced a juxtaposition of "I'm so sorry for your loss" and "Congratulations!" side by side, sometimes even simultaneously, like at my father-in-law's funeral when one person gave me a copy of the small article on me being named poet laureate in the Kansas City Star while someone else offered his condolences. The cards and notes that come in the mail and the emails I download offer me the same mixed message, which seems to add up something my brain hears as, "Mazel Tov! And remember, life sucks" or "This too shall pass, so don't get too excited about any of it."

Perhaps what's most odd about it all is that I can't tell by the face of whoever is approaching which message will pop out. I'm sitting at my computer at a coffee shop, a man behind me turns around, taps me on the shoulder, and says, "Sorry to hear about your father-in-law, and please give Ken my best" or a woman I don't know on the street passes by and yells over her shoulder, "Great to see you in the paper."

For years we've dreaded the loss of Gene, and for years, I yearned for some recognition and a lot of readers, compounded by the piles of rejection slips, and years spent shepherding books to publication. No surprise that now, during a very good year indeed as a writer, the void left by Gene is like the Grand Canyon compared to the little ant hill of successes. This is not to say that I don't appreciate being congratulated, the forthcoming publication of books, and the quiet calm of being seen alongside the hard-won peace of feeling good in my writer's skin.

Meanwhile, there's the Grand Canyon behind my shoulder, a place I peer into and, just like the actual Grand Canyon, can't see to the bottom of it all. My father-in-law, although he used to tease me that "how could this be poetry when it doesn't rhyme?" -- even while he stapled together copies of my chapbook for six hours one day -- never issued even the vaguest rejection slip or "this doesn't quite suit our needs at this moment" messages. In the almost 26 years I knew him, he accepted me always, helped when I asked, tried not to impose when he needed help, and probably served me hundreds of tacos, dozens of roast beef dinners, and a whole lot of bowls of hamburger soup. Despite the reality that since his heart surgery four years ago, and his seizures two years ago, he had lost a lot of short-term memory, mobility, strength and lung capacity -- and he was leaving this life a little bit at a time -- his death is still unfathomable to me.

Yesterday, lying in corpse pose at the end of yoga class, I saw him in his oversized red woolen cap and 30-year-old gray coveralls, just coming in from chopping wood and happy to stand close to the fire place. He was always cold, and it broke his heart a little when he could no longer run that blower connected to his fireplace when he went on oxygen. In a strange way, it's as odd that he grew so old and fragile as it is that he died. Diagnosed with rheumatic fever during WWII, he tinkered on the brink of serious illness and regular life for over 60 years, and now that he's gone, I am sorry for his loss, but I could almost congratulate him for leaving behind years of illness, pain, and discomfort.

But since he's gone, and I can't tell him anything directly, I just share this poetry -- which doesn't rhyme, but I think he would be okay with it anyway:

In the End, There Is Only Kindness

for Gene
February 19, 1925 – February 10, 2009

When the floor slips and the time comes,
when interventions falter, there is only kindness,
a lantern to hold at journey's end, then hand over
so someone else can lift the light enough
to illuminate where to step next, and how.

In this kindness, there are always stories:
Telling the checker who rang up his milk twice,
don't worry, everyone makes mistakes.
His long wait among aging magazines at the VA
so a homeless vet could get his medication.
Gravel on our walkway because he didn't want
us slipping when we brought home the new baby.
The vase of roses he left on my kitchen table
and for Alice because roses were on sale.
Jokes about being old and decrepit while he
cooked everyone dinner. How he power-rocked
the babies to sleep, his heart beating through theirs.
Christmas stockings and grandchildren to wake up early,
coins to collect for each one. Oxygen in one hand,
a cane in the other so he could see a grandchild
in orchestra or band, graduation or swim meet
even when his back and memory hurt.
The dishes or long drives, reaching for the check,
and taking the time to greet the stranger eating alone.
Only kindness matters in the circle of love
he made out of this world.

In the end, there is always the beginning,
a seamless turn from here to there
even if everything is different from
the irreplaceable loss shining and aching at once,
a kind of river running alongside our lives,
or weather reminding us that
we love, were loved by a man here only
for kindness, which is not just a kind of love
but the only love there is.

– Caryn

Remembering Gene

2009-02-10T15:21:00.010-06:00

Today my father-in-law, Bill "Gene" Lassman, died at age 83 after many years of severe health issues and breaking his hip two days ago. While there's a lot to be said about how hard he struggled, how long he outlived all predictions, how strong his spirit was despite the frailty of his body, and the details of his dying, I want to focus here on what Gene meant to me.

I met Gene when Ken and I started dating in 1982, and the first thing he told me, when he was giving me a lift back to town from the country, was how sorry he was for accidentally running over Ken's dog when Ken was a boy. This may seem an odd way to get to know each other, but it showed me right away that being a good father was at the core of who he was. That core glowed around his children and grandchildren, all of whom were surely the light of his life.

Having grown up with an difficult father who was only about emotionally mature as a sullen 12-year-old, it took me a long time to really understand just how loving Gene was. Over the years, it began to sink in: when he rocked my babies to sleep and held them for hours, when he babysat and drove around my kids; when he dressed up and got his portable oxygen to see any performance the kids were in; when we were broke and he lent us money; when we were exhausted and he invited us over for dinner; when he went out to buy me jumbo maxi pads after I gave birth; when he left roses for me in a vase on my kitchen table because they were on sale, joking that his no-good son didn't buy me flowers so he needed to. Gene turned upside down what I knew about men of his generation just as Ken turned upside down what I knew about men in general.

His generosity extended itself well beyond the family. After 38 years of teaching printing at the high school -- which, in the early days included many kids who didn't fit in elsewhere -- he retired, but found friends everywhere he went, who called out, "Mr. Lassman!" He spent a lot of his retirement going from one supermarket to another, to get the bananas on sale here, the milk on sale there, but mostly just to be social. I didn't really understand why he shopped so much, but he once told me that if he could help a checker at a grocery store or janitor in a department store feel a little better by showing them friendliness and kindness, that made his day. It obviously made the day of a lot of other people, the ones we often don't see as we rush from one thing to another.

I'm in the odd position of writing this from Vermont, 1,400 miles from home, Ken, and our kids, but I'm flying home Saturday in time for the funeral, burial, and sitting shiva. Although Gene wasn't Jewish (Lutheran turned Methodist), I look toward my own tradition's way of opening up space to feel the loss, and from far away, I say Kaddish for him. This poem, which a good friend sent me, speaks to my soul right now.

KADDISH

Look around us, search above us, below, behind.
We stand in a great web of being joined together.
Let us praise, let us love the life we are lent
passing through us in the body of Israel
and our own bodies, let’s say amen.

Time flows through us like water.
The past and the dead speak through us.
We breathe out our children’s children, blessing.

Blessed is the earth from which we grow,
blessed the life we are lent,
blessed the ones who teach us,
blessed the ones we teach,
blessed is the word that cannot say the glory
that shines through us and remains to shine
flowing past distant suns on the way to forever,
Let’s say amen.

Blessed is light, blessed is darkness,
but blessed above all else is peace
which bears the fruits of knowledge
on strong branches, let’s say amen.

Peace that bears joy into the world,
peace that enables love, peace over Israel
everywhere, blessed and holy is peace, let’s say amen.

~ Marge Piercy

In the Batcave Doing Yoga

2009-01-16T15:10:00.007-06:00

Today I hung upside down -- a bat in a line of other bats. It was my first time doing this pose (see picture on right although I didn't look quite as poised as this woman, and also, not quite as happy as the bat on the left). Still, I was thrilled. I was also terrified. As I hung there, after my very gracious yoga teacher for this class -- Anne Underwood -- helped me jump, pull myself up and climb into this inversion -- I felt waves of panic. What if I fell and broke my neck? What if the ropes didn't hold? What if I just freaked out in front of everybody?

As usual, I countered the fear by telling myself, "breathe, breathe, breathe." Each asana, each breath, is a continual way to come home to my body, and to re-program how I inhabit my own body.

This month, I'm doing YoMo through the Yoga Center of Lawrence , a commitment to do yoga everyday through January. A few days ago, when I had a virus, I wondered if a prolonged time in corpse pose would count ("Hell, yes," said Kelley), and some days I feel myself stretching, reaching, almost soaring through Sun Salutation. Often it's just the old struggle: how to try my hardest without putting so much effort into trying that I make the pose hard. Today, at least, I found a way to hang. And in the hanging, there was no such thing as trying too hard or not hard enough. There was just the support of the wall, ropes, and Anne, the strength of my body, and the beauty of gravity. The hard part was surrendering to it all. Now that I'm upright, I want to do it all over again.

Stories and Healing: Barbara Esrig

2009-01-12T11:51:00.004-06:00

Okay, so I'm stealing this item from another blog I edit -- http://TLAzine.blogspot.com, but the story is just too compelling to not share. Barbara Esrig tells the story of surviving a car accident that nearly took her life and finding meaning through the power of words -- and her story is now featured on the StoryCorps site. Barbara is writer-in-residence in the Shands Arts-in-Medicine program in Gainesville, FL. where she does oral histories for patients to remind them that they are more than just a diagnosis. She's presently collaborating on a book on these oral histories as well as writing about her own work. Listen to her story and check out her amazing work. Barbara has been a frequent attendee at the Power of Words conference, and she has been active in the field of Transformative Language Arts for many years.

What Happens When Kelley Hunt Performs

2009-01-03T18:29:00.008-06:00

New Year's eve, and again, Kelley Hunt sang us up and over, far and wide toward the changing of years. This time, it was in the Lawrence Arts Center, where Kelley performed "I Dreamed of Rain," a benefit concert, with an astonishing drummer, Diego Voglino from Brooklyn, and also the soulful Gary Mackender on accordion and percussion. Throughout the concert, I found myself feeling a deepening connection with the packed audience as the boogie-woogie unfurled and long notes rose. While this was a performance, a form of entertainment, it was much more a long conversation, a ceremony, a meeting in the calm hum of our dreams, and then an awakening when we can't help but dance in our seats.

I remember several years ago another Kelley Hunt concert -- this time in Liberty Hall, and on the New Year's eve eve. On the dance floor, in the middle of "It Ain't Over When It's Over," Kelley had us all belting out with her, "I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside." I remember how glorious the meeting of worlds was: two elderly women sang with all their heart, lifting their arms to the stage that they stood before. A woman with short hair and maroon pants and top shimmied up and down along with her midrift-baring teenage daughter, holding hands and singing to each other. A older man, unshaven and gray, jumped up and down with his arms waving above his head. Two young women in love wrapped their arms around each other and leaned close with their eyes closed. An older lesbian couple swayed as they spooned and sang quietly. An young African-American woman jitterbugged with a middle aged white guy. It was quiet and ecstatic, sacred and wild. The music made us all family at that moment.

I felt the same thing at this concert. Kelley's beautiful arrangement of Jan Garrett's song, "I Dreamed of Rain" threaded into "We Shall Overcome," which she also sang -- the traditional song of freedom and equality. Yet Kelley's song also acknowledged that we will not only overcome some day, but this day; that we won't be afraid some day, but this very day. The song paid homage to Barack Obama's election and to all the ongoing struggles for civil rights and social change.

The final songs of the concert echoed this message -- that the struggle goes on, but the light comes through. Kelley sang a newer song, "There is No Place That God Isn't," a tribute to healing and comfort, and also the power of words, and then exploded into a boogie woogie jubilee in "Say the Word."

The songs circled through us, circles through us still, calling forward the soul of community, the heart of love that so seamlessly blends the political, spiritual and artistic; the power of a single voice and the beauty of harmony and rhythm; and always endings and beginnings, showing us how we can lift above the cusp of what blinds us and see the rain, the freedom, the change we dream of.

Pictures: Kelley and a friend at Camp Wood, where we'll do our next Brave Voice; Kelley and me in Vermont after she performed at The Power of Words conference; Kelley's latest CD, "Mercy." See more about Kelley at her website, mypage site, and the website we share for our business, Brave Voice.

Breaking the Mold

2008-12-12T14:04:00.006-06:00

It started with underground rivers of salty water left over from the days when Kansas was part of a large inland ocean. At our house, we draw our water from 200 feet down, right from the core of one of these underground rivers. When we mix such salt water with metal piping, over time, of course there's erosion. That erosion led to a small leak under the kitchen sink where, unfortunately, we had a pile of newspapers to be recycled. Over months, it turned into layers of mold (mostly green mold, as I'm now learning, but still potent enough that we've had frequent colds lately).

Now, within a few days, the kitchen will be taken apart by some mold restoration folks, the air cleaned and exchanged seven times, boards and walls sanded down or replaced, counters removed and doors taken off. The air and mold guy tested the air, found enough evidence of mold under the boards and walls under the kitchen sink, and left us with a somewhat startling report and a big square of dark chocolate (in a mold of his company's name). Now we're facing our kitchen plastic-ized off with some kind of plastic-ized door and a lot of dining out for a few weeks (covered, remarkably, by insurance).

Within a week, we should be completely and thoroughly mold-free. By the end of the year, the restoration should be done, but it's still tricky in looking at an in-tact part of this home and knowing it will be turned inside-out. Breaking the mold. Knocking it down and building it back up again. Re-making home. I exhale, tell myself the only way out is through, and turn the new air purifier on high. May the end of this year bring new breath into all of our lives.

7 x 7

2008-12-04T09:03:00.006-06:00

Seven has always been my lucky number although I can't say it ever won me a lottery or a horserace. I've just always been partial to odd numbers, especially this one that encompassed the days of the week. This probably goes back to my imaginary friends of childhood and beyond -- the days of the week. Each day I hung out with an invisible pal. Monday was more mature and little anal. Wednesday was my best friend, and quite naughty at times. Saturday was sensible and laid-back. Sunday was a slightly uptight, prissy man. Tuesday and Thursday were twins, each with a distinct personality although both preferred wearing green.

Today, although it's the 4th (not the 7th), I celebrate being 7 x 7 year's old, a perfect square and also the Jubilee birthday. In ancient Hebrew traditions, Jubilee meant two things -- one was that every seven years, you let the fields go fallow so that they could regenerate themselves. The other was that at your Jubilee birthday (your 49th, your 7 x 7), you gave everything away and started over again. It was a way of giving you a clean slate, a new start, a lighter way of being while also helping out those less fortunate.

Although I don't plan to give everything away (although I have been making my usual deposits to the local goodwill), I've been thinking for months about what I'm ready to release, and the list is long and, at times, trecherous: inactivity, compacency, all vestiges of self-hatred, the kinds of judgments of others rooted in the need to protect myself, little meannesses, big impatience, rushing around for no good cause, and yelling for no good reason. It may well take me another 49 years to give away what I'm accumulated.

So as usual, it's breath by breath, stretch by stretch, story by story, word by word, and deed by deed. When I blow out the candles, I'll be wishing for enough awareness to see where to turn and how to step next.

Pix: Elvis, Juan-Tomas, Ken and me in Nashville, and me one morning after the coffee.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying & Love America

2008-11-05T15:00:00.006-06:00

A Black man is president-elect. A man who calls on each of us to bring our highest calling to our work and thoughts has been elected in one of the widest margins of popular vote in decades. Someone who speaks of sacrifice and hope in one breath is our president-to-be, and one I can call "my president" without sarcasm or shame. For the first time in my life (to paraphrase the oft-misrepresented words of Michelle Obama), I am proud of my country, but in my case, I don't mean "prouder"; I mean, "for the first time."

Last night, sitting on the couch with friends and family, glued to the television screen in between leaping up to check one of eight websites or listen to the radio, I felt the kind of elation I only knew decades ago, when I made my living as a political organizer (mostly working with labor unions), and occasionally, I would stand with labor bosses in some dingy basement hall, singing out "Solidarity Forever." I was young, told often I was naive, and totally in love with doing something to change the world, even if it mostly entailed taking many notes and sorting bulk mailings. At the same time, I knew the labor movement was an ambling, often-falling-down old soul, someone most people outside the movement (which is to say, most people) looked at as some nonsense-filled kook.

Over the years, like many of you, I've been involved in armfuls of campaigns and mailings, event-organizing and putting together testimonies or attending city commission meetings. I've stirred soup for a dozen, and joined a few to do bulk mailings for thousands. Whether the cause was environmental, labor, gender or educational, I've often found the most profound fellowship and meaning in this kind of work. Yet like many of you, I've also felt isolation at times, doubt, and a kind of trembling hope that just a few people (as it was and is often just a few) can make some kind of difference even though the difference is mostly a hundredth of an inch forward.

With this election, it's the same but different. The fellowship is vast and infinite. I think of the elders in Barack's father's village in Kenya, the kids now attending his old elementary school in Indonesia, the sea of humanity in Chicago or LA or New York. I think of my friends and neighbors in downtown Lawrence, cheering and crying, or driving down Mass. St. honking horns. I think of my family in Florida, my dear friends in Tennessee, my marvelous colleagues in Vermont, and the many of you I visit virtually each day on Facebook, all of us united by this event, this evolution, this breakthrough.

While I've always loved what America could be, now, finally, I love America.

Pictures include you-know-who, plus Obama's 87-year-old Kenyan grandmother. Some interesting weblinks:
Lovely slide show of part of Obama's speech with great images
Colin Powell's reaction
Jesse Jackson talks about civil rights and crying with joy
Signs of Hope and Change
Springsteen sings Seeger while Obama talks of hope
Obama Rising (Springsteen)

Changing Light Reading at the Raven

2008-10-27T09:56:00.007-05:00

I'm thrilled to be able to share a reading with two very fine poets -- Peter Wright and Kathleen Johnson -- at 7:30 p.m., Sat., Nov. 15th at the Raven bookstore. I met Peter over 17 years ago when he showed up in a poetry writing class I was teaching at the University of Kansas, and he dazzled me with his raw and alive poetry, which has continued to unfold over the years. I met Kathleen 20 years ago when we had babies to balance around our poetry, and even then, I was taken by how she used language is such vivid and delicate ways. I share a poem from each of them below. Please join us for the reading, in which we each will read poetry that has to do with changing light, sky and land.

Peter Wright -- from Cloud Poems
nothing is distinct
but echoing kettle drums
in this summer sky

from green rolling hills
a huge rose in black and white
blooming and blooming

slate green above
your inhabitants have morphed
into waves of rain

come hither earthbound
imagine we are your own
animals to ride

far away voices
hang in storm clouds and pouring
issue from my mouth

Kathleen Johnson -- from her debut collection, Burn

Muse

Poetry will always be
a wild animal
William Stafford, You Must Revise Your Life

I've seen a wolf
in the woods of a dream.

her canine contours run
ravenous with color:
sage, pine, sun-yellow,
adn canyon-brown, the rich
carnelian of a Mexican sunset.

Lean, leggy,
pink tongue wet and lolling
she stares me straight in the eye.

Silver moonlight on her back,
wildfire burning in her eyes,
she circles close in the night
daring me.

Walkabouts on the Prairie

2008-10-07T18:51:00.006-05:00

It started with a simple yearning to hang out together, be outside more, and not add another meeting to our overburdened schedules. The "we" here was KAW Council, the local bioregional group I've been part of since it started in '82, that meets annually for a weekend gathering each spring, plus does other workshops, events, and mostly, a lot of potlucks. At our annual meeting last May at the usual place -- Camp Hammond (located between Lawrence and Topeka), we again perused the ways we could be with each other more and walk our bioregional talk until we stumbled on the idea of simply getting together one Sunday morning each month for a walk with each other, a walkabout.

I've come to love walkabouts, being outside with old and new friends, moving my body and feeling the earth beneath my feet. So far, we've walked along the Kaw river from points on each side, through the Haskell Wetlands, and circled Mary's Lake. This month -- Oc t. 19 -- we meet at Clinton Lake. We meet at 9-ish most times, but I imagine we might move the time a little later to correspond with the colder months.

In any case, there's simple joy and connection in walkabouts, an Australian Aborigine tradition of singing/telling the particular song/story of wherever a person steps. While we don't sing out loud (at least, not yet), I feel the sense of each particular place -- met communally by our moving feet -- coming through each walk.

Through KAW, we've done long walks for years -- at Camp Hammond through woodlands to prairie, but also all around the watershed, including Castle Rock near Quinter, KS.; the Flint Hills on various occasions; along the Platte River in NE; at night and in the daytimes; in winter as well as summer. Walking together is a way to deepen our connections, sometimes just by stepping in concert with each other and the pale or fierce wind, early morning heat or cool damp air, in silence or while our voices tell new stories and re-tell the old ones we've come to love for how they make us laugh.

Come join us any time we're walking, and feel free to bring your coffee, kiddies or walking stick. See more at the KAW Website or blog.

Pictures: A bunch of us in a big hole near the KAW river, August; and some of us on a bench in the Haskell Wetlands, September.

The Sweetness of Between-ness

2008-09-15T19:11:00.013-05:00

I write this from the Cleveland airport, where I wait in the in-between. The full moon has risen just over the terminal out this window, and it shines in that milky-yellow of harvest moons, holding its own and the sky above it that it will soon travel.

I travel home to Kansas soon, after leaving my other home, Vermont, where I spend an average of one month a year, although not any consecutive season. There's the green explosion of dark, late summer, an exhilarating leap from Kansas in late August where summer builds character (as we tell ourselves). In winter, I leave a Kansas landscape of muted black, brown and white for the white and green winter wonderland of Vermont, where no one lifts an eyebrow over a foot of snow. Then there's the autumn Power of Words conference, an event to grow Transformative Language Arts (TLA) that I started over six years ago and cajoled, organized, begged and pleaded into existence and continuation, despite bureaucratic obstacles, sudden presenter cancellations, and all manner of confusion about what I was doing.

But such confusion is to be expected when starting anything new. I was reminded of this the other day in Vermont when I went for a walk, somehow lost the trail, and finding 30 minutes' worth of thick bramble. The trek was an odd combination of pushing through attack blackberry bushes that left dozens of scratches on my legs, but occasionally presented me with a fresh blackberry, which led to an inner dialogue of a lot of cursing punctuated by ecstasy. Did I mention it was raining too? I experienced many thorny branches, some heavy rain, and great many wild blackberry moments over the six years of the conference and the 10 years of helping to found TLA.

What's sustained me most are those who also resonate with how our words, aloud and on the page, can change our lives, and how I've seen -- through TLA -- how a few people, and then a few more, and eventually a community can make something worth sustaining. I had always envisioned that a TLA professional organization would one day take over the conference, and that a group of dedicated people committed to transformative uses of language would step in and grow TLA. I also sensed, without yet knowing the form, that something else was calling to me, which I've since realized was simply a less-intense and more embodied way of being.

Now the dream I once dreamed solo is being sung in chorus. The TLA Network -- composed of past and current TLA students and others in this emerging field, profession and calling -- slow-danced through a mindful process to decide to take over the conference, hired a coordinator, and then stepped with great heart and deep thinking into making all of this happen. Heather Mandell, our marvelously gentle, wise and compassionate coordinator, began last spring , and she has been shadowing me since. The TLA Network Council members are already planning next year's conference with verve and creativity, wisdom and vision.

Last night our whole conference community sat in a circle in the moonlight after an astonishing "Coffeehouse of Wonder" (two hours of song, poetry, story, drama by some 24 participants) to sit in silence under the moon. The closing circle, held and led by Callid and Kristina Keefe-Perry in the Quaker tradition, brought us together in silence, complimented by the language by the wind and by any of us who felt so moved to speak.

As I sat there, looking around at the 50-60 people on chairs and the ground, between the Haybarn Theatre and the grassy hill that led to the dorms, everything framed by the swaying Firs and Pines, and the full moon, I knew the sweetest peace. The peace of community speaking its mind, the peace of letting go when the time is right, the peace of the gorgeous wind that held us all, the peace of people speaking about the beauty of reclaiming themselves, the peace of one time coming to its close to another can begin.

According to the airline representative who just spoke, that time is delayed about 37 minutes for me, but no matter. I'm savoring the moon, now higher and brighter, a full disk that carries me between that time and this one and the next, between those I love in one place and in another, between two lands that seem -- despite being 1,400 miles apart -- to be just over the bend from each other in my life. I am grateful for the stories -- and the power of words -- that link these lands like the same moon I can see from here, there and in-between.

The Sky Begins at Your Feet and Is Going to Be Published

2008-09-08T20:32:00.008-05:00

If you've known me for a while, you know that I write like crooked politicians vote: often and always. For me the wall has never been about writing, and I confess, dear reader, that I don't experience writer's block, maybe because I keep rotating among projects, aiming for where the energy is, and loving the act of writing. What don't I love? Not being able to get writing published, even after years of trying, reading books on writing the perfect query letter, writing agents who are friends of friends, and feeling generally hopeless for long stretches of time (I also don't love the Bush administration, the scary look in Sarah Palin's eyes, and cottage cheese). All of this is to say that I have good news: my memoir about breast cancer, bioregionalism and community -- The Sky Begins at Your Feet -- is going to be published.

Ice Cube Press, a small Iowa-based press that specializes in books about the earth is publishing my memoir. The little email I got today from the publisher with the contract attached showed me what I've been wanting to hear for a very long time: yes.

My woe-is-me-and-the-publishing-world-sucks story is long and boring, and suffice to say, I went through all the stages of grief. After years of yearning to be "choosen" by, say, HarperCollins or another big press, despite all I heard about the screwed up state of publishing and how authors are treated, I persisted in holding onto the old dream. For decades.

I went through bargaining (please publish my book and I'll polish your poodle for you); anger, mostly when I walked through bookstores (why them and not me?); denial (maybe the 20 agents I wrote to simply misplaced my query letter); and depression (and how!). Eventually found myself to looking more honestly at the situation, which some might call acceptance, and thanks be to good and patient friends, who helped me cultivate more curiosity and tenderness about it all. The old dream about being chosen didn't hold so much weight anymore, but the writing itself did, and if I wanted to get my work out, I could, which led me to where I'm landing now.

On the ground, where the sky begins.

When Downward Dog Goes to the Dogs

2008-09-03T15:28:00.005-05:00

After a solid week of ecstasy over my realization that I was truly in love with yoga, the small punctures of self-doubt deflated my starting-to-soar mind. Luckily, my body is still a happy horse, although one that seems to be trotting or even walking slowly at times instead of galloping. I'm still going to yoga daily, and I'm still reading, watching yoga videos, and often -- when standing in line or talking on the phone -- doing some simple balance poses. But I'm also encountering my original response to yoga: it's just hard for me.

It's hard for me to get into some poses. It's hard for me to hold some poses. It's hard to remember to breathe. It's hard to get down. And it's hard to stand back up. At each class, I find myself going through a tragicomedy of emotions, starting with the thrill to being ready to go again, tthe surprise at how unflexible I became overnight, the trembling and hard breathing and onslaught of doubt (occasionally interrupted by looking at people around me step wider, bend lowerand reach higher), the reprimand not to compare myself to others, the second wave of doubt about becoming a teacher, and then -- usually in the middle of Corpse Pose -- a slow chime of joy that's so exquisite at times that it's all I can do not to cry on my mat.

I realize too how choking and hot this doubt can be -- the same kind of doubt that has plagued many students I've worked with over the years about their desire to write and call themselves writers. While tabletop (a pose) and forward bends might come easy to some (but not me), writing always came easy to me. Yet whoever we are, and whatever we do, to practice an art is to bring yourself to your edge, breathe, relax and dwell there however long it's healthy and productive, and then exhale slowly and stand back up.

I tell myself this while holding downward dog (a supposed rest pose that's always been more like running a marathon for me). I also tell myself that like any good practice, I'm just showing up, trying to cultivate curiosity and drop judgment, and find greater compassion for living in a body, this body, forward-bended or stretched out, upside down or back on its feet.

Pictures: Me doing Downward Dog-With-Photography-Variation; other -- someone on the internet I found doing Downward Dog.

Galloping Toward Becoming a Yoga Teacher

2008-08-23T09:13:00.011-05:00

On Tuesday I said out loud something floating through my mind for months, a thought so strangely persistent and impossible I kept trying to dismiss it just like the farmer in the movie Babe tried to ignore his idea to enter Babe in the sheepdog trials (Babe is a pig). Sitting in my therapist's office, I said, "I want to become a yoga teacher."

"Of course you do," she said, completely convinced it was the perfect next step. Reeling, I left, went out to lunch (or was I metaphorically already there?) with my friend, Kris, who gave me further encouragement. I jumped on the internet, and despite other things to do, started cruising for yoga teacher training programs, of which there 5.2 million, most sporting pictures of 20-somethings in spandex doing headstands or balances more delicate than peace in the Middle East. Without ever having been there, I instinctively knew my program was Kripalu, one of the premier and oldest yoga centers in the country, located in Western Mass and offering long-distance training (two 12-day intensives as the main teaching format).

At first, I thought I would work up to the training in, say, two years or so, and by that time, I should be able to do a shoulder stand without my legs falling over. On some level, maybe I was thinking I would also "look" just a tad more like someone who teaches yoga. But after a wonderful phone call with a former lead yoga teacher at Kripula and student at Goddard, the lovely and inspiring Susan Moul, a writer and yoga teacher I admire tremendously, the gate opened and the horse of my body shot out.

I know it's a dualistic way to talk about the body as if it's running with the mind saddled on, yelling, "Whoa!" and "Oh my god!!!" as it tears across the field, but it's obvious that my body is way ahead of my thoughts. My galloping body surged into research and found some important books to read. My galloping body took me to yoga practice already five hours in four days, and now it wants to do it again today and tomorrow. My galloping body took me shopping for more yoga work-out clothes, and told me, "Who the fuck cares?" when the yoga pants I tried on showed me how the straight lines of my legs led to the large bowl of my stomach. My galloping body took the prerequisite information for Kripula of an hour of yoga a day for six months, and instead of thinking it needed a few years to even begin to begin, immediately started fulfilling that requirement.

Coming from a history of some mild eating disorders, an avoidance of exercise, and a wide swatch of overweight family, just the notion of practicing something like yoga regularly is a radical departure from my genes and upbringing. My people, when there's a family gathering, tend to bring a dessert (as in a whole pie or cake) for each person attending. When we get together, the news is the latest gastric bypass experience among us (out of a dozen of us, four have had the surgery). Most of us have been through deep pain and years of struggle over our bodies, peppered with shudders of shame and infused with hopelessness.

Yet what makes becoming a yoga teacher unlikely for me is also why I need to do it. It's the best initiation into the rest of my life that I can imagine, and the process alone of going through the training and deepening my practice through training and teaching is the best way for me to continually strengthen my health and enhance the rest of my life.

This summer, I taught a class on finding your calling with no notion where putting that out was going to land me. While I watch this new calling unfold, I'm thrilled, scared, and I know this is absolutely the galloping motion I'm in love with and need to ride out.

Photo of yoga practitioner is Meer Patricia Kerr, founder of "Big Yoga"
Other photos are a horse and me when I was about 8, and photos from Kripalu.org.
Check out Susan's website/blog too!

The Brigadoon of Goddard

2008-08-18T15:41:00.010-05:00

As many of you know, my day job is teaching in Goddard College's low-residency Individualized MA Program. Because the college in Vermont, the students are all over the world, the faculty is in the U.S. and Canada, and I'm in Kansas, I often find myself having to convey the geographically-challenged workings of such a job. By the time I get through how students and faculty come together for a week-long residency twice a year, followed by a four-month semester we then do through students emailing packets and faculty emailing back letters, then detailing how students design their own studies, I've usually thoroughly confused my listener too much to bring up the time travel dimension of our residency, which is a little like the story of Brigadoon.

For those of you who haven't seen the play/movie, Brigadoon is secret Scottish village that wakes up to once every hundred years, then disappears into the highland mist. Witness one lovely June 1 in Brigadoon in 2008, and then come back for June 2 in 2018. In the case of our residencies, we go from summer to winter seemingly overnight (never mind the three of snow replaced by nine varieties of green) when we leave in August and return in January.

What happens in that mist that swallows us back into our home communities is as mysterious at times as Brigadoon itself. People change. Through packet work, and the spaces in between, we start to articulate more of our life's work, and what it means to craft lives that are more engaged with the local and the global, not to the mention the body and the mind.

To get a tad more specific, I've had the joy of witnessing student projects that include:
* Developing a new expressive writing model to help children use poetry to counter the trauma and stress in their lives. See Heather Mandall.

* Creating a community trance dance ritual that fosters joy and connectedness (Gary Meitrott's Soul Bath Trance Dance).

* Traveling the world to take part in pilgrimages in Spain, France, Tibet and Peru, and from this walking, come to understand the psychological and spiritual stages of pilgrimage. See Angela Mullins.

* Building "a room of one's own" for women in Trinidad/Tobago in which these women can read and write their way toward a greater sense of self (Sue-Ann Commissiong)

* Exploring and challenging beauty conventions, and unfolding a new way of claiming beauty through the arts and the natural world (Patricia Fontaine).

* Making a film about how to transform moments of competition into cooperation and community-building. See Ben Stumpf.

* Explore and reclaim what it means to be a body, particularly a body living with chronic illness, through writing, embodiment and photography practices. See Rhonda Patzia.

The mist that envelops the residencies sometimes makes it hard for us to see what we're doing, but within that space of letting go of what we thought we knew to uncover new knowledge and new ways of knowing (and living), magic prevails. It's the kind of magic that continually addresses that core question of how to live. Yet there's also immense joy in the process of being together, going to too many workshops or staying up too late, hanging out with others following the work and studies that thrill them. To quote Gene Kelly in the movie version of Brigadoon, it's almost like being in love.

Thanks to Cynthia Curley -- who's created a young adult novel that blends fantasy with overcoming racism for her Goddard work -- for the great Goddard photos of some of us faculty (top photo: Francis Charet, Ruth Farmer -- program director, Ralph Lutts, Ellie Epp, Katt Lissard, and me; bottom photo Janet Tallman and me).

Dog Days of Summer Turned Cat Days

2008-07-30T10:31:00.005-05:00

Today and yesterday and probably tomorrow is rain, but not the ordinary kind of hard and fast-moving summer rain. This storm is a dying hurricane, swept inland about 1,000 miles to linger slowly and gently over us, fading to almost nothing, and then nothing. Last night, we saw a white volcano-looking cloud standing in the middle of the storm, the center of Hurricane Dolly, Ken told me.

Usually, we have the kind of hellish heat and sun that we jokingly tell non-Kansans "builds character," and by that, we mean, "we still live here and often love our home despite the absolute horror of summer of late July and early August." This period of time usually is marked by highs in the over-100s, and lows in the low 90s. I remember someone telling me he moved to Lawrence in early August, arriving in the middle of the night to see a bank time/temperature sign that said, "1:30 a.m. Temperature: 99," and he seriously considered turning right around.

Inside our house, where our air-conditioners are lounging about instead of pushing iron, it's also anything but dog days. The kittens are about 16 weeks, and the older cat, Judy, hasn't seriously injured them yet although she growls, spits and hisses like the kitty version of "The Exorcist" when she sees them. The kittens just come right up to her, and cock their heads as in, "Oh, aren't you fascinating."

So it's cat days here, somewhat naughty, almost getting into the kind of weather and paper bags you wouldn't expect this time of year, and still ample with napping. The sky yawns. The kittens stretch out and sleep on the laptop. The big cat stands in the mild rain, still distraught over these new invaders. And the dog sleeps in the closet, terrified of the thunder and lightning that come at night. Nothing to complain about, but not what we expected.

One Cool Breeze in the Seasons of My Life

2008-07-16T21:05:00.005-05:00

It's mid-July, and in Kansas, that means heat, more heat, and then even more heat. This year, we seem to be lucking out in that it's mostly hovering in the low 90s this week, but that stretch of weeks between mid-July and mid-August is usually when the temperature starts hanging out in the 100s, and the nights sport lows in what most people would prefer to see as highs.

I keep thinking of that small poem I wrote about some months back.

Then thousand flowers in spring, the moon is autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
-- Wu Men (Hui-k'ai), 1183-1260

This small poem has become a talisman for me as well as guide for how to live. And this is just what I thought about while sitting on the back deck tonight, watching the wind swoop up Old Cottonwood Mel (the giant cottonwood tree I named for my dead father) while the leaves shimmered that bright, pale green at their edges against the stunningly crystal blue sky.

For me, the problem isn't necessarily finding beauty in all moments, but figuring out how to stay with that beauty instead of getting mind-clouded (to paraphrase the poem). But at that moment as I sat with the tree, I realized dropping all the tiny hooks that seem to grab me from across my computer screen and within my mind could be easy. It could be like just watching a tree, enjoying the cool breeze, the light, the color and simplicity of a singular moment in life.

From the Mountains to the Ocean and Back Again: Two Deaths in One Week, and a Whole Lot of Hats

2008-07-10T16:08:00.009-05:00

A week ago, we hit the road to attend the memorial service for Woody (who I wrote about in Dec. on this blog), our very dear and beloved cousin, who died from a rare form of lung cancer on July 2nd. We got to Fort Collins, CO., where Woody's wife, Janet, lives, and we were soon meshed with family, friends and neighbors, there to show their love for Woody and Janet.

Because Woody loved fireworks, the memorial service was set for Fri. night, July 4th, with optional firework viewing afterward, and beforehand, the passing around of hats. You see, because Woody lost his considerably long, reddish blond hair due to the chemo treatments, and because Woody was born for storytelling with a particular bent toward dark humor, Woody was flooded with funny hats to wear. There was a cow hat (complete with mooing button), a cup-of-coffee hat, a viking helmet with blond braids, an ace newspaper man hat, a baseball cap with Woody's cut-off-ponytail attached, a giant fish hat, and many others. Of course we each donned one for the memorial service which, led by Woody's brother, Dennis (who is also a minister) in a multi-colored jester catp, included telling stories about Woody. Woody led us off -- via a recording Dennis did in the last year -- in a long and vivid story about how he and others dyamited out everything in the hole under an outhouse (way up in the mountains), or as Woody concluded, shooting the shit.

The next morning, my mom called to say that our very sweet and dear Henry died after his struggle with pancreatic cancer. Henry is my mom's great love, our kids' grandpa (called "Epa" since my mom is called "Ema," which is Hebrew for "great mother"), and Ken and my dear stepdad. So we loaded up the van, drove to Janet's for French Toast and goodbyes, and then booked it back to Lawrence, arriving home at midnight, just in time to sleep for four hours before leaving for the airport. The trek to NJ, via Baltimore, and via the July 4th weekend traffic jams, is something I'm trying to forget, but suffice to say, we were soon at my mom's house along with all my sibs and their families.

Of course, too much traffic and travel led us lock the keys in the rental car trunk which, it turned out, couldn't be opened because this car sealed its trunk as a security feature at such moments. After AAA and the car rental place gave up on helping us, we were at wit's end. Our funeral clothes were in the trunk, our hotel was 12 miles away, and we were blocking mom's car. After three hours of struggle, I looked up and said, "Help us, Henry." At that moment, Eddie stuck his hand into the trunk through the backseat being pulled out, and landed on the keys. Thank you, Henry!

On Monday, we had Henry's funeral, which also included the telling of stories. My sister Lauren said how thrilled Henry was when, at age 85, he rode one of the wildest rides in Disneyland. My sister-in-law Tammy had stories about Henry's generosity and sweetness. And my mom said that she had just lost the one great love of her life. Back home, there were more hats: Henry loved hats, especially beautiful caps commemorating wherever he traveled. We were each to take one or two, and for the rest of the trip, I wore a Grand Canyon cap I had bought for Henry's 85th birthday.

The trip home included another new experience. When our flight was delayed enough to ruin our connection, the airline put us in a taxi from the Baltimore to the Wash., D.C. airport, and off we went with an Iranian taxi driver who delighted us with stories of how he and his wife married in a mosque (his dad is Moslem), a church (his mother is Catholic) and a Buddhist Temple (his wife is Japanese Buddhist) while he cut across lanes quickly to speed through the rush hour traffic.

Now we're home, loving and missing Henry and Woody, and sending our deepest love and wishes for comfort to Janet and my mom.

Wild Women (W)Rite: 7:30 p.m. July 19th

2008-06-30T19:56:00.007-05:00

I'm thrilled to be doing a poetry reading with my dear friends and poetic wonders. Dixie Lubin is someone I've known for seemingly lifetimes, and I've always thought of her as the closest thing I know to a female impersonation of the Boddhisattva via Wild Kansas Woman style. She writes fluidly and with enticingly raw and compelling images, unfolding her remarkable life (both the inner and outer lives) with ease. Nancy Hubble was born to read her strong poetry aloud and to write it also. She has a voice that sounds like equal parts field of peonies, hot dark chocolate, and hand-made quilts with patterns of naked women dancing like chickens. Chantel Guidry comes to us via Louisiana, and the wonders of eating succulent melon in the middle of the night in Harveyville, Kansas. She writes with gentle fiercenss, and an open heart as well as a mind fluent in deeper awareness and radical change.

I'm honored to be reading with these women at the Raven Bookstore at 7:30 p.m., Sat., July 19th. Who knows what we'll do and say, but I guarantee it'll be fresh and alive. There'll also be wine, cookies, and much visiting, spilling out onto the sidewalk where we delight in the wild edges of words even in the dogdays of summer.

Please come and hang out with us. Thanks to the amazing Ailecia Ruscin for the fun photos, and to Nancy to the more-than-fun flyers floating around town....and of course, thanks to the Raven. Long may our local bookstore perch and fly!

9 Hours in New York, 12 Miles, 5 Trains & One Garden

2008-06-18T12:23:00.010-05:00

I've just returned (2:30 this morning after flight delays I'm trying to block out) from New Jersey and New York where I visited my loving stepfather (who is sadly dying from pancreatic cancer), and my equally loving mother. Because I was flying home in the evening, I took advantage of a long day and a lot of public transportation so I could do one of my favorite things in the world: Walk the streets of New York City until my feet blister, and even then, keep going.

Why do I do this? Well, for any of you who have walked in New York, you already know the answer. The energy for walking there is unparalleled in its vibrancy and variety. Crossing a street in a stream of people, once you get into the rhythm, is a musical blend of languages, cultures, and destinations. Each block is a small universe of its own making, whether there's a gourmet pet store with someone playing African drum under the awning, or an ancient cemetery next to a shop that sells lingerie for transvestites. The city was made to be walked, and once you get going, it's too delicious to stop (speaking of which, you can easily eat your meals still walking: I had a bagel, slice of pizza, and knish without losing the pace).

I also walk because this is home for me, or at least, one of my homes. I grew up downtown, at the Nassau-Fulton subway stop where my father had a very small (10 x 10 perhaps) stamp store. The Subway Stamp Shop was in an arcade with all a kid could want: a Greek diner, complete with Greek lesbian waitress, who fed me chocolate malts and grilled cheese while telling me how to live my life; a barber shop full of stories; a much-loved candy stand; a shoe shop with old Black men who called me Sugar and told me crazy things my father did; and a jewelry shop run by a paranoid old man. My Saturdays and many summer days were spent underground, between layers of trains above and beyond, sitting in the stamp shop and drawing abstract art.

Even at age 8, I was old enough to go above ground and wander the city a little on my own, stopping for pizza or ice cream, and knowing how to avoid making eye contact with the occasional pervert. The three blocks between the stamp shop and the World Trade Center, along with a long stretch of Nassau street, were my territory. So now when I head downtown from Penn Station (where I've just taken NJ Transit from near my mom's house), I feel that blast of home every time the heat rises from the subway grates, and I see Ann Street, Church Street, and the other friends of my childhood wanderings.

Yesterday, I did my usual routine: I went first to the subway arcade where I grew up, even if all the stores are gone and sealed in steal curtains, and I went someplace new. This time it was to Battery Park, just 10 blocks or so south of the stamp shop. There, I sat on a bench, ate a hot pretzel, and watched the Statue of Liberty watching me while lines of tourists snaked into the ferry and pigeons gathered at my feet. There were also men dressed up like Miss Liberty herself, wearing iridescent green-silver masks and gowns (that covered their stilts).

On the way there, one of my favorite only-in-New-York things happened: a stranger walking beside me just started telling me her thoughts at the moment. "That man has lady legs," she said. "He's got the legs of a beautiful woman. I wish I had legs like that." We both laughed and compared notes on the lovely and feminine legs of the man in front of us.

Later, I took the train to Brooklyn (after my ritual stop at the Duane-Reade pharmacy for foam shoe inserts), where I went to the Botanical garden. When I first walked in, the twisty and tall pines were so enchanting that I stepped off the path to sit against one in the shade. Then there was the Japanese pagoda -- brilliant orange-red -- sitting in the pond where I could see gold fish the size of hot cats making the rounds. A German woman spoke kindly to a small Japanese boy about the beauty of the fish. A Chinese man took photos of his beloved with the pond behind her. Strollers and backpacks abounded.

Back in New York, I was determined to hunt down the greatest knishes in the city, so I set off for Houston street, which meant taking a train to Chambers street (about 10 blocks south), and walking through Soho between the French boutiques and elegant apartments. Once on Houston, I headed east for a long, long time until I got to Yonah Schimmel. The knishes didn't disappoint, and neither did the corned beef sandwich at Katz's, the same place where Harry met Sally (and they had the "I'll have what she's having" scene).

Walking back to the subway, a half-dozen knishes heavy in my backpack, the sun starting to set and a steel drum band performing across the street from a pick-up basketball game, I felt totally at home....and ready to go home too. Two trains, a tram, a long wait for a delayed flight, a long flight, and a surreal drive home later, I was back in Kansas, climbing into bed. And making plans to eat a knish for breakfast.

Juxtapositions When Things Go Wrong

2008-06-14T17:41:00.007-05:00

I'm driving home from the airport, thinking how surreal it is to is to have just driven there, taken the blue bus from long-term parking to terminal C, stood in line with others who thought they were Newark, NJ-bound until they saw the florescent blue "Canceled" under "Departures," and after waiting a suitable amount of time, learned my fate. I would be flying to Newark tomorrow, through Cleveland, at a time that would necessitate waking before 5 a.m. I nodded, took the new ticket, and traced my so-previous steps back to the blue bus, the long-term parking lot, the car, the highway, and then the interstate.

As I drive, everywhere the sky is brilliantly blue. The storms -- which flooded our basement from the bottom up -- passed, right on to New Jersey, which is why the flight is canceled. The light is so clear that the green, every direction, glows. Yet there's a dead deer near the medium of the interstate. Yet there's outrageous waves of construction, which slops the line of cars I'm in to at times. Yet when I called Ken, he told me he was at a light in Lawrence that went out, and every direction he looked, electricity was off. Yet my son is in a job interview at this moment in a place with no lights.

The easy is juxtaposed with the hard all over this weekend. We spent hours last night soaking up water in towels, squeezing those towels into buckets, and hauling out 50-something buckets of water. The night was silky beautiful, one of those just lightened up and cooled rare summer night when the humidity doesn't beat up everything in sight. Being our habit when faced with sudden stress (and don't old habits die hard?) we juxtaposed screaming at each other about the way to clean the basement with laughing, hugging, and joking about how we needed to clean the basement and get new carpet anyway.

Everywhere I look, all the time if I were paying attention, there are these juxtapositions, these "how-can-that-be?" buddied up with "thank-heavens-for-this." Right before I went to the airport, I was paging through Buddhist Sylvia Boostein's book Happiness is an Inside Job. I was caught by a comment from the Dhammapada, a compilation of sayings attributed to the Buddha: "Anyone who understands impermanence, ceases to be contentious."

Meanwhile, there's power outages, little floods in our basement and huge floods that cover over 40 square blocks in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, just northeast of here. There's canceled flights and big, open, shining skies. There's roadkill outside and lovely air-conditioning inside. There's also occasional moments like this when I find myself immersed in empty, alive time; hours not planned into any one thing or place anymore. All impermanent, and in pausing, observing this constant passage of weather, change of plans, and wide skies between the airport and my house, I realize there is no need to drive myself crazy over any of this. All I need to do is drive myself home.

My Wabi Sabi Life

2008-06-07T21:05:00.008-05:00

When I found the term "Wabi Sabi" several years ago, I was thrilled to discover there were actually some words to easily describe that sense of everything always in flux, always falling apart and sometimes coming together in new ways. Wabi Sabi, a Japanese term, means the beauty in the impermanence of everything, or as my mind shorthands it, the perfection of imperfection.

Since that time, I try to look at piles of laundry, dirty dishes on the counter, and the occasional pile of credit card applications to shred in the dimming light of the late afternoon as examples of Wabi Sabi. Stepping outside, the examples -- particularly the ones I'm responsible for -- abound, such as exhibit A: our yard (or that portion of the big field we consider our yard). You can see from the picture what happens when, due to a broken mower and too much else to do, we skip doing the first spring mowing until early summer. Wabi Sabi: the tall, overgrown grasses spinning against each other in the fierce winds of our stormed-over land lately juxtaposed with the somewhat neat rows of the freshly sheared grass. It's all in flux, and there's beauty on both sides of the mower.

Recently, and simultaneously as Ken was doing this mowing, I was outside on the deck with a digital camera in hand, a nightgown on, and because I wanted to look better than bedtime, a pair of earrings, too. I needed to send a photo of myself to a reading festival where I'm sharing some poetry next fall, and all my other head shots were of a head with very short hair (having kept my hair for over a decade as close to the ground as many lawns). After who-knows-how-many photos I vetoed, I realized the silliness of judging each shot as not-yet-fit-for-consumption. The more I can see myself as Wabi Sabi, the more sense aging makes, particularly given the alternative of wasting what's left of life fretting over wrinkles, extra fat, and changes in the weather of the body.

Speaking of which, the weather is obviously and especially in Kansas always Wabi Sabi. So much beauty, and so much changing, just like the Zen Buddhist notion that everything is passing memory, all of life is just a dream as we row these boats. I think of a poem I found:

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

-- Wu Men (1183-1260), translated by Stephen Mitchell

I love this tiny poem that reminds me how, in each season, at each moment, there's immense beauty in the simplicity of what's right here, Wabi Sabi, in front of our eyes.

Ad Astra Poetry Project and and Ad Astra Poet Denise Low

2008-06-03T15:48:00.005-05:00

I wanted to share with readers the wonderful web blog of Denise Low, Kansas poet laureate, who is featuring Kansas poets and also Kansas poetry happenings on her site regularly. While my sharing at this very moment is obviously very biased (you'll see why when you go to the site), and absolutely overdue, I wanted to give thanks in general for Denise's generosity as a writer, scholar, mentor, teacher, and friend to humans and the more-than-human world. Denise has written and edited over a dozen books of poetry and prose, many of which explore our relationship with the living earth and how to further cultivate that relationship. She's also been a source of inspiration and support for me as a writer, in great part because of how she models a way to inhabit this work and role with great compassion, awareness, determination, and balance.

Some of her poems, such as "Place," are particular favorites of mine and people in my writing workshops. I often ask people, after reading this poem, to start writing questions that ask what place is for them, questions which help us find greater insight as to the answers.

Place

Is it the eagles returning to Lecompton, Old Eagle Town
that stretch of lookout cottonwoods on the Kaw River,
or is it those rivers we measure towns by,
where we wait for flood and drought tides?

Or finding my grandfather during a storm,
clouds and lightning and his face by the window?

Is it the house I grew up in,
the way sun slanted through the front window,
warm bars of winter dust and light?

Is it a locus inside a muddy muscle,
the heart squeezing rivulets of bloods
again, again, again?

-- Denise Low

View her blog at www.DeniseLow.blogspot.com

Kitten Season

2008-05-27T12:17:00.005-05:00

After a winter of losses, including the loss our beloved cat, Akio, we have moved through our mourning enough to open our home to new life -- and in this case, we're talking kittens. We brought home the two newbies -- an orange male named Hideki (Japanese for valient, strength and tree) and Miyako (another Japanese name, which means "beautiful night child").

We found these two in a small East Lawrence house where 14 kittens from three litters raced around and piled on each other. Hideki likes to sleep and purr, and Miyako prefers pouncing and throwing herself over Hideki when she's ready for another cat nap.

Meanwhile, Natalie -- who is the mama to these miniature beasts -- is losing some sleep to their nocturnal ways, is overjoyed. And the rest of us cannot help but to keep sneaking into her room to see how they're currently sprawled on top of each other, or what new forms of attack and counter-attack are at play.

Irises outside exploding in color and height, among the tangle of the overgrown grass, outside, and inside it's kitten season.

Iris Season

2008-05-23T20:55:00.009-05:00

Each year it amazes me. Irises spring from their tight vertical buds into a blossom delicate as breath, and both intricately ruffled and simply spun open at once. Years ago, someone told me that irises smelled like the color they were, and since that time, I'm constantly testing this theory to find it true. Yes, the purple ones smell like grape, the peach ones like peach, the yellow ones like lemon, and the brown ones like chocolate. Or maybe all these smells are more similar than we realize, but who cares? Whatever it is, it smells like heaven.

The colors are both watercolor and oil paint at once. The hues are saturated with depth. The shine shimmers up close and from a distance.

Social flowers, irises tend to blown in groups, spending their winters rooting themselves horizontal to grow more friends for the spring. Partying against a broken faucet in an alleyway, or landscaped into a luxurious yacht club cocktail party near the marble stairs to the manor, irises defer class, looking completely at home whether admired by the monied or the local racoons.

They break out the champagne all at once, but linger a bit more than the peony, the ultimate party flower (all at once and then all spent). They turn quick to translucent paper and die on the stem while their sturdy flat leaves shoot happily on all summer. They're here in such vibrancy, a cabaret for the senses, and then they're gone. Against the wind, against the rain, they carry on -- dancing like there's no tomorrow and holding tight to that gorgeous bundle of blossom, alive and filling the air with that scent that can only be iris.

Each time they come around, I'm in love all over again.

Where the Weather Can Kill You: Tornado Warning and Other Things That Go Bump in the Night

2008-05-02T23:48:00.007-05:00

When my friend Sara was about to move to the northwest, she said, "I just want to live somewhere where the weather can't kill you."

Yesterday the wind battered everything and everyone. Trees bent, people tried not to topple over, and minivans like mine clung to the road with extra fierceness. No wonder that the wind picked up its pace when cooler air moved in, and at 1 a.m., I woke to hear tree limbs banging each other, a light roar, and unidentifiable flying objects meeting in midair collisions. "It sounds like we're having a tornado warning," I thought, and then the second thought came about how such a warning meant leaping out of bed and getting the kids and terrified dog (bad thing to be a Kansas dog who fears thunder) to the basement in a hurry.

"Caryn, get up now! Kids, get to the basement. It's a tornado warning!" Ken yelled. He had been glued to the weather radio in the other room (as usual, given the circumstances and his impeccable -- knock on cottonwood -- ears for bad weather).

In a few seconds, we were huddled in the storage area of our basement, half awake, blankets half draped over us, and Ken and me running in and out to check the TV, the weather radio, and cajole the terrified dog out of a laundry basket upstairs. Cell phone in hand, I called some close friends, and Ken called his folks. "I'm already in my basement, holding tight," Kel said. "Courtney heard the winds and got us up," said Denise. Ken's folks got themselves downstairs on a small couch where, later after the warning expired, he went over and found them sitting quietly like "two peas in a pod," he reported.

But in the here and now, we were focused on how a tornado might have just happened in the northwest part of the county, and how the big, energetic storm heading toward our area was reported to have just the right kind of multi-directional wind meeting to form a tornado. Tornadoes by daylight are scary enough, but in the dark, we have to depend not just on radar and people calling into television stations, but on our ears.

I lived in Kansas for a long time before I saw a tornado, and then -- in the last few years -- small tornadoes starting popping my way. First there was the tiny, white tornado high up in the sky that Ken and I saw while stopping at our mailbox one spring day. It looked like an upside-down wedding gown. Then there was a similar tornado in New Mexico, high up but slightly bigger. It stayed in the same place for dozens of miles. A few years ago, we saw a tornado head toward Lawrence (we live south of town), where it proceeded to rip apart an apartment building and do other damage. It looked like a long finger of god, and the kids and I (who had been watching too much Austin Powers back then), put our pinky fingers to our lips to act out Dr. Evil.

A year ago, I was lying in bed one fine afternoon, home alone, when I heard a rumbling kind of roar. I went outside, looked south, and the photo you're seeing of the tornado is what I saw. It didn't do much damage, was safely far from me, and lingered for about five minutes. I was so mesmerized I didn't know what to do so I called Ken on the phone. "Get the camera and keep taking pictures. Don't stop until it's gone," he said. I could post a dozen more pictures like this one, but you get the idea.

The tornadoes I've seen aren't the killing types, luckily enough, but whenever conditions are right -- the western edge usually of a thunderstorm when the clouds are exhausted and somewhat disorganized but the wind unduly fast, and a thousand other pieces perfectly attuned -- I'm watching. So all the other Kansans I know, living in a state where the saying, "Why would anyone buy a house without a basement" isn't a question but an affirmation. The largest tornadoes of the world tend to be just south of here -- Wichita, Oklahoma City (city in the U.S. with the most torandoes per capita, and perhaps the fastest and largest ever tornado with winds about 260 mph back in the 90s), and the general large swatch of south Kansas (where Greenburg was hit by a two-mile wide tornado a year ago), most of Oklahoma, and part of Texas.

The variety of tornado is vast and daunting, from rope-like remnants of tornadoes (which I think of as a somewhat dispersed herd of confused animals), to wedge tornadoes (such as what hit O.K. City and Greenburg), to ones that can and have carried mail 200 miles away, sucked up an entire river, killed a mother while landing the baby safely in the field, and pierced a piece of hay through a hardwood tree. They come, move, and leave in mysterious ways, and yes, when you live in Kansas, the sky can kill you. But most of us, with enough warning, basement or cellar or strong room hold-out space, and the use of all our senses and our cell phones, can survive the sky.

And the sky is even more generous with its safer forms of beauty in these parts.

Burn, Prairie, Burn!

2008-04-29T10:17:00.007-05:00

A few weeks ago, we burned the prairie near our home,
an annual rite of passage for us and for the grasslands, which
need to be freed from the distractions of invader trees and fed by the nutrients the fire imparts.

Burning a prairie is one part pitchfork dragging fire, one part carrying around water just in case, and one part hitting little flames that spill out the wrong direction with the back of a shovel (or just stomping on them, which works well if you dance fast). Of course the most thrilling part is dragging fire, and this year, we just so happened to have divided up, women on one side of a long rectangular prairie (about 10 acres) and men on the other. On the women's side, we took turns, each of us learning how to perfect our technique for wrapping a bunch of dried grasses around the pitchfork, a little like spaghetti, and then dragging with just enough bounce and enough connection to drip fire in a straight line along the edge of the prairie. Sometimes, in one ecstatic drag, I would walk 20 feet, leaving enough drops of fire that would quickly form a straight line of flame behind me.

As we dragged fire on one side, the men did the same on the other, all of us trying to keep pace with each other. We do it this way so that the flames will rush toward each other, flare up gorgeously and dramatically, and then consume themselves, leaving behind a nicely charred prairie. I should say first, though, that we started out burning a line along the short side of this rectangle of land, and then went forth from each edge of that line until we reached the far side. Then we dragged the flames across the opposite short end of prairie to meet, men and women, and ignite one last wall of fire, so loud and so hot that we all had to rush the opposite direction into the woods until the smoke and heat died down.

Within a few weeks, the land starts greening up. Within a few months, the grasses are two or three feet tall, and by late fall, they start to redden. The colors alone that run through this land cover a lot of territory, all reminding me how our lives are made of such seasonal shifts, some slow, and some sudden.

For a related story on prairie burning on our land, see Liz Black's wonderful column.
Thanks to Heather Frost for the bottom two photos of Daniel (on the right) and me.

Passing Through Passover

2008-04-24T11:02:00.009-05:00

Passover is my favorite holiday; in fact, sometimes I think it's the only designated holiday that I even like at all. I love that it's a celebration of freedom, that it focuses on a story of one of the more effective political organizing campaigns of the bible (e.g. the exodus), that it happens just on the cusp of deep spring, and that many people I love come to my house for a road-trip like sedar with plenty of pit stops for humor and conversation.

I've been co-hosting the sedar with two dear friends, Reva and Judy, for what? 24 years, I think. Kids have been born and have grown up, couples have changed, some families have gone to California and others have come to Lawrence, and one of our elder, Ben, died (although we have the Cup for Ben as part of the sedar to make sure he knows he's still welcome). Usually, we have 25-30 people. This means Ken or I do the annual trek-to-the-rental-store for tables and chairs, and my whole family (and sometimes friends swept into helping) sweep, clean, unfold chairs, and push back furniture together. The preparations are usually rushed, and this year, Ken pointed out, mop in hand, that this kind of haste in cleaning was perfect, given how the Israelites had to make such a hasty jolt from Egypt that their bread didn't have time to rise (thus, matzvoh).

The singing is loud, the company shines, and the meal is impossibly good, and almost always the same each year (each person brings something): lots of wine and matzoh, boiled potatoes and eggs, gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup, salad, a vegetarian version of shepherd's pie, and dessert. This year, we had one dessert, and I worried it wouldn't be enough, but it turned out to the dessert equivalent of the Hanukkah oil (which miraculously lasted for eight days): Something called "The Next Best Thing to Angelina Jolie (or Robert Redford, depending on your orientation)" is a layered delight of chocolate pudding, whipped cream, some other kind of creamy part, and a ground-almond crust (thanks to Courtney for making it all from scratch).

The other part of what fed us was the land and sky. People poured out the front door to the porch or the back door to the deck at regular intervals to watch the sunset, look at the bowls of greening hills, and enjoy the sweetness of the breeze. As always, being with friends and family, alive and connected inside and outside, was its own celebration of liberation. When it was over, just like each time we do this, I felt that I was now firmly landed in the new land of spring.

NOTE: Thanks to Joni for the great photos (and fabulous Choroset)

On Swanky Hotels and the Habitat of Being in Motion

2008-04-03T14:29:00.004-05:00

I write this from the 12^th floor of the Millennium Hotel in Minneapolis. Outside, I can see other swanky hotels, apartment buildings, and if I look closely, trees and ground. While I tend to both be somewhat enamored with the romance of a swanky hotel – just the idea of room service and those carts with doom-covered plates and miniature crystal salt shakers – I also feel a little like a prisoner in such hotels, confined to waiting for and riding elevators. It’s a vertical life, and I guess I’m just a horizontal kind of gal.

I’m here now for a marvelous conference, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, and I love running into old friends, perusing the intriguing workshop offerings, and preparing to do my own workshop. But in my quasi-queasy anti-swankiness, I’m constantly drawn down the slow-moving elevator, out the automatic revolving doors and onto the street. Having done conferences all over the country like this one, I’ve gotten very acclimated to a routine of leaving whenever possible to reconnect with the sky and earth, the sidewalks and stop lights, the occasional sculpture, like in this city, of giant blue herons and the rarer actual blue herons.

Back at the hotel at nightfall, I’m surrounded by the erect bodies of other tall hotels, damp or snow-covered lower roofs, and to my delight, a woman dressed completely in red washing windows on the small terrace of her apartment. This is a good swanky hotel in terms of the view. Two years ago, at another NAPT conference in Boston, I faced another building so close that my room was engulfed in constant shadow. My only consolation was my wonderful roommate, writer Normandi Ellis, who, because the Blue Man theatre was at the bottom of the building that blocked our view, would pull open the slit of air our window allowed, and every night at 11 p.m. She’d yell down, in her Kentucky accent, “I LOVE YOU, BLUE MEN!”

Over the years, I have found small charms in the isolating (at least, for me) vertical life of the swanky hotel: A beautiful lobby in Albuquerque, an especially plush bed in D.C., and the proximity of the Charleston hotel to the enchanting downtown. I’ve also had my share of fear and lothing in such hotels. The room my roommate and I shared in a Costa Mesa hotel, in the land of no place to walk except a large Japanese grocery store, made us both so deeply depressed whenever we were in that room that I labeled it the pit of despair. In Boston, the elevator life of the hotel clashed with my then very vulnerable state at the time, so much so that I fell into all kinds of physical ailments and a far-too-visceral sense of reality leaving my grasp.

I don’t blame the hotels directly; they’re just being what they were built to be. But as I get older, I find myself not craving the comforts of warm rooms, soft beds, and mini baskets of mini shampoo and hand lotion. Instead, I want to simply be on or close to the ground. I would rather be, dare I say, not in this swanky hotel but in an aging summer camp where I sleep in a simple bunk bed and have to trek through the cold grass to the bathroom. My body yearns for the body of the earth.

So I enjoy the swankiness like I would a stupid-funny movie, and I head out to walk for miles whenever I can, paying attention to the trees inhabiting small squares built into the sidewalks, and the quartet of white birds speeding overhead, just like me, heading toward its habitat, even if that habitat is largely defined as being in motion. And each night before I fall asleep, although there’s no theatre below, I pull over the window and call you, “I love you, Blue Men!”

Ear Candy for the Road: Recommended Books on Tapes

2008-03-23T17:49:00.004-05:00

Over the last 10 days, our family jumped into a rented car and drove close to 2,700 miles to and fro New Jersey. The trip, decided upon on a whim, was catalyzed by my very dear step-father Henry's hospitalization, and the convergence of spring break, our schedule's being somewhat open, and the feeling that we should just go, right now. So we did, and it was very beautiful and essential to have been there with my mom and stepdad, and to have seen other family. Yet because we were there for the same amount of time we also spent driving, this was one of those trips where the destination really needed to be the journey too. Lucky for us, I loaded up on a heap of books on CD, and here are some mini-reviews for your driving pleasure.

Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy -- This lovely Irish tale told in several compelling voices unfolds a landscape and community, both in the vacinity of a small Irish town and the nearby woods, which contain a shrine to St. Ann, believed to invoke miracles and healing. When the woods and shrine are threatened by a new highway, the community finds itself divided and also thrust into thinking long and deep about what that shrine means to them as individuals and collectively. What follows are splendid, interlocking stories of love against the odds, loss and its aftermath, and how to live together as community, particularly as community members age, change, leave and return. It was a marvelous book for the road although I did walk into gas stations in rural Indiana thinking in an Irish accent as I hunted down more ice tea.

Fear of the Dark by Walter Mosley -- While I don't tend toward mysteries, I was amazed and thrilled at this one, set in 1950s L.A. and narrated by an enticingly honest and learned bookstore owned named Paris Minton, who is drawn unwittingly into situations way beyond his coping skills or courage. Luckily, his good friend, Fearless Jones, a cool-as-iced-coffee protector, fighter and investigator of all things dark, comes to his aid to help balance the trouble set into motion in a Rube Goldberg kind of arrangement by Paris's cousin, Ulysesses "Useless" S. Grant, IV. Mosley is brilliant at setting scenes and conveying characters with charm, wit, music and vivid hues of description, and the language throughout borders on profound and hysterically funny simultaneously. Just listening to this made me feel far more cool than I am.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See -- This fascinating, disturbing and often very melancholy long-life narrative tells the story of a friendship between two women who find their fortunes shifting over their lives in extremely sexist and cruel 19th century China. Lily, a poor girl who, by virtue of having feet shaped perfectly for binding and breaking so that can turn into spectacular "golden lilies," lands a prestigious marriage, community standing and riches while her dear friend, Snow Flower, her "old same" (laotung) -- a girl to whom she commits to for life -- finds her high-ranking family origins sucked dry into poverty, abuse, addiction and great loss. They communicate with each other mostly through nu shu, a secret language only for women. While the sections on the details of foot binding were so upsetting that my whole family made me skip those tracts, the story itself was compelling in what it showed about the deepest friendships and loves of our lives, and about the need to tell our stories and be heard. The writing itself is a bit simplistic and clumsy in sections, but mostly, this is a marvel to listen to as you roar down I-70.

Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson -- Few things I've ever read are infused with such meaning, depth, beauty, and loss as this novel by the author of Gilead about the coming of age of a misfit who, lucky or unlucky for her, is eventually raised by her misfit aunt. With an eye toward the nuances of the sky and nearby glacial lake, and an ear for the most poetic and flowing language this side of Toni Morrison and Ben Okri, Robinson unfurls the family story, shot through with great and uncontrollable losses against the backdrop of a remote and gorgeous landscape. The sense of longing and grief is balanced out by such imagination that hearing this has expanded how I listen to, look at, smell and taste the world around me. The characters are so pervasive that I would wander into truck stop restaurants thinking their thoughts.

Self-Portrait of a Woman Who Loves Her Body For a Moment: A Poem

2008-03-13T10:00:00.013-05:00

My ankles, for instance, functional
as bicycle pedals, the elbows too,
elegant as the unfurling of an iris.
Then there are my thumbs, twin sons
of a mother who never forgets them,
marvelous their gymnastics.

My eyes that land on orange in a painting,
or my shoulders, heroic in their lifting.
The flat slate of blue crooked lines where
there used to be breasts, the curve of my belly,
the hips weary of insults when they surge
across the days like prize-winning horses.

The way my knees bend to make strong hills
of the legs. Then there’s the hummingbird synapses
of my brain, tired but as lovely in their blur
as the heart’s tap dance and dramatic bows.

Everywhere, there’s applause my white blood cells
drink each leg of their marathon, the efficiency
of my tongue, the wind my lungs translate into song,
and the fire at the center of each breath.

In the mirror, walking through foot-high snow,
or turning to sit in the chair, this body's imperfections
just the weather rolling through the landscape of the soul.
Why insult the thick heat, the broken branches that left
their lines, the dappled rocks up close?
I’m just a container for time like a river.
Tell, me, what’s not to love?

Kitty, Come Home!

2008-03-03T13:15:00.006-06:00

We walk through the brush on the hill, mosey through the prairie, visit all the neighbors to hand them flyers, and whenever we open a door, we first call out, “Akio!!!” as loud as we can, hoping it will charm our beloved kitty back home. Akio, our 11-month-old male tabby, disappeared Thursday at dusk, around the same time a feral long-haired reddish beast of a cat showed up. We shooed the beast away, but from that time on, our kitten hasn’t come bounding like a dog (as he was apt to do) onto the porch whenever we call his name.

I know that life in the country can be like this for cats, especially ones less than sterling in their intelligence and speed. Unfortunately, Akio was such a cat. Within the last week, I saw him take a swipe at our other cat (who, in all fairness, has been attacking him since he was the size of a beanie baby), and then sit down beside her and stretch out on his back. So I have good reason to worry about him roaming this land where hungry hawks and owls patrol the skies, a packet of coyotes roams the woods, and occasionally, a cougar leaves her tracks. Although his name meant “Bright Boy,” he was bright mostly in his loud, clear purr and his dark eyes (and who knows how much of a boy he was after that fabled visit to the vet months ago). But he was a light of joy verging on ecstasy for my family.

My daughter’s cat, a gift for surviving junior high school with her humor intact (although a little darker), she would walk in the door after school, singing out “Baby!” as he speed-ran from wherever he was sleeping to leap into her arms. He leapt to poetic heights to catch and eat moths. He slept next to the dog, his best friend, and the two of them followed each other inside and out, room to room, sleeping couch to sleeping bed to sleeping floor.

What I loved best about Akio was how, in the middle of the night (when I’m prone to wake for no particular reason), he would suddenly make a sound like a cross between a meow and purr, which signaled me that he was about to leap on the bed, walk up to my chest, lie down, reach his paws out to hold my face between them, and tuck his purring head under my chin. During this longest-of-years winter when I’ve experienced the loss of a dear friend, and from a distance, my step-father’s serious illness, there was nothing I needed more than a sleeping, purring cat on me at 3 a.m.

So I steer the car up our long, muddy drive, hoping against hope that Akio will spring out of the cedars and run alongside me to the house like he used to do. Or I open the back door in the middle of a cold night just to see if there’s a meow that morphs into this kitten. Mostly, like my daughter, I ask impossible questions: Is he alive? Does he have a new home? Is he trapped somewhere or lost? Will we ever see him again, or know what happened?

The answers don’t come, just the sudden drop in temperature back down to the cold, pewter sky. Just the sun suddenly. Just the wind toppling over trash cans. Just the dog asleep, surprisingly not as depressed as I would think to lose her good friend. Just some of us who live here sad and still for a moment, then back to whatever we’re doing without Akio, the bright boy of a kitten we love. If, beyond reason, there are blog-reading angels with specialties in kitten whispering out there, you know what I’m asking. Please.

The Best Pie-Maker in the World: Remembering My Dear Friend Weedle

2008-02-16T20:37:00.006-06:00

When Paul called my little cell phone that evening, I was immediately taken by the very still tone in his voice. “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he said. I wondered if Weedle had a heart attack or a minor accident, but before I could spin out a scenario that ended with everyone intact, he said, “Weedle was killed in a car accident.”

Paul. Weedle. The friends we knew well before they found each other. Paul, who used to live in an upstairs apartment of a small alleyway home, the hermit of Old West Lawrence with his books, architectural drawings, sharp mind and beautiful heart. Weedle, who lived for years in an old farm house in Vinland, where she majored in meat loaf, child-rearing, a weary-but-knock-you-over humor, piles of books, insane genius in any word-focused board game, and the very best pies in the cosmos. Weedle was what you would get if you cross-pollinated Mary Englebreit with Rosanne Barr (the Rosanne before she just had one name) – and by the way, she loved both Mary and Rosanne.

I first connected with Weedle in a large car with her then-husband Walt, friends Dan and Kat, and my not-yet-husband Ken. We drove around Kansas City, laughing uproariously, switching lanes fast on our way home from a Joni Mitchell concert at the Starlight Theater. The night smelled like roses, honeysuckle, car fumes, popcorn, and darkness. Weedle demanded we stop at a quick shop so she could get her mandatory diet Pepsi.

At the time, most of us subscribed to walking the carob road, eating little or no white sugar, chocolate, dairy, meat, and generally consuming a whole lot of tofu, granola, and those awful carob brownies. But Weedle never followed convention in such ways.

Weedle had an intellect of immense sharpness and wit, a heart as big as all the pies (and we’re talking thousands here) she ever baked lined up across Kansas, and God help you if you ever crossed her. Weedle loved her friends, family, and especially Paul and her children like nobody’s business, with a fierceness that rivaled a pack of Grizzlies. She collected quirky and moving tales from the lives of her children that showed just how much she loved watching them grow up, try new things and new places. The thrill of her day was when the cell phone rang with a call from Laurel, Will, Kevin or Kelly. She also adored all their spouses and sweethearts, she was over the moon about her grandchildren – Katie, Allison and Joshua.

She was also the funniest person I ever met.

At a party at our house last year, people were hanging close to the kitchen table, covered with beads of all kinds for making jewelry. Food overflowed the kitchen counters nearby, and there were about 30 of us reaching over each other for a piece of turquoise or another slice of Weedle’s cherry pie. Weedle herself was on the phone, trying to reach Paul to find out when he would be here, but the phone was continuously busy.

“I can’t reach him. He must be downloading porn,” she announced before taking another sip of her diet Pepsi. Now for anyone who knew Paul, imagining him downloading porn was analogous to George W. Bush revealing that he was a gay, vegan, meditating Pacifist with the IQ of Einstein. The next hour, she kept juggling the joke about Paul downloading porn, to the point that when he arrived, a bunch of bead-bearing women immediately called out, “You done downloading porn?”

Weedle cooked up more than jokes. She was the diva of the kitchen in the grand tradition of comfort foods. Nobody made spaghetti and meatballs, meatloaf, fried chicken, chocolate chip cookies, mashed potatoes, gravy and especially bread like her. When I was walking gingerly from the car to my bed after my hysterectomy, Weedle was already on her way with an industrial-sized tray of her chicken pot pie.

Of course it was her pie-making ability that trumped all. She could not only make the best-tasting pie (winner of grand prizes in the very competitive pie division of the Vinland Fair, and deemed by my mother-in-law, a fellow pie competitor, to be the best ever), but she did it at the speed of light. I once timed her making a cherry pie from scratch (although the cherries came from a can) to oven: 6 minutes. Really, I’m not making this up. Her hands knew dough.

Her heart knew love. When Weedle met Paul over 15 years ago (at my backroom prompts of, “Weedle, Paul likes you,” and “Paul, Weedle likes you”), she met her match in mind and heart. While Paul is relatively quiet and internal, he fit around her like an exquisite home-made quilt. “You were the love of her life,” I reminded Paul the night she died as we sat in the kitchen, dishes Weedle washed in the drying rack behind us, and to our left, the open oven to warm the room. “She was the love of my life,” he answered.

She found in Paul someone who also brought home piles of library books to read on everything from the Black Sea to Harry Potter. They went to farmer’s market together. They walked their pony-sized Great Pyranees down country roads. They took trips to Chicago, New York, and other outposts. They played with their granddaughters. And they sat with us and our friends Courtney and Denise playing board games, mostly “Taboo,” a game where you have to make your partner guess the word on a card without saying the obvious thing. “It’s like a….” Weedle began. “Dishwasher,” I yelled, and we were right, again in a kind of telepathic word-game connection neither of us understood. Together, we prided ourselves on wiping our opponents into the ground, and we never lost when we played as a team.

Weedle was a whiz at any game that had to do with speed, words, imagination, and no wonder: As a long-time librarian after being an excellent elementary school teacher, and a writer, she was always a storyteller. When the kids were little, when the kids were grown, when the grandkids were born, when she took a road trip, when she stayed home.

The first Weedle story I fell in love with concerned her taking Will, who was just a little kid at the time, to see Bambi. When Bambi’s mother died, little kids throughout the theatre raised an intense collective crying chorus. After they were finally soothed quiet by their mothers, the movie’s final scene revealed a pastoral twilight expanse, with smoke from a campfire in the distance. “Is that where they’re cooking Bambi’s mother?” Will yelled out, tilting all the kids in the theatre into hysteria again.

Weedle loved that story for its irreverence and freshness, for its perspective, too, all three of which were ample in Weedle’s surprisingly-tender, full-voiced, fierce and imaginative writing. From her short essays for an old Lawrence publication, Well, Well, Well, to the brilliant memoir she was writing of late, Weedle’s writing brought to the page all you saw of her and so many more layers. The writing was gorgeously funny and poignant, just like the writer. It was one of Weedle’s great dreams to have more of her writing published.

As the news lands, I remember the long after-dinner walks we took from her house to the road alongside the elementary school, watching the sunset through fields of coming twilight. I see her turning to my children – from the time they were babies through their teen years – to hand them cookies, videos to watch, and roll her eyes at wry asides. I think about the last time we were together, New Year’s Eve, with Paul, Ken Denise, Courtney, Marek, Daniel, Natalie and Forest to eat vast quantities of miniature eggrolls and toast the New Year with sparkling grape juice at 8:30 p.m.. We played a game we had come to love because it often made all of us laugh ourselves into falling-over crying.

It’s called, “Moods,” and for this game, there are 8 moods, each on a card, displayed at any given time. When it’s your turn, you draw a card with a statement like “It’s getting bigger” or “Would you like fries with that?” and shake the dice in a little cup, look inside, and see which number mood you have to bring into how you say this statement. Everyone else has to guess which mood you’re conveying in your voice.

Life is giving us all a new card to draw here, and the moods on the table, for me this week, are numbness, irritability, fear, grief, despair, spacey-ness, love, and sadness. I know Weedle is on the other side of the table even though I can no longer see her, and my heart is breaking at how far away she is. Yet at home, on the shelf in our refrigerator door, are a few cans of diet Pepsi she brought for herself for New Year’s Eve. I think I’ll keep them there as a fitting and well-placed memorial of someone, even without the diet Pepsis, I never could forget.

Please see http://www.LovingWeedle.blogspot.com for a community scrapbook on Weedle and lots of her good writing.

Failing

2008-02-07T09:45:00.000-06:00

It happened again. Yesterday, the long-awaited email arrived from the agent reading my revised (as per her suggestions) novel. In short, she said one word: No.

Finding an agent is akin to being a teenager desperately seeking a sweetheart: “Yes, I’ll be whatever you want me to be, just say, yes!” After dating this agent for over a year (all those encouraging emails and lingering conversations), I was once again dumped, mimicking my previous dating-game-gone-bad love story with the agent before her. If there were such a thing as Literary-agent-eharmony, I would post an ad that read, “Sincere and hard-working writer, willing to listen to you deeply and edit until the cows come home yearns with all her being for long-term relationship with literary agent who tells it straight, loves my characters, and knows her way around a publishing house.”

Instead, I find myself once again matchless (not that I should complain – I feel like I was surprisingly lucky in love beyond the manuscript), and feeling like I’m failing. It’s not so much “failed,” as in the past tense, but more an ongoing process punctuated by doubt, fear, longing, anger at the publishing industry, jealousy when I stroll the fiction sections of bookstores, and an underlying sadness. The sadness is what catches me most and, in slow-motion, lowers me to the ground. There’s something about failing that feels like falling, and then lying quietly on the ground for a long time.

It reminds me of when I failed my Ph.D. comps – 12 hours of written exams over a three-day period on my four chosen specialty areas: American literary of the 20^th genre, Emily Dickinson, poetry as a genre, and child birth imagery in contemporary women writers. After reading over 300 books, memorizing dozens of poems, and readying myself to speak at length on 50 poets from Chaucer to Leslie Marmo Silko, I thought I would leap and twirl through the exams like the Baryshnikov of the English department. Instead, I picked up the phone a week after the exam, holding my toddler son, and heard one of my most beloved professors on the other end, gently explaining how the committee unanimously failed me on each section of the exam. I put my son down, and although I was standing, I felt like I was sinking into the floor, laying face-down, seemingly unable to stand again for many months.

When I went into the graduate advisor’s office to sign the form that basically said, “I quit,” the advisor cagily suggested I sign another form that said I was taking a leave. “Who knows? You might wake up in a year and realize you can do this,” he said. I told him he was dreaming, but wouldn’t you know it? A year or so later, that’s just what happened. I realized that, although I knew the literature inside and out, I had been resisting putting my analysis of it into any kind of theoretical framework based on the irrational fear that to do so would compromise my poet’s soul.

After reading the likes of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and other feminist writers who presented theory with the poetry intact, I saw that passing the exams was a challenge of translation for me. I enrolled in an American studies course on literary theory, revisited the likes of post-structuralism, Marxism, reader-response theory, and assertions from the professor that everything – from the earth to love or spirituality – was simply a social construct. I disagreed mightily, but found the strength to stay put and listen to the language people used to discuss theory, in great part through a connection with a fellow student who felt, like me, that the living earth wasn’t a social construct. At the end of the semester, I re-took my Ph.D. comps, passing them this time, and polished off the dissertation I had almost finished before I took the comps the first time.

Had it not been for finishing my Ph.D., I would never have gotten into the door at Goddard College, where I’ve now been teaching for 12-plus years, and where I’ve found my people academically and artistically. Had I not failed my exams, and learned that I could engage with theory without selling myself down the post-modernist black hole of pure nothingness, I would not know how to engage so deeply with students facing similar challenges. Failing broke open my heart as a teacher in ways that continue to teach me how to help others forge critical writing that’s honest, meaningful, and liberating for the writer.

But beyond the actual lessons learned, there’s also that sense of lying quietly on the ground, the same thing I feel each time a manuscript is rejected despite my jumbo-sized effort and earnestness. I carry that sadness and close connection with the ground in my pockets and computer bag, finding it when I look for loose change for the parking meter. It’s not so much the sadness of plans not panning out, but something underneath the intentions and words, a kind of common ground that hurts a little to walk, and yet it’s also completely okay. It just happens to be where all of live in addition to the fields glimmering with light wind, sunlight and horizons that look like tourist outposts. Knowing that all over again feels sad, but also honest, meaningful and strangely liberating for the writer.

Photos of the ground: Top is floor in the HueHuecoyolt (Spanish for old, old coyote) ecovillage community center, middle is prairie in winter, bottom is prairie in late spring.

Braving Brave Voice

2008-01-20T21:32:00.000-06:00

Several years ago rhythm and blues singer-songwriter Kelley Hunt and I started talking about how singing can open up our writing voice, and visa-versa, all of which couldn’t help but to enliven the rest of our lives. That was the impetus behind Brave Voice, the week-long retreat we developed that brings men and women together in the wilds of the weather and their own experience to recover, discover and express more of their voice and life.

As a writer, I’m long-acquainted with the value of entering a new piece of writing through the backdoor, which means being committed enough to write without making such a big deal about doing it perfectly that the words get too scared to show up. Instead, I show up, put myself out there on the page, and bring enough curiosity and respect for the art, for the poem, story, or song to unfurl and show itself. In bringing singing and writing together with Kelley, I realize we’re walking into all kinds of new places through back doors, opening up the physical voice through singing and then watching what happens with that voice on the page, or speaking from the heart and then leaning into a song to see what it has to show us.

This kind of engagement allows us to access far more of our lives, experiences, perceptions, magic, music and words than putting only our brain’s frontal lobe in the driver’s seat. Yet such engagements benefit from enough patience, time, safe enough space to take creative risks, and good enough witnesses to help us see what we’re creating. It’s a date with the mysterious to witness what wants to be said, written, sung or performed, and both Kelley and I believe in having outrageous fun and making sure to get up and dance on such dates.

At Brave Voice, we come together to listen deeply to ourselves, to each other, to the land and lake and sky around us, to the calling of our own voice, and the sightings along our own path. We witness each other, and in doing so, we learn how to listen more deeply to our own creative process. We are witnessed, which helps us feel and know the full weight of our music, writing, and art.

Where we meet has much to do with what we find. The retreat is held at a camp on an arrowhead-shaped peninsula surrounded by Council Grove reservoir. The location, in the center of the Flint Hills (endless hills of tallgrass prairie that look like voluptuous women lying on their sides), was key meeting ground for Plains-area tribes, which came together in council to share news, celebrate, meet and make and keep community. The location of the camp is the precise place where thousands of tribal people met for hundreds of years.

Coming to this sacred ground, we experience both resonance and reverence that’s inherently healing, grounding and renewing. We come to a particular place, and in doing so, we also find our ways into our own particular songs, stories, poems, plays, rhythms and motions. Such a place, combined with such a process, uncovers the utter bravery of our voices, and what we have to say, sing or write to the world.

Check out Kelley's new site: http://www.myspace.com/kelleyhuntmusic.

One Good Note & The Larger Song: Learning the Cello

2008-01-07T16:51:00.000-06:00

I unzip the case, and carefully, trying not to bump against a wall or cabinet, lift out my cello. Made in China, put together by one luthier in the south part of town, and recently adjusted by another luthier in the north part of town, my cello has been with me for close to four years now. A cross between an antique rocking chair, a favorite dress, and a particularly loveable family pet, this cello has been déjà vu all over again when it comes to beginner’s mind and the sweetness of both one good note and the larger song.

I came to the cello and the cello came to me all at once after many years of yearning to learn it. One day I was in the Merc, our local natural foods co-op, talking to a friend who had recently begun cello lessons when I blurted out, “I always wanted to do that, too.” The next day I was renting to own a cello, and setting up lessons with a gentle-voiced celloist named Julianne Boren. Getting whatever I needed to get started – inspiration, a teacher, and of course, a cello – came so easy that I knew I had to follow. Learning the cello, however, didn’t, but I still followed.

I was, shall we say, a remedial cello student, taking months just to learn to hold the bow, and weeks of weeks to master (e.g. play badly but close enough that people could tell the tune) “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Now, after close to four years of lessons, I’m just starting to be able to do vibrato (that way celloists make that fast, mellow siren sound). Lucky for me, the cello, my first, and now my new teacher -- fabulous celloist Matt Herren -- have all had a good sense of humor.

Practicing the cello is all about practice for me. There’s nothing to learn well enough to parlay it into some kind of income or something flashy enough to impress anyone. There’s no train stop where I’ll finally arrive; it’s more like riding the train, seeing the scenery and especially, feeling that sway up and down my spine as the wheel turn, and that because the cello, as much as it’s about sound, is also about vibration.

I love holding the cello between my legs and arms, letting its neck rest on my shoulder, and when I bow a good note, feeling the sound echo through my body, like ripples in a lake. It's like standing in the woods on an overcast day when the sun breaks through and lights the edges of everything just as a south wind sweeps through.

When the vibrations add up to a song, I’m encompassed in movement and sound at once. Sometimes the song is slightly injured and unsure of its footing; other times, it surprises me with its deep color. In any case, I’m just leaning into the sound and letting it show me its underside. If I fall off, I climb back on. When I let go and make contact at once, I fly.

When I started learning, I was barely out of treatment and surgeries for breast cancer, and just taking baby steps back to some kind of new normalcy. I sensed that wrapping myself around this instrument and letting sounds vibrate through my newly reconfigured and somewhat-fragmented body would help. I was right, but what I didn’t realize was that making this music, one pull of the bow at a time, wasn’t just about healing: It was and continues to be about everything else in the day to day practice of being alive.

That’s because practice is what we mostly get: We practice at love, work, parenting, friendship, spirituality, citizenship and all else on our path. Vacuuming isn’t a destination, and neither is apologizing to someone when it hurts, speaking up a public hearing, trying to figure out what to tell our son about his heartbreak or parent about her diagnosis. It’s all a constant music we practice at, hoping to make the note sweet enough.

But then sometimes, often when we’re not expecting it or certainly not forcing it, we enter the larger song. As the poet Tess Gallagher writes in a found poem, called “What Cathal Said,”

You can sing sweet
and get the song sung
but to get to the third
dimension you have to sing it
rough, hurt the tune a little. Put
enough strength to it
that the notes slip. Then
something else happens. The song
gets large.

Benazir Bhutto: Rest in Peace

2007-12-27T19:20:00.000-06:00

It’s dusk, the snow is about to start any moment, and I’m driving down Iowa Street, one of the main drags in my town, on our way to Target to buy something for dinner and a DVD of the Simpson movie. It’s been a good day, considering the holidays’ pressure that still lingers behind me, my husband sick at home across town, and the tricky weather ahead. At least, it seemed like a good day until NPR began telling us of a woman who runs a website to match up people with their missing gloves.

“Why in the world are they reporting on this when Benazir Bhutto was just killed?” my oldest son, Daniel, yells out.

I almost stop short. For years, I’ve followed her story, mesmerized by her daring, intelligence, and leadership. The first woman to serve as prime minister of a Muslim country, Bhutto, and 20 others – as most of you know by now – were killed at a political rally by an assassin who blew himself up afterwards. Born into a wealthy family, and educated at Harvard, and Oxford, she lost her father and two of her brothers to political violence. She also lived in exile in between serving two terms as prime minister, dodging death threats and denouncements of her political party, being falsely charged with corruption, and continuing to defy those who would silence her.

Returning to Pakistan after 8 years of exile, she was met with a bomb blast that just missed her. In recent weeks, she’s been under house arrest and even had her house barb-wired by the police to keep her from speaking at a rally against Gen. Musharraf’s emergency rule imposition. That didn’t stop her from launching her election campaign 27 days ago

“We can expect 3-5 inches of fresh snow tonight, and a 50-50 chance of more snow tomorrow,” the news announcer says with just enough cheer. I aim the car toward the Target parking lot, feeling shaken by how, when she stuck her neck out for her beliefs, someone slit it. I forget to look for a parking space for a few moments.

There are news stories of tragedies far from here all the time. Maybe because I tend to hear most of my news on the radio instead of having repeated images imprinted into my memory, I often find it easy to just feel momentarily sad, and then get occupied with other things. But there are some stories, like this one, that break through the numbness and resistance born of being safely here, where I can wander store aisles without fearing for my life or buy my kids sweat shirts without fearing for theirs. Minutes after heading the top-of-the-hour news, headlined with the sounds of Pakistan men weeping, I’m pushing a cart through Target, looking for noodles.

Yet my mind is on Bhutto, who I believed would win election and start the slow process of releasing the fascist steam from Pakistani politics. Maybe, and quite obviously, this was a naïve belief. At this moment, many time zones from where we’re expecting freezing drizzle before the snow, thousands of people face far more than my dashed hopes. I circle through the bread aisle twice without remembering what I’m here for, and try to wrap my mind around the grief and loss, the great gulf of fear just split wider, the unbearable pain for so many in Pakistan. I wish for comfort and peace in a country that hasn’t seen much of either in so long and now faces a future where both will be as rare as a brave woman who walked right into the fire, refusing to be silenced or hidden.

I push my cart toward the register and find no line to wait in, only a simple prayer: Benazir Bhutto, rest in peace.

Spirit Trips: Woody

2007-12-19T22:15:00.001-06:00

We’ve all taken those kinds of trips that aren’t anywhere in the vicinity of relaxing poolside under swaying palms, or long meetings in elevator-filled hotels where the donuts are never fresh. Yet there’s another kind of trip, one usually sudden regardless of what’s in the bank account or already on the credit card, guided by a simple yearning to be with someone we love to say hello, goodbye, or I’m here for you with our presence. These trips glow with their own energy and make their own luck, and like these trips, the person we were going to see in Colorado – our cousin Woody – also glows with life, humor and heart.

Having just driven with my husband, sister-in-law and youngest son about 1,400 miles give or take a bathroom break, in 3.5 days, I realize I’ve experienced such a trip. Why else dodge an ice storm on one end and snow storm on another while balancing the slowly-dying embers of a virus to drive relentlessly onward so engrossed in the autobiography of Steve Martin on tape that we run out of gas in Western Kansas? Yet because it was a spirit trip, we found ourselves on roads hours after they were cleared, and meeting an Oklahoma angel who just happened to travel with a canister of gas when we needed it.

Besides being related to us, Woody, whose real name is Forrest, is a forest ranger in Fort Collins, CO. with decades of service, daring and making others bend with laughter. A man so full of life, and wildly-entertaining verbal gymnastics, it was little surprise to find him sitting in his office in a huge red and gold stuffed crown (of the “It’s not butter, it’s Parkay” variety), telling everyone, “This is because I’m a royal pain in the ass.”

The crown as well as our trip was motivated by Woody’s latest turns on the trail of living with lung cancer that has now set out for the hinterlands of other organs in his body. His cancer, an atypical carcinoid, is the rarest of the rare, not unlike Woody himself (who is not, in any way, cancerous but certainly rare). His emails to his many friends and family address us as “noidistas” and report such headlines as, “Once again I look like a poorly maintained cue ball,” and “We are now launched into the next orbital level of the As-The-World-Turns inner space trip.” We’ve also heard of Captain Atypical, how “mets” aren’t just a baseball team in New York, and what it means to undergo bouts of chaos theory.

Just regrowing his hair after a particularly nasty chaos-theory-through-chemo regiment that almost put Woody beyond the chaos of our everyday lives, not to mention his own life, he was thrilled to see us. Our short time together was punctuated by long stories of energy politics, camping trips gone awry, mind-blowing pesto pizza, and especially the company of Woody and his wife Janet’s four schipperkees.

The dogs – Rainbo, Teddy, Frostbite, and the ever-mysterious Guy Noir – look like a mix between refrigerator magnet black dogs and miniature Tasmanian devils. They probably have the intelligence of dolphins on their good days, and the speed of low-to-the-ground cougars as they race (“here comes the Indy 500”) through the house, pausing to do tricks (like patty-cake), sit on our laps (at least one of them), or pace-race around the kitchen table with a toy in their mouths. My kids tend to think of the dogs, who they’ve visited for years, as relatives. “Cousins?” I asked my son. “Not really,” he said, “more like second cousins.”

These dogs, Woody’s wacky and enduring ways of bringing all of us more light and laughter, his wife’s wondrous caregiving (Woody once wrote of her that she was due for a second halo upgrade), and the parade of hats that keep coming, are carrying him through. Like most cancers, and especially unusual and later-stage cancers, the time ahead is mostly unpredictable. And so are spirit trips: journeys you don’t plan to take, but in the taking, you find your spirit has opened just enough more to perceive the life that’s always been here.

While Woody might be rarity in the cancer world, he’s old hat at spirit trips: He’s the one who managed to show up – seemingly out of nowhere – to surprise us at weddings, funerals, family reunions even if it meant long and wildly-spun travels from remote forest stations near 14,000-foot mountains. He’s been making spirit trips his whole life, and with our little roadtrip, we got to accompany him on his for a few days.

Body Is As Body Does

2007-12-10T12:21:00.000-06:00

Okay, so I struggle with what most women, and many men I know worry about, fuss over, beat themselves senseless because of and generally fall backwards into like a big vat of butter: My body looks wrong. I don’t think about this with each breath, but far more frequently that I wish I would. Then I worry about worrying too much, and why can’t I be happy as I am: healthy, strong, relatively happy and able to walk long distances on a single café au lait (with soy milk, and whipped cream on top).

I suppose my worry started in those pre-teen “oh-my-god-is-this-what-I-look-like?” moments when I caught a glimpse of myself in a locker room mirror, a mean girl’s comment my father’s bad jokes (“Hey you, don’t get fat until after you’re married. Boys don’t like fat girls”). From there, it’s the garden variety story that most of you dear readers know so well already involving making desserts out of toast, pineapple and anise seed; counting calories, points, grams and portions; writing eager manifestations and making collages out of slimmer women; and alternating between telling myself I love myself the size I am and then having an unflattering picture snap me back into the mildewed-halls of self-hatred.

What’s a girl to do? Like many of us, I’ve driven myself crazy over the reality that despite all the books and articles I’ve ingested on accepting and loving my body as I am, and despite so many journal entries, art projects and long discussions with friends about loving the body we’re with rather than the yearned-for one that looks good in horizontal stripes, I occasionally land on my (too large) butt back on square one. It’s not just the frustration of not moving ahead, but the boredom of thinking – once again – the same thoughts about my size and shape that occupied my mind when I was 15. It’s as if I have a permanent time-share in my brain where such thoughts occasionally vacation, making my life feel I’m anywhere but on vacation.

So I write today without enduring answers, suggestions or perceptions. But I am finding one simple thing to be true for me: Body is as body does. If I’m eating foods with great color, texture, freshness and vitality, I feel more alive. If I’m doing my Lamaze-type breathing to get through Pilates class, holding a Warrior pose in yoga class, lifting weights while trying not to fall off an exercise ball, or taking a long walk in the frost-filled landscape, I feel strong. If I’m soaking in the tub, complete with some kind of lavender or eucalyptus salts, the water as hot as I can stand, I feel calm and clean. There are other things I do that make me feel body-good (of the dark-night-under-the-blanket variety), but in the interest of not humiliating my children or parents if they read this, let’s just move on.

My realization is that living as if I love this body, my body, makes it way easier to pal around with my whole self.

The other thing I found is tangible evidence about how I never have looked as bad as I thought I did. I recently put together a photo timeline of myself from birth to the present, using about 50-60 shots of me lying in a crib, hugging a pony, waving from atop a giant cement turtle, cringing next to my prom date, posing as a nun beside a playboy bunny (Halloween), hiking in Kenya, standing over a cradle while nine month’s pregnant, holding a newborn in one hand and a dissertation in the other, and laughing with friends. Thanks to a glue stick and oversized journal (where I pasted the photos in wavy and curling lines), I found myself all over the place, giving whoever I am now this message: Hey, it’s all good! Or at least, it’s all okay.

Those photos I critiqued in microscopic detail when I was in 20s, 30s, 40s, even last year really are just one angle or another of someone living her life. Altogether, the photos don’t tell the story of a 19-year-old cursing her hips or a 45-year-old fretting over her chins; they just show one woman alive, surprisingly happy, experiencing one landscape of the heart or community or earth at the moment.

All along, it’s always been the same good song: Body is as body does.

Abiding Grace: A Tribute to the Late Grace Paley

2007-12-04T08:33:00.000-06:00

Note: Grace Paley, one of the most amazing writers and activists of our time, died in late August. I wrote this after experiencing her warmth, honestly and humor at the Power of Words conference in 2005. If you love to read or write, I highly recommend any of her collections of short stories. If you're interested in the Power of Words conference (we're accepting workshops proposals now), please see www.goddard.edu/powerofwords).

Liberation. That was the theme we chose for the third annual Power of Words conference held Aug. 6-9, 2005 at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, and so when it came to finding a keynote speaker, who better than Grace Paley, the poet laureate of Vermont? A legendary writer and activist, who read often at Goddard, and lived just down the road, Grace was the shining star of writing, speaking and acting for justice with all passion and no pretense. I got her phone number from a friend of a friend of hers, dialed, and so began my odyssey of seeking Grace.

The conference, hosted by Transformative Language Arts concentration (part of Goddard’s Individualized MA Program), would bring together 80 writers, activists, storytellers, helping professionals, artists and educators from as far away as Southern California and London. Getting Grace, who lived only 20 minutes away, proved to be the trickier part.

The first time I called, I spoke with her husband, Bob (Robert Nichols): “Is Grace there?”

“No!”

“Do you expect her back soon?”

“No!”

“I wanted to ask her to be the keynote speaker for our conference.”

“She won’t do it,” he told me, but he also said I should call back on Sunday night.

I did. She wasn’t there.

I called again, and this time left a phone message.

A week later, I tried again. Bob answered, “Wait, she’s in the tub, I’ll hand her the phone.”

I ended up called back later that evening, and for the first time, spoke to her.

“I would like to go back to Goddard,” she told me. “It’s been a while. But I don’t know if I’m going to be on the Cape with my daughter and grandson that weekend. Call back in a month.”

I did. She still didn’t know. Call back in another month.

By this time, I had her number just about memorized. She still didn’t know.

About six weeks later, just as I needed to finalize the program, she told me that she knew she had to give me an answer, but what should it be? She said she felt terrible about putting me off. In the background, I heard Bob yelling, “Just say no, Grace! Say No.” Grace paused, then said, “You know what? I’m going to do it.”

From that point on, I called her about once a month just to visit a little, see how she was faring with her wild schedule that brought her all over the country and beyond to give readings, speak against the war or meet with students even though she was well over 80 and was dealing with a recurrence of breast cancer. At one point, I mentioned to her that I also was a breast cancer survivor, and although she was actively going through treatment and tests, she instead focused her voice on me, “Oh, Sweetheart,” she said, “what did they do to you?”

“I had chemo and a bunch of surgeries, but I’m okay now.”

“Oh honey, are you okay?”

“Really, it’s fine.”

“Don’t let those bastards hurt you,” she said, referring to the medical establishment.

That was about a month before the conference. A week before, she called me. “That conference, when is it?”

I went over the details with her, and she told me she had been feeling so much better lately, it would be good to come to the college again.

The night before she was to speak, I figured it might be good idea to make sure she had the details handy. So I called. Bob answered, told me Grace was in Boston, and wouldn’t be home until late.

“But she’s supposed to speak at our conference tomorrow. She’s the keynote speaker.”

“She’s old, she’s not feeling well. How can you think she’s going to be there?” he said.

“She said she would.”

“She didn’t say anything to me about it.”

“But she said she was coming. We have people who have come from all over to hear her.”

He told me that I was a little crazy for thinking she was my keynote speaker. But when I asked if we could send someone to get her, he replied, “What are you talking about? She can drive herself. Look, she’ll call you in the morning.”

Once I hung up, I knew it was time to think about a little thing I liked to call “Plan B.” Thanks to the help of novelist Katherine Towler, who was also reading at the conference, along with poet Joy Sawyer, journal therapy pioneer Kay Adams, and storyteller Meg Gilman, we whipped together a tribute for Grace.

The next morning, Grace called. “I feel terrible about this,” she said. I could hear the exhaustion in her voice.

“Look, Grace, it’s okay. We can do this without you. We’ll just do a tribute to you instead. We’ll read some of your writing and think of you.”

“I can’t believe I fucked this up,” she said, her voice gravelly with exhaustion. I told her it was fine,

“Are you sure?” She sighed. “Okay, just promise me that you’ll come and have tea with me sometime.” I told her I would.

I hung up in time to race to the cafeteria, find all my co-conspirators at a single table, and within 30 minutes, we had the tribute ready.

In front of all the conference participants, seated quietly although some looked puzzled as to why Grace wasn’t there, I explained what happened, and I told this story of calling Grace, and having Bob try – often without much success – protect her from both her popularity and her urge to keep giving to others. Gilman read one of Grace’s stories. Towler read four of her poems.

Than two others surprised us: Joseph Gainza and Sara Norton, who had worked on many peace and justice issues for decades alongside Grace, heard of the tribute and showed up to tell stories about Grace’s earnest compassion, great sense of humor and way of making everyone feel at home. They told of Grace’s remarkable equanimity and presence whether she was arrested at a protest, eating homemade pie in her living room, or reading a short story to a ballroom of over a thousand.

At the end of the tribute, one of the conference participants stood up and said, “I didn’t know Grace Paley before this, but now I realize we are all Grace.” Tears made her cheeks shine. I looked around the room where Grace should have been, and realized another kind of grace had overtaken us. The whole group sat in a silence for a moment, some smiling, some crying, thinking of Grace’s life of words and deed.

So that was grace, but grace is a surprising thing. Fast forward two meals later: It’s dinner, and I’m at a picnic bench with some conference attendants when I get a phone message: “Call Sara and Joseph immediately at this number. They have Grace and Bob with them, and they’re coming to the conference.”

Within 30 minutes, we had assembled most of the conference participants back in the haybarn. We set a chair next to the microphone, everyone sitting in a horseshoe of chairs, thrilled that the woman we fell in love with through her story and poems was actually about to walk right into that love.

And she did. Everyone sprang to their feet, some of us rushed up and hugged her, and people clapped, called out her name, and cheered as she sat down.

She glowed and yet was so utterly down to earth, a small woman on a folding chair who said in a Brooklyn accent untempered by years of living in Vermont that she could answer a few questions. Someone asked her about the war, and she told her of her hope for the world because people came out all over the world and protested the Iraq invasion before it happened, the first time, she reminded us, there’s ever been this kind of response to try to stop a war before it started.

Patricia Fontaine, a student and Vermonter, stood up and reminded Grace that recently in a speech she gave, she said her favorite word was “then.”

“It still is,” Grace told us, demonstrating through her presence (as well as her previous absence) how a story can seem to be over, but then – just like in Grace’s stories, just like in real life – something else happens.

I watched her stand to leave, the crowd again on its feet, and then she stayed for another 40 minutes, visiting with a young woman who gone to Sarah Lawrence, where Grace used to teach; posing for pictures with a Canadian Jung scholar, and hugging anyone who came to thank her. I posed for my own picture with her, all the time realizing that if liberation through our writing and lives is about anything, it’s about the grace of letting, and many times, helping the story that seems to be over to begin again. It’s about the freedom inherent in a simple word like “then.”

How to Live?

2007-11-30T10:48:00.000-06:00

A steady question has circled me for years like a song I can't shake: "How to live?" When I was diagnosed with breast cancer over five years ago, it was as if someone turned up the volume of this question, and since then, I been regularly landing in moments when I felt paralyzed as to what to do with myself to live my life the way I should....or felt I should. I would stand in the middle of my living room, debating whether to put my feet up and read a book, or practice the cello (which I'm learning), work on poetry or teaching or something else that locks my eyes to my computer screen, do some yoga, take a walk, or clean out an obscure drawer. "What to do?" became the back beat behind "How to live?"

In the land of my mind, "How to live" is a number #1 hit, playing as gospel, rhythm and blues, hard-driving rock and roll (complete with those Bruce Springsteen-like howls), familiar Irish gigs, complex but haunting folk songs, and of course as blaring but sweet musicals (think "Oklahoma" meets "Rent"). While I'm learning the various tunes and hues of this question, I'm finding -- to paraphrase the poet Rainer Maria Rilke -- that I can only live my way into the answers (or, more likely, more questions).

For me, one of the clearest responses has been -- ironically enough -- trying to try less, and working to not work so hard, something almost impossible for my grasping mind to inhabit often, given my you're-not-alive-unless-you're-doing-something ways. Being my father's daughter, I carry within me the legacy of working passionately, but also obsessively, springing into doing something related to my brilliant and exhausting career at any given moment (2 a.m.? No problem, I'll just start up the computer; weekends? Oh, just this one thing and then... Vacation? Let me just answer a dozen emails first). Yet my father died relatively young after years of feeling sick and too busy to see straight. After my own list-carrying decades, delighting in crossing things off, and feeling generally compelled to immediately do whatever I think up, my very smart body refused to tolerate being dragged around like a pull toy from one overwhelm to the next.

To be honest, I'm didn't just realize the obvious easily. I sailed under the skies of low-grade, but chronic, unidentifiable illness for about three years. After visiting my oncologist (repeatedly), various other doctors, energy healers, acupuncturists, massage therapists, psychics, dear friends, the self-subscribed-to myths of my past, and all manner of big pills that came in glass bottles (herbs, vitamins, amino acids, etc.), I had a breakdown of sorts. In a small hotel room on the 8th floor of a Boston Marriott, in the middle of a conference at which I was presenting, and doing many manner of other tasks, and in the middle of various health dodahs all descending on me simultaneously, I heard one clear sentence: If you want to heal your life, you need to change your life.

Since that Boston epiphany, I started giving up things I used to do: extra work outside of and inside of my teaching position, overfunctioning with friends and family (on the premise that if I couldn't fix my own life, I could fix someone else's), and activities, thought-mazes and habits that took me away from being here, with myself as I am, in the present whatever the weather. I'm a slow learner in the art of surrender. Give me an urgent task and high speed internet, and I'm easily tempted to go galloping in my mind toward whatever is asked. Give me an excuse, and I can convince myself it's fine to take on yet another job (and rationalize how it's not too much). But the imperative to live a life of meaning in a meaningful way has been a patient and persistent teacher. My health, which tends to go south easily and for prolonged periods if I don't listen to my body, reinforces what I need to do....or not do.

Lately, though, I've been discovering something entirely thrilling and not so unexpected: Living with greater self-care, discipline and awareness makes me outrageously happy. I love watching the deer outside eying our bird feeder (which they empty out on a regular basis), sitting very still under the weight of the motor-purring kitten, and picking up the kids from school without feeling rushed. I love the open space and time that's always been right here, like the sky -- sometimes stripped in golden pinks and grays through the bare branches of the sycamore I watch while stopped at a light. I love having long stretches at home, and because I'm still hard-wired to keep doing things, using these stretches to re-organize the linen closet, make collages, or stare at old pictures I found of my parents and siblings. There is such a profound joy in the simple and constant art of cultivating space.

How to live is no longer such a rap-style mantra, complete with cross-blends of many stations playing at once, but more like a heart beat. Its rhythm is all around me. All I need to do is listen.