Cottonwood seeds drift through the air on their parachutes of fluff. Gravity tugs them down, but they are light enough that the air currents bat them about on their way down, sometimes sending them up again for a spin. Large, dry, warm-weather snowflakes.
It's been 2 weeks since I've returned home from Soul Mountain, still holding onto the determination to make writing space here amidst the family, which also means space for contemplation, and permission to enter contemplative realities without feeling like I should always be doing a hundred thousand other things first. I've found a good perch in an upstairs bedroom, used by Jonathan when he's home from college, and gradually I'm taking over this room, shifting his bedroom/guest room to my smaller, darker study downstairs, which is good for sleeping, but not very good for writing. At Soul Mountain I realized how important a morning view of the day and the world outside was to my writing and meditation. Otherwise, I'd never pause to see the cottonwood seeds, or the dark green shadows in the fully-leafed trees. And this upstairs bedroom has a view of sky and trees and lawn, and the neighbor's house, which does not suggest more work to be done, as a view of our yard would.
I fear disorientation, drift, as yesterday I misplaced my journal--my faithful companion at Soul Mountain. The cottonwoods seeds, aimless and graceful as they appear, sooner or later reach or don't reach their target soil--only one in a thousand will actually take root and produce a new tree. So I am driven back to this blog and a search, again, for a lost space, some fertile ground in which to root daily words, some of which may eventually grow into something more.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Soul Mountain # 20
Woke early to watch the sky through an eastern window, a drama of dark clouds sweeping across a pale gray background. I opened my eyes again to streaks of rose, then to patches of celestial blue. Time to rise and pack, carry home memories of this time and place.
At mid-morning rain spatters the pond outside my writing window. I'm nearly packed and am just putting a few finishing touches on this blog before I leave, knowing that another world will engulf me when I return. But I hope to remember the co-ordinates of this soul place in soul space.
At mid-morning rain spatters the pond outside my writing window. I'm nearly packed and am just putting a few finishing touches on this blog before I leave, knowing that another world will engulf me when I return. But I hope to remember the co-ordinates of this soul place in soul space.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Soul Mountain # 19
One of
Of course, when the Puritans came to the area in the mid-1600s, they attributed the Moodus noises to Satan.
This afternoon Tonya drove us to Moodus, and we searched for the place where we might hear the spirit voices. We stopped in the town of
As of tonight, Ching-In and I have completed our reading of each others' work. Her reading of my essay was so helpful last night, that I finished another one this morning, and then went back and wrote a new, stronger ending for "A River Tale." I finished critiquing her poetry manuscript this afternoon, and she responded to mine this evening. It is affirming to be read and understood by another. Both of us are writing about women characters/speakers who strive to break through the myths and stories and losses they've allow to define them in order to become creators of themselves, at peace and poised for deeper adventures as an integrated person. It will be a thrill to see each others' books in print.
Soul Mountain # 18
Sunday Morning. Woke from a long deep sleep to bright sun, a clear blue sky, the pond's eye open, everything in clear focus. Last night I finished a typed first draft of my story, now called "A River Tale." It took a long time to type it, basically because I was still writing as I typed, adding whole new passages. My motivation now at the end of the residency was a deadline that Ching-In, the other resident, and I had given each other to finish drafts of our work so that we could read each others' writing and give feedback. I'm really looking forward to both reading and being read. A fitting finale.
If mind is the residue of incomplete thoughts, perhaps this story I've come back to numerous times in my writing life is a very large, incomplete, undigested thought, and working it through will remove the "carbuncle" from the passage of my creativity, the deep underground reservoir from which the voices emerge. (Metaphor borrowed freely from a legend about the Moodus, a place of underground voice, near where I am staying.) Listening to the spirits.
If mind is the residue of incomplete thoughts, perhaps this story I've come back to numerous times in my writing life is a very large, incomplete, undigested thought, and working it through will remove the "carbuncle" from the passage of my creativity, the deep underground reservoir from which the voices emerge. (Metaphor borrowed freely from a legend about the Moodus, a place of underground voice, near where I am staying.) Listening to the spirits.
Soul Mountain # 17
The week of fragrances is in full bloom. Apple blossoms and lilacs have opened and the air is full of their scent. It's a heady time, when the body wants to step out, break into blossom.
Every day as I look into the trees around the pond I see and recognize more birds. It feels as though my eyes are growing sharper, that soon I'd be able to gaze up into the green and see into the life of birds without binoculars. The pond is a bird's playground in spring, as full of courting, pairing, and mating as any college campus in the same season. Geese, ducks, a pair of red-tailed hawks, catbirds, warblers, robins, sparros, finches, swallows. The hawks and snapping turtles add an edge of drama to the scene of nesting, bringing out the protective behaviors of the parent birds. A few days ago I sat at my computer before the pond window and looked up every so often to see two Canada Geese strolling with their fluffy little gosling as it learned to peck in the soft earth around the pond for food. One would stand tall and keep a look-out, while the other pecked at the grass, and the baby toddled after it, imitating every move.
Today we saw a whole flock of turkey vultures roosting in the trees on the road to Soul Mountain. They are the clean-up crew. After something nasty and predatory happens, they come around to clean up the leftovers. Tanya stopped the car in the middle of the road and called up to them, but they stayed in the trees, shy of us and our big shiny white bird of a vehicle.
Every day as I look into the trees around the pond I see and recognize more birds. It feels as though my eyes are growing sharper, that soon I'd be able to gaze up into the green and see into the life of birds without binoculars. The pond is a bird's playground in spring, as full of courting, pairing, and mating as any college campus in the same season. Geese, ducks, a pair of red-tailed hawks, catbirds, warblers, robins, sparros, finches, swallows. The hawks and snapping turtles add an edge of drama to the scene of nesting, bringing out the protective behaviors of the parent birds. A few days ago I sat at my computer before the pond window and looked up every so often to see two Canada Geese strolling with their fluffy little gosling as it learned to peck in the soft earth around the pond for food. One would stand tall and keep a look-out, while the other pecked at the grass, and the baby toddled after it, imitating every move.
Today we saw a whole flock of turkey vultures roosting in the trees on the road to Soul Mountain. They are the clean-up crew. After something nasty and predatory happens, they come around to clean up the leftovers. Tanya stopped the car in the middle of the road and called up to them, but they stayed in the trees, shy of us and our big shiny white bird of a vehicle.
Soul Mountain # 16
A relief to be back in the writing groove at Soul Mountain. Every day I walk out to the river and then return to my room, take out my computer kayak and paddle by myself through the rapids of thought. The writing is beginning to accumulate, the shape of the imagination emerging in language.
Soul Mountain # 15
River Spirit
While I sit on this rock in the river
and write, a fisherman casts his reel
from the opposite bank. I look up
and we exchange smiles. Has he guessed
how I'd almost entered the body
of my younger self, long dark hair flowing
over slender shoulders, shifting back and forth
on my perch to claim the full scope
of river views: Upstream so I can see
what's coming, then downstream to measure
the liquid speed of time. A turn of the head
and thirty years have passed.
While I sit on this rock in the river
and write, a fisherman casts his reel
from the opposite bank. I look up
and we exchange smiles. Has he guessed
how I'd almost entered the body
of my younger self, long dark hair flowing
over slender shoulders, shifting back and forth
on my perch to claim the full scope
of river views: Upstream so I can see
what's coming, then downstream to measure
the liquid speed of time. A turn of the head
and thirty years have passed.
Soul Mountain #14
After Rosemary's visit, I took a quick field trip to New York on the Shore East Line from Old Saybrook to New Haven, then on the Metro North from New Haven to Grand Central Station. Trains are a smorgasbord for people-watchers like me--eavesdropping on families, businessmen, and high school kids dressed for the prom. I also love reading on trains, and today read all of Linda Gregg's "Chosen by the Lion" and Mary Karr's "Viper Rum," along with her essay "Against Decoration" on the long journey into the city. My destination was a poetry reading at the Brooklyn Historical Society in honor of the publication of "Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn," an anthology edited by my friend Julia Kasdorf and fellow poet Michael Tyrell. Unfortunately, my memory slipped, and I ended up all the way down at the Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway, instead of the Historical Society. So by the time I'd taken the subway up to Brooklyn Heights, I'd missed the reading. However, I didn't miss Julia, and I had a pleasant evening out with her and Michael and a few friends, listening to funny stories about the readings and celebrating the great labor of love--sometimes unrequited--that anthology-making is.
Train sketches:
Full-grown clean-shaven young men in shirtsleeves, ties stowed in their pockets, enter the train in the unexpected May heat, talking amongst themselves about high school friends, football, ice hockey minor leagues they one played in, colleges they and their friends attended, young warriors set to the task of making money, so that in 30 years they can still pay the Visa bill of someone like the sleeping blond across the aisle, dark glasses over her eyes.
A slender 40-ish woman with dyed red hair and a short black and white print skirt stands propped against a pillar on the platform, reading "Eat, Pray, Love," her slim, tanned knees winking althernately at me as she tightens and relaxes her quadricep muscles, a habit well-hidden by longer skirts through the years and now revealed, perhaps unconsciously, by fashion.
Train sketches:
Full-grown clean-shaven young men in shirtsleeves, ties stowed in their pockets, enter the train in the unexpected May heat, talking amongst themselves about high school friends, football, ice hockey minor leagues they one played in, colleges they and their friends attended, young warriors set to the task of making money, so that in 30 years they can still pay the Visa bill of someone like the sleeping blond across the aisle, dark glasses over her eyes.
A slender 40-ish woman with dyed red hair and a short black and white print skirt stands propped against a pillar on the platform, reading "Eat, Pray, Love," her slim, tanned knees winking althernately at me as she tightens and relaxes her quadricep muscles, a habit well-hidden by longer skirts through the years and now revealed, perhaps unconsciously, by fashion.
Soul Mountain Retreat # 13
On Wednesday, Rosemary Starace drove down from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to have lunch with me. I showed her around Soul Mountain, then we drove to Old Saybrook for lunch at an outdoor cafe where we both picked up a bit of a tan sitting in the brilliant sun. I met Rosemary on the WOM-PO (Women's Poetry) Listserv. She's a visual artist turned poet, and she has been instrumental in putting the WOM-PO anthology into physical form. I've proposed a panel for next year's AWP on the creation of this collaborative anthology in cyberspace and have actually been trying to meet as many members of the editorial group in person as possible. It turned out that we have many things in common, not the least of which is the art backgrounds we bring to writing. Rosemary developed her work as an artist when she attended the New York Feminist Art Institute. She told me their motto was "Where artmaking arises from self-understanding and content inspires form." She's taken several writer's workshops with Jane Hirshfield, one at Tassajara. We both have the Tassajara bread book, and shared that memory as well as many others about our journeys in art, cooking, and poetry. It was good to meet a soul mate, and I bought a box of paints on our walk around Old Saybrook.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Soul Mountain #12
I used to see 20/20.Now, without my glasses
I can't discern the exact
lines of the fiddlehead's curve
but the stalks glow against
the mottled earth.
Spring leaves appear
as tiny green lanterns
hung on the branches, as
red confetti strewn
among the tree tops,
dappled shade in motion
shaping the light.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Soul Mountain Retreat #11
Today marks my half-way point at Soul Mountain. The time has gone so fast. Once one enters a deeply meditative space with comfortable people and total control over one's time, it's like being in another zone all together. I've gone deeply in, loving the pond and the river as daily touchstones for writing. I want to stay as deeply available as I have been for writing during this next week. I was feeling a bit lonely for the family yesterday. Knowing I will go back to them makes the next week seem more poignant and the work more necessary.
Yesterday, while I was writing my woman in the woods essay, I was castigating myself for not being adventuresome enough when it came to exploring my environment. I've done a lot of walking here, but in "designated" zones, especially since this is the crucible of lyme disease. But yesterday I decided to venture beyond Baker Lane to perhaps find a public access entrance to the Nature Preserve behind the house. I walked along 156, the highway at one end of Baker Lane, towards a bridge over the Eight Mile River. Just before the bridge, I saw some dirt tracks off to the left. I followed them past a wooden bridge in a wooded clearing and continued towards what looked like a large open meadow. As I neared the meadow, I saw rows and rows of large black birds. At first I thought it must be someone's shooting range, with decoys. But then one of the large birds slowly turned its head towards me and lifted its large wing. I turned and fled. I felt outnumbered, as though the whole army of birds might advance on me.
"Turkey Medicine" Tonya called it. She says she has turkey medicine and that I must, too, if so many turkeys appeared to me. When animals appear to you, they have "medicine" or teachings for you. I am still pondering what I should learn from these turkeys. Tonya said that they can be aggressive, but mostly if they feel threatened, or if they are nesting. She told me that it was probably a good idea that I turned around and high-tailed it out of there, even if they did have a message for me.
In the afternoon Marilyn took Ching-In and me to the Florence Griswold Museum, where we viewed the house and the exhibit, including a display of poems written by Marilyn about Venture Smith, and accompanied by landscape paintings from the collection that inspired her. Afterwards she took us to Venture Smith's grave in Old Lyme.
Yesterday, while I was writing my woman in the woods essay, I was castigating myself for not being adventuresome enough when it came to exploring my environment. I've done a lot of walking here, but in "designated" zones, especially since this is the crucible of lyme disease. But yesterday I decided to venture beyond Baker Lane to perhaps find a public access entrance to the Nature Preserve behind the house. I walked along 156, the highway at one end of Baker Lane, towards a bridge over the Eight Mile River. Just before the bridge, I saw some dirt tracks off to the left. I followed them past a wooden bridge in a wooded clearing and continued towards what looked like a large open meadow. As I neared the meadow, I saw rows and rows of large black birds. At first I thought it must be someone's shooting range, with decoys. But then one of the large birds slowly turned its head towards me and lifted its large wing. I turned and fled. I felt outnumbered, as though the whole army of birds might advance on me.
"Turkey Medicine" Tonya called it. She says she has turkey medicine and that I must, too, if so many turkeys appeared to me. When animals appear to you, they have "medicine" or teachings for you. I am still pondering what I should learn from these turkeys. Tonya said that they can be aggressive, but mostly if they feel threatened, or if they are nesting. She told me that it was probably a good idea that I turned around and high-tailed it out of there, even if they did have a message for me.
In the afternoon Marilyn took Ching-In and me to the Florence Griswold Museum, where we viewed the house and the exhibit, including a display of poems written by Marilyn about Venture Smith, and accompanied by landscape paintings from the collection that inspired her. Afterwards she took us to Venture Smith's grave in Old Lyme.
Soul Mountain Retreat # 10
Our Eyes Are on Our Dreams
(for Marilyn, Tonya, and Ching-In, with thanks to Zora Neale Hurston)
In this garden there's a blossoming
pear tree for each of us--Janies all--
but these trees are are taller, older
than Janie's pear--there's no need
to lie down in the grass to see the wonder
of blossoms creaming to the hum of bees,
no need to risk the ticks of Lyme disease
in exchange for ecstasy. These trees are generous,
they lower their branch tips trained by years
of bearing heavy fruit to the height of our eyes
and hands, so we can stand beneath them,
grasp their branches, hold the flowers
to our faces. Though their fragrance is faint
the cascade of blooms is abundant
as a waterfall, bees ecstatic as ever.
To any Johnny Taylor who walks towards us
from the verigible woods
we'll languorously wave
and keep on writing,
keep on dreaming.
Soul Mountain
5 May 2007
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Soul Mountain Retreat #9
Draped in a daffodil yellow shawl Tonya comes walking down the path from the woods towards the house, carefully carrying a goblet with both hands. "You're carrying a cup of sun!" I greet her.
"No, it's river water," she tells me, as though carrying a goblet of river water back to the house is the most normal thing in the world.
It's a perfectly clear and sunny morning, the sky blue and high above us. A day to bottle for posterity. I ask if I can take her picture carrying the river water. We talk about the birds, the pond, and gardening, her passion. It is she who has planted the bleeding hearts in front.
"I wanted to put one plant by the Buddha," she tells me, "because it is a symbol for Christ. I like the mixing of the two dogmas," she says. "They seem to resonate with each other." And indeed the bleeding heart she planted by the Buddha is four times as large as the other bleeding hearts she planted in the same garden.
"No, it's river water," she tells me, as though carrying a goblet of river water back to the house is the most normal thing in the world.
It's a perfectly clear and sunny morning, the sky blue and high above us. A day to bottle for posterity. I ask if I can take her picture carrying the river water. We talk about the birds, the pond, and gardening, her passion. It is she who has planted the bleeding hearts in front.
"I wanted to put one plant by the Buddha," she tells me, "because it is a symbol for Christ. I like the mixing of the two dogmas," she says. "They seem to resonate with each other." And indeed the bleeding heart she planted by the Buddha is four times as large as the other bleeding hearts she planted in the same garden.
Soul Mountain Retreat #8
A river runs through the Nature Preserve behind the house. Eight Mile River it's called, designated "Pristine" by the Wild and Scenic River River System of Connecticut. Shaded by large old hemlocks, it reminds me almost exactly of a stream in Central Ohio that I discovered on a walk with a friend, Buck Sanford. Thirty-three years ago that was, but the rushing water in the river and the scent of the Hemlocks bring it back so vividly it could have been last year. The flood of memories triggered has prompted me to write an essay about nature and discovery and longing. Back then Buck taught me to pay attention to plants and to look and listen for birds. He's a wildlife biology professor now at the University of Denver. And I'm still paying attention; I was an artist then, I'm a writer now. But the memories give me a hankering to pick up my pencil and draw. So far my visual impulse has been expressed through photographs--the river, the trees, the newly budded leaves, the blossoming pear.
Soul Mountain Retreat # 7
Marilyn invited Ching-In and me to accompany her to the Governor's Awards for Culture and Tourism. She was going to introduce William Meredith, a wonderful poet and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. So we all took a field trip into New Haven and attended a lush reception at Branford College, then the Awards Ceremony at the Schubert Theater across the street. Sadly, Meredith had just been rushed to the hospital with congestive heart failure, but at the ceremony his partner read several of his poems. It was so moving--Richard could barely make it through. Clearly he loves Meredith, around whom his life centers. Vincent Scully introduced Robert Stern, both legends of architecture. My favorite was Dr. Robert Ballard, who is an oceanographer with a lab at the Mystic Aquarium. His specialty is underwater archaeology, and he estimates that 50% of America is actually under water. He's the one who found the Titanic and discovered hydrothermal vents. And he's from Kansas (once an ocean bottom, I've been told). All three of us poets thought his profession was amazing. But then again, we realized, we do underwater excavation all the time in the metaphorical realm.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Soul Mountain Retreat #6
I have abandoned Thoreau this morning for the pond. The woodpecker trills from across the water and songbirds join in a symphony, celebrating the blush of green in the underbrush. Overhead three geese fly abreast, announcing their presence, and further away the drone of a plane and the revving of motors remind me of the inescapable human presence. What is it I want to know, capture in words, as I sit here in the adirondak chair, notebook in my lap? "Surely some revelation is at hand." Is it the human names for the birds and their rhythmic cheeping and twittering that could be charted in musical notation or poetic meter? Is it a term from physics that could name the ripple patterns on the pond's wind-stirred water, or describe the contrasting pattern set off by a duck's entrance into the pond? Perhaps it's the constant variation within a predictable range, or the sun's steady warmth--steady at least for now--that holds me here, each day, each moment, a variation in beauty, a shimmering, whose larger pattern I anticipate, whose minute particulars I can't predict. Or perhaps I am a voyeur of nature, longing for binoculars, to pry into privacies I have not been invited to witness. Yes, and there's that expectation from reading the Bible or centuries' old poetry that a blade of grass will hold a prophecy, that a stubborn dandelion sprouting in the crotch of an old tree will provide the text of a sermon, that the lazy surrender of thought will clear the mind of spot or blemish--that I will feel myself a member of the family of nature.
Soul Mountain Retreat #5
Jahrezeit
Morning mist rises.
Behind the trees clouds dark as mountains
edge their way elsewhere. Two yeas ago
today you left us, your heart winding down
as I sat at your feet. Where is
your spirit now?
I fall back into a deep sleep.
When I wake I have no idea
what time it is. The sky is still overcast
but leaves have come out on one--no two--
trees at the edge of the yard. I open
the window to birdsong.
Morning coffee on the glassed-in porch
where bees have wakened to Jasmine.
The porch is warm as a green house, but outside
April wind rattles the panes and stirs
the treetops, tosses the prayer flags
on their string tether.
In late afternoon I finally go out
to discover air warmed by golden sun,
much warmer than the shaded house.
Up the lane there is a woman who keeps
a menagerie--the Peaceable Kingdom she calls it:
horses, goats, llamas, an emu, guinea hens.
Her greyhounds are friendly and want
to follow me, but they are too polite. Perhaps
they sense your reluctance in me. "They're such kind dogs,"
Jane, their owner tells me. "You couldn't
race them if they weren't so kind. Otherwise
they wouldn't do what you ask."
On the way home I see
the first orange butterfly of the season
chasing a honey bee around a blossoming
shrub. Somewhere in flight, on the wind,
you are blessing me as I carry on, looking for signs
and wonders in the world you have left behind.
Morning mist rises.
Behind the trees clouds dark as mountains
edge their way elsewhere. Two yeas ago
today you left us, your heart winding down
as I sat at your feet. Where is
your spirit now?
I fall back into a deep sleep.
When I wake I have no idea
what time it is. The sky is still overcast
but leaves have come out on one--no two--
trees at the edge of the yard. I open
the window to birdsong.
Morning coffee on the glassed-in porch
where bees have wakened to Jasmine.
The porch is warm as a green house, but outside
April wind rattles the panes and stirs
the treetops, tosses the prayer flags
on their string tether.
In late afternoon I finally go out
to discover air warmed by golden sun,
much warmer than the shaded house.
Up the lane there is a woman who keeps
a menagerie--the Peaceable Kingdom she calls it:
horses, goats, llamas, an emu, guinea hens.
Her greyhounds are friendly and want
to follow me, but they are too polite. Perhaps
they sense your reluctance in me. "They're such kind dogs,"
Jane, their owner tells me. "You couldn't
race them if they weren't so kind. Otherwise
they wouldn't do what you ask."
On the way home I see
the first orange butterfly of the season
chasing a honey bee around a blossoming
shrub. Somewhere in flight, on the wind,
you are blessing me as I carry on, looking for signs
and wonders in the world you have left behind.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Soul Mountain Retreat #4
This morning I was sitting on the porch reading Walden when Marilyn knocked on the glass door and invited me to go with her to church. The sun had come out through the clouds and the blossoms were tentatively opening to the warmth. Yes, I'd love to go to church.
We drove to the First Congregational Church in Old Lyme, where a woman stopped us on the stairs. "It was so good at nine I had to come and hear it again," she said of the sermon we were about to hear.
But first a word about the ambiance. The town was in full blossom--magnificent magnolias in full magenta-lavender bloom, sunny forsythia abundant and golden, the lawns fresh and green--all amidst quaint
Inside the church was painted white with gold trim and had old-fashioned pews: a typical nineteenth century New England Congregational Church with a lavish fresh bouquet of white flowers on the altar. The mostly female, mostly gray-haired choir sang beautifully. And the organ accompanied familiar hymns--"God of Grace and God of Glory" and "I Love to Tell the Story." The prayers were soulful and intelligent, expressing gratitude for the spring weather and sorrow at violence here and around the world. Usually I prefer Emily Dickinson's garden services, with a "boblink for a chorister," but this morning the service was worth being indoors for. Senior pastor David C. Good gave a rousing and passionate sermon on the Virginia Tech shootings, using a text from Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood." His reading of the excerpt made me want to hear him read Wordsworth aloud forever. Here are the first two stanzas of Wordsworth's Ode:
THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
II
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Of course, the glory that "hath past away" became, in Good's sermon, a description of the beautiful and talented young people, the professors, and even the killer himself, who were shot in this twisted display of violence and mental illness--for if each one of us is a manifestation of the creator's love, even the young man and his fearfully shaken family are included. He also mentioned that on the day of the shooting nine American soldiers were killed in
When I teach Wordsworth's Ode, I explain that the poet feels that a "glory hath past away . . . from the earth" because he senses he has lost the direct connection with the power of nature he felt in childhood. As we age and are shaped by the human world, we grow cataracts, as it were, over our senses and our souls. So it is not just in tragedy, but in the living of life itself, that this glory passes away. Such tragedies at the shooting at Virginia Tech shock us into feeling briefly, but afterwards we become even more numbed, more removed. Reverend Good mentioned that his memories of
1) Support universal health and mental health care, so that the mentally ill among us might have treatment.
2) Support the banning of handguns, assault weapons, semi-automatic and automatic guns.
3) Actively influence the shaping of culture by providing an imaginative vision of what society can be, rather than allowing our children and ourselves to be scripted by violent fantasies in everything from movies to video games, by the polarization of the issues on which the media describes. Yes, fantasy does matter, he asserted. The killer in
At the end of the sermon the congregation gave him a hearty round of applause, which is not something, Marilyn told me, they usually do. His words are so right, yet the situation seems so hopeless. But to have someone continually articulate the "right things" that must be done is at least an encouragement. If David C. Good were running for President, I’d vote for him. I noticed the church has a website and posts the sermons, so I’ll look forward to reading it again.
When we came back to Soul Mountain, I read through the Sunday Times and pored over an article on Boy Soldiers in Africa--over 300,000 now--and another on the weakening of the influence of the US Saudi connection with Prince Bandar. Wrapped up together with the sermon, these thought found their form in a poem I've been working on: "Why We Fear the Self" that uses a rap rhythm to question the ways in which our complicity with violence is fueled by our fears of facing and being our true selves.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Soul Mountain Retreat #3
Economy (with a nod to Thoreau)
In my rush to leave home I forgot the cash I'd meant to bring with me to Soul Mountain. Besides a credit card and a slender checkbook with just a few checks left in it, I had only a few dollars stuffed into the side of my purse. Or so I thought. But after two days of settling in and unpacking at my leisure, cleaning out my pockets and my purse, I've found 39 dollars and a large fist full of change. What might have seemed meager before is riches now. The wealth I carried here and didn't even know it!
That's my hope for these few weeks--to find the riches I've brought with me and didn't even know it. So far I've not been disappointed. This afternoon is the first time I've been able to sit down for an extended period of time to push beyond journaling in my writing, and already a sort of poem has broken through the matted leaves in my brain, years of bloom pressed down and composted for later . . .
Skunk Cabbage
At first a pair of leaves unfurls
one shaped like a tablespoon,
one a butter knife
of brightest green,
and as they take in light
they spread their girth and curl to face each other:
the tablespoon becomes a trowel in size,
the butter knife a tablespoon.
When they've grown tall as leaves of young romaine,
they spread again and this time curl apart
to make a space for new twins birthed
between them from the mother root:
another tablespoon of green,
another slender butter knife,
which in their turn
will curl again then spread,
admitting space for other shoots,
and so the family's large embrace enlarges
to make room for newest members
yet still preserves an outer layer that gives
it bulk and shape.
Beside this plant a dozen hundred others
spring up and birth
their inner leaves
before the trees have greened.
This emerald extravagance
beneath bare trunks and spindly branches
a marching band of green
in scattered rank and file
proclaims that spring
has taken root
despite the frequent rain and chill.
My first writing of this season--as cheap and gaudy as skunk cabbage, perhaps--but hey, something's poking up through the compost.
In my rush to leave home I forgot the cash I'd meant to bring with me to Soul Mountain. Besides a credit card and a slender checkbook with just a few checks left in it, I had only a few dollars stuffed into the side of my purse. Or so I thought. But after two days of settling in and unpacking at my leisure, cleaning out my pockets and my purse, I've found 39 dollars and a large fist full of change. What might have seemed meager before is riches now. The wealth I carried here and didn't even know it!
That's my hope for these few weeks--to find the riches I've brought with me and didn't even know it. So far I've not been disappointed. This afternoon is the first time I've been able to sit down for an extended period of time to push beyond journaling in my writing, and already a sort of poem has broken through the matted leaves in my brain, years of bloom pressed down and composted for later . . .
Skunk Cabbage
At first a pair of leaves unfurls
one shaped like a tablespoon,
one a butter knife
of brightest green,
and as they take in light
they spread their girth and curl to face each other:
the tablespoon becomes a trowel in size,
the butter knife a tablespoon.
When they've grown tall as leaves of young romaine,
they spread again and this time curl apart
to make a space for new twins birthed
between them from the mother root:
another tablespoon of green,
another slender butter knife,
which in their turn
will curl again then spread,
admitting space for other shoots,
and so the family's large embrace enlarges
to make room for newest members
yet still preserves an outer layer that gives
it bulk and shape.
Beside this plant a dozen hundred others
spring up and birth
their inner leaves
before the trees have greened.
This emerald extravagance
beneath bare trunks and spindly branches
a marching band of green
in scattered rank and file
proclaims that spring
has taken root
despite the frequent rain and chill.
My first writing of this season--as cheap and gaudy as skunk cabbage, perhaps--but hey, something's poking up through the compost.
Soul Mountain Retreat #2
At the end of a chilly, rainy day--gathering in the harvest of things done, felt, seen tasted, touched, even smelled . . .
Scent of drenched soil rising through a mat of wintered-over leaves
Pale green lichens spotting rocks and trees
A white-tailed deer facing me sideways across the wet driveway, fringed with dripping newly budded leaves
The mechanical click of the battery-operated clock in the too-bright kitchen where I write
Perfume of deeply steeped rooibos tea on my tongue
(I finally figured out what rooibos reminds me of: sweet tobacco!)
At dusk, when the rain had dissipated into a fine mist, I took a walk out the driveway and turned left on the one-lane road that passes the house. I walked until I reached a vista of meadows and several grander but still tasteful wood-sided houses nestled back in the breast of hills. On either side the road is lined with low stone walls, probably of the kind Frost wrote about: stacks of large, odd-shaped fieldstone. The woods are full of rocks and boulders competing with each other to see who can wear more of the pale-green lichens that grow profusely here. It must be a damp spot. Skunk cabbage is sprouting wherever running water gathers into shallow pools. When I returned to the house I saw a full-sized female white-tailed deer staring at me from the edge of the woods, so still. It's a good thing deer are shy; an aggressive or even friendly deer would be a rather terrifying creature with its size and speed. I started back into the woods again, but when I saw another deer--or this same one again--I thought better of disturbing her habitat at dusk. So I came back into the house and wrote this down.
Scent of drenched soil rising through a mat of wintered-over leaves
Pale green lichens spotting rocks and trees
A white-tailed deer facing me sideways across the wet driveway, fringed with dripping newly budded leaves
The mechanical click of the battery-operated clock in the too-bright kitchen where I write
Perfume of deeply steeped rooibos tea on my tongue
(I finally figured out what rooibos reminds me of: sweet tobacco!)
At dusk, when the rain had dissipated into a fine mist, I took a walk out the driveway and turned left on the one-lane road that passes the house. I walked until I reached a vista of meadows and several grander but still tasteful wood-sided houses nestled back in the breast of hills. On either side the road is lined with low stone walls, probably of the kind Frost wrote about: stacks of large, odd-shaped fieldstone. The woods are full of rocks and boulders competing with each other to see who can wear more of the pale-green lichens that grow profusely here. It must be a damp spot. Skunk cabbage is sprouting wherever running water gathers into shallow pools. When I returned to the house I saw a full-sized female white-tailed deer staring at me from the edge of the woods, so still. It's a good thing deer are shy; an aggressive or even friendly deer would be a rather terrifying creature with its size and speed. I started back into the woods again, but when I saw another deer--or this same one again--I thought better of disturbing her habitat at dusk. So I came back into the house and wrote this down.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Soul Mountain Retreat #1
In my last post I mused on mothering and monasticism. Today I'm entering the adventure of planned solitude in community at Marilyn Nelson's Soul Mountain Retreat. I will mark each day of this retreat with a blog entry. For two-and-a-half weeks I'll be away from family and work in Goshen, Indiana and the constant chores of the house and the old cars and the weedy garden. This is the first time I've been away from the family for more than a week--ever. And I've been a mother and writer for 24 years.
At Soul Mountain--a spacious house on 6 acres of woods in Southern Connecticut that borders a nature preserve--I help with chores and cook for myself and have my own cozy bedroom with two beautiful views. The two other women here right now each go their own way, offering friendly advice and occasional brief conversation, but otherwise we are all engrossed in our writing and solitude. Harmonious parallel play. Writing, and the solitude and self-care and contemplation that go with it, are honored in this space. Writing is not a guilty pleasure here. It is what we do. That and eat and sleep and walk in the woods. My writing desk and laptop face the window that looks out over a long kidney-shaped pond with a spillway--Peanut Pond--and a wooded slope of the nature preserve beyond. It faces southwest, so I can watch the sun set every night beyond the computer screen to my left. During the day I can watch the clouds change the color of the water and tree shadows root themselves deeply into the pond's surface. For more information about Soul Mountain visit www.soulmountainretreat.com
Last night, in preparation for my departure for Soul Mountain, I never went to bed. I stayed up all night in my office at Goshen College, commenting on student papers, organizing files, cleaning off my two desks heaped with months of papers, sorting through stacks and stacks of papers in boxes, on the floor, under the desk. My impetus was to clean up my office for visiting poet Rhoda Janzen who will use it during my absence. Rhoda's a dear friend, and I will miss hosting her, but she was a great sport and urged me onto Soul Mountain. As a writer she knows how precious two plus weeks of solitude can be. So I am here.
In cleaning the office, I found several boxes of files I had abandoned when Mother died two years ago during May Term while I was teaching Native American Lit. I never finished my filing for that course, nor for the courses I had taught the previous semester while she way dying, and I was at her place every day and in and out of doctors' offices and the emergency room with her. Two years' of stuff had accumulated over these unsorted piles. I read in Buddha, Zen, Toa, Tantra by Osho that "mind is the accumulation of incomplete thoughts." Well, one could certainly have said that about my office. Yes, there are still piles, but small manageable ones I can finally deal with when I get home. Yes, still there is the accumulation of incomplete thoughts. But the pressure is much less. I'm beginning to break through the iceberg of grief and move forward in a more graceful way embodying my life.
Somehow the sorting and cleaning and working through energized me enough to keep my going till 3:45 a.m. when I drove home to take a shower, throw some things in a suitcase and go with Lizzie to the airport to catch a 6am flight.
Lizzie, bless her soul, had gotten up at three to come over to the house and drive me in a drenching downpour to South Bend Airport, 50 minutes away. When I pulled up in the driveway from my night marathon in the office she was making me scrambled eggs. I hustled to take a shower and throw together a few things for the trip. We loaded up her slow old Honda Accord, Jeanie, who is filled with almost as much debris as my office was. Her mothering and baby paraphernalia is stashed over the dried flowers and empty juice bottles and audiotapes of her student days. In the midst of leaving I was panicked that I couldn't find my cell phone, so I rushed back into the house and took Julia's phone and charger so I could call home. Such wonderful daughters I have. Lizzie's steady, calm company on the way was like a quiet music. She looked so sweet and determined in her new glasses, the street lamps casting a dim glow on her face. When she dropped me off I was so tired I could barely manage getting the luggage out of the car. One more minute dawdling and I would have missed the plane.
One the ride from Chicago to Harford I sat by a young mother from Italy and her four-month-old daughter Alethea. The two of them made beautiful harmony and nursed openly and happily in the plane. (Curses on that stewardess who had a woman thrown off a plane last year for nursing a baby.) She reminded me of Lizzie driving home from the airport to her 9-month-old daughter Willow. Someday these babies will be driving their mothers somewhere, their mothers who were once so young and in tune with their daughter's bodies and rhythms.
Of course, when I got to Hartford, there was my cell phone in the backpack. It had flown with me the entire time in the overhead baggage compartment, and I had never even turned it off in flight.
At Soul Mountain--a spacious house on 6 acres of woods in Southern Connecticut that borders a nature preserve--I help with chores and cook for myself and have my own cozy bedroom with two beautiful views. The two other women here right now each go their own way, offering friendly advice and occasional brief conversation, but otherwise we are all engrossed in our writing and solitude. Harmonious parallel play. Writing, and the solitude and self-care and contemplation that go with it, are honored in this space. Writing is not a guilty pleasure here. It is what we do. That and eat and sleep and walk in the woods. My writing desk and laptop face the window that looks out over a long kidney-shaped pond with a spillway--Peanut Pond--and a wooded slope of the nature preserve beyond. It faces southwest, so I can watch the sun set every night beyond the computer screen to my left. During the day I can watch the clouds change the color of the water and tree shadows root themselves deeply into the pond's surface. For more information about Soul Mountain visit www.soulmountainretreat.com
Last night, in preparation for my departure for Soul Mountain, I never went to bed. I stayed up all night in my office at Goshen College, commenting on student papers, organizing files, cleaning off my two desks heaped with months of papers, sorting through stacks and stacks of papers in boxes, on the floor, under the desk. My impetus was to clean up my office for visiting poet Rhoda Janzen who will use it during my absence. Rhoda's a dear friend, and I will miss hosting her, but she was a great sport and urged me onto Soul Mountain. As a writer she knows how precious two plus weeks of solitude can be. So I am here.
In cleaning the office, I found several boxes of files I had abandoned when Mother died two years ago during May Term while I was teaching Native American Lit. I never finished my filing for that course, nor for the courses I had taught the previous semester while she way dying, and I was at her place every day and in and out of doctors' offices and the emergency room with her. Two years' of stuff had accumulated over these unsorted piles. I read in Buddha, Zen, Toa, Tantra by Osho that "mind is the accumulation of incomplete thoughts." Well, one could certainly have said that about my office. Yes, there are still piles, but small manageable ones I can finally deal with when I get home. Yes, still there is the accumulation of incomplete thoughts. But the pressure is much less. I'm beginning to break through the iceberg of grief and move forward in a more graceful way embodying my life.
Somehow the sorting and cleaning and working through energized me enough to keep my going till 3:45 a.m. when I drove home to take a shower, throw some things in a suitcase and go with Lizzie to the airport to catch a 6am flight.
Lizzie, bless her soul, had gotten up at three to come over to the house and drive me in a drenching downpour to South Bend Airport, 50 minutes away. When I pulled up in the driveway from my night marathon in the office she was making me scrambled eggs. I hustled to take a shower and throw together a few things for the trip. We loaded up her slow old Honda Accord, Jeanie, who is filled with almost as much debris as my office was. Her mothering and baby paraphernalia is stashed over the dried flowers and empty juice bottles and audiotapes of her student days. In the midst of leaving I was panicked that I couldn't find my cell phone, so I rushed back into the house and took Julia's phone and charger so I could call home. Such wonderful daughters I have. Lizzie's steady, calm company on the way was like a quiet music. She looked so sweet and determined in her new glasses, the street lamps casting a dim glow on her face. When she dropped me off I was so tired I could barely manage getting the luggage out of the car. One more minute dawdling and I would have missed the plane.
One the ride from Chicago to Harford I sat by a young mother from Italy and her four-month-old daughter Alethea. The two of them made beautiful harmony and nursed openly and happily in the plane. (Curses on that stewardess who had a woman thrown off a plane last year for nursing a baby.) She reminded me of Lizzie driving home from the airport to her 9-month-old daughter Willow. Someday these babies will be driving their mothers somewhere, their mothers who were once so young and in tune with their daughter's bodies and rhythms.
Of course, when I got to Hartford, there was my cell phone in the backpack. It had flown with me the entire time in the overhead baggage compartment, and I had never even turned it off in flight.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Coming Back as a Mother
When Katagiri Roshi asked Natalie Goldberg what she'd like to come back as in her next life, she playfully answered "a clump of white flowers."
"No, that's too simple," he replied.
"What would you come back as?" she asked him.
"A monk. I would always come back as a monk."
At least that's how I remember the conversation as I was "re-listening" to Long Quiet Highway on audiotape driving on one of my many mind-numbing errands as a mother. On those long, lonely hauls to pick up someone or other from from wherever they may be, I've taken to listening to Buddhist tapes or CDs, something soothing that stimulates calming interior monologue.
But when I asked myself this question, "What would you come back as?" I surprised myself by immediately answering, "I would come back as a mother."
Being a monk is a spiritual path, and I never craved solitude until I actually became a mother. The monk’s path has some appeal to me these days. Yet it's possible to find those jewel-like moments of solitude in the midst of a mother's life cycle. In fact, this week I am home alone in the house I share with my family--the first time ever in 27 years of marriage and 23 plus years of parenting. I have left home for a week, I have traveled alone, but to just stay home alone is another story. This week I’ll get to find out just what kind of an inhabitant I am—of my own space and my own body—when there aren’t a lot of others around stirring the pot.
What is left of the giver, the one who finds in another's suffering her own usefulness (to paraphrase the words of Julia Kasdorf's wonderful poem, "What I learned from my mother") when she is left alone for a spell? Sometimes she finds out through tragedy, through enormous suffering of her own--forced separations, divorce, death, war, exile, accident--to find out otherwise is a gift. Especially on a sun-filled April morning, after a night of heavy rain, the world dew-fresh and last years’ chives sending up new shoots that I have time to gather and chop and sprinkle over the omelet I’ve made for myself, without having to make several others first. A life of such self-focus would become mundane, but a week of this will be as savory as the sprinkle of fresh chives on the omelet—chives that have decided to come back as chives--because they are especially tasty when they are the first fresh garden greens one has eaten in a good six months or more.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Lenten Journal
2-28-07
A few days before leaving for a conference, I become anxious as a mother hen, wondering why I ever decided to go on a trip and how the kids will manage without me. But a few hours before my departure, my energy level rises, I feel a surge up through my abdomen that lifts me heart and puts a glow in my face. It’s almost as though I’ve sprouted wings and am about to take flight. My body’s wisdom tells me I need the change.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Lenten Journal
February 24, 2007
Drove alone to Indianapolis to hear my daughter Julia, who had driven to Indy earlier on the school bus, perform with her vocal emsembles at the high school ISSMA state contest. On the way down I listened to Pema Chodron's "Awakening Compassion" and to some of E. M. Forster's "Howard's End." Tonglen practice--"Drive all blame into the self" and breathe out the feelings you would like to establish. Then the adventures of Helen and Margaret Schlegel--"Only Connect." When I arrived at Warren High School the parking lot was as crowded as New York City at rush hour. Once inside, with the thousands of students and parent swarming to watch the performances, I felt like part of some larger good. Parents and students were shepherded around by dozens, maybe hundreds, of volunteers. So many students rising to the occasion, created by an association that allows for many students to have a performing experience that otherwise might be open only to a select few. Julia sang soprano in a barbershop quartet, "Baby Face," (after the judge had to listen to half a dozen renditions of "Yesterday") and they did it beautifully, with expression and style. She was so happy to see me, and snuggled up to my side, and so happy to go out to eat--she's a Vegetarian foodie. The traffic was still terrible, so we found our Veggie treats at a nearby Qdoba where we also saw a winter storm warning on the news. After her women's ensemble sang "How Can I Keep from Singing," we headed for home in the sleet and freezing rain, but first circling town to look for the bead store in Broad Ripple, and then to eat out at another fun place before returning to the more bland and familiar cuisine of our hometown. We parked and walked through blocks of puddles and slop to the Bead Store, which we had visited after last year's contest, when the weather was spring-like but bracing. This year it was closed early, the proprietor no doubt having fled because of the storm warnings we were not heeding. The Thai restaurant we wanted to eat at was closed, too, because of the weather, so we found a table at Shalimar, the Indian restaurant next door. But I grew more and more worried, so we asked for styrofoam boxes and began the drive home. By the time we got on the road home we were crawling through an ice storm, driving about 30 mph the entire way. Here I was traveling with my most precious daughter, having waited in Indy to please her, and now taking both of our lives in my hands as I drove through a desert of snow and ice, the road barely visible. At one point along State Route 31 I saw lights flashing intermittently like someone was setting off firecrackers. But it was actually the electrical wires that had come loose from their poles and were showering out sparks and flames into the snow and ice. I was glad that the bursts of flame were coming from the opposite side of the road. And breathed a prayer of gratitude when we finally crawled into our driveway about midnight.
Drove alone to Indianapolis to hear my daughter Julia, who had driven to Indy earlier on the school bus, perform with her vocal emsembles at the high school ISSMA state contest. On the way down I listened to Pema Chodron's "Awakening Compassion" and to some of E. M. Forster's "Howard's End." Tonglen practice--"Drive all blame into the self" and breathe out the feelings you would like to establish. Then the adventures of Helen and Margaret Schlegel--"Only Connect." When I arrived at Warren High School the parking lot was as crowded as New York City at rush hour. Once inside, with the thousands of students and parent swarming to watch the performances, I felt like part of some larger good. Parents and students were shepherded around by dozens, maybe hundreds, of volunteers. So many students rising to the occasion, created by an association that allows for many students to have a performing experience that otherwise might be open only to a select few. Julia sang soprano in a barbershop quartet, "Baby Face," (after the judge had to listen to half a dozen renditions of "Yesterday") and they did it beautifully, with expression and style. She was so happy to see me, and snuggled up to my side, and so happy to go out to eat--she's a Vegetarian foodie. The traffic was still terrible, so we found our Veggie treats at a nearby Qdoba where we also saw a winter storm warning on the news. After her women's ensemble sang "How Can I Keep from Singing," we headed for home in the sleet and freezing rain, but first circling town to look for the bead store in Broad Ripple, and then to eat out at another fun place before returning to the more bland and familiar cuisine of our hometown. We parked and walked through blocks of puddles and slop to the Bead Store, which we had visited after last year's contest, when the weather was spring-like but bracing. This year it was closed early, the proprietor no doubt having fled because of the storm warnings we were not heeding. The Thai restaurant we wanted to eat at was closed, too, because of the weather, so we found a table at Shalimar, the Indian restaurant next door. But I grew more and more worried, so we asked for styrofoam boxes and began the drive home. By the time we got on the road home we were crawling through an ice storm, driving about 30 mph the entire way. Here I was traveling with my most precious daughter, having waited in Indy to please her, and now taking both of our lives in my hands as I drove through a desert of snow and ice, the road barely visible. At one point along State Route 31 I saw lights flashing intermittently like someone was setting off firecrackers. But it was actually the electrical wires that had come loose from their poles and were showering out sparks and flames into the snow and ice. I was glad that the bursts of flame were coming from the opposite side of the road. And breathed a prayer of gratitude when we finally crawled into our driveway about midnight.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Lenten Journal
2-21-07
Woke up with more energy today. It helps that the snow is melting and the sun out. Went to pick up Ida Mae, my Amish cleaning helper, for the first time since her gall bladder operation four weeks ago. She's doing much better. And Senior Seminar today was wonderful. The students ran the class beautifully--Kristine and Alex gave their "English Major" initial statements in which both expressed reserve and ambivalence about their majors. Then Erin and Anita led a succinct and coherent discussion of cultural construction and Borges' story "The Garden of Forking Paths." I just sat back and the students engaged each other in conversation for a good hour, enjoying the opportunity for cross-talk. I could truly practice "sitting quietly" and allowing them to take over the space. Kristine and Alex stopped to talk with me after class about their essays and I assured them that their ambivalence was a normal English major phase. They mentioned, too, the practical emphasis of Mennonite culture--the anxiety that they weren't doing anything worthwhile when they were reading and writing poetry. Sad, but so true. Alice stopped by to ask about helping me with the newsletter and working as a student assistant. An answer to prayer.
Borges's story has many interesting facets, but one that seems prophetic to me now is that it is filled with intercultural conflict: the story of a Chinese Spy teaching English in a German School in England, working for Germans he despises in order to prove that the Chinese are worthy. And then assassinating the British sinologist who has solved the mystery of his grandfather's labyrinth in order to send a message to the German General about the location of the next English attack--and dying with regret at having committed such a crime without provocation. The entire story seems to be told through the mind of a ghost, and the inherent ethnic conflict all too prophetic. I wish I'd brought this up with the students, but I'm even prouder of myself that I could stay in the background and let them run the course.
To night at yoga I worked hard, almost didn't have the energy to hold plank position long enough to do the moves Kara was teaching us. It would go better, I realized, if I practiced every day as though it were a music lesson. But even once a week the practice is beneficial. I kept Willow for Lizzie during her yoga class and beyond. Mostly Willow was restless, and turned and turned in my arms like a little screw. "Monkey" I decided is her animal name.
I have 3 poems in my Lenten commonplace book now, after two day, and have enjoyed reading student responses to Susan Neville's Iconography--asking them to write about a metaphor that intrigued them has worked really well. Helps them to look at the texture of the writing, which is its best part. And one student, Emily, wrote tonight that Neville's honesty about her own imperfections invites the reader to spiritual practice as well.
Woke up with more energy today. It helps that the snow is melting and the sun out. Went to pick up Ida Mae, my Amish cleaning helper, for the first time since her gall bladder operation four weeks ago. She's doing much better. And Senior Seminar today was wonderful. The students ran the class beautifully--Kristine and Alex gave their "English Major" initial statements in which both expressed reserve and ambivalence about their majors. Then Erin and Anita led a succinct and coherent discussion of cultural construction and Borges' story "The Garden of Forking Paths." I just sat back and the students engaged each other in conversation for a good hour, enjoying the opportunity for cross-talk. I could truly practice "sitting quietly" and allowing them to take over the space. Kristine and Alex stopped to talk with me after class about their essays and I assured them that their ambivalence was a normal English major phase. They mentioned, too, the practical emphasis of Mennonite culture--the anxiety that they weren't doing anything worthwhile when they were reading and writing poetry. Sad, but so true. Alice stopped by to ask about helping me with the newsletter and working as a student assistant. An answer to prayer.
Borges's story has many interesting facets, but one that seems prophetic to me now is that it is filled with intercultural conflict: the story of a Chinese Spy teaching English in a German School in England, working for Germans he despises in order to prove that the Chinese are worthy. And then assassinating the British sinologist who has solved the mystery of his grandfather's labyrinth in order to send a message to the German General about the location of the next English attack--and dying with regret at having committed such a crime without provocation. The entire story seems to be told through the mind of a ghost, and the inherent ethnic conflict all too prophetic. I wish I'd brought this up with the students, but I'm even prouder of myself that I could stay in the background and let them run the course.
To night at yoga I worked hard, almost didn't have the energy to hold plank position long enough to do the moves Kara was teaching us. It would go better, I realized, if I practiced every day as though it were a music lesson. But even once a week the practice is beneficial. I kept Willow for Lizzie during her yoga class and beyond. Mostly Willow was restless, and turned and turned in my arms like a little screw. "Monkey" I decided is her animal name.
I have 3 poems in my Lenten commonplace book now, after two day, and have enjoyed reading student responses to Susan Neville's Iconography--asking them to write about a metaphor that intrigued them has worked really well. Helps them to look at the texture of the writing, which is its best part. And one student, Emily, wrote tonight that Neville's honesty about her own imperfections invites the reader to spiritual practice as well.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Lenten Journal
2-20-07
After the Mardi Gras poetry reading at Goshen College last night--where we read poetry about New Orleans and Hurricanes and the rebuilding after Katrina and Rita and then announced the winners of the Broadside Poetry Contest, crowning them King and Queen--Ash Wednesday seems slow and weary. Almost like a New Year's Day, when resolutions suddenly seem daunting and dreary, and one's waistline swells with the previous evening's indulgences. The students in my Spiritual Writings of Women class are beginning their Lenten projects today, and so I thought I'd begin mine, too. I will keep a simple commonplace book, copy down a poem a day into a handmade book created by a young artist from Elkhart, Indiana, an act of listening to other voices. Something that it appears I will need to practice more and more with age. "Mother was sad that no one wanted her advice any more," one of my sisters told me over Christmas. We lost her in 2004 and we are still very much in mourning. She was such a wise woman, so full of experience, and yet, sadly, she was right--we didn't want much advice. We just wanted her to listen as we stumbled about our lives, and slogged through our mistakes, learning on our own. Listening is hard for me, especially at this busy time in my teaching semester when I have no time for my own writing, and I'm just bursting with ideas. Now even the classroom doesn't seem the place to express them. I've never tried a blog before, but in these days when I'm at the computer a lot and I keep misplacing my notebook, I thought I'd give it a chance. Perhaps writing out the voices in my head will help me open my head and heart enough to listen more attentively.
Yesterday a lovely student told me in an email that he thought that there wasn't enough discussion in class, because after I spoke there was nothing left for them to say. "You know the material so well and you've thought about it so much, that perhaps they are intimidated. Your comments are very good, but if you could save them for later in the class period, perhaps more people would speak up." So that was today's plan. I'd asked students to respond to one entry from Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace, choosing in a lectio divina manner what chose them, and write about it. I was thrilled with the responses I was receiving over email. One student wrote about "Blood"--it connected the Vagina Monologues and the notion of honoring the body with incarnational Christianity for her. Another wrote about "Exorcism"--a word that's terrified her so much that she's afraid to watch movies on the subject. (I don't blame her--I also avoid them like the plague.) But when she discovered Kathleen's view of demon possession as addiction, she began to re-possess the word. Another student confronted her own fears about owning her own spiritual journey through Norris's entry on doubt and unbelief. So I lit a candle and then asked students to read their responses aloud, suggesting a bit of silence in between. Well, perhaps these students are such good listeners that they don't need to talk, but my --there certainly was silence! Was it reflection, or fear, or intimidation, or boredom? I felt so let down after class. What I'd expected, the gathering of a bouquet of voices, didn't happen. It didn't feel like any flower arranging was going on. The flowers stayed put in their individual plastic holders, nodding at each other vaguely across the room. They had gathered in my mind only, during late night and early morning reading on the internet. Perhaps this isn't fair. Perhaps these students' efforts were the seeds of future dialogue. Risking the sharing in the group is scary for them. They didn't read the most personal parts that would really have helped them connect to each other. Open the heart. Breathe in the fragments, breathe out unity. Keep doing it. Keep doing it, Ann.
I've been listening to Pema Chodron on Tonglen. I started last Thursday morning, when Elizabeth, my daughter, called at 7 in the morning to see if she could drop off Willow, her daughter, for the morning. I'd risen at 5:30 so I could read papers and would have had just enough time to finish them by the time I met Senior Seminar at 12:30, but now, Willow was coming my way with her seven months of energy and delight, and I would also have to drive out in the snow to get Lorana, the Amish woman who cleans for me. I knew Lizzie needed me--she needed to sand walls before the painter arrived, she said, and I didn't know how she'd so it even without Willow--so I said OK and tried to breathe my way through school preparations with Julia and David, Willow on my hip. The house was a disaster, and I couldn't even seem to get dishes in the dishwasher before the cleaning help came. At one point I lay Willow, who was clinging to me, down on the floor so I could get a load out of the washer and into the dryer. She just screamed her bloody head off. Well, this is not quality child care, I thought. Not what she deserves. How was I going to calm my racing heart, bucking with the pressure of all I had to get done and a child to care for who needs all the calmness I can muster? I snatched the Pema Chodron conversation with Alice Walker tape out of my office, buckled the screaming Willow into her car seat, and drove to get Lorana, listening to the voices of these two calm wise women. I'd heard the tape before, but wasn't really listening. This time I practiced the basic instructions for Tonglen as I drove by snow-covered Amish farms, the sun rise glow still in the sky. And I began to calm down. Open the heart I kept telling myself. Open the heart. And now, with Tonglen, I was being asked to take in suffering and breathe out joy and peace. So Willow lulled into sleep and I began to remember to breathe and I opened the heart. I began to feel how suffering can dissolve like alka selzer with the breath. Those hard knots of resistance and pain. A kind of lamaze for the groaning psyche, the groaning earth. And I made a space for Willow, and a space for myself, and all my papers did not get done for the seminar, but some did, and the world did not end.
After the Mardi Gras poetry reading at Goshen College last night--where we read poetry about New Orleans and Hurricanes and the rebuilding after Katrina and Rita and then announced the winners of the Broadside Poetry Contest, crowning them King and Queen--Ash Wednesday seems slow and weary. Almost like a New Year's Day, when resolutions suddenly seem daunting and dreary, and one's waistline swells with the previous evening's indulgences. The students in my Spiritual Writings of Women class are beginning their Lenten projects today, and so I thought I'd begin mine, too. I will keep a simple commonplace book, copy down a poem a day into a handmade book created by a young artist from Elkhart, Indiana, an act of listening to other voices. Something that it appears I will need to practice more and more with age. "Mother was sad that no one wanted her advice any more," one of my sisters told me over Christmas. We lost her in 2004 and we are still very much in mourning. She was such a wise woman, so full of experience, and yet, sadly, she was right--we didn't want much advice. We just wanted her to listen as we stumbled about our lives, and slogged through our mistakes, learning on our own. Listening is hard for me, especially at this busy time in my teaching semester when I have no time for my own writing, and I'm just bursting with ideas. Now even the classroom doesn't seem the place to express them. I've never tried a blog before, but in these days when I'm at the computer a lot and I keep misplacing my notebook, I thought I'd give it a chance. Perhaps writing out the voices in my head will help me open my head and heart enough to listen more attentively.
Yesterday a lovely student told me in an email that he thought that there wasn't enough discussion in class, because after I spoke there was nothing left for them to say. "You know the material so well and you've thought about it so much, that perhaps they are intimidated. Your comments are very good, but if you could save them for later in the class period, perhaps more people would speak up." So that was today's plan. I'd asked students to respond to one entry from Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace, choosing in a lectio divina manner what chose them, and write about it. I was thrilled with the responses I was receiving over email. One student wrote about "Blood"--it connected the Vagina Monologues and the notion of honoring the body with incarnational Christianity for her. Another wrote about "Exorcism"--a word that's terrified her so much that she's afraid to watch movies on the subject. (I don't blame her--I also avoid them like the plague.) But when she discovered Kathleen's view of demon possession as addiction, she began to re-possess the word. Another student confronted her own fears about owning her own spiritual journey through Norris's entry on doubt and unbelief. So I lit a candle and then asked students to read their responses aloud, suggesting a bit of silence in between. Well, perhaps these students are such good listeners that they don't need to talk, but my --there certainly was silence! Was it reflection, or fear, or intimidation, or boredom? I felt so let down after class. What I'd expected, the gathering of a bouquet of voices, didn't happen. It didn't feel like any flower arranging was going on. The flowers stayed put in their individual plastic holders, nodding at each other vaguely across the room. They had gathered in my mind only, during late night and early morning reading on the internet. Perhaps this isn't fair. Perhaps these students' efforts were the seeds of future dialogue. Risking the sharing in the group is scary for them. They didn't read the most personal parts that would really have helped them connect to each other. Open the heart. Breathe in the fragments, breathe out unity. Keep doing it. Keep doing it, Ann.
I've been listening to Pema Chodron on Tonglen. I started last Thursday morning, when Elizabeth, my daughter, called at 7 in the morning to see if she could drop off Willow, her daughter, for the morning. I'd risen at 5:30 so I could read papers and would have had just enough time to finish them by the time I met Senior Seminar at 12:30, but now, Willow was coming my way with her seven months of energy and delight, and I would also have to drive out in the snow to get Lorana, the Amish woman who cleans for me. I knew Lizzie needed me--she needed to sand walls before the painter arrived, she said, and I didn't know how she'd so it even without Willow--so I said OK and tried to breathe my way through school preparations with Julia and David, Willow on my hip. The house was a disaster, and I couldn't even seem to get dishes in the dishwasher before the cleaning help came. At one point I lay Willow, who was clinging to me, down on the floor so I could get a load out of the washer and into the dryer. She just screamed her bloody head off. Well, this is not quality child care, I thought. Not what she deserves. How was I going to calm my racing heart, bucking with the pressure of all I had to get done and a child to care for who needs all the calmness I can muster? I snatched the Pema Chodron conversation with Alice Walker tape out of my office, buckled the screaming Willow into her car seat, and drove to get Lorana, listening to the voices of these two calm wise women. I'd heard the tape before, but wasn't really listening. This time I practiced the basic instructions for Tonglen as I drove by snow-covered Amish farms, the sun rise glow still in the sky. And I began to calm down. Open the heart I kept telling myself. Open the heart. And now, with Tonglen, I was being asked to take in suffering and breathe out joy and peace. So Willow lulled into sleep and I began to remember to breathe and I opened the heart. I began to feel how suffering can dissolve like alka selzer with the breath. Those hard knots of resistance and pain. A kind of lamaze for the groaning psyche, the groaning earth. And I made a space for Willow, and a space for myself, and all my papers did not get done for the seminar, but some did, and the world did not end.
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