Wordsmithing

Circling

2010-01-01T10:20:00.001-08:00

(I offer Circling to the unknown reader who once underlined sentences in my book, Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest and posed a haunting question in the margin of the essay Compromise: Ghost Dance of the New West? Should chance bring you to this blog, please get in touch with me. My gmail is bstarr67@gmail.com)

We circle around
We circle around
We circle around
The boundaries of the earth.

Wearing our long wing feathers
As we fly
Wearing our long wing feathers
As we fly

We circle around…
---1986, a song from sacred land work

There is a full Blue Moon and partial eclipse tonight. Today is the last day of a year that, for some, has been akin to being extruded through a basalt tube that is only 2 inches wider than the body. If you read this, you have made it through. Perhaps unscathed, perhaps not. It’s a good bet that you’ve learned more than a little about how some things circle out and return---and some circle out and are gone.
Winter Solstice I surrendered to that which has left in these last twelve moons. I had imagined that I would make my good-bye on the wooden bridge over the Deschutes River. I envisioned a somber ceremony, a quiet sadness that accompanies releasing beloveds become ghosts. No-one had died. No town had been bombed into molecules. And yet there is no possibility of reclamation of that which is gone: three once-dearest friends; my story of the one I had believed to be the One; a town I believed would be my real home forever; the last shreds of not being old.
The ceremony was not what I had in mind. A mallard had other plans.
That morning, I wrote messages to my beloved dead on scraps of yellow notebook paper. Fifteen minutes before a pale sun dropped below the horizon, I stuffed the notes in my jacket pocket and left the house.
I walked down Broadway past little houses catching last light in their windows; took the narrow dirt path to Idaho Street and saw the river gleaming a few blocks ahead. I picked up my pace. You gotta move when you’re racing the sun.
I reached the bridge with a few minutes to spare. Mallards and Canada geese huddled on the shoreline. I turned to the west and thanked the sun for the day. I thanked the 12 moons for a year filled with healing and grace. “And damn hard work,” I muttered.
I turned again to the east side of the bridge and looked down at the black and frosted water. A flock of mallards moved toward me from the northern shore.
I took the first note from my pocket: Dear X, I am deeply sad our friendship ended. I wadded the paper into a ball and dropped it into the river. The lead mallard sped up and gobbled the note. Before I could say, “Sorry pal, it’s not food,” he shook his head and spit it out. And waited for something tastier.
I took the last five notes one by one – their contents are unremarkable and perhaps the most bone-bare words I’ve written – wadded them up and dropped them in the river. The mallard snatched each one, shook his head and spit it out. I was laughing by the time I read: “Flagstaff, every day, I miss who you were.” I had no tears. Clear-eyed, I watched the notes drift down-river. The mallards hung around for a few minutes, then swam back to shore.

We circle around…

I often buy used copies of my books to give away. When I opened the old Bonelight a few days ago, I found that the reader had circled and starred a few sentences in the essays I'd written between 1994 and 2001 - and asked a hard question. I was startled by what the reader had unwitting sent forward to me. The words were what I need now:
* Here is, perhaps, the only question that counts: how do we love?
* ”I love you,” he had shouted. “I love you, Mary!”
So what? I think. All of it, so what?
* I knew that the inheritance we are squandering in casinos is not just money.
Those of us hunkered in front of our machines, bent over the craps table, hunched over a losing hand are giving away our time, our knowledge and our stories. What we might once have passed on to our children, our children’s children remains locked in our hearts and minds. We gather in casinos, in gated communities, in exclusive golf clubs and leave the younger generations to piece together what they can.
* The Buddhists tell us that joy lies in limitations. We Americans are taught the opposite. More is better. Go for it all.
* I prayed in the only way I know. Talking to a Great Friend, then listening. In silence, I understood that vengeance can never be a moral act.

The reader wrote one question:
11/13/02: So with kids, how can we show them a better way, the Way, once they become addicted to stuff, to over-indulgence and greed?

Dear reader, I wonder if in seven years you have found answers to your question. And, do you look back on that mid-November in 2002 and long for what now seems like a simpler world? Do you look at your children, now seven years older, and see in their eyes at least a few answers to your questions? I would love to hear from you. Mary Now

What Now?

2009-11-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

“What kinds of things do you write?” asked Martha...
”I’m not exactly a writer,” Sam corrected her. “I’m a listener. I’m listening for clues about day-to-day life on the planet.”
“But do you write things down?” asked Jessie.
“Of course,” said Sam.
“Are you writing a book?” demanded Martha
“No,” said Sam. “I’m saving stories. So a hundred years from now people will know how it was with us…”
---Nancy Willard
Sister Water

I have finished writing She Bets Her Life, the book on women and compulsive gambling. Seal Press accepted it last Tuesday to be published April 2010. In some ways, I put a year of research and nine months of writing into it; in other ways, fourteen years of my thoroughly enjoyable gambling addiction carried the book more than any of my discipline or effort.
I loved playing slot machines. I wouldn’t have quit except that my body told me, “Stop. Now.” After seven months of being clean---it would have been a year and a half except for an anger-driven episode in a Yakima casino, an episode marked by rapidly escalating boredom and rapidly de-escalating numbers in my savings account---I know a little more about the chimera of the thoroughly enjoyable.
I look back now and see that while my casino time was mostly childlike bliss, the days between my binges were not. That is the nature of addiction. A real addict only feels normal when they are using. In between my casino runs, I was a deeply irritable, mean and ungrateful woman – a woman terrified of her aging, a woman longing for the childhood she barely had.
So last week I finished the book, the press accepted it and I waited to feel the rush. There was nothing. Then I remembered the nineteenth of the twenty questions Gamblers Anonymous asks its members: “Did you ever have an urge to celebrate any good fortune by a few hours of gambling?”
Yes. Always. For fourteen years.
Not this year. Instead of grabbing my slot cards, twenty $5 bills and driving to Reno, I ate as though I’d just lived through a famine and played video games till my fingers ached. It didn’t do the trick. I turned off the computer, walked out to the front stoop, looked up at the cloud-veiled stars and said, “What now?”
“What now?” and “What the fuck.” are the addict’s mantras. But, this time I asked the question not of my addiction, but of toothy Mahakala, the ogre deity who eats everything and gives much. I knew it was time to do nothing.

The next day I felt bleak. I haven’t felt depressed in years. Panic is my m.o. I moved slowly through the day, planted poppy seeds for the Spring, re-potted an avocado, opened the freezer door at least five times to contemplate the Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream and closed the door firmly – it was what my pal, Michael and I call a yuppie crisis.
I waited till late afternoon to walk downtown. Bend’s hub of local shops and restaurants lies adjacent to Drake Park, a beautifully designed haven of grass, flowers and pine trees along the Deschutes River. I mailed my letters, stopped at Dudley’s Bookstore to talk with my friend Terri, the owner and took the side alley to the park. I hoped sitting by the river would remind me of what matters – and if it didn’t, there would be the silvery water and ducks laughing at the setting sun.
I walked across the grass toward the steps that go down to the river bank. A woman was on the path ahead of me. She walked slowly, not with the stroll of a desperately laid-back tourist, but with the careful steps of a person whose joints were stiff with arthritis. She had pure white hair. She wore a black sweater, gray slacks and beige walking shoes. Her back was straight as a young dancer’s---and she carried a long-stemmed orange carnation carefully in front of her.
She came to the steps and started down. I held back. I am a woman who walks alone at twilight and midnight. I know what I feel when someone comes up behind me. She reached the dirt path at the bottom of the steps. I started down.
The woman stopped and stood at a railing between the path and the river. She looked out over the water. The white hair. The black sweater. The perfect orange carnation. I walked toward her. She turned. We smiled.
“What now?” came into my mind.
“May I tell you something?” I said to her.
“Of course.”
“I saw you up above. I wondered why a woman would be walking the path this time of day carrying a carnation. I thought to myself, ‘There is a story there.’”
“My son died here.” Her face and voice were gentle.
“I’m so sorry.” I touched her arm. She didn’t pull away.
“He was on an outing with his church group,” she said. “He came down here to be alone. He loved it here. ‘It is so quiet,’ he always said. There were three young men. They wanted money for drugs. When he wouldn’t give them any, they beat him to death.”
She paused. “I don’t live here in Bend, but my daughters do. We always come here each year. They were both busy so I told them I would go to the park by myself. They were worried, but I told them I wasn’t afraid.”
I didn’t ask her the logical questions. There didn’t seem to be any. “How old was he?” I say. I imagine a boy in his teens or twenties.
“Forty,” she said. “He left behind a wife and a teen-age daughter.
“At the trial, my grand-daughter stood up and faced the killers. ‘You took my father from me,’ she said and she read a piece she’d written about her dad – about how they would go camping together and how much he loved the quiet places. I was so proud of her.”
We looked out over the water in silence for a few minutes. I said, “You are going to put the carnation in the river, aren’t you?”
She smiled again. “I am. It’s for him. You see, we never know how long we have – with another.”
We embraced. She turned back to the water. I walked along the dirt path. The light had gone silver, the water dark. I listened to the rowdy ducks. I wanted the light and cold air and the ducks’ laughter to last forever. I thought of how I cling to everything, how I would capture every sweetness if I could.

A few hours later, I made my supper. I read while I ate. Nancy Willard. Sister Water. I found the words I hadn’t known I was looking for and understood that capturing is what a writer does, for as long as it takes to witness, remember and record. After that, there is only this:

“…look over there,” said Sam. “A turtle.”
The turtle was making its way slowly toward the water like a man exercising for his health.
“Oh let’s catch him!”
But Sam made no move to catch the turtle. He kept on paddling in dreamy circles around Stevie. “I wonder if he’s carrying a message,” he said at last. “He’s headed straight for us.”
“Let’s catch him,” said Stevie. “Come on, Sam. Let’s catch him.”
“If you catch him, he can’t do his work.”
----Sister Water

Grape Popsicle

2009-10-19T14:40:00.000-07:00

This is her story. I barely know her. We met at a gem and mineral show in the Little America hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona at least fifteen years ago. I bought a raw opal from her. She gave me two more for free. She had dug them from her little claim in Australia.
The sun fire opal was a rough blue cylinder no bigger than the first joint of my little finger. The surface was matte. She had chipped off a sliver so the gleaming interior was visible. “Put it in water,” she said. “That way you’ll see the fire.”
The second opal was the size of the nail on my fourth finger. It was a puddle of glint and pale blue against rough brown. I can’t remember the nature of the third opal. I think I gave it to some one – a gift beyond measure.
The brown opal is also gone---stolen, I suspect, by an unfortunate visitor to my cabin in the Mojave. The sun fire opal is here with me. It is time to put it in a vial of water. It is time to see how it holds and gives back the Central Oregon sun. The delicate flicker will bring her to mind.
Two days ago I received an email from her:

Mary, thank you for sharing your beautiful dispatches with me.
I am sad to tell you of what is the speeding up of the beginning of the final journey we all must take. I was rushed from Australia in direstraits...inoperable pancreatic cancer stage iv so am here in texas with my two sons and all my grandkids. We are in a large 3500 square foot house...rents are cheap in texas. and am laughing with them daily and resting some from chemo...a light chemo...hoping to give me a few more months.
I ate a magnificent grape popcycle the other night in the dark hospital room, with curtain drawn wide open so as to catch the thunder lightning show and the sheets of poring rain cascading over the glass as the grape jusce cascaded over my sore throat instantly soothed by the wonder of it all. I am wishing you well in your new start. I am so glad you own the black opal nobbies that I mined so many years ago. May it be your companion on many new adventures ole gypsy girl you.
Love, BVM a aka Eskimo Nell
I wrote her back and asked her if I could use her words in a new Dispatch. “It is gorgeous and others need to read it.” She wrote back:
Yes, dear Mary, Feel free to use it. I write and all writers want to be read. I treasure our brief meetings too Mary. Regards, Barbara
Here, Barbara, are your words. And, you can know that you are being read. You are on my mind. And today, the sky is gray and the Oregon light is opal.

Tendrils

2009-09-15T12:05:00.001-07:00

We know who we are. We are those who are willing to not know much of anything else. And still we let tendrils from within us coil out. Sometimes they take hold of another. Sometimes they tremble on the air.
I am most interested these strange and tawdry days in what comes my way. My friend Tony Norris, a bone-deep Flagstaff writer, musician and story-teller, sent me the following words this morning. They are written by Tom Russell, a man who knows and is willing to not know. He makes music.

The Locusts Sang

"It was not a luxury for me to write, it was a necessity. These times are very difficult to write in because the slogans are really jamming the airwaves - it's something that goes beyond what has been called political correctness. It's a kind of tyranny of posture. Those ideas are swarming through the air like locusts. And it's difficult for a writer to determine what he really thinks about things. " Leonard Cohen

The novel appears to be dead. Dissolving like a rotting cadaver in the quick-lime of post modernist droning. Authors are boring. Thus their characters. The radio air waves are filled with posturing; swarming with locusts full of the poison and "the tyranny of posture." New folk. Bad folk. Weak folk. Poetry's coming back, after Bob Dylan virtually killed and overpowered it as a relevant genre in the 60's. Every hack college lit professor knew it was doomed back then. Poetry is coming back because of the huge gap out there; for anything resembling literature or lyrics or scribed emotion. The yen for something which imbues lyrical passion. We are a nation of old junkies going cold turkey on very bad drugs. Word drugs cut with borax, false bravado, and insincerity. Tattoed babble. Watered down love and greeting card rhymes. At least Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison and Merle Haggard are playing to full houses and selling records. As the maestros should. People are hungry for anything vaguely real….but there are few new songs. No "new generation" of folk writers. As Kerouac said: "There is nothing new under the sun. All is vanity. Pass me the chalice, wifey, and there better be wine in it….."
I was leafing through two great books of letters: those of Martha Gellhorn, and another collection from William S. Burroughs. I realized there's not gonna BE anymore of these collections, because no one WRITES letters now. Just cryptic emails and cell phone messages. Slogans again. A nation of housewives in SUV's ranting on the cell phones as their drive toward nail appointments. The word "love" has become a slogan. The last good song I heard was probably: "I Don't Want To Go To Rehab," by Amy Winehouse. Dig it. Or maybe it was a John Trudell recitation called "Happy Fell Down." ("Love is blind; when it opens it's eyes it can disappear.") Or maybe it was Gretchen Peters' "This Used to Be My Town," inspired by a young girl who was abducted and raped. Jesus. And Nanci Griffith's new record is pretty damn good. Simple truths. Well told. With passion. Rolling Stone dismissed it with two stars. We don’t expect anything anymore. Running scared. My friend; London Observer journalist Peter Culshaw, stated, regarding journalism: …"the age of the drunken hack with a heart of gold buried under a cynical exterior is gone and the papers are run by terrified bureaucrats and guys who never leave their non-smoking, non-drinking offices where if you flirt with the secretary they haul you up for harassment..." Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Leibling and Hunter Thompson are rolling over in their graves. Little Stephen addressed the masses at South By Southwest music conference this year; told the audience that young musicians are not doing their homework, paying dues; not learning to write good songs. (My friend Alec asked me if I wrote the speech.) I'm sure 10,000 thumb-sucking networkers from around the world stood there and smiled; nervously fingering their access badges; twittering like parakeets at the Place of Dead Roads.
What's left, to cite Flannery O'Conner, is to "push hard against the age that pushes against you." And so, under the guise of taking out the trash at night, I sneak into my painting studio and blast out old Dylan and Ian and Sylvia records (like Fritz Scholder and T.C. Cannon before me.) I need that fix. Bad. And I paint Indians and plot new lyrical ways to push against this culture.
Well, hell, into all this great void; this fear driven mess; I toss my record. Blood and the Candle Smoke. 12 songs. Missives from this agave-choked wilderness. And I stand behind it. And you, dear reader? What can you do? Listen. Or not. Maybe buy two or three for your friends and get on the internet and invade a dozen chat sites and let 'em know. Call radio. Toss one off the Empire State building. Go out and create that internet tsunami…or don't. But I'll stand behind it. If you don’t think the record is 100% there for you or honest or "good," or if there's any false passion or bad lines, then bring it to a gig and I'll trade you two different cds back for it. Or give you 20 bucks. That's what I can guarantee you within the so-called music culture of today. It's all I have at present. I believe in this record, and I don't believe in much else.
And now it's time to shut up and tour. I hope the carnival is coming to your town…all the dates are up, and the ponies are being saddled. Amen.

"Words lead to deeds…they prepare the soul,
Make it ready, and move it to tenderness."
St Theresa

Geography

2009-07-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

A moment of happiness
You and I sitting on the verandah,
Apparently two, but one in soul, you and I…

…The stars will be watching us,
and we will show them
how it is to be the thinnest crescent moon.

You and I, unselfed, will be together,
Indifferent to idle speculation, you and I.
The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar
As we laugh together, you and I.

And what is even more amazing
Is that while here together, you and I
Are at this very moment in Iraq and Khorasan.
In one form upon this earth
And in another form in a timeless sweet land.

---Rumi, 13th c. Persian poet

Last night, the moon a chunk of tarnished silver, gauze-pink clouds, the osprey perched next to her nest, guarding, watching, hunting. The air smelled of rain. Thunder rolled in the south. For a moment, I was not afraid of death.

This morning I opened up the NY Times on-line and found this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/us/31land.html?th&emc=th
You will only understand what I write next if you read the story. Community is everywhere. Loneliness is everywhere. The campfire that glows on the faces of those without a home is not the same as what shines in our safe houses. And still, at this very moment, we breathe the same air.
In the same edition of the NY Times that The Story appeared there was another story about bailed-out banks in NY giving out huge bonuses. I call on an army of parrots to come to us and crack the bones of the insatiable in their powerful beaks. It is good to remember that the moon is sometimes a scimitar.

Magic

2009-07-17T19:40:00.000-07:00

I'm ready to begin working with one-on-one students again. I love working with those of you who have been meaning to write and haven't yet begun. I love working with those of you who began and stalled out. I love working with those of you who have been steadily writing and know it's time to go in with the scalpel and the embroidery needle. More than anything, I love working with writers who know that if they don't write, they are half alive.

You can contact me at bstarr67@gmail.com. Let me know how you might want to work. I'll tell you how we can shape a connection that will honor the writing you carry.

Starwomen

2009-07-17T17:23:00.000-07:00

Two dear friends are both astrologers. They work far beyond what passes for sky-reading in the popular press. Their signals come back to us from those great distances with clarity and mystery.

Deborah O'Connor: www.lovedogdesign.com

Cassandra Leoncini: http://www.twoeaglesastrology.com

We are, you know, made from the same particles that make up the stars. We are moved, as they are, by forces far beyond our imagined will-power. That's the bad news---and the good.

Now

2009-07-16T10:49:00.001-07:00

I write from a little house in Bend, Or. I have everything I could need: prayer flags ripple in a cool breeze; a cord of wood is stacked along the fence, a gift from a friend of a friend; there are three pints of loganberries and marionberries in my refrigerator; all four cats are alive and well; and there is a door on my bed-room, which means that for the first time in twenty-six years I sleep without being waked by cats jockeying for position.

I just finished working on a book with a dear friend to the north. We both feel as though eighty pound packs have slipped from our shoulders--and the hike was up a steep trail at least a thousand miles long. We've emerged at the top even closer than we were when we began. That's the nature of the real work.

I'm in the middle of writing She Bets Her Life, a book on women and gambling addiction. Believe me, I am an expert---not just in casinos, but across the boards. My new novel, Going Through Ghosts will be published by University of Nevada Press in Spring 2010. It took me twenty years to write it, twenty years to learn enough to be able to write about love that is not obsession.

Down the road, m

**************
Dudley's is an almost indecently comfortable bookstore here in Bend. There are two floors of used books, couches and chairs, meeting tables and now--a piano. There is always good conversation. The owner, Terri Cumbie, writes her own blog. Check it out. http://dudleysbookshopcafe.blogspot.com/ Dudley's is the real deal. It almost, but not quite, soothes the ache in my heart that has been with me every since Flagstaff's Aradia Bookstore was killed off by a rich landlord's greed.

Detained

2009-07-04T15:55:00.000-07:00

“There was a rebel who kept transmitting,” Yates recalled in a whisper...He kept on transmitting for years after the program ended, even though no one answered.”
“There was no world afterward,” the hermit declared in a thin, haunting voice. “We had to make do.”
The words brought Yates out of his trance. “No world?”
“Down below were all those Chinese, destroying everything Tibetan. On the other side of the mountains were all those who had given up fighting, who were becoming new kinds of Tibetans,Tibetans as Indians, Tibetans as Nepalis. If we wanted to stay the way we were, we had to become invisible.” Dakpo rose and reverently dusted the top of the radio with a rag.
...”I thought about telling old Kundu that the Americans were gone, never to come back, that he should stop the transmissions.”
...”But he didn’t?” the American asked.
“Not for years.”
“What would he say?” Shan asked after a long silence, when he transmitted on the radio?”
“The first few years, he stayed on the run on the mountain, using a sleeping bag from the Americans, saying his mission now was intelligence...he would watch the highway, watch the Chinese army, then come up and report the movements...For a while he decided the Americans had changed the codes, or frequencies, and so he would turn the dials and repeat his number, announcing again and again that he was a sergeant in the Tibetan resistance army. In the end he would talk about the weather or read sutras*.”
“Sutras?” Shan asked.
“Eventually he realized it wasn’t the Americans he was trying to reach. He said it was something people didn’t always understand about radios, that even if the Americans stopped listening, the heavens always heard.”
---Eliot Pattison
The Lord of Death

The restaurant is a delight. There are sturdy pine tables and huge windows. The pizza comes with a scattering of fresh basil across the top. I sip my organic iced coffee and try not to dive into the pizza. My friend is late. I don’t care. It is enough to be in this sunny room while softly cool air drifts in through the open doors.
My friend hurries in. “Life,” she says, “detained me.”
We laugh. She is a poet, teacher, environmental activist and the mother of a twelve-year old,. She knows my story, knows that forty years earlier, I was so detained by life I didn’t think I had one.
We eat and talk about our work, magic, and our mutual senses that the brittle surface of our comfortable American world is crazing. “Windshield glass,” she says. “One second there was that little ding in the corner; the next second, you can’t see.”
But the basil is fresh and pungent, the coffee is the same, so we toast our good luck and move to different topics.

That night I read Eliot Pattison’s new novel, The Lord of Death. It is set in occupied Tibet.. I read about Chinese practices that have been refined far beyond waterboarding---electrodes clamped on nipples and testicles, injections of mind-twisting drugs, beatings administered until the detainee is almost dead. And, for those who are particularly recalcitrant, there is “cerebral pasteurization” in which holes are drilled in the Tibetan’s skull, electrical wire inserted into certain pocket of cells and the ON switch flipped.
Now.
All of this is occurring now.
I finish reading the book, go to the computer and find the website: www.savetibet.org. There are photos at the bottom of the home page. I go to the photo album A Great Mountain Burned By Fire and click on a picture of Lhundup Tso, lying curled in fetal position on a stone courtyard. She was sixteen when she was killed when Chinese police opened fire on unarmed protestors in Ngaba. I think of the recent outcry over Neda, the young Iranian woman shot by Iranian “security” forces. There was no international outcry when Lhundup Tso was murdered. Not from a failure to give a shit, but because the photo didn’t go viral.
I click through other photos. One word occurs again and again. DETAINED. Jamyang Kyi, writer, singer and broadcaster - DETAINED. Norzin Wangmo, who spoke on the phone or internet about Tibet - DETAINED and imprisoned. Lobsang Kirti, 27, monk, who printed and distributed leaflets--DETAINED.
A dear friend wrote me recently. He was concerned about my work load. He wondered if I shouldn’t concentrate on the deadlines for the two books I am writing, and let these weekly Dispatches go for now.
I wrote him back. “Writing the Dispatches is my lifeline to the deeper work.”
They are my sutras. Help them go viral. More than the heavens need to hear.

*sutra - an ancient teaching--not a sermon, but a conversation The Buddha told his listeners and students to question and to test his teachings like a jeweller would test yellow metal.

http://www.savetibet.org/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=390

if

2009-06-28T12:45:00.001-07:00

you never read anything again in your life, read this.
If you catch me whining about my privileged plight, send it back to me.

I'm so lucky.

love, me

Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's Speech in Full
this is bristol.co.uk ^ | March 13, 2008 | Terry Pratchett
Posted on March 16, 2008 11:56:20 PM PDT by Hetty_Fauxvert

My name is Terry Pratchett, author of a series of inexplicably successful fantasy books and I have had Alzheimer's now for the past two years plus, in which time I managed to write a couple of bestsellers.

I have a rare variant. I don't understand very much about it, but apparently if you are going to have Alzheimer's it's a good one to have.

So, a stroke of luck there then!

Interestingly enough, when I was diagnosed last December by those nice people at Addenbrooke's, I started a very different journey through dementia.

This one had much better scenery, interesting and often very attractive inhabitants, wonderful wildlife and many opportunities for excitement and adventure.

Those of you who's last experience with computer games was looking at Lara Croft's buttocks might not be aware of how good they have become as audio and visual experiences, although I would concede that Lara's buttocks were a visual experience in their own right.

But in this case I was travelling through a country that was part of the huge computer game called Oblivion, which is so beautifully detailed that I have often ridden around it to enjoy the scenery and weather and have hardly bothered to kill anything at all.

At the same time as I began exploring the wonderful Kingdom of Dementia, which is next door to the Kingdom of Mania, I was also experiencing the slightly more realistic experience of being a 59 year old who finds they have early onset Alzheimer's.

Apparently I reacted to this situation in a reasonably typical way, with a sense of loss and abandonment with an incoherent, or perhaps I should say, violently coherent fury that made the Miltonic Lucifer's rage against Heaven seem a bit miffed by comparison. That fire still burns.

I want to go on writing! Admittedly, that means I have to stay alive.

You can't write books when you are dead, unless your name is L. Ron Hubbard.

And so now I'm a game for real. It's a nasty disease, surrounded by shadows and small, largely unseen tragedies.

People don't know what to say, unless they have had it in the family.

People ask me why I announced that I had Alzheimer's.

My response was: why shouldn't I?

I remember when people died "of a long illness" now we call cancer by its name, and as every wizard knows, once you have a thing's real name you have the first step to its taming.

We are at war with cancer, and we use that vocabulary.

We battle, we are brave, we survive. And we have a large armaments industry.

For those of us with early onset in particular, it's more of a series of skirmishes.

My GP is helpful and patient, but I don't have a specialist locally.

The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own Aricept because I'm too young to have Alzheimer's for free, a situation I'm okay with, in a want-to-kick-a-politician-in-the-teeth-kind of way.

But, on the whole, you try to be your own doctor.

The internet twangs night and day. I walk a lot and take more supplements than the Sunday papers. We talk to one another and compare regimes.

Part of me lives in a world of new age remedies and science, and some of the science is a little like voodoo.

But science was never an exact science, and personally I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.

Fortunately, I have the Greek Chorus to calm me down

Soon after I told the world my website fell over and my PA had to spend the evening negotiating more bandwidth.

I had more than 60,000 messages within the first few hours.

Most of them were readers and well-wishers.

Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I'm not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.

But a large handful came from 'experienced' sufferers, successfully fighting a holding action, and various people in universities and research establishments who had, despite all expectations, risen to high places in their various professions even while being confirmed readers of my books.

And they said; can we help? They are the Greek Chorus. Only two of them are known to each other and they give me their advice on various options that I suggest.

They include a Wiccan, too. It's a good idea to cover all the angles.

It was interesting when I asked about having my dental amalgam fillings removed.

There was a chorus of ? hrumph, no scientific evidence, hrumph???., but if you can afford to have it done properly then it certainly won't do any harm and you never know.

And that is where I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the cure, which I suspect may be more like a regime, comes along.

Say it will be soon - there's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with the disease will double within a generation.

And in most cases you will find alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse, suffering as much. It's a shock and a shame, then, to find out that funding for research is three per cent of that which goes to find cancer cures.

Perhaps that is why, for example, that I know three people who have successfully survived brain tumours but no-one who has beaten Alzheimer's???although among the Greek Chorus are some who are giving it a hard time.

I'd like a chance to die like my father did - of cancer, at 86.

Remember, I'm speaking as a man with Alzheimer's, which strips away your living self a bit at a time.

Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things.

He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was.

Right now, I envy him. And there are thousands like me, except that they don't get heard.

So let's shout something loud enough to hear. We need you and you need money. I'm giving you a million dollars. Spend it wisely.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1986843/posts

Burn This

2009-06-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

The news is heavy...there are beasts loose that make the long walks,
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bhopal and Chernobyl pale in comparison.
---Barry Lopez
from his eulogy for Edward Abbey, 1988

...When we first moved here, pulled
the trees in around us, curled
our backs to the wind, no one
had ever hit the moon--no one…

From our snug place we shout
religiously for attention, in order to hide:
only silence or evasion will bring
dangerous notice, the hovering hawk
of the state, or the sudden quiet stare
and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor.

This message we smuggle out in
its plain cover, to be opened
quietly: Friends everywhere--
we are alive! Those moon rockets
have missed millions of secret
places! Best wishes.

Burn this.

---William Stafford, 1993
From the Move to California

We begin with thanks—to Bob Katz for the Lopez quote and to Scottalatyl for the Stafford quote. We continue as “we”, because it is imperative at this time that we understand we are not alone. We are in the company of countless others---creatures, plants, minerals; we are not at the top of the heap. We are dispersed throughout a divine and temporary mix. We remember we are dangerous.
Last week I walked through rose-gray light to the Deschutes Public Library. I went upstairs and took a seat with perhaps sixty other people lucky enough to live in Bend on this particular June night.
It had been ten years since I had last seen the compact man whose hair had gone gray, whose face was gentle. Barry Lopez stepped in front of us. “Thank you for coming to hear me,” he said
He read a story remarkable for the mysteries and hard wisdom hidden in its its austere elegance. He read of a marshland in Northern Nevada and violation and the failure to listen to the old knowledge of the people who have lived here long the colonizers.
When he was finished, he called for conversation. I’d brought two tapes recorded at Edward Abbey’s Memorial Service. I gave them to Barry and told him the bones of information the Hopi elder, Ferrel Secacaku had given a few of us in Spring 2008. Barry listened. Then he spoke of watching Barack Obama receive the elders of the Civil Rights movement---and young African Americans born a decade after those battles. He spoke of Obama as an agent for transition.
My turn to talk was over, so I did not tell him and those around me that the Obama administration had recently opposed the Supreme Court reviewing the case of thirteen Southwestern Native American tribes vs. the Snowbowl ski resort. The ski resort had been granted permission by a lower court to make artificial snow from treated wastewater on one of the San Francisco Peaks. The tribes were hoping to appeal that decision at the highest level. They know that the act of making snow from wastewater on their sacred mountain is equivalent to pissing on the main altar at the Vatican.
I did not stand and tell those around me that the San Francisco Peaks are the holy of holies for the Hopi tribe. Their Katsinas live on the mountain. It is there that the Holy Ones make rain and snow. I stayed in my seat and I listened to Barry Lopez call for deep community, for listening to the old knowledge of indigenous peoples.
I thought of that which was loosed among us twenty years ago, and how the beasts have devoured so much. I studied Barry Lopez’ gentle face and, behind him through the huge windows, the delightful downtown of Bend, Or. I understood that it was hard from that vantage point to see the cracks continuing to open out in what we might believe is our world---and the beasts that have come through them and are with us.
Burn this.

Heading North

2009-05-27T07:49:00.000-07:00

Despite the best efforts of the Mojave to hold me fast with its beauty and dear people, I leave today for Bend, Or. Thanks to my son, Matt; and my beloved friend, Fred K., every object I own is in a 5X8 trailer and my Vibe.

I carry with me the silhouette of the Joshua Buddha, 395 sightings of the moon; pressing my face to the rough bark of the old Joshua west of my cabin and breathing in its fine scent and the kindness of friends and strangers. I carry, too, the solid joy of knowing my second novel, Going Through Ghosts, will be published by University of Nevada Press in Spring 2010; and being half-way through writing, She Bets Her Life: women and compulsive gambling.

When I came to this medicine desert, I was one month away from my last casino bet. I was in the grip of recurrent opthalmic migraines. And raw terror. And no hope. I knew it had something to do with the withdrawal from the gambling that had had become my refuge and my reason to live.

I found a group of gamblers who didn’t gamble. I listened to their stories and heard my own. But they said little about the ferocious nature of gambling withdrawal. I hunted the inter-net, ordered books, but nowhere could I find information about the terror I was walking through.

I began writing She Bets Her Life. Slowly, my pain began to ease. Slowly. I came across information that made sense of the fear that at times had seemed a descent into psychosis. Slowly, I found the women of Scheherezade’s Sister occupying my thoughts and emerging on the page. The Sisters are a circle of women who meet once a week for Double Decadent Brownies, good coffee, talk and listening. Each of us, like Scheherezade, tells stories to save her life. We grant ourselves a reprieve of twenty-four hours, no more, no less---again and again.

I take the Sisters with me. They are becoming as dear to me as my Mojave friends, D. and D. I owe them and this desert my life.

My email stays the same. bstarr67@gamil.com

Up the road, m

Sendings

2009-05-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

...and I lift my glass to the Awful Truth
which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth
except to say it isn't worth a dime
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
and it's once for the devil and once for Christ
but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights
we're busted in the blinding lights,
busted in the blinding lights
of CLOSING TIME....
---Leonard Cohen

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
---The Guest House
Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks

I woke this morning from a strong dream. I took my coffee out to the back of this cabin. There was a waning 2/3 moon above the old Joshua tree. Doves and sparrows swarmed the bird feeder. I opened my notebook to write the dream.
I heard my son yell. "Coyote!"
The young black cat was hunting lizards. Coyotes hunt young cats. I looked up. Coyote ambled from east to west about twenty feet from me. The beautiful arrowhead face. The calm gaze. The deliberate settling into the shade of a blossoming creosote.
I began writing the dream. "I am in a dark interior. I know the place. It is the old city, an old life and an old love..."
Twenty minutes later, I wrote the last line: Oh," she says, "I was with him two years ago. That's over."
I look up. The coyote is gone.

Tonight, the uneaten black cat is curled up on a red cushion. I am back from a long sundown walk.
Nighthawks had hunted in the soft air. My friend called as I walked. She told me of speaking river to a committee of drought. I headed west as she told me the story, my eyes on the ground to avoid the sun’s blood glare. Something shone in the sand. I stopped. It was a perfect owl feather.
I crouched and picked it up. "I just found an owl feather," I said. "You are Minerva."
She laughed.
“It’s yours,” I said.
The signal began to break up. We said goodbye. The nighthawks arced around me. Nighthawks. The merciless surgeons of twilight.

I cut away. Three bags of what once seemed indispensable go to the Joshua Tree Hospice second-hand store. I throw away pages of thirty-year old writing---warnings about our cruelties to each other and the earth that have turned out to be oracular; the epiphanies and sorrows of a woman waking to the reality that she had regarded herself as “less than” for most of her life; calls to awakening, to knowledge, to action. I tear each page in half. This is a ritual annihilation.
There will always be more words. As long as I draw breath. The words come through. I release them. Loss is the essence of a sending.

I go forward. North. This desert has been demanding and generous. There have been no work and few friends. There have been glare and molten heat. There has been nowhere to run from loneliness, inexorable aging and the imperatives of the only true teacher---the body. There have been Deborah’s open gaze; the good silence of the Joshua Buddha; my youngest son’s intermittent presence, and constant wit and kindness; dawns and twilights infused with mineral light. Through all of that, I have come home to imperfect shelter and been grateful.
Next Wednesday I drive north alone. I will go home to a little one bed-room house in downtown Bend, Or. There is a wood-stove and a half cord of lodgepole pine. Forests stretch to the south. I will live in a city---and the company of tall dark trees.
I am already lonely for the hard Mojave. But, that is the nature of a sending.

She Knew

2009-05-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

...kiss the snake so that you may gain the treasure...
---Rumi

My mother, in her deepest heart, was a jazz pianist. She had perfect pitch, could learn by ear anything she heard on her cherished records. Satin Doll. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore. Oscar Peterson. Marian McPartland. “The best by the best,” she’d tell me.

She made music everyday, but I never heard her describe herself as a musician. My mother played only in the living-room of our home in small-town Irondequoit, New York, most often to an audience of no-one. Or to me, who couldn’t stay on key if her life depended on it. My father was a man of his time and did not want my mother working outside the home. She came to believe it was better that way.

I’m way outside the home. I’ve brought my notebook to the open cocktail lounge overlooking the Reno Hilton Casino gambling floor. It’s ten a.m. I left the breakfast buffet, ready to either gamble or write. The little cocktail tables and big soft chairs made my decision.

I open my notebook and hear piano music. A shiny white baby grand sits on the veranda just above me. The piano bench is empty. And, the piano is playing. Under a chandelier made of gold birds and purple globes my mother would have found atrocious.

The piano begins to play Misty , Errol Garner’s classic. My mother’s favorite song. I go to the empty bench and sit next to the invisible pianist. I watch the keys move, remember my mother’s small, sure hands, a cigarette burning perpetually in the ashtray next to her. Morning or evening, bright sun or shadow, she always wore dark glasses. Back then all that was missing was a blue spotlight.

A tall young woman walks by, pauses and looks at my hands folded in my lap. She grins, “You play very well.”
“Thank you,” I say. Misty was my mother’s favorite song. She died five years ago.”
The woman nods. My tears are easy, an old knot in my heart loosening. “My mother,” I say, “was a jazz pianist.”
“Wow,” the woman says, “lucky you.” She walks away into the slot glitter and jangle.

The piano plays on. I consider putting my hands on the keys and don’t. That was her gift. The words, and the empty pages in my note book are mine.
---White Piano, 1999
Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest

Dear Mom,
Thank you for playing Misty and Lullaby of Birdland and I’ll Be Seeing You. Thank you for teaching me the names of your saints: Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington; John Steinbeck and Louisa May Alcott; Martin Luther King and Marian Anderson. Thank you for betting on death and insisting on life. Thank you for teaching me how to kiss the snake.

I have filled 320 pages of that empty notebook. I wrote at the roll-top desk that once reminded you of your father’s. I wrote on the battered back porch of the beloved cabin that is now a shell. I wrote on the shore of the Colorado River; on a basalt ledge near Wendover, Nevada; on a sandstone boulder at Muley Point in southeast Utah. I wrote in casino coffeeshops as I slammed down a comped breakfast that I had earned with five hundred bucks of deliriously joyful slot machine play.

If your soul hung around after your death in 1995, you must have been smiling as you watched me. There would have been a conspiratorial gleam in your eye. You might have whispered again what you told me on your death bed: “The biggest sorrow of my life is that the fucking depression kept me from mothering you and your brother the way I longed to.”

I know. I carry your genes. I move my fingers and make what is necessary and what is beautiful. More often than not, at best, my brain and I are in uneasy conversation---at worst, nuclear annihilation. You know.

So when I received the phone call a few days ago that told me that my second novel, Going Through Ghosts had been accepted for publication at University of Nevada Press---with unanimous approval, I felt the ghostly touch of your gifted fingers on my head. “Yes,” you said. I saw you as I had seen you an hour after your death. You were somersaulting through the air. You were laughing with pure joy.
love,
Liz

********
Dear reader,
If you can find Errol Garner’s or Marian McPartland’s Misty, it makes the perfect soundtrack for this love letter.
It took over twenty years to write Going Through Ghosts. It took every moment of using whatever would blur the wars in my brain, of using what was killing me---and it took every moment of not using.
The body and the word have great importance. It is through their support that the true nature of mind can be realized. It could be said that, in a way, the body and the word are servants of the mind.
---Kalu Rinpoche

On May 27, I’ll drive north with a trailer loaded with what’s left of my belongings. On May 28, I’ll pull into the driveway of dear friends in Bend, Oregon. My work in Washington State softened the scars that were left in my heart and body. Without them as a carapace, the brilliant heat and glare of the Mojave are too harsh.
I go toward green and mountains and basin-range desert. My mother’s wise-ass smile watches over me.

Time Ball

2009-05-01T07:21:00.000-07:00

"When Hemos Johnson (hereditary Hahwannis chief of Kingcome) was an old man visiting his daughter at Comox she took him to Elk Falls, a place he had heard much about but had never seen. He stood where he could behold the raging torrent in all its splendour, gazing in silent wonder at the majestic sight and when he came away he announced, "It gave me a new song."
It had all come to him there, the words and music straight from the Master of all harmony - a song that would always be his alone."
---Mildred Valley Thornton
Potlatch People: Indian Lives and Legends of British Columbia

In the past much of the Yakama tribe's history was passed down from generation to generation by the women of the tribe using an oral tradition known as the time ball. New brides used hemp twine to record their life history starting with courtship. They tied different knots into the twine for days and weeks and added special beads for significant events. They then rolled the twine into a ball known as the "ititamat," which means "counting the days" or "counting calendar." The ball of twine grew in size as time passed and as events occurred…
When the women were very old, they could use the knots and beads of their time balls to recall not only what happened in their lives but when the events occurred...When a woman died, her "ititamat" or time ball was buried with her.
---Bonnie M. Fountain
Using the Yakama Native American Time Ball Oral History Tradition to Tell the 1965 Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March

My friend and I finished his book a few days ago. It is not my book---nor even ours. Though I worked with him, the book belongs to him and the eagle Hanble Okinyan. It came to them from the Master of pain, loss, fear and loyalty. It is a song that has never been sung before.
My work is done here. My eyes and fingers are tired. I like the feeling. This is the weariness of hard labor faithfully done. I am ready to go home.
This is my last night in the Dutch Cup Motel in Sultan, Washington. This place has been perfect shelter for the month of the work. The owners know that the planet’s resources are being stripped. The towels, cleaning products, shampoo and hand soap are all organic. Hand soap is in a squirt bottle. Toilet paper, the telephone instruction card, the stationery are made from recycled paper.
The desk clerk cleans rooms. The owner mends what is worn out or broken. He takes in the chairs from the deck when there is a high wind. Each worker was unfailingly kind and creative in dealing with the few blaring television crises.
This morning I began to pack up my charms and amulets: the Dave Edwards postcard of the Tuvaan shaman and her words: Keep your line and don’t be afraid.; my friend’s photo of Hanble taking a joyous bath in her pool; the little raven drum I bought at Raven’s Corner in the Makah village of Neah Bay; my writing altar on which there is a new stone from a beach at Puget Sound. I will take the pot of rosemary to my friend’s partner Lynda.
There is little left to do. I write my friend:
We did what were brought together to do---for now. The Yakama women keep track of their lives with a time ball. They spin fiber and tie a bead into the thread at each important moment of their lives.
March 30 to May 4 will require more than a few beads---they are weather and mineral. One is azure for the sky outside my window right now; one is moonstone for the sky outside my window yesterday; one is garnet for the blood the talon leaves; one argyllite, one the green stone the Northern people use in their art. One bead is mist from a Cascade waterfall. Another tastes of salt from the waves below the point at kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx. One bead is shell, one is cedar, one is the exact color of my eyes, one the exact color of your eyes as we go gaze to gaze---to more easily follow the threads a wounded eagle weaves. The brightest bead is made from laughter.
When we look back on these four weeks, we will hold a length of braided cedar bark in our hands. We will let the beads tell us the story. It will be a story that is ours alone and for all who read it.
It is a story that belongs only to the future.

Veils 3

2009-05-01T07:20:00.000-07:00

You must leave your home and go forth from your country.
The children of Buddha all practice this way.
---The thirty-seven Bodhisattva Practices

I stand firmly on the ground on the other side of the Veil. Here, loneliness is transformed to honed and solitary awareness. Here, longing is transformed into the path to my own door. Here, places are re-named. A people reclaim themselves.
My friend and I head for the Olympic Rain Forest. We never arrive. Somewhere around Sequim, he feels the northwest pulling him as far as it will be possible for two humans to go. Beyond that point there are cormorants and orcas. There is a blue-black horizon and light fading down into the sea. There is air vibrant with salt.
We stop along the way to the last stop. I go down to water’s edge. I scoop handfuls of liquid mineral. I touch my forehead, my heart and belly with my wet fingers. I take away my cool wet touch, and a gray-white pebble flecked with mica.
At the Makah Cultural & Research Center, I learn that the people regard the knowledge in that place as “a canoe” carrying them and a “war club” shattering assumptions and prejudices. I learn that their real name is kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx which means People who live by the rocks and the seagulls. Makah is a name given to them by another First Nation. It means Generous with food.
My friend and I walk through the exhibit that is a canoe and a war club. Much of the weaving and pottery, toys and weapons, cooking and burying objects were found during the excavation of Ozette Village. We look into the cases together. We say little.
We sit in a reconstructed cedar longhouse. It is dark and fragrant with cedar. There is silence except for soft chanting from the hidden stereo speakers. Later, my friend says, “I was there.” I nod.
We drive out to the trail that will take us to the furthest northwestern point of what never really was The United States of America. We walk through prisms that break the gray light into particles of green. Then, we stand on a cedar platform a hundred feet above dark sandstone and silver spray.
You will not find the kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx name for this place on any map. You will find, instead, “Cape Flattery” and when you research the name you will find this:
...on Sunday, March 22, Captain Cook saw, between a low cape and a steep island just off the cape, “a small opening which flattered us with the hopes of finding an harbour”. The hopes lessened as the ships drew nearer. Cook decided that the opening was closed by low land and turned the ships away. He named the point of land Cape Flattery...
...Cook’s activities at Nootka actually had a far greater impact on the future history of Washington than his brief excursion past Cape Flattery. He and his crew were able to trade with the Nootka Indians for sea otter furs, which were highly coveted by Asian and European merchants. When Cook’s expedition finally returned to England following his death...news of the wealth available on the Northwest Coast inspired the fur trade that brought many more Europeans and Americans to the Pacific Northwest.

I look down on the dark fingers of sandstone, on the cormorants gliding in and out of the darker caves. There is a dwarfed cedar to my right. Salt spray beads on its boughs. I know I will write about what I see. And I know I will write that the fur trade brought genocide. I know I will not be able to call the place “Cape Flattery.”

The day after we return, I e-mail the Makah Cultural & Research Center. I ask to know the kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx name for the furthest northwestern point. A woman writes back:
I hope I understood your question right and that you are asking for the word in our language that describes or names Cape Flattery. If that is the case, the name kwih dich chah uhtx IS the name we use to loosely mean the area of the Cape. ---Vickie B.
The people and the place have the same name. The people and the place are the same.
You must leave your home and go forth from your country. The children of Buddha all practice this way. The kwih dich chah uhtx go forth from “Cape Flattery”. They travel in a great canoe. They carry war clubs of knowledge. They circle out from “Cape Flattery” and back into their home. The kwih dich chah uhtx come home to kwih dich chah uhtx There is more than one way to practice.

Note: When you look down from the furthest northwestern point in kwih dich chah uhtx, you might see this: http://www.outventures.org/photos/old/2005/FlatteryCaves.jpg

Veils 2

2009-04-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

It is one thing to step through the veil. It is another to take my place on the other side. There is no turning back. Those of you who step through know. If you try, you see that the veil is gone. Only a new world that seems to be the old world surrounds you.
And then, as you move into this new lost world, you are shaken by what has always been around you. Inside you. Hidden.
The licorice ferns grow from the bark of the red cedar. An eagles’ nest sits in a tree at the edge of the Skykomish River, perhaps a half mile from the four-block Monroe strip mall. A brown bat circles above me on the trail at Wallace Falls. The greens are not more green. The rill of a stream is only the sound of snow melt moving. The bat is not a messenger but a creature hunting food. I have been open to all of this for years.
What I have not been open to is my huge loneliness on the other side of the veil. I’ve blurred it for five years---with anger and compulsion. Here, on the other side of stepping through, I live each moment with the steady physical ache of having not been touched for every day of those five years. Yes, there have been the rare comradely embraces of my brothers and sisters. Yes, those have been the only touch. Yes, they are not enough.
I talk with a friend about my loneliness. He listens and he says the perfect words, “I’m sorry.” There is no pity in his voice. He gives no advice. Later I write him: Thank you for your response to my loneliness. So often well-meaning people (especially those happily partnered) either give useful advice on how I can meet a partner or regard me with ill-masked pity. Loneliness is an honorable emotion. It has been relegated to shameful in our world and times. It is far too honorable to be pitied or fixed.
I send this same message to my oldest and closest friend, M. He calls. “I’m sorry you’re feeling so sad,” he says. “Loneliness is not fixable or dishonorable. It’s a condition of being open.”
A few days later, I talk with I. who is my true sister. (I am not writing Rasta here, I only protect my friend’s privacy.) “Loneliness,” she says, “is crushing. You and I seem to find it often. I think it is an edge from which to explore. I hate it.”
Grace to have these friends. Grace to know that not only the single are lonely. Grace to be on the other side of the veil, refusing to blur or fix the ache. My efforts to not feel what I was feeling had nearly killed me.
So, for you, one request. Honor my loneliness. With it and without it, I am a woman blessed.

2009-04-03T12:44:00.001-07:00

Cameras

I rarely take photographs. I tell my students that using a camera short-circuits the pathways that fix an image in my memory. And, a picture cannot bring in sound or scent, taste or dawn warming my back as I pray: For the furthering of all sentience beings and the protection of earth, air and water. I trust what surrounds me. I trust I’ll retain what I will someday need for the Work.
Not all memories make it into writing. Those that do rest dormant until a cue from the imperative to write brings them out. Here is how it works: I walk out the dirt road to the Joshua Buddha. Much streams in through the body into mind, loops through the heart and down the arm to the fingers on these keys: Sunset clouds, rose-gold herring bones against the blue dark. Soft air. A small wind brushing my skin. Saffron light just above the mountains. Coyotes screaming in the east.
I stop near the broken dry well in which lie more than a few of my words. One pewter-light day in December, I carried four journals to its rim and dropped them in. They were the record of a time when “much” was code for love, a time when I didn’t know that code is not necessary for love. I am learning. Clouds, light, wind and coyotes come into that emptied moment.

In four days I will begin a drive north. In the last two months, my life has spun into a new location, a new book and new hope. Jeff Guidry and the eagle Hanble Okinyan touched their story to mine and this circling began.
Come with me. http://eaglewalker1.blogspot.com/ Jeff took the photos of Hanble in her bath. He is a living camera. How else to explain water exploding off the jubilant eagle into spirals and auroras and splinters of diamond ice?
Jeff flies to Denali tonight. “I’ll send you pictures,” he promises, “I’ll have two cameras with me.” I am a camera. I think as I listen to him. So many gifts. I think as I imagine him standing on the glacier. He’ll be wearing old work boots. Standing on the glacier with all your heart is work. Being a camera is work. Light and pure cold and the glacier’s voice will be streaming into him. He’ll raise the camera to his eye and capture. He’ll leave the camera in his pack. And capture.
Later, we will swap stories. I’ll see his words. He’ll see mine. They will stream into our minds, loop through our hearts and emerge in the book we are making. The eagle, Hanble Okinyan will keep us honest. She demands beauty.

By then, I will have driven north on Route 395. I will have stepped into Warm Creek, felt the sand shift under my feet, crouched where the hot spring bubbles up. I will have parked my car at the base of Glass Flow and pressed my hands against the sun’s touch on the brilliant obsidian.
I will have met a friend in Reno. As I come into her presence, my mouth will be dry, my heart pounding---because I will not have brought myself into the presence of neon as brilliant as a Mojave sunset, and jackpots as elusive as a desert mirage, and the descent into what I still long for so often. I don’t know how I will drive past the casinos. Perhaps I’ll be a camera, nothing more.
Then, there will be the dirt road to a low butte. There will be obsidian needles shining in the sand. I wonder if I’ll take one. I have learned a different way to capture. Pages in the bottom of a dry well, clouds become a radiant fish, love shaping and re-shaping itself. Michael, A., Chris and Chris, you know.
Two days later, I will arrive at an unfamiliar house I can already see. My friend has sent me photos. He will step out his front door. He will have seen me from the window of the upstairs room in which he has been making his half of our book. I already know what will be in our eyes.
Laughter. Friendship. And the willingness to go further into the mystery of making.

************
Lightning Glass

I began to see that, when it comes right down to it, we are nothing until that nothing becomes so dedicated that it
is like a vessel through which good things can move, an instrument for receiving knowledge and sharing it with
others who might be in need.
---Bear Heart, with Molly Larkin
Bear Heart

Eighteen years ago, three trucks drove up the dirt snake of the Moqui Dugway. The road rises 1100 feet on a 10% grade. The ascent can take your breath.
The first time I had driven it alone. It was 1982, I was forty-two and it was the first time I had spent longer than three days alone. A new friend had given me directions. You approach from the south and drive across flat desert toward what seems to be an impenetrable cliff face. Keep going. I followed his instructions. Suddenly the road curved east and I had no choice but to go up hair-pin turns, cliff-face on one side, drop-offs on the other. I remember keeping my foot steady on the accelerator of the rental car and thinking, “If I can do this, I can learn to do anything.”
Eight years later I was passenger in the lead truck. I was not alone. We were perhaps a dozen women and men and we were friends, lovers and strangers. Our trucks were loaded with river gear. We were headed for a trip on the San Juan River.
We topped out and headed West. As abruptly as any human change of heart, thunderheads moved in. There was no rain. The man I now think of as Dead Bill---no longer with rancor, but with affection---drove. I sat in the passenger seat and opened his beers for him.
Lightning slammed down into the pinon-juniper a few miles ahead of us. A thread of smoke rose. By the time we came to the strike, there were no flames. Only smoke rose from the little juniper. Some of us jumped out of our trucks, walked to the juniper and began to pile sand around its charred base. We waited till there seemed to be no more smoke. A soft rain – the Dine call it Female Rain began to fall. We climbed back in the trucks and went on.

It would be years before I would learn that sometimes a lightning strike in the desert makes glass. By the time I looked into a desert museum display case, saw a non-descript chunk of jagged glass labeled fulgurite and found it far more beautiful than the slab of emerald and cream malachite to its right and the wine-red chunk of garnet to its left, I was no longer the woman who had piled sand around the base of a smoking juniper. Had that woman known that there was lightning glass, she would not have asked the group to wait while she searched the ground for a glittering shard. She would have deferred instead to her lover, to his need to get back on the road and to his beer.
She is gone. He is gone. The group is gone, not so much dispersed by lightning, but drifted away on currents of alcohol, pot, betrayal and lies. The woman would herself disappear for five years, carried deep into loneliness by her own addictions and lies.
She would once have said that the disappearances were nothing but loss, and that our behaviors were cruel and tragic. Now, I understand the nature of juniper, lightning, smoke and glass. I see that addiction, lies and betrayal may be no less alchemical than the action of unearthly heat and sand. Now, my favorite chain of words has become: I don’t know.
I don’t know has transformed me from a woman who once would have googled lightning glass and ordered a piece from an on-line store, to a woman who walks the abundant Mojave, under skies from which lightning rarely descends, her eyes often on the ground, hunting for a glint of nondescript glass, knowing she may never find it.
I don’t know moves these words out of what sometimes feels like nothing, a nothing that is both frightening and welcome. I am a vessel formed by dedication, a vessel made from lightning glass.

**********

Rivers 1 & 2

The first of the Four Noble Truths taught by the Buddha claims that life is suffering. The second truth explains
why. We suffer because the self desires, grasps, clings, is never satisfied, never happy, never free of its many illusions;
we desire what we don't have, and when we get it, we desire to hold on to it, and when we are sure we have it, we
lose interest in it and desire something new. In our constant, blind striving for something more, something better,
something new, something secure and permanent, we act in ways that hurt ourselves and others, and create bad
karma, which leads to rebirth and more suffering.
---Jamie Zeppa
Beyond the Sky and the Earth: a journey into Bhutan

1

8/11/99: The river carries us. Water the color of old blood. Four Foot Rapid. Eight Foot Rapid. June on the San Juan river in Utah.
Much farther to the south, the beaches are full. Near-naked people hold smoked glass in front of their eyes. Samba pulses in their bodies, vibrates between the watchers and the sun. The wail of forro; a fruit ice seller; a woman drunk on nothing more than possibility arcs across the dimming light. A thousand lost loves are forgotten.
Here on this river, I sit motionless except for breath. The boat surges, slows, is caught in an eddy. I spin. East shore to western shore. Sage and rabbit-brush. Red earth. It is near noon. The light begins to dim. Imperceptibly. As though a delicate mist fell silver.
I consider probability. To be a woman on her way to being old on a desert river, in the dreamlight of noon, on the northern border of a full eclipse.
My companions drift and paddle. There are seven of them, one of me. Eight souls on a planet orbiting a shadowed sun. Eight out of billions, What fierce astonishing luck.

2
3/26/09
Highway 395 curves north along the West Walker River in Nevada. I head north. I slow for a curve, glance to my right and see veils of color on the riverbanks. Pink, silver-brown, gold, green-gold, rose-gold.
Alice. Through the Looking Glass. She is in a boat. Something else paddles. A caterpillar, a white rabbit, a mad hatter---I no longer remember. Rushes grow on the banks of the stream.
Alive has never seen colors as beautiful as the pale greens and pinks and silvers of the rushes. She leans over the edge of the boat and gathers in huge armfuls of the rushes. Again and again. The bottom of the boat is filled with glowing color.
And the, no matter how many rushes she lays at her feet, the radiance in the bottom of the boat begins to fade and to disappear.

All we gather collapses into this moment and the next, is gone and cannot be reclaimed. In our constant, blind striving for something more, something better, something new, something secure and permanent, we act in ways that hurt ourselves and others...
In our constant blind striving to cling to something old, we break our own hearts. A shadow passes over the sun and is gone. I pull off the road and fill my eyes with the pink, silver-brown, gold, green-gold, rose-gold of the young willows and reeds. I pick four sprigs of sage, wrap them in a red bandana and set them on the passenger seat.
Later, when I must remember the first and second Noble Truths, I will crush a sage leaf between my fingers and breathe in its wild scent.
gate gate paragate. gone gone gone beyond.

From the road
3/28/09

Now Is

2009-02-25T12:29:00.001-08:00

Temple Cats

Americans are obsessed with the notion of control. The control is just an illusion.
---Lee Barnes, writer

Bean, the 10-month old gray tabby, is possessed to leap up on the old dresser that serves as the center for my faith in what little I know of Tibetan Buddhism; and all I am learning about the nature of impermanence---a knowledge both unwelcome and irresistible. The dresser top is more accurately an altar - a flat-topped block used as the focus for a religious ritual, esp. for making sacrifices or offerings to a deity.
There is no demanding god here. There is no religion. There is only the sacrifice of most of what I once believed was permanent. There are offerings, not to be consumed in flame or carried away on a river, but objects and images to remind me of what matters. Each reminder has its own place, its own proximity to another.
There is a book of Tibetan photos and words. Behind it, a picture leans against the mirror: two Chinese soldiers walk away from the body of Kelsan Namtso, the Tibetan Buddhist nun that have just murdered. She lies in the snow. The only color in the picture is her saffron robe. All is else is the snow, gray boulders and the black figures of the soldiers.
There is a postcard of Tibetan Buddhist monks singing. A Black Hat dancer wears a ceremonial apron embroidered with the terrible and gracious visage of Mahakala, the deity who eats that which is in the way of joy---if you regard joy as knowing you will most certainly die and, therefore, this moment is the best in your life.
Two books of collaborative art and poetry (made by poet Gail Wade, his students and me) lie on top of a photo of the black and white crippled cat Stretch. He is not the only ghost cat on the dresser. There are tatters of brindle fur that once belonged to my good cat Harold. Rumi, my a 12-step book, the Witches’ Almanac, and my journal lie in front of the collaborations. Beneath them is the 1948 edition of the Classics Illustrated Arabian Nights, the comic book that opened my way out of dark cave after cave after cave; below lie more photos of my beloved dead.
A gray pyramidal rock with a black dot in one side, and a Northwest Raven medallion hold the Tibetan book open. Today’s reading from Sogyal Rinpoche: Why, if we are as pragmatic as we claim, don’t we begin to ask ourseles seriously: where does our real future lie?
There is more on the dresser: a baby spoon engraved with Mary, a broken heart-shaped dish my mom gave me, a lace agate shaped exactly like a woman’s yoni , a tape of chanting by the Gaden Shatse monks, a photo of beloved Harold (who was eaten by a coyote eight months ago). There is the wristwatch that stopped on 9/11/01. There is the grooved rock in which I put a chunk of cookie for Mahakala when I ask his help in ripping out my hard heart.
Mr. Toad from Wind in the Willows sits on top of the mirror. He wears a red-striped frock coat, blue pants and a blue bow tie. My velvet prayer beads bag hangs below him. It contains the string of twenty bone beads on which I count my morning prayers: for the furthering of all sentient beings and the protection of earth, air and water.
I murmur the prayer as Bean mounts his ninth assault on the dresser. He tries to capture Toad. I go toward the dresser. Bean leaps off. As soon as I settle back to my prayers, he leaps in my lap and grabs the beads.
We both hang on. In that instant, I imagine a temple altar. The monks or priestesses or rabbis or imams responsible for the altar believe that in order for the Holy to be present, the sacred objects must be placed and aligned with precision. The work of tidying and arranging the altar has just been finished. All is ready.
A mouse races across the shining tiles of the temple floor. One of the temple cats is within paw’s reach. The mouse scurries up on the altar. The cat follows.

********

What Falls Into the Absences
---for M.

The only sure antidote to oblivion is the creation. So I loop my sentences around the trunks of maples, hook them into the parched soil, anchor them to rock, to moon and stars, wrap them tenderly around the ankles of those I love. From down in the pit, I give a tug, to make sure my rope of words is hooked onto the world, and then up I climb.
--- Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put

The Invisible guitar
Fullerton train station
guy playing guitar
with right hand
withered left hand
from very visible was
playing to a
chair covered seat
and a bench
covered blanket
Invisible audiences
listening to a distant
guitar...
6/1/02

had been written on the back of a Vanity Fair subscription card tucked into a copy of Delicate, a collection of short stories I wrote in the early Nineties.
Delicate was inscribed:
Rosie
I “met” this
woman thru NPR radio
She writes about real
women on real journeys.
Enjoy - Janet
2001

There was also a 3X5 file card in the pages. On it was written todolopuedo.ina.nel Password EBIZ I googled todolopuedo.ina.nel It does not exist.

A few days later, I walk east across the desert. The setting sun dusts the creosote with gold. Shadows are gray, then purple, then indigo. A jack-rabbit startles out of a tangle of downed Joshua branches. I follow my footprints from the day before. They carry me past the white couch that is settling back into the earth and the backless shelves my son and I left next to the couch. Each day I put something on the second shelf that I am ready to lose. Once it was how I scare myself, another time it was imagining I have a damaged brain---there is a theme here.
My footprints disappear from the road and curve through more creosote and Joshuas and groves of yucca. I follow. I stop at a yucca which has split into three equal sections. I press my hands against each section, then link the broken pieces with my splayed fingers. I have no idea why I do this. It just seems right.
I reach the old Joshua Buddha just as the light goes rose-gold. I bend down to the stump that is also the form of a seated Buddha. I lean my head against it and I say, “I’m back.” I touch the tiny white spine tucked into the bark of the fallen trunk and sit next to the delicate bones. I plant my feet in the sand. There are dark mountain ranges in the northeast and perhaps a mile away, the county land-fill.
Gate gate paragate. Gone gone gone to the other side
I remember my most recent talk with M. We spoke of aging. We spoke of loss. We spoke of what has fallen away---and what hasn’t. I told him that I no longer was able to destroy myself. I told him I came to that inability not by my own choice.
“I don’t know why I had to give up what I loved so much,” I said to M. “There are layers and layers of emptiness in me now . It’s not time to fill them...if they can ever be filled.”
The sand is no longer pale gold. The shadows fade. I drink what’s left of the water in my bottle, touch the Joshua Buddha stump and head home.
I’m a few minutes away from the light that burns outside my cabin door when I see a sheet of paper caught in a clump of dried grass. There is writing on it. I pick it up and carry it home.
I wait till after dinner to read it. The words are carefully printed in a child’s hand on lined paper.
12/11/07
Dear Isaaih,
I hope you have a merry christmas and may all your wishes come true. Thank you for playing games with me.
When we play monopoly we have fun. Monopoly is one of favorite game. Hve you ever played monopoly video game. It’s fun, isn’t it.
When I grow up I will keep you in my hart. When both of us grown up we can both hang out.
Love, Angela

********

A Murder

When you pass through the fire
you pass through humble
You pass through a maze of self doubt
When you pass through humble
the lights can blind you
Some people never figure that out
You pass through arrogance you pass through hurt
You pass through an ever present past
and it's best not to wait for luck to save you
Pass through the fire to the light...
---Lou Reed
Magic and Loss

Rain for three days. Heart-shredder wind. This morning dawn is soft and clear. A winged shadow moves up the tangle of Joshua branches. A raven follows. The bird drops to the top branch. She, he, it, shakes out a wing. The breast feathers ruffle in what is left of the banshee wind.
Dawn reflects off the shining black beak---or a crumb of corn chip from the handful I scattered last night for the resdent coyote. More ravens soar and dive above the dirt road to the west. One, two, a dozen, a murder of them.
The raven at the top of the Joshua Tree watches, lifts and takes off. The shadow follows and is gone.

In the last week, I have found myself beginning to drift from the path I have been making. Imagine you could step by step move to the side of a trail of your own footsteps, a trail that is not easy, but a trail that carries you in and out of beauty, in and out of fear, in and out of wonder. Imagine that you imagine something glowing a little off the trail, something that you know might draw you toward damage, not of the material, but of the spirit. Imagine that you imagine that the damage might be worth standing in the glow...and maybe this time that sweet light would never fade. Imagine you take one step in that direction, then another.

As you pass through the fire
your right hand waving
there are things you have to throw out
That caustic dread inside your head
will never help you out
You have to be very strong
' cause you'll start from zero
over and over again
And as the smoke clears
there's an all consuming fire
lying straight ahead...

I called trusted friends. “It’s happening again. He is so like the one before. Where did he come from? I didn’t ask for this.” I wanted to be amazed. I wanted to be better than the rules. I wanted to believe that Something that most resembles a huge raven or a desert twilight or the bark of a dead Joshua Tree has given me a second chance at Big Love.
My friends reminded me that in one crucial area, “he” is so like the one before---he is not free. I wanted to smack my trusted friends. I wanted to smack my own trusted knowledge.

They say no one person can do it all
but you want to in your head
But you can't be Shakespeare
and you can’t be Joyce
so what is left instead
You're stuck with yourself
and a rage that can hurt you
You have to start at the beginning again
And just this moment
This wonderful fire started up again

I ran my sales pitch. “But, he is this and this and this...and I felt as though we had known each other for centuries and he feels the same way and and and...” My most long-time friend listened. “Yeah,” he said. “It is such a good drug.”
I didn’t smack him. I felt how stale my words were. There was something about my long-time friend’s perfect responses and how we laughed that pulled the pin on the potentially rhinestone-encrusted (little Zappa there)grenade.
I slept with nothing but the banshee wind. When I woke, I was grateful for my long-time friend. We had always referred to our drugs as toys. One time, one of us had lost a bundle on the slots. “The toy is broken,” we said. This morning I wrote him: “I/you can always try to fix the toy or get another one. But when the toyness goes out of the toy and I know that another toy might be fun the first time I play with it, even the second or third time, but ultimately the toyness will go out of the new toy---then, the gig is up.”

When you pass through humble
when you pass through sickly
When you pass through
I'm better than you all
When you pass through
anger and self deprecation
and have the strength to acknowledge it all
When the past makes you laugh
and you can savor the magic
that let you survive your own war
You find that that fire is passion
and there's a door up ahead not a wall...

I wrote my friend: I feel grouchy and gray this morning. I read the newspaper. The comics and the pop horoscopes. The important stuff. One of my horoscopes says: ‘Knowing when you have had enough might be important. Think carefully about a decision that could impact your daily life. What you feel could possibly be wrong. Give yourself the gift of time.’
And a second horoscope: ‘Your artistic mind is keen, your creativity set to fire off at any moment. You are in the right place with the right tools to enable you to capture the kind of fleeting moment that you wish could last forever.’
And I had already had---before I read the horoscopes and wrote you---a fleeting moment I wished could last forever Here it is:

A Murder

Rain for three days. Heart-shredder wind. The early sun this morning is soft and clear. A shadow moves up the tangle of Joshua branches. A raven follows...

As you pass through fire as you pass through fire
try to remember its name
When you pass through fire licking at your lips
you cannot remain the same
And if the building' s burning
move towards that door
but don't put the flames out
There's a bit of magic in everything
and then some loss to even things out.

********

Lightning Glass

I began to see that, when it comes right down to it, we are nothing until that nothing becomes so dedicated that it is like a vessel through which good things can move, an instrument for receiving knowledge and sharing it with others who might be in need.
---Bear Heart, with Molly Larkin
Bear Heart

Eighteen years ago, three trucks drove up the dirt snake of the Moqui Dugway. The road rises 1100 feet on a 10% grade. The ascent can take your breath.
The first time I had driven it alone. It was 1982, I was forty-two and it was the first time I had spent longer than three days alone. A new friend had given me directions. You approach from the south and drive across flat desert toward what seems to be an impenetrable cliff face. Keep going. I followed his instructions. Suddenly the road curved east and I had no choice but to go up hair-pin turns, cliff-face on one side, drop-offs on the other. I remember keeping my foot steady on the accelerator of the rental car and thinking, “If I can do this, I can learn to do anything.”
Eight years later I was passenger in the lead truck. I was not alone. We were perhaps a dozen women and men and we were friends, lovers and strangers. Our trucks were loaded with river gear. We were headed for a trip on the San Juan River.
We topped out and headed West. As abruptly as any human change of heart, thunderheads moved in. There was no rain. The man I now think of as Dead Bill---no longer with rancor, but with affection---drove. I sat in the passenger seat and opened his beers for him.
Lightning slammed down into the pinon-juniper a few miles ahead of us. A thread of smoke rose. By the time we came to the strike, there were no flames. Only smoke rose from the little juniper. Some of us jumped out of our trucks, walked to the juniper and began to pile sand around its charred base. We waited till there seemed to be no more smoke. A soft rain – the Dine call it Female Rain began to fall. We climbed back in the trucks and went on.

It would be years before I would learn that sometimes a lightning strike in the desert makes glass. By the time I looked into a desert museum display case, saw a non-descript chunk of jagged glass labeled fulgurite and found it far more beautiful than the slab of emerald and cream malachite to its right and the wine-red chunk of garnet to its left, I was no longer the woman who had piled sand around the base of a smoking juniper. Had that woman known that there was lightning glass, she would not have asked the group to wait while she searched the ground for a glittering shard. She would have deferred instead to her lover, to his need to get back on the road and to his beer.
She is gone. He is gone. The group is gone, not so much dispersed by lightning, but drifted away on currents of alcohol, pot, betrayal and lies. The woman would herself disappear for five years, carried deep into loneliness by her own addictions and lies.
She would once have said that the disappearances were nothing but loss, and that our behaviors were cruel and tragic. Now, I understand the nature of juniper, lightning, smoke and glass. I see that addiction, lies and betrayal may be no less alchemical than the action of unearthly heat and sand. Now, my favorite chain of words has become: I don’t know.
I don’t know has transformed me from a woman who once would have googled lightning glass and ordered a piece from an on-line store, to a woman who walks the abundant Mojave, under skies from which lightning rarely descends, her eyes often on the ground, hunting for a glint of nondescript glass, knowing she may never find it.
I don’t know moves these words out of what sometimes feels like nothing, a nothing that is both frightening and welcome. I am a vessel formed by dedication, a vessel made from lightning glass.

Welcome to the Age of Nugacity

2008-08-13T11:05:00.000-07:00

We are living in the Age of Nugacity. This, from a word-a-day service
a friend once gave me:

nugacity

PRONUNCIATION:
(noo-GAS-i-tee, nyoo-)
MEANING:
noun: Triviality; futility.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin nugax (trifling), from nugari (to trifle).

Last night, after I had read in the LA Times and on Yahoo about Adolf
Hitler's Olympics unfolding in Beijing, I took myself out to the
Joshua tree and watched the moon's slow progress toward the mountains
(which is, more accurately, the earth's falling into day) and I said
to That which contains us, "I am so sorry."

It is astonishing to me that the moon, the old tree, even the lights
of human dwellings slowed my breathing and brought a little peace. I
was able to sleep.

I woke this morning to sadness. Immediate. Inexorable.

Later I read this poem:

All night I could not sleep
Because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered 'yes.'

- Zi Ye, translated by Arthur Waley, *A Hundred and Seventy Chinese
Poems

How much we have all forgotten---the Chinese, the Americans, every
global victim of the Great Hypnosis...

I Offer

2008-06-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

I am a free-lance writer, editor and writing teacher. I begin to think about credentials and balk. You can google Mary Sojourner to find my books and articles, my NPR commentaries and writing conference gigs. Here is what is important:

Last night I walked out over the desert, into light that went from too much to burnished to cool gray. I was heading back when I saw a jade-green snake coiled in a perfect circle. Its head was slightly raised, its tongue testing the air.

A few seconds later I found a delicate feather, downy white near its spine, barred cream and brown toward its tip.

I had spent the day fighting various ghosts of "what if". The snake and the feather slowed my heart.

I bring to publishers, writers and students my willingness to walk out over the desert alone; to watch the ground; to look up; and to fool the various ghosts of "what if". Those phantoms block beauty. I teach my students how to float with them.

I teach for writing conferences, in private circles (will travel throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado; you organize your circle and bring me in), and one-on-one through e-mail, phone and/or face-to-face meetings. $175. for an initial individual consultation (my written suggestions on maximum of 20 double-spaced pages) and 30 minutes phone time. I work with fiction, essay, poetry and the transformation of journal writing into what comes next... My fee for writing circles depends on location, number of writers and length of time.

I edit that which needs a razor's edge and respect.

You can reach me at bstarr67@gmail.com

Down the road

****

WORDSMITHING: they say

Father, father, we don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
What's goin' on what's goin' on, what's goin' on - what's goin' on
Heah, what's goin' on - what's goin' on, oh, what's goin' on - what's
goin' on...
---What's Goin' On?
Marvin Gaye, 1971

I fall in love with the old times
I never mention my own mind
Let's f..k the world with all it's trend
Thank god, it's all about to end...

They say it's all about to end...
---They Say
Scars on Broadway, 2008

"Thank god, it's all about to end..." That's got to be an old broad
talking or an angry geezer. Daron Malakian just turned 33. He was
lead singer for hard rock band, System of a Down. He now fronts SOD.
They Say registered 100,000 downloads when it went up free on ITunes.
Four years ago, Big Dog publisher, make that rabid Big Dog publisher,
Scribner's released my memoir, Solace:rituals of loss and desire
(this excerpt records a reading in Denver in 2002):

I paused and asked for questions or reactions. A young woman
in a bright red t-shirt raised her hand. "Something has been
troubling me for a long time," she said, "long before your reading. I
have two small kids. I am terrified for their future. I've been
taught that life moves in cycles of expansion and contraction. I see
growth exploding. Will there be a contraction? Are the cycles still
in place?"
I wanted to to say easily, " Yes, we move in cycles, our earth and
our huge little species are moved in cycles. It will all come out
just fine." But I remembered a moment from the day before and could
not. At an off-ramp gas station in Colorado Springs, a furious kid in
a pick-up truck had squealed out of the lot, his back tires tossing
rock like shrapnel. Ev had vice-gripped the door handle of his truck.
"I want to go after that kid and beat the shit out of him," he said,
then shook his head. "Which makes me him. We are all spinning out."
I lsat on the edge of the stage.
"I'm deeply afraid," I said, "that the incredible speed at which
most of us are moving is carrying us out of the natural spiral. We
have exceeded some inner and outer gravitational pull. We are flying
out of control."
"But, where," she said, "is the hope?"
Before I could answer, her friend stood. She was a woman in her
early forties,
impeccably groomed, hair cut beautifully, her feet in polished
top-of-the-line cowgirl boots. I would have said we were about as far
apart as two women can be. And then I saw the pain in her eyes.
Her words came slowly. I had heard them three other times on this
trip, once at the Albuquerque reading, once during a radio interview,
once between old friends. "My only hope," she said, "is that some
day, maybe even soon, our species will be gone."

Four years since Solace was published. Six since I listened to
those mothers longing for hope. Thirty-six years since Marvin Gaye looked
deep into the terrified heart of America and asked, "What's Goin' on?"
Every day I hear someone say: "It's coming apart. This cannot
continue." They speak about home foreclosures, gas gouging,
unemployment, food banks stretched as thin as Depression potato soup,
the obscene flaunting of wealth by them that got it...
You can say "It's coming apart." Or you can say "It's goin' down."
And, the question I ask myself every day is this: "Where do I stand?
And, when it's gone down, where will any of us stand?"
A friend read my last column and wrote: Your last column in LIVE
troubled me. Your current sojourn in the desert sounds more like an
austere and lonely exile than a fresh start set some distance from a
casino. Is there anything I can do to help you?
His last sentence is the beginning to the answer to the question:
Where will any of us stand?
For all of us.

************
WORDSMITHING: with all due respect

The planet isn't going anywhere; WE are!
---George Carlin
by way of old comrade, Bob Katz (Lippman)

Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
---Sogyal Rinpoche

I am lazy. I am compulsive. The real issues hung out with me for a couple years. They would not go away. I couldn’t. The real issues worked on me.. They used sand-paper and evisceration. When they were finished I was a parchment bag of bones and not knowing.
I cast my bones into the future. They brought me here. This place is merciless. Molten. These times even more so. No work. Frightened people.
And still, around 6:30 in the evening, the light cools. I step out my door and am immediately in the presence of radiant sand, dark mountains and human debris. I am in the Mojave Desert.. I set out.
Three nights ago I came across a pale yellow cabin. The windows were boarded up. One nail held the door shut. There were words painted in flamingo pink on the door:

PEOPLE! If you are the ones that stole the chair,
go ahead and break in again. There is nothing left to
steal.
Hey, Dougie, here’s the phone number...
...call...
...if you want...a shower.

BEWARE OF SNAKES!!!

I began to try the door and stopped. It was not the possibility of serpents that stayed my hand. It was the certainty that the lives of the people who had written on the door were none of my business. It was the dozens of abandoned shacks, houses and trailers I’d found near Twentynine Palms, the currents of lost hope and despair that seemed to wind through those phantom neighborhoods and the stories I knew needed to belong to people who might have lost everything.
I walked east. I’d gone no more than fifty yards when I saw a ripple of jade and gray gleaming in the sand. The snake lifted its head. It flicked its tongue and tasted what might be coming toward it.
I stepped back. “Sorry,” I said. “This is your neighborhood.”

I went through old papers that evening. I hunted nothing. What I found was an invitation as big as the hopes of people building a homestead cabin and as precious as light swimming along a rattlesnake’s curves.

January 1, 1990: On January 14, I will turn 50. Please join me and a few friends for a birthday witness at the proposed uranium mine site near Red Butte. No present, please. Bring music, food and the willingness to stand outside the wire fence that still encloses the intentions of a Denver mining company, a company a few of us stopped cold. Love and Respect, Mary

There was the the hand-drawn map still incised in my heart. And, there were the memories of a miracle. A few of us had caravanned over frozen dirt roads. Bob Katz drove his truck. I drove mine. We parked outside the concertina wire. The head-frame and the workshed had not been taken down---in case the price of uranium went up, in case the Havasupai and a few of us forgot.
We heard dogs barking. I walked up to the locked gate. Bob opened the truck doors. “Let’s do it,” I said.
I’d brought two tapes: Aretha Franklin singing “R.E.S.P.E.C.T., and the Gaden Shartse monks chanting a Tibetan Buddhist prayer for the Earth. Bob slid in a tape and turned up the volume.
“Wait a second, “ I said.
A door opened. Two dogs barrelled out of the workshed. Their fangs were bared. “Hit it,” I said.
The low thunder of the monk’s chant moved out into the air. In that instant, the dogs went silent. They dropped to their bellies. They crossed their front paws, lowered their heads and looked calmly up at me. They did not move, even when their owner walked up; even when he asked us what we were doing and we said, “Praying.”; even when he said, “O.k.”; even when the chant faded out and the black diamond of Aretha Franklin’s voice glittered over our heads---and we began to dance.

Jaybird

2008-06-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

WORDSMITHING: for Jaybird

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass.

---Ezra Pound

Letters, Arizona Daily Sun, December 20:
Dear stranger who returned my wallet, I’m in a down-town restaurant thinking about how this diner, in the nearly ten years I’ve lived in Flagstaff, has served everybody: tourists, folks off the Rezzes, visitors up from the Southern sprawl, ragged wanderers in off the cold streets; me and my dead friend, Jaybird. I’m thinking about this bone-cold time of the year, of endings and beginnings. I’m thinking of Jaybird, of his lonesome death and how his life was far from lonesome.
Where’s the wallet come in? I lost it the night of Jaybird’s memorial service. A bunch of us told stories in a smoky room. People spoke of their sorrow that his death had been just a cold fact in the local paper. I decided to write my piece of his story instead of saying it. When I went to my truck to get money for Jaybird’s memorial stone, my wallet was gone. Dark parking lot, shaky neighborhood, oh well. I came home, called the cops, waited and thought about Jaybird’s story.
I knew him briefly. In that short time, he did nothing but give. He heard I was working on a novel about Viet Nam vets and he found guys who wanted their stories told. He listened when I needed to talk about my own small inner war. He heard I was spiritually lonely and showed me a photo he had takien that he believed showed the presence of God. He carried it with him for months and when our paths weren’t crossing, gave it to a friend to give to me. All of that, but most of all, he told his story with absolute honesty.
His story? The truth? Prison. Drugs. Booze. Serious physical damage. Pain beyond what most of us will every face.
His story? Truth? A recovering life of compassion and williness. Sobriety. Teaching himself to read and write---in his 40’s. Tears and belly laughter. Pain endured and transformed. Wisdom given. He would love that I am passing this on.
Stranger, you were kin to Jaybird when you called and said you’d found my wallet and wouldn’t tell me your name. I wanted to send you a thank-you. Flagstaff and Jaybird and my imperfect recovery have taught me that.
So, I’ll give half of what I would have given you to Victim Witness and half for Jaybird’s memorial stone. Thank you stranger. Thank you Jay.

I wrote Jaybird’s memorial letter in 1994. That Christmas friends and I went to a Laughlin casino. I played twenty dollars in nickles, twenty dollars in quarters and twenty dollars in dollars. When the money was gone, we went to the lavishly insipid buffet; my Cockney friend repaired to the bar; my other friend and I walked along the river. Everything seemed bejewelled and perfectly shabby and poignant.
Christmas morning, I bought bad coffee and sat on by the river. I listened to Alvin and the Chipmunks sing Jingle Bells over the casino outdoor speakers. It was still dark. I watched airplane lights race across the opposite shore, lift slowly and ascend. The dark began to soften above the far mountains. I knew I was the happiest I had been in years.
That was the beginning of my affair with slot machines. It gave me greater ease and fun than any lover I have every known. At first, my friends and went twice a year; then once a month; and then, I went alone---once, twice, three, four times a month. I tried to quit even though I didn’t want to. I loved the game, the casinos, the workers. I found stories there I would have found nowhere else.
Jaybird’s ghost has been watching over me. He might have carried me through the loss ot the Flagstaff I loved so dearly and to a hard-scrabble California town. His ghost must have sat beside me a week ago when I put my hand up in a little room of brave people and said, “I’m Mary and I’m a compulsive gambler.”
Jay, thanks again. I will pass it on.

Ghost in Ghostland

2008-04-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

Terra Incognita
1. Cabin Becoming a Crow

Seven years ago my best friend and I drove East on I-40. We were headed for a writing conference in central Oklahoma. When we saw the Cuervo highway exit in New Mexico, we pulled off. It was time for coffee. What better place to drink my friend's fierce dark brew than a dirt road on which we might be attended by fierce dark birds.
There were no ravens, but there was an old New Mexico cemetery. The tombstones were melting back into the rose-gray dirt. The inscriptions were in Spanish.
There were stone lambs weathered to gray lumps on some of the markers. What dates we could make out told us that the bones gone to pure mineral under them had been the bones of ninas y ninos.
The names of the grown-up dead might have been given in hopes of bestowing virtues and blessings. Fulgencio. Rosendo. Adora. Epifania. Dulce.
Shining One. Path of Fame. Beloved. Manifestation. Sweetness.
The oldest stones were carved with roses and crosses and circles. There was a rusted iron grill around a family grave. Faded plastic roses glowed pink and pale orange in the mid-morning light. The silence was crystalline.
We drank our coffee, talked and were quiet; then we gathered up the plastic flowers that had blown into the ditch between the cemetery and the dirt road. We scattered them on the oldest graves, and on the most recent burial. There was no last name. Only this: Juan. Our brave son. 1950-1968.
We headed back on the dirt road. A town rose on the hillside to the east. We drove slowly up through its six streets. Lights burned in perhaps five of the twenty houses. We wondered who lived there. We made up stories that the families left were the grand-children of vaqueros and miners. We imagined asking about buying a house, and learning that only those from the original familes would be allowed to own property in that place. We were good at telling stories. We drove, always, on roads of worship and imagination.
-space break-
This winter I drove east to visit my daughter. I was alone. It was midnight by the time I came to the Cuervo exit. I was tired and the moon was just past New. I pushed through the last miles to Tucumcari and slept in the Buckaroo Motel. I woke to a thread of pale green seaming the eastern horizon. A mother cat and her teen-age kittens twined around my ankles as I went for coffee. The owner's young daughter ran to get me milk. The cats and I drank our breakfasts in the chill air.
I timed my return trip so I could visit Fulgencio, Rosendo, Adora, Epifania, Dulce and Juan. I slept again in the Buckaroo Motel. Again, the mother cat and three kittens who lived in the laundry next to my room greeted me as I brought my coffee to the stoop. For a few minutes, I felt less alone.
I drove west in the growing light. By the time I came to the Cuervo exit, the sky behind me was soft tangerine. I found my way past the hill-side houses and pulled up to the cemetery. There was a new fence around the graves. A road had been bull-dozed up to a new gate. Epifania's marker had been set upright. A vase of roses tilted at its base. The flowers were frozen. I righted the vase.
Again I gathered plastic lilies and marigolds from the ditch and scattered them over the graves. Again I drove back through the little town. All the houses but one were breaking apart into the earth and air. The authorities had tacked Condemned signs on the doors. There seemed to be only one story to tell about Cuervo. It was the story echoing in my smaller life.
-space break-
This morning I woke to bone deep cold. The fire in the woodstove was dead. I went to the woodpile in my front entry. I bent to pick up a log and saw that the floor under the edge of the woodpile had crumbled down into the dirt below.
Cuervo surrounds me. My cabin is becoming earth. Air. A crow.

2. Hunting the Moon

"Each generation receives a little capsule of
instructions, says Eisley, that passes through the
eye of the needle like a blowing seed. They are
carried "through the molecular darkness of a minute
world below the field of human vision and of time's
decay."
"They are transmitted from one generation to
another in invisible puffs of air known as
words---words that can also be symbolically incised on
clay. As the delicate printing on the mud at the
water's edge retraces a visit of autumn birds long
since departed, so the little tablets in perished
cities carry the seeds of human thought across the
deserts of millenia.
---Loren Eisley, The Star Thrower"
in Richard Wentz' The Contemplation of Otherness:
the critical vision of religion.

Barn's burnt down
now I can see the moon.
---Masahide

All wisdom is rooted in learning to call
things by the right name.
---Kung-fu Tze

I write on a tablet of light from a perishing city.
In its outskirts I could be anywhere: Phoenix, Chapel
Hill, Seattle, Flagstaff. In their outskirts, the
cities have perished. Or been transmuted by the kiss
of vampires.
Still, instructions drift through the eye of the
needle. From Masahide. From my younger self. He
tells me there is radiance beyond charred black. I have
fore-told my future.
I once wrote: "That double light of story and
connection has shone true---on the levelling and
subdividing of the hills and creeks of my childhood
home; on the gentrification of the neighborhoods we
hippies re-built in the heart of an Eastern city; and
even now, on Western towns and earth disappearing
before our eyes, eaten by insatiable hungers as
thoroughly as bone by cancer.
Under that light, in pure gratitude, I offer story
and the possibility of connection, delicate and
essential as Desert Big Horn bones in an un-named
Mojave wash---or any first meeting."
Over the last four years, the double light of story
and connection began to fade from my life. In the
last year I came to doubt that it would do anything
but disappear. A few friends; the Sacred Mountains; a
cluster of seven Ponderosa, one of them reduced to a
stump by the busy work of the forest service; the
double-trunked pine behind my cabin, the ancient alligator juniper in the meadow at the base of the mountains---women and men,
stone and trees have been my illumination, my medicine
and fragile tether.
Two months ago I learned that the Hassyampa Insitute
for Creative Writing summer writing conference had
been killed. For ten years or more, writers and
teachers have gathered in Prescott, Arizona for a week
of work and beauty. A month ago, a gifted editor and
even more gifted friend told me that it had become
impossible to publish the books she loved; and then
another editor and friend said an identical
lament.
I told myself that as long as my hand moved a pen
over paper; as long as my fingers moved words out
through computer keys, I was where I needed to be. I
walked with friends, sat with the trees. The dark territory in me
grew.
And then, I was invited to a little desert town to
read and teach writing for a Land
Trust. I drove west between blue-black mountains. I
was alone on the little two-lane till a beat-up
Eighties Ford truck appeared on the western horizon.
As the driver passed me, he slowed, grinned and raised
his hand.
I waved back and pulled off onto mosaic hardpan;
climbed out and leaned against the car. The mountains
to the south had begun to catch pink-gold light. It
seemed vital to know their names. There is always a
road atlas on the passenger seat. I opened it and
studied the Eastern Mojave.
Old Woman Mountains.
I smiled as I had not for much too long. Easily,
deeply. I knew the barn was nearly burnt. I knew
that somewhere down a dirt road there was an un-named
Mojave wash, and moon-white bones and an old woman
finding them. I knew it was time to leave what had
once been my home.
It was time to hunt the moon.
***********
3. Terra Incognita

It is fate that determines the territory
of the heart.
---Terry Tempest-Williams
Desert Quartet

"She holds herself in the fire dying
through the eleventh hour
through the twelfth
with the outrageous hope..."
Miriam Dyak
quoted in Ilse Asplund's
Eco-Feminism: Bridging the Gap

Sometime in the next six months I will move to a
one-room cabin in XXXXXX, The Desert. Sooner than later. Fate determines not only the territory of the heart, but its timing.
"Why XXXXXX?, friends and neighbors ask.
XXXXXX because there is a huge military base and
bombing range and that guarantees the little town will
never be regarded as charming by the rich and jaded.
XXXXXX because on my first drive through town there
were never more than five vehicles ahead of me at a
traffic light. Those vehicles were bleached-out and
battered pick-up trucks and Eighties beaters with
windows tacked together from duct tape and plastic
wrap. And there were maybe a dozen traffic lights.
I'm moving to XXXXXX, The Desert because my neighbors
(despite a city council that believes global warming
is a hoax) will be committed to keeping the town desert
rat's-ass. They are already known for turning out by
the hundreds at planning and zoning meetings armed
with references to XXXXXX's General Plan. And most of
them live in real houses...which are their first and
only homes.
So far, I haven't heard of any absentee landlords,
though there is fierce debate about whether Walmart
ought to be allowed in. The debate is not about taxes
or killing local businesses---most of the local
businesses are dug in deep as desert wildflower roots.
The debate is about carbon foot-print: Is Walmart's
toxicity worse than the forty-five minutes to drive to
the nearest town with discount stores?
I'm moving to XXXXXX, The Desert because when I asked
my ally there what kind of Big Money was in the
place---Old Money or New Money?, she laughed, "There's
no money, Big or otherwise."
There are lots of artists and potters and musicians
in XXXXXX. There are only a few writers. And, there
is a deep hunger to write. I will have work.
Should I ever have enough to buy a house in XXXXXX,
The Desert, there are decent two-bedroom houses for
$65,000. Since I am not likely to be a buyer, there
are apartments for rent for $500.. The place could be
Flagstaff, Arizona 1985.
My new home will cost $300. a month. I'll
share kitchen and bath with my land-lady. When I wake
in the morning, I'll look out on miles of golden
Mojave stretching to cobalt and buff mountains---in all directions. I will be
held in a circle of granite and basalt---and rock whose names I have yet to know.
And therein lies the essence of why I am moving to
XXXXXX, The Desert. I woke the first morning of my
working visit to the place. As always, I was
frightened. My mind whirled: loss, loneliness, not
enough money; age, the rotting publishing world. I
opened the curtains over the north window.
First light was amber on the creosote and cactus. I
didn't know the names of most of the plants. I wanted
that knowledge. Second light fell on the first of an
aviary of birds. I did not know their names. I
wanted to. And then, the top of the creosote went
red-gold. I stepped out into warm air and looked
east. The sun crested a purple-black range of mountains
whose names I did not know.
I went into the cabin and picked up my notebook and
pen. I sat on the low stoop and made notes about
second light and nameless birds and red-gold creosote.
It was the first time I had wanted to write in
months. There were more question marks than words.
The lacunae were mysteries for the solving.
The absences are the reason I am moving to XXXXXX, The
Desert. They will save my life.

"I asked my seven year old daughter, 'What does the
environment mean?' She answered simply, "'It's the
circle of life."
All things turning, one into the other, without division."
Ilse Asplund
Eco-Feminism: Bridging the Gap (1990)

(The name of the town has been changed to protect the
still-innocent.)

Hunting the Moon

2008-01-26T10:06:00.000-08:00

"Each generation receives a little capsule of
instructions, says Eisley, that passes through the
eye of the needle like a blowing seed. They are
carried "through the molecular darkness of a minute
world below the field of human vision and of time's
decay."
"They are tranmitted from one generation to
another in invisible puffs of air known as
words---words that can also be symbolically incised on
clay. As the delicate printing on the mud at the
water's edge retraces a visit of autumn birds long
since departed, so the little tablets in perished
cities carry the seeds of human thought across the
deserts of millenia.
---Loren Eisley, The Star Thrower"
in Richard Wentz' The Contemplation of Otherness:
the critical vision of religion.

Barn's burnt down
now I can see the moon.
---Masahide

All wisdom is rooted in learning to call
things by the right name.
---Kung-fu Tze

I write on a tablet of light from a perishing city.
In its outskirts I could be anywhere: Phoenix, Chapel
Hill, Seattle, Flagstaff. In their outskirts, the cities
have perished. Or been transmuted by the kiss of vampires.
Still, instructions drift through the eye of the
needle. From Masahide. From my younger self. He
tells me there is radiance beyond charred black. I
fore-tell my future.
I once wrote: "That double light of story and
connection has shone true---on the levelling and
subdividing of the hills and creeks of my childhood
home; on the gentrification of the neighborhoods we
hippies re-built in the heart of an Eastern city; and
even now, on Western towns and earth disappearing
before our eyes, eaten by insatiable hungers as
thoroughly as bone by cancer.
Under that light, in pure gratitude, I offer story
and the possibility of connection, delicate and
essential as Desert Big Horn bones in an un-named
Mojave wash---or any first meeting."
Over the last four years, the double light of story
and connection began to fade from my life. In the
last year I came to doubt that it would do anything
but disappear. A few friends; the Sacred Mountains; a
cluster of seven Ponderosa, one of them reduced to a
stump by the busy work of the forest service; the
double-trunked pine behind my cabin---women and men,
stone and trees have been my illumination, my medicine
and fragile tether.
Two months ago I learned that the Hassyampa Insitute
for Creative Writing summer writing conference had
been killed. For ten years or more, writers and
teachers have gathered in Prescott, Arizona for a week
of work and beauty. A month ago, a gifted editor and
even more gifted friend told me that it had become
impossible to publish the books she loved; and then
another equally fine editor and friend said identical
words.
I told myself that as long as my hand moved a pen
over paper; as long as my fingers moved words out
through computer keys, I was where I needed to be. I
walked with friends, sat with the trees. The darkness
grew.
And then, I drove to Twentynine Palms, California to
read and teach writing for the Mojave Desert Land
Trust. I took the I-40 Mountain Springs exit to Amboy
Road. I drove west between blue-black mountains. I
was alone on the little two-lane till a beat-up
Eighties Ford truck appeared on the western horizon.
As the driver passed me, he slowed, grinned and raised
his hand.
I waved back and pulled off onto mosaic hardpan;
climbed out and leaned against the car. The mountains
to the south had begun to catch pink-gold light. It
seemed vital to know their names. There is always a
road atlas on the passenger seat. I opened it and
studied the Eastern Mojave.
Old Woman Mountains.
I smiled as I had not for much too long. Easily,
deeply. I knew the barn was nearly burnt. I knew
that somewhere down a dirt road there was an un-named
Mojave wash, and moon-white bones and an old woman
finding them. I knew it was time to leave what had
once been my home.
It was time to hunt the moon.

Hard News

2007-12-17T09:56:00.001-08:00

I woke this morning in the wake of this last year in
my writing. I was not depressed or frightened,
but I knew it was time to take a cold look at the
realities of the attrition---personal and greater.
Here is the accounting:

(Personal): I worked for at least four months on the
fine-tuning of the fine-tune of my second novel, Going
Through Ghosts; then fine-tuned that fine-tune for two
months. I wrote my third novel, Scylla. I compiled a
collection of ten years’ essays, Trajectory. I wrote
three NPR commentaries; twenty-six Wordsmithing
columns; three essays to submit to High Country News’
back page; three essays for Inside/Outside; two essays
for Mountain Living magazine; and created three blogs,
one a collective effort. I submitted my first novel,
Sisters of the Dream to two presses and one agent for
the possiblity of re-issue. I sent Going Through
Ghosts to one agent and two presses; Scylla to two
agents. I sent four essays to Mountain Gazette; one
interview/review of House of Rain to Four Corners
Press.
I earned $2315. for my writing.

Sisters of the Dream was turned down for
re-publication. In both cases, the editors wrote: “I
love this book, but we have had to tighten our list
and re-releases are not selling.”
Going Through Ghosts was turned down by one agent and
one editor: “You are a wonderful writer, I just
didn’t fall in love with the book.” A peer reviewer
at a university press wanted me (among some biased and
some legitimate concerns) to convert an
ensemble/community book to a book focused on the
relationship between the heroine and her lover.
Scylla was rejected by two agents: “You are an
astonishingly gifted writer. I didn’t fall in love
with the book. (One agent wrote: “This book should
do wonderfully in the hands of the right agent. You
need to find a more literary agent.”
Trajectory was taken by an acquiring editor who was
then told by the marketing director that “This kind of
book won’t sell.” It was then rejected by a peer
reviewer at a university press.
The new editor at High Country News conjectured that I had made up one essay.
The NPR commentary editor rejected all submissions as
“Not right for us.”

I am not alone in this escalating attrition.

(General): Two fine editors (a small press, a
university press) tell me they can no longer “afford”
to publish books they feel proud of. They have not
made that decision themselves. They are under
pressure from marketing and, in one case, a new owner
who knows nothing about publishing, but is hugely
wealthy.
One respected writing center is in shambles; in part
because its parent university is being run on the
business model.
Two respected writing conferences will no longer be
held; one because of student attrition, the second
because its parent college is being run on the
business model.
Our local publisher, Northland/Rising Moon, was
purchased by investors, its catalog retained, but the
actual business and workers terminated.
Most other writers tell me similar stories.
As Barry Lopez said at Ed Abbey’s memorial service:
“The news is hard.” That was in 1989.

Yes, I know the stats on Americans relationship with
reading; yes, I know even the big box bookstores and
corporate publishing are hanging on frantically. But,
one of those editors whose hearts are being broken and
I talked for hours about the disappearance of the
women who were once writing the Western terrain and I
believe I have become one of them.
At this time, I
don’t want useful advice. While there may
be something I haven’t thought of in terms of getting
my life work out to others; there seems to be nothing
to be done about the greater story.
I’m willing to sit in that silence. And see what
emerges.
********************
Writing this down was awful and illuminating.
I'll send it to a few trusted people in the
"industry."
Seeing it in black and white---one year's
losses---made me feel a little less crazy.
And, the bigger question is: How do we care for
each other in this?
The biggest question was posed by one of my editors in response to my accounting: "It's not how we care for each other; it's how do we get others to care?"

Limp Sentiment and Hard Dollars

2007-10-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

WORDSMITHING: limp sentiment and hard dollars
"Edgardo Vega Yunqué, a Puerto Rican-born novelist, began going to Librería Lectorum, one of the oldest Spanish-language bookstores in New York, in the early 1960s as a student at New York University.
Nowadays, if he needs a Spanish-language book, he is more likely to buy it online. The last time Mr. Vega visited Librería Lectorum, which closes its doors for good on Saturday, was about a year ago. 'It’s more important as a presence rather than a resource,” said Mr. Vega, who lives in Brooklyn. “It’s more like a cultural icon — like a statue — that reminds us of who we are.'
Unfortunately, that cultural landmark needed to sell books to stay afloat. With new rent increases, 'we could not run the bookstore in a profitable way.'”

---”A Spanish-Language Store Is Forced to Close Its Books”
Motoko Rich, NY Times, September 24, 2007

It is both accurate and chilling that a bookstore gone broke because of greedy land-lords and absentee customers is indeed, “a cultural icon...that reminds us of who we are.”
The bookstore that is no longer a bookstore, the customer who stopped being a customer---those absences are holes in the fabric of what we might believe we are, cigarette burns in cheap rayon, voids in a cultural landscape that cannot be mended. A literary resource which is not supported by customers cannot be a presence; it can only be a shadow on its way to an icy absence. I never pass what once was McGraw’s Newsstand without feeling a chill.
Book-selling is anything but a romantic fantasy. Writing is no less hard. Both hang on in an economic corpo-reality that is simultaneously brutal and banal. I could write you a true story of how Barnes and Noble leaned on Scribner/Simon and Schuster; how the big publisher went limp, how a writer’s contract was cancelled---all because Barnes and Noble’s buyer was offended by the author’s opposition to Big Box bookstores. But, I have been told that the story would be interpreted as sour grapes; and the bitter seeds that are its truth would be dismissed.
So, I will leave you to fill in the story’s lacunae, and point out that you and your hard dollars might off-set the flaccidity of Edgardo Vega Yunqué’s sentiment. We begin with a lesson in literary economics: writers hypothetically earn their livings writing; bookstores earn their keep by selling the books the writers have written to hypothetically earn their livings. So simple.
So it is not a true compliment to a writer to tell her/him that you so loved their book(s) that you loaned them to all your friends. (I hope I do not have to deconstruct the economics ot that.) Nor is it particularly comforting for the writer trying to figure out from what lacuna the rent will emerge, to hear, “I found a used copy of your book on Amazon and ordered it.”
Contemporary publishing (with, perhaps the exception of university and literary presses) is ruled by the marketing department. Sales figures are based on sales of new books. Hence, used book sales torpedo the working writer’s income. Only a few of us have either the luxury or the guts (more often the latter) to survive without a “real” job. (I am blessed to teach. The work feeds my spirit, my body and my cats.)
My work is all copy-lefted. Anyone can use it, pass it on, quote from it, print it out and give to friends. I live in an economic oxymoron. Anyone living with integrity in a culture created from lies, greed, smoke and mirrors occupies the same place. We have no choice.
We can choose to know Edgardo Vega Yunqué’s sentiments as the butt-smoke they are---that which he blows up his own vacuity. And, we can actively support Flagstaff’s few remaining independent bookstores. I am most familiar with Aradia, at 116 W. Cottage, located deliciously near Macy’s and the Beaver St. Brewery; and Starrlight on Leroux Street. Both stores are Aladdin’s chests filled with treasure. And, if by some miracle, the book you want isn’t there, they will order. You will be a presence. You will be on your way to knowing who you really are.

Caitlin Lives

2007-10-13T15:12:00.000-07:00

Kathleen Walters/Martha Shideler is releasing her wondrous Celtic novel, Caitlin, Priestess of the Goddess. While the story is set in ancient times shrouded by our forgetting, the message is crucial to our deeply troubled world today.
Caitlin emerged a chapter at a time in Flagstaff's Aradia Bookstores writing circles. It is a pure gift to know I will be able to hold it my hands soon.
Caitlin's website is: http://www.caitlin-priestess.com/
Be ready to be amazed.

Barn gone, red moon rising

2007-09-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

“Well if your house catches on fire
And there ain't no water 'round
Throw your trunk out the window
Let the doggone shack burn down...”
---Van Morrison
Out on the Western Plains
****
WORDSMITHING: Immolation

"Mr. Bloomberg, who declined to be interviewed for this article, told The New York Times just before the first anniversary of the attack: ‘And the 9/11 ceremonies, what I’m trying to do is that in the morning we will look back, remember who they were and why they died. And in the evening come out of it looking forward and say, ‘O.K., we’re going to go forward.’
---Michael Bloomberg, present mayor of NY
"Bloomberg Tries to Move the City Beyond 9/11 Grief", NY Times

We are humbled by the nature of grief. Older and wiser generations knew that deep grief is tyrranical. To lose a beloved---animal, home, human; specific intersection of limestone, light and pine; the pattern of businesses on a small town street; that perfect crazy quilt of mom ‘n’ pop restaurant and tiny bookstore and day-drinkers’ bar---to irrevocably lose a beloved is to find oneself enthralled.

The mourning are trapped in time. They are trapped in memory. They are trapped in waves of sorrow and rage and bafflement that render them as unpredictable as a juniper twig in a flash flood---or a floating carcass, the bereaved nothing but a skin-shell around a huge and stinking emptiness. At times, it seems there is barely enough breath to stay alive, much less howl.

The mourn-full are told to “let go,” to “move on,” to “make room for new beginnings.” They are granted perhaps a year, at best a little longer. (In some cultures, those left behind are encouraged to mourn deeply for four days and then let the soul go on. Tibetan Buddhists accompany the soul on the first stages of its journey with prayer and intention.)
It doesn’t matter. None of us, no matter our tribe or spiritual grace, are greater than How Long It Takes. We are tiny in the immeasureable flow of Time. We are incapable of saying brightly, “O.K., we’re going forward.” and fully carrying out that intention.

Rightly so.

It is time for us to face our deep helplessness in the face of the inexorability of what we are losing---most painfully, the violent escalation of our affects on the greater life system. If we cannot fully grasp that we are out of control---of time, of our falsely managed emotions, of How Long It Takes---how can we fully grasp that we are the sole species responsible for causing damage from which there will be no “going forward”?

Ancient people saw the universe as the Ourobouros, an immeasureable serpent who was locked into a death/life grip with itself. Its fangs are sunk into the tip of its tail, the poison of its bite neutralized by the antidote under the skin of its tail. How Long It Takes and brutal knowledge and our acceptance that we are spin-drift caught in an eternal eddy put us in our place in that circle. And give us one gracious choice---to know that we are incapable of "willing" ourselves to go forward.
In the instant that imperfect release can finally occur---a man bows his head over the blood-stained jeans the EMT’s once cut from his daughter’s body, raises his eyes to her picture and lays the jeans carefully on the woodstove coals; a daughter brings herself, sorrow and breath burning in her chest, to walk past the space in which a tower stood, a tower from which her mother never returned; a woman sets a match to letters and song lyrics which once were pure oxygen in her cells---in the instant of imperfect and unwilled letting-go, the mourner becomes a little more animal, more mortal, more blessedly tiny.

Perhaps you know.

It will not be pretty, it will not be “O.K.”, but It Will Be.

“I broke the bone in my throat that makes it sound prettier.”
---Dave Matthews, singing, his hoarse voice barely audible at Farm Aid concert in New York, September 10, 2007

****

“barn’s burnt
down...now I can
see the moon”
---masahide

Salt Marsh and Blue Herons

2007-09-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

In 1988 I was blessed to be given a residency at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island in Washington State. There were six weeks of as much silence as I needed; no telephone, no need to cook, no need to do anything but be in the company of my sometimes gracious, sometimes terrifying thoughts---and the words emerging from that bittersweetness. There was time to face into what I had been avoiding. And there was a Great Horned Owl that cried out from the pond at the back of the property and a one-mile walk to a salt marsh in which six Great Blue Herons fished.

Hedgebrook is for women, FOR women---meaning the people who created it, those who staff the place, those who keep it going know the reality of most women's lives. The term Renaissance Woman is too narrow to describe who most women are these days---you know the litany. You live it. Worker, partner, lover, maker, solitary, nexus and portal... At Hedgebrook, whoever you are, you will be sheltered, fed and left alone.

It was the first time in my adult life I had been cared for on a daily basis. Four stories emerged in that shelter. You can find all of them in my collection, BONELIGHT. And you can find Hedgebrook's website in Cool Stuff.

Here is a story that came from the heart of facing into...

HAG

Mariette tells me we still have beautiful legs, both of us, even if our faces have gone to seed. She is fifty-three and doesn't come from this country. I am fifty and the day we have this conversation, which is about discovering that our faces and bodies, in men's eyes, no longer exist, I am heading into town to dye Easter eggs with my best friend, Deena and her two wild boys. I see a woman walking along the road. She is dressed in brown tights, a cherry-pink top and turquoise head-band. There is sunlight all around her, clear mountain light, and she looks wonderful. I am jealous.
I pass her and realize it is Mariette and she is walking the five miles into town to do her shopping. She has made herself up beautifully, in that subtle way European women seem to know. I beep. She ignores me. I stop and go back to get her.
"It's you," she says, "you didn't have to turn around to get me."
"True," I say.
"I'm glad you did. There are lots of assholes driving on this road."
"You look wonderful. I am so jealous of your legs.”
“Thanks,” she says, “about my beautiful legs. Let me tell you a story.”
She cracks open the window, lights a cigarette and aims the smoke
delicately out into the slipstream. Not for one second, while she talks, does she turn to look at me.
“I was just become fifty,” she says quietly, “in Atlanta. My daughter had given birth to her third daughter and I was helping out. I walked to the big mall to buy some Pampers. A truck came up behind me in the parking lot. The driver going slow, staying behind me. He was saying things that were dirty and they were also said so gentle that they were turning me on. I was wearing tights and one of those big shirts that hides everything but your legs. I kept walking. He finally drove up past me. He was young and cute. Like a carpenter maybe, one of those guys. When he saw my face, he made this ugly, ugly look and he flipped me, you know, that third finger.”
I bow my head.
“I wanted to disappear,” Mariette says.
"I know," I say.
“Right then,” she says, “I was gone. As a woman. Gone till the day I die.”
Up until now, though we live in a half-acre collection of cabins, trailers and sheds a few miles south of a small Arizona mountain town, we have not talked that much. We are two of three women in the place. The third is Darlene Jackson. She’s half-Paiute, half-Chicana. Darlene works at Millie's Cafe and she has some interesting views on men and sex. If she's going to fuck him, he's got to have a car and a job, and, if he doesn't make her come the first time, she doesn't answer the phone for a few days. The guy always disappears.
"I can tell right away," Darlene says. “If they don't have will-power in the sack, they haven't got it anywhere else."
Darlene does manicures on the side, somewhat unlicensed. She has
little business cards printed up that say Darlene Jackson...when it's touch that counts...637-9910. She weighs two hundred pounds, “two hundred beautiful pounds,” she says. “We Jacksons are big scrumptious women,” she says and she wears levi cut-offs, fuschia tank tops, silver cowgirl boots and when you see her heading out in early twilight for a date, you know she’s right. All that mocha skin catches the last sweet rose of sunset. She wears eyeshadow the same blurred lilac as the mountains. She pauses to wave before she climbs into her truck and you can see how some
horny guy would be grateful for all of her, for a woman big and scrumptious, bright and shadowed as the moon.
All our other neighbors are guys, three of them steady tenants, the other four a floating crap-shoot. What we do, Mariette and Darlene and me, in the rare instances when we meet by the community shower-house, is compare notes on the lovelies the fellows bring in. We were going to organize a pool on average age difference between guy and girlfriend, but Darlene said Mariette and I tended toward bitterness and it wouldn't help to see the truth in round figures.
For instance, Amy's twenty-three to Rick's forty; the red-head's thirty to Dale's fifty and, cruelest cut of all, Tina Rae's twenty-seven to the sober doper's fifty-seven. Thirty fucking years. Damn near Granpa and Granpet.
"Round figures?" Mariette said mildly. “Yes. Round figures.”
“You bet,” Darlene said. "Life on life's terms.” She goes to self-esteem meetings where she hears stuff like that. She likes it. It's a small price to pay for no longer waking up next to strangers, looking down at her round dark arms, and counting the bruises that blossomed there.
"You would not believe the way my romance hang-overs were," she's told Mariette and me, "just like sitting on your paralyzed butt, looking down a tunnel and the light at the end of the tunnel is the Midnight Espress...aiming for you.”
"I believe you," Mariette once said. "It sounds a lot like getting fifty to me."
"Don't talk about that!" Darlene says whenever that topic comes up. "I'm twenty-eight and I'm not going to think about being fifty till I get there."
"You turn around, darling," Mariette will say in her throaty Latvian or Belgian or who knows what accent, "and you are there."
Mariette leans back and sets her feet on the dashboard. I open my window. Spring is cooking the pine oil out of the trees. We both take deep breaths.
"So foolish, so sentimental," she says, "when I smell those trees I could be twelve again. We would go to the mountains, to a tiny lake. The summer evenings were so long. We would sit by the lake, my father pretending to fish, my mother doing nothing, just sitting, watching him. Those were the only times I saw her still, not even when she was an old woman. Always something in her hands, always something to keep her occupied. But not there at the lake.”
"Do you think she worried about losing her sexiness?" I ask.
Mariette laughs. Cold. An ancient sound.
“The war came,” she says. “And then, being refugees. And then...”
I signal, pull into the shopping center and park. I don’t know what to say.
“You going to Fairway?” are the words I find.
“I’ll get back o.k.” she says.
“I didn’t ask if you’d get back o.k.,” I say, “I asked you if you’re going to Fairway.”
“I am. I don’t need much. Potatoes, some milk. I can carry everything.”
I stop, pull in next to a brand-new cherry-red Bronco. Blonde mom swings out of the driver’s seat. She’s wearing day-glo aerobics gear, her hair pulled back under a visor that says Lake Pow!ell . Two cute kids scramble out of the back and they all bounce into the store.
I don’t move.
“No,” I say. “I’ll take you back. I want to talk more.”
“You have something to do,” she says. “Yes?”
“I’ll call Deena,” I say. “I hate Easter anyhow.”
“Yes,” Mariette says quietly,” Easter is for witches, and it got all turned around.” She lights another cigarette. “Spring. Fertility. Making love in the fields---that is Easter. That bunny is not about cute. It is about fucking.”
I laugh. I watch normal life go on outside the truck. I like that I am in this movie where a gorgeous, silver-haired witch is telling me about holy sex.
“Did you see that mother?” Mariette says. I turn. She is smiling ‘20’s German film sorceress. Her green iceberg eyes look straight into mine.
I nod.
“I used to look just like her.” Mariette sticks out her chest. “Except my breasts were more beautiful.”
Even without a bra, even with what nursing four kids, and irresistible gravity have done, she is impressive.
“They still are,” I laugh.
She doesn’t alter her gaze. She pulls up her shirt. It’s eleven in the morning in the middle of the busiest shopping center in West Flagstaff on Wednesday, the day the bonus coupons are in effect. I look at her breasts. Ivory bells. Burgundy nipples. Stretch marks silvery against her pale skin. I think of the moon, half-full, how its surface is scarred and perfect.
“Mariette,” I say. “They’re beautiful. I mean, you’re beautiful. You should see me.”
“Go ahead,” she says, “show me.” Her voice is harsh. She looks down at herself. “No-one will bother to notice two old hags.” She looks flat into my eyes.
I remember driving the lake-road back from my ex-lover’s when he was my lover. A young eagle dropped out of the sky and raced alongside my truck, pure light between me and the dawn dark trees. Somehow, I kept the truck on the road, and studied the bird’s cold bright eye for what felt like hours.
Mariette’s eyes are the same. I look past her. I don’t know what I expect to see. People are schloomphing along, cars and trucks pulling in and out of parking spaces, the bag-boy gathering in a dozen carts. A raven perches on a lightpole and screams.
“No,” I say. “I can’t do that.”
She nods. Smiles. “Gone,” she says, “both of us. Every woman our age. Disappeared till the day we die.”
“Mariette,” I say. “Go buy your groceries. I’ll wait for you.”
“Sure,” Mariette says. “Thank you.”
She pulls down her shirt and climbs out. I bend to put a tape in the deck. When I straighten, I see that Mariette is waiting. She taps on my window. I open it.
“Hag,” she says, “was once a holy woman.” The tape starts. Annie Lennox. Mariette smiles.
I watch her walk away, her legs perfect as a dancer’s, her back straight, her pewter curls escaping from the knot into which she’s gathered them. If I were a man, I would fall down at her feet. I sit alone in the truck. The raven flops down, scavenges what’s left of a bag of Cheetohs. I close my eyes. Mariette’s scent lingers. Belgian. Expensive. What’s left of the last gift her last lover gave her. Once a day, just before sleep, she puts one drop at the pulse in her throat.
“It is for me,” she says. “Otherwise I will forget.”

We don't need no stinkin' numbers*

2007-09-12T11:17:00.000-07:00

Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000.
* "Number of these that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000.
* "Number that sold more than 100,000: 483."

--- Harper's Magazine

The Hopi word for trauma, tsawana, means "a state of mind that is in terror." ...we must learn the power of being able to see in this terrifying darkness and to strive towards a state of Qa Tutsawanavu-a state of living, unintimidated by fear from any source. Such people, the Hopis believe, will enjoy a full life, regardless of the fear around them.
---field notes

...uti’ means fear but uti’ hii’ , from the same core, means sacred. “The way I see it, the journey of the artist is the process of making fear sacred.”
---Michael Kabotie, Hopi artist and poet

Zero Point

2007-09-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

August 16, 2007
WORDSMITHING; Doing Nothing

Be a blank
sheet of paper.
Be a spot of ground
where nothing is growing,
where a seed
could be planted,
perhaps from
the absolute.
---Rumi

Two days ago I shipped my third novel Scylla to an agent in New York City. I had begun it less than three months earlier with these words:
“The spine of it shattered. There was no camel. There was no straw. There were bees and their silent Queen.
It was time to go.
The bees left at night. One by one each bee ascended. At first you might have thought a coil of smoke rose from the wooden hive. Bee by bee, the spiral thickened, swirled across the pale moon and was gone. The hum faded. Then you knew.
Deep within the hive the Queen waited alone.
Nell turned once in her sleep and came instantly awake. She sat up. The bees were gone. The room was not quite dark. She opened her laptop. The glow of the screen would be the only illumination necessary. She logged on and opened the previous day’s New York Times. The bees were there. Rather, they were not there. Five hundred thousand bees had left the boxes their keeper had placed near a California almond orchard.
‘I have never seen anything like it,” Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said. “Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home.’”
***
A day after the book went out, an old friend arrived:
Mr. Fear stepped through the door of my cabin without knocking. Mr. Fear, my most faithful main-line squeeze. I remembered the days of ‘I’m scared, I’ll do it.’ and how I thought I’d left Him behind. I knew about going through fear. I’d heard all the slogans: Fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. F..k the Fear---just do it. Fear is the opposite of Faith. I’d read most of the earnest books about changing. Self-help. Buddhist. New Age. ‘Fear is an artifact of the past. Fear is an Illusion. Fear is the opposite of Love.’
Nobody, not the most earnest simplicity guru, not the most westernized lama, not the most faux-elegant blonde former-business-consultant turned-motivational speaker has Mr. Fear’s number.
Mr. Fear was, he is shape-shifter par excellence...
----Solace: rituals of Loss and Desire, memoir, 2004

Of all the offers Mr. Fear holds out, the most tempting is “Get Busy.” Once upon a time, I would have complied. The emptiness that follows deep making would have seemed the onset of madness. Now, three years down the line, a rosary of losses having slipped through my fingers, I’ve wised up.
Scylla is a vessel, an exorcism, an oracle and an amends. It is a chronicle of the daily and the extraordinary. In the course of the research that is the solid armature for its impossible shape, I learned that my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors kept impeccable recoords of the daily and, in that, created a map to the extraordinary. Making and emptiness are in my blood. Each requires the other. And, as a lover once noted, I am sturdy peasant stock.
So, I slow down. I stop. And, in that, I learn again and again what drives so many of us. It is not the demands of our life that ratchet our hearts and minds. Most of us---unless we are a student raising a family, working two jobs and doggedly pursuing the degree they believe will free them from exhaustion---most of us could cut fifty per cent of our busy-ness out of our days.
We are driven by the threat of a visitor. Mr. Fear. And the whisper of our mortality echoing back to us from the certain future. In the uncertain present we are free to stop. We are free to do nothing. And, then we are free to ask ourselves this question: If you were told you had six months left of a healthy life, how would you live it?

Galileoentine (February 2007)

2007-09-11T16:43:00.001-07:00

Thursday, February 15, 2007
We don' need no stinkin' valentines...
We don' need no stinkin' valentines...
...because, in fact, Feb. 14 is the eve of Galileo's
birthday. He was a sad-faced man who was hauled up
before the Bush, oops, I mean the pope, for believing
in a heliocentric universe.

I am, however, particularly fond of this bio of St.
Valentine, by a guy named James. E. Kiefer (note
heart-rending typo, 'ending romantic cards and
messages'...)

Ahem...

"Around this time of year, many persons ask:"Who was
St. Valentine, and what does he have to do with ending
romantic cards and messages?"

St. Valentine is a martyr from before 312,
commemorated on the 14th of February. Probably he was
martyred on that date, but nothing else is known of
him... it was once said that birds began to pair off
for the nesting season in mid-February. Since our
forebears often spoke of a given day by naming a saint
connected with it rather than by giving the month and
the number of the day, we find them saying that birds
choose their mates on St. Valentine's day. That is
all. If a major earthquake took place on Columbus Day,
it would probably be known to future generations as
the Columbus Day earthquake, but it would be a mistake
to try to connect it with Columbus.

There are several stories making the rounds that try
to explain the connection between valentines and
Valentine. Every one that I have heard sounds like an
explanation made up after the fact, probably by a
Victorian clergyman lecturing to children. There are
other explanations attempting to connect it with
various pagan festivals of the early spring. (YES!!)
Again, I am not impressed. That young men should send
romantic messages in the springtime both in 90 Bc and
in 1990 AD does not require a conspiracy theory to
explain it.

***************
Galileo's eyes
sorrow drifts there
red stars
black holes
nebulae unlike angels

He can only guess how distant knowledge lies
solar flares
planets yet un-named

His heart
is vast
as the unknown.

He is no saint.

From Wikipedia:
"With the loss of many of his defenders in Rome
because of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems, Galileo was ordered to stand trial on
suspicion of heresy in 1633. The sentence of the
Inquisition was in three essential parts:
Galileo was required to recant his heliocentric ideas;
the idea that the Sun is stationary was condemned as
"formally heretical." However, while there is no doubt
that Pope Urban VIII and the vast majority of Church
officials did not believe in heliocentrism, Catholic
doctrine is defined by the pope when he speaks ex
cathedra (from the Chair of Saint Peter) in matters of
faith and morals. While Church officials did condemn
Galileo, heliocentrism was never formally or
officially condemned by the Catholic Church.
He was ordered imprisoned; the sentence was later
commuted to house arrest.
His offending Dialogue was banned; and in an action
not announced at the trial and not enforced,
publication of any of his works was forbidden,
including any he might write in the future."

The Sound of One Hand (January 2007)

2007-09-11T16:39:00.000-07:00

The void has collapsed upon the earth,
Stars, burning, shoot across Iron Mountain.
Turning a somersault, I brush Past.
---Zekkai

There were no stars. There was no somersault. There
was the rock and the plummet to the red hardpan.
It was Xmas Day. My friend and I had gone to holy
ground, an easy trail twenty miles south of Flagstaff.
I fled the fading reminders of a holiday my species
had drained of its holiness. As the count-down toward
the crack rush of Xmas Eve shopping proceeded, my mind
and spirit descended---more painfully than the
shrinking of the winter light could explain.
I am led by light. I follow moon and dawn. Twilight
is always medicine. So, as I felt myself descend, I
drew into my cabin. I faced endings I had not wanted.
I wrote of our animal need for slowness, for wakings
and dreams linked not to clocks, but to ancient time.
And, I gambled and played computer games till my eyes
were sand-papered and I could not think. I googled
names better left buried, circling around my romantic
past, zeroing in on the bullseye, till I saw on the
screen the name, address and phone number that told me
the man who I had once believed to be my future, was
in a future that was his alone.
I did not make contact.. I logged-off and left my
cabin. I walked out the dirt road to the
seven-trunked tree. I entered its hollow and leaned
back against two trees. “O.k.,” I said. “I need your
help. I want my life back...or forward.” I felt cool
bark against my face, looked up and saw a ragged
circle of clouds above. Nobody answered.

Later that day I bought two flower bulbs. The first
was a Paperwhite Narcissus, the second a Hyacinth. My
mother had brought herself through gray northern
winters by the flicker of christmas candles---and the
hope that the Narcissi and Hyacinth bulbs she had set
in water would bloom. I filled two empty candle cups
with water, balanced a bulb in each and tucked them
into a dark corner.
In two days pale roots had sprouted. For a week I
topped off the water and left the bulbs alone. Their
presence, the life multiplying in their cells brought
no comfort. I read about Holiday Rage and parents
spending “three paychecks” for their kids’
presents---and I remembered the flood of letters and
music, perfect gifts and e-mails I had once unleashed
in the direction of my lover. I played a little more
computer solitaire, drove to buy groceries and snarled
at the shoppers clogging the Walmart parking lot.
At last, it was Xmas day. I took the bulbs from the
dark. The Hyacinth was a green sprout; the Narcissus
a cluster of jade and emerald stems. I set them in
the big southern window. My friend and I picked up a
loaner dog and drove to a Verde Valley trailhead.
Sun and walking did their good work. By the time we
were on our way back from gold sycamore leaves
drifting on dark water, from watching the joy in the
dog’s small body, I believed my prayer for renewal had
been answered, “Alright,” I called up to my friend,
“she lives! All it’s going to take is sun and moving
my body.”
My left boot-toe connected with a rock. I lost my
balance. The fall began. I knew more was about to be
required.

i learned that night I had broken my right arm. I am
right-handed. A day later I woke to gray light. I
knew what mattered. Not lost love, not anything but
friends, writing and the ability to walk. I hauled
myself out of the recliner, lit a candle and opened my
computer. These are the words I wrote---hunt and
peck, left hand only. They carry me into this new
year:
Narcissus, one, paper-white. One candle flame.
Winter morning is silver beyond the southern window.
Pale flower. Flame seen only by the shudder of its
heat. Layers of light. Drawing me forward.

Ghost Flowers (written October 2006)

2007-09-11T16:19:00.000-07:00

GHOST FLOWERS

I finish my reading at a Southwestern writers' conference. I have spoken about pain from a hiking fall and seeing a dust cloud from the Gobi Desert turn the sun moon-silver over the Black Rock, and how a
volcanic out-cropping seen against sunset can become figures from a Javanese shadow play. A woman in the audience stands. "Could you please tell us," she says, "YOUR writing process."
I abhor the word, "process" almost as much as I do "issues",, but her eyes have that "I gotta know the secret" look,, so I soften my voice and say, "Which one?"

Here is one of the ways It works when It works:
At the intersection of a dirt road and wash near Horse Tanks in the Kofa, a man once told my friend Michael and me that he had just walked a ten mile loop in search of a Ghost Flower, and had found two. Michael asked him if he was a botanist.
"Not a trained botanist," the guy said, "I'd say I was a para-botanist, but there is only one of me."
I completely missed the joke, because I thought he was a botanist in search of phantom flowers...
...which made perfect sense to me...
...as I was chasing a ghost I had begun to suspect was, as the Buddhhists say, gate, gate, paragate---gone, gone, gone to the other shore.
We were in the heart of pure corporeal. Everything was in bloom, globe mallow, an orange lantern at sunset; magenta prickly pear blossoms, as many as five on a cactus paddle; desert lavender,which smells of sage and lavender; another two dozen flowers whose names I don't know...scarlet and delicate blue, and a tiny white one, no bigger than a sequin, growing alone from a rock.
Less than thirty minutes from our meeting with the man who found the Ghost Flowers, I set my foot on a small boulder. It rolled backwards. I was thrown forward to the ground.
For six months, pain hollowed me out. I became a ghost. Slowly, far more slowly than the desert blossoms after rain, I reoccupied my shell. I made myself feel hope by remembering that somewhere in a ten mile loop of dirt road in the Kofa, two Ghost Flowers might someday bloom again...
...and I might move over the desert to find them.

And now, eleven months later, I sit on red sandstone. I look down at a pool in Red Tank Draw in the Verde Valley. I open my journal and write:
The sun is a platinum disc trapped in a web of dark branches on the surface of the water. A breeze movees over us. Sun and trees shudder. I remember looking down into what had once been an arm
of Glen Canyon and seeing, five feet below our boat, the tangled branches of drowned cottonwoods.
Here, the small wind is steady. The sun’s halo trembles. Clouds soften what liesabove. What lies mirrored on the water, a platinum disc haloed by vaporous blue and pink and green, might be the mouth of a passageway that leads into a diamond lens.
I work a spell. I am worked by what contains me. The clouds pass over. Sun is warm on my face.
The rocks underwater are fuzzy with algae. For at least a century, cows have shit upstream. Transformation is constant."

My companion walks back toward me. He is a carpenter and wood carver. He watches the world for how it is put together, for connections---for where they might fracture, where they might hold. He has walked west, along the creek. He tells me the water disappears, then returns. There is a series of pools. “And this,” he says, “what is this?”
He holds up a stalk. It rises through the middle of a leaf shaped like a plump arrow-head. There are tiny dried seed husks springing from the top of the stem. The leaf is mottled green and wine-red, the seed husk cinnabar.
“I don’t know,,” I say. “I’ve seen it before. I’ll find out.”
I thnk of my friends Ilse, the wild-crafter and Phyllis,the ethno-botanist ; I think of the Internet---of human and digital networks of knowledge.
“There are new plants coming up around the dried stalks,” my friend says, “they are green and much smaller, but the stem comes right through the center of the leaf the same way.”
Later, we climb up out of the wash. My feet are steady on rock and talus. I move joyfully over the ground.

This flower that is not a ghost--- though far from its life---draws me further, on trails and currents that move over other than sand or rivers. I walk downtown to Phyllis' herb and Native American art shop. She tells me the plant might be a penstemon. I enter the glowing screen of my computer and follow cairns and bubble-lines. I find a photo of the living flower with its leaf-clasped stem, extrapolate from its vibrant green and pink to the dry stalk that stands next to my kitchen statue of Guadalupe. The website contains a phone number.
I make a call. When I come back from walking, there is a message on my cell phone. "The plant on the website is Penstemon pseudospectabalis." It occurs to me the name is a joke, an echo of the days when Valley Girls pronounced everything totally fantabulous!. I google Penstemon pseudospectabalis and find a galaxy of photos---a hundred Penstemon p., all clasped by a single leaf, all bearing sprays of blossoms like magenta comets.
The map of my world grows more complete; it will never be finished. It is shaped, as is my writing, by wildcrafters, para-botanists and carpenters, by damage and time and what we see when we hunt connections. It is the map of impossibility, the map of What Is.

The Red Pill + Planxty (2006)

2007-09-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

"...STRAIGHT DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE..."

"Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
-----
Morpheus: I imagine that right now, you're feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm?
Tumbling down the rabbit hole?
Neo: You could say that."
---The Matrix

I grew up on fairy tales, never knowing they were the sacred stories and folk legends of my Clan. My grade school teachers trained me in the beauty of a strong, well-made sentence. But, it was my phantom teachers---, Scheherezade, Hans Christian Anderson, the Grimm Brothers, Lewis Carroll---who lifted me away from my parents’ living-room into planes of ephemeral light, terrifying midnights---and wisdom that sang like the clear black mountain streams of my childhood.
I did not read Carroll’s words about his writing until a few days ago. Until then, I carried his wonderlands in my heart, as did so many of my generation---”one pill makes you larger, the other makes you small...” Recently a friend asked me if I remembered the opening to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Carroll is in a drifting boat on a summer day with three little girls who demand stories.
I hunted for the book, found it and turned first to the poem, then to the back cover with Carroll’s credo: “...there came a day, when one of my little listeners petitioned that the tale might be written out for her...I distinctly remember how, in a desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-tale, I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole without the least idea of what was to happen afterwards.”
Precisely. Marcel Proust bites into a tisane-infused cookie; Joan Didion sees a woman enter a hotel in Lima, Peru; I find a red sequin on a filthy Vegas sidewalk...and we are down the rabbit-hole. And, there is Morpheus: “You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
All artists face that challenge. The best teachers pose it to their students. And, the writer, finally exhausted by her/his efforts to avoid the challenge---that is, making enough money to feel safe for six life-times, managing grown chldrens’ lives, being the perfect partner, parent, grand-parent, boss, employee,daughter, son, being perfect---that writer, lonely for her/his work, aching to empty what feels like emptiness onto the page, that writer swallows the red pill. Swallows it all the way, because worse than not swallowing it is the pathos of the person who merely licks off the sugar coating, and hopes something will emerge.

*******

HOPPING ON ONE FOOT

"...planxty (an ancient Celtic music form) is not suitable for either singing or dancing, due to its erratic sequencing...the conclusion of a phrase is so framed as to produce the idea of a beginning; and again, the beginning or middle of a phrase so constructed as to seem for a moment the notes of a passage about to close."
---Tom Cowan
Fire in the Head

My new student is on fire, willing to face that she doesn’t know everything. She’s the keeper of a remarkable story. The only glitch is that her favorite slogan is “Get ‘er Done!’
Aside from the hee haw, let’s git that snow cannon up on the mountain and fire some frozen pee at the slopes nature of the phrase, the one work ethic a novel will resist is “Get ‘er done!” It’s a lot more like “’Er gets the writer done!”
The writer doesn’t dance in lockstep. We dance to a choreography that makes us as we go. Here, from the Flagstaff Women’s Newsletter twelve long years ago, is how it works. When it works!
Ravens dance in the snow around the ashes of the Solstice fire. This is not a miracle.. This morning I scattered bread crumbs to the four directions around the little pile of charred wood and paper. North for the Old Ones, East for Light and Burning, South for a little girl, humming to herself, playing hop-scotch alone every day through a long, hot, wet summer; West for She Who Rules Me, the Dark shining Lady of Take and Give-Away.
Bread on snow. No speed limit. No white line. No danger. Cats safe behind the woodpile. No trucks looming around the curve.
“Too easy,” my friend, the planxty, would say. “Never move road-kill off the road. It takes away all the fun.”
Ducking and dodging, running the knife edge, off balance, in. Either way, we’re gonna die. Either way, this may be the last day we have, the last moment, the last breath. The way the ravens see it, so what. This could be the last bread crumb and that would be the real tragedy.
One of my students writes about wild turkey. She says they have no vacations.
We only believe we do. From the edge of the blade, there are no holidays. We step out, and out, and, past a certain point on that shining, we look back.
To a time we could close our eyes and pull our history and fear around us and imagine that, for an instant, we were safe. And, safe moment by safe moment, we died. I am one of you. I look back.
Look back.
This last time. Remember when you were safe. You knew the dance. The music was easy. One, two three, one, two three. Moving hand in hand in a straight line. Patterns droning. The first step leads to this one, this one to the next, the middle, the closing, the end. Pause. Breathe. Change partners perhaps. And begin again. One, two, three, one, two, three, in endless circles, moving out, around, coming back, again and again, to the same place. No drums. No back beat. No voice, no harp rising like a clear, wild scream. When the ravens hear this same old same old, they fly away.
Somewhere, they know, there’s a two-lane highway so far out the cops forget it. Kids in Cannibal Corpse t-shirts are eating french fries and drinking sweet wine. They have their hands on each others’ thighs and J.R. is driving. There is no sun. Orion rises in the east. Somebody screams. Laughs. J.R. throws his empty out the truck window, grabs Leeanne’s french fries and gives them to the wind. Your raven heart jumps in your gleaming breast like a drum. Starlight glitters off shattered glass. You hop. You scream. You call the others in and, YOU EAT.
Lugh, before battle, hops on one foot and screams. His arms stretch out from east to west. Blue-black feathers. Bright eye. His shining. Hopping on one foot to a tune that has no pattern. Only endings held in beginnings and beginning rising from the end. Screaming. Out of balance and in.
The only safety is the edge. Heading west to the East. Till we meet again.

LIGHTNING

2007-09-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

DOING IT

"Jackie Wilson said..."
---Van Morrison

Mark Twain said:

"The difference between the right word and the almost-right word
is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug,"
- Letter to George Bainton, 10/15/1888

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.
To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into
the luminous flash of a single sentence,
is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by
itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them
without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced
to one glittering paragraph.
- Letter to Emeline Beach, 2/10/1868

note: I use italics for emphasis, irony and quotes. Phantoms sometimes speak in my work. I use italics for their messages. However, I am a Mac user and have yet to figure out how to italicize posts. I mark italicized material with *.

(November 2005) ALCHEMY

I e-mail a writer friend: “I find myself without the blazing energy that has so often carried my hands across the keys, my pen across paper. So, I read, taking comfort and inspiration from other writers. Mary Stewart's fine-crafted Merlin trilogy carries me to sleep and dreams each night. Here, from, The Last Enchantment, are the words that brought me solidly to earth, free from the terror that the work has ended for me, perhaps because in focusing a year ago on my former partner and his writing, I disrespected my own gift:

(Young King Arthur speaks to his teacher Merlin) "...it has seemed---not like a dream exactly, but as if something were using me,using all of us...’
(Merlin) ‘Yes. A strong wind blowing, and carryng us all with it.’
(Arthur) ‘And now the wind has died down,’ he said soberly, and we are left to live life by our own strength only. As if---well, as if it had all been magic and miracles, and now they had gone. Have you noticed, Merlin, that not one man has spoken of what happened up yonder in the shrine? Already, it's as if it had happened well in the past, in some song or story.’
(Merlin) ‘One can see why. The magic was real, and too strong for many of those who witnessed it, but it has burned down into the memories of all who saw it,and into the memory of the folk who made the songs andlegends. But, that is for the future...’”

In February I left the man to whom I gave away my time and my work (not at his demand, but out of fear,---and the last shreds of belief that one must earn love.). Two months later I fell while hiking and soon found myself imprisoned by pain. Arthritis racked my hips, shoulder, legs and hands. I began to believe that I would never again be able, physically, to write. There was no way out of the pain, no way out of the knowledge that writing was more precious to me than the illusion of safety. Hour by hour, day by day, I walked an unmarked path that carried me home to myself, and my work.
Now, I find clouds and shadows of what I have learned drifting into my re-write of my second novel, affecting the characters, affecting how they treat each other and themselves. But, it is too early to write directly about what happened during those nine months. When I try, the flow is dammed, no word seems true enough---except these: I vow to keep my writing near me at all times; and I vow to teach what I have learned about the hard craft and the radiant magic of writing.
Those of us who write---novelists, journalists, essayists, poets, journal-keepers, e-mail scribes and those who still practice the near-lost art of letter-writing---we sense, or know that writing is much like forging metal. There must be fire and work and the cool discipline that emerges from knowing when enough is enough.
And, even that is not enough. As with baking bread, shaping glass, carving air with music or dance, the ancient craft of alchemy transmutes good writing into greatness. There is a phase in alchemy callled the Black Work. Dross material is sealed into a glass retort and left, by itself to transform. Any story maker who has sat with only the company of the blank page and her mind-cage imprisoning her words knows real solitude. Any columnist facing a deadline bereft of his subject and his passion knows true surrender.
The writer considers the relative ease of a hang-over, a sugar crash, re-entering the sandpaper shelter of a lousy relationship---and does; and does not. The writing life is a flow and ebb of making and gathering; of creation and attrition, of beer and donuts and the phone call she knows she must not make, and time spent instead waiting---then putting one’s hands on the keys.

*******
THE MYSTERY OF TEACHING MYSTERY

She calls herself Lost Angel. She is seventeen and she lives in a little northern resort town. She and I wrote together in a circle of women---one of us sixty-five, the others between fourteen and seventeen. I did not teach grammar or sentence structure or organization of paragraphs. Instead I said, “Imagine this. You contain poems and stories, songs and scraps of words. Imagine they are threads. Let yourself know their colors, feel their textures.”
The young women were quiet for a long time, then each of them picked up her pen and wrote. Here are the threads Lost Angel spun out, threads, she would tell me later, that were a lifeline:
"I find that I cry almost every night, and for what reason I don’t know. My mom says its hormones and typical girl thing. But I have a feeling its more than that. And I think it is because I hold so much, to the point to where if I were to hold any more I’d bust. I feel like I’m rambling and maybe I am, because doing this allows me to not hold on to things inside of me anymore, and their not weighing me down. I still have them though. I just now realized that I’m a rambler, someone who holds on to too much, some one afraid of forgetting her memories and the things she holds on to, and lastly, I’m afraid of being alone. I’ve finally said it and I’ll say it again. I’m afraid of being alone. And that’s why I hold on to so much. But can you blame me? When you’ve been through what I have, you either forget it all, or you hold on until you can’t hold any more. I thought by writing this I’d be crying. But I’m not, and I think its because I’m experiencing some kind of twisted closure. I think I’ll start to let go. And as long as I remember to write I wont lose them completely. I just wish I could have realized this sooner. Its not that I don’t write everyday, I just don’t write about the past. Which I’ll start doing. So I can make more room to hold on to more, and write it down when I’m ready to. This is what I needed, to write this entry. Because I have said things I’ve needed to say for a long time, I just had not figured out how. So this ends it. But starts a whole new beginning for me as a teen, or young adult. Yeah it’s not the end, just the beginning. I’m happy for that.”

Last week I taught a few hours at Puente de Hozho, the multi-lingual school on Fourth Street. My students were fourteen 6th graders and three dozen third graders. They wrote not from a spoken cue, but from photographs they had taken in what they experienced as their community: family, friends, schoolmates, sales clerks and workers at the Mall.
I was the teacher and I felt ashamed---because most of the sixth graders spoke two languages, one bright-eyed girl three---and I am fluent only in English. I helped them study their pictures, looking for colors, and for what reminded them that they belonged. They helped me stumble, dull-tongued through a few words of Spanish...
...a few words, but words that we spoke together, standing proud, fists raised in the air, every boy and girl, both teachers grinning in a kind of triumph. “I have many stories,” we said. “Tengo muchos cuentos,” we chanted. “I have many stories. Tengo muchos cuentos.” And Kayla, our trilingual girl, whose people live on the Dine reservation, said, “I have many stories, and I am proud of them all.”
I remember our voices, and how I e-mailed Lost Angel’s words to many of my adult writing students and read their responses: “This is why we have to write. This is why we have to let kids know that it is the stories that matter, and the telling of them. This is why we cannot give up, even when there seems to be no time, no room, no will to follow our pens as they move over the blank page, the emptiness that might receive what we must tell.”
If I have a *credo* for making beauty, this is it: the stories exist, it is our good luck and burden to bring them out. And, if I have a *credo* for the most precious gift we can give our children, not just our biological children, but the children of our species, of our belonging, it is this: what you feel and know matters, if you write it, paint it, dance it, speak it, make music with it, you will let others know that what they feel and know matters. There is a moment in the new movie, Walk the Line, in which record producer, Sam Phillipps, tells Johnny Cash that if he sings what he believes, it is what will save others.

*******
ON ANARCHY AND THE EDGE

Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking, her new memoir of the double wound of her husband’s death and her daughter’s brain injuries (a book both skeletal and profoundly loving) writes of an exchange between her husband and herself a few days before his death. He asked her to write a sentence in her notebook for him. He had forgotten the 3X5 cards he normally kept in his pocket. She remembered a time she had not carried her notebook, and he asked her how she could write if she didn’t have her notebook.
I remember a writer opening her notebook. “These are my Field Notes,” she said, and I heard how “field” and “notes” were capitalized, how the words were charms to insure deep and authentic writing.
I’ve been thinking about words ever since the police and Coconino High School took down posters put up by a student group, Youth for the Peaks. Police and school principal believed the posters were “propaganda”, for the promotion of “anarchy”. The casual use of those highly-charged words sent me to my dictionary in which I found definitions of both words that had nothing to do with the student group, the reason for confiscation or, indeed, any alarm whatsoever.
And, I remembered the words of writer Greg Mcnamee, in "The First Emperor", in his collection, CHRIST ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES and OTHER STORIES:
"IV - Shih Huang Ti poured a measure of rice wine and considered the first lesson. A new understanding came to him.
He ordered that the word 'hunger' be stricken from the people's vocabulary. If the people could not name the emptiness in the center of their beings, Shih Huang Ti reasoned, they would not feel it.
The word 'father' was to be used only in reference to the First Emperor.
No event that occurred before the reign of Shih Huang Ti was to be discussed.
Death was never to be mentioned.
A thousand words died."
We live in an epidemic of word deaths. Listen to newscasters, to Oldies Rock d.j.’s, to the jargon of Reality t.v. Listen to political addresses. Read the language of advertising. Banal repetition. Spin. It is as deadly to alter the meaning of a word as to forget it.
But some are remembering. Two weeks ago I worked with students at Flagstaff Middle School. I was blessed to watch over forty-five 7th graders writing. No cross-talk. No hesitation. Just forty-five pens moving steadily. When some of them looked up after the writing time was over, I saw on their faces the look of people who had surfaced from a deep immersion.
Here are the words of one young man, the kind of writing that emerges when there is no threat of being labelled. Alex wrote:
“If I write the truth, I’d write about how calming just looking at the sky or ocean in their majestic serenity. I’d write about how there’s no better place on earth than on a hot beach, with the sun beating down on you, with the gentle lapping of the waves as your only company.
“If I wrote the truth, I’d write that you can do no more than try your best, and ask why nobody seems to be able to accept that. If you’ve done the worst of everyone else but tried your very best, and no one else did, yours is the best of all.
“If I wrote the truth, I’d write about my quest to find out who I am. I know I’m Alex, but it must go deeper than that. But I realize that in the very end that we are who we are, and we may never know who exactly who that is.
“If I wrote the truth, I’d write about hope, and the hope that burns in everyone, for everyone hopes for something. Hope is what keeps us alive, and if we had no hope, we would give up and perish mentally physically and spiritually.
“If I wrote the truth I’d write about my fear of rejection, a fear that everyone must
feel at some point in their lives. But rejection is a part of a life, a part that everyone can relate to and deals with one way or another.”
Alex has written from his center, and from an edge all writers, sooner or later, walk. His words might be Field Notes for all who create, all who know that from the edge, all sacred work is the same. We push a great wheel; it snatches the hem of our shirt and drags us forward. To be crushed----and to be carried.