Talkin Country

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
       love what it loves
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

It's a rainy spring/winter day here in Colorado.  I have been laid out with a case of the end-of-winter musings, eating lots of cheese and staring into space for the past week, but yesterday the spell broke.  Since then, it feels like my feet haven't hit the ground. 

I recently dove headlong into Roseanne Cash's memoir, Composed. Reading it feels like stepping into a best friend's kitchen.  Like the best of art, or the best of friends, her voice and insight strikes to the very core of my heart, and I'm not ashamed to say I teared up reading its first pages. 

I also read a book by Karen Maezen Miller during my weekend stupor (fittingly a book on engaging more deeply with your daily life...Note to self: mindfully get up off the couch).  The book was called Hand Wash Cold, and something she wrote keeps cycling through my head.  This is a paraphrase, because I already returned the book to the library.  She says it takes a mother to heal a daughter, and a daughter to heal a father.  Reading about Roseanne Cash's relationship to her father moves me not just because of a life-long obsession with Johnny Cash, with whom I share a birthday, and whom my friend Colleen and I used to call JC, jokingly usurping Christ's initials for the purposes of a different worship.  I appreciated Cash's honest reflection upon her father because reading about any earnest look at parent-child relationships really moves me.

And so, when I got to Cash's summation of country music and song-writing, I felt a shiver pass from the bottom of my spine up my back, and felt it rush out of my arms.  Cash writes: At the heart of country music lies family, lies a devotion to exploring the bonds of blood ties, both  in performance and in song-writing...Country and roots music treat family as a rich and fascinating source of material...

When people first learn that I am writing a novel, a lot of them ask what it's about.  I used to smugly answer, "A family."  It is still my sincere answer, my umbrella answer--one part goofy and one part hide-out.  Superstition rules more moments in my life than I like to admit.  "Your family?" some people ask.  "No, no," I say.  "A family."  What I mean is, Family.  I am writing a book about Family. 

When I was little, I called my mother to the television to see a country singer performing on a show.  I was pretty excited about it.  My mother made it half way across the room before covering her ears and just about running away.  Since then, I've tried to come up with explanations for why I love country music so much, because as I grew up, I recognized that our love affair--country music's and mine--is a little ironic.  Like the scene in Kissing Jessica Stein, when the two main characters are trying to define what "sexy ugly" means.  Country is sexy-ugly to me.  I know it's not Brahms.  I know it's not Radiohead, not Weezer, not Beck.  (But it is Wilco, is Dylan, is Jack White wailing on a guitar while Loretta Lynn warbles into the front mike.)  Where I come from, country is not what the cool kids are listening to, and I know this all too well. 

But lately I've given up wondering why I blast Alan Jackson through the house whenever I come home.  Or why I have not stopped playing Tammy Wynette's greatest hits for the past five days.  I make no apologies.  My downstairs housemate, who is an actor, is rehearsing for a musical. When the clock strikes noon, I know it is time to bolt from the house, because soon he will play the same two songs over and over, singing choral refrains in the laundry room, in his bedroom, in the driveway...It is both a fascinating glimpse of an artist's life and a daily reminder that creativity is a home-grown force.  In any case, for this reason, I play Stand By Your Man like a clock striking the hour, and feel no remorse.  Tit for tat.

I think I know who to blame for this passion--my friend from college.  A shy soccer player from Masachusettes, Liz introduced me to the great car songs of our college life--country musicians I had been hiding from in my leafy Connecticut perch.  I had been born into a southern heritage--my grandfather's heavy radio dialed to twangy guitars and whining lyrics while he ate banana sandwiches for lunch, peanut butter crackers with glasses of milk for a snack, in between round after round with his riding lawn mower--but when I was five, my family moved to Connecticut.  There, my mother could escape the music that had become so ludicrous to her.  She joined a choral group and sang show tunes at nursing homes and schools with a collection of sassy women.  My father could scan the Times as he rode the train into New York every morning.  We bought scarves to cover our tender ears the first winter.  We took pictures at a snowy beach on our first Thanksgiving, after we ate in a restaurant--one little clan of funny-talking children led by two sweet sweet adults.  In the spring, when daffodils came up in my grandmother's garden, we were 600 miles away.  When her tomatoes came up in the summer, we were driving the 600 miles south to eat them by the peppered slice.

People ask me where I am from, and I say to them, North Carolina.  You don't sound like you're from North Carolina, they reply.  I know.  But trust me.  I am.  My grandmother's house, her kitchen, the big ass radio and pristine white carpets--if there is any hometown left in this traveling heart, it is there.  And country music takes me back there, delivers me to my first home--to the south, the place where everything is a little bit broken, a little bit off, and sometimes, if you look too closely, a little bit something to be ashamed of...especially to an outsider's eye.  But I don't have an outsider's eye.  There is no accusation left for me--just pure adoration.

There is a yogic saying--This is perfect, that is perfect.  If the perfect be taken from the perfect, the perfect remains.  I think that's what I love about country music - the exaggerated brokenness, and the reverence for that very thing.  It is redemption, I guess you could say.  In true southern fashion, it's a straight shot of Jesus, chased with a spot of sun through the porch screen.

Last night, I heard Robert Plant and Alison Krauss's version of Your Long Journey (off of the album Raising Sand) and immediately imagined singing it with my mother.  We used to sing together before bed every night, and though we have not sung together much since, she has a voice as delicate as crystal, and as clear, and I am so grateful for the gift of song which she passed on to me.

In honor of Johnny Cash, and artists everywhere, I leave you with these words by Roseanne Cash: ...what I understand more clearly now, is that it's not just the singing you bring home with you.  It's the constant measuring of ideas and words if you are a songwriter, and the daily handling of your instrument if you are a musician, and the humming and scratching and pushing and testing of the voice, the reveling in the melodies if you are a singer.  More than that, it is the effort to straddle two worlds, and the struggle to make the transition from the creative realms to those of daily life and back with grace.  My father did all of those, as a habit of being.  He provided a template for me, of how to live with integrity as an artist day to day.

May we all give thanks to our teachers, to our roots. 

Whoa Nelly

LAY OF WOOD
by Donald Revell

Yellowbird here for one day only,
I'm telling you
The trees here
Are children of themselves.  You can see it:
The deadwood in mid-air
Departing into mid-air,
And just below it,
Bright circles of emerald-green new growth.

The day is long when it is blind.
This morning, I find only darkness in me
Where yesterday I saw through countless eyes.

Yellowbird, I pray for change.
I dream about it,
The wild transformations,
Even as each day
The changes prove more terrible,
More set upon death and humiliation,
Even the humiliation of mountains.

I want celestial light, but not apocalyptic.
The end of the world is an old story.
I'm starting a new one.
Yellowbird here for one day only,
These emeralds are trees.
Fly fast.

This poem comes from a book called The Bitter Withy, from which I had the pleasure of hearing the author read not long ago.  I bought the book because it has a bunny on the cover (from Titian's Virgin of the Rabbit (Virgin and Child with St. Catherine) which we will all now go to Paris to see, okay?).  I also bought the book to remember the apocalyptic passion of its author, creator, reader.  I tell you, the next time I do a reading, if my bangs are not flapping like mad crow wings, I will not have done my job. 

Nevermind that I don't have bangs.  Or that no one has asked me to read.

I hate to start off like a bad thank-you note, but I cannot believe so much time has passed since the last post!  And yet, I can.  I realized this week that March was a subtly-declared Artist's Month, wherein I bought cheap art supplies, modge-podged everything in the house, stayed in my pajamas far too long, and baked lots and lots of sweets.  (I am so grateful for my hungry friends, and this is in the oven right now.  Mine slumps in a misshapen way that makes me feel great love for it and my whole life.)

I have also been reading Dr. Christiane Northrup's books and gobbling up her elegant wisdom.  She kind of reminds me of a sane Martha Stewart - someone with an intense amount of focus which she points toward nourishing subjects and pursuits.  Not that making your own crepe paper carrots is a waste of time.  I'm sort of serious here.  I read a blurb of a book that is coming out soon (by Sara Avant Stover, whom I have often mentioned), and here is what Nischala Joy Devi says about Sara's book:

"From the first page of The Way of the Happy Woman, I breathed a great sigh of relief. As women we are told to be warriors, smart, sexy, successful. We can have it all, but at what price? It seems all we really want is to be happy. Thank you, Sara, for helping us remember our true divine nature and making it so accessible.”

That part about all women really wanting is to simply be happy made a lot of sense to me.  (See also: The Pajamas All Day section of my personal handbook, filed under Crepe Paper Crafts.)

What am I learning?  Whatever creates happiness = Good.  Period, the end.  As long as it's not causing harm to others, I guess is the caveat.  No shooting bb's at passerbys, etc etc.  That's what fiction is for.  Which is maybe why I write?  Cause, come on, sometimes it's really fun to shoot bb's.

My friend sent me an article on writing advice recently.  In it, Geoff Dyer wrote:
Don't write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés . . . Since then I've developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.

I'm not sure I agree with him that one should never write in public places but I crack up every time I think about it being a lavatorial activity.  Writing is sooooo personal, and I do find myself muttering to myself, scratching my head like a dog with fleas, and employing other such unattractive habits, that maybe Dyer has a point.  (I just want to clarify: I want to go to Paris for the Titian, in addition to the cafes.)

Because Roddy Doyle's advice won my heart, and I have little understanding of copyright laws on the web (joking joking) I think I will post them here:
 
WRITING ADVICE FROM RODDY DOYLE
1 Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph ­–

3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.

4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.

5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.

6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".

7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.

8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.

9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.

10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.

And with that, I'm off to a piping-hot loaf of puffy, croissant-like cinnamon-pull-apart bread (I did this?), a novel that wants to call itself mine, and the whole month of April!  Which I have ambitiously declared Career Girl month.  I am still waiting to understand what I mean by this. 

Ahimsa

Poem 1: An Entrance
by Malena Morling

In the city
     of leaks
and ghosts
     just past
The Casket
     Company
on Van Rennselaer
     Street
there is a
     building
with its front
     entrace
cemented
     shut.
And just
     above it
are the words:
     "No Trespassing."


Poem 2: Sunflower
by Federico Garcia Lorca

If I did love a cyclops
I would swoon
beneath his stronger gaze
sans eyelids.
O fiery sunflower, ay!


Poem 3: Sheba's Hesitation
by Rumi (of course)

Lovers of God, sometimes a door opens,
and a human being becomes a way
for grace to come through.

I see various herbs in the kitchen garden,
each with its own bed, garlic, capers, saffron,
and basil, each watered differently to help it mature.

We keep the delicate ones separate from the turnips,
but there's room for all in this unseen world, so vast
that the Arabian desert gets lost in it like a single hair

in the ocean. Imagine that you are Sheba
trying to decide whether to go to Solomon!
You're haggling about how much to pay

for shoeing a donkey, when you could be seated
with one who is always in union with God,
who carries a beautiful garden inside himself.

You could be moving in a circuit without wing,
nourished without eating, sovereign without a throne.
No longer subject to fortune, you could be luck itself,

if you would rise from sleep, leave
the market arguing, and learn that
your own essence is your wealth.

Hi!  It is a three-poem night, which you may or may not be glad to know differs a little bit from a Three Dog Night.  I have been reading a piece from Shambhala Sun, which my father once jokingly referred to as my "lesbian buddhist" magazine, because he didn't know what to do with its cover photo of a shaved-headed female teacher.  I'm guessing it was Pema Chodron, a favorite speaker and writer of mine. (Just to be clear, no lesbians or Buddhists were harmed in the making of my family.  It was a joke. A joke!  At least, that's what I'm telling myself.)

I have been interested in Eastern teachings ever since I can remember.  I don't know if it was passed down from my brother, or if was always something we both leaned towards.  I remember calling him once and asking what he was reading.  He replied, The Art of Happiness, by (His Holiness) the Dalai Lama.  The next time I called, I was delighted to learn that he had put down The Art of Happiness for a finance book that in my mind was, How to Get Rich and Retire Young, although I can't actually find a book with this title.  I may get in big trouble for writing all this, but this combination of true heart and honest earthliness is one of the reasons I love my big brother so, and find his company genius.

Anyway, that was a sidebar.  The real reason I am writing is to share the tiniest image in this article I read tonight called "Smile at Fear: Teachings on Bravery, Open Heart & Basic Goodness."  In the article, adapted from talks Pema Chodron gave on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's book, Smile at Fear, Pema Chodron says, "Fear is like a dot that emerges in the space in front of us and captures our attention."  She goes on to say that it is like a doorway that go one of two ways: to awareness or to more fear.  Actually, you should read the article to see what she says about it, because I lost focus when this image of fear as a tiny dot was introduced.  It sort of blew my mind, to see fear as this pin prick of a black dot in the air, something so tiny that it is almost a dust particle, but something that, when focused upon, expands and expands until it opens up like a rabbit hole and our mind jumps in, followed by our sweet body, and our whole heart and all of our good intentions, and everything gets tumbled and scrambled and sort of lost.

The article actually talks about befriending our fears - "touching" them, as a path to befriending and loving ourselves unconditionally, as you would a friend. (But how many friends do you really love unconditionally?  As I contemplate this, it occurs to me that I might have some work to do in the unconditionals department - for myself and others.)  Instead of thinking about befriending fears, however, I was thinking about that damned dot, and how completely humongous I can let my fears become.  Pema talks about the pointlessness of running away from fear, or disguising it, or numbing ourselves from it.  But I just kept thinking about how small that dot could be, and how big I sometimes make mine.

I was talking about fear with a friend today. We said, "Why so hard to stay in the heart?  Heart, why you so hard to befriend?"  The truth, of course, or it seems this way to me, is that it is MUCH harder to be out of the heart than to be in it, but it is more acceptible to be out of it.  If we aren't watching, acceptability - rather than sincerity - becomes our training.

I want to pause to say that, of course, this isn't everyone's training.  The majority generally rules in the world, but I know children being raised with the most intentional, supportive parents, children who are truly wild and open beings, and I know LOTS of open, loving teachers - including my own family members.  I want to be very clear about this.  World, I believe in you!  It's verrry easy to bemoan, bemoan.  And yet, I come for something different.  A little sumthin called LOVE.  Just kidding.  About the tone, I mean.  But otherwise, I'm very serious!

Pema Chodron gorgeously defines spiritual warriorship as "working on ourselves, developing courage and fearlessness and cultivating our capacity to love and care about other people."  Wowwee wow.  So lovely.  At the end of the article, there is an exerpty- thing from Chogyam Trungpa's Smile At Fear book, which describes "The Tender Heart of the Warrior." He writes, "Warriorship is so tender, without skin, without tissue, naked and raw...You have renounced growing a thick, hard skin.  You are willing to expose naked flesh, bone, and marrow to the world."  

Now that I write it, that last part sounds a little alien-movie/Die-Hard 3: lots of flesh and guts and face parts ripping around everywhere.  But I really dig the emphasis on tenderness, and that word itself is so tender.  I also am taken with the image and idea of renouncing your shield.

The whole article is an address of unconditional friendship to oneself.  Holy hard task, batman!  But worth a shot, right? What else are we here for, but to love.  And how can we fully love another until we can give the same grace to ourselves?

It is time for bed, but before the dreams begin, I leave you with an image and a lyric from my favorite band in the cosmos (zee Wilco).  No laughing at my grandma-like understanding of how to post pictures on this blog, please.  The lyric is somewhat risky, because if you think of your emotions as the seat of your heart, the lyric sounds like a betrayal.  But if you think of your heart as the seat of truth, and emotions as the dust particles and sea waves that are part of the whole kerblanging cosmos, then it can be like a renunciation of panic with eye toward the pie, everything a remembrance of peace, peace, peace.



After Midnight

Ed
by Louis Simpson

Ed was in love with a cocktail waitress,
but Ed's family, and his friends,
didn't approve. So he broke it off.

He married a respectable woman
who played the piano. She played well enough
to have been a professional.

Ed's wife left him...
Years later, at a family gathering
Ed got drunk and made a fool of himself.

He said, "I should have married Doreen."
"Well," they said, "why didn't you?"

I have loved this poem ever since I stumbled upon it, years ago when a friend gave me Garrison Keillor's Good Poems.  (Suppose it isn't rightly his - or is it?  Is this an interesting question--maybe only in Intro to Feminism courses: if someone compiles something, do they get their name on part of it...?)

Soooo, it's late and I am on vacation with family, and I just wanted to post this poem because I've been thinking a lot about why I delay my freedom/happiness/delight and how, really, no one cares what anyone else is up to.  I often give this as advice to sensitive (read: paranoid) friends that most people are so self-absorbed that they don't pay much attention to other people's flaws. 

Or is this self-absorption thing just a problem of mine? 

Seriously, I think a lot about binds - mostly the mental sort, and how to get free from the obsessions around which I wrap my bliss & power, rather than going with the flow, intuition, divinity, grace, etc. etc. 

(I just wrote grave instead of grace, which is up to something, too.  Sometimes I am blown away when I remember that I will die.  It sounds morbid but awareness of the short stay on earth--in this here body--is possibly the most humbling and liberating force there is.) 

Let's all go sky-diving, say?

Admittedly, this post is all jumbled, even the punctuation. I've also been accidentally setting the font on some posts to GINORMOUS and it makes me embarrassed to see but also reminds me of my friend whose emails arrive in two-story-high font, and it feels like she is cheering her hellos through my computer with a bullhorn. 

So, a big bullhorny shout to passion, to whatever it is you are reaching for.  And if it is hidden in a closet (guilty, guilty), to all I say: What are you waiting for?

Road River Tree Stone

Happy New Year!  But it's almost February!  Where did January go? 

Mine went to recovering from travel, sleeping and eating, plotting out the new year, cleaning out the old year, day dreaming, night dreaming, drawing, singing, praying, all with a little work sprinkled in.

I have been chewing on lots of quotes lately, and these have sustained me as much as beloved poems. The poems I hear have been wisping off the wings of black birds, creaking in the frozen pond I've been walking, and rolling down the loud and clear mesas along the shy blue reservoir in town.

I went to an Acro-yoga class last night where I touched other people's feet, received Thai massage from a stranger, and wobbled as the base while "flying" another stranger above me.  It was unnerving, revealing, and ultimately expansive. When I got home, I rearranged my whole office, so something must have cleared in the hour and a half class. 

My goal for 2011 (the word resolve seems to involve something more organic, where this choice is certainly deliberate)...is to be more vulnerable. This little Sut Nam station is part of that exercise, as is befriending perfect strangers, talking about my flaws and paranoias, asking for what I really want (i.e. a pair of red cowgirl boots as well as world peas), and flinging myself (or walking boldly) in the direction of my dreams. 

If my goal for 2011 is to be more vulnerable, then my resolution is to have fun. Having gone over some 2010 goals and seeing ones that missed the bar by a mile, I think the trick is to take the work out of homework and just see about the home part. To me this means making peace with my place on the earth, and just kicking around (hopefully in new cowgirl boots) in that space. Whatever this brings will be what needs to be. Right? This is my hypothesis, anyway.

So, what has your heart resolved to create in this gorgeous new year?  (I may be biased but it looks so bright to me now - my friends are: pregnant, new mothers, women contemplating babies, women birthing books, art projects, steaming platters of food...ok, they aren't actually birthing steaming platters of food. That would be disgusting. But there is a whole lot of inspired creation everywhere I look!). As you contemplate your goals, here are some words from the wise. Or, at least, the published :)

"I believe that one of the secrets to happiness is to work within the parameters of the reality of your life."  --Kenny Shopsin, in Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin

Eat Me is newly arrived at our house, given to us by a dear friend.  I hear tell it comes by the suggestion of Amelia, who has this really great blog. 

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men--that is genius."  --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

I had the very excited but erroneous thought at work today, Was Emersom, Lake, and Palmer inspired by R.W.E.?!  Prolly not, huh.

"The Creator made us for honoring Him (insert Her if you wish).
He (insert comfy pronoun) put in us the ability to work for the good of all.
One of the things He (ahem) did
Was give us ears, and ears are not mouths.
Ears were put on the side of our heads
So that we would hear all that goes on around us.
That's to let us know things before we talk.
Our mouths are on the front of our face
So that our words can be directed.
We're to use that gift of speech for specific purposes.
It should be limited, otherwise we can be mislead."
--Chief Leon Shenandoah, in a beautiful book called To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah, by Steve Wall, who also did a book called Wisdom Keepers

"Yoga is the rule book for playing the game of Life, but in this game no one needs to lose. It is tough, and you need to train hard. It requires the willingness to think for yourself, to observe and correct, and to surmount occasional setbacks. It demands honesty, sustained application, and above all love in your heart. If you are interested to understand what it means to be a human being, placed between the earth and sky, if you are interested in where you came from and where you will be able to go, if you want happiness and long for freedom, then you have already begun to take the first steps toward the journey inward."  --B.K.S. Iyengar, from Light on Life

I find it really really interesting that Native American elders and yoga philosophy talk about "being" or "becoming" a human being, as if it is not enough to be simply animal.  It suggests the choice we have in bringing about the human potential in the human body. In terms of the Christian tradition, I think about the fact that the most loving and compassionate teacher in this tradition (Hey-Zoos) is sent by God in human form. 

And lastly, "I set off in yoga seventy years ago when ridicule, rejection, and outright condemnation were the lot of a seeker through yoga even in its native land of India. Indeed, if I had become a sadhu, a mendicant holy man, wandering the great trunk roads of British India, begging bowl in hand, I would have met with less derision and won more respect. At one time, I was asked to become a sannyasin and renounce the world, but I declined. I wanted to live as an ordinary householder with all the trials and tribulations of life and to take my yoga practice to average people who share with me the common life of work, marriage, and children. I was blessed with all three, including a long and joyous marriage to my beloved wife, Ramamani, children, and grandchildren."  --B.K.S., Life on Life

This last one gives me such comfort. When I first read it, my jaw dropped open. It said exactly what I was hoping for in my life with, and helped me reconcile my desires for a family with my desires for a spiritual life. Now I see the two as beautifully intertwined. This quote perfectly introduces the yogic possibility of living ordinary days with extraordinary love.

Tim just came in jokingly singing Sheryl Crow's "If it makes you happy...it can't be that baa-aa-aad...," which reminds me of when my college roommate and I used to screech out that song at the top of our lungs while being transported around town in other people's cars. 

To friends, to exuberance, to happiness!

Little Statues

Summer Meadow
by Tomas Transtromer

There's so much we must be witness to.
Reality wears us so thin 
but here is summer at last:

a large airport--the controller brings
down planeload after planeload of frozen
people from outer space.

The grass and the flowers--here's where we land.
The grass has a green supervisor. 
I report to him.

I went to a friend's gathering on Friday night.  Heading in to her house, I grabbed my journal.   Was I planning to free write on a trip to the bathroom? I didn't try to make sense of it.  I just listened to the journal, which all but screamed, Take me with you!

We were gathering to celebrate a beautiful story my friend wrote.  Each of the women present shared a little piece of her own, personal story - the one we carry in our hearts and scribble on all day long.

When it was my turn to speak, I realized why the journal was there.  I was supposed to talk about my writing, how I have turned a corner of insecurity in my life and, still in the dark when it comes to the future, feel a subtle but significant decrease in fear.

Someone asked me to show something from the journal so I flipped to three drawings and passed them around.  I was somewhat embarrassed.  More pressing, however, was the very sweet and unashamed voice inside that said, Yes!  Share something.

The act was akin to stripping nude for me because I draw pictures like this: 




I think of myself as a dark and brooding person, because I experience my emotions very strongly.  But when I draw, I get a glimpse of something very sweet and innocent beneath all the turbulence: (fyi, the  purple elephant is not mine!)

When I was little, I loved to sit in my disheveled closet and sing.  I still love to sing, and, much to my own dismay, I still create disheveled spaces in a matter of minutes.  I was reminded of this when I passed my journal around, showing the frogs and rabbits and snakes that, at 32, I still love to draw.  

In a moment of vulnerability, I opened the doors I had built around what brings me great joy.  In doing so, I revealed what was beyond constraint.  I held up to the light that which wants to be seen.

The moral of this story?  Go forth and embarrass yourself!

Okay, maybe we shouldn't all run out to embarrass ourselves.  Maybe expose yourself is a better phrase, but we all know that's not a perfect one either.  Determining the right spaces and times to expose your underbelly is perhaps one of the dances of this life.

I am reminded of a poster that my friend's mother hangs in her kitchen.  It is of a man in a trench coat flashing a statue on the street. The text reads, Expose Yourself to Art!  I love the absurdity of the poster, and the underlying loyalty it proposes between the individual and the receptive abundance of art. Finding a safe space for all my emotions is, I think, one of the reasons that I write.

In the circle of people sharing their lives, I was reminded that when one person crosses a threshold, we all do.  As Susan Piver says of the vulnerability of a broken heart, (or in this case, a vibrant whole one that I want to hide): That's where all the good stuff is. 

Behind the Veil

What Is Real

Flesh or cloth or water or wind
hair or feathers or rock
jumbling completeness
curve of the horns
our reaction to anecdote

There are trees, flowers, crags 
there is a river
a spring with rocky basin
full of crystaline water
understood in its essence

Everything
the cult of chastity

I began this post the day after Thanksgiving, when my world had returned to its normal pace.  Already I miss the slow ease of Thanksgiving day, the mysterious quiet outside.  Tim joked that everyone he saw when he walked the dog that day looked shady.  It is a small puzzle to think about who is outside on the day when most people are lounging on couches, munching peanuts, catching up with each other, everyone waiting for the feast. 

Enough talk about food!  Although some would say there is never enough.  And since I find myself curiously attracted to Italians and partial Italians in this lifetime, most of my reading audience may feel this way. I don't know what this friends collection of mine is about.  Also weird is that almost every one of my best friends went to Catholic church growing up, a fact that I find eerily wondrous.  I mean, what is it about saints, or guilt (ha!) that attracts me?

Okay, enough talk about Catholicism, too. After my previous post about gospel music, Jesus, and activism, I feel a little sheepish.  It is always a little difficult for me to own my fascination with religion, for a number of reasons.  The first is that religion is such a personal topic, and is often handled so clubbishly - by which I mean, people either swing it around in a threatening way, or bonk you over the head with it, with their literalism, or lack of subtlety.

But I know that my objection to too much discussion of religion has something to do most of all with the technicalities of language. In pre-wedding counseling sessions, my dear family friend, Molly, the Presbyterian pastor who married Tim and I, told us that one of the biggest challenges in any relationship is finding the right language so that you know what the heck the other person really means when you are talking.  Every couple has to do this, she said, but for two writers (writers being something both Tim and I consider ourselves, on good days), the challenge of finding the right words will possibly be even more difficult.

I love this woman.  I always have.  She has snow white hair and the bluest eyes, and has painted the dining room of her house an improbably deep royal blue.  Some things easily impress me, like the fact that she put out cheese straws and bourbon-coated pecans during one of our pre-wedding meetings, and, when Tim and I squeezed in a cross-country trip to her mountain home in North Carolina in order to make it to one of our three required counseling sessions, and arrived at 9p.m. in time for a black-out, we were greeted by Molly and her husband, who was fresh from an ice-cold shower.  We all warmed ourselves by a fire and talked in the dark until it was time to turn in for the night. 

I willingly admit to being skittish about marriage.  I am skittish about most things I really care about - yoga, writing, even friendship - anything that forces me to put my tender heart on the line.  But when I start to focus on the perils of marriage, moments like this one line up in my mind, rows and rows of grace-filled artworks bearing witness to the magic I've stumbled across by the moonlight of my relationship.

Back to semantics, for a pinch.  I now recall that even Molly and I disagreed about the wording of one line in our marriage service and we debated it for nearly thirty minutes one day.  This was the day before Tim arrived at the wedding site, so it was just Molly and I seated in her home study.  (Well, Molly was seated.  I squatted on the ground in Malasana, propping my elbows on the inside of my knees, crouching my hips close to the ground so that they would not lock up in all the stress of planning, negotiating schedules, and balancing the various visions for the wedding day.)

Molly and I went back and forth, back and forth, trying to edit the last line of the final prayer so that it resonated with my...I want to say beliefs, but truly, it was my sense of poetry.  We couldn't get it right.  We couldn't rewrite it so that we were both happy with it, and every time I said, Oh, just go with the original, and she read it back to me, I made a face like a child forced to eat spinach.  We finally gave up and just cut the line entirely.

In B.K.S. Iyengar's book, Light on Life, he says that he avoids using the word "soul" before a certain point in his writing because, he writes, "The word Soul usually has such strong religious connotations that people either accept or dismiss it without reflection."  Aside from Mr. Iyengar's jubilant mug plastered on the front cover, his caterpillar eyebrows and warrior-like necklaces, there is much to admire about this book.  (Though I admit to using the book as a poster of sorts in my kitchen.  When people call, I say that I'm having tea with B.K.S. and will have to call them back.  The book cover is also inspiring me to someday rock three initials plus a surname.  So badass!)

In this one statement, Mr. I. has said it all.  He has especially summed up how I feel about discussing church and using the words Jesus, Christian, even words like Yoga or Vegetarian, in casual conversation. Because if we don't have all the minutes we need to have to go into our personal definitions of those words, are we really having a conversation?  Or are we throwing out words like rockets, that may shoot past someone's head, their eyes glazed, or shoot right into their heart, making accidental friends out of a misunderstanding.

When I say the word Jesus, I know it means a very different thing to some people than it does to me.  I realize that sounds incredibly, stupidly obvious.  But I think that is one of the miracles of life - that meaning is so personal, that language is both pliant and historical.  That the bible can be alive, so to speak, just as any book of poetry can be.

I didn't realize that I wanted to talk so much about my wedding experience, but another anecdote comes to mind.  Nearly a year before the wedding itself, my mother bid on a cake for us.  I don't know how it worked, exactly, except that a very talented woman offered her services at a silent auction.  I like to picture my mother lunging for this particular sign-up sheet like a crazed woman at a sample shoe sale.  In any case, Tim and I had our cake made by this very talented woman, and when I met with her at her home, along with my mother, to discuss what kind of cake I wanted, she sat me down and looked me in the eyes.  I also like to pretend that she held my hands at this moment, but that's not true.  It was just a very intense moment.  She held my gaze and told me in  stony dedication that she takes the sacrament of marriage very seriously, and that she treats the cake as part of the wedding day sacrament.  I nodded along, imaginarily took my hands back from hers, and went back to the photo album of cakes she has made throughout the years.

When we got into the car and pulled away from the house, my mother apologized to me.  "I had no idea she was going to say all that about the sacrament," she said.  My brain was awash with cake flavors, icing patterns, and big fondant bows.  Then I remembered the weird intensity of the hand-holding moment. (See? I can't let it go.)  But it hadn't bothered me.  I have learned to translate the language of Christian tradition to something that makes sense in my life, in my heart.  Sometimes it doesn't take much of a change to make sense of the wording, but it is this translation that feeds me in church services, that makes it possible for me to even attend many. 

At this point in my life, I would not be caught dead using the word sacrament, because it doesn't have a real meaning to me.  It is a hand-me down word, one given from formal elders that I don't know well enough.  But I also take very seriously what happened during the service on my wedding day.  I think of it as an alchemical transpiration. All the things that were ostensibly the same after our wedding were, internally, undeniably different. 

And it had to do not just with the words that we exchanged, or the blessings Molly bestowed upon us, or the music that swelled in my body as we sang, although of course it had to do with all those things.  But it had just as much to do with the rows and rows of relatives and friends lining the pews of the church, and with the eyes of my little cousin (now a big man, and a father himself) watering as my father and I walked down the aisle, and with the flowers spread like a garland forest around the choir loft, and my sweet sisters trembling in the line next to us, perhaps remembering their own vows, or simply bearing witness to the divine frailty that braids with love in commitment.  Whatever you want to call it, something holy filled the room.  Even if it was the promise of chilled wine waiting for us in the garden when the service ended. I count it all holy.

The poem above is a found poem, one owed to my dear friend Corinne, for whom I once made a collage and, embarrassed, never gave to her.  It is in a pile of things to send out to friends across the country.  What can I say?  Things happen slowly for me.  But it is a relief that the things I care about keep circling and circling in my heart.  I only wish I could gather them all at once.  But they are patient, so patient.  They stand when they are finally called.  I am starting to understand that the heart cannot betray us.  It is only the other way around.