There's No Place Like Home

I'm currently teaching poetry once a week to fifth graders who were affected by the immigration ICE Raids in our town. Tomorrow's topic is home. What is it? Where do we find it? How can we define it wherever we are? Many of these children and/or their families face deportation in the next few months. They are, for sure afraid and the message I want to leave with them is by Rumi: “Fear is the cheapest room in the house – I’d like to see you in better living conditions.”

I started thinking about metaphors for home, my own writing about home. Here are two examples:

Single Person Dwelling

I am many roomed
and every year there are fewer corners,
less closets, softer lighting, and ceilings that vault and vault.
Songs whisper through my walls:
cotton lullabies that rock me to sleep,
velvet green ballads, safe in their loneliness, and sometimes
the floors quake with a Barbra Streisand sing-along.

Laughter surrounds my walls
like tree frogs in the garden. Someday, soon, I will open
the back door and those leggy frogs will spring into the kitchen,
fill the sink and we will all croak and chuckle contagiously.
But for now I am content in knowing they are just outside the window.

A formal entrance, the front door, opens to an orderly white.
Exacting angle of an ottoman and precise tilt
of the picture frames may cause you to pause and ask,
“Unapproachable? Cool? Elegant, but stiff?”
Do not hesitate.
Do not pause. Please, come in.
Turn my rooms upside down.
Leave your garden footprints on the China Silk carpet.

Yes, the toothpaste is neatly rolled from the bottom up.
Yes, spices and books are alphabetized, magazines fanned
on the coffee table, and socks color-coded in their drawer.
But, poems fly across rooms in random chaotic scribbles.
Furniture is shoved aside when the need to dance arrives.
Passions stack up for the weekend
when a mere word like “mellifluous” can extend the day
into a ‘never get out of my bathrobe’ flurry,
a tigerlily tangle, an elegant mess.

Orchids bloom in steamy bathrooms, but die on precious shelves.
Can you smell the wet carnations, vanilla, violets, and bread?
Do you notice the ladybug on the light switch -- in my many rooms?

In my many rooms there is moonlight that slides in
through partially opened blinds; moonlight like memory
that lays in blue-white streams over elbows, wrists, and fingertips—
moonlight like memory that cannot be held.

On Writing

"The goal of writing is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest."

~ William Carlos Williams

Where Does the Poetry Come From?

On a Sunday morning

after coffee in bed

and a book

and a word like mellifluous

tickles my ears and tongue.

I do not know this word,

this mystery,

so I explore the dictionary

then think of honey

and remember

those Bit-O-Honey candy bars

that we kids bought with dimes

from the general store at Balsam Lake.

I remember

those northern lakes

many years later

when I went skinny-dipping with a lover

I think of bitter honey

and I write it down.

Honey

Mellifluous memories
harden like taffy candy
Cracked on the sidewalk
Bit ‘o Honey
Shattered bit ‘o love

Tongue the edge
hot lick saliva
Seal you back
soften in my belly hold
Barely

Lurid butter-yellow pieces
trapped in paper folds
Wrapper cracks
and barely holds

I long for the wholeness
that never was
But you were bought, already
already
broken

Reflection onf Thich Nhat Hanh and Negative Seeds

Between My Neighbors and Me

I begin with me,
my garden, my internal landscape.
It's all I can do
with these autumn leaves
that bluster over neighboring fences and walls,
leaves of anger, resentment, jealousy, and fear.
Walls that raise more walls,
fences that separate us
from our humanity.

It's all I can do
to try, keep trying every day,
every way I know how
to blow those rotting
leaves away
in this season before death.
And yet,
damned if those leaves
don't just drift right back,
silently in the night,
to my side of the fence,
while I sleep,
not trying so hard,
not trying at all to resist the wall
or rake away the leaves.

It's the walls, really
that must come down,
the fences between us,
that divide us.
It's not the leaves of emotion
that spread seeds of negativity.
It is the walls
that must come down
so we can gather all those leaves,
the leaves that make us
who we are,
into one bountiful pile.
Then and only then
can we leap, weep
and laugh together
beneath our shared oak tree.


-Wendy Thompson, 9/15/2007

September 11 and six years of still breathing

Today I decided to fast in memory of 9/11 and also to support the forgiveness of debt. I've also been studying Thich Nhat Hahn's practices and Buddhist breathing practice of breathing in the negative and out the positive.

I inhale
debts of the world.
How can we owe anyone anything?
I exhale the generosity of God, who has
given all.

One of Hahn's Gathas I've chosen for the week is:
"Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion."

It is so hard for me to do this, both wake up smiling and live fully in the moment. I am such a planner and spend much time in memories, and my depression makes waking difficult.

Know I
am breathing in
reluctant wakefulness
of morning. Know I
am breathing
out dreams.

Know I
am breathing in
latte's chicory scent
I am breathing out today's
long fast.

Staying present and noticing on the drive to work is difficult and actually dangerous:

I lean
softly into the curve
of highway 405. I am easy
easy like Sunday morning that plays on FM103.
Drive time.

An organic
produce truck rumbles overhead.
I am present and aware of the barreling
Swift Movers and police sirens coming from behind
my exit.

I am
nearly cut off because
I drifted into memories of MayDay
and turning away from my intended 6th Avenue
destination, work;

and instead
turned onto North Burnside
to meet my lover for kisses.
How do I stay present between the past
and future?

Breathe in ~
purpose in the office.
Yet, work isn't all there is.
So I breathe out freedom to just be
simply me.

The power of poetry: Poet Sharon Olds Declines White House Invitation

This is an open letter from the poet Sharon Olds to Laura Bush decliningthe invitation to read and speak at the the National Book Festival in Washington, DC.Sharon Olds is one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed poets living in America today. Read to the end of the letter to experience her restrained, chilling eloquence.
"Dear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure,and the inner and outer news, it delivers. And the concept of a communityof readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom,become our teachers.When you have witnessed someone non-speaking and almost non-moving spellout, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing.When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely non-speaking and non-moving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song. So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top" and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to. I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness - as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war. But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration. What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us. So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.
Sincerely,SHARON OLDS"

This exchange was forwarded to the original sender by the famed American opera singer, Marilyn Horne, who had also turned down a similar invitation some time ago, as follows:"Brava! I did not write a letter when I was asked a few yrs. ago to sing for the Christmas Tree lighting at the White House. I refused, but did not go public about it. I just could not be seen as supporting this regime. It was the first term, too......." MARILYN HORNE

Why I Write

Kim Stafford writes, "Life is a universe of fragments yearning for coherence." And this is why I write, for synthesis, wholeness. I write to understand the fragments of my sadness, like individual cello notes longing for both the harmony and dissonance that create a concerto. I write because there is dew on the Canna and I miss you ~ yet I'm not really supposed to miss you and I don't understand. I write to make sense of why some people irritate more than delight me. I write to try to make sense of a senseless war, of hostile treatment of others, of differences in beliefs and the need to be right. I write from wonder.

Paint peels off the summer deck. What does it remind me of, teach me to re-member? Antique gray pushes through a fresh coat of green ~ indentations of the past converge with now in a message ~ a message of what? Planks of pine are filled with woody knots, whirls of trapped grains pooled together to create curves of intrigue, or are they bumps in an otherwise straight and narrow road. What layers of old are ready to peel from me this day, this weekend, this minute, starting yesterday? Paint chips, morning stillness, crimson honeysuckle and hummingbird busyness, blackberries in an orange bowl. And ease. I wonder.

These associations, oblique to cliche, can transform me if I choose to notice. If I listen to the universe outside of me, the large and the small of it, maybe I will begin to make sense of what churns within. Maybe I will begin to create my own whole constellation of random stars, asters from dis-asters, lucidity from these fragments of light. And wonder.

Garden Beds on 54th Street

Garden Beds on 54th Street

No more garden to tend with winter tears.
Pink lady iris will bloom without me.
It was not you who made me cry, my dear,

but rather the dark soil on my boots, too many years
weeding through bleeding hearts and rambling sweet peas 
No more garden to tend with winter tears.

Did you know that trillium plucked will not, for seven years, appear?
You never promised me or arranged a single guarantee.
It was not you who made me cry, my dear.

I was just a tourist through your beds, that was clear,
planting impatiens, a hapless rose, yearning for intimacy,
but no more a garden to tend with winter tears.

Elusive blend of petals and rain, lilies and Shakespeare,
we were both gardeners then, a laconic iris of discovery,
and this made me cry, my dear,

that like sundials in the shade, I fear
our wisp of time has gone to seed.
No more a garden to tend with winter tears.
It was not you, really, who made me cry, my dear.

Prize winning poem

This poem won a prize in the Willamette Writer's Kay Snow contest:

Flow on River
(with homage to Whitman)

Once I was
naked
on a rocky river bank
flesh on granite
tender curves
a lone drape and flow
over rugged stone
at ease
and at ebb with the ebb-tide

Once I was
stoic
baking in a summer sun
squinting
at the world
and wondering
why I stayed
at water’s edge
while fine spokes of light
glanced like
shimmering gems
off the Klickitat
Flow on, crested and scalloped-edged waves
flow on

Once you told me
you like to read the obituaries --
“Not ‘like’ as in it brings me pleasure
to read them,” you said,
happy to be alive and 50,
“but take this one for example:
23 years old, gone…
makes you think,
don’t you think?
What if you only
had 23 years, or five
or just a 3-hour river run?”

Makes you think,
don’t you think,
about the choice
to flaunt away the day,
just receive the summer sky.

Are you ready, you ask,
to pass through a class III?
“You know, it’s okay
to back out,” you say
as a curious white goose
bobs effortlessly by
suspend here and everywhere

but then I go nowhere
so I know
it’s not okay
to stop short of the finish line
shy of sunset
it’s not okay
so I catch one last gaze
from your loving and thirsty eyes
and dig my paddle
in white water
drenching me
I follow you
into the V
into the splash
of canyon shadows
and fears
and mere seconds pass
soaked and grinning
the moment splendors me
then spits us out
from the river’s tongue,
alive

Seek justice, love, kindness, walk humbly

I just received a letter from my friend Char who has completed her first year of Buddhist retreat where she meditates all day in solitude. She says she would like to be in retreat for the rest of her life, but will continue only until 2010. I think, 2010, that is so far away, but really, it’s only three years from now. I don’t claim to understand what she does in retreat or why she is called to separate herself so fully from the world; maybe though, in my ignorance, she is not separating, but entering true intimacy, contributing love and healing to this wounded world in a dimension I only dip into for a few short scraps of time in my week.

Along with paragraphs of gratitude, Char sends photos of her new retreat space behind her house, a “mini-barn of enlightenment.” I want that space, that solitude, that clearness and quiet for myself, too. I want to step out of the busyness of my days, the dis-integration of this world where we resort to cruelty and killing in the name of freedom, independence, righteousness, democracy, and peace. We are fighting for peace! I am fighting for peace within me. Every inch of me is tugged by someone(s) in need and my compassion is spent. I long to be with one Mary Oliver poem all day, stare at an uncluttered pine paneled wall, be still, just be in quiet, simple grace. I am certain that is not an accurate description of Char’s days, but from my weary vantage point, I imagine her life in a diaphanous ease. My heart, mind and soul are jammed with horrific news of each day, crisis management, reaching, grasping longing for communion, opening my heart only to have it slashed and burned as a result of someone else’s fear of intimacy. Anger rises in me and I am desperate to turn that anger into change, into slashes of red paint for frescos of enlightenment; I am desperate to turn my anger into action toward justice, into slaps of a kayak paddle through the river, making waves, into fierce loving, fierce rightness, fierce loyalty, fierce prayer, but where do I begin? Iraq? The orphans in Darfur? The undocumented workers interned in Tacoma? The hideous repetition of our shadowed pasts? The liars, the cheats, the combusting egos, the abusers and users, the game players, the politicians, the Pharaoh in the White House, me? There are just too many notes in my life and I long for a singular bell tone, one focus. Of course, I know I must begin with me, the violence within me, the self-abuse, the avoidance, addictions, fears, cravings, ego-driven actions. Char’s practice, as I perceive it, is that beginning with self, reintegration of self so that we stop contributing to the off-centeredness that threatens to destroy us.

A friend told me that her overall impression of my blog postings was that there was an unquenchable longing, thirst, desire for intimacy. Her take is accurate. I am seeking intimacy, ultimately with the One Creator God. I do seek at-One-ment. But so much of my journey has been about a mediated experience of atonement, seeking intimacy with other mortal souls to reach an ultimate intimacy with God; I have neglected to sit for too long in intimacy with myself. Perhaps that is what is so attractive to me about Char’s practice and the photographs of her mediation space.

I trust that Char is performing invaluable work in her practice and I wish to do the same in mine. She asks me how my “word work” is going. I have neglected and avoided the word work, detoured through a superficial dating relationship that circled through a whole lot of nothing, exhausted myself with menial tasks at a less than challenging job, worried about money, only sang on Sundays, barely wrote, barely gave a nod to my higher purpose. (Okay, I know I am being a bit hard on myself, I am doing good work, have been doing good work, but it just doesn’t feel like enough right now.) Char reminds me to get back to my practice of centering myself, listening for the care-full words, being courageous in new ways of being, shedding my fear, and donning the sheer, gossamer poetry of truth.

Power of Words

As more of my poetry gets out in the world, as I enter the field of poetry/journal therapy, I must be conscious of a few things:

1) First do no harm
2) Say only what is necessary, kind, and true
3) What has the power to heal has the power to hurt
4) Words bear power in their lucidity and universality. Sometimes readers think that if they resonate with the words they are also resonating with the writer; they believe they know the writer and make assumptions of false intimacy. Beware. Be careful. Be care-filled.

Am I best that way?

"I am lonely, lonely
I was born to be lonely
I am best that way..." ~ William Carlos Williams

Was I born to fly solo
cries the red-tailed hawk
as she canvases the desert sky?

Was I born to be alone
asks the single thistle in the sand,
her scarlet center aching to bloom?

Was I born to be lonely
coos the mourning dove,
her song echoing through redrock caves

And what of the one
cluster of paintbrush,
the one magpie perched
on a manzanita branch,
the mariposa lily,
cream white petals
flung open to the heat
of each day?

What of the one poet
hiking alone
with a single pack
a single pen
and a single page?
She is alone by choice
she notes
it is best that way
when the desert is in full bloom.
It is best that way,
alone sometimes
she is best that way,
alone.
She is best
alone, or not, but for now
she is
and she is no less
alone.

It has been awhile

I have been immersed in academic writing, preparing old work for poetry submissions (just sent out my first full length poetry manuscript), and so haven't been as communicative on a blog scale.

But here are a few poems:

Living at the Limit of the Habitable World
Alone,
the albatross,
no wish to swallow sky,
cries out the salt of sea water
my home




(Wo)
Man-i-
fest light.
May I please have
epiphany –
seamlessly celebrate
reason and mystery –
together in one small yellow
corner of un-i-verse, to claim
my own
my whole

A Lenten Question

Encountering Dangerous Beauty

Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands,
parched places of apathy, or are you
agitated in desert wastelands ~

awake in the dark light where mystics stand,
or do you slump in your usual Sunday pew?
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?

Do you fill your life with privileges of every brand
or do you empty your cup of all you once knew ~
agitated in desert wastelands.

What do you require to acquire? How do you fill your hands?
Can you reduce possessions to just a few
or are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?

Commercialize, privatize, merchandise: your life in a can.
What do you get from all this? What do you construe ~
agitated in desert wastelands?

To bloom in the desert, don’t you understand,
you must let go of the last hope of morning dew.
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands
or vitally agitated in desert wastelands?

writing prompt response

Visualize an edge. It can be an edge of something tangible or of experience. In as much detail as you can, feel the physical setting -- colors, temperatures (it's cold way down there Laura Nyro sings), textures, sounds -- and write what happens.

When I was a kid, younger than 10, I had a recurring dream about a narrow suspension bridge. I had to walk it to the other end, where the light was. On either side of the two-foot wide bridge was an abyss (How I knew the word abyss at the ripe old age of eight, I don't know, but I also knew the word infinity in kindergarten. "There must be an infinite number of cookies in that box," I commented during a lesson on estimates.). I knew I couldn't fall and I couldn't jump into the place of nothing, giving up. The abyss echoed with my cries, sometimes glowed red in the dark, sometimes spun a chilly whirlpool of nothingness. As unappealing as walking this bridge path was, the abyss was less appealing.

At the time, I wasn't so wide as I am now, my feet not so long, I was a delicate child, a long drink of water, my Aunt called me. I played soccer and kick ball, was the square dance expert in 4th grade. I wore shorts under my pleated, seersucker dresses and swung round and round on the parallel bar, my long stringy hair sweeping the dusty ground at every rotation. I was absolutely capable of traversing this precipice of my dream, yet I was still afraid. The bridge was invisible, surrounded by fog or dry ice, an eerie werewolf movie setting.

When my older brothers were charged with babysitting my sister and me, they forced us to watch Dark Shadows and any werewolf or vampire thriller that filled the black and white television screen of my childhood. We lived in the Pennsylvania woods, in a four-story country home with no curtains on the windows. We didn't need curtains for privacy. We had trees. My brothers would begin the evening following our TV dinners with a news story. "Did you hear about the crazy guy who escaped from the Bedlam House?" Then, as we are watching horror flicks on the boob tube, one brother disappears with the excuse of homework.

Suddenly, a knock on the door. Parents aren't due home until after bedtime. We don't lock our doors in the country. Nobody visits us at night. Stomach tightens. Eyes dart at every foreign sound.

A tree branch scratches against the night-blackened window, or is it a branch? Goosebumps.

I don't know how to swear yet and I'm not allowed to say, "Oh my God." But a hand appears, pressed against the winter window pane.

That face.

I scream.

My brother laughs. That face, my other brother leering through the window as dry-ice covers the gravesites on the television and scary music from some unremembered composer imprints my fear of fog.

I cannot walk this foggy precipice. I cannot see the pathway. I cannot see at all, but I have other senses, and I don’t know the name for it then, but I am a kinesthetic learner. I feel my way through life. So that’s what I do in my dream. Each step an experiment in survival, I inch my way along. In the dream, I never fall and I never reach the end. Black and white as all dreams, black and white as the old RCA television, I was called to live in gray and still do. There are no absolutes, only color and courage over fear, and sweet tension of cello strings in horror movies anticipating a pinpoint of light at the very end. There is only infinity and the abyss. Take your pick.

Listen In and Out

Reading Response to a lecture: Parks, Suzan-Lori. Portland Arts & Lecture Series. Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland, Oregon. 8 February 2007.

She skips onto the stage, tosses her waist length dreadlocks over her shoulders and plants her feet wide and pigeon-toed like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann. Suzan-Lori, who changed her name from Susan to Suzan as the result of a typo on a promo poster, dons a coral knee-length straight skirt, gray top, and calf-high black cowboy boots. With hands on hips, elbows and shoulders thrust slightly forward in oxymoronic cuteness, knees locked back, she reminds me of Bad Becky, a childhood neighbor girl. I expect Suzan to draw toy pistols from a hip holster and zap the audience with literary witticisms. Instead, this 42-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner (Topdog/Underdog (2001)) begins with, “Anna Nicole Smith died today, and you know, people laugh, and it’s supposed to be funny, but, you know, she was a person too. As nutty and wacky and loopy, she was a person, too…so just, like, wave to her as she leaves the building, because she was something.” Such compassion emanated throughout her 90 minute homily. “Listen in and out,” she advises through a slight lisp. Then she rolls to the outside of her feet in an unassuming way and asks how to “conduct oneself in the presence of the spirit.”

I am temporarily seized by this muse, by the suggestion to treat inspiration “as an honored guest” and “entertain all my far-out ideas.” Only occasionally in my 46 years have I fully entertained the muse and my edgy, unconventional ideas. Typically, I am so consumed by a need for approval that I do not dare blurt out the true meanderings of my mazy mind. As a child, I spent most of my time in my imagination, creating fantasy lives when I was bored needing to get out of yard work, or detach from a socially painful elementary school scenario. I visited complex story lines every night I couldn’t fall asleep. I used the index finger on each hand to represent a character and created dialogues between the two fingers in the back seat of my mom’s lime green station wagon. I would whisper, not wanting to be caught, and occasionally my mother would ask what I was doing back there. “Nothing,” I would lie as I worked out the hurts of my youth on my index fingers.

Parks also revealed her imaginary childhood adventures under the piano waiting for her mother’s high heels to click by. She read Harriet the Spy and Hotel for Dogs and then, when asked, “What are you doing under there?” responded with, “I’m writing my novel.”

Wish I had thought of that line for myself.

“The play is always happening,” she declares. “I just plucked something out of the ether.” Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play a day for a year. Her efforts resulted in the recent publication of 365 Days/365 Plays (2006). Many of the works are in production at theaters across the country. If the voices tell you to write a play a day for a year, you say “OK!” Parks explained. “In the presence of the spirit, you don’t say, ‘What do you mean?’ ”

I remember reading that Georgia O’Keefe painted a painting a day for the discipline, or perhaps to stir her artistic compost.

I started writing a poem a day for a while.

Then it became a poem a week, a poem a month, and finally a poem if I happened to be inspired and made the time to write it down.

I slighted the spirit yet again ~ didn’t even offer her a glass of wine when she came to visit because I was too determined to lead a proper life with a proper income from a acceptable job, own a house, keep it clean, go to bed by 10:00 and never reveal the true outrageousness of my spirit. After 1825 days of depression, I finally decided to quit my stable job, sell my clean house, stay up after midnight, and trust the voice that dared me to write, fill that life with constant creation and open every pore to the spirit with a resounding, “Yes!”

So here I am, signed up for a semester at Goddard and writing a Villanelle a day, well, not quite every day, but the point is, I let myself be consumed by the spirit, in love with the spirit, and I listen to words outside my own undulating mind.

My good friend and housemate Donna sent me a card while I was at Goddard. “Gazing out the window while rinsing the morning dishes, she chased her thoughts in circles, until they escaped through the screen and onto the mulberry tree. From a distance they actually made sense.” On the back of the card by Susan Mrosek it read, “A person needs a place to unfold their truths and extract the humor. That place is the Pondering Pool. Perhaps I’ll see you there.”

So here I am, in the ‘Pondering Pool’, wondering about the space between and the power of language within that space. I long to breathe only the ether that Suzan-Lori Parks speaks of; I long to be immersed in synonyms and similes, hyperbole and raw truth, the day to day 365 every day fascination with language as a symbol for enunciating our human condition. I stepped out to the edge of the tide and the shoreline; now I walk the wavy waters of artistic unknowing and, like Parks, I hope to go to Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse and remember who I am and who I am supposed to be.

Ash Wednesday

This is my fifth year with ash on my forehead. The church I attend conducts a moving Ash Wednesday service that invites us to make clay sculptures, burn what we need to let go of, wash our hands in warm water, anoint ourselves with oil, take communion, and receive the ashes of atonement. I've written several poems about this experience over the years. Here they are:

(2003)
I am not afraid to drive in the rain
to church
with the radio and me blasting
Melissa Etheridge
I am your passion, your promise, your end.
I am not afraid to drive to church in the rain
out of ashes and darkness
into New life
and wilderness
I am not afraid to step in
to a moment of clay
shell empty
not afraid to create thick red lilies
out of playdoh
with round pure white centers
that rest against a receptive bowl

Can I not do with you
just as this potter has done?

I hold in my praying hands
the clay
and fear not.

I am not afraid to dip my fingers
in the swirling warm waters of salvation
while hips sway
and sweet vanilla oil of forgiveness
drips from my heart
I am not afraid to remember
communion
union

I burn fear and spread the ashes
a cross
my forehead
oh blue flame of eternal love
enter my heart in the place of forever
refined

I am not afraid to step out
exit prayer
enter poetry
on secular sidewalks
I wear a bold testament to faith
a scarlet “A”
unAshamed
I step out
into darkness
fearless in my knowing
that I alone
am marked
I long for a hand of friendship
as stranger’s eyes avert
as if I am disabled
handicapped by my declaration of faith

I sit through the stories of women I don’t know
women I have yet to love
and I quiver with the first gasp of fear
I am no longer home
here
I ask how am I to move with Grace
between poetry and prayer?
Only if my poetry is my prayer

Take me back to sanctuary
certain of You
and not afraid
I press my wrists to my inscribed forehead
not out of shame
but as a way to quiet my faith
and humble my love
humble as dust and ashes
I am not afraid to leave the familiar
and enter the unknown

I am not afraid to drive home in the rain
alone
and, and, and


Finding Form (March 2004)
"Can I not do with you just as this potter has done?"

Put your hands in the clay
Put my hands in the clay
Let the heat of our hands
the heat of our histories
sculpt the cool amorphous mass
Let the heat of our hands
our fingers
curl, stretch, dig,
unfurl our lives
sculpt our love
Let the heat rise above the coolness
of fear and unknowing
Rise and shape the new

Encountering Dangerous Beauty (2/11/07)

Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands,
parched places of apathy, or are you
agitated in desert wastelands ~

awake in the dark light where mystics stand,
or do you slump in your usual Sunday pew?
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?

Do you fill your life with privileges of every brand
or do you empty your cup of all you once knew ~
agitated in desert wastelands.

What do you require to acquire? How do you fill your hands?
Can you reduce possessions to just a few
or are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands?

Commercialize, privatize, merchandise: your life in a can.
What do you get from all this? What do you construe ~
agitated in desert wastelands?

To bloom in the desert, don’t you understand,
you must let go of the last hope of morning dew.
Are you asleep in uninhabited salt sands
or vitally agitated in desert wastelands?

The Birds

While in Vermont we visited an odd little science museum begun by Horace Fairbanks. There were several "paintings" made from butterfly wings and bugs, yes, really beetles and things. I was most drawn to the taxidermy exhibit of tropical birds of paradise followed by the fashion exhibit of the hats made out of these birds.

Price of Beauty

The birds of paradise pay
fascinating feathery frills
marketed for millinery trade
magenta bellies and emerald throats

Fascinating feathery frills
a plume craze into extinction
magenta bellies and emerald throats
women wear the males on their heads

A plume craze into extinction
one ounce of feathers for two ounces of gold
women wear the males on their heads
courtship props of the highest price

One ounce of feathers for two ounces of gold
I would just die to have that hat.
Courtship props of the highest price
the birds of paradise pay

The Villanelle

Looks like blogging is going to help me in my studies. I am researching poetry forms, looking at villanelles right now and would love your feedback. What does the poem say to you? Apologies for the MLA citing in the intro...I need to write a critical, formal essay and these are my notes:

The villanelle began as an Italian rustic field song, sung as a round, which most likely accompanied various stages of farm tasks. This poetic form might be classified as a work song, a form most identified with African-American heritage involving repetition with the rhythm of the task. The song-like origins of the form unconsciously allow us to enter the language of spirit. A liberated language, beyond words, beyond utterances, beyond non-verbal communication, the language of spirit is an integration of all three forms of communication in a story without syntax – a story that divorces itself from context in order to generate the new. The villanelle was revived by the French, via Jean Passerat who gave the form its current metrical and rhyme structure. Oscar Wilde unleashed the form into the 20th century with his villanelle written in 1891. The contemporary appeal for such a rigid form, according to Strand and Boland (8), is that it refuses a linear narrative, and instead cultivates a spiraling repetition that allows both the reader and the poet to experience a transformational déjà vu. Like the double helix at the core of our being, a spiral motion and shape allows us to witness where we have been without going back and glimpse at where we are going without charging forward before we are ready. “Its repeated lines, the circularity of its stanzas, become, as the reader listens, a repudiation of forward motion, of temporality and therefore, finally, of dissolution” (Strand 8). The villanelle is a form that remains in the present; an ideal form for holding in the thin places of our lives while still having the velcrox of the known with the possibility of re-configuration or resurrection into the new unknown. As Dorothee Soelle says in her book on mysticism and resistance, “We need a new language in order to plunge into the cloud of unknowing” (Soelle 59).

If a man falls in a forest

will he rise
from clay and solitude, by degrees,
through a blessed throat of communion cries

he lies
naked among russet leaves.
Will he rise?

Winter skies ~
dream haloes light frozen trees
and a blessed throat of communion cries.

He relies
on the night watch, crouching, clutching rib and knees
Will he rise?

What if the male of the species dies?
Released to a starry night crossing, he pleas
through a blessed throat of communion cries.

What if he lives, cornered, at sunrise,
strapped in gun-metal gray, old way, patriarchal seize
Will he lie or will he rise
through a blessed throat of communion cries?

To the Manor Born

This is the Manor House at Goddard where I had most of my classes last week. Lovely snow! So Vermont-esque. I don't know how much I'll be able to blog in the future as I pursue my studies, but I'll try to put stuff on as it comes.

Imagine it is Still Ground Hog Day

I'm a bit behind in blogging.

Groundhog Day

Unearth us
rain or shine
from the bowels of history
from the womb
out
to the light of our future
now
rain and shine
there are shadows
but they no longer confine
to yesterday
to unspoken mystery
they are
our shadows
and we fear not
stepping in
to our divine
rain and shine
so sublime
today
is the day
step out
to step in
to shine
and re-define

White Light of Morning

Snowing today and I am less than eager
to drive down Sandy Blvd. for a first day of work.
Cars park in the middle of the road here,
even with a mere two inches of powder.

I’d rather watch the fat flakes rain down
in what certainly looks like a school closure day,
and that bright light of Donna and Jackson
sledding on the sidewalk.

I should call Anne and Nancy in Colorado
and remind them of New Year’s Day that one year,
so much promise not to be realized until now,
after everyone moved away.

Last night I dreamed of poems on the page,
an allegoric past of ink-stained affairs
I erased and re-wrote, but couldn’t wipe her out
so I licked a stamp and mailed it all away.

The day looks so frail, but otherwise, it’s just
another northwest winter, sky a pewter gray
and the just unfurling children,
full of oatmeal and enthusiasm

with more than a hint of ecstasy
filling their Michelin-man snowsuits
while the parents gather on the corner
to brainstorm child care.

Nobody is going anywhere today,
except to ski in the cemetery,
wave hello to Judge Clifford
and etch cherubic angels in the grass-speckled snow.

Outside my window, between SUVs
and a few enduring maple,
three days past Epiphany,
tiny white Christmas lights still blink hope;

overflowing, feet-stomping, snow-shaking, door-slamming
Donna shouting ‘woohoo’ with the neighbor boys;
like a tribe of the uncensored,
leaving white footprints in their abandoned wake.

De-escalation

I remember the smell of peace, like freshly cut grass at 4:00 pm on a Sunday afternoon. That was the time my father finally smiled, plopped down in the lawn chair, satisfied with his life for a moment. Chores were done -- anger at children who whined about chores, de-escalated, released to the emerald gold light of approaching dusk. Tension settled into the giant rope hammock as I rocked gently between two grand maples and retreated into my book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. At that hour, I was free to be a child, to be the introverted, Pennsylvania country girl, not the intuitive, too wise for her age child who felt responsible for everyone else’s pain. At that hour, like my father, I felt peace and could finally rest.

I just taught a writing workshop titled Tikkun Olam: Writing to Repair the World. I first came in contact with the Judaic concept of Tikkun Olam after watching a movie (I don’t remember the title) about God and a spelling bee. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of weaving old threads into something new, found art, shaping a curse into a blessing. Even as a child I had a sense of my responsibility to make beauty from the ugly, to care for the wounded, the hurt, and even the angry as a way to repair the brokenness in our world. I couldn’t define what I did or how, but I saw, after the fact, the impact of my actions on healing. Over the years, I began to see how I did what I did and had to learn to let go of any investment in the healing work (I’m still challenged by checking my ego at the door each day). When I heard about Tikkun Olam it felt like maybe there is an entire movement focused on this “work,” this ministry and maybe I don’t have to feel so alone or so tired. Later I heard about Tikkun Olam again and then again and then when I was applying for the school I wanted to attend, I read that they base their philosophy on the concept of Tikkun Olam. Well, there you have it.

I’ve been accepted into the Goddard program for Transformative Language Arts. I don’t know where it will take me, but I do know it is the right path toward healing myself, finding inner peace and therefore bringing some repair to this wounded world, one word at a time, one freshly cut blade of grass at a time. It is what I have to offer in resistance, moving away from the absurdity of this war.

Salvation, I'm not ready to sign up

Christ died for our sins? I don’t get that in my bones yet, which some would say means that I am not a Christian. I hear say that Jesus dying for our sins is the basic premise of Christianity, but I have some questions. "No one who is born of God will continue to sin." Yeah, right! Ain't gonna happen, even with my definition of sin being ‘moving away from our personal relationship with God and falling short of who we were born to be’. All I can do is have the intention to live in relationship with God.

For me, in I John, I hear Amway pyramid scheme: for a mere penance you too can be cleansed, repent now and you will ascend through the gold and pearly gates, the pinnacle of financial success (or righteousness, or spiritual freedom)...dear children, come to papa, the great Father in Heaven...the language continues to turn me off. It is too simplistic, too "do this and you will get that," too lacking in recognition of the work needed to live in the Way, the work required to be in relationship with God.

I'm reading Dorothee Soelle's The Silent Cry in which she speaks of the mystics’ passionate search for intimacy with God. She says, "God loves, protects, renews, and saves us. One rarely hears that this process can be truly experienced only when such love, like every genuine love, is mutual. That humans love, protect, renew, and save God sounds to most people like megalomania or even madness. But the madness of this love is exactly what mystics live on." And later she says, "I can see God's love only when I become part of it myself."

"I am filled with you.
Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.
There's no room for lack of trust, or trust.
Nothing in this existence but that existence"
~Rumi

This speaks to my New Year intention to love self in the journey to a loving relationship with God, in the journey of co-creation, in the recognition that I am the hands of God; we are the hands that co-labor toward the grand vision of the kin-dom. Like Grace Sbrissa prays in Winter’s Wisdom Advent readings, "The kin-dom of God is within me! May I live my life so that the world and I can recognize that! God within me, let me recognize you! Let my relationship with all others, all creation, be an exclamation, proclaiming, "Look, here is God!"" Now imagine if everyone we met was praying that prayer. What a world it would be, loving ourselves to honor God's creation and then the simple unfolding of love for other and trust that what is, is what Is and all that matters Is.

And more Rumi:
Christ is the population of the world,
and every object as well. There is no room
for hypocrisy. Why use bitter soup for healing
when sweet water is everywhere?

Lovers think they're looking for each other,
but there's only one search: wandering
this world is wandering that, both inside one
transparent sky. In here
there is no dogma and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future. Forget the future.
I'd worship someone who could do that.

On the way you may want to look back, or not,
but if you can say, There's nothing ahead,
there will be nothing there.

Stretch your arms and take hold the cloth of your clothes
with both hands. The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you don't belong with us.

When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.
There's no place like that anywhere in the world.

Is this our salvation, our freedom from sin? Is this the message of "born again," learning to love the creation that is I, that is You, that is Us, and that Is Love? Faith in action? We learn to love so that we may Be Love and therefore live free from sin and separation, free from contraction and disengagement. Okay, wouldn't that be grand? But then the question arises in me about polarity. Life Is about the joy and pain of living. "The cure for pain is in the pain." We must move through bad and good, so that in each moment of now we have the experience of both sin and salvation to comprise what we call living, what we call Is.

Okay, so I've twisted myself around in some philosophical, theological exploration of the mystery. That's what I get for getting up at 5:00 a.m. before the cats.

Everlasting Comfort and Love (Joy)?

The metronome tick, tick, tick of the clock tells me the morning is almost over. A seagull cries as she passes by my window and the Tibetan prayer flags occasionally whip into view (all this is of great intrigue to Buddy the cat who sits in the window sill). A winter wind chime blows over frozen grass and then it is gone, taking its song with it. I am left in silence as if I'd never known the song of winter.

Why should God be any different? How can we know the lasting everlasting presence, comfort, and love if nothing in our reality is forever? The Queen of Hearts suggests we try to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Well, I've already had breakfast, but here goes:
1) God is always with me
2) I am loved unconditionally and have always been
3) World peace, it could happen
4) I can make a difference in this world
5) Miracles happen
6) True love and joy will come again

If I were to stand on the moon tonight

what light would I see from Earth?
Would it be strings of colored Christmas lights?
Or streams of headlights racing to the mall
for some last minute, hectic consumerism.
Would it be the golden glow of childlike wonder?
Or sparks of anger from the drunken lady across the street,
who resents the doctor who cut off her cancerous breast.
Would it be the Festival of Lights at the Grotto,
or the Star of David at the synagogue,
a menorah, Kwanzaa lights, Advent candles,
or would it be the blue light of a television
that keeps the widow company
during her first Christmas without
the love of her life?
Would it be the green light of forgiveness?
Or the blazing red, white, and blue artillery
across an ocean of loathing.

Could the light from Earth
simply be three candles lit:
one for gratitude
one for longing
and one for clarity
in this mystery?

Advent

Adventure

You enter my life
like a northwest snowfall,
fickle and inconsistent, one
moment an incessant
rain of winter turns
thick and whitens
rooftops then thins
again into rain, more walls
of rain, a vexatious mix
of opposites you are
here now you are gone.
Oh come oh come
oh glorious oh wisdom
oh love
oh one, stay,
please stay and lift me
from my darkness
ordain my shadows to flight
I beg in the cleft
of my being, waiting
for awe, for you
magnificent you
stay, stick to the still
green grass dotted
with golden birch leaves,
stay and light
on my tongue
like the first snowflake,
then melt into nothing
into me so I can believe
you are gone forever
and I can believe
you will come again.

Upon Return of a Painting Titled “Flight”

The picture wire at the end of the hook
snapped at the last moment, and
the frame dropped to the parking lot
shards of glass, shattered flight

snapped at the last moment, and
I could only think, “Ironic!”
shards of glass, shattered flight
you asked, “What did you do?”

I could only think, “Ironic!”
and get the painting out of the rain
you asked, “What did you do?”
I said, “Nothing, the guide wire just broke.”

and get the painting out of the rain
a downpour replaced any tears
I said nothing. The guide wire just broke.
And picked up the pieces, no more apologies.

a downpour replaced any tears
you tenderly laid the painting in your Pathfinder
And picked up the pieces, no more apologies.
We shook hands and went our discrete ways.

Last Day of November

November has always been a difficult month for me...Season of death I suppose~ entering Advent, but not there yet.

It's about Matisse blue paint
on slanted attic walls,
crisp white wainscoting
and a view from above:
frozen raindrops
on bare oak branches
and Christmas lights hanging
from the eaves.
It's about moving in
and moving out
getting away
from the stinging ocean spray
salty...
well, you know what's next
after salty (in a sad poem).
It's about tears
and torn hearts
and other Hallmark sentiments,
although Hallmark doesn't
make cards for unrequited love
and getting shit on;
love 'em and leave 'em,
used and discarded:
Especially for you
When you are feeling blue
You would have had better luck
If I hadn't been such a fuck.

But it's really not about that
anymore. It's about
fresh paint
and fresh starts
clean slates
and clear...
(hearts? is that what you expected to hear?)

Well, not today
Today, it's just about
crystal prisms that catch
even the smallest
amount of Oregon light
and it's about being
eye-level with the seagulls
as I initiate the morning
with a poem
and they with flight.

Frank McCourt

Last night I went to hear Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, Tis, and Teacher Man, read with the Literary Arts Lecture Series. My last work site gave me free tickets. I was looking forward to hearing an Irish accent. I have a fondness for that accent every since my I met Annie Callan, a local writer and gentle teacher who used to call me "Wendy luv" and I not only felt like the most important person in the world, but she also made me feel like a pretty good writer. I digress. Did you know that Frank McCourt was also a teacher? He taught 33 years in the NY schools. He had stories to tell, like we all do. When asked why it took him until age 66 to publish his novel he said, "I was teaching, that's what took me so long...When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you're not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose. After a day of five classes your head is filled with the clamor of the classroom."

When I read that in his bio I had an odd longing for days of 5-7 classes and 2-4 hours of paper grading every week night. I bitched and moaned at the time and flew into a rage every time someone said teacher's have it easy. As McCourt said, "You try it!" But last night, when McCourt called teachers heroic and an audience of 1500 applauded ~ when he would like to shoot the No Child Left Behind bill and the audience applauded ~ I had renewed pride for the my profession, for my greatest talent. Beyond writing, poetry, dancing, singing, healing, creating events, and coming up with good ideas, I am a teacher. AND I still have time to publish my book!

What are you listening to right now?

I'm listening to silence, but soon I'll hear Mozart's Serenata Notturna and Mahler's Song of the Earth with our own Taylor Schlichting on cello and the Diva singing. What is the sound of Earth? In this corner of the Nation it's been sloshy and ambiguous like the sound of bad acting in a soap opera. I think the Mahler is something about horse hoves and joy. I'd like to hear that pounding certainty again in my days. This week was full of culture (freebies no less); I heard West Side Story, Faust, and Frank Rich of the New York Times. Both WSS and Faust ended with the use of white lights and white set on center stage to represent walking into the unknown or the redemption scene in Faust. Rich didn't speak of white space, but from what he said about the media and our government (pre Tues. election) I'd venture we could use some white space, white sound at the White House. What is the sound of white space? Silent truth? Quiet wisdom?

Jump
We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in between whether we know it or not. ~ excerpt from Silence by John Cage

Jump
Jump
Contemplation not required, not recommended, not desired.
Hatch out, tumble out with unbridled ferocity

Fall
Fall
I dream of dreaming a dream of falling
Fluid, suspended falling
swallowed by cushions of air
I float on the wake of the sky
vapors thick like honey slow my descent

I dream of dreaming a dream of falling
Lingering in the time between
the between spaces where thoughts turn inside out
where behind my eyes is emptiness - clean and pure
where all my endings become an entrance
into another beginning - a deeper recess
leagues beyond knowing

The faster I fall
the faster I fly
Am I ready?
Are we ready
for space to narrow into a thin line of nothingness and time
to turn yellow with age and uselessness
Are we ready for free fall and grace?

I dream of dreaming a dream of falling
Falling into the soil
into the space between the web, between the lace
I enter the white space
a new place
a new face
Jump
Jump

Today I listened to the cheers at Bridgeport UCC regarding the election results (even though our friend Rob lost by a few hundred votes). Lately, I hear fewer cat fights between Buddy and Tucker (maybe I don't have to get them anti-anxietmedicinene after all. Maybe they are content now with Democrats in the house). I hear more empty silence as Donna leaves again (after only being home 3 days) to work in Japan and Hong Kong. I think I hear, off in the distance, a smile returning to Denice's face. I still hear doubts in my own head about my decision to move and now I have an empty house unsold while strangers north of me are flooded out of their homes. I thought I heard God's call, but I've got some doubts about that right now too. Rabbi Rami Shapiro (who writes for Spirituality and Health) says doubt should be befriended because it melts the fire of certainty that is the antithesis of faith. If we are certain of everything we have no need for faith. "Doubt...awakens you to a compassionate curiosity rooted in a humble not-knowing that is the hallmark of mature faith." Wow, I must be REALLY mature! I hear that.

What Color Are You Today

A friend asked me that title question. Yesterday I was sleepy siesta yellow (she asked around 4:00, nap time). The warm autumn sun through my bedroom window seduced me into a rare afternoon nap before gearing up to start the second coat of mud on my drywall project.

Today is a crunchy orange day like the crisp on the side of the baked mac and cheese casserole. Crisp cold, crisp bright, crisp leaves under foot, I'm anxious to get outside and take a walk around my new neighborhood. I choose a different route each day, sometimes with a destination like Safeway, or to Pam's house to teach her daughter how to use the sewing machine I gave her. Sometimes I just explore; the other day I discovered a stone mosaic "door mat" in front of a house on Siskiyou. I have to remember to show Donna, she'd want to make one with all the stones and pebbles and rocks she collects. But not until the drywall/paint job is done in the study, I say. Turning the corner on 46th, I was amazed by the professional front yard garden with a manicured lawn winding between well cared for triangular flower beds. Usually those urban front yard attempt-at-an-English garden look really trashy this time of year, but this one was well planned for a fall showing with asters and mums and stalks of burgundy somethings.

I'm relieved to be in a neighborhood again where I can walk to the store, help out a neighbor with her construction project, or be pleasantly side-tracked from daily chores by a visit from Jackson (see Donna's blog) and his mom looking for the Toys R Us catalog in Donna's Sunday paper. I'm relieved to be an active part of every day living: laundry, cleaning up after territorial cats, taping drywall, mudding, baking cookies, reading, going for a walk, studying, not just numbing out on television and wine, waiting for my house to sell so my life can begin.

Since Sunday I begin again to access the sacred within the every day profane, the every day mundane. The dictionary defines profane as irreverent, vulgar, course and secular in contrast to what is sacred. Mundane is also defined as secular, common place, ordinary, typical of this world. In the last 3 years or so I've been exploring the sacred in Christian religion, practicing lectio divina, daily centering prayer, breath meditations, reading the Bible, reading other theologians trying to develop a more intimate relationship with God. For some reason, throughout this process I started doing less gardening, had fewer walks in the woods, hardly ever baked or rubbed fresh basil between my thumb and index finger before simmering it in a pot of pasta sauce. For some reason, I took less pleasure in the scent of freshly washed sheets and the tidy, satisfactory folds of laundry day. I stopped noticing the chatter of squirrels, the phases of the moon, or even the passing seasons. I stopped noticing God as I have always known God.

Sunday, a small clan of us were invited to visit my friend Gerry's farm in Oregon City. Five year old Maude had a saddle and no horse to ride. Gerry is an equestrian, professional carriage driver. Gerry has horses she calls ponies. The threatening clouds from the morning broke open just as we pulled into the driveway. What was a gray day became an easy baby blue, soft as the colt's nose on our dispositions. Gerry, the consummate hostess, had prepared rare roast beast, oven baked mac and cheese, apple cobbler, and a raspberry martini "hooha" for the adults (it was Sunday after all and we could drink before 5:00). After a leisurely meal, a climb up the hay bails in the barn, and a few fly-bys of breathless, red cheeked children chasing the Guinea Hen around the house, Gerry saddled up Comet for Maude and Ellory to ride around the yard. Despite the carrot treats, Comet was less than cooperative while the kids tried to ride, tugging at the lead line until he could crunch a mouthful of grass. Gerry scolded him, "Come on Comet, be somebody." We all took to that expression rather quickly and I decided I would use it to scold myself when I would be tempted to zone out in front of the television. Come on Wendy, be somebody!

Finally, Ellory decided he'd much rather sit in the lawn and let the cat's tail tickle his chin while he sang the Little Pony song. We brought Comet back to the barn and Gerry offered the kids a ride on her tractor, with wheels at least five feet tall it was a sight to see. I thought I was in some Disney movie, "Day at the Farm," it was so ideal. Driving back, Maude's mom, Buff, commented on what an amazing woman Gerry is and what a full life she leads. I agreed and thought about my life and how I keep trying so hard to make it fuller without recognizing how full it can be just as it is: the fullness of witnessing Ellory trumpeting with Gerry's fox hunt horns through autumn storm clouds, urging the tentative sun to stay one more hour in our day. And towheaded Maude perched on Gerry's lap, steering the tractor with all the confidence five year old girls should have. My heart was full while I noticed Genevieve with the opportunity to see fearlessness in others and also the unconditional right to hold on just one more day to her own cautions. Just by being, we could be somebody. This is the stuff of a full life...that a horse can eat an entire carrot in one feeding, that we can scrape the side of the mac and cheese bowl for the coveted toasted brown crunchies. That strangers can meet on a farm and become friends, that is a full life, a full day.

Sunday, I saw how I spend too much time wishing for something more, waiting for the house to sell, the perfect time and conditions to begin to write, the right person to enter my life to help me feel complete. I've spent too much time seeking the sacred in something outside me, outside my mundane life, and not appreciating the miraculous in every moment, the God of each ordinary, common place day. Today is crunchy orange, and in order to be somebody within the day, I will not wish for the day to be anything other than what it is. I will step in, bite down, crunch, crunch, crunch as lively as I can until I intimately know about a simple, common, crunchy, orange day.

What it Means to Love

I'm reading Kathleen Dean Moore's book titled The Pine Island Paradox. She made a list of what is means to love a person and place. This list struck I cord with me and I wanted to quote her for all of you:

"What does it mean to love a person? What does it mean to love a place? Before long, I discovered I had made two copies of the same list. To love -- a person and a place -- means at least this: One. To want to be near it, physically. Number two. To want to know everything about it -- its story, its moods, what is looks like by moonlight. Number three. To rejoice in the fact of it. Number four. To fear its loss, and grieve for is injuries. Five. To protect it -- fiercely, mindlessly, futilely, and maybe tragically, but to be helpless to do otherwise. Six. To be transformed in its presence -- lifted, lighter on your feet, transparent, open to everything beautiful and new. Number seven. To want to be joined with it, taken in by it, lost in it. Number eight. To want the best for it. Number nine. Deperately.

Love is an anchor line, a rope on a pulley, a taut fly line, a spruce root, a route on a map, a father teaching his daughter to tie a bowline knot, eelgrass bent to the tide, and all of these -- complicated, changing web of relationships, taken together. It's not a choice, or a dream, or a romantic novel. It's a fact: an empirical fact about our biological existence. We are born into relationships with people and with places. We are born with the ability to create new relationships and tend to them. And we are born with a powerful longing for these relations. That complex connectedness nourishes and shapes us and gives us joy and purpose.

I knew there was something important missing from my list, but I was struggling to put it into words. Loving isn't just a state of being, it's a way of acting in the world. Love isn't a sort of bliss, it's a kind of work, sometimes hard, spirit-testing work. To love a person is to accept the responsibility to act lovingly toward him, to make his needs my own needs. To love a place is to care for it, to keep it healthy, to attend to its needs as if they were my own, because they are my own. Responsibility grows from love. It is the natural shape of caring.

Number ten, I wrote in my notebook. To love a person or a place is accept moral responsibility for its well-being."

Community

Come Unity
for Vi

We sing
wind beneath wings
and rub sandalwood oil
into her too tired old feet
tucked beneath hospice blankets
blue
while not far beyond
thousands of russet and gold leaves
turn and turn and turn until
silently they all fall
to the cold ground
released.

________________

morning
comes unity
intimate as crystal
dew on her lately woven web
vast, too
the view
Crater Lake blue
deep and high and nearby
generations beyond knowing
hold truth

___________________


Relish community
like a spoonful of homemade applesauce,
cinnamon rich,
made of apples gathered
from last year’s barren tree

Stories

Last night a group of us told (in ten minutes or less) our spiritual, religious, faith, journeys of truth. Stories revealed shadows of humanity, doubt, misgivings and missed directions. This morning, as I read and wrote, the neighbor man, a confirmed schizophrenic, was shouting his story to nobody in particular. Some how parts of what he said, what I could hear, what I understood, pieces of his "rantings" made sense to me:

"We're gonna keep going down a dead-end street. We have power to do it all over again, make it right. What are you doing? I know a fucking hoax when I hear it. Well it's about time. No, I'm staying. What are you doing? Too good for Words (Works?) You're gonna have to find some better lingo when you start giving out the um, the uh explanation of feelings. And the fucking story goes on and on and on. I wanna kick your shadow."

Confessions

Don't kick my shadow
such a shady story
in the bright light of day
elongated like an El Greco painting
pained in purple gray
or stumped into secrecy
my shadow
is as much a part of me
as the detail you see
in the face
facing you
in all honesty

Irony

Just as I remove the final framed artwork from the wall, I receive news that the buyer's financing fell through and the house is going back on the market. I had intended to sell that final art piece at a church art auction this week. Nobody bid on it, so I brought it back to the empty house to resume it's place above the mantle. The piece, titled "Flight," just doesn't seem to want to fly. I refuse to believe that means I can't fly. Maybe that artwork stays with the house. Maybe it needs to be returned, with grace, to the artist. My head swims with 'how comes' and what's up with this, and what, damn it, is the lesson I'm supposed to learn in order to move on!!

Grace is in the Return

This weekend I removed the last framed artwork that hung over my mantle in my Vancouver house. Painted by a lover of nine years ago, the work is a simple 3' by 4' line drawing of an open poppy (or some such full-petaled blossom) with one red streak across the bottom of the otherwise white canvas, a crimson river of femininity. In the center of the flower is a sweet but somewhat phallic stamen and a real live dead bug caught between the canvas and glass on its journey to pollination. My lover and I laughed about that bug's aborted effort to consummate even as we wept about our own inability to fully realize our relationship. We were an affair that would never reach fruition. I started writing poetry as a result of her artwork. I wrote several pieces about this painting, but can only find this one:

Rapid thin streams,
thin crimson streams rush through ~
Petals thrown back, hotly back
on throated stems.

Does she
remember the flower?
The orchid?

The flower grows in its growing from hour to hour
while the Master flame
Destroys the dry mountain pine.
The dry
mountain pine.

At the appointed time,
a cry from the morning crow will come
Will come.
Does she know when? Do I?

Only then, can she
remember the flower.
The flower trembling
from root, to pistil, to petal.
And
Oh, the fragrance!

She can
remember the flower.
The orchid.
Again,
this hour, this instant
She can.


It was appropriate for this painting to be the last piece of art to come off the walls. I designed my entire living room around this painting...White fireplace, white carpet, white furniture, pale yellow walls, splashes of red accent throughout the room. Her artwork was a focal point of my living space. In fact, I bought the house eight years ago with the vague hope that she would eventually move in with me and we would have a life of co-creation. I painted my garage a high gloss red with the thought that it could be an art studio...Something she didn't really have in her house. My bedroom was a convent white in readiness for a new life with her. Over the years it became apparent that she wasn't going to leave her marriage and even the fact that she called me "the other side of her face" wasn't enough to liberate her from what I saw as a possessive (yet socially acceptable and secure) marriage to build a life with me. I'm acutely aware that selling this house is the final letting go of that relationship. Not that I've been mourning, moaning, and mooning away here in this house for the last eight plus years (I've had other lovers since and maintain a realistic sense of what is (and isn't). But we never really said goodbye and I've always wondered what I'd say if she showed up at my doorstep. Would I close the door in hurt and resentment and bitterness or would I welcome her return with grace?

In my spiritual direction class we practiced a breathing meditation for about 30 minutes. I found myself, as usual, drifting out of focus and coming close to nodding off to sleep in that state of relaxation. I asked the teacher how this practice could lead me to higher consciousness if I kept drifting into unconsciousness. She said that the discipline is in the return. It is not about getting to a place of meditative transcendence, it is not about judging our perceived failure and giving up, it is about recognizing that we have drifted (as we all inevitably do, often) and exercising the discipline of returning to the breath. Grace is in the return.

This week I've been reflecting on the parable of the prodigal son. I used to be annoyed by the father's reaction and would take sides with the resentful (but faithful) son who never left. I was the one who did everything right, or at least gave the impression that I was good and responsible and faithful. Then I swayed, I had an affair. I became lost to myself, my community, my family. Through this reading of the parable I was reminded of our inclination to seek what is lost. We don't focus on the $20 in our wallet, but the $10 we knew we had and can't find. Jesus searched for the one lost sheep, not the ones in constant view. I don't write as much poetry about the love that is steadfast and present in my life, but I do write volumes about lost love. In the parable, the focus and attention isn't on the one that is lost, isn't on the going away, the celebration is about the return. The return home, the return to God, the return to one another, to self.

I never noticed the title of my lover's artwork until I lifted it off the wall last week. It is called "Flight." As I leave my cocoon of a home, spread my wings and take flight in a return to my own artistry, I have hope that by removing her work of art from my wall, no longer claiming or possessing it as mine, giving it up to the church art auction for someone else to be nurtured beneath its simple strength, that she will fly home to her artistry, she will return to Grace. As I write this blog entry, revealing my secret affair, seeking release, forgiveness, homecoming, and renewal, I open myself to a return to grace. And I know now that if she finds me again, stands on the threshold, facing me in humility, I will welcome her return to my life with all the celebration and open heart of any lost love come home.

To Be or Not to Be Claimed

Can I allow myself to be claimed without being possessed? I bristle at our human need to possess property, things, people, to claim as ours a house, a parcel of land, a spouse, a room of one's own. As a friend Donna says, it's all on loan, all of it. When we were designing the art school we had a tin can that was used to collect quarters every time someone said "my or mine"; my students, my classroom, my department, my whiteboard marker. We struggled for years trying to maintain the collective and cooperative ours over the possessive and competitive mine. We finally had to concede on some things like whiteboard markers for sanity sake, but really, the concept of fasting from "my" is a good one. The more I give away, sell, separate myself from detachment in a fasting sort of way, the less I can relate to those who continue to cling. Something as small as a board member from a former workplace not being willing to let go of a button maker long enough for me to borrow it for a festival, it BUGS me to no end.

On the contrary, another friend taught me that being claimed can be a grounding experience. Claimed as a best friend, as a life partner, as a valued employee, as a child of God can root us and help us self-identify without clipping our wings and censoring our flow. Yes? Maybe? I believe, though, we must be willing to relinquish all, fast from all our attachments, before we can experience the liberation of this type of claiming.

My name, Wendy, means wanderer. Whenever I feel trapped, inhibited, tethered, reined in, I become seriously irritated, refusing to see that these reins may be just the thing to keep me from going off the deep end as I wander the edges of life. MY best friend keeps an ankle bracelet on me (metaphorically) because she knows I can drift off into nothingness when I'm needed right here in the now. I know I can take this bracelet off any time, so rather than feeling possessed by her, I feel cared for, rooted in a relationship and never abandoned. She helps me find the French translation of A bandon, "to put in one's power, to liberate."

Disorientation

I walk the edge between begin and end
beyond the tether of created self.
I am not afraid to move.
I am afraid of standing still,
utterly still in this gray silence -- this 2:00 a.m. space
where the crow has long since cawed away
the busyness of a day,
where my purpose of being
is not yet linked to memory or knowing --
utter stillness, before the morning dove has begun her lament.

I am awake
spinning in the space between --
vertigo of the soul.

The East opens beyond the sun
The West, an ocean abyss
I am direction-less.
North and South (heaven and earth)
a fading filament.
Storylines, brittle with age.

In this center threshold, this 2:00 a.m. space I am,
at the same time, both leaving and left behind.
Self and other --

We desert and are deserted
forsake and surrender
to be in our being
define in our defining.
We are both form and motion
noun and verb
abandon and abandoned.

A bandon,
to put in one's power.

To be in one's power
we must yield completely.
We must relinquish our claim,
our right --
to what?
Certainly, to our hold on other
and apparently,
to our hold on self.

We must spin without reference
without spotting
disoriented
sick with dizziness
we must continue to spin and spin and spin
until we collide and fall
until we have spun ourselves into laughter
until we have spun the new.

A bandon,
liberation.

Geography of Love

Ephesians 3:14 encourages us to explore the expansiveness of God's love, the breadth, the height, the length, and the depth, both overflowing and rooted, ours for the receiving. Because I try not to personify God, I do not imagine a being expressing his or her love in a tangible, sensory way that I can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. I can, however, notice the manifestation of that love in the landscape of my every day living:

Breadth of autumnal sunshine
and the five year old
neighbor boy's call
to come out
and play ball.

Towering circle of cedar ~
there is no ceiling
to Your love.

Moonlight and shadow ~
oh the length of You
arched long along
my living room floor,
arms open in a transept
of receptivity.

Even in the darkest depths
a porch light shines
somewhere
here or there
guiding me home.

Just Questions Today

Does sin abate when surrender abounds?

I cannot bow down to any lord, as solicitous scriptures suggest. I do not see how reverence to the lord God is any different then reverence to lord Caesar or lord Bush. The paradigm, the holding to hierarchy (patriarchal or matriarchal) is what needs to be dismantled for us all to live in unity. This is what I have believed, and yet, sin (defined as separation from true self, in my Book) continues to plague me. I wonder if surrender to the Lord God, release of my knees into soft soil, the buckling of pride and independence would not just bring me the freedom i seek. And yet, (yes, yet again) Ephesians states we are the adopted children of God. While an adopted child can (and did in Biblical times) have the same rights as a blood child, anyone adopted can tell you, it's not the same. If I am not of God's womb, how can a surrender to God lead me to my true self? We, God and me, never had the symbiotic relationship, the umbilical connection (according to what I read), so how can I return to wholeness through God if I was never whole in God in the first place?

And another thing. We are all One in God's love through the sacrifice of Christ. What about Buddha? What about Ghandi? What about MLK Jr.? What about the rest of the world? The Euro-centrism disturbs me. I want the Bible to make room in my head for a more global embrace of humanity. Seems to me that's what Paul was suggesting with his chain letter to all communities in Asia Minor. Still so much to learn. I must remember to read loosely.

Grace, Oh I Get it

"It is not falling in the water that drowns us, but staying there."

By grace I unveil
shame like steam from crimson
burnt branches
once smoldering then doused
by tears of compassion

By grace I rise
from stark wrongdoing
to circling caress,
her smoky whisper, "I still
love you. Don't ever forget."

I had a realization that to have Christ live in me is not about clothing myself in the costume of Christianity and pretending, but rather it is surrender...Disclose and de-clothe to raw vulnerability, ask forgiveness and begin again, naked and new, every day.

More Scriptural Shorts

Psalm 126

Laughing hallelujah
and God recommends
we re-commune with sisters, all
from beginning to end and back again
Aloha and ciao


Dr. Luke 24, a Gentile among Jews

Every day
doubt looms
like gray clouds
threatening to ruin my
garden party.
So I am called to remember
Jesus is in the cornbread.
Can't you see?
Every day.
So eat up.
Abundance comes from loss.

Lies can be Life Saving

I am your Rahab, as you are mine,
living on the edge
one stop short of rejection
and one window away from freedom.

We spin a deceitful thread
not silver, not gold, but blood
red, my life for your life
we lie to save both.

Salvation for all,
this thread, we know
will not devastate,
if delivered as kind protection.

A redeeming passion, we must trust
will save us from stone walls
of panic and fear, away
from enslavement, from possessive love.

This crimson thread will
lead us to transformation
to open hearts and silver
waterfalls of unity, if we are not afraid.

Let it be so.

In a Nutshell

I'm taking this course with some church friends called Companions in Christ. We have Bible readings and I just got the idea to write some short poems summarizing what I read.

Genesis 12
Leave it all behind
Blackberries and 'mourning' doves
Impugn not my call

Genesis 28
Jacob
With head upon stone
I wrestle an angel, dreams
descending like dust

What next?
Glad tithings?
Let's make a deal!

Exodus 17
Water from sand stone ~
Doubt and you will die of thirst.
Exodus ain't easy.


I've decided that my study plan for Goddard will be to study both Rumi poems and Paul's letters, Sufism and Christianity, find the connections, travel to Turkey, and create a contemporary response from my unique perspective in letter and poetry form. These mini poems are good practice. I'll send on more if anyone is interested.

Mortgage and Marriage

I choose to sell my house because I don't want to be locked in anymore to the commitments, obligations, costs (literal and not so literal), work, and constant repair involved in a mortgage. As soon as I had a buyer, I started looking at where I would live next. Some days I thought, I really want a clean slate, empty rooms, not even paintings on the wall (painted by ex-lovers, streaming red with aching memory). I'll just rent a studio, make art, collect unemployment and detach from my entire past. Oh so tempting. Then I explored intentional community living...A community just starting, out on Sauvie Island. I could build a yurt, meet and eat in the big house, work the land, sustainable living, a fantasy since my Sandy days almost 25 years ago, a vision from six years ago that I called the Place of Grace. Or I could join the established Lighthouse Community, an urban, Buddhist community just off of Hawthorne. The house is enormously spacious with a poetry stage and movie seats in the basement, an open flex space with just an alter and some pillows, and a modest bedroom with sunlight, a fireplace, and hardwood floors. But wait, I already have a community. I am already committed to Bridgeport. Granted I don't live with these people, but I stood in front of them four years ago and promised to give and receive through thick and thin, for better or worse, like a marriage. I can't sign on to another community, that would be bigamy, wouldn't it? Yet why do I feel the need to flee?

Typical for me to squirm in tight spaces. As Denise Levertov says, "Don't lock me in wedlock, I want/marriage, an/encounter--" Most traditional committed arrangements are too tight and rule-filled for me. I need room to flex and flow with the changing tides. I need to be able to say, "Until life do us part." I know that nothing is forever and don't need to lock myself in with a myth of security. In younger days, as soon as things got too tight, I split open and flew on winged feet to start another honeymoon of lightness. Then, three years or so later, I would be disappointed with the superficiality, the unsatisfactory nature of the relationship (individual or organizational), and think it must be time to leave and seek again. My longing has changed from a desire for light flight to a yearning to go deep, with clay feet, through all the scrapes and mistakes, dents and scars of loving and living, to the other end of community, family, work, relationship.

Rilke writes, "Like so many other things, people have also misunderstood the position love has in life; they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure are more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, precisely because it is the supreme happiness, can be nothing other than work. It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."

So first I say, "Okay, I am ready to step in deeper, no more toe dipping." Again, Denise Levertov in her poem "The Ache of Marriage...two by two in the ark of/the ache of it." Or three by three, or 50 by 50, whatever commitment to comm-unity calls for. Now, what about authentic self within? If I am to exchange winged NIKEs for clay heavy work boots, do I not need to be fully of this earth, true to who I am? This brings forward, for me, the question of secrets and integrity.

Another reason I have fled community in the past is that secrets became too heavy for me. I cannot hold in secrecy and feel internal integrity. We all have secrets. How do others maintain long term relationships with individuals and community while keeping secrets? Really, I want to know. That's a genuine question. Is it a matter of semantics, renaming secrets and calling them a right to privacy? Is about saying only what is necessary, true, and kind? I've always thought the path to greater intimacy is through open disclosure. My cousin once said that it is impossible to reach intimacy in a group. Maybe this is why. I am particularly challenged by committing to greater intimacy in a faith community. Am I not expected to walk in transparency, light, soul-filled truth? How do I do that in heavy, soil-filled boots?

Help me out here. Let's dialogue for future blogs.

9.11

We shudder, all of us, no doubt, with each plane passing overhead today.

So it Goes

We are in reunion with rage
a stone throwing stone
upon stone
upon stone upon
cordon of memory
Caught in a storm of twin sorrows
we rage -- eleven upon eleven
at tomorrow at forever
at mid-night
and so it goes
Blind-sided by terror -- naked, alone
a stark stones throw
away stone
upon stone
upon stone
upon stone
upon stone
and so it goes

Ah, but stop, listen to the circle of cedar
listen to pine and her spine
soft marrow of forgiveness
and light, listen
where darkness springs bright
and we can unite in a faltering
flight
upon flight
upon infant
flight

-Wendy 2001

Vested but not Vetted

I have a buyer for my house. The new title company sends me a document: "Commitment for Title Insurance. Schedule A. 4. Title to the estate or interest in the land is at the effective date hereof vested in: Wendy J. Thompson, an unmarried woman."

That's it? An unmarried woman; not poet, teacher, theologian, philosopher, lover, kind and thoughtful friend? No wonder I struggle with my single, childless status in this world. Legal language defines me solely in relation to other and never in relation to my true self. No wonder I've felt lost trying to play by society's rules of good behavior and integrity: go to college, get a respectable, acceptable, vetted, and appraised job, get a spouse (vetted again in socially acceptable pairing), have a child, buy house, control your wild, wandering, verdant soul. I don't fit in that mold and I'm tired of trying. I can only hold in integrity when I hold in center, sound in who I am and who I was created to be ~ not trying so hard to fit and merge and blend with other.

Rainer Rilke wrote in "On Love and Other Difficulties" that "Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another...It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake."

This transition I am in (selling house, leaving a job, going back to school) is all about me daring to step into my true self, my true call, become who I was created to be, ripen, and trust that just being that person will be more than enough for the rest of the world. I've spent most of my life trying to be for others, helping to manifest other peoples' dreams, helping others transition into wholeness. I continually feel left behind, left out, kicked out, unappraised, unvetted, for all that I invested in the world outside my core. Now, starting today, I give attention and vested interest in MY life first.

Yesterday was a pivotal day, my last day at work (to name just one significant event). I am no longer Executive Director, titleless and free, I refuse to be defined and held in a definition not true to me. Instead I hold myself together in stable soundness, listening within to what is right and good for me as the unique creation that I am. I trust that such integrity within will serve the comm-unity around me without my having to try so hard anymore.