White Silence is Violence

I have been silent on this blog in part because I've been writing papers for two graduate English literature classes. Below is a reading response to Doris Lessing’s The Old Chief Mshlanga

excerpt from Salt. 

          by Nayyirah Waheed

if we
wanted
to.
people of color
could
burn the world down.
for what
we
have experienced.
are experiencing.
but
we don’t.

— how stunningly beautiful that our sacred respect for the earth is deeper than our rage. 

I “was a member of the white minority pitted against a black majority that was abominably treated and still is,” Doris Lessing wrote of herself in relationship to the racial injustice she witnessed in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for the 24 years she lived there (Lessing 716). From 1925-1949 Lessing was in the center of social/political conflict resulting from the infiltration of white British settlers onto tribal land. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which divided the territory into Native (unaliented) and European (alienated) areas, set the scene for her story, The Old Chief Mshlanga. The story begins with a detached third person black and white point of view. On the land is a “white farm” with a msasa tree “notable for the vivid colorings (pink through copper) of its spring foliage and for the fragrance of its white flowers” a “pale willowed river, a pale gleaming castle,” and “a white child, opening its eyes curiously on a sun-suffused landscape” (718). This Caucasian landscape is contrasted with the “amorphous black mass” of other that “instilled a consciousness of danger, of something unpleasant, that made it easy to laugh out loud, crudely…there is a certain kind of laughter that is fear, afraid of itself” (719).

With this trigger-finger black and white tension in place, Lessing pulls the reader in with a brilliant shift to first-person point-of-view. Bam, we are the white girl walking through corn fields, conscious of the ploughed soil beneath our feet, “the great red clods…like a choppy red sea” (720). The hierarchy of white over black is established and the foreshadowing of bloodshed red on the land is further enforced when we meet Chief Mshlanga “his hair grizzled white, a dark red blanket slung over his shoulders like a cloak” (720).

This story, set in 1925 Rhodesia, was published in 1951 available to an American audience, “a generation radicalized by the civil rights movement of the 1950s” (Behrent). The story still speaks to the “color wars” raging in the United States today in 2016. I read my longing “to let both black and white people meet gently, with tolerance for each other’s differences” (Lessing 721). Until 2012, in my small relatively white landscape of Portland, OR, I thought, like Doris Lessing, that this gentle meeting of races “seemed quite easy” (721). But then there was Trayvon Martin and “Black Lives Matter” and “White Silence is Violence.” Tolerance was never enough and this story is an old, old story. As writer Anne Lamott said in a recent Facebook post, “Life has always been this scary here, and we have always been as vulnerable as kittens. Plagues and Visigoths, snakes and schizophrenia; Cain is still killing Abel and nature means that everyone dies. I hate this. It's too horrible for words.”

I learned as a white dance major in college taking my first African dance class that there was “a slow intimate dance of landscape and men, a very old dance, whose steps I could not learn” (Lessing 721).  I could only imitate and hopefully not appropriate; I could fill my body with respect and awe and wonder for a culture in a land I would never truly know. Yet today, in Portland, OR, I read “it is my country as well as the black man’s country,” yet unlike Lessing I’m wondering if there really is “plenty of room for all of us, without elbowing each other off the pavements and roads” (721). Tolerance is not enough. Inclusion is not enough. Yesterday, I thought the ideal was pluralism: beyond inclusion to an embrace of our differences so that those differences blend and swirl and spin in a cosmic reverse centrifuge creating a “stunningly beautiful” rainbow Earth.

Today, I’m not so sure. I know that “Silence =Death!” But what do I, a white woman who has never even stepped on any African soil, have a right to say or write today? I am not afraid to speak, I feel compelled to write something because "white silence is violence" and I am a pacifist. But what value do my words have in this narrative? I have experienced discrimination, a loss of civil rights, but my experience is not the black experience and I refuse to co-opt the black narrative. So what, if anything, am I allowed to say today? 

Allowables
-Nikki Giovanni

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

Works Cited:

Behrent, Megan. “A Golden Writer.” Socialist Worker 5 Dec. 2013. Web. 17 July 2016.

Lessing, Doris. The Old Chief Mshlanga. S. Akbari, W. Denecke, V. Dharwadker, B. Fuchs, C. Levine, P. Lewis, M. Puchner, E. Wilson (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of World Literature. (Vol. F 3^rd ed. pp. 716-726) New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 2012.

Transformation

False Monarch

This month I finish my final class for certification in Transformative Language Arts. It is a crossroads on a journey that I officially began in 2007 at Goddard College, but really has been a life journey for me. The poem this morning in my daily reading was by Jeanne Lohmann, a NW Quaker poet I happened to meet in a writing workshop in Spoleto, Italy in 2000. The poem is titled A Certainty of Transformations from her book Shaking the Tree. I'd like to share the second half of the poem here, but encourage you to read the full poem.

"...My heart pumps messages beyond the flow of blood,
and I've achieved a person eager for renewal.
Affection's earth enough to sprout such change,
and love's the richer mix for metamorphosis.
Yet mystery is where the final trust resides
and I've been transient there at other times,
often enough to know that change is how we're made.
Surprise hides laughing around corners
and weeping is a necessary healing
doubly releasing to those who've learned
to see beyond the surfaces of tears.
Lively creation labors everywhere.
We are upheld by all we do not see,
our lives enmeshed in endless restless worlds.
The whole of me moves straight toward transformation.
Alive in ways I cannot imagine I will continue,
relinquishing all that I am to new remarkable forms,
translated in death to a fresh becoming."

Ramage

I learned a new poetry form, Ramage, invented by Robert Bly.  Here are two examples:

Homage Ramage to Daylight

One crow two caws and the day launched unalarmed

with a white-green frost unlike the usual gray.

I missed the changing of the guards

from full moon to sun star day –

a covenant kept despite my absence.

So I kneel in awe before this common morning,

after a doubtful night and daunting pall.

I kneel in awe at the promise kept by my Beloved light.

The Chronic Tempest

Lime heat startles and shouts bitter darts,

an assault on her winter skin. Hibernating squint

into the imminent past. Tears salt the edge of fear

and sweat seeps down her susceptible spine.

Across stark sand, over clamoring waves,

a bruise-purple storm hangs in suspense,

cloaked but familiar, tsunami ready

to drown her in unexamined history.

For the Malheur Bird Sanctuary

The sanctuary, now held hostage by militia men, began as a way to protect wild birds from being destroyed for the millinery pleasures of ladies' fancy hats. For the sanctuary now in danger, I re-post this poem:

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

From Graham Oak Park

Oregon White Oak

Oaks are opportunists like the pioneers

seeking open territory, uncrowded
by fancy fir or large leaf maple

stout and craggy, crooked limbs gray
and fissured bark they are
the cornerstones of scarcity -

old men of the savannah.

The White oak splits readily

despite its hardness, and oh the gall -

calluses in their foliage,

hard-shelled hollow spheres

and lichen hanging on leafless limbs

impart an eerie appearance on winter nights.

Yet mistletoe, too can be found in the crown

of these majestic elders
mistletoe seeming to say Kiss me 
won’t you please come, 
sit under my canopy the old oak beckons

I have shade and wisdom and years to offer

won’t you, won’t you please

come, sit with me 

Cinquain Snow

Cinquain Snow

Sober snowfall

pillow-white sky

mesmerizing array

Wilson Bentley buffet

flake to individual flake

uniqueness united in drifts

Which is the illusion ~

unique or unity?

Were I to gaze

from a distance

into the glass snow globe

that is my earth today

we snowflakes would swirl and free fall

landing on a communal mound

then melt into puddles

to evaporate in

order to start

over again

or we

millions

would soon collect

on cedar limbs

like abominable

insentient beings

hanging out along Nordic tracks

a cheering crowd of spectators

in this strange race ~ a marcescence

like deciduous in winter

withering, yet still so attached

How Mary Oliver teaches and inspires

Do These Poems Speak to You?

You gave me a book of poems ~

Felicity, what does it mean?

   apt and pleasing

   expression in writing

but why the caution

   when headlong might save a life?

“They are her love poems you know.”

No, I didn’t know.

From Mary through you to me?

You speak of longing

then point out the poem on page 15,

   the one that contains death?

   and one of the poems contained a tree…

I am pleased to tell you…

   Mary loves trees, as do you and I, too.

But do trees love us

even with our saws and hatchets?

Why do we cut down what we love?

You told me you read this book cover to cover

like a novel, a love story.

   “You know how the climax

   comes in the middle?”

I want to cheat and peek at the middle poems

   get right to the essence of Mary, of love, of you.

I want quick answers

to those questions

that have no ready answers…

Do these poems speak to you

or speak of you between the lines

   like the space between

   rings in a tree stump

like the years between

   your beginning and end?

These poems are short,

potentially a quick read,

but I will take my time.

Upon your mother’s death

I search for a poem about fireflies

to send you maybe

Mary Oliver wrote something

about fireflies

so I don’t

have to it’s too hard

to write you too

hard to open

my heart

your grief 

I don’t know 

so I look

for a poem about fireflies

and find golden head Gannets, Whelks, Ghosts

but can you

catch them in a Mason jar

at dusk or in your fist

at nine years old

I don’t know

I didn’t know

you then or even now

but I know fireflies

and that quick swipe

on a muggy night

to catch

the light cupped

between my palms I can

crouch low on the freshly mown

lawn and peer

into the tiny cottage of darkness

I know

so I look again

for a poem about fireflies

and find Starfish, Rain in Ohio, Rage

and When Death Comes

like the hungry bear in autumn

but it is summer in Michigan

and a firefly

that lights on your wrist

as you cry it’s too hard

to be grown up these days

to be big all the time stand tall

and write you I don’t know

what to say

and it’s too hard

to write

about fireflies

------
And most recently:

A New Psalm

            for the 20^th Anniversary of Bridgeport UCC 1998-2018

Do you think I know what I’m doing?

That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?

As much as a pen knows what it’s writing

Or the ball can guess where it’s going next.

~ Jelahuddin Rumi[1]

They asked her to do church differently.

So, the Word was Revised

and the Messenger was Mary,

“One day you finally knew

What you had to do and began…” [2]

Do you think I know what I’m doing?

Yes, they agreed:

            the curious

            the wounded

the sinners

the seekers

the fallible

            and the discontent

all God's children, wonderfully made:

            the chosen ones

            the delivered

            the pacifists and warriors

            the black, the brown

            the young, the old

            the men, the women

            and all those in between.

They came together under one roof.

            First to one house

            then to one school

            to one room

            and finally to an empty white church

                        that they painted a hopeful yellow.

And they filled the pews until the “they” became a “we”

and the Word was Rumi:

We are “folded into union

as the split-second when the bat meets the ball

and there is one cry between us.”[3]

Do you think I know what I’m doing?

As much as the ball can guess where it’s going.

She said, “Believe the good news of the gospel.

And as fallible as we are, we are no mistake.”

So we began to make a bridge and a port

            for the lonely

            the questioning

            the marginalized

            the other.

Again, the Word was Rumi:

“If you’ve not been fed, be bread.”[4]

So we made bread

and soup

protest signs

and gardens

            we made silk banners dyed with daffodils

            and we made music, so much music.

“We are clay,” we sang

until the “we” became I.

And as fallible as I am

I am no mistake?

And I am loved unconditionally?

And I am welcome at your table?

And I matter?

I sang “Testify to Love” until “I” became “you”

and you sang “…like eagle that Sunday morning…

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you...”[5]

Do you think I know what I’m doing?

She said, “Be responsible, but carry no guilt.

Be mindful, but carry no shame.”

And again the Word was Mary:

“You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”[6]

And again the Word was Rumi:

“Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there”[7]

as fallible as you are

because you are no mistake

and you are loved unconditionally by God

            Beloved

            Creator

            One.

Time passed.

And the Word was Mark, “…there are no wrong turns,

only unexpected paths.” [8]

The “you” became “they”

and they found courage for renewal.

He said, “Bridgeport?  Yes!”

and the “they” became “we” again.

Time passed

then she said, “We are the church.”
We are the right and the wrong

            the pain and the balm

            the shouts and the song.

We are the death and the resurrection

            the thorn and the bloom

the soil and the seed that will sustain us.

We are peace where there is war

            and we are a sanctuary where there is none.

We are the church

and “We are God’s children, wonderfully made.

As fallible as we are, we are no mistake.

Be responsible, but carry no guilt.

Be mindful, but carry no shame.

Believe the good news of the gospel —

you are loved unconditionally by God.

May the peace of Christ be with you.”[9]

~Wendy Thompson, 6/10/2018

---

[1] all Rumi references translated by Coleman Barks in Open Secret: Versions of Rumi

[2] The Journey by Mary Oliver

[3] Folded Into the River by Rumi

[4] The Image of Your Body by Rumi

[5] Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo

[6] Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

[7] #158 by Rumi

[8] The Book of Awakening  by Mark Nepo

[9] Affirmation of Humanness by The Reverend Doctor Susan Leo

Christmas Eve at Twin Spruce Hollow

Consecrated nights. Snow mounds silent in muted moonlight. White pine boughs bristle with icicles over Twin Spruce Hollow pond ~ firmly frozen, skated over, struck with bladed plectrums ~ lucid accents ring silver through whooping pewter echoes of crack-the-whip. From an indeterminable distance amid black walnut woods I hear the hoot owl’s sonorous song, how der do hoo hoo. Wild fox eyes glow between sinister shadows, but I do not fear the night: for sleigh bells hang on the farmhouse door and a golden light from the toasty kitchen casts a warm welcome across snow drifts, how der do hoo hoo. Redolent oak smoke spirals from chimney tops and the last batch of sugar cookies has just been pulled from the oven. When the muffled groan of the hoot owl taking wing sounds like a tempest brewing in the forest, I do not fear the night for I know I will hear my dad’s melodious response to the owl’s cry. How der do hoo hoo? With an impudent grin he will reply, Great, fantastic, never been better. and I will know all is alright in the night. Stockings are hung by the chimney with care and the tree, a Norwegian spruce cut from the back hill, is strung with bubble lights. Outside, Dad trimmed the holly bush a sparkling white then positioned red and green floodlights as a jovial greeting for all who venture down the gravel driveway, how der do hoo hoo. One lambent stripe of emerald light shines through my bedroom window, over the quilt, on to my cheek, a soft glow like a father’s lullaby of love and I do not fear the night.

Self Care in Transformative Language Arts (TLA) Practice

The experiment of rocks in a container that still has room for sand and still more room for water is a powerful reminder when I think of self-care as the rocks, the first thing to put into my container. In the past two years I’ve hustled up enough part-time work to nearly replace my full time job…but there are no paid vacation days, sick days, or even weekends. I’m working constantly. Granted, I’m delighted with the work, but it’s all consuming. Last weekend was the first break from all work since April. I went to the coast for a wedding. Saturday morning I woke at my usual 6:00 a.m., brewed some coffee and sat down in front of the window facing the ocean with my Power of Words homework and journal. I could hear the crash of the surf, but the view out the window was still black except for the reflection of the reading lamp. I went to work with the “TLA snapshots.”

Pat Schneider offered me a ray of insight, “Not being able to write is a learned disability…If you can daydream, you can write. If you can cuss, pray, joke, tell what happened in the hospital cafeteria to a friend -- you can write.” Nancy Shapiro via Flannery O’Connor illuminated my morning with, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Then Pam Roberts affirmed with a bit more light, “…everyone has a story and…the telling and the hearing of our stories is healing. And in this healing lies the realization that we are more than just our stories.” And so I write…just a few lines about the swelling rivers back home, the sink hole on our street, the power of water, of rain and floods and ocean waves, their blue white foam just now becoming visible through the thin transparent piece of glass, which with walls and corners, and a roof protect me from the elements. I write about the awesome and awful power of water…only 100 yards away like death roars. How is it that I feel more alive with the possibility of death so near? How is it the five stalks of sea weed clinging to the basalt wall between me and the ocean manage to survive the constant barrage of waves? How is it seagulls trust the currents above enough to still their wings and just ride…flipping 360 degree like a Blue Angel? How is it the lacy white spray at the crest of a wave looks so harmless?

The sun has risen, as it does every morning. “…no matter how thoroughly we have convinced our intellects…our unaided animal senses… Whether we are scientists or slackers, we all speak of the “rising” and the “setting” of the sun, for this remains our primary experience of the matter” (Abram, 114). I put down my pen, my work, my worries, my thoughts, my creations, metaphors, dreams, and plans; for the first time in months, I allow myself to just be with the ocean and the gulls. I release to Abram’s suggestion to stop looking at nature as “a fixed and finished entity waiting to be figured out by us” and instead view it as “an enigmatic presence with whom we have been drawn into relationship” (118).

And I am renewed.

What is your songline?

"It's time to get up, it's time to get up, it's time to get up in the morning" my mother would sing to the tune of reveille. Repeat once with words and again with your own version of a blaring trumpet complete with “raspberry spray.” Despite the fact that my mom couldn’t hold pitch, she’d sing all day (even in the grocery store) and into the night even around the Girl Scout campfire (much to my embarrassment). Silly songs like do your ears hang low do they wobble to and fro will pop into my head even today at the most surprising times. I remember my brothers obnoxiously changed ears to boobs, can you tie em in a knot can you tie em in a bow accompanied by obscene gestures. Some of the Girl Scout songs my mom sang, like Make New Friends, taught me lessons. Some taught me history, like Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow about the Chicago fire. Others were just nonsensical like:

I'm a hayseed. My hair is seaweed.
And my ears are made of leather and they flop in stormy weather.

(What is it about my mom's generation and flop ears?)

Gosh oh, hemlock, strong as a pine knot.
I'm a senior can’t you see.
So what do you do on a Saturday night
when all the girls have gone to the fight
and a boy's best friend is his mother
fireman, fireman save my child
good evening friends
bow out

It wasn’t until preparing a slide show for my parent’s 60th wedding anniversary that I discovered that Gosh o Hemlock was a Mickey Rooney expression. Incidentally, Mickey Rooney owned the Downingtown Inn in my home town in Pennsylvania. I didn’t learn the origins of Big Rock Candy Mountain until I was teaching a history lesson about the depression. I realized then that my mom had replaced cigarette trees with sugar plum trees.This was our lullaby…although I’m not sure how the buuuzzzin of the bees helped us calm down for sleep.

My mom was what I always referred to as an instructional mom (as opposed to a snuggling mom). She wasn’t big on cuddles or hugs and never fussed over our physical or emotional pains. Perhaps that was her Midwestern German heritage. To this day she struggles with saying, “I love you.” When I say it to her, she stutters back over the phone, “Yeah, okay, well then, bye now.” She may not have been physically affectionate, but she taught us all we needed to know to survive in this world. She taught we four kids a slew of songs along with how to build a camp fire, ice skate, make buddy burners and sit-upons, dive in the deep end of the pond, peel an apple, sew a plaid skirt, dip beeswax candles…her repertoire was extensive. I realize now that I learned how to teach from my mom. She was leading us in hands-on, integrated, project-based learning in Brownie Girl Scouts before those terms and methods of teaching were ever acknowledged by the experts.

My favorite song Mom sang was, Skinnamarink. I liked it in part because I thought it was written just for me. I was quite a long thin drink of water when I was a kid and my parents called me skinny gink. Also, my mom sang this song to me in a low whisper just as I was falling asleep at night.

Skinnamarink a dink  a dink
Skinnamarink a do,
I love you!

Skinnamarink a dink  a dink
Skinnamarink a do,
I love you!

I love you in the morning,
And in the afternoon
I love you in the evening,
Underneath the moon…

Skinnamarink a dink  a dink
Skinnamarink a do,
I love you!

No More the Silent Cry

No More the Silent Cry
Trust the cloud of unknowing ~
an air of white-blue liberation.
Stand wide in this urban morning, crowing!

So what if you don’t know where you are going;
sing any song, no more mute hesitation.
Trust the cloud of unknowing,

for you are the queen of all sowing
that thin place of wordless inspiration;
stand wide in this urban morning, crowing!

This lush time is your time for growing.
Ignore those false rulers of reification.
Trust the cloud of unknowing.

This time is your time for feminine flowing ~
you are the mother of creation, of emancipation.
Stand wide in this urban morning, crowing!

So what if your words necessitate a lowing;
this is the time for that quiet (not silent) creation.
Trust the cloud of unknowing.
Stand wide in this urban morning, crowing!

Good-bye to Sheila Lodge

Sheila was one of the most generous I have ever known...not only giving her hugs, love and support, her fierce, mother-bear protection, but also her disappointments, resentments, sorrows, and unbearable grief, connecting us to the full meal deal of being human...both the awe and awful of our breathing beating coursing existence. A section of W.S. Merwin's poem:

"...I have to trust what was given to me
if I am to trust anything
it led the stars over the shadowless mountain
what does it not remember in its night and silence
what does it not hope knowing itself no child of time

what did it not begin what will it not end
I have to hold it up in my hands as my ribs hold up my heart
I have to let it open its wings and fly among the gifts of the unknown..."

AND

When Giving Is All We Have
Alberto Ríos, 1952

One river gives
Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

Transformative Language Arts

Well, I'm finally finishing a certification in TLA: almost 10 years and $10,000 in classes, workshops, airfare, and medical bills later! My reading last night for the penultimate class was about Suzan Lori Parks' play Venus, which brought to mind this essay I wrote back in 2007 when Parks spoke at the Portland Arts & Lecture series.

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 that 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 an 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 her 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 through the wavy waters of artistic unknowing and, like Parks, I hope to set off to Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse and remember who I am and who I am supposed to be.