sermonette

I mini sermon I was asked to write for a service on Sabbath:

I was asked to say a few words about what Sabbath means for me. Sabbath, the seventh day, a day for rest and renewal. I used to think a Sabbath was like a vacation, a break from work, until I took a sabbatical, a type of Sabbath, and realized that entering into the space of Sabbath, sabbatical is anything but a vacation. The writer and intuitive, Caroline Myss said, “[During Sabbath,] more than relaxation and de-stressing, we are seeking a genuine encounter with the power of Grace.” (Mystics Without Monasteries, Unity Magazine, Nov/Dec 2007, page 16).

True, Sabbath is a time of slowing down, being quiet, but it is an active rest. In order for an encounter with God to occur, we must clear our space and time of distractions, busyness, absolve our perceptual field of any imposition of rigid structure and knowing, because Sabbath is not about how much we know, it’s about whether or not we can endure listening in the silence. We have to let go of our need for control, our fear of nothingness, fear of pain. We have to let go of the security of the known, comfortable habits of our day, long enough to hear the still silent voice of God. For many of us, this is an effort; surrender control, that’s really hard work, risky business. It demands a level of faith that our finely constructed and controlled worlds will not fall apart in the process of seeking a genuine relationship with God, the Source.

As a performer, I know that place of surrender to the luminous ineffable, that place of transcendence into the Cloud of Unknowing. It’s the point in a song or dance when I’m not thinking about technique, the notes or steps; I’m not thinking about my next line, or the mistake I made in rehearsal; I am not thinking. I am purely in the moment, trusting that I am one with the movement, the gesture, the sound -- and the song sings me. This is the place of Grace; this is my Sabbath; this is my prayer. I’ve only reached this state of surrender a few times in the dance. How did I get there? Through daily devotion, discipline and practice. I trained my tool, the body, up to six hours a day, 6 days a week in order to get closer to the absolute, that collaborative conversation between grace, gravity and God.

As a poet, when the Spirit travels through me I know I have to lean back and let it; I have to trust that the writer’s craft will be there, as a part of me, without me manipulating the process. I must discipline myself to write every day in order to reach that occasional encounter with Spirit, with mystic mystery. I must empty myself of preconceived notions and perceptions, suspend all judgments, dissolve the boundaries of ego and fear, and be willing to tolerate uncertainty and a sense of insecurity. Hard work! I must have the patience to wait for the truth to reveal itself in an image, a word, an unexpected combination of thoughts.

I try to do this every day, but I don’t make a living writing poetry and if the poem hasn’t birthed itself in the hour before work that I’ve allotted for Sabbath, well what can I do? Sometimes I take the poem to work with me and I feel really guilty even if God does trump my place of employment. Sometimes I try to stay in that open state of listening, breathe the breath of Sabbath throughout the day and marry what I hear and see and feel in the office or on the bus with the light wisp of words from the morning. Sometimes I don’t return to the poem for days, weeks, even years, but every day I continue to devote myself to an opening of my heart and mind. I open wide, putting aside both the objective facts and subjective filters to listen to the Word of God. This is my purpose. This is my Sabbath. This is my prayer.

My place of Sabbath can look like inactive rest, even laziness, but actually, the devotion, discipline and practice of surrender into the silent mystery is a type of effortless work that, if I can reach an encounter with the vast power of Grace, is more renewing and life giving than any vacation I’ve ever had. I wish to leave you with a thought about Sabbath time from Rev. Eleanor Fleming. “Time in the silence is sacred. We must learn to place it ahead of everything else in our lives until it becomes such a part of our functioning that it has more authority over our thinking, our words, and our actions than the outer voices of the world.” (Rev. Eleanor Fleming, Unity Book Preview: Sacred Secrets, Unity Magazine, Nov/Dec 2007, pg 19.)

Fall

Lamentation

If you insist, God, that I stay alive
then what consolation? Don’t I too deserve more
than a couple hours of joy?

Entitlement is a nasty word.
I know too much about grief
and the ache in an old dancer’s hips.

Shivers of midnight light on downy quilts
no longer convince me that Beauty
makes these years of strain worthwhile.

I know the pain of surrender to gravity;
release to a hard, cold earth as the only way
to bliss. Beauty hurts,

so like an autumn leaf trembling
on the tip of an oak branch, I suspend
in quiet gold until it is my time to fall

and become nothing again.

From Vermont I feel Burma

Across Oceans of Compassion

Vermont maple syrup
flows bitter sweet through my pen
as silent monks fall.

Autumn orange stands
tall, still, with Myanmar roots.
Breathe my violence in

Breathe in maple’s gifts
of O2 and fluid veins.
The leaf touches me.

CO2 released ~
Winter comes early this year.
We know what to do.

Depression isn't about feeling sorry for myself

Depression

1.
My other mind
the one that I'm out of
sometimes
plays tricks on me
scribbling catastrophe
and conspiracy
in every fold of gray matter
until I can't fight It anymore
and I begin to believe
the unreasonable.

2.In this home,
not my home
resides the bear,
who is I, but not me
filled with stone-cold
polar resentment.
Fiercely caged in
an infrastructural landscape.
Is it the bars
or the space between
that lodges me,
a paws length away
from freedom?

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?