Santa Ballerina

Read Full Post »

Saints or Sinners, We Need to Talk

I read the edge in ybonesy’s piece, Who Stole My Saint? What I like is that she didn’t shy away from what she wanted to say. She spoke her truth.

Writing breaks us open, wears us out. Most good things do both. Shadow. Dark. Light off the dent in a muddy golf ball. I liked her edge.

No one wants to talk about the hard stuff; they’re afraid they’ll say the wrong thing. Politically correct stops us from talking. PC sugarcoats the glaring truth. We need to talk.

I’m reminded of a recovery meeting a few years ago. Someone made a reference to race when they spoke on one of the Steps. I nearly fell off my chair. I fidgeted and looked around. I was noticeably uncomfortable. What were racial comments doing in a recovery meeting?

After the meeting, I was walking out to my car with an African American woman I had connected with in small group. She had been honest and warm. I felt an opening. So I took a risk and asked if she had been offended at the speaker’s reference. I swallowed hard, waiting for her answer, and squelched a sudden obtrusive thought to apologize for the whole white race.

We talked in the parking lot for only 10 minutes. But those 10 minutes really counted. Good, direct conversation. She said she’d reacted to the comment. But then stopped for a moment and looked at the speaker’s intention. She knew they were trying to use a powerful analogy to get their point across about recovery. But what hurt was the fact that there was no follow through. The speaker threw the comment out there and left it hanging in the room.

There is no cross talk in recovery when someone speaks. And little back and forth conversation. Unless you are well-versed in the 12 Traditions, it’s hard to know what to say in an awkward moment.

As we started to wrap up the conversation and head to our cars, I told her I grew up in the South and had to do a lot of personal work to unlearn what I’d been taught as a child. We talked about experiences with racism in the South. But especially in the North, in self-declared liberal climates, where prejudice is more underground, dangerous, and silent.

I knew that was true. A few summers ago, two baseball cap wearing punks in a Ford pickup pulled up next to Liz’s Saturn on Highway 55, rolled down their windows, spit at us, and yelled, “Get off the road, fuckin’ dykes!” All we were doing was talking and laughing in the front seat. No “L” was tattooed on our foreheads. We weren’t kissing or wearing purple. We didn’t have Human Rights Campaign or rainbow stickers on the rear bumper. We were just talking. And laughing.

There’s a lot of hate out there. Plenty to go around. We need to start talking if we’re ever going to heal the past.

There have been many conquests in this country, too many to count. No one is above it all. No one culture. No one race. I spent a long time early in my life blaming it on the whites. Blaming it on men. Blaming it on my family. Blaming it on me. But I’ve learned – change happens at the individual level. You can’t cover things up with blanket blame. Talking things out might have made a difference. But I know from experience, I was angry and that’s all I could see.

When people are angry, it’s hard to have a conversation. It’s hard to change things. Even if you want to. It’s hard to forgive others. First, we have to suck it up and forgive ourselves. When other people hate us so fiercely, after a time, we start to hate ourselves. We have to forgive ourselves for that hate.

I started a conversation with the woman in recovery. Ybonesy started a conversation in the blog. That’s what needs to happen. If we’ve got some edge, good. But we will have to deal with responses from our families. And our friends. It could get touchy. Better to get it over with now, rather than when my first book comes out.

What I want to say to ybonesy is that I was one of those New Agers that stormed New Mexico. I went with my partner in 1987 during the Harmonic Convergence. It was a big deal. Many Native Americans participated that summer. They told us it was written in some of their history that a new age would come; a time when they’d have to teach whites how not to destroy the earth – and every being on it.

The New Age movement changed me. It gave me a place to find my anchor. It was a white movement. Whites trying to find ground. I never related to Christian religion. It had no place for gays and lesbians. But with some indigenous cultures, people who were different were sometimes the most revered. And nature was integrated into day to day living.

I am Pagan mostly. Wicca based. Female goddess based. It’s rooted in nature, the turn of a season. But I believe in a Higher Power, a Greater Universe, Jung’s collective unconscious. I believe Jesus was one of the prophets, just like Buddha. I pray in Recovery. I subscribe to the basic tenets of Buddhism. I sit, I write, I practice. I don’t fit into mainstream religion. But I’m a spiritual being.

We are all spiritual beings. And that’s what a mystic like Saint Teresa would tell you if she were standing here today.

What *did* I get out of the New Age? A lot. I learned about every culture and how each worked with nature and Spirit. I looked for common ground in my own roots. I learned compassion. I forgave myself. I brought what I learned back home.

I tried not to trounce on anyone else along the way. I was curious. I wanted to know other cultures. I’m not as romantic anymore. I know that a lion in the desert is going to attack and eat a wildebeest. Something has to die. In order for something new to be born.

There was a New Age way before the 1980’s. It involved Mabel Dodge, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Georgia O’Keeffe, Willa Cather, and all the whites that came to New Mexico in the 1920’s. It was going on in Europe at the same time – Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, countless artists and writers. It was a great time to be gay or lesbian in France. There was a freedom there. Baldwin knew it. He moved to Europe.

Psychology came out of that time, relating the way we think and live to our spiritual lives. People like William James and Carl Jung were mystical pioneers who changed the face of psychology, forerunners of therapy as we know it. James and Jung consulted for Bill W., Dr. Bob, and Bill’s wife, Lois, the founders of AA and Al-Anon that have gone on to help thousands of people. The connections weren’t accidents.

Whole cultures changed because people were hungry. They opened up and talked to each other. They went to smoky bars and restaurants in Paris, met in drawing rooms next to the fire at Mabel’s, and lived on high desert ranches like Kiowa and Ghost Ranch. They shared knowledge, fought about ideas, weren’t afraid to paint forbidden paintings, and have the hard conversations that bust things open. They also spent a lot of time alone.

The 80’s wasn’t the first new age. It won’t be the last. It’s only been 20 years. It’s too soon for us to know what we learned from it. Maybe it was whacked out and crazy, the way 60’s counterculture was whacked out and crazy. Some took it to the extreme, were offensive to other cultures, profited from it. Frauds. Unauthentic warriors. Crystal eaters.

But we needed something to break open. Because white culture as a whole needed to wake up. We needed to understand as a country where we came from. And take a good hard look at where we were going. Countries are born, mature, age, and have a spiritual life, the same way people do. And America is just a babe.

The New Age is over. Or middle-aged at best. Like ybonesy said, plugging into Catholic saints – it might be a leftover New Age thing. But Catholicism came from Judaism, didn’t it?  Many of the mystics broke off with their own brand of religion. Their own New Age. Agree or disagree, we are all connected. Whether we want to be or not.

Being a writer is not so much about comfort. As it is about truth. We can each only write our own truths. Different cultures have different truths, different histories. And a straight woman is never going to know what it was like to grow up lesbian. Or a straight man know what it’s like to grow up gay.  But shouldn’t we still ask the hard questions? To hide those things in our writing would be a sin.

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

Read Full Post »

PRACTICE – Brownstone Auras – 10min

I had a dream last night about the 3 of us. We had a business in a brownstone out in the country. I don’t know if there are brownstones in the country. But this was a New England type brownstone.

Liz was there. And my mother, Amelia. It was a well-known fact that Amelia could read auras. Mine was sky blue. And she said it was healing. The 3 of us were getting along well. There was a scene where we took off skating on a frozen pond between bare branches of aspen and birch. Wordraw wore black ice skates. So did ybonesy. They were chasing each other.

I wasn’t there. I was watching from a window. And smiled at their playfulness. They were with two clients and had taken them off skating on a trail through the woods.

It reminded me of the photograph I took in February of Wordraw and ybonesy walking down the snowpacked, icy road at Kiowa Ranch. Ybonesy is pushing to gain speed so she can slide in her black boots across the ice. She revs her body up, gaining momentum, and then step, step, step, whewwwwww, slides down the hill toward my camera.

At the same time, her arms fly up in the air, helping her keep her balance. Wordraw is in the background smiling with his Wayfarers on. It is more like a boyish smirk. And I don’t know if they were Wayfarers. It sounds cool to say they were. Back to the dream.

Another scene, we are sitting around the brownstone. A client walks in. It’s like we have this business that draws people for one reason, like we have a storefront offering. But they are really there for another, some kind of healing energy. To get to know themselves. For tools. We have something to offer.

I asked if the person needed anything. They had their child with them. They said they wanted to hang out in one of our sitting areas for a while. We said okay. Wordraw was sitting next to me, Liz, and Amelia on a large couch where we were relaxing in sunbeams streaming through clear panes in a crossbar window. He said he wasn’t feeling well. Liz reminded him that Amelia could read auras. Amelia said his was in an agitated state that was pushing back on him. She said to meditate and be still. To walk out in nature.

Another woman came to visit us. She walked around the brownstone, reading the energy. That sounds strange. But she was talking to the walls. And, after all, it is my dream. When she came to a certain spot, she said there was a 40 year old letter or contract buried deep in the wall.

“Yeah, right there,” she pointed to a midsection of brick wall over a daybed. “There’s a letter buried there.”

That’s when Liz’s alarm went off. I was groggy when I turned over to spoon her and realized it was a dark morning between winter and spring. And the letter in the wall had only been a dream.

But that letter is haunting me. I wonder what it says?

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

Read Full Post »

12 pre-spring haiku

seven o seven
March equinox dons lamb’s wool
the first day of spring

snatching liquid snow
from the puddle near the fence
silent and thirsty

red lichen dot folds
around a dead aspen branch
in my direction

tater tot medley
whiffing around broiled chicken
on a gray March day

a kid smoking pot
across the pond on a log
sitting in the sun

1 and a half feet
juniper split from the weight
of early spring snow

shedding muddy boots
on the rug by the white door
a black beetle crawls

flattened dirty snow
crusty and black near the porch
frees the columbine

Liz’s clear blue eyes
when she pulls on monkey socks
KitKat bunny ears

chocolate craving
combs the SuperValu aisles
looking for a snack

motherless children
Flower leads the long-tailed pack
of Meercat mansion

sandpaper crystal
reflects the moon in a leaf
spring thaw flutters by

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
first night of spring

Read Full Post »

Who Stole My Saint?

I didn’t go see Mirabai Starr last month in Taos when she read from her new book. The translation of Teresa de Avila’s memoir. I wouldn’t mind reading the book, especially if the writing is accessible. I suppose that’s one of the roles of the translator. To make the language as accessible as possible while being true to the original work.

When I worked for an ad agency in Santa Fe in the mid-1980s, one of our clients was a New Age book publisher. We designed their book covers. The books included some of the translated works of Hildegard of Bingen and, I think, Teresa of Avila. Matthew Fox was one of their authors, and Robert Bly. I always got a copy of whatever book it was we were working on, and I almost always tried to read the book. I never got through any of them. Too scholarly. Too removed.

I’m not sure what it is about “New Age” that turns me off. Maybe it’s that I associate it with people whose own roots aren’t deep enough or interesting enough to hold them. They have to go in search of someone else’s cultures and traditions.

That’s harsh. I suppose I have resentment toward Santa Fe and what I saw as the second conquest. First conquest was Spaniards over indigenous. Second conquest was the white people, and not just any white people. Crystal eaters, I used to call them.

I remember going after work to see a channeler at one of Santa Fe’s many New Age shops. Part of me was intrigued; part of me lost and searching for something to hang on to. The store was closed. The channeler sat on a cushion in the middle of the room; we sat on pillows and cushions in a circle around him. There were about a dozen other people, almost all around the age I am now. Forties and fifties. (Why do people seek out New Age in their 40s and 50s? And didn’t I read in one of the links on QM’s Teresa de Avila post that New Age is going through midlife crisis?) They were dressed in purples and oranges and wore garnets and soap beads and bracelets that jangled with every movement.

The channeler was bald on top with the rest of his hair long down the sides. He had big cracked yellow toenails. After a few moments he started to gyrate. Round and round in wide slow circles like a spinning top that is finally coming to its standstill. In a deep voice he said, Ahhhh, allaaaahhhh, allaaaahhhh, ahhhh… Everyone around him was transfixed.

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to crawl up to him and push him over. I wanted to do something to break his connection, like wave my hands in the air above him. I didn’t believe he had a link to the other side. Was he real or was he putting on a show to make money from people in need?

I never went back to see the channeler. I dabbled in positive thinking, astrology, and body work. Now, twenty years later, I still do the body work, and I’ve embraced the idea of writing practice as a spiritual practice. And probably most significant, I’ve come back to the ritual of the Catholic Church.

I love the saints because they’re people I grew up with. Like aunts and uncles. I feel protective of them. But I also feel like I’m growing up when it comes to New Age. I still can be irreverent toward the movement. I can still be indignant at times, like some feminists are when it comes to the question of whether men have a place in women’s studies. But when it comes down to it, I’m pretty sure I can share.

Read Full Post »

Saint Teresa of Avila – Archetype Whose Time Has Come

I’ve got archetypes on the brain. First the Labyrinth. And now, Saint Teresa of Avila.

I’m thinking about her because Liz is sitting here researching subjects for a paper she has to write for her Psychology of Religion class. She’s digging into early 1900’s new agers: Carl Jung, William James (brother of the writer, Henry James), Marion Woodman, and Annie Besant, who was close friends with George Bernard Shaw, and Gandhi. Supposedly she was the first to call him Mahatma, Great Soul.

After hours of research, Liz ran into Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul, the latest book from Caroline Myss, archetype queen. Her focus abruptly shifted.

“Did you know Caroline’s new book is about Teresa of Avila?” she asked. “Isn’t that the same mystic the writer you saw in Taos wrote about?” 

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “Mirabai Starr. I didn’t realize they had both written about Teresa.” 

Wordraw and I had stayed behind a day in Taos after the last retreat to hear Mirabai read from her new book, Teresa of Avila: The Book of My Life. The book was due to be released February 13th.

On February 10^th, at the pre-book launch and benefit for SOMOS, the room at Mabel Dodge Luhan House where we had sat the week before in complete silence, had been transformed in 3 short hours to a crowded, way too hot, energetic bundle of Taosenos. They had all come out to support Mirabai.

 Over in the back left corner, I sat quietly near Sean Murphy, who was manning the video camera, and Tania Casselle, writers I met in Taos at my first workshop in 2001. I was among a group of 12 tired, road-weary writers who had just ended a year long retreat. We were either busting with pent up emotion or flagging with the numbness of no feeling at all. And who was the woman up front next to the stage wearing a wrap of bright orange?

Oh, it was Tessa. Mirabai Starr’s book has a forward written by Tessa Bielecki, an author who has been writing about Teresa of Avila, from what I can tell, since the 1970’s. Tessa took the podium first. She said Teresa’s favorite color was orange and she spoke about her likes and dislikes as if the Saint herself was standing there. Then Natalie introduced Mirabai who took the stage with wild applause. She is the first woman, and one of the only non-Catholics, to translate Saint Teresa’s memoir, The Interior Castle.

Until I heard Mirabai read from her book in a mesmerizing style that sounded like the channeled voice of the 16^th century nun and mystic, I had no idea who Teresa of Avila was. Maybe this says more about me and my ignorance than anything else. And it’s surprising, since I’m big on mysticism as the core root of all religions.

But even though I know very little about the Saint and her history, I do find it thought provoking that the Caroline Myss book about Saint Teresa was released on March 6^th, within 3 weeks of Mirabai’s. They had to have been up to their ears in Catholic Reformation mysticism at exactly the same time.

What’s going on with Teresa?

When Liz mentioned Caroline’s book on Saint Teresa, I was reminded of Wordraw’s blog piece, a writing practice from a few days ago, on Living a Double Life. Near the end, he was talking about Rilke, writing, and Saint Teresa: 

“Not tonight. Tonight I want to stay up, to read Rilke, swim in the life of Saint Teresa and write. And I want to wake up in the morning and sing to God, dash to work before the traffic on the bridge is deadening.”

His words took me back to the reception we attended in Mabel Dodge’s sitting room after Mirabai’s reading. It was crowded with people. I was hot and tired. Mirabai was signing books in the dead space of the Rainbow Room. Wordraw and I had to pack and catch the Twin Hearts shuttle back to the Albuquerque airport the next day, a venture that, depending on the driver, can sometimes be harrowing.

I decided to go back to the Ansel Adams room and shower. But Wordraw stood in the long line and bought Mirabai’s book. She signed it and chatted with him for a few minutes. He was beaming when he got back to the room.

A few weeks later, he is swimming in the life of Saint Teresa from his loft, Liz is researching whether or not she wants to plunge into the pool with Caroline Myss (who just jumped off the high dive), and Mirabai is probably somewhere in between Boulder and Chicago on tour. 

What’s going on with Teresa? She must be an archetype whose time has come.

Monday, March 19th, 2007

Read Full Post »

PRACTICE: Crazy Leafy Carpet

sunroom at the school where Em takes guitar lessons…crazy leafy carpet…red brick interior wall…lonely pine table…skinny piney plant…

Read Full Post »

PRACTICE: Leading Two Lives

leading two lives…half dog-half cat…cat-dog…dog-cat…meow-woof…woof-meow…cat dog and dog cat

Inspired by this post, and this one, and this one.

Read Full Post »

PRACTICE: Living a Double Life – 10min

I remember in my twenties feeling there were two me’s. The true me and the false me. I can’t describe now the difference except to say when I was in the “true” mode I felt as though nothing else were with me. No material concerns, no jealousy, no desire. Just me.

I don’t have that feeling now, twenty-some years later, of being two people. I write. I work. I mother. I love. I do many things but each thing informs every other. Some of my vocations I love more that others. But if, for example, I am in the heat of a meaty project at work, something that takes me to an exotic country, I can be happy. And sad, for the week or so away from my girls. And sick, for the long trip overseas squashed in economy class. And exhausted and overwhelmed and awed. Nowadays I bear the flood of every emotion that comes with doing what I do and being who I am.

When I was in third grade I went to a new school. My first friend was Kim Bay. She looked like her name sounded, short and cute with freckles, a button nose, and reddish brown hair she wore in pigtails. We were on the playground at recess when a group of six boys came to us and said they wanted to play chase.

Kim and I started out together, two little running bundles, screaming with mouths open. Such fun and glory! Boys had never chased me in my life, never at my old school, and here we were. It was great having the attention of six boys. And then Kim veered right, I veered left, and as if I were up in the sky looking down upon the scene I see all six boys move like a cloud of bees after Kim.

My screams disappear into the empty air around me, my little legs come to a slow stop. Why run? Where am I going? My fun game is over almost as soon as it started. At that moment I suddenly have this thought: I am Kim and Kim is me, we are the same person.

That scene sticks with me like an out-of-body experience of sorts, a realization that the molecules that formed to create me are the same as molecules that create every other thing. All through my twenties I searched for myself, and now I wonder if it’s because I saw the truth once but couldn’t find it again no matter how hard I tried. Do I know it now?

Read Full Post »

Labyrinth

The Labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, from Alice Walker’s book, “The Same River Twice, Honoring the Difficult”

 

I walked the labyrinth many times last year as part of my practice. In the year-long writing Intensive the two of us attended in Taos with Natalie Goldberg, we were encouraged to keep and log our practice. Every day – as part of the structure of our writing.

Practice included anything that anchored, grounded, or sustained us. It could be writing, slow walking, drawing, photographing, swimming, or sitting. I chose to continue my daily writing practice. And walk the grass labyrinth at The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet in St. Paul.

I walked in every season. I carried a pocket notebook and Space Pen and sometimes as I walked I’d jot down haiku, page after page after page. It poured out of me. I can’t explain why. Except to say that the labyrinth is an archetype. It is not unique to any one person or culture.

What makes the labyrinth so powerful is that many have walked it before me. And many will walk it to come. We all walk together. The QuoinMonkey avatar is an image of The Labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral. But not just any image.

Many years ago, before I ever set foot on a labyrinth, I was drawn to the symbol and scanned it from the front of one of Alice Walker’s books – The Same River Twice, Honoring the Difficult. The book is about the challenging journey of turning her book, The Color Purple, into a blockbuster movie. It is a book about process. I recommend reading it.

I saw Alice Walker at Borders in 2004. Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart had been released. She came to speak at Block E on Hennepin Avenue in the small first floor café of the bookstore where I worked. The place was packed. I sat on the floor at her feet. I could not believe my good fortune. She is one of my mentors.

I don’t know her personally, except to shake her hand when she signed my book. But I’ve read everything she’s ever written. For over 25 years, she’s inspired me through her work. Her books were my mentors. I even had the chance to tell her that. But that’s another story.

Inside the front cover of The Same River Twice, Alice quotes another writer, Jungian psychologist, Jean Shinoda Bolen. As fate would have it, I saw Jean speak at Amazon Women’s Bookstore in Minneapolis a few weeks before I attended the last Taos Intensive in February 2007.

I told Jean I was thinking about teaching writing but I was scared. She said if it is meaningful to me, fun, and motivated from a place of love, I should do it; it would energize me and give far more than it would take. Then she smiled and signed my book. When I turned to the back cover, there was a quote from Alice Walker.

If you’re a writer, I don’t have to tell you that everything is connected. You already know.

Practice. And keep walking.

 

 __________________

Labyrinth excerpt from Alice Walker’s book, The Same River Twice, Honoring the Difficult, 1996

 

Once we enter the labyrinth, ordinary time and distance are immaterial, we are in the midst of a ritual and a journey where transformation is possible; we do not know how far away or close we are to the center where meaning can be found until we are there; the way back is not obvious and we have no way of knowing as we emerge how or when we will take the experience back into the world until we do. There are no blind ends in a labyrinth, the path often doubles back on itself, the direction toward which we are facing is continually changing, and if we do not turn back or give up we will reach the center to find the rose, the Goddess, the Grail, a symbol representing the sacred feminine. To return to ordinary life, we must again travel the labyrinth to get out, which is also a complex journey for it involves integrating the experience into consciousness, which is what changes us.

 __________________

Journal excerpt from The Same River Twice, Honoring the Difficult, 1996

 

It is a blustery partly sunny day in the country. It rained all night, which should be good for the trees. I’ve still got a dozen trees and shrubs to plant. But I spent four hours weeding the garden yesterday; after feeling depressed and as if I had no support. But really, I have the support of the Universe. And if I meditated more, I would feel less alone.

-from Alice Walker journal entry, March/April 1984, a “strong” period

 

Saturday, March 17th, 2007

Read Full Post »

PRACTICE – Living a Double Life – 30min

I’m exhausted. Can’t seem to find my ground the last few weeks. I live a double life. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. How hard it is for artists and writers to live an alternative life. No wonder so many writers are alcoholics and addicts. I can feel the great need for relief from the pressure. A gnawing pressure, an I-need-to-get-moving, I’m-wasting-my-life pressure – so different than performing a 9 to 5 job.

There isn’t much support in our society for being an artist or writer. Many cave from the pressure of trying to do it alone. That’s why it’s so important to find community – people you trust with your work. People you can write with every day. It’s rare. It can be fostered through meeting writers at retreats. But you have to risk exposure. And intimacy at the group level. It’s the only way it happens.

It’s one of those days when I want to cave in, give up. My eyes are glued shut, my back is sore, I look like hell. If someone looked at me the wrong way, I’d probably break into tears. It’s one of those days when I don’t think I can take another step.

I have to get to my 27 hour a week day job. I’ve got deadlines to get the blog up. One of our cats, Mr. Stripeypants, has a urinary infection and we have to give him meds twice a day. I haven’t unpacked boxes from moving last December. My hair is shaggy and disheveled. And my toenails need to be cut. Did I just cross a line?

My tooth needs a crown (the deductible for which I have to save), I need new glasses (since my eyes seem to age faster than the rest of me), a pile of bills needs to be paid, and I’ve had a cough the last few days. I have no idea where it’s coming from. I’m also trying to run a new business, start teaching workshops, finish more pieces that I can submit for publication, and make plans to go Down South with my mother for two weeks in late spring to start researching my memoir.

Did I mention I have a relationship and, bless her heart, she even gets what it means to live with a writer. She’s stepped up the last few weeks to help out with the day to day, doing more than her fair share, even though she’s working full time and going to school.

Stop the insanity. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. This, I don’t understand.

I used to go to a corporate job everyday. I did that for 9 years. I poured everything I had into the structure of the 3 teams I managed. At the end of the day, I’d drag my butt out to the parking lot at 6pm (sometimes 7), sit in dead heat traffic on 169 listening to motivational tapes, go home and heat up a frozen Lean Cuisine, watch TV for 3 hours, go to bed. Get up and do it all over again.

You know that Jackson Browne song, The Pretender? That was me. On weekends I’d paint or meditate or do some clay work in the art studio I had set up in my apartment dining room. Some weekends I’d rent 6 videos and watch movies non-stop until I had to go to work again on Monday. But mostly it was go to work. Come home. Get up and go to work again. That’s what I did.

Until I couldn’t stand it anymore. It might be great for some people. But I wanted something more. I wanted my life to have meaning to me. I had a deep need to create, to give something back.

Everything is integrating now. After 4 years of working hard, hard, hard, on making a living after 9 to 5, and 6 years of writing practice, I’m starting to live my dream. The money part is slow in coming. Many successful writers will tell you, don’t quit your day job. I know where they are coming from. But for me, it was the only way I ever would have worked this hard on my writing. I had to make a big statement to myself.

Yeah, it was dramatic. But I had to plunge in. I don’t recommend it. It caused me a lot of pain. But it was what I chose. To make room.

Writing needs space. A room of one’s own. Silence. And don’t forget money. The green stuff – $$$. Writing has to be funded. If you want to write, you can plan on living a double life: the one where you do your creative work and the one where you figure out how to eat and pay rent.

Many books don’t ever get published. It doesn’t matter, keep writing. Because that’s not why we write. You just have to keep going, when every bone in your body is creaking tired and the gas bill for February is $250.

Keep practicing. Finish those pieces. Schedule your writing in like you do your day job. Give it just as much energy and time. Because that’s what it takes. Writing is a lot of work. And it takes time away from other things. I don’t use those excuses not to write anymore. I make time. I do the work. I have come to accept time and work as a fact of writing.

It’s a simple equation: writing divided by time & money = more work than you’ve ever done in your life. Every day you have to get up and decide if it’s worth it to you.

You’ve got to have a lot of guts to write. Courage. And perseverance. And when you’re down, you’ve got to get back up. And keep going. And, yes, there are days I want to cave.

I feel like Rocky Balboa. Red gloves, blackened eye shadow, the whole deal. Well, I’ll leave out the sit-ups. I hated them when I was 20 and I hate them now. I heard the final Rocky sequel last year was good. And I’ve got to hand it to Sly, he did a lot of crunches for that one. You don’t often see men his age in that kind of role.

Though I’m big on routing for the underdog, I didn’t go see Rocky. I give myself these daily pep talks instead. Rah, rah, rah. Cough, cough, cough. I wonder if they’re working.

Friday, March 16^th 2007 

Read Full Post »

More Sunflowers

   

Brett’s sunflower window, D. H. Lawrence Memorial near San Cristobal,  New Mexico , longshot and detail, February 8th, 2007                                       

                                                                

Read Full Post »

Dorothy Brett’s Blue Chair

There were many chairs holding the ground at Kiowa Ranch in the 1920’s. This one was Dorothy Brett’s. It is smaller than the Giant’s. But has a sturdy seat. Strong foundation.

At the round table, she typed Lawrence’s manuscripts for St. Mawr and The Woman Who Rode Away (based on Mabel Dodge Luhan) on a typewriter once used by Aldous Huxley.

A knight of the round table. I like the sound of that. Aren’t we all searching for some kind of Holy Grail?

 

Dorothy Brett’s Blue Chair, detail inside Dorothy Brett’s 9 x 11 cabin at D. H. Lawrence’s Kiowa Ranch, near Taos, New Mexico, February 8th, 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Read Full Post »

Black Dog Calling

Something about movies I watched when I was 13, 14, 15 years old. They left an impression on me that no other films seem to have done since.

There was Jaws. I remember sitting in the dark theater, my feet up on the back of the seat in front of me. When the great white shark emerged from the ocean as the police chief leaned over the side of the boat, I jerked so hard my wafflestomper hit the back of the person’s head in front me.

But the movie I really want to talk about is The Omen. In the original 1976 film there was a black dog, maybe two, that appeared whenever something bad was going to happen. I don’t remember everything about the movie, but I remember the black dog.

When I was in my early 20s, I wanted to move into an apartment by myself. I’d lived with my parents, my older sister, and my friend Ellen — but never alone. I found a studio converted from a detached garage. It was one room with a tiny kitchen, sitting area, and space for my bed.

Shortly after I moved in I started getting phone calls in the middle of the night. I’d answer the phone; the person on the other end sounded like a child. He (or she — I couldn’t tell) would ask for his mother. It sounded like a party was going on in the background. The calls came at 1, 2, 3 in the morning, and each time I asked, “Where are you? Are you alone?” The caller always hung up before I got any answers.

One night my pillow flipped off my bed and landed on the floor heater. I woke up choking on smoke that filled the room. I pulled the pillow, which was at that moment bursting into flames, off the heater and threw it out the front door into the cold night. I was sick for days from smoke inhalation.

Soon after that I opened the front door late one afternoon on my way to meet up with my boyfriend and there stood two big black dogs. I gasped when I saw them. I didn’t even try to call out to them, whistle or say, “Good dogs.” They stood side by side, showing no signs of friendliness nor fear. I shut the door, phoned my boyfriend. By the time he arrived the dogs were gone.

A friend from high school, Patrick, came to my studio to give me a prognosis. He had powerful perception, a sixth sense, and his ability to tell whether a house was haunted was legend among our circle of friends. He walked into my place and immediately turned to me and said, “You have to move.”

I didn’t spend another night there. My friends and I moved me out during daylight hours the following weekend.

Nowadays one of the first things I notice when I walk into certain places is how they feel. Were the people who occupied them happy? Sad? Angry? What lingers in the walls?

Perhaps the black dogs were nothing to be afraid of. Loneliness, my own or someone else’s. (Does melancholy have its own spirit?)

I’m not afraid of black dogs now. I’m more superstitous of black cats, to tell the truth. But I still can’t swim in the ocean.

Read Full Post »

Listen for the Black Dog

My visceral response to your sketch of Dirty Dog and Retro Wallpaper is black dog – the Black Dog of loneliness. Late at night in Taos, the silence would waken me. But it wasn’t silence; it was the dogs of Taos barking in the distance. Dogs have always scared me. And when we walk Morada Lane from Mabel’s to go into Caffe Tazza to write, I’m always aware of the dogs, lurking around fence corners.

A friend in art school started a series of paintings the year we graduated. She called it her Black Dog series. She was obsessed with research on black dogs. It took me a while to understand what she was talking about. But when I saw her brooding wall-sized images, I knew. It was a gut reaction. Deep loneliness. I visit the place often. There is no map out. You have to find your own way. She painted. I took photographs. We weren’t running. We were looking to know the Dog.

What I want to say is that loneliness is a part of writing. And sometimes loneliness feels like Dirty Dog looks – bared teeth, facing off, marking territory. Underneath, the loneliness drives me. Like fear, I’ve learned to embrace it. Even when my life is so good I can’t stand it – even then, late at night when the whole house is sleeping, and I’m up writing – the Black Dog is there, lurking around fence corners.

I still wake up in the middle of the night, scared and lonely. I try not to push it away. The last few weeks, I’ve been listening to Writing Down the Bones on CD. What I love about books on CD is that I hear the writer’s voice. I first read it almost 20 years ago. Revisiting it now, I am taken back to Beginner’s Mind, where I need to be to teach. It grounds me. I find comfort in the gnarled roots of other writers’ loneliness.

I’m tired. I’ve really been pushing myself the last few weeks. On the way to work this morning, I realized I wasn’t in my body. I almost hit Liz’s car backing out of the driveway. Looking for ground, I pushed the button on the Alpine stereo; I glanced up to see the sun rising in billowing blush clouds in the distance; I listened to a writer read her work. The early sky reminded me of mornings walking from my room at Mabel’s to the zendo. A deep calm came over me.

Stopped at the light on the corner of Winnetka and Bass Lake Road, crawling to my day job, I was just sitting. Natalie was revisiting the chapter on Engendering Compassion and the way she used to be tortured by loneliness. But something had turned. The dog doesn’t come for her anymore. She seeks him out. She hunts the dog.

The last thing I heard as I turned the corner on green –

“When I don’t feel loneliness, I know I’m not in connection with the edge of my life. I look around for that Black Dog, loneliness, and make sure it’s near me.”

Listen for the Black Dog.

Thursday, March 15^th, 2007

Read Full Post »

Giants Sat Here – I Remember

Lawrence’s Firebird, February 8th, 2007

I remember the chair.

And you there sketching on the porch. The day was clear, my 2 year anniversary date, and you could hear the wind through the Ponderosa pines. Water dripped off of corrugated tin roofs. And we walked up the hill to the memorial in silence.

 

Remember last October? When we each did 1 minute timed writing practices in the D. H. Lawrence guest book, sun peering through the spoked sunflower window painted by Dorothy Brett.

 

 

 

 

 

I

remember.

 

 

 

detail of Giant’s chair, February 8th, 2007

-inspired by the post, Giants Sat Here

Read Full Post »

Giants Sat Here

Do you remember the chair from the D.H. Lawrence Ranch? It’s an oversized chair for an oversized figure. Only the wood frame is left.

I sketched the outline of the chair when we visited the ranch in early February, but I didn’t color it in until last night, sitting in a council meeting.

d.h. lawrence sat here. and probably frieda and georgia and mabel and tony and and and…the leather is all gone all that remains is the oversized frame…for an oversized being.

Read Full Post »