Fade to Quiet

The Font Poem I Wrote Live on Twitter Answering My Own Question

2012-01-20T17:17:00.000-08:00

I want a Twilight font that drips blood and snaps in two when deleted.
I want a Romantic poetry font that has birds in it and damp chunks of moss.
I want an Art Deco font in which I will type in blue terra cotta tile.
I want a Lascaux Cave font comprised of berries, blood
and the sounds of wild animals outside the cave.
I want a Marcel Marceau font that says nothing and still makes the reader weep.
I want a Beethoven font that no one can hear and
a Chagall font that flies, painted red, above the page.
A Sartre font in which when I write I love you it doesn’t mean you are in a cage.
I want a zen font that vanishes in the wind.
I want a Camus font that carries no meaning.
I want a Malthus font with a bug in its mouth.
Design for me a Darwinian font. Let the words eat each other.
And then eat the page.
An Edith Piaf font that sings for the Resistance.
A Billie Holiday font that prints only in blue.
A Lao Tzu font. It is made of water, fire, some dirt and a soft breeze.
A Simone de Beauvoir font that men and women will forever read differently.
I want a Ghandi font that carries the salt from the ocean
so the people may have salt.
I want a Martin Luther King Jr. font. All the letters are different colors!
And a Vaclav Havel font that never makes any sense.
And still becomes the president of fonts.
A Marie Antoinette font! (the letters at first are decorative, then only partly there)
I want a Winnie-the-Pooh font that wanders off into the woods.
And I want a Van Gogh font that makes my words worth a million dollars
though they come from a poor place,
a small room with a chair and a broom
and a window filled with sun.
Who can make a Sartre font I can’t get out of?
A Kerouac font that breaks open a sentence like a firecracker?
A Picasso font that is cruel but people will love it anyway?
A Dali font that drips down the page?
A Duchamp font that looks like any other but it is by Duchamp.

A Riot in the Heart: My Six Months on Match.com

2012-01-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

Yes, I did it.

I am a 42 year old single mother with a Masters degree in Poetry and I went on Match.com. I'm also a Taurus, which I add because they ask that on Match. I also add it because I am about as earth-bound and stubborn and unchangeable as they come. And I never thought I'd turn to the Machine for a date. But I did.

In hindsight, I did it well.
In hindsight, I ran it like a well-prepared high school science student.

But when I recall certain moments, I have to face to truth. There is no such thing as dating from a purely rational perspective. I got sucked into it. At times, the machine ran my life. At other times, the men it "brought to my door" got to me, for better and worse. Hundreds of them have written to me. I didn't always write back. Thousands were paraded before me above little boxes that let me check "yes," "no," "maybe." I sent them in droves into the no-pile, mostly because they weren't wearing shirts, or because they provided photos of their car or because they lived an hour away in Tennessee. I can recall the faces as I write these: all these men among the 7 million men on match.com. I can't quite bring myself to burst into a girl version of Julio Iglesias paean to all the girls he loved before. I didn't love them, any of them. I saw their pictures, and I imagined (it's kind of impossible not to) what kind of a person they were. If they said, "I'm looking for a good woman," I got an idea.

With some, I corresponded on and off for the entire time. They never asked me out. I never suggested they do so. We just occasionally wrote to one another. They were the sleepers. They were almost my friends.

I went out on more dates than I care to count.
By the end, I walked away from dates the way I walk out of movie theaters, sometimes moved or shaken, often wondering why.

I got enormous crushes on men who may or not have deserved it. I learned it was so much about me and my own projections, and I took a little break. I wanted to be thrown. I wanted to experience the "riot in the heart" that Gwyneth Paltrow's character speaks of in Shakespeare in Love. After a time, I realized that maybe the really nice turf salesman in _______ maybe doesn't really search for the same thing. He wants a girlfriend he can relate to. Not a literary dynamo, a woman who finished college. I learned I had enough imagination in me to turn a guy just struggling to make it through dinner before his shyness caused him to break into sweat appear as an answer to my prayers.

What my prayers were: a relationship where I could curl up with a man I love and feel his arms around me at the end of a day, a relationship where we could prepare a meal together and peacefully devour it, and then do the dishes, read some books, tuck my child into bed with a story before we ourselves turned in.

Something this quiet and safe and yet still with the riot in the heart. Was it possible to have both? Was it possible from a date or two to have any idea whether person #572 was the one for me?

The BeeGees Poem

2011-11-21T03:44:00.000-08:00

On Finding Out the BeeGees own the Priory where Joan of Arc was Sentenced to Death I Write a Poem using 40 titles of their No. 1 Hits

(I'm posting this in honor of Robin Gibb's announcement of his battle with cancer. Thanks, songman for songs that always cheer me up! The BeeGees are the only band to have number ones in five decades.)

It was God whom she needed to show how deep
was her love, and for one night only, spirits
having flown, she was named guilty, doomed

to stand, sticks and specks, against the flames'
shadow dancing. Did she think, did she hear
alone the melody, through the still waters of

her timeless, god-connected mind for whom the
bell still tolls, knowing a love so right, the words
in the night, in the night we love, we know how

to do it? Did a horn section blast out the hard beats,
shout out as the ropes lashed her wrists, the words
nobody gets too much heaven no more? Did she

expect to get saved by the greatest bell? I just want
to be your everything, God has said, demanding that
we the little islands in the stream invite his jive talking

in exchange for the sort of immortality that often has
come too soon. You win again, the saints must always say.
Don't forget to remember, instructs God, before letting his

words of "you and I," heard one night only through the still
waters of the mind, feeling like ESP, disappear like a woman
consumed by fire. This is where I came in, says God,

running down a list of Number Ones who answered,
served and died, as the world saw a new morning, and alone
now tries still, shouting from beyond: I've gotta get a message

to you, crying out, singing: If I can't have you I don't want
nobody, baby. And God shouts back, Love you inside out
but we, still thinking we are islands in the stream, like Juliet's

Romeo don't get the message in time. And while this may indeed
sound like a tragedy, love still is so much thicker than water.
Great spirits have flown, having learned how can you mend

a broken heart. And the answer has always been to keep
stayin' alive, and know even among the flames that consume
you like a Saturday Night Fever, you should, like you started

a joke, for the record, in Massachusetts, anywhere, like a
ghetto supasta, no matter what your lonely days, lonely nights
may leave you, you should be dancin'. Yeah.

The Book of the Ferris Wheel Whose Axis is Sun and Moon

2011-09-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

A Sunday evening, an anniversary of an act of war,
my daughter and I ride the ferris wheel at the Mountain
State Fair where we’ve seen a man with an impressive
belly covered with a t-shirt that reads, “I approve of myself.”
We’ve seen the father on his cell phone while he spun
with his family on the Tilt-a-Whirl and a pair of sunglasses
fallen from the chairlift onto the white plastic roof of a tent
as we passed over the white plastic roof of the tent.
We’ve seen the young goats and the Brahman Bulls, the
enormous rabbits fluffed and prized. All the things that
give milk and meat, all the things that devour them.

As our little cart reaches the wheel’s top and begins
its move forward toward the descent, it jounces and my
daughter reaches for me. “I’m afraid of heights,” she
remembers, “Don’t let go of me.” We’ve timed our ride
for the perfect minutes, the sun had broken the mountain
of clouds above Mount Pisgah. Silver light pours
through everything like a liquid we’d all drunk willingly,
together, kneeling at the mass of farm animals and
assertive t-shirts and signs that read “not responsible for
dart-related injuries” people walk by in a deep trust,
a trust that no one will go crazy tonight, all the bolts
will hold, and the calf born this morning at 7 a.m. will,
in fact, live to one day be also on exhibit in a pen in a
tent at the Western North Carolina State Fair because
this is where everything belongs right now, illuminating
itself from within each great circuit breaker flipped on high.

In our little cart that rocks with the wheel's tick
tock of its own bright and timeless clock, I press
my hand into hers rested on her small 8-year old knees.
In the West, the sun is setting. “Look, the moon,”
she points to the East. Together we revolve there high and
low above the earth, the thing on the cosmic bead-thread.
Suspended, we ride the axis of night and day, dark and light,
cloud and the world that moves beyond cloud that breaks
open at times to show us it holds us as we circle the
loosely grinding September night.

For Piya (Beloved) and Jiya (Heart) Patel

2011-08-31T08:28:00.001-07:00

--for the children murdered by their ill-medicated mother on August 27, 2011

The city will remember your smiles, beloveds,
and carry them in its heart.
The shapes of your small hands will always be beloved,
grasping at the world you were just coming to know by heart.

The city will invite you over to play, beloveds,
when the mountains are changing
as they are always changing our hearts.

The city will sit on the edge of your bed, beloveds,
read you your favorite story until it knows it by heart.
And the city will peek in on you at night, beloved,
and watch the rising blankets as you breathe and listen to the beating of your heart.

Though we now let you go to be with the spirit, beloveds,
we will keep you here in our spirit in our hearts.
We will watch you grow, beloveds.
We will remember you when our hearts delight in play.
Our children will remember the name of your most beloved fruit.
They will know how high you could swing on the playground with a racing heart.
They will mark their hearts with your beloved names
because you’ll be the ones that are always missing.

The city will always have a place for you, beloveds, in our heart.
In our gardens, the flowers that bloom from this summer on will be bright as your hearts.
They will belong to you
and to the beloved summer itself,
and all the bluest skies shall hold you, beloveds,
as we now reach to touch you, beloveds,
high above the mountain, beloved in its softness,
that holds us up today, beloveds,
in its shining, loving heart.

The Mommy Moon

2011-08-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

In 1940s movie consciousness, a honeymoon in Niagara Falls was that iconic holiday. The dream destination for beginning a life together, Niagara is the site of a millenia-old geological event. At the end of the last ice age, the newly formed Great Lakes crashed through the escarpment, forging a path to the Atlantic Ocean. Despite its being one of natural wonders of the world, Niagara Falls was commonplace in my childhood. My grandparents lived fifteen minutes away along the Parkway in a Georgian house on the river. We picnicked just above the Falls where a ruined ship rusts away in the current over the decades. "This is my favorite part of the river," my grandmother would say, "just before the Falls." I grew up with one of the greatest natural phenomena just down the road.

     When my daughter was three weeks old, I flew to Canada to introduce her to my 93 year old grandmother. We stayed in a Victorian Bed and Breakfast where my grandmother had played with her friends as a child, back when it was a private home. It was summer, and each day during the visit, I took my baby to the Falls. The following winter, I flew north again, and every six months, again. Each time taking my daughter to the Falls, standing above them in the snow or sun. When she was three years old, I started to drive up to Canada each summer to visit my mother at her cottage on Georgian Bay. She's eight now, and each year we have stayed in Niagara Falls for three days. We have stayed at the Econolodge in Clifton Hill, the "strip" where every business is an amusement of some sort: wax museum, lego museum, haunted house, fun house. This year I did something a little different.
      While looking at hotel prices on hotwire.com, I came across a "special rate" for the Sheraton at the Falls. All my life, or at least I think all my life, I'd seen the tall hotels directly across the street from the river. They had always seemed dreadfully out of reach, astronomical. I'd always dreamed of staying in one, of having Niagara Falls be something that was exceptional, something one gazes at for hours rather than sees briefly through the car window on the way to Nanny and Poppee's. I called the hotel to book the special. I asked about the view and learned that particular rate was for a room with no window. A square space inside a building next Niagara Falls. I said no and hung up.
     But the first bit of rock had already been shuddered from its place. I called the hotel again asked the cost of a room with a view of the Falls. For a difference of $150.00 per night, I could stay at the hotel I'd always dreamed of staying in. Or I could be smart and stay up the road at a hotel that could be anywhere. I couldn't really "afford" an extra $300.00. I hung up. I returned to work, thinking of my paycheck. How much I work to earn what I was considering blowing. I called again. I booked the room with the view. Then I regretted it. When my 8 year old and I walked into the room and saw the American Fall directly in front of me and the Horseshoe Falls just a little farther up, I stopped.
        We moved the loveseat from the wall to right in front of the window, which had a center portion that opened (with a good strong railing). We opened a jar of cashews and listened to and watched the roar. Me and my girl. For about twenty minutes.
          Being in Niagara Falls with an 8-year old doesn't mean sitting and staring at a natural wonder the whole time. That first evening we did the fun house, the foam ball jungle thing, the fun house again, ice cream and a walk through the town. At the end of these things, we returned to our room. Rather than it being a come-down from the various defining qualities of being at Niagara Falls, rather than being a withdrawal into the anyplaceness of a hotel room, we walked into a vista. I made a cup of tea and watched the water fall. Naturally, we slept with the window open. The moisture from the spray entered the room with the sound. Upon waking, I stared. While my daughter slept, I made coffee I drank sitting in that love seat, gazing.

   Across the river, I could just barely make out the wooden staircase they rebuild each year, taking people to the Cave of the Winds. I watched the four Maid of the Mists perform their daunting journeys rendered neutral by half a century of repetition. I saw the passengers in their blue rain ponchos board from either Canadian or American side. Through my childhood I'd seen these things, and I had wondered whether I would one day have a honeymoon in Niagara Falls as it seemed every girl used to dream. It dawned on me then. I was on my own kind of honeymoon, the single mother kind.
     I was celebrating my life as a mother, the kind of completion that I personally desired. My daughter was now 8 (just turned) and bright and healthy as I could wish. We have great fun together and when it comes time to correct her on anything I just use a couple of bits of sign language, and we're good. I like my job, had nearly finished my third book. I'd arrived at a good place in my life, perhaps the new "bar" that marriage signified for our mothers' generation. While my daughter slept into the daylight and the Falls roared on through their geological magnificence, I sat on the loveseat and loved it all.

Digital Silence, Digital Speech

2011-07-03T02:47:00.000-07:00

I fell through a bridge into a river in Switzerland once. It was a glacial river. It was a very old bridge. I still don't know how I survived. I somehow climbed a brick wall and passed out in a woman's vegetable garden. I did survive, and I got arrested for trespassing. For years following, each time I heard the sound of running water, be it of a river or a faucet in a kitchen, my hands would itch and often swell. When I went with friends to a "swimming hole" on the Blue Ridge Parkway, I experienced a full-blown panic attack which led to my being carried up the mountain by rescue rangers in a white wicker rescue basket then taken by ambulance to the hospital. All of this was unconscious. My task was to consciously draw this fear of water forth by exposing myself to increasingly dramatic forms of this necessary element.

I think of this "de-fearing" process when I think of Tweeting and Facebooking (and blogging). Public speaking is the number one fear among North Americans. In today's world, it is a daily terror. That is, if someone wants to be part of the online scene. If that fear remains in place, the person holding it will go unnoticed and unheard. Public writing is speech. It is the conveying of what is inside into the outside, audible, legible world.

People who aren't writers are expected suddenly to write. Writers for whom revision and long thoughtful pauses between typographical activity are the long-held practice, are now told that "4-5 tweets per hour" is optimal. That's several poems a day! That's a scene in a novel. But we can no longer get by just on our looks or on how well we perform daily tasks. We have to speak. And in order to speak, we have to have something to say. In the age of digital personality, it just might be inevitable that we find out who we are.

There's the feeling at first that you have nothing to say, that if you type anything at all it will be the wrong thing. It won't be "cool" enough. No one will "like" it. You might say too much, or you might offend someone. What you say might not matter enough to take form in letters stolen from the alphabet. The alphabet! What right does anyone have to take letters from one of the longest living human-made systems on the planet just to share what they are thinking?

Everyone.

As with all fears, overcoming a fear of self-expression takes time. As though the universe is moving us through a new phase of evolution, we are all forced by fashion into group therapy. Sometimes we want to share. Sometimes we have nothing to share, sit back in our chairs, fold our hands, or simply describe what we had for lunch.

The machine into which we speak has become a medium for self-development. Instantaneous feedback arrives in the form of a blue button under our facebook update. Like. And in the vacant box beneath it. Comment. And in the ultimate reward for having said something of value. Retweet. It has become a medium for finding one's voice. Whatever that voice may be.

As anyone committed to psychotherapy knows, there are many aspects within each person. The more speech, the more discovery. And it's okay to have a number of voices: to be reflective one moment and blatantly brilliant in another, to speak of a real-life moment at noon and to post a critique of a world event at one. Speech is space. There's only one way to create it, though. To gently but boldly move the unconscious fear of speaking (instilled in us from an early age!) forward, to feel the thrill of daring as our fingers type into the world our very own words and ideas.

This is the river of human discourse now.

The Lovers

2011-06-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

In the land of the esoteric, the tarot deck is much more than a box of thick, richly illustrated cards. It is a practicing ground for symbolic literacy wherein a practitioner "learns" how to "read into" things intuitively. This literacy renders the world a magical place, one where, as Paulo Coelho says, we can see into the Soul of the World.

For the ancient Greeks, for the ancient anybodies anywhere, the world and all that happens in it is living organism, growing, breathing, changing every second. As a part of this living world, we also participate in the whole. We are affected. We are transformed by experience. (Passive voice fully intentional there.) That is, when we are open, when we have been broken open just enough to let the world speak with us. From that point, with imagination and intuition, we can "see" the world at work inside the world, reflecting on the surface.

So, this photograph. How incredibly well it has captured the very essence of the yin-yang. There is all the fire, all the hardness, all the riot shields, all the rioting. And in the midst of it all, a boyfriend comforts his girlfriend, who has been knocked down (by the police no less), with a kiss.

Scott Jones and Alexandra Thomas, you are beautiful. You are the Lovers in the worldly tarot deck.

For more about them: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/18/riot-kissers-tentatively-identified/

SCATTER WHEELING: SWANS OF THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE

2011-03-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

The Wild Swans at Coole as Yeats saw them, too.

I woke up this morning to a clouded over moon and news of a new war, this after a week of earthquake and following fifty nuclear energy workers as they strive to save the world. The vegetables are already contaminated, and the people will get sick from this, even if Ann Coulter continues to insist that radiation is good for us. It is the first day of Spring, and it is cold and gray out. It's a hard day to wake to. I read that it was mostly children who were harmed by the bombs over Libya, and Ghadafi simply replies, "Prepare for a long war." I slept so heavily last night. Today, I want to sleep some more. I feel the earth is tired, the people of the world are tired. I feel we all need to sleep. But we don't sleep. We will keep acting, keep trying, keep searching for the words that will balance out the silence of the dead and dying.

I feel all of this invites me to move through the countless layers of grief that tragedy stirs. To somehow address the personal and political past and reconcile it through the present. I wonder if this isn't the meaning I can find, the path to feeling equal to world events.

The world is like a poem: doing things that at first appear incomprehensible. But the longer I spend with a poem, the more space opens up in me to accommodate the complexity. I can accept the many-sidedness, even if it still doesn't make a "rational" sense. I remember the first time I read Yeats' "Wild Swans at Coole." None of it made sense, kind of how the world doesn't make sense to me today.

I pick up the poem today as way of encouraging myself. What was once incomprehensible is now soothing for me, still deeply engaging. I feel my mind expand as I read through, expanding to hold a more complex world than the one I'd much prefer to wake up to. Here's the poem:

The Wild Swans at Coole

THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

When we are faced with something complex, we will almost always shut down our hearts and imaginations and revert to a kind of thinking that insists that things must make simple sense. I can't relate it to Okkam's Razor because the simplest solution may always be the "correct" one but "simple" is sometimes determined on emotional terms, terms we are ill-equipped to access. The razor is sometimes tears and loss. But we will more often call it action and set about further cutting up the world. I remember when first faced with this poem, I wanted to rip it out of the book with my own Okkam's Razor.

There was an intensity, or perhaps a peacefulness, to the language that my 17 year old brain wasn't prepared for. I got lost immediately, sitting in Mrs. Dennis's class where I was usually a bit of a superstar for being able to write well. The truth is that having a poem placed in front of me inspired the same anxiety of walking into math class and seeing the systems of algebraic equations. A feeling of being defeated before I'd even begun. New information, in whatever form, made me retreat.

Over time, though, I've grown into the poem. It has appeared in my life many times, at one point in the context of my growing fascination and connection with swans. I simply wanted to read every poem in the world (in translation) about swans. This one resurfaces.

I can see now that Yeats merely paints a picture in the first stanza: there are 59 swans drifting on the lake.

In the second stanza, he says he'd counted them 19 years earlier, and the birds had all taken flight before he'd finished.

In the third stanza he reflects on how they make him sad now because so much has changed in 19 years, when he "trod with lighter tread," meaning he'd felt lighter in the world, because of youth and because, I suppose, because of how life weighs us down over time.

The fourth stanza shows that he sees that the swans have been unaffected by all that time (poets seldom make allowances for the shorter lifespans of animals: Keats' credits the Nightengale he hears while eating oatmeal one morning with being the same one that's been singing since the dawn of Time). "Their hearts have not grown old," unlike the poet feels his own has; the birds are all still "Passion and conquest."

What happens in the final stanza is, still for me, a rough encounter. As is often in poems, the ending flies in many directions, like the swans leaving the water. Yeats imagines they will move away, "mysterious and beautiful" to delight other "men's eyes." Perhaps he laments them as he laments his waning sex-life, the affection of women. Perhaps he also laments the idea that he will "wake" in a world without them when he dies. The poem's ending is open-ended, as wild as the flight of 59 swans (four more swans than the years of his life at the time he published the poem), "scatter wheeling in broken rings/ upon their clamorous wings." The poem does not seek to resolve incomprehensibility so much as reflect it back to us, the way things really always are.

The things we "wake one day/ to find they have flown away" are the very things of incomprehensibility. A love, a loved one, a world we expect to be the same on Tuesday as it was on Monday. The way that poems end are so often the way that life really is, open-ended, complex, "mysterious and beautiful" and too often terrifying because of this.

This morning, I am overwhelmed with the world. I can only open myself wider to take it all in the way Yeats stood by the shore nineteen years before this poem and tried to count the swans as they flew. He can count them in the today of the poem because they "drift on the still water." He has also known the "bell-beat of their wings." Today is a "bell-beat of their wings" kind of day. A day I won't get a good count.

Yeats penned this poem during World War I, the war that took a generation of poets from the world, a generation of men. He saw it all and too often must have woken as I wake today: astonished, bereft, nearly dismantled by human events I don't even have to touch to be able to experience. Are the swans his friends who are fighting? Are they the general sense of "making sense" that we, no matter what, insist on finding in the world and news of world? Are they everything that changes and that will change? "Mysterious and beautiful." One day: gone.

Yeats would say that he knew he'd heard a great poem when he felt like "taking the sword down from the wall." I am tired of swords and of things being cut open by nature or by weapons. I am content to spend the day with poems. They bring my swans back to me. Always.

Epicenter, a poem for Japan

2011-03-19T04:19:00.001-07:00

EPICENTER, for Japan

Japanese sailors rescue Hiromitsu Shinkawa Sunday, two days after the 60-year-old was washed to sea on the roof of his Minamisoma home by a tsunami caused by a powerful earthquake. Thousands are feared dead.
Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2011

When the home is shaken, then taken
by the sea,

when all they can compare it to
are two atomic bombs,

there is no such thing as waiting as
when in this: the water wants.

There is no such thing as meaning as
when in this: the earth does break open.

Sometimes it helps to lift one’s head in prayer
and look around the world for what is missing,

to count the waves and all the waves have taken
and see how everything can be taken.

The shoulder of the globe is always soft to cry on.
The distance love will travel, salt to salt.

I look to the man on his roof floating on the ocean
and know he is a story unto himself,

having made it safely out of the doomed city, then
having returned for something he wanted, had to have.

What could it have been that made him be
the one who floats with the last of his home

in one hand, a red makeshift flag in the other?
What letter was it he returned for? What photograph?

What favorite piece of cloth, perhaps, or perhaps that’s
too perfect in the stories we want to tell about others’

survival of the disaster. He floated for two whole
days, had agreed with the sea that this is how

he’d die, surrendered his world to the wind
as he could not do on shore, gone from home,

unable to let it entirely go, and to the waves.
For the others, the other story we cannot know

even more deeply, so only hold onto them as one holds
onto strangers in a tragedy: closely—their open mouths,

their voices loud in our dreams, the screams and names
we want to say before the sea swallows them when it is

shaken, the earth

broken open, the heart of the world broken open,
gaping whole and in wonder at how it all—

the roar of it, the falling, the love, the families, the stories from
before the water through the window, the smiles, the touches,

the reaching hand we imagine emerging from the crushed
and drowning city reaching out of us to touch everything

that is never too far away.

The Full Dreaming of Asheville Wordfest

2011-03-03T16:30:00.000-08:00

The Full Dreaming of Asheville Wordfest, a press release for a paper that might not exist yet.

by Laura Hope-Gill on Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 3:48pm

ASHEVILLE WORDFEST 2011
May 2-8, 2011
All poetry events are free.
Films $10.00 donation.

It’s time for Asheville Wordfest, Asheville’s poetry festival. Between Tuesday May 2 and Sunday May 8, Asheville residences and guests can enjoy poetry events and readings around the city. Asheville Wordfest is the product of a conversation among poets Laura Hope-Gill, Glenis Redmond, Jeff Davis and James Nave in 2007. In 2008, Wordfest launched at UNCA. Director Hope-Gill expected “maybe forty people, but by the end of the weekend, more than ten times that many had come to the events.”

Wordfest is a local festival created to bring the Asheville community together while also connecting it with global voices. Each year, Wordfest explores a theme, using poetry as a form of citizen journalism and not just as a Fine Art. This year’s theme is Resilience as Wordfest fixes the wide lens of poetry on the many ways that poetry acts as an agent of absorbing and moving with change when life changes.

The 2011 festival begins on Tuesday May 3 with a screening of local film-maker Paul Bonesteel’s ten-year project The Day Sandburg Died. Sandburg’s poetry celebrates the resilience of the American people. “He was very much a singer of the American song, a song of work and collaboration,” says Hope-Gill. “Sandburg’s full voice lives on in Bonesteel’s film.” In keeping with Wordfest’s goal of connecting the regional to the global, the presence of Sandburg’s Flat Rock home, Connemara, plays a powerful role in the film, while the poet’s work in the Civil Rights movement, and his highly-regarded biography of Abraham Lincoln resonates with the whole of American, and world, history. Screenings are at 7 p.m. on Tuesday and 1 p.m. on Saturday at the Fine Arts Theater at Biltmore Avenue.

Further exercising the local-national focus of Wordfest, on Wednesday May 4 at 6 p.m. Biltmore Farms hosts a Wordfest Reception at the Hilton Hotel in Biltmore Park followed by performances by Keith Flynn and the Holy Men and Quincy Troupe. Quincy Troupe penned his memoir of his close friendship with Miles Davis in Miles and Me and has published collections and anthologies (including an anthology of third world writing) that have won him international acclaim. Troupe and Flynn became friends when Troupe first came to Wordfest 2009 to read. Hope-Gill says of Troupe, “He is the first poet I ever heard who used poetry to reach out as much as to reach in.” After Quincy came here in 2008, with his wife Margaret Porter Troupe, he published a number of other Wordfest poets in the literary journal he edits. “That’s what Wordfest is about: bringing voices from outside, getting our local poets’ voices even deeper into the world,” says Hope-Gill.
Asheville-area poets Landon Godfrey, Holly Iglesias, Luke Hankins, Rose McLarney, Mendy Knott and Britt Kaufman all have new collections published. They will read at Asheville Wordfest.

Hope-Gill themed Wordfest 2011 “Resilience” upon seeing a trailer for the not-yet-released documentary Poetry of Resilience by Katja Esson at the AWP writers conference in 2009. The film will show at Fine Arts Theater on Thursday May 5 at 7 p.m. The documentary features poets who have survived the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Iranian Revolution, Rwandan genocide and exile from their homelands. Each poet has found healing and renewal in poetry. “I wanted to shape a festival that explores this nexus of creativity and survival.” Film director Katja Esson will be present to introduce and discuss the film.

Readings by local and Asheville-based poets Britt Kauffman, Luke Hankins, Mendy Knott and Rose McLarney take place at 4 p.m. on Friday (Grateful Steps at 159 S. Lexington). The William Matthews Poetry Prize winners will read Saturday at the YMI Drugstore at Eagle and Market Streets at 4 p.m. Local (Landon Godfrey and Holly Iglesias), national and international poets (see schedule), take place at 7 p.m. at the YMI Cultural Center.

The visiting poets each speak from a place of Resilience, as well as hope.

Kwame Dawes, born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica, has published fifteen collections of poem hailed by Elizabeth Alexander as “majestic.” Also a playwright, author and producer, he penned the quintessential study of Bob Marley’s words in Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius. Dawes is Distinguished Poet in Residence, Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts and founder and executive director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. He is the director of the University of South Carolina Arts Institute and the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica in May of each year.

Paul Guest of Tennessee was paralyzed in a bicycle accident at the age of twelve. His collections have gained acclaim for their “puckish cheek and utter sincerity” as he shares his journey. His debut collection of poems, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, explores the body and disability, familial history, and the author's childhood in the South, which was "oppressive as wool and cartoon tonnage" in one poem, and, in another, "home ... a wordless idea." The book was selected by poet and MacArthur Fellow Campbell McGrath as winner of the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, Winner of the 2006 Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry, explore the loss of love, the pleasures of language, and the fascinations of pop culture. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (Ecco Press 2008) toys with biography and truth—and our expectations of them.

Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor's Choice” selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA "Best in the West" award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others. Turner served seven years in the US Army, to include one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, of Wendat, Huron, Metis, Tsalagi, Creek, French-Canadian and Scotch-Irish descent, has served as a panelist for United Nations‘ Indigenous Peoples Human Rights Forum and has published more than a dozen collections and anthologies drawing light to contemporary indigenous voices. Hedge Coke is a board member of the Mountain Multicultural Literary Society, the non-profit Hope-Gill is forming to house Wordfest and other multicultural events.

Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist, is widely considered to be one of the most influential and provocative Native American figures in the contemporary American literary landscape, and is an internationally recognized public speaker addressing environmental issues. Hogan has received a prestigious Lannan Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim, and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from both the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and Wordcraft Circle. She has also received the Mountains and Plains Lifetime Achievement award and has been inducted into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame. A Professor Emerita from the University of Colorado, she is now the Writer in Residence for The Chickasaw Nation and lives in Oklahoma.

The line-up of poets, says Hope-Gill, “aims to inspire all of us to apply our creativity to our own healing and to the healing of the world we live in. Creative imagination is medicine. It staves off despair and also offers a vision of what comes next. Without it, we stop dreaming.”

To bring the city's youth into this dreaming fold, Wordfest will feature young poets at all the readings and include a highlights reading from the WORDslam, a poetry slam that will take place during the months leading up to Wordfest in Buncombe County schools.

Wordfest’s new partnership with the YMI Multicultural Center enables Wordfest to take place in the nation’s first non-university, non-church-related community center for African Americans. For Hope-Gill, this means the festival takes place in one of the most powerful symbolic architectures in America. She says, “I have realized it isn’t enough to just have a multicultural poetry festival if it’s taking place in a part of the city with a history of hostility toward minorities. There are deep scars, scars we all need to heal. Wordfest is about welcoming everybody. The YMI only has a history of safety and welcome to everybody. It is a true multicultural center, and I’m honored to be working with Ronald King and Dan Johnson on a number of new projects.”

For Hope-Gill, Resilience, poetry and multiculturalism are all closely related. “Multiculturalism is about so much more than surface demographics. It is a way of thinking from multiple perspectives at once and being able to hold a space for complexity. In poems, complexity thrives without threat to the integrity of each of the many ideas present. Poetry has always been a system for accommodating multiple systems of thought. That’s its gift. And for today’s world, where a dominant way of thinking no longer holds, it offers itself as a guide."

“In order to be resilient, we have to be able to accommodate the full complexity of life. This is what Wordfest 2011 is about.”

Wordfest 2011 features a family event that aims to share the role nature and imagination play in developing resilience in children and adults alike, IMAGINATURE. This event features with local children’s authors Cindy Bowen, Lisa Alcorn, Hal Mahan and puppeteer Hobey Ford on Saturday morning. (Check website for location.) Late night events include a reading by The Rooftop Poets atop the Battery Park Hotel on Friday at 10 p.m. and The Mountain Xpress Poetry Bash on Saturday night.
Visit the website at www.ashevillewordfest.com (.org will still reach the site, for people who are used to using that url) for more information. Asheville Wordfest is made possible by a grant from the NC Arts Council and local support.

www.ashevillewordfest.org

Info: laurahopegill@aol.com or through the website

Black Swan: Alchemy in a Tutu

2011-01-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

For any mother who has taken her daughter to ballet classes at the local studio, the irony is evident. We hand our daughters wands and tiaras, while in the waiting room the mothers talk of all that goes on in our adult lives: husbands who have returned from war with deep psychic wounds, struggles with jobs and the efforts to keep a house (either clean or from going to the bank). Meanwhile, through the large plate-glass window, our daughters leap and twirl, engaging dreams of princess-ness. The dichotomy of girlhood and womanhood is clearly pronounced.

The film Black Swan draws on an ancient motif. The whole goal of the alchemical process is transformation through a slow drawing forth of the "active feminine," or "mercurial," principle from within matter. It is the "dark nature" that dwells within things, including the alchemist, and once the "soul" of matter is released, the soul of the alchemist can work with it and make new things come about. Nina, the obedient, girl-like woman alchemizes herself in this film. In the process, she must encounter and grapple with her dark-side, her own dark feminine nature and bring it to light.

It is, as Aronofsky's film shows, not an easy process. It is about much more than technique, which only serves the surface. It is a dance with oneself: dangerous, terrifying, in some cases deadly. The opus contra natura, this "work against nature (nature being the surface appearance of things which hold us captive)" is the theme of the original metamorphosis stories of Ovid, a theme that reaches into all cultures, all mysteries. Most familiar to us, it is a theme prevalent in fairy tales. The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty all encounter their dark feminine sides, be it in the form of a sea witch, a closed cell or a vine-encrusted sleep in a castle. The darkness consumes, draws the girl into an unconscious state where she must do battle. True love's kiss not withstanding, it is the girl who must go through the darkness. Ovid shows that the metamorphosis is sometimes successful, but most times not. Daphne turns into a tree and remains a tree. The Sybil becomes immortal but forgets to ask for eternal youth. Many things can go wrong on the path to transformation.

In the language of the alchemist, a failed opus is called an "abortion." If at the moment of death, the spark of life does not carry through to a resurrection, the matter in the crucible, the "child," remains dead. Success requires a "diuturnity of intense imagination" and also a disciplined balance within the mind of the alchemist wherein he or she is at once consumed in the process and separate enough from it that the boundary serves as what Robert Frost terms a "stronghold."

Nina's star-turn as both the black and white swan reaches perfection. It is a dance of life and death, the loss of self sacrificed to becoming new. There is a great power in the swan metaphor. A bird both graceful and violent, an embodiment of all we are and hide from.

The Travel Agent

2010-12-18T07:56:00.000-08:00

In the world of travel agenting, every place has a code. AVL. CDG. FCO. All the romantic and troubled places in the world are summed up in three letters: BEY, JRS, NBO. My first travel agent job was at the top of the BB&T Building, Asheville's steel and glass skyscraper. The office of Wilcox World Travel and Tours occupied the entire floor with cubicles for individual travel and group travel. I worked in Groups. In our section of the office, the floor was covered with airline-blue carpet. In winter a walk from a desk to the photocopier would generated static electricity. I'd get shocked everytime I touched the machine. I anticipated it. It was a mild form of torture built into the every-day necessities of work.

Between trips to the copier, I organized people's adventures. I had three-ring binders for each tour I was organizing. One group was The Beverly Hill Baptist Church Choir's European Tour. The address was Rodeo Drive in the 90210 zip code. Its leader was Nick Stimple, who wrote the songs for Air Supply. When I'd call him to go over details, I fought the urge to talk about those songs. I'd hear them playing in my head: I'm all out of love. I'm so lost without you. When you're booking travel for thirty-plus people, you know not all of them will enjoy the journey. People wrote letters complaining once the trip was done. From the Beverly Hills group, I received letters griping that wine had been served on a train in Italy, that there was no air-conditioning in the castle in Poland.

Travel to the Holy Land comprised a large portion of the company's business. "Journeys with Paul" was a favorite. One passenger, one of the countless pastor's wives who gave their names as their husband's with a mere "Mrs."placed in front, explained to me on the phone that she thought "Paul was the best-looking of all the apostles." I booked lunches at "St. Peter's Fish" and arranged boat-rides on the Sea of Galilee. One client requested an add-on tour of the "hopscotch court Jesus drew under the city of Jerusalem for the children." A woman called the day of one tour's departure asking to join because "Jesus told me in a dream I have to go to His hometown." (I pulled it off.)

For every tour I'd key in the passengers' names and place these people I did not know in hotel rooms together. I'd organize their meals from my desk, their transfers from the hotel. Every little detail: I organized it. But I knew every time a departure date appeared on my calendar, there was so much more that these people would experience that I could only have the smallest hand in. And nothing I could rescue them from, from my desk a few feet from the copying machine that zapped me.

Alchemical Christmas

2010-12-16T20:44:00.000-08:00

The intertwining of the alchemical metaphor and Christianity are never quite so pronounced as they are at Christmas. Of course, since the metaphor isn't ever outwardly shared, its resonances with Christmas remain invisible.

On my drive out of and back into the city today (because I had to retrieve clean clothes for my daughter's school performance since she'd become a mud-swamp during recess), I listened to Christmas carols. Shepherds watching in fields. Holy infant. Christ is born in Bethlehem. Years ago, before I started researching alchemy, these songs told a story of the birth of Jesus. And they were beautiful. I remember hearing Julie Andrews singing them at the Royal Albert Hall in London when I was four years old. So beautiful. And they're still beautiful. With another level added.

In the alchemical metaphor, matter is worked through a series of alternatively soothing and mortifying steps. At the end, it is "killed," then it is left in a "tomb" to putrefy. Then it is brought back to life: resurrected. These "biblical" terms aren't mine. They are the terms that have been used for ages. Ages. And it sounds like I ought to be writing about Easter, since that is the rebirth. But there's something about the language of rebirth that drew my attention in a jaw-dropping way. When the matter is made gold, in the metaphor (for it is no more just about matter than it is about the matter of our selves), it is referred to as "the King," "the son of God" (as opposed to the son of man) and even "King of the Jews." "Our newborn king" in the carol is an alchemical reference to a successful alchemical process.
The shepherds watching in fields are the alchemists, watching and waiting. The star is the spark of life that the alchemist hopes she has stirred into the process through passion and love and hard work. Ages. It all goes back ages.

Most of the hymns in the hymnals used in churches were written (I observed this while I taught at an Episcopal boarding school for nearly a decade: I attended at least three chapel services a week, creating a lot of time to let my eyes trail down to the bottom of the page to see when the songs were written) during the 18th and 19th century, a time when alchemy was coming under fire of a cold rationality even Sir Isaac Newton would have shied away from. The teachings, I suppose, had to be conveyed somehow. People weren't reading fairy tales anymore or legends of the Round Table, former vessels for alchemical wisdom. So, hymns became the cups for hidden meaning. Christmas carols speak to the final step of the magnum opus, the moment when base matter has risen to a new state.

"The son" is the term given that matter when it is beginning the process. When that matter has turned to gold, it is called "the king." So, we ask, how is it the king is born in the manger (another term for crucible)? Because in alchemy the lowest is the highest and vice versa. The king has to be born in meager circumstance, because only in humility can we find greatness.

This is the message of Christmas.

Reading it this way doesn't at all detract from the meaning, the "reason for the season." Alchemy teaches that "both" truths hold in any situation: a personal and a universal. Since alchemy occurs in all of us, is all of us, Jesus is one who completely moved through all the stages and became the Son of God, was born the Son of God (I know theology can go on and on arguing about this: both is the answer). He is the great teacher for having done so, and I do my level best to walk in His footsteps, being kind, practicing compassion, learning to "read the world," as he advises (even raising his voice!) the disciples to do, though they don't "get it."

And there is the other level.

Just as were I Jewish I would find the Kabbalistic meaning in all rites and rituals, and were I Muslim, I would seek the Sufi perspective, as an Episcopalian I find the mystical meaning in the same. And love it. And celebrate it with my whole heart. Because I know that I, too, am on my way to becoming "gold," to rising to new states of being, to being born surrounded by cows and goats and mice and oxen, hay and cold air. Alchemy makes Christmas at once personal and universal. Not just a story, a story that has been used to oppress and confuse and conquer. It is a timeless story of becoming new. I am at once the watching shepherd and the newborn baby and still the amazed four-year old hearing these songs about this moment in awe. And in me are the wise men guffawing when I screw up. And three kings bearing gifts for the mother who is also me, and I am the weary, worried father. And a bright star, leading me toward myself through the dark desert night. I am my own Bethlehem. In the liturgical calendar, I am about to begin.

Reflections on Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty

2010-12-14T12:29:00.000-08:00

For a book about surface-appreciation and the nature of beauty, this book's jacket-designers knew the cover would be judged. First of all, using canvas as the book cover is a brilliant idea. The print of oilpaint-like quality is a delight. Moving into the novel, the aesthetic appeal continues. Martin's prose is clear both when he is speaking literally and figuratively. His similes and allusive turns of phrase give the novel striking textures in what could otherwise be a not-so-striking read. He weaves subtlety into the surface elements by stretching our imaginations like canvas across the frame.

To increase the license for such figurative speech, he makes his narrator an art writer, Daniel, who, as the Independent notices, functions much as Nick Carraway does in The Great Gatsby. Daniel is the witness who, like Carraway, steps over the line once or twice but for the most part provides a line, if only by doing so. Both men remind us there is a line.

When we think of the main characters of Great Gatsby we think of Gatsby and Daisy. Similarly, the focal point in The Object of Beauty appears to be Lacey Yeager. But in both works, the narrator is the one controlling the information. Seemingly innocuous and apparent instruments of narrative, the narrators in both works bring their own baggage with them to the story. In a novel about objectifying beauty, the Daniel undergoes a similar transformation as Lacey, learning the value of slow time in love, breaking below the surface distractions of desire, thereby embodying the narrator in the narrative and making him the embodiment of novel's theme.

Similarities between this book and Gatsby reach beyond narrative strategy and figuration. Martin indulges his own Fitzgeraldian bifocals to witness both the elegance and the grotesqueness of the New York scenes. In the sympathetic character of Patrice, we see the genuine lover of art. One of his many counterparts, Mr. Alberg, comments "Collector is too kind a word for me. I'm a shopper." Then the latter tells, and tells again, a tale about a Joseph Beuys' "felt suit," the reader feels much the same as when reading of cruel Tom Buchanan's mistress' blood dripping over a fashion magazine in the hot, second chapter hotel room. Martin's eye roams the aesthetic spectrum, counterpointing artworld stimulus (much of it beautiful) with artworld behavior (much of it not).

Lacey embodies Daisy and James Gatz both. As he showed us with Shopgirl, Martin studies psychology and personality. Lacey is a narcissist to the nth degree, as Daniel shows us. But of course could Daniel be missing a part of the story, leaving it for the reader to tell? This is where Martin's ability to create and captivate really comes into play. We all know girls like Lacey, have been destroyed by them. ("She's the kind of person who will always be okay," says a character undone.) We also make excuses for them, which is something that Daniel does not do. Daniel witnesses and wants but does not judge her, except in the way he subtly compares her to money, shimmering, fleeting.

She is compared to money much in the same way that Daisy is. Daniel doesn't comment on any of Lacey's inner life because, like money, she has none. But both Daisy and Lacey have stories shaping them from within. The absence of Lacey's story makes the reader as susceptible as the book's other characters to the too-quick evaluation of "an object of beauty."

The Great Gatsby would not have its thrust and balance without the fireworks-less pairing of Nick and Jordan. Martin builds a similar figure into Object of Beauty. "We could talk for months," says Daniel of his relationship (details witheld). He describes his love interest as being the only person with a normal upbringing, which renders her impervious to Lacey's "full courtship press" of the art world at the moment when it really matters. This slow-and-steady approach to love mirrors the low-key attention of the true collector, rather than the minute-makers who create fame out of novelty.

The "series of successful gestures" which Nick Carraway sees in Gatsby's life is also evident in Lacey's. And in both stories, there comes a point at which things fly out of our control, regardless of the perfection of our gestures. Had it not been for the hit-and-run in Gatsby or the sub-prime loan crisis on Wall Street, our narrators would have different stories to tell, stories of unhindered rises from reality into dreamworlds. The setting of Martin's book makes the reading strangely less intimate than that of Gatsby.
If Fitzgerald's novel was prophetic, Martin's is deeply reflective, exploring the great WTF all economies still feel the effects of, and even going so far as to stitch a narrative, however at once literary and economic, into a chaos. What redeems Gatsby is the truth: that it was never as beautiful as he thought it was. But in Object of Beauty, even in a world fallen to pieces in so many ways, beauty is indeed a redemptive constant, and while the word itself might get dropped from our vocabularies in service to some fashions, Martin asserts it does and always will exist. We just have to be broken from time to time in order to recognize it and allow it all the way in, if only in order to find again a line within ourselves we don't allow ourselves to cross, ever again.

Snow and Solitude

2010-12-12T07:51:00.000-08:00

I'm sipping morning coffee, seeing the snow that covers my garden and the neighboring field. The hush of snow, its thick insulation. It bursts my heart with memories of every other snow I weave through in my mind, back to my childhood in Toronto where an enormous blue spruce, though thirty feet high caught it all and became a part of the white. I have an enormous green spruce now, just as tall, outside my living-room window. It, too, catches and holds the weight of it all. I think of the year I lived alone in a cabin in Sequim, Washington, and the week I was snowed in with just my soup and coffee and the poems there were to write then. So many poems. So much solitude I had to hold in my mind, so much it felt I might break under its weight. But then once the week was over, I wanted it to begin again, so comfortable had I become with the world's silences.

Sometimes a heron walked the stony shore in front of my cabin, its gray a part of the sky's gray. Its slow steps on fragile legs were a reflection of my own internal steps around the details of my rocky life so far. I sat at a small table, the kind they had in diners in the fifties, with the stainless steel rim around a formica-like top and stared at the bay. Bald eagles sometimes stood in the trees, appearing tall as men. I stood inside my self, looking over my story, sometimes diving down to seize some memory and re-invent it on a page. I listened to Bach's Cello solos again and again. Yo-Yo Ma's stroke of the bow across the strings was the perfect soundtrack to the snow, and to my aloneness in the poems where I brought figures from my life back to me, tracing their outlines in words that slowly moved into metaphors that surprised me for what they revealed. I wrote virtually non-stop. I had nothing else to do, no one to talk to. The world of poems were a wonderland that opened wider every time I thought some life into the alphabet and followed it. I learned that love has so many sides to it that it was possible to write more than twenty or thirty poems about one person and with each one come to know them and what they meant to me better. I learned that when writing, I become a part of a things in ways I'd missed out on when they were surrounding me. I name them. I give them the attention they deserved. There, alone in my small cabin (barely the size of my bedroom now but still having everything I needed) I sat surrounded by the ghosts that live inside the snow, the memories of a life only yet partly lived, discovering it was enough to write about forever.

Searching for Sir Isaac

2010-11-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

I'll be talking, out loud this time, about Sir Isaac Newton soon at the Creative Technology and Arts Center salon series on December 2 at 6 pm at the Odyssey School at 90 Zillicoa Street. If you dig back a bit on this blog (a while neglected, since summer!) you'll see I went through a time when all I wrote about was alchemy. It is still very much what I muse about when I'm musing, and much of what I muse about are the connections between contemporary scientific discovery and alchemy. Both maintain that at the most subtle levels, matter behaves quite differently from its molecular, concrete nature. At the smallest level, all things are rising, attracting, sympathizing, communing. I don't mean that spiritually, though it certainly sounds it. These are the times in which we live: when science and spirituality are the same.

This is what John Maynard Keynes, the father of economics, wrote of Newton. It is part of a speech he was going to give regarding the scientist to the Royal Society, but he died a few days prior and his brother delivered the talk. I'll use this document as well as a letter Newton wrote to the Royal Society in 1645 as the anchors of the talk. What lies between these two documents is rich, deep and offers a worldview that includes all faiths and finds in sacred text a symbolic language of science.

In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.

What Steve Orlen Taught Me

2010-11-20T05:35:00.000-08:00

I was one of Steve's students at Warren Wilson MFA Program. It was my second semester, after my semester with Joan Aleshire, before my semester with Tony Hoagland. The genius of the program had something to do with that: I was "shaped" by a exactly who I needed at the time. When it was time to work with Steve, I was ready to fall apart, as Ellen Bryant Voigt had told a friend of mine when my friend was falling apart, I was doing right on time. During my semester with Steve, I went from working for an import/export company and being in a relationship to living alone in a very small cabin on the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and teaching half-days at a basic education lab 30 minutes away in Port Angeles. (It was by the way, the most magnificent drive to work: past Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Forest, the Dungeness Spit, a herd of elk.) This was before I had email. The only person I called was my mother. And the only person I got letters from was Steve when he responded to the packets of poems and annotations I'd sent to him.

I wasn't doing any drugs, but I was very much experimenting with my mind. I felt that at the end of my 20s I ought to face what needs to be faced and write what needs to be written. Alone. In the Woods. My mind, I discovered, was a very tricky place. If I hadn't been teaching mostly people from the reservations and reading about their cultures and worldview, I might have just turned myself in at mental institution. Instead, I just stayed with it and, in order to maintain a sort of balance, I wrote Sonnets.

They were horrible sonnets. And Steven said so, except for one in which I placed Daphne in the modern-day world. The others were pure drama and rhapsody. Fortunately, my goal wasn't to write good poems during this time. I was learning rhythm, form and toying with that impossible paradox that constraint lends itself to freedom. This is the stuff Steve and I wrote about in our letters. The heavy heavy. But the way Steve wrote about the heavy heavy was so graceful, as though he were discussing a movie he liked. The mind was familiar territory to him, and he could follow me just about anywhere and enjoy the journey with a soft smile. The things that terrified me had already terrified him and he had come to terms with coming to terms with terror. He let me feel that the mind was something we can get used to. I remember one particularly searching letter in which he meditated on various "equalizers" in our lives, among them: death, and some of the letter were smeared. In the p.s. he explained he had "schnoodled" just as he was putting the letter together and apologized for the snot. Like this, the profound and the bodied co-dwelled in the six months we corresponded. I stopped with the sonnets after a bit and discovered I could write very long poems. I'd never explored that before, and I think it had everything to do with having Steve as a teacher and living with my solitude. I had space.

From the constraints of sonnet work I burst into the field of the long narrative poem, using the form to write my story, to find the poetry in the real things of my adolescence. I was deep-sea diving into my past and retrieving some stuff. It wasn't yet poetry, though. Strangely, when the faculty at the basic ed lab went to a conference at Western Washington University, I went for a walk and found an antique store which had a train set like the one my father had set up for us in the basement of our house in Canada. The smell of the smoke-making oil shot through me. I sat down next to it and wrote a poem. After, I wandered into a bookshop nextdoor and in the poetry section found a book by Steve, Permission to Speak. It was, it said on the back, his first book. In my next packet to Steve, I only sent the poem about the trainset and told him I'd found his book. He made some suggestions on the poem and wrote that he didn't think anyone had that book. He also spent more time writing about the poem I'd sent, drawing my attention to why it actually worked as a poem, why it was, in essence, the first successful thing I'd written, the thing that could stand alone in the world.

Steve knew, as I wish all teacher knew, that poetry is a process that take place only in a very small part on the page. He was my teacher at the very moment that I was becoming a poet, when I was letting go of so many parts of myself, the very way I had been shaped to think and perceive. Because he had already let go of these things and found a poet's path through the world, he was comfortable with my wild journey. I remember signing off a letter, "I'll go for a walk now to burn off some of this restlnessness. Maybe I'll get eaten by a panther." I thought it might have been too much. But he never judged, never restrained and, most importantly, he never, ever once pontificated or otherwise used my vulnerability to his advantage. He never crossed any of the invisible lines.

I consider myself among the luckiest of poets because I had the gift of working with Steve Orlen. I think of all his other students and know they also experienced his vastness, his ability to hold space for students without owning them, over-stepping or ever molding them in his likeness. He was an expansive man. And as much as one recalls Ben Jonson's words following Shakespeare's death, "a light has gone from the world," in seeing the words of Steve's colleagues and friends all over the Facebook world and how we, his students, are contacting each other, planning suppers in his memory, I don't think a light has gone from the world. I think it is just beginning to shine.

Home to Canada

2010-07-07T13:13:00.000-07:00

I have returned to the "land of the silver birch" in Ontario, Canada, Georgian Bay. Here, the precambrian shield stretches like a thirsty animal into the water, swirls of time emblazoning its stony surface lined with quartz. The blue water of the Bay is 80 degrees, perfect for an afternoon swim. Like this, up here, I live between eternity and time for a nap in a hammock suspended between two pines in a grotto. I sailed with my daughter yesterday, and for the first time she held the tiller, and learned a little about wind. I'm rather struck by how much she knows already. Earlier today, I canoed with her and was similarly struck by how she knew how to make whirlpools with her paddle and also how to do a cross-bow cut, something I didn't learn until I was a good ten years older. But this is what she is: a fourth generation Georgian Bay girl. She's brave. She's got a knowledge of the water and wind beyond anything I've taught her. Tonight we'll build a fire and make s'mores on the high rock above the bay.

The other day, the day before we arrived, a moose, a male, was on the shore near us. He sipped water from the shallows before lowering his enormous, cumbersome body into the depths and then swam to the island facing us. I watch for him.

That's pretty much what I do up here. I chew juicy fruit gum with my daughter and watch for moose.

THE HOLY CROSS

2010-06-27T13:46:00.000-07:00

(image from steed griffin, cryptotypographer: http://steedgriffin.tumblr.com/page/2)

Every now and then, a piece pops up in the news that helps me connect a few dots. Today's piece is the article about Gunnar Samuelsson, a quiet minister from Sweden who has spent the last several years trying to figure out where we got the idea that Jesus Christ was crucified. His conclusion: the word "stauros" that has been translated for more than 2000 years to mean "cross" denotes any variety of long wooden objects. This resonates with an exhibit I saw a few years ago of various artifacts from Biblical times. Among the remarkable objects was a part of a human foot with a metal spike driven through it attaching it to a piece of petrified wood. The tour guide pointed out that this is the only found evidence that human bodies were nailed to wood as a form of torture and execution. I remember wondering how that can be possible if crucifixion was the number one favorite form of execution at the time in question? Wouldn't feet like these be everywhere? I couldn't find any answers at the time.

I have seen such wonderful and inexplicable things that I know there is more than meets the eye at work in things. As a poet I've always been hesitant to just dismiss the Bible as something "written by a bunch of men." But at the same time, for a long time, I had such trouble accepting that a book filled with such wacky statements as "spare the rod, spoil the child" could have anything to do with what I was experiencing. But I couldn't dismiss it. I held to the belief that there must be another way of reading these things that would make it all resonate with what God is not just in one narrow group's view, but, for me, all the views would at some point come to reflect the One thing.

When I started reading The Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, I started to see. Later, I read Jung's symbologies and from there it all really started to make sense. What remained was the historical notion of Jesus' death. . . if the other alchemical books were accurate, then the crucifixion is a metaphor for part of the alchemical process, the bad part. The really, really bad part. "Crucifixio" it is called, or "mortificatio." At this stage, whatever matter is in the crucible is completely obliterated. If the matter is ourselves in the crucible of our lives, we are obliterated. And then we go through a period of "putrefactio" (ew) and from that state we emerge anew. This emergence is called "resurrectio" and "fermentatio." Water into wine.

Jesus in all of this is a man who goes through the alchemical process:

born: "calcinatio"

baptized: "dissolutio"

separated from community: "separatio"

unified with community: "coniunctio"

killed: "crucifixio" or "mortificatio"

placed in a tomb: "fermentatio"

brought back to life: "resurrectio" or "fermentatio."

It is what we all do. All the time.

I do believe there was a Jesus and that he was an alchemist, an adept, and that the genre of alchemical writing gains a wonderful new shot in the arm in the telling of stories about this figure (much in the same way that Plato tells stories about his adept teacher, Socrates). The stories are about alchemy, about the spirit within matter, a concept we know today as Gaia Principle, and ways to work with this spirit. It's all very beautiful to me.

Samuelsson's work points out that the use of the cross doesn't appear in Christology until the 2nd century. This would correspond with the flourishing work in Alexandria, work that would get squashed one century later. I believe it was when this new way of writing alchemy emerged, not just as history of one man's life but as a beautiful vehicle for upholding that man's life as a vessel for alchemical teachings. And what better way to get a story to convey alchemical teachings than to embed the very structure of alchemical opus in the narrative?

The full article about Samuelsson's work can be found at:

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/little-evidence-jesus-died-on-a-cross-says-swedish-scholar/19530666?icid=main|main|dl1|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aolnews.com%2Fnation%2Farticle%2Flittle-evidence-jesus-died-on-a-cross-says-swedish-scholar%2F19530666

SIESTA KEY

2010-06-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

This is my beach. Siesta Beach. On Siesta Key, on the Gulf Coast.

This is my beach. It has white sand I walked on every day when I was a teenager.

This is the beach that saved my life, kept me off drugs, the beach that was my boyfriend

for all those years I didn't have one.

This is the beach my grandmother and I walked along in winter, imagining the white sand into snow. It's the beach I kicked soccer balls on while walking its miles with my best friend.

It's the beach where I lost the key to my father's Audi while my parents went to England on vacation, before I had a license to drive.

It's the beach that mysteriously coughed up the key so I could drive home, astonished.

For how many years have we been using the phrase "of mythical proportions?" The oil in the Gulf of Mexico has reached "mythical proportions." They are now saying that since the underwater robot (what planet are we on?) bumped into the cap (the one we actually watched that 24 hour spew cam to see if it would work), the problem is worse than before. Now, the hole in the earth is actually broken. We have broken the earth's crust.

Mythical proportions are too much to think about. I can't comprehend what this means. I see the dead baby dolphin being carried out of the tide. I see the oil-drenched pelicans. These are the things I understand.

I am so afraid and sad. My 7 year old daughter cries about this.

I grew up on Siesta Key, Florida. Our house was actually on a very small island off the island of Siesta Key. Mangrove Island, it was called. It was named this because the entire island was formed out of sand caught in the sharp roots of black mangroves. Standing at the edge of it, I could bounce and feel the island move. We speak of fragile environments. I grew up on something caught between branches.

From the age of 12 to 20, I inhaled Gulf of Mexico salt air. Pungent and sharp, heavy in the lungs, it was a coarse place to live. Yet unpaved, Mangrove Island was a crushed oyster shell and sand escape hatch from the progress going on elsewhere on the island. And sharp and stunning things grew there--yuccas whose black tip still rests deep inside the skin of my hand from a day I reached under one to retrieve a tennis ball I was throwing to my dog. Hard black dock spiders clicked their pincers against the salt-worn wood and barnacles of our dock at low tide as I brought my canoe to shore. My feet were often bloody from the razor edge of the oyster shoals. But there were softnesses, too, like in the way the pelicans would roost on the mangrove branches then burst into evening flight as I paddled past. There was the slap of a mullet, its brief flight above the bayou's surface done. And there was sunset after sunset after sunset, spent walking on the silk sands of the beach.

In all that is happening in the gulf, all that is mythical and incomprehensible has no choice but to take me back deep and down into my own mythology. The mythology of place, of the home that was rendered unreachable years ago when our house was sold then torn down and replaced, the island paved. But now it is even less touchable. I think of the brown pelicans, of the young heron that I rescued once from traffic on the quiet island, how its long spindly blue legs struggled against my hands.

I can't reconcile any of it.

I am at a loss.

I am beyond angry and frightened. I am wistful and gazing at how on earth this problem can possibly be solved, and, on a more personal scale, how it can be grieved.

What To Do Now That the Masonic Lodge Is Open For Arts Events

2010-05-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

It's a bit too much of a dream come true. I've had dreams about this place. I mean, really. However it is possible to geo-locate where dreams take place, I have woken knowing I dreamed about the darned Masonic Lodge at the corner of Woodfin and Broadway. Of course, in my dreams it has all these secret rooms and magical walls that disappear when you say certain words, and walls within walls, thin spaces revealing entire secret universes. So, when the mountain xpress published photographs of the interior hall--now available for rent for public events--naturally I was a little dismayed. Granted, the room with columns painted with scenes of King Solomon's activities is mighty cool, but in my dreams, well, they would have been holograms.

But, here it is. The post-Masonic age. All the inside secrets have been let out in one way or another. Some books are weirder than others and some references stranger than others--from writings about Oumros, the strange black powder sought after for centuries to Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (with hints of the final scenes of Requiem for Dream just beneath the surface (shudder) and Dan Brown's Lost Symbol which did go into some interesting places architecturally, though didn't quite finish its sentence regarding "the Word" and how it relates to Masonry.

I've been afraid that the Lodge would just fall away, given that it seems to have fallen into disuse, and its location is a bit odd. . . it could easily have become prey to developers. But, thankfully, no.

The Masonic Lodge is going to renovate and restore this beautiful building, and groups are invited to hold events as a way of helping to pay for the project. A wonderful way for the arts to help architecture. I'm in. (I think they're also hosting dinners on the first Thursdays of each month but not sure.)

The Masonic Lodge Scottish Rite Temple was built in 1913. That's 13 years before the Jackson Building went up. It was sort of a harbinger of what Asheville would become in the next decade. In 1912, "three initiates" had published The Kybalion, a releasing of Hermetic Alchemical principles. This was in time with the whole Theosophical Society rise in the states following World War I and subscribed to by such lovelies as Harry Houdini (who performed at the Kennilworth Inn. . .) and, later, Elvis. Also, at around the same time, Sharp Smith built the Masonic Temple on Market Street, which housed the nation's largest African American Masonic Lodge. So, anyone thinking the Masons have always been just the powerful white guys can dig a little deeper into history.

It is wild to think of Richard Sharp Smith pulling out all the stops, as he did, for this building. He's got a full-blown Beaux-Art vocabulary--columns, arches, balustrades, bas-relief, ornamental stonework. . . not to mention tilework, including the square and compass mosaic on the ground as you walk in. Richard Sharp Smith was an all-over-the-place architect, true to his time, a moment in architecture (1900-1919, as Witold Rybszynski writes in Looking Around) when really all everyone was doing was toying with old forms with new materials. Sharp Smith is the wild man of his age--his work in Asheville ranges from:

--the tudor style/pebbledash signature buildings of Biltmore Village and Estate and YMI

--the Arts and Crafts style of the Annie Wright House in Montford (He is credited with bringing the Arts and Crafts to Asheville)

--All Souls Cathedral (big Gothic)

--the Chicago Style of the Loughran Building (Mobilia on the first floor), which was, by some accounts, his final work in Asheville.

--Hopkins Chapel AME Zion (little Gothic)

--the Spanish Romanesque with Guastavino of the Basilica

It's not easily possible to point to a building by the Asheville architects, with the exception of Ellington, and say "that's such a ________ building." This is because the architects, like architecture itself, were more interested in exploring than in defining anything. Even in Ellington's work, his style is defined by exploration. He had merely found a language for exploring, while his contemporaries were using the language of their forebears--a little Gothic, a little Romanesque, a little Neoclassical. Richard Sharp Smith's architectural fingerprints are all over Asheville, fingerpainting the city with all the styles available to him.

I think it's great that the Masonic Lodge is getting restored and that artists can help.

Writing About Architecture

2010-05-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

It's Tuesday afternoon. The two labradors, Chloe (black and small) and Sir Isaac Newton (white and enormous) are napping next to the rabbit's cage (Brownie) while a storm brews outside. Wordfest is over as of 2 weeks ago and last night I read my writings about architecture for the first time in public, while Mike Oppenheim's amazing photographs of Asheville's architecture shone on the screen behind me. I shouldn't have read, I realized. I know it well enough to talk extemporaneously and there's some other kind of energy that comes from me when I do. It's because I've fallen in love with architecture. Hearing someone talk about what/whom they love is always better than hearing some read something from a page.

I started writing about the architecture of Asheville in February. At first I was all clumsy, not knowing how to talk about buildings. There's something mysterious about learning the language of things, particularly the language of buildings. This is such ancient stuff, and learning the language of it seems to tap me into the ancient stuff architecture is a part of. What that is, I guess I'm free to say it here, is all that original, primal stuff I first started this blog to explore. Alchemy and architecture are basically inseparable. On my great-grand-father Masonic certificate, awarded him in Belfast more than a century ago, the Latin translation on the right hand side of the page translates "freemason" to "free architect." That says it all right there.

So, I think about it all the time. Shelter. The limited number of shapes and structures available to humans and animals--domes and blocks, doors and windows. And all the variations which can evolve from those. . . innumerable.

Somehow, poetry and architecture have come together. And I can see how they're the same thing. With one, the words symbolize the world. In the other, you actually use the world. But it's all about building, about structure, about delineating a space where something can happen.

I'm aware of the wind surrounding my house.

And how peaceful and still it is inside here, just the sleeping dogs, the watchful rabbit. . . .

ELEVATE, a poem and what I think is the process behind it

2010-05-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

ELEVATE

Elevate me, O God, into what is highest within me.

Bring me to the sky where loose clouds loosen more

and show me what I cannot touch with my skin.

Loosen me so I break open like the sky above a thirsty earth.

Elevate me. O God, loosely, like clouds in their skin.

Touch what I cannot thirst after on this earth. Loosen me

until I cannot break and show me what is highest in me,

bringing within what is more, what breaks ceaselessly open.

Elevate me, O God, to the loosened earth where sky is a show

of what I cannot touch and clouds break open against my skin.

Break me open with thirst. Like the sky above the earth,

bring me what is highest, loose and within.

Elevate me, O God, within, where loose clouds show me

how I break open like a thirsty earth. Into what is highest

in me, bring your touch. Loosen me more, your cloud, this

skin. What is highest, open within this earth.

***

This is the poem that will appear in the paper tomorrow as the first of the Asheville Citizen-Times series on poetry/civic journalism. I've been writing about architecture for the past few months and this poem, and the ones that will appear on the paper's website, is a result of many of the ideas I've been exploring.

I think it's cool that from my drafts in approaching this image, I started to write one of these permutation poems--shifting words around within stanzas without adding new key words. It created something of a dome in words. The creative process always amazes me.

On Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday the paper will present other poet/photojournalist collaborations in honor and preparation for Wordfest. I'm so happy to be seeing poetry in the newspaper! Poetry used to be in the newspaper. . . and when we lost that we lost something more than column inches I believe.

Diary of a Fascination

2010-04-21T20:28:00.001-07:00

I get fascinated with things. Constantly. Lately, I've been fascinated by a story, an Asheville story. It involves a woman who lived nearly a century ago. Her name is Mary Tillinghast. She was a stained glass artist who was hired by architect Bertram Goodhue to create windows for Asheville's Trinity Episcopal Church in 1912. I stumbled upon her name while writing an essay about the church for my current writing project (read: obsession) on Asheville's architecture.

When I took on the project I had no idea how deeply it would affect me. After all, they are buildings. I thought I would learn the vocabulary and take it from there. But no. Something happens when we learn the vocabulary. Its whole history sort of grafts itself onto the psyche through the words. It is as though the buildings want to speak and now that I've engaged them in conversation they virtually throw stuff at me to write about. In the case of the Trinity Church, what got thrown was the name of Mary Tillinghast.

What's a woman doing making stained glass windows in 1912, I'm afraid, was my question. And then the next: "Who are you, Mary Tillinghast."

I think we often believe it's the answers that change our lives. But Rilke teaches us it is the questions. My question to Mary continues its own asking as I am persistently opening doors into this woman's life, and she is opening mine.

This is one of her windows, Urania, located at the Allegheny Observatory in Pennsylvania. This woman was an artist, a contemporary of Tiffany and John LeFarge, both of whom she worked with or for. She even became business partners with LaFarge, then she sued the company and started her own. Unmarried, deeply talented, whipsmart and born into money, Tillinghast had a way with glass that I think neither LaFarge nor Tiffany (and his countless workers whose names have melted away under his own) come close to touching. Certainly each of the three, the veritable triumvirate of 20th century glass making, has his and her own aesthetic. I went to the Morse Museum in Winter Park, Florida last week to see the Tiffany glass and to see if the curator knew anything of Mary Tillinghast (she didn't). What I saw was a sort of beauty that doesn't quite escape the object. In Tillinghast's work the beauty does escape the object and enters me, illuminating me.

Tillinghast's windows at Trinity have been taken down. I learned tonight that they were in such horrid condition that they fell apart or were broken apart and six-inch pieces were either sold or given to parishioners. I've read her letters, detailing her experience of making them. And I want to see them whole again. I know this isn't possible.

But I am beginning a quest to find the six-inch pieces of the windows. I want to touch them.

The Eloquence Within

2010-03-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

I might spend the rest of my life trying to articulate something. . .

and this is what I suppose most writers do--something happens and we spend the rest of our lives trying to put words to it. Emerson, Eliot, Jung all had mystical experiences in early adulthood (James Joyce in adolescence) and spent the rest of their lives trying to put words to it, and in some cases waiting for it to happen again.

I think about my mystical experiences and I am delightfully amazed, even though at the time I was rather frightened.

But no mystical experience has been quite so transformative as losing my hearing.

It is one thing to see "letters" in the clouds then find them in poem I wrote days before then learn they have a meaning in Hebrew and Arabic, and then there is getting a diagnosis of hearing loss and living it through to its conclusion in deafness.

There is an immediacy to the mystical experience. The "refragrancing" as it is called in Buddhism takes moments or months, but then it gets integrated. These change us permanently in our awareness of what the world is made of. But they don't necessarily protect us from going back to what we were before they happened. T.S. Eliot did not remain "transformed." He lived out his days searching for explanations. Whitman on the other hand was permanently transformed. Being diagnosed with something that will change you physiologically is another kind of mystical experience.

No bright flashes. No chariots riding down from the sky.

It is an apocalypse, meaning a revelation. Slow, difficult, demanding. But real. It is the mystical experience you can hold in your hand.

Coagula et Solve

2010-02-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

First of all: thank you Adam McLean for use of Barchusen's above version of The Crowning of Nature (http://www.levity.com/).

Coagula et Solve. One of the basic tenets of alchemy and of life. But geezh we don't hear about it. It basically means that human life is constantly moving between two states--one of being firm and structured and another of being all hell broke loose. Once we max out on the former, circumstance moves us back toward the latter. We coagulate--come together. We dissolve--solve.

Solve is a state of destabilization--a change is moving through life so we have to loose our preconceptions of what must be. That is, if we are going to survive it.

Some people live in a seemingly constant state of solve. Too fluid, too changeable, not enough structure and form. Some people in a seemingly constant state of coagula. Too rigid. Disdainful of change. Resistant to the effects and lessons of life.

Any paradigm shift is a movement from coagula (a fixed set of ideas) through a solve and back to a coagula.

Today, I have been in solve. Sometimes solve just happpens. It doesn't always take a massive surface change in life. On the contrary, change begins always deep below the perceptible surface, but we can feel it coming. And we respond by, whether we like it or not, loosening our hold on things.

It's hard to be in a state of solve. When I'm in it, I want to change things, nail things down, name the thing that's happening. But I never know what's changing, only that change is coming. At such times, I know, it's best to avoid major purchases or drastic alterations to my appearance. Today I found myself looking at office space on the fourth floor of an office building. The view was incredibly--way high over the mountains to the North. But you know? All life is a metaphor. I don't know if I'll get it or not, and that's not the point. The point is I was moving to higher ground. Something is afoot, so I felt instinctively the need to grow wings.

Opus Contra Natura

2010-01-31T19:02:00.000-08:00

The Work Against Nature is a phrase powerful enough to drive anyone away from something. But in alchemy the work against nature--Opus Contra Natura-- is merely a turning inward, a searching within which yields development and awakening.

It is a "work against Nature" because "nature" means physical nature. The opus contra natura draws our attention toward spiritual nature, the deeper truth of things.

In working with individuals who are just starting to write "again" the opus contra natura is a riot in the heart. The words just start flowing and, in some, they bring with them deep sorrow and joy which must be moved through.

I have been, of late, made aware (through being dumped by one such person and realizing my life is full of them) of personality disorders and their onset at either age 7 or in the adult years. Such disorders--borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and the like--occur because a child is not given the safety and expression children require. So, that child ceases developing past a certain point psychologically while the body continues its journey into maturation. The result: an incredible number of very tall 5 year olds, men and women, walking around and often running various shows.

I think of the opus contra natura and how it can be used to retrieve those inner 5 year olds, tend them, move them back into the forefront and listening to them. Doing the hard work necessary to become whole.

Is it possible that the sacred texts and their writers were writing about people who have left themselves entirely behind? And the fluidity of Life comes when we have gone back and dislodged those parts of us once frozen in time. . .

(picture courtesy of Adam McLean's website www.levity.com : Geber's Works woodcuts, c. 1678.)

Alchemy and The Red Book

2010-01-29T14:56:00.000-08:00

When Jung was having his initiation, which occurs in the writing and art of The Red Book, it was his introduction into the rights of alchemy, this wild formula for converting the matter of one's life into spirit.

I contacted Adam McLean about Jung's work in Alchemy. McLean is the founder of Hermetic Journal and a leading voice in the study of alchemical texts. McLean labors intensely to reproduce and publish the arcane and little known alchemical works on which Jung--and, since, countless others--based his work. McLean states on his stunning website (levity.com) that he was once enamoured of Jung's work. I emailed him asking him, basically "what happened" and he replied (within hours) that he simply prefers working in the originals. I respect that, and i also see it as in deep keeping with the nature of alchemy itself--a return to, and journey through, origin into the highest self.

McLean's work allows us to see the sources Jung turned to--the dark and peculiar, often grotesque drawings of the medieval texts such as Mutus Liber. It was on these books that Jung based his own Red Book. To explore them visit McLean's website: http://www.levity.com/.

For me, the images of the old stuff deeply spoke almost as soon as I'd opened Lyndy Abrahams' Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery. Granted I was going through absolute hell at the time and had reached out into alchemy since I'd heard it was the source of the deep healing (called politely "depth psychology" professionally, but I call it something quite different). I started to see the symbols dance with each other, and they became increasily illuminated--even playful. There is a joy in working with alchemy and its artwork. Its elements and writings look dark and frightening--as does the Book of Revelations, but inwardly, elucidated by the dictionary and the work of McLean (who is acknowledged in the dictionary), all of it is about reaching a deeper place in ourselves, a place so dark it glows.

2010-01-06T18:54:00.000-08:00

I picked up a copy of Jung's Alchemical Studies and, while getting my hair done by the amazing Guadalupe Chavarria, an alchemist in his own right for what he can do with a pair of scissors and that "diuturnity of intense imagination" he examined me with when I walked into his shop all shaggy and unshorn in the throes of last minute Christmas browsing, opened this unassuming little white book. Following the experience denoted in the Red Book, Jung devoted the rest of his life to trying to comprehend it. He calls all the other stuff, aside from the Red Book, his attempts at integration. This volume is his exploration of a number of alchemical writings--The Secret of the Golden Flower, the writings of Zosimus and Paracelsus and exploring the alchemical concepts of mercurius and the philosophical tree.

Jungian psychoanalysis draws heavily on alchemy and theosophy. This is just an example of the master psychic archeologist's explorations, a warm-up to the later works through which he furthers his argument that the psyche has been left unexplored for centuries as a result of the shunning of alchemy.

Why I Love This Stuff

2009-12-19T11:32:00.000-08:00

Next to my bathtub I have three reading choices. A long outdated (Madonna and A-Rod) People magazine, a more recent issue of Yoga Journal, and The Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery by Lyndy Abraham. This third thing is the one I reach for. It's not a New Age thing at all. It's this woman's Doctoral Thesis at Cambridge University and to write she she ventured into the depths of the Vatican's secret libraries and cruised the coffers of ancient memory to dredge of these defitintions of things I never used to think about.

Things like: alembic/limbeck, the red dragon, albification.

I read this book with remarkable pleasure.

For me, it's like reading the poems of Shakespeare. . . only maybe even better.

I feel this is my own private world, a book few others venture to pay nearly $40.00 for on Amazon (used: $29.45). It's a language I share with these ancient minds. . . women and men who influenced great poets and composers. . . Goethe. . . Rilke. . . Jung. . . they challenge me, stretch my mind, and I marvel at their creativity. . . and expand my mind with every word I read.

What I like best about it, it never becomes something rational.

Reading this stuff, like reading great poems, keeps me always in that metaspace--like love, like dreaming, like doing a really good crossword puzzle and it all starts coming together as though you don't even have to read the clues anymore because your mind has become one with that of the puzzle designer--where my mind is cruising just under its own surface.

I laugh out loud when I read it. It's a laughter like: damn, you guys were good.

For all the darkness and spookiness clouding around alchemy all these years, reading it is pure joy. Joy in language. Joy in life. Joy in the mysteries of the human mind and the joy of getting deep into symbols and stirring stuff up from thousands of years ago.

Why the Red Book is Red

2009-12-17T10:23:00.000-08:00

In Alchemy, there are many symbolic systems. Often, a practitioner would create his or her own system. These would possess a variety of properties.

The symbols are polyvalent, an understood and accepted fact, so that once a practioner "knew" the basic structure of the alchemical process one could read another's work (often rendered in artwork) without being confounded.

It was also understood that the process is reiterative and in constant flow (why detachment is necessary--one is never "finished") so a reader or viewer would not expect the writer or artist to deliver the information in a sequential manner.

A third property of the systems involves concealment. While the information begged to be shared, it could only be shared in a way that would reveal its content only to one's peers. These were not breadcrumb trails for strangers but rather records maintained for safe-keeping. One writer described the alchemical knowledge as "a secret set afloat across the sea of time." To maintain the secrecy, the writers were incredibly playful. Wonderfully so. But they were playful with such dark images that it hardly resembles play.

Even under the manifold symbolic systems, there are a number of inviolate levels.

--matter going through the opus will alternate between two states of being: coagula et solve, or coagulated and dissolved.

--matter going through the process will move through three states denoted by color: nigredo, albedo, rubedo.

--matter going through the process will move through seven states: calcinatio, dissolutio, separatio, calcinatio, crucifixio, putrefactio, fermentatio (resurrectio).

Ascribe to each of these "states" about 1000 symbols each and you have the complex symbology of any alchemical text, (check out the colors/animals/plants in Book of Revelations in the Bible). But they denote the same process.

The symbolic systems employ animal imagery (often blending species), colors, plants, shapes, objects (tomb, crucible, bedroom) and human figures (the son, the mother, the virgin, the King) to denote various stages in the process.

The color red denotes the final stage of the process. Symbolized as staining with blood, or blood itself, the red dwells hidden within the whiteness of the albedo phase ("know that in whiteness there is redness hidden" --Artephius). "At this union, the supreme chemical wedding, the body is resurrected to eternal life," writes Lyndy Abraham in The Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery.

The Red Book is Jung's Chemical Wedding, so its color is befitting. What's so beautiful and fascinating about alchemy is that every single thing is symbolic. No part of life is left out of its sacred lexicon, down to the color of inks and books.

And just to make thing s little more interesting, Sir Isaac Newton's home was decorated primarily in crimson as well. . .

Alchemy and Narcissism and The Red Book

2009-12-17T02:43:00.000-08:00

This book is different from Jung's other books.

He writes that this is the book that started the whole Jung thing. Everything he wrote after The Red Book was an echo of the Red Book, of the experience he has within these pages.

This is not a book about mystical experience. This book is his mystical experience. In it he uses the writing and art as transformative tools in moving across the gap in the mind between conscious and unconscious aspects of the self. The writings and mandalas guide him, show him what he needs to see, believe, think and surrender to. This is art without vanity. It's his journey into his soul. After The Red Book, Jung strove to make sense of what had happened within him.

I think it's funny how we so easily take our sanity for granted, meaning, more often than not, we just assume we're perfect and don't need to do any more "work." People don't attempt to understand what's going on, or what has happened within us. Recently I've been learning a lot about how narcissism denies itself. A person can be entirely caught up in him/herself and not know it. And blame everybody for everything they've got going on that's wrong. We know these people. More often than we'd like to admit, we are these people.

As countercultural icon, a psychotic, a dreamer or madman, Jung and his legacy, bear the burden of one who strove to overcome narcissism. Egotists have no patience for non-egotists because the ego only wishes to preserve its hold on reality. Jung's work challenges this hold. The Red Book throws down a serious gauntlet in the modern age: the mystical journey is not a thing of the past, of long lost prophets and flying nuns, and this is a map of how to do it. This is the man's alchemy of himself.

Lately, I've been thinking about how maybe all the sacred texts work together as a ladder out of the self, out of the blindness of narcissism. I've been thinking that perhaps "ego" and "the self" are ways of saying "narcissism." And alchemy, as buddhism, as Christianity, as Kaballah, as Judaism, as Hinduism, as Islam, is the means of overcoming it. And, thinking of the immense Red Book, religion stripped of affiliation, I think of how treacherous it is.

The Red Book

2009-12-16T15:00:00.000-08:00

Last week I went into Malaprops with my daughter. We had some time to browse prior to a reading I was doing at Posana. I bought some Moleskins for a workshop group for the following day, some pens. I bought my daughter a pair of journals, one for her and one for a friend. I was paying for it all when I saw it. The Red Book.

The secret book by Carl Gustav Jung, sealed away in a chilly Swiss bank for a century and now sitting before in all its red immense glory, beckoning to me. Not saying "buy me, buy me, buy me" (though I knew I would) but rather "open me, open me, open me."

Let me tell you a thing about me and books.

When I took a group of my boy students (as their teacher at a boys' boarding school) to go see the Dead Sea Scrolls in Charlotte five years ago, by the time I exited the exhibit, they'd all found new girlfriends and had bought them sodas. I had spent that long looking--no: gazing--into the strange cases built to house them, complete with low lights on timed dimmer switches so the paper bears the weight of light, and sight, for only seconds at a time. I swear I wanted to see every stroke of whatever language they were written in. Not that I could read it, but I know there's power in the word, and there's greater power in words written in that metastate of illumination.

"What are you?" I whispered to them, under my breath, but no low enough for the Rabbi standing near me to hear, close his eyes and nod very slowly in agreement with my awe.

I don't take these matters lightly.

So, there was the Red Book. "Please," I said, unable to complete the request. And within a moment, this enormous book was under my hands. I touched it first, much in the way I touch a horse as I move alongside its enormous body, toward its face, careful not to startle it, careful to let it know I"m here.

I opened it. . .

Giving The Soul Tree to Leonard Cohen

2009-11-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

Well, last night Leonard Cohen played in Asheville. I drove into town a few hours before the concert, approached the front desk at the Haywood Park Hotel and said, "I have a present for Leonard Cohen" and the concierge saw my book and said she'd have it taken to his room. I sat down on the comfy sofa and wrote in it: from one Canadian poet to another. . . thank you for your song. . . with love, Laura Hope-Gill. Then I handed it to the woman and presumably someone took it to Mr. Cohen.

How do I describe this? Leonard Cohen has been such a profound influence on me. His poetry, along with Galway Kinnell's, has shown me how poetry can move the mind through darkness, lighting it as it goes. Yes, it's a wonderful gift for poets to be able to describe what is and even what is inside what is. Then there are these poets who go even beyond the what is and still find something there. Cohen and Kinnell are among the living who do this, and The Soul Tree is rooted in this kind of work, moving associately through the music, letting it be the guide beyond reason. . . .

I remember the first time I really listened to "Take this Waltz." I was stunned. It's a poem comprised of images which share a tenor, a concept desiring to be conveyed. He encloaks some forty or so images within a metaphor of a waltz, conveying an emotion of such complexity only music can carry it. It's wistful and bitter, alive and at the same time dead.

It was a powerful moment for me, as a poet. Since then I've looked at his lyrical logic, how he weaves emotion from forms. If Mr. Cohen just opened one page of The Soul Tree last night before he went to sleep after an earth moving three and a half hour concert, I'm the happiest poet on earth.

The Soul Tree

2009-07-16T10:27:00.001-07:00

Coming out in August from Grateful Steps Publishing in Asheville, NC. View pages at www.thehealingseed.com/the-soul-tree. Ordering info at www.gratefulsteps.com.

A Small Anatomy of Change

2009-06-05T04:44:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed how during times of great change, a swell of energy comes into our lives? Much of the energy appears to work "against" the change but the effort it takes to overcome the negations that work to push us through into the next part of our lives.

This past week I have worked harder than I've ever worked. Several deadlines for writing pieces for various publications--one local, one statewide, one regional (still ramping up to the national I guess)--struck at once. To meet them, I had to write hard-well-fast. It's my daughter's last week of school so there's been "splash day" and today's Kindergarten awards day. The Wednesday Night Odyssey class took me to a deep level of teaching and planning, and of course the fair at the mall opened. All of this in addition to my job for which I marketed five books all week, rather successfully. All of this the week after I rent an office and step into the community of healers.

In a turn-of-the-century alchemy book published by some ballsy masons, the authors write of how a pull of negative forces precede a positive leap forward. It's an observation of change, and I'm going to search through the Tao te Ching today to find its correlation. At other times, I've felt pushed to my absolute limits to fill the voids that arise just before some great launch to another level. There are moments when I really feel I could just crumple in the face of it all. But then I work. And from the work comes this peculiar illumination, a sense that I'm being helped from the other side--this helper is bending time, this helper is making my sentences, this helper is making the lines short at the fair--and I realize that the stress is a lesson in letting go, and through being stressed to the max I'm being taught I am not alone. This is a prelude to what's to come, the next great jump of a further into-me becoming.

I imagine this crumpling feeling, the sense that I can't do it, is the human equivalent for the nothingness the caterpillar goes to, the reduction to merely the base of the antennae, before the regeneration begins. And we have to go through this again and again.

A Room of Her Own

2009-05-22T19:08:00.001-07:00

Virginia Woolf says in her famous essay that in order to be a writer, a woman needs 500 pounds a year (cash) and a room of her own. For the low-low price of just under 500 dollars a month, I got a room of my own today. Aside from my house, in which I share several rooms of my own with my daughter, I now have this.

It is a small room. It is part of the Women's Wellness and Education Center. It is immense to me because it represents my movement, as poet, into several new realms. The first of these is my own "private practice" as writing teacher, editor and creativity coach. I have been moving toward this through a series of fits and starts--and peculiarly strong signals from the universe--that it's time. But the other realm is that of medicine. Women's Wellness and Education Center is a women-run holistic care center for women who are pregnant, women who want to be pregnant and women who have little interest in pregnancy but love a great massage and yoga or pilates class.

Way, way back, I was born into a family of doctors on my father's side (going back three generations) and teachers on my mother's (going back also three generations). As a kid, I expected that I would become a doctor. But by the time college began, it was very clear, and my freshman year chemistry 101 teacher would vouch, medicine was not my path. At least not, I see now, Western medicine. I signed on for literature and never looked back. That is, not until my masters thesis semester of grad school. With only one month left to write a brilliant essay on poetry and three reams of rough draft with no solid thesis anywhere in the mix, I called my father and told him I was dropping out of poetry school and becoming a doctor. I said, "To be a doctor all you have to do is memorize things people already have names for. In poetry, you have to name things no one else has been able to." My father argued against my decision. I couldn't believe my ears. "Don't do it, honey," he said. "Poetry is the better means to finding the truth."

So, here I am taking an office in a wellness center, returning to the roots of two family trees. And little has ever made more sense to me.

Looking back through this blog and all the exploration of alchemy and poetry and how they relate to my deafness and my healing, I see this new part of my life interlace perfectly with all that has come before. I am stepping into myself as poet and healer.

I envision this as a beginning of something wonderful. Perhaps soon, all holistic healing centers will include a poet/memoirist among their staff. We will begin then to heal our minds while we heal our bodies and our spirits.

So, Virginia, and others who find me here musing. . . come by my office at 24 Arlington just off of Charlotte St. Or call for an appointment: 242-7372. It's a beautiful day to begin a new chapter.

Asheville WordFest April 30-May 3

2009-04-09T06:21:00.000-07:00

I think the really important thing to convey about Wordfest is that it is product of many years of Asheville poets' legacy-building. From the early nineties until now, there's been a strong poetry community. (I see it as a healing of what happened to poor Thomas Wolfe whose words won him exile from his city.) James Nave, Glenis Redmond, Bob Falls, Allan Wolf, Keith Flynn and more recently Graham Hackett, Sebastian Matthews, Jeff Davis, and many more too many list, have stoked the fires for a free poetry festival for this town. Back in the early 90's there was a poetry event every weekend evening, in some crazy location, ranging from the Green Door to the Diana Wortham, which back then, like the Green Door, allowed local performers to use the mainstage (!) for a mere 20% of the door. The town came out for these events.

Wordfest was dreamed up at a table at Malaprops, where I think all of us have read at one time or another. James Nave, Jeff Davis, Glenis Redmond and I sat around after a broadcast of Wordplay and up it bubbled. It's interesting that three of us are rooted in the performance scene--we've always had that drive to make poetry public, to literally give it away. That's the spirit of creativity, so we keep that at the heart of Wordfest. Lewis Hyde's book *The Gift* is one of the most important books in my world. In that book, the poet explores the creative economy, one based on circulating energy, rather than trapping it in place. For Whitman, poetry was currency. He spent it generously and in return he received it generously. He devoted hours to writing letters for wounded soldiers. For him, there was no difference between service and poetry. Hyde also studies ancient economies and folktales, revealing that cultures have survived quite well on this circular economy. It's interesting to me that we're witnessing the end of the linear economy (however many bailouts we attempt in order to put off the inevitable). It's a perfect time for creativity to rise, for people to give things away for free, such as a poetry festival, and enjoy seeing how it comes back to them in other forms.

So, it's about much more than poetry for me. It's about restoring things to a more natural economy.We invite local businesses and groups to sponsor poets as way of integrating poetry into the marketplace. For the amount it costs to buy a paper ad in one issue of a magazine, a business or group can actually pay for the poet's airfare and (part of) a reading fee and give much more life to the money, and reach many more people (through our website, press and the actuall event itself) in a much more human way. Also, WordFest presents poetry as Citizens Journalism. This is simply an emergence from my experience of watching Dr. Maya Angelou on Nightline on September 11. She was talking about how we need to "feel" what has happened, how we need to grieve, and Ted Koppel said, "Well, thank you for that poetic reflection, Dr. Angelou. And now for a more realistic perspective." And gone was the poet and up came a general or colonel. That was it. Neither of those perspectives is more realistic than the other. There are two realities--the active and the reflective.

Asheville Wordfest, by presenting poetry as Citizens Journalism, explores this.We are funded by the North Carolina Arts Council and the North Humanities Council, two amazing examples of circular economy in the way they return taxpayers money to the taxpayer in a higher form, that of art. My own company, The Healing Seed, picks up the rest of the tab along with Amy Mandel, Shiner Antiorio, Katina Rodis, Laurie Masterton, Grateful Steps Press, Maggie Wynne and many other members of our community. As the years continue, I envision more businesses and friends will "sponsor-a-poet" by donating money. It can happen, We can change the economy into a creative one, and see how everyone benefits. Asheville Wordfest is one model for doing this.

The English Major and the Apocalypse

2009-03-09T05:52:00.000-07:00

In Chicago a couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk by Art Spiegelman, the author/artist of the groundbreaking (oh, I'm so tired of that word but Spiegelman deserves it) MAUS. His talk was in the Roosevelt Theater of Roosevelt College, just off Michigan Ave. I sat in a private box, not because I am special or had paid any extra. Just no one else was sitting there. And from there in my little velvet cave I heard something stunning. Spiegelman was just getting warmed up for his presentation on the logic of the cartoon when he said, "I just attended my grand-daughter's graduation from Yale. She got her degree in English. I'm so glad she got a degree in something useful, not something useless like Finance."

I've been reading the posts on dabagirls.com, the blog for young women who have been cashing in on Wall St. dating practices such as being given a Saks credit card by an FBF (financial guy boyfriend--the "g" is silent, they explain in the glossary). That is, up until the recession. There are two time period for the DABA (dating a banker anonymous)--BR, before recession and AR, after. Naturally, the blog has links to other blogs. I visit them. I see similar takes on the ending era--finance is over. It doesn't make sense. Lehman Brothers employees are having to work-out because their fat bonuses just won't be there to draw the babes.

So, I think of Art Spiegelman's statement.

I lied to my father when I was in college. I told him I was taking business classes for my freshman year. Of course, he caught on and warned me against my English degree, which I pursued, or more aptly merrily walked into merely by doing what I loved best--reading and writing.

Now, the world is changing. Boutique banks are taking counter deposits from anyone who walks in, and the people who have focused their lives on financial compensation--openly doing so, with no qualms for not really being concerned for social causes--are suffering, for real. And I can't see their loss as any less tragic than other kinds because I know that any loss forces us to dig incredibly deep in order to move through the change it inflicts. These people are experiencing an apocalypse.

But I'd be dishonest not to feel somewhat vindicated for having pursued a degree in English, as well as for my remarkable aversion to all things focused entirely on money. Maybe I'm gloating. I think of a professor of Education who, upon looking at my transcript, said of my Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, "Wow, I'm sure that's useful." The piece of paper she was looking at is the most important piece of paper in my life. I just live in another world, have always lived in another world, from the one where education translated into immediate financial gain. And I think this world I've been inhabiting is going to be the "next world" more people step into. The mere number of blogs--beautifully written blogs, I might add--by ex-finance men and women--suggests that creativity is going to carry people through this, that it is an instinct, not a luxury. A necessity and not a waste of time. . .

YouSendIt - Send large files - transfer delivery - FTP Replacement

2009-02-01T17:56:00.001-08:00

YouSendIt - Send large files - transfer delivery - FTP Replacement

2009-02-01T17:56:00.000-08:00

YouSendIt - Send large files - transfer delivery - FTP Replacement

2009-02-01T17:52:00.000-08:00

YouSendIt - Send large files - transfer delivery - FTP Replacement

The Secret of Poetry

2009-01-29T18:50:00.001-08:00

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Join poet Laura Hope-Gill as she explores the relevance of Eastern and Western alchemy to poetry.

The Secret of Poetry

2009-01-29T18:49:00.003-08:00

Click to Play

Join poet Laura Hope-Gill as she explores the relevance of Eastern and Western alchemy to poetry.

Revelations

2009-01-29T18:49:00.001-08:00

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The Poet's Alchemy

2009-01-29T18:48:00.001-08:00

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Beyond Yin and Yang

2009-01-29T18:47:00.003-08:00

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The Language of Change

2009-01-29T18:47:00.001-08:00

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From Mind Into Spirit

2009-01-29T18:46:00.001-08:00

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God Chemistry

2009-01-29T18:45:00.001-08:00

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The Two Worlds

2009-01-29T18:44:00.001-08:00

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The Secret of Poetry

2009-01-29T18:43:00.001-08:00

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The Alchemical Process

2009-01-29T18:42:00.003-08:00

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The Quiet Mind

2009-01-29T18:42:00.001-08:00

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The Healing Seed

2009-01-29T18:41:00.003-08:00

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Sitting with the Negative

2009-01-29T18:41:00.001-08:00

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Join poet Laura Hope-Gill (www.thehealingseed.com) on her exploration of poetry, sacred texts, life and alchemy.

Zoe the Dog

2009-01-29T17:44:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday morning at 7:15, just a little bit before my daughter's school bus comes to pick her up, Zoe and I said good-bye to each other, ending our 13 year partnership in this world. Her death ended a three month battle of me against her death. I fought like crazy, turning my back on two suggestions by her vet that we "do it now" and compiling an array of medicines, holistic and non-. Antioxidants, vitamins, drops, iron, vitamin E, prednisone, nausea pills, painkillers. . . and I was feeding her "dogsure" with a syringe. Death has been living in my house, pacing. And now it's gone.

The way she died mystifies me. I was holding her as I have done so many times, my arms wrapped around her neck (by now so skinny) and my face buried in her fur. I had never visualized how she would go. I only feared it and wept for it since the vet told me in November he'd found cancer in her liver. But when the moment came, when her breathing changed, I talked her through it. I did it unconsciously--and my voice was calm and strong. I was saying all her favorite sentences and words--ride in the car, go to the cottage, get in the boat, go for a walk, have a treat. . . and her breathing grew heavier, and for the first time in her life she growled as she released her last breath.

And then I brushed my daughter's hair, zipped up her coat and walked with her to the end of the driveway where bus 181 picked her up and took her to school.

2009-01-22T10:53:00.001-08:00

OLD
--for Michele and Barack Obama

He has grown into an old man,
Even older than Mandela did who also did
The remarkable thing simply by doing the only

Thing he could do. Be.
His hair is longer now, not fully gray.
It is as though he has stopped time the same way

Anyone who changes the course of history holds a power over time.

He stands tall, still,
Dressed, as always in his best
Because that is what his grand-mother taught him.

He remembers every single one
Of her lessons because she gave them in the
Soft language she knew could shape a man from the inside.

His wife is old now, too, and she
Still holds him to her every word and to his
Word and to the words of the world. She is his weaver

And he is her web. Their love forms
A constellation of stars all the places they walk. It lights the path.
Two presidencies down, they still talk mostly of their daughters who are

Grown and do not recall
A time when either a woman or a person with dark
Skin could not make a home of the White House or any other house

For that matter. The years
Have been good to them. The nation, grateful.
They have served and they continue to serve, traveling.

They always hold hands. They still have
That smile for each other they’ve kept going
Since college. It has been a good life for both of them.

They have lived a long time.

Life as God Has It

2009-01-19T20:12:00.000-08:00

LIFE AS GOD HAS IT

ζωη(zoe) n. - greek "life". Life in the absolute sense, life as God has it, that which the Father has in Himself, and which He gave to the Incarnate Son to have in Himself (Strongs #2222)

In his adaptation of an Abenaki legend, Joseph Bruchac speaks of the origin of dogs as Great Spirit’s gift to human when He saw we were moving farther from the natural world and therefore farther from Him. Spirit saw that human was in trouble and needed an animal that would sleep inside the shelter, curled up at the foot of the bed. And so came Dog.

I named my dog “Zoe” because it means “life” in Greek. More specifically it means Life as God has it. My dog “Zoe” now as I write this is leaving this other life, life as mortals have it. She’s lying next to me as I write this, as I’ve written so many other pieces, with her beside me through every word. Her white and apricot fur is healthy. It is her winter coat, thick with curls and swirls. The softest fur covers her head, emerges in gold feathers down her ears. I will seek this texture in silk and pussy willows for the rest of my life and remember her. From this memory, the countless others will radiate.

Of Zoe and me running together along the Swannanoa River on the Warren Wilson College property. Of Zoe and me running in the meadows of the Christ School property where I lived for nine years. Of Zoe and me, Zoe and me, Zoe and me. In a life lived, as viewed from the outside, greatly in a solitary way, with Zoe I have never been alone.

She is the first creature I have raised. I adopted her from the puppy pool at the West Lafayette humane society in Indiana. She was a wedding gift from my fiancé at the time, Tom Andrews, the poet who passed away shortly before the towers were attacked in 2001. I thought she was a boy and named her Hugo at first sight when she peered out from under a child’s little chair placed in the puppy pool as a toy. Her black-rimmed dark eyes reminded me of the seals that swam up to me when I sat by the sea on the Olympic Peninsula. I whispered in her ear on the drive from the humane society, “You’re the dog that’s going to help me raise my child.” My fiancé ended up breaking off our engagement just two weeks later, saying that having a puppy made him realize he didn’t want to have children (he also said I was "taking all the good poems" and that I "blocked his view of God"). I loaded Zoe’s blue cage into the front of the truck I bought off him for one dollar and together we made the drive over the Ohio River and up the Blue Ridge back home, to my mother’s house in Oteen, my life and my heart in pieces.

We rented a house on Riceville Road, the pretty yellow across from the cow pasture with the stream. A parrot lived next door who quickly learned how to mimic me calling her. “Zoe!” the parrot would call out when I did, often causing Zoe to just lie down on the grass confused as to which way to run. For the first three years of her life, I couldn’t have house guests or a boyfriend. She was so rambunctious I expected a lawsuit from my landlady, Grace, for all the times she nearly pushed her over. Upon returning home after a day of teaching teenage criminals at the juvenile center, I’d often weep as she uncontrollable mauled me with kisses. She symbolized how crazy my life had become.

Time passed. Boyfriends arrived and departed. And Zoe calmed down. Living at Christ School in a small two bedroom cottage with limitless room to run, we shared furniture and hours of quiet. She swam in the lake every day in Summer and after school in Fall, when we drove to my parents’ cottage in Canada, she rode on the back of my kayak and we explored Georgian Bay. When she saw something move in the woods on land she’d leap off. I’d follow in my boat and swim from the rocks until she returned, climbed on board and signaled she was ready to move on. I’ve read all of my poems to Zoe. She looks away when the language falls flat and stays focused when the rhythm works. This doesn’t work so well with prose, although some pieces hold her attention better than others. Our lives are intertwined.

When I gave birth to my daughter, Zoe’s mouth at first watered at the sight of the small pink thing I’d laid on the bed next to=2 0me. I’ve only harshly scolded Zoe twice in her life—this time and when she chewed up a long letter from Galway Kinnell, my favorite poet. Once she understood that my daughter Andaluna wasn’t a snack, she took on the role of helping me raise her. She recognized early that, due to my hearing loss, I didn’t always hear my own child cry or whimper when I was writing in another room. With a heavy head pressed onto my lap, she alerted me, and when Andaluna left her toddler bed for a middle-of-the-night trek into the living room to play, Zoe nudged me in my bed. She became my unofficial hearing-ear dog, happy to have a job. She helped my daughter master walking by staying close so the child only had to reach out an arm and Zoe would steady her. And this morning, she would not rise to get off of Andaluna’s bed when I asked if she wanted to go outside. This is how I know we are nearing our end.

From what I can tell, two conversation topics open women up to each other better than any other. The first of these is pregnancy; who among us when pregnant did not become the carrier of “birth stories” from absolute strangers, some of which were gutsy enough to just reach forward and touch our belly as though it was their own. The se cond of this is animal death. Everybody in my life knows that I am losing Zoe. She is the first one they ask about, knowing that the answer to this question is inseparable from the response to the next, how am I doing? Zoe on her journey is creating a coven of love around me, woven of stories of how others have let their beloved four-legged’s go. And like the stories of women who shared when I was pregnant—even the one told me by my waitress at Sagebrush who had the most horrendous pregnancy and birth experience imaginable, a story which terrified me and had me on the phone to my doctor disproportionately to my condition for over a week—these stories are sacred, discomforting and necessary. They help me see that there is a time beyond this moment, a time when Zoe will become a memory, a spirit guide and companion, long after fur and wet nose have vanished. But at this moment, I have only grief and the longing to over-ride the natural course of events and make Zoe live forever.

No matter how full of faith I am, no matter how well I know, for certain, that the spirit world is real and that all being is illusory and flowing and One, I am deeply celebrating my illusion that Zoe an d I are two separate creations, one with a black nose and one with hardly any nose at all to speak of. I am loving that she has paws and I don’t and that when I come home from a day in the world, she wags her tail vociferously, as though I’ve been gone for months. Our illusory separateness is the source of our story. Her dogness gives meaning to my humanness. I’m the one that gives her food. She’s the one that makes sure my daughter and I are safe. In the past when I argued with boyfriends, she’s the one that chose my side and barked at the boy until he left. We’re a union of differences, a partnership of strangers.

I can’t figure out the nature of this grief. From the all the stories I have heard, the depth of grieving humans go to for their pets is admittedly more raw than that they indulge for humans. People pass on. Animals die. People speak of the last days they shared with their animals as “the most beautiful experience of my life” or of the moment they “put him to sleep” as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Superlatives belong to the animal bond. In moving through this sorrow, given my compulsive poetic need to be able to name un-nameable things, I attempt to e xplain it as being a mixture between the love a parent has for a child and that which a child has for a parent. For while I am the one who feeds Zoe, pays her exorbitant vet bills, trims her toenails (if she’ll let me) and provides her with shelter, when it really comes down to who is taking care of whom, I’m the one heavy on the receiving. All the stuff I give is purely material. All the stuff she gives, speechlessly, watchfully, is purely something else, all encompassing.

Possibly feeling a little displaced by all the attention I’ve been giving Zoe and the throes of emotion her leaving spins me into, over dinner the other night my boyfriend brought up a sentence from The Road Less Traveled saying that the love that humans have for animals can’t really be called true love. Because animals don’t have free will and are entirely dependent upon their human, Dr. Peck says. If I were less exhausted from grief and terror of losing Zoe, I might have picked a fight over this one, but rather I joined him in acknowledging that I think there is some truth to that and fed Zoe a bit of chicken from my hand, happy to see her eat anything. But the question pawed at me, if this isn’t true love, what name do I give this inter-species same-sex relationship I have with my dog?

Not quite the love of a parent for a child (remember, I scolded Zoe for thinking my daughter was food) and not quite that of a child for a parent (oh, for just a little of the money I’ve paid my therapist for working through that stuff—Sorry, mom, not you!) and not quite the love of a lover for a lover (I did not pick the fight), the love I have with Zoe has only one more place to go in these comparisons and that is back to the Abenaki story. What else in this universe is very quiet, at times giving and others withholding, ever-present and comforting? Great Spirit sent us our dogs as a way of connecting us to nature and by extension back to Great Spirit himself. In my life of faith and searching, Zoe is my personal love letter from the Creator. And in losing her, I am losing this form of direct contact. And I really don’t want to. And I am comforted by the passage in Mark’s Passion where Jesus—Jesus, whose faith was completely solid with good reason—“became depressed and wept on the ground” during the last supper. No matter what we know or experience of the Spirit, emotion is a necessary process of moving closer to it.

I am writing this on the floor next to Zoe. While I’ve been writing, she has gotten up a couple of times to look out the window, making me wonder if this really the last afternoon-into-evening writing session I will have with her. Truthfully, a part of me hopes it is so I can be free of this fear and move on into grief and loss, emotions I’m considerably more comfortable with, stuff I know how to write. I know how to cope with something that’s already gone. But knowing it is leaving, for me, is the harder task. And possibly this is going to be her last gift to me, this enduring moment of that very emotion I am worst at holding. I have her. She is right her next to me. I am joyful that I can see her breathing and at the same time I am gripped with sorrow that soon I will not. I am living in a three-way mirror of past, present and future, and all three panes show Zoe. Zoe as she was, Zoe as she is, and Zoe as she will be continuously in my memory. They all look the same.

Zoe the Dog

2009-01-14T03:43:00.000-08:00

My dog of 12 years is dying. She has cancer, at the very least, of the liver. Two months ago I took her in for a rabies shot. The vet, feeling something in her abdomen, told me we should operate immediately. During the surgery he called me (I was across the parking lot, at Old Navy, looking at turtlenecks as though they mattered) and offered to just "put her down" then and there, having seen the cancer.

More than a month later, and two weeks ago, he told me again it was time. I didn't listen and have had two more weeks with her. Yesterday we went for a long walk at the Biltmore Estate.

This morning she is lying on my bed, warm and cozy.

Every night I say good-bye to her, and then in the middle of the night I wake and reach my foot over the blankets to feel her breathing. I want to cancel everything I have to do today just so I can sit with her, walk with her, talk to her. I know she'd get tired of me, though, and, as she often does, she'd get up from wherever we were and move to someplace else.

Alchemy and the Political Scene

2008-11-07T07:09:00.000-08:00

I have not written on this blog for some time now. This has been partly due to my need to reconcile the deep work I was doing with alchemy with the more surface stuff of life. Truthfully, I didn't realize when I was writing this that the inner eloquence of alchemy was so closely related to hearing loss and deafness. Now I see they are inseparable for me.

Deafness has continued to move into my life, as both physical reality and as metaphor. Only in alchemy--in taoism and its shared deepest roots of Christianity--can I make sense of it. And it makes perfect sense.

I am working with Debra Roberts on developing a website. We've done some video which allows me to talk very freely about the Bible's roots in alchemy. I prefer just talking about it. Writing about it so often falls dryly from the tree of ideas. Also, I feel the rising need to accelerate an understanding within Christianity of these ancient processes, the processes of change and improvement which the texts speak of in reiterant symbolic terms.

Now, with the fall of the religious right and the seizure of government by the left, it is even more opportune a moment to explore Christianity's connection with Taoism and promote healing between the opposites. Once we can approach the western sacred texts in terms of alchemy, we can get rid of the hateful aspects of the church--the anti-woman, anti-child, anti-gay doctrines in particular. They are completely unfounded by the text.

I have no doubt that alchemy is the language of the Bible. As such, the union of opposites is the purpose of the faith. Not physical opposites. Spiritual opposites. In alchemy, all things are one. Not physically, spiritually. Any reference to homosexuality in the Bible is a reference to the spiritual nature of elements and beings. They are statements on balance. Too much masculine energy tips the crucible and does not yield a philosopher's stone, basically. Same with too much feminine energy. I think we've all be in relationiships, whether gay or straight, in which the "chemistry" was off. This is why we leave relationships behind. Spiritual chemistry is the stuff of the Bible. It is also the stuff of love and it is found in every manifestation of love.

In regards to abortion, the other battering ram of the religious right, this is an alchemical term for a failed process, the magnum opus gone awry. Very few magnum opi go right. That's why the practice got so frustrating and science ditched it. The alchemist controls only so much of the work (the inner work, not a pot over fire with lead and base matter in it). The "spark" of life comes from the invisible--from God, from the quantum field, from dark matter, whatever we want to call it. In the Dictionary of Alchemical Terms, if this "spark" does not come, the opus is failed and called an "abortion."

Alchemy also employs a rhetoric of light and dark, in which the dark, or obscure, is written of in threatening ways. The darkness is the internal darkness, the spiritual frontier of the self. It is guarded by reason's obstructions and fear causes us to back down from furthering our journey. The writers had to express this somehow in language, so they use the opposites of light and dark. Of course, anyone can see how this translates in material form. But it it, again, metaphor.

Human form in the Bible is metaphor, symbolic. Actions are symbolic of the metaphor of the crucible. It is intentionally obtuse and obscured, but it does make sense. It has a logic to it.

There is absolutely no foundation in the Bible for any of the church's doctrines that limit either choice or union. On the contrary, alchemy is about free will and union.

I'm going to start writing this blog again. Not because I need it to cope with my deafness or because I'm using it as a sounding board for alchemical exploration. Sure, those are wonderful purposes. Deafness and alchemy are not problems to me. But, really, I think the deafness to alchemy is the cause of the world's problems. The deafness keeps people from acknowledging the unity of mystical traditions. The deafness is the seed of fundamentalism. And of hate.

THE MOURNING PATH

2007-06-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the Gospels for references to mourning. I see so clearly how little space there is for mourning in our society. We are moved from one tragedy to the next with hardly space for a sobbing breath in between. Years ago, when I lived on Riceville Road and taught at the Juvee, I bought an enormous block of clay and molded chunks of it with my hands into these hollow standing figures, only two of which survive. An art historian friend told me they were examples of funerary art. I hadn't known such a thing existed and just continued making them, one after another.

There's a movement in Qi Gong called "Carry Tiger Up the Mountain." And every time I did Carry Tiger, which you repeat 17 times or something, I'd weep then feel sobbing approach. It was the strangest thing. None of the other moves had this effect. My instructor explained one day (he'd never comfort me during the practice, always left me to do the work myself) that the movement was begun by a Tao master who, when it died, carried his pet tiger all the way up a mountain because that was the only way he could grieve and honor it with his whole being. The move is ancient, and it amazes me that it still speaks its story to the body that does it.

Anyway, funerary art. Grieving. The more I think of it, I am quite sure that this is what depression is--grieving that didn't have a chance to get done so it turned into a horrible knot.

In the Book of Kells, this knot is everywhere. Sometimes it's outside people. Sometimes it's inside them. In one image two men are grappling with eachother (could just as a easily be a love grapple as a war grapple) and the knot is within and between them. It says so much to me. It helps me objectify the knot when I'm uncomfortable with what I'm feeling, so maybe I can feel my way into it on another level, the way my grandfather once spent two hours untying a knot in my Ocean Pacific swimsuit he'd pulled from the clothesline, worked on it 2 hours with his eyes closed. It was just his project for the night. The Psalmist says, "You will feel anger. Do not sin. Sit on your bed and commune with your heart." If our society honored sitting on beds and communing with hearts, we'd have way fewer tangles in us, fewer tabloids, more gardening magazines.

As much as I am aware that this is work of any spiritual path, I am convinced that this process is also what it means to be a follower of Jesus--who is always on the move, here, there, hopping in boats, climbing up mountains, traversing the terrible desert of the inner world. Like the ropes in the Book of Kells or following a thread of imagery in the Bible, we are given only glimpses of the whole and follow the glimpses toward a complete vision.

RISE

2007-04-28T04:28:00.000-07:00

RISE

I wake to rising, to the elevate sun and flight of birds.
I wake to the lift and life of daylight, the streaming of shine clouds illuminate in.
I wake to a rising child whose small arms reach up for holding.
I wake to her uplifting face, a helium kiss.
And I salute this day for the upward shift of heart it gives.
I wake to the uplift of bloom and branch and catch as much of the sun as I can.
I insist on joy and the living out of it like the infinite box of good things it holds for me.
I live for the lifting hands, and haul each beaten dreamer out of the dark,
one by one, the basement empties of starving child,
wounded student, yet another undreamed of horror.
I stand at the circle door of heaven sleeves rolled up for the work.
My muscles flex in delight and purpose. I lift so they may rise.
I do life like love and revisit the morning light of everything I do.
I imagine the arisen. I enact the rising.

This life invites the illuminating action.
I reach out to you, child, all who have witnessed the bullets, and I sing
out the low, the debasing, the unceasing image hat this is all we are.
I rise above the working and I turn it into lifting.
I lift myself up out of the world til I am floating on the muscular rain,
making my shape out of cloud and soprano sunlight, the voice
at the top of the dome of heaven
I bind to my voice and I sing out of the world its call for me to hey come down from there.
I lift up that voice, too.
I am the singing wingspread of my mind.
I eat the shadows up into me.
For they are mine, all these tragedies. They are mine so send them forth,
So I may infuse them with my breath and turn them into sorrows with wings
and bid them leave this world through the elevator of my witness.
I insist. I take them up like a banister. I am the staircase of the eschatology.
I rise in the morning and in the night when the moon comes up, as all the lights go down, I bind myself to the moon’s light and I rise.
I insightful, strong with God who also is always there lifting, singing as I lift.
I infinitely bound to air and earth, I rise with the color of fire.
And I am breathing in the weapons.
And I am breathing in the war.
And I am breathing in the harsh words.
And I am breathing in the same old story told to the same old music.
I am absorbing the history of mankind,
The history of violence, the history of the rise and fall of just about everybody at this point.

I am absorbing the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Nagasaki, Baghdad, Kabul, Sarajevo, Sierra Leone, London, Paris, Darfur, I am absorbing Rwanda, absorbing East Timor and East Berlin, I am absorbing Congo, I am absorbing Watts and New Orleans. I am absorbing Wounded Knee, Tippecanoe, anything and everything that took place on this soil since 1492. I am taking in this moment on this earth surrounded by these amazing, loving good, hopeful, dreaming, wanting, determined, anxious, did I say loving people and I am breathing all of this in and I will not breathe it out.

DHARMA AND THE CHRIST

2007-04-17T18:38:00.000-07:00

As we walk the paths of our lives, we are to exercise our love for all things spiritual. In a close relationship with the world, we develop a close relationship to God. By loving life, we love God. For the poets of the Bible, this love was deep to the point of being all consuming. Amazement and wonder accompanied their every step. They walked aware that every grain of sand that shifted beneath a sandal was luminous with the light of creation. And just as much as it is a commitment to live life for every minute drop of wonder it can contain, it is a choice to engage life on this level of ultimate intensity. Such is the choice to know God not only through creation but through the experiences that arise in our lives. For just as the flower blooming through the snow is a presentment, and a metaphor, of the divine every conversation and kiss is as well. Once we choose to visit the sacred level of life, we find that it extends through all things and events.
In the reclaiming of Christianity as Buddhism’s cousin, we can find the Buddhist principles of attention to the “good path,” “The virtuous man delights in this world, and he delights in the next; he delights in both. He delights and rejoices, when he sees the purity of his own work.” This verse from Dhammapada's “The Way of Truth” finds its beautiful companion in Psalm 1 from the Holy Bible:
Blessed is the man who walks not in the way of the ungodly nor abides by the counsel of sinners, nor sits in the company of mockers;
But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law does he meditate day and night.
And he shall be like a tree planted by a stream of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaves fall not off; and whatsoever he begins he accomplishes.
The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away.
Therefore the ungodly shall not be justified in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
For the Lord knows the way of the righteous. But the way of the ungodly shall perish.
Righteousness and virtue are one and the same, and both involve a deep sense of attention to the world. In this state, one seeks the beauty and truth of all circumstances and conducts oneself in such as way as will multiply the beauty and truth in the world. Buddha teaches that Mara, the great tempter, can easily overthrow an individual who “lives looking for pleasures only, his senses uncontrolled.” Mara, he also teaches will not overthrow him “who lives without looking for pleasures, his senses well-controlled, moderate in his food, faithful, and strong.” The sinners and ungodly of the Biblical terminology meet a similar fate as those who look for pleasures only in the Buddhist.
When we view Christ as our dharma, an inner-voice that weighs in on our thoughts and motivations, we can begin to see how the teachings of both Buddha and Christ resonate with our own natural sense. While Mark Twain says, “There’s nothing common about common sense,” the vouchsafed Buddha seed and Christ seed in our primordial minds beg to differ. There is a path to achieving a flawless intuition and sensitivity to beauty. There is a fundamental part of us that longs to allow this part of our psyches to be all there is. For once we function from this place, we function in alliance with God. We are no longer “in the way.” We are “of the way.” And in this place, all our works will find completion.
The Messiah Dharma works like a tree breaking through bracken to receive the sunlight. In Psalm 2, we witness the activation of the dharma,
Why do the Gentiles rage and the peoples imagine vain things?
The kings of the earth and the rulers have conspired and have taken counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying,
Let us break their hands asunder, and let us cast away their yoke from us.
He that dwells in heaven shall laugh, and the Lord shall mock at them.
Then shall he speak to them in his anger, and terrify them in his wrath and say,
I have appointed my king over Zion, my holy mountain,
To declare my promise; the Lord has said to me, You are my Son; this day have I begotten you.
Ask of me, and I shall give you the heathen for your inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for your dominion.
You shall shepherd them with a rod of iron; you shall break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.
Be wise, therefore, O kings; be instructed, O judges of the earth.
Serve the Lord with reverence, and uphold him with trembling.
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish from his way while his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they who put their trust in him.
Even in so-called Biblical Times, there were two kinds of people. There were those who did not see life as sacred, and those who did. The former radically outnumbered the latter. This psalm works quite well as a study of a wrathful God about to set aright a wrong people. However, when we read it as a description of how, once activated, Messiah Dharma functions as the communication instrument of a promise-keeping God, the psalm brims with a new spiritual and neurological life. This seed makes us God’s kings who reign over the Kings of the worldly world. It makes us all “my Son,” and we are “begotten” on the day we waken to our Messiah Dharma. God is not speaking to our ego-selves when He says, “You shall shepherd them with a rod of iron; you shall break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Rather, he addresses the Messiah Dharma, granting it permission to do whatever it takes to get us on the right path.
In the Book of Jonah, Jonah denies God’s instructions as they are fed to him through his dharma. The dharma then works with God to bring about Jonah’s awakening to his true path. The sequence of events necessary to bring about this awakening are quite awesome and no more awesome than the journeys our Dharma will take us on to get us to see what we need to see, or, more aptly, see how we need to see. In this same way the dharma shepherd moves through our psyches with a rod of iron judging what can remain and what can be lost. Then we lose it. What we do not “get” right away is brought to us in lessons and experiences. The harder we fight our dharma lessons, we more depressed and ineffective we become as humans. The farther we retreat from life. We will all get broken like a potter’s vessel because we are made of clay. By destroying the clay, dharma empties us so we can be made new. We are not to strike out at the Messiah Dharma, the psalm teaches, but to Kiss the Son. For it is the Son, as in Buddhism it is the Dharma, that will show us how to live life completely.

WHY THE HOLY BOOK IS HOLY

2007-04-13T05:34:00.001-07:00

In Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsch "quotes" God as saying that the Bible was written by men and they got a lot of things wrong. I know that the Holy Bible has been the source of much horrendous action. Yet, our lack of understanding does not make the poets unskillful. The cipher of alchemy runs through these texts like water through soil, nourishing every word, image, and symbol with cool life. It has been hidden, and in its discovery and application the Holy Bible shifts into its own deliberate meaning. It flourishes under our eyes like a living forest rich with all life from root to loam to wolf to leaf to eagle and cloud. What is unfolding in me unfolds further each time I read, and I am awed always by the depths it finds in me to sound.

These are words we fall through into the mystical. Beautifully enough, the text with the cipher running through it does not in the least bit vary in meaning from the contemporary view of the Divine held by many, including Walsch who sees God as a stem cell of the universe. The text compounds what so far has been hinted at, and it takes us deeply into the mysteries of the universe. These are mysteries we can't afford to ignore now that they are opening. My wish would be that we can open them together.

THE WHISPERING GALLERY

2007-04-13T04:57:00.000-07:00

At the top of the dome at St. Pauls Cathedral in London, in an area called the Whispering Gallery, aged benches curve the dome’s circumference. Lean forward and you can see the brilliance of the marble floor below, look up and see Sir Peter Thornhill’s glass mosaic scenes of Creation. Sit still, raise your eyes slightly and you can see, between the arches of the inner dome, mosaics of prophets and saints as they sit at their desks either engaging or trying to escape from the task of writing down the word of God. Each man takes a varying degree of dislike to the process. John is most disciplined, there with his lion, as angels hold open his book. Not so willing, Isaiah looks about to haul off, punch the angel holding the pen, and ditch the job altogether. Jeremiah must be held down while one angel forces the pen into his closed fist and implores him to take the divine dictation, which he does. It’s a scene of violence and trepidation, furor and resistance. The whispers of the Whispering Gallery, the mosaics suggest, might not be the kind of whispers we long to hear, despite our pleas to hear God’s voice.
There is that edge where the soul starves for its free expression in a material form, a desire to be made manifest. Yet in order to achieve expression in physical form it requires a language whose limits must by definition expand to hold such a wild and unformulated thing. Those prophets around the dome weren’t afraid of God; had they been, they would have seized the pen like good little prophets. It’s God’s voice that’s got them wanting to run. The thoughts of God are simply too big for our mere words. And the soul longs to always be talking back, communicating, communing. The soul longs to break free of its skin and soar in ecstasy, a state which defies the hard skin of language altogether. At this place, the state of trying to get the spirit world to listen, or At’woo, as the Tlingit call it, language changes shape. Metastasis. Metaphor steps in to help us do what Plato’s speaker’s soul, “poor thing,” can not. At the edge, the systems of language break open to reveal technical leverage for reaching beyond. But if we can achieve a new system of language to phrase such expression, wouldn’t it then follow we’d need new ears to hear the response? And this presents a whole new set of problems in the world of ears.
At some point, the prophets had let go of the language they normally listened to, thought in, lived through, the language within their own heads. They had to abandon the known to receive the unknown language of God. No wonder they look a little scared. Their faces convey a sense of living in a perpetual state of wonder, wondering if what they heard is what was said, if what was said could possibly be true, if they could possibly do anything to avert a dawning tragedy, change the path of man. And also their faces, in so many shards of glass, convey what weight it is to be able to hear in any sense of the word, what great responsibility it is to be the receiver of any kind of speech, what an honor it is to listen.
Throughout the texts of the Bible, countless references to hearing loss suggest we are all living on the edge of God’s language, and countless references to unheard prayers suggest that God lives on the edge of ours. Deafness is as much a spiritual condition as it is an aural one, and overcoming it seems to be the key to our salvation, as well as God’s only hope for satisfaction with His creation. In Hebrews 5:11, the language of hearing loss is used to suggest that communion with Yahweh is quite similar to being in an audiometer: “Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing.” It would seem that the one “of whom we have many things to say” is having trouble getting through to us because our hearing stinks. And yet what’s so wonderful in this passage is that the words themselves can’t be formed with the knowledge that they won’t be heard. It’s an auditory stalemate. In Hebrews 4:2: “For indeed we have had good news preached to us, even as they also did, but the word they heard didn't profit them, because it wasn't mixed with faith by those who heard. “ The ability to hear is insufficient for knowledge of God. For it isn’t merely what we can hear that matters but how we hear it. If we do not listen “with faith” we may as well be deaf.
“Hold the pattern of sound words which you have heard from me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.” In the audiometer, my audiologist says things which I must repeat. He gauges my hearing ability by how many words I repeat correctly. This passage from 2 Timothy 1:13 reminds me of being in glass dark booth. And more intriguing certainly, “sound words” here seem to hold special weight. Are there unsound words? Are these words that are not safe or are these words that make no sound? Is it suggested that God’s words are the only sound words, all else is phantom speech?
Isaiah writes in 49:1, “Listen, islands, to me; and listen, you peoples, from far: Yahweh has called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother has he made mention of my name.” Listening is the means to receiving gossip prophecy as it is passed from prophet to people, and the “islands” ought to listen to be connected. Through listening, we form union. Ephesians 4:21 begins “if indeed you heard him, and were taught in him.” Hearing is a means of receiving instruction, “if indeed" we can hear at all. Deafness or Hardness of Hearing is hinted at by “if indeed.” Perhaps you heard something but are you sure of what you heard?
Hearing is, again, not enough in Mark 4:24: “He said to them, "Take heed what you hear. With whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you, and more will be given to you who hear.” Hearing, it seems, is here an act of willingness, something beyond chance sense, otherwise all would hear. Hearing loss is diagnosed for all humanity by audiologist Matthew in 13:15: “for this people's heart has grown callous, their ears are dull of hearing, they have closed their eyes.” This suggests to me that whereas I think that my sense of hearing has abandoned me, perhaps we have, to fall upon idiom, abandoned our senses. And perhaps it isn’t merely idiom, metaphorical. Perhaps what we perceive as our literal senses are our metaphorical ones, particularly given that what we hunger for most is a direct experience with the sacred. Matthew offers hope for our move into the metaphorical (a word that lovingly longs to be mistyped as metamorphical) senses: “or else perhaps they might perceive with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and should turn again; and I would heal them.” The metaphorical senses are those that we use to perceive the Divine, or tragically fail to, as in Deutoronomy 30:17 they are cut off: “But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but shall be drawn away. . . “ They allow us hunger: “My dove in the clefts of the rock, In the hiding places of the mountainside, Let me see your face. Let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. (Song of Solomon 2:14)” They allow us joy, “Those on the rock are they who, when they hear, receive the word with joy; but these have no root, who believe for a while, then fall away in time of temptation. (Luke 8:13) And unused, they render us downright evil as in Jeremiah 13:10, “This evil people, who refuse to hear my words, who walk in the stubbornness of their heart. . . .” Yet, it seems that God, Himself, has selective hearing. He hears his servants in Exodus 22:27, “for that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin. What would he sleep in? It will happen, when he cries to me, that I will hear, for I am gracious.” And yet in Psalm 64:1, “For the Chief Musician” it would seem that God must be called to, does not automatically “hear” unless summoned. This is how it is for the hard-of-hearing. Touch us on the shoulder and we will give your attention, but just start muttering about something near us and we will ignore you. My friend David has promised me a t-shirt that read “I’m not a bitch. I just can’t hear you.” But that other poet David calls out, taps God’s metaphorical shoulder, “Hear my voice, God, in my complaint. Preserve my life from fear of the enemy.” At times, it would seem God is altogether profoundly deaf, “And ye returned and wept before Jehovah, but Jehovah would not listen to your voice, nor give ear unto you (Deutoronomy 1:45).
Viewed this way, the Bible is a story of living with hearing loss, only both parties of the relationship suffer it, and the relationship is in dire need of some other language to carry it through on. At the very least, our metaphorical ears need our permission to open,
"Today if you will hear his voice, don't harden your hearts (Hebrews 4:7).” Also, they require reminders to “hear this (Isaiah 48:1),” as though we forget at any time to listen intently. And ultimately, metaphorical listening must be a communal act as in Isaiah 48:1: “Come near, you nations, to hear! Listen, you peoples. Let the earth and all it contains hear; the world, and everything that comes from it.” And we must “come near. . . to hear,” just as the speech-deaf must approach the speaker, be close enough to make words of the sound.

THE ONION METAPHOR

2007-04-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

The mystical journey is often compared to the peeling of an onion. Here's my take.

Go get an onion. Put it on the table in front of you. Take off one layer of the peel. Then another, and another. You get the point. You have tears coming from your eyes now. Keep peeling. Peel all the way to, well, peel all the way. The onion’s gone and you’re completely weeping and maybe the tears have now turned into real tears, drawing on feelings you did not know you had. But you can’t really tell. Wipe away your tears.

Now, get another onion. Put it on the table in front of you. Take of one layer of the peel. Now, using a very fine knife or burning apparatus, remove one layer of your own skin from your entire body. Then another from the onion, then another from yourself. Then another, and another. You get the point. You are a screaming weeping ruin by this time. And you have to keep going in order to find the truth. When the onion is gone, you are also gone. If you really exist, this is the moment you will know it. If the onion still exists, you will know that as well. Keep peeling.

CARRY TIGER UP THE MOUNTAIN

2007-04-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

I am posting this poem in honor of Good Friday and the closing of a very difficult Holy Week. I have found that the more focused I have become on spirit the more deeply I am affected by the liturgical calendar. At present, I feel as though my heart is being gripped by enormous hands that want to tear it out of me. At such times, I remember the Qi Gong move called "Carry Tiger Up the Mountain." Years ago when I was doing Qi Gong I would weep every time this motion came into my practice. By the tenth movement I'd be a wreck. Finally I asked my teacher why I wept every time I did this. He told me the movement follows the story of a Tao master who carried the dead body of his pet tiger up a mountain because he knew that was the only way to fully embrace his death.

CARRY TIGER UP THE MOUNTAIN

If you really want it out of
you, then we’re talking the
Himalayas, Sherpa-less, no
gear because who can carry
gear when they’re carrying
a tiger. You really have to
take it all the way. And after
you’ve climbed the whole
mountain, then begins the
journey, then you must name
the mountain. Call it: Tiger
Mountain, and after that, there’s
the mountain inside you you
have to climb that makes
Everest look easy. You long
for low oxygen, pulmonary
edema on this internal peak
that begins with your hair
and goes downward, tearing
through every cloud in your
mind. And you can’t climb
up the outside of it but must
go through the molten interior.
Through the stone sealed earth
and still with that tiger slung
across your back like a scarf,
this thing you loved, this thing
you spoke to as water pours
itself into a cup. You thought
you would drink of this life
forever. One foot and then
another is how you walk,
each drives claws, luxurious,
gold in the dark, to scratch
initials of longing into your
skin. Death is the only ink for
the calligraphy of pain, and
every stroke must be confident.
Carry your love up that wild
mountain. Only then can you
rip that mountain out. Set into
ice and sky you and tiger free.

PEACE AND PATIENCE

2007-04-03T04:25:00.000-07:00

In Mandarin, Patience means "to wait with certainty; to allow life to carry you."

The Ten Commandments are lessons in dealing "with our own stuff" and not putting it out into the world. I've been thinking about how in Hebrews Paul writes that Christ becomes "an author of life" and how this reflects the Buddhist and Taoist notions of "ministering." The Taoists and Buddhists maintain that how we walk and talk and think creates the world. The Judeo-Christian Commandments are our version of this. Along with the command not to commit blasphemy, harsh speech, we, too, are instructed to only put peace in the world. I struggle with this when I want an answer NOW for a question. Our tendency is to "talk" about it when we are angry, to put our emotions out there for all to see, and endure. This is counter to peace. Inaction and silence prompt us to work through our attitudes toward things that confound us, rather than to turn them into a circus of words. Thought, word, and deed is such a tall order. But I think that if it leads to peace as the teachings suggest, it's worth it. All of my control issues are the result of my impatience, my inablity to let things unfold. I am working on developing patience.

THE DEAD SEA

2007-04-03T01:40:00.000-07:00

We who lived there
didn’t call it that.
We worked the ink
as God works the tide,
sealing it with sand
and salt. We ate in
grace, moved in peace.
What kept us never
yelled or scolded. No
one got hurt. We were
allowed to leave but
who would want to?
Gazing out, the water
in us sang life that
only ended when
forgotten.

Back then we all moved
upon the water in our
minds. I left my cup
on a rock.It filled with
rain. But you won’t find
rain here. This rain
cleanses memory but
leaves no earthly mark.
And when you remember
us, picture me standing
on this cliff as you stand
now, kind visitor, gazing
out at what I saw but not
seeing.

POETS

2007-03-31T14:15:00.000-07:00

There are two worlds, that of form and that of emptiness. But the emptiness is never stagnant, nothing is every hollow. Everything in it, rather, is constantly filling with every shifting spirit. The more we can surrender to the world of emptiness, the less stressful and anxious we become. We become attuned to Vidya, the sanskrit Ultimate Reality, and the world that, as Paul writes in "Epistle to the Thessalonians," God hides from the unrighteous. Many of us in the "West" know this world--the world of mindblowing coincidence and flagrant interconnectedness. This is the world alluded to page after page in the Holy Bible as well as in Buddhism. Many of us are already living in Ultimate Reality and doing our level best to put up with the nitpickiness of the delusional world. Many of those whose lives "we," meaning the progress starved West, never made the mistake of leaving it. Many still know all the bullshit we call progress is totally delusional and is the very "sin," (off the path) we preach against. The literature of the Ultimate Reality didn't ever stop getting written in Europe and America, though, even if the Bible got hijacked by materialists 2004 years ago. Poets have been writing it, and knowing exactly what they were doing provided they had contact with the masons and rosicrucians (of which Shakespeare is called "The Mask").The poets who have lost touch with the fact of Avidya/Vidya and from whom the dual creation described in the "Epistles" was successfully kept never lost touch with the primordial mind, the mind that perceives the ultimate reality. Nowadays we reduce the most wondrous phenomenon to literary terms: metaphor and simile. These are techniques not only for talking to God, but describing it as well.

COMPASSION

2007-03-31T13:42:00.000-07:00

Compassion itself is seen to be
The Seed of a rich harvest, water for growth,
And the ripened state of long enjoyment.
Therefore at the start, I praise compassion.
--CHANDRAKIRTI

Compassion draws the world into us. When we reach out with the light streaming from under our fingernails, as Chekhov says, we can touch the world, something it is impossible to do "literally." Imaginatively, though, we can do this, and the Vidya world, the Ultimate Reality, is reached only through imagination. Therefore, compassion is a doorway, every expanding into it, until ultimately the door is all it opens into and we no longer need it. Compassion becomes our natural state and we are thereby fused to and of the world completely. In this state, we become, as Paul writes in "Hebrews" "authors of life." Our compassion shapes the world in its own image. What we think, is. First, though we must overcome our perception of ourselves as separate from anything. We have to overcome our attachment to the illusion of form.

It is easy to overlook the mentioning of the nurturing mother in the Bible. When God's harshness is mentioned, it is in a context of a father "shaping" a son, just as fire shapes matter. When the Holy Ghost's desire for our return is mentioned, it is in terms of a mother's undying compassion for her child, her desire for her child to get well again. Paul mentions in "Romans" the world in labor pains until we allow ourselves to be adopted back into the whole. Certainly the strictness of masculinity, of form, dominates the subject matter of the Holy Bible, but in the manner of the feminine, the feminine when mentioned, when present indicates an unfathomable mother whose pains we are causing by not returning to her. The Bible is written in the masculine idiom of violence, but once we tame that violence by perceiving the fire as a healing and purifying force adn the sword as a method of
"detachment" from form, the language opens up and we can experience the compassionate teachings as celebrations of the imaginative mind liberated from linearity. The Dead Sea Scrolls become anthems toward creative spirit and perception of what lies under the material surface of 10,000 things.

And there, too, we find again and again, as in the Bible, that the path to this liberation is love. Love for the whole. Once we traverse the violent shells of the Holy Bible's words and enter the mystical content, we find, on every single bloodstained page, the Buddhist notion of compassion. Shame we didn't see this before we killed everybody. . . .

BALANCE OF HEART AND MIND

2007-03-31T13:09:00.000-07:00

Seeing with the mind and seeing with the heart reveal two very different worlds. One of these is what Paul calls "delusion" in "Epistle to the Thessalonians" and one of these is "the way, the truth, and the light." None of this anything to do with anything beyond the human mind, which in Buddhism is the exact same thing as the world. Looking through the eyes, we can only perceive delusional reality. Poetry and visual art reveal the sight of the heart. Sages can see both worlds. To merge them, reason and emotion must become one. The only way to accomplish this, develop both. Create communication between the heart and the mind through a commitment to art, poetry and developing intuition. This is how to access what the Hindi call Vidya, Ultimate Reality.

DYING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

2007-03-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

I am teaching my students T.S. Eliot's "Waste Land." I have been teaching British Literature, Beowulf to Ted Hughes, for almost ten years. I think having the words of the master English poets wash over me, through me, around me all this time has played a role in opening me up. Now that I'm open, I can't help but see how many of them--all of them--"practiced" poetry rather than just wrote it. They were all affiliated--ALL--with some aspect of Rosicrucianism or Masonry. And I am more and more convinced that these societies based on Alchemy have been the keepers of the True Religion all this time. There is in "The Waste Land" a perfect journey through the boundary "between worlds." As I taught it, I described this journey as it is found in the poem and this sparked a whole discussion about what the poet means by "dead." Dead is Avidya. Dead is all of this stuff. But what I want to impress upon them is that the spiritual path does not have to be taken in robes and shaved head and that they do not have to give up stuff intentionally. This is a forced detachment and I don't know if it accomplishes anything. All of my losses have been engineered from within the world. None have been my choice. And I live in a really nice house and I drive a CRV. And I've touched God and been feng shui'd from within by Boddhicitta that refragranced my mind. But I read People, Us, and I dye my hair blonde. What opened the doors for me wasn't at all an intentional pushing away of the material world. I was ripped from it as it was ripped from me. And I live in it now with awe and reverence. Just as I did before. And it is not at all far from me. I lost nothing. It's all here.

Avidya

2007-03-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

Avidya is the Sanskrit word for the delusion of separateness. The purpose of life is to overcome it. It is used repletely through Hindu texts and also forms the basis of Buddhist Sutras and teachings. Adi Shankara says in his Introduction to his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, "Owing to an absence of discrimination, there continues a natural human behaviour in the form of 'I am this' or 'This is mine'; this is avidya. It is a superimposition of the attributes of one thing on another. The ascertainment of the nature of the real entity by separating the superimposed thing from it is avidya (knowledge, illumination)". In Shankara's philosophy avidya cannot be categorized either as 'absolutely existent' or as 'absolutely non-existent'. Once we commit to overcoming avidya, the realization of the true Self begins. This search finds expression in the universal metaphor of the snake and the rope. Avidya, our delusional attachment to the material perception, leads us to see a snake where a sage, one who has overcome Avidya, will see a rope. This metaphor appears in the Qur’an when Mohammed speaks of prophets, “are the rope of Allah which should be held fast. (3:104).” Signs and wonders connect us to the Divine, but we reject them because they do not make sense. They run counter to our Avidya. The serpent, the snake, lives on in Judeo-Christianity as Satan’s chosen form in the Garden of Eden. Avidya knowledge damns us to suffering. Freedom from avidya is communion with God.
We must face our own realities, though, before we can see the Reality of Creation. To do this, we each move through our individual darkness. People who deal with their ghosts in weekly therapy appointments are already doing this. Once it has been traversed, it allows us to see the “flipside” of reality, the material world in its spiritual manifestation. When we have traversed what Everett Fox translates as “waste and wild,” we attain the Buddhist state of the Brahmin, “one who having banished his evil, a contemplative for living in consonance, [is] one gone forth for having forsaken his own impurities (Dhammapada, 26).”

SAMADHI

2007-03-19T20:12:00.000-07:00

Setting the correct wind-to-music
ratio driving home today

I thought of how looking back on the
world must feel for monks who,

having sung the sanskrit right,
walked the prayer wheel one last

turn, maybe had the wind jam a seed
of luminescent lapis shaded sand

in an eye where it lodged and blossomed
into a vision so complete it blinded

him forever, and as it did how small
it must have seemed then, the world, not

the sand, suddenly, how insubstantial to
have deserved so many believers in it,

walking their heavy steps that should
have, were it not for so much faith in nothing,

fallen through and yet driving their stupid
cars, windows half way up, down, no, up,

no, down, moon roof moonlessly open
on an open wide lashless cold March

sky and the music for today was U2’s
Achtung! Baby, the song, “You’re So Cruel.”

AL-CHEMISTRY

2007-03-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

What is it in us that makes us go absolutely crazy for a person, to fall head over in heels, to reach levels of emotional ecstasy just by thinking about them, by soaring out of our bodies and minds just by touching them?

I have this in my life. Just the thought of him nourishes me when I am in my darkest places. In fact, thoughts of him have actually lifted me out of these dark places. Hearing from him when I was in the depths of a depression magically reminded me what happiness feels like, and its contrast to where I was slowly guided me upward. Love is a ladder out of darkness. It is a healer. And I think it is why "God" is "Love."
God is the name given to this state of enlightenment, (That hardly demystifies it since enlightenment is the deepest mystical state.) this corridor of wisdom wherein one interacts with the world and the world interacts back, as though no separation existed, epidermal or intellectual. I am increasingly aware that it has everything to do with brain chemistry, with some perfect balance that allows one with the universe on a chemical level.

What I have with this man in my life--it's nothing short of divine chemistry. It corrects depression. It heals wounds. It inspires art. And it flows like a fountain out of us and between us when we are together. Yet, how often have I read the term "chemistry" in Cosmo dating columns and not considered that Chemistry is what Alchemy is all about. Now I see that we have "chemistry" with things and people in this life because they are our chemical pathway toward wisdom. This is why it is important to follow one's heart, one's bliss. Because chemistry is a map. It leads us home.

THE ALCHEMICAL HEART

2007-03-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

At its very heart, this is about connecting with the heart of the world with our own hearts. We do this through feeling passionately, through taking risks and finding where our path is. The only way to find where one's path is by bumping into walls, especially invisible ones. The labyrinth is therefore a powerful symbol for Alchemists, for whom the process is not at all really about laboratories and bunsen burners but about everything that goes on within and around us. Our life is a labyrinth. And the life of the planet is a labyrinth. Our personal labyrinths are microcosmic of the whole. How passionately we live determines how deeply our path merges with the path of the world. It is so indefinably beautiful we can only turn to the poets through the ages to find reflections of the experience. The emotional daredevils of history draw us closer to the path we should be on. The fools who had the audacity to wander far from safety--they should be our guides.

WIKIPEDIALCHEMY

2007-03-11T18:35:00.000-07:00

Here's a little bit about Alchemy. For deeper stuff look at Lyndy Abrahams' Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery--or just cruise online. But you won't find anyone saying the Bible is written by Alchemists. That's new. What's very, very cool and what makes this whole thing so striking is that Alchemy (Masonry, basically) is forbidden in Christianity. Also, Hebrew Scholars scorn Kabbalist insistence of a connection between the "divine influx" and a "hierogamos," a heavenly union of God and the Divine Feminine of Knowledge (Shekinah) to produce the sacred seed that grows into infinite wisdom. This hierogamos is one of the key symbols and concepts of Alchemy.

Here's Wikipedia, a sort of a primer since I know I go off on this stuff. . . and forget to ground out the basics.

In the history of science, alchemy (Arabic: الخيمياء, al-khimia) refers to both an early form of the investigation of nature and an early philosophical and spiritual discipline, both combining elements of chemistry, metallurgy, physics, medicine, astrology, semiotics, mysticism, spiritualism, and art all as parts of one greater force. Alchemy has been practiced in Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Persia, India, and China, in Classical Greece and Rome, in Muslim civilization, and then in Europe up to the 19th century—in a complex network of schools and philosophical systems spanning at least 2500 years.

Western alchemy has always been closely connected with Hermeticism, a philosophical and spiritual system that traces its roots to Hermes Trismegistus, a syncretic Egyptian-Greek deity and legendary alchemist. These two disciplines influenced the birth of Rosicrucianism, an important esoteric movement of the seventeenth century. In the course of the early modern period, mainstream alchemy evolved into modern chemistry.

Today the discipline is of interest mainly to historians of science and philosophy, and for its mystic, esoteric, and artistic aspects. Nevertheless, alchemy was one of the main precursors of modern sciences, and many substances and processes of ancient alchemy continue to be the mainstay of modern chemical and metallurgical industries.

Although alchemy takes on many forms, in pop culture it is most often cited in stories, films, shows, and games as the process used to change lead (or other elements) into gold. Also another form that alchemy takes is in the search for the Philosopher's Stone, in which to obtain the ability to transmute gold or to eternal life.

MYTHOGENESIS AND THE LOST WAY

2007-03-11T17:12:00.000-07:00

If one's God(s) and one's spirituality don't match, it is a sign that things are terribly misaligned. My experiences with the Divine have been playful and generous much more than stern and frightening. Most people I know who "know God" and have a working relationship with some form of the Mystery do not speak in terms of "going to hell" and "getting into heaven." Rather they borrow the language of the Buddhist path, which more and more people are turning to. The lifeblood of teh Judeo Christian faith has been, it seems, cut off from us. Needing this source so we may follow our hearts into the sacred, it only makes perfect sense that we would need to turn to other fountains.

I was reading the Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner Peace the other day. I was deeply saddened by his suggestion that Judeo Christianity is a harmful religion. I agree that the way that it is practiced--with its patriarchal misinterpretation of Alchemy's deep symbols (in which the "male" and "female" references describe the active and passive nature of these psychic aspects)--is harmful. The Dalai Lama does not see the Alchemic metaphor in the text, otherwise he would not suggest we turn from it. He sees only the veil cast over it. But why not scrap the Judeo Christian faith? Why can't we just turn from it and pursue wisdom down other roads? Certainly, Buddhism is much more attractive and the Native American religions offer much more in the way of earthly connection.

According the Jung and Joseph Campbell, however, we achieve the heaven state of enlightenment through the symbols emblazoned on our psyches. A person whose pschye is forged in the "West" must fill the symbols of the Western tradition with meaning--these being the grail, the sword, the star, the cross (for Christians), the wheel-a-rollin' in the middle of the sky. These are the breadcrumbs back to the primordial mind, and connection with the God consciousness therein. Dreamcatchers, Totem Poles, yin yangs, and Buddhas may serve as cool reminders of the existence of sacred paths, but ultimately to cross over into the backlight of the ancient mind within us--to allow the "Buddha seed," or the "mustard seed" Christ speaks of, within to germinate, we have to go through the grail and the sword and the cross and the star. And there has been no way that we can know how to move through these symbols safely without knowing they were alchemical symbols for 7500 years before the Hebrew Bible was even written and added to 1500 years later.

My own path as definitely been a patchwork of world religions. From the Salish artwork, I learned the breakdown of hierarchy. From Buddhism, I learned self-examination and how to love without grasping. From the Koori in Australia, I learned about the dream ceremony and the power of imagination in traversing great distances. From Taoism, I became aware of some kind of balance between humans and nature. From Christianity, all I got was music, but damn I loved the music. But I also got something about the liturgical calendar. Teaching at an Episcopal boarding school I have to attend almost daily chapel services and I've come to see great correspondences between the sacred calendar and my own life. For instance, Lent is a time of death and letting go, whether I go to church or not. It's just a gloomy time. But I had to use all the other faiths I've explored to finally fill my experience in church with meaning. I have had to draw the connections that the church, long ago, severed. And it is through working with the alchemical symbols in the Holy Bible that I've crossed over into this other place of understanding. I think it's an important connection to make--this one between other faiths and Judeo-Christianity. After all, all faiths emerge from the same Mythogenetic zone in Asia thousands of years ago. In the end though, we each have our own mythogenesis in our psyches. To fully enter the enlightened state, one, I beleive, does so through the doorways laid out for one through centuries of gazing at them from infinitely deeply within.

An Email to Father Tom at St. George's Episcopal Church

2007-03-06T17:22:00.000-08:00

Dear Tom,

Thank you so much for the honor of presenting the alchemical reading of the passion narrative at St. George's. I read the Mark narrative last night in McDonalds while Andaluna played. And I just wept, Tom. Wept. Christ was so real to me, and the story, which I have read before, just resonated not with fear and terror and the anger I've been taught to feel against the priests, some righteous indignation which has blocked me from the meaning I received last night. What I saw was Christ's isolation at his darkest hour. In the Peshitta Bible Mark says, "and he began to be sorrowful and depressed. . . and he went aside a little and fell to the ground, and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass away from him." This "sorrowful and depressed" part and the desire to let an event pass without our being in it is so beautiful. It fits in with what I mentioned about Jonah yesterday, that there comes a time when we can't "think" through something and must relinquish control to our emotions so they may carry us. As the men fall away then in the series of betrayals, the ones who are left to witness are the women. (tho who that mysterious man in the loin cloth who runs off naked is invites so much inquiry--he's like the last male witness before the trial.) In the alchemical process, reason has to disappear in order for the soul to be free to unite with God, to enter this psychological heaven. Reason, being a masculine aspect, does fall away here. The women follow Christ. And the women are the first to see him after he rises. It is the feminine which remains the constant if we are to traverse death into rebirth. We must let go of our reason and allow the dark to carry us through, and the feminine aspect is what moves us. This is the thread throughout much of the whole Text. The women may be on the sidelines, like the animals, but they are the carriers through of the most profound transformations.

The great gift of this new way of seeing scripture is that we can invite illumination from the brethren faiths of Navaho, Buddhism, all. And this is our death myth. This is the myth and ritual we revisit just as we let winter fall from us. But the traversion of the border between seasons, particularly that from dead winter to living Spring is no small hop. This is serious. How do we get across? How do we ensure safe passage? This is so gorgeous: when the woman with the alabaster jar (the jar a symbol of the feminine of course) pours all the perfume over Jesus's head, he praises her actions as opposed to wishing she'd saved it for the poor. This is the key--do everything now, commit to this moment. be here. It's zen. It's about not thinking through the moment, weighing alternatives, but rather about just pouring all you've got into it in the spirit of sacred kindness. This is how to let the moment die completely in your hand so it can live on forever in a pure state. It is to act without regret or thought. It is to give.

The cup of suffering a strong figure. Christ knows he is staying in the fire and not forsaking suffering in favor for an easy life. The cup is something we can use to "pass away" from ourselves in times of suffering. We pour ourselves into the cup to be made new. The cup here becomes the metaphor for the crucible in which we are constantly formed. We transubstantiate into it, deliver the parts of ourselves that need taking away. But we don't get to choose which parts these are. That is God's will only.

In alchemy, Al-khaim (and I wonder if this is "chaim" in Hebrew, life?) in Arabic, the crucifix for 7000 years has been a part of the most difficult process, mortificatio, death in which the four elements that make us are drawn to their polarities completely (hence the four points of the cross). In the alchemical process, this is the torture and destruction of the matter so its soul can be set free. When it is done, the matter is covered with linen soaked in dew and left in a "tomb" to putrefy. The putrefactio stage renders the matter without its former identity. It is the death after the death. Most painful. It is the descent into the nothingness before nothing. When it is over, fermantatio occurs. The dead grape has turned to a great bottle of wine. But the key to all of it is commitment to each phase. We must go into the tomb and be in utter darkness.

During mortificatio, Christ transubstantiates and this is mercy--he does the process in a ghost walk, wherein he renders his soul to the maker while his body goes through the motions. It doesn't make it easy, it is a skill that one learns from the other stages because they have suffered enough by this point to be able to walk with ghost. (Glenis Redmond and I have often told eachother, "I'm ghosting" to get through a particularly difficult time.) It is the mastery of dissocation used to its fullest benefit, to get us through unspeakable trauma. It is the ability to move the greatest part of oneself back into God so this world can't hurt us anymore. And God carries us through. To be proud, to think we can handle it without Him, to think we are in this alone--these thoughts interfere with the process of rebirth. It is not enough to die. We have to die before we die. We have to give our lives back to God. It is like a suicide, only done in the right way. We kill our ego so our soul can live on. In putrefactio, we don't have the luxury to transubstantiate. We take on our death whole. When we rise, there's nothing left of who we were. The butterfly's got nothin' in common with the caterpillar.

In a garden, it would be wrong to try to keep the flowers alive through winter. To do so would be to interfere with the necessary husk and drain of the season. Andaluna got incredibly sad in the autumn when the last red leaves fell from the dogwood. I had to explain to her that this has to happen. We have to let go of the beauty so it can return to us in new form. The paradox of giving is always this--we can't do it thinking of what we'll get, but we can always know that in giving everything we will get more back in return. The motive must be separated from the action. This is the left hand path I suppose. The cup must be separated from the man. And all things must be permitted their course through the darkness--be they daffodils or us.

Speaking of daffodils--did you hear that thing on NPR years back, the man whose manic, troubled mother sent him a thousand bulbs which he, angry with her, didn't plant carefully but just, fed up with the space they took in his garage, dumped them all at once into a hole in his garden where a tree service had removed a tree. And he forgot about them. And she died and he still did not think of them, his countless issues with her madness unresolved. Then in Spring, there were these thousands of blossoms screaming gorgeous yellow from the unwintering earth. It is like this--this constant act of letting go of everything. This constant giving back to the earth what belongs to the earth and never stays.

In Native American tradition, every story is medicine. There are songs for our illnesses, rituals for great maladies. This is our medicine story of the greatest transformation, that which occurs in the final three stages of the alchemical process, and through which we all go as well symbolically, and hopefully as gracefully as Christ.

Safe journey,
Laura

The Heaven Game

2007-03-04T17:59:00.000-08:00

In The Alchemist we read this tale. A boy enters a great house. He is told he may venture throughout the whole house. The trick is he is to hold a spoon with two drops of oil in it. He may venture throughout the whole house but he is not to spill the oil. This is the state of the mind of the master, or the adept.

Chaim, the root of alchemy, is life. But it is more than life, it is, as the Vedas say, the very life of life. There is a way to do it right. It is about living wisely but never dully, living wholesomely but without deprivation. In all things, a balance between their opposites exists. Between the farthest room in the house and the entire bulb of oil, there is a secret. The masters live in this zone and life, as a result of their doing so, unfolds for them magically. I don't exagerrate. It's magic. There is magic. It is wizardry, light side, dark side, so very crouching tiger, hidden dragon-type magic. Plato said, "Life is a game." And this is what he meant. For those who enter the realm of the masters, life becomes simply that, a game. By holding the right posture of mind, a master can make things occur, can draw words forth from other's mouths, can invite rain. It is a reality, the most supreme reality. The Dalai Lama inhabits it. I don't know who else, but I shudder to think of the Masons knowing this and using it to design our cities and win our elections. I never would have thought it possible if I were not standing in this place and catching my own novice glimpses of what can be done. Early Christianity rocked.

The game of wisdom must have been so thoroughly embraced during the Bronze Age for it to have breathed into form of our Sacred Texts. Reading the Bible in this context, one sees the double edge sword of mastery--the wonder it allowed, the solitude it bestowed. When Christ walks out over the water to helps his buddies in the boat, what better metaphor for being able to manage the sundry details and hobgoblins of the unenlightened life. What is a life threatening situation to the neophyte is just a walk across the water for the adept.

Those who enter heaven join in the game. Those who don't, get by the best they can until they "get it."

The Want of Ages

2007-03-04T16:47:00.000-08:00

Gladys Reichard wrote the seminal work on Navaho belief system in Navaho Religion. I bought this book 10 years ago when I was experiencing mysticism for the first time. I was reading everything I could about any belief system other than my own. This time, though, I am convinced that this magical mystery stuff is embedded in my own religion, Christianity. I can read every line of the Holy Bible and connect it to the simple structure of the Alchemical process. But I know it would not have meaning for me if I had not lived this alchemical life which I have--a live rich with nature and beauty, passion and disaster--then read The Alchemist by Paul Coelho, the book that gave a name to what I've been doing forever. To what many of us have been doing forever, I gather.

How could we not--for the alchemical process is ingrained in us, literally, emerging as we do from the earth, itself an ongoing alchemy. But it has been hidden from us in the West and from our counterparts in the Near East, these crazed monotheisms so much to blame. But not the texts of the religions, merely the interpreters of them, the confabulists of vertical cosmogonies, the makers of a faraway Maker. Once we undo that simple architecture, that heaven-up-there-hell-down-there and compress it to within the mind, the shifting symbols of the Holy Bible, drawn directly from alchemical symbology, are perfectly comparable to the Navaho symbologies in Reichard's text: "Considering a whole, all, or any one of its parts as the "same" affects classification. For example, , djic means "medicine bundle as a container," medicine bundle with all its contents, " "contents of medicine bundle," or a "separate item of a medicine bundle." The chanter knows perfectly well that the hide or muslin wrapper is not the same as a the bull-roater, that the "wide board" differs greatly from the talking prayer sticks or from the otterskin collar, yet in certain circumstances each is djic. He is acutely aware of the context and, therefore, of "sameness" and "difference," whereas his questioner is unable to determine the meaning because his is ignorant o the cultural context. (8) Cultural context is, of course, everything. And it makes our, meaning Western Judeo Christianity post-317 A.D., loss of the alchemical metaphor more heartbreaking. This is our culture. This is our context. And we have been forced to live without it and still expected to understand our own sacred texts.

What infuriates me: how may of my loved ones deal with depression and have actually succumbed to suicide when all along we have had this Book to guide us through our sorrows and our psychoses and no one was allowed to know. The way I see it: if a religion isn't healing its followers, somebody's being jacked.

And this is our story. 2700 years of jacking. And all along we have had what the Taoists, Buddhists, and Native Americans have had, a religious context for belonging in our own lives.

The Strawberry Field

2007-03-04T16:09:00.000-08:00

At some point, a truth is simply a truth, a fact a fact. Whatever deafness took away from me, it has given me much more. I'm at the beach. This is, I suppose, my eighth week in this state of mind and every day brings a new lesson, a new penetration of what I used to call the world. Last night I prayed on the sand, just as I used to during my first initiation ten years ago. I used the prayer name I was given then, the one I don't say out loud to anyone. And I asked for a lesson. Lessons come in dreams and in day to day events. Once establised, as Mircea Eliade teaches, the dialectic of the hierophanies is a fluid interchange between invisible and visible worlds. My dream was this: an enormous strawberry. The biggest strawberry--as tall as a person, as wide as a couch, and inside it were all these other great big strawberries. I opened one of them took a bite and it was just the perfect strawberry, bite after bite. I can still taste it now. Later, the lesson came when I withdrew money from an ATM at the aquarium and found considerably extra funds in my bank account. This is also connected possibly to how yesterday when I was shopping rather wildly, I pictured a fountain each time I spent money. With my mind fixed on the fountain, I wondered if the "currency" of the water would flow into the "currency" of my cash. In the world of strawberries within strawberries, this apparently works. Upon finding the extra money in my account, I promptly started envisioning Niagara Falls and sending its "currency" into the bank accounts of my closest friends--and for the ones in my life who are coping with depression and break ups, I sent the currency as strength. Lao Tse teaches in one of the early Tao te Ching poems that one should be satisfied with enough in the cup and not ask for the filling portion. I remember this.

How God Writes Poems

2007-02-18T20:05:00.000-08:00

I think it goes very easily without saying, or hearing, that deafness isn't at all a physiological condition. Quite the contrary, were this so, the world would be such a better place. And as much as I have kept these posts to being about physical deafness, it's time simply to jump the fence. I've stumbled upon something. Call it an idea. Call it an hypothesis. But it's got proof to it. And it is amazing. Here it is in just a little over 1000 words:

HOW GOD WRITES POEMS

If I could do it all again, I’d be a locksmith.
--Albert Einstein

I’ve always loved a puzzle. Whether it was that little wooden triangle with red and white pegs at Stuckey’s through the 1970’s or hooking up a VCR, I was into it. And I was good at it. Interpreting and writing poetry have been great puzzles. And the greatest puzzle of all has been this concept of God. I never understood how can a person of excellent literary analytical skill and a strong faith, like myself, not “get” the Holy Books?

But two weeks ago I got it. Pushed into the netherworld of doom and gloom by a bitterly bad experience, I ordered a whole slew of books on Alchemy, at once the oldest and the latest fad in depth psychology. Lyndy Abraham’s Alchemical Imagery placed the key for me in the great lock, and Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and Crucible turned it. I recognized too many of the terms of the imagery from the New Testament and felt urged to confirm the familiarity. I got out my copy of the Holy Bible, read through a few stories, seeing where the words fit in. Then, in a state of shudders and, yes, tears, I opened the online Rheims New Testament which does word counts. I plugged in word after word from the Imagery and other websites and books. I found them by the tens and hundreds in the Sacred Text. Before going to bed, I’d found more than two hundred alchemical terms and symbols in the New Testament, all swirling in a magnificent whirlwind, and, yes, speaking to me.

Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible illuminates our Iron and Stone Age ancestors’ alchemical belief systems. Alchemy was everything to them--science and religion combined. The Alchemical Process is a metaphor for self- and global- and cosmological improvement. The old idea of turning base metals to gold is used over and over as a metaphor for what goes on in each of as “God” or “the Universe” shapes us through suffering into something better. This is done in seven steps: Calcinatio, Dissolutio, Separatio, Coniunctio, Mortificatio, Putrefactio, and Fermentatio. Each of these corresponds beautifully to the major moments in Christ’s Life—going to “my Father’s house,” Baptism, Mary Magdelene, Crucifixion, Entombment, and Resurrection. Because it is all an alchemical metaphor, every story in these texts details an aspect of the alchemical process. They also provide lessons on how to live compassionately on earth so we never commit “blasphemy, “which means in Greek “hard speech, ” which is also "work" and "action." I had solved my puzzle: the Judeo Christian texts are written using the evershifting ultra-symbolic language of Alchemy and all the Hebrew Fathers and Jesus Christ Himself are all master alchemists. Our Sacred Texts, like all others, detail the sacred art of transformation.

It helps ease some of that residual guilt to know that the fish is an Alchemical symbol for constant attention (fish never close their eyes). To "convert" means to achieve the Philosopher's Stone and is what we are all moveing toward in our own time. The “cross”is a symbolic tool for drawing the four elements into polarities in “separatio.” It is what happens when we really, really fall apart to the extent that we will never again be the same again. They call this process crucifixion. An “ark” is a crucible. Jacob’s “Wheel-a-rollin’” is the opus circulatorum. Fire isn't eternal damnation but the element of earth used to purify us of ego and primordial sludge. Heaven is a state of mind attained once ego falls away. The “son” is the raw material which through much burning with fire and rinsing with water called “the virgin” emerges as any of the following and more: “the King of the Jews,” the wine, the stone, the tree, and the Way, the Truth, the Light. An “abortion” is the term for the alchemical process that doesn’t turn the base metal into gold, and is the usual result. The "Holy Virgin," the symbol for water, is also called“nightingale, palm tree, pearl, dove, phoenix, swan, ship, rose, lily, dew, star, moon, rainbow, mountain, and bee.”

Why so many words for one thing? Because our ancestors, as our Buddhist, Taoist, and tribal brethren, never bought into the concept of dictionaries. We live in a constantly shifting reality—more of a sand mandala than a parking lot—and our language should be an open system to allow its multidimensional changes. Each word is a momentary vessel for meaning just as our bodies are momentary vessels for our spirits. All words are metaphors, shape-changings. So, the question now is: what does it mean if the Holy Bible is written in this way?

Basically it means we get to discover it all for the first time. Churches and Temples don't need to change, except for hateful political agenda, since the rituals and text are still rooted in the Alchemical Opus and are therefore every bit as sacred as prior to this moment. We can also see this basic metaphor underlies the metaphors in the Tao te Ching, the Qu’ran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Rig Veda, and you can just take your pick of the “Lost Gospels” and any and all oral histories through the ages. We can now learn from all these other faiths. It also means that we can begin understand the Icons now, for they are rife with alchemical symbolism, for instance the gold leaf inspires us to turn our hearts to gold. The Dead Sea Scrolls can now be studied remnants of the Alchemical Age, sealed and hidden by Qumran inhabitants when they knew it was time to disappear. The puzzling thousands of coins buried under the door now find explanation: alchemy. We can now open up the Arthurian legends using the Rosetta Stone of Alchemical Imagery and other fine works; every color, ever animal, every symbol is found here. The sword is a lancet for the process, the grail, the crucible in which the process is undergone. The very best part is that we can now unite with our brothers and sisters of Babel, under the shadow of which we parted ways to conceal these secrets of knowledge from monotheistic warlords. We have found the single, universal meaning of our many different languages. Also, it means that the Judeo-Christians have been the "prodigal son" in the parable. We’ve blown our inheritance but we are returning Home.

Truthfully, there are many more very unacademic steps to this discovery. Miracles and wonders have never ceased for me. I have never stopped looking at the world through my childish eyes, and I never for a moment bought into this Age of Reason business because, as a poet, I never felt it bought into me. And it is through poetry, the wild validity of my imaginings and my passions that I’ve come to this, my first certainty. I always believed in God beyond any interpretation of His words. The real word, scripture teaches again and again, is all around us, and it is pouring forth all the time, the fountain of real life. I know this is the beginning of a beautiful time on earth. I know also that we must let go of our previously held notions of these texts. For all, this is the healing. But often with healing, more suffering must come first. In this case, it will come as a sense of having been betrayed. There will indeed be grief that I hope won't turn to anger. All is unfolding as it needs to. I know this for a wild, beautiful, irrationally irrefutable fact.

Sunday February 18, 2007

MUSIC

2006-12-30T18:48:00.000-08:00

My daughter has been spending several afternoons a week with my mother. What do I do with the free time? Listen to music at really high volumes. Not the Curious George soundtrack, which I actually adore. And not even Madonna's Immaculate Collection, which my daughter adores. I've been listening to Hole. To Pink Floyd's The Wall. I've been listening to REM. The music I listened to before I went deaf. I test myself to see how much of it I notice missing at a regular listening volume, and then I just blast it into my living room so I can see at what decibel level I can hear all those fabulous nuances I'd forgotten at some point were there. This is how the deaf girl entertains herself when she's all alone.

The real truth of the matter is that other than what I've lost in music, I am really quite comfortable with the whole deafness thing now. I think the shift occured this summer when I stopped saying, "I'm going deaf." I just, instead, started saying, "deaf." That was it for me. A simple act of acceptance in a word. If you're becoming something, you live in a state of anticipation and its consequent fear. But if you are something, then that's just a fact of being. I think that as long as I was, in my perception, "going deaf," I was hoping that something would somehow stop it. It became exhausting to check in on it, guaging how much hearing I'd lost overnight or something. I'm much happier being deaf than I was when I was losing my hearing. I now have energy to focus on other things. Like rocking out to track 10 of Celebrity Skin.

LIPREADER

2006-12-30T18:44:00.000-08:00

LIPREADER

Maybe he likes to be
listened to by the deaf girl,

the way she watches
each word begin deep

beneath his facial muscles
before it even becomes

a thought. He likes to see
her turn her entire body

toward him, square her
shoulders as though

she’s about to listen with her heart.
When she’s ready, she lets him know

he has her full attention. She’s
focused. She takes a breath.

She lets him know she’s
ready to have this conversation,

just as an astronaut is ready
to step onto the moon

or a cloud is ready
to burst open with attentive rain

and he’s forgotten what he
wants to say but wants so badly

to move his lips.

My Daughter, My Deafness

2006-12-12T04:06:00.000-08:00

"You can't be deaf," my 3 year old daughter says into the rearview mirror at a stoplight. "You have to be my mama."
The light turns green and I readjust the mirror so to see the traffic behind me.
My daughter's face disappears, as does her voice. What I want to do is pull over, get out, crawl into the seat next to her carseat and insist that my deafness has nothing to do with whether or not I can "be" her "mama." I don't want the drama though. I don't want to frighten her. At the very least I don't want her to think she can drop bombs like that and get me to pull over every time.
"I am your mama. Nothing changes that."

The conversation began because I was practicing my signing at the stoplight. She asked, "Are you signing?" Then she started waving her arms in the air, "I'm signing, too." As we pull onto the Interstate I tell her that once we both can sign it won't matter if I can't hear everything. I tell her that this is why it's important to practice. In my mind, I'm signing this.

As we drive home, in the far corner of my eye, I see her little hands making words in the air. Her words. It is the same as the gibberish she first spoke when as a baby she realized mouths are important for more than nursing and crying. This is sign language baby talk, and I encourage it just as I encouraged her early attempts at speech.

In my heart, I'm breaking a little. I'm feeling the urgency of establishing her trust that I'll always hear her in one way or another. It's also trust in myself that I'm trying to establish. She knows I love her. She'll always know that.

"I'm deaf too," she says when we get home, her hands moving the air between us. She then asks, "Why are you deaf?"

Here are the answers to this questions: (I've tried all of them, and each time they form the why-loop toddlers are so good at creating)
"I am deaf because my ears don't hear everything."
"My ears don't hear everything because your great-Poppee was deaf."
"Great Poppee was deaf because his body's ears didn't work."

"I am deaf because God thought I should listen more."

And then we get onto God and then on and on and on.

Why I'm Wearing My Hearing Aids

2006-08-05T03:27:00.000-07:00

This morning I will act in an independent film called Neutral. I, like all the other actors in this, have a small part. It is a pastiche of some 100 lives. I play a mother who waxes surreal freely with her son then suddenly blocks his flow. I am wearing a black dress and heels because I'm supposed to look like I've come from a teacher conference to discuss my son's behavior. I'm also wearing my Phonak hearing aids.

I gave birth without wearing my hearing aids. I went through my pregnancy without them. When I was actually in labor, though, I realized I couldn't hear what the doctor was telling me to do. I was strapped to a table, or it felt I was, by these electrodes guaging my and my baby's heartbeat and I couldn't hear what people were saying to me (except my mother, who always talks carefully to me). It was a feeling of being out of control because I was so controlled--by the machinery (the electrode belts), by the absence of the machinery (the hearing aids).

In the final hour of 16 hours of labor the doctor spoke orders to me from behind the blue blanket stretched between my legs. My mother translated what she said, meaning she repeated them so I could read her lips. But I was exhausted and eventually just closed my eyes and let the voices go. Inside the dark, I asked my daughter to tell me what to do. An idyllic forest scene appeared and in it was a little rabbit. The rabbit hopped to the left, I pushed to the left. The rabbit hopped to the right, I pushed the right. And in this way, following this little rabbit, I delivered my child 45 minutes before the doctor had predicted.

I'm wearing my hearing aids today so I can hear the directions I'm given.

The Speech Banana

2006-08-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

There are things I don't hear anymore. Some of these are bird songs, the wind in the trees on a balmy day, and rain. Also on this list are weedwackers more than a hundred meters away and the sound of my name spoken by someone who isn't looking directly at me. I don't hear music in my yoga class. I don't hear my teacher's voice.

If I put in my hearing aids I can hear these things louder than you can. Especially the weedwacker, and the music in yoga class is often louder than my teacher's voice.

I cannot communicate without my hearing aids in. But I can still hear the sound of the human voice. I can hear a few of the words, but this is not enough to follow the flow of what someone is saying. On my audiogram, there are three frequencies in which I dip into "severe" hearing loss. There are three in which I am mildly or moderately deafened. The marks on my audiogram fall just below or far below something called the speech banana. This is a gray area between 30 and 60 decibels at which speech sounds occur. I can make out some of the speech sounds and not others. When I lipread, or speechread, my imagination and experience with mouthspeech compensates for my loss of the speech banana. When I am wearing my hearing aids, I lipread very well. It's fatiguing because it requires so many different ways of paying attention, not the least of which is a kind of telepathy.

When I first heard my audiologist talk about the speech banana, I cracked up. But it was the first metaphor I'd learned pertaining to hearing loss. The other metaphor is "cookie bite" refering to the audiogram of a sensorineural hearing loss, or nerve deafness. Audiology is a very abstract science, and I am very a concrete thinker. I was grateful for the metaphors. My hope in writing about this transition is to create more metaphors about it, so losing this particular sense will make a bit more sense.

The Sound of a Particular Music

2006-08-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

I am thinking of my favorite listening experiences. I have not thought of this before, of breaking down my life experiences into the sense they pleased. In terms of gustatory experience, a particular bowl of potato leek soup served me in a restaurant on a rainy day in Montreal comes to mind. Visual experiences: Lauterbrunnen valley in the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland in June. Tactile? a particular rain I felt in Florence one night I was locked out of the Ostello Camerata for coming back too late, having spent the evening romping with Jorn and Russell (from South Africa) and Maritza (from Chicago). The rain was thick and almost warm. Jorn kissed me in it; that might have helped drive it into my "best of" memories. Olfactory and Auditory are a bit more specific, more difficult for me to name. Olfactory? Best smell ever? Something about when the Spring temperature hits a particular feel and mixes with a perfect kind of blue in the sky, more specifically, that one morning after my 8th birthday in Toronto and Bethy and I walked to school wearing our matching white capes. Best sonic experience? Now, I can name it.

I was in London in the Fall of 1989; the Berlin Wall was coming down but I was in London. I'd wandered into St. Pauls to kill some time (and I hear Sam Beckett retort: but who wants their time dead?) between lunch at Whitbread and evening curtain at the Barbican. I sat in the pews of the choir stalls, thinking that was a place other tourists were sitting. But they weren't other tourists. They were people there to attend vespers. All the tourists, I realized as men in robes began to appear through secret little doorways facing our stall, had been ushered out. And Midsummernight's Dream started in 20 minutes. So I broke all protocol--stood and made my apologetic way back to the black and white marble of the nave. I was a third of the way to the door Christopher Wren's masterpiece when the choir blocked the light of the exit. Men, countless men, draped in black and white robes and processing in two collumns, all singing the deep baritone of the Gregorian nature. Their song filled the dome, filled the engravings of John Donne's tomb, pressed into the grooves of the wood of the pews, and I stood there in the aisle, the opposite of a bride, headed out in my green woolen coat, my blue wool hat, and these singing men walked past on either side of me.

Outside again in the gray chill, it took a moment for me to recognize all the other sounds of the world, which in that moment, meant nothing.

The Dawn of Deafness

2006-08-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

I found out I was losing my hearing when I was 31 years old. Later that year, I broke off with one boyfriend, met another, traveled to China, came back, got pregnant, got married and the next year I gave birth, got divorced, and started to accept the fact that I was going deaf because now I was a parent and I was terrified I couldn't hear my daughter cry.

It can turn your life around, this losing a sense. And although I know the teachings of Buddha and Christ and so many other great teachers tend very much in favor of overcoming our attachment to the senses, I never realized how attached to hearing I was.

There are dimensions I hadn't thought about. The first, the second--what are they? and the third? I know the fourth is time. Is one of the others sound? It ought to be. Sound ought to be one of our dimensions because as I lose it I feel the world has grown thinner. A layer has come off.