Through the Distances

Fall Song

2011-10-14T14:50:00.000-07:00

I'm always particularly drawn to poetry in the autumn, when everything is burnished and falling. I love how Mary Oliver captures it here:

Fall Song, by Mary Oliver

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this Now, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries--roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay--how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

Ablation

2011-10-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

Ablation

Water blues in the ice bowl, thick as blubber rendered.
I plump and fur with desire
to belly into it, and so I do. I seal
I seal I seal myself
and sluice into the glacier's blue pool.

What I leave behind: camera, pen, crampons.
What I take: heat, held breath.

This is a dream I have again and again.
My fingers flipper sometimes, I swear.
My eyes turn into cryonitic holes, sediment
of ice and earth.

I ablate. I glaciate.
All along I have wanted to be ice
or something that thrives in it. Ice worm.
Bow head. Blue light.

Little to Show

2011-10-04T14:11:00.000-07:00

After taking a few days off to work on other projects, I designated this morning to writing. Since I sat down at my desk two hours ago to begin, here’s what I’ve accomplished:

• Filed my nails
• Paid my credit card
• Watched a short on-line documentary about a family friend with ALS
• Read and responded to several emails
• Browsed the sale items on Anthropologie.com and Banana Republic.com
• Updated my list of ideas for Christmas gifts for friends/family
• Brewed several cups of tea
• Reorganized my tea drawers
• Made a list of friends to whom I want to send hand-written letters
• Brushed my teeth
• Read an article about writer’s groups in Poets and Writers
• Ordered a book on Amazon.com that I hope will inspire me to get productive

Here’s what I have not accomplished: writing one meaningful word related to my own writing projects. This question is plaguing me lately: why do I often avoid writing, when I profess to devote my days to it? I’m blessed to have been able to create a lifestyle that allows me ample time to write, yet I often fritter that time away, as I have today.

This is not an insightful or salient post, and for that I apologize. I’m only posting it because I promised myself I would update my blog today, which I’ve been avoiding lately because writing has felt extraordinarily difficult and I haven’t come up with anything that seems worth sharing. So this post is the dark truth about the writing life: sometimes there’s little to show for it.

Bigger and Better

2011-09-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

A running joke up here is that everything in Alaska is on a larger scale than other places—our mountains, our glaciers, our winters, our mosquitoes are all epic. So are our viruses, apparently. I’m just recovering from a late summer flu that has lasted two weeks. I had another two-week flu in the spring as well. As much as I love Alaska, I do tend to get sicker up here. During my Arctic years, I was constantly down with strep throat, bronchitis or some sort of virus.

My roommate in Anchorage is a doctor, and I asked him if the viruses up here are different and more virulent. Yup. Turns out they are. So, that’s one aspect of Alaskana that doesn’t enamor me, but I’m still sufficiently placated by all that does enamor me to overlook the beastly viruses. I’ve spent my recent sick time reading a stack of new books by authors as obsessed as I am with the North.

Bill Streever’s Cold: Adventures in the World’s Coldest Places considers frozen landscapes, the animals and cultures who have adapted to live in them, and the scientists, explorers, and adventurers who are drawn to them. Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle wanders the top of the globe, investigating each region of the high north: the Asian Russian Arctic; the Alaskan Arctic; the Canadian Arctic; Greenland; Lapland, Svalbard, and the Scandinavian Arctic; and back to the European Russian Arctic. Wheeler’s quests are guided by two questions: What can the Arctic tell us about our past, and what can it tell us about our future?

Seth Kantner was raised in a village very near where I lived in the Arctic, and his novel Ordinary Wolves is a vivid, gritty, plaintive song about life in the remote world of snow. He does not paint a rosy portrait of Arctic life, but it is a compelling one. Kantner’s memoir about his own Arctic life, Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska is a fun read with fun photos.

Elizabeth Bradfield’s book of poems, Approaching Ice, travels to the far North and far South. Bradfield evokes the early polar explorers and the poetics of ice terminology itself in her poems that are as chiseled, bony, and alluring as the ice that fascinates her. I had the great pleasure of working with Liz at the Wrangell Mountains Center poetry workshop in August. She is a lovely poet, teacher, and person.

Next on my to-read list is Nancy Lord’s new book Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North. I’ll admit to feeling some trepidation about reading this book about the accelerating decline of the icy landscape I love.

For eye candy, I’ve been perusing photo books on glaciers and snow: Sculpted by Ice: Glaciers and the Alaskan Landscape, by Michael Collier; Glacier Ice, by Ed LaChapelle and Austin Post; and The Art of the Snowflake by Kenneth Libbrecht. And for eye candy + ear candy, a friend and I watched Sigur Ros’s documentary film Heima, which tracks the Icelandic band on an intimate tour of performances in remote settings in Iceland. The film is gorgeous, and Sigur Ros’s music feels to me to be a soundtrack of the North.

I might get sick a lot up here, but T.S. Eliot said that the essential advantage for a poet “is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.” My appreciation of the North, virulent viruses and all, remains in good health.

Home

2011-09-06T20:35:00.001-07:00

Summer ends fast in Alaska. The weather here already feels fully fall-ish. The birch trees on my street are yellowing quickly, and the skies have been deep gray. Just down the coast in Girdwood, where my brother lives, the sky has poured rain for three days straight. A lot of Alaskans go away in the fall to escape the gray and rainy weather, but I’m enjoying it. Summer always feels a bit manic and raucous to me, and felt particularly that way in McCarthy, where I was never able to fall into anything resembling routine or continuity. I’m happy the weather is cooling and the days shortening. I’m ready for some quiet. I’m cozy in the thick wool sweater I bought in Ireland in the spring.

In August, a lot of family came up to Alaska for my brother’s wedding in Girdwood. For many, this was their first trip to Alaska. The newcomers were all duly impressed with the spectacular beauty of this landscape. My cousin Susannah summed it up best when she said “I see now why people come to Alaska and never leave again!”

My dad is antsy about the holidays already. “When are you coming home?” he asked me twice last week. By home, he means where he and my mom live. He asked me the first time in a phone call, and my reply of “I don’t know” apparently didn’t stick, because yesterday he sent an email to reiterate the question. My dad loves a celebration, and he’s eager to start planning the holiday festivities. He also wants, I know, to have a fixed date on the calendar when he can look forward to seeing me again. He misses our frequent visits when I was living in the state next door to his. This, alas, is the drawback to living amidst the beauty of Alaska, which is far away from many people I love.

“I don’t want to think that far ahead yet, dad,” I told him today, though. I’m enjoying Anchorage again. I’m happy to be home, which is where I live. I don’t plan to disappear up here forever, but for now, I’m happy to be just here. To just be here.

Flux

2011-07-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting with a McCarthy geologist high up on a mountain slope, in a meadow cleared by an avalanche run, looking out at the Copper River basin and the peaks of the Wrangell and Chugach Mountains. The Chugach, farther away, are blue-toned by distance. The Wrangells are closer and loom larger. From the right vantage point, we could also see the St. Elias range in Canada, not too many miles away. Most of the peaks are icy and craggy. Huge ice falls spill down off the peaks. Glaciers wind through them and spread thickly through the valley. To me, nothing looks or feels more stable, more immovable or immutable than mountain ranges. Where oceans and rivers teach me about flow and tidal motions, mountains always make me think of stability and what the mystics and contemplatives and yogis call “being grounded.” Permanence. Strength.

The geologist begs to differ. “This whole ecosystem,” he tells me, “is an ecosystem of disequilibrium. In fact, it’s an ecosystem of disintegration.”

He gestures out to the miles of silt-covered glaciers spread out in the valley beneath where we’re sitting. From here, they look like huge piles of gravel, static and still. But they’re not. “They’re moving,” he reminds me.

A glacier is, by definition, a moving mass of ice. If we were patient enough to sit here all day, we might actually be able to see them move. The glaciers we’re looking down on move forward by more than a foot each day. True, from this vantage point, high up in the mountains, it’d be nearly impossible to notice such a small change. But down on the glaciers’ surfaces, glaciologists track and measure the movement carefully, and down there, it’s noticeable.

“Even the mountains are moving,” the geologist explains. “These glaciers that flow down through the mountains are slowly but steadily moving the mountains along with them.” He points out the huge boulders—called glacial erratics—that are scattered along the mountain slopes and near the edge of the glaciers and tells me they were carried by the glacier from higher up the mountain and deposited down lower as the glacier receded. And the silt that covers the glaciers is rock dust from the glacier’s gradual mining process as it passes along the mountain’s rocky slopes. It’s evidence that the mountains are being ground up and carried away. They’re being broken. They’re falling apart.

“This space that looks stable and solid, it isn’t,” he tells me, leaning in closer for emphasis. “Everything living here is in a situation of instability.”

We both sit for a moment. It’s warm up here on the sunny, south-facing slope on which we’re perched. Thankfully, it’s a breezy day so the mosquitoes are held at bay. Scrub willow, cow parsnip, fire weed and horsetail, a prehistoric plant that is reputedly the oldest plant on earth, rustle in the breeze. The air is scattered with bird song.

“And when you go deeper,” he says, “the mountains are actually formed by disintegration. These mountains are, in large part, formed by fossils—by the petrified bodies of dinosaurs and other creatures that used to be alive.”

He unzips his backpack and takes a drink from the glass jar he totes his water around in. “These mountains are full of death,” he says, then swallows some more water.

At his home, his window sills are lined with the fossils he and his wife and daughters have found while hiking up on these slopes and down in the valley. Fossils with the fine, clear markings of spiraled sea shells—an undeniable reminder of the totally different ecosystem and landscape and lives that used to inhabit this valley.

And then he says the one, simple truth I’ve spent the last few years—in the Arctic and in the desert, in my relationships and in my faith, in my despair and my hopefulness—trying to accept:

“Everything is in flux. You can’t count on anything to stay the same.”

Water from a Good Source

2011-07-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

A river—McCarthy Creek, as it’s called—runs right through McCarthy. It is wide and shallow and large rocks lie along its beds. It pools in deep, still eddies along its banks, which are an ideal place for gathering water the community needs for drinking and cooking. But no one gathers water here. Instead, everyone walks farther away from town to a smaller creek and fills their buckets there to haul back in wheeled carts to town.

I asked a local why this happens. Both creeks are glacial fed. Why not take the water from the source closest to town?

“By the time it gets here, McCarthy Creek is farther away from its source,” Greg said.

“So?” I asked.

“So that means it covers more distance, which means more likelihood it flows past the carcasses of dead animals on its way to us. The further the water travels from its source, the greater the likelihood of contamination along its way.”

The same basic principle applies to my life as well. Once again, I find in the natural world a metaphor I need. The farther I get from my Source, the likelier I am to get contaminated by some sort of decay. My waters get less pure. My flow becomes obstructed.

I don’t know how to define or label what my Source is, and I’m okay with that. I don’t need defendable answers. I’m Living the Question, as the mystics of all traditions say. Sometimes I call my Source God. Sometimes I think of it as the Divine Indwelling. My Buddhist friends call it the Buddha Nature. Sometimes I think of my Source simply as my soul, my spirit, or my heart. Whatever I choose to call it (and some days I don’t call it anything), I can feel it. I know when I’m close to it and living from it. I’m aware. I’m present. I’m centered. I’m authentic. I’m honest. I’m compassionate. I find it through meditation, through prayer and contemplation, through art and poetry. I find it in friends and in community and in the beauty of the natural world.

When I stray from these cool, clean waters, I get contaminated. I start to envy. I start to feel jealousy of others. I start to fixate on the things I’m lacking rather than expressing gratitude for the abundance I have. I start to long for some things and resist other things. I get angry and irritable. I get competitive. I get judgmental and harsh, with others and with myself. I’m full of death, and then no one wants to drink from my waters, least of all myself.

Greg walked away, and I immediately dumped the bucket of water I’d just collected from the nearby McCarthy Creek. I was thirsty, and headed with my empty bucket up to the better source.

Text

2011-06-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

Another writer friend and I have instigated a reading circle for the community on Thursday nights. Sometimes we gather in the cozy sitting room at the hardware store, and sometimes in someone’s cabin. We gather in groups to read aloud poems or short pieces of prose—either things we wrote ourselves or things that we’ve recently read and found inspiring. Someone read from Robert Hass, another read from Rilke. Jeremy read a piece about the connection between wilderness and poetry. I read a Mary Oliver poem that, indirectly, expressed the same thing.

Some nights, the mood is quiet and very focused on the readings themselves. Other nights, the readings act as a mere pause between our conversation. Last night was the latter mood. Between readings, our talk kept returning to our own experiences in this wild land or other wild lands we’ve traveled through. Johanna spoke of watching a goat faint as a grizzly bear approached. Margot spoke of a broken thumb while hiking through a treacherous mountain pass. Andrew spoke about his friend out here, who lost his wife in a tragic gun accident. The stories were all laced with both experiences of loss and hardship and a sense of awe and joy.

We all talked, in different contexts, of how much we love life out here, a life in which there are few pretenses, few layers of shelter between ourselves and wildness. One woman, instead of bringing a piece of text to share with the group, brought bones instead. She’d just been out hiking along the toe of the glacier and found an intact leg and foot bone from a bear. The bones themselves were dried and bleached white from the sun, but the ligaments and tendons in the hip, knee and ankle were all still in place and the joints articulated. That lone leg lay in the circle amongst us, the body’s text reminding us of the thin threshold we all walk through each day.

The View from Down Here

2011-06-27T16:35:00.001-07:00

I’ve come down off the mountain into town, into McCarthy proper, to spend the weekend in a friend’s cabin, writing. From here I can’t see the glacier, but I can look up to see the slopes and peaks I’ve been living on. The view from down here—from the lowlands—is beautiful, too. And there’s still ice to see, on the summits of all the mountains.

The cabin is rustic and decrepit and I love it. It’s a small log structure with two rooms—a living room/bedroom, with an old iron bed on one side and a glass-front wood stove and rocking chair on the other, and a kitchen with a jelly cupboard, a wobbly table, and an enormous, cumbersome woodstove for cooking. An outhouse stands behind the woodpile in the cabin’s back yard. I haul my water in large buckets from the nearby creek and come with my batteries for my laptop and cell phone fully charged, since there’s no electricity here to recharge them. The rough hewn logs of the cabin’s walls are chinked with moss and pieces of burlap. Wild roses and fire weed and rhubarb grown rambunctiously in the yard.

While I sit at the kitchen table drinking licorice tea and writing, in front of a window that looks down toward McCarthy Creek, Bella lies on a scrap of carpet in front of the bustling woodstove. They’re both warm and snoring.

Across the street from the cabin is the town’s old false-front Hardware Store, now home to the Wrangell Mountains Center. A group of 14 college students have just arrived at the Hardware Store to participate in the six-week Alaska Wildlands Studies program. They’ll be out in the back country for three weeks, with nothing that they can’t carry on their own backs, studying the ecology out here. Last night, as I read from a book of essays on the cabin’s front porch, the college students spread out on the hardware store’s front lawn and began assembling their loads for the backcountry trip. A teacher walked amongst them, looking at the gear they’d spread out to inventory before stuffing into their backpacks. The teachers—who all have vast experience in this landscape—play the role of making sure the students have what they need for their journey.

Sunscreen? I heard one teacher, Leif, ask a student. Ice axe? Cramp ons? Flares?

Check. Check. Check. Check.

If only it were that simple to prepare for all of our journeys. A basic checklist of supplies. A teacher guiding us through the preparations, double-checking our work, leading us, or just accompanying us, down the trail.

And maybe it is that simple. I’ve begun to suspect that we’re all guided and supported in myriad ways, but that all-too-often, we just don’t recognize it. We’re not aware. We’re not present to the guides and the wisdom all around us.

A large, furry bee has been trapped, bumbling, in my cabin, buzzing loudly and banging his poor body against the window trying to escape as I’ve been writing.
I’ve just caught him up in an empty yogurt container, carried him outside, and set him free.

Solstice

2011-06-22T15:45:00.001-07:00

And again: another new season begins.

Moving Backward

2011-06-21T15:55:00.000-07:00

On the surface, I’m digressing. As far as outward appearances go, I’m moving backward down the ladder of the Keeping-Up-With-the-Jones version of adult development. I used to own my own house, as well as a second space I rented out for income. I was a verified property owner and liked being one. Then, the house was sold as part of my divorce settlement. For the first few years after that, I rented a house for myself—first in New Mexico and then in Indiana. In January, when I moved to Alaska, I stepped another rung farther down the ladder and decided to just rent a room, sharing an apartment in Anchorage with my beloved friend, Dan.

Now, in McCarthy, I’ve digressed further, according to the Jones' scale, at least. I’m not even living in a four-walled permanent structure. I live in a tent. I am actually climbing a literal ladder to enter my canvas home, which rests on a high wooden platform on a steep mountain slope. I’m sleeping on a cot and my writing desk isn’t the 150-year-old oak table I usually use, which is in storage back in Indiana, but a fold up plastic table I bought at Costco.

Beneath the surface, though, which is the region that always interests me the most, each of these steps feels like positive development. I’m moving up in the world—not in terms of amassing more property or material goods, but in terms of amassing more courage and more freedom. Each move, downward or upward depending on your scale of measurement, has brought me a step closer to living an authentic life of my own making and not blindly following the masses but following my own passions instead, and learning to listen to my deeper instincts.

The latest instinct, which led me to Anchorage and then on to McCarthy for the summer, was for the wild. I wanted to live closer to the wildness of nature as well as to delve more deeply into my own interior wilderness alone. This requires a new level of self-reliance and trust in my own abilities, and it’s sometimes challenging. Yesterday morning, when I woke up wet and cold from a leak in my tent, I wanted badly to give it up and return to a lifestyle that is easier, more comfortable.

I cried on Dan’s shoulder yesterday (virtually, over e-mail). You can come home anytime you want to, he consoled me. But, he added, “I know you’ll regret it.” Dan knew, as I did, too, that though I was wet and cold and momentarily uncomfortable, I’m also right where I want to be. Leaving here would be a step backward.

Chopping Wood

2011-06-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

In a gym in Indianapolis, before I moved to Alaska, I learned the motions for chopping wood with my friend and trainer, Sam. Sam, who is a gifted and devoted personal trainer as well as a gifted and devoted friend, trains his clients toward strength and balance by using the basic human movement patterns—like pushing, pulling, squatting, lunging, dead-lifting and wood-chopping. On a gray Sunday morning in January in an empty fitness center, Sam taught me the movement pattern for chopping wood. First, we worked on the stance: Stand firmly with feet slightly wider than hip width apart. Bend the knees slightly. “Breathe, kid,” Sam coached. “Feel strong in the core of your body.” Then, using pulleys and weights, Sam guided my upper body through the motions of chopping wood.

Yesterday, while rain fell on the glacier in the valley below me, I applied Sam’s training to chopping real wood. I stood in front of the chopping block, holding the heavy splitting maul with both hands and observing the pine log awaiting my blows. I planted my feet to the earth below me. I grounded my stance. I felt strong in my solar plexus. I breathed consciously. I raised the maul over my head. I visualized bringing the heavy maul down cleanly through the pine log.

I swung the maul down with force and missed the log entirely. In the background, from behind the clothesline, Jeanna and Marci giggled.

My first efforts at chopping wood were ridiculous. I got the wedge stuck in the log. I whacked my thumb with the dull end of the maul. I dropped the maul on my foot. I knocked the log off the chopping block repeatedly. I had to keep stopping to rest my arms. I destroyed the log, splintering most of it off into tiny, unusable shards. One mangled log and a sore back were the yields of an hour of labor.

Mentally, I catch on to things fairly quickly. Physically, I am a slow learner. After months of training with me, Sam will attest to this. “Just keep practicing,” I told myself yesterday. I committed to chopping one log a day until I become proficient at the skill.

Today went much better. I made some fumbles, for sure, but I split a log of birch reasonably, without too much mangling. And I managed to do so without injuring myself. And when the maul does come down on target and smoothly splits through a thick wedge of wood, the satisfaction is addictive. I finished one log and reached for another. I chopped through eight birch logs today before my muscles gave out. Then I stacked the pieces and carried them up to my wood stove.

Now, I wish I could invite Sam over to sit beside the stove with me on one of these cool Alaskan summer nights, and bask in the warmth of his labors.

Seeing the Light of Day

2011-06-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

Some excerpts from the memoir I'm writing about my Arctic life are beginning to be published. Hooray! Booth, the literary journal from Butler University, has just gone live with several vignettes (click on the Booth link to read them). A few more vignettes will appear later this month in Cirque, an Alaskan journal published on the solstices. Many thanks to the editors of both these journals.

Extra Tough

2011-06-02T17:02:00.000-07:00

XTRATUFs, a brand of heavy-duty, insulated rubber boots, intended for commercial fisherman, are colloquially known as the Alaskan state shoe. Most Alaskans, I’ve discovered, own a pair. They’re ubiquitous. I rarely leave the house without seeing a pair on someone. They’re super handy for the rainy, wet, snowy, and muddy conditions Alaskans experience throughout the year.

Confession: I have a thing for rubber—possibly even a fetish. I love rubber gloves and rubber footwear, and I fantasize about a pink rubber dress, in an Audrey-Hepburn-in-“Breakfast-at-Tiffany’s”-inspired sheath. If I’m ever independently wealthy, having such a dress commissioned will be one of my first orders of business.

So, I was happy to buy a pair of XTRATUFs for my summer in McCarthy working in the garden. I love them. I get a thrill each day stepping into the extra tall, extra thick, extra tough rubber boots that are now coated with mud. I like wearing them around even when I’m not in the garden. I wash them off and wear them into town, with skirts. I wear them around the house, just because I like how they feel—or rather, I like how I feel in them.

Like Alaskans, these boots are extra sturdy. They’re extra rugged to withstand the extra rugged Alaskan terrain and climate. I’m continually amazed by the ruggedness of the Alaskans I encounter, particularly out in the remote McCarthy community. I’ve met people here who have accomplished feats of physical endurance I can’t fathom, some by choice and some by necessity: digging root cellars by hand; summitting the Wrangell’s stormy peaks; walking 15 miles to get the mail.

I’d like to be that tough. I’m toughening up out here this summer for sure, but I’m still pretty soft. “You’re really more of a city girl,” my mom said to me yesterday on the phone after hearing about my morning of hard labor. For me, this rugged lifestyle is something I’m still trying on. I like stepping into it-like a costume I can easily shed.

For the Birds

2011-06-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

I love birds. They figure prominently into my writing and into my artwork. I am drawn to bird imagery and have an ever-increasing collection of bird-inspired art objects and artifacts given to me by family and friends. I wear images of birds, doodle birds in my journals, read anthologies of poems devoted to birds, talk to the birds in the trees overhead when I’m outside. I think about birds a lot.

Saturday morning, a long-time birder from the McCarthy-Kennicott valley, Mark Vail, offered a birding walk, called “Birding By Ear,” through the Wrangell Mountains Center. The walk began at 7:00 at the Hardware Store in McCarthy, the WMC’s headquarters. Jeanna and I both wanted to go. To be at the workshop, we had to leave Sweet Creek at 5:30AM for the four mile hike into town. But I was excited to begin actually learning about birds rather than just admiring them, so the early morning exertion seemed worth it.

Thirty of us from the community gathered on the front lawn of the Hardware Store, and wearing a wool beret he had woven, knitted, and felted himself, Mark began to talk to us about the birds currently migrating through these icy mountain ranges. Then, for two hours, he walked us through town to different locations where we could hear a variety of bird calls. At each site, we’d set down our thermal coffee mugs to peer through binoculars, and Mark would imitate the bird calls so we could learn to recognize them. “This bird’s call sounds like 'There-is-no-gold-here,'” he explained of one. From now to summer solstice is the peak of bird vocalization, so prime time birding. Mark and other experienced birders compared notes about the new thrushes, warblers, swallows and hawks they’ve seen or heard migrating into the area each day.

I found I couldn’t keep the bird songs straight in my head. I’d learn a new one, and quickly forget the distinct melody and meter of the ones I’d previously learned, and I had trouble discerning one individual call from the cacophony of song we often heard when pausing in the woods or by a creek. I enjoyed hearing the birdsong as background noise, but found I had no patience for honing in on a specific species’ tune. By the time I found a bird’s location with the binoculars, more often than not it had flown away, and all the scoping around with the binoculars made me feel dizzy and nauseous. Pretty quickly, I gave up. For most of the two hours, I daydreamed. I watched the other birders watching birds, or sat looking at the mountains all around us. I scanned the ground for heart-shaped rocks. And I spent ample time admiring, covertly, the attractive men in the group.

To my chagrin, I’ve realized that I might like the concept of birds—birds as metaphor—more than actual birds themselves. Throughout the morning, I jotted down a few salient details from Mark’s lectures to use in future writing. The fact that birds have a distinct flight song, for instance, seems fruitful for use in a poem some day. Metaphors flapped busily through my mind.

After the walk, we all returned to the Hardware Store, where an enormous pan of Mark’s famous rhubarb coffee cake awaited us just out of the oven, with big pots of fresh coffee. We sat outside, on tables made of warped plywood resting on saw horses, and ate together as the sun wound higher in its spin toward solstice. Our voices chattered and sang in laughter and happy, Summer-is-here-and-friends-are-near conversation. Lots of birds flitted through the bright blue sky overhead. I couldn’t begin to say what they were, but I felt like one.

Tap Root

2011-05-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

In last year’s Memorial Day post, I likened the writing process to an all-consuming house fire. I spent the holiday weekend last year staying home and writing. This year, fire has once again figured prominently in my holiday weekend, though writing hasn’t. Horsetails, (equisetum) a prehistoric plant that has been found on fossils from the same time period as dinosaurs and is believed to be the oldest plant on earth, are prolific in these glacial mountains—and thus in our gardens carved into those mountains.

Horsetails send down very deep tap roots. In order to get them out of the garden, Jeanna and I spent the first week digging up the beds, trying—in vain—to reach the prolific tap roots. Two days later, all the horsetails we’d cleared out of the garden were back. Then we took a gardening workshop last week through the Wrangell Mountains Center, and we learned that a more effective way to get rid of horsetails in the garden is to toast them with a blow torch. “Don’t flame them to ash,” the instructor from the University of Fairbank’s agricultural department said, “tempting though it may be. Just scorch them slightly.” These plants have had millennium to become extremely well-adapted. When the exposed plants get lightly toasted, the root system will respond by determining the environment to be unfeasible, and the whole root system will gradually withdraw itself. If the exposed plant is completely charred, however, the root system will simply cut off life from that one plant, but the root system itself will live on.

This year, I haven’t had the whole weekend to write. I’ve taken on this extra gardening job this summer to get the experience of living out here in McCarthy. I have less time for writing than I’m used to. But the tap root is deep and I’ve yet to experience an equivalent for the blow torch in my life. Though my days are busy, if I go too long without writing, I feel the void of it, and I’m finding that I’m working harder to carve out time to write. I’m adapting.

No Path

2011-05-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

A year ago on Memorial Day weekend, I wrote on this blog about my decision to devote the long weekend to writing, rather than holidaying with the extended family who lived near me in the Midwest. A year later, I’m living in Alaska. My world keeps changing. Here, in McCarthy, the natural world is changing rapidly. It’s greening. Two weeks ago, when I arrived at Sweet Creek, most of the landscape was brown. Now, it’s mostly green. On Thursday, I sat in downtown McCarthy, in the second story of a decrepit building, and wrote. I often paused to look out the window at Fireweed Mountain or at the small birch tree growing next to the window. I swear that the small leaves on the birch tree grew perceptibly and visibly just in that afternoon. With the sun hanging in the air for most of the 24 four hours in a day, things grow fast up here. The growth season is short, so the growth happens rapidly. I’m astonished at how quickly our garden is already growing.

I’m also astonished at how quickly my life path seems to keep changing. Three sequential Memorial Day weekends have found me living in three distinct places: New Mexico, the Midwest, and now Alaska. I don’t know where I’m headed. Often that makes me feel anxiety. I feel like I should know where I’m going, like I should be settling down and, like the seeds and plants I’m tending, setting down roots.

Part of my job up here this summer is to sit in meditation with Marci, one of the owners of this homestead, each morning. Marci is a Buddhist, and we follow her mediation rituals, which involve Tibetan singing bowls and chanting Buddhist prayers. I don’t chant, but I enjoy listening to her. She ends our practice with a chant that draws on the Buddhist idea that there is no attainment, no goal to be achieved, no understanding to reach, no path to follow. The only objective is to be here, right now, in this moment. Each morning, as she sings those words, I feel some relief. Like the soil in Marci’s gardens that I’m enriching with compost for the seeds I plant, the soil of my mind is fertile and ready to receive those words. I stand up, bow alongside Marci, and then head back out to rediscover the gardens and terrain that transform each day.

Downside

2011-05-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

Lest I lose balance by writing about life out here in McCarthy like it is total bliss, I will mention the downsides. Even now, in May, I’m swarmed by mosquitoes when I step outside at night. This early in the season, they’re the ones that hibernated all winter in the snow, and they’re large and slow—easy to swat away. As the season progresses, they’ll become smaller and swifter and more accurate. We have to heat water on the stove to have hot water for washing dishes. Between saunas, if I want to get clean without the effort of a sauna, I have to fend off the mosquitoes to stand naked outside under a lukewarm solar shower, which hangs from a tree or the edge of the deck. This is combat showering, swatting at mosquitoes with one hand while ripping shampoo across my head with the other. We have to wash our clothes by hand, in a large basin of cold water—which means we don’t wash them very often. I get tired of feeling dirty and dusty and wrinkled.

To get into town, I hike ¼ mile down hill, then bike four miles down a rough gravel road, which isn’t too tough. But to get home, after a night at the local bar, the New Golden Saloon with friends, the bike ride home is uphill, and the trail to the cabin feels extra steep. By the time I’m back home, I’m wide awake from the physical exertions, and it’s still broad daylight, so falling asleep takes awhile.

The homestead’s electrical system is powered by solar panels, which is fantastic, but we have to be very cautious and mindful about the amount of electricity we use. Some days, with four of us trying to use varying amounts of electricity to charge cell phones, lap tops, camera batteries, iPods and Kindles, we don’t have enough to go around. Whether I want it or not, this is becoming an intervention for me, to alert me to my addictive dependency on staying plugged in and connected. Most days, I resist the intervention and get frustrated when I can’t power up and log on.

Some days I feel trapped and isolated out here, daunted by the effort it takes to get into town, annoyed with myself and with the others with whom I’m sharing this communal living space. I wake tired and sore and don’t want to go back into the garden, especially on days when it’s cold and rainy. I long for my car, for sterile, easy showers, for hot water at the turn of a faucet, for a drive-thru window, and for the river of electricity that flows into the outlets at my home in Anchorage.

Life happens at a different pace here, a slower one. I’m trying to catch up.

Sauna

2011-05-23T20:20:00.000-07:00

A luxury of life out here in the wild lands is the sauna, which we use for relaxing and bathing at night. It takes some time to get the sauna going, so we only use it every few days, which makes it all the more enticing when we do.

A few hours before we’re ready to use it, we start a fire in the large oil-drum wood stove in the sauna, and set a massive pot of water on top of the stove to make steam. A couple of hours later, we open the stout wooden door and wade through the heat and steam to sit on the benches and let our muscles unfurl after a day of hard work. It’s heavenly.

When we feel like moving again, we pour hot water off the stove into a bucket on the floor, and add fresh cold water from the creek, which sits outside the sauna ready for use, until we get water to a comfortable bathing temperature. Then we take turns ladling the water over ourselves, to wash our hair and bodies. It’s a slow process, with time for me to really feel the water river over my shoulders and down my back and savor the bright, welcome bite of peppermint soap against my flesh.

After I’m clean, I lay back again on the lower benches, where it’s cooler, and drink more cold water. When I step out of the sauna, wrapped in a hot towel, the cool air of evening rushes around me. From the porch platform of the sauna, I look out on the circle of ice-capped peaks framing the valley and pause to listen to the bird song ricocheting from the woods and meadows around me.

Like everything else out here, getting clean takes some effort. But it’s an effort I’m glad to expend.

Sweet Creek, Sweet Labor

2011-05-21T20:15:00.000-07:00

Today, I’ve been in McCarthy for a week, living on a homestead called Sweet Creek. This is the first day I’ve paused to do any writing. I’ve set up a temporary desk in one of the cabin bedrooms, which I’m living in until my canvas wall-tent gets set up next week. The cabin is just below the tree line of Porphyry Mountain, and from the window by my desk, I can see the treeless, snowy slopes of the upper mountain. If I wanted to distract myself with binoculars, I could watch for bears to amble across them.

Jeanna and I finally arrived in McCarthy last Saturday night. As we drove into town, we spotted a juvenile bear sitting in a tree just off the road. I felt welcomed. We spent our first night in the bunk room of St. Elias Alpine Guides, a local adventure outfitter owned by Gaia, the daughter of the couple we’re working for this summer. Before collapsing into sleep under a mosquito net, I went to a bonfire down on the rocky banks of McCarthy Creek and met some of the local community. The next morning, we ate scrambled local duck eggs for breakfast then Gaia, who is also a pilot, took us out flight-seeing to give us an aerial perspective on our summering grounds. We flew over miles of glaciers and ice-capped peaks. I was breathless for the 90-minute flight, overwhelmed by the beauty.

Then, we began our work, which has been overwhelming in its own right. It’s been a week of physical labor. Everything we need for life in McCarthy that isn’t provided directly from nature itself has to be brought in by hand in a multi-stage process that has taken days. The 60-mile gravel road that leads from Chitina to McCarthy ends at the Kennicott River. The bridge across is only for foot traffic; seasonal vehicles, like ours, don’t cross over. (There’s a private vehicle bridge farther down; for $300, locals can choose to bring vehicles across.) We parked our fully-loaded Suburban there, and began to empty its contents onto flat-bed carts and then pull many loads of our supplies across the long foot-bridge.

On the other side of the bridge, we loaded all the supplies back into two St. Elias Alpine Guide vans, loaned to us by Gaia, and drove everything four miles from McCarthy up another gravel road to the Sweet Creek property. Sweet Creek sits on the lower slopes of Bonanza Ridge. There’s no vehicle access to the homestead itself, so our next step was to load our large backpacks and hike the supplies up the mountainside to the cabin. We had two trails to choose from: a very steep ¼ mile trail, or a ½ mile trail with a more gradual incline. After trying them both, we opted for the longer, flatter trail. All day Monday and half of Tuesday, I hiked up and down that trail, with 40-50 pounds on my back, bringing up every bottle of shampoo, every can of salmon, and every pound of cheese we bought for the summer. I have grown acutely—and painfully—aware of how much we consume.

Other tasks this week: getting the water running from the creek to the house, through a web of black plastic flexible water pipes that spreads down the mountainside; emptying the root cellar (the cabin at Sweet Creek and everything in it freezes solid throughout the winter in the -50 degree weather, so at the end of the summer anything that can’t freeze solid, like canned goods or electronics, has to be put down into the root cellar, where it won’t freeze, then hauled back up in the spring); refilling the root cellar with the dairy and produce that needs to stay cool throughout the hot summer months; chopping wood to replenish the wood pile; cleaning the large cabin from top-to-bottom after a winter’s worth of dust; hardening off the plant starts we brought from nurseries in Anchorage; and cleaning out, raking, and turning the beds in the many large flower and vegetable gardens scattered across the yard. In the evenings, growing weary, we sit by the wood stove and read seed packets, draw out maps for the gardens, and sprout seeds.

At night, I fall into bed exhausted by 9:00. Every muscle is sore. I’m covered with bruises and my arms are a lacework of scratches from cultivating wild raspberry brambles. All of this physicality is actually a welcome change from the purely cerebral labor of my normal writing and teaching routine. Using my body fully feels good. I’m reminded of one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, “To Earthward,” which ends like this:

“When stiff and sore and scarred I take away my hand
from leaning on it hard in grass and sand,
the hurt is not enough, I long for grace and strength,
to feel the earth as rough to all my length.”

Bush Living Redux

2011-05-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

McCarthy has no grocery store, so for the past week, I've been busy shopping for the groceries and supplies that my three co-workers/friends and I will need for the four months we'll be living in McCarthy. Cases of shelf-stable milk, 60+ pounds of trail mix, 50+ pounds of cheese, 6 flats of apples, all the seeds and plant starts we'll need for our garden, a canvas wall tent with its own wood stove, chainsaw oil, and a bear-proof electric fence are just some of the things on the 12-page spread sheet that was my shopping list. This kind of shopping is old hat for me, since it's what I did every year while I lived in the Arctic.

When I shopped for the Arctic, though, I took carload after carload of my mountains of assembled supplies and groceries to a bush consolidating company that boxed it up, wrapped it onto pallets, and shipped it north for me. For this McCarthy trip, though, friends and I had to load it ourselves into the 87 Chevy Suburban that we're driving to McCarthy. We spent several hours maneuvering all the boxes and bags into place, strapping things to the roof rack as needed so that 1) everything would fit, and 2) the load would be tight and secure to withstand the 60 miles of frost-heaved, pot-holed gravel road we'll travel down to get to McCarthy. It was a feat of engineering, overseen by a man who's been homesteading in McCarthy for nearly 30 years.

Fully loaded and ready for the journey, we set off from Anchorage yesterday morning. It's a nice feeling to set off down the highway, knowing that everything we'll need for four months was securely within our vehicle. Bella rode in the front seat, between my friend Jeanna and me. We took turns driving north from Anchorage on the Glenn Highway up into the Mat-Su valley, where we stopped in Palmer for a few more supplies. Outside of Palmer, past the musk-ox farm and Wolf Country USA, climbing toward Glenallen, we marveled at the massive Matanuska Glacier off to our right.

As we wound along the sinewy highway beside the glacier, the less-than-sinewy belts in our road-weary Suburban suddenly snapped. The sky had clouded over the wind had picked up, and when we pulled the vehicle to the side of the road and jumped out to assess the damage, we had to quickly put on more layers.

We stood in front of the steaming engine, hood popped, for only about five minutes before a full-size pick-up truck headed in the opposite direction pulled over, and a man ran over to assist us. He called himself "Lil Curtis," and cut short a conversation with his grandma on his cell phone to help us. "I love you, darling, and I'll call you back just as soon as I help these sweet ladies," he said to her as he hung up. A few minutes later, Officer Cox, an Alaskan State Trooper, pulled over to assist as well. As we worked on repairing our belts just enough so that the Suburban could hobble into Glenallen, we shared with the men the fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies we'd packed for the journey. We joked and laughed as we worked. I paused every few minutes to look around at the glacier and snow-capped peaks that jutted up all around us. All in all, things didn't feel too bad.

We spent the night in the Caribou Hotel in Glenallen last night, and I had the first full night of sleep I've had in a week. As I write this, Jeanna, Bella and I are sitting in the front room of the mechanic's shop in Glenallen. Out the window, I can see the white Wrangell Mountains, toward which we're ultimately headed, waiting for us in the distance. The adventure has begun, and I'm loving the ride--bumpy and halting though it is.

McCarthy-bound

2011-05-03T13:18:00.000-07:00

I’m spending summer in McCarthy, Alaska, a remote community located eight hours from Anchorage in the heart of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. Ryan, my painter/sculptor friend from Brooklyn sent me a postcard when he heard of my summer plans: “There you are on the last frontier, and still you go deeper.”

Many of the new friends I’ve met since returning to Alaska are connected to McCarthy, and when they talk about the town, their voices change, their eyes light up. Over bar stools and dinner tables, they lean in closer to me and tell me McCarthy is magical. It's a magnet that draws people in. So when I decided I needed to pick up extra employment this summer, I looked for opportunities in McCarthy—and happily found one.

McCarthy today has a population of about 300 people, but it was once the largest city in Alaska—a booming copper and railroad town. The town recently celebrated its centennial. Not many towns in Alaska have been around for 100 years, so a centennial is a big deal. Of its 300 residents, only a dozen or so live there year round—and those that do are rugged, independent and solitary Alaskan homesteaders. McCarthy doesn't have a post office, a grocery store, or paved roads.

McCarthy is the last (and only) intact community located within a national park. The Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is the largest national park in the world—at 13 million acres, it’s the size of Switzerland and is the largest internationally protected wilderness site in the world. Four major mountain ranges span the park, three of which converge in McCarthy. The park boasts nine of the 16 tallest peaks in North America and more mountain peaks than any other location on earth. The park is also known for its ice: 150 glaciers, including the largest glacier outside of the polar ice caps and one of only two glaciers in the world with a forest growing on it.

This summer, I’ll be living at the foot of one of those glaciers. While continuing with my online teaching and consulting with graduate writing students, I’ll be living and working on a homestead in McCarthy called Sweet Creek. I’ll work in the large organic vegetable and flower gardens and help out with miscellany around the homestead. Sweet Creek is also something of a lay monastery, with spaces and routines devoted to meditation. Morning communal meditations will be a part of my daily rituals.

I leave for McCarthy next week, and I’ll be there until the middle of September. To prepare, I’m busily scurrying around Anchorage assembling supplies needed for four months in the remote Alaskan wilderness: a wall tent to live in, propane lanterns, trail shoes, bear mace, a big box of books to read out there, and lots of blank journals.

(Photo courtesy of JP)

Collecting

2011-04-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

My family is a sentimental lot. We’re Nostalgists. We’re also pack rats, imbuing every object with so much meaning we have trouble letting go of anything. This tendency runs on both sides of my family, but my paternal grandma is especially plagued by it. When she broke up housekeeping a few years ago, in her late 80s, my two aunts were charged with the task of sorting out and emptying the labyrinth of boxes and chests and trunks in her basement full of the treasures she’d horded through the years. She saved every card she’d ever received. (The Valentine’s cards she exchanged with her classmates in elementary school are now a prized part of my own collection of keepsakes.)

In my family, the Less-is-More truism has never taken root. My mom’s house is full to the brim of things she’s gathered over the years. I alternately succumb to and fight against the impulse to keep everything, collect everything, and carry around everything. Moving frequently has helped me pare down my holdings, but I re-gather new ones quickly.

So, all over Europe, my sister and my mom and I collected things. We collected the usual keepsakes and souvenirs to bring home: Irish wool sweaters, bottles of good Scotch whiskey, French scarves, Parisian fabrics. We also horded weird things. My sister, for instance, collects a small vial of soil from every country she visits. I don’t know what she does with them, but she was everywhere digging on the trip. For my part, I traipsed across Europe acquiring samples of moss. I started in Paris, snagging a bit of moss from outside the Louvre, from the Eifel Tower, and from Sacre Couer. All over Germany, on early morning walks with Stacie, I picked moss. In Scotland, my moss-picking became more explicit: I went on long walks around Delgatie’s grounds to find new varieties of moss.

In Ireland, I discovered moss heaven. Larry, our Irish friend and host, drove us out into the hills outside Dublin one day. The day was sunny and warm and even the wind was balmy. We’d come prepared for rain, but Ireland surprised us. (Larry made us promise we wouldn’t reveal that Ireland has sunny, warm days, as it might harm the Irish national psyche, which relishes its doom and gloom, if word got out that Ireland can be comfortable and temperate. But writers can’t keep a promise that interferes with telling a good story. Sorry, Larry.) We spent most of the afternoon tramping around the rolling hills. After a while, mom, Bari, Stacie and Larry sat on the hillsides and savored the vistas of the bucolic, impossibly green countryside. I missed all that. My eyes were glued to the ground. I ran around in a frenzy, pinching and plucking clutches of moss. I assembled a shopping bag full of shaggy mosses and velvety mosses, in all different shades of green.

When we left Ireland two days later, I had too much moss to stuff into the carry-on suitcase that had gotten me through Europe. So Larry climbed the ladder up to his attic and found a cardboard box for me, and I packaged up the moss in that. I was worried about getting it through customs, and had an elaborate story I was prepared to tell the customs agent if my box was searched. (“I have female problems,” I would say, a line that would be sure to shut up any male customs official and create solidarity with any female one. “I’m going to use the moss to make a tea that’s an old folk remedy,” I’d continue.) Like most writers, I was prepared to lie. But when I passed through customs the next morning, the young official took a look at my passport, and then looked up at me. I smiled broadly. He waved me right through.

Now all the moss is on my worktable in Anchorage. Eventually, I’ll use it to make terrariums as mementos of the trip. Meanwhile, now that all the snow has melted up here in Alaska, moss is growing everywhere. My walks on the trail each day are moss-rich. I didn’t need to bring the mosses home from Europe with me, just like I didn’t need half-dozen new art books I dragged home from museums in Europe, but I’m glad to have them.

Homeland

2011-04-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

While visiting Scotland earlier this month, we stayed in Delgatie Castle, a castle that was owned by my mom’s ancestors, from the Clan Hay. Delgatie Castle is outside of Turriff, in Aberdeenshire, in the highlands of Scotland. A castle has stood on this site since 1030, but the current castle dates back only as far as 1570. Mary, Queen of Scots, once stayed here.

The castle is now a tourist site and museum as well as an inn. The land around the castle grounds is largely agricultural, with rolling fields and small, picturesque farms. The castle grounds include a trout pond, pastures for ponies, lots of gardens and fountains, a hiking trail through the surrounding highlands, and many mossy glades. It was lovely.

I loved the highlands. Of all the landscapes we visited and viewed while in Europe, I liked the Scottish highlands best. They felt familiar, maybe simply because their rugged, windswept terrain reminded me a bit of Alaska, but I like to think it’s also because my ancestors lived there for centuries. My mom, my sister and I all experienced a sense of nostalgia there.

Like good Scots, my family is thoroughly of Protestant ilk, which is how I was raised. In recent years, though, I’ve enjoyed delving a bit into Catholic traditions and rituals, mostly as a spectator. I was happy to find some lineage for this at Delgatie. We learned that a Catholic monk was buried in the walls of the castle. The monk was a member of the Hay Clan, and when Scotland changed its national religion from Catholic to Protestant, the monk went into hiding in the castle. In secret, the Hay clan kept practicing Catholicism, and the monk presided over family masses. When he died, he couldn’t receive a proper Catholic burial, so the family buried him in a wall of the castle. According to legend, Delgatie Castle is haunted, and one of the ghosts was long-believed to be the monk. One of the castle’s legends tells that many generations after the monk died, a young girl in the Hay Clan dreamed about a body buried in the wall. She was distraught by this image, and to console her, her father broke open the wall to investigate. (Some of the castle walls, by the way, were 16 feet thick.) Sure enough, he found the monk’s skeleton. When the bones received a proper burial, the monk ghost’s haunting stopped.

Finding homeland is important.

The museum portion of the castle now also houses a tea room. After touring the castle, we sat in the tea room and ate cullen skink, the most delicious fish chowder I’ve ever had. Then we had tea and scones with clotted cream. Afterward, we all sat at the table quietly for a bit, lost in thought or memory. I worked on a poem. Outside, a birdsong sawed through the air.

The Tate Modern

2011-04-27T15:11:00.000-07:00

During my recent travels abroad, I had one day to spend in London. My mom and my sister boarded the double-decker red buses for a tour of the city, to see Buckingham Palace and lots of other London icons. Stacie and I bypassed that and headed toward just one icon: the impressive modern art collection at the Tate Modern museum. I spent the bulk of my sole day in London in that one building, but saw everything I wanted to see.

For quite a while now, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan has been my favorite art museum. No longer. MoMA has a fantastic collection and an inspiring space, but I much prefer the curatorial approach of the Tate Modern. Rather than being organized by time period or medium, the Tate Modern’s galleries are organized by fundamental concepts and ideas, which (to my untrained mind) often revealed for me links between what I’d previously thought of as disparate art movements.

In the “Material Gestures” gallery, which featured mainly Abstract Expressionists, I had a revelation. Monet was my first love in the world of art. As a sophomore in high school, I fell in love with Impressionism generally and Monet particularly. My passion for Monet intensified when, for a field trip for that class, we boarded a bus a rode three hours from our little rural high school in southwest Michigan to a museum in Toledo, Ohio, where one of Monet’s massive canvases of water lilies was on tour. I’ll never forget my first moments standing in front of that wall-sized painting. Until then, I’d had no idea paintings could be that big, that encompassing. Standing there, a naïve girl from a farming town, I felt myself become absorbed by the painting. I felt woozy. Everything disappeared from my awareness but for Monet’s colors and brushstrokes. From that moment on, I’ve loved art ardently. I’ve never stopped swooning.

However, over the years as my tastes and preferences in art have grown slightly more informed and, ahem, sophisticated, I’ve turned my back on Monet and the tranquil landscapes of the Impressionists. For a few years now, I’ve favored the raw and volatile and havoc-fraught canvases of the Abstract Expressionists. Against their angst and enormity, Monet in comparison had begun to feel lightweight.

The Tate Modern slapped me (gently) out of that misperception. In one room of the gallery, a late Money water lily painting hung on a wall, flanked on the other walls by three of the cornerstones of Abstract Expressionism: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Joan Mitchell. I was initially dumbfounded. Why is an Impressionist painting hanging here, in this gallery devoted to Abstract Expressionism.

As the curators explained on a placard in the room, in Monet’s late paintings, which were mostly of water lilies, his “observations of changing patterns of light on the surface of water became almost abstract.” Monet’s “organizing technique, in which he rejected traditional organizing space and single points of reference and instead created a single, fluid surface modulated by color, tone, texture,” actually laid the groundwork for the Abstract Expressionists that would follow behind him many decades later. Joan Mitchell’s absence of compositional line echoes Monet’s work. Pollock’s explorations on a theme and evocation of mood through color echoes Monet. And Rothko’s desire to immerse the viewers in a particular atmosphere echoes Monet.

So there I stood, in front of those canvases that dwarfed me and overwhelmed me, seeing--and feeling-- direct connection between my first love and my current loves. A lineage between two parts of my life I’d thought were disjointed. And just outside, the river Thames flowed past.

In the midst of my reverie, Stacie found me. “Come check this out,” she said, leading me toward a room full of Cy Twombly’s radiant orange-red paintings in sprawling, squiggly lines. We walked toward a brightly-lit room that seemed to glow with that luminous hue. “You can feel these paintings before you can even see them,” she said.

I Want My Hasenpfeffer

2011-04-26T15:39:00.000-07:00

As a kid, one of my favorite Loony Tunes cartoons was the one in which Bugs Bunny unwittingly almost becomes rabbit stew for a cantankerous German monarch. The rotund king sits on his throne and screams “I want my hasenpfeffer!” That was one of my earliest impressions of German culture. I grew up imagining everyone in Germany ate hasenpfeffer, a peppery rabbit stew.

So when we visited our friends Kim and Christoph in Germany last month, I asked them if we could eat hasenpfeffer. In response, I received bewildered stares. “No one here eats hasenpfeffer,” Christoph said. “I don’t know anything about hasenpfeffer,” said Kim, who is also a literature scholar. “But there is a German saying about rabbits and pepper.”

“Da liegt der Hase im Pfeffer.” There lies the rabbit in the pepper. Kim and Christoph explained that it’s a saying that means There’s no way out of this situation, much as in English we might say “My goose is cooked.”

We didn’t eat hasenpfeffer, of course. We ate excellent sausages and beer instead, but the hasenpfeffer rabbit trail yielded something far tastier to me: an interesting new phrase to add to my repertoire. I’ll savor that much longer than any stew would last.

The Grotesque

2011-04-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

When I first studied Gothic architecture in a high school fine arts survey class, I detested the gargoyles. Why muck up such a lovely church with ghastly, ghoulish grotesqueries? Yeah, yeah, I knew that they were supposed to scare away the evil spirits from entering the sacred buildings, but they scared me as well. They were creepy.

My tastes have changed. In France last month, I loved the gargoyles. I took photo after photo of them on all the Gothic churches and chateaus we toured. Maybe I’ve seen enough of what is truly gruesome in this world to no longer be spooked by these artistic renderings.

Beyond their presumed metaphysical purpose of fending off evil spirits from the buildings, gargoyles served a more pragmatic purpose as spouts to direct rain water away from the walls of the buildings. Water dripping down the side of a stone wall would erode the mortar between the stones, and the building would become unsound. Another example of something grotesque serving a purpose.

All over Paris, the City of Love, grotesques stared down from on high, and I liked that very much.

Unfamiliar Ground

2011-04-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

When I returned from Europe last week, Anchorage was wholly changed. The several feet of snow that still blanketed the city in late March had mostly disappeared by mid-April. For the weeks that I was away, Anchorage got a lot of rain, which helped the snow melt quickly.

I brought a virus home from Dublin with me, and spent my first week home in bed with a fever. Outside, the days were sunny with bluebird skies and the temperature climbed into the 50s. I've hated being stuck in bed, sick. The sky stays light at night well past 10 now. I haven't regained my stamina yet after the Dublin death flu and the long days tire me out. Most nights this week, I went to bed before it was dark--something that will happen more and more often as we tip toward summer solstice.

Part of what makes travel so exciting and stimulating is that in unfamiliar environments, our senses become more keen. We take note of things--sights, sounds, tastes--we would normally overlook. We pay attention. We revel in our surroundings because they feel exotic and out-of-the-ordinary. In Paris, the hyacinths smelled better, the clementines were brighter in color, and the butter from Brittany felt more luxurious on my tongue. Maybe those bounties actually were superior (they were French, after all), but probably I was just slowing down to appreciate them more meditatively, more distinctly.

Being in a snow-free Anchorage is a bit like being in foreign territory, too. As I'm feeling better and getting out and about more, there are new things to discover: my neighborhood has sidewalks, for instance. Under all the snow previously, I had no idea they were there. On our walks, Bella snuffles along more slowly now, pausing more frequently to smell the new scents of the reviving earth. Driving around, it's as if the city is remembering itself after the long winter. Forgotten shopping carts poke out of melting piles of snow on the edges of grocery store parking lots. The gargoyle-like snow mounds on all the roofs have disappeared. My studded tires, which I've been too ill to bother with changing yet, make unfamiliar sounds on the pavement as I drive. The snow-free world feels foreign.

But anywhere I am in the city, I can look east and see the Chugach Mountains. They're still covered with snow, a reminder of where we've been.

If Not, Winter

2011-03-24T00:08:00.001-07:00

This is the first year in memory that the official start of spring on the calendar hasn't excited me. Call me crazy, but I actually felt a twinge of regret that winter is ending.

Since moving to Anchorage in January, I've been attending a weekly poetry writing group with my friends Joan Kane and Jeremy Pataky, both fine poets. On my datebook each week, I've written the word "poem-ing" on each Tuesday. I look forward to Tuesdays. We meet at a upscale bar downtown called Ginger. Sometimes we critique new work we've all drafted during the week. Sometimes we just write together. Last night we wrote, using prompts supplied on Tupelo Press's website. The prompt we chose provided a list of line fragments from Sappho's poetry; the assignment was to use one of those line fragments as the title or first line of a poem. We each chose a fragment and then spent 15 minutes writing a first draft of a poem with it. I chose this fragment:

"If not, winter"

Here's my result (still in rough draft form), my tribute to these final, fading days of winter.

If Not, Winter

If not winter we wander
unaccompanied through heat, unable to see
heat as solace, as relief.
If not winter we watch
a day that won't settle into hard
edge, a close.
If not a wordless limb, the line blacks itself out.
If not a wordless line, the limb breaks under
the weight. Fecudity,
foliage, green growings are all
too much if not winter
to hedge them in, keep our undergrowths
under, bring restraint, bring white
pauses, white passes. If not winter
we wonder, when, respite, when?

In this latitude, daylight now stretches to 9PM. We've still got lots of snow in Anchorage, but the pavement is showing through on the roadways. Tomorrow I leave for 17 days in Europe. By the time I return to Alaska in mid-April, the new season will be in full swing. Good-bye, winter. Bon voyage.

Glide

2011-03-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

Japan is collapsing. A plume of radioactive particles is drifting across the Pacific toward me. A former student from the Arctic I visited this week is huffing gas. Meanwhile, I'm watching the fresh snow fall and avoiding the constant stream of news updates, graphics of plume paths, and Facebook links to videos of the devastation on Youtube. I'm planning the route for my afternoon ski trek through the woods around my neighborhood. I'm blocking out certain realities that I don't want to--or can't--face.

In a commencement address, poet Stanley Kunitz once said that "the artist ideally is that rarity, a whole person making a whole thing." Sometimes it's hard to be a whole person, responding in a whole way to the whole world. Compartmentalization has its benefits. Right now, I don't want to make a whole thing or be a whole thing or see the whole picture--not when it's one that involves catastrophic waves and nuclear crisis and the slow, steady destruction of people I love.

After seeing the huffing student, I was upset. I went out for a jog on the trail through the neighborhood, and I passed a moose sleeping in a clearing a few yards off the trail, in a large pool of sunlight. Wendell Berry's poem, "The Peace of Wild Things" came to mind:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I have to make a conscious choice to stay in the sunlight and not let the darkness overwhelm me. Sometimes optimism feels like narcissism, and choosing hope and joy in spite of everything feels like denial and detachment. But I have to compartmentalize my outlook: these are the things I can manage and respond to effectively, and these are the things I can't. The struggling priest in Iris Murdoch's novel The Bell says "One must perform the lower act which one can manage and sustain: not the higher one which one bungles." I can't always take it all in or I capsize--like the houses I watch topple in the tsunami footage.

So today, for now, for the moment, I'm heading out to ski into the wild, lovely, broken world, with some lines from Mary Oliver's "First Snow" tucked along for the glide:

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning....
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain--not a single
answer has been found--
walking out now
into the silence and light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

Winter News: In Honor of John Haines

2011-03-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

I began my day today with the news that the legendary Alaskan poet John Haines died yesterday, at age 86, in Fairbanks.

I first read Haines' poetry in grad school, while I was living in the Arctic. I admired many of his poems, but at that point in my life--so thoroughly isolated in winter and the same wild, secluded lands of which Haines wrote--the poems I loved most ardently were those that spoke of a different landscape than the one in which I spent my snowy days. So I shelved his poems and largely forgot about him.

Sometime later, a poetry journal in Alaska gave me an award named after him. Even that didn't call me back to his work. When I was perusing my books of poetry two months ago--deciding which ones to bring with me to Alaska and which ones I could put in storage for a while--John Haines' poems went in the "take to Alaska" pile.

This morning, upon hearing of his death, I spent time reading his work again, and I realized how much I had wasted him when I first read him in the Arctic. Now, as I've returned to Alaska on my own terms, I am fully ready for his poems, able to let them speak to me in a way I couldn't before. His poems are beautiful and virile, earthy and wild:

The Chase

Once man chased his woman through
the woods. He caught a glimpse of her
wetness beneath a waterfall, and sucked
his breath. She was a smell in the night,
a dumb presence under thatch, warming
the mouth of a cave with sticks, until
he closed with her in the underbrush.
Now through the rooms of his household
he still pursues her. He catches sight
of her over the morning paper, touches
her sometimes in the intervals of an
argument. He knows her presence in his
children, her distance by day.
Evening after evening he runs her
to earth, until they both lie panting
in that darkness made equally of night
and themselves.

His poems are both quiet and ferocious, like the Alaskan landscape itself. Many are elegaic, laced with the awareness of death that an Alaskan winter, which Haines once described as "the unfinished, the abandoned, slumped like a mourner between two weeping candles," can't help but inspire:

Sleep

Whether we fall asleep under the moon
like gypsies, with silver coins
in our pockets, or crawl deep
into a cave through which the warm,
furry bats go grinning and flying,
or put on a great black coat
and simply ride away into the darkness,

we become at last like trees
who stand within themselves, thinking.

And when we wake--if we do--
we come back bringing the images
of a lonely childhood: the hands
we held, the threads we unwound
from shadows beneath us;
and sounds as voices in another room
where some part of our life
was being prepared--near which we lay,
waiting for our life to begin.

The Anchorage Daily News this morning reported that John Haines had been in a coma before he died, but that a longtime friend sat beside him in his final days, reading to him from Winter News, Haines' first book of poetry, published in 1966.

Flat Terrain

2011-03-02T22:53:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite parts of living in Alaska thus far has been the Nordic skiing. I bought myself cross-country skis the first week I was here because I knew I wanted to pursue this sport regularly. Anchorage has a dense weave of trails winding all through it, and I have easy access to them at the end of my street. I love being out in the cold, bright air, on the look-out for moose or stunning mountain views around every corner. The rhythmic, gliding motion of classic-style Nordic skiing is soothing to me and feels very natural. (My brother, a downhill skier by nature and trade, dislikes the motion of Nordic skiing. He says his body, which he uses elegantly on downhill skis, feels foreign to him on cross-country skis.)

For the first time last week, I went Nordic skiing last week (or tried to) on particularly hilly terrain. Thus far, I've stuck to trails that remain pretty flat, but I got enticed (read: coerced) by friends to try out a trail that had a lot of hills. I have a very simple reason for preferring Nordic skiing to Alpine skiing: I dislike skiing down hills. No matter how much I practice snow-plowing and no matter how many ski instructors tutor me in the art of stopping, I feel utterly out of control when the tips of my skis head down hill. And in those moments, I feel nothing short of sheer panic. My psychological response is far out of proportion to any actual danger. This became evident when I encountered the first small hill on Friday Nordic trek. I wasn't confronting a steep vertical drop, like I might face on the mountains my brother patrols each day. This was a very gradual drop--the kind of hill that wouldn't even make me breathe harder if I were jogging up it. The trail was wide and open and the snow was soft, so if I fell, injuries would be unlikely. And yet I felt complete terror.

Adonna, my friend from New Mexico was along on the ski excursion. She had never been on Nordic skis before visiting Alaska last week, and fell frequently even on flat portions of the trail. Yet she happily careened recklessly down the hills, shrieking and laughing as she fell. She often fell, but she didn't feel terror of a fall like I did.

The fall is not what frightens me as much as the feeling of being out of control before the fall. In most aspects of my life, I like feeling a bit out of control. I dislike playing by the rules and sticking to the safe route. I like adventure and ambiguity. I'm not afraid to pack up and move somewhere new. I like taking risks.

Emotionally and psychologically, I'm not afraid to leap off cliffs. But physically, I'm terrified of skiing down them. Now that I'm living in Alaska with ample months of ski weather, maybe I can conquer this fear. Or maybe in this one area of my life, I need to stick to flat terrain.

From Alaska, With Love

2011-02-14T06:30:00.000-08:00

On Thursday night, I attended the Anchorage premier of “America’s Wildest Refuge: Discovering the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." The Bear Tooth Theater was packed for the event. Charles Money, the executive director of Alaska Geographic, kicked off the evening by welcoming all of us who were "friends of wild places."

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the largest of the US's 500 national refuges. At 20 million acres, it is the size of the state of South Carolina--and not a single road dissects it. "This is a symbolic landscape," the filmmakers said. "Millions who will never visit it find satisfaction, inspiration, even hope, in just knowing it is there."

As the stunning cinematography of mountains, forests, and the sloping coastal plain played on the screen, I was struck by the language that accompanied it, through the film's narration and in the Q&A after the viewing with the film makers and the chief ecologist of the refuge. It was a language of love--not just science. Phrases such as finding connection and experiencing immersion pulsed like heartbeats through the evening.

I've been enjoying the presence of ravens high in the trees of my neighborhood in Anchorage. Their strange, metallic calls transport me back up the Arctic viscerally, as only sonic memories can. One day last week, as I was walking Bella, I met the woman who lives across the street from me, who was out walking her own dogs. She asked what brought me to Alaska, and I explained that it was my writing that drew me back, and told her about the book I'm working on that was inspired by living in the Arctic. "Yeah," she said, smiling, "the Arctic is the dream we all share."

Mollie Beattie, the former director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said "What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself." The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge speaks of a love of wild places. On this Valentine's Day in Alaska, that's the valentine I'm sending out. This dream of wildness we all share? It's here. Beating on.

See the film's trailer here.

Anchor

2011-02-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

When I arrived in Anchorage 10 days ago, I kept hearing a refrain, from my brother, from new friends, from within: "Welcome home." And I am happy to confess that Anchorage does feel like home--in that mix of nostalgia, familiarity and eager anticipation that home entails. Given that I've never lived in Anchorage before, I'm amazed at how settled I feel here already, how natural my new routines and friendships feel.

I've been reading a book of short stories by Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You, which I bought last week at Title Wave Books, Anchorage's jewel of a used book store. (It will be a small miracle if I don't go broke living so close to Title Wave now.) The story "This Person" is about "this person" who makes a discovery:

"Someone is getting excited," the story begins. "Somebody somewhere is shaking with excitement because something tremendous is about to happen to this person....A long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speaker phone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that. This person is laughing out loud with relief and playing the message back to get the address of the place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life. It really is exciting, and it's not just a dream, it's real.

"They are all waiting by a picnic table in a park this person has driven past many times before. There they are, it's everyone. There are balloons taped to the benches....Teachers of subjects that this person wasn't even good at are kissing this person and renouncing the very subjects they taught. Math teachers are saying that math was just a funny way of saying "I love you." Best of all, every person this person has ever loved is there. Even the ones who got away. They hold this person's hand and tell this person how hard it was to pretend to get mad and drive off and never come back. This person almost can't believe it, it seemed so real, this person's heart was broken and has healed and now this person hardly knows what to think."

Far-fetched and fantastical as that set-up is, I can kind of relate to that feeling, right now, in Anchorage. On Friday night, a friend and I attended a reading of poets featured in the latest issue of Cirque: A Literary Journal for Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. (A year ago, in its inaugural issue, Cirque featured a nice interview with me and several of my poems.) A poet named Jim Hanlen read a particularly lovely, elegaic poem about Iraq and birds, with this great line: "Some days birds are more than birds."

How true. And some days, places are more than places. They're heart-swells and strong-holds. They're anchors.

One Art

2011-01-26T05:12:00.000-08:00

As I tape shut the last boxes and say my final good-byes to loved friends and family in the Midwest on my way to Alaska, Elizabeth Bishop's poem about letting go, One Art, is a refrain in my head. A friend in Alaska says that we're continually given the same lessons over and over again until we learn them. Letting go, or loving without attaching, is the lesson--the art--I keep re-learning.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Contained

2011-01-14T12:10:00.000-08:00

I spent New Year's Eve in Philadelphia with my cousin, Susannah, and her partner, Will. Susannah and Will, both artists, live in a great loft in an old sewing factory. I love visiting them in this space. They each have art studios in the large loft, but their creative projects spill over into every part of the space: piles of canvases and tools in the living room, paints and beeswax and camera equipment on the kitchen counter. This is very much a work zone.

Susannah's latest artistic obsession is with plants. For a couple of years, she's been making gorgeous still life paintings of her house plants and flowers. A large table--a makeshift potting bench--stands next to the loft's dining room table, and here Susannah exercises her green thumb. The loft's deep windowsills are packed full of plants with interesting shapes and textures. Lately, she's channeled her love of plants and her painter's eye for color and design into creating terrariums, and when I arrived at her loft on New Year's Eve, she presented me with a handmade terrarium as a Christmas present.

Susannah had tailored the terrarium to reflect me: pieces of turquoise lined the bottom, and tucked neatly into the soil were three varieties of moss, a Pink Splash (Hypoestes phyllostacha) and a bright green, ebullient Princess Pine (Lycopodium dendroideum). It was lovely, and as I held it, I felt like a lightbulb went off in my brain.

When Susannah visited me in Indianapolis in November, she told me about a dream she'd had recently. (Susannah and I are both interested in dreams and often tell each other about particularly interesting ones. We also often appear in each others' dreams, coincidentally.) In this dream, Susannah, who loves black and white stripe patterns, said she looked down at her body and discovered she was entirely striped: her legs were one black and white striped pattern, while her torso was another, and so on. "I was so happy!" she said. "And I suddenly realized, 'Oh my gosh, I've always wanted to be striped!'"

That's how I felt when I encountered my terrarium--like I suddenly possessed something I'd always wanted but never knew I wanted: a perfectly contained, perfectly tranquil and lush little world that is all mine. On New Year's morning, Susannah and I rose early and she guided me through the process of making my own terrarium, so I left Philadelphia on the train that afternoon with two little terrariums of my own. Since then, I've been reading blogs about terrariums and making plans to make more once I'm settled up in Alaska. I'm ordering equipment, planning to harvest moss from the rain forest behind my brother's house, and will host a terrarium-making party for my Anchorage friends when I arrive up there in a few weeks. An obsession is taking root in me.

All my life, I've been collecting interesting glass jars and bottles, generally antique ones. I love jars, which is a strange thing to love. A feng shui book once advised that keeping so many empty vessels around my house was not particularly advantageous, but I persist in collecting them nonetheless. And I'm forever dragging home rocks and shells, pebbles by the handfull and clumps of moss that catch my eye as I'm ambling in the out-of-doors. Suddenly, all these random objects seem imbued with new purpose: to become parts of terrariums.

A sudden fascination with terrariums makes a lot of sense for me right now. In a phase of life when I'm moving around freely and rapidly in a large world, the small landscape of terrariums is appealing. As my world feels increasingly open and unbounded, the containment of terrariums is comforting.

For Christmas, my friend Marge--a fellow poet who is obsessed with all things miniature--sent me a poem by Gjertrud Schnackenberg called "The Paperweight," about a tiny, contained world:

The scene within the paperweight is calm,
A small white house, a laughing man and wife,
Deep snow. I turn it over in my palm
And watch it snowing in another life,

Another world, and from this scene learn what
It is to stand apart.

When I board the plane to Alaska in two weeks, I'll carry my two terrariums--two lush landscapes to bring with me into my new space. In the midst of all my moving and changing, maybe this fascination with terrariums means I'm actually longing to be settled--longing to find anchorage in Anchorage. Or maybe, like Susannah, I'm simply charmed by their beauty.

Safe

2011-01-08T10:58:00.000-08:00

Bella has a gimp leg today. When I called her outside for her morning walk, she hobbled on three legs, holding her rear right leg up off the ground. She went no further than a few feet from my front door. She stood, awkward, in the snow for a moment then looked up at me pleadingly, ready to go back inside. Her ears were limp and lay flat against her head--a sure sign she's not happy. Back inside, she parked herself next to the door--not even wanting to walk back to her bed. I picked her up and carried her to her favorite spot, where she likes to be when she's frightened or unwell, where she feels safe.

Each room in my house has a bed for Bella, but her favorite is in my bedroom. At the foot of my bed, a fluffy, plaid quilt lies under an antique farm bench with faded green paint. The bench make a perfect den. Bella crawls under it, uses her snout and front paws to arrange the quilt into a nest shape, and nestles herself into it. The bench used to stand on the front porches of my grandparents' various farmhouses in Pennsylvania. This bench has been a haven for dogs for several generations. My dad remembers the dogs of his childhood sleeping under the bench on hot summer days.

I've been feeling a bit gimpy this week as well. I've had some bouts of cold feet about my upcoming move to Alaska. I got momentarily mired in anxiety about the upcoming changes and the abstract, unfathomable future: What if I get up there again and don't like it? What if I have to move again? Then, like a reflex, the judging part of my brain joined in on the frenzy my emotions were whipping up: "Why do you keep moving around, Kelsea? What are you constantly looking for? Why can't you find it? What's wrong with you?" After months of confidence and a feeling deep within that moving to Alaska is the right step, for the moment, I felt lame this week, unable to move forward, as if I was standing, awkward, in the snow, looking up pleadingly for help.

When this happens, I know I need to go to my safe space, too--the den in which I find comfort. For me, this safe space is the present moment, the now. I can't handle the future--no one can, because it doesn't exist. It's not real. Only right now is real. Here and now, this present moment, I can handle—and not just handle but enjoy and savor. Moment by moment, I can make my way through the snow.

Over the last few months, I’d strayed from my meditation practice. I returned to it this week, called myself back to the present moment again and again. Now, as I write, Bella is asleep, snoring quietly, her pain medication kicking in. Nestled into the now, I, too, find ease and comfort.

Welcome, Winter

2010-12-22T21:47:00.000-08:00

"Winter, there is no prayer but this"
-Joanna Klink

"Winter is the time for reading poetry," John Betjeman wrote. As I drove to my parents' home in Illinois on the day before winter solstice, to inhabit the holiday with them, I passed my journey by listening to a set of CDs from the library, Poetry for the Winter Season. Poems from Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Bronte, Lord Tennyson and many others--all read in crisp British accents--filled my Subaru as I sped down the highway.

While I drove, Bella slept soundly on the seat next to me, curled into a tight comma, and my two cats were a pile of slumber and purr in their kennel in the back. W.B. Yeats' fireside poem, "When You Are Old," kept me hitting the repeat button on my CD player. The poem's first line is "When you are old and grey and full of sleep." In late December, the world can feel old and grey and full of sleep. Yet it is also the season of renewed light--when the days begin to lengthen and new brightness unfurls.

I love winter. I don't dread its darkness or cold. I welcome the chance to turn inward, to sleep as the trees sleep, full of snow. In winter's quiet stretch of hours, everything feels more basic. I seek shelter. I sit fireside and reflect. I turn toward poetry, that brightest flame. "Winter," says poet Joanna Klink, "there is no prayer but this/ to hold fast in the time of few choices."

Poets, Like Birds

2010-12-15T12:03:00.000-08:00

"Poets, like birds, can be migratory beings," say Ted Kooser and Judith Kitchen in their anthology, The Poets Guide to the Birds. As if to live up to that, I'm moving once again, for what feels like the billionth time. In January, I'll bid adieu to the Midwest and return to Alaska. After leaving the Arctic six years ago, I didn't think I'd live in Alaska again. I felt full-up on winter and eager for sunnier, warmer climes. But then I spent fall in Alaska, and like a catharsis, remembered how much I love the wild, the stormy, the frozen.

Before I flew up to Alaska in August, I spent a few days with a poet friend in Seattle. We always make a pilgrimage to Elliott Bay Books, where I picked up a copy of The Poets Guide to the Birds, a collection of poems about birds. I read a poem from this book each day in Alaska. It became like a devotional, like my personal Book of Common Prayer, keeping my focus on flight.

As I prepare now to return to Alaska--which in some ways is striding forward and in some ways is returning to what was once home--I'm struck by a stanza from Ralph Black's poem, "Birds of Prayer," which I read in September:

It is the season of migration,
which is the season of drifting, and of home
which is the season the winds lifts us
back into whatever world we have lost
and names it over, which is forgiveness.

So, here I go. Drifting. Lifing. Naming. Forgiving.

(By the way, I've typed out the title of the anthology exactly as it appears on the cover, sans apostrophe.)

Fur in the Snow

2010-12-15T11:58:00.000-08:00

I've been promising photos of two different furries: my mukluks and my Bella. A recent snowfall provided a good backdrop for both.

Northing

2010-11-30T12:02:00.000-08:00

I've fallen in love again. With the North. With Alaska. With all the images and words--particularly those strong, active verbs--that conjure her. Glaciating. Avalanching. Frost-heaving. Northing.

The dictionary defines northing as the distance due north made on any course tending northward. My course is tending northward again. And like most of my paths, this one begins with words. While I'm not in Alaska, I'm fixated with reading about her. (Alaska has become a feminine presence in my mind.) In the last weeks, I've been poring through books written about the North.

I turn again and again to an anthology of short prose writing and photography called Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska, edited by Michael Engelhard. Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist, by Eva Saulitis, an Alaskan writer and biologist, is luminous and lyrical in its meditations on the creatures that plumb Alaska's depths--both whales and humans. In The Readers Companion to Alaska, edited by Alan Ryan, I'm reliving the northern adventures of John Muir, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, John Haines and Jon Krakauer, among others. And next on the stack is Margaret Murie's Two in the Far North, which I read while living in the Arctic and am now re-reading. Murie writes with such joy and exuberance about what others might see as harsh in the northern lifestyle.

As always, poetry is where I really find the flame, and happily, poetry that evokes North abounds. I've been spending recent quilt-clad nights with three particular northern poets: Joanna Klink, Mike Burwell, and Jeremy Pataky.

Mike Burwell's Cartography of Water is a net full of Alaskan imagery:

"Immaculate against blue, snow geese wedge
a fluid syntax, crack open
the season's speech."

Joanna Klink is Montanan not Alaskan, but the siren song of wind and ice quietly keens from the pages of Circadian:

"I would have come
without thought to this place, where the present

extends forever into ice, and the seasons, bright-in
dark, fall on the crystal threshold."

Fall tips toward winter. From Indiana, my mind tips ever more toward Alaska. Seasons are changing. Again. Always.

In "After this Life," Alaskan poet Jeremy Pataky notes a changing season:

"The lisp of seasons we scarcely have left
chime another morning haphazardly to light."

The chime in me is Alaska. The verb in me is north.

For Kyle: Savoring Indiana

2010-11-23T08:51:00.000-08:00

"Are you writing about Indiana yet?" Kyle asked me last night. Kyle loves Indiana.
"No," I had to say. "I can't get Indiana into my psyche yet."
Kyle frowned.
"The problem is me," I added quickly, "not Indiana."
"Obviously," Kyle affirmed.

Recently, an Alaskan friend described a part of Alaska--in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park--as "hungry land." Hungry land is land that is harder to eek nourishment from, for those practicing a subsistence lifestyle and trying to physically survive on the fruits of the earth, as many Alaskans do.

As a poet, ambling my way over the earth to scavenges its bounties, in pursuit of the full berries of inspiration, I do encounter hungry lands--places that don't feed me as much. I wish that weren't true. The fault is totally my own. I wish I could feel fed in all places.

Another friend, Justin, who's resisting the impulse he can feel growing in me to return to Alaska--my most reliable feeding ground--said during our last conversation, "Don't you think it's the poet's task to find the inherent beauty in all places and to write about it so that others can experience it?" Yes, I do. And in that, in Indiana, I have failed, thus far.

So, to begin setting the record straight, and in light of the approaching day we set aside to focus on feasting and gratitude, here is a far-from-comprehensive list of the Indiana succors for which I'm grateful:

*The stacks of turtles soaking in sun like hungry rocks in the quiet, green canal behind my house.
*The collage-like bark of Sycamore trees, forever peeling and shedding layers, trying on new skin.
*Summer thunderstorms that roll across the plains to bracket us, for a moment, in fury.
*Naps in the lulling rain after the storms pass.
*The herons and cranes that watch me skeptically but tolerate my presence as I jog along the afternoon canal.
*Long summer evenings of locusts and cicadas and crickets on wide, flat, lush lawns.
*Lilacs and peonies heavy with night and ants and dew.
*The way the farm fields speak of the different phases in life: the growing season, the harvest season, the months when the corn is high, the months when the soil looks barren but is just quiet and resting.
*A single, bright red leaf glinting amidst a windfall of brown.

"I saw signs of a beaver yesterday in the lake in the sculpture park," Kyle said. "It's not a moose or a polar bear that could eat your whole village, but still: beavers are cool."

Indeed.

Silence, Interrupted

2010-11-21T20:05:00.000-08:00

Late last night, a poet and new friend from Alaska, JP, and I were discussing, over the phone and the four-hour time distance, the way Alaska has impacted our writing and our poetics. J spoke of how Alaska helped him to allow quietness into his poems.

Closely tied to Alaska's impact on my poems is Alaska's impact on me, as a person. Here, too, I need quiet. After living in Alaska, most everywhere else feels too loud. Long before learning meditation in the New Mexican desert did, they physical landscape of Alaska taught me to savor silence. I feel almost claustrophobic in a conversation without some reticence.

When I speak of silence (a paradox in itself), I don't mean just a lack of sound. There's a visual silence, too. Gazing into the blue distance on the bike trail in Girdwood along the Turnagain Art or on the sea ice when I lived in the Arctic, I knew I was looking out onto hundreds of miles of undeveloped space, which creates its own kind of mental and physical stillness. In other landscapes, the incessant racket of billboards and strip malls and cell phone towers interrupts the silence.

Don't get me wrong. I'm grateful for the cell phone towers that allow me to speak with JP and all my other, far-flung friends. And I love big cities: the thrum and whir of Manhattan can become its own kind of lulling, compelling meditation. I need a city fix every so often, but my most recent stint in Alaska has begun persuading me (or reminding me of something I knew six years ago living in the Arctic) that I'm a better poet--and perhaps a better person, too--when there's less noise in the background and more stillness to hear myself breathe.

Keep Moving

2010-11-15T09:12:00.000-08:00

Anne Lamott says that writing a book is like driving a car at night: you can't see any farther ahead of you than the span of your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way. Leading a life is like that too, of course. It's all about baby steps, drawing in one breath at a time, taking just the one step in front of you.

I have a crippling ability to live my life in a fantasy. (Anyone who is familiar with the Enneagram will know this is both a blessing and curse to all who occupy the number 4 space on the Enneagram, which I do.) In a current fantasy--which is only one of many, I'm living back in Alaska, amongst the virile wilderness and the vibrant community of writers I met in Anchorage, writing books and running a nonprofit community art studio. The fantasy changes weekly. I can easily walk through my daily life missing what's here, right now, because I'm wandering a maze of dreams in my mind.

Another fantasy, which feels equally real, is that I waste my whole life living in my imagination rather than in the actual concrete world around me, and end up a recluse living in a house full of half-read books, half-finished manuscripts, half-digested plans. This one is compelling because of the sheer terror it evokes in me. Fantasies are the surest form of inertia.

I can't see where the path leads, thank God. I might turn back if I could. "Keep walking," Rumi says, though there's no place to get to. Don't try to see through the distances. That's not for human beings. Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

I wake up, rip myself out of the dream space of flannel and down, and remind myself to take an actual step, on actual ground.

Held

2010-11-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

“Has Alaska become your muse?” my friend Starlet recently asked. I’m back in Indiana again and I should be writing about the bounties of Indiana: the golden season of Midwest fall, the quiet, green canal behind my house I run along each evening, or the magic of the Sufjan Stevens concert I saw here upon my return last week. But Alaska’s still got a tight grip on me.

A few weeks ago, my brother dangled me over a steep slope of a mountain. I was strapped, flat on my back, to an orange sled. And it was raining.
This might sound like some sort of karmic pay-back for miseries I inflicted on my younger brother when we were kids. I’m sure I deserve any punishment he might now dole out. But I stepped into this precarious situation (slope + sled+ slippery ropes in the rain) willingly.

Ben is the director of ski patrol at Alyeska Ski Resort in Girdwood, Alaska. He had to conduct a training for high-angle rescue missions with his crew of patrollers, and he asked if I might be willing to help out by being a real-life dummy for their simulations. That I agreed is a testimony to the confidence I place in my brother’s skills (and those of the crew he has assembled).

While I lay strapped tightly into the sled high up on Alyeska’s slopes, a glacier bowl and the Turnagain Arm sprawling below, Ben and his crew reviewed winch anchors, the differences between dynamic and static ropes, and a variety of knots. And then they lowered me over the edge and took turns rescuing me.

From my position in the sled below, I could only look straight up at the sky that was white and thick with fog. The rain that fell on my face was cold. Sometimes the sled jerked and slid a bit as each different patroller took the helm. From above me, I could hear my brother’s voice, giving directions. I knew I was in good hands. I was tightly held.

Going Out In A Blaze of Glory: Final Day in Alaska (For Now)

2010-11-03T23:47:00.000-07:00

Mud Flats

2010-10-28T13:42:00.000-07:00

After two months back in Alaska, I’m about to return to my home in the Midwest. I’m sad to leave Alaska and say goodbye, again, to this place. I’ve loved being back up in the North, rediscovering this latitude. I’ve loved secluding myself in a cabin and writing about the Arctic.

Today, the Girdwood valley is thick with fog and rain. It’s a good day to stay inside, cozy in the cabin with a mug of ginger tea. As I drove down the valley from the ski resort this morning, I noticed the snow line on the mountains has moved down substantially. The mornings stay dark later. Winter is on its way.

On sunny days, after a jog along the bike path that runs from Girdwood to Bird Point, I like to load Ivy and my journal and laptop into Ben’s truck and drive to the Russian bakery down by the highway to pick up breakfast, then drive a couple miles on the Seward Highway toward Anchorage, to the first scenic pull-off. From this parking area, I can sit in the truck and look out over the waters of the Turnagain Arm, Mount Pyramid, and Mount Alpenglow while I write. Over the weeks here, I’ve watched the snow on the mountains turn from the early powder Alaskans call “termination dust” (because it signals the termination of summer) into the permanent snow cover of winter .

Depending on the time of day, the Turnagain Arm will be mud flats with yolky rivers cutting through, or a gray stretch of sea water. I like to watch the tide flow back in, the currents moving inland, water oozing back up through the mudflats where the heaviest current hasn’t yet spread.

At this point along the Arm, glaciers used to stand 4000 feet high and extend all the way up the Arm to present-day Anchorage. Now the glaciers have receded and this valley remains. Watching the shift of the seasons and the evidence of shifting geological eras, I’m reminded to embrace the different seasons of my own life.

Here on the Turnagain Arm, the towering peaks of heaven-colored blue ice eventually receded to mud flats. But you know what? In the golden fall sunshine, as the tide rushes back in with all its plenty, these mudflats shine an unblinking brilliance.

To Keep From Sliding

2010-10-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve been chewing some seal skin this morning. Ok, not literally; figuratively.

The last year I lived in the Arctic, I was gifted with a pair of kamiks—or mukluks. (Kamiks in the Inpuiaq word for mukluks; mukluks is a Yupik word.) The tops and sides of the kamiks, which reach midway up my calves, are made from the fur of a spotted seal caught on the ice by the family who made the kamiks for me. The tops are decorated with finely-wrought beadwork. They’re lined with mouton fur and topped with a dark, beaver skin ruff. They’re incredibly soft and warm to wear—far warmer than the high-tech boots I bought from a gear supply store in Anchorage.

I loved wearing my kamiks in the Arctic. When I’d wear them around the village, Inupiaq elders would admire them and admire me for wearing them. “Hey,” they’d say, “you’re wearing Eskimo kind.”

The kamiks are beautiful. Beyond the fact that they were a gift from a family I loved in the village, these kamiks are particularly special because the seal skin soles were chewed for me by an elder in the village. The bottom soles are hard. They’re made from the seal skin that is thick and stiff. Today, most soles are softened by hand, using a metal tool made for this purpose, but traditionally—for thousands of years—to soften and pleat the soles, Inupiaq women chewed the skin. And chewed and chewed and chewed it. Many elders completely wore away their teeth by this hard chewing. Rarely are kamik soles chewed any longer. The fact that mine were chewed makes them all the more valuable and all the more meaningful to me.

While I’m up in Alaska, working on a book about the years in the Arctic, my kamiks are at home in Indiana, in my freezer. They have to live in my freezer or the seal skin will rot. As I’m reading about/writing about/thinking about/chewing on my memories of life in the Arctic, I’m grateful for my kamiks, and grateful to Suyuk, who shared with me the art she painstakingly chewed.

The wet, wily beast I hunt isn’t a seal but a body of words that’s equally alive. I’m hunched over a laptop, not over a slab of flesh. Not with my actual teeth but with the mandible of language, I’m chewing a hard, thick skin to make a soft and pliable sole that holds steady on the ice, to keep myself from sliding. It’s all the same work.

How about you? What keeps you from sliding?

(I'll post a photo of my actual kamiks when I return to Indiana in a few weeks.)

Swanning Around

2010-10-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

“The swans are back!” Ben said as we drove through Potter Marsh on the Seward Highway. The swans have left their Arctic summering grounds and are migrating south. Cars lined the shoulders of the narrow Seward Highway, and dozens of tourists and photographers watched the swans from the marsh’s boardwalk viewing area.

A scenic byway, the Seward Highway runs 127 miles from Anchorage to Seward, skirting the Chugach Mountains of the Chugach National Forest and following the Turnagain Arm. This is one of the most scenic highways in the world, easily rivaling California’s Highway 1—and far surpassing it in terms of wildlife viewing. Driving along this highway, it’s common to see moose or black bear near the shoulder, Dall sheep up on the mountains, or belugas swimming in Turnagain Arm.

Just outside of Anchorage, the highway passes through Potter Marsh, at the southern end of the Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge. This marsh is a stopover point for the migrating tundra swans. Paddling around in the silver waters, the swans are brilliantly white. They look like small chunks of ice. They're thick with fluffed feathers that make them seem ebullient.

I used to see the tundra swans in the Arctic, too—at the end of my annual migration north. Tundra swans spend their summers on the Arctic Coastal Plain of northwestern Alaska. When I flew back up to the village at the end of the summer, returning north for the school year, the swans were still happily feeding and rearing their young in the richness of the tundra lakes and bogs in the long, silvery days of Arctic summer. From the village, I could watch them flying in formation in low lines over the tundra.
I’ve been researching tundra swans for the last few days. Tundra swans pair monogamously until one partner dies. If one partner dies long before the other, the surviving bird might go years without mating again. Swans can live up to 50 years, but in the wild they rarely live longer than seven. Like most Arctic inhabitants, the swans are threatened by the changes in the Arctic environment.

A female tundra swan is called a pen. This tidbit piqued my curiosity, so I went to Answers.com to ask “Why are female tundra swans called pens?” Of course I was hoping to find an answer that somehow linked swans with a literary life. I found no answer.

My teacher in contemplative practice in New Mexico always used to say that questions are far more interesting than answers. Answers often close us down; questions open us up. Our questions should define us, he would say, not our answers. On WikiAnswers.com, I found an archive of questions that have been asked about swans. While I’m intrigued by some of the things I’ve learned about swans, I’m much more intrigued by some of the things that other people have wanted to learn about them:

Do swans ever eat people?
Do swans have metal teeth?
How many parts does a swan have?
What is another word for swan?
What is the difference between a swan neck and a human neck?
Do all baby swans live?
What scientific community does the swan belong to?
How much feathers does a swan have?
Which gender of the swan lays the eggs?
How do you make a flapping swan?
In a fight between a swan and a goose, who would win?
Do swans ever drown ducks?
How are black swans made?

(Photo from Wikipedia.com.)

Faint Echoes

2010-10-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

One morning I woke to discover that during the night my husband and I had turned into seals. I first noticed the change when I felt him rubbing up against my silky back in the early hours with an erection far larger than any he’d previously achieved. I was startled and rolled over with a flop to find that the hard, curved appendage rubbing against me wasn’t his penis but the lower half of his seal torso as he wriggled in his sleep.

Everyone in the Eskimo village where I was a teacher had inexplicably become a seal overnight. Some chaos ensued. After our initial disorientation, we all bumped and scooted along the snow toward the school as normally as possible and barked our confusion to one another.

The day was irregular. Obviously the school bus was out of commission, as the driver’s frond-like seal toes couldn’t reach the pedals even if his flippers had been able to control the large steering column. The principle couldn’t bellow out the Pledge of Allegiance with any clarity and, though the cafeteria cooks found that flippers were excellent for flipping pancakes, none of the seal pups were interested in the breakfast they prepared before the first bell rang.

The school was an ice hovel of babble that whole day, all of us bellowing and hollering, none of us able to understand the others. Finally recognizing our own ineffectualness as educators, we released the seal students onto the playground for the day, where they happily slid about on the snow drifts and icy slides. Meanwhile, we adult seals in the school flapped around uselessly, our bodies curling in around themselves until we were each a tight little knot of fear and confusion and utter futility.

Eventually I flopped home laboriously on my belly and put myself straight to bed. I’m sure some experimented with the mechanics of seal copulation, but honestly, I was too perplexed and awash in the insecurity of our present state to have any
curiosity in that regard.

I woke the next morning to find my body had returned to its normal state of long limbs and hair-less skin, and life had resumed as normal. But for months afterward, whenever anyone spoke to me I heard the faint echoes of seal barking.

Sisters and Sufjan, Poets and Guideposts and Pain

2010-09-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

Behind the cabin in the woods where I’m staying alone for a month, my brother cut a trail toward the mountain. Most afternoons I hike the trail, which is quiet and dense and moss-lush. I sometimes get nervous on wooded trails by myself, but when I’m on this one, I have companion guideposts my brother left behind: fragmentary orange flagging he hung on branches to designate the trail, trees fallen by his axe, tramplings his boots made.

My brother is familiar territory. Though we’re more different than two siblings should logically be, we’re close. My brother feels like home, a landscape I know how to navigate.

My sister is different terrain. I love her tremendously but I sometimes stumble walking toward her. I lose the path in overgrowth and roots. Sometimes what designates a trail between two people are flags of pain, orange and searing.

I’ve been listening to Sufjan Steven’s “Djohariah,” a song named for his sister. On his new EP All Delighted People, “Djohariah” is 17 minutes long. The first 12 minutes are thick, overgrown, dark. He repeats his sister’s name over and over again. And then in the last five minutes, he sings out a sudden and heartbreaking tenderness to her. It’s a painful song, referencing an excruciating moment in his sister’s past.

A year ago, I had the happy privilege of joining in with Sufjan and a group of his friends for a late night dinner at a restaurant. Over an ale that night, I told Sufjan I count him among my favorite poets. He shirked that off immediately. “I’m not a poet,” he said. But I disagree. In his lyrics, I often find the language play of Gertrude Stein, the spontaneous eruptions of Emily Dickinson, Keats’ reliance on the particular and the fantastic, and intimate confessions to rival any modern confessional poet. His strongest poetics, though, are the clear compressions of emotion in his songs: awe and longing, wonder and heartache. Granted, the lyrics alone on the page don’t solely accomplish this, but when coupled with his melodies and the ethereal voice, I often get the same visceral ignition I generally get only from poems.

I keep “Djohariah” on repeat play on my iPod lately while I’m writing or out thrashing along the trails. I feel the heartbroken, gut-wrenched love in this song; I double over with it. Like all good poems, it calls me into my own skin—a skin raw from the brambled trail I stumble through with my own sister who has her own painful past. And like all good poems, it says something I’ve been wanting to say but can’t find my own words.

My brother leaves clear, obvious markings so I don’t lose my way on the trail winding behind his cabin. Sufjan sings clearly of the love that often sounds like grief. Either way, I find solace remembering that none of us are alone on these trails. And neither are our sisters.

From “Djohariah”
“Don’t be ashamed, don’t cry in the bath
For it’s the story of, story of, morning glory story
It’s the gloriole that comes to your path

There is a time when the lights will arise
For the mother is, the mother is the glorious victorious
The mother of the heart of the world

Go on! Little sister! Go on! Little sister!
For your world is yours, world is yours
All the wilderness of world is yours

Go on! Little sister! Go on!
For you’re beautiful, beautiful
All the fullness of the world is yours”

Listen to "Djohariah" on BandCamp here.

For Now (Some Secrets)

2010-09-24T10:31:00.000-07:00

I woke up really early this morning. I’m often a fairly late riser, so a fully dark morning, when I’m a part of it, feels to me like a secret. So, in honor of my morning—my secret—I’m in the mood to reveal a few other secrets:

Secret: The only reason I could get up so early is because I went to bed at 7:30 last night; I am an Olympic sleeper par excellence.
Secret: I haven’t showered in five days (the benefits of spending time alone in a cabin).
Secret: I’m a wee bit afraid of walking into the woods alone.
Secret: I’m not afraid of doing most anything else alone.
Secret: I actually prefer doing most everything else alone.
Secret: Due to the above, I’ve often wished I could be a medieval anchoress.
Secret: As much as I like enclosure (note above), I also like exposure (note blog).
Secret: I haven’t had a face-to-face conversation with another person in almost two weeks.
Secret: I get by with a little text from my friends.
Secret: I think I’ve found the secret to happiness, for now.
Secret: I’m audaciously happy, for now.

Poetry Chain Gang

2010-09-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

Michelle McEwen runs a cool blog called the Poetry Chain Gang. Michelle, a poet herself, asks poets five fast questions about the art and craft of poetry. The final question asks the featured poet to suggest the next poet Michelle should interview. I enjoyed being a part of this project. You can view the results here.

A Solitude She Has Not Had To Choose

2010-09-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

I am now alone in Alaska. Ben and Stacie set off on their journey yesterday, leaving me for a month with Stacie's dog (Ivy), Ben's truck, and a quick lesson in how to use a BB gun to scare away the bears that like to check out my front porch. I've got nothing (nothing) on the calendar until October 10, when Ben flies back into Anchorage. Nowhere to go. No people to see. My to-do list: Daily treks through the mountains and daily treks across the page. I couldn't be happier. (Unless Bella were with me.)

Of course, I'm not alone. I have Ivy, who folds herself in half for joy when I greet her. A mile down the road, in the Turnagain Arm, belugas pass by. Stacie's bird feeders draw in daily congregations. Black bears and moose meander through the woods just behind the house. When I follow the mossy trail my brother made through those woods, I sing loudly to alert them to my presence. I like knowing they're there, but I don't want to get too close.

In Seattle a few weeks ago, I visited my favorite book store, the Elliott Bay Book Company, where I picked up The Poets Guide To The Birds, edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, to accompany me in my Alaskan solitude. Here are some lines from Betty Adcock's "Bird Woman:"

there should be words
to lift her into the air the way a saint
might travel. Or an angel. That's not right:

whatever's hers is earthen, bought with earth,
a solitude she has not had to choose.

Hot Work

2010-09-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

I’ve been learning to weld. For a few years I’ve wanted to learn welding so that I can begin doing some metal sculpture. My brother welds quite a lot, and since I’ve been in Alaska he’s been mentoring me in the craft. Ben is a great teacher—patient and good at explaining processes. We call our afternoon sessions, under the pine trees in his yard, our Welding Clinics.

Turns out, I’m something of a natural welder. Ben has been quite impressed with my early weld joints. Once you get past the heavy equipment, the motion of welding is similar to the motion of moving a pen across paper, a muscle memory deeply engrained in me.

Welding is a full-on sensory experience. I love donning the big gloves and heavy coveralls. I love the flashes of light, the sparks that fly, and the crackling sound of the current. I love the smells of burning metals as they coalesce and love feeling heat rising off the weld pool.

It’s also highly meditative. The welding helmet and mask with a dark face plate protect my eyes from ultraviolet rays, but also inhibit my ability to see anything at all. When I’m welding, the only thing I can see is the tiny puddle of orange, molten metal pooling at the tip of my torch. The only thing I can attend to is the exact now. I can’t see behind to what I’ve done or look ahead to what’s coming, except in the narrowest margins.

I like the metaphors welding yields, too. Welding is classified as a hot-work process, a name given to any process that can cause ignition. What is the experience of being human if not an experience of ignition, of hot work? When I weld, I use fire to join separate cold metals together—so often what happens in relationships. In welding, as in my life, I put on my protective mask, stand in utter darkness, pull the trigger, and then find the flame.

All Delighted People Raise Their Hands: Of Sufjan Stevens and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

2010-09-02T16:29:00.000-07:00

When I was in California a couple of weeks ago, I went to the De Young Museum in San Francisco to see a special exhibition from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, “The Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musee d’Orsay.” Gallery after gallery of sun-dappled spontaneity on canvases by Manet, Monet, Whistler, Boudin. I was thrilled to see Monet’s The Magpie, and Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers.

But the shining moment of the exhibit for me was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ The Balloon, painted in 1870. I love this painting. I love how the woman, clad in black and standing in shadow, raises her hand elegantly toward a balloon floating in a distant bright sky. I’d never seen this painting before the De Young exhibition, and it stopped me dead in my tracks, heart racing and short of breath. I stood before it transfixed by its simple gesture toward light, its lyrical articulation of hope.

Last week, Sufjan Stevens, my most persistent muse, dropped a new EP, which I’m listening to this morning in my Alaskan cabin, while staring at an image of The Balloon I found online. The title song, “All Delighted People,” repeats, like a mantra, the refrain: “All delighted people raise their hands.” The song is, in my read, a manifesto of hope—a song about lifting our hands, raising our aspirations—despite ample reasons to keep them down. In his voice that always, to me, sounds elegiac, Sufjan sings:

The world surrounds us with its hate.
All I’m deciphering from the spirits is the light within.
All delighted people raise their hands.
I’m not easily confused.
I feel alive, I feel it glowing in the room.
All delighted people raise their hands.

Impressionists knew that the critical element to capture was light. Chavannes knew that one gesture of a raised hand sufficed to spell out hope. Sufjan sings of the same. Hope is reaching toward the brightness we see in the distance, lifting up, raising our hands, delighted or not.

Listen to "All Delighted People" here.

One Log At A Time

2010-09-01T15:05:00.000-07:00

I’m feeding a brush fire on a cloudy afternoon in Alaska’s Mat-Su valley, while Ben and Stacie put the roof on their new cabin. Every few minutes, I put the laptop away and go off to gather another pile of damp brush, clearing debris from the land around the cabin. A raven cries out overhead. Ivy, Stacie’s beautiful vizsla, stations herself nearby, to snap at the flies buzzing around me. Moose River sounds in the distance, over a ridge. The air is smoky and gray. Pieces of ash from my fire lull through the air like snow.

I don’t really know to build fires. Ben gave me a quick seminar in the science of fires. For a sustained fire, I learn, the center coals are what matter, not the quick-burning dragon tails of flame I produce by wadding up packaging paper from the construction site. Keep the center coals hot enough and anything you put on the fire will burn. If the coals die out, no matter how big the external flames are, the fire is going to die.

Stacie bought this land several years ago, with a previous boyfriend. Now she’s building a cabin on it with a new boyfriend, my brother. Last night, toasting marshmallows on the same fire, Ben asked me what news I have of my former husband and his new girlfriend, their new babies. And I asked about Ben’s former wife, who now lives with a helicopter pilot in Colorado. What we now know of the of lives of our former partners is flimsy and trivial. Like marshmallows. Quick to fall away.

Thick clouds hid the moon and stars. After marshmallows, we all fumbled through the dark toward the partially-roofless cabin. Ben and Stacie climbed a ladder up to the loft, zipped their sleeping bags together, and fell asleep. Below, I was restless in the cold, unable to get warm enough to fall asleep. But I was happy—happy to be sleeping (partially) under the Alaskan sky, happy to be with my brother, happy to be alert and aware of the darkness.

As afternoon wanes, some neighbors, a married couple, have stopped by the cabin site to investigate. They’ve lived on this dirt road for thirty years, and the wife makes it her business—she admits—to track the changes and keep up with what’s happening. She’s wary of these newcomers, the changing landscape they bring. The husband is inspecting the cabin’s progress and my brother’s workmanship.

“We built our log cabin ourselves,” he tells Ben, gesturing down to his cabin at the end of the dirt road. “Some days were slow-going,” he said. “We did it together, log by log.”

While Ben and Stacie make small talk with the couple, I carry armfuls of storm-downed trees and fallen branches to burn.

Exuberance

2010-08-27T01:22:00.000-07:00

Not to boast or anything, but this is what I get to bike (or hike) along each day. Flanked by both the Turnagain Arm and the Chugach mountains, with glaciers and fireweed in abundance, the views are spectacular. A couple of days ago, as we drove along the highway that runs parallel to this trail, we watched a large pod of beluga whales swim past. They looked exuberant, but maybe I was projecting.

I know I give up a lot to keep up this wandering, roaming lifestyle of mine. But I get a lot, too.

Welcome Home

2010-08-27T00:09:00.000-07:00

I flew back to Alaska a few days ago. Greeting me in the Anchorage airport, my brother said, “Welcome home.” Home has become an increasingly abstract concept for me. Mostly, it means my own skin. I’ve lived in 13 different places in the last decade. I wake up in the mornings and have to think for a moment about where I am and in which location I'm arising. But flying into Alaska did feel familiar and nostalgic and deeply satisfying, and maybe that’s what a homecoming is.

Revisions

2010-08-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend meandering through lush and dramatic landscapes, both internal and external. I’m in California, visiting friends—poets and writers, all—who feel like tribe. On Friday, I wandered through the lavender lane in Sally’s garden. I wound along the coast on Highway 1 from Monterey to Big Sur and back on Saturday with Catherine, through fog and mist and a canopy of Coastal Cypress. Yesterday led to chilly redwood forests in the mountains and lunch on the Santa Cruz harbor.

Sipping a Tall & Sneaky, Sally’s latest and most seductive concoction (tequila, ginger soda, and cassis), Sally and I talked about health, about fragility and about lyric poems. Over a Thai coconut curry, Catherine and I talked about the passive versus the active voice in both our writing and our lives—and about how to speak our needs without pleading them. On Monterey Bay, over Kung Pao chicken and gooey noodles, we talked about continuity and connectivity, in relationships and in our own narratives.

In Catherine’s cozy house, with a cactus garden in the back, we consulted the Oracle, in the form of the I Ching. I asked “How can I find my own voice in prose?” I don’t struggle with this question so much in poetry, and perhaps that itself is the answer. The I Ching, however, advised Limitations: “Without limitations, you’re overwhelmed by possibilities, moving from one thing to the next, never able to make a true commitment to anything.” After limitations, the I Ching forecast was Promotion: “You will gain great clarity about your identity and your place in the larger scheme of things. Try to develop a permanent perspective of the confidence you are now experiencing.”

The work I have to face in my writing is the work I have to face in my life. In my writing, I struggle with finding an active voice and the authority to tell my own story. The same is true in my life. A gracious and generous agent who looked at early versions of my memoir about the Arctic said, “The story is powerful—but you’re missing from its pages.” She could have been talking about my life. And so I keep revising.

2010-07-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

“Let’s settle down and raise a book.”
-Mary Karr, from Lit

I’m more and more acutely aware that I’m sliding farther off the traditional path for a woman of my age. I should, I am everyday reminded by the society I inhabit, be thinking about raising babies rather than raising books. Maybe some day I will. Or maybe not.

Most acutely, I feel like I’m bumping up more and more against my parents’—and society’s—expectations of me. I’m 35, single, and childless. This is not what my parents envisioned for me, and I see in their eyes, sometimes, a pained expression that confirms this.

For a while after I moved back to the Midwest and left the contemplative community I was with in Albuquerque, my dad asked, every time we talked on the phone, if I had found a church to attend in Indianapolis. “No, dad, I haven’t,” I always said. I presumed he was worried about my soul. Instead, I discovered, he was worried about my singleness. “Well,” he said once after hearing me say for the umpteenth time that I hadn’t settled into a church, “I just think a church is going to be the best place for you to meet another husband.”

But I’m really happy. I love living my life on my own terms, following my whims. Maybe that’s self-indulgent, but it’s indulging a self that has needed to be indulged for a good long while. I believe these words that May Sarton wrote: “And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves.” Someday, I’ll engage in that type of love with another person again. Right now, though, I’m engaging in that with my own self, learning what it means to love her: for better or worse, in sickness and in health.

Cabin Fever

2010-07-27T03:33:00.000-07:00

In a few weeks, I’m heading north to Alaska again. My brother and his girlfriend, Stacie, are building a cabin on some property Stacie owns near Hatcher’s Pass, her favorite part of Alaska. Once it’s finished in late August, they’ve offered it to me as a space to use for some intensive work on my book about the years I lived in Alaska.

I’m excited to visit them and help with some of the construction of the cabin. I’m excited to return to Alaska for an extended stay and to visit some of my favorite old haunts, like Title Wave Used Books and Moose’s Tooth Pizza and Brewpub (I won’t be eating raw there!). And, I’m excited to have a secluded space and an unencumbered span of time to wrestle, alone, with my manuscript. Writing in prose about those Alaskan years still challenges me on a few different levels. I’m hoping that being in the Alaskan landscape again, surrounded by her expansiveness and wildness, will help me find my way through these pages, which feel like their own kind of wilderness.

This cabin time will mark my most prolonged experience of seclusion and isolation. I’ll be several hours away from anyone I know in the state. I may or may not have cell phone coverage in that area. I’ll be able to drive to town each day to get internet access and stay in touch. And then it will be just me.

We’ll see how that goes.

No Fullness

2010-07-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

When I began eating predominantly raw foods (I’m currently eating about 90% raw foods each day), I found that my cravings for the other foods that generally consume me—donuts, ice cream, french fries and cheese—largely went away. It takes less food to satisfy me, and the more raw food I eat, the less junk food I want. By satisfying one craving (for beets, for fresh, nourishing raw foods), I eliminated the craving for overly sweet, overly salty, less nutritious food. I like that math.

A different equation is at work in my craving for solitude, however. While I crave solitude, I equally crave community. Satisfying one need does not quell the other. The more solitude I get, the more I want. And all the while, the more I yearn for community. And vice versa. The more engaged I am with friends and community, the more I want that. And all the while I yearn for more solitude, for seclusion, for withdrawal. I have a hard time feeling satisfied. One appetite or the other is always ravenous.

I am pulled between two poles—community and isolation. Sometimes I find a nice comfortable point of balance between them, but more often than not, I feel uncomfortably and precariously stretched between them. Right now, I’m more inclined to give in to my cravings for solitude. I’m a bit of a hermit, a fact that my extroverted dog dislikes. When I take her for a walk in the evenings in the park across the street, she bounds toward any people we pass as if they are her whole heart’s desire, as if she’s been looking for these particular strangers for ever.

Most days, solitude—time to read, think, write and daydream—feels like the greatest luxury I can fathom. And yet on some days, the solitude that I have deliberately created in my life feels stagnant, and I worry that I’m closing myself off to something, limiting myself—or my scope of myself—in some way. I know my mom worries about this for me.

In Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton, a poet and writer who relished long stretches of time spent in relative isolation, writes about her ongoing struggle between “a driving need to share experience and the need for time to experience, and that means solitude, a balance between the need to become oneself and to give of oneself.”

Finding foods that satisfy and nourish me on deep, sustaining levels has felt easy. I now crave the foods that are good for me more often than the ones that aren’t. But my other cravings are more complex and far more difficult to satisfy.

Keats said “love doth know no fullness.” He was on to something.

Appetite

2010-07-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

Since returning from my travels three weeks ago, I have been in a wholly absorbent phase—content to soak in (by reading) and not give out (by writing). Thus, I have once again neglected this blog. Sufficiently recharged by some idle days and refueled by the gifts of insightful words by other writers (Keats, Sarton, Karr, Walls, Gladwell, Twichell, Moore and Julian of Norwich, to name a few), I am once again ready to resume my own, more active, part in the conversation.

In these intervening weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about appetite. I read a book called Appetites: Why Women Want, by Caroline Knapp, which explores the ferocity and fear that surround women’s appetites.

“In Renoir’s world, a woman’s appetites are imagined as rich and lusty and powerful, the core of the female being celebrated as sensual, deeply attuned to pleasure,” Knapp writes. But in our time, she says, “satisfying hungers, taking things in, indulging in bodily pleasures—these are not easy matters for a lot of women.”

I’ve been exploring two of my particular appetites: my physical appetite for food, and my psychological or spiritual appetite for solitude. Both of these appetites are ferocious, and both are shrouded in some fear.

Recently, I began to crave beets. I’d wake up in the morning with a ravenous appetite for raw beets. Who does that? And then, I began to crave more and more raw foods. So, I’ve been experimenting with a predominantly raw food diet—including beet and ginger smoothies, and I’m loving it. The raw food tastes vital and good, and when I eat it, I feel like I’m eating food that I’ve been hungry for my whole life. A couple of friends have asked me to start a blog devoted to my raw food adventures, so I’m going to give that a go. You can find that foray here.

In the meantime, stay tuned right here for more thoughts about my other, all-consuming appetite—for solitude.

Looking Back

2010-06-09T08:04:00.000-07:00

When my dad was a boy, raised on Mennonite farms just outside of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, he was driving a tractor through a field one afternoon. A rural highway ran alongside the field, and a car drove past, the driver waving fervently at my dad. My dad waved back, with equal enthusiasm. Shortly, the driver of another passing car did the same, as did another. My dad continued to smile and wave. He tells me now that he felt happy, in that moment, to live in such a friendly community, where people waved greetings at one another with fervor.

Finally one of the cars stopped, and the driver leaned over toward the open, passenger-side window to holler out to my dad, “Hey! The field behind you is on fire!”

Something had sparked behind the tractor, and a fire had spread along the field in my dad’s wake. While he had been happily chugging along, waving and grinning at the passing cars, the drivers had been attempting to warn of the destruction following.

My dad isn’t one to look back—especially not if there is fire and chaos behind him. I, on the other hand, want to watch the mess behind me, want to see the destruction and learn from it, watch the fires in me burn, and try to make sense of the wreckage and ash.

Tomorrow I head back to Pennsylvania, my dad’s homeland, to visit my grandma and extended family, and then on to New York for a visit with friends who form a different kind of homeland. More posts when I return in a few weeks.

Memorial Day Fire

2010-05-30T08:36:00.000-07:00

A couple of commitments have kept me at home this weekend. Since I can’t spend the holiday at my aunt and uncle’s lake house in Michigan, I’ve decided to devote the long weekend to writing. The neighborhood is quiet; everyone is camped out around a grill or a fire pit somewhere.

Lately the hours when I’m not writing are restless, agitating hours. At the risk of jinxing this, I’ll say that I think I’m close to finishing a couple of projects that I’ve been working on for a long while. When I get close to the end of something like this, I get feverish about wanting to finish it. I lose focus on other things in my life (like friends and relationships) in the myopia of my writing vision. (All apologies to the people I’ve been neglecting.)

A favorite quote—the author of which I’ve long forgotten—hangs on the wall by my writing desk: “There comes a time…to let the words come as they want, a time to take no advice and give no reason, a time to write like you’re trapped in a burning house and you’re the fire.”

This weekend, rather than sitting around a bonfire with friends and family, I’m at home, being the fire.

More Peonies

2010-05-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

The peonies are nearly finished. I enjoyed them extravagantly while they flourished, carrying in an armful each morning. Twelve bouquets filled and scented my house with their lemony rose scent. They’re now beginning to look shaggy and frayed in their vases and pottery pitchers scattered around the tables of my rooms. They are slowly succumbing to droop. Even in their dying they are lovely.

Bella, my beloved dog, is also beginning to droop. Though I’ve shortened our walks together this spring considerably, she still lags behind and pants heavily as she goes. Her tail wags as ever, and she’ll still tear off after a squirrel if I let her, but I see her demise daily. I hate seeing this. “Bella and I are in the same boat,” my dad said to me on the phone over the weekend. “I can’t do what I used to.” He’s building a barn in his back yard and finds he has to sit and rest more than he’d like. Everything succumbs.

I love immoderately. Some days last week I sat and stared at my cut peonies for long stretches of time. Some days I feared I loved the peonies too much and would feel their impending finish too keenly.

Frozen Soil. Frozen Self.

2010-05-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

I've been writing lately about my Arctic life.

I lived in the Arctic for five years. I lived in a marriage for just a few years longer than that. The years of my marriage were predominantly the years I lived in the Arctic landscape. I mean that literally: I did have a husband while I lived in northern Alaska. I also mean that metaphorically: I did actually live with a frozen heart. In the years since both those former habitats have disappeared from my life, I’ve noticed some compelling similarities between the two landscapes, by which I mean the Arctic and marriage, which was, in my case, a period of freeze. Not exclusively freeze, of course. There were many warm moments. Many. But when I look back now on the self I was then, the first reaction I have is chill.

People often ask me why I went to the Arctic. Much more rarely do they ask me why I got married. I suppose that’s because marriage is a more expected route along the path of most people’s lives, whereas the Arctic seems to many like something of a detour. You have to go to the Arctic deliberately. It’s not a place you just pass through. As it turns out, though, that’s what my marriage was—something I had to pass through.

2010-05-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

During my fellowship at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, my urge to go traipsing through snowy pastures laced with spring mud each night, after midnight, was inexplicably strong. Each still-dark morning, in the hours when some of the fellows were just beginning to wake up for the day, I was out in the fields—down by the train trestle or the Baptist church up the road, visiting the cows at the neighboring dairy farm, listening for the owl in the woods nearby the fellows’ residence hall, making snow angels with Ryan in fresh snow, or watching the sky brighten toward morning.

Sometimes as my boots carried me through the snow at night, my mind was still carrying me through a tough passage of the memoir or screenplay I’d been working on during the day. I had no fixed route or destination as I walked, but went guided by whim or instinct. Sometimes my body seemed to be able to work out, through uncharted movement in the dark, an insight that my mind, stuck at its desk, couldn’t find.

Almost always, the walks themselves felt like prayers. “Make me all melt, Lord,” I wrote in my journal after one muddy walk. “Let my boots not weigh me down,” I wrote after another. Everything felt holy—the silhouettes of tree branches in those dim mornings were poems scrawled across the night-white sky.

Miles To Go Before I Sleep

2010-05-06T08:40:00.001-07:00

I was awarded a fellowship at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, an artists’ colony in Amherst, Virginia. I spent the month of February there, with twenty-some other visual artists and writers. In February, Virginia got record snowfalls. Two feet of snow fell on my first morning at the colony.

VCCA sits in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains and is surrounded by high meadows and pastures. My painter friend, Ryan, and I got into the habit of hiking through the snowy fields and pastures late at night, by moon or starlight. I don’t know what it is about a snowfield that makes me want to plunge into it, especially in the dark. That instinct is, I’m sure, part of what led me to the Arctic to live.

One foggy night, we ventured out into a remote field. The snow was deep and the fog blocked the light from the stars. I walked far out into the field. Ryan was off exploring something else and I was alone. I stopped and stood still. I was utterly surrounded by snow and fog—I could see nothing else. No lights. No buildings. No other sounds broke through the silence. My heart was pounding with joy.

After a while, I found Ryan again. Or he found me. After a while, we trudged out, back over the fields toward home. We had promises to keep. And miles to go before our sleep.

Peonies and Parker Palmer

2010-05-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

The peonies are opening in my yard. The window in my writing studio looks out over a row of them. Peonies aren’t my favorite flower, but I find something compelling about the way they sometimes topple over in the immensity of their lush blossoms. They can’t support the weight of their own blooming.

I’m reading Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. The book takes as its starting point Frederick Buechner’s admonition to each of us to find “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need,” which is more or less the ruling directive in my life right now.

Palmer is a Quaker, and he writes that Quakers traditionally say, to anyone seeking: “Have faith—and way will open.” But Ruth, a birthright Quaker, offered him this wisdom instead: “In sixty-plus years of living,” she once told Palmer, “way has never opened in front of me. But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.”

A lot of way has closed behind me, too. Sometimes I feel I am all topple. Palmer says that “there is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does—maybe more.” It’s heartening to be reminded of this—the inherent value in our falls and failures—as I’m looking for ways to support the weight of my own blooming.

Of Hearts and Stars, Anchors and Diamonds

2010-04-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

In January, I visited Sanibel Island with my two siblings and their partners. We stayed with my cousin, MaryBeth, and her family. For Christmas, MaryBeth received a set of vintage childhood card games—like Old Maid and Animal Rummy. One night, we sat around the fireplace and played Crazy Eights. The cards were marked with four suits—but not the traditional aces and spades of grown-up card decks. Instead, these suits were hearts, stars, anchors, and diamonds.

One year ago this month, while still living in New Mexico, I picked up a book called Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live. Written by Martha Beck, a life coach, it’s about learning to live by heart and following the profound or just profoundly simple things the heart tells us to do. Within days of picking up the book, it was clear to me that my heart wanted to be nearer to my family. While my head loved the desert, my heart wanted home.

So now I live in Indianapolis, next door to MaryBeth. Coming back to the Midwest to live near my family and my homeland in some ways feels like the most natural move I’ve ever made. Like a ship coming to anchor in its homeport. But nearly a year after moving here, when people ask me where I’m from, Indiana doesn’t come quickly to mind. My instinctive response is still likely to be New Mexico. Recently, without thinking, I even answered “Alaska.”

I don’t particularly feel like an Indiana girl. But I feel like a woman who is living by heart, guided by her own stars, anchored in homeport. As for the diamonds, the treasures? Stay tuned.

Wander. Write.

2010-04-26T07:01:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog, I was living outside of Chicago. Then I moved to New Mexico and wrote a bit about my life there, which included contemplating a move to old Mexico, to Juarez. Instead, I’ve moved to Indianapolis. After that move, I stopped blogging. I couldn’t collect my thoughts, couldn’t collect myself. I’ve moved a lot and had begun to feel embarrassed by my incessant moves. Am I unable to commit? Why can’t I settle? Why can’t I quiet my raving wanderlust?

I’ve been thinking about the stars lately. I’ve become interested in astrology. No matter where I’m living, no matter which friends from which community I’m missing, the stars are always there. They’re a map to guide me as I wander. My personal star map, or birth chart as its called in astrological terms, predicts some very specific things about my life based on how the stars and planets aligned the night I was born. One strong prediction is that I will be restless, that I will wander. The second clear prediction is that as I wander, I will write.

Haven

2009-04-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

I've neglected blogging for the past few weeks, largely due to travels. Since my last post, I've traveled south again, back to the border to visit El Paso, meeting up there with friends from Juarez. The situation there, and my life's intersection with it, continues to feel complex and unclear. I'm emotionally hooked and am unsure where or what that hook is tugging me toward.

Over the last weeks, I also traveled north, back to Alaska--for the first time since moving from there five years ago. Being in that cold, wild land from my past--a true frontier for me, at least in the psychological sense--provided a thought-provoking juxtaposition with my current life and much fodder for new insights into future directions.

Whether in the desert now, in the Arctic of my past, or the ever-looming land of future, I know I'm relentlessly seeking a haven. Interestingly, in one of the least expected places you'd expect to find said haven, a reporter from the New York Times thinks he's found one. I'm happy to post a New York Times feature video article that highlights Sister Donna and Centro Santa Catalina, the self-same haven of hope I've found in Juarez. I hope you'll watch it.

Shards

2009-03-18T16:36:00.001-07:00

When I first visited Juarez last June, I picked up large shards of colorful, broken glass that I found all over the ground as I walked around in the neighborhood where I stayed. The neighborhood, Colonia Panfilo Natera, is one of the poorest in Juarez. Much like the favelas in Brazil made infamous by the harrowing film City of God, this colonia is a make-shift shanty town, with ramshackle houses that often lack electricity, running water, or roofs. It’s also the site of the former municipal dump for the city of Juarez. The neighborhood was carved out of the mounds of waste. Fires still spontaneously erupt in the colonia from the methane gas released by the buried garbage, and the soil is strewn with residue from the dump—including the shards of glass that children with feet tough as leather ran over barefoot.

The colonia is dry and dusty. Not only is Juarez in the Chihuahuan desert, but as result of all the buried toxins from the dump, the colonia’s soil is barren and nothing grows on it. There is little that isn’t coated with a heavy layer of dust and filth. Yet in the dirt, all around the colonia, bright pieces of glass glinted in the relentless sun. I began collecting them, carrying home pieces in my pockets.

When I returned from Juarez a few days later, I had a brown paper lunch bag filled with pieces of glass. I dumped them into the kitchen sink, filled the sink with soapy water, and set about cleaning them, swishing the glass around in the water and swirling a scrub brush through them. I cut myself a few times and bled a bit into the water. Somehow, that seemed appropriate. After a few minutes, the water was dark and gritty, and I drained it. On the bottom of the sink lay a mound of brightly sparkling jewels.

I spent that first day back in silence, to reflect on what I had experienced on the other side of the border—the poverty and injustice and alienation. In silence, I spread all the pieces of glass on a towel on the table in the courtyard. Then, I wrapped each piece in wire and strung the pieces together, making long strands of glass shards. I hung each of the strands from a round metal frame, and made a mobile.

The mobile now hangs in my dining room, under a skylight where it catches rays of the nearly omnipresent New Mexican sun. The shards gleam brightly, reminding me of the women who live their lives each day in the midst of so much refuse and filth, both literal and figurative, and still manage to reflect light. The shattered pieces of glass help me remember that that which is discarded can still glimmer, that beauty and love are resilient, and phoenixes can rise from the ashes—or from the dust.

Border

2009-03-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

In going to Juarez, I cross over a border within myself. I say yes to something to which I might normally say no, like confronting danger. Or I say no to something that surprises me and leaves me feeling shocked and humiliated. When, for instance, I feel the compulsion to change my lifestyle and live more simply—so that others may simply live, as the adage goes—and I say no. No, I don’t want to give up some measure of my comfort so that you can be more comfortable. No, I don’t want to sacrifice my own safety so that you may feel more secure in the midst of your isolation. No, I don’t want to become more aware. No, I don’t want to love that much.

It’s easy to be aware and be compassionate in the midst of our own comfort. It’s easy to say I care about the women of Juarez until it requires something uncomfortable from me in return. And easiest of all is to forget what I’ve crossed over into once I’ve returned to my own home, my own safe and easy life.

Let me say yes, regardless. Let my no become a yes. Let my compassion become a sacrifice. Let the closed doors within me open. Let the borders within me break down.

Let love cross over.

Hunger

2009-03-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

My first night in Juarez, I sat out on the roof and prayed.

I use the word prayer with difficulty. For me, the word is fraught with connotations and contexts that no longer feel applicable. The word prayer feels too heavy-handed and too directed. Meditation, or being still in awareness of the presence of Divine Being, is probably closest to what I actually do, but the word meditation itself connotes a stance that feels too impersonal. And the term that bridges and combines the two is contemplative prayer, which, though more and more what I aspire those prayerful yearnings within me to become, is just plain bulky in nomenclature. For me, there's no one term that quite captures it.

Whatever it’s called, what happened is this: my heart was crying out.

The second night, sitting on the roof, I heard a small dog whining in hunger in the courtyard below. I climbed down to get her to bring her up to the roof and to hold her and pet her. I suddenly remember a smashed sandwich in the bottom of my backpack, leftover from lunch the previous day. I got it out and began breaking off pieces of it. She licked peanut butter from my fingers between bites. As I fed her, a stray cat appeared on the roof and watched the meal in progress, licking her lips. I held out a piece of sandwich to her, and she came to join us.

They both ate eagerly. Then, for a few moments, we three sat there together under the nearly-full moon and became still.

A while later, when I finally retreated to my hot bed, the dog whined outside my window for hours, hungry for more. When I awoke at dawn a few hours later, the cat was waiting outside the door, hoping for additional food.

Both nights, I realize, were spent in prayer. At its essence, prayer is calling out. Prayer is waiting on what feeds us. Prayer is feeding what is hungry.

The next day, I swear to God, the dog—whose ribs jutted out through her matted, tick-coated fur—approached me quietly, and laid her bone at my feet.

Guide

2009-03-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

Last June, when I first visited Juarez, the heat was stifling. I’ve never been so uncomfortably hot. Even the nights provided no respite. I slept in a cinder block, tin-roofed room where the heat was as thick as a good atole.

I couldn’t sleep. Lying in the airless room, I felt claustrophobic and anxious. So each night I sat out on the roof. I’m not sure if it was the heavy heat that kept me from sleeping,or the greater heaviness of the reality of life in Juarez. I know that I felt equally suffocated by the heat as by the increasing sense that I needed to make a change in my own life after being confronted by the harsh lives of the women and people of Juarez all around me.

Juarez is poor. The minimum wage there is $5 a day—for those lucky enough to have jobs—but food costs the same in Juarez as it does in El Paso. Juarez is also dangerous. It’s been identified as the most perilous city in the world for women. The mutilated bodies of over 400 women have been found in recent years, and another 4000 women are simply missing. Amnesty International, a branch of the UN, has developed a term for this widespread violence against women: femicide.

Yet sitting up on the roof, overlooking the dump, the scant lighting of Juarez, and the far brighter skyline of El Paso, I couldn’t deny a desire to spend more time here. I’m just four hours from where I live, and in a totally other world. Earlier in the evening, as we walked around the colonia, Aurelia, the woman from the cooperative in whose home I’m staying, reached out and held my hand. Hand in hand, we walked through the noisy, filthy, and achingly beautiful night.

That’s what beckons me back. Or, that’s who beckons me back: the women of the cooperative. The women of Centro Santa Catalina have so many reasons to succumb to bitterness and despair, and yet instead they choose joy. They could wallow in their isolation and alienation, but instead they choose collaboration and community. There’s a lesson for me in this. They are my teachers. I want to spend time at their feet.

Nine months later, in the midst of violence escalating to the extent that friends in El Paso refer to Juarez as a war zone, I keep feeling a strong go when I think about returning. I’ll be honest: as a trip leader, I don’t feel totally comfortable leading groups of others over the border right now—though it makes me feel ashamed to admit that. I do feel fear; it’s hard not to when I hear on NPR about the bodies found hanging from street lights or read the latest death-toll in the New York Times. But when I’m quiet and still and separate my thoughts from my mom’s or boyfriend’s wariness of my travels, the voice deepest within me still says go.

And so I’ll go. Someone, I know, will reach out for my hand and guide me along the darkening street.

And They Will Heal You

2009-03-07T17:40:00.000-08:00

As a teenager, I was fortunate enough to get to see a lot of the world. I traveled to South America, Europe, and Africa. I traveled to these places under the guise of short-term missions work with my youth group at the evangelical mega-church I attended in Michigan. As an adult, I have mixed feelings about those trips.

Undoubtedly my experiences in new cultures, in those new lands, were profoundly formative for me, and deep and lasting good came from them. They helped me to understand how important it is to broaden our perspectives and see the world from a different vantage point—especially from the vantage point of poverty and suffering.
Yet the premise of the trips was that we, as privileged, upper class, white, American adolescents, were traveling to the far-reaches of the earth to save those we encountered. We—from what human rights workers refer to as the Global North (or the first-world)—had everything to teach them. And they—just by virtue of being from the Global South (or third-world)—had everything to learn from us.

Coming at it from a different angle, Henri Nouwen said “Go and live among the poor and they will heal you.” Nouwen flips the equation on its head. Somehow, this feels to me like a more solid premise than the premise of the Great Commission, an ideology in which I was raised, that, as Richard Rohr so accurately says, presumes that the savers are transformed and enlightened people who have the right or obligation to change others. This denies our own complicity, corruption and flaws. Nouwen’s stance, on the other hand, presumes that it is those who come from a position at the bottom who have greater wisdom and insight than those of us whose lives have been privileged.

One of the aspects that I like best about the philosophy behind the CAC’s border immersion trips that I have the honor of leading, is that that our premise is Nouwen’s. When we travel to Juarez to the women’s cooperative, we go simply to be with the women. We don’t take on the savior complex. The hope for our trips is, in fact, the reverse: that by spending a few days with the women who live in the midst of extreme poverty and political and economic persecution and still retain a steadfast vision of hope and faith, we ourselves will be healed from our greed for comfort and status, saved from our ignorance and arrogance.

In reality, the point isn’t to save another. The point is to open up our lives to another, to open up to real relationship, and that is what results in salvation—a salvation from the isolation and narrowness of self.

Migra

2009-03-07T14:54:00.001-08:00

On my most recent trip to Juarez, I smuggled home a puppy. The puppy—a dusty, black thing with white-tipped paws and a ceaselessly wagging tail—was wandering around the dry courtyard of the women’s cooperative where I’d spent the morning. As I kneeled down and watched it wobble excitedly toward me, I told myself, “Kelsea, you may not bring this puppy home with you.” (I’ve already taken in and provided a home for three stray animals. My house is full.) But when, after 30 seconds of being in my arms, the puppy—exhausted with hunger and the pursuit of shelter—nestled its rump into the crook of my elbow, laid its head on my palm, and fell soundly asleep, I knew I couldn’t put her down.

I did a quick check with all the women and children at the cooperative. Did anyone know to whom this puppy belonged? Did she have a home? The consensus was no. She was homeless and starving and she would die. And so, despite my own previous “no,” she became my ward. The CAC director, Stephen, who was visiting Juarez with me, and the two Adrian Dominican sisters who administrate the cooperative and who had driven us over the border, helped me devise a plan—albeit not a very sophisticated one. I would hide the puppy in my jacket and we would attempt to drive her over the border without detection.

The pup, whom I immediately began referring to as migra, the Spanish word for migrant, slept in my arms for the hour ride over bumpy, noisy streets from the women’s cooperative to the military checkpoints at the border crossing back into El Paso. But as if on cue, about 300 yards from the border checkpoint she began to wiggle and get restless. I put her on the floor, on top of my feet, and covered her with my jacket. She continued to tumble around and wrestle with my sneakers. We pulled our Jeep up the border patrol and the two sisters and Stephen prepared large grins for the young officer with a machine gun. We handed over our documents. Two of us in the car didn’t have the right documents, and the patrol office looked as if he might delay us, and even search the vehicle. If that were to happen, he would find and confiscate the puppy and we would all be given a hefty fine or detained. All the while, the pup was making more and more racket by my feet in the backseat, just beside where the patrol officer stood.

So, I did what anyone would do. I rolled down my window and winked at him. He looked startled, and then flashed me an enormous grin, shrugged his shoulders, returned our documents, and waved us over the border.
Now the puppy lives with Stephen and his family, and she bears the name of one of the sisters who helped to found the cooperative. She is a fat, happy thing, nearly double the size she was when I found her a few weeks ago. Regular food and abundant love have been good for her.

When I see the puppy, she reminds me to ask myself what else I can bring back across the border with me. What else can I carry home from these experiences, and once with me, how can I nurture them?

During my first visit to Juarez last summer, what I carried home with me was a question. Just as I was preparing to depart the cooperative last June, at almost the same time of day as I found the puppy on this most recent trip, the sister who directs the cooperative approached me and asked me if I would consider returning to work more closely with the women there. You understand them, and they respond well to you, she told me. I think you have a bond with them. She is very intuitive, and she was right on more levels than she knew.

After that trip, I carried that question back over the border with me. It’s a question that stays with me. I shelter it. I feed it. And it’s growing.

Clear + Hard

2009-03-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

I’m writing a series about Juarez, Mexico. Juarez is all over the news lately, due to the unprecedented violence erupting from every corner of the city right now as drug cartels and extreme poverty rapidly dehumanize life in the border regions—and elsewhere.

I feel fortunate that my job, with the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico, allows me to be engaged with a women’s cooperative in Juarez—a group of women who are resolute in their hope that life can be better. Daily, as I follow the news reports, I’m wracked with anxiety and grief over the tragedies. The murder rate for early 2009 in Juarez is 3-5 times higher than it was in early 2008. Daily I become more aware of all the ways in which I, as an American citizen, am complicit in the violence and the poverty and the injustice that grips Juarez. And thankfully, by some measure of grace, daily I’m inspired by the astonishing good work that is still being done there, by people on both sides of the border. My friends in El Paso and elsewhere in the US are relentless in their work toward solidarity with the people of Juarez. My friends in Juarez are relentless—and restless—in their hope.

I’m wrestling with knowing what to make of this, with discerning what role is mine to play in the struggle in Juarez, and wondering what more I can do. Right now, in addition to staying informed and leading delegations of CAC friends to the border region to help them become informed, I’m wrestling with the question through my own writing. Ernest Hemingway admonished writers to “write hard and clear about what hurts.” Juarez hurts.

Hatchling, Hope-ist

2009-02-26T15:17:00.000-08:00

Hope is a point you arrive at and endeavor to stay on, to balance on. It's a landing strip, a launching pad, a diving board, a shooting target. It's an ottoman, a bird's nest, a keyhole. Hope is the deep hole on the beach where the turtle first hatched from her leathery shell and toward which point she orients herself, navigating current and wave, for the rest of her life.

Collage

2009-02-22T10:02:00.000-08:00

One of my teachers, a Sister of Charity named Sister Vinny, recently said, "When I die, I need to be buried and not cremated. I need a lot of time to process what's happened to me."

In a few months, I will have been out of the Arctic for five years. And still, I'm sorting through and processing what happened there. I could say the same of my first marriage and the life I lived in the midst of it. It's over, and though I'm more content in the life that has opened to me--in me--since then, I still spend a lot of time sifting through the sands of that time to see what can be found.

Am I living too much in the past by processing in this way? Perhaps. But it doesn't feel to me like it takes me away from the present moment. I'm not trying to live vicariously through my past. (At least, I don't think so. I'm counting on my friends to tell me if I'm misguided in this thought, though. Call me to task, please.) On the contrary, reflecting on the past in this ways allows me more clarity in the present. The processing of the past doesn't feel like a clinging to what is gone but an integration of what will always be a part of me.

Over the last few years, I've begun to make collages. In the boom of this new art form in my life, while I was a writer in residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute, instead of the writing that I was supposed to do during my stay there, I spent my days making collages on any available surface--walls, doors, the concrete floor of my studio. I also began to make mobiles, often using broken pieces of glass or pottery along with random found-pieces. I hung them all over my studio. I hung them all over my bedroom. I hung them all over my friends. One evening in Santa Fe, over a glass of wine, I was pondering the significance of these new artistic obsessions. A sculptor friend who had become a confidante and who knew about the Arctic and the shift I was making out of marriage and into a new life said, "Well, isn't that what your whole life is about right now? You're piecing together different parts of yourself, different images of life. And you're finding new ways to use the broken parts."

I think that's what processing is. It's not obsessing so much as re-visioning and recreating. Sister Vinny follows up her personal anti-cremation stance with a clear mandate for a biodegradable coffin. "I want to change into something new," she says. "I just need to be able to take my time getting there." That's how I feel. And anyone who visits my house now will see the fruits of that labor, hanging on my walls and from my ceilings.

2009-02-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about longing. A wise friend recently reread my book and told me that the predominant feeling she sensed in it was longing.

When I look back over my life, I recognize the longing that marked my days. In the Arctic, I thought what I was longing for was escape--from the isolation of the village, the stalling freeze of winter, or the clenched fist of the despair around me in the village. I also realize that I was also longing for myself.

Now, in what feels like a wholly (and holy) different life, I teach workshops on giving voice to the self within us that we suppress or ignore. It's risky to let our true selves emerge, to let our true voices speak. We might say something impolite. To defend against this, our egos are armed with sophisticated silencing mechanisms. For my workshops--and for my own writing practices--I've developed a handy little repertoire of tricks to distract and preoccupy the left-brained ego, the old brain that judges, criticizes, and stifles the creative and honest expression of possibility and potential that our right brains let freely flow.

I've heard from many people who have taken these workshops with me that in them they have experienced powerful moments of reconnection with their own voice. One of my favorite life teachers says that we teach that which we most need to learn. That is the only thing that can explain any ability I have to help other people find their deeper voices, their silenced selves.

I keep thinking about the difference between longing and listening. To long for something is to reside in a space based on absence, a belief that something we need is not present. To listen is to be present, to be aware of and attentive to what is.

When I look back over my writing--specifically the poetry in Hollow Out, I read a clear expression of a self that I wasn't at that time able to recognize, let alone embrace. I didn't know her. Though I did my best to ignore her, she--that self--spoke nonetheless. I may have thought I was longing for something that was absent, but she wasn't--I wasn't--ever absent. She spoke then, and she's still speaking now. And finally, I'm learning how to stop longing and start listening.

To Lose Myself

2009-02-21T22:02:00.000-08:00

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for--
to look, to listen
to lose myself
inside the soft world--
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy
and acclamation.

-from Mary Oliver's Mindful

Waiting

2008-12-11T10:37:00.001-08:00

Advent is the season of waiting, the season of preparing to receive the blessings and gifts that are about to arrive—like light, like Light. To intentionally acknowledge the Advent season on a daily basis this year, I've committed to writing a letter each day to people who have brought blessings into my life. The friends who come to mind each evening as I sit down to write my letter have blessed me in a variety of ways. Two of them took me to a favorite ballet during a particularly difficult holiday season. Several sent me plane tickets to visit them. Several offered me their homes. All offered me their hearts.

The gifts we receive from others come in a variety of shapes. Often, we don't even recognize them as gifts. Often, we initially see them as disappointments or betrayals. Over time, with waiting, their true significance—as a gift that helps us learn something we needed to know, or grow in some way we need to grow—comes after waiting. Advent season is about waiting. It's about waiting in hope, confident that what we need, what we long for, will arrive.

The Darkening Hour

2008-12-11T09:26:00.001-08:00

Usually, the increasing darkness at this time of the year makes me anxious. I feel myself growing progressively restless and irritable as the afternoons hasten and shorten. This year, however, things are different. I don't dread the darkness. In my life, I'm learning to seek light more consciously, and conversely, to savor darkness more deliberately.

Each afternoon after work, I greet the darkening hour in a small, adobe chapel that sits in a meditation garden. On the floor in the center of the room, candles burn to commemorate the weeks of Advent. When I enter the room each afternoon, it is daylight. I take my seat on a cushion on the floor and try to let my mind settle like a gentle snowfall. Most days, for most of the time I'm sitting in that room, my mind is more like a blizzard. But when the gong rings at the end of the sit, I find I've settled into the drift of a deep rest, surrounded by the soft breathing of those who have gathered in the room with me. When I open my eyes again, the world has darkened. Night has settled over the desert—and the meditation room is lit only by the glow of the candles. How bright they seem. And how unnecessary.

Light

2008-11-06T11:19:00.000-08:00

The light in New Mexico is brilliant. Every day is golden, perhaps most vibrantly so in this golden season of yellow Cottonwood leaves and the burnished calls of geese flying overhead. No wonder Georgia O'Keefe left the gray east to come and paint in this light. No wonder this landscape, this light, is the home to so many spiritual seekers.

Rumi, my favorite mystic poet, equates light with love, saying:

"Such love does
the sky now pour
that whenever I stand in a field,

I have to wring out the light
when I get
home."

As I go through the fields of my day today, may I remember that this glorious pool of light is, in fact, Love.

To Bring Home

2008-09-30T14:57:00.000-07:00

"The journey is essential to the dream."
-Francis of Assisi

Saturday is the 800th feast day of Saint Francis, the day on which the life of Francis of Assisi is celebrated. It feels like a good omen to me that this event occurs in the same week that I've been officially welcomed as staff at the Center for Action and Contemplation, an organization that strives to put into practice St. Francis' vision.

St. Francis said "We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way." This statement sums up precisely what my experience at the CAC thus far has been. After some long years of journeying, I'm excited to have found home.

Still Point (or Where I Spent My Summer)

2008-08-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point,
the still point,
there would be no dance,
and there is only the dance.

-T. S. Eliot, "The Four Quartets"

That Very Self

2008-08-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

As I've been learning contemplative practices throughout this summer, many friends and family members have asked me what contemplation really is and why I want to do it. Here is St. Augustine's response:

"What if the tumult of the body were to quiet down, along with all our busy thoughts about the earth, sea, and air? What if this very world should stop, and the mind cease thinking about itself, go beyond itself and be quite still? What if all the fantasies that appear in dreams and imagination should cease, and there be no speech, no sign...so that we should hear the voice of the One whom in these things we love, might hear that very Self without these? And what if it could be continued on, and all other visions be withdrawn, and this one ravish, and absorb, and wrap up its beholder amid inward joys? And what if life could be forever like this one single breathless moment of illumination!"

Dear Ruin

2008-08-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

Today I'm reflecting on August 4, 1996, my wedding day. This would have been my 12th wedding anniversary.

Obviously, many conflicting thoughts and emotions arise for me as I think about the day of my wedding. Tenderness and anger, love and disappointment , regrets and aspirations all co-exist. The only way to move forward productively, I've come to learn, is to hold them all. In my contemplative retreat time this summer, I've been meditating on what it means to hold the tension and to accept that paradox is what energizes and enchants all things. What we initially think is the greatest part of our lives can also be the worst. And what we think is the worst that could happen to us can also turn out to be the gift that helps us realize what is truly great.

Today, as I think about my marriage and the person I was within it, as well as the person with whom I shared it--and everything that each of us and each of our experiences entailed--both for better and for worse, I am reminded of this poem by Thomas Moore that a dear friend read at our wedding:

Believe me if all these endearing young charms
Which I gaze on so fondly today
Were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms
Like fairy gifts fading away,
Thou wouldst still be adored as this moment thou art
Let thy loveliness fade as it will
And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart
Would entwine itself verdantly still.

No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets
But as truly loves on to the close
As the sunflower turns to her God when he sets
The same look which she turned when he rose.

Today, and for the days that follow, I'm endeavoring to hold it all, both the dear and the ruin.

Winged Life

2008-07-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

"He who binds to a joy
does the winged life destroy."
-William Blake

As my initial internship experience here at the Center for Action and Contemplation draws toward a close, the time for saying goodbye to the friends I've made here is beginning. Many of these friends are truly anam cara--soul friends. When the sadness of our departures stirs within me, I'm meditating on non-attachment and remembering that love flows best when it is freely given--rather than when it is given only in hopes of achieving attachment or permanence.

Anthony De Mello, in The Way to Love, writes about attachment, which he calls "a major killer of life" because it means that we have handed over to another person or thing the power to make us happy and we therefore begin to cling and hold on too tightly. We should not think of another person as the source of our happiness, he says, but rather as a conduit who allows us to receive from the Source of all happiness. Instead of saying to a friend or lover, "You make me happy," which implies an attachment to that specific person, De Mello suggests an alternate approach: "When you and I met, happiness arose. We have enjoyed not each other but the symphony that arose in our meeting."

Much happiness has arisen for me here. My task now, as dear friends depart and I feel real sadness, is to remember that the love and happiness I've experienced with them isn't going away; its source will remain with me.

We speak of love as a form of falling--something we fall into. It implies a descent and an imminent sadness that will inevitably arrive. But falling, when viewed from a different vantage point, looks an awful lot like flying.

Fail Better

2008-07-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

"Try again. Fail better," were some of the words of advice given to us at the graduation from my MFA program at Bennington.

I've thought of these words of encouragement often. It is fitting, therefore, that three of my poems from my forthcoming book have just been published on the great online journal "failbetter.com."

Swimming far and diving deep

2008-07-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'm not swimming in much literal water here in the desert this summer (alas), but a good friend sent me a quote that reminds me that there's a different type of swimming that I'm focusing on daily:

"Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advance experience that shall explain and overlook the old."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Such sublime seas they are.

Steadfast love

2008-07-10T12:12:00.000-07:00

In the quiet of the desert, in this space of contemplation that has become my summer, I'm trying to be more aware of what I receive, of what enters, of what calls.

Gregg Levoy, in Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, says “Calls are essentially questions. They aren’t questions you need to answer outright; they are questions to which you need to respond, expose yourself, kneel before. You don’t want an answer you can put in a box and set on a shelf. You want a question that will become a chariot to carry you across the breadth of your life, a question that will offer you a lifetime of pondering, that will lead you toward what you need to know for your integrity, draw to you what you need for your journey, and help you understand what it means to burst at the seams. These questions will also lead you to others whose lives are propelled by the same questions, and from them you will receive 'oh never an answer,' as writer P.L Travers says, 'but a spark of instructive fire.'”

To learn from those instructive fires and give serious heed to the calls we receive from the world around us, Levoy reminds us that "it is essential to know how to gain and regain strength, to know to what people, places, teachings, practices, beliefs, and sanctuaries we can turn."

In his homily during a recent Sunday mass, Father Richard reminded us that our self is a sanctuary, and that living authentically and fully in ourself is living in the kingdom (or queendom) of God.

In this moment, I feel grateful to have found a sanctuary.

Phoenixes rising from the ash (or in this case, from the dump)

2008-07-10T12:07:00.000-07:00

(In the above photo, I'm learning to do the sewing the women do each afternoon at the center.)

(This is Sister Donna, the nun who directs the center. She's invited me to come back and work at the center with her.)
(This is the center itself, in the distance, viewed across the expanse of the dump.)

(This is the home of a woman from the center, where I was privileged to stay during my visit.)

Faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is....

2008-07-10T11:55:00.000-07:00

My time last month in Juarez, Mexico at el Centro Santa Catalina, a women's cooperative that stands on the site of the former municipal dump of the city of Juarez, was deeply impacting. I felt a strong connection with the women and with the mission and aims of the cooperative and I'm pondering ways to return, ways to give more. I was profoundly humbled by the women's joy, their generosity, and their hope.

“How can women and children whose experience is violence on physical, mental, political and economic levels rejoice? How can they sing! Violence is the basic experience of every person who enters Centro Santa Catalina. In spite of experiences of battering, negative messages about one’s worth, systemic oppression due to bureaucratic violence, and deep economic poverty, the community has learned to live out of a deep spiritual power….giving them the strength and power to live the values their mission proclaims—respect, love, friendship, confidence, justice, peace, moral security, community and love .”
-Sister Donna Kutusch, OP

Women of Hope

2008-06-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

On Monday, June 18, I will travel with a group of other interns from the Center for Action and Contemplation to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. This trip is what the CAC calls their "Border Awareness Experience," a chance for us to meet people who are directly affected by the reality of poverty on the other side of the US/Mexican border. While in Juarez, we will be staying and working with a group called Las Mujeres de Esperanza (the Women of Hope), from the women's cooperative Centro Santa Catalina. The women in the cooperative use fabric made in the Michoacan, Mexico to make shawls, tablecloths and blankets that they then sell to fund themselves, their families, and the cooperative community. (The Lady of Guadalupe, above, is an example of their handiwork.) The women support each other in spiritual development, economic empowerment, and self-determination.

Here's what I love about the objective of this trip, as opposed to other cross-cultural programs or trips I've been involved with in the past: We're going to Juarez to learn from these women, not to teach them anything.

I will be serving as the group's Spanish translator.

Little altars everywhere

2008-06-09T14:30:00.000-07:00