september has arrived with nothing less than the promise of fall

I woke this morning and that phrase came to me as soon as I pulled back the curtain that covers my bedroom window to reveal the thick, cool fog that was enveloping my mountain. I wore knee socks under pants and a sweater when I left the house, and a sense of dark nostalgia was piqued when I inhaled the crisp air. Fall is here, the season of my birth, the time of the darkening, the quieting, the cooling of our days and nights.

When I got home this evening, I was struck with it again. The temperature in my house had dropped, and I was struck by my sense of foreboding, by my sudden urge to build a fire to ward off the cold. It felt premature, this longing for a fire in the hearth. Wasn't it August just yesterday, the dog days of summer?

I changed out of my work clothes (an odd, new phenomenon to me since I began my internship, I was wearing slacks I had actually ironed in the morning and professional looking clogs too impractical to walk the dogs) and into jeans and a long sleeved pullover to take my four dogs on a late walk. It was almost eight o'clock, not an uncommon hour for me venture out, but this evening I realized that this was the first evening in quite some time that I was gambling I may be returning home with just enough light left to see.

As I walked through the dimming with my pack, once more I felt a tinge of fear. We were heading into twilight and I was a lone human traversing isolated woods, only I felt I wasn't alone. I was having visions of bears out lurking, hungry bears, as they, too, would be feeling the first chills of fall and readying for their hibernation. Would we run into each other on my late jaunt?

I thought deeply as I walked, the typical phenomenon of my over-active mind going into complete overdrive when there is no other verbal traffic to interfere, and pondered why the arrival of fall necessitated I feel this sneaking sense of dread. Was fearing fall an evolutionary imperative that assured my ancestors would hurry and put up a winter's worth of preserved food and seasoned wood so they would neither starve nor freeze before the season's end, and I was tapping into some quiescent remnant of that instinct that I no longer need having access to grocery stores and fossil fuels? I also noted that though the moon is waxing, my cycle is waning to that hormonal drop off that will commence my menstruating soon, but hormonal downshifts sometimes precipitate dark, anxiety-ridden thoughts in this particular bleeding woman. Perhaps my hesitancy to embrace the seasonal shift was simply a case of PMS?

Nah, I know what it is, and I've been bluffing all the time. Somewhere, deep down inside, I have always been afraid that I am cursed for bad things to happen to me in the fall. It seems that in my life, if bad things are going to happen to me, they are going to happen during the fall, and these aren't just going to be trivial bad luck days, they are liable to be hellaciously dark experiences that change the course of my life. Such as...

Eighteen years ago as I entered my freshman year of college, a childhood girlfriend of mine was murdered in a mall bathroom in the new town where she had just moved to start her first year of school. A few weeks later, another girlfriend and I set off to Boston for a series of four consecutive nights of Grateful Dead shows, for which we had ordered tickets long in advance. One of those shows just so happened to be on my 18th birthday, and when the mail order tickets arrived we were thrilled that the tickets for September 25th, my special day, were embossed with gold foil, and we had been singing "I've got the golden ticket!" Willy Wonka style in eager anticipation, yet the pall of our friend's death clung around the edges of our minds as we embarked on our journey. The whole trip ended up being edgy. The shows were good, but it was hard to really connect with the bliss being so far from home with this recent murder on our minds. Then our ride decided to leave town early, and we had to sell tickets to one of the shows to make enough money to get a bus back to Pittsburgh.

Our bus was due to leave town at 3AM, and the taxi we called to take us to the bus station never showed. After almost missing the bus, we spent the next TWENTY HOURS in a public transportation nightmare that was complete with creepy perverts, a missed connection in the chaotic NYC Greyhound station for we two, sleepless, weary and freaked out girls, and the most phenomenally absurd happenings, like Bill and Ted riding the bus to their stop in King of Prussia and drunk Indian men getting trapped in the bus restroom and pounding loudly begging for help to get out. To top it all off, I came down with a wicked bout of the flu, so by the time we rolled into the Pittsburgh station, I wanted to climb into bed at my mom's house and never leave again. There were good times on that trip, and some great stories emerged from it, too (right, Al?), but as time has worn on I have found that those memories are forever tinged with the sorrow around the tragic loss of our friend.

Two years later, fall, I was quite pregnant and had the first uncomfortable stirrings of asthma in my lungs, which has grown successively worse each year. I cried when the doctor diagnosed me and handed me that first cursed inhaler. The other chronic ailments from which I suffer have all cropped up, some with a vengeance, in the chilly days of autumn, as well. That same year, the day before my birthday, my sweet puppy Zelda was killed by a car on the busy street in front of my house.

In later years fall brought me the break up of my relationship with my kids' dad and another nasty break up after him, the devastating miscarriage of my third baby, the powerful and frightening dissolution of my beloved's sanity that resulted in his involuntary commitment the same year we bought our house which left me alone, ever since, responsible for our property, and the stillbirth, on my 33rd birthday, of a dear friend's baby delivered into my terrified hands.

Darkness touches all of our lives, and some of us dance more intimately with the darkness than others. I have long felt that I am one that has been called to work, at times, within the veils of life's dusk and murk. Perhaps that was why I was born so close to the autumnal equinox that heralds the time when our Northern Hemisphere culture shifts into the chill and obscurity of cycle's end. Or, perhaps my own birth, when I came to my mother, herself a very young woman without the stability of a loving, safe partner and supportive family, was marked by darkness and stress, and thus it comes around to me when my body begins to sense the shift into harvest's end.

So what can I do? I'm not really afraid; I am merely lost in the musings of what my repeated and unbidden sense of foreboding today might mean. I am actually a remarkably ecstatic human being, no longer prone to the heavy weight I often felt as a young woman being initiated into a life of navigating the turbid, composting cycles.

To not let the dark envelope me into gloom, I knew I needed a remedy. I took tonight off from all responsibilities, and I tended to myself. I played Songs: Ohia albums and got lost in Molina's mournful croon. I ate warm, nourishing foods: lamb, broccoli, quinoa, and gluten-free raisin toast. I treated myself with a batch of my own homemade goat milk, maple, pear custard, because my friend Elon, the brilliant acupunturist, tells me that warm pears are supportive fruit for lungs, and fall is the lung season in Chinese medicine. I infused and drank hot, deep, supportive herbs: dandelion and ginseng and wild yam roots, nettle leaves, and horsetail needles. And I spent time at my long neglected craft, writing this blog for you.

freak

I am participating in an exciting project, the first ever Freaks of Asheville calendar, which will be out for 2010. I have already had my freaky photo shoot, and now I have to submit a freak statement. I just wrote this declaration of myself, and I feel particularly glad that I wrote it on the solstice, a holy day during the wheel of the year to which I am seeking to connect more, and particularly poignant since the last time I blogged was at the equinox. I am sure this statement will be cut down dramatically in order to appear in the calendar, so I am sharing with the world the brand spanking new, editor's cut of my personal, freak story. Enjoy.

Justina. Statement of freakhood. Summer solstice, 2009.

I suspect I am not alone amongst the “freaks” in remembering that even as a young child I always felt different, felt like I didn’t fit in, felt always alone in a crowd. In high school I did it all: made great grades, smoked cigarettes, excelled in sports, did drugs, performed in theatre, had sex, sang in chorus, got in a car chase with the cops, got a scholarship, and did this all with a wildly shorn mop of dyed black hair, lots of piercings in my ears, and carrying on a punk rock meets flower child aesthetic to which neither the punks nor the hippies could relate, let alone the nerds, jocks, or stoner kids. I felt like a freak long before I learned to revel in it.

During those alienated high school years I discovered that my love of nature, my passion for justice, and my deeply primal urges to be a wild, earthy girl actually connected me to the Wiccan tradition, and I decided the minute I learned what it meant that I was a witch. To this day, I remain a witch. My pagan spirituality is inextricably intertwined with everything I do, and everything I do sets me apart from the mainstream, supposedly normal values of our culture. As a witch living amongst the forebears that burned my ancestors, I have been the freak.

I believe it is my responsibility to serve the earth and her creatures - human, animal, and plant beings alike – thus, I have lived that by gently birthing and mothering my own children, serving other families in the ancient tradition of midwifery, raising and rescuing animals, growing, wildcrafting and using herbs as food and medicine, protecting the land, protesting for peace, and attempting to live compassionately through my every choice from how I speak to my neighbors to where I buy my goods in hopes of diminishing my support for sweatshop labor, disposable products, and the many profanities of capitalism. As an activist whose purpose is to serve the planet living in a fast-food, throwaway society, I have been the freak.

A powerful tenet of my belief system is that all acts of love and pleasure serve a higher purpose. My joy, my delight in my actions, my delicious orgasms make the world a better place, not just for myself, but for all. My soul is awakened and inspired by art in every form, particularly by music and poetry. I perform raw, radical poetry as a way of sharing my art with the world and expressing my individual perspective. Like a shaman starved of otherworldly experiences, I devour deep, guitar-heavy, rock-n-roll and electronic psychedelic trance music that transports me. I dance ecstatically, stomping my prayers for peace and transformation into the Earth’s sacred ground. I make love to my partners and to myself as though sex were an ancient form of worship for all creation…. because it is. I permanently alter my body with decorative piercings and colorful, tattooed artwork, each blood-let, needle-carved alteration a chapter in the story of my journey, so that even my appearance becomes part of the giant, collaborative art project that is human existence. Amongst other artist/performer/participants I help create ritual festivals to showcase our creations in temporary societies in which the art is the focus, ceremony is part of every waking moment, and at the end of the day we burn effigies to release all that is unwanted through a spiraling inferno that itself becomes the performance, the art that is our intention. As a unique creatress in a society that values homogeneity and as a woman who always dances like no one is watching, but all the while hopes that everyone is watching, I have been the freak.

My path as a witch and a scholar has taught me that the sacred feminine is every bit as valuable as the sacred masculine, which our culture exclusively exalts. I have studied women’s herstory, have learned of the power imbalance between women and men, and I know that gender is a societally created construct that serves to control men and women alike by binding us to strict but narrow definitions of who we can be. Yet, I am a large woman, a loud woman, an outspoken, forthright, powerful, independent woman who loves the touch of another woman’s skin upon my own, and I am a soft woman, a stay-at-home mama who loves being barefoot and pregnant and tending to children, a cook, a baker, a homemaker, a hearth tending, nurturing woman who loves the feel of a man’s strong hand on my body. As a feminist living in a patriarchal society, I have been the freak.

As I grow more into the tradition of service to humanity I have sought to expand my skills as a healer. I scale ivory towers to pillage knowledge I can return to my people and use for our mutual evolution. I have learned to mediate the dissent between others, facilitating the high art of communication to prevent the schism that its absence creates. Currently I am studying in a Masters program to become a mental health counselor, and simultaneously I am learning to counsel others in a way that intrinsically honors each sacred path, and I am building a bridge of understanding between the hallowed halls of academia and the oft-maligned underground of the counterculture. As an outlandish but overachieving student performing excellently in the whitewashed world of graduate school, as a self-appointed ambassador declaring the weirdo perspective is valuable, too, I have been a freak.

Witch. Midwife. Homebirthing, breastfeeding, homeschooling mother. Activist. Pacifist. Animal lover. Environmentalist. Poet. Performer. Rock-n-roller. Ecstatic dancer. Sacred whore. Psychedelic shaman. Burner. Tattoed. Pierced. Queer. Feminist. Healer. Scholar. Mediator. Counselor. Ambassador.

This litany of mismatched descriptions names me as I am. I am a freak, the unifying quality of being exactly who I want to be in a world that wants to standardize, minimize, and tame me. I push the margins even as I am marginalized. I am a freak.

dear blog.... some poems for spring

Dear blog,
I miss you. Grad school is totally kicking my ass. I swear I will be back someday soon. In honor of the vernal equinox, I am leaving you with a couple of poems from the days of yore, when I was still able to write poetry. These were written during the childbearing days, so now date back to the mid-nineties. Wow. I have been a grown up for a long time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This first piece was written during a wonderful writing workshop, the only I have ever attended. It is a letter to my then very young children, written at a time when I believed that my youthful wild days were over. I have been very pleased to learn they are not.

I am not fat.
I know I may look that way, but I am not.
I am not old.
I may seem that way, but trust me, I am as young as you.
I am not evil.
I may scream and bark and harp and swear, but I am good.
I have feelings and needs like yours, you know.
I once walked topless on a beach in Washington State, and
another time was topless in the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.
I won't do that again, probably,
but it's OK with me if you do.
I am not a housewife.
I am not anybody's wife, except maybe spring's.
When my years reach the century mark,
which I duly hope they do,
Remember all of this:
I dug deep holes for garden beds (I've done that topless, too).
I climbed to the tops of trees.
I carried many, many pounds of feed bags to cows and
many pounds of babies to birth.
I sang and danced and acted on stage and
had sex outside, even in the rain,
walked up steep mountain paths on dark moonless nights
to get to kegs of beer or
swimming holes
or lovers awaiting my touch, and
I've climbed steep, dark paths of my heart
to get to feelings indescribable.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


This piece, I think, pretty much speaks for itself coming from a woman who conceived three times in five years during her early twenties.

I am fertile as the crescent moon.
My ova hang in clusters like grapes so ripe
they burst through their taut skins.
I conceive like nobody's business,
am forced to will away conception days and days each month.
Hormone levels soar exacerbating yeast,
Yet even in my itchy, juicy, sporishness
I feel like bread dough ever ready to rise.

(for Melanie)

shameless

Sometimes I feel invincible,
and for all that human frailty may try to keep me back
I am gonna just spit in its face,
'cause the fount of feeling that wells up in my breast,
the hurricane, thunderstorm, cavalcade, concerto
of overwhelming emotion that bursts forth from my soul,
Constantly,
is powerful as nine hundred million nuclear reactors on the face of the sun
and I simply must use this power for good.

I am omnipotent,
Able to accomplish astonishing feats like
Coaxing the unwilling to learn to love,
Overcoming internalized oppression so I feel really good about myself as a person,
Communicating remarkably well, all of the time,
and consistently being a considerate human being
while striving, aggressively, toward my dreams.

I am unabashed and unwilling to take no for an answer.
I can and will do it all,
Experience every raw moment this raucous life presents –
I will guzzle everyday miracles like a baleen whale sucking saltwater in the sea,
I will let life shove my face full of sweetness like she is my merciless newlywed,
I will nurture and tend like the thousand-breasted Artemis, and
I will ride life bareback like she was my bucking rodeo pony.
I will use the thorns of the Joshua tree soaked in cuttlefish ink to etch life’s pedigree permanently under my skin,
I will study like a scholar in an ivory tower and obtain the highest degrees –
Just you try to stop me!
And I will wail the cries of every widow war ever made, brokenhearted under the stars then
Like a Jedi on Dagobah I’ll levitate my spaceship above the murky abyss that tries to keep me from soaring light speed through the universe and
Turn even the most heinous of events into lessons I will be grateful to have learned.

I refuse to accept any assessment that I am
Too big, too loud, too wild, too proud and
when those words come toward me like bullets
I will pluck them delicately from the air
Pulverize them,
then blow the dust back in the faces of non-believers till they see…
There is no one as powerful as me,
No one as powerful as any one of us who insist
We live life by our hearts
We submerge ourselves fully in the complexities of existence and
Never ever apologize for what we are or
Who we want to be -
We who are shameless in our insistence that
We are fucking remarkable beyond belief.

(This piece inspired in part by a shameless scorpio beloved, a silver super sonic rock star, and a Death Cab for Cutie song I got turned onto by said silver rock star. The artwork above, also titled "Shameless," is by an amazing artist I just discovered named Stephanie Metz. She is a felted wool sculpture - wow. Please click to see more of her work once you have read my post, of course. Thanks Stephanie.)

rhetorical flourish

I am friends with a young fellow who I'll call M. M is four years old, tall for his age, blonde in a Dennis the Menace kind of way, and uncannily clever. He has a way with words far beyond his years and has a gentle, sensitive, inquisitive nature that often disarms people. He is so amicable people often do not know what to make of him. He is one of my favorite people.

One of the most delightful things about this young character is his penchant for describing and naming things in fabulous detail and with words you'd never expect out of the mouth of a four-year-old. A few weeks after Halloween he pointed out his family's forgotten jack-o-lanterns wasting away in the yard, and told me that those pumpkins were "decaying." Recently his mom told me a story about him explaining to her that he wanted to share his "loves" with her and then described his loves according to the colors and degrees of sparkliness as he saw them.

Today, while playing a game in which he attempts to surprise his mom and she is supposed to act scared, she overdid it and yelled out. M told his mom that her reaction was too loud and that he didn't like it. She asked him how she was supposed to act scared. "Maybe you could just cower," he told her. Yeah mom. Duh. Just cower next time.

But a different incident recently topped them all.

I was visiting with M a couple weeks back, and he wanted to show me one of his robots. He is quite into Transformers (one can hardly blame him; those guys are badass), and he introduced me to a battle worn robot he called Rhetorical Flourish.

"What?" I said, and looked to his mom for confirmation.

"Rhetorical Flourish," M said, with literal flourish. "This is Rhetorical Flourish and he likes to......" and whatever it is that M went on to tell me about Rhetorical Flourish I totally don't recall because I was in shock that I had heard what he had just said.

"What the hell?!" I asked his mom.

You see, M's parents are pretty serious Obama supporters. During the election they had the TV turned to MSNBC most nights taking in all the punditry they could in anticipation and hope for Obama's election. M was there, listening passively, and began endearingly referring to Obama as the president before the election ever happened. At some point M must have picked up that phrase and decided it was an apt name for his Transformer. He shocked his mother, though, the first day he asked her if she had seen Rhetorical Flourish. She said she reacted in much the way I did, asking "What?" with her jaw agape.

So yeah. Rhetorical Flourish. There's not much more I can say to compete with that.

my face in asheville

I am participating in a fantastic project that I am excited to share with you. The lovely and talented Jen Bowen is documenting the people who love Asheville and call it their home. The project is called Faces of Asheville, and I encourage you to check out her beautiful and well done website about this inspiring undertaking as soon as you are done reading my blog post!

Faces of Asheville is a two part project. The first part is comprised of portraits taken of any and all Asheville volunteers who were willing to come and be photographed, holding a single item somehow representative of themselves. My boys and I went and were photographed individually and together. L held his guitar, of course; G held a stick and wore a mask for his individual photo, and I held a puppy... ;) We also did a family portrait. We haven't seen our pictures yet, but there are great examples of other people's portraits in the website.

The second aspect is for each participant to share their Asheville story. Jen asked us to write about what brought us here, what keeps us here, and what do we hope for our future in our city? Plus she asked us to include our thoughts on the a few more questions regarding Asheville:
1) In the immediate present, what do you like / dislike?
2) In the immediate future, what would you change and what is sacred that should not be changed?
3) In the more distant future, what is your vision or hope for Asheville and the surrounding region?

This was my answer:

I originally came to Asheville in 1992 to attend Warren-Wilson College. As soon as I visited the area I knew I wanted to be here. I loved Warren-Wilson, but at that point in my life I was not sure I wanted to be in school. What I really wanted was to be a mom. I had just turned 19 years old. I had some fun at WWC, and in the meantime I discovered a local herbalist named Whitewolf with whom I started my first holistic herbal studies. I decided I wanted to pursue this training and carry it over into studying midwifery. Asheville seemed like a great place to do that.

Then, sort of accidentally on purpose, I got pregnant. Yay! It was during the amazing blizzard of '93 in which my partner and I got stuck out in Swannanoa. He worked in the kitchen at the restaurant in the Holiday Inn on Highway 70, and the management put us up in a room at the hotel so he would be available to cook every shift for all the hotel patrons trapped in Swannanoa, too. We were there for three days, and during his few hours off of kitchen duty, we made a baby.

Even though I loved the area, I thought I wanted to be closer to my family in Pittsburgh to have the baby, so we moved back up north. Our families helped us a lot, which we needed, but I never quit feeling like leaving Asheville was a mistake. I loved it here so much. But, I was busy having a baby and my partner went back to school and that was what we did for a couple of years. In the meantime, we got pregnant again, and in the spring of 1995 I had my second son just in time for their daddy to graduate college.

We lived, all four of us, at my mother's house in Pittsburgh for one more year, and during the summer of 1996 we returned to attend a friend's wedding at Warren-Wilson. That was it. We knew we had to come back. Though I loved being a mommy and lived in a busy suburban area close to the city, I have never felt so isolated in my life as I did at that time in Pittsburgh. Our move back to Asheville was like a whirlwind. We went to the wedding and were in town one weekend. We picked up a Sunday edition of the Asheville Citizen-Times, and my partner found a job listing that interested him. We returned to Pittsburgh, and he spent the next couple weeks interviewing over the phone, faxing resumes to the company, and lo and behold, they hired him, sight unseen. One month to the day after we had been in town for the wedding, my partner returned to Asheville to start his new job and to look for a place for our family to live. One month after that, on August 1st 1996, our whole family relocated to Asheville, the place where our family, really, had begun.

On the way to NC our very old Volkswagen bus bit the dust, so we were destined to move with no vehicle. He found a place in Montford for us to live, a 2nd story apartment in an old brick apartment quad that seemed perfect since it was walking distance to his new job and to town, and there was a family in the apartment below, a young couple like us with two babies almost the exact same age as our kids. To this day I remain close friends with them, and our kids are the oldest and closest of friends.

So that's what brought me here. What keeps me here is the amazing community. As soon as we moved back, I felt like my whole world opened up. In Pittsburgh I had been an isolated, young, alternative mommy with no peers and no friends. In Asheville there was a thriving, supportive, progressive community of young parents with whom I immediately connected. I made great friends, as did my kids, and I loved living with my babies in such a healthy positive place with so many creative, inspired, loving people. I still do. To this day we have many friends that we have been close to for most of the years since we returned. I can't imagine living without that kind of thriving, conscious, support network.

In the years I have been here things have changed a lot, some for the worse, some for the better. I am thrilled by how vibrant the Asheville arts community has become. Everyday, everywhere you go you can find amazing visual artists, poets, musicians, dancers, crafters, circus performers and individuals doing things you never dreamed of to make this place exciting and entertaining. Unfortunately, with the influx of amazing gifted people, there has also been an element of those who seek to gentrify the town, make it more homogeneous, more upscale, and as a result the racial diversity in town has diminished, and buildings and housing developments have been going up, up, up while dragging the landscape down, down, down. The devastation of our amazing natural resources is by far the worst thing I think that is happening here. The air quality has plummeted since I first came here 16 years ago, and I think the steep slope development, cookie cutter housing complexes and forest clearcutting is criminal. If I had one wish for Asheville and the country as a whole it would be for everyone to STOP, take a deep breath, and to start doing some well-considered urban, suburban and rural planning that would preserve the land and its resources- forests, mountains, waterways, farms, etc. and learn to build sustainably with an eye for integrating with the natural landscape in the places where development and growth must take place.

That is my vision for Asheville and the surrounding area. I want us to create a sustainable haven for individuals and families that wish to live consciously - conscious of community issues such as racism and poverty and oppression and how to work against them, conscious of health and the best ways to live well, conscious of the value of art, music, dance, poetry and the beauty of self-expression, conscious of how to protect the land and the plants and animals for whom this region is also home, conscious of the human need to develop spirituality and seek divinity in a myriad of ways. I want us to learn to truly value diversity and not just give it lip service. I hope we will start taking steps toward this future immediately, so we can reap the benefits of it continually throughout the future of Asheville. Blessed be.

thank you, barack

Earlier tonight I watched Barack Obama speak as he accepted the Democratic party nomination. I am no political pundit, nor am I particularly versed on politics in general. My agenda is generally so far from anything any mainstream American political candidate can muster that, unfortunately, I often pay them no heed. And though I am not naively touting the party line now, well aware of the shortcomings of the Democratic Party and even of Obama's campaign, I genuinely support Barack Obama. Furthermore, even if I didn't support him, I would still honor and respect him if only for his brilliant speech writing capabilities and his breathtaking skills as an orator. His speech tonight was certainly another spellbinding moment in his career.

I was gathered with some friends and my kids to watch the speech, and as we waited for Barack to hit the stage my younger son, G, asked if he could go watch a movie in another room. I told him no because I thought he should be with us for an important historical moment, the moment that a major political party in the United States finally, officially nominated somebody other than a white guy as the presidential candidate. Even if Barack does not assume the presidency, though I dearly pray he does, I felt this moment was of historical significance and that it was a worthy history lesson, a valuable moment to spend time with family, and if nothing else, an opportunity for the boys to get a good lesson in public speaking.

My friends and L and I watched the speech in rapt attention, and though I wasn't keeping very close tabs on him, G seemed kind of bored, and occasionally I had to stop him from fidgeting with a ball as the noise from him playing was making it hard for us to hear. So, imagine my surprise when we arrived home and G came up to me and said, "Mom, that speech was so amazing. I was interested in it the whole time even though I didn't think I would be. I even got tingles sometimes listening to it. I've never ever heard anything like that."

I asked him if he was glad I had made him watch it. He said, "Yeah," then hugged me and walked away.

Wow. For all that the American political process feels antiquated to me like a coal-fueled steam engine heading over a rickety bridge in the dark of night with no moon to guide, my heart sang for this moment. My children were inspired by the political process; they were inspired by a man participating in this supposed democracy who is doing his job well enough that an aloof teenage boy who would normally rather be playing video games listened with interest and "tingles" to a political speech referencing foreign policy, veterans' affairs, energy resources, tax cuts, the right to choose and same sex marriage. The acceptance speech from the US Democratic party candidate moved my thirteen year old boy to hug me in thanks for making sure he did not miss it, and this is a child who generally does not give physical affection without a struggle. Wow.

Thank you, Barack. Though I know this country and the world need a lot more than one man to bail us out of this handbasket to hell, I am sure grateful that you're hat is in the ring to try to help. Thank you for demonstrating to my sons that compassion, hard work, dedication and good communication are valuable to our society, and thank you for, perhaps, inspiring them to take up their civic responsibility someday soon. I am grateful for that.

I hope you and your beautiful family fare this arduous election process safely and come out thriving on the other side. And I hope I can soon call you the next president of the United States.

first night

(the moon as seen before the eclipse, through the Bone Tree)

Today Burning Man 2008 begins in the Black Rock Desert, and I will not be there. I feel good about that, although of course I would love to be there, because going to Burning Man in the first place was an amazing miracle that I thought I might never accomplish, and now I have been twice! So, to my dear friends on the playa tonight, I dedicate this poem that I wrote about my first night last year during the outstanding lunar eclipse. I hope you all the change the world, one dusty step at a time.


(during the eclipse)


we were bicycle pilgrims in the flat desert night
watched the looming moon disappear into eclipse
the absence of the silver brilliant sheen rendered the scene undercover
like an underground movement of salvation seeking souls.
hallucinated colors orbited the newborn stars of the falsely dark sky
the rust colored orb slowly arced through shifting star trails
and chaos reigned as the effigy burned by arson nearby.
but all around a neon city grew from the bottom up
the bare bones of geodesic domes filled with
towers of speaker stacks eager to create oases of sound.
the moon in totality loped at a timeless pace
we wondered like the ancients if the world was ending
or just beginning
and if we would ever see her silver face again.
our answer was to commence the ritual
fired up the gas generators to start the electric drums
that echoed over the long silent floor of the empty lake bed
now brittle, dry and alkaline.
the boom of the beat drove bodies to move
to shake and stomp and beg for the light
all the while worshiping the dark.
I danced the prayers of a thousand deities into white dinosaur bone dust
felt the mercury moonglow like liquid as it seeped
cold and crystal bright from the edges of the swollen shadowed satellite
witnessed the sky’s evolution from india ink to azure
my own shadow once again cast long on the ground by
the lunar spotlight shining just above the mountain horizon
where she headed for her morning’s rest.
but before the moon laid herself down
the beat belied a hint of brassy
the distant line of the opposite horizon
began to glimmer with a warm edge of daylight.
we were engulfed between cool blue waning
and golden dawn fire waxing
breathing in the powdered shells of trilobites
rising in fossil clouds from beneath our pounding feet
rising as the smoke from the still smoldering remains of the man
who we would resurrect only to burn again
and the music carried us
as our shadows centered into ourselves
balanced
rapturously
between the moon and the sun
in the exact moment
that our day was born of night.


(the man still smoldering as the eclipse wanes)

elemental

I have been noticing the parade of time lately
marching jubilantly across my friends’ faces,
fertilizing each life stage my sons race through and
dragging down the soft contours of my frame

a silent river, invisible and swift, carrying away
one day after the next
edging flowers out of the earth
trampling them then back to loam,
building our young from seed cells to
marbled flesh grown
on to lanky strong bodies
that eventually curl to shrunken shells
of themselves

our bodies are mere mile markers in this race of indefinite end
that turns brown to green to yellow orange red brown again
feel it gaining speed each turn of the season
frost floods of spring barreling down mountain streams and
fall’s hurricane winds whipping wildly through trees
a frenzy of change, of cycles, reprise
with power and momentum that never cease

yet

in the eye of this storm I find I’m defenseless
flailing and grasping to reign in my senses
to come back to the moment and be here right now
to witness, experience and listen to how
amidst this rampage of growth and decay
imperceptibly the most devout of songs plays
the undercurrent, the harmony heard only
when we deign our minds still
the thrum rises up like a sap
with which our veins slowly fill
with its essence of each moment existing tranquil
deliberate and wholly in the now
each separate zen instant
ending adamantly as it begins
the force of the stillness sets the mind to spin

it’s inscrutable this paradox of time raging on
composed of a train of never-ending seconds
individually lethargic, gradual, brief
but time that deft bandit gathers them, a nimble thief
leaving only traces and memories on our minds and our flesh
like the skin now threadbare that covers my breasts
they’re silt-dust soft as a favorite shirt worn see-through
the caress of aging that I never quite knew
to expect or to love as these lessons I learn
for youth and days past it’s so easy to yearn
but the element of time our compassionate master
nudges us onward sometimes slow, sometimes faster
to the inevitable and gorgeous culmination of our days
and we have the great joy of indulging on the way
in each second, instant, moment, hour, year and phase
and I am gathering my rosebuds while I may
and I speak to suggest that you do the same
but unlike the poet of that phrase’s fame
I implore you to endeavor that your gathering persist
long beyond the days of your prime

time does what it does and there is no denying
but how we define its impact is our way of trying
to live absolutely our fullest and best
to soak it all up before our shells rest
to make peace with ourselves and our own perfection
as creatures laconic without resurrection

I know, I say it all the time- we die!
but dear ones my point is to see through the lies
of the inequity of age and the falsehoods of danger
so we will live and live and live
and never be as strangers
to each other, to experience and
to our own corporeal selves
we are so blessed to inhabit this realm

time giveth and time taketh away
but even in the taking there are gifts that remain
so hold them, examine them, let them wide in
feel it move across your skin
I am absorbing this lifetime and letting it
win

irony

I just returned from a trip to New York City to visit my sister. I consider myself a country girl and choose to live way the hell out in the mountains, and I like it that way. I do, however, very much enjoy the city. I love to see all the people and daydream what their lives are like, and of course in New York the diversity is fantastic. There are so many languages, so many styles of dress, so many colors of skin, and so, so many fabulous foods to eat from all over the globe. I also love concerts and museums and busy excitement, so the city is a great place for me to visit, then I am perfectly content to get back to my crickets and sunrises at home.

On this particular trip I enjoyed a couple moments of great irony. On our first day in town, my sister asked the boys and me if we would mind to help her catch up on her gardening. She has a plot in a wonderful, reclaimed lot full of flowers, herbs, veggies and artwork that is clearly a haven for the community. We dug in the dirt, pulled weeds and helped her harvest tons of green beans, tomatoes, basil, carrots and hot peppers. I love to garden and was so glad to have the chance to help my sister, but I couldn't get over how ridiculous it was that I had to go on vacation to one of the biggest cities in the world in order to be able to garden. At home I have a very small flower and herb garden I keep up, but I am entirely too busy, thus far, to invest in a veggie garden. I hate that I don't have one, and one of these days I will, but right now school, work and single parent homeschooling has ruled it out. Funny, huh?

On our last day in town we visited a P.S.1., a satellite MOMA gallery. It was awesome! There were several exhibits I really liked including one called "Arctic Hysteria" which featured, amongst other things, a stuffed, white, arctic hare perched mystically at the edge of a round, lighted pool of water as if the fellow were in the middle of scrying some future torment for its human adversaries. His colleague, above, holds a small plate of milk and was animated by a motor so he trembled, thus the piece's name, "Trembling and Honoring." How good is that?

There was also a collection of socio-political activist artwork from and inspired by the 60's and 70's called "That Was Then... This Is Now." Naturally, I thought this was great. I love revolutionary artwork and do believe that art is a natural forum for creating social change, so I am always glad to see it in action. I find it inspirational.

Honestly, I am a bit of a museum slut. It does not take much to turn me on when it comes to creative expression because, for the most part, I am just so freaking pleased when people take the time to do anything out of the ordinary to share their own unique perspective with the world that even if the work does not appeal to me personally, I am glad to have seen it.

So the second moment of irony came at the P.S.1. The gallery has an outdoor installation of large, round barrels full of plants and vegetables, again, another constructive way of employing urban space to hold aesthetic and oxygen-providing greenery. But this installation did not stop at plants. Oh no, once again I found that I had traveled 750 miles to the city to indulge in a simple country pleasure. This time it was hanging out with their chickens. You see, I don't have chickens of my own, even though I would really like to, because my husky dog loves to eat them. So at a hip, urban art gallery in Queens, I got to chill with some quaint country fowl. They were cute. It made me happy.

After all, I love irony.

blogs are amazing: a post for cassi

I have blogger's guilt, which is a silly self-imposed phenomenon, but nevertheless I am feeling it because I have sorely neglected this blog for the last year. Though the truth is, my blog is still serving me. As you may know, I started graduate school this summer. It has been an amazing whirlwind of an experience in which first I had this wild hair idea to go back to school against all adds, and next thing I knew I was doing it.

Now, I love it! So far, at least. I completed my summer semester with a 4.0, thoroughly enjoyed all my classes, learned a great deal and realized I am absolutely on the right path for myself at this time. One of the things I have realized through this process, first in applying to the program then in doing my coursework this past semester, is that my writing joints are well lubricated even though it has been seven years since I was last in school. Blogging did this for me! If you read my first post you will see that one of my intentions in starting this blog was to give myself a constructive outlet with some degree of accountability so that I would write and keep writing. At that juncture, I was specifically missing the structure of a formal educational environment that would force me to think critically and write proactively, so I made that for myself with this blog. Now that I am back in school, I don't need it as much, so I am writing here less. C'est la vie. But I love this blog and suspect I will always tune in from time to time to put in my two cents. I can't help myself. My brain churns out penny thoughts at an alarming rate. I've got to stash all that intellectual loose change somewhere.

The other thing that is amazing about blogs is how it connects people. Twice in the last year I have had lovely experiences in which someone who read my blog had been connected to me in the past or was going to be connected to me in the future. When I met the beautiful and talented Yoni Love online through myspace, she said to me, "I have been wondering when we would meet." She had been introduced to my blog through a midwife teacher we share, and she was already intimately acquainted with my writing when I wrote to her to ooh and ahh over her gorgeous yoni paintings (please check out her artwork, like the piece above, and contact her if interested in prints of her work). In fact, she had shared one of my poems with a birthing family to ease them in a difficult time. Wow.

Recently, I was contacted by a former acquaintance who had the mixed fortune I did to grow up in the same backwards, blue-collar suburb of Pittsburgh from which I so gratefully escaped. That place always felt to me like a prison, a stifling, choking vortex of unhealthy attitudes and suffering people that I prayed through my youth to leave. And my suspicions were correct; my life blossomed in a liberating and healing way when I relocated. Every now and again I hear from folks still living in that same community, and all too often they are still stifled and stuck there carrying on the same attitudes and oppression that our families and neighbors bore before us. Once in a while, though, I meet up with a light that shone through, someone else who realized that, though they may stay in that place, they need not live that oppression and that they can seek emotional, spiritual and physical health through a different paradigm. Though I haven't spoken with her, Cassi, for whom I wrote this post, connected with me to say that she, too, has a passion for midwifery, and knowing midwifery as I do, I realize that if she holds dear the values of midwifery, she has come a long way since those dark Shaler days. I am glad you found me, Cassi. I am glad we can look behind us together and realize we are not stuck there. I would be glad to stay connected into the future.

So today, in honor of the gifts this blog has given me, I have decided to breathe a little new life into it. I've got a handful of small posts I have been meaning to add, and I will try to get them up in the next few days. School starts in one week, so before I get carried away by the rapid river of academic assignments, I'd like to dip my feet into this babbling brook of my creative writing a few more times. Thanks, "just a position." And thanks to all of you other writers out there connecting and sharing in our global community. Yay us!

paean to a modern mystic

Body painted in reds and blues
you open your face to bellow melodies
that scream of soul’s initiation
of looming revelation
of stoned intoxication
the divine---
your holy verse delivered
in front of an electrified guitar choir
rumbling powerfully
fueled by sacred meter drumfire

ministering to many, your lyrics a koan
raising the level of human vibration
sending followers to seek an unknown
sung by you
your rage, your love
your holistic experience of godhead
dropping the hints we need
to reap the Eleusinian mysteries of our age

You, irreverent harbinger of the rains to come,
I am listening---
I have experienced communion through the sound of your voice,
a raw tremor and roar speaking directly to god,
resounding your poetry of sex and death
mother/ son
father/ child
the illusion of our pain
I have felt your parabols deliver me
to my mortal eternity
to the inborn wisdom seen
through my own third eye

in supplication
in prayer that I might behold you, hold you and
hear, at least once, the inflection of your voice
hummed directly in my ear
I offer my mind to yours to share in
metaphysical, psychedelic discourse,
I offer my flesh to yours to share in
sessions of salvation through intercourse
Maynard James, I would give you the holiest of gifts
I offer you my sacramental self

i have been accepted

Heh. I like the sound of that. It can mean so many lovely things.

In this case, though, it means that I received my acceptance letter from the grad school program to which I applied. Which is great and a great honor. Only now I am scared to bejeesus of what my life will be like as a single mom, homeschooling two kids, holding down a part-time job and commuting to a grad school program that will be either a 30 minute or an hour and a half commute depending on which site my classes are that day. I have hardly written anything in months because I have been working on my application and quietly hiding away with all the responsibilities that I have, and love, but that already take up all of my time.

Can I make magic? Can I create more hours in the day so I can still make healthy dinners from scratch and take long walks with my dogs and do yoga and teach my kids a little about the world and go to soccer games and guitar lessons AND attend classes every evening and do lots of valuable reading and write thoughtful papers and complete an internship? Goddess bless, I hope so, 'cause I think I am gonna give it a shot!

So the program to which I have been invited is for a Masters in Community Counseling at Western Carolina University. It is, apparently, a very good program, well accredited and appropriately focused on personal wellness.

I thought I'd share the essay I wrote for my application since it is the only thing worth noting I have written in quite some time. This is the extended version; I had to cut it back considerably in order to stay within the required length, but wordy creature that I am, I prefer this version:

For a number of years it has been my goal to seek the education I need to make counseling my career path; as such I am applying for admission to the M.S. in Community Counseling program. I have an earnest desire to promote healing and wellness in the world by providing assistance to others to help them attain their own satisfaction, comfort and joy. I have always been personally dedicated to human service and healing. Earlier in my life I studied and practiced as a midwife because I felt that by helping families bring their children into the world in safety and in peace that I might make an impact toward creating a safer and more peaceful world. It is my belief that with compassionate, natural care during pregnancy and birth it will increase the likelihood that healthful nurturing will take place within the family itself, and my hope that it would create a healthy family dynamic preventing potential problems for those family members later.

For a variety of reasons, though, I have decided that I am unable to practice midwifery as my career, yet my interest in serving my community as a resource and support person has never waned and, fortunately, neither have my opportunities to provide that service. Friends and acquaintances as well as the families with whom I have shared birth experiences have continued to call upon me to midwife them, so to speak, through some of their more troubling personal concerns, and I have been grateful to make myself available to them to serve in that capacity. I have stood with my loved ones as they have faced relationship concerns, parenting issues, community disagreements, addiction, depression and the loss of loved ones. While I never think that I have the answers to their problems, I find that I have a strong ability to be present and listen and offer support in a variety of ways to people in these situations. I believe it is the logical progression of my being organically called to serve in a counseling capacity to my community to now move forward and strive for the education that will allow me to best serve that community and also allow my family and myself to benefit from this service by making it my career.

In my role as a midwife I have had many opportunities to work with people as they have tried to overcome deep fears and concerns. Midwifery is an intimate service in which normal barriers fall away and you find yourself staring directly in the face of another person, to whom you previously may not have been close at all, as they stare directly in the face of their greatest challenges. In this space I have found myself needing to be centered and compassionate, strong but yielding, giving of myself though never taking over the process that rightly belongs with the family. I have assisted women as they dealt with the unexpected disappointment of a difficult birth, a c-section when a natural birth was truly desired. I have been supportive to couples as they have decided how to tell their families they are unexpectedly becoming parents and as they dealt with the emotional repercussions of their families’ reactions. I have mediated between an expectant father and mother as they tried with difficulty to decide whether or not to circumcise their baby, should he be a boy, because the father felt his heritage dictated that ritual but the mother believed strongly that it was an unnecessary and undesirable medical procedure to which to subject the child. I have provided reassurance as a family learned their newborn had a grave congenital heart defect and stayed close as they processed the intensity of his subsequent surgeries and hospitalizations. And I have cried with a family as they grieved over their stillborn daughter and spent many long hours in therapeutic discussion with the bereaved mother as she tried to make sense of her loss.

My experiences in the realm of counseling are not limited to those I have had through midwifery. I am a mother of two teenaged sons, and my interpersonal dealings with them as they navigate their relationships with each other, with their father, who has lived long-distance from us since their early childhood, and with me has been a fount of opportunity to explore therapeutic human interaction. As a result of home-schooling my children I have also taught a wide age-range of other children in classes and groups and participated with them as they have worked to learn their subjects, to learn about themselves and the world and to learn how to interact with their peers. I have served as a youth group teacher and counselor in Unitarian-Universalist churches off and on throughout my adulthood and have worked with young people as they have explored such diverse topics as race relations, religious tolerance and their own developing human sexuality. In my long time residence in the Asheville area I have connected with a wide social circle full of an eclectic set of characters typical of this unique area; many times I have found myself in the position of mediating between these friends or within families or various local organizations. I chose to bolster my skills in mediation by pursuing professional training through The Mediation Center, which I completed in 2006.

I feel that my own personal growth process has led me to a place in which I am very open to self-reflection for the purpose of preparing myself to become a counselor to others. I am, to be frank, a thriving survivor of a highly dysfunctional family in which I experienced poverty, abuse and neglect. I have coped with the long distance separation of my children’s father from our family and raising my sons as a single parent. I faced serious emotional hurdles in supporting a former partner during an emotional breakdown that led to his commitment to a mental health facility, followed by a stay in a drug rehabilitation center and ongoing recovery work. The combination of these experiences, amongst others, has resulted in a personal openness, a deep sense of compassion for myself and others, a willingness and desire to communicate as effectively and healthfully as possible and a sense of understanding of self that allows me to recognize my mistakes and patterns, to forgive myself and to learn from the process. These traits are helping me to become a more strong and adaptable person and to succeed in my personal goals, and I hope that they will foster my ability to learn what I need in order to work competently in the counseling field. I see myself working professionally in a private or group practice, counseling for individuals or families, perhaps in conjunction with practitioners of other holistic modalities. I may wish to focus on working with a similar demographic as I did in midwifery, families going through the experiences and transitions of childbearing and childrearing and the concomitant changes of that time in relationship to self and others, and perhaps providing grief counseling for families experiencing childbearing losses.

Today, after all I have been through, I consider myself to be a content, well-adjusted and self-assured individual with a great joy for living. It is the fact that I have faced such hardship and been able, with the help of an assortment of different types of counseling and therapy, to make such an enjoyable life for myself, to provide a healthy home for my children and to have enduring and beneficial relationships with my family and friends that leads me to believe that it is possible for individuals to overcome many hardships and still find their peace. While I know that I can never hold the secret for others to reach contentment, as they must do so for themselves, I do believe that with the proper education I can combine the lessons I have learned, my gifts for compassion and communication and my desire to serve and go out into the world and listen, support, and yes, midwife others as they seek their own resolution, find their own peace and become the people they long to be.

tonight i write for grandma gail

Tonight I write for Grandma Gail.

(This original post was written 11.29.07. Today is 1.28.14 and Grandma Gail died this morning. She actually recovered very well from the sudden heart problems that I describe in this post, and she went on to actually quit smoking, which I never thought would happen! Unfortunately, a few years ago she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She received treatment and went into remission for a while, but when the cancer re-occurred about a year ago the doctors deemed her health too unstable to treat. For the last year she has been living with the awareness that her death was approaching, however the cancer progressed very little, and it was a secondary infection that ultimately called the last breath from her.

More importantly, from the time I wrote this post I was able to engage more actively with Gram. Though I did not see her often, my family made a point to visit when we could, and I spoke with her on the phone more frequently.

We all found she softened a good bit. She reluctantly moved out of the house she had shared with my great grandmother and relocated to an apartment in a complex with other elders and lot of social support. To her surprise, she made friends, she played cards, she got to visit the casino, she helped plan parties! It is with a glad heart that I can say in her final years Grandma Gail relaxed and had a little fun.

I am so grateful that i was able to visit her in her very last days and introduce her to her newest great grandchild. Just over a week ago I made the trek to Pittsburgh from North Carolina to see her. Arduous as it was to go on a long, snowy drive with my 9 month old baby and my 2 1/2 year old niece along, the timing was so very good. We had two days of gentle, easy visits with her in her apartment, and quite literally we were visiting with her until the last moments she ever spent there. She was taken to the hospital just after we left and never returned home.

She thanked me again and again for bringing the babies to see her. She and I had a few good minutes of one-on-one talking about waiting for death. She told me she did not know how to die, and all I could do was liken it to birth. "We don't know how to give birth either, Grandma, and we don't know when it's going to happen. We just need to believe in the process and let it come." I am grateful she did not have to wait very long, as she expressed being ready for the end.

I am also very, very grateful that in her final days that she did have a lot of family nearby, after all. My cousins and uncle lived close to her and helped her regularly. My mother was able to have a long visit over the holidays, and my boys got to see her briefly then, as well. My sister moved to Pittsburgh months ago and has been dutifully visiting and caring for her during this time. My aunt has flown frequently from New Mexico to make several prolonged visits to make sure her care was excellent and her needs were well met. My sister and aunt were both with her until late into last night sharing stories and love.

I love you, Grandma. I envision your energies peacefully and freely mingling amongst all the universe now. Thank you for bringing life to our family. Blessed be.)

My grandma is in the hospital. Late last night, alone in her house so recently vacated by her mother, her only roommate for the last ten years who died this past summer, Grandma Gail called 911, terrified I'm sure, by the horrific pain in her chest. She was rushed to one hospital, then life flighted to another apparently in some imminent danger, and now she rests in the ICU, medicated and sedated while they wait to stabilize her blood pressure so they can open up her chest and work their way to the aneurysm swelling threateningly in her tough old heart.

See, my grandma is no white-haired sweetie who bakes cookies and sends birthday cards every year or care packages in your first year of college. That was my great grandma, her mother, who we called Sita, who passed on, as I said, earlier this year. Gail was never very maternal or nurturing. She is actually quite a miserable old lady who smokes way too much and is prejudiced and judgmental and just a wee bit delusional. She spends too much money on lottery tickets, has a loudly voiced opinion on everything whether you want to hear it or not and is usually no fun to be around. So now, having driven most of her family away from her, she is alone.

Except now, the only place in the world I want to be is by her side. Because right now, I don't care about all the ugly things she said to me when I was a teenager, right now, she is my grandma, my ancestor, and I am afraid she could be at the end of her life. Right now I am remembering that this bitchy old lady used to be my favorite person in the world. There is a family legend of which I do have a vague recollection of living that as a very young child when my mom would tell me no or make me mad that I would cry and scream, "I WANT MY GRAAAAANDMAAAAA!!!" because I knew she'd save the day. Really.

When I was a little girl, my grandma spoiled me rotten. I was raised by a single mom who, like me, like every single mom, was really busy, so when I was very young I spent a lot of time with my grandma. She took me to K-Mart to buy me cheap plastic toys and she took me to the Eat-N-Park restaurant and fed me junk food, all of which I thought was very cool. She never cooked, but she did teach me how to make fried garlic bologna. And I thought it was really, really yummy.

But I have always known in my heart of hearts that Grandma Gail has had a much deeper and more formative impact on me. For all that I have come to know in later years that it was mostly a facade to hide her own pain, my grandma was tough. While other people's grandmas were white-haired and shriveled and in nursing homes, my grandma was sturdy and black-haired and loud. She ran her own business. Of course, through my child's eyes I had know idea her business was failing, miserably. Instead what I saw was a smart woman who could be a business-lady, who worked as an equal with men and drove a jeep out into the country to oversee operations. It doesn't matter now what a myth that is, what a mess it was, the impression it made on me lasted. Grandma Gail taught me I could be bossy, I could be in charge, and I don't think there is a soul who knows me who would argue I have done anything but live that lesson to my core.

Grandma Gail taught me to love books, love literature, love to write. Although the books she read were mostly crappy-ass romance novels, that woman read books voraciously. There were always, always books stacked by the dozen on her desk, her kitchen table and on the floor by her bed. She set an example that if you had free time, you better have your nose in a book. And I didn't know any better about what kind of books she was reading. I just saw that she was reading, all the damn time.

But you know what books she gave me? Shakespeare's plays. I was in fourth grade when my grandma bought me my first copy of Romeo and Juliet. I loved it. I didn't understand a goddamn word of it until I read it all again in high school, but then it was fluid like Seuss, because in early childhood I had mustered my way through that thick and indeciperable old English so it was back there in the recesses of my brain, and with the illumination of a few years and some English classes, suddenly that stuff made perfect sense. I can still recite the balcony scene by heart. Since the fourth grade.

And as much as she read, she wrote. She was aspiring to write the great American romance novel that was going to fly onto the bestsellers list with its buxom heroine on the cover and make grandma a bunch of money. And, like her every other endeavor, she failed at that. But that didn't stop her from clacking away at the cacophonous keys of her electric typewriter late into the night, sometimes really late into the night. She tried. She was really trying. And as I rapidly clack away at my somewhat more decorous computer keyboard composing this ode to her, there isn't a beat in my rhythm that wasn't put into motion by her. Looking around me at the volumes of poetry and blogs and journals I have written over the years, at my sister's nuance laden, remarkable song writing and my brother's deafeningly talented, late night poems, there is no argument that can be made that Gail didn't have a hand in making writers out of all of us.

I just can't figure out what the fuck went wrong. Grandma, for all the falsehoods she has come to rely on as fact the older she has gotten, is a really smart lady. She is highly intellectually gifted. She could have been a good writer. She could have run a successful business, but something was always wrong and for the life of me I have not been able to trace it to its source.

Our family is like a modern fairy tale, a tale of one daughter that grew like a favored flower on a vine and another who grew like a hardy weed, tough and irascible but never the delicate blossom you would bring home and admire. My great grandma Sita or Mary, as the rest of the world knew her, had two beautiful daughters, Gail and Wynne. I didn't know my great grandfather, but I heard he was a nice man, and Sita was a very lovely lady. They had traditional values, of which I am not a huge fan, but that was how the world worked early in the last century, right? And some of those traditional values were really based in an even older tradition, that I suspect I would appreciate more. Sita's family immigrated from Lebanon, five kids or so in tow and a couple more to be born in the new world. So Gail and Wynne grew up with a loving mother and father and lots of family around to shower them with love. They grew up on homemade Middle Eastern food with Arabic speaking aunties telling them stories.

So somehow along the way the two flowers diverged. Gail got married young, too young, to my grandfather who I never knew because he left before I made it into this story. She had three kids, beautiful and bright, and from their telling, she committed her worst failure of all by neglecting to nurture her babies as she should have. They resent her and her lack and their lives have been full of struggle, are still full of struggle. Wynne, though, well, she went to college, then got married, then had four kids, who all grew up to get educations, then careers, then spouses, then families-- and all in that order. Not that I think that is all there is to life, but those cousins of ours, they seem even-keeled, seem a little less stricken. They certainly have made some money, but they also seem to have a lot of love. They seem like happy people.

But my grandma's legacy has been poverty and drunkenness and drug addiction and divorce. Her kids have all seen it all, and most of us grandkids, too. And though I personally am truly happy and very content with my life now, it was a hell of a hard road getting here. And I do recognize and honor all of the radical thinking and revolutionary acts and outstanding art that has been born out the painful path that Gail's progeny have walked, too. The beauty in the dissonance (to quote Tool) stemming from Gail's side of the family is by no means lost on me.

But I can't help but hurt knowing that my grandma is not happy. She has never been happy. Not, I believe, for a day in all the years I've known her. And I am sad for her. I forgive all her ridiculous mistakes, all the times she called us names once we left behind childhood's innocence. Man, she hated that. She loved to dote on all of us as young children, but once she began to see a glimmer of our snarky adolescent independence, she turned on us like God turned on poor Adam and Eve once they had bitten that bittersweet apple of knowledge. When our innocence was lost, so was the grace we held in her eyes. And it was a really fucking hard fall for me, her pronounced favorite. But in retrospect, I know in my flesh made of her flesh that that was when she experienced her own fall. I am sure of it. When she lost her own innocence was when all the world went dark for her, and every time she saw one of her kids or her grandkids go through our natural progression out of the safety of childhood's naivete and into the relative danger of the dirty knowledge of adulthood, she went through her own loss again, and she could not bear it. She lashed out at us, as if to keep the very memories from her own mind, all the while, though, wanting only to protect is from the fears she held for us about growing up into the pain she has known for herself.

I don't know what happened, Grandma, but I wish I did. I wish I could take all that pain away from you and let you live your life again unfettered by that trauma and fear. I wish for all the world that any of us could have better tolerated your harping abuse, because maybe now we wouldn't all be so far flung away from you all over this big country and instead be by your bedside. I get it now. But it took you being incapacitated in a hospital 500 miles away from me for to really let it sink in.

When Sita died this summer I was the only one who didn't cry. I loved Sita, but I did not feel close to her, and she lived such a long, rich and happy life that when in her 96th year she didn't wake from a nap one summer afternoon, I felt nothing but relief and joy that she did not suffer, that her full life had come to its natural end. Today I've cried for Gail off and on all day. I want my grandma who I always thought was so strong to actually be strong. I do not want her life to end alone and miserable, for I would not wish that on anyone, but most certainly not on the woman from whom I learned that wearing boots made you look cool and swearing like a fucking truck driver isn't just for truck drivers. I wish that, despite our insistence that poverty is an act of revolution that we had somehow succeeded where she failed and that we all had enough goddamn money to take the week off work and jump onto planes and fly to her side.

When I was a little girl, I had a lot of fears. The dark veil that fell over our side of the family shrouded me most in my early years, and I had some real shit to be scared of. But I remember saying to grandma one time that I wasn't afraid of any monsters coming to get me at her house cause I knew she would scare them all away. I remember everyone laughed when I said that, and of course as a mommy now, familiar with the "out of the mouths of babes" phenomenon, and knowing how everyone felt about Gail, I understand why they laughed and the entirely different dimension of meaning there is to that story. But I also remember acutely, in a way I do not remember much else about my cloudy childhood, the feeling I had when I said that to her. I felt safe. I felt secure. And I did not feel that way much as a child. I am grateful my miserable grandma had the power to make me feel safe, had some sort of gift of illusion that lead me to believe she was strong, that demonstrated to me that women are strong. I have gone far with that belief.

As I sat writing this my mom called. Although she is still in ICU, it sounds as though maybe Grandma Gail is not as bad off as we thought earlier today. The diagnosis is no longer coronary aneurysm, but two small aortic tears brought on by a very serious and scary, nonetheless, attack of high blood pressure. This is just the beginning of the end. Born of her pain and self-loathing I am sure, Grandma Gail has not at all cared for herself well. I do not suspect she will make the mostly graceful exit that her mother made, having never lived with much of the same grace, either. It is too early still to know how she will recover from this episode and how she will respond to medications and instructions to, say, quit smoking (although, I can guess on that count). She will probably be bitchier now and in pain and feel even more persecuted than before. She may not be able to work, poor soul that she is, who has still been working almost every day at 75 years of age as a manager at a gas station because she's too poor not to. Fuck, what I wouldn't do to change that for her.

But I am grateful that her illness brought up this well of compassion and admiration for her that I didn't even realize until today that I harbor inside me. I am inspired to get more present in her life and figure out how I can be there for her if and when this happens again. And even more so, I feel suddenly dedicated to work on bringing her some joy, some comfort, some validation in the coming months and hopefully years of her life. I didn't realize until just now how much I forgive her. I didn't realize until I started writing how much that tough old broad really did help make me who I am today. And though I did not learn this trait from her, I really like myself and am proud to be who I am, a third generation single mother who swears too much and writes late into the night and fiercely protects her children from monsters in a way that I may have only imagined had been done for me, but that my grandma helped me imagine well enough to make it my reality.


(Grandma Gail loves unicorns, as do my mom and I. I picture her as the unicorn above with all of us gathering around her.)

spiritual rock

Yesterday, for the first time in a long while, I walked out onto the other end of my property. Granted, almost every day I walk alongside one edge of our property’s border with the boys and the dogs, and I love our walk and daily feel so blessed to live in these mountains surrounded by trees and millions of brilliant little plants and under an impossibly blue (and still very dry) sky. But out of habit and function, we have fallen into a routine in which we take the same walk every day, so it was nice to break out of that and walk the overgrown path out to the sturdy wooden platforms that were built on this land before we ever got here.

And I fell in love, as I do every time I wander anywhere on this patch of earth I so gratefully call home. The leaves crunched crisply under our feet and our pack of dogs gleefully ran roughshod around our legs. The kids climbed on our mysterious hippie sound dome, another structure built prior to our arrival that we adopted with the property. I keenly noticed which pieces of fallen wood will burn well to heat the house and which pieces were better suited to compost back into the ground nourishing the soil and providing housing for mice and bugs. It is so beautiful here, and there is so much life, so much going on around us every minute; it is miraculous.

I cannot explain really what it is like to be in love with land like this. As much as I don’t want to think ownership has anything to do with it, I know my relationship to this place is very different than it has been to any other place I’ve ever lived or visited, but I think it is less because I feel it belongs to me, and more because I feel like I belong to it, or that we are here for each other, locked into an agreement that these hills and trees will provide me with shelter and beauty and food and heat and space, and I will, in turn, do everything in my power to protect at least this little parcel from being plowed under, bulldozed over, excavated and turned into one more homogenized, flattened, suburban sprawl style housing development. I talk to the land and to the trees. I pray for them to pull energy up through their roots to send out to me that I may have what it takes to protect them. I offer to be their voice. I vision what I might see for the land and me to create together and play that vision over in my head as I walk along to feel if I am met with approval or resistance. The land feels it might enjoy having some alpaca live here. It would rather not become ground for cattle or too many more houses. That works for me, too.

As we trekked back toward the house I noticed another entity that makes this place feel especially magical and enduring and inviting: the rocks, the outcroppings and boulders and huge stones that are all around us as if we now reside on grounds that were formerly used for some sort of giants’ pebble tossing festival. I will never ever forget the first time we drove here, utterly enchanted and enthralled to think we could perhaps live in such a wonderland. The route to our home from town is filled with dramatic rock faces and waterfalls, and our land is home to many impressive, massive stones that jut defiantly from the ground. They have so much personality in their different sizes and shapes and colors and feelings.

One rock, in particular, will always have my heart. This one sits just a little way off the path we walked yesterday, back amongst the trees, and I noticed it very fondly. It faces out into our yard to the east, where you could catch a dazzling sunrise through the forest if you were to sit there near dawn. It is large enough that two or three beloved friends could sit together comfortably, their feet dangling off the edge just above the ground. During one of our earliest visits, as we returned here numerous times to be sure this indeed was the place we would call home, my then eight year old G romped excitedly through the woods. This place was like something out of my children’s dreams, and they were excitedly exploring every facet of the land. He called to me from the woods and I looked up to see him perched on that particular rock, and he said, “Mom, look! A spiritual rock!” but in his childlike dialect it came out more like “speerichool rock.” I am sure I will always think of that rock as the spiritual rock, and it will always give me a shiver of pleasure to remember his little voice calling out those words and to be reminded of how exceptionally blessed we are to live in such a place that calls a little boy to so easily name the sacred.


(The rock in the picture above is not on our property, but rather is a distance view of the locally famous Chimney Rock which our property overlooks from a greater distance.)

suddenly adolescent

My eldest is going to turn 14 next month. That means in just over a year he will be old enough to qualify for his driver's learning permit. This occurred to me just recently. Now, all of the sudden, he seems to have a girlfriend.

He is a tricky fellow, my little boy turned big. He is very smart and very cute, but very awkward. He talks too much. He is really negative and judgmental. He seems to want to dress all in black and kind of goth-metal. Which is fine, I did all of that stuff. But the issue has been that for months he has felt like he has no friends (which isn't true) and has been a bit mopey about it, yet at any opportunity I have provided for him to make new friends (and I have gone well out of my way to do so), he always hates the other kids.

Until now. A few weeks ago a new girl showed up at the homeschool writing class I teach. She is tall, like him, pretty like him, all goth and into vampires, like him, wears dark eyeliner, like him, a 13 year old Capricorn, like him. During the second class I noticed she threw notes to him throughout. Cute.

So they have spent some together since. And oddly, another thing they have in common is their upbringing. She, too, has a single, heavily tattooed, fringe-of-society kind of mom. She, too, has been living out on a very rural acreage with limited friends. She, too, has three big dogs, one of whom eats their chickens. She, too, has been homeschooled her entire life. So it all really makes sense.

Last night when I arrived to pick him up, there he sat on the couch with her, arms around each other, her head on his chest. A first. I am experiencing my own sense of shock. It feels a bit like the tornado winds of change have just blown through my life and my relationship with my son. Now he puts his arms around a girl and I wonder what will come next. (Well, I know what comes next, but when?) For the first time in his life, he ignores me and my adult conversations for his own teenage companion. An entirely new set of very adult issues is now a potential reality for his life, and mine. I want to reign him in, hold him close to me, tighter. I have worked so hard to protect him, but now I really do need to let him go and begin to figure out his own life (which it is) on his own.

I realize I am not the first person to ever go through this transition with their child, but our paradigm has been one of being so very enmeshed with each other, intentionally. Attachment style parenting is about allowing the incredibly powerful bond that exists between parent and child to truly flourish. It is about giving yourself, body and soul, to your child so that he knows that he is safe and loved. Through that gift he develops a strong sense of security, of self-worth, which allows him to explore his world with such secure back up that he can become strongly independent. Now he is. He has had wide open access to me for all his needs for so long, that it is a bit like getting the rug yanked out from under me to recognize how near he is to no longer needing that. Not yet, I know. Not today. But soon.

I am pleased that he is happy and enjoying himself. I have been giving him rides and dropping him off and allowing him to have free time with his friend. I have not been harassing him (too much) with questions about what they do together. And I know (unbeknownst to him) that this is just a beginning, the first in a long line of meetings that will gradually, over time shape how he gives and receives love, who he will love and what love will mean to him. And I know that this is a delicate and powerful process that will literally shape his life and will greatly impact his enjoyment of his life, his ability to be fulfilled in and out of relationships. I look around at all those around me broken by love and I realize why this feels so monumental. Because it is.

We are born to love, are creatures of love incarnate, and so many struggle with that all of their days. As I have since the first of his cells began replicating in my womb I want for him to live a joyous existence and thrive in every aspect of his life. The role that love plays in his life will touch every other part of his existence. And now at this crucial moment is when I must let go and give him up to this big world and to his own destiny. It sucks, quite honestly.

Yet now is when I look back on the last almost fourteen years of my sacrifices for his sake, of my loving him and his brother like nothing else mattered (because nothing else did), of my being there for him, and I can release him to life knowing that I have prepared in him a well-nourished soil for love to root strongly and survive even the most bitter of winters should he need to brave them, he and his warm heart full of all abiding love.

poem for my brother

poem for my brother

Night creature
Slight young creature born in the pneumonia month of January,
I watched as the ambulance drivers carried our mother
out into the cold on a stretcher.
So sick was she,
Her belly swollen with you protruding into the white sheet
Pulled meagerly over her weak body on its way into
The sharp chill of a Pittsburgh winter.

On a penicillin bender
You came to us 3 weeks early
Never put to the breast
‘cause nobody knew that the good that nursing would have done you
Far outweighed the risk of more antibiotics in the milk you never imbibed,
Nobody knew that whatever attention from our mother you could get
Would barely quell the ache in your heart left by our father’s absence.

30 years later I sit composing in your cave,
Sit writing in your dark, underground space
As I know you have done a thousand times before.
Driven to write about you sitting in your seat and
Surrounded by the library stacks of your poetic predecessors
Blake and Bukowski
Confucius and Cummings
Dante and Dostoyovsky
Hesse, Kafka, Kazantzakis and Kerouac.
Your life lacks such order
Yet your heroes’ tomes rest alphabetically on their dusty shelves
A testimony to the priority the written word has in your world.

Unpaid bills and unattended health issues and untapped talents galore
You are the poet I wish I could be-
Prolific, spewing volumes into the deep hours of the dark night
Edgy and complex and tortured and
What a fucking way with words, man.
All that brilliant angst and unprocessed pain
Distilled into a tangled fury of pure emotion
Your clarion call to yourself, to our mother, to our father
That your childhood still requires action.

Take it, babe. Take that action, whatever it may be,
That gets you out of the pizza joint and into the literary magazines,
Out of the bar and into graduate school,
Out of your misery and into a fulfilling, exciting life of
Love and art and health and family,
Functional family, finally.