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Ecstasy as Housewifery
I light red candles for the table. I sing to the trees
as they leaf. I practice mundane ecstasy. I wash
breakfast dishes in pear-scented suds and look
out the window at slow burgeoning buds
and know, too, of the soft grey nubs
where the peach flowers will not come this year—
December’s frost was too much with them
and the cold turned them dull and barren.
And further in the distance, the vacant acre of dirt
where the garden will grow once the soil gets warm.
Already my fingers itch to dig in the rows.
Already we’ve planted the radishes that no one
in our home wants to eat, but such pleasure
to see them grow so fast, welcome proof that things ripen
when given the chance. Some things take so long to season—
like mothering and forgiveness. And learning to love things
as they are. And these constant lessons in letting go of fear.
And so I recite love poems to the sky. I thank the flour
as I knead it before I leave it to rise. I open the doors
of the heart, I fling them wide, wider, wider still.
I look for divinity in green vegetables as I dice. Oh
mountain top, oh river lodge, oh retreat by the sea.
Oh home, this familiar place where we practice ecstasy.
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Before We Can Unlearn
At this moment, you are seamlessly flowingwith the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the cliffs of Dover. … The Universe thinks and worksthrough you. —Deepak Chopra
So far it’s the physical world that we speak of:
the red Frisbee, the sweet blackberry, the small pink ball.
She points to a tree. This, she says. Tree. I say. Well,
lilac bush. Already the world slips from its chain of syllables.
I want to speak with her about the filtered honey light
of a late April afternoon, and I do, but she brings me
a rock and says, This.And I say, Rock. Gray rock.
And even more, I want to speak of what comes next,
of the longing that the light begets—how it rouses in me
a deep wish to lose the physical world and be current,
be wave, be invisible flourish, to be warmth that drives flowers
to bloom. I want to tell her how sometimes the body
interferes, so material, so fleshsome, so brute in its hungers.
How beyond the red Frisbee there’s a pulse, a rhythm,
atide that no words can touch, and it gathers us and connects
us to all that is: one cosmos, one bloodstream, one river,
one art. How sometimes we get it—whatever it is—and all
that is concrete dissolves in the breath. How we’re twined
to this moment, and the next, and the next. Nest, I say,
as she brings me the small wreath of grass. Bird, I say,
as the small body wings past. She smiles and tries to fly—
half jump, half fall, all innocence. Yes, I say. That’s what
love is like. Oh golden light.Oh luminous task of losing
whatever we think we know. Tree. Rock. Nest.
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Just When I Think I Know
All day, I carried your love
in my pocket as if it were a stone,
something solid, something
with weight, with a shape
I might memorize. I rubbed
it like a rosary, fingering its hollows
and bumps. I found odd comfort
in its smoothness, its heft.
Imagine my surprise tonight
when I emptied my pockets
and pulled out a petal instead.
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Because of the ache
I learn to practice
accepting what seems unacceptable, for instance
this surplus of space
that gapes between us— I tell myself
imagine all the butterflies
that might fly in this breach. I tell myself
the shoulder is made
so the hand might reach.
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As an organic orchardist, I have learned a lot about how much good it does to worry.
None.
If it is going to freeze, it is going to freeze. If it is going to hail for a minute and ding up 70 acres of fruit, it is going to hail. Doesn't do one bit of good to fret. But that doesn't always stop us.
So as I felt that worry coming on a few nights ago, I decided to write about a few facts--what was going on in the world around me. I started with the orchard and its environs and moved it into our home. Seeing things through my children's eyes made things easier to contextualize.
You may want to try this same process, giving yourself multiple new lenses to see the same perceived problem.
Sure There Are Things to Worry About
Late March and the river is indifferent still,
too lazy to be half empty or half full.
On the ends of the branches the peach blossoms
throb inside tight gray clusters, pushing pink
despite the prediction for cold next week.
So much to ripen, if given the chance.
The air hums electric with the pollen dance
And the orchard grass is dressed in white apricot bloom.
In the shuttered room next door to my desk
sleeps a girl in her crib, a boy in his bed,
neither worried one bit about frost.
He knows that tonight there were bats in the yard.
She knows her blanket is velvety warm.
I know I go on loving, no matter the weather.
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Colorado BloggersPowered By Ringsurf
Have you ever wished your life had a sound track? Living in Telluride, Colorado, with a local radio station KOTO and a flurry of music festivals all summer, we just about do have a collective sound track.
But I have this fascination with a personal sound track, one that would include lilting melodies for hiking and even ominous organ chords when I am facing danger.
And then, a few years ago, I came across an article by Alan Cohen, author of “The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” In “They’re Singing Your Song,” which you can find on his website, alancohen.com, he writes about how “a certain African tribe” uses song in a miraculous way—to remind us who we really are.
As his story goes, the women in this tribe go out into the wilderness when they find out they are pregnant, praying and meditating until they channel that child’s unique song—the one that will ultimately express his or her purpose and path. The song that will be not only soundtrack but theme song.
After finding the song, the mother returns to the village and teaches it to the rest of the community, and in this way they are introduced to the new being. And in this way, they are able to engage with that child for the rest of his or her life.
The song is sung to the child at pivotal life points: birth, the beginning of education, the initiation into adulthood, marriage and at the death bed.
I was drawn to the story immediately, partly from personal experience. I know that the first thing my mother did when they laid me on her belly was to sing to me, and for my whole life, I have felt marked by that song. Though she didn’t go out into the wilderness to find it, she did sing it to me almost daily for many years, wrapping me in unconditional love: “How I love my pretty baby, sweet and cuddly pretty baby, how I love my pretty baby, honest to goodness I do.”
But Cohen’s story takes the theme song notion a step farther. He writes, “In the African tribe there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them. The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity. When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another.”
Every time I try to share this part of the story with other people, it makes me cry. Every time. I think it’s because there is so much resonance in what he relates. As he says, “There is something inside each of us that knows we have a song, and we wish those we love would recognize it and support us to sing it. … How we all long to be loved, acknowledged, and accepted for who we are!”
Though I doubt the veracity of the story, suspicious, I suppose, because the tribe is unnamed and I have been unable to research my way into any such story, I still love it. It is true in that it resonates. And so, before my son was born, I went on a long walk to find his song, and did. And taught it to several women who sang it to him at his birth. And last week, I took a long walk until I found a song for the little girl about to arrive in our family, “Woodsie,” as we’re calling her for now.
Whether or not we have a song, we know when we are “in tune” with ourselves, our families, our communities and our environment. And I like the notion that the singing of a song can remind us of who we are. If our mother’s didn’t give us one, we can perhaps choose one ourselves. Come up with a lyric that suits who we want to be and then play it when we need to make important decisions. Or when we are scared. Or when we know we’ve done something out of key and need a little reminder of who we are.
To remind, of course, means to remember. The prefix re- in this case means “again.” And the mind, as dictionary.com details, is “that part of a human being that thinks, feels, and wills, as contrasted with body.”
When we mind our song, we are living in harmony.
As it is, when I try to sing my son his song, he says, “Mom. Please stop singing.”
Sometimes we’d rather not hear our soundtrack. Sometimes the singer might be more annoying than helpful. Maybe someday my son will be grateful for the lyric that promises him “in your life you’ll always have enough.”
At least for now I can delight in the fact he says “please,” music to my ears.
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Song for Woodsie
There are places you will go
that we will never go,
there are lessons you will learn
you can teach us.
There are mountains you will climb
and rivers you will find
and roads that you will take
where you will lead us.
And everywhere you go
you will always know
you’re surrounded by love and wonder.
and everywhere you are
you will always find
a place where beauty breathes
inside of you, outside of you
inside, outside.
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Sometimes when you open a can of worms, you realize the can is much deeper than you thought. And while you contemplate the depths of the seemingly bottomless container, a lot of the worms wriggle away, and you see you can’t possibly fit them back into the original can.
That’s what happens when you try to define sustainability; you unleash an interpretive pandemonium of squirming, unruly, slippery concepts and ideas all of which defy a proper grasp.
Imagine, then, trying to achieve it.
And then imagine what happens if we don’t try to define and achieve some measure of sustainability. Even with our poor understanding of what sustainability really means, there’s a reason it’s become a buzz word in the last few decades. 1) Because we care, on some level, about what happens to our planet in the future. 2) Because we’re scared, on some level, that we’ve done irreparable damage to the planet, specifically to our environment, our economy, our bodies and our culture.
Let’s start with what we know—where the word came from. We start with the Latin verb, sustinere, which means “to uphold.” This is the basis for our English verb “sustain,” which means, according to the “American Heritage Dictionary,”
1. To keep in existence; maintain.
2. To supply with necessities or nourishment; provide for.
3. To support from below; keep from falling or sinking; prop.
4. To support the spirits, vitality, or resolution of; encourage.
5. To bear up under; withstand: can't sustain the blistering heat.
One thing I notice about these definitions is that they are all active. They all involve an energy input.
That’s why it’s interesting to note that when Spanish-speaking scientists try to translate the noun sustainability, they need to choose between sostenabilidad (from sostener) and sustentabilidad (from sustentar). The first is more passive, “being upheld,” while the second suggests actively upholding.
As a concept, the noun has its origins in forestry, fisheries and range management. Long before men in red silk ties were sitting in air conditioned boardrooms talking about economic sustainability or sustainable development, the miner von Carlowitz was writing about Nachhaltigkeit, a German approximation of sustainability, in reference to forestry. He was interested in the long-term productivity of timber plantations and their ability to provide construction poles for the mines. That was in the 1700s.
Over 200 years later, the term was globally popularized by the Brundtland Report. Written for the World Commission on Environment and Development, the 1987 report, titled “Our Common Future,” defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
That report got the world talking. And that’s good. For though the definition is noble, there’s no way to measure it, to implement it operationally or to interpret it objectively. Needs are contextual. Do you need your TV? Do you need your cell phone? Your SUV? Your organic potatoes? Your second house? I am sure we can all make good arguments for what we “need.” Just today my toddler assured me that he “needed” a new John Deere tractor toy, the kind that could pull a seeder implement.
It is easier for us to define what is unsustainable. New Zealander Alan Fricker writes, in his article “Measuring Up to Sustainability” at www.metafuture.org, “Unsustainability is commonly seen as environmental (in its broad sense) degradation, from the stresses of human population, affluence and technology on ecological and global limits. Since these stresses are all of our own construction, their control is, theoretically at least, within our capabilities.”
There is little doubt, he concludes, that our present path is unsustainable.
If we dig a little deeper into the etymology, we find that the Latin origin stems from the Indo-European root ten-, which means “to stretch” (also the basis for our words tendon, intend, and tenable).
And stretching is exactly what we are being asked to do. Stretch our preconceived boundaries in terms of what is possible and what is necessary. Stretch our minds in terms of new solutions. And stretch our individual practices.
I like, as a starting point, embracing the word sustainable in terms of more or less. In all your actions, in all your practices, you might ask yourself, “Is this more sustainable or less sustainable?”
Though it would be nice to have a clear cut definition of what constitutes sustainability—and you can find some folks who are trying at http://www.flora.org/sustain/Sustain.html—we don’t need a commission to tell us that an energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulb would be more sustainable than an incandescent one. We don’t need a report to tell us that it’s more sustainable when we ride our bike ten blocks than when we drive our Subaru there.
“But I had to drive,” you say, “I needed to be on time to my open space meeting.”
It’s a can of worms. And maybe our job isn’t to try to put them all back in the can. Maybe they’d do more good if we let them out so they could help us deal with all the compost material we’re creating. Let the wrangling with what is slippery go on …
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What we try to hide, how early it starts, and when does it stop?
It’s not easy being unique. Just ask Sam (not his real name), one of the fourth grade boys I worked with in Lake City for the last two weeks.
I didn’t ask him. He told me anyway, in a poem. First, he made a mask. The nose, bright pink, looked like a horizontal trumpet. The rest of the face was awkward—a blue unibrow and blue mouth framed the mask. Swirling lines of red and orange tears streaked from the unmatched eyes. A bright green strap hung from ear to ear as if a mockery of a wide smile.
On the back of the mask he wrote,
Do you see me?
I am a Deformo and I feel left out
so I tell jokes to get you to notice me.
My dream is to be successful in life
and I ask mankind to help me fulfill that dream.
How many of us feel the same way? As if we are somehow deformed, unable to fit in. As if we go unseen. As if beneath the great smile, the jokes, the grinning mask, we are dreamers who wish someone else would see our dreams and help us along.
And how many of us would have the guts, like Sam did, to acknowledge that to ourselves, much less to share that with our peers?
When he did share the poem and held up his mask, there was a palpable shift in the way the room felt. As if the other kids really did see him, perhaps for the first time. There had been lots of loud goofing around before his poem. Once he sat down, it felt like the kind of release the rain brings on a humid day. As if something anticipated has finally come, bringing with it clarity, a breathability.
I’ve been doing similar mask workshops with kids around the state for a few months, reading “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, then having them think of who else they might be for a day if they were not themselves, making a mask and then writing a poem to accompany it.
In his poem, the African American poet mentions the kind of mask that many of us wear, relating how “with torn and bleeding hearts, we smile.” Sound familiar? Better to say, “I’m fine, thanks, how are you?” than to give a real answer. Because really, when most people ask “How are you,” they are not expecting a real answer. And hence, “We wear the mask that grins and lies.”
The word mask has been in our lexicon since the mid-1500s, and means “a covering to hide or guard the face,” and it comes from the Middle Latin masca, meaning “mask, specter, nightmare.”
It interests me that we now consider a mask to be protective, but that it hails from a word meaning nightmare. And indeed, in some ways, the wearing of a mask is a nightmare. It prohibits our ability to be and show and accept our true selves.
But of course we wear masks. We’re afraid people will see us as we are and not accept us. Witness again the etymology: Even farther back in the word’s history, it comes from the Arabic, sakhira, meaning “to ridicule.”
It occurred to me that Sam’s poem was asking for love, compassion, and acceptance, and it reminded me of a recent interview I read from Ricardo Cervantes Cervantes Tlahuizcalpantecutli, a spiritual leader of the Toltec indigenous community of Teotihuacan.
In it he said, “If you teach a child something, they will share it with others on the road of life. Therefore, the most important thing to teach children is how to carry love, compassion and harmony in their hearts.”
Yes. Though I don’t think we need to teach them this. Most children carry these things in their hearts intuitively. Our goal is more to nurture that yearning, to create environments safe enough where they can take off the masks they already wear, even by fourth grade, and show their shining, worthy selves. And maybe teach us how to do it, too.
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Technorati Profile
Ohm or Om
I have tried to resist the killing frost,
to create enough heat in my defiance
to save a whole orchard of pear and peach.
As if worry could raise a May night one degree.
I invent new battle hymns in my blood.
With my friction, I try to protect the trees.
But fervor has no effect on freeze,
does not defend what browns.
The night has its way with me.
Surrender becomes my name.
Before we understand acceptance,
we must refuse to believe what is,
must wrestle with every bit of our lattice
the tide of blind inheritance
until all our nos are replaced by oms
and hum is the only law that sticks,
till we bow to the current ecstasy,
widen the scope, increase the flow,
become the rare conductor
who knows how to let go.
The prediciton for the weather tonight: 26 degrees. Anything under 28 is enough to kill the fragile blooms and tiny fruits that already hang on the trees. There are wind machines, propane burners, irrigation techniques. But all of those are useless when the temperature drops precipitously.
No matter how helpless she is, how is an orchardist to sleep?
For the last year, I have noticed a similar theme in most every arena of my life. Doesn't matter what we call it. Surrender. Letting go. Acceptance. The idea is the same. I am becoming increasingly fluent in the notion that we are not in control. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our relatively new careers as organic fruit growers.
Just over a year ago, my husband and I bought a 70-acre orchard of peaches, pears, apples, cherries, nectarines and apricots. Located on the banks of the Gunnison River on Colorado's western slope, it is both a paradise and a prison. Though it is hard to imagine a calling more compelling than growing good, sweet, nourishing food for people, it is not a light commitment. It's like having a baby. People tell you, "You just don't know until you do it how much work it is."
And they are right.
I understood work. Hard work. Long days. Sacrifice. What I did not know was so prominent in the job description: Surrender. These nights of frost in April and May have been difficult for me. As my husband likes to point out, "You like to worry."
It is not that I like to worry. It is that I am still learning about how to temper my resistance to what is and what will be. Mothering has been a wonderful primer. The orchard is like getting a graduate degree.
If we do make it through tonight's frost with enough of a crop to care for, then there will be plenty more to worry about: coddling moth in the apples, green peach aphids in the stone fruit, hail in late summer, the list goes on.
And so surrender becomes my teacher. And resistance is another word for fear--one that must be faced. Because even if we grow beautiful fruit this summer, there is always next year, and next year, and next year. We do what we can. And then the prayers begin.
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“You are the hero who doesn’t get it right,” wrote the boy. “You are the hero who forgets things and shows up late.”
I loved it. There is something marvelous about embracing a flawed hero. It gives us permission to believe that we too might be courageous defenders, contributors to the greater good despite our own myriad flaws.
Even in my flip flops? Even when I’m exhausted and want to whine? Even when the most politically active thing I do is vote in the general election?
Of course we can be heroes, warts on our toes and all. Recall how Achilles, the greatest, most handsome and quickest warrior in the fight against Troy, had a bum foot.
Just because we’re average doesn’t mean we can’t be a hero somehow.
Joseph Campbell once defined heroes as people who give their lives to something bigger than themselves. This might be parenting. Teaching adaptive skiing. Pulling noxious weeds from the banks of the San Miguel. Or as we saw at Talking Gourds last weekend, performing poems about rising from abuse and neglect.
According to Wikipedia, a hero, in Greek mythology, was “originally a demigod, the offspring of a mortal and a deity. Later, hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters that, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self-sacrifice, that is, heroism, for some greater good, originally of martial courage or excellence but extended to more general moral excellence.”
There are no demigods. But there are lots of people trying to make a difference.
Here’s one way we might define a hero. Confronted with the idea that “The world is in a downward spiral,” how would a person answer the question, “What are you going to do about it?”
The answer, I think, determines whether or not that person has heroic qualities. We can look at heroism again through Joseph Cambell’s lens, one in which he defines two types of heroic deeds. There’s the physical, in which a hero performs a courageous act and saves a life. And then there are spiritual deeds, in which the hero experiences the supernormal range of human life and then returns to the community with a message (a lesson, a gift, an idea) to share.
What is the gift that you bring to your community? How can you follow your own passion, delve into new ways of seeing, and share what you learn?
I sure did learn a lot about what a hero is this week in Lake City doing a poetry residency at the small school there. Only 65 kids in the whole system, k-12, and to kick off the program we did a family poetry night, playing with words across the generations.
I shared with them a poem by Dorianne Laux, “Oh, The Water,” which begins this way:
You are the hero of this poem,
the one who leans into the night
and shoulders the stars, smoking
a cigarette you’ve sworn is your last
before reeling the children into bed.
And then they wrote poems to each other, and some to people not in the room, exploring the ways in which our friends and family members might be everyday heroes, tackling the troubles of the to-do list, tending scrapes, soothing hurt feelings, paying the bills, and getting nutritious food on the table.
As they lauded each other, it got me to thinking about all the heroes in my life—the poets who help me see the world in new ways. My husband who daily tends 20,000 fruit trees organically. My mother who travels with me to watch my son so I might teach in Lake City for two weeks. Jim at the post office who hangs photos of local children and families behind his desk and has an unceasing smile. My father who gives money anonymously to people who need it.
In some way, all of these people impact the lives of others. In their wake, they leave positive change.
They don’t do it for money, for recognition, for pay backs, for fear. They do it because they are drawn to contribute to the greater good. They want to be, as the Indo-European root of the word would suggest, “protectors” of wonder, of love, of possibility.
As one boy wrote to an older man in the group, “You are the hero I want to know better, the one I have seen but never got to meet.”
How many heroes do we walk by every day, disguised as strangers in the street?
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Liz came to class wearing a blue rubber bracelet on her right wrist.
“It’s to keep me from complaining,” she explained. One of her children had sent it to her. “Every time I complain, I have to switch wrists. The goal is to go twenty-one days without switching wrists.”
The idea, launched by Rev. Will Bowen of Christ Church Unity in Kansas City, is that complaint management is like anger management. In a March 6 interview he told MSNBC, “You catch yourself not articulating these negative thoughts that are in your head, and because there’s no place for them to flow, they tend to dry up.”
Not only does he disallow complaining, but also criticizing, gossiping, and the use of sarcasm. His idea has taken off like wildfire, and his congregation members volunteer to come into the church on weekends to fulfill orders for the official purple no-complaint bracelets. Anyone who makes it successfully through twenty-one days gets to return it for a “certificate of happiness.”
It took the good rev. three and a half months to take off his purple band. Other folks have taken up to seven. Some folks, I imagine, are doomed to life with a purple appendage.
I didn’t have the feeling that Liz was the kind of woman who often complained. But Liz, like the other nearly 200,000 Americans who are taking the complaint-free challenge, it’s not easy.
We all know complainers, folks who seem to thrive on griping. If it’s not their health, it’s the weather. If it’s not the weather, it’s lack of a boyfriend. If they have a new boyfriend, he doesn’t make the bed right. Yeah. You know the type. Of course, you’re not one of them.
Or maybe, like Liz, you find that to some extent you are. Maybe we all have some propensity toward self-pity that propels us to moan, to seek sympathy, to focus on what’s wrong.
From what I can see, complaining serves at least two purposes. It helps us voice our discontent, and for sure, this is important. Whatever anger or frustration we swallow wholesale will come back up uglier and more vitriolic than the first time around. You don’t need to be a shrink to know that, though psychologist Barbara Held, author of “Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching” lends the notion credence.
But beyond venting, complaining for an audience is also a way to get attention. Like a toddler who comes running to his mom to show her his new invisible scratch so that it can be kissed, sometimes the complainer looks for something to complain about simply because he or she knows it’s worked in the past as an attention getter.
But what defines complaining, really? If I curse aloud about the rain falling in the forest, is it complaining if no one else hears?
The dictionary would say yes. To complain is to express grief, pain or discontent.
But surely it’s not so wrong to say something like, “I had a tricky day with my toddler today,” especially not if he peed on the wall, colored all his toys with permanent black marker, screamed while I was on the phone to get my attention, dumped the cat food in the water dish, threw his train track pieces around the living room, sawed off a low branch on the spruce tree in our front yard and kicked me in the shin.
Just reciting the litany of naughtinesses, is that complaining? Or is it just a statement of fact?
Somehow, I think, the kind of complaining that causes “ear pollution,” as Rev. Bowen might say, has more to do with how we focus on our grief and discontent. In the talking about it, are we earnestly looking to neutralize the emotional antecedent? Or are we thrilling in the mire, showing off our wounds for sympathy and pouring salt in them for effect?
The very word complaint hails from dramatic origins. It’s related to plaintiff, plaintive, and plaint, all of which stem from the Latin verb se plangere, to strike one’s breast in grief. The prefix com- is used as an intensifier. As if striking one’s breast in grief weren’t intense enough?
I think the art of not complaining comes down to accepting what is. Where we get into “complaining” versus describing the events of the day likely has something to do with judgment and a certain “woe is me” factor in the way we relate an incident. I don’t know how you quantify that, but if the listener needs to detox when done listening to you, chances are you're complaining.
In the end, I think the complaint-free idea will not only help the individual feel better by recognizing how negative thoughts can control us, it also will help keep negativity from spreading.
Though the thought of a happiness certificate to hang on the wall is no inducement for me, I like the idea of monitoring and decreasing my complaints.
I think I’ll start with a pretend purple band on my right wrist. Wearing bracelets drives me nuts.
Oops. Is that a complaint?
Switch the dang pretend thing over to the left. Back to day one.
If you would like a real no-complaint bracelet, visit http://www.complaintbracelet.org/.
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Thunder?
At first, it sounded as if a giant wheelbarrow had grumbled across the mesa top. Whatever it was, the noise was unusual and loud enough to rouse both my husband and I from half-slumber at 6:30 a.m.
"Rockslide," I mumbled, remembering the 4-foot rock that had tumbled from the sandstone cliffs above the orchard the day before, how it had bounced over the railroad track before finding a home in the middle of our gravel road.
Still drowsy, we let any thoughts of the loud grumbling dissipate with dawn. That is, until we heard the distant rumble of the Union Pacific returning to Somerset for more coal. And then the shrill emergency whistle. Brakes shrieking. Scraping of iron. Groan of the track.
"Train wreck!" Eric shouted and catapulted from bed.
My first thought: Please let everyone be okay.
Second thought: My son is going to love this. He lives for trains, setting and resetting his Thomas the Tank Engine track multiple times a day. The Telluride library has created a special Thomas section at our request (awesome librarians!). And we spend hours watching the trains lumber past the orchard house, just a hundred feet from the track. A real train wreck? Finn would be more curious than a monkey named George.
While Eric went to investigate, I stayed home and waited for Finn to wake up, and on rousing, he immediately noticed the stopped train out the window. "Let's get dressed and go investigate," I told him.
He ran to put his clothes on. Amazing. Often, getting dressed requires cajoling and assistance. The kid got himself dressed in 49 seconds flat and was ready to explore.
The rockslide, about ¼ mile from the house, was much more dramatic than the day before. These were not car-sized rocks, they were train-size rocks. They imposed themselves along the sides of the tracks and in the road below. Where one had bounced at the orchard gate, there was a crater large enough for Finn to stand in and barely have his head poke out.
The train had glanced one of the boulders, pushing it down from the rails, before rounding the curve and sidling a larger one that unsuccessfully tried to pull back the engine's siding as if it were a giant yellow can of sardines. And there, scraped up and slightly atilt, the engine was forced to a stop.
The three engineers were okay, though they had ragdoll legs and white complexions. More than anything, they seemed stunned with gratitude that things weren't worse.
Of course they got worse. The plan was to uncouple the train from the battered engine and move it back along the track, allowing for the blasters to come work on breaking down the giant boulders and also allowing us access to our barn, farm machinery and orchard rows across the tracks.
Another engine arrived to pull the train from the other end, and the uncoupling and reversing operation took place quite slowly. Finn held my hand and watched with great interest as the warning bell clanged, the wheels slowly rolled and the great train hit a spot where the rock damage to the track caused one of the wheels to derail.
The whole shebang came to a halt.
“Darn,” said one of the engineers, walking over to Finn and I. “We didn’t want that. When it rains, it pours.”
A few minutes later, Finn said to me, “Mommy, do they really want it to rain and pour?”
His innocence about the idiom was sweet. But it unfortunately, it was right on. I had earlier thought, well, at least it’s not raining out, but by 8 a.m. the sky was wearing a dark shade of gray and a storm looked imminent.
It got me thinking about the “when it rains it pours” phrase, which translates roughly as “When troubles come, they come together.” Apparently, folks have been noticing this for at least 200 years.
In 1726, English physician John Arbuthnot published a book entitled “It Cannot Rain But It Pours.” In the same year, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope collaborated on an essay entitled “It Cannot Rain But It Pours.” The saying has been use ever since.
It also reminded me of another bit of folk wisdom, “Bad things come in threes.”
Maybe it should start to rain, I thought. That would be the third thing and then the whole train wreck effort might go much smoother.
It hailed.
With the use of a shim, the crew got the train speedily back on track. All kinds of Union Pacific workers showed up to blow up and relocate the rocks. A breakdown train took care of the injured engine. Within 24 hours, despite weather and night, the trains were up and running again, transporting coal and sawdust and metal parts along the Gunnison River corridor.
The whole day, I carried that crazy train wreck energy with me, skittish of accidents and grateful for each little thing that went right. Finn dressed himself. We drove back safely to Placerville. The peas at the City Market salad bar were fresh.
The train wreck is, of course, a fantastic metaphor for life. How fragile we are. How easily we are derailed and caught unawares by obstacles in our path. How often, when it seems things can’t get worse, the sky opens up and pelts us.
And still. The thrill of being able to stand in that storm, hands outstretched, face turned up, and admit (once again) we’re just not in control. And after the rubble, the trouble, the earshattering breaks, the aches, the driving hail, after all that, the miraculous heart still beats.
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Spring is here near Telluride—the San Miguel River is no longer ice-locked. The first purple and yellow flowers are pushing their way through the snow. Soft gray pussy willows line the roads. And the cottonwood trees are starting to bud. It’s a time of beginnings. Happy New Year!
Though by modern standards the New Year is already three months old, historically, people celebrated the New Year in late March around the vernal equinox. According to Charles Panati in Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, the earliest recorded New Year celebration took place in Iraq—what was then Babylon, capital of Babylonia.
And what a celebration it was! Eleven days of feasting, performance and ritual. He explains, “Initiating events, a high priest, rising two hours before dawn, washed in the sacred water of the Euphrates, then offered a hymn to the regions chief god of agriculture, Marduk, praying for a bountiful new cycle of crops. The rump of a beheaded ram was rubbed against the temple walls to absorb any contagion that might infest the sacred edifice, and, by implication, the next year’s harvest.” The ceremony was known as kuppuru, a word that was also claimed by the Hebrews in their festival of atonement, Yom Kippur. For the duration of the festival, there were parades, feasts and ceremonies that focused on seed sowing and crop growing.
The Iroquois Indians also celebrated New Years based on the crop cycle—only they had their festivities when the corn crop ripened. To signify the destruction of the old and the welcoming of the new, they would have a giant bonfire and feed it with all their old clothes, wooden utensils and unused corn. This enabled them to start their New Year completely fresh.
Like the Babylonians and the Iroquois, most cultures around the world tied their New Year’s celebrations to crops. So how did it happen that New Years came to be celebrated in January—an unlikely month for anything to happen with crops? Politics. The confusion comes from the Romans. They, too, had an ancient calendar that celebrated the New Year on March 25. But emperors and other high-ranking politicians fiddled with the number of days in a month or in a year to extend their terms in office. As a result, by 153 BC, the calendar days were completely off of the astrological markers that corresponded with the months.
To resynchronize the months to the stars, the Roman senate declared the start of the New Year as January 1, hoping to clarify the public record. Though politicians still tampered with the days, the date for the Roman New Year stuck, and as Christianity spread, so did the new date.
Commoners were not so quick to embrace the new New Year, however, and throughout the Middle Ages, the English and French continued to celebrate the New Year in spring. In France, until the mid-16th century, New Year’s Day was observed on March 25 and celebrated for a week, culminating in an evening of dinners and parties on April 1. But in 1564, King Charles declared that the Frenchman should follow the Gregorian calendar—now many times revised—and celebrate New Years Day on January 1.
Some Frenchmen resisted, others simply forgot. So for years following the king’s proclamation, the folk kept celebrating New Years with parties and gifts on April 1. As Panati explains, “Jokers ridiculed these conservatives’ steadfast attachment to the old New Year’s date by sending foolish gifts and invitations to nonexistent parties.
The butt of an April Fool’s joke was known as a poisson d’Avril, or “April fish” (because at that time of year the sun was leaving the zodiacal sign of Pisces, the fish.)” Ultimately France did grow accustomed to the January 1 date for New Years, but they grew attached, too, to a day of fooling and made it a holiday in its own right. Several hundred years later the custom came to England and was passed on ultimately to the United States.
So this April 1, why not wish someone a Happy New Year? When they give you a funny look, throw in the clincher—“April Fools!”
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More poems are written about love than any other subject. Death is, perhaps, second, followed by a big emotional bouquet: anger, despair, loneliness, greed, fear, lust, misunderstanding, gratitude. These are, after all, the most important things to write about.
Notice that everything in the above list is abstract. You can't touch, taste, smell, hear or see any of the topics listed. You can't hold love in your hands. You can't smell gratitude. But you can cradle a lover's face or smell the macaroni & cheese your mom made when you visited last because it was your favorite childhood dish.
And this is the secret to writing about the emotional world. If you want to really reach a reader, make it concrete.
For instance, here is a recent poem I wrote about regret.
Regret
When you listen to the story of the white birds
that skimmed the morning drive,
imagine how they might have taken flight
in your wintry blood, if only
you’d remembered to look up.
You must sit with the eight brown leaves
that still cling to the naked shrub
and recognize your own dry dreams,
how they, too, were once green
and gathered the sun into succulence.
When did you let your thoughts
become gray knuckled,
forget how to surrender to opening?
And where is the smell of spring?
And how might you slip your breath
into the rhythm of snow melting
drip, drip, drip,
and become the rich song
the one-note crow wishes to sing?
Regret is the sister of longing.
They both fall in love with their long blue shadows,
mesmerize themselves with their lonely dance.
If you sit long enough by the naked plants,
you will see how the sticks
bare their own bald grace,
how sometimes the most powerful prayers
begin as skeletons.
This poem came out of an exercise I gave for the Vail Symposium earlier this month. It's one of my favorite writing exercises. Here's how to do it at home.
1) Think of the last time you laughed or cried.
2)Think of an abstract word--such as an emotional word or an ideological word--that seems appropriate to that moment and at the top of the page. Humor. Independence. Frustration. Desire. Impatience. Exuberance. It will be your title. Now forget about your word and the event for a while.
3) Go outside and gather as many images as you can. Write them on a page. Try to use all your senses. Make a list of at least 20 things. More is great. Be specific. Instead of saying "leaves," note that they are dry brown leaves. You may note their shape. You may crush them in your hand and note the sound. You may smell them for dankness. I do not recommend tasting them.
4) Put yourself in a new space, a comfortable writing space, and begin to let your mind freely associate the images you've just gathered with your recent experience. Write. What is marvelous is that the whole time you were gathering images, your brain was still thinking about the event and the abstract. It will make the connecting leaps for you.
5) If you need a starting line, I like stealing this one from a poem called "Kindness" by Naomi Shihab Nye: "Before you know what _______ is, you must ..." Fill in the blank with your abstract. Another great first line comes from "Cruelty," by Lucille Clifton: "Don't talk to me about _______"
6) Try to use at least eight of your images. Try to not know what the ending will be until you arrive there. If you think of a good ending, try to write around it. See what else lurks there.
7) Send me your poem. I'd love to see it.
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At three, the kid already understands the miraculous potential of honey.
“Mommy,” he says, “I have a splendid idea. Let’s get a cookie.” His eyes are impossibly bright. He tucks his chin and he turns his hands upward, a caricature of a salesman posing an irresistible idea.
I resist. He sees it in my face. He begins to twist his upper lip into a scowl, then stops himself and looks at me with doe-eyed openness. “We can shaaaare it,” he suggests.
I’m hooked. He knows I value sharing.
Truth is, I want the cookie, too, but I am willing to walk away from it. If he’d whined, I would have declined, demurring with something like, “This is so sad. You could have had the cookie if you’d asked nicely.” In fact, those are the words on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I walk up to the counter and say, “One sugar cookie, please.” Give the kid a reward.
As I purchase the prize in green frosting, I marvel at how my son is already learning how to get what he wants. “Tart words make no friends,” said Benjamin Franklin. “A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.”
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy construes the popular phrase this way: “You can win people to your side more easily by gentle persuasion and flattery than by hostile confrontation.”
The idea is sound, but old Ben wasn’t the first to say such a thing. In the 17th century, Thomas Fuller had an earlier version: “More flies are taken with a drop of honey than with a tun of vinegar.”
Supposedly, the saying hails back to a practice that predates fly paper. According to talklisten.com, “To avoid the annoying task of chasing flies in enclosed areas, an alternative was used to lure flies to traps with little effort. To capture a fly, pour honey on something and set it out in the open. When a fly lands on the honey, it becomes stuck.”
Whether or not anyone ever really did try to trap flies this way, I can promise that many metaphorical flies have been caught through such a method. Exhibit A: sugar cookie.
There is another law of attraction at work here for me. I am sure you have also noticed that once something enters your consciousness—a new word, a new phrase, or simply an old idea such as this one, we begin to bump into it all around us. And so it has been for me lately with this phrase. The “how to catch best catch flies” philosophy came up two weeks ago in a class I was teaching, and then again in an email this week from San Miguel County Commissioner Joan May. And of course the implications go far beyond a toddler getting a snack. The golden honeyed approach can be an important tool in conflict resolution.
Joan had been working with the Sage Grouse protection group to write a letter to the folks at an agency non-supportive of their cause. As she wrote to me, “The first draft was kind of nasty and accusative, which got nixed (but felt good to get it into words!) and the next was nicer, inviting them to meet with us. One of the DOW guys said, ‘I agree with using honey to attract more flies, but for the life of me I can't imagine who'd want to attract more flies.’ ”
Right.
And really, if the goal is to attract more flies, there are things besides honey that might do the trick better and less expensively. Excrement comes to mind.
Joan, seeing his point, suggested they try a new idiom on for size: Let’s extend an olive branch.
“But then,” as she writes, “who wants an olive branch, either?” That’s another column.
When it comes to saying difficult things, we often become so focused on getting the message across that we forget the potential effect of our words—how they can be like thorns underneath the fingernails of others when said the wrong way. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King said, “It is unfortunate that we still cannot disagree about violence, without being violently disagreeable.”
When shouted at, the best bet is not to shout back. That only ends up in two sore throats and two bent egos. Play it straight. Keep the voice and rate low, maintain a neutral to positive tone, and offer informative, and solution-focused words.
And if you can muster it, make it sweet. Not sugar coated, by the way. What fly is attracted to a pile of white refined stuff? It must be genuine. Integral. Wholesome, even. And if the message is really tough, why not deliver it with a big box of homemade cookies? Sweetened with honey, of course.
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