Out of the Cube

If Reading = Breathing, then what is banning books?

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
~ Harper Lee

I lead a busy life, so busy that I wonder how I ever had time to work a full-time job. But I'm not busy with - you know - little busy things. And I'm not busy the way my ex-housemate's chihuahua Lola gets busy - her tiny little legs setting out to get somewhere  because there are things to sniff and bushes to pee on (we call that walk "Going to the bank"). Today when I should have been "busy" with work (editing, writing, research), I somehow (I really don't know how) landed on a web site that kept me busy for two solid hours. It's called Flashlight Worthy (see the widget to the right of this post). It's like crack for readers (I suppose - I only know about "crack" because I watch a lot of crime shows on Netflix).

Check it out. Tell me how long you stayed. Tell me your favorite lists and your favorite books, too. Here are some of my favorites that come to mind without my having to get out of the chair and go look at my shelves:

• Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• The Children's Book - A.S. Byatt
• Truman Capote's short stories
• E.B. White's essays
• Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
• All of the Harry Potter books
• Flannery O'Connor's short stories

I could go on.  I'm hooked on this stuff.

Tomorrow is the first day of Banned Books Week. In celebration of reading (and not having to break the law in order to do so), here's a list of only 10 of my favorite banned books, no particular order, all beautifully written, all great literature:

1.  1984 - George Orwell
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
3. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
4. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
5. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
6. An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
7. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
8. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
9. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
10. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

 Where's your list?

The Dance of Time

This morning while I made tea I was wondering what day it was. Oh yeah. Thursday. Was that right? Yes, yes, I'm sure: Thursday. And then as the tea steeped, I turned and looked at the pattern of sunlight on the wood floor, an autumn pattern; light doesn't slant just that way on just that spot at any other time of year. So I knew it was autumn. Now I sip tea and look out the window at the honey locust tree just beginning to turn, a small yellow patch here, a sprig of yellow there. What year is it? 2010. No! Yep, uh-huh.

I'm not losing my mind. I know perfectly well where I am in the flow of time - when I stop to think about it. Because I don't work in an office anymore and rarely work to some time-driven deadline, I do have to check my iPhone sometimes to know the date. But for the most part - why? I stopped wearing a watch a long time ago, except when I want to wear my kokopeli silver cuff watch like a bracelet. For all I know, the time part stopped working; I don't know - I haven't checked.

Even now as I write, I'm doing that drift that I do - maybe that we all do - like getting lost in our thoughts and suddenly coming to and wondering how we got to the thought we catch ourselves in. And what does all this have to do with Torvil and Dean?

Steeping tea for a certain number of minutes (four for black tea) is a great time to let my eyes wander and my mind to do whatever it wants to do. Black tea takes four minutes to steep to that perfect fullness without getting bitter. That's how long it takes. You can't rush it. Summer turns to autumn in its own way, every year similar, every year with a bit of difference. In the early 90s, it snowed here on Labor Day weekend. But we still know it's autumn. So I'm allowing the tea to get perfect and I'm thinking about time: Thursday already, autumn while my back was turned, and impossibly - 2010. Does time slip? I wondererd? Slide? The words to a Simon and Garfunkle song came to me: "Slip slidin' away - the nearer your destination, the more you're slip slidin' away."

But life isn't like that for me. I guess it would be if I thought of death as a destination. Sure, I know I'll die and now that Dad is gone, surely I'm next, but no, "slipping" doesn't feel right, and "sliding" doesn't sound right, and "slip sliding" is just wrong. And then I thought of Torvil and Dean winning the Gold in ice dancing in Sarejevo in the 1984 Olympics. I sat on a sofa in a friend's house that night, leaning forward to catch every move, crying for the beauty of their genius. Watch it and tell me if you see what I see: birth, life, love, death, all in a seamless flow that is undeniably right.

 

What hangs in the balance

E.B. White said: "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." Here’s what makes it hard to plan my day: I arise in the late morning torn between a desire to play solitaire on the computer all day or do the laundry before I have to go around bare nekkid (as my mother used to say). Improve the world? That isn’t even on my list, let alone on the top of my list.

However, I do what I can from where I am, which often means improving, say, the bedroom by making my bed every morning or the ceiling by pulling down cobwebs. And this morning I watered the garden. And I say “I love you” to the people I love, and to the people I don’t love, I say “How you doing?” and I listen to the answer. As I said, I do what I can.

The point is, I guess, that there’s so much we can do without having to go out and save the world, which sounds like a pretty big job, and I can be overwhelmed by the pretty-big-jobness of things like organizing my desk - again.

I heard an interesting statistic from one of the participants of a workshop I went to Saturday. He said, “Most people spend 85% of each day complaining, and 90% of those people do the same thing the next day and the next.” Just hearing that statistic made my ears hurt, and not just because it had numbers in it.

I’ve been having a rough week emotionally, all of my Dad-stuff crashing through my protective activities (like playing solitaire all day). He died a month ago, and while I was in Indiana, my brothers and sisters and I were busy taking care of business and loving each other. Then I drove home, and because it’s not a good idea to break down weeping while driving, even across the long, straight stretches of Kansas, I held it together. When I got home, I went numb every day - until I was almost asleep, and then the sadness would hit. This past week I think I peaked, so I went to a workshop on Saturday and a movie on Sunday and today I have my feet under me and I’m pretty sure I won’t cry forever.

The rough times that come up don’t involve complaining, but that statistic made me think of Dad - the real Dad, not the one I romanticize. Real Dad loved to complain.

Dad: I hate Oprah. What a stupid show. Stupid people go on there so they can whine about their lives - “Oh, boo hoo hoo!”

Me: Why do you watch it?

Dad: Well, there’s nothing else to watch, unless I want to see that stupid Ellen doing that stupid dance. What’s the matter with her? She can’t dance.

Me: Ummm . . .

He told me once that he likes to complain because it makes him feel good, and I learned in one of the workshops at the Boulder Center that some people mistake an adrenaline rush for feeling happy. So I guess Dad complained, made the listener miserable, but hung up the phone feeling happy.

The first week I was in Terre Haute and Dad was in the hospital, I drove up from my brother’s house every day to just sit with him and hear whatever news the nurses had for us. He was sedated, on a ventilator, and surrounded by hanging bags full of the fluids that kept him alive.

While Dad was in the hospital, my brothers and sisters and I talked every day about the possibilities: he could live with S and B; I would stay and take care of him, he’d gradually get stronger and maybe he could live in his house again. Sure, we knew he was a very sick man and we accepted that he could die, but we carefully skirted that minor detail. About midweek, the nurse told us that they were starting to reduce the sedative and his reliance on the vent. That’s good news, right? There was really lots of good news that week: his lungs were working, his body was healing from the surgery, there were problems with his heart but they would address those when/if he survived.

Sitting with Dad every day was easy. I’d talk to him, tell him hello from my sisters (who weren’t in town yet), tell him he was doing well. The doctors told us not to tell him that he had had a colostomy, so we didn’t.  Then one day as he started to come out of the sedative and could track me with his eyes, I broke into a cold sweat: What if he gets off the vent and can talk? What if he finds out what the surgeons did? Suddenly I felt like I was about 10 years old and I was in big trouble: Crap! If he can talk, he can - and will - complain. If he can talk, he’ll do what he did the last time he was in the hospital: yell at the nurses and threaten to leave and yell at us and it would be all our fault - whatever “it” was. He had been a holy terror during previous hospital stays. When I was out there a year ago, I ran out of his hospital room and had to pace for half an hour to get my moxie back. And they hadn’t even done anything to him yet.

In the midst of a very painful time, I found humor in my response. This 65-year-old woman was watching her 84-year-old father dying, and I had an image of me and my siblings as little kids when, say, something got broken:

“I’m gonna tell.”

“I didn’t do it - you pushed me.”

“Did not!”

“Did too.”

“You’re gonna get in trouble”

“Am not. It was your fault.”

And so on. No matter how old we are, as long as we have parents, we’re still someone’s kids. That day, the terribly thin man barely hanging onto life still had the power we assigned to him as kids, and during the lasts two years when his health went to hell and his complaints increased, we did what we could to hold on to the idea of Dad even as we flinched from the outbursts of the dying man he was.

People say “It was a blessing that he went when he did.” I get that. He would have been hell on wheels trying to live with a colostomy bag. Aunt Hazel said to me one day, “This is going to be hard on your dad. If it were me, I’d learn how to take care of that thing myself and I’d just clean it up, slap it on, and go out and mow the yard. But not your dad. No."

So Dad never knew about the colostomy. And after the surgery, he never spoke again. So the last things he said came from a dad who loved his kids very much. Among all the stories I have of Dad, I'll include this last one. For balance.

Confession

Appreciate your uniqueness. ~ Captain Kangaroo

Over the last two years I’ve been to Terre Haute four times, and three of those times I was there for about three weeks. I stayed with my brother and his wife, whom I call Hermanita (Little Sister). She’s from Hondouras and will speak only English to me, so I give back what little Spanish I have. The extended visits were working visits: the first two getting Dad back and forth to doctors, hanging out with him, sitting with him when he had chemo, and finally, sitting with him when he died and working alongside my brothers and sisters to do all those things that must be done when someone dies. In the evenings, we would have a late dinner and watch TV, all of us settling back into an ease that meant the work day was over.

At home I don’t watch TV. Now I’m going to out myself and be very literal about what I just wrote: I don’t watch TV. I watch TV shows on my computer. I don’t need a TV to do that. In the past I’ve been sniffy about that, nose in the air indicating that I am so above watching TV, except for PBS or maybe I would watch the Olympics.

Well, I’m over it now. I think I got over it the time I was sitting with my brother in the barn working a crossword puzzle (he works Sudoku) and relaxing. The TV was on one of those stations with such a high channel number that not only had I never seen it; I had never heard of it. It was called “Redneck Weddings.” We both looked up, he offered to change the station, but I wanted to watch, you know, like a cultural anthropologist, the Margaret Mead of rural Indiana (or rural Anywhere, USA). It was hilarious. I thought I had already laughed my butt off, but then the mother of the bride was running around the bride’s apartment just before the wedding trying to find her teeth.

I want to make this very clear: Neither I nor any of my family (rural or otherwise) deliberately watch “Redneck Wedding.” But that one time was a gift of laughter and incredulity that still makes me snicker. Picture white wedding dress, long train, wedding set up in a barn (a real working barn, not my brother’s pole barn) - and it rains the night before the wedding. White satin shoes stepping carefully on the emergency path made of boards as the bride makes her way into the crepe-paper-strung barn to an altar made of hay bales. Lordy!

So anyway, back to the quiet evenings at my brother’s house. He has one of the satellite things that lets him record everything he programs into it, and one of the shows he and Hermanita love to watch is “America’s Got Talent.” Once upon a time, without ever having seen the show, I’d have put my nose in the air: Sharon Osbourne? Oh, puleeze! Cut to the present: I love the show. I love Sharon, Piers, and Howie. And guess what? I can watch the latest episodes on Fancast! On my computer! For free!

I grew up in that transition time between radio and television. We listened to radio shows in the evening; only rich people had a television (it wasn’t referred to as “TV” back then). Then in 1953, by some miracle, we got a TV. It had cabinet-style doors over the screen so that it would look like an ordinary piece of furniture during the day - when no shows were televised. And what did we watch? The Steve Allen Show, the Ed Sullivan Show, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Your Show of Shows, Ted Mac’s Amateur Hour, Your Hit Parade. Shall I go on? All of these shows were variety shows, very similar to "America's Got Talent."

TV shows like “America’s Got Talent” aren’t new, and there’s a reason they’re so popular. Based on my limited research (and a talent for sounding like I know what I’m talking about), I have found that most of us - in addition to enjoying a good song or dance or magic trick or harmonica or synchronized pogo sticks - also love a good rags-to-riches story, especially if the story involves terminal disease, a childhood spent on the wrong side of the tracks, orphans, babies, or old people who get applause for being old. Who doesn’t thrill to the stillness that precedes an extraordinary voice coming out of a completely unlikely person? And don’t we love to boo, hiss, and laugh at the guy who, probably on a dare from his buddies, makes music with his belly button? Don’t we wonder, "What kind of person would do these things?" Don’t we feel a tug of longing that we never tried?

Dad was one of my greatest teachers, though I’d never have told him so because then I’d have had to explain what I meant: I watched him hold onto his judgments and his biases and his hurts until they would have destroyed his life had he not had persistent and loving children. I see in me this same propensity to judge what I know nothing about. I learned a lot about myself by watching my father navigate his world as a man, as a child of depression-era parents who kept a family of eight alive and healthy but were not openly affectionate. My brothers and sisters and I, who all hug and pat and say aloud “I love you,” figure we got this way by deliberately not being like our parents.

I’ve learned to recognize my judgments for what they are: not “the truth,” as Dad used to say. And in learning, I mess up a lot, which gives me reasons to laugh at myself. Lots of contestants on shows like “America’s Got Talent” laugh at themselves and they make us laugh. In being such a funny person, Dad taught me how important it is to laugh. That’s another gift he gave his kids. So I watch “America’s Got Talent” and I laugh and I cry and I wonder about the lives of all these people "who would do something like that."

Epitaph

Life is a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once, and now I know it.
~ Lines from the poet John Gay, added to his epitaph

Over Memorial Day, my two sisters and I flew to Indiana to meet up with our two brothers and spend time with Dad, as we’ve been doing annually for about 10 years. It was a short visit, but it was similar to all the other visits: we sat around in a garage or in the gravel driveway eating good food and laughing and telling stories. The difference this year was that we met at my brother’s house and Dad drove the 20 miles from Linton, hung out, drove home, and one night he spent the night, sleeping in the loft of my brother’s barn (not a hay loft, not a farmer’s barn). The next morning we sat in the barn, big bay door up, drinking iced tea and talking as we looked out at trees and sky.

Dad: Life’s a joke, Verna.
Me: So you have said many times, Dad.
Dad: No, really. What else could it be?

I flew home that afternoon. The next time I saw him was in early June in a hospital in Terre Haute where he had just had emergency surgery to remove most of his colon. He died eight days later. I was holding his hand.

I don’t think life’s a joke. I think life can be very funny, just as I find it mysterious and serious and sometimes downright silly. But Dad was wrong: it’s not a joke. One evening during that last visit over Memorial Day, I looked around at all of us and I looked at my thin, frail father holding court while leaning on a cane that he used for effect - he didn’t need help walking. Five of his kids were there and a slew of his grandkids. We made a crowd, this family that he started when he married my mother in 1944. They were 18.

 

Our family is grieving for the man my father was over a a lifetime that (in terms of what he loved most) started with the Model A Ford and ended with the Hummer. We’re grieving for our individual losses of the father he was to each of us and the father we wished he could have been. My greatest grief for him was that he never let himself see how much we loved him, these seven kids who heard his stories and who created our own to pass on to our children.

My brother was with him the night he went into the hospital, and they talked while they waited for the surgeon. That night Dad was not calling life a joke. He was saying things to my brother that - I’m guessing - he probably wished he had said to all of us when he still had time. The  jokester was gone, the cranky old man left far behind. He must have known that he may not have another chance to speak those words of appreciation that came from deep within the folds of a life that had not been a joke at all but an accomplishment of love that eluded him and anointed us: his five remaining children are very close.

Tonight I’m thinking about something that never occurred to me before: Dad’s seven children watched him and our mother grow up. He was 19 when I was born and only 33 when my youngest sister was born. We knew his childhood from his stories, but we knew his adulthood from ours. And as time passes, our stories will change with our own passages through however many years are left to us.

Next Memorial Day, we’ll meet at my brother’s house and we’ll each bring Dad with us. We’ll tell stories and we’ll laugh and we’ll cry and we’ll move on. What else could life be?

Turn the page

Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A few years ago when I was planning a trip to California, I kept thinking about what I wanted to do when I got there and who I wanted to see. And I had this thought: "I'll go see Madison Stone." There was only one problem: Madison is a character in a mystery novel I wrote (all three drafts now reside on a storage DVD somewhere on my shelves). My brain was bumfuzzled. On the one hand, I knew very well that she wasn't real; on the other hand, by god I knew exactly where she lived! I can see the house, I know how untidy she is, I can hear the ocean and seagulls from her front porch, I see where she left the hose out back when she was watering the roses. Nasturtium grows in a riot of color pushing through the leaning picket fence out front.

Real brain: She doesn't exist.

Writer brain: The hell she doesn't.

I lived with Madison and her pals for several years when I was writing draft after draft, and just because she isn't a real person living in Santa Cruz, and just because I made up her house, adding a room or extending the garden as needed, doesn't mean she isn't real. And I felt as sad about not being able to visit her as I might feel about a friend who has moved so far away that she is no longer available for talk over tea and scones at a sidewalk cafe.

What brought this story to mind is a pending trip to Indiana to see Dad. My sisters and I will fly out for a few days, hang out with each other and our brothers, and spend time with Dad, who is slowly dying from a bone marrow disease. Because I see him only once or twice a year, I have a picture of him in my mind that doesn't sync up with the real person living in rural Indiana. I picture him healthy, making jokes and telling stories, walking tall. His walk has changed as his body grows weaker, and I grieve for the younger man - and so does he. When I was there last year and was taking him home from the hospital, he joked, "Oh to be 80 again!"

Just as Madison is a real person to me, so my father is still in his prime at 80, wearing blue jeans and a white tee shirt, pinching the cigarette butt from his lips and flicking it into the ditch that runs along the south edge of his property. In my mind, Dad has taken on the properties - and nostalgia - of my memories of place. I long to return to the Terre Haute I knew when we would take road trips from San Francisco in the summer to see my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I want to go to Third Street and see that old house with tar paper siding; Third Street is now a highway and the house was torn down years ago to make way for a small building which was, in its turn, torn down to put up a bigger building.

I want to go to a place that doesn't exist to see a father who is not the man I remember; but he is. He's still there, the same as Terre Haute is certainly still there, and he's gone just as surely as my childhood Terre Haute is gone.

I'll turn 65 this year, and every passing moment is a moment to practice letting go. Take down the old to make room for the new; accept the inevitability of change to leave space for celebrating transformation and honoring evolution. I know that Dad is gradually leaving, and I know how fortunate I am at my age to still be able to spend time with a parent. We used to joke about how much we have in common because we're "the same age." I mean, how many people can he talk to now who remember old time radio programs? We do not joke about aging now. Dad does not joke at all now.

So here's what I'm wondering on this warmish night in mid-May: At the end of the day (so to speak), all we have are stories. And I don't mean to diminish their value by saying "all we have," as if this is nothing. In fact, isn't it everything? Don't the minutes and moments and remember-the-time-whens accumulate and dissipate like fog in low-lying land? It's like this: for more than 10 years, I've been meeting up with my siblings annually at Dad's house, where we sit in the garage with the big bay doors open where we can stay dry while thunderstorms pass through, where we tell stories and create new stories, and just as the storm passes and leaves everything fresh and new, so this visit passes into memory - and into story. Thank god for story.

At the end of the visit four years ago, as I was putting my car in gear to pull out of Dad's driveway, I looked in the side-view mirror to see Dad and my sister Carolyn waving at me, Carolyn doing that imitation of our grandmother who used to wave a hankie at our retreating station wagon on those childhood visits, and I thought, as I often do, that this could be the last time I'd see my father.

Carolyn died three weeks later. Just like that, the Carolyn stories were a complete set. There would be no more.

All I'll ever have of Madison Stone is the story I created that she still inhabits. My father continues in the half-light of his last days in a place where I can still go and in a form that I can still see and hear and touch. I know very well how long he will live in stories and how important it is to live those tales and to tell them over and over - for the love of the person, for the love of the story.

Real brain: He's going to die.

Writer brain: The hell he is.

I swear to you . . .

It's snowing again! (Don't get me started.)

On Tuesday afternoon I was in Boulder for a meeting. When I went in, rain was falling down out of the sky. When I came out 90 minutes later, I was in what could be called a Winter Wonderland, but only by people who don't have to drive in it.

 

I live about 10 miles from Boulder, which is usually a meander from the central part of town to the back road I take to get home. It's a 15-20 minute drive, 25 minutes at commute time, which this was. On the first part of my drive, the road did not climb and my tires still had unfrozen pavement to grip. It took me one hour to drive 5 miles, which translates to - ummm - 5 miles an hour - right.

Then I turned left onto South Boulder Road, a steady incline to a steep pitch and at the top of the hill, a dip down to my neighborhood. I may as well have been attempting to drive up the first pitch of the Giant Dipper Roller Coaster at the Santa Cruz boardwalk - just imagine the snow. 

Hyperbole, you say? Fie! I say.

By the time I got through the intersection onto S. Boulder Road, the slush was collecting and the temperatures were dropping, the traffic was literally - and sometimes dentingly - bumper to bumper -  and for the next 2 (count 'em) 2 hours, I was fiercely determined not to slide into oncoming traffic or the surrounding cars heading up the road with me or the snow-covered cars a-slew on the shoulder or stuck in the ditch. My tires spun and all but smoked; the rear of my Honda fish-tailed every time I wag-wag-wagged a few inches between stopping. My speedometer never got off the zero marker.

There's a lot of talk these days about being "in the moment," and by the time I got home Tuesday night, bloodied but unbowed, I knew in my tense body exactly what that means: no music, no phone, no wandering thoughts; no sipping water, searching for a mint, blowing my nose. No nothing but my hands on the steering wheel and an eerie awareness of the Chevy in front of me, the SUV in my rearview, and the hunkering shapes of cars on my left, ahead of me and then behind me and then ahead of me again. I could feel no gain forward, even as I was certain I wasn't going backward; I didn't know snow as falling, only as result: poor visibility, white patches on road that could give my tires something to grip if I fishtailed just right.

I held this intense "moment" of concentration until I bullied my way into the snow-filled alley behind my condo and gunned the car into the garage, stopping short of hitting the washer and dryer. And then I started swearing. And then I marched into my house and yelled all the cuss words I knew until I had shaken the tension out of my body. A friend said I must have felt scared. Hell yes! But mostly I felt powerful, I felt determined, I felt like the Green Hulk not taking any crap off of anyone. I got my front-wheel-drive Honda Civic up a roller coaster of an icy-slush covered hill - in the dark - in commuter traffic - without a dent or a ding or a - wait, I really should check the tires because I swear to you they were smoking.

It never occurred to me before I left Boulder to, say, get a motel in town. It never occurred to me that I couldn't get home (and once committed to  S. Boulder Road, I really had no choice but to keep moving - and stopping - and moving again). And really, it wasn't like I was going to die on that road. We weren't going fast enough to hurt each other. The worst that could have happened was that I'd get stuck on the side of the road and then - well, I don't know. Use my cell phone to order up a helicopter? Hike up the hill? Freeze to death maybe, but probably not.

Times like these I sometimes get out of my own way and accept that I am completely responsible for creating my life. And that's what feels so powerful, I think: To make choices and follow through and hold down the cursing until I have enough of a break in my concentration to do it right. By the time I had poured myself a finger of Scotch and was collapsed on the sofa, I could see that drive home as just a 3-hour drive home. I did what I needed to do, that's all.  I faced into "what is," and "what is" didn't kill me or diminish me or wound me. I think I probably swaggered to bed, carrying that power with me: I am woman, hear me roar.

In the middle of the night, I fell out of bed.

Power and Intention

Like Shangri-La, like mathematics, like every story ever told or sung, a mental geography of sorts has existed in the living mind of every culture, a collective memory or hallucination, an agreed-upon territory of mythical figures, symbols, rules, and truths, owned and transversable by all who learned its ways, and yet free of the bounds of physical space and time. ~ Michael Benedikt

The ax is attracted to the log as surely as the bee to nectar, and when the blow is true and strong, true to its promise the log splits clean and shoots the kindled wood across the grass to be stacked. I am 35 and I live in a tract home on a suburban street: two-car garage, sprinkler system, hot tub, and wood-burning fireplace. It’s early fall, the days warm and the nights beginning to chill. I bend to pick up a log, find the most level end, place it squarely on the round of oak stump, and swing the ax back in an arc over my head and forward with force. I know by the crack of the blow that I hit the seam where the wood beckoned.

Over and over, lift-swing-crack, until the stack of firewood mounts and the music of ax playing oak and piñon no longer resounds in the canyons of family backyards separated by good-neighbor fences. Sweat trickles down my back, and my ax-embracing palms are tender. But I don’t want to let go of the ax or relinquish the power of arc and cleave. What I want is to stand in the body that swings the ax - stand tall in the woman’s body that swings the dangerous ax with precision and grace.

That was 30 years ago, and tonight I wonder why that vignette of a memory comes back to me with the full force of ax to oak. I think that was one of the first times I knew what power felt like in my body, and I knew that when I put down the ax, I also let go of the only power I recognized.

There is something out there that exists already, and when we act, we are simply stepping into what already is. So I think of the intention of splitting logs for firewood: the ax knows where it needs to strike and the oak invites the ax and the woman steps into the space that was hers before she entered it. Let’s say the wood is already split and stacked and burning on the grate before the woman enters the space and lifts the ax to fulfill the intention.

And so I go to bed at night and get up in the morning, step into the day that holds a space for me - not preordained, not destiny or fate - but the power to choose. And if I stand in just this spot at just this time and open my eyes and listen with my ears and feel the ground beneath my feet, I recognize the same power that propelled the ax. And all I had to do was step up.

I’ll be damned.

Six Impossible Things

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle. ~ Lewis Carrol

For years I have been drawn to books by women who - say - take six months out of their lives to live in a cottage on the beach and write and weep and walk and think and be left the hell alone. And many times in my life I have longed for a hut in the woods where I could go to be completely alone, where the village Wise Women would quietly and invisibly leave meals at my door, never disturbing me while I howl, cry, sleep, drift, draw in the dirt - and be face to face with me. During those times, I do not want a happy medium: a little time alone, a little time with friends. Frankly, "happy medium" is a big fat lie. Or as my younger friends say, "It blows." Happy medium is neither this nor that, it's flat, featureless, boring, and a sell-out.

Remember that old adage, "All things in moderation"? What?! Why? Even when I was a Stepford Wife living in the suburbs and making meat loaf and protecting the status quo, my brain would turn that adage around: "All things in excess." If my whole body is telling me to be alone, it doesn't mean kinda-sorta. And it also doesn't mean forever. I wonder what our world would look like if we listened to our bodies more and paid attention to messages from our emotions, the real emotions - not the ones we concoct to keep from knowing what we feel ("Oh gosh I am so confused") or to keep from speaking what we know ("It's not you - it's me - I am so screwed up").

And I wonder what the world would look like if we didn't judge other people who aren't just like us. Any of these sound familiar:

"She should get out more; it would do her good."

"Team building is a great way to create bonds at work. Let's all play minature golf."

"If I've told him once, I've told him a million times . . . ."

I've had several more training sessions at the BCCL since I last posted, each adding more drops of insight into my parched bucket. And yesterday I went to to the movies, my favorite form of escape, to see Tim Burton's wonder of a Wonderland in 3D. At one point the beings of Wonderland are trying to decide if this Alice is the real Alice, and the Mad Hatter tells her that if she's Alice, she has lost her "muchness." Later she summons her muchness to slay the Jabberwock, and between those two events, she accidentally introduces herself to the Queen of Hearts as "Um." Now Um is neither this nor that, and even Tweedledee and Tweedledum are more clear about their identity than Alice is about hers at that point. Do we wander through our babyhood as Much and gradually lose our muchness to an Um before we can move on to claim a self unclouded by opinion (others) and doubt (self)?

Alice insists that she must be Alice because Wonderland is, after all, her dream: there would be no Wonderland without her. But everyone around her madly gladly sagely fondly loudly insists that she is not who she knows she is.

Mad! They're all mad!

The young Alice asks her father if she is mad, and he gives her a wonderland of an answer: "Of course you're mad! All the best people are!"

What if "bonkers" were our benchmark instead of the current standards of civility. Wouldn't that be a huge relief? Couldn't we then create a Much of a Much self?  Wouldn't we then be seeing - and creating - a world in which anything is impossible - and therefore Wonder(land)fully believable?

The art of the effort

Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. ~ Samuel Beckett

The only way to get what you want in life is to know what you want. But how do you know what you want?

Let's say you know what you want and you lay it all out there - in a notebook, say, or in dinner conversation on a friend's patio on a summer evening (aren't those the best conversations?).

Now what? That's the rhetorical question that woke me in the wee hours this morning and tormented me until I finally got up just as the first pink was painting the horizon, made tea, turned on a book light, and wrote in my journal. Whatever it is we want, are we really prepared to have it?

I love words. I love writing and I love conversation. I love reading and reciting and pondering all those ideas that emerge in words. I understand the risk that goes into writing, as much risk in writing in a journal as there is, for me, in writing to a blog. Maybe more. I've kept a journal since I was 12 (Dear Diary - Today Uncle Harry and Aunt Red came over in their new car - a Volkswagen Beetle! It is SO CUTE!!). I wrote almost daily until I was 19. Then I got married and I stopped writing for seven years. Seven years!! Why? I had no idea - until I started writing in a journal again and my unhappiness poured out, too obvious to keep ignoring. I was 26, I had two small children and no education, no means of supporting myself: writing in my journal was a huge risk because it woke me up to a reality that scared the crap out of me.

So yes, writing is risky. But not writing was slow death.

Knowing what you want and stepping up to getting what you want are two entirely different things. I can use words to spin the fantasy that by knowing I am acting.

Bullshit.

I wonder how many of us are capable of accepting into our lives the very things we profess to want? This goes back to last night's post about taking risks. So, OK, I say I'm willing to take risks in order to have connection, to build intimacy, to sink into that sweet spot of love with another human being without the fear of drowning. Words words words.

He words me, girls, he words me. ~ Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, Scene ii

In order to have anything we really want, we must be willing to risk everything. We must be willing to fall, to fail, to rise, to fall again. Risk is a given; it is the subtext to "I want . . . ." It is the shadow self.

What if we rephrase this conundrum in a way that honors the magnitude as well as the necessity of what we want: wouldn't we then say, "I want to risk failing (feeling) in order to have  . . . ." Now we're getting somewhere.

Today I'll be in an all-day workshop on this very subject. I feel the fear deep in my belly. I feel the excitement under the fear. Turn the key in the ignition; rev the engine. I have no idea where I'm going, but I'm getting there under my own power.