Been Away a Bit

I have been away from blogging for a bit, due to simply being a bit lazy. But that's summer for you. Still, I am looking ahead towards work, towards a creative writing course to teach that is full and waitlisted. And really, I've just been enjoying my summer and getting used to a somewhat empty nest. And all that is as it should be.

Scars

I am well recovered from my surgery in June, though it took surprisingly longer than I thought to clear even the moderate anesthesia from my system. Now I have a very ugly scar on my previously rather nice shoulder. I have plans for a small tattoo over it, but am not sure what. I feel it will take getting used to. I keep thinking of how many people bear scars, psychic and physical, and how they become part of our landscape. God knows, I have got both, and I think the grace comes in learning how to bear everything with equanimity. I'm not perfect--when I took off the bandage on my shoulder, I was really sad. I can feel the scar tissue when I dance and need to find ways to keep the skin supple there. But I am glad my tumor is gone--my arm has never felt so wonderful, free of pain and numbness--and that I am okay. I still have work to do in this life, and am grateful I am here.

Shiva

There are houses we think we will live in forever, then suddenly these are not our houses. There are summers we believe will be one in a long endless daisy chain of summers, but the chain breaks in the hand--fragile all along, though it looked strong. You must be the pillar at the center of chaos, even when the psychic ether rips apart and the person you knew from aeons ago, from centuries, falls through. It is a cycle: birth and destruction, the lamb born in freezing rain and sleet on the cusp between a season of cold and a season of brightness, the tyger who springs forward like a scream made from shadow and fire.

"You're back," I say. I knew where you were all along, but I could not find you.
"You were here all along," you say. You thought maybe the cogs would not mesh this time around. Disappointed, you had said, "What's another twelve centuries? I'm patient." Then you saw the rivers in my open hands. When we talk, our words tumble over both our voices. Hard to hold back everything we haven't been able to say for a thousand years. There's a lot of catching up to do, and meanwhile the moon "turns in its clockwork dream" still.

Why are you here, now? So many riddles, so many untranslatable sutras whispering in the imagination, songs of small gods in the chambered nautilus of the outer dark, a shell that pours forth dreams in wild and fragmentary spillage.

The world will collapse time and space to bring these two together, when the time is right. So write. The Book of Life is falling open to the proper page. Trust in the process. It is written in letters you once thought were barbed wire, but whose true meaning is the heart of peace.

Love Abounds

Missing my dear departed sister today intensely, I switched on the radio and the following song was playing (you have to sit through an intro, but it's worth it):



My sister and I saw Cindy Lauper perform this live.

Love you, sis.

Watching It Happen

I'm tempted to start out my Creative Writing class next semester with a disclaimer that the decision to embark on "growing" one's creativity, particularly through writing, is a dangerous and a courageous act, because it changes one's life, subtly or overtly, in nearly alchemical ways. I saw so many of my students' lives change during my summer course (and it had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with their decision to open up their willingness). I am getting like a kid in a candy store as I think all I want to teach, all the writing exercises, and a semester of absolute wonder and fun (hard part is getting them to buy into it at first, but they warm up quickly).

Yes, I Turned 50

I turned 50 years old on June 7th, and am really quite happy about it. When I was young, 50 seemed "old"--and of course, I could never imagine that the day before my odometer rolled over, I would be participating in my first African dance recital! Which is precisely what I did. My friend Nonah from my dance troupe, almost 80 years young, has a slogan on the frame of her car's license plate: "Screw the golden years." Damn straight.

I feel younger now than I did in my thirties. That was a difficult, questioning decade for me. My forties were better, but I look forward to the next decade with joy and curiosity. I leave you all with the following quote:

"People do not grow old no matter how long we live. We never cease to stand like curious children before the great Mystery into which we were born."

Albert Einstein

Over the Weekend, A Cloud

Coming to terms with things over the weekend, there is sadness--really enormous sadness--but also a sense of what is real. I feel that perhaps life is always about trying to see through the fabric of illusion. I was saddened by an answer this weekend; it was not the one I wanted. We all get answers like this from the universe, so it doesn't matter what it was. I felt like a woman walking barefoot through the desert today, and yet I did not feel so sad after a while. I went to restorative yoga (the type in which one is supported by pillows and blankets, as if in a cocoon). And remembered something my myth professor Harvey once replied to a student, that in the end, it is all love, no matter what. And love cannot always be quantified, which is good.



If You Forget Me

by Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

The Week Ahead: Yay!

Three nice things will happen this week, with all luck: I get to go to African dance on Thursday night, a nice treat as my teacher from my regular class that night will be away, and I really plan to get to a class with my yoga teacher on Tuesday night. And I turn 50 on June 7th! ;)

A breather, then it's on to compiling a course reader for my Creative Writing class (feel free to comment with suggestions, dear readers, or send mailstrega@yahoo.com--short stories, poems, nonfiction essays, including books which I can excerpt). And the syllabus.

Keeping all my hopes up this summer for finding an agent, too.

Peace out!

For Kathleen Flowers

A beautiful poem by Kathleen Flowers, my friend who passed away recently:

In These Five Remaining Days
After Hafez

In these five remaining days, I see
I’ve spent my life bellowing like a mule,
feeling broken beneath a burden
that was mine to learn to carry
or the weight of another’s I could not ease.

In these four remaining days, the robe,
that has been my body, revels in
its own unraveling. Inside, a hummingbird
hovers, half-inside a flower, then zips
away, stitching the sky with iridescence.

In these three remaining days, I am still,
knowing what ripens below, soon breaks
through the duff, finds some light––
a rose-colored mushroom, quietly
glistens in the redwood mist.

On this, the second to last day, I ride
a riptide out to sea, find myself
fixed again to the ocean’s umbilicus.
Rocked upon her heaving breast, I taste
the briny tears we share, let go my thirst.

Oh this, my final day of living,
with every last breath, I make a plea
for the chance to hold aloft a hundred more
burdens, a friendship to sip, a forest to sit in,
singing thank you, thank you, thank you!


I miss Kathleen, though I hardly knew her. A short time ago, I was taking a walk in Santa Cruz, and stumbled upon her little house. I had only been there once. I went to Emily's Bakery afterward, close by, and wrote this in my journal. Could be the start of a poem, might not:

"In this unexpected rain, I walk, suddenly discover your little house with its neat bamboo hedge, this day a landscape of lead, fog, mist, stormcloud. Here is your cherry tree with its small ruffled parasols of ruffles, here are the tall spires of lavender, the ones you wrote about from the other side of the window. I wish my poetry would bring me to such heights as yours; you knew the wild pulse under the hummingbird's throat, the ecstasies in a single opening flower. There was a time, not too long ago, when I could look deep into the creamy throat of a morning glory and joyfully translate its song.
Now poetry is my Lilith with wild red hair; she wraps me in chains, drops me to the bottom of the sea, twists me through dead-end labyrinths, old wells echoing with grievances told over and over, unquenchable longings.

The night before your funeral, I dreamed I stood in front of a dark church, waiting, afraid I would not find a place there, and you jumped out of the dark, showered me with handfuls of pink rose petals. Laughing, you gave me a gentle push down the street. "Go!" you said, "Leave here! Go have fun!" So many leaves on the sidewalk, shushing under my feet.

How strange now to me that you are gone and your house still stands, paint washed to ochre in this gray light, a flamenco-red geranium in front, all the small brightnesses, the suns you dropped like coins in the wake of your leaving.

In the Heaven of Flowers

"I must have flowers, always, always." Claude Monet

Went to the Plant Works in Felton today for the first time since my mother and sister died. How she loved flowers, though hers was not the ragtag gypsy garden that I have--I plant for wild color, she planted for uniformity, though everything she grew became exquisite, especially her roses, like colorful silk skirts open to the wind and sun. I grew up with roses everywhere: in vases, on porcelain lampshades, printed on my clothes. on bedspreads and tablecloths, the perfume in her garden swoonable in its intensity. I plant roses for their scent now: Bella Roma, Gertrude Jekyll, Angel Face, Mr. Lincoln, Elena, Dreamweaver, save the petals, cook them into rose petal jelly in the autumn, the jelly a soft, soft pink. The mouth fills with roses touched ever-so-delicately with lemon, in one bite. The jar has to be used up quickly, the sweetness does not last.

I walk along green-shaded rows of plants, every leaf like a hand reaching for the sun, dumb and so grateful. My heart knows the planet is ill, but the leaves still reach, still give me the most basic of hopes. My sister is ash now, my mother has gone to bone-white, wrapped in rags of a beaded dress. I turn down the path that is all roses in black buckets, too tempting for this day. I could take a truckload home.

I buy salvia the color of pink paint thinned again and again with water. Each flower is perfectly shaped for the hummingbird's inquisitive needle. A miniature fuschia for my shady deck; my mother had fake fuschias in a wicker basket, same colors of red and purple. I touch a plant called "dead nettle," the name evoking a shiver, wonder if I will feel the sting anyway (I don't). In England, it is called "Archangel." I see the blood threads lining the petals of abutilon, the delphinium's cupped leaves like ragged-edged plates, coral bells, poppies always on the verge of losing their petals, like shameless hussies.

How goes the heart today, the healing from my losses. Blooming again, blooming.

I want to be a D.J.

I've been primpin' my Facebook with playlists, including song clips with great titles, like:

The Witch Queen of New Orleans (Redbone)
Paying the Cost to Be the Boss (BB King)
Nobody Loves Me But My Mother (and she could be jivin' too)--BB King
Chicken Ain't Nothing But a Bird
Are You All Reet?
Is You Is Or Is You Ain't? (above three as performed by Cab Calloway)
You and Me and the Bottle Makes Three Tonight (Big Bad Voodoo Daddy)
Stop the Wedding--Etta James
Love Me Like a Man--Bonnie Raitt
Mr. Jelly Roll Baker (performed by Leon Redbone).

I want to be a DJ; my show would be called "The Witch Queen of New Orleans" and I would play all kinds of wonderful songs.

For now, enjoy the following video of Cab Calloway (Fred Astaire said this was, in his opinion, the best tapdancing ever put on film). And then, all you hep cats get up and dance!