Soul Food

Posted on November 8, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“It’s like driving at night with the headlights on. You can only see a little aways ahead of you, but you can make the whole journey that way.”
~ E.L. Doctorow, on writing
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For the first time in years I didn’t go to the Dixon artist studio tour. I love that tour.

Dixon is a tiny hamlet that seems out of the way unless you know it’s there. Then, it’s simply a gem on the way to Taos. What I love about this tour is there’s a true center to the community, including an actual community center (!), small market, library, and other buildings of specific function. A large number of the 1000 souls who live there are artists. These days I go for the sense of being part of something as much as for the artists’ work. Really good music is always happening live in the community center. The small restaurant that’s sure to have a long line come lunch time serves yummy, well-prepared New Mexican fare. And tho a car is needed to visit most of the studios, you can amble thru some about ‘town.’ Apple orchards, acequias, and the Embudo River that usually runs clear renders the valley particularly beautiful.

This year, tho, I didn’t feel like the drive up. I took myself to The Teahouse for breakfast instead. The small adobe building, formerly a residence, was packed inside. The 56 windy degrees outside pushed me to accept a tiny table indoors that at any other time I’d reject to wait for the next option.

I sat in the smaller middle room, my favorite. Against a wall on an extremely busy aisle — the single pass-through from the entry & kitchen to the two rooms across the back of the house. The aisle where every person coming & going + every wait & support staff walk. On the wall behind me was another busy spot, the rack holding food & tea menus. I cocooned in the ancient, low-seated barrel chair whose sides rose nearly to my shoulders. And somehow, beyond comprehension of anyone who knows me, I stepped out of the noise that can feel like an assault.

40 footfalls a minute passed by my chair. The floor vibrated and bounced with each footfall. I looked about the room at the people, pulled out my notebook and ordered food. My thought, I love my life in this moment. Sitting in this place drinking fine tea. The sight of favorite fall draped trees against an oh, so blue sky out the window. The sunlight that streamed in once the cloud passed. Knowing the folks there didn’t care if I linger. This town where asking for water that’s never seen ice sounds normal. I was mindful I belonged.

I believe mindfulness is not about meditation and rules. It’s about paying attention, listening, being present. That the quieter we become, the more we hear. Things we so often fail at. Because we’re human, and carry a big suitcase that’s gathered pieces of paper and memory, words and sounds, images and smells and feelings from a minute ago to that time in kindergarten when our prized fifty-cent piece was dismissed by the teacher.

We dream ahead, plan & prepare ahead, think & live ahead. Our presence in the moment co-opted by aspirations down the road a minute or year, vs. what feeds our present. At least I do.

The word aspiration reminds me of my class with author Meg Wolitzer at Stony Brook Southampton Writers Conference. Meg has the best exercises. This one paired two writers of opposite predilections in writing. Which meant me of description & words with one whose words are spare. The instruction, take the other writer’s work, and write to it. No more than one page, double spaced.

I wrote a fiction piece to a powerful, spare poem about an abused kid who aspired for the freedom of the surf.

I spent the afternoon after class learning everything I could about surfing. The how-to’s of the sport. The language and habits of surfers. The timing and experience of a ride, and wipe-out. The places and names the 14 yr. old in her poem might relate to. I loved the challenge in that exercise. By the time I began writing, I could feel and see every word I wrote. Watching the big waves roll in, the thunder of the break, that point of decision when you hit the water. Underwater, the seconds of disorientation, not knowing which way is up, that feel like minutes. When I read the piece aloud in class, she asked if I surfed, her face clearly expectant. I was almost disappointed to say ‘no.’ She said I got it, exactly.

It was because I was mindful to the ethos of the kid in pain, and heard something between the lines. I was present to it as I allowed the resolution to unfold. I wanted that kid to triumph in a way she knew for herself she had. Somehow I knew shooting the tube on the North Shore, Oahu like John John Florence, who at 13 was the youngest surfer ever to compete professionally, who was famous for shooting the big wave tubes, was how she’d know.

I once read there are no new stories, just new ways of telling them. I believe that. I think the secret is to pay attention to the people in them. The ones of our life, and the ones we read or see outside our life.

This is what I know. . . mindfulness is akin to wonder. Not a doing, but being. Something that happens when we’re connected with something other than ourselves. It’s being happy & sad, feeling freedom & fear, residing in strength & vulnerability, sure & uncertain at once. Present to the dance of live.

There are no new stories, just new ways of telling them. Pay attention to people in stories. They show what it is to be human, and to wonder. After all, as Ram Dass says, “We are all just walking each other home.”

Look at the people in stories you’ve seen on film and paper. Be mindful. What do you see beyond the story?

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A Native Home of Hope

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“. . .like a dream between the crease of shadow and light.”
~ author Terry Tempest Williams

I want to tell you a story, and this week is not about my stories. It’s about yours.

I’ve been quiet, considering the shape of my life. I bought a small seated buddha for the yard. Placed him where I see him easily from my kitchen window. On the ground in front of him I shaped a lei made of grasses and shells from Big Island, Hawai’i into a heart. The islanders create these leis as a lasting blessing to encircle something treasured. . .a photograph, an item, whatever. I’m blessing the ground of my home. In the buddha’s hand I placed a white heart rock. It glows against his earthen colored body, even in shade.

My unexpected gift is a small book I’ve known about for 5 years: “When Women Were Birds” by Terry Tempest Williams. I wanted to like it when it first came out, and I didn’t. I felt disconnected to her rhythm, and couldn’t get past the first chapter. Perhaps it was because I’d left a home I liked, with a kitchen I loved (so important), in a town I really liked where I had community, to move to Florida. I’d relinquished 5 days a week of solitude (a writer’s blessing) to live with my husband every day for the first time in 17 years. I was tangled in adjustments.

Now, having read the book, I believe I wasn’t supposed to read it back then. Because she’s talking straight to me and everything I’m creating & passionate about in my life now.

As a reader, I won’t write, underline, or highlight in books. I copy beautiful sentences into a notebook. I’ve never placed more than a few tabs in a volume. Even when researching, I photocopy. This small volume has more than a dozen tabs, color coded. Yellow for writing & the writing life. Purple for a sentence about creativity that adds to what I say in my own book, “The Writer’s Block Myth.” Pink for the women’s retreat I’m co-facilitating with visionary artist, Kendall Sarah Scott, in March (Madonna – Contemporary Ally for These Times).

One story I didn’t tab is about the secret language created by oppressed, illiterate women in China centuries ago. The script (Nushu) was embroidered on handkerchiefs & kimonos, written in the folds of fans, inside slippers covering bound feet, and in small books passed mother to daughter on wedding days. The language shared only with other women. Tradition and a culture intentionally created around it.

The script was distinctly feminine. Curving, fluid, linearly flowing. Much different than the boxy, angular lines of Chinese words we’re familiar with. (my son who lives in Taiwan corrects me when I call them characters. they’re words, not characters, he says) Strangely, the word for a bird’s head in this language is the same as for a woman‘s head. What story and meaning lies there?

Writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous wrote, ‘We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.’ I believe it’s because when the principles of the feminine are embodied, change occurs. And we’re in those times when change must come from the desirous heart.

Another story I didn’t tab is about a small group of writers who saved thousands of previously protected wildlands from disappearing to gas and oil exploitation in Utah. In the state and national congressional hearings regarding the legistlation, Senators unequivocally ignored the populace and silenced testimony from anyone other the extractive energy industry.

What can we do, Williams and her colleagues asked. Their solution: a collective voice. They petitioned twenty-five writers committed to language and the landscape. In the end, a congresswoman and historian added their voices.

With the help of volunteers and donations, they compiled the writings, biographies, and signatures of the contributors, and maps into a small bound anthology edited for an effective progression of ideas that spoke directly to their intended audience. In three weeks, “Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on behalf of Utah Wilderness” was delivered into the hands of every member of Congress, Vice President Gore, key members of the administration, and others.

Following a press conference, a Washington Post reporter told the organizers, ‘What a waste of time. Do you have any idea how much paper gets passed around in Congress? You are so naive. This will never see the light of day.” The organizers reply, “Writing is an act of faith.’

What happened? When the congressional land management act contested by the populace went to the Senate floor, every essay from that book got read. And six months later, a new national monument was created to protect 2 million acres. The President holding a copy of “Testimony,” saying ‘This little book made a difference.’

We’re in a different world now. Many feel there’s no hope. Author and naturalist Diane Ackerman warns, “Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain yet they color and clarify everything. They can stain the mind or warp the feelings.” What she says is true.

And I believe in words to do good and enact change. Because they have power. The Nushu language was destroyed when the thought behind it became a threat to regimes. The first thing forbidden in cultural genocide is the culture’s language. And in some countries, poets and writers are executed. It’s how we use words that matters. And how mindful we are of intent.

20 yrs. ago writers changed the course of what seemed a sure trajectory. Not with words of argument, logic, righteousness, or blame. With words that bought a place and a different vision alive. Can it happen now. I believe it can. Even knowing all I know about the hard hearts, fear, terrorism, division, and devastation that plagues this country and planet.

Because a writer’s gift is the ability to touch others. To make connection. And we never know when or how that happens.

Terry Tempest Williams’ words in her book gave me what I need 5 years after I first picked it up and put it down. A successful author found my book & called me after 6 years of feeling stuck, and started writing again. The ah-ha moments we experience as we journal, connect with ourselves. The family stories that shift our understanding of the tribe we’re born into. The novel that expands ideas inside us of what it is to be human. The Chinese women who found a voice. The senators getting ready to vote away thousands of acres of wildlands for oil. It is not naive to hope.

In nearly every spiritual tradition, Word created the world. Scientists have linked words to physical vibrations that affect the brain. The power of our words hold consequences beyond the intent of the messenger. So, write. Write what matters. Writing is an act of faith.

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Making a Writer’s Life

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Heloise Jones

My morning walk these days is short. 15-17 minutes. The heart of it three long blocks uphill, and three blocks coming down looking out to the western sky and mountains. If I’m in the third block at the top of the hill early enough before sunlight breaks, my treat is one to six bunnies. All sitting perfectly still, face forward, front feet together, ears erect like those chocolate bunnies wrapped in colored cellophane we used to get at Easter. Their big round brown eyes don’t even blink when I tell them how beautiful they are.

Recently, just after our nights started hovering 32- 40°, I noticed the colors on the western horizon we only see at sunrise – a blue between robin’s egg & sky blue and the salmony peach known as Santa Fe colors – rose to nearly fill a third of the tall sky. I wondered perhaps the temperature’s sudden change. This is the first time I live where I fully see it each morning. I felt I was witnessing something special, this tall rise of western dawn color. I felt I was gliding downhill, as if flying right to it. And suddenly I was transported to sailing across country. Two of us, bringing me home to Santa Fe, my thought. And just at that thought, two ravens sailed silently side by side over my head from behind, straight into that horizon. Their wings outstretched, like gliders.

Booker Prize winning author George Saunders says, “Story is kind of a black box. And you’re going to put the reader in there. She’s going to spend some time with this thing you have made. And when she comes out, what’s gonna have happened to her in there is something astonishing. It feels like the curtain’s been pulled back and she’s gotten a glimpse into a deeper truth. As a story writer, that’s not as easy as it sounds.” I think that applies to life stories, too.

This story of me being here, and my life now, began almost exactly one year ago when I pulled out my pile of notes, sat down and wrote the first words of The Writer’s Block Myth while on my yearly fall visit to Santa Fe. I’d already decided to move back, so I searched for a home while I wrote the book. It wasn’t a typical visit. It was a writing retreat and the beginning of my new life.

Then, in the six weeks December 1 to mid-January, I rewrote the entire book, edited it twice, created a pre-launch, made my first 2-1/2 min. video (which took 12 hours to do), packed my entire household, contracted movers, and set out across country. Like those two ravens, my husband and I in the car sailed to this horizon thru diverse American landscapes. I could’ve told a different story each night from what I observed. But it was my story I was in the midst of. And it was full enough.

Nine months ago this past Sunday we pulled in. I remember ascending the hill from Clines Corners, the thrill I felt seeing the Sangre de Cristos. How the clouds were so dramaticly surreal. We stopped at one of my favorite places for a New Mexican Sunday brunch before we headed into town.

I can’t remember when I finally stopped telling people I’d moved back after 19 trips in 18 years, after leaving to go east for family and job. That the last 6 trips were for two months. . .when I shed that story of part-time local who wasn’t really a visitor.

The months since I returned I’ve focused on the alchemy in the work I do with writers. I’ve put myself out into the world. I’ve spent hours at the computer, little of it writing stories. And I’ve been recovering from what it took to get here.

Winter passed into spring. Then spring passed. Summer passed. Fall has nearly passed. And two weeks ago I walked outside and realized I’d done little of living in this place.

I didn’t see the summer wildflowers on the mountain like I promised myself I’d do. Or walk amongst the aspens, hug one & put my ear to the trunk to hear that creaking like an old wooden ship. I’ve soaked at Ojo Caliente mineral springs only three times. And been to few festivals, galleries, poetry readings, or the many other things you only find here. I haven’t even visited the Georgia O’Keeffe museum.

The views of sky and cottonwoods out my windows I’ve lived on are no longer enough. I desire space inside and to write, as well as expand this work that I truly love doing with writers. As well as speaking before groups, and seeing people’s faces soften and smile as their eyes light up. I desire space i.n.s.i.d.e, and to write. Connection with myself and this place.

Thomas Wolfe said you can never go home, again. It’s true places change, people change, even cultures change. If we are alive, we change. And I believe what poet Derek Walcott says in his lovely poem, ‘Love after Love:’

The time will come
 when, with elation
 you will greet yourself arriving
 at your own door, in your own mirror
 and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
 You will love again the stranger who was your self.

I believe you can come home to yourself. I realize as I write this, that’s what I’m in the process of doing, even in the work I do with other writers. Because I am a writer.

That picture above is dawn from my kitchen window the first week I was in my little house. George Saunders is right. This story has not been as easy to write as it sounds. It’s been worth it, though.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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The Color of Autumn

Posted on October 11, 2017 by Heloise Jones

Fall in my neck of northern New Mexico is about studio tours. Artists across valleys and in small communities display their creations & welcome visitors. It’s a decades-old tradition. Many of us regulars look forward to visiting our favs. Know there may be cookies, apples, or posole. One I’ve attended every year since 1994 is the Abiquiu tour in the Chama River Valley. These days as much for the place as the artists.

The Chama valley is where I take visitors. For me, it glows, and holds the magic of northern NM like no place else. Not even the dramatic stretches beyond that lead to Ghost Ranch. This valley speaks of land and people. Orchards, vineyards, lavender farms, the Rio Chama winding in big loops thru it.

Yellow is the color of autumn in New Mexico. We get a few russets, a bit of burnt orange, but it’s yellow that we see everywhere.

Sunshine groves of aspens that stretch swaths across the high mountains. Luminous golden yellow cottonwoods seemingly lit from inside that line waterways, sprout on mountain sides, cluster in valleys and on old homesteads. Fields & roadsides of sage green chamesa crowned with fuzzy looking yellow flowers. Mediums & neglected patches of ground covered with leggy yellow daisies.

The sky was clear the day we headed to the studio tour. Writing this, remembering how my friend and I felt lucky for such a day, I realize clear skies used to be expected. I couldn’t wait for it when I landed back here during those years I lived on the east coast. Then there was the year of wildfires. The smoke coming up from Arizona, and all directions around Santa Fe. But it cleared. Then (I can’t remember when), I noticed how many days the skies seemed bleached. A shroud of haze hanging on the horizon. It reminded me of my visit to the Grand Canyon five years ago. Me wondering if it would ever clear as the smoke from the electric power plant on Navajo lands continued.

This is smog from Albuquerque that blows up, my friend says. It’s smoke from the entire west up in flames, I think. We are all linked.

Our last stop on tour was the lavender farm. We sat at a table on the porch of the small wooden dwelling they call their teahouse. We sipped lavender tea, looked out on fields striped with rows of short domes of pruned lavender under a solid blue sky lifting to heaven. Light filtering thru the cottonwoods at the borders tinged the air golden.

A half dozen people sat or strolled about, quiet and mellow. So, when a woman came onto the porch and brightly proclaimed the sun strong for this time of year, she stood out. Not from here, my friend and I said. The sun’s always strong in the high desert, even in winter.

In 1993 I drove across country to live six weeks in the Berkeley Hills above San Francisco and get a hypnosis certification. I rented a small room in a house high above the bay, and 6 days a week drove over the mountain to the small town of Lafayette. It was a really small town then. Not having near the wealth that predominates the township now. I don’t remember much about the place, except the 2 pump gas station I filled up at. The first time I pulled in, I got out of the car. A guy who looked and spoke as if of middle eastern descent came over, chastised me, told me to get back in the car. It took me a moment to realize he was going to pump the gas. Full service stations had all but disappeared in North Carolina where I lived. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not from here.’ The next moment has never left me. His expression and demeanor immediately changed, softened. His voice turned quieter, kinder. I’m not from here. He’s not from here. We shared something, including understanding that feeling of ‘not from here.’

This wasn’t what I thought about when the gal walked by where we sat, tho. ‘You’re covered with flowers,’ I said. She looked down at her blouse and the large, vibrant, clearly defined flowers on a white background. I guess I am, she said. She was from Charleston, SC, a place I know. We chatted briefly.

Somehow it came up – yellow is the color of autumn in New Mexico. I told her how the trees seem to be lit with thousand watt lightbulbs at certain times a day. She quieted as she looked across the grounds and up the mountains in the near distance. Noted one tree tinged russet. Then said she thought she’d hang around, not return to Ghost Ranch right away, as planned.

17 yrs. later, while in Bluefield, WV doing research on the coal fields for my second novel, a friend offered to help me see what I was looking at, as she put it. She interpreted the landscape and culture, gave me perspectives. Like the sun is always strong in thin air. My experience of the place and understanding of where I was shifted in magical ways. I wasn’t thinking of this, either, when I greeted the woman from Charleston.

In fact, I’m not sure why I spoke to her. It might’ve been a way to mollify my initial dismissal for myself. And I think it’s because I felt something in her besides the space she took. She truly was earnest and engaged with being there. And completely unselfconscious about it! I simply wanted to share what I love, that I’m always in awe of, so she could love it, too.

In the end, I gave her a way to see what she was looking at, like my friend did for me in West Virginia. And a way for us to connect, like with the guy at the gas station in California.

The experience at the lavender farm has dogged me for days, and just now I understand why. I talk often about observing with awareness. Awareness the key word. That experience illuminated a whole new level of what awareness means. It’s more than presence and noticing. It includes the meaning we don’t know. It includes the Other – nature, human, place, culture. It’s allowing our understanding to expand.

It’s the heart of the work I do with writers. Allowing their relationships with themselves, their work, and their lives to deepen & shift toward what they desire. Because unless a hurricane drowns your world or a fire swallows your life whole, change happens in shifts. And presence to the creative process is about flow. Constantly changing in small shifts.

It’s the questions answered in the retreats and workshops I offer, such as the women’s retreat with amazing visionary artist Kendall Sarah Scott that’s happening on the full moon in March. Questions such as how do we go toward what we’re drawn to? How do we see all that we look at, and engage with awareness? How do we take what we see, and deepen our relationship to ourselves and this world that seems to burning, drowning, and crumbling in so many corners? How do we find our allies, the ones who support us feeling stronger, more alive, connected, and full of good stuff?

It’s a journey.

Tell me. . .What sparks you when you look around?
I’ll tell you a secret. . .The field of alfalfa really was this green, the sky really that high, and those trees really that luminous.

**Special Thanks to my angel messenger this week: The woman from Charleston, covered in flowers.

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Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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A Lesson from Dirty Dancing

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Heloise Jones

I got surprised the other night. Do you remember that gem of a movie from the 80s, Dirty Dancing? I watch it every few years, and strangely, never tire of it. My surprise the other night was Netflix scrolling the remake. I clicked OK, expecting to be entertained.

Oh, my, right from the beginning I questioned myself. Is it my age, not getting today’s idea of attractive? Do muscles replace fluid? Is it the new trend of dance? What is it about this fav scene I don’t like? That scene where the main character, Baby, enters the off-limit hall of dancers that’s so pivotal to the story. The scene that launches it.

In the original she’s overwhelmed with the sight. The hall packed with writhing bodies. The sensuality. The remake lost it completely. This wasn’t about bad. We’ve all seen cheesy or bad movies, and yet, walked away saying ‘it was so bad, and I liked it.’

I started watching the visual story as a writer. The dialogue, how it considered the viewer. What we call trusting the reader. How the characters were drawn. The backstory and context.

We’re not shocked and surprised along with the character as we are in the original, where we zero in close on details we humans notice when first seeing something so new. Realizing this is ‘dirty,’ and yet, not feeling it that way. In fact, it’s what I remember most.

Here the frame of the camera is close, our entire view the dancers. Men and voluptuous women focused on the other, hips moving in syncopated rhythm. We’re overwhelmed with it as she was. The camera pulls back only when Johnny, the lead dancer, enters. He’s isolated in our attention as he becomes isolated in her attention.

Then, when he gives her a lesson, ‘move your hips this way,’ we go with him. There are no thrusts, bumps, or grinds in a way that we feel her violated.

The remake felt exactly opposite for me. We enter a sparsely occupied room. The camera angle wide. No sensual mass. Couples here and there, hips humping and thrusting in isolated joining. The women thin, unlike any person I know. The one image I’m left with from that scene is a near-stick of a woman in the background, viewed from the back, her legs spread wide enough for standing sex. I’m no prude, and the visual story was not sensual here. It looked and felt dirty. A different set-up for what would follow.

I still expected better, tho. I quickly noticed the cultural context was diluted. The story takes place in a Jewish family summer camp in the Catskills. Something very common at the time, and perhaps still. As one blogger wrote after an evening with Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and co-producer of the original movie, “The film is hugely Jewish, capturing a 1960s Jewish family and their open-minded but still guarded sensibilities.” Except for the Kellermans, I didn’t get that impression.

Class and gender issues were diluted, too. Johnny’s given the added weight of serving time in prison as a device why he’s ousted. He’s given the story of leaving home at 16 instead of the female lead dancer, Penny, weakening her character as a strong woman. Even weakening the social context of how dangerous abortion was at that time. Her botched abortion was not her weakness, but all too common.

In a time when exclusion, race, and conflicts between religions are issues, isn’t it important to retain the context? All those things are in the story on purpose.

There was little trust in the viewer getting the points made. Evidenced by Penny declaring ‘it’s all about the hips,’ when that one short lesson by Johnny in the beginning of the original set that up. Evidenced by the mini-speech & threat (“you have no integrity; go apologize or I’ll call all the medical schools so you’ll never get in.”), which stole the impact of the look of disgust and the money gift snatched back from the waiter’s hands.

What I know. . .a picture says a thousand words. A picture also tells a thousand stories. Historical and cultural contexts shouldn’t be lost in today’s world, nor do they need to be unfathomable to today’s viewers.

We’re all storytellers. We can tell stories so the unfathomable is seen, and understood.

At the end of the remake, I waited for that famous line ‘Nobody puts Baby in the corner.’ Such a corny line, and I love it.

Look at the story you’re telling when you write.

What are you holding back or diluting.
How does the reader see thru your character’s eyes.
How might you make the unfathomable seen and understood.
What do you want your reader, viewer, or listener to remember.

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