Stepping Into Wonderland

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Heloise Jones

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen

Big Sun - Version 2

A year ago I discovered half-closed blossoms bigger than my hand covering a small tree, stunning flowers on plain, prehistoric looking cactus tendrils entwined through the branches. ‘Oh, the night blooming cereus opened last night,’ a woman behind me said. She took me to a large oak engulfed with similar vines, small nubs furred with what looked like coarse gray dog hair pocked along their length. I learned the nubs would stretch into thick reddish stems, push a large teardrop bud out at the ends. That I had to go to the tree the very night the buds plumped. Nothing prepared me for the miraculously beautiful sight of an entire tree draped, roots to the ends of its furthest limbs, in an abundance of 8” blooms. The white petals felt like feathers, the abundant yellow stamens baby-soft. I took pictures, vowed to remember, because the whole show played just once a year, at dark night. By 8am the blooms would close, drop their heads.

But I missed the night display this past week. Not because they came early, which they did, but because I forgot to feel the excitement of anticipation, head out in the late late night. I stood before the fading display the morning after, wondered at myself for finding the splendor in the waning blossoms less than when I first found them a year before. Wondered at thinking them not quite as fine as when they glowed wide-bright in the night. I even noted there weren’t as many on the tree this year, as if that lessened their magic. I’ve experienced peak perfection, I thought. And immediately saw what I was doing. I was dismissing this year’s grandeur with comparison, not appreciating the divine before me. These, no different in their life progression than the gorgeous sculptures of disintegrating tulips and insides of broken conchs, the rugged ocean battered beauty of aged shells that I love.

It wasn’t because I couldn’t possess their impermanence, either. For they’re no different than other beauty I can’t hold – changing light across the bay, the turning of trees through seasons, the birds and clouds. I realized I’d somehow projected my perfectionism for myself, my current angst of not in right time, not the right output, not good enough onto the stunning flowers that help us see their prehistoric looking host differently 364 days a year.

Three days later, the sun barely up, the sky spread flat, uninspiring, I left the bay earlier than usual to walk home. Halfway up the walk I turned, saw pink, pale yellow, the biggest.sun.ever over the water. And something otherworldly happened. I was transported to Wonderland.

Light shown with a difference reminiscent of New Mexico, what I imagine in Provence. Every street I looked down was a tunnel to somewhere shining at the end. Wherever I looked, color popped, was intensely 3-D against the hundred shades of green and brown around it. Lit lamps floated before buildings. Small white flowers hovered mid-air, glowing. Purple cloth, a pale lemon umbrella, hot pink chair danced in front of dirty white stucco. Daisies on thread stalks, brilliant yellow splats on a red-dirt colored wall. Subtleties were painterly, the brush strokes luscious. And sunlight cut through like timed spotlights, illuminated a patch of peach wall in the shadows, hot orange-red palm tassels overhead, and ahead, lit bright, the entire tall trunk of a tree covered with the limp drooping heads of night blooming cereus.

Rumi says the wound is the place where the Light enters you. I say sometimes it takes a gift like a trip thru Wonderland to open your eyes. Perfection’s everywhere, every moment. The big secret. . .we define it.

Tell me. . .you see that, too, don’t you?

*
The morning after
*

Another journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writers Life.

A secret: I really was in Wonderland.
A favorite: Wonderland

When Losing a Home’s Like Losing a Lover

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Heloise Jones

“Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same.
Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.”
~ Thomas Wolfe

Wisteria – Biltmore Estate, Asheville, NC

lilac Biltmore

Are they opening, or closing?

My breath caught at the first glimpse of the Appalachians rolling below me. So beautiful. I forgot how pictures don’t do justice. I landed tucked away for a few days in a quiet Asheville neighborhood. My view trees, a tiny bit of sky. I felt grateful it’s still early for the full bush of leaves. I immediately scanned the small woods for flaming azaleas. The next day on a drive to Grove Park Inn Lost to Omni (how some of us think it), I scanned the roadside where I knew wild, thick, brilliant flames of forsythia show. Another day I expected azaleas in full bloom at Biltmore Estate. Tall walls of pink laurel blossoms on the drive to the mansion. But I’m late for the forsythia. Thick green foliage stand instead. The azaleas and laurels bloomed early. Brown nubs of spent flowers all that remain.

I had breakfast at a place I regularly frequented when I lived here. Simple meals of fresh ingredients well prepared. Fine local art on the walls, good music. Quiet, intimate with 30 seats and a short bar for diners. It sold after I moved so I don’t know the owner or staff anymore. Most strange, though, I saw Me of a few years ago in a fellow diner. A woman known by name, her special requests, her stories. Her familiarity clear by the way she praised the food, the place, her tone like an insider. I observed from the outside in, felt like a visitor for the first time in the three years since I left.

Perhaps that sparked my notice how the air feels abuzz with a difference that doesn’t invoke in me the wonder of discovery or thrill of new experience. How hearing seven new hotels approved for city center didn’t stir an outrage of ownership for my old town. I have the comforts of familiarity – knowing to check weather reports every morning, knowing the back roads, best meals, fav galleries. Share the camaraderie of longtime friends through the known and evolution of the known. But this difference feels like a love and I have changed in different ways. Like a lover lost who’s still my good friend. The comfort of not being a visitor gone.

A literary agent once asked after reading my novel if I was naturalist. Such a strong sense of the place, he said. I didn’t tell him as I told you here I don’t hike or get in the dirt. I said I observe. His remark sent me searching the book for descriptive passages, worrying I had too many, might bore my readers. I found words, random sentences, a couple short paragraphs focused on nature, all key to context and character. Writing this, I remember what Natalie Goldberg calls painting a place we can’t see into a work. If she’s painting a house and the Mississippi River is a mile behind her, she must somehow capture that river in her painting of the house. Same as I do when I write. Capture the fullness of a place without all the words. It’s what we do when we go home. Capture the fullness without all the markers, flowers, and time.

Thomas Wolfe wrote we can never go home again, meaning all things change. But I believe we can. That a place can continue to inform who we are in the world, and our relationship with it remains despite the changes. Santa Fe, NM after twenty years and Big Island, Hawaii after ten years are like that for me. I feel local when there. People treat me as local. I’m feeling my way through this sense of losing my home in Asheville, and I don’t know what to think of it. These mountains are in my blood. I’m right where I need to be, feeling good here today. Guess I’ll do what Thomas Wolfe suggests, lean down and listen. Perhaps that’s all any of us can do when the ground shifts. Have you noticed how once it starts, it ripples out?

Another journey in mindfulness. Getting to Wise.
A Writers Life.

A secret: I never thought the Blue Ridge Parkway drive special after the leaves filled in. We’d go to Town Mountain Rd. above the city, view the valley and ridges from there.

A favorite: Rising vapor trails of fireflies across a yard or field.

An Inexplicable Love

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Heloise Jones

“As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks,
learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself
with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can”.”
~ John Muir

Love Your Mother

*

I have an inexplicable love of the natural world. I find the details and stuff of birds, animals, and fish, of rocks, rivers, and oceans, of sky and space, land and habitats fascinating. I say inexplicable because I’m not sure where it comes from. I’ve always been a girly girl. Not prissy or cute or squeamish, but neat and clean with no appreciation for dirt under my nails and an over-appreciation for bathing dry salt from my skin after a sweat. Plus, I like my clothes unwrinkled, my socks to contrastingly match my outfit, my shoes unscuffed, earrings in my ears. Did even when I wore flannel shirts every day.

Nothing that happened to me as a child instilled this love, either. Yes, I spent twelve hours a day outdoors when I was a school girl – when I wasn’t reading – collected snails in a jar at one time, vividly remember Disney’s animated paint brush sweeping across the screen, full watercolor scenes in its wake that morphed into real life moving images. But my family didn’t camp, view wilderness areas, or hike off sidewalks. A sandy beach, never more than an hour away my entire childhood through high school, was something my mother disliked. A photo of me at five in an immaculate sundress, my face contorted, eyes squinting from the sun epitomizes our trips to the shore until I was a teen and dad took me with him the days he fished. In other words, my parents were great with their hands, had flowers in the yard, but indulged no pleasure in gardening. My love comes from somewhere else.

We all have moments etched forever in our minds. One particularly important one for me was on a day my father asked me to cut his hair. He was dying with cancer, couldn’t move well. We went to the little screened porch at the back of his Florida house. I cut it the way he wanted, slicked back, cool like he always wore it, not the way I wanted to cut it. We sat quietly, afterwards. A small bird hopped about in a bush near the screen. “I wonder….” he said, his voice soft, not really speaking to me. Honestly, I can’t remember what he wondered about that bird. What I remember is the gentle light of humid air, how the warmth was the kind where lesser clothing would not be enough, one layer more too much. And I remember a tiny shock thinking he wonders. As if the word wonder on my father’s lips was the prick of a memory.

A friend said this morning some of us are born loving nature, some are not. I don’t agree. Because it’s clear to me now my love and awe is part and parcel of Me before I listened to the shoulds and oughts, before I learned pretty and ugly, before time took on meaning and busy meant something besides presence. The Me connected to the mystery of the Universe. For nature is surely the expression of every mystery we cannot know, do not know. Beautiful and challenging as experiencing another country and culture inside us. Something we know in our cells when we listen, see, wonder. That’s what I believe. What do you believe?

When I was out scouting things to draw, I slowed down…As I slowed down
things became brilliant. Grass growing through a cement crack, a stop sign
…suddenly mattered, because I saw them.
~ Natalie Goldberg (from Living Color – A Writer Paints Her World)

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Another journey in mindfulness. Getting to Wise.
A Writers Life.

A secret: I don’t see much around me when I hike. I watch the ground so I don’t trip.
A favorite: The changes of light across landscapes and sky.

*

Happy Earth Day

Big Hearted Souls & Unexpected Journeys

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Heloise Jones

. . .One day, there 
will be nothing but the hum 
of breathing, the drum of heart. 
So for now, look up, listen with 
the most acute attention. Can you
 hear the world singing for you? 
See the way it puffs out its chest 
trying to get you to notice, notice it all?”  
~ Jean Reinhold

geese07

Snow Geese on the Wing

This was gonna be really short. A roll call of heroes & sheroes to balance the grim news that seems everywhere. My first entry this beautiful story by Marlisa Mills in CT that I read on facebook: ‘…in a cold and windy rain…I saw a flock of geese trying to cross a busy road, maybe to reach a patch of grass on the far side where snow had melted, left a large puddle of rainwater. The birds were weary and winter-worn, hungry and thin. Two cars in front of me had stopped for the crossing. Coming the other way, a large old beat car stopped. One by one the geese crossed the street. Then a car behind the old white car honked impatiently, zoomed around and, missing the geese, sped off furiously honking. Suddenly, the door of the old car opened and an elderly man, stooped and winter weary himself, got out and stood solidly in front of his car as the geese slowly continued. Then the man in the car behind him got out, stood next to the elderly gentleman. Then two women. Soon, eight humans stood shoulder to shoulder making a barrier so the birds could finish their journey. Tired, wet, and longing-for-spring people, saluting the courage of their winged friends who survived another season. It was something to behold. Sometimes, if we look, we see divinity standing right in the middle of the road.’

I bow to those eight, as well as to people who passionately live in their hearts, don’t see issues as too big, like this chef in India, this man in Minneapolis, and Will Allen on his urban farm in one of Milwaukee’s worst neighborhoods. And people who speak loudly against the discrimination and marginalization of women and girls, like Jimmy Carter with his huge personal sacrifice and Malala Yousafzai who won’t be silenced by a bullet or the Taliban. I love The Nature Conservancy for what they do and their continual shares of good news & triumphs. Salute Jane Kleeb and Nebraska ranchers, and self-labeled Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmental-lunatic alternative farmer Joel Salatin, who break assumptions but never lose sight we’re in this together.

Then something happened, turned this blog into an unexpected journey. A woman in a big car approached in my lane on our narrow street, stopped, wouldn’t pull to the curb on her side though she had ample room, though it’s the courtesy protocol in the neighborhood. She remained in my lane until I backed up. As she slowly passed (admittedly, my window down, voice hailing her) I saw her raised middle finger behind closed glass. Raised for her entire slow passage. A heaviness hit me. “I’m SO darned tired of people like you,” I thought. Today I realize what I felt was a visceral recognition of the violence in that f**k you. get out of MY way attitude. Something I’ve experienced before, know on so many levels. I can’t but think how many times people feel this daily.

On the same day I read about the geese, I read this by Thomas Cahill: “<Our> future may be germinating today not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other — …a house for the dying in a back street of Calcutta run by a fiercely single-minded Albanian nun, an easy-going French medical team at the starving edge of the Sahel…a nursery program to assist convict-mothers at a New York Prison — in some unheralded corner where a great-hearted human being is committed to loving outcasts in an extraordinary way.”

School girls like Katie Stagliano who gardens for the hungry and Olivia Bouler who raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for Audubon can give me a boost humanity’s gonna be okay. Anne Lamott with her unapologetic honesty will remind me I’m okay. Today, though, I believe we’re all a sort of outcast when we can’t see we share the same big stuff of life in our hearts. Don’t see the divinity standing in the middle of the road. That we’re truly great-hearted souls when we do.

*
Another journey in mindfulness. Getting to Wise.
A Writers Life.

A secret: These posts always surprise me.
A favorite: Finding and giving someone a gift s/he loves.

Photo by Alan Berner, Seattle Times Staff Photographer

The Medicine of Poetry

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Heloise Jones

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled
after a night of rain.
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?

Mary Oliver (At Blackwater Pond)
*

I’ve made a writerly time of my convalescence after my crashed foot. I’ve edited, written, spent a thousand hours researching agents (well, it felt like a thousand). Even traded ‘who do I think I am’ for ‘why not me,’ entered contests. On the cusp of National Poetry Month, sparked by an article in Spirituality & Health magazine, The Medicine of Poetry, memories of my fickle relationship with writing and poetry rose.

I went back to third grade, the open air lunch room at a school in southern California where I spent three years and never felt I belonged. The bench and dark brown table where I composed four lines on white paper with a pencil. I remember I sought rhyme, because poems rhymed. I think I remember my prompt was a student’s poem in a newsletter, an aspiration for the same, deciding a poem something I could do. I like to believe it was more primal, the birth of the lyrical style in my later works. I did love to sing, often. That same year I planned a volume of short stories, completed a table of contents and five of the tales before abandoning it like I did the poem. At eleven I won recognition for a long story, the pages displayed on a table at a school arts fair. At twelve, my teacher wrote “good in creative writing” on my report card, and I attended a Student Authors’ Tea. But at eighteen, I flunked creative writing in college. Every Friday we sat for the hour, our only assignment to write, and each week I dropped a blank sheet of paper on the professor’s desk. I turned to visual artmaking, confined my words to postcards, inconsistent journal entries, until age twenty-seven when I suffered a painful divorce. When, like angels and birds, poems flew to me unbidden. Perfectly rhymed chronicles of my heart and thoughts. For three years. Then as suddenly as they arrived, they left. My stronger heart no longer listening, I suppose. In the ensuing years I wrote academic papers, promotional copy, proposals and training manuals. And one day, in an attempt to recover my activist’s voice and a will for expression I realized I’d lost, I joined a circle of women, wrote from prompts, shared. A character showed up, and stories. A novel emerged, and a second. Three years ago big changes called the medicine of poetry once more.

This time the poetry of nature out my windows. I watched the cycles of life on the St. Johns River cross the seasons. Tracked weather, reflections, and light across the forever sky and changing water. Gazed into sky canyons on the surface. I composed short, poetic descriptions of all I observed. Now later, living in a place I feel at more at home, I recognize poetry as affirmations.

I once heard each of us has an abiding question at the heart of everything we do. That we’re always seeking the answer. Mine, “Am I Okay?” Not ‘safe’ okay, but the okay meaning acceptance as I am. Nothing puts me against my abiding question more than my writing does. Again and again it forces me to answer ‘Yes’ for myself so I can continue my craft, reach toward that immaculate creation of work and my best self I’ll never achieve. And that’s why I love it.

Tell me. . .what’s your abiding question?
What answers Yes for you?

*
Another journey in mindfulness. Getting to Wise.
A Writers Life.

A secret: At 41, I graduated university summa cum laude. . .on my fifth attempt to finish.
A favorite: The tumbling sound of a small creek rippling in a quiet wood

Waterlillies photo: Solitude, by Tudor Livada

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