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

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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.

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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.

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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

Love, a Writing Exercise

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Heloise Jones

Some days your novels will be narrowed down to grocery lists
 and the screenplay burbling inside will pinch into a note
 you leave the kids to walk the dog or change their sheets. 
There are so many blank pages you could fill, poems you jot
 on the margins of your day, what you tell yourself you’ll transpose
 later, after dinner’s on the table, after the phone stops ringing,
 after you get more gas in the car. It’s alright. Maybe, now, your prose 
is meeting some other page, absent of a pen or the room to use it in. 
What will be written here is more than words will ever do. 
This vast and vibrant book that’s always writing you.
~ Maya Rachel Stein (what will be written there)

Writing Exercise: Each day for one week, fall in love at least three times.
Write in detail about each.

Tulipbones.1

I’m in love with Tulip Bones

I finally sent the last of the file boxes stacked in corners to the storage unit. Important papers like income tax documents and years of spiral notebooks in which I wrote the stuff of my craft. I kept aside one heavily tabbed and labeled book of un-transcribed scenes to peruse later, tore out beginnings of poems, notes, and writing exercises. A page caught me, would not be filed. At the top in my handwriting, “We can fall in love with a star or species of wildflower, or a human being who is different from ourselves, or music.” Yes, I thought, but fall in love, three times a day?

I don’t know why I couldn’t let it go because surely this is something you feel through, not think through. In love is not an act of will, but a recognition, tap on the heart, an awareness that burrows in, says ‘hold me.’ Something deep in the cells for more than the moment. The very instant it becomes a part of oneself in love viscerally remembered. I glanced at that sheet of paper for two days before I found a hint to the question I couldn’t articulate. Buried in a beautiful short film about art-journals with artist and sage Paulus Berensohn. “Art is being present to something. Love is to pay attention.”

Tulip bones grabbed me on a day I was too blue to do more than notice the flowers’ delicate dance, how the petals looked as if they spoke sign language, their colors of age richer, more peaceful. Rereading a favorite book these past weeks, I noticed the storytelling as the kind you’d hear around a campfire, or at a table one afternoon over coffee or tea or beer. The form unconventional in novels, and masterfully done. This morning when I stepped out I noted the sultry air. Was surprised by the wind blowing eight blocks away at the bay. Wind that rendered birds stationary flapping aloft, where herons spread legs to stand rooted in water whipped sideways. Where everything color clings to is swept aside, nothing left but the pure pale yellow of the sun’s robes on the sky. My own body was pushed so photos blurred.

Back home, such a short distance, I looked up to pink clouds on a field of the sweetest baby blue. I understood, felt it. To pay attention is indeed Love. The kind in love follows. Indeed writing me. Have you felt it?

What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love! ~ Louise Erdrich
(from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse)

H.Ringling.Feb2015

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Another small journey Getting to Wise.
A Writers Life.

A secret: Walking slowly is hard for me.
A favorite: The sound of palm trees in the wind like mountain streams or ocean surf.

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Slow Down

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Heloise Jones

“If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone.”
~ Helen Keller

I’m laid up with a sprained foot. This is my world during confinement:

Sick-Table

In front of me, a pile of pillows to rest my foot above my heart.
Beside me, my calendar and a pad for notes.

I twisted my foot in a spectacular loss of gravity, leaving me airborne in a parking lot under a sprinkling rain for seconds that felt like minutes. My arms flung wide, one hand holding an umbrella like a clown on a wire. No slippery slide. Simply aloft, landing with wild momentous wobbles back on two feet. No thud of a fall, just clear, awful pain in my foot.

Honestly, I thought I was over this sort of thing. My history holds two broken bones, four other sprains, and four surgeries, including a joint replacement in my big toe. Every trauma to my limbs, primarily my feet. Each leaving me disabled for a time. Every thought focused on how I’ll move through the world – sit, bathe, dress, eat, go to the bathroom, step over a threshold, set myself up for productivity with purpose. And in no small measure, planning how I’ll get past it.

I once willed myself to push through, thought myself the exception to doctors’ wisdom. With my husband away, working in other cities most of the time, I also dealt with recovery on my own. No voice of reason reining me in. Some could say being on my own was exactly why I pushed through: I had to. But the truth is I didn’t respect my body. I fed it unprocessed organic food, boosted it with supplements, exercised it, but I did not acknowledge dignity in my injury and trauma. Did not give my body patience or allow it to equilibrate so it could heal. I bullied my body forward, not recognizing I bullied myself in the process. I did not accept my injured self with the same empathy and respect I gave others who are differently abled.

I could spend a lot of time on my journey to understanding I can indeed facilitate that quicker healing if I allow my body to find its breath inside the injury, after the initial shock. What happened is my consciousness changed, including asking for help. Not my regiment of treatment. The last time I broke a bone, as the doctor cleared me for shoes three weeks early, he exclaimed I healed like a child, not as a mature woman. I admit I’m surprised, though, that I’m up on two feet three days after this sprain. Slowly, briefly, carefully, listening to my body for guidance. Taking it as a gift, a hard reminder to slow down, pay attention to the important stuff. Because I’d been pushing myself, again. Not tending to the pains of misalignment. Sometimes you just gotta say Thank You.

Another journey in mindfulness. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

A secret: human figures are recurrent images when I paint
A favorite: sleeping by myself

PS This was my last visit to the bay

When Cells Excite, Rothko and Life

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Heloise Jones

“. . .the response is automatic, a spectacular impression of nothing. . .<Mark Rothko> resisted meanings. He was afraid words might trap the painting, so he abandoned using titles in the late 1940’s. He thought names might encourage a viewer’s mind to stop its imagination. At least that’s what I like to think. Rothko was right when he said “silence is so accurate.” It is better for me not to describe his paintings, because when I try, the keyboard just thuds out rocks.” ~ Ardith Louise Brown, describing her experience at a Rothko exhibition at London’s Tate Museum of Modern Art

I read the above on Facebook today. A comment with this image:

Rothko - Bloue

My cells excited.

I love color. Feel it as deeply as I feel life. Can see it where others don’t. Purple desert grass others see as brown, 50 shades of gray (couldn’t resist) in a cloudy day, values and hues, undertones and shade on shade. I’ve created paint colors for walls, can tell the color of an M&M when blindfolded by the feel in my mouth. White walls and white skies quickly drain me. Vibrant pictures and scenery no help. I particularly love color that’s layered and/or juxtaposed, one to the next.

In the early 80s a boyfriend introduced me to Mark Rothko’s work. A brilliant, offbeat longhaired chemistry professor who’d already introduced me to ‘O, Superman’ by the fabulous Laurie Anderson, and took me sailing with famous explorers, I’d grown accustomed to what I considered his unusual surprises. I remember actively wondering what he saw in the flat images on the posters and postcards he showed me. Years later, I saw my first Rothko on canvas. The work a spectacular impression of nothing but emotion and life – humanness – in nothing but color. It shocked me backwards, then pulled me in, arrested me on the spot.

As a writer my challenge and joy rests in experiencing the click inside that occurs when the right words drop into place, the right sentences align to conjure an image or idea that evokes a sensory experience, or recognition in a reader. My tools, words. And yet, I know what Mark Rothko means about silence. Sometimes to name is inadequate, to describe incomplete. Because that first painting, and each of his I’ve viewed since, call me to simply be, with no words. Silence, my most accurate container for all I experience – thoughts, emotions, discoveries, pleasure, grief, memories, recognitions, stories. So accurate.

Another journey in mindfulness. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

A secret: I used to be afraid to paint on paper
A favorite: Solitude