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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Poetry Taking Me Home

Posted on September 17, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“This turning toward what you deeply love
saves you. Read the book of your life,
which has been given you.”
~ Rumi (from A Voice through a Door)
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I went to a most extraordinary concert the other night. Jami Sieber on electric cello + Kim Rosen reciting, nay chanting, poetry like she was calling our spirit to dream deep and live out loud. As I walked into the space, a woman approached me with a box in her hands. Want a poem card, she said. I took the one on top. The lines paraphrased what had been up for me this past week. It felt like an affirmation. I wanted a blessing, or message. I traded it in. The poem on the second card was from “The Still Time” by Galway Kinnell, and as it turned out, my first story of the night taking me home.

The music went to my bones, flowed with my blood. The poetry Kim spoke, repeating lines as a chorus, started with a mix of Mary Oliver’s ‘The Journey,’ Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah,’ and her own. She took us into the words of refugees fleeing horror. ‘No one leaves home unless Home says Go, you are not safe here.‘

It was her chant of Rumi’s Sometimes you hear a voice though the door calling you, as fish out of water hear the waves from “A Voice Through a Door” and

If the water were clear enough, if the water were still. . . you would see yourself, slipped out of your skin, nosing upstream, slapping, thrashing, tumbling over the rocks till you paint them with your blood from ‘King of the River’ by Stanley Kunitz

that cracked my heart open.

Once home, I ran to my small bookcase, reached for my two Stanley Kunitz books. “The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden,” written when he was 98, was missing.

I knew the shape of what I looked for. The cover, the thickness of the spine. I turned to the three boxes of books behind the door. I searched twice. Not there.

All the books neatly back in the boxes, I questioned myself. I’d missed something. The next morning I pulled every book from the boxes and stacked them on the floor.

I once had an entire wall of books. I shipped them move after move for decades. Six years ago, forced into a downsize, I decided I wouldn’t do that again.

Some left easily: I no longer did raku, would never build a kiln; I hadn’t read the spirituality books in ages. What remained were linked by attachments and meanings not on the pages in the books. And not ‘til I wrote my husband in NC ‘You have one of my books. It’s important to me,’ did I realize that truth.

I remember the first time I heard a poem from “The Wild Braid.” The vivid image of entwining snakes in a tree. I remember where I sat in the circle of women who came together each week to write to prompts, and read our raw work aloud. How later I gave the book as a gift to new friends in New Zealand when meeting for the first time. Knowing they were writers and gardeners. Not knowing how precious and costly books were in that country. This book has memories. It has stories beyond those on the pages.

I looked at the other books I’ve kept thru four downsizings.

Author and director John Sayles’ signed novel. Because I’ve followed him since 1984 when I saw ‘Brother from Another Planet’, not fully understanding what I watched but feeling I knew this director. And because when I finally saw him in person, he embodied such presence with each person when he spoke that I will never forget it. And a signed book by author Ron Rash, who wrote one of the most beautifully haunting passages I’ve ever read, and years later blurbed my own novel. There’s all of author Nancy Peacock’s works. Including both volumes of her last novel (self pub & trad pub) + her very first publication in St. Andrews Review that she gifted me when I was young & beautiful. A story that became her first novel. We’ve been friends for 35 yrs. and she is the first writer I ever met.

There’s numerous poetry books, most purchased at readings and workshops. Books on writing – process, craft, exercises. The pristine hardcover of Stephen King’s “On Writing” I got second-hand, feeling so lucky that day. Volumes on creativity, two dozen large art books and a number of small exhibition booklets. I still have a half dozen cookbooks, tho I no longer cook beyond function. There’s more memoir than I realized. And a miscellany of reference that follows no particular thread except energy and connecting with the Universe. Only a small number of novels remain. Some I may or may not read. A few because they’re hard to find. A few because they’re simply the best for language, story, and/or craft. And in the mix, three vintage books on beekeeping given me by my son that hold a flood of memories.

The process put me into my Life. I whittled the three boxes to two. Short stacks of a dozen novels on trial + beloved oversized art books now sit on the floor, a chair, and on top of the boxes.

What it all gets down to are the stories inside us that give meaning, and hold the energy of a life lived. Every book has a story in it for me, whether in experience or one I still hold in my mind. Things more than merely things. Holding more than the sum of their parts.

For me, the theme of the night was greeting my life. I knew it by the time I heard Derek Walcott’s ‘Love after Love.”

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door. . .

You will love again the stranger who was your self .

And returning to what we were born to love? I didn’t know ’til the very, very end it is myself I return to. Or that the changed air between my palms born from living my life falls like glitter on common things.

So it surprises me now to hear
the steps of my life following me — so much of it gone
it returns, everything that drove me crazy
comes back, as if blessing the misery
of each step it took me into the world;
as though a prayer had ended
and the bit of changed air
between the palms goes free
to become the glitter
on some common thing that inexplicably shines.
~ from “The Still Time” by Galway Kinnell

Kim Rosen says poetry is our first language. What do you think?

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Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Photo of wildflower path: Aaron Brunhofer

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We are All Storytellers

Posted on September 3, 2017 by Heloise Jones

I have a small window in my shower, the opening positioned right at my upper body. It looks out to the backyard and western sky. I’ve taken to opening it as I bathe. The air outside feels delicious. A cool crispness on my skin within the hot shower. Reminds me of outdoor showers in Hawaii. Last week I saw from my window little birds splashing in the low-sitting platform of a birdbath. Birds taking a bath while I take mine, I thought. Do they know? Today I smelled sweetness & bread baking thru the window from the bakery-cafe a block down the street. I put my face to the screen, drank the aroma. Thought how I often smell bacon & omelets when I’m outside.

Walking across a parking lot the other day, I thought ‘fall has officially arrived.’ The sunrise comes in on a stroll now. Far later than it did two weeks ago. Night no longer waits for 9pm. I noticed the quality of the air appears thinner. The shadows have sharper edges. That I now expect each breeze to be a cool glide like a sheath thru the middle of the 85° heat. I even started thinking my stories of fall in NM – the far-flung studio tours, the smells of chiles roasting in big caged drums and pinon fires, the first snow, different rhythm of my life.

All tiny events. All triggering stories.

I edited two poems almost back to their original rough form this week. Both were free writes in workshops. Each got a ‘wow’ from the teacher. I put back what I’d clipped in my edits on the computer. Slipped back into rhythm that felt right. Told the gut story, trusting the reader, even if cleaned up a bit. I did it with red pen on paper. My body in the writing. Like stories are in our bodies.

I entered the poems in a contest. The journal required a short bio. I didn’t know what to put. The usual Authorly bio didn’t feel right. So I wrote poetry is medicine for me. Both poems are about loss. One as a daughter and woman looking back at her childhood. The other as a mother. I didn’t mention I received a Pushcart Prize nomination for a poem. In that moment as I hit send, recognitions didn’t seem part of the story. I didn’t think about other stories of loss, either. Including my own heritage.

I’m half-Armenian. Food is my only remembrance of my first nine years when I knew being Armenian. Those years when I heard Armenian spoken, the house filled with smells of special foods being prepared for weeks during holidays and funerals. When people shared the ways we were related by heart or blood. We moved when I was nine and all that was lost. What I learned firsthand, before I ever read it as a scholar, is that food and language hold a culture. Even more, how food’s prepared and the words spoken. Their meanings. They hold our stories. Even the blends of everything we are.

I saw an article about a most amazing theatrical production called Oh My Sweet Land. A play ‘about a woman of Syrian-German descent whose search for a lost lover takes her from a sheltered life in Paris to the refugee camps of Lebanon and Jordan and finally into Syria, to confront the smoldering remains of her cultural inheritance.‘ The story unfolds entirely in a kitchen, the actress preparing an actual meal. The genius is each performance occurs in a private home kitchen donated by local citizens, and the actress doesn’t visit the ‘set’ until 30 minutes before she starts. She enters each performance as the character she portrays – displaced, forced to navigate unfamiliar surroundings. Food her anchor as she recounts refugee stories. Other’s stories. Some so unimaginable as reality I can’t even hold them.

The word Ally recently entered my consciousness. I’m co-creating a retreat with artist Kendall Sarah Scott for March 2018 called Madonna: Contemporary Ally. I put the words ‘I am a Writer’s Ally’ on my website. Yesterday a woman I like a lot mentioned looking for allies. I thought how the word like-minded became Tribe in our current lexicon. Tribe a word that goes beyond like-minded to associations on many levels. I looked up Ally online. The first definitions are about war, WWI & II to be specific. As if that was the first use of the word. I wondered if collaborators and supporters could become Allies in our minds. Ally implies a commitment, and perhaps a story behind the relationship, too.

The subtleties of language and story, so powerful.

Many years ago I heard a saying that said volumes to me – “If you want another perspective, stand on your head.”

We are made of stories. And we are all storytellers. Every minute of every day. In the tiny moments, and in the grand arenas. Textures and gorgeous color palettes of humanity & majestic nature wrapped up together. In my world, it’s time for different perspectives. For myself, and for that broad space beyond my dot on the planet.

Notice the stories.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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Do the Good Work

Posted on August 19, 2017 by Heloise Jones

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)

On the way to the hair salon, I pass the gourmet creamery that makes small batches of yummy ice cream. It’s impossible not to peek, see what’s on the board. The elevated sidewalk in front of the short row of small businesses is narrow.

This is herb season, so the day’s special flavors are tumeric, black cardamon, and ginger. I chose ginger, surprised cardamon didn’t woo me. I also got a taste of what’s next, but not ready to serve: rose-green tea, and thyme-lemongrass. We can tell a lot about a person by the flavors he creates, I thought.

As I sat eating what seemed too small a taste of sweetness for this heavy heart, I looked at the pristine sky. Listened to the sound of leaves in the trees fluttered and rifled by the wind. I thought about a line I just read in a new book by Sheila Blanchette. How her character described the sound of oak leaves in the wind as like silk rustling. I thought of the morning I believed I heard water running, and looked for the source. Only learned on my way back it was two tall trees shimmering in the breeze. I couldn’t think what the sound resembled that particular day I ate ice cream. Only that it was all around me, that I was surrounded by trees. And how we can go in our minds to where we’re nourished if we let ourselves.

I’ve been very quiet inside for days. Some of the time feeling I’m in a semi-fog. I thought eclipse energy, or the fullness of my new Monday night writer’s group where they show up open, sharing, and bringing their best, even on their bad days. Perhaps it’s me simply needing space inside so I can write stories and poems, I thought. What worked before – writing with others to prompts – hasn’t worked. I was stepping back to a quieter space and it felt like goofing off. My thinking mind wondered what might be falling thru the cracks. And strangely, something else inside me said this pause was completely necessary.

Then Charlottesville. The sounds of division and hate. In counter, the intellectual conversations, points of helpless and hopeless. None of it OK.

I am not neutral on this.

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)

I’ve been here before, sorta. It rolls in like big ocean waves. I talked here about the hard truths of differences. How I’m the liberal my sister despises and my efforts to understand the thinking. I’ve shared here my stance on immigration, refugees, and value of difference. I’ve shared here what I care about as a heart-filled person. And here what I call my shame points that some call badges of honor. I talked about how loving oneself can feel so hard. And my hopes we turn to the better angels of our natures. My belief we all cast ripples, that it’s our choice what ripples we cast. Neale Donald Walsh puts it this way in ‘Conversations with God:’

“Your life is about everyone whose life you touch.

‘It is about how you touch them,’ God told me. ‘How you touch them determines how you experience your Self–and how you experience your Self determines how happy you are.’

In this sense, my life was about me…but in a *reverse English* kind of way.

I was to pay attention to myself by paying attention to others.
I was to help myself evolve by helping others evolve.
The fastest way for me to be happy was for me to make other people happy.”

The first day of my Monday night group was August 7. We introduced ourselves. I told them they could read my website for the regular stuff. I wanted to share what matters to me in the work I do.

My goal, I told them, is to contribute in creating great reading and writing so people are exposed to something beyond themselves, or their experience, or what they think they know. So they can find, see, and hear fresh perspectives. Can experience the both/and of Life. Meaning the good/bad, and the shades of gray of differences that live side by side. For me, this means using my genius to free writers’ Voices, so they can release their stories. Because the power of connection for us humans is in stories.

Sharing those words, I realized this work I do empowering artists’ and writers’ Voices is my Resistance to division and hate in the world. To the two H’s, hopeless and helpless, too. It’s my contribution that stretches beyond my dot on the planet. Because writers and artists can be powerful. Their influence so strong they’re executed in some countries.

Author Barbara Kingslover says it this way:

“A newspaper could tell you that one hundred people, say in an airplane, or in Israel, or Iraq, have died today. And you would think to yourself, “How very sad,” then turn the page and see how the Wildcats fared. But a novel could take just one of those hundred lives and show you exactly how it felt to be that person rising from bed in the morning, watching the desert light on the tile of her doorway and on the curve of her daughter’s cheek. You could taste that person’s breakfast, and love her family, and sort through her worries as your own, and know that a death in that household will be the end of the only life that someone will ever have. As important as yours. As important as mine.”

And then Charlottesville.

I am not neutral on this.

Over the past month I created collaborative relationships with two artists in Santa Fe with the intention to co-host workshop & retreat immersions that combine writing and art. One on Sept. 22, a nature immersion. The other March 1-4, 2018 called ‘Madonna: Contemporary Ally,’ an immersion into all aspects of this powerful icon for today’s time. Once solidified, I wondered how the heck this fit my goals. I considered my inexplicable love of nature. The need for something grounded beyond Wonder Woman. And it came to me. . .this is how we go home to Life that sustains our humanity. This is my activism in counter to hate and division in a way that uses my genius. Nature (think, forest bathing in Japan), and the strength of a steadfast teacher centered in principles of nurturing life.

There’s a weekly column called Free Will Astrology. Friday it said I have a cosmic pass to ‘loiter and goof off…to put off making hard decisions.’ That I’m in a time one might call the equivalent of pushing the reset button, re-establishing default settings. Yes, I am.

“Alone, we are defenseless. Collected, we are sacred.

We will march by the millions. . .
We will be courageous with our love. . .”
~ Sherman Alexie (from his poem Hymn)

Many of us won’t march or join rallies, petition representatives, canvas door to door, wait for an audience outside a closed congressional door, lick envelopes, or stand in freezing weather to protect our beautiful planet & its creatures. Many of us can, do, and will use our genius in ways to do the good work beyond loving those who look like us, think like us. Beyond supporting our own comforts or profit. Beyond railing against others with the same hate we don’t want. We do the good work to sustain the expansion of life, not the contraction. The hard conversations, the listening, the advocacy, the feet on the ground. I know. I’ve done it before. And I know we can.

Look to the better angels.

*
”In my dream, the angel shrugged & said, if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination & then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.”
 ~ Brian Andreas

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Photo by Marc-Antoine Dépelteau

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Radical Self-Care

Posted on August 12, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“Something inside you is always telling a story. I believe every single thing you see and hear is talking to you. The bottom line with all of this. . .is Love. We want to show ourselves and have that be accepted. I love being alive, and the art is the evidence of that.”
~ Jim Carrey, actor & artist, in a wonderfully magical video

I start each blog by asking What’s it about today? Self-care came thru loud & clear. In the shower, my thinking mind jumped to radical self-care.

I logged onto emails. Webinar-podcast whiz Amy Porterfield’s message was self-care. On Facebook Anne Lamotte spoke to radical self-love, which includes self-care.

Sitting at the computer, what I felt is how little space I feel inside. I write and teach about the importance of space inside us for the creative process. How expansion is what the creative process is about. That engaging with creativity is a dance. What we want is to focus on possibilities that come with a Yes inside, and expand the dance floor.

Then I glanced at my tea mug beside my computer. Felt the big No in my chest from breaking a promise to myself months ago I’d enjoy my fine tea. Taste it vs. have it be a beginning ritual for work. I don’t want the computer today, I thought. I rescheduled this blog to Saturday morning. Radical. I’m committed to you here.

At a friend’s later, I said I have to go after we’d talked 2-12 hours, the time feeling like minutes. Just two more things, she said. After that I said ‘just one more.’ We kept on as I signed a book she bought for an author friend of hers. An entire hour passed before I got in my car, glad I let the connection continue. I decided to do ‘nothing’ the rest of the day.

I lingered in the market. At home, I turned off the computer, leisurely thumbed through a fav weekly. It’d been ages since I did this with leisure, or on the day it came out. I cooked food, ate it at the small high top counter of a table in the kitchen while listening to the rain. Not at my desk where I usually eat. I watched episodes of ‘The Crown’ on Netflix before exhaustion stole my mind. I saw two episodes before I fell asleep. Simple, little things that may not sound radical, and for me, they’re Big. Because it’s the little things that trip us up. The day-to-day that slides into habit.

I’ve shared my desire & efforts to get back to the joy of writing fiction and poetry. I’ve tried to do it like I used to, writing with others to prompts, and confess it hasn’t worked. Now I believe it’s because I didn’t fully surrender to the creative process, allowed space inside me. Because it’s clear the challenge is not the time allocated. + I’ve done this before, with heavy trials. And I heard characters and stories and the full breath of a poem then. I edit my Facebook posts like tiny poems. I can expand the dance floor.

The other day I stepped away from the computer, went outside. I couldn’t believe how glorious the day was. The air, the sky, the birds on a wire. So like Heaven I felt myself breathing deeply. And I was missing it! Still, I pulled myself away, returned to work. What would have happened had I stayed ten minutes more?

Travel has always given me space inside. Put me in a state of awe & wonder. I return a different person. One with expanded boundaries of thought and Being. I haven’t been able to travel in a few years. Today I decide I’ll travel another way until I can board an airplaine.

I’ll follow awe and wonder in nature and thru art. Researchers at UC Berkeley say it’s a very good thing to do. In a study they found awe, wonder and beauty signal the immune system to work harder and may lower inflammation & extend our lives! I’ll buy that. Their suggestions for getting this direct influence on health and life expectancy are where awe and wonder reside for me–walks in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art. I can travel this way. This is not new to me.

I look up often at my desk, gaze out a window across the room at trees. Behind me, above my desk, is the eastern sky framed in two small windows. I’m going to turn, look out at the sky more often. Perhaps the next rainbow I catch won’t be fading.

Step away, even for ten minutes, from people and things that constrict your insides. Look at the sky, or peer at the minute details in a leaf or blade of grass.
Consider what radical self-care is for you. Make a list. Do one thing this week. Schedule one thing next week. Note how you feel inside after you do.
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