A Christmas Fable

Posted on December 27, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of.
If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”
~ Eric Roth (from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”)
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After three years of regular weekly posts, it’s nearly a month since my last blog. I never know what I’ll write before I start. I’ve learned to trust the process, go with whatever’s up. And this past month, a thousand words simply weren’t enough to contain what mattered – the realizations, decisions, and changes inside me.

This week what matters came wrapped in one day – Christmas Day.

Two friends and I went to the traditional dances at Santo Domingo and Cochiti pueblos. Not celebration dances or tourist events as some think. Moving prayers that go non-stop for 24 +/- hrs. Prayers for abundance in what sustains the health and welfare of the entire pueblo: crops, the hunt, Earth itself.

The day started cold. I bundled in two layers of shirts and scarves, long underwear under my corduroys, a high collar on my coat against the wind. The sky was three shades of blue. The clouds seemed to stretch out in three shapes. We were lucky as there was no breeze to slice cold thru our clothes.

Shifts of pueblo residents, men-women-children, ‘performed.’ The drums, songs, movements steady, rhythmic, and constant, even as they transitioned group to fresh group. Those not dancing quietly sat or stood encircling the plaza as witnesses. Many of the women wrapped up to their chins in blankets with colorful native designs. It’s a community prayer. Even positioned a distance away at the far end of the plaza, I felt the beat of the drum inside me and my legs felt to dance with them.

‘I wish we’d been closer,’ I said as we left. And at the next pueblo, as if my wish was a prayer to be answered, we unknowingly stood on the path where they exited the plaza to turn it over to the next group. Little children (deer and ram) darted toward me in streams of 3 & 4. They would’ve stepped on my toes if I hadn’t backed up. They stopped inches from me, bent forward, leaning on stick legs, waiting. Their bodies pulsed with the drum. I could easily touch their greenery festooned heads. I was in their cloud of prayer. As the ‘hunters,’ drummers, & singers who followed came close, they darted away. One little body behind the other, like lights of a firefly trail. Song & sound filled me. My body dissolved. I knew then how they could dance for hours. Community and the earth matter.

It’s the day after Christmas as I write this. Here’s the thing, I went to the dances knowing I wasn’t 100% well in my body. And today I’m under the weather. I felt the exact moment it happened, too. Feeding birds outside, not bundled against the 22° morning. My ears unprotected against the wind. I fooled myself with thinking ‘I’m only out for a few minutes.’ Right before ‘oh-oh.’ It was weird. Like I felt my cells wobble off a too-close edge. This pushing my body with my will is an old pattern. I’ve done it for goals, for others, and this time mere lazy convenience. As the day wears on, a Thank You settled inside for the reminder that presence to what’s important is conscious action, not random thoughts. My health is important.

Nature plays tricks on the eyes in New Mexico. The mountains can move forward, appear huge & very close. Other times they’re distant horizons, and appear as crooked lines against the sky. After the dances, we picnicked at Cochiti Lake. Our backs warmed by the sun. The sound of lapping water like a background song. No one else was there.

Built in the 70s, the lake is a very deep & large reservoir. For perspective, 28’ sail boats are drydocked nearby. Even so, it didn’t appear far to cross. Not until I spotted people on the opposite side of what I thought was a narrow inlet. They were tiny. So tiny they were hard to see! So many illusions. It matters what perspectives we hold. They affect how we see things.

I got seven holiday cards this year. A rarity. Three are handmade. The other four contain touching handwritten messages. My grandson (the official card sender for the little family in Taiwan) included a drawing of Santa in his. They’re connections and precious gifts to me. I have the one from my 98 yr. old friend on my desk. The others are on display, along with a gift from the dances.

To say I was surprised when Santa showed up while they danced is an understatement. I watched as he casually walked in front of the spectators, his back to the ceremony, tossed candy in wide arcs. Every now and then, he paused to reach into his bag and pull out an unwrapped something he handed to someone. Small things, like a cardboard can of Playdoh. To my mind, a reminder not to take things too seriously and appreciate small gifts.

The three of us anglos sat on a bench, me in the middle. He paused in front of us, looked for a moment, then reached in and handed the gift to me: a large gold-foiled holiday popper I’m told contains a tissue-paper hat, a toy, & a fortune or blessing. Makings for a celebration. My God, I know the angels are behind this. So much this past year deserved celebration, and I’ve haven’t.

Celebrations matter. They’re like Thanks You’s & attagirls. I teach this. The popper is my reminder. I’ll know when it’s time to pull the ends, and celebrate.

Another gift of the day sits on my kitchen counter. 4-1/2″ high & so large it fills a dinner plate. Baked in a traditional wood-fired adobe horno oven shaped like a large old-fashioned beehive. The man at the Santo Domingo church who greeted us gave it to me.

The church is also an optical illusion. Outside it looks quaint, even small. It’s made of wood, which is unusual here. Painted white. Simple painted images on the front. When you walk inside, it’s a long, large, dimly lit rectangular hall with very tall, plastered walls. Doors off the sides open to rooms with low ceilings. Perhaps they set up chairs on regular church days, but there was no seating. Perhaps that added to the expansive feeling. That, and the prayers of the dancers that still hung in the air.

We walked the length, oversized modern Christmas decorations above our heads, to an alcove where a small Mary, maybe 15” long, lay on a bed with baby Jesus, a little blanket covering them so only their heads showed. Tiny faded silk flowers at their crowns. An honoring of the human Mary (of course she’d be in bed) that felt sweet. As we were leaving, the man brought us bags of bread. My bag held the giant loaf in the picture, and what appeared to be four huge rolls. My eyes went wide at the abundance. The four rolls were actually another loaf, which I gave to my friends. The bread is a reminder to me of the abundance in my life. How well I am fed.

There’s no Christmas tree at my house. No planned exchange of gifts. And yet, I received a succession of gifts in this one day. Like in a fable. The lessons within the story. Like angels following me, whispering See. See what matters. And here’s the greatest wonder. . .not until I sat down to share with you did I see it all. It took the community of Us for me to fully understand. Isn’t that the blessing of this season?

Heart. Light. A Seed.
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Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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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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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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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)
*

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?

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

Photo of wildflower path: Aaron Brunhofer

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