Canada Goose

Late in March I went for a walk on the road above our house. I was surprised and saddened to find the body of a Canada goose just off the road, lifeless but still magnificent.

Writers! A Manifesto. (work in progress)

Writers!

Abandon the staid center, your faculty meetings and lattes, your unimaginative friends, your practical cars and shoes, your scramble to perceive the cultural norm!

Life is alive at its fringes!
Break through your glass ceiling to be solar-powered by the brilliance above!
Find the thing that makes your pulse burst in your ears every second, that moves you like a perpetual motion machine!
Corner your cowardice, loose the tethers, skyrocket to rock stardom!


Writers!
Lift the tool at hand!
Assume a mandate to observe and compellingly describe the minute and the miraculous!
Uncover your faith and wonder of the world with words resonant and rhythmic!
Bring people to their senses in the most bodily sense of the word!
Unearth your voice, and harness the river of words -
Be a conduit for whatever it is that rings through you!

Lift your voices to sing, tremble, wail -

Pierce people’s hearts, shake them by their lapels from the page, and leave us all on our knees before the beauty and terror of it all!

Writers!
The unhinged universe awaits your divine proclamations!

My Mother's Kitchen

There was nothing romantic, sentimental about my mother's kitchen. Built in the '70's, it reflected the time's prevailing attitudes - women weren't supposed to spend lots of time in the kitchen, and CheezWiz was food, anyway.

So her kitchen had elbow room for one, an 'L' shaped galley, and prep space provided by a floating island.

Regardless, she attemped ambitious meals, splattering cookbooks too close at hand, and melting Tupperware when absentmindedly she placed a piece on a still-warm, electric burner.

Afterwards, bowls empty, table clean, she'd wash the dishes and I would perch behind her on the island, both of us speaking to each other's reflections in the window over the sink.

We had big plans for me.

***

It's Monday night, a lifetime later, and I am making soup.

It's a meatball soup - or is it chowder - that my mom used to make, one of my favorites.

Full of herbs and veggies, there's some richness missing from it.

I call my nana for the recipe while I'm chopping leeks, and then my sister as I pour the broth over the now-translucent onions, but neither of them remember. They both want whatever recipe I come up with.

Chopped celery, shredded carrots, herbed meatballs, basil, thyme, oregano, salt and pepper, a dollop of wine. Broth to lips...

Perhaps what's missing is my mother's touch. She's 3000 miles and an addled mind away from my new, spacious kitchen, in which there's enough room for both of us to chop, and chat, and, now both adults, tilt wine glasses toward our lips, toasting our uncertain futures.

A Memento

I'm taking Ellie Waterston's class, The Story You Came to Tell. The following was a writing prompt in class - what object are we carrying that we might consider a memento of sorts...

Blue fleece, reversible red mittens that I've had for at least 16 years - so durable, that polyester fleece. How many hands I've held in them, how many times I've swiped my runny nose and been grateful I could toss them in the wash - how much I've clung to them, the sheaths of my own hands, for their warmth, the memory of coming across them with my mom on a family vacation in New Hampshire when she was healthy and I was ready to rap on the door of the world as a high school senior.

They are big and a bit cartoonish, always at the ready, fetishized to the point that my partner and all my friends join my frenzy of looking for them when they've been misplaced. I am amazed that they've lasted and stuck around this long, companions on my journeys across time zones and states, through 3 cool seasons a year, and in contact with innumerable doors, banisters, steering wheels, snowballs...

Long Suffering Dog

We got Siri some Ruff Wear booties for winter wear. And then proceeded to laugh our heads off at her visible discomfort. We love her, really, we do!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo_piboXT5o

Tympanic membrane, anvil, hammer

I am squatting like an Indian, holding a tepid mug of tea in my two hands, rocking forward onto my toes, back on my heels, bouncing off the cushion beneath me, rocking back to my toes… In a flash, my writer’s block is relieved.

Rocking is medicine. Sometime over the summer I learned that any kind of mental congestion, overheat, can be resolved by swinging in a hammock. A lazy push is necessary, simply laying in the hammock isn’t enough.

~~~~

Most every massage session I’ve ever given began with my rocking my client on the table. It is a convenient way to introduce my body to theirs, an on-again, off-again touch, not an intrusive, immediate laying-on-of-hands. I think it is such an unusual movement for them after a full day of sitting stiff in an office chair, that it breaks their mental tunnel vision and allows them to be present once again in their bodies. It makes my job easier – rather than mowing down ranks of rigid muscles with lethal elbows, I can cajole a body to let go of its own accord.

There’s some science here. I tell my massage students about it, in hopes that they will employ compassionate techniques like these, saving their clients’ and their own bodies from agony. But is there any need, really, to dissect what every mother has known since the her first child drew breath - that gentle movement is grounding, and brings even the most recalcitrant child back to the safe haven of its body?

~~~~

I would gather and rock in my arms Tony, who slipped from a bridge weighted by deep and inexplicable sadness. I would rock the water from his ears and warm his body, pressed close to mine.

I would gather and rock my mom, with too many maladies to count, in hopes of healing cognitive connections, in prayer for miracles.

I would gather and rock my old friend Erin, rock until all her pieces came back together, sifted into their places, and made her whole again.

I would gather and rock all the people for whom there is nothing else I can do, but give of my body.

~~~~

In the depths of despair over losing my mother’s mind, I was saved by the love of my boyfriend. The rhythms of our heartbeats, the rise and fall of our breaths, were enough.

In college I sat one night in meditation with some dear friends. In the silence, listening to my heartbeat, I felt a slight rocking caused by the pulse of blood through my body. I was pleased to feel my own rhythm, permeating my entire being.

~~~~

We are outrageously out of touch with ourselves. In what other place and time have we so skewed the balance between body and mind, thudding heart and intellect, such that our bodies are merely the vehicle for our brains? Asses slung in office chairs, we touch just with the tips of our fingers, while our minds whir away about nothing to do with our being. Our bodies whisk our minds home at the end of the day. The car radio is blasting; maybe we don’t even use our ears – tympanic membrane, anvil, hammer – to hear it.

Or perhaps the music is unexpectedly moving – a holy choir chorusing out into a dark night – and one cannot help but listen, reverberation of another’s throat in ear – and what is that ache in my chest, suddenly, at beauty? The crash backwards into my body is painful. Where have I been? What have I missed, oh body?

~~~~

A violin string plucked will cause the instrument’s body to resonate for 24, and then 48 hours. After an hour of practice, the instrument will continue its steady, warm hum for two days, before falling silent, growing cold.

What if we are similar? Must we plow the furrows of each others’ fingertips to maintain a healthy resonance? Do we fall silent when we do not rub up against one and other?

~~~~

I know this – when I do not touch, when all is done for me, I lose the groundedness of being. Shivering in my skin, pouring morning tea, steam billowing toward my face… holy, holy, I am alive.

Whychus Creek Hike, September 2009

(Dear readers - Sorry for my absence, but as you'll see, I was writing... for an amazing group of women writers whose presence in my life feels like throwing open a door to an entirely new landscape. I'll be back more often, now. The following piece is a bit rough, but may lead to a larger project.)


When you reach Alder Spring in the Whychus Creek canyon, you have to sit down amongst the grasses and take off your shoes for the 20 foot wade across the river bed. Had you done this just last year, you might have been puzzled by a strange sight – Alder Spring emerging from the bank to fill a rocky creek bed that upstream of the spring is completely dry.

For decades, Whychus Creek has run dry in the summer. It’s an all-too-common example of a water resource being sucked dry by too much need, without concern for the wider ecological impact within its watershed.

But the Whychus, with the minutest bit of encouragement, is back.

In 2007, the Deschutes River Conservancy bought 1.5 cubic feet of Whychus Creek water right from a previous holder. That’s barely enough to fill the creek bed, and in September, when I visited, the creek was warm from a long, shallow passage through dry desert. It’s not really enough water to guarantee the success of the steelhead that so many agencies are trying to encourage to spawn in their former grounds, high up on the Whychus, after a challenging tour up the rocky Deschutes. Still, I’m buoyed by the return of a creek, however piddling, as it seems so radically the reverse of most of the environmental news we hear, daily.

“Lynn, how cold’s the water?” I call, though I was the first of our party to step in, and I’m still shin deep in the confluence of the waters of Alder Spring and Whychus Creek.

“Suck my ass!” Lynn yells back to me, scurrying toward the opposite side as best she can on rocks slick with algae. Apparently she is no aficionado of slimy rocks. Despite this momentary tiff, Jim, my partner, Lynn, one of my favorite people ever, Siri, my nature dog, and I are having a pretty fabulous day on the weekend that I’m celebrating my 33rd birthday. I’d hiked down to Whychus Creek once before, just a few weeks previous, and promised both Lynn and Jim that I’d take them there. When Lynn showed up as the best kind of surprise birthday present, it was a given that we’d go together.

I was so taken with the canyon and all its miraculous springs, emerging from riverbanks, canyon walls, percolating straight up from the ground. There are a million tiny worlds in that very condensed space between the two walls of the canyon. The dusty high desert descends to a riparian corridor along the banks of the creeks. After the aforementioned crossing, you find yourself on an island crisscrossed by a hundred tiny springs, each tickling the roots of water-loving trees that provide unusual shady oases. Continuing on you ascend a dry cliff, and coming down again you clap your hands among thick reeds, in hopes of scaring off the rattlesnakes. And finally, under towering Ponderosas is the rocky outcropping that marks the cathedral of the confluence of the Whychus with the Deschutes, both rivers having regained their strength since leaving civilization through the contributions of those thousand little tributaries.

What I’m really excited about though, is the renaissance of Whychus Creek. I can’t help but conflate its history with my own. Just a year previous, I had been living in Portland, dreading another rainy fall. I’d reached my outer limit with my massage practice, so overwhelmed by my clients’ energies that I had no energy for myself. I was entering the dark days of recovering from gluten intolerance – a pervasive fatigue and ennui that no amount of coffee could shake. And for many years, I’d felt like there was a layer of plastic between me and the world, probably the result of two separate but terrifyingly similar losses many years before.

On the first day of rain in the city that fall, I’d looked at my partner Jim with such despair that in that instant, he acquiesced to my stated desire to escape Portland, as soon as possible. A few months later, we moved to Tumalo. Now eight months have gone by, and I am so overjoyed to be hiking, to be taking photos with my new camera, and to be sharing this amazing place with my favorite people, that it’s nearly painful.

I’m sure that there appears to be an inherent risk in our abrupt leave-taking of a city that had been our home for nearly ten years, but we had done our homework – we had friends here, brought our respective businesses with us, and knew we’d remain productively tethered to Portland. The greatest risk I’ve encountered in these months? Opening myself up to all the beauty that surround us, letting it percolate like those thousand tiny springs through what had become my personal, inner drought. The dust yields reluctantly to the rivulet, and then is rent by a cautious sprout…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHOSZ6RgNoc