Thankful Tuesday: Because I'm desperate

Jenny Holzer, artist

Today, surveying the splendors of spring, I discovered a chair lodged high in our tree. 

It's been a wet, windy, gray winter. And now, according to the calendar, we're in spring. But the sky is hanging fierce to its damp mood, shaking out rain and gloom.

Wearing my tired sweaters and scuffed boots, I shake my fist at the sky. "Please," I plead, "let me wear something other than high necks, thick sleeves, wool and fleece."

I won't even ask for an open-toe shoe. Even a shoe without socks would suffice.

But because rain and bitterness threaten to rust my heart, I'm challenged to set aside my gripes. And so, I look past the neighbor's deck chair wedged in my spruce.

Setting aside the furniture, I see camellias in a burst of hot pink, a clutch of hyacinths, and a shag carpet of grass. Daffodils, my favorite announcement of spring, pop up in unexpected places. As if wild, they dot remote roads in a random pattern, and patchwork through vacant lots and scraps of land. 

In the gray of a record gloom* spring flowers are the happy-to-know-you welcome wagon. They arrive to the party early, and with too much enthusiasm. But, oh, how I'm drawn to the tender promise. Hand me a loopy bouquet of these spring charmers. I'll never turn from the innocence of those not yet battered by weather and wear. 


* not just my disposition, but real data showing Oregon's wettest winter on record.  


It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. And today It's Thankful Thursday on Tuesday because the best way to minimize a sour mood is to move toward gratitude. What are you thankful for today? 


On Sunday: The Challenge of Humility

 

So, this is our ongoing challenge: Not to turn everything into us. In truth, the deepest function of humility is that it helps us take experience in on its own terms, not violating its own nature — all in an effort to be nourished by life that is different from us. Through this effort, we find the corresponding seeds of such life in us. They are the common seeds of grace that can sustain us. 

- Mark Nepo
The Book of Awakening 

 


You're wondering if I'm lonely


We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?" 

             — David Foster Wallace

 
I've spent my life swinging between alone and lonely.

Alone, as in solitude, as in quietude. Alone is where my real life happens.

Lonely is sad, wanting, an aching yearn, an enforced aloneness. Lonely hurts.

And yet lonely carries a certain sort of necessity. To truly feel fullness, you must know emptiness.

Song

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

— Adrienne Rich


I'm trying not to wear my loneliness, and yet it fits. It's become convincing and comfortable. Initially, the fit is snug, but with time there is loosening, acceptance. It's not flattering, but loneliness makes the body invisible, the mind numb. I turn inside myself.

I'm trying to believe that loneliness is not a character defect, not a resignation, but I'm wondering, now, if it is a default setting and I haven't the energy, or trust, to turn the channel. Decades since it's aired, and I'm still watching reruns of M.A.S.H. I'm mixing my metaphors. Loneliness makes you blurry. You lose definition. You mistake edge for action, feeling for thought. Loneliness is so far from alone that though you're lost, you no longer ask for directions home.

It’s not that 

I’m lonely but that
I went to bed too
late and alone
and miss the promise
of you.

It’s not that I’m sleepy
but in the morning
I wake slow and
wide, do not stir,
do not want
this quiet time
in solitude.

It’s not that I
don’t like solitude
but that my
mind travels
and confuses
not here with
gone, slow with
sad, alone with
lonely.

It’s not that I
am alone but
that my body
is a planet
in the
dark
without
its star.

— Drew Myron


Are you still with me?

Loneliness is both penetrating and true, mean and cruel. Who are you now? and now? and now? When loneliness pushes for answers, you want aloneness to rise, to take charge, answering: I am here. Full, feeling, alive. 

 


Baby bangs are not for you (or me)

We've got rough patches and easy streets. Weeks that move like months and days that last a year. This past week, I've known each stretch. In the spirit of William Stafford's Things I Learned Last Week, I offer my own (puny and profound) nuggets:

Things I Learned Last Week

1.
Athleisure is mostly leisure. 
Is everyone exercising, or just wearing lycra and driving to the store for more Cheetos?

2.
Baby bangs favor no one.
I know because in 1999 I tried blunt, super-short bangs and my already-full face took on funhouse mirror proportions. It was the longest growout in history, rivaling that of my current bad hair situation: short-in-the-back, long-in-the-front, otherwise known as the reverse mullet or the midlife mom cut.

3.
It's not cars or coal destroying the planet — it's cows!
No really. My sources are legit: a former cattle rancher, National Geographic, and the documentary Cowspiracy.

4.
I'm not alone, and poems prove it.
Ada Limon shares my love of quiet (and my disdain for phone calls):

The Quiet Machine

I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand
in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field
across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from
people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't
answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the
floor in the kichen and pretend I'm not home when people knock.
There's daytime silence when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I
do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent
and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that
comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones
and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's
how this machine works.

- Ada Limon
from Bright Dead Things

5.
The answer is gin.
On those gravel-in-the-shoe sort of days (or weeks), gin and a friend provide solace and grins (emphasis on friend, because drinking martinis by yourself is just sad).

 

Your turn: What have you learned?


Our strange, ruined, rotting bodies

Franny Choi - poet and teaching artist

Do you know Franny Choi?

She's a poet and teaching artist, and I like her style:

I am most drawn to work that places me in my body,
work that awakens me to the heartbeat, to breath,
to muscle and bone . . . " she says. "By 'body language'
I mean not only speaking about the body, but asking how
our (strange, ruined, rotting) bodies would speak if we let them."

On 3 Good Books, Choi explains why the topic of body language resonates through her work, and offers book suggestions too.

 

Thankful Thursday: Shirley & other wonders

Shirley Plummer - photo by Chris GraamansShirley says she needs to do more.

"I should write every day. I should write in forms. I should challenge myself," she says, with a head shake and a sigh.

We're admiring her book. Her debut. At 85, Shirley Plummer is now a published poet. 

I'm so happy for Shirley my face hurts from smiling. And happy for the power of writing, for the magical, mysterious way creative expression can lift and change.

While she had long dabbled in words, it was only five years ago that she began to take writing seriously. She read and studied and attended a weekly writing group. She forged friendships with writers and exchanged ideas. Her days and journals swirled with words.

A few years ago she fell ill, and then fell down. What followed: surgery, rehab, slow unsteady steps to something that looked like normal. Not so much recovery as readjustment. Her mind, she says, isn't as sharp. Loose change rattling. Cloudy.

When she says, "I can see the end," she's not talking about today. But she's got a lot to do, she says, and ideas to explore.

But first, she has reading events to celebrate the publication of her debut poetry collection, The Task of Falling Rain.

Are you in Oregon? For the love of Shirley and poetry and creative expression, please attend her book release parties:

• Saturday, February 20 at 2pm, Waldport Community Center in Waldport, Oregon

• Saturday, March 5 at 2pm, Yachats Commons in Yachats, Oregon

If you're not nearby, give a nod and a note of thanks to the force of creativity which saves, changes, lifts and connects.

It's Thankful Thursday. Is there anything better than gratitude (which is really just another form of love)? What are you thankful for today?

 

Can't get you out of my head

 

we spread a blanket      spread
ourselves               almost pulseless

in pacific deception


- from A Duet of Novices by Gail Waldstein
from The Hauntings

 

I've got word envy. Or poem envy. Or something like a revved-up appreciation for another's work.

Does this happen to you? You read a line, a passage, a chapter, and you are moved, but it comes with a twinge of wish. As in, I wish I'd written that.

These twinges, this envy, at first feels petty but is really instruction in disguise. This yearning awakens, and then asks why? And the why leads and encourages us to find our own version, our own voice, our own way. 

What's leading you?


Thankful Thursday: Yes


Say yes.

Yes opens the door.

Lately, I've enjoyed a sequence of yes. Like shopping for a car, once you notice the Subura, you see Suburas everywhere (or you just live in Oregon).

My friend Vicki sends out a weekly poem (she researches and writes backstory on each poet. It's a great free service produced by a real poetry appreciator). A few months ago she asked me to serve as guest curator. I shared a few of my favorite poems, including God Says Yes to Me by Kaylin Haught, and concluded with one of my own, Turn Up the Quiet.

One of her readers noted that yes made a frequent appearance. I hadn't noticed, and thus, began a fun exchange:

In response to yes, Careful Reader sent me a no poem by Vsevolod Nekrasov:

no no
no and no

no and no and no and no
and no and no and no and no
and no
and I     no

I responded with another yes poem, an excerpt from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong:

Say amen. Say amend.
Say yes. Say yes
anyway.

When Careful Reader said she was having trouble finding no poems, I felt heartened. Yes had triumphed.

Still, I kept on the search, digging up more yes poems (though at this point, vindicated, I kept them to myself). I found this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:

Divining

Not just on the wall—
the writing's on the sky,
the river, the bridge, your hands.
Wouldn't you love to believe
all those blue and red lines
make a map, and if only
you could read those lines,
you might know where to go
from here? Yes, we're lost
and wrinkled and surely doomed,
but god, in this moment
between concerns, isn't it beautiful,
the place where we wander,
this hour when gold gathers
just before the plum of night?


Wanting to know more, I discovered Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer approaches writing and life with yes. I liked her style, and I reached out to learn more. Rosemerry is now featured on the blog series I host, 3 Good Books, sharing her top picks on the theme of, you guessed it, Yes.
 
Don't you love the power of poetry, how it nudges us to pause and consider, how it moves us toward yes? 

 
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. What are you thankful for today?


Fill me up, it said

. . . And turned, therefore,
 to the expected silence of a page,

where I might simultaneous assert
and hide, be my own disappointment,
which saved me for a while.
But soon the page whispered

I'd mistaken its vastness for a refuge
its whiteness for a hospital
for the pathetic. Fill me up, it said
give me sorrow because I must have joy,

all the travails of love because
distances are where the safe reside.
Bring to me, it said, continuous proof
you've been alive.

— from Turning to the Page
by Stephen Dunn

To view full poem, go here.


 

When we read . . .

I ask questions: What are you reading? Why? What is it about this topic that resonates with you? How does it influence your own work?

I liked the responses so much, I made a place to share those answers, influences and ideas: 3 Good Books.

Because when we read, creativity stirs. And when we create, our lives expand.

Expand yourself. Get to know great writers and artists. Now Showing at 3 Good Books: Ebony Stewart, a performance poet and sexual health instructor (that's her in the video). She's funny, tender, smart and sharp, and she's got some great book suggestions.


Thankful Thursday: Midwinter Blues

Gratitude, smatitude.

It's the bleak midwinter. Creative folks are dying left and right (see: David Bowie, C.D. Wright, Alan Rickman) and my thankfulness is a dry, dry cup. As in empty. 

The sky is grey, the days damp. My body heavy, my mind slogged. Oh goodlord, enough already. Hello Zoloft, my dear friend.

But, yes, of course, we must turn to gratitude. When we feel it the least is when we need it the most. Because attention attracts gratitude and gratitude expands joy, it's time to slice through the ugly and get to the good.

This week, what gets me through:

Parenthood
I refer, of course, to Parenthood, the television show (and not —shudder — my own children, and the fact that I don't have children, and chose not to have children, and that I had the opportunity and support to make that decision is another thing to be thankful for. But I digress). I'm late to the party on this ensemble show that is really a dressed-up, contemporary soap opera. But gosh, it's been fun. Not completely mindless, it's been the ideal binge-watch on these dark, long nights.

Kettle Corn
I'm cutting back on sweets (so goes my resolution not to resolve). I'm not cutting sugar entirely, that would be crazy (see also: impossible, wonderful) but I'm backing off. And if you don't eat the entire bag in one sitting (while watching Parenthood), it's a nice treat.

Creative Self-Help
Uggh. I have an adore-abhor relationship with self-improvement books. Like an ant to a picnic, I'm drawn in with vigor and focus. Yes, I will be a better person! Yes, I will be more creative, more happy, more efficient, more slim, more young, more old, more self-accepting . . . Well, you can see what happens. So much more is, well, less. And exhausting. (And so, we return, with gratitude and guilt, to Parenthood and kettle corn. Oh, how the hamster wheel turns).

Long-story-short, I'm reading Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert (am I the only one who hasn't read Eat, Pray, Love?). It's a self-help book, which is to say it feels sort of insightful, sort of soothing, and sort of annoying. Still, there are some nuggets that speak to me, like this:

The older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.

Yes, that's where I am too. In mid-January, on chilly days and long nights, I'm scratching for gratitude and finding more than I imagined. My cup fills, if slowly.

And you? What are you thankful for today?

* p.s. I'm also thankful for digression, asides, parentheticals — and your patience.

 

Aspiration wears me down

Blank page. Clean windows. New shoes. I like a fresh start.

But, sheesh, I can't take the pressure of a new year.

I can't see another photo of a fit woman with luminous skin and super-toned bod. No more lists advising me how to be a better boss, rising star, team player. And please, no more images of dreamy couples on dreamy beach vacations.

Aspiration wears me down.

I already know I'm not going to write every day, exercise more, or eat less. I won't give up sugar or dairy or carbs. I might drink less. I'll try to love more. But, really, I can't guarantee much.

I've read the same endless stream of self-improvement suggestions you have: Have a clear goal. Write affirmations. Positive self-talk. Visualize your ideal self. Self care.

I get it, but oh, it takes so much effort to be my "best self." While I don't want to let myself go, I'd sure like to relax.   

So, this year I turn again to Lisa Romeo's I Did It practice. Rather than look forward with resolution and proclamation, I'll quietly look back and assess what I did achieve: personally, professionally, emotionally, physically. I'll recall (to myself) the accomplishments and may even feel buoyed. And that may be just the nudge I need to believe I'm able, willing, and often revved with possibility.

How about you? In this new year, where's your head and heart?

 

Thankful Thursday: When shared with you

It's a big Thankful Thursday — the last of the year. Thank you for spending Thankful Thursdays with me, for keeping me accountable, appreciative, and grateful for things big and small.

Attention attracts gratitude, and gratitude expands joy, and my gratitude grows when shared with you.

Thank you.

 

Bell Song of Thanks

for patience and prayers
    for holding tight
    and letting go

for mothers     
    who cry in the dark
    and pray for light

for fathers
    reticent as rocks
    solid as time
    
for brothers
    that call

for sisters
    that don’t
    
for the near miss
    the second place
    the small dent

for speaking up
    and stilling down

for lungs to run
    legs to stand
    a heart to believe

for sickness
    and balm
    fortitude and grit

for newborns
    cradled in hopeful hands

for goodbyes
    that shook
    left us sobbing and stranded

for faith
    and song
    and the reminding chime

for giving up
    and starting over

despite of,
    because of,
    almost always
    for

love.

 

- Drew Myron


On Hidden Lives


Memoir often gets a bum

           wrap as a self-involved 

           genre, but the irony is that 

           when it's done well, a memoir 

           is an exploration of one person's

           life that illuminates the lives

           of many."


             —  Sonja Livingston


Sonja Livingston is master of detail. She peers beneath the surface and extracts the emotional terrain of people and place. She is author of Ghostbread, an award-winning memoir about growing up in poverty (it's one of my favorite books), and her newest work, Ladies Night at the Dreamland, is a collection of essays.

At 3 Good Books — a blog series I host — Livingston shares her favorite books on the theme of Hidden Lives.

Join us, here.


Merry music, softly

Had enough of the jingle-jangle of Christmas?

Me too. I cozy to a quiet Christmas, with books, blankets, and calm.
For sanity and serenity, I'm listening to tranquil tunes: 


Aimee Mann: One More Drifter in the Snow
Ever since she penned and performed the soundtrack to my favorite movie, Magnolia, Aimee Mann has reigned as my very own queen of substance & cool. With this collection, she turns classic tunes into a hushed and intimate holiday with a dreamy vibe.

 


Chris Botti: December
Okay, okay, the title says seasonal, but here's my confession: I play these tunes all year through. Botti's low-key trumpet is warm and soothing, and keeps me snuggled and serene.

 


Sarah MacLachlan: Wintersong
Gauzy and ethereal, Sarah McLachlan delivers. This collection is signature Sarah: pretty, pensive and beautifully moody.

 


Tracy Chapman: O Holy Night
While she doesn't have her own collection of holiday tunes, Tracy Chapman's O Holy Night is the standout of A Very Special Christmas 3 compilation.

 

As usual at this time of year, I'm in a mix of harried, moody and melancholy, and almost any version of Silent Night leaves me in near-tears. But, really, isn't that the spirit of the season — to be touched, to be moved?

Your turn: What's playing, and are you moved? 

 

These music selections are available on iTunes and Amazon.


Finding meaning, making art

Let Me, a found poem by J.I Kleinberg  

"Every journey is about finding," says Judy Kleinberg, an artist-writer who has created over 1,000 found poems.

"Browsing through magazines for images, I noticed 'accidental' phrases that were created through the happenstance of page layout," she says. "My process is all about finding that unintentional syntax and combining small word chunks into poems."

Join us at 3 Good Books, where Kleinberg offers reading suggestions on the theme of finding.