Feeds:

Posts Tagged ‘writing from life’

For the Week of December 1, 2013: The Promise in Dark Mornings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right…

(From:  “Waking at 3 a.m.,” by William Stafford, in Someday, Maybe, 1973)

It’s dark outside when I awaken each morning, a time when the house is blessed by quiet.  As as I walk, neighborhood streets are still, their silence interrupted only by the odd passing car, early risers on their way to work.  I cherish these winter mornings, the comfort of darkness shifting into dawn, the shorter days and longer nights, even though I live in a place where the advent of winter is less noticeable than other places I once called “home.”

Yesterday,  the first day of December, the temperature i San Diego was a balmy 70 degrees, making the idea of winter seem all the more unreal.  As I gaze out my window and across the canyon, the slopes are still green, dotted by succulents, silk oaks, eucalyptus and palm trees, unfazed by the calendar date.  There are buds on my bird of paradise plants and a riot of fuchsia blooms on the bougainvillea.  Yet winter has announced her coming in change of the light.  The angle of the sun has shifted—it will soon be at its lowest arc in the sky—the daylight hours are shorter, and each morning, I darkness greets me when I awaken.

The advent of winter signals not only a change in light and seasons, but a time of celebrations, whatever what our religious heritage or beliefs might be.  In the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in our hemisphere occurs later this month, on December 21st, coinciding with the season of our major holiday celebrations.

Our winter celebrations have their roots in the winter solstice, the time when our hemisphere is farthest from the sun.  The winter solstice was time our ancestors associated with death and rebirth.  As the days grew shorter and the sun began to sink lower into the sky,  they feared the sun would completely disappear, leaving them to endure an existence of permanent cold and darkness.  Imagine the primitive fear that accompanied those dark winter mornings, a feeling echoed in the first stanza of “Winter Solstice,” a poem by Jody Aliesan.

When you startle awake in the dark morning
heart pounding breathing fast
sitting bolt upright staring into
dark whirlpool black hole
feeling its suction…

The winter solstice was considered a turning point.  It marked the return of sun and promise of warmer seasons to come.  Even though winter was far from over, the solstice a time of celebration, usually taking place  a few days later, the time that many of us now celebrate the Christmas holidays.

Aleisan’s poem echoes that same sense of promise that the ancients associated with the solstice, something I find I also feel in these dark mornings.  She reminds us there is comfort found in remembering the beauty of darkness:   stars close together, the winter moon rising, or an owl in the distance.  A sense of rebirth emerges out of the beauty in darkness.

already light is returning pairs of wings
lift softly off your eyelids one by one
each feathered edge clearer between you
and the pearl veil of day…

(From:  Grief Sweat, Broken Moon Press, 1990)

This week, why not use the metaphor of winter, of solstice, to reframe your experience with cancer or another difficult time in your life, a time when hope seemed to fade and you feared little more than darkness. Did your experience a kind of “death” and rebirth?  Move from darkness into light?  Discover a sense of life renewed?

It’s comforting to look up from this roof

and feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,

to recollect that in antiquity the winter solstice fell in Capricorn

and that, in the Orion Nebula,

from swirling gas, new stars are being born.

(“Toward the Winter Solstice” by Timothy Steele, from Toward the Winter Solstice. © Swallow Press, 2005.)

Read Full Post »

For the Week of November 24th: We All Have Food Stories

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 24, 2013 | 4 Comments »

It’s at dinnertime the stories come, abruptly,

as they sit down to food predictable as ritual.

Pink lady peas, tomatoes red as fat hearts

sliced thin on a plate, cornbread hot, yellow

clay made edible. The aunts hand the dishes

and tell of people who’ve shadowed them, pesky

terrors, ageing reflections that peer back

in the glass when they stand to wash up at the sink.

(“At Deep Midnight,” by Minnie Bruce Pratt. In Walking Back Up Depot Street, 1999) –

“We all have food stories,” said Marcus Samuelson, chef and owner of New York’s Aquavit, in an 2009 NPR Thanksgiving day broadcast.  “So much of cooking is where you want to go in memory,” he remarked, adding that he was baking his mother’s apple cake for his Thanksgiving dinner.

It’s true, isn’t it?  Whether you’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving or Hanukkah next week, families and friends will gather together to share in meals; traditional foods will be prepared; stories will be told.  This year, although we’ll be celebrating with four other friends, I’ll prepare two traditional dishes to contribute to the meal, both from recipes I’ve used since I was young and newly married. One, a candied yams recipe from my mother (although I now reduce the brown sugar substantially), and the other, a broccoli soufflé, following instructions on a worn and stained 3 x 5 notecard, copied from my mother-in-law’s recipe, her little tips on preparation noted in parentheses.

Take some flour. Oh, I don’t know, 

like two-three cups, and you cut

in the butter… 


You cut up some apples. Not those

stupid sweet ones. Apples for the cake, 

they have to have some bite, you know? 

A little sour in the sweet, like love. 

You slice them into little moons.

No, no! Like half or crescent

moons. You aren’t listening. 

 (“My Mother Gives Me Her Recipe” by Marge Piercy.  In:  Colors Passing Through Us, 2003)

Missing from our Thanksgiving will be my daughters and their children—they each live in different countries—my parents, who died several years ago, and the forty or fifty relatives who once gathered together for Thanksgiving dinners all the years of my youth.  I still remember the crispness and color of those Northern Californian autumns, games of softball and touch football outdoors before the meal, the smell of roasting turkey in the kitchen and finally, the tables laden with food.  There were cousins’ tables, defined by age, and the adult table.  I remember how thrilled I was to “graduate” to the adult table when I began high school, for there I heard the family stories, told and re-told each year by my father and his brothers.  Even though I still feel a sense of longing for those Thanksgivings of the past, the stories linger, carried in memory and ignited by the comfort of the food and tradition that marked those family celebrations.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on…

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women…

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks…

(“Perhaps the World Ends Here,” by Joy Harjo, In:  The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, 1994)

Holiday celebrations, the food and traditions that accompany them, are rich in memories and in story.  What are some of yours?  Whether you are celebrating Thanksgiving or Hanukkah, it is also a time for all of us to give thanks.  I wish you a very happy, storied holiday.

Read Full Post »

For the Week of November 3, 2013: Searching for Home

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , poetry and healing, , , on November 3, 2013 | 1 Comment »

I guess I have to begin by admitting

I’m thankful today I don’t reside in a country

My country has chosen to liberate, -

(From:  “Thanksgiving Letter from Harry” by Carl Dennis, in:  Unknown Friends, Penguin Press, 2007).

I returned to San Diego Monday afternoon, my feelings mixed, yet happy to settle into my space, surrounded by my own things, nap in my bed, and be in my house after nearly a month away.  Yet I was nostalgic, missing the enthusiastic greeting “Gramma!” I heard as my grandchildren, sleepy and smiling, opened the bedroom door to crawl under the covers with me every morning.  I was both grateful to be home and yet, reluctant to immerse myself in what had been so routine before I left:  a busy teaching schedule, errands to run, even my regular habit of tuning in, morning and evening, to the national news.  I resisted listening to the political circus in Washington, reports from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran that only spoke of ongoing violence and warfare, things happening in a troubled world that I’d left behind for the weeks I was in Okinawa.  I missed the sense of family—of the home that family offers, the laughter and delight of extended time with Nathan and Emily, the quiet graciousness of Claire’s Okinawan friends, the beauty of the island’s coastline, and, perhaps the more peaceful existence on an island once so brutally devastated by war.

My sense of “home” has changed over these past many years.  I left the United States in the sixties with my first husband to go to Canada.  It was a self-imposed exile, a kind of protest against the Vietnam War that mobilized so many in my generation.  We never imagined we would stay longer than three or four years at most, but it was twenty-three years later when I returned to California.  I was like a homing pigeon flying west, back the place I was born, to California, the place I’d always called “home.”  What I discovered, like so many emigrants before me, was that “home” no longer existed in the ways I had imagined it.   It—and I—had changed, and the very things that drew me back to the West were now elusive.

 “Goethe once wrote that all writers are homesick, that all writers are really searching for home.  Being a writer is being on a constant search for where you belong.”  It “comes out of a place of memory, not geography.” — Mary Morris, “Looking for Home”

Where I belong.  I admit it:  I don’t have the same sense of belonging to California that I once had.  But it’s not only years living out of one’s native country that changes things, even a brief time away, like the month I’ve just had, can shift your perspective for a time.  But the longer times, the years spent in different places, can change you in ways you aren’t even aware of.  For all the years I lived in Canada, I’d clung so tenaciously to a golden dream of California, the one harbored in my imagination, that I didn’t notice how Canada had quietly wrapped itself around my heart.  The people, culture, and experiences of the twenty-three years I lived there had defined me in ways that weren’t apparent until I attempted that return to my childhood home.  Canada was as much a part of me as California had been for the first twenty-three years of my life.  I just hadn’t realized how much until I’d left it.

You want to get a good look at yourself.  You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly.  The outer clothing falls from you.  You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet.  You remove your underwear.  At a loss, you examine the mirror.  There you are, you are not there.

–Mark Strand, “In the Privacy of the Home”

Now, these many years later, I am grateful my daughters have lived in other places in the world, as much as I hate the distance between us.  They are international citizens in a world that demands we not isolate ourselves nor see our country as somehow superior to others.  Each time I travel to spend time with them, I remember how young and naïve I was in those first years being in Canada, how lonely and overwhelmed I felt at first, but how, in the end, I became a better person, more accepting and my life enriched from the experience living in another country.  In truth, I still struggle to define California and San Diego, the place I live now, as home.  And I still search for that sense of belonging, of identity with a place that I once knew.  Even now, I hope to find it.

Yet Thomas Wolfe’s words play in my mind.  “You can’t go home again.”  And the truth is that even if we’ve never left a place, the events of our lives sometimes make us feel as if we’re suddenly strangers to it.  Cancer can have that effect; job loss, divorce, other difficult life events can too.  You cross the boundary into a strange, new territory, one in which the customs, the nuances are unfamiliar.  The world you now inhabit requires you learn how to navigate it, and yet, you long for home, for the feeling of belonging, for the life, the place you once knew by heart.  Only in returning to the life you once had before do you discover that you aren’t “at home” as you once were.

Home.  It’s a topic rich with memories, experiences, and stories.  Explore what “home” means to you.  Have you ever felt “of a place” and yet estranged from it at the same time?  Has cancer or other difficult life events changed your definition of home?  Write about leaving or returning to the place you call “home.”

Read Full Post »

For the Week of October 27, 2013: If You Could Turn Back Time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on October 26, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Since I first arrived in Okinawa more than three weeks ago, I’ve been mildly confused about time.  It’s not a case of jet lag, but one of adjusting to the vast difference in time and date between here and my home in San Diego.  I lost a full day coming west and crossing the international dateline as we flew over the vast  Pacific ocean, but when I return home Monday morning, I’ll gain that day back. I’ll fly out of Okinawa on Monday morning, change planes at Tokyo’s Narita airport, then fly back across the Pacific to arrive the morning on 28th in California!  I suppose it’s an opportunity to claim I was able to turn back time, other the yearly routine of setting my clock ahead one hour in the spring and back again in the fall.

I’m not the only one intrigued by the notion of time change.  Turning back the hands of time is a subject that  has ignited the imagination of filmmakers, singers, science fiction writers, novelists and poets for decades.  “If I could turn back time,” pop singer Cher famously belted out in her 1989 hit.  Her lyrics may have been inspired, as so many films or works of fiction since, by H.G. Wells’s 1895 novella, The Time Machine, adapted for film, radio and television several times in the decades following its publication.  Think of Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, or Bill Murray in the constant replay of Groundhog Day in the film of the same name.  Fox’s character traveled to the past in an attempt to influence the outcomes of life in the future.  Murray’s, an arrogant, self-absorbed news reporter, was doomed to repeat the same day until he finally began to care about others’ lives.  Another journalist who steps back in time is the protagonist in Ken Grimwood’s novel, Replay.  After dying of a heart attack in 1988, he awakens as an eighteen year old in 1963 with a chance to relive his life, yet the memories of his next twenty-five years are intact.  He continues to replay his life and death, awakening each time back in 1963 before he finally realizes he can’t prevent his death, but he can change the events before it—for himself and for others.

Neil Sedaka’s 1962 hit, “Turning Back the Hands of Time,” became his signature tune and one he performed for many years.  Set to Puccini’s “Nessum Dorma”score from the opera, Turnadot, the lyrics echo some of the longing we’ve all experienced when we look back over our lives.

Turning back the hands of time

To see the house I lived in,

To see the streets I walked on,

And there’s the children when they were oh so small,

Step back with me…

 

And there’s my father,

He’s waving to me gently,

Oh how I miss him.

 

To touch the face of friends and loved ones,

To hear the laughter and to feel the tears,

What a miracle this would be,

If only we can turn the hands of time…

How many times have you looked back over your life and begun a sentence with the words, “if only I could do it over again…?”  Whether regret and the wish you’d done something differently or the longing for a simpler time, a place you loved, or friends and parents you’ve lost along the way, chances are you’ve had those moments of wishing you could turn back time, maybe even alter the outcomes of your present life, giving yourself a change to make different choices than the ones you did.

I imagine I’ll be too tired and jet-lagged from my long flight to take advantage of having two October 28ths in my life this month, but it’s still fun to consider.  What if you could turn time back–not just an hour, but any period of time you chose?   What point in your life would you replay?  Would you do things differently, knowing what you know now?  Or would you opt to return to an earlier time and enjoy the memory a time in life you once knew?  Begin with the line, “If I could turn back time…” and see where it takes you.

Read Full Post »

For the Week of August 4, 2013: Can It Get Any Worse?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 4, 2013 | 12 Comments »

saywer-tornadoI’m a news junkie.  My day begins with NPR and ends with the nightly news on NBC, CBS or ABC, depending on which newscaster is most appealing to me on any given day.  Lately, however, I’ve begun to wonder if my addiction to current events is healthy.  The news, particularly the nightly news, is almost always bad, or at the very least, aggravating:  the perpetual dysfunction and gridlock in Washington, the terrorist threats that have led to an overseas travel alert, the continuing violence and bloodshed in parts of the Middle East, the sad commentary on the character of political personalities on either coast, the continuing weakness of our economy, an outbreak of a severe stomach illness linked to packaged salad mix…the list of depressing news goes on and on.

nn_netcast_130701.video-260x195

I question my decision to tune in.  Is it healthy to be bombarded with such disastrous news day after day?  I doubt it, because I struggle, some evenings, to feel hopeful about the world, my country or state.  I talk back to the broadcasters, arguing with the political pundits who ignite my ire.  My blood pressure rises; my body tenses, and even the human interest “feel good” story at the end of the evening news does little to offset the impact of so much suffering and hardship happening in the world.  I doubt I’m alone in these feelings.  “Can it get any worse?” I wonder aloud.  Given the barrage of crises, wars, natural disasters, and political embarrassments that are the stuff of the nightly news broadcasts, apparently it can.

Can it get any worse? “Afraid so,” Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s poem tells us.  She uses the litany of bad news questions we hear almost daily as the lines of her poem.  By the time we reach the end of it, we discover she’s already answered our questions in her poem’s title.  “Afraid So.”

…Is this going to hurt?

Could you lose your job?

Did the glass break?

Was the baggage misrouted?

Will this go on my record?

…Could this cause side effects?

Is the wound infected?

Are we lost?

Will it get any worse?

Bad news is all around us, and as cancer survivors, you know what it’s like to get it.   “I have bad news for you,” the doctor begins.  You feel your heart plummet.  “You have cancer.”  Cancer?  It sounds like a cosmic bad joke, even a death sentence.  You rail against the diagnosis in one moment and break down in tears the next.  You’re in the middle of your own personal disaster.  Why is this happening?  What is the prognosis?  What can I do?  What can I expect?  Will it get any worse?  Well, maybe so.  Maybe not.

Everyone has bad, even terrible, times in our lives, whether the result of being diagnosed with a life threatening illness, losses, or hardship like the loss of income or one’s home.  None of us are immune to bad news, but life demands we go on.  We can’t give up; things do change, and often, they get better.  We have to find room for hope, for strength and resilience to move ahead.  Whether we find that through support communities, prayer, the promise of a new treatment, or reaching out to help others who are suffering, we move on, repair, rebuild, and deal with what we’re given.   There’s extraordinary courage discovered out of disaster or hardship.  I still think about the people living in New Orleans after Katrina struck five years ago, the victims of the 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri, the community of Newtown, Connecticut, and more recently, the three young women freed from years of abuse and violence in a Cleveland neighborhood.  While those individuals and communities  still bear the vivid reminder of events, the destructive power of the storms, the depth of their emotional wounds, they’ve shown strength, given us hope as they begin to rebuild homes and lives.  We are humbled by their  strength and sheer human resilience in the midst of unbelievable devastation and loss.

Can it get any worse?  Maybe so, but then again, maybe not.  Hope keeps us moving ahead, one step at a time.  Think of a time you were dealt bad news, your own or someone else’s?   How did you first react?  How did you get through a difficult period in your life?   What helped?  How did you find the strength—even hope—to cope and begin to heal?  How did you find a way to reverse the course and bit by bit,  make your life better?

Read Full Post »

For the Week of July 28, 2013: What Did You Notice?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , writing and spirituality, , , on July 28, 2013 | 2 Comments »

This past Friday, I led an all-day writing workshop for a group of twelve women.  We met at my home; first assembling in a cozy circle, but as the day wore on, moving outdoors to the deck, the dining room or my study to write. It was, as it always is for me, a privilege to be present and share in the richness of stories and poems written and read aloud, each in response to a single prompt, yet each so unique to the person doing the writing. I felt, as everyone did, inspired and exhilarated by the experience of writing together in community.

One of the great gifts of being a writing instructor or group leader is that I am always surprised by what is written and read:  the unexpected observations, the life stories revealed, the beauty and musicality of someone’s voice.  Even, as it turns out, learning to see the familiar in new and surprising ways.

“A writer pays attention,” I said, before segueing into two exercises on noticing and using specific details and description.  I began with a short exercise inspired by Poets & Writers’ “The Time is Now,” a series of weekly writing prompts for poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction writers.  It’s an exercise I now practice routinely during my morning writing practice, one that reminds me to attend to the details, even find the unexpected and describe it. 

Choose an inch of space anywhere around you: the sole of your hiking boot, the rusted headlight of an abandoned car, that weathered and broken thumb your grandfather used to pry open the back fence. Write about that inch...

The results, as you might expect, are diverse and surprising.  Fingernails, an inch of skin, the fur of a dog, a patch of denim—all yielding something unexpected, even beautiful.  Once we finished sharing the results, I sent everyone outdoors for a ten minute exploration of the neighborhood.  “Walk around the block,” I said, “and as you do, note a half dozen or more things you notice.  Describe each.  Then use all you’ve observed to create a poem.”  The women left notebooks in hand, and began exploring our street, returning to write as instructed.  At the end of the allotted time, I sounded the chime for everyone to gather in the circle to read aloud.  What happened next was a lesson for me.

Each person had written a short prose poem about my neighborhood, the one I have lived in for six years, where I walk my dog and drive along its streets.  A neighborhood I know well, a familiar array of houses, gardens, sidewalks, but seen through the eyes of the writers, full of the unexpected.  The persistence of weeds, cracking the asphalt and poking their heads through the street; the house two doors away that last week, was beige stucco, but had been painted a colonial blue—an odd choice for a neighborhood of succulents, palm trees and stucco exteriors—the contrast of neatly arranged plants against the multitude of dove droppings, the porch swing, empty, swaying gently in the afternoon breeze, but seeming to ask for a coat of paint, and the house across the street from us, brown, white and speckled with several shades of green as our neighbor tried out new paint colors for its exterior—all seen from different perspectives and vantage points.  What I thought I knew well, it turns out, was full of surprises—and I think the writers were amused by my unexpected exclamation, “I didn’t know that!”  I had, as we all do, attenuated, become less observant in the familiar in my neighborhood.  Each person’s observations offered  something different, a way of seeing the familiar anew.  I realized I hadn’t been paying attention, caught up, as I often am, in my own thoughts–agonizing over a deadline, a stalled story, even a topic for this blog…”  Whoops.  “A writer pays attention…”

Ted Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks:  One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison, is a book of poetry inspired by his postcards to his colleague and friend, Jim Harrison, and written during his recovery from cancer treatment.  Simple in format, it is testimony to the power of paying attention, how  ordinary and little things can inspire and captivate us in simplicity and insight.  Kooser describes how the book came to be in his preface:

“In the autumn of 1968, during my recovery from surgery and radiation for cancer, I began taking a two-mile walk each morning…hiking in the isolated country roads near where I live…During the previous summer, depressed by my illness, preoccupied by the routines of my treatment, and feeling miserably sorry for myself, I’d all but given up on reading and writing…  One morning in November, following my walk, I surprised myself by trying my hand at a poem.  Soon I was writing every day… I began pasting my morning poems on postcards and sending them to Jim…”

What I love about this book is its portrayal of a man recovering from the ravages of illness and treatment, whose spirit and sensibilities are reawakened by the small moments of beauty in the natural world around him.  On each, he begins with a note on the weather before beginning the poem:  “Sunny and clear.”  “Six inches of new snow.”  “Quiet and cold at 6 a.m.”  Each poem is an observation, rich in detail and imagery that leads to a reflection or insight.

The sky a pale yellow this morning

like the skin of an onion

and here at the center…

…A poet,

and cupped in his hands, the green shoot

of one word.

 Despite his recovery from surgery and radiation, Kooser’s poems do not focus on cancer, rather, it is life he shows us, the small gifts in nature he captures.

I saw the season’s first bluebird
this morning, one month ahead
of its scheduled arrival.  Lucky I am
to go off to my cancer appointment
having been given a bluebird, and,
for a lifetime, have been given
this world.

Just as my writers did for me, Kooser’s book is a reminder of how important it is to pay attention, to notice, to be fully present in the world around us, to celebrate, and to give thanks.

There’s another exercise I have used in my writing practice from time to time, inspired by the poem “Gratitude,” by Mary Oliver.  Her observations of the natural world are so beautifully rendered as she asks–and answers—eight simple questions.  She begins by asking, “What did you notice?”  And responds:

The dew snail;
the low-flying sparrow;
the bat, on the wind, in the dark…

What was most wonderful?

…the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

…so the gods shake us from our sleep.

(From:  What Do We Know)

Paying attention, as Oliver, Kooser, and other writers remind us, is about slowing down and being attentive to the present, to what’s right in front of our eyes, discovering not only the beauty, but the meaning, the metaphors that inform our lives and our writing.  Anne Lamott observed, “There is ecstasy in paying attention.”

What did you notice?  I’m taking a walk today along paths familiar to me and I’m taking my notebook and capturing those small gifts in nature, the extraordinary found in the ordinary, the poem waiting to be discovered.  Why not rekindle your observational powers this week?  Practice paying attention, really noticing, what is around you.  Talk a walk, meandering along a trail, near the sea, into the woods.  Take in the sights, sounds, smells, the movements that are Nature’s.  When you return, take out your notebook and describe what you’ve seen.  You just might discover a metaphor lurking somewhere, a poem or story just waiting for you to notice it.

          “At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world,
Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.
You empty yourself and wait, listening.”


–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Read Full Post »

For the Week of June 16, 2013: A Father’s Legacy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 16, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.

(From:  “Father” in Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser)

In an article entitled, “Father’s Day:  Even the cards are different,” which appeared in a 2008 edition of the San Diego Union Tribune, reporter Jenifer Godwin wrote:

Moms and dads are more equal parenting partners than ever before, with studies showing men do far more housework and spend more time with their children than previous generations.
Yet Father’s Day still doesn’t inspire the same need to bestow sentimental cards, gifts and dinners out as Mother’s Day.

Godwin cited a number of statistics to show the contrast between how we celebrate mothers and fathers.  More cards are sent to mothers on Mother’s Day and more money spent on mothers’ gifts.  In fact, Father’s Day wasn’t an official holiday until 1972, when then president, Richard Nixon made it official, over a half century after the designation of an official Mother’s Day.

Father’s Day was, by comparison to Mother’s Day, didn’t garner the same attention when I was a kid, but happily, things have changed.  In fact, parenting assumptions were beginning to change as I reared my own children, but the shift is most obvious today, as I witness the shared partnership of child-rearing responsibility between my daughters and their husbands.

When I was young, my mother was primarily responsible for the day-to-day upbringing of my siblings and me.  My father wasn’t as involved, but we felt his influence in so many ways.  He was an affectionate, fun-loving man and, unlike our mother, soft-hearted and easy-going, I often stopped by his store on our way home from school to beg for an after-school treat, my allowance already depleted.  More than a few times, he’d grin as he rattled the change in his pocket, then, winking at his assistant say, “Hey Kid…how about I come with you?”  We spent many afternoons sitting together at the drugstore counter across the street, Dad with a cup of black coffee, and me with a coca cola.

He wasn’t hard on us kids,
never struck us…

He used to sing in the car
bought us root beers along the road.
He loved us with his deeds.

(From: “A Father’s Pain,” in A River Remains by Larry Smith)

He was the father whose feet I stood upon as he danced around the living room to his favorite Glen Miller or Benny Goodman tunes, who taught me how to pitch a baseball and throw a football even as my mother wished I’d choose more feminine activities.  As man raised by a wonderful cook, I sought to please him with clumsy attempts at making the blackberry pies he loved so much.  At first, my creations bordered on inedible, often made with too much flour and not nearly enough sugar.  But it hardly mattered.  Dad would eat an ample slice; flash me a big smile and say, “This might be the best blackberry pie I’ve ever tasted.”

Three months after his diagnosis of lung cancer, my father died on Thanksgiving Day, 1992.  I wasn’t ready to let him go, and in the wake of his death, our family devastated,  the emptiness I felt lingered for months.  I’m sure that my father influenced my decision to begin my expressive writing groups for cancer survivors a few years later.  He was a storyteller, and all my life, he spun tales of his childhood, filling our heads and hearts with a love of story.  In the last weeks of his life, those stories, told as I sat by his side in the family room, became all the more precious.  On the afternoon the last day of his life, he struggled to get out of bed, sit at the table and share in his family’s traditions, and asking, as he had for all the years I remembered, for a second slice of pie.

I miss my father even now, and although I’m celebrating other fathers in my life today– husband, sons-in-law and family friends—I’ll think of him.  His easy smile, the laughter, his legacy of story.  Stories I still remember; ones I have told and re-told to my daughters and will tell to my grandchildren.  “Death steals everything except our stories,” Jim Harrison wrote in his poem, “Larson’s Holstein Bull.”  It’s the part of my father’s legacy I treasure most—he may have died too soon, but his stories are the one thing that cancer could never take away.

Why not write about your father or grandfather—or, perhaps, someone who was like a father to you?  The memories of our fathers, whether fond or complicated, are full of stories.  Write one.  And to all the fathers in our lives, Happy Father’s Day.

Read Full Post »

For the Week of May 19, 2013: Happy Anniversary

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 19, 2013 | 3 Comments »

I’ve had my head down all week, buried in preparation for a weekend workshop, reading my UCLA creative nonfiction students’ latest submissions, moving through each day with a long list of “to dos.”  On Friday, when my husband asked how we should celebrate our wedding anniversary this weekend, I was taken by surprise.  “Oh good grief,” I laughed, “I completely forgot.”

I don’t usually forget birthdays or anniversaries dates of family or friends, but for the first time in 24 years of marriage, I had forgotten my own.  I like to believe it’s a function of being too busy, not the memory slights of older age.  I’ve redeemed myself.  We’ll have an evening out, toast one another with a glass of champagne, and tell a few stories of our many years together, probably thanking other for weathering those rough spots that occur in any marriage.

This morning, I remembered another anniversary.  It was on this date, thirteen years ago, that I first learned I had early stage breast cancer–an event that altered my life in profound ways.  I don’t think much about that distant cancer diagnosis anymore, but I often think about how my life was changed—in good ways—in the years that followed.  I’m grateful I had the chance to create a new chapter of life, grateful I had the love and support of my husband.

Anniversary dates have a particular poignancy attached to them, whether birthdates, weddings or the other events that alter our lives—cancer, a loved one’s death, a nation’s tragedy.  Anniversaries serve as a reminder of who we were then, what we have endured or achieved, and how those events shaped or changed us.

In the first anniversaries of loss, trauma or tragedy, strong emotions are often re-ignited: grief, old fears, relief, or happiness.   Despite needing a reminder from my spouse about ours, I’m a believer in rituals or celebrations to mark important anniversaries or milestones.  We have one ritual, for example, that we share each Thanksgiving Day, to honor my father.  He died of lung cancer on Thanksgiving Day, 1992, but in the days before his death, requested we celebrate invite all his existing family members and friends to a wake and toast his life with a glass of Jack Daniels whiskey, his perennial favorite.  Now, each Thanksgiving, my husband and I take a moment to remember him with that same ritual, sharing a small glass of Jack Daniels before dinner to toast my father and share a  favorite story about him. It’s a ritual that preserves his memory, allowing us to honor his life with story and laughter—just what he hoped we’d do.

Celebrations and rituals are important and meaningful in  healing, offering a way to acknowledge our experience and place it into the context of our larger lives.  We remember. We’re reminded of who we were and how far we’ve come.  We are reminded how much we have to be grateful for.

During the past several years, I have often forgotten the anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. That’s not unusual.  Some milestones recede in importance as life goes on.  The pain of loss diminishes.  We find new joy, new hope, and gradually, move on, creating new chapters of life.  I often recall the words of Alice Hoffman, novelist, writing about her cancer experience in a 2001 New York Times article, a year after my diagnosis:  “An insightful, experienced oncologist told me that cancer need not be a person’s whole book, only a chapter,” she said.  That’s true of so many of the painful or difficult chapters of our lives.  As we heal, we have less need to mark the dates of suffering, instead, we live forward, fully immersed in life.  It doesn’t mean we forget, but rather, we celebrate rather than mourn. We honor.  We give thanks.

There are many ways to celebrate or honor important milestones in the in our lives.  Here are some suggestions from Cancer Net, but they are applicable to many of the milestones and anniversary dates of life.

Take time to reflect. Plan a quiet time to think about your cancer experience and reflect on the changes in your life.  Writing in a journal, taking a long walk through the redwoods, along the ocean, or anywhere you enjoy being, offers the quiet time for reflection.

Plan a special event.  One of the women in my writing groups celebrated with a trip to Costa Rica after completing  her treatment for a recurrence.   Why not plan something special, like a hot air balloon ride a trip somewhere you’ve always wanted to take, or plan a gathering with family and friends.

Donate or volunteer. When I first joined the ranks of “cancer survivor,” I was the interim director for Breast Cancer Connections, a Palo Alto, CA nonprofit.  I was impressed by the number of cancer survivors who, daily, gave their time to volunteer at BCC.  Many cancer survivors find that donating or volunteering helps give positive meaning to their cancer experience.

Join an established celebration. Many of us have walked, run, or participated in support of one of the annual cancer survivor walks hosted by patient advocacy groups and cancer organizations. Communities and cancer centers around the country also celebrate National Cancer Survivors Day, which is the first Sunday in June.

Do something you truly enjoy. Celebrating can just be taking time to do something you enjoy, husband taking a walk along the seashore or through a public garden, going to a film or the theater with a friend, placing flowers on a loved one’s gravesite, or, as I will

Whatever anniversary dates are important to you, which do you remember most vividly? What images or feelings do those dates evoke? Write the story of that date.  What happened?  Why was it important to you? How did your life change because of it?

As for me, I’ll be  sharing a special dinner together with my spouse this evening, grateful for this gentle man who so willingly embraced  me and my then-adolescent daughters, weathering our storms in the wake of a husband/father’s death,  to create together  a loving and enduring bond between us all.   Happy Anniversary, John.

Read Full Post »

For the Week of May 12, 2013: “Mommy, It’s Your Happy Day!”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 12, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

“Mommy! It’s your happy day!”  My four-year old grandson said as he greeted my daughter at the bottom of the stairs in their Okinawan home this Mother’s Day morning.  He held out a little box with four cookies inside, ones he had decorated the day before, and offered her one–before sitting down to eat the rest himself!  His two-year old sister, not to be outdone, gave her a half-eaten jelly bean.  “I love my family,” she wrote on her Facebook page.

In years to come, the jelly beans and cookies will likely be replaced with cards and flowers, like the ones my daughters sent to me, but these first childish gestures of celebrating mothers are often remembered with the greatest fondness.  Among my cherished keepsakes, there is a box devoted to the handmade cards and love notes scrawled across the page in my daughters’ childish handwriting.  My mother kept a few of those little notes too.  Shortly after her death, I found a crude watercolor painting of Mount Shasta tucked in between the pages of one of her books.  I’d painted it for her in third grade, writing at the bottom of it, “I will always love you, Mommy.”

And I did, although our relationship was tested as I grew into adulthood and rebelled against what I perceived as her unrelenting and unnecessary control.  Many years later, when I navigated the turbulent years of adolescence with my two daughters, I became much more understanding and forgiving of my mother’s unintended misdemeanors.  Motherhood is complicated:   tender and loving, challenging and at times, frustrating.    Even if our feelings about our mothers are sometimes conflicted, like it or not, their voices echo in our minds long after they are gone.

It’s no wonder that mothers have been the inspiration for more than one poet or writer.  Type in “mother” in the advanced search on www.poets.org, the site of the Academy of American Poets, and no less than 611 poems are listed.  Read works of fiction or memoir, and a full range of mother characters emerge as, for example, in this vivid portrait of Russell Baker’s mother in his 1982 memoir, Growing Up:

In that time when I had known her best, my mother had hurled herself at life with chin thrust forward, eyes blazing, and an energy that made her seem always on the run…Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not.  She ran.

Anne Sexton remembers her mother with bitterness as she describes her “little childhood cruelties”:

I will speak of the little childhood cruelties…
of the nightly humiliations  where Mother undressed me,
of the life of the daytime, locked in my room,
being the unwanted, the mistake
that Mother used to keep Father
from his divorce.

(“Those Times,” The Complete Poems, 1982)

And it’s a mother’s love that Carl Sandburg recalls in “Home:”

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
to a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness.

(In:  Complete Poems, 2003)

Motherhood. The huge task of nurturing and caring for our children, of guiding them through childhood, weathering the inevitable storms of adolescence, and hoping we’ve done right by them.  I, like every mother I know, did the best I could, but I learned as I went, and I made my own mistakes along the way.  Now, so many years later my heart swells with pride when I watch my daughters with their children.  I sometimes see a shadow of myself as a young mother, the tenderness, the questions–“am I doing the right thing?”—and I witness little gestures and actions I learned from my mother, even my grandmother, passed along, consciously or unconsciously, just as they each do now to their children.

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point…

(“What I Learned from My Mother,” by Julia Kasdorf, in Sleeping Preacher, 1992)

“Your kind of love, once given, is never lost…”Wallace Stegner wrote in a letter to his mother over fifty years after her death.   (“Letter, Much Too Late,” Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, 1992)  It’s been almost a decade since my mother died, but today, I’m remembering my mother with a fuller kind of gratitude than, perhaps, I did before she died.  Maybe it’s time to write the letter, long overdue, I always meant to write before she died…a kind of adult version of that third grade girl’s promise, “I’ll always love you…”

Write about your mother this week.  And to mothers everywhere, I wish you each a Happy Mother’s Day.

 

Read Full Post »

For the Week of March 3, 2013: Inspiration From a Box of Crayola 64

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 3, 2013 | 5 Comments »

Earlier this week, my husband and I spend a delightful evening listening to reading his poetry at the annual “Writers’ Symposium” at Point Loma Nazarene University.   Described in the New York Times as “the most popular poet in America,” the former U.S. Poet Laureate has a particular gift of welcoming the listener or reader into his poems, finding inspiration in the ordinary and leaving us smiling, hungry for more.   Inspired, I signed up for a poetry workshop, which I attended yesterday, in hopes it could ignite something fresh and  new in my writing and admittedly, wishing I could write poetry like .

After the delight of two hours with the famous poet, two hours spent sitting in a windowless college classroom, without the sunlight of a spring day or even my usual morning coffee, left me anything but inspired.  When the instructor invited us to write a poem about a color near the end of the workshop,  I sighed, trying in vain to remember the names of the sixty-four crayons in the Crayola box I so loved as a youngster, the smell of the wax, the exotic array of colors, before  listlessly penciling the word “gray” at the top of my page.  My poetic muse, her face ashen, was apparently lying limp on the floor of my mind, gasping for air.

But I misjudged my muse, forgetting that she doesn’t  ever appear on demand, and this morning when I awakened early to write, as is my habit, I discovered a poem lurking in the shadows of yesterday’s disappointment.  I opened my notebook, stared at the crossed out lines from the previous day’s exercise, and suddenly, my pen began dancing across the page.  My mind was still toying with the  color “gray,” but now, images  rained on my lined pages in rapid succession.  By the time my husband awakened an hour later, “gray” was no longer limited to boredom or malaise, instead it ignited something humorous,  and, as I read it aloud, shared laughter.

Any color, even gray, as I discovered, can inspire our writing.  Colors carry strong emotional associations; Some elicit almost universal meaning.  For example, colors on the blue side of the spectrum communicate calm, but also sadness.  Red, by contrast, expresses warmth, but also anger.  Whether in a poem, a love song, the hard beat of rap, or smoky voice of a jazz singer, the mention a color immediately evokes a feeling or a mood.  “I got the blues for my baby…”  “Baby’s in black…”  “Seeing red…”

Color also plays a role in cancer.  In a December 2009 Cure Today supplement, “The Color of Cancer,” its cover illustration depicting men and women of all skin colors, the contents focused on the issues of cultural differences in cancer care and treatment, such as the lack of healthcare access, early diagnosis and individualized treatment.

The supplement’s title, “The Color of Cancer,”  was the motivation to search my bookshelf  for The Cancer Poetry Project, a favorite anthology edited by Karin Miller and published in 2007.  Color played a part in several poems, whether used in the description of a loved one or  expressing the complex emotions of the cancer experience.

For example, notice how Mary Milton uses color in her poem, “Bi, Bye-Bye, Buy,” written after a friend advised her “Don’t start buying stuff to compensate” for her upcoming mastectomy.

…a sheet of bed sheets dusty coral
so blood stains won’t show much…
and shirts that open in front
one short-sleeved white
bad choice of color but I liked
its spirited portrayal of zebras
galloping through ferns
and gold paint splats
Besides it was on sale…

Joan Annsfire, in “First Summer,” infused her poem with color to describe the glory of the first summer after her recovery:

…the Oregon landscape
was a work of art, vivid and deep
slices of cloudless blue opened
into evergreen valleys
bounded by a massive,
all-encompassing
horizon…

In “Red,” Elizabeth Johnson painted a vivid image of the moment in her mother’s hair began to fall out during chemotherapy:

…We had pulled them out in handfuls,
big beautiful red spirals that swung
‘round your freckled face
that danced across the green in your eyes…

Color can be a great source of inspiration, a way to express what you feel.   Whether in poetry or prose, why not let color guide your writing this week?  Visualize your feelings as colors on an artist’s palette.  Begin with a 4 x 6 inch blank index card, and using crayons, magic markers, torn tissue paper or whatever you have on hand, create a mini-collage.  Draw, paint or paste colors on your card, ones that symbolize your feelings—whether fear, anger, a punch to the gut, desolation, boredom, or even hope.  After you’ve created your mini-collage, study it for a few minutes before brainstorming words that come to mind.  Then, start writing, capturing lines, images, comparisons–however color expresses itself in your writing.  Write for twenty minutes—longer if you wish. Maybe you will, as I did, discover a poem that begins with nothing more than a single color.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

Follow