Snow and Equanimity

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It snowed last night. It's only October, but often in October it snows here. It always seems too soon, as if Nature, indignant, is just trying to demonstrate her power to rearrange our lives. Yesterday it was summer and I was growing tomatoes. Now the still-green tomatoes hang on blackened vines, chilled and dying in the snow. Yesterday I wore shorts and today I wear winter tights and a sweater. The heat is on. The cat is in. I wonder where all the gloves have gotten to.

Nothing stays. It's not supposed to.

One day I am exultant. The next day I am quite sure that quite a ways back my life took a terrible wrong turn and that I am plodding in desperate misery over the road to absolutely nowhere. I am tired then I am caffeinated, awake. My kids are happy little boys and now they're teenagers and always furious with me. My youngest son could play the violin and now, at practice, he sounds like he is trying to kill a cat.

And this is all, according to my thoughts, supposed to be bad somehow, or troubling. But it isn't. The snow just lies on the ground, blanketing the world in slushy ice. It is indifferent to my attempts to deem it good or bad. It is cold and wet and white. It kills the garden and adds moisture to the thirsty reservoirs.

Teenagers press up against the sides of an imagined bouncy house, threatening to blow right through the side. They slam around, hitting little hopping children who scream righteously that they stop. They don't stop, can't stop. Their insides are made of lightning. They are huge, untenably intermediate creatures, gasping for air between the surface and the depths. They radiate anger, passion, lust, amusement—big feelings all covered with zits. It's like springs in a machine, this emotion: more energy than they will ever have again. Far more than I.

The snow just keeps on being snow then water then steam. And I keep on being sad and then happy and then at quiet peace. Until I freeze again.

Anger and passion and sadness and joy all sit next to one another and seep into the spongy soil.

Who's in Charge of the Kids Anyway?

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Yesterday I was at coffee with a cluster of my good female friends. (I am purposely not calling them girlfriends because I am already old enough to wonder if I should dye my grey streak and too old to be posting selfies to Facebook and calling my female compatriots "girlfriends.") Anyway, we were all of us drinking lattes at my friend's kitchen island while someone was making a hair-removing concoction of lime juice and sugar and the rest of us were watching in fascination.

My friend's oldest son, who is seventeen, was wandering around the kitchen and talking, and all of us were torn between enjoying his company and wanting him to go away so that we could talk about the things that you can't say in front of teenage boys. As he moved back and forth through the kitchen, lighting briefly on counter tops before hopping off again, his mother questioned him about his homework, suggested what speech he should choose in the next Speech and Debate tournament, and told him to go and weigh himself and see if he had gained any weight, like his swim coach wants. He remained rather congenial throughout these suggestions despite not really doing anything she said. Somehow, all of us fell into talking  about internet security and the necrophiliac-bestiality porn that we are all afraid our boys may be watching on the ginormous cesspool called the internet. That, and all the countless hours some of them spend staring at screens instead of doing their homework. My friend with the seventeen year-old talked about a program called Safe Eyes and how it was installed on her kids' devices now, allowing her to limit their screen time and block unsafe sites. Safe Eyes, I thought. I should write that down. Her son asked her to unblock YouTube, and she told him no, but she could unblock it temporarily that afternoon. He didn't get obviously angry. He's a good kid. They're a good family. A supportive, interested mother and a son, almost a man, still letting her do her job.

"You're lucky he lets you do that," I teased her. "My teenager would leave home if I did half of that [meaning half the instructions, half the incursion on what he has learned, to my dismay, to think of as his own business]."

Another very good friend (who also has a teenager) responded to me, saying with alarm, "Let? Who's in charge?"

I chose not to respond at that moment, sensing the presence of a complex subject, but I have been thinking about her words ever since then, and I think her question is both very understandable and also a really good starting point for discussion.

When I was myself a teenager, my parents (who, you have to understand, had only recently been hippies) tended to take the attitude that if they forbid me to do things, I was going to do them anyway, so what—really—was the point. This was not really untrue. However, not having the boundaries they might have given me to push against, I assumed both that I was not loved enough to protect and that the world was very unsafe. I felt like a person walking over a high and narrow bridge without guard rails on either side. It always seemed like I was in danger of falling, and I felt equally sure that nobody would catch me if I did. I looked for boys and best friends that might catch me and tested them all repeatedly by hovering over the edge. With my chronic drama, I used all of them up so that they could barely stand the effort of knowing me. And then I did whatever I did—to show them or to show my parents or to make someone come and rescue me.

What I learned from this, by the time I was eighteen and sober, is that no one can really stop you if you want to destroy yourself. Nobody's love for you, no matter how great, can substitute for your own sense of self-preservation. When I did finally return to safety, it was of my own volition. Many, many people loved me and helped me to do this, but they all made it clear that my decision to survive would be completely my own. I had always blamed my parents for what I thought was not loving me, and for being human and therefore imperfect, but in the end, the damage I had done to myself through alcohol, drugs, and anorexia was entirely my own responsibility. Both the mess and the cleaning up.

This was a good beginning, but I was twenty-five, with two children, when true sanity finally dawned on me. My oldest child was struggling in school and, due to an extremely unfortunate presentation of severe ADHD, was chronically in trouble for doing something awful to someone else. I tried my best. I was extremely young and extremely stupid and had assumed that if I provided what I thought were the right ingredients that my child would come out happy, successful, well-behaved, and nice. He would be like a cake that I had baked following a recipe. I had read countless parenting books. I knew the recipe, but the cake still kept coming out fucked-up. One day, it hit home to me what was so hard about parenting a kid like mine. It was that it was assumed that I was responsible not only for my parenting—for my own actions—but entirely for the actions that my child himself chose to take.

It was then that I realized what I had done to my own parents. I had held them responsible not simply for their own actions but for all of mine. I could only now begin to appreciate how painful that blame must have been. Stricken, I immediately called my mother and apologized. I can still feel now the horror that I felt at the moment when I realized what an asshole I had been to the people who loved me most, who had stood by me, always doing their best to help me in whatever way I could receive any help they gave. They had been afraid that if they laid down the law, they would lose me altogether—and they had been absolutely correct in having that fear. Instead, they had managed to maintain a relationship with me, and because they did, I had been able to stay with them and get well on my own, when I decided to.

Which brings me back to my friend's question. Who's in charge? The answer is actually obvious if you can look at the situation for what it is.

They are.

It seems to me that to think otherwise is to buy into a luxurious deception wherein you can go on thinking that your children are somehow within your control, that they are appendages of your own desires and intentions, and that, if you follow that sure-proof recipe, they will turn out as they "should." You can get away with the thinking this way when you happen to be parenting compliant children—children who, by temperament and circumstance, are not especially inclined to go to war with what you want. But when you are given a spirited child to parent, you quickly learn the folly of this kind of parenting.

Certainly, parents have enormous influence over their children. We make rules. We set examples. We encourage. We inspire. Good parenting is as important to children as good baking powder is to cake. Without it, nothing is going to rise. But here's the part most parents never grapple with—when you make rules, kids either choose to follow them or not. You can give consequences and you can give rewards, but if they don't want the reward as badly as they want to break the rule, or if getting the consequence is worth asserting their own will, they can and will break the rule anyway. Day after day, they comply with our smallest desires, with our endless instructions to get ready so that we're not late, with our requests that they eat vegetables, and our injunction that they go to school.

They do all of that of their own free will, and rarely do we appreciate that they Do. Not. Have. To. When we encourage or inspire, the child still has to be encouraged or inspired. They have to participate. They have to value their relationship with you enough that they are interested in what you say.

They get to choose—always.

A wise man in Alcoholics Anonymous once told me, "You can do anything you want—as long as you are willing to accept the consequences of your actions." Later, my friend Amy gave me the keys to the kingdom, saying "I think your problems parenting come down to this essential problem of belief. You think you should be in control of him and not that you are two human beings trying your best to work out your relationship."

Realizing that she was right may have saved me from committing child abuse (or some other horrible result of my constant stress in the face of not getting what I wanted).

These are now the truths I choose to parent from: The choices are theirs. The consequences are theirs. Just as my choices and consequences are mine. I make as many rules as any other parent. I follow my kids around, entreating them to complete their homework. I threaten cell phone confiscation. I follow up. I praise. I hug. I rub backs. I apologize. I lay down the law. I build and nurture our relationship. But I never forget that my children's choices belong to them. That, in fact, they don't have to do a thing I say. I can restrict their internet and, if they want to, they can watch porn over at the house of a friend whose mother does not. I can pack them healthy lunches, and they can toss them and spend all their allowance on Fun'yuns and Arizona iced tea. I can spend sixteen years raising them to value themselves, to work hard and try and make a difference, and they can still choose to ditch class, smoke pot, or bully other kids, if that's what they've set their hearts upon.

Parents who have never dealt with real behavior problems in their children are like wealthy people who have never known what it is to walk around with holes in their shoes until next paycheck, who have never had to choose between groceries and electricity, who have never had to stay home praying with a fevered child, terrified and wondering what the emergency room might cost. Studies now show that we all make the same mistake about our good fortune: We think we deserve it. We think we have earned it. And we think—all of us—that those that don't have what we have simply have not done as well as we.

I think it all the time. My kids know how to think critically because I engage them in interesting conversations. My kids know how to work because I expect them to do so at home. My kids are smart because I picked good books, because we don't have cable, because we value education in our home. I have done a damn good job, I think.

That kid with the meth problem? Bad parenting. How the Hell are they letting him do that? The bossy tyrant in my sons' play group? Naturally, he's a bully. Just look at how cute his mom thinks his antics are. That woman getting the divorce? Bad picker. Why would you choose to marry a man like that?

As long as I can continue thinking I have what I deserve—bright, drug-free, compliant kids, a supportive husband, a vegetable box filled with organic food—I am protected. I don't really have to worry about teenage addicts, about painful divorce proceedings, about how I might feed a family on what I could buy with SNAP. Even if I feel compassion, I still don't have to feel fear.

But it's a lie. I don't have what I deserve. I have what I am blessed with. I have kids who, every day, choose to let me parent them, kids who do the dishes when I ask them, kids who listen to what I say and text me, over and over this letter:

"K."  [Yes, Mom, I'll do what you say.]

Except when they don't. And whenever they don't, I am presented with the conundrum at the heart of all human interactions: that I very badly want what I cannot make another do.

It is at these moments that I find I can use force, I can direct anger like a fire hose in hopes that I scare them into doing as I say, I can cajole, I can entreat, I can cry. I can make new rules. I can enforce existing rules. I can be authoritative but not authoritarian. Not permissive. Empathetic, but strong. And how will they respond? I am suddenly aware that my relationship with that child that is almost a man hangs by one tiny, frayed thread of remaining belief that I am the parent and he is the child, that I am really the authority figure governing his life. We have to agree to this reality—both of us—or we lose each other. We damage ourselves.

And, again, he agrees to believe that I am the parent, that my rules govern his behavior, that he still needs me and I can be of some use to him. He does not have to believe this, but he does—as much as an act of love for me as because it is easier to think it true. The fraying thread of his childhood thread gets smaller every time, but he still believes this. He still looks at me and answers "K."

At that moment, I am blessed by his choice—as I am blessed that my husband doesn't leave me, as I am blessed that, despite the economy, I still have vegetables in my frig to eat. I may be blessed, but one thing I am not is in charge of anyone's choices. I am again granted permission based on the shared illusion we call parenthood.

Here is a strong-willed, intelligent, complex human and he has given me the honor of continuing to let me be his mom. If he wasn't as much like me as he is—strong-willed, feisty, single-minded—I wouldn't have to know that I'm not really in charge. I wouldn't have to deal with the fact that I want very badly something which I cannot make another person do. I could go on believing I am the only parent he has—that there are no teachers, no peers, no media, no unexpected disasters, and no authority within the young man himself.

To believe all this would be easier, but it isn't true.

And so I remain profoundly grateful to have strong-willed children. I am a better human for not thinking I am in charge of what I'm not in charge of, that I am the master of what I am merely the servant of. I cannot fall asleep to the truth because they won't let me. I am a humbler and more compassionate human being for every single time they have looked at me and, instead of saying "K"—have told me "No."

Fainting Goats

Ever since I first heard about them, I have wanted to have a goat that would pass out. It seems to me it would provide hours of entertainment, and you also would get the milk. However, rather than receiving a fainting goat, I have become one—and in the worst setting possible.

In my small town of 12,000 souls, we have one grocery store. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that everyone is there at once. If you have exchanged terse words with someone at the MVD, they are in the freezer aisle. If you have taught a child at the local elementary school, that child is in line with his mother at the pharmacy window while you go to buy spermicidal lubricant. If you bump your cart into someone, the person in question is a respected member of your church. And so on.

The most public part of this store is the part with the check-out aisles. It faces the door and the pharmacy, and 90% of the people you know are always lined up and checking out. It would be easy to do without Facebook, because you can always just go and buy applesauce.

Yesterday, I went to the store after church. I hadn't eaten for several hours, but I wasn't hungry. I had a bunch of unpleasant paperwork to fill out at home and I just wanted to get my shopping done and get back to get it over with. I had accidentally left my cell phone on my desk before going to church and I knew my husband, after leaving his church meeting, was going to arrive home and wonder where I was. The store was busy, but everything pretty much went fine. In the produce section, I waved at two women I knew from the school I had worked at and visited with a fellow soccer mom. In the frozen section, I ran into a friend who also homeschools, and we talked for a bit about the possibility of a homeschool field trip to a pumpkin patch. My cart was extremely full, and I was thinking that after I shopped, there wouldn't be any money left in my account, but reasoned that I was planning on baking bread and so that this fact balanced out my financial irresponsibility with the assurance that I was the right kind of person—which is the kind of person who bakes bread for her kids. Whole wheat.

I got to the check-out line and had placed everything on the belt except some toilet paper in the bottom of my cart. In leaning down to pick it up, somehow I jammed the cart into the end of the aisle and whacked my knee, in that tender spot just below the cap. It hurt. It wasn't terrible, just the kind of pain that accompanies a smack of the funny bone, not the sort that accompanies burning alive or giving birth. However, I immediately felt light-headed. Lights, like glowing asterisks, punctuated the air. I could hear only as well as if I was underwater, which is to say that there were sounds, but that they seemed distant and muffled, as if ushering from another world. Most concerning, I felt like my body wanted to fall down. Fine, I thought, if I can just get through check-out, I will go out and sit in my car until I'm OK again to drive. I can do this. I have persevered through worse. And indeed I did. Staying upright demanded quite a bit of energy, but I seemed to be doing OK. I replied to the polite checker—yes, I was fine today and how was she—and swiped my card, wavering only slightly and feeling more than a little disoriented. So far, so good. I even remembered to withdraw allowance in cash for my three kids. The problem apparently came when the checker asked me if I had a Fresh Values card. I did have one and had already placed my keys with the green fob onto the little check-writing dais in front of me. But no sound came out of my mouth. In fact, I only know that she asked this because she reported it later to the paramedics when they came.

Time seemed to be punctuated by periods of strange blankness, like pages missing from a book. The next thing I knew, I was being settled into a chair (right there is the check-out lane) and given orange juice that wasn't mine. A woman who I know vaguely as a substitute teacher was talking to me and a lot of people, one after the other, were saying, "Are you OK, Ma'am?" "I'm fine," I assured them, while wavering more alarmingly and then starting to retch. A plastic shopping bag was handed to me and I retched into that. Nothing came up, but breathing into the bag seemed to make me feel better, so I did that for awhile. Then, some men that I think must have been policeman suggested that I be moved over to the little in-store Wells Fargo area just across from the check-out line. They asked to see my ID, wanted to know if I knew what today was, and if I was diabetic, and then they let me know that they had called the fire department.

It was then that I realized that from now on I needed to find a way to shop at the very-expensive health food store on the edge of town, because I was never going to be willing to darken the door of Smith's again.

The thing is I have been at Smith's with intolerable migraines. I have been at Smith's with fibro flares so bad that I felt like I wanted to collapse in tears on the floor of the paper goods aisle. But, up until now, I have never made any scene that has caused anyone to notice my having a problem. And, today—which was a day that I had felt basically fine during—I was finally and irrevocably making a spectacle of myself.

Then the paramedics came. All twenty of them. And they talked to me for a while before insisting that I get on *A STRETCHER* and go out to their ambulance. This was not what I was hoping would happen. The nice substitute teacher lady had called my husband on her cell phone and I indicated that I would really like to just have him come and get me and that everything would be fine. I had no desire to the local emergency room and have them tell me that I still had fibromyalgia and also a fainting goat gene. One paramedic looked with interest at my cuticles and asked if the injuries therein were due to anxiety or a medical condition. "Bad habit," I told her. "So you pull the skin off your cuticles?" she asked. "Yes," I told her. Everyone nodded and looked at one another. They took my blood pressure, which is always low—this time being no exception—and my blood sugar and said I should go to the ER. "No thank you," I demurred.

After signing a refusal of service against medical advice, I ended up leaving with my husband, who installed me at home in a bed and then went back to dealing with the groceries and the laundry, without expressing overmuch concern about this new wrinkle on the ongoing saga of his wife's physical frailty. This, he thought, was the most helpful thing possible. And perhaps it was. However, after all of the attention and concern from the good-looking firefighters, I couldn't help but feel that this was not exactly the reaction I was looking for: "Oh, it's just my wife. It's one thing after another with her." I began to wish I had gone to the hospital where people actually cared about me. *

At any rate, I used to joke that it would be intolerably embarrassing to actually buy condoms in the pharmacy window at Smith's and that this was most likely the cause of the multiple teenage pregnancies in our town. Now I know that doing this would not be nearly as embarrassing as being hauled like a sack of dirty laundry from the most visible section of the local Smith's. And so I would now say to any teenager who is worried about publicly purchasing contraceptives that they should rest assured—at least the fire department would not be called.

Lest you worry, I have diagnosed myself with a vasovagal reaction and determined that the thing to do would be to avoid clocking any tender nerve centers, at least while in public, in order to avoid future embarrassment. From now on, I will simply remember to wear knee pads and a bag on my head before going to shop at Smith's.

And everything will be fine.


*This is not me making fun of my husband. This is me making fun of myself.

Twelve Years Later

Twelve years later, I can still remember my horror on the morning that I heard. Horror both at what had happened and at what would happen next, which already loomed like an oncoming storm in the sky of the day's pain. I held my baby in my arms and listened as Amy Goodman, from Ground Zero, played the terrified voices of people on the street. I held Devin closer and kissed his hair and wondered what the world would be like now.

Glennon of Momastery had this to say this morning. It says everything I might hope to say and more, so I will save my words and recommend it to you.

I also want to tell you about a book. It is called Acts of Faith and it is written by a man named Eboo Patel, an American Muslim from India and a leader in the youth interfaith movement. This book has transformed my understanding of what is going on in the Muslim world, especially for the kinds of men that end up committing terrible acts. It has expanded my empathy and my commitment that we all need to learn to know one another and live together and that the best place to start is with our youth. I cannot say enough about it. It is one of the most important books I've read in my life. I sincerely hope you'll consider checking it out. It's not an apology for anything. It's a rallying cry for us to create a world of cooperation and pluralism.

On this anniversary, my hope is for all of us to be at peace, all over the world, safe from violence and misunderstanding. I pray that we all find freedom and that we can learn to live together in this fragile world. And I hope and pray especially for the Syrian refugees who are right now, in the millions, living in uncertainty as the world decides their fate.

Boddhisattvas

Source

I have the sweetest readers. I really do. After my last post, you have left me long, personal comments. You have offered encouragement and some good advice. You have even sent me personal emails and started dialogues with me. I really can't express how lucky I am. And because you have been so supportive, I want to tell you a little more.

First off, I am OK. I am actually better than I've ever been. I let myself get lost, and I am so glad that I did. I don't think we ever learn anything without first losing ourselves, and so I let myself get lost a lot. Sometimes it feels frightening, but it's not the kind of thing anyone should worry about. I'm just like you, only louder and squirrelier in my fright.

Why, though, do I say I get lost? What is the point of that?

Fundamentally, we all seem to experience a dissatisfaction with the way things are, the way life is. We sense that we are being deprived of the real purpose for our existence, that just behind the thick miasma of everyday thoughts and happenings is something always present that we just can't touch. I am talking about what I was told in AA is "a God-shaped hole."  I will take a risk and say that I think we all have this sense, even buried under positive affirmations or accomplishments or survival strategies we've learned. And I don't think that what we are yearning for is found in religion for everyone. We could call it a God-shaped hole because there isn't any word big enough to fit in there for lots of us but God. God is the biggest word for what I mean, but it isn't the only one. For others, it is Transformation. It is Purpose. It is Peace. We can feel it close, but it's through a veil. It's an aroma lingering on the edge of our senses that we just can't name. We are crying out for meaning and connection to the ultimate truth of life.

Like most people, I have filled up this hole, most of the time, with more of Self. Not like most people, sometimes that expression of desperate hole-filling has been destructive in obvious, palpable ways. But it's destructive for all of us. I am not alone in that. We fill the hole with internet activity. We fill it with gossip. We fill it with chocolate. We fill it by expressing our thoughts and waiting, desperate, for someone to respond with a love large enough to assuage the pain of our missing piece. And we get relief from these things—from exercise, from service, from friendship. There is not one thing wrong with any of what we do.

It just doesn't fill the hole permanently. It covers it with bandages that fall off again and again. We simply cannot make it go away because the hole is part of us. It is as necessary as nostrils. It is as ordinary as lungs. We need it because otherwise we never seek to become larger than we are.

I spend a lot of time, especially in my writing life, talking about and paying attention to the existence of this hole. Because once you see it for what it is, once you glimpse that you are forever left open for something you can rarely reach, there isn't really anything else to talk about. (Not that I don't spend most of my days on exactly that Nothing!) The hole is painful, but it is the only true thing you've ever touched.

When I was seven, I came home one day and told my mother that I was from another planet and that I'd come here to save mankind. I had passed through a magic waterfall and here I was, I said. This was an expression of my dissatisfaction with the state of ordinariness and noise that I found myself living in. With one sweeping declaration, I became for myself larger than I had before. My head brushed Heaven and my feet, like roots, grew into the asphalt and concrete, connecting with the earth beneath me, entwined with every other living thing ever to put down roots.

Eventually, I grew out of this. I realized that I am not an alien, that there is nowhere to ascend to, that I had accidentally made myself a God. And yet, what was that experience but a child's expression of the essential truth I've been chasing ever since? We are born from the bliss of ignorance. We pass through the waters of our mother, living suspended, aquatic, for a time. We are pressed into a sort of reality, crushed by the pressure of being born. And then we arrive strange, like aliens, to be greeted by the loving hands of Earth. As we grow, we develop a language that we can use to understand the world. We learn that we are "me" and our mother is not. When I first spoke, I called both of us "Baby," my mother and me. Our relationship was "Baby," acknowledging the sweet understanding that the two of us were joined. Later, I learned who Tara was. And that is where I, like everyone else, began the necessary business of both losing and finding my way.

I was, in fact, a creature from elsewhere sent to save humankind. We all are. We are all Bodhisattvas, our mouths filled up with dry crumbs of separation, our tongues thirsting for the time when we will be joined. Our work is to love everyone, to save everyone. We cannot seem to do it alone or in our lifetimes. That is why there are so many of us. We, all of us, are born to care for one another. We have merely forgotten who we are.

When you begin to realize this, the knowledge doesn't come in a flash of peace and divine understanding. It is neither relaxing nor is it soft. It hits you like a hard wave of salt water, leaving slap marks on your face. It hurts. And you can never again forget that you touched the truth of it. Sometimes, days seem empty. The Self you have constructed seems vapid, claustrophobic. The methods you use, without forethought, to survive life are exposed as the scrambling of sea lice on the sand. It is no longer good enough to just exist. It's not good enough to be happy or wealthy or successful or funny or smart. You will spend the rest of your life trying to deal with the poverty of words that you have to express the wholeness you have seen.

That is why I write here. And that is why I have to stop sometimes. When my writing fills up with Self, I need to pause and again let myself be knocked back off my feet. I am not a religious zealot. I am an ordinary, skeptical, scientifically-minded liberal who can't wrap my head around what most people mean by God. And, at the same time—as my parents blessed me to be—I am Tara. Not ordinary Tara Adams, with pimples and frizzy hair. I am Tara, Mother of Compassion, she who hears the cries of the world.*

We all are. We are made to be. It is the purpose of that hole.

If all of that makes me sound crazy, please accept this version instead: I am doing fine. I am allowing myself to notice the human condition, especially as expressed in my own narrow self. I consider this both sacred and necessary and it is what I think my life is for. Nothing I've said is intended to be taken literally. Nothing of import should be taken literally, or you will always miss the truth.

Again, I love you all. Thank you for your compassion and your encouragement. I will write something light and funny again, when it feels like that is what I have to say. Thanks for sticking with me through all of it.




* Tara is the Tibetan Buddhist Bodhisattva, an incarnation of Avalokitesvara. She is correlated with Kwan Yin in the Chinese Buddhsit tradition.

The Smell of Rot and Orange Rinds

Hello there. It's been a while.

I only intended to be off of my blog and Facebook for 40 days, and that 40 days ended over a week ago. When the time came for me to come back and tell you all something about my time off, I found I didn't really have anything to say. I wrote blog posts and discarded them because they were trying to hard to prove something. So I waited some more, becoming increasingly concerned that inspiration had not struck.

Inspiration still has not found me, so I guess I'll go ahead and just give it a go.

I don't have any deep thoughts for you. Time out of the internet social network was the same as time in it, except quieter. I honestly expected that I would have some kind of spiritual epiphany, as if I had gone up into a cave for a month and waited for God to speak. That didn't happen. Sure, I had several useful thought-processes and made what I think of as some discoveries, but I remain very much as I was.

More so, in fact. I find that fact a little embarrassing.

Right now—as I am writing—something in this house has gone terribly bad. I can smell it every time I inhale through my nose. It is, judging by the odor, either some very rotten milk or a dead cat. I have searched for the source of the smell in vain for several days and I can't find it, so instead of looking, I am boiling orange peels and cinnamon on my stove.

And this sort of sums up everything.

The things about myself that I don't like just keep on stinking up the place. I am insecure, self-involved, and prone to fits of anger and depression. Still. I wonder, all the time, if I am hiding this well enough, underneath the smell of cinnamon, and if it smells as bad to you as it does to me. I have frequent moments of peace and I think I have found The Answer, but, once the water boils away, the smell still lingers on the air.

I am stuck with it. And I think it might be fear.

Writing a memoir is very unsettling. Or, at least it was for me. I don't regret having done it, but it hasn't been easy to do. Taking the intimate truth of my humanity and putting it down for others to read takes something like courage, and I am not sure yet if it's a courage that I want. I'm not sure yet if I am ready to be criticized—not just for how I write but for who I am. I am not sure I am ready to read internet reviews that make me feel like all the cinnamon and citrus in the world cannot hide the odor of my truth.

This fear is not unreasonable. The internet can be a bit cruel, don't you think?

In my book, I wrote a chapter about middle school. (Remember middle school?) It is called "Forsaken," and it is about feeling that no place in the world was safe, that everything about me—even my trying to be different and better—was fuel for others to torment me. It is about losing my faith in a world that loved and wanted me. Perhaps it's about losing God. When I was twelve and thirteen, there really was nowhere safe for me to turn to. There was no real respite from the pain. It lingered on me, festering, until I learned how to treat myself with alcohol and drugs and then later with the 12 steps.

This is relevant, because I find that the social media world often feels a great deal like middle school to me.

In dealing with this, I have focused entirely on the notion of courage, on boldness, on shameless truth-telling. I believe in all those things. I truly believe that there is nothing in that memoir I need be ashamed of and that it contains a great many things  to which others will relate. So, I have plunged forward, over what felt like a quietly mounting hysteria, and prepared to give it to the world. I have thought about selling it, about revising it, about making it the best version of me that it can be. I have buckled down and striven to do my best.

It occurs for me only now that this may not be very healthy.

I find that the person who wrote that memoir needs a safe place she can turn. Before she opens herself up to the universe, inviting anyone—no matter their intention—to take a look, she deserves for her feelings to be known. There needs to be a spirituality that can hold her, a circle of friendship that can sustain her, and a real choice to go forward.

She needs permission to turn back.

I find it's easier to empathize with my own needs when I think of myself as a daughter, someone whom I love unconditionally and whose feelings, no matter how large, remain important to me. And if I had a daughter and she was scared and vulnerable and hoping for courage she wasn't sure she had, I'd give her permission. I'd give her space.

So, I am doing that.

I am waiting and I am learning whether I can be with myself, whether I can see all of I have written, and all I think, as the story that is and not as the one true case about life. I am not going to send it out into the world until I can sit with myself in silence and be comfortable with what I find. I think I owe that to myself.

So, thanks for being patient with me. Right now, my work as a writer requires more mediation and less courage, more quiet, and less of my own commentary.

I need to divest myself of my fear-based desire for acceptance and popularity.

I wonder if any of you can relate. I wonder if anyone else is learning to have self-compassion and sit still. If you are, and you are willing to share about it, I'd love to hear from you.

I have other things I want to share with you, but, for now, I will just say: I missed you. Drop by and say hello.

Signing Off for Now

This morning, one of my favorite bloggers posted that she is signing off the internet for 40 days. One of my best friends has been offline for the whole summer. I am choosing to take both of these things as a sign. The internet is wonderful because it is a lot like the library of Alexandria. It is also a lot like the covers of tabloids in the checkout aisle. For me, as a writer, it is driving me nuts right now. There are 100,000 internet tasks I'm told I simply MUST do every day in order to be a writer and they all devolve into clicking on shiny links. I have a chapter I need to finish and I am going to disable my Facebook for a while. I'll leave my email up. Too many seemingly important things happen over email. But I want to have some time to breathe and get away from the idea that there is all this to do and I have to write THIS way and, incidentally, the way I am doing it is all wrong. I will see you all once I feel more sure again of why I really write and what I want from doing that.

I'm signing off for a bit. See you on the other side of the silence.

Drive: some thoughts on anxiety

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Today, the only thing I can find to write about is fear. And I don't want to write about fear.

I am sick of fear. I don't want sympathy. Instead, I want to hear the strike of metal against another person's truth so that the room fills up with the hum of Tibetan bowls. Fear, I've found, tends to elicit something else: a desire to comfort, along with its attendant Hallmark cards and pep talks and "you're-too-hard-on-yourself"s. I have a had time with these acts of kindness. They make me feel...exposed.

But fear it is.

I am scared to death, really, to be a real writer. I was once told (and I think I have said this here before) that if you want to look at what you are committed to, look at what you already have. This is true. I have exactly what I can handle. I want to write and, in the solace of my living room, I want to think that what I have written may be meaningful and good. I want to imagine that I could be successful, am about to be successful.

The list of things I do not want to do associated with being a writer is somewhat longer and it involves any kind of public embarrassment and openness to criticism and rejection, any kind of standing in front of people looking prettied-up and confident, any kind of telling people all about what I can do.

Because—at my core of cores—I don't think I can do anything.

This is what this is really about. Perhaps most of you will not know what I mean, because perhaps most of you are not sexual abuse survivors who are recovering from alcoholism and bulimia* and have spent most of your lives out of the work force raising kids. But—maybe, maybe, some of you, despite not being all the same kinds of messed up, will still know what I mean.

I don't think I can do anything. I am surprised I can cut apples. I am thrilled I can sweep floors. When I applied for my job as an instructional assistant at the local schools six years ago, I was terrified. I had run a daycare, twice, taken child development classes, and had been raised by a mother who worked almost all my life in the schools, but I still didn't really think I could do the job. I couldn't make copies, I thought. I didn't know how to use the die cut machine, I thought. I was sure I would not be picked.

After I expressed all this, my husband looked at me like I had spouted several additional heads.

"You're worried that you're not qualified to be an IA?" he asked. I was.

They hired me anyway.

Now, I tutor and I don't think I can do that either. The parents of my students think I can. I act like I can. And I seem to be able to go through the motions of planning and teaching an individualized lesson for each child, and they seem to learn, and everyone seems to be pleased, but I'm still, on some level, utterly sure that I can't really do the work, or that someone else could do it better than I do.

In my solar plexus—I know.

One of the things I wrote about in my book is that I didn't learn to drive until I was 26. I just felt safer letting other people do it. When I finally learned, I took only a month and I had to learn to do it while having full panic attacks. Once I'd been driving several months, the panic attacks went away (except for when I drive in heavy freeway traffic, or in high winds, or late at night, or on the side of very high cliffs).

I think writing, for me, is a bit like that right now. I have my foot on the gas, but I am tapping the brakes constantly and trying to keep from crying as my adrenalin surges, telling me I need to get off the road RIGHT NOW. And I seem to be off in all directions: updating my LinkedIn profile, trying to get freelance work, researching magazines to submit to, getting help to update my blog and create an author page, ordering books on queries and agents. Trying to figure out what I should do with beta readers. I cannot focus. I just get up and do something every day. Take some action. Drive somewhere. Take notes. Tap brakes. Breathe deeply. Start again.

Before—I was just writing. I know how to write. I do not know how to be a writer.

I did learn to drive, and perhaps I will learn to be a professional writer, too. Perhaps something will yield. Perhaps all this garbage in my head about platforms and business plans and writer's groups and publishing will form itself into something actionable.

Perhaps.

But for right now, again, fear is my teacher. I have the opportunity not to run but to stay and confront it, to put my feet on the pedals. Or to take a break and ask what I am doing and why I am doing it. Or to ask for help. Most of all—to show up and tell the truth. It's all I have: the Truth. It's why I like writing. It's why I am doing this. It's why I am telling you. Not because it's sad (it's not) or because it's interesting (it isn't really). Because it's true.

Not just for me, but in some way, for someone else.

Life was never the same after I learned to drive. Suddenly, I could go where I wanted to, when I wanted to, drive as fast or as slow as I wanted to go. I could choose the grocery store I shopped at. I could drive my kids out to the beach. I was in control of something that before I was just the recipient of.

I don't feel ready, but I'm ready. I'm ready to drive my career. Where, and how, I do not know.

And it may take months  before the panic subsides, during which I will have to take action anyway. That seems to be how it goes. Yes, I've done therapy and yes, I once took anti-depressants for a long time (and I still panicked while driving) and yes, now I meditate virtually every morning. But none of this gets me out of being who I am, which seems to include a certain amount of panic and hysteria to which most people are just not prone.

The other side of this coin is that I kind of like myself: panicky, over-wrought, tense, and complicated. I know that seems impossible, given what I've said, but it isn't. I've spent a year writing my whole life down and I am now intimately acquainted with Me.

I kind of admire her. She has guts.

My youngest son, who has auditory processing disorder, has not yet been able to earn his first belt in Tae Kwon Do. When called to the front to do his forms, he tends to forget them. He tends not to notice he's been called to the front. He tends to be doing the wrong thing. He tries very hard and so he feels bad about all this.

"Listen," I told him one day, "You are working harder than anybody else."

"I am?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said. "Your brain has to work just to hear them calling your name, to hear them call out the count. You have to work harder and it is going to take longer than others to do the same thing because of that. It's not because you're not as good. It's because your job is harder than theirs."

"Oh," he said, relieved. "Ohhhh."

And it's no different with me—with people like me—I suppose. If it takes me fifteen nervous emails to friends and a thousand scatter-shot web searches and thirty mornings of meditation and that many days of feeling like I am crawling out from being crushed under a rock—all to figure out one thing I really need to do next for my writing—then that is what it takes, and it is not because I am not as good. It is because my job is harder than the people who woke up this morning confident in who they are and what they do. It is because I have put in the work of a PhD in order to get an associates**.

I am not less because I struggle. I am more.

So, today, in honor of every woman I know who has stayed up late with flashcards well past when she knew the material for her test, and every teenager who has dressed and primped for a party and then realized at the last minute that she's too ugly to go, and every woman who doesn't even apply for the job because she can't bear to hear the words "You are unqualified." I say:

You did good work today. Carry on, and fight another day. Breathe in, breathe out, foot on pedal, inhale again. Exhale.

Now drive.



* I am grateful to say 20 years of recovery now.
* *This is a metaphor. I don't even have an associate's and I am not dissing anyone who's earned a PhD.

Into the Tidal Zone Part Two: Making Justice

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Welcome to part two of Into the Tidal Zone. Part One can be read here. This is intended for audience participation, so please comment, and comment on comments, and follow comments, and otherwise keep things interesting in a respectful way. This series is intended to explore in a variety of ways those areas of our lives that we might call spiritual, religious, ethical, or whatever name you have for the magma core of who-you-are. I call mine my spirituality. Today I am delving into the issue of obligation to make justice, or change, in the world.

*

At the church of my childhood, there is one religious teaching I remember most: Make justice. This is the thing that got stuck on me.

It was the 1980s and the government of El Salvador was killing its own people (10,000 by 1980). My church was part of the Sanctuary Movement at the time. After long deliberation, the adult members of the church had decided to harbor a family from El Salvador in open defiance of federal law. The family had two children: Marta and Jesus. When they first came to us, we played a game with them and, all the other kids, where our names were drawn out of a hat.

"JEE-SUS?" my friend Karuna whispered, holding a slip of paper in disbelief, before someone corrected her.

Marta was around my age. She was taller than I was and had long dark, wavy hair and a broad-lipped smile. She seemed shy without more English, shy out of her world, but likable and kind. This hiding of people was an important secret that had to be kept, or Marta might be dragged away to blood-covered jungles, I imagined, where, taken by the military, she would be turned into black smoke. Disappeared. One day we went with her and her brother to the county fair, and I was scared the whole time that she would be recognized and dragged away with the cotton candy still sticky and pink in her hands and teeth.

This was how I learned that justice was something that real people needed and real people provided, that it was imperative, and that it included risk.

I wondered why we didn't do more.

"Would you give up your TV if it would save a starving child in Africa?" I asked an adult friend one day, when I was twelve. (All the starving children were in Africa in the 1980s.) She thought about it and answered honestly.

"No."

This drove me crazy about the world. I gave up eating meat when I was seven, but everyone else ate it. If I asked questions about why, they tended to say that they thought it was wrong but that they did it anyhow, which bothered more than the people who said they thought it was all right.

When I was fourteen, my friend and I walked into Macy's and, examining all the make-up, left it with stickers that said "This product tested on animals." When we were caught, the store clerk was kind and gentle and didn't yell at us, but simply asked us to stop. We did. Having walked in as nonviolent protesters, we left as reprimanded kids. We walked on to the food court to order a calzone.

When, at twenty-two,  I was getting ready to have my first baby, I was hearing about the conditions of workers in China in factories. No baby things from China please, I asked everybody.

"Here," said my grandmother, proudly, handing me a stuffed animal for my coming child. "This seal was made in Sri Lanka."

"You're not realistic enough," people told me. "You can't make them stop."

"I know," I told him. "I think I'm still supposed to try."

There were no diaper bags that weren't from China. At least not in our price range. So we bought a Chinese one anyway. Would you give up your TV? Maybe I wouldn't... Maybe not...

Having been presented with no more refugees to be friends with since middle school, my heart ached for something meaningful to do. How do you make justice? I wondered. Does it always mean making someone mad? The kind of justice I was trying to practice seemed to involve $5 cookies from Whole Foods, made locally with all-natural dyes. It seemed to make shopping harder, make life harder and bring no obvious reward. Thinking in terms of justice, without getting next to injustice, was like walking around barefoot on hot and rocky ground.

*

Today, I look at the world and ask myself the very same thing.

Today, I buy ethically-questionable meat along with ethically-questionable rice and sometimes the only thing I can be sure of are the bunches of lettuce from my yard. I sob inwardly at the mountains of fire and the young firefighters killed and think, Surely, we could do better than this. Surely I could do more to prevent the climate change of the world! I become exhausted by the need for action and justice-making and do nothing, too often, when something would be the thing to do.

But still I am moved by the need for justice. I let my heart be engaged. I watch the films posted of children who, having grown up in America, then face deportation because they cannot get the right paperwork*. I wonder if Marta ever became a citizen. Did she go back to El Salvador? Or was she deported, after learning to love cotton candy, and learning to speak easy English, and calling this nation her home? I wonder.

I carve out small spaces and do what I can: I give up paper towels, plant a garden and learn to grow food in a way that does not make war with the earth. I eat eggs from chickens that I keep and tend myself. I strive to teach and love and honor each child that I am given to teach and love—mine or someone's else's—in a way that makes both of us larger than we were. We make small donations. and read and try to stay awake.

It does not seem enough.

When my teenage son came back from Mexico this April, where with his own hands, he built houses for those living in dirt-covered shacks, I saw the face of justice-making: he was exhausted, nauseated, dirty and, getting in the van, he told me:

"I want to go home and take a shower and eat real food and go back to Mexico again."

*

How were you raised to understand justice and action to the change the world? Was this part of your religious upbringing?

Has this understanding changed?

What have you lost? What have you gained?



*You should really try and find time to watch this moving film. Gather tissues first.

Not Today.

My mountain, back in 2011, after we came home, as we watched it instead of Fourth of July fireworks.

Two years ago today, I was at a hotel in Albuquerque, spending down all our emergency savings while evacuated from a wildfire threatening my town. Back home, ashes fell, smoke choked the air, and, hopefully, my ducks were still alive. Mike drove back and forth from Los Alamos to work for the county, we went to the pool, we watched the news, which said nothing useful, and stared at Facebook, which had up-to-the-minute updates on what was really happening. Friends, having evacuated as far away as Colorado or Oklahoma all connected online to find out about each other's well-being. I missed my underwear back home.

Photos were released of the fire. It was gorgeous, in the way that Balrogs are gorgeous: beautifully rendered power, indomitable. In the midst of the plumes and walls of flame and the mushrooms of smoke walked firefighters—hotshots—running straight into what we had packed up and fled like so many cockroaches fleeing the scene of a fumigation. They were sooty and sweaty and they looked absolutely like gods. No one could have been more potent, more heroic, more good.

On July 3rd, we got to go home. They saved our town.

Today, I woke up and found out that 19 hotshots had died in a single devastating fire. 19 heroes snuffed out all at once. I felt sick. On the nearby main thoroughfare, cars and trucks drove by all morning, and all morning they have sounded just like skycrane helicopters: big, orange birds dropping retardant on the flames. I keep checking and they're still just cars. But, inside again, I'm sure I hear the helicopters once more.

I held my breath and Googled "Granite Mountain Hotshots" and "Las Conchas Wildfire" and—yes, they are the same ones. The same ones that saved my home, my town, my ducks, my garden, my patio, my savings, my memories. The very same team, among others, that did that. I can't bear it. I can't bear the incessant drought and the endless wildfires and the loss of homes and now the deaths and the slow-turning consideration that perhaps we should address global warming and perhaps we should fund our forest management and perhaps we need to understand nature better. It's not soon enough. Not today.

Not today.

The Lustful Lettuces of June

Once, when I was a dewy-eyed twenty-three year-old I told my friend Amy that I wanted to live on a homestead with a geodesic dome and several goats.

She snorted at me. It was very rude. (I'm not sure why I was—and am, after almost fifteen years—still friends with her.)*

"What?" I demanded. She said something about fantasizing. I was deeply offended and drew myself up to accommodate the large stick now materializing in my rear end. "How do you know this isn't my life's purpose—my POSSIBILITY?" I asked her.

"Because," she told me calmly, "it doesn't make you happy when you talk about it. It makes you flustered—and annoyed that you don't have goats."

That seemed to put the conversation to rest.

I still don't have any goats and, given the state of my back yard after years with only a dog in it, I think goats may be out of the question. That said, I have gone on to have ducks and then chickens and to  put in one garden after another at my house (completely without geodesic domes).

So, perhaps we were both right, in a way.

It is nearly July now, and it is hot. It has been in the nineties the last few days. I planted quite a lot of lettuces this March and we have been eating them since May. Every time I harvest a small head here or several leaves there, another lettuce merely stretches out and yawns, relieved to have been given the extra space. I can't get rid of them. They appear to be multiplying. Every night the menu is something and salad. We have to eat this lettuce, I tell everyone. I can't stand waste.

"Yum," I say.

So, now the lettuce is thinking to itself, "Ahhh, it's hot." It is starting to feel sort of sweaty and sexy and wanting to reproduce. The lettuces now go shooting up seed stalks with pretty little flower crowns atop their heads. Some of them can do this, fine, and I will harvest the resulting seed. But a whole half-bed of lettuces in flower, too bitter to eat, I do not need. So, we are gifting lettuces not yet bolted to our friends.

"Here, have a lettuce! Take two! Have a ladybug with that!"

We are pulling things up willy-nilly and calling this Bacchanalian scene of lettuce lust a wrap. And thinning carrots. Because, for some reason, I haven't done this yet. I am pulling up itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny onions crowding in on the great big beauties and preparing, perhaps, to make onion frittatas for little elves. My littlest son is with me, goggling over purple carrots, sticking his little brown fingers deep into the soil to feel around the tops of tap roots and pulling others out. He is holding lettuces like bridal bouquets and feeding some of the sun-starved leaves to chickens, who are begging for scraps like a horde of gypsy children rushing tourists in a square. We are nibbling sugar snap peas as we work. And, of course, he is shirtless and wearing his pirate costume pants inside out. Which is exactly as it should be.

So, things are perfect. Although, I think you will agree that the situation could be improved by a few goats.

*unless it's because she's been the sort of friend that coached me through two births, one divorce (not in that order) and makes an hour to talk to me anytime I need to talk to someone who will "get it" and know that she is the only one.

New Series: Into the Tidal Zone

Photo Credit: Morguefile  

What I call the tidal zone is the transforming edge of human experience, that place that is neither sea nor is it shore. It is a place apart from the ordinary concerns of daily life but close enough to them that are not fully lost to the ineffable greatness of the sea. In the tidal zone, sometimes things are clear and beautiful; sometimes they are murky and scary and dark. The world there teems with beauty and it all lives on the knife's edge between birth and death.

The tidal zone is the spiritual world: the world of longing, prayer and wonderment; the world of finding, grace, and bliss. 

It doesn't matter, really, if you think you are religious. Life will take you down to the shore. The questions and answers you find there will shape you and make you who you are. We all come out different from one another —some of us more different than we'd like.

I wrote a whole book about my life in the tidal zone. And I'd like to start exploring some of these ideas here. I want to start with a spiritual experience—mine or someone else's—and open up a conversation about it to see if we can find the common places and the places where we find different answers, take different paths from one another, and why.

*

Witness

It is Sunday and I am in a black church somewhere in my county because my daddy has been singing with his gospel choir. The pews are long and wooden and old, and I am shifting in them; feeling white and blonde and not Christian, feeling curious, feeling pale. I am small and I am an audience. I am a visitor. I am blue and cream and pale. All around me is coffee-colored skin and deep emotion and conviction: souls uplifted, assenting "Mmmmmm-hmmmmm. Yesssss." I am quiet. I know the words to the songs by heart and I know they are not real. Daddy sings "Just like Jeremiah..." I don't know who Jeremiah is, but I know how to sing. The Lighthouse Singers clap and stamp and move their feet; I want to get up and burst into thankful song with them. 

In a bit, there is more church service. This is quite unlike my church. In my church we stand and sing "We Are a Gentle, Angry People" and, afterwards,  there is a fish shredded into salad, at the buffet, and molded back again into the shape of a fish. It has olives for its eyes. Before the fish, before leaving, before Sunday school, we light a chalice and we quietly reflect. My feet have to be still. I have to think. I like my church. But the singing is better here.

Up in the front of the room is an old black woman with a trim church jacket: pink, and a hat on which perches a coiled fabric rose. Music swells and testimony rises to the low rafters and back down to where I sit. She is asking the congregation, "Will you look for Jesus?" People stand up and say loudly, surely, that they will. As a man stands up right near me, I feel whiter and stranger and less Christian than I ever have before. I feel hungry. And, as each person stands and says that they will accept Jesus, that they will listen for Jesus, will look for Jesus, I find that I am doing that, too. I am scanning the room right now for Jesus, hoping he will come in the side door. I am waiting for something blazing to happen, for some miracle to occur. I want Jesus to happen to me. I want to be invited and I want in. I want it to be real. The gospel song goes:

Jesus is real, I know the Lord is real to me. 

Jesus is real, I know the Lord is real to me. 

(Sometimes when I'm feeling low,) (no where to go,) 

(Jesus comes along) (and He makes me strong.) 

For I know, oh, Jesus is real.*

So I stand up. And this black woman is looking at me, this woman as smooth as dark molasses with a voice like the rumbling of a deep-bellied purr. She looks at me, with seriousness and affection, and she asks me,"Will you look for Jesus, child?" 

"I will," I tell her. And I sit back down, feeling so much better than I did before. 

Later, in the car, my dad, who is not Christian either but loves to sing, doesn't seem perturbed. His choir full of white people—Jewish, Buddhist, hippie, Christian, Nothing—sing gospel music. They sing about Jesus, who is real, and now—so do I.

*

Here's your question: What was a time when you can remember being exposed to the faith practices of other people in a way that actually got inside you, and in some way, and changed your feelings about life? 

What made this experience different from all the times you saw people believing differently and were not changed?

Are you still informed by this experience?

Your soundtrack: Jesus is Real by John P. Kee

Author's Notes: The memory I've included here is a bit of a collage of experiences I had. I found that I had a very clear memory of the woman speaking but not of her exact words or the circumstances of the day, so I filled in with what I could remember, in general, of sitting and watching gospel and how that felt to me.

If you want to read more about my experience of religion, or religious history read this.

*Song by John P. Kee.

Moving Violations: a review

To buy Moving Violations at Amazon click here.

I can't stand book reviews.

Here's why: reading reviews in a serious manner is like asking a group of kindergarteners what their favorite color is, and on that basis, choosing how to dye your hair. I also find that highly opinionated reviews drift frequently into the absurd. Kurt Vonnegut put this best: "Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."

My favorite writers at the moment are David Sedaris (who is "boring, not very funny, mean and bitchy, and too lazy to write a novel"), Anne Lamott (of whom it is said: "reading about someone else's needless suffering is about as attractive as watching it in person"), and Glennon Melton, who inspired the following sentiment: "After reading her book, I think I'd go batty if I were in her company for more than half an hour." For me, these writers are best friends that exist in 2D form. For others, obviously they represent something altogether different—perhaps small pox, or crab lice.

For this reason, I feel that I would generally rather not add my voice to the general din. Who, honestly, cares what I think about other people's books?

Nevertheless, I'm going to do just this. Why? Nicole Amsler. I met her at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Conference last April when I went. She was in every way pleasant, congenial, well-mannered, good-smelling, and friendly. I consider her a friend. She has written a book and this book is now in print and—what's more—it is really good.

I want to tell you about it.

Her book, Moving Violations, is a collection of short stories concerned with themes of transportation and death. There are nine of these in all. The book, at 89 pages, is slim enough to hide under a pillow so that young children cannot find it. (This is probably a good idea, by the way. There are some themes of sexual abuse and grief which would not necessarily make good read-aloud material.)

The stories showcase Amsler's considerable range as a scribe of the human experience. A self-described writer of "Midwestern dysfunction," her characters are, in each story, put through their moral paces and asked to redeem themselves. It's as if we, as readers, are Peter at the gates of Heaven and the protagonists, in turn, show up, are summarily stripped of the trappings of their egos and are made to justify their actions on this earth. Make no mistake: this is not an insipid, predictable touched-by-an-angel motif. Each studio-sized plot is well-wrought and believable, if fantastic in being a worst-case-scenario.

We first meet a grieving widower as he confronts the loss of the wife he lost to breast cancer; he is giving away her belongings at a garage sale put together by his insensitive daughter, who just wants him to move on. Amsler artfully manages to convey strength, anger, grief, attachment, and compassion in her believable dialogue. Immediately, I was hooked and wanted more. I consumed the book more or less whole, like a small carton of sorbet that was supposed to last the week.

My favorite of her nine stories is "Burnt Offerings." For a parent, reading it is somewhat like watching a cat kill small robins in the nest. And yet it's compelling. The character, Cole, is a jerk; horrible, contemptible; he thinks of a sweet little girl on the airplane as "Mongloid," is unable to see or really understand the heart of his own son. But—boom!—life punishes him in such a way that you can't help but want to hold him, to soothe him and tell him it's OK. Amsler keeps us with him, through the moment of loss and disaster, and well after—through brutal pain, humanization. She expertly paints every single tiny detail in the landscape of misery and redemption so that, in the locus of horror, we see how he learns how to love.

Each of the six other stories—whether that of a sorority sister going through airport security in a red negligée; or of a girl taken out for driving lessons (and worse) in a family hearse; or of the first responder at the sight of an airplane crash who meets a victim with the same name as his late wife—is a complete meal in itself, one that, like me, you'll probably eat too fast.

Moving Violations is fabulously dark but ultimately hopeful. The characters are genuine, the plots believable. Amsler has done her job here in crafting plots and characters. All this sin and redemption, death, and moving from one place to one another are somehow about all of us: We are magnified and cast in shadow, driven off roads and set on fire, blinded, haunted, and bursting with momentary glory—before we flash finally off the page.

Note: I was not compensated in any way for this review.

I wrote a book.

I have written the ending to my book. Or, rather, I have written it again. I have now revised each chapter 20-40 times, until the language, sentiment and plot of as interesting to me as watching Koyaanisqatsi without the aid of any hallucinogenic drugs. It is too long. Far too long. And I wonder what parts of my life I will ultimately deem "unnecessary to the plot." This is the story of my life so far—a memoir—because certainly what the world needs most is more memoirs, you will agree. I can do nothing but give the world what it needs. I am called to serve.

I have passed through the predictable stages of writer's schizophrenia which have first caused me to suffer from the belief that what I have here is a work of shocking genius ready to be set on the shelf next to my favorites: Lamott, Sedaris, and Melton; to take its place in the canon of literature which, in a bold, new way, illumines the human soul. "A victory," the review will say. Next, I have realized that what I have here is the carcass of a toad: stinking, in a state of ego-fueled, narcissistic decomposition, an embarrassment to everyone around. Then, I have thought: "Meh."

But—here's the thing: I have finished something. Until my eldest child reaches the age at which he can be, at least legally, said to be adult enough to leave my home, I have otherwise finished nothing of length or import. I have dropped out, left early and quit everything without fulfilling on what some especially kind people have called "my potential." Now, you see, I have finished a book. Out of respect for those of you with more sensitive natures than mine, I will be polite and refrain from calling it what I truthfully meant to call it, which was a mo$#erf&&king book.

I finished a book!

Sort of.

It is, as I have said, too long. And I want to run it by what they call BETA readers, which are the people who will read my manuscript and tell me exactly and specifically in which way they think it sucks. I did this once and was promised a copy of the book when published. As a volunteer gig, it was kind of fun; like eating pizza and saying "Push!" at someone else's birth.

After the BETA reading bit, I have to try and convince someone at a publishing house, who has sold his soul to Satan in exchange for a red pen, that this is something someone would want to buy. I am not, to say the least, looking forward to this. My relationship to promoting myself is similar to Ted Kaczynski's. I like to deliver my words in plain-looking packages and separate letters explaining what I am about. I hope these will have an impact on the world, but I like to maintain my privacy. The thought of a book proposal makes me physically ill.

Besides, I'm not sure anyone would want to buy it. Why would they, when they could spend their money on thneeds?

Privacy is a concern. It is all good and well when you are sitting at home writing your innermost thoughts onto Microsoft Word, but it is not so well when you imagine several thousand someones reading them. And the criticism! "The author cannot seem to make up her mind about who she is," I imagine that they'll say. "Profoundly full of herself." "Pretending to be wise." I can only imagine that I will have to plead guilty as charged.

Of course, more likely, I will simply receive a form letter: "Game Over. Thank You For Playing."

At any rate, like all achievements, the book was more fun when it wasn't done than it is now.

That said, I am doing this anyway. Because—

I wrote a mo$#erf&&king book.

My Father

When I was a little girl, my father drove an old white Plymouth Duster, and he used to let me climb in through the window like I was one of the Dukes of Hazzard, getting in by way of my grubby sandals on his seat. When he came to pick me up from my mom's house on weekends, I would run out to the old, familiar car and get in, with a great joy suddenly inside me—a joy made of the musty, closed-in, old smell of his car, with its floorboards full of magazines that shifted under my feet, and the not-yet-known location we might go to eat our lunch, and the possibility of adult attention that I could have entirely to myself.

At my dad's apartment, when he first had an apartment away from us, I would sit behind his kitchen counter and he let me order my snack from him. What I always ordered was Marie cookies a glass of Like cola. He was prepared for this and produced them right away. I ate the sweet biscuits and drank the soda and then we walked across the way to where there was oak forest and supernatural creatures could be found. I was seven at the time. I talked about the Carrion Crow and her minions and my dad listened with interest, and hummed. Always, he whistled and hummed. I drew pictures of the planet I said I had come from and my dad looked at them, asked questions, and approved. I made up songs and my dad recorded them, set them to a drum machine, and played them back for both of us. I wrote up small performances and cast him in roles which he performed as I told him to.

"Pretend that I'm a mermaid," I told him.

And he did.

Dad didn't sign me up for music lessons that I hadn't asked for. He didn't give me unasked-for books on how to draw or how to write. He didn't correct my spelling or my choice of words. He just provided an interested audience and let my encouraged creativity work out the rest. As a result, I was a writer and an actress and a singer, an artist and a playwright. I needed no one's permission, having been given the impression that my own permission was enough.

When I was a teenager, I moved in with Dad and that was when he taught me how to cook. Carefully, he'd walk through one meal or the other, explaining how to mince garlic and how to make a roux, how to slowly add liquid, how to thicken a too-thin sauce. Once, for his birthday, I tried to make Mushu Vegetables with homemade pancakes and the pancakes were revoltingly lumpy and thick, inedible. Dad wasn't disappointed. He never seemed to be expecting anything. He was pleased that I had tried.

When, at 22, I was in the hospital giving birth to my first baby, Dad called us on the phone.

"I wonder if there's going to be heavy traffic heading up that way," he said.

We told him it would be a little while, that he should wait.

Later, he called again.

"It's getting close to rush hour," he pointed out.

Still not having the baby, we said.

The phone rang again.

"I'm on my way," he said.

He arrived just after Rowan came into the world, like a tiny, angry wizened grape, and was lifted off by scrub-clad cherubim to the Intensive Care Nursery away from me.

"Do you want me to order Thai food?" Dad asked.

We said yes.

Dad is a dream-tender. Last summer, when my youngest, Mikalh, came upon a street musician in the Boston Commons who handed him a small violin to try, he decided to become a violinist. I called my dad.

"Can you pay for lessons?" I asked.

"Yes!" he said, enthusiastically.

When my middle child, Devin, wanted to go to an expensive sleep-away music camp in the mountains this summer to study his tuba, he called Grandpa Rick.

"We're trying to raise 200 more dollars," Devin said. "Just give what you can."

Dad sent all of it.

Dad reads my blog and he tells me, when we talk on the phone, how much he enjoys what I am writing. I tell him how much I have to learn as a writer and he tells me, "Don't sell yourself short."

My dad, knows something about creativity because he, himself, is an accomplished musician. He has studied Indian music and Jazz and learned to play six instruments. Now, his favorite instrument is his voice.

Thanks, Dad, for 38 years of encouragement. Happy Father's Day to you.

All the God We Cannot See

Photo Credit: Morguefile by imelenchon

On the subject of religion, words mostly fail to join us in understanding; these words we speak that begin with "I believe."

I don't feel you. I don't get it. I can't make head nor tail of what you say.

And soon everyone gets angry or gets their feelings hurt—most especially the ones who think they really know.

I'm tired of this surety.

Aggressive atheism is like gathering up all the poetry books and burning them because you can't understand the metaphors.

Hard-nosed religiosity is like insisting on the singular, provable existence of only vanilla ice cream; it's like spitting on every other flavor in the freezer bin, threatening them all with a fiery, melty, imaginary doom.

This is how we fail to know each other.

Watch carefully. It's happening all over again. We fail to understand.

It's not that this overly made-up woman with the cross around her neck has never sat in the dark of a tornado cellar and asked herself whether God was in the wind. It's not, as we've thought, that she is feckless, stupid; unable to plumb the depths. It's that she's thought about this already and she knows that God is not in the wind but in the firemen who came for her, in the embrace of her neighbor, in the moment when her dog was found alive underneath the rubble of her whole world, and she felt gratitude.

She knows graces when she sees it. Do we?

It's not that this stuffy man is a fundamentalist, a naysayer, a bigot when he says no thank you to the idea of God. He is a seeker of wisdom, a kind of monk of the secular world. He is the one who will not enter the door of the temple while the beggars still have to stand outside. We think he's an ass, but he values reason, because he knows how easily we are swayed by the idolatry of passing thoughts. Even in great turmoil, he sets aside easy comfort and holds the line; he waits for evidence.

He knows courage when he's called to it. Do we?

It's not that this woman is trying to be difficult, even if she's furry, bra-less, and wears a pentacle around her neck. She is the sister of all things living; she is the spirit of the wild. It's not like we thought: that she believes in a Goddess sitting astride the Heavens; a superhuman hippie queen who rules the world. It's that she has learned, with practice, to see the divinity in every single rock, lichen, and ant that she observes. She calls this "Goddess." She closes her eyes to chant and everything alive is joined with her.

She knows beauty when she sees it. Do we?

We don't.

We cannot have the sacredness of Nature, the compassion of a loving God. We cannot have the peace of the dharma. We cannot have the courage to live without succumbing to short-cuts, to easy explanations of the unknowable world.

We cannot have these things. Not at the same time.

All the time, day after day, prayers are being prayed that will never leave our lips. Moments of transcendence are visited on the weary, on the sick. Faith is being shattered, threatened, changed, and born in the hearts of people we will never know.

Every day this happens. Spiritual lives are lit up like great torches or snuffed out; souls are trembling in the storm.

And still we think, in some small way, that we know God, or know what God is not.

We think we know this, without the inconvenience of praying five times a day or of keeping the Sabbath, or of daily meditation, and without cultivating the discipline of groundlessness. We know, we think, without the disciplined intention of spellcraft, or the utter trust required to sit, breathing stifled, and pray through a sweat lodge.

We don't really want to know. I don't. Because if we sat in the sweat lodge and let the smoke fill up our lungs, if we gave ourselves up to the practice of the yogas, if we fell to our knees and prayed to Jesus Christ to save us, and meant this with the truth of our entire hearts—we would be changed from what we are.

We would no longer know ourselves. Because we would have gone to a place where we were quite sure there was no God and found that God was there. Even in the abnegation of God's existence, we would recognize the beating heart of awe, of faith, of devotion to humanity and the world.

We would find that God is the same in all moments of rapture,

—and that we never ever knew what anyone else meant when they uttered the word: God.

We do not do this. And we cannot do this. We simply cannot live inside the skin of another person's soul.

But I wonder if we might just ask ourselves how much truth we are missing, all the God we cannot see; I wonder if we can ponder how much wealth is always concealed from us by our own  inevitably narrow human minds.

And so it is that I think that some of us might instead place faith where we have prior substituted small truths.

Faith is better; it lasts longer. Feet sunk deep in the unknowable, arms reaching for the trust we need to live our lives; faith is indeed precious, wise.

Aggressive truth, by contrast, is destructive, and, what's more—it's never true.

The truth is unknowable, unfathomable. The ineffable, refracted light of the sacred filters through us and shines its indescribable colors, gorgeous to our eyes.

Perhaps to have faith is to look each time at that light, as it passes through another, as it passes through our egos, landing splendid on the world;

and each time find something in it that is holy, that is new.


“Faith is believing that the outcome will be what it should be, no matter what it is.”
~Colette Baron-Reid