Temple Cats
Americans are obsessed with the notion of control. The control is just an illusion.
---Lee Barnes, writer
Bean, the 10-month old gray tabby, is possessed to leap up on the old dresser that serves as the center for my faith in what little I know of Tibetan Buddhism; and all I am learning about the nature of impermanence---a knowledge both unwelcome and irresistible. The dresser top is more accurately an altar - a flat-topped block used as the focus for a religious ritual, esp. for making sacrifices or offerings to a deity.
There is no demanding god here. There is no religion. There is only the sacrifice of most of what I once believed was permanent. There are offerings, not to be consumed in flame or carried away on a river, but objects and images to remind me of what matters. Each reminder has its own place, its own proximity to another.
There is a book of Tibetan photos and words. Behind it, a picture leans against the mirror: two Chinese soldiers walk away from the body of Kelsan Namtso, the Tibetan Buddhist nun that have just murdered. She lies in the snow. The only color in the picture is her saffron robe. All is else is the snow, gray boulders and the black figures of the soldiers.
There is a postcard of Tibetan Buddhist monks singing. A Black Hat dancer wears a ceremonial apron embroidered with the terrible and gracious visage of Mahakala, the deity who eats that which is in the way of joy---if you regard joy as knowing you will most certainly die and, therefore, this moment is the best in your life.
Two books of collaborative art and poetry (made by poet Gail Wade, his students and me) lie on top of a photo of the black and white crippled cat Stretch. He is not the only ghost cat on the dresser. There are tatters of brindle fur that once belonged to my good cat Harold. Rumi, my a 12-step book, the Witches’ Almanac, and my journal lie in front of the collaborations. Beneath them is the 1948 edition of the Classics Illustrated Arabian Nights, the comic book that opened my way out of dark cave after cave after cave; below lie more photos of my beloved dead.
A gray pyramidal rock with a black dot in one side, and a Northwest Raven medallion hold the Tibetan book open. Today’s reading from Sogyal Rinpoche: Why, if we are as pragmatic as we claim, don’t we begin to ask ourseles seriously: where does our real future lie?
There is more on the dresser: a baby spoon engraved with Mary, a broken heart-shaped dish my mom gave me, a lace agate shaped exactly like a woman’s yoni , a tape of chanting by the Gaden Shatse monks, a photo of beloved Harold (who was eaten by a coyote eight months ago). There is the wristwatch that stopped on 9/11/01. There is the grooved rock in which I put a chunk of cookie for Mahakala when I ask his help in ripping out my hard heart.
Mr. Toad from Wind in the Willows sits on top of the mirror. He wears a red-striped frock coat, blue pants and a blue bow tie. My velvet prayer beads bag hangs below him. It contains the string of twenty bone beads on which I count my morning prayers: for the furthering of all sentient beings and the protection of earth, air and water.
I murmur the prayer as Bean mounts his ninth assault on the dresser. He tries to capture Toad. I go toward the dresser. Bean leaps off. As soon as I settle back to my prayers, he leaps in my lap and grabs the beads.
We both hang on. In that instant, I imagine a temple altar. The monks or priestesses or rabbis or imams responsible for the altar believe that in order for the Holy to be present, the sacred objects must be placed and aligned with precision. The work of tidying and arranging the altar has just been finished. All is ready.
A mouse races across the shining tiles of the temple floor. One of the temple cats is within paw’s reach. The mouse scurries up on the altar. The cat follows.
********
What Falls Into the Absences
---for M.
The only sure antidote to oblivion is the creation. So I loop my sentences around the trunks of maples, hook them into the parched soil, anchor them to rock, to moon and stars, wrap them tenderly around the ankles of those I love. From down in the pit, I give a tug, to make sure my rope of words is hooked onto the world, and then up I climb.
--- Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put
The Invisible guitar
Fullerton train station
guy playing guitar
with right hand
withered left hand
from very visible was
playing to a
chair covered seat
and a bench
covered blanket
Invisible audiences
listening to a distant
guitar...
6/1/02
had been written on the back of a Vanity Fair subscription card tucked into a copy of Delicate, a collection of short stories I wrote in the early Nineties.
Delicate was inscribed:
Rosie
I “met” this
woman thru NPR radio
She writes about real
women on real journeys.
Enjoy - Janet
2001
There was also a 3X5 file card in the pages. On it was written todolopuedo.ina.nel Password EBIZ I googled todolopuedo.ina.nel It does not exist.
A few days later, I walk east across the desert. The setting sun dusts the creosote with gold. Shadows are gray, then purple, then indigo. A jack-rabbit startles out of a tangle of downed Joshua branches. I follow my footprints from the day before. They carry me past the white couch that is settling back into the earth and the backless shelves my son and I left next to the couch. Each day I put something on the second shelf that I am ready to lose. Once it was how I scare myself, another time it was imagining I have a damaged brain---there is a theme here.
My footprints disappear from the road and curve through more creosote and Joshuas and groves of yucca. I follow. I stop at a yucca which has split into three equal sections. I press my hands against each section, then link the broken pieces with my splayed fingers. I have no idea why I do this. It just seems right.
I reach the old Joshua Buddha just as the light goes rose-gold. I bend down to the stump that is also the form of a seated Buddha. I lean my head against it and I say, “I’m back.” I touch the tiny white spine tucked into the bark of the fallen trunk and sit next to the delicate bones. I plant my feet in the sand. There are dark mountain ranges in the northeast and perhaps a mile away, the county land-fill.
Gate gate paragate. Gone gone gone to the other side
I remember my most recent talk with M. We spoke of aging. We spoke of loss. We spoke of what has fallen away---and what hasn’t. I told him that I no longer was able to destroy myself. I told him I came to that inability not by my own choice.
“I don’t know why I had to give up what I loved so much,” I said to M. “There are layers and layers of emptiness in me now . It’s not time to fill them...if they can ever be filled.”
The sand is no longer pale gold. The shadows fade. I drink what’s left of the water in my bottle, touch the Joshua Buddha stump and head home.
I’m a few minutes away from the light that burns outside my cabin door when I see a sheet of paper caught in a clump of dried grass. There is writing on it. I pick it up and carry it home.
I wait till after dinner to read it. The words are carefully printed in a child’s hand on lined paper.
12/11/07
Dear Isaaih,
I hope you have a merry christmas and may all your wishes come true. Thank you for playing games with me.
When we play monopoly we have fun. Monopoly is one of favorite game. Hve you ever played monopoly video game. It’s fun, isn’t it.
When I grow up I will keep you in my hart. When both of us grown up we can both hang out.
Love, Angela
********
A Murder
When you pass through the fire
you pass through humble
You pass through a maze of self doubt
When you pass through humble
the lights can blind you
Some people never figure that out
You pass through arrogance you pass through hurt
You pass through an ever present past
and it's best not to wait for luck to save you
Pass through the fire to the light...
---Lou Reed
Magic and Loss
Rain for three days. Heart-shredder wind. This morning dawn is soft and clear. A winged shadow moves up the tangle of Joshua branches. A raven follows. The bird drops to the top branch. She, he, it, shakes out a wing. The breast feathers ruffle in what is left of the banshee wind.
Dawn reflects off the shining black beak---or a crumb of corn chip from the handful I scattered last night for the resdent coyote. More ravens soar and dive above the dirt road to the west. One, two, a dozen, a murder of them.
The raven at the top of the Joshua Tree watches, lifts and takes off. The shadow follows and is gone.
In the last week, I have found myself beginning to drift from the path I have been making. Imagine you could step by step move to the side of a trail of your own footsteps, a trail that is not easy, but a trail that carries you in and out of beauty, in and out of fear, in and out of wonder. Imagine that you imagine something glowing a little off the trail, something that you know might draw you toward damage, not of the material, but of the spirit. Imagine that you imagine that the damage might be worth standing in the glow...and maybe this time that sweet light would never fade. Imagine you take one step in that direction, then another.
As you pass through the fire
your right hand waving
there are things you have to throw out
That caustic dread inside your head
will never help you out
You have to be very strong
' cause you'll start from zero
over and over again
And as the smoke clears
there's an all consuming fire
lying straight ahead...
I called trusted friends. “It’s happening again. He is so like the one before. Where did he come from? I didn’t ask for this.” I wanted to be amazed. I wanted to be better than the rules. I wanted to believe that Something that most resembles a huge raven or a desert twilight or the bark of a dead Joshua Tree has given me a second chance at Big Love.
My friends reminded me that in one crucial area, “he” is so like the one before---he is not free. I wanted to smack my trusted friends. I wanted to smack my own trusted knowledge.
They say no one person can do it all
but you want to in your head
But you can't be Shakespeare
and you can’t be Joyce
so what is left instead
You're stuck with yourself
and a rage that can hurt you
You have to start at the beginning again
And just this moment
This wonderful fire started up again
I ran my sales pitch. “But, he is this and this and this...and I felt as though we had known each other for centuries and he feels the same way and and and...” My most long-time friend listened. “Yeah,” he said. “It is such a good drug.”
I didn’t smack him. I felt how stale my words were. There was something about my long-time friend’s perfect responses and how we laughed that pulled the pin on the potentially rhinestone-encrusted (little Zappa there)grenade.
I slept with nothing but the banshee wind. When I woke, I was grateful for my long-time friend. We had always referred to our drugs as toys. One time, one of us had lost a bundle on the slots. “The toy is broken,” we said. This morning I wrote him: “I/you can always try to fix the toy or get another one. But when the toyness goes out of the toy and I know that another toy might be fun the first time I play with it, even the second or third time, but ultimately the toyness will go out of the new toy---then, the gig is up.”
When you pass through humble
when you pass through sickly
When you pass through
I'm better than you all
When you pass through
anger and self deprecation
and have the strength to acknowledge it all
When the past makes you laugh
and you can savor the magic
that let you survive your own war
You find that that fire is passion
and there's a door up ahead not a wall...
I wrote my friend: I feel grouchy and gray this morning. I read the newspaper. The comics and the pop horoscopes. The important stuff. One of my horoscopes says: ‘Knowing when you have had enough might be important. Think carefully about a decision that could impact your daily life. What you feel could possibly be wrong. Give yourself the gift of time.’
And a second horoscope: ‘Your artistic mind is keen, your creativity set to fire off at any moment. You are in the right place with the right tools to enable you to capture the kind of fleeting moment that you wish could last forever.’
And I had already had---before I read the horoscopes and wrote you---a fleeting moment I wished could last forever Here it is:
A Murder
Rain for three days. Heart-shredder wind. The early sun this morning is soft and clear. A shadow moves up the tangle of Joshua branches. A raven follows...
As you pass through fire as you pass through fire
try to remember its name
When you pass through fire licking at your lips
you cannot remain the same
And if the building' s burning
move towards that door
but don't put the flames out
There's a bit of magic in everything
and then some loss to even things out.
********
Lightning Glass
I began to see that, when it comes right down to it, we are nothing until that nothing becomes so dedicated that it is like a vessel through which good things can move, an instrument for receiving knowledge and sharing it with others who might be in need.
---Bear Heart, with Molly Larkin
Bear Heart
Eighteen years ago, three trucks drove up the dirt snake of the Moqui Dugway. The road rises 1100 feet on a 10% grade. The ascent can take your breath.
The first time I had driven it alone. It was 1982, I was forty-two and it was the first time I had spent longer than three days alone. A new friend had given me directions. You approach from the south and drive across flat desert toward what seems to be an impenetrable cliff face. Keep going. I followed his instructions. Suddenly the road curved east and I had no choice but to go up hair-pin turns, cliff-face on one side, drop-offs on the other. I remember keeping my foot steady on the accelerator of the rental car and thinking, “If I can do this, I can learn to do anything.”
Eight years later I was passenger in the lead truck. I was not alone. We were perhaps a dozen women and men and we were friends, lovers and strangers. Our trucks were loaded with river gear. We were headed for a trip on the San Juan River.
We topped out and headed West. As abruptly as any human change of heart, thunderheads moved in. There was no rain. The man I now think of as Dead Bill---no longer with rancor, but with affection---drove. I sat in the passenger seat and opened his beers for him.
Lightning slammed down into the pinon-juniper a few miles ahead of us. A thread of smoke rose. By the time we came to the strike, there were no flames. Only smoke rose from the little juniper. Some of us jumped out of our trucks, walked to the juniper and began to pile sand around its charred base. We waited till there seemed to be no more smoke. A soft rain – the Dine call it Female Rain began to fall. We climbed back in the trucks and went on.
It would be years before I would learn that sometimes a lightning strike in the desert makes glass. By the time I looked into a desert museum display case, saw a non-descript chunk of jagged glass labeled fulgurite and found it far more beautiful than the slab of emerald and cream malachite to its right and the wine-red chunk of garnet to its left, I was no longer the woman who had piled sand around the base of a smoking juniper. Had that woman known that there was lightning glass, she would not have asked the group to wait while she searched the ground for a glittering shard. She would have deferred instead to her lover, to his need to get back on the road and to his beer.
She is gone. He is gone. The group is gone, not so much dispersed by lightning, but drifted away on currents of alcohol, pot, betrayal and lies. The woman would herself disappear for five years, carried deep into loneliness by her own addictions and lies.
She would once have said that the disappearances were nothing but loss, and that our behaviors were cruel and tragic. Now, I understand the nature of juniper, lightning, smoke and glass. I see that addiction, lies and betrayal may be no less alchemical than the action of unearthly heat and sand. Now, my favorite chain of words has become: I don’t know.
I don’t know has transformed me from a woman who once would have googled lightning glass and ordered a piece from an on-line store, to a woman who walks the abundant Mojave, under skies from which lightning rarely descends, her eyes often on the ground, hunting for a glint of nondescript glass, knowing she may never find it.
I don’t know moves these words out of what sometimes feels like nothing, a nothing that is both frightening and welcome. I am a vessel formed by dedication, a vessel made from lightning glass.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
I am the Rabbit
Forty years and 2500 miles ago, I hauled myself and my three kids free from Welfare when I found work in a nursing home in New York state.
Recently I learned I didn't get a job in the little Mojave Desert town where I live. I had already applied for everything else that was available. At sixty-eight, I found myself hauling my tanking credit cards and drained savings back to welfare.
I am not alone in any of this. This fierce stretch of rural California may be a microcosm of unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, and inflated gas prices. My neighbors are lower middle-class, working-class, working poor
-– AND unemployed in all three categories.
The rich don’t retire here. Cobalt mountains cradle our soft desert twilights. But triple digit temperatures and double digit winds don’t make for Nouveau West cachet.
My neighbors and I swap stories at the gas pump … the jack of all trades in the beat-up El Camino who tells me gas prices have cut his wages in half. The woman who glares at the pump and says, “I’m supposed to be thrilled to pay THIS per gallon. They play with us like mean dogs with a rabbit.”
My neighbors do more than grouse. The grocery clerk, the folks in the Social Security waiting room, the receptionists at the Welfare office … the people of this gorgeous battered place simply ask each other, “What do you need?”
It sounds to me like a blessing, but I wonder why they say it. They have the right to glare at the old guy stalling the check-out line when they’re trying to make minimum wage cover a week of groceries. But they don't.
My guess is that a day at 109-degrees cooks the arrogance out of everybody. A 45 mile an hour scorching wind knocks the starch out of any stuffed shirt.
But more than anything, I suspect, it’s because we all know we are the rabbits. And we don’t want to be mistaken for the mean dogs.
Contact Mary: bstarr67@gmail.com
Recently I learned I didn't get a job in the little Mojave Desert town where I live. I had already applied for everything else that was available. At sixty-eight, I found myself hauling my tanking credit cards and drained savings back to welfare.
I am not alone in any of this. This fierce stretch of rural California may be a microcosm of unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, and inflated gas prices. My neighbors are lower middle-class, working-class, working poor
-– AND unemployed in all three categories.
The rich don’t retire here. Cobalt mountains cradle our soft desert twilights. But triple digit temperatures and double digit winds don’t make for Nouveau West cachet.
My neighbors and I swap stories at the gas pump … the jack of all trades in the beat-up El Camino who tells me gas prices have cut his wages in half. The woman who glares at the pump and says, “I’m supposed to be thrilled to pay THIS per gallon. They play with us like mean dogs with a rabbit.”
My neighbors do more than grouse. The grocery clerk, the folks in the Social Security waiting room, the receptionists at the Welfare office … the people of this gorgeous battered place simply ask each other, “What do you need?”
It sounds to me like a blessing, but I wonder why they say it. They have the right to glare at the old guy stalling the check-out line when they’re trying to make minimum wage cover a week of groceries. But they don't.
My guess is that a day at 109-degrees cooks the arrogance out of everybody. A 45 mile an hour scorching wind knocks the starch out of any stuffed shirt.
But more than anything, I suspect, it’s because we all know we are the rabbits. And we don’t want to be mistaken for the mean dogs.
Contact Mary: bstarr67@gmail.com
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Welcome to the Age of Nugacity
We are living in the Age of Nugacity. This, from a word-a-day service
a friend once gave me:
nugacity
PRONUNCIATION:
(noo-GAS-i-tee, nyoo-)
MEANING:
noun: Triviality; futility.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin nugax (trifling), from nugari (to trifle).
Last night, after I had read in the LA Times and on Yahoo about Adolf
Hitler's Olympics unfolding in Beijing, I took myself out to the
Joshua tree and watched the moon's slow progress toward the mountains
(which is, more accurately, the earth's falling into day) and I said
to That which contains us, "I am so sorry."
It is astonishing to me that the moon, the old tree, even the lights
of human dwellings slowed my breathing and brought a little peace. I
was able to sleep.
I woke this morning to sadness. Immediate. Inexorable.
Later I read this poem:
All night I could not sleep
Because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered 'yes.'
- Zi Ye, translated by Arthur Waley, *A Hundred and Seventy Chinese
Poems
How much we have all forgotten---the Chinese, the Americans, every
global victim of the Great Hypnosis...
a friend once gave me:
nugacity
PRONUNCIATION:
(noo-GAS-i-tee, nyoo-)
MEANING:
noun: Triviality; futility.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin nugax (trifling), from nugari (to trifle).
Last night, after I had read in the LA Times and on Yahoo about Adolf
Hitler's Olympics unfolding in Beijing, I took myself out to the
Joshua tree and watched the moon's slow progress toward the mountains
(which is, more accurately, the earth's falling into day) and I said
to That which contains us, "I am so sorry."
It is astonishing to me that the moon, the old tree, even the lights
of human dwellings slowed my breathing and brought a little peace. I
was able to sleep.
I woke this morning to sadness. Immediate. Inexorable.
Later I read this poem:
All night I could not sleep
Because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered 'yes.'
- Zi Ye, translated by Arthur Waley, *A Hundred and Seventy Chinese
Poems
How much we have all forgotten---the Chinese, the Americans, every
global victim of the Great Hypnosis...
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
I Offer
I am a free-lance writer, editor and writing teacher. I begin to think about credentials and balk. You can google Mary Sojourner to find my books and articles, my NPR commentaries and writing conference gigs. Here is what is important:
Last night I walked out over the desert, into light that went from too much to burnished to cool gray. I was heading back when I saw a jade-green snake coiled in a perfect circle. Its head was slightly raised, its tongue testing the air.
A few seconds later I found a delicate feather, downy white near its spine, barred cream and brown toward its tip.
I had spent the day fighting various ghosts of "what if". The snake and the feather slowed my heart.
I bring to publishers, writers and students my willingness to walk out over the desert alone; to watch the ground; to look up; and to fool the various ghosts of "what if". Those phantoms block beauty. I teach my students how to float with them.
I teach for writing conferences, in private circles (will travel throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado; you organize your circle and bring me in), and one-on-one through e-mail, phone and/or face-to-face meetings. $175. for an initial individual consultation (my written suggestions on maximum of 20 double-spaced pages) and 30 minutes phone time. I work with fiction, essay, poetry and the transformation of journal writing into what comes next... My fee for writing circles depends on location, number of writers and length of time.
I edit that which needs a razor's edge and respect.
You can reach me at bstarr67@gmail.com
Down the road
****
WORDSMITHING: they say
Father, father, we don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
What's goin' on what's goin' on, what's goin' on - what's goin' on
Heah, what's goin' on - what's goin' on, oh, what's goin' on - what's
goin' on...
---What's Goin' On?
Marvin Gaye, 1971
I fall in love with the old times
I never mention my own mind
Let's f..k the world with all it's trend
Thank god, it's all about to end...
They say it's all about to end...
---They Say
Scars on Broadway, 2008
"Thank god, it's all about to end..." That's got to be an old broad
talking or an angry geezer. Daron Malakian just turned 33. He was
lead singer for hard rock band, System of a Down. He now fronts SOD.
They Say registered 100,000 downloads when it went up free on ITunes.
Four years ago, Big Dog publisher, make that rabid Big Dog publisher,
Scribner's released my memoir, Solace:rituals of loss and desire
(this excerpt records a reading in Denver in 2002):
I paused and asked for questions or reactions. A young woman
in a bright red t-shirt raised her hand. "Something has been
troubling me for a long time," she said, "long before your reading. I
have two small kids. I am terrified for their future. I've been
taught that life moves in cycles of expansion and contraction. I see
growth exploding. Will there be a contraction? Are the cycles still
in place?"
I wanted to to say easily, " Yes, we move in cycles, our earth and
our huge little species are moved in cycles. It will all come out
just fine." But I remembered a moment from the day before and could
not. At an off-ramp gas station in Colorado Springs, a furious kid in
a pick-up truck had squealed out of the lot, his back tires tossing
rock like shrapnel. Ev had vice-gripped the door handle of his truck.
"I want to go after that kid and beat the shit out of him," he said,
then shook his head. "Which makes me him. We are all spinning out."
I lsat on the edge of the stage.
"I'm deeply afraid," I said, "that the incredible speed at which
most of us are moving is carrying us out of the natural spiral. We
have exceeded some inner and outer gravitational pull. We are flying
out of control."
"But, where," she said, "is the hope?"
Before I could answer, her friend stood. She was a woman in her
early forties,
impeccably groomed, hair cut beautifully, her feet in polished
top-of-the-line cowgirl boots. I would have said we were about as far
apart as two women can be. And then I saw the pain in her eyes.
Her words came slowly. I had heard them three other times on this
trip, once at the Albuquerque reading, once during a radio interview,
once between old friends. "My only hope," she said, "is that some
day, maybe even soon, our species will be gone."
Four years since Solace was published. Six since I listened to
those mothers longing for hope. Thirty-six years since Marvin Gaye looked
deep into the terrified heart of America and asked, "What's Goin' on?"
Every day I hear someone say: "It's coming apart. This cannot
continue." They speak about home foreclosures, gas gouging,
unemployment, food banks stretched as thin as Depression potato soup,
the obscene flaunting of wealth by them that got it...
You can say "It's coming apart." Or you can say "It's goin' down."
And, the question I ask myself every day is this: "Where do I stand?
And, when it's gone down, where will any of us stand?"
A friend read my last column and wrote: Your last column in LIVE
troubled me. Your current sojourn in the desert sounds more like an
austere and lonely exile than a fresh start set some distance from a
casino. Is there anything I can do to help you?
His last sentence is the beginning to the answer to the question:
Where will any of us stand?
For all of us.
************
WORDSMITHING: with all due respect
The planet isn't going anywhere; WE are!
---George Carlin
by way of old comrade, Bob Katz (Lippman)
Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
---Sogyal Rinpoche
I am lazy. I am compulsive. The real issues hung out with me for a couple years. They would not go away. I couldn’t. The real issues worked on me.. They used sand-paper and evisceration. When they were finished I was a parchment bag of bones and not knowing.
I cast my bones into the future. They brought me here. This place is merciless. Molten. These times even more so. No work. Frightened people.
And still, around 6:30 in the evening, the light cools. I step out my door and am immediately in the presence of radiant sand, dark mountains and human debris. I am in the Mojave Desert.. I set out.
Three nights ago I came across a pale yellow cabin. The windows were boarded up. One nail held the door shut. There were words painted in flamingo pink on the door:
PEOPLE! If you are the ones that stole the chair,
go ahead and break in again. There is nothing left to
steal.
Hey, Dougie, here’s the phone number...
...call...
...if you want...a shower.
BEWARE OF SNAKES!!!
I began to try the door and stopped. It was not the possibility of serpents that stayed my hand. It was the certainty that the lives of the people who had written on the door were none of my business. It was the dozens of abandoned shacks, houses and trailers I’d found near Twentynine Palms, the currents of lost hope and despair that seemed to wind through those phantom neighborhoods and the stories I knew needed to belong to people who might have lost everything.
I walked east. I’d gone no more than fifty yards when I saw a ripple of jade and gray gleaming in the sand. The snake lifted its head. It flicked its tongue and tasted what might be coming toward it.
I stepped back. “Sorry,” I said. “This is your neighborhood.”
I went through old papers that evening. I hunted nothing. What I found was an invitation as big as the hopes of people building a homestead cabin and as precious as light swimming along a rattlesnake’s curves.
January 1, 1990: On January 14, I will turn 50. Please join me and a few friends for a birthday witness at the proposed uranium mine site near Red Butte. No present, please. Bring music, food and the willingness to stand outside the wire fence that still encloses the intentions of a Denver mining company, a company a few of us stopped cold. Love and Respect, Mary
There was the the hand-drawn map still incised in my heart. And, there were the memories of a miracle. A few of us had caravanned over frozen dirt roads. Bob Katz drove his truck. I drove mine. We parked outside the concertina wire. The head-frame and the workshed had not been taken down---in case the price of uranium went up, in case the Havasupai and a few of us forgot.
We heard dogs barking. I walked up to the locked gate. Bob opened the truck doors. “Let’s do it,” I said.
I’d brought two tapes: Aretha Franklin singing “R.E.S.P.E.C.T., and the Gaden Shartse monks chanting a Tibetan Buddhist prayer for the Earth. Bob slid in a tape and turned up the volume.
“Wait a second, “ I said.
A door opened. Two dogs barrelled out of the workshed. Their fangs were bared. “Hit it,” I said.
The low thunder of the monk’s chant moved out into the air. In that instant, the dogs went silent. They dropped to their bellies. They crossed their front paws, lowered their heads and looked calmly up at me. They did not move, even when their owner walked up; even when he asked us what we were doing and we said, “Praying.”; even when he said, “O.k.”; even when the chant faded out and the black diamond of Aretha Franklin’s voice glittered over our heads---and we began to dance.
Last night I walked out over the desert, into light that went from too much to burnished to cool gray. I was heading back when I saw a jade-green snake coiled in a perfect circle. Its head was slightly raised, its tongue testing the air.
A few seconds later I found a delicate feather, downy white near its spine, barred cream and brown toward its tip.
I had spent the day fighting various ghosts of "what if". The snake and the feather slowed my heart.
I bring to publishers, writers and students my willingness to walk out over the desert alone; to watch the ground; to look up; and to fool the various ghosts of "what if". Those phantoms block beauty. I teach my students how to float with them.
I teach for writing conferences, in private circles (will travel throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado; you organize your circle and bring me in), and one-on-one through e-mail, phone and/or face-to-face meetings. $175. for an initial individual consultation (my written suggestions on maximum of 20 double-spaced pages) and 30 minutes phone time. I work with fiction, essay, poetry and the transformation of journal writing into what comes next... My fee for writing circles depends on location, number of writers and length of time.
I edit that which needs a razor's edge and respect.
You can reach me at bstarr67@gmail.com
Down the road
****
WORDSMITHING: they say
Father, father, we don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
What's goin' on what's goin' on, what's goin' on - what's goin' on
Heah, what's goin' on - what's goin' on, oh, what's goin' on - what's
goin' on...
---What's Goin' On?
Marvin Gaye, 1971
I fall in love with the old times
I never mention my own mind
Let's f..k the world with all it's trend
Thank god, it's all about to end...
They say it's all about to end...
---They Say
Scars on Broadway, 2008
"Thank god, it's all about to end..." That's got to be an old broad
talking or an angry geezer. Daron Malakian just turned 33. He was
lead singer for hard rock band, System of a Down. He now fronts SOD.
They Say registered 100,000 downloads when it went up free on ITunes.
Four years ago, Big Dog publisher, make that rabid Big Dog publisher,
Scribner's released my memoir, Solace:rituals of loss and desire
(this excerpt records a reading in Denver in 2002):
I paused and asked for questions or reactions. A young woman
in a bright red t-shirt raised her hand. "Something has been
troubling me for a long time," she said, "long before your reading. I
have two small kids. I am terrified for their future. I've been
taught that life moves in cycles of expansion and contraction. I see
growth exploding. Will there be a contraction? Are the cycles still
in place?"
I wanted to to say easily, " Yes, we move in cycles, our earth and
our huge little species are moved in cycles. It will all come out
just fine." But I remembered a moment from the day before and could
not. At an off-ramp gas station in Colorado Springs, a furious kid in
a pick-up truck had squealed out of the lot, his back tires tossing
rock like shrapnel. Ev had vice-gripped the door handle of his truck.
"I want to go after that kid and beat the shit out of him," he said,
then shook his head. "Which makes me him. We are all spinning out."
I lsat on the edge of the stage.
"I'm deeply afraid," I said, "that the incredible speed at which
most of us are moving is carrying us out of the natural spiral. We
have exceeded some inner and outer gravitational pull. We are flying
out of control."
"But, where," she said, "is the hope?"
Before I could answer, her friend stood. She was a woman in her
early forties,
impeccably groomed, hair cut beautifully, her feet in polished
top-of-the-line cowgirl boots. I would have said we were about as far
apart as two women can be. And then I saw the pain in her eyes.
Her words came slowly. I had heard them three other times on this
trip, once at the Albuquerque reading, once during a radio interview,
once between old friends. "My only hope," she said, "is that some
day, maybe even soon, our species will be gone."
Four years since Solace was published. Six since I listened to
those mothers longing for hope. Thirty-six years since Marvin Gaye looked
deep into the terrified heart of America and asked, "What's Goin' on?"
Every day I hear someone say: "It's coming apart. This cannot
continue." They speak about home foreclosures, gas gouging,
unemployment, food banks stretched as thin as Depression potato soup,
the obscene flaunting of wealth by them that got it...
You can say "It's coming apart." Or you can say "It's goin' down."
And, the question I ask myself every day is this: "Where do I stand?
And, when it's gone down, where will any of us stand?"
A friend read my last column and wrote: Your last column in LIVE
troubled me. Your current sojourn in the desert sounds more like an
austere and lonely exile than a fresh start set some distance from a
casino. Is there anything I can do to help you?
His last sentence is the beginning to the answer to the question:
Where will any of us stand?
For all of us.
************
WORDSMITHING: with all due respect
The planet isn't going anywhere; WE are!
---George Carlin
by way of old comrade, Bob Katz (Lippman)
Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
---Sogyal Rinpoche
I am lazy. I am compulsive. The real issues hung out with me for a couple years. They would not go away. I couldn’t. The real issues worked on me.. They used sand-paper and evisceration. When they were finished I was a parchment bag of bones and not knowing.
I cast my bones into the future. They brought me here. This place is merciless. Molten. These times even more so. No work. Frightened people.
And still, around 6:30 in the evening, the light cools. I step out my door and am immediately in the presence of radiant sand, dark mountains and human debris. I am in the Mojave Desert.. I set out.
Three nights ago I came across a pale yellow cabin. The windows were boarded up. One nail held the door shut. There were words painted in flamingo pink on the door:
PEOPLE! If you are the ones that stole the chair,
go ahead and break in again. There is nothing left to
steal.
Hey, Dougie, here’s the phone number...
...call...
...if you want...a shower.
BEWARE OF SNAKES!!!
I began to try the door and stopped. It was not the possibility of serpents that stayed my hand. It was the certainty that the lives of the people who had written on the door were none of my business. It was the dozens of abandoned shacks, houses and trailers I’d found near Twentynine Palms, the currents of lost hope and despair that seemed to wind through those phantom neighborhoods and the stories I knew needed to belong to people who might have lost everything.
I walked east. I’d gone no more than fifty yards when I saw a ripple of jade and gray gleaming in the sand. The snake lifted its head. It flicked its tongue and tasted what might be coming toward it.
I stepped back. “Sorry,” I said. “This is your neighborhood.”
I went through old papers that evening. I hunted nothing. What I found was an invitation as big as the hopes of people building a homestead cabin and as precious as light swimming along a rattlesnake’s curves.
January 1, 1990: On January 14, I will turn 50. Please join me and a few friends for a birthday witness at the proposed uranium mine site near Red Butte. No present, please. Bring music, food and the willingness to stand outside the wire fence that still encloses the intentions of a Denver mining company, a company a few of us stopped cold. Love and Respect, Mary
There was the the hand-drawn map still incised in my heart. And, there were the memories of a miracle. A few of us had caravanned over frozen dirt roads. Bob Katz drove his truck. I drove mine. We parked outside the concertina wire. The head-frame and the workshed had not been taken down---in case the price of uranium went up, in case the Havasupai and a few of us forgot.
We heard dogs barking. I walked up to the locked gate. Bob opened the truck doors. “Let’s do it,” I said.
I’d brought two tapes: Aretha Franklin singing “R.E.S.P.E.C.T., and the Gaden Shartse monks chanting a Tibetan Buddhist prayer for the Earth. Bob slid in a tape and turned up the volume.
“Wait a second, “ I said.
A door opened. Two dogs barrelled out of the workshed. Their fangs were bared. “Hit it,” I said.
The low thunder of the monk’s chant moved out into the air. In that instant, the dogs went silent. They dropped to their bellies. They crossed their front paws, lowered their heads and looked calmly up at me. They did not move, even when their owner walked up; even when he asked us what we were doing and we said, “Praying.”; even when he said, “O.k.”; even when the chant faded out and the black diamond of Aretha Franklin’s voice glittered over our heads---and we began to dance.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Jaybird
for Jaybird
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.
---Ezra Pound
Letters, Arizona Daily Sun, December 20:
Dear stranger who returned my wallet, I’m in a down-town restaurant thinking about how this diner, in the nearly ten years I’ve lived in Flagstaff, has served everybody: tourists, folks off the Rezzes, visitors up from the Southern sprawl, ragged wanderers in off the cold streets; me and my dead friend, Jaybird. I’m thinking about this bone-cold time of the year, of endings and beginnings. I’m thinking of Jaybird, of his lonesome death and how his life was far from lonesome.
Where’s the wallet come in? I lost it the night of Jaybird’s memorial service. A bunch of us told stories in a smoky room. People spoke of their sorrow that his death had been just a cold fact in the local paper. I decided to write my piece of his story instead of saying it. When I went to my truck to get money for Jaybird’s memorial stone, my wallet was gone. Dark parking lot, shaky neighborhood, oh well. I came home, called the cops, waited and thought about Jaybird’s story.
I knew him briefly. In that short time, he did nothing but give. He heard I was working on a novel about Viet Nam vets and he found guys who wanted their stories told. He listened when I needed to talk about my own small inner war. He heard I was spiritually lonely and showed me a photo he had takien that he believed showed the presence of God. He carried it with him for months and when our paths weren’t crossing, gave it to a friend to give to me. All of that, but most of all, he told his story with absolute honesty.
His story? The truth? Prison. Drugs. Booze. Serious physical damage. Pain beyond what most of us will every face.
His story? Truth? A recovering life of compassion and williness. Sobriety. Teaching himself to read and write---in his 40’s. Tears and belly laughter. Pain endured and transformed. Wisdom given. He would love that I am passing this on.
Stranger, you were kin to Jaybird when you called and said you’d found my wallet and wouldn’t tell me your name. I wanted to send you a thank-you. Flagstaff and Jaybird and my imperfect recovery have taught me that.
So, I’ll give half of what I would have given you to Victim Witness and half for Jaybird’s memorial stone. Thank you stranger. Thank you Jay.
I wrote Jaybird’s memorial letter in 1994. That Christmas friends and I went to a Laughlin casino. I played twenty dollars in nickles, twenty dollars in quarters and twenty dollars in dollars. When the money was gone, we went to the lavishly insipid buffet; my Cockney friend repaired to the bar; my other friend and I walked along the river. Everything seemed bejewelled and perfectly shabby and poignant.
Christmas morning, I bought bad coffee and sat on by the river. I listened to Alvin and the Chipmunks sing Jingle Bells over the casino outdoor speakers. It was still dark. I watched airplane lights race across the opposite shore, lift slowly and ascend. The dark began to soften above the far mountains. I knew I was the happiest I had been in years.
That was the beginning of my affair with slot machines. It gave me greater ease and fun than any lover I have every known. At first, my friends and went twice a year; then once a month; and then, I went alone---once, twice, three, four times a month. I tried to quit even though I didn’t want to. I loved the game, the casinos, the workers. I found stories there I would have found nowhere else.
Jaybird’s ghost has been watching over me. He might have carried me through the loss ot the Flagstaff I loved so dearly and to a hard-scrabble California town. His ghost must have sat beside me a week ago when I put my hand up in a little room of brave people and said, “I’m Mary and I’m a compulsive gambler.”
Jay, thanks again. I will pass it on.
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.
---Ezra Pound
Letters, Arizona Daily Sun, December 20:
Dear stranger who returned my wallet, I’m in a down-town restaurant thinking about how this diner, in the nearly ten years I’ve lived in Flagstaff, has served everybody: tourists, folks off the Rezzes, visitors up from the Southern sprawl, ragged wanderers in off the cold streets; me and my dead friend, Jaybird. I’m thinking about this bone-cold time of the year, of endings and beginnings. I’m thinking of Jaybird, of his lonesome death and how his life was far from lonesome.
Where’s the wallet come in? I lost it the night of Jaybird’s memorial service. A bunch of us told stories in a smoky room. People spoke of their sorrow that his death had been just a cold fact in the local paper. I decided to write my piece of his story instead of saying it. When I went to my truck to get money for Jaybird’s memorial stone, my wallet was gone. Dark parking lot, shaky neighborhood, oh well. I came home, called the cops, waited and thought about Jaybird’s story.
I knew him briefly. In that short time, he did nothing but give. He heard I was working on a novel about Viet Nam vets and he found guys who wanted their stories told. He listened when I needed to talk about my own small inner war. He heard I was spiritually lonely and showed me a photo he had takien that he believed showed the presence of God. He carried it with him for months and when our paths weren’t crossing, gave it to a friend to give to me. All of that, but most of all, he told his story with absolute honesty.
His story? The truth? Prison. Drugs. Booze. Serious physical damage. Pain beyond what most of us will every face.
His story? Truth? A recovering life of compassion and williness. Sobriety. Teaching himself to read and write---in his 40’s. Tears and belly laughter. Pain endured and transformed. Wisdom given. He would love that I am passing this on.
Stranger, you were kin to Jaybird when you called and said you’d found my wallet and wouldn’t tell me your name. I wanted to send you a thank-you. Flagstaff and Jaybird and my imperfect recovery have taught me that.
So, I’ll give half of what I would have given you to Victim Witness and half for Jaybird’s memorial stone. Thank you stranger. Thank you Jay.
I wrote Jaybird’s memorial letter in 1994. That Christmas friends and I went to a Laughlin casino. I played twenty dollars in nickles, twenty dollars in quarters and twenty dollars in dollars. When the money was gone, we went to the lavishly insipid buffet; my Cockney friend repaired to the bar; my other friend and I walked along the river. Everything seemed bejewelled and perfectly shabby and poignant.
Christmas morning, I bought bad coffee and sat on by the river. I listened to Alvin and the Chipmunks sing Jingle Bells over the casino outdoor speakers. It was still dark. I watched airplane lights race across the opposite shore, lift slowly and ascend. The dark began to soften above the far mountains. I knew I was the happiest I had been in years.
That was the beginning of my affair with slot machines. It gave me greater ease and fun than any lover I have every known. At first, my friends and went twice a year; then once a month; and then, I went alone---once, twice, three, four times a month. I tried to quit even though I didn’t want to. I loved the game, the casinos, the workers. I found stories there I would have found nowhere else.
Jaybird’s ghost has been watching over me. He might have carried me through the loss ot the Flagstaff I loved so dearly and to a hard-scrabble California town. His ghost must have sat beside me a week ago when I put my hand up in a little room of brave people and said, “I’m Mary and I’m a compulsive gambler.”
Jay, thanks again. I will pass it on.
3 Work
3 White
Mojave sunset
I study the persimmon sand
a tiny jawbone
a downy plume the length of my thumb
there is no quartz
no plastic shard
but when I look up
the moon is a sliver of lace agate.
3 Cinnabar
mercurial
apricot to molten above the western mountains
fooprints (mine)
what burns imperfectly
all of that
there is no need for more
And still I find more in the desert in which some believe there is Nothing: the words My Mission printed carefully in pencil at the top of a sheet of notebook paper; a poem in a child’s scrawl:
the lepercon
It is somthing
green. And it’s
somthing not
mean. His
face is not green. he
is not a
king. He lives
In green.
It starts with
an L and
it ends with
N
There is a tattered scrap of a large print bible in which I find unintended inspiration:
hail
“Sun stand thou
and thou Moon in the vau
And the sun stood still, and
until the nation took
their enemies. Is this not written
What I am not finding in this generous desert is work. I am not alone in this nor in the fury a gas pump has begun to inspire..
A friend calls while I am walking in the rose-gold light. She speaks of the necessity of doing her part of the greater work in partnership with the elements; in partnership with Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I stop in the blue shade of a Joshua Tree and listen. The gibbous moon hangs above the southeastern mountain range.
“Metallurgy,” she says. “Permaculture.” I move out of the shade onto an old mining road. I remember teaching the 2004 Desert Writers Workshop and what emerged:
Metallurgy
Three women sit at the end of the long table in a cabin south of Moab. There has been an early October snow. The light is dove gray. There is a fire in the woodstove.
The women have known each other less than a week. They are writers. One of them has taught. The other students and teachers have gone to their rooms, or in to town to unwind from four days of intense work.
The room is so quiet they can hear the fire popping in the stove and the sound of wet rain on the big windows. A woman says something. Another responds. And then, as though they have moved toward the moment from the instant they each decided to stay at the table, each woman tells the others that she was sexually violated when she was a little girl. Their voices are calm as they speak of finally remembering, of puking and howling and, only a week ago, one of them watching in horror as a new date set his hand on her child’s thigh.
“Three out of three,” I say. “One hundred per cent.”
I think of my solitary walk before dinner. The western sky had boiled with clouds. Their light was sulfurous, brilliant as the edge of a new-honed blade. I had imagined a hot spring below the clouds, its waters dangerous and beautiful, its mineral steam billowing up.
I had imagined sky and earth were foundry and forge. For making weapons, weapons made for cutting through. I imagined that to die by one of these blades would be painless. Death would be finished as soon as begun. I wondered why my mind roiled as the sulfur-yellow clouds did. Why violence simmered beneath my spirit.
I look into the bright and ferocious eyes of the two other women. Sky blue. Cloud gray. I am surprised that I do not express fury.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I am so sorry.”
This is the nature of true metallurgy. This is the nature of women’s work.
Metallurgy. Taking one’s place in the perfect pattern of Water, Earth, Air and Fire. Not fixing, but mending so that there is always the hair-line wound that admits the light.
The surrendered will always have our work.
Mojave sunset
I study the persimmon sand
a tiny jawbone
a downy plume the length of my thumb
there is no quartz
no plastic shard
but when I look up
the moon is a sliver of lace agate.
3 Cinnabar
mercurial
apricot to molten above the western mountains
fooprints (mine)
what burns imperfectly
all of that
there is no need for more
And still I find more in the desert in which some believe there is Nothing: the words My Mission printed carefully in pencil at the top of a sheet of notebook paper; a poem in a child’s scrawl:
the lepercon
It is somthing
green. And it’s
somthing not
mean. His
face is not green. he
is not a
king. He lives
In green.
It starts with
an L and
it ends with
N
There is a tattered scrap of a large print bible in which I find unintended inspiration:
hail
“Sun stand thou
and thou Moon in the vau
And the sun stood still, and
until the nation took
their enemies. Is this not written
What I am not finding in this generous desert is work. I am not alone in this nor in the fury a gas pump has begun to inspire..
A friend calls while I am walking in the rose-gold light. She speaks of the necessity of doing her part of the greater work in partnership with the elements; in partnership with Water, Earth, Air and Fire. I stop in the blue shade of a Joshua Tree and listen. The gibbous moon hangs above the southeastern mountain range.
“Metallurgy,” she says. “Permaculture.” I move out of the shade onto an old mining road. I remember teaching the 2004 Desert Writers Workshop and what emerged:
Metallurgy
Three women sit at the end of the long table in a cabin south of Moab. There has been an early October snow. The light is dove gray. There is a fire in the woodstove.
The women have known each other less than a week. They are writers. One of them has taught. The other students and teachers have gone to their rooms, or in to town to unwind from four days of intense work.
The room is so quiet they can hear the fire popping in the stove and the sound of wet rain on the big windows. A woman says something. Another responds. And then, as though they have moved toward the moment from the instant they each decided to stay at the table, each woman tells the others that she was sexually violated when she was a little girl. Their voices are calm as they speak of finally remembering, of puking and howling and, only a week ago, one of them watching in horror as a new date set his hand on her child’s thigh.
“Three out of three,” I say. “One hundred per cent.”
I think of my solitary walk before dinner. The western sky had boiled with clouds. Their light was sulfurous, brilliant as the edge of a new-honed blade. I had imagined a hot spring below the clouds, its waters dangerous and beautiful, its mineral steam billowing up.
I had imagined sky and earth were foundry and forge. For making weapons, weapons made for cutting through. I imagined that to die by one of these blades would be painless. Death would be finished as soon as begun. I wondered why my mind roiled as the sulfur-yellow clouds did. Why violence simmered beneath my spirit.
I look into the bright and ferocious eyes of the two other women. Sky blue. Cloud gray. I am surprised that I do not express fury.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I am so sorry.”
This is the nature of true metallurgy. This is the nature of women’s work.
Metallurgy. Taking one’s place in the perfect pattern of Water, Earth, Air and Fire. Not fixing, but mending so that there is always the hair-line wound that admits the light.
The surrendered will always have our work.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Terra Incognita
I have become a ghost in a ghostland.
TERRA INCOGNITA
1. Cabin Becoming a Crow
Seven years ago my best friend and I drove East on I-40. We were headed for a writing conference in central Oklahoma. When we saw the Cuervo highway exit in New Mexico, we pulled off. It was time for coffee. What better place to drink my friend's fierce dark brew than a dirt road on which we might be attended by fierce dark birds.
There were no ravens, but there was an old New Mexico cemetery. The tombstones were melting back into the rose-gray dirt. The inscriptions were in Spanish.
There were stone lambs weathered to gray lumps on some of the markers. What dates we could make out told us that the bones gone to pure mineral under them had been the bones of ninas y ninos.
The names of the grown-up dead might have been given in hopes of bestowing virtues and blessings. Fulgencio. Rosendo. Adora. Epifania. Dulce.
Shining One. Path of Fame. Beloved. Manifestation. Sweetness.
The oldest stones were carved with roses and crosses and circles. There was a rusted iron grill around a family grave. Faded plastic roses glowed pink and pale orange in the mid-morning light. The silence was crystalline.
We drank our coffee, talked and were quiet; then we gathered up the plastic flowers that had blown into the ditch between the cemetery and the dirt road. We scattered them on the oldest graves, and on the most recent burial. There was no last name. Only this: Juan. Our brave son. 1950-1968.
We headed back on the dirt road. A town rose on the hillside to the east. We drove slowly up through its six streets. Lights burned in perhaps five of the twenty houses. We wondered who lived there. We made up stories that the families left were the grand-children of vaqueros and miners. We imagined asking about buying a house, and learning that only those from the original familes would be allowed to own property in that place. We were good at telling stories. We drove, always, on roads of worship and imagination.
-space break-
This winter I drove east to visit my daughter. I was alone. It was midnight by the time I came to the Cuervo exit. I was tired and the moon was just past New. I pushed through the last miles to Tucumcari and slept in the Buckaroo Motel. I woke to a thread of pale green seaming the eastern horizon. A mother cat and her teen-age kittens twined around my ankles as I went for coffee. The owner's young daughter ran to get me milk. The cats and I drank our breakfasts in the chill air.
I timed my return trip so I could visit Fulgencio, Rosendo, Adora, Epifania, Dulce and Juan. I slept again in the Buckaroo Motel. Again, the mother cat and three kittens who lived in the laundry next to my room greeted me as I brought my coffee to the stoop. For a few minutes, I felt less alone.
I drove west in the growing light. By the time I came to the Cuervo exit, the sky behind me was soft tangerine. I found my way past the hill-side houses and pulled up to the cemetery. There was a new fence around the graves. A road had been bull-dozed up to a new gate. Epifania's marker had been set upright. A vase of roses tilted at its base. The flowers were frozen. I righted the vase.
Again I gathered plastic lilies and marigolds from the ditch and scattered them over the graves. Again I drove back through the little town. All the houses but one were breaking apart into the earth and air. The authorities had tacked Condemned signs on the doors. There seemed to be only one story to tell about Cuervo. It was the story echoing in my smaller life.
-space break-
This morning I woke to bone deep cold. The fire in the woodstove was dead. I went to the woodpile in my front entry. I bent to pick up a log and saw that the floor under the edge of the woodpile had crumbled down into the dirt below.
Cuervo surrounds me. My cabin is becoming earth. Air. A crow.
2. Hunting the Moon
"Each generation receives a little capsule of
instructions, says Eisley, that passes through the
eye of the needle like a blowing seed. They are
carried "through the molecular darkness of a minute
world below the field of human vision and of time's
decay."
"They are transmitted from one generation to
another in invisible puffs of air known as
words---words that can also be symbolically incised on
clay. As the delicate printing on the mud at the
water's edge retraces a visit of autumn birds long
since departed, so the little tablets in perished
cities carry the seeds of human thought across the
deserts of millenia.
---Loren Eisley, The Star Thrower"
in Richard Wentz' The Contemplation of Otherness:
the critical vision of religion.
Barn's burnt down
now I can see the moon.
---Masahide
All wisdom is rooted in learning to call
things by the right name.
---Kung-fu Tze
I write on a tablet of light from a perishing city.
In its outskirts I could be anywhere: Phoenix, Chapel
Hill, Seattle, Flagstaff. In their outskirts, the
cities have perished. Or been transmuted by the kiss
of vampires.
Still, instructions drift through the eye of the
needle. From Masahide. From my younger self. He
tells me there is radiance beyond charred black. I have
fore-told my future.
I once wrote: "That double light of story and
connection has shone true---on the levelling and
subdividing of the hills and creeks of my childhood
home; on the gentrification of the neighborhoods we
hippies re-built in the heart of an Eastern city; and
even now, on Western towns and earth disappearing
before our eyes, eaten by insatiable hungers as
thoroughly as bone by cancer.
Under that light, in pure gratitude, I offer story
and the possibility of connection, delicate and
essential as Desert Big Horn bones in an un-named
Mojave wash---or any first meeting."
Over the last four years, the double light of story
and connection began to fade from my life. In the
last year I came to doubt that it would do anything
but disappear. A few friends; the Sacred Mountains; a
cluster of seven Ponderosa, one of them reduced to a
stump by the busy work of the forest service; the
double-trunked pine behind my cabin, the ancient alligator juniper in the meadow at the base of the mountains---women and men,
stone and trees have been my illumination, my medicine
and fragile tether.
Two months ago I learned that the Hassyampa Insitute
for Creative Writing summer writing conference had
been killed. For ten years or more, writers and
teachers have gathered in Prescott, Arizona for a week
of work and beauty. A month ago, a gifted editor and
even more gifted friend told me that it had become
impossible to publish the books she loved; and then
another editor and friend said an identical
lament.
I told myself that as long as my hand moved a pen
over paper; as long as my fingers moved words out
through computer keys, I was where I needed to be. I
walked with friends, sat with the trees. The dark territory in me
grew.
And then, I was invited to a little desert town to
read and teach writing for a Land
Trust. I drove west between blue-black mountains. I
was alone on the little two-lane till a beat-up
Eighties Ford truck appeared on the western horizon.
As the driver passed me, he slowed, grinned and raised
his hand.
I waved back and pulled off onto mosaic hardpan;
climbed out and leaned against the car. The mountains
to the south had begun to catch pink-gold light. It
seemed vital to know their names. There is always a
road atlas on the passenger seat. I opened it and
studied the Eastern Mojave.
Old Woman Mountains.
I smiled as I had not for much too long. Easily,
deeply. I knew the barn was nearly burnt. I knew
that somewhere down a dirt road there was an un-named
Mojave wash, and moon-white bones and an old woman
finding them. I knew it was time to leave what had
once been my home.
It was time to hunt the moon.
***********
3. Terra Incognita
It is fate that determines the territory
of the heart.
---Terry Tempest-Williams
Desert Quartet
"She holds herself in the fire dying
through the eleventh hour
through the twelfth
with the outrageous hope..."
Miriam Dyak
quoted in Ilse Asplund's
Eco-Feminism: Bridging the Gap
Sometime in the next six months I will move to a
one-room cabin in XXXXXX, The Desert. Sooner than later. Fate determines not only the territory of the heart, but its timing.
"Why XXXXXX?, friends and neighbors ask.
XXXXXX because there is a huge military base and
bombing range and that guarantees the little town will
never be regarded as charming by the rich and jaded.
XXXXXX because on my first drive through town there
were never more than five vehicles ahead of me at a
traffic light. Those vehicles were bleached-out and
battered pick-up trucks and Eighties beaters with
windows tacked together from duct tape and plastic
wrap. And there were maybe a dozen traffic lights.
I'm moving to XXXXXX, The Desert because my neighbors
(despite a city council that believes global warming
is a hoax) will be committed to keeping the town desert
rat's-ass. They are already known for turning out by
the hundreds at planning and zoning meetings armed
with references to XXXXXX's General Plan. And most of
them live in real houses...which are their first and
only homes.
So far, I haven't heard of any absentee landlords,
though there is fierce debate about whether Walmart
ought to be allowed in. The debate is not about taxes
or killing local businesses---most of the local
businesses are dug in deep as desert wildflower roots.
The debate is about carbon foot-print: Is Walmart's
toxicity worse than the forty-five minutes to drive to
the nearest town with discount stores?
I'm moving to XXXXXX, The Desert because when I asked
my ally there what kind of Big Money was in the
place---Old Money or New Money?, she laughed, "There's
no money, Big or otherwise."
There are lots of artists and potters and musicians
in XXXXXX. There are only a few writers. And, there
is a deep hunger to write. I will have work.
Should I ever have enough to buy a house in XXXXXX,
The Desert, there are decent two-bedroom houses for
$65,000. Since I am not likely to be a buyer, there
are apartments for rent for $500.. The place could be
Flagstaff, Arizona 1985.
My new home will cost $300. a month. I'll
share kitchen and bath with my land-lady. When I wake
in the morning, I'll look out on miles of golden
Mojave stretching to cobalt and buff mountains---in all directions. I will be
held in a circle of granite and basalt---and rock whose names I have yet to know.
And therein lies the essence of why I am moving to
XXXXXX, The Desert. I woke the first morning of my
working visit to the place. As always, I was
frightened. My mind whirled: loss, loneliness, not
enough money; age, the rotting publishing world. I
opened the curtains over the north window.
First light was amber on the creosote and cactus. I
didn't know the names of most of the plants. I wanted
that knowledge. Second light fell on the first of an
aviary of birds. I did not know their names. I
wanted to. And then, the top of the creosote went
red-gold. I stepped out into warm air and looked
east. The sun crested a purple-black range of mountains
whose names I did not know.
I went into the cabin and picked up my notebook and
pen. I sat on the low stoop and made notes about
second light and nameless birds and red-gold creosote.
It was the first time I had wanted to write in
months. There were more question marks than words.
The lacunae were mysteries for the solving.
The absences are the reason I am moving to XXXXXX, The
Desert. They will save my life.
"I asked my seven year old daughter, 'What does the
environment mean?' She answered simply, "'It's the
circle of life."
All things turning, one into the other, without division."
Ilse Asplund
Eco-Feminism: Bridging the Gap (1990)
(The name of the town has been changed to protect the
still-innocent.)
TERRA INCOGNITA
1. Cabin Becoming a Crow
Seven years ago my best friend and I drove East on I-40. We were headed for a writing conference in central Oklahoma. When we saw the Cuervo highway exit in New Mexico, we pulled off. It was time for coffee. What better place to drink my friend's fierce dark brew than a dirt road on which we might be attended by fierce dark birds.
There were no ravens, but there was an old New Mexico cemetery. The tombstones were melting back into the rose-gray dirt. The inscriptions were in Spanish.
There were stone lambs weathered to gray lumps on some of the markers. What dates we could make out told us that the bones gone to pure mineral under them had been the bones of ninas y ninos.
The names of the grown-up dead might have been given in hopes of bestowing virtues and blessings. Fulgencio. Rosendo. Adora. Epifania. Dulce.
Shining One. Path of Fame. Beloved. Manifestation. Sweetness.
The oldest stones were carved with roses and crosses and circles. There was a rusted iron grill around a family grave. Faded plastic roses glowed pink and pale orange in the mid-morning light. The silence was crystalline.
We drank our coffee, talked and were quiet; then we gathered up the plastic flowers that had blown into the ditch between the cemetery and the dirt road. We scattered them on the oldest graves, and on the most recent burial. There was no last name. Only this: Juan. Our brave son. 1950-1968.
We headed back on the dirt road. A town rose on the hillside to the east. We drove slowly up through its six streets. Lights burned in perhaps five of the twenty houses. We wondered who lived there. We made up stories that the families left were the grand-children of vaqueros and miners. We imagined asking about buying a house, and learning that only those from the original familes would be allowed to own property in that place. We were good at telling stories. We drove, always, on roads of worship and imagination.
-space break-
This winter I drove east to visit my daughter. I was alone. It was midnight by the time I came to the Cuervo exit. I was tired and the moon was just past New. I pushed through the last miles to Tucumcari and slept in the Buckaroo Motel. I woke to a thread of pale green seaming the eastern horizon. A mother cat and her teen-age kittens twined around my ankles as I went for coffee. The owner's young daughter ran to get me milk. The cats and I drank our breakfasts in the chill air.
I timed my return trip so I could visit Fulgencio, Rosendo, Adora, Epifania, Dulce and Juan. I slept again in the Buckaroo Motel. Again, the mother cat and three kittens who lived in the laundry next to my room greeted me as I brought my coffee to the stoop. For a few minutes, I felt less alone.
I drove west in the growing light. By the time I came to the Cuervo exit, the sky behind me was soft tangerine. I found my way past the hill-side houses and pulled up to the cemetery. There was a new fence around the graves. A road had been bull-dozed up to a new gate. Epifania's marker had been set upright. A vase of roses tilted at its base. The flowers were frozen. I righted the vase.
Again I gathered plastic lilies and marigolds from the ditch and scattered them over the graves. Again I drove back through the little town. All the houses but one were breaking apart into the earth and air. The authorities had tacked Condemned signs on the doors. There seemed to be only one story to tell about Cuervo. It was the story echoing in my smaller life.
-space break-
This morning I woke to bone deep cold. The fire in the woodstove was dead. I went to the woodpile in my front entry. I bent to pick up a log and saw that the floor under the edge of the woodpile had crumbled down into the dirt below.
Cuervo surrounds me. My cabin is becoming earth. Air. A crow.
2. Hunting the Moon
"Each generation receives a little capsule of
instructions, says Eisley, that passes through the
eye of the needle like a blowing seed. They are
carried "through the molecular darkness of a minute
world below the field of human vision and of time's
decay."
"They are transmitted from one generation to
another in invisible puffs of air known as
words---words that can also be symbolically incised on
clay. As the delicate printing on the mud at the
water's edge retraces a visit of autumn birds long
since departed, so the little tablets in perished
cities carry the seeds of human thought across the
deserts of millenia.
---Loren Eisley, The Star Thrower"
in Richard Wentz' The Contemplation of Otherness:
the critical vision of religion.
Barn's burnt down
now I can see the moon.
---Masahide
All wisdom is rooted in learning to call
things by the right name.
---Kung-fu Tze
I write on a tablet of light from a perishing city.
In its outskirts I could be anywhere: Phoenix, Chapel
Hill, Seattle, Flagstaff. In their outskirts, the
cities have perished. Or been transmuted by the kiss
of vampires.
Still, instructions drift through the eye of the
needle. From Masahide. From my younger self. He
tells me there is radiance beyond charred black. I have
fore-told my future.
I once wrote: "That double light of story and
connection has shone true---on the levelling and
subdividing of the hills and creeks of my childhood
home; on the gentrification of the neighborhoods we
hippies re-built in the heart of an Eastern city; and
even now, on Western towns and earth disappearing
before our eyes, eaten by insatiable hungers as
thoroughly as bone by cancer.
Under that light, in pure gratitude, I offer story
and the possibility of connection, delicate and
essential as Desert Big Horn bones in an un-named
Mojave wash---or any first meeting."
Over the last four years, the double light of story
and connection began to fade from my life. In the
last year I came to doubt that it would do anything
but disappear. A few friends; the Sacred Mountains; a
cluster of seven Ponderosa, one of them reduced to a
stump by the busy work of the forest service; the
double-trunked pine behind my cabin, the ancient alligator juniper in the meadow at the base of the mountains---women and men,
stone and trees have been my illumination, my medicine
and fragile tether.
Two months ago I learned that the Hassyampa Insitute
for Creative Writing summer writing conference had
been killed. For ten years or more, writers and
teachers have gathered in Prescott, Arizona for a week
of work and beauty. A month ago, a gifted editor and
even more gifted friend told me that it had become
impossible to publish the books she loved; and then
another editor and friend said an identical
lament.
I told myself that as long as my hand moved a pen
over paper; as long as my fingers moved words out
through computer keys, I was where I needed to be. I
walked with friends, sat with the trees. The dark territory in me
grew.
And then, I was invited to a little desert town to
read and teach writing for a Land
Trust. I drove west between blue-black mountains. I
was alone on the little two-lane till a beat-up
Eighties Ford truck appeared on the western horizon.
As the driver passed me, he slowed, grinned and raised
his hand.
I waved back and pulled off onto mosaic hardpan;
climbed out and leaned against the car. The mountains
to the south had begun to catch pink-gold light. It
seemed vital to know their names. There is always a
road atlas on the passenger seat. I opened it and
studied the Eastern Mojave.
Old Woman Mountains.
I smiled as I had not for much too long. Easily,
deeply. I knew the barn was nearly burnt. I knew
that somewhere down a dirt road there was an un-named
Mojave wash, and moon-white bones and an old woman
finding them. I knew it was time to leave what had
once been my home.
It was time to hunt the moon.
***********
3. Terra Incognita
It is fate that determines the territory
of the heart.
---Terry Tempest-Williams
Desert Quartet
"She holds herself in the fire dying
through the eleventh hour
through the twelfth
with the outrageous hope..."
Miriam Dyak
quoted in Ilse Asplund's
Eco-Feminism: Bridging the Gap
Sometime in the next six months I will move to a
one-room cabin in XXXXXX, The Desert. Sooner than later. Fate determines not only the territory of the heart, but its timing.
"Why XXXXXX?, friends and neighbors ask.
XXXXXX because there is a huge military base and
bombing range and that guarantees the little town will
never be regarded as charming by the rich and jaded.
XXXXXX because on my first drive through town there
were never more than five vehicles ahead of me at a
traffic light. Those vehicles were bleached-out and
battered pick-up trucks and Eighties beaters with
windows tacked together from duct tape and plastic
wrap. And there were maybe a dozen traffic lights.
I'm moving to XXXXXX, The Desert because my neighbors
(despite a city council that believes global warming
is a hoax) will be committed to keeping the town desert
rat's-ass. They are already known for turning out by
the hundreds at planning and zoning meetings armed
with references to XXXXXX's General Plan. And most of
them live in real houses...which are their first and
only homes.
So far, I haven't heard of any absentee landlords,
though there is fierce debate about whether Walmart
ought to be allowed in. The debate is not about taxes
or killing local businesses---most of the local
businesses are dug in deep as desert wildflower roots.
The debate is about carbon foot-print: Is Walmart's
toxicity worse than the forty-five minutes to drive to
the nearest town with discount stores?
I'm moving to XXXXXX, The Desert because when I asked
my ally there what kind of Big Money was in the
place---Old Money or New Money?, she laughed, "There's
no money, Big or otherwise."
There are lots of artists and potters and musicians
in XXXXXX. There are only a few writers. And, there
is a deep hunger to write. I will have work.
Should I ever have enough to buy a house in XXXXXX,
The Desert, there are decent two-bedroom houses for
$65,000. Since I am not likely to be a buyer, there
are apartments for rent for $500.. The place could be
Flagstaff, Arizona 1985.
My new home will cost $300. a month. I'll
share kitchen and bath with my land-lady. When I wake
in the morning, I'll look out on miles of golden
Mojave stretching to cobalt and buff mountains---in all directions. I will be
held in a circle of granite and basalt---and rock whose names I have yet to know.
And therein lies the essence of why I am moving to
XXXXXX, The Desert. I woke the first morning of my
working visit to the place. As always, I was
frightened. My mind whirled: loss, loneliness, not
enough money; age, the rotting publishing world. I
opened the curtains over the north window.
First light was amber on the creosote and cactus. I
didn't know the names of most of the plants. I wanted
that knowledge. Second light fell on the first of an
aviary of birds. I did not know their names. I
wanted to. And then, the top of the creosote went
red-gold. I stepped out into warm air and looked
east. The sun crested a purple-black range of mountains
whose names I did not know.
I went into the cabin and picked up my notebook and
pen. I sat on the low stoop and made notes about
second light and nameless birds and red-gold creosote.
It was the first time I had wanted to write in
months. There were more question marks than words.
The lacunae were mysteries for the solving.
The absences are the reason I am moving to XXXXXX, The
Desert. They will save my life.
"I asked my seven year old daughter, 'What does the
environment mean?' She answered simply, "'It's the
circle of life."
All things turning, one into the other, without division."
Ilse Asplund
Eco-Feminism: Bridging the Gap (1990)
(The name of the town has been changed to protect the
still-innocent.)
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