Category Archives: Writings

Typewriter Haiku

My friend Frederica has asked me to contribute haiku to her installation about uranium that will be going into the Coconino Center for the Arts in a show called Uranium Legacy. We both decided I should focus on peace.

I write my best poetry on my typewriter, on the top of our land, sitting at a desk that looks out to three different mountain ranges and is snuggled in the arms of the Ortiz Mountains. This morning, I rose with the sun for the fourth time this week, got myself up the hill to the Poetry Hut and wrote haiku on scraps of paint samples (yellow ones, of course.) I tried to imagine all the people who have been affected by uranium; the children who were given uranium toys to play with, those that lost their health mining it, the many, many victims of the atomic bombs. I tried to imagine how to help them find peace after such injustice.

A lot of these haiku are about finding inner peace. A few of them focus on finding your voice after you have been wronged. Some are about justice. I have not been directly affected by uranium, but I understand how it is to be wronged by selfish powers. I feel anger that our earth is raped for even more violence. I don’t want people to placidly accept injustice–I want us all to find our voices to stop it, as peace warriors.

Here are some of my favorite ones:

Find a way to peace                                                                                                                                            Let it be your only goal                                                                                                                                   Come back to your heart

Mystery of god                                                                                                                                                 Contained in earth’s elements                                                                                                                           Not for careless use

Peace will end the pain                                                                                                                                        Peace and justice united                                                                                                                                     Start with peace inside

Truth and Honey

Dear Higher Self,

My family disagrees with my politics and my religion, and talk about their views but don’t let me talk about mine. My friends suggests engaging with them “won’t change anything, and will just upset them.” I don’t want to upset anyone, but I’m tired of not having a voice. I’m also tired of having to assert myself every time to be heard. What should I do?

Sincerely,

Just Wants to Show Love

 

Dear Gentle Soul,

It’s not that you “aren’t allowed” to talk about things, it’s that they prefer you would keep silent about it because it brings up unpleasant feelings in them. You can say “I know you don’t want to talk about this, but I’m going to.” This is how you bring persistence and love into speaking the truth. This is how you break their unspoken rules without flaunting them.

If you want to show love, then you will speak your heart with kindness but firmness. No need to tell them what to do, judge them, call them names or use harsh language. Keep it firm but center around your experience. Everyone has the right to speak about their own perspective! If you have been kind and they still get upset, then it is their path that they have blocked, it is their fear and judgment that arise. No one should be exempt from gentle honesty because of their specific fears.

Imagine that your voice is like honey. When not used for a long time, it crystallizes and won’t flow. When fresh or reheated, it spreads easier. The more honesty you spread, the more it softens, becoming gentle and easy. When you first start, it will be stiff and hard and you need to work with it, warm it. Use it often, keep it soft and it will go farther. But the good thing about honey is that it never goes bad—it is always edible and delicious.

Honeybees are the tears of the Egyptian sun god Ra. Those sacred tears were made up of holiness—all the emotions of the world are contained in tears like that, and so there is not only sadness, but happiness, joy and release. They contain all humanity, and because of that they taste sweet. Imagine your honesty and your voice as those tears—as sweet as honey. Both the Atharvaveda (ancient Hindu scripture) and the ancient Greeks associated lips anointed with honey with the gift of eloquence. If you consciously cover your lips now with honey, you’ll notice it has filled the cracks, the place of pain and blood, and makes your lips feel plump and full. The words become sweet.

The Jewish historian Josephus noted that the name of the poet and prophet Deborah meant “bee”. The same root, dbr, gives us “word”, indicating the bee’s mission to give the Divine Word, or Truth. Truthful word is like honey, essential and sweet. It never spoils, it has healing qualities and gives us insight into the Divine meaning of life. Like a bee, you are tasked to ingest the individual grains of truth, the small seeds, digest them, and transform them into the sweetest, highest truth. Then share that sweetness.

Bees are endangered, and their hives are threatened by the advance of “progress”. If you don’t practice your voice, it will go extinct. It will die, and no one will be able to enjoy its nectar. Bees are also highly social insects that operate within a teamwork-based community. If you don’t speak up, you will isolate yourself and will stop interacting with the people that you say you love. Instead, contribute as a member of the hive and the family!

You want to speak out because you need to practice your voice. Your closest relationships require that you be your most authentic self; in your relationships with your beloved, with your child, with your friends and with your family. To have a voice means that you can go deeper into those relationships, grow closer to truth and be your best. The bee pollinates other flowers as it creates its honey, and you too fertilize other minds when you discover your truth through your life journey. Don’t limit the spread of it.

If you really “just want to show love” then you will stop protecting people from the truth, stop shielding them and not upsetting them. They are fearful of some of the things you will say because they have long ago stopped speaking their own voice. They have tried to stop it in others as well. But those are not your rules and that is not your game. You have your own life that you get to choose how to live. You have your own heart that governs you and you are not required to live up to their expectations. You are not required to please them, but to have a loving family you are required to have open communication.

Practice your voice in difficult situations, and it will become stronger and heard more clearly. You will find that your words have more depth and more conviction and those that are ready to hear you will find their way to you. It will be effective and will be heard, if not to the family who disagrees, but to others outside the family.

Yes, it is valuable for you to speak your voice and to be heard. It may be hard work, but it’s as precious as the gold of the honey.

Self-Dove

I’ve been so focused on external goals lately—I finished my MFA in creative writing in December—that care for my body has been neglected. And so now it’s January, and I have a winter fluff about me. I don’t mind the extra weight so much as the stiffness of my joints, the slug of my movements, and the overall heavy feel I have with all my thoughts and actions. I operate better 10 pounds lighter, and my heart is lighter too.

This is the best time to practice self-love, though. I know that I will soon have lost the unneeded layers of mass, but in the meantime, I wiggle and bless them up. I prefer to see it as a transition time—a moment for me to reexamine the things I carry, and a chance to empty my load of unnecessary items.

I have a few burdens that I need to set down, things that are not meant for me, emotions I choose not to pack in my suitcase. The extra weight is patterns, rules and expectations that I did not consciously know I allowed into my knapsack on this life journey.

But I prefer to pack light both emotionally and physically, both metaphorically and literally, as for an airplane trip. That way, I don’t have to wait for other people to deliver (or carry) all my baggage, I don’t have to ask other people to do the lifting, moving and sorting—I can do it all myself. It requires me to live a simple life. Carrying little to no baggage keeps me independent, and the experience flexible. When I carry little, it makes me fly higher, longer and further. It doesn’t take as much energy.

I have seen so many doves lately; on a piano, in nature, on a poster across the street, and even Dove Valley Rd. was on a road sign we went under last night, that I have had to explore what that means to me. Doves are symbols of peace and serenity, signaling transitions in existing relationships that have rough spots in them, which is all appropriate for me right now. I like to think that the closer I get to internal peace, the lighter my body and heart will become, and the higher I will be able to fly. I’ll become whiter, purer, and more in line with the spirituality I seek. I can rise above the sullenness of a reluctant body.

Open Road Heart

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; there’s nothing like the open road to get my creative juices flowing! My heart just swells with the freedom, the adventure, the possibility as I travel. I call it Open Road Heart. Journeys bring insight and connections to my world that my productive daily routine does not.

That’s why I applied yesterday for the Amtrak train writing residency. Imagine—five days riding the train from Flagstaff to Chicago on the Southwest Chief. I rest in the sleeper car, dine in the dining carriage, and write all day long. I’ll be alone, yet stimulated. I’ll be moving forward yet suspended. *When* I get the AmtrakResidency, I will get to experience Open Rail Heart. I can’t wait!

For today, though, Owen and I are on our way to Mesa, AZ to meet with members of the Mesa Arts Center. Owen has a sculpture project he’s facilitating with their Creative Catalyst group of young professionals under 40. I’m renting out the Telepoem Booth to them for Spark! Mesa’s Festival of Creativity. (If you haven’t heard about the Telepoem Booth project– to “dial-a-poem”–see more information here: TelepoemBooth.com.)

I’m very excited about this meeting, as it is one of the first successful steps in my new career as a writer and creator. The Telepoem Booth project combines two of my favorite worlds—word and art, and combines it with my favorite sense, touch. The sweet spot in the middle is the portal to magic, at least for me.

I love words. But words won’t just stay on the page for me; they jump off and become 3-dimensional. They become objects in and of themselves and have angles, become characters and stories. For instance, I have a collection of words and names that have popped up in my world more than three times each in the last few weeks; numinous, milieu, lacrima, Nimue, clavicle. They have synchronistically similar sounds, don’t they? I want to invite them to a dinner party of a poem, introduce them to each other and see what conversations they make amongst themselves.

I really love the sense of touch and I think we often overlook it in our daily lives. I wish there were a collection of word sculptures, so I really could fondle each and every noun, verb and adjective. Some would be rough granite. Others polished white marble with gold fleck. Some would flow in cursive script, others would be wooden grain, patinaed with a constant run of fingers over the years. Until a sculpture lexicon comes into being, I will have to be content with the imagined words between my forefinger and thumb and rub them together, searching the print for meaning.

As for the feel of travel, in a way a journey is a constant source of new contact zones for our kinesthetic pleasure. The wheels, the rails—they always run over new surfaces. The tread of a tire grooves the way; the rhythm of the rails glide and smooth the way. Travel is a kinesthetic sense, a sense our bodies have of perpetual forward motion. When I travel the Southwest Chief, I’ll sit still, find my internal mind, and come into contact with all the new textures and words that my fingers feel I should know. I guess I could say I am as excited to touch these new sensations as I am to see the new sights.

 

Synchronicities: Trickster Version

This is the first installment of a synchronicity project that Lauren Paredes from Portland, OR and I are undertaking. Lauren read my post “The Reason I Read: Or Seven Synchronicities I’ve Had With Books Recently”, tracked me down online and wrote a completely charming introductory email. “I completely agree with you about feeling like those moments are pieces of evidence that you’re on the right track – I truly believe that,” she said.

We decided to do some research on the phenomena, pay attention to it happening in our own lives and share the pieces of synchronicities and magic with each other and then a broader audience. I am so grateful for this person who landed in my life to push me into a more aware and deeper-seeking lifestyle! I haven’t had any trouble spotting synchronicities; the biggest problem I’ve had is interpreting them.

Last weekend, my partner Owen and I traveled to Taos and Santa Fe, NM. At the beginning of the trip, I asked for synchronicities along the way that would help us decide if we should move to either place, as we want to eventually move somewhere outside of Flagstaff, AZ. We search for someplace with new opportunities for professional growth (I’m a writer and Owen’s a sculptor.) I was reading “The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity” by Trish MacGregor and Rob MacGregor and realized that I had to ask for synchronicities to answer my questions–and be ready for them when they came.

In Taos, we checked into our Airbnb, owned by Joni who looked like a lot of other in-shape older yogis from Flagstaff. In fact, her parents lived in Flagstaff. After dinner we went to the Alley Cantina. I struck up a conversation with Tony, an Australian hotelier who had traveled to New Mexico for a few days. Owen discovered that he and Tony both knew two different businessmen from the days when Owen worked as a consultant and designer. Both were named John, one from New Zealand and the other from Bali. Then I looked at the dance floor and saw a friend from Flagstaff. She was an English instructor for the university I used to work for. I passed her in the hallways many times as I finished my MFA degree and I had boogied next to her many nights in my hometown—and here she was, seven hours away in Taos, to visit her mom and dad.

We thought for sure we were supposed to move to Taos that night. But in the morning, the town wasn’t as appealing. We listened to a few different shopkeepers, and they all inferred similar themes; choosing the artist lifestyle meant being poor and Taos is not as chi-chi as Santa Fe (and proud of it.) After we left each store, we joked about how everyone “talked long…and listened short.” People seemed frustrated with the local economy. Some shopkeepers even followed me around and watched me so close that I felt like I couldn’t touch anything–or that I was a potential shoplifter! Still, we had a great time and saw Big Horn Sheep, ducks and hawks when we went to BlackRock Hot Springs.

The animals had a lot to say this trip. As we left town, a coyote crossed in front of us. The trickster archetype! I had read “Synchronicities are the jokers in nature’s pack of cards for they refuse to play by the rules and offer a hint that, in our quest for certainty about the universe, we have ignored some vital clues,” (F. David Peat, Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind.) I realized the Taos synchronicities were a bit of a cosmic joke. We had felt at home in Taos because it was similar to our current life, the place that has served well, but that we are looking to expand our horizons beyond. In fact, we had both received synchronicities from our old careers—the very ones that we had left behind because of their creative limits!

When we went to Santa Fe, we also saw someone from Flagstaff, one of my son’s high school teachers. Then we went to Allan Houser’s sculpture studio, as he has influenced Owen on a current marble sculpture project. By chance, Allan’s number one assistant, Tony Lee, who worked with Houser from 1989 til his death in 1994, showed up at the studio. Another Tony! Owen had a great time talking with him about sculpture. This was a synchronicity that pointed positively towards Owen’s new career potential in Santa Fe, but I’m not sure what it meant for me.

Paul Kammerer was an Austrian biologist who came up with the theory of “the law of seriality.” He stated that the phenomenon was an objective but undiscovered principle of nature. He used to study random-chance events to see how many people were using umbrellas or wearing the same hat and classified his synchronicities into first, second, third, and high-order series. All of Kammerer’s research influenced Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity. I’m not sure what all the synchronicities in Santa Fe meant, but I’m collecting them and others to keep track.

Here is a list of other things I’ve noticed this week:

Lost Items

  • My turquoise horse fetish that represented healing and strength
  • Owen’s Ipad
  • Taos guide books

Found Items

  • Owen’s Ipad! (lost in the menus at El Gamal, Taos)
  • 1 pink plastic bead
  • 4 pennies (in the Hot Springs in Taos)
  • 1 quarter and 1 dime (near the Earthships in Taos)
  • $12 in bills (in the snow, near the fabulous waterfall in Flagstaff)

Animals

  • horses
  • big horn sheep
  • ducks
  • hawks
  • quail
  • coyote

Words/Names

  • clavicle (x3)
  • lacrima (x3)
  • milieu (x2)
  • Tony (x2—one from Santa Fe, one from Australia)
  • Nimue (x2—in novel and Fairy Cards)

Numbers

  • 11:11 and 1:11 (too many times to count)
  • 12
    • found $12 in snow
    • dreamt I received a $1200 rent check

Dream Images

  • phonebooths and coins
  • buying eggs and milk from the grocery store
  • a scooter
  • the badhakonasana yoga pose (needed for female cycle)
  • Crystal Bridges (the museum in Arkansas that I’ve never been to)
  • cupcakes
  • cell phones and voicemail messages 10 minutes long
  • oil and vinegar
  • Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac

 

Some of the synchronicities are just surface level coincidences that tickle my fancy, but there are those synchronicities that hint at a deeper order in the universe. I found out that physicist David Bohm called this the implicate or “enfolded order”, that births everything in the universe, even time. External reality is the explicate order. Synchronicity is where the implicate and the explicate, the inner and the outer, coincide. This is also called psychoid, where it shares both psychic and material aspects and acts as well on a psychic or material plane. (A synchronicity here; I found David Bohm’s book at a bookstore after I had read this about him. It was so scientific it went completely above my head, but it was fun to find it.)

This hunt for deeper meaning is making me feel more alive. It gives me daily motivation to wake up, feeling like life is a treasure hunt and I’m the only one that can understand its clues. I feel a bit younger too, as if life is more playful and fun.

Motherlove

"Mother and Child" by Mary Cassatt

“Mother and Child” by Mary Cassatt

My dad texted last night to say that Mom was in the Emergency Room. It was her gall bladder, the doctors didn’t know why it hurt, but “they’ll be home soon.” This is typical of my parents. Every piece of bad news is glossed over with something meant to be comforting.

This is the fourth time in four months that my 74-year-old mom has been in the ER. Gall Bladder Sludge, Urinary Tract Infection, Ovarian Cysts…the tally of her ailments runs like an extra-long receipt at the grocery store—and the price is even higher.

My sister and I pay attention to the sum total of these transactions and try to see what the larger bill might become. “Something’s wrong” my sister constantly says. What’s wrong is that my mother is getting old. She may die soon, she may rally and die later, but what’s certain is that—like all humans—she will certainly die someday. And to fathom the meaning of a mother’s death seems to me a Great Mystery of human existence, a paradox of importance.

Mothers are life-givers. Mothers are the source. While my father obviously contributed to my conception, my mother was the carrier, the womb, the chalice. She was the fertile cave that sheltered my first fragile life. She nurtured me within the innermost reaches of her body and I was privy to all her secret recesses. I fed at the deepest, most important spring of life that she could offer. I exist because of my mother.

And now my mother’s poor health teases death into my consciousness. The possibility of death, however slight, makes me want to have full presence and cognizance of her life now, while it’s available.

That sounds like a great plan. And then I remember that my mum and I haven’t been on the best of terms lately. My mother is upset with me for not believing the way she does, and I have been speaking more openly about my own belief system. I don’t want to sweep our differences under the rug; I want to be heard and loved despite our differences.

I love my mother unequivocally and that love is returned. But still, there is an estrangement of the heart. The one thing my mom wants is the one thing that I cannot give her. For me to say “I believe” in her God and her religion would be my mother’s ultimate wish. Until then, I sense she holds me at arm’s length, using her religion as a barrier to true connection and true sharing. It seems like my mother can’t let me into her innermost chambers of her heart until I agree that her belief system is correct, that she has dedicated her whole life rightly, and that I recommit to it.

But I can’t do this, even for her. If I were allowed to talk freely, without harsh words or tears from her in return, I would tell her that I don’t believe there is only one way; I believe that there are many paths to the same goal. I learned individuality, independence, self-reflection and all sorts of inner secrets from her and her life force. I learned to be a strong woman. I learned to think for myself and to be true to myself.

The gestures that resonate most from the total experience of my childhood are a head held high above my shoulders and a hair flip of my horse-like mane. Physical expressions that were indifferent to public opinion and valued personal freedom were what she taught me. These are the ways my body remembers my mother’s example. I am a proud woman with a beautiful, sexual and rich life force, things she wanted for me that perhaps she couldn’t find for herself.

If there is any mystery equal to my mother’s God, it is the mystery of a mother’s Love. My mother has been responsible for creation of life, for the three of her children. This is the closest we humans can come to pure miracle. Perhaps the God Wall between my mom and I has no priority over the bond our bodies have already forged in the crucible of her womb. Perhaps I’ve always had and always will have access to her and her heart—it’s the privilege that comes from being born of her.

I test this theory out in yoga today. I close my eyes and set an intention to send my mother healing thoughts throughout my practice. In my inner world, it is easy to find her and her heart immediately, recognizable by the same feeling I get when she hugs me and calls me “Lizzy.” She’s not even very far; she is inside my own heart, beats in the same rhythm, courses the same bloodlines. To love my mother is to love myself. There is no wall between us after all; only the heart valve that opens and shuts to prevent us from flowing backwards.

 

Tasty like Tears

Tasty Tears

“You write because you turn sadness into funny,” said the dream gods last night.

Thank you. Thank you for that. I had gotten so PMS-y that I had turned into the worst kind of negative blockage—the blasé blockage. “I just don’t want to do anything, I don’t care about anything,” says the voice of apathy. That voice is the most dreadful creeper of slime I’ve yet encountered. If I’m furious and mad, I can rebel. If I’m distraught and in pain, I can rally from the passion of it all. But anytime I feel as though “I don’t care,” I know that I’ve put too much distance between me and my source; I’ve swaddled myself in too many layers of cotton to be able to thrash about freely. Apathy is when I’ve anesthesized myself, but looked away from all of the needles.

I would rather swoon from the sight of my deadening. Or perhaps not become numb in the first place: Isn’t it better to hydrate on one’s tears than to be dry…and thirsty? To take it further, isn’t it better to have an open heart that could occasionally get hurt than a closed one that grows smaller through disuse?

They say that like attracts like. If we are able to feel the depths of despair or sadness, then we are also building in ourselves the capacity for light and love—and the two measures are alike in their closeness to the heart. When I wall off those feelings of inadequacy, or don’t look at them and deal with them directly, I am also cultivating indifference to joy. When I was pregnant, in Lamaze class, we practiced dealing with pain by holding an ice cube. I was told to ignore the bite of that pain, become uninterested and unresponsive to that freezing burn. To me, this was impossible. Instead, I much preferred to dive down deep into the experience, to welcome the pain and let it wash over me. During labor, I rode the waves of my contractions, breathed down into their very core and found the bottom. Then I pushed up off the sandy floor and rose through to emerge on the other side.

Pain has depth. Pain has numinosity—it arouses spiritual emotion and is awe-inspiring. Pain and terror often overwhelm “those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man’s egotism and the divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.” (Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception.) We feel pain because we are human, because we are always wondering and longing for the deeper meaning. Being human means we can change our position.

But apathy, apathy is a shallow pond. There’s not much to see with apathy, no places to go. It’s a one-horse town, an organism-breeding puddle. If I don’t care, I don’t have to feel. My plane will neither take off nor land, and the scenery remains the same because I have stopped seeing it for lack of concern, interest and enthusiasm. Me—I need a little needle of pain to get me motivated. I look to the injection site and pull back the skin. Because my apathy is just the surface; the real feeling is in the blood that pumps underneath. Everyone knows that blood brings healing. If I give it air, clean it, care for it, I’ll never have to reopen the wound.

They say that life fills a void. If I feel empty after I clean up my apathy, after I cry and flush it out, it’s because I have excavated the infection. If I have done my job, it will be a flushed, clean cache, ready to secretly store new valuables that I have yet to find. I know that out of dark places can come the greatest jewels. As a metaphor for that realization, I once dreamt my best friend and I were forcibly thrown down into a cave. I was unable to rescue us until I simply grew big and lifted her out. When she was safe, I cleaned and inventoried the crannies of my cache, finding a purplish green pearl in the corner. I found a treasure in the deepest corner of my prison.

If you are what you eat, then you are who you hang around with. I am only as good as my social milieu, and so I enjoy people who can be honest, kind and perceptive with me. I enjoy those who remember the simple pleasures (because of course, too much materialism and extravagance brings a blasé perspective.) I enjoy people who catch snowflakes on the tip of their tongue, make metaphors in their casual conversation, and are start new, exciting endeavors with courage and persistence.

This morning brings the third rejection letter in the last 24 hours. I feel disappointed, and I am a woman under the pressure of hormones… so I cry. I also watch the snowflakes fall outside my window—they are so lovely and beautiful. They land where they will, they fall because it is their fate and the earth is of no consequence to them. Following their lead, I must only write for myself, it does not matter where I land. Every word is a snowflake, a cold unique object that forms differently every birth. I catch each on my tongue and savor; they melt over my taste buds and sense like my tears. And then I laugh. Like the wind it blows the teary snowflakes into a different place. At least I care, at least there is breath for movement and momentum for journey. The snowflakes and the tears stop simultaneously and things are still and quiet.

I want my snowflakes to be thick, heavy with moisture and to fall lazily, with intention but slow. I want them to make an effect when they land, tasty like tears. I want the snowflakes to blur the reading to an internal sight, to fall onto the page and make an indelible impression on the warp of the paper, and the psyche.

The BoilerRoom

BoilerRoom3

South of the tracks, tucked back off Phoenix Ave., is a building with two 15 ft. tall sheet steel-sheathed doors. You’ve never noticed it though you’ve walked by it 100 times. Or if you have observed it, you’ve wondered about it.

It’s known as the BoilerRoom because that’s what it once was. A first layer of igneous rock was laid to build the original Southwest corner in the 1920s. Vintage cinder block was added to it in the 50s and then the most modern building was placed upon that like layers in a sedimentary rock formation. The 1800 sq. ft. rectangular warehouse once housed steam-generating equipment for the laundromat on San Francisco St. American Laundry was owned by an immigrant family, built by Grandfather Wong with winnings from the Chinese lottery. It is now replaced by a dive bar and Thai restaurant.

The BoilerRoom has grease on the back wall where the boiler once exchanged oil for hot water vapor. Random pipes, dead wires, abandoned electrical outlets and boarded-up doors provide a visual history of the now-defunct business. The ceilings are high and the lofty windows near them tempt the tenants below with their unavailability. It smells of earth. Hand-hewn nails, broken hoe blades, ceramic tiles and pinning needles have been found as the place is excavated from layers of dirt.

After the laundromat, the BoilerRoom was used for many decades as storage, holding old roll-top desks, rocking horses, dollhouses and Christmas lawn decorations after divorces and many moves rendered the possessions inconvenient to the extended family of the owner.

The BoilerRoom is now a sculpture studio, creative-collaborative working space and raw gallery. While the artists conceptualize their 12 ft. high wooden nest sculptures, graffiti-style paintings, sewing projects, and tinker with old telephone booths, the branches from the Siberian elm trees grow through the warehouse windows up above. The steel doors slide open to let in the necessary studio ingredient of north light. Cinder blocks have cracked in right-angle tracks, allowing access to slanted beams of day that illuminate the dust motes.

Everything wants to get in to this space, where imagination is incubated.

 

 

Ekphrastic Flash Fiction 1

Blotterature cover

 

Life Systems

published in Blotterature Ekphrastic Issue

I was hungry like a battery for his love. He charged me up, like an unbroken orange and teal
horse, painted without restraint by a touched brush-master. I had that painting back home,
hanging on the hearth.

We had plugged in this morning. And again for tea-time, instead of scones and oolong, looking
out at The Blue Marble. The wormhole of time had brought us to 3 p.m. “This is becoming a
self-contained unit,” he thrust into our silent conversation, our bodies’ electricity.

We were running out of calories, oxygen, all the human keys of sustenance.

We saw the apogee of an asteroid like the flow of information from god. Time became
paradoxical, my finger pad touching itself. I was downloading nuance, drinking in the Nommo.

Below us, the 90-year-old yogi kicked into a headstand lotus. The lotus-eaters on earth turned on
their televisions. The radio waves of Ground Control’s last doomed words had subsided to only
gentle swells, and the last of the land’s wild mustangs shook their manes and ran.

During training, when I thought of my man-mate, I always thought of his chest. The warmth of
it, to begin with. And what was inside, I thought of that too. Hints of gravitas.

In space, we save precious matter in a box in his man-chest. To access, I lace golden chest hair
through my fingers, trace three scars with my time-sensitive pads, key in my print codes on the
Golden Triangle of his moles. Then we place gently harvested stray hairs, balling them up into
coils. Nail clippings, dried nose snots, and all other flesh detritus follow into the primordial
slime. I bury them in the strongbox, piling up the flesh of earth like I were burying a sweet little
seed.

My man-mate and I have evolved. His heart pumps forth green after green, sprouts of my
freshness from his treasury. We are a living system, self-contained, producing produce in the
dead space of the spaceship, overriding failed mechanical functions with our love battery, god-
flow, and carnal matter. We plug in and the cycle pulses.

We are like the wild horse. We need no one.

 

Deserving a chance to be understood

This essay I wrote, “Overcoming an Unusual Communication Difficulty” won the William Verville scholarship at Northern Arizona University. I’m sharing it here with my son’s permission, because, as he says “everyone deserves a chance at being understood.”

Overcoming Unusually Challenging Communication Difficulties

The most challenging communication difficulty I have had in my entire life has been daily communication with my 18-year-old son.

Isaac has autism, with speech and language impairment. He did not speak his first words until he was two, and did not speak in complete sentences consistently until he was in elementary school. He takes things very literally and has difficulty with abstract thought. For instance, just two years I accidentally slipped up and said “Please put the milk on the fridge,” instead of “in the fridge.” He took me at my literal word and I found the carton next to the dust bunnies on top.

When Isaac was younger, he couldn’t seem to comprehend my words, or keep track of the sequence of things. I took to drawing visual to-do lists. This included a shopping cart for the grocery store, a book for the library, and a car for the mechanics. I had to do this for every event in the day. Just saying the sounds didn’t make it into his processing system. It was similar to working with a deaf person; he would rarely look up when you called his name. He barely knew what words were, and he would have a hard time transitioning from activities without the visual aides.

We used visual images for many lessons, including “social stories” when Isaac was 7-10 years old. As you can imagine, his social skills were poor. He could barely speak in sentences, and definitely could not communicate his emotions, much less identify them. I would draw cartoons of tough social situations, including situations that required more empathy.

Isaac’s biggest social problem was his inability to tell anything but the truth.

“How do these pants look?” I would ask.

“They kind of make your butt-cheeks look huge,” he responded.

Without protest, I returned those pants immediately. Telling the truth might make you socially awkward, but at least everyone always know where you stand.

Isaac’s psychological diagnosis claims that he is well below average in the working memory category. “Working memory is different than short-and long-term memory because it requires more than simple rote recall, and necessitates that an individual maintain mental flexibility while encoding information into short-term memory,” says his psychological report. This means that Isaac can’t process difficult abstract thought. He can’t remain flexible while problem-solving, or regroup for Plan B at a moment’s notice. To help with this, I try to refer to the past, to something he already knows. We use many strategies of apperception and preparation.

For instance, before we went to parties when he was younger, I would try to explain how I knew these people, and how he was supposed to act. I said, ​“Now this is a Christmas party with lots of adults I work with at the library. Ann is the hostess, and my boss. Make sure you greet her, shake her hand and look her in the eye. She’ll probably want to know where you go to school, what you like to study, and other stuff like that. After you answer questions, you can take your dinosaur books into a quiet spot and read them.”

After the party, I would say “Isaac, it’s not okay to touch someone’s belly, even when it’s very large… And no. She’s not pregnant.”

It also means that our conversations and resolutions aren’t immediate. Isaac’s memory does not fire at the same speed. Sometimes it fires slow, sometimes he jumps way ahead, and sometimes it’s just stuck in a loop, much like a moebius strip. It’s like communication in space; some transmissions get through, some get lost, some take a really long time to arrive. Somedays it’s like a black hole–I don’t think anything will ever surface again.

But with patience and a lot of humor, I’ve raised Isaac to adulthood. I think he’s a reasonably good representation of a responsible young adult. He has his driver’s license, a job at Safeway, and will be studying film through the Coconino Community College to NAU program, living on the NAU campus. He has found a communication medium that resonates with his self-expression. His self-confidence, patience, and good attitude will help him get the extra help he needs.

And most importantly, he has a good heart, and you can’t really teach that from books anyway.