God drains
what God breathes
into us
so long between
breaths
Posted in Grief, Life Changes, Literary Inspiration, Poetry | Tagged depression, flow, inspiration, longing, poetry, spirituality | 2 Comments »
A doctor’s advice and some glib Facebook posts about people who shouldn’t get welfare assistance if they’re on drugs have set me off recently. I’m neither a druggie nor a welfare recipient, knock on wood, but I’m irritated by “just do it” remedies for complex issues.
Not long ago I was talking to a new doctor about a slew of issues, including hypothyroidism and fatigue. We were discussing biorhythms and she mentioned an article she’d read in which someone successfully changed from night-owl to day-person rhythms by forcing herself to rise early every. single. day. By never once deviating from this pattern, the author was able to change her clock.
Awesome.
“Have you tried this?” the doctor inquired.
I had to confess that although I had sometimes attempted reset my clock, I had not managed to achieve this degree of perfect discipline. So I suppose you could say I had not really tried. Lazy-ass that I am, I have not tried to climb Everest, either, though I have climbed many smaller mountains. On some of these relative hills I have turned back before reaching the summits. Lightning. Darkness. Ran out of water. Sprained ankle. The usual sorry excuses.
Did I not try? Now I am not sure.
“If you really want to, you could get up earlier,” she said.
My ex-husband always used to say this, come to think of it, when I would express frustration over not accomplishing everything I’d hoped to accomplish (which was usually more than he’d done, conveniently overlooked) in a day. “Get up earlier,” he’d say.
Ah, the simple solution, devised by the simple mind.
Note that this solution is not really based on evidence but on a belief, on a value system. On the idea, derived from anecdote, that a person can apply his or her will to something and achieve a change. The Little Engine That Could. The woman whom my doctor had read about changed her clock; ergo, it can be done. We all know someone who quit smoking; therefore, smoking can be quit.
Never mind that we know nothing of the woman in the article’s other circumstances, such as whether or not she has anything else wrong with her—does she have hypothyroidism? Any mood disorders? Any history of PTSD or head injuries? Or did she have just a plain old sleep disorder? What, in general, are the stats on people who try to change their clocks, and for how many years was she successful at this? At what age did she make this attempt?
It’s not like I haven’t consulted doctors about this before. Mostly I’ve been told that altering your biorythms cannot be done. I’ve also read accoun
ts of hunter-gatherer societies that seem to suggest that it’s not necessarily normal for human beings to follow the sun in terms of sleep-wake patterns.
People in non-agricultural and non-industrial societies pretty much 
go to bed whenever they feel like it, get up when they’re hungry or when they hear people singing around a fire and want to join in, and take naps when they’re tired. Also, in agricultural societies in parts of the world where there’s a lot of daylight, people may not be as stressed about fitting as much “productivity” into the day as those from northern climates are, and again they may not feel as rigid about sleep-wake cycles.
I’m skeptical of systems that allow no room for error—where for example you can never once oversleep, or never once have a drink or eat once piece of food containing sugar. Who’s that perfect? When I expressed this doubt, the doctor said, “Well, if you really want to change…”
Again, we’re back to the idea, the value system. Why do I want to rewire my whole system, again? Although it is probably true that I would feel less fatigued were I not constantly out of synch with the rest of this country, I do not think it is a problem that I am not a morning person, per se.
Possibly adjusting my thyroid dosage would be a more efficient place to start. For me. In terms of my overall life and everything that’s on my plate. I know. It seems like a saggy-butt, just-take-a-pill approach vs. the more pure, bootstrap, get-up-at-five-and-take-a-cold-shower-every-day-for-the-rest-of-your-life strategy.
Circling back to welfare and addiction. Most addictive substances have a relapse rate of around 70 percent, depending on what study you go with. Do we truly believe that the small percentage of people who succeed in quitting do so as a function of really wanting to and everyone else is lame? Or might there be more going on here than will power? Certainly wanting to quit has to be a prerequisite, but it’s probably one of those necessary but not sufficient kinds of things. All I’m saying is that things could be complicated. Possibly.
The connection I see between my doctor visit and the angry Facebook posts about welfare and druggies is the idea that people can will themselves to change always, and that because someone knows of a case in which this has happened, it must follow that it’s true for everyone.
For every example a person can bring up of this or that medical miracle or this or that person who willed themselves better, someone else can come up with a counter example. That’s the trouble with anecdotes. That’s the trouble with the myth of will power and the myth of America.
Still, it seems to me that the starting point, when trying to heal or help is listening to stories, rather than telling them. That’s what I, storyteller, have to say about that.
(PS, to be fair to this doctor, she did listen in other ways, and she had some additional advice which was good, and which I took.)
Posted in Life Changes | Tagged addiction, anecdotal evidence, biorhythms, sleep disorders, will power | Leave a Comment »
Once again these are the books that stood out for me among those I read this past year. They were not necessarily published in 2011; many of them appeared decades ago, in fact.
Fiction
- Native, by William Haywood Henderson. Henderson’s gorgeous, delicate, but also ripping first novel explores some themes similar to th
ose in “Brokeback Mountain.” This novel came out several years earlier. And it’s better, IMO. Not that there isn’t room for lots of this kind of thing in a big state like Wyoming. - The Sojourn, by Andrew Krivak. So many American novels are about personal anomie, with characters suffering from what the DSM-III used to call schizoid personality disorder. I’m left wondering, why should I care about characters who don’t care? This main character has every reason to be in this situation. He’s an immigrant three times over, having come to America, returned to Austria, and ultimately coming back to America. That is to say, he has no home. Yet, he fights for the Habsburgs in WWI, among so many tribal groups it’s hard to say why they’re fighting. It’s a time in history when close personal bonds are not always present. However, there is no narrative distance in this story. Great trick, Krivak.
- City of Light, by Lauren Belfer. A little soapboxy, or a lot, at times, but so interesting in terms of the industrialization of electricity and the social movements it either spawned or was coincident with. Take a trip to Buffalo, which once, like Pittsburgh, had a shot at being one of the centers of wannabe old-money American society (ie, robber barons aping blue-bloods…the ridiculousness goes on and on, but it’s worth reading about). What keeps this book out of mere book club classification is Belfer’s refusal to give her heroine a neat ending. She doesn’t wind up unhappy, exactly, but it’s a tough time in history to be a woman and there’s no real way out of that.
- Collected Stories of Frank O’Connor. Yeah, should have read these a long time ago. Thanks to author Thomas Powers for pointing this out after I mentioned a book of his in my blog last year.
- Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. I’ve read lots of Stegner’s longer works, but am only now working through the stories.
- The Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin. Actually I’m not sure I liked this one, but I recommend it so someone else will have suffered.
- The Good Son, by Michael Gruber. I recommend anything by Gruber, no matter
what’s wrong with it. His books are so interesting and engrossing that you come away satisfied even if the plot made no sense or the characters were slightly impossible. They’re supposed to be thrillers, but he takes his time building place and character, and it’s always worth it. His writing is pretty high-quality. Every once in a while, it’s as if he says to himself, oh, crap, I’m supposed to be writing a thriller, better stick in a sex scene on a kitchen counter. And so you have this awkward sex scene on a kitchen counter (nothing against kitchen sex, just awkward kitchen sex). In the end, though, you learn so much about whatever it is he’s writing about, plus the setting, that you don’t care. Okay, I don’t. The Good Son is about Afghanistan. - Sworn Before Cranes, by Merrill Gilfillan. I went back to this book after reading Great Plains (see below), to see if I liked it as much as I remembered. I had initially reviewed it for the Boulder Daily Camera back
in the 90s. Yeah, baby, it’s still beautiful. This may be one of the most under-noted and –appreciated story collections of the last century. Maybe that’s because they’re almost more like long prose poems than stories. Today, this form would be welcomed, perhaps even elevated over a conventional story. But then it was fairly radical to call this a short story. James Galvin’s novel-or-whatever-it-was, The Meadow, was out, and people were excited, but they weren’t sure what to do. What I like about Sworn before Cranes is the way he’s unafraid to delight in what he sees down in the pockets and folds in the plains. He’s a magic man. Where Frazier is at pains to show the braided glory and seaminess surrounding Native Americans since the Conquest, Gilfillan as a poet and naturalists has interests in sound and imagery. It’s good to read them both in the same year.
Nonfiction
- The Tiger, by John Vaillant. About a tiger who began stalking and killing some of the particular poachers who had wounded it. About Siberian Tigers in general. About Siberia. About the history of human-tige
r interactions. About why poachers poach. About the few people in Russia who are trying to protect the environment and why. And about how not just dead tigers but also the whole Siberian ecosystem is getting smuggled to China and made into stuff we’re buying in Home Depot. With the personality and menace of This Particular Tiger on every page. - Great Plains, by Ian Frazier. I hadn’t got around to this for some reason. I remember Frazier sitting in the Boulder Book Store back when it was a one-storey, one-slot place. He wasn’t giving a reading, just sitting behind a table with his ponytail, waiting for people to ask him questions and ask him to sign his book. I didn’t know who he was, but I like guys with ponytails. I kind of felt sorry for him. I thought, Oh another guy who drove across the country and wrote a book about it. It’s a great book.
- On the Rez, by Ian Frazier. Not sure who else could pull this off. At first you’re not sure who this book is about. Indians? Frazier? Frazi
er’s kids? The contents of his household? But Frazier is a good, entertaining writer and it’s no skin off your nose to keep reading, so do it. In the end it comes together with a big, WHOA, holy shit that was intense. Nose skinned. - The 4% Universe, by Richard Panek. It’s not even wrong, according to some reviews I read by math and physics majors! A user-friendly way to find out a little about dark matter by getting the dirt on how the scientists fought each other to discover it. I particularly liked learning about Vera Rubin, who did some of the important early calculations and pursued her Ph.D. (but not at Princeton, her first choice, because women were not admitted to the graduate school then) despite nursing four children. At one point concessions had to be made in a key telescope regarding the only bathroom…. For pete’s sake, as if we don’t all pee in one place inside our homes.
- Murder in the High Himalaya, by Jonathan Green. Not the greatest writing but a gripping story. Tibet is the weirdest place to read about because you might as well be in the middle of the Lord of the Rings, the references are so medieval and mystical. At the heart of the book is a moral dilemma that should not have been one—a community of climbers witnessed Chinese border guards shoot unarmed refugees—mostly
women and children. A 17-year-girl was killed. The event was filmed. The people who filmed it knew what to do—release it to the press. But most of the climbing community wanted to keep it under wraps so that they could stay on China’s good side and keep climbing in the area. The book digs into the story of the refugees, gives the official Chinese version, and explores the different climbers’ opinions. But overall you wind up thinking a lot about relative versus absolute morality. This isn’t even the Holocaust, where you might have to choose between your life and someone else’s, or between your child’s life and someone else’s. This is about whether you get a sponsorship for a being a jock. - Leaping Poetry, by Robert Bly. I saw this referenced in an interview with Bly in American Poetry Review and asked the library here at Phillips Exeter to get it. Bly argues, here and elsewhere, that American poetry has moved too far away from the great associative leaps that characterized romantic poetry as well as the work of many of the Spanish and South American poets, such as Lorca and Neruda. We’re too much stuck in our heads. He’s not arguing for the stream-of-consciousness stuff that we’re starting to see all over the place in MFA poetry now. Bigger leaps, more stream-of-SUB-consciousness stuff that requires a broader base of reading and experience.
- The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, by Alexandra Fuller. Drawn to the beauty of Western Wyoming, Fuller moved to the area near Pinedale and found
herself caught up in the conflict associated with the industrialization of that landscape for gas and oil development. In the life story of a young cowboy and roughneck, she epitomizes this tension. It’s not unlike The Tiger (above) in some respects. Fuller’s controlled but essentially gonzo journalistic style makes these characters sympathetic and gives the lie to narratives offered up by writers like Annie Proulx, which make the same landscapes look ugly and the same people bestial. One question is what are we going to do about the fact that we are turning our last wildernesses into grids full of drilling rigs, powerlines, switching stations, dusty dirt roads, and tanker trucks going up and down all day long? With little concern for worker safety as we go… - No Life for a Lady, by Agnes Morley Cleaveland. Memoir of ranching in New Mexico in the late 1800s. Interesting to compare her life with the
one depicted in City of Light, above. Cleaveland went East for her schooling and it must have been a shock to deal with the routines and proprieties people in the East were bothering with. Something I’d never heard before: there was a messianic figure who came to Denver, walking out of the Mohave desert. Francis Schlatter was so charismatic that special trains were sent to Denver full of people who wanted to see him and be healed by him. He disappeared, only to show up on the Morley ranch in New Mexico, where he dictated his life story to Agnes’s mother. The title he chose is wonderful: The Life of the Harp in the Hand of the Harper. However, although she recounts this tale about Schlatter, I’m struck by how little personal reflection on God comes through in these memoirs I’m reading about life in the American West around this time. - The Victorians, by Thomas J Schlereth. Actually reads pretty well. Packed with interesting facts and figures about this transformative time in our culture. Good stationary bike or elliptical reading.
Poetry
- Way More West, by Ed Dorn. I wanted to reread Gunslinger, but this was what was on my shelf here in my Exeter apartment, and it’s got parts. Never gets old.
- Morning Poems, by Robert Bly. Okay, I’m on a Bly kick. The stuff that’s coming out right now from him just rocks. So I looked on my shelf and found this, which I hadn’t got around to reading for some reason. Lots of strong pieces here. My only real objection, and it’s a big one, to Bly is that although he means to honor the feminine it’s always as he defines it, and his definition is always in terms of the male. Boring. But almost any poem that stays clear of that stuff, I love.
- From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, by Charles W. Pratt. Each quiet piece will make you think. Pratt’s had some airtime in 2011 courtesy of Garrison Keillor. Here’s a sample from my blog earlier in the ye
ar. - Three Russian Women Poets: Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Bella Akhmadulina, by Mary Maddock. I was feeling so unsatisfied with certain Akhmatova translations by Kunitz and Kenyon that I thought I might have to try my own hand at them. Luckily, I went looking for other versions, and after reading what was in this book, I decided I could sleep. I also discovered Akhmadulina, who is possibly a better poet (gasp). While I was at it, I read Feinstein’s biography of Akhmatova. Sometimes it’s better not to know.
- Perennial Fall, by Maggie Dietz. Just read it. If you find anything in there you don’t like, let’s discuss.
- When I received my fellowship, the identities of the fellowship committee members were revealed, I found out about their significant publication credits and awards. So I went out and bought their books. What an enriching and humbling experience to read them:
- Evidence of the Journey, by Ralph Sneeden
- Cameo Diner, by Matt Miller
- Strange Land, by Todd Hearon
Posted in Books, Literary Inspiration, Poetry, Reading, Writing | Tagged book choices 2011, great reads, recommended reading | Leave a Comment »
The other day I had lunch with someone who is a mix of colleague, old friend, mentor, and teacher. I’m not sure how he sees me, but I look up to him a lot. That day, I had been spending time with my thoughts and my pages, but hadn’t spoken to anyone out loud. When I caught up with him, I found out that I was a little disorganized.
It wasn’t just that my hair hadn’t dried yet, or that I was some minutes late, which is something people seem to notice in the East, when it wouldn’t even register in my usual habitat. I just felt scattered, flustered, and sweaty.
Later I spoke with a friend who is about a decade older than me, a successful young-adult novelist who told me she is retiring from writing, at least for the foreseeable future. Does your decision have anything to do with menopause? I asked.
I told her some of the confusing cognitive effects I’d been experiencing. Oh, she said. That’s temporary. Your mind comes back. She added: You do get a few years between menopause and Alzheimer’s when you can think.
She was quitting, she said, because she had nothing to say to anyone.
That was the part, I said, that felt like menopause to me. I still had things to say, but I kept falling into these emotionally blank spots where I wanted the world to leave me alone.
An end to nurturing, she said.
Yes, I said. Look, I’ve even wondered if menopause isn’t stalling out the careers of all these women I know in their 50s. They just gradually get either disinterested or grumpy or both. They stop putting out the effort, or they grow unpleasant to work with. The frog in gradually heating water thing. So they don’t promoted, or they get put on the projects no one wants, including them.
Over time they get isolated, which makes them more bitter and more grumpy, and more unpleasant to work with. The next thing you know they’re fired, or they quit. And they can’t find the energy or the interest to go out and sell themselves. Plus they’re angry.
The thing is, this is something that would pass… in, um,… maybe ten years. But because what happened was so gradual and environmental and reinforced by so many feedback loops, they don’t even know what it was, and now it’s built into their sense of self.
I remember seeing a Tweet from an agent. I won’t take any crazy or rude clients, she declared. What about cranky menopausal women, I wondered. Was this agent so sure she would have perfect self-control when she hit, oh, say, 48?
My writer friend had to be tracked down by phone. I’d been wanting to talk to her for several months because my neighbor’s twins loved her last book so much they nearly came to blows over it. I wanted her to know this, how vivid she made the world she’d built for them. The easiest way to reach out, the most socially appropriate given the relationship she and I have, would have been via email.
But you can’t email her. She’s cut herself off from all that. She’s gradually been moving to a remote place that used to be her vacation spot. A very-off-the-beaten-path kind of vacation spot. Now, the only way anyone, including her editor, can reach her, is by phone.
If she chooses at some time in the future, to reengage, will she be able to? Isn’t this something you have to practice? What happens when a woman checks out for a decade or more?
(I don’t mean to mislead. She has friends and a husband. Still, she’s streamlined her life considerably over the years.)
The last time I saw this friend we were climbing in Eldorado Canyon, outside Boulder. When we finished our conversation this time and I clicked off the cell, I stood for a moment tracing the figure-eight knot in the air. I ran a rope through an invisible belay device. Belay on, I whispered.
She’s more an acquaintance—our connections have been infrequent but quite deep—than a close friend, and it took some energy for me to call her, much more than it would have for me to email or message her on Facebook.
But I’m going to try to stay in touch, if only out of selfishness. She spoke of windsurfing, gardening, and wayfinding on her mountainside. I need to do find my way, too.
Woman, you’re on belay.
Posted in Grief, Life Changes, Professional Choices, Relationships, Writing | Tagged disability, glass ceiling, menopause, professional obstacles, transitions, women's issues | 1 Comment »
No small thing, the shine
passing from one person
to another…
A poem I’m working on starts this way. It’s growing out of a conversation with a New York City taxi driver in which he offered small “advices” that wound up making a big difference in a terrible family crisis.
The other night I was hurrying to hospitalize a cat and had to stop to pay a toll. Generally I’m frustrated with tollbooths in the East—why do they have them? In Colorado they scan your license plate from under a bridge; you don’t even have to hit the brakes. And don’t say it’s because of antiquated infrastructure—there used to be tollbooths in Colorado, but when something better came along, they ripped the booths right out. People in the East just put up with stuff, I was thinking.
Anyway, the toll was 75 cents and as usual I’d forgotten about the whole stupid idea because back home they just ding your checking account and also parking meters are all credit cards now, so who needs actual money in your car? All I happened to have was this half roll of old dimes I’d been meaning to see about. Maybe some of them would fit into one of the collecting books I had. Somewhere. In one of the boxes packed up in the garage after the move. So that would be back in Colorado? Ish.
I handed over eight really silvery-looking dimes. Oh, hey! said the toll guy, lighting way up. What are these, old dimes? Give them to me.
Who could resist a gap-toothed grin like that? I handed them right over. All the forbearing Easterners behind me just waited while he happily counted them out. No honking or anything.
I’ll let you make some money, he said. Here’s $3 for $2.50 in dimes. This probably means the dimes were worth more than that, but here I’d neatly postponed the moment of reckoning with the boxes back in Colorado indefinitely. And I didn’t even pay the toll.
I was in a strange location with a sick pet. The dimes found someone who understood their worth. This random little exchange of money on the “free”way seemed to light the night for both of us.
I guess that wouldn’t have happened with a scanner.
Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged coin collecting, connections, letting go, serendipity, tollbooths | 4 Comments »
It took 22 years to come to this.
I never knew what to do about letting Jacob’s ashes go.
But I am taking a creative writing fellowship on the East Coast this fall. My ex-husband is also moving, and our other son is in college on the West Coast. It didn’t seem right to put Jake in storage, or to drag him around the country.
It’s pretty hard for parents to design a memorial for their own child, especially when they have no religious community. When it’s a baby it can be even more difficult, because no one else knew the person or has any memories to share.
In the last few months I’ve been getting a strong sense that it’s time. And finally some ideas for how to go about it.
Return to the source, the place where he was made. Where both our boys were made.
Climb to an overlook on Spencer Mountain, where I used to hike, ski, or snowshoe nearly every day. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes with a friend, sometimes pregnant with one boy or the other, and sometimes with the second son on my back or at my side. (And always with a dog or several.)
Hold up the urn, a hollowed-out piece of an aspen branch, and show Jake the view he never got to see with his eyes.
Point out the house he would have lived in.
Kiss some of the ashes, taste them on my tongue, and offer them to the wind that slips out of the jet stream to help make Eldora such a place of power.
Then lead my ex-husband and my living son back down the mountain to “the rock,” a boulder jutting into the rapids in North Boulder Creek.
When I was depressed and drained I would lie there and draw on the heat of the rock, the roar of the water, and all that melting light from the glaciers above. I did this when pregnant with one son and then the other and after Julian was born I brought him here for picnics in the summer. I took him snowshoeing here in the winter, when the hurl of the wind supplanted the thunder of the melt. “Icy ri-ber” was one of Julian’s first concepts.
As the three of us approach the rock, there are many shared ah-ha’s and remember thises and remember thats. But also some shocks as a treasured memory turns out not to be shared by the other.
For years I’ve had a hard time revisiting this valley because its beauty pains me. I hate that I don’t still live here, that I couldn’t hold on to the magic for the sake of my living son.
And that’s part of why this ritual needs to happen, and why Jacob needs to go now. He doesn’t need to be tangled up in this confusion and regret any longer. This is a farewell to a marriage, a segment of motherhood, and a childhood, as well as to a little son and a brother.
All this source water. Jake may never have seen this place, but he certainly heard and felt it.
One of the most challenging moments comes when the box is empty. We’ve talked about burying it nearby, but I’ve forgotten to bring a trowel. Julian dangles the box over the river, stroking it. Should we just drop it? his dad and I wonder. It feels right. But when we do, we all are shaken by the violence with which the water grabs it away.
“I guess you’re never ready,” Julian says later.
No. You never are. Not for the final good-bye.
So I think of Charon and his boat on the River Styx, Moses and his basket of reeds. This valley was once a container for all of us, and now we’re all taking different paths. It wouldn’t be right to leave Jake behind, rooted.
Well, little boy. We’ve kept you close for so long. Travel far. Stay safe. Please, please check in. Our hearts are always open to you.
Posted in Bereavement, Death and dying, Grief, Life Changes, Parenting, Relationships | Tagged ashes, bereaved parents, children and death, funerals, letting go, rituals | 11 Comments »
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