A ballet of birds
flying en masse creating
a moving cloud of art
What I Want You to Know
What I want you to know is that I’ve decided to grow wings. I know you wanted to keep me down, tie me down, and silence me, but it can’t be helped. The pinions have come in like wisdom teeth you see, and the back of my shoulders have a second set of blades there now. You probably can’t see them.
I know, it’s ok. You’ve never been able to see me very well.
But I just want you to know I’m ok. I’m going to fly, and you can keep the cage and the trappings and all of the spoken and unspoken rules you expected me to live by.
The light is lovely this morning. The sun has come up over the mountains and is shining on the tops of the hills. The trees sparkle in the golden light. I’m taking to the air now.
Don’t worry. I forgive you. I never fit in there anyway. Bye, now.
(The whoosh of air as I ascend.)
Sitting by the Ocean with my Mother
Sitting by the ocean with my mother.
Today is her 103rd birthday.
We’re leaning on a log watching the surf pound the shore
and the long slow slide of the waves reach up the beach
foamy at the edge
thin and cold, glass like
rippling over the tiny craters of the razor clams
and pulling back again, faster, like they are pulled by a rope
connected to the whole, to the One:
the All force of Time, Power
expressed in this unique Eon of ours here
as water.
Water
timeless
indestructible but vulnerable
the home of giant Blue Whales and tiny Shrimp
the waving kelp and sea grass
the hiding places of sea otters
crunching joyously on their shells amid their cozy tangled beds of floating kelp.
Ocean, timeless
You’re here today, aren’t you?
I’m always with you, honey.
My beloved daughter.
The surf curves, green and luminescent
the edge falls white, a trick of the light.
A bright red balloon floats by us
a child running after it, crying
her mother catching up to her as the balloon lifts into the air
passing into the sunlight.
I turn to look at where my mother was sitting.
But she’s no longer there.
The Elephant and the Golden Pears
One day as I was walking my elephant, we came to a giant pear tree loaded with golden pears. There were people running back and forth under the tree collecting the pears that had fallen and reaching up to pluck the pears down from the branches.
As each pear would be picked from the tree another pear would pop into place where the first pear had been, so that the tree, shining as it was in the full sunlight near the road, was constantly full of beautiful golden pears.
People were collecting them in baskets and lugging them away to their homes, and more people kept arriving to harvest the abundance of pears.
My elephant, Alphonzo, reached up with his trunk to select a beautiful pear from high up in the branches. He then “handed” it to me with his trunk and I took it into my hands and smelled it. The pear was fragrant and ripe, full of juicy goodness, speckled, and warm from the sun. I took a bite and let the golden sweetness fill my mouth and then gave it back to Alphonzo.
My whole body reacted to the delight of this amazing fruit: my skin felt like it was glowing, my hair shimmered, and all of the sadness of my spirit melted into the joy of the moment. I could see the lines of my legs, relaxed but strong, and I could feel the goodness of hope and strength returning to my body and mind.
Alphonzo munched the pear contentedly, and looked at me with his wise eyes, tossing his head up and down. We did not take more than one pear, because I already knew how this fruit had healed us.
And it was only morning, the beginning of a new day.
My Alternate Timeline: A Shift in Perception
I don’t know about you, but when I look back over my life I tend to focus on all of the mistakes I made and the painful events that I view as spectacular failures, epic breakups, or horrific personal decisions that cost me dearly. There were job losses and career changes, and the deaths of various relationships, through literal death or figurative dismemberment: being dissed and un-membered. While I certainly contributed to many of my personal catastrophes, (except the literal deaths), there were plenty of times when I fell victim to some very catty office women and other mean girls and boys. Even when it seemed to me that I’d done everything possible to make things work, the mean people were simply not having it and would not play fair. Raspberries. I’d move on, burn the bridges, or bandage my wounds and stagger out through the smoke as they giggled or cursed or shook their fists behind me.
I chastise myself about entire decades being lost and ruined (in my mind) because of some very poor choices, mine and others’, and when I look back this way my life looks something like a junkyard highway: the flat tires and wreckage of jobs and careers and relationships that ended badly.
But it occurred to me the other day in a conversation with my spouse, that concurrent with many of these painful events were extraordinary moments of creative or compassionate excellence, which I managed to pull off despite what those in power over me did to try to stop, sabotage, or silence me. I got to wondering what THAT trail might look like, if I glanced back and connected the dots of those exceptional moments and focused on those instead. These points of light illuminate a parallel path; it just wasn’t the path I thought I was supposed to be on. This was not a road less travelled, because clearly I was doing several things at once, but these events illuminate a different journey altogether: a road less often remembered.
For example, while I was the lowest paid staff member at a domestic violence (DV) support agency, I wrote a play called Rule of Thumb based on the true stories of our clients, at their request. I did this to help get the word out to other women about what domestic violence was really all about: power and control. I spent months writing, researching, directing and rehearsing the show. When I presented it and offered it as a fundraiser for the DV agency, the president of the board stood up in the audience after the show and questioned the integrity of my work, right there in front of our clients, whose stories were being told anonymously. There were over 100 people in the audience, including my mother and many revered members of the community. It was unbelievable to me that she would try to humiliate me and shame me for this important and unpaid work. Yet despite this response from someone who should have known better, my show went on tour and received glowing reviews and comments from audience members from around the state, many of whom thanked me personally for helping to change their lives. The “reward” for this work was not money or the respect of the agency for which I had worked, in fact the agency collapsed and closed its doors. The reward was that these stories were given a voice, that lives were touched and changed, and in the process I started my own non-profit theatre and toured my show around the western half of the state for four years. Was it painful? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely.
Other examples: my drama therapy work with women in prison at the pre-release program in Steilacoom. I was working for the Girl Scouts in a program for girls whose moms were in prison. At one point I was working with the moms to help prepare them for the upcoming holiday party. I devised an activity to evoke a spirit of generosity. During this activity, women from two different gangs got up and hugged each other. Not a dry eye in the room. But despite this my boss was annoyed with me because I wasn’t following the Girl Scout playbook, and they hired someone else for the job. The woman who coordinated with the GS at the women’s correctional facility in Purdy met with me before I left town and gave me such a glowing verbal review that it felt like she had turned on the sun. So that happened.
My next job was at a forensic state hospital in Texas. Hard work made harder by a coworker who was constantly trying to sabotage me. I stayed ten weeks instead of twelve, and my patients were sad when I told them I had to leave. I got a rap-poem blessing from one, tears from another, and a fist against the wall from the woman everyone feared. When they heard the thud, doctors and therapists flew out of their offices thinking she had decked me, but she hadn’t, she was just sad. My coworker tried unsuccessfully to prevent me from getting my credential in drama therapy, but I was so exhausted that I gave it up for some time after that. But those women at the hospital with Borderline Personality Disorder? I got them dancing together instead of trying to kill each other. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. They were beautiful.
At a volunteer job during the summer some women on our committee refused to discuss my ideas, and later in the fall one of them snottily refused to answer a question I’d asked for clarification. That was pretty rude. A month later they went behind my back and cut my creative presentation from a special program we’d been working on. I’d been volunteering with them several hours a week for the better part of a year, so cutting me out was mean-spirited and deliberate. But this wasn’t the significant event of the day.
Although this particular sting was less egregious than others I had experienced, it bothered me a lot because I thought these people were “friends”, and I hold friends to a higher ethical standard than I do bosses, teachers, or co-workers. When I let them know I was upset, one of them told me to “get over it” for the sake of our friendship, AND that she would never discuss her actions with me. That part made me laugh. No. I don’t have and can’t keep “friends” who treat me like that, even if I do “get over it” and forgive them. A relationship is not functional if you can’t clear the air to maintain it, or if both people are not valued enough to be heard. There’s simply no place for a friendship like that to exist. So that’s just sad. Their timing was also tacky and mean, because they told me they had cut me from the program on the day I had another performance going on. So they chose to knock me down when I was flying high. Why was I flying high? Because that was the day that I co-directed and hosted an online, international, audience-participation reading of my adaptation of A Christmas Carol, with readers and musicians from Romania to California. We had audience members join us from around the world. It was spectacular and heart healing, magical and fun. THAT’s what happened that day.
When I look back now, I notice that throughout my life there were numerous of these “memorable” events which took place at almost the exact same time: while earning my Master’s degree I broke up with my fiancé, but I got standing ovations for an original play I wrote, two nights in a row, and was politely mobbed by the audience. When I took a break from the drama therapy work after I left Texas, I went back to directing theatre because a show was put into my hands by a fellow director. Later still I was scapegoated at a university when what I thought was going to be my “dream job” turned into a nightmare, but that’s exactly when I reconnected with the man of my dreams, and the sweetest part of my life. Then I lost my wonderful mom six months short of our amazing wedding.
More lights on the alternative path:
2014: I lost one of my long-term and favorite gigs as a massage therapist, doing chair massage for quilters at their retreats, because one of the retreat coordinators didn’t like me. I really loved this particular job and I adored my clients. But I found out that I had been cut while I was on vacation in Assisi Italy, where I felt absolutely enfolded in love and blessings.
1978: When I designed a creative drama activity for kids as part of my college work at UW, my teacher scoffed at my idea in class in front of all my peers, and the sorority girls giggled. Despite this humiliation, when I led the activity with the children, a shy six year old girl who seldom volunteered for anything came over to me afterwards, and told me it was the most fun she’d ever had in that class.
1992: I coordinated the first AIDS walk in Tacoma, which raised money for 5 different agencies. My position was later cut, but the event was a big success. That same year, in the same town, I put together a playwright’s festival. We had plays blind juried in, and mine was one of the six chosen. So that was cool. This event was also a success, despite the man who fought me every inch of the way because he wanted the festival to be all about him instead of all of the other artists involved.
2005: My colleague Beth and I got some very bad news when we were at a DV conference in San Diego. We were having dinner at a Mexican restaurant when the call came in. The life of the DV agency we worked for depended entirely upon us getting our big VAWA grant renewed, but we didn’t get it, which meant the agency would close. Beth put down her cell phone and told me the news. We looked at each other in stunned silence, and that’s when the Mariachi band showed up at our table and played Ciolito Lindo for us. We clicked our marguerite glasses together and had a good laugh.
I forgave my dad in 1996 after he hadn’t spoken to me in 8 years. We’d had a difficult relationship. I went to California that January and did a forgiveness ceremony on his doorstep at 6 in the morning, prayed, left him a note and a basket of goodies, and then felt enormously freed. Six months later he reconciled with me and spoke to me 3 times a week from then until the day he died, two years later.
As I look back now at the timing of these events, really at the brighter moments instead of the dreadful ones, it’s like looking back at a trail of starlight or solar lamps dotting the landscape behind me.
Maybe I wasn’t lost after all.
No life can escape being blown about
By the winds of change and chance
And though you never know all the steps
You must learn to join the dance
You must learn to join the dance
So how can you see what your life is worth
Or where your value lies?
You can never see through the eyes of man
You must look at your life, Look at your life
Look at your life through heaven’s eyes
(Excerpt from the song Through Heaven’s Eyes, by Stephen Schwartz, from Prince of Egypt)
My Garden
Last summer, during the pandemic, I built four raised beds for vegetables. The beds are great, but my gardening expertise, not so much. We do better with flowers.
We also put in a raspberry bed and fenced it. The tall canes that our friend Lori gave us bloomed continuously and gave us berries into November. The kale is still growing, too, and the strawberries are going strong.
The truth is our entire property is a kind of garden. It’s wild and unkempt, by most standards, but to us every area has its own unique magic: the roses up by the road, the tall madronas and alders, the Himalayan blackberries cascading over the neighbor’s fence, the peach and pear trees, the labyrinth I put in last spring, the apple trees along the driveway, the pummeling plum tree (a Mirabelle plum), which shields our little pop-up trailer that we got a year ago, so that it’s invisible from the road. The trailer is tucked away for winter, but in summer it’s my tiny writing retreat. There’s a trail from there under the shade of madrona and fir, through the salal and salmonberries and the wild cherry trees. The trail leads to the rockery, where stone steps and a hazelnut-beam railing lead down into the back yard, which is lush now with new grass. The yard is bordered by cedars along the north side, rhododendrons, tulips, irises, and daffodils, and tall Douglas firs where the eagles perch above the house, more apple, pear, and cherry trees near the house, and a Daphne odora which is budding now. A jumble of hazelnut trees behind the raised beds on the north side of the house lean across the yard, and on the south side the dogwood, azaleas, quince and camellia grown in the shade of the neighbor’s towering deodar cedar, with its huge limbs and which I worry about during the winter windstorms. In front, overlooking the harbor is a long row of peonies at the top of the bank, with rosemary and daffodils, and below the peonies are rows of lavender bushes which entice the bees all summer long.
There’s so much to keep up with, and much of it is wild, like the wild roses I keep trying to train up onto a trellis, and the bluebells that spring up in May, the wild sweet peas that erupt in profusion over the entry area near the house, the carpet of orange crocosmia and the copious foxgloves that spring up all over the southwest side of the yard every summer along with the Oregon grape and the sprawling wild blackberry vines and the detested English ivy which is the one thing I constantly keep hacking away at.
Every corner of the property has its challenges and its unique beauty. When we took out the towering junk cherry trees along the back yard, sadly we also destroyed the climbing pale yellow roses that bloomed overhead in their branches, but the tree branches leaned over the fire pit and when we took the trees down we saw charred spots on some of the branches. How lucky we were! How lucky we ARE! I do not take a bit of this for granted. We live in a paradise—and I haven’t even mentioned the pink climbing roses along the driveway, and the new fence we gave them to grow on. One year when my husband was first here he went out to trim the blackberries and clipped off several of these beautiful rose branches. It was a bad day for him, and I watch him like a hawk now whenever he goes out with the clippers.
Speaking of hawks, we have those, too. A Cooper’s hawk, I think, sometimes flies through, or a sharp-shinned hawk. Our garden home is also home to chickadees, the rufous-sided ones mostly, and towhees, Oregon juncos, and nuthatches, Northern flickers, Stellar jays, robins and white crowned sparrows, song sparrows, ruby-crowned kinglets, Pacific flycatchers, cedar waxwings, goldfinches, house finches, wrens, and hummingbirds. It’s also home to chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, otters and deer.
The tiny cabin my grandparents built here in the 1930’s is on a medium-high bank above the harbor. The beach consists of rocks and granite boulders from the ice age, and logs brought in from the tide. The beach: gray rocks crusted with barnacles, clam beds, sand dollars, moon snails, mussels and starfish. There are transitory loons on the harbor in the spring and autumn, and a combination of other migratory and year round residents including ospreys, cormorants, grebes, buffleheads, golden-eyes, surf scoters, mallards, gulls, mergansers, and Canada geese. There are kingfishers, crows, and ravens, the tall blue herons and the savage bald eagles which prey on everything and decimate the heron rookeries. There are harbor seals which follow our canoe on quiet evenings, or pop up a few yards away from us while we’re swimming, much to the horror of my friend, Kate.
On summer nights with the windows open, the quiet lap of the water rolling onto the rocky beach lulls me to sleep. The waves are less comforting during winter storms, or when they are the result of passing boats: the racing shells leave silver streaks of light along the harbor, but the noisy hydroplanes, the fishing and motorboats and sailboats which take over in the warmer months make this seem less of a paradise than a noisy parade of people, who litter the water with their plastic bottles and snack containers. But most of the year it’s wet and quiet, and nature thrives here.
The Italian plum tree that my grandmother planted has numerous offspring growing in a thicket near the road, but her old sweet tree still grows outside our kitchen window and holds the suet feeder currently being raided by the squirrels and the flickers. At night we hear the hoot of the barred owl, and in February, we hear the chorus of frogs from the meadow pond up the road.
Women Walking
A parable.
Two friends were walking along a country lane.
Behind them was the village
Ahead of them were some houses
To their right there was a dark woodsy area
To their left was a large open field.
As they walked along, another woman approached them.
She was coming across the open field on the left.
Woman #3 was known to both of the other women,
but she was a closer friend to woman #1 than to woman #2.
When woman #3 approached them,
she walked up to woman #2:
first she shoved her,
then she slapped her,
and then she knocked her down.
Then she walked away, back toward the village.
Woman #2 jumped to her feet and turned to Woman #3, saying:
“What the hell was that about? Why did you do that?”
Woman #3 turned back to her and replied:
“You know, you’re just going to have to forgive me,
because I am NEVER going to explain what I did.
In fact, I think dwelling on the past is very unhealthy.”
Then she turned away again, and walked toward the village.
Woman #2 turned to Woman #1 in disbelief.
But all Woman #1 said was:
“Shall we continue our walk?”
Orion
There was a big windstorm here last night and the power got knocked out for several hours. In the middle of the night, while the wind was blowing, I got up to go comfort my dog, who was freaking out. I finally got her calmed down a bit, and lay down on the couch with her. Then I looked out the window.
Bright lights were shining in through the glass. With the power out, there were no lights on across the harbor, and no glow of ambient light in the sky from the nearby cities. The light shining in through my window was starlight from the Orion constellation. The handsome huntsman, with his gleaming belt, seemed to be standing outside on my deck.
The huntsman in mythology steals the heart of the queen. But the huntsman is also the one who looks after the hounds. My dog curled up on my feet and we both went back to sleep then, guarded by the huntsman in his silver tunic.
Accountability, Respect, and the Rule of Law
I’ve seen many posts and tweets today where people are calling for “unity” in the USA.
Let me just say this: there can be no unity until we have accountability.
One of my friends noted: “I can’t be unified with people who want me dead.”
Another friend called for us to use our collective imagination, to imagine a time when we can come together again.
I’m a big fan of imagination
AND
We also have to look at the whole picture: the possibility for joy or for disaster.
Because it’s also a failure of the imagination to not imagine (and prepare for) how much worse this attack on our Democracy could have been. We saw it coming. They announced it. Why were we not prepared?
Be prepared NOW.
In the coming weeks, be very careful of those who insist they didn’t know any better
or that they really want to work toward “unity”, when they just violated the rule of law.
The US cannot make deals or bargains with terrorists. There is no negotiating possible.
The same is true for women in abusive relationships. It’s the same script.
“I thought maybe if I gave him what he said he wanted, then maybe he would settle down. But then he tried to kill me in front of the kids.”
Harsh reality check this week, folks.
We must stand for the rule of law and demand accountability and justice.
When those who sought to overthrow our government are behind bars,
and the seditious leaders who incited them to riot are also brought to justice,
THEN will be the time to talk about unity.
You can’t have unity with people who are trying to kill you or silence you.
It simply isn’t possible.
In the meantime, we are in the midst of a global pandemic.
The first stage of healing is to recognize the problem, and then to pull people out of harms way. After that, treat for shock and injuries.
We don’t get to sing together in a big circle until all of this is behind us.
Be safe, everyone.
(And go check out Failure of Imagination on Wikipedia)
Emotional Aikido in a Time of Double Speak: an ongoing conversation
January 4, 2021
When I was in my late 20’s I signed up for a martial arts class with a friend of mine.
The class was Aikido, a Japanese self-defense course. The idea with Aikido is that when someone attacks you, they are out of balance and so you move in such a way as to help them collapse, using their own energy. The idea is to step out of their way to protect yourself, but also to protect them as they fall. You step out of the way or flip them, but it’s really their own momentum and imbalance that does the trick.
It’s been a long time since I took that class, so I may not be explaining it with complete accuracy, and sadly the class didn’t work out for me.
The thing about it was that I GOT the basic idea of it, and it worked, so I was able to flip my “opponents”, my fellow students, out of the way, even though I did not have perfect form.
But my lack of perfect form was very offensive to my instructor, one of the apprentices who ran the class who was not any older than I was. And neither one of us were Japanese. She got very upset with me and verbally humiliated me in front of the class for doing the moves incorrectly. She brought me to tears, even though I was doing very well in the class.
At that moment I realized that what I needed most was Emotional and Verbal Aikido.
I needed a way to turn her verbal and emotional assault around, so that her own imbalance would flip her and stop her. In hindsight, I wish that I had reported her, or taken the same class at a different studio, because it was a brilliant form, and I wish I had learned it more thoroughly.
Instead I’ve spent a lifetime learning (and often failing at) the art of Emotional Aikido.
Although these lessons have seemed challenging to me, I know that I have a great deal of privilege and power in my life. But I haven’t always been aware of it.
I didn’t set out to try to learn Emotional Aikido. It seemed to me, and I hate to admit it because it often does seem to me, that good behavior is something that I should be able to take for granted from my colleagues.
This is a very naïve assumption on my part, but for heaven’s sake, I have worked with some very intelligent, professional, dedicated and spiritually-minded people throughout the years, and it has always surprised me when one or more of them have treated me and/or others badly, without provocation or explanation. So then I have to “suit up” and do the Emotional and Verbal Aikido. With or without good form.
I can promise you that this is a lot of work. It involves painful scrutiny, self-reflection, honesty and integrity. It requires precise verbal dexterity and articulation. It involves accurate accountability, the knowledge and history of the assumed (and often false) levels of hierarchies present, plus a working knowledge of the facts. It requires an ability to perceive and distinguish between numerous forms of emotionally manipulative and verbally abusive tactics, like lying and distorting and minimizing and twisting the truth, and other forms of bullying and coercion. Finally, it requires the courage to confront these, name them, and hand them back. This accountability is the “flipping” part of the Verbal Aikido: naming and handing back the stuff that doesn’t belong to you. Stepping out of the way in order to give the other person the opportunity to experience the consequences of their own drama. A friend of mine calls this “giving them the gift of your integrity.”
Simultaneously, while doing all of this there’s also the need to assess one’s own emotions, observe these emotions, and to move in a timely, unhurried manner with a focus and clarity of mind balanced by grace and humor. That grace and humor part is the “good form” portion of Emotional Aikido, and apparently I continue to be given the opportunity to develop it.
This has been a hard week. I started writing this on the 4th of January. By Saturday the 9th, the world had changed again, but the words I continued to hear this week were about the need for accountability and restorative justice.
Accountability. Josh Marshall said “Forgiveness begins with accountability. . . Reconciliation without accountability is just another name for impunity.” And Timothy Snyder said (and I paraphrase): “The truth comes home when you have accountability.”
I think we have a lot of work to do, and Emotional Aikido is only a small part of it. But I hope you’re able to hand things back that don’t belong to you, so that the people in your life who try to cause you grief are able to experience the consequences of their own drama. Even if that is sad to watch.
To my old instructor of Aikido: you were the one who failed, and we both know it.
Breathe, everybody. Let’s get back to work.