Holly Hughes & Bethany Reid

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Photo by Matthias Zomer from Pexels

On Thursday, 15 October 2020, Edmonds Bookshop is hosting a virtual reading with poet Holly Hughes, me, and moderator David Brewster. I would love to have you join us!

Click on the link (above) to go to their Events page, where you’ll be redirected to Facebook.

If you are looking for any of my books, Edmonds Bookshop has signed copies of Sparrow (2012), Body My House (2018),and Ravenna Press’s Triple No. 10 (2020),which includes my chapbook, “The Thing with Feathers.”

Here’s a sample from the chapbook:

Like Emily, She Hears a Buzz

Maybe I did hear a fly buzz
but I hadn’t died.
I wasn’t dressed in white.
I never said “I do.” 

So if a fly buzzed, what
stopped me from buzzing, too,
zipping right out that window?

I don’t think I was a fly–

I was all in black and gold
like a bee or a queen.
Everyone bowed and buzzed
as I passed by. 

 

 

Happy Birthday, Mom

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I was up at 5:30 this morning, fretting about the political scene, finally getting out of bed and stumbling to my writing desk.

I finished the review I’ve been trying to write for months, revised a poem, and queried one more agent, regarding my mystery novel. I was typing today’s date, 10.8.20, when I remembered that today is my mother’s birthday. Or, as we say when someone has passed, today is the anniversary of her birth.

Since Mom’s death, on October 12, 2018, I’ve written a lot of poems that seem to be about her. Even this week, writing about two great blue herons on a dock, I was drawing from the memory of a walk I took after visiting Mom at her skilled-nursing facility. The poem felt shot-through with her presence.

Mom and I had a lot of differences. Setting up her apartment after she moved from the farmhouse, I would set out her knick knacks and pictures so they were asymmetrical. I like triangles, staggered lines, angles. She would come behind me and straighten everything to be evenly balanced and straight across.

Mom was proud of  me, I think, but she didn’t understand my choice to become educated and we could never talk about it. She thought being a teacher was a good thing. But I had overdone it, getting a Ph.D. in literature. It seemed like a waste of money to her that we were saving for our daughters’ higher education. “College has ruined your mind,” she said to me once.

We were at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Or it felt as though we were. So were the rest of my family of origin. (My daughters think this is hilarious: “You’re like their black sheep.”) It was God’s grace that I was able to set aside those differences during the years of caring for Mom in her decline.

But we shared things, too. We both loved mystery novels. I was a little more hard-boiled about it, but I was perfectly happy to spend evenings with her watching the light-hearted mystery-comedies that she loved: Monk, and Murder, She Wrote. After her stroke in 2014 she was no longer able to follow a television program and I brought home her DVDs. I never watched them. Watching the shows with her was the whole point.

It means a lot to me that I was able to read a chapter of my murder mystery to her before her death. Did she take it in? I’m not sure. (“That woman!” she said.)

Here’s a poem from a 2018 notebook that I recently stumbled across. I had forgotten that I wrote it:

Pilgrimage

After her death
I would wake
in the night,
my heart tender
as a bruise,
the night room purple
in moonlight wavering
like the surface of
a pond. The room
was a pond,
or a chalice, water
like satin, familiar
as thirst or hunger.
What communion
was this, where there was
no sorrow now
and no more longing?
I had reached the end
of the journey I made
with my mother,
the quest of her final
ten years, the quest
of my whole life
in company with her,
ushered to a close.
Waking, I drank
from that cup.
I ate the bread.
I waited for the benediction
to bless me as I walked on.

Happy birthday, Mom.

Writing Will Save Your Life

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I’m in a mood today for dramatizing. Will writing save your life? All I know is that it saved mine and I’ve made it my business to try to understand how writing saved me, and how it can keep saving me. Louise DeSalvo has been one of my mentors—not that I know her, personally, but I’ve read her book, Writing as a Way of Healing, about 100 times. DeSalvo doesn’t flinch from the difficult, in fact, that’s exactly what she goes after:

Writing about traumatic or troubling life experiences initially unleashes difficult, conflicting emotions. In the long run, though, we feel better emotionally and are healthier and achieve a level of understanding of our lives that only writing can provide. Safe writing—writing what we already know or understand, writing that is superficial—won’t help us grow, either as people or as writers. For our writing to be healing, we must encounter something that puzzles, confuses, troubles, or pains us. (p. 93).

And that’s why you don’t get to go back to bed and sleep through the next six week news cycle.

I recently came across this KUOW story about poet Colleen J. McElroy and wanted to share it—she’s a walking, breathing example of writing’s power to sustain us. (Click on the link to go to the story/video.)

Hunkered down at 85

Colleen J. McElroy

DeSalvo continues:

An outgrowth of the kind of writing that digs deep, that takes risks, that arises from our desire to explore the unresolved emotional puzzles or ongoing pain in our lives is that we “gain greater psychological freedom” (as Albert M. Rothenberg, M.D., has observed) and greater range and depth in our artistic expression… (p.92)

I can’t imagine living any other way.

#notoriousrbg

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Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim once said: “Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.” – Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I have been trying, not entirely successfully, to wrap my head around all that’s swirling around us in 2020. There’s the pandemic, of course, and there’s the resurgence of Black Lives Matter–both, to my mind, more than worthy of our attention. Then wildfires, extreme weather, climate change hit the news headlines, and the furor over the coming election becomes even more heated.

With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death, the political turmoil that our country is going through seems even more exaggerated, and more divided. Because many people in my family of origin are on the opposite side of this divide from me, all of it is a source of deep, personal anguish.

I try to read widely and deeply, to think my own thoughts and be clear about what I believe. But, under these circumstances, it gets murky and I am as apt as anyone to lose my way.

“Why be a poet now?” I asked a friend. “What’s the point?” She said, “If RBG were a poet, she’d be the best damn poet. That’s what you should do.”

This morning I read this tribute in The Seattle Times, “Clerking for Justice Ginsberg We Learned about Law–and Love,” by Miriam Seifter and Robert Yablon. It says it all:

“The justice kept up her relentless pace because she believed in her work and in doing the job right.”

And in my email feed yesterday, I found this message from Richard Rohr, author of Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, and many other books. He helped me and maybe his words will help you, too.  I’m attempting to share, via this link — but just in case the link doesn’t work, I’ve pasted it in below:

Some simple but urgent guidance to get us through these next months.

I awoke on Saturday, September 19, with three sources in my mind for guidance: Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), the young Jewish woman who suffered much more injustice in the concentration camp than we are suffering now; Psalm 62, which must have been written in a time of a major oppression of the Jewish people; and the Irish Poet, W.B.Yeats (1965 – 1939), who wrote his “Second Coming” during the horrors of the World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. 

These three sources form the core of my invitation. Read each one slowly as your first practice. Let us begin with Etty:

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.

—Etty Hillesum, Westerbork transit camp

Note her second-person usage, talking to “You, God” quite directly and personally. There is a Presence with her, even as she is surrounded by so much suffering.

Then, the perennial classic wisdom of the Psalms:

In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
In God I find shelter, my rock, and my safety.
Men are but a puff of wind,
Men who think themselves important are a delusion.
Put them on a scale,
They are gone in a puff of wind.

—Psalm 62:5–9

What could it mean to find rest like this in a world such as ours? Every day more and more people are facing the catastrophe of extreme weather. The neurotic news cycle is increasingly driven by a single narcissistic leader whose words and deeds incite hatred, sow discord, and amplify the daily chaos. The pandemic that seems to be returning in waves continues to wreak suffering and disorder with no end in sight, and there is no guarantee of the future in an economy designed to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and those subsisting at the margins of society. 

It’s no wonder the mental and emotional health among a large portion of the American population is in tangible decline! We have wholesale abandoned any sense of truth, objectivity, science or religion in civil conversation; we now recognize we are living with the catastrophic results of several centuries of what philosophers call nihilism or post-modernism (nothing means anything, there are no universal patterns).

We are without doubt in an apocalyptic time (the Latin word apocalypsis refers to an urgent unveiling of an ultimate state of affairs). Yeats’ oft-quoted poem “The Second Coming” then feels like a direct prophecy. See if you do not agree:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Somehow our occupation and vocation as believers in this sad time must be to first restore the Divine Center by holding it and fully occupying it ourselves. If contemplation means anything, it means that we can “safeguard that little piece of You, God,” as Etty Hillesum describes it. What other power do we have now? All else is tearing us apart, inside and out, no matter who wins the election or who is on the Supreme Court. We cannot abide in such a place for any length of time or it will become our prison.

God cannot abide with us in a place of fear.
God cannot abide with us in a place of ill will or hatred.
God cannot abide with us inside a nonstop volley of claim and counterclaim.
God cannot abide with us in an endless flow of online punditry and analysis.
God cannot speak inside of so much angry noise and conscious deceit.
God cannot be found when all sides are so far from “the Falconer.”
God cannot be born except in a womb of Love.
So offer God that womb.

Stand as a sentry at the door of your senses for these coming months, so “the blood-dimmed tide” cannot make its way into your soul.

If you allow it for too long, it will become who you are, and you will no longer have natural access to the “really deep well” that Etty Hillesum returned to so often and that held so much vitality and freedom for her.

If you will allow, I recommend for your spiritual practice for the next four months that you impose a moratorium on exactly how much news you are subject to—hopefully not more than an hour a day of television, social media, internet news, magazine and newspaper commentary, and/or political discussions. It will only tear you apart and pull you into the dualistic world of opinion and counter-opinion, not Divine Truth, which is always found in a bigger place.

Instead, I suggest that you use this time for some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above.

        You have much to gain now and nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
And the world—with you as a stable center—has nothing to lose.
And everything to gain. 


Richard Rohr, September 19, 2020