How to Know

"Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality." —Esther Lightcap Meek, Longing To Know

We were in the car going somewhere. Our children, Joseph and Jonathan were in the back seat with Bev and me up front. It was nearly Christmas and Joseph was challenging the veracity of our assertions about Santa Claus. It's you guys, right? Bev and I weren't ready to abet our seven-year-old's descent into the murky realm of fact versus fantasy. It's a yes or a no, he insisted. Stunned by his need for this knowledge, the best I could do was offer a pathetic, Um, well... yes and no.

I still struggle with this. I would love to be certain, but I know that real truth resists the either/or of certainty. And though I'm a big fan of both/and quantum outcomes, this seems equally unsatisfying. Besides, there are no Hallmark moments reading quantum mechanics to your kid at bedtime.

I am not alone. The struggle is historic. Duality is expressed in the Age of Enlightenment from the 18th century still evidenced in the sacred/secular divide. It's in ancient Greek philosophy, in Raphael's School of Athens showing Plato's upward pointing finger and Aristotle's downward palm as essence and existence at odds. We even see its beginnings in the torrents of creation: the cold and the heat, high and low pressures, tectonic forces, the things we're made of. It seems the world's dynamics—its mechanisms for change—depend on apparent opposites cast irreducibly together. Yet, can such a maelstrom be the unity we intuit?

Duality inheres a two-ness that begs for a reconciliation that is beyond our present choices. We sense it should be there on the insistence of our desire alone—a belief that persists in a search for justification that is fleeting. So the choice seems between an endless struggle and the sidelines—between living in the tension-filled room where money, power and influence too often win, or being alienated by skepticism that leads to desperation.

Poet William Bronk offers an example of the latter position. Michael Heller remarks in the New York Times Book Review, “The natural world, Bronk would insist, is a world we can never know.” Bronk’s work suggests a basic estrangement between man and nature, promoting a bleak human situation we persist unsuccessfully in belonging to. Consider his poem On Being Together:

I watch how beautifully two trees stand together; one against one. Not touching. Not awareness. But we would try these. We are always wrong.

But consider the struggle again. In the Four Corners region of New Mexico, in Chaco Canyon, are the ruins of an ancient pueblo village of the Anasazi Indians. For years archaeologists puzzled over its disparate buildings, spiral petroglyphs and stone slab arrangements. Finally in 1979, a team oriented parts of its layout on the sun and suddenly, the pueblos became a watchport on the seasons. Their strange architecture was a finely tuned eye on the relationship of the earth with the stars. Here is human endeavor, book-ended in time, following human longing for harmony, clarity and insight. The patterns are there.

How we know is captured in a context somewhere between the rules and the world where our selves are subject to both, and certain of neither. But in this proximate humiliation our beliefs can flourish in the apprehension of patterns—our coming to know by glimpses on the hope that our home is secure in the stars.

Joseph is twenty-seven, now. I don't think he has reached a conclusion on the matter of Santa Claus. I think he is beginning to rest in the dialectical tension of life. He still wants concrete answers on metaphysical realities, but all I can do is give him two trees—not Bronk's—but rather one on the earth pointing to the sky that is also a similitude of the one that gives hope. In the mean time he has become one of the best Santas I know.

The Pageant of Specificity

This fall, I plan to take my twelve-year old pheasant hunting for the first time, as my father took me. Last fall, when he was eleven, I took Micah out to shoot in a gravel pit outside of town, after which time I had one question:

What was my dad thinking?  

A shotgun in the hands of a twelve year old is an unnatural thing. Even my simple single shot 20 gauge doesn’t fit his body, overbalancing it and conjuring young David in Saul’s armor at best and Wilfred Owen’s “Arms and the Boy” at worst. Though several of his friends already went hunting this year, meaning the peer pressure’s on, after seeing him shoot I contemplate putting him off another year—until his body grows into it, I tell myself.

Enter Hunter Safety training. In order to legally carry even the metal tube plus firing pin that is the shotgun I own, Micah has to complete twelve hours of online course material that will take him through things like a short history of the gun, the various moving parts of various types of guns, and situational hunting ethics, and he’ll have to be able to show that he can handle a .22 safely under the watchful eye of an instructor at a scheduled “field day.”   

Observing the online course over his shoulder, I’m reminded of why guns and hunting are so bewitching: particularity.

Consider the action types:  break action (think the double-barrel shotgun of every old coot in every old film you’ve seen), bolt action, lever (think every western), pump (think onomatopoeia: “snick-cluck,” in one Faulkner story, “chuh-chuh” in ominous adolescent boy parlance), and semi-automatic. Going through action types feels like insider information, and I can feel Micah’s interest grow.

In a later chapter, a man literally up to his eyes in camo disappears against the backdrop of a tree; his decoys set carefully in the field in front of him, he squeaks out a perfect turkey cluck with what looks like a stick and cross section of limb but is really a slate call. Micah asks, “Can we go turkey hunting?”  

My question exactly.

Once, during my MFA program, the fiction writers heard a craft lecture on the topic of guns. If you’re going to talk about something like a gun in your writing, the idea went, you’d better talk about them specifically and well. They came out bright-eyed, thinking about their work and the world more closely.

This is what details and paying attention and writing do:  focus us in on the world.

Micah passes the field day tests. Seeing how conscientious he is in handling the .22, I feel somewhat better. At the end of the day, the students are given a chance to shoot clay pigeons, first with a 20 gauge and then a 12 gauge. I convince Micah to try it, though he’s nervous. He’s never shot either, and he’s worried about the kick they will give, and whether he’ll miss. Knowing the situation, he’s probably equally embarrassed to not shoot, a more dangerous motivation, conjuring in a small way The Things They Carried.

But we’re among friends here. One of Micah’s instructors was also the instructor at my field day almost thirty years ago, a man who once told me how disappointed he gets when the novels he reads don’t get the guns right. When it’s Micah’s turn, he readies the black 20 gauge pump and once again looks the part of David. The gun’s unwieldy; he looks as if he could tip over. As the first pigeon wheels outward, a bright orange disk against the warm background of gravel piles, Micah fires but misses, the disk breaking against the ground. He carefully snick-clucks the second shell into place. When the second target spins through the air, Micah finds it at the end of his bead and fractures it with his shot. He’s satisfied, even pleased, but also ready to leave. He doesn’t feel the need to shoot a bigger gun.

I look forward to the fall pheasant hunt:  father and son in blaze orange amidst the shades of fall on a crisp October day; walking some rare, grassy corner of the plains; startling a bird skyward, a bird so painted it can only be exotic; maybe knocking it down with lead shot, opening the break action to smell the quick bitter smoke of the powder; toting the bird home to clean it, including heart, liver, and gizzard so Micah’s Grandma can cook it; eating it, as part of our particular practice, as laab gai, ground up with herbs and accompanied by a salty soup.

In reality, it might not work this way—the weather will be too cold, too hot, too windy; more likely than not, I’ll miss, hopefully Micah won’t; maybe we won’t see any birds and we’ll need to use frozen chicken for the laab. No matter, because the pageant of pheasant hunting, gun safety, eating laab gai, all of it is a way to turn us to the things of the world, the ongoing pageant of the specific.

The Sea Wall

                    so intimately, out there at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world and spirit wed. - Howard Nemerov

When I was young, our family friends had access to a deserted strip of beach. Over the summer, my mom would pile us five kids and two of our friends’ kids into our station wagon and let the waves and sun exhaust our energies. There was a sea wall with a makeshift ladder that we climbed to get from the car to the sand below. I remember going up and down that ladder as a six year old. It was positioned straight up against a wall of creosoted beams. That meant, for a small child, getting up the ladder was a combination of pulling up on one rung while pushing off on another, the simple physics of overcoming gravity by force. The physics was simple, but the effort was not.

Decades later, I realize that as artists – creators – the sea wall is a metaphor for two aspects of our vocation. First, it’s where we put in the effort to call things into being. In “Choruses from The Rock,” T.S. Eliot writes, “After much striving, after many obstacles;/For the work of creation is never without travail.” At the sea wall we prevail over obstacles that come between our attempts to take our vision of waves, sky, and sandwiches on the beach into the every day world of roads, framed views, and meals at the table. Part of the effort comes in working against the paradox of noisy backgrounds – where we live – those places that both hinder our art and are its wellspring. The sea wall is also the meeting point between the finite nature of our abilities and where we are (hopefully) set ablaze by Caedmon’s sudden angel.

Nemerov’s lines show us another aspect of the sea wall in the artist’s life. We begin to shape the language of our vision on the sea side of the wall. It’s where we take in the world by reading fiction and poetry, nonfiction, the lines on people’s faces. Where we listen to the wind, and music, and sounds of longing in the babel. And we watch movies, sun and shadow, postures in conversation. It’s when we attempt to translate the vision with “pen’s point or brush’s tip” that something inexplicable happens, “world and spirit wed.” Because humankind struggles to see by believing, we long to bring something of the invisible world to the visible. Maybe it’s partly through artists’ creations that God answers the prayer, “I believe, help my unbelief.” This is the artists’ call, to carry the stone jars up the ladder, and watch the water turn to wine.

Spoken Word

The documents are in folders, carefully taken out and laid upon my desk. Others have been folded and refolded; the creases have become a part of the paper. They are birth and marriage and death certificates, transcripts and diplomas. I scan the documents and send the file to one of my translators. After a few hours or days, the translated words in English are sent back. I look through, edit and check. The documents are filled with words like certify, signature, official, issued, expire; it’s pretty straightforward stuff.

Many clients are fluent in English and could translate their own documents if not for the need of an official stamp. A few come with little English and have a friend or family member along. Some are in a hurry with a deadline to meet, often students with transcripts due the next day, but many are relaxed; they’re used to things taking a long time.

Every once in a while, a client hands me a personal document—a statement or letter. These contain painful stories, usually against a backdrop of political turmoil, and they are usually handwritten. As I scan to proofread the English, I am an intruder, as are all the other people—the secretaries and lawyers and judges—who will be privy to the pages of story. Some of these documents are for immigration purposes, and they are the most difficult.

Recently I sat with a man from a war-torn country, for whom we had translated multiple documents over several weeks. On this day, with this last letter, the most important document, the man asked me to read the finished text aloud in English.

I didn’t want to but couldn’t refuse. So I put on my best reading voice, stopping to improve phrasing or make a better word choice as I read words that are common to these kinds of documents—words such as whips and gangs, militia and refugee camp. The man, standing next to my wood desk, listened intently, occasionally asked me to reread a sentence here and there, to be sure it sounded right. I had read the words before—it’s my job to do the final proofread—but by reading aloud, I felt the full force of my intrusion into a story that wasn’t mine. The words shook me up; they became a part of me.

When I finished, the man nodded, satisfied with the translation. He could hear how the words sounded just right in my American accent. I printed the words, the pronounced and perfected words, and pressed my organization’s seal over them. The man thanked me, and I wished him well, God’s blessings on his family, maybe in French, maybe English, I don’t remember now, and he returned the blessing, because that’s what you do.

And as the translated words have moved from office to office—accomplishing, I hope, the work they were meant to do—they have stayed with me, linking me somehow, to this story of a foreigner’s family hoping for refuge and safe haven.

A Game of Refractions

As holidays with my extended family arrive, so does the expectation of playing games. Whether in a pool, in the snow, in a gym, on the floor of a living room, or, especially, at the table. Ah! The evening table game. We’ve played everything from “Awkward Family Photos” to “Risk” to “Tenzi” to “Reverse Charades” to the incredible, mind-bending card game “Killer Bunnies”.

It begins innocently every year. One person suggests altering a rule of a game because of an injustice. It descends quite rapidly. Soon we are borrowing the rules, pieces, boards, dice of any number of games and combining them into one. It is not lightly we alter the rules of games — but we’ve found it’s great fun to create new rules and new games. Especially when hilarious calamity can ensue: a roll of the dice being named after someone despite indignant protestations, a chandelier almost yanked out of a ceiling, a mirror nearly shattered, a dining room table upturned.

This suspension of the imposed order is the epicenter of creativity. We’ve all seen the phenomena of the broken straw in the glass, or the way a shimmying pencil bends. Quickly it is explained. There is nothing to see here, the rules are still in place. The pencil is still the pencil. But doesn’t creativity abound when we marvel at refractions, not define them? Perhaps it is a disservice to the immutable and often, in and of themselves, astounding laws of the physical universe. But give me a three-year-old and a No.2 and I can alter reality.

One game my family has successfully refracted is “War”. There are five pages of new rules; it takes a lot of energy and attention to play it. Our most clever rule is a combination of cards — a straight flush— that will reset the entire game. It’s likelihood explained away by statistics. It was foolish to think this could actually happen, but still we hoped.

It was nearing two am. Three players were left. The other seven of us watched. Nerves were frayed. The game had dragged on. A play of the cards. An almost straight flush. One number off. The ten of us froze before erupting into astonishment and agony —and admittedly gratefulness at such an hour— that it hadn’t happened. And as we resumed our seats around the coffee table, still hemming and hawing about the nearness of such a realized but possibly, now that it had almost happened, stupid rule. The remaining players played their next cards.

It sounds simplistic and obvious if I tell you what happened next.

So remember when you were toddling along unaware, and, then suddenly, in a flash, the rules that govern the universe could make a pencil bend.

;

The grammarian Roy Peter Clark refers to the semicolon as “a gate that stands between two thoughts, a barrier that forces separation but invites you to pass through to the other side.” It is a punctuation of subtlety that has plagued college freshmen for years. Wouldn’t a period be more succinct? A comma more enlarging?

To think about semicolons, one must first think about what punctuation does—it organizes thoughts into units. Punctuation creates rooms for ideas to fill. Some rooms have windows (coma) and some doors (period). Long, dark hallways (ellipses) that are frequented by angsty teenagers uncomfortable with conforming to one particular room. And there is Clark’s meadow and the gate that swings.

Two months ago I married my husband, packed up my books, and moved across the country. Marriage was a relief; engagement, and its obligation for transformation, was exhausting. I should be more excited, more blushing, but I was terrified. I’m sure it is something akin to what a tadpole feels as its tale begins to shrink and nubs of legs begin to sprout. Will she be as good at living above water as below? Lungs bring new dangers.

Not all joinings are the same. In woodworking, there are dovetail joints, finger joints, tongue and groove, birdsmouth joint, and stitch and glue. The dimensional stability of the construction must be considered; what holds the materials best. The semicolon indicates both connection and separation, and in this way, it could also be a hinge. Two parts working in conjunction, opening and closing, leaving and returning, but sharing a pin.

Perhaps in this way, the semicolon is also always filled with unrequited desire.

The semicolon is Like a sperm forever frozen in its yearning towards an ovum, like a tadpole swimming upstream to rouse the moon’s dropped coin —Maurya Simon

This particular punctuation mark seeks a connection that is not realized in itself. A connection that occurs in the reader’s mind. It is two objects placed side by side on a shelf. The twin lenses of a pair of binouculars that magnify in parts to show the whole.

At our wedding, we read Jane Hirshfield’s “For What Binds Us.” Hirshfield saves the semicolon for the last stanza, in which a long love is both a scar and a fabric—something both broken and healed and woven together. Something made strong by perpendicular threads. And by brokenness.

here are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they’ve been set down— and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

…

And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.

If there was going to be a punctuation of matrimony, I would argue for the semicolon. It can be broken—an independent clause packing up her things and leaving for her own, punctuated space—but it is a joint of flexibility. It allows ideas to be separate from each other, to be in meadows, rather than rooms. It is equal. It is two ideas working towards a unified argument. It is the punctuation of striving.

Put Weather In

It can’t make sense everywhere. I assume it has a temperate climate bias. Or, to be more precise, a four-season climate bias, yet it’s arguably one of the most lasting pieces of colloquial insight bequeathed to us from the recent past:  “March comes in like a lion and goes out like lamb.” Or vice versa. That’s the allure of the phrase, I think, its seesaw mechanics. Pay attention to this one month, this little adage promises us, and you too can predict the weather. It’s tempting to make weather simple. The weather in any given place is distillable to a few features, to northeasters and lake-effect snow and Santa Ana winds. Where I live, any given day is likely to be ruined by wind, first and foremost from the northwest, straight out the arctic, and second from dead south, straight out the furnaces of hell.

I have wanted few things more than to be a weather connoisseur. Not to hide behind complaints and clichés but to distinguish between gradations of northwest winds. To really know a hundred of types of rain.

Or to have special insight about what’s coming. To have a trick knee that could forecast blizzards. (“Is there going to be a blizzard tomorrow?” a checker in a small town grocery store asked me once. I didn’t know, I confessed. “The old people say there is. They feel it in their bones.” We got 10 inches.) To predict precisely the first frost of fall by the blooming of goldenrod in the ditch. To know the rain is coming because, as a man once told me, “the martins are hunting the mosquitoes close to the ground.”

My calendar almanac does this another way, by including the names for Ojibwe moons—names which sound poetic simply because they connect more directly the world of things with the bodies and hearts of people: Snowshoe Breaking Moon (March), Maple Sap Moon (April), Wild Rice Moon (August), Little Spirit Moon (December).

Perhaps I’m gaining in the weather department. Not long ago, we got a wind from mere degrees north of due west, a direction from which we hardly ever get wind. Not a biting or vindictive wind, not lashing or blustery, raising the voices of trees and dropping them suddenly, as in a violent argument. A continuous but respectful wind out of the west, like slipping into a pool that is exactly your body temperature, like a stranger who seems familiar with your town ahead of time, who respects it without being asked to, even though he’s just passing through.

“Put weather in.” So read a quote I posted on a writing bulletin board when I was a high school teacher. Which is a way to say pay attention. Which is a way to say distinguish. Which is a way to say be a connoisseur.

Online, someone hypothesizes that there’s religious imagery to “in like a lamb, out like a lion,” since Christ is both lamb of God and lion of Judah. And so he is. And so he is the God of March.

Food for Thought

“It tastes healthy,” my friend benignly replied to my increasingly inquisitive gestures in the church potluck dining hall. The substance before us had the color of chocolate mousse; it had the consistency of chocolate mousse; it certainly felt like chocolate mousse on the tongue, but upon taking a mouthful, it immediately introduced itself with that telltale vegan, no sugar added, and nutrients aplenty sensation. It wagged its tongue at the sweet sultry flavor that chocolate offers—no sir, this stuff boasted dates, avocados, and coconut milk!

Now, I actually have a pretty strong affinity for quirky health-filled kitchen concoctions. Pinto bean brownies, dessert hummus, beet breakfast bars with chilli peppers and cardamom, gingered lentil goji berry cereal: these are things that find their way into my edible creations. Someone might call my concoctions bizarre, but most nutritionally minded people I know would call them wholesome, or guilt free, or maybe even innocent: and they would mean it as a compliment. Still, though, there is no denying it, sugar-free, dairy-free, gluten-free food generally has that healthy taste about it. And to be honest, as a metaphorical concept, the whole healthy food versus yummy food dichotomy deeply troubles me. I struggle against the thought because as someone who aspires to a spiritually enriched life, I feel that the polarization relegates my pursuits to the healthy tasting section of the potluck table: the brownish, runny bland dish in a homely, well-used crockpot that people look at probingly before quickly darting to the next dish.

Several years ago I found it quite convenient to partake in an exclusively strict superfood laden regimen. I had some spare time on my hands so I figured taking the effort to prepare really healthy stuff would be a good experiment in how it made me feel.  For months I ate sprouts, beans, kale, spinach and tofu—it was a banquet of nutrition packed awesomeness. And then a friend of mine, who happens to be an excellent cook, came to stay with me.

During the week together we feasted on homemade buttery shrimp bisque, Greek pasta salads that luxuriated in feta cheese and oil, crème brulee and cake so delightful that I could have written romantic odes to it. Meal after meal I quietly moaned to my friend, “I didn’t know food could taste this good.” Every meal was like a Dionysian festival betwixt my lips.

When my friend left and the culinary expedition ended, I felt as though I had two stark choices for restocking my refrigerator: sprouts or stroganoff.  I approached my food choices as I sometimes subconsciously approach life: I could make the healthy and responsible choice or the delicious and enjoyable one. My mouth, accustomed to the sweet joys of butter, sugar and cream howled for satisfaction, my body, slightly sluggish but staunch, quietly demanded some veggies. I had to make a choice, there was only room for one.

What I am seeing more of is that, as a general concept, enjoyment and responsibility are not necessarily as dichotomous as I sometimes have been led to believe though. Surprising as it is to me, my pursuits can’t quite be compacted down to the category of a vegetable or a cake. This is particularly applicable to a nuanced spiritual perspective. In an excerpt of Miroslav Volf’s book, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World, posted in Christian Century, he says:

In choosing between meaning and pleasure we always make the wrong choice. Pleasure without meaning is vapid; meaning without pleasure is crushing. In its own way, each is nihilistic without the other. But we don’t need to choose. The unity of meaning and pleasure, which we experience as joy, is given with the God who is Love.

This is truly magnificent news, for it tells me my dichotomy is off. Love personified has constructed a world in which, when approached from a spiritual lens, proffers things both beneficial and satisfying. Our spiritual awareness, far from making us and our world the unappealing undercooked onion puree in the potluck of life, enhances flavor.        

Love Me Tender. Laugh Me True.

The professor had this to say about my work, “Sometimes I get the feeling that you are sitting at your desk and just cracking yourself up.”  She was wrong. I didn’t have a desk. I sat on the bed, at a coffee table at Starbucks, on the train, or on the yoga mat that doubled as an accent rug. She was right about one thing, though. I make a habit of cracking myself up. I had to. I was working full time and in grad school so tears came easily and regularly. Laughter was a bit more elusive. The yoga teacher would begin class by having us set an intention for our work, something that would carry us through the convoluted poses, the unnatural stillness, the words I didn't know. As I sat before whatever surface that got the opportunity to hold the weight of my blank page, my intention was quite simple. It wore brown slacks, a grey shirt, and a tan hat. It contorted its face into funny shapes, it held wordless conversations with headless manikins, it tapped dance in the middle of movie set, and when the big moment came it belted out, “Make ‘em laugh.” My dance students look at me with wide eyes when I ask them if they know the combination well enough for me to turn the music on and stand off to the side. “It’s just hard,” one of them says. “We lift our left leg,” she pauses and performs a small, personal version of the combination. “Then the right and then the left again.”  I nod. “It’s so complicated!” she tells me again. “It really isn’t.” It isn’t like you are an octopus. You only have two legs.” I am serious, but they laugh. They foil my plans to be the “humorless dance teacher” and they laugh. Their eyebrows fall away from their hairlines, and they tell me they are ready to dance. We are rarely short on sources that encourage us to feel our feelings in the corners of dark places, especially in the arts. The goal of a lot of the “successful” works seems to be drama, conviction, introspection, berating self-reflection. It is far too easy to find failures and shortcomings to dwell on and to replay the never-ending movie of images things that we could have done better, or the millions of other choices we could have made. But we have other options. We can laugh. Not a snicker at something stupid, or an academic chuckle at an intelligent joke, but a full-bodied guffaw over something that is actually and simply hilarious. By doing this, we give ourselves a few seconds of love and relief. In the time it takes to squint the eyes, throw the head back, and forget that the world can be a sad and horrible place, we experience an appreciation for our lives and all of the twists, turns, and choices that brought us to the moment that invites us in to take a load off and have a drink. In the movie, the girl who took some creative writing classes in college tells the author that his narrator is narcissistic. The author, wearing khakis and a white t-shirt, both wrinkled, shrugs and says, “Well, somebody’s gotta love me.”

I laugh at this every time.

Living Water

I always try to pick just the right moment to tell people. That moment is sometime between realizing that they are one of those who will need to know, and the point when they figure it out on their own. Although I frequently share intimate details of my life, in writing, and with my bank teller, or a new acquaintance, there is one thing that I hold back until the last minute.

I have hyperhidrosis, which is believed to be a disorder of the parasympathetic nervous system. What this means is that I sweat excessively, mostly from my hands and feet, although everyone who has this condition is affected a little differently.

The paragraph above is usually what I tell people who are about to give me a professional massage or a pedicure. I’m still nervous every time I say it, but I’ve learned that these are the conversations most likely to go according to plan. These people are professionals.

Whenever I start dating someone new, I begin thinking about when I should tell them. My goal is always to do it before we hold hands for the first time, to minimize the shock, and the revulsion. Although no one has ever reacted badly at first (one boyfriend told me he liked knowing when my anxiety was heightened, so that he could attempt to soothe me), I cannot count the number of times that my beau of the moment has removed his hand from mine, wiping his palm on his pant leg. My sweat stands between me and the intimacy I crave, sometimes.

I was in single digits when I started to notice this phenomenon. My reading confirms that this is fairly standard for those who suffer without another underlying condition to explain the symptoms away. As a nine-year-old, I knew that a pencil was likely to slip through my fingers if I wasn’t paying attention, I couldn’t wear sandals, and that hardback books were my best bet at the library (I was once charged for water damage).

In my teens, I went the way of drugs. At the time, my only option was to put a highly concentrated antiperspirant on my hands and feet, wrap them in saran wrap, and cover them with socks and gloves overnight. The antiperspirant burned and dried out my skin, but the sweat got through. After too long, I stopped.

I used to plead with God to take away this condition, frustration twisting deep in my stomach. It seemed like such a small thing for God to do. But it hasn’t changed.

I have learned to live with my extra sweat. I shy away from synthetic fabrics and an abundance of cinnamon. I bought a mat made for hot yoga so I don’t slip. I wipe my hands discreetly before meeting someone new in a handshake. I am patient when I explain the water damage on my phone to the guy at the Apple Store.

Sometimes, my senses overpower me and I squirm. In those moments, I want nothing more than to run my hands under ice cold water while wearing a pair of absorbent socks. My boyfriends are not always the ones who pulled away, sometimes I was the one who couldn’t stand the humidity anymore.

I know that my sweating is outside of my control, something that came to me unbidden. Still, I can’t help but wrestle with shame when holding it up to the light. My sweaty hands are connected to me, a part of me, just like my heart and my lungs.

I have learned that when something doesn’t make sense to me, my best bet is to sit with it, even pour it a cup of tea. In these interactions, I have to force myself to be civil. I cannot say: “why are you here?” so instead I say: “tell me about yourself.” I ask: “could you possibly be living water?”

I believe that our bodies are intentional, that they are the best lens for us to experience the world. I believe that it matters that I am five foot two and a half, that my knees contain tendons that like to hang loose, and that my hands and feet sweat more than most.

My sweaty hands and feet have taught me to be patient with myself, and with others. They have taught me to take myself less seriously. There might be more, I need to schedule another time for tea. Along the way I have also learned that healing doesn’t always take the form I hope for. Some days it looks like sidling up to Jesus and slipping my hand in His, not worried about rejection. He already knows all my stories.

Somewhere Between Tom Brokaw and The Misfit

I blame Tom Brokaw. Or someone, anyway, west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies. This might qualify Walter Cronkite, too, who was no doubt the most powerful white man of my youth. The news itself, it might be said, was the direct descendent of Puritan plain style, the most complex stories broken down into a few short sentences delivered by stolid white men in serious, accentless tones with direct eye contact. And Midwestern English had a starring role.

Spellcheck doesn’t recognize the word “accentless.”

The idea itself is illogical, like water without wetness. Language by nature has an accent. The idea that Midwestern English is accentless is therefore obvious bunk. Still, for generations it was the language of the news. Generations after Brokaw and light years from Cronkite, the Midwest continues to suffer from their legacy, the idea of accentless language.

Or the Upper Midwest does—maybe the northern plains—I’m not sure where to locate it. Certainly west of Chicago. Chicagoans’ accents are crystalized, their identity sure. Though also south of the Coen’s Fargo. North, certainly, of Hannibal, Missouri. Mark Twain’s writing is among the surest of itself, rooted, but Twain is a Southern writer. Sure, the Midwest feels affinity for Twain, but primarily in a kind of envy, as wannabes.

As a writer, I spent years trying to neutralize my voice. First, I tried to leave the Midwestern accent—or non-accent—behind by trying to sound smarter: I spent years trying on the greater non-accent of academia. That is, I thought as a writer I was supposed to climb to some position high above the biases and stereotypes of accented English, so I tried to leave Midwest English, a supposedly accentless English, for Academic English, a really accentless English.

I know it doesn’t make any logical sense, that being smart means you know there is no objective point of view or accentless English, but that’s certainly not the impression academic writing gives off.

Something has also changed about Midwestern English. Its supposed clarity has become equated with simplicity or facelessness. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the era of Kronkite and Brokaw hasn’t left a vacuum, if it hasn’t left us with Southern accent envy. This would help to explain the way Duck Dynasty has colonized the Midwest and why I see a Confederate flag displayed in the window of a tiny town (population: 50) I commute through every day—in Minnesota.

So, I'm trying to return to the Midwestern accent again—or, more precisely, to the accent in this part of the Midwest, south of Fargo, west of Chicago, north of Hannibal—to hear it, to align myself specifically with it. What are the ins and outs of the English spoken in my backyard?  What has the language itself sheltered within its peculiar constructions and idioms?

But where do I turn for help?  To Southern writers, where else?  When Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit says about Jesus, “He thown everything off balance,” we know we’re in the middle of it, in the middle of a mind, in the middle of a place, in the middle of a theology. The best writers both align themselves with an accent, the diction of a place, and enable us as readers to get inside it, too. They both affirm it and hold it up to the light.

Which drives me to a second source: to the men at the downtown coffee shop, to the women at the supermarket deli, talking their Middlewestern talk, here in flyover country, the land of Tom Brokaw.

Building

 

I turn forty in a few weeks, and I want to find the blocks I played with in kindergarten.

Instead, I am trying to figure out practical solutions for replacing a claw foot tub with a walk-in shower.

[]

My childhood blocks were simple squares and rectangles, painted every hue in the color wheel. I loved the feel of them in my hands, between my fingers. Unvarnished. No protective gloss. I remember learning the word, periwinkle, for my favorite block. I loved the feel of the word in my mouth.

[]

I was snorkeling in the Swan River when I felt that same joy again. It was October in western Montana. My hands and face were numb from the frigid water, but coming face to face with a cutthroat trout in a deep inky pool under a full moon overwhelmed those discomforts. I learned that fish are less fearful at night and even allow a flashlight pointed at them. For two months, my classroom was outdoors, and my teachers were a mix of people and the land. I remember nearly everything from those two months studying ecology and community forestry.

[]

I am angry about the gap between kindergarten and college. I am angry about the leaky bathtub. My husband doesn’t have this struggle. His mind lights up with seemingly random bits of creativity, just as a kindergartner discovers new galaxies in a pile of blocks. I don’t think his education was very different from mine. And yet, he is fearless about exploring his imagination.

“I could build it myself,” he says. I internally calculate the probability of completing a DIY bathroom within a week, a month, half a year. “Uh huh,” I say.

“You know what,” he exclaims. He’s excited and looks right at me. “I could lay paving stones on the floor!”

“What?”

“Yeah, that’d look really nice, and we would just treat it once a year.”

Instead of trying to be a kindred spirit and channel my inner kindergartner, I think, but what if one of us dies?  I’d completely forget about that stone, and I’d be left widowed with a cracked floor. Or, even if we live long and healthy lives together, neither of us want to expend the energy trying to remember to care for the stone.

[]

The closest I’ve come to finding my childhood blocks is a set of pastels. I once placed each powdery stick on the exposed roots of a foxglove flower in my front yard. The pastels cascaded into the soil, and my heart skipped a beat. I played in the dirt and photographed the marriage created between earth and an art supply. It was thrilling.

[]

I later learned that the founder of my college field semester wanted to teach students what they had forgotten from kindergarten. How to listen. How to share. And, she knew that outdoor, experiential education encouraged joy and creativity.

[]

My kindergarten was a metaphorical sandbox where innovation sprouted. I have three memories that still glow as if they happened yesterday:

1. Crying until I stuck my lip out on the first day.
2. Frequent visits to the time-out spot.
3. Playing with the most amazing set of blocks.

I will turn forty soon. As the day approaches, I see certain facts with alarming clarity.

1. The older I get, the more aware I am of my mistakes, ignorance, and ego.
2. My mind is packed full of lessons and self-help ballyhoo*.
3. I continue to circle back to lessons I thought I already mastered.
4. I’m more honest about expressing myself, even when it’s scary or embarrassing.
5. I want more joy and play in my life.

These blocks have power over me. I don’t want a fancy car for my birthday or a new wardrobe. I want to play. I want to play with my kindergarten blocks.

It makes sense to remember the kindergarten penalties from an evolutionary survival perspective. Don’t bust open packets of mayonnaise with your heel, or you’ll get in trouble.

Perhaps I cried on the first day because I had spent most days with my nanny, who resembled the young woman on a package of Sun-Maid raisins. My nanny had a closet full of art supplies and an aquarium full of tetra fish. Gold flecks sprinkled her popcorn ceiling, and her house smelled like fabric softener. I did not want to leave that bit of heaven for a strange place full of strangers.

My childhood blocks are a keystone species** of my formal education. They embody hopeful words like curiosity, possibility, and resiliency. These words have become a vulnerable species as I’ve grown older. I want to step forward with more intention toward wonder. 

[]

The more fearless my husband is with his imagination, the more rational I am in response, the more practical. That’s not a good idea, I will say. I can’t help but wonder, though, what am I missing out on by avoiding mistakes?  

The closer I am to forty, the more delusional my desire becomes to avoid messing up. As if getting older means I may now live perfectly. The only perfection I’ve ever experienced is a manicure.

Maybe I need to lighten up on this constant reflection about what I’ve learned in the past forty years. I’ve made many painful and beautiful messes.

Still, I want to return to the kindergarten neurons in my brain, to the grassy habitat uncluttered by fear and cache seeds for unanticipated possibilities. I want to play and enter my forties with wide, open zeal.

Yesterday, my husband and I went to an art supply store just for fun. He bought indigo ink for his fountain pen. I couldn’t find the blocks from my childhood, but I brought home a set of colored pencils. I spent the evening coloring in my journal while we watched a prime time television drama.

“Let’s try the paving stones,” I say.

“It’ll be fun,” he says. “Let’s see what happens.”  

^{* What a wonderful word, ballyho.} 

^{**Keystone species are plants and animals identified as essential to the survival of other plants and animals. Healthy habitat for a bird called Clark’s nutcracker, for example, is tied to the health of whitebark pines, which also affect the health of squirrel, trout, and bear populations.}

Beauty Inherent

Over the years our family has enjoyed a place in Georgia, the farm my mother and her three siblings grew up on. It is in the middle of the state, fifteen miles west of Interstate 75, just outside of Fort Valley on Old River Road. The place names are particular. Some are obvious in their connections like Railroad Street or College Street as the sources of their meanings are still intact. Other names, Five Points, Fox Valley and the name of the farm, Breezy Hill, are less secure and open to interpretation, their corresponding stories lost to time.

But we know Breezy Hill. Our family locates about eighty years of time there. The stories of six generations include formative days on that place. On it we discovered singular aspects of our essence and being as people and family, to wit: why the name Hezzie is revered, why chinchilla means cold house, that Bush Lady is a sister, that cancer is brutal and devastating, that Leader-Tribune means real writing, that the green of spring is the whisper of flushing pecans, and that Bonzite is what it is to truly have dogs.

Signs and signifiers, words and their meanings, in the particular world of lives lived collapse the considerable breadth of time into sensations more brief and powerful as any fusion of atoms in the heart of the sun, and move us to recall and respond with pleasure and pain so precise as to know we are wholly unique, an imprint so recognizable, so relational, so phenomenological, it is a proof of true personhood, essential and there.

Breezy Hill, from anyone's point of view, was once a beautiful place. It is less so now owing to time and its ravages. But even as the physical appearance suffers, there is another way in which time cannot destroy its beauty. It is ransomed from time in the memories of the ones who lived there. The beauty of Breezy Hill now comes in such ways that sentiment and nostalgia are gathered and perfected in beauty transcendent.  

Such seeing is the way we come to know beauty in its ultimate, overcoming sense. It is how, counter to any general definition, we can view lived experience, full of joys and heartaches, successes and failures, and count them all good. It is how we can see in the tragedies of those we love the moment that beauty returns. Such familiarity becomes the merciful judgment seat of Truth.  

Any general knowledge of the Christ  –  in his tragic story, in unattractive appearance, in his low position, in his grandiose claims  –  must report that he is not God since God resides in infinite perfections. He is the inconsistency that proves his falsehood. And yet, for those who know him, who know beauty, these are the very signifiers that resonate in us as most substantial and true. We know he is the Christ because we know what beauty is, because we know its costs.

David Bentley Hart articulates the transcendental concepts of beauty and being in the kenosis (or, outpouring) of Christ better than anyone I've read. I strongly recommend this video to you. I will close with an excerpt:  

The experience of the Beauty that awakens us to the special force, to the difference between being and beings, that awakens us to the sheer fortuity of transcendent being's revelation in things, is also a revelation of the originally and ultimately peaceful economy of being. It tells us that between infinite Beauty and finite beauty there is no conflict, no dialectical tension, no betrayal of the divine, rather, Divine Beauty is that transcendent truth of being in which creation graciously participates, and which creation discloses again and again as pure grace.

Weight for it

The story was told to me with flannelgraph figures that effortlessly hopped from one point on flannel to the next. Abraham figured that it was time to find a wife for his son, so he sent his servant back to the old neighborhood to find a wife who had home-training similar to his own son’s. The servant prayed that the right girl for his master’s son would make herself known by giving water to him, his team and all of their camels. The servant made several turns that led him to Rebekah. He asked her for a drink water, and she gave it to him, and offered to get water for his team and their camels until they weren’t thirsty. This was a story about asking God for help with big decisions.

The night before my dance students were congregating in the lobby giving each other the type of hugs where one person is lifted off the ground and spun in circles. “AH!” one carrier exclaims mid-turn. “You are so light!”

“Hey, how much do you weight?”  I ask.

“Um…” the smaller shrugs, “eighty-something pounds.”

“Come here for a second.”  She walks over to me without hesitation. “We’re going to do a lift,” I tell her, and she agrees because she is a dancer and this is what we do to each other. We give, take, and share weight. She prepares to bend her legs in a pliè to help get her high into the air. “No, just give me dead weight.”  Her limbs flop and I hoist her up by her waist. 

“What are we doing?” she asks dangling in midair.

“I’m buying a couch tomorrow, and I don’t know if I can lift it. It weighs more than you though, so I’m really just preparing you for partnering.”  I laughed.

“Do you have help?” asked the girl’s mother, who was standing nearby.

I shook my head.  I was still new to the area, a recent transplant who hadn’t yet gotten all of the necessary home furnishings or friends to invite over to enjoy them, but I still had hope.  I put the tiny dancer down, and we all sauntered out into the night air.

The IKEA trip itself was uneventful. I’d shopped online and figured out where in the store’s underbelly my couch was and could therefore avoid having to meander through a store that is the size of some small cities. I could skip the carelessly blended together consonants that someone assures me mean things like “loft bed,”  “TV stand,” “duvet cover with clowns,” and the misleading sign that says shortcut, but really just leads to more words I do not understand.

In the warehouse, I held the cart in place with one foot and pulled then dropped the couch onto the basket. An IKEA associate jammed the about 60 percent of it into my Corolla and tied the trunk down. “Good luck getting this home,” he said in a tone that I perceived to be dripping with doubt.

To get to the door of my apartment building, one must walk about 30 feet uphill. It is hard on a normal day because there is no oxygen in the Colorado air. It is even harder when you have a couch. “You don’t have to carry it the full 30 feet,” my dad assured me when I expressed concern about how I was going to get the couch from the warehouse to my car to my apartment building to my actual apartment. “You only have to move it a few feet at a time.”

A few feet a time sounds like a nice idea when it is only an idea and  there is no actually weight involved. It sounds possible, before you actually have to attempt the task. Half-way through the task, it sounds downright stupid. I tried pushing. Then, after my straight path went awry and I almost pushed the couch into a bush, I tried pulling and end up ripping several holes into the protective plastic cover. I tried creating a sort of sled out of cardboard. The couch moved a bit; the cardboard stayed put. I tried praying. 

I adjusted the cardboard and hugged the frame and pulled it backwards. Adjusted, hugged, and pulled. I heard voices exit the apartment building, and I felt hope. It must have been how the beaten, and robbed man from the Good Samaritan story felt when he heard footsteps approach. The voice sighed. “Can I just get past you?” I let the weight of the couch lean on me and tried to make our join form small enough for the man and his companion to get by. I watched them converse around the cardboard, the plastic, the couch, and me. I watched them walk away. My heart beat several levels lower.

Here’s the math. A camel can drink an average of 20 gallons of water a day. A gallon  of water weighs about 8 pounds. There were ten camels. This makes for a total of 1,600 pounds. 

My questions are as follows:  How long did it take Rebekah to gather and carry over a thousand pounds of water? How many trips did it take for her to regret her offer?  Did it occur to any of the people within visual range to offer assistance, not because she was a woman, but because over a thousand pounds of water is kind of a heavy load for anyone to deal with alone.

I do not understand this story. The servant could have prayed for any type of sign and the story could have still ended with the desired wedding and moral intact, but instead, he prayed a prayer that placed a 1,600-pound burden on someone's shoulders and he stood by watched her suffer through it all by herself.

But she did it. She carried the water and did it well enough to warrant being someone's else bride and, according to an internet commentator I read once, she did so quietly and without complaining. She survived the burden, one gallon at time.

On Entanglement

I was sixteen and my demand for God right then and there was that “Crazy Times” by Jars of Clay would play on the “secular” radio station. If it did it would mean Lisa liked me. I turned on the radio and sure enough “Crazy Times” came on.

These days I’m more apt to display another type of naïveté and call that evidence of Quantum Entanglement. Spooky action at a distance, that’s the more poetic phrase for this factoid about our universe. As I understand it two particles are connected, though separated by distances that would take a crazy amount of time to cross. These particles can communicate with each other so that they lose their independence, thus entangled.

Physics also tells us that particles are constantly being exchanged within matter. We all are tied up with a bit of Albert Einstein in us, a bit of our neighbor, a bit of stardust. In his cosmic fantasy novel, The Dalkey Archive, Flann O’Brien comically explores implications of this very branch of quantum study. One of the character’s has this “Mollycule Theory” that posits people all over Ireland are turning into their bicycles and vice versa: “you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that partake serenely of humanity.”

For however wonderfully satirical O’Brien’s novel is, I can’t sleep on the Mollycule Theory. Books communicate to me, and I become them as I read. The good ones anyway; the ones that break off some humanity like it’s bread. So the goal is to read widely, diversely. The goal is entanglement with the atoms and molecules that compose words. Words and ideas and points of view that chase after what makes us live and breath, kill and suffer, laugh and shiver. And many, many times, usually at some distant point, I’ve discovered it’s those books that suddenly turn themselves on like a radio.

I never had the guts to tell Lisa she liked me because I heard a song on a radio — undoubtedly a good thing. But I haven’t learned my lesson. As a teenager in the bathroom I sang, You can’t attract/the things that you lack. So I’m still asking of radios, jokes, God, stories, songs, basketball shots, physics, to conjure connections that will deepen my entanglement with life.

Living with Armadillos

It had to be 98 degrees as I walked the perimeter of my cabin last summer, surveying the damage caused by armadillos. Wow, they had plowed up the entire hill where my cabin sat! They’d sent nearly all the topsoil down to the creek, exposing the underlayers to the heat and drought. No wonder a large crack had developed along the steepest side of the hill.

A year ago, I’d spent a lot of money for an engineer and an earthworks company to create a stable, level soil foundation for my cabin. In the months after, I’d spread topsoil, then planted grass and liriope on my hill, in an effort to create a natural barrier against soil erosion, crucial to the health of the house’s foundation.

I don’t live at the cabin full-time; I live in a city and commute to my place in the woods about six times a year. So it’s easy for a few armadillos to come in and wreak havoc without humans around full-time. The damage they can do in one night is astounding. Over a few weeks, their work can be monumental. I wanted to scream about the destruction, in fact, and strangle a few armadillos. The only reason I didn’t—I might be fined for throttling an armadillo, because this creature is honored as one of the “state” mammals in Texas.  

It’s amazing that I was once fond of armadillos, that just the sight of these “little, armored ones” was amusing, pleasing. Yes, they’re mostly gentle animals, foraging for insects near creeks and ponds.  And in this century, they’re a threatened species. What’s the harm in an armadillo? I never thought to ask such a question.

In the middle of my armadillo troubles, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo” inserted itself into my thinking. Truly, I’m a Bishop fan, and I like to revisit her work every so often. When I reread this poem, I didn’t consciously think it could help, but engaging with poetry is a source of meditation for me.

“The Armadillo” isn’t just about an armadillo, but about “the frail, illegal fire balloons” released during Brazilian celebrations of saints’ days. When the fire balloons “flare and falter, wobble and toss,” they suddenly become dangerous to wildlife, and this is just what Bishop wants us to see when  

                another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down.

Unfortunately, a pair of “ancient owls,” whose nest “must have burned,” fly “up / and up,” their undersides “stained bright pink” by the fire just below them. The armadillo of the poem “glistens” and is “rose-flecked by the fire,” leaving with its “head down, tail down”; its armor can’t protect it from the fire’s danger. The poet then shows us a small rabbit, “so soft!” but its softness turns grotesque “like a handful of intangible ash.” Here are the vulnerable animals whose lives will be cut short by humans sending up fire balloons meant to celebrate a holy day.  

While Bishop’s poem is ostensibly about the specific incident described, the dedication to her friend, the poet Robert Lowell indicates a larger purpose. Lowell, a conscientious objector during World War II, protested US firebombings of cities. In Bishop’s poem, the balloons that bring fire to the wildlife echo on a small scale what it might’ve been like to live in a firebombed city:

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!

The “weak mailed fist” suggests the soldier, who even though well armored like the armadillo, cannot win in a conflagration.

For readers today, getting at Bishop’s intention requires some digging. Yet her poem resonates for me in the way we humans have encroached into the natural world. In situating my own cabin, I know I’ve disturbed the wildlife, from fire ants to armadillos to coyotes. No, I didn’t wish to destroy the natural scenery, or animal habitats; and I do understand how much of the natural world we’ve already gobbled up. I’m aware that the East Texas woods now receive a lot less rain than they did in decades past. Just two years ago, wildfires threatened the areas close to my new habitat. There, and in “The Armadillo,” I’m reminded that we share the God-given world.

When I felt the urge to destroy armadillos after they destroyed my hillside, I scared myself. After all, these guys only did what armadillos naturally do. I don’t think I can return to my old fondness for armadillos, but I want to find a way to handle them without animosity—a fence maybe.

Distillation

Underneath my mother-in-law's table sits a bucket with a lid. In it, fish sauce—made from four ingredients: fish, salt, water, time—rots its way beyond rot to the salty-savory goodness. It's fermenting, condensing into a flavor so intense that it will almost level you, like strong drink.

She tends to it by opening the pail occasionally—though never in the presence of guests—and turning the contents, perhaps adding more salt. Then she closes the pail again and returns it to its position under the table. And waits.

I think I first heard the word distillation used, literarily, in association with Emily Dickinson. That ideas could be that intense yet held in your hand, distilled, that was a powerful thing.

It's counterintuitive, distillation. In a country of gushers and booms, and in a time of series and tomes, the idea of waiting on a few distilled words seems, ironically enough, wasteful. Then again, this just isn’t something one says about the Harper Lees of the world.

I suppose ripening is a handier metaphor for the process of writing growing into itself. Then again, ripening may be what reading groups and MFA programs are for. But what happens post-reading groups, post-MFAs?  I’ve waited so long for some of my essays to take shape that I'm afraid their peak flavors are past and they’ve moved into the logical outcome of the ripening metaphor: rot. Distillation, too, can be a cover for procrastination.

It can also backfire. There are essays which I put in the pail under the table and come to stir them only to find a sweet, cloying smell where there should be umami. This is the hardest, to throw something out.

But in general what’s the advantage of time?  And how much time?  

I found the ending to an essay—in writing a Relief blog, no less—about a year after I thought that essay was finished. Fermentation. Others of my essays, bloated to self-important lengths, I seem to be waiting to reduce down.

But how long is enough—or too long? Why do some combinations of words, like aged liquor, just get better?  And is there really a recipe? Is it really as simple as the right ingredients, process, vessel, and time?

Writing for Sport

 

“I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.”  — Joshua Ferris

A woman I barely knew once asked me what I would be if I weren't a writer. The list was not a prepared one, but it flowed with that sort of ease. In fact, I had, and have, no trouble thinking of other things I’d could spend my time and emotional energy doing. The list ranges from the realistic (a dancer), to the unlikely (a CIA agent), to the completely ridiculous (a house cat).

Only after listing my career ambitions did I pause to consider that I probably should have an all-or-nothing relationship with writing and that my answer should have sounded something like, “Oh, I don’t know. I would waste away into emotional turmoil if I could bring the pen to the page every day.”  I know for a fact that this simply is not true. There are days when I don’t write, and I survive to tell the tale.

I was a soccer fan once. I was living in Philadelphia at the time, which, it should go without saying,  meant that I was a very passionate Eagles fan. Being a Philadelphia Eagles fan means that you own a jersey (or because the roster changes so frequently, a selection of Eagles-praising t-shirts). It means that you hate the Dallas Cowboys, tolerate the New York Giants, and don’t really care about any other team in the league. It means that you know the lyrics to “Fly, Eagles, Fly” or at least know when to join in for the spelling of the team name and the subsequent cheer. Sometimes, it also requires some familiarity with the defeat song to the same tune, “Cry Eagles Cry.”

I reveled in all of this:  the regalia, the trash talk, the drama, the game. However, after the final loss of the 2013/2014 season and a rather spirited rendition of the defeat song, I came to a decision. “I am done with football!” I announced. “I’m switching to rugby, and I’ll be an All Blacks fan because they rarely lose.” As it turns out, though, rugby games are surprisingly difficult to find in a city dominated by football enthusiasts or without the added cable package, and since I was broke grad student, I decided on soccer instead which was an easier ship to climb aboard.

That summer, the World Cup was on, and my friend who had moved to Philly from Amsterdam dragged me a bar to watch the Netherlands vs. Spain game. I say “dragged” because, at this point, my passion for soccer was no longer fueled by the betrayal that comes with unsuccessful Eagles season. But something happened at that game. The team that had my support won, and by a ridiculous amount by soccer standards, and I got to cheer with, high five, and hug total strangers, and gloat at the end of the game. I suppose that was wanted from a sport. I wanted to write self-congratulating statuses, and work long-past victories into conversations about completely unrelated things.

Netherlands would go on to beat Australia, then Chile, and then meet up with Argentina for the semi-finals. My friend and I caught the bus to New York to watch it with like-minded fans.The bar was crowded, there was a cover charge, and the kitchen was closed even though the game was happening in the middle of the day. 

“Exciting game, right?”  a bearded man asked me during a commercial break. I smiled and made a sound that could pass for a yes. "We’ve waited four years for this,” he told me. 

“What did you do in the meantime?” I asked shifting my weight from one foot to the other. My feet hurt and because it was New York there were more people than seats.

He told me how the teams come together for the World Cup, but between that some of them who were playing together that day were rivals during the regional season. “It’s more like the Olympics than your Super Bowl,” he said. And that was it. That little comparison, the vocally italicized use of “your,” the too-long line to both the bathroom and the bar, and a game that seemed to be the athletic equivalent of “The Song That Never Ends,” putting all of that together meant that I was done with soccer. It also meant that I would care less than the people around me when Argentina won the game during overtime.

“You just don’t understand,” the bearded man, now close to tears, told me. “You’re American.”  

“I don’t understand?”  I muttered angrily. “You feel this way once every four years. I’m Eagles fan. This,” I looked at the defeat all around me, “is what I do.”

I think I have a long list of things I would rather do with my time because I want the soccer equivalent of a career. I want something that is easy and glamorous. Plus, since any particular world cup team only exists once every four years, I don’t need to put that much time or effort into it. What I think that means, is that there is a part of me that wants the victory without the fight. I  suppose it was easy for me to give up on soccer and start counting down the days until football season because I never tried or fought for soccer and therefore, didn’t feel the need to hold on to it. It is difficult to like things that don’t challenge your loyalty, your will, and your patience. Along with the challenge comes the choice to continue trying being a fan. Simply liking something is easy. You can walk away from it and never look back. Being a fan is hard because it is a choice not to walk away just because thing are going awry. It is a choice to keep believing in your team’s ability even while belting the words to the defeat song.

Being a writer is also a choice and not an obligation. Like being an Eagles fan, it is one I have to make, and make again, and again, through rejection letters, writers block, un-liked blog posts, and other people’s success. I sometimes forget that I can walk away, but if sports imitate life the way that art does, I can, and probably will, walk back, pick up my pen, and think of something to say. Why?  Because I am a writer, and this is what I do.

Retreating together

Writing is an act I do alone. In my home office before anyone is awake (just as now). In my school office between course prep, grading, and the dozens of other tasks that demanded my attention. Even at one of my local coffee shops, when others are present, I’m still by myself. Solitude is my preferred working method.

Yet one month ago, and for the second consecutive October, I reserved time and money to attend a weekend writing retreat in a three-story house facing Lake Michigan, a retreat with a dozen other writers from various states. For a self-acknowledged introvert, for someone who works alone (preferring it), what is the draw?

The gorgeous fall colors that are absent back home in Central Texas, sure. The temperature thirty degrees cooler than the above-average fall temperature back home, yes. The walk along the Lake Michigan shore, my bare feet chilled in the off-season sand, yes. Still, those aren’t the only reasons.

*                *                *

For much of Saturday, each of us carves out hours of space in the lake home to work on our projects. I sit in a lower bunk in my room, small reading lamp on, windows open to the breeze rushing in off of Lake Michigan, the heater set low enough to offset the brisk air, coffee cup within arm’s reach.

My first project is tightening a forthcoming creative nonfiction publication. I read aloud off the paper copy, marking it up, the task wonderfully slow. Next, I transition to completing those edits in the file itself. By late morning I have finished this first big project, and there is a feeling of success, a feeling of momentum.

I slide in socked feet down the hallway: others are still sleeping. Two rooms over, a friend is reading Dante’s Inferno. I descend the creaky stairs, each step a tree limb snapping, despite my attempts to be stealthy.

In the kitchen, someone has claimed a spot at table, gathering essays for a book-length manuscript. Another person is editing a collection of poems. We chat in snatches, each respecting the need for quiet. I pour the last of the coffee and prepare a new pot.

In the living room, a few people sit on the world’s most uncomfortable couch, each working with words in some way. I sit down, stretch my legs, having already written for several hours, the most my brain can handle in one span. I ask others what they’re working on; I share what I’ve been doing. And then it’s back upstairs.

*                *                *

Back in my room there’s a new sound. I approach the window, glance down. My friend sits on the deck two stories below playing her fiddle. It’s one thing to listen to music when I write (which I often do), another to listen to live music by someone whose written words months earlier moved me to seek help. Instead of being states away, she is in the sunshine bowing melodies that help me sort through images and scenes.

I am ready to work on the next project, a piece about something that has bothered me for decades, something I am not yet ready to disclose, and the revision comes easily. I acquire a new vision for the piece. Although I am alone in this room, I am supported by community around me in this three-story house, and that is enough to move me forward, to brave my way through what is painful to write.

*                *                *

Oh, it’s not all quiet, no. A bunch of writers together?

Over three days I laugh more than I have in months.

Over three days I’m a part of a community of writers, some of whom I know well, some of whom I barely know, some of whom I’ve just met, and somehow something creative, something sacred happens over this quick span.

Over three days there are communal activities: the evening meals preceded by our rendition of the Doxology, the evening jam sessions (my fingers aching from playing an acoustic guitar for hours), the reading at a nearby public library where each of delivers a couple poems, a short prose piece.

Over three days my heart is filled, and when I touch down in Austin on Sunday night, my heart still overflowing with fellowship, I have already been plotting the probable retreat dates for 2016.

Feel the Pull of Darkness

I volunteered to drive the night shift during a cross-country road trip last year. That meant the long drive through South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Maybe my enthusiasm to take the short straw was the prospect of what singer/songwriter/writer Josh Ritter calls being “pulled by the American darkness/the mountains, the rivers, the fields at harvest”. Or maybe it was the goal of meeting the sunrise in Missoula. (I had long ago been lured in by A River Runs Through It.) I didn’t want to come to such joy by sleeping until the morning.

A writing mentor told me once, “You really like to write about losers.” I do. I like stories whose characters experience the weight of evil and suffering dragging them down far short of redemption. I like stories and books and movies where evil— and I’m simplifying here—wins.

In a recent conversation in Granta, Ben Marcus and George Saunders discuss ‘dark’ literature. Both writers make no apologies about being pulled to stories that, in quoting Joy Williams, deal with “the horror and incomprehensibility of time.” Stories not fleeing from fear or hopelessness or sadness. Characters whose experiences do not bloom into rainbows and sunrises at the end. Marcus sums it up best, “Relishing this kind of writing does not mean we do not love life. It means we love life enough to want to be present to its difficulty and complexity. We experience pleasure when we feel that someone has arrived at something essential.”

Growing up with faith I have been assured I am part of a great cloud of witnesses. But too often this “cloud” is paraded around as a heavenly choir singing only of “glad tidings of great joys”. Faith, like literature, if it is to “arrive at something essential,” needs to be honest with darkness, allow space for doubt, and ponder questions with answers that leave us far short of redemption. As Madeleine L’Engle says, “pretending there is no darkness is another way to extinguish the light.”

It was nearly 2 a.m. when I crossed the Montana border in March 2014. Rolling hills were covered in frost and sparkling in the starlight. Just passed the state sign I pulled the car over and stepped outside. And, right now, as I’m thinking about what I felt out there, another of Josh Ritter’s lyrics rings true,

A sky so cold and clear the stars might stick you where you stand and you’re only glad it’s dark ‘cause you might see the master’s hand you might cast around forever and never find the peace you seek.