Poems & Thoughts

Long Ride Home

Ann — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:15:28 GMT

The last week seems more like a month; the last month, more like a whole season. A time of change. So many of you I had the great privilege of connecting with at the Hoop Path Retreat just two and a half weeks ago—it seems impossible! Only two weeks ago this morning I was saying the last goodbyes to Sparks and Jessica as they left to drive back down to Florida. Hard to believe. Since coming up here to the far Northwest of this continent, I feel I’ve walked through a long and transforming dream, just barely having awoken from the magic of our retreat weekend. The delicious electric activity of the retreat weekend fuzzed into a few days of pure exhaustion—nothing but catching up on sleep and food---and then immediately shot into high gear again. The Sunday after the retreat I was up early, driving the 5 hours to DC to enjoy a spur-of-the-moment hoop jam in a local park (courtesy, Surprise! Thank you so much, girl--) before a quick night’s sleep (thanks again to Surprise!) and up at 7 to get in line for same-day passport renewal at the DC branch of the US Passport Service—an undertaking I fully expected to expose me to the most extreme forms of bureaucratic tedium. I was not disappointed. A jocular security guard from Oxford, NC, did his best to entertain me, and I enjoyed some friendly hobnobbing with fellow passport sufferers. During the 3-hour break when my passport was being prepared, I wandered around the neighborhood, marveling at the meticulously landscaped rows of embassies and diplomatic residences. I have never quite enjoyed DC in the past, having firmly established my New York snobbery when I was in school there (“It’s all right—but it’s not New York f*ckn City!”)—however, the excellent hoop jam (to 30 or 40 live drums! Incredible!) and the surprisingly pleasant afternoon I spent dealing with the federal government gave me a fresh view of the place. I got back from DC just in time for Monday night hoop class—still distracted by the need to finish some hoops (which I never finished), pack, and leave the following noon for another long day of travel. Wasn’t quite relaxed until the next night around 7 or 8pm, at the Toronto airport, when I finally finished some paperwork from my other job, The Sun Magazine. Kimo and I had a 5-hour layover there but it flew past—we were already walking into the next dream. We arrived in Edmonton after 2am (4am our time) and caught a cab ride to our hotel, a downtown Days Inn. We got in so late we couldn’t pick up our rental car til the next morning. We finally got into bed by 3am (5am our time) and slept well for just a few hours—had to pop up early to check out and grab the car. On that overcast Wednesday morning I got my first solo taste of Edmonton. Leaving Kimo at the hotel, I walked the four blocks to pick up the rental car. I immediately noticed the cleanliness of the sidewalks and streets (something Baxter and I had also noticed in Vancouver last summer) and an appealing kind of plainness to the features of the city. Buildings of gray & brown, lacking ornamentation, but this absence of obvious beauty was tempered by the sense of purposefulness behind the design. Nothing was there that didn’t need to be there. This was one of the many ways I felt I saw the Canadian character reflected in my surroundings—a friendly and inoffensive pragmatism governed so much of my experience, which I noticed all the more, almost constantly needing to avail myself of services. Once I got our snappy little Toyota Yaris, we were mobile, and this is where The Food began. For many years Kimo had waxed rhapsodic about several Edmonton restaurants, two in particular. One was the Cheap Chinese (not its real name), the other was the Than Than Noodle House. Our first stop was the Cheap Chinese, whose specialty is the Long Donut, an unappetizingly-named culinary wonder. I was too afraid to order one myself, but once Kimo’s arrived I ate as much of it as he would allow. It’s a strange dish made of fried bread wrapped in a silken rice noodle and served with a strong broth. It was the first of many astonishing flavors I was gifted throughout the week. We had to more or less kill time the rest of the afternoon in order to ensure a supper at Than Than, which is only open Tuesday through Thursday. Apparently it’s so popular it can dictate its own weird hours. In a few days the restaurant will close for its annual five-week summer break. Incredible, no? The dish-to-die-for there was the Red Soup (again, not its real name). This soup is so important to Kimo that he greeted it and thanked it when it arrived. It was a tremendously beautiful sight—the bright crimson broth in the white bowl, sprinkled with chopped fresh spring onions. I had to take mine to go because I had not recovered from lunch yet! We began our drive into the great countryside of Alberta that evening around 7. The sunlight stretched long in the sky—so far north, the sun only touches the horizon around 10 and is fully set by 11. The sky and the land opened in every direction around us. The colors blue, green, white, gray, and gold made a painting that we were in. Deer of a much warmer reddish-gold color than the drab deer we see at home leapt at intervals in the reserves we passed, wisely placed a safe distance from the highway, wire fencing keeping the animals from leaping into the road. I appreciated the civility and kindness shown in this government planning. It struck me as very Canadian. We dragged in to Cold Lake First Nations Reserve around 11:30, too late and dark we felt to join the rest of Kimo’s family at the campsite they had set up down by the lake. Instead we were offered the chance to spend the night at his cousin Conrad’s house, where another couple and their teenaged son were also staying. Conrad and his family were all already at the lake about 10 miles away. I felt lucky to have the chance to get one night’s uninterrupted sleep in a real bed before we went to roughing it for 3 days and nights. My feeling of luck, however, ran dry the next morning when I felt a slight heat on my face, looked in the mirror and saw a nasty red rash all over my neck and cheeks. WTF?!? I quickly ascertained that it had to be the misleadingly soft, plush airport pillow I had impulse-purchased in Raleigh. I hadn’t used it on the plane, but figured it was the perfect thing for my night at Conrad’s, since they had taken their pillows with them. I had been poisoned by a reprehensible Toxic Pillow. It turned my stomach to think how I had snuggled into it, loving the light nap of its cover. Now I knew it to be filled with something about as innocent and yummy as radium. The Toxic Pillow Disfigurement proved to be a primary feature of my weekend. My face remained tomato-red through the whole Treaty Days celebration, as well as swelling up one day so that my whole face went off-center, finally resolving into a red, cracked hardpan that made me look like I’d been riding through the desert for weeks without water. Today my entire face (except the forehead) continues to slough itself off in a kind of Accutane nightmare. It feels much better though—no longer burning hot, and no pain or itching. K and I trashed the pillow at a gas station. I thought about sending it in and demanding a refund, but as the saga went on, more than anything I just wanted the pillow out of my life forever. My disfigurement, however, could not override the joy I experienced finally meeting Kimowan’s family and spending time within that warm circle. We met Conrad, who is best described in the Southern way as “a hoot,” the next morning when he came with his wife Michelle and baby Landon to pick up more supplies. When Conrad has the stage, which he most often does if he’s around, he has you laughing about every 90 seconds. I imagine his smile hasn’t changed a bit since he was 10 years old—it shines with a child’s brightness and hilarity. I loved him instantly. We made our way to the camp that afternoon and I was finally able to meet Kimowan’s Auntie Lee and his mother Ada. Two sisters, Lee’s expansive presence is complemented by Ada’s sweet, shy shadow. Within minutes we were all sitting around the fire (which at the family camp is going around the clock) listening to stories and trading jokes. I found it remarkably easy to catch onto the family rhythm, which surprised me since it was so different from what I’m accustomed to. Instead of questions and answers, or abstract debates, conversations were braided together out of observations of the immediate, affectionate jokes, and old stories. All these modes of communion came together to further establish a primary focus on common history, which was of course what the weekend was about. The Treaty Day celebration, as far as I was able to understand it (an effort which was midwifed dramatically by many conversations with Kimo) is a yearly occasion of marking another chapter in the tribe’s (or, as they might say, band’s) history. Folks who now might live in Toronto, Winnipeg, or Eastern Canada (or even North Carolina ; > ), come home to re-inhabit their space in the unfolding story of this people—in some sense, to remain in the story. Here we lived chapter two of The Food. Kimo’s Auntie Lee, aided by Ada and cousin Molly, cooked 3 meals daily over the open fire, usually for about 25 people. We ate boiled eggs and fresh sausage, deer and beef stew, fried bannock (Indian quick bread), steaks, boiled potatoes (it’s incredible how delicious a simple boiled potato can be…), as well as your classic roasted marshmallows (we cooked those for ourselves) and the most succulent fruit plate I have ever enjoyed. I sat by the fire and feasted, with my sore face, for three straight days. Every morning I made my way down to the shore of Cold Lake, the 13-mile-wide deep crystal-clear lake that straddles two provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Bright sunlight coated the quiet surface of the water like a layer of liquid metal, or a precious oil. I was told to greet the lake by facing it and throwing a stick into the water. Then, the lake would know I was there. I had said hello. Though I mistakenly dunked my feet in the water before properly greeting the lake, I think it forgave me. I submerged myself as long as I could stand it (something in the neighborhood of two to four seconds) each morning, letting the frigid water start my blood racing. I’d go under two or three times and then stride desperately through the water to a dry towel. Wrapped in the scratchy, homeworn towel, I felt true warmth. Nights we would gather around the fire and just jaw. I mostly just listened. That is the overriding memory now—sitting around the fire, listening to the voices. I immediately adopted a noticeable Canadian accent and set of verbal cues: “Cohen-rad’s goht to goh set up the hahndgames, hey.” It just came out of my mouth without any kind of plan set up by me. It was like a voice had been waiting around there for me to pick it up, and it was simply available when I reached for it. There were many games and customs ritually engaged in throughout the weekend, many of which I was able to witness. I relished every second of my role as background observer. I felt greatly relaxed in the mix of people, though I was one of the only non-Indians and probably the only American there. It reminded me of my early twenties, when all I did was walk around New York and watch people. But I digress. Just to describe a few of the games and practices I got to see: the annual dance (the cover band played nothing but classic country and fiddle tunes—by far the most popular music in the area and I am NOT KIDDING). Couples shuffled around doing variations on the Texas Two-Step and the basic clogging steps. A few times an old gramma would dance with a younger female relative. It was such a sweet thing. I also got to see (and play) the handgames, teams of five seated across from one another, trying to guess who’s holding which “bone”—the blank or the striped—in which hand. The “bones” are often made of wood but used to be made of moose bone. The team that is holding the bones sings and beats small handheld drums. The plaintive song against the strong and fast beat makes a deeply soothing sound. I fell asleep to it each night. Another really fun ritual is the Tea- and Bannock-Making Contest. Teams of two race to build a fire, boil a pot of tea, make bannock dough and bake it in a skillet over the open fire. One couple finished their goods far ahead of the others—it struck me how watching the race made me hanker for a piece of the bread and a slurp of the tea. We had to leave before the contest was quite over, though, to partake in another of Auntie Lee’s feasts. It’s not advised to be late for supper, or god forbid, miss the meal. That would constitute a deep insult to those cooking for you. I obliged happily. Our time there seemed like an age—when we left Sunday morning, both Kimo and I had to hold back tears. Yet, when we got back on the open road, all was well. We were headed for Food: Chapter Three—Dim Sum in the City! We were blessed to meet up with our hoop brother Geoffrey and his partner Kyle for this meal. They drove all the way from Calgary (three hours!) just to spend the day with us! It was a joy and an honor. Our dim sum choices were delightfully varied: squid in curry sauce, barbecued pork buns, large savory meatballs, fried rice wrapped in a banana leaf, steamed shrimp dumplings. With a cup of black tea and a glass of water, it was a perfect Sunday meal. In the afternoon, we stopped through a street festival. K suddenly got tired and we realized that we were standing right across from a sort of cheapo-fleabag-but-also-nugget-of-history hotel, which had a bar downstairs and a youth hostel kind of vibe. It wasn’t fancy living by any stretch, but at only $70 a night we felt we could do little better. Seems like the hotel and its companion bar had been going for many, many years. Kimo remembered it from his college days back in the 80s. We slept just fine there. My power supply is getting dangerously low here on the plane, and I feel moved to wrap things up. I’ll just mention a few more moments: hooping in the park with Geoffrey and Kyle, breakfast at Albert’s, the best Tom Kai Gai I have ever tasted, and another series of glances at the city of Edmonton—a city I had never heard of until Kimowan and I became friends some six years ago. It was a journey on every imaginable level. And I thank you, Kimo, my friend, for bringing me into this rich experience.

Ocean

Ann — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:56:40 GMT

The ocean that is eternally open to you. In the sliding sand, your dog gently alters his play to meet the deficits of his aging companion. A similar tenderness in your decade-long friendship with the other dog’s owner. When was the ocean ever not there? If such a time could be remembered, it would exist beyond anything resembling memory, or what became memory—the force that enables single-celled organisms to reproduce. When have we ever not been here? Youth sang a song and later watched the young sing. Age watches neither self, nor other, but the knowingness in which we will all come to be held. The ocean that is eternally open to you.

Proud

Ann — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:11:04 GMT

I feel so proud tonight, May 6th, 2008, to have had the opportunity, the honor, the privilege of voting for Barack Obama today in North Carolina's Democratic Primary. I feel so proud that this rare leader, such as I have never seen in my lifetime, has handily swept a victory in my home state. I feel so proud, so proud tonight, of my state, North Carolina, for so unexpectedly bringing its tarnished (by decades of Jesse Helms and other Republican victories) political power to bear in one of the most important political contests of American history. Should this moment ultimately prove to be pivotal to Obama's candidacy, should it be the decisive showing of votes that finally and fully (and deservedly) open the Democratic nomination to him and thus make it possible for him to defeat John McCain in November, and thus make it possible for us to finally and fully (and deservedly) exhale for the first time in eight years--I will be glad to have noted this feeling I have today of Yes. May 6th, 2008, today, I have had the opportunity, the honor, the privilege of voting for Barack Obama in a contest that may well determine the future of this country and, therefore, the world (at least as we know it), and I'm proud and humbled tonight to have the power of the right to vote, and I think of so many who fought and put their lives on the line to make this privilege possible for me and for all people who have been disenfranchised in the history of this nation.

An Introduction

Ann — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:26:08 GMT

At our Hoop Path Retreat Fire last summer, some of you will remember that for my Fire offering I burned a huge stack of checks. These were the checks my father had signed over the last six months of his life, when an aggressive tumor was rapidly overtaking his brain. Steadily his signature disintegrated until it became an unrecognizable, childlike scribble. Finally his signature was replaced by that of his executor, an old family friend. Finding the checks when I cleaned out his house (alone) after his death was one of the hardest discoveries. The visual evidence, the image of his artfully minimalist signature unspooling, little by little, into an awkward, effortful, bumpy scrawl, was too much for my eyes. I put the checks away and didn't look at them again for ten years. When I found them again, I didn't understand why I was holding onto them, but I also knew I couldn't throw them away. It was a strange and confusing feeling to be lugging around this concrete relic of my father's slow disappearance from the world. Why? I couldn't answer the question and so stopped trying, and put the checks away again in the attic of the house I had finally settled in. When I started a regular hoop practice, with Baxter and Kimowan, I began a new relationship with myself. Instead of my mind always leaping to the forefront, taking over all tasks of understanding, shoving its way to first place to interpret and synthesize experience, I began to experience things through the body, through a truer and less mercurial Center. Before hooping I could not get my mind out of the way--it simply dominated. Now I was learning how to trust a deeper knowledge, a wisdom that came up directly, unfiltered and uninterpreted, through me. It was this deeper wisdom that told me it was coming time to let go of the checks. Seeing with my inner eye, I could recognize that I was holding onto the checks because my father's death had become more important to me than his life. What I had lost when he disappeared from this earth was more important to me than all of the gifts he was responsible, loving, and unselfish enough to give me in life. I realized that holding on in this way, while I was able to have compassion for myself for doing so for many unhealed years, was not the best way of honoring my father's memory. Who he was was so much more than the last six months of his life. And so, with the witness of my hoop brothers and sisters around the Fire, I set in motion a Current Change (a term coined by Brother Robbie) to let go of dwelling on the pain and sorrow of losing such a vital and rare person, and turn towards honoring the immense gifts he brought into my life. And so, in this blog, which I've thought about for many months, I thought I would make an attempt to introduce you to my dad, Jim Humphreys. For sounds and visuals, the best way to envision him is to imagine John Edwards. Their resemblance, noted by our whole family, is uncanny--particularly their similarity of speech. When he died, my dad was only a couple of years younger than Edwards is now, and looked every bit as youthful and exuberant as the unfortunately doomed presidential candidate. Daddy was also a lawyer with political aspirations, albeit considerably more modest. He was active in the local Democratic Party and talked occasionally of running for mayor of Winston-Salem. Like Edwards, he grew up in small-town Southeastern North Carolina, and like Edwards he felt inordinate ambition from early in life to move beyond the parameters his hometown. He spoke quickly, often in staccato flurries that suggested his thoughts nearly outrunning his ability to lasso them into words and sentences. In what I now recognize as an innate delight in language itself, he always took care to find just the right word, to say exactly what he meant. Having spent 3 years in Germany (he had compulsory military service after college because he had been a cadet at West Point, where he was teased mercilessly for his hillbilly accent), he was also fluent in German and spoke some French (but zero Spanish, to my great amusement). He read only histories and biographies, lacking the patience to follow the often winding paths of fiction, and would often read a thick hardback with one eye while watching TV (news, old movies, and "Rockford Files" being his programs of choice) with the other. My parents had divorced, with admirable maturity and absence of drama, when I was 7, and we spent two nights a week at my dad's house less than a mile away. He was an absolutely terrible cook but did his damnedest to make meals for me and my brother, despite our relentless heckling, eye-rolling, and jokes about his prowess in the kitchen and ridiculous yellow apron. His weekend Birkenstocks, coupled with khakis and a bright polo shirts, were also the object of affectionate derision ("Wow, Pop--what a combo!") My dad bore our bad preteen jokes and even insulting comic drawings with an endless well of good cheer. He saved my brother's superhero rendition of him in a cape and tights with a discernible potbelly and a huge, orating mouth, along with every artistic foray we made while at his place, the Land that Art Supplies Forgot. Magic marker menus on notebook paper and pencil tracings of Ziggy were carefully collated in Daddy's photo album. At home, his 1977 Gibson Hummingbird was always out of its case, ready to be played. He played and sang at least one song every day, and my brother (who eventually became a professional musician) and I (who still play & sing when I get the chance) learned hundreds of songs that way--traditional, bluegrass, folk, and "gonzo country"--the Texas style pioneered in the 70s by legends Jerry Jeff Walker, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson. I know if he had believed in his own musical talent, which was real but limited, he would have loved to spend a few years knocking around coffeeshops as a gypsy songman, like his idol Jerry Jeff. But his small-town sense of convention and responsibility, as well as the strong desire for a family, took him down another path. Even though it is so easy to exaggerate the attributes of the dead, so easy to render them as they appear in our memory--larger than life, rinsed of flaws and limitations, amplified to proportions that would be unrecognizable in life--I know that when I say my father was an extraordinary parent, I am not exaggerating. Nothing in life brought him more joy than my brother and me. He delighted in us whether we won or lost, whether we were behaving ourselves or being little whining pains in the ass. He both loved us unconditionally and genuinely *liked* us, as people. He believed in us and consistently demonstrated that, which gave us the gift of real confidence in ourselves. He listened to us, he was fair, he was interested in who we were and who we would become. He often mentioned how excited he was to become our friend when we were grown, to get to know us as adults. He would tease me, saying, "Maybe someday you'll start calling me 'Jim'--" to which I would scream "NO!!! I'm NEVER calling you anything but Daddy!!!" Among my dad's papers I found one of those local magazines (like "Triad, On Point" or "Winston-Salem Magazine"--mostly advertisements for local businesses) who they had interviewed my dad as one of "The Top 10 Eligible Bachelors of the Triad." They printed the answers to a semi-personal questionnaire which all the "eligible bachelors" had filled out (my dad was never one to refuse good publicity) and I was struck by one question in particular: "What is your life's greatest achievement?" All the other bachelors (many of them, like my dad, divorced with children) had cited business or professional achievements. One of them even talked about buying his first boat. My dad's answer was: "Being father to two nice children." It goes without saying that my dad's funeral was surreal. I had been largely oblivious to the symptoms (forgetfulness, exhaustion) preceding his diagnosis with an advanced and inoperable brain tumor, which happened two weeks before I left home for my first year of college. One day my dad was up and about, his normal self; the next day he sat me down and told me that no matter what was wrong with his brain or what happened to him, I was to continue my life as planned, no interruptions; the next day he was disoriented, flat on his back in the hospital, head shaved from the biopsy, voice weak, unable to find words. We never again had a real conversation. As he had directed, I left for college two weeks later, as planned. I returned for 3 visits before he died in February--two weekends and the winter holiday. Nothing about it was in any way real to me when I received the phone call that he was gone. My dad had several close friendships and knew thousands of people, and thousands showed up at his funeral. In my shock I experienced this outpouring of love and respect as through a convex lens--large faces waving in front of me, one after the other, moving, distorted, speaking words. Thankfully, some words made it through my glassed-in state and offered me another chapter of what my dad had to teach me in this world. Face after face that I did not recognize came up to me after the funeral, saying, "Your dad really helped me once..." "I wanted to go back to school and your dad lent me some money..." "I can't tell you how much your dad helped me when I was having a hard time a few years ago..." I was astonished that none of these people were familiar to me. I didn't know any of their names or how my dad knew them. Most of them I would never see again--my mom moved away from Winston-Salem before I graduated from college, so I hardly spent any time there again. But they gave me the gift of letting me know who my father had been, in at least one respect, outside the world of my perception. They realized that I might never have known something important about who he had been. I am so grateful for that. This was one easy example of a way my father has been able to guide my life toward Light, toward being a better person than I might have been, even though now he has been absent from my life as long as he was in it. It's an amazing thing, to realize that I can still learn from his example, or at least try to. But I've had to turn away from the temptation to wallow in this loss, to refuse to grow out of anger that things did not turn out the way they should have. Of course, my father should have lived, should have been able to delight in witnessing the growth and change in our lives as well as take more time for himself, for answering his own unanswered questions as he got older. I often wish that he could have gotten to know the many wonderful friends in my life--there are so few left who really remember him. But I thought I'd take some time today and let you get to know him a little, not just because he was my dad, but because he really was a great guy, and you would have liked him.

Movement's Blessings, and Lessons

Ann — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:56:38 GMT

Last night's hoop practice was particularly rich. Having had a sore shoulder for much of the week, and a bizarre episode of overcaffeination on Thursday, I vividly felt the absence of discomfort in my body. Stretching out before practice, I reflected on the simple relief that quiet, relaxed, mind-present stretching can bring, really noticing the difference that came out of allowing my full attention to rest in my physical being. Having practiced an intense form of yoga for eight years, I got to a point where yoga itself dispirited me, and for the last 2-3 years I've essentially put it aside--it had become encrusted with thoughts and associations that made me feel intense and keyed up, as opposed to relaxed, free, full. Now that hooping has dropped my center more resolutely into the actual center of my body (as opposed to residing, like a transient renter looking for a new place to live, in my head/thoughts, in the electric center of my brain) I have felt awareness in parts of my hips and back that is entirely new. The awareness is unrushed, quiet, and complete. I realized while resting inside this slow movement how easy it would be for so many to benefit from the very low-impact exercise of simple stretching. I also realized that I, an extremely physically active person, rarely take time to stop what I'm doing and just stretch, just feel. So I understood how difficult it must be for someone who is inactive, unfit, and unhappy in their body to take this time to practice this kind of self-care and feel its richness. My hoop practice itself zoomed by, easily yielding a score of new insights about moving with the hoop--exhilarating--separating undulations of the upper arm, moving from the soles of the feet as the hoop revolves around the core, new connections with the hoop on the legs--a delight. I marveled at the joy that is so readily available through engaging the whole body in rhythmic movement, and understood anew that the human body is meant to move, is built to move. I am certain that there are encodings built expressly for dance embedded in our genetic material. We are machines that can move as a poem moves--with intent, within structure, into grace. Present within these recognitions was the conviction that each of us has the potential to find physical relief, joy, and, consequently health, through movement. I could feel the untapped power of pure physical awareness--how, if we can bring full attention to our bodies from within, we can identify with ease the places that don't feel "right", and we can nurture those places with profound relaxation, deep stretching, even self-massage. It struck me in the middle of one of these delicious moments that the love and respect of self that we can choose to bestow upon ourselves by honoring the body in this way is something that so many people desperately need--an easily accessible resource that can truly heal. But the thing is, so many people lack even the self-respect and self-love to even begin the process of taking time to nurture the body, to listen to its needs and respond with kind, loving hands. The healing these simple practices have brought to me--a former anorexic who saw my body as a queer windowshade that was pulled down awkwardly beneath my huge thought-stuffed head, as an incidental and confusing scaffolding that I was attached and condemned to--has been immeasurable: listening to my body, responding to my body, respecting what it is. And yet--and yet--after a while as my thoughts drifted on, I realized that an underpinning of this line of thinking was that we have total control over our health, that we can always be free from pain if we listen closely and carefully enough. But we cannot be free from pain, whether it be physical, mental, or emotional--we have no guarantees (as my therapist likes to say). We might take every precaution and still develop stomach cancer. And ultimately there is no way to guard ourselves from death, of course. Death and pain, at some level, come into our lives, and they are not by definition punishments, or the consequences of bad choices. They simply are. So what is the lesson here? I have life, and blissfully I have, much more often than not, health and comfort in my body. My gratitude for these blessings, and my recognition that my life and health are gifts that have miraculously come into being through phenomena that I have no way of understanding, will leave less room for bitterness, resentment, and resistance when pain, physical challenges, and ultimately death come my way. I will be more present in the miraculous cycle of my own life. How else can we live? If we are afraid of pain, we are not appreciating the freedom from it that we now enjoy. If we are experiencing pain and hating it, we are preventing ourselves from discovering acceptance and, possibly, healing. I felt last night a new understanding that the more humbly and completely we appreciate the gifts that we are blessed with now, the less we will be shocked and unbalanced when life inevitably brings its slings and arrows. Gratefulness for the miracle of being. Thankful. Present. Alive.

Black Dog

Ann — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:07:04 GMT

---for my beloved Vincent Down at the creek trail we run together, as twilight makes shapes in the trees. The next moment, for him, always holds promise-- he bounds ahead, unafraid. With my voice I could stop him fifty yards away-- and his black, bat- eared head, turn, waiting for my yes. And if a stranger, if a stranger were to enter our home, he would stand between me and whatever might happen. I know this. More deeply than I have ever trusted another person, he trusts me. In the growing dusk, we run. And his brave heart cuts like a light into the darkness and danger before us.

A gift, a love-gift/ Utterly unasked-for

Ann — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 21:19:12 GMT

Over the last few weeks, my consciousness has been pricked again by the flat-out realness and even perhaps the necessity--certainly the inescapability--of the shadow side of life, the heavier and darker side that lives with or without our acknowledgment. In youth, I lionized tragic figures like Sylvia Plath (from whose poem "Poppies in October" comes the title of this blog)--whose explorations of loss magnetized me. I was drawn to and identified with emotions like nostalgia, sadness, wistfulness, and melancholy. The Christmas season was the epicenter of this orientation--every year I reviewed family albums, rued my lost childhood, and ticked back through my extensive catalog of memories, just for the sake of doing it. I quite simply enjoyed it. The compulsion to do this was powerful--often much of my daydreaming mind was caught up in an almost cinematic memory review, almost unfailingly culminating in a few tears, swollen with a sense of import. I was deeply *aware* of the passage of time--poetically, "What had been"--the sense of anything that "had been" earned automatic significance and weight. When real loss hit me with my father's totally unexpected death at 50 (I had just turned 19), this formula for a time helped me stay afloat, like a single dry branch, in the incomprehensible and raging ocean of what was *really* possible in life. What *real* loss was was a sickening halt to the rich accumulated meanings in everything, from the largest (a sense of the presence of god) to the smallest (enjoying a pretty new set of earrings). The sudden revelation of the depth of my ignorance was gag-inducing and unbearable. For a time, the memory-review habit became important as incantation: my father *was*, he *had* been somebody, he was *not* forgotten. I grieved constantly and privately--looking back, looking back, looking back--my father, after all, was there. I developed many behavioral rigidities to preserve things as I understood them. This meant: lots of serious concentration on abstract concepts, doing the same things in the same way every day, never wasting time on anything that I couldn't define as useful. It took many, many years to fully relax this hold on myself, but it did happen bit by tiny little bit over the years. The natural disorder and unpredictability of life slowly became apparent to me, and I set myself to the task of acceptance. And yet, since I've started hooping, so much more has been revealed to me. When I first started hooping seriously, and was experiencing my first moments of bliss, I also had an extremely intense encounter with fear. This strange dance, which was borne upon me with a sudden and totally uncontrollable ferocity, led me (unwilling) closer to the face of fear than I had ever been. I can't explain it any better than to say, I was casually spinning the hoop around my waist one night, and Fear itself possessed me and chased me through the house. It sounds incredibly bizarre, and it was. The whole time I was aware, "What am I afraid of? I don't even know what I'm afraid of!" but at the same time I felt more acutely terrified than I could ever remember. In a way it was even more terrifying not to know what was scaring me. I could just feel the presence of Fear and I knew it was chasing me. I knew it *meant* to scare me. And what I learned was: there was nothing I could do. I simply lay down, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to ready myself for the worst. And what I learned then was: feeling Fear is one of the worst feelings imaginable. I truly felt like I might die. But I also saw that what I usually call fear, is not Fear, but resistance to Fear. This was so important. Avoiding Fear is also a terrible feeling, and that's what I usually feel. Feeling pure Fear is way too intense and draining to go through regularly. I can't tell you how many times I've returned to this insight for guidance and clarity in moments where Fear seems present. So, moving through this awful, awful feeling was incredibly important and valuable to me--an experience that was new. I had a similar experience a few nights ago. I was home alone, working on hoops, and feeling heavy reverberations of some anger and anxiety that I had been struggling with earlier that day. I've tried recently not to resist anger (trying to take the lesson from the fear experience) and open myself to witnessing it, feeling it in my body. This anger was mixed with old, stuffed-down feelings of betrayal so it had a particular acrid and raw feeling. I found myself crying and just tried to allow myself to cry as deeply as I needed to. However, the more deeply I cried the more confused I got about why I was crying. I was trying not to get caught up in thinking about why, and just observe my thoughts, but the more I observed them the more they seemed to change. I tried to just follow them. And what I understood was: the deepest, deepest sadness that I felt came from the realization that I could not know what was real or true. This is hard to explain. I was trying to follow my feelings back to their origins in facts and events, and I realized that nothing could really be said to be absolutely true about anything that had happened, and everything was always going to be interpretable or understood in a different way, and then I realized that I did not even know myself or anything, really. I could not see what was true, and I could not even know if there was an irreducible truth. This is not a new idea in philosophy, but experiencing it directly was entirely different from considering it with only the intellect. I finally felt like I had a shred of understanding for the incredibly strong longing some people have for a real (i.e. verifiable) sense of God--how someone might just want to know, "What's real?" And to feel, to experience, the unknowability of this, was really, terribly sad. Yet, the next day, I felt calmed. I had seen something real, which was unknowability itself. It was profoundly calming to see that I didn't have to "get to the bottom of things" somehow. The bottom was not the bottom. Or something like that. Then the next night I was reading my new Sun magazine (which is, incidentally, my other job--reading manuscripts for The Sun) and there is an interview with a therapist named Miriam Greenspan who has written a book called "Healing Through Dark Emotions: the Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair." Through the interview she talks about her parents, both survivors of the Holocaust, and the despair that shaped their lives, and her own experience of losing one of her three children. These experiences are unimaginable to most of us. Yet, her life has shown her the wisdom of learning from, as she says, "the dark side of the sacred." She points out how pain and despair are categorically pathologized in modern medicine--i.e., there is not such thing as "normal" despair. She references practices and rituals in other cultures--sitting shiva after a death in a Jewish family, for example--that contextualize a descent into grief and hence, provide a way out. When she described emerging after the seventh day from sitting shiva after her father's death---how the rabbi guided them on a walk around the block, and how struck she was, after seven days in the same room, at the bright bustle of life, and how a part of her longed to return to that---tears came into my eyes. She saw the wisdom of the ritual--it was designed to allow that sense of rebirth after being fully *in* grief. Somehow, all these things have come together for me, reflecting on the past year. I have learned so much from the darkness, so much that I don't know how I would live without. I still hate and resist it in many ways, but more and more I understand and accept its place in the world, and in my own mind and heart. I send out to all of you the wish that whatever darkness befalls you becomes your teacher and guide.

Train

Ann — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:58:00 GMT

Moving south on the train, towards home, middle life truly a welcome companion. The sky darkens rapidly, to the left a brighter skein of orange and rose gold, the last remaining stain of the day-- and I don't mind anymore-- nothing's so terribly important as I once believed. Nothing's waiting to happen like an actor offstage, the idea of a life. Today a foul smell wafts through the train car every once in a while, people chat on their phones. I've been comfortable here, I've gotten work done.

Night in Fall

Ann — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 04:58:39 GMT

The way the dog sleeps tells us the season's changed-- he's no longer restless. The cold gives us deeper access to the unconscious. And if I could describe that space-- Lord knows I don't want to. The first time loss hit me like a two-by-four and erased who I had been I decided I no longer wanted to try to become a better person. But that's been eighteen years, and the temptation to be better, better than who I was, comes on so slowly I never knew it hadn't left-- the foolishness of a teenager! To think I could decide how life would change me.

Lucky

Ann — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 05:31:12 GMT

Tonight I feel good luck in this perfect air of September, both warm and cool enough to leave the door open. Luck: it tends to point back to survival, at core, basic, and unromantic. But to feel it in the first nights of fall! There are certain nights... It is obvious what's real. On such nights, no one is called superstitious. Death tried to take someone and didn't, that's when you know you've seen Luck pass over this life and felt her silk ribbon across your cheek.

Outside the O.R.

Ann — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:16:40 GMT

Hunger, a stiff jaw. Family members pace, pace, slump staring at a small TV "What happened to her? I went to get her cigarettes and she wasn't even there, she doesn't even watch TV. Just lays in her bed all..the..day.." It's nothing like the desire for real food, real life, being in here and thinking about getting a Frosty (Wendy's actually inside the hospital) and everyone, everyone is having this experience of not-life here, where we have to be saved. It's too cold in the hospital. Belongings have to be lugged. You have to lug an IV behind you like a tail or Siamese twin. It's loud. There's a TV on. The fan grum, grum, grums, then blessed silence. Everyone's suffering. When they stop suffering they get to leave.

A New Poem

Ann — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:55:44 GMT

The Parrothawk Dream The parrothawk's wing folded against my chest though he would die-- And his chirrup-song beneath my chin was everything love was supposed to be. I wished he would never leave me, I'm still wishing-- Something had crushed his wings, tail--my mother stuffed him in a bag and when I ripped it open to save him his lost blood left a stain. So gently, I tried to straighten his broken length, and laid him against my heart which might warm him, with one hand lightly I held him safe for a short time. And against my neck he tucked his head, and made small whirring sounds warm, he curled against me, and sang, and for those moments, did not die.