“There was a rebel who kept transmitting,” Yates recalled in a whisper...He kept on transmitting for years after the program ended, even though no one answered.”
“There was no world afterward,” the hermit declared in a thin, haunting voice. “We had to make do.”
The words brought Yates out of his trance. “No world?”
“Down below were all those Chinese, destroying everything Tibetan. On the other side of the mountains were all those who had given up fighting, who were becoming new kinds of Tibetans,Tibetans as Indians, Tibetans as Nepalis. If we wanted to stay the way we were, we had to become invisible.” Dakpo rose and reverently dusted the top of the radio with a rag.
...”I thought about telling old Kundu that the Americans were gone, never to come back, that he should stop the transmissions.”
...”But he didn’t?” the American asked.
“Not for years.”
“What would he say?” Shan asked after a long silence, when he transmitted on the radio?”
“The first few years, he stayed on the run on the mountain, using a sleeping bag from the Americans, saying his mission now was intelligence...he would watch the highway, watch the Chinese army, then come up and report the movements...For a while he decided the Americans had changed the codes, or frequencies, and so he would turn the dials and repeat his number, announcing again and again that he was a sergeant in the Tibetan resistance army. In the end he would talk about the weather or read sutras*.”
“Sutras?” Shan asked.
“Eventually he realized it wasn’t the Americans he was trying to reach. He said it was something people didn’t always understand about radios, that even if the Americans stopped listening, the heavens always heard.”
---Eliot Pattison
The Lord of Death
The restaurant is a delight. There are sturdy pine tables and huge windows. The pizza comes with a scattering of fresh basil across the top. I sip my organic iced coffee and try not to dive into the pizza. My friend is late. I don’t care. It is enough to be in this sunny room while softly cool air drifts in through the open doors.
My friend hurries in. “Life,” she says, “detained me.”
We laugh. She is a poet, teacher, environmental activist and the mother of a twelve-year old,. She knows my story, knows that forty years earlier, I was so detained by life I didn’t think I had one.
We eat and talk about our work, magic, and our mutual senses that the brittle surface of our comfortable American world is crazing. “Windshield glass,” she says. “One second there was that little ding in the corner; the next second, you can’t see.”
But the basil is fresh and pungent, the coffee is the same, so we toast our good luck and move to different topics.
That night I read Eliot Pattison’s new novel, The Lord of Death. It is set in occupied Tibet.. I read about Chinese practices that have been refined far beyond waterboarding---electrodes clamped on nipples and testicles, injections of mind-twisting drugs, beatings administered until the detainee is almost dead. And, for those who are particularly recalcitrant, there is “cerebral pasteurization” in which holes are drilled in the Tibetan’s skull, electrical wire inserted into certain pocket of cells and the ON switch flipped.
Now.
All of this is occurring now.
I finish reading the book, go to the computer and find the website: www.savetibet.org. There are photos at the bottom of the home page. I go to the photo album A Great Mountain Burned By Fire and click on a picture of Lhundup Tso, lying curled in fetal position on a stone courtyard. She was sixteen when she was killed when Chinese police opened fire on unarmed protestors in Ngaba. I think of the recent outcry over Neda, the young Iranian woman shot by Iranian “security” forces. There was no international outcry when Lhundup Tso was murdered. Not from a failure to give a shit, but because the photo didn’t go viral.
I click through other photos. One word occurs again and again. DETAINED. Jamyang Kyi, writer, singer and broadcaster - DETAINED. Norzin Wangmo, who spoke on the phone or internet about Tibet - DETAINED and imprisoned. Lobsang Kirti, 27, monk, who printed and distributed leaflets--DETAINED.
A dear friend wrote me recently. He was concerned about my work load. He wondered if I shouldn’t concentrate on the deadlines for the two books I am writing, and let these weekly Dispatches go for now.
I wrote him back. “Writing the Dispatches is my lifeline to the deeper work.”
They are my sutras. Help them go viral. More than the heavens need to hear.
*sutra - an ancient teaching--not a sermon, but a conversation The Buddha told his listeners and students to question and to test his teachings like a jeweller would test yellow metal.
http://www.savetibet.org/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=390
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
if
you never read anything again in your life, read this.
If you catch me whining about my privileged plight, send it back to me.
I'm so lucky.
love, me
Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's Speech in Full
this is bristol.co.uk ^ | March 13, 2008 | Terry Pratchett
Posted on March 16, 2008 11:56:20 PM PDT by Hetty_Fauxvert
My name is Terry Pratchett, author of a series of inexplicably successful fantasy books and I have had Alzheimer's now for the past two years plus, in which time I managed to write a couple of bestsellers.
I have a rare variant. I don't understand very much about it, but apparently if you are going to have Alzheimer's it's a good one to have.
So, a stroke of luck there then!
Interestingly enough, when I was diagnosed last December by those nice people at Addenbrooke's, I started a very different journey through dementia.
This one had much better scenery, interesting and often very attractive inhabitants, wonderful wildlife and many opportunities for excitement and adventure.
Those of you who's last experience with computer games was looking at Lara Croft's buttocks might not be aware of how good they have become as audio and visual experiences, although I would concede that Lara's buttocks were a visual experience in their own right.
But in this case I was travelling through a country that was part of the huge computer game called Oblivion, which is so beautifully detailed that I have often ridden around it to enjoy the scenery and weather and have hardly bothered to kill anything at all.
At the same time as I began exploring the wonderful Kingdom of Dementia, which is next door to the Kingdom of Mania, I was also experiencing the slightly more realistic experience of being a 59 year old who finds they have early onset Alzheimer's.
Apparently I reacted to this situation in a reasonably typical way, with a sense of loss and abandonment with an incoherent, or perhaps I should say, violently coherent fury that made the Miltonic Lucifer's rage against Heaven seem a bit miffed by comparison. That fire still burns.
I want to go on writing! Admittedly, that means I have to stay alive.
You can't write books when you are dead, unless your name is L. Ron Hubbard.
And so now I'm a game for real. It's a nasty disease, surrounded by shadows and small, largely unseen tragedies.
People don't know what to say, unless they have had it in the family.
People ask me why I announced that I had Alzheimer's.
My response was: why shouldn't I?
I remember when people died "of a long illness" now we call cancer by its name, and as every wizard knows, once you have a thing's real name you have the first step to its taming.
We are at war with cancer, and we use that vocabulary.
We battle, we are brave, we survive. And we have a large armaments industry.
For those of us with early onset in particular, it's more of a series of skirmishes.
My GP is helpful and patient, but I don't have a specialist locally.
The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own Aricept because I'm too young to have Alzheimer's for free, a situation I'm okay with, in a want-to-kick-a-politician-in-the-teeth-kind of way.
But, on the whole, you try to be your own doctor.
The internet twangs night and day. I walk a lot and take more supplements than the Sunday papers. We talk to one another and compare regimes.
Part of me lives in a world of new age remedies and science, and some of the science is a little like voodoo.
But science was never an exact science, and personally I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.
Fortunately, I have the Greek Chorus to calm me down
Soon after I told the world my website fell over and my PA had to spend the evening negotiating more bandwidth.
I had more than 60,000 messages within the first few hours.
Most of them were readers and well-wishers.
Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I'm not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.
But a large handful came from 'experienced' sufferers, successfully fighting a holding action, and various people in universities and research establishments who had, despite all expectations, risen to high places in their various professions even while being confirmed readers of my books.
And they said; can we help? They are the Greek Chorus. Only two of them are known to each other and they give me their advice on various options that I suggest.
They include a Wiccan, too. It's a good idea to cover all the angles.
It was interesting when I asked about having my dental amalgam fillings removed.
There was a chorus of ? hrumph, no scientific evidence, hrumph???., but if you can afford to have it done properly then it certainly won't do any harm and you never know.
And that is where I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the cure, which I suspect may be more like a regime, comes along.
Say it will be soon - there's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with the disease will double within a generation.
And in most cases you will find alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse, suffering as much. It's a shock and a shame, then, to find out that funding for research is three per cent of that which goes to find cancer cures.
Perhaps that is why, for example, that I know three people who have successfully survived brain tumours but no-one who has beaten Alzheimer's???although among the Greek Chorus are some who are giving it a hard time.
I'd like a chance to die like my father did - of cancer, at 86.
Remember, I'm speaking as a man with Alzheimer's, which strips away your living self a bit at a time.
Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things.
He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was.
Right now, I envy him. And there are thousands like me, except that they don't get heard.
So let's shout something loud enough to hear. We need you and you need money. I'm giving you a million dollars. Spend it wisely.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1986843/posts
If you catch me whining about my privileged plight, send it back to me.
I'm so lucky.
love, me
Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's Speech in Full
this is bristol.co.uk ^ | March 13, 2008 | Terry Pratchett
Posted on March 16, 2008 11:56:20 PM PDT by Hetty_Fauxvert
My name is Terry Pratchett, author of a series of inexplicably successful fantasy books and I have had Alzheimer's now for the past two years plus, in which time I managed to write a couple of bestsellers.
I have a rare variant. I don't understand very much about it, but apparently if you are going to have Alzheimer's it's a good one to have.
So, a stroke of luck there then!
Interestingly enough, when I was diagnosed last December by those nice people at Addenbrooke's, I started a very different journey through dementia.
This one had much better scenery, interesting and often very attractive inhabitants, wonderful wildlife and many opportunities for excitement and adventure.
Those of you who's last experience with computer games was looking at Lara Croft's buttocks might not be aware of how good they have become as audio and visual experiences, although I would concede that Lara's buttocks were a visual experience in their own right.
But in this case I was travelling through a country that was part of the huge computer game called Oblivion, which is so beautifully detailed that I have often ridden around it to enjoy the scenery and weather and have hardly bothered to kill anything at all.
At the same time as I began exploring the wonderful Kingdom of Dementia, which is next door to the Kingdom of Mania, I was also experiencing the slightly more realistic experience of being a 59 year old who finds they have early onset Alzheimer's.
Apparently I reacted to this situation in a reasonably typical way, with a sense of loss and abandonment with an incoherent, or perhaps I should say, violently coherent fury that made the Miltonic Lucifer's rage against Heaven seem a bit miffed by comparison. That fire still burns.
I want to go on writing! Admittedly, that means I have to stay alive.
You can't write books when you are dead, unless your name is L. Ron Hubbard.
And so now I'm a game for real. It's a nasty disease, surrounded by shadows and small, largely unseen tragedies.
People don't know what to say, unless they have had it in the family.
People ask me why I announced that I had Alzheimer's.
My response was: why shouldn't I?
I remember when people died "of a long illness" now we call cancer by its name, and as every wizard knows, once you have a thing's real name you have the first step to its taming.
We are at war with cancer, and we use that vocabulary.
We battle, we are brave, we survive. And we have a large armaments industry.
For those of us with early onset in particular, it's more of a series of skirmishes.
My GP is helpful and patient, but I don't have a specialist locally.
The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own Aricept because I'm too young to have Alzheimer's for free, a situation I'm okay with, in a want-to-kick-a-politician-in-the-teeth-kind of way.
But, on the whole, you try to be your own doctor.
The internet twangs night and day. I walk a lot and take more supplements than the Sunday papers. We talk to one another and compare regimes.
Part of me lives in a world of new age remedies and science, and some of the science is a little like voodoo.
But science was never an exact science, and personally I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.
Fortunately, I have the Greek Chorus to calm me down
Soon after I told the world my website fell over and my PA had to spend the evening negotiating more bandwidth.
I had more than 60,000 messages within the first few hours.
Most of them were readers and well-wishers.
Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I'm not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.
But a large handful came from 'experienced' sufferers, successfully fighting a holding action, and various people in universities and research establishments who had, despite all expectations, risen to high places in their various professions even while being confirmed readers of my books.
And they said; can we help? They are the Greek Chorus. Only two of them are known to each other and they give me their advice on various options that I suggest.
They include a Wiccan, too. It's a good idea to cover all the angles.
It was interesting when I asked about having my dental amalgam fillings removed.
There was a chorus of ? hrumph, no scientific evidence, hrumph???., but if you can afford to have it done properly then it certainly won't do any harm and you never know.
And that is where I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the cure, which I suspect may be more like a regime, comes along.
Say it will be soon - there's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with the disease will double within a generation.
And in most cases you will find alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse, suffering as much. It's a shock and a shame, then, to find out that funding for research is three per cent of that which goes to find cancer cures.
Perhaps that is why, for example, that I know three people who have successfully survived brain tumours but no-one who has beaten Alzheimer's???although among the Greek Chorus are some who are giving it a hard time.
I'd like a chance to die like my father did - of cancer, at 86.
Remember, I'm speaking as a man with Alzheimer's, which strips away your living self a bit at a time.
Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things.
He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was.
Right now, I envy him. And there are thousands like me, except that they don't get heard.
So let's shout something loud enough to hear. We need you and you need money. I'm giving you a million dollars. Spend it wisely.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1986843/posts
Burn This
The news is heavy...there are beasts loose that make the long walks,
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bhopal and Chernobyl pale in comparison.
---Barry Lopez
from his eulogy for Edward Abbey, 1988
...When we first moved here, pulled
the trees in around us, curled
our backs to the wind, no one
had ever hit the moon--no one…
From our snug place we shout
religiously for attention, in order to hide:
only silence or evasion will bring
dangerous notice, the hovering hawk
of the state, or the sudden quiet stare
and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor.
This message we smuggle out in
its plain cover, to be opened
quietly: Friends everywhere--
we are alive! Those moon rockets
have missed millions of secret
places! Best wishes.
Burn this.
---William Stafford, 1993
From the Move to California
We begin with thanks—to Bob Katz for the Lopez quote and to Scottalatyl for the Stafford quote. We continue as “we”, because it is imperative at this time that we understand we are not alone. We are in the company of countless others---creatures, plants, minerals; we are not at the top of the heap. We are dispersed throughout a divine and temporary mix. We remember we are dangerous.
Last week I walked through rose-gray light to the Deschutes Public Library. I went upstairs and took a seat with perhaps sixty other people lucky enough to live in Bend on this particular June night.
It had been ten years since I had last seen the compact man whose hair had gone gray, whose face was gentle. Barry Lopez stepped in front of us. “Thank you for coming to hear me,” he said
He read a story remarkable for the mysteries and hard wisdom hidden in its its austere elegance. He read of a marshland in Northern Nevada and violation and the failure to listen to the old knowledge of the people who have lived here long the colonizers.
When he was finished, he called for conversation. I’d brought two tapes recorded at Edward Abbey’s Memorial Service. I gave them to Barry and told him the bones of information the Hopi elder, Ferrel Secacaku had given a few of us in Spring 2008. Barry listened. Then he spoke of watching Barack Obama receive the elders of the Civil Rights movement---and young African Americans born a decade after those battles. He spoke of Obama as an agent for transition.
My turn to talk was over, so I did not tell him and those around me that the Obama administration had recently opposed the Supreme Court reviewing the case of thirteen Southwestern Native American tribes vs. the Snowbowl ski resort. The ski resort had been granted permission by a lower court to make artificial snow from treated wastewater on one of the San Francisco Peaks. The tribes were hoping to appeal that decision at the highest level. They know that the act of making snow from wastewater on their sacred mountain is equivalent to pissing on the main altar at the Vatican.
I did not stand and tell those around me that the San Francisco Peaks are the holy of holies for the Hopi tribe. Their Katsinas live on the mountain. It is there that the Holy Ones make rain and snow. I stayed in my seat and I listened to Barry Lopez call for deep community, for listening to the old knowledge of indigenous peoples.
I thought of that which was loosed among us twenty years ago, and how the beasts have devoured so much. I studied Barry Lopez’ gentle face and, behind him through the huge windows, the delightful downtown of Bend, Or. I understood that it was hard from that vantage point to see the cracks continuing to open out in what we might believe is our world---and the beasts that have come through them and are with us.
Burn this.
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bhopal and Chernobyl pale in comparison.
---Barry Lopez
from his eulogy for Edward Abbey, 1988
...When we first moved here, pulled
the trees in around us, curled
our backs to the wind, no one
had ever hit the moon--no one…
From our snug place we shout
religiously for attention, in order to hide:
only silence or evasion will bring
dangerous notice, the hovering hawk
of the state, or the sudden quiet stare
and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor.
This message we smuggle out in
its plain cover, to be opened
quietly: Friends everywhere--
we are alive! Those moon rockets
have missed millions of secret
places! Best wishes.
Burn this.
---William Stafford, 1993
From the Move to California
We begin with thanks—to Bob Katz for the Lopez quote and to Scottalatyl for the Stafford quote. We continue as “we”, because it is imperative at this time that we understand we are not alone. We are in the company of countless others---creatures, plants, minerals; we are not at the top of the heap. We are dispersed throughout a divine and temporary mix. We remember we are dangerous.
Last week I walked through rose-gray light to the Deschutes Public Library. I went upstairs and took a seat with perhaps sixty other people lucky enough to live in Bend on this particular June night.
It had been ten years since I had last seen the compact man whose hair had gone gray, whose face was gentle. Barry Lopez stepped in front of us. “Thank you for coming to hear me,” he said
He read a story remarkable for the mysteries and hard wisdom hidden in its its austere elegance. He read of a marshland in Northern Nevada and violation and the failure to listen to the old knowledge of the people who have lived here long the colonizers.
When he was finished, he called for conversation. I’d brought two tapes recorded at Edward Abbey’s Memorial Service. I gave them to Barry and told him the bones of information the Hopi elder, Ferrel Secacaku had given a few of us in Spring 2008. Barry listened. Then he spoke of watching Barack Obama receive the elders of the Civil Rights movement---and young African Americans born a decade after those battles. He spoke of Obama as an agent for transition.
My turn to talk was over, so I did not tell him and those around me that the Obama administration had recently opposed the Supreme Court reviewing the case of thirteen Southwestern Native American tribes vs. the Snowbowl ski resort. The ski resort had been granted permission by a lower court to make artificial snow from treated wastewater on one of the San Francisco Peaks. The tribes were hoping to appeal that decision at the highest level. They know that the act of making snow from wastewater on their sacred mountain is equivalent to pissing on the main altar at the Vatican.
I did not stand and tell those around me that the San Francisco Peaks are the holy of holies for the Hopi tribe. Their Katsinas live on the mountain. It is there that the Holy Ones make rain and snow. I stayed in my seat and I listened to Barry Lopez call for deep community, for listening to the old knowledge of indigenous peoples.
I thought of that which was loosed among us twenty years ago, and how the beasts have devoured so much. I studied Barry Lopez’ gentle face and, behind him through the huge windows, the delightful downtown of Bend, Or. I understood that it was hard from that vantage point to see the cracks continuing to open out in what we might believe is our world---and the beasts that have come through them and are with us.
Burn this.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Heading North
Despite the best efforts of the Mojave to hold me fast with its beauty and dear people, I leave today for Bend, Or. Thanks to my son, Matt; and my beloved friend, Fred K., every object I own is in a 5X8 trailer and my Vibe.
I carry with me the silhouette of the Joshua Buddha, 395 sightings of the moon; pressing my face to the rough bark of the old Joshua west of my cabin and breathing in its fine scent and the kindness of friends and strangers. I carry, too, the solid joy of knowing my second novel, Going Through Ghosts, will be published by University of Nevada Press in Spring 2010; and being half-way through writing, She Bets Her Life: women and compulsive gambling.
When I came to this medicine desert, I was one month away from my last casino bet. I was in the grip of recurrent opthalmic migraines. And raw terror. And no hope. I knew it had something to do with the withdrawal from the gambling that had had become my refuge and my reason to live.
I found a group of gamblers who didn’t gamble. I listened to their stories and heard my own. But they said little about the ferocious nature of gambling withdrawal. I hunted the inter-net, ordered books, but nowhere could I find information about the terror I was walking through.
I began writing She Bets Her Life. Slowly, my pain began to ease. Slowly. I came across information that made sense of the fear that at times had seemed a descent into psychosis. Slowly, I found the women of Scheherezade’s Sister occupying my thoughts and emerging on the page. The Sisters are a circle of women who meet once a week for Double Decadent Brownies, good coffee, talk and listening. Each of us, like Scheherezade, tells stories to save her life. We grant ourselves a reprieve of twenty-four hours, no more, no less---again and again.
I take the Sisters with me. They are becoming as dear to me as my Mojave friends, D. and D. I owe them and this desert my life.
My email stays the same. bstarr67@gamil.com
Up the road, m
I carry with me the silhouette of the Joshua Buddha, 395 sightings of the moon; pressing my face to the rough bark of the old Joshua west of my cabin and breathing in its fine scent and the kindness of friends and strangers. I carry, too, the solid joy of knowing my second novel, Going Through Ghosts, will be published by University of Nevada Press in Spring 2010; and being half-way through writing, She Bets Her Life: women and compulsive gambling.
When I came to this medicine desert, I was one month away from my last casino bet. I was in the grip of recurrent opthalmic migraines. And raw terror. And no hope. I knew it had something to do with the withdrawal from the gambling that had had become my refuge and my reason to live.
I found a group of gamblers who didn’t gamble. I listened to their stories and heard my own. But they said little about the ferocious nature of gambling withdrawal. I hunted the inter-net, ordered books, but nowhere could I find information about the terror I was walking through.
I began writing She Bets Her Life. Slowly, my pain began to ease. Slowly. I came across information that made sense of the fear that at times had seemed a descent into psychosis. Slowly, I found the women of Scheherezade’s Sister occupying my thoughts and emerging on the page. The Sisters are a circle of women who meet once a week for Double Decadent Brownies, good coffee, talk and listening. Each of us, like Scheherezade, tells stories to save her life. We grant ourselves a reprieve of twenty-four hours, no more, no less---again and again.
I take the Sisters with me. They are becoming as dear to me as my Mojave friends, D. and D. I owe them and this desert my life.
My email stays the same. bstarr67@gamil.com
Up the road, m
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Sendings
...and I lift my glass to the Awful Truth
which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth
except to say it isn't worth a dime
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
and it's once for the devil and once for Christ
but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights
we're busted in the blinding lights,
busted in the blinding lights
of CLOSING TIME....
---Leonard Cohen
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
---The Guest House
Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks
I woke this morning from a strong dream. I took my coffee out to the back of this cabin. There was a waning 2/3 moon above the old Joshua tree. Doves and sparrows swarmed the bird feeder. I opened my notebook to write the dream.
I heard my son yell. "Coyote!"
The young black cat was hunting lizards. Coyotes hunt young cats. I looked up. Coyote ambled from east to west about twenty feet from me. The beautiful arrowhead face. The calm gaze. The deliberate settling into the shade of a blossoming creosote.
I began writing the dream. "I am in a dark interior. I know the place. It is the old city, an old life and an old love..."
Twenty minutes later, I wrote the last line: Oh," she says, "I was with him two years ago. That's over."
I look up. The coyote is gone.
Tonight, the uneaten black cat is curled up on a red cushion. I am back from a long sundown walk.
Nighthawks had hunted in the soft air. My friend called as I walked. She told me of speaking river to a committee of drought. I headed west as she told me the story, my eyes on the ground to avoid the sun’s blood glare. Something shone in the sand. I stopped. It was a perfect owl feather.
I crouched and picked it up. "I just found an owl feather," I said. "You are Minerva."
She laughed.
“It’s yours,” I said.
The signal began to break up. We said goodbye. The nighthawks arced around me. Nighthawks. The merciless surgeons of twilight.
I cut away. Three bags of what once seemed indispensable go to the Joshua Tree Hospice second-hand store. I throw away pages of thirty-year old writing---warnings about our cruelties to each other and the earth that have turned out to be oracular; the epiphanies and sorrows of a woman waking to the reality that she had regarded herself as “less than” for most of her life; calls to awakening, to knowledge, to action. I tear each page in half. This is a ritual annihilation.
There will always be more words. As long as I draw breath. The words come through. I release them. Loss is the essence of a sending.
I go forward. North. This desert has been demanding and generous. There have been no work and few friends. There have been glare and molten heat. There has been nowhere to run from loneliness, inexorable aging and the imperatives of the only true teacher---the body. There have been Deborah’s open gaze; the good silence of the Joshua Buddha; my youngest son’s intermittent presence, and constant wit and kindness; dawns and twilights infused with mineral light. Through all of that, I have come home to imperfect shelter and been grateful.
Next Wednesday I drive north alone. I will go home to a little one bed-room house in downtown Bend, Or. There is a wood-stove and a half cord of lodgepole pine. Forests stretch to the south. I will live in a city---and the company of tall dark trees.
I am already lonely for the hard Mojave. But, that is the nature of a sending.
which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth
except to say it isn't worth a dime
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
and it's once for the devil and once for Christ
but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights
we're busted in the blinding lights,
busted in the blinding lights
of CLOSING TIME....
---Leonard Cohen
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
---The Guest House
Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks
I woke this morning from a strong dream. I took my coffee out to the back of this cabin. There was a waning 2/3 moon above the old Joshua tree. Doves and sparrows swarmed the bird feeder. I opened my notebook to write the dream.
I heard my son yell. "Coyote!"
The young black cat was hunting lizards. Coyotes hunt young cats. I looked up. Coyote ambled from east to west about twenty feet from me. The beautiful arrowhead face. The calm gaze. The deliberate settling into the shade of a blossoming creosote.
I began writing the dream. "I am in a dark interior. I know the place. It is the old city, an old life and an old love..."
Twenty minutes later, I wrote the last line: Oh," she says, "I was with him two years ago. That's over."
I look up. The coyote is gone.
Tonight, the uneaten black cat is curled up on a red cushion. I am back from a long sundown walk.
Nighthawks had hunted in the soft air. My friend called as I walked. She told me of speaking river to a committee of drought. I headed west as she told me the story, my eyes on the ground to avoid the sun’s blood glare. Something shone in the sand. I stopped. It was a perfect owl feather.
I crouched and picked it up. "I just found an owl feather," I said. "You are Minerva."
She laughed.
“It’s yours,” I said.
The signal began to break up. We said goodbye. The nighthawks arced around me. Nighthawks. The merciless surgeons of twilight.
I cut away. Three bags of what once seemed indispensable go to the Joshua Tree Hospice second-hand store. I throw away pages of thirty-year old writing---warnings about our cruelties to each other and the earth that have turned out to be oracular; the epiphanies and sorrows of a woman waking to the reality that she had regarded herself as “less than” for most of her life; calls to awakening, to knowledge, to action. I tear each page in half. This is a ritual annihilation.
There will always be more words. As long as I draw breath. The words come through. I release them. Loss is the essence of a sending.
I go forward. North. This desert has been demanding and generous. There have been no work and few friends. There have been glare and molten heat. There has been nowhere to run from loneliness, inexorable aging and the imperatives of the only true teacher---the body. There have been Deborah’s open gaze; the good silence of the Joshua Buddha; my youngest son’s intermittent presence, and constant wit and kindness; dawns and twilights infused with mineral light. Through all of that, I have come home to imperfect shelter and been grateful.
Next Wednesday I drive north alone. I will go home to a little one bed-room house in downtown Bend, Or. There is a wood-stove and a half cord of lodgepole pine. Forests stretch to the south. I will live in a city---and the company of tall dark trees.
I am already lonely for the hard Mojave. But, that is the nature of a sending.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
She Knew
...kiss the snake so that you may gain the treasure...
---Rumi
My mother, in her deepest heart, was a jazz pianist. She had perfect pitch, could learn by ear anything she heard on her cherished records. Satin Doll. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore. Oscar Peterson. Marian McPartland. “The best by the best,” she’d tell me.
She made music everyday, but I never heard her describe herself as a musician. My mother played only in the living-room of our home in small-town Irondequoit, New York, most often to an audience of no-one. Or to me, who couldn’t stay on key if her life depended on it. My father was a man of his time and did not want my mother working outside the home. She came to believe it was better that way.
I’m way outside the home. I’ve brought my notebook to the open cocktail lounge overlooking the Reno Hilton Casino gambling floor. It’s ten a.m. I left the breakfast buffet, ready to either gamble or write. The little cocktail tables and big soft chairs made my decision.
I open my notebook and hear piano music. A shiny white baby grand sits on the veranda just above me. The piano bench is empty. And, the piano is playing. Under a chandelier made of gold birds and purple globes my mother would have found atrocious.
The piano begins to play Misty , Errol Garner’s classic. My mother’s favorite song. I go to the empty bench and sit next to the invisible pianist. I watch the keys move, remember my mother’s small, sure hands, a cigarette burning perpetually in the ashtray next to her. Morning or evening, bright sun or shadow, she always wore dark glasses. Back then all that was missing was a blue spotlight.
A tall young woman walks by, pauses and looks at my hands folded in my lap. She grins, “You play very well.”
“Thank you,” I say. Misty was my mother’s favorite song. She died five years ago.”
The woman nods. My tears are easy, an old knot in my heart loosening. “My mother,” I say, “was a jazz pianist.”
“Wow,” the woman says, “lucky you.” She walks away into the slot glitter and jangle.
The piano plays on. I consider putting my hands on the keys and don’t. That was her gift. The words, and the empty pages in my note book are mine.
---White Piano, 1999
Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest
Dear Mom,
Thank you for playing Misty and Lullaby of Birdland and I’ll Be Seeing You. Thank you for teaching me the names of your saints: Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington; John Steinbeck and Louisa May Alcott; Martin Luther King and Marian Anderson. Thank you for betting on death and insisting on life. Thank you for teaching me how to kiss the snake.
I have filled 320 pages of that empty notebook. I wrote at the roll-top desk that once reminded you of your father’s. I wrote on the battered back porch of the beloved cabin that is now a shell. I wrote on the shore of the Colorado River; on a basalt ledge near Wendover, Nevada; on a sandstone boulder at Muley Point in southeast Utah. I wrote in casino coffeeshops as I slammed down a comped breakfast that I had earned with five hundred bucks of deliriously joyful slot machine play.
If your soul hung around after your death in 1995, you must have been smiling as you watched me. There would have been a conspiratorial gleam in your eye. You might have whispered again what you told me on your death bed: “The biggest sorrow of my life is that the fucking depression kept me from mothering you and your brother the way I longed to.”
I know. I carry your genes. I move my fingers and make what is necessary and what is beautiful. More often than not, at best, my brain and I are in uneasy conversation---at worst, nuclear annihilation. You know.
So when I received the phone call a few days ago that told me that my second novel, Going Through Ghosts had been accepted for publication at University of Nevada Press---with unanimous approval, I felt the ghostly touch of your gifted fingers on my head. “Yes,” you said. I saw you as I had seen you an hour after your death. You were somersaulting through the air. You were laughing with pure joy.
love,
Liz
********
Dear reader,
If you can find Errol Garner’s or Marian McPartland’s Misty, it makes the perfect soundtrack for this love letter.
It took over twenty years to write Going Through Ghosts. It took every moment of using whatever would blur the wars in my brain, of using what was killing me---and it took every moment of not using.
The body and the word have great importance. It is through their support that the true nature of mind can be realized. It could be said that, in a way, the body and the word are servants of the mind.
---Kalu Rinpoche
On May 27, I’ll drive north with a trailer loaded with what’s left of my belongings. On May 28, I’ll pull into the driveway of dear friends in Bend, Oregon. My work in Washington State softened the scars that were left in my heart and body. Without them as a carapace, the brilliant heat and glare of the Mojave are too harsh.
I go toward green and mountains and basin-range desert. My mother’s wise-ass smile watches over me.
---Rumi
My mother, in her deepest heart, was a jazz pianist. She had perfect pitch, could learn by ear anything she heard on her cherished records. Satin Doll. Don’t Get Around Much Anymore. Oscar Peterson. Marian McPartland. “The best by the best,” she’d tell me.
She made music everyday, but I never heard her describe herself as a musician. My mother played only in the living-room of our home in small-town Irondequoit, New York, most often to an audience of no-one. Or to me, who couldn’t stay on key if her life depended on it. My father was a man of his time and did not want my mother working outside the home. She came to believe it was better that way.
I’m way outside the home. I’ve brought my notebook to the open cocktail lounge overlooking the Reno Hilton Casino gambling floor. It’s ten a.m. I left the breakfast buffet, ready to either gamble or write. The little cocktail tables and big soft chairs made my decision.
I open my notebook and hear piano music. A shiny white baby grand sits on the veranda just above me. The piano bench is empty. And, the piano is playing. Under a chandelier made of gold birds and purple globes my mother would have found atrocious.
The piano begins to play Misty , Errol Garner’s classic. My mother’s favorite song. I go to the empty bench and sit next to the invisible pianist. I watch the keys move, remember my mother’s small, sure hands, a cigarette burning perpetually in the ashtray next to her. Morning or evening, bright sun or shadow, she always wore dark glasses. Back then all that was missing was a blue spotlight.
A tall young woman walks by, pauses and looks at my hands folded in my lap. She grins, “You play very well.”
“Thank you,” I say. Misty was my mother’s favorite song. She died five years ago.”
The woman nods. My tears are easy, an old knot in my heart loosening. “My mother,” I say, “was a jazz pianist.”
“Wow,” the woman says, “lucky you.” She walks away into the slot glitter and jangle.
The piano plays on. I consider putting my hands on the keys and don’t. That was her gift. The words, and the empty pages in my note book are mine.
---White Piano, 1999
Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest
Dear Mom,
Thank you for playing Misty and Lullaby of Birdland and I’ll Be Seeing You. Thank you for teaching me the names of your saints: Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington; John Steinbeck and Louisa May Alcott; Martin Luther King and Marian Anderson. Thank you for betting on death and insisting on life. Thank you for teaching me how to kiss the snake.
I have filled 320 pages of that empty notebook. I wrote at the roll-top desk that once reminded you of your father’s. I wrote on the battered back porch of the beloved cabin that is now a shell. I wrote on the shore of the Colorado River; on a basalt ledge near Wendover, Nevada; on a sandstone boulder at Muley Point in southeast Utah. I wrote in casino coffeeshops as I slammed down a comped breakfast that I had earned with five hundred bucks of deliriously joyful slot machine play.
If your soul hung around after your death in 1995, you must have been smiling as you watched me. There would have been a conspiratorial gleam in your eye. You might have whispered again what you told me on your death bed: “The biggest sorrow of my life is that the fucking depression kept me from mothering you and your brother the way I longed to.”
I know. I carry your genes. I move my fingers and make what is necessary and what is beautiful. More often than not, at best, my brain and I are in uneasy conversation---at worst, nuclear annihilation. You know.
So when I received the phone call a few days ago that told me that my second novel, Going Through Ghosts had been accepted for publication at University of Nevada Press---with unanimous approval, I felt the ghostly touch of your gifted fingers on my head. “Yes,” you said. I saw you as I had seen you an hour after your death. You were somersaulting through the air. You were laughing with pure joy.
love,
Liz
********
Dear reader,
If you can find Errol Garner’s or Marian McPartland’s Misty, it makes the perfect soundtrack for this love letter.
It took over twenty years to write Going Through Ghosts. It took every moment of using whatever would blur the wars in my brain, of using what was killing me---and it took every moment of not using.
The body and the word have great importance. It is through their support that the true nature of mind can be realized. It could be said that, in a way, the body and the word are servants of the mind.
---Kalu Rinpoche
On May 27, I’ll drive north with a trailer loaded with what’s left of my belongings. On May 28, I’ll pull into the driveway of dear friends in Bend, Oregon. My work in Washington State softened the scars that were left in my heart and body. Without them as a carapace, the brilliant heat and glare of the Mojave are too harsh.
I go toward green and mountains and basin-range desert. My mother’s wise-ass smile watches over me.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Time Ball
"When Hemos Johnson (hereditary Hahwannis chief of Kingcome) was an old man visiting his daughter at Comox she took him to Elk Falls, a place he had heard much about but had never seen. He stood where he could behold the raging torrent in all its splendour, gazing in silent wonder at the majestic sight and when he came away he announced, "It gave me a new song."
It had all come to him there, the words and music straight from the Master of all harmony - a song that would always be his alone."
---Mildred Valley Thornton
Potlatch People: Indian Lives and Legends of British Columbia
In the past much of the Yakama tribe's history was passed down from generation to generation by the women of the tribe using an oral tradition known as the time ball. New brides used hemp twine to record their life history starting with courtship. They tied different knots into the twine for days and weeks and added special beads for significant events. They then rolled the twine into a ball known as the "ititamat," which means "counting the days" or "counting calendar." The ball of twine grew in size as time passed and as events occurred…
When the women were very old, they could use the knots and beads of their time balls to recall not only what happened in their lives but when the events occurred...When a woman died, her "ititamat" or time ball was buried with her.
---Bonnie M. Fountain
Using the Yakama Native American Time Ball Oral History Tradition to Tell the 1965 Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March
My friend and I finished his book a few days ago. It is not my book---nor even ours. Though I worked with him, the book belongs to him and the eagle Hanble Okinyan. It came to them from the Master of pain, loss, fear and loyalty. It is a song that has never been sung before.
My work is done here. My eyes and fingers are tired. I like the feeling. This is the weariness of hard labor faithfully done. I am ready to go home.
This is my last night in the Dutch Cup Motel in Sultan, Washington. This place has been perfect shelter for the month of the work. The owners know that the planet’s resources are being stripped. The towels, cleaning products, shampoo and hand soap are all organic. Hand soap is in a squirt bottle. Toilet paper, the telephone instruction card, the stationery are made from recycled paper.
The desk clerk cleans rooms. The owner mends what is worn out or broken. He takes in the chairs from the deck when there is a high wind. Each worker was unfailingly kind and creative in dealing with the few blaring television crises.
This morning I began to pack up my charms and amulets: the Dave Edwards postcard of the Tuvaan shaman and her words: Keep your line and don’t be afraid.; my friend’s photo of Hanble taking a joyous bath in her pool; the little raven drum I bought at Raven’s Corner in the Makah village of Neah Bay; my writing altar on which there is a new stone from a beach at Puget Sound. I will take the pot of rosemary to my friend’s partner Lynda.
There is little left to do. I write my friend:
We did what were brought together to do---for now. The Yakama women keep track of their lives with a time ball. They spin fiber and tie a bead into the thread at each important moment of their lives.
March 30 to May 4 will require more than a few beads---they are weather and mineral. One is azure for the sky outside my window right now; one is moonstone for the sky outside my window yesterday; one is garnet for the blood the talon leaves; one argyllite, one the green stone the Northern people use in their art. One bead is mist from a Cascade waterfall. Another tastes of salt from the waves below the point at kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx. One bead is shell, one is cedar, one is the exact color of my eyes, one the exact color of your eyes as we go gaze to gaze---to more easily follow the threads a wounded eagle weaves. The brightest bead is made from laughter.
When we look back on these four weeks, we will hold a length of braided cedar bark in our hands. We will let the beads tell us the story. It will be a story that is ours alone and for all who read it.
It is a story that belongs only to the future.
It had all come to him there, the words and music straight from the Master of all harmony - a song that would always be his alone."
---Mildred Valley Thornton
Potlatch People: Indian Lives and Legends of British Columbia
In the past much of the Yakama tribe's history was passed down from generation to generation by the women of the tribe using an oral tradition known as the time ball. New brides used hemp twine to record their life history starting with courtship. They tied different knots into the twine for days and weeks and added special beads for significant events. They then rolled the twine into a ball known as the "ititamat," which means "counting the days" or "counting calendar." The ball of twine grew in size as time passed and as events occurred…
When the women were very old, they could use the knots and beads of their time balls to recall not only what happened in their lives but when the events occurred...When a woman died, her "ititamat" or time ball was buried with her.
---Bonnie M. Fountain
Using the Yakama Native American Time Ball Oral History Tradition to Tell the 1965 Selma-Montgomery Voting Rights March
My friend and I finished his book a few days ago. It is not my book---nor even ours. Though I worked with him, the book belongs to him and the eagle Hanble Okinyan. It came to them from the Master of pain, loss, fear and loyalty. It is a song that has never been sung before.
My work is done here. My eyes and fingers are tired. I like the feeling. This is the weariness of hard labor faithfully done. I am ready to go home.
This is my last night in the Dutch Cup Motel in Sultan, Washington. This place has been perfect shelter for the month of the work. The owners know that the planet’s resources are being stripped. The towels, cleaning products, shampoo and hand soap are all organic. Hand soap is in a squirt bottle. Toilet paper, the telephone instruction card, the stationery are made from recycled paper.
The desk clerk cleans rooms. The owner mends what is worn out or broken. He takes in the chairs from the deck when there is a high wind. Each worker was unfailingly kind and creative in dealing with the few blaring television crises.
This morning I began to pack up my charms and amulets: the Dave Edwards postcard of the Tuvaan shaman and her words: Keep your line and don’t be afraid.; my friend’s photo of Hanble taking a joyous bath in her pool; the little raven drum I bought at Raven’s Corner in the Makah village of Neah Bay; my writing altar on which there is a new stone from a beach at Puget Sound. I will take the pot of rosemary to my friend’s partner Lynda.
There is little left to do. I write my friend:
We did what were brought together to do---for now. The Yakama women keep track of their lives with a time ball. They spin fiber and tie a bead into the thread at each important moment of their lives.
March 30 to May 4 will require more than a few beads---they are weather and mineral. One is azure for the sky outside my window right now; one is moonstone for the sky outside my window yesterday; one is garnet for the blood the talon leaves; one argyllite, one the green stone the Northern people use in their art. One bead is mist from a Cascade waterfall. Another tastes of salt from the waves below the point at kwih-dich-chuh-ahtx. One bead is shell, one is cedar, one is the exact color of my eyes, one the exact color of your eyes as we go gaze to gaze---to more easily follow the threads a wounded eagle weaves. The brightest bead is made from laughter.
When we look back on these four weeks, we will hold a length of braided cedar bark in our hands. We will let the beads tell us the story. It will be a story that is ours alone and for all who read it.
It is a story that belongs only to the future.
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