Not Magnificent Indeed...

"And at once I knew, I was not magnificent." It is the chorus to a Bon Iver song that plays in my head again and again. It is the anthem of my miniature mid-life crisis. How I knew, suddenly at 40, that my life, my accomplishments, amount to nothing special, except if you count the lives I have begotten, the little lights that are my two sons but for whom I can hardly take credit.

But at 40 and a half, I find that it is also a promise. Not being magnificent, that is. It is a promise that is sustaining and which creates peace in the heart, in the mind. It means that though my life represents an individual wave that swells in the sea, drags itself along the ocean floor to take its unique shape against an offshore wind, though I arc and curl around the barrel of my own hollowness, crush it with the weight of my watery mass, I am ultimately, undeniably, a part of the sea, indistinguishable from the vast expanse of saltwater that encompasses all else under the sun. Undeniably not separate and alone, as I might at times believe (or even desire to assert).

I find now that it is a comfort that I have the expanse of the entire sea to fall back into when the peak of my life folds into whitewater, then foam, then the receding calm that it was always becoming. Indeed, has always been.

A Word on Words...

"Words are inert," she says, and inadequate to convey human experience. I ponder this and think, yes, to the extent that they are symbols, perhaps this is true. But in their representation as such, they stand for things that are alive, myriad, complex. Words therefore have value, not because they are perfect in their symbolization, but because they are the basis for our linguistic expression of these valuable things.

Beyond that, they are the building blocks, the raw medium, of literary art, as clay or bronze might be to a sculptor. What grows from them is completely dependent and contingent on the artist and her intention. Does the question of the reception of that art, how one sees or experiences it as perhaps different from that seminal intent, diminish its value? Only if we think that the only value of language, and therefore of literary art forms, is in the communication of something very specific.

When we broaden our sense of the value of words and thus the story, for example, to encompass a communion of sorts, then we see that their value is infinite. It is, as the woman in the film says, "what we live for."

Landlocked Blues

January sun dresses trees in light.
I am the thing I have always been
though tethered now to snow and ice
and an image of myself
neither aquatic nor buoyant.
Heavy. Ice is heavy after all,
though translucent,
and I move my body
over it cautiously and
with care. There is a kind
of captivity here, a kind of
restraint that I must observe:
the world through leafless branches.
Trying to remember a time
when I felt strong and water
received me in its freest form,
salty ablution as counterpoint
to my life on land.

2012...Bring it.

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." --German philosopher Arthur Shopenhauer.

Perhaps this is our charge for the new year: first, not to project and therefore impose our own limitations on others (our lovers, our children, the institutions of which we are a part) and second, to be ever pushing, striving to expand the field of our vision.

We must break down barriers, namely the misguided beliefs about things and people, that limit us. Though they be constructed in earnest, beliefs that are circumscribed by lack of experience or knowledge, indeed by ignorance, are infinitely limiting and must be dismantled. Only in doing so can we re-emerge with clarity and understanding of the 'other,' rather than fear and limitation, and begin to achieve the peace that is ultimately dependent upon such conditions.

But how do we begin this dismantling? I struggle with this daily, but this I know: we can start by identifying those beliefs that put up artificial boundaries, that create mental barriers against achieving our highest potential. Only by identifying those beliefs can we begin to chip away at them. Maybe we have to start again every morning, from the beginning. So we must. Eventually, we can succeed in this, and what we are left with is a vast, open plain, an expanded "field of vision" in which anything is possible and into which our wildest dreams may amble and spill.

With every individual manifesting his or her most pure, essential and transcendent self, how can we fail to achieve peace on this earth? First in our relationships and in our families, then in our communities, then in our countries and ultimately the world.

Yes, I have a good feeling about 2012. Let the transformation begin!

Vermont Education

There is nothing, I learn when I move to Vermont, like the beauty of a leafless tree on snow, blue sky spreading itself as backdrop. Ancient calligraphic expression of life and the industry of growing. Absence of sound and sensation--just the visible substance of what lifts itself into the air of its own fortitude. It ravels itself out as the arboreal architecture of a sugar maple or a tamarack and teaches us how to be still. How to be lovely in our nakedness. Even in this wild and whispering cold.

How it Happens...

I reach page 50 today on the new novel. I feel more and more certain of the way these stories will piece themselves together, the way they are inherently intertwined and, perhaps most importantly, that they already exist. Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet that "the future enters into us, in order to transform itself, long before it happens." In some ways I think he encapsulates the seed truth of my novel, and in another sense, I think that he speaks precisely of the process of writing it, how it is coming to be.

It is admittedly a bit esoteric, this little quote, and yet its essence, depending on the light in which I view it, seems utterly lucid. Violet's future entered into her in September of 1952, the day she received the telegram from the U.S. Army declaring her husband Missing In Action, in order to transform itself, long before it became her reality. Her future included those of her sons and of Jesse, her granddaughter, and within it was contained the whole of their combined and individual stories.

These stories enter me daily, it seems, almost as if while I sleep, dreamlessly, to be transformed and then manifest on the page as, upon waking, I write them down....it seems to occur by some magic of transcription, rather than by any ingenuity on my part. My job, it appears to me, is just to be open, receptive to the channel that runs through me, not only because I have 'agreed' to tell these stories but because in many ways, they are my own.

Who knew I would write novels, intimidated as I have always been by a work of such magnitude? And yet here is another story, another pattern of inextricably linked stories, as it were, that I have agreed to tell and which, because of my willingness, yields itself to me, to my telling of it. It is a relationship of mutual trust, and I grow to know and love these characters. I wake eager to meet them again in that linguistic space we inhabit together. It is a gift. It is a surprise, even to me. Especially to me.

Still Fixated on Radiohead's "Lotus Flower"...

Clap twice, shake your head, take your hair into your hands and pull. Pull up and away from your "fast ballooning head." Know that nothing is as it seems. And what is seems, after all? "Mother, I know not seems!" says the devoted boy, the ghost's story leering into his tilted consciousness.

Lotus flower sprouts up, opens itself: wide yawn of the hopelessly beautiful and infinitely complex. How one life is absorbed into another, moments ticking away the only measure of the space between birth and death. Abandon poetry for the real, for the grounded and mundane. Sip it like a martini, dry and acrid but full of promise.

We lift our hopes on air, giant, colorful parachute desire: cat and mouse, though not a game. Not the rush of childish whimsy but the ballooning evidence of dreams deferred and wishes turned to ashes, ashes we all fall down.