Leaning Into What Aches So We Can Be Saved...

I read haiku aloud to the group of seekers who have gathered here; they are the group that has assembled for my first creative writing workshop in the Vail Valley. They are perfect, and they are gracious, each of them strong in his/her own way, each of them vulnerable, too...like me. Like every one of us who opens their mouth to speak, lifts their pen to write.

I want to keep them for another hour, but of course I must honor their time, and this is the last exercise we have time to complete. I have told them they can start writing as soon as they are ready, and for now a single haiku drifts to their ear at intervals of about 30 seconds. It's a beginner meditation, a beginner visualization...from a beginner human. If I had lives before this one, I don't remember them, so yes, I am a beginner at being human, and I assume the appropriate humility (now that I am 44 and have spent more than half a lifetime being fairly egocentric). Hey, at least I know what I know (even if it isn't very much).

What I do know is that what we are doing here is important. With time ticking (like always I have tried to cram too much into this small collection of minutes...it means so much, after all), each of them continues to listen, lips lifting up almost imperceptibly at the edges, soft foreheads and smooth, gentle breath. I love that they are present. That they are receiving each tiny poem as it comes, lands like a sparrow on their gently rising and falling breastbone, lifts off again. Finally, as gently as I can, I tell them it is time to come to the page.

We all begin writing, keeping in mind the word, the abstraction we have each drawn from a miniature deck of cards. My word is HEALING, and I re-enter this space, the yoga studio at Dogma--where I have used that word more times than I am able to count. I have talked about "creating the optimal conditions for healing" in the body, in the mind. I say it as we sink into Savasana, having breathed, moved, balanced and stretched into spaces we didn't know existed.

"Rest," I say. This is how we heal ourselves, and like in asana, we lean, mindfully, into what aches, what makes us afraid, what challenges us completely. We just lean into it, try to love it. Breathe it. Ardha Chandrasana, Utthita Trikonasana, Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. Oh. We soften into these ways of moving or being still, try to claim them as our own.

This we can also do with disease. Heartache. Fear. Lean into it, receive it, acknowledge it. How can we begin to send it light, to heal it, if we simply deny and reject it? These are my cells, these are my tears, this is my hurt, and by softening into them, I can begin to attend to them, to heal myself.

In the same way, I bring what aches out of darkness and onto the page. Lean into it by giving it voice, letting it be the truth that it is, here, in front of me. Where I can see it and where others may also see it. Perhaps only in this way, in daring to allow what is to fully BE, as I give it language and expression, can I begin to address it. Send it the loving, healing energy that it needs. Rest. Softness. Acknowledgment. Healing. Om.

I look around the circle and some of us are beginning to wind down, letting the pen lift from the paper across which it has been busily moving. Eyes begin to lift, too, and there is a softness there, as well. I am overcome with the importance of this work, which requires no special gift on my part, but rather a holding of sacred space for each of these who would come here and lean into their own stories, their own impressions and memories. Those who would "give voice to what is inner," so that indeed, they may "survive what is outer" (Nepo).

I know that I will continue to do this work, with anyone who wishes to "dive into the wreck" of memory, to explore their "dreaming place" and to learn what it is they think or believe or wish--by seeing what they have to say.

When we close the circle, gratitude hangs in the air, and wonder--at our own authentic voices, more beautiful than we could have imagined them, simply because they are our own. We lean into our stories, into the sensations and memories that grew them, and we know that what aches can also save us, if we can only soften into it, acknowledge it as our own.

The River Fear

There was a period of silence. A period of undulating urgency, where one importunity spilled and rolled into the next like the troughs and crests of a river wave. Something I knew nothing about before I moved here, and something about which I am bound to learn a great deal more. How can one live without water after all? Not just drinking it, but being in it.

The silence was because of a fear that felt in my body like an electric current (which never mixes well with water).  At times we were rushing down the rapids of a current we had willingly entered, with our children no less, and hanging on to the raft (and our sons) for dear life. At others it felt easier, more mellow, but we knew that what lay ahead might be worse than what was behind us. It was pretty terrifying. How could I produce words during a time like that? How could I tell a story?

And even in the calmer moments, the fear was there. It baffled me, paralyzed me at times. But I knew that it was born of creating, of making esssaie. It was a response to the turbulence that comes when one risks everything for a change that feels necessary...not just unavoidable but absolutely critical for moving forward. We were making a place for our family in this valley. I had to love even the fear.

Knowledge of surfing gives you no advantage in a river. None. And it would take a much greater knowledge of river lore and language for me to extend the metaphor any further, but let it suffice to say that it was a year that challenged us. Slowly, slowly we got our heads about us. Things began to open for us, began to support the wild and risky choices we'd made. We began to feel that we would eventually be safe. And we had each other. We had our gratitude.

I have lived long enough (and written long enough) to know that you can't really write something real until you've finished living it, and with the uncertainty of how this story would end, or at least segue into the next chapter, I was wordless for over a year. Voiceless. There was fear in that, too.

Mary Ruefle once spoke about the fallow periods of a writer. Periods where the soil from which one's stories and poems grow is at rest. Things germinate, and the soil prepares itself to yield something alive and unfurling, but until then, it seems like nothing is happening. But it is. I still don't know what it is, but I feel that it is time to write and "see what I say" (Forester).

I will start slowly. As the fear falls away, there is peace, and there is language. There are stories and verses that want to give themselves to me, and I am safe enough to receive them. I let them arrive from the mystical world that generates them and projects them against a cloudless sky. I transcribe them from there. Live their heaviness. Their lightness. They are who I am, and for the first time in over a year I am not afraid.

Angel DNA

No, says the angel, and Shhhhh... There is no need for tears, though they are beautiful and can be loved. Drops of glass refracting light. You teach yourself the lesson again: "Everything not fully suffered, not fully resolved [comes] again: the same sorrows [are] suffered over and over." 

Ask yourself, she says, Ask yourself the question. So I do. And in doing so, I have beckoned it. The answer rises like a wave--a wave nearly identical to the ones that have been dragging their bellies over this reef for a lifetime, before standing up and bowing to the sand. To the stone.

It is as clear as day, as clear as night: There is no roof under which I need to station myself, no shelter I should seek from the beauty and worth of stars. Easy is not best--why should I begin to believe otherwise now? I choose the way that speaks to me of a well-chosen journey, of the kind of independence I have always garnered, and of the million names I might give to a single shape on the horizon.

The angel settles herself among feathers and tulle, lets a smile curl the edges of her lips, where she wears her approval. Where she reflects the heredity I carry in my genes. Where she looks exactly like me.

Emergency Flotation...

Three doors open, two click shut again before her heart has even absorbed the joy that was building around it. Collection of sighs and affirmations become homeless in the space of two emails. Such a fine line between what the heart imagines and what it can actually contain.

Left to swim in uncertainty again, she puts a hand on a nearby piece of driftwood and extends her arms and legs as she knows to do in a swiftly (or slowly) moving current. She fills her lungs with air and believes in her own buoyancy. Lets the water kiss an oval frame around her face as she lifts her eyes skyward again, always on the lookout for the truth that might spell itself against the clouds overhead.

She thinks of Ophelia, singing her snatches of old tunes, but only as a passing expression of despair--Ophelia sinks in the fidelity of the story, but not she--she rises, her garments fanning around her like pale wings. There is gratitude here. She immerses herself in it again, lets the thoughts of her love, her boys, her friends, her family swirl into the negative spaces of her body against this mottled blue. She surrenders to it.

Lungs fill with air, push sternum to the surface. Ribs are a sweet little cage for the pulsing aspirations of a seeker. A lover. A writer. A teacher. This soul straining heavenward, asking the question again and again--how? Not why--That is the wrong question, says the angel. But how? Yes, how to be the thing it is in her to be? How to believe. Her willingness is all, and she does know. Knows it will take shape in time. Knows that the softness of her heart is all. Is all.

Angel Card: Synthesis

Yes. Synthesis. And harmony. Together we can. I never worked well in groups. I was "bossy," my mom told me. And a little controlling. I preferred to work independently. Choose each color, each word, even the arrangement on the page or in the air. And spirituality as a group effort? Never. But now. But now...

Sisterhood, I see, is all. Not just the synthesis of souls, intentions, efforts, but of my own experience, my own gifts and offerings. There is a way to give it all and be left to overflowing. Be a fountain, Kim. Be a fountain.

Loving Jane...

When I think of Jane Kenyon and why I love her so much, though I have only discovered this since she has been gone from the Earth, I am not entirely sure. It seems it would have to do with her language, with the utter purity of her images and the sweet, hymnal intonations of her verse. Of course I first loved her language. What else have I to go on?

I never met her and have only ever corresponded with her husband, who forgives me the fact that his poetry is not my favorite because he knows that the poet whose work holds that position of favor is his late wife. Jane died at 44 when her husband was 66. Now, at 85, he writes back to me in all graciousness, though he is weary and must receive a great deal of mail from people such as myself, wondering about his great art, his great success and, like me, his fabulous wife of 23 years.

Today I read A Hundred White Daffodils and even while I try to read slowly, savor each delectable syllable, I am aware of the dwindling number of Jane's works that remain to be read by me. I will have to start again, from the top, when that happens. For now, I am at a church fair or in a garden. I climb Mount Washington and take the train down--or not.

I am with Jane and it is as if the two years that remain between this moment and the moment I turn 44, her age at her death, are all I have of her. It is a bit eerie to think like this, and I try to understand the source of such a sense, but it is lost in some notion of time and poetry and in an image of wild geese against blue sky.

From Fear to Affirmation...

"If you do not come too close,
If you do not come too close..." --T.S. Eliot

There is fear here. I am reminded that fear is perhaps the polar opposite of all things edifying. It is crippling. It obscures and hinders. I will not move with fear directing my course.

I still believe in karma. I still believe that if my intention is perfect, good will come of what I do. Good will come of what I create and what I share--and I will reap the rewards of seeds sown in love and beneficence.

Abundance is mine. I open my hands to receive it, while at the same time opening my heart to my purpose. To giving what I can give. To being the thing I was born on this planet to be.