Seed Talk

What matters is these five women, holding space for one another--angels on earth, angels in the ether of E's heaven.

"This could be heaven," she said matter-of-factly, looking around the circle, sort of assessing us before reasserting, "Yeah, you could all be in my heaven." We laughed but were inwardly honored, without speaking it, by the notion. By E including us in such a place in her heart.

What matters, then, is this tower and the seeds we have planted here. They rain down from the sixth floor like petals or snowflakes and settle in the rich soil beneath us.

Each day we have gathered here in earnest. The sixth floor of the tower at Awaken Whole Life Center. Together, with pens in hands, layers of trepidation and restraint shed for the opening, the unveiling of our own personal truths, each of them nestled into the nest of this larger Truth. Satya.

What matters then is a village. People who are trying, really trying to be whole, good, light. People whose practice it is not to judge but to open themselves one limb, one petal, one thought at a time to what is possible in the world.

It took me a while to realize what made this place so special. It was, all around me, the collective 'essaie,' the effort to be good. The intention of each person who walked there--the chefs, the bookstore clerks, the spa staff--to be kind to one another. To see each other clearly and come from a place of acceptance for each interaction, whether with strangers or friends.

What matters then is the miracle of a dog. A boy with words in his heart. A mother willing to give him the spoon that feeds him.

N, you are so beautiful in your love. It is, we could all see immediately, without condition. It is for everyone you encounter, everyone with a hurt or a need or a hope. How lucky your children are to have such a strong presence of maternal compassion in their lives...one who is rooted in her feminine lineage but not bound by it.

What matters then is a formidable woman who embraces a girl--forlorn in a foreign land, rejected by those who would love her, confused by the incongruity of culture, family, propensities and lives that enveloped her in eighteen short but enduring months.

What an honor, P, to be among the midwives of this amazing birth. Your story will unfold itself before your eyes. All you have to do is "show up" to write. This story wants to be told by you; it picked you, as I believe a child chooses its parents...I can't wait to see all the ways it will grow!

What matters then is an ageless woman with a love for life that supersedes all fear, all inhibition, all self-consciousness. A woman who, after 87 years, continues to evolve, grow herself, attend to the business of blooming.

Thank you, E, for modeling sheer gratitude for life and all it brings. For reminding us that we are constantly and ever evolving, and for giving us so much to look forward to!

What matters then is a mother of six who springs into the autumn of her life in beauty, in joy. She is a fountain, she is a source of life in and of herself. She, too, seeks to blossom heavenward.

C, whose 'peasant feet' root her to the earth. Ground her in her present and give her the steadiness of heart and step as she moves through a life with the intention of becoming what it is in her to become...never forget that what you are already is beautiful and worthy of every good thing.

What matters then is a woman cupping the heart of a man in her warm hands. Her own beats like a sparrow's--quick skittering rhythm hidden in her breast as she breathes in his brokenness, exhales what would heal him.

T, I wish you could have fully grasped the amount of admiration and appreciation carried in the hearts of each of the members of our group...for you, friend. For you.

This time together, here, in a seven-story tower, we have leaned in to one another. It has been a time of intrepid openness and unfettered self-expression, each woman moving toward a light that she herself placed before her. Each one holds the space toward this expansive motion and shared evolution. We know ourselves as in the process of becoming, but also as already embodying that perfect thing toward which we strive. Time is inconsequential in the mapping of our intent.

This weekend was the synthesis of souls, intentions, efforts, but also the synthesis of my own gifts and offerings. We are the "seed group." We acknowledge it aloud. We know that it will never be like this again and this we speak, as well. "We are the 'good old days,'" E asserts, having most certainly looked back and known herself like this in other settings, other circumstances over the course of her 87 years. She grins broadly, and we know it to be true. "Seed Talk," we called this meeting...Sunday evening, the last of our retreat. Indeed. Seeds and talk and love and the cultivation of this fine thing that has already begun to grow in the garden of our collective consciousness.

What matters, then, is my own effort to tend to this garden of unruly but fantastic flowers. And to trust in the process. There is a way to give it all and be left full to overflowing. Be a gardener, Kim. Be a fountain.



**Thank you to Margaret Robison whose untitled poem inspired the refrain of this post: "What matters then..."

The Art of Being Still

I have sometimes thought that I had nothing in common with my mother, content to raise her children, keep our tidy house, put food on a maple-wood table. My mother who never heard the call of distant countries or foreign cultures but instead hunkered down and laughed about being an "Okie," though each step she took distinguished her as "other" than what her Oklahoma Dustbowl lineage might define.

In California, she watches the sea from the shore, her feet firmly planted on East Cliff Drive, arms wrapped around her body against the chill of North Pacific breezes. My mother, resigned to working in the same tiny medical office for over 20 years, all the while anticipating a time of rest in retirement. Slowly working her way up a pay scale and growing in the esteem of the doctors whose insurance billing she governs.

I have spent my adult life in a steady progress away from this kind of stillness, always moving, always driving in the direction of the unknown. Driving seaward, lusting for the adventure of ocean swells. Winds of change. Only now, in my 42nd year, the year that for my mother held the wedding of her daughter and the diagnosis of breast cancer, do I begin slowly, slowly, to learn the art of stillness. To know the difference between still and stuck.

I see now the strength in making a choice and carrying it out over time. Being very still and waiting out times that don't measure up. Nurturing hope and indeed action for incremental change, rather than flying to the dramatic: abandoning your post in the face of a picture of life that is incongruous with the picture in your heart.

Looking back over my own story, I consider counting the number of times I have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, fled from a place that was still becoming "home." Created the need to rebuild, start again in a new place under new circumstances.  What has been the draw of utter and complete upheaval? Have I never known moderation?

But there is no point in doing this. No point in trying to imagine what might have grown had I ever had the perseverance, the patience, to nurture something akin to a garden. In fact, I have come to see gardening as the symbol of the kind of rooting of the self that I still don't really know how to want. The kind of rooting of the self that I believe I will evolve to find myself understanding. Even desiring, one day.

In the meantime, I will practice the art of being still in Vermont. Because my children love this place in which I have begun to learn it. It is the place that held up a mirror for me to see my mother's features in my own brown face. Her expression of steadfastness. Her constancy. These endow me with a kind of beauty I did not have before now but which was always in her, though I did not understand its origin. They provide me with an anchor. I drop it here among the carrots and the lettuces. I find comfort in the tautness of its line, as the waves of my life lift me up and away from it. But the line holds. I stay. Still and not stuck.

Thank you, Vermont

The rain begins with the commencement of school--an impressive concussion of thunderstorms that lasts for two days. I notice that the leaves in Snow Valley have already begun to let go of their summer green, though not yet infused with the dazzling palette of autumn.

The air is cool during the rain, heavy and hot during the moments of stillness. I find myself serene and knowing this place as a kind of home. For all my resistance, I do like Vermont--in spite of its being a part of New England, which always feels stifling and accusatory, if only for its history and the vestiges of the puritanical sensibility that gave it its place names, its conservativism, its general fear of pleasure.

No, I find I can forgive Vermont its geographical association with New England (though I still joke that I think I was burned at the stake in my last life--besides, if that's true it had to have been southeast of where I now reside). Plus, Vermont's "hippies" and rednecks defy the standards of her Massachusetts and Connecticut neighbors, making me feel less like a fish out of water.

I find I can embrace Vermont for its verdant hills, for its sparrows and chickadees. I can embrace Vermont for its blue lakes nestled in the blazing fall foliage, too, but mostly I begin to embrace Vermont for the joy it brings my sons. I can even love Vermont for the way it has adopted them and absorbed them into its snow culture.

I find that after 20 nomadic years I could possibly learn to be still, and I know that Vermont has taught me that. There is undeniable gratitude here and a fondness for the seasons, which I could never have anticipated. In Vermont I have learned to be home.



*I can't in good conscience not admit that I have borrowed a morsel of language from Ray Bradbury in this piece. I first saw the word 'concussion' used to describe a storm in a short story of his called "All Summer in a Day." Thanks, Mr. Bradbury. Love your work. 

Imagine Yourself a Writer, Part II

My interview last week with the Reverend Paulette Pipe on her radio show "Touching the Stillness" inspired me to put down in writing a navigation of my happy discovery that suffering is not a prerequisite for great writing and that the most important aspect of what we create as writers is not that it distinguishes us as separate from others but rather, that it connects us to them and highlights what is shared among us...

Something that plagued me for many years as a young writer and teacher was the idea that suffering and art go hand in hand. I had the idea that only misery and grief could generate good writing, and historically, there are so many examples to support this. The “tortured artist” is not a new concept. I had this fear that I could never achieve peace and happiness in my life and still write meaningful poems and stories. It was some comfort that in my periods of misery, self-loathing and grief, I could come up with some very powerful poems, but ultimately, I wanted to be happy. And I wanted to be a writer. So much of what I knew about writers supported the argument that these two conditions were mutually exclusive.

Theodore Roethke, arguably one of America’s greatest poets and writing instructors, once said, “I can’t go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost?” It was true. In my own experience, each poem, each crown of sonnets, each villanelle, had been born of some devastating sensation or experience. They exacted a very real cost in that the requisite suffering took its toll, one that didn’t necessarily, and certainly did not permanently, get erased or even compensated by the works of art so exalted by others. Roethke went on to exclaim, “They’re not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.”

I feared, too, that inherent in the poetic sensibility was a kind of instability and even this “madness” Roethke talked about. I wanted to write, but my fear that what made me a writer also constituted inherent flaws in my mental state began to overwhelm. It helped when I started to write more prose, more fiction. I would eventually move away from wrenching the personal material from my gut for the poetry I had been so committed to writing in my twenties and early thirties, and I would start to invent characters. It would feel safer, more stable, and finally I would all but forget what had previously felt like an irreconcilable conflict….but it did not happen all at once.

I began to deepen my yoga practice. I began meditating regularly, exploring stillness, sitting with my quiet self and simply being. These practices brought me profound peace, and I began to find that the sort of fissures in the heart, caused by suffering and causing a kind of leakage of consciousness, were not the only way I could access what lived and moved in my “dreaming place.” It was one way, and indeed I had haphazardly dredged up the contents of my “dreaming place” in this way for years, dragging them over the coals of my own torturous uncertainty, through the darkness of my melancholy, trying, as it were, to tend to wounds that always surprised me with the keenness of their sensation. I would often later craft these images, this language, into poems that would then get published in a literary journal or magazine, but the cost. “My God,” the cost.

Through my practice of yoga, which led naturally into meditation, I began to change. I began to heal myself. I began to find my centre. To know and love stillness, which landed me smack in the middle of the present, where I found I could let go of every fear, every ache that had ever plagued me. Not by resisting it, but by acknowledging it. Absorbing it. Breathing it in, letting it be transformed in me, and then breathing it out as peace. As gentleness. As love. This, I learned, was the practice of Tonglen. It is a Buddhist practice that, roughly defined, means “giving and taking,” or “sending and receiving.” In the practice of Tonglen, we breathe in not only our own suffering, but also the suffering of others, the universal hurt that differs only in the stories that encapsulate it, and we breathe out what we believe will give relief: serenity, human connection, joy, confidence. In this way we heal ourselves. In this way we heal the world.

So where did this leave me as a writer? Could I exist as two people? The elevated, joyful yogi, and the tortured poet? Or could I somehow integrate these aspects of myself, allow the “torture” to be transformed in me, and let it feed my writing? Would my writing become flaccid, undisciplined, springing as it would from a place that was wildly happy and content? It was a risk, I felt, but this softness of heart, this boddhichitta,  or “awakened heart,” was not something I was willing to give up. I was realizing my true nature, it seemed, and I was not willing to accept that this meant that I would no longer write. When I began to try, I felt in some ways that I had little to say in a poem. The poems just did not come. I knew, though, that writing is like child-rearing, and as soon as one says, “I always do this,” or “Whenever I do that…,” the maxim just formulated becomes null and void by a new behavior, a changed and wholly unpredictable variation in the pattern. With this in mind, I did not get too worried.

Instead, I tried my hand at fiction. This was new for me. By meditating and navigating my way consciously into that “dreaming place,” instead of waiting for the membrane between my conscious and subconscious thought to tear painfully, I found that I could give myself access to all the wildness of my imagination without the suffering. I could begin to generate language, images, and whole stories in a healthy way. I found that my writing became richer and more intricate, and certainly more accessible to others, since I was no longer skulking about in the semi-obscure language of my secret longing.

Characters began to arrive at my proverbial door, and I began to welcome them happily, weaving them in to the stories that germinated somewhere inside and found their ways to the surface, like gardens. I felt only partially responsible for them, and yet I had the desire to cultivate them, and this effort, this loving time invested in them, gave me ownership of what felt otherwise divinely gifted to me. I had discovered, it seemed, a new way to create. I had also begun to realize, that this experience was not unique to me. People love to think that they are unique, special in some way, and it is through no fault of our own that our egoic self is so intrigued by the feeling that we are doing something that no one else (or very few others) can do. I had to let that go. I’m not special. Not in this way, at least.

EVERY person is a writer. EVERY person has a “dreaming place” that is unique to herself, and EVERY person can learn to access what is there and to bring it onto the page. We can also ALL learn to craft that material into poems, stories, essays… It is limitless, really, what we can create and how we can, through our creation, connect with others. Why do we orient ourselves early on toward asserting ourselves over others? There is room in the world for infinite expression, infinite art, and ultimately, infinite empathy. How about that as a goal of art? To unite?

I do believe that many artists throughout history have ‘gotten’ this. Albert Camus, for one, who said in his banquet speech upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, that “often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he has felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others.”  In Camus’ words, “the artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.” Gospel. Seriously.

The more that I practice yoga, I see that I/we can achieve union, as it were. Between body, mind and spirit; between our selves and others; between our subconscious and conscious minds. I see that it is possible to access my creativity, indeed my “dreaming place,” through peaceful contemplation. Through the softening of my heart, the opening of my self to the infinite possibilities of my own imagination, I can create, and this connects me with my fellow human beings. And I see that with a little guidance, we can all do this…and experience the joy, healing and liberation of speaking our truths, whether through real or invented characters.

I have made it my mission to provide such guidance and to help other people, people who desire to be both happy and creative, to find their way through this labyrinth of human experience. I love teaching yoga, meditation and writing. What better way to combine these things than in a Lotus Wheel Retreat? I invite you to join me for the upcoming retreat at Awaken Whole Life Center in Unity Village, Missouri (click the link below for more info). And in the meantime, may your spiritual path be well lit, and may you cultivate your own creativity through daily practice, even if it is to sit down and write a single sentence each morning. Your stories, your observations, have a place in this world, and they connect you to others in a way that means everything.

Namaste.

 Creative Awakening Yoga Retreat at Awaken Whole Life Center

Imagine Yourself a Writer....

I often begin my discussions on creative writing with the idea that Wallace Stevens had of “the Dreaming Place.” I believe I first learned about this from Pat Schneider during my Amherst Writers and Artists training over fifteen years ago. I remember being a fairly young writer and teacher at the time, arriving in the idyllic town of Amherst, getting settled in to my room at a farm house belonging to a woman named Clara, and heading off to learn from the master.

I loved everything about that training: Pat’s easy-going approach, her sincerity, the wide range of ideas shared for generating material, and Pat’s staunch belief that anyone can write…and should. It confirmed that I was onto something with my idea that Percy Bysshe Shelley, for one, was full of something unsavory when he defined poets as “spirits of the most refined organization…hierophants [or interpreters] of an unapprehended inspiration.” I have always secretly felt (as appealing as it can be to be part of something exclusive and elite) that writing was not something reserved for an elite group, for  “those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination.” No, I had an inkling that every individual was a writer, a potential story-teller and poet, and that the only thing that distinguished one who called herself a writer from one who did not was the desire to be that thing. One is a writer because one desires to cultivate their story-teller/poet self and, perhaps most importantly, because one is willing to put in the hours of practice it takes to really craft her work.

So this “Dreaming Place,” it exists in every one of us, and access to it is our birthright. It belongs to us. It is the field of one’s imagination, one’s thoughts, tame or wild, animate or inanimate, squawking or humming; all of it is there in the wide open space of one’s “Dreaming Place.” It is through early criticism, the poor reception of a story, perhaps or the red-pen markings of a well-intentioned teacher, that we begin to bar our own entrance into this place. Finally, I think, most of us forget the way.

Happily, though, the memory is always there, latent perhaps, but present, and with a little effort, we can retrace our early steps to this place and remember our creative selves. We can grant ourselves not only access to this place, but also permission to fish things up from it, record them on a page. This is the stuff of our dreaming, it is the way we remember our writer selves, and it is the way we can say something new. No, as emphatically declared in the biblical Ecclesiastes countless times, “there is nothing new under the sun.” But there are new ways to say everything. What connects us to others and, paradoxically, asserts our individuality, is the story we tell. The poem we write. At the end of the day, if we want to write, we can.

The techniques I learned at that little training in Amherst paved a way for the writing circles I lead now, and over the years, the experience of working with budding writers from all walks of life and of all ages has deepened and bloomed into something quite lovely. I have sort of made it my business to guide people in this process, and I have to say, it is one of the more rewarding ways to spend my time.

The other very rewarding way I spend my time is guiding people in yoga and meditation, both as an expression of the self and as a way to listen. Through the meditative movement of yoga and the stillness achieved in deep relaxation, I believe we can visit our “Dreaming Places.” We can connect with our own imagination, our wildness, the pictures and words that populate our thought, and we can gain insight into our own creativity. If I visit my “Dreaming Place” regularly, the way into it becomes more familiar, less intimidating, and easier to navigate. The speed with which I can reach it, and draw from it for my writing, increases…to the point that when I sit down to the page, there is little to restrict the free and easy rummaging, sifting, recording and crafting of the material it offers me.

If you have peace with this whole process, if you trust it, you can know your writer self. You can bring her to the fore and indeed embody her. If it is what you want, whether to forge a new life path or simply to find the wherewithal to write one particular story that you have it in you to write, you can certainly achieve it.

As for the yoga part, you do not have to be able to twist yourself into a pretzel, and I will not make you chant “Om Namah Shivaya” (unless you want to, that is!). You just have to arrive with the willingness to breathe, move your body a little, set an intention to yoke body to mind and both of these to spirit. If you would like to attend to this integration of the self, through yoga asana, meditation and yes, writing, you might like what we are up to at Lotus Wheel.

This is what my Lotus Wheel: Creative Awakening Retreats are all about. I hope you’ll visit the website for information about the upcoming retreat at Unity Village this October (click link below). This retreat is limited to 30 participants, mostly to keep the writing circles to the intimate size I like them to be, so be quick! It’s filling up! I hope to see you there…

Namaste.

Creative Awakening Yoga Retreat at Unity Village 

*Both quotes in this essay come from "A Defence of Poetry" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which was first published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments.

'Twas the Night Before the Frendly Gathering....

After our morning yoga and a little work, I leave Timber Ridge around noon each day, and each day it is a little bit different. Today, the day before the Frendly Gathering, this place is wild with energy, color, bodies and movement. Everyone has a place to be, a tool to wield, an area to clean or decorate or transform for festivity.

Drinks are piled into coolers and bins for the volunteer staff, and vendors start rolling in, their bright wares swinging from hooks and shelves in vans, or stuffed into hatchbacks. Tents are being erected left and right, and the sound crew arrives to start preparing for the parade of bands that will grace these stages starting with the pre-party tonight.

The Burton crew is busy preparing their ‘lodge,’ which looks like a teepee with two long awnings sprawling away from its central structure. Camera crews move among the workers, documenting each interaction Jack and Danny have: someone needs a screw gun over at the skate ramp. Did the Beats Antique merchandise arrive? Where is the yellow tape measure? That toilet in the men’s bathroom is clogged again. It’s less than glamorous, to say the least.

And yet, Jack and Danny thrive on it. This is their karma, it seems, the work that they offer up to the world to create this amazing three-day festival. Gray clouds, swollen with rain, threaten to open themselves and dowse us all, as they have every day, but never mind. There are things to do. “Everything’s better with mud,” someone quips cheerfully. Jack tugs at the hair protruding from beneath his hat and reminds himself to breathe. It’s stressful, running all this, and he and Danny have watched this thing double each year. Anticipating over 2,000 festival-goers this time around, they bolster themselves for numbers but not chaos.

The Frendly Gathering is just that: it’s Frendly. More and more people are coming to understand exactly what that means. The adjective “Frendly” denotes anything that cultivates a positive, peaceful, nonjudgmental exchange among people. That exchange involves mutual respect and revelry in equal parts, and in my experience over these past three years, it just might be a magic combination. “The boys” work tirelessly, as do their female counterparts in charge of every administrative detail, and each night they play. Hard.

And in the morning, as the sun begins to warm the hill that is the backdrop for the Frendly Gathering, they face that hill and do a little yoga. Their commitment to mindfulness and entering each day with positivity and intention is evident in the discipline they have to show up here on their mats first thing every morning. They choose yoga over an extra hour of much needed sleep, and I watch the tension and the sleep, still tangled in their hair, unravel and spill away from them with each asana, each “long, slow exhalation.” Their bodies uncoil from their couple of hours of restless sleep and open into the Frendly vibe that gave rise to this whole thing in the first place. As they move, stretch, balance, they remember. It is good.

“The day has been officially launched,” is the closing comment that someone always makes, Jack or Danny or Luke, and it’s true. From there we flow out onto the landscape of Timber Ridge and engage in the karma that will yield an entire festival of this Frendly feeling.

Everyone will feel it, for sure, because it comes from such a real place. These guys are the real deal, and the people they have garnered to them to help launch this thing, they’re the real deal, too. I am honored to be even a small part of this thing and to watch as it grows…to birth not just a three-day party, which it certainly is, but also a movement. The Frendly Movement.

Smile. Breathe. Connect. Hug someone. As one walks through the archway from the Main Stage area up toward the Woods Stage and the mini-ramp, they are reminded to do all of these things. Each Frendly action is prompted by a hand-painted sign that punctuates the colorful field of feathers and mobiles hanging from above. This ornate archway framed by branches ushers one into the next enchanted realm of the Frendly space….in the direction of the VewDew Board demos, Wellfleet oysters, the Frendly skate ramp and yes, the DJ Nest. Ah. It’s time.

The Frendly Gathering is about to be launched.  I’ll see you at Timber Ridge, Frends!

To My "Frends" at Timber Ridge

I sit and talk you through a visualization. You 13. I arrived with 13 brand new composition books and threw in 2 or 3 recycled ones for good measure, but I see now that you are the 13 who were always going to be sitting here, listening to my words and generating your own.

Gratitude rises like a wave dragging its belly across coral reef, so that it pitches skyward and gives the sensation of pleasure--I skitter across the face of the wave. I smile, though there is always the seed of fear, always the knowledge that not every gift is received with love. I give it anyway.

In your varying degrees of interest and investment, you listen. You close your eyes. You meditate. Write. I am awed by your willingness. Your positive orientation toward every new thing. This openness, this trust, is what encourages me to keep tending the soil, keep caring for this group so committed to caring for this thing--this vibrant, growing, pulsing, alive thing that has the potential to heal the planet.

When you share your writings, I am humbled. By your guilelessness and your frankness, by the beauty of your stories and impressions, but mostly by the way you express your love. By the way you trust this group. You send the gift back to me a thousandfold, and I am blessed. Thank you, Frends. Mahalo nui.

See you at the Gathering...