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Louise Erdrich, “Advice to Myself”
Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup. Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins. Don’t even sew on a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all. Except one word to another. Or a thought. Pursue the authentic-decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don’t even think of cleaning out. That closet stuffed with savage mementos. Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks. Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in through the screened windows, who collect patiently on the tops of food jars and books. Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity. “Advice to Myself” from Original Fire by Louise Erdrich. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Ellen Skilton, “New Fridge, Old Song” This morning, lemon seltzer cans all line up in the new refrigerator door preening for the cameras. Oh, the sweet joy of new beginnings in refrigeration! Soon enough though, spills, half-eaten burritos, and partial cat food cans will take over again, lurking in the back corners, hiding in hard-to-reach spots. Its stainless-steel skin shimmers in afternoon light, but the sheen of this cooling wonder is already dulled by a weekend of fingers opening its doors. And yet, even when bread and cheese turn moldy and milk transforms from liquid to a smelly solid mass, a white-throated sparrow’s welcome song can still reach your aging ears from its perch on the back gate. Smudged, dinged and damaged by the long slog of it all. Then daybreak again. Ellen Skilton, “New Fridge, Old Song.” Copyright © 2022 by Ellen Skilton. Published by permission of the poet. All rights reserved. W. S. Di Piero, “Chicago and December” Trying to find my roost one lidded, late afternoon, the consolation of color worked up like neediness, like craving chocolate, I’m at Art Institute favorites: Velasquez’s “Servant,” her bashful attention fixed to place things just right, Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,” whose fishy fingers seem never to do a day’s work, the great stone lions outside monumentally pissed by jumbo wreaths and ribbons municipal good cheer yoked around their heads. Mealy mist. Furred air. I walk north across the river, Christmas lights crushed on skyscraper glass, bling stringing Michigan Ave., sunlight’s last-gasp sighing through the artless fog. Vague fatigued promise hangs in the low darkened sky when bunched scrawny starlings rattle up from trees, switchback and snag like tossed rags dressing the bare wintering branches, black-on-black shining, and I’m in a moment more like a fore-moment: from the sidewalk, watching them poised without purpose, I feel lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things when from their stillness, the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds erupt again, clap, elated weather- making wing-clouds changing, smithereened back and forth, now already gone to follow the river’s running course. From Poetry (June 2006). Copyright © 2006 by W. S. Di Piero. Reprinted by permission of the poet. POETIC THEMES Just as the natural world is dialing down to darkness, this week we’re asked to rev up for the holidays. This can mean only one thing, sooner or later: whole body exhaustion. If you are a ball of goo on the couch, it’s not just social expectations this week; there’s a special kind of emotional fatigue at work too, especially for those of us for whom cultural and family traditions can be triggering. Setting limits on output isn’t easy. A somatic approach to the psyche insists that we don’t really have a choice about those limits. We can’t “construct” boundaries based on a cognitive construct or willpower; there are limitations that we quite simply have, and ultimately they will find a way to stop us. The choices we make about energy output have consequences because we have predetermined, finite resources. The “spoon model” of energy output, observed by those with chronic illness, is useful for all of us: each daily activity is measured by how many spoonfuls of energy it requires, and careful priorities must be set since we have only so much juice in the tank. To discern how much we have to give, we must go beyond what the dominant culture says we should give (since we are embedded in systems that are designed to exploit our resources to benefit the few. Disproportionally. Yay, Nap Ministry!). If we are to heal the damage done by compulsive patterns of mismanaging our energy, we must reexamine the toxic habits our culture has inculcated in us that teach blatant disregard for the needs of the body and psyche. Over time, as the messages from within are continually drowned out and silenced, we can lose touch with our own needs entirely. To repair this rift, we need to tap into physical feeling as we would attend to hunger or thirst so that we can sense again, and honor, the signals our body is sending. These poems offer different prescriptions for treating ho-ho-holiday exhaustion. We can allow for stillness, even stagnancy, or we can escape! Erdrich’s advice is to stop organizing, stop fixing, stop doing, as is epitomized in the poem’s mantra-like first line, “leave the dishes.” This principle is not just about repairing our culture’s tendency to overdo, it actually breaks down the “insulation” between the daily grind and who we really are. Beyond the ruse of necessity, according to this poem, lies our truth. But this poem’s specific strategy for touching truth is to toggle between depth and humor. The prescribed reaction to mold in the fridge: accept new life! And her irreverence helps us . . . well . . . relax. The instructions to welcome the dead who collect on kitchen jars might be dark and intense if they didn’t follow on the heels of her instructions to let everybody eat cereal for dinner. Some of us sink into this blend of morbidity and humor like a comfortable couch. The poem shifts us from “doing” verbs—throw patch mend buy sew invade worry pursue go after stuff sort answer weep break grow recycle read destroy pull strike shatter—to “non-doing” verbs: leave. let. drift. grow. And arguably: don’t? “Let the wind have its way” is such a lovely articulation of the ethic of allowing, which respects dust as a precious manifestation of the earth element. Each instantiation of rot, crumb, and crack is a holy testament to natural processes of death and decay. As a defense for non-doing, we are called to imagine the heart as a memento-stuffed closet we’d never want to clean. We’re invited into this inner chamber, away from the ruse of necessity and toward all that is authentic, genuine, gritty, true. Spending some time in stillness, we can sift through the dusty stuff tucked away in the corners of our heart. Allowing natural processes to have their way is a kind of unflinching esteem for the whole of creation as holy. And I just had to include a variation on the theme in Ellen Skilton’s haibun, a poetic form of prose interspersed with haiku that was originally used for travel narratives. And truly, there’s the promise of change that moves this poem along, from the pristine, cool wonder of now and the half-empty cat food cans to come. The old slogsong of awakening to newness each morning, only to watch the mold and milkcurdle take over, is the story of aging. And yet—yet! The white-throated sparrow still breaks through the “hard-to-reach” spots in our heart, like a haiku breaking up the prose. In contrast, “Chicago and December” insists that to escape all that is damaged, insincere, and affected, we need to fly toward whatever ragged, authentic form of beauty we can find. For those of us staggering through the end of the year“one-lidded,” the craving for something colorful in the gray Chicago fog is so like the way we hunger, viscerally, for something real inside aaaaall the cultural bullshit around us. Di Piero, an art critic herself, uses the art world to represent what is true. Looking out on the bling of Christmas lights all across the skyscrapers, we feel, more than see, the two museum lions guarding the world of art, wild and proud as pyramid sphinxes. We feel, more than see, their proud heads yoked with wreaths, ribbons, and “municipal good cheer.” From this “mealy mist,” our desire for escape, “worked up like neediness,” is granted by an explosion of starlings. Not pretty or nice birds, but “bunched scrawny” things. Real things. The pace of the poem picks up to a staccato rhythm, like wings flapping, till we as readers, as movers moved, feel galvanized. We too crave release from all the holiday ribbons and baubles; want instead to be “lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things.” Nothing strung with lights, just the rattling dance of nature “smithereened back and forth.” The snare-drum rhythm of movements is cadenced by unexpected rhymes: “switchback and snag / like tossed rags.” Enjambments both condense and stretch out a moment: “elated weather- / making wing-clouds changing.” It’s a relief to be for a moment “already gone” with them, following the river’s course, lifted out of the whole scene of bling and jumbo wreath and crushed Christmas lights. And so we pray: move us, lift us from out of it all, give us our wings back, our proud lion manes. PRACTICE An explosion of starlings, wrought physical, might inspire you to go for a run. If so: HUZZAH! YOU ROCK! Lift yourself out of the sleepy fog and awaken fire and flight and freedom. As an alternative (since I'm not much of a runner), you might want to move to this gorgeous video of a starling murmuration by Søren Solkær. That could be whole-body movement, but I like to sit and just free up my arms to move with the switchback and snag and smithereens. Or, your couch-huggin’ brownie-poundin’ booze-guzzlin’ body might have a whole lot to say about the prospect of a jog. In that case, you could instead explore Erdrich’s evocative models for non-doing: how might you experience physically the feeling of dust bunnies forming, the buildup of earth, new forms of life growing, old things drifting in through the windows of the mind? Find a weighted object to place on your chest and consider adding a source of heat, like a hot pad. Best of all is a “laundry bath.” I like to dump all the laundry hot from the dryer onto whichever kid happens to be prone on the couch, feeling low. With or without heat, allow yourself to recline on your back with your legs extended up the wall, or furniture, and relish the warmth of thoracic cavity, imagining your ribcage as a dark receptacle stuffed with sacred-to-you people or things, stuff you’d never throw away. The imprint of life lived, like the sticky fingers dirtying the fridge door with sacred smudges. Take yourself out of the long slog, and wait for daybreak.
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"Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Is Not Breaking" - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons equals the collective weight of every animal on earth. Including the insects. Times three. Six billion tons sounds impossible until I consider how it is to swallow grief-- just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed a neutron star. How dense it is, how it carries inside it the memory of collapse. How difficult it is to move then. How impossible to believe that anything could lift that weight. There are many reasons to treat each other with great tenderness. One is the sheer miracle that we are here together on a planet surrounded by dying stars. One is that we cannot see what anyone else has swallowed. 'Tis the season of thanksgiving, friends. Have you noticed addressing people as 'friends' has become the norm in leftist progressive circles? I've always thought it seemed kind of oogie when Quakers did it, but now that everyone's doing it (albeit without the Quaker capital 'F'), it feels easier to adopt, frankly. I always joke that in NYC (where I lived for the decade before moving to Philly), people would be like, "aaawww... you're a Quaker, like with the horse and buggy and the cute hats?" And here in PA, it seems like every little town has a street called "Meetinghouse Road." Increasingly, I hear Friendly phrases flying around like "holding you in the light" and "speaking truth to power." Every spiritual/healing organization is now integrating social justice into their offerings. I've even heard of the "Quaker pause" in equity circles. It makes me proud of this faith I was born into - one that isn't always easy to stick with. Part of the challenge is the sheer number of HOURS being a practicing Quaker demands each week: our business process is considered part of the spiritual life of the meeting, so every aspect of running the organization is done communally, rather than paying a staff. This, my friends (tee hee I get a chuckle each time) is *partly* why when you think "Quaker," you imagine a white, upper middle class, retired person. Who else has time? It's not a super easy path, especially for those of us who don't really consider ourselves Christian (that's a whole 'nother conversation), but I have continued with it because after some spiritual tourism, I believe that you'll always find problems if you dig deep enough, so the hole that's in your own backyard will probably be the deepest - or at least wrangling with the problems will be the toughest, most authentic and healing wrangling you do. Say, like, we wrangle with the famous 19th century painting "The First Thanksgiving," depicting the Plymouth settlers and the Wampanoag peacefully sharing a meal, which is in keeping with the history as rendered by a Quaker (Edward Winslow). It's a lot like the way we've spun William Penn's "treaty" with the Lenni Lenape, disappearing all the violence. So maybe we should talk about colonization too. We've been doing more yoga in class, as our practice becomes more physical to balance the cooler weather. I don't want to paint a 5000-year-old tradition into some happy image of a Thanksgiving smorgasbord of offerings. But I should back up. My teaching has been a way of sharing the aspects of Quakerism most dear to me: making way for a direct, unmediated experience of the spiritual plane - one that happens from the inside. Cultivating a capacity and reverence for inner stillness. Practicing peace with ourselves and with one another. Discerning your next right step by listening for the still small voice within (whether you call that your conscience, The Universe, your tradition's word for the divine, or the IFS Self). And then experimenting with embodied ways of accessing all that in a syncretic practice that might best be dubbed Somatics, drawing from multiple traditions including yoga, modern dance, and polyvagal techniques. Let's take a moment to wrangle with the tough stuff about syncretism. If we're claiming to be a politicized space that is concerned with addressing oppression, we need to acknowledge some things about the lineage of Somatics - and here I'm drawing on the work of Marika Heinrichs. The term was coined in the '70's by Thomas Hanna, a professor of divinity and philosophy deeply interested in neurology and Feldenkrais' investigations of movement patterning. Most of the teachers clustering around Hanna were white, and most had BIPOC mentors emerging from traditions that weren't being credited. So the field of Somatics has at its origins a practice of invisibilizing black, Asian, and indigenous cultural traditions, stripping them of their spiritual elements to legitimize them as a science. One way we can address this decontextualization/colonization of sacred traditions is first to acknowledge it, and then to try to find ways to repair that harm. One reparative way to dismantle supremacist culture is to refuse the premise of stripping practices down to render them as "science." To refuse the separation of embodiment from the sacred is to re-infuse our own bodies with a sense of spiritual worth that predates white patterning towards domination and control. Ideally we'd pursue this through our own ancestral lineages, to place spirit firmly back in our own bodies, lands, and practices. The problem is that many of these traditions have been "lost" (by which we mean, burned, drowned, and tortured out of the largely female bodies that contained their wisdom). So we do our best, we search for teachings from our own traditions and hold our borrowed practices with reverent regard and blunder and own our mistakes and keep trying to reinvigorate our relationship to all life as holy. So on this Thanksgiving, I want to send you so much gratitude for bringing yourselves to this work and this beautiful community - and to my own spiritual home in the Meetinghouse! I often bust on my faith - it's my inner teenager's way of holding something precious at arm's length. But while she's busy over there in the corner with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, James Dean style, I want to share with you that I LOVE sharing it with you. I mention often the South Asian practice of covering your mouth, or whispering, when you utter the name of your beloved. It's like that. Too dear to shout about. So let me whisper in your ear, dear friend: thank you for companioning me through these incredibly difficult times, for showing up again and again willing to share your strength and heart with one another. Thanks to those of you who put up with "check ins" when they're uncomfortable and new, and to those of you who guide others through the discomfort, believing we need to dispel the shame about our bodies to re-engage with their wisdom and know what's really up, individually and collectively, and then proceeding in a way that authentically accounts for that reality. #runonsentence. Thank you for connecting before and after class about what it felt like to be hustled into a bomb shelter in Israel and how that Amichai poem landed in your body and what to do with the anger and how to acknowledge multiple wounds in the room and still work for peace. And still believe in peace. And still hold out for peace. And still... Thank you. These poems are rough, at such a tender time. I've kept the somatic practice of cupping the hands into a bowl to externalize pain, and replaced the poem on the practice video with a poem of peace by Aurora Levins Morales. Trigger warning that "Summons" might also bring up stuff for you, so please, as always, take CARE of yourself and feel free to get off at your bus stop. Sending strength in this crazy time.
Aurora Levins Morales, "Summons" Last night I dreamed ten thousand grandmothers from the twelve hundred corners of the earth walked out into the gap one breath deep between the bullet and the flesh between the bomb and the family. They told me we cannot wait for governments. There are no peacekeepers boarding planes. There are no leaders who dare to say every life is precious, so it will have to be us. They said we will cup our hands around each heart. We will sing the earth’s song, the song of water, a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn to weeping. The mourners will embrace, and grief replace every impulse toward harm. Ten thousand is not enough, they said, so, we have sent this dream, like a flock of doves into the sleep of the world. Wake up. Put on your shoes. You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner. Let’s go. Dion Lissner O’Reilly, “Scavenged” what becomes of us once we’ve been torn apart and returned to our future… Dorianne Laux When I was nineteen, a flame clung to my back, ate me to the spine. Torch-lit and alone, I ran through the house, a contagion cindering couches and carpets. Flayed, my fingertips peeled back to the nail beds. My spongy tissues touched air, light, and the steel cot where they took me. Each day, they peeled me like Velcro from my sheets, left bits of my meat there. Lowered me into Betadine, scrubbed me to screams-- that became my history. Scavenged by the curious. They see my twisted fingers and are hungry for the tale. I’ve done the same, stared at a leg’s nubbed end, wanted to touch it, feel the cut bone under the knob, hear its shrapnel story. I wanted to know how that man was alive, arms glistening playing basketball from a high-tech chair, making his shots. The body’s scarred terrain becomes consecrated field. We gather to pick through the pieces that remain-- an ear hanging from its hinge of skin, diamond stud in the lobe, ring finger shining with its promise-band of gold. Dion Lissner O’Reilly “Scavenged” from Ghost Dogs. Copyright © 2020 by Dion O’Reilly. Used by permission of Terrapin Books. Marion Wrenn, “Firebird” I’m the girl who smelled of kerosene & candy, who, once supine in a treefort & already forgetting the damp magazines slick with women the jinxed shag carpet under bucket seats pried from a junked Camaro, boys watching the boy on top of me, was unthinking breath that would be kisses, the pressure of a body & mine a fulcrum: of course— of course I can still feel a finger on my philtrum. An angel whispers plunk & I keep quiet, cleaving & knowing not to ask or tell, unwilling to risk turning my mother to ash, trusting only my strength to hold tight. Marion Wrenn, “Firebird” copyright © 2022 by Marion Wrenn. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari” v. Thick coat. Black fur. Two russet horns twisted to stone. One night I was stuck on a narrow road, panting. I was pregnant. I was dead. I was a fetus. I was just born. (Most days I don’t know what I am). I am a photograph of a saint, smiling. For years, my whole body ran away from me. When I flew--charred-- through the air, my ankles and toes fell off onto the peaks of impassable mountains. I have to go back to that wet black thing dead in the road. I have to turn around. I must put my face in it. It is my first time. I would not have it any other way. I am a valley of repeating verdant balconies. Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari” from The Voyage of the Sable Venus: And Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis, copyright © 2015 by Robin Coste Lewis. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopt, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. POETIC THEMES I’m no astrology master, but as a Scorpio Rising, I feel I can say the attributes of this sign are uncomfortably intense. Scorpios like to get right down to the bottom of things, without necessarily driving at the speed of trust. I’ve never felt from the inside the watery aspects of Scorpios; hanging out with one is like being held to a flame, and being one is like... well... it’s like being fire. So I’d like to issue a trigger warning for these poems, which touch wounds that many of you may prefer not to poke and prod. But as the #MeToo movement showed, spitting out the stories we were all taught to choke down and swallow does hold potential for transforming the culture at large. If we want change, now is the moment to hold ourselves and one another to the fire. Maybe we can burn off what doesn’t serve. The progress of O’Reilly’s brutal poem “Scavenged” is as straightforward as it is generous. The first half is about the excruciating pain of being, essentially, burned alive. The second half hinges this unusual personal story to the shared morbid curiosity we all feel about other human wounds, our shared hunger for one another’s darkest stories. And the poem arrives, finally, by declaring all of us, our scarred living remains, sacred: our flesh is depicted as a “consecrated field” spangled in diamonds and gold. The kerosene girl of “Firebird” endures a more metaphorical, and more common, manner of scorching. The setting is like a movie rendition of ’80s Americana: a kid’s tree fort, damp magazines (ew) dating back to a pre-digital age, bucket seats pried from a Camaro, and the shag carpet, jinxed. The superstitions of the scene reflect the times, when we used to play with Ouija boards and ceremoniously lift one another’s as-if-dead bodies in the game “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” The plunk-whispering angel and the near-beatific Firebird (almost identical to a Camaro) wrap in dark magic the unspoken rule “not to ask or tell.” Here the code of silence ensures that the speaker’s mother won’t be turned to ash, kind of like “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” This is a telling reversal of the phoenix theme: nobody is going to rise from the ash in a circle of horny onlookers. The only thing to be trusted is the survivor’s “strength to hold tight,” minimizing the orbit of harm to a tight circle of one. Like you do with a fire. So, returning to the question from O’Reilly’s epigraph: “…what becomes / of us once we’ve been torn apart?” I think of the “torch-lit” girl in O’Reilly’s poem, “cindering couches and carpets,” the bits of her meat left on the sheets. A nightmare inverse of the phoenix is the myth of Parvati, a goddess whose punishment for immodesty is to be charred, dismembered, and scattered across the valley that bears her name. One of the purported sites where Parvati’s charred body parts fell from the sky is the setting for Robin Coste Lewis’ long poem “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari.” Zinging around this poem are the subtle crosscurrents of power and violence at work in South Asian tourism, not only in the scarred aftermath of British colonial conquest, but in Indian culture and mythology itself. The poem depicts an African American woman and a group of American college students traveling down the dark mountain, where they encounter a nomadic clan with a herd of water buffalo, one of which is giving birth. This is all taking place, we have to remember, at the very site of the self-immolation of the goddess of fertility. When the baby turns out to be stillborn, the tribe ropes the mother buffalo, holding her down until she looks directly at the dark fur of her dead offspring. She finally gives up and stops bucking, to put her nose down in the “folded and wet black nothing.” The buffalo’s suffering overlaps associatively with the speaker’s own childbirth experience, and she describes feeling drawn back to the corpse: “I have to turn around. / I must put my face in it.” By the end of the poem, the speaker has a kind of clarity born from clear witness—of the bereaved mother animal, the charred goddess falling in pieces, the fetus, death, the smiling saint, the valley itself. The shadow work of Scorpio season beckons us all past the surface to dive down into our own darkness and history, put our face in the hard thing. It’s a form of consecration. PRACTICE If you’re down for some down-and-dirty shadow work, this is the week for it. If you are a menstruating woman, you could dive into the Parvati theme and scatter your blood as an earth offering. Or, if it’s your thing, you could make art out of it or ritual marks on your skin. You could study roadkill if you happen to pass it; that’s an ancient meditation. But maybe the true Scorpio practice would be to go back to a time you were wounded, if and only if you feel you can trust your strength to hold tight. Dr. Sarà King teaches a practice of holding pain. Nothing could be simpler: the practitioner simply holds their cupped hands, like a little bowl or container, in front of their chest. Could you hold your wound in this way or hold your body where it has been wounded, as a way of giving it a place that’s separate from you and also as a way of caring for it and, symbiotically, caring for you? What is the associative web of thoughts and feelings? |
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