The Siren Song of Night Skies and Campfires (Blog #16)

12:40 am

I'm out here, listening to all the manmade noises, at 12:40 a.m, on the second Friday in a row.  Why does the city of Pittsburgh think it is okay to get started on roadwork at this hour?  The roommate tells me they start it up at 10 pm every weekend, at which time they shut down the tunnel and wreak general havoc on Swissvale traffic through Sunday night. My ideal, quiet little neighborhood is taking on some new qualities I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with, as the approach of the summer months and good weather becomes a reality at last. 

"There are two seasons in Pittsburgh," she tells me, "winter and construction."  Damn.

Still, I don't mind the dark, even with all the noise.  The half-moon above the houses off to the right has an otherwordly sheen all around it.  The air smells cool, fresh, the grass has sprouted up everywhere in my backyard, apparent in the slivers and flashes of light that stream outward from our dining room window.  Even with all the traffic noises, there is more a sense of peace out here at night than even on the quietest sun-drenched day (not that we have many of those in perpetually overcast Pittsburgh).  There is a stillness out here in the nighttime hours that is near-impossible to locate during summer afternoons.

The still-broken backyard light does its thing, flickering on and off on a whim, each time I turn my head or move my pen too much.  It is still a bother, but even that indecisive lantern cannot ruin my good mood.  I am out here for the first time in several weeks, and I have missed this stillness in my life. 

Today, a friend wrote an email to me, complaining of a camping trip with friends that had gone sour for her once she realized that said friends weren't really there to experience any kind of nature or stillness, but just to tell stories around the fire and drink.  These activities have their place in our world, too--but when a gal needs a good dose of silence, some thinking time (or mind-wandering time, as the case may be), no amount of chatter and fun is going to fill that gap.

I think of my own recently-busy life, busy enough that I've been prevented from entering the backyard for any length of time.  Long hours of data entry in a hot room and the whining of children who are not getting their way, though separately manageable and representative of an off-day rather than the reality of the everyday grind, may nevertheless compound themselves into one very long workday.  These things, taken together, have a way of lessening one's will to work hard in the off-hours on various life projects,. backyard blogs included. 

It is true that something has felt vaguely amiss to me these days, a bit askew, despite the happiness I feel toward my living space and the things I have been devoting my life to this past year.  Most recently, it has felt as though no amount of throwing myself into my work has been able to fix the proverbial leak.  Could it be that the thing I've been putting off because I "don't have time"--time to sit and contemplate things--is the very thing that will mend me, that will give my days more meaning, and bring a sense of rightness to my world?  That the pieces will fall into place, once I do this one solitary thing?  I can't confirm or deny the answer just yet, but I have my suspicions that I have been missing more than just my "backyard time."

I am convinced that brain and body know when one is neglecting things, and make their displeasure known in all the little ways--the lack of concentration and drive to work; the tiredness that steeps itself in the muscles and in the bones; the frustration of feeling for no particular reason and contrary to all logic, that the work one has done in the day has not made a bit of difference, that it is not one's "real work" (never mind that whatever "real work" might mean still remains a mystery); the restlessness one feels before bed, as though there were some cosmic task that needed doing, but that the real logistical specificities of this task, whetever it may be, are beyond her reach.  Even when one knows that the real solution lies in becoming more aware of one's surorundings, of becoming more present in every waking moment, it would seem to her that this reality cannot be felt, just yet, until some decisive action has been taken.

To make things more confusing, though no less powerful over one's life, these symptoms do not come all at once as they might with some kind of diagnosable illness, nor is the person affected by them always aware of their effects.  They are temporary, and sporadic, and situational, but even so, they require something to be done by the person residing in this headspace.  They are the marks, I am often convinced, of living one's days with too much quickness, and too little awareness--the certain signs of of inhabiting a world that is moving too quickly to encourage a person to slow down and sit out a few laps.

My newly long days at work and my decision to take on a lot of extra projects in the past few months (three, to be exact) has left some part of me numb and fighting for balance.  And so I reach for it, in the stillness of the night sky, with no distractions to lure my attention away.  Maybe it's the age of the internet, or maybe it's just a quirk of my own personality, that compels me to seek this thing out when most seem content to talk their way through a campfire night these days.

But whatever the reason, I need a time-out, like a child who has been surrounded by too many stimuli and becomes craky and manic in the process.  I am no longer afraid or ashamed to take it.  And what wonders twenty minutes under the cover of darkness can do for a restless soul, perched as she may be beneath the half-moon and its halo, the silhouettes of branches, the secrets and mysteries of the night sky.

Scenes from New Orleans, Part I (Blog #15)

10:10 a.m.

For the first time, I’ve brought my computer outside with me for blogging purposes.  It occurs to me what a loud instrument this is, as the beeps and dings go off that signify my computer booting up, and then an episode of New Girl starts up immediately—the one I was in the middle of watching last night on Hulu before passing out from the exhaustion of the week.  I get hooked into that drama for a minute or two before returning to the task at hand.  This is why I don’t bring my laptop outside with me, I think.  Of course, there is also a car alarm going off somewhere behind me. 

All this noise seems inordinately loud for a Saturday morning, but maybe I’m just used to blogging at night and not at 10 a.m…

Our deck was powerwashed yesterday, and so the only thing covering it now is pollen.  The chairs and grill sit on the lawn, forsaken for the time being, and only the table and some planting pots sit at the edge of the wooden slats.  The air around me is cool and crisp, as befits the new spring days.  The nights have been hot, and it has been hard to wake up in the mornings due to the stuffiness of my bedroom and my poor allergy-prone nose, which is why I have slept 11 or 12 hours a night this week.  So in being out here I am simultaneously trying to wake up and to write out a much-overdue blog post.

It is overdue only in my mind, of course, as classes are done and blogging is no longer a required part of my week. Yet, when I was in New Orleans last week, all I could think about was committing to paper all of the crazy adventures I was having.  Most of them were not “crazy” in the way you would expect a trip to New Orleans to bring forth; but there were surprises, big and small, nonetheless.

There was the restaurant I went to, an old haunt I used to love called La Madeleine, which served up a mean tomato soup.  It had been remade into a fifties-style soda shop called Stanley’s.  This place advertised, appropriately, a sandwich called “The Stella” on the back of the servers’ t-shirts, though I didn’t try it—I was there for the cherry limeade and chicken and gator gumbo, with a lump of potato salad dropped in the middle of it. 

There was the palm reader in Jackson Square who told me I am going to have three children (three!) and that I wanted to be a doctor when growing up (I wanted to be a bus driver, actually).  I silently scoffed at these tidbits of information.  But she also told me I'd live til at least 96, outlasting my grandfather.  She told me I've had my heart broken twice.  She told me I worry too much about my body, that I think I can't have kids but I really can.  "You've lost one man, one woman," she told me, when I've been writing about my grandparents all semester long.  "The woman was like you," she said.   

She looked around the square, at the mix of tourists and other fortune tellers and said, "You are one of us, not like everyone else.  She was this way, too."  She told me this, and I wanted to believe it. 

"Are you sure about the kids?" I asked her.

"The girl is like you, too," she said.  "Fighting with her is like fighting with yourself.  You can't win."  This feels true, somehow, though the reality of it doesn't exist yet.  I think of my mother  in New York and how we fight, the way we each fought with my grandmother, the way all the women in our family fight.  Dirty, lowdown fighting.  It fits.

She drew a few tarot cards, including the Devil Card, and told me, "Don't blame me. This is your card."  I laughed, knowing she was probably right.  "You have three sides," she said.  "There is the very sweet side and the bitch."  Anyone who knows me at all would already be nodding in agreement; I've always held it as a strength to be able to show either side, as needed. To not let myself be trodden upon at some moments, then to come back with a fierce generosity in others.  It is a personality quirk, I guess.

"But  at your heart, you are a family woman,"  she concluded.  "You give a lot to them, though you don't get back as much in return as you give."  She looked at my left palm and saw heart disease, cancer, and diabetes in my family line (all true, of course) but that in 3-5 years--no more illnesses.  I prayed she was right about that one.  

                                                                              *

The beignets in Jackson Square were the same as ever, and the jazz at Preservation Hall, too, though I gave away my last beignet to a homeless man on the street begging for scraps.  As for the jazz, it fired me up, as usual.  Half the fun was witnessing the man from Provincetown, Cape Cod—who I chatted with in line for a half an hour beforehand—at his first Pres Hall show, whooping and hollering and exclaiming to his wife, “That tuba player in the back is far underappreciated. Far underappreciated.”   The woman standing in front of me, probably in her late twenties or early thirties, swayed with drunkenness during “When the Saints Go Marching In,” splashing her drink everywhere and narrowly missing my feet and purse.  (Drinks are not served there, but one is allowed to bring them in from Pat O’Brien’s pub, next door.)  While I was hardly nostalgic for this kind of behavior in a grown-ass adult, it felt strangely familiar to me, after enduring three years of such things here as a student over a decade ago.  

In the three days I spent here this month, I saw more adults teetering of the edge of sobriety than I would have liked and yet, as one hardly sees this kind of permissive go-ahead elsewhere in the States, at least as far as grown adults are concerned, there is something kind of intriguing about a place that in its very nature invites this sort of freedom to do what you please and damn the consequences. 

What is it about New Orleans?

Though I’m a two-drink maximum kind of girl, most days, this city captured me, too, in other ways.  Yes, I finally ordered a Hurricane on my last night there, about an hour before my bus was scheduled to depart, and yet it was another kind of hurricane entirely that caught me on this trip. 

It was my first time visiting since Katrina.

Imagine me in the darkened theater, at a larger-than-life IMAX feature called “Hurricane on the Bayou,” struggling to keep my sobs in for thirty whole minutes.  (It didn’t work.)  The film was a tasteful documentary, set just before Katrina, and it was about a girl who was doing a project for school about hurricanes and interviewing local people who’d been through the last big rager that had hit New Orleans.  But during the course of the film, the real thing hits, and the city is evacuated.

I saw real scenes, in enormous pixillated detail, of people fleeing their homes or refusing to flee their homes, waiting for rescue, being rescued.  I saw the little girl who was narrating part of the film waiting for days to hear from her grandparents, to know if they were alive.  It hit home, after losing my own grandfather so recently.  But it also hit home, to be sitting there in my old city, albeit among other tourists, and watching the devastation it had faced all those years ago, knowing that some things still remain to be fixed—people’s lives included.  In some ways, Katrina wasn’t real for me until this moment in the theater, surrounded by other tourists who were politely taking it all in like the detached history lesson it was, for them—in this moment, when the home I had seen destroyed on the TV screen all those summers ago synched up with the real thing, rooted in this place in all its gigantic IMAX terror.

Yeah, I pretty much lost it.

                                                                                *

Now this is me we’re talking about—I’d even written an essay for my thesis four or so years ago about watching this tragedy unfold in my former home, about the scenes posted all over CNN, and how it made me feel numb, confused, resentful.  How the media—though it did focus our attention there and help us to know the real atrocities that were going on in the city during that storm—sometimes seemed to be exploiting a terrible situation for the sake of its own viewership stats.  It was hard to watch.  It was hard to know what I was feeling.  I wanted to help my city, but I was a broke grad student and did not know how else to help other than donating money I didn’t have.  The best I could do was tell people when they asked what an amazing place it was, one-of-a-kind.  Tell them why it should definitely be rebuilt.  No questions asked.  The best I could do was write about it, so that other people might see in New Orleans what I saw, not a wreck of a town but all the joy it had always brought people. 

That's what Ernest Gaines did, what a host of local writers and lovers of this place did, too, I guess.  That's the only power we have as writers, sometimes.

In the April 2013 Jazz Fest guide, I read about Aaron Neville, whose wife was lost in the years after the storm, and of others who fought bravely through these tragedies in ‘05, but who were unable to fend off the devastation done to their hearts and their minds, to their culture and their way of life, in the years following.  These past few years have been the darkest years for the people of New Orleans, indeed.  But when I am there, in person, in the parts of town I used to frequent as a student, I realize that this IMAX film is the only sadness I see all week.  How does this city do it?

I hear the strains of jazz music everywhere—in the background of this film, along the river’s edge where the riverboats gather to bring the tourists out on dinnertime tours, in the park where the lone trumpeter plays the riffs of “Little Liza Jane,”  in my own mind for four or five days after this trip.  Four or five days of jazz music going solely in one’s head is a long time, when one is surrounded in actuality by the strains of rap and pop.  But the jazz refused to leave me for a little while.

What is it about New Orleans?  I know it is, at least in part, their music that has brought them back.  The musicians’ village that was created after Katrina, and the many programs created by Harry Connick Jr. and Trombone Shorty, among others, to being musicians back, to help them find their livelihood again, to teach high schoolers the roots and techniques of jazz so that the lifeblood of this city is not lost, can never be lost.

It is their music—that and the knowledge that seems to be written on every person’s face, even those who have had hard times and have hard times still—that has kept them going.  This knowledge is a kind of secret to living a good life, the joy that comes in living well and knowing how to make other people smile—strangers, even, who are merely passing through, traveling from lands as foreign to the concept of joy for its own sake as New York City.

Blog #14- Some reviews of cutting-edge chapbooks

In a departure from regular “blog format,” I thought I would post some brief excerpts of a few new chapbooks I had the pleasure of reading this week.  All of them relate to the natural world in mysterious ways.  The first is Hannah Kreitzer’s Marrowbone, which has been described as a collection of “myths and fables” by the publisher: “These three stories will whisk the reader to arcane and mysterious lands, but the darkest journeys take place within the human heart.” 

Indeed, Marrowbone delivers to the reader a strange world of stories filled with unusual narratives and creatures, including one of the most intriguing characters in this slim volume, a bony animal-like figure who befriends a fellow traveler:

"That night the sun gave swift surrender to the butter-pale half moon. I fell asleep with ground squirrel and cold water in my stomach, the bonebuck’s ribs bracing my spine, and I dreamed a sky full of crows layered dozens-thick between the clouds and earth. Bones were strewn all through the field around me—ribs and limbs cast askew like forgotten omens. Snow came down through the crows’ wings, stacking up around the bones and settling on my boots…"

The stories in this book lead the reader to some fascinating and unexpected places, and we never lose our confidence in Ms. Kreitzer’s vision and skill as we journey along with her characters.  Chelsea Ardle, one of the publishers of Marrowbone and co-founder of Beetnik Press, shared with me her impressions of Ms. Kreitzer’s take on the natural world and of the chapbook itself:

"Marrowbone" takes the reader to places unknown, and yet, emotionally familiar—a woman going through her time of the month, trying to find some comfort; a girl trying to find her rhythm on a path unknown; a love lost. In her fictional tales, Kreitzer uses subtle symbolism to tell old stories through new eyes. In her descriptions of place, I think it is easy to recognize the author's own ties to land. I will tell you here that Kreitzer is a strong supporter of being barefoot for as long as it is possible during the year. Her feet are calloused and knowledgeable of the places she has walked, the land she lives on. This fact, shows through in the chapbooks stories to me, especially "Threefold."

As I read this volume, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the way Ms. Kreitzer distills the mysterious into concrete terms.  A native of Maine, she cites as one of her writerly influences John Prine, “who is a quiet master of earth-stained truth and humor,” and has said of her own connection to place: “I love the woods and the dirt and the shared heritage of stoicism. Being from Maine means knowing something about space and silence.  I’m grateful for that.”  Ms. Kreitzer has proven herself an expert in those very topics via the earthy yet elusive stories in this collection.

Read on to learn about a few more chapbooks…

After hearing Lorena Williams read from her new nonfiction chapbook Relic last week in Braddock, PA, I quickly became enamored with the honest resilience of her prose.  While she is currently a writing teacher at two universities, the bio on the back of the book also tells me that she has played the roles of “Wilderness Ranger… wildland firefighter…and…whitewater guide,” so by the time I open her chapbook to the first page, her well-wrought descriptions of place don’t surprise so much as thrill the restless wanderer buried somewhere within me.  Her descriptions of the natural environment are shot through with a quiet kind of beauty:

“My jog takes me along the ditch road past rolling hills of sagebrush, the windswept Oregon desert silent but for the tee-dee, tee-dee of pygmy nuthatches huddled together in the morning sun. The crunch of my shoes through crusty snow disturbs the tiny blue-gray birds into a chattering departure, only for them to alight on the very same branches moments after I pass.”

Ms. Williams displays a finely tuned sense of place in these tales, as befits her biography on the back cover.  I find myself intrigued with this description of the author’s roots:  “A native of the American West, Lorena Williams has long preferred rock to brick, sage to streets.”   Released by Appaloosa Press, Relic displays the tension between the Oregon landscape of Ms. Williams’ roots and the Pittsburgh cityscape that is her more recent home:

“Content with the reasonably unchanged vista—the cows, the distant tractor making its way up Graham Boulevard—I turn toward home and prepare to lie.

“No—I actually really like living in a city,” I say through a mouthful of scrambled egg. “It’s great being so close to everything, you know? I ride my bike pretty much everywhere.”

Throughout Relic, Ms. Williams confides in the reader as she explores a kind of longing for the land of her childhood, and we can only respond with appreciation for the beauty of both her landscapes, real and longed-for, and her words themselves.

And finally, Shannon Hozinec’s chapbook Unbridaled, a book of poems, makes its debut this week.  According to her bio, Ms. Hozinec is a Pittsburgh poet who “is powered by an oft-lethal combination of whiskey and hairspray!”  I appreciate the humor in this description, though the majority of poems featured in the book are of a more serious nature than this brief blurb. 

According to the publisher, this intriguing collection of poems “examines what happens in a post-apocalyptic society after a pseudo-human creature corrals a horde of lostlings under his wing. It engages with bloodlust and dominance, sacrifice and self-preservation, gender relegation and destruction – with what is earth, what is meat, and what is unalienable within us all.”  An earthy kind of premise, indeed!  While this description sounds terrfying to me, the poetry itself is a gift of surprising images and juxtapositions such as this one:

                           The sky ate and ate, clutching
         the open spaces in our jaws where
         it flashed through and became the world.

and this one from later in the same poem:

        Past the hungry days, gathered,
        a collective--
                           
                        shudder as we remember how it felt to eat our least favorite dogs.

On the whole, I found Ms. Hozinec’s use of language to be thought-provoking and often astonishing.  Witness for yourself in an excerpt from "The Melting Town": 

                        Besmeared with mud as we were--
      as we walked, we created the ground.  And oh,
      we are such a wooden bunch, 

      wearing gristle-grain proudly on our chests--
                        each step turned old beasts to ash.

Her images resound and linger, long after the words have been read and the book set down.

Ms. Hozinec's chapbook is available through Valium Vixen Press.

Blog #13: The Hum of Music Beneath the Traffic

11:06 a.m.

A daytime blog, at last...but something doesn't feel right, though it's beautiful outside.  What feels off, I wonder?  I stop and use my ears.  I hear the ubiquitous traffic noises, the sounds of humans doing human things outside, and the calls of birds, all mingled together. I realize that what I need today is silence.  Why is it so much easier to hear this silence at night?  There is a stillness at that hour that makes it so much easier to think. 

But then, there is something else happening in my mind today, a kind of distraction I can't escape.  It hums just below the surface of everything, until the distraction itself becomes my sole focus, flipping my world and its priorities around.  All other noise becomes bothersome, intrusive.  It is the strain of a song I have been working on for several months, and it is the only sound I want to hear right now.  Maybe it is not complete silence I need today, but simply the ability to hear this music, underneath it all.

I have an upcoming concert with several choirs in Pittsburgh, and with the Symphony, yet I've been unable to really inhabit the space of the music all semester. Something to do with being too busy, and putting my graduate school homework first, methinks--music is always the thing that's getting put on that proverbial back burner, since I don't need it to graduate.  I am doing it for the love, as they say.

But something has shifted in me this week.  This shift has something to do with a few two-and-a-half hour rehearsals at Heinz Hall, spent in the presence of an inspiring musical trainer, who gives us bits of wisdom such as "The professional gives--the amateur gets. Do it for them, not for you," and "Music is the consistent eternal march."  Somehow, I've started to internalize that last one this week; I've awoken these past several days mid-song, as though I'd nodded off in the middle of performing a concert the night before, with the words (in German, no less) still lodged in my throat.  It is a strange sensation to wake this way, as this kind of focus usually takes many hours to achieve instead of being built-in to one's morning--but it feels right to me, somehow.  I think of Bing Crosby, of Rosemary Clooney and Billie Holliday--all my vocal heroes from the old days, from my grandfather's day--and wonder how often they woke up singing.

Perhaps every day should begin this way, with the promise of a song on one's lips.

"In the arts," Bob says, "do not divide your own attention between many things.  You think of only one thing."  This lesson seems so applicable to everything else in my life right now.
Of course, we don't always have the luxury of handling only one problem at a time, but if I can manage to maintain my focus out there in the world, until the first of many problems is solved, I feel more accomplished, less divided amongst warring factions of my own psyche that want to do everything, and want to do it right now.  I am surely a product of my generation, of this high-speed moment in our culture.

I wish I could hire Bob as my personal musical guru, but I'm sure he costs a lot.

                                                                         *

"Auf-er-steh'n," we sing in German, "ja auf-er-steh'm, wirst du mein Staub, nach kur-zer..."  He has some of us hum the words.  Those in our choir born from May through August sing them, so that between the two groups we nail the pianissimo just right.  A tremulous sound echoed throughout the hall before; now we seem sure of ourselves, sure of this language most of us don't speak in our daily lives.  Some of us hardly even know what we are singing, but nevertheless, we are certain of our voices, now.  Bob has done his job. 

"Arise, yes thou shalt arise, my dust," the translation reads on the first page of the Mahler, "after brief rest. Eternal life... To bloom again thou shalt be sown.  The Lord of Harvest goes to gather sheaves of us who died..."  But we are not capturing it, just yet.  "I will arise," Bob tells us, by way of translating the translation, so that we can understand not just the meaning but the purpose of the words. "My death will give life to something."   A Resurrection Symphony, they call it.

On page 6, Mahler's own text appears: "O believe! My heart, Believe! Nothing will be lost to you!  Yours is, yes, whatever you longed for.  Yours-whatever you loved, fought for!"  Enthusiastic exclamation points aside, his words seem beautiful to me, accessible.  It is as though I could have written them myself, though he composed them between 1888-1894 when he was about my age.  "O believe: You were not born in vain! Have not lived, suffered in vain!" 

I think of the meaning we try consistently to locate, the purpose we must determine for ourselves before we die, lest we feel we have lived unfinished lives.  Mahler felt it, too: "What has arisen must pass away. What has passed away, Arise! Cease to tremble! Prepare! Prepare to live! O pain, you all-piercing one! O death! You conquering one! Now you are conquered!"

                                                                        *

Bob is speaking from above, perched at a music stand on the stage, while hundreds of us listen from the audience, in a reversal of the usual setup that places choir singers up high and the teacher down in front.  The reversal seems appropriate, as everything Bob says is the opposite of what it seems to be when he's not in the room. The girl sitting next to me frantically writes down every witticism and piece of advice he utters with her pencil, on the last page of her choir music, lest something get lost in the shuffle of pages and singing. 

"Our modern technology keeps us from communicating. It does not help us communicate," Bob tells us from the stage, and I know in an instant that he is right. It makes me wish I had turned off my phone during rehearsal, that all these girls sitting around me to my right had turned theirs off, too. Some of them are sending text messages during Bob's talk, including the one with the pencil, even though she ceratinly seems to be paying close attention to his words in other moments. 

I think again of what Bob said before: "You think of only one thing." I wonder how we will ever find a cure for ourselves, for this inability to do just one thing.


                                                                     *
"With wings that I won for myself in fervent strivings of love, I shall spar to the Light," we sing in German, "to which no eye has reached! I shall die that I may live again."

My world is filled with music, suddenly.  I don't want to go back to a world that isn't. I've been waiting all semester to wake up singing, to fill the bathroom with the sounds of German and Latin, Norwegian and French while I hum in the shower.  To know the music well enough to recall it from memory.  To let the voices fill my head, to give them accompaniment while I empty out the trash, take my dirty dishes downstairs, brush my teeth.  All I want to do is sing, and the singing follows me to the bus stop, onto the bus, on the sidewalk. It is with me in every moment.  The songs I carry with me become my life's soundtrack for a day, for a week, for a month.  When the concert is finished, when the last strains of 2,000 voices have hushed the audience and the applause recedes, the songs will fade from my mind.  I will try to hold onto them, but they will lose some of their magic until next fall, until the next concert.  I will live in a world where music is here only sometimes, like before.

But for now, the boundary between these two worlds is permeable, a "thin place" like St. John's Cathedral or the entire city of Edinburgh, a site of transformation and possibility.  The songs bleed through.  The world is music, one endless song uttered in all languages at once, meant to be sung in the shower, on the bus, or anytime at all.

Blog #12: Reflections on the Varied Species of Boxwood and the Creepiness of Stephen King's Brain

12:20 a.m.

What has this backyard project meant to me over the past 15 weeks? Though I've reflected on this idea elsewhere in earlier weeks, I continue to approach these recent outdoor sessions and the effect they have had on me with something approaching wonder. I wrote last week about the "unsayable," and I believe that still holds, for me, in relation to some aspects of nature.  But I have tried my best to put words to the often mysterious forces that accompany me out here in the yard, and will probably continue to do so for quite some time, until I move myself to a new place at the very least. 

Over the past several entries, I've looked at the spiritual bridge offered to those of us who watch closely birds and ladybugs in particular (though the experience could apply to any animal at all, really).  I've thought about the paradox of loneliness one feels when in nature with no one else around to point things out to; I've reflected on how important these twenty minutes have come to be for me each week, as they seem to balance out everything else, somehow. I am not sure how this works, or why this works--only that it does indeed work. 

There are plenty of experiences of "flow," as Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls it, in which time disappears and one is left floating in a sea of focused attention and forgetfulness of common everyday worries.  (The technical definition: "the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.")  For me, I experience flow when I am writing, and when I am in nature, once I have settled in--whether this finds me lying under a tree or in a green chair I have dragged outside from my dining room.  Thus, this blog has me on double duty in terms of flow.

As I sit outside with an online field guide, trying to isolate which of the 70 kinds of boxwoods are proliferating in our backyard on either side of the fountain--are they, for instance, of the wedding ring or north star variety? --I realize that I am still as hopeless as ever at identifying plants.  But I suppose that identification hasn't really been my focus, after all, these past 15 weeks. 

According to Rodale's All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening: The Indispensable Green Resource for Every Gardener (which was edited by Bradley, Ellis, and Phillips and has a ladybug on its cover), "Boxwoods are healthiest when protected from direct sun and wind."  I suppose this is why they survive so well in usually overcast Pittsburgh, in this protected corner of my backyard.  Is my temperament opposite the boxwood's, then, as I relish the natural elements of sunshine and wind?  If I were a plant, I'd be much more likely to be a cherry tree or a daffodil or something colorful that withers easily in poor weather.  Though I, too, wilt in the extreme heat of a July day, so perhaps the boxwood and I are not all that different after all.  (Honestly, who isn't miserable on a 100 degree day during a Pittsburgh August?)

My roommate insists that these boxwoods are either buxus sinica or buxus sempervirens, and I am inclined to believe her.  I continue to read that the boxwood is a favorite of plant enthusiasts when it comes to topiary, as "its slow growth and tolerance of severe pruning allow gardeners to trim it into fantastic shapes."  This knowledge is far from comforting in my case, and gives me the chills, since I lived in Estes Park in the summer of '09 while reading The Shining and regularly hanging out at the Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King's book.  I watched the film from inside the Stanley, in fact, and tried not to look at the super-creepy bathtub scene or the super-creepy hallway scene or the... well, any of the other creepy scenes.  It doesn't help that I stayed up late last night, watching the appropriately titled Creepshow, another of this prolific author's film adaptations.

So far, the boxwood and I do not share an easy kinship.

But I read on.  Wikipedia tells me that boxwood can be used to make white chess pieces and stringed instruments, and it is also ideal for woodblock printing. This seems a romantic notion to me, that the musical arts and the thinking man's (and woman's) pursuits could be so closely tied to the earth.  The usefulness and flexibility of this plant begin to seem admirable, in a zen-like way.  I imagine the plant giving way to the gardener's skilled and supple hands, bending to his or her will in a show of cooperation;  I imagine it putting up no fight when the Japanese carved it up to make woodblocks.  I imagine the wrinkled hands of the men in the park who play chess every Sunday, moving their knights and rooks back and forth, as the game demands.  I try not to imagine the boxwood becoming topiaries in the shapes of creepy animals, if I can help it; nonethless, I try to appreciate the many ways it makes itself useful, available, and open to the whims of the human spirit, the way we all should do. 




For more on the positive psychology of "flow," see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
For more on boxwoods, see the guide mentioned above, as well as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buxus

Blog #11- The Powers of the Unspeakable

12:00 a.m.

There is a tiny cut on my hand, a spot I must have missed with the moisturizer a while back, which becomes irritated whenever the weather gets colder.  It is a small but insistent kind of pain, and as I sit in my green chair contemplating my backyard in the dark once again, I can't think of anything else but this small annoyance. 

It has been a good day, a productive day, a day filled with writing-talk, dinner with friends, and even a film festival which is pretty much my favorite event all year.   And yet, this tiny cut is demanding all my attention right now, the way that pain always tries to do.  The weather, though recently beginning to warm up, has left its mark on me. 

The feeling of winter is still with me, too; I haven't managed to shake it just yet.  The days are warmer now, but the nights retain a chill that makes me shiver most nights at the bus stop.  I know, with all the sensibility of my logical brain, that we are on the cusp of spring, but my body refuses to accept it as real, until there is steady proof, until it can be counted upon in a more consistent way. Until then--until every day brings the same, reliable promise--I will remain just a little suspicious.
                                                            
                                                                     *
Lately, a friend and I have been getting together to write haiku poetry. We take our time about it, 5 verses between the two of us per session.  We are following, as closely as we can, an adaptive form that requires us to build on one another's poetry in a collaborative effort.  We use an old yellowed book of experimental poetry in mixed-language translation as our guide.  We rely upon this format: Stanza 1- mention or reference a particular month; Stanza 2- reference a season;  Stanza 3- introduce a new idea; Stanza 4- no mention of the season here, so the author has a bit of freedom. Then we wash, rinse, repeat. 

I find the comfort of structure an enjoyable way to write; having an unseen force to push against in my writing is helpful.  And yet, when consistently juggling seasons and months becomes tiresome, we try to find a way to "say it," establishing the "when" of our verse, without actually saying it.  This is an old, well-worn technique for most poets, but non-fiction writers are accustomed to truth-telling, and sometimes I find it difficult to hold back on the tell.  In my classes, professors ask us to write about grief without the word "grief" itself, to prune our writing back in a way that hardly resembles the old academic writing, with its need for clear thesis statements and literary evidence at every turn.  It resembles instead the way my roommate might attack the boxwoods in our back yard with pruning shears whenever they get out of hand.

All this has got me thinking about the power of the un-sayable, and how it so often seems to overshadow those things that we have no trouble speaking aloud.  Once the words are committed to the page, or to a listening ear, is it possible that this act alone can lessen their power over us?

                                                                         *
When my grandmother passed in 1998 from a brain tumor, I found the process of her dying an excruciating one to bring up in conversation. The first person I spoke with about it on the day of her death--a music teacher of mine--seemed sympathetic, but later insisted that I should stick around for rehearsal.  I could not do that, I told her.  Who could make music at a time like this?  She insisted that times like this were indeed the most appropriate for the creative arts.  But I couldn't bear to bring my grief to the stage, to my friends and peers.  I couldn't lay it out in the open like an unwrapped gift.  I couldn't feel her logic, and I felt betrayed instead.  I didn't want anyone telling me how to mourn. 

I stopped talking for a while.

Fast-forward 15 years.  In December, by the time we lost Nana's husband, I had changed.  Once again, I learned of the news on my way to choir practice, as though the universe had waited until just this moment by design to tell me of his passing.  This time, though I didn't tell anyone just yet what had happened, I came prepared to sing.

 And later on that night, when I needed to talk about it with someone this time around, there were a few friends in Pittsburgh in whom I could confide. We drove around town looking at Christmas lights and got coffee, talking around the subject at first, but when I was ready to rehash my indecisiveness over and over about whether I should return home in the middle of finals to attend the services, I was supported fully by a set of listening ears.

Of course, this was not easy terrain for me to navigate; but speaking about Poppop to others and soon after composing a brief essay about my visit to say good-bye helped me to keep on going even after I'd returned home.  The act of expression seemed to lead me out of the darkness, this time around.  This is not something I could have known in 1998, but I'm sure glad to know it now.

The ramifications of Nana's passing still seem mysterious and strange to me, after all this time, perhaps because of the difficult circumstances of her death, or perhaps because I was so much younger and more immature, then.   The power of the unspoken won out, then, and the effects of this continue on for me. Yet here I am, letting her husband go with all the grace I can muster.  Putting a voice to the unseen turned out to be the most liberating thing I could do, under the circumstances.

                                                                 *
Lately, I've had many opportunities to be heard in the ways that I desire, to say the thing I am not sure I want to say, but which needs to be said.  Professors are recognizing my writing with thoughtful comments more often than before; my blog is about to get more exposure due to my partnership with another site; and I can call up a few of my closest friends whenever necessary to talk about the big-ticket things in our lives, the stuff we all need advice about once in a while. 

And yet, I sit here in the darkness of my backyard, the dining room light glowing through our picture window and casting shadows in stripes on our lawn, and I find that the brightness makes me both uneasy and grateful, all at once.  It is nice to be able to see my words on the page, for once, as I sit out here.  But I feel exposed, too, as though any neighbor peering out a window or even my own roommate and her guests might catch me in the act.  The act of what, you might ask, and it would be a good question, a pertinent question.  The act of putting the un-sayable to paper, I suppose--of speaking things aloud which make me uneasy, of steeling myself for truth-telling in a way that even a degree in Nonfiction Writing has not prepared me for. 

It probably looks just like thinking, from the outside.  It leaves me feeling vulnerable, nevertheless.

On the page, we're not always meant to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  We are meant instead to lead our readers there of their own accord, to act as guides.  But in our lives, sometimes this is not enough, and that is the different between living and writing.  What brings me truth and clarity on the page may keep me muddled elsewhere in my life.  The un-sayable has the power to overshadow a person--I must try to bring it to life, to light, or risk letting it bury me alive.  Luckily, I have a few tools in my toolbox I didn't have before.

This is why, if we merely feel a little clearer about things at the end of a day than we were when we began it--even if we have done nothing else of note--it is enough.  We have already made a start.

Blog #10: Look Up For All Things Red

6:40 pm

As I write out here in my backyard, I immediately notice several new things.  Sunshine, a rarity in Pittsburgh, finally makes its way out to my humble abode, and I can sense the beginnings of spring.  Our fountain, which I can finally see because it is no longer covered in snow, is filled with soggy leaves and twigs. I hear several bird calls, which I can't identify.

I look up into the trees, hoping to see the crest of a red cardinal, but to no avail.  When I direct my eyes downward again, two birds that look like turtle doves fly up from the fountain, startling me, as I had not even been aware of their presence before.   Of course, as I am hopeless at identifying most birds, they were in all likelihood not turtle doves at all. I'm not even sure what a real turtle dove looks like, or whether they are native to this area.  (Though I do know most of the lyrics to "The Twelve Days of Christmas!")  As I can hardly even tell the difference between a hawk and an eagle, this should come as no surprise, but my terrible memory is certainly inconvenient for the purposes of writing a nature blog.

The birds I do know, however, I am quite partial to.  I can identify precisely four kinds: a blue jay, a hummingbird, a cardinal, and a red-winged blackbird.  (Apparently, I am only impressed by bright, immediately recognizable colors when it comes to our feathered friends.)  On occasion, I will note the obnoxious squawk of the blue jay before I spot him, but more often than not it is the cardinal that will stop me in my tracks without even a visual confirmation of his red crest and black eyeliner.  On my way to class, I will drop my rucksack on the ground, halting wherever I happen to be--whether perched at the bus stop, strolling along the sidewalk, or speed-walking down the lane toward class--and crane my neck upward, staring intently at treetops for as long as it takes to find the source of the music.

This stillness and focus is an impulse that is difficult for me to control.  Surely, if Big Brother made a law against stopping suddenly on a path to seek out one particular bird or another, I would have a bad time of it.  I am sure I would accrue many, many fines.

In my backyard at this moment, a blaring car alarm coexists with the bird calls.  The cacophany disappoints me, making it hard to focus.  The sound is as repetitive and loud as a blue jay's fighting words aimed at his brothers, and yet it is more offensive, somehow.  I curse the car under my breath, then recall that this mixture of noises is a reminder of the close proximity nature and humankind share.  Right on top of one another in my senses, they seem to be duking it out for my attention:  Bird call. Alarm.  Bird call. Alarm.  And so forth.  Of course, the soundtrack of humankind always seems a little more demanding than the other, and this irritates me to no end. 

           
                                                                  *

I used to be big on totems.  Proof of this: Once, when I spotted a snake on the sidewalk in Kansas--a rare occurrence for me--I ran immediately to the bookstore to see what Ted Andrews, animal symbologist and author of Animal Speak, had to say about it.  The man researches this stuff for a living, after all. 

One day, several years back, I saw at least a hundred ladybugs on the steps of the Budig computer lab at KU (my alma mater).  I was speaking with my mother on the phone shortly after I spotted them, and told her that they reminded me of her mother, who had passed away when I was six.  I did not tell her that this reminder was due to a personal recollection of having watched a ladybug die, slowly, on the edge of Gramma's bathtub once when I was a child, though my grandmother was not even in the room when this happened.  I did not tell her that this experience came back to me while witnessing a massive group of ladybugs, twenty years later, crawling around the steps of KU.  Yet, my mother shared my ladybug run-in with my sister, who started noticing ladybugs everywhere, too, and claiming that her ladybugs were also a sign, a hello, from our Gramma.  (Apparently, I was not the only one who was big on totems.)  How was this possible, I wondered, since I was the one who'd had the original experience with these insects?  Could this whole totem thing be contagious, somehow?Could one person "catch" another's faith in ancestor worship, in some kind of higher power?

Instead of feeling supported in my obsession with ladybug symbolism, I felt as though my spiritual vision had been co-opted.  I wanted my own connection with the spirits of the earth and sky--a symbol that I would always know belonged to me alone.  But nature doesn't work this way.  It is there for all to share, and any feeling that we are the only ones who can take pleasure in it at any given moment is a mere illusion.   
     
                                                                     *

The arrival of ladybugs heralds the start of spring, as they are some of the first insects to return to their warm-weather routines. In the autumn, they will seek shelter indoors, and when temperatures become warmer following a spurt of cool weather, they may converge on sun-warmed buildings, which may be why I encountered them on the steps that day. At the time, their presence seemed magical to me, an unexpected encounter with a strange kind of power and intensity that reminded me of things past. Perhaps it would have disappointed me, then, to know these tiny creatures were just doing what ladybugs do. Today, as I research their species and their habits, I am okay with this. I am disappointed only to learn that as a species they may aggravate my asthma.

In a garden, ladybugs are considered among the most useful of creatures, as they voraciously consume aphids, a common garden pest.  Among humans, therefore, they are well-liked. The most beautiful ladybugs, in my opinion, are those of the darkest shades of red--the darker color indicates that they are older (and perhaps wiser in the ways of the ladybug world) than their lighter-shelled counterparts.  

Lady bugs, interestingly, are also known as "ladybirds" in the U.K. and elsewhere (so perhaps I can now say that I know how to recognize five kinds of birds, and not four).  They share this nickname with Lady Bird Johnson, wife of Lyndon B. Johnson and First Lady in the U.S. in the 1960's, who famously worked to beautify numerous trails and parks, as well as cities and roads.  The name "ladybird" itself comes from the term "Our Lady's Bird," a reference to Jesus' mother Mary, who wore a red garment in early artistic renderings, and whose seven woes and joys are said to be represented by the most common European verison of this insect, the seven spot ladybird.  (Fun fact: In German, she is called a Marybeetle.)

I think about the worldwide influence of ladybugs, in learning that they have moonlighted as the logo for a London publishing company, a line of children's clothing, a ski resort in the Pyrenees, and the Swedish People's Party of Finland, not to mention standing in as a Dutch symbol for peace in the face of senseless violence and as a major character in British author Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach--one of the first books my sister read to me when I was a child.  In Turkey, ladybugs are known as good luck bugs, and Irish, Polish, and Romanian people refer to them as "God's...cow."  There is even a German version of a popular ladybird-themed nursery rhyme, titled "Marienwürmchen," set to music by the incomparable Robert Schumann (Opus 79, No. 14).  I listen to the beautiful singer's voice on You Tube; if we take her words and translate them back into English, we would hear:

Ladybird, sit on my hand -
I will do you no harm.
No harm shall come to you;
I only wish to see your colorful wings:
your colorful wings are my joy. 

I see my own thoughts echoed in these words and in the beliefs of many cultures regarding ladybugs.  There are so many variations of ladybug lore across the centuries; how could I ever have thought these delicate insects belonged to me alone?  And yet...

And yet, I needed a new totem.

                                                                       *

When winter drags on interminably, as it has of late, I seem to forget the the call of the redbird.  Though there are many birds I might like to see, his is the only song I miss.  I have read that his singing is a territorial thing, that he carves out his space with song; his voice is the most recognizable, and therefore the most beautiful to me.  I don't mind his motives in the slightest, as long as I can listen to him. 

They say that he is a bird who stays around all year, but he never seems to visit my home in the winter months.  When I do forget his voice, I try to hear it in every bird's song, try to compare their notes with my memory of his tones.  My heart lightens for a moment or two whenever I think it is him calling to me, only to be dashed when I realize it is an imposter I hear--until one spring day, I think to myself decisively, "There it is!" and I scold myself for ever forgetting his melody.

Two mornings ago, the sudden movement of a redbird startled me.  She was mostly brown, as the females are, offering only a slight flash of red as she flew from a low lying tree nearby into a much higher canopy.  I did a quick double-take, thinking I may have imagined that flash of red, in a bout of wishful thinking.  I had not yet seen a cardinal this year, though I had been looking.  Had I only imagined that bit of scarlet?  Lo and behold, a second bird sprung up a  moment later, the same telltale flash of red rising up from the low tree.  If I had any lingering doubt that the first was a cardinal--the very bird named for the scarlet garments of the other Cardinal, the religious kind--the partnership of these two seemed to confirm it.  One redbird was good luck.  But two!  Two redbirds meant, in my mind at least, that the tides of the natural world were changing with the arrival of a new season.  That something in me was changing, too. 

I have found their guidance to be relevant in my life.  A single flash of red as I walked home through the woods in Kansas after volunteering on KU's campus was enough to inspire me for the rest of the day, enough to make me thoughtful.  Ever since that time, the call of the redbird has never let me go. 

I still recall the books I used to consult several years back on the subject of animal totems, shortly after I adopted the redbird as my new totem.  How useful are they, as guides? According to the musings of animal symbologist Ted Andrews, redbirds remind us about "responsibility and the recognition of the importance of the task at hand."  Check.  They tell us, Andrews says, "that we should be listening to the inner voice... more closely for our own health and well-being," that when we spot a redbird, the occasion "reflects a need to assert the feminine aspects of creativity and intuition" in our lives.  Check.  Perhaps these will remain powerful lessons in my life, whether or not a comrade adopts my totem of choice, once again.  (Though I suppose I will keep a deer or a turtle or something in mind, just in case.)

Even if totemic thinking can sometimes offer us the illusion of specialness through giving us a distinctive connection with the animal world, it surely possesses some meditative value as well.  The redbird might say, if only we could translate his song as we do the lyrics of the German ladybird:
"Add color to your life, and remember that everything you do is of importance."


      
See these pages more more information on ladybugs, ladybug lyrics, Lady Bird Johnson, and the naming of cardinals, their symbology, and their habits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccinellidae
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070405155814AAMXEm0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Bird_Johnson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_(bird)
http://www.birdclan.org/cardinal.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cardinal