Sage Said So

Depth of Field

In preparation for the rapid approach of our son, Jon and I purchased a new camera with all the bells and whistles. Because technology is my friend only after a proper introduction has been made by someone else who knows what they're doing, Jon has become master of the camera; as he learns, he teaches me.

Today I've been admiring Jon's experiments with depth of field (these photos are his) and considering how it mirrors the changes in my life.

The more closely we look at a certain thing, the more blurry everything beyond the subject becomes. This seems to be what pregnancy is demanding of me: a singular focus, a deliberate tunnel vision, a simplicity. After keeping so many balls in the air for so long, I am suddenly utterly incapable of the juggle.

My depth of field has narrowed to the life inside of me, this enormous and weary body that carries it and the needs of my family. Everything beyond that nucleus has gone soft and blurry. As my priorities shift like sand in the great wind of this transition to motherhood, I am told that even my beloved animals will lose focus a bit as our son takes center stage. That is difficult to imagine. I will hold these photos as stones along the path--reminders that we choose in every moment how to adjust the lens.

"I just knew"

This is what my friends would say when pressed for explanations about how they chose their husbands and partners. I always found this to be an entirely unsatisfying answer.

"But HOW did you know? What made you so certain?" My desire to comfortably navigate the unknown often expresses itself in trying to understand phenomena beyond articulation.

"I just KNEW." Clearly, this was some kind of insider club code that I was not likely to penetrate. There were no strategies I could mimic, no best practices I could adopt. Just some ambiguous intuiting that seemed available to every other person on the planet but me.

And thus I spent many, many years in many not-so-happy relationships, not-knowing--and wondering when that lightning bolt would strike.

Then last year a mutual friend introduced Jon and me by email. With Jon's first paragraph, I knew. A few weeks later on our first date, I knew. And when he proposed two months later, I knew. Absolute as a mountain was this knowing.

Today is the anniversary of that lightning bolt of mutual intention striking. I have a year's worth of experience confirming what my being somehow measured on some indescribable cosmic scale almost at first glance: that this is my person to love. And I am his.

There is so much about knowing that will gratefully never be burdened by the limited reach of the mind.

Your New, Huge Size

That's what the subject line of the email said.

Having spent the past few days fielding well-meaning, unsolicited comments from strangers about my now-indisputable baby bump, I have this unnerving feeling of eternal exposure. As a writer, I am accustomed to a kind of security that comes from being the disembodied person behind the words. I like my privacy. And after several excruciatingly slow first-trimester months, suddenly my life is transforming in a hugely visible, public way at the momentum of an oncoming train. Never have I felt a greater sense of belonging to--or being claimed by--the human culture. The new life taking root in me seems to inspire a kind of magnetic optimism that is beaming in from the faces around me, everywhere I go. 

So when I saw "Your New, Huge Size" in my in-box, my first thought was that yet another stranger had somehow penetrated my personal space membrane to say something about my belly or how I should eat or feel or think or look or give birth. And my second thought amusingly brought me back to the reality of spamland; this was just another email about penis enhancement. And yet--

My new, huge size...I have been reinvented, larger than life. Or at least larger than my old life that is in the process of being shed from the inside out. This husk of past fattening around the seed of future. This little boy I know more intimately than anything or anyone and yet do not know. This answer to the question I never knew how to ask swallowed whole and blossoming.

Across the finish line

Well, folks, I did it. The first draft of Writing the Life Poetic is now in the capable hands of my fabulous editor, Jane Friedman. With nine months of writing nights and weekends under the belt, I have been floating around my office weightless and aimless, like a balloon cut free. Good thing I have five months of baby above the belt to give me a bit 'o ballast.

It's time to turn my activity level down a few notches, and I've been studying the masters of stillness: my animals. This one's my favorite so far. (Photo by Jon.) I call this the "seducing sleep" asana.

If you have any tips for saying "no" to inspiring and utterly important literary projects in favor of sleep and sanity, I'm all ears!

Introducing Mr. Peanut

Today I am celebrating the half-way mark of the greatest creative act I have ever passively accomplished: pregnancy. At exactly five months, I am no longer pushing that lifelong boulder of me, myself and I uphill. Instead, I find myself hobbling from the first trimester precipice downhill toward a completely awe-agape new concept of we that is literally reinventing my body, my family, my future.

We learned last week in our ultrasound that Aliya, like Dahlia, has a penis. Instead of the daughters we dreamed up in high school, Jayne and I will have sons born within months of each other. Her third, my first, but gosh darn it, we pulled it off: a semi-synchronicity of motherhood! More than twenty years beyond our first shared crushes and infatuations, an entirely new boy narrative is emerging.

In five months, I will be mother to a son, our little in-utero Mr. Peanut. My son. Never have two words conjured so much possibility, so great an anticipation, so vast an unknown. 

Thank you, Northwest Author Series

On Sunday, I spoke at the Northwest Author Series about the power of poetry to transform our lives, community and world. Christina Katz, hostess with the mostess, suggested the topic; I'm so glad she did! In preparation, I spent a few weeks contemplating, researching, writing and corresponding with my local poet friends about the alchemy of poetry in our lives.

David Hare says "The act of writing is the act of discovering what we believe." This has always been my experience, and writing my lecture was no exception. I think my happiest discovery-through-writing was this one: Poetry is the electrical current of desire––to understand, to give name to, and to share––that anchors us to our humanity and to each other.

This current of desire magnetized 22 beautiful people to the Wilsonville Library on a Sunday afternoon where we told stories, explored questions and followed the golden thread of inspiration that stitched through our time together. I came home overcome with gratitude that there are others where I live who care passionately about poetry and are willing to splash about in the great depths of its mysteries with me.

Thank you to Christina for yet another gracious invitation to go deeper into my knowing and come back with an offering to share with my community. Each time I rise to a Christina challenge, I stretch beyond my previous idea of what might be possible and get a little braver, stand a little taller, then smile all the way home.

Thank you, Silverton Poetry Festival

On Friday, Jon and I drove through a subdued landscape of open fields and sprawling farms bathed in late afternoon light. In our often overwhelmingly consuming lives of medical school and writing-for-a-living, it was a rare and delicious treat to be traveling together in daylight on a weekday toward an evening of community and poetry.

We arrived at the open, gracious home of Kathleen and her laughing-eyed husband where we squinted into the blessed sun on the back deck and got to know our Silverton Poetry Festival host Steve, President of the Association Michael and his wife Carol. Within a few minutes, the two other featured readers, Penelope Scambly Schott and Karen Holmberg arrived and joined us.

I must sound like a broken record, but I am routinely astounded by how much I love my Oregon writing community. Prior to life in Portland, it was a rare occurrence to admire a poet's work and also enjoy their company. In Silverton, I was reminded of how very wealthy I am with the double-blessing of people + poetry that I want to be up close and personal with. Every single person on that porch and around that dinner table was a person I wanted to know better and listen to at length.

Silverton felt like a glove I'd never realized I'd lost. It fit just right. I felt held and safe and warm. I had an impulse to wander barefoot down its streets in my nightgown, drinking a lemonade. The reading was held in a beautiful, intimate church with light and spring air pouring in from all directions. Beside the podium, a painting of a red chair piled with books and pens painted especially to commemorate this year's festival.

The first time I ever read my poetry publicly, I was pretty sure I wouldn't make it out alive. My breathing was so constricted and my hands so shaky that I wasn't even able to raise a bottle of water to my lips and take it in. I remember nothing about that reading other than that I was clearly still living at the end, for which I was grateful.

In contrast, fifteen or so years later, stepping up to the podium in Silverton was the first time I ever had the feeling of actually belonging up there in front of an audience. I had poems that I am proud of to share, and I was so thrilled and grateful to share them. I trusted myself to do a good job, and I trusted my audience to take the ride with me. My voice felt strong and sure. I was feeling the poems deeply as they came through me in spoken words.

A few poems before finishing, as I was reading I Make You a River, a man's cell phone rang. I smiled and paused as he fumbled for his phone, giving him time to silence it. I know the humiliation of forgetting to turn my phone off very well. No biggie. But when the man took the call and started talking I really didn't know where that left me. Should I try to talk over him? I giggled, then giggled some more, and kept on reading as the man shuffled out on his single crutch, still talking. In all my years of attending poetry readings, I've never seen such a thing! I have no idea what the protocol for such an interruption might be, but I sure did enjoy improvising.

Listening to Karen and Penelope was like breathing in a feast of wine and fruit and cheese. I hung on every word as worlds of image and sound and profound human truths rose up before me and carried me out into my own knowing. I don't know if I've ever been so present or connected as a listener at a reading.

Afterwards, Ella-Marie introduced herself and nearly knocked me over with the gale force of her enthusiasm. "That line about the poem being the hinge," she said. "That's it! That's how poetry is! That's exactly how it is!" This is the gift of poetry: Ella-Marie taught me something about my own poem and poetry at large by sharing what resonated for her. Thank you, Ella-Marie and everyone who has ever taken the time to receive my words and feed them back to me. Your listening creates a mystical expansion beyond where I can travel alone.

Thank you to Brittany, who introduced me to the Silverton Poetry Association (and who has captivated audiences there for the past two years) and thank you Michael, Steve and everyone who worked so hard to create such a fine poetry festival and a very special evening. And thank you to Jon for traveling far with great enthusiasm to share this evening with me. And for interrupting my many-decade cycle of participating in the events that matter most alone. Bathed in grace I am. With gratitude, always. 

Cockle this!

I am just coming down from a long weekend at the coast at the glorious Oregon Writers Colony house with eight extravagantly extroverted, entertaining and talented poets. I have known for many years that the coast is my cosmic writing place where the universe and I converge in a rage of grace and foam. I had no idea how much Bob, Donna, Livia, Liz, Shanna, Shawn, Susan and Tomas would contribute to my appreciation of poetry: its process, its possibilities, and the sheer joy of tasting it alongside the ocean with others who share my delight in the salty, bitter tannens of truth.

Stripped of our online dependencies, we resorted to dictionaries to sort out the discrepancies of cock and cockle: a small, conical pile as in hay; an instrument of torture; a heart-shaped mollusk. Stripped of our real-life expectations, we were simply who we were together: the steam coiling above the boiling pot. The wisdom that the sky breathes up and rains down again.

Six people is the max that the OWC prefers to attend an event. We were nine: the max and then some. And this seemed to be the theme of the weekend: the max and then some. We wrote more poetry than was reasonable, drank ourselves silly (as designated driver without a drive, my sobriety was like the fact against which metaphor builds its tent) and found in each other a trust and hilarity that rarely gets unearthed in such a short time among strangers and semi-strangers (thank you, fuck knot and Big Blue Jesus!)

Every hope I had for this weekend was carried out beyond the buoys of my imagination by the intelligence, vulnerability and poetic prowess of this new family of poets. I had prepared a rigorous schedule of an exercise every other hour, followed by reading/sharing our work, breaking only for meals and Saturday night revelry. Unbelievably, everyone participated in every exercise, and we powered through sound, the art of the ordinary, truth and lies, show and tell, the sensory unhinged from the literal and so much more. We explored how we write, why we write, who we have the right to be when we write, what our public expects of us, and how we might prepare ourselves for that leap through what looks like a wall but is really only butcher paper into the poems we are not sure we're allowed to write and the people we're not certain we're allowed to be.

I ate too much, stayed up too late, and nearly split my seams with laughter. Ah, the excesses of the ecstatic.

Thank you, Oregon Writers Colony, for this rare opportunity and privilege to spend a few days among an inspired community, standing at the edge of our known world in the great, blue wonder of language.

(Note to the curious: see Shanna's blog to learn more about the fuck knot + cockleshells!)

The little poem that could

In August, I told the story of a poem that crossed the world, creating a drawstring of hope uniting a girl in China, a family in Ohio and me. Last night, I learned that Bai Hua, the child I once sponsored, is finally coming home! Her new family in Ohio has received final approval to adopt Bai Hua.

Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles: this child I have known only through snapshots, a few fragmented paragraphs and the poems I've made to bridge the distance, will be cherished and loved by a family of her very own. This enormous gift of grace is a candle I hold out against the darkness.

Untethered

I'd been trying to make it to a Saturday morning yoga class for maybe eight weeks or so, but couldn't time it right with the morning dog walk. This morning, Jon took matters into his own hands. In an unprecedented series of events, he dropped me off at yoga class at 10 a.m. and kept right on driving with the dogs to Forest Park. As I was bringing breath into the strict cage of my body, gently teasing the locks of fear and clench open with each reach and stretch, Jon and Hamachi and Henry were galloping six muddy miles of trail together in the deep womb of urban wilderness.

I had dressed for the walk home, and was warm and relaxed as I headed out from class into the mild gloom of March afternoon. Digging around in my purse to no avail, it struck me that we had used my keys in the car, and that the car--and keys--were with Jon; I'd be locked out until he got home. In my entire life, I don't think I've ever been locked out of my home. Jon didn't have his phone with him, and I had no idea when he would be home.

With destination erased from my trajectory, I felt like a balloon cut free, floating purposeless and weightless down Clinton Street.  I remembered seeing a cafe on my way to class and walked east another three blocks to Broder, a Scandinavian cafe. The cafe was long and narrow, about the size of a train car, and had been polished with care to a modern minimalist sheen. The patrons had clearly emerged from a Portland other than the one I inhabit: one of high-style, where darkly framed, dramatic eyegear and strangely proportioned clothes in shades of black and brown slung over heroin-chic bony bodies. The waiters and chefs were waify, underweight young men smattered with tattoos and too-tight black pants with a slick of aloofness greasing down the errant eagerness beneath their cool facades. In my sloppy stretch pants, bunched-down wool socks, fleece jacket and unwashed hair flopping around in a loose clip, I was blissfully out of place. In an urban environment, not looking the part is as close to invisible as you get, and I love being invisible.

I took a seat at the bar, retrieved a small pile of index cards and a pen from my purse, and started writing. Card after card, the ideas kept coming through me, through the pen. A lifelong practice gone dormant for a few years, my body needed only assume the position to turn on its freewriting tap. As I wrote, a glorious glass mug of fragrant decaf coffee arrived with a smart glass jar of sugar cubes and a silver carafe of half and half. Then came the large, frothy orange juice. And then three aebleskiver, quarter-size Danish pancakes dusted in powdered sugar and circled in dollops of lingon berry jam, maple syrup and lemon curd. Compliments of the chef. I had fallen through the rabbit hold to a Swedish heaven.   

As I wrote, my baked scramble with wild mushrooms and caramelized onions materialized on the counter steaming in its square, cast-iron baking dish, aligned with a square white plate with a perfectly spiced potato pancake accompanied by a fan of triangular slices of walnut  bread. I tasted, marveled and wrote some more. And as I did, I was transported to the life and times of Sage of yesteryear.  This Sage had free time. She paid $300 in rent, made $8 an hour and lived for the indulgence of her weekend cafe breakfasts. With no car but plenty of notebooks and one divine poetry book at a time, she'd ride the streetcar and listen and look and FEEL and write and weep. This old Sage was spontaneous. Not yet the precariously over-committed and over-scheduled adult she would grow up to be, this young woman had room for surprises.

For a brief hour of homelessness and exquisite food, I returned to this lost wilderness of my 20's: the Sage of open spaces. I carried her home like a pressed flower-- fragile and old and new. More than I have yearned for anything else in my life, I want her back again. I will court her with words and sunshine, beaches, potatoes and public transportation. I will write her love letters because that's all she really ever wanted: something big and impossible and gloriously alive to get lost in.