Stream of Consciousness

Keeping the Heart Open

I went to a writing weekend at Esalen in Big Sur, California back in October 2003. At the final session, all the attendees gathered together and we were all asked to reflect on these questions:

What do I do to keep my heart open? How do I stay in touch with the source of compassion inside myself in these difficult times?

Thirty years ago today, American hostages were taken in Iran and I moved with my toddler to Ithaca, New York. Looking back on old journals this morning a part of research for a writing project, I found what I wrote at that Big Sur weekend, back in that year when we started on the debacle in Iraq:

I sleep eight hours, eat slow meals, walk every day. I take a short nap, cook soups from scratch, sit out on my deck in the sun and pet my fifteen-year old Siamese cat. I pick zinnias from my garden, hang laundry out to dry on the line. I read every day but I also take time to sit and do nothing, to simply be. I let the world in but only so much. I listen to music. I breathe. I haul wood for my woodstove, put oiled sunflower seeds in the feeder for the nuthatches and the finches. I write in the morning. I listen to Garrison Keillor read me a poem at 10 a.m. I practice lovingkindness toward people like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. I watch Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! I practice gratitude each and every day for my bountiful good fortune. I take deep breaths.

Easy Instructions for Any and Every Writer

                                                                                      

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
                —Mary Oliver

A Day Like Any Other Summer Day

It's almost sultry here in Oregon as I type these words, sitting outside listening to the temple bells make their music to my ears. I'm alone this week with J. down in Corvallis. And I'm thinking more about Cynthia, and how much I've missed her wise e-mail counsel and conversation and daily updates. It's a week since she's been gone. 

 Cynthia and I met in a community chorus in Corvallis. The serendipity of two altos ending up standing next to one another to sing everything from Agnus Dei to songs of Bob Marley and the musical, Hair, became an eleven-year friendship of ladies lunches and art house movies and book swapping and even passing along my New Yorker subscription on a regular basis. Whenever we met, we had interesting, surprising conversations that left me with more food for thought. A smart and wise writer, she regularly wrote letters to the editor about what mattered to her—the environment, alternative health care options, peace and justice. She tended our cats and watered our flowers when we travelled out of town. She didn’t have much money—including no car and a subsidized apartment in low-income housing—but she lived one of the richest lives I have ever seen, splendid in its emotional generosity, its good humor, its peaceful and exuberant grace. She was making art—cards and letters to send her wide circle of friends—until the week before the tumors that had spread to her brain laid her so low she could no longer get out of  bed.

In this week since Cynthia’s leave-taking of this earth, I have fumbled around a lot. Words I’ve used include rattled. Shaken. Out-of-sorts. In spite of knowing for months that her end was near, and her death very much conscious and by conscious choice. I suppose some of this is that, in spite of my own middling middle age, I am not yet ready to face mortality, the finality that is both the blessing and blessed curse of our humanity, in the way my dying friend joyfully was.

Yesterday afternoon at the Sunday Parkways event in Alberta Park, there was a gospel choir. All women, all filled with song and praise and the holy. From their first notes, I could do nothing but weep. The group's leader, Prophetess Gloria, hugged me afterwards. You could feel the power of her faith coursing through her after that hour of glorious hosannas. I felt grateful for the music, its soulfulness, but also the reminder that too often I forget what is under my nose, ripe for my picking, ever eager for embrace. And that something as life-changing and profound as a true friendship can begin simply because two people end up standing next to one another to sing alto in a community chorus, just for fun.

Sunset

                                                    

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.  Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

—Henry David Thoreau

Last night, I dreamed of being on the ferry from Mukilteo to Whidbey Island in Washington. It was crowded with people, what I imagine it might feel like to travel in steerage, and the weight of all the passengers made the ferry ride so low that it almost seemed as if we would take on water and perhaps start to sink. But we made it to shore and disembarked and the crowds dispersed and there were plants and trees and sand and a quiet road to walk to wherever it is we were trying to go.

A dear friend died last evening. This has been coming for a while as she chose not to be treated any longer for the cancer which had spread to her brain. She embraced—there is no other word for it—the experience of leaving this world with joy and curiosity. Thanks to a loving and hard-working circle of family and friends, she was able to stay at home, and die at home in peace, in a bed that we gave her (along with my infamous pink Ithaca couch!) a number of years back when she first moved into her apartment. Even though I wasn't able to be there in person, I'd like to think I was there, holding her metaphoric hand, having a final conversation or ladies lunch, and, of course, wishing her godspeed and well.

She was far from afraid as she crossed over on the ferry to whatever is next. Welcoming the whole journey, really. Not concerned about the waves, the wind, the tides, the choppy water, what she might find on the other shore. I have so much to learn from her example. I suppose we all do.

A Pulitzer Prize Well-Earned

In this era when prizes can seem both overblown in terms of their importance and/or handed out to friends of friends of friends if you run with the right, connected crowd, these photographs by New York Times photographer Damon Winter seem like bona fide winners to me. You will recognize some from the Obama campaign last year. They are so worth viewing again. 

Blogging These Days...

...at www.writersdojo.org. Follow this link for Nancy Flynn's explorations of life, liberty, and the pursuit of creative writing happiness.

The Day After the Day After

Yesterday was like being in a waking dream. Not just for me, for everyone I talked to on e-mail or the phone, everyone I celebrated and cried with. The combination of something long-dreamed for, long-hoped for, finally, peacefully and graciously happening. And the effect that has on one's body, so much emotion, uplifting emotion, knowing you have been part of history, knowing you are witnessing history, knowing, as one friend did, that this may be the best day of our entire lives. By dusk last night, my mind and body were in a state of utter exhaustion as I sat trying to read on the living room couch. I closed my eyes and felt like I was buzzing at a cellular level. Is this what the day after exuberance and elation feels like? Have we been down so long, expecting so little, even less, cynical and endlessly disappointed, that at the most basic level of our basic selves, we'd forgotten what it would feel like to have the good, the open-hearted, the forgiving, and the embracing side win?

 In times of difficulty take refuge in compassion and truth.

- The Buddha

That's the Peace quote that was waiting for me this morning when I checked e-mail. I am going to re-write it for myself today and for the days to come and try to breathe it in, and out, over and over again.

In times of hope and joy, take refuge in compassion and truth. 

 

   

Brilliance and Truth in Four Short Lines

I read this poem by Daniel Tobin in a recent issue of Poetry. Talk about economy of words. Wow. Speaks volumes, I think. The brilliance of poetry-as-truth, yet again. 

The Cause

Unreel the human weave to molten stone

And still you’ll find the upraised arm of Cain.

The hand that rigged the flesh in Abu Ghraib

Caressed another’s for the feel of home.

 

Summer Garden Epiphany

               

A butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.

 - Rabindranath Tagore

I have seen two butterflies in our back yard woodlands garden. And the sparrows are coming to enjoy the hanging suet, to dive and perch on pruned tree branches, to sip and splash in the birdbaths. It's nice to have created a little habitat for them back there, in the city as the planes fly overhead these past few days, re-routed because of work on their usual runway. 

Wise Words from Wendell Berry

I found what's below in an interview with Wendell Berry in the July 2008 issue of The Sun. It is something I certainly need to take to heart, being one privileged the writer's life over other paths and journeys for far too long, I think: Berry says: "You need to realize...you can lead a perfectly good and satisfactory life even if you're not a writer. When I figured out I could be perfectly happy and not be a writer, I became a better writer...I don't think you ought to let your happiness depend on writing...The unhappiest people in the world may be the ones who think their happiness depends on artistic success." 

Amen.