My friend Elizabeth pointed out that it is National Corduroy Day. 11-11-11 looks most like it, is all.
In honor of this wonderful holiday, I am re-posting a link to my short-short called THE TROUSERS, which is my homage to the nubby fabrik we all secretly love.
Get that special pair out, pull ’em on and read:
http://mnartists.org/article.do?rid=252807
This time I had a job cleaning tables for Hollywood. At the tables sat Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon, Richard Gere, and some other famous person I don’t think about in the waking world (I don’t think about any of them, actually, so it frightens me they represent some icon in my subliminal mindscape).
They were sitting around brainstorming and editing a screenplay that focused on people without money. I wiped tables. I moved to wipe Richard Gere’s table because his was especially sticky and dusty, even though he had his three ring binder on top of it.
He was upset that I was wiping it as he was talking, so he took both hands and shoved me away. I exploded emotionally, telling him “You have no idea what it’s like for 99% of the people in the world. You are all clueless!”
Anyone who knows me, knows that this type of angry reaction happens rarely in me (I can count my “real world” emotional angry outbursts on one hand, and I still have some fingers left to lift–and it’s not the middle one, yet). I woke up, touched my eyes and I had real tears. Wow, I thought, Richard Gere really pissed me off. Then I remembered he’s supposed to be Buddhist, so maybe this was why he upset me even more?
Clearly, I have a complex about the top 1% in this world…which is healthy….I think….Anyway….Om…..
Apparently, it takes quite a few months for me to sit down a post something here. Our turtle speed Internet at home is the most likely target for this delay and the fact that with a new job, etc…blah blah blah, so many reasons. Well, get on with it then, no more excuses.
I have been having extremely populated dreams lately, like high broadway productions as far as cast and set designs go:
1) I was trapped at a summer camp for women in their forties this Monday evening-and the highlight was when a woman rushed to the bathroom with her toothbrush wrapped in plastic wrap to check if her pet slugs on it had survived their trip in her suitcase.
2) And just last night I dreamed a news-like quality documentary about pubescent street youth. It featured a rather unkempt and questionable blond thirty-something guy handing out religious tracts to the young boys with offers of ‘safety’. Then it featured a even more suspect forty-something belly bulging blond man strolling through a Salvation Army in nothing but a zebra-striped bikini heading toward the used book section (think of those horrible patterns on the baggy workout-muscle man pants of the eighties for his underwear garb–what are those awful pants called, again?–clearly, I wiped that word from my vocabulary due to severe fashion duress).
I am not sure what was unfolding in my subconscious on this particular trajectory, since my husband woke me up right when a young boy, say age 9-10, in said thrift store, wandered across my REM brain, replete in purple g-string and matching puffy purple winter vest. He had juststuffed a wine glass up the back of his purple vest when I woke up, feeling worried that the glass would surely break and harm the young shoplifter…
Okay, why share these embarrassing bits of dream? Well, for one, they helped me wake up laughing for two days in a row–which is good. They showed that my brain is still capable of some crazy-ass shit, which for a writer, is also good news.
But what would a Freudian analyst make of all of this? Would such analysis suggest an unwell mind? Does it display a pathological fear of blond lurking pedophiles, tinged with a healthy (unhealthy) concern for young people being lured into the clutches of creepy people? Hmmmm….let’s just remain calm and positive about this here, Freud.
I’d rather conjecture that I am not alone in having an active dream imagination, and maybe I am a little less scared of being honest about that fact. I think all of these people populating my dreams are simply out to remind me to dream big, to dream wild, and to risk appearing crazy, for the sake of a good laugh in the morning….
Now, just don’t ask me about last week’s dream involving a man with a goat’s face, okay?….hmmmm….
He used the red “walker” for a while until he got used to the idea–he’s at the Depot, an indoor rink that was once a train station and has a zamboni shaped like a steam engine. What’s not to love, then, T-chan must wonder.
Now he begging me to buy him skates and he wants to take skating lessons….
RECIPE TO AVOID HATE
The recipe to avoid hate isn’t complex. A few basic
ingredients: clean water, food, shelter, sweaters,
and daily hugs. Add generous spoonfuls of humor,
compassion for broken spirits, respect for the co-existence
of insects. Cultivate the seedlings of self-love with care.
Upon dark occasion, sprinkle with red pepper
and pour pure maple syrup thickly when sour.
Cut open ginger root or splash lemon juice
wherever melancholy hits. Shut your eyes and hum
a little made-up tune if Teacher belittles you in front
of class and later in life when Boss dismisses you
with the flick of her wrist, go to the Internet and look
up the nesting habits of hermit crabs. The most
important thing to experience after that pink-faced
woman in her white SUV has attempted to gun you
and your son down as you crossed the street
for the park—besides midsummer rainfall
and its lush green light—is lifting your face
to the sky with your son held tightly
in your arms. Look beyond rainclouds
to the red orange flare of your soul.
Be thankful you live to love.
My son commandeered the navigation through the woof and weave of the New York subway system. The few times I tried to “help out,” we ended up on the wrong platform or even once on an express train toward Rockaway.
Okay, I was quite useful once–when the trip required a bus detour due to a temporary closure that I knew about from checking the Internet, but from here on as we find ourselves in future cities on as yet unplanned journeys, I plan to defer to the young one, who knows best.
The NYC vibe exudes chaotic, noisy, often smelly, energy and I think it’s true to say we all feel more alive there than here. The nearness to people of all different fashions, skin colors, languages, and the rich tapestry of faces inside one subway car feels more humane, and we belong. We breathe easier.
In Minneapolis I feel more separated, more different, outside the box, and often the observer. I live inside my mind and its constructed comfortable pattern, where I define what I find safe, predictable, boring, irritating, or desirable. Not much surprises me here–which is not to say that’s bad per se–but life here is just not as inspiring or as lively as when I lived in Tokyo, Kyoto, Asahikawa or as how engaged I felt when I traveled through other parts of the world–and I am not as connected with fellow human beings here because we all have a lot more space and we Midwesterners steer toward isolation, perhaps because of the winter prairie and the invention of furnaces, now we are mentally, emotionally, and physically set apart like fence posts dotting a landscape during a winter storm.
When I expressed to my mother how good it felt to be able to hear probably fifteen languages in one day while we were bustling about NYC, she commented that even in her small Midwestern town she easily can encounter many different languages in a day.
And it’s true, I can say the same about Minneapolis–but I think it is the physical proximity to people that changes the energy from passive observer into inspired participator for me. To see people of all shapes and sizes standing at a bus stop while I zoom past in my automobile is an incredibly different experience, it’s a distancing aesthetic, quite apart from the act of swaying hip to hip with strangers on an overcrowded, screeching, careening rickety subway car.
To smile at people who find my son’s ecstatic vigor inside subway cars entertaining, or to experience people offering him a seat on the crowded train, or to hook his shoes nest to me so they don’t dirty the cashmere coat or the torn raincoat of a fellow passenger and to then see them acknowledge and appreciate my effort–to see their smiles inside their eyes.
These small, brief human interactions build connections with others. I don’t feel as alone, and I don’t feel as much an outsider or, rather, I feel a part of a collection of outsiders, a large, misfit river of eccentrics all flowing in the same direction, and collectively we travel, destination unknown.
One benefit of having time off is that I can feel wholly myself again. I can wake up at midnight and write until 4am and not feel terrible the next day because–ah, it’s so lovely–I can take a nap in the middle of the day! I can dream freely and re-discover my passions and possibilities.
Somehow such a firm understanding of who I am gets lost when I am working that 8-5 shift without respite. Now I realize (again) that I need to reinvent my world–to return to my roots, to my calling, to my loves: this realization is always what I discover after having a few days off!
Another benefit of vacation, though a less obvious one because it is also painstakingly slow-going and also very exhausting, is to have the time to clean our home really well, which–for me– means to rearrange all the furniture, to sort and donate and throw out tons of objects and papers room-by-room, and then to bask in the very liberating results: a simple life.
While sorting through my desk papers, I came across a postcard from an art opening at the U (which T-chan and I had gone to 3 years ago), where an artist called Mica took photos of people holding up cards on which they checked off their ethnicity/race.
Curious to see if the picture of us that she had taken was online, I looked her website up tonight–and there we were!
[See http://www.pleasemarkonlyone.com/Gallery.html for more folks.]
Human beings, I wrote on our form, and remarkably, this answer still holds true today, three years later, despite a lot of ups-and-downs in our life here in Minneapolis, or maybe because of a lot of ups-and-downs here. My son and I remain both card-carrying members of the homo sapiens clan here on planet earth.
Which reminds me of my dear (though now lost) friend, Ines, who lived in a Buddhist nunnery (that’s another story, folks!) with me many moons ago. She and I had very similar (read: emotionally gifted) dispositions. She told me, in her Belgian-French accent, “Ree-bay-kah, we may not be able to control our emotions so easily, staying calm and cool like Katja [another friend in the temple]. We feel so much, when we are crying, when we laughing. Given a choice? To be like Katja? Pffffffff!”, she concluded dismissively, shrugging her shoulders, “We feel everything more deeply, the good and the bad! We are more alive!”
True, Ines and I are not those people you know with steel-nerves, with dry eyes, with calm voices. Sometimes I can be in that neutral state for a while–say at staff meetings–but it’s not the best option for me for long-term sanity or well-being. I’d rather express myself and feel than stuff my feelings in wool socks and seal off the tops with wire. Now that’s a weird image–but let’s leave it be!
People like Ines and me, we are not Buddhists like the typical stereotypical Buddhist you hear about in magazines: we cannot be detached or neutral about life. We are instead the fringe Buddhists, like Santoka, or Ryokan, or Issa! We cry, we laugh, we get hurt, we dream, we love life very, very much.
And I’m not wishing to be anything else, either, even when it’s rather uncomfortable or embarrassing when I’m boo-hooing around people who are very serious, calm, or controlled. I do know that my passion for life is a good thing, the best thing for me, even if other people don’t always think so–those who don’t agree with me are those who like wiring their own wool socks shut all the time.
I know by staying true to who I am that I can inspire people–whether students or strangers–and having passion and an insatiable curiosity for this chaotic mud puddle called ‘life’ helps me become a better writer, a better mother, and a better human being.
So, in the end, my dear friend Ines is right: being fully alive, taking the blows, and crying, and getting back on my feet, not living in the middle (waking dead) zone all the time, is so much more interesting. Living without a muzzle or a societal straightjacket–and really, freely being in the moment and making god-awful mistakes is another–just as valid–way to be a Buddhist. And maybe our way is the more enjoyable adventure.
I don’t care for manicured lawns, for their need for large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides that kill off both the good and the bad insects. The chemical, unnatural perfection of such lawns frightens me and I want to wash my feet and not breathe deeply after walking past it. I feel the same way about overdosing on perfume and thick layers of makeup.
I prefer running around in the wild grass, letting a few dandelions bloom, even if it means I also get a few burrs on my clothes and shoelaces. At least for me, life feels damn good on my side of the fence! At least when I’m on vacation and I have no need to be anyone, to pretend to be anyone, but me. Messy, occasionally drive-to-despair and frequently confused, but overall ulcer-free me.
My son has discovered the beauty of Michael Jackson’s voice. Granted, it’s been over a week of T-chan listening continuously to an extended DJ mix of MJ’s music that my husband had downloaded whenever we were driving about in the car.
Yet, finally, a few nights ago, when the car had stopped, but the music played on, he crawled up to the front seat frantically with a huge grin and he placed his ear near the front speakers. He first looked at me and then at Dad, full of joy, and then he began to sing along:
Soon enough, we were all singing. What is it about Michael’s voice that connects with people, that helps us transcend the everyday? Is it the clarity, the passion, the purity, the deeper resonance–all of it?
It doesn’t really matter. We were all singing very loudly and it felt like we, as a team of three, or actually of 4 (including MJ), that we were one powerful, unstoppable wave of positive energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFL_gYXE6Rk
I came across T-chan, age 7, reading Robert Bly’s book, Morning Poems. He read silently, his mouth shaping out the words. It’s the first time I ever noticed him reading one of my books.
It makes me wonder what else he has been reading when I wasn’t around. I am so proud of him.
A line from the poem “For Ruth” that he was reading:
‘And I’ve learned from you this new way of letting a poem be.’
Spent last weekend in NYC–first trip without T-chan and Hubbie since my whirlwind trip to interview for a job in Hokkaido over 7 years ago. Went with K under the excuse of reading our work at Cornelia Street Cafe in the West Village, which we did (honestly), but most of the time we were just walking looking for food and people watching.
I used to think it’s the perfect drink for me, absinthe. Wormword, fennel, and green anise: the holy trinity for fallen Catholics. Absenta in Spanish. The Green Fairy. But I feared the nausea, the fainting spells, the bloated stomach, the rumored madness, and truths I might let loose from my lips and never reign back in.
Escape is good, escape is so needed, but in the end, I prefer words to the tonic poured in a glass. I’d rather be fueled by hope, than by a physical slight of hand/mind/body. Desire—Of the stars, I gaze at them for long stretches of time—it’s what insomnia is for– wanting them because they are beautiful to be nearer to me, but also knowing not to wish too hard, as they’d just turn me into astral dust. So in the end, it’s best to choose the longing instead. I’ll stay on the unfinished journey toward that mysterious something I prefer to never fully know.
There is no there there. The room is here
and they live inside it. The ceiling seems
the loneliest place of all, a barren land
where a spider nests in a corner
and the music of dried insect shells
tingles in its threads. The walls
act as four barriers to the outside.
Each muffles the shuffling of feet and
the flapping of wings until living seems
swallowed in white plaster tombs.
She sits here, her hair is straight
and brown and it hangs down
into the roots of an elm tree, these roots spreading
sideways. The window thick with ice, rots
in its frame, and a child sleeps steadily
inside the room, next to her, inside
secret dreams. In her dream she cast spells
on an electric guitar. Like Jimi, in black feathers,
she blows the amp and crowd’s eardrums off.
She played that song of wind and snow, wordless
pine green shadows and icy blues, winter leaves
of dead summers. There is no there here. She knows
this. Her child sleeps. The room is here
and they live inside it. The cord connected
to the lamp on the table gives weak light.
Her child smiles at nothing. Then he screams.
It’s early afternoon Sunday. My 7-year old son and I are parked at a local café. He’s happy with his purple Tootsie pop and I’m happy with my cappuccino frothing over in a black ceramic mug. He’s drawing elaborate houses in his Gomi Taro Scribbles book. Occasionally, I am asked to draw specific appliances and furniture through his windows, but otherwise we are each busy with our singular tasks of the heart.
Days like this are days of bliss, and, yes, the sprinkle donut in my mouth helps a lot, as does having my goofy little son with me (who’s looking especially goofy since he lost his second front tooth yesterday). Days like this can be dangerous, too, because I have the time to question why I’ve caved into the social-pressurized game of keeping a full-time job. Why do I and most people I know spend our waking lives away from the people we love the most? It seems a sad and weird way to live, but society has a way of making the sad and weird seem “normal.”
I have played this 9-to-5 game for over three years—a world’s record for nomadic me—because of my family’s current situation: there’s rent to pay, gas to pump into the rusty Toyota (whose back bumper has begun to frown on one side), and most importantly for us, monthly government fees paid so my son has access to the services he needs for his disability (which my employer’s health insurance ironically excludes), and, of course, there’s the desire for a bit of pocket cash to buy an occasional cappuccino such as the one I am sipping right now, so that I can pretend I am royalty. So, the full-time game I play, but then I also must ask how can I make this life choice more palatable, more enjoyable, more creative, so that I don’t feel trapped, suffocated, and dead inside?
One shared goal of my co-conspirator—K—and I has been to carve a creative life outside of our work and outside of our household duties—to create snippets of constructive dream time when (instead of complaining by the water cooler or devouring frosted cookies in the office kitchenette/washing dishes or getting flu shots) we can reclaim and develop our creative selves as writers, as artists, as humans with a sense of mission. We want to encourage the other to Fly! Leap! Swim! Run!…toward our better selves.
I spend so much time in a land of conformity, inside the building of same-old, same-old, that I could despair (and I have). But it’s better for me, and for planet earth, when I instead focus my energies on rejuvenating my soul through that ongoing difficult, but rewarding process of being true to myself!
For me, writing is like a warm coat I’d pull over my frame before heading out into a blizzard. Or it’s like wearing an unraveling, old sweater stitched with dreams and secret tasks as I step through the portal of the office each day. It’s a swaying, creaking pine tree to climb to reach a state of mind where I am out on a limb, where risk is involved. I want to sing songs about what’s deeply part of my skeletal, molecular self. What’s the point of building a nest, birds, if we can’t rest in it?
My son in his beloved wildflower garden and bird sanctuary, which is only 20 minutes away from our house. He bounces down the winding wood-chip paths like an exuberant rabbit and he makes sure to cover every stretch of the 2-square miles of enclosed park land. It is small enough to feel I can’t lose sight him for too long, and large enough that he feels free to run and run and run.
+ Newsflash: while standing in the center of our prolific garden after work today, I discovered a ball of grass clippings. When I picked the clump up, I saw about 5 little newborn animals, pale grey, stirring blindly in a nest. I was a little surprised, as it is late summer, and a little scared, because I thought at first: mice? rats? I put the grass back on top and jumped out of the garden. But then my husband said he saw a rabbit leap out of our garden this morning and it rushed up to 2 more rabbits like they were having an emergency meeting.
This chance observation makes me guess those little babies are rabbits! I hope they will be okay as it gets colder now at night. The mom rabbit is obviously smart to have chosen a good safe garden for her home. And I now have to be careful where I step! What will it be like when five baby rabbits are jumping around my garden and are too little to escape? This, folks, is going to be an interesting harvest season….
We rode the Brown Line (befittingly) on the L our last day in Chicago. Our son was in train heaven (also my husband looks pretty happy, too; but he also looks like he’s about to give our son a surprise squeeze in this picture, if you ask me).
Afterward when we told our son we were heading back to Minnesota–he yelled “No!” At that moment I think we all wouldn’t have minded moving to Chicago and not going home 8 hours away. The train was that sweet, as were the rows and rows of old brown-brick buildings. This trip helped clarify that deep-down I am probably a big city vs. not-so-big city kind of gal. Although, I admit the wee house atop a hill in a field of wildflowers on a remote island, with no neighbor in sight, also tugs at my imagination, too.
“Hi!”…well, it’s been far too long since I last posted here–and I really miss being able to carve a few moments where I could write to the universe now and again (as I see this blog, since I have no idea who, if anyone reads it–besides me).
I have created a life without wiggle room for the time being–one-night-a-week graduate class, two nights-a-week joining my son for his swimming lesson and speech and occupational therapies, and then full-time work is full-time work times 10 since we are now transitioning into an interdisciplinary university-wide program–which results in strange creatures called ‘working committees’ to scatter about my desk and floor, and no matter where I step, I step on one of them, and they like to squawk.
And then I decided I need to apply for a part-time job (Ahhh, don’t ask!) and will interview soon.
I am either insane or insane, folks. You tell me.
This 45 minute round trip re-ignited my son’s slumbering passion for trains.
Last Saturday our small family dedicated ourselves to trains, trains, and then more trains. We first headed to Bandana Square, which back in my childhood had been quite the fancy shopping mall (inside restored train yard buildings), but today the area has dwindled down to a hotel, empty warehouse space, and, most pertinently, the Twin City Model Railroad Museum.
Our son was thrilled to be amongst other Thomas the Train fans pushing trains over bridges and tunnels at the play tables, but he also spent a good amount of time racing around to explore the expansive model train set, which replicates the Twin Cities glory days of the 30’s-50’s in train transportation.
I think our son enjoyed most the tiny button he could press to get the Northern Pacific train to kick into another journey through the 3000 square feet space.
***
An aside: My mother just told me a story of her trip through Cree country in Canada, where Cree people would stand in small groups near the tracks, even at night, and the trains would stop to pick them up. The stopping to pick up folks in Indian country also happened when my grandfather was a child in the Blackduck/Bemidji area, where Anishinaabe people would flag down trains for rides through their tribal lands.
***
After the model museum, we decided to head to the Jackson Street Roundhouse, built in 1907, where trains were brought for servicing. The buildings had that smell of tar from the railroad ties, and above you see the little man very intently taking his first ride inside a diesel engine, a Northern Pacific 105, 1200 horsepower Diesel Switcher. Sigh, perhaps you can sense that I am beginning to turn into a train fan myself; yet, let it be known that my husband succumbed even earlier to our son’s passion for the train.
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