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Medicine Words

18 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by towardbeginnersmind in Uncategorized

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Food, Inspiration, Music, New Mexico

I’m sitting in the afternoon sun now, eating, inhaling. Mouthfuls of wild mushroom and dark broth—rosemary, shallots, thyme, cod. I dip the dense bread in, that the man who made the soup, brought to go with it. It tastes like medicine. I’m listening to the new Ryan Adams album—a change from the Janelle Monae, Alicia Keys and Beyoncé I’ve been consuming regularly. And that too feels like medicine, a soft male voice amidst the angry ones shouting out everywhere. My body is aching from last night’s wine, used to cover something else inside that I have no name for but which makes me want to cry, what feels like, all the moments of the day. But, the wine isn’t working and the tears won’t come. It’s late winter and too warm, too still, too empty. I’m looking for medicine of some kind. I’m waiting for snow medicine or spring medicine; I’m waiting for a lover to hold me somehow in a way that goes beyond my body.

Just that word even, feels like something I may only understand a little. Feels like a word that likely doesn’t belong to me. In the sweat lodges I’ve been in, they talk about medicine and they pray for it, offer it, to each other and each body offers healing as it opens and begins to contain the heat. I like the lodge as hot as I can stand. I feel this way about baths, about tea. It’s as if I want all the heat of the universe inside me, every morning and night. I want my skin to burn. A few weeks ago, up in the forest with some friends, we had a wassail. A wassail is an ancient tradition, though I’m not sure where it comes from exactly. You heat some of last year’s cider from the trees and you go out to bless them, to cry out to them, to wake them midwinter, to ask them for another bountiful harvest for next year. And you sing. We raised our voices in blessing and asking, together in the deep snow and it was beautiful. And at the place where the wassail happens, there is a sauna as well. There were nine of us in there that night.

And much like lodge, I watched our bodies open up to the night, and to the sound of each other’s voices and the heat. Though many people walk in and out, jump in the ice-cold pond, roll in the snow or pour cold water over one another, for some reason, I do not. I never do anymore. I’d like to say it’s because I don’t want the shock or the cold. But really, it’s that I want only heat. I want, almost, to burn myself up to ashes, or maybe, it is more like a melting, a dissolving, a disintegrating away from who I know myself to be now and to be re-formed as something I might someday become. The crackling of the wood, the red-hot stove, the steam, it makes me feel like I am going home, like I am home.

I felt my breasts changed with age, and my skin still soft, I felt my body across the cedar seat. Maybe this is medicine? Even if I don’t know, I want to begin to know. I want to begin by simply naming the things, I now, in these last weeks, think might be it. A car ride with Suki, and our laughter and her bright eyes, the quiet at the end of the road, my sister’s babies in my arms, where Gisselle says before sleep “Auntie, tell me a story out of your head,” the sound of that perfect breath beside me in the knells of sleep. All this, medicine against the tyrant at the door and his hideous minions, medicine against our fears, medicine against our loss, against our uncertainty, my own trepidation at keeping my heart open, my imperfections and those of everyone else, because, let’s be real, if perfection is a requirement for love, for solidarity, for action, we’re all gonna fail every time. At least, I will. Because I do not have a perfect heart. I try to remember that too, every day.

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A Little JazzFest

14 Monday May 2012

Posted by towardbeginnersmind in Food, Friends, Music, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Food, Jazzfest, Music, New Orleans

There’s this Mary Oliver poem that I read to Lindsy as she drove me to the airport under southern clouds that I cannot find the words to describe—puffy? Languid? Impossibly beautiful? A word that denotes something in relationship to greenery and heat. But Mary Oliver knows how. Here is her line:

I will be that small cloud, staring down at the water,

the one that stalls, that lifts its white legs, that

looks like a lamb.

The world is white thunderheads and green grass. The time is po’boys and long mornings, late nights and grottos, a flowered dress released of its clasp leaving the back of my heart exposed to night, sleep in front of a small fan, turning over the stickiness of my dreams, the air sweet with magnolia, night blooming jasmine, and sweaty, earthy, swamp, papaya, turtle in pond, splashing water babies’ kisses all covered in sweetness. It’s so hot here. So that, in the morning when I step outside the most prolific sensation is the tiny bead of sweat that becomes a line of twine down my whole spine, under my dress like a good secret, waiting to be shared, or a burden to be borne silently. I remember again, as if for the first time that it is good to be a part of the world.

I stand in the sun at Jazzfest to just sway and then sing out loud. My own heart puffs up like the selfsame clouds, with Bonnie Raitt’s voice and her silver streak of hair. And she sings a song I listened to repeatedly when I was an adolescent and which I now understand both more and less. I am surrounded by loved ones and alone. Everything is flux and flow and slowing. I am reminded of a Tom Robbins line about the hungry beast of heat that lives in New Orleans and which to stave off, you must eat. And eat I do. Like I said, po’boys, pulled pork, crawfish dumplings (which aren’t actually called that) with a sort of gumbo and the buttery-est and creamiest, fat oysters I’ve ever had. Add to that mint-rose sweet tea, jambalaya, fried chicken, gumbo, éclairs, breaded eggplant, red peppers with fish inside of them, crisp and bubbly white wine, absinthe, oblivion, hurricanes, and longing. The good kind of trouble.

A friend sends me a letter about the Crescent City while I am there and remarks about the yummy food, giving me a few recommendations and then the last line of his letter, an entreaty, haunts me:  Please, be careful. That town can turn dangerous quickly.

On the way home, that line rolls around my mind a bit. I am startled by the realization that New Orleans contains an essence of something we’d often rather ignore: you cannot control everything. There is something wild and exciting in that danger and quickness. Maybe the best you can do is celebrate each moment as it passes, on porches, in the crisp call of a French horn, in the sway of the hips of dark skinned women who are not afraid. Proud black queens. And then it hits me, there are many places in the world that are dangerous but try to hide it. This place seems so unmasked in its guilelessness that it is both frightening and appealing. Don’t get me wrong, nothing bad happened to me there at all. Only delightful, wonderful things happened to me there. But there is a fear-provoking sensation to match the richness that is unmistakable and feels like a part of the fabric of the place itself. It feels as compelling as New Mexico. New Orleans feels like a place saturated. Saturated with color, flavor, scent, music, heat, water, error, desperation and celebration. More than once people remarked to me that there were neighborhoods I should definitely not go into. And I wondered what secrets and disaster lived in those places that might make them so boundless.

And, one evening, just after Jazzfest, I was attempting to ride my bicycle home alone in the dark. I was swallowing gulps of anxiety about my safety. I had no idea where I was going at all, being a bit directionally challenged already. I stopped to ask directions from some women talking on the street. One in particular, who I will call the angel Barbara, put me into her suburban (she was on off duty cab driver who took pity on me) and drove me all the way home. My faith restored, we talked like old friends. More than once she mentioned Katrina and openly shared how it had left its mark on her city. And the mark wasn’t physical; it was psychological. She told me about the school kids who she drives on her other job and how they were emotionally shaped by the hurricane. How it made them terrible. But she told me with a confessional giggle and a smile that, while it did nothing hide the seriousness of her story, did much to make me feel like the open-hearted compassion of this city was making a concerted effort to take it all in stride.

Yet, in writing this, I am struck by the idea that this place shouldn’t, can’t, be spoken of truly by an outsider. In that way it is also much like New Mexico, difficult to describe but so palpable that you must rub yourself up against it until you understand. We understand in a variety of ways; one of them is language. Lindsy teaches me a few phrases that I turn over and they make me laugh. I can’t pronounce the names of streets and she laughs back at me, Decateur, Marigny, Freret, Treme. And, (like another friend of mine relates from a book she is reading) language cannot be separated from place and so place cannot either be separated from language. I do not know the language of Lake Pontchartrain, but I am enrapt nonetheless. On the plane ride it stretches out like an ocean and the man beside me tells me, as if I do not know, that this lake swelled and flooded the city of New Orleans, once, in a storm called Katrina.

On Monday afternoon, Kasey invites me over to his farm. It is on an ancient plot of land and he tells me how old the soil is there and how it misses the floods, which would bring nutrients needed for richness but the ground is now deprived. And yet, he speaks of this quarter acre with such pride and understanding that I see things, not yet growing, coming into being under his attention. And then we get on our bicycles and ride around the street corner so that he can show me an old cypress. This cypress covers its house in shade and is magnificent. We curl like small cats in its direction with wonder. Only Kasey would notice this tree, in this way, and think to share it with me. The way an old friend tells me he loves me. When he knew me best, I was a child and so it is good to return to that place, like a child and look at trees. We ride by beautiful houses and an old cemetery. I am remembering to stop and smell the magnolias with their waxy leaves. My New England life mercifully melts away and I shed a roughness I’ve been building to survive. That roughness indeed also momentarily dissolves into the loving arms of my Taos friends who are there in New Orleans with me. It dissolves into the long days spent in heat and near rivers and swamps. I feel both alive and like I am dreaming in this city.  My guess is that I am not the only one to feel this way and that this elusiveness, this lack of boundary between awake and sleep, magic and reality is part of the appeal.

My last night, later in the evening, Johnny and I drive along on the way home from the swimming pool in the Bywater and stumble upon Armstrong Park.  We are alone in this inky world with one bright set of lights, out of place and so fantastic that we circle around it in its Treme neighborhood trying to discern what this magical palace is doing in the midnight. And then we drive home through quiet streets, still alive.

As abruptly as my ruminations, my time there ended. I got back on a plane and headed north and left those contradictions behind for a land that is more clearly defined in its borders and boundaries. But, as the Angel Barbara said, you just have to remember, this city is like a crescent, and everything curves. But it meets up again eventually. The roads lead into each other. After all, New Orleans knows it’s ok to be both dark and light all at once, that might just be where the magic is born. And we all need a little magic in our lives…

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A Perfect Time

01 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by towardbeginnersmind in Loved ones, Music

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Tags

Grief, Love, Music

You know it’s bad when your best friend tells you that you sound like you’ve been hit by a 4’x4’. Not any ordinary 2’x4’, no, the big guns. When the person who might love you the most can hear it over the phone, the exhaustion and rawness. I guess I finally hit the proverbial wall. And so, I’ve been doing my best self-remedies; I’ve been swallowing beauty today—as much of it as I can put in my mouth and my eyes, and my ears.

I’ve been listening to the Morning Benders, Bon Iver, Wilco , Madeleine Peyroux. I watch on Youtube so I can see the faces, feel the colors. I listen to my friend Rita’s radio segment from NPR and watch the documentary about the guy who loved bears and was then killed by them. I watch and listen to things that on an ordinary day might just make me smile but on a day like today, make me weep. I cried in the end of Grizzly Man when Werner Herzog, the director, says that Timothy’s work and even death was more a reflection of the human experience then it was of the natural experience which Timothy was so insistent on portraying. He looked at this man who most people would have written off as little more than a novelty and made us see what he saw, a filmmaker and a human being not afraid to live his life. A human being who was flawed in his vision.

This metaphor of our perspective just being a reflection of our own seeing and not actual reality is powerfully true.  At some point, it doesn’t matter does it? How we perceive and understand the world becomes the truth of it for us. Herzog, as the narrator and Timothy as the narrator/subject both stumble upon this with wit, tenderness and guilelessness. Above all the film is honest.  Herzog lets the man who he is looking at, be total unto himself and yet remains true to his own view of the circumstances.  For myself, after weeks of grinding an administrative blade to useless sharpness, I revel in the honesty of unmitigated human experience and reflection.

In the afternoon, I read poetry out loud and record it to send to a friend in California. I want to be there but I send my voice instead. I write desperately, so fast my fingers can’t keep up with my mind. I sip a little brandy and deal with tear-ready eyes.

This crying is important. I haven’t wept in months. Which is strange for me because my life feels pretty challenging these days. I used to cry everyday, when my mom died, when my lover left, when I was heartbroken or terrified about my future, or worried over my health in my early twenties. But now, faced with some of the trickiest, most intricate parts of my understanding about life I remain stoic? Maybe it is just New England wearing off on me. Maybe I have cried enough for a lifetime and just needed a break. It isn’t that I haven’t been struggling. But, for a change, instead of just struggle, I have been asking questions. Sometimes questions are harder. They go something like, is my current life truly making me unhappy, or is the suffering I feel, really all my own doing? These seem like relevant questions, adult ones, where I have begun to see my own hand in my experience and to examine the ways I might want to take better responsibility for that experience.

And part of it is that when I get too tired I am faced again with another facet of my own grieving process. I don’t always let myself feel it. I can’t after all, function very well crying everyday. More so, grief suspends my thinking and makes the world into this mosaic of time and space being movable and sensory. It changes my mind about everything. I don’t think my brain has ever gotten back to the place it was before my mom died. My mind became a new landscape, yes, perhaps even a beginner’s landscape. And also, I was grieving a meaningful relationship when my mom died, so the griefs are tied up together in one strange swirl.

Sometimes, when I hear an old lovesong of  ours or when I dream of his beautiful, angular face and he is looking at me with so much sorrow in his eyes and telling me he is afraid I don’t remember him, I know that I am really missing her. It is easier to look into the face of Jesus than into the face of God. We look where we can. We find solace where we can. We are human after all.

Truly, grief pops up everywhere. My friend from school lost her dad this week. There are no words for this and so I don’t even try. I know that much. On the phone, another loved one and I talk about his wife who died this year. We talk about the brokenness and what it might take to come back from it. But we both know there is no coming back from it. We talk about the years that have passed and how much we still love each other after all this loss. I read poems out loud on my couch and I weep for them, for myself. I listen to Rita’s story and I weep for the young man whose story she is telling and how he got to touch the hand of god when he almost lost his life in a car accident.

I weep for my own shattered heart that wants so much to love again, without fear this time. But today, I can barely be other than my own ridiculous self, on the couch, crying. My mom used to say that crying is how we integrate things. It is how we come to terms.

There are so many things I cannot ever come to terms with, but I will start with this unexpected weeping. I will start with crying in the bathtub in this big, quiet house. I will start with letting myself dissolve into water and into my life. Tomorrow, I will be strong and put it all back together. Not today. This day deserves my tears. It is a perfect time for tears.

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