Get Sick

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I don’t want to talk about what is going on in Washington. But I can’t justify not talking about it. So I’m going to just say some shit and then move on.

Because I do think about it. It enters my consciousness through Facebook, NPR and Jon Stewart. Seriously? How liberal middle class of me.  I read about it, diligently. I hear about it, committedly. I sign petitions, daily. But I realize – beyond my outraged intellect, it is not touching me. Which is wrong.

Why should hearing-impaired students stop receiving therapy that will let them use their voices to demand a better government? Why should government workers who live paycheck to paycheck lose their incomes, default on their rents and have to decide between gas for their cars or milk for their children? How long before they can’t afford either and have to sell their cars? Why should research about outbreaks stop at the CDC (especially while diseases prepare to spread exponentially thanks to global warming)? Why should a few white guys in Washington have the right to be petulant and why should I have the luxury of having my hair colored and cut and my nails done? I can still feed my cats—and myself. My daughter can still go to class—and to parties. The lights are still on—and the dishwasher.

What will be the breaking point when people like me have to turn on NPR to be reminded that poor losers in Washington would rather pout and shut down the government than accept a law that has been legally passed and vetted by the highest court in the union? When does “government shutdown” start to hurt everyone? Enough for the shift to happen. The masses to rise up. The enemy to retreat.

We need to feel the fingernails corkscrewing our upper arms for a wicked pinch. We need to choke on the vinegar forced down our throats. We have to wake up to the flea bites from fleas we cannot repel no matter how hard we try. We need to be sick of it. Just plain sick of it.

http://action.johntierney.com/page/s/shutdown?source=fb_auto_share_shutdown

Doohickey and Other Forms of Intelli-talk

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There’s a scene in When Harry Met Sally, I’m pretty sure, where Harry and Sally are on the phone planning to meet. They’re in a hurry and one of them says something along the lines of: “So let’s meet at the place near that thing,” and the other is like, “Yeah okay, bye.” They know. The whole point is that their intimacy is such that they “get” what each other means even when what is spoken is entirely devoid of content.

When I was growing up, my step-mother used words like “majigger” to indicate the particular thingamabob she wanted me to fetch from the place upstairs where it was usually kept. I usually knew what she meant, which led me to understand on a very fundamental level that, in families, at least, specificity is not necessary when haste, distraction and intimacy all come together to make the need for words obsolete. At least temporarily.

“Can you bring me the thingamabob from the closet when you come back?” – called to a family member getting up for a snack.

“Where is that damned whosiewhatist I got last summer at that place? Remember? Where the hell did I put it?” – angrily muttered to anyone within earshot while tearing the house apart.

“Did you get the stuff like you said?” –asked when a husband/wife/mother/sibling/child walks in the door after doing errands.

All of these seem obvious and clear in the moment.

I have always had a little bit of a delay when it comes to recalling nouns in particular. I found out not too many years ago that the human brain stores words of different parts of speech in different sections of the brain. That blew my mind. I mean, why wouldn’t words all hang out in the same place, neatly alphabetized in little file boxes? Why would we keep adjectives in one corner and nouns in another, with adverbs and pronouns, verbs and conjunctions all squirreled away in their own little hidey holes? But it makes me think maybe I have a little problem in the noun-storage space in this brain of mine. I usually think of it, but have been known to make random replacements, such as asking someone to get the milk out of the telephone or put the gloves away in the fridge or answer the doorknob when it rings.  But in any case, the convenience of doohickey, majigger, thingamabob and whatchamacallit has not gone unnoticed in my daily life.

And I’m a word person, in the end. I love words. I teach words. I write words and read words and have a close, romantic relationship with them. I do love the convenience of intelli-talk and also…there is nothing sexier than when you say: “Do you remember that thing we saw at the place when we were doing that thing and then the guy showed us the whatchamacallit that you bought for me and I cried?” and your significant other answers, “Oh yes, honey. How could I forget that?”

The Genius of Community

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In Walter Isaacson’s book Einstein: His Life and Universe it’s not clear to me which part of the mind-blowing story of Albert Einstein is the most mind blowing. I know how difficult it is to rethink my own inner universe, throw out entrenched ideas and preconceptions and false realities in order to usher in something closer to the truth, knowing all the time that the truth may elude me until I die, and maybe even beyond that. And that’s just one middle class, middle aged white woman. So how did Einstein have the chutzpah, brainpower and vision to do all that for the ACTUAL universe? He didn’t just blow his own mind, he blew everybody’s minds. And with a few exceptions, people loved him for it.

But as fun as it would be to draw analogies straight down the line between Einstein’s breakthroughs in theoretical physics and the path to understanding one’s self, it would be forced and silly and not that revealing.

But there is something about his process that keeps coming back to me. Einstein was a loner in many ways, in that he worked for large stretches of time in solitude, doing thought experiments and re-seeing everything from atoms to distant stars in a totally unique way. But he always came out of his genius cave to interact with others. He had genius friends –tons of them—who could pretty much keep up with him when he’d run his cool ideas past them. They’d sit around, or ride the trolleys, or write letters, discussing and debating and sharing. A lot of the time, when Einstein did that, he came up with even better ideas about his ideas. He understood something in a new way or figured out what the roadblock was that had been pestering him. He had lots of “aha” moments when he was by himself, but it seems pretty clear that he had lots of “aha” moments when he was in profound communication and dialogue with other people. I don’t think he would have gone as far, realized as much, redirected our understanding of the universe as completely, had he kept to himself.

I find this fact comforting and validating and not at all surprising. I guess I could have assumed that someone of Einstein’s capabilities might not need a sounding board the way normal (non-scary-genius) people do. But I would have been wrong, as it turned out. He did need it, and so do we.

As both a former student and educator, I always got such a kick out of the way the sparks fly in a classroom where people are talking. A lively dialogue will take everyone to that “new place” in their learning far faster, and more thoroughly, than reading, listening or memorizing will. Even Einstein would admit that reading, listening and even some pesky memorizing are all important pieces too, but those things do not a mind create. Without playing mental catch with someone, it’s just not the same.

My son learned a lot about pitching from throwing a rubber ball at the chimney outside, on which he drew a square out of chalk. He’d go out there all by himself and throw it and throw it and throw it till his accuracy was incredible. But what made him a damned good baseball player was … yeah, you get the picture. Playing baseball. With other people.

Community is so irreplaceable and joyful. A bunch of people sitting around a table drinking wine and discussing politics. Close friends exploring spiritual beliefs gathered together under a full moon on a summer’s night. Parents with their children having dinner together and letting the topics of life unfold among them. Kids leaning forward at their desks as they listen and wait their turn to share an insight or epiphany, and then as they sit there, someone else says something and inside their head, everything gets notched up another level. The hand that was raised suddenly reaches five inches higher and the look of ecstatic awareness on the face of that student is unmatchable. An idea looks like pure joy on the face of someone in the process of thinking. Or learning. Which go together, don’t they?

I get nervous about distance learning, and on-line courses, and the ways education is adjusting to trends, financial reality and the needs of the consumer. The community of the classroom is such a big thing to lose. The very fact that we don’t live within a few blocks of our extended families, to share and pass down the wisdom of the generations that way, as people used to do, saddens me. Where was the red tent when I needed it? When I think of all that I had to reinvent and figure out for myself about being a woman, being a wife, being a mother, taking care of myself, seeking fulfillment, and juggling the things we all juggle, it’s a shame. Will my wisdom be lost among the interstates and computer wires that have replaced, in many ways, the connective tissue of community?

Being connected to other people is one of the best things about being a person and that connection gives me a chance to tap into my genius self. I learn so much about life through the example and sharing of others, and about myself by bouncing me off of people and letting them bounce themselves off of me. We need time to ferment in solitude and a chance to bounce and share. There are times in our lives when we have less time to ourselves, and other times when we have fewer chances to connect with others. It’s a balancing act. Einstein had to figure it out. We all do.

 

Community

Summer vs. Autumn – an Irrefutable Argument in Favor of the Latter

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So what is it about the summer that I just don’t love as much as the season that comes next—despite a beach vacation, garden vegetables, music festivals, more time with family and all the glories of the hot season? And don’t get me wrong. I’m big on all the clichés of summer. I love the smell of cut grass. I mean, who doesn’t? And fresh herbs outside my window? I could bathe in basil and wear marjoram perfume and never tire. The long days of light are magical, especially when I eat dinner at nine and still have time to go for a walk before the sky is all-the-way black. But there is something about the fall that gets me every time.

Let’s start with the practical issues. Like sweat vs. a cold nose. Give me a cold nose over pointless perspiration any time. (Pointless means you don’t exercise one iota and you are sopping wet.) I’ve never loved the sticky season. But as I’ve matured my body no longer can cool itself off. My internal thermostats behave randomly and hormonally, capricious and difficult in the extreme.

If the autumn weather proves nippy, however, the clever application of a cozy sweater, a throw blanket or a fleece robe and fuzzy slippers does the trick. Snap.  Additional warming items include: cats draped across various body parts, a fire in the firepit, hot tea with honey and warm milk, flannel lined jeans, the company of a man who smolders at a high temperature. And so forth.

More practical concerns. Body image. Though fairly comfortable with my physical self in many ways, I am not a big fan of flaunting certain aspects of my imperfection.  So I sort of HATE skimpy, low cut, sleeveless shirts that expose soft upper arms and the non-perfect neck.

The clothes of autumn are glorious. The layers of autumn include camisoles and gauzy shirts and flowing sweaters and silky scarves. In fact, a gorgeous pashmina strategically draped around the previously-mentioned neck does wonders for my sense of style and self-worth.

Take a hike in the summer and pray for death halfway to the summit. Take a hike in the fall and stand like a goddess at the top, pleasantly warm from exertion, glowing with health (not streaming with ghastly sweat), and the freshly picked apples are still cool in your pack. Sit reading a book in the summer and you either have to go into the air conditioning (which sucks) or you can’t turn the pages because they are damp with humidity, or you start to blister. Sit outside with a good book on a fall day, blanket over your lap, fleece zipped up tidily, and you can enjoy the sun for all it has to offer, instead of taking out a restraining order on it.

But to hell with all these profoundly practical reasons to love autumn. I am sure you are convinced already. But the real beauty of this season is its power to embody both endings and beginnings with grace. The rebirthing that takes place in the springtime is exquisite indeed. But it is the poignancy of autumn— things dying off while so much feels brand new. Even the flowers that bloom or simply linger deep into the season, like the cheerful mum or the effusive hydrangea, are eloquent reminders that goodbye must happen. The cooling of the air is the cooling that precedes every death. From abundant garden to heavy harvest to blackened stalks in mere weeks. The blanket of fallen leaves tries to warm the embittered soil of the final days, only to succumb at last to winds, rakes, bonfires and compost heaps.

During all this, the children return to school. People of all ages return to classrooms in elementary schools, high schools, colleges across the country and progress another year, another grade, which is about growth, anticipation, and blossoming. As the windows darken earlier and earlier in the day, minds re-engage.

I realize I am not objective, having been a teacher for so long. But I think a lot of folks would admit that they sense a reawakening with the start of school and the commencement of autumn. Lounging, poolside beer drinkers become coffee sipping multi-taskers, hanging their professional jackets on the backs of their professional desk chairs in offices across the nation. Sluggish baristas or grocery baggers become intellectually dynamic college juniors discussing the structure of philosophical argument, co-authoring physics papers with their professors or writing erudite rants about social anthropology’s latest theories. Tiny children in tiny sweatshirts explore the edges of playgrounds across the nation, searching for a stick in the shape of the letter Y, or maybe L. They are truly thrilled to be a step closer to the Promised Land called reading.

All this happens – eyes opening a little wider – as the Earth shuts its eyes for the impending winter. It is glorious!

A demonstration of 3 of the warming techniques mentioned--blanket, cozy slipper and cats.

A demonstration of 3 of the warming techniques mentioned–blanket, cozy slipper and cats.

 

 

And Then There’s Me

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I’m up at 2 a.m. Exhausted after a gratifying day of hauling suitcases and boxes from two cars into my daughter’s brand new on-campus apartment as she begins her junior year at college. But I can’t sleep. The coffee I drank at 8 p.m. so I could stay awake on the highway is doing its job all too well. The highway is far behind me but the coffee is the gift that keeps on giving.

Instead of lying in bed cursing the goddess of caffeine, I will use this gift of time. Moments stolen from the 24 hours of a typical day. Moments when I can do something for me.

The day was beautiful and mostly about her, my daughter. It was about her and that is as it should be. It was also about us and the bond we are so lucky to share. A joyful day full of simple expressions of love. Unpacking, talking, planning, laughing.

But for me it was also a strange anniversary, and I cannot help remembering last year at this time and how different it all was. When I dropped her off on Labor Day weekend 2012, I was in the middle of a serious upheaval and only a few weeks away from the start of a huge adventure of my own. I had taken a leave of absence from my job, and was setting out to learn how I fit into the new world I had made. A world where I was no longer married, and, for a year at least, no longer a teacher. A world full of an unknown, untested passion and new love. A business I was going to try to support myself with. I was leaving literally everything I knew behind me for things all new.

That move-in day was a normal, if exciting, stepping stone in the life of my second born who was also creating her own world and her place in it. I was painfully aware that my pursuit of a life different from the one she had always known me to live was an excruciating upheaval for her and she was scared, angry, and sad. And yet she, too, was venturing out. She wanted me to stay in place, and be there, familiar and close. But it was not to be.

As full as I am of the mother-urge and as natural as that role has always been for me, the last year of my life has taken me deep inside myself. Truly an epic journey into what I needed, wanted, craved, and even feared. I never forgot my children, gave up my responsibility to them or altered so much as a molecule of my love for them, but I let myself sit in the front row of my own life for the first time, maybe ever.

My children (my college age daughter plus my son who lives in Vermont), adults now themselves, faced a world in which the mother was, for once, distracted by a life of her own. Tumult and change, divorce and distance, love and sorrow, anguish and renewal. Do our children automatically believe these to be the provenance of the young? Certainly having the truth—that there is no age limit on… well, anything, really—smack them upside the head is a cold splash of water for kids cradled in a world eternally made safe and warm for them.

Today’s college return was much less fraught than last year’s. Last year our goodbye had many faultlines of uncertainty. When would we see each other again? Instead of my being within a car ride for a lunch date or a visit home, I would be over a thousand miles away. My daughter felt abandoned. As much as I was compelled from within to do this thing, I also felt very sad, and very guilty. Mama was being unpredictable. Mama was taking chances. Mama was adventuring. What was happening to the predictable world?

We expect our children to be unpredictable, take chances, adventure. When my son ventured off to Rome or to ski in the Alps with people we barely knew, we were simply excited for him. Thrilled that he could experience such a thing. When my daughter threw herself into a first love that ended in agonizing hurt, I ached for her all the time knowing that, hoping that, she would heal. As much as I bite my proverbial fingernails at the crazy uncertainty of their lives, I know it to be right and suitable and healthy.

But it was (and I understand this) very difficult for my children to see me veering off the path I had been on so long. Reinventing myself and the future that might be out there for me. Throwing caution to the winds and trusting the universe—just as they do. Trusting life to give me what I need, whether joy, suffering, or simply a lesson to be learned.

I wish I could say that all my risks paid off. That my leap of faith was justified by a joyful happy ending. But no. In crucial ways, I crashed and burned. Yeah, pretty much. The balloon of hope pricked by the needle of harsh truth. A big fat lot of harsh truth.

My business was a gratifyingly successful endeavor, considering it was just the first year. But in the realm of the heart, I was, at least temporarily, road kill.

But you know, I can only hope that the lesson for my children is not: “Oh, well, of course it ended badly. Whenever a woman her age stirs the pot or tries something so unexpected, it is bound to fail. It’s good she’s back and come to her senses.”

Because I have not come to my senses. Not a bit. I am devoted to my choices and the path I am standing on right this minute, tonight, in the black hours before dawn, caffeine coursing through my system. I have learned more in a year about me, them, life, love, art, courage, pain, beginnings, endings, failure, success, attachment, clarity, heartbreak, independence, fear, passion, forgiveness, trust, anger, and humility than I had learned in the twenty preceding years. Though I have regrets, I regret nothing.

I want my children to love me because of—and in spite of—the fact that I had the guts to blow up my life (and, to an extent, theirs) and reconfigure it in a way that seems much more like life. They did know, have known, still know and know again that no matter what happens, they are the golden threads that tie my heart to this lifetime of mine. Nothing can come between me and them—not even me. Not even them. But they live for them. I live for me and them. “Don’t forget me,” my learning reminds me.

So today was a beautiful day. A young woman stirs herself back into the rich syrup that is college life. I return to the ongoing journey that is an examined life. I miss her. And then there’s me.

maggie and me

A Week Away

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Great blue heron taking flight.

Great blue heron taking flight.

A week away. It is a luxury most citizens of the world never experience. For those of us lucky enough, it seems as if we could not live without a week away, now and then. For people with enough money to live without financial fear, time often seems as valuable as money. I doubt an unemployed, homeless or starving person would think so. But for the purposes of this blog, I will proceed from the proposition that time is a rare and precious commodity, like oil, real estate with a view, diamonds, fine wine or a thoroughbred horse.

My favorite place for a week away: Chincoteague Island, VA. A barrier island with another barrier island, Assateague, beyond it, a mere causeway away, where pristine beaches and wild ponies can be found.

But now I ask myself why, when I give myself the gift of time, is it so hard to cherish every moment, guilt free? If I am doing something that seems “useless” – like watching an episode of Game of Thrones on my computer – I think, “I could do this at home in the evening, after dinner dishes are done. Why do it here, on vacation?” If I linger for an extra hour with a book in the morning, before getting everyone motivated to do something “vacationish,” I have failed at my maternal job of helping everyone drain the last drop of fun and relaxation out of the week. As emails from work and clients clog my inbox, I wonder if my “vacation response” is good enough?

Once the daily heave-ho takes place and I finally find myself sitting in a lowslung chair on the beach, brushed by the persistent sea breeze and letting only my tiptoes peek out from the edge of my umbrella’s shade, I let it all go for awhile. I can lose myself for hours. The gulls’ needle sharp caws, the shushing of the waves and the wind muffled sounds of nearby children building ramparts against the tide lull me as few things can. I love the way my skin accrues a gentle, gradual skin of sand granules atop sticky salt atop sunblock. When the sun lowers, I drag my chair to the water’s edge, nudging back against the off shore wind, holding my hat on my head, reading in the slanting light until the sand on my skin is less fun and it is time to break the spell.

And though I fear the waves, I love the feel of the ocean holding me up. I have the strangest relationship with water. I am drawn to it only on the shores of oceans. It’s the tides that draw me, but not to play or body surf or boogie board as my family can do for hours and hours. But to “bob” as we call it. To get past the scary breaking surf to where the waves just swell and pass by, lifting my body as if it weighed no more than a jellyfish. Ever since the time, about 15 years ago, when I lay on an inflatable raft and “bobbed” my way out too far, I have maintained an enhanced respect and attunement while in the ocean. But though I never quite relax in those gentle swells—I know they can become ungentle in a heartbeat—I feel embraced and loved by the universe in a way I never do anywhere else.

This past week, we reserved spots on a boat that circled the island. Because Chincoteague is bracketed on one side by the mainland and the other by Assateague, most of the trip was in the inlet waters between bodies of land. At the southern tip we entered open sea for an exhilarating 20 minutes or so. This trip provided two joys—speed and getting close to places I could not see any other way.

I no longer downhill ski with the abandon I once did, so hitting that adrenaline high of open-air speed that I not-so-secretly love is a rare event. Sitting in the prow of the boat as it zipped around the tip of the island sent me into a luscious trance. The boat slowed often, to show the sights and to edge into the circuitous lanes, called “guts,” that wend through the marshy edges of Assateague. In the silence of those moments, we saw wild ponies, herons, egrets, even a bald eagle, who perched like a pagan icon on the sea-rotted stump of an old dock foundation.

For the three hours of that boat tour, I let everything go. I did not think about my clogged inbox. I did not feel torn about where I “should” be or what I “should” be doing (what an absurd idea!). I did not think about the dinner that awaited (even though it was the best BBQ on the Eastern Shore). If I had any responsibilities in the world, I was not thinking about them at all. There was nowhere else I would want to be—ever, it seemed. As the sun set behind buttermilk clouds and the lighthouse started to send its beacon, the air chilled. Our captain handed me a blanket on cue, and I continued to simply be.

Wild pony on the shore of Assateague Island.

Wild pony on the shore of Assateague Island.

Open sea. Island tip in the distance.
Open sea. Island tip in the distance.

Pro-child-choice-life

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I love children. I love my children. I love the many children I have taught, and my nieces and, in an abstract way, I love all the children I will never meet, and the children we all once were. They see the world through fresh eyes and as they grow they taste and smell and hear the world. Their senses are open, as are their hearts, at least for awhile. And so are their minds. At least for awhile.

I also love life. All the ridiculously perfect things about life, like the smell of fresh basil and a balsam fir tree, the way fresh polish looks on toes, long guitar riffs, the sticky air at the beach, standing next to greatness at the MOMA or touching lips with a loved one. And all the other things I can’t list here. And all the not perfect things – well, I don’t love them, but I love that I am alive to experience them and think about them and accept them or rail against them, as is my wont and my right.

I love that we are alive and have free will and can choose. I can choose to drink decaf in the morning. You can choose to give a tenth of your paycheck to Amnesty International. My son can choose to live in a tent. Your son can choose to shop at Wal-mart. Or not.

We can choose for whom we vote. We can choose not to vote. We can get drunk every day or we can lie down and choose never to make a choice again.

But what I do not get about the abortion debate is that it is always about life or choice. Why doesn’t anyone talk about the kids?

So here’s what I think. Children are invited into life by adults. Because of that, we have a responsibility to them. All of us have a responsibility to all children. Because all children are here at our invitation. Not a party crasher in the bunch. That’s the bottom line. And even IF every adult in the world signed off on free health care and food for all children living in poverty, we could not give them that one ineffable thing they deserve and only one person in the world can give them. To be wanted. We can’t get Congress to sign being wanted into law.

So, okay. Sure. A woman needs to have control over her body. Yeah, she needs to have control over her life. But why is that so important? Well one big reason is so that she is not forced to bring a child into the world that she’s not ready for. Or doesn’t want. Or can’t take care of.

90% of the time, when I hear the talk on the radio, or see the rants in the paper or online, it’s about precious life vs. a woman’s right to choose.

What is so precious about a life that no one wants to take responsibility for? If that life will not be treated as precious, who has the right to insist on it? The very fact that a single life is precious is why those laws are so stupidly blind. The ones that seek to take away a woman’s right to choose to raise a child as it deserves to be raised – or not have it at all.

Remember that George Carlin rant about how the pro-lifers (and I so strenuously object to their calling themselves that) are all about the rights of the fetus but when it’s an actual child, they throw up their hands and say, “Taking care of your unwanted baby is not my problem aka the government’s job.”  I mean, George Carlin said it better, but you get the drift. The government can legislate you out of your right to choose to terminate a pregnancy but has no interest in helping you provide for the child once it’s born.

For years I had a sticker on my bumper that read: Pro-child/pro-choice: every child a wanted child. To me that sums it all up.

I know what people say and I am sure it would be true for me too, had my outcome been different. You love all the children you have, previously wanted or otherwise. But I don’t know what it’s like to live in a one room apartment, a single mom with a child I can’t feed, unemployable because I could not finish high school or maybe because I can’t find affordable child care. Does she love her child? Yes. But it is specious in the extreme to say that every woman who has had an abortion is missing something. She is simply carrying out her choice to wait. Until she finishes school. Until she has a job. Until she has a partner. Or whatever it is for her. And maybe her choice is simply not to bear children.

Maybe people who are pro-choice are wary of bringing the child into the conversation. Maybe they don’t want to remind everyone that there is a child at stake. Not just a fetus, but a future child who deserves to be wanted and have the basic rights to love, food and shelter, and also education, healthcare and the chance to get a job one day. But skirting the fact that choice is as much about life as it is about a woman’s body is just artificial. It is about the baby’s life and the mother’s life. And yeah, her body. But pregnancy only lasts 9 months – motherhood lasts a lifetime and no one should be forced to do that job against her will. It is the most important job there is, and a woman brave enough to admit she’s not ready to take it on is all right by me.

pregnant women

Moon Music

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Full moon or close enough. Saratoga Performing Art Center – known as SPAC. Late afternoon of the first day in over a week that was not too hot to breathe. Sitting under the roof in ticketed seats (as opposed to lawn seats, which is where I used to be when  my kids were with me through the baby, toddler and rug-rat years). The sun slants in through roofline gaps and sears my eyes into blindness. Ryan Bingham, young folk singer in the Dylan lineage, croaks out a string of blues tunes, sexy voice wailing.

Then the trippy, soulful music of My Morning Jacket, swinging like a pendulum from hardcore to lyrical. Jim James, with hair like a tangled halo that drips down over his eyes, pierces the cooling air with his unsettling voice. The sun slides further down in the sky and the crowds gradually fill more of the space. Outside, the lawn-sitters line up their chairs in courteous rows. Around us, under the roof, a few people stand to dance. My son had played me some tracks of the band a few times, but I had no idea how the fullness of the sound and the slightly twisted murkiness of the lyrics would work by osmosis in my cells.

The sun lowers with day’s receding tide, and the air turns that familiar blue. The sourceless daylight of dusk.  Wilco comes on stage. My legs grow restless. I am still processing Morning Jacket and feel dissatisfied with the transition. So I walk out from under the roof, away from Wilco revelers, to feel the breeze and look for the rising moon. Not visible yet. I listen long distance to the music as I wander. Wilco grows on me and in time I am ready to go back to them. I’m primed, now, for their twanging rock and roll, the thunderous undertones and the smiling high notes. The end of their set leaves me in good spirits. Outside, it is fully night.

The lights on stage come on. The bustle of the hive takes over. More amps, more keyboards, more machines, lights and those mysterious musical accoutrements that plebes like me don’t understand.

Now someone kills the lights and when they come back on, Bob Dylan and his band make beautiful noise.

Dylan, aged 71, who never speaks to us, never acknowledges the audience that stands as one, rising to his presence. He knows we are there. He sings towards us, his face a pale focal point in the gloomy stage lighting. His band faces him from one side of the stage, attentive to his gestures, small nods, forms of musical communication the rest of us are not privy to. Few of his songs are readily recognizable. He has (as he usually does) created new arrangements for each of them. “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Simple Twist of Fate” – off my favorite album – are recognizable only by a small musical phrase and the lyrics, half mumbled in that Dylan way, but so tattooed into my brain that I hear both versions, the original and this one, playing in symbiosis inside my head. “Hard Rain,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and many more familiar, iconic songs treat themselves to rebirth through his ever-restless vision.

I know many of his fans are disappointed not to hear exact renditions. But I respect him more for not resting on his laurels. A hard working man of music and words, Dylan is not ready to lie down in a bed he made 50 years ago.

I am moved to see him there in his black clothes. Dark curling hair dusty gray now and body slower. The harmonica sings just as achingly as ever. My eyes tingle in sympathy for the young girl I was when I first saw him play in Washington DC and then again, in my later 20s, newly married, at Madison Square Garden in a double show with Tom Petty. But I feel none of the pity for aging musicians that I have felt before as I watch them try to recapture what once was. Tonight, Dylan plays songs from his newest album, Tempest, and from his first, and many between. His opus continues to grow and his interest in what he does never seems to wane.

We walk into the darkness after his last song; I wonder if this is the last time I will see him play. I can’t know. I look up to see the moon full and high in the sky. She understands all of it. The music, the night, the feel of the air, the sense of lost youth, and the promise of more to come.

 

The seats were good, not that you can tell....

The seats were good, not that you can tell….

 

Creative Emptiness Part II (water)

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There is a pool. It is not mine, but for now, it is mine. I have stood under the midday sun stroking the pool’s floor with a strange vacuum that sucks up the slimy stuff and leaves clean behind, but until today, three weeks in to my month long exile in this beautiful place, I felt no affinity for the pool.

Though I’ve tended to its needs, I never put a toe into it until yesterday when the heat blackmailed me into dipping my body into the water that is clearly not my element. And my conversion was so complete that today, I was actually disappointed to hear the rumble of thunder when I went back, ready to give myself to the pool again.

My relationship with water is not altogether clear cut. No right angles or black lines about it. Though it is not my element of natural affinity, I love rain. Soft rain, steady rain, torrential rain, storms of any kind. I also love the ocean. I fear the ocean. I succumb to the ocean, but awkwardly. My children tease me for the uncomfortable way I enter and exit the surf. But when I am held up by the gentle mountains of water during the quiet tide, I feel the emptiness of space enter me.

Lying there atop the swells, I think about the way every inch of my world is full of something tangible. People, coffee pots, computers, wooden spoons, grassy fields, forested mountains, huge oceans and an atmosphere of gassy atoms that sneak in to every cell of my body without my knowing it.

Water does not change any of that, obviously, but the way it seems to defy physics by lifting my weight off my feet and cradling me—doesn’t that seem like an open door to all possibility, even emptiness?

The good emptiness of naked space and naked time.

When I was young, the future was empty, for I had not invented it yet. I still have a future and I am still inventing it, but the space that the future inhabits seems less empty. Not to mention all the trajectories of my already-lived time. They shoot out possible futures ahead of me like laser beams.

Lying in water, even a swimming pool, lets me for a moment feel the space of time yawning at my fingertips, full of possibility.

Words and color, images, music, even my spirit guides – the intangibles that fill the spaces that are not spaces – have a chance to enter my head when my eyes are closed, my ears muffled by the water and my body lifted improbably by a substance I can drink, or that can disappear into a mound of sand.

A pool and a promise....

A pool and a promise….

Creative Emptiness Part I

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The light from windows reaches hallways through half-opened classroom doors. The shadowy inner spaces of the school seem sad. A school the day after a summer holiday is as empty as a place can ever be. The skeleton part-time staff of July is at home enjoying a long weekend. The arts camp that uses the building and grounds for a few weeks is closed down, too.

When I first got there yesterday, hauling a lamp and some picture frames, a desk calendar and other supplies into the building from out of the blistering sun-baked car, a young colleague was sitting in her classroom writing a grad school paper. But then she left.

Alone is being in a place where people are supposed to be, but aren’t. Alone is also starting a new job in the same place I spent my career doing something else altogether. A new job as unfamiliar as the hallways, classrooms and libraries are familiar. I go to work, and sit at my desk, inventing myself in a new image. Bravely being new again. Again.

I have reinvented myself so many times in the last 12 months that I wonder anyone can recognize me.

Maybe that’s what alone is. The fear of being by myself in a world that can’t see me because I am simply unrecognizable. “Who is she? I thought I knew her….”

The limbo of summer meets the limbo of newness and the limbo of solitude. And something else to consider, I tell myself. I am living in someone else’s home again. Again. With someone else’s skillets and someone else’s pets.

I miss my skillets and I miss my pets. I wonder how I manage to get myself into these situations. These new-old situations. This new-old version of me. Instead of counting the minutes until I can be reunited with my skillets, I am trying – I swear – to embrace all that is new as well as the aloneness and the emptiness. I see now that being the new-old me in these empty places is quite perfect, really.

Alone is good. Empty is good. The emptying out that happens now and then inside my chest cannot be filled if I am not left alone with my thoughts and my new self loving my old self, and my old self returning the favor.

I found this photograph titled Woman in Progress.

I found this photograph titled Woman in Progress.