Whispering amen

"Art is imagination at play in the fields of time." - Julia Cameron

So now the ice is broken, an iron curtain crossed: from private introspection, years of gathering resources - to a small, public sphere. Strength expands like a parachute. Glide down with it now, through the atmosphere, and then below, as a soul’s purpose deepens. Strange, I thought myself a private person; yet now, out here, exposed, I am more myself than I have ever been, with so much given, undeserved. Where to place this gratitude? My head spins. I am falling; I am found. Finally, I am beginning now, to be.

A purpose emerges: give words to the things that so often elude words. Catch the dust that falls between the details of a day, and watch it glow. Speak for things that are pointless, that are only games; remember that play is divine, dancing with us.

Live here, if nowhere else: in words, in strings of letters on a page. Continue as you have been: hovering somewhere outside of the space that the body occupies, between the exhaled breath and the atmosphere.

Photo provided by yiseol you on flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Here's to you, Barbie

Dear Barbie,
I've been thinking about you quite a bit since yesterday morning. I noticed, over coffee, that it was your birthday. I know we've never been close, but I've been meaning to write to you since. Sorry this is late. Happy belated birthday, Barbie.

I have to say, there have been times when I have hated you. There seemed to me, in the black and white way of categorizing the world that is habitual of youth, that there were two kinds of girls: Barbie girls and non-Barbie girls. Barbie girls, for one, had lots of Barbies and seemed to enjoy playing with them at length. They had Barbie accessories: the Corvette, the pink house. They often seemed irritatingly nonchalant about their riches, carrying an air about them that seemed to say, Of course I have the Corvette. Don’t you? Of course I have the dollhouse. Of course I had to get the Cheerleader outfits. Of course I love clothes; I love shopping. Don’t you?

I didn’t. I had somehow missed the boat when it came to you. For the first ten years of my life, I didn’t really pay you any mind.

Frankly, I had better things to do. There were trees to climb, and obstacle courses that I once engineered, just for fun. In the winter I constructed igloos for the purpose of seing what it what it was like to climb inside, even if I had to shimmy on my stomach, to be surrounded by snow. I played inventor. How had Edison done it? I wondered. I needed my own lightbulb moment; I needed an idea. Surely there was one coming to me, with so much still undiscovered. I rose early on Saturday mornings and constructed pulley systems in the basement. I carried a notepad and waited for my eureka moment to strike.

I had a few. I wrote them down. I wrote poems and plays. I preferred musicals, and these could be performed on holidays, when the family gathered, presumably in need of entertainment. I made invitations, tickets, a menu ("Tonight's special is orange juice and vanilla jello - on the house - Enjoy!”). Time went on; I didn’t notice it. I lived inside my own world.

Then one day, in summer, I had a eureka moment that I had never anticipated. I suppose that’s the thing about such moments; they seem to come from nowhere. It happened in the summer, about a month before the start of my sixth grade year. I had just turned eleven.

At the start of the season, I did not consider myself too old to play my favorite game at the local pool. It involved jumping into the water over and over again, at the deep end. Once submerged, I would spread my arms and hover at midpoint. Then, push off forward slightly with the balls of my feet, and glide. I was flying; the world around me muted; it was a living dream. When I ran out of air, I had to surface. Only then would I climb out, turn around, jump in again. Uninterrupted, I might have done this for hours, with the focus of a yogi master. We are the playthings of the gods, Plato has said, and for this reason, play is the most serious of human endeavors. I knew that then, but it was about to end.

Before the sun reached its midday zenith, I surfaced. I climbed out as usual, only mildly aware of the way that the elastic of my suit pulled against my belly. I had always been an athlete; I had always raced the boys. I had not spent much time considering that the value of my body might be measured by its proportions. A change was coming.

There were two girls: both conventially pretty, with freckles, long hair, and friendship bracelets; their fashionable bathing suits bagged a bit accross their tiny torsos. Each one had a noticeable indentation at their hip flexor. Such details would become significant to me only afterwards. I was emptying the excess water from my Cousteau-esque goggles, which I thought were wonderful because they let my eyes move about freely as I dove, and I could see the underwater world as if looking thourgh a pane of glass. I emptied quickly, and as I was preparing to turn around, I heard one whisper to the other, That girl looks like an alien.

I continued turning as if I hadn’t heard, walking to the edge; I jumped in. I remained underwater for as long as I could, even after the lack oxygen began to make my temples tingle. Slow, reluctant tears filled the insides of my now-hideous mask. I waited at the wall until they left. I got out of the pool, wrapped myself in a towel, and sat silently by my mother. There were no words for such an onslaught. What's wrong? She asked me. Nothing.

What have I missed? Something had been opened, suddenly. A grenade lobbed carelessly, a universe punctured and bleeding out. I ached to repair the damage caused by my lack of defenses. I grasped for answers and I considered the details: their slimness, their accessories, their trendy bracelets, the way they were playing rocks paper scissors on the pool deck because neither one wanted to go in first. Getting wet was to be avoided. Perhaps it was my shock, or my ignorance. Who knows? For whatever reason, I decided that it must have something to do with you, Barbie. I decided that all of those missed hours I had spent not playing with you, while I had been off doing other things that I had considered more important and more interesting, girls such as those had been studying up, and that this this label that I suddenly found myself wearing - Alien! - must have something to do with my distance from you.

Now, one does not start playing with Barbie at the age of eleven, and neither did I. But I did start to pay better attention. There was a code; I had missed it. I thought you were the key, or if not, at least symbolic of the missing link. Time to go about making sense of things. After all, I knew enough about you to know that eventually, the goal must be to have Ken, or someone like him, with which to ride around. I didn’t care whether the car was a Corvette, a bug, or a station wagon; I just didn’t want to be alone in it: outcast, loner, alien.

I resolved to do a few things differently in the fall. For starters, no more underwater diving. No more raising of my hand in class. No more plays. No more wearing of t-shirts I had painted myself. No more speaking in character at whim. The worst was finding new friends. My best friend, Tara, had long ago been branded class geek. I had known this for years; it was nothing new. But now the knowledge carried an ominous portent. If we remained friends, I might risk a lifetime of being alien. Tp prevent this from happening, I committed the greatest betrayal of my life. When she spoke to me, I sometimes pretended to be invisible, even though I wanted to ask her about her turtles. When she raised her hand, I wanted to raise mine, but sat on it instead. While she continued to earn A+’s and derisive comments, I deliberately put in wrong answers on spelling quizzes in order to earn C’s and the appropriate comments of, Hey I did better than you! from a boy in the back who smoked at recess and read books with pictures.

I spoke less, and listened more. I learned to doubt. Time went on. High school heartbreaks ensued. There was always a better girl: she was always there, always thinner, with better skin and hair and with the fashion sense I lacked. In college, I read widely. This was when I learned that women with advanced degrees had written books on you. They critiqued your waist, your heavy bosom; the way your proportions defied gravity. If she were alive, they said of you, she wouldn't be able to walk. I guess you were an alien, too.

They counted your faults: You only cared about how you looked. You could only be Doctor Barbie, or Army Ranger barbie, or Peace Corps Barbie, or Veterinarian Barbie, as long as you were still the Barbie that Ken couldn’t resist, with your irrational proportions and your forever smile. I don't think I ever saw a Postpartum Barbie. I don’t think Military Barbie ever took a beating or cried alone in her bunker. I don’t think Doctor Barbie ever got her hands dirty opening up cadavers or delivering babies. Plenty to critique here, and plenty did; only now do I think that this was futile. It was no better, really, than failing to recognize your power at all. We were all missing the point. Meanwhile, you smiled on; you always did.

Your power was at it’s zenith when you were in your box, new and shiny and still dressed, fastened at the back of your neck and at your wrists with plastic ties. Once you came out of the box, something happened; you did nothing. Wherever you were placed, you just sort of lay there.

I wondered where you came from, so I looked you up. I learned that you had been created by a mother, Ruth Handler, who had noticed her daughter, in play, giving adult roles to her infant dolls. Wouldn’t it be good to have a grown-up doll for her to play with? Ruth had wondered. She found your predecessor in Germany; she brought three back, and took one to Mattel headquarters. Soon afterwards, you were born. Ruth named you after her daughter, Barbara. The company branded you a teen fashion doll, but to Ruth you were also meant to be a talisman for the kind of play that her daughter seemed to want: the trying on of adult roles,as she imagined herself a woman. Here, Ruth had said. Here is a perfect adult woman. And so you were, Barbie: impossibly beautiful, like any worthwhile dream. There you were: a nurse, a teacher, a secretary, a firefighter. On and on and on, and never a frown or a line in your skin.

To be honest, I thought I had forgotten about you until I ran across a list of notable dates in the month of March. March 9 was your day. I almost missed it, Barbie. Just as I almost missed the point. You were not insignificant, nor were you a source of the rift that almost swallowed the girl I used to be, before I started to worry about what Ken would think. You didn't separate me from my best friend. You were only a doll: a gift from a mother to a daughter; a gift from one woman to many girls. You were plastic wrapped in plastic, but we wanted you to be a woman. At the very least, we wanted you to be a symbol: of something just out of reach. We let you stand for what we couldn’t grasp. You became what we wanted you to be: a nurturer of a daughter’s grown up dreams of what it would be like to be a woman. You became a witch when we learned that our womanhood had been bought with the dreams of our childhood. You became a scapegoat for the inevitable loss that ensued with the Faustian bargain we had so tacitly agreed to, with smiles just like yours.

Oh, Barbie. What could you do? What did you ever do, but stand there, held up in your shiny box, looking out through the window as we gazed upon you? What did you ever do, but lay there when we took you out, your permanent smile aiming at the ceiling beneath your perky eyes, as if to quip, Well? What did you expect? What now?

I have to go. My daughter needs a bath. She is still too young to know who you are. I don’t intend to tell her. Still, I suppose she will ask. And I could say, No. I could try to find another doll, or better yet - a worthwhile game, and ask, How about this, instead? Or, I could ask, Which Barbie? and let her play. After all, if play is the most serious thing we do, perhaps we make a mockery of it when we take it as seriously as ourselves.

I’m not having cake, by the way. You’re probably not either; you never were much of an eater. Still, I’ll toast to you. Happy fifty-first, Barbie. I hope that you're not insulted that no one seems to be making much of this particular birthday, which must seem pretty anti-climactic in light of all the fanfare that seemed to surround your fiftieth. You must understand, we are symbolic creatures, and fiftieth is silver, and silver anniversaries are emblematic: they carry a weight and a significance that goes beyond the number of their years.

I suspect that you know all about that. Or rather, I like to think that you do.

Photo provided by bugeaters on flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

From wonder to wonder

“I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”

-Richard Feynman

A year or so ago, a colleague shared with me a truly delightful video interview with Richard Feynman. I am unearthing it today in the spirit of celebrating the human capacity for wonder.

Feynman won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics, prior to a long-time career as professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute for Technology. Such a description truly tells us nothing about the expansive, playful, fascinating mind of this man who speaks at length about “the pleasure of finding things out”. Feynman was also a prankster, juggler, painter, writer, and bongo player. He read expansively on diverse subjects, from Mayan hieroglyphics, to art, to lock picking.

In the opening discussion of the interview, Feynman recalls the misguided criticism of a friend, on the scientific way of viewing things. The friend, Feynman recalls, pointed out the beauty of a flower, which Feynman noted and recognized, and appreciated. The friend asserted that scientists failed to recognize nature’s intrinsic beauty because they insisted on studying it systematically. Feynman goes on to explain how he comes to appreciate the beauty of a flower more deeply by observing it through a scientific lens: by studying the processes, the color, the way insects respond to the color, the cell structure, the wonderful capacity for photosynthesis, etc. He speaks with excitement, and exudes an ebullient joy in being that is strangely rare in adults. In my recent readings on matters related to quantum theory, I’ve come across countless references to Feynman’s work, and I knew I liked him when I came across this quote of his, referenced in Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds:

“ I think we can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics… (which) describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as she is - absurd.”

What struck me most about this video, aside from Feynman’s essential beauty, was his sincere conviction about the importance of recognizing the vast difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. This deeply-held tenet made Feynman suspicious of those who claimed to have definitive answers about the complex mysteries of our natural world. And yet, he was not disillusioned about continually looking for greater understanding. He continued to try to figure things out because, as he said, “it was fun.” Feynman died in 1988, at the age of seventy. This was the same year that Dr. Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time about the search for black holes and a unified theory of everything. Five years later, a junior in high school, I discovered Hawking’s book, and learned about the work of Richard Feynamn and others, and I learned, with a shocking mixture of terror and utter fascination, how limited my view of the world had been. I understood, then, that I understood absolutely nothing.

I’ve been learning ever since, and today I think that I know less than ever.

This is a long clip, but for anyone who can find the time, it's well worth it.

Feynman: "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out"

Photo provided by Alex on flickr under a creative commons license

Some enchanted evening

I am delighted to be participating in the SheWrites.com Blogger Ball Redux. Thank you for taking the time to peruse the modest beginnings of this very new blog. I am just beginning to make a slow and arduous metamorphosis from private notebook writer to public blogger with an eye for developing stories, essays, and my first novel for eventual publication. This feels like a coming out party! I am truly inspired by the resonant, witty, and powerful voices of so many of the women writers that I have been finding through SheWrites. I am also inspired to realize that so many, like me, have been writing in solitude until entering this community. I feel as though I have found my tribe.

I have been writing all my life. I work full time as an English teacher at a High School in an urban fringe community of East San Diego County. My students are mostly children of poor and immigrant families. Many are children of the system. Some are refugees of war, of gang culture, or broken homes. I struggle to find effective ways to meet their many needs while offering meaningful reading and writing instruction. I also struggle to preserve time to write. My husband stays home with our daughter; he lost his job to a major corporation due to company downsizing while I was pregnant. I am a natural home-maker and he took considerable pride in his management position, so to say that this has been an adjustment for both of us is an extreme understatement. I have learned that as long as I am writing, I can handle anything. So, I write more and more. I seem to do my best work in memoir, but feel uncomfortable at the possibility of publishing those. So I am trying my hand at fiction, and learning a great deal. And, of course, blogging! Thank you for joining me here.

Like a web in the air

Poet Robinson Jeffers called it "divinely superfluous beauty," and my daughter, Grace, at seventeen months calls it, "Sky! Sky! Sky!"

We take a few moments in the afternoon yesterday, on the porch, after I get home from work. I take a glass of wine out with me; it's Friday, time to breathe.

Now she turns her attention to a spigot in the wall. "Open, open, open!" She insists, smiling.

Not yet, baby.

I can relate to the feeling though: the sight of an open valve carries with it a craving to turn on the faucet and see what pours out. I am just as impatient, sometimes.

Other times, I am too cautious. I doubt effortlessly, tending to wonder about the point of every word before it leaves me. Locked inside over time, I guess some grow itchy with cabin fever.

This morning I signed up for an online class in Advanced Novel Writing, which seems quite presumptuous in light of the fact that I am an absolute beginner. But it was available, and can be done at 3 am in pajamas, before work, while Grace is sleeping. It starts next week. I have never written a novel, nor even a complete chapter. I have tangles of ideas in stacks of notebooks, and I think it's time to start the messy process of unwinding some.

Grace giggles after her ball. She marvels at the ice in her sippy cup, and remarks enthusiastically at passers-by: Dog! Car! Baby! Bike! My role, for now, is to look, point with her, name, and smile.

Often, though, when I am falling asleep, I wonder what she will notice and question as she gets older. I often suspect that one thing she will ask is, What did you do?

My answers, though balanced enough, seem insufficient if they do not include an honest report about the open valves I tested as I found them. I would like to tell her that I believe life is well-spent noticing details like "the storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals," and prove it. I'd like to create superfluously, that she may see that not everything needs a point; it's the act of pointing that needs preservation.

I'd like to unlearn a learned habit of neglecting to remark and exclaim; of thinking that the azure that envelops our tilted heads is obviously sky, and that it has been seen before and sufficiently named.

She raises her arms above her head now, hands open wide as if to catch something falling. "Up!" she grins, "Up, up, up!"

Photo provided by alistair.pott on flickr under a Creative Commons License.

Gratitude

Since the weekend, I have been noticing how gratitude feels like a ringing in the ears. A visitor enters one’s tiny universe; they ask for nothing, and leave a gift.

What to do? Say Thank You, obviously. I’m afraid that far too often I have stood wondering in amazement, too stunned by the ringing in my ears to enunciate. Earlier, I posted about writing publicly as a deliberate act to offer something instead of nothing, when nothing measures up. In doing so, I have been welcomed by people I have never met, to a community of other senseless givers, far more eloquent and generous than I have been. I have been reunited with the oldest and most kindred friend of my life. My mother’s encouragement was there again, quietly nudging, Yes!

My grandfather, Bob Mons, will be turning eighty-eight in August. He remembers the battle of Normandy. He has raised nine children of his own and countless others for whom he became a stand-in father figure. He overcame alcoholism, beginning the day of my Christening, and used to say prayers over us when we went to visit. When I decided to drive across the country to see places that I had never seen, he asked Why?; and after listening to my ramblings for long enough to figure out that I had no sensible answer to his question, he offered me a four ounce bottle of holy water, and made the sign of the cross over my head. To this day, he sends me pictures on my birthday. There’s one of me on his shoulders at Ward park when I was three; there’s us at the petting zoo. There is my mother in a bathing suit at age nine. There is me on the week of my birth. I’m not sure that’s me, I said to my husband, when it came. It’s you, mom said. He has been doing this every year, for as long as I can remember.

My heart’s blood strains against its walls as I consider this. How does one maintain such diligence, for so many years in a row, with so many other matters of importance to tend to? How is it possible, that he should keep offering so selflessly to me, when I am one of over thirty grandchildren; when I have kept all but few of my heartfelt thank-you’s in notebooks and cards in drawers? Words never measured up. More importantly, none were ever sent. I thought gratitude was a feeling, but I now think it is an act.

Perhaps no words ever do justice to the feeling I have thought of as gratitude. But what good is such a feeling, unexpressed? Giving is an act, and words are... well, just words. That is, until one opens the cage door, and lets them fly, even though there is no telling whether their time in the cage has warped the musculature of their wings. Words are birds in gilded cages in locked rooms, until they find a perch out in the world. In high school I was even more ignorant than I am now, and still I had sense enough to be haunted by this line, from a song in Natalie Merchant’s Tigerlilly album, which I eventually wore out:

I may know the word,

but not say it.

I may love the fruit,

But not taste it.

I may hear a sound:

A whisper, sacred and profound,

But turn my head, indifferent.

It looks like indifference, this stunned awe. I am silent, though you make me sing. I never write; I am writing all the time. I can’t help it.

I can only help to send it back, into the world from whence it came. Why, if it is a ringing in our ears, should one bother waiting? In the words of a man who spent a lot of time contemplating freedom, Let it ring.

In the words of countless others: I’ve got some explaining to do. Or, there is No time like the present; Carpe diem; You can’t win if you don’t play.

Enough borrowed words. Time to find my own, though they will never be able to emulate the ringing in the ears, the swelling of a heart.

It is a subtle shift in posture: from pulling back, to watch a world be offered, in naked and chilled reverence; to leaning in, so slightly, to reach out and offer up one’s amazement, a wondrously ridiculous gift.

Photo provided by Infinity Rain on flickr under a Creative Commons License

So perfect it might not exist

Sometimes I have to catch myself from imagining my way out of existence. I have a tendency to build potential creations up in my head, and then, when I get around to the messy process of making them real, lament their many flaws and leave them cold and abandoned against the ravages of cyberspace, or the darkness of a drawer, or the accumulation of time, which settles like dust and hardens like a layer of earth's crust. What's in there, anyway?

It's unfathomable to think of abandoning one's children this way. But what happens to the many children of a wayward heart? It's always running about, falling in love with the world, impregnating the barren mind with a thousand swimming ideas, intent on connection, entry, gestation. When I became pregnant with my daughter, I gave up wine and coffee. I went for long walks, drank green smoothies, napped, and made an effort to silence unkind thoughts. I visited the doctor at scheduled intervals even though medical offices make me cringe. I read, I prayed, I rubbed holy water over my abdomen and retreated from places that seemed overly loud. But how well do I protect my budding projects: the stories, the songs, the poems that struggle for a fighting chance? How well does any woman, when she allows herself to put a thousand urgent demands ahead of .... well, what do you call it? A soul's cry? The children of a heart? I'm really not trying to get all Leonard Cohen here, but if if there is a sacred chord, and I think there is, in each of us, I want to hear it in a song before it dies inside of me.

So I'm going to forget the fact that I have had lofty ideas about what this could be and ignore that it doesn't look anything like what it is now. I'm going to let go of the urge to throw up my hands and shout, Forget it! Just because, when I finally had a few hours to myself I wound up spending them noodling around trying to get a fancy Wordpress blog up and running. Why? Because I have heard it was the best. Because I have heard it would allow me to maximize creative control. Because people I admire have Wordpress blogs. It would be perfect: I could add this page, and another, and another: music, poetry, inspirational witticisms, tea on fine china. Just as soon as I make a banner, edit calcified poetry, record some songs while the baby sleeps, and learn to use Adobe Illustrator for more than stick figures.

But, the weekend is ending, the sun is about to set, and tomorrow will be Monday with it's jarring demands, and a whole week's worth of reasons why it makes no sense to do this. Number one? It's not ready: the design in my head is so much more beautiful!

As the saying goes, Blah, blah, blah.

Right now this is just a blog. Maybe it'll be a genius. Maybe it will win awards. Maybe it will be picked last in gym class. More likely, it will find its home somewhere in the muddy middle: playing in dirt, playing soccer, playing spin-the-bottle, reading in secret, riding bikes, and feeling a bit confused when it comes to math.

Right now this is all I have to offer you, world. Okay. Here's to writing anyway. Here's to having a pulse, and a warm body, and a goofy smile. Here's to waking up in the morning, and going to bed every night, even though so much is still unfixed, and there is so much preparing left to do.

Perfectionism is a coward's game. Being a mother has taught me that I'm better than that. Here's to all of the illegitimate children of my imagination: I won't let you down. I'll be back soon.

Photo provided by zunardu on flickr, under a Creative Commons License.