Privacy Versus Secrecy

Milwaukee, WI January 2012

I write memoir. It’s kind of my thing, has been for a few years now. I am a pretty public person, willing to talk with most folks about private issues, though I am discrete, or like to think of myself that way – trying not to over share, to have boundaries. Sometimes my wife has to remind me to speak quietly in a public place while having an intimate conversation on my cell phone.

I am very careful about confidentiality with my students, and set limits as to what gets shared about my own life with others, asking for confidentiality for myself. But now that some essays are getting published – on elephant journal, in the anthology Trans-Kin, I am beginning to realize what I have set up for myself here – a life of a writer sharing her life with everyone who will read it.

Compassion Confession

Ekphrastic photo of Squeak Carnworth's Perfect Studio, Chazen Museum, Madison, WI

I have a confession to make.
I have made it in oblique ways to some of you in the past, but I think it's time I say it directly.
A newer student this week said that she read the essays I send out before starting class (which started as blog posts here: Listening In, All the Ways We Apologize and Speaking Up, and have since all been published online elsewhere). After she was done, even before she was done, she realized she "didn't even need to read them." Not because she already knew all they said, but because even reading just parts told her what she needed to know:
I create safe spaces.
She will learn in the process what's in the essays.

So here it is:
I am not a writing teacher. I am not a photography teacher, a calligraphy teacher, a movement teacher.
I am a Buddhist teacher.
I am a Compassion teacher.

Set This House in Order

Mannequin photo from my upcoming show "Mannequins and Miniatures" at EVP East in Madison, WI, May 1-May 26

I've got Shingles.

Because I am a linguistics nerd, my favorite part of the Wikipedia entry is about the etymology of the terms for this virus:
The family name of all the herpesviridae is derived from the Greek word herpein ("to creep"),^[77] referring to the latent, recurring infections typical of this group of viruses. Zoster comes from Greek zōstēr, meaning "belt" or "girdle", after the characteristic belt-like dermatomal rash.^[78] The common name for the disease, shingles, derives from the Latin cingulus, a variant of Latin cingulum meaning "girdle".^[79]

But the fact is that when I google "shingles," which, of course, I've been doing a lot lately, the most common thing to come up, along with the actual virus, is references to house shingles. You know, the things that make up the roof. And so it seems, again, I am setting this house in order.

Support

Every year for the last few years, I have picked a Sankalpa/intention word on New Year's Eve.
Or, I should say, it often picks me.