Reflections on Identity

I am going through a training to become authorized to facilitate workshops with Leesa Renee Hall's Unpack Biases Now program. I am really excited to be able to use such powerful tools, developed by a whipsmart and compassionate highly sensitive Black leader, in writing. Not only do I not have to re-invent the wheel myself, and I can use her amazing tools, but I also get to support and emanate out her style and approach, which has greatly impacted me in the last year or so.

Over time, I am investigating identity more and more with my Contemplative Writing groups. This has been a blindspot in my teaching practice in writing - not going directly for or into identity, especially ways in which access via identity privilege some of us more than others. My students are majority white, cisgender female, middle class. While I have a high percentage of queer women in my classes, in terms of sexual orientation, I have found for myself and others that "being queer" can only carry us so far in terms of compassion and direct understanding with People of Color. More often than not, it can actually serve as a bargaining tool, an "oppression Olympics" player piece. As in: "Well, I may be white, but I am also a woman, and I am queer, so I know what it is like to be oppressed," said in a defensive tone, especially when called out for having expressed a racist view.

There is so much wisdom in exploring our identities, especially the dominant identities, with a contemplative lens and deep curiosity. So I wanted to share, along the lines of blog posts I used to do more frequently, some of the reflections which have come up. These are anonymous, only occasionally direct quotes (when the person's articulation was stunning) but other than knowing they come from my classes over the last few weeks, I have removed any identifying factors. As a lot of you know, I so prefer to tell stories from first person, or relate them to a specific person. I generally avoid, "you," or "one," or "we," in writing, because I don't want people to feel if they don't fit into the description there is something wrong with them. However, when I am protecting identity, I generalize a bit in order to protect identity. So please keep that in mind.

Here is a wisdom culling from reflections on identity in class a few weeks ago. The prompt was on what we see in the mirror - and what is not shown in the mirror.

Where I Am - Weekly Class

(I decided to start doing these again this session and see if they are of benefit to others and myself. I take bits and pieces from conversations in classes, combined with nuggets of language - removing any identifying factors and changing necessary details to preserve anonymity - from classes. I used to do this more and it's a lovely way for me to gather all I got out of the classes, and have a place for everyone to see the collective wisdom and struggle I get to see each week.)

"Where I Am" is my favorite default prompt nowadays, borrowed from Natalie Goldberg via Saundra Goldman and her #continuouspractice group on Facebook. "Where I am" is a classically good prompt - it can be answered very directly, with description of your physical location, or it can be taken many different possible directions - where you are in your life, where your mind is right now, etc. It seems boring, simple - but it is multidimensional.

"Forgetting How Easily Children Soil Clothes"

This beautiful, totally unedited fresh writing came from a student this week, Priscilla Matthews, in response to a prompt where they selected a single line of poetry from various poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. Priscilla had no idea this was what she was going to write - as is true to the practice, she simply put pen to paper, and this homage emerged.

There's not much I want to say about it, except to point out the incredible ordinary-ness of it: clothing, stains, children, laundry. And so powerful - all the details, and the way she connects it back to her mother and herself. Direct. Clear. Universal. Specific.

I will also point out that Priscilla stated some things I can relate to, having also lost my parents when I was young. I relate in particular to these lines: "If she had lived, she may have died by now," and, "Does this mean I'm finally in sync with my peers?"

Please enjoy this poignant grief and pleasure mixture.

forgetting how easily children soil clothesI just remembered that today would have been my Mom’s birthday.  She would have been 87 years old.  If she had lived, she may have died by now.  Having a parent pass at my age now is “normal.” It’s part of the process many people my age are going through.  Does this mean I’m finally in sync with my peers?  No.  I don’t understand their expressions of grief.  But I am more compassionate and patient with them than I was with myself.“forgetting how easily children soil clothes”My mom had 8 children within 9 years.  The other day I imagined how joyful it must have been for her with one child…the time she had to dress her, play in the grass, share her growth with my Dad.  And then my brother was born, and the work grew, the balancing act.  And then another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another.

Being in the Body Post-Election

Last week, I asked my students in my weekly contemplative writing classes to write about their feelings regarding the election from their bodies. The most potent pieces came Wednesday morning, as folks had either stayed up all night, most of the night, or gone to bed and woken to the news.

The fact is, the over-whelming majority of my students are liberal. But a lot of students were able to feel how human our reactions are. This anonymous piece in particular struck me with the universal human level of fear in the body. 

I offer this as a model for being present, for watching not only the body but the mind itself. Regardless of whether you are celebrating right now or in deep despair, tap into your body. Fear consumed most of us pre-election, and if the results had gone the other way, the "other side" would right now be feeling a similar way post-election.

Finally, one of my favorite parts is where this student opens up questions about neurotic smallness (childhood survival, which was useful but she now sees as disempowering) versus the kind of smallness that can open us to all of the present moment - simple actions like picking chard from the garden. These two smallnesses are often conflated with each other, but the second can offer serious liberation and deep relief in times like these.

I breathe into my body through my feet.  The sun is a vibration of continuance, the yellow leaves of a neighbor's tree shimmer and wave.  The sky lightens into a bright blue.  I find comfort in the fact that my garden is still growing, people are still walking their dogs down our street, I can still hear traffic from nearby streets; the world continues despite last night's outcome.  Or at least it seems to continue.  The world of people and politics and the world beyond people and politics.  I pick chard, red and green, my hands and cuffs soaked with morning dew.

My 3 R's

I don't do much arithmetic. When called to do it, I derisively jest that I am a writer and writing teacher for a person - a classic artist, uninclined to physics except for metaphors and definitely not good with numbers. For me, the third R - a real R - that rounds out reading and writing is equally tricky, strangling even. But it's related to the writing process in a way that mathematics isn't.

The White Expanse

This piece blew us all away in class. 

It's very tricky to lean into a full-on metaphorical image like this. Though Tod said it happened without his thinking about it, and without planning, his practice has allowed him to stay very close to surprising connections. He says he didn't even realize it was him until teh part about "the other members of his writing group." 

The imposter syndrome - feeling a fraud is well-depicted here. Also, the more nuanced but super tricky feeling that anything we do well must be cheating, not worth reading. If the writing comes easily, if, for instance, we build fictional worlds easily with barely any effort, then that must be bad writing, or we are just tricking everyone into thinking we are a good writer.

How to overcome this? Practice. Regular and compassionate. Consistent. And companionship.

Tod's writing:

He sprung into the white open expanse of his blank notebook page as if he was diving into a swimming pool of milk.  When he surfaced, breathless, blinking away the liquid pearls from his eyelashes, he was astonished to find that he’d written an entire story.

            The story was about a man who wrote stories, but hadn’t always been able to do so because the stories got stuck on their way out, they spoke in languages the man didn’t understand, so he didn’t know how to write them down, how to spell them.  It was a matter that came before the actual craft of writing itself, because he had to learn the language the stories were speaking.

Compassion: A Short Fiction Story

I get to offer you another incredible piece written by a student for my prompt on Compassion a few weeks ago. As always, it is unedited, written rawly this way. Powerful stuff.

This one blew all of us away. This student, Kika, doesn't usually write in fiction and we were immediately pulled into the world she describes - the snow, the insect, the mug, the window.

The ambiguity she addresses was universal in so many student writings that week. Compassion: we want it to be easy and clean. But it isn't.

Please enjoy.

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Compassion. It was the guiding force in her life - or at least, she liked to think so.

As she watched the bundled humans toddle past in their heavy boots and scarves, Clementine noticed an insect crawling up the window pane. It had a long, narrow body and bowed legs, with delicate wings in four sections. It was a pale green color, at odds with the weather, and it used its antennae to gently tap the glass, as it it, too, wanted to be out in the snow, moving through that fresh glittering white. Where had it come from? Clementine was overcome with tenderness at its unlikely presence, its fragility, its ghostly vernal beauty. She looked at the glass again; such a thin pane, old enough that cool drafts seeped from it, causing her to clutch the mug of tea more tightly. It had been a bad idea to put cold cream in the tea. In December it was always best to heat the cream, so both vessel and drink stayed hotter longer. A warm kind of company, almost like holding hands with someone you love.

Feast of Plenty

A prompt from a couple of weeks ago, "Feast of Plenty," inspired this response from a student. We were all struck by how the container of one year showed such a dramatic difference in her life. Without being sentimental or romantic, she shows a serious reversal of thinking along with her reversal of fortune, so to speak.

When I asked her if she wanted this to be anonymous or with her name, she said: "No anonymity needed. I shout my truths loudly and unapologetically from rooftops." Excellent courage and power.


Feast of Plenty
Polly Sackett

This will be the first year that I will not write several checks to charitable giving and 503 c organizations. Goodman, Second Harvest, Common Wealth. I don't chip* anymore. This is the first year that my children and I will not go to Farm and Fleet toyland to purchase gifts for children in the Goodman Center holiday gift sponsorship program.

No, this is the year that I ask the Goodman Center if my children can be sponsored. Boy - age 7 - loves Rick Riordan books and Legos. Girl - age 5 - any little toys she can use to manipulate and play out her world.

This is the year of foodstamps. This is the year of eating out of the free box at work. This is the year of filling my van with gas only $15 at a time. 

Horror as Consolation

Last week in my weekly, in-person classes, the prompt was about reading. I got so many amazing responses, as I recall was the case the last time I used this prompt, two years ago. In fact, I am going to ask students to share their writings and put together a small book of them - Writers on Reading.

However, one response in particular really hit all of my personal bells.
I wanted to share the part(s) that struck me most here.
The first spot to really shock me awake was her insight about compulsive reading. I often find (and many others wrote about this) that I read mindlessly, intensely, and that's even reading "good literature."

Here's Kara's insight on this that struck home for me:

I grew up as one of those quiet shy girls with my nose in a book. I actually resisted reading at first. I remember in first grade being behind. Then something happened. I know my sister gave me The Little House on the Prairie books in second grade, and the next thing I know, I began tearing through books. I kept reading, and did it a lot. Compulsively. These were my video games.

It's that last set of lines that hit me. That would have been enough. So articulate. But then she went on to describe something I have NEVER heard anyone else describe: assuaging grief with horror. When my father died, I read all of Stephen King, a fair amount of Peter Straub and the like.

Here we go with Kara's passage that blew me out of my seat:

Counter-Narratives of Joy

It's easy to tell a sad story.


I know, because I have told one a long time. Many sad stories, in fact. I am not saying it is easy to live a sad story, but modern American culture seems to long for tragedies.

I know this is hedgey ground. I, myself, highly dislike overtly positive psychology, affirmations, attraction theories. I think, I believe, it is highly important to not only address our pain, but to tell that story, again and again and again. Until we feel heard, until it is clear, until we understand.

And yet.

At a short writing workshop in Toronto on Monday of last week, a student ended her last piece, the last one read, with a passage about "counter-narratives of joy." This struck everyone immediately - we all felt the power of it, though it took some discussion afterwards to figure out why, and what the different meanings were.

The main gist was this: we tell stories of woe, of suffering, of sadness, and they are essential.
And yet.
Sometimes they become the main narrative. The only story. The way we show how hard we have worked, how much we have been through. Suffering can seem a credential, being a victim a preferred position, always being wronged as being on the right side. So it's not just a need for stories of joy - stories that also express - also, not instead of - where we have reveled, appreciated and celebrated. Not just that need, but that following, developing, expressing that can actually seem antithetical, opposing, against the stream.

Wilderness

This writing is by a student named C. V. Clark. She is relatively new to the practice, but empowered instantly, as is often the case. Call it "beginner's mind," but her direct hit on wilderness (the prompt from a few weeks ago) was insightful, vivid and real. Her insights reflect many of those that arose all week - questions about whether humans are wild or nature is, about solitary/solitude/loneliness and nature, and about the edges of danger meeting beauty.

In particular, the closing line really struck at the paradox of the prompt:
"The wilderness of humanity is not always so welcoming and reaffirming."

Please read for yourself...

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Wild. Wilder. Wilderness.

Instantaneous pictures: Painted Desert. Great Plains. Badlands. Congaree Swamp. Ice caves

and frozen-over Great Lakes.

Awesome and inviting in their sheer lonely, empty, overwhelming beauty. Nothing distracts

me. That is what I first recall.

The Power of Trees

Tree Prayer, Deer Park, 2012

A few weeks ago, I gave a prompt about trees in my contemplative writing class. Out of the deep cold of winter, many students pulled memories and palpable experiences. Just the week before I'd asked them for what brought them joy. When they couldn't find it asked directly, a lot of them found it in trees.

There was an article recently in the New Yorker where the writer debated whether or not plants have intelligence. In the article, one scientist was quoted as saying, paraphrased: They can turn light into food. Isn't that intelligent enough? The student poetically captures this thought in this line:
All words grasping at form, imagery that belittles the magic of life essence, the simplicity of warm transmuting into life.

This piece resonated along those lines: really appreciating the ordinary magic of trees. It has a lot of specificity - the writer has become the tree! And yet, it is so spacious and open. Enjoy.

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I am an outlier. I am the tip of the tip – round, full, bulging. An ever so slight pulsing puts me in close association with my world; the world beyond my borders, my edges. I feel clear and warm – a bubble of a cell. Green. Clear. Light beams into me, through me. The sun is warm. 

I lie on the edge, the boundary of something and nothing. The boundary of shape and shapeless. My shape shifts slightly with the pulse of the warm sunlight as I form sugars and sweets that pass, that get passed – sucked – shloop, shloop and shloop – steady, unremitting giving up my sweetness that comes from the sun and moved along. Shloop. Shloop. Shloop. Moved along the channels, the pathways that connect me on the outer edge of this internal world. The sweetness sets out on its own journey from the edge of shape and form; pulses along the channels. The sweetness gathers and is joined and formed and becomes more intense. 

The outer reaches are where birth happens but it is at the centre in the main trunk of movement, the solid form, the upright channels of life that support the edge, the boundary of form and no form. The heat on the edge is sun-warm, today anyway. 

But further along, deeper in, is the life warm, the essence warm.  Factory? Engine rooms? Control central? All words grasping at form, imagery that belittles the magic of life essence, the simplicity of warm transmuting into life that is anchored deep in the earth to the outliers of where form and no form rests in the cool damp earth. I am warm. The tip of the edge where the sun touches, caresses and makes magic. 

Far below is the edge which opens to receive the moisture of the earth; the shapeless pulsing edge of life. Our edges never touch. We do not know about each other. We stay on the edge. This edge is for now. Tomorrow there will be another edge; the separation between form and formless and we will continue to be where we are.

By Miriam’s novice student, February 2014 (this was how the student asked to be credited)

Quivering

signs of life, january 2014

This is a student piece, written in response to a Rumi quote prompt from a couple of weeks ago. I was impressed with her deeply physical descriptions of being cold, and the description of a civilized city like Toronto being a wilderness. As well, her on-the-spot spontaneous analysis of "side effects" really hit me.

This is my favorite line:

And so this quiver that I quiver is a reminder that I am alive and fragile and only a moment in all of time, waiting for a bus that will be late and trying not to make all of this a bigger deal than it really is.

-----On to the piece--------------

Stay here, quivering with each moment

like a drop of mercury

-Rumi

By Jan Derbyshire

I quiver here like I don't remember quivering before. It is minus 31 with the wind chill factor. I don't understand this wind chill factor. The temperature, I'm told is minus 19 degrees celsius*,but with the wind chill factor it feels like minus 31*. If it feels like minus 31, isn't it minus 31? This is all too much like drugs and side effects. To me an effect is an effect. When they say side effect it makes it sound like something that will happen beside you. If a drug has a side effect of making you gain weight, the fat will just pile up next to you. You can even leave it there when you go out, just call the fat sitter. My point is this-they talk about the wind chill factor like a side effect of the weather. It's true, they say, it feels like minus 31 but don't feel too bad, it's really only minus 19. And who can say what one person's experience of minus 31 is to another person's experience of minus 31.

The Way of Writing Is Not A Subtle Argument

Lost, Chicago 2013

I am sharing a student writing again this week.
I love this piece because it so clearly shows the writer's process.

The prompt for this last week was to use one of many possible (and provided) quotes from Rumi. This is the one this student, Heather, chose. She chose another one and felt similar resistance, so she went on ahead with this one: "The way of love is not a subtle argument." At first it seems to be "working" - she's writing about the quote. Then she feels her block, and proceeds to describe the guards who are protecting whatever is behind her block.

Then, the not-subtle argument becomes her process - it's not (just) about love anymore, but about the very writing she is doing. Finally, she returns to the place where she is - neighbors and sounds, and creates/discovers a little universe that is conspiring against inspiring her.

My Heart on My Sleeve

Love, NYC 2011

This week is a post by a student, Barbara Samuel. She describes so well the process of sharing, what we are looking for from others about our writing, as well as looking for from others about ourselves. I think it really fits my last post about not using writing - or anything else - to get love. She really shows the mixed bag of connection and fear. I am discussing a lot of how this relates to writing memoir in particular over at Memoir Mind, in case this piques your interest in that direction. She also begins to explore how hard it can be to depict a particular time in our lives and share it with others without them seeing us as just that at that time. What do we do when the era we are depicting is so different than who we are now?

We just read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which she refers to in the piece.

This is a rough draft, as always is the case with my students' pieces here.Actually I prefer to call them "raw drafts" instead of rough drafts - it better depicts why I find them so powerful.

-Miriam

When I visit my son and daughter-in-law I take a flash drive with me that contains
everything I’ve written in the last year and a half. Every time we are together, there
or here, they ask me to read some pieces. That’s one benefit of having a close child;
there is one person in the world who actually wants to hear what I’ve been writing.

Chicken Soup de la Soul

I've been struggling with phantom lung distress (no one knows what it is, but it makes it hard to breathe) lately, and this story keeps coming back into my mind, a lovingly funny and odd releif from focusing on what is wrong with my body.

I hope you enjoy it as well.

Chicken Soup de la Soul
A flash fiction story by Tod Highsmith (an un-edited student writing from last spring)

    I felt sick last week, my stomach was upset and after a few hours I went in the bathroom, kneeled by the toilet for a while and finally vomited. It was unpleasant as it always is, and I was surprised to see a slip of paper in the toilet. Did that come out of me? I wondered. I almost flushed it down, but something made me fish it out, dry it off and check it out.
   It was a poem, not a very good one, written in my own hand. I’d never seen it before, but I recognized my own tracks in the words and images. Some of the words were the wrong words, they were close to what was necessary but just far enough off to sour the image or the meaning. I had tried too hard in other parts of the poem, so that it felt overwrought and over written, it wasn’t a poem you could relax into, it had the uptight energy of someone trying to force square words into round meanings, or mixing words of different colors to make new colors but always ending up with gray or brown.
   I went outside later on to sit on the front steps and feel the sun on my face. The neighbor was coming out to get in her car to go somewhere. She saw me and commented that I didn’t look so good.
    “No, I’ve got some stomach thing,” I told her.
   “You should try chicken soup,” she said, “for the soul.”
    I thought she was talking about that popular book which I’d never seen but assumed was full of folksy aphorisms about life and love.
    “Oh, I don’t think that book’s for me,” I said.
    “No, not the book,” she said, “Chicken Soup de la Soul. It’s a rap group. They’re at the coffee house tonight. You should go hear them.” And she drove off.
    That night I walked down to the coffee house. I was feeling better since I’d purged myself, so to speak, and thought maybe an evening out would do me good. I walked the few blocks, my eyes alternately moving from the cracks in the sidewalk where ants were moving in masses, each carrying a tiny white egg, to the horizon, where shining dully in the sunset a comet was visible, its fuzzy tail dragging behind like a spritz of spray from a freshly opened can of soda or the blurry swish of a cat’s tail being violently wagged.
    After thinking up those images, I felt sick again and had to stop for a couple of minutes, squatting on the sidewalk. Then it passed, and I decided I’d go on to the coffeehouse. A cat walked across the sidewalk in front of me, her tail held high like a signal of warning, her loud purr a cross of affection and foreboding.
    I vomited a small puddle of yucky stuff in the grass, almost started home again, but stopped and looked in it. There was a tiny piece of paper -- it looked like a wrapper from a piece of candy. On it were written in my own hand the words “June, croon, moon, spoon.” I kind of laughed, looked around to see if anybody was watching me, and put the paper in my pocket.
    When I finally got to the coffeehouse, the show had already started. There were three men on stage, and I could hardly believe my eyes. They must have been identical triplets -- is there such a thing? And they were dead ringers for myself when I was about 25 or so. They were rapping with an incredible complexity, wrapping words and rhymes around each other in a magical way. I was spellbound. I recognized some of the words that I’d been using in my own poems recently, but in their hands the words flowed with color and feeling.
   There was a woman at a small table next to me who was listening intently and weeping softly. When the band took a break and she got up, I looked over at a small notebook she’d been writing in. She had written something about how the three women on stage reminded her of her younger self. That kind of freaked me out, and I got up and went into the men’s room.
   When I opened the door, the musicians -- I guess that’s what you’d call them -- were all in there. Well, two of them were. One was standing on a box by a small window. The other was supporting him from behind as he crawled through the small opening. When he heard me come in, the last brother turned and gave me a sheepish look before he climbed up and disappeared through the window himself.
    He said, “Sorry, all we can really do is suggest a little melody, try to provide a little music. The words are yours. You have to own them. It’s okay if they make you sick now and then. That happens to all of us. Good luck!”
    When I got home, I pulled out the paper I’d rescued from the toilet and looked at it again. I started copying the poem onto a new, clean sheet of paper and spent most of the night playing with the sounds of words, humming a rhythm into them and underlining them with bright primary colors. I was quite pleased with the poem by morning and taped it to the refrigerator door. I went outside to look at the sunrise just in time to see the comet’s tail disappear over the horizon.

Swimming While Sleeping

Lake Wingra, Madison: Sky in Water, July 2013

This is a student writing from late last spring. It keeps haunting me. The prompt was about "elements" - which of the four main elements (earth water fire air) do you relate to most?

This student had really been struggling with her writing, but this came out, well, like water.

It is unedited here, just as it came out of her pen on paper.

Enjoy.

She is swimming, always swimming, even when not swimming.  Even when sleeping.  No, that’s not right.  She sleeps and dreams of swimming.  Keep the pen on the paper.  Don’t stop.  Don’t look out the window.  Don’t listen to the trucks rumbling by.  No; let the sounds in, but don’t hold onto them; let them float by, as do the tiny sea creatures, down deep, that the swimmer swims through, in the deepest part of a dream.  Everything is slower in the depths, in the ocean, in the murky but strangely light fluid that is filled with life.  She doesn’t need to breathe, at least breathing is not an issue, and she can see everything, but is not aware of her eyes.  She can’t name what she sees, cannot hear, cannot touch, but she is aware of it all and knows it by heart.  This is the ocean, or is it sleep?  Or wakefulness?

She jumps into the clear, sparkling water of the Olympic-size pool, adjusts her goggles and swims freestyle to the end and back, once, twice, three times and more.  The air is warm, the water holds the blue of the sky and crystals of light, and the sun shines with enough power to propel her through the water.  She is smiling, even as she breathes out bubbles of air, turning her head to the side and capturing the sunlight on her face as she takes another breath.  This is what she has waited all winter for: the twelve weeks when she can have it all – the warm air, the bright sun, the sparkling water, the countless gallons of water holding her aloft, weightless, as she moves herself down the lane, back and forth from end to end, free from every single thing. 

In the water her mind is free.  Her thoughts float as she would float in the surf at the ocean, buoyed by the salty infinity that reaches around the globe.  And when her hands are in the water, washing dishes, her mind wanders then, too, and she is free to be anywhere, anything.  As she fills the dog’s water bowl, as she rinses off her dirty feet after gardening barefoot, as she stands under the shower letting streams and beads and bullets of water run over her head and down across her shoulders, as she points the hose at the thirsty plants, holding her thumb over the nozzle to make the water spray far and wide, and the sun catches drops and makes colors and translucent mist, as she watches the rain come in sheets and run in little rivers down the gutters in the street, she is at home in the universe.