Long, Long Summer Days

The cats are alternating napping on and sniffing my tent, spread out over the living room floor to dry after this weekend's camping out. Aviva is hunting out any bugs she can find, sure that every pucker contains a caterpillar or spider. Drala could care less - is happy for the coolness of the polyester, which has yet to warm to room temperature, sticky and hot.

I am trying my hardest to fulfill a promise I made this morning in "I just slept from 7:30 at night to 7:30 in the morning" grog: this is my weekend. Right here. Right now. Monday and Tuesday are it - after that, I need to pack up and prepare to go to Burlington. After I do that for four days, I'll be back to visitors, teacher training, summer school and finishing up prep for the wedding reception. That's a lot! And as I told Dylan last night, I thought doing it "all on weekends" would make things ok (eg work on weekends and take the "weeks off"), only if I don't set the boundary to actually TAKE OFF during the week, I won't. My default is work, work and more work. If there is no work left (never mind that that never really happens), I turn something fun into work. So today will be tv, bike rides, coffee with friends, art and reading/writing. Same with tomorrow. Doctor's orders.

Aviva has settled down to nap like Drala. Looks like the cats agree. Time to do some "serious" chilling.

My website is finally back up!!!

www.herspiral.com

Please subscribe/link here for blog - easier to update and more public, not worth it for me to keep two blogs (at least for now) but check there for class schedules, information, more on what I teach. Thanks for being patient through the phishing debacle and host change-over!

Fierce Attachments

The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick was one of our required books for the last session of Natalie's intensive. It's a fantastic book, essays of an intellectual nature about how to distinguish between memoir and personal narrative. Very educational, lots of examples, and an introduction which, as Nat said and I agree, is "pure dharma." I won't even quote it here, that's how good the whole thing is. Read it - check it out from the library, buy it from your indy local bookstore. Yessiree.

In the process of tracking down that title, I also ran into her memoir Fierce Attachments at St. Vinnies for a buck. I bought it, as it promised me to be about a mother-daughter relationship after the father dies when the daughter is in her teens and mom in post-menopausal world. Sigh. Sound familiar? With a title like Fierce Attachments and a name like Gornick's attached, I couldn't pass it up.

Now I can barely pass it through my system. It's a stormy night/day and I feel like the weather, though of course this is more atmospheric and symbolic than true, is reflecting my immersion into this book. My god. Some of the passages strike more closely to home than anything ever has. There are plenty of books out there about grief - the loss of the living - but it takes a special mind to be able to depict the loss of *life*, a parent or partner who totally subsumes under death's will, not theirs, but that of a loved one's. Here's a passage I read to Dylan last night which made him wince, and I said "Don't you see? This is exactly what it was like in my mom's house after my dad died and it was just her and me." Gornick tells it too well, I guess better than I ever have, which is a strange relief:

"It was the year after my father's death, the year in which I began to sit on the fire escape late at night making up stories in my head. The atmosphere in our house had become morgue-like. My mother's grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air. A heavy drugged sensation filled my head and my body whenever I came back into the apartment. We, none of us -- not my brother, not I, certainly not my mother -- found comfort in one another. We were only exiled together, trapped in a common affliction. Loneliness of the spirit seized conscious hold of me for the first time, and as I turned my face to the street, to the dreamy melancholy inner suggestiveness that had become the only relief from what I quickly perceived as a condition of loss, and of defeat."
(Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments, page 55)

Shit. So I did this outside my own window, in a room separate from my mother. So it was just my mother and I. But otherwise the story is the same. The story of unmitigated but also fiercely attached-to grief. Her mom couldn't let it go and it dragged her down, which dragged everyone down. Hopefully you've read other passages by now of my blog, so you know I am not just blaming the mom. I know that grief is ongoing, all too well. That's all the more reason to let it go when you can. And her mom didn't. Ever. Hurt her worse than anyone and made collateral damage on her daughter. Sounds very familiar to me.

Then, because she is blessed, and rich and full, Gornick depicts openness, mindfulness, awareness, with the same ease, the same pedestrian everyone-can-understand way, just a dozen or so pages later:

"That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as the slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I'm safe. I'm free. I'm thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing."
-Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments, p.103

Not only does she depict singular suffering (the situation of her father's death and mother's grief) but also the larger picture of enlightenment and suffering (what a story we attach to!). Amazing stuff, and not just for another orphan, or 1/2 orphan, as she points out, since she had "only lost Father."

The fierce attachments that Gornick depicts for herself most in this book are that spaciousness on one end and the horrid grief that calls her home on the other. Where's the middle ground? I'll let you read yourself to find out.

Undoing the guilt of non-doing

So, in theory, I am on vacation for the three weeks including this one and next two.

I teach this upcoming weekend, so that's definitely work. And the weekend after that, also work. Let's say that is half time. If my life were easier to assess in terms of what is work and what is pleasure, I could say that I could work 20 hours this week, if I wanted to, and relax the rest. Or say that since I am freaking working during "vacation" I shouldn't work at all during the week. ONly there is stuff to get done, not much, but some, and well, my life just isn't that distinct.

The kinds of things which sometimes feel like work and sometimes like pleasure:
-sewing tablecloths for our wedding reception
-wedding reception prep stuff in general
-painting the kitchen
-writing, yes, writing
-cleaning the cat boxes, the bathroom, the floors
-gardening


The things that never feel like work:
-watching Buffy (just about to start Season 7)
-Biking
-shopping
-reading (even when I *have* to do it)
-hanging with the cats
-collaging
-knitting
-going for a walk
-taking photos

Things that always feel like work:
-emails (even if they aren't work-related, and that's a fine boundary for sure)
-phone calls (except for very personal ones, and if I am depressed, they feel like work, but a different kind of work)
-teaching (as much as I love it, it's definitely draining, even with good boundaries)
-taking care of house repair calls, appointments, errands
-grocery shopping

Last night I spoke with a student and friend who is a "stay at home mom". We talked, because I was having some trouble with these things and was curious how it is for someone who is "not" getting paid to do her work, no matter what kind it was at home, how she felt about that. She said at first, when her boys were young and always home, she could relate to working class families, and felt underappreciated at times. "Look at me, I am freaking working full time and getting no pay," but at the same time, she said, they shared more tasks, she and her husband who worked/s outside the home. Now that both of her sons are in care, one in school the other in pre-school, she has more time to do the house things during the day so they can all relax at night. "And I am ok with that, because now that makes more time for all of us. Even during the summer, it works, because the boys are older now and can amuse themselves." Still, she said, of course she can't be as creative for longer as she wants, and it is hard, but not the same kind of hard. She even prefers summer without scheduling, free open days. She also now appreciates how her husband works so hard to ensure they have benefits, safety, paid mortgage, etc, and realizes what a sacrifice he makes.

Huh. I was on a martyr trip all day yesterday, really feeling like because I am at home a lot, whether officially working or not, I am "stuck" doing the stuff at home. This is neither totally fair nor true, of course, and was triggered mostly by a) my lack of boundaries about it and b) not doing more fun stuff for myself during the day. And a discussion with Dylan about whether or not he should keep his full time job "just so we can have benefits."

So why not do less? Why not take advantage of this time, instead of blaming the feeling that I can't do nothing on the tasks that are always hanging around regardless of how much I or Dylan do/es? The endless to-do lists of all ilk. Pick more from the definitely never to-do feeling, especially for the next couple of days, before I go to work for the weekend. Chill out. It's a choice. And one I can be especially grateful for, for as "unstable" in theory as my job is, I have a lot of freedom and choice, which can be almost paralyzing, but also appreciated.

So that's it. Nothing from the definite work list. Some tasks from the sometimes-feels-like-work list in order to get them in order. And today, lots from the not-work list. Knitting. Cat cuddling. Reading. If I do enough of those, then even weeding and painting don't feel like work. Like so many things, context is key.

Spontaneous Cooperative Action (Return from Taos)

Here it is. "The post" following my week in Taos. I put up a couple of posts while there, but of course I hand-wrote my heart out, so the idea of getting online to either copy over some of my experiences or write them in a different mode was far from appealing.

I was glad I took my laptop along, though. The couple of posts I did make, as well as being able to sieve through email bit by bit, use Skype to talk to Dylan for free and keep tiny tabs on Facebook (I was very proud of my non-progress there!) were all really helpful. I found the first of the four intensives with Natalie Goldberg (I am doing a four-part program and this one was part two) intensely lonely - I knew almost no one there, we were in silence almost immediately, and I had to pay outrageous cell roaming rates to talk to Dylan. No hugs, barely any eye contact, no cats. Plus I was in a mid-winter depression.

This time around was remarkedly different for many reasons, but the main one is the title of this post. There was a sense, barely logically built by the minimal email contact in-between, of actually knowing each other, and of increased compassion. Folks made a bit more eye contact, were relaxed into their issues more easily, and the pain rose, for all of us, to the surface a bit sooner and stayed there. The first few stormy days let us feel at ease being unsteady, and the sun dried it all up toward the end. I went on an (almost) silent spontaneous field trip with a core group on Thursday, and got to see the Rio Grande Gorge (pictures up soon on Flickr) and a few of the small towns nearby. Friday we did a similar trip with a caravan of all 25 participants and Natalie - to Sweet Nymphs in Peñasco, to Dixon and their fantastic community library, to Banana Rose territory. Add to this so many hours of inner landscape, and the sense of spaciousness, though tittered through with depression, confusion, self-hatred, was glorious.

For those of you who haven't done it, I can't recommend it enough. Go Study With Natalie. The area she teaches in, Taos, and the building/retreat center, Mabel Dodge Luhan House, are an experience all in themselves. Though I am working on getting her here to the Midwest to teach, she is utterly in her element there, her home scape of now 20 years. The high desert is a powerful tool for stripping one down to the elements. She offers financial aid. She is a master. There are very few reasons not to do it, and I guarantee I could convince you out of them if you give me half a chance. If you feel any calling to writing practice at all whatsoever, just one long weekend retreat will buoy you up for years.

The sense of what can happen in a space where people are gathered for just this motivation: spontaneous cooperative action - that sense is hopefully common enough in our neighborhoods, with friends and family, but to do it with strangers, in the desert, high up above the earth, and one hand held by a master while the other writes through your fears to the deepest truths that exist, that is immeasureable. Priceless, as Mastercard would say.

I am lucky enough to realize I get whiffs of this week to week, whether or not I am in class sessions. I am also smart enough to realize very few are as lucky as me. You want the luck? Make it happen. That's the way to make a path for it to beat its way to your door. You have to cooperate for spontenaity to act toward you. Go for it.