See? I told you Carlene can squat!

With Elena last night before we went to Cappy's.  

Chapters 3: My Spiritual Journey

Back in Middle Georgia College, we had a professor who  started every class in American Government with these words: "The question before the house is...." He pronounced "house" hoose.

The repetition of that phrase every day for an entire quarter branded it in our brains.  I think of it often as I begin to write, especially as I write about something as personal as my own spiritual journey--which I'm going to wrap up in this post.  The question before the house is, frankly: "Who, besides me, cares?"

I've read several writers who say that they write for one person, sometimes two.  For themselves and one close friend or for one imagined stranger. Joan Didion said, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

I write to find out what I'm thinking: Putting words on a page or a screen, I'm often surprised by what I say.  If I started out knowing what I was going to say, I wouldn't have had to write it to get there.

As for "who cares?" I care--about what it my truth enough to write it, and I care about the truths of other writers, in my groups and writers who have been like lighthouses for me through the years.  When a writer reads aloud what she's excavated from her own soul and memory, I often respond with goosebumps, a visceral response to "what is true" for her being also true for me--or close.

I started this blog as a travelogue as I drove, solo, to the west coast. And yet, here I am, still writing.  Writing is my spiritual journey.

John Keats wrote, "All writing is a form of prayer." Writing connects me to you--those of you who are reading this blog--and it connects me to whatever is bigger, even when it's the larger territory of my own mind.

Each time I read a good memoir or novel or poem, I'm blown away--as we used to say in the sixties.

Giving Up Cooking

Carlene and I have decided that we're done cooking.  We both cooked our share of meals in our day: pork chops and vegetables and fried chicken; my three-year stint of macrobiotics; various other trendy cuisine and dietary paths.  We shopped for groceries and washed the dishes by hand--until our kids were old enough to wash them for us--or (as I did) practice piano to avoid washing them.

But we don't cook any more: how liberating to say that!

I make smoothies in the Vitamix and she eats cereal.  Sometimes we make soup or nachos.  But really--five course meals, even three--those are from bygone days.

Adalantes makes the best quesadillas and fried sweet potatoes!  (And it's filled with colorful folk art and globes)

You can't beat the enchiladas verdes at Solunas.

Cappy's dishes are consistently excellent.  I love their crab cakes and creme brûlée. 

Betos, Nordstrom's Bistro, Cracker Barrel and Chipotles: All provide terrific alternatives to cooking in the kitchen.  Maybe I'm going to turn my kitchen into a crafts room and start making rag dolls; who knows? 

Carlene tells a story about her mother, Mildred, and her grandmother, Cana.  When they were young, they used to make a chocolate pie and eat it, just the two of them!

There's a scene in the movie, Sweet Land, in which two farm women do the same.  They don't even speak the same language--but they make themselves a pie and they both speak Pie! 

What happened to two women eating a whole pie together?  With all the gluten-free and sugar-free and other attempts at perfection, where's the good old pie eating that should be staples in any friendship? 

Easter in Helotes

"The Language of the Body"

Callings, by Gregg Levoy, includes a chapter with this title, opening with this line by Herman Melville: "I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me."

The body speaks in signs.  When something hurts, the symptom may be telling us something we can't "get through our thick skulls" in the ordinary language we speak.  The body doesn't speak English.

I read this book years ago, but this time I'm reading it with the backdrop of all these films I've been watching (like Hungry for Change), which say that the body is designed to heal itself of many ailments and diseases, if we know how to read what it's telling us.

I watched a documentary called My 600 Pound Life that followed a morbidly obese woman for seven years. As she begins to lose the weight, she acknowledges that she had been sexually molested as a child, and that she nearly "ate her way to death" to protect herself from further abuse.

When surgeons  cut off pounds of excess and sagging skin, she looked way better--in clothes.  But her body unclothed looked battered from the ravages of gaining and losing more than 400 pounds. The point of her journey was to lose enough weight to walk around, "to get her life back," as she said. But the strange thing was that she was not advised to eat drastically different--only less of the stuff she was already eating: hot dogs and canned chile and cookies.

Everyone wants to avoid what is painful or unpleasant, but the thrust of this chapter is that we shouldn't medicate symptoms away before we hear what they are trying to tell us.  Stephen Levine said that we are not so much responsible for our illnesses as we are responsible to our illnesses. "The question is not so much what to do about our suffering, but what to do with it."

The body speaks in pain,  blockages,  bleeding, stiff joints, etc.--just as the psyche speaks in dreams. We have to learn the language to understand what our bodies may be trying to tell us.

Alice Walker says: "Illness has always been of enormous benefit to me.  I have learned little from anything that did not in some way make me sick."

Health Update

Several inspiring health-related videos on Netflix:

Fat, Sick and Almost Dead; Vegucated; Hungry For Change; and Food Matters

I've been drinking fruit and vegetable juices, infused water and lots of green tea--and not drinking Diet Coke.  I'm down to two cigarettes a day.  Practically no gluten or sugar.  Taking CALM (powdered magnesium) and other supplements for inflammation.  As of yesterday, I have had no leg pain and no all-over body aches.

Tomorrow I see a physical therapist, and Tuesday the rheumatologist about the auto-immune condition.  If I'd felt like I do today on the day I made these two appointments, I wouldn't have made them.

"Something is missing," I thought--both yesterday and today--and I realized that what is missing are the mysterious pains of the past several months.  Could it be that drinking gallons of water is the cure?  Could it be that the de-fox is over?  Even if this is a temporary respite, it's a wonderful reminder of what it feels like to feel good.  As the Robert Earle Keene song says, "Feels so good feeling good again!"

The Quarry Farmers Market on Sundays makes it easy to make all these changes.  Today I had a delicious organic vegetable tamale and brought home kale and chard and yard eggs.  Having them in the refrigerator--they say--doesn't do much.  You have to cook them and eat them, or--in the case of the greens--toss them into the Vitamix and make a green smoothie.

I'll think about that tomorrow....

Another wonderful day--doing what I love and loving what I do

My Saturday writing group grew by two members today--and both are excellent additions to our lively group!  Sometimes I can't believe I get to do exactly what I love doing--and in my own backyard.

One of our new members told us about Brazil nuts as a sleep aid and dream-enhancer--so I went straight to Central Market and got me some.

Then I went to my favorite restaurant in the 'hood and had some zucchini quesadillas and played Solitaire on my phone.  Adalante's has a new bumper sticker: Enlightenment, One Taco at a Time.  I think I may need to get me one of those.

Certain places just have the right feel when you want to visit with a friend or enjoy a few moments of solitude, and Adalantes (North New Braunfels and Brees) is that perfect place for me.  I've been going there for years and love sitting in those turquoise booths with all the folk art around and eavesdropping on the conversations at surrounding tables.

My Solitaire has a Hint Button.  Just when you think you've made all possible plays, the Hinter says, "Try this" and you do, often winning after all. Isn't that a pretty good analogy for problem solving?  You put it out there that you're stuck and somebody gives you just the right hint you need to find a solution.

Chapter Two: My Spiritual Journey

In my mid-thirties, so much was good:
I had my two children and my two parents--the loves of my life.  I had a bachelor's degree (funny now, that we called our first degrees by male words) and a master's degree (same kind of funny).  I was teaching at UTSA, teaching eighteen-year-old students how to make sentences and public-speak. I had great friends.

But one Easter morning, I was playing the organ at the Helotes Methodist Church when I realized that I had  been married for exactly half my life.  Something had happened the day before that had made me add up the years and admit that marriage wasn't quite what I'd had in mind.  In fact, it was nothing like I'd had in mind.

So there I was playing  resurrection songs, and I realized that that particular story had lost its juice for me. God and Jesus were male; all the pronouns in all the hymns were male--and I felt invisible in that story, just as I felt invisible in my marriage.  I could hear something clicking in the back of my mind and I knew it was the sound of unhooking from that particular story.

I could play, and sing, every hymn in the Baptist hymnbook--but as a female, even if I'd wanted to, I could never have been ordained to tell that story--just as females in the Catholic church could never be priests. We could sing "This is my Father's World"--but we left out Mother Earth entirely.  We talked about "brotherhood"--but what about sisterhood?

In that Easter moment, I knew that the very songs I'd played for a lifetime were songs of a story that I would always treasure and keep parts of, but that I also needed some girl stories, some women stories, to build a female spirituality.

Something's Gotta Give

A digression from my spiritual journey, I am watching a good movie, again.  Diane Keaton (Erica) and Jack Nicholson (Harry) are right now in the pancake scene just before Harry and Marin (Erica's daughter) break up.

Here's what I'm noticing this second viewing: the whole movie's color palette replicates the colors of the ocean and the beach.  The interior of Erica's house in the Hamptons, Erica's and Harry's wardrobe, even the stuff in the refrigerator and the plates, the candles, the flowers--everything is mostly sandy off-whites with specks of ocean blues and the greens of beach grass.

With DK's trim and agile body, does anyone really think she eats pancakes in the middle of the night?

Chapter One: My Spiritual Journey (May 15)

At salon last night, we talked about our  spiritual journeys. Some of us are "recovering Catholics;" some are steeped in the 12-Step traditions; all nine of us are spiritual mutts--a little of this, a little of that.

We talked about the differences between religion and spirituality.  Both are paths to understanding "whatever is bigger" than we are. Religions include credos that members share; spirituality is more loosey goosey, more individual.

Religions have rituals, hierarchies and vocabularies.  If you grow up in a particular religious tradition, you may look across the fence at the others and think them peculiar--and vice versa.  The tighter the box ("People who don't believe like we do are going to Hell" for example) the more likely that the people on one side of the fence will dislike people on the other. At salon, the word "mystery" kept coming up when we talked about our spiritual journeys.

When I was a little girl, we sang "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know" in Sunday School.  We also sang "Jesus loves the little children/ All the children of the world/red and yellow, black and white...."
Since Jesus was the man in the songs and the stained glass windows and not one of the people I knew around town, those two songs were mysterious: Someone I couldn't even see loved everybody.

In the segregated South, black people and white people lived in two separate worlds.  Jesus might love 'em both, but they didn't seem to love each other all that much--if you judge by their actions.  Colored People had their own churches, water fountains, and schools; White people had theirs.

It wasn't a perfect world.  Some people said one thing and did another--just like they do now, just like we all do sometime.  Prejudice and Hypocrisy, you name it--it was all there, right up beside the Golden Rule and Goodness.

Toni Morrison--one of my favorite writers--said something to this effect: The best gift from parents to children is "their faces lighting up" when their children enter a room. (http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/Does-Your-Face-Light-Up-Video)

Belief in religious principles and stories was its own good thing.  Belief was like gravity holding everything together.  But what meant more than belief, what sustained me when pieces started flying off the ground when tornadoes came out of nowhere, was love.  My parents' faces lit up when I walked into the room--as did the faces of certain luminous teachers and grown ups and friends.

We could have sung  "Pine trees love me this I know" (or stones or ice cream or pumpkins or marigolds) and I'd have believed it.  But what mattered more than belief to me, what formed chapter one of my spiritual journey, was the deep well of feeling loved and heard and seen (imperfect as I was)  in the world, imperfect as it was.

The Spiritual Journey

Tonight nine women met at Gerlinde's beautiful house to discuss the surprise topic: "your spiritual journey."

After walking through her yard and looking at her lush poppies and wildflowers, we ate delicious shrimp and veggies and salad and chocolate chip cookies. The house smelled wonderful with big pink irises on the piano.

The conversation was, as always, provocative--and I'll probably more write about it when I have time. I'm going to bed early so I can head out to Helotes at the crack of dawn.

But I want to share Janet's prompt for those who would like to do it:

Write the titles of the chapters of your spiritual life--up to seven.

A Word From Down Under

This journey to wellness is fascinating and filled with stops along the road I'd never considered before.  What are micronutrients? is the question of the last three days--and I now can answer that question, sort of.

I watched Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead on Netflix last night. In this documentary, an Australian man recovers from fatness and sickness by going on a six-week cleanse with fresh juices and vegetables.  I may never do anything as extreme as that, but I am going to go to the juice bar later this morning and buy a mixed fruit and vegetable juice.

Tom cured himself of an autoimmune disease by drinking only fresh juices for six weeks; then he introduced the same plan to others, including an obese American truck driver he met with the same disease.  The transformation was dramatic in both of them.  The truck driver wound up losing almost 300 pounds.

Then I researched juicers for a couple of hours: masticating juicers, centrifugal juicers.  For now, I'm not ready to purchase a large juicer for the kitchen, what with three good juice bars within a few miles of here, but I may later decide to do that as well.  We'll see.

The take-away from last night's research, especially the video, is that fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds and beans, are the carriers of micronutrients--essential for healing and avoiding disease.  Most of us, according to the film, rely on macronutrients, found in everything else besides fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and beans. Think bread and potatoes and spareribs and fish.

To get all the micronutrients your body needs, he claims, you would need to eat more food than you could eat in one day: platters of beets and celery and apples and kale, for example.  If you mix up a few of them every day, add some apple, say, to sweeten the mix, you give your body a chance to reboot from years of eating food products heavy in calories but light (or missing in) nutritional value.

Bling and Gospel Music and Oedipus

On this chilly and foggy Sunday afternoon, Freda and Susan and I went to Austin to see The Gospel At Colunus at the Zach Theatre. From the moment the black church choir members walked to stage through the aisles singing, I knew it was going to be good!

The women were dressed in bright yellow and blue church dresses with outlandishly wonderful hats and bling, the men in suits with colorful ties, the choir members (actual members of local black choirs) in choir robes, everybody clapping and Amen-ing to the preaching and fanning hard with cardboard fans.

The acting, dancing and music were dazzling--as Oedipus (of the Greek tragedy) winds up in a lively community of Pentecostals. An unlikely pairing of stories, but it works.

Oedipus was the one, as you recall, who married his mother and killed his father.  When he and his wife-mother realized what they had done, she hanged herself and Oedipus blinded himself. Blind Oedipus, wracked by guilt, became an exile whose two daughters (and sisters) had to lead him around for the rest of his life.

The play opens in what looks like a tent-revival setting, the preacher--spot on in his delivery style--reading "from the book of Oedipus" (as if it were an actual book in the Bible.)  From that point on, the play shows how he found forgiveness among the Pentecostals.

When we walked in, we were handed cardboard fans--which brought back memories of the summer nights of my childhood when we went to  revivals in the little churches in Georgia.  Those churches were steamy, both in temperature and sermon content--and from the piano bench (where I sat on nights I played) I could see the fans going a mile a minute in the congregation.

Southern gospel, black and white, is the trunk of the tree from which so much powerful storytelling and music sprouted--and it reminds me of a time when religious passion colored everything.  Going to this play was like going to Big Church.  The audience was clapping and fanning and humming along. If it had gone on much longer, I might have had to stand up and give my testimony!

Missing Mini

Yesterday, I had lunch at a vegan restaurant called Vegeria with my friend Janet P--with every intention of discussing the details of our upcoming trip to Chicago for her daughter's wedding--when she said, "I read in your blog you're feeling blue; what's up?"

That was all it took to start tears that didn't much stop for the rest of the day.  I had no idea they were even hovering, those tears.

"I miss my Mini Cooper!" I said.

I have a pretty and practical new turquoise Honda.  It's probably safer, certainly more spacious, than a Mini. It has big wide mirrors and no blind spots.  It navigates bumpy roads well; it doesn't have those stupid run-flat tires that require towing on a long road trip when you have a flat and are further than fifty miles from a Mini dealership.  Five people can ride in this big Honda with ease and comfort.

But for ninety-nine percent of my life, only one person is riding in it!

I'd traded the little Mini for the Big Minnie because I felt it would be safer for transporting children  in car seats.

Then I traded Big Minnie for the Honda because of theTire-and-Towing nuisance and the hope that a different car would be friendlier to my driving leg that still hurts exactly the same as it did in the Mini. But every time I see a Mini, any color, any size, I still follow it with my eyes, probably like people do who see their favorite breed of puppy when they no longer have one.

"I don't feel like me anymore," I said to Janet--and she (who never cries about cars) totally got it!

"Well," she said, "You have to fix that!"

She had a sweet, bemused expression on her face, so kind, that it made me think: "Oh yeah, I hadn't though of that!"

Sometimes when you're sad about one thing, you realize that the top thing is attached by invisible strings to other things, and if you're a person like me, you have to talk to people who love you to figure out what all's tied to the other end of the strings.

The Blues: Another version

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open."

Muriel Rukeyser wrote that in 1968, and it's been quoted innumerable times since then and emblazoned on T-shirts and bumper stickers.

It's an audacious claim for sure--which is why it sort of hangs out in the mind koan-like, tickling at your brain: how could one woman telling the truth cause the world to split open?  Is the truth so hard to tell that if only one woman could muster the courage to do it the world would crack apart at the shock of it?  

What I wrote yesterday were the facts of one particular day: Elena and I did go to the zoo; I did have a screaming leg pain in the car; and I did make it to Laurie's investiture just in time--and the next day I felt the blues rolling in. I spent the morning inside the blues cabin, sending out smoke signals.

I woke up this morning and re-read yesterday's post.  I couldn't even stand to re-read the whiny email I'd written to a friend first. What mattered was that my friend had--generously--read through the knots of too-many-words and gotten what I was trying to get at--which was enough to split open something, if not the whole world.

Smoke signal sent, received, returned, voila!  "Enough about my aching leg and aging already!" I said to myself.  "Let's move on!"

As the most seasoned and best writers teach us, good writing is not ego-driven drivel--though I'd bet that for all of those writers, they got to the good stuff by writing lots of drivel first.  Muriel Rukeyser didn't say "When one woman publishes the truth...." She said "When one woman tells the truth."

If a writer stays on the road of tangled briars long enough, she's bound to split open something and find her way. It doesn't happen just imagining the journey ahead, or planning to embark someday; it happens in putting on her old soggy shoes and starting out, not knowing where the path is going to lead.

As I was pruning my own writing of yesterday, I thought about Mark Twain's line: "I would have written a shorter version if I'd had more time."

On Tuesday night, Laurie read the poem that has been an inspiration to both of us--Mary Oliver's poem, "The Journey." That poem is one of the most generous poems I've ever read, beginning with the line: "One day you finally knew...."

It's a not a poem about Mary Oliver, but a poem about the universal "you"-- all of us, you and me, when we"finally" stop listening to bad advice and trying to "mend" everybody else.  It's a call to action to begin--"even though it's late."

"Sometimes a poem changes your life," Laurie said.  I could imagine our poet friend Gary Lane--who would have been there for sure that night--tearful all the way through Laurie's reading, Gary a man who knew how to cry so well.  Even though I never personally met him, I could also imagine Laurie's late-grandpa on the front row, so proud and happy that his granddaughter is now the poet laureate of San Antonio.

All those colorful fish under the surface of the water are like all the moving, swimming things under the surfaces in all our minds, all clambering for attention or feeding.  To just sit and look at them, without moving on right away to the bears and flamingos and reptiles: that would be enough revelation for any one day.  That would be a poem in motion.

Age by Any Other Name....

Last night after yoga, a few of us were standing by our parked cars talking--when the subject of aging came up.

The new receptionist at the chiropractor's office had called me "Sweetie" this morning:  "Do you see those stairs out there, Sweetie?" she asked, directing me to my chiropractor's new office space.

A very young doctor had told Maggie, sotto voce and winking, as if he were in on the secret, "It's like I tell a lot of my patients, Aging sucks!"

I could come up with a page full of other examples--of young people calling older people by names that don't sound good unless the person saying them (a) means them as genuine terms of endearment, (b) knows you personally, and (c) is close to your age or older.  If said by a stranger, they sound patronizing--because they are.

Most of us in yoga class were sixty or more, including the teacher.  Like people of any age, we like to be called by our names; "Sweetheart" and "Sweetie" are not our names.  From waiters, doctors, store clerks, and other strangers, they reduce us all to doughy little grannies.

Imagine a healer in a culture that respects age saying "Aging sucks!"

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but should we trust "medical professionals" whose vocabularies for the incredible landscape of age are limited to one verb?

Wouldn't they be just as likely to say--after a complex diagnosis--"Just take an aspirin"?