Happy Valentine's Day, Everybody!

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

-Mary Oliver


Yesterday five of us writers met over flowers, presents and pink-iced Valentine's cake, all gifts from Sharon.  The Saturday Topo Chicas and the Sunday Writers are merging, and it's going to be a terrific group.  We wrote about Valentine's Day for one thing.

Sharon, the bringer of flowers and cake and presents

We remembered our days of decorating boxes with feathers and glitter and paint, then counting up our valentines from classmates at the end of the day, always hoping that one certain boy in the class would do more than sign his name on the card.  Sometimes we got lucky and he wrote "Love."

I'm remembering all my valentines through the years, starting with first grade boyfriend Jim McCoy.   We made sugar and butter sandwiches on white bread in his kitchen, but we never kissed.

Then there was Mike Parker--the boy I danced with to "I Want To Hold Your Hand" and all the other Beatles songs, the new boy in town who was killer handsome. Unlike Jim--who stayed babyface and sweet always, Mike was a bad boy sort of boyfriend who sent me notes in algebra class and  said "I love you, Beautiful!" whole sentence with an exclamation point at the end. (I can still see his handwriting.)

At 18, I married the man who'd been my valentine all through high school.  Some years he'd stop at the grocery store and pick up a straggly bunch of carnations on Valentine's Day, but mostly not.

We had us one weird marriage--more like a an awkward alliance of two strangers, punctuated with--what else can I call it?--meanness. We could go weeks without speaking a word to each other.  Who were those people? I wonder now.  And why did it take me 28 years to leave? When I see him now--which I do from time to time--it's like seeing someone I knew just a little bit once upon a time.

I'm looking around me tonight at my life and seeing that out of that box of darkness came some of the best gifts of my life.  Day and Will, for starters--and now their children, my precious grandchildren, forever valentines. And San Antonio--incredibly wonderful friends, beautiful city.  What a life of freedom and joy this is!

Some people may take happy for granted, but on Valentines week, I'm grateful to every love and friendship, even a few disasters, that brought me to this place.

Full Moon Friday

I picked up Elena from Pre-K and we had a wonderful swim--imagine, in February!--at Lorraine's.

Thanks to Qigong this morning, I had plenty of energy and the heated pool felt terrific!

After a swim, we had dinner at Bee's, then spent over an hour at Jo Ann's Fabrics--one of Elena's favorite stores.

Janie from Zimbabwe (with a beautiful British accent) taught Elena how to sew on a machine, and we came home with it.  It's a simple self-threading machine with several embroidery stitches and we're going to have so much fun sewing together.

She also bought some yarn and, Nana, she wants you to teach her to crochet when you come next week!  She's making a blanket for her stuffed and real animals. Papi brought them a poodle puppy, bringing the grand total of canines at their house to three--Conway, Skippy, and now Charlie.

Inspiration

I gave myself a present--hiring a personal trainer for six weeks.  It's not about losing weight; it's about being grounded, strong and happy.

And it's working. Today I feel all those things in spades. Renae, my trainer, is teaching me qigong--exactly what I needed and I'd never have imagined myself doing anything related to martial arts.

I'm happily unplugging cable TV.  I've watched enough MSNBC to last the rest of my life, and it gets me all tangled up in the world of politics, a distraction from these beautiful days that no politician can take away.

I want to avoid talking about politics.  It makes me anxious and fearful.  I'll choose things I can do something about but not focus on the negatives.

After my workout, I sat in the car and talked to Phoebe, my new friend and six-doors-away neighbor.  She inspires me, too.  She has macular degeneration and she's only 44--but she's one of the most positive people I've ever met.When she found that she was losing her eyesight, she took a trip around the world and saw all the things she'd always wanted to see.

I'm sure I'll get more inspiration later today when I pick up Elena--who's so excited about coming she wanted to skip school today.

But first--a nap!

Mr. Church

I started watching this movie (Amazon) about midnight, and it's worth staying up til 2 in the morning for!

Mr. Church is hired to cook for a single mother and her daughter for six months.  Anything further would be a spoiler, but I loved it!

Homecoming

At NIA, we dance to "Going Home," the first track on  Cohen's album, Old Ideas:

Going home
Without my burden
Going home
Behind the curtain
Going home
Without this costume
That I wore....

***

"Home" is at the core of human longings--a place of peace, love, and belonging.

For some, home is an imagined afterlife.  "This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through...."   Enslaved and mistreated people must hope that the next world is better than this one.

Imagine the slaves in our country who longed for their homeland. They worked back-breakingly in cotton fields, were beaten, and their babies sold to strangers. They never asked to come here; those who survived the trip arrived in the belly of ships, in chains.  Yet they sang, dreaming of home, their music the seeds of the blues.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot....Coming For to Carry Me Home....

Imagine all the men, women and children today, living in shelters and refugee camps, longing for their homeland before wars ripped them apart.  Imagine young girls sold into prostitution--by their own parents in some cultures. Imagine soldiers fighting wars in strange lands and prisoners whose incarcerations are too long and who are sometimes not even given fair trials.  Everyone longs for a place of peace and freedom.

***

Simon and Garfunkel's version of home in "Homeward Bound"---

Home where my thought's escaping,
Home where my music's playing,
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.

***

In Frost's poem, "The Death of the Hired Man," Silas says, "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

***

Thomas Wolfe's novel, You Can't Go Home Again, started with a line borrowed from a writer friend, "You know, Tom, you can't go home again."

At the end, Webber says: "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

***

The original Trip To Bountiful is about a woman who wants to return one last time to her hometown of Bountiful.  When she escapes her son and daughter-in-law's control and goes there, it's no longer the Bountiful of her memory.  The house is empty and dilapidated, and no one who made it home is still alive.

***

My move to San Antonio was not a choice, but a consequence of my then-husband's military assignment.  The plan was to live here four years, then return home. A thousand miles from home in Georgia, I got teary every time I heard "Georgia on my Mind."

Ten years ago, when I moved in with Mike in Georgia, I figured he was my reward for doing time in a humorless marriage.  We didn't actually plan it out; we were just having so much fun we rolled into it like we did everything else.

But Georgia, of all places?  After forty years in Texas, I finally got a chance to live there again, something I used to dream of doing.  How ironic, how perfect! I thought--seeing ahead only as far on the night road as I could see with low-beam headlights.

Suffice it to say, it wasn't what it might have been decades before.  Sandwiched between leaving and return were forty years, and my daddy--who'd often said "I'll buy you a house if you move here,"--was no longer there.  My house, writing groups,  Texas friends, and Will were all in San Antonio. My Georgia homecoming welcoming committee--except for Betty, Mike and Carlene--was absent.

In the end, I discovered for myself that I, for one, can't go home again--not Georgia, except to visit.

Georgia is the home of my childhood, beautiful kudzu, sweet tea, peach tree, red-clay, orange and gold leaves in fall Georgia. It's still a poignant and beautiful movie with a soundtrack and a cast of characters that roll over and over in my mind. But when I drove back to Texas in 2007, (after breaking up with Mike the first time), I knew for sure that San Antonio was home for the rest of this lifetime.

Qigong

Pronounced "chi-gong," this new practice I'm learning is a blend Chinese philosophy, medicine, and martial arts.  I'm so enjoying learning it--a flowing set of movements designed to get through the clunkier emotions (fear, worry, grief, etc) and to get to "joy, courage, and confidence."

After doing this for an hour, I feel quite courageous, joyous, and confident!

My teacher told me that her husband is in a nursing home, very ill--but she's focusing on the 29 wonderful years they have had together.  "He's taught me so much," she says. In their way of thinking, we choose how we'll die.  At first, she was angry that he'd chosen a way that causes him so much pain, but she's worked through that to a sense of peace about it. "We've all learned a lot by the way he's choosing to die," she said, "Things we wouldn't have learned if he'd done it another way."

Some people radiate joy, and she's one who does.  The practice of qigong is her way of not letting circumstances or other people dictate what she feels.  It's a way of grounding yourself in your own energy.

I'm inspired!  I found myself thinking--like Sally in the movie (Harry Met Sally) --"I'll have what she's having."

Screaming

Yesterday Janet O. and I had a spontaneous two-hour Thai lunch.  Our temperaments, our politics, and our sensibilities are very similar. We're both conflict-averse, outwardly mild, and slow to anger (at least in the expression thereof).  As we talked, we were angry together, but not at each other.

Afterwards, she invited me to attend a political event, but I was too emptied out from screaming the night before to join a group.

"I have never screamed at anyone in my  life until this year," I told her.  "Not even my children when they were little. I'm not a yeller."

Saturday night I'd had a three-hour phone conversation with Mike in which I screamed, cried, ranted and said mean things--along with some rational and kind things.  It was one of the most healing, cleansing, liberating three hours of my life.

What made it healing, cleansing and liberating was that he (this crazy man, this on-again, off-again mensch)  stayed with me for three hours and listened to every word, every scream, encouraging me to let it all out. He didn't interrupt or say "now, now, calm down," not once.

A year ago, we'd experienced something that devastated us both. For a while we stumbled along the bumpy pot-holed road together, but we ultimately found ourselves at a fork in the road.  He went one way, I went the other.  For months, I've been trying to figure out what happened, walking around in a daze of sadness. On Saturday night, we both finally heard and understood the other's point of view.

As a man, he can't help wanting to fight back when things from the outside hurt him; as this woman that I am, I get a deer-in-the-headlights look on my face and go silent--except for talking about it with my friends and family.  Maybe it's fair to say that men and women have different styles of dealing with conflict?

After I was done screaming, he said, "You're the love of my life.  I love you more than breathing, always will."  That kind of generosity was breathtaking! Anything is better than bottled rage, but it takes a long time to find someone who can "love you more than breathing" even if you yell so loud  the neighbors can hear it.

Twenty years ago, a therapist tried to get me to bash pillows with a baseball bat and scream.  I couldn't do it.  I had nothing against those innocent pillows.

Besides, I've always been scared of anger, afraid that the other person would just chalk me up as a nutcase and leave.  To have someone hold my hands across the miles and listen, without defensiveness or telling me how I "should" feel and still love me?  That was huge!

Who knows where this road will take us?  We're both too battered to know right now, but we love and respect each other, always will.

The soundtrack of our story, however, may be a verse of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah:  "Love is not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah."

***

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

-Mary Oliver

Waking up

When asked why her fiction contains so many grotesque characters, Flannery O'Connor said, "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures."

That line comes to mind every time I see Trump.  Did somebody send him to wake us all up?

From the outset of his campaign, this paternalistic, bullying man has shocked me out of my complacency.   A "large and startling figure," he's a caricature of every patronizing authority figure I've ever known, a reminder of what it felt like, once upon a time, to be disempowered and treated like a child.

When he held up his hand and said, "Don't worry about the tough calls I have to make, I'll take care of it, you don't need to know," every cell of my psyche went into a rage.  Are we back in the days of "Father Knows Best" or what?

Don't tell me what to worry about! I will never trust you to tell us what matters, you whose "prayer" at last week's "prayer breakfast" had to do with some ridiculous reality show.  If I hear you talk about the size of your parts, or your crowds, or your claim that "God stopped the rain" for your pathetic inaugural speech,  I'm going to throw all my kombucha bottles at my TV screen and smash it.  

Trump's brand of narcissism,  along with smallness of vocabulary and heart, along with "alternate facts" and outright lies, could destroy us all if we don't talk back, throw bottles, make signs, and speak back to warped power.  It's not okay for men to decide what women do with their own bodies and minds.

Thank goodness for the scores of writers and people who are saying the same things, way more brilliantly than I am.  Thank goodness for those who resist having the truth framed and finessed by a power monger.  Thank goodness for the thousands of women marching against injustice for themselves and their sisters and brothers on Mother Earth, women who are willing to "crack the world open" with truth.

And yet, had the election gone the other way, would we have woken up?  Or would we have continued to trust the political machine to "take care of things" and tell us "the truth"?  I probably would have continued in complacency and silence.  I'm happy that countless people are speaking back to power in the wrong hands, no matter the size of those hands.

Among my many teachers in the world are Leonard Cohen, Flannery O'Connor, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, David Whyte, Mary Oliver....The list could fill pages.  David Whyte said, "Anyone or anything that doesn't bring you to life is too small for you."

The stakes are too high to stay small.  The stakes are too high to stay silent. Too high to look the other way, cover our eyes, or pretend that what we're hearing is not outrageous.  A man who disparages immigrants, women, disabled people, and anyone else who "doesn't like him" is way too small to be at the helm of a country.

A Republican congressman who lost his election is speaking out against Trump.  "Why don't your Republican colleagues speak out like you?" an interviewer asked him.  "Because," he said, "They know that Trump can destroy their careers with one Tweet."

In an article in The Sun this month, Krista Bremer wrote, "I am done trusting someone else to get things done.  There is no one wise or compassionate enough to restore my sense of security.  All I can offer now in the face of uncertainty are my attempts to pay attention, to resist complacency, and to find ways to give more and love better."

Subversiveness in the Classroom

I read a book many years ago that shaped my teaching philosophy.  Teaching As A Subversive Activity by Neil Postman tapped into my rebel core.

Among the five classes I was teaching that year at Horace Mann Middle School was one extraordinary class of super-bright 7th graders.  Susie and Brandon, Elisa and John, Lupe and Jorge.  I can still see that class in my mind's eye and can remember many of their names.

It was one of those classes I didn't think of as little kids.  They used to ask me what I was reading and I'd read them paragraphs, even from Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

One of his points was this:  Every thing we do is an answer to an unspoken question.

Another was this:  Teachers should let students see the relevance of what they are learning.

So as I was imbibing that philosophy, I was sharing it with Susie and Brandon and Elisa and all the rest of them.  From that date onward, I never gave them an assignment that one of them didn't pipe up with "What's this assignment going to teach us, Mam?" or "How is this going to make us better writers?"

They made me accountable as a teacher. We all  learned to ask different kinds of questions.  As Postman said, the kinds of questions we ask determine what we learn.

"Befriending...Feelings"

In The Metaphors We Live By--a book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the linguist-writers give thousands of examples of metaphors that reflect how we (who use those metaphors every day without even thinking about them) grow to think and feel about whatever we're talking about.  This has always interested me and even more so now that we have publicly-admitted "alternative facts" to confuse our thinking even more.

A metaphor is never an exact way of saying that one thing is like another thing, but they are poetic ways to express likenesses and enrich our way of seeing.  After generations of using the same metaphors, however, they are often assumed to be true without our stopping to think: Is this thing really like this other thing?

For English-major types like me, and for anyone interested in how language shapes and reflects our culture, this book is fascinating.  It makes you notice what you're saying and question assumptions about truth.

Arguing, for example, is a process by which people share conflicting points of view.  We could think of  arguments as a conversational dance, but we don't. Our inherited metaphors in this culture are all war-related:

Your claims are indefensible
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
Her criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
You disagree?  Okay, shoot!
If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out.
He shot down all my arguments.

Time is money is another.

You're wasting my time.
This gadget will save you hours.
I don't have the time to give you.
I've invested a lot of time in her.
I lost a lot of time when I got sick.
He's living on borrowed time.

The subject is huge--I'm giving it short shrift--but it's fascinating to look at what we're saying through the lens of metaphor.

When a friend wrote me an email yesterday about "befriending the spectrum of feelings," I thought--yes that would change my life!  To see feelings as worthy of friendship, even the "negative" ones I'd rather hide in the closet, is hugely liberating.

Imagine!  Being friends with not only Happy-Face emotions but sadness, heartbreak, remorse, regret, anger, and anxiety--there's an idea that can change any life.  Imagine saying, "Depression and I had conversation today" or "Grief came to visit this afternoon" or "I'm hanging out with Anger until I can figure out what she has to say."

Befriending is a powerful metaphor! It suggests taking care of, listening to, and being real.