Icon, Idol, Model Man

Icon, Idol, Model Man

You are a place in my mind
and I am a person
You, icon, idol, model man,
tresses on your shoulder
long and lithe when you
stand and rock the boat
bare thigh, a flash.
We lay on a raft
made of saplings and drift
toward a shipwreck in
Gloucester Harbor where
there are night swimmers
and other incorporeal beings.
You, too, are a ghost
and yet your hand is pure
sensation
You take down my shirt
and expose my skin
to the stars.

Later, you break me
and I break you, entomb
you in a mountain cave
like Antigone.

When the evening wanes
and the dishes are put away
and the children asleep
I return to you, my private
lust, my evensong.

Mothering: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Wonder-ful

Love that does not have humility as its mother and holy awe as its father is orphaned from all goodness.

                                                ~Mechtild of Magdeburg

I don’t find it easy to write about motherhood, probably because the independent, creative self wants to be free of all duty (and motherhood, although a blessing, is indeed a duty). But the above quote struck me as true. No matter how talented you are, no matter how brilliant, successful, etc., motherhood and the type of humbling love that accompanies it can knock you on your ear.

A couple of weeks ago I posted two pictures of myself side by side on facebook: the one on the left was taken of me when I was newly married before motherhood; in it I have long model hair, a tan, and I’m smiling like the world is my oyster. The one on the right is of me as of my twins’ third birthday: I’ve gained weight, have bags under my eyes, wrinkles across my forehead, and I look exhausted.

Motherhood takes its toll; you get gray hairs and no longer have visible abs; you are often at that place of Wit’s End, but as a friend once advised me, that’s how you know you are doing it right. Love that does not include the hard part isn’t love at all. And what is the hard part exactly? Compassion. Putting another first, caring for them first, satisfying their needs before your own.

The women of my generation went to school and got jobs; we knew how to put ourselves first. When we wanted a new dress, we bought it. When we wanted dinner and drinks, we called a friend. We lived independently from our parents and followed our passions even if they failed us. My mother’s generation never complained so much about motherhood (no one ever told me it was going to be this hard, we always say when we’ve found a confidante); they went from their father’s house to their husband’s where they assumed the role of caretaker and that was that.

This is why motherhood is more of an adjustment for my generation. The education, thinking skills, and experience we got serving ourselves translate to valuable wisdom for maneuvering our own kids through the world.  We use these skills to try and strike a balance between a life for ourselves and a life for our family, but that just isn’t easy in today’s society. This often leaves us frustrated and it can get the best of us.

When I was pregnant with the twins, I remember observing a gull with its baby, a speckled bird bigger than its demure white and gray mother. The baby followed the mother along the edge of the water, crying and squawking incessantly. The mother gull walked ahead, ignoring her baby, and then she suddenly took flight across the bay and the baby hurried after her. Yep, I thought. That’s a part of mothering, too, wanting to fly away.

I take my dog for a walk every morning and when my son sees me put my jacket on, he importunes, “Where are you going, Mommy? Huh? Stay here, Mommy. Sit down right here on the couch.” My daughter confronts me every time I fetch my purse and keys, “You’re going to come back, right?” What do I do that makes them question if I will come back? Is my restlessness that visible?

I remember how frustrated my father used to get when my brother and I started acting up, so much that he would voice this frustration and threaten to leave. And he did take off, for weekends at a time, to go hunting in upstate New York, to be free for a little while and blow off some steam. But my father always came back. And this is what a humbling love does: it brings you back to the people who need you most.

I try to see the world though my children’s eyes. My daughter is delighted by dandelions, pill bugs, and worms. She likes to carry them around. She tells me she loves them, that they are the most beautiful things to her. My son notices every truck and construction vehicle we drive by. He moves his matchbox car over the sofa and observes how the wheels rotate in unison. My children are enthralled by the world, by snowflakes, spring blooms, tidal pools, and I can reach back, back and recall this feeling of the “gift of life” of a sacred wonder, where everything was new and precious. For me, it was the fiesta colored azaleas with their silk thread stamens and the rainbows in the hose water, the peonies with their ant sentinels patrolling each bud, and the feel of the cool grass between my toes at twilight. I was safe. My parents were home and my parents were everything.

And that holy regard one has for one’s parent does not go away, no matter how old you are. A couple of weeks ago I was giving a public lecture at North Shore Community College and my mother walked into the room. Something inside me cracked open and I wanted to sob. She’s here. She’s come. My mother.

So I remember what it’s like to need a mother, to love a mother and I need to be mindful of this-- in my rush to be this and my desire to do that-- because to be anything less than a mother would bring suffering to my kids and that, to me, is unthinkable.

Regarding those two photos, the motherless me and the mother me, well, here’s a secret: pound for pound, I’m happier being the mother, despite its physical and emotional drawbacks. I have lost the existential angst that used to plague me during my younger years and I wouldn’t want that back for all the model hair in the world. This humbling love is hard, and it has taken everything I’ve got, but it has meaning and purpose, a deep soul kind of meaning and purpose that confirms, no matter how nuts I get, that I am on the right track.

Father God, Mother God, Lover God

Father God, Mother God, Lover God

Father God has been drummed into our heads aplenty by the patriarchal dogma of Judaism and Western Christianity. Mother God and Lover God are lesser known deities, but they do exist. Mother God stems from a feminist undercurrent rippling within the patriarchal religions: you can find evidence of Her everywhere. I think of my own grandmother and her allegiance to the Blessed Mother; she prayed more to her than Christ himself. My grandmother belonged to the Legion of Mary and attended meetings and prayer groups; she said the Rosary every morning. I can still see her lying on her back in her bed, her lips mouthing the prayers, the beads wrapped around her gnarly fingers. She put herself into a trance every morning, a communion of sorts with the Catholic version of the divine feminine.

Recently I’ve started revising a novel I thought I finished two years ago. It’s a part historical/part contemporary read featuring polygamy in nineteenth century Utah. In my research, I stumbled upon a feminist text that reports an undercurrent of feminism within the oppressive bounds of polygamy. Sister wives were bonded to one another through the Female Relief Society, a society that incorporated feminist ideas, not only in spirituality, but daily life as well. Joseph Smith organized the society himself, under the helm of one Eliza Snow, who wrote poems about a Mother God. The society was modeled after the priesthood in that members could practice sacred acts such as the laying on of hands to heal the sick. The Female Relief Society had its own publication called the Woman’s Exponent where women could voice their frustrations with men. Here is an excerpt from Blanche Beechwood, a.k.a Emmeline B. Wells, the editor:

I know we are taught that Eve was the first to sin. Well, she was simply more progressive than Adam. She did not want to live in the beautiful garden for ever, and be nobody—not able even to make her own aprons.

Here’s another excerpt, showcasing true feminist thought, from an entry titled “An Old Maid’s Protest” addressed to the “Lords of creation,” i.e. men:

I have no doubt but that you will greet this with a cynical smile, as your conceit and vanity are developed to such an extent as to prevent you from accepting it as truth. But such it is. You may call me “Woman’s rights advocate,” “Blue Stocking,” or any other tender epithet; I care not. I am independent and not afraid because I am a woman to express my views on any subject. You may think I am only joking; but I warn you not to test the truth of my remarks by proposing to me, for I have such an utter detestation for the whole sex that it is with the greatest difficult that I can treat the men with common civility. And don’t think I have been crossed in love either, for I haven’t.

The once editor of the Woman’s Exponent, Emmeline B. Wells, was active in the women’s suffrage movement while still being a proponent of polygamy. She believed that plural marriage afforded a woman personal freedom and independence to exercise her rights because her sister wives helped in the chores and child rearing.

I’m excited about incorporating this research in my novel. I believe it will supply some depth to the chapters that needed a bit more oomph. The research served another purpose for me, though: I realized it was okay to want a divine female counterpart in God. Mormon women both contemporary and historical are/were vocal in their need for a divine being they could relate to. I realized I felt the exact same way and that this was a very natural thing. You didn’t have to reject a patriarchal religion altogether, as I have been doing; you could voice your conflict with it and make necessary adaptations.

While rewriting the novel, I revisited my book of readings by woman mystics to further be inspired (I have a character who is a Mormon mystic). The mystic shows up in every religion; she’s that person who pushes the boundaries of doctrine and is fueled by passion—more than conformity and fear—and sees God not only as a divine parent, but a lover. In my research I’ve encountered the term “coniunctio” defined as the conjugal bond between the soul and God. Catherine L. Albanese, author of “Mormonism and the Male-Female God: An Exploration in Active Mysticism,” describes this bond as “erotic” and “sexual.” I found this idea fascinating, how the mystic yearns to be one with God as a lover yearns to be one with her beloved. Here is evidence of coniunctio in the poems of Mechtild of Magdeburg, a thirteenth century German mystic:

A Song of the Soul:

Lord, You shine into my soul

like the sun glows on gold,

and when I rest in You,

what rich joy I have.

In fact, You clothe Yourself, God,

with my soul.

You are her most intimate piece of clothing against the skin.

God’s Singing Response to the Soul:

God as Lover of the Soul says:

“When I shine, you glow.

When I flow, you grow wet.

When you sigh, you draw My divine heart into you.

When you weep and long for Me, I take you in My arms and

embrace you.

“But when you love, we become one.

And when we two are one,

we can never be separated.

Instead, a joyful sort of waiting

binds us.”

We are tempted to say we know this love through sex with a beloved, a person one loves and wants to join oneself to. But sex can be divisional; we get too focused on bodily sensation and pleasing one another. I feel like I know this grander type of love on an unconscious level; last night I dreamed of an old crush, and in the dream, my crush had a twin who was dating my friend who happened to look like me (Jung would have a field day with this). I remember the euphoria of being held by him; it was not a sexual type of union; it had nothing to do with body desire, and yet he had strong muscles and was regarded as the handsomer twin. I felt like I had achieved something, that there was a struggle to move through and then a reward—his magical love that soothed me and made me feel like all was right. He was a safe-haven of sorts. My “crush” was almost god-like in that way.

I wrote this poem before I had these thoughts about a Mother and Lover God. But it fits. Maybe it was a premonition of sorts:

If I say the world Love

do I mean it?

Judgement and Scrutiny back me

into a corner, where I sit

until I can't stand it anymore.

But with Her, I can run

or sleep in the soft snow.

We will rest in Winter's

Womb--the rabbit, the fox

and us. I feel it-- Elation.

Eleison. A cloud of Yes 

about my ears. Yes! Yes!

The God is singing in the bell

tower. His love child with

every man and woman is born

again and again.

Letter from the Editor of The Compassion Project: Beyond the Dragons of Eden: How Art Makes Us Human

Letter from the Editor

Reading and witnessing works of art can open our minds to our global community in both space and time. They allow us to act as fully functioning humans, not reptiles that want to kill each other.

We are all hard-wired for both selfishness and compassion, for ruthless fighting and enduring love. We all have that ancient reptilian brain embedded in the hypothalamus, designed to implement what scientists call the 4 Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and… sex. When your testosterone and adrenaline are pumping during an argument, you can thank your distant cousin the T-Rex. If you’re born into poverty with few resources, survival becomes paramount, and you’re more vulnerable to the reptilian instincts.

As we moved up the evolutionary ladder, some reptiles evolved into mammals, and the limbic or mammalian brain that developed enabled them to nurture. This wasn’t out of love, per se, but preservation of the species. Unlike reptiles that laid eggs and split, mammals gave birth to their young and had to care for them until their bigger brains matured. They had to feed, protect, and shelter their babies. For humans, it is through the mammalian brain that we learn to put another individual first, that we can exercise our compassionate tendencies.

 The evolution of the neo-cortex or “over-seeing” brain in human beings made it mandatory that an infant be born “prematurely,” that is, before the bigger brain fully matured so that it could fit through the birth canal. Thus, infants were born totally helpless and entirely dependent on their parents. “Parental affection ensured the survival of the species,” writes Karen Armstrong in her book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. Infants now “needed the support, care, and protection not only of their parents but an entire community.” Through evolution, this type of compassion became more entrenched and widespread. It eventually evolved into altruism.

 With the adaptation of the neo-cortex, humans became capable of reasoning, reflection and creativity. We began to seek meaning in our lives. This is where art and science factored in; we began to experiment and explore the world around us. We documented and classified. We expressed our emotions through creations. We realized that art, as well as science, could lead to knowledge. Most importantly, we learned that art and science allowed for us to abolish wrongly preconceived ideas and notions.

 Art establishes understanding and empathy, and it does this with finesse and originality. It employs beauty and sophistication. I think I can speak for most of us when I say I would much rather read a novel that showcases the full range of human emotion than delve into the tenets, theories, and accounts in a textbook.

 Here are some examples of art that promoted large-scale understanding, empathy, and disproved wrongly preconceived ideas:

 ·      Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass. This elegantly written autobiography proved to nineteenth century Americans that blacks were not inferior to whites intellectually; they too had fully functioning neo-cortexes.
 ·      The plays A Doll House, by Henrik Ibsen, Trifles by Susan Glaspell and the paintings of Frida Kahlo. These works prove that women are not “dolls” nor do they have trivial inner and outer lives.

 ·      Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. These works portray the imperialistic attitudes and emotional complexity inherent in colonialism. They aim to show that what some deem an “inferior society” is just a different take on being human, and often a more spiritual one.

·      The poetry of Rumi. Poet and translator Coleman Barks says that the “love” in Rumi’s poems is “nakedly exposed and restless like a mountain creek, like sunlight moving around a winter room.” Rumi’s poetry is a portal to mysticism through which Non-Muslims can freely enter and learn that true Islam is not fanatical and hostile, but compassionate, ecstatic and reverent.

When our belief systems are altered through experiencing artistic works, it translates to our behavior and enables us to act compassionately.

At North Shore Community College, a female faculty member claims the poetry of Bruce Weigl helps her relate to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.  She writes, “Every time I encountered a veteran, I thought of this Weigl poem, ‘The Snowy Egret.’ It made me approach these students with a respect and gentleness that I didn't think I had in me…it clearly made me treat veterans differently than I expected I would and which my political beliefs on paper would dictate.” 

Tam Martin Fowles, founder of Hope in the Heart, an organization that guides individuals to triumph over adversity and understand their place in the global community, cites the novel Notes from an Exhibition and specifically the character Anthony, a Quaker who “lives his life by a set of values that aroused great empathy and inspiration” in Martin Fowles.  After reading the book, Martin Fowles began to attend Quaker meetings herself, ultimately discovered a faith that suited her, and a community of people that embodied “ an ethos of peace and social action.”

We tend to see art/literature as a means for empathy only, but empathy is only the starting point. Readers can empathize with the plight of characters they love; people can be captivated by works of art for very personal reasons. Yet, when we say art matters, we say it because we have been moved beyond personal illumination to act more compassionately in the world. 

We at The Compassion Project seek to do just that. The fundraiser we are sponsoring this spring will benefit the children of ChildHelp Sierra Leone, a child rights organization that bore the brunt of the Ebola virus—not only physically, but emotionally and financially—this past fall. I have been in contact with director Kaprie Thoronka since August and his heart-wrenching letters of devastation in Sierra Leone have moved me to do what I can to help. Moreover, Africa got the short end of the stick with respect to world aid for a calamity. People weren’t rushing to Africa to lend a hand like they did for Haiti and Japan. I remember scrolling through all of the Indiegogo Ebola campaigns; many of them had no funding at all and remained that way until they closed.

Please read the Call for Submissions on our home page to learn how you can contribute and help foster our community of compassion through creativity. To quote Armstrong again, "We have a duty to get to know one another and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village."


Regards and happy spring,

 Laurette Folk, Editor of The Compassion Project: An Anthology
www.compassionanthology.com
 

 

Snow Life

There's a car outside skidding its tires up our icy hill, and the wind is roaring about the house like a train circling. It feels like the window panes are going to get punched in. The snow is more than 3 feet deep in our backyard and in some drifts, over 6. Taking my dog Josie for her walk along the road is like taking our lives into our hands; the snow banks make for a maze where imposing cars suddenly appear and disappear, and it's nerve-wracking. So I decided to take a different route, out back and into the woods, atop the snow and otherwise prohibiting brambles. For the 6 and a half years we've lived here, we've never ventured back there, because it was too difficult to manipulate the undergrowth. But now, with snowshoes, I can easily make a trail for my dog and I to safely follow.

The land abuts the Bass River, now cloaked in ice. In the morning we usually see a red-tailed hawk perched high in an oak tree, surveying the land around the cattails; nervous doves flutter below him. When I peered through my binoculars at him, I saw a design on his back like a peacock's emerald eyes-- he was still watching me with his back turned.

The woods here isn't much and the river isn't that pretty during warmer months. Its bed is muddy and when the tide is low, you can see remnants of tires, chairs, shopping carts. You can't help but hear the road-- Route 62, and see the urban sprawl of the Cummings Center. But there, where the hawk perches, atop an old oak tree, atop a promontory, you can look East you and see the breadth of the woods, a tributary of the river winding through the ice; an old nineteenth century factory building and church spire make for a nostalgic backdrop. At dusk yesterday, the setting sun pitched an orange halo over that part of the city, and the wind picked up the snow and made for an ethereal white haze. With the tinkle-ping sound of the sailboats boarded across the river, it was mystical.

We trudge back our worn path, which has been covered again and again by more snow; I make sure to break tree branches so I can trace where I've been. And it's worked famously. We track through the new fallen snow with every storm; any move to the right or left and we sink into cold, soft down. There are coyote, squirrel, fox, and rabbit tracks back here. I found an owl or hawk bolus and the remnants of a kill. There are locust, birch, box elder, and oak trees so old, they have gaping mouths that might at any moment start talking to you. There's thriving life in these ragged woods behind my house.

Last week I contemplated crossing the land bridge beneath the House of Usher. The House of Usher rises up from the banks of the Bass River like the tall gray oaks that camouflage it. It has giant solar panes mirroring the sky and a deck that spans into the branches of the trees. The man in the house has a vehicle for hauling trash or shoveling snow off his long clandestine driveway. Once, when I was in the latter months of my pregnancy, I was picking lilacs at the end of his driveway where a blooming bush was growing on an abandoned property on the other side of his fence. "Hello!" he kept yelling at me. "Hello!" His pitched voice betrayed his nervousness. In the back of his house, in the woods along the land bridge there are half a dozen No Trespassing signs, which I found intimidating, thus halting my trek at his boathouse. The dock there doesn't look like much from the road across the river, but up close, it's a formidable structure, built like a tank and stuck in the frozen mud and snow. Josie made her way out to the beach part behind the dock, and while the man was watching her from the window, pooped. I hobbled out to go bag it. It was sort of funny, a retribution of sorts, and I could have left it, but I didn't want him to peg me as irresponsible; I didn't want to give him any ammunition.

I try to sympathize with the guy. If I owned a house in the woods and the city wanted to run a trail abutting my property would I be upset? Would I dress up in a Carhartt jumper and spy on snowshoers hiking with their dogs, making for a cliche scene from a B-rated horror flick? My neighbor said he's very "vocal" at the town meetings on the subject of the trail. But he hasn't got a let to stand on. It isn't his property; he needs to learn how to share the woods.

I've appointed myself a scout for the trail and have contemplated bringing a sign with me to hold up for him to read while he watches me from his window. Perhaps it would say, "Dude, what are you hiding?" or "Paranoia, Big Destroyah." But that would be antagonistic.

And yet, the light is brighter now and promising; spring is just around the corner. Perhaps that would bring understanding and kinder relations.

Tending a Fire

I meditated this morning and the first thing that appeared in my head was the long blue (pale and steely, like the ocean) ranch across from our house in New Jersey. The Kelleys lived there and the seven years that we lived across from them, we never met any of them. We saw them from time to time, the son who drove a small car, perhaps a Toyota, blue like the house. He had long hair; my father probably thought he smoked dope. We were neighbors and yet, had no reason to know one another. Perhaps the Kelley's house is a metaphor for the impersonal, for disconnection, the disconnection common to winter.

After the Kelley's house came the boulders. My father hauled them to the edge of our front lawn to serve as a deterrent after some idiot did donuts and tore up the grass. Are they a metaphor for protection? I have been realizing as of late how blessed my husband and I are, by our children, by our belongings, house, and property. We don't realize our own vulnerability, being so close to the street. So far, I've only had to pick up the cigarettes people toss into my flowers.

After that, the wooden path to the Taylor's. I had walked it a thousand times, and dreamed of it; I flew over it, just a few feet off the ground, where I could still see every root and rock. Metaphor? Ahh, we may dream, but we are bound by gravity, by reality; we can only get so high.

A kitten with its paper bones, soft fir, warm vibrations. In Glaspell's Trifles, Mrs. Peters recalls how a boy "took a hatchet, and before <her> eyes"...And then I saw Denise's hawk, the curved beak and stoic eye after it had killed her rabbit. She told the bird she wanted to be there for the eating, and it did wait for her. She wanted to see it to understand, to know, and not have mystery to contend with; the mystery would make it worse. This is a very Buddhist thing, to not give the mind the ammunition of mystery, to make understanding a priority.

Why do these horrid images come up? It's the slaying of the innocent, and on some level, it happens to every one of us. There are reptilian forces out there. They have no empathy; they have no loving-kindness, and it's best to be aware of them. Gaining awareness is the mark of maturity.

Encounters

I've been walking Green Hill lately, behind Ayer School, because the city has cleaned up the woods, cleared paths, kicked out the squatters. My dog Josie and I have a route down to the shore line, up a promontory, down, up, down again, up again, through the woods, on a vine-draped path that reminds me of a setting from Tolkien.

I saw deer prints frozen in the mud one morning, which surprised me because this patch of greenery seemed to small to support deer. I was happy when I saw the symmetrical two-moon prints, because it meant I was closer to a wildness that I originally thought; I wasn't completely engulfed in suburbia.

I wrote a poem about meeting this lonely doe. It was hard to write, and I don't feel that I was successful in describing how I felt "blessed" by encountering her. I have since seen her a half-dozen times, always when I least expect to. One morning, she sprang up out of the wood, ran a few feet, and then stopped. She actually turned around and faced me. I gave her the universal I-come-in-peace sign by raising my hand, palm facing her. She took a few steps toward me. We locked eyes for a moment, and I felt the euphoria one gets when a wild thing trusts her. I coveted her wildness, her freedom; I wanted to run with her.

Josie caught wind of her, and her hair roused off her spine. The deer seemed to sense this, and in a flash, she became the woods again, just as suddenly as she became a deer.

Encounters

what I would speak of rather

is the weightless string of his actually soft and

nervous body the nameless stars of its eyes

                                                ~Mary Oliver, “Ribbon Snake Asleep in the Sun”

They toppled trees, cleared paths to open

the woods and flush out the homeless vets

pitching tents, sleeping in the oak leaves.

I saw the two moon tracks first—incredulous,

that my neighborhood’s patch of woods

could support something as big as deer.

She came to eat the tops of fallen trees.

We came to walk the new paths and view

the river from a different vantage point,

climb the rungs of roots and run loose.

Across the river, skaters motored and

scraped their boards at dusk. Through the
young maples you can see the light turn red.

Across the river, the nameless guard

their personal space, hunched over,

waiting for the train to let down her steps.

I only see her when I am not looking

when I am head-down walking

and then a flash of white, a flash of wing

from some other world.