A Glimpse of My Life

I felt it this morning-- a something Sunday, a kind of ease. Rest, meditate and the muse whispers. It was possible, I thought, as I walked the white-washed road to the woods with my dog. We entered the dark, cool woods, entanglement of branches, smatterings of green. I perched on my rock and framed by a tree was a great egret, a picture of grace with its soft curves and softer plumage. Across the tidal river, the cars glided along the road. I got up from my rock, looked for her; I'm always looking for her. I may never see any of them again.

We hike up through the blues. The foxes must've eaten all of them. A boat sent a wake across the river; small waves splashed on the shore. A vixen had left her mark right in the middle of the trail. "This is mine," it said. I walked down a path that had every shape of mystery and myth. Where were they all, the totem beasts? Buried in the piles of mulch they dumped on the edge of the playground? Sleeping in their dens between the rocks? They say the fishers hang out in the trees, but I have yet to see one up there. We have seen the northern flickers scampering through the wood, their white patch like a star ascending in the dark. We passed an opened door and there was singing. If there were only some shade I may have stayed a bit. I headed back home to clean, to do everything that is expected of me. To do everything I expect of myself.

Cool Confidence

I think of the monarch butterfly in its jeweled sheath, transforming. Is this process rushed? Does she slide out with half a wing? No, she dangles elegantly until the sheath is torn. She waits silently in transformation, is patient about her tender wings. The sheath shrivels and is whisked away. In that moment just before flight, she is certain; she is confident. This is the characteristic of a genesis un-rushed--confidence. A cool confidence is valuable to an artist. A cool, mindful confidence is everything.

The butterfly tests her paper wings. The eye of the wing is awake. One moment to wave, another to lift, up, up, up.

She looks down and sees the world.

Letter from the Editor: Taking the Namby-Pamby Out of Compassion

Taking the Namby-Pamby Out of Compassion

I found the essay “Keep Your Compassion, Give Me Your Madness” (NYTimes, June 20, 1987) while doing research on compassion in literature and I felt like I struck gold. In it, the writer and critic Anatole Broyard wonders “whether it isn’t oxymoronic for a novel to be brilliant and compassionate at the same time” and “whether compassion isn’t just another form of writer’s block.” Finally, he claims there’s something “sticky, pious, or namby-pamby about the word.”

There it is in print, namby-pamby, further evidence of how compassion, often mistaken for pity or sentimentality, gets a bad rap. Broyard wants characters “to survive on the strength of their deviousness and stubborn wrongheadedness.” That’s what makes a novel brilliant according to him, because after all, novels are a form of “sadomasochism” anyway.

Huh.

Broyard provides no examples of the namby-pamby, compassionate novels of which he speaks and abruptly shifts his essay into a review of a non-fiction book about the neurotic utopian socialist, Charles Fourier (Charles Fourier: A Visionary in His World, University of California Press, 1987) who sought to construct a society based upon human pleasure and “passionate attraction.”

This essay/book review provoked a reader to write a letter to the editor titled “Compassion in the Novel” (NYTimes, August 1, 1987). The reader chastises Broyard for not giving evidence to prove his point, as any college freshman knows to do. That reader was bestselling author and National Book Award winner John Irving.

Irving refutes Broyard with the classics, concrete examples like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and specifically the character Levin, who believes life has meaning by the power of goodness he puts into it. Levin’s relationship with the peasant people who live on his land is exemplary in the novel: it shows the interconnectedness of humanity, which in the good, translates to compassion. I would like to add to Irving’s list the Grapes of Wrath: who doesn’t remember that last scene where Rose of Sharon, after having lost her baby, nurses the half-starved man back to life? Or in Ethan Frome when the hypochondriac misanthrope Zeena changes her tune and devotes her life to caring for the crippled Mattie and Ethan? In these beacons of literature, compassion has a sort of power and is anything but namby-pamby.

In the summer edition of The Compassion Anthology we are including “The Cloak” a classic itself, by Nikolai Gogol. Fyodor Dostoevsky said of the short story, “We all come out from Gogol’s overcoat” speaking here of Gogol’s influence on Russian literature and literature in general. The story is timeless in its premise of lack of compassion and how a society will be “haunted” by remorse when the powers-that-be don’t do the right thing. We have contemporary examples in Michael Brown and other black men killed by police; these men may not have been as innocent as Akakiy Akakievitch, but they certainly did not deserve the fate that befell them.

Also included here are works by Janel Houton, whose colorful paintings lend awareness to endangered species living among us; Mikele Rauch’s paintings of compassion and healing after violence; Don Cooper’s photographic collage of Mother Teresa (the icon of compassion) amidst the destitute in India; Cansu Bulgu’s “Eye of Oneness” that portrays how, in the stillness of the self, unity and compassion show up; Laura Foley’s poetry based on her fearless plunge into “compassion predicaments”; and Marina Cantacuzino’s reflection on the complex nature of forgiveness.

I hope you find these works and the others published here inspiring and evidence that art, too, can touch this innate power in us all.

 www.compassionanthology.com

Owning the Flowers

My 3 year old daughter is a flower freak just like her mother. I had to hide the oxalis in March when it burst into bloom because she kept nagging me for one of its nymph-like white flowers. No, two. Two, she'd say. I would find her crawling across the kitchen table to grab a fistful in the baywindow. Later they lay limp and dying on the rug in the living room, forgotten. In the mornings in May, dried dandelions in her bed. Now that it's July, she nearly hyperventilates every time we go for a walk. I see her crouching in the grass, hastily grabbing at each small bloom. She walks around with fistfuls of grass, weeds, roots clinging to dirt--byproducts that come with the beauty she covets.

When it comes to picking the perennials in my garden, I intervene. Why can't you just admire (love, I say, she understands love) them from afar? If you pick them, they will die sooner. She doesn't care. She has no comprehension of death or the concept of time. She wants to own the beauty of the flowers and that's that.

I can relate. I want to own beauty too in all of its forms--color, grace, song, poetry, laughter. Beauty (a bouquet, a painting, a Neruda poem) often mimics passion and depicts a heightened state of being. Our lives are filled with drudgery--bills, chores, errands, the to-do; glancing at a bouquet reminds us of our more passionate selves, a peak state when it's easier to be wholly alive and engaged. It's the child part of us that wants to cling to it, though, possess it like a secret. A mature mind knows to appreciate beauty where it stands and let it go when it fades.

There are some that believe the fading part is just as important as the ecstasy part. I think of the Buddhist monks building their sand mandalas, revel at the painstakingly placed particles and complicated patterns. When the toil is over, the monks destroy the mandala in the blink of an eye by sweeping the sand. It's a practice, to endure the end of beauty. Later, the monks transport the sand of the mandala to a river where it is poured into the water and flows out to the world, a blessing.

 

Could you take a knife to a Botticelli? I doubt I could. But watching the monks pour the sand into the river in a sacred ritual made sense to me. It had intention, meaning, a higher meaning. I hope someday I'm that mature.

The Persistence of Mrs. Finch

And still Mrs. Finch has not returned to her nest.

About a month ago, a Mr. Finch and his partner Mrs. Finch were scouting out a nesting area. They were fluttering about a downspout at the northeast corner of our roof; this had us concerned. But the couple resigned to the top of a column supporting our side porch roof, therefore bypassing a clogged spout and a drowned brood. Unfortunately this was the same exact spot a sparrow, let's call him Jerry, used to roost at night in the late fall and early winter. I would come home after an evening away and see him up there with his eyes closed. It was sort of strange to see a bird sleeping; we know them as the antithesis of this--singing harbingers of the waking world. So Jerry had his roost at the column top (there's probably some architectural term I should be using here, but I am too lazy to look it up) but abandoned it come spring and the Finches moved in.

Mrs. Finch began to build her nest and Mr. Finch serenaded her with his sweet trills. As I was making lunch or dinner, I would hear his delightful song and every once and a while catch a glimpse of him with his jewel-red head and throat. House finches they are called, and the male is stunning with his scarlet color, the female a slender brown bird with black eyes. They originated from Mexico and the Western US and were introduced to the East, specifically Long Island, as cage birds, but this failed. They were released into "the wild" sometime in the 1940s and multiplied quickly; today they are numbered, nationwide, in the billions.

So Mrs. Finch gathered dainty twigs and stalks of grass and wove them together with her beak. I watched her do it, her butt high in the air like a duck in a pond. She tucked and primped and made it all just so. We decided to close down the porch once again, despite it being closed most of the winter due to ice dams and snow mounds. This was inconvenient, especially since we were looking forward to using the deck, the side door and porch being the easiest access. Mrs. Finch and her babies were a priority, much to the dismay of my husband, and we honored her nesting and let her be for the most part.

She was very astute and nervous as it were, always aware of me when I was stealing a glimpse and flying off if she sensed an intrusion, which there were, of course, intrusions, due to my husband breaking our pact and grumbling about the damn bird. I must confess, I felt anxious and caught between my husband who had every right to access his back deck in the most convenient manner and Mrs. Finch who was now sitting in the nest and atop her babies that needed her warmth to properly mature. We did have a few visitors who came to the side door, due to my being lax about roping it off, and this sent Mrs. Finch off in a tizzy each time.

Truth be known, I had every intention of roping off the porch one particularly fateful day, but when I returned home from a pressing engagement found the carnage: two blue eggs smashed on the deck. There were fragments of the nest everywhere as well as feathers and a smattering of bird poop. It was a crime scene.

Later that day, Mrs. Finch returned to try and rebuild the nest and there was Jerry alongside her (or some sparrow that strikingly resembled Jerry) trying to destroy it. So as Mrs. Finch was frantically rebuilding, Jerry was frantically destroying and protesting in loud, sharp chirps. Mr. Finch was nowhere to be found.

Eventually, Jerry succeeded in completely dismantling the nest; wisps of it floated hither and thither all over the deck and side porch. Then both birds disappeared and we saw neither one for about a week. Richard washed the deck and we presumed that was that.

But not a week later, Mrs. Finch returned again to build another nest. And once again Mr. Finch cheered her on with his tender trills.

I found this to be particularly perplexing. Mrs. Finch had already laid her eggs; could it be she had more? Can birds manufacture another brood that fast? Or was she just delusional? I admired her persistence, and I thought of myself and how, with every failed fertilization attempt, it was back to the drawing board. It never occurred to me to give up. It's an innate thing, perhaps a female thing, a faith, that the good in life, the joy, the successes are all worth the effort of having a brood. Or is it the innate compulsion that life must go on at all costs? There's also the larger than oneself factor: the progeny part and the extension of the self through children. We're only here for a short time and it's somehow comforting to know we will live on in others. Was this what Mrs. Finch was thinking?

So Mrs. Finch built the entire nest again and Jerry never showed up again; I wondered if perhaps the Finches hired a hawk or raven to whack him. And then Mrs. Finch suddenly disappeared after the nest was completed. I watch for her every day and every day she does not come and the nest is up there, constructed but empty, like an empty womb, and I must once again embrace the unknowable.

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.