Letting My 'Inner Mowgli' Out For Some Fresh Air

If I could create an ideal world for myself, like I was asked to in a writing group recently, I would be the female equivalent of Mowgli, Rudyard Kipling’s much-loved jungle boy, raised by wolves, friend of most, if not all, animals in The Jungle Book.  I sometimes wish I had been raised by panthers, bears, wolves—my very own Bagheera, Baloo and Akela.

In this world, I'm often tortured by my inability to say the "right" thing and my propensity to blurt out the wrong one. Some acquaintances, reading this post, may say to themselves, Ah yes! That explains it!  But maybe I'm a misfit in this world because there's another one I really belonged to once. Indeed, the places in my childhood where nature and I touched constitute my most clear and vivid memories. My earliest memory, at age 3, is peering into a robin’s nest at a freshly laid, vibrantly turquoise egg. Now, turquoise is the color of my studio walls.

I also remember a thicket...

It separated our yard from a neighbor’s. My mother (yes, I had one, an actual human) called it a gully and tried in vain to keep me out. When she wasn’t looking I wriggled up and down a scrubby apple tree whose fruit was so green and sour it gave me a bellyache every time I ate it, which I did often, on principle. Or, in the deeper part of the thicket, I followed narrow trails mother nature left for me, round and around, in a spiral. I sat cross-legged on the dirt at the center, smashed berries mom said were poisonous into a pretend stew with a stick. I told myself stories. I imagined myself as characters I invented. I became a writer.

Much of this took place in upstate New York, in the Finger Lakes region—lands the Iroquois settled before the Europeans, a far cry from New York City downstate. Seneca, Keuka, Canandaigua, Cayuga were the lakes close by, but I also remember Chatauqua and Otsego, and hearing and seeing Iroquois names everywhere. The lakes spread across the state's middle like slender, outstretched fingers on a pair of open hands. The water was clear, and rounded pebbles carpeted lake floors. I remember steep and rocky cliffs, gorges and waterfalls. Along one cascading stream I found a geode, its homely exterior belying a blaze inside: quartz crystal shards in shades of white and orange. I carried it with me to every place we lived after until we landed in flat, seemingly indistinct Indiana. The Finger Lakes were, to me, like what the Iroquois thought: God’s hands, in this case, rested upon my young life.

Back home again in…where?

Ultimately, it was the geology of New York state I missed more than friends or schools or neighbors when we moved. I often imagine how I might have grown up differently—better—if we'd stayed there. Odd that we ended up in a place named for Native Americans, in Indiana, a place I haven't always appreciated. But Indiana is where I found the man I'll always love. It's the place I came eye-to-eye with a fox in my garden—something he AND I will never forget! It's a place where I've watched saplings grow into shade trees in a yard of my own. And everyday I go on living here, Indiana surprises me. 

A few weeks ago, following one of the covered bridge trails in Parke County, something I saw took my breath away. Our car turned a bend and surprised a white-tailed deer—a doe—eating in a field of tall corn. Only her head was visible, dipping up and down, nibbling on the stalks' tender ears. As we slowed and steered to the shoulder, we saw two smaller heads—noses and ears to be exact. The threesome reminded me of musical notes, their bobbing heads a melody dancing across a page. A page of Indiana: What could be more "right" than a rolling field of corn?

The doe’s velvet ears stiffened at our presence, and before we came to a stop, before I could get my camera out—before I could say, Hey! Wait for me!—she bounded across the road and into a woods. She stood stock still and back far enough so that the forest hid all but her legs. She'd succeeded in calling our attention away from her babies. First one fawn emerged from the corn and crossed clumsily into the darkness, and then another, both still in their spots. My only photo is a blur of the last spotted brown rump being swallowed by the dim, silent forest.

What is silence anyway, and what good is it?

How hard it is in the world we inhabit to find a truly silent place! For even when you’re able to turn down the volume of civilization, something is always making itself heard. For me, silence steps forward when road noise fades—no singing tires, no squealing brakes, no revving engines. When I get there—if I get there—I inventory the multitude of other sounds that heretofore were hidden by everyday life. I hear water sloshing, birdsong, gurgles in the woods I surmise are made by a wild turkey, but I really can’t say because I see nothing in the stillness. If I lived in such a place—had been reared there—I would know the name of every one of those sounds—at least its “forest" name, and knowing would make it truer somehow. Or so I imagine.

How would it change the world, for instance, if we could hear the the prayer of the mouse as the hawk swallows it down? Or the missive of the fish, as it's scooped up by a bear? If only we could give ourselves over to that way of thinking about life, about death! If only I could...

At the least, I want nature to help me understand the hurts I see people inflict on one another, the hurts others do to me, the hurts I cause. But, all in all, spending time in the quiet of a deeper wilderness than my day-to-day one makes me care less about the world of people. How much better a use of my attention to watch a heron make the rounds of coves at Raccoon Lake, wade out into the shallows on straw-like legs, fish for his supper with his beak in the late afternoon breezes, after the skiers and their boats have gone home. Or to count the birds of prey (hawks? eagles? turkey vultures?) overhead—12, no 15!—buoyed on air currents exhaled by the interplay of water and sun. 

My favorite experience of nature, if I must choose just one, is wind. By itself it has no sound and can’t be seen. It depends on impedance—branches swayed, leaves rattled, water lapped against another resistance, the shore—to make its music and its paintings. Resistance is what gives the wind its character. And I know then I’ve come full circle. Resistance—impedance—also defines character in my messy, imperfect day-to-day life. Not only standing against something, but standing with it, bending, being bowled over or merely rattled or untouched.

I doubt I could last a night in a true wilderness, but I can glimpse one sometimes and let it fill me up. We all have an inner Mowgli, and we all need to let it out to breathe in. To breathe in silence and song and an idea of who we were before we "grew up." I'm told (but don't quote me on this) it helps the disposition. Leastways, it does wonders for mine.

Living Beyond the Landscape: A Parable

PROMPT: Write the story behind and/or associations with a treasured object of yours. Here's what I got...

The woman bought the fan on their first date--an exhibit of art for sale by Li Xing-Bai, a visiting scholar at a nearby university, one of the Communist Republic of China's earliest gifts of cultural exchange with the United States in the 1980s. A mutual friend and coworker of the couple arranged the exhibit in a town hall of a tiny German settlement tucked within a diverse metropolis in the Midwest. Mr. Li was a good friend of the coworker, who was also an artist.

Could she even call this a date? The man had left his wife for her. They made plans both to attend the exhibit so they could spend time together in public before his divorce was final without arousing suspicion. The woman brought along her best girlfriend as additional cover, but also because she wanted her to meet the man. But the hierarchy of friendship was in flux. When the woman was out of earshot, the friend grilled the man about his intentions, for she felt the balance of relationship changing.

While the drama between the man and the friend unfolded, the woman gazed absently at the art and intently at the prices. Even the fan she chose was more than she could afford at the time. As she paid, the coworker introduced her to Mr. Li, who spoke to her in Chinese, which the coworker translated.

"He says you have chosen wisest among all here, for there is first the fan itself, which he made from 300-year-old rice paper, then there is the painting on one side, and finally, there is a poem, in calligraphy, on the other." The coworker turned the fan over to reveal elegant Han characters in swirling black paint and the personal stamps of the artist in red. Mr. Li continued in Chinese as the coworker first listened, then translated. "A loose rendering of the poem is, he says, The plum blossom is the bravest among flowers because it blooms first, sometimes before the snows end, and so it stands alone against the cold."

The coworker turned the fan back over to the landscape side, and the woman looked anew at the branches dotted with purple buds, some blossoms blood-red and others blush-white, only the suggestion of snow. Mr. Li and she exchanged smiles, and he bowed to her as the coworker collapsed the fan and placed it in a protective bag.

The friend passed out of the woman's life even before the wedding took place. The coworker came to the wedding but retired from the workplace the three shared, sick and bitter in his heart. And Mr. Li, when his visa expired, escaped north, at least for a while, with a Canadian graduate student who studied under him in his years at the nearby university, thus leaving his Chinese wife and children to tend his landscapes in Beijing.

The woman's purchase gathered dust and tears, first open on shelves and then folded away in cupboards, until, in the time of the couple's 20th year together, she mounted it on silk two shades darker than the rice paper had become and placed it in a display box.

It hangs now in their living room, where she and the man who ran away to her all those years before see it daily from a room away as they wait for their coffee to brew. Visitors to the home they made together see the landscape side, but the poem on the reverse remains their secret.

Of Ducks, Daylilies, Life and Death

PROMPT: Think of something you saw recently and what it brought to mind. For a group variation, have everyone write down 1-5 images and share. Other writers can jot down the ones that appeal to them, too, and then choose from their own or someone else's to write about. The image that came to my mind is underlined and in a paragraph near the end. The rest is its back-story. Enjoy!

A mallard made a nest this spring in the corner of a flower bed that surrounds our chimney. The bed is crammed with daylilies I’ve allowed to take over because my persistence is no match for theirs. The mother duck found the one thin spot in the jumbled jungle of clumps where a pussywillow that grew too big used to grow and the stalwart daylily rhizomes have yet to bully their way into.

From the time my husband discovered her, this duck hen was nesting. Bits of down, shed from her underbelly to warm the eggs we assumed incubated beneath her peeked out around her like stuffing from an old pillow.

For a few weeks, every time we walked by her spot, we saw her on her nest. She appeared worn down by her task, but eyed us warily anyway. I wondered if she ever left to eat. Now that the work had begun, the male with his flashy feathers was nowhere to be found. I left a few breadcrusts close by to help her out. She never touched them.

Then one day the mother duck was gone, but there were no ducklings clacking about in a bobbing train behind her, nor did the nest contain any bits of shell as evidence of hatching. Only the circle of down remained, with the shape of her underbody pressed into it. We thought raccoons or a hawk found the eggs—maybe mama duck too? Or the neighbor’s cat or a crow? We were mystified and disappointed.

The daylilies in that bed have since begun to bloom—the yellow ones anyway, which used to be a dwarf, ever-blooming variety but seem to have bred themselves with other larger varieties that bloom for only a few weeks. The wild, orange ones—which eventually all the bed will become, I suppose, because it’s the most aggressive—have sent up their taller, gracefully bending stalks where flowers the color of sunrise will tell me  June is at home in Indiana again. Soon these blooms will be everywhere—in yards and woods, suburban banks and country ditches.

I tried to separate the wild orange ones and another tamer red variety out from the tangle of tubers when I transplanted the yellow ones here—the root stocks actually look different. And I set what I had too much of under the shade of a tree in my front yard with a “FREE” sign; all disappeared by late afternoon the same day. Some turned up soon after planted in small clumps at one of the entrances to our housing addition. Now they fill a thick, deep edge of that large bed.

All this has me wondering: How far away is life? Is it past the next death? 

Each daylily flower blooms just that one day, hence the name. But the plant lives on. Several flowers come and go on each stalk, never more than one per day, each disappearing into the night until the stalk exhausts its bounty, forms its pods, turns brown and waits for me to cut it down. Then next spring it's back again.

Likewise, which moments we live through are the significant ones? In our lives, when do the leaves emerge? When does the bud form, the flower open? Is the wilt in silence and under stars somehow less because we fell into sleep and missed the precise moment of expiration?

Even cancer cells—which every body grows but only some retain—must possess in themselves a certain joy, unbridled perhaps as they culture in a corner their host refuses to turn and live consciously. I’ve read the pathology report on my own tumor. It seemed to me a sort of swirling, exotic plant, attempting to set its blooms in a closet.

How far away is death? Is it at the end of life? Or is it just the beginning?

One of my favorite movies is one I don't quite understand, but it fascinates me nonetheless: The Fountain. In it, an Aztec priest—who is either from a dream or past life or a character in a book, or all three—says, "Death is the road to awe."

The other day I looked out the kitchen window and spied a pair of mallards mating on my patio. Maybe it was the same hen who lost her eggs in my daylily bed. Maybe now she'd have another chance to be a mom this year. The drake climbed onto her back and bit her neck to hold on. She squawked and fussed and flapped. He fell off more than once in the minute or two I stood at the window and stared out. But each time, he climbed back on, and she let him grip again in his bill the back of her neck. For the first time in all the times I’d seen mallard pairs swim or fly or waddle through our neighborhood, I detected hints of lavender in the feathers along the edges of of the wings of both the flashy male and his duller mate.

How far away is life? Is it waiting outside my patio door? Lurking in a dark corner of a chimney flower bed beneath a tangle of lance-like leaves? Or shut in a neglected corner of a locked closet? Is it in my eye or my mind’s eye or my heart? As far away as what I notice or sort out or untangle? Or as close as what I ignore or abandon or give away?

Today my husband found a duck egg "planted" in the asparagus patch some 20 feet or so from the former nest site. This seeming decoy, meant perhaps to fool a potential predator, apparently went untouched while the predator stripped the nest. (A week or so later, it, too, disappeared without a trace.) I haven't any answers, you see, only questions. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said to live the questions. I say they are all way signs on the road to awe.

Little Boy Blue, Come Blow Your Horn

The sender line in my e-mail inbox was an address I didn’t recognize. Probably spam, I thought, or worse—porn spam.  I already burden my mail accounts with just about every control available, so how did that get through? 

I clicked on the email haltingly, ever afraid of imploding viruses since that one time when something corrupted all my photo files then emailed itself to everyone in my address book. My husband, the computer guru, made me feel as if I’d had unprotected sex after that encounter. Never again, I swore; once bitten, twice shy—or so the saying goes.

But this email wasn’t spam or a virus. It was from my nephew’s wife—someone I’d never met. She’d been googling my name and found my website. She wanted to say thank you for something I’d sent her months ago—a sort of baby gift—and she hadn’t had time to write. No surprise there. She has two small children to keep her busy.

All this takes on a vastly different character when I explain that I haven’t had much contact with my family of origin for somewhere around five or six years even though my parents live only a few miles away. This lack hasn’t been for lack of trying on their part. I’m the guilty one here—I chose silence and separation. The reasons are many and complex, and I don’t want to discuss them anymore. The sympathies of others and, more particularly, their judgments are irrelevant.

Exceptions and Rules

My nephew has been the only occasional exception to the blackout, though I’m not really sure why. I sent him a gift built around a poem when his daughter was born four years ago. Then last year I sent the gift for his son, who was well on his way to his first birthday by the time I got a letter written and everything packaged up and mailed.  He named that son for his father—my brother—and what I sent him was a baby quilt my mother pieced and embroidered for that brother, her first child, while she awaited his birth.

I don’t know why my mother gave that quilt to me. At the time, I resisted taking it. Not because I didn’t like it, but because it didn’t belong with me. But she was cleaning out dresser drawers, I was there, and she insisted, “Take it,” pushing it into my arms.

The quilt is made of blocks of blue and white, with scenes from nursery rhymes embroidered in blue on the white squares, similar to the one pictured here. I think the motif is called “Little Boy Blue.” I didn’t really know what to do with it. My daughter was beyond the baby quilt stage by then but a long way from having any children of her own, and I saw no babies of any sort on the horizon for me. My brother's kids were still in school and single.

I suppose mom knew I’d take care of it, which I did. It lived those ensuing years zipped into a plastic blanket bag in my hall linen closet. When I got the birth announcement from my nephew, I took the quilt out and put it away any number of times. I knew now where it belonged. In fact, I’d always planned to send it to whichever one of my brother’s children had a son first, but I hesitated because of the letter I needed to write to send along with it.

Eventually I moved the quilt to a suitable mailing box. It sat on a shelf in my office, waiting, waiting for the letter. It was hard to explain my silence without putting innocent parties in the middle of disagreements with other family members. In truth, I’d hoped that my silence (after many attempts to discuss the issues had failed) would motivate the affected parties to understand how deeply the matters we disagreed over impacted me. I thought, perhaps, those who missed me might pressure others to reconcile. But people cling quite stubbornly to their ideas about others, as if they could force them to continue to carry their psychological baggage for them. Be who we insist you are! they seem to say. I tried that route. It nearly ruined me as a writer.

Finally, though, I wrote the letter and mailed the quilt. For months I heard nothing. I figured, oh well, so that’s that. I didn’t regret sending it. The quilt needed a proper home. Theirs was the right one, no matter what they thought of the letter or me.

Then the email came. I answered, she responded, I answered again, she responded again. Then my nephew wrote twice and I answered each time. Then he wrote his cousin, my daughter, and she answered.

With each exchange, more of who I am and what's behind my actions trickles out, little by little. I’m careful because I’m scared. What if I’m rejected or misunderstood—again? What if my feelings are shuffled aside—again? Can I take it? I don't know. It really hurts every time who I am and what matters to me is rejected.

A Misbegotten Legacy

One of the things my nephew and I discussed in our emails was an incident of teasing when he was 6. He said his sister and I ganged up on him and called him a name, over and over. Two things struck me: First of all, I was ashamed of myself. After later raising a child of my own, I understood how teasing children is seldom anything BUT destructive, in spite of how innocuous it seems at the time. Children internalize the frustration it creates differently.

I’ll never forget my young daughter sobbing uncontrollably because one of her uncles (my other brother) insisted her Minnie Mouse pictures and toys were really Mickey Mouse. She was distraught! Every time he visited he teased her along these lines. Every night after he left she cried herself to sleep.

Alongside that picture of her in my head is one of him as a child in a home movie, also sobbing, because one of his uncles took some string he was playing with and tangled it into a nest of knots, just to watch him cry. This is the brother (not my nephew’s father) who would later smack me around whenever my parent’s heads were turned or they were out of the house. It lasted until he got married and moved out. By then, I was a senior in college.

“It never happened,” my father told me when I tried to talk about why it was overlooked, “because I didn’t see it.” That, even though I was never silent about it. I dreamed once that dad looked straight at it and still claimed he saw nothing.

The other thing that struck me about what my nephew shared was that I didn’t remember it. Of course I remembered teasing him and his sister on more than one occasion; I just didn’t remember the specific details of the incident he mentioned. But I don’t doubt his recollection of it at all. He’s younger than me for one thing, and because it happened to him it carries a stronger emotional charge; his memory of it is bound to be clearer. And I felt that charge through the words he wrote. I felt his feelings about it. I know he spoke the truth. And I felt truly sad that I had hurt him and that it stuck with him all these years. 

I apologized, and I meant it with every fiber of my being. He said it wasn’t a big deal. I said it was because we all go on repeating what isn’t pointed out, talked about, analyzed.

Further Along 'The Blind Side'

I have another uncle (the older brother of the string-tangler) who says he doesn’t remember molesting my mother when she was 8. Everyone wants me to shut up about it. Up until now, I didn’t believe he could have forgotten. Maybe, like me, he just forgot the particulars. It’s hard to believe he could wall off the rest completely, though my mother did for more than 70 years. 

As lonely as it feels being the only one to keep harping on the truth, I believe in the importance of remembering—especially the unpleasant things. Anyone can and will remember the good stuff. But all our linens need air and sunshine and the touch of human skin, warm with the blood coursing beneath it. With this in mind, it really doesn't matter if our recollection of events differ; there is an emotional truth that is just as—or, more likely—more real, and that's the truth that bears response.

We strive to preserve obvious heirlooms—things—and pass them down, generation after generation. Who wouldn’t want a mother’s quilt stitched with care and love? But this other stuff—these hurts—well, we need to give them the airing they require now so they aren’t passed down. Little Boy (and Girl) Blue should remain only-ever-always just characters in a nursery rhyme.

Mom, if you ever read this, know that it was you who thrust upon me the role of keeper of the family memories, though neither of us knew then what that would ultimately mean or the toll it would take. But know that the quilt survived, and I delivered it to its rightful home.

Celebrate the Coming of the Light

Today is the first full day of winter. Yesterday at 12:47 p.m. EST was the Winter Solstice. If you had a chance to see the sun rising or setting, it would have appeared to hug the horizon closer than ever because the earth’s tilt was at its maximum declination.

I use that word, declination, for fun--it was the word of the day yesterday at Visual Thesaurus Magazine, an online service I subscribe to.

It used to seem odd to me that it feels like winter several weeks before winter officially arrives and that Christmas, which we consider a winter holiday, barely makes it into the official winter season. Part of the reason, I think, that it seems like winter long before it really is, is because daylight wanes up until the Winter Solstice, when it begins to wax again.

I don’t know if it happens like this every year, but the new moon very nearly coincided with the Winter Solstice this year. Through Dec. 15, the portion of the moon we see was growing smaller (if, indeed, cloud cover allowed us to see any of it) and thus giving off less light. Then, Dec. 16, 17 and 18, the three days of the “Dark Moon” phase, it disappeared entirely until it reappeared Saturday, Dec. 19, as the merest eyelash. Yesterday and today it’s in its peak crescent form, and it will continue to “grow” until the full moon on New Year’s Eve.

Many gardeners, in springtime, continue to plant with a new moon as almanacs advise, so that the increase in light at night will help to pull the new life forth from the ground.

Cycles Within Cycles Within Cycles

I see the waning and waxing of the moon as a smaller cycle within the larger cycle of the earth’s movement around the sun and the changes in sunlight we experience as a result. That cycle is in me as well, and in every living being. I go through times of decrease and increase, and each of those is natural and will pass into the other eventually. This happens to us all. It is what makes us alive, and we should celebrate it in ourselves and in each other.

It’s when I began to garden that I gained a new appreciation of cycles and of winter’s place in the cycle of life. As much as I love watching things grow, caring for a garden takes a great deal of time and effort. Suddenly, winter revealed itself anew to me as a time of rest, and along about July I began to look forward to its coolness and its chance for repose.

The plants rest in winter, too, after pushing past their peak around the time of the summer solstice and retreating gradually back inside themselves so they can regenerate for another year of spilling forth. Let me give you an example: my asparagus. Unusual in that it’s a perennial vegetable, the asparagus crop is done around the first of June, depending on the weather and my diligence at harvesting.

Instead of cutting the stalks for eating while they’re still under a foot and tender, at that time I begin to let them grow as tall as they like. In a few weeks they’re as tall or taller than I am and they “bloom” into gracious ferns that shade their corner of the yard like a primeval forest. Or at least it must seem so for the birds, rabbits and other wildlife who congregate in their coolness as summer temperatures soar.

As the garden moves toward fall, these same ferns bear tiny red berries, which the birds and rabbits feed on. We don’t cut down the stalks until falling temperatures and waning light turn them from citrusy green to brown. Why? Because as long as the topside is green, the underside, which I personally buried under a foot of earth, is drawing off energy to produce next year’s crop. The ferns are like giant straws, reaching toward the sun to suck energy down into the plant crowns.

I’d like to see what happens underground the day after the Winter Solstice when daylight begins to increase again! The plants certainly must feel it, as I do now that I'm aware of it. This knowledge gives me a new appreciation of the winter world. The colors of my yard, though subdued, are alive with a sort of restful beauty. Shapes are more apparent, particularly when snow accentuates the remaining deciduous plant structures and evergreen shrub forms.

Winter turns my yard into a sort of sculpture garden, and I realize I don’t need to see evidence of growth at all to know it’s going on. Something is always happening, always growing. And often, more is going on below the surface, beneath the ground, in the dark, and even in the winter. It’s true for people, too; you’ve heard the adage, “Still waters run deep,” right?

Bird by Bird by Bird

I like to feed the birds, and I usually keep feeders filled in both the front and back yards year-round. But 2009 was a stressful year for my family and me. I forgot to fill the feeders most of the time, or if I remembered, I just didn’t do it. I was too depleted. But things are finally turning around.

I know birds depend more on feeders in winter when there’s less food available naturally than in summer when things are growing everywhere, and that snow makes it even more difficult for them to scavenge for food. So before the last snow hit, I brought in ALL my feeders (Six? Seven?) and cleaned and filled them. The snow came and went over the weekend, and no birds showed. The seed and suet just sat there. The birds had forgotten me, I surmised, just as I’d forgotten them.

Then yesterday, on the Winter Solstice, the first cardinal couple visited my front-yard feeders. This morning, the tree outside the window where I sit to write is full of at least six pairs of cardinals, busily exchanging places at the four feeders. The males spar in the air from time to time, as do the females. All flit from feeder to feeder to ground, where they retrieve what’s fallen. The brown and white palette of my snowy, hibernating yard and the gray, clouded light that is midwinter make these always colorful birds more striking than ever. Even the tawny females seem lit with an inner glow I wouldn’t notice in the glare of a sunny July day.

Now there are two gray-blue nuthatches with white chests and faces and black caps, prancing down the trunk of the ash tree. One squirrel just chased another away until he (or she?) is done filling his cheeks with my corn. It waits across the street until the first squirrel leaves, then moves in and out in a flash, followed by a third. Where there was no activity, now there is an abundance of life.

Most of winter is about the light increasing, whereas after the Summer Solstice in June, the garden is on the wane; it’s dying, in spite of the beautiful weather yet to come. Like an iceberg that’s more than three-fourths underwater, winter is mostly the “new” waiting underground. Life, of which I’m a part, always finds a way to sustain itself, though some days the feeder is empty, and other days no one comes there to eat in spite of an abundance of food. But if it hangs there long enough, eventually there will be diners.

As I organize my writing projects for the New Year and prepare to celebrate the Christmas holiday with my family, I look forward to a period of flow after so long an ebbing. And I’m thankful for cycles, something I can depend upon. Regardless of our individual differences and various beliefs, it’s important to realize that the one thing that unites us, world over, is the cycle of life and, at the Winter Solstice, the coming of the light.

True blessings of the season to you and yours.

Dreams: The Stuff Shirts are Made of

PROMPT: Dreams are always a good prompt because of their stark imagery and unusual associations. It could be one of your own that gets you writing or someone else's (with their permission, of course!). Here's one of my husband's I expanded on thanks to an news item, which also often make good prompts.

About a year ago, my husband Chris and I got a chuckle out of a dream he had in which he acquired a new skill: how to "program" shirts (yes, as in long- and short-sleeve, button-down, buttoned-up and stuffed). Chris has a degree in computer technology and has done his share of pounding out code in the 30-plus years he's worked at an electric utility. Even now, his job involves scouting emerging technologies to augment customer service. So it's a fitting dream, no matter how "out there" it seemed at the time.

Imagine, then, our surprise when this week he discovered "programming shirts" isn't as far-fetched as we thought, that one company has developed a flexible screen onto which they can feed video-rich information. Making that screen part of a garment is a logical next step:



Chris and I often tell each other our dreams and puzzle over the symbolic content. I keep a running log of mine and try to analyze many of them. We know we're the only ones who can really figure it out for ourselves and that what seems "right" to us today will likely yield to another layer of meaning tomorrow, next month and next year. A dream has that kind of life. It begins inside us like any other creative product and is just as real as a book or a poem or a program we write--even as real as a tasty holiday meal we plan and serve to family!

Dreams and Premonitions: What's the Connection?

More often than we probably realize, a dream possesses foreknowledge--either in what will come for us or for the larger culture. Sometimes in reaching ahead it gives us warnings. For instance, many people didn't arrive at work at the World Trade Center at their regular time on Sept. 11, 2001. Still others did not board planes involved in the tragedies that day. A number of these people spoke of premonitions and dreams that made them uneasy and either kept them away or slowed them down. Who knows how many of those who perished had similar misgivings that day?

I had two dreams of a car accident before I actually had one a couple years ago. All this is not to say that the purpose of the dreams was to warn me about the old lady who backed into me in the grocery store lot--in my dream the vehicle and the circumstances were different. But it could have been to warn me I was driving myself  too much in my personal life. Or, it could have been trying to tell me my thyroid medication was too low and my attention span and reaction times were off, because it was and they were.

About this time five years ago, I dreamed of a tsunami. The day after Christmas that year, a tsunami devastated the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. The focus of my dream was the personal me and how I felt overwhelmed by some personal issues. In my dream, I surfed the tidal wave and watched from the ocean shallows it left behind as it went onto shore and swamped the buildings. But instead of destroying them, it washed them dazzlingly clean. The cities and peoples of Sumatra weren't so lucky.

Certainly the dream wasn't meant to warn me away from traveling or to get me to call the earthquake warning center, because I had no travel plans and the dream contained no information about where or when. But when the waking-life tsunami hit, my spine tingled. The dream became an extra source of encouragement to me that I could survive these tough times, that they had a purpose. An artist friend who also pays attention to her dreams told me she, too, had a tsunami dream--hers just a day or two before the actual one.

I believe these seemingly odd occurrences happen because everything living--us, the plants and the animals, our thoughts and our dreams--are all connected in the organism that is Earth. Just like a whale or a bird can create a new pattern of vocalization and transmit it to all other members of its species everywhere within a few months without direct contact, so can we. We haven't even begun to tap what it is that happens in our inner lives.

Searching for Evidence of Inner Life

Last June I had some physical therapy. I don't remember what was on TV as the therapist gave me my treatment, but we started to discuss it. You've probably all had conversations along this same line: What on earth is the world coming to? I said I thought a big problem nowadays was that many people have no inner life. The therapist asked me what I meant by that.

My reply was dreams and the stream of thoughts that go on inside us all, nonstop. It's not really that people lack this current of thought, but that they don't pay attention to it. They don't remember their dreams, and they don't try to. They don't quiet the outer life enough to hear the inner one, and it's the inner one that's full of all the new stuff waiting to emerge.

Did you know Abraham Lincoln dreamed about his assassination on several occasions? His wife did as well and didn't want him to go to Ford's Theater that night. Julius Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, dreamed of her husband's assassination, too. German chemist Friedrich Kekule correctly postulated the structure of the benzene ring after seeing an image of a snake swallowing its tail in a daydream, and Mary Shelley attributed her fictional character Frankenstein to a similar source.

The list is endless. Launch a Google search of your own sometime.

I just finished re-reading a favorite book and posting a review about it: The Wild Braid by Stanley Kunitz . In it, he talks about the inner life and dreams:

One function of dreams is to inform us that the boundaries of experience are infinitely open and that the limits we perceive in our daily life are in themselves an illusion, that actually to be alive is to occupy territories beyond those we recognize as our physical universe. Each person's dream-life is in itself a universe, a product of a single tangle of membranes and nerve centers and the rest of it. In the dream you move beyond that dominion into one where the rules have not yet been discovered and never will be.

Later, Kunitz tells of recurring dreams of being lost. He admits he doesn't know how to interpret this feeling and concedes he couldn't possibly tell what the dreams "mean" once and for all. But he believes his purpose as an artist is to try to describe the feelings they evoke. "There is, above all," he says, "a need to articulate your own source of being so you will recognize that source and know who you are. How could you be an artist if you didn't explore your own inner life?"

I'll take it one step further: How could you be fully human--or fully alive--if you didn't explore your own inner life? I believe a blade of grass has an inner conscious sense of itself. My two cats are ALL inner life; they could care less about anything that goes on outside them beyond food and sunlight!

Kunitz writes of how he had a vision of his garden as it was to become prior to creating it, as if predicting the outcome. I've changed my own waking-life garden after staring at it quietly, long and hard, so that it has become, through the years, more of what both the land and I wanted. But I also dreamed once that a more ideal version of this garden existed alongside it--with trim brick paths, neat root cellars with cold-frame windows and just the right storage conditions for seeds and bulbs, and (best of all!) no weeds.

It's a garden no one will ever walk through in the ungainly western side yard of my house, but it lives in my mind to help me grow the things I say and do and write.

Are You Really an "Early Adaptor"?

Someday soon, my inner garden may also be available in a "shirt version." Do you think long ago the person who coined the phrase "wearing your heart on your sleeve" actually dreamed the same dream as my husband?

Before you go to sleep tonight, put a pen and a pad of paper on the table next to your bed and, if you have it, a flashlight. Tell yourself: I will remember my dreams. If you wake up from a dream in the middle of the night, write it down. When you wake up in the morning, lie still for a few minutes to see if you remember anything else, and write that down. Start a log on your computer with dates, all the weird images and any ideas you have about what it might mean. Begin your writing day with the transcription of the night.

You really don't want to miss the drama of your inner life, do you? Once it realizes you're paying attention, even more will begin to come through, night and day. When the "shirt version" of what makes you grow becomes available, don't you want to be ready?

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

by Stanley Kunitz, with Genine Lentine
photographs by Marnie Crawford Samuelson

Billed as a "visual memoir," this book is an intriguing introduction to the poetry of Stanley Kunitz, the two-time U.S. poet laureate who died in 2003 at the age of 100. Published in 2005, it follows Kunitz from summer 2002 through fall 2004. It details a near-fatal health crisis in 2003, from which he says he "emerged in a transformed state" and also his loss in spring 2004 of his wife of 47 years, the poet and painter Elise Asher.

Throughout, Kunitz discusses how fashioning a garden is like fashioning a poem and how growing a body of work involves growing a life. The reader is treated not only to glorious color photos of Kunitz at work in his gardens, but also to a sampling of some of his best-loved poems. The conversations with co-author Lentine and the excerpts from Kunitz's journals give the reader a rare peek into the lived life that went into creating each of the selected poems.

My copy is hardcover first-edition and was a Christmas gift--a keepsake--from my husband. The book came out in paperback in 2007; the price difference between the two on Amazon is a mere $5. I advise you to get the hardcover, though, because this is a book you'll thumb through again and again.

Why is this book so valuable for writers? Because of the process it depicts. Your process isn't like mine, which isn't like Kunitz's, which isn't like someone else's. But by examining how writers talk about their process we start to develop a respect for our own, as it emerges. It's like the "wild braid" in the title of the book, which is a phrase from a well-known Kunitz poem, "The Snakes of September" (included in this book, of course).

Do you have to be a gardener to enjoy this book? Hmmm...that's a tough one. You need to have a curiosity about the natural world, that's for sure. Nature has its own rhythm, and that external creative rhythm has a way of thrumming its way into your soul and feeding your creativity. So no, you don't have to be a gardener to enjoy it. But if you've already discovered your garden as a place that slows you down and feeds your inner life, then you'll likely enjoy this book all the more.

A few of the gems aglow herein:

• Gardening is a living poem, a collaboration between the spirit of a place and the intervening human, who must respect the spirit of the place. This carries a message for the teaching of writing, Kunitz says. Just like a gardener in a garden, "it's a terrible mistake to impose your pattern on a student...What one needs to cultivate in a young poet is the assertion of that particular spirit, that particular set of memories, that personhood."
• Knowing what to keep and what to cut (in both gardening and writing) is an art in itself. Kunitz bemoans a perfectly healthy Alberta spruce he had removed because it blocked a great view and prevented other plants from getting adequate light. "When the time comes for cutting, gathering, moving, removing, one has to be pretty ruthless," he advises. "It took may be 15 minutes for them to cut it down. It came down all in one piece. The root system took longer to hack out...one can easily sense the metaphorical resonance in that."
• Knowing how to shape--our writing and our gardens--without destroying is also an art. He discusses a juniper he trained to spread and shelter rather than grow upright and adds the writing parallel: "The danger is that you cut away the heart of a poem, and are left only with the most ordered and contained element. A certain degree of sprawl is necessary; it should feel as though there's room to maneuver, that you're not trapped in a cell. You must be very careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin." (emphasis mine)
• Mystery is as important in our writing as in the structure of flowers. "The height of the beauty of a bloom is its folded state, rather than when it's fully opened," Kunitz says. "That's why I've always believed that so much of the energy of the poem comes from the secrets it folds into what we would call, in a flower, its crown...In a poem, the secrets of the poem give it its tension and gift of emerging sense and form, so that it's not always the flowering in the poem and the specific images that make it memorable, but the tensions and physicality, the rhythms, the underlying song....So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn't say as much as in what it does say."
• Fostering an inner life is at the heart of all creative work, and what works for one person may not work for another. But: "The more you enter into the unconscious life, the more you believe in its existence and know it walks with you, the more available it becomes and the doors open faster and longer. It learns you are a friendly host...The unconscious is very much akin to what, in other framework, I call wilderness...It resists the forms, the limits, the restraints, that civilization itself imposes." Later he calls this "the wild permissiveness of the inner life" and says it was as a child "I learned I could go anywhere in my inner life."
• Time is a luxury both gardener and writer must allow for. As a gardener, I know you plant small, with the mature size of the plant in mind. It has to have this room to survive, even if it doesn't look so great for a few years. "The mystery of the creative process is that the poem is there but not there within you, accumulating experience, accumulating images," Kunitz says.
• Good writing means taking chances and exploring what you fear, what's unknown to you. With gardening, particularly in the beginning, that will be just about everything, and you'll make a lot of mistakes. A good gardener is one who's accumulated many mistakes and puts them to work. It's the same in writing. "...you are hesitant to explore unfamiliar areas," Kunitz says, but "if the terrain were familiar, the poem would be dead on birth...the path of the poem is through the unknown and even the unknowable, toward something for which you can find a language."
• The art you make is your unique gift to the world and therefore is sufficient unto itself. "That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes," Kunitz adds, "but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life."

I can't pick a favorite poem in this collection because that changes for me with every reading. Certainly "The Snakes of September" is right up there, along with "The Round," "Touch Me," "Raccoon Journal" and, lately, "The Layers." But I do have a favorite Kunitz journal entry, excerpted in this book that pulls it all together: "My garden, my life, my poems--a planned disorder."

Enough said. I love this book. I hope you will, too.