no, colette

When I was a younger woman, I read Colette’s two Cheri novellas and was so disturbed by them I read them several times, trying to understand what bothered me. Having just seen the movie by Stephen Frears with Michelle Pfeiffer as the aging courtesan, now I do. The movie has only a barest trace of the ennui and cynicism that the two stories carry: Love is an illusion. People will betray. The only proper response is wearying self interest and another glass of champagne. I don’t believe that. We don’t always get what we want in love. If we do get it, we have no control over how long we’ll have it. But the point isn’t to be safe or to be cynical. It is to be open-hearted. It is to risk loving another while also learning to love ourselves enough not to be abused for the sake of the powerful illusion sex offers, that we are desireable, worthy of love, and not alone.

We are alone. And it’s ok.

listen

Honey, I didn’t come here to stay. 

 

That rock solid wisdom lessens the wistfulness of last week’s blog. The speaker is in her 80s, has buried a husband or two, seen a child die,but remains grounded in her faith and her family. She isn’t afraid to die. 

 

Why do I forget that with arrival, there is departure, at least in this life, try as science will to keep us going forever? Advertising does us no service either, promising youth, implying youth is the goal, the prize in the cracker jacks box. But we came here with death as destiny. 

 

It turns living into a challenge: how to live the best life possible because this particular assembly of circumstance and folk is unique. And then there is the deeper question: what is the best life? Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Money. Power. Control. Faith. Family. Friends. Success. What?

 

Stumble on, pilgrim, and let me know when you find the answer, only I think I know the answer. It’s in your heart, not always easily discernable, but there, like your heartbeat.

 

Listen. Listen. Listen. 

tick tock

My mother is a fine old clock wound up by the Infinite’s touch once and only once, and the hour hand on the face of her life is slowing. The heart aches as the daughter in me sees feet shuffle, words disappear, lips tremble when she sips tea. And it aches for my incomprehension of the gift that was ours, this once in a lifetime meeting in the sacred space of time and life.

the end thus far

Well, I’ve gone and done it, really finished the manuscript, after two weeks of literally rewriting the ending chapter every day. Parts of the book read as smooth as glass, a good sign, but I dragged my feet at the first signal I might really finish, only to find day after day that I was not finished and there I was drubbing out an ending yet one more time. Then I think I got mad at the book. Be done and go to your room. Now I’ve sent the thing off to my agent in New York electronically and printed out some copies for trusted friends to read. So it’s out there, but no feedback yet. Odd, I feel odd, a little empty, more than a little lost, with a messy office and tons of chores to do as I attempt to join 2009 and be up to date as far as “social media” is concerned. I jumped in the water (read last blog), and I’m dripping wet with no prince to kiss. 

kiss that frog

There’s a fairy tale about a princess and a frog in the pond in the royal garden. The frog rescues the princess’s golden ball and tells her that if she will give him one kiss he will turn into a handsome prince. The drama comes from the fact that the princess doesn’t want to kiss a frog–who does– but in the end, she gives in, and he becomes what he said, a handsome prince. I was thinking about this because I had been listening to the Peter Gabriel’s song, Kiss that Frog, and I thought about all the frogs in life, not just people, but events that I haven’t liked, that I said were ugly. And I was thinking about acceptance, about kissing them, and about transformation, when an event or person turned out to have been a blessing in disguise. Do you know what I mean? And I can think of handsome princes I was more than willing to kiss, and they were frogs at heart. And I can think of things I was so reluctant to do, and I was wrong. The reluctance was about fear. Can’t you hear beyond the croaking? Gabriel sings. So what’s a little kiss, one tiny little touch? Jump in the water, come on, baby, kiss that frog.

a flower

May I step in peace upon the earth….I bow to you, a flower…..it’s a Sufi heart-opening meditation I learned this weekend, and the words keep reverberating inside. What does it mean to step in peace upon the earth? I have this sense of a kind of sacredness with every leaf, every stone, every tree. I have this sense of a respect on my part, not a blind using what I want and walking away. I have this sense of everything being sentient. I have this sense of my immense clumsiness. And bowing to a flower….I almost can’t wrap my mind around the words and the images that float up. A flower is so simple, so small, so low to the ground. It reminds me of the Christ’s words: Inasmuch as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethern, ye have done it unto me. Are we not all flowers upon the earth, too…? I bow to you, a flower…..

rachel alexandra

Rachel Alexandera has made me so happy. She’s a filly who just won the Preakness, the first filly to do so since 1924. Her jockey and trainer and owner say she’s a one in a million kind of gal. I just feel happy that she had the stamina and power to run with the colts, who can rough up a lady on the race track. I remember being roughed up in the racetrack of my life, told by boys to be quiet, not to boss them around even though I was smarter and had the best ideas and for awhile they’d let me boss. Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t ok. It’s an interesting conundrum, this life of ours, where we have to fit into the mores of our society and surroundings or pay the price. As I age as a woman, I can look back at all the ways I fit myself into the boxes of what I was told a woman was. Now I don’t know anymore: I’m just glad there are so many more choices and that women can possess real power in a racetrack that often understands only that. And I can rejoice when a filly outruns the colts. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.

may

Walking down the street in this hot evening, aware of Confederate jasmine in full bloom everywhere with its little alabaster five fingered petals and magnolias blossoming, dark green leaves, tight creamy blossoms that open to splendid plates of flowers, and gardenias, snow white many layered, all their heavy southern perfumes filling the air…..May where I live, and the humidity here, so that no walk is without perspiration, dewy or not, and the moon is full right now and there is a mist of an aura all around it, I wonder what that means, I love walking down the sidewalk because all the fences are filled with the little starry flowers, a Confederate jasmine May……………………..

seed

How did this novel I’m working on come about? What sparked the creative urge to write it (other than insanity to think I could)? What was its seed? As a girl, I focused on English history, on the Tudors, because of their strong queens, and on the War of the Roses. When I was in college, newly married, I joined the Book of the Month Club. I loved books, and I grew up in a family that didn’t value them. Now I could have one of my choice coming to me every month, thanks to my ex-husband’s generosity (he loved books, too). One of the books I chose was Nancy Mitford’s The Sun King. It was about Louis XIV, and I lingered over every page with its beautiful photos as Mitford lightly and intelligently overviewed the span of his reign. I began to read French history. I liked the Louis’s, XIV, V, XVI (16 lost his head on the guillotine). 

Of the Louis’s, only 14 really interests me, and as a novelist, the relationship he had with the women in his life fascinated me. I wanted to write about those women and their axis, him, only the story was too big. As a writer, I kept getting lost and overwhelmed. Only when I broke off a piece to use in another novel did I realize I’d tried to contain something too large for its container. And so this novel was born, with its focus on three months in this king’s life when he was twenty-two and carved his place in history. History slights all but the most aggressive of his loves, but I believe it was the shy love, the love of those three months and years afterward, that was the wing beneath his wings. 

Interesting questions, those: Who are the people in our lives who have helped us be all we can be? And how many of them have we left behind?

of her

 

She still smiles at most everything, but she is losing more cognitive ability, more and more associations to words and meaning. Last week, she did something so bizarre that it shocked me, and I realized how far gone she is in this disease, which I just want to go away but which is taking her away instead.

And then there are times when some old piece of her rears its head and equally breaks my heart. My brother was telling us about the time he hired on as a merchant marine hand, and the ship he was on went to Cairo, Egypt, and how he and crew members had hired camels and trekked into the great Sahara to see the mighty pyramids, and how they were mighty, magnificent, amazing to see.

I have always wanted to see them, I said.

We should go, piped in my mother with all her old spirit. We laughed, my brother and I, in surprise and pleasure at her enthusiasm, and she because, well, because she has a laughing heart. Oh, we should, I thought, my dear, dear mother, but it will be in another life for you and me––moments like this, when I see her old self both gladden and hurt me beyond words.