page proofs

I just sent off page proofs to New York. This means that not another word of the book I’ve finished will be changed. I did something I didn’t expect. I took what I thought was some worldly wisdom out of the book, deleted it. When I wrote the worldly, warning words, I was adamant about keeping them in. I don’t like sticky sweet romances. I feel like they’re a lie. But in rereading the story again, I decided that I wasn’t being fair to the character, who couldn’t know what he would do in the years ahead, and that I was killing hope, that we begin everything with hope. Time or circumstances may change that, but hope is one of the most beautiful things in our lives. We’ve never dare to anything without it. So I dropped lines that were foreboding, showing what the future would hold. I decided they reflected my own cynicism. I don’t want to be a cynic. I want to keep  aspects of a child, but not deny the wisdom of my years.

What are you looking for when you read? An escape? Realism? Adventure? Why do we read fiction?

shade

I heard an interesting phrase at a meditation retreat this weekend: compassionately let go. The wise man speaking (he runs in Deepak Chopra circles) was answering a question about wanting to help someone by telling them about your meditation practice and/or your God or guru or whatever it is spiritually that is working for you. You must do it without ego and without expectation, as a sharing, he said, as in this worked for me….and then compassionately let go.  I liked that word compassion. I remember the first time I heard about letting go in 12-step….detach with love, was the advice. I could detach, but with love…nope. I was too angry, too fearful, upset by how another’s behavior was hurting me, but too afraid to walk away. Which reminds me of something another wise man once said,  you always have a choice. Always. It’s just that sometimes the choice is between one pain and another. But I was talking about compassionately letting go: of another’s reaction, attitude, addiction, behavior, with compassion toward them. It’s out of our hands. Of course, it always was. Each person has his own path, his own guides and inner light for that path. We can’t make him turn on that light. The word love requires more than I can sometimes give, an energy of engagement that I can’t or won’t summon for various reasons. I can’t always love others. But compassion….I think I can go there, for the other, and also, for myself. Compassion is an interesting shade of love. Less red.

How do you see compassion and how do you see love? And how do you see letting go?

unlined

I wrote a few blogs ago about crones and crone energy. One of my questions was why the word was so scary? I didn’t get many answers, but one of the reasons I see is loss of youthful beauty. I’ve been thinking about power lately. A friend gave a talk to some high schoolers about Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. What is a heroine’s journey, I wondered? Now we can live the life of men because we can keep from having children. But all women I know, married, single, widowed, divorced, crave connection, are often connected with friends and relatives in a way men aren’t, though gay men come close. And what if our heroine has a child? Without a partner, even with one? What, then, happens to her journey? It’s no longer straightforward. There are sacrifices and guilts if pursuing a career. If single, there are struggles and compromises so immense that they can’t be overstated. And what about beauty? What does that do to a heroine’s journey, for a beautiful woman is pleasing, and there is huge power in that. What does that do to her path, to her integrity? There’s great seduction in being pretty or more, in seeing men attracted like metal to a magnet. But in a savage, warrior culture, like the streets, a beautiful woman is captured early by a man, or she’s taken against her will. Her beauty is both power and a snare in which she’s caught. Youthful beauty is also a double-edged sword because it fades. I’m thinking now of Elizabeth Taylor, the great beauty of the 20th century, encased in the brown amber of plastic surgery and botox in an attempt to look 50 when she is close to 80. What if she, the most beautiful woman of her age, had let the hair grey, the pounds accumulate, the wrinkles place themselves on her face, so that along with the wisdom and strength she often displays, the deep marks life makes would show outside as well as inside? She was afraid of looking the crone is one of my guesses. Cronedom is a foreshadow of the dark side, and I don’t mean witchcraft. I mean death. The crone so clearly is walking toward death. But why are we more fearful of those marks on women than on men? And why is beauty thought of as unlined? Is it fear of death again? I don’t understand…..

heroine

Thinking about heroines….thinking about a lecture I heard Jean Bolen give at the Jung Center last year. Among the things she said was that a heroine’s journey often begins because she is cast on her own and didn’t expect it. Unchosen circumstances put her on an individualistic path. I was thinking about my path, about the very domestic life I thought I would have. And how I didn’t obtain it though some unwise choices. I tried to tame a tiger. I have a friend on a heroine’s journey right now; she’s adjusting to the death of a long-time partner. But it’s not only a partner’s death that puts on a woman on a path that contains only her. There’s divorce, illness, disease, the death of a child, the death of a dream. There’s some Mary Oliver line….to love what is mortal and let it go. It takes a heroine’s heart to do that. What makes a heroine? Do you know?

looking good

Well, some things about getting older are absolutely fun. I just went to return my neighbor’s garage door opener, and he met me at the door in his boxers and T-shirt. The boxers had bright blue circles on them (and my neighbor is thinner than I thought). He wore a patch over the eye that has a glass eyeball in it to rest it, he told me. I can understand that. Let me add that I walked over braless, in a baggy dress and shirt, sunburned a vivid pink with hair upstyled by a day at the beach. (My husband and I added a tarp to his truck and sat on the beach like trailer trash.) My husband has taken to wearing kerchiefs and soft cap things to protect his balding head. Today he had on a blue cylinder of cloth made by National Geographic (proudly I was told this) that could be pulled over his face like a mask or pushed back and tucked in, as it was. He looked like an Aryan extra on a Pirates of the Caribbean shoot (see Johnny Depp). I no longer wear a bra. Refuse to, though I am–how shall I put this– abundantly endowed. I don’t care what Oprah advises, I’m not doing it anymore. It’s like armor at my age. And may I add (don’t read the rest of this if you’re visually sensitive), one of the girls hangs lower than the other. Last week, I walked out to get the paper, saw a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile and proceeded to talk with her for thirty minutes in an old T-shirt and pajama bottoms as the world drove by on its way to work. As Rhett said to Scarlett (let me know how many of you have no idea what this refers to), “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  I don’t. And apparently, others feel the same. That’s fun.

What don’t you give a damn about anymore? I hope there’s something…

habit

We sat talking tonight….a playwright, two writers, a photographer, and an artist….of our bosses, how cruel they are, what ugly things they say to us. They’re within, these bosses, for we, more or less, work for ourselves. They tell us we don’t do enough, don’t work well enough, fast enough, aren’t going to make it….whatever “it” is. The photographer, the wise one among us, said: you have to learn to ignore those voices. You have to concentrate on the work, on doing the work as best you can. It’s a habit, thinking those harsh thoughts. You must form another habit.

sense of place

I’ve never had any kind of sense of place. I spent early years in a tiny town in Arkansas before we moved several times to end in Pasadena, Texas. The Houston Ship Channel runs along one side of town, and the structures which process oil and gas are miles of intricate metal piping and holding tanks. At night, they look like fairy palaces of lights. In the daylight, they look like some kind of monstrous ugly invention that overwhelms everything around.  I never bonded with any of it, never processed it even for bad memories, like writer Mary Karr. My real world was in books: fiction, history books, biographies, historicals. It was in England, which I imagined as green and grand. It was in some old house a Cavalier ancestor built. Now I’m in a place–Taos— where I understand what it means to bond with the ground under my feet, the trees over my head, the sky, the mountains. At twilight, I try to watch the sunset, its entire hour of departure, its drama changing each night, wild and colorful if there are clouds, quietly sensual if there are none. There are grand sweeps of pasture land to the mountains themselves. The air is clear and clean. There are adobes both new and crumbling with age. There are abandoned trucks in some yards. Horses or cattle still matter here. Cottonwoods green any creek bed or the river, even if the water is gone; otherwise there is the desert, with its grays and beiges and tough little turfs of sage and pinion. Off the main drag, main street, main highway, all rolled into one road, paved streets quickly give way to gravel or dirt ones. Today I went to a Pow Wow inside Pueblo land. The sun beat down fiercely on me and dancers from all the nations: Apache, Sioux, Navajo, Tiwas…others. They were feathered and belled and beaded into splendor. I loved their stomping, whirling dance….mirroring the heartbeat of the earth, the announcer said. This isn’t an easy place to make a living any more; small farms are a way of the past, though with all the exposure of the terrible practices of our food industry, that just may change. The sale of art and crafts and the service industry for tourists seem to be the two main props of employment. And yet, what beauty there is. But you can’t feed yourself solely on beauty. Beauty is food for the tourists, like me…..

What place is in your blood? If there isn’t one, do you feel a sense of loss, a sense of being a ghost? Are you always looking for home? Is home ever real?

oil

I’ve joined a writing group here in Taos. Everyone brings a saying or quote. We throw them out. We write from the prompt of one or more for 30 minutes. We share, but no critique, just what we liked in each other’s writing. I love this kind of writing, gentle, explorative, safe, and so often, revealing. This last week, the oil spill came up in several people’s writing. There was everything from rage to prayers for us and the earth. Last night, at a dinner party, the spill came up again. Again, rage and blame. What can we do? What if people just met one evening and did a candlelight vigil for the Gulf? One of those same time all over the place vigils? And there are always petitions to sign, and congress people to write. Being here in Taos, where nature is so vibrant and where space has been protected from development because of the Pueblo, I wonder if the Pueblo Indians are still keeping guard over the earth. That’s what I’ve heard; that their religion is the earth and sky and that their life is around loving and celebrating both. But there aren’t very many of them, and modern life is making inroads into their culture.

I wonder what it’s going to take to get people to let the powers-that-be know that enough is enough? We have to begin, no matter how hard, to be more in harmony with the place that sustains us. So what do you say: pick an evening, get a candle, make a sign that says “enough,” call a couple of friends, and stand vigil for just a little while for the Gulf and for the earth…..

getting ready

I leave soon. I leave Houston’s flat, coastal plain, the humidity that will open out for certain this week and make every breath heavy, make shirts and blouses soggy with perspiration. I leave a marvelous greening  that will be jungle by July if the summer has its usual rain. I leave routines: picking up grandchildren, going to exercise, sitting at my desk to work, lunching with friends, going to visit Mother. I leave friends who are like flowers in my life and circles of women that meet monthly or weekly to aid and comfort and listen to one another. I leave a husband who takes me for walks and makes me take my vitamins. And where do I go? West, to a writing residency in the town of Taos, which sits in a valley of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I will be all by myself, in my casita. Near will be other writers, artists, and composers, but we are to respect each other’s solitude, the literature tells me. We are here in create.

I feel amazed that this hovers on my horizon, I who live at sea level and don’t have a grand horizon. What will I create in a solitude I’ve never known? What will I see in my one small life that normal distractions keep me from seeing? What thoughts will visit me? What dreams? What work will I do? I know something inside will be shifting, moving the chairs and tables. I’m reminded of lines of the poet Mary Oliver that I looked at tonight: And have you finally figured out what beauty is for?/And have you changed your life?

Have you? Will I?

legacies

“Caustic and eccentric, proud of having nothing to live on but his pension after having once been rich, he possessed courage, effrontery, intelligence, contempt for death, and thirst for life.”

The words stopped me. I had to reread them. What a way to be described. Sharp-tongued, not one of the herd, able to let riches go. Courage I understand. Effrontery (shameless boldness) I’d like to emulate. Contempt for death is grander than what I possess. Thirst for life. Primal. Basic. That I would like to have. And who’s being painted thusly? One Marquis de Galliffet, Prince de Martigues, nearly 70, in Barbara Tuchman‘s The Proud Tower. Tuchman, a fine historian, is writing of the political world before World War I…. when the danger of more and more sophisticated weapons and the threat that war between two nations could drag in all the rest were gradually forming on a horizon no one wanted to see.

How will I be described, I wonder? How will you? What legacies am I leaving? Are there only political ones? Surely not. Surely we small ones count for something other than cannon fodder.