Dear All,

This isn't politicking -- I don't do that.

But this is about Al Gore's idea to generate some interest about the environmental crisis -- he reasons that a lot of signatures make an argument look real good, so he's asking for them. I was willing to send mine, and thought you might be too.

Check out his website at Al Gore Goes to Washington for the form.

And thanks. My daughter is breathing a little easier now.

"Spring is like a perhaps hand" by e. e. cummings

This poem was printed on the liner that came under my room service dinner this weekend. I almost didn't notice it, preoccupied as I was with the tiny salt and pepper shakers and making room on the bed for the tray. I tried to bring it home -- folded neatly into a tiny rectangle, tucked in the pocket of my suitcase -- but it got mangled somehow. Ripped in the middle, creased like crow's feet. But here is the poem, so lovely in a Chicago room with snow flurrying out my window and a full moon rising:

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and from moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.

Discordian Charge to the Goddess Eris

"I have come to tell you that you are free. Many ages ago, My consciousness left humanity, that they might develop themselves. I return to find this development approaching completion, but hindered by fear and by misunderstanding. You have built for yourselves psychic suits of armor, and clad in them, your vision is restricted, your movements are clumsy and painful, your skin is bruised, and your spirit is broiled in the sun. I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free."

From the Irreverand Hugh, KSC, for Witchvox

Melancholy Funk or Creative Ferment?

He saw a deep, redemptive connection between spirituality and depression. For him, depression was not a weakness but simply “one of the things that humans happen to be capable of experiencing.” It had its uses. “Depression turns you inward,” he explained. “In some senses the artistic calling becomes easier with a depressive illness.”

An idea from Joseph J. Schildkraut in the NY Times piece, "The Creative Mindreader" by Michael Kimmelman

A Candle for Saddam

C. S. Lewis said that when we first start to practice forgiveness, we should start with someone easier than the Nazis. He was speaking, of course, as a war torn Brit. He had something against the Nazis. They weren't simply a personification of the ultimate evil -- they were evil right next door, evil at his elbow. Personal evil.

I lit a candle for Saddam Hussein this morning. I felt like maybe I was the only one, although I know that isn't true. Surely there is someone in the world who grieves this man today, who remembers some moment of sweetness, maybe laughter, shared with him. But there were hundreds who applied to be his hangman, who wanted not only his death, but to have a hand in it.

I saw the news photo, the noose being draped over his head. He went calmly, at the end anyway, with surrender in his eyes and a Koran in hand. They did it during the morning prayers while most of us in the US slept. Even George Bush wasn't awakened for it.

I have no hatred in my heart against this man who died, this grizzled old man they dragged out of a filthy bunker and put in clean expensive clothes to sentence him to death. I have seen the photographs of the babies he had gassed. He was not a respecter of innocence or goodness or decency. He murdered, by command and probably by deed and by the trickle down inertia of hatred that flows so strong when it flows from strong people.

So it was easy for me to light that candle and say a prayer for his soul as it returns to Oneness. It was easy for me to breathe gratitude that he is now of the absolute again, joined with the souls of those who perished because of him. Home sweet home. My heart bears no scars from this man, no specific loss. He puzzles me, challenges my belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. His crimes diminished humanity as a whole, including the finite little scrap of it that is me. But forgiveness flows easy from me to him, a benediction that I have the luxury to offer since there is no wrenching personal pain in its way.

You have to get close to my heart to break it. Maybe that's why I've always kept people at arm's length, kept a cushion of distance between us so they couldn't reach inside the gear works and yank something loose.

But some people have. And for the most part, the grander part, the people I have let in have treated me with respect and kindness and understanding. And forgiveness.

There are exceptions.

This is where forgiveness gets pulled taut -- our own personal slights. It is easier for me to forgive Saddam Hussein than it was to forgive the people in my life who hurt me. Who said they loved me only to cease all communication with me. Not murderers, not war criminals. Just complicated people whose needs and wants clashed with mine.

I forgave. Be kind to everyone you meet for everyone is fighting a great battle. And so it is with them. I understand this now. Once I got that clear in my head, I was able to let go of the anger and the bitterness and the utter disbelief that it had all really happened, that they really were gone.

And so is the way of the bodhisattva wannabe, the one who makes kindness her religion. She releases everything that isn't love because everything that isn't is an illusion anyway. She releases the past and keeps only the blessing.

Yes and yes again. I can honestly say that I have released every bit of bitterness and anger. When I think of these people now -- my missing ones -- it is with gratitude that I miss them because they mattered so deeply. And still do. I still love them. My missing them is a pain that is testimony to a larger grace, to the blessing that they still are. They helped make me who I am today, and I am profoundly, utterly grateful.

If I have one remaining regret, it is this (and I am working on it, trying to release it too, but it is dug in very deeply). I do not know if they have forgiven me. I remain unforgiven, with no benediction of release. No blessing, no goodbye. It is a desert between us.

I bear responsibility for the collapse of our friendships. I acted out of fear. I demanded reciprocations. I tried my best, I really did, but my best was flawed. I love them and it wasn't enough. My fear was bigger than my love, or felt that way anyway. I see that now for the cock-eyed illusion it was, but then I made an island of my ego and set up base camp. I worried about what people would say, how I was being judged in the cold fish-eye of public opinion. I clutched at security, too scared to even look at what I was going to lose if I didn't make the right decision, like some metaphysical Let's Make A Deal. I needed them to be a certain way, to treat me a certain way. I had a playbook. I left them little room for error, and now the universe is returning likewise to me.

I crave forgiveness too, even as I understand that this craving does not serve the highest good. I don't know if they need to forgive me or not. It doesn't matter, in the end. My challenge is to forgive myself. And that is a great challenge indeed. It involves unsquinching my heart, stretching the cardiac muscle big enough to include myself.

I know this much -- their paths will lead them where they need to go, as will mine. All is meaningful and right in the fullness of time. So after forgiveness comes the real truth -- compassion -- and until I can treat my own soul with both, I cannot extend it fully either.

I am trying. Until then, I light candles for executed dictators. A baby step toward tomorrow, when perhaps I will have the heart to light one for myself.

Synchronistic Serendipity

Synchronicity -- the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality -- used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

Serendipity -- the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also, accidental fortunate gifts.

I have become a spiritual magpie, collecting sacraments. Everyday oracles. Postcards on the floors of elevators, fortunes from cookies, small rocks. Lyrics from songs, junk mail. I line my nest with these shiny bits of tin foil, waiting for some scrap to reveal itself to be gold or silver or maybe even a diamond, dusty with ordinary earth. Waiting for it to flare into meaning, profound and rich.

Vegetable 911

I rescued a pumpkin today. It was sitting in someone's garbage at the side of the road. I passed it on my daily walk, noticing it as I simultaneously noticed the trash truck rumbling and sputtering at the end of the cul-de-sac.

I was a large pumpkin. And I was tired. And it seemed silly. But the truck heaved itself closer and I caught the stink of diesel fumes and it was like catching the smell of a predator through tall grass.

So I went into this other person's garbage, this person I didn't know. My logical left brain kept poking at me -- this is illegal, you know, it said, you're trespassing and that's a big damn heavy pumpkin and oh God, it's covered in spaghetti sauce or something worse, just walk away and forget this happened . . .

I ignored this voice. The stranger's neighbor tending his yard saw me pilfering the pumpkin. He waved. I couldn't wave back with an arm full of pumpkin but I smiled and nodded as I hoped any harmless eccentric might, so I wouldn't alarm him.

The pumpkin was intact. No spaghetti sauce -- my left brain had been pulling a fast one. Someone had drawn a ridiculous face on it with a magic marker, a cupid bow mouth and seductive slanty bat-bat eyes. Miss Thang, said the inscription.

"Come here, baby," I said to it. "You've suffered enough."

I took it home to where it rests on my front porch, communing with the other pumpkins still left over from Halloween.

I don't know why I did this. Perhaps it is my new pagan sensibility that makes me notice such a rift in nature's cycles, the bright orange organic against the plastic soda bottles. I have always recycled but it has been out of duty -- yes, I am a good liberal and I know what's good for the planet and I will do what I must. But now I am finding something else in tucking vegetable peelings in a bowl to take outside to the compost bin. Something sacred. I do not toss that word around. I mean it. There is something larger in what used to be merely responsible.

So what is the larger thing? I contradict myself in the asking, because the importance of this pumpkin turned not on the larger but on the smaller, on something finite. Something small enough to get my arms around and carry home.

From "I Believe in Father Christmas" by Emerson, Lake and Palmer

I wish you a hopeful Christmas.
I wish you a brave New Year.
All anguish, pain and sadness
leave your heart and let your road be clear.

They said there'd be snow at Christmas.
They said there'd be peace on Earth.
Hallelulah Noel
Be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas we get, we deserve.

RIP William Diehl

One of my writing inspirations died Friday -- William Diehl. He wrote Sharkey's Machine and Primal Fear and was made very wealthy by his work. He inspired me because he was real and because he was smart and because -- truth be told -- he said I was a damn fine writer.

It was a set-up; he had no choice. My thesis director put him on the spot in front of an entire classroom full of people. He had no gracious way out.

I still hold him to it, though, took it right to heart, then immediately called him up and asked to come to his palatial home on St. Simons and bother him for an afternoon. Amazingly, he said yes. Sometimes my own audacity astounds me.

I interviewed him then (a little snippet of which appeared in Writer's Digest a looong time ago). I still have the cassette tape of our conversation. In the background you hear what sounds like someone hacking up a lung. It was one of his parrots, the one that could mimic a smoker's cough with uncanny parroty precision. The other parrot said nothing for almost the entire time I was there. On my way out, however, the telephone rang. And then it said, "Goddamn it!"

William Diehl taught me something I will never forget. "You won't lose your story," he said, "if you can always find its spine. Everything must attach to that backbone. It's how the story moves. Find the spine."

Death sux. But only for the ones of us still alive. A profound and vulgar friend once said that if there is a heaven, it is this -- to finally know it all, everything, and to understand it all, forever and fucking ever amen.

From what I knew of William Diehl, he would agree with this whole-heartedly, add his own vulgar hear-hear to it. His office overflowed, like he was trying to cram it all in -- live it, breathe it, suck the marrow from it (to paraphrase someone more eloquent than I). I believe he is there now, at last sinking into it with a big "ah!" Putting his feet up. Taking a drag.

What a mensch.

Fucking amen.

Empty Spaces

It was just a conversation, one of those eating-dessert-by-the-fire, reading-after-the-child's-gone-to-bed conversations. I was re-reading A Return to Love and my husband was paging through Scientific American. I don't remember what we were discussing, only that his point was that most people don't realize how ruthless evolution is, that the underpinnings of the universe aren't compassionate whatsoever, that competition is the engine that drives human life, all life. And it is a vicious thing, messy and lacking in aesthetics.

I told him to stop talking, that he was screwing with my spirituality.

Later, I was able to understand that what he was saying bears no relation on my spirituality whatsoever. Evolution is a bloodless machine, yes, and competition is its hard wiring. You cannot look for love in it -- it grinds out all love, all emotion, all spirit. It has a cold efficient beauty perhaps, in the end anyway. A breathtaking effectiveness certainly. A glorious watchmaker precision that runs on error, is fed by all that goes wrong -- such a concept, almost exploitive in its brilliance, like something Enron would think up, to drive the glory at my doorstep. The autumn leaves, the winging geese, the swirl of gold in the water bowl that is our pet.

But -- as I muse on my swing, lulled by the back and forth, the heartbeat of the universe -- I realize that what I am calling ruthless is in fact neutral. Competition is a word I judge, but it's really just a giant values sifter. I think of competition and I think of little girls not pretty enough for beauty pageants, crossing the finish line last, losing the big game. I bring to it the memories of an also-ran, of a sidelines girl. I invest it with psychic baggage. But it is neutral -- it brings to the top what we ask it to. If the values that we select for are compassion and consideration and -- yes yes -- love, then they will rise to the top of the machine as efficiently as ruthlessness.

Such is evolution as well. There is no poetry in it, only an equation. But perhaps that is poetry as well, even if it is an icy sort.

This is a conversation I had on my swing, with myself. My husband is not particularly interested in such musings. He will listen patiently -- a skill that has kept us married for fifteen years -- but it is the patience of an engineer who knows that if the wing strut is not adjusted just so, the whole thing crashes and burns. It is mumbo jumbo, like a Tom Cruise movie. He is not offended by my searching -- he doesn't tell me I'm a deluded wishful-thinking traitor to logic and reason, even if he thinks it. He tolerates my individual search for meaning. But it is very much an individual search.

My best friend tells me I think too much. She is Catholic and very happy being so, but she feels no need to conform to that playbook. She tells me I use too many big words. She says her conservative husband doesn't want her hanging around me anymore, that I'm a liberal nut job who's just gonna whack up her thinking too. She laughs when she says this because she doesn’t take him seriously.

My other best friend isn't speaking to me anymore; he's never said why. We used to have these long talks on faith. He was an agnostic who really wanted to be an atheist but couldn't quite pull it off. We debated whether religion was primarily a biological or socio/political construct. We discussed whether someone like him could maintain a relationship with a fundamentalist evangelical Christian girlfriend, a person who thought he was hot, yes, but who also thought he was going to hell. We told each other stories, like I'm telling stories now, and he listened this way too, with his full attention. I am guessing that in all that talking and listening, he finally ran up on something he couldn't say, that he couldn't have me hear. But it's all a guess on my part, an attempt to make our narrative into an arc that makes some sense to me.

Here is my point. I think we make stories to express a truth. But all truths -- even the kind that keep airplanes in the air -- have holes in them. My husband knows this -- he learned it at Georgia Tech in a class called differential equations. There are some values you cannot solve for -- you have to know how to fill in the blank and move on. In my world, a more right brain world than his, stories help us find out what might go in our empty spaces. They span them, like bridges, with their own rules of physics. They help us connect stars into constellations.

Because we talk of stars, of drinking them in. Starshine, stardust, star stuff. We adore our stars, make love to them with sonnets and telescopes. They define our nights. But in reality, if you stand outside and look up up up, what is chiefly visible is the darkness.

From "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who finds our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Autumnal

"By now, the wind has emptied the milkweed pods. The goldenrod has gone mousy. All the leaves are down, except for a few tenacious oaks and beeches and an ornamental dogwood that is a reprise of the entire season. Each tree looks more singular — and the woods more intimate — in this bare month than in the thickness of summer. October’s memory seems a little lurid from the perspective of mid-November. The sumacs down by the road might have been reading Swinburne the way they caught fire and expired, vaingloriously, in last month’s light.

But now the drama is over, as if the year had come up hard on a plain, Puritan truth and was the better for it."

From "A Private Month" by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the N.Y. Times

Why, Stevie, Why?

Miss Hisler, Stephen King's school principal and (perhaps) his first critic, said, "What I don’t understand, Stevie, is why you’d write junk like this in the first place."

My first experience with Stephen King wasn't writing – it was the movie Salem's Lot. Nothing – before or since – has terrified me quite so viscerally. It is the boogey-man of my generation, this movie. I watched it alone in my parent's bedroom, surrounded by every stuffed animal I owned. I sat there through all four hours of it, eyes fixed on the tiny black and white TV in the corner, protected only by pastel CareBears and litters of Pound Puppies. They were -- as expected -- useless. All it takes now is the memory of fingernails on window glass and my stomach juices congeal. I didn't sleep without nightmares for two weeks. My parents blamed Stevie.

He's continued to scare the bejesus out of me ever since. And now that I am daring to call myself a writer too, my respect for what he does with words has grown. He taps the deep primal, the dark vein. It's present in all of us, which means we guard it well, and yet we let him slip the needle in, over and over again, knowing it's coming -- the sharp prick, the bloodletting. I still bare my jugular for him, but not because I have a taste for being tasted by monsters. Not anymore. I have different appetites now.

In a 1993 essay, King wrote: “The question which haunts and nags and won’t completely let go is this one: Who am I when I write?” That's why I read him now, with incantations on my lips that maybe he'll find the answer, and that if I keep the faith and keep reading -- words like tea leaves -- I'll discover how he did it. And then maybe -- maybe -- I can see the answer for myself, blooming there in the bottom of my own cup.

Stories are Medicine

" . . . Whenever a fairy tale is told, it becomes night. No matter where the dwelling, no matter the time, no matter the season, the telling of tales causes a starry sky and a white moon to creep from the eaves and hover over the heads of the listeners. Sometimes, by the end of the tale, the chamber is filled with daybreak, other times a star shard is left behind, sometimes a ragged thread of storm sky. And whatever is left behind is the bounty to work with, to use toward soul-making . . ."

"At the Gates of the City of the Storyteller God"
Clarissa Pinkola Estes

From the NY Times review of The Clean House

“There are things, big invisible things, that come unannounced — they walk in, and we have to give way."

The chilly silence that follows this explanation is broken by Matilde, ready with her usual remedy: “Would anybody like to hear a joke?”

Of course it’s told in Portuguese, so you probably won’t get it. But this peculiarity epitomizes a fundamental message of Ms. Ruhl’s odd and enchanting play: We may never come to a full understanding of the jokes life plays, but the wisest and possibly noblest response is to have a good laugh anyway.

by Charles Isherwood

The Goodbye Drive

We are driven
by endings as by hunger. We must know
how it comes out, the shape o' the whole.

A. S. Byatt

Getting There, Hell and High Water

"[The] path to knowledge [is] a kind of madness. I'm interested in the route that people must take to arrive at a spot where they can be large and whole and responsive. And the kind of forbearance that we need to show each other because sometimes people can be doing things that seems really crazy and nonsensical, but when you look back at it, this was the path that they had to take, there was no other way to get there."

Scott Spencer in Crafting Scenes

Pointe Vierge

“A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”

Albert Camus

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow, or a friend.

Terry Pratchett in Small Gods

"Don't put your faith in gods. We get the gods we deserve. But you can believe in turtles."