Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Irons in the Fire


They rest there on the coals, sleeping dogs, bright red in the evening light. I put them in a while ago, hoping that I might someday extract the glowing harvest and pound them into the tools and shapes I will need for the rest of my journey. The one sending out subtle sparks as it breathes the heat of the embers is grief. That one sits in me like a ticking time bomb. It burns brightest at dawn when the possibility of a new day fans it into a near molten state, flowing lava. The one next to it ticks perceptibly. That one is joy. Without that one, nothing I do will be worth the powder to blow it to hell. I have to retrieve my gloves, the thick, leather ones given to me by my father, the ones he got from his father. And the goggles. Those are new. One has to bring his own style, after all. I will wear purple socks too. The anvil and hammer are waiting for the work to come. It has taken a lifetime to get to this point. I have made many mistakes and wasted too much time, but the moment is now, the place here, the words tempered, waiting only for all the craft, passion, and love I can bring to their birth.

Monday, October 30, 2017

Of Introversion and Other Afflictions


The membrane between it and you is pretty thin. You can see through it, but it's tough. You can't quite break out of it. So you carry on in there, all by your lonesome, dreaming of the day that someone might see you. But they don't see you because you can't reach out to them. You are a failure at self-promotion, marketing, attention getting. You are always the last one to get the call, if you even get a call. In these days of din, volume, and cacophony, you are especially silent. The digital revolution has made the ego king and the extrovert a cruel despot. You are not only the minority, you are erased from the scene. Yours is not the life of shallow friendships and casual crowds. So you trudge through your days, a misfit, outcast, social incompetent trying to learn the ways of a world gone berserk with half-baked impulse, shoot-from-the-hip Twitter feeds. You stand there, appalled and uncomprehending on the sidelines hoping that someone might string together a few words that might break the shell, might free your feet to join the other idiots on the conga line. 

That Young Guy


An inmate was waiting to pass through the gate that opened onto the big yard of the Rincon Unit. Standing there with a cane, wearing a straw hat, he looked wizened, and his body carried the relaxed posture of a man at home with himself. He turned as I approached and we stood there waiting for the snap of the electric lock to open the gate. "You the writing guy?" he asked. "Yep." "I used to do that workshop a while back," he said, "with a young guy, curly hair." I named others who had done the workshops before me. None of them fit. "How long ago?" I asked. "Four, five years," he said. "I've been doing them for ten," I said. His eyes lifted. "You put on weight," he said. "Gone gray too," he said. If only you knew, I thought. I did not recognize him either. "That bad?" I said. "Just like me," he said. "Had a hard time of it." I realized I had no idea what he had been through. "I didn't have a  cane back then." We looked at each other, and saw something there, two men who have taken a few hits, waiting for the gate to open. Soon enough, it did, and we went through together.

The Other Side


Over here, on the other side, where it's time to begin to close up, trim the wick of desire, and taper back, it is the little things that teach you where you are, that show you you are no longer what you thought you were, that you can no longer do what you used to do, no matter what you think you can. The cat, for instance. In the predawn darkness she finds a nest in your lap and settles in with her motor running. The earthly delight is palpable. You feel the preciousness because you are crossing a line into something different, something less full and certain than you knew before. You notice that your body is so heavy you can't lift your hand to scratch her ears. You feel like you have been stuffed. With lead. But you still rally to get your self girded for the work to come. You carry on in the inertia of the old ways, not having fully "decided" yet that you must adapt to getting old. You have not yet severed the ties to the hard slog of making a living and have commitments: grading, teaching, workshops. But the ambition has gone. You go through the motions, more than a little disinterested in the hustle to improve and get an edge. People find you boring and weird. Some want to walk on you. You are target now. Because you are soft, wrinkled, and plump, you make a pretty easy target. You pull back, notice that you are alone. You remember that you came in alone, that you are moving toward your exit, the one you will take alone and naked as the day you were born.The only company you can keep is that of others who know this secret. There in the lonely comfort of shared mortality, you rest as the shade comes down. You have to tell them. Have to tell yourself. You have crossed the line, like it or not. 

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Body of Wind and Feathers: The Early Days


Summer 2010 --


We arrive in New Mexico trailing streamers of desert heat. Here it is quiet and cool, jade green and burnished buckskin. Prayer flags join Indian blankets and Georgia O’Keefe style hats and Remington bronzes to make a style. Some people arrive with momentum and fashion homes of adobe and pools near the rocks of El Morro. Others take on the hardscrabble land and build a challenge. They raise goats, open businesses, offer services, make meals an art, shape clay, interpret the magic of the canyons and mesas. The days are long and bright and the wind spins rainbow kites. The place works a spell. A place opens. It waits on the other side of work and fire. The barrier looks impossible to pass, but my heart rests on the other side of the wall. I have to find a way, the one that is not direct, but out of my line of sight, just in shadow, on the periphery. 

***

Navajo rugs, Taos drums as big as a table, antlers, incense, flowers, this place has the feeling of an altar. There are places to sit, converse, contemplate. Corners, couches, hogans, seat cushions. There is a place where people do the work and live the dream, follow the fine thread laid down through time. Paintings, churches, woven pillows, more Taos drums as cup holders, sheepskin covers, family photos, but no microwave, TV, or computer that I can see. Even those words sound foreign here. I feel small and weak in this big place, this thin air. We are on the edge on the rocks leading up to El Morro. It is sunrise. What will I do today, this the first day here? This is a million dollar opportunity: time, place health. The gun is loaded. The hay is in the barn. I’m at the starting gates. Ready, set, sit.

***

So I was watching Maqui yesterday to figure out how it is he handles a business and a restaurant. He and his cook make sure people are served and treated well. Also he focuses on whatever it is he is doing. I watched him squeeze lemons and then de-leaf a strawberry for Megan’s lemonade. He did so with utter intention, mindfulness, and attention to the tasks. He does one thing at a time, doing whatever it is he is doing.

***

How clear, dazzling, and empty the air. How ephemeral my prints in the sand in the wind. The paradox of presence and impermanence dance like dust devils. Torn and faded prayer flags flap their happy message to any who will listen. Get up, pilgrim and do what you can do today. Find your vision in the quiet, then pick it up and carry it into the world, clinging tight so that you don’t forget, don’t forget. It is too easy to forget when too much of the world tugs at your attention.

Kate took us on a walk on the mesa this morning. We passed ruins, saw tracks of deer. Then a kestrel perched in front of us on a juniper branch. He stayed there while we walked past, headed over to a place not yet finished, a draft of a poem needing some revision. “What about moving up here into Tony and Jasmine’s place?” Kate asked.

***

Who is this observer who speaks from the junipers, so sad, tireless, and insistent? He scares me and sometimes shows himself in the corners of my sight, never quite touching the range of direct gaze. I am so glad to sit, but not so glad to stand up and take steps toward fashioning my love. Help me dear God to be so full that I cannot contain my joy, that it spills out of me in actions that fill me even more, a cycle of cascade and filling, the miracle of step after step. Go and look for prints.

***

While I was sitting this morning, I heard something, some kind of a cry, close to the house, human-like, a woman’s voice, it seemed, but not. Once, and then again, more insistently, out behind the house. I went to check on Megan. It was not her. I then called Kate. Not was here, so I wondered if it had been him. No go. So what was it? It had to be La Llorona. But in the morning? I don’t know.  A mystery.

***

A fierce wind buffets the valley today. It howls through the windows and the juniper branches. Dust comes up the road in drapes, sweeping the dust before it. In a hurry, it stops for nothing.

***

I took the bike and the truck down to Chain of Craters this morning. Nice road, but I had to learn how to ride it. It’s not a mountain bike trail nor is it a road ride, but something in between. Like many things here, it is new and unfamiliar. With contact, however, I begin to see the landscape, the terrain so to speak. I learn new repertoires, new ways of responding. I am also getting acclimated. I can ride the bike for an hour without dying, and even stand up for a while. I am moving into being here with some strength, some physical adaptation.

***

Joy that cannot be contained. Boo bounds across the sidewalk and then leaps up on the  table. She lies on her back and wants to be rubbed. She is a Tibetan pony in terms of toughness. Even her fur is so thick it feels like fleece. She delights in what she is given and accepts what is withheld. She shows up with greater and greater frequency at the window in the morning. She runs to meet us when we arrive. She does this show at sunrise to show us how happy she is.

***

On my ride to the Ancient Way café, I passed a car freshly rolled over in front of Bria’s. The driver was just getting out and the EMTs were putting away the backboard. How fragile… It was lucky that no one was in the oncoming lane twenty minutes before. I spoke with the Navajo officer who was writing up the report and taking down notes. He saw tracks in the road I did not, but I nodded anyway as he pointed them out.

***

Kate made dinner for us at her place. Bria, Kirk, David, Jim, Chon, Megan, and myself. Steak, lamb, wine, vodka, asparagus, potatoes, peppers, onions, cous cous. Bria made blonde ale that may have been one of my favorite beers ever. Kate gave us a tour of the gardens and the plans. I rode my bike in the dark home. A crescent moon hung over dark streaks of clouds in the ultramarine blue, Venus higher up in the heavens. Chon spoke about Cambodia. She knew the reign of Pol Pot to the year, month, and day. About not having enough to eat, eating any animal they could catch.  We sat in silence for a while as Chon spoke, fighting back tears, the picture of courage, strong heart.

***

So, in a small way, I engage. I paint. I ride my bike on new trails. I learn to cook in other people’s houses. I am blessed with being able to do things. If I want to do something, I need to just do it and let it go at that. Some things will happen and others will not.


***

The sun has not yet risen, but the El Morro Valley sits in the pre dawn light. Only mocking birds and mourning doves break the silence. No wind stirs the trees or the grasses. It is the good time, the quiet time. I sit and count breaths into heartbeats of twelve, hoping that if I can control my breath, I might be able to control my thoughts. Not much luck there yet. I am grateful for this day, for all these days on the high New Mexico plateau. The light continues to reveal more of the valley. Soon the sun will come over the crest and we enter the dazzling day brilliance and shadow, or direct and intense light.  Soon it will be my time to get up and move. I ask that I move with grace and presence in whatever I do. The direct light hits the high buildings first, Kate’s among them. It looks like it will be a bright, dry day. Where I sit all remains in shadow, still cool, anticipating. The Japanese lantern is on the table. Chairs wait for visitors.

***

My sister Sarah came over from Albuquerque for a visit. We walked the mesa last night around sunset. A crescent moon was waxing and Earth shine lit the moon’s shadow. We climbed up and down the rocks as wind and sun kept the gnats down and our worries at bay. This blending of heat and coolness mingled around us as the vistas opened up. To the north, broad green, grassy plains at the foot of the Zunis, and the hoodoos called Los Gigantes standing apart from creamy sandstone cliff faces. To the west, El Morro’s escarpment and the craters of El Malpais. To the south, Kate’s house before a Mormon pasture stretching south the other half of the Davis anticline, a huge arch of sandstone that has since eroded, and more buttes. To the west, Zuni Land and the low setting sun. It all spreads before us, inspiring and humbling, so beautiful, enduring, vast, fragile, changing. There is a pull coming from the land, a pull I feel in my heart, a call I hear in my soul. The low hum asks for reverence and worship and dancing. The mystery lies in how this can happen. The only way is through fears and straight into surrender. It asks nothing less than heart and hands. It whispers “Join me;” “Honor me;” “Wake up.” “Live me a life worthy of this place.”

***

Boo follows me around like a dog and rolls over in front of me, shamelessly, waiting for me to rub her belly. Her one good eye looks at me full of trust and pleasure. She purrs before rolling back over a scouting ahead, tackling grass blades and balls of fur. I don’t know where she goes at night, but so far she has eluded the owls, hawks, coyotes, and big cats. I look forward to seeing her when I return to the house. Booster, Boo-boo, Boonkimous. She plays on the flagstone chasing invisible prey. She sees something in me. She knows.

***

I follow Kestrel Road in my dreams. It winds through pastures dotted with juniper and sage. Last night, as the sun set, I watched swallows dip to the water, skim and sip it before rising again in tight turns on their search for bugs. Water ran over a little waterfall into a pond bigger than the pool at El Morro. It is backed up against the rocks, a testimony to human power to shape the land. The sun, the air, the birds, water, and scent of sage added up to making this one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

***

We sipped soup, crackers, beer, and talked small talk. Stores, projects, walk over the rocks, food, dogs. Not ran alongside us as we drove Kate back home through the dark down the one lane road and up the bumpy stretch to her place. We got out to look at an iris the color of midnight, of deep purple, almost black, an iris of mystery, the rarest of plants.

***

Father’s Day. Still in the saddle on Kestrel, riding the range of possibilities, holding the reins of my destiny. I am not up so early that I cannot see the computer, but the sun is still far below the horizon, the quiet when the veil is still thin. Time in El Morro is running out. The last grains of sand are waiting to drop through the hour glass of our sojourn. Moments feel compressed, more urgent, poignant, but still inevitable in their passing. Only my attention notices them sliding past, the great river. My arms are sore from helping Briana yesterday. I shoveled back fill around her septic tank, helped place the D-Box in the intersection, dug out the trench leading to the next field, and generally breathed in lots of silt. It was a windy, dry, nasty job. But my reward was a swim in David’s pool. After that Diablo and Angel would not leave me alone. Hungry for affection, lonely, like part of me, they see the walker at the edge of sight, and look to live the possibilities.  

***

I guess I could leave it at that, but there is more, so much more. Megan and I had dinner with Kate at the Ancient Way Café. The light of the setting sun hit me square in the eyes as we savored Jamaican spiced chicken, sweet yams, mango salsa, rice with red peas, delicious strawberry lemonade, slightly melted cheese beneath slivers of coconut. Kate is getting ready to leave for her trip to Indiana. The jade lantern still sits on the table waiting for the visitors that surely will come. My life is standing outside the door of this episode. He is smoking a cigarette, and has one foot propped up against the wall. Not in a hurry, nor entirely patient, he knows that time swiftly passes, and opportunities are lost. He is the stranger in the trees, the watcher in the clouds, the whisper on the wind. He has no need for me to listen, but a strong hope that I will join him in finding the way, the live wire, the under current of beauty and energy in all things. Which way, dear Pilgrim?

***






The Space Behind the Noise


A little music. Some plants. Nice tables and comfy seats. Time too. Lots of time, sweet time. To wonder. That's all I ask. Consistency, movement, practice, vision too. Guess I want a lot. Maybe too much. Or not enough. Desire that is. Raging, rolling, burning desire. Into action. Surrender. Joy. Abandon. A taste of sweet peace and paradise. All because of this, of you, beloved. You helped me to remember, to ask, and to give. With you I can stand without fear and step forward into what I will I never fully know or understand. When I have passed the point of seeing I will let you carry me the way I now carry others. Help me see what is so close but so easy to forget, so quiet there in all the noise.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Dangerous Possiblities Outside the Virtual Bubble


The screen lit the way as the cursor blinked, waiting for the next key stroke, the venture into a blank page, uncharted territory. He could stay here, at home, play it safe. It felt like treason, but he closed the laptop and set off into a day still young with possibility and sensory indulgence. That work would have to wait. The desert of his destiny was calling. He might not make it back. Of that he was certain. It was a risk he was willing to take. The dangers were everywhere, the need great, a world on fire. He had to call the warden at the prison to ask if they would allow a camera in to interview inmates. He was lifting his head up high enough to be cut off. They would shine the light of scrutiny onto what it was he was doing: the contraband, the coloring outside the lines, the blunt disregard for rules. He would do it though. Why exactly, he couldn't say. This was all new to him, the bold step forward into a world waiting to sweep him away, to take him off the stage of the drama in which he played the one without scripted lines. Say it, out there where it matters, where you might not get the thing you most desire, the voice said. The lights are about to go out. Your chance is now. 

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Ego-Holic In Chief


A man who is never wrong, who attacks others who say he is wrong, who defends his rightness with his dying breath, is an ego drunk, an opinion addict, is acting out and needs to dry out. Trump is drunk on his self-image, his solipsistic conversations with himself, and with imposing his warped worldview on the world. His is the simple-minded, binary universe of winners and losers, of white and black, of with me or agin'me. He is "right" about everything. One of the tenets of recovery is learning to "get off it," or to promptly admit when you are wrong. When that is impossible because the rabid ego will never admit being wrong, the drunk gets to stay a drunk. All who go along with it are enablers. Well, we have a raging ego-maniac who is drunk on power in the White House, and he leaves a swath of chaos and megalomania in his wake. Anyone who really cared about him would call for an intervention. Sycophants, thugs, goons, and yes-women are too busy keeping the house of cards from imploding. We'll see how long that lasts. The biggest drunks fall the hardest and usually take a few of us with them when they collapse: think war, stock-market collapse, healthcare crisis, skyrocketing poverty, xenophobia, and on and on. The cardboard cut-out man,who worships his tall drink of power, the idol of his reflection, won't see it coming. We'll say we knew as the dust settles. We knew. 

Monday, October 23, 2017

Why Public Education Sucks


For the record: I am a devotee of the idea of public, democratic education. My life is better because of inspired teachers. I owe them. As a working class kid, I never would have gotten what I needed in a decadent dictatorship, a puppet plutocracy, an arrogant autocracy, or an opulent oligarchy. Public education has made my livelihood possible. I've been a teacher for thirty five years and have taught elementary, middle, secondary, and college students. This little rant is not a commercial for elite, private schools. What it is is an indictment of the tyranny of testing and all it implies. No Child Left Behind picked up the bad idea that the outcome of a good education should be passing a test. (Of course, the lack of funding, bad working conditions, lack of respect for teachers, bad policies made by politicians (not teachers) also had a lot to do with it.) That outcome pushed, no, coerced, teachers into teaching to the test, and left the real work of education -- equipping students to become creative problem solving humans and engaged citizens of a democracy -- out in the cold, an after-thought. Students have learned not to think, but to wait for the answers. The ones who asked questions got thrown out; many ended up in prison. Public education has made a business out of producing mediocrity: standardized, bloodless, dry, mind-numbing, instruction-following mediocrity. One of the taboos of the new era is creative self-expression and being "human." The new way is exclusively "social." Well, I think that the best social achievement comes from a knowledge of what one loves to do, what one is good at, and what one feels "called" to do. That comes from self-awareness and self-examination. The "self" makes the best "social" possible. This dominant either/or view of knowledge as exclusively socially constructed drives good minds out of the classroom and into hiding. The few that make it do so in spite of public education rather than because of it. 

Little Darlings


Note to self: it's time to murder the little darlings. Now, some of you might find that cruel, crass, and insensitive. But you have to understand that this is war. The war is between honesty and lies, truth and deception, hope and bitterness. They have to die. There is no way around it. Just who are they you ask? They are the self-aggrandizing fears of an egoic mind. They are the chains and loops of chatter that say you are owed a living, that others are responsible for your misery, that you are better than they because you are special. You are special, of course, just not in the way you think. You are special in that you can give rather than just take all the time, that you have exactly what the world needs if you can just get off your ass and give it away. It's what you are called to do, and you know what it is. The little darlings are the excuses you make to sit at home on your hands and hope that you will not die. If you just wait, you think, the time will be right. Well the time will never be better than it is right now and your fear is what is killing you. Time to move on in spite of the terror that you might catch fire doing what is it is you most dread doing, what it is you know you came here to do.

Lucidity


It's been almost a year since my father died. I remember the leaves turning in Wisconsin. We sat on his deck in the back yard and fed a fire in a raised copper pit and watched the squirrels gather their winter stockpile of acorns. He sat wrapped up a blanket, hunched over most of the time. In the early light, however, he was usually lucid, looked straight at me, knew who I was. One morning, my son Sean called me from Panama. Miraculously, he timed the call during one of my dad's lucid moments. "Hey Grandpa," he said. "How are you?" "I'm dying," my dad said. "But I'm putting a good face on it." That left my son quiet. "Where are you?" my dad asked. "In a village in the jungle in Panama." I thought that would be too much for my father to understand. My dad replied that he was glad that his grandson was serving in the Peace Corps. "I'm proud of you," he said. "I love you," he said. "Love you too," Sean said.  They talked some more. It was the last time they would speak to each other. I thought that was pretty good, that moment of light in the October colors where leaves fall and squirrels get ready for the long sleep of winter.

Saturday, October 21, 2017

Micro Burst On the River Path


He walks the river path in the morning. Walk might not be the right word; what he does is more like a shuffle, and his heels have worn away the fabric of his too-long pant legs. He looks strong and has the shoulders of a weight-lifter or a wrestler. He has tattoos on his face, a tear in the corner of one eye. The yuppie runners give him a wide berth as they jog past, eyes averted, voices too loud as they discuss investments and travel plans. It is cool this morning, for the first time in a long time, but he is still over-dressed. My guess is he wears his entire wardrobe. When he passes me, he shoots me a quick, appraising, look. When his eyes hit mine, I smile an easy smile. I see you I say. With that his eyes light up and he smiles back. S'up? he says. Chillin' I say. Nice day he says. You too. Two neutron stars collide several hundred million light years away. Waves ripple out. Time bends. Gravity hops a ride with light. He straightens up, lifts his eyes. It might be my imagination but his step is just slightly lighter, perceptibly lighter. Maybe.

Friday, October 20, 2017

Radical Neo-Expressivism


The key to writing, for me, has always been desire. I write because I have something I want to say, maybe even need to say, or, rarely, because something needs to be said. Then I do the work of finding out how to say it, pick the genre that will work best, the voice, the register, the techniques. And, I will take this to my grave, it is in the magic of storytelling that communication happens best. When a writer captures the imagination of a reader, things begin to cook. The world of the writer overlaps that of the reader, creates a world that the reader can move into, is invited to try out, and the reader chooses to share the writer's vision, take on a new way of seeing things, and, (gasp!) might learn something. Now, this may be a quaint notion, since people don't really read anymore, but, as a teacher, with a bare minimum of convictions, I will quit before I give this up. So I carry on, with one eye on the door.

Jumping the Rail


He, the failed writer, down there, toiling away in obscurity, was shackled by the very things that would free him. Chains of stinking litanies held him frozen in fear, catatonic at the prospect he might actually wake up. His identity began to wear thin though, and he began to see through the garb of who he thought he was. He saw the black coat that had defined him in a clear, irrefutable starkness -- it was a fiction that served only to contain the light radiating from that part of him that was the gift of a dying star. He was, he realized, a drop of an ocean, connected to a mystery he would never understand. The words, he saw, could only free him if he let them come to him from where he knew he did not know. From the quiet of "doesn't matter what others think" and "you do this because it is what you do with no thought of the outcome" he found freedom and joy in the work. This getting out of his own way made him a bit crazy in the eyes of others, but gave him the attention he needed to hone his craft. Beauty. Beauty. Whether or not anyone ever sees or understands. 

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

CRS Syndrome


An old guy, about my age, walks into a bar and sits down between two women. He is out for a good time, so pops his question with the hopes of a much younger man. "Do I come here often?" Well that is the status of the state of this writer's mental nation. My brain has gone south, packed its bags, moved to the tip of Tierra del Fuego and left me here holding the bag of appointments that I can't seem to open or make sense of. I wake up to a new day with no idea what went on in the old day and don't have any idea how to sort out what isn't there on the big blank slate that is my memory of a long and complicated to-do list. I need a personal, or even an impersonal, assistant. I need a seeing eye dog to guide me through these days of fog and gray indistinctness. This condition, Can't Remember S@*t Syndrome, will be my undoing, my Waterloo, my swan song. Every day presents a new list of things to be left undone, a pile of cans to kick down the road, a tall glass of oblivion to sip at my leisure.

Monday, October 16, 2017

Can't Fight History


The beating heart of my job, at one time, was teaching: local, actual, at-your-door, what-are-we-going-to-do-tomorrow-in-class-with-25-students teaching. I and my colleagues trained graduate students to teach in a year-long course. In small groups we worked through the baptism-by-fire that is a first year teaching freshman writing. We brainstormed brainstorming, conferenced conferencing, and graded grading. Teacher/writers taught student teachers, and our authority came from years in the classroom along with our reflections on teaching to improve practice. And we tried to make student writing meaningful; we read literature because it raised human questions, invited students to consider perspectives other than their own, and, at its best, pushed students into zones of discomfort, new ideas, and pointed toward writing as a way to create knowledge, insight, perhaps empathy for ways of knowing other than one's own. We wanted to make our students think, and also to feel; to be thoughtful citizens, better human beings. Our teaching workshops were messy collaborations where we shared materials, trouble-shot student conflicts, mulled over the nitty-gritty questions of what makes good writing, developed critical awareness of how language can be shaped for effect; we worked to create a community (both teachers and students) that wrote its way into understanding that was beyond the teacher, beyond the text because that was what writing was supposed to do: shine a light on big questions.  By today's standards, the workshops were low-tech, paper-intensive, anecdotal lessons and discussion that seem quaint by today's "professionalized" teacher training. Authority has been transferred to the "experts." Now, grad students read scholarly articles -- written for scholars -- about teaching in lieu of sharing lived experience. Our classes are driven by vague, hugely abstract rhetorical SLOs, and we use a corporate textbook instead of our in-house anthology. We don't teach the features of the essays and genres that we actually grade, but instead the thinking about notions of context, audience, purpose, and how all that works. Nothing wrong with that if there's something to stand on underneath it. But we don't give students much help in building the stairway to those lofty abstractions. We don't actually instruct students how to narrate narratives, or to show rather than tell, or to craft an analysis. We point to the tools and say "have at it; you're on your own here." The core now, (I can't call it a heart) is administration, and is more "about" writing than actual writing. Teachers "keep track" of things, just lay out vague ideas, point to pages in the text. We don't much model or practice ourselves. Craft, process, student engagement, attention to language, real care about subjects is pretty much accidental if it happens at all. Such is the freight train of new way and it has run me over, left me bloodied and broken in the ditch as it moved on into our vague, assessment-driven, centralized, unaesthetic, sanitized future.

Friday, October 13, 2017

Too Bad It Didn't Turn Out That Way


The crossing gate was up, an erect little soldier, as I closed in on my opportunity. But just as I was about the pass over, it came down. I tried like hell to get in under the wire, but sure as sin, I was blocked out. The rest of my happy little caravan of writer wannbees just kept going. Oh, a few of them waved as they receded down their paths, around a lovely bend next to a river I thought I might know. But I was going no further. The guardians of the gate said so, and their dogs growled to reinforce the message. So I turned around and saw that my path went off in another direction, the one toward teaching. It was a rocky one, beset by days of fog and obscurity. I had to keep moving ahead by force of will. I don't know why this happened, why the others got to go on, why it doesn't matter any more that someone else lives the life I dreamed.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

At Least There Is That


He is there again. I have lost count of how many times I have seen him there. He is perched on the fountain, looking like a statue, not a feather out of place, a Greek god. Of course he watches me and tenses his talons, ready for the lunge that will lift him into flight. To say he is handsome understates his elegant dignity. Why he perches there on the lip of the fountain I don't know. Maybe he contemplates his visage in the reflection, wonders if it is all worth it. I doubt it. He is too full of life for such petty ruminations. Life is to be embraced, he says, lit with passion and risk. I am glad he is here. With the world of wild creatures in decline he thrives here in close contact with humans. At least there is that. At least there is a Cooper's hawk that sits on my fountain in front of the place I call home for now. With a heart crying out for contact with wild wisdom, at least there is that.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Fires, Hurricanes, Floods, Carbon


The hills are on fire, wineries destroyed by flames. Rivers have run dry; the stain of reservoir bath-tub rings grows as waters drain, leaving stone the color of bleached bones. Hurricane after hurricanes break records for destruction from wind and flood surge. Summers bake the plains, the mountains, the bayous. Still the emissions rise and denial festers like a stinking fungus in the moist areas of vested interests. The new head of the EPA repeals the Clean Power Plan. With a flick of the pen he fuels the fires, poisons the air, sends tornadoes roaring across open fields toward the barn you just built with borrowed money and your dreams of an earth still green.

Monday, October 9, 2017

Heart Dipped in Blue


Because you risk loving you will feel pain. The love may be unrequited, result in a deeper solitude than you have ever known, lead only to a hard, cold wall of grief, but it is what opens you to what will happen next, what grinds off the sharp edges of you so that you can see the pain in the eyes of others, can settle your gaze in the here and now in a way that will make the other feel seen, heard, embraced. You must rise from the blue of darkest night, dear one, even though you feel so heavy you feel the weight will crush and break you. The colors of love will lift and heal you if you let them. Let the cracked armor of anger slough off like dead skin. Let it fall, brittle and useless, into the dust beneath your feet. Your skin will tingle: tender, fresh, blinking at the brilliance of the rising sun.

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Interstitial: The Increasingly Untenable Position of a Listening Between


A luxury it is to reside here between things, more or less, temporarily. As a writing teacher, I get to stand back and take apart images and arguments in the news to show them for their fallacious underbellies without getting too wrapped up in the content, without taking a side. It's more about "how?" than "what?". I have to say the fallacies are rampant on all sides. So are the legitimate gripes. My particular devils have to do with the split in (mostly) white America, between the groups that went to college or didn't, between the ones who stayed in the hometown and those who moved to bigger cities, and especially those who see owning any kind of gun you want as a right and those who see them almost exclusively as tools of police and military. I straddle both worlds and pay a price for that. On one side are the "nutcase" gun totin', holy rollers who are pissed to the gills at globalism and the "elites." On the other are the secular, globe-trotting, craft beer drinking, urbanite yuppies and hipsters who wouldn't touch a gun if it crawled into bed with them. And the gun thing is only part of a deeper divide. The rednecks up there, bummin' and pining for the jobs that went to Korea and China want my blood for having jumped ship and gotten a degree and left my country music, pick-up drinking sessions behind. The Academy, while having provided something of a livelihood, has not exactly embraced me either. I am more at home with criminals than muckity mucks in regalia. It's true that I no longer own a gun, but I do understand the appeal, the feeling of being spurned, the nose bent out of shape of being left with opioids and Bud Light in the Rust Belt. Downward mobility sucks. At the same time I can't see blaming immigrants and liberals for all the problems. Nobody wants to admit that the growing gap between those at the tippy top and the rest of us yawns deeper and wider by the day. That's taboo. Hard work to deal with too. It's an injustice that's going to need all of us working together. I wonder if Trump and his goons are fueling the divide, or if it's just human nature to want to have an enemy, someone to look down on, to feel better about yourself. People, it seems, would rather be damned close-minded, cloistered, and angry. So I hang here all by my lonesome in this rapidly disappearing middle: middle class, middle age, middle intelligence, mid-riff bulge. The teeter is tottering and I'll have to slide one way or the other I guess, as the lines get drawn, leaving nobody here in the no man's land of trying to entertain a thing called dialogue, a respectful back-and-forth, an attempt to see and hear the many sides.

Friday, October 6, 2017

Sitting On Gold


It is a key that can open the lock, break the cycle, reveal the off ramp of a loop that will only end in disaster and despair. Not everyone will pick it up or take the risk or be open to what might be there hiding in plain sight. When a space is created, the chaotic world pauses for second and listens for what you might say. A Muse hears the call, finds her way to the circle where you and others gather in reverence to consider what is possible; it is there she considers giving you words to the otherwise ineffable. If the time is right, the moment ripe, and the intention both brave and sincere, she might grant you what you seek. They will tumble down onto you and take shape through the pen you put to the page in front of you. In the act you might see that your capacity for beauty is immense. She will ask much, will become a demanding mistress, but you should listen to what she asks of you. It is the way in and through. That part of you that is hungry for light will infuse you, define you, polish the gold of you to a brilliance no eye can bear.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

The Places They Are Not


Someone asked me what type of men come to the prison writing workshops. Kind and thoughtful person though she was, she was incredulous when I said that those men were as diverse as any group I encounter out here in the "free world," much more diverse, actually. She said she could not imagine that. From there I looked to all the places inmates aren't in the narrative we have crafted about them; I looked to the many representations -- in film, books, music, advertising, TV -- of what "regular" (and more privileged) men can do but where inmates (and many other marginalized groups) are conspicuously absent. I looked to the omissions that form a wall of what is possible to conjure up when we imagine the word "inmate," or ex-inmate. A very short list: I don't see inmates at universities. I don't see them reflected as lawyers, judges, legislators, CEOs, preachers, soldiers, artists, writers, musicians, mountain climbers, meditation teachers, yoga masters, hardware clerks, race car drivers, or bureaucrats. Very rarely do I see them as loving fathers, good spouses, brothers, or helping friends. In short, they are limited to what we all know from the familiar narrative of the men in orange. No wonder they are so easy to erase from the mind's line of sight, to pigeon-hole as outcast, loser, bad apple, sociopath, thug; no wonder it is so easy to deny that those who are invisible will someday return to claim the empty place that must be colored in by a creative, hard-won possibility.

Monday, October 2, 2017

You Wouldn't Believe


How can I begin to describe to you what happens in the prison writing workshops? You would not believe it if I told you that we gather in dim light around a harshly dilapidated table to taste the possibilities inherent in a poem about love and the power of creative expression. You would not believe that men who have murdered someone dream only of giving back some polished pearl of peace to those who grieve. You would not believe that beneath the thick necks and tattoos that rise from the collar up to the jaw and beyond that men hunger for words, will buy a cheap thesaurus with their last dollar. You would not believe that they want to turn bitterness into a struggle for justice, a black flower of resolve. You would not believe that they have more to say than means to say it; there is not enough paper on the planet to hold the stories they want to tell. The games that govern prison take a back seat to honesty, sometimes, in the workshops. They become the subjects of talk rather than the rules. All of this sounds impossible, does it not? Well I can only give words to what I see, however flawed that perception might be. When so much is taken away, the alchemy woven into language begins to hum and shine. Words become real, something to hang onto when the only other option is drowning.

Hit It With Your Best Shot


Before the sun lights the sky behind the ridge of mountain to the east, before the wave of another week breaks over you, you imagine what might be. You might remember what it was you came here to do. You might get your work organized, might find the will and energy to complete the tasks waiting for you as you do them with the quality that comes from love. You might sidestep the nattering nos and move gracefully though the roiling waters, the sharp rocks that snag your progress, cut and bruise your flesh. You might see in your students the potential and latent passion to be what they dream of being. You might leave that black coat of despair at home in the closet. You might choose to live the pain and joy of what is instead of clawing your way through the day to the relief of sleep. You might pierce the fog that covers your future and see there one more day to walk with the beloved, to delight in the soft light of her. You might shed the dead weight of fear and put your pen to work laying down the story that has led you here. You might find peace at the end of the day knowing that you said yes, that you didn't back down, that you followed the call to enter the fire. As the sun breaks over that serrated horizon you try to remember, to fasten this vision of what might be to this breath and the next and on and on into the gauntlet that waits for you.