Monday, April 30, 2018

Last Tango


They were not the usual contents of the big recycle bin used by our modest little community. Unopened boxes of expensive adventure gear lay scattered amid the cans, jars, cardboard, and assorted paper products. Shining blue anodized aluminum tubing caught my eye. Brand new snow shoes, still in the box. Beneath them, an unused, full-body wet-suit lay crumpled ignominiously next to a milk carton. A high-end sleeping bag was under the wet-suit. Treasures mixed with trash, a mother lode for the scrounger. My neighbor must be cleaning out his stash of adventure gear, I thought. He's realized he's old and it ain't gonna happen: all those dreams of surfing, red-rock camping, and rough-country road tripping are going to forever stay in a lock box of intentions that he will keep under his bed, but never actually realize. Like him, I am looking at a future much more limited than what I am used to, but I extracted the snow shoes from the dumpster, then the sleeping bag and wet-suit. I'm not ready to toss in the towel just yet. I have a swan song summer on the horizon.

Saturday, April 28, 2018

Play It Again, Sam


Once, a while back, when I was in a particularly dark funk, a friend asked me whether or not I had any heroes. I thought for a long moment before saying that I only saw heroism in those who grew beyond themselves and their egos. Those rare souls saw themselves as connected to something larger, and, often took some action to remedy social ills. They found joy in service. One of those diamonds was Sam Hamill -- a voice, a poet of pain, a witness to the glowing heartbreak of of love and politics. Here was the remedy to a toxic masculinity, an ex-Marine who learned the vocabulary of emotion, an ex-inmate healing the trauma of rape, a heroin addict who swapped his need for a fix for a love of words, a teacher who asked his students to open forbidden doors by living as example. His essay, "The Necessity to Speak," became a kind of manifesto for my writing life. The only kind of writing that interested me was writing that rose above technical prowess into a dangerous truth that most people did not want to hear. Speaking this kind of truth to power can get you killed in many places on the planet, but it is what needs to be done, is waiting there in the wings for someone brave and committed enough to say it. I am still working on that. Today is sad. I am grateful, though, for the words that remain. Adios, Sam. I'm still listening.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Ah, Sweet Summers in the Southwest


First Sonoran Summer -- you know -- the dry, hot season of May and June, tightens its grip on more and more of April. (Second Summer begins with the monsoons, sometime in July, usually.) At first it was just the heat of high afternoon, the one-to-five-o'clock window, that felt like a convection oven. But now the heat spreads across the day,  stretching from late morning to early evening, and my bike rides to work or home have become summer sweat-fests. Wildfires have already begun to blacken the skies. Open camp fires? Forget it. Get ready for one-fifteen. This, friends, is what separates the weenies from the wusses. We wusses abandon Tucson and run north. The crazy weenies stay here and complain to those of us at higher latitudes and altitudes. Sometimes I wish I were young enough to enjoy this free sauna, but other times it's okay to have entered late mid-life, that time when horizons close in, when the not so gradual decline of tolerance of dehydration and heat exhaustion makes hiking a kind of Russian Roulette. Too bad there are no spare parts yet for all the body pieces that could use a refresh, a cold shot of hail, a taste of ozone after a bolt of lightning. Just so you know, Second Summer, I won't be offended if you arrive early and stay late.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Dues


Honing the work doesn't happen without contact with a grinding stone. In this case, the stone offers a clear look at how far you still have to travel. You want the work to be done. You are tired. Bone tired. So tired you can't get up. You have to get up. You have to lift your tools and get to work. The forces weighing you down are great, but this is the final push, and the line you are about to cross is where the real work begins.

Monday, April 23, 2018

Life Line


Unlike the others out there doing what it is you are trying to do, you do not have the entourage of guidance: the faculty support, connections to the publishing world, friendly editors who have groomed and polished your work to a high shine. Yours is more the path of the the underdog, with good hearts giving you a pat on the back as you lumber past through the tangle of confusion and thick underbrush. Although it feels that way, you are not alone. You just did not get the easy pass in this life. You have to learn to ask for and accept help in whatever form it comes. The life line is there, but you have to pick it up and throw it out. Whether or not someone finds it is another story.

Sunday, April 22, 2018

Could Have Been Worse


It rests there: a smoking, wrecked ruin. But you are there to see it, at least. You think you should care a bit more that it crashed and burned, but you are so tired that you can't think about it, much less feel anything yet. Before this result, you actually thought it might work, magical thinking that you have been so good at. You didn't listen to the voices that told you how wrong you were in your hopes. You trusted that, somehow, it would turn out, that you would find the reciprocity you imagined. Oh well... you did what you could. Your mistake was that you never learned how to dance left-footed, legally blind, almost deaf, one hand tied behind your back. 

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Introversion to Distress


Without people, there would be nothing to reel me in from my musing. By people, I mean obligations, responsibilities -- extrinsic reasons for leaving the land of freely-associated ruminations. I would  linger here in my introversion like a balloon batted around by air currents. Of course, if there were no people, I'd have to do my own digging of roots and stalking of mastodons to survive. Ruminating is a kind of civilized luxury, an act possible because of discretionary time and resources. So, I guess I should grateful when pulled out of my thoughts by what it is I need to do to teach, to earn my three hots and flop. But time, sweet time. Without it, I am paralyzed by lack. With it, I paralyzed by possibility. 

Livin' By the Laws


So, my dear, tired wanderer, you are sad about how things have turned out. That is one way to respond to how you have been perceived by others. And you know that the key to the future rests in aligning your hands, your heart, your mind, with your actions. Your actions. Actions, you must remember, work the alchemical laws of how your life will proceed from here. The veil in front of you, keeping you from creating the life you want, can be pierced only by courage, love, and passion made visible by what you do. It is the way of things. You must calm your fears, quiet the voices that say no, find your serene, vibrant source that does not fear death, place your foot firmly on the base of that foundation, and then take that first step. If you can breathe, you will soon find yourself running, and the world will swirl around you, now a cascading river of light.

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Twenty Years Plus


Today, after four hours of teaching, I will attend the University of Arizona Service Luncheon. One gets invited to this lunch on "milestone" years of service: ten, fifteen, twenty, and on. My milestone year is twenty. That is twenty full-time years here at the UA. I also have four years of service at ASU, three years in Tucson Unified School District, several years teaching in Mexico and Ecuador, nine years as a grad-student TA, a year teaching Adult Basic Education and ESL in the prison, and some odd tutoring gigs. All in all, I have been teaching for a living for thirty-six years. But today, I mark the last twenty here at the UA. I get to tuck them under my belt, file them away, take one last look around before I turn toward the door, the one that opens onto what happens next.

Honest Work


They were in my dreams again last night. My students, that is. They were there, waiting for what it was I, we, were going to do. I threw the curriculum out the window, so to speak (there are no windows in the basement classroom in which we meet), and said "Write what you feel and think about something important to you." Magically, we all got to work and began to have a real conversation. Oh, it messy, chaotic, and garbled, but something was happening. Students were up out of their desks, reading to each other, talking, laughing, having heart-to-hearts. I felt blood rush back into my extremities, felt tension drain out my hands, felt my brain spark with small flashes of lightning. I said, "Pick your genre; no, mix them. First a response, then an analysis, then a synthesis of the two: right and left brains, emotions and thought, heart and head. Tell a story. Let your words be the basis for action you dream of taking in the world. Work on our own; work together." It was a mess, I say, a tangled, glowing, beginning of something that would never be fully resolved. But we were on our way. The honor way.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

You Have to Wonder


It's not just about merit. Definitely not about merit. Politics and membership have more to do with it. Some get let through the fence keeping them down and out while others, no matter what they do, get blocked again and again. I happen to be one of those who didn't make it for some reason. Sure, I had an OK run at some small successes, but they were all pretty bush-league. It could have something to do with the MFA Mafia. That's a tight-knit tribe that watches the score closely and takes you out if they don't like you. Or it could be fashion. I just didn't make the right moves at the right time. Or it could be work. Honestly I didn't work as hard I as I could have. Part of that was due to fear, and the belief that I didn't deserve success. Whatever it was, the game is over and I lost. That's a hard pill to swallow. I don't feel so bad for me -- my ego -- but I do feel some shame for not having given light to the gifts burning inside me. That one stings.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Picking Up the Thread


The day yawns and stretches and rubs its eyes as light rises behind the eastern ridges. The air is cool, sixty-eight degrees, and it is a Tuesday according to my calendar. I have exactly five days of meeting classes left in the semester. Right now, I don't yet feel the urgency to get ready to meet those classes, to gird my loins for work in the trenches of literacy. That will come later. Right now it's time to remember what it is that I wanted to do with this short life. The moment is the definition of potential, and I am afraid that I cannot live up to that potential, feel some shame about that. I have taken a few wrong turns, taken the easy way, and ended up in a dead end. Not sure what to do about that, how to rectify that mistake. Why has it been so hard to mesh my desires with the demands of livelihood? Time to feel the loss and to act anyway. I don't know why it has gone so awry, but I do know that today I will write, teach, and try to make my word visible in action.

Monday, April 16, 2018

Connecting the Dots


Caught between the twin inevitabilities of drought and rising population, the Desert Southwest is looking down the barrel of severe water shortage. It's been coming for some time now, and, like Capetown, South Africa, we are drawing down reservoirs on the Colorado River to a dangerous low, a Day Zero, when no one will be getting the allotment they are entitled to (on paper, anyway). Groundwater wells, the old Plan B, have to be drilled so deep it's too expensive to pump the water up and out. All of this is exacerbated by the swings of climate change and all that CO2 belched out by your cherished chariots. What does this have to do with me you might ask. Well, dear pilgrim, it means that the constant growth you so dearly depend on cannot be sustained. It's time to learn to get creative, to do more with less. That, or carry on with denial, the belief that the dots mean nothing, that you can do more of what you've always done, hoping that nature really doesn't matter as you move into your virtual horn of plenty.

Interviewer: What's the most important meditation we can do now?
Dalai Lama: Critical thinking, followed by action. Discern what your world is. Know the plot, the scenario of this human drama. And then figure out where your talents might fit in to make a better world.

Friday, April 13, 2018

Twit For Tat


Middle school parking lot pissing contests have more verbal panache than Trump's Presidential Pronouncements. The President of the United States just tweeted that James Comey is a "slime-ball" because Comey published his view of Trump as a glorified mafioso, along with other, more serious revelations. (Mr. Trump did not deny the validity of the comparison, but dignified it with his tweet.) This level of discourse, a kind of pre-pubescent mano-a-mano, degrades language as much as it degrades the dignity of the Commander in Chief, all while dumbing down the level of political discourse. Name calling has so much become a substitute for debating issues that the news doesn't even know what the issues are (income inequality? security threats from climate change? crumbling infrastructure/education/health care? nuanced diplomacy?). It's just tweets. This nattering nabob banter makes my brain hurt even more than bad TV sitcoms or game shows, which, by the way, would serve as great "interrogation" techniques. No wonder the minions, like Paul Ryan, are jumping ship. He will now be able to go in search of intelligent dialogue in the taverns of his Wisconsin hometown of Janesville or just run to the woods to escape the brain-numbing broadcasts of insults masquerading as leadership. As much I disagree with him, I'd like to join him in his flight.  Since I can't get away yet, could somebody take the battery out of the President's phone and hide it? Please?

Thursday, April 12, 2018

Limbo


The calm of another morning betrays nothing of the pending upheaval. The fountain is running, the hummingbirds gather at the feeder, and Simone snores on the recliner. All of this is about to change. I don't know who will fill the hummingbird feeder, take care of the fountain, or how Simone will adapt to the New Mexico digs. I do know I have work to do. Teaching, prison, house cleaning all will take every moment I have. No time to think about what's coming. It will just get here and I'll deal with it. The limbo, though, is deceptive, a bit too quiet.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Everything Must Go


I am moving soon and need to rent out my house. Twenty-some years of living in the same place is why I have a stack of neatly-folded blue jeans over two feet tall. Then there are the shirts. And the bike socks (dozens). I have milk crate full of cycling bibs. A milk crate! That's just the beginning of the list of stuff, truckloads of stuff.  No matter; it's all gotta go. I am outta here in a month, a short-timer at work, about to launch into a summer of abandon. I will have a bike, a tent, a sleeping bag, a pad, a very small stove, and a cup. I realize that is a lot when compared to monks out on a pilgrimage, but I am an American Material Boy, a bona-fide consumer! A minimalist bike tour is about as low as I can go, given my comfort zone. I will taste wind and sun and rain and hear bears outside the tent at night as I wonder where it all went, all that clutter gathered during a long life.

Monday, April 9, 2018

No Strings


I need to get out town, he said. After watching that movie, especially, he added. He referenced the stunning scenery and exotic culture and dramatic arc of the film. Now, we had seen this movie four days earlier, but I found myself drawing a blank. What movie? I asked, trying to grasp what he was talking about. Yes, we had seen a movie, but what was this cluelessness? I honestly could not remember the genre, plot, actors, or title. Big nothing. Zip. Four days ago. What's happening I said to myself, knowing that the answer was right there in front of me: a big, looming lug of a memory-sucking monster. So far, this black hole of forgetting is not so unpleasant as inconvenient to conversation. The words, they don't come, names either, but an entire movie? This is new. All of these strings that used to hold me here on this earth seem to be unraveling, or have been cut, or dissolved, or something. They recede as I rise into the ethers, floating, free from thought, from any sense of what it is I am supposed to be doing.

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Story of a Writing Class


What I have to offer is language and just a bit of experience. Now, what kind of language, and what kind of experience, is up for hot debate among writing teachers. My question is: What is the story we want our students to tell about their university writing classes as they move off into their lives? Do we want them to tell the story that writing is merely a means to win arguments, to jab and slice opponents? To dupe consumers with fancy, psychological innuendo so that they buy products? To see language and thinking as a kind of intellectual math problem of situations, audience, and purpose? Or do we want them to see writing as means to common ground, to better self-critical awareness? A means to better pay attention, find compassion, understanding, empathy? Do we want them to say "That writing class changed my life?" Do we want them to say "I know myself better than I did before, and I used writing to figure that out?" Do we want them to say "That class made a writer out of me?" Or is it a bit of both poetics and rhetoric? Whatever it is, their story will be a creation composed by the language we use and how students use that language to compose relationships between themselves and written presentation and expression. Oh, the stories they might tell.

Honey Bee In the Espresso


It was late on a Friday afternoon, and I was sitting outside the cafe with a small cup of espresso. I was on my way home, glad that this intense week was winding down. The moment was rare, a spring blend of cool and warm; mountains rose in front of me as the setting sun painted the ridges and canyons. I sat ruminating on the regrets and broken pieces of my life, scribbling away in my journal, when a nice looking honey bee landed on the rim of the cup and promptly descended along the steep wall of porcelain. After a few moments, I checked on her. Sure enough, there she was, drowning in dense umber. I got my pen and fished her out, poor thing. She had been blinded by the muddy bloom and could not fly. She buzzed her wings and flipped over on her back, her abdomen threatening to sting anything that got close enough to impale. I carefully used the pen to right her. Breathe, I said to her, breathe. She stood on the glass table top and seemed crippled. One of her legs wasn't working. It looked like she was going to expire, slowly, and come to her demise right there. But, as I watched her closely, she found some strength and stood. I saw her long tongue extend as she calmly cleaned off her eyes and antennae. That took some work, some patience. Her wings too, seemed to be clearing up, or at least drying off. She buzzed them with practice runs. When a gust of air blew her off the table, she caught the currents and flew back into the rest of her life, a bit over-dosed on caffeine, perhaps.

Thursday, April 5, 2018

The Titanium Cup


It serves as a reminder. It is a reminder that your future is waiting to be created. Paradox that: remembering as part of future. But, you know that in a weird way, it makes sense, and the sense it makes is pointing your little beam of attention to what might be. It is extravagant. It is light. It is blue. It is titanium. Titanium means strong, highly crafted, beautiful, and rare. Titanium means quality. That is what you want. That little cup, a pricey bauble that you will carry up and down mountains as you pedal your way into who knows what, will serve up your drinks and sustenance. Every time you lift it, it will remind you that you are on your way into the next waiting moment, the one just around that curve, over the hill, right here. It waits for you to fill it in with the best you have. A few tools to keep your body fed and moving will get you there.


Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Ode to the Black Bag


The black bag has gone shiny with wear and is frayed from habit and rough use. We all know the story of the black bag, the one Robert Bly describes as our repository of shadow. And we also know that the psyche creates in this world the dynamics of the one inside. And this bag is no exception. But it has served you well, has worn like iron, and faithfully held the objects of your work and dreams through days of sun and cold rain. It has held your words, kept your secrets. If it could talk, it would tell the story of your days over these last years. That story would be one of stretching. You have put in the time and miles in order to do the right thing, to bring light to places of darkness. But now the darkness has come to you, and your light wants to flicker out. You try, but don't have the strength to fight. You have some of the will, but so much has left you that it is hard to rise and engage. Even the bag slouches there on the table, its load one you can barely lift. But you do. The black bag sags under the weight but holds itself together even as you bend under the burden. It's all you can do, is more than you can do, and you glean the least particles of energy remaining to make it happen. If the bag can hold it together, you can too. 

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Out of Step


You want to go one way as the sun breaks over the ridge, while the abundant pressures of the world pull you the other way. You lean toward the cool morning and all its possibility as the leash of work tightens and pulls you onto the treadmill of modern, corporate, social order. If you want to eat, for now, anyway, you join the line trudging obediently to the smokeless factory, where you will take up your place in front of the screen in order to channel minds into a chute of abstractions. You see them there, the young people, and wonder what you are doing. Soon enough, you are caught out. Your privileges are stripped from you, your ID badge confiscated, and you are set free to wander in search of scraps. It's a thing, this condition. You don't know if you are sorry or not, unlucky or blessed. 

Monday, April 2, 2018

April Fool


You tried. You did your best. You put it out there, all polished up, all spiffy. You thought is was really good, really important, one of the most important things that you had learned in this long life. That was good. You took the crazy path and sang your crazy song. It doesn't matter than no one cared or sang along or listened. Now it's done and you can let it go. You did your part, and sometimes that works, hits a note that resonates with what people want to read, and sometimes it doesn't. Your roulette marble just landed in a losing slot. That's all. No biggie. Time to move on, to dance your way into the next silly undertaking.

Show Up. Channel Your Inner Beaver.


They are restless, all those tasks you have to attend to. You know, the meetings, the classes, the grading, the never-ending paperwork, the chore to get the house rented, the packing for the rest of your life. It's a long list for sure, and you need to corral all those unruly responsibilities by scheduling them. Just put them down on your calendar and then walk through your days trying to quiet your restless mind. You know it is not enrolled in this whole thing, all the planning that must be done to get your sorry ass out of your job and on into the summer and beyond. You have to override your desires to run -- to panic -- and settle down. Just settle down and show up, like a little beaver who wants nothing more than to work all day, every day. That is the way, little beaver, the way.