What is it like to live a principled life?

This is the question at the heart of Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, The Last Runaway. 

Hundreds of miles from home, Quaker heroine Honor Bright is forced into a life she didn’t expect when she lands in Oberlin, Ohio. Without any family or close friends, the only comfort she can hope to find is in her faith community, but even that proves difficult. When she accidentally becomes involved in the Underground Railroad, she has to choose between adhering to the expectations of her new family, or following her belief in what is right.

All of us face this choice at some time or another—whether to listen to our hearts, to the Spirit that speaks within us, or whether to go along with what our community thinks. In Honor’s case, she lives during American slavery, and following her own set of principles not only saves lives, but attempts to restore some dignity to a country struggling to meet actions with ideals.

As a Quaker, I was immediately drawn to The Last Runaway. Contemporary fiction writers don’t speak much about spirituality or faith, but many still admire Quakers for not having a creed and for their devotion to silence. The attempt to connect with our inner selves during a Quaker meeting is not much different from the leap of faith it takes to create art. The final work of beauty—a form of ministry as well as truth—is something for a community to celebrate and share. I was glad to see that much-loved author Tracy Chevalier was similarly inspired.

I spoke with her at her home in England about what inspired the Quaker heroine Honor Bright, how technology affects us in the modern world, what it’s like to be a foreigner, and the challenges of writing historical fiction.

What is your personal history with Quaker practices and testimonies? 

I grew up in Washington D.C. and went to Quaker camp for seven summers in Maryland. My brother and sister and I loved the Quaker camp system; we had meeting everyday for 15 minutes and got to know the principles of the Quaker faith. I loved the simplicity and silence of it. After that, I occasionally went to Florida Avenue meeting in D.C. and Bethesda Friends not far from our house. My stepmother became a Quaker, and my sister is a Quaker who co-founded a meeting in Toulouse, France. (There are apparently only 250 or so Quakers in all of France).

Throughout my adult life I’ve dipped in and out of meeting. I live in England, so I occasionally attend Hampstead Meeting. My husband is Jewish, so we’ve sort of gone down that route, but in the back of my mind is the Quaker silence and simplicity, of not needing anyone else to mediate between you and god.

How did you come up with the idea to create a strong but quiet Quaker heroine?  

The reason I was attracted to writing a Quaker main character is partly to do with my increasing desire for silence in a world that has gotten very noisy. I’m 50, and five years ago my hearing started to worsen. The higher tones are going, and I find it’s hard to have a conversation on the street. Also, everybody wants to use their cell phones, and I don’t think the newer technology is as good as a landline. People are using cellphones on the move, in places where noise level is high. It’s harder to feel like I’m communicating.

I know that silence at a meeting is different, but there’s a physical silence that I crave, a mental silence I’m looking for. Our lives have become so distracted and distractible; we get news for 24 hours nowadays, and it’s exhausting. I love going to meeting partly to be quiet but also to give the space for my mind to move into a nonverbal state. I thought I’d like to explore this more, and the way I always explore something is by writing a novel about it.

One of the things people seem to be afraid of in contemporary culture is being alone with themselves. We are so bombarded with technology that we are almost afraid of silence, a chance to take stock and face whatever feelings or thoughts come up.  A Quaker meeting has this focus on silence and going inward, which might be what draws people to it, but it also might be what keeps people away. 

I think you’re right that people are afraid to be with themselves. We have so much more to distract ourselves with from the internet and constant connectivity. It makes it even harder for us to be willing to sit down and be alone. That’s why I’ve taken to not writing in the room where my computer is.

Writers are more used to silence or being alone. The thing that is difficult for a writer writing about Quakerism is the silence—what I’m looking for is a nonverbal feeling, but as a writer, I’m often looking for the best way to describe something. One of the biggest challenges writing this book was trying to find a way to describe that silence. After meeting, I’d write down some notes, but in the end you can’t really describe what it is.

How did the idea for The Last Runaway come about?

The idea came partly from a Bench by the Road project. It was based on a conversation with Toni Morrison saying there are no monuments to slavery, and she was putting benches at places of historical significance. Oberlin was instrumental for various reasons. It was the first college in the states to admit African American and women and a major stop on the Underground Railroad.

Three days later in Bethesda Meeting, mulling over issues of silence, I thought it would be great to write a quiet Quaker. I was thinking about how so many Quakers worked on the Underground Railroad.

I like the way you interspersed your narrative with letters from Honor writing home. It helps modern readers realize just how long it took for people to communicate back then, how much patience was required. Now we are instantly gratified by texting, calling, social media or emailing. Do you think there is still something to be said for the old-fashioned letter? Do people tend to reveal more of themselves in handwriting?

I started the letters as a kind of experiment to see what I wanted to do. I’m more comfortable writing in first person, and I didn’t want to give that up entirely. I knew that Honor was going to be a quiet person—originally I wanted her to speak less than she does in the book, but it was too impossible. She is a closed person, so the letters help the reader get to know her better. They would also provide a comment on immigration—what someone new to a country sees and how she sees it. Because email is so instantaneous, it’s hard to imagine writing a letter that takes two months to get somewhere.

Honor’s community and her family would normally know her information. It’s new for her as well to write a letter that has to cross an ocean—a kind of exercise in patience and understanding that she really is in a new world. She can’t rely on her family anymore—by the time they could write back, the news would be old. She really is on her own and has to use her own support system in place.

In a lot of ways, your novel deals with the loneliness of living in a foreign land, both for Honor, as an immigrant from England, and slaves, who are trying to get to a place of freedom. Was this influenced by your own experience moving to another country?

There is a feeling of disjointedness as an immigrant, feeling out of step. When I moved to England, even the smells were different. I noticed one smell all the time and it was a chemical they put on wood to keep it from rotting. I also always smelled coal fires burning, which is different from my experience in America.

It was a lot of fun putting an English person in America. I did a lot of research, accounts of people from England visiting America. Some of the things Dickens and Trollope said about America are still true. They said Americans were so patriotic that they wouldn’t put up with outsiders criticizing their government, and they had ferocity of holding onto their independence; the feeling of going it on your own. All of that is still true today—down to little things!

Since you tend to write historical fiction, where does your research end and your imagination take over? If I were writing this kind of novel, I might be so overwhelmed with information that I’d be unable to use my imagination and create a story.

I struggle with this all the time, possibly more when I am basing the books on real people. Girl with a Pearl Earring was based on Vermeer, and we know some of his biography (not all that much). Remarkable Creatures was about an English fossil hunter. I always think that the biography is the skeleton and the fiction is to flesh it out. In The Last Runaway, all the people were fictional, so I could make them do what I wanted.

If you set a book in a certain time or a certain place, you’re always going to be constricted by that time or place. You could say that about any writing, really; a contemporary novel has real things you have to deal with—if you set it in New York, you’d have to mention 9/11, because the city is shaped around that event. Because I set The Last Runaway in 1850, I had to deal with the fact that there was no railroad, no train.

I like the facts because they ground me. They’re helpful because it’s very hard to completely make up a story. I do a bunch of research before I start writing, then I start writing and do more specific research. I do enough to feel comfortable writing in the period, but I don’t always have the story worked out. I have an idea of the direction, and things will come up along the way that I don’t realize I want to make a bigger thing out of later.

Belle Mills, an important character in the book, was not an important character in the first draft—I wasn’t even sure she was going to come back. I wanted to use her more, though, and the more I used her, the more I had to find out about how to make a hat and a bonnet. Originally she was in Hudson, Ohio, and I wanted her to be closer to where Honor ends up. Things shift as you’re writing.

Artists and writers can be very wary of criticism and attack when they try to deal with America’s past and the problems of prejudice that still exist today. Two examples are Kathryn Stockett, who wrote from an African American woman’s point of view in The Help, and Quentin Tarantino, for telling the story of a slave seeking revenge in Django Unchained. Did you find this subject matter difficult for those reasons?

I was aware of it while writing, but the difference is that I didn’t try to get in the head of an African-American narrator. I used a character who is a foreigner, so everything to her is new. It’s a trick an author can do to put a character in a new situation—it makes it easier for reader to empathize and follow along. Honor has never met a black person or a slave and it’s all new to her, so when she describes the African Americans she meets, by necessity it’s going to be a bit clumsy, and that’s perfectly acceptable because it’s within certain boundaries.

I didn’t find The Help offensive, but I can understand why other people had concerns. On the other hand, isn’t that what writers are supposed to try to do? I’ve written inside the heads of male characters and French characters, and why not? But because of the painful history of race relations in America, it’s become something very difficult to do and not ruffle some feathers. Luckily, I haven’t had any criticisms about my black characters. Actually, a review that was otherwise negative said I write black characters pretty well. (Laughs.)

One of the scenes in the novel involves premarital sex between two Quakers, and that might be surprising to some readers. 

We have a tendency to retrospectively place a Victorian value system on everyone in the past, even though plenty of people had sex before they even thought of getting married. Just because they’re Quaker doesn’t mean they’re not lustful. I’ve also heard that in various societies, some couples didn’t marry until the woman was pregnant—they wanted to make sure the couple fit well together. I wanted to be more open minded about sexuality in the novel.

One of the things that makes this book so powerful, I think, is your ability to give depth to these characters, to help us understand what the conversations might have been like surrounding the Underground Railroad. What were some challenges of writing a Quaker abolitionist at this time in American history?

When you talk about Quakers, you don’t want them to be a type rather than real people—that’s why they’re mixed up with good and bad in the novel. One of the biggest challenges I faced was writing a character that never lies. So often I would need her to tell a lie or a lie of omission. That was a really tough one.

It’s not easy to write credible Quaker characters. The shorthand for a Quaker is just too good to be true—they’re very honest, never lie—and I think that makes it seem like Quakers are not flawed people. I realize I might offend many Quakers, but this book, for better or worse, shows that not all Quakers are perfect people.

One of the big surprises in doing research was finding out about the “Negro pew” in Arch Street meeting and other meetings. It was then that I realized Quakers were as prejudiced as everybody else. There were Quakers who kept slaves until 1776 when Philadelphia Yearly Meeting decided that Quakers had to give them up. That surprised me because I assumed all Quakers would be opposed to slavery.

We like to assume that our ancestors would have done the right thing in certain situations. A lot of people like to assume that if they were Quaker in the 19^th century, they would have worked on the Underground Railroad, but a lot of Quakers didn’t. The last thing they wanted to do was bring attention to themselves by speaking out against the law, the huge jeopardy involved. All of this made for much more interesting subject matter. Quakers always being good and doing the right thing is not a story.

Interested in the Maladjusted Book Club? Visit the book club page to see past selections. Leave a comment if you’re interested in a particular summer 2013 pick!

I’m one of those women. The kind who had a poster of Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything up on her dorm room wall. The kind who memorized lines from Singles. The girl in high school who read the horoscopes of the boys I had crushes on.

I’m a romantic, and my enthusiasm for romance still exists, even though I’ve been married for almost ten years and am living in suburbia with two kids and two cars.

I am thrilled to pieces about the next installment of the Richard Linklater series Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. If you don’t know the story of these three films, allow me to educate you.

Before Sunrise came out in 1995; it’s the story of Jesse (an American) and Celine (a Frenchwoman) who meet on a train and realize quickly they have a lot in common. They enjoy talking to each other so much that they get off with each other in Vienna and spend the next day together before Jesse has to catch a flight home.

In the movie, they’re young, dorky, easily inspired. I’ve never been a huge Ethan Hawke fan—a little too much grease, a little too much hair in the face—but his fervor for life in this movie is infectious. Flash to 2004 (nine years is the theme), when Jesse meets Celine again in Paris on his book tour. Once again, they have a long soulful conversation, sharing thoughts and reflections they’ve had about life in the nine years since they last saw each other. I hate to tell you what happens in Before Midnight, because Before Sunset leaves off with a mystery. Will Jesse get back on the plane, or stay in Paris with Celine?

I haven’t seen the movie, but they’re together, trying to find the spark of romance they had when they first met.

If you’re too cynical to enjoy watching two people talking about their deepest darkest fears and realizations and feelings as they stroll through the most beautiful cities in the world (Vienna, Paris, and somewhere in Greece), then I don’t want to argue about it with you. Next you’re going to tell me you don’t believe in God, either.

I, on the other hand, love the premise and lines from the movie. I love the way the characters share truths about life, and the very idea that you can share so much with a person you barely know. That perhaps you can be more of yourself with a stranger than the people you’ve known all your life.

I’m counting down the days until this movie is released. And on the way, I’m going to watch the other two in the series to warm up. In case you’re just as excited as me, or simply intrigued, here are some glimpses.

Before Sunset (1995)

Before Sunrise (2004)

Who cares about another Great Gatsby film, give me Richard Linklater and Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke! I’ll be in line on May 25th.

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Way back, I was a college DJ. I loved picking songs that felt like they went with the radio slot I got each semester, whether it was early morning or Saturday dinner time. And the season has a lot to do with the kind of music I want to listen to.

Certain albums always feel like autumn to me, like Radiohead’s OK Computer or In Rainbows. (This probably has a lot to do with the September release date of their albums.) In winter, I like to listen to Cat Power or Nina Simone. When spring comes, I pull out albums by Sarah Harmer, Leona Naess, Jeff Buckley, and the Innocence Mission.

So in celebration of the old Janarama show, here are a couple of spring-inspired tunes that I think you’ll love.

Leona Naess, “Leave Your Boyfriends Behind” from the album Thirteens.

And a longtime favorite from The Innocence Mission’s album Glow, “Bright as Yellow.”

And I do not wish to be a rose,

I do not wish to be pale pink,

but flower scarlet, flower gold,

And have no thorns to distance me,

but be bright,

bright,

bright as yellow,

warm as yellow.

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This week is Teacher Appreciation Week, and I’m thinking back to my own experiences as a teacher. When I worked at a Catholic school, this was the week that the mothers brought in food for the teachers to have a special lunch. The food was delicious, and it was a special break from routine. Now that I’m a mom who should be showing appreciation for my kids’ teachers, I realize how much work they put in, how hard it is to do something extra like that on top of a busy schedule. In public school, I think the administration gave us something. Maybe turkey and gravy? I can’t remember. In a lot of public schools, administrators don’t think they need to appreciate teachers. They think everybody should just be appreciating them.

In community college, you get nothing. Nada. Because the semester is over by now. (That’s good enough!) Though I did get a very interesting “cup cover” for doing a professional development seminar once. It looked like a nipple.

I don’t remember my own kindergarten experience much or at all, only that the teacher read us stories in a dress with her legs spread apart, and we could see her underwear. (“Don’t look!” was her solution when we told her of the problem).

But I have learned a lot from Mr. B’s kindergarten teacher this year. Not only is she a wonderful person, kind and nurturing and intelligent, with a strong sense of responsibility, but she also teaches lessons that can really help adults. In fact, I think adults should start to hire her for workshops.

Lesson #1: Accept mistakes and move on.

Do you know how hard this to do? For me? But I’m working on it. (It’s apparently very hard for Mr. B, too, because he did come from my loins.) But there’s real wisdom here. You can’t go back and change a mistake, so just accept that you’re not perfect and proceed. Toward your next mistake. For life is absurd. Ha!

Lesson #2: There are some things that are in our control, and other things that are out of our control. Learn the difference.

I want to control everything. I particularly want to control time. Why won’t it bend to my will? If I’m running 5 minutes behind (or more typically, 20), I want the clocks to set themselves back when I arrive at my destination. And why can’t this happen? What kind of yoga-mind acrobatics do I need to learn to time travel?

This is one of the things I can’t control. (Bullocks.) I also can’t control the weather just by hoping for it, and I can’t control whether I sell my novel this fall, when I hope to be done with it. The things I can control are, of course, the weather and selling my novel in the fall, as long as I worry hard enough about it.

Wait, no.

I can control whether I dress appropriately for the weather and whether I actually finish the novel.

Jeez. The things I can control are really meek by comparison.

Lesson #3: When there’s a conflict, talk to the person about it, not somebody else.

Boy oh boy, do adults need to get the hang of this. And teenagers. Teenagers might be the worst, but inside every adult, there’s a teenager. I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve met adults who still behave as though they are in high school, when really they need to go back to kindergarten and learn this lesson.

Lesson #4: When something’s on your mind, put it on paper.

This isn’t a lesson written on the blackboard, per se, but in Mr. B’s writing workshop, he draws things that happened to him as a way to tell a story and practice communication skills. Then he writes it out the best he can. We’ve used this at home recently.

Bothered by a girl that was mean to you at school? Draw a picture of her, complete with eyes made of daggers.

Or annoyed that your sister is like some evil/cherubic faerie who keeps stealing all your toys? Draw the two sides of her.

(This is way cheaper than therapy, I promise.)

Even dads join in the fun. (Moms prefer to write on their blogs.)

I think he is working through the pressures and loneliness of early prepubescence.

Lesson #5: Take a deep breath.

Mr. B’s teacher tells them in the morning and at the end of the day to take deep breaths. This is simple, but monumental. Do you know how many people forget to breathe, or sort of don’t know how? It’s all in-out, in-out through the mouth. Deep breaths create openness in your mind and in our heart and settle your whole body down. They need to teach this stuff in college. (Coping with Life 101.) And then to employees at big soulless corporations, or even employees at small nonprofits, and to retail workers, who get shit on a lot, and to moms and dads. Breathe in the stress life gives you, breathe out so life can take it away.

I’m sure there are more lessons, but these five basic ones can kind of get you through anything.

As Mr. B nears the end of his kindergarten year, I realize once again that having kids forces you to constantly be in transition, always learning or re-learning something new. Parents (and teachers) are always beginners, no matter how old their kids are. It’s constant work, and tiring, too. But it’s wonderful work, soulful work. I’m grateful that I get a chance to continually grow and see through my children’s eyes. And I’m glad they have so many talented, kind and beautiful people around them to usher them on their way.

I haven’t been blogging much, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been trying. Each time over the last few weeks that I’ve started to write a post—something about yoga, or teaching, or meditation, or writing a novel—I give up after a few paragraphs. Everything I’ve been trying to say sounds too preachy, not quite right. It wasn’t until today that I realized the problem with all my drafts is that they’re covering up the real issue I want to write about and work through.

I haven’t been totally honest with myself about how much the loss of my job in February affected me. Don’t get me wrong—I strongly believe I’m in a good place now, and I’m finally focusing on my writing in a significant way. (I’m on the second draft of my novel! Hooray!) I no longer wake up in the morning and head to work with knots in my stomach about what tension the day might hold. And I have faith that positive things will come from this transition in my life.

Still, it hurts that I was let go. I wasn’t working for some big corporation, where I might expect a level of soullessness for the sake of profit margins and ego. I was working at a place with a spiritual mission, and I thought I was among friends. Being targeted and told to leave because I had a reasonable concern was harsh and violent. I know now that there were probably a lot of negative things being said about me behind my back that I wasn’t aware of, even though I tried so hard to communicate face to face. I acted with integrity and trust and kindness, and the response was darkness, hostility, dishonesty. Those are actions from which I won’t heal easily.

I still believe in kindness, though, in compassion, in peace. In fact, I believe in them now more than ever. I know that when a person tries to hurt someone else, it’s because he or she is already hurting. Aggression often comes from fear. And all of us have to make the choice about whether we let fear be our guide, or faith. Choosing faith and love showed me I’ll never get the short end of the stick. What will always remain, in the face of whatever consequences, is my integrity and my dignity. Nothing is more important than that.

In the past months, as I work on my novel and take on small side projects that help nourish me, I’m working through the next big phase of my life. I’m practicing patience and mindfulness, surrender instead of the need to control. I’m paying particular attention to the role of women in our culture, and thinking about what I can do to support and nurture a sisterhood that we so desperately need. As I found in my last environment, women still have a lot of sexism to overcome. For a long time, as a teacher, I talked about these issues in my classes. We discussed the role of mothers, the expectations placed on men and women in the household, the reason to read women writers, the need for equality. But until recently, I wasn’t fully cognizant of the struggles women face in the workplace and even in liberal-minded religious institutions. I knew about the issues, of course, but I didn’t feel it in my bones. Now I do, and it was an important wake-up call. As the next stage for me unfolds, I know that I want to commit to women’s equality in a meaningful way.

Of course, my story is little in comparison to some of the darkness we read about in history and see in the news everyday. There are plenty of people who direct their energy downward, who choose weakness and fear and destruction instead of compassion and love. But there are also people who consistently do inspiring and positive things: people who speak up about injustice, who teach, who learn, create, foster discussion and cultivate empathy. The spiritual work I did at my last job affirms that.

There are loads of good people in the world doing positive and meaningful things, creating beauty, however small. I am trying to consistently be one of them.

Image: “Reflection of Sunlight” by Rajiv Ashrafi via Flickr Creative Commons.

“Change is constant,” people say. It’s a phrase we always hear, even though saying the words never actually gets to the heart of it.

I’ve written before about change, about how much I’ve wanted to avoid it. One of the things I found so hard about teaching college was the constant change—transitioning of semesters, transitioning from school to school, new schedules, new childcare arrangements.  There were new classes to create and conduct, new syllabi to adapt and tweak. When I switched to an office job, I was hopeful for an end to so much change, a feeling of constancy and stability. But that job proved to be inconstant, too.

One of the things I’m learning from yoga is how to adapt to change. A constant shift in posture forces a mental shift every few seconds or minutes. The more my body does it, the more it feels like second nature. I am constantly coerced into an attitude adjustment. In every pose, as in any new situation, our goal should be to breathe, focus, and be present.

Right now, as April wanes, change is happening not only in nature, but in my life. My longtime neighbors are moving in a couple of days, which means I’ll no longer be able to look out my dining room window and see them sitting outside, their son drawing with chalk in the driveway. I won’t be able to call for an egg or a cup of vegetable oil, or stand on the porch with them in early summer and watch the kids on scooters ride by.

Yesterday, I got an invitation in the mail for a memorial lecture to pay tribute to one of my favorite college professors. He used to sit in the restaurant where I worked, drinking wine and writing his ideas down in notebooks. My husband remembers that we saw him in a bookstore after I’d had dental surgery, and he said “Be true to your teeth, or they’ll be false to you.” He seemed to be from another era, another world. Now he’s gone.

On top of that, this weekend my son turns six. Six is so far from infancy or toddlerhood. He has longer legs now, a strange sense of humor, a firm fold in his arms when he doesn’t want to listen. He has a new best friend every day, new interests. And then there are the rumblings about girls, even though he’d rather not tell me about those.

Soon enough, he’ll be 16, and he won’t want to tell me anything.

There is no way to control change, even though I want to. Stagnation is a kind of death, an unwillingness to grow. It’s not that we have no power; it’s that the power is in our own behavior, our willingness to surrender. I can’t control change, and I can’t control what others think of me. But I can direct my energy where I want it to go. I can act with integrity, adhere to a value system that strengthens me so I can adapt. I’ll never know what’s going to come, but I can work hard and breathe and be present.

When I first finished this post a few minutes ago, I saved it and went back to search my blog for the other times I wrote about change. A lot of titles popped up, but I had a particular one in mind, so I scrolled back until I found it. “Change and Resilience,” I saw, was published in April of last year. I remembered writing it at my coffee table when I was at the cusp of a new job, invigorated by spring, eager to fit one more thing in before bed. Every year, when spring comes, I tend to write about the merging of old and new. It’s not the first time my blog helped me notice I’ve had the same thoughts and observations swirling in my head year after year, almost to the same day.

That’s when I saw I had published on the same day. On April 23rd, 2012, I wrote a post called “Change and Resilience.” And today, I wrote a post I almost called “Change.”

It delighted me to remember how many things stay the same.

Image: “Stylidium productum” by petrichor via Flickr.

Every year, when National Poetry Month comes around in April, I get excited about the encouragement to read and re-read poetry. It makes me happy to know there are others out there like me who look to poetry for solace. I think poems are the parents of all other writing, and they comfort me, give me refuge.

Unlike other years, this year I’m not teaching, which means I’m not reading as much poetry. But I’m determined to make room for it in my life. Reading poetry is an exercise—if you’re open to it—in mindfulness, in contemplation. It encourages us to look at the world around us and find beauty, depth, and mystery.

Still, a lot of people feel intimidated by poetry. That’s why I always liked to share poems that were simple and seemingly direct. Playful, even. They remove some of the barriers and help almost anyone enjoy. Two of the poets whose work I turn to again and again to make me smile or to make me breathless are Richard Brautigan and Lucille Clifton.

“Map Shower” 

by Richard Brautigan

I want your hair

to cover me with maps

of new places,

so everywhere I go

will be as beautiful

as your hair.

(A kooky-looking guy, no doubt, but that Richard Brautigan sure knows how to write.)

“the making of poems”

by Lucille Clifton

the reason why i do it

though i fail and fail

in the giving of true names

is i am adam and his mother

and these failures are my job.

“africa”

home

oh

home

the soul of your

variety

all of my bones

remember

Hope you find some time for poetry this month! Check out Poets.org for a variety of great poems, interviews, audio clips…. Do I sound too much like a teacher?

Images of Lucille Clifton and Richard Brautigan via PoetryFoundation.org.

SuperWoman has met her high-maintenance match with her progeny, TalkMonster. Especially now that he’s turning six.

(SuperWoman, despite her super-ness, would really like an instruction manual for how to deal with an almost-six year-old who alternates between knowing everything—including how she should drive—and bursting into tears over the unfairness of life.)

TakMonster has a lot of ideas about what his birthday party should be like. He’s been planning for an entire year. First, the party was going to be at a gym, one of those places where you spend a ton of money and kids jump until they drop and then go into a yellow room for pizza and cake. SuperWoman was not into those places, until last year she discovered the joy of not having to clean her house or make goody bags herself. Not only that, TalkMonster said it was “the best birthday ever.” She has that on video.

Now that TalkMonster is in kindergarten, though, and has spent the year observing and participating in about 12 other six-year-old parties, he’s decided that this affair must be in his very own house. Apparently, in kindergarten, house parties are the up-and-coming thing.

Nevermind that their house doesn’t have room for 20 kids, or that she will have to make the goody bags herself and clean. (As far as SuperWoman knows, TalkMonster does not plan on scrubbing toilets in preparation for the event.)

Attire: TalkMonster would like his partygoers to wear pajamas.

Menu: SuperWoman suggested a menu of pancakes to go along with the pajama theme, but TalkMonster put his hands up and refused. “Pizza and chocolate cake. A party must have pizza and chocolate cake.” He put his finger to his chin and thought for a minute. “Skylander cake.”

Activities: TalkMonster would also like a pinata and an Easter egg hunt.

Goody bags: TalkMonster would like all male children to receive a Skylander and all female children to receive a Barbie. SuperWoman has no idea where he learned such gender specificity. And also, fat chance.

Special request: TalkMonster chartered new territory with this next one. He has made it a practice of noticing when SuperWoman leans over and the back of her shirt rides up a little, exposing a thin sliver of pale white back. He corrects this problem by diligently pulling down her shirt and recommending she wear longer shirts on a daily basis. SuperWoman usually furrows her brow and carries on with her day.

But with his birthday party coming up, TalkMonster has decided that more extreme actions are necessary.

Last week, on the first day of spring break, he stood next to SuperWoman as she picked up cracker crumbs and said, “I hope you don’t wear that shirt on my birthday.” SuperWoman smirked. He began to walk away, but then turned back, struck with the most remarkable idea. “I think you should wear a dress, actually.”

SuperWoman, as you might expect, was dumbfounded. She doesn’t really do dresses. ”What is the big deal about my shirt riding up a little? No one cares about that!” (In fact, Superwoman does care about that a little, just not when she’s walking around the house.) When did her son become such a  prude? More importantly, why is he such a prude?

He sighed and tilted his head and said in the most gentle voice, “One day, you’ll understand.”

WTF?

SuperWoman thinks that instead of that video game system he wants, she may just get him a headset and a clipboard so he can further practice telling everyone what to do.

Where did age 5 go? There are 27 days left, but SuperWoman already misses it.

Instead of a dress, SuperWoman plans to wear her long, shiny cape. It’s a party outfit that’s long overdue.

“Self-knowledge promotes choice and action, and many people feel unready for either.” –Caroline Myss

Caroline Myss’s  Anatomy of the Spirit has been a transformative read for me this year. I bought the book two years ago, but didn’t start reading it until January 1st when I felt that I was ready and open for spiritual guidance. I was also starting to realize how important yoga was in my life, and I wanted to learn more about the seven chakras of Eastern spirituality. Myss explains how each chakra in our body is part of our spirit, and if we are depleted in one or more of those areas, it can lead to physical ailments or illness.

Learning about the chakras has been eye-opening to me, but more important is her message of listening to yourself and developing your intuition. We all have it, she says. We are just very, very out of practice.

So much of American culture is based on science, data and  research. We don’t believe in miracles anymore, in the world that’s experienced and felt rather than simply read about. Many of us assume that psychics or intuitives are quacks, that everything in the universe will eventually be discovered and known in an intellectual way. (Maybe I’m just speaking for myself, after twelve years of college,  graduate school, and teaching English.) No wonder there is such spiritual despair, people fleeing their religions and finding comfort in Christopher Hitchens’ angry rants. We’ve been taught to believe that anything that exists can be seen–and perhaps because we’re so patriarchal and associate feelings with women, we neglect to pay attention to what’s going on under the surface of things. In fact, a lot of the messages we get are that we’re not supposed to have any feelings at all, that we’re supposed to be 24/7 perfection machines.

My Quaker faith and my yoga practice are at odds with some of these societal messages. I experienced something deeper and profound the first time–and any time thereafter–that I spoke during meeting for worship. Quakers believe that anyone in the room can be called to deliver a message, and the pounding in my chest, the shortness of breath told me this was a message that needed to be spoken out loud. I had never had an experience like that before, and I trust it when it happens now. In fact, in searching weekly for that inner knowledge, that connection to a divine force, I am challenged to cultivate trust——both in myself and something greater.

Yoga is similar; it teaches that truth is within us. In a yoga practice, you must move from posture to posture, some difficult, some easy, all the while trying to maintain steady breath and stay in touch with yourself. A yoga practice is a metaphor for life. No matter what you face, what situation you find yourself in, you must remember to breathe and be present. Change is constant. The most we can do is be true to ourselves and honor where we are.

I am learning to honor myself lately by being gentle. Each day is different, and I can’t expect to have the same energy level all the time. Now that I’m home more, it’s tempting to berate myself about all the laundry I haven’t done, the dust on the surfaces, floors that would be mopped clean if I were a better housekeeper. But I’m not. (I’m really, really not.) Or the number of pages I should be filling with words, the people I should be connecting with, the money that needs to be budgeted, the bills that need to be paid. Here’s what I try to remember: I am not a machine. There may be some days when I accomplish little and other days when I accomplish a lot. Balance doesn’t come like a flat line on a heart monitor. All human beings are part of nature and have the same ebbs and flows. If it’s raining, I tend to stay inside and turn inward; when it’s sunny, I’m more inclined to go out and become easily inspired. There are days when I’m very hungry, and days when all I want to eat is crackers and peanut butter. Acknowledging who I am, accepting it, being in touch with myself and not judging, is how I’m choosing to honor myself. I’m finding that it’s great practice in honoring those around me as well.

Do you make an effort to honor yourself?

Image: “In the Blue” by sharkbait.

There is so much poetry in our lives.

For months now, I’ve been practicing detachment. I’ve tried to acknowledge what I can control and what I can’t, and that sometimes, the only thing I can change is my attitude. I stopped shopping for extraneous things. I started writing a novel in November without a plan, and let the plot and characters carry me along. I’ve been going to yoga at least once a week, reading books about spirituality, Buddhism, Christianity. Many nights in a row, I’ve dreamed of riding in buses or losing my car——once, even, that the car was driving me.

I’ve also been deepening my faith by overcoming fear. Under my habit of worrying has always been fear. And fear is the opposite of faith. The more I allow myself to trust, to believe, the less I worry that bad things are about to come. In fact, I feel like I’m finally inviting the good stuff in.

Last Thursday, I lost my job. It came out of the blue, with no warning. My first emotion was shock. But three seconds later, I felt a deep sense of freedom. I had learned so much, truly tested and applied the principles of my faith, and come out stronger. I realized right away that I could take all the energy I had been devoting to an organization and begin applying it to my writing, to the work that brings me the most satisfaction and the most joy.

I was happy to detach. It felt good to let go.

On the train ride home that day, I saw a man from my yoga class. I happened to have a bag with me, my purple yoga mat sticking out awkwardly from the top, and I raised it in the air like a fist to show him. The next day, I went to yoga class, and when the teacher said at the end that she was starting yoga teacher training this month, and that there were still a few spots left for stragglers, I realized that this was the next step for me. It was as if a higher power had laid it out, set it up for me, gently showed me the way.

I’m not angry about losing my job. I feel as though I’ve been given a tremendous gift——the opportunity to be who I really am. I’m going to become a student of yoga, and by next year, a teacher. I’m going to finish the novel I’ve been writing, because if there is any time in my life I’m supposed to write a novel, it’s now. I’m going to be more present for my family, drop off the kids at school and pick them up, focus on what they have to say rather than be stressed and distracted. I’m going to let myself be buoyed by the support from my faith community so I can give back to it. And when all of that’s done, my husband and I are thinking of starting a magazine.

My spirit is strong, and so is my faith.

But back to poetry.

Twelve years ago, my husband (then-boyfriend) gave me a watch. It was small and dainty, something I never would have picked out for myself, even though I quickly fell in love with it. This past December, it stopped working. It wasn’t the battery; the hands had just started to slow down, and they got slower and slower as the days progressed. First, the jeweler tried to save me money by cleaning it. That didn’t work. Then he sent it away to be fixed, only to have it come back still broken.

I considered getting a new watch, or whether to wear a watch at all. But last week, when the jeweler called to say it was finally ready, I picked it up and knew that I had gotten back more than my watch. I had gotten back time. I had gotten back my family. Maybe I had even gotten back myself.

Image: “yoga” by Go Interactive Wellness via Flickr.