Mar 23, 2010 | Random Thoughts
Rushing things. Trying to check my email while rescheduling my acupuncture appointment. Not the worst thing in the world as long as I don’t press send.
I have tried to save my children from too much of this multi-tasking sound bite world too soon by trying to limit electronic games, television. My older son still insists he finds it easier to concentrate on polynomials with Pandora playing in his earphones and perhaps Facebook open and lurking behind a sheaf of other open windows to be clicked on once I leave the room.
And I, who made up the rules to protect the present – the live-in-the-moment zen path to enlightenment – find myself dropping the telephone on a friend from Canada to hand another friend who was away from home for a week his mail. Unable to connect with either of them in that traverse across the house and back, no good to anyone, including myself.
Breathe. Do one thing. Do nothing. Remember what it feels like when you can.
*a tribute to Bhanu Kapil. Just the title, not the text.
Mar 15, 2010 | Random Thoughts
Friday night, I went to see Fela on Broadway. It was, in turns, jubilant and heart wrenching – most notably when the projected mugshots that followed the storming of his compound reminded the audience that the bigger-than-life characters we were dancing with were based on life, and especially that the gorgeous female dancers we might have thought of as merely ‘backup’ each had a tragic spotlight of her own.
But the most resonant moment for me was not when the body of ‘truth’ broke the surface of the water, but when, back in the safety of the performance, the character of Fela decides to carry his mother’s coffin to the seat of government and place her on the stairs to show his country what a true leader looks like. He turns to us and invites us to join him. He asks, “Whose coffin would you carry?”
Whose coffin would you carry?
Who do you love that much? What do you stand for?
These are very important questions as we try to raise ourselves out of a prolonged period of fear: fear of losing our jobs or having lost them, fear of losing homes, the market crashing; fear that our country is busy killing people in other countries, and that they are killing us. The corruption of government that Fela spoke out against was rooted in the same greed and need to control and fear of lack that we all face: that every country, group and individual must face down in our own souls.
Whose coffin would you carry?
I invite you to answer.
Mar 12, 2010 | Our Nuclear Age
Today’s thoughts on memory and narrative have found a home on the Huffington Post. You can read it here.
A sample:
“On September 11th, 2001, however, my keitai denwa (my little Japanese cellphone) rang, and a friend told me that a plane had just smashed into the World Trade Center. In the aftermath of those terrorist attacks, the survivors’ stories changed radically. The shock of war, hostility, lives lost so tragically, opened them up. Their stories no longer began with the time (8:15 am), the blue sky, the faraway dot of the B-29 bomber. They told me about cremating their children, scraping maggots out of the raw swathes of skin on their spouses’ bodies. How a child’s lips came off on the spout of the water container when he tried to drink.”
Mar 8, 2010 | Random Thoughts
Seventy-eight new spirits have taken up residence in my house, or perhaps just one spirit with 78 voices. They are the cards in Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe Tarot, and they seem quite pleased at the prospect of celebrating the sacred truth and spirit of the individual in the former Catholic seminary that is my home.
I have always loved the tarot, but never tried to read it on my own. I bought this deck and its accompanying book, not because I thought I could be a tarot card reader, but because Rachel’s images, and her emphasis on joy and spirit, called to me. It was quite a surprise, then, that every time I ask a question and pull a card, the meanings and ideas and thoughts that Rachel has set out in her book resonate perfectly. The cards know.
Last night, my friend Jan was visiting and she pulled three cards for me and told me to tell a story. “There once was a woman named Reiko who…” I tried to go to the book, but she wouldn’t let me. I had to make up my own story from the puppet trees, the sacred ceremony, the spirits in the underworld. The story came out of nowhere – it was truthful and scary and necessary, and later, when I went to the book, I found it was also very congruent with Rachel’s descriptions of the essence of the cards.
Where does the story come from? It isn’t “the cards” that know. The origin isn’t “nowhere.” As a writer, I call the story, I do some magic, something alchemical in my body, to translate it into words and bring it onto the page. Whether that alchemy is conveyed using cards, or whether it is happening, hidden, in the silent, solitary figure of a writer with paper and pen, I am only now, as I write my fourth book, realizing that we are magicians, and that the divine spirit is ours to call on. It is out there, and inside us, waiting to be called.
From the “scary” card, the Five of Stones, which is where I am going:
“They emerge, they emerge,
the dark hidden healers,
power from secrets,
visions from stones.”
Mar 2, 2010 | Random Thoughts, The Writing Life
I have been thinking recently about how to enter a book. The best way, I think, is just to step into it. Wrap the pages around you like a favorite blanket. Let the ink smudge your cheek, the words seep into your skin.
Feb 26, 2010 | Random Thoughts
Like the story of the princess and the pea, the little bump of snow in the center of the table is an echo of sea shells, which my dear friend and amazing poet Elena Georgiou gave me. Even in winter, summer is present. Even in adulthood, the child in us still shapes who we are. Thank you to all the people and events that have bumped me, and made me who I am.
Feb 23, 2010 | Random Thoughts
A question from Rob Brezsny:
Do you promise to push hard to get better and smarter, grow your
devotion to the truth, fuel your commitment to beauty, refine your
emotions, hone your dreams, wrestle with your shadow, purge your
ignorance, and soften your heart — even as you always accept yourself
for exactly who you are, with all of your so-called foibles and wobbles?
Do you pledge to wake yourself up, never hold back, have nothing to lose,
go all the way, kiss the stormy sky, be the hero of your own story, ask for
everything you need and give everything you have, take yourself to the
river when it’s time to go to the river, and take yourself to the
mountaintop when it’s time to go to the mountaintop?
Feb 20, 2010 | Random Thoughts
To mark today – which is the Day of Remembrance for the Japanese-Americans, the 68th anniversary of the Executive Order that would put 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into American internment camps – a small excerpt from the manuscript of my new memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning:
“There’s a little girl in my head with Shirley Temple curls and freckles playing in a dustswept road. She is the enemy. She looks about six, even though she shouldn’t be: my mother was not five when she was released from the internment camp, but no pictures survive from that time so age six is the youngest image I have of my mother, the only image I have from ‘war time’ was taken after the end of the war. Of course, this little girl – skirt flying, dancing with tumble weeds – is not my mother, not exactly. She is my first character from my first book.
My mother could not remember the camps, so I invented them for her. That’s how my first novel began. I made them up, pulling from a mixed bag of the photographs that could be taken, from the questions that the man with the year book at the internment camp “reunion” had asked, the man who wandered through the community center full of former internees eating home lunches of sushi rice and teriyaki, searching for anyone in the room who was three when he was three in camp, who might have been in a nearby block, who might have been his friend.
I pulled from dreams.
I created the children first – this little boy, the little girl who was his friend – and even while I was doing interviews, gathering the details of how the brick floors in the barracks had to be shellacked to keep the dirt from rising, I must have known I wasn’t dreaming up a “book about the internment.” Write a potboiler, a kindly, grandfatherly man had told me in passing, in the halls of one of the elder homes I visited to do my interviews. That’s what people want to read. The facts are boring. His advice stuck, though I was never aware of following it. I began to fictionalize, to trace family ties that could never have existed but could still be realized and, more than that, could be made so persuasive that my mother could fill in her past with them, tucking her adopted life into bed each night without acknowledging its true parentage until it was hers by nurture. I recreated my mother’s memories before she began to lose her own, and now she too cannot remember what is real. I have been left with fragments of my own creation, with fictions, and now that I am in Japan, I’m discovering new creations and new memories of my mother – older, different – of times with her that I never experienced.”
Feb 17, 2010 | Our Nuclear Age
I’ve been rendered speechless by the idiocy in the conversation about Obama’s plan to build more nuclear power plants.
Is it the counter-argument about regulation? (Nuclear power plants are problematic because regulations are so restrictive…so let’s just ease those regulations, eh? Where have we heard that brilliant solution before?)
No, it’s this quote, from The Atlantic, which offers arguments against the arguments against the idea (already I am dizzy):
“Then there’s the worry of a terrorist threat. What if someone flies a plane into a nuclear reactor? Thousands could die. Well, what if someone flies a plane into a giant building? Thousands could die. Should we not build them either?”
Feb 15, 2010 | Random Thoughts
Thinking about Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day. Our best Presidents, the ones we really need, are pathmakers. Writers are also pathmakers. Someone (okay, an incredible writer and a witch) once told me that I was a pathmaker, that it was my job to walk into the dark forest and make a path so others could follow, and so others could make their own paths off of mine. I loved this image – who wouldn’t? – and when I shared it with another incredible writer friend, she looked at me kindly and said, “of course.” As in, of course, you silly child, we (writers, artists, lovers, creative thinkers) are ALL pathmakers, how could it be that you are only now understanding this about your forty-something year old self?”
So I am writing today to celebrate President’s Day. I am going to clear the path all the way through Chapter Two of my new book. I am doing it at the temporary expense of the two manuscripts on my desk that I have to read, and in doing that – putting myself above others! – and I am also celebrating Valentine’s Day. For how can I give love without understanding how to love myself? How can I offer myself in service unless I have nurtured the strength I need to serve? For me, that means feeding that thing I do best, that makes me whole: my writing.
Hey Obama, Happy “Your” Day. What a beautiful morning to pick up your sword or scythe or shining heart or Buddha nature and start clearing that path to health and peace so the rest of us can follow.
