very close, very wet

very close, very wet

The river floods.

Tamarind seeds do not sprout.

Supermarket-roasted chicken falls apart.

I use toilet paper to blow my nose.

But we have a new bar of soap.

A healthy heart beats inside the dirty girl.

A silver blaze rides the haunch of a dark grizzly.

I lie awake in the glow,

the bright mystery

of who I was

between Junes.

Full moon at perigee.

Millenial flood.

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Shame and Vulnerability

I have a new lover. Meet Vulnerability. We're crazy about each other.

Brené Brown talks about having a "vulnerability hangover" after admitting her breakdown publicly on Youtube (now at 9,794,150 Views). What memoir writer hasn't experienced a vulnerability hangover? I certainly have, and I'm currently writing about one of the aspects of that hangover - shame. I hope to post some of the work-in-progress here in the coming weeks.

She also says, "Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change." These are some of my top values. So basically, I'm screwed. Me and Vulnerability are gonna be life partners.

I love my zits

I am one of those despised dermatological unicorns: a person blessed with great skin. One of those people for whom actual blemishes are so rare as to make each one memorable. Like the Great Squee of Oh-Seven,  flaring in the night with its own evil incandescence.  And, more recently, the Tenacious Tunnelling Blackhead of Two-Kay-Thirteen.

Occasionally - and I mean as occasionally as a baby elephant - a single pimple would happen. Always on my chin, within a one-inch sweet spot - my very own personal crucible of pustulence.

I would peer in the mirror at it, mystified.  A lone zit seems as unnatural as a hen laying only one egg, a cob of corn with a single niblet, a green pod cradling a lonely pea. Shouldn’t whiteheads come in crops? In festering flocks of clogged-pore goodness? In a murder of mandible-cloaking crow heads? But no. Not on this body.

Until now. These days, my skin’s threatening to unleash all the zits it horded during my teen years. After all these years of restraint, I dread a lynch-mob of white suprema-cysts. So far, production seems to be at a simmer, not a rolling boil (ahthankyou!)

But still. I count precisely two on my chin… and five on my back. My back! For the love of fuzzy baby animals, when did my back become fair game?

For me, this verges on traumatic. But those plagued with acne all their lives laugh at me. "You're freaking over a measley seven zits? I can't remember a time when I didn't have at least ten." They smirk at my primadonna horror and hand me tea tree oil.

Why oh why is this happening? It's partly to do with my age. Peri-menopause can be a sort of second adolescence, hormonally speaking. Experts also attribute worsening of acne to stress.

Knowing this brought a realization: I love my zits. Because these crimson craters mean I've survived to reach middle age. That's no small thing for someone with anxiety issues and a family history of breast cancer that makes medical professionals indulgent.

I love my white-capped wonders because they show I am brave. In the past six months, I've made a host choices and decisions.  Each has stretched me to greater levels of exposure and vulnerability. There are things I need to do, things that scare me into acne-studded alertness. And I am doing them, one spot at a time.

So when you see me, salute my latest dermal conflagration as the badge of honour it is.

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Writing Memoir

When the train sounds its level crossing in the wee hours, the coyotes howl. Why? I don't know, but I like it. I know the coyotes are always there, though I may rarely see them. But when their ruckus starts up, there suddenly seems an impossible number of creatures just outside my window.

Think of animal tracks. Summer trails show only a few traces of animal life in the mud. But winter - winter transforms and conceals even as it provides revelations. Snow reveals a super-highway of wild activity. Snow provides the evidence of abundant life. When the snow melts, you have to go back to believing without proof - back to a kind of faith.

Elk, deer, even the bighorn sheep confirm their presence regularly. It's the pine martens, mice, siskins, coyotes, wolves, lynx, cougar, and white-tails who recede and emerge from awareness seasonally. The shy. The nocturnal. The furtive prey, and the stalking predators.

And now here I sit, awake hours earlier than everyone else to make my own tracks in ink.

Writing about my life is like all that - the snow, the tracks, the train and the coyotes howling. Within me lurks a longing to share my life through words. I merely believe there is something of value to express. There's no evidence that's true - until I face a blank page.

I hitch one word to another with deliberate momentum and hear the animal cry of my authentic being. I have been placing a notebook on my lap for thirty-five years. That simple act camouflages the mundane signs of my passage - bills and "to-do" lists and schedules, trash and used tissues and dishes and laundry - and my life is transformed by being hidden. The proof of a deeper, more meaningful existence is exposed, ironically, by drifts of paper accumulating over my life. Without fail, within moments of placing pen on paper, I'm breathing deeply and rhythmically - as though I were asleep. But it's a much better rest. One that even coyotes cannot disturb.

post-MFA advice: with pants around ankles, begin again

The bathroom stall walls where I work are covered in magnetic words. For months, I've been pulling my pants down, then pairing magnets together. Two magnets to please only me with their assonance, alliteration, rhyme, unpredictability, or peculiarity. Why is this important?

When soil is very dry, it cannot absorb water. Some moisture must be present because, if I recall my biology lessons, H20 molecules attract one another thus drawing moisture into the soil. So if you have a plant that is very dry, first you must place the pot in a dish of water and allow the roots to draw some moisture up into the soil. Only then can you douse the soil surface with water and expect it to infiltrate.

Since finishing my MFA, my brain was like that dry soil. I tried to pour books upon it months ago but they pooled uselessly on the surface. But those word pairings were the trickles of hydration below the roots.  And now, it's possible to splash my cortex with the written words of others, but gingerly. I can take a bird-bath of reading, no more.

That little bit of moisture has been enough to nourish a few new leaves to share with you. I must be a cactus.