Monthly Archives: November 2011

Good morning good morning — I’m beginning this morning’s write from the BART station. I got to have this morning in Berkeley’s thick mist. Do I have to call it fog? When the sun shine through, I could see the individual drops of atmosphere I was walking into, and I just felt glad, grateful. Grateful for these legs, eyes, the possibility of ambulation — grateful for the thin green moss on all the trees, making them look like paintings of themselves.

I’m thinking more about hands this morning, as I feel the sharp pain now and again as I type this with my thumbs into a tiny machine. I pass communal gardens, feel the dirt, humus, leaf mould, wiggling nightcrawlers around my fingers, imagine the smell, want that possibility, capacity again. I’ve been remembering a time, from Before, when my hands were always active–we played sports, instruments, our parents signed us up for crafts classes; it was important for our hands to know how to do things. In the After, I had silicone, plastic–the computer–and of course, his body. That’s what my hands were good for then.

My therapist asks me how I get my hands back. This, I think, is a good question. How do we get our hands back, get back the parts of our bodies made not ours during extensive trauma or torture? I indicate my notebook, when he asks: this, I say this is how I’ve done it. Writing.

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Sometimes this is what it looks like: night-walks through fogged streets, dinner alone at a quiet Thai restaurant, the hospitality of silence.

I was invited today to return to “The Handless Maiden,” to read again, to find my own meaning or points of connection in the story. So I pulled my copy of Women Who Run With The Wolves from the shelf, and am revisiting. Let me share a piece of Pinkola-Estes with you:

There are times in a woman’s life when she cries and cries and cries, and even though she has the succor and support of her lived ones, still and yet she cries. Something in this crying keeps the predator away, keeps away unhealthy desire or gain that will ruin her. Tears are part of the mending of rips in the psyche where energy has leaked and leaked away. The matter is serious, but the worst does not occur–our light is not stolen–for tears make us conscious. There is no chance to go back to sleep when one is weeping. Whatever sleep comes then is only rest for the physical body.

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Good morning from the land of fog. I’m writing to you from the ferry, this boat I take to get from home to San Francisco. We’re preparing to push away from the dock (I say we like I have anything to do with it), to shove into the thick fog. The pelicans are a quiet party on the sea wall bodies grey, heads a tufts white, gorgeous orange beaks tucked into their bodies almost like they’re amused or disapproving, but don’t quite want to let you know it.

This morning I spent my writing time with the notebook. It was me, a candle, the strong tea, hand moving fast, trying to push beyond the editor back into those first thoughts.

At the talk I gave at Davis a couple weeks ago, I waxed pretty rhapsodic about this process, about the erotics of letting thoughts flow onto the page, no editing, no crossing out, being all the way in my body, all of a piece: hand, thought, pen, breath. And as I spoke, I realized how infrequently I let myself have this sort of writing time these days–and how much I miss it. As much as I work here on the blog to offer first thoughts, the fact is that I edit myself much more often when I’m writing here, writing for immediate public consumption. That’s ok, in and of itself–what’s not ok is not having any spaces for messy, sticky, surprising freewriting. So this morning got to be that time.

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A short blog today — I’m still taking some time away from the computer. These are some quiet days that we’re in the middle of, and the writing is happening differently.

This is an old write, from 2005:

The young woman with the ripped jeans at Ashby Station spitting out blood and consternation. F! asks if she need us to call help, a doctor, and she doesn’t speak — just shakes her head. Long vine streams of saliva dripping from her mouth, her legs spread wide          feet flat on the ground         good angle for a grand plié, if she were on her feet and moving and maybe one of the things she’s lost in moving into adolescence is her fine facility with dancing         now that the thighs and belly have bulbed out with womanhood. Her hair is a straight flaxen tail at the back of her head and her face is a lovely blotch, so fresh, those cheeks, with a redness that promises acne that hasn’t yet appeared. And between her feet a pool of spit that slowly reddened from blood or food coloring, we don’t know which — it doesn’t really matter, ’cause all she needs is attention, gone so long she can’t even make eye contact. It’d be a long haul back to keeping her spit in her mouth. She’s slapped at home for speaking or someone is or she’s encouraged to do altogether too much with her mouth and for too long. She sits alone, waiting for somebody to give her a chance at waiting for her dreams, too. She’s not even anxious on the outside. Just a cauterized wound.

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It’s 5:30, and we’re in the midst of preparing a last-minute big meal to take over to a friend’s place — she and her daughter have roast beef and a bunch of sides; we’re bringing chicken, gravy, mashed potatoes, rolls, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. Of course we’re running late. So there’s just a bit of time for a blog.

I’ve been reluctant, all day, to get here and be faced with the prospect of the obligatory gratitude post. I have nothing against gratitude posts, per se — it’s the ones on Thanksgiving that leave me a little curdled, sometimes: the way and the why we’re meant to be so grateful on this day, to be public in our gratitude. A national day of thanks for or draped over this history of genocide — this now of genocide.

I shared this poem at the Writing the Flood workshop over the weekend, and again on facebook today. I can’t get enough of it. This is the truth of our complication: Continue reading →

Good morning. There’s a candle here, casting a small circle of bright onto the dark wood of my desk. Even though it’s late, there are no birds awake yet. I’m not dealing very well with the fact that it’s already the end of the year. But in the dark time, there are lights everywhere — and even though I find it infuriating that there’s already Xmasness all over the place, I do like the lights that folks set up, in their windows and along front porch railings. The practice of casting light into the heavy, long winter nights, that part is old, older than xmas, and so I take a particular joy this time of year in setting this small flame alight.

Here’s the nablopomo prompt for today from BlogHer: Write about a piece of music that changed your life forever. What do you feel when you hear it now? (Guest Post by Alex George, author of A Good American)

I’ve had Depeche Mode running through my head for the better part of this week (and better holds all the possible meanings there) — on Monday, I was listening to 101 again, crashing through the history that that particular cd holds for me, my freshman year in college, the beginning of the worst part of my life, the beginning of my escape.

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