Tag Archives: restorying

WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Robert Bly’s Things to Think

photo of a leaf and tendril spray painted on the sidewalk at the base of a pipeGood morning, good morning. It’s early morning in Boston, where it doesn’t really ever get dark – there’s always light from the nearby buildings, the cityscape. I’m not awake yet and I want my tea. My feet are chilly but it’s too warm in the radiator apartment for the wool socks I brought down with me. My car is on the street here – it’s strange for city life to begin to feel foreign. Across the street from me is an MIT frathouse, an old heritage building, probably once a single-family mansion now turned into dorm plus gathering space for the smartypantses of America. On the second floor, there’s a huge window shaped like a bishop’s hat, stained glass amid interlocking arches at the top, and through this I can see a faded oriental rug, dark wood floors, bright lights, a couple of benches. I can’t help wondering how many times that rug has been thrown up on, cried near, how many feet have pressed soles into its shortening naps. I can’t help wondering what that rug has seen.

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Things to Think
~Robert Bly

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off to see the wizard

Painting of a log cabin in the woods, beech trees in the foreground; the house has a steep, peaked roof and stands up on chicken legsGood morning, good morning.

On my screen is Baba Yaga, going off on an adventure in her cup, hair flying wild, broom in hand. Her house stands up on chicken legs. It’s just right for this day that I’m getting for my own adventure.

This morning, though, I am sick and scared, and even though I’m exited, there’s part of me that just wants to stay home, not do something new, stay where I know, with what I love and what’s familiar and good, stay with my pup and the view of the water and the trees and the bay. It’s like a wall inside me, this fear, something stubborn and seemingly immovable.

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what if everything’s ok even though a bad thing’s happened?

Full color graffiti painted on a cement wall next to some stairs and a patch of grass; graffiti is a dog's face looking out at the viewerIt’s morning again on a Monday. I feel like an addict who’s had a week clean, proclaiming I did it! I’m back on the wagon! now that I managed to get up early today after not needing alarms on Sat or Sun. Just keep going, Jen.

This weekend was a fun and energetic Writing the Flood on Saturday, and then yesterday I had a day at home in the sun. Last night, E and I made dinner and played cribbage out on the deck while the sun sank down over the mountains,  and then we came downstairs and watched tv and then I let Sophie out back to go pee and she took off like a shot after a noise under the deck and while I was busy yelling frantically at her to come back, she was getting sprayed by a skunk. As soon as she came back around the corner of the deck, I raced inside and slammed the door shut behind me, trying to keep the smell out. I gathered up all the things we needed — dish soap, peroxide, baking soda, Nature’s Miracle Skunk Odor Remover — while E soothed Sophie through the closed door.

It’s an intimate thing, getting skunk smell off a dog, especially one you love. I went back outside, knelt down, and got my face down near Sophie, sniffing around her face, neck, ears, trying to locate just where the smell is worst. This time, I think Sophie mostly got it in the mouth, poor thing. There’s a whole precise formula for the peroxide-dish soap – baking soda skunk smell remover, but I wasn’t really up for looking up something on my phone. It’s a race against time when she’s been sprayed — I have the idea that the faster I get it off, the less bad it will be.

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“render, render”

Good morning good morning. It’s grey here today, the clouds soaking across the hills, coating everything in an impenetrable foggy frost that I am deeply grateful for. How has the day begun for you? Where is your sun just now?

Sophie has gone after a squirrel this morning, who is now stuck up on top of the neighbor’s garage and is letting forth a stream of chitters that I can only assume is squirrel for lots and lots of expletives. Sophie stands guard, ball in her mouth (thus rendering her fully incapable of catching anything else between her teeth, but the squirrel doesn’t know that) — she and the squirrel have this sort of antagonistic relationship when he gets close to where she can catch him, but I’ve seen her watching him in the garden for long stretches, those times he risks coming down from the walnut tree to grab one of the fallen green walnuts or takes to examining the garden to see if there’s anything there he might like, and Sophie will stand up at the top of the garden, on the patio, watching and watching, still and quiet, not wanting to disturb him, waiting for him to get close? Or maybe she just wants to see what he’ll do? Maybe she wants to be friends?

He’s made it now, from the garage roof, across the top of the backyard fence and back to the trees where he lives — Sophie chases him along the fence, every time he comes down far enough that she’s aware of him, and he chitters his curses the whole time, though now I think maybe it’s more like, go ahead and try it, you land-bound thing! Perhaps something better, more vitriolic.

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It’s not your fault

Good Tuesday morning, writers & writers-to-be — the sun is shining outside and the guys who are fixing my car window have got the vacuum running strong and my poor little dirty girl is getting a bit of a cleanup.

What’s outside your window today?

My car was broken into last night. I parked in a busy lot in a bustling part of town, and my sweetheart and headed off to pick up our bit of take out. When we got back to the car, fewer than ten minutes later, a back window had been smashed in and the bag that I’d inherited when a dear friend passed away — filled with nothing more than a couple of writing notebooks and some flyers for upcoming workshops — was gone.

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questioning the broken story

patterns-closeIn Tuesday’s post, I said: How we tell our stories matters. The words we use for our stories matters. The metaphors and symbolic language, the imagery – all matter, all influence how we perceive ourselves, our bodies, our physical being, our agency, our history and our possibility.

For instance, consider the story inside the word broken as it gets applied to survivors of violence. Broken is commonly incorporated as a metaphor into survivor stories – he left me broken. He ruined me. She left me in pieces. He tore apart my soul.

I climbed into this fragmented narrative, this narrative of fragmentation, when I began to identify as an incest survivor. Identity is a story: we don’t just take on a label when we identify as something, we take on the narratives that accompany that identity – we have to interact with that identity’s story. The incest/trauma survivor story contained these: “broken, ruined, dead.”

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opening to new stories

Thomas King writes, in The Truth About Stories, “Stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous.”

What is a story? It is a rehashing of events, a narrative, an anecdote, a lie, a truth. The dictionary isn’t helping me here, just giving me synonyms. What is a story? It’s a telling or a making up. It’s offering an account of an experience, so someone else can can come to know or understand what happened. It’s a fabrication, a weaving into existence something that wasn’t, that didn’t exist, until we put it into precise words.

 Story is contextual. And who determines a story’s context? “She’s telling stories” is the way some folks call us liars. But we know what truths come from storyteller’s mouths.

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the shift of our stories

graffiti detail: bright slashes of red blue black yellow silverGood Monday to you. Here is candlelight and cooling tea, here is the chill of late October morning, here is the click of keys into a quiet kitchen, here is the ache of morning. What is hovering inside and about you at this time of faeries and visitations?

Today I am thinking about story: the stories we share with others in order to explain ourselves, the way those stories, our storying, shift over time — and what those shifts can tell us about how we are healing. Continue reading

trusting our soul fire

graffiti of a bird behind barsGood morning, my friends, and good Monday! I’m here on the other side, just waking up. Slow morning and all the clothes are on inside out, waiting for the tea water to boil and for the words to come.

This morning I am thinking about instinct, intention and ambition. I spent some time yesterday, again, with the women who run with the wolves, reading the chapter about soul hunger. When we have been starved of our true selves, we will grab for anything that looks like it will feed us; how do we learn to trust our instincts again, to only take on and in what will truly feed and sustain our souls?

Yesterday Matthew Fox gave me Hildegarde von Bingen in conversation with Audre Lorde, spoke of a reengagement with an eros that is embodied, that inhabits our every movement, that is about our passionate communion with life.  He mentioned, too, Women Who Run With the Wolves, which brought me back into this book’s stories. We who have been starved or have starved our souls, we who have been trapped and dried up and without access to that which fills us up and moves us forward (which is, of course, our erotic self) can often stuff ourselves full of whatever comes our way as soon as we are freed from what bondage has kept us separate from our souls. And — at least in my experience — we can get strung out on that feeling of being released.

(Some explicit languaging of trauma below the fold in this post: be easy with you)

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the deep vein of your body’s true story

stencil graffiti that reads: I say / the say/ the say/ says/ me/say/sayGood morning good morning good morning. Who is feeding you this Wednesday? What does it sound like where you are? Here, I think it’s mostly quiet outside — there’s a lot of clamor in my head this morning, so it’s hard to say for sure.

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Tonight’s the Erotic Reading Circle, 7:30-9:30pm at the Center for Sex and Culture — if you are local to the Bay Area and are doing any writing that involves sexuality or desire, I invite you to join us. The folks who gather at the ERC consistently impress me with the power and variety of their work, and, too, with the generosity of their feedback for one another. It’s a good space for sharing new work, and a safe space for folks who are just starting to offer their work to others. It would be great to welcome you into the Circle!

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