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Breathless

Sometimes there are no words, and there shouldn’t be.

George Floyd is trying to tell us something. His first message was clear, urgent: he couldn’t breathe because of the pressure Derek Chauvin applied to his neck for more than eight minutes before Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation.

But as I sit with the events of the past week, feeling a deep gnawing because we still seem so far from equality and justice, I’m hearing another message, equally urgent. Know what it’s like to be breathless. Stop talking and listen.

Sarah Bellamy, artistic director of the Penumbra Theatre, said following Mr. Floyd’s murder:

“As a black institution that has carried the water of racial equity work in Minnesota for decades, . . . we must be permitted the space to grieve right now. . . . Give us a moment while we practice deep self-love. Give us a moment while we gather our strength. ”

George Floyd

Listen while we mourn.

“For white folks who want to help the black community right now, if you have the energy to act: step into the space and put your comfort at risk. Stand with us. Stand next to us. Be kinder. Be even more compassionate. Listen better. Dig deeper. Move past fear. Don’t wait for us to tell you what to do but be ready to listen when we offer constructive criticism or advice. We can’t do this alone and we need everyone, everyone, in this fight.”

Listen.

George Floyd’s is one voice among many that has been trying to tell us for a very long time, We can’t breathe.

Today I visited the site where Mr. Floyd died. At the scene of the crime that has rocked the world and broken too many hearts, a boy no more than 7 offered me water. Free.

Listen.

My In-between Place

Where language and living connect

Heidegger had his hut. Deborah Levy, a garden shed. Dickinson, her bedroom. I have my treehouse.

It isn’t really a treehouse built around branches. But that’s how I like to think of the space where I write. With 8 windows that bring me as close to nature as possible without stepping outside, the room where I write feels private, high up, secretive—as tree forts are intended to make its young residents feel.

Who doesn’t want a space where our imaginations are set free? A space we can paint any color or leave wood and brick exposed? A place that holds only what we bring to it, kept as messy as we choose?

A favorite picture book when my children were young was A House Is a House for Me, by Mary Ann Haberman. After 35 years, the book is still in excellent condition, and not for lack of being read. Now it has become a favorite of my grandchildren. The text is minimal, pleasantly repetitive and rhyming. The illustrations are of ordinary things: drum, bag, kangaroo, coat, jack-o-lantern, egg, sandwich.

It’s the premise—that anything and everything is a house for something—that is at once clever and provocative. The story moves from the obvious “A hive is a house for a bee” to “A mirror’s a house for reflections, a throat is a house for a hum.”

The east windows of my treehouse look out on a towering pine, planted around the time my house was built in 1917. The pine—a house for every imaginable bird that visits my yard—has the slightest southern lean, maybe by 7 degrees, which has endeared me to it even more. My neighbor whose house is closer to the tree worries a storm will topple it and has hinted it might be time to cut it down.

To the south—4 windows wide—are, left to right, a walnut tree (much maligned by the neighbor who must clean up its nuts encased in rock-hard shells), an aging birch, and a sugar maple. In the foreground (my yard) is a hydrangea tree that offers its own fall blush.

Out the west windows is a white pine, the youngest of all the trees by far but holding its own against two columnar cedars which, if I opened the window, I could touch. A hawk patrols from their dense cover, doing its part in controlling the mice and voles that have taken up residence in my yard.

It is in this sunroom that I write. It is where I’m invited “to climb in-between the apparent reality of things, to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure, to discover that everything is connected in the ecology [read: house] of language and living.” (Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living, 37)

Or as Haberman writes at the end of her charming book, “The earth is a house for us all.”

No matter the month or season, I’m grateful to have this in-between place, a room that is at once a treehouse, rising moon, thunderstorm, dream, echo, flame: anything I want it to be.

Ahead, the Unexpected

Finding where peace is possible

My Canadian Rockies trip in August didn’t start out well. For all the training and preparations, I miscalculated how early I needed to be at the airport that Saturday morning. The lines were historically long. The wait for an agent as long as the lines. By the time my travel companion Pat and I reached the kiosk to check our bags, the message on the screen told us we were too late. Checkin for international flights must be done at least an hour before departure. That meant another line, another wait, to rebook on a flight that evening.

Things don’t always go as expected.

By the time we arrived at our hotel in Calgary, it was midnight. The others in our group, from as far away as New Zealand and Boston, had arrived much earlier, met each other, and had dinner with our two guides, who left a note that we were to meet for breakfast at 7 a.m.

When we came down to eat, we looked around, expecting, well, our group to be assembled and holding a sign that welcomed us. Instead, I felt like the newly hatched bird that keeps asking, “Are you my mother?” to anyone who looked like they might be about to spend seven days in the wilderness. Unfortunately, everyone seemed to be dressed for that occasion.

A mother and son finally joined us, then others in our group stopped by. An hour later, we were all in a comfortable van, on our way to Lake Louise campground, our base for the week. The days revolved around the weather, which changed often. After setting up our tents, we drove to a trailhead close by and hiked on a forested path in a light rain up to Sherbrooke Lake. As we admired the turquoise water and the mountains rising all around, our guide said, “On the other side of this mountain is the Continental Divide.”

The Canadian Rockies are vast, covering some 75,000 square miles. Each day our hikes—carefully chosen by our guides—took us to incomparable vistas. We climbed to the Lake Agnes Tea House above Lake Louise. We walked to the toe of the Athabasca Glacier, then climbed Parker Ridge to view another glacier tongue of the Columbia Icefield from above.

Some of us made the steep climb to a secret lake tucked deep in the mountains, stopping along the way to view Takakkaw Falls, the tallest in the Rockies. What else might I see, I wondered, if I stayed longer?

Our longest hike started at Moraine Lake and took us up switchbacks and through an evergreen and larch forest before we came out to an alpine meadow on our left, scree pitching sharply up on our right. There, before us, was the Valley of the Ten Peaks, each one more than 10,000 feet high. My eyes filled with tears. I stood in awe, hearing only the sound of the wind. It was nothing less than a mountaintop experience. Here was the bare, unfiltered love we spend out whole lives seeking. Here was the God within me who had always been there, the God I could stand before and feel as one. Here was the peace I had come to see was possible.

These moments change us. They stay with us, become a part of who we are. Life is never the same afterwards. I still feel aftershocks when I recall that place, even choke up when I try to describe my trip to a stranger.

Moments such as this bring me to the tender time, when I mark Chris’s passing nine years ago today. Things don’t always go as expected. A hard lesson for me, who likes order, control, and a plan.

One afternoon we went rafting on the Kicking Horse, a class III-IV river, swollen from recent rains. I’d never rafted before and needed coaxing by the group to overcome my fears. During the orientation, our guide said she would use three simple commands throughout our seven-mile float.

I climbed into the raft. Within a minute we were hurrying downstream. “Hold on!” our guide shouted as the raft pitched forward and a cold spray crashed over me, finding its way under my wetsuit. “Get down!” she hollered over the roar when rapids swirled around us. And between these harrowing moments, between the unexpected and the seemingly impossible, “Paddle!”

From somewhere deep within came a swell of energy and I laughed at the pure joy of living.

When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming—then row, row, for your life toward it (Mary Oliver, West Wind, 46).

I have many wonderful memories from my trip, but these three commands may be all I need. The past nine years I’ve held on, wanting to survive. I’ve ducked some hazards, faced others. And in between, I’ve navigated the river, paddling, paddling, with all my heart toward the unexpected.

A Walk Taken

When not having a purpose is the purpose

My father loved to walk. Walking was simple, functional, and the purest form of exercise. He walked in his wingtips to the train station, then across the Chicago loop daily for 37 years. He maintained a healthy weight because of the 3 miles he walked every day.

He would be delighted that his youngest daughter has been logging her own miles this summer in preparation for a hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies. On weekends Father liked nothing more than to take a walk in the woods, at the arboretum—wherever he was surrounded by the natural world.

I will be thinking of him as I scramble across boulders and stand before snow-capped peaks and glacier-fed lakes. He will be my reminder to walk for the pure enjoyment of it. I won’t be tracking number of miles or speed. I certainly won’t be breaking any records. My goal is not to have a goal. I’m eager to see a magnificent part of the world, meet new people, and appreciate being able to have this opportunity.

Walking has recently become the subject of several books that promote the activity as a goal-driven pursuit. Writers, one book documents, are invigorated by walking, which fuels their creativity. Another author argues that walking is a form of protest against our busyness, going so far as to suggest that walking is a way of imagining a more sustainable future.

Norwegian writer Erling Kagge believes that “walking is among the most radical things you can do.” He speaks from experience, having been the first person to cross North and South Poles and climb Mount Everest on foot. For him, walking is a protest against growing the GDP and then resting whenever we aren’t doing so.

In my own preparations, I admit to wanting to have the right equipment, training a lot, and becoming the consumer I’d rather not be. At least I haven’t joined the “Order of Walkers” just to head out my door.

My great hope is to keep all things political and purposeful out of my week of hiking. I intend to walk every day, period. I will put one foot in front of the other and imagine Father at my side. More than anything, he and I would agree, walking is good for the soul.

What to Say to a Writer

Writing takes courage and no small amount of faith

At my writer’s group recently, we were going around the circle and checking in—giving the others an update on our own writing, perhaps raising an issue we’d been facing. One woman, when it was her turn, expressed frustration over a question she is asked often by those who know she’s working on a memoir. “When are you going to get your book published?”

When indeed. For anyone who doesn’t make a habit of wrestling with words and calling it her livelihood, let me tell you a secret. This is the question every writer dreads. It’s a question that pokes us, taunts us, by way of saying there should be a measurable outcome to everything we do and perhaps we’ve chosen the wrong thing to spend our time on.

A journalist writes to meet a deadline. An academic writes to stay relevant. A copywriter writes to sell.

The writers in my group are not the publish-or-perish type. Our work has a more subtle intent. We are trying to solve something that may not have a solution. And we won’t know that until we do.

We aren’t capitalists. We don’t keep a time sheet. We don’t have a business plan. We don’t build empires. We don’t insist on deadlines that force us to a place we don’t yet know exists.

We aren’t lion tamers. We don’t train words with a whip, making them do tricks for others. Writing must maintain its wildness. We’re just along for the ride.

This is why we don’t know how to answer these questions. They seem to be in Farsi, and we only speak English.

• How long have you been working on your book?

• When will you be done?

• How long is your book?

• What’s your next project after this one?

• Do you have a publisher yet?

As Annie Dillard writes, “Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.” (The Writing Life)

Let me tell you something else. I came to the end of my latest revision this week. For a quick minute I breathed. But my first thought wasn’t to begin researching literary agents or tell you how to preorder copies on Amazon.

My first real thought was, “Now that I’m done, I can sit down and write my story.”

This is how writers think. We arrive, hoping for greater insight, a clearer path that then requires going back to the beginning, rubbing that new insight like a smooth stone.

It takes courage, believe me, and no small amount of faith, which is assailed most days when we look at our words from the day or week or year before and they’ve lost their sheen. Still we persist, sometimes taking a necessary break, sometimes diving even deeper into the murky waters we’re trying to see our way through.

Here are a few thoughts on what to say to the writer in your life:

• What feeds your writing?

• I’m interested in what you’re working on.

• How has writing changed you?

• I admire your commitment to your writing!

• Courage, my friend.

When we write, we put symbols (words) on the page. We don’t know yet what meaning they contain. We can’t because we are traveling in new territory. It is full of mystery. “Right now,” Dillard says, “your job is to hold your breath.”

Signs of Spring

What we all need after a long winter of discontent

I’ve been more than tempted to malign Spring’s slow arrival this year. I’ve succumbed. I guess a 7-month-long winter will do that to a person who likes to garden, if not simply be outside without wearing several layers and spikes on my shoes. The long winter of my discontent (political and climate) had turned my thoughts more foul than the weather. Even with hints of change, I wasn’t willing to stop complaining.

Still, my determination is a formidable foe. Nearly every day for the past three weeks I’ve managed to spend a few hours in the garden, raking leaves from under shrubs, cutting back dried blooms, moving perennials, and making discoveries along the way.

Bleeding Heart.jpg

Lady's Mantle.jpg

Meadow Rue.jpg

Today when Mike the Mailman pulled up and got out of his truck, we greeted each other and commented on the lovely day. “You know,” he said, “I kind of like that Spring has been gradual this year.”

I had to agree. It was pleasant being on my hands and knees without sweat dripping in my eyes. It was nice to transplant perennials before the heat stressed them. It was comfortable working in long sleeves and not seeing (or feeling) a single bug.

A friend who isn’t from here helped me with some of the digging. The temperature hovered around 50 with a slight cloud cover and no rain. In other words, perfect for the tasks at hand. After a full day of gardening he said, “Minnesotans like to complain about the weather.”

I’m going to try not to be one of them.

NOTE: The first person within a 20-mile radius to identify all the plants shown above will win a FREE elephant ear (not the pastry). They get BIG and are great in large pots or planted directly in a sunny spot in your garden.

Elephant ear.jpg

The Sense of an Ending

Writing and life: where nothing is tidy

Growing up, I read a lot of mysteries. I cut my sleuthing teeth on Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but eventually moved on to Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Patricia Cornwell, Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Maj Showall and Per Waloo, Ngaio Marsh, and British TV series such as “Inspector Morse,” “Prime Suspect,” “Vera,” “Sherlock,” “Broadchurch,” and “Shetland.” Now when I walk, clean, cook, or garden, I listen to mystery-thrillers.

Mysteries are inherently satisfying. A crime is solved, a criminal apprehended, and order is restored to a family, a village, a country. I liked this tidy resolution that restored my belief in good triumphing over evil.

I was into my twenties before I stopped flipping to the last pages of a mystery I was reading. I couldn’t wait to find out “who done it” and why. Then I would go back and read to the end as I was supposed to, all the while knowing exactly where the story was headed. The element of surprise was gone, but I liked to think that I noticed clues I might have otherwise missed.

Who doesn’t like happy endings?

Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, stars of the “Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” were my favorite secret agents in the 1960s. Like James Bond, they always resolved some international situation. The book Boys in the Boat tells the story of a group of rowers whose homegrown grit and teamwork lead them to Olympic victory. In Educated, Tara Westover finally escapes a suffocating life. Easter is the happy ending to Lent, when Christians say, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

I’ve been working on the ending to my manuscript. For awhile. At times I’ve thought I could just tie all the themes up neatly, cinch the bow on top, and declare, “Done!” But a thought—more a correction to my thinking—keeps surfacing. There is nothing tidy about life. And what is literary nonfiction but a person’s experience artfully told? To be true and real, that experience must include all the messiness and pain that come with life—relationships, parenting, aging, a diagnosis, dreams derailed, and, waiting for all of us, death.

When I shared my struggle in writing my final chapter, a friend suggested I look more closely at the endings of other memoirs I admire. What a good suggestion that was! Revisiting what we think we know nearly always yields something new.

“[W]e never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder creatures . . . the pain is what yields the solution” (Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home).

“If we are to live ourselves, we must relinquish the dead” (Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking).

“I opened the door to the rest of my life, this new life without a living link to the old world” (Patricia Hampl, The Florist’s Daughter).

With these rich examples steeping in me, I appealed to my writing coach. “I’m spinning my wheels,” I wrote to her, “wondering if what I have to say has value, uncertain as to how to land, questioning my faith, even revisiting the story’s heartbeat. No wonder I’m stuck!” At least I didn’t add, “hoping to run a marathon this weekend without training.”

With her help and my perseverance, I will find the elusive ending. But it will require patience, instinct, the gentle wisdom of others, and trust in the process itself. In the midst of my writing block are loved ones, activities of purpose, a good poem, a good meal, nature—all sources of inspiration and hope.

Truth and Reconciliation

A process not just for nations but for ourselves

First, some background.

The truth and reconciliation concept emerged in the 1970s as a strategy for dealing with war crimes and other human rights abuses. As one website explained, “It seeks to heal relations between opposing sides by uncovering all pertinent facts, distinguishing truth from lies, and allowing for acknowledgement, appropriate public mourning, forgiveness and healing.”

The most famous example is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the end of apartheid. More than thirty nations have used this model during the past three decades. (Imagine what restorative justice we could achieve if our country had a commission that confronted slavery.)

So why not apply the process to ourselves?

I asked myself this question at a recent writer’s group. Isn’t this what we’re about when we tell our stories? Isn’t writing the most intimate form of truth and reconciliation? Done openly, the process helps us confront and reckon with our past so that we can move beyond old hurts and inaccurate versions of ourselves to a place of authenticity and healing.

As one of the women in our group haltingly described what her story is about, tears came to her eyes and her face reflected utter anguish. So much in our past, in our lives, to reckon with. So much to process and forgive before we can love ourselves.

This is why I write. This is why many of us write. Some of us in our sixties and beyond know that it’s much more than a desire to be published that puts us in our chair. It’s more than “morning pages” or a 200-word daily goal. Writing the truth—naming it and reckoning with it—takes us deeper as we seek an Eden we will spend our whole lives hoping to reclaim.

What would it mean for each of us to speak our own truth?

Today is Ash Wednesday. It marks the beginning of Lent, the Christian church’s 40-day journey of truth and reconciliation with ourselves and God.

Today is also any Wednesday, a day like every other when, regardless of our beliefs, we can begin the process. There is always truth to uncover and reconciliation to come.

Surviving the Siege, part two

I woke up this morning and it felt a little chilly outside of the covers. Since it was the coldest morning of the year, I figured that was why and dressed and headed down to the kitchen. I checked the thermostat on my way.

Yep. You read that right. It was a bracing 45 downstairs, a crisp 50 upstairs. At least there wasn’t a windchill.

The extent of my ability to diagnose or fix something is to check the fuse box or go on YouTube. No circuit flipped. Somehow, this seemed beyond YouTube.So I started up the space heaters, one up, one down, all smugness from yesterday’s post gone. I ate crow for breakfast. Perhaps to punish myself (and before coffee), I figured I would hunker even further down than I already had been the last few days and wait it out. Wait what out? I thought. Now is not the time to prove anything.

I called the heating company that had installed the furnace some 15 years ago and soon the service technician showed up. I met him at the door in a down coat, hat, and scarf.

After a bit of this and a bit of that, he told me my filter was probably the culprit, even though I’d replaced it this fall. He put a new one in and left. The house temperature climbed into the high 40s, then dropped to 42. Another call, another technician. He spent a bit more time doing this and that, including a few loud bangs, then gave me the news.

I needed a new furnace. Yes, I could replace parts (which might have to get ordered and weren’t easy to come by) but if I intended to stay in the house for awhile, I should do it.

I ate chilled crow for lunch. Last fall my neighbor mentioned she was having their furnace cleaned and checked out before winter. I made a mental note to do the same, forgetting that mental notes don’t come with a guarantee.

Now another guy is on his way to tell me how much it’s going to cost. I’ll gulp and cancel travel plans for the year, but be the warmer for it.

Back to the jigsaw puzzle.

Surviving the Siege

When the usual tricks aren’t working

I thought getting through January was enough. I’d avoided making any resolutions I would not follow through on. I’d read and listened to several books, finished a podcast series on race, painted a room.

Then, the Siege.

Arctic air some of us haven’t experienced before or can’t recall, it’s been so long since temperatures here registered lower than Antarctica. (So cold that the previous sentence doesn’t have a verb.)

What to do when we are in virtual lockdown in our own homes?

The usual tricks weren’t working. I finished a book but couldn’t get out of my chair to fetch another. My office is begging to be decluttered but I can’t seem to see the piles all around. I dare not take a walk, not after listening to the dire warnings on MPR of exposure, frostbite, hypothermia, death. Frightful stories on the scale of news from Washington that were followed by a story of the Arrowhead 135, an annual endurance race of that number of miles across northern Minnesota that 146 people who need a challenge started yesterday.

“If you get a warm year,” one regular participant said, “it’s almost like you got cheated.”

Ha.

This morning I was at my desk, as usual, feeling just a little cheated that I wouldn’t be walking outdoors today, as is my habit. Even through the shades, the room had begun to brighten. It was time to open them, I decided, calculating that the overall effect of sun in (not to mention the lift it brings me) was greater than the draft that would come with it. This is what I saw:

Maybe it’s a matter of perspective, this Siege.

I’d worry about my mental health if I was stuck indoors long-term, but for now, I’m embracing it. Last night I spent an hour in the basement, trowel in hand, planting canna and elephant ear bulbs. Today, a jigsaw puzzle. I won’t ever attempt the Arrowhead 135, but I can see why some people do. There’s something about not doing the usual.

Things could be a lot worse, I tell myself, still in my chair, staring out the frosted window. I could be married to Donald Trump.