Wild Work

Wild Hereafter

2010-11-08T05:31:00.000-08:00

The Hereafter portrayed on screen is awash in shades of grey.
If only a character as strong as the great necromancer himself, Jacob Marley, had been written into Clint Eastwood’s tepid film HEREAFTER, then perhaps we’d care about the characters who live on the fringes of death. Instead, we’re shown three interwoven stories, none of which can seem to take a stand about the afterlife, or at least allow the audience to emotionally invest in what happens to these people who are grieving their own losses.

George, the one who sees dead people, ably played by Matt Damon, is a reluctant psychic. Everyone who is a real psychic is a reluctant psychic. Eastwood says screenwriter Peter Morgan “doesn’t believe in an afterlife,” and in his lack of understanding of what it would be like to experience occult phenomena – initially it’s both decidedly normal and completely terrifying – what we’re left with is the vague George, a stoic construction worker with a love for Dickens. Nothing to help us learn who he is, and what his conflicts are.

Two of my family stories relate to coming back from the dead – my grandmother died in childbirth and returned to life; and my husband died in ICU in front of me, and returned minutes later in surgery, without his former personality or memories. I’ve had a swipe or two at seeing ghosts as a teenager, and once saw my mother-in-law after she passed (and that’s only slightly less frightening than Jane Fonda playing one on the big screen.) I have written about the effects of such reluctantly lived events on me and my family here, and I can tell you that just like any event in one’s memory, we grow to both question our perceptions and stake a claim to them. Sometimes in the same moment. The people I’ve talked to who have experienced this phenomena, (and yes, I now know a motley crew of psychics, shamans, poets and ne’er-do-wells,) aren’t making a fortune off their sudden mediumship, nor are they particularly confused about ‘what to do about it.’ They’re too busy being great parents and professionals. But if they were conflicted about this odd ‘gift’, they wouldn’t articulate that problem by running away from people who recognize them as psychic. Like this script has Matt Damon doing every fifteen minutes.

When I started writing, I was afraid to tell what I saw and heard in the imaginal realm -- that place from which characters and story arise. And with daily practice, I’ve come to know that the imagination is a real place. Where ghosts walk and spirits talk is the land of the instinctual, and it is neither hokum nor domesticated. As every child who has found a storyteller knows.

Almost every review I read of the film following my weekend trip to see HEREAFTER mentioned how fantastic it was that Eastwood didn’t descend into the wackiness of spiritualism. Roger Ebert says, “This is a subject that lends itself to sensation and psychic baloney. It's astonishing how many people believe New Age notions, which have the attraction of allowing believers to confer supernormal abilities on themselves and others without the bother of plausibility. Eastwood's film will leave such people vaguely uneasy. It believes most psychics are frauds.” You’d think the journalistic high-road involved everything that can be scientifically proven, and that film isn’t mastered by the wizards of magic and the surreal. From the radicalists Godard and Bertolucci, to Camus’ BLACK ORPHEUS, to Brooks’ DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, to Burton’s BEETLEJUICE, to Matheson’s WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, film is full of exploration of the thin line that divides life and death, and what those who have gone there envision our (non) existence to be.

If only the HEREAFTER storytellers had thrown their passion and belief behind their main characters, then we wouldn’t be left with a story that was so trivial and indistinct. {The opening scene's tsunami is the film's greatest moment, not only for its special effects but for allowing actors to register trauma and grief.} I don’t care whether you believe in the afterlife, but if your character experiences the effects of the dead in his own waking existence, you’ve got to imagine enough to specifically realize his visions and traumas and consequences. You can’t intellectually prove what’s uncanny in the human experience. But you can take what’s unknown to most people, and make something mesmerizing from it.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Film

Wild Lover

2010-09-07T12:31:00.001-07:00

The past several summers I have been taking other lovers. Every August my husband says goodbye from our home in Seattle, and watches me drive north. I travel across the border into Canada, and then west to Banff National Park, eleven hours and entire world away from the city I usually inhabit. Banff is my soul home, and her vast dogtoothed, sawbacked, castellated, matterhorned mountain ranges are my lovers.

Making relationship with these mountains – Rundle, Cascade, Tunnel, Sulphur, Norquay in town, and the vast ranges that cross the continental divide, and the thrust faults of Yoho and Kootenay Parks, and the Waputik and Wapta icefields, and the glaciers of Peyto, Bow, Vulture, Crowfoot, Hector – has been much like learning to love another human. Anyone who is creative knows that one can be spiritually companioned by a being who is not necessarily human. The lover can be the spider, the tree, the raven, the rock. For me, to be with the mountain is to be ensouled.

To become a lover with a mountain, reciprocity is required. I ask for peace, grandeur, timelessness, perspective and expansion; the mountains expect the same from me. I enter into our union knowing I’ll not urgently scamper to the top in some conquerer’s takeover, but instead gaze at the minutae. I’ll spend time in solitude, watching who this mountain being is. Reciprocity means that I work on behalf of the mountain – her streams, lakes, trails, flowers, boulders, animals – and that I will not disregard the sensibility of creatures whose language and role is different from my own.

I’ve become aware this trip, in a manner unlike any form I have ever known, how much the mountains have to teach me about expansive energy. I no longer end at my skin. Or even at the few feet around me, as I project my strong personality. Instead, in this grand Precambrian force, my sense of “I” is altered. In these wild places my being leaves my known self and moves outward, sometimes for an entire mountain pass, through dense forests and deep gorges, over meadows and montanes, around alpine lakes and glacial rivers, and within that breadth, I become as they. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” said Walt Whitman, and he spoke the lesser known too – “I… am not contained between my hat and boots." Like the poets, the wild can take us beyond a conventional knowing of self, to a transcendental identity. And when such wilderness traverses occur, unlike in the city, amongst noise and pollutants and urgencies, I don’ try to protect my heart or my mind or my body. I reel. In the wonder that is living large, my ‘self’ scatters beyond my cells, blood, organs, brain, and I receive the persistent mystery. “Who am I?” is the question my Zen master assigned as my koan some two decades ago in these Canadian Rockies. How strange that I stand alone and hear these very mountains echo – “All of us.”

On the day that I left Banff, there was new snow on the mountains. The rain clouds lifted revealing granite edges swathed in crystalline powder. Another season, another transformation that I would be absent for. These mountains are the beloved to me, in as tangible and erotic a manner as the dear man to whom I’ve been married for twenty-nine years. This isn’t an amusing metaphor. I have been taken by the mountain lover. We belong to each other. I must return.

Wild Tigress

2010-02-16T16:45:00.000-08:00

On our recent pilgrimage to India, my husband chose an adventure that was one of his holy dreams – to go on a tiger safari in Rajasthan. He wanted to tour the national park, and sway his considerable luck toward sighting the near-extinct Bengal tiger. We had twenty-four hours to rollick about in a sunset and then a dawn safari, amidst bedding down in the luxurious Aman-I-Khas resort, served up with the most gracious hospitality we have ever experienced. (I’ll write about the joy and challenges of abundance in a future post.)

On the first safari, we met our knowledgeable guide, who had spent a lifetime in the Park, and who showed us how to spot crocodiles, nilgai, and sambar by the watering hole, lompar monkeys in the oldest banyan trees in the world, leopards in the dry grasses, and peacocks and parakeets by the walls of a tenth century fort. Ranthambhore is most famous for the tiger, which lives in the dense rocky bushland flowing with streams and lakes. But it is not a land separated from history – temples of Ganesh, Shiva and Ramlalaji are here, and as they have been doing for nine centuries, people bring their devotion to these stone faces.

A limited number of jeeps and guides are allowed into the park each day, and the visitor’s route is determined by lottery. Even though one’s assigned zone can’t ever predict a better chance at a sighting, the skill with which a guide spots a paw print in the sand, or the speed by which a driver bounces the jeep up a rock outcropping can determine the visitor’s fate. I laughed uproariously when my television-raised man shouted into the wind after a wild rip over a cliffside and down into a valley, “It’s just like an episode of Daktari!” We were thrilled to experience the chase that first sunset ride, and arrived back at our camp to warm cloths and cold limeade.

The next morning, with a hot water bottle on our laps, we left in the dark with hopes to meet the tiger on our final journey. A few minutes into the trip, I looked down and saw the imprint of a pad and claws in the dirt. A roar up a mountainside, and there appeared T 17, daughter of the famous Tigress, called “Lady of the Lake,” or Machchali, who survived despite her parents being taken by poachers.

T 17 is known as the most dominant tigress of the reserve, as evidenced by her stealth saunter in any direction she feels like moving, despite the tight territorial zones of the tigers of Ranthambhore. At first we thought she had moved past the jeep, and then our guide swung the wheels down the trail, and she came over the ridge directly toward us.

“Stay quiet and do not move,” our guide said as he slowly reached for his camera. This glorious Tigressa, the largest of the species, moved within three feet of our bodies, and then sprayed a nearby tree with her urine, marking her territory. I later learned that she was pregnant, and that her cub would be taken to live in a nearby park, in a reintroduction effort. “You do not know how rare this moment,” said our guide, and I trusted his word, yet I wouldn’t understand how extraordinary such a visitation might be, especially to future generations, until we learned about the impact of the Chinese New Year.

The Year of the Tiger may usher in more devastation for the near-extinct species, whose decline continues because tigers raise significant amounts of money in China and Tibet, where it is believed that their bones and teeth can cure certain ailments. Despite claims by the Chinese government that it is discouraging such use, India’s Wildlife Protection Authority has evidence that trade is rampant. Recently, India discovered their tiger, the country’s national symbol, had dropped in population by more than 60% in five years, driven by poaching and human encroachment into tiger habitats. Today 1,400 tigers are left in the wilds of India, 3,500 internationally, compared to 100,000 one hundred years ago.

A villager in India can earn double their yearly wage by killing a tiger. In 2005, the Namdapha reserve in Arunachal Pradesh was swept clean of all 61 tigers by the Lisu tribe, who set up camp inside the reserve to hunt. The reserve continued reporting a large tiger population to its government, and to the World Wildlife Fund, whose support under Project Tiger has been one million U.S. dollars, a scandal that has been widely reported in India. Similar events happened in Sariska and Panna reserves.

Project Tiger in Ranthambhore was also in chaos just a few years ago, when villagers grazed their cattle too close to the reserve, and poachers laid siege to its animals, reducing the population to 26 tigers. These days the world is watching Ranthambore, whose camera traps, staff patrols, and savvy supervision --including tribal negotiations to offer jobs, education and housing in exchange for identifying poaching rings – has improved conservation management. Still, tribes whose own land has been encroached upon by big dams and large scale mining, and the rampant bribery amongst politicians in India makes it challenging to survive in these forest and farm dependent communities.

Because we have lived in Banff National Park, and those mountains remain our soul home, we are aware of the delicate balance between animals and humans in protected regions. Rather than become a hindrance, tourism can support conservation, through educating humans about fragile species, and about how one is expected to act in a wilderness environment, as well as support a growing economy.

India is the home of the tiger. The tiger leads all other species in its ecosystem. When it roars, the Bengal can be heard for three kilometers. In this Year of the Tiger, lets let this roar be heard around the world.

Stephen Jaffy/AFP/Getty

Wild Underbelly

2010-02-03T09:41:00.001-08:00

Photo by Vandana Rajagopalan

Upon return from India, I discover a new poison for our children

The Stain -- On the morning of the first bath of the Maha Kumbh Mela, when we had returned from the ghats just as dawn was breaking, my husband and I ran up the stairs to our hotel, deliriously laughing, shocked that we had submerged ourselves in the Ganges with the other pilgrims, and relieved that we had made it to the crowded site with relative ease. As he peeled off his wet clothing, I moved into the small bathroom and started the shower. I unzipped my long wet skirt, and as I stepped out of the folds, I saw that the bottom of my feet were scarlet-colored. “Honey?” I said, “Please come quickly.” At that moment I thought that I had cut myself, and in the dark of four in the morning, and the delight of the journey, had simply ignored the sensation.

We ran our hands over my feet, their shade a distinct blood-red, and saw no cuts. Then we looked down and saw the stain spreading across the towel. Some substance I had stepped on had stained them so completely that I was to wear this color for days. After it happened I saw several other women on the street with the same red soles, usually the women who worked in the markets, out on the streets with bare feet or light sandals, as working women often seemed to be. I wondered if the powder placed on the agna or sixth chakra by marred women and temple-goers had somehow fallen into the street and had given me my Dorothy-like ruby slippers.

The Sell -- Later, traveling over dusty roads and through small villages, we observed hundreds of small street vendors in everything from wooden stalls, to rolling carts to umbrella-covered boxes. At every stall long silvery streams of small packets were lined up like prayer flags, flying in the sun. They looked just like condom packets sold in America in bathroom stalls and pharmacies. “Do you think it’s a sign of their great family planning education?” I hopefully asked my husband. “I think they’re candies,” he answered.

It wasn’t until several days into our long rural drive, as my husband heaved against thistle bushes – oh, the ravages of food poisoning, -- that I got up the nerve to ask our quiet, polite driver what the packets were. There, littered by the side of the road were hundreds of packets, scattered from the street to the farms. I pointed at one on the ground and he said, “Gutka. Terrible. Like cigarettes. Make people sick.”

The Sickness – Back in America, I google ‘gutka’ and discover that it is the scarlet substance that stained women’s bare feet. Like chewing tobacco, gutka is a stimulant placed in the mouth, where it turns red, and then spit out after its effects have been ingested. Composed of crushed betel nut, tobacco, catechu, lime and sweet or savory flavorings, gutka is manufactured in India and exported to other countries. Costing a pittance --between 1 and 6 rupees apiece, -- even the poor can afford its high, and it is the working people who most prefer the buzz to keep them awake during long shifts.

Cheap, sweetened, and as portable as candy, the deadly substance has also found its way into the mouths of India’s children, sometimes even as far away as England’s South Asian population. The age for initiation to gutka is between eight and fourteen years. Now gutka is so popular amongst the young that doctors say it is causing an oral cancer epidemic.

Called the ‘Indian avatar of tobacco’ – even though the ingredient of tobacco is missing on some packets -- about 5 million children under 15 are addicted to gutka. India has the world's highest incidence of oral cancers, about 30%, compared to the West’s 5%, and over 2,000 deaths a day are tobacco related. A survey in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh yielded precursor of mouth cancers in 16 percent of the children.

Indians have long chewed paan, a betel leaf wrapped around a mixture of lime paste, spices, areca nut and sometimes tobacco. Convenience, in the form of shiny packaging available everywhere in India, has made gutka accessible to children and young people, for whom smoking is taboo. Sales of the deadly mix quadrupled in the 1990’s to over one billion dollars, causing Mumbai and other places to attempt a ban on the product, which the High Court later overturned on the grounds of unfair trade practice.

Gutka manufacturers say it was cigarette companies that wanted the ban on their product. Gutka marketing campaigns managed to erase the stigma tied to using tobacco by utilizing glamorous and socially acceptable situations. India's version of the Oscars is sponsored by one of the top-selling brands, and free samples are available at religious festivals, youth events, and some say even outside schools. In television commercials, gutka gives actors the power to perform superhuman feats.

With gutka’s use, tumors bulge from cheeks and jaws; there are holes where larynxes used to be. Dr. A. K. D'Cruz, the lead head-and-neck surgeon at Tata Memorial Hospital says, "most of our cancers come a decade earlier than the West." They’re often preceded by submucosal fibrosis, a hardening of the palate that can make it almost impossible to open the mouth. Gutka’s ‘glamorous’ effects.

The Switch – Enter the Marlboro Man. Philip Morris, who changed its name to Altria in a rebranding effort, is lobbying President Obama, under new FDA laws, to categorize smokeless products as less harmful than cigarettes. No contrite corporate citizen, it was reported yesterday that Altria seeks to add sweet flavorings to its smokeless products and market them in tiny packages. Smell like teen snuff?

“A series of letters that Altria submitted to the F.D.A. as part of that process argues that the government should, effectively, sign off on the notion that smokeless tobacco products are less harmful than cigarettes — and that Altria and other companies should be allowed to market them as such to consumers,” says The New York Times. Not only would indoor smoking laws be bypassed, but just as in India, smokeless ‘candy’ would become popular with children and adults for whom smoking has become stigmatized. With Altria’s control of 55% of the smokeless tobacco market, and its alignment with Kraft Foods, (not to mention its $11 million in bad debt,) it is counting on the ease of access to flavored smokeless products to improve its stagnant cigarette sales and bottom line.

In The New York Times, Christopher Growe, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, the investment bank, says smokeless could be a business with strong potential growth for Altria. “There’s an opportunity that, in the long run, the F.D.A. could treat smokeless tobacco differently than cigarettes,” he says. (1) Even without glitzy ads, sponsorships, shiny packaging and the sweetening up of the poison, in the U.S., smokeless tobacco use is growing amongst high school teens. For Altria, repackaging is only the beginning – in its appeal to the FDA, it is seeking to have its ‘American gutka’ designated as safe as smoking cessation products.

“They’re clearly trying to make the product more palatable and more appealing to a broad audience,” says James F. Pankow, a professor of chemistry and engineering at Portland State University in Oregon who was a researcher involved in preparing the journal report. (2)

That audience, public health experts say, includes children. “The flavors are designed to attract kids,” says Kenneth E. Warner, dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a founding director of its Tobacco Research Network. (3) The Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health states that use by immigrants is on the rise. “Smokeless tobacco prevention and cessation research and interventions have not yet addressed the unique sociocultural circumstances of this growing, at-risk community. The medical, dental, and public health communities need to join forces to combat this emerging threat.”

Let India’s lessons teach America. Before our children’s mouths, jaws and lives are destroyed by a deadly toxin masquerading as candy, write the President, your Senator, and please write the FDA at http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/ContactFDA/default.htm.

Material from this piece also came from The New York Times, August 13, 2002 “Sweet But Deadly Addiction Is Seizing Young In India” and February 2, 2010 “Where There’s No Smoke, Altria Hopes There’s Fire

Wild Death

2010-01-26T10:14:00.000-08:00

The Buddhist’s Kashi. The Hindu’s Holy City. The citizen’s Banaras. Varanasi: the oldest city in the world, from the first millennium BCE. Named for the confluence of the Ganges with the old rivers, Varana and Assi, now the ghats known as the beginning and the end.

At midnight we are led from the airport to our hotel, Palace on Ganges, at Assi ghat, one of the main spiritual sites of the city, the place where one bath can eliminate 100,000 births, according to Hindu belief. Patrons and pilgrims, religious thinkers of all kinds flock here still, as they have for centuries.

We wake before dawn with smoke already filling our throats in the Himalaya-inspired room, tucked into the earth near the banks of the river. My beloved selected this room with a double bed (over the river-view twin) because he draws sustenance through touch. In the night I have dreamed of a baby newly walking who beckons me to leave the room, and I wake with a moan, the baby’s childlike fierceness as real as my own skin.

Before light our guide ushers us through the weave of tuk tuk drivers and beggars, and leads us through narrow alleyways to a waiting boatman, stopping to buy two lamps, candles nestled in leaves, marigolds around the wicks. We will light these as the sun comes up, and place them in the water, making our secret wishes for our loved ones.

We enter the long, wooden boat, and we are taken further into the fog, the lights from the distant ghats a misty gold, the ring of bells and throaty chants and the dip of the oars in the water both strange and familiar. In a few moments tourists will descend upon the river, along with boatmen hawking every manner of souvenirs, as they grab the sides of boats to place brass bracelets and rough-carved figurines in front of faces. For now, as we stream toward the Shiva side of the city (the other being the ‘karn’ or bardo side) we’re greeted by a sadhu on the shore, naked except for a loin cloth and gold-rimmed glasses. He raises a stream of smoke to the sky. Upon the platform that the sadhu stands, a street dog is humping a bitch whose teats haven’t yet receded. Nearby at a table, a couple prepares the flame for morning puja, and then with a stick broom, sweeps the dogs from their perch, but the pack barks and growls, their tantric practice a different sort.

Less than a hundred steps away a body is burning in a funeral pyre and the mourners move through the smoke -- talking, touching, singing. We find it difficult to offer them their privacy, for it is so unusual to witness the death of the body in this direct and oddly gentle manner. I think of my father cremated sixteen months ago, and I wonder what it would have been like to watch his body burn, to smell his flesh in the flames, to stand watch until the bones could be collected and taken to the Mother River.

When we’re back in the boat, rowing toward Manikarnika, the ghat that cremates 270 people each day, our guide tells us that some souls are considered so pure they are taken to the water directly – pregnant women, children, sadhus, and those who have died through snake bite, the mark of Lord Shiva. He looks in my eyes to ensure that I understand – a body or a limb can float by if the fishes haven’t consumed it completely.

On the excruciating twenty-two hour train trip to Varanasi (another story entirely) we have read the extraordinary contemporary novelist Geoff Dyer’s, “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” and so we are somewhat prepared for the insanity of the driving conditions, the seeming chaos of the alleys, the ever presence of death through all the senses. Still, we do not know the ferocity of Varanasi’s grip, we are not aware of what is ingested with the taste of ashes. We are not familiar with the devotion that will cause pilgrims to run to 98 temples (56 of Ganesha!) within twenty-four hours, to run from the first ghat to the Assi ghat, to run in the knowing that the soul is being released from 8.4 million rebirths (the math counts layers of atmosphere multiplied by a ghat’s particular power.)

When we leave our boatman and head toward the old city, we’re greeted by masala merchants, bony cows, armed soldiers. Near the Hindu Golden temple, is a Muslim mosque, and since this is a site of violence, before we enter we must deposit everything in a keyed locker, and then be searched. A woman soldier reaches under my bra, feels along my pubis. Later, I ask the guide if there have been terrorist threats in the news. “This is the way we do things since 9-11,” he says, “If they can do that to your people, what can they do to us?”

I don’t have time to follow his thought because we are soon pressed against the stone wall, chanting in the distance becoming louder as men move toward the Mother Ganga. “Ram nom seta he,” the voices chant, and I ask what these words mean.

“The name of God is the last truth,” our guide speaks.

Then the men are beside us, holding a body on a palanquin, a dead body covered in a gold cloth, with gold ribbons tied around the head and feet. After the mourners pass, an old man with a plastic box of cards thrusts a picture in front of my face. “Want memory card?” he asks, and I shake my head, a habit already, to decline the offering of things placed in front of us at every moment we are in the street.

“Want memory card? Want memory card? Want memory card? Want memory card?” he says over and over, his chant cutting into my consciousness. Every cell of my body is a memory card, a body whose remembering I can scarcely realize at times, for whose is this body, remembering? This body is the vehicle, the Varana and the Assi, my self, and yet not mine at all.

Wild Mother

2010-01-15T05:07:00.000-08:00

Photos by BBC

On the day before we are to take the bath at the Kumbh Mela, we discover that the town’s security situation has changed. Our guide, Mr. Parikshit Joshi drives us around the site so we can see what we are in for. The main ghat, Har Ki Pauri, will be inundated with sadhus and temple leaders, who bring their devotees by the thousands. We will be hiking toward Ashti Parvath ghat, directly south and across the Ganges River from where the sadhus will immerse themselves before dawn the morning of January 14th, the first bath of the months-long festival. Because of the need for high security in the region, 20,000 Indian military, state police, and the RAF, a rapid action force, has been brought in to deal with suppressing potential riots and terrorist threats. We soon learn that plans may change hour to hour, and that we will not know until the day of events what our approach to the site might be.

Mr. Joshi points to the long, fenced, narrow bridges and tells me that if the procession became too crowded they herd people onto the bridges and then lock the gates, sometimes for hours, until the bathers at the ghats move toward their homes and tents. My husband takes my hand. I have been claustrophobic for years. I avoid elevators, crowds and locked rooms. I close my eyes and listen for an inner voice I have learned to trust. Could I overcome my fear if this situation emerges? I look to the man sitting next to me, who I have been loving for three decades. Something beyond our intellectual understanding has brought us to the Khumbh Mela, and we want to complete the ritual, to understand something about why we have come. “Think you can do it?” my husband asks, and I nod, feeling safe knowing that neither of these men would allow us into a foolhardy situation. The holy bath calls to me beyond my fears.

Life sometimes sounds nonsensical when lived by instinct, those moments before too many thoughts arise. First impulse is the way we had children, and chose homes and healed cancer. As I come into the wisdom of an (ahem) older woman, I want more body-centered instinct and less mental chatter. I realize my inspirations are no Jesus on a naan, however, I consistently find direction from what arises in my imagination, and sometimes just by leaning into things. First impulse tells us to get to the Kumbh Mela at the beginning. Thus, even though we’d had rather a full day of Shakti Peethas and Shri Swaminarayan, we ask to leave the hotel at four in the morning, to be at the ghats when the sadhus are in attendance.

Pilgrims walk here for many days, often families carry one shared bag, wearing bare feet, or worn sandals. The weather is unseasonably cold in Haridwar, 4 degrees C at night, and so this is not an easy journey. The families save resources so they might come for a bath in their beloved Mother Ganga.

In the hours before dawn, we walk through the dark. Past the checkpoints no vehicles or bicycles are allowed, only those travelers on foot, and we walk down alleys so dark I cannot see the ground. People emerge from alleys and buildings, people come from everywhere, chanting, moving quickly in the blackness, no lamps or lanterns. Although I had prepared myself for what it might be like to be noticed as westerners -- we had a few days of acclimating to being the new ones in town -- I have no idea of the degree to which those effects are amplified at the Kumbh Mela. According to our guide, people coming from rural areas may have seen a western person in the media, and some have not yet seen one up close. And it is mostly the locals who have witnessed westerners bathe in the Ganga.

As we take off our jackets and Richard removes his pants and shirt, I become aware of the people around us, watching us while they make their own preparations. I walk down the steps into the freezing river just as I see my husband’s body fall below the churning waters. He holds onto the iron rail to keep his torso still for the current is strong. I lift my hands into the Mother Ganga and pour the stream over my head, my skirt flowing around me like a blood-red pool in the steel grey water. A glowing statue in the distance lights the heads of other bathers -- falling, rising, jumping, bowing, shivering, stilling.

I splash a river salutation. In my mind: Ganges! Ganges! as the loudspeaker blares instructions in Hindi. Over my body is flowing the ashes of the dead. Where we are standing in the River is the place of last night's puja, the ceremony we witnessed, with fire and flowers, and chanted by a son and a priest as they performed the last rites. I am swimming through souls. Something deep inside realizes a belonging I have never registered, like what Marabai has written:
“I came for the sake of love-devotion;
seeing the world, I wept.”

Before we leave the ghats, I ask for a moment to offer my gratitude at the place we took our bath, and as I bow and lift the water to my head, my lips, my heart, I become aware that a group watches my movements. My hair and skirt is wet from the dip an hour earlier, and my feet are bright red from the cold, and around my shoulders I clench a saffron shawl for warmth. I am aware of an elder man to my left, watching as I pray, and as I turn to follow my men back down the road we arrived upon, this old one meets my eyes and we nod to each other. What passes between us is something beyond language and culture. This poem of India: a Mother river, a long pilgrimage, a seeing in the dark.

Wild Pilgrimage

2010-01-08T23:04:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow morning I board a plane for Mother India. The notion of traveling to this exotic country began ten years ago when my Zen master, Shifu, also known as Dr. Kim Han Suk, suggested that India was one of those places I could clear my familial karma. Not just my own lifetime, but those of my ancestors and children, and perhaps even their children. Damn that proclamation. In classic student fashion, I rebelled, argued, dismantled (all inside my own mind,) knowing that I had received wisdom in the form of what my friends, the Dakini Sisters, called The Big Hit. Like the Zen stick that could come down upon our shoulders when we slumped in meditation, The Big Hit was a way Shifu could shred my psychic comfort by making me rethink everything I think I know about who I am.

An eldest child who was invested in being a good student, loving mother and conscious citizen, while underneath simmered that wild girl, I spent the last decade resenting the possibility that I could be responsible for others, all while nursing my husband through a rare cancer, and going to my father’s bedside after his brain tumor, and helping my mother, son and myself through our family disease. All experiences that led me to ask – Who is it that needs healing? I no longer believed that karma had created my family’s fate – karma was one more concept, one more identity that I would cling to. Still, I was afraid. Would I lose my mind in India? And would I want to live in that emptiness?

It wasn’t until one of the Dakini Sisters said, “Well, aside from all that rebelling, what if you went to India to see what was there?” that I allowed the place to lure me. A year later, when we received a financial reward, we thought about the lands we could travel to celebrate: Spain, Italy, Ireland and Wales all captivated. Instead, when my beloved asked me where I wanted to be for my fiftieth birthday, my eyes teared, because I knew I was compelled to go to the mythical land of Kali and Lakshmi and Saraswati. A few Google searches later, we discovered that the world’s largest act of faith, the Kumbha Mela, was happening within two days of my birthday, and then a few moments later, that we couldn’t find any compelling reason to stop ourselves from attending this magnificent event.

The Kumbha Mela will begin this week, in Haridwar, where the river Ganga enters the plains from Himalayas. Organized in the holy cities of Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik, the Kumbh Mela (Festival of the Pot of Nectar) features the largest human gathering in the world. We’ve heard estimates of eighty million people, with half that number present at its pinnacle. The religious festival invites devotees, sadhus, rishiks, yogis and tourists from almost every corner of the world. We will be present for the opening baths or snans, January 14th and 15th, the latter a solar eclipse.

Hindus believe that the waters of the Ganges turn into nectar on the auspicious occasion of Kumbh Mela. And that a holy dip in the divine waters of Ganga eliminates all the evil and past sins from an individual's life. Astrologers believe that bathing at Har ki Pauri ghat during the festival purifies the inner-self of an individual. I don’t know if any of those things are true. Self realization seems possible in any moment. Yet what is compelling for me is the chance to become a pilgrim, to be in the sensation of the heightened moment, to be embodied by the strange journey, to be unafraid of this ‘I’ dissolving, to give up thinking and instead experience being thought. The Big Hit reverberates still.

You can follow our journey to Delhi, Haridwar, Varanasi, and in Rajhasthan -- Jaipur, Shahpura Bagh, Ranthambore, Udaipur – then on to Kovalam beach in Kerala via facebook and http://workingwild.blogspot.com (as long as I can get wireless where we are roaming.)

Wild Relating

2010-01-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

Months after our basement was beautifully renovated by a group of wild craftsmen, we’re packed to the rafters with our two adult children, their beaus, and our family from Atlanta and their two magical children.

This is why we created this beautiful space – to share guest rooms and double showers and comfy sofas, to be together. We’re grateful to have little ones to bathe and feed and snuggle with again, and the company of newness in each other too, for we must introduce ourselves every time we visit – who are you now?

What I like about the way we relate in our family is the ability to tell the truth, our personal truths. I like where truths intersect, where the possibility of finding each other can happen. And too, I am beginning to like where my world can be upended in discovery of some aspect of life from another’s point of view. I don’t always enjoy the chaos – like when I screamed at my son in anger the other day over a sarcastic joke he made, because I had a dirty house and unwashed hair with guests arriving in ten minutes. Still, later, when I come to my senses, I will enjoy how a three year old scarfing my homemade divinity puts the prospect of domestic perfection in perspective; I will appreciate how my children feel free enough to describe their discomfort with my anger; I will like how my beloveds can give me spacious silence till I simmer down; I will investigate how an afternoon at the park makes me willing to see that I am fearful of not having it all together, a condition that will surely run nonstop when we arrive in India in a week.

The end of the renovation project happened with perfect timing, though it didn’t seem so when Joel Hester, an amazing welding artist lost all of his tools and materials when they were stolen from his truck shortly after we contracted him. Joel lives in Texas, and makes beautifully welded furniture from recycled cars. Our bathroom vanity is the roof of a Ford Fairlane, which has been molded, buffed and shined, so it now holds a laboratory style sink, curvy wall faucet and an ecohouse pressed paper counter.

I knew Joel’s work would be a great industrial-looking counterpoint to a rainforest marble that encases the double shower, and his work didn’t disappoint.

Strong, textured and masculine, the unconventional vanity balances the tree trunk and branch shapes spiraling up the bathroom walls.

Though we thought the theft would delay the project when it happened, there were other setbacks that caused delays, and the vanity arrived the same week that we were ready for it to be placed. The final decorating touches were completed in September, just in time for a series of parties leading right up to the holidays.

On the last day on the job, our contractor Michael Aaland relayed what had caused much of the delays on our job. The team had lost their main plumbing man when he committed suicide one week into our work, over a relationship issue in his private life. The contractors did not choose to tell us because they were worried that it would have affected our obvious joy in the renovation. I am not sure this is true. Losses, like anger and chaos, are as much a part of our lives as the beauty these wonderful men have created on our behalf. Though we didn't know this man, our hearts went out to every person on the team who worked here, in silence, through the loss of a beloved friend.

One of my teachers, Byron Katie, says “To exclude anything that appears in your universe is not love. Love joins with everything. It doesn’t exclude the monster. It doesn’t avoid the nightmare—it looks forward to it, because, like it or not, it may happen, if only in your mind.” In this blog, as we move into the days ahead, I want to capture our selves altered by culture, circumstances and mistakes, not excluding the nightmare, only love; I want to relate with full-on monster intact love.

Wild Build Part Deux

2009-09-28T12:50:00.000-07:00

Signs of autumn around here include pie pumpkins overflowing a basket, and blankets lying on chairs, and a pantry full of sauces, relishes, chutneys and jams. And sadly, the guys I have spent my summer hanging out with showing up just once or twice a week, while our construction project finishes in a stall of delayed supplies and missing vendors.

The most wonderful and the most challenging aspect of my job, writing, is the silence of the room. All summer, while our dream room was being built (see The Wild Build below) I had the company of the dudes -- the Greatest Build Boys Ever.

Michael Aaland of JB Mac (above) was our contractor, who we chose because we trusted him to guide The Bear and I. We had goofed around with enough home improvement fiascoes to know that we were dangerous when armed with Black or Decker. And this wasn't just about finding competance in a contractor -- it was knowing we could count on someone to give us the facts and to handle all the ups and downs of a project without freaking out. Don't let his babyface fool you -- he can fire a crew (bye-bye plumbers) while explaining to the furnace guys that ducting is not in fact the focal point of a design. Props to Michael for merely looking amused by my quirky choices, and in the midst of chaos, for always acting chill (at least to the clients.) People quibble over the additional costs of a contractor, but it saved us a lot of money to have Michael's know-how and daily check-ins keeping details in line, details that I didn't have a clue needed managing.

We thought the project would be wrapped up in six weeks. It lasted four months. In that time, the main guy on the build, Art, became a father, and other craftsmen got sick and one had parents in distress and one had his tools stolen and some lost their lovers.

That's Art, when he was still getting sleep.
One of the best surprises about this project was discovering that men talk about their lives. To each other. Loudly. This is like manna from manland for a female writer. All it took was a "She did what?" and I was immersed for the afternoon. It was Days of Our Lives meets This Old House. DIY guys emote! And not just about the Seahawks either. I liked discovering they were real people, real men, with fears and foibles and fractures, and that in the middle of this small thing we were choosing to create together, we got to know each other's humanity.

Francesco, making art with concrete

Another great surprise was discovering what a gift it is to have people help you create something that barely exists inside your mind. From my experiences building museum exhibits and IMAX Theatres, and The Bear's experiences making physical therapy clinics, we knew that collaborating can be fun, and it is an entirely new phenomenon to have the foundation of your own home jacked up, re-shaped, and made beautiful in ways you didn't know were possible, because these men loved to make it happen. When friends found out that our project was delayed yet again (plumbing problems persisted throughout), they asked about the hassle, wondering if we were annoyed. Even Michael A had tried to warn us about the realities of a construction project before we began -- "It gets messy and dirty and noisy," he said, looking at our well-ordered home. And I liked this new chaos -- the loss of a garden to a staging site, the appliances that stood in the back yard like my own hillbilly heaven, the slams and sports scores that chortled through vents during my women's writing groups -- it was a reminder that something big was happening. Far from annoyed, we felt incredibly grateful that we were able to renovate this little dream space at a time that people were losing jobs and living on less.

Finally, one of the biggest surprises was the effect of this project upon my creativity. Because I'd spent so much time around people who know their own style, who seem to flawlessly express in their homes and attire and image, I was rather tentative about what I could bring to a home design. Architect Mike LaFon said he'd offer his expertise on any finicky detail (and he definitely nudged me in certain directions, bless him) and still, whether it concerns fixtures or color or lighting, there are a gazillion choices out there, waiting to deter your budget and your vision from reality. The thing was, I didn't have a vision. One choice led to the next, which helped us make the next decision. I thought the basement might be an inspired mish-mash, like the Clampetts on psychedelics, until we found The Tile. Marble, rainforest green with veins of ochre and grey, The Tile makes our bathroom the oasis we had imagined, and became the springboard off which we picked wall colors and lighting and cabinets and even had a custom vanity designed out of a car (see the next blog -- Wild Build Finale -- for more.)

The confidence we developed in making this one choice helped us plant our treasures --my grandmother's jewelry, and rocks collected on mountains and gifts from children -- in concrete, and have the floor stained in a gorgeous multi-hued forest. I was reminded that I make stories like this, one choice at a time, not requiring anything more than the trust of the day. And that all of life has become this too -- we make food and love and family without holding tightly to how it might end, or sometimes even if it will end well. One choice at a time, life is gracious, and holds both the abandon and the wholeness of creative collaboration.

The Wild Build (or Men, Men, Men, Men)

2009-08-26T12:06:00.000-07:00

The Wild Build started with a simple intention my guy and I set three years ago – to create a sanctuary in our basement for our friends and family. In January of this year the cash arrived, and by the spring we were designing the space on long walks at Green Lake, near our home.

Truth told, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to put down more roots. I’m a gypsy. An American who grew up in Canada, I naturally seek transformation through adventure and pilgrimage. We moved eight times during the raising of our children and I would have traveled more if I could have gotten away with asking my family to live out of boxes.

However, I am married to a bear masquerading as a man. Bear snarfs berries and heavyfoots it to his bed at the end of a long day and heaves his long furry arm over my torso and holds me in his thick paw. Bear’s idea of the perfect date is my Pasta Bolognese, a crackling fire and some serious smooching. To choose investing in our home meant imagining snuggling with Bear in the Man Cave he snorted over in his dreams, instead of the wanderlusty adventure that had me in its grip. Maybe I could be rooted for a few months (years?) while I poured over travel blogs, and fashioned the next quest.

The basement is 800 square feet of reclaimed storage bin and laundry pile. The crap in there included my Brownie pins and his 1979 skis and every drawing our (now adult) children ever crayoned, about 738,965 of them, stacked in plastic bins. I tossed ten years of journals. He gave away a giant electric letter ‘R’ a buddy found while dumpster diving. We scanned and tossed and donated stuff we had theretofore been carting around three countries, claiming as sacrosanct. The rejuvenation had begun.

The first guy on the scene was the architect Mike LaFon, who lives down our beautiful street

with his beautiful family that includes Jack, a kid so calmly self-contained that I cannot take my eyes off him, in that embarrassing manner of a woman completely charmed. A few weeks ago, at the Block Party for our amazing neighborhood, I moved his mother aside so I could get a better view of Jack straggling a Hot Wheels trike over the pavement. See what I mean?

I won’t say I hired Mike because of Jack, but it certainly didn’t hurt the deal that I got to check in on the hipster kid in the guise of design meetings that went like this: Mike -- “So if we alter the stairs we can get more headroom for the six foot four Bear you married.”
Me – “Will Jack be able to come over and watch cartoons when the stairs are done?”
Mike – “Uh, sure.”

Let me stop right here and say that when you decide to build something big, you’re going to be working with guys. And when you’re working with guys, the answer is pretty much always, “Sure.” It might be, “Sure, and we’ll need to rebuild the foundation and that will cost you half a million dollars,” but there is always this very guy-like positivity, a gallantry if you will, that is all about getting the damn job done.

My friends, when you’re building, you’re really learning about Men. Menfolks, the masculine, brothers, blokes, buddies, chaps, boys, Storm Troopers. I'm on the yang side myself; my femininity does not include sufficient quantities of the woman ju-ju necessary for shopping, sewing, design, hair style or where-the-dessert-spoon-goes. I’ve always liked hanging out with guys, starting with bartending for my dad’s baseball team, a job I was put to fresh out of grade school. There’s a directness and a sweaty savoir fair that goes with the dudes. Sure, there may be players, crooks, and weirdos, but in the male form, they usually come with the swagger that forecasts their game. The male is whiskey on the rocks and a decent steak. And when you’re under construction, it’s maximum men, all the time.

Mike, father of Jack (and the wild Zora), took our big dirty rectangle, and designed a space to maximize every square inch – actually he designed three spaces and let us choose, and a girl does love options, so he had me at ‘double shower.’ We selected a layout that had a film viewing room (okay so it’s a Man Cave, but let me have my moment); a guest room; a tucked away storage room; a suave laundry room with real counters and cabinets (ooh); and a bathroom with space for the Bear and me [ahhh].

Mike walked us through all the nitpicky choices I’d never consider on my own – for example, how to work the ducting into the ceiling so the Bear didn’t have to crouch along the floor while Vitale or McEnroe crooned their ballsy operas on the Big Screen HD LCD Orgasmo Escapetron with Five Channel Surround Sound Acoustibatory Satisfaction, High Performance Guaranteed. The Bear started planning a line of lounge wear with clip-on channel changers to keep the TV technology from remotards like myself, and I began dragging him to tile stores. We were aglow in our post child-rearing, pre hard-of-hearing bliss. The Architect Extraordinaire even helped me figure out how to interview contractors, so I could hire the second half of the Michael team, or (look the other way Michael A,) Fair Beefcake Michael, as my women friends called him.

In the Wild Build Part Deux, we cover how to properly handle the moment when your contractor approaches you, in your coffee-stained robe and your face wearing yesterday’s grime and asks, “What shall we build for you today, M’lady?” Where I live, there's a quixotic renovation with one less virtuous maiden requiring attention.

Wild Encouragement

2009-08-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

Art by Teesha Moore

As part of my Wild Work, I pay attention to synchronicities. Words assert themselves into my life and tend to lead somewhere. In the past week, I’ve heard several people discuss concerns with ‘writer’s block.’ Last night, in my new writing group, we talked about the ways we have been shut down by criticism and judgments, how someone’s ideas for our work have cost us our work.

I had writer’s block for years. Reading through a decade of my journal writing recently, I was reminded about how long it took me to develop the confidence to begin. During this time, my friend, the photographer Carole Harmon, said, “When you have something to say, then you will write.” This was the truth, and over those years, I learned that my voice was essential, worthy and capable.

I no longer believe in writer’s block. In my mind, there’s no such thing as a ‘block’ in the sense of experiencing an obstacle that prevents me from my writing. Living with our home in construction all summer, (see my next blog The Wild Build) I have been watching how the craftsmen make progress one ‘block’ at a time. When they make mistakes, they don’t abandon their project. They step back, refocus, call for help, try something new. The builders are practiced in using a variety of strategies to manifest the architect’s drawings. With artists and entrepreneurs, the lack of a plan can result in an uncomfortable standstill, when we really want a wildly creative life.

First, question the ‘blocked’ thinking. The antonym for ‘block’ is ‘encourage,’ to give hope, confidence or courage. There’s only one person who can offer you the courage to write, and that’s you. And you build the courage by seeing things clearly, or as Byron Katie might say, by noticing that reality is kind. Your first drafts may be very far from where you end up. Annie Dillard says, “original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen.” So start already.

This week, as I tossed out most of my journal pages, (bye-bye self concepts!) I was made aware that getting good at a craft is a process. The current state of my writing is what I’ve got, and there is no perfection other than this. Even my rejections from publications have been ideal because my work clearly wasn’t ready or right for a particular magazine. Encouragement isn’t a false buoying up of one’s fragile artistic sensibilities; encouragement is seeing things as they are, including our very flawed (yet perfect!) writer selves, and choosing to create anyway.

Second, surround yourself with allies. Confidence comes from aligning ourselves with others whose brilliance is clear. For the past few years I’ve taken classes from Priscilla Long, Waverly Fitzgerald, Pilar Alessandra and Warren Etheredge -- people who are masters in knowing how to bring the writer to self knowledge and adept craftsmanship. Apprentice yourself to someone whose process you trust. Whether they’re a great writer is less important than their ability to help you understand character, voice, structure, setting, point of view, themes and so on.

I belong to three writer’s groups. In each of them, I write, and I am required to produce material for critique and to edit every other member’s work. Just like twelve step programs and weight loss buddies, other writers and the structure of the group keeps us accountable.

Stories are also allies. Read works that make your heart sing and your mouth fall open and your eyes read the same sentence six times with a sigh. One year I set a goal to read 52 books, and achieving it changed my limited view of myself. Priscilla Long has her students study stories by classic and contemporary authors and asks us to discuss what makes each a masterwork. Pick up a book, discover for yourself -- what makes a great sentence sing?

Third, just write. Write thirty minutes a day. Or write five pages a day. Or write 1000 words a day. Consistently write. Take your journal to the café and write what you see. Steal dialogue from the people in the park. Wax poetic on the story that eludes you. From that rambling, you will mine your future material and discover your voice and most importantly, learn to trust that this happy meandering is leading you somewhere.

Wild Taste

2009-05-19T07:53:00.001-07:00

An excerpt from this essay, "Good Enough To Wait" can be found in Living in Season.

Preserving food is the extended foreplay of the gustatory world. Especially for city-dwellers, it revives a sense of connection with wild nature, and rejuvenates senses dormant from over-reliance on the fast and the cheap. If drive-thru is the dining equivalent of the quickie, preserving fresh, seasonal produce for later supping is tantric bliss.
The last week of summer I drove out to the local farm and purchased boxes of coral peaches, firm pickling cucumbers, banana and pasilla and sweet Anaheim peppers, ripe red and fleshy green tomatoes and plump blackberries. It didn’t look like promiscuity until the saleswoman sized me up and down behind the mountain of produce stacked in eight large boxes. “Well, you’re sure going to have your work cut out for you,” she snarked. And the old man in line in front of me offered a wide grin, as if he knew what I would be up to, and said, in a wistful tone: “Me and the missus used to put up. Oh, I miss it so.”
By the time I unloaded the car and began washing the long, nubby cuke, I realized I was going to be days in this kitchen – days immersed in the sweet perfume of fervid juice and musky field; days with my fingers in slippery seeds, days nudging the ruby pit from its fleshy center. I filled the sink with cool water and stripped to my bare feet, and brought a berry to my lips, tracking its nib with my tongue before biting into its succulent drupelets.
*
Canning, freezing, drying, curing, fermenting, pickling, jam and jelly making – preserving holds the genius of our earliest people. Preserving developed between 5500 and 3500 BC, creating villages, and vessels, and livestock, perhaps even the very urge to civilize in the way we experience it today. (Though it seems strange to this acculturated cook, one of the ways historians categorize societies as being ‘civilized’ is when the primary purpose of food gathering, preparation and storing has been diverted to allow the pursuit of other, more ‘complex’ activities, such as war, religion, bureaucracy.) Homo sapiens found he could manage his stock, and digest proteins better when food went over fire, and intentional cookery followed, leading to food as a social engagement, as taboo arbiter, as identity-maker. What we keep can communicate our sense of frugal sparseness or our abundant beguilement: the heirloom we shelve can be our strained broth or our rose-drenched honey. We preserve what we wish to have known as the common good.
*
The world’s greatest preserved city, Pompeii, (smoked, as it were, by layers of volcanic ash) put up all manner of food, especially in the town’s restaurants that served such salt-preserved brews as garum, a sauce made by fermenting fish entrails, a flavor whose closest modern equivalent would be Thailand’s nam pla. (In another paean to eating out, Pompeii also featured one of the world’s earliest monuments to cunnilingus in a famous fresco. While phallus-centered Romans found use for many household objects shaped like the male member, the town was open to all manner of sensual influences. One wonders what it would have been like to live and dine constantly in the midst of erotic art.)
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Like discovering lips and tongue can travel, drying food was quite likely a happy accident. Fire made food easier to trek, as well as store over the lean season, which soon changed the tribe. It allowed people to settle in one place, gather their resources, plan their next adventure, maybe even provided time for other desires. Whether preserving first occurred by hanging meat over a fire or leaving some fruit to dry in the sun, it opened the imaginative impulse toward adventure. The Sumerians were the first to combine drying and smoking, and the South Americans, American Indians, Celts of Armorica and the nomads of Asia each had a favorite method of drying and reducing meat so it could be reconstituted on the trail. Still, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century, and the discovery of sterilization by Nicholas Appert (Americans deemed his process ‘appertizing’) that the use of heat guaranteed food safety. At the time of Napoleon’s conquering, and British scurvy, the press proclaimed the brewer-inventor had “found a way to fix the seasons; at his establishment spring, summer and autumn live in bottles…”(1) Some say historically, a full pantry preceded sexual adventures because, from an evolutionary perspective, survival had been assured, before there was time for play. Now we’re more likely to preserve to escape the mundane. We want concoctions that happily tempt the tongue, and an environment that allows us to be tempted by food and each other.
*
Gastronomy, being lingual, and sometimes seductive, as M.F.K. Fisher knew, pleasures “one who with cunning and deliberation prepares a meal which will draw another person to her”, (2) and the one seduced by the beauty of the feast is also wooed by the appearance of abundance. Such “wanton women” and courtesans have “studied the appetites of their prey” (3) and can “placate his earlier inhibitions and flatter his later ones” (4) both in acquired taste and carnal performance, one could assume. And there is a breed of lover for whom a full pantry is like having a lustful bedmate: pickles and relishes and chutneys and sauces and vinegars and oils and confit and curds and ketchups and jams and marmalades and mincemeats and mustards and butters and leathers and patés and cured hams and smoked fish and peppered salamis and herbed cheeses and sugared fruit and all manner of dried fruits and canned vegetables make a horny cornucopia. Even a simple split biscuit loaded with berry preserves brought to the morning bed can tantalize the beloved in a manner that state fairs and 4H clubs have little in common with. And in our desire to please, we expose the body to the rigors of the preparation – we sweat and strain, we create the fleur de sel that those we live with grow to know as our scent.
*
It’s possible that salt was the first additive used as a method to preserve food. Used by ancient communities close to the sea, salt preserves by inhibiting toxin-producing bacteria, making it essential for forms of flesh – meat, fish and the human body, as for mummifying. Those who wielded the salt wielded the power, as the Emperor Claudius knew when he strolled into the senate one day asking if man could live without salt meat. Before it was the Eternal City, Rome was a staging post where local marketers exchanged their goods for precious salt. Leaders and merchants preserved their own futures along the Via Salaria, the salt road; when unforeseen circumstances meant there was little access to fresh food, salt could define a government’s rule.
Indeed, whoever holds the keys to the pantry holds the power. None knew this better that Mahatma Gandhi, who emerged from his six-year prison confinement to protest the exclusive British licensing of Indian sea salt. When he marched from the ashram to the beach at Dandi, he placed salt crystals evaporated by the sea into his small palm, enacting a potent ritual that defied the authorities in one simple act. Indians followed, breaking the law en masse, literally assuming worth of one’s salt, until the Brits relented and asked Gandhi to represent his Indian Congress Party at the 1931 leadership conference.
*
At Indian rituals, Roman feasts, Athenian festivals, Chinese banquets, Middle Eastern merry-making, and Egyptian sacraments all manner of seeds, plants and flowers were preserved with sugar. After the fourteenth century, the master confectioners of Paris made their fortunes selling to the aristocracy, and since gifts of preserves were considered luxurious, these sugared treats became a regular expense of anyone who had a role with the law. (Used as chamber spices for ‘dispelling wind and encouraging the seed’ these sweets, often called sweetmeats, were at least poetically-perfect: a candy by any other name would surely not have prefaced lovemaking.) Sugar was brought to the New World after Columbus’ affair with Canary Island’s Governor, one Beatrice de Bobadilla, who sent him from their month-long tryst with cuttings of sugar cane. From that sweet union, came America’s love affair with all things candied. Jams, jellies, syrups, sugared fruits, sugar-wine (rum) – sugar was once an international currency, with labor rewarded in casks of syrup, and millions paid for its becoming a standard with their very lives, including creating a caste of slaves from Africa who would do the back-breaking work of sweetening up the colonist’s diet, and his pockets. Even though we now have more sugar than we know what to do with, we continue a romance with the saporous temptress: we call our beloveds ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ and ask them to give us some ‘sugar’ when we wish to be kissed. “It must be jelly,” says the blues singer, “Cuz jam don’t shake like that.” We cut into the virginal white cake after our nuptials, in a ritual symbolic of intercourse and of promises for a sweet future. Our nursery food – puddings, custards, purees – become, like breasts, a reminder of the comfort we once had at our mother’s side. At the Smell and Taste Research Foundation, pumpkin pie was the scent most likely to stimulate blood flow to the penis (offering another potential meaning of the Thanksgiving spread.)
*
Because aroma can have compelling aphrodisiac aspects, spices have long been a food served at the altars of the gods and offered up to lovers. We place basil in our marinara sauce because it is a fine compliment, and perhaps, because it stimulates fertility and the sex drive. Chili peppers spice up our pickles and chutneys and when eaten, they simulate the physiological responses – heartbeat, sweating, heat -- of having sex. It is said that Tibetan monks were not allowed to have eaten garlic before entering the monastery – the passion of this bulb (and its ability to increase circulation) being reputed. Though there are Chinese herbals dating 5,000 years old, the Egyptians date the first aromatics, at 2800 BC, which was likely a papyri recipe indicating the use of mint, juniper, frankincense or myrrh. Cinnamon, used widely in preserves today, was utilized “lavishly” by Indians, and cinnamon was also valued by the Greeks and Romans as “a medicine, cordial and aphrodisiac...To the Taoists it was the food of the immortals, a kind of ambrosia.” (5) Ginger, the ambrosia of chutney-makers, was said to provide African men “insurance for their old age by siring a great many children.” (6) Spices of all kinds were mixed with wax and worn as perfumes, or pinned onto the clothing or hair, to entice the suitor. Before the commercial scents of lotions, oils and creams masked our body’s sexy aromas, Aphrodite’s spices complimented our natural funky state, generating heat on the skin, lips, fingers, and providing warmth to our insides. Scent in our food is so titillating that the Puritans “barred spices from their tables on their belief that their use ‘excited passion’.” (7) Preserves cooked with bold spices -- chutneys, harrief, masalas -- like the dominatrix of the world, assume the ascendant, assertive role on the plate. The seal is lifted from the jar and we are entered, first by means of this fierce and risqué fragrance, and then through the reawakening of the tongue and our organs of desire. We are transformed by what we have saved.
*
There is no savings in preserving food at home. The costs of labor and equipment and of what will break or go rotten through experimentation is high compared to what we can stroll down to the store and buy for a dollar or two from Smuckers or Kraft or Heinz. Still, there is a part of our relationship to food we are buying back when we agree to follow the transformation from field to table. In grocery shopping there isn’t the kind of bond to the elements, the land, the season, the home, the kitchen; there isn’t the connection to one’s memory, or history or intention; there isn’t seasoning or sensuality or seductive surprise that can come from becoming present to food as it changes, or even likelier, as we are changed by its presence in our midst.
*
This is how it happens in our home – we weave food preparation with the events of the day, with the weather, with the quiet and the conversation, watching movements and mistakes as they assert themselves, upon us and upon our food, asking for our attention. This is how dried lavender gets shaken into the sugar canister for lavender-scented sugar; this is how the lavender buds get dumped into the peach jam, when the sifter is forgotten; this is how it gets stirred in with a jam-coated spoon; this is how it drips onto my breasts when I lean over to sample it; this is how my lover, walking by, missing no entreaty, turns me around and licks it from my flesh; this is how the fire leaps into me and my peaches while we’re dancing and kissing above the flame; this is perhaps what you also taste when I make you toast from fresh bread and chunky fruit and violet sprigs of calming flower. We are preserving passion, which is, I believe, able to be ingested as nourishment, as earth-muse, and for us, as remembrance of a moment’s lovemaking.
*
As Proust knew, food is our strongest form of remembrance – we can be transported to our childhood or to a lover or to another land through scent and taste. What the home cook preserves not only reveals how she feeds her family, but what she desires to hold onto, what she values in method, in memory and in meals. Show me a cook with a mouth set in a grimace, and I will show you fodder for heartburn. It is the heartfelt connection to, say, a ripe tomato, how it burnishes plump under the hot sun, how it is splattered with droplets on a summer morning, how it gives, gently, when it is taken from the vine that can provide the inspiration for a recipe. We preserve because “…a taste of a coming season in the wind can sweep your whole life past you, rich in portent.” (8)
We preserve in a way so we can open up that jar and know what it was we felt on that day, the qualities of the food, the way the house smelled, the way our lover leaned against us as we stirred the pot. We preserve food in the same way we engage in other arts – it is an impulse that stirs us, that compels us. In these the domestic arts, we long to make meaning from small acts. Wendell Berry, farmer and writer, reminds us we preserve to explore that rewarding bond – “from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing, as the so-called “fine arts”. To learn them is, I believe, the work that is our profoundest calling.” (9)
*
We seek to preserve food with the same integrity in which we preserve our relationship with the land. The land is humus for apples and ancestors. We cannot hold dear our harvest without regard for the terra firma -- the same ground receives our forebears and feeds our children. For those committed to such movements as Slow Food, our very urge to eat is being compromised by ignorance of the connection between harmful food production and perilous consumption systems, the recent deaths from spinach being a tragedy likely to reoccur until the costs of not eating locally are reckoned. We preserve both food and land for the common good, and when we are disconnected from the locality of the harvest, we cannot trace disease, and we cannot receive our food in a nourishing way. (Have you ever been filled up by or understood the food origins of a Twinkie?) We’ve become like Zen’s hungry ghosts, gorging at an ever-groaning feast, without truly tasting it. By slowing things down enough to locate a farmer, connect with a recipe, mull in the kitchen, preserve on behalf of our community, we enjoin the fruits of our labor with the promise of wholesome meal-making, ensuring biodiversity and cultural diversity through conscious choices.
We ‘put up’ what we like, especially what we wish to devour midwinter when the tomatoes are without scent, when the berries have no grassy must, when the roll cries out for ripe infusion. At such times, we’re not prying lids off jars sealed for months just out of desire for fuel, but to be nourished by the people who made them for us; we’re eating to feed the deep hungers that reside within, including the desire for community, for union, for comfort. Hospitality enters in the moment our senses link with the sensual experiences of the preserver, the repast a link to that specific past, and also, the imagined past – those interested in the domestic arts long to preserve the beautiful, historical traditions of the table, even though we might have only known frozen food from TV trays. Like the Beatitudes reveal, we hunger and thirst for righteousness, and in the virtue that comes from right growing, right harvesting, right preparation (meaning, in part, that we produce and consume in a good, clean and fair manner), indeed, we shall be satisfied.
*
On the Sunday after I’d been at the farm, a box of enormous tomatoes sat on the kitchen table, their pulp so ready to burst forth they practically split sitting in the afternoon sun. It was time to get ready for dinner, and my man had lit a fire of mesquite and hickory on the smoker just outside the kitchen door. As he came and went, smoke infused the house, leading us straight into an ancestral domain. Before long we had gathered those beefy reds and laid them on the grill and waited until their skins split from heat and flame. I let them cool on the counter, then quickly cored and peeled them, sliding eighths into a large pot, simmering slowly, before adding grainy salt and a handful of fresh basil. An hour or so later, I lifted a wooden spoon to my mouth and felt another woman enter from the balls of my feet to the curve of my belly to just below my throat. And then she was yelling a phrase I knew I’d heard my grandmother say a long time ago, -- “Oh. My. Lord!” – a gusty, guttural call of a blues woman, an expression coming more from kinetic core than mental knowing, the smoke-dazed freshness of the fruit a memory of a time I hadn’t had, couldn’t know. The man looked inside from the fire, smiling. He didn’t know who this woman was yet, but he was about to taste her.

*
SEXY RECIPES:
Peach Lavender Jam
Smoke-Infused Tomato Sauce
Fig Chutney
Ginger Chutney
Spiced Whole Oranges

1. History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, U.K., 1992, p. 738.
2. The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher, Wiley Publishing, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1937, pg. 706.
3. Ibid, pg. 706.
4. Ibid, pg. 708.
5. History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, U.K., 1992, p. 485.
6. Ibid., pg. 497.
7. The Sex Life of Food, Bunny Crumpacker, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2006, pg.66.
8. “The Fruits of Memory,” Corn Bread Nation 2, Amy E. Weldon, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004.
9. “In Distrust of Movements,” In The Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World, Wendell Berry, Orion Books.

Peach Lavender Jam
Sugar:
4 cups granulated sugar
large bunch lavender buds+
Shake buds into sugar and let rest for two weeks, shaking a few times each week.
Jam:
2 1/2 lb. peaches, peeled and pitted
juice of one lemon
1 cup water
Prepare peaches, cut into chunks, then sprinkle with lemon juice and stir.
Bring the sugar and water to a bowl; sift the lavender out, or not – your choice! Stir until the sugar is dissolved, and boil rapidly five minutes. Add the peaches, return to boil, and boil rapidly, stirring often twenty minutes, or until jell stage. Remove the pot from the heat and let cool for ten minutes. Skim well. Ladle into hot sterilized jars and seal. Process according to recommendations.
Makes three pints.
+(if you don’t grow and dry your own, purchase buds from a botanical store locally)

Smoke-Infused Tomato Sauce
4 lb. beefsteak tomatoes
large bunch basil
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
Prepare a grill or smoker and soak wood chips in water. A few minutes before placing the tomatoes on the grill, let the chips begin to smoke. Quickly place the tomatoes, cover and peek every few minutes to see if the skins have burst. Take them off the flame (use the grill for a kebob or steak to go with the sauce.)
Peel the tomatoes, cut into eighths and if you prefer, remove most of the seeds. Place in a heavy bottomed pan, and bring to boil. Add salt. Simmer 45 minutes, or until the sauce thickens. Take off the heat and stir in the vinegar.
Add a few basil sprigs to each hot sterilized jar. Pour the sauce over. Heat process, cool, and check the seals. (If you prefer not to heat process, you can refrigerate up to one month, or freeze for two months, but cool the jars first before refrigerating.)
Makes 5 cups
Use in pasta sauces or on pizzas.

Other recipes I recommend here should be from Preserving, by Oded Schwartz, which is the most beautiful preserving book ever created. (DK Publishing, Inc., New York, N.Y. 10016) 1996.

Wild Triumph

2008-03-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

Richard on Mt. Rainier

A few months ago I sent out a note to clients asking for their most amazing triumphs of the last year. 'Toot your own horn!' I said. One person sent something back. And that was my daughter. It got me to thinking -- are we used to sliding past our achievements in our urge to live ever in the future? Do we only see the past as the ways in which we tried and failed? Are we missing out on the gratitude and recognition of our most glorious gifts?

I purposely didn't specify or define 'achievements' because what we're most proud of may be very different from how others see us, or what the world says is successful. Our triumphs may not be about manifesting new cars or high-paying jobs (unless they are.) Success may be about being absolutely secure and loving whatever reality brings us. But if we can't see or acknowledge our triumphs, if we only we see what we haven't done, or can only acknowledge our flaws and half attempts, then aren't we skewing reality?

As I work with clients in planning their new year, we start each session with claiming the triumphs. It is the source of many tears and gasps -- how people are surprised by what they consider their victories!

What wild triumph are you rejoicing in? How can you add a moment each planning cycle (monthly, quarterly) to reflect upon your successes?

My own greatest triumph would have to be witnessing my two children graduate from college, and knowing that these last ten years especially I have been such a steady, creative presence in their lives. And as the photo above notes, surging back out into the world with my beloved being well enough to travel with again. We continue the exploration together.

Here's a few from my Wild Work clients. Add your own triumphs in the Comments section. Go ahead, get real with all your amazing accomplishments.

"In the past week, I moved to NYC, conquered the subway system, found two jobs, and continue to feed my curiosity through this wild and exciting new place."
--dylan nichole

"I have several treasured successes this last year:
1. the continued and healthy growth of my ministry
2. the launching of our youth program therein.
3. I finally began writing my book! (thanks to you, Sonya!)
4. My lover and I finally went on vacation alone for a week (after 17 years of being together)
5. This April I will have stuck to my fitness program for two years.
6. I had a breakthrough about my financial worth."
--Rev. Judith Laxer

"2007 was a breakthrough year for me. I moved across the country to a place that has always enchanted me, Santa Fe, and I am enthralled with a new body of my creative work. This has been one of the most interesting, joyful, passionate and intuition-honing experiences of my life. The process has given me the trust and confidence to go for some of my larger life goals."
--Melissa Weiss Steele

"My most treasured success of 2007 was organizing and presenting, in partnership with my husband, Gary Sill, the performance of three orchestral works by Sufi composer Hidayat Inayat Khan, in part as a celebration of his 90th year. In the audience were mainly his students and long time friends, most of whom had never heard his music performed live before. The Orchestra was drawn from Vancouver musicians who perform in the Vancouver Symphony, CBC, and Vancouver Opera orchestras. The three symphonic works were Poeme en Fa, Suite Symphonique, La Monotonia, and the Royal Legend. All three are drawn from incidents and historical events in the composer's life and ancestry and musically illustrate the themes of peace, spiritual and personal liberty, and freedom from opression which are the ideals he lives his life by. My husband, who is a wonderful pianist, and a brilliant violin virtuoso named Talia Marcus also performed several of the composers smaller works. The Orchestra was conducted by a brilliant young conductor from Munich, Andreas Pascal Heinzmann who will no doubt one day be known internationally. For everyone involved this was a transcendent evening."
--Carole Harmon

Wild Hope

2008-02-10T07:59:00.000-08:00

Caucus, Seattle, WA Joshua Trujillo, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

It is the first time in my life I can remember feeling a part of a movement.

After the Obama Rally in Key Arena, I turn to my friend and say, "I felt my identity as 'I' slip away, and become part of the group, like I couldn't distinguish any longer where I ended."

"It was that way in the sixties all the time," my friend says.

And I believe her, things in that era seeming much less defended, less critical, less prone to irony. No matter what happens with Obama this movement has been created, it was 21,000 strong in Seattle yesterday, and it's not going away. Amongst the loudest cheers he received: to end the genocide in Darfur, and when he included straights and gays in his groups seeking equality in his government, and when he said George W Bush would no longer be on the ticket.

But it took years of GWB to get us to radicalize. To understand what we might lose when our constitution is altered.

The most punishing photos in Obama's slide show were the ones of Abu Grab. I drew my breath in when I saw it come up on the screen, partly because I was sitting next to my friend's twelve year old granddaughter, and partly because I hadn't yet been hopeful enough to imagine we could undo that damage. My friend cried, her grief coming to the surface. "We had to push some of this away, in order to go on," I say.

Desmond Tutu says forgiveness starts with an admission of the wrongdoing. Neither Bush or Cheney seem likely to stand for impeachment, and so who is going to admit this horrific wrong? Did it, indeed start with us? When we stayed in confusion on the facts instead of confronting? When our Thanksgiving dinners turned to silence when we couldn't understand how peace and war could share the same table?

It left me wondering: As Dr. Martin Luther King said, as Barack Obama quotes in his speeches, how can I "confront the fierce urgency of now?" And how have I been unwilling to confront it since the reign of fear mongering in this country?

In America, when we don't have the courage to do something, we say we don't have enough time. We're paying the mortgage, raising the kids, running errands, and mostly not taking care of the piece that holds us together. Maybe because it comes under the name of government, that unwieldly, complex, sometimes corrupt entity that can't hold us, can't describe who we are. But then, we have forgotten that they is us. When Darfur (or Mississippi) is starving, so are we. When those children are going without health care, those are my children too.

My wrongdoing is that I forget another's pain when I'm too busy taking care of the details of my own life. And I'm wise enough now to live as if we all matter, to make choices that lead in that direction.

The movement I saw wasn't a man called Barack Obama. He was standing up there, talking about a plan. But really, it was the sea of hands raised in the air of the mostly young people, there to stand for something else besides politics as usual. They showed up to start the undoing of terrorist politics, to close the torture chambers, to end poverty. The hope that it is possible and not just rhetoric was palpable yesterday. And no matter what candidate comes into office, these people had a taste of what that could feel like. And I predict that they, like myself, won't be going back to their safe, comfortable lives anytime soon. They're Generation Now.

+++

On February 9, they forecast that double the biggest ever Washington state caucus turnout happened, about 200,000 people showed up, to vote almost 3-1 for Obama. People were shocked at the lines of traffic, the overflowing polling places, the ballots that ran out and had to be used for scrap paper. It is happening!

Wild Writing

2007-12-26T10:27:00.000-08:00

image courtesy of Teesha Moore
www.teeshamoore.com

New Classes for the New Year!

Dinner & A Journal

Thrust yourself into the week with a sensuous seasonal dinner, and an evening of exploring new material. The class uses wild writing to reveal the themes we want to investigate. The hour begins with a bold and resonant prompt line (or passage or poem,) and then we write as a group without letting our pens leave the page. The focus is not on finished pieces. It is about pushing ourselves past making impressive stories. We nosh, and then we move into the fertile imagination that lingers within us, exposing images and ideas that may become the beginnings of our screenplays, plays, essays, memoirs, studies, stories.

In this class, we read our work aloud, however we don’t critique. Instead, we offer insight to the writer about the words or phrases that are alive in the work. This class is not therapy, still it is a joyful and supportive way to launch a new writing project, or bring new eyes to one that has halted or become stale. My essays and screenplays and character studies begin with wild writing because it helps me wade into the depths without being frightened about what it is I am embarking upon. Your willingness to risk, dream, vision, pirouette past the province of the prosaic, and move into novel territory is more important than whether you write often or well. Indeed, this is the place to learn how to write more consistently, and what work is stirring.

I welcome non-writers, poets, screenwriters, playwrights, fiction writers and non-fiction folks.

Monday nights from 6-8 p.m. Classes cost $180 for 5 weeks. January 14, 21, 28, February 4 & 11. Six - ten students.

Enroll at sonyalea@gmail.com.

Big Mind Writing

From Buddha to the Beats, in Rumi's poetics and Munro's stories are the moments of mindfulness that awaken us. Celebrate the coming of the Dalai Lama to our city by embracing the compassion of candor!

In this class we will focus on breathing, meditation and action as a jumping off place for insightful, direct truth. In-class writing and some reading completed prior to class will illuminate the practice.

Class One: Love
The Dalai Lama on the practice of exchange of self for other. Dante. Keats. Neruda. Munro.
Assignment: Write a love poem, whether past, present or anticipated future, grounded in simple physical experience of body and phenomena.

Class Two: Sex
The Great Passion: Discussion of Buddhist Tantra. The Blues. Anne Sexton. Donald Hall on his poet-wife Jane Kenyon.
Assignment: Write a sex poem, blues stanza or passionate story, either from your experience or fantasy. It may be a story no one ever sees. Share this writing only if you want.

Class Three: Candor and the Non Dual Method of Inquiry. Dave Eggers. Anne Waldman. Mary Gordon.
The merit of confession. What do you really want or desire? What are you confused about?
Assignment: Techniques to unfurl the truth. We write our worst secret that no one has to see. Make friends with it, forgive yourself and hope to do better if necessary. Share this writing only if you want.

Class Four: Ecology
Interdependence. All sentient beings have been your big toe. Margaret Atwood. Wendell Berry. Barry Lopez. Elaine Scarry "Rules of Engagement".
Assignment: Write the most panoramic way you can. Include many details of your immediate experience. What is living in front of your eyes? In your body? What's there you can't see?

Class Five: Spiritus
Sacred view. Blake's visions. The nature of Emptiness. Pema Chodron. The Poet-Seers.
Assignment: Consider your most sacred moment. Write a passage without any traditional spiritual language.

Class Six: Death
The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Have you died to yourself or others in some way? Anne Cushman: "What Is Death, Mommy?" Amy Bloom.
Assignment: Write as if you are on your deathbed. Who and what do you want to tell?

All kinds of writers & all kinds of seekers welcomed.

Monday mornings, as early as the group can make it. Classes cost $180 for 6 weeks. February 4, 11, 18, 25, March 3 & 10. Six - ten students.

Enroll at sonyalea@gmail.com.

Wild Safety

2007-12-26T09:51:00.001-08:00

Last month we were in DC on business. I like to negotiate strange cities, and find the surprises encountered along the way one of the joys of travel. We decided to use the Metro, because it was fast and relatively uncomplicated, rather than take expensive taxis to our meetings. We’d loved the tube in London, adored the subway in New York, been in trains all over France, and appreciated the cleanliness of Toronto’s rocket, and the speed of Vancouver’s sky train. It seemed a snap. Then the unexpected happened.

We stepped off the Metro. A stout woman in a reflective vest met us at the transfer station where we inserted our tickets and waited for the bars to shift, allowing us passage into a narrow concrete hallway. I could hear her screaming from the subway doors, and now we were close enough to understand her words: “You just did the hardest thing of the day! You woke up and got dressed and got out here! Everything gets easier from here, honey!” She was a Metro employee who took her job seriously, directing us not only to the next place on our journey, but how we could think about it, if we adopted her strategy. I followed a line of students and people dressed for business down the passage until I saw a large cave-like elevator with twenty people inside, waiting for us, the last two, to squeeze inside.

I am seriously claustrophobic. Have been for the past decade, mostly due to being suffocated as a child. I can take elevators if necessary, but I have been known to walk up a dozen floors to avoid it if the space is too small or decrepit. This elevator was old, older than any I had ever seen. I looked around for stairs and saw no exit. My husband stepped on and held the door. This was his way of saying, “Suck it up, sweetheart. We have a meeting.” Ten faces turned to indicate they were waiting for me. Before I could think, I was on the lift.

After the door closed, the elevator clanked, jumped and then sat there for almost a minute before it began creeping in that manner that you know is going to take forever. (I later learned the DC Metro elevators are so notoriously slow that bloggers say you can “load 100,000 superballs, one by one, in the time it takes the doors to open and then close.”) At the front, about five rows of people ahead, I could see a small rectangular window, a few inches wide by about eight inches high with iron bars behind it. It reflected concrete and then light as the seconds passed. We were traveling up, but could not exit, the glimpses of light a reminder that I was trapped inside. I felt my legs disappear under me. The bodies pressing up against me seemed to hold me up. Another minute into the ride. We were creeping up foot by foot. I looked up. Watched a ‘3’ light up red at the top of the cold metal box. How many flights were we going to have to stay in here? There was nothing inside this death trap to indicate where the lift ended and the doors opened into the light shining past the bars of the window. I knew this was no microchip operating lift, but it was traveling so slowly, I imagined some horse winding a rope that hoisted us skyward. I reached out for the steel wall; it was cold, clammy against my fingers. My senses searched for something comforting: the pink ipod of the woman in front of me, the aroma of aftershave and smoke. I couldn’t look at my husband because I imagined if he had anything other than a calm face, I would start shrieking in terror. Then I remembered the words of the woman yelling me into the morning. “Everything gets easier from here, honey!” “You just did the hardest thing of the day!” We were going to a deposition. I seriously doubted waking up was the hardest thing, but if these elevator doors opened soon, I might begin to believe I could withstand anything.

Then, in the middle of losing my feeling of my body, I realized something in that woman’s voice. It wasn’t what she said – it was that she got up and did this every day, for every customer, shouting encouragement to every passerby, including those who never met her eyes with a nod or a smile. That woman had my back. If my worst fear came to fruition – that I would be stuck inside this elevator for hours or days, this was the kind of woman who would come to the rescue. And as we slowly strained up over the ‘4’ and a brief glimpse of ‘out there,’ wherever that was, I realized that if this stranger could provide a feeling of safety, then I could provide it for myself too.

I started breathing again. My fingers reached out for my guy’s palm. He was there: still, sure, gentle as ever. The elevator terrorizes me because I think I am trapped, that I cannot control my movements. A teacher had trained me to realize that an uncomfortable thought is not an enemy. I began to investigate the painful thought: ‘I am trapped’ – is that true? The elevator screeched to a halt. The door remained closed. Up above, a ‘5’ lit up. I looked around and saw people who were bored, going through the routine of their morning lives. They were expecting these doors would open. The mechanics of the elevator was out of our control, as was most everything all day long; perhaps everything that we will ever encounter would be out of our control. Still, I could affect my mind, that wildly unpredictable collection of synapses that allowed me to perceive safety or experience fear. After the “code orange” fascinations of this government, I had said that I wanted to feel safe anywhere, no matter what was happening to me in external circumstances. Wouldn’t testing my skills in the world’s slowest elevator be a great way to get there?

The door opened. The people tucked their heads into the harsh winter wind. My husband took my hand, and my legs followed, trusting gravity. I began to wonder: what would we do differently if we felt safe in every environment we encountered? What do we avoid doing or being because we needlessly fear? If we stopped believing our stressful thoughts and questioned our mind, might we create a world free of harm?

Wild Life

2007-11-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

Heart Menhir, Cote Savage, Brittany
Photo by Carole Harmon

Life is slowly taking away my father. The other day as he waited for an MRI, a picture into his wounded, decaying body, he turned to my mother and asked, “Am I dying?” “Of course not!” my mother replied, likely out of her desire to locate some permanence in the man whose brain and heart and nerves are steadily refusing stasis. When she relays this story over the telephone, all the way across the country, I do not respond. I let her talk, telling me about the new doctor and the treatment plan and how she had known of his condition before the medical team. I don’t know what I would have said to my father in the same circumstance; I don’t know what I would say if he asked me now, except perhaps I would be curious: “What compels you to ask that question? What if you are dying?”

It has been a question I’ve lived with these past few years, when my husband almost died through blood loss during surgery, when a resultant brain injury removed his former personality and forced the death of our previous relationship. As he lay unconscious the surgeon showed me a graph of his tumor markers, a chart that went out only ten years. “What happens after 2014?” I’d asked. “We don’t have statistics for that time frame,” he’d replied, the surgery so experimental that no one had yet lived longer than a decade with this rare disease.

All of the work, it turns out, hasn’t been to get ready for his death, but to get on with our lives, as if the doctor’s words had no basis in reality. We’d had to stop imagining that anyone knew when the cancer might return. And to kiss each other at the door like we might not see each other again – with all of the love, all of the yearning, all of the hopefulness pouring out of our lips while we knew there wasn’t any protection from going in a flash.

Seeing my husband in restraints on the hospital bed is one of the dearest sights in my repertoire of memories: his face coming off the ICU’s flat mattress, wild-eyed, thrashing, using every muscle in a body that had been cut and scraped and burned in a twelve-hour surgery to look into my eyes, to communicate his closeness to that other place, the one where who we are dissolves like salt into water. I knew how much he wanted to live in that moment, how he was willing to experience being ground to nothing and have to build himself back up again. When I don’t know who I am or what this is, being present in what I consider the moment of his death and rebirth sources me. If I am the woman who can witness this death and live with its conditions, then I somehow know what is mine to do. He is the man who gave up his former self to live. I am committed to be with him, including being with the pieces I think are “missing.”

The same day my father is in for tests at the hospital, I receive a voice mail message from my daughter. She has dreamed that I died, and that my friend, the wise woman Judith predicted it. My daughter says we’ve been told I will die in a fast food restaurant, and then somehow we end up in one and I am gone. Later she is in New York, finding she can’t bear my death. In the dream, she can’t leave her apartment because she’s so frozen in her grief, then she realizes she has to audition, that the emotions will be useful there.

Her dream feels like the way it is when things are altered beyond our recognition, when bodies leave, when minds leave, when people we had counted on being there suddenly die to us in some way. We’re grieving we’re separate, and then we return to the world, and we even make art in it. Something noble happens when we share the depth of what it is to be alive in such times, when life is passing by, and we seek to affirm our passion for it, despite our sorrow at its going so very uncertainly, out of our control.
***

One of the joys that cancer brought our family was the creation of a list of things we want to do before we die. Each year we acknowledge what we’ve been given to experience, what we’d like to do next. It’s a way of giving thanks, of focusing on our dreams. What do you want to do in this sweet, wild life?

Wild Curiosity

2007-10-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

Colleen Rice, Photographer,
Curious Nephews

Curiosity killed a cat! Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."
-- Eugene O'Neill, Diff'rent

When clients who have had their creative lives or passions on hold come to their Wild Work, the first thing I ask them to do is to choose actions that help recover the curiosity they had as children. Ask people questions. Say "tell me more" when someone speaks a belief different than yours. Go off on side paths meant for wandering and wondering. Do something you haven't allowed yourself since childhood. Just watch for a while, without labeling what you think is happening. Find "why?" coming into your mind more often.

Children explore freely, enthusiastically. They take risks. When adults step in with fear or disapproval it kills their curiosity. (As does the absence of a parent, since a perception of safety and sharing the pleasure of exploration are key ingredients.) Adults, and especially artists, need to take risks too. Watching where we allow expressed or perceived disapproval to diminish our creative gifts is a great way to free up energy that can be used for one's art and work. I notice what tends to cut off my inquisitiveness is another's anger or judgment, which I'm learning to be curious about as a way to increase intimacy. I've also formed several good creative friends who will tell me what they see as the truth in any situation in which I feel stuck. I can check my actions and thoughts with them, and they're like my curiosity life preservers.

I'm curious about people and what motivates them. When I go back to Kentucky, in the region where I was born, I order a sweet tea and a barbecue sandwich and sit for a spell at the Shady Rest, where I like to listen to the conversations of the people around me. Writers call this research, not eavesdropping. I'm not interested in the specifics of what people say but in how they say it. I wrap myself in the dialect, its rhythm and inflections and silences. What subjects do they talk about? What shorthand do they use? How are they connected to the land, their history, the politics of the day? It was at these tables that I began to recognize the spiral-like dialogue of people who live on land for multiple generations. There are side stories of cousins and funerals and family reunions that sweep back toward the original subject before circling out to a peripheral talk and then back again. A dozen subjects, all interlinking, woven in a common knowing. Because of my curiosity, I learned of the complexity of these mostly rural people. I also learned that as a woman who has lived in a dozen places, I have never held the knowledge of what a place was before its current incarnation. As in: "Down by old Jim's Tavern, when it was a juke joint, before the gas station came in..." When we explore the world, we're exploring ourselves -- we find connections and differences that can lead us to further inquiry.

Being curious turns us into the quester. We learn more. We experience novelty (which produces dopamine in the brain, thus elevating our sense of well-being.) Once we start to break through our own barriers and fears, our curiosity can carry us, opening us to potentials we might not have known existed. Explorers, inventors, innovators, artists, and great leaders happen because they remain curious when others would seek to usurp the investigation.

What will you do to power up your curiosity this week? Here are a few of my choices:
* See what kind of colors mixed paints will create
* Have a meaningful conversation with a stranger
* Watch a film someone else suggests
* Try going slow and fast at the park to see what happens to my sight
* Ask my friends what this autumn is bringing on their curious quest

Wild Work

2007-09-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

People ask me what I do. And I mostly say I help people recover their wildish natures within their work and life. The shape of my work has changed over the years, so I thought I'd send a slice of the way it is now, how the bones of your stories have altered me, given my work substance and taken it to its natural depth.

WILD BUSINESS & LIFE PLANNING

Visioning
Claiming Values & Goals
Busting Your Old Rules
Finding Your Myths & Stories
Heartful Action
Money & Prosperity

Sonya uses her fifteen years of experience in strategic planning, as well as cognitive therapy, instinctual knowing, myths and stories, and writing exercises to coax out your wildest dreams, and help you work with the barriers to realizing your ambitions. She teaches groups, and works with individuals, customizing a program to embolden your wild one, the one that yearns for a deeper, fuller, saner life. What you create is a sense of beauty, a sense of the life that is serving you and the whole, and what place your soulwork has within that vision.

Wild Work came about when artists and entrepreneurs asked me for a process of business planning that fit their wildish natures, as well as respected the values inherent in nature. I'd like to thank the clients who came on this wild ride while we were creating a work world we wanted to emerge into.

WILD WRITING

Workshops & Groups:

Wild Writing to Overcome Obstacles & Barriers
Wild Writing to Claim Your Mission
Writing Your Way To A Wild & Creative Life

Screenplays, Essays, Book-Length Memoir

WILD CARDS

Years ago, I used to read Tarot cards for a small group of friends. Then, in 2003, when I went to live at the Cancer Center in DC during my husband's surgery and chemotherapy treatment, this strange event happened. I became more intuitive. When I next picked up the cards, it was as if a painting had turned into a sculpture, and I experiencd many more meanings in this centuries-old art. I don't tell fortunes. My readings tell a story,they reveal the way events are moving through your life, the impacts that are surging in, even the shadowy stuff underneath the day to day. These stories are archetypal, and thus they cross lines of belief systems and philosophies. I think we're all intuitive, and we use the tools that are presented to us to get to the essence of who we are. This mythic story is one of mine.

Wild Testimony

2007-09-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

tes·ti·mo·ni·al:
1. A statement in support of a particular truth, fact, or claim.
2. A written affirmation of another's character or worth; a personal recommendation.
3. Something given in appreciation of a person's service or achievement; a tribute.

Sonya brings a unique and exciting perspective to the world of work. I
am always delighted to refer clients to her. A remarkable resource!
-- Pamela Grace, psychotherapist, author, workshop leader

Sonya is for those who want their work to embrace and express the soul's true path - whether launching, running or revitalizing a business. Sonya has been a trusted guide and ally for me through the whole process. She brings extensive knowledge, fine-tuned intuition, incisive analysis, and useful tools. And she has always been there when I felt uncertain or discouraged. Thanks to Sonya's help and a lot of hard work, I'm on my way to realizing my dream.
-- June Blue Spruce, life coach, shamanic healer and dreamer

Sonya draws upon a wide range of tools to create an extraordinarily thorough and unique service. Her entrepreneurial expertise in business is matched by her creative capacity as an artist in word and form. Sonya is also deeply intuitive. Time and time again her readings have provided practical insights and tools for both my personal and professional life. To receive Sonya's gifts is to receive from the Goddess herself!
-- Anne Douglas, yoga instructor & therapist

Sonya's combination of insightful compassion and business savvy was the perfect guide during the breakthroughs and transformations I needed to live my dreams. I am now moving to a completely different part of the country pursuing my life-long desire of a successful art career. Our work over the last year and a half has been an important piece of claiming my own wild woman ways. I am jumping off the cliff, and the universe shall meet me!
--Melissa Weiss Steele, artist

Wild Ambition

2007-09-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, we were in Banff in the Canadian Rockies, getting ready for the last hike of our holiday when a freak storm hit. Within a few minutes, hail was flying around us, like the Goddess had cast off her string of pearls. We watched the forest as the wind corkscrewed trees out of the ground, and listened to the sirens stir around the village, attending to the stalled movements of summer tourists and townies.

My friend Anne came in from the beach, and as the storm continued, we started a conversation that lasted most of a day while our families napped and read and ate Cornish pasties (the meat pie, not the erotic adornment) that we’d packed for the hike. The conversation would become one of the most seminal events of 2007 for me, full of insights about what it is to live a wild and free life. Even after the storm subsided, I abandoned the plan to play just a few more hours on the trail, and paid attention to the weave of talk and contemplation that nature had opened up for me. Those spoken words would become the rich humus from which I would write my new film, and we would later see that this day of rest was exactly what was required before we re-entered our busy lives.

I teach planning. Or rather, I help people remember what they already know about how they want to live. Together we design ways to, as author Alice Sebold says, “realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted." We often characterize what we think we do not want as mistakes or failure, still, these are truly the moments that are making us, shaping us into the kind of people who can make our visions real.

Many years ago, when I was an employee, some guy told me the best planning went like this: “Ready. Fire. Aim.” (I mentally wrote my resignation letter as he spoke.) Today I would tell him that I believe battle language enacts war, and that I get what he is saying -- sometimes we just have to try things, see what happens, absorb the 'failures', even give up our original idea for what is taking shape around us. Really though, in this state of wild ambition, no mistakes are possible. We're free to invent and create in what the Zen masters call "spontaneous right action," resting in the awareness that reality can not fail us. This isn't about having some 'secret' knowing that will provide us with everything we desire. Wild work is about seeing that our choices (and mistakes) are informing how we live and prosper. For some, staying in from the storm is building the life they want; others will need to dodge falling ice at the peak.

The planning work I do now is to help people notice when they’re holding the original idea too tightly, or when perseverance is required. It’s less about self-assurance, and more about what can happen when we’re not so tied to our definition of ‘who I am’. It's about distinguishing when we are making things work, and when the work is making us. Stay tuned to this blog for regular updates on what I call wild ambition -- that moment of abandon colored with focus, elegance and grace.

What's your vision for your life? If you want to learn more about working wild, contact me at sonyalea@gmail.com or (206) 729-2270.