Mother's Day Musings

My brain swirls with many things, but I want to bookend this post with Mother's Day musings.  So, first, a tribute to my mom.  My mom is/was a great mom in so many ways, but the one that was perhaps most important to me was that she kept me supplied in books.  Before I could drive myself to the library, she drove me and checked out as many books as I wanted (the Montgomery Alabama public library only allowed children to check out 5 books at a time--5 books??!!--I could read that amount in a lazy afternoon!).  And when our family only had one car, we biked to the library.  She was supportive in any number of my future endeavors too, like writing and drama and choosing a college and writing a dissertation and oh, the list is so long--but all those quests are rooted in my early reading.  It was those books that showed me all the possible lives that humans could have.  And it was my mom that made it possible for me to have books.

So, I've been away at my church's Synod Assembly.  The larger Lutheran church is divided into districts, or synods.  I'm part of the Florida-Bahamas  synod, although we're larger than that--we have more Lutheran churches in Haiti than in the Bahamas.  In the past, there's been computer access, so I thought I might blog a bit, and thus thinking, I decided not to announce a blog silence.

Of course, there weren't computers.  Ah well.  I'll be posting more about Synod Assembly on my theology blog tomorrow, if you're interested.

Yes, I got back from the Create in Me retreat on Monday and headed back on the road on Thursday.  It's been a whirlwind of a week, and I'm not exhausted, so much as a bit worn down and fraying at the edges--just a small unravelling, which I'll knit back together today.

I keep thinking of scenes from the road, the sign that said:  "Alien fresh jerkey," with that iconic alien head.  Was it a warning?  A sign like the "Fresh Eggs" sign beside it?  Just something that amused the owner of the property?

I saw so many bulldozed orange groves.  Of course, I only know about the missing orange groves because of my earlier memories of Interstate 95.  Many of them were bulldozed for housing projects that are only half done.  Will they be completed?  Are the people who bought early, and now have houses in the middle of nowhere, with no neighborhood, are those people happy, or were they hoping for a community?

Synod Assembly is held at an Orlando resort, which is a surreal experience in and of itself.  We meet to talk about poverty and the needs of the world and how we can minister to those needs in a Christ-like way.  We're discussing those issues in a very expensive resort.  I looked out over a golf course that was a vivid green.  That apocalypse gal side of my brain said, "This is not sustainable."  We're not like Las Vegas, which uses its scarce water resources in amazingly conserving ways (go here for a Fresh Air story on water use and how Las Vegas uses water wisely, despite the desert environs).  I have this vision of being an older woman and remembering resorts of my youth and shaking my head at the excesses and at what we embraced as a society and at what cost.

Last night, as I tossed and turned, I thought about future archaeologists and the golf courses they might uncover.  What would they think the golf course represented?  I had a vision of a whole series of poems about future archaeologists and what they uncover.  Feel free to play along!

On the way home, I listened to the amazing Bruce Springsteen CD, The Seeger Sessions.  Lots of great Depression era songs, which fit my musing mood.  I wondered what Woody Guthrie would make of this landscape of bulldozed orange groves.  I found gas for $3.74 a gallon; I don't expect to find that price again anytime soon.  As I was about to leave, a young guy asked me for gas money to make it to pay day.  I was sad that the gas station was so busy; I was tempted to buy him a whole tankful, but there was such a line behind me that I just gave the kid all the quarters that I had.

Again, I thought of Woody Guthrie.  I wondered if that kid really needed gas money or if he was just begging.  I thought about I don't usually see begging at the gas station, but it makes sense.  I thought about everyone who's working at jobs that don't pay much and how they make it from pay day to pay day.  I thought about all the Caribbean islands that aren't too far from this peninsula, and the even more extreme poverty we'd see there.

I need to get back on some sort of poetry schedule.  This promises to be a busy week.  I'm doing a reading at a wine shop on Wednesday (7p.m. at Hollywood Vine; if you're in the South Florida area, come join us!).  This week is the last week for pre-publication sales of I Stand Here Shredding Documents--have you bought your copy yet?  Go here and scroll down to order, if you haven't.

So, back to Mother's Day musings.  What?  You were hoping for a Julian of Norwich meditation?  Go to my theology blog post for a reading with which to celebrate her feast day--complete with poem inspired by her.

You were hoping for a post on the female face of God?  Perhaps even something that talks about God as our mother?  Go to my post on Living Lutheran for that one.

Of course, if you wanted the theology stuff, you might not have come to this blog in the first place.  Maybe you'd just like a Mother's Day poem.  I don't have anything that's like a traditional celebratory mom poem.  But "Necessity of Moisture" seems to fit the bill, in terms of celebrating family traditions and love of all sorts.  It first appeared in Tar River Poetry and will also be part of my forthcoming chapbook.


Necessity of Moisture

His last letter spoke of snow,
the necessity of moisture, the dryness of the soil.
Even though he had not tilled the ground
in more than twenty years, the dirt
still spoke to him. As with an old love,
his connection to the land would never completely cease.

Although she would never farm his way,
his daughter always kept a garden.
Even now, long after she’s let the grass grow
over the backyard once ruled by green
beans, squash, tomatoes, and okra, even now, she shovels
her organic waste back into her compost heap.

I will never garden on even my grandmother’s
small scale, but I save all my kitchen scraps,
mix them with grass clippings, compost
in my non-professional way. I long for her rich, black dirt
as I stick my seedlings in the Florida sand.
We chat every Sunday, exchange rainfall statistics
the way some men might discuss baseball details.
Catlike, I save weather tidbits through the week as a love offering.

Some families develop elaborate gift giving rituals,
a whole language of material love. Others create pet
names, secret personalities, languages no outsider understands.
My family’s secret language lies in the meteorological details
and soil analysis, love as moisture, compost, seedlings.

Not Letting Go of National Poetry Month: Justin Evans' Latest Book

I can't seem to let go of National Poetry Month.  I've been reading Justin Evans' latest book, Town for Trees, and while I don't have Dave Bonta's technical skills, so I won't be posting an audio podcast, I'm doing an interview with Justin via e-mail.  I'll be posting the interview in two parts next week, likely on Wednesday and Friday.

If you haven't bought a copy of Justin's latest book, go here right now and buy it.  Even before I read the poems, I fell in love with the book design:  creamy pages that are heavy, readable text, great cover photo (taken by Justin himself).  The poems are worthy of the beauty of the book design.

The poems circle around a particular town and the surrounding landscape of a place in the U.S. west.  It's not a desert landscape, as I think of it, because there are trees and rivers.  But the depictions of the landscape are so vivid that the landscape becomes almost a character itself, often upstaging the humans in the poems.  The opening poem, "In Twilight," foreshadows these intertwinings:  "Together we both migrate, one man and one river, / each of us bound to accumulate with our own kind / where we are certain to find a place to stop and sleep."

Many of us will be familiar with the human characters in these poems, the grandparents, the inhabitants of small towns.  I loved the poem "The Way It Goes," which describes small town deaths in two sections.  I loved the multi-poem sequence, "Hunting Chinese Pheasants," which talks about shotguns and the people who use/misuse them.

But I love the landscape poems even more, with the brooding mountains, the marauding rivers, the silent highways that slice through the landscapes.  I read these poems as I was cradled by the Appalachian mountains, a homeplace of sorts for me, a very different scenery than the one described here.  However, I felt like I knew those landscapes in the poems.  I thought about this fact as I read, "After remembering the Rocky Mountains Are New, Relatively Speaking."  The poem talks about the incremental nature of change in geological time:  "Each shrink inches per century, eroded / by the constant ebb and flow of rain / and the busy companionship of wind."  The poem contrasts this almost cheery version with the human attitude:  "We choose to believe that when a portion / is cut from us we can no longer be whole."

As I was reading these poems, with their almost elegaic tone that celebrates and mourns what has been lost, I thought about younger generations of poets who will come after us.  Will they write these same kind of poems?  After all, we're in a period of homogenization, when so many towns look the same, with their SuperWalMarts and chain restaurants.  Or will those chains be the very things that will be missed and mourned?

These poems ultimately offer hope and consolation.  The poem "Advice For Your Last Night on the River," offers a fine example:

"What have you got to lose?  The day will be long
and full of possibility, and you are still sleeping
while the aspen trees whisper to you,
singing to you all night your family history." 

Recipes for Poets

Deborah Ager of 32 Poems fame asks us all to share our favorite, quick recipes on May 20.  What a great idea!  I'll be sharing two recipes, both vegetarian, both quick, both great ways of getting more veggies into your body.  And both are recipes that never have people turning up their noses and saying, "Hmm.  No thanks."  One of them is kid friendly for sure, the other, perhaps not.  And until recently, both were very cheap.

I knew that the economy had shifted on some deep level this winter when I decided to make a pot roast.  The beef cost less than the potatoes.  Now, I'm a child of the 1970's, and I remember beef being a very special occasion food--not just for special occasions, but very special occasions.  To be fair, I'm probably remembering a year or two in my family's life and generalizing for the whole decade. 

But I digress.  If you'd like to add a recipe, go here for more details about what Deborah has in mind.  And hopefully, on May 20, we'll wake up to a world of quick recipes that leave us more time for writing!

Update:  Go here for the recipes.

Creativity Retreats, Writing Retreats,

Kelli has written a great post about how to have a successful writing retreat, or residency, the term that she posits might be more useful.  But what if writing is just one of the creative activities we like to do?  I've gone on all sorts of retreats, but my absolute favorite is the Create in Me retreat that I go on each year.  It's at a church camp, Lutheridge, in the mountains near Asheville.  It approaches the issue of creativity from all the angles that are important to me.

What does a day at a creativity retreat look like?  Let me stress that although there's a schedule, participants are free to do their own thing.

We often begin with yoga, tai chi, a walk, or some other kind of gentle movement  for twenty or thirty minutes.  Then there's a hearty breakfast.  I could eat breakfast for every meal.

We have a Bible study, and the focus rotates each year.  One year we're looking at God as creator, the next, Jesus as creator, the next, Holy Spirit as creator.  We also consider other elements:  muse, miracle worker, co-creator.  We approach our Bible study from a mainline Protestant angle, so if you're not a person who takes the Bible literally, you'll feel at home.  And even if you're a person who looks at the Bible as a historical document, you'll probably find some like-minded folks.

Then we have a choice of workshops, where we learn/experience an art form that might take more guidance.  This year, our workshops included batik, terrarium creating, mosaics, stained glass, drop spindle spinning, tatting, and several others.

After workshop time, it's time for lunch.  And then we spend the afternoon at drop-in stations at the large central building.  Each year, our choices are different, depending on who's coming and what they might want  to present.  This year, we had stations with fabric art, English paper piecing, magazine mosaics (which morphed into collaging), bamboo flutes, kaleidoscope making, and a few other things.

Each year, we do a community art project.  This year, we created a cross filled with broken objects, which I created a photo essay about on my theology blog.  I really enjoyed smashing crockery and dropping the pieces into a plexiglass cross.

We also do some worship creating.   We have a skeleton of a service, and we break into teams:  word, music, movement, image.  We have several hours to create those parts of the service.  It's always amazing to me how the pieces come together into an amazing service that we have at a nearby Lutheran church.  On Friday night after dinner, we have a worship service (on Saturday, a talent show).

We do this worship creating to show how we might do something similar at home.  I recently finished Mark Pierson's The Art of Curating Worship.  He would likely approve of our worship.  Growing up, I always found the worship at camp or on retreats to be so much more meaningful than the worship at my home churches.  I always wondered why worship couldn't always be the way it was at camp, and I was assured that I wouldn't like it, if I had it every week.  I beg to differ, as does Pierson.

Worship should be exactly the way it is at camp, week after week.  Since this is my creativity blog, not my theology blog, I'll leave the theology aside, and point out that one reason worship likely isn't the way that it is at camp is because it takes considerably more time.  It's easy to show up week after week to trudge through the same old liturgy, with hymn selection the only decisions to be made.  It takes a lot more time to think about worship, about the message, about the themes, about all the ways we could reinforce those themes.

It also takes a lot of creativity, and not everyone's brains work in that direction.  But I bet most congregations have those folks in the pews.  What would worship look like if poets designed the worship?  What would worship look like if we welcomed visual artists?

I've been on writing retreats, most regularly at Mepkin Abbey, and the Create in Me retreat at Lutheridge is similar, and yet so different.  I like that both of these retreats speak to a spiritual side that's often missing at non-religious retreats.  I like the chance to be by myself and to also interact with others (easier at Lutheridge than at Mepkin).  I like that the Lutheridge group is large, yet I often leave feeling like I haven't had a chance to connect.

I've been going to the Create in Me retreat since 2003.  I went to a women's retreat that year and was frustrated at how the small group discussion turned to housework and kids--didn't anyone have a creative life?  At the closing service, the camp leader mentioned the Create in Me retreat.  At first I felt sad:  "That's the retreat I should have attended!"  And then, happiness!  I realized that it hadn't happened yet.  I could still go.

I decided to be big and brave, and I went all by myself.  I met all sorts of great artists, and I've gone back ever since.  So now, the retreat also includes the joy of reunion.

I like being with a variety of artists, many of us trying a variety of art/craft forms.  We emphasize process, not the end product, so it's easy to be a beginner, to experiment, to play.  I've always liked a variety of creative activities, and it's great to be with people who encourage me to do it all, who refuse to choose.

It's also great to try things without investing in them.  For years, I wanted a pottery wheel and a kiln at my house.  Then one year, I actually sat down and worked with the wheel.  I decided the learning curve would be much too steep, and I have let that dream go.  Likewise with weaving.  I romanticized the idea of having a loom.  Once I did it, I found it both boring and annoying.  This retreat has saved me all sorts of time, energy, and money.

For the past two years, I've been the retreat coordinator, so I spend the year planning the retreat.  Last year, we experimented with a retreat to plan the retreat; before, the planners met periodically for lunch and planning..  I know that a retreat-planning retreat might sound like a joyless event, but it was great to have all those brains together for a week-end.  Our retreat this year was one of the best ever, and I think it's because we had an intense week-end of planning and visioning.

I am not opposed to secular retreats.  I'd be happy to experience a residency at Bread Loaf or Sewanee.  I've gone to plenty of academic conferences that make me happy.  But I'm happy and inspired by the increasing number of conferences and retreats that look at the intersections of faith, art, spirituality, and creativity.  For too many years (centuries, really), artists have had to make uncomfortable choices if they wanted to remain within religious traditions.  Some of us still do.  I'm lucky to be a Lutheran, a tradition that's almost always been comfortable with intellectual approaches and almost always been cool with artistic approaches to faith (particularly if it involves music).

And now for the hard part, the return from the literal and metaphorical mountain, the attempt to hang onto retreat mind even as daily life takes over.  It's easy to feel spiritual at a mountain top church camp.  It's easy to remember God there.  It's easy to be creative at a retreat where all the supplies are spread out enticingly and there's enough space to leave them out.  It's easy to be creative when we're all being creative together.  I'm lucky to be working in an environment that honors our creative impulses, yet there are still tasks that must be done that aren't exactly mountain-top experiences (e-mail management, document shredding, scheduling, planning, emergency/crisis/problem solving).  How to approach those tasks with my retreat self, not my frazzled self--now there's the life's task!

Back from the Mountain to Choose Book Winners

I am back from the Create in Me retreat that I go to every year, where we have fun creating together and we talk about the intersections of Faith, Spirituality (the Christian/Lutherany variety), Creativity, and Art.  I'll put together a post soon.

So, I'm feeling a bit scattered today.  I'm always feeling a bit like I left a leg or an eye or some essential Kristin-ness behind when I return from retreat (or just generally, whenever I return from travel), but this year, it's worse.  I drove up with tales of horrifying tornado weather and death coming from the radio, and this morning, I turn on Morning Edition to hear:  "Osama bin Laden is dead."  I forgot that he was human, just like the rest of us.  I feel discombobulated.

In fact, had not other people been posting their book give-away results, I might have forgotten completely.  So, without further ado, here are the winners, and I'll be getting in touch with each of them by e-mail:

Frontier Literature by Shefali Choksi goes to Jessica Goodfellow

Whistling Past the Graveyard by me goes to Valerie.

Are you sad that you're not getting my book?  It's not too late!  We are in the last two weeks of the pre-order period for my forthcoming book over at Finishing Line Press.  Go here to buy a copy.  The press decides how many copies to print by how many copies are sold during this time, so if you were ever going to buy a book, buying now helps me more than buying later.

And if you were really hoping for my first book, I'll be happy to sell you a copy for a low, low price.

In this time period where storms blow through and kill staggering amounts of people, or when terrorists get a taste of their own treatment, it's more essential than ever to return to what matters.  For some of us, it's poetry.  For others of us, it's fabric and fiber arts.  Maybe it's cooking.  Maybe it's gathering our loved ones close on a regular basis.

I will spend some time today and tomorrow getting re-centered, collecting all my vital parts back here with me.  It's time to get back to poetry writing!  But maybe for one or two more days, I'll nestle into poetry reading as I wait for myself to catch up with myself.

Blog Quiet Until May 2

This blog will be quiet for a few days, as I wrestle with writing deadlines, work deadlines, retreat deadlines--trying not to notice the word dead repeating.  I expect to return to regular blogging on May 2.

Here's a close up of a bubble wand that my spouse made last year.  Consider it your creativity wand to give you that last push to get through National Poetry Month or the end of the term or whatever deadline you may be facing.

The End of the World as We Know It

Yesterday we had a great poetry lunch:  students showed up with favorite poems to read, plus a Short Story class came and was good-natured about listening to poetry in exchange for lunch.  I was happy not to have food going to waste.  I thought about Chalking the Walk, in the way that Sandy Longhorn describes here. But it was HOT yesterday, and no one wanted to kneel on blindingly white sidewalks for any reason.  Neither did I.  So, I'll tuck this idea away for later.

Then I read the Chris Hedges piece that my colleague recommended.  He talks about how the corporations have won and ended this way:  "Do not expect them [the elites, the haves, the rich] to take care of us when it starts to unravel. We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and culture values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global, corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one."

I was surprised to find myself thinking, not much of a choice?  It sounds like a great choice.  Small, monastic communities founded in the heart of empire, keeping alternative dreams alive--where do I sign up?

Of course, I've always lived outside the mainstream.  I've never felt that my values are reflected in the larger culture.  And even within my subcultures (like the Lutheran church), my view is oftenthe minority view.

I think it's interesting, too, that during his anti-corporate rant, there was no mention of the planetary changes barrelling down upon us.  I was intrigued by this piece by a professor who teaches what he calls comparative planetology.  He gives them glum news about the planet we're all inhabiting and he says this about how he tries to encourage them during the last class: 

"What I will tell my students today is that the choices they face hinge on where they live, what kind of community they choose to live in, and just as important, what kind of communities they choose to build for themselves.


If water resources are likely to become an issue then living in a region where water supply is already an issue may be a bad choice (sorry Las Vegas). If the loss of cheap energy is likely to become an issue then living in a region that can not support itself by growing the bulk of its own food within a few hundred mile radius may not be a good idea. If the loss of cheap energy is an issue then living in a place where personal automobiles are the only means of transport may not be a good idea either. Just as important, if the systems which support culture are likely to be stressed by climate, resource and energy issues then finding a town or city that has a long history of valuing community and innovation may be effort well spent."

It seemed like an interesting counter-message to the bleakness preached by Hedges.  Of course, the trick is forming that community while we still have some choice in the matter.

These ideas are ones that I come to again and again.  I've long been fascinated by the idea of intentional communities.  If one was ever going to buy land for such a venture, now would be the time to buy.  I'll keep my eyes open as I head towards my creativity retreat in the coming days.  Will I spot the perfect piece of land?  As I drive and my brain shifts into problem solving mode, will I think about a different way to create the community I want?  Stay tuned!