Heart of a Whale, Ambition of a Hummingbird

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Heart of a blue whale that had washed ashore.

Birds own my backyard. I have the deed to the property, but birds own it.

I don’t know enough about birds to name all who live there, but I can identify mourning doves, mockingbirds, bluebirds, and red-breasted robins. At least I think they are red-breasted robins; they are birds with red breasts.

They come for the grapes, to bathe in the fountain, to nest in the trees and grape vines that cover the pergola, and, I would like to think, to sing. I know that the songs are territorial songs. But who’s to say that our songs aren’t a way to claim our territory.

Did I mention there were hummingbirds in my yard?

In “Joyas Volardores,” Brian Doyle writes that hummingbirds have more heart attacks and aneurysms than any other living creatures. “The price of their ambition,” he writes, “is a life closer to death.”

He also writes that the biggest heart is inside the body of a blue whale. As big as a room. Big enough for a small child to stand in, ducking only to pass through one of its four valves into another chamber.

Little is known of blue whales once they reach puberty, Doyle says. Humans aren’t privy to their domestic habits. I suspect they know how to ride out typhoons.

I spent seventy-five days crossing the Pacific on a Dutch Freighter when I was a kid. Once we left the Phillipines for Long Beach, California, our final destination, we didn’t see any land for two weeks. We sailed through the tail end of typhoons, waves crashing over the bridge, which in calm seas rose three stories over the ocean’s surface.

We were not in our element. That’s how I feel when I fly in a plane. Probably OK, but not in my element.

Doyle says that blue whales travel in pairs and that their songs can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

It seems to me that uncertainty is the pervading force in our culture right now. Crumbling towers and tumbling markets have pitched us out of our element and we are at sea, riding through the tail end of typhoons, but uncertain where we are headed.

Perhaps this is an opportunity.

Maybe if we have the heart of a blue whale and are willing to notice that we always live life close to death, we will know why the nectar is worth the risk to the hummingbird, and we’ll create songs that will be heard beyond miles even we can imagine.


NOTE: I first posted this in June, 2009. We lived in Livermore back then.

Turn Left at the Whale

DSCN1057I have been on blog silence for three months. I know. I know. You’re not supposed to go on blog silence, but since my whole intent with starting Writing Shed was to change my story, I’m giving myself permission to make my own rules.

I go silent when I don’t know what to say.

These past three months have not been easy ones. Tom started radiation in July. Each treatment lasts 10 minutes and we are about 10 minutes away from the facility. So treatment and round trip amount to about 30 minutes a day, five days a week. He has 10 more treatments.

Doesn’t sound like much—30 minutes a day. Radiation doesn’t have the noxious effects (they aren’t side effects, they are effects) of chemotherapy. And yet, it has been a period of endurance for him. I am on the sidelines watching it. Helpless to do anything to make it more endurable as he prepares five days a week to do what he can to protect his bladder and bowel from the noxious effects of radiation.

Every Monday he meets with the radiation oncologist where he is asked questions to determine if he is being affected by the treatments. Any trouble urinating? Any pain urinating? Any diarrhea? Any fatigue?

No. No. No. And yes. Being hyper-aware of one’s bodily functions is exhausting.

There was something sobering about Tom starting the treatments. It made his diagnosis real. And then two weeks ago, we learned that it will be about a year and a half before we find out if the treatments are indeed curative. Six-month intervals of PSA tests. And even then . . .

That’s the reality of a cancer diagnosis. Once it enters into your home, it’s there as a ghost—if not an actual presence.

It’s the new normal—the realization that there is an end parenthesis, even if it isn’t punctuated with cancer. One never knows when it will come or how it will come or if it is your end parenthesis or an end parenthesis that leaves you the one left behind.

We all have that end parenthesis hanging out there. It’s just that it’s a bit more in our faces.

The new normal.

For me, it has made me wonder, why did I, a native Californian, end up in the Pacific Northwest for this journey into the wilderness?

The theatre group we threw ourselves into turned out not to be our tribe. It tends towards the cliquish, and Tom and I are the opposite of that. We didn’t fit. It was a loss on many levels, including losing a feeling of belonging. His diagnosis intensified our feeling of loss and isolation.

So why here? Why now? What?

Turn left at the whale.

That was the instruction I received to locate the Marketing Your Small Business class offered by the Jamestwon S’Klallam Tribal Library. The photo at the top of this post is the whale at which I turned left.

The culture that was here before Europeans arrived, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, is strong here. I want to say that their artwork is pervasive, but I think referring to it as artwork doesn’t quite fit. It is a work of being, rather than something that is done.

In June, a totem pole that tells the story of why the sun shines in Sequim was installed in the new Civic Center plaza. I had stopped by the House of Myth where the carvers were working on the totem pole so had seen it as it transformed from a piece of wood into a story.

The dedication included a ceremony conducted by the tribe.

Last night, I attended a storytelling event that featured Tribal Elder and Storyteller, Elaine Grinnell, who shared stories of her people, the Jamestown S’Klallam, the Strong People. The blurb that described the event said that her stories can, “. . . include retellings of canoe journeys in the wild North Pacific Ocean, where death is always a possibility that must be faced . . .”

As I listened to her last night, the answer to the questions, why here, why now, and what washed over me.

Turn left at the whale.

I live in a place that is a reminder of being. A place where the original inhabitants derived their spiritual essence from the environment that surrounds them—who recognize that the end parenthesis is a part of being.

The new normal that was actually the normal all along. It just comes with eyes that see more clearly, ears that hear more perceptively, and a heart that feels more strongly.

Turn left at the whale to discover your human being.

I cannot leave this post without thanking Renee Emiko Brock-Richmond, who taught the class, for her gracious and generous spirit. Check out her website.

Somewhere Between Times Square and a Happy Valley

I looked over my new business cards, ordered so I could get them in time for my trip to New York City where I was headed to attend Robert McKee’s Story in Business seminar.

I liked the color. I liked the design. I liked the font. Pretty impressive I thought. And then I noticed my address. I live on Happy Valley Road. Would New York City take anyone who lived on Happy Valley Road seriously?

I had been so looking forward to this trip. I had recently been raked over the coals by a local group who thought my voice sounded too authoritative. Women cringed. Certain men responded with hostility to any sentence that came out of my mouth. If only I could do something about that voice, they said, maybe then they would like me.

New York City seemed like a refuge to me. An authoritative voice was just talking there. It’s how you ordered dinner, hailed a cab, or asked directions.

But then I saw it: Happy Valley Road.

Would an address as optimistic as that make me seem as alien and untrustworthy to urban dwellers as my authoritative voice had to the members of the group in the rural community I now live in?

My first truly rural experience happened shortly after I moved here. A German shepherd started running after my car as I headed down to Happy Valley Road. It was getting close to rush hour and Happy Valley Road, let’s face it, is a more or less thoroughfare. As many as five cars might barrel down the road at rush hour.

I had recently moved from a suburban town so immediately went into protect the dog mode. I stopped the car and started talking to him. Loping up the road came a second dog. He was enormous and it was clear to me that he was a wolf hybrid.

It was a sign, I thought, that I had moved to the right place. I have a wolf tattoo on my right forearm. The wolf hybrid lay down in front of my car. How very trusting. I was moved by his trust of me.

Another car drove by and stopped.

“Do you know who these dogs might belong to?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied, “but they killed one of my chickens this morning. I think that one,” she pointed to the wolf hybrid, “was the instigator. I called animal control but their truck is out of commission. It got hit by a drunk driver last night.”

Wolves get such a bad rap, I thought as she drove off. Remembering that I was in a rural environment, I now worried more that they would get shot than that a car might hit them.

I looked back at my car. I had left the driver’s side door open. The shepherd had climbed in and was sitting in the passenger’s seat, ready for a trip to the drive-in. I walked around the back of the car, opened the door and tried to coax him out.

I turned and saw that the wolf hybrid had followed me around the back of the car. There I was right smack in between the German shepherd, who occupied my car, and the ginormous wolf hybrid who stared at me with a look that said, “I hear humans taste like chickens.”

Well this was a conundrum. Was the shepherd my friend, trying to get away from the bad boy chicken-killing instigator, or was this part of the plan? Were the two of them hunting down tasty treats?

And then it occurred to me that rural living also requires street smarts—just a different kind than urban living.

I don’t honestly remember how I got the shepherd out of my car, but he did leave. As I drove off I still wondered, was the shepherd trusting me to get him away from the bad boy instigator or was he part of the plan? I drove past a house that had chickens in the yard and realized it was all out of my hands.

I enjoyed New York. I stayed in a hotel in Times Square with its overload of neon lights and teeming humanity; walked half a block to see Love Letters with Brian Dennehey and Mia Farrow. Made sure I was always aware of my surroundings.

No one seemed threatened by my authoritative voice.

I returned late in the evening to Happy Valley Road and the crisp clear autumn air, the darkness barely pierced by the lights of the farm across the street and the homes sparsely scattered across the valley.

This is where I live, I thought—somewhere between the optimism of a Happy Valley where wolf hybrids stalk chickens and naïve newcomers, and a teeming city where a human hybrid might stalk you.

It makes sense to me that I can live in both places.

As for my voice, well, I’m a writer. It makes me neither predator nor prey. Anyone can have an authoritative voice. You just have to make that choice. Like me, don’t like me, just know that without a voice, I’m not a writer so I’m not giving it up.

I’ve earned it. Get over it.

Hurtling Along the Pacific Coast Highway

first carIt was 1974. I was newly divorced and about to turn 25. I had also recently purchased my first car—a 1963, factory-equipped camper VW bus.

Owning a car was a big deal for me. My parents were terrified of my owning a car. I still don’t know why, but it had something to do with me being a woman alone in the world, though I had been the “bread-winner” in the marriage I had recently extricated myself from.

The women’s movement was nascent, but loud. Mostly we blamed men. I was as confused as anyone else. So in an act of independence, I decided I would celebrate my birthday by driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, from San Francisco to Washington—alone in my newly acquired VW bus. Well, I had my dog Rita Louise with me.

The first night out, I stopped at a campground somewhere along the northern coast of California. I have no recollection of where. I opened my can of tuna fish, dumped it in a bowl, added mayonnaise, and made myself a sandwich.

And then, darkness descended on me along with a blanket of aloneness. No one to talk to. No one to share the tuna fish with. Now what do I do?

So I made my bed, tried to read, but drifted off to sleep with Rita Louise curled up next to me.

I decided I needed company.

And there, not far down the road the next morning, was a young man, longish blond hair, wearing an army jacket, backpack beside him, his thumb stuck out—the international sign for a hitchhiker.

I had hitchhiked through New England three years earlier with my husband and his two friends (that was my honeymoon, which probably explains a lot about why the marriage didn’t last). So, of course it was fine to stop and pick up a hitchhiker. To hell with that woman-alone-in-the-world-without-a-man-to-guide-her bullshit.

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

“Washington state but I’m not in a hurry,” I said.

He climbed in. I don’t remember where he was going, but as soon as I aimed my VW bus onto the highway, the voices started in my head: “He knows no one is expecting me. There’s no on else on the highway. What if he’s a crazed murdering hitchhiker?”

“This is my dog, Rita Louise,” I said pointing to her lying on the pulled-out bed behind us. One should not name a dog Rita Louise if one wants to present her as a fierce, defend-you-to-the-death attack dog. She looked like a Disney dog. Cute and scruffy.

My terror and uncertainty filled the car. Which brought out his terror and uncertainty.

We hurtled down the winding highway making small talk—uncertainty so dense that not even subtext broke through the unspoken questions. Me, “Why did I pick up a hitchhiker?” and my hitchhiker “Why did I get in her car?”

We hurtled, that is, as much as a 1963 VW bus could hurtle, until I felt the right back wheel start to drag.

“I think I have a flat tire,” I said, though I had no idea what a flat tire actually felt like. We pulled over. Apparently I did know what a flat tire felt like.

My hitchhiker gallantly offered to change the tire. Which he did as I stood by and watched my VW bus sway and shudder as cars sped by on the narrow, winding highway that is the Pacific Coast Highway. Traffic had chosen this moment to pick up.

“Let’s go,” he said as he climbed back in the car, his face ashen. It was entirely possible that this was the first tire he had ever changed—and he had risked life and limb to do it.

And yet, still in the back of my mind, I worried that he might be out to murder me.

I decided I didn’t want to camp out that night, so as darkness descended, I pulled into a motel. He asked if he could sleep in the back of the van. I said yes, and then spent the night peeking out the window to make sure he hadn’t driven off with it.

He didn’t.

We reached his destination a couple of hours into the next morning. I think that by that time we each had developed enough trust to figure out that this was not a scene in a horror movie. It was just a ride.

I don’t remember his name.

Two days later I ended up in Sequim, Washington, where my Uncle Ray and Aunt Mary lived. Their daughter Sue, her husband, and son lived in the trailer parked on their property. Ray was my mother’s oldest brother.

“Weren’t you scared driving up here alone?“ Sue asked me as we sat together on the couch that first evening. “Whatever you do, don’t pick up a hitchhiker. Girls have been murdered and they think it’s by a hitchhiker they picked up.”

I decided not to tell her about my hitchhiker.

So now it’s forty years later. My Aunt Mary died in 1984. My cousin Sue, who was never in very good health, died sometime in the 90s. My uncle outlived my mother. She died in 2006; he died in 2010, eight months after his 100th birthday.

I visited Sequim for the second time for his memorial. That was when I decided I wanted to live here—in Sequim. And so now I do. Been here a little more than a year.

A lot has changed in forty years. That assertion of independence for my 25th birthday, as tame as it seems now (think Cheryl Strayed’s Wild), was the starting point for the path that led to where I am today on the verge of turning 65. With that act, I began to break free of the expectations and confinement that seemed almost Biblical-pronouncements of what the world was supposed to be for me.

The road has not been straightforward—more like the winding Pacific Coast Highway I drove to reach the Pacific Northwest where I celebrated my 25th birthday.

I got a wolf tattoo on my right forearm to celebrate my 55th birthday. Two weeks later, in the shower I looked at it and thought, “Wow! This isn’t washing off.”

It gave me a new understanding of permanent. It took another couple of years to understand what that meant to me: no turning back.

I have come to understand that the obstacle to freedom that the women’s movement was birthing back then really had very little to do with men. I have come to learn that often the biggest obstacles to a woman defining her own being, her own liberation, are not men, but other women. Women who fear their own liberation.

But that might mostly be women my age. I suspect it might be different for younger women—women who were born about the time I was hurtling up the Pacific Coast Highway with my hitchhiker.

I wonder where my hitchhiker is. I wonder if he was as scared of me as I of him. I wonder if he became a corporate executive or became a maverick who defined his own way in the world. I had forgotten all about him until I did a writing exercise that asked me to describe a scene in a car.

Several years ago, while conducting research for a story that included the Vietnamese orphans who perished when a plane that was trying to save them from the fall of Saigon crashed shortly after takeoff, I discovered that there indeed had been a murdering hitchhiker who was terrorizing the Northwest about the time I had picked up my non-murdering hitchhiker. He was famous—the murdering hitchhiker.

It was Ted Bundy.

Things could have turned out very different had he been my hitchhiker.

Writing by Hand

writing by handI got As in penmanship when I was a kid. I found an essay I had written my senior year of high school—don’t remember even what it was about, just that I was applying for some kind of senior-year prize. I could read every word. My penmanship was neat and even.

I don’t know when my penmanship turned illegible. You would never know my name by reading my signature. Sometimes, I can’t even discern what I was saying in my journals—not even by context. I’m certain there are brilliant gems, words of an insightful genius lost to posterity because it’s impossible to interpret the penmanship.

Lately, I’ve made a commitment to writing so I can read what I’ve written by hand.

Writing by hand. I call this writing acoustically. When I’m in my Writing Shed, I use a fountain pen—a black fat, elegant pen made by Mont Blanc and left to me by my mentor, Ed Brush. Recently, I have discovered Levenger ink—Raven Black.

My hand-written writing comprises two things: recording the Animal Tarot Cards I draw each day, and my morning pages. I sometimes skip my morning pages. I think that is okay.

As I wrote today, I noticed I was writing legibly, neatly, evenly, taking the time to form each letter, careful to spell words correctly, and punctuate for meaning. The slow flow of the ink filled the white space on the page letter-by-letter, word-by-word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. Its clean smell wafted up from the page.

I slowed down. I took the time to smell the ink.

An actor friend wrote on his Facebook page today that he was taking his next step without a plan. His other plans had all fallen through, so he was just moving forward, leaving behind fear of what others thought of him, embracing his own life.

He was writing with ink.

My career path in life has been pretty non-existent. I got diverted from a career in health care administration when I quit a job after ending a relationship with my boss. I became a bar tender so I could spend time with my writing.

That was nearly 40 years ago. That decision was the turning point of my life—the moment I decided to embrace my own life, though I didn’t know it at the time. I backslid off and on, taking paths that had clearly marked signposts. I failed miserably anytime I tried. The signposts annoyed me.

Where Fred Astaire aspired for perfection, Gregory Hines would allow a mistake to take him to the next move, making it up as he went along if the occasion called for it.

He improvised.

It has occurred to me that improvisation, rather than a career, has determined my path in life.

The constant has been writing, though it has only been the last ten or so years that I found my voice.

I love writing on a computer. It allows me to keep pace when my mind is racing. Its fluid nature matches the way my mind writes, then edits. Backspacing letter by letter to erase a word, highlighting whole sentence or paragraphs to cut them, or cut then paste them somewhere else. Seeing the change instantly in black and white without the distraction of crossed out words, scratched out sentences or paragraphs, arrows and notes to indicate where to move a circled word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph.

It has its own flow—writing on a computer.

But writing by hand, with the pen that once belonged to Ed Brush, the flow of ink filling the empty page, the smell of ink transporting me into the moment—that’s an improvisational moment for me.

Much like life, there’s no Undo command when you write by hand. Make a mistake. Then improvise.