On Turning 60

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Something Out There Somewhere

A writer’s prayer. Please, something out there somewhere, find me.

I have several decks of tarot cards. The deck I am currently most fond of is the Animal–Wise Tarot. I use the Tarot to give myself a three-dimensional picture of where I am. It provides me with metaphors to understand what is not immediately clear to me.

I suppose I am most fond of this one because it incorporates nature into the metaphors — and the accompanying book has a wolf on the cover.

Five years ago, I got a tattoo. A howling she-wolf tattooed on my right forearm right below my elbow: a local Livermore artist, Linda Ryan, did the original artwork.

The tattoo artist, and she is quite an artist, started scraping my skin away, embedding the ink as she went, waxing poetic about how once people get a tattoo, they want another, and then another.

All I could think was “Get this over with quick. I’m about to slap you it hurts so much.”

About a week later, I noticed that the wolf wasn’t washing off my arm. It’s not that I had thought it would wash away — I just wasn’t prepared for its permanence.

Then began, my odyssey to accept my forearm. This is not a small tattoo, as I had planned; it takes up about half my forearm. It cannot be ignored. It’s just so there.

I wore long sleeves, made jokes about it, endured shocked reactions by a few people – including my mother, who had trouble accepting my piercing my ears my senior year of high school. “You’ll always have holes,” she warned. “They never grow closed.”

My mother was big on certain dire warnings. “If you don’t wear a bra, your breasts will end up like those women in National Geographic!”

One can only imagine what she thought would happen to a tattooed forearm.

At some point, I remembered why I decided to get my tattoo. I asked a friend, who has a lovely Om character tattooed on his wrist, if it hurt to get one, expecting him to say no.

“Pain is a part of it,” he said. “Not because I enjoyed it, but because it marked a turning point in my life. It’s part of the sensory memory.”

Oh.

Then I re-read this passage from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves:

La Loba (Wolf Woman), the old one, the One Who Knows, is within us. She thrives in the deepest soul-psyche of women, the ancient and vital Wild Woman. She describes her home as that place in time where the spirit of women and the spirit of wolf meet, the place where her mind and her instincts mingle, where a woman’s deep life funds her mundane life. It is the point where the I and the Thou kiss, the place where women run with the wolves.

And I understood permanence in a new way: No turning back. Once you recognize the wild woman in you, you can’t ignore her. This is no out-of-control-woman-on-the-verge wild woman. This woman is wild because she is in sync with her nature, a nature that for years cultures have tried to destroy: by burning women at the stake; by mutilating their genitalia; by corseting their organs until they began to fail; by turning crones into frightful creatures.

I think that the she-wolf on my forearm howls to remind me to banish shame from my writing shed and from my life. Dismissing shame opens the door to compassion.

Who knows how much we can accomplish when we walk through that door.

I am writing this in Moody’s Café in Mendocino. The proprietress set a mug filled with wonderfully fragrant flowers next to me, asking me if their fragrance was too much for me. It wasn’t. Soon, other patrons were burying their noses in the flowers. None was disappointed. One woman came by for a second dose, and then went back to writing.

The flowers were wild azaleas.

Take a few minutes to be wild today.
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A bit more from Mendocino:

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Over Time, This will be More Graceful

Twitter.

I’ve avoided it, almost resented it because I feel like it’s just one more thing I can be distracted by (by which I can be distracted – okay, Ed Brush). I mean what do I care about the minutae of someone’s every day life?

And then there was this from my friend Judy’s blog – a twitter (tweet?) from a friend of hers:

“I just changed over oxygen tanks for my father. My first time. A lot of dictations from both sides. Over time, this will be more graceful.”

My heart slowed down when I read this, as if time itself had slowed down so the words could embed themselves in my heart, between its beats.

Over time, this will be more graceful.

It isn’t true that roles get reversed as a parent’s aging makes them dependent on you. You don’t become the parent and they the child. It’s just a new and confusing relationship, for both sides – a dance for which there is no choreographer. You make it up as you go along. You improvise.

I’m beginning to think that most of life is improvisation. Fred Astaire strove for perfection. Gregory Hines used his mistakes to take him to the next step.

I had to improvise a lot in my mother’s final years. She was fiercely independent, but depended on me, just as her mother was fiercely independent and depended on her. Your job is to lead the dance, but not seem like you are.

My mother died right in the middle of a misstep in our dance– a particularly graceless moment. And so I thought that grace would be forever denied me.

But, death ends a life, not a relationship and it’s up to the survivor to carry it on. That’s a paraphrase from the film “I Never Sang for my Father.”

My mother died three years ago this July. At first I felt kind of numb. But then the numbness wore off and I fell into a vortex of questioning – particularly wondering whether or not I had been a good enough daughter. Could I have done something to make the dance more graceful?

Finally, sometime over the last year the answer came to me in the form of forgiveness – no, there was nothing I, or she, could have done to make our final dance more graceful. There was no choreographer. Just the two of us finding our way through. It was up to me use the misstep to create a new dance – one I would have to dance solo.

I had to improvise. Work with what I had, not what I had hoped for. And trust that I had made my choices based on love, my love for her and myself. And assume that she had done the same. And then I had to forgive us both for not being perfect. Our dance was more like a Gregory Hines, than a Fred Astaire dance.

But I like Gregory Hines dances more than I do Fred Astaire’s. I think they had more life to them. In forgiveness, I found the grace I thought was not mine to have.

Over time, this will be more graceful.

Sometimes, great wisdom is found in the minutae of everyday living.

And now for something different . . . a bit of grace from Mendocino

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Writes of Passages

Okay, that was one of my more fun puns to write.

A newly discovered writing friend, and it’s so nice to call her a friend, recently wrote a blog about the writer’s dilemma: the business side of writing. How to get your book published in a world where there are “. . . ever-changing literary/publishing trends.”

The way I have dealt with it is to take the Lana Turner approach: sitting at the soda fountain looking cute and waiting to be discovered.

I’m not particularly proud of this (and it hasn’t been particularly successful – but you never know) and think that I need to get over myself.

So my new goal is to start sending my work out. A couple of writing friends have suggested that we have a weekly coffee klatch so we can give reports on what we sent out that week. A kind of weight watchers weigh-in for writers if you will.

The saddest part about doing this is that getting a rejection with a handwritten note is considered a step in the right direction.

Oh, my. I think that’s how I felt in high school. I hope I have girded my ego with enough maturity to actually endure this.

In the meantime . . . one needs to keep writing. And it’s easy to wonder, “what’s the use” since the odds of getting published are so high, and even if you do the odds of your ever coming close to recouping your costs are astronomically against you. I spent two and half years on perfecting a short story that I discovered in my Iowa Summer Writing Festival class last year should probably be a novel.

The task seemed daunting, so I’ve approached it as a novel in short stories. I’m actually enjoying it. It gives me more time with the characters, which deepens my understanding of them, and forces me to become more understanding of what it means to be human.

Which leads me to a book by Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth. I’m reading it as part of my research for being the dramaturge for the play Metamorphoses. It is quite literally short (you can read it in an hour or two). I got to the last two pages and found this:

“. . . like mythology, an important novel is transformative. If we allow it to do so, it can change us forever.”
page 148.

And then this:

“If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.”
page 148-149

That’s why writing is worth it — worth doing it with respect for the power of language to transform. Or in the words of William Faulkner, worth “the agony and sweat.”

As for the business part of it, well, that’s not going to go away. However, the Greek word for marketplace meant a place for debating and exchanging ideas.

Perhaps it’s chutzpah on my part, but maybe there’s something we as writers can do to help transform the marketplace — the publishing world that thinks in terms of trends and demographics. I mean the one undeniable demographic is that we are all human, and humans need good stories as certainly as they need food. I think we are meant to live our lives, not merely survive them. Perhaps the recent economic bubble was an expression of that – a desire for something “more than.” Money and things weren’t it.

I don’t know what the answer is (perhaps five), but I feel better and plan to keep on writing, with the knowledge that writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.

You will all be invited to the release party of my best-selling novel, a work of such transformative power that it humbled the schmuck who said there was nothing unique or compelling about my writing so he joined a monastery and took a vow of silence, an act for which writers everywhere are applauding.