On Turning 60

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After the Storm, Lured into the Wilderness

Here’s to not burning people at the stake — ever again.

So what are angels? Perhaps the opposite side of demons. Instead of trying to keep you small, they tell you grow. And that is the soul’s journey, to grow and change.

I have been on blog hiatus for more than two months.

I meant to write blogs. I even started one or two. But I became consumed with directing Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. It was a great experience for me. It turned out that the roles I assigned to the actresses were just the right one for each of them. They were roles that forced each of them to go deeper — to find the vulnerable place in themselves that matched the material.

Being vulnerable on stage is courageous, and what is most effective in telling the story.

My job was to provide a safe place for them as they discovered and uncovered this place, and then brought it to the character.

My morning pages during this time period were interesting as well. As I read back through them, I found that I had written on more than one occasion that I didn’t seem to be having any epiphanies — that I seemed to be writing about very mundane things. Maybe they were mundane.

They open on December 8 with this:

So George was cremated today, and I feel at sixes and sevens.

On December 31st I wrote:

The fire (of my rage) has burned itself out because I found what I wanted to be accepted for and then found those who accepted me.

On January 3:

Being fearless I think means confronting fear and leaving it behind. Like the statue of David, fear and courage come together. Courage has something to do with the heart, and the heart is what determines the temperature at which a body is cremated.

On February 2 (Groundhog day):

In the end, you just love the person. The flaw in the tapestry that lets life through.

My final entry on April 5 included this:

So my world has become big enough for me to be in it . . . I started these (the book of morning pages) the day that George was cremated, and they will end with my resurrection.

I think the fire of my rage used to be my homing beacon. It showed me the way home when the demons told me I was getting too big for my britches; those voices got put through the emotional food processor of my quest for acceptance, and turned out — well a processed message that said “There is no safety in vulnerability.”

What I discovered was that the only way to find safety is by bringing compassion, rather than judgement, to vulnerability. That’s when my angels’ voices kicked in. The ones that said “Pay attention to fear, it leads you to your courage. Courage is in your heart. And the heart determines the temperature of cremation — it is the most enduring part of the temporal world we live in.”

I don’t need those fires of rage to help me find my way home now. I stopped wrestling with the demons. Instead I set them free. I thanked them for protecting me in the best way they knew how; explained that I knew where home was now. I didn’t need to stray from it to find acceptance that was not mine to find.

As I worked with each actress on her monologue, I came to appreciate what Eve Ensler has done with The Vagina Monologues. An article about the upcoming performance unleashed a flurry of comments — mostly from women I suspect. One was particularly upset that middle aged and older women were involved — that it was somehow particularly offensive that these women were moaning on stage. Another claimed that the play turned women into vaginal objects — rather than celebrate our intellectual capacity. Others were upset by the horrific stories. Better left untold they thought.

To me, these commenters missed the point. To me, the play brings to light that fear of women’s sexuality has provoked responses that make us mute this very vital part of our humanity. The responses range from genital mutilation to domestic violence to women being considered the spoils of war to women being shamed for the vitality of their sexuality. For me the play allows women to reclaim something that is essential to the temporal world we inhabit.

The women I directed were courageous. Some had been victims of domestic violence; some had been raped or sexually molested; those who worked at a shelter heard horrific stories every day. Others had just simply learned to mute their vitality by lessons passed down through generations of women who had learned to seek safety by denying their most vital selves. To tell the stories contained in the monologues, they had to experience their own anger, fear, and shame, and then transcend it.

They told the stories so that we can start changing the story that normalizes abuse and violence.

I didn’t even remember that Easter was the day before when I wrote that my pages would end with my resurrection. The day before that passage I had drawn the deer card from the Animal Tarot Card. Its meaning is the lure of the pursuit. The accompanying book notes that in many myths and fairy tales, the hunter is drawn into the wilderness in his/her pursuit of the deer. It is in wilderness that the hunter learns a new consciousness.

On the very last page of my morning pages I wrote this:

So I think the deer leading us into the wilderness is the thing. It takes us to those wild places that endure long after civilizations rise and fall. It takes us to the natural world, where the laws of nature show us true love: Love of ourselves. Love of others. I’ve connected with others in a way I’ve wanted. People whose hearts are open and willing to look.

It’s interesting what you can do when you find your home in the wilderness.

All photos are by Paul Hara — simply the best.

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Prepare the Soul, Make it Ready, Move it to Tenderness

“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.”
From “On Writing” by Raymond Carver

“Words lead to deeds . . . They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.”
St. Teresa

I walked in the arroyo last week. It’s about two blocks from my house —a little bit of wildness that has endured as suburban neighborhoods developed around it.

I came back from my walk and grabbed the first book that caught my eye as I sat down to write in my writingshed: Call if You Need Me – the Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose, by Raymond Carver.

One of the reasons I am captivated by him is that he is of and from the West Coast. He went to Chico State — I lived in Chico around the same time (he started in 1958, I moved there in 1961). When he wrote about John Gardner, his mentor, taking them to sit on the lawn I could see the town and the campus. I was in junior high at the time and the college always seemed — well so college-like to me. Neither of my parents went to college, so it was an exotic setting to me.

He taught at the Iowa Writing Workshop in Iowa City — I attend the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and absolutely love Iowa City.

He got married at 19 and had two children by the age of 20. He became a raging alcoholic, relied on his wife to support the family, and treated her like shit – as alcoholics have a tendency to do. He had affairs himself, but nearly killed her by hitting her on the side of the head with a bottle when she dared to stray. They eventually separated and divorced.

He stopped drinking in 1977 and confronted the wildfire of his alcoholism, met the poet Tess Gallagher, who, I suspect was his soul mate, and went about his writing.

His early publication history is a bit of a horror story; his editor, Gordon Lish, edited his short stories without consent and then published them.

Carver wrote “Errand,” the short story about Chekov’s death from tuberculosis, in 1987. Shortly after it was published, Carver began coughing up blood. He was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer and died in 1988 at the age of 50.

So even I am wondering what Raymond Carver has to do with my walk in the arroyo.

I think it has to do with the distant sound of a train.

One of my favorite things when I walk through the Arroyo is hearing a train pass through — a distant sound. I feel life simultaneously passing by and standing still.

I start to wonder who is on it, where they came from, where they are going. Are they running away from something? On the way to visit a relative? Maybe there’s a hobo or two riding the rails to wherever.

Of course, mostly now, the trains are carrying containers that get filled in far away ports and then placed on a train at the port of entry. Carrying things.

Yet that sound makes memory present tense for me — untethers it from time — while also giving it the context of reflection.

I think that turning those memories into words is what writing is to me. My voice.

All writers benefit from good editors. They help us identify where our voice is not clear.

But for an editor to do otherwise — as Lish did with Carver — is to wipe clear the sensory memory of the writer. For writers to relinquish those memories, that voice, as the price for acceptance, is to participate in their own oppression.

Even when the editor making the changes is the one inside the writer’s head.

I wonder if our voice is the hobo and the Arroyo: both a bit of wildness in the mundane world that is part and parcel of our everyday life.

Carver nearly lost his life to alcoholism. When he stopped drinking he began to stand up for his voice.

I found St. Teresa’ quote in “Meditations on a Line from Saint Teresa” — I think it is a talk Carver gave about writing —which is in Call if You Need Me – the Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose.

He concludes the piece with this:

“Long after what I’ve said has passed from your mind, whether it be weeks or months, and all that remains is the sensation of having attended a large public occasion, marking the end of one significant period in your lives and the beginning of another, try then, as you work out your individual destinies, to remember that words, the right and true words, can have the power of deeds.

“Remember, too, that little-used word that has just about dropped out of public and private usage: tenderness. It can’t hurt. And that other word: soul — call it spirit if you want, if it makes it any easier to claim the territory. Don’t forget that either. Pay attention to the spirit of your words, your deeds. That’s preparation enough. No more words.”

In the end what we have is our words. They should be the right words. They should be punctuated so they say what we mean them to say, so they have the power of deeds, so they can prepare our own souls and move them to tenderness.

Two things. I wondered if hobos still exist. They do. They have a convention each year in Britt, Iowa. I want to go to it.

And . . . checkout the lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo’s Lullaby.”

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Once Upon a Blue Moon

“Once in a blue moon” either means two full moons in the same month or thirteen full moons in the same year.

At one point in history, the moon did appear to be blue, but that was a result of the ash and gases released when Krakatau erupted. Didn’t have anything to do with the moon being made of blue cheese and ever since I saw a rabbit in the moon, I haven’t been able to see the man in the moon.

I don’t know what any of this has to do with my silence, but I haven’t written a blog for close to a month – since my friend George died. After writing about that, I didn’t know what to say. And then I learned that my friend’s eight-year old granddaughter died – killed in a crosswalk in Prague by a truck driver who was distracted by the weight of his own life.

I really didn’t know what to say after that.

The past decade has been top heavy with loss. I’m sure enduring it has made me stronger. But it’s also made me more fragile – leaving me with the skin of a snake that has just slithered out of its old skin.

I’ve been looking at that old skin, wondering what to do now that I’ve shed it. I’m a little scared to see that it is no longer a part of me. I’ve even tried putting it back on, but that’s like pushing string. It just doesn’t work.

So I have to deal with where I am right now. It’s a little bit scary.

My biggest epiphany as I wrote my way into the New Year in my morning pages was that my rage seems to have burned itself out. I just kind of noticed it was gone – the way the lighthouse keeper wakes up at two in the morning and asks “What’s that?” when the fog horn that goes off every hour on the hour doesn’t go off.

I think that for years my rage was my lighthouse, the homing beacon that showed me the way back to myself when the Greek chorus chanted, “You’re too big for your britches, you’re too big for you’re britches, who do you think you are?” over and over ad infinitum.

I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve sought out that chorus recently, hoping to find some comfort in the familiar. Like a horse running into the burning barn.

But there is no comfort in what was familiar.

Life is more fragile than I ever imagined. I see the photographs and videos of my friend’s eight-year-old granddaughter and wonder how can this be? How can a life force so strong be snuffed out with so little regard for rhyme and reason?

For some reason, it makes seeking the familiar to keep fear at bay a fool’s errand for me. My choice is to accept change as the only thing that is certain.

So here I am with a new chorus waiting for me to cue them up with a new refrain. And I wonder, what will I write?

Once in a blue moon, something rare happens. Life is fragile. I think it’s important to seize those moments.

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A Solstice Greeting

Please feel free to share this greeting.

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Beauty, Peace and the Grandeur of Death

’There were no human voices, no everyday sounds,’ she wrote.
‘There was only beauty, peace, and the grandeur of death.’”
From “Errand,” by Raymond Carver

My friend George died at 5:20 in the evening on Thursday December 3, 2009. He was sixty-three.

I met George when we were among the first group of volunteers for a hospice program at San Francisco General Hospital. It was early 1980.

We worked with people for whom economic circumstance made daily reality an uphill struggle. Our job was to help people through the system so their dying had some dignity. My first patient was a woman who was diagnosed with oat cell cancer just as she emerged from rehab.

At monthly support meetings we talked about our patients, exchanged ideas for how best to support them, and drew strength from each other. Death, we learned, was intimate, and we were privileged to be a part of that intimacy.

It was in this context that I became friends with George. A friendship forged in the intimacy of pausing to recognize that death has come and gone and a life has ended—what Raymond Carver refers to in his short story “Errand,” a story about Chekov’s death, as the “grandeur of death.”

Shortly after we began volunteering, what started as random articles on page fifteen of the San Francisco Chronicle about a strange trend in cancers found in young gay men, morphed into more alarming articles about a “gay cancer,” and then became the tsunami that was AIDS.

San Francisco and the General were ground zero for confronting the tsunami head on. While gay men died in shameful isolation in hospitals around the world, the General created an AIDS Ward that was revolutionary in the way it treated people who had terminal illnesses.

The room usually reserved for doctors and nurses became a place where patients and medical staff met over coffee. The emotional chasm between patient and physician or nursing staff did not exist on this ward. Since AIDS at that time was such a devastating disease, cut a swath through an otherwise young and healthy population, success was not measured in cure, but rather in how to maintain quality of life even as it was ebbing.

Staff did not draw away or reject patients as death drew near. They stayed close, opened their hearts. The system was set up to welcome compassion—including compassion for those who provided care.

The hospice program continued to serve all of the population at General as it integrated the AIDS patients, usually young, otherwise healthy men.

George was gay. As long as I knew him, he never tried to hide it. But I think that for him as well as a lot of gay men, being gay had to take on a new meaning of identity—the response to the disease was delayed because it was largely affecting gay men, who deserved to die because they committed acts that were an abomination against God.

I think it was that commitment to his sexuality as well as what he learned in those early years at General, that drew him to Maitri, first as a volunteer and then as a board member. He became the voice of conscience about who they needed to remember to serve: those who would otherwise not be served.

Perhaps because he was gay, George saw and embraced the beauty in women in a most unique way. My personal experience is this:

In the early nineties, while riding the California Street cable car he saw a woman and thought, I really like her energy. “As the car passed by her,” he said, “I realized it was you, Karen.”

For the first time in my life, I felt—desirable—not because he desired me, I knew he was gay, but because he recognized something in me that I thought was forbidden to be: a woman in charge of her own destiny.

I suspect that the reason gay men and strong independent women connect so well is that we have both had to overcome notions that our very beings were somehow a threat that might unravel social conventions and bring a society to its destruction.

Those notions are probably true. Our very beings do unravel those social conventions that bond people together through hatred for and fear of the other. By thriving, we are living proof that being authentic is more life affirming than is surrendering to hatred of yourself.

George and I kind of lost contact over the past few years. My move to Livermore put more of a physical distance between us and that seemed to also put a distance in our relationship.

In retrospect, I think my part in the distancing had to do with facing childhood demons—demons I thought I had dealt with during the thirty-four years I had been gone. These demons were not easily dissuaded. For those who followed my blog over the recent months, these were demons who were not happy about being written out of my story. Facing them was like running a gauntlet with them throwing old messages of fear and loathing at me.

My rage was fully engaged.

I have no idea how this affected my relationships. But I know that in August, 2008, when I met George for coffee shortly before he was due to check into the hospital for his hip replacement operation, I was depressed. Felt like a loser.

It was during his hospitalization for his hip replacement that George learned he had a sarcoma in his pelvis. Sarcoma, a soft tissue cancer is very nasty.

When he called to tell me his diagnosis, I asked, “How are you?”

I don’t remember his answer exactly, but it was clearly polite, designed to protect me.

“No,” I said, “How are you?”

He exploded in anger. “Oh, I can’t go there.”

He apologized for his outburst, but that kind of set the stage for our relationship over the following year. I spoke with him one other time, and he was angry with me then, too. I suspect that the awkwardness between us was born in the context of our initial friendship—a time of facing death head on.

I don’t think George was ready for that. And I could never find a way to meet him authentically while I was acutely feeling the prospect of losing him.

Finally, late this last summer, the chasm began to be bridged. But I was still on the periphery of his life. That felt peculiar to me, because of the intimacy we had had over the years.

It pained me. I feared that I had misread our relationship over the years—a fear that spilled over from the final year of my mother’s life.

George weighed heavily on my mind and heart. Then I remembered the story he had told me about being on the cable car, and wrote a draft of a poem that came out of that memory.

When I spoke to him the Friday before Thanksgiving, he seemed like the George I had known over the years. Whatever shield he had put up to cope with his illness and impending death had come down, as had my fear of misinterpreting our relationship.

We found a project to work on together—preparing for publication the blog he had posted that tracked his journey from diagnosis to search for wellness to acceptance that he would not recover from the illness to his preparation for death.

I prepared a design for the publication and sent it to him. The next time we talked, it was clear that he was starting to drift. “I know I haven’t been there for you, Karen,” he said.

I assured him that he had always been there for me.

It occurred to me that in this brief exchange, we had acknowledged the distance that had occurred between us and that it didn’t matter. What mattered was the connection, and that distance had not broken it, only covered it in the fog of everyday living.

I don’t regret the distance—our lives just took us in directions that created the fog. We each had to pay attention to what our lives demanded.

Maitri was home to George in his final days. His request was that following his death, he lie in repose there for three days. His request was based, as far as I know, on several traditions that believe that the soul stays connected to the body for three days after death.

I received the call about George’s passing on Thursday evening as we were having dinner with our friend, Rob. He had come over for dinner and to play music with Tom. The two (Tom on piano, Rob on saxaphone) played for me, their music carrying me through the first shock of grief and loss.

I woke on Friday and knew that it was important for me to sit with George.

The staff had prepared his body, washing it with water scented with cinnamon and vanilla. He looked very natural lying in the bed, a soft green comforter covering him. His mouth, as rigor set in, had formed the beginning of a smile. He looked as if he was at peace with himself.

Others had come to sit with him as well. As we spoke, I kept expecting him to open his eyes and join us, felt that in many ways he was there with us.

I will miss George. I want more. I want more of those times that George and I talked on the phone, met over dinner, went to the symphony together. We came away each time energized, with new insights about the course of our lives.

I want more.

One of the gifts George gave me was to help me send my demons scurrying. His dying forced me to see that life has an expiration date—and that it was time for me to embrace my life, instead of keeping it at arms length through guilt and shame. Without guilt and shame to nourish them, demons quickly fade away.

It feels strange to have someone who shared a particular moment in a time of my life gone. George was a touchstone. I fully expected that we would grow old together, sitting on the park bench like bookends.

I carry those memories of times we shared alone now.

I believe that, as a culture, if we can figure out how to have compassionate birth and compassionate death, that everything else will fall into place.

George did his part through his actions in life and his dying to show us what compassionate death means.

And on Friday, as I sat with George, there was only beauty, peace, and the grandeur of death.