Three weeks from today I will be in Iowa City. I’ve been going there for the past five years for the Writing Festival. My friend Selene came with me one year; a friend asked her, “Are you going to Iowa on purpose?”

My friend Selene being purposeful.

I’m a California girl through and through. Born here, lived here most of my life. Northern California, of course. Though I hear that Southern California has its charms.

What I like about California is its diversity of topography. Within four hours I can be in the mountains or Mendocino. Within five I can be at a dormant volcano or Hollywood.

It’s an interesting place California.

But I go to Iowa on purpose. It has something that California doesn’t: summer thunderstorms, lightning bugs, and cicadas that sing as day changes into dusk. They have waited ten years to emerge and sing their songs.

Talk about patience.

I might be learning patience; trusting that life unfolds as it should, if I pay attention to nuance. Nuance must be what a ciccada pays attention to – waits for the moment when it’s called to emerge and join the chorus. Talk about a miraculous moment.

Maybe I’ll try and record their music this year.

Last night, after dinner with friends, we talked about transformation. One friend, who takes the role of devil’s advocate, questioned whether we could ever really transform; took the position that we can never escape our birth language.

It was a difficult and interesting conversation for me, because I had to articulate what I meant about transformation, without having to be right and win the argument – an argument I didn’t know I was having.

I tried using the term paradigm shift, but he got irritated with the word, “shift.”

I asked him why it irritated him, because that was not my intent. He never answered that question. I think it was an important question, but he did not.

In the end he was satisfied that I wasn’t talking woo-woo nonsense, though I’m not sure he’s convinced, in the way I am, that we can transform.

So here’s what I’m thinking might be the metaphor for what I mean by transform.

Catepillars.

I sometimes think that catepillars are the most courageous creatures on the planet. They crawl along and at some point heed the call that tells them to cocoon. While they are in the cocoon, their matter turns gelatinous, they no longer look anything like they did when they crawled along the ground. In fact, they have no discernable form.

But then their gelatinous stuff forms itself into a butterfly. Their DNA changes.

They struggle to emerge, then have to wait for their wings to dry so they can fly, for what a day or so?

I mean what an experience: go to sleep, knowing a world that you only perceive crawling on the ground, then wake up with the ability to fly – to look down on the world you used to inhabit.

Maybe that’s what astronauts experience when they look back down on earth from space.

So maybe we can be caterpillars or cicadas. Trust that when a crisis gives us the opportunity to make a fundamental change in our belief systems – there isn’t enough for everyone, for example – that it is life calling us take our next step – which could be to take wing and fly or sing our unique song.

Dick Cheney challenges my ability to be compassionate. Why, oh, why does he and his family want us to be afraid – be very afraid. Perhaps his mechanical heart has too many shorts in it.

When matter doesn’t matter anymore, it changes into energy.

I first wrote that some fifteen years ago in an essay about Sally a friend of mine who had taken her life. She had planned on it for at least the three years I knew her; told me that she didn’t want to live past 70.

“The women in my family don’t do well after 70,” she said.

That’s when the vagueries of aging seemed to get them. Being a gambling woman, she wanted to fold her hand while she was still ahead.

Sally had an antic sense of things. She took the pills a day or two before her seventieth birthday, just before mailing out (snail mail – email was still in its infancy 15 years ago) a farewell letter to her friends. An afficianado of eros, her letter concluded,

“And those of you familiar with my birthdate will recognize that the timing of my exit allows me to claim as my epitaph:

Toujours soixante-neuf!”

Always 69.

I neither approve nor disapprove of what Sally did. I had decided when she first told me of her plans that I would do neither. I knew it would be of no use trying to talk her out of it and I wanted to keep the lines of communication open. Instead I would say to her that if she got to 70 and decided she wanted to give herself a bit more time, that would be fine with me.

About a week before Sally’s birthday, we had dinner with our mutual friend Jeanette who was slowly but surely declining into Parkinsons. I knew the deadline was approaching so I asked Sally as we headed our separate ways into the San Francisco night, “So, is this goodbye?”

“You can’t get rid of me that easily,” she said, and smiled her Sally smile.

I thought perhaps she had decided to give it more time. But, she stuck to her plan. I got her letter a few days later: the salutation: “To those I love –“; the closing, “Love and goodbye, Sally”.

I did not really understand what Sally meant – about having to live with the debilitation that can come with aging until I watched my mother’s struggle with emphysema. She went very quickly from being physically vital, to struggling for each breath she took.

She had her idea of when to fold them as well. For her, it came when she had to face the prospect of recovering in a nursing home from a broken hip, her health already so compromised that whatever life was left to her would most likely never happen outside an institution. So, since death was inevitable, she eschewed the antibiotics and welcomed pneumonia as the friend who would save her from what was to her a humiliating end.

Both women took matters into their own hands. Took control of their final destinies. Determined the difference for them between what was living their life and merely surviving it, and acted on it.

It was difficult for me to watch my mother’s struggle, for I knew that somewhere in the back of her mind was the question, “Well, when is enough, enough?”

For Sally, I don’t believe that was a question she wanted to ponder. I think she was afraid that once she went down that path, she would hold on too long; that she would not do well in the dance between fear of dying and fear of living. So, she took action before she had to dance that dance.

Sally appeared to me in a dream shortly after she died. She was laughing at the paramedics who were trying to revive her. She had no regrets about her choice. I wondered if she, as an atheist, was a bit annoyed that there was some kind of “life” after life. She wouldn’t say.

About a month after my mother died, while sitting on the patio of a local restaurant, a truck lumbered by towing a speedboat with the name Betty Jean – my mother’s name – painted on its side. It’s not exactly that I think she got reincarnated as a speedboat, but heading out of town for a good time on the delta was not out of sync with who my mother was.

Here is what I concluded with Sally many years ago: She asked that her ashes be added to a friend’s compost pile. Very much in keeping with Sally’s antic let’s-get-real sense of things (Did I mention that she took her vibrator to Mr. Fix It in Mill Valley when it stopped working?), so I assume they were.

My final image then is of life feeding life, even after it’s gone.

When matter doesn’t matter anymore, it changes into energy.

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

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.