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| Sea Ranch Chapel |
The
same feeling that leads us to a “memory” of primeval hermaphroditism has taken
people a step further to the image of the entire universe as having once been a
single human being... Rachel Pollack on The World Card, "Seventy Eight Degrees
of Wisdom."
I woke at 4 am to make a thermos of coffee to add to
the van already stocked with gear for two weeks away from home, including a
cooler with two frozen hummingbirds and a blonde sparrow I mislabeled a
flicker, sorrowful casualties of the cats shrugging off their belled collars.
My plan: to deliver the birds to an artist in Northern California. She promises
to use their feathers and revere their tiny skeletons which fractionally alleviates
the hangover of feline destruction, my guilt at fostering the urban food chain.
In the hours of unbroken reverie, one child per seat
row in the van sleeping soundly as we stop-stop-go in the perpetual rush hour
traffic of LA, I metabolize the week’s events. I’ve been blogging about the anxiety
of exposure that keeps welling up as my book approaches November release date
and private poems (such as Peer Counselor) about the past take their place in online journals and print
publications...
….so that private narratives become the occasion for
public conversation…giving others from that past a reason to reach out,
wondering where or how they fit into the tapestry, which is both the risk and
the reward every artist and writer faces when sharing work.
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| Butterfly Shield by Peter Pryputniewicz |
Driving, I registered this physical sensation of the
body as some kind of magnetic puzzle piece, for so long cloaked, emerging into
view. The rest of the pieces, or players, drawn to reconnecting, re-making our
collective map, putting themselves in right relation, or asking to relate. Where do I fit? What was my part? Yours?
A beautiful, if unnerving, side effect—let’s redraw the collective body,
light-filled, all of us grown, matured, bringing our best and most loving
selves to re-align in order to forgive and heal one another.
Emotionally it is complicated: perpetrators have
mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, cousins. So do those who suffer
at the perpetrator’s hands. But even those labels (perpetrator, victim) push us
too easily on opposing sides of an equation. This part of the journey for me
isn’t about blame, but moving on. Yet sometimes you can’t move on until you admit
out loud what happened and how.
And if you’re a writer, and/or a blogger, you weigh
each biographical revelation against what it might set off in others and
yourself. How do you know if you are
going about all of this the right way? Or if it matters to keep living one’s
way to the answers to the questions, out loud, word by word? Are you doing more damage than good? Is it time, like a dog with a wound, to don the proverbial scone of that white cone so you'll stop revisiting the wound...time to just let it be, enough already?
Traipsing through such mucky fields of doubt for me
requires staying in close contact with other riskers until some omen appears.
And appear it did, the following day after driving through the geography of
trespass under a three quarter moon:
Through
night’s hull, I pass
My
hometown. Fog fades treeline,
River’s
dim black hem…
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| Osho-Zen Tarot by Ma Deva Padma, Osho |
Fog shrouded the road and I pulled frequently over
to let a handful of throaty pick-up trucks zip by. I rolled down the window to
clear my head and in rushed that familiar dank marshy smell of ditch weeds.
Later, as the road ascended the cliffs, the saltier tinge of ocean air. It was
close to 11 p.m. when I safely made it to my destination.
The next morning, I sat with tea and a cherished
writer friend. Knowing my love for tarot and nothing of my internal grief over
drawing others from my past into the tapestry of my now, she hands me her Osho-Zen
Tarot deck (see below for links to the artist and deck reviews). Halfway through the deck, I spot it: the artist’s depiction of The
World Card as puzzle, one piece foregrounded, the very one that will
complete the face of the soul traveler at her third eye. Perfect out-picturing
of this leg of the journey—the third eye’s ability to help us access visible
and invisible realms, to witness self and others with compassion.
And later, less tarot-ish omens arrive in the form
of correspondence from readers thanking me for the level of reveal they’ve come
to expect on this blog, and voicing reminders to remember the exquisite power
of nature to heal trauma.
The coastal flowers, vibrant purple and orange,
celebrate with me on my morning walk. The deer and the dragonflies come into
focus as past loses its grip.
Dragonfly’s
stuttered
Thrum.
His hoard: eight slight wings sheathed
Violet
by the sun.
Dragonfly, I’m later told by another writer, offers this
medicine: let go of old illusions about the self.
Like the soul traveler in the Osho-Zen Deck, it’s true, I
wish to start anew, standing under the silver hoop of zero as the happy Fool, the
clueless Troubadour poised to quest for the next garden of poems. Maybe I will even
trust the Gardener again, given the kind and loving bravery of other travelers from
both past and the now coming forward to take my hand.
Which
puzzle piece have you kept hidden? What does your sanctuary look like? How are
you arriving?
Additional
Notes:
I'm looking for bloggers to join me live for Beginning Blogging at San Diego Writer's Ink. We start already Tuesday night and still have room for a few more. Visit my teaching page to sign up.
Balancing the Ledger of Relationships: Questions in Novelist Sandra Hunter’s Losing Touch is up on my She Writes Blog. In this reading
diary, I look at the universally haunting questions Hunter poses, the kinds of questions
that make us rethink our habitual judgmental ways of viewing our loved ones.
The tarot-poet friend mentioned above is Michelle
Wing. Her book Body on the Wall deserves more than a mention, in fact I wish I'd read it in time for my earlier post, Revising Guinevere, Ten Writers Transforming Rape or When Trees Mattered More Than Boys. Wing, part poet, part lightworker, helps others cross the bridge
of the unthinkable with the program she founded for survivors of domestic abuse,
Changing Hurt to Hope. Wing is also currently editing an anthology of writings
by participants of the program (due out in the fall of 2015).
The dragonfly-medicine poet friend is Lisa Rizzo (In The Poem an Ocean, reviewed here at The California Journal of Women Writers by Marcia Meier).
Another beautiful poet, risker, brave light, Ruth Thompson of Saddle Road Press (Woman with Crows, Here Along Cazenovia Creek). Here's an interview with her I know you will love on writing poetry, “I wrote myself back to life."
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Photo Robyn Beattie
Cover Design Don Mitchell |
Related posts on the process of exposure and healing from date rape:
Thumbelina, Innocence Found at Feral Mom
And finally, I'm in the process of mapping out my book tour for November Butterfly slated to start November of 2014.
I'm open to suggestions for reading venues, and looking forward to reading--please send me an email if you have suggestions. I'm looking at pairing readings with poetry workshops for small groups and venues.
I'm working on a static page for the book on my main site, but in the meantime here is one of the blurbs I'm thrilled to feature on the back cover:
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| Photo by Robyn Beattie |
In Tania Pryputniewicz’s collection, November Butterfly the lyrical I, looks into the mirror to find a different face with each pass. In this way, Pryputniewicz maintains the intimacy of the poetic I while expanding the personal lyric to a global resonance. As Ophelia, Jeanne d’Arc, Nefertiti, Amelia, Lady Diana, Marilyn and Sylvia come to reflect, we too find ourselves dissolving into the mirror—it is not only ourselves we see in the looking-glass, but the eyes of generations staring back at us. With her gift of deep empathy, imagination, and lyricism, she gives readers the chance to live again and again and again.
–Nicelle Davis, author of Becoming Judas
Marilyn, the poem, originally appeared at Salome Magazine and will reappear in November Butterfly in Section I featuring the iconics. Section II focuses on Guinevere's Camelot and Section III looks at present incarnation. Overall, the book's poems constellate around notions of how women over time thrive at the crossroads of love and motherhood given the inescapable trials of intrusion.
Robyn Beattie's website.
June 30, 2014 update: writer Barbara Ann Yoder just forwarded me a link to the site of The Embodied Tarot, which outlines a list of beautiful ways one could use the body and the tarot to grow and heal. Jennifer, founder, also has a facebook page you can visit.
Photos:
First and third to last photos are taken inside The Sea Ranch Chapel, "gift of two Sea Ranch residents who wished to offer a nondenominational sanctuary....It was their hope that all who enter will find a measure of peace in the blending of art and purpose amid surroundings of beauty and inspiration." (from note inside chapel)
Butterfly Shield artwork, copyright Peter Pryputniewicz.
Robyn Beattie's website.
I never met her--but there she stood on the back of one of the bedroom doors in our house, gracing a poster taller than my parents. I remember falling asleep to that black and white image: city street, sturdy legs, skirt billowing up, one hand holding down the pleats but not really. It was either my brother’s poster or a poster we pitched in for my father—I can’t remember—grade school. Maybe 7th grade.