An Easter Note: Spirituality, Blogging and Dorothy Parker

 

I confess, here on a sun filled Easter morning, I miss our Northern California redwoods and the hill of trees above our house. Where my husband would rise while it was still dark to hide the goods: jellybeans, chocolate eggs, malt-balls tucked inside the neon pinks and yellows of plastic eggs. From the upstairs bathroom window I’d see the flash of his legs as he powered along the acre trail ringing our property. We’ve new rituals to make at our sunny San Diego home where we’ve as many hummingbirds flitting amidst the birds of paradise as we used to have juncos in their black hoods bobbing along the deck of the old house.

Easter holds for me the memory of my father waking our family of five in the dark so we could drive to the top of the nearest hill to wait for sunrise. Remember? The chill of night air, the smell of damp grass and dew wet sneakers. Then, jostling shoulder to shoulder beneath sleeping bags with my brother and sister in the backseat, the last handful of stars starting to wane in the predawn grey as we stepped out and spread out our blankets on the hill. How still and quiet. Nothing to do but wait. Gradually the layers of grey, muting brighter. Til more silver than gold, the morning light surrounded us and the sun’s rim crowned.

I love that Easter has been an experience my body remembers, that my father gave us a way to know it. Watching the sun come up, connecting to something so far from us in the sky that radiates with the same heat as the core of the earth. Or, now that I’m older, a mother myself, reading Dorothy Parker’s, “Prayer for a New Mother,” written for Mary, which opens with the lines, The things she knew, let her forget again-- / The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold…praying that Mary have all the peace and time with her son that other mothers have in their earthly incarnations. By stanza three, she begs on Mary’s behalf, Keep from her dreams the rumble of a crowd, / The smell of rough cut wood, the trail of red… For now, there is enough time. To bask in the sun. To imagine one’s children grown, thriving.

I’ve also fallen down the rabbit hole into my new Transformative Blogging site, but an equal portion of my heart lives here still at Feral Mom, Feral Writer. My hope in launching The Year of Inquiry for Women Bloggers was to learn as much as I taught and the trail of synchronicity has already begun. I’ve met new writers, creatives, and bloggers to engage and play with along the way. Edith O’Nuallain, who blogs at In a Room of My Own is one such new writing companion (she also happens to be a mother) who took the time to interview me about the work I’m developing in my classes for women bloggers. Edith’s questions, such as her lead, “Why transformative blogging? What is the connection between the spiritual and the personal?” took me on a reflective journey you can read here: Tania Pryputniewicz on the Art and Craft of Transformative Blogging.  And Edith just posted part two of the interview here.

I’m throwing a good deal of my blogging energy into giving examples of each of the posts from my Twenty Inspiring Blog Posts You Can Write to Kickstart and Transform Your Blog worksheet (offered for free to email subscribers on my main site). Here are links to those latest posts:

Inquiry Posts, Chaucer and Blogger as Pilgrim (about question posts and considering blogging as pilgrimage)

Trickster Angels: Collaborative Posts and SynthesisBlogs (about hybrid blogs and teams and pairs of bloggers)

An Interview with the Collaborative Team Behind TheScience of Parenthood (about a humorous postcard blog put together by a writer-designer duo)

And the latest post I wrote for Mother, Writer, Mentor, is part of a “Postcard for Nursing Mothers” series I started, though my postcards are metaphorical:

Postcard for a Nursing Mother: Be Where You Are

And if you wish to read Prayer for a new mother, I found an online version of it here at Poem Hunter:

Prayer for a New Mother

photos by Robyn Beattie.

What the Heck is Transformative Blogging Anyway or How I Used to Not Sell Vacuum Cleaners

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

Over an omelet at Clayton’s on Coronado Island (and generous portions of coffee), tired of listening to my manic lamentations about the deluge of slicker, smarter blogging classes and a profusion of free e-books online on the same subject, my husband blurts out, “What the heck do you mean by Transformative Blogging anyway? Why don’t you just teach Blogging 101?”

As usual, my man’s not even intentionally after my goat. He’s just earnestly confused.

He perpetually forgets he married a poet. At least he likes to pretend that’s the case. Just like he likes to pretend he’s not spiritually connected. He’s the one our daughter visited before she was born. Here’s yours truly, the reiki-loving, tarot-throwing dreamer, who can’t stop free associating long enough to tie her shoes, famous for leaving apple cores all over the house as a child (ok, and as a grown woman) reading everything from Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe to Terry Tempest Williams's When Women Were Birds). And our firstborn appears in a dream to tell him, the husband--the former ten-year Ironman triathlete, women’s cross country coach, fitness instructor and mentor extraordinaire, etc., etc., more grounded in his body than a sumo wrestler—that she’s a reincarnation of a blue-eyed woman who formerly died in her 40s. Nope, he’s not spiritually connected.

There’s nothing wrong with my course title, I tell my husband (secretly hoping there isn't and trying not to sound too defensive). But maybe there is room to grow in other arenas. Which brings us to to the M word: Marketing. Which still calls up “used car salesman”, or worse, college memories of two miserable weeks pushing Kirby vacuum cleaners. Memories of singing How Much is That Kirby in the Window to the tune of  How Much is that Doggy in the Window at the sales meetings while standing up in front of cold metal folding chairs with half eaten powdered donuts still clutched in the palm.

And memories of pulling dirt pads out of the tiny, wet, dome window besmeared with dog hair and family filth meant to shame people into buying something they couldn’t afford. And that was back in the days of the land-line, when you were required to phone in to the top sales guy who barked out an excruciating set of questions you were required to parrot at the tired housewife as you dragged the tightening ringlets of the phone cord all through the dining room on the way back to the newly cleaned back bedroom. At which point you were invited to leave.

Except, Kirby didn’t realize they were sending us untrained artist types into the homes of un-shame-able people who really just wanted the back bedroom carpet cleaned for free. Nor did they realize how much we empathized with our desperate potential customers, that we might be too appalled to foist a vacuum cleaner on a family with seven children, so that the only way most of us made news at the sales meeting was by selling product to an unsuspecting uncle or aunt who took pity on us over the weekend.

I’m far better at the art part of life, making poetry movies and hooking up tangential lines of reverie, pushing the borders of association for what might reveal itself towards a world of beauty, wonder, and cross-pollination. That skill transfers joyfully and easily over to the work of supporting women reach their blogging goals and mine their dreams for how they’d like to use a blog as a tool towards exploration.

Any act one returns to repeatedly, with intention and care, has transformative value. Transformation simply refers to a process by which you just might be changed, or the act or instance of transformation. Or, in relation to math, it refers to “mapping of one space onto another or oneself." At the end of the class and our mutual exchange of ideas and exposure to new tools, if I’ve done my job well, participants emerge with a new blogging map.

Transformative Blogging II is a course for students who have worked with me in the past or for those somewhat acquainted with blogging. We delve more intensely into mask-making, tapping into the power of art to give ourselves three-dimensional room to play with the concept of on-line persona. Why would you need or want a mask or on-line persona? Why do we wear clothes? If you are curious, image-driven, hands-on hungry to work with a group of eclectic and motivated women readying themselves to blog, join us (sign up here). Or stop by my main website for the latest articles written in support of blogging women looking for post variation ideas:

On Blog Titles: The Ex-Boyfriend, The Blogosphere, and Why Your Blog Title Matters

On Blog Subtitles: The Oracle at Delphi, Your Blog Subtitle and Three Examples

On How to Posts: The How to Post or How Your Meander Creates an Aerial Snake to Remember

On Holiday Posts: By the Spell of the Spin, The Human Calendar, or How to Write a Worthy Holiday Post

On Interview Post Variations: Interview Post Variations and The Role of Travel Bloggers on Dwellable

And if  you have an opinion either way, cast me a vote: What does Transformative Blogging sound like it would offer?  Is my husband right (bless him for his opinions), should I change my title to Blogging 101? I welcome your thoughts.

Feral Valentines: Thomas, Nijinsky, Plath

The lines of the boys of poetry filled my head this Valentine’s Day (Thomas, Arnold, Pablo). By dusk, in the glow of night approaching and a lifetime’s habit of threshing the day for its beauty with attendant promise of rising at 3 am to write, I forced a reading of In My Craft or Sullen Art upon my unsuspecting husband just to get to those last lines describing how the poet “labours by singing light / Not for ambition or bread…But for the lovers….Who pay no praise or wages / Nor heed my craft or art.” A sumptuous capturing of longing by Thomas: nocturnal poet, moon-driven, hunter of the oblivious hunted lovers so sated by the warmth of one another’s arms they have no interest in poetry. Though the poem, and the force behind it, often outlives the particular lover, as Thomas no doubt knew, such wooing a waiting game.

Other equally adept interpreters of longing (besides poets): dancers. Isadora Duncan (married for two years to poet Sergei Yesenin) seized my imagination early on as a child. I no longer have the book (no doubt lost in one of the moves of childhood) but the image lingers of the scarf trawling behind Isadora, the axels around which it wrapped, the irony that the very fabric she so loved to swath and swirl about her played a hand in her death directly. But here in our home, it is Romola Nijinsky’s book Nijinsky on my shelf luring me with tiny dancer on its spine as image of mysterious lover.

Every portion of the miniature figure’s skin is covered in blue, black, grey, and plum geometrics. At the dinner table, after I’ve tried to capture Nijinksy’s ethereal strength and prettiness with words alone (“He was Russia’s “God of The Dance,” etc), I show my family the five or so grainy black and white photos portioned through the yellowing pages. Because he’s generous, knows to humor my occasional dark girl poet obsessions, my husband patiently retells the story of Narcissus to my boys as they stare intently at Nijinsky. In the pose (labelled Narcisse), his arms are raised but gaze averted in a gesture of abandon, vulnerability. But his pose also conveys refusal: the downcast eyes portend the tight internal focus which leaves no room for an earthly lover.

But such focused refusal has the power to draw feral valentines, as here, where Paul Claudel so succumbs to the intensity of Nijinsky’s presence that everything takes on a certain radiance: “There was a green half-light in the dining room, and the sun of midday with the intermittent cry of cicadas reached us dulled by the mango trees, there was a green shade on the cloth between the fruit dishes and the silver service, a gleam of emerald play in the glass salad bowl among the fragments of ice” (Claudel, preface to Nijinsky, 1934, Simon and Schuster).  Claudel admitted he had no reason initially to enjoy the ballet or expect to be affected by the dancer, but we know he’s smitten by the passage above.

 

I close today by acknowledging one of my favorites of the girls of poetry, Sylvia Plath. On this anniversary of her passing, Brain Pickings posted, The Quicksand of Existence: Sylvia Plath on Life, Death, Hope, and Happiness, pouring us once more through highlights of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (published back in September 2000), celebrating the whole, feral poet, with light of previously edited passages bringing Sylvia's passion and skill for hunting the moment down into focus. All is fair, as they say, in love and war: if you are going to love any girl, love all of her. Happy Belated Valentine’s Day.

Further reading:

Additional blogpost on the movie Sylvia: Phantom Narratives and the Reel Picture

 

Book: 100 Love Sonnets, by Pablo Neruda

 

Poem: Complaint of Isadora Duncan's Scarf, by Charles Jensen

 

Poem: Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold
 

Book: Nijinsky, by Romola Nijinsky

 

 

 

Sculpture Poetry with Sandy Frank

In spring of 2009, sculptor Sandy Frank and I started playing with the notion of putting poems on sculptures. I gave her a handful of poems and here's what she sculpted. Visit my website, specifically, Collaborations for Bread, to see her artwork side by side with corresponding poems: Someone (about an ethereal dream lover you might encounter between waking and sleeping), The Painter's Wife (about the opposite: a physical plane lover, in this case, a painter, a husband). We wrap for now with the sculptures for a trio of poems out in circulation: Querent, Seer, Selke...so we only showcase the sculptures for two of the poems....but...more to come.

 

And I want to extend the collaboration...by reversing the process, so here's my promise to Sandy...to write new poems based on her existing sculptures. We will post as we go. Further, I'd love to discover other work by poets and sculptors along similar lines; so please, in comments, add your links to work you are doing yourself or that of other artists you enjoy.

 

Someone originally published by Coe Review Press, 1996.

The Painter's Wife originally published by Line Break, 2009.



Transformative Blogging Class Openings

Just a quick note to say I still have room in my month long on-line Transformative Blogging class that begins Monday, February 4^th. Detailed course description here at Story Circle Network (open to members and non-members alike).

All level of bloggers welcome, as we start nice and easy with an inventory questionnaire designed to help you map out your goals as a blogger or recalibrate your existing blog. Support comes several ways: 1) via the extended brainstorming we do as a class  and 2) your teacher. Expect generous mirroring of goals, specific feedback and ideas for the next step, which, it turns out, may be anything from journal writing to writing a sample “about Me” to writing up a guest post for one of your classmates (and more).

 In support of Transformative Blogging coursework and women bloggers in general, I’ve been happily blogging on my website:

 Welcome to Transformative Blogging for Women: 2013 Year of Inquiry

The Ex-boyfriend, the Blogosphere and Why Your Blog Title Matters

The Oracle at Delphi, YourBlog Subtitle, and Three Examples

Stop by and join our conversation.

 

Found Angels, Snow Birds, and New Perhaps Maybes

All God’s angels come to us disguised…—James Russell Lowell

....and regardless of the mood we inhabit, in my case, an extreme case of grumpiness spurred by relocating to a new city (for backstory, see A Daughter, Sand Angels and the Sun).

With frustration lingering, children, husky and husband in tow, I plowed down the Coronado dunes of SEAL beach, desolate but for our family on that particular Saturday, where on any given week day, you’ll find SEALS-to-be swarming the sand, running in groups, one boat a group balanced and bobbing on the stocky necks and heads of the men.

 

Or storming the surf, linked arm to arm and dropping flat onto muscled backs right at the tide line, waves flowing in, flowing out, over their shivering bodies. Later still, after sunset, find them slipping stealthily into the water wreathed in the green glow of chem lights to withstand what they withstand on their way to soldier-hood.

But I wasn’t thinking about any of this, too lost in my own dark spiral of tension, when up out of the sand waved this little creature who turned out to be one of many angels formed by the convergence of late afternoon sun, beached pebbles and the patterns left by retreating waves repositioning the silvering to black and tan sand into robes and hems and waving arms.

I fired off a few images to my photo poem montage collaborator Robyn Beattie…(she’s the real photographer) and thus began an angel image volley, in which I scored the lovely blue pebbled image of Robyn's heading this post. And took delight in Robyn's recounting of photographs she coincidentally had just taken at the di Rosa Art Preserve in Napa of an installation we quickly fell into calling "the angel pit..."

...since, in the photo she sends me, it appears to be a jumble of white angel statues. Robyn tells me yet another angel, high overhead, like a sentry, circles the pit on an orbital track. I do not know the story behind the artist or even the true name of the installation, but no matter, the images haunt best, richest, unexplained.

Where mermaids took me by storm earlier this month, angels followed....first strung all along the beach...and then in the garage of our new house where I found perched above the washing machine a plaster angel with face averted and broken wing covered in cobwebs. And unpacking boxes, the cover of a journal from years ago with a silver metal plate angel bronzing slowly with rust.

But it is the sand angels I want to share here. This next one I call "Dancing Angel," because of her tiny feet peeking out from under her cloak.

Later, with a hot cup of tea and from the comfort of a leather couch, I felt overcome with gratitude for the mirth of nature to jar me out of my funk as I read James Russell Lowell’s poem, The First Snowfall (1847), written upon the death of his daughter Blanche, I stood and watched by the window / the noiseless work of the sky / and the sudden flurries of snow birds.

The poem turns on a kiss for his remaining living daughter who kisses her grieving father back, unware that his kiss was given to her sister / Folded close under deepening snow.

I continue to give thanks for the century (and its advancements in medicine) I inhabit, in which unlike Lowell, (god willing) I will not face the almost certain loss of one or more of my children and spouse.

 

I'll close with "Angel Heart" (above), and "Praying Angel" (below), ever aware of the intense field of the sand these angels emerge from, coalescing intermittently between the myriad bootfalls of men straining towards prowess, trainees large enough of heart to risk incredible physical and mental duress in the service of the desire to protect.

And I can't close without a nod of gratitude to one of my everday angels, poet Liz Brennan, who has promised not to ditch me and perserveres in collaborating on Perhaps Maybe poems despite our physical separation. She has recently posted The Color of Lightning, Tenderness Calls (a tri poet effort, with Tess P), and From a Mage's Staff (Liz hooked Tess and I up). There's still room for you to join us...send Liz a Perhaps or a Maybe and she'll write up the other half or volley it on to one of her other contributors.

 

Namaste...

 

Transformative Blogging for Women: 2013 Year of Inquiry

I’m honored to be heading into my second year of teaching Transformative Blogging for Women over at Story Circle Network—always a dynamic, alchemical exchange--such a joy to engage with each blogger who joins the circle. Out of the synergy of our shared inquiry comes new inspiration and blogging direction and well, just plain old fun. We get to the work, of course, but there’s more going on than meets the eye with this built-in accountability team: gentle encouragement, fearless brainstorming, leaps of faith. I hope you’ll join us—members and non-members alike are welcome; I still have spots left in this month-long workshop that opens on February 4, 2013. (Or contact me if you wish to work one-on-one—also an option).

I’m also very excited to announce that I have a Transformative Blogging e-workbook in the pipeline (based on the course). If you are not able to take the on-line class, maybe you’d like to work through the exercises we use either on your own or with a blogging companion. In support of the workbook, I am gearing up to provide an extended look at the world of women bloggers on my other website where I plan to kick off a year of inquiry this spring. I’ll be reviewing current blogging literature, reviewing blogs of note as well as fielding questions about blogging; hope you will stop by and join the fray.