Notes from the Road: Footprints, Storefronts and Valentine Mimes

This Valentine's Day we did the moonscape—the snowdrop white Pismo Dunes, pristine and lovely where the kids babooned up and down for hours. Sheer cliffs away, we never lost sight of our three speedsters against the two color panorama—miles of blue sky, miles of warm, gold sand with wind-sculpted ribs we couldn’t resist footprinting.


I set this storefront photo aside for the infamous day of love--took this photo on a recent excursion with my niece Natasha in San Francisco.






And this one—we both loved the way the houses across the street reflect over the statue’s torso.

Also wanted to share this intriguing call for submissions for an anthology from writer LA Slugocki at her site: Tales from the Velvet Chamber (http://talesfromthevelvetchamber.blogspot.com/). She is looking for:

Stories that radically revise stereotypes of "bad women" in the Bible, in myth and in fairy-tales. Stories that aren't afraid to be literary, transgressive, dark, and sexy. Think: Lilith, Medea, the Wicked Stepmother, the Evil Witch, Pandora, Eve, crones, sibyls, fates, muses. Contemporary adaptations are fine. Mythical adapations equally welcome. The spine: We begin to see these women through another lens.

I came across this call for entries, and a plethora of other inspiring ideas, through She Writes (http://www.shewrites.com/) —a fabulous network comprised of over 5000 women writers, editors, bloggers, you name it, all talking about writing and what it takes (from first time writers to seasoned published, book-toured authors). Hope you’ll check them out, and consider joining. Sometimes I get “internet head” or “high speed fog” with all the social networking outlets tugging at my writer’s time, but I love having the option to post specific questions and mingle with writers from around the world minus cost of airfare.

I had it in my head to post this poem for St. Valentine, but was eclipsed by the road trip and a less than spectacular ability to keep a grip on my (self-imposed) deadlines while driving, so here it is, a belated, cynical Valentine, just for fun, contrary as it is to my current state of relative equanimity.


Envy

the mime his concentration
like the chased in a pair of lovers
lost to the now, so busy moving,
gloved hands ever edging the door,

or women their addictions of the moon,
marking their gardens with morning blood
in cups of tin to ward off deer (in the knotted spent lust
of chocolate, tears over road-kill, yelling at the kids)

or young boys their absolute
disinterest in girls, given
the thrill of dead cars, bottles to shoot,
a can of beer to split in the fort

or Cupid his logic, messy as wolves in Grandmother’s
clothes and hatchets. Granted: one’s fated to grow,
bad love’s still love. And after, one’s less likely to join
the casually cruel in the audience willing the mime to falter.



I will be reading a couple poems at the March 6, 2010 mini WOW (Women on Writing) Conference at Skyline College for a 3 minute open mic spot I've been promised. Haven't read in public since 2005 (Copperfields Bookstore, one poem), so I'm a little nervous. But even I can get through 3 minutes of reading. By 2015 maybe I'll be up to 3 poem readings. Looking forward to the face-to-face contact with other writers after so many months of e-mail or blog comment conversations.

Coronado Storefront

Thresholds

I spent today interviewing my friend Lydia Stewart regarding the volunteer work she has done for the past eight years at the California Parenting Insitute (for an article forthcoming at The Fertile Source—I’ll post the link when live) on behalf of women, children, and families in Sonoma County. Lydia serves on the board of CPI, all while raising her three young boys. I asked her where she’d like to see her career lead her in the future , and we ended by talking about how much of one’s heart goes into non-profit work (though, after today, following Lydia’s example, I’ll try to remember to say, “social profit” work). How or when do you pursue your own dreams, I asked her? With such a rich history of giving behind her, this Valentine’s Day I wish her love and courage to pursue her heart of hearts. Lydia, you inspire me.

A second friend comes to mind as I reflect on love in its many forms—writer Penina Taesali, who I’ve been blessed to know for the last 19 years. We met in an undergraduate poetry workshop at the University of California, Davis, and became fast friends. She, like Lydia, is a community saint, who has given tirelessly to the youth and families of Oakland; in recent conversations with her, I love hearing she’s beginning to turn that same compassion towards herself as she pursues her goals as a writer. In honor of Valentines Day, I wanted to post this blockprint design, titled, “Threshold,” I carved and rolled out in July of 2001 for Penina when she lost her father. In my notebook of blockprint drafts, I had recorded:

Penina shares my sun, moon, and rising sign—our birthdays two days apart-- my “older sister”, 11 years my senior. The news of her father’s heart attack registered as a physical pain in my heart and I needed to make this for her. Her father: deep orange and red, poppies, monk, wise man, gentle. A beautiful, tall, strapping Samoan man with a large Samoan heart. He nurtured Penina, urged her to follow her heart and write. I intended to have many poppies, but instead, this is what came: a door, the spiral path to the heart. And the door-- a false barrier, falsely open or shut, because love remains omnipresent. While I intended to have many flowers, simplicity won out: one heart, one door, one flower.

I’m hoping to roll out a cleaner print for you--but that could take some months to get to--seems I've given away all my favorite ones in the mail. Consider this one a bookmark. I also hope to get permission to post one of Penina’s beautiful stanzas she’s written about her father so you may have her words; my love to them both and to you all.

Bouquets

"...the/mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either/knows enough already or knows enough to be/perfectly content not knowing..." Mary Oliver, from "Daisies", Why I Wake Early

Four deer eat Spanish moss on the hill above my cabin from a tan oak tree top downed by the last storm. Their burro ears twitch warily when I raise my cup of tea off my writing desk for a surreptitious sip, the movement enough to stall them, green moss tines wriggling in their jaws as they asses me assessing them. I have the mild urge to pet them, but know from the Fair Zoo how bony they are. On their end: a mild urge to flee--a stalemate--clearly they sense I’m just another deranged writer hunkered down to my desk chair five feet beneath them, a double-pane window and a damp, steep incline between us.

I’ve been waking with night dreams vapored. Fire: out. Deck boards: amphibious. No end to the litany of to-dos, and the wheel of days showing no sign of slowing. What gives, when all the tiny tasks matter and one remains dogged by the desire to do each task well? You layer your time, right? Take stock of the good, stop dwelling on the unfinished, the how far to yet go?

I remember taking a class from a tarot reader/astrologer named Quan Tracey Cherry in Iowa City, arriving at his doorstep with a bouquet made up of the ferns and flowers I’d found between his door and mine. It was fall, and flowers were scarce—a dandelion or two. I came across a cardinal feather, some overgrown stalks of grass gone to seed, some browning ginkgo leaves. Plenty to harvest, when I let go of my idea of bouquet and looked closely along the sidewalk for what was actually there: the odd bit of bark, the lichen covered twigs.

This year, driving, in the absence of sidewalks, weeds, and tarot, I’m gathering animals. Tracking them on the daily drive to and from town, two, sometimes three round trips. The yield: crows, crows, always raucous crows. Blackberry sparrows fleeing my van on Green Valley. Wild turkeys, gangling away, flustered, around the man-made pond at Lazy G Ranch. The kids and I spout out a greeting to the black goat, speculate he’s forgotten he’s a goat, so near he loves to stand to the white horse. One pert, pesky blue-jay right before Bones Road cruises the curve for crushed acorns. On Mill Station, the dark brown elongated heart-shaped shoulders of five turkey vultures congregate over a deer carcass in the ditch. Finally, in the rain plush grass of the kids’ school, forty or more robins feeding, and one massive crow strutting in their midst.

Later, animal totems of the day recorded in my journal, I spend a futile portion of the night trying to reassemble Rudy, my son’s 52 piece interlocking balsa wood Tyrannosaurus Rex. A xmas gift from my brother’s sweetheart, Rudy took residence in my son’s heart from the moment Maria took the time to snap him together (smart girl, suspecting accurately the fate of gifts delivered for future unsupervised assembly). Rudy’d fare better glued together and placed high on a shelf. But once named, along with my daughter’s matching interlocking Brontesaurus (Sally), he acquired stuffed animal status and slept under blankets. Ever since, we find dinosaur spine bits and forelegs in the couch, under the table, in the tangle of blankets at the foot of the bed. Though five goes of scotch tape refuse to repair his broken tail, Rudy’s got most of his outline. I gather up his errant parts and plunk them in a cup, tail end ferning up into the air.

"3 a.m. New Melleray Monastery..."

...is up at Autumn Sky. New Melleray Monastery is one of my favorite places in Iowa, as I wrote in an earlier post.

Also live at Reality Hacker : an interview with Sandy Frank on her first completed Beings of Light sculpture; photo featured here was taken by Robyn Beattie.

This particular sculpture rests on our piano at home (a gift for my husband). It stands nearly 18 inches by 6 inches across, and given the light inside, is exquisitely warm to the touch. One's palm fits perfectly across the stomach--something you learn when you live with one of these miniature beings of light. I had to give her temporarily back to Sandy for a photo session, and I miss her already...

Contact info:

To view Robyn's photos: www.robynbeattie.com,

To view more of Sandy's work or to learn about the sculpture classes she teaches:

www.sandyfrankfineart.com
email: sandyfrankfineart@gmail.com

Storm, Revisited

One January several years ago, 55 mph winds coursed through our redwoods. I woke and walked down the stairs to light a candle. As I blew out the match, the lights went out, followed by the unmistakable snap of a tree trunk. I called my husband and ran up the stairs to my daughter's room. Before I reached the top of the staircase, the tree fell, missing the house, but landing across our deck and damaging the hood of our car. After the third tree fell, we gathered up our children, backed the van out from under the tree, and drove ten miles to my father's home. All told, 8 of our tan oaks hit the ground (all previously infected with the sudden oak death virus), one of them narrowly missing one of our cabins, one crushing the clothesline stand the ladder to the children's play structure, another taking the power lines to the house down.

Since then we've taken down the remaining infected oaks near the house. And called in a tree expert to help us gauge the health of our Doug Firs, oaks, eucalyptus, madrone, and redwood groves. In addition to taking a few questionable other trees down, our expert recommended listening for high wind warnings ( and considering staying elsewhere when such storms came along).

So this January 2010, Monday night at 3:30 or so a.m., when one of our healthy oaks fell (root ball and all) parallel to the power lines (60 feet of tree missing our roof and cabins), I hatched an alternate plan to sit out the storm with its predicted 60 mph gale winds in the day, expected to drop to 40 mph at night. We packed up and headed to the family house overlooking the Russian River, arriving just before bedtime. We rolled out our sleeping bags in front of the fireplace. As I stepped out onto the back deck to survey the river, bits of rain stung my cheek; porch lights from the resorts across the way and the arc of my mother's flashlight glinted to reveal the vast, brown, swirling waters, cresting up over the bulkhead of the patio, creeping towards the sauna building. Eerie, but lovely--the sound in the dark, of river eddying around the tips of the bamboo lining the path to the dock.

We slept to the hum of the fireplace fan blowing its warm air over our heads. At 7 a.m., I rose, took stock--calling a river mom for a road report--was it wise to risk the drive to school? No sonner had I hung up (having decided to brave it), than the house shook with a terrific series of bangs--of the unmistakable tree variety. My mother and I froze--grabbed one another's arms. Two of the kids were safe in the kitchen eating burnt oatmeal. The other, still sconed in his sleeping bag, I rolled away from the sound. We waited for the rest...of our imagined tree. I opened the front door, flashlight illuminating a 20 foot redwood branch extending from the roof, spear tip resting on the van windshield.

Adrenaline propelled me under the branch and down the stairs to back the van out. But the brute limb, as I backed up, just came with me. I got out. I thought about it--but not with my best "woods smarts"...I had a feeling the heavy end on the roof might boomerang down and take out the car windows. But at some point, your "woods stupids" kick in and you just take an action. I yanked the spear tip free of the windshield wipers. It teetered peacefully in the air above me. So I shoved it. Hard. Bam...the good fairy of falling tree limbs for wives dealing with storms while husbands are out of town came to my rescue. The branch crashed down perfectly between the van and deck, missing the windows, my head, etc, denting only a foot of the garage door and leaving in the bedroom roof a spike of wood, from whose tip rain dripped steadily down onto the carpet.

The next morning, waiting to meet the contractor, a light rain persisits. Despite the threat of skyborne limbs, I'm still here. In the river house, in love with the wide river. And the dim barn blue of a heron with its slow lift, heavy winged ascent, and breath defying u-turn in its neck.

An Average Life

This is poetry’s province; a form of deep memory; a place from which to witness the intangible, unspeakable thresholds of incarnation we misname an average life.--From The Poetic Narrative Of Our Times, by David Whyte

The same mist I drove out of this morning at 8 a.m. hung in the trees at 2 p.m. when I returned with the kids from school. At dusk, thicker still when I step out the front door for newly split madrone, startling a deer from behind the truck where she’d been feasting on gutter acorns out of the mounds of dumped leaves of Oakmont and elsewhere. I watch her three darting leaps up the hill, listen to an owl settling, hooting, in the top of a Doug Fir, wipe the black bark sludge from my hands….a few of my father’s old fence boards into the stove, and the madrone soon catches. While soup simmers, I sneak in a few sentences of an email to Denmark on the kitchen counter laptop, though something (timing of the Gods? obsessive 360 surveillance at 30 second intervals?) causes me to glance over my shoulder, in time to see my 3 year old under the table where he’s managed to plug in the iron and set out a few large silk napkins like his sister did last week. So matter of fact, intent, I have to admire his careful movements.

I finish the job for him, ironing his “cape”, tying it about his shoulders; then, rummage for a new undisclosed location for the iron. Naked but for his warm little cape and superhero boxers, he throws his arms around my neck, demands to give a kiss of thanks on my forehead. I carry him outside, where we listen together for the owl—a long moment. But dusk has deepened, the woods silent. A moss-damp, mist rich stillness.

Which invites listening. Attunement. I talk often with my mother friends about rhythms of togetherness and apartness—how as one’s children grow, one’s need for retreat changes. After eight years of raising children, I’m surprised to find occasional moments of shared solitude—if there’s such a thing…often in the woods (listening for owls) on our acre, or out at the ocean, the sense of renewal is as good with my family as when (if) I’m alone. (Or is that the result of writing regularly at night when they are asleep, or the result of no longer breastfeeding--no longer sleep deprived or in total hormonal uplink with the youngest).

I sense a heightened collective listening as we enter 2010. David Whyte’s post, The Poetic Narrative of Our Times, raises some beautiful concerns. Whyte writes: It may be that we live in a time of collective heartbreak, where for the first time in history we are being asked to witness the disappearance and reappearance on a global scale of what it means to be fully human; to give away our identity and see how it returned to us through a sincere participation in the trials and necessities of the coming years. Opening with descriptions of night mist and mountain-scapes, Whyte uses nature to ground his accurate but sorrowful observances and gives sobering examples from political as well as family life scenes to make his point about how much we stand to lose. On a positive note, he suggests, It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. He calls on poetry to give an “unflinching” view of life on life’s terms, with all of its "terrible beauty" (see the rest of his post here: www.huffingtonpost.com/david-whyte/the-poetic-narrative-of-o_b_378536.html.

As a fond straddler of present incarnation and night time dreamlife, I’ve noticed a paradox: the more deeply I relax into my body before falling asleep, the more likely it is I’ll go lucid that night in dream. As if the “aloha” to each individual cell fires their imaginations to let go of their anchors and congregate in the astral body, take flight, out of the constraints of time and particular incarnation. I think we’ll need to inhabit both: earth as well as star realm, present incarnation as well as those of our dreams, in order to forge a consciousness our planet and our children might survive.

Further reading:

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle—I’m halfway through this excellent compilation of spiritual understanding—with its “evolve or die” call to growth.

Story of a Storyteller (Cathryn Fairlee) and A Musician (Stephen Pryputniewicz)

Since the birth of my children, my father Stephen Pryputniewicz has cared for my children one day each week so I may pursue my writing (and wife Robyn as well, once she joined our family). I maintain this blog and write due to the blessing of their time. I wanted to start 2010 by thanking them—and writing about Stephen’s upcoming performance.

Currently a keyboard accompianist for The Hot Curtain Revue (a West County Comedy Improvisation Group active for the last thirty years comprised of founding members Scott and Darlene Kersnar, members Susan Packer, Frank Ferris, Steve Page, Michelle Jensen, and light techs Mike and Waits Taylor), Stephen performs next (piano, guitar, drum) with storyteller Cathryn Fairlee on January 23rd at Guerneville Community Church from 7-9 p.m.

How did you become involved with Cathryn’s work?

I first met Cathryn when I played at her wedding years ago. Last summer Cathryn showed up at a house concert and we spoke of Patrick Ball's storytelling punctuated by harp music. Soon after, Cathryn saw a Hot Curtain Revue performance and suggested we collaborate. Cathryn is part of a storytelling association and has traveled to many countries (including China, Guatemala, Ireland, Bali, Mexico, Turkey) but wanted to bring her work to a West County performance.

How would you describe her work?

Cathryn tells traditional stories from all around the world often including songs.

What draws you to her work?

I love storytelling in general, and Cathryn's is very theatrical. I especially like her use of distinct voices for various characters.

How did you choose the music to go with the work?

We started with a survey of music I already can play, and a handful of Cathryn's stories...kind of a synergistic jam session. Hard to describe: you had to be there. There are a few stories where I play an entire piece that sets the tone, some stories have little sprinkles of music throughout and other stories have music at the beginning and the end.

What have you learned by working with storytelling—how is it different, for example, than working with River Repertory Theater (a former West County Theater Company)?

I have learned to be flexible, and to listen carefully. It is similar to working with theater: knowing the story well enough to anticipate the music cues. However, storytelling is not scripted like a play. The story is memorized, but not verbatim. So the words that cue a piece of music may vary from telling to telling.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a piano player for improv theater?

Making the music loud enough for the actors to hear, while still being able to hear the actors! Having dozens of musical snippets at the ready for any mood.

How about challenges of playing music as a background to storytelling?

Rebuilding my guitar finger calluses after years of no guitar playing.

Any other upcoming performances where people can hear your playing?

To be announced: a performance by the Hot Curtain Revue, likely this spring.

To find out more about Hot Curtain Revue or upcoming performances with Cathryn:
contact Stephen Pryputniewicz at: kapoosta@sonic.net

or Cathryn Fairlee at: cfair.@monitor.net

Performance location: Guerneville Community Church, 14520 Armstrong Woods Rd.
Reservations by the 20th: $10; Tickets at the Door: $12. 707-433-2297

Lively Q and A to follow.

Watch for an article forthcoming in January by Cathryn Fairlee regarding this performance in The West County Gazette.

For more information on Patrick Ball (Theater of Legend-Celtic Harp and Spoken Word): www.patrickball.com