![]() America, meet Wilma the worm. And Baby, a velvet blue jumpsuit-clad plastic doll with a strangely bendable head. And dust fairy sequins. And John T Price, who knows how to bend a sentence like Baby bends that head—"completely backward, allowing him to stare at you upside down with his glassy eyes." Which is to say, the ordinary ups and downs of Iowa family life will amaze and sometimes smite you with joy in this loving memoir called Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father. You will also meet Steph, John's tolerant, positive wife and the mother of his two rambunctious nature-loving boys. You will never meet the novel John is never working on, due to teaching creative writing, repairing an old house with too many levels of decay, resisting doctor's visits (who needs the bad news?), and wondering why he feels so cut off from life (AKA exhausted) when daily his boys deliver muddy earthworms to his bed, shout at him to save every praying mantis in every Walgreens parking lot, declare a no-kill zone around their entire neighborhood (mosquitoes included?) and radiate so much joie de vivre in their buck naked red rubber boot clad explorations of John's back yard you want to lie down with him for a good long nap. But no, the next chapter brings new pleasures. New views on family life that make you say "oh, yeah, that's it!" Price's memoir is realism that redeems. And we could use some redemption, these days, help pulling our heads out of our own sorrows. If you've never had kids, there is the added bonus of gaining access to the adorable and maddening and crazy-great things toddlers say and do. I loved sharing the insider's view. (And not cleaning up any messes!) I met John Price at a literary conference in Kansas, and then heard him read in Denver. That's where I met Baby. And Pengy, his nemesis. And Gramma K. and her grouchy chihuahua. Do yourself and your dad and your best friends a favor—read this charming book and pass it along. Reading Daddy Long Legs felt like a huge nudge to pay attention to wonder and kindness and the release of self-interest. To join the family. But watch out for Baby—that blue velvet schemer has Pengy in his sights!
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![]() "I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life — except in hope, which is by no means bankable." Edgar Allan Poe Let me be honest. Poe and I both know firsthand hope is not bankable. Another year almost over, another book published, and earnings as a writer I have none. I haven’t yet succumbed to insanity with a black raven perched above me, dimming the bust of the Goddess of Wisdom, calling “Nevermore!” And yet, this December, this darkest time of year, when the cries of the citizens of the world—animal and leafed and wind- and wave-filled—shock me with their waning health, and I recognize the futility of willpower, and tremble at the ferocity of the world’s polarities, I realize my mortality and ask, as Poe did, “Is there--is there a balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!” And here things decidedly brighten. Because no raven but a Sufi teacher flies in the open window. He’s cawing about the end of the world, December 21, 2012. Will we succumb to catastrophe this time, or start a geo-spiritual renewal, or wake up the morning after the newest apocalypse and find things are exactly the same?
Click here to read Amidon's superb essay. Click here to read Poe's "The Raven." Look up. Breathe out. No judgment, first or Last, will end this “world of division.” Your openhearted view can.
Click here to listen to "It's the End of the World as We Know It." ![]() Why is it so often that humiliation and grace appear together, or in close proximity, if we are willing to listen? Do you remember a hugely humiliating time, when you were little, perhaps, when your spirit was reduced to cringing ashes? And did anyone or anything insert a saving grace? I Break All the Rules at Ben Franklin Elementary I am talking to a hundred of them about death, God and the Indians when one of them farts loudly and time stops; the silence and the stink hang there. All of the scoldings and whippings and public humiliations are not enough to stifle the low wave of giggles and then I say, Who farted? All hell breaks loose. The teachers are lined up along one wall; their faces freeze over. The principal rises, her jaw set like iron pipe. Jeffrey, she intones in an icy rage, you go wait in my office. NOW. The little boy rises from the sacred circle I have so carefully made. No, I say, able to save only one face, hers or his. I put my arm around him and sit him up front, next to me. When I am done she comes up to me with a look that would bring God to heel. 3 things you never do in a school, she says handing me my $50 check, Talk about God or death or violate a teacher’s authority. I give her back the check, which stops her in mid-reprimand. She seems pleased and dumbfounded. As I walk to my car, the students along one side of the building bang the windows and wave to me. They do not know I have just purchased Jeffrey’s redemption, all they know is that here is a man who laughs at farts and does not like the principal. —Red Hawk Humiliate, by root definition, means to bring low, to be made humble. So although we tend to avoid humiliation like some dread plague, the agonized captivity of it can somehow spring the trap for the soul’s release. Take two of the most humiliated women in Shakespeare’s plays, Desdemona and Ophelia. Hamlet wounds Ophelia’s heart cruelly, infecting her with his scorn and germy indecisiveness, until she drowns herself in the river. Desdemona—Othello’s perfectly attuned true wife—suffers at his hands literally, when he is duped into believing she has cuckolded him. Othello strangles her at play’s end. Put them in Pasternak’s hands and you get this. English Lessons When it was Desdemona’s time to sing, and so little life was left to her, she wept, not over love, her star, but over willow, willow, willow. When it was Desdemona’s time to sing and her murmuring softened the stones around the black day, her blacker demon prepared a psalm of weeping streams. When it was Ophelia’s time to sing, and so little life was left to her, the dryness of her soul was swept away like straws from haystacks in a storm. When it was Ophelia’s time to sing, and the bitterness of tears was more than she could bear, what trophies did she hold? Willow, and columbine. Stepping out of all that grief, they entered, with faint hearts the pool of the universe and quenched their bodies with other worlds. —Boris Pasternak, tr. by Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk Northwestern U Press, “My Sister—Life” Grace/release usually comes utterly unexpectedly. One great example of this comes in Father Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart. Boyle is a brand new priest, serving in Bolivia. He’s asked to give Mass at a native Quechua community high in the mountains where locals harvest flowers for their living. He starts a flop sweat on the drive up, because not only does he not speak Spanish well, he doesn’t even know mass in English without his missive, which of course he is missing. These people have not received holy communion for a decade. They await Father Boyle in a huge open field, hundreds of them. He recalls, “I hobble and fake my way through the liturgy of the Word, aided by the health workers, who read everything in Quechua . . . ![]() I’m like someone who’s been in a major car accident. I can’t remember a thing . . . lifting the bread and wine whenever I run out of things to say, I can’t imagine this Mass going worse. When it is over, I am left spent and humiliated. I am wandering adrift, trying to gather my shattered self back together again . . . I turn to discover that I have been abandoned. The field where we celebrated Mass has been vacated . . . I am alone at the top of this mountain, stuck, not only without a ride, but in stultifying humiliation. I am convinced that a worse priest has never visited this place or walked this earth. With my backpack snug on my shoulder and spirit deflated, I begin to make the long walk down the mountain and back to town. But before I leave . . . an old Quechua campesino, seemingly out of nowhere, makes his way to me. He appears ancient . . . As he nears me, I see he is wearing tethered wool pants, with a white buttoned shirt greatly frayed at the collar. He has a rope for a belt. His suit coat is coarse and worn. He has a fedora, toughened by the years. He is wearing huaraches, and his feet are caked with Bolivian mud. Any place that a human face can have wrinkles and creases, he has them. He is at least a foot shorter than I am, and he stands right in front of me and says, ‘Tatai.’ This is Quechua for Padrecito, a word packed with affection, and a charming intimacy. He looks up at me, with penetrating, weary eyes and says, ‘Tatai, gracias por haber venido’ (Thanks for coming). I think of something to say, but nothing comes to me. Which is just as well, because before I can speak, the old campesino reaches into the pockets of his suit coat and retrieves two fistfuls of multicolored rose petals. He’s on the tips of his toes and gestures that I might assist with the inclination of my head. And so he drops the petals over my head, and I’m without words. He digs into his pockets again and manages two more fistfuls of petals. He does this again and again, and the store of red, pink, and yellow rose petals seems infinite. I just stand there and let him do this, staring at my own huaraches, now moistened with my tears, covered with rose petals. Finally, he takes his leave and I’m left there, alone, with only the bright aroma of roses.” --Tattoos on the Heart p. 36-38 Reposting my most-read blog, from one year ago today. My ex-husband gave me this as a card once long ago, and I burst into tears. Here was the secret woman I was not, a woman writing in a room filled with air and light. A woman undistracted. The painter is Vuillard. No painter has loved women and interiors so dearly. ![]() I spent a dozen years with my writer-desires hidden in a tumble of life, like sheets, pulled over me. A potent simple love-filled sleep, and then I remodeled and walked and sewed and knitted and gardened my way through the birth-pangs of my first novel. It went nowhere in the real world. This longstanding pain remained private. The manuscript, after two years going the rounds with various publishers, collapsed in a closet from exhaustion. About a decade after receiving that Vuillard card, I visited The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. One painting in particular stopped me. I stood mesmerized by this very small, very intimate portrait called “Woman Sweeping.” I trembled and I wept. I simply could not believe the domestic radiance, the woman and the room warm as velvet. The patterns wrenched me out of my twentieth-century freedoms into the intimacy of belonging somewhere. ![]() This unassuming, glorious 17” x 18” painting is by Edouard Vuillard. Yet again, I didn’t choose Vuillard as a favorite painter. Vuillard chooses me. He helped me through the brighter years, the green period when landscape design and planting trees and still a bit of sewing for tranquility flung me into the arms of a new novel, a contemporary novel, the novel where perfectionism dropped in a puddle and I wrote like a drunk on fire. Guest House. How fitting that most of Vuillard’s paintings are interiors. Interlocking interiors which glow with belonging. Belonging is a central theme of Guest House. And still the story goes. Just last week, I went to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, to see a Post-Impressionist exhibit. I expected to be ravished by some of my old pals, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne. I have to admit I loved Renoir’s “The Dancer” so there was a small contest for my heart—but truly and utterly, Vuillard won the day. And I’m proud to say the painting among his half-dozen paintings which threw me over its shoulder and hauled me into its crazy den was “Profile of a Woman in a Green Hat.” Can you begin to calculate the impact this 8” x 6” card-sized portrait has in a hushed crowd of reverent onlookers? With a Picasso blaring trumpets at it from across the room? I laughed out loud. I love it dearly. It’s Olive Oyl asking Popeye to can the spinach and give her a kiss.
Simeran Maxwell, of the National Gallery of Australia, says about our Olive: The face is an enigma. The conspicuous brow evokes a variety of responses in the viewer. Is the woman anxious, persecuted or suspicious? Is she shying away from our intrusive gaze, archly teasing us, questioning what we are looking at, or crossly glaring at us? Simeran, she is saying: I am in my place. Don’t you envy my green lucidity? Edouard Vuillard lived with and adored his mother for sixty years, his dress-maker mother. He loved his best friend’s wife chastely and was often in their company. The radiance of his heart seems the topic of each painting; love of women and their interiors. A gal could do worse for a favorite. "I don't paint portraits," Vuillard once said. "I paint people at home." Ah, there’s the attraction. Being at home. NPR on Vuillard. The New Yorker on Vuillard. And for the first time on my blog, here is the man himself . . . stunning. I am rewriting my Utah historical novel, Tributary, for the last time. It will be published late this year. The first draft arrived in 1992. Only now, at age 55, with all of the events that have happened since I began, am I able to give my character Clair the full power and range of her voice. The most recent and remarkable life event came three weeks ago when I accompanied a Shoshoni healer, Rose Soaring WhiteEagle, to the Washakie graveyard thirty-five miles north of Brigham City. Rose was born in Brigham as were both of my parents, and all of my Mormon ancestors who displaced the Shoshoni from their lands. Tributary is set largely in Brigham City and northern Utah. Traveling with Rose in this deeply loved land, boundaries dissolved. She and I blessed the graves, marked and unmarked, of her ancestors at Washakie. I sang a lullaby in Shoshoni to the twenty children buried there. Animals and spirits guided us, because we asked them to. No act was taken without first asking.
This generosity is the generosity of the land. This way of living counteracts a separate self. Spirits in these latter days, and the healing has begun. ![]() I am reading Tattoos on the Heart with tears in my eyes, every chapter. Maybe it’s because I’m fifty-five. Maybe it’s because I know humankind can be kind. Maybe it’s one of those exceedingly rare stories of raising hearts into hope in the midst of a seemingly hopeless situation. Or maybe I just love bread. Father Greg Boyle planted himself in a tough barrio in Los Angeles many years ago, and like any good Jesuit, he let the sisters in his parish whip up a community salad of caring. Gang activity was overtaking their ‘hood, but these women were mothers with Jesus in their hearts. Whatever the trauma, they were mammas. And mammas didn't close their church's doors to sorrow, violence, poverty or fear. Two decades later, Homeboy Industries is one result, a place where former gang members can learn a trade, lose tattoos and bake and serve sourdough bread. Father Boyle masterminded this gang intervention program, touring and talking about his work to raise awareness and funds. If you need a steady dose of goodness, let G-dog give you a tour of his calling among the stressed and oppressed. He believes so strongly in the power of god's unconditional love, that he can hold that space and wait for gangbangers to come into the grace of it. He knows they can come into the grace of it. I love this book for precisely that, Boyle's snapshots of the infallible power of “not two.”* My favorite quote so far: “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals.” *From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Zen demands the practitioner to overcome the dualism operative in the everyday standpoint, which it speaks of by using the phrase “not two.” The use of the phrase “not two” expresses Zen's proclivity to favor the simple and the concrete, such that it is not expressed as a negation of dualism.
And here are two great videos of the Homeboy Industries. A documentary is in the works. We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return,
We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark, We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side, We browse, we are two among the wild herds, spontaneous as any, We are two fishes swimming in the sea together, We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings, We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals, We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down, We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets, We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey, We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead, We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other, We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious, We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe, We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we too, We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy. --Walt Whitman You may never have heard of Bikers Against Child Abuse. I hadn’t, until I drove past a rally in Tooele, Utah, and turned the car around and stopped. About a hundred men and women and their handsome machines milled around a deli parking lot. Every rider had a B.A.C.A. patch blazoned across their backs. They were happy and they were proud. ![]() I only had a chance to talk with a few men before the pack drove off, inviting them to my Truck Stop reading in Tooele on July 23rd. They said they’d spread the word. My friend Carolyn bought a black B.A.C.A. T-shirt with skulls and wings on the chest. I thought that we were through. But Carolyn mulled over that meeting. And I went online to the B.A.C.A. website to find out about their work. I watched two great videos, one short, one long. I sent Carolyn their beautiful, powerfully written creed. And she said, “Make sure they come to your reading. They’re protecting kids and your book’s about a neglected kid. It’s a perfect match.” So I called the Tooele chapter and extended another welcome. On July 23rd—the night of my first Truck Stop Reading—twenty minutes before we began, a strong kind man in black said, “You must be Barbara,” and I threw my arms around him and said, “B.A.C.A.’S here!” ![]() I read their creed aloud, to kick off the reading. And handed out B.A.C.A. decals. I read Guest House to two B.A.C.A. riders, one truck driver, the family of the restaurant manager who’d come to listen, and eighteen of my friends. It was a glorious night. Then Clutch and Droopy, the B.A.C.A. dudes, let me take a few shots with them and their bodacious bikes. And for the grand finale, we drove off into the sunset together, Guest House, Droopy, Clutch and I. I didn’t sleep much last night. I was so grateful for the long arms of men like that who care for children they’ve never even met because the children need their strength and their numbers. You find me a group with better intentions in this our day and age, and I’ll invite them to my next reading. Thanks, B.A.C.A. My only regret is I did not buy a T-shirt. The v-neck one with red piping. Size small. Next time. FROM THE BACA CREED:
I am a member of Bikers Against Child Abuse… My past has prepared me, my present makes sense, and my future is secure. I’m finished and done with low living, sight walking, small planning, smooth knees, colorless dreams, tamed visions, mundane talking, cheap giving, and dwarfed goals. I no longer need pre-eminence, prosperity, position, promotions, plaudits, or popularity. I don't have to be right, first, tops, recognized, praised, regarded, or rewarded. I now live by the faith in my works, and lean on the strength of my brothers and sisters. I love with patience, live by prayer, and labor with power. My fate is set, my gait is fast, my goal is the ultimate safety of children. |