Old Recipe for a New World

Glorious, long armed light reaches through the windows.

The cottonwoods and willows along our dusty river are slowly giving way to gold and yellow.

New sorrows and joys come with each turning. Ripening, sweetness, decay. Struggle! Surrender! Despair! Gratitude!

Oh, yes, truly I’m forty now.

Lately, uncertain what to do with myself, and also guided by an older self (a younger self? A past self?) that was once more certain, I’ve been cutting scraps into strips and piecing them together.

Yes, there is the gist of a pattern, of form. But to create in a medium that is free of language and even image is a particular joy. Something beyond the mind, beyond knowing.

Though these could be infinitely useful, they don’t have any particular purpose.

And they are so fast! I can make one while the rice cooks, the teenager procrastinates, the right word comes to finish a poem, or start a poem.

In other news, this weekend I’ll be part of a living quilt (I get so carried away with these metaphors, sorry), ie a literary festival.

On Sunday at 3:30 mountain time, I’ll read alongside the poet Michelle Otero as part of the Fort Collins Book Festival. If I got to organize a book festival, it would have a lot in common with this one. There is a sturdy thread of land, healing, and, the power of language, running through the schedule.

After my reading I plan to hop over to The Ecology of Herbal Medicine with Dara Saville. This new book is a must have for New Mexicans wanting a deeper relationship with our home place, but also filled with wisdom and relevance for plant lovers everywhere.

As I write about the festival, I find myself wanting to tell you about the other events, authors, and readings, and I see that it is another patchwork making things a bit more connected in the world. Which strikes me as very beautiful.

Stay warm, friends. Stitch yourself to someone, to something.

Ps, here’s the book that woke my crafty hands and yearnings back up:

Last time I spread poems out for a birds eye view, I started translating the words/language into images/glyphs. It’s all there: keys, snakes, stars, boats, dunes, daughters, fire– the usual cacophony.

If I use these glyphs to create a map, and the poems are placed/arranged according to its cartography, where would it lead? Could it possibly navigate inner and outer worlds, not to mention multiple dimensions and times, simultaneously? If anything can do this, don’t you think it would be poetry?

Wish me luck as I draft my way through this wilderness.

As far as companions along the way, listening to Louise’ Erdrich’s Advice to Myself has been my guiding star each morning at the start of a writing day.

And Jamie Figueroa’s essay on nurturing your writing ecosystem reminds me to be mindful of the habitat I create around myself:

” My life as a writer is its own ecosystem. When the elements of the ecosystem are healthy and thriving, creation is occurring….When this ecosystem is pulsing with aliveness, the flowering and fruiting of creativity happens—it simply cannot not happen—and stories of all kinds seem to fall, heavy and ripe, into my hand.”

How do you nurture your writing/living/working ecosystem? What are you mapping? What fruit is falling into your hands? What tracks are you following? Where do they lead?

February has brought to these parts/pages a lively awakening of language and new poetry. My hens are laying again, and the spinning wheels of winter writing practice are gaining traction and rolling. Or maybe it’s just that the kids are back at in-person school?

Whatever it is, I’ve noticed that this happens year after year– a winter of labored writing practice that, like childbirth (my births, anyways) doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for a long time. Until all of a sudden a door opens and a new creation bursts forth. I feel like I say this every spring. Well, it’s still true.

I spend so many hours, days, weeks, months waiting to see what might emerge from the quiet room. It has been a year like no other, and for most of it I felt as if I had nothing to say, and if I did, as if I couldn’t write it. But apparently, I could write something: a 30 page farewell letter to my kids in case I died as a nurse on the frontlines of the pandemic (one of my favorite and most failed projects because really there are no words for that), poems about the dry river and death (as usual), my daughter’s coming of age (same story, new season), and a series in which I explore a complicated and unexpected twist in my quest for a spiritual home. Oh, and a chapbook called Notes on the Recovery of Self From Childhood, which features a thief, animal guides, a sleep walking girl, dream interviews, and a book that does not need to be written because it is already written. See, there’s never a scarcity of material if you make everything your material!

When some of these poems came along, they surprised me in the same way I am surprised when I see my friends’ adolescent children after a long period apart. Who are these marvelous creatures I never imagined possible? And what are they talking about?

Well, we can find out tonight (Tuesday, Feb 16th), when I share a reading’s worth of them LIVE on you know where (see below). I will be joining poets Ken Hada and Donald Levering for a reading at 6pm mountain time. I’d love to see you.

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Meeting ID: 874 5821 0237
Passcode: 695722

And so we said goodbye to Grandma Rose.

Our family surrounded her with prayers, laughter, and love. And then, alone with her son, she heard the final, welcoming silence.

Or perhaps it was singing.

She had one last ride (or was that a first?) in the back of a pickup truck before being laid to rest in a desert cemetery.

It’s a long way from her starting place in New York City, but the view is great.

Descanso en paz, Gramita.

You are miraculous.

We love you.

What poems await us on this Mid-October night? As the cusp of a new moon forms the cup we lift our lips to, we shall see what poems arise to keep us fed.

Tonight @ 6pm in the Rocky Mountains!

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A small celebration for Refugia, which celebrated its first birthday in September, and also received a New Mexico Book Award for poetry last week. I am honored (stunned!) that this collection continues to make its way in the world and to touch readers. I want to give a special shout out to Aaron Morse, the artist behind the cover art. Please visit his website to see the painting (Wilderness #2) in its entirety, and to treat yourself to his full portfolio.

In other book news, a few weeks ago I was supposed to be part of a reading and panel at the Montana Book Festival called The Earth’s Story is Also Our Story: Grief and Reverence in Poetic Ecologies. Could there be a more ideal panel for me? I mean honestly, what else is there to talk about? Unfortunately I was unable to attend at the last minute, but I encourage you to tune in to the video–the other panelists are extraordinary and it was a joy to enter into conversation with them and their work in preparation for the reading.

And, as it happens, I’ve been living through a season of grief and reverence in real time. This entire year has been a grief rite, it seems, but frankly, September was heartbreaking. The west coast fires broke my heart. The correlating songbird die-off that plagued New Mexico’s backyards and riverbanks broke my heart. And most devastatingly, piercingly close, the sudden loss of my dear friend’s husband breaks my heart open every day.

A year for apprenticing to sorrow, indeed.

I remember sitting around a campfire back in normal times, under a big moon with a handful of very wise friends. One, perhaps the wisest among us, asked about despair–the despair she sensed in her teenagers about the climate crisis, a despair that echoed through all of us. It seemed at that point that there was something to be done, some way forward, some way out of that pain. If only we could find it.

Now, I think of despair as pure invitation, and the answering grief as its only remedy. Therein lies reverence, therein lies healing.

I painted these retablos of Our Lady of Autumn at the beginning of September in a meditation on impermanence, death, and cycles of renewal. This was before the birds began to fall out of my apple tree, before Breonna Taylor was denied justice, before our friend passed away.

Now these ladies remind me that we are bathed in light even as we bear skull beads on strands, passing them between our fingers in prayer. They ask, as poet Tanya Holtland asks in Requisite:

“What in us needs to die first / for the rest to continue living?”

Here you go–just another Wednesday in New Mexico.

Actually, most days lately I live my life in the margins of wild places. Despite how lucky we’ve been to take river trips and have a couple local runs in the VW, I am far from getting my fix of the forests this summer. The only thing I can be sure I’ve done enough of is sweeping the floor.

Does it always have to be about nature? My daughter asks as I try to lure them out on yet another walk in the arroyo after dinner. Why are you so obsessed?

But how could it not always be about nature? It is always about nature.

It is in wild places that something in me arrives home. I lose myself in the numinous only to find I can locate myself at last– Here, on this earth. Here, in this body.

Belonging to this particular landscape is something I am utterly devoted to. I would rather return over and over to the same beloved forests and trails (and rivers) than take the most epic road trip (though periodically an epic road trip is needed to remind me of this truth).

As with any great love, there is danger in attachment. Be it to blight, storms, drought, fire, or floods, we risk losing the places that sustain us and occupy the “home” corner of our hearts. Today, that danger constantly surrounds us, no matter where we live or what land we cherish.

This week, a new fire burns perilously close–again–to the places I love best of all. I hesitate to say it will destroy these places, but for us short lived humans, transformation by fire is a process that we are for too impatient for. Fire takes what we love and breaks our hearts.

Is it me or does it seem like fires have been burning all of 2020?

There have been fires in Australia, California, and Colorado on a scale I can hardly fathom. There are the figurative fires wrought by a global pandemic, economic collapse, systemic failures, white supremacy, and the ongoing, increasing destruction of our global environment. More personally, fires are burning through a spiritual community that is dear to me.

Like the forest, these things need to burn. But everything is so out of balance, so insanely combustible, that the resulting inferno is all-consuming. As I write, Santa Fe is shrouded in smoke so thick I can’t see the ridge behind our house. And that’s how everything feels to me–impossible to see a way through.

My friend Erin reminds me that fire is above all a renewing force. Fire burns in service to life. It is the ground-clearer and the seed-opener.

Best of all, she says, when the fire has passed, the forest doesn’t need us to do anything to help it regrow. The land knows just what to do, sending up wave after wave of green growing things. The forest comes back because that is what forests do.

I hold that image inside myself even as I grieve lost places.

In witnessing burning, may we know the true medicine of the wild.

May the seeds for personal and collective renewal crack us open.

May all beings be safe.

May it rain.

Of all the journeys we might take in a summer, the ones down this beloved river are most important to me. 

It is a gift to return again and again to the same place, and to come to more deeply know its shape and being.

I know the views that lie around each bend, but can’t always predict the light or weather. 

 I love to see what flowers will be blooming in June vs. late July, and have learned which stretch is filled with Western tanagers and which with swallows.

Geese fill the full length of our 33 mile run. 

Safety patrol is really my chance to daydream and drift. I did fall in once while craning my neck to identify a bird.

On these journeys, our growth during the past year becomes most apparent. I gauge it against the bare bones of the canyon and the eroding tug of the river.

Take a peek here to see how much these two have grown since their maiden voyage down the river four summers ago.

They come back to the “mother duck” to rest and eat, and then launch back out on their own. 

The trip almost always ends in monsoon rains. The smell of sage and willow surrounds us as a last storm passes over and the rapids carry us downstream. We reach the final eddy just as the sky clears. 

Late July is out-to-drift season for me, the time when I loosen my will from its steady hand on the wheel. I can’t say I plan this letting go, or even like it, but eventually I drop my head back into the current and let it hold me.

Aside from the constant search for water, there is not much rhythm or form left to our days. Summer is, and always has been, the necessary unraveling that undoes all my doing.

I have been reading, but seldom write. That self, too, needs a chance to sleep and dream and be remade anew.

One friend calls this the summer of lost things. I keep thinking I’d like to write a poem with that title, but find myself thick in the heat and stickiness of it, unable, again, to find words.

Does the speechlessness wish to speak?, another friend asks when I complain that I do not know what to say, though perhaps I am just too afraid to say it. What does the speechlessness wish to say?

And so I cast a line into the still waters to see what message silence wishes to send up.

Perhaps it’s my bait, but I don’t seem to catch much. That’s okay. The view is nice from here.

Martin Shaw says, Look at the prayer rug of our own lives with our divorces and depressions and say, this is the mythic ground I stand upon. How on earth do I grow corn from it?

Here I am last week on the mythic ground of my 39th birthday. My line is cast. If I catch a fish, I’ll be sure to plant it in the corn for luck.