Distance: How Close Do You Have To Be To Someone To Do Good–Or Harm?

Distance

My first husband, Robert Winson, used to say–it’s upsetting that a person has to be close to you to do you any good but can hurt you from farther off. I found this intriguing, and just believed it, but this windy spring I’m wondering exactly what it means.
It doesn’t seem to hold true for history. Yes, Nazis can hurt and terrify me still, even at this remove of time and space. But I have FDR to thank for the social security checks. What about lovely little parks dedicated to someone civic I’ve never heard of or met? This is good at a distance.
And so of course is writing–poems, novels, literature, great suspense fiction–you name it.
There is a corollary, though, about appreciation. Do I wake up every day glad I don’t still have vertigo? Yes, that appreciation holds at a distance. Be happy I have a house with a roof…hmmm, this seems vaguer. And yet, there is my garden. For about twenty-five years my yard was mediocre. Now, thanks to other peoples’ expertise, time, love, and money, it is beautiful. I didn’t hate it every day then. But I do love it every day now.
Maybe Robert was just an introvert–and a shy person at first. Maybe he needed intimacy to feel good but not to suffer the bad. I can’t ask him because he has been dead a long time. And although he is indeed at a distance, he can still do me both good and ill, at least in memory or in the energy the dead still have to visit us.

Clouds on gallery ceiling, Santa Fe Community College

Death Interests Me

Death interests me. A lot. Or maybe not death– a state I suspect I’ll have no conscious experience of. But rather the human experience–fear, intimation, loss, and grief.
When I was 21, I almost died from what appears in retrospect to have been swine flu. Spent weeks in the ICU, months in the hospital, lost part of one lung, and was forever changed. Or maybe that story isn’t exactly true. Maybe I was already a rebel, a poet, a seeker. Maybe that experience only uncovered my basic nature. In any case, the realization of death propelled me forward into a life that worked for me.
My first husband Robert died when I was 41. That was twenty years of believing in death, even though that was also when I had my only child, a primary life affirming event. After Robert died, something shifted radically again and it was as if the life force became ascendent. I’ve tried to solve every Zen koan I ever met that would allow me to experience life and death as one non-warring state. Don’t ask how this is going.
So I keep wanting to read about death. Emily Rapp is a Santa Fe based writer whose new book, THE STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD, is about her young son’s death from Tay-Sachs disease. It is a different–much better–book than I’d expected, based on my extensive reading of memoirs of extremis. For one thing, it isn’t a narrative of redemption. How could it be, as a child is dying. But despite the American preference for the storyline of “I once was lost but now am found” life–and death–don’t really work that way. Rapp writes: “After those first few weeks of blackness and bouncing back and forth in the void, I realized that I didn’t want to be coddled or protected from the wild unpredictability of my feelings….But digging into the experience of loss is not only deeply profound but artistically, at some points, absolutely electric.”
Writing helped Rapp. And this is a very good book. However, although I wrote book after book about Robert–for some reason the process didn’t offer much direct solace. The investigation certainly helped my writing, but it didn’t deeply cheer me. It was other people–from friends to strangers–that did that.
STILL POINT isn’t an elegy, a how to, or an ode to survival. Rather, it reminded me of C.S. Lewis’s A GRIEF OBSERVED…what happens when a fine writer is given a subject he or she never wanted, but must dive deeply into as well as transcend, often at the same time.

We Are The Champions

I love Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” As does all of humanity. It is the rock anthem par excellance–and of course the winning team’s.
But when it comes on the car radio and I weep a little and sing along I’m not thinking about winning. I’m thinking about failure. I’m thinking about all I’ve lost and all I’ve struggled with and how at 59 years old (next month!) I still have the ability to go on and rise to the occasion. When I was a young window and a single mom, it was my song. When I didn’t get what I wanted professionally or health-wise or financially–mine.
I know I’m not alone. There are millions like me driving around in old Toyotas singing along. Running between daycare and care taking. Trying to substitute a kind word for mere knee jerk rudeness. Not giving the finger to the car that cuts us off.
The B side of the hit (ah, I miss B sides) was “We Will Rock You.” One of my favorite memories is coming into my daughter’s pre-school to be greeted by a grubby chorus line of kids on the playground chanting “We will we will rock you.” Indeed the did.
And we’ll keep on fighting to the end.

Interview with Terry Wilson

Interview questions–

1. I think of your material as funny, quick witted, and based on
observations of daily life. Can you say what your major sources of
inspiration are?

My whole family is funny, and sometimes visiting my Mom (and the rest of my siblings in Buffalo) gives me material for a few new chapters! I often tell my students that sometimes the hardest experiences are the ones that I (and they) can write about later, once we have some distance on them. I think that even when I’m going through a painful bump in the road, there is a part of my mind that detaches and can see the humor in it. That helps so much! My father taught me comic timing though he wasn’t always easy to be around. And my Mom can still get us all laughing even though she’s 95. Growing up in an Irish Catholic family often inspires dark humor when you least expect it!

2. What are you currently reading? Favorite authors?

I am currently reading My Beloved World, Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir. She’s such a strong person and has an amazing attitude about life and her own success. I read a lot of memoir; favorite authors are Mary Karr (Liars’ Club),Jeannette Walls (The Glass House), Cheryl Strayed (Wild) and Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies and of course, Bird by Bird—not a memoir but a comical writing guide.) Rhoda Janzen’s memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is hysterically funny. In fact, many of these stories are rich with humor, and that’s a big draw for me. I also love historical fiction; a book I’ve read a few times is an older book, Rumors of Peace by Ella Leffland (about WWII) and also, Winds of War. Annie Proulx is another author I read a lot of, though it’s hard to beat her Pulitzer prize winning, The Shipping News. And I’ll devour almost any book about Africa; Malaria Dreams (by Stuart Stevens) is hilarious and Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari is an easy book to get lost in! As far as poetry goes, I love Mary Oliver. My husband, Mark, and I used to read her poems to each other. (Hey, Mark, we need to start doing that again!;-)

3. Your first book is out! How exciting. Can you describe some of the
process of editing it all together? What are the major themes?

My book starts with stories about growing up Catholic in the Rust Belt of Buffalo, NY in a large Catholic family and the kind of insane logic that goes with looking up to suffering and dead saints as role models! Another theme is how I survived Catholic school and also my father’s drinking, and then I move on to the strange events that happen to us all while living in Santa Fe (including trying to be a Buddhist)! I discuss my Mom’s Alzheimer’s toward the end of the book and how we still all love her desperately and completely as she clings to life in the green lounge chair in her Buffalo living room with snow raging outside. I finish the book by reclaiming some aspects of Catholicism and spirituality that work for me today.

4. How can readers buy your book?

My book is for sale on Amazon.com; I will give the link below. Also, I have a web page called ConfessionsofaFailedSaint.com (or just look for me on Facebook at Confessions of a Failed Saint). This FB page functions as a blog if anyone wants to discuss my book or just spirituality, humor or life in general. Here’s the link to buy my book! And thanks so much, Miriam for this interview!

http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Failed-Saint-Terry-Wilson/dp/1479279404/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361664281&sr=8-1&keywords=confessions+of+a+failed+saint

Essay by Devon Miller-Duggan

Word Love

I have noticed, since I’ve begun writing my other blog, that I have a new favorite word: complicated. Or complex. They come up a lot.

I was trying to write a note to a young friend who’s caught in the shredding darkness of grief about how complicated grief and even more complicated healing are. This was by way of affirming some things she had said about the also-young great love of her life who had recently died, and about how she was trying to begin to understand what the process was going to ask of her over the next few years. Short answer: a lot. Long answer: a lot of muddled, complicated, bumpy, non-linear work.

Often in my other blog, issues around weight, the distinction between the fake Obesity Crisis and what may be the real obesity crisis, and what both of those things have to do with ethics, psychology, religion, medicine, culture and God knows what else, lead to my sort of throwing my hands in the air and declaring that it’s (whatever “it” is) is complicated. It’s not a cop out, at least not all the time. I’ve sort of come to understand why so much of philosophical writing is more circular than linear—or maybe more fractal than linear—sometimes you need to pull yourself back from a branching conversation in order to stay in the neighborhood of your original subject. And, very often, declaring something complicated is an attempt to keep the blog post under a zillion pages. But often enough, it’s a way of saying that I’ve thought my way into a corner and can’t write my way out of it. And most often, it’s my way of building a bulwark against a culture that desperately wants to make everything simple and binary.

I get it. I’m a binary kind of girl—at least that’s often my default first response. But more than simplicity, I ultimately treasure the complex and the paradoxical. There’s a visceral pleasure in playing with/around/through problems and narratives and circumstances, even when the issues themselves are painful or difficult. And it’s a better pleasure—for me, at least—and a less dangerous pleasure—for me, certainly—than the pleasure of simplicity often is. Simplicity, for me, often leads to contempt and anger and dismissal and discourtesy and short-sightedness.

The problem is that complexity, for me, often leads to hesitance, over-thinking, and near-paralysis. And sometimes things are just plain wrong, or gorgeously and uncomplicatedly right. And some people are just jerks, even if the reasons for their jerkitude are more or less complicated, the jerkitude is, itself, fairly straightforward. And often, it’s important to recognize the clear, uncomplicated stuff for what it is—both the bad and, probably just as importantly, the good.

But I do love the complex. T. S. Eliot, whose work I adore down to my cells, was probably something of an anti-semite—something I find uncomplicatedly unacceptable. Mother Teresa, inarguably someone who lived in a sacred space, was not a particularly nice woman and knew it, and was tormented by it, even as she walked around spreading the light of her God everywhere she went. Most saints, in fact, were not particularly easy folks to live with. Greatness and venality/idiocy/cruelty/pick-the-failing are not mutually exclusive, even when they seem like they should be oxymoronic. They’re just extreme examples of what most of us are, and most of us are just ambulatory examples of the complexity of being in a world where everything is in a constant, complicated tension between birth and death, light and dark, being and nothingness, peace and violence.

So, unlike some of the other words I have fixated on in the past (gossamer made its fluttery way into a great many of my early early poems, lucid inserted itself into every corner of my justly unpublished novel, gather and flesh fight their way into many of my poems even when I watch out for them…) I think this one’s actually got work to do.

Goopy, but it wanted to get written: Devon Miller-Duggan Muses on Friendship

Goopy, but it wanted to get written:

I recently spent a week at The Glen Workshops—a nice conference on religion and the arts that’s full of some of the nicest people I’ve ever been in a group with. I’d made an unusually large (for me) bunch of friends when I went 3 years ago and I was a little nervous about meandering back in and being welcomed after a couple of years of not going. Wasted worry. People were gloriously, heart-healingly welcoming. And I made new friends. Like I said, the place is unsually dense with folks who are smart, art-driven, and truly nice, so it’s very, very fertile ground. I didn’t stay on the campus of St. John’s College in
Santa Fe where the Workshops take place, though. I stayed down the mountain in the city with one of my oldest and most deeply beloved friends. 40 years we have now.

I don’t think of myself as someone who makes friends easily—a holdover from a slightly isolated only childhood (we moved a lot and I was a little weird and a lot shy). I do a pretty good job these days of acting like I’m an extrovert when I’m in groups—mostly because I’d rather make that high-energy effort than go
back to watching from the side and feeling weird and socially dysfunctional.

Anyway, I started thinking about friendship. I’ve had an interesting year, friendship-wise, a weirdly good year, partially because I’ve maybe been more focused on it than usual, for a variety of reasons (one friend out of work and
stressed, another grieving the loss of a child, others who’ve wandered back into my life because of Facebook, the happy surprise of the Glen, and my I’m-always-smarter-when-I’m-talking-to-her Santa Fe friend whose wisdom I particularly needed this year and who runs this nice blog and lets me write
these meandering think-bits). It’s probably good to periodically run through your friendships and make sure you’re paying proper/nurturing/conscious attention to them. Because I, at least, can be careless, and have been.

Smarter and more profound folk than I have written reams on the subject of the value (salvific, succor-giving, steadying) of friendships of various sorts and degrees. I can’t add anything to those reams and don’t mean to try.

Maybe I’m just writing this to let the Universe know that I know how fortunate, how blessed, and how flat-out wealthy in friends I am, and that I’m deeply grateful, even if writing this makes me feel a little bit like an Oprah episode…

Twin 6′ Hearts
Jim Dine 
Born in Cincinnati in 1935

Covalescence–You Don’t Miss Your Water

Thanks to everyone for your kindness and concern. I’m feeling much better. And that is great. Or is it?
Convalescence is a limbo. In a way, being sick is easier–it is unpleasant, terrifying, passive, and marked by (insert your least favorite symptom here). But it is without choice.
In my twenties, I took a raft trip through the Grand Canyon.For days on end, we could not see the entire sky. I liked that! Even in my youth I knew a certain kind of unlimited choice wasn’t good for me.
So I can stand up without the world spinning. And note that the beautiful thrashers in the cholla cactus have indeed hatched babies who are now fledglings. Was the neighborhood always this fascinating? This funky? Decrepit? No sooner am I standing, than I have an opinion.
Buddhists and seekers pay good money for silent retreats that focus on mindfulness. Actually a recovery from a bad flu or a case of strep throat or vertigo or somesuch will work just as well.The self dissolves, focused in the present of illness. The body recovers, the self kicks and screams, realizes the floor is dirty and that it has not had any COFFEE for an entire week.
And on to the next thing. No longer do I thank God for my legs. No longer does my family seem like angels. Oh no, I want not just coffee but a grant–and probably to get my way in everything.
It does not help to remind myself there are people in much much worse shape. I have a list of those I worry about and a list of those I’ve outlived. I’m not in Darfur (insert your most extreme scenario here.) No, invoking these things does not instill instant gratitude.
This has happened to me before, and I am sure it will happen again.

Do Not Resuscitate–Me

A few days ago, I was hospitalized briefly with some very unpleasant symptoms. Many tests ruled out anything too nasty, and I’m home in a convalescent manner. My memory is uncertain about some bits, but I clearly remember the doctor asking if I wanted to be resuscitated. Now I was conscious, and not facing surgery, but it is the standard question.
Immediately I said, “No.”
Now this may seem irrational. I’m not yet 60, and most of the time I’m walking around and employed full time, busy with family and friends and projects. But I have my own private relationship with the specter of death and extreme disability (As I assume do all of us) and in that vulnerable moment I just said no to extreme measures.
Then I saw my husband Rich’s face. Not only had he taken me to the ER, waited on me hand and foot, worried, and generally been angelic–we did not agree about certain end of life options. I tend to the “Let the undertow take me” school while he is of the “let’s live as long as possible because there might be fun or at least lunch ahead” view.
I may have gained some wisdom in my years. “What would YOU like?” I asked him.
“Resuscitate,” he said.
My friend Hope, as positive as her name, was also keeping us company (and stable) in the hospital. She looked worried, too. I could not disappoint Rich.
“Ok,” I said. “Resuscitation is fine.”
Hope smiled. Rich looked relieved. The doctor regarded me briefly with an eye for emotional instability.
What did I learn? That I do know my own mind. And that what I want just isn’t that important.

I Was Rewarded

I was rewarded for walking along the bike path on the old railroad gauge by the appearance of a huge glossy fox in broad daylight.

I was rewarded for staying home by looking out the kitchen window and seeing three deer nibbling the manicured lawn at the First Presbyterian Church.

I was rewarded for going to Giant Wal-Mart by finding a cheap straw fedora with black band that fits perfectly.

I said I would never put the fox in a poem.

Then, in the middle of the night, I did.

I’m not sure if the hat will end up in verse or just on my head.

Be Here Now–or maybe not: Salida, Colorado

It is lovely here in the artist’s residency in Salida. There is always a remarkable sense of decompression when I get some solitude with the expectation of writing–and some conflict too.
When I was young, youth wasn’t the only thing wasted on me–so were Yaddo and MacDowell. I spent a month at Yaddo in my mid-twenties–morose, with a useless boyfriend, and a bad head cold. I was also trying to read The Brothers Karamozov, which did not help. I wrote a few poems. It took me several more residencies before I could get the peace and quiet to actually work for me.
There was a fifteen year period where I was home with the family–the first residency after that (in Marfa, thanks to Lannan Foundation) had the excitement of the escape from Alcatraz. Alone! With myself and poetry! Eating odd little meals! And unbelievably, cable T.V. (I’m still not sure why this devil of temptation was there but I enjoyed it).
As a grown-up, residencies present me with various problems. The first is fun. Can I have it? And how much? Here in Salida, for example, I can
1. write
2. walk around a charming mountainous town
3. eat out
4. shop
5. look up various acquaintances
6. swim in a large pool of glorious hot spring water
7. sleep
8. read
(these last two might be part of writing)
9. start driving around to other charming locations
10. get my hair cut
11. oh, write some more…
These leads me to some musings on “being in the present moment” as it is something I do not believe in. A hallmark of New Age thinking, maybe from the Human Potential Movement, it eludes me. Moments cascade by me mixed with the past, with memory, regret, hope, fear, a huge rushing input from the senses, the click of biologic time, awareness of my body, and much more. What present? What moment? I’ve sat zazen, played with koans, said the shema, been to the wailing wall, recited a mantra–and I wouldn’t know the present moment if it bit me.
There are three cut pink peonies in a vase on this table. Two are withered. I’ll change the water.