Little homestead in the prairie town

Sustaining Motion

September 28, 2009 — 4 Comments

I used to believe that with the right amount of effort, therapy, money, discipline, and time, I would achieve the perfect state and then maintain it. I would live in the right town, in the perfect house, with the right person, drive the right car to the perfect job, be the right weight, achieve the perfect hairstyle, have the furniture arranged and the yard landscaped just right . . . and then hold that pose – forever! Perfect! Permanent!

One moment in the life of my late grandmother, Hazel Dominguez Tindall.

One frozen moment in the life of my late grandmother, Hazel Dominguez Tindall.

But not possible. Nothing is ever standing still. My body moves involuntarily with every breath, my heart pumps without my conscious consent, my cells are factories in constant production. Even when I die, my body will not be still, as decay takes over and every atom moves on to become part of something else. The earth on which I stand spins at nearly 1,000 miles per hour, one small mover in a vast expanding universe.

Plenty of movement is required simply to sustain life. But the time and place where I live has “progressed” to a state far beyond simple sustenance. I can get anywhere in the world in a matter of hours or days, learn about anything with a few mouse clicks, communicate my ideas through a plethora of instant media options. Because so much is possible, it takes plenty of energy for me simply to sift through it all, to decide what I will do, buy, wear, eat; and to deal with my own and other people’s expectations and reactions to my choices.

With all this motion around and within me, I find deep healing in the disciplines of rest and reflection. Rest is not perfect stillness, but a deliberate slowing down, setting aside the oars and moving with the water rather than forcing my way through. Reflection is not absolute silence, but a thoughtful tuning out of the noises I ordinarily attend to, so that I can listen to the echoes of the recent moments through which I’ve moved.

Beneath all the layers of progress-driven sound and light, life is still a flowing river. The more I try to hold a living thing in a freeze-frame squeeze, the more energy I must expend – and even as I inflict any level of un-natural stasis upon that thing – be it my face, a relationship, a belief system or a zucchini, it slowly begins to wither in my grasp – or speeds up the natural rhythms that end in death, another way of saying the same thing.

This is why the bugs and baby bunnies my daughter captures usually convalesce until either they are released or they die. It explains why my marriage has suffered seasons of stagnancy, and why the fresh greens I stash in my refrigerator often need to be re-classified as compost.

Healthy living things are always growing. Evolution is the heartbeat of life. We deny the goodness of life when we try to force living things to stand still. Paradoxically, we affirm the goodness of life when we regularly and deliberately slow the pace we’ve picked up trying to keep up with those Joneses, and choose instead to move with the rhythm of the forces that sustain us.

Reaching Maturity, or, If I Were a Tomato

September 17, 2009 — 1 Comment

On Monday evening my proud papa showed my youngsters video clips he had taken of me and my band almost ten years ago. There we are, up on the big stage, under the bright lights, playing our twenty-something hearts out. “We were young and we were improvin’. . .”

the glory days for rock band St. Andrew's Descent

the glory days for rock band St. Andrew’s Descent

Mellencamp was on to something, although I haven’t always thought so over the years. Wrinkles, gray hairs, extra pounds and stretch marks don’t seem like an improvement. But they are simply markers of the real life I’ve been living. The wrinkles around my eyes record the smiles and laughs that have crinkled the skin there again and again. The creases between my eyebrows show the grip of stress, grief, and anger. The gray hairs grow from a head that has pumped out thoughts and dreams at the pace of a Chinese toy factory. The poochy tummy and the stretch marks tell about the two people I co-created, nourished, carried and bore into the world.

These days I don’t look back as wistfully as I used to. I can almost laugh at – I mean with – no, I mean at – the profoundly serious girl up there on the stage, who scans every audience for a talent scout and will soon cry herself to sleep the night she learns of her first pregnancy, certain this means death to her creative life.

Small children, it turns out, are small for only two or three blinks of an eye. This is a great relief and an eternal sadness.

yes, they dress themselves!

yes, they dress themselves!

They are also loaded with material – not only the fecal variety, but the sort of material every writer seeks – magical moments, ironic situations, hilarious word usage, and heart-stabbing lovelinesses and tragedies of all sorts.

On Tuesday morning I took my guitar down from the wall and began to play and sing. My two-year-old Silas hurried from the other room, smiling and dancing like sun-sparkles on a forest stream. It was a stellar performance. I totally connected with the audience. I’m pretty sure I’ll get another call soon (“Mommy! Play my song again!”).

Lately I’ve discovered that the songs and performances I do create, when I take the time, are better than those of ten years ago, and they often take less effort. I think this is about reaching maturity.

This past spring I bundled up and went out to the garage, where I poked tiny tomato seeds into small pots of soil arranged on an old cookie sheet. I brought the cookie sheet into the house and set it on top of the refrigerator so the seeds could stay warm and germinate.  It took about a week before I saw more than soil in those pots. It took even longer for the tiny seedlings to grow into recognizable tomato plants that could stay outside overnight alone.

Once I finally got the plants outside, the tender leaves soaked up sunlight and used that energy to make more leaves, which all soaked up more sunlight and made more leaves, so that the plants grew exponentially. A couple weeks ago, green tomatoes began blushing into red, and I knew that the plants were doing what the seed packet had said they would do in the prescribed number of days – reaching maturity. Now every day I spot another brilliant red tomato, standing out vividly from the surrounding green leaves.

If I were a tomato plant, I think I would currently be putting out yellow blossoms. These blossoms are more interesting than the green leaves I have spent much of my life to produce, but it gets even better! If I keep growing, one day I will make brilliant red fruit with the power to nourish and cheer whoever finds it. I don’t miss those spindly seedling days. And I’m not seeking to preserve these yellow flowers. I’m going for the juicy red fruit. I’m reaching for maturity. I’m still young and still improving.

Exactly Luthien

June 25, 2009 — 7 Comments
Luthien took this photo of herself last summer

Luthien took this photo of herself last summer

My girl is extreme, expressive, exhausting, exciting, exasperating, exuberant, extraordinary. Every moment, to her, is a canvas waiting for color; a page waiting for poetry; a reel of tape waiting for a symphony.

Each day she leaves a trail of artifacts marking the twisting turning path of her imagination. At the foot of her bed, hastily-discarded pajamas and underwear. A few steps away near the dresser and closet, a shallow sea of rejected wardrobe ideas. Scattered over the living room floor, a stuffed dog with a rope tied around its neck (its leash), surrounded by wooden blocks (its food); rubberbands and wadded-up, tape-wrapped newspaper balls (her bow and arrows); a stool pushed up against the window (to close the curtains because she’s camping and it’s nighttime); the piano bench pushed up near the bird cage (to let the bird out); paper and markers spread out on the table (where she was making storyboards for the movie she wants to direct); a small pile of awkwardly-folded laundry (where she was briefly in the mood to help with the housework); library books scattered around a throw pillow (she is working on learning to read); a few dolls wrapped up in blankets and napping on the couch.

In the bathroom, an open bottle of essential oil, a tube of lip balm knocked over in her haste to flee the scene of the crime when she heard the owner of these items approaching. In the kitchen, a stepstool pushed up to the counter, a cabinet left open, exposing a raided snack cupboard. In the back yard, a bowl of walnuts picked up from the yard, crushed and mixed with water (homemade perfume); a small boulder on the patio (where she enlisted a friend’s help to drag it so she could crush said walnuts); a wagon tied to a bicycle with a jumprope (car and trailer); a table spread with cups, a pitcher of water, and eight little metal bowls filled with raisins (a snack stand for the neighbors); a pair of sandals in the driveway; a beach towel wadded up under the walnut tree; ponytail holders and barrettes discarded on the picnic table.

Washing hands in a public restroom involves at least three squirts of soap from the dispenser, a roaring cascade of water from the sink, and as many paper towels as she can get her hands on before she is interrupted by a reprimand or a more interesting distraction.

This is my girl, unlike any other. Dancer, scholar, beauty, artist, lover, fighter, cook, bicyclist, inventor, problem-solver, preacher, scientist, singer, fairy, dreamer. And then some. She thrills me, annoys me, inspires me, exhausts me, entertains me, loves me, ignores me, kisses me, confuses me. She expands my horizons, reminding me of what I already knew – that this world is bigger than me – and surprising me with the hardly-believable truth that this world is also bigger than her – as she pushes ever forward with every fiber of her hard-headed wild-hearted starry-eyed iron-willed being.

My lover and I had a dream once, to sail the world together. On the brink of turning the dream to reality, we discovered this girl would be expanding our family. I thought we traded our dream of sailing the world for the mundane experience of parenting, but Luthien has proved me wrong. We are right on course, exploring new territory, fighting stormy gales, sleeping under the stars, going stir-crazy in confined spaces, and learning to lay aside our schedules and expectations to work with the unpredictable wind that pushes and pummels the colorful sail we named Luthien.

Emmylou

June 10, 2009 — 1 Comment

We have this amazing music and book collection not too far from our living room – just a few hundred yards down the tree-lined corridor to the west. We don’t mind sharing it with everybody else – it’s a community thing, and that’s the way we like it.

So Nathan and I were there at the library the other day – on his birthday – and he brought home a 2003 Emmylou Harris recording called “Stumble Into Grace.” I first got into her when I bought “Red Dirt Girl” – which became an all-time favorite of mine – eight or ten years ago.

We’ve been listening to it, and I really really like it. That’s the simple truth, and I just had to tell somebody.