Enchanting myself away from the normal - Angelou post

Before I applied to grad school I spent the summer reading MFA reading lists for schools across the country. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was on several lists, so I read it. The book has stuck with me for its vivid imagery and uniquely light way of speaking to dark subjects. Angelou's ability to write with the innocence and wonder of a small child carries this book, and even though I sometimes wonder if she's really a trustable narrator- because her style of storytelling IS so vivid-- I feel satisfied that I am getting an accurate portrayal of Marguerite's life. So in reading our lecture notes, I wasn't surprised to learn that Angelou's magic carpet is sherry, a deck of cards and secluded room. As writers we have to do whatever it takes to get us out of the ordinary into a place where language sings and the common description/definition of things falls away. Because of this, I think Caged Bird is a timeless story, one that speaks to a certain period of Americana, but at its heart can show anyone how to live and move beyond one's world. Even if that world was a war-torn Parisian cafe and the writer was Hemingway, or a crummy, dumpy house and the writer was Augusten Burroughs, writers have the unique ability to take a moment and move beyond it to speak a larger truth.

So, in moving away from the 2010 Caribou cafe in which I sit now, let's go to Nebraska, circa 1989. This might be hard for some of you to read.. sorry. It's just what came to me.


The burlap bag is heavy in dad's hand-- I can tell becuase the muscles in his tanned forearm are shifted out a little, and with each wriggle and bulge of the bag I see that muscle tighten and pulse as he steps forward. I'm not sure where the bag came from, but he probably had it out in the dusty shop. When he came to the house with it an hour ago, I grabbed it from him and watched it puff the scent of dirt and tractor grease, surprised at its presence in his hand.

"Marcella, where did Touca have her kittens? Can you find them?"
Dad refered to me as his "right hand man," and becuase I had yet to start school and mom was gone all day, I spent my days with him in the shop. He was my best friend, and at five years old, I was all sugared compliance and quick eagerness.
"Yeah yeah, she had them in the old pig barn, over behind the saddles. You know, where you keep the old hay bales? Only one of them has been up and walking but--"
"They're sick, Marcella. All the cats around here always get distemper. It's not good to have sick kitties, it is?"

Was dad actually telling me he was going to take my kitties to the vet? This was unheard of. The feral cats mothered batches of babies the way I collected toads and slugs in the summer-- often and a fierce protectiveness, and dad had no use for the multitudes of wild cats that teemed around the farm propoerty. I couldn't believe he was going to make sure this group got the attention they needed to clean up the boogers that constantly plauged their eyes, and I didn't want him to stuff them in a bag, but if that was what it took to get them there safely, then so be it.

"No, it's not." I said, agreeing that sick kitties were bad. I couldn't play with them, what with their snotty faces, and most of the time, they lived for a while then died any way. If dad was going to get them some help, maybe I'd actually get to tame one, feel its soft down fur and nuzzle it in the way my friends with indoor cats got to. "I can help you get them if you want."

Dad had nodded me toward the pig barn, and we'd gone in to find the kitties. The old shed hadn't been used for hogs in years, but in the dust-mote shades of shadow and light that filtered in through the cracked and broken boards you could always smell some combination of amonia, straw, mash, pig shit and mold. I loved the old buildings on our farm, but I never played in this one becuase it was so old and fally-downy. The containment corrals had mostly fallen down, but next to the building and the one fence still standing, and old well and water tank still bobbed mossy water in and over its lipped surface.

"Ok, Marcella, I see them. You can go back to the house now."
I wasn't sure why dad was sending me to the house alone-- I figured we'd load up the kitties then take them to the vet together.
"You don't need my help here? But I can--"
"No, no, go in and.. get me some.. twine or something. To, uh, tie the bag? Please?"

The tall grass that had grown up around the pig barn knicked my legs as I ran through it, trying to get to the house and back in time to help dad. I don't know why I can still remember the way that grass and the weeds felt as they slapped against my bare legs, but I know that I'll never forget the scent of that pig barn, or the way dad's arms looked as he walked around the water tank, carrying that bag, arm muscles bulging. By the time I had found and hauled the spool of twine back to dad, he was outside again, moving around the water tan, dipping the bag in it. I stood and watched as he dipped the wriggling bag in the water, holding it under longer and longer each time, then letting it drop. I knew then, as a child knows a bad thing when she sees it, that something was wrong with this picture, that my kittens were sick and that dad was drowning them. I knew then that yes, maybe those kittens were beyond saving with the vet's medicines. I knew that even pulling them up was probably not going to save them. But what I witnessed was wrong in a particular way that only the executioners of bad men can probably know. My dad had drowned my kittens to put them out of their misery, and to end his own discomfort with their presence, but those things alone were not exactly what was so wrong with the scene. What was wrong was that he had lied to me, that my dad had lied to me, or at the least, misled me as to what he was doing with the kittens and why he needed my help. I eventually grew up and got hogs to show for 4-H and housed them in that pig shed. They drank water that came from that tank; I "got over" what I saw that dad and how bad I felt for the mewling bag of sopping kittens who had their eyes cleansed in the most unholy of baptisms, and I left the farm. That memory doesn't come to me often, but when my last cat died, it did. When my dog ate poison and died, it came to me then, too. There is something beautiful and innocent about a life lived among the cycles and organic moments of life and death on a farm, but I wonder if it only when we keep them masked and containted that we are able to accept them.

The language of being: Prompt Post 8

"As a preschooler, Lisa Yellow Horse knew only one language, Lakota. Now a grown woman on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, she embodies what many in her generation feel: a paralyzing fear to speak a language she is no longer fluent in and confusion about how to pass it down before it disappears.

The regret is hard to swallow."

A year-long series on the Lakota language and culture has been featured in the Rapid City (SD) Journal, and today's stories focused on the loss of language and the generational gaps that helped contribute to this loss as much as colonialism has (Yes, I do realize this disinterest was fostered by colonialism, as is pointed out in the series).

As I read this story, I was reminded my own small self, the only "brown" kid I knew, the only one who could speak another language. As I got older and my friends found plenty of things about my mom and her culture that were "wrong," I grew less and less curious in learning about that culture myself. Now, I feel ashamed only of the fact that I didn't take the time to appreciate my mom's culture more, as a child. Sure, today I take the time to visit relative in Colombia, and I'm genuinely interested in my heritage, but I don't feel like I'm "Colombian" anymore than I am "White." In action, manner and culture, I'm definitely White, north American. But this morning, as my mom rambled on and on and on about some story over breakfast (Colombian hot chocolate and a very America slice of cold, leftover pizza), I realized that in the way I tell stories, I am very much the Colombiana of my ancestry.

My aunts tell stories like my mom, loong, complicated rambling things that veer off in this direction for a while, then that one, then loop back around again and finally (or not) begin to make some sense. My grandma was the same way, and even my uncles tell stories full of stories, heaping one idea upon the next upon the next.

As I chewed and nodded, feigning in interest in her 7 a.m. nonsense, the work of Bruce Chatwin came to mind. A storyteller himself, Chatwin shared the work of the Australian Aborigines and their Songlines and Dreamtime stories, the stories by which all of Australia is mapped, plotted and held together by story. It seems like all cultures are held together by an intricate web of words, and for the Lakota people to lose that web is to lose their system of navigation.

Having spent a semester getting into the history of a place that I once knew intimately, I've found that my ideas of nature are as conflicted as I am. I'm a country girl who'd rather live in the city, but I have found that I want that city to have some of the pace and culture of my childhood landscapes. I still tell people that I left Chicago this semester because being in "nature" for a nature writing course made more sense than being in Chicago, so I guess I don't really think of Chicago as nature, although I know it does have it's own natural elements. This awareness is also conflicted, because I think of cities as places of learning, learned people,people who want more than a life toiling in the dirt. Cities are full of knowledge, and they have shaped the adult I am. They provided the education I received in college.

And yet there is a certain kind of knowledge to be found among the rural. The knowledge of cloud patterns and storms, the way plants grow, and animals; the simple understanding of the seasons and where food comes from.. all that is more a rural education than a concrete and book-learned one. Throughout the semester we've focused on the duality of this genre in the authors we've encountered, and even those who live in cities, or less rural places have a reverence for the natural land (land not paved or developed, in this case) that doesn't seem to have been bred of the city.

At the beginning of the course I felt that nature writing was the wild, lyric, expressive rambling and storytelling that a writer writes because he has to, is compelled from somewhere inside to create and honor with the gift of words and sentences. Environmental writing seemed to be the more scientific, book-learned stuff, and as the course ends, I feel mostly the same way. I know that there are cross-overs, as there should be in all good nonfiction writing; even in the fiction within the genre we see that the author hopes to inform as much as entertain. We see that as much care must be given to language as to the story itself, the story we tell in our existence on the land.


As I read the stories of the young women in this article, and then the story of a Philadelphian who came to the Rez to learn and then teach the Lakota language, I felt like I've spent a whole semester not just learning how to connect to nature and consider it, but how to speak to it, and about it, on its own terms, in its own language. What we need is a bridge over our failed communications, a means of spanning not just generations, but cultures and people and ideas. We need to close the gap between "nature" and "wild" as bad things, and develop a sense of understanding and fluency in our relationships toward all things. I'm just not sure how to go about getting at that fluency, other than writing. And exploring. And being.

Spring shed: Place Post No. 8

Wind is blowing in from the Southwest when I get to the lake. Not a cold wind, but strong, the force pours into my ear as I clear paint chips from a picnic table and view my surroundings.
Ducks on the water are invisible except for the slender, black tubes of neck and curves of head. I can hear them, however, fart-like noises and squeaks reach across the water's edge. A robin, clinging to the branch above me, yells at the wind and flaps its wings, remaining if not steady, attached to its wooden landing. even though the winter wheat is a green, shimmer carpet beyond the boundaries of the area, the bird's rusty orange breast is the only brightness I see in this drab surrounding, and I am thankful for it.

There is no sun today, so even though the day is in the low 60s and imaginatively warm, I want tome color to my surroundings. Yes, thin stabs of grass poke up through the dead leaves and grasses around me, and the wheat fields to the north and south beckon with luxurious industry, but what I am feeling is a lack of color—in mind and physical presence. I feel shadowed and dark, as if the melanin under my skin reflected only "bruise" as a color.

The ducks take off, and I watch the water "settle" after them. Its ripples flow and bounce like static on a television: jittery lines that move up and down, and up and down again, then across the gray surface in a haphazard pattern. I am mesmerized by the movement, much as I am when settled (reluctantly) in front of a noise box that must be plugged in. Television transports the viewer to other places; here at the lake, I too disappear, but only to the landscape within. My semester is almost over, and I feel that I've come to see the wildness of the lake in a way I never had before. The flora and fauna were just sticks and grasses and animals..and they still are, but I feel like I'm seeing them with an awareness that others who sit at these picnic tables might not notice. I don't really feel that way about those human others—I don't feel any more connected to the people I went to school with or sit with at the bar when I rarely go to town. I don't feel any more interested in the history of my home county than I did before. I feel settled here only in the temporary way I felt settled here when it was "home:" as if it were a place to be, for a moment. Like a sun-dappled bit of grass that invites an afternoon of reading in the summer.
I have just returned from Denver, from the annual AWP conference and bookfair, and even though I went to sessions on the Nebraska writer, or the importance of place and home and habitat, instead of the rosy color of promise, my heart is shadowed like the water before me. The conference connected me to authors and ideas, and hearing the words of authors I've read all semester float above a crowd in person was wonderful. The words of Leslie Mormon Silko, and David Gessner—words in favor of ancient rootedness or of seeking it until one is connected to a new place, respectively—stick with me, but the words of Debra Marquart have probably done more for me, because she took the stagnation of small town life and wrote about it, honestly, Compassionately. But as part of her past.

The air swills around me, traces whorls in my hair and marks my skin with invisible patterns, as I walk to the edge of the water and settle on a smooth, white stump. I run my hand along the arch of thick branches, marvel at the smoothness where the tree has shed its bark. Parts of this felled giant feel like the soft, curved back of a lover, the sturdiness of shoulder blade and bone and muscle, wrapped up and protected by a porous, peach cover that sometimes shivers with resistance. The smoothness of the tree is a second skin, and I think about the many times I've talked of "skin" when referring to the frozen water. That cover is gone now, the one before me is active, fluid. Moving water.
Moving.

As I stand up to leave, I look behind me an notice a dead fish, (a huge bass? wallye?), eye sunken in and horrid, a muddy scab of brown. Two ants crawl from its gill and march across their scaly, silver territory; I squat and look at its distended belly, the yellow opening of its mouth. Dad would have loved to catch a fish this big (maybe four pounds) at Walgren, so I wonder what happened to him, how he washed up to the shore, and if he drowned in the heavy absence of vital water. He's brittle and dry, so there's no stench of rotting fish—I probably would have smelled him before now, if there had been—and for this, too, I am thankful. The air today smells light and beautiful, like spring rains and cottonwood down. It's sweet, and sticks to me, but is not sweet and sticky like some smoke, clogging the air with a resinous, wet blanket. No, it's sweet and sticky in the way pine gum is when it covers pores on your hand and lingers in the air with a movement of fingers.

I walk back to my car, across foot-deep ruts of peeling mud that puncture the road's surface, and again, I think of the skins we are shedding, always, everyone of us. After this coursework, all of it, I will never come back to the lake and look at it the same way, nor will I be able to write of the natural world without a need for deeper connection and understanding. We might spend seven years shedding our skins—a time that seems like forever—or see new elements of the world with the dawning of new seasons, but in every moment, sun-dappled or crusted with snow and ice, our own landscapes are transforming.

"The inherent emotional risks of creativity"

a short video on creativity and staying sane as a creative person. I try to stay away from Gilbert (haven't read EPL yet) becuase she's soooo over-hyped, but she's super-funny in this clip. And her message is worthwhile. While creativity isn't necessarily birds and trees and bugs, I do believe there is a natural sort of pool from which creativity comes.

At any rate, I hope this clip entertains and spurs some thought.

The science of forgiving

I left Sioux Falls four years ago not so much with my tail between my legs, but with my teeth bared and snapping at everyone. A friend and a boyfriend had made social life difficult for me, and the editor I'd been working under at the newspaper left for a better position. Life felt stagnant and black, like the water in the Big Sioux when it hadn't rained all summer. Chicago sounded like a good idea while I was taking a break from life, in Seattle, so Chicago became home. In the four years I lived in the Big Windy, I never got over my love for South Dakota and Sioux Falls, or the real friends I had made there; birthdays, weddings and a simple magnetism drew me back time and again.

Since I've been home in Nebraska, that longing and pull has gotten stronger, so last week I up and road tripped across the plains and made it back in town in time for two birthdays. Although the airwaves are about as lonesome as the country music that chokes them, NPR never fails to entertain and educate me; on Saturday, while passing the Wall Drug signs and deteriorating carcasses of animal after animal after animal, I listened to this amazing American Public Media story on the evolution of forgiveness. This is a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that tells us how revenge and human emotion has evolved over the centuries, a story that tells us that we humans are "more instinctively equipped for forgiveness than we've perhaps given ourselves credit for."

I could write about how the components of this story-- an interview with the father of an Oklahoma City bombing victim, a scientific breakdown of revenge, a bit of thoughtful music-- made me feel, but I think listening to it yourself will be more meaningful for your own story.

I never sought revenge on my friend and my ex, because I wanted nothing to do with either of them any more, but instead of confronting the issue, it festered deep enough to force me away from a city and a landscape I loved.

I just got back to Nebraska from Sioux Falls, and even though I don't see either of those people any more, listening to this segment set me up for an afternoon of reflection on what was truly important to me as I went about my days in eastern South Dakota. I don't know how we ever muster up the courage to forgive and move on ( Michael McCullough, author of the book and papers this segment is based on) says that he'd like a new discourse on forgiveness to happen; a discourse that removes the softhearted wimpy connotations of forgiving to take place. Forgiveness is a strong, difficult, powerful thing to do, he says. We should respect it as such.

Seagull: Prompt Post No. 7

The small white "boats" bob in the distance, like scoops of vanilla ice cream atop a dark, bluish float. I can't see the small black eyes of the gull, nor the vivid, sharp hooks of their beaks. Their cute little webbed toes are hidden beneath the surface of the water, but I know they're either tucked up into warm feathers, or paddling languidly. The seagulls pay no attention to me, but I am watching them. The tables have been turned. "The circle, as Joseph Bruchac writes, "is the way to see." In these warm feathered bodies, bobbing and drifing in the current, I see the natural world. I see a reflection and an interconnectedness. I see me.

I have always been fascinated with the seagull. As a little girl, liked the birds because I could throw my icky bread crusts overboard, and the loud birds would swoop in a for a meal, entertaining me and breaking the monotony of a day on the lake. I learned as a child that gulls are not picky; watching them scavenge on the shorelines for bits of fish skin, human refuse or even the living insects and water bugs showed me that these birds know how to make do with what they have.

Walk along the edge of any dump, landfill or polluted place, and there's the gull, loudly proclaiming himself king of all the things in the world that no one else wants. I've often wondered what, if anything, I can learn from these birds.

Once, while reading a book in a park in downtown Chicago, I'd set down the lemon bar I was eating, only to watch it slide away out of the corner of my eye, pages later. A craft gull had snuck in close behind me, nabbed the cellophane wrapper, and was slowly backing away from me with one eye trained on my face. It was the first time I'd even been so close to a bird like this, and I held my breath, not wanting to freak him out. I don't think he cared at all.. he scooted about two feet away, and looked up, then took his time pecking at my lemon bar. By that time, I realized I could no more offend him than he'd offended me, so I pulled out my cellphone and snapped a picture of him, in case no one believed me. Thankfully, my friends in Chicago "get" this kind of thing; one saw it as a message.

"You know, Mars, maybe the seagull is your totem animal."

Totem animal, huh? I'd heard of this concept, but hadn't felt like I'd even had an encounter with any animal to experience the coolness of this.

A totem animal, is, according to the Manataka American Indian Council, a spirit guide that may "teach us their powers and give as lessons of life (and these things don't necessarily have to be animals)."

Well, from that day on, I kept noticing gulls, all the time. Sure, they're all over Navy Pier in downtown Chicago, and I lived next to the lake on the North side, but even when I wasn't near water or trash or spilled food.. I'd see a gull.

There would be a magnet in a bookstore, a lighthouse with a bird atop it.

And one day, at home in Nebraska, I was feeding ducks at a small lake in the town where my mom works, and these gulls flew above me, and hovered there, caught on the wind current. Most of the flock moved on, but there was one gull in particular that kept riding the wind; he'd go higher, and move forward, then drop down and be pushed backward again, until he was above me yet again. It felt like this went on for hours, but it was probably no more than 60 seconds. There was this old dead tree behind him, and the way the sun was coming through the tree, dappled and reflected, broken into small squares of glittering, opalescent light, then landing on the bird's feathers, made me feel like there was more than woman and bird and wind involved in the moment. It made me feel like I was connected to something larger than the bird, or the sun or even that moment. It made me feel like all moments were the same and my entire life was as shot through with amber and gold and warmth as any life had ever been.

So what did the seagull mean? That a carefree, scavenging, wild attitude was always going to be part of my makeup? I guess I knew that already, but it was fun to see a similarity between me and the animal.

Since that time Raccoon has added himself to my cache of totem animals. Before I left Chicago for good, I'd been praying for a sign, and the night I first talked to my boss about possibly putting in my two weeks, a raccoon walked out of a dark street in front of me, and walked about 1/4 of a block home with me. Raccoon can often help people let go of things that no longer serve them.

I feel stronger ties and loyalty to Seagull, but it was really amazing to feel like I'd gotten the sign I was hoping for.

I know I am not alone in my kinship with animals in this manner; many indigenous peoples believe that there is power and connection and meaning in special animal encounters. For example, ancient cultures, such as the Mapuche, know that Puma and Jaguar are animals of power. Condor and Snake represent life and death and the great mystery surrounding us, and it is not uncommon for spiritual practice to invoke the names and strengths of these animals as needed. Even author Peter Coyote, who pays homage to his namesake in "Muddy Prints on the Mohair," calls upon the trickster spirit of the furred animal in both humor and contemplation.

"Coyote is the miss in your engine He steals your concentration in the Zendo… He is total effort. Any good afternoon nap. Best dancer in the house . The dealer and the sucker in a sidewalk Monte game. An acquaintance who hunts your power. The hooker whose boyfriend comes out of the closet while your pants are down. He's also the boyfriend…"

Seagull, too, is all of these things and more. He is the bird who flies with others but is not afraid to go alone. Seagull is like Gluskabe, or Ikitomi, depending on the tradition of story. He makes his home in any place, mates with anyone, finds what he needs to survive and knows how to go on. He is hated, cursed, studied, poisoned, diseased, make into cartoons and stuffed animals is stuffed and studied in museums and labs. Seagull is loud and annoying and always has something to say, like it or not or understand it. Seagull is also comfort.

I can't watch the birds bob on the water or pick through trash to this day without thinking of that day in Chicago or the moment in Nebraska at the lake. No matter where I am, what or who I encounter, I find a strength in these memories because I find a strength in seagull. I know I'm crass and loud and irritating and even animal in my actions at times. I don't so as far as theft of others' food, from behind their half-turned backs, but I know how to get what I need in order to function and survive. I am okay with going though the cheap-o bins at good will or the curbside junk left on the edge of my street corner. I am drawn to those who live likewise, the curious, the messy, the adaptable. We might be a stone's throw away from the edges of humanity and being pesky, pesty animals, but we are true to our animal nature. And for providing the example and reminding me to by myself, at all costs, I remain indebted to the seagull and the other guides who walk this planet.

Hardiness: Place Post No. 7

The lake has shed it skin for another winter. Sunlight shines on the ridged surface this afternoon, and I think that the gulls bobbing on the water look like small, white boats or dutch shoes floating in the distance. In just a matter of weeks it feels like winter has come and gone, and yet there's still a feeling of harsh cold in the air. I wonder if the wildlife below notices something similar? I know that fish like rough water, still, beautiful days above the surface do nothing for for the fisherman or woman.
I still see only dead plants, and a few birds, but no abundance of animals (or people). We've made it through the winter, but where is everyone?

The trees are beginning to send out small knobs of brown buds, and I can't wait to see the green life that sprouts from them. Their barren branches are now familiar, but they're not as inviting as the fullness of color is. Is the algae and other underwater greenery undergoing a similar process? Do these things live and die and move in cycles like the same things above water? I know the water grows its own furry covering sometimes in the late summer, but that's just what I can see. The filamentous algae covers the wooden legs of the dock with a mustardy yellow throughout the summer but is absent now; but what's it like underwater? Is the curly-leaf pondweed flourishing (I scout it out online and learn that it is, but will die back in the summer)? We don't have to worry about the invasive Eurasian watermilfoil in Walgren, but I know it exists in rivers throughout the south-central region of Nebraska.

I don't think we have Zebra mussels here, like Yankton county, South Dakota, so that's one less lifeform to worry about. But for all of those that should be here that didn't make it or don't, how many of the bad guys do? How many survive our winters (the zebra mussel comes from the Caspian so it should love the cold)?

I don't think about the wildlife that I know as invasive--he plants I see, the animals.. pheasants are not native to our country either--in much the same way I don't think about how hard it is for other life forms to make it through the winter. But as spring creeps around the corner and curiosity blossoms, how much will I begin to think about the existence of these things, and mine, relative to them?