Tis the Season

I am looking out the window of Santa Lucia, past the poinsettia on my red-clothed table, beyond the Christmas tree outside, and through the reflected white lights, to the new Fox Theatre blade sign. The theatre that I went to as a child is slowly being restored to the way it looked when it opened in 1930. I say slowly because it hasn’t been a project some company threw a lot of money at, or that the city or a new owner took out a big bank loan for. No, it’s being done through donations as they are given and a lot of volunteer labor. It’s a gift of love the people of the community are giving themselves for the benefit of all.

 

Friday night the new sign, an exact replica of the original, was lit for the first time. And it is beautiful. After the lighting, the not-entirely inhabitable theatre was sold out for a showing of "Holiday Inn," the 1942 movie with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. It was accompanied by Merrie Melodies’ Bugs and Elmer Fudd and a very long short about buying war bonds. We live in such different times. My mother was just about the age of my daughter when the movie was made, ten years before my birth. It kind of boggles my mind.

I’ve been thinking about gift-giving this week. I gave myself a gift last week, a magical writing retreat on Whidbey Island. My family all participated in the gift by making it possible for me to be away. One of the participants, Joanna, sent this a couple of days ago, “Make time, every single day, to keep the sparks of your soulfire glowing brightly.” I’m not sure how you do that, but I do know it takes intention. Last year in my December 11 blogpost, I quoted Earl Nightingale, “You become what you think about.” Thinking about how you want to be is intention. I want everyday to be a gift I give myself. I want my self to be a gift I give to others. Wanting it doesn’t always make it so. We are human. We have pain. And sometimes we have to just take care of ourselves or we will fall completely apart. That’s when we must make time to rekindle the soulfire.

Of course we all know about giving gifts to another person; the kind wrapped up and tied with a ribbon. That is what we have made this season about. It isn’t always fun. It doesn’t always feel good. We give people what we think they might like, and sometimes guess wrong. We give them something we like, but it isn’t necessarily appreciated by the giftee. We give them something they ask for, but that isn’t much fun. And I really don’t like being asked what I want. World peace? As one interviewee in the People on the Street column in the local paper－a man who volunteers at a food bank－said, "That's the wrong question to ask me." (I do sure hope I get a new camera, though.) I have always best liked to give gifts I craft myself; I like thinking about the person who will receive it the whole time I’m making it. Some people like those gifts, others feel cheated. I don’t really like the whole gift-giving part of Christmas. It feels too much like an obligation. I would be happy to do away with it entirely and give gifts through the year when they aren’t expected and there’s no pressure.

In her book, The Seven Whispers, Christina Baldwin suggests that asking for what we need and offering what we can is a spiritual practice. It is "a two-step exchange of needs and offerings, and the whole village is dancing.... Asking / offering / giving / receiving is one circular motion." If we break the circle, if we skip a step, we block the dance. If we fail to notice what we need and ask for it, the beat is lost and we are thrown off balance. Christina reminds me that the trajectory is not a straight line, it is not tit for tat (though I think that is the expectation on Christmas morning, another reason the custom doesn't resonate with me), but "it's a dance of intersections and connections between myself and other people and the opportunities we create as we cross each other's paths."

So often I hear people say that when they do something for someone else, it feels like a bigger gift to them than it is to the recipient. I think that’s true. But it’s not always true. Another friend reminds me this week that sometimes you give a gift of yourself that is excruciating to the giver, but sends the recipient over the moon with happy. Those are the hardest gifts of all. Those are the biggest gifts of all. When you receive nothing whatsoever in return. Except sometimes, later, maybe much later, you realize it really was an enormous gift to you, too.

A Retreat to Aldermarsh

When a friend in North Carolina sent me the link to the PeerSpirit website a few months ago, sharing information about a 6-day writers’ retreat on Whidbey Island, less than three hours from my Washington State home, I didn’t even consider that I could go. Too expensive, and too big a time commitment away from my mother and diabetic cat. I did attend a one-day retreat with the same leader that was wonderfully enriching and relaxing. Perhaps next year, I thought, I could attend the long one.

Good ideas like hardy perennials take time to germinate in the garden. I bought Christina’s book, Storycatcher, at that retreat. I had a lot of reading material in the queue, it took me a while to get to it. By page 10, I knew I had to figure out a way to get to The Self as the Source of the Story retreat. I’m writing a memoir; writing is part of the reason I moved; it was a no-brainer. And God knows I deserved a break, didn’t I?

My sisters encouraged me, though neither of them really offered any ideas of how to replace my presence with Mama. Just that Magical Thinking: we’ll figure it out. And then there was the expense. I have no income. But sometimes, I have learned, you really do just have to leap and trust that the details will work themselves out, magical thinking or not. I signed up. Before I could get the deposit made, Mama took her own break from home to the ER, followed by three days in the hospital and several more days to recover from the three days in the hospital. No way could I go away, knowing it could happen again. I withdrew my registration.

Things got back to normal at home, though, and I finished reading the book. I had to go. Then Mama strained her back and it took both me and Rebecca to get her through the next several days. The second crisis knocked us to our knees. Sometimes that’s what it takes to let go of the fairy tale that a 96 year old is going to live in status quo forever. We lucked into and hired an in-home caregiver and insisted against resistance from Mama that she have a regular schedule, to augment the other caregiver that comes by invitation only. I signed up for real.

So now I am here: Aldermarsh Retreat Center. And it has been among the best experiences of my life. My early arrival netted me the tiny Spirit House cottage and blessed solitude.


I have learned much about the craft of writing memoir from Christina Baldwin－who is a truly gifted teacher－and about my own project. I have spent hours and hours with nine other women participants with fascinating life stories. I have wandered the grounds of the center’s marsh, tall trees, meadow, and vegetable garden; treated myself to a fabulous massage and eaten amazing food that someone else cooked－not a morsel that my housemate could eat and therefore I would not prepare.

I have bathed in a soaking tub in a Zen bathroom and peed in a bucket in my bathroom-free cottage where I have been all alone for the past five nights. The rain has pounded on the roof and the wind and the coyotes have howled. And I lived into my first ever Silent Day in the presence of other people. From Friday evening until Sunday morning, I did not speak and no one spoke to me. Eleven women ate dinner together in a communion of silence. I wrote, I read, I wrote. I did yoga by myself for 45 minutes overlooking the misty meadow. I wrote, I took pictures, I wrote, I read, I slept, I wrote. As I pen this I have opened the small windows where I sit on my bed to better hear the bullfrog croaking in the teeming marsh.

There is no AT&T cell service here and I can only get internet in the main house. I have not looked at Facebook all week. I have no idea what is happening in the world. I am off the grid. I am breathing. I am listening to the story that is inside of me. I am letting the story onto the page.

Sometimes magical thinking becomes simply Magical.

They Will Know Us by Our Stories

One of my favorite National Public Radio shows is “This American Life.” It is storycatching, pure and simple. Yesterday, in the car, I came in in the middle of a story: an elderly woman relating time spent in a Louisiana neighborhood some years ago, in which her and her husband’s neighbors were a gay couple. They were, she said, the best of neighbors in a bigoted neighborhood. They were kind and helpful and reliably dependable whenever anyone needed anything. It was just who they were, and the fact of their sexual preferences became unimportant. She doubts that even today a black family would be accepted into that neighborhood, but gay people are welcomed wholeheartedly. She caught that story of an ordinary neighborhood in a place in time, carried it into the future, and told it back out.

Storytelling, the human experience passed down from family to family, friend to friend, neighbor to neighbor. It transforms us. “My story is myself; and I am my story. This is all you will know of me; it is all I will know of you. This is all that will survive us: the stories of who we are, the ways that people speak our names and remember something we did, an event we lived through, a clever story we were known for, or hopefully, some wisdom. They are mostly gone now－grandparents, aunts and uncles－and you and I will soon be gone, too. What is left of their lives, and what will be left our ours, is story” (Christina Baldwin: Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story).

What, you may ask, does storytelling have to do with the garden, and thereby this blog about the garden? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I knew when I left my soil and plants garden in North Carolina and moved across the country, following the highways and byways through the taller-than-an-elephant’s-eye cornfields and across the windblown plains and sagebrush deserts and over the soaring mountain ranges, I was going in search of a different garden to live in. I have told you the story of that other garden, now listen as I catch a new story.

Storycatching and storytelling. My aching desire to write more story fluctuates between hopelessness and hot burn. New gardens take time to come to fruition. There are false starts and discouragements; and there are triumphs, however small. There are times that I feel I am delusional to think I can write anything; and times that I kick ass－if only in my own mind. 

I asked my mother this week if she knew where her name came from. “Yes,” she said. “There was a socialite in my [Tennessee birth] town name Stella Jo, I expect it was spelled like that. My mother liked the name.” She said the socialite was in the newspaper a lot, or maybe she said she probably was. I wouldn’t have thought her mother read a newspaper, but our stories include a lot of could haves and guesses to fill in blanks; and that is okay. It’s her story and who am I to question or correct. (Now that I have written that, I may get more story, though!)

“My father wrote it on the birth certificate as ‘Stella Joe,’ with an “e” on the end. In school, there was also a Stella Mae, and we were both called Stella. So I changed my name to one word, Stellajoe, so there would be no mistake. Later, when asked what my middle name was and when I replied that I didn’t have one, I was told that everyone has a middle name. When I married I began to use my maiden name initial in my signature.” Perhaps I knew and had forgotten that my mother’s first name does not match her birth certificate. We forget a lot of stories.

This is part of my mother’s story. And of mine and my sisters’. And now I have written it down in the garden.

I went on a cemetery tour on a rainy yesterday. It was not my beloved historic Oakwood in Raleigh for sure. But all cemeteries are filled with stories. Some are widely known, most are not. The docent passed along some of the known stories. Like the Martin family: lumber mill owners and the area’s largest employer. Until the mill burned down and caused a personal and local economic collapse. Frank and Mellie Martin (family of one of the victims of the Centralia Wobbly massacre－her relative’s grave visited by President Warren G. Harding as he passed through Centralia) died within three months of each other in the early 1940s. Their story links the stories of two families. And storytellers pass it on. Two fir trees, planted next to their graves, have grown side-by-side to great height, telling the Martin's story of love for trees and each other. My friend Phillip is restoring their home, lost to them after the mill fire, and telling about them; and so their story continues.

“Story shifts us into connection when only moments earlier we felt isolated” (C. Baldwin).

I admit to a semi-love of FaceBook. FaceBook has been vilified by many; even by those who use it. But each time a friend, or even a stranger, posts something on their wall or responds to another’s post, it is storytelling. Like hieroglyphics scratched into cave walls, it tells us in millions and millions of snippets who we are. Each time someone reads it, it is storycatching.

I have kept a journal off and on from my first pink diary with its tiny lock and key, to the volumes one upon another written weekly for the last dozen years and a few from years before, to the past two and a half years of this blog. I have often asked myself why, and the answer is to know myself, and to leave my story behind when I am gone. Like Christina Baldwin, maybe paying attention to myself is my job, telling my story is mine to claim, and maybe my life will be different if I do. I no longer ask that question.

(This photograph tells one of our family stories; let me know if you want to hear it.)

And so, an invitation:

Write something. Write something now. Or tomorrow. But soon. Just a sentence. Look out the window; what do you see? Do you see the utility line? or the pigeon sitting on it? or the red-leafed tree hanging over it? or the pair of Reeboks flung over it? or the clematis vine climbing the guy wire? What you see tells something about you. When you write it down or tell it to someone, you share your story, with yourself and maybe with others. Send me a sentence (gigi.pnw@gmail.com), or leave it in a comment on this post. I want to know you. As I want you to know me.

Finding the Rhythm, Learning the Words

It has been exactly three months since I left my North Carolina garden and its bloom of friends, meaningful work, and familiar places and routines. It was just after the summer solstice; and now we have celebrated the autumnal equinox and the northern hemisphere is halfway through its long exhale. I am exhaling, too; and trying to feel the beat of this new song.

The summer was chaos. I should have been sweating through the North Carolina heat, watering the garden (or not), harvesting tomatoes and summer squash, watching the banana tree shoot its broad leaves skyward, having wine on a friend's deck, taking pictures of baby birds learning to eat from my feeder, doing Julie-yoga, writing on the porch at Cafe Carolina with the Fresh Market blueberry scone (until they stopped making them), throwing my windows open to hear the thunder and the pounding rain then slamming them down before the humidity slithered in, visiting my grandsons, and pitching my tent beside a murmuring mountain stream in the gentle Appalachian mountains.

But I wasn't doing any of those things. I stepped off the edge of my familiar life into this chaos where I don't know the words. I drove across the country with only my cat for company and moved into a house with another human being for the first time in more than eight years. There has been no thunder, nor much rain of any sort－certainly not pounding. I have not been able to lure the shy birds to the feeder; and my writing place is a few steps from my living room, having given up on coffee shops. My yoga class is, well, different from my familiar and beloved. My new grandson will be nearly a year old before I see him a second time. Dear Vee took a picture of the bigger than ever banana tree and its first ever flower and fruit, that I missed; it is no longer mine.

We think we know all about the song of our lives, then over time the tune doesn't quite fit anymore, and we tumble into chaos or despair. But there are many songs in the universe and I am finding the rhythm to this one and the words are beginning to come; I make up some and adapt others. I am slowly letting go of what was and letting in the wonder of what is. I guess we are all always doing that.

 "Wonder and despair [order and chaos] are two sides of a spinning coin. When you open yourself to one, you open yourself to the other. You discover a capacity for joy that wasn’t in you before…. As far as you are willing to venture into shadow, so far may you venture into light” (Christina Baldwin; Life's Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest).

I have had wine in my sister's courtyard with her friends and camped at the foot of a mountain in lush greenness with my daughters. My windows are always open and the cool night air wafts in around the bedclothes; I wake to morning fog in the valley. Cows bawl in the valley and coyotes howl in the hills beyond my window. I have harvested my tomatoes finally, this week. Cooking for someone else is becoming a little less onerous. I am discovering new friends and reconnecting with old ones. I bought Washington-grown Honey-crisp apples at the farmers' market－in Washington! My writing was published in the local newspaper this week. I have explored from the mountains to the sea and all over the enormous county that is my home now. I am rediscovering life in a small town; it has its challenges and its beauty.

Perhaps it is because it's autumn that I am settling into a rhythm finally. On the Native American medicine wheel, the season of autumn lies to the west. Since I can remember, autumn has been my favorite season. The west is where my soul was born, and where it has always resided－in spite of long seasons away.

Autumn is a time of introspection and manifestation. In autumn, I travel inward to the center of the spiral, my favorite symbol, after hanging out on the edge all summer. From that place, seeds of renewal and new life germinate. Through our chaos we receive the world’s calm. I will learn the words and rhythm of my new song in time, as I step from the chaos of summer into the calm of the earth's center.