A New Poem: Doldrums

 Taking a brief break from my prose blog series, here is a new poem.

Late summer,

where here

in northern California

the sky dawns overcast

almost every day;

where the fog burns off

and the sun emerges

by 11 AM;

where the weather

is perfect, breezy,

not hot, very dry -

there is a poignancy

to these drifting days.

Each arises from its night

so slightly sooner,

the change is

barely perceptible.

I don’t know

if it is boring or grace,

these doldrums,

these suspended days

when the repeating pattern

feels endless and timeless,

and yet,

and yet,

we know for sure

that the changes

of time and times

are coming.

It is important now

to breathe fully, not

to hold the breath.

What will come

will come –

winter, troubles,

beauty, blessings.

The doldrum days are

no curse; they are

a space in which

to open.

Navigating Mystery, Part 5

 As Mary Oliver says, I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. 

 

I confess, I have been more of a visitor than a resident.  The land doesn’t know me.  I was never trained in its ways. I grew up without a deep connection to the natural world.  We lived in a city.  The natural world was a place to visit upon occasion.  There were parks.  There were visits to a beach.  There were summer vacations in the Smoky Mountains or the White Mountains of New Hampshire, places of beauty to love and marvel at but that were not central to my daily life.  I did spend much of my childhood playing out of doors, catching lightning bugs on warm summer nights, exploring the tiny woods a few blocks away from the house, sipping honeysuckle flowers growing along the back fence; building snowmen in the front yard on winter days.  I was not without any appreciation of the out-of-doors. I just wasn’t taught to see how everything is interconnected or inspirited.

 

Even so, I was not totally bereft of spiritual experience.  Often, I was afraid of the dark.  But once in a long time, alone in my bedroom, a radiance would wash over and through me.  Radiance is not precisely the correct word; the darkness itself glowed. I thought of it as “the bright of the dark.” It filled the room and me and left me feeling clean and peaceful.  Then, on its heels, I would see in my mind’s eye an image of a child in light blue overalls on a double swing in a garden.  The swing was draped with flowering vines.  This happened every time, and seeing this image made me happy.  That was my connection, if not to the natural world, at least to the world of the imagination, or spirit.

 

I danced the ballet again in my last recital eight years later, but Persephone continued to spark my imagination.  I was born in the spring, and she was a goddess of the spring.  But I worried that, like Persephone, I, too, could be pulled into some dark underworld.

 

Now, so many years later (and as I have said already) I’ve grown heartily weary of living in and with fear, and not truly connected with the earth. I think about the time Demeter occupied her newly built temple at Eleusis, grieving, unwilling to leave or to allow the earth to provide sustenance until her daughter was returned to her.  The first sit-down strike. I am no goddess, and it is fear rather than grief that I am reckoning with.  But I can sit down and dig in.  Here are my tools: an old leather journal and a decent fountain pen.  I intend to write my way into healing.

SoulCollage® card - Demeter and Hades at Eleusis

 

Navigating Mystery, Part 4

 Maybe grief was not okay in my family.  Or any big emotion.  Certainly, anger was unacceptable.  I wasn’t much older when I began to be punished for having “temper tantrums.”  Either my mother would leave me alone on the floor of the living room to “cry it out,” or, when I was older, she would send me upstairs to my room until I calmed down.  If I stomped up the steps in anger, I had to come back down and walk up quietly.  I knew why anger was bad; my father had a big temper, too.  He was never one to hit or spank us, but he was a large man, and when he was angry, his voice and his presence swelled to fill any room.  His explosions sucked all the air out.  My breath would freeze on the inhale, and I would shrink, trying to make myself too small to notice.  My mother was evidently concerned that I’d grow up to be like him because I also expressed frustration and anger.  I eventually learned to wrestle with the big feelings and to attempt (not always successfully) to tamp them down.  My mother socialized me using shame and humiliation.  My father’s name was Melvin, and when she really wanted to keep me in line, she would call me “Little Melvin.”  I hated that.  I knew what it meant, and I was afraid that I would grow up to be like him, or at least like the worst of him.  I don’t mean to paint a totally negative picture of my dad – he was a loving man and father, but he loomed large for me on the anger front.

 It was in those early years that I met Persephone. I began taking ballet classes at age 3. One of the first ballet recitals I danced in was the Persephone story; I had the role of the north wind in the meadow where Persephone was abducted.  I loved ballet.  Out of all the nine years of recitals I performed in, this story is the only one I remember. It stayed with me. I began writing Persephone poems as a teenager. Although I never experienced the kind of extreme trauma that Persephone did, I lived in fear of change, of being dragged down into the dark realms, of waiting for some other shoe to drop.  I always expected it would drop.  I was wary.  Uncertainty was to be avoided.  I made the decision not to risk too much, not to reach too high, not to shine too brightly.  I remember telling a friend in 7th grade, “I believe in never expecting too much because then you’re never disappointed.”

 

But I am old now and desperately tired of fear’s grip on me.  I worry that I am too old for whatever initiation may be required to change this. There are traditional rites of passage for adolescents, for new mothers, for entering the elder years.  I am entering the elder-elder years.   The final initiation gapes like an open doorway in my mind’s eye as I get closer and closer.  As Mary Oliver says, "I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world."

SoulCollage® card - Persephone

Navigating Mystery, Part 3

What my grandmother was like before the shock therapy, I don’t know and never

thought to ask.  I knew her as a passive presence, crocheting popcorn-stich

bedspreads and doilies, and watching daytime soap operas now that television

had arrived - Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns.  She went along with

whatever the family did. I was her favorite and would sometimes spend time with

her in her bedroom, playing her treasured music box shaped like a piano (which

now sits in a glass cabinet in my studio), and breathing in the pungent scent of

the cedar chest at the foot of her bed. But I never truly knew who she was.

My parents were second generation Americans.  All four of their parents had come over in the early 1900’s, escaping the pogroms and the hardships of Jews living in Russia. Even though World War II ended several years before I was born, the after-effects lingered, especially for Jews.  I remember hearing stories of the holocaust when I was a child, mostly because a cousin of my uncle’s escaped from a concentration camp, bearing an amazing story of survival and reunion.  Her name was Regina.  She and her family occasionally came to larger family gatherings in Baltimore from their home in New York.  I was puzzled at how her legs looked, thick and discolored.  My mother told me that Regina’s legs had gotten frostbitten during the war.  She and her husband had been sent to different concentration camps.  Regina was pregnant and managed to hide in a closet to give birth, and somehow she managed to smuggle the baby out to friends on the outside.  She herself escaped the camp by lying down in the winter fields, pretending to be dead.  That is how she got frostbite.  When the war ended, Regina reclaimed her son, but had no idea where her husband Sava was, or even if he was still alive.  When both she and Sava independently wrote letters to a mutual friend, they found each other again.  They and their baby made their way to the states where they eventually had a second son and a new life.

 

Every family has its sorrows, its losses, its challenges, mine included. Not everyone winds up as scared and risk averse as I have always been.  Most of the family’s traumas occurred before I was born.  Why was this my cross to bear?

 

Many years later, sometime in midlife, I was lying on a massage table getting a Cranial-Sacral adjustment, when the therapist encouraged me to tell a story about my family.  She suggested it might shed some light on the tension locked into my body.  The story about my grandmother’s shock therapy instantly arose in my mind, although it was a story told to me rather than one I remembered. After I finished relating it, she asked me this question: “Where were you when this was happening?”  My eyes flew wide open with sudden realization.  Of course!  I was very young, maybe two or three years old at the time.  I would have been on those bus rides, witnessing my grandmother freaking out over the horrible treatments, hearing my mother tell her to get a grip on herself.  I must have been scared.  I witnessed my grandmother’s terror and grief.  I looked up at my mother, the center of my life, at her wits’ end, forcing my grandmother into even more pain and suffering.

 

SoulCollage® card - The Writer

Navigating Mystery, Part 2

 

When my parents expected their first child, they were living with my father’s parents.  This was a good thing because when my mother went to the hospital in labor with my sister, my father was flat on his back in another hospital across town.  He had been in a streetcar accident and suffered a broken back.  It was a good thing that my mother had her father-in-law, a man she adored, to accompany her.  She no longer had a relationship with her own father.  My grandmother had divorced him after he refused to end a long-standing affair. The whole family disowned him.  Divorce was uncommon in those days, especially for Jews. I never met either of my grandfathers.

My sister Ellen was the first grandchild on both sides of the family.  My father recovered fully from the accident, and when my sister was a few years old, my parents moved into their own house, less than a mile away from his parents.  It was a modest row house in the Pimlico neighborhood of Baltimore, but it was all they needed.  My mother suffered a few difficult years then, losing several pregnancies to miscarriage, and then enduring an even greater tragedy with the death of a baby boy several days after birth.  My father was ready to give up trying to have more children.  He never could bear to see her suffer.  But my mother wanted another child. 

Each and every one of us begins in the depths, deep in the mother’s body, held in that small watery world.  When the mother moves, the baby rocks.  When the mother sleeps, the baby sinks down and rests in the darkness. Or wakes up at the sudden stillness, poking and jabbing an elbow, a knee, a foot. What the baby hears is muffled, distant – the familiar hushed lilt of the mother’s voice, other voices, the perpetual drum beat of the heart, the pumping and humming of the blood, and the muted noises of the outside world.  When the mother eats, the baby is nourished, everything pouring into her through the placenta and umbilical cord.  But what about what the mother feels?  Her fears and tension, her joys and excitement all travel through the cord with her shifting hormones. 

In 1949, six and a half years after my sister was born, I entered the world. I wonder what of my mother’s losses came through the placenta to me.

 

In the year before I was born, my father’s father and his older brother and only sibling both died.  My parents took my grandmother in; her grief was relentless and seemingly insurmountable.  My mother said that her mother-in-law wept incessantly, day and night, for months, and then for years.  My mother understood, as she was grieving as well, but when the never-ending crying did not abate or even lessen, she couldn’t live with it any longer.  She took my grandmother to doctors for help.  The only help they had to prescribe was shock therapy.  And so, my mother would take her weeping mother-in-law on the city bus across town to get treatment, as this was in the days before my parents owned a car.  Each time my grandmother would beg my mother not to make her go back.  My mother claimed that my grandmother would be very quiet and docile on the bus ride home, but that the tears would soon start up again.  My mother told her, “When you can get a grip on yourself, we’ll stop. But for now, this is what the doctors say we have to do.”  At some point, the weeping ended or at least calmed sufficiently for the treatments to end.  The medical world likely deemed it a success. Mission accomplished.  I will never know what my grandmother lost or the terrible pain that she suffered.  In other words, what damage was done in the name of healing her?  It was as much if not more horror than it was healing.

My mom, me, my sister Ellen