It Begins with a Call - Part 1

I have been working on a piece of writing for some time now.  It is a work in progress, and I really have no idea where it is going.  But I'm taking a deep breath, taking the risk, and starting to share it.

This story begins with breaking a lineage.  This story begins with a fire.  This story begins in childhood.  This story begins with a dream.  This story begins with a longing.  This story begins in elder years.  This story begins with a call.  This story begins with an image.  This story begins with fear.  This story began centuries ago.  This story begins with a story.  All of these beginnings are true.  Or maybe none of them is true.  What is true is that this story does not have an ending, no happily ever after.  It may or may not ever have an ending, except for the inevitable death of the writer of the story.  This story is what I have.  Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that this story is actually many stories within stories.

           

Let’s say that it begins with a call.  Things do begin with a call.  Sometimes you hear it, and sometimes you even follow it.  If you don’t, something dies inside, and a particular way forward shuts itself off to you.  The call is always surprising, fresh, original.  Where does it come from? Spirit, intuition, the thread you’re given to follow, your dreams, your parents’ dreams, out of left field?  Sometimes it emerges out of memory, out of what has transpired in this life, or in one’s parents’ lives or their parents’ lives.  It may lead away from these, or deeper into them. 

           

For instance, in my life, I continued and furthered the breaking away from thousands of years of lineage that my parents initiated.  I am close to one hundred percent Jewish, all the way back.  My parents, however, joined no temple and never attended one other than for the requisite Bar Mitzvahs and weddings.  I always believed they simply chose to reject organized religion.  Someone must have told me that; it was the story that I believed.  My older sister recently informed me that it was all her fault.  Our parents had tried to enroll her in Sunday school, but the synagogue gatekeepers refused to place her in the higher-level class that my parents requested and felt she warranted.  So, they left in a huff and never came back, and neither my sister nor I got formal religious education.  I’d never heard that story before. 

We did celebrate Hanukkah and Passover, and my father spent Yom Kippurs sitting alone in the back yard (or later on the patio of our house in Miami), praying or contemplating, or whatever it was he did out there.  When I came of age, I left even these observances behind.  The traditions had a fond, familial feeling, but not enough significance for me to carry them forward.  I’ll always be Jewish in my bones, but I no longer carry the lineage, and my sons even less.  I feel a certain wistful regret about this, but, again, not enough to draw me back into the fold.

           

And yet, despite my disconnection from religion, from early on, there was something ineffable and intangible that hovered around the edges of my consciousness.  There was an inkling of another reality, a murmur of a call.  I didn’t understand that.  I didn’t know what it was that I felt.  At night, alone in the darkness of my bedroom, before my older sister was sent up to join me, I sometimes had an experience.  The dark took on a quality of brightness.  There was no light, but there was an indescribable brightness to the dark, followed by a vision.  It was always the same vision: a garden swing, double-sided, in an arbor.  The light was golden and ethereal.  A child in pale blue corduroy overalls sat on the swing, and perhaps others. Maybe the child was me. I always felt a sense of peace at seeing this scene, maybe even euphoria.  The way I described it to myself was, “I feel clean.”  I never told anyone about this. I’m not sure why; perhaps I knew they wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t want to minimize its power.  It didn’t happen frequently, and I couldn’t will it to happen.

In waking life, at age four, my ballet teacher planted the seed of a story in my awareness, and, like a magical vine, it grew and twined itself around my being.  As the years passed, it beckoned and called and sang and tugged.  Its name was Persephone.

Camus said, "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."   Persephone was mine.

My Persephone SoulCollage® card

By Heart

People often are impressed by those of us who memorize poems for salons or events like Rumi's Caravan.  I tell them, "It's a muscle.  You have to exercise it."  Why bother, though?  I can only say that poems you really love, that you bother to commit to memory, have an effect on you.  They work on you in mysterious ways.  For instance, I've been living with Theodore Roethke's "In a Dark Time" for going on two years now.  I can't explain it; it's mysterious.  But really worth the effort.  Plus, with oral traditions salons, we feel we are restoring soul to this very needy world.  Certainly, poetry writing and reading have their places, but poems told by heart are another thing altogether.  Come to a salon and you'll feel the difference.

One night, I got some lines for a poem, about poems, in a dream.  They disappeared in the morning, but the ideas behind them stuck.  So, I wrote a poem.  I don't know if this is one I'll learn by heart, but maybe it will give you a sense of what that is like.  (As always, this poem is fresh and mostly unedited, so please forgive any chunkiness.)

By Heart

The poem is not your friend.

The poem is a pest. 

It gets under your skin and

nestles down inside you.

You would like it to go to sleep,

give you a break,

but the poem tosses and turns,

throwing off its blankets to expose

this line or that.

The poem does not care about you.

It is looking for a home,

and when it finds one in you,

it will move in for good, or at least

for a long stay.

If you ignore it, the poem will pout

and keep tapping you on the shoulder.

The poem will tell you,

“Here.  I belong to you.”

The poem doesn’t care who wrote it,

only who gives it residence.  

The poem will 

pick at your scabs, 

make you cry,

yell in your face.

Then it will pat your back and say,

“There, there.”

As long as the poem includes

one line of mystery, it will continue to

niggle at your thoughts,

tug at your heart,

poke you in the gut.

Repeatedly.

But although it isn’t your friend,

the poem will be

your companion.

It will move you,

agree with your deepest thoughts,

tell you if you are on track.

Even if you forget one of its lines,

the poem will reveal the lesson

in that omission.

The poem will be 

your teacher.

And you will love it.

One of my SoulCollage® cards

P.S. I will be doing a Persephone Rising SoulCollage® event on April 8th.  Email me if interested.

Ladybugs! Ladybugs!

It's really unusual for me to blog twice in a week, but here goes.  As you might have seen on Facebook, Barry and I went to see the annual ladybug visit to Redwood Park here in the Oakland hills.  When we got home, Barry tasked me with writing a ladybug poem in the style of Mary Oliver.  I'm no Mary Oliver, but I do write the occasional poem, so here's the rough draft.

What guides the ladybugs

to cluster every year

in the early winter months

alongside the Stream Trail?

How do they remember,

locate their way back,

find each other?

Clustering in the sunny patches of 

blackberry brambles and on

dead logs, they rest,

lay their eggs, and 

wait for Spring.

Why are ladybugs, like salmon

pitting their way back

to the places of their spawning,

smarter than we supposedly

superior humans?

They know to spend the bleak

winter months congregating with

their companions, while we so often think

we must overwinter alone, or only

with a few of our nearest and dearest.

Here is what ladybugs know:

Rest.

Find your way home.

Huddle up together.

Stay warm.

A Dream for the New Year

I woke up in the night with a dream that included pomegranates and wandering through hidden, dark places.  Persephone is clearly knocking at my door after a hiatus, and I feel responsible to honor that.  I haven't felt so connected to Her of late, and so I'm grateful for the dream.   And, given the timing, it also seems like a message for the new year.

Because of the appearance in the dream of someone known for his humor, I'm taking it as a sign I need a lot more of that next year!  I'm not alone in that, am I?

On the grocery store shelves

            I find two pomegranates:

            one is broken open;

            one is squashed.

A helpful clerk offers

            to look for others,

            fresh and whole.

In the meantime,

            I meet an old acquaintance,

            a celebrity, in fact, one known

            for his humor and political savvy.

Together, we roam the store

            and nonchalantly enter

            the back rooms, the dark storehouses

            and cold corners inaccessible to the public,

            and then finally the night-time parking lot.

When we reach the holiday’s long

            check-out line, I am still waiting

            for the clerk to reappear with my

            sought-after fruit.

After I wake up, I appreciate that I have had

            a congenial companion and guide

            through some hidden other/underworld.

I hope that Persephone’s

            healthy, whole, ruby red and

            burgeoning fruit will soon

            be in my hands.

The Tension of the Opposites

Sitting in the tension of the opposites is apparently where I find myself these days.  I’ve been reflecting on our recent trip to the Czech Republic and Austria.  So much beauty, both natural and cultural.  I fell in love with beautiful Prague and the charming Czesky Krumlov.  I admired the artwork of Alfons Mucha and Klimt.  We had the sweet companionship of friends and family.  I was thrilled to see the Artemis of Ephesus in the museum in Vienna.  And the Austrian Alps – what words can truly describe their grandeur? 

Then there was the old Jewish Quarter of Prague and Terezin.  There was beauty – the Spanish Synagogue, for instance, and the old cemetery.  And there was also the horror and sadness of the names of all the Holocaust dead covering the walls of the Pinkas synagogue.  And then there was the strangeness of Terezin itself.  The Nazis had adapted the fortified town of Terezin as a ghetto and concentration camp. They evicted the Czech residents and interred primarily Jews from Czechoslovakia, as well as Jews deported chiefly from Germany and Austria, and some from the Netherlands and Denmark. More than 150,000 Jews were sent there, including 15,000 children.  Although it was not a death camp, about 33,000 died in the ghetto.  And of the 15,000 children only 100 survived the war.

But going to Terezin… It is a charming little town, once again inhabited by Czechs.  The odd paradox of this fine little town and the horrors that happened here….it is hard to take in.  Only in what they call the small fortress do you really get a sense of the nightmare.  

We were there around the same time as Charlottesville was happening here at home.  The synchronicity was chilling.

But doesn’t this all make sense in a larger context?  We are, many of us privileged and (relatively and so far) safe, yet horrified by what is happening in our country both naturally and politically.  Shortly after we came home we got word of the sudden death of a friend.  Hurricane Harvey hit, and all the California fires.  And yet, I, for one, am in almost daily contact with the most beautiful and wonderful of granddaughters, for whom I have to have hope. 

How do we sit with it all – the beauty and the horror?