The stalks are high the year
I kiss him under a cornflower sky.
He is slender. Friends marry.
We perch on hay bales, thighs touching
spider thread and dust.
Now, their children grow
pole beans they help to sell at market
on Saturdays. The sun has not aged
since that afternoon. It still is as high
as I have to rise, up on my toes
so his face
blocks the gaze of the wise one
beckoning from across the field.
Love, her lips say. The breeze carries her words
away,
the direction I learn
too late
is mine.
She nods to the fecund stretch of earth.
Love, come here.
On the hem of my dress
alights a grasshopper, dry
as my mouth on his.
Category: Uncategorized
Pool Party
It is to impel. It is to motivate. It implies the exertion of an animating force, and it enlivens. It can even mean to draw breath.
As overused as it is, I still love the essence of this word:
Inspire.
The momentum to write is not of my own making. I draw shamelessly from the sweat of the ones who write with more tenacity than I can imagine. I have tapped them all: storytellers, poets, journalists, bloggers, and those alchemists who can wed lyric to song. I thank my lucky stars for folks before and alongside me who have had the grit to get something down on paper and send it off into the world. Their efforts lift me up out of myself and sometimes plunge me deeper in, but no matter which way they tip me, they get me up off my tuchus. They move me. They are inspiration.
I was a reader first, voracious and obsessive. Since those first years dog-paddling around storybooks, I have loved soaking in letters. Stories and their characters were always my buddies, and I felt right at home dipping my toes into their adventures. When I finally came around to writing, it was as if I was finally diving into the deep end where the real party was happening. Every time I return to the page (which I must do for the first time every time), I am re-joining a splash and chatter that has not paused in my absence. It is so easy to stand at the edge of things, hesitating, doubting, wondering if I can find a way in. If it were up to my courage alone, I would still be peering from my safe remove in the shallows. Always, every time, it is another writer who tosses me a line and pulls me in.
Where would I be if the universe of writers did not keep guiding me back? What a thing it is, to learn that a reader finds some source of inspiration in my words! I am delighted to discover that my own writing, on occasion, has a similarly animating effect on folks who stumble across it. Patti Clark at A Woman’s Guide has generously nominated SmirkPretty for the “Inspired Blogger Award.”
These awards are chain letters for bloggers, giving us a chance to pay forward our appreciation for the stories that impel us to swim out a little further. This is my first such nomination. It is a lovely reminder that we are all here to help each other keep our hands moving and our heads above the surface to draw breath, no matter how strong the undertow.
Thank you, Patti, for your inspired writing and for the generous gift of reading SmirkPretty. This is a great nudge to keep swimming. Check out Patti here: http://patticlark.wordpress.com
The Inspired Blogger award’s requirements look like this:
1. Display the award logo somewhere on the blog.
2. Link back to the blog of the person who nominated you.
3. State seven things about yourself.
4. Nominate 15 other bloggers for the award and provide links to their blogs.
5. Notify those bloggers that they have been nominated and of the award’s requirements.
That’s a whole lot of lists for this little blog, but we can make room.
Seven things about me
1. Every night we are together, my son and I read either one chapter of a big-kid book (Harry Potter, or maybe The Secret Garden) or three children’s books. Then we sing three songs. We have been doing this since the day he was born. His favorite song right now is “The Cat Came Back.” The whole human race gets annihilated by an atom bomb in the end, but it gives us something to talk about during our morning commute.
2. I dance 2-3 times a week, walk every day on my lunch break, bike to and from the metro, and give the dog a 1.5 mile walk before bed. I know they say action is the antidote to despair, but exercise is the nurse administering the shot.
3. Someday, my ex husband and I are going to be close friends.
4. Whenever I smell honeysuckle, I stop and allow my tongue one tiny sugardrop before moving on.
5. About 13 years ago, I slammed out the words,
I believe in reincarnation
but in this lifetime, and not with Jesus.
I want to be born again, a hybrid kid
somewhere between grass and air and human.
I want to crystallize,
go chrysalis,
break out butterfly
all new.
I still believe. It is happening right now.
6. I allow myself 10 minutes of self pity per day. Sometimes I go over quota.
7. In my grandmother’s last few years, I visited every time I could (which was nowhere near enough, I realized too late). She had terrible arthritis. “Oh, sugar, could you please rub my hands?” I would sit on the floor by her powder blue recliner and rub the flesh between her brittle bones. Her skin was a treasure map, blue lines bleeding into ancient silk. Her feet, her fingers, I pressed mine between. She would moan and sigh and thank me quietly, over and over. When I imagine talking to my son about death and about what happens to people after they die, this is what I hold: the sensation of my grandmother’s tissue-thin skin on my fingertips, so fleeting, so completely forever.
Fifteen Inspiring Blogs. Read ’em. They’re good.
Agenthood and Submissionville: http://jackiebuxton.blogspot.com/
A Mama’s Peaks: http://amamaspeaks.blogspot.com/
Conversations with Curtis: http://conversationswithcurtis.blogspot.com
Failed at Forty: http://failedatforty.com/
Life Reconnected: http://lifereconnected.wordpress.com/
Mama C and the Boys: http://mamacandtheboys.com/
MamaTrue: Parenting as Practice: http://mamatrue.com/
My Morning is Your Evening: http://10hours10years.blogspot.com/
Our Story Begins: http://our-story-begins.com/
S.L. Writes: http://blog.slwrites.com/
Suzi’s Boob Juice: http://www.suzisboobjuice.blogspot.com/
This Man’s Journey: http://thismansjourney.net/
Two Sharp Pencils and a Broken Crayon: http://juliewolk.wordpress.com/
Unsettling: http://endlessstream.wordpress.com/
Virginia Trail Guide: http://virginiatrailguide.com/
Wind Me Up
Kissing is fine. It is pleasant enough. Repeat the act a few dozen-hundred-thousand times, and the pleasantness takes on a kind of general tone. Some smooches are better than others, but overall, kissing is nice. The particulars slip away.
Except for the first. No one ever forgets that kiss. If your first was with someone who has done it a few times before, don’t be too hurt when he does not remember your name. Also, don’t be afraid to be a little in love with him for the rest of your life.
The same goes for concerts.
Mine was Go Go Live at the Capital Centre, 1987.
We claim our own music at one critical moment. We never get that moment a second time, and we never forget it. Our tastes belong to our families and then, perhaps, to our friends. At some point, we find the direction of our own discernment, and we lean in. The choice does not feel so important when it is happening. Aren’t we just seizing an opportunity and just jumping into the pleasure of noise? Such things are usually not planned according to a grand strategy. Like that kiss. The moment appears, someone offers up a ticket. We enter that melee independent, freely choosing. “I love this,” we say, and without reading the terms and conditions, sign on to a lifetime membership among the acolytes.
Any concert is an anonymous experience. Hell, they happen time and again, and thousands if not tens of thousands of people converge. The experience of gathering into theater or stadium washes each spectator free of name and history, crushing everyone together into a single, teeming mass. An organism fills the concert hall. This unified Fan rises and falls under the sway of the music.
Also, though, nothing is more personal than that first time. Ask anyone about that earliest solo adventure, and she will call up the whole of the sensation with her eyes flashing and cheeks warming. This one clanging, bopping, overcrowded moment several lifetimes ago is burned into bone and still lives there. It still stings. The first concert marks us. Even if most of what we feel is embarrassment or lingering terror at becoming lost in it, even if we have no recollection of a single song, we still feel it. It pulses against skin and eardrum and vision as if Right Now. The echo is almost indistinguishable from the shout.
I was fourteen, a freshman in high school, and as dumb as a box of rocks. What did I know about the world outside the safe confines of my Bethesda neighborhood? Most of the time, I could not even identify my own tastes until my more self-possessed peers decided for me. (Guess jeans? My favorite!) From time to time, I was able to zero in on exactly what I liked. In these exceedingly rare cases, I could neither justify the preference nor find the company to commiserate, but I did not budge.
My one self-defined pleasures was Rap music. That was all we knew to call it then, that infant form of Hip Hop. Whatever it was, it worked its way right down into my bloodstream.
In the mid-80’s, Rap was popping up everywhere. Run-D.M.C. was hitting top 40. Salt ‘n’ Pepa were giving the girls a voice, Public Enemy was inciting rebellion, Ice-T was birthing gangster rap into being. Rap made me loosen up parts I did not even know I had. There I was, this dingbat white girl busting a move in her bedroom, I’m like Tyson icin’ I’m a soldier at war, I’m makin’ sure you don’t try to battle me no more. I was far too high on the beat to notice that I did not have the first idea what a “glock” was, let alone how to use one.
None of us is any single entity during adolescence (thank heavens). I was also bopping on the Pom Pom squad to Tiffany and could sing every word to every Madonna song. UB40 had me grooving. I would crank Donna Summer and bounce the pictures off the walls. My only criterion for falling in love with a band was this: Can I dance to it? Because once this girl started moving, there was no way she was going to stop.
This may not be true anymore, but in 1987, every bonehead in the ‘burbs knew how to work a radio dial. When I grew bored of my cassette tapes and 45s, I could roll on down to strange new territory on the FM frequency. Sometime around then, WPGC began playing the kind of music I did not hear at the school dances. I had no idea what it was, but it got my rear end in gear. It met the conditions for dance-ability then carried the bar up into the stratosphere.
Whatever I was hearing was like rap, but more vital. Juicy. It had this funk. Its cool down-tempo percussion and uh-huh beat made it hard to sit still. I had no idea what it was and I did not think to ask. What did it matter? All a girl has to do is listen and feel and let it shake loose the spine.
An older boy in art class razzed me to no end about my musical tastes. I was not so sheltered I couldn’t see him for the foul-mouthed Neanderthal he was. He favored country and kept trying to engage me in a stultifying argument about the superiority of his preferred musical form. To locate myself as far from his world as possible, I immersed myself in hip hop. Also, this drowned him out. I credit his blend of racism, misogyny, and idiocy with expanding my rap vocabulary exponentially during my first year of high school. (It took me another decade to realize I could actually like Garth Brooks without selling my soul).
This dude knew some other dude who had tickets to a Go Go concert. Go Go, it turns out, only sounds like the name of an 80’s pop-girl band. It is actually that funked out music I was discovering down the radio dial. Go Go is a homegrown DC genre of music with R&B roots and a dancehall style, though I did not even know that much at the time. (Check out a sample here).
The guy with the tickets went to another school, but he was old enough to drive and I guess he was having as much trouble finding a date to the concert as I would have in the same circumstances. So, without even meeting first, he showed up at my house on that weekend night and whisked me off to Prince George’s County. It amazes me now to think how this could have occurred. My parents must have been more consumed by their own drama than I can even imagine. Off I went, into the wide-open night with a complete stranger.
God bless their distraction. What a thing it was to walk into that giant arena and join 15,000 complete strangers in stomping and whooping to those rat-a-tat beats! I knew the sounds through the tinny bands of my radio, but here it was in the deafening flesh. Lights and voices and very real people on stage and more people pressing in on every side. My companion had scored tickets on the floor, and I was standing up on the seat, dancing like a fool. I was aware that I was younger and whiter than anyone else there, but I didn’t know enough to care. I just figured if I liked something, I was allowed to like it openly and shamelessly. That’s the privilege of being from a certain background, I suppose. I may have been far dumber at fourteen than I am now. I was also bolder. It did not occur to me that music may not belong to a person who has claimed it. Those rhythms were mine because they spoke to me, and so I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
The lineup included a few I knew, like Rare Essence, Junkyard Band, and Experience Unlimited (who later hit the charts with “Da Butt,” but that song had not been hatched when they hit the stage). I had not previously heard Hot Cold Sweat or Little Benny. I fell in steamy, pure love with each and every one of them that night, and chanted along in the call-and-response, and got up offa my thing, just like I was told.
Chuck Brown exploded through a fanfare of music and lights, jamming into the screaming adoration of the audience. Even then, they called him the Godfather of Go Go, and he lit up that whole arena. I remember feeling like I was a part of something I should have understood but did not. What is a girl to do but step aboard and go for a ride? I got up and got down – way too far down for a skinny-assed kid – but I felt it all. My throat was as sore as my feet, but that was only later. Inside the night, inside the music, it was only the funk. It was only the Right Now.
They razed the Capital Center a decade ago, and Go Go had slipped into retirement a few years before that. Today, just a few miles down the road, a memorial service for Chuck Brown took place. He died last week at 75. It’s a sad, strange thing to think of all that flash and groove going quiet. I am sure I am not alone in claiming his music as the soundtrack for a first or for a whole chapter of firsts. On body, city, time, and even on me, that man left his mark. Just by playing his music, just by sending it out to the crowd, he gave this place sound in motion.
Go Go has been making its return to the District over the past few years. I have not had the courage to make my way in and see what the fuss is about. I know I will have to make the pilgrimage soon. We never forget the first one. The sting it leaves is still hot and deep. Even if the music does not remember me, it will always be my one true love. Chuck Brown, thank you for that kiss.
—
You can read Natalie Hopkinson’s tribute to Chuck Brown’s role in shaping Go Go here: http://www.theroot.com/views/chuck-brown-dies-75?page=0,0
Fight or Flight
Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature:
when it blows, there is only wind;
when it rains, there is only rain;
when the clouds pass, the sun shines through.
– Tao Te Ching, 10
We are dressed for the day. A Tupperware of cinnamon toast and eggs is ready for Bug to scarf down on the commute. The only thing left is walking the dog. I offer Bug the choice to stay in the house with granddaddy or come with me. He fiddles with his legos, weighing his options. Usually the dog’s constitutional is an all-business trot down the cul-de-sac. Ten minutes, tops. While I know better than to take the kid when we are in a hurry, the situation calls for adaptation.
“Gramma Genie can walk her,” he tells me.
“Gramma Genie is in Dallas, remember? Your great grandma Mardy fell and broke her hip.”
“Oh yeah,” he remembers. “What did they have to do for the operation?”
Many mornings, Bug will hang around my mother’s room chewing the fat as she gussies herself up for her workday. My father sequesters himself in the basement to write. In the blessed reprieve, I can buzz around packing lunches and walking the dog, half hearing that mode of relentless interrogation only a 5-year-old can pull off. This week, the big bedroom upstairs is quiet. Bug tags along after me instead. Great Grandma Mardy needs my mother right now much more than we do, so I attempt to move along at a steady clip while also keeping expectations down where they belong. Bug’s ceaseless chatter accompanies me. I explain as briefly as I can how hip replacement works and what the word “rehabilitation” means. I remind him he is supposed to be choosing between the dog and granddaddy.
Bug glances at the wan light coming from a too-quiet basement. The old man is no match for the outdoors. “I want to walk with you,” he tells me.
Racing down the driveway, Bug kicks through a puddle. It has rained torrents every night for the better part of a week. Giant mushrooms bloom low in the grass and a creek the length of the block has formed along the edge of the blacktop. Fenway snuffles, squashing tiny wild strawberries as she goes. The scent of honeysuckle drapes itself over the mist.
Ahead, Bug sees Cleo dart into a gauze of brambles. Our skinny calico cat often joins us on these jaunts, keeping her haughty distance. In an instant, she is invisible, her patches blending into the spongy decay of last season’s canopy. Bug turns to me, impulse flashing across his face.
“Let’s go on an adventure!”
I feel a sigh gather steam but I quell it. It is getting late. The dog roots around in the puddles. She has peed so we are done here. “It’s awfully wet, baby,” I say, “and we need to get to school.”
“It’s not too wet,” he says. He steps off the blacktop and his feet sink into the muck. I groan. He shrugs. “It’s okay. It’s only a little wet.”
The cat is visible for a moment, stalking her imaginary prey. She creeps further into the shadows. Bug watches her, keeping one eye on me. He is primed. “We have to chase her,” he explains.
“We’ve already gotten all dressed for school. I’m wearing my work clothes.”
“We can change our socks. You will dry off at work.” He grins at me, momentum quivering from toes to scalp. His gaze twinkles with something like. . . flirtation? I’m a sucker for a charmer. No and Yes start throwing punches. The crowd presses in, choosing sides. The determination to distinguish myself in my profession joins the clock in clanging out support for the clear favorite.
The underdog’s backers are silent.
Open yourself to the Tao,
then trust your natural responses;
and everything will fall into place.
Sometimes the hardest steps are the simplest to take. The playground scuffle goes on, but I tear myself away and look only at my son splashed across the canvas of the morning. How many of us get to kick off the workday by ducking into the wild woods? My grandma in that post-op hospital room would probably surrender her reserve seat in heaven for one last moment exactly like this.
“Let’s go get that kitty,” I say. I unclip the dog’s lead. Bug chants “Yay, yay, yay!” as he ducks under the vines and plunges into shadow. We are deep in when a breeze awakens the leaves and showers us with a morning-after rain. We look up through the blue-green awning at the sun making its way through a weave of branch and cloud. Bug and Fenway follow the incensed cat down into a creek-bed and up onto a soggy log. She leaps away and we part a congregation of weeds whispering at our calves.
Our ragtag foursome dips and climbs through summer then winter and even next year’s spring. We burrow through the earth’s core and emerge from the mouth of a cave that smells of seawater and smoke. We wander through a valley teeming with cockatiels that screech from the low branches of mango trees. Every person we have ever known has grown old and died. A waterfall as tall as a mountain washes us free of memory.
Bug parts a curtain of ivy and we spill out onto the road. The cat bounds back towards the house, her tail arched in irritation. My son’s face is wild with pink light and his legs are streaked with mud. “We came out all the way down here!” We have exited fewer than twenty feet from our entry point, but I share his wonder. The continent has shifted in our absence, and nothing will ever be the same.
We dash back to our house and peel off socks and shoes. I take the stairs two at a time to change the whole outfit because three inches of damp trouser cuff might blow my cover. I may be a feral thing, but I still have to don my breathing apparatus to survive in the world of steel and glass.
No one knows where we have been. How could we begin to explain? We slipped through a tear in the damp fabric of the morning and crawled onto the beach alongside those first gilled beasts. Only a skittish cat, one lop-eared dog, a boy and his mama recall what happened here, but our recollection is fading fast. In the car, Bug and I speak of quotidian things, of weekend plans and hip surgery. When we attempt to fit what we have witnessed into the shape of language, our tongues founder.
I know only this: When all the clocks in the world demanded we stay on solid ground, we stepped off the edge. We made our way back, but we may not stay for long. Do we have years or decades? Will we will reach ninety-two or knock off next week? No one gets out of here unscathed. For every moment we claim as our own, we will pay. It is only a matter of time.
If you open yourself to loss,
you are at one with loss
and you can accept it completely.
Walk the dog or stay home? Get wet or stay dry? Everything we love, even the very selves we occupy, might be gone in a blink. Knowing this, what choice do we have but to step over and meet what is here?
—
Mitchell, Stephen. Tao Te Ching. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
Homeward Bound
My parents were the age I am now when they bought their first real house. We had lived in several apartments and a townhouse during my earliest years, but it was not until we moved onto that corner lot that I found my Tara, epic and tortured and almost breathing with coming-of-age angst. It had three bedrooms and big trees for climbing in the yard. The neighborhood boasted all the accessibility and leafy quietness of one of those rarified zip codes everyone knows is the perfect place to raise a child.
The house is still there, squatting on prime real estate wedged between the Beltway and the red line in Bethesda. I drive by it sometimes and feel my stomach clench in a fit of nostalgia and hunger. Inhabiting one of those doomed swaths of DMV land where swollen mini castles erupt from the still-warm remains of modest post-war bungalows, the house may be seeing its final days.
Drive-bys are just one symptom of my unchecked covetousness. The dear people closest to me gently suggest that I am a bit obsessed with money. Fear about Bug’s and my financial situation clings to me like some kind of unpleasant aroma. The jokes I crack at lunches with co-workers about our salaries are usually too loud and too close to the bone. I find it hard to control myself. The paychecks come in twice a month. They are adequate for here and now. Here and now, however, is not adequate for up and out.
The exasperation of the dear ones has long since eclipsed indulgence. No one wants to hear (again!) how tight things are, how frightened I am, how tough it is occupying this point on the financial spectrum. Someone out there is happy with less than what you have, they remind me. Someone out there is unhappy with more.
What if you already have enough?
I have a sweet tooth for drama. This is not news to anyone. Low-dose panic is my drug of choice. In a rare show of equanimity, I am taking their words under consideration. Is fear feeding the anxiety? Have I lost perspective? Perhaps the dear ones are right. It might be the case that I am so caught in this loop of defeat that I am unable to see how far my finances can stretch. Is all this quivering anxiety just me being a little hooked on the flavor of my own misery?
If my paycheck is sufficient to support Bug and me in our own place, I might actually have to get off my frightened ass and make the leap. I claim I ache for a home. A Place of Our Own is my official Red Ryder carbon action 200 shot range model air rifle. But maybe I don’t entirely trust myself to manage alone. If I wake up to find that possibility under the tree, will I shoot my eye out? Having enough would, after all, mean the end of this recuperative chapter in the suffocating security of my parents’ nest. Might it be that the truth of my terror is not in being stuck but in becoming unstuck?
Clearly, it is time to take an honest accounting.
I am a stranger to neither fiscal prudence nor a precise ledger. In all the years Tee and I were living together, I kept us on a noose of a budget. A single YMCA camp income supported our family of three, covering everything from staggering health insurance premiums to dog chow. One of my many jobs as the captain of the domestic ship was to scrimp, save, and track every penny. I made the baby food, hung the cloth diapers on the line, and hand-crafted the holiday decor. We traveled only to visit family. We ate in. Every single month for five years, I reconciled the budget. By some kind of financial sleight-of-hand (and more than our share of help from the ‘rents), we lived just a hair above the poverty line without ever feeling the pinch. We were actually comfortable. Never in all that time did I carry anything like the sickening panic weighing on me now, even though my current income more than the Y ever paid Tee.
This week, I bit the bullet and sat down with my Excel spreadsheet and a pile of bills. I mapped out the year ahead with Bug’s transition to kindergarten and the corresponding reduction in childcare costs. The budget contains 27 items spread out over 12 months. I tried to keep it austere but realistic, including meager numbers for dining out and clothing along with slim grocery expenses. The thin trickles into retirement and Bug’s college fund were saved from the axe. Cable and wifi were slashed along with any travel pricier than a day trip.
In the end, I tallied up the numbers. If I move out of my parents’ house in the next year, I will have enough money for a two-bedroom apartment. In Peoria. As for a location in Fairfax, Arlington, Loudon county? I cannot even afford a studio, let alone a condo or a townhouse in which my son can have a room of his own. Understand this: I hold an administrative faculty post at George Mason University. The position requires a master’s degree and carries an assistant director title. After bare-bones living expenses, the salary leaves me a mere $900 a month for rent, taxes, and utilities in an area where a bottom-end two-bedroom apartment is $1800 a month, before utilities.
They say public service is noble. Where can I trade in all this nobility for a little dignity?
This is not a woman who is eating her own tail in a solipsistic frenzy over money. My perception is not skewed, and objects are not appearing bigger because I am viewing them through the side mirrors. The situation is, in fact, just as dire as I had thought. The number gazes right at me with its italicized crimson smirk. It will not diminish unless I cut out things like trips to the dentist. Or Christmas.
The number is real. Also, it is not. For now, Bug and I are secure in this way-station, parked in a house which does not eat my earnings for an appetizer and then come slathering after my savings for the main course. The number is just this: a sign of how much further I have to go and how different life is going to look for my son growing up than it did for me.
The dear ones guide me away from my talk of financial trouble not because the trouble is false, but because they are helpless to ease the burden. We would all like to believe poverty is a state of mind and that overcoming it just takes hard work and a positive attitude. I am guilty of this half turn from uncomfortable truths. During the three years I spent working in a shelter for homeless families, I was a dogged cheerleader. I advocated for the guests to keep plugging away, and never ceased maintaining that the right combination of social programs and part-time jobs and bus vouchers could move a family into permanent housing. The fact of the recidivism rate – a number I cannot recall, but whose smirk had fangs much redder than my little spreadsheet figure – was hard to look in the eye.
Nonetheless, one has to believe against the evidence. What the dear ones are really saying is that the only alternative to faith is despair, and that is a sure exit ramp to ruin.
I can’t own a house any time in the foreseeable future, but I can own this: $900 a month free and clear is not chump change. Draw at random any one from among the 7 billion, and odds are she lives for a year on less than my monthly surplus. The generosity of my parents combined with that minor excess keep us from sinking down under the poverty line. I know better than to wallow. We are rich. We have trees in the yard, and Bug does have a room of his own.
A $900 rope is in my grip. I cannot see how far it stretches over the cliff face, but I know the only direction of travel is up. How I use my muscle to put that cash to use will determine how high we can climb. I clip one strand of it into a savings account to tether us to an embryonic down payment. A fraction hooks into Bug’s 529 plan so he is not choked by college debt in 15 years. Another thread harnesses us to a retirement account. With these small outlays tied on and my kid strapped firmly to my back, I climb.
I picture what is waiting just up over the lip of the rock. It is just out of sight, but it is there, the door open, a tall glass of something over ice waiting on the porch rail. I picture my son at the age I am now standing on the front step, watching for his retired and nimble mama to pop up for a visit. I picture home, and up we go.
Poetry Left by the Back Door
We planned games. Invited friends.
Poured her a drink. Bubbles and ice.
One thin twist of a lemon rind.
The glass sweated.
We waited.
Who saw her last? She had worn a blue dress
loose at the neck.
No, no, a suit.
Hair in a braid or a pillbox hat.
Weren’t her curls red
spilling down her back?
The dice lay naked, staring up at lanterns.
Six. Two.
An hourglass with its sands
Asleep for the night.
We did not think to play without her.
What had she meant by excusing herself?
Talk of her absence crusted our lips.
In silence we ate
from the small plate of oiled beans she had brought,
Twisting tongues around mealy bellies.
They brought tears to our eyes.
We spit them into napkins
And poured sugar down our throats
Then drifted to our private quarters
In pairs
Alone.
Someone emptied her glass
Into the sink and washed
Clean the last trace
Before setting it in the cupboard
To complete the even row.
With Drawn
Gather
Rose McLarneySome springs, apples bloom too soon.
The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick
to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs,
pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty
and quiet. No reason for the bees to come.Other summers, red apples beat hearty in the trees, golden apples
glow in sheer skin. Their weight breaks branches,
the ground rolls with apples, and you fall in fruit.You could say, I have been foolish. You could say, I have been fooled.
You could say, Some years, there are apples.
For the second night in a row, my son is awake past 10:00pm. He is riding a tidal wave of inspiration. A paper sea churns around him. He draws with thick marker on a sheet of blank-backed leftovers from my father’s draft articles on adaptive management and my own half-hearted attempts at a screenplay. Without any concern for the neat lines of type on the opposite side, Bug splashes the blue ink across the surface of everything. He makes rocket ships and big-headed people, giant insects and treasure maps. When the clipboard is empty, he takes to the bedsheets. His lime green linens explode with giant butterflies and airborne letters. Even the bedside table has become canvas.
He is wearing me out. Eventually, I tip him from his perch. The wave crashes to the shore in a blast of salt and foam. Sobs wrack his body as I snap the cap firmly back on the marker and toss his creations overboard. “It is bedtime,” I say. My lips are tight. I am so very tired. The past week has been yet another chapter in the thousand year history of insomnia. Without good thinking to move us up and out, my own vessel runs aground in some desolate cove. While we languish, my visions of the promised land atrophy in tandem with my faculties. Neither tide nor wind is sufficient to carry us where we need to be. Without rest and a shot at a better life, I give my son only the leavings of my legacy of mistakes.
I long to give up, to curl into my own rumpled sheets. It is impossible while he is awake. He, too, spars with the night. What worries does he carry into his fractured dreams? With nothing to do but be, I crawl in next to my sobbing son.
“I’ll sing you one more song. What do you want to hear?” I have to ask this three times before he can calm down enough to decide. Finally, he chokes out a request.
“Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
“Okay, baby. Come here. ” Drawing him close, I sing it all the way through, slow and low. He surrenders his weight to my waiting shoulder one ounce at a time. When the song ends, he starts to stir. I ease into “Molly Malone,” welcoming him back to my arms. In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty. . .
Well before the fever kills her, Bug’s breath steadies and his muscles soften. I carry on to the end so I can bid goodnight to Molly’s ghost, Alive, alive-oh.
When my feet swing off the bed, they splash into the eddying pages. I have to wade through them to get to the door. I can barely bring myself to look at my son again. His peace is too stark a reminder of what is required of me. How will this broken woman ever provide enough for this beautiful, bursting boy?
In a literature class in back in the wide-open days of college, a professor spoke with reverence of the tenacity of the great authors. She told us of the Brontë sisters, hunched over tables and making stories by candlelight. On bits and fragments in cramped script, they inked worlds to life. Sometimes, the scarcity of paper was severe enough that one of the girls would fill the page with tiny horizontal lines, then turn the page sideways and write across the previous words.
In my own bed, I train my mind away from our doom and breathe in the quiet safety of an in-between place. This inlet, our only home. We have paper in abundance to fashion both ship and sails. Oceans of ink. Currents of light. Our larder is full. We have song. We have each other.
We have enough.
You could say, I have been foolish.
You could say, Some years, there is this.
Shift Happens
I was nearly twenty when I learned to ride a bike. As a kid, I had tooled around my neighborhood on my 3-speed, but these short trips never took me beyond the distance my feet could cover if a tire blew. It took the self-righteousness of young adulthood coupled with a bike-snob boyfriend to push me past the safe circumference of my known territory. Living in accordance with strict ideals about justice and simplicity meant a vegan diet, a cooperative house, anti-racist activism, and thumbing one’s nose at the auto industry. In Burlington, Vermont in 1993, a womyn had to learn how to ride.
The finely muscled boyfriend and I ventured into the country on our slick, matching Fat City Wickedlights. With shoes snapped into slim pedals and water bottles sloshing, we were so much who we aimed to be. In the span of a few months, I learned how to change a tire, true a wheel, adjust a derailleur, and repair a busted chain. Who needs AAA? On the side of the road with just a tiny cache of tools, I could handle anything short of an organ transplant. When the apocalypse came, I would be delivering the mail.
The only problem was that I could not ride. My personal drill sergeant would pedal alongside me, offering up corrections. He called it “help.” I had another name for it.
“Shift up,” he’d holler. “Lean down and just glance back.” I was too frightened to see if a car was gaining. Every time I did, my bike would sway like a drunken frat boy. The stress further constricted my peripheral vision, and I could only hope I would hear an engine coming before I had to make the next turn. Wildly swinging into traffic when I most needed to hug the shoulder, I was a two-wheeled terror on the Hinesburg-Shelburne road. I covered dozens of miles with the boyfriend drafting me as he shouted out warnings about approaching traffic.
After a few near misses and a lot of yelling, I figured it out. Just as a driver checks mirrors and blind spots before changing lanes, a cyclist has to look back while staying straight. I practiced leaning down, steadying the handlebars to keep the front wheel aimed in the forward, and taking a quick peek at the terrain behind. It is a bit of a mind game, turning the head without steering the body in the direction of the eyes. After a few tries, I could share the road. The boyfriend got off my rear a few hollers short of a black eye.
Hills, on the other hand, refused to yield to either logic or determination. At the base of every incline, my well ran as dry as my mouth. Vermont is not flat country, so the Green Mountain cyclist has no escape from the ups. Every time the ground rose ahead of me, my gut contracted and my heart raced. I hated hills the way George Mallory must have hated gathering clouds. My legs were not strong enough. My lungs were too tight. Every bump on the landscape was my own personal Everest. The altitude, no matter how miniscule, conquered me every time.
I tried to hoodwink the topography by speeding down the previous descent as fast as I possibly could, shifting into the highest gear and spin spin spining to get up the other side. Pedaling like a maniac carried me about halfway up before I started to lose steam. Barking in pain and gritting my teeth, my momentum slowed to a wobble. The sight of Lance Armstrong up ahead, standing up on his pedals with his legs of bronze sinew glinting in the sun as he floated up to the summit, was enough to make me want to shove a tire lever up his axle. I walked my bike to the next flat stretch.
“You have to shift to a higher gear,” he explained.
A higher gear? You’ve got to be kidding me. “You mean the harder one?” That went against all logic. When a tough stretch approaches, why would a rider increase the difficulty? I was working as hard as I possibly could in the lowest gear, and still was not strong enough to get up the hill without teetering off. I was a lost cause, and he was a fool.
He went on explaining. “First you shift higher then you stand.”
My mind rebelled and my body followed suit. “I just stand?” I saw him doing it, but I could not make sense of it.
“Just stand up. Like this.”
He orbited around me, shifted up to the highest gear, and lifted his fine backside up off the seat. I had a hard time believing this thoroughbred was my companion. His claims of confidence in my cycling abilities were even more incredible than his affections. It all seemed like an elaborate ruse, and I was the one who would land on my ass.
He continued to draw smooth ellipses around me. “Then you can climb. It’s easy. Try it.”
Nothing is harder than the task someone else tells you is not. I did try it, goddamn it, and it was anything but easy. Over and over again, I tried. My bike crossed that stretch of blacktop, and I willed myself to stand. I commanded my legs, “Climb!” I roared at my tush, “Up!” These intractable parts paid me no heed. My posterior remained planted on the seat. I rolled to a stop.
“Maybe it’s like the eyebrow thing,” I panted.
“The what?”
“You know how some people can raise one eyebrow, but other people can only do them both?” I lifted both mine to prove my physical deficiency. “It’s genetic.”
“You mean to tell me you are genetically incapable of standing up on a bike?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I am.”
“Yeah. Maybe you are. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You can always just get off and walk up the hill.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
My tolerance for his proximity quickly exhausted itself. The ability to ride alone was too compelling. I would have to be independent after I killed him, after all. He was too perfect, and even if he were not, any witness was a distraction. This was between me and my goddess. Or, more accurately, it was between me and my demons. The boyfriend, no matter how right or skilled or just plain gorgeous he happened to be, did not have a say in the matter.
A few days later, I made my way alone to a stretch of somewhere road with a shortage of cars but an abundance of contour lines. I walked to the top of the first hill and perched there like a sky diver at the open hatch. I swung my leg over, kicked the chain up to the highest gear, and let ‘er rip. Body and machine sped as one down towards a rising wall of blacktop. “Go girl, go girl, come on!” I hit the dip at the bottom and started the ascent. My speed dropped and my legs began to scream. The urge to downshift almost won. I shouted at the road and the sky and my own resistant butt. “Up! Come on, UP!”
Just like that, I stood. Off the saddle, legs push-pulling the pedals, I was up where I had no business being. My torso tipped slightly forward to keep the now careening handlebars even. I sat back down and promptly ground to a halt, tipping off the bike and onto my feet. “Woah,” I breathed. “Just stand.”
Back at the summit, I did it all over again. Leap, fly, grind. Then, right at the beginning of the ascent, I stood. I started to climb. Climbing was exactly what it was. Ascending a hill is like walking up a staircase, one foot in front of the other. The bike felt alive in my grip, ready to lift right off the ground. The only way to hold it steady was to hover miles above the safe clutch of the frame. I willed my skeleton to stay upright, refused to succumb to the desire to cling, and pressed my mighty muscles into the climb. I trusted the laws of physics to pay me back in motion. In a blink, I crested the hill and went whirring down the other side. I hooped aloud, flushing grasshoppers from roadside brush.
It turns out that this is how it works. Plates make their tectonic shifts without so much as a warning tremor. Mountains appear where the land was once flat. The impulse is to pull back and creep along, gripping the earth and keeping to a familiar pace. It will not work. A greater effort is required, but that effort is unlike anything ever required before. Shifting into a lower gear may keep you feeling safe, but the wheels just spin twice as fast while covering only half the distance. Trying to stay grounded will wear you out long before you reach your destination. You will not make it over the hump.
No matter how counterintuitive this seems, the toughest transitions require a hefting of more weight, not less. Change has no mercy. It has no attention for resistance, cowardice, or the illusion of control. The starkest way is the only way forward: pure exertion. Crisis requires the courage to press pass the point of self-imposed incapacity.
Conquering the mountain is impossible, yet nothing could be simpler. Bear down. Engage the muscles. Brace yourself and rise up out of your protective posture. Allow momentum to carry you forward. The extra effort is unavoidable, but the mind and body are stronger than gravity. They are mightier than the imagination’s most clever tricks.
Increase the tension, lift your body past the pull of gravity, and climb.
—
Stories have a way of moving towards their proper denouement. The aforementioned boyfriend found his way to a partner and a purpose perfectly suited to him. Read about their adventures at 2cycle2gether.
Structural Integrity
In the park, a dad holds hands with one son while his other boy darts off into an empty batting cage. “Garrett, come on,” the dad calls. “We’re leaving.” Dad and little brother are strolling at a toddler’s pace. They have plenty of ground to cover before they reach the parking lot. Clearly, they are not leaving yet. “Bye bye, Garrett. We’re leaving you here.” Garrett, God bless him, ignores his dad. He is in a cage. A deserted one. How dangerous can it be?
I have only one kid. I’ll concede that I can’t fully appreciate the challenge of managing more. How does a parent keep an eye on the one who has run off when the other is foraging in the dirt for cigarette butts? Like every other parent out there, Garrett’s dad is doing his best with the tools at hand to keep his sons safe. Still, I can’t help but think “bye bye” is a flawed strategy for roping the calves.
Garrett has undoubtedly heard his dad’s ploy before and knows it for the idle threat it is. I watch as he moves up and down the cage, lacing his fingers through the fencing. He is busy exploring and marveling, and his dad’s farewells ping off his deaf ears. “Garrett, now.” Ah, yes. Escalation. The wheedling has not worked, so Dad kicks it up to demands. Garrett stands at the gate for a moment before turning and re-entering the cage. Dad’s voice edges upward. “Come here, now. Five, four, three. . .”
I do not stick around for the next installment. The father will figure something out. So will Garrett. That’s the thing about kids and parents. We are always figuring things out. More often than not, what we end up learning is not what anyone intends.
It seems like eons have passed since I last counted down towards a punishment. It has been almost as long since I have seen Bug’s temper go volcanic. Parenting tactics in which I was engaging almost daily are now abstract memories. “If you don’t get over here by the count of three, the cinnamon toast goes in the garbage. One. . . Two . . .” Threats are disappearing from my vocabulary. Time-outs have also been enjoying their retirement. Occasionally, warnings about endangered privileges still slip out. My voice became accustomed to the feel of “If you don’t ____, then you lose ___.” These tics still skitter past my lips before my brain can intercept them. Like Garrett, Bug ignores these ploys. I usually do, too. We return to mending whatever is frayed between us.
From time to time, I still walk away. Before I respond, I need to quiet down my own howling, growling head. I am not always so good at telling Bug I need to step away to catch my breath, but I hope I am getting better. When I explain I will be back and we will figure it out together, he usually manages to wait for me without going off the rails.
They say twenty-eight repetitions form the habit. New approaches I established in my interactions with Bug are actually working. We get into the car for school most mornings now just by moving together through the preparations. It stuns me to watch my boy perform the straightforward exercise of walking out the door, sitting down in his car seat, and picking up his book. For months as long as lifetimes, that stretch between bed and car was a minefield. Now, I explain the expectations, give him choices, and speak in an upbeat tone about what is unfolding right in front of us. The former slog has become a simple morning routine.
While Tee and I were leaving kindergarten orientation last week, Bug threw not one, not two, but thee rocks at me. They all missed, but not by much. My vision constricted and my jaw set. I walked away from the first throw (which is why he hurled two more). Trying to stay calm, I called over my shoulder, “I cannot be near a little boy who throws rocks at me, even though I love him very much.” He had been asking to stay with me that night. It was, however, his night with his daddy. Repeated requests and increasing volume had not worked, so he scaled up to aggression. He was also tired, having forgone a nap at preschool, and was a little disoriented by his tour of the new elementary classroom.
All of these facts about his experience in that moment were right there for me to notice. Shifting my gaze away from my own rising temperature and back onto my son had the effect of cooling and centering my mind. In a previous post about Bug’s defiance, I wrote about focusing my attention on just one measure when deciding how to approach my son: Does this choice strengthen or weaken my relationship with Bug?
Halfway up the hill, I paused. Looking back, I saw my little boy standing all alone. He had been left behind. Even Tee was walking away, explaining calmly that Bug was going to lose his movie that night for throwing rocks. With yet another punishment added to the burden, Bug was cracking under the weight of it all. Somehow, he was supposed to swallow the disappointment and describe rather than act out his feelings in an unfamiliar location while being incredibly tired. He had almost no resource to handle the task before him. Clearly, he was far too small for all the decisions required of him in that moment.
A number of options are available to a parent to get a situation like this under control. Roaring, wheedling, doling out consequences, and putting the kid in a time-out all are on the table. The simplest approach might be to just ignore the behavior and continue walking. Wouldn’t this deprive the kid of a the satisfaction of a reaction while also making him practice moving through his stormy emotions? Any of these options might make Bug drop the rocks and get his butt in gear. They also might further fracture an already strained relationship.
The mantra about strengthening the bond reminded me to set aside every extraneous objective and slip back into alignment with my child.
Down the hill, Bug’s face was set somewhere between tornado and downpour. My response could determine which climactic event would occur. I took a breath. Then I walked straight out of the tight corset of my own anger and returned to my child. I knelt and opened my arms. He collapsed against my chest. I spoke in a very quiet voice. “You threw three rocks. You must have been feeling something big.” He quivered and sobbed. “I feel disappointed when something doesn’t go the way I want. I feel like throwing and breaking stuff, too.”
He quieted against me. “Yeah?”
“Yep. But throwing and breaking usually hurts people and makes things worse. So maybe I say how sad and disappointed I feel, or I cry, or I go find a hug. You did that. You cried and now you’re getting a hug.”
I kept holding him and letting him hide his face in my neck. He was as small as he needed to be. He was small enough to disappear. This was just fine, because I had become a big sanctuary carved into the side of a mountain.
For the first year or more of the separation and divorce, I lacked integrity. I understand this now. The foundation was cracked, the floor bowed, and the walls were caving in. My flawed judgment and instability led to poor choices. I was not able to face the truth of my limitations and situation, so I found escape in dishonesty. With upended priorities, I forgot how to be Bug’s refuge. He did not know who inhabited the tilting room that was supposed to hold his Mommy. Would he be entering Opelia’s haunted quarters or Medusa’s lair? Would his pre-dawn knock awaken Miss Havisham or one of the Scylla’s sleeping heads? Sometimes, he did not find anyone at all. His grandmother had to fill in the sinkhole left in my absence.
“There is nothing easy about divorce,” writes Abigail Trafford in Crazy Time. “It is a savage emotional journey. You don’t know where it ends for a long time. You ricochet between the failure of the past and the uncertainty of the future. You struggle to understand what went wrong with your marriage, to apportion the blame and inventory your emotional resources. There is one thing you are sure of almost immediately: you know that life will never be the same again.”
During those falling-down months, I was not Bug’s safe place. Now, I can be now. The new floor is laid on bedrock. The beams are carved from oak.
“Tell you what,” I murmured into his scalp. “When I pick you up day after tomorrow, the doggy and kitty and grandma and granddaddy will all be at our house. We will have a special dinner. Anything you want. What is your all-time favorite meal?”
“You know,” he said, pushing his head up under my lips. He could not get close enough.
“Pizza,” I say.”
“Nope.”
“Hamburgers?”
“Nope.”
“No? Hmm. Lasagna? Ham and eggies? Chicken on the grill?”
“No. You know.” He was smiling in his shoulders now. Stone pillars no longer pressed them down. He grinned up at me. “Thai food!”
“Really? You want Thai on Wednesday?”
“Yes!”
I lifted all fifty pounds of him into my arms and carried him like a baby up the hill to Tee’s car. “I will get a whole order of spring rolls just for you.”
“Five whole orders!”
I want to tell Garrett’s dad that his kid never needs to hear that he will be left behind. Not even a struggling, just-good-enough father would abandon his son in the park. Even if the little boy cannot keep up, even if he tests how far the radius of his parents’ attention extends and moves an inch or three beyond that, he will never have to find his way back by himself. This is the contract that we sign with creation when we become parents. We commit ourselves to being the safe place.
Building a refuge requires measuring with precision. We speak truth first to ourselves and then let it guide our voices. Because we know we would never hurt or leave our children, we should not say aloud the lie that we might. A threat, even a toothless one, is that first termite eating its way into the frame of our relationship. Either our children believe the lie and our rule is one of terror, or they do not believe us, and the emperor wears no clothes. Trust is brace, footing, and bolt. Trust is the stuff of integrity. If I have faith in my mind and the good universe to guide me along the parenting journey, then my son can have faith in me. He can even dart out of my reach from time to time, and I will always be there to carry him back home.
—
Trafford, Abigail. Crazy Time.. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Print.
Greater Good
Your brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. Therefore, a foundation for happiness is to deliberately weave positive experiences into the fabric of your brain and your self. – Dr. Rick Hanson
The brain does not know the difference between chilling on the beach and imagining chilling on the beach. It also cannot differentiate between real and perceived peril. Fretting about being late while stuck in traffic stresses the physiology as much as the actual pink slip, eviction notice, or other phantom disaster that rarely materializes.
Why is it that anxiety about indistinct threats consumes us when positive outcomes are just as likely to occur and pleasure is just as easy to achieve?
Surely, a few mesozoic critters kicked back by the water’s edge, munching on berries and belching, “take it easy, man.” It would be nice to think we inherited a few of their relaxed tendencies, but the odds are against it. The Cheech Marins of prehistory likely ended up as dino snacks. The skittish ones, the ones who were a drag a parties because they mistook every passing cloud for a pterodactyl, survived long enough to present us with the Trojan horse of their genetic code. Without them, we would not be here. Neither would our well-honed ability to obsess over worst-case scenarios.
A bias towards danger served our ancestors well. Humans are very good at keeping the attention alert for threats of every flavor. The pace of life on an overcrowded planet gives us plenty to worry about, what with the European debt crisis and the melting ice caps. The mind and body are quite adept at remaining in a state of hyper-vigilance, no matter how high the cost. The cost just happens to be higher than we can afford if we are going to keep on living as long as we do. Short-term survival has a tendency to trump long-term well-being, as the insomniacs among us understand all too well.
Prepare the body for a fight, and it complies every time. Even if rest or serenity would be better for the system’s overall health, the perceived need to stay alert to danger keeps an overtaxed system awake and awash in glucocorticoids. The human body, as well designed as it is to respond quickly and intensely to threats, did not adapt to rebound quite as swiftly from an overstimulated stress response. Scientific literature and popular media alike have documented ad nauseum the cumulative effects of stress. As you might expect, access to information does not appear to correlate to behavior change. Hypertension, obesity, depression, memory loss, and bone thinning top a list that grows longer with every new study, providing an unfortunate counterbalance to stories of ever-increasing longevity.
(For more on this, give Robert Sapolsky a whirl. He manages to turn the biology of stress into a kind of free-wheeling science road trip in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.)
The good news in all of this is that the brain is resilient, even if our stress responses are not. “Neuroplasticity” has been buzz-word around positive psychology circles for a few years. You can score a few extra points at your next cocktail party if you toss out “self-directed neuroplasticity” while sipping your gin gimlet. The suggestion is that humans have the capacity to sensitize the brain to positive experiences. We can actually train the brain away from its compulsion to collect negative information. Through the practice of attending to what is going well, so the theory goes, we can begin to re-wire the synaptic framework inside the skull and make the old gray matter a lean, not-so-mean, happiness machine.
What flows through the mind sculpts your brain. Immaterial experience leaves material traces behind. – Dr. Rick Hanson
In a practice Hanson calls “Taking in the Good,” three practical steps can begin weaving a new neural network one thread at a time. This exercise requires just a few moments of focused attention. Once a day, once a week, whatever gets you on the bus. The best practice, so they say, is the one that a person actually does. During the keynote presentation at a recent conference on resilience, Hanson led 350 attendees through these simple steps. It took less time than the wait at the average stoplight. This would be a far more productive way to spend those idle, grumbling moments.
- Look for positive facts. Notice something that is going well. In the absence of right-now positive detail, calling up pleasant memory is a handy shortcut.
- Savor the positive experience. Allow the facts from step 1 to become an experience. Sustain it by keeping the mind trained on it for 10-20-30 seconds. Count out the time, and just stay immersed in the details. Allow the facts or recollection to expand during these seconds. Feel the experience in your body and in your emotions. Try to sense it. If possible, intensify it.
- Sense and intend that the positive experience is soaking into your brain and body. Register it deeply in your emotional memory.
It is interesting that Hanson refers to this emotional landscape as “memory.” It does seem to function like cognitive recall. As we all learned in Psych 101, items move in and out of short term memory, skimming the surface like dandelion fluff on an easy breeze. All around, all the time, stimuli alight on the senses. Only a small portion of what is sensed actually settles in and lays down a root system within long-term memory.
In order for an item to move down into the deeper storehouse of the brain, a person has to engage with it in some way. The stimulus must connect to a larger collection of experience, and click into alignment with what is already in place. In this way, random bits of information go through a metamorphosis to emerge as knowledge. Have you ever noticed how you can still call up TV jingles for products that have been off the market since before you were old enough to buy them? An item embedded in long-term memory becomes as hard to dislodge as garden weeds.
If a person wants to learn Swahili, she seeks it out. She buys the CDs, makes friends with Kenyans, and plans a trip to Nairobi with a homestay family. She immerses herself in the language so that it twists its new threads around and between her known cognitive pathways. In order to call up Swahili phrases when she needs them, she will need to hear them. Through practice and repetition, she can weave loose strands into something thick and strong. Most of us on the opposite side of the globe might encounter a Bantu construction and not even recognize it as language. We hear beautiful gobbledy-gook. It is the engagement with a bit of drifting data that pulls it down into a person’s foundation. The overlooked items float on away like those feathered seeds. The brain only knows what a person chooses to hold. In this way, it is true that we become what we pay attention to.
It makes intuitive sense to see emotional experience functioning like memory. Life bombards us with experiences of all kinds. The vast majority of what occurs to us and around us does not stay with us. It is only what we attend to, what we really grab onto and get acquainted with, that builds our emotional vocabulary.
This is what it means to self-direct the neuroplasticity. It is as true for learning happiness as it is for learning any foreign tongue. If the brain does not know the difference between a beach vacation and daydreaming about one, why not take one right now? Three simple steps can carry you to the lip of the sea. Attend to the positive facts, savor the experience, and draw that lifting sensation into the brain and body. In this way, the mind learns to speak the language of hope.
If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.
– Chinese Proverb
Shannon E. Williams 