January 31, 2013

Book Review: Stones of the Sky

“Break yourself open at the breaking point,
you, body of the one I love,
into another genesis, into the cataclysm…”

In another life, I planned to be a poet. I spent hours perfecting the craft of iambic pentameter and the beauty of haiku. I wanted to share my world in the ways of Annie Dillard and Carolyn Kizer. I dreamed to write the revolutionary poems of my generation, to echo the energy and moment of Audre Lorde and bell hooks. Somewhere on the journey, though, poetry got pushed aside for creative nonfiction and the radical energy was channeled into action, not words.

But on a cold winter night, when the rain outside freezes before the ground, I want to curl up with a book of poems and a cup of tea and not consider the challenges we face every day. One of the few poets who returns to my life over and over again is Pablo Neruda. Best known for his love poems and his prolific writing, Neruda is a watcher, a seer of beauty in all moments. Though I believe poetry is best read in its original language, I have found that the Copper Canyon Press translations are most delightful to my eyes and ears.

In Stones of the Sky, we find a collection of thirty poems written to Nature, a being worthy of the greatest love. Deepened by his love of the Chilean landscape of his birth, Neruda writes to crystals, stones, birds, water, and trees with a clarity that comes from years of romance. His language, with a unique command of description that is evocative but not overwhelming, brings each sense present to the scene of love he describes. With a translation by James Nolan that faces the original Spanish for every poem, this version is more than just a book of poetry. It’s a record. A memory.

The succulent
sky
had not only clouds,
not only space smelling of oxygen,
but an earthly stone
flashing here and there
changed into a dove,
changed into a bell,
into immensity, into a piercing
wind:
into a phosphorescent arrow,
into salt of the sky.

In the deepest parts of winter, I reach for the sunlight, however it may appear.

In a poem, a song, a cup of tea with a friend, the smile of a stranger. We walk so silently, so loudly, through this journey, and I wonder how often we miss these moments on sunlight. Poetry, of the love kind or the nature kind or the all kinds, poetry is my window into that bright April day when the air is crisp and the learning is deep. Neruda, or Audre Lorde, or Annie Dillard, or you — these are the poets of my heart.

What is your favorite poem? Who is your favorite poet?

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January 4, 2013

book review: The Language of Flowers

I can’t remember the last time I sat down and read a novel for pleasure. The simple act of words across paper, no pens, no highlighters, no taking notes. Just time and tea and the swish of one page turning into the next. So when The Language of Flowers arrived in my post box, on loan from a friend, I knew it was time to read.

The first few times I picked it up, I could only read a page or two. Slowly, as I adjusted to tempo and the transitions in time (it is written in both present-day and memory), I began reading more, pages turning into chapters turning into whole sections in one sitting. The final stretch, the last 100 pages, were read curled under the covers next to my love. I don’t know if I could have finished it otherwise.

The thing about this book is that it is, from the outset, about an orphan. A woman who knew nothing other than the pain of not having a real family. And somehow, there is a deep thread of hope, that something else is possible. You can tell that Victoria (the protagonist), for all her anger, has something special about her. Reading the book is a process of unfurling her petals, getting closer to the center, gaining her trust.

So many of us carry wounds from childhood, from adulthood. Often we think we’ve worked through them, we imagine that the healing is done and we can forge ahead, building new relationships and new connections. But some wounds go deeper than we can ever truly know. It isn’t until we try to form relationships that defy expectations and nourish our soul that we encounter the scars (and perhaps even the festering they contain). It’s in this moment we have a choice: re-open the wound and release the infection, allowing us to heal — or give up everything we’re building to avoid the hurt.

Anyone can grow into something beautiful.

Sometimes it’s a secret, holding our hearts captive like a prisoner of war. Sometimes it’s just a feeling, a nagging hurt that doesn’t leave. Sometimes it’s an anger, or a nonchalance, or an intensity that frightens away those we seek to hold most close. However our lives have wrought the pain, there comes a moment when we have to choose. It won’t be easy. It won’t be attractive. But it might just save our lives.

Victoria has a secret, one that has kept her from happiness, from family, from love. A secret she shares with no one, throughout group homes and onto the streets for her eighteenth birthday. But her secret suddenly appears behind a bucket of flowers, and she’s forced to make a choice.

Our secret hurts can appear anywhere. We can’t plan or prepare for them, no matter how hard we work on ourselves or our lives.

There are hurts we carry that even we don’t know exist until they are poked and prodded and made to ache.

This book was, for me, that poking and prodding. It was ripping off a bandage that had stuck to a wound, taking with it all the growth and healing I thought I had done.

Don’t let this scare you though. The reason I ultimately chose to write about this here is because reading The Language of Flowers made me see how much work I have the chance to do. Reading it in December, just before the holiday, ripped me open in a way I needed more than any gift. This book, with its sadness and its beauty and the bonus of learning floriography (the actual language of flowers), encourages me to reflect on my wounds, to begin the long process of turning over the ground to make the soil of my heart rich and fertile, to plant flowers to bloom in every season. I’ve sent a dozen copies to friends and loved ones in the past few weeks. And I will continue to send them as I find them, because this book is one I will never forget.

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December 13, 2012

Daring Greatly

I have been on quite the Brené Brown kick lately. Really, I can’t seem to get enough of what she has to say. When I picked up her latest book Daring Greatly, I kept flipping through the pages and soaking it all in, until I had flipped through every last page. I’ve been having a serious struggle with shame lately, and opening myself up to vulnerability, despite the fact that I know it is so very important.

This is not a new struggle. It’s a human struggle. Yet sometimes, I have a hard time realizing that shame doesn’t define me, and that opening up to vulnerability is exactly what I need.

Shame hangs out in the parking lot arena, waiting for us to come out defeated and determined to never take risks. It laughs and says, “I told you this was a mistake. I knew you weren’t  ___________ enough.” Shame resilience is the ability to say, “This hurts. This is disappointing, maybe even devastating. But success and recognition and approval are not the values that drive me. My value is courage and I was just courageous. You can move on shame.”

– Brené  Brown

I think for me, my shame lately has been showing itself in the form of me not feeling _______enough. Brené talks about this idea of never enough in her book, and I think it pushes its way into all of our lives in some form or another. For me, it varies depending on the day and what I’m dealing with. Yet, at its core it all boils down to feeling inadequate in some form or another.

But the truth is, in allowing myself to not feel worthy enough, or competent enough, or successful enough, I’ve gone away from the me that I really enjoy. My raw, authentic self has been overtaken by this shameful, terrified person that I’m not a big fan of. I’ve been noticing this change for awhile now, and I needed something to reaffirm to myself that I am enough.

Showing up just as I am is enough. It’s more than enough.

So, I bought a plane ticket to Europe. I leave for my trip on December 17, and will be there for 16 days. Besides that, I don’t really have a plan at all. I’m not sure what countries I’m going to cover, what hostels I’m going to stay in, or what trains I need to take. This is me being vulnerable. This is me knowing that I’m strong enough to do this by myself. This is me owning what I need, and choosing to let myself have it.

This trip could a great experience for me, or it could honestly be one disaster right after the other — but that’s something I would never find out if I chose not to go at all. So this time I’m choosing vulnerability over fear.

If I encourage you do to anything as this year is coming to a close, it’s to own what you need to keep your soul stirring.

Tell me, what do you need?

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November 7, 2012

Tiny Beautiful Things

Someone yelled at me the other day. I don’t mean a shout to alert me to danger or even a short string of expletives. I mean someone spent several minutes of their precious life screaming at me on the phone while shifting with whiplash speed between potentially legitimate complaints, baseless ad hominem attacks, and plenty of stuff that was clearly about someone other than me. The details are neither important nor am I at liberty to share them. Getting yelled at seems to be sort of an occupational hazard: People apparently yell at their rabbis. I’ve asked around and, yes, it’s a thing.

So, of course, I’ve been telling myself all sorts of stories about this: replaying the “conversation;” imagining how I am supposed to interact with this person when next we meet; telling myself there must be things I am supposed to learn from this and supposing that the diatribe included kernels of truth if only I could sift them from the bitter chaff. None of this has helped.

What did help was this line from Cheryl Strayed’s storehouse of goodness, Tiny, Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Dear Sugar:

“I never believed the boys were angry,” she writes of young men she was working with as a youth advocate, “I believed they were hurt, and anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow. It was the channel down which their impotent male rivers could rage.”

I heard these sentences and felt something release in my chest. Are there things I could still learn from the screamer (including how to excuse myself until they could talk to me more reasonably)? Yes. Are there grains of truth in the substance of the yelled words? Quite possibly. But Sugar’s story brought me round again to the base of compassion, the stronghold of love, from which I try to run this whole operation of my life. This person who yelled at me was in pain, and for them, too, “anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow.”

Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” advice columns written for therumpus.net. I listened to the audio version of the book, which had the added advantage of letting me hear Strayed give voice to her own words. But the book is so well written that I’m sure the words would dance off the page and into your heart in any format.

In it, people write to Sugar for advice about relationships and art, drug abuse and their urges to hurt their children. And Strayed, as Sugar, weaves her advice to them with stories of her own life, experiences, poems, mantras that arise for her in response to the letters.

Sugar isn’t exclusively about loving people up no matter what, she also tells it like it is. Urging all of us darlings to take a good look at our words and our actions and from that vantage point to take responsibility for our part in our hardships and for our potential to live better lives and to be better people. And she does it all from a place of acknowledging that none of us is called upon to be super-human, but that all of us are called upon to be our truest selves.

This is also, as Strayed makes clear, where art comes from. She writes of a memoir-writing class she taught where she asked students to answer two deceptively similar questions about their own and their fellow students’ work: “What happened in this story?” and “What is this story about?” The raw materials, the facts, the eclectic inheritances of our lives are the starting point, but only the starting point, for the hard and wonderful task of making our work, our relationships, our whole lives meaningful. The willingness to distinguish between these two basic questions is the difference between making art and making a life or failing to do either.

Even facing this blank page, I was afraid that I would not find a way to do Sugar justice, to share with you a glimpse of what her work is truly about. But I was heartened, as I know you will be, by her voice of unending compassion and unflinching honesty. Go and listen, sweet peas.

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November 1, 2012

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

When I got the idea to read this book, it was not yet released but being hyped everywhere. It seemed I couldn’t watch a news broadcast or commentator without hearing about it. I had been watching Chris Hayes’ show for a few months, and am really impressed by the diversity of his guests and the real questions he asks about society, people, and government.

It has taken me since Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy was released in June finally to get through it. Some sections I have read three, four, five times. I keep returning to it, though I have devoured all the information once already. What astounds me most about this book is its brave simplicity: the system we have been using for decades is not working for the vast majority, and we need to examine that system and fundamentally fix it, or use something new.

The sentence that I have repeated to myself since I first read it, and one of the core ideas behind the book, is this:

“all the smart people f**ked up, and no one seems willing to take responsibility.”

Meritocracy is a simple concept: it is the rule of those who are deemed to have higher ability, greater skill, or other measurable talent over others. Those who are chosen as talented move ahead, and those with lesser talent and skill are given fewer, different opportunities. This might be in politics, but truly it is seen everywhere: education, healthcare, athletics, even friendships and cliques. With greater talent comes greater value to society, and therefore more opportunities.

But what if you are an undiscovered talent? What if you are a genius from a poor family, and unlike other kids don’t have resources through schools or private funding to release your brilliance? Or an entrepreneur with an incredible life-changing idea but lack the funding/connections/tools to put your idea into the world?

This is why meritocracy doesn’t work.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy is about all this. It’s a history of an American way of living that American society grew out of. It’s a lesson in what doesn’t necessarily work (only providing opportunities to the selected ones proves to deny society of a vast wealth of brilliance), and a suggestion for how to move forward.

But perhaps more important to me than the history, or the possibilities, is the question. How do we recognize those who have incredible contributions to society, even (especially) when they don’t match our preconceived notions of who should be making contributions at that level?

How do we open to the awesome possibility that surrounds us?

Chris Hayes’ book was so much more than a large-scale examination of American culture. I experienced this read as a call to reflect on my choices and approaches to advancement. How do I prevent myself from moving to the next level of opportunity? How do I choose one person over another for an offer? How do I place value on my clients, on my customers, based on perceived merit?

These aren’t easy questions. They are rather painful to ask, and even more challenging to answer. This reflection, however, gives me a chance to directly contribute to a society that offers new value and new ideas for the greater good of the whole.

What could be better than making real, positive change in the world?

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