Writing from my heart, today, to fill the space of gray, the in-between spaces, the spaces that words can't quite light. Some images that warm me, in this year-end time, the not-quite-threshold time, the waiting, waning time not yet ready to wax.
images: Jean Misceslas Peské, Femme à l'ouvrage; Medieval roof angels, 15th c, St Agnes, Cawston, Norfolk; Francis Killan, Bird Woman; Maurice Marinot, Intérieur; Odilon Redon, Fleurs
On this shortest day, this day to reflect and stay still, to revel in silence, I've turned again to my account of one of the perfect silent retreats that restored me in years past. (And this year, sadly, the leader of those retreats has passed too.)
___
Back from a day’s silent retreat at the Green Gulch Zen temple and farm, I’m full of quiet wisdom. I’ve come back not with the silence itself, which is hard come-by in our obstreperous world, but the capacity for silence (as my father wrote about never losing the capacity for happiness, however unhappy we might be). This is the richer gift, I see. The key to that place inside myself I can return to, over and over, at need; where I can hear birdsong, or twigs falling onto the canvas of the yurt, where I can hear my heart expressing gratitude over a simple handful of October flowers, the hard wood (Eucalyptus) and the soft wood (pine) ready for our first-morning fire should we need one, the taste of peppermint tea made with two teabags.
The capacity for brilliant yellow, too—the walls of the old wooden laundry room, open at both ends. Inside humming with clean clothes tumbling in a row of dryers, outside colored the most intense and radiant yellow, from (I’m guessing) lichens or pollens collecting on the wood over the years. Accumulating yellow: a good way to live. (And like my favorite painter, Pierre Bonnard, who used to go back and add yellow to his finished paintings, sometimes years later.)
In the silence I learned I need to listen to my heart, foremost. I walked out to the ocean with the others, because my bad knee didn’t let me walk that far the last time I was there, so my mind told me I needed to make up for that. It told me I like the walk, and the ocean. All of that true, but what I really wanted, above all, was to sit the whole while in the garden, which I don’t just like, but love. The beach was terribly crowded, with people happily engaged in their noisy business, and though that taught me an important lesson once before—that I don’t need to be a part of that, that I can maintain my silence and just observe (something I do naturally anyway)—it wasn’t what my heart needed. Not then. So I walked quickly back to the garden, and spent a precious ten minutes just being there, with end-of-summer roses, lichen-ey old wooden trellises, my favorite apple tree in all the world, a couple and dog on the grass, the play of sunlight and late-afternoon early-October shadow just perfect by then, the silence absolute—except for my heart’s exclaiming its utter delight.
Another of the members of our group had said at introduction time that he had recently decided to quit work, to work on opening his heart. Meaning that going on working was led by mind, and trying something else important for heart. I know I need to do that too—live that yellow!—and maybe some day soon will find the courage to do so. To know that following my heart is the right thing to do. Not willful or unwise (as I’ve been gravely taught over the years), but essential. The wise course born of silence.
(October 2014)
image: Pierre Bonnard, Bouquet de mimosas
I'm pleased that my short story "Kachinas" has been published in the December issue of Grande Dame Literary Journal—an appropriately seasonal tale, making me terribly nostalgic for New Mexico and its incomparable way of being.
"Lil didn't know the meaning of the intricate rhythms and steps, since no outsiders were allowed to know, but she felt it somewhere deep within, encouraged by the drums. The story being told and prayer offered. The waiting clouds they danced into being, and quickened into hope. Nimbus, nimbostratus, the fertile, undulating clouds Xavier painted with abandon, with enormous swooping strokes of not just fingers, wrist, but his whole body—in a way becoming cloud himself, just as the dancers in their masks became the spirit-beings they embodied. Kachinas."
This story is part of a thread also including "The Persian Warrior," "Day of the Dead," and "L'inconnue de la Seine."
And I, henceforth, would love the honorific "Grand Dame."
image: Kachinas, photographer unknown
"a kind of glow—humanity, noblesse, beatitude—lingered in the great spaces that like Space itself held stars already dead but luminous, inherently present, the residue of suns long since burned out. Ghost light, Aash thought of it."
Just published in Livina Press Literary Magazine, Issue 2, Fall 2022 (print only)—my short story "Ghost Light," set in the ruins of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a museum which was originally a collaboration between the places and peoples of its collections and between the collections and the viewers who engaged with them. And then between me, the author, who's collected them again, and the characters I have sent into the ruins to collect what they can of what's left after the world's culture has been destroyed and most animals and plant-life gone extinct.
This work is a collaboration too with the author of a book one of the characters once read—Russell Hoban, who offered his amazing The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz to the world. The book is integral to my main character's identity, and has remained for many years in my own consciousness, now informing my writing. In it are extinct lions, which are regenerated in the haunted spaces of the museum, later joined by other extinct animals gathered between the covers of a salvaged bestiary.
And finally, or really first, the work is a collaboration between me and a writer friend's grandson, Westley, who offered us the first line as a gift.
At its heart this story is about the essential shared responsibility of carrying the memories of things past, things gone, as we all do—together saving what we can in these destructive times. It no longer takes a village. It takes a world. A museum, with all its salvaged, plundered ghosts.
image: photographer unknown
I've had a quirky short story published in Flights (just print, so far, but online someday, it's suggested)—"The Queens Gambit." Not a typo; indeed there's no apostrophe, because the story's set in Queens, NY, and involves chess somewhat peripherally. A gambit is the core of it, "a device, action, or opening remark, typically one entailing a degree of risk, that is calculated to gain an advantage," and specifically, as in chess, "an opening in which a player makes a sacrifice, typically of a pawn, for the sake of some compensating advantage."
A subconscious long-ago inspiration was apparently Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace," which I hadn't remembered, and I much more consciously had in mind the twist in O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi."
It's a playful tale at heart, and was great fun to write. Fun to remember some of the chess moves and concepts from the also long-ago days when I played often and voraciously.
One of the main characters is Tante Cristelle, moved from Guadeloupe to Paris for art school to Far Rockaway, Queens—
"In recent days he'd seen his landlady becoming a ghost-in-training. Gliding around the house both day and night, moving chess pieces stealthily in games they'd left out to finish (always to good effect), cunningly challenging the stairs as if they were an ascent of Kilimanjaro. She went unseeing and all but unseen, shuffling along the upstairs corridor in a bathrobe the color of oatmeal but set off by her many-colored carnival headdresses, meant to hide her nearly hairless head, with her wheeled walker—a skeletal companion who Gino had seen her do something like salsa with, Haitian kompa he thought she'd said. The last of her dance partners in this world, likely. And on her ancient phonograph at odd hours she set playing Maurice Ravel's "Five O'Clock Foxtrot," a favorite of her Paris beau ("prince of the sturgeon eggs," she'd called him). Ravel had been in Paris when she got there, Cristelle had once reminisced, her proud head cocked sideways, seeing it all, her young-again profile splendid."
image: Chess Game, artist unknown
This meditative essay has been published in MockingOwl Roost (Volume 2, Issue 3: Introspection), and is surely nothing if not introspective. I felt extremely lucky to have found the space inside this discombobulated year to dwell from time to time in a lovely cerebral realm, lofty and light and well above the fog-line, and was happy to be shaping a gauzy blue and silver tissue of ideas in defiance of my off-and-on-again dull fuzzy-headedness. The finished piece feels almost like things I wrote in graduate school, when I was fully in my element.
At some point while sitting a spell, I came across this poem about quiet power that seemed to beautifully sum up the power I was summoning (or hoping to) in my meditations.
The Quiet Power
I walked backwards, against time
and that’s where I caught the moon,
singing at me.
I steeped downwards, into my seat
and that’s where I caught freedom,
waiting for me, like a lilac.
I ended thought, and I ended story.
I stopped designing, and arguing, and
sculpting a happy life.
I didn’t die. I didn’t turn to dust.
Instead I chopped vegetables,
and made a calm lake in me
where the water was clear and sourced and still.
And when the ones I loved came to it,
I had something to give them, and
it offered them a soft road out of pain.
I became beloved.
And I came to know that this was it.
The quiet power.
I could give something mighty, lasting,
that stopped the wheel of chaos,
by tending to the river inside,
keeping the water rich and deep,
keeping a bench for you to visit.
– Tara Mohr
image: Antelope Canyon, Arizona (reminding me as well of the quiet and sacred space—humming with possibility—that has been photographed by Adrian Borda inside cellos)
This story, just published in the Emotional Transitioning issue of Woodcrest Magazine, moves through dreams and memories and hazy longings from San Miguel d'Allende, Mexico, to towns in northern New Mexico; makes brief forays to Georgetown and the Hudson River, to the Oregon coast and off to Turkey; attends a wedding on a southern California beach; and leaves us for the time being unable to travel to the mirage that is Paris, France.
"Lili had started dreaming of San Miguel d'Allende just after the New Year, when colors had been leached from the world as they had long since from her parched spirit. Flavors and smells too—though the ravaging disease that took those things away officially was mostly still unknown, wouldn't arrive in the southwest United States for a couple of months. Since Xavier's death Lili had suffered from a color deficiency the way others did a deficiency of iron or vitamin B-12, vitamin C. Her grown children had tried to coax her out of it, with varying degrees of concern and exasperation, not knowing what healing tonics to offer. Herbs, roots, spices (like pineapple Tepache from the streets of Mexico, with allspice berries, cinnamon, cayenne—something Xavier's grandmother would have ladled down her mercilessly at the least sign of flagging or floundering. But she'd been resistant to all efforts to cure her until the kachinas brought colors back on Christmas day, and after that the dreams began and like Abuelita Juana and her herbs, like Xavier and his hog bristle paintbrushes, wouldn't let up. Cajoling and prodding, butting in until she couldn't possibly do other than they wanted. Invite him back."
The main characters here appear in my linked stories "Tin Mask" and "Kachinas," not yet published, and are connected to the characters in "The Persian Warrior" and "L'Inconnue de la Seine." The denouement in Paris follows in another of the linked stories, "The Inheritance."
image: source unknown
A departure for me, this story features a woman race car driver—and her car, an inherited Austin-Healey.
"Catrin had loved so many things about that car. That it had been a gift from Uncle Oliver, who she'd been fonder of, to be honest, than their own father. That it was fast as greased lightning, he'd said, and the color of blue iris. That it had sailed Caribbean waters (past Puerto Rico, through the Panama Canal) on its way from Southampton to Los Angeles. That she had raced it five years in a row on the track east of Monterey and ended in fifth place two of those years, and only a few seconds slower than the winner the last year, when she was four months pregnant with Windell—the son meant to inherit Ollie, as she had christened the vintage racer with Laguna Beach champagne."
Somehow this whimsy just happened along, as intriguing narrative byways do. The story has been published in the Spring 2022 issue (Number 31) of Pinyon, the handsome national journal of poetry, prose, and art of Colorado Mesa University.
image: 1954 Austin-Healey, Classic Driver Market
"A daydreamer is a writer
just waiting for pen and paper."
—Richelle E. Goodrich
image: William Merritt Chase,
Woman with Crimson Parasol
This story, one of my collection of seven mask pieces—which should be called just Masks, or Masque Suite, or such, but has probably become Fugitive Colors—colors (relationships, identities) that over time can change, lighten, darken, or almost disappear. "Colors" also refers to flags, which are a symbol of identity, and "true colors" has to do with one's identity. Also, three or four of the stories have a lot to do with an artist and the bright paint colors that were his trademark. So it all fits . . . in my meandering way. The Rilke quote I use as epigraph to the collection mentions colors and also explains the relationships between my repeating characters.
Everything, as I already wrote, has become
an affair that’s settled among the colors
themselves: a color will come into its own
in response to another, or assert itself, or
recollect itself.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne)
"L'Inconnue de la Seine," set in Paris, is a kind of prequel to "The Persian Warrior" (being set four years earlier), and has been published in the gorgeously artistic Wild Roof Journal, Issue #14. Another of the stories, "Day of the Dead," is due to be published in Woodcrest Magazine (Emotional Transitioning issue) sometime soon.
It made me happy to visit Paris again in this story, remembering a sunlit afternoon ramble along a genteel tree-lined canal, an evening concert at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. My nostalgia for the city influenced the story's mood:
"It was late September, with days waning and the light mellowing richly before finally leaching away, reminding anyone with literary leanings of Prufrock or Strether (Eliot and James, respectively), who life had wistfully passed by. Reid, at merely 37, couldn't claim that for himself, but felt it threatening nonetheless. He drifted for long, elegiac hours along the river, across bridges, at the alluring mouths of alleyways, past warm-lighted cafés, feeling that sense of not belonging anywhere, with anyone."
Come journey back with me . . .
An old favorite whimsical story of mine, "Pishing," has been published in Issue 4 of Doubleback Review, and can be found right here. It first appeared in 2013 in the Mills College Walrus—since gone defunct, along with Mills itself.
I was editor of The Walrus my senior year, and typeset/printed almost the whole thing in the letterpress studio where I spent countless late-night hours that spring, with the windows flung open to the sounds of frogs under the bridge nearby and the regularly sounding campanile designed by Julia Morgan. A graduate student, a quiet artist, was working there too, on his own project—a calendar of skies, clouds, watercolor records of the passing days. He listened to a staticky transistor radio with country Western music from somewhere in the Central Valley (maybe out towards Stockton and Tracy where friends and I found a rodeo one weekend), while printing tiny squares of skies into coarse textured artist's paper.
"Pishing involved making a variety of sounds mimicking the scolding calls of birds. The idea was to get the birds’ attention and draw them out into the open, where you could watch them better."
"Every year of the three they’d been married and lived in the house off Old Page Mill Road, she’d been charmed by the plaintive minor triad of the Golden Crowned Sparrow, the bird which showed up only after summer ended, and, elusive as the last sunlight of the year, sang always hidden in the trees. Claire was charmed by everything elusive and doomed. So she really did try to pish the furtive lovely bird. But instead of her sparrow, she got a mockingbird—a brilliant flash of white tail morphing into the joker, the clown, the unabashed fake. It unnerved her, to have conjured the mocking spirit in place of the quiet one she’d asked for. She took it as a sign, and refused to try again."
Image: Esralogue at Pexels
I have again been included in the community of Digging through the Fat—having links to my publications "Augury" and "Possessive Pronouns" posted in their Community No. 68 on April 4, 2022.
My friend and fabulous writer Jeanne Althouse preceded me, in Community No. 67. It's so nice to be in company with her once more, as we have been in Birdland Journal, Amarillo Bay, Potato Soup Journal, The Plentitudes, and Catamaran.
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.
e.e. cummings
image: Daniel F. Gerhartz, Writing Home
Another story with a past! "Child of Sky and Earth," just published by the wonderful Persimmon Tree, in their Spring 2022 issue, began life as a sequel to "When Bluejay Stole the Moon." Jodi and Quinn in the first story have morphed into Josie and Clary (aka the unsympathetic Clarence, the "big-deal" Project Director) in this.
The main impetus was my fascination with the telescopes on Mauna Kea, and the inherent conflict just exactly there.
"Many Hawaiians feel this place must be returned to the ancestral gods. That scientists and their construction sites have desecrated the summit—forbidden to all but the highest chiefs or priests." Atop the desecrated mountain now, defiant, stood the thirteen telescopes, probing and unrobing the skies.
"But nowhere else is it this clear. No other instruments are this precise and powerful."
image: Telescopes on Mauna Kea, Honolulu Star-Advertisor
My story "Without Trace" has a long, convoluted pedigree. Much of it comes from the novel set in Crete which I researched there as well as in many Continuing Studies classes about Minoan culture and archaeology. Kanti Deschene, half Navajo in this story, was in the novel Abel, full Navajo. Zak—my Afro-Greek cultural anthropologist—is new, though his Romantic outlook has been stolen from the main character of the novel, Mar.
I revised this part of the novel to submit as a "border crossing narrative" in late 2021. Its main preoccupation, as I see it, is extinctions—that huge temporal border. The main character, Kanti, is an archaeologist whose specialization in ancient pollens has taken her to Crete over the years to study the abrupt end of the Bronze Age, of Minoan civilization. Her final trip to Crete occurs during another looming extinction—our own, due to the worsening climate crisis and growing devastation by Covid-19 (in the Navajo homelands especially). Another important border, this one theoretical, lies between knowing and not knowing, knowledge gained and lost. Kanti is preoccupied with finding out what happened to end the Minoan world; that's been almost more important to her than intimate human relationships.
But those, in this liminal state we're in, our "inbetweeness," are in flux. All our identities, social relations, and established customs, routines, and spaces have suddenly changed, become foreign, uncertain.
For those fortunate enough not to be refugees, I believe, foreign countries had stopped seeming particularly drastic borders anymore—but all that changed in early 2020. Even other people, even those closest to us, in the same house or room or public space, were suddenly forbidden to us, on the other side of crucial lines.
Crete and its prehistory is something that has always fascinated me, as a lifelong student of archaeology and philosophical reflection, and having been born in New Mexico I feel kindred to the Navajos and other Native peoples, and write frequently about their customs and beliefs.
Here's a brief excerpt:
"So they set out together in the blue Fiat for one of the last fastnesses of the small remnant of the once-great civilization which had survived beyond the general fall—soon to be gone as well.
She felt the urgency especially there, in that liminal place so near the end. The end of the Minoans, the end of the Bronze Age. She felt in her own bones the aching traces of the dying culture she'd followed with curious concern. At Vronda (and still higher up, at Karphi, the highest of all the peak sanctuaries) the very last hold-outs had defied the forces of natural destruction, the unidentified invaders, fate writ large. They’d been cut off from everything, hung on precariously in the haunts of gods who'd chosen not to save them. They died unmarked on mountains they had held sacred. In the end the shrines that they had tended had become their graves."
"Without Trace" was published online on March 1 in the Frontiers issue of Halfway Down the Stairs—frontiers and borders being more or less the same.
image: The site of Vronda, InstapStudyCenter.net
A short story, "Upping Stakes," has been published online in the Winter 2021 issue of The Courtship of Winds. I must admit to several possibly autobiographical or at least recognizable elements in this, including the dislike of change and upset which I share with the by-preference-unmoving heroine, Kaya.
Kaya, during her seven years of college (as long as she could reasonably stretch it out) had gathered all the grounding weight she could—all kinds of massive belongings that she'd imagined she could count on to keep her anchored.
First, a set of kettledrums, after she'd joined the youth orchestra as a freshman. Then a letterpress and cabinet of type drawers, with various fonts, after she bought the cottage she'd been renting near the college—useful later for the covers she designed and printed for the nearby Press. And finally, in her late twenties, the seated stone Kwan Yin carved by the artist she would have married if he hadn't developed a fatal itch to "see the world." There were also the heavy words she set around her, round and dense as paperweights, her substantial "no"s, and cautious "oh?"s, the smooth hard-shelled walnuts she set in various inherited Nambé bowls, Kenyan beaded bowls, pine needle bowl with African blue beads, Hopi wedding basket, and woven coil basket, set out everywhere in the cottage as offerings to whatever god or goddess was the inverse of Hermes, the god of travel and transitions.
image: Gypsy Caravan, source unknown
Cozy inside, this winter day, I'm writing about noble stags, travelers in search of seeds and bulbs, a Raphael drawing, a magic bestiary, flannel, words.
image: Just around the corner II
Writing in the water, writing on the sky . . . always, writing with light.
image: Gaston La Touche, Night Party at Versailles
