I close my eyes and walk

into your hands that flow

over my skin and out onto the ground

of Music. You are light

and dark, and shadows

accompany your smile.

I love how nothing

is sacred.

We close our eyes and walk

into the earth, with two candles

and lit and sparking

courage.

I feed you apples.

You feed me laughter.

We are unknown to each other.

But there are simple doors we open

once in a while, peek in,

and see each other painting

bright, large canvases of ourselves,

pregnant and flowing.

Come my love,

let us wake up.

Move from the mud

where were have been gaping

at each other like gentle

crocodiles.

Let us arc from birth

to death and around

and around and over and under, in

each other’s arms, like

angel-devil-humans, a holy

Trinity of Awakening.

The sun and the earth

want our tumult

and our joy.

You are the goat-god,

romping, kind, brutally

honest, and full of

ecstatic flesh, on which

you feast, and in which

you bury your great head

in prayer.

I am the snaking queen,

writhing, kind, brutally

aware, and full of

ecstatic flesh, on which

I feast, and which

I bury within my great

singing mouth.

Come, my love.

we can accomplish this

myth together.

Join hearts with me

and let us dance

into the purifying fire.

Our purpose is not to be doers but witnesses. Let us witness.

I see the people, beautiful and sad.

I see the people.

A red struggle to the top, I see myself in this.

This is why I see it. I am my own limit. I am my limitlessness.

This question must be lived

and bravely lived.

*~*

The summit points toward heaven.

“Our collective vision ends up there.”

Peak or plateau –I want to know which

and why. I am about my own justified

story.

*~*

And Self used to be this. Used to be

this inward. But now notice

it has turned, and opened outward

into wings, into possible light,

possible dark – “Which one?” is the next question.

But at least flight happens

after all.

*~*

So if it feels like a cocoon, let all go.

out. out. out .

out.

*~*

Have you wondered how to be with yourself

in a way that feels most authentic?

How beautiful that we were given the compass,

and, after all the searching,

found that it is inside, not out.

*~*

This is what flight is. The willingness to open

and shut completely and completely open.

*~*

Look around, how so many shoulders shake.

We are practicing.

*~*

It is not crying.

We are practicing

flying.

May I be like the door

opening into my little girl’s room –

slender, lit from a burning

somewhere out

beyond its limit.

First Glimmer

First glimmer,

a song in the dust,

a portal, a beckoning, a lover

in time for the first of the final dances.

And we are the calling

back and forth through the web.

And we are the Great Dance.

And buildings pass

into and out of us

wrapped in fine threads of old

stories, threadbare beautiful myths

holding up the structure of our dreams.

And from within this gleaming we emerge

shining, tall and growing,

picking apples

and walking among the trees.

you are to use this body you are to dance.

go learn from the masters the language of the body and find your dance.

you will create and recreate this dance many ways and many times and make it known and yours and illuminating and powerful and one with your vision and you will make it lightening and levity and lifting off into space above the building you build.

you are moving quickly and at the right pace and the building is nearly complete.

this is your inner building. the outer forms later, after the inner is complete and set on the trusting process of journey and every time you overcome a fear you build a wall a floor you install a high beam and this is a building of light – tensile, strong, impossible to “break” because the paradigm of destruction no longer applies to your life because you are beyond breaking now.

this building of light is your soul’s home, temple, playground, theater, church, mosque, office and only after it has become these things and do not despair, it can become them quickly and in a time-passage you might not expect, it is all up to your willingness to go where your fear sleeps, to wake it and ride it into itself where you will find a dear friend an ally a powerful being you need to call on access send out into the world as an ambassador – only then will the outer building of “income” and “profession” manifest for you.

did you know you are to let all your selves out to play?

no more trying to be one self.

this is the paradox of wholeness, of health.

this is what most of you cannot see, but many of you sense.

this the way to your holiness.

to manifest a myriad of selves, this is joy, this is the beauty and fun of life on this plane.

the power.

the exhilaration.

unpack your armor and let all your selves out to play.

and yes, the grounding is important.

you have a ground of Being on which you reside and stand firmly and connecting to this will keep you “sane” as you call it.

this has to do with levity and is another paradox to understand and unpack later.

come back to this.

it is important.

but for now, know that the world is waiting and needs all your selves.

and you will find they continue to come, one waiting behind every door in your deep Being and behind every door behind every door, and yes, as you suspect, they are infinite, these doors, and you do contain multitudes within multitudes and it is for you to learn how to access

release contain grow

nourish lead guide

and challenge them, give them pathways to self-mastery, and this is what is meant when I say that you all need to learn the art of mothering

the heart of mothering.

a spiritual mother, unconstrained by physical form, can give birth to a thousand thousand selves, beings, incarnations, such is her creative power and each of you has this within you.

and yet you decide on one for your whole life?

why commit this imprisonment of the soul?

why lose your light so easily?

these are the disenfranchised and as long as they lie unawakened in your own inner graves there will always be those deeply disenfranchised ones on the outside and the way to healing and wholeness is not to lock them up even more deeply but to let them out, give them ground for standing and it is for you to see that your way is illness this way you follow and worship like a god, this idea of being one self forever through time and space.

and yes, this is the madness you all fear.

go toward it. it is a beauty you cannot imagine and it will be your cure.

it looks like madness but only from where you are, it is not that serious or dis-astrous, it is simply the Divine playing.

the Divine Story unfolding in form, time and space.

this is your bliss.

your calling is deeply connected to it.

you know this.

this is the deep, deep forest – go in and dance.

(others will come.

they will not be able to stay away.

and this will be your “in-come.”)

Still mouths (a sestina, reversed)

This is about the way things breathe
in my absence. About the sound
of things breathing that are supposed to be
silent. About the way I can almost catch
a chair filling with air, a wooden spoon
left near an open window, opening its small mouth.

Mouth the secret of these still things who
breathe in, out,
spoon the air from window ledges,
sound like tambourines or flames crackling.
Catch something breathing.
Be quiet.

Be still. The clock advances like a
mouth speaking strict lines.
Catch the sound of tense lips that cannot open to
breathe (even the
sound of death can soothe. The chair. The
spoon.) Certain among us are beyond this fear, and simply

spoon air into invisible lungs.
Be still, and know that I am
sound. That you are
mouth.
Breathe in.
Catch the same breath leaving.

Catch god taking his air with a
spoon. What gods eat we cannot even
breathe, let alone
be. And still my
mouth waters, thinking of the
sound of spatulas, the

sound of saucepans when they
catch a ray of air, open a small
mouth to it,
spoon it in. When I enter, they will of course
be silent. But they will still
breathe.

In my kitchen, it is the things who breathe. Though I cannot catch
them at it, I think I would like the sound. Just now, a spoon
shifted in a drawer. Trying to be quiet, opening its mouth.

~ published in Where We Live; Illinois Poets, 2003

To Be Read While Listening to Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132, third movement

When the Yes
you have longed for sounds, finally,
like the space between two stands
of naked trees, each line of them
like a violin string and the Yes
the emptiness between
then you are lifted up
and parallel lines
that once warred, meet
at the edges of the heart's open
field and you must go there
with your bare skin
and trace your delicate song
of giving in.

Here's to Absurdist Playwrights, Who Do, To My Surprise, Get It Right

There are moments in my life when i think, oh, i get it, this is like that point in a play when i'm reading it or watching it and think what in the world? who breaks down at a place like that? it makes no sense, what kind of absurdist play is this. like for instance when a mother has just spent two days in the hospital with her 1-year-old daughter seeing her get poked and prodded with needles and IVs and having her baby cry so hard she vomits and her eyes get so puffy they are a continual squint and sitting for hours, like 6 at a time, in a rickety, broken recliner with her daughter in her arms because the baby girl won't sleep anywhere else as her daughter's head keeps bumping the wooden armrest (a wooden armrest. are you kidding me? she thinks) because the towels the mother draped over it to cushion her daughter's head have for the fifteenth time slipped onto the floor which is too far down for her to reach over the wooden armrest and retrieve and because actually getting up to get them requires simply too great an outlay of effort and maneuvering around cords and IV drips and blankets and bags and the rickety recliner with the wooden armrests so she just abandons the hope and arches her arm to protect her daughter's head in such a way that her arm cramps and prevents her from being able to sleep, which is the second night in a row because the previous night her baby girl threw up every hour but somehow through all this she is chipper, even chatty, and as she and her mom and her recently released baby girl step out of the car she even thinks, wow, what a beautiful day, only to come home to a huge renovation project, in fact installing shelving and drawers in her daughter's bedroom (huge meaning the entire den has been overtaken with all the recently purchased hardware) but in fact instead of deflating she finds she's excited about it and feels something like a subtle fleeting hope, an opportunity to exert some control over the chaos, to instill order and serenity, a subconscious sense that this project will in fact reclaim, recover and restore the last four days of sickness hell she's been living in, i can't wait, she thinks, only to discover that the final, aesthetic piece of the project was entirely overlooked by the "specialist" with whom she spent at least 90 minutes three days ago, which discovery prompts her to fly into a rage at the customer service guy on the phone, a pure, unmitigated rage about how the "specialist" forgot the birch, how in god's name could she have forgotten the birch, and then being told that in fact having the birch will require completely redesigning the closet at which point she nearly spits into the phone or at the phone and then apologizes to the customer service guy and explains that she's just returned home from being in the hospital for two days with her daughter and this was the project she had planned to tackle today and at this point she really can't think straight and needs to just hang up and think about it and may just return everything and go somewhere else after which confession there is a pause and she hears, on the other end of the line, very softly, what can we do to help you, and for some reason she almost dissolves into tears as she struggles through the rest of the conversation, chokes over her email address and hangs up the phone and then does utterly dissolve into tears and it's at this point if it were a play that i'd be thinking, what is she doing? why is she crying because the Container Store guy is offering to help her? this is absurd. this is why i hate absurdist plays, but since it's actually not a play but my life instead after i finish crying i think, oh. I get it now. and i wipe my eyes and sink back into the couch and think about it for a while, while the mascara dries on my hand and my husband is upstairs giving my daughter a bath after yet another sickness mess. yes. this is actually when people break down. not at the places I think they should or would, when i watch or read their lives. not at the climax of what I think the pain or the struggle is, but later, when everything has apparently died down and made a turn for the better. later, when all that's left to do is the next thing in a normal day. that's when emotions are paper thin and some small inconvenience represents every huge one, and some minor kindness represents the absence of more significant ones and suddenly after a bit of sun and a lull in the drama some stranger with one sentence trips a wire or flips a switch triggering an elaborate emotional Rube Golderb contraption of frustrations and struggles and triumphs and hopes and disappointments which ends with me sobbing silently on the couch.

and then thinking, life is an absurdist play. I can't wait to direct one.

My Own Kind of Popular

At one point in the evening, I remember thinking, Are we weird? Is this weird?

It was when Aaron was playing a Chopin Prelude (I think it was a Prelude. I'll have to ask him. I'm terrible with musical specifics.) and we were all sitting in the living room, listening with rapt attention. Mom, Meg (my sister), Dad and me. The living room had become a forest of red and white twisted streamers - candy-striped, crepe-paper columns running from the ceiling to the floor, with red and white balloons attached at the top. And on the glass coffee table, the remnants of a Tags Bakery chocolate birthday cake.

I emerged from Aaron's musical spell for a moment and thought, Here we are, just the five of us (You're doing all this just for us?! Aaron had asked incredulously earlier in the evening. All these decorations and everything and no one else is coming??....), hanging out now for going on five hours for Mom's birthday celebration, and there's no other place on earth I'd rather be than right here.

The agenda for the evening (Really. Dad printed out an agenda.) included numerous performances, all entrancing: Dad singing a John Dowland solo; all of us, sans Mom and Annika, singing a selection of Beatles tunes (Mom's been on this Beatles kick for several months now. And now that I think about it, our performance was probably quite a bit less than entrancing ), me reading my blog homage to her, Aaron playing several solo pieces on the piano, and Meg performing a purely improvised dance/monologue number based on reflections from her recent 3-week creative retreat in Virginia.

Audience members becoming performers becoming audience members. My favorite way to spend an evening. Who cares if it's "just" my family.

But I do recognize that it's probably weird.

Makes me think of high school. And cliques. The first time I became aware of them was in Ms. Steinbaum's 5th grade class. I noticed that Jenny Glickman always had a claque of girls around her, giggling, whispering, passing notes back and forth. And then there were the outliers. The little groups of girls who played quietly among themselves at recess, all the while casting sidelong, envious glances at the screaming, giggling clique hovering around Jenny. This, to me, was the oddest thing.

First, Jenny was boring. She wasn't very smart, or kind, or creative. She was bland. She was the white bread of 5th grade girls. Second, all the other girls in the whole class, as far as I could make out, were scrambling to be her best friend. Why? There wasn't a bone in my body that wanted to be Jenny's best friend, or giggling and screaming with any of the other girls. Or pining wistfully like the other other girls. I rather liked my own company.

From that point, I became fascinated with group psychology, especially as it played out in the halls and homerooms of my schools.

In high school, the fascination deepened, probably because I had stronger faculties for distinguishing, characterizing and ruminating. I noticed, again, the Popular Girls in their Awesome Clique, and Everyone Else who in their own way, wished desperately to be in. Some girls formed anti-clique cliques. (They were the cheerleader-haters.) But just like the Popular Girls, they had their own rules, their own restrictions, and deep down (I knew some of them so I can say this with some authority) they really would have been much happier being one of the Popular Girls.

If any of them reads this, she'll deny it vehemently. But it's true. Wherever you find hate, there you find denied love (ahem: Ted Haggart).

I was a clique drifter. I rode the clique trains from one group to the next, hopping off for a quick cup of coffee around the proverbial burning garbage can, and back on again to move to the next group huddled around their own private fire. And I really enjoyed that. At school, I had no enemies. And yet once I walked through the big metal doors at 3:15pm, I left the entire social structure behind. I was 17 and utterly unaware of the normal after-hours social scene.

To me, after hours consisted of pouring over homework (I confess it. I loved homework.), devouring TCBY white chocolate mousse frozen yogurts with Reece's Peanut Butter cups while watching black and white movies with Alka, or grinding our way through Jane Fonda's 90-minute workout and then flopping on the couch to watch MTV videos with Michelle.

Not once did I wish I was really with someone else, doing something else. To me, I was as cool as could be. I just had vastly different tastes and interests than everyone else.

I credit my parents with raising me with a potent disregard for peer pressure. I'm not quite sure how they did it. Part of it was certainly the by-product of rather unhealthy elitist attitudes, but part was genuine strength of character: The ability to truly look at a situation dispassionately, see it clearly and choose proactively based on personal principles, not groupthink. Because of this, I quickly realized that The Popular Girls were only popular for two reasons: (1) they were having the most fun and, more importantly, (2) everyone else's envy made them popular. By gazing wistfully at them all the time, by pining after what they had or were experiencing, instead of creating something of their own.

So I figured out early on that it's not popularity that the other girls wanted. It was a sense of personal power, of personal pride. What they really wanted was to be able to enjoy a vital, vivid, exciting life, to really get inside a moment and stay there. Well, hell, I thought. I can do that.

So can anyone, if she is willing to do the hard work of creating her own circle of popularity. Even if it's just a circle of one, or two, or five.

Which is why it wasn't odd at all for us to be planning an extensive, five-hour party for Mom, even if "just" for the five of us. Because to us, we five were it.

And what a gift. To feel like my family is it. Where the excitement is. Where the deep love and creativity is. Where the charisma is.

Ok so we might go overboard with our agendas and our marathon political and religious discussions. Ok so visitors and new girlfriends and boyfriends often leave scratching their head, wondering what in the world they just walked into. Because it's weird, it is weird, to do what we do. But weird is just another way of saying charismatic. And charismatic is just another way of saying Popular. And Popular is just another way of saying "cool with myself." And "cool with myeslf" is just another way of saying "centered," "present," "here," "vital," "alive."

And that's exactly what all five of us were as we listened with rapt attention to Aaron playing his deeply moving Chopin, to Dad singing a beautiful tenor solor, to me reading my homage to Mom and as we watched Meg move brilliantly through her improv piece.
*****
And last night we did it again for Thanksgiving (sans Mom, because she had to take a last minute trip to help my Grandma heal a bad back).

I just encountered Dad at a local coffee shop this morning and he gave me one of his signature bear hugs and said, jubilantly, "That was the best Thanksgiving ever!"

I heartily agreed. Even though, in Mom's absence, we (shhh) ordered a full turkey dinner from a lcoal restaurant. But that aside (it was a delicious meal, actually, with all the traditionals: mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, etc. etc. etc.), what made the Thanksgiving great is what happened after and around the food.

First, we went around the table during the meal and recounted everything we were thankful for. Second, we spent a good half hour on a rousing conference call with my brother (who lives in Indiana and couldn't come up), talking about the the military-industrial complex, the disappearance of the electric car, why he is actually going to vote for a President this time around and what place ideals have in politics. Third, after the phone calls and the clean-up, we dusted off my old guitar, tuned it up, broke out the song books and spent two full hours singing: four-part harmonies, a capella pieces, canons (our resounding favorite: "Why doesn't my goose sing as well as thy goose when I paid for my goose twice as much as thine?"!!). Everything from hymns and spirituals like "Now the Night is O'er" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" to old standards like "Puff, the Magic Dragon" and "The Sound of Silence." It was fabulous, we sounded great, and by the end of the night our voices were scratchy and our heads stuffed with singing as much as our bellies were stuffed with good food.

So there we were again: a small group of people creating something beautiful, vital, moving. What does it matter that we were only four? That others may have been doing something "cooler," or "better"? In our eyes, there was no better place to be, and no better people to be with.

This is how I learned to be my own brand of popular. We had family gatherings like this constantly, and I simply absorbed the charisma, the ability to fully and thoroughly enjoy a moment, to simply be with the people we were with, doing what we were doing.

If there's one thing my family is good at, it's creating moments in which a kind of magic happens, a soft radiance arcs over everyone, time slows, senses heighten and strong, silent, silvery webs of dynamism, charisma, creativity and deep connection bind us to each other.

May everyone discover this cure, this healing power, this mighty secret.

Ok, Now for a Complete 180

So my first two posts were about extravagant questions. How good and great they are. And then I read a comment posted by my uncle, and it got me to thinking.

He said something about how no one wants to ask the "unextravagant question," and how those posts made him think about what extravagant questions he has asked lately. All good stuff, really. But, still, something tickled the back of my mind, like a whispery little voice, saying, "Watch it."

Watch what?

Well, watch my tendency to value extravagance over simplicity, probably. If there's one consistent character trait I've had since I was tiny, it's a taste for the extravagant. I loved to read, so I read 600-page novels in 3rd grade. I loved to cartwheel, so one summer afternoon a friend and I cartwheeled across the entire campus where my dad was going to seminary. In fact, that was the summer when cartwheeling was our de facto mode of transport.

In high school I wanted to double pierce my ears, but mom would have none of it. So I put four earrings in each single-pierced ear.

In 11th grade English class, Mr. Carey constantly chastised my prolific use of the comma. I used it profligately, for emphasis, apparently far too often.

Dessert? Anything with obscene amounts of chocolate.

Espresso drinks? Always grande. Always a flavor.

I live in a world of superlatives. Everything is always The Best! The Most Amazing! The Funniest! The Greatest! But my uncle's post made me reconsider. Yes, there is a virtue in asking the extravagant questions of one's life. It's like a shot of espresso. It rouses us, stirs us to great possibilities.

But there is also virtue in the unextravagant question. In the seemingly simplest, unnecessary, shy question.

I am reminded of my very first class in college. I went to St. John's College, a Great Books school started by Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. Classes are intimate, led not by a professor but by a tutor, and always, always begun with a Question.

In this particular class, we were discussing The Iliad. For those unfamiliar with the tome, basically it's about war. And what goes with war? Booty. As in: Plunder. Loot. Stolen goodies.

So there we were, 8 o'clock on a Monday night, all eager, fresh-faced freshman with our big books and our little lives, waiting with pent-up anticipation as the tutor opened his mouth to speak. So my question tonight is.....

The room held its baited breath and all went silent.......

What is booty?

My brow furrowed and a contemptuously quizzical expression crossed my face. What is booty? Are you kidding me? That's the question? Ohmygod. This is going to be a long year. I got stuck with the lame teacher who can't even ask a decent question. What is booty. Please.

At the end of class two hours later, we hadn't even begun to answer it.

And of course, Mr. Rawn was not lame. He was quite brilliant. It was I, in my constant superlative stupor, who was misguided. And for the next four years, I learned the art of asking the very, very simple question. I learned how those questions, the ones I almost cringed in asking, were powerful, mysterious, complex (and they were almost always the ones everyone else was silently wanting to ask anyway). They were like long, deep tunnels into the heart of the thing. They were extravagant on the inside, and you had to dig pretty deep to discover that.

I am just finishing up my life coaching training with an organization called iPEC (Institute for Professional Empowerment Coaching). In this training, we learn to ask powerful questions. They are powerful not because they are extravagant or sexy, but because they are simple. Even obvious.

Well, Coach, I just can't seem to get out of this relationship that I've been in for years. It's really driving me crazy. I want nothing more than to be free and move on, and I just can't seem to do it.

Interesting, the Coach says, quietly. How are you benefiting by staying stuck?

How am I what?........

Extravagant questions are for encouraging us into great possibilities. They are for flinging outward and upward, to see how high they can take us in our search for our greatest potential. And this is good.

But there is another movement that is just as essential. And unextravagant questions are for that. They are for calling us down and in to the heart of something. They are for tunneling from the surface to the core. And the simpler they are, the more unextravagant, the more readily a thing's essence will open itself to us, because essence is by nature shy, hidden, quiet.

So, in challenging towards possibility: atiprazna. In tunneling into essence: the anti-atiprazna.

And I have a feeling that the two are in fact blood relatives. That at the remote edges of the atiprazna lies the unextravagant question, directing the enquirer back down and in. And that in the deepest core of the simplest inquiry lies the extravagant question, opening out and up.