Writing Up A Storm

The Princess and the Pea

"The Princess and the Pea," illustration by Edmund Dulac, 1911
fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen

Dear readers, I did not know that my writer’s retreat was going to turn into a mysterious disappearance. I am so sorry. It is all the fault of something as tiny as a pea. A little pill, no bigger than a one-half of a pea, has literally brought me to my knees.

It is very hard to arrive in one’s sixties without having to take one or two tiny little medications of one sort or another. I have not managed to escape the physician’s prescription pad, try as I might. And this one teeny tiny pill keeps me up all night and yet will not let me quite wake up all day. We are searching for an alternative, but until we do, I find myself without the energy to do much of anything.

I so much want my blog for poetry, not for something as prosaic as a pill. Then I thought of Dulac’s enchanted illustration for “The Princess and the Pea,” and found a way to fleetingly see my situation in some of the old fairytales.

You might wonder why I am having to take this little pill in the first place. 

Well, I would have to go back to 1998. No, better go back to when I was born in 1943. No, wait. Because my father was born in Germany and was so very Germanic, I really think I have to go back to the Brothers Grimm to find the answer. I must go back to the very moments when they were writing down all of their versions of the old fairytales, especially that one about the little girl with the red hood.

If I could think clearly, I know I could put my finger on something in “Little Red Riding Hood” that explains everything.

 

I'm quite sure it all started right here, faraway and long ago, in the deep dark woods. One thing led to another. The domino effect. But I haven’t been able to sleep properly, you see, and so I can’t think clearly. As soon as the fog in my mind clears, I will pounce upon the culprit in a nanosecond.

In the midst of my inability to sleep, we have decided to repaint our old house, both outside and inside, and to rip out the carpet in the bedroom and the boxroom, and the linoleum in the kitchen, so that we can reclaim the old wood floors throughout the whole house. I don’t know if this is the worst possible timing for doing this or the best possible timing, but it pretty much means boxing everything up and getting it out.

I know that some of you have done major renovations and managed to keep on blogging without skipping a beat, but I do not think I am going to be able to. Even if I could sleep properly, I still might not quite have that extra bit of ooooomph.

During the worst of the renovation, I will probably spend my days at our little neighborhood castle. Yes, I have a castle almost in my front yard. The castle, otherwise known as the Elisabet Ney Museum, is open again after being in a state of renovation itself this past year, and I’ve been meaning to take you here on a tour.

I find it incredible that a castle is alive and well only four blocks away from my house. I walk past this wild wonderful landscape nearly every day of my life, and bow my head to Elisabet Ney who lived here and perfected her sculptures here. She is on my list of posts that I want to do for you. I can’t possibly get too very lost when all I have to do is walk one block to the corner, turn left, and then three more blocks due east, and there it is, a castle in a field of wild grasses.

Our little old house, being made of wood rather than medieval stone, is built on what is called “pier and beam,” and so before we can start to paint, we must have the house “releveled.” Perhaps that is what I need the most: a house that is sitting level. Am I unable to sleep at night because I am living in a tilted house? Now that I think of it, not one doctor has ever asked me if my house needs to be releveled. It might be the most important question!

I should tell you that paper girl and rabbit are not happy about not being featured here on a regular basis. They have found an old typewriter, and I can hear them typing away in the middle of the night. I found a discarded scrap:  

Oh dear! When I confronted them, they pretended to be made out of paper and unable to speak, much less operate a typewriter.

I don't know yet when I will start blogging again, but I will check back here in September and let you know how things are going sleep-wise and house-wise. Until then, dearest ones, please bear with me. I am trying to get back to you. With all my heart and soul.

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Valentine's Day & Writer's Wretreat

About seven years ago, in the middle of a wild storm, a huge limb fell in our backyard. We are always heartbroken when we lose a tree limb, and this was a very large one, a very great loss. As my husband was cutting the fallen limb into logs and I was helping stack the logs, we saw that one of the cuts revealed the almost perfect shape of a heart.

I took it as a sign that in the midst of misfortune there is the chance that something in the shape of a heart will materialize, unexpectedly. I know from my own life that this is always true, there is always a silver lining in the cloud, even though I rail against having to look for it sometimes.

I grew up with a mother who looked at life through a pair of rose-colored glasses, and I wish I could find those glasses of hers!

My husband was able to get about four or five heart-shaped slices out of this part of the limb before the heart dissolved into a more circular shape. We kept one and gave the others away. Ours hangs in our kitchen to remind us to look for the heart in the middle of dark times.

I want to give this heart to you today, for I am going to be gone for a few days. I am going on what I like to call a "writer's wretreat" for the rest of this week, and so I want say "Happy Valentine's Day" a little early.

I don't know where I'll be going, but it won't be very far. Only as far as the hinterland of our backyard, or closer, through the back o' beyond of the boxroom, and from there, into the wilds of our kitchen and the wasteland of our mudroom, a little room just behind our kitchen where the washer and dryer sit. A whole clutter of rooms, now that I think of it, in serious need of cleaning and uncluttering.

Maybe my writer's wretreat will be more of a "writer's wrestoration," as in "please wrestore this house to some semblance of sanity so the writer can think straight." And, hopefully, while I am doing all of this cleaning and uncluttering that I am now imagining myself doing, I'll be writing things in my head and figuring out what it is I really want to do next.

I've been going through my old greeting cards, and I think the guardian bag lady is my favorite of all my guardians. It might be a matter of "there but for the grace of God go I," but she taps the most upon my heart.

There is no other person in our culture who wears so much clothing all at one time as the bag lady. So many fabrics, so many patterns, all at once. Dresses and pants, aprons and vests, jackets and coats, not to mention all of her bags, pillowcases, purses, and satchels. It is this mismatched mix-and-match glory that is her great artistic charm.

She does seem to be beckoning me, for she is the essence of both heart and misfortune, the heart of misfortune, perhaps. I have a longing to get into the very heart of her, and so I hope, as I weed out the things that I no longer need, that I will get closer and closer to her, not only in my thoughts, but in my prayers, too. Maybe I have been thinking about her because I've been wanting to follow Mendofleur in her quest here to examine collecting and hoarding. And, sometimes, in my case, the hanging onto for dear life.

We have a van that comes every few months right to our doorsteps to pick up unwanted clothing, small appliances, bedding, and kitchenware. They are coming this week and I hope to have several bags for them.

This heart from our fallen tree limb, my thoughts about my bag lady, my cluttered house so badly in need of spring-cleaning, have all given Valentine's Day a new meaning for me this year, for I want to enlarge the compass of my love. Oh, so easy to say while I am sitting here, all safe, in my chair. But still, if I say it, perhaps it is the first step for loving more, caring more.

Happy Valentine's Week, then, and I do so hope to see you back here next week!

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Walking on Ice

Louis Rhead, 1900 poster for "The Sun," New York City.

We didn't quite get skating weather this weekend, but we grazed 29º and that is cold for us in Central Texas. It is February, and I am holding on to winter now, for I love autumn, winter, and spring in Texas, but not the long hot summers. When winter starts to disappear, I know that summer isn't far behind. 

I went looking for ice skaters for a particular reason. Last week, I mentioned how important notebooks were to me, how I never go anywhere without one. I have written thousands of pages in notebooks, ever since I was nine, when I decided I would be a writer when I grew up. But most of these pages have been notes, sketches, ideas for stories, the stories themselves, or letters.

Not journal pages, as in personal diaries.

I didn't write a personal journal until 1994, and then I kept a journal, written in spiral notebooks, for about twelve years. But one day, a few years ago, I threw these notebooks away. Fifteen or twenty very fat, 180-page, wide-ruled, spiral notebooks.

I took them to the dumpster behind my husband's office and threw them all away.

"Les Patins d’argent (The Silver Skates)," éditeur Hetzel et Cie, 1876 or 1877

I threw them all away because I had filled them with everything that was bothering me, and I couldn't imagine ever wanting to read them again, much less ever wanting anyone else to read them. I've never kept a personal journal again, for I find I do better when I write my thoughts down in sketches, stories, or letters.

But there is one tiny scrap of those pages that got saved in the most curious way. I thought I would tell you about it today.

It came about because I had read that several hundred of Emily Dickinson's poems were recently discovered, poems never published before, because they were hidden inside her letters. Someone, and I don't remember who, had been reading her letters and realized that some of her words were actually poems if you lifted them out of the letters and put them in poem form.

January 1916 Vanity Fair cover by Ethel Caroline Rundquist

This idea of poems being hidden in letters was mulling around in my head when I suddenly looked into my own journal pages and found one little group of words and thought, "Oh, this is a poem!"

When I saw this Vanity Fair ice skater, I thought that she almost illustrated my words in a lighthearted way, although the words are really not so lighthearted. In my journal these words would have appeared all together, in mid-stream, in the middle of other words. But I lifted them out and made a poem out of them.

I have to tread so carefully to keep the ice
from breaking beneath my feet.
But, no,
I can't walk that nicely anymore.
I need a footstep that makes a sound,
that hits the ground with a roar
that can be heard for miles around.
And if my footfall cracks the ice,
I'll take up freefall
and soar.
I can't tiptoe anymore.

This poem has been saved because I put it in a folder marked "Poetry," where it has lain so quietly for years now. You'd think it would make a roar every once in a while.

I have no idea what event prompted these particular words. But I'm glad, out of all those words, that these are the ones that got saved, for it is a message from myself to myself to not be so quiet, perhaps!

To try to illustrate my words, I decided to make a paper version of the Vanity Fair ice-skater. This is a first draft. I'm not sure about the red and the violet, but I have always liked the idea of pairing "infra-red" with "ultra-violet." In a story once, I described the color of a dress as being "ultra-violet" to add a poetic dimension to the character who was wearing the dress, for she seemed to me to be the kind of person who would clothe herself in ultra-violet.

I think the hands are wrong. Can both hands be in that position, I wonder, or do I have two right hands, or two left hands? A few lessons in human anatomy might be needed here!

But back to my "poem."

I've been thinking of how this little blog has become my morning notebook now, and of how much I love to put my thoughts and memories and sketches here, and of how the sound that quiet people make is like the age-old question of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is there to hear it.

I think a quiet person writing all alone in the early morning dark of her boxroom might make a sound in the darkness . . . Not a roar, perhaps, but maybe a purr.

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Whirling Dervish

This where I am with Tatiana, a kind of whirling dervish phase. I found this definition at this site:

Whirling Dervish (wurl-ing dur-vish) n. 1. A mystical
dancer who stands between the material and cosmic
worlds. His dance is part of a sacred ceremony
in which the dervish rotates in a precise rhythm.
He represents the earth revolving on its axis while
orbiting the sun. The purpose of the ritual whirling
is for the dervish to empty himself of all distracting
thoughts, placing him in trance; released from
his body he conquers dizziness.

I find this curiously comforting, for my first thought was that I really don't know what I am doing, but now I am thinking perhaps there is method in my madness, after all.

Tatiana was a wonderful little third-grader I had who always wore a little purse, like a soap-on-a-rope, that whirled around her in orbit. My leap to the paper circlets above comes from the planetary models of atoms that we have all seen, especially the logo for the Atomic Energy Commission. I might talk about this more at another time.

But today, being in a kind of whirl, I thought I would share my whirling thoughts with you instead. All of your lovely comments about my doll and about home have taken me to both old and new places in my mind.

I love how one thing leads to another!

And somehow, the doll and Tatiana and that longing to find the way home before dark are all circling around in my mind. The doll circled me back around to Tatiana, and then, suddenly, I started thinking about how the colors in my atomic paper circlets match the colors in Margret's windstorm from yesterday's post.

(Painting © Margret Hofheinz-Döring/ Galerie Brigitte Mauch Göppingen)

It is wonderful to find a way to put the storms of our lives into colors that please us, to find a way to be safe in spite of all the storms that come our way. Maybe I am trying to make Tatiana safe by encircling her with magic circles.

Or maybe she is simply radiating her own colorful energy!

But I am in this whirl today, and cannot sort it out. I'm such an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person that I owe some of you some responses from yesterday, but I am off early today to visit some dear old friends this morning. I will get back on my computer this afternoon to talk to my dear new friends and to visit your lovely blogs, where I find so much to think about, so much to learn, and so much comfort.

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A Frayed Frame

After gazing lovingly and long at Spirit Cloth's inaugural flag here, I decided to begin a frame (of sorts) for Tatiana out of torn fabric. (You can read more about Tatiana here.)

I chose fabric scraps that were black and white, with a touch of red, and laid them out on a white cloth. This is very much a sandpainting type of fabric painting, for a whiff of wind would surely blow all these little pieces to the ends of the earth.

I'm afraid I rather like it this way, this evanescent, ephemeral quality. I did put three quilt pins here and there to anchor these scraps a little, but needle and thread are very far away. I don't know why, to tell you the truth. Maybe it's because Tatiana is made out of paper and doesn't want any needles making their way toward her.

The white cloth that I am using (temporarily) for my background is a dish towel hemmed by hand by my grandmother. I tried to capture the million little stitches in this hem, but I couldn't get my camera to see them. The hem is 1/8 of an inch, so tiny.

My grandmother had a little Singer sewing machine all the years that I knew her (this wonderful machine is mine now and I often use it, mainly to repair things). I wonder if she made these dish towels before she got her machine, or if she simply liked to make these little stitches, stitch, stitch, stitch, while sitting in front of her fireplace on a winter's night. 

She was such a tiny little person, quick as lightning, always busy as a bee.

I thought I'd show you where I am usually to be found, in the room we call the "boxroom."

This is the view from across my art table: two black filing cabinets, one on top of the other, and three library bookcases (the third one on the far right is out of view here). These bookcases were long ago Christmas gifts from my husband, very large gifts of love, for he had to assemble all of them (and there are two more behind me, and two more in our dining room).

In the corner between the filing cabinet and the first bookshelf is a stuffed raccoon, in case you are wondering what that is.

This is where I sit to write my blog or read. Behind me is a door, and a blanket is currently hanging over the door to ward off winter drafts.

There's a place for our cat Boo to sit beside me but you can't see it here. He likes to hide and it is a very hidden place.

This is why it is called the boxroom.

There are more boxes than this surrounding me, but this might be enough to show you for today. When we first moved into our little house, about twenty years ago, this is the room where everything in boxes went. Some of the boxes never quite got unpacked. 

We live in a two bedroom house: the master bedroom and the boxroom. Since my husband uses the garage for his workroom, I got to have "a boxroom of my own." Overnight guests, I'm afraid, have to sleep on an airbed on the floor in the living room.

This is the window facing the front porch. Small stuffed animals and birds hang in strands down the curtain, turtles on the far left, then peace doves, then elephants, peace doves, peace doves. Most of these were gifts from New Mexico, brought back to me by my husband from his many years of flying his hot-air balloon in the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

I see that the elephants have managed to push the curtains open a crack to have a peek outside.

This room is very small, a little cave of a room. I feel quite safe in it. I usually feel wrapped up in its storybook quirkiness, but sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the clutter of too many things. Spring cleaning is very high on my To Do List, but (sigh) spring in Texas is just a blink. So easy to miss it.

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Christmas Tree Mulch

My husband brought home a pickup-bed full of Christmas tree mulch yesterday. Austin collects all the trees after Christmas, mulches them, and then announces for one and all to come and take. I didn't go yesterday, but I have been before. You drive up to literally mountains of mulch and back your truck or car as close in as you can get and start shoveling. Or forking. A fork works best.

We don't ourselves ever have a Christmas tree. Partly, our house is very small, so there is a problem of where to put a tree. We neither of us want an artificial tree, and we both don't like the idea of cutting down a living tree.

Ideally, we would like to buy a small tree in a pot, and then plant it in our side yard each year, which would result in a Christmas tree woods. Which I would like very much!

I stood at the bed of the pickup yesterday and inhaled the Christmas fragrance. The memories of childhood dreams and wishes and wonderings came flooding back. The impossibility of Santa coming down the chimney in the house without a chimney that we lived in when I was a child, and the glorious wild belief that somehow he would make his own chimney, anyway.

It was cloudy and cool yesterday, my favorite kind of day, and I stood before the wreckage of the Christmas trees, the golden, olive, sepia chips, looking just like the pile of treasure you would expect to find where the X lies on a treasure map.

But my thoughts were of Haiti. I kept seeing the wreckage in Haiti overlaid upon the wreckage of the Christmas trees. I plunged my fingers into the sharp-scented chips, and thought of how we would scatter all this splintered gold around all our trees, especially the new ones we are growing, our brand-new redbud, the spindly Barbados cherry, the slowly growing burr oak. New life will come of this wreckage.

I bowed my head, knowing that somehow, someday, new life will come to Haiti, too. And then I thought about all the one dollar bills, the ten dollar checks, that are flying through the air right now, with "Haiti" written upon them, and of how the whole world really can make a difference. I thought of how much good we can do, especially when we do it together.

I brought one little sprig inside with me and let its tantalizing ping! of needles and snow and rooftop hooves patter inside my heart. Its promise of goodwill to all.

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The Cardboard Suitcases

The suitcase in The Arrival, from my last post, reminded me so much of my grandmother's suitcases. I don't really know what they are made out of, but I have always thought of them as her "cardboard" suitcases. They have been mine for years. I took them out into the wilds of our garden and set them beside my scarecrow. I like the effect. A scarecrow ready to embark upon her very own journey.

I have always been drawn to the idea of journey. If I pick up a book and the first sentence tells me that a woman put all her things in a suitcase and bought a one-way ticket and boarded a train, I will keep on reading. I will want to know everything about her. Where is she going and why, and what, exactly, are her thoughts, her hopes, her dreams?

This scene above sets me to imagining where, exactly, would my scarecrow want to go, and why.

These suitcases are a golden-grayish-brown. They are of a color that I am finding almost impossible to find a word for. They are not really gray, they are not really brown, they are both, with a golden tinge.

They have traveled with me on buses and airplanes and trains. The last time I used them was in the late 1980s on a plane from Austin to Dallas. The world often passes me by without my noticing. I remember at the baggage claim turnpike (or whatever it is called), other people were having to read the names on baggage labels to see which black suitcase on wheels was theirs, for they all looked alike, whereas I could see my suitcases the minute they appeared at the top of the ramp.

And this (sigh) wasn't the first time that I suddenly realized I was a little out of step with the rest of the world.

There is a missing latch on the larger one, and so I always put a strap around this one. The faded label, "Italian Line," is from my grandmother's travels. I have never been abroad but she went to Europe any number of times, usually by plane, sometimes by ship.

I'm not one for traveling anymore, not the kind where you have to pack a suitcase. But I'm still very much a traveler in the sense of feeling that I am in the middle a journey. It all feels like traveling to me, going outside to visit my scarecrow, or going inside a book, or opening up a drawer, or looking inside my computer in which the world can be found, like magic. Alice in Wonderland, indeed!

It occurred to me this weekend that I have seen recent photos of some of you, and that I should post a recent one of me. I've shied away from photos all my life, and so there aren't very many in existence.

The last posed photos of myself are the class photos from my teaching days. This is from my second year of teaching. By my calculations, I must be 46 years old in this photo.

I thought I'd do a 2010 version of the class photo, and so I got myself out to the garden this weekend for a pose with my scarecrow.

Fast forward, then, about 20 years:

My husband calls this my "ragamuffin" look, and, luckily, he doesn't seem to mind it, because this is pretty much my "look" these days, the ragamuffin look.

I wore my green wellies (a treasured gift from my husband), which is my idea of dressing up. My hair has not "turned" yet, and I don't know why. By all rights, by the time I was 35 my hair should have turned, not just white, but stark-raving white. I wonder if I'll be one of those people whose hair turns white overnight? I have baby-fine brown hair, and I've been hoping for gray hair as I have been told it has more body.

Well, I am 66 years old now, and by my way of figuring, I have 33 more years to create, to read, to dream up whatever comes to mind. My mother told me that most people see themselves as they were at about age 25, but I think I might go back much farther than that, especially when I try to see my heart and soul. 

I tend to see my heart and soul in this nine-year-old girl. She often stands before me, just looking at me, as if she can't quite believe where I have taken her, the things I have gotten her into, the things I've gotten her out of, the times I've forgotten to take care of her, the times I've gotten her lost, the things of hers that I've lost along the way, that old typewriter, for example, her very first typewriter and I don't even know where it is anymore. 

Oh my! I have a lot of explaining to do!

Well, I have set the old cardboard suitcases out, ready to go, one for me, one for her. I think it's time she and I went on a little trip together, and had a very long talk.

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Roses Out of the Blue

A year ago when I was in the middle of being very ill, a thud came upon my porch. It was a long slender box, and inside were roses. Not a dozen roses, but two dozen roses, and not roses yet, but rosebuds. From the high mountains of Ecuador. They were in autumnal colors: russet, gold, copper, vermilion, coral, yellow. And they opened up in a day or two into full-blown petite roses.

They were a gift from a dear friend of mine, Siu-yung.

Roses from out of the blue. I had found myself in such a dark place, and here roses arrived like a flowering torch to light the darkness. This unexpected gift seemed to say that miracles lie in wait, everywhere.

I did not have my camera back then, but these roses above by Renoir come very close to the colors of my roses from Siu-yung. His painting even comes with a blue curtain to go with my "roses out of the blue."

This photo above shows what remains of the roses today, all the dried rosettes and petals, a few still rich enough in color to be jewel-like.

And I should tell you a little bit about how I know Siu-yung. She was one of a lovely group of women with whom I had the great good fortune to work when I was getting my footing in the world after ten years on the loose, when I was writing short stories and trying to learn how to be a graphic artist and studying to get my Master's in Education.

The stars had brought us all together in one of the many continuing education departments under the large umbrella of The University of Texas at Austin. We were an unexpected group of women, interested in astrology, literature, the arts, the theatre, the home, poetry, music, meditation, nutrition, everything from Shakespeare to Country Western to New Age.

Siu-yung was our Chinese poetess. And if I remember correctly, she came to our country by way of Hong Kong. And when she walked into our lives in that very star-charmed work place, she cast spells that made magic begin . . .

Here is a 19th century painting of "Roses Lying on Gold Velvet," an oil on canvas by Martin Johnson Heade.

This painting does not capture the autumnal colors of my surprise roses, but I love these red ones against a faded golden cloth, and the simplicity of this painting, the warm dark background, the folds in the velvet, the mixture of full-blown roses with rosebuds and leaves and stems.

It is a year later, and of course, I no longer have these roses in their bloom, but I have almost all of the dried rosettes, a few rosebuds, and all of the petals. I never let go of a rose. I always save the petals.

To try to mirror the Heade painting, I laid my dried roses on an old tapestry of my grandmother's in front of a black cardboard background.

Ahhhh, I thought it would be so easy to take photos of a still-life. I thought that photographing people is what would be hard. But I am finding out that there is a very high art to all those photographs in "house and garden" magazines that look so perfectly beautiful. An art that I have not yet mastered!

This is one little part of the tapestry. I don't remember where it hung in my grandmother's house. I have a feeling it draped either over the piano or over a library table in her lovely, long parlor. I keep it in a trunk, I'm afraid. I love its golden colors with touches of olive green and rusty red. It is very threadbare in places, and I love that, too.

If you look closely, you will see a figure, a woman holding a fan in her right hand, and pointing with her left hand. She is wearing an elaborate robe, and I love how the tapestry itself becomes her robe, so that she is wearing a little piece of the tapestry. Maybe that fan is the back of a mirror, for she does seem to be gazing into it as if she were looking at herself.

But that pointing finger ~ she seems to be trying to tell us something. I wonder what it is?

I am going to think to myself that the lady in the tapestry represents all of us who come together in some star-influenced time, looking into the universe, finding, sometimes not finding, but always searching for the answers to the mysteries of the world.

The rose petals live here now, in a glass vase in the jumble that is our kitchen, on a little island table in the middle of the kitchen, almost hidden amongst a caddy for mugs and two tomatoes and my little pumpkin, and dwarfed by yet another glass vase, an enormous one, which holds many very tall-stemmed silk sunflowers.

Every time I brush past this little island table, I brush past the memory of being surprised by a dear friend with roses out of the blue, and then I remember all of those lovely women from those years from the past, and all our long-ago conversations, which are still on-going . . .

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The Constellation of a Baby

This is a piece of gift-wrapping paper called "Starry Night," designed by Linda Edwards, Clare Maddicott Publications, Ludlow, England. I bought two pieces of this paper about ten years ago, and I keep it under lock and key, for I want to use every last piece of it in my art work. All those stars in that Milky Way swirl of color!

Then I started Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting by Michael Perry.

Suddenly, a piece of this precious gift-wrapping paper seems like the perfect illustration for words that I found in the first chapter of Coop. Michael and his wife and their six-year-old daughter are expecting a new baby in the family. Michael's wife wants to have the baby at home with a midwife, and he is trying very hard to accept this, however much it worries him.

But then he hears the midwife Leah describe the knobby parts of the baby that you can feel through the mother's tummy (the head, the knees, the toes, etc.) as "the constellation of the baby." Later Michael finds he can't stop thinking about these words:

"But what really keeps circling my head was the phrase Leah used to describe the landmarks of our child: the constellation of baby. What a gorgeous image ~ the unborn infant afloat in the universe of mother, identifiable but unknowable."

I find these words so incredibly beautiful myself that they have been circling around in my head as well, and so I wanted to put them here for you, too.

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Below is the Constellation of the Big Dipper in the universe of the Universe.

Photograph taken by Astronaut Donald R. Pettit, NASA, 2003
(One of the stars of the handle is not in view on the far right.)
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Writer's Wretreat

I'm on a little writer's wretreat. If I could, I would go here, but it appears that this perfect little hut belongs to someone by the name of jacknky1. Well, that's obviously a code name. So, who knows? it might belong to Baba Yaga, or The Three Bears, or one Henry David Thoreau. Anyway, I think I'll just spend a little time in the deep, dark woods of my own imagination. Be back soon. xo Kari

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Emily Dickinson and the Fourth of July

I did a little double-take when I looked at one of my bookshelves. This is the shelf where I keep most of my poetry books ~ I have a haphazard kind of order going on in my box room, the room where I live most of the time. My box room is full of boxes and books, fabric and paper.

This particular shelf, along with the poetry books, is currently showcasing, from left to right: a square green-glass candleholder (it once held a grass-scented candle and now holds small pieces of concrete from the very driveway of the very house in northern Illinois where I was born), two emergency flashlights (you never know when a storm might blow out the power), a wooden monk and a wooden bird (in such similar poses I can never resist putting them side by side), my copy of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (to remind me not to miss the movie this coming fall), a stack of language pocket-books (you can never have too many language dictionaries), an angel (you can never have too many angels), and a small trunk (with quarters inside for buying Sunday newspapers).

It is the stack of small pocket-size language books that caught my eye.

I put some brown cardboard behind the pocket books to isolate them so you can see them better. I wish I could tell you that I am fluent in all these languages, but, alas, the only language besides English that I took in school was French, and I can barely read it now, and then only with serious help from my Harrap's French-English dictionary. No, I simply love words, and I have long collected dictionaries to help me with the languages that I sometimes find quoted in whatever I might be reading.

Not that I often read something in Sorbian/Wendish (see the very bottom book) and have a need to translate it. Still, you never know, do you? And this little book says the Sorbian word for grandmother is "wowka." Truly, can there be a more wonderful word for grandmother than wowka?

Proceeding up my little stack of pocket books, we go from Sorbian to Arabic to an English Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary to a Roget's Thesaurus Vest Pocket Edition to Norwegian to Greek to Chinese to Emily Dickinson.

That's where I did my double-take. Emily Dickinson? Is she a language all of her own? And really, when you think about it, isn't she? And isn't each one of us a little language all of our own?

(This is the tiniest book, no taller than a clothespin.)

This thought about Emily and language has given me pause, especially today on The Fourth of July when those of us in the United States celebrate the birth of our nation. This little stack of books represents just the tiniest fraction of all the languages that have found their way to our country to make their home here, to inform us, to enrich us, to make us who we are. And I do just want to say that for all our faults (and we are so many and so large that our faults can also seem many and large sometimes), we do keep trying to make things better, to get it right, to break glass ceilings and tear down barriers. We do keep on marching for justice for all, and I am so very proud of us this particular year for we can now even more truly say that we are a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

And what is really wonderful is that wherever you are on this planet today, whatever language you speak, we are all together in our much larger planetary boat. I find that very comforting, being in this wonderful big boat with all of you.

Wülves Running With Wolves

I have long been fascinated with wolves. Perhaps it is because I grew up with wülves. Let me explain. My father was one Hans Hermann Karl Wülf. Not only did he carry the weight of his very German name, he was born in Germany, and even though he immigrated to the United States when he was quite young, nevertheless, he brought with him the whole of his Black Forest, Grimm's fairy tale, Germanic heritage.

If you were raised up by an old-world and old-school German father, then I need say no more. And if you weren't, well, let me just say that my father was A Great Force of Nature. One of my siblings put it very well one day when we were little by saying, "Ooooooh, Daddy is fierce tonight!"

There were four of us, the four Wulf cubs, our mother called us, and we all, more or less, survived our upbringing with The Big Bad Wolf, as I am sorry to say we sometimes called our father, however endearingly. Poor Daddy! He was a good man who worked very hard to make a living for his family but whose children were a great bafflement to him.

My father was among that legion of fathers from his particular time period who simply did not understand their own children. One by one, they threw up their hands over their children, and over other people's children, too, and especially over what the world was coming to. No matter how hard these dear fathers tried, they simply could not fathom the mystery of where their children had come from and where their children were going and why.

Perhaps you yourself know a beloved father like this.

I think it must be a great tribute to my father that wolves have always held such a tender place in my heart.

I often long to break the spell cast by children's fairy tales, the spell that has made the wolf a creature to be feared, although, on the other hand, don't we all secretly love being afraid of the wolf in stories like Little Red Riding Hood? Just look at that wolf peeking out from behind that tree!

The above cover illustration of the old Grimm's fairy tale is by Trina Schart Hyman, one of my very favorite children's picture book artists.

And here is the rough layout of an illustration of my own, showing a wolf and the boy who goes to the woods to find the wolf. This is from a story that I wrote as a precursor to A Far-Fetched Story (see right-hand panel of this blog). For now just imagine that you are about nine years old and you have gone to the woods to find the lone wolf. And there you are, frozen in time at the moment when you both set eyes upon one another.

I wanted to capture the boy in my story in that one moment when he is equally poised to flee or to embrace, and I wanted the wolf to look frightening, for it is wild, and it might be dangerous. The boy cannot be sure if this wolf will know that he, the boy, means no harm. When I was nine years old (and actually even now), I believed that all wild animals would know ~ instinctively! ~ that I meant them no harm, and knowing this, that they would come to me, and eat cookie crumbs from my fingertips.

(Note: You will probably find out that I am often writing about lone wolves, I do love them so.)

And the boy's sister? Here she is. And up to no good, as you can see. Sneaking into a hut in the wilderness, and barefoot. This is definitely a self-portrait, for I lived a huge swath of my life both barefoot and age nine. I think I must have been nine years old for about nine years running. In almost all my childhood memories, I am nine. Or could it be that I only remember that one year. . .

If you look closely, you can just make out that a witch on a broom is flying into the illustration, but the girl cannot see her yet. She has, however, deliberately gone in search of witches. She is hoping ~ and yet dreading! ~ that she will find one.

Here are Hansel and Gretel by Arthur Rackham, another favorite artist of mine. A brother and sister lost in the forest. Under suspicious circumstances. Really, these old tales have a way of putting their finger upon the dark side, don't they?

Well, I for one have spent far too much of my life lost in the forest in one way or another, a wülf-girl running with wolves, and sometimes running from wolves, or plummeting headlong into witches, throwing bread crumbs out of car windows, etc. I have often not had a foothold on my own life. But then I'm not a person who feels that I have to understand everything. I can get along very well with just a glimpse into enchantment, with the tiniest fragment of a fact or a piece of poetry, with the whisper of a wish or the wave of a wand to get me by.

I find that I can cut a wolf out of fabric, give it a star wand to carry with its teeth, add the words "A Guardian Wolf," and, like magic, the fabric wolf will take on a life of its own. And so much so that it will guard me, as if it were real.

If there is such a thing as Jung's collective unconscious or some kind of ancestral memory that we all tap into, then it must have been my father who unwittingly brought all the German fairy tales into his children's lives, and yet, ironically, he was a person who wanted things to make sense. Poor Daddy indeed! It was very hard for him to understand why his children spent their childhoods running wild in the woods behind our house, little wülves running with wolves! And even harder for him to understand why his grown children should have wandered so far off the beaten path. . .

On this Father's Day in 2009, let me take the time to honor my father, and to say that if there is any such thing as closure in the universe, it is my hope for those of us who reach for our fathers across the threshold of A Great Bafflement that we and our fathers will be explained to each other some day, and that the explanation will have the power to bring about the kind of healing that comes from the laying on of hands. From miracles. From grace.

And so, Hans Hermann Karl Wülf, wherever you are up there on your little cloud, Happy Father's Day!!

An Ancient Fire

This is a little old lady who camped next to us one time years ago. It was a very cold winter day. She came all alone to camp in what was at this particular time of the year an almost deserted camping site in The Lost Pines of Texas in Bastrop.

We managed to capture just this one photo of her or we might have thought she was a dream.

I love her white moon coiffure with the little barrette, her pale green jacket, her black-flowered skirt, her rumpled pumpkin-colored socks, and that cloud of smoke she seems to have conjured up with her fire-shovel wand.

She built her little fire, ate her little supper, and slept the night inside her little car. In the early morning hours, she drove away. And how I have wondered and wondered about her ever since! Like Daniel in my last post, was she on her way through the woods in search of coals?

Or did she come to the woods, as we do, to sit before an ancient fire in the forest primeval and commune with the old ones?

I have been drawn to this kind of little old lady all my life. Sometimes I call her a "babushka" from the Russian or Polish word for grandmother or for kerchief. And I often create her myself in my art with a kerchief, or babushka, around her head.

Sometimes I call her a "bag lady," and then I usually picture her in a wool hat with a bobble.

Here is one attempt of mine to capture her in her many layered and patterned glory.

Most of the time I just call her a "little old lady." I have always looked forward to being a little old lady myself (although I am getting glimpses here and there that getting older comes with twinges of pain I would rather go without!)

Whenever I see this little old lady out and about in the world ~ oh! ~ my heart goes out to her, and I cannot completely say why. Maybe I hear her speaking to me, softly, in the words of Yeats:

"I have spread my dreams under your feet,/Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

Or maybe it's because she burns before me like an ancient fire. Yes, I do seem to turn toward the idea of her in my mind as if I could sit before her as before a fire, and be warmed and comforted, and enlightened. . .

Test from iPhone

Kari please delete this. Just trying out iPhone app. L

(This is what happens when you aren't smart enough to set up your own blog and your husband sets it up for you and has the code to get into it and therefore can sabotage it anytime he wants to. From his iPhone, no less! But, still, isn't that the sweetest kitten??)