Purple Cashmere

Seven Minutes:

My present today is a nubby purple cashmere sweater that has been regulated to pajama wear.  Blazing hot sun disappeared and it’s cool again.  I would love to live where the weather never saw ninety degrees, much less 110.  Give me fog and wool sweaters, a knit cap, drizzle.  The type of weather where a hot bath is appreciated.  The long cloudless summer is approaching.  Sometimes cumulus clouds appear on the far mountains on the other side of the lake. But here, it is endless blue skies from June to October as a rule.  Monotony.  The rattlesnakes are coming out as they do each year at this time.  It’s common for one or two to be seen at my school.  Friends are reporting their presence at their homes.  If you walk at Anderson Marsh, you can hear them in the rocks in the early mornings.  They could be the rhythm section for a mariachi band.  Trato de apprender castellano en mi coche en la manana cuando manejo a trabajo.  The nice lady and man with the beautiful Spanish diction never get frustrated with me.  I feel my head is very small.  My brain is at least.  But I need big hats.  So I’m back on that drizzle day in my large comfy cap walking along the beach with my hands in my pocket and breathing.  I can wear my ratty purple sweater.  No one will care.

What is My Present?

Seven minutes:

What is my present?  The leafy maple outside my window?  The sun casting its last light on the trees lower on the hill?  They had warmed with gold light just before I wrote the last sentence, and by the time I typed the period their illumination vanished.  Six seconds of splendor as the sun descends behind the mountain.  Is it the slight pain I feel in my back as I sit here?  The tightness of my legs?  Or is my present in the breath and striped fur of my tabby cat stretched along my thigh?  The open notebook next to her?  The feelings of frustration in trying to market a book? I saw one of the pileated woodpeckers for the first time today, though I’ve heard their hammering for over two weeks. That is the present I want.  Writing thoughts and making images, that is the present I desire.  Selling and searching and looking at Amazon rankings, not.  My present is my struggle with faith.  The laundry in the dryer and the new load to put in.  In hearing my husband’s car door shut and his feet on the steps. The opening of the door as he comes home.  The opening of the book I plan to read tonight.

Nanchuti Myth: When Old Woman of the River Got Tired

A long time ago, Old Woman of the River got very tired.  She was tired of always rushing her children down the river, all the fish and all the silt, tree branches and pieces of gold.  She decided to stop.  Her water froze, the froth of the rapids became little white stars hanging in the air, sun sparks stopped twinkling,  and there was only quiet in the forest.  The birds stopped flying because they thought the sound of the pounding river was what held their wings in the air.  Bear sat heavily on the ground confused.  All the weeds and bushes leaned over straining to listen for the mother’s voice.  Never had such silence fell upon the forest.  Old Woman of the River fell asleep in the quiet day.  One by one the fish vanished.  Each spark held by the air and water snapped out.  Bear’s body slowly dissolved into sunlight.  Birds put their heads under their wings because even the sun began to dim.  Hanla’chu sat on her hill and watched the world disappearing.  She cupped her hands and made a huge cry over the land. “Wake up, Old Woman of the River!”  A startled woodpecker cried out, flew from her tree, and vanished.  Hanla’chu saw this happen.  She stomped on the ground and caused an earthquake.  The mountains rumbled.  Panther, who still prowled the forest, growled.  “Wake up, Old Woman of the River!” Hanla-chu yelled.  Old Woman kept sleeping, but she turned over and the water of the river rolled with her.   One by one the stars where beginning to shine in the sky.  Night was coming forever.     A wind rushed over the sleeping body of Old Woman.  “Wake up, Old Woman of the River!” Hanla-chu  yelled.  Hanla-chu took in a deep breath of dark night.  She filled her lungs and blew it out with as much force as she could.   Deep in her dreams, Old Woman felt cold and began to shiver.  One eye opened and she saw it was night.  She called for the birds to make the morning but there were no birds to hear her.  Old Woman slowly rose and saw what her sleeping had done.  “But I was so tired,” she said, and waved her hand.  The river began to move again, but there were no fish or pieces of gold or life of any sort within its banks.  Panther let out a loud angry growl for he saw that the Earth was dying, and he knew that he too must die.  Hanla’chu also cried and her body began to break apart.  It became fish and bird and the sparkle of the sun on water.  Her head began to burn and slowly lifted to the sky.  Her skin became plants and deer and from her breasts all the birds of the forest were reborn.  Old Woman of the River thanked Hanla-chu.  She flowed on and on forever after this.  And no matter how tired she gets, she keeps flowing to the ocean.

My Students Who Have Murdered

Seven minutes:

I have had too many students put into prison.  I just saw a headline yesterday. Another troubled child, now grown, sent to prison for shooting someone.  As a teacher you see how disturbed they are, how much in pain, how horrific their lives are, how dysfunctional their families, how abused they come, how broken they were as small children.  I write of Eddie and his brother Richard, both who murdered other young men, who came to school beaten and wild and in pain.  Eddie was always in trouble from the day he walked in as a kindergarten. Richard was quiet. We thought he’d “make it.”  I didn’t teach Eddie to read.  Richard could have been a scholar.  I think of driving along a winding road outside Willits and hearing the news that Alberto had shot his brother Rafael and how I stopped in the middle of the road taking in the news.  Now Sonny.  Red-headed and angry, so angry as a child.  How helpless we feel with these children as teachers.  There is nowhere to send them for the help they need.  They’re fighting generational abuse.  No stories we read to them can heal their spirits.  Poor children, all of them, illiterate parents.  And our prisons are full of men who were once boys who created chaos because their tears were ripped from t hem and their fists and guns and  hatred that has grown like a poisoned weed has filled their souls in their place.

Arturo

Another seven minutes.  I cannot write about what I should write.  I cannot write of loss so fresh.  Mourning is not an assignment.  Emptier life, the spot on the couch vacant.  Compassion of pets. Psychic kitty who knows more than us.  Four now three.  Twenty-four hours ago, there was so much time. Seven minutes like a spoon of bitter herbs.  Evening never came with soft cat feet.  No more funny feet.  I miss you, Arturo, so much.

Galaxy Girl

There is a question next to her,

a small dog’s face,

loyalty to what she carries,

a cluster in the sky.

She is a new constellation,

lead by nebula light

and a galaxy brain.  ‘

Shy girl hiding her face beneath stars, exposed with her large naval,

all the dark matter of her belly, the crook of her arm, womanly hips.

I am in love.  I believe she would carry me to the dimensions of dreams,

through the night as minutes pass.  Call her Midnight and be done.

How I Invented My Ethnic Group

    One of the questions I am often asked about Heron’s Path is how the Nanchuti, the indigenous tribal group I created for the novel, evolved.  As I mentioned in my last post, a trip to the Klamath River while I read In the Land of the Grasshopper Song hit me at such a sensory level that it compelled me to write.  My husband Bill and I camped on a sandy bank of the Klamath in one of those weeks in July where the temperatures hovered around 100 degrees.  I remember listening to the river, feeling the consciousness of the forest around us, and felt so removed from the modern world.  This experience is about as visionary as I get, and I had to make something out of how the river was affecting my body, imagination, and emotions.

I naïvely went about reading about the Karuk tribe.  I purchased a couple of books I don’t remember now and read as much as I could find by Alfred Kroeber on the Karuk and Yurok ethnic groups.  So, a few years passed, and I finally finished a draft of the novel that I thought worth sharing. (For such a short book, it took almost two decades to write,  tucking it away for years in between until I worked out various problems.  I learned to write with the novel, and I needed a long apprenticeship.)

I contacted a professor at Humboldt State, whose name I apologize for not remembering (this was in the 90s!).  She was Yurok and invited me to her house to discuss the novel where she very kindly let me know I had no business writing about her culture, telling me that I really could not understand it.  So, another year or two passed with fretting about what to do.  I wrestled with the idea of creating my own people, how could I meld it with the historical aspects that I did want to portray?  Would an alternative California work?

The elements I did keep from my original manuscript were the ideas of the doctors, medicine people, and sacred dancing that, to the best of my understanding, the Karuk did to create balance with nature.   Again, apologies if this is not correct.  I confess I stole the idea of the Baby Growl straight from In the Land of the Grasshopper Song.

Last spring I  read from Heron’s Path on a public radio station.  The only response I got was from an angry woman (who said she was not Native American) upset that I would dare to write about Native Americans.  I had already hung up and couldn’t respond that the point of my creating a mythic tribe was because I did not want to do any washee  (Nanchuti for “white people”) misguided writing about aspects of a culture I do not belong to.  All I can say is that I fell in love with the stories and information I read about the Yurok, and though their culture is the seed from which the Nanchuti grew, they are MY creation.

One last thought: Kroeber’s daughter, Ursula Le Guin, was a very strong influence on me as a young writer.  I devoured her work long before I ever heard of her famous parents.  Her mother, Theodora Kroeber  wrote Ishi: the Last of His Tribe, which chronicled the life of the last member of the Yahi tribe.  So, a large part of the spirit of Heron’s Path is in debt to her, especially the book Always Coming Home.  It gave me the courage to create a language for the tribe, a process that I really enjoyed.

Review of In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country 1908-1909

In the Land of the Grasshopper Song is, hands down, my favorite book, and I have often wished the authors had written more. I found it in a bookstore in Eureka over twenty years ago on a trip that took me through the Klamath River area. At that time I was beginning work on a novel. The power, quiet wisdom, and tolerance of In the Land of the Grasshopper Song inspired my manuscript and, I believe, it became a richer book for reading this fascinating tale.

Two women from the east coast venture in the wilderness of northern California riding on rugged trails to the heart of Karuk culture. Their job was “Indian Field Matrons” and to “educate” the tribe. What happens, though, is that their world opens and they are the ones who receive the education. The writing, taken from journals they wrote during their tenure in the woods, is so fresh that the reader easily falls into a world, not so remote in time, but one that is different in every other aspect from today.

My novel, Heron’s Path, was born because I was so deeply immersed in the adventures of Ms. Arnold and Ms. Reed. They inspired an important character in the novel, and I feel in debt to these two remarkable women.

Summer Thoughts

I started this blog saying I was going to write for at least seven minutes daily.  It has morphed and taken on a personality all its own, however.  I like that it has.  It’s been awhile though since I’ve just sat down to write and see what I want to say.  Summer is speeding by, as always, but this summer seems to have roller blades.  School starts August 14th (I think, if that’s a Tuesday).

Some people would say, Oh, you have a month, but come the first of the month I’ll be my classroom getting ready, putting up paper for bulletin boards (I reused the same paper two years in a row, time for a change), sorting math supplies, peeking into our new reading curriculum . . .I’ll most likely teach first/second grades again which means learning Pearson for both grades if my school can’t find a way to separate kids for reading time.  We’re small, one or one and a half classrooms per grade and sometimes the numbers don’t work.  Nobody wants 35 kids for reading.  Last year I had only 10 first graders for math, though, and it was delightful.

There’s smoke in the air.  A fire is burning a long way off, but the sky is red and that burning feeling is up inside my nose.

Wondering what to start writing next, the project I’ll be committed to for the next year.  I thought my mermaid novel, but in working on promoting HERON’S PATH I’ve found a plethora of mermaid books.  Going to look over my novel THREE DEMONS and see if it’s salvageable.  I think the Las Vegas part works well.  But I need to re-envision Hell.

I am so grateful for summer.

Art From the Body

The second picture I did in the Painting Alive! class I took (see June 9th’s post for details).  Much less thought, more just painting from intuition and body.

Painting makes me happier than anything else I do.  I believe it’s the wordless state that I get in, something so rare for me.  And I feel.  I’m hoping my body someday will feel like a safe place.  The physical world has always been a challenge. Perhaps due to left-handedness, a difficult birth, parents who hated their own bodies and obsessed with safety.  I’m not sure it matters anymore, but negotiating the physical was the hardest part of growing up.  Sometimes walking and talking is hard (really), or knowing which hand to use.  I break the lead of every mechanical pencil I’ve ever used.  Yoga makes me edgy. But when I paint, I feel my heart open, my head clear, and I feel free.