95% Bullshit Free

Here’s the truth of it: some days just kick my ass. I get scared, lonely, tired and overwhelmed, and then I sort of wade around in it for a spell trying to remember how to stand up straight and move forward.

This is not a confession, because anyone who reads between the lines probably already knows that I am not as strong as I profess to be (nor as confident). In fact, the sole brilliance I may possess (outside of making very tasty pies) - could very well be my ability to act as though I have all the confidence in the world.

In some circles this is also known as “bullshitting.”

For years and years, I sharpened my bullshitting skills. It wasn’t uncommon for me to leap before looking, raise my hand first (even if I didn’t know the answer), get mad rather than show pain, and generally act as though nothing could frighten me. The bad news about all this behavior is that, over time - I liked who I was pretending to be less and less.

Now, the funny thing about traits that we practice for years and years, whether they’re good or bad, is that they take can take root deeply. To really and truly dislodge one’s negative roots can be very very difficult. It requires not only awareness and practice...but maybe even a life changing event - or two - to shake you to your core and start mixing things up.

A year ago I was plodding along, considering the pros and cons of being just a tiny bit less of a bullshitter. I wasn’t much liking myself, but change felt like an awful lot of work. I suspect that I may have even been attempting to bullshit myself into believing that happiness and connection and forgiveness and faith - were perfectly attainable - without requiring me to make too many adjustments in my behavior.

Enter life changing events: a career unfolds, a marriage ends, a child becomes ill. Family falters, relationships are tilted on their axis, 2 A.M. takes on the gray streaks of loneliness and creativity has flown the coup. Nasty shit. Sort of like copper cleaner. It stinks; it’s poison; you really ought wear protective gloves when using it, but man oh man - with just the right amount of rubbing and attention to detail - it sure does make the metal gleam like sunlight.

So, what I said in the beginning - about “some days” ??  Right. Well, I had one of those today. I was tired, frightened about a simple thing, didn’t like being alone and feeling especially sorry for my sorry little old self. Compared to some of the days I’ve weathered, it really was NOT that tough of a day, but for some reason, maybe because my bullshit tools are growing rusty from disuse, I not only allowed myself to honestly feel, but I also asked for help. (And guess what?) Help arrived in spades!

I was assured, treated with respect, reminded to keep a sense of humor, shown kindness, offered love - and even told that I really AM strong (without pretending).
 
So, at the end of this day that I was pretty convinced I couldn’t be done with quickly enough), I am now savoring.

Sarah, thank you for making sure I ate breakfast  and getting me to smile. Roanna, thank you for letting me be grumpy and still being my friend. Carlos, thank you for calling me all the way from Spain - twice - to reassure me. Steve, thanks for being a boss who supports learning and for making me laugh at the small stuff. Aidan, thanks for starting and ending my day with your care. Carolyn, thanks for checking up on me. Maylee, thank you for catching me with tenderness and for the beautiful flowers! And all my friends paying attention out there - you twinkling points of light and life - thank you for reading and posting and asking great questions and making honest observations.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. From the depths of my much happier, much more vulnerable and 95% bullshit-free heart - I thank you. ~ mlp

Life While-You-Wait

I rarely re-post things that others have sent via email on the same day or even in the same month, but this incredible poem really called out to me to "send it along." A large and warm "hat tip" to Joe Riley and his ongoing sharing through Panhala, and to the poet, of course -Wislawa Szymborska. The photos are from me. ~ Enjoy, mlp

Life While-You-Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alterations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it's mine. I can't exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play's all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisation.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can't conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for happy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can't take back,
stars you'll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run ?
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If only I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I've done.
 
~ Wislawa Szymborska ~

The Territories of Joy and Sorrow

How does one who lives a wild and untamed life keep the inevitable sadness that goes with such a life at bay? Because, it's true. To live in the fullness of a passionate life that is creative, intentional, in motion and ever-changing, one must be prepared for unexpected risks into the deepest territories of both joy and sorrow. The joy...well, most of us risk-takers know exactly what to do with joy. But the sorrow can be a bit trickier to manage. Either way -  learning to completely embrace either state of being is not for the faint of heart.

T.H. White wrote, in a conversation between Merlin and Arthur in the novel The Once and Future King a bit of wisdom that helps me when I find myself disoriented by fear of the unknown, or despair over the state of the world, or the simple but profoundly intense experience of missing someone I love.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

My current "to learn" list looks something like this:

• a new language
• the fiddle
• more patience and trust
• all the new web-building programs that my boss has asked me to digest
• how to streamline my practical tools (camera, computer, phone). Whew!
• more kindness
• more surrender
• more faith - that all will be well
• and maybe a wee bit of step dancing...because, when I'm truly sad, dancing is a temporary and wonderful remedy.

So that seems like plenty for now. It may not abolish the sadness completely, but it will - at least - keep my wild and untamed fire burning while I wait to turn the next corner into the realm of joy!

 

 

"North Star"

“Make your plans. Make them now,”

urges the light filtering through the curtains.

“Move honey, just move,”

calls out the road map from the trunk of the car.

“What are you waiting for?”

Asks the able-bodied adventurer in my heart,

shaking her head with impatience

from waiting - 

too long, 

pack ready,

to move forward on the trail.

See that compass?

See the sun moving across the sky?

Another day is passing.

Another moonrise is certain.

Which vista will be your viewpoint?

Are you paying attention, my beloved?

Will you see from inside the same room

and through the same window?

Or will you step outside?

Will you

let Polaris be your marker?

It’s time to open the front door and walk away.

Go deep into the woods and 

find the path though the underbrush;

roam the edge

of the desert,

turn away from the sign posts reading “Wait

Until Tomorrow,”

cross the ocean

and make passage along roads 

so well-seasoned by memories

and movement 

that ghosts of ancient travelers 

watch over you in sleep

and never let you lose your waking way.

“Take yourself by the hand,” whispers my soul,

“Don’t wait, don’t wait,

dear god....

don’t wait.

Just seize your heart -

and go.”

"North Star" © 2010 and beyond by Martha Lee Phelps

Standing Fast

“I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson 

It’s been one hell of a year.

Every single day when I awaken, I try to concentrate on the unexpected joys that surround radical change and practice counting the blessings that are so abundant in my life; however let’s face it, I’m a flawed human being. There are days I get mired in some of the sadness that change has imposed.

This morning in particular, I’m thinking about the unwritten guidebooks for surviving things like, being laid off from one’s job and long term unemployment, or having a marriage come to an end, or having a family member diagnosed with cancer. Specifically,  I’m wondering why there aren’t operating instructions for dealing with the loss of friends one once had, yet who drop away when life’s terrain gets bumpy and the view from the windows is less than scenic. Fair-weather friends, my mother used to call them: those who are most likely to appear when they are in need or, at best, when you are not in need. Because, let’s face it, friendship is sweeter when life is fun, right? A lot more work is required to remain present to someone who’s world has been turned on its axis.

Mind you, I’m not questioning WHY it happens. It happens for a myriad of reasons, such as:

1. People don’t know what to say or do. Keeping a safe distance allows them to watch without touching and very little extra effort is required.
2. Hard situations sometimes remind folks of their own problems - past or present - and they often don’t have the stamina for more.
3. Sometimes it’s about inability to pay attention to a story that isn’t a Hollywood action flick but a slowly unfolding real life documentary. People bore easily.
4. Folks get scared. They don’t want to admit it, but they’re afraid that if they get too close they might “catch” the problem. Like witnessing a friend’s divorce might cause one in their household, or knowing the reality and pain of cancer might cause a cell mutation in their family. Their fear takes on more meaning than their friendship.
5. They just can’t be bothered. They don’t want to take the time. They’re over it - even if their friend isn’t.

Initially, I was hurt and angry knowing that friendships were evaporating for reasons that, in my judgment (with the exception of #2) were pretty messed up and selfish. But in classic Kübler-Ross movement through the stages of grief, I’ve come to realize that what I mainly feel now is a deep sense of sadness and believe it or not, a bit of gratitude.

Relationships may be sweeter when they’re only fun, but they’re not nourishing.

As this big year of changes continues to catalyze and the guidebooks write themselves along the way, I grieve the loss of those I thought I knew, and celebrate the unwavering true.

In the long haul, I’m grateful to know and love a few well-rooted old friends as well as some amazing new ones. I am honored by these full-hearted individuals who have courageously reached out across the rough scenery and despite my grief to stand fast. Ambose Redmoon said, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” 

Choosing love is that “something else.”

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures,  have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing  and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”  ~ Henri Nouwen

A Lifetime Love Affair (Part II)

(This is the second installment of a lengthy post. Part I was published on April 28.)

If your eyes were not the color of the moon,
of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,
if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,
if you were not an amber week,

not the yellow moment
when autumn climbs up through the vines;
if you were not that bread the fragrant moon
kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,

oh, my dearest, I would not love you so!
But when I hold you I hold everything that is--
sand, time, the tree of the rain,

everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives.         ~Pablo Neruda


My first book of Pablo Neruda's poems were given to me on my eighteenth birthday. I had little life experience to filter his exquisite writing through. Roger Housden says in the opening of his book, Ten Poems to Change Your Life, that good poetry has the power to start a fire in your life, and I think that’s what happened for me with Neruda. I mean, I had already been exposed to good poetry. But it had all come to me at someone else’s behest. With the arrival of Neruda’s love sonnets and odes, I now began seeking new poems and their writers on my own accord. A fire had been lit within me that felt so marvelously untamed and warm, I wanted to stoke the flame with more fuel.

Fortunately, an English major in college is in the perfect spot for foraging. Barbara Clark-Mossberg gave me an education in the fireside poets and the likes of Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville and Thoreau that had my mind and senses overflowing. Ed Coleman, my beloved adviser, baptized me in the African American poets: Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni and others found their way into my marrow. Gloria Johnson stood, with her open Riverside collection of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, and read aloud in class in lilting iambic pentameter that made perfect sense - nearly all the time! I read, listened to and wrote prose and poetry in an environment that inspired more exploration and discovery than I had previously known. This is, of course, one of the beautiful aspects of going to college and studying what you are passionate about. There is plenty of encouraging support around you.

When I graduated, with a bachelor’s degree in English and minors in creative writing and folklore and ethnic studies, I began to make my way toward being a teacher. I hadn’t forgotten that my ten-year old self had a different career goal, but I figured that instilling a love for literature, poetry and writing in children would be a worthy way to make a difference in the world. And it did. Poetry study in my LA classes were NOTHING like what I had encountered in high school. We learned the language, read contemporary works, listened to rock, pop and rap music, threw out the rule books, wrote constantly, shared daily - and had fun. Imagine that?

At home, in my carefree life before motherhood, poetry was present daily. Your dad wooed me in fairly romantic fashion with a piece called “A Late Aubade” by Richard Wilbur, not long after I met him - 

You could be sitting now in a carrel

Turning some liver-spotted page,

Or rising in an elevator-cage

Toward Ladies' Apparel.

You could be planting a raucous bed

Of salvia, in rubber gloves,

Or lunching through a screed of someone's loves

With pitying head.

Or making some unhappy setter

Heel, or listening to a bleak

Lecture on Schoenberg's serial technique.

Isn't this better?

Think of all the time you are not

Wasting, and would not care to waste,

Such things, thank God, not being to your taste.

Think what a lot

Of time, by woman's reckoning,

You've saved, and so may spend on this,

You who had rather lie in bed and kiss

Than anything.

It's almost noon, you say? 
If so,
Time flies, and I need not rehearse

The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.

If you mustgo,

Wait for a while, then slip downstairs

And bring us up some chilled white wine,

And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine

Ruddy-skinned pears.


...and perhaps this poem even had something to do with why I fell in love with him? I certainly remember the sound of his voice as he read to me, as well as the light in the room and the texture of the ripe pear he had placed gently in my hand.

You see, Sarah, the right poem can change not only the way you see yourself, but it can change the way you see the world. At the least, it entertains us with images and rhythm, at the most though -- it gives us permission, welcomes forgiveness, dares us to push pass the edges of the safety net that we live so much of life within and sustains us when the of life territory feels new, scary, raw and wild.

By the time your older brother had arrived, a decade after Neruda was born into my heart, I had come to realize that one of the biggest reasons I loved poetry so very very much, was because the truly gifted poets - somehow, some -inexplicable- how, seemed to be able to put into words my exact feelings about certain things and experiences - when even I could not. How was this possible? I couldn’t explain it, but felt it deeply and truly. 



(End of Part II)

Squeak (Part I)

(Death Valley, California
Monday, March 22, 2010)

We’ve been waking right around sunrise each morning. The desert birds have a lot to talk about, and their celebratory tones invite participation...that fact, and I’m needing to stiffly extricate myself from sleeping bag and sardine can tent.  I leave my sleeping companions alone so they can spread out just a bit more.(Did I mention that we accidentally brought the two-person tent instead of the four-person? Yes, the quarters are beyond cozy.)

Today, after a marginal camp breakfast, I underestimated how quickly over-easy eggs will cook in a good cast iron skillet at - 203 feet below sea level, we headed south to Badwater Road and points beyond. Our destination: Badwater Basin, elevation -282 feet, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere.

As we navigated yet another long, mostly straight, two lane highway, a small squeak spoke up. “What’s that?” I asked Sarah.
    “Not us, “ she replied.
    “Hmmmm,” I responded with a frown.

After another mile, while passing a sign that read “Next Services 73 miles” another squeak - confirmed with windows rolled down for better hearing - that it did/does indeed belong to us. Or, it belongs to Becky, our steadfast bright red Cruiser. For this trip, we’re calling her “The Beckinator.”

Sarah and Ginny continued their gaze of appreciation at the Pinamint Mountains to the west and the Black Mountains to the East. I, on the other hand, immediately begin to fret about the Squeak. I moderated our speed, breathed deeply, and said my millionth prayer for no mishaps.

I decided to be proactive with my fretting. You know that old trick where you think of the worst case scenario, acknowledge it, contemplate all the ways one would deal with said horrific scenario - and then release it? I did that. I played out visions of tow trucks, being hauled to Las Vegas, putting the girls on a plane home, waiting for car parts, expensive mechanics and a long, lonely drive home weeks from now after having suffered the full wrath of the Squeak.


It then occurred to me: that’s not the worst that could happen.

The worst that could happen would be one of us getting hurt (or worse) and with a intuitive wash, I began to breathe deeply and peacefully.  We are well and whole, and all the rest is just idol squeaking and desert dust in the  cogs of the car.

Then, as if for confirmation, Sarah looked at me long and hard. “Are you worrying again?” She probed. I shrugged. And she raised her eyebrows and said in her most knowing voice of wisdom, “When you worry about stuff, I worry about you. Please stop.”

Do we all have a squeak that occasionally stops us from seeing the world around us and steals away our ability to be present and attentive? There’s no question about it. Sometimes, our squeaks actually manifest into something that requires action, but mostly they just work us over from time to time. The trick perhaps, is to treat the squeak not as an element of ominous foreshadowing but as a reminder that although we have no control over the events of our lives, we do  choose the attitude with which we’ll deal with it.

Not suddenly, but finally and wonderfully, the majestic mountains and the stunning whiteness of the salt flats and the brilliant cerulean sky climbed into the driver’s seat.