Archive for June, 2008

God Night

Published by Jamie on June 24, 2008 in Bead people, Essays, On Becoming Human and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I feel like I am coming home to myself at last.  I needed a bit of summer to restore my spirit.  Today I went to the park and built Bead People underneath a tree.  It is so strange how those little characters can restore my equilibrium.  The project itself is beginning to grow outside of my own creations.  My daughter, Nichol, has started the first outside Chapter of Friends of The Bead People in Lincoln, NE.  And, in typical Nichol style, she has created a beautiful, enchanted booth that makes me want to go to Lincoln and build a few just to sit inside of it.  She called the other night and told me that she had three blind people building bead people in her tent.  It was such a lovely image I nearly got teary-eyed.

It is strange how engaging such a simple project can be.  It reminds me that beads have been a part of every single human culture since the beginning of time.  They have been created from mud and glass and seeds and shells.  They have been used to adorn, as money, and of course, as gifts.  It must be embedded into our collective souls-this love of beads. 

Sadly, her partner Lynette, who is 7 months pregnant, has been told she needs to be on bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy.  Although I’ve never met her, her energy and enthusiasm for the Bead People has reached me from 11 hours away.  We will hold her in our thoughts and prayers.  Nichol also told me that she sent her husband home with a list of necessary items she would need for her hospital stay-and top of the list were her Bead People supplies. 

We are now inviting others to get involved.  You can see details and meet Nicci and Lynette at www.thebeadpeople.org.  In recent weeks we have had money donations for printing, bead donations from as far away as Australia, and several requests to get involved.  Two women at our own Journey Museum fell madly in love with The Bead People and I spent over an hour with them as they handled each little person in order to pick the ones they wanted for the gift shop.  I loved watching them play.

That is what the project is about.  It is play-with a mission.  It gives us a way to sit around and get to know each other and to talk about life and how to create the world we all want, where “family” takes on a much bigger meaning.  I love the Lakota saying, Mitakeya Oyasin-We are all related.  I believe that in my heart.  Our humanness so outweighs the differences.

I am back at work on another novel.  While we were in D.C. recently, I had a note from my agent with her list of first submissions for my novel, One Drum.  Suddenly it struck me that my life-long goal of “being a writer” was at hand and I want to be ready if a publisher wants to see what else I have up my sleeve.  The novel I went back to work on is about a small and very wise lizard (yes, I said lizard), named Sulee who is sent to help a girl named Lela.  This little lizard is so engaging.  He is smart, funny, and very sincere.  It sounds like a children’s book but it is not.  It is in the same theme of what I’ve begun to think of as my “Earth Series”.  Sulee lives in a world where the animals, the stones, the trees are all awake and aware, tuned into the earth in a way that humans have forgotten.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll post the opening pages just to give you an idea of this wise-but young-little lizard.  Oh, the working title is “Sulee-A Lizard’s Tale”.

God night.  That was a typo but I rather like it.

Jamie

Coming Home Again

Published by Jamie on June 24, 2008 in On Becoming Human, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

We just got home from Washington D.C.  We went for the Silver Docs film festival in Maryland and Milt went to lots of movies and I wandered the city and played with beads.  It is good to be home again–always.

This morning I was searching the web for some information on another person who is doing video letters from prisoners to their children at home–very cool.  Anyway, I came across a blog called “Writing the Line Between Heaven and Earth” and I recognized that as one of my own titles.  I stopped and clicked onto the blog and it WAS one of my own titles.  I had completely forgotten that I tried to start a blog almost exactly a year ago (the only post on there was July 17).  It made me wonder how many other remnants of myself are floating around out there in cyber space.  It is like outer space where all these tests and trials have been jettisoned into space and never brought home so they just . . . float.

Who cleans up the web?  A question.

I am sitting at my kitchen table and the smell of the white peonies I cut yesterday is almost overwhelming.  I shook the ants off and put them in a blue vase for my mom and dad.  Peonies were the flowers they had at their wedding.  In my family, June 18th is a significant date:  the date my parents married, the date they had their first child, and the date which marked my father’s death.  In the year that he died, it was also Father’s Day and he died with all eight of his children and our mother in a circle around him.  I think just in his honors that I will post a small piece I did called “My Father’s Hands”. 

 

My Father’s Hands

 In last night’s dream my father gave me a tiny bag with trails of heart-shaped beads wandering the pale cloth.  Something in my soul wants to finger the tiny heart-shaped beads wondering what he meant by this gift.  Did he mean follow this little trail, my darling girl, and you shall carry anything that comes after with ease. 

So many books are about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, but what of the daughter caught by a golden thread to her father’s soul?  What of that child? 

I am a grown woman, a grandmother now, who looks down at her own stubby fingers one day and sees her father’s hands.  They are not the hands of a piano player or a dancer but the sturdy hands of labor, of getting things done, of endurance and strength.  I remember his hands in one scene and then another; tying myskates in winter, sketching the walls of his new house or solving an intricate problem on paper as if each knubby fingertip had its very own brain and only when his hands moved could he think. 

I remember the warmth and strength of his hands as he kneaded the calves of my legs late in the night when growing pains hurt bad enough to wake me up crying.  I see his hands holding cards in a favorite game of whist or bridge or gently patting the shoulder of a friend he met on the street.  I see his two hands on a steering wheel driving to grandma’s house or holding the very edges of the Sunday paper after church, a plate of powdered donuts hidden on the other side of the news.  I smile and remember the way my father’s hands would pick up myneedlepoint project and run the yarn through six rows, tugging just a little too tightly so that Icould always see in the tapestry of the finished work his rows beside my own.

I see his hands holding the Louis La’Mour book late in the evening, letting go only to take a sip of the beer warming on the side table; his hands building two houses to shelter those he loved most, his hands fashioning the ugliest boat ever out of wood and plank, his hands turning wood, twisting metal, picking berries and then building a special screen to roll the berries down gently to clean them.

I see his hands playfully slapping my mother’s backside or holding her against the fridge to steal a kiss, and his hands wielding the razor that plowed a smooth path through his lathered chin and me, sitting on the closed lid of the pot, waiting for the moment when he would turn and growl and try to kiss my cheek like  a rabid dog.  I would squeal and run out of the bathroom giggling. 

All of this I see in an instant when I looked down and saw my own small, square hands, so sturdy and strong. 

And she see his hands, swollen and bruised, a blueberry stain on the back where the IV had kept him alive for three more minutes, five more minutes, and then that last and final breath, of death.  And he was gone, living on in the short fingers of my own hands that crack in the winter . . . just like his did. 

 

Farmer John and Candide

Published by Jamie on June 11, 2008 in Our Straw Bale Project, Short Fiction, Uncategorized, Writing and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments .

We are home again and I am scrambling to get my home garden in.  We shot a lot of footage and Milt is producing something he calls “The Blueberry Chronicles”.  You can see them at http://www.hollowbonefilms.com  He is having some fun with it. 

I have a cold and am not good company tonight so I’ll skip out and put in a bit of fiction instead.  I like the beginning of this odd series I started that is my version of “Candide” and “Siddhartha” combined.  I’ll let you figure that one out.

 

Evida
Or How a Forest Girl Discovers the World

Evida Takes a Walk and Finds Herself Separate 
There could be no better place on earth than this the young girl thought as she stepped her toes into the muddy edge of the pool of water to catch a closer look at the water spiders skimming the clouded surface.  She was in a small clearing carved out by road workers who had taken the red soil for their road-like purposes and left behind the moon.   The clearing was dotted with rough craters that were filled with water and each pool birthed a new universe teaming with tadpoles, water spiders, bugs, birds feeding, and scruffy grasses poking up among the reddish mounds. 

She was eight years old the summer she awoke from childhood to find her self encased in a wrapper of skin that separated her from this beloved world.   Up until that moment, it had not occurred to her that she was separate. 

Evida lived along the northern edge of the nation in what she simply called Blueberry Country in honor of the low bush berries that filled her forest.  No one else ever came to this small, scarred piece of earth but Evida, and she came daily that spring to watch the transformation between winter and spring.  It was, in truth, a muddy mess, but she loved it.  She ran along the plowed ridges that separated one small pool from another so often that her bare feet padded and packed the sand as if it were an ancient road carrying tribal inhabitants across the Bering Strait. 

Life was good.

Down the road her parents had built a house that sheltered Evida and her five brothers and sisters in a cocoon of warmth and safety.  That her dad had tried to defy Mother Nature and built his house in a swamp seemed not to matter to them.  When the ditches filled with murky water, Evida and the other kids leaned over the edge to see the wigglers that bred there by the millions and would soon turn into mosquitoes.  It was a small price to pay for paradise–a few hundred red, itchy welts and the little screamers buzzing them to sleep each night.

Evida couldn’t figure out what was different this spring, different from all the others she had endured in her full eight years.  Something had changed.  The color of a single green leaf bud opening on a twig belonging to the larger tree pierced her eyes almost painfully.  The dry grasses of last year, as they gave way to the newer shoots poking up from some mysterious earth ethos, seemed to say reassuringly, “We go gratefully, never mind.  We’ve had our season.” 

Wind, sun, birds, the tiniest flowers, all spoke to her in a language once incomprehensible, but now understood clearly as if by magic.  Going to sleep each night was almost a burden, that she must close her eyes to such beauty for the dimmer world of sleep and dreams. 

She took to speaking aloud, only when alone of course, to the many offerings of nature.  I love you, little bird.  I love you tiny clover.  I love you big mamma tree.  I love you creepy little spider on my hand. 

What had caused such an awakening?  She didn’t know, couldn’t understand.  Perhaps an old bearded philosopher standing beneath a tree watching her from his invisible vantage point would nod knowingly and whisper, “Ah, she now feels her self separate from.”  It didn’t matter to Evida.  In truth, there wasn’t a bearded old one to explain that where once she was simply a part of nature, like trees and grass, now she saw her self as occupying a human body. No, she simply drank the realization in, letting it fill her soul and spirit with such rich nectar that by noon she was drunk, intoxicated and asleep on the grass. 

When she opened her eyes again there was a blue-silk sky wrapping her like a sari.  It was exotic, foreign, scented with the spice of Mother Nature’s unique perfume.  When she stood again and stretched her arms to touch the blue silk, she glanced down and saw the imprint of her own small body in the grass.  She felt just the slightest shiver of what could be fear or foreboding, a wisp of warning of things to come, but she tossed her blonde hair and walked off.

Thirty years later, she would return to this same spot, now an overgrown piece of the forest once again, desperate to find the slightest indentation she had left on Mother Earth. 

Walking back into her Mother’s house in her newly found eight-year-old body was like finding an alternate universe with an entirely different set of shapes, forms, tastes and smells, and its own moon and sun.  The blue silk sari dissolved like a thin skin of ice beneath the heat of this new sun, and the blue was replaced with the gray garb of an ordinary peasant

“Where have you been, Evida?  Lunch was over an hour ago and little Johnny has a dirty diaper and Rocky has a fever and and and and . . . .”

Evida stood for a moment, stunned and shrinking rapidly as all the wide thought-forms fled the little house where her parents ate and slept and were raising six children like raising chickens in a wire coop.

“Yes, Mamma.”  She said.  “I’m here now.”

Here.  Now.  The rest would simply have to wait out there in the wilderness for her return.  Evida turned her attention once again to the business of being eight, third girl in a family of six.  It was okay, this life in this house.  She helped her oldest sister, Kay, fold clothes and roll socks.  She helped her next oldest sister Ann change little Scott.  Ann and Evida got the giggles when Ann removed the nasty diaper and jokingly pointed to his tiny penis and said “Ready…aim…fire.” only to have the little squirt–squirt.  Ann panicked and threw the new diaper over the warm stream, and then had to use a third diaper to have the baby officially and legally changed.  

Kay, Ann, Evida, William, Joseph, and Scott had checked into the family in polite two-year intervals ranging from ages twelve to two.  If you added their ages together it came to forty-two and Evida couldn’t begin to imagine herself at forty-two.  She tried it once, but it was unfathomable. 

All in all, it was a pleasant family to find one self suddenly occupying. 

 

 

Ah–the land, the land

Published by Jamie on June 4, 2008 in Bead people, On Becoming Human and Our Straw Bale Project. 1 Comment .

For those of you who have been following my blog, you will know that last winter we bought some land in Northern Minnesota so that I could go “home” and plant some berries.  Today my 24 baby blueberry plants arrived at my brother’s ironworks shop.  They are BEAUTIFUL.  This afternoon my brother Rick hitched an old hand plow to his tractor and Milt did his best to guide it through the furrow.  Tomorrow we will finish preparing the berry garden and plant the plants. 

The first day we were here, we walked the whole twenty acres just to scope it out and see what we had bought into.  We found this perfectly cleared circle of land in the farthest ten acres from my brother’s place and decided it wash here that we wanted to “homestead”.  We mowed down the meadow, pitched our new cabin tent and moved in.  Naturally, we fought the huge mosquitos who were not too friendly about having their lush habitat disturbed.  I also picked a bunch of ticks off–part of the bargain if you buy land in N. MN. 

Once we had established our spot, my brothers (very resourceful guys) began to contribute to our meager establishment.  Suddenly we had an old wood stove, a fish house aka outhouse, a picnic table and a few chairs.  We built a fire and people came.  I have a feeling about this place that many, many people will visit.  We have not big desire to build a camp or commune, just a place to experiment with alternative building techniques and berries.  Our idea is to once every summer have a building camp where we construct a small, alternative cabin and end it with a Bead People Festival–a peace party. 

As you can tell, I am having a wonderful time exploring and dreaming. 

It is always about the land–and this little piece feels just fine to me.

Jamie