Monthly Archives: April 2009

All is Well in the World

April 29, 2009

I have been moving at a breakneck pace these past few weeks.  Many different parts of my life are coming to a close.  I’m in my last three weeks as an instructor at Oglala Lakota College.  Our training group in Family Constellation Work has just a few more sessions before it closes.  And the house I’ve lived in for the past 26 years will soon be occupied by somebody else.  It has been both exhilarating and bittersweet to watch box after box of stuff go away.  Even my old dead windows are gone-two shining, new ones went in today.  Leon and his son, Rusty, have been residing our house, installing windows and generally making it look like a completely different place.  Why is it that we will do all these nice things to a house-just as we are leaving it?  My husband, Milt, is up on our land in N. Minnesota getting power brought in, digging a well, and arranging to have the survey done so we don’t accidently put our little straw bale cabin on somebody else’s land. 

In less than a month my life will look entirely different.   My plan is to gently return to the blank page and see if anything speaks to me.  The Bead People will take a substantial and very pleasant part of my time.  Creating our new space will also call me.  For those of you who are new to my blog, we have been planning this shift for several years now.  I know so many people want to make a substantial change toward a more simple life, and I keep blinking to see if we have really done it.  The first thing we did was cut up all credit cards, tighten our belts (and our spending habits) and get rid of nearly all debt.  Then we bought the land and made a plan to build with straw bale.  It has been a dream of ours for at least a decade and somewhere in a hayloft in N. MN are 300 dry bales just waiting for us.  Next we began whittling away at the mountain of stuff we had accumulated.  Last summer we had four garage sales.  Next weekend we will have another.  In the meantime we raised a roof over our studio, resided, bought and installed new windows and generally took care of old business.  It is amazing to me that we have done all of this without incurring any new debt.  When we need-money arrives.  How is that for sweet?

Here is my plan.  I want to do only what moves me.  I want to follow spirit and flow and see where this river takes me.  I want to let go of old expectations and past disappointment.  I want to be open, receptive, awake.  I want to give back in a big way-whatever that means.  I want simple and clear, crystal clear. 

Tonight during my constellation training group, one of the women (and a friend of mine) was talking about how much she wants to reach out and create something new for herself.  Even as she was talking about it you could see the grief come up.  It was as if just the act of wanting to reach brought a deep pain that it wouldn’t happen-wasn’t possible.  We did an interesting integration constellation between the part of her that desires and the part of her that does not believe it is possible.  It was beautiful to see the two warring parts of herself come together and get to know each other a little bit.  As they (the representatives) closed the gap between these two parts, you could feel the union.  It was wonderful.  I talked to the group about how we all have these parts that disagree or feel disconnected.  One wants-one stops it.  It is almost universal, I believe.  Paradoxically, we can’t resolve this deep separation by “getting rid of” one of the parts.  We can only resolve it by bringing them together into a shared sphere, a joining of desire and desperation. 

 

I am tired, but so satisfied.  All is well in my world-and I hope all is well in yours.

 

Jamie

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The Muse in Black

April 14, 2009

A Tidbit from a few years back.  Never could make the Lit Mags.  Sour grapes–or more?
The Muse in Black

In Milwaukee I find the mother lode of literary magazines and park my ass on the dull carpet and scan the titles, plucking first one and then another off the shelf to read beginning with ‘A’ for Antioch and moving to ‘Z’ for Zoetrope.  Most of them I’ve never seen despite all dire warnings of read the markets before you submit.  I can’t help it.  I write and write with little care of who will take the offering. 

But here, now, I intend to find out where I belong.

I read the Braille of my culture in the clip, clip, clip of the new writer, leaf tip curling from early frost, fruitless buds, hearts frozen, all memory of blooming gone, cut short, can’t.  The style is an email style; short, staccato, cut it until it bleeds truth, bony finger language, incomplete sentences.  Stop.  Staccato, wings clipped, flight impossible in the mutation of language, in the marriage of current culture and language, in the deep abandonment of soul. 

There is no generous, voluptuous language swinging its hips, stretching a finger across space to touch a blemished face, across time to spy on a mother’s first moments with her newborn, no loose limbed walk across an open field filled with the scent of soil, sage, and sex sticking to your jeans. 

More like jab, poke, flip. 

I think back to my radio days when the NPR style suggested we edit the breath itself for efficient sound bite, sound chunk, bits and bites and no chewing, no time for digestion or digression or exposure.  I think back to my German teacher who says all neurosis rests in a failure to complete the reaching out movement.  Infant to mother, soul to life, the complete outward stretch. 

I test it out and think Colorado peach.  I want, I desire, I long for, I reach and reach and stretch and elongate, in elegant braids of desire and need, in a moment, one moment more, the breath caught in my thought, salivating, the zen movement, satori movement of breathing through the obstacle until yes, feel it, smell it, touch it, bite it, suck it, juice dripping, wet, water, life flowing, yes, yes, mine. 

Tension releases.  I eat the peach. 

Life is wet.  Oh well.  I slip the magazines back on the shelf-and buy nothing. 

 And then I drive again through Wisconsin gold and red, autumn in the leafy world, along the river, through the farmlands of Minnesota, back across the long, dry prairie, counting cows and counting minutes until I can get back to my page of blank white paper and play and dance and sing the muse out of hiding and demand she disrobe before the grand council and do a river dance until her toes bleed and her heart sings once again for the sheer love of it, the sheer love of life, the sheer love of language. 

She sheds her widow’s weeds and joins me in the dance.

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Welcome New Visitors

April 9, 2009

Lately there has been a surge of new registrations on my blog.  I’d love to see this grow and grow, but even more importantly, I’d like to know who you are and what caused you to push the subscribe button.  Leave a comment and let me know who you are.  I’d like to know what you like, want you want more of, etc.  Happy Easter!

Jamie Lee

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On my last leg . . .

April 5, 2009

Tomorrow I start the final leg of my term as an instructor at Oglala Lakota College.  Today I spent many hours reading (and correcting) my student’s historical fiction stories.  I asked them to place their stories within the context of a “war”.  I was stunned by their output.  One story was nearly 17 pages long-and these are developmental English students.  I loved reading these stories, many of them connected to family stories and Wounded Knee, both the massacre and the occupation of.  I do love this teaching thing, but am ready to be done and find the next leg of my life. 

I wandered old files tonight trying to find something interesting.  I abandoned the darker stories for this one.  This is the opening of a small collection of stories that I wrote when I wanted to play with my own version of Siddhartha and Candide combined.  I thought it was a nice spring story although we are buried in snow here in South Dakota. 

 

Happy Easter

Jamie

 

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 filled with water.  Each pool birthed a new universe and was teaming with tadpoles, water spiders, bugs, birds feeding.  Scruffy grasses poked up between the reddish mounds. 

She was eight years old the summer she awoke from childhood to find herself 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 her, 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 her and her five brothers and two 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, “Never mind.  We go gratefully.  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.  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.

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