Not That Kind of Person

A couple of days ago I received an email inviting me to join an "interfaith devotional exchange." The message contained two email addresses and the instructions were to send an inspirational quote or poem to the first name, move the second name to the top of the list, add my own name and then send the invitation to 21 friends.

The invitation was similar in format to those emails promising magic if you send it on within 10 minutes (and misfortune if you don't). My first thought had been "Oh no, it's one of 'those' emails" and my first reaction was to delete it.

But my second thought was that I liked the idea of sharing inspiration and encouragement with a stranger. There was something improvisational and pay-it-forward-ish about it that appealed to me. Besides, I love language and writing so the idea of sharing good writing felt 'right'. Maybe I could try something new? Do something I don't usually do? Break one of my rules?

Deciding what to share required revisiting documents and browser bookmarks I hadn't looked at for awhile, a nostalgic stroll through words and ideas that have shaped me, encouraged me, affirmed me. The process was like taking a tonic or going on retreat.

Deciding who to send the invitation to was a different matter. I have no email addresses for many of the most likely candidates; we're connected only through FaceBook. I anticipated some people would have a similar first impression to mine and decline to participate. Some might even take offense at being included in the recipient list.

I scanned my Contact list, conjuring the face and voice of each person as I read their name. Many of them were people I'd met at spiritual retreats or personal development seminars of one stripe or another. Some were audience members at one of my performances. My evaluation ran along the lines of "Will they read and consider or just delete? Will they be offended?"

As is always the case when trying to anticipate another person's reactions, my thoughts became a tangled mess. It's a profoundly perplexing assessment. How to predict what someone else will think (given the staggering limits of our acquaintance, even with 'close' friends). The airwaves are full of friends and family and neighbors surprised by the behavior of someone they thought they knew well. 

How to see another person (or anything, for that matter) clearly (given the unavoidable encroachment of my experience, value system, fears, desire, etc. on my point of view). My first impression of the invitation was a perfect example:  "Oh, it's one of those emails" I thought and my perspective was instantly clouded by other emails, stuff from The Past and my feelings and opinions about those Past Events. Standing in Right Now, consciousness flooded with Memory.

I came up with two names. I was intellectually bedraggled after the process. Peace of mind was shattered.

And I thought, How curious that a message with the intent to inspire and encourage has delivered me to a state of exhaustion and spiritual disruption... 

I took a cigarette break.

In that pause, I remembered:  I know nothing. Anything is possible. In that pause, I identified a niggling fear creeping through my thinking. Fear of what "they'll" think of me:  they'll think I'm "one of those people" who send "those kinds" of email messages.

With an affectionate nod, I acknowledged Ego's terror, chose 26 names from my Contact list and sent the invitation on its way. 

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

One by one the no thank yous began to hit my email box. Who knows what motivated the folks who replied? Some of the refusals were lengthy. Some were eloquent and heartfelt. Some were nervous and polite. I responded to the first few messages, attempting to communicate comfort and acceptance -- it's okay, you're not rejecting me, I didn't initiate the exchange, other people declined too so you're not alone or strange...

"I'm not the kind of person who....." or "I don't do these kinds of email..." or some variation on that thinking appeared in some of the replies. I smiled to see my own initial reaction reflected back to me.

At first, it seemed ironic to me that people who declined to allow a single stranger a glimpse of their heart by sharing an inspiring or encouraging text, seemed to have no trouble posting a FB affirmation or wearing a message T- shirt or sticking a bumper sticker on their car or otherwise exposing themselves to countless strangers. Was there something intimidating about one-to-one versus one-to-many?

On second thought/guess, it seems more likely that they were less concerned about intimacy with a stranger. The issues were not wanting to offend or impose upon their friends, not wanting their friends to see them as "the kind of person who...," and a perhaps unexamined need they felt for identity integrity, i.e., to not see themselves being the kind of person who sends those kinds of email.

Peer pressure is a bitch--even after you're all grown up.

Exit Number 20

It feels good to return to SITC and write again.

I needed a little break from the heart-wrenching, gut-socking, embarrassing and exhausting process but this week I'll resume the work of pulling weeds and pruning the blog. I reached the point where I felt like slapping my face and crying at the same time. I needed a break.

Only about two years remain to be read and the first round of review will be complete. The next step will be to take a closer look at the surviving posts to determine if there's enough material to seed a little book.

How do I decide what to cut? There are two main criteria: First, if I still find the theme of a post interesting. In these posts, I introduced an idea but did not fully explore it.

Secondly, some posts are valuable as historical records. Posts about my family fall into this category as do those in which I offer in-depth commentary on my experience in a certain locale. In their current forms, many of these posts probably need to be moved to a journal or diary. But with some reworking they might be good in a book.

So far, there's not a lot of powerful, pop off the page, stroke the heart or say "it" so clearly and honestly it hurts type writing to be found here. And I can hear some of you saying "Oh, Alex. Don't be so hard on yourself" but I'm only being hard because I know from experience that rigorous critique serves creative process and no one has shown up yet to provide this essential support on a ongoing basis.

Creativity is messy. Brainstorming and allowing ideas to spill out helter-skelter is a necessary step. Spontaneity and wildness have their appeal. Untended vines can be beautiful.

AND

Good writers recognize that revision, polishing, fine-tuning can turn a beautiful raw thing into an exquisite piece of art.

I'm going for the art.

Mississippi Rain

The rain is falling and evoking a certain kind of mood in me. I searched for "MS rain" on YouTube and found this clip, which sits at a polar opposite to my current "MS rain" mood. It makes me smile because this kind of dissonance has been the story of my MS sojourn. There's a disconnect between me and this video -- the music, the performer's style, the dancing audience members.... -- that feels, today, an eloquent synopsis of the Sojourner in Mississippi experience.

Trying to Weave

A new year, a new page. Sitting on the back porch with coffee and cigarettes and laptop for the first time in several months. It's raining but warm enough to sit for a few minutes, watching fat noisy birds crowd in the naked branches of trees before swarming down to hunt and peck in the soggy dead leaves.

It is Sunday so the flocks of birds remind me that flocks of humans are gathering in churches all over town to hear sermons about beginnings and second chances.

I just made my weekly telephone call to Daddy. As always, my stepmother answered the phone and while we made our usual small talk about health and weather, I could hear voices in the background. "What's all the noise?" I asked. She said it was my sister and her boyfriend, making their weekly visit. "Oh!  OK. I'll try to reach Daddy tomorrow," I offered. "Say hi to Rhodie."

"Do you want me to put her on the phone?" she asked.  I chuckled. "Nah. That would be strange..."

"Oh. I didn't know."

"No, it's okay. She doesn't return my calls. Just say 'hi'" I explained and quickly hung up.

This morning, I viewed the familiar awkwardness of our family dynamic with detached clarity. It was like looking at a two-headed kitten through a glass pane. I thought, and so here we are...we're like this....and so it is.

I dialed my brother's number. We haven't spoken since last spring. The phone rang and rang before his voice in the outgoing message apologized for missing my call and invited me to leave a message. He sounded like Daddy and I mentioned that, and a hope that we can talk soon, before wishing him Happy New Year and love and hanging up.

...and so it is.

The hiss and murmur of the rain is interrupted periodically by sharp creaks and cracks, and pings as dead twigs, assaulted by the weight of birds and the cold wind, fall onto the tin roof of the shed. Nature proceeds with its renovations, its plan for the "new year". Trees shed dead wood, new growth pushes through. Under the decaying piles of leaves, Spring is turning, turning in readiness to break ground and emerge.

 I am pruning the blog. In this first pass, as I re-read from the beginning, I am slicing and purging, deleting obviously dead and malformed posts. On the second pass I will read more closely and harvest what I can with an eye to compiling "the best of" into a book.

There may not be enough good writing to constitute a book. We'll see.

It's a painful process:  noticing misspelled words that I didn't before, melodramatic non sequitur, boring complaint and feeble attempts at humor.  The original idea of showing up here, uncensored and unedited, seems a bad one now. I've been gun-shy of ever posting again until today.

Life goes on. Every new day brings some error and some success. We keep going. Some things stay the same -- and we're grateful; some things stay the same -- and we wonder how we stand the enduring pain of it.

I don't know that reconciliation and joyous intermingling is possible in my family. I don't know if I'll ever become a good writer or publish a book. I know that the trees will shed and the leaves will decay to become nutrition for new grasses and flowers in the Spring.  I hear that writing every day makes one a better writer. And I hear there's always hope...

Wondering on the Eve

in utero wp editionby scissors-hands

Fifty-nine years ago Now 

I was curled inside my mother's womb on the brink of farewell to the only Home I'd ever known. Soon to breathe in a way I'd never known. I had no idea of the journey that awaited. I had no ideas. 

Or words.

I was warm and wet in the womb sojourn. No night no day no wondering.

I am wondering Now

was the womb the first sojourn. Where was I before that place?

I am wondering about the brink where I rest Now and the journey that awaits.

Perhaps I have no idea. Only words.

A conspiracy beyond me moved me into this unknown world.

And I'm wondering.

Have You Heard the One....

I was a little worried yesterday:  There are too many Sojourner in the 21st Century (SITC) posts now to remember exactly what I've said in each. What if I repeat myself?

I abandoned the worry (and, if you know me at all, you know this was easily accomplished) by reducing the issue to its plainest, simplest terms:  I am afraid of writing/saying something I've written/said before. My assumption is that you desire and (require?) something "new" each time you visit my blog and my fear is that you will stop reading (e.g., stop loving me) if I fail to fulfill that desire.

The easiest way to avoid repeating myself is to stop blogging.  This is not a viable option since a) I want to keep blogging; and b) not blogging (i.e., disappearing from view) definitely puts the kibosh on receiving your love...

A more complicated, time-and-labor-intensive strategy would be to re-read SITC from the beginning, creating an index of topics, keywords, images, etc. as I go and then to consult said index before publishing any future posts.  

There's a good chance such an index will eventually be created since I am contemplating transforming the blog into a book; but it hasn't happened yet and, honestly, I am not willing to postpone additional blog posts until such an index is created. I'm just not....

But perhaps my assumption that you want something new every time you visit is incorrect.

Or it might be that even if I repeat myself, you won't stop loving me (or at least reading me). In which case the worry, as is often true, is unnecessary, a waste of psychic time and energy.

I'm pretty sure I've told you the story of my friendship with Laura. That friendship ended -- she chose to walk away -- when I said I doubted we would be forever friends or close friends because our value systems were so very different. I was speaking from what I knew and believed at that point in time. It sounds naive and ignorant to me today but it really was the way I looked at things then.

I thought about Laura yesterday after spending time with the one and only woman in Holly Springs who I call "friend". On the one hand, I am immensely grateful to have a friend in this town. We have some things in common -- including both being aspiring writers and both being transplants to MS from northern states.

On the other hand, we are very different from each other:  I am inclined to value my own counsel above all others -- sometimes recklessly so -- where she is more inclined to base her choices on social convention and diplomacy. In a controversy, I look first at the heart and soul of a person and she more often looks first at the impact and influence of race and politics on the situation.

As I drove away from her house yesterday, reflecting on some of the territory we covered conversationally, I caught myself thinking "I see limits. We will not be forever or close friends." I was almost immediately aware that I was about to make the same mistake I made with Laura 10 years ago.

Some of the movies and novels I love most hinge on pairings of dissimilar personalities, people who are, on the surface, very different from each other, perhaps irreconcilably so, who go on to become good and solid friends. I feel these stories deep in my soul and enjoy inserting myself into them. Such friendships are big, complex, rich and the participants become bigger and more complex people through them.  


It's not an arrangement that I've seen very often in real life. Mostly I've seen (and experienced) "Oh, so you believe THAT. Well, I believe THIS which makes you wrong and I'm outta here." It happens a lot. Intolerance for difference. Inflexible commitment to a perception of "the right" in a given setting.

I recently shared Voltaire's notion that "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd" with an acquaintance, suggesting that the discomfort and unpleasantness of doubt or "not knowing" is so great that it drives some people to violent conflict or dissolution of relationship. She replied that people who can't see that some things in the realm of human endeavor have been researched and proven to be absolute certainties, should rightly be forsaken; they are impossible and relationship with them is impossible. (Yes, we were talking about religion and the Holy Bible was the archive of "absolute certainties" she offered.)

**********************

I'm certain now that I've talked about this before. Maybe some readers realized this early on and stopped reading....and will never return.

Maybe some readers disagree with me (and Voltaire) and the conflict between our perspectives is the final straw -- they stopped reading and will never return. 

There's something in all of this feels like a bottom line of human social interaction. Something that will either be understood and peace will reign or will not be understood and the fighting and breakups will continue. 

Oil and water don't mix but something happens when they come together...

Winter Birds

The land has taken on the drab colors of winter -- grey and brown and white -- so it's impossible not to notice them when they're in the vicinity. Brilliant bursts of red against the ashen background of winter trees. And it's impossible not to feel some excitement at every noticing. The color startles. Something unabashed and unapologetic about such boldness of hue.

All the more exciting to see two or five or 20 of them, a crowding cloud of cardinals, in the wooded areas to the front and rear of the house for the last several days. "Bustling" is a way to describe their activity:  flying then perching, flying then perching, twittering feathers and swiveling heads while perched, then brief hunt-and-peck missions on the ground-- only a few seconds and purposefully before making quick winged sprints back to bush or fence post. Scarlet flight:  sound in motion. Do cardinals ever sing? They have been quiet the last few days as I stood on the porch smoking but that could be due to my presence. Maybe they sing when I'm away....

No two birds seem to belong together more than the male and female cardinal. They are "birds of a feather" though her pale coloring is a somber echo of his screeching scarlet. They are companions -- so alike in form. In the uncomplicated contrast of their coloring they seem to complete each other.

[Note:  Just went out for a cigarette break and to scatter the crumbs of the last loaf I baked around the yard and on the ground beneath the trees across the street. The cardinals and other winter birds gathered....and I heard the cardinals sing.]

I woke up early today, the pain and distress of missing my son too great to allow sleep. While the coffee pot gurgled, I stood at the front door and watched industrious squirrels harvest and bury the last of the pecans. Cardinals and wrens and chickadees and other birds whose names I don't know scrambled around the bread crumbs. Others in the winged community paced or perched or pecked about on the porch and in the yard, in the bushes and trees on both sides of the street. So much activity!

The cardinals' color expressed my feeling: the bright red a picture of the intensity of my psychic pain, the muted tones of the female a visual representation of the steadfast loneliness I feel.

I think of Sojourner Truth. My identification with her is embedded in every page of this blog. She, too, was a dark-skinned, outspoken woman whose presence and manner frequently provoked antipathy in others. She, too, was regularly counseled to sit down, back off, stop saying what she was saying, stop doing what she was doing. She, too, spent most of her adult life longing for "a room of her own."

And she, too, had a son she loved who was finally lost to her.

I am discovering that there is no escape, no salve, no comfort. All the reasoning and prayer and alcohol in the world is ineffectual, provides no relief. This mother's heart is bound intimately, inextricably and forever to her child. The longing for him is an experience of bearing the unbearable, as though each breath I take might be my last.

My mother and I were estranged for the last 20 years of her life. Poring through her photograph albums last week in FL, snapshots and newspaper clippings of me as a child and a teenager, items she collected before the permanent estrangement kicked in, I wondered:  did she ever look at these things again after she closed her heart to me?  If so, was it painful?

I pondered the contradiction of her refusal to see me or speak to me while preserving a baby book with a lock of my hair preserved in a wax-paper envelope. What did it mean? What does it mean?

A Facebook friend, a woman I've never met, lost her teenage son. He went missing and she later learned he was dead. Her heart aches. Her life aches. We, her virtual community, witness some of the surges of agony. I consider that her pain must be greater than mine -- my son is still alive and I know where he is. I cannot fathom how she stands it.

******************

The ground is frozen. Two days ago, the rain fell steadily for most of the day. That night the temperature began to fall while thunder and lightning enlivened the night. Yesterday temperatures plummeted and anything still wet from the downpour was gradually encased in ice. Today I gaze on a scene of devastating beauty: the gardenia, azalea and forsythia bushes are flattened or nearly so, their branches sheathed in ice. Vines and

grasses, twigs and leaves on the ground wear beards of hoarfrost. Icicles drape the branches of every tree, forming a bright crystal canopy overhead. The great pecan tree on the front lawn whines and groans as it bears the weight of winter.

I gather stray twigs from around the yard and toss them onto a heap of leaves raked to the curb weeks ago (where are those city maintenance teams?). The frozen sprigs make a crisp, crackling sound as they hit the icy pile. Moments later, winter birds flock to the mound, alert to some edible life beneath the surface. They peck and chirp and quarrel. They know something I don't know; they perceive sustenance that is invisible to me. 

I am scratching here, click-click-clicking the keys, clawing my way to break the frozen surface of my grief, to find the warm space of compost underneath, where the promise of Spring -- companion, shadow, echo to the bright red pain of Winter -- sleeps now as larvae and seed.