Birthday Of A Book: She Seemed to Be Afraid, For She Went on Writing

“He seemed to be depressed, for he went on writing.” These words are from an ancient Japanese text quoted in poet Mary Ruefle’s essay “On Fear.”  She also quotes Rilke:  “I have taken action against fear.  I sat up the whole night and wrote; and now I am as thoroughly tired as after a long walk in the fields at Ulsgaard.”

Last night, powerful rain woke me up at 2 am.  The island is profoundly thirsty, and it soothed me to think of that water quenching the dry earth, saturating the porous soil, soaking deep to reach the roots of newly planted native trees and baby beets and beans in the garden.  I thought also of the next day, when my new book would officially be published.  The book, along with this blog, and my recent project of writing prayer-poems, represent my living out the truth of those quotes.  Writing is the way I take action against the unknown, the void, the doubt, the terror.  And it’s been that way since I can remember.  As a child, I had two secret friends:  Jesus and my journal.

Often in the midst of gravest duress, actually, I stop writing.  When my mother suffered a brain aneurysm, I was so consumed with the daily coming to terms with that tragedy and its reverberations through our family, I couldn’t bring myself to recount each day’s horrible events.  But during cancer treatment, my therapist urged me to write.  Not even urged.  It was my homework: to write poetry each week and read it to her.  My baldness, my nausea, my homesickness, my fear, my acid reflux, my peeling skin, my steroid-induced breakdowns, the stifling heat of Cape Cod that summer, none of it struck me as the stuff of poetry.  I was drowning in physicality.  I was in no position to be transformed.  I could recognize none of it as fodder for what a writer seeks:  epiphany, meaning, insight.  Writing didn’t bring relief.  And yet, I believe, those words on a page, those discards – rinds, pits, skins, bruises, bitter leafy matter – formed the soil from which later writing would come.  It took time, and rain, and words.

My oncologist asked me once if writing the blog didn't make things harder for me, and I told him it was the opposite.  For me, to face my fear on the page, to write my way into and through, affords the only antidote I know to fear’s consuming power.  Fear perhaps is some unnamed thirst inside me.  It thirsts to be heard, witnessed.   It thirsts to speak.  To hear that choked whisper of a voice, I must be fully present, engaged with questions, ideas and my life. 

Perhaps some of my loved ones’ concerns over my continuing to write about my experience with cancer for over two years, and for keeping the name “Alaskan in Cancerland” as the blog’s masthead, mirror the unknown Japanese author’s concern for his friend, who “seemed to be depressed, for he went on writing.”  For the one who is afraid, and writes as balm, or writes because he or she has no other effective medicine, it is hard to explain this relationship.  Don’t we want to chase fear or despair out from its hiding place in the corner and show it the door?  The way this morning I swiped blow-in dirt off the window ledge and swept a panful of detritus from the floor beneath the window and tossed it out?  Why engage with difficult emotional states?  For me, it’s this way.  Life will never cease unexpectedly storming on me.  Dirt will blow in again to rime the furniture.  My loved one will track muddy footprints across the wood floor.  All of this coming at me: my impulse is to make something of it, all of it.  For me, it is like paint or clay.  It is my given material, what I have to work with, the ordinary detritus of a day, as well as the extraordinary mudslide of traumatic event.  To approach fear is to approach the edge of the known inner world, my limit.  The heart thumps, fear urges me forward, across the threshold, and line by line, a poem appears in my notebook, a paragraph coalesces out of a dark night.

So cancer found its way into my memoir about a vanishing orca family.  So orcas found their way into my blog about cancer recovery.  So invasive birds – saffron finches – found their way into yesterday’s poem about my mother.  So this fine, almost invisible rain, falling now out of a dingy sky, finds its way here, at this point in the blog.  As well as my empty coffee cup.  And one white sailboat my love mistook for a moment to be a breaching humpback whale this morning.  And the drum-skin the metal roof became last night, waking me.  And me lying there, listening.

I wrote my way through breast cancer, and today, two years and a month after my last radiation treatment, January 15, is the birthday of a book.  Writing was the action I took against fear.  In the face of death, it was my faith in whatever span of life remained to me, to give it everything, and to receive from it everything, all the dirt, all the stars, all the rain, all the beauty, and make something.  I wrung words from that place out of which my fear sprung, which is the desperate love of life.

I am writing this for you, whoever you are, you who are about to enter, or are drowning in, or are crawling out of the experience of cancer.  This is a dispatch from the other side, the side of life, however long.  I will meet you here.   

Prayer of the Wasted Life

1.4.2013 Prayer

I have wasted my life.

          -James Wright

 

This is a prayer for all of the wasted moments,

days, hours badly spent, forays into the Internet

jungle-land of links from the launch of the words

symptoms of recurrent breast cancer. For tangled

sheets and novels whose plots and themes are

long-lost, for staring at the ceiling in the dark, trying

not to blink. For wasted fivers at coffee shops,

and browsing bookstalls waiting for delayed flights.

For batches of chocolate chip procrastination

and Scrabble moves, and movies, and the weather

underground. For taking way too long to choose

outfits, trying sweater after earring, convincing

yourself you require new shoes and a more neutral

color scheme. For subsequent stops in shops or www

whatever dot com to search for nothing you need,

shelling out money you don’t own. For magazines,

and staring out the window waiting for dawn, or night,

or the mail truck, or the right line for a failed poem.

For lingering near the duck pond for no good reason.

Arranging books on shelves alphabetically and by

size. To what purpose? For cleaning, and getting rid

of stuff and writing long emails. Wiping crumbs off

counters, and streaks, and smears of butter-substitute.

Cooking, generally, an excuse not to do something else.

Weeding. For God’s sake, a waiting room, is what this

looks like.  Outside, why are those trees just

standing there? Bum-birds hitched to their bum-limbs.

Wind blowing errant tinsel and what-knots

hither and yon. Everything waiting for the cows

to come home, when they won’t, ever. They’re cows,

and need to be driven. This is a prayer for

the gorgeous, blessed waste of it all.

Prayer of Soap and Rags

The first of the year, and after actually staying up to mark midnight in the last time zone in the U.S., Craig and I woke early, in a spring-cleaning state of mind.  It wasn’t conscious.  Just doing it.  Not stress, no discussion; it was what the new year asked of us.  Still in my pajamas, I started a load of laundry, then wandered out to the picnic spot, under the monkey pod trees, to collect cups and glasses, bottles and plates from last night's chili party while Craig sat down at his desk to write a letter to his daughter.  Then smoothies, then I followed Craig with a garden hose while he mopped the lanai, rubbing away the gecko poop, spraying leaves and grass off the edge.  Then laundry hung on the line, flapping in the growing trade wind.  Then hunger, one goose egg scrambled with some fresh dill from the garden, last night’s cornbread toasted and smeared with mac nut butter, drizzled with maple syrup.  And then, back to cleaning.  Craig hosed the salt off the windows of the house, then decided to build wind-break cages for his baby bananas next. 

When he asks me to help, I say no. Now I need some quiet time to write.

But before I do, one more task: clean the corner of the floor where I keep my altar and meditation cushion, where I sit to do my morning prayers and set my intentions.  I fill a yogurt container with warm water and oil soap, grab a rag from under the sink, and kneel down.  I clear away the incense boxes, the books and candles, and swab the wood floor of its layers of fine ash, gecko shit, clay dust and garden dirt.  On my hands and bare knees, I crawl along, swiping a wider and wider swath, and I wonder who it was that taught me to pray.  I think back to Catholic school, to CCD (Tuesday night church school), to my mother tucking us into bed with prayers in Latvian.  I think of Oma, my father’s mother, who prayed all day, an ancient book of crumbling pages, covers wrapped in layers of waxed paper, open on her broad lap.  She rocked and beat her breast with her fist when reciting the rosary, fingering the carved wooden beads, plain and unvarnished, a peasant rosary. But no, she wasn’t the one who taught me to pray; her spiritual realm was private, monastic, and to me as a child, one of the mysteries. 

I crawl along the floor, now wiping underneath the couch.  Washing a floor by hand with an old cloth napkin, I realize, is today’s prayerful act, and the one who taught me who to pray that way was my mother.  After her husband died, my mother’s mother (we called her Omama, to distinguish her from Oma) declined, had small strokes, then larger ones.  One of the last times I went to her little cottage-house with my mother and sister, we found it a shock, floors and cupboards grimy, bathroom dirty, houseplants unwatered.  One night, after Omama had gone to sleep, my mother, sister and I stayed up and cleaned.  “My mother could never imagine living in a dirty house,” my mother said, with bafflement in her voice.  I didn't understand then, but now I know what she meant.  Her mother, the version she’d known all her life, the capable, artistic, green thumb, whose small house was invariably cozy and clean, whose windows were filled with lush plants, cacti and mysterious African violets constantly blooming, the woman who raised her – she no longer lived in that house.  Instead there lived a fragile new version, a quiet woman in a pale blue sweater, prone to long silences, her brown eyes staring past us.  On hands and knees we three scrubbed the kitchen linoleum, the bathtub of its soap ring, the seam between toilet and floor.  We were young girls, yet we felt purposeful, needed, and uncertain.  Our mother so clearly grieved, our grandmother – where? And when would she return?  Could our cleaning restore her?  But for some things, there is no restoration, only change.  Our mother had suddenly entered the chapter where a daughter must push out of herself, out of her old role, like a shoot pushing up the half-frozen earth, the dead leaves, to become a mature plant, and not perennial. 

That night, we trimmed the dead leaves off the African violets.  We stayed up way past bedtime, way past midnight, learning from our mother how to take our rightful places, learning what would one day be asked of us.  She was capable, our mother, and knew just what to do, filling buckets at the sink, finding the rag bag and the oil soap.  Her sadness was palpable, and though we couldn't fathom it, we shared in it.  Though we knew our mother had entered a new foreign country, we followed her to its border, and when she reached back across to hand us a rag and can of Pledge, we took them from her, and went to work in our grandmother's living room. 

Today, I swab and rinse and remember, and the water in the plastic tub darkens.  I remember how my mother’s finger-skin used to crack from her labors, how once a slit opened at the knuckle and expelled a glass splinter.  That is also a form of prayer.  The wound buried, and we too young to understand, nevertheless, bearing witness.  And one day, unexpectedly, on the first day of a new year, recalling.  Only now, at the end of my forties, do I understand what she taught me of prayer.

To Wield My Pen, and My Shovel

If healing is attempting to achieve (or reestablish) balance, then a writer's life is an ideal proving ground.  Because a fanatical writer would adopt a hunched posture, a bleary set of eyes, atrophied leg muscles, a deathly pallor, diminished social skills, a flat derriere, never leaving her desk.  The work of writing happens sitting down.  But the raw material of writing comes from bodily contact with the world.  I once read a wonderful biography of Georgia O'Keefe by Roxanne Robinson.  A journal entry or letter excerpt of O'Keefe's when she was young and just committing herself to her art impacted me greatly.  She wrote that at a certain point, she asked herself, with every choice she made (whether to go to a party or outing or engage in an activity) whether it would enhance or detract from her art.  If it detracted, she'd refuse it.  As a grad student, I tried that on for awhile.  But I realized quickly that a whole human being is more than an artist (or scientist, or farm laborer, or activist, or whatever our passion or vocation).  I still find the idea of it romantic.  In the abstract, it would be nice to be one of those single-minded artists believing so much in the importance of their work (and with a wife to deflect all input from the world so the great works can get written), that they live by O'Keefe's principles.  (We should build monuments to those (mostly) women, without whom, so much literature and artwork would never have been born).  But since breast cancer, my writing, healing and spiritual impulses have woven themselves more tightly together; I can't separate them.  Hence the prayer poems I've been writing, and hence this blog, and meditation, and walking, and observing the world, all of it feeding into the words that appear on a page or in a blog post.    

My love, Craig, accuses me of being an extremist and I admit he's right.  My current anti-cancer diet is evidence: no meat, no dairy, no sugar, no alcohol, no wheat.  But the holidays, and a social life in general, challenges such rigidities.  So when Don and Douglas invite us to dinner and make meatloaf, I eat it.  And when the Winters invite us to a traditional Swedish Christmas Eve dinner, I load my plate with sauerkraut, homemade potato and meat sausages, Swedish meatballs, and after, chocolate cake.  I share a macadamia nut martini with Craig, or a cosmo with my friend Ralph, who has Hep-C and also shouldn't drink.  I don't tell friends who invite me for dinner of my private cancer phobias around food.  My oncologist, Dr. S., once looked at me with dismay, I dare say sorrow, and asked, "So that means you don't treat yourself to an ice cream cone?"  I'm lucky, because I love healthy food, vegetables, fruit, salmon, rice, tofu, miso, brick-like bread, gritty crackers.  But I'm less obsessed about reading every study that suggests this or that food is good or bad in terms of cancer recurrence.  So this morning's poem reflects the balancing act, the life of the mind at play with the life of the body.  As I write these words, my love clears the ground for a flower garden outside my window with that big orange tractor that appears in the poem.  I have the opposite of Hemingway's dutiful wife: my man calls me to come outside and plant beets.  For his distracting and healing influence, I am grateful. (I am also grateful to poet Mary Ruefle's essay "Madness Rack and Honey" which also provided inspiration for this poem).

-->

12.27.2012 Prayer

Distracted by laundry on the line, the physics of wind, which defines

whether a t-shirt wraps itself into a cocoon or flaps like an injured

bird or dangles. By him watering the eggplants. Distracted by his orange

tractor parked outside my window. By remembrance of snows past.

By a hand of bananas, half-green on the lanai. Distracted by the door

opening and him asking (not caring) where to plant fennel, where

to move the hotly inedible pepper tree. This is a prayer

for the war(p) between

a world lived on the page, unseen, in the mind, and another, of trade wind,

o-bar, pick-ax, bleach. And memory, singing in the choir loft, Our Lady

of Mr. Carmel, Lucille at the organ, the opening mouths and chords to Let

there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me constructing a poem of leaves

and debris, leaving the draft to cool, to load the dehydrator with bananas

and holes in the ground with cassava and pigeon pea. To wield my shovel.

 

A Long Walk Through Rugged Terrain

For Christmas, my love made a booklet of the last year’s blog posts, and presented it to me.  The last entry in the booklet showed me in a hoarfrost meadow in Alaska, marking the two-year anniversary of my final radiation treatment.  So now I’m on the other side of those two years, and the other side of my winter transition to Hawaii, out of the hoarfrost and into the salt spray of a wild, windy, rocky coast.  And we are on the other side of the Mayan calendar’s end, the Solstice, winter holidays, preparing for the new year.  What does it mean?  A page in my calendar is titled “unexpected blessings,” and another speaks of “changes we may anticipate and those which may take us by surprise.”   

December this year was a month of shattering and sorrow on this earth, of storms and violence and loss.  Right now blizzards are bearing down on humans and animals and birds in the Midwest, pushing eastward.  Trees are crashing down.  Some people’s time on earth, ends abruptly, unexpectedly.  It’s been a month, too, of prayers and the painful, brutal first steps toward healing which always come, the days after the funeral, which don’t feel anything like relief.  Looking back at the last two years, I see that healing is like that.  It sounds nice, soft on the tongue, but in reality it’s lonely and harsh.  A healed tree displays its old wound.  It’s gnarled.  We gnarl our way out of grief, too.  

I talked to my cousin today.  In the last few years, she’s lost her only sibling, a brother, of a sudden heart attack, and her mother, of pancreatic cancer; she died in October. My cousin, a social worker, has taken care of others her whole adult life.  She never had kids, but helped raise her brother’s kids, who lived in the same house as she and her mother. She says she feels the love of her extended family.  But there is a process only she can go through and know, the process of coming to terms with being, as an old gospel song says, an “orphan girl” on this earth. There is no comfort anyone can offer for that.  The healing path is private, a long walk through rugged terrain, picking up along the way truths, like stones, which fill your backpack.  You emerge sun-and-wind-burnt, sinewy, weathered, stronger surely for all you’ve carried, maybe more self-contained.

Since December, I’ve begun a new daily writing practice, a series of prayer-poems.  In Alaska, in mid-winter, sunrise takes at least two hours.  The sun doesn’t crest the mountains across Kachemak Bay until after 10 am.  It’s the ideal time to write.  At first, I thought of those poems as separate from this blog, but today, I’m reminded to question holding back.  This is where I am now, and these prayer poems have something do with healing.  And they are an exploration of the thing we call “praying,” what it means to me.  And they represent the stones I gather in my backpack.  So I will begin to post them here.  The older I get, the more so many things seems beyond my control.  But I don’t wish to throw up my hands in despair, or become passive or indifferent.  Sometimes, the only gesture left to is prayer.  And to me, the poems that matter in my life are forms of prayer.  It’s what I do with my worries now.  And writing, poetry or prose, for me is the way I know to answer the question I started this post with:  “What does it mean?”

This is the first in the series:

11.28.2012 Prayer

Morning stacks up in parallels – inlet,

a flat-topped mountain, cloud-strips,

a black

line

of sand.  Light arrives in bands

at 9, hues like faint scent marks.  But this is still the hour

before I want there to be, before any prayer,

any please, gods:  just a mountain dusted in pale

blue talcum (as in light as powder).  That’s all.

That’s enough.          

Before any if, the wishful, before the arrival

of need or dread:  the letter, the word, even you,

away now

these many weeks (due on the noon plane),

and I, in solitude, this hour just prior,

(day as yet without

prognosis, anniversary of no one),

watch hues elide into blue

of a shadow I remember

pooled at the base of a tree

in deep winter, north of here,

memory I peel

off moonlit boreal snow and carefully

glue to this incipient

sky, line by line.

Lay it down like a wing-track.

Until a soul can’t hold 

any longer, and cracks, crying its tiny please,

between as-yet black branches

(the way bird song bursts, a prayer) don’t let anything

begin or be just yet.  Please day,

(as-yet black)

don’t arrive for me.

Anniversary: After Two Healing Years, Two Kinds of Joy

On December 1, the two-year anniversary of my last radiation zap, I waited for my love to get off the plane in Homer.  Through the door walked Rosanna, who’d flown in from Anchorage, where she goes every week for her radiation treatments. The elation I felt for her being almost done (one week to go), at her telling me that she is suffering no ill effects, was intense, a body rush.  We hugged each other hard and rocked back and forth.  Sympathetic joy, it’s called.  When you experience another’s joy as your own.  

There is another kind of joy, one you get to experience alone.  That afternoon, after dropping Craig off at his office, I drove with my dog Gris-Gris to Beluga Lake for my first skate-ski of the winter.  There isn’t enough snow on the ground yet for skiing anywhere else.  Skiing’s fine by me, but in this case, skis were just a means to get to the other end of the lake faster.  It’s about a mile across the ice to a wild marshland inaccessible at any other time of year.  Weeks of cold dry weather have sublimated the snow covering the grasses, transforming it into a quilt of hoar frost.  Mounds of bowed-down grass are thick with a velour of crystals, some an inch or two long.  I left my skis at the end of the lake and Gris-Gris and I followed narrow ice channels through the marsh.  I was hoping to see the white owl again, the one that flew up from the ice last weekend, or one of the great gray owls my friends saw last winter, or a lynx or coyote out hunting the snowshoe hares whose tracks are everywhere on the ice.  I angled toward the nearby trees, found myself surrounded not by creatures, but by crystals. I was swishing knee deep in ice-bearded grass, millions and millions of miniature crystal ferns glinting in the low sunlight of midwinter.  I just wanted to lie down in it.  So I did, eating handfuls of hoarfrost off the collapsed grass around my face. It is fragile, collapses at the touch of a tongue, at a breath.  I ate it, and I let it cool my aching lower back, injured from last weekend’s ice-skating and too much sitting on a hard kitchen chair and working at the computer.  I looked at the sparkles of the grasses’ second skin.  I lay in a cradle/grave of hoar frost.  I stared up at the blue, blue sky. I swear I could see the sky streaming by in a river of molecules.  Let this earth become a heaven, writes Cyrus Cassells, “Down from the Houses of Magic.”  Sometimes you find that it is, that prayer is answered.  Heaven on earth, a house of magic, in the midst of everything chaotic, frightening, uncertain.  I don’t know if I can call it joy.  It is peace.  It is enough.  All concepts of forgiveness, guilt or fear vanish, dying into life in a meadow of hoar frost.

Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

In the dream, my windows were open.  It was fall. 

In fall, songbirds quiet since July sing again, before they fly south.  It's a strange phenomenon.  Midsummer, the forest falls silent.  The bustle of territory-defending and nest-building and mate-luring-and-attending is done.  Birds are too busy raising their young to sing.  But in fall, just as in April, I hear their tentative, raspy songs again, as though their voices are hoarse from disuse.

In my dream, their voices were not hoarse.  Their songs were flute-like, rippling, tumbling, swirling through the dying leaves.  Their songs moved like whirling winds.  In my dream I tore out the door, desperate to hear this music I'd missed, this music so ephemeral, crazed to be surrounded by it before it was too late.  I ran down a long green lawn, my arms in the the air, and the birds were already leaving, winging south above me, one after another, swift bodies arrowing away, and I cried up to them, waving, "goodbye, goodbye," not caring if anyone saw me.  People across the street stood on their porch watching, but I didn't care.  My heart was busting out of me, all that mattered was reaching up toward those birds, loving them.  And then I saw the bear.  In my dream, the brown bear was there suddenly on the lawn, and she was close, coming right for me, and just as suddenly there was my car in between us in the middle of the lawn, and I dove over its roof, to get to the driver's side door, the door closest to the bear.  I had to get into that car, but I knew I wouldn't make it.  In all my dreams, I can't outrun whatever it is that is chasing me.  My arms and legs fill with sand, and I can't make them work anymore.  But I got the car door open, tumbled into the driver's seat, but before I could shut the door the brown bear was upon me, my arm in her mouth, her teeth clamped on my flesh, pressing.  And that's when I woke up.

It struck me that this is exactly the conundrum of the person who's had breast cancer.  How to live with the bear lurking always behind the hedge?  The bear can appear at any moment.  Do you run headlong toward life, toward beauty, toward all that you love anyway?  Is it worth the risk?  Is it worth the loss?  Or do you live your life listening to the bird song from the safety of your house, hearing it only through the open window?  Do you follow your madly beating heart?  Do you chase the alive creatures?  Or let the fear of dying paralyze you?  Or maybe there is yet another interpretation.  Could be it's the brown bear and not the birds you are running headlong and recklessly toward?

My friend Erin, who writes a blog called "Being Poetry," posted this poem this morning, by Jack Gilbert.  I place it side-by-side with my dream, on that pile of salvaged things I wrote of yesterday (goshawk, pillar, grosbeak), the things I've saved from the ruined landscape of my day, that place where creation begins out of destruction.  If this life is one big dream.  Then I say, hello departing songbirds.  Hello pounding heart.  Hello poetry.  Hello goshawk.  Hello brown bear with my arm in your mouth.  Teach me how to live here.  Yes, my eyes are open.

A Brief for the Defense
by Jack Gilbert 
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

From Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005)