The Mystery: Reciprocity

"...I became fascinated with the cycle of reciprocity in which trees give off the oxygen human beings and other animals need and we exhale the carbon dioxide green things need. I loved to think about this quiet exchange between leaves and lungs. It resonated with the wild love I felt for trees then, to know that we were sustaining each other in this way."

-- Susan Griffin
(from Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen)

I read these words. Close my eyes and fall into my own love of trees. I recall fondly, that counted among my childhood friends in Iowa, was a large, old Oak in our back yard. A friend I could climb and nestle high up within its arms when I needed silence, to escape the world of humans. I would climb up there with a book and read among its branches and leaves for hours. When, in the middle of my sophomore year in high school, we moved to California, that Oak was among the beings I deeply missed.

Since moving into our home here in Oakland, K. and I have planted more than 25 trees and shrubs on our piece of land. I wanted to be able to see and experience branching, leafing trees from every window in our house. As I sit here typing, the window in my red writing room frames the view of three of our six laurus nobilis trees. Trees that were 3 feet tall when we put them in the ground and that now top our neighbor's roof line. Sunlight dapples the leaves. A light breeze off the San Francisco Bay whispers through them. Laurus nobilis, or Grecian laurels, are trees of protection, trees from which branches were used to commemorate poets, hence the title poet laureate.

On Saturday I sat close to the the branches of our Crape Myrtle, and with Susan Griffin's words in mind, I breathed. As I inhaled, I took in the oxygen exhaling from its leaves. As I exhaled carbon dioxide from my lungs, I imagined the leaves breathing it in. Inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale - over and over a circuitous loop between my being and its being; my lungs, its leaves. And on the third round of this exchange the branches nearest me swayed and caressed my cheek.

Yes, you could say it was a subtle breeze that wafted between us, causing the leaves to reach, to move. Or, we can say, the leaves caressed my cheek in a moment of recognition of what was transpiring between me and tree.

(Day 350) Too Much Corn

I don't own a scale. I judge my weight by how my body feels, how I look, how my clothes fit. I know when I'm putting on weight that isn't healthy because I don't feel good. My body becomes uncomfortable when I sit down. I feel sluggish and, well, heavy. Yet, I have been curious to know exactly how much weight I've lost since I began this food journey back in June, 2007.

A week ago I had my annual gyn appointment. I knew the nurse would weigh me.

When I stepped on the scale I was actually shocked. I haven't weighed this weight since I was a sophomore in college. I've dropped 15 pounds. I'm sure at one point I had lost closer to twenty, but I was getting too thin so I began eating a bit more.

Losing the Weight / Keeping it Off
I've been thinking about how I lost this weight. Is there a single, primary factor that I can point to? I exercise the same as I always have - long, strenuous walks 3 to 6 times a week with lots of walking throughout the day. Switching to whole grains has made a difference (steel cut oats rather than cold, processed cereal, brown rice rather than white rice, etc.). Increasing the amount of vegetables and reducing the amount of bread, rice, and potatoes.

And yet I have had this sneaking intuition that giving up sweet drinks and juice has been a significant contributing factor to my weight loss and continued ability to remain at this slimmer weight that I've come to like.

A Food Supply Dominated by Corn
Then, last night we watched the documentary King Corn. At one point in this engrossing and smart film, a man from Harvard (I can't recall his position) said that people are drinking more of their calories now than at any other time in our history. And a lot of those drinks are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup - a substance that is messing with our metabolism and a key factor in the rise of obesity and type 2 diabetes afflicting so many Americans.

I can't emphasize enough that I'd like everyone to watch this film. And consider its message that, if you are someone who eats fast food, processed food, sweet food, pretty much what you are eating is corn - even if it looks like beef, or tastes like sweetened yogurt, or you're certain it's a soda you're drinking to quench your thirst. You're actually eating and drinking corn. Corn, which is almost all starch and converts to sugar in the body, which if consumed in too great a quantity turns to fat.

Drinking Candy
I wish I had a record of how many sweet drinks I consumed in a day, in a week, before I changed my habits. If I recall honestly and correctly, my daily habits were something like this: orange juice first thing in the morning (although I didn't drink any brand that contained added sugar or sweeteners), a hot chocolate or jasmine lime cooler mid-morning (depending on the weather) (the hot chocolate most likely contained high fructose corn syrup - in the chocolate syrup and the whip cream), a Pepsi with lunch, another sweet drink in the mid-afternoon, possibly another Pepsi at dinner, and maybe another hot chocolate at night (if it was cold outside), and at some point in the day I most likely had a glass of chocolate soy milk.

Not every day was like this, of course, but back then, none of this seemed excessive to me. Which is incredible to my thinking now. In King Corn, one of the talking heads indicated that one soda a day is enough to eventually trigger diabetes. He called soda "liquid candy." Over a year ago, I considered my eating habits healthy. Now I understand that I consumed far too much liquid candy corn. It didn't occur to me to consider these drinks in such a way.

I understand, after giving up these drinks and most other sweet excesses, why my acupuncturist/Chinese medicine doctor gave me the same message over and over and over: "Too much sugar." But really what the message should have been was "too much corn."

Blue Sky Mind: Love & Haiku

I want to carry the practice of writing Haiku with me until my end.(1) (2) (3)

I am laying on the couch this morning sipping ice water with lemon, low in energy on the second day of my moon. I am reading Susan Griffin's Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy. It is already very hot here in Oakland. It is only 10:45 in the morning. I stop reading. Something makes me reach for my copy of Narrow Road to the Interior (translated by Sam Hamill). I flip open the book and come upon this haiku written by Basho near the end of his life:

Somehow not yet dead
at the end of my journey -
this autumn evening

-- Basho (from Narrow Road to the Interior)

and I think to myself how writing these lines must have given him comfort. Peace and relief. A peace and relief that comes from acknowledging the reality of a particular moment, the truth of one's experience. I read these words three hundred fourteen years later and they enter me, whisper to my soul some sensation, some power of knowing I can't put into words. I feel love for this haiku. I feel love, now, in this moment from reading this haiku. I think about Basho, ill and at the end of his life, and still he has the presence to appreciate the beauty, the this-ness of "this autumn evening." And to connect this autumn to his own.

The Mystery: Merry Christmas

I must have been 30 years old. My sister J. was getting married that year and she was 25 then. The church she and S. had chosen for their wedding required that they attend several Sunday and holiday services before the church would allow them to use their sanctuary. Somehow this translated into our family attending Christmas Eve services. Unable to resist family pressure, I found myself in a pew that Christmas Eve.

I was frustrated that I had been unable to say no to my Mother's manipulative "It would mean a lot to your father." I had not outwardly renounced Christianity at this point, but inwardly I had no love or belief in this kind of practice - particularly the habit of many Americans to only attend church on Christmas Eve and Easter.

As the priest droned on, I began to feel a tightness in my chest. My body filled with tension and I felt a growing urge to leave. When he began to speak about women being the cause of all sin, that God made childbirth painful to punish us, I started to rise. My mother, sitting on my right, grabbed my hand and pulled me down. She held my hand and pressed it to her thigh in a confused effort to show support for me and yet to also keep me in place. She looked at me with a look that said, "I know why you want to leave, but I won't let you do it."

I couldn't breathe. My heart raced. My body hurt with anger and frustration. At the priest, at the dull parishioners who accepted this lie as an appropriate way to celebrate the life of Christ, the spirit of Christmas, and at my mother for squashing my desire to live my truth. I wanted to burst into tears. I yanked my hand from hers.

I don't remember anything else the priest said. I remember trying to calm myself. I remember the overwhelming relief of the air outside the church once the service was over and I was freed. I remember thinking that my Mother had probably done something like this to me many times throughout my life along with teachers and other adults who seemed determined to reign me in. I remember feeling sad. Confused. Hurt and alone. Always the one in my family to speak up, speak out, rebel - and not one family member to support me.

Many years later my Mom apologized for prohibiting me from leaving that church. She admitted that she wished she'd taken my hand and walked out with me. What a moment that could have been for both of us and for the person I was struggling to become.

(Day 344) Cooling Down the Heat

Last Thursday I made a big pot of Turkish Lentil soup from the Real Food Daily cookbook. I missed my notation to cut the 1/2 tsp. of Cayenne pepper to 1/8 tsp.

Hot soup. Delicious soup - lots of it. But the heat was causing problems for both of us - neither K. nor I have digestive systems that handle hot, spicy foods well. We kept eating the tasty leftovers (the soup gets better each day it sits) for lunch despite the distress it caused. I mentioned this to my friend R. (owner and chef of Cane River Gumbo Company - see her at the Montclair Farmers' Market). "Just add a dollop of plain yogurt to your next bowl. It will cool the heat. You should be able to eat it without any problems then," she knowingly advised.

And she was right. Yesterday I re-heated the remaining soup for lunch. After ladling it into a bowl, I stirred in a couple of spoonfuls of organic low-fat yogurt. Not only did it cool the heat, I liked what it did to the overall flavor of the soup. Next batch I'll remember to cut the cayenne and still serve each bowl with a dollop of yogurt.

Word Medicine (#46)

"We are the ones we have been waiting for..."

--June Jordan
from her poem "Poem for South African Women"

The first time I came upon this line, chills rippled throughout my whole body. I heard it again the other day, and again my body responded - wave after wave after wave of electrical energy passed through me...prophetic words my deep self knows to be truth.

Poet-Writer: The Private Sea

"It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm...than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific ocean of one's being alone."

-- Henry David Thoreau
(as quoted by Susan Griffin in Wrestling the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen)

At different points in my life, and by different types of people, I've been told that to be a writer I must travel. I've never believed this to be true. For me, there is an infinite field and forest and sea within - rich with growth and decay. Travel to the inner realms of one's soul presents an exhilarating, treacherous, and arduous journey that never ends. For me, venturing outside the front door of my own home presents a moment by moment pilgrimage into a vast and lush corner of the world.

Travel can be the right prescription for some writers. For others it can end up an escape from one's life and inner self, a running from one's myriad of demons and angels. Each writer has to discover and choose the type of life that pushes her writing into bold realms, empowers her to enter the places she fears most, and survive to write about them in honest, compelling, beautiful language.

(Day 339) Heart Palpitations

Several years ago I began experiencing recurring heart palpitations at night when I'd go to bed. They were mild at first. I'd read that this can be a symptom of perimenopause, so I intially didn't worry. But then they became stronger, sometimes feeling as if my heart was rolling over inside my chest. I went to see my acupuncturist, who, for the first time, was unable to immediately diagnose why this was happening.

She sent me to a western medical doctor she trusts. She wanted me to have an EKG to ensure nothing serious was going on. The EKG showed nothing out of the ordinary. So the doctor asked me questions about diet and exercise but none of my responses gave her cause for concern. Then she asked me if I drink green tea. "Oh, yes," I replied. "I love green tea. I drink several pots a day." "Stop drinking it," she advised, "and especially don't drink it in the afternoon or evening." She told me that green tea has something in it (which I can't recall what it is but she gave me the term - and it wasn't caffeine) that can cause heart palpitations in some people.

This advice bummed me out. I love green tea, but I also love my heart. So I ended this daily ritual. The palpitations ceased. About a year ago I began to introduce green tea back into my mornings. I brewed it very mildly. I drank only one small pot of tea in the early part of the day. I watched and paid attention to my heart. Nothing happened. So I continued this practice. But as time moves forward and the memory of the heart palpitations recedes into the distance, without thinking about it, I have reverted back to strongly brewing my green tea and drinking a lot more of it, although still only in the morning.

Last night my heart was rumbling and tumbling all over the place. The palpitations weren't as strong as they'd been before, but they were much more frequent, and they began before I got into bed. It took awhile for them to stop.

Consequently, I did not drink green tea this morning. I brewed a pot of Pu-erh. This experience reminds me that just because a symptom has healed, doesn't mean it won't return if the aggravating habits begin again. I don't want my digestive episodes to come back - it has been 9 months now - so I need to remember that the healthy practices I've implemented since June, 2007, need to remain with me long after the problem, that made me make these changes, has healed.

The Mystery: The Church's Little Horror Film

I didn't grow up in a particularly religious household. Though we were all baptized in a Christian church and attended services regularly on Sundays for the 10 years that we lived in Iowa, my sense memories about things related to church are that we followed religious rites and honored Christian holidays because this is what good Americans do, not because my parents had any particular desire, for themselves or us, to develop a relationship with God.

Westward Ho
When we moved to California we stopped attending services. My parents said they couldn't find a church they liked. I don't think their search was an arduous one. My sisters and I were only too happy not to have to go any longer. Religious memories are of droning ministers, boring Sunday school teachers, uninspired sermons to which I could not relate. Except for one specific early childhood memory in which I watched a film about the return of Jesus Christ.

The Rapture
I can still call forth scenes from the film as we watched in the basement of the Presbyterian church situated on a corner near the public swimming pool and the strip mall that housed Happy Joe's Pizza. I love movies, have always thought them magical, so I imagine when we were told we'd be watching a film that Sunday morning I was excited by this.

The movie started out innocently (and stereotypically) enough. A wide tree-lined street in a suburban neighborhood with large, beautiful homes. Men mowing perfectly green lawns, children jumping rope or eating ice cream cones while they stood near the curb. Someone raking leaves. Mothers inside cooking or cleaning. Birds sing. The sun shines through the Maple leaves. And then suddenly, people on the street and in the homes begin to randomly disappear. The ice cream cone has fallen to the pavement and melts - the child holding it gone. A lawnmower idles in the middle of the lawn, grass still needing to be cut - the man vanished. Cars crash into fire hydrants as their drivers pop into thin air.

And now the sun isn't so bright, the birds have stopped singing. The neighborhood no longer feels idyllic and happy. The remaining people panic - start running and screaming. Somehow it becomes apparent that Jesus has returned. Chaos ensues. Things start burning. Life has become a living hell for those left behind on Earth.

Age Appropriate Information
Nice film for a group of 6 or 7 year olds. I don't remember if it was the same day, or several days later, but at some point my mother comes upon me crying in my sisters' bedroom. This is where my memory of time becomes strange. I see myself lying across J.'s twin bed in the room she shared with my sister J., but this is in the house in California. I am certain, though, that I was 6 and J. a baby when I was made to watch the church's little shop of horrors. My mother asks why I am crying. I tell her that if J. dies she will go to hell because she is a baby and can't ask Jesus Christ to be her savior. So this part of the story couldn't have taken place in California as J. would have been 10 years old then. Memory is an interesting thing - how it warps and bends time, crosses events over and back on themselves, coalescing different selves with different events in one's life.

Somehow my Mom convinced me that J. would not go to hell if she died as a baby. But I remember carrying in my bones, long after watching the movie, quiet fear, a sense of hellishness, and stern insistence. To be a good girl, to be liked and accepted I had to worship Jesus and God without question. Worship came from a place that feared punishment, banishment, and isolation. Not love, joy, and awe.

Beauty: Singing Their Mournful Cry

Everywhere I walk it is there, filling the air, touching me, a song that seems to understand the small, quiet sadness I carry within me. On my way to the post office, to the bank, to pick up batteries from the hardware store, or an iced tea from the local cafe, the air is filled with the mournful cry of Cedar Waxwings who make their way to our neighborhood every April and May to partake of the berries now fruiting on so many trees.

Such a lament, their high-pitched choral wail. They move in flocks from a towering Redwood to a mighty Maple. They hover around and in the branches of a Toyon tree hungrily eating its red berries. The tree is alive with feathered movement - so many birds swarming about it that the tree is hardly visible. A sudden loud rumble of a bumbling truck frightens them into a tall tree where they sit together singing their sad siren song.

Something about their song pierces me. It makes me feel like weeping, and yet it also brings me comfort. Even though they are part of a large flock, their song seems one of loneliness, one that makes me yearn for something I can't quite name.

Living Now: Slow Medicine. Dying & Death.

This morning as I drank my Mao Jian 'Hair Tip' green tea and bowl of steel cut oats, I read a welcome article in today's New York Times on the subject of the elderly and aging and the practice of slow medicine. 'Slow medicine' is an approach that encourages less aggressive, and less costly, care at the end of life.

Skeptical About American Medical Treatment
I am skeptical of Western medicine and its aggressive approach at any age. I've heard too many stories from friends of being rushed into aggressive tests and biopsies without being given the time to reflect, to step back and consider what is going on, what is wanted. Too many aspects of American life are filtered first through the lens of money and profits. Everything else comes second. This is true of American medicine as well. And I would add the filter of "absolute fear of death" to how medical decisions are rapidly made.

Yes, I'm happy for many of the advances of American medical science, but I also believe that courses of treatment, "routine" exams, and prescription drugs are prescribed with an unflinching and unquestionable authority based on little more than "this is what we do." As patients we are not given room or encouragement to ask questions, to say no, to doubt what we are being told. I especially feel that the elderly are often used as test subjects and profit centers for drugs. Rather than recognizing the aging as those at the end of life and that our primary concern should be in helping them die with respect, dignity, and far less fear, we put them on multiple prescriptions to keep them alive no matter what the condition of their life may be like.

Unapproachable Taboo
We do not talk about dying and death in this culture. We pretend it isn't happening when it is. We deny that it will ever happen. In my experience, we talk about our aging grandparents, parents, and in-laws when they're not in the room, but we seldom talk to them about what they're experiencing. We rarely ask them what they think and how they feel about the fact that they are nearing or are at the end of their life. We don't talk with them about the option not to go on another drug or undergo another invasive procedure, or, as discussed in the NY Times article, the possibility of weaning oneself off the myriad of medications keeping them alive in a dis-eased state and allowing themselves to die peacefully.

I know, as someone in mid-life, I'd like to hear and learn from those in their 60's, 70's, and 80's what they are feeling as they enter these decades. Do you think about and approach your days differently than you did when you were younger? What are your goals and dreams now? How do you feel about life as you face the reality that you have less life ahead of you than behind?

Beauty: Blink to Clear What Clouds the Eye

On Sunday K. and I headed out to Point Reyes National Seashore. Being within an hour's drive to this place of remarkable, quiet beauty is one of the reasons we remain in Northern California. Pt. Reyes vibrates with the Hum more than any place I've been. We went to hike among the native wildflowers in bloom at this time of year.

At the entrance to the Tomales Point trail is a stand of trees that captures my imagination each time we return here. The windblown architecture of these old pines (I think they are a type of Cedar) contrasted against the achingly bright blue sky moves me. The trunks have been bleached and sanded by the constant rough touch of the salty sea wind. Bare for upwards of 80 feet, the trunks look like driftwood rooted in the ground that then branch out into magnificent canopies of green needle leaf.

On the return trip from our hike, the sun poured through these trees in such a way that I was compelled to take pictures in an attempt to capture the beauty they exuded. I moved around and about them snapping images. This is the first time I've been hiking with my new digital camera. It felt like a luxury to be able to take numerous pictures without worrying about wasting film and hoping at least a couple of them turned out. The trees' majesty and magnificence made me feel like a little kid who has just discovered a treasure; I was so delighted by their wild beauty.

Absorbed as I was in the trees I was unaware of other hikers coming upon us. My complete connection and reverie with the Cedars was suddenly broken by the incredulous and sincere voice of a woman (I'd guess in her early 30's) now standing near me: What do you see up there?

It's amazing how much happens in the mind within a span of a few seconds. Immediately upon her incredulous asking I was abruptly pulled down from the canopy that had held me so enthralled, and self-consciously to my camera and feet, feeling a flash of embarrassment at being called to the attention of strangers. And for just a blip of a moment I was confused by her question. How to answer? For how could she not see what I saw? And then, by some power that didn't feel like my own, I smiled out toward the horizon and in a light-hearted but obvious tone I simply said, "Beauty."

And, as if this was, of course, the most obvious thing in the world, she and her two male companions laughed at their momentary lapse. "Oh. Of course," they replied and walked on.

Poet-Writer: Hellish Day in the Writing Life

"Enduring silence is no small part of poetry's discipline, acquiring the patience to wait, knowing when not to write. There is a kind of frenetic production that conceals an essential indolence, and a writer can be at the same time prolific and mute. Prose that is written merely to stave off silence, then, serves roughly the same function as booze or excessive exercise. It's merely a busier, less efficient oblivion."

-- Christian Wiman
from Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet

This is exactly what this post is today. Frenetic production staving off silence. I raise my glass and knock back these words.

I am beside myself today. Can't find peace or place. No work. No friend. No desire to pick up the phone. No desire to plant the Russian Kale I bought on Monday. I have poems spread across the dining room table - a particular set of poems - dreams that I had right after the destruction of the towers in NY, and two poems I wrote in response to the insane response of those in power and the disturbing response of those succumbing to intense fear. I've been staring at them for 45 minutes as I listen to the finches sing their songs of Spring and mating. I can't write what I want to write. I can't do what I want to do with these poems. It isn't time yet.

They want to be combined in some way - woven together. They want to respond to the brilliant book I just read by Susan Faludi - a thinker and writer and feminist I admire. I credit her earlier book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women with expanding and enhancing my thinking. The information and events exposed in this book gave me a language with which to understand the many sexist encounters I'd experienced but was unable to put into context, or to give shape and meaning.

Her newest work The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America is an important and critical and devastating book. I cannot believe in how many ways it has validated my initial and early responses to 9-11. I don't feel crazy anymore in thinking that those in power to shape the country's "approved and acceptable" reaction to 9-11 were having some kind of psychotic episode as they perpetuated the American myth of cowboy bluster and machismo against the requisite backdrop of feminine frailty and victimization.

Both of these books are on my essential reading list.

Back to now. The reading of this book has started something swirling in me. But it isn't ready to be implemented. So I stare out the window trying to be comfortable with the waiting. Trying to have patience. Trying to sink into the silence without falling silent forever. I fear falling silent.

I am, today, both "prolific and mute," as Wiman writes. I feel utterly indolent and yet something in me fights this indolence with great mental force. It won't let me sit and stare for long. It is the Puritan in me that believes, with irritating and debilitating conviction, I must always, always, always be working to prove my worth, to stave off the guilt of my semi-unemployment while others around me are at the office.

So I knock back another post before I take a hard-driving walk in an attempt to enter some form of soft-focused oblivion.