radishes from my garden

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.” ~ Oscar Wilde

I have to admit, I thought I had come upon a new idea, but as I searched the stores of thoughts on sonnets, I found the above lines from Oscar Wilde. It should not surprise me that a man who said so many witty things would have said this, and so well. The phrase “Life has been your art,” echoes the words of Naomi Shihab Nye who says, “Your life is the poem.”

The longer I live the more I am concerned with days. With how to enjoy the day. And though my enjoyments might be odd, sometimes, and sometimes ordinary, they are specific. I have started to figure out that hitting certain touchpoints gives me a sense that I have made the most of a day. I like the way a day is a square on the calendar. I like the way a sonnet makes the same shape. Both are contained and have a turn toward the end. A sonnet, the volta, a day the setting sun.

A sonnet is often a struggle the poet is having with themselves. Perhaps trying to manage the fallout of a great love. Or trying to reconcile the human influence on once unspoiled nature. But whatever they address, they do so within the confines of form.

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit” ~ Madeleine L’Engle

So it turns out everyone is thinking about life as a sonnet! Or at least a significant handful of writers who see the play of limits in both sonnet and the everyday. It’s true: we have 24 hours but must write the content of those hours ourselves. The meal, to me, is an important marker. A way of slowing and sitting down and writing a line of pleasure as a plate of homegrown greens, a ripe avocado, a cool iced tea. And then a walk along a most-loved path in our new county, one with endless novel sights and hidden trails, walks with overhanging oak tree boughs and a variety of blue jays, finches, black-plumed quail.

“Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet’s health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.” ~ A. R. Ammonsbut laying out a garden.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are caught in repetition from the moment we wake up. Make coffee or tea, eat breakfast, make the bed. Get some form of exercise. Water the garden, walk the dog. Whatever it entails, ordinary life calls us to task from the very onset. Some wake early to have time to themselves before the merry-go-round begins, but even that habit is another way of adhering to form. I think we crave such form as much as we push against it. Days of endless idyll are fun for a while, then lead to restlessness, or even depression.

But when we get the balance nearly right (and we never have true balance for long) there is a thrill that comes from meeting obligations and also doing the most to partake of the world, making sure to make music of our days, however that might come. Love is a kind of music. Being is a kind of music. Even a repetitive task done with gratitude. How satisfying and impossible to live in so strict a container as time. May we revel in its limits, count the lines as they pass, see if we can find––even an off-center–––rhyme.

Is there a way you find music in your days—-even in the midst of all the necessary tasks? I’d love to hear how your life is a poem, and what helps make it one.

Danusha

Every day–––or almost every day–––we go for our favorite walk under the tree canopy. We have to walk the dog, but that just gives us an excuse to get out, put on some layers and head into the green. It’s an easy walk, as walks go. Slightly sloped upward, on a trail in the middle of a neighborhood. But the path, lined with arched trees, feels fairly sylvan despite the cul-de-sacs and ranch homes visible through the foliage. We see the same rotating assortment of folks day after day: the couple who ask if we’ve seen the nesting owls today––or at least heard them. We see the owls themselves, who are halfway up the grand, peeling eucalyptus trees, turning their heads this way and that, watching over their homestead in the boughs. Then, we see the woman with a new golden retriever puppy who is turning out to be a very good boy and tolerates Pumpkin’s lack of awareness of personal space.

When we are on our walk, whether in a slight rain, or in the sunshine I feel an almost unreasonable level of happiness. I mean, there we are, our little charge sniffing the fallen leaves, the grass alongside the path, happy in her world, as we the two-leggeds accompany her. Crows overhead, finches and chickadees in the shrub. And now these tremendous Great Horned Owls.

There are many myths about owls, and many different ways in which people interpret their presence. Of semi-local, California Native lore, I learned this:

“California Newuks believed that after death, the brave and virtuous became Great Horned Owls. The wicked, however, were doomed to become Barn Owls.

In the Sierras, native peoples believed the Great Horned Owl captured the souls of the dead and carried them to the underworld.”

https://www.owlpages.com/owls/articles.php?a=62

So, there is a long history of reverence for these beings who appear often in the lower branches of the eucalyptus (a common nesting tree of their kind) and look down on us with a very distinct indifference. It would not surprise me if they had some sway over my fate (though humans are known to have an undue influence on the fate of all other creatures) What’s clear is that all of us walkers revere them and wait upon their back and forth calls. Hoo hoo hoo, one calls. Hoo hoo, the other answers.

It’s a gift to be in the world. Despite the news of suffering near and far. There is so much beauty. So much ordinary, regular, tree-borne beauty. When I think of all those working to make the world kinder, to save species on the brink of disappearing, to protect human rights in order to ensure the well-being of people of all ages, faiths, colors, sexuality, and creeds, I hope we might be worthy of the Great Horned Owl. May we find it in ourselves to be brave enough to keep standing up in protection of what is tender and true.

Soon, if we’re all lucky enough, the owls will reveal their own fuzzy-headed offspring who will join their parents in looking down at us from the boughs with their uncanny yellow eyes. If the hawks don’t come. If they stay safe (please, please) through storm and rain.

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Do you have a daily ritual to share? One that keeps you connected to a larger goodness. Or smaller one ; ) Do tell! Oh, and this is Pumpkin saying hello.

Danusha

I am obsessed with seeds. Packets of seeds, seed mixes. Non-GMO, open pollinated seeds that can be grown again and again. I keep them in plastic boxes in my fridge equipped with a silica packet. Think index card filing boxes (as a throw-back) but filled with seeds. Few things give me more joy than rifling through them, adding go their number, planting some in those little compostable egg carton-esque flats with seed sprouting mix. They need the right amount of light, a steady temperature, regular watering. They are tender, susceptible to all manner of molds and invisible ailments. They are filled with possibility.

Most are vegetables. I ordered a set that offers up everything from butternut squash to bell peppers and basil. Add in tomatoes and melon, chives and carrots. Plus, I’ve sourced special varies: a set of heirloom tomatoes that includes black krim, red cherry, green zebra. Cherokee purple. Also asparagus, artichoke and radicchio––in pink! (see above) I am beside myself with joy over these seeds. But I am a renter who is liable to move in a few months. Who is still looking for where exactly to settle and not attached to a piece of land I can cultivate over time. I’ve ordered raised beds on wheels. I’m in between.

Meanwhile–––for those in the US ( though not limited to here) –––we face a country in turmoil. We are either out in the streets where we might see a person slammed to the ground, or sitting in bed looking at the news to see a child in blue a bunny-eared hat taken by authorities. This is not a moment of tenderness. It is not a moment when we know what to do with our own tender hearts. Those behaving as if every person who was not born here or who is brown-skinned or who is protecting their friend/neighbor is a criminal, are not answering their better angels.

There have been studies that show that junior high kids who are given a baby to hold score higher on empathy tests afterward. Is that what we need? To hold something or someone helpless for a while? To hold ourselves and each other with tenderness? We are at our best when we when we attend to what is vulnerable. And maybe that’s what I’m trying to do with all these seeds; finding a way to tend, to take care of.

And more than that, finding a way to give my attention to something that can grow and, someday, nourish. I may eat a bell pepper, but it’s not the same as tending the bell pepper and making sure the whole plant thrives. I want our whole plant to thrive. The plant of country, the plant of world. It takes love to grow things.

And that is my hope for us. Not just the seed growing (though that, too) but the hope that we are, even now( and so many of us) sorting through seeds, planting them. Planning a garden and a harvest that will nourish us all.

Pumpkin in Gingko Leaves

Because the world is filled with chaos, and also with really good croissants and also accidents on icy roads, and also peonies, and also split pea soup, and the scent of fresh cut pine trees, I am always finding myself trying to reorient toward something I can keep my sights on. These days it has to do with making sure I am soaking in as much of the season I’m in as I can. Not season of life, so much as the actual calendar season I have lists in my notes app, serious lists, with things like: “eat or make and eat pozole,” or, “get in a canoe and go down a river.” It feels like such a small––and even feeble––attempt at something, but also it feels good to keep these lists and even better to follow them.

The Winter List is how I found myself, with husband and dog, in Freestone (a small town en route to Bodega Bay on the Sonoma coast) at Wild Flour bakery eating an Old World pastry I can’t even describe except the flour was earthy and the pastry had sliced figs. It was raining and we sat on a bench under an awning savoring torn off pieces and watching the rest of the folks in line look at the blackboard above our heads, trying to decide what to eat. We met a young couple on vacation from Florida who were missing their dog and stopped to admire ours. We drank hot tea and watched the rain.

We’ve also found ourselves walking down a trail under the wet, orange leaves of tree cover, watching squirrels hurry upward, occasionally stopping to peek at us, heads poking out horizontally, from behind a trunk. Here’s the truth: I am afraid of missing any of it. What a shame to go through winter without, somehow, wintering. Wintering can be a serious study in bread baking, movie watching and bakery visiting. And also a time of evaluating, taking stock of our lives, while freezing soup stock. It is, despite my love of gardens, my favorite time of year. I love that the world slows and turns inward and I can better focus my attention on books and poems and assessing the drafts I have waiting for me to revise.

And I love that where I live now I can feel the seasons just a little bit more: the cold seems slightly colder, the rain more abundant, and the leaves of the vines hit every note of orange, yellow, and gold. We are, I believe, happiest in season. Meaning we find ourselves when we are, more fully, exactly where we are. And this is what I wish for you and yours as you dip into this darkest still of winter. Before the days lengthen too much more, before we begin another year. Let’s stop and be in this dark together a little while longer, tea in hand.

And here’s a walk with me through Wild Flour’s winter garden.

And I almost forgot to mention that my husband Armando is offering day of reflection to ease us into next year. I will make a poetry cameo! Song of the Self. An online retreat. Another thing I keep meaning to do as I take stock and set out a path for the coming year.

And I’d love to know what’s on your Winter List, if you have one. An actual one or one by tradition. I’m always looking to add to mine!

Stay warm. Get wet. Savor whatever you have to savor. And tell me if you have a signature winter dish you like to cook. I am expanding my repertoire!

xo

Sometimes I wake up and even before I look at my phone or stretch my legs, I get The Dreads. We’ve all had them at some point. And they’re mostly amorphous when they appear. Not prompted by a specific event on the calendar, not yet attuned to the world’s ongoing mayhem, but just below the level of all of these. An electrical current mixed with a tinge of torpor. Not depression. Not acute anxiety. Just The Dreads. There’s a nighttime equivalent that has its own flavor (racing mind, the thought, “why did I say that?” and oddly specific food cravings) But for the purpose of this, I am focused on the morning and The Dreads.

A study of The Dreads has shown me a few things. One, I am likely carrying a burden that is not mine to carry, and two, I have lost confidence in my capacity to enjoy the day. The first can be tricky to address, because we are all so connected and we want to do our part to make a difference. But what is ours to tend is likely a fairly small plot of land. If, for example, we are mindful of where we spend/what we support, make a point of smiling at strangers, and employ our abilities to be in service through well-chosen work, that is probably a reasonable capacity. Few of us are going to walk in the shoes of someone like Martin Luther King Jr. Mostly we are going to muddle through lives that are far more private and affect a much smaller circle. And, in truth, we have no idea who we affect and how.

I am struck by how many of my most memorable and meaningful moments arrived in a way that was so small as to be nearly nonexistent. Did I dream it? Like the time I was at the farmer’s market some years ago––a hot day in July—and was wearing some sort of long diaphanous scarf, as I tend to do. A girl––I’m guessing five years old––took the two ends the fabric in her hands and started to twirl. And I twirled. And we danced this make-shift ballet in between the rows of corn and tomatoes and piled up apricots and no one else even seemed to notice. And when it was done, we curtsied to each other, which was, it turned out, the unspoken but agreed upon protocol for the occasion. I walked on, she rejoined her parents who were a few feet away and that was that.

This is how we hold the world up for each other. It’s small. Sometimes we don’t even know each other’s names. And I think we all have countless events like this. Different details, but same delight. We cannot plan such an event, because it is the opposite of planned. It’s arriving in a moment as ourselves and answering it.

Another time, I was standing in the garden of my family home in the Berkeley hills. We lived way at the top of a peak and it was, in some ways, a bit isolated, even though there were neighbors. And I was a teen-ager and therefore felt inherently alone. One day, looking out over the green hillside, and apparently inspired, I tilted my head back and sang out, as loud as I could, “The hills are alive….” and from somewhere in the lush beyond, someone I could not see sang back, “with the sound of music.” I don’t know how to describe the satisfaction that came with that answering voice.

May we be each other’s answering voices, and may we wake to the possibility that we do not know who we will answer or how. Or, for that matter, who will answer us. But hold, somehow, the possibility of chorus. Of overlapping song.

What is it about fall that makes us think about the past? I think it has to do, at least in part, with harvest. We’re gathering what we’ve planted and tended, the past come back to be held our hands. And it’s also the time of turning under whatever’s gone uneaten, ungathered. It’s the time of year when we might reflect on our choices, on the turns in the road and how we’ve weathered them or been weathered by them.

Often there’s a single thread that holds us, thin as it might seem. What could be more slender than a poem? Dorianne Laux likes to quote Miłosz’s line, “I fashioned an invisible rope, and climbed it and it held me.” The way in which something that seems to be almost nothing can hold us. Even for a lifetime.

And I want to be held now more than ever. Every day I look at the news and it’s a slow-motion parade of macabre absurdities. Cruelty. And every day I wonder what it might look like to live, even to bloom, in the midst of all that.

Right now, it’s drizzling outside and I am at our two-month rental home in West Sonoma County. I’ve eaten a bowl of the chicken soup I made yesterday, with carrots and tiny sungold tomatoes I picked from the garden right outside our window. Earlier today, I gave Pumpkin, my little Havanese dog, a trim, combing through some matted bits of fur or cutting them off. I’m about to put in a load of laundry. Most of life is like this; bits and pieces, talking to a friend on the phone, taking out the recycling.

And somehow holding a piece of ourselves apart, an onlooker that peers in on our lives and keeps noticing. Look––there’s a patch of zinnias right by the front door. And look, a hawk is circling the field. These intimacies with the everyday that give us a sense of life’s continuity and beauty.

Let us keep collecting these, keep gathering. Let this a be a part of our resistance––insistence on what is good and plentiful and true. I include here a poem I wrote in the early part of the pandemic that is its own gathering of sorts. Its own savoring.

Today the Pleasures

By Danusha Laméris

Today the pleasures are too numerous to name.

Walking over the bridge and up the drive

to get the mail, then setting down the packages

to open by the front door, a fat swath of sun

falling against my arm as I open a box

of two slim books, then a box

with blue ink refills for my favorite pen,

one that glides so nicely across the pages

of my grief. All this, I think all this, and also

the broccoli soup I made with bone broth

from last month’s turkey, blended to a creamy green.

Yes, the world is falling down, death taking

a stroll down every street. And yes, it’s getting hotter

by the hour. And still, today the wind

has quieted and the dogs next door announce

their gods, who, so far, keep lifting the sun

and letting down (just enough) rain.

(from Blade by Blade, Copper Canyon Press)

May you gather much to hold dear. May we hold the world in tenderness and remember what tenderness is. And may that remembering––in the long view––save us.

For more about how I hold a space to focus on wonder and the craft of poetry, check out my new community offerings at www.litfieldwriters. com

Scholarships available for anyone who would like to participate in November’s Breaking the Line. Litfield Community membership open through October 10th.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to make a life. A good life. Especially in a world of so much division, a world that seems to have turned itself inside-out. And I’m also thinking about it as someone who’s settling into living somewhere new—the fresh start that comes with that. What does it mean to truly live somewhere? To truly live at all?

I’m tracking the arc of it. First, it involves finding coffee shops and grocery stores, the post office, places we frequent on the regular. Small stuff, I know. But life is mostly that. The small. For example, right now I’m wondering why is there a whole train car inside the same building as this coffee shop where I’m sitting to write this all down? As a newcomer, I am fascinated with novelty, and it's all novelty. At the grocery store it’s “Look at all the olive oil!” Or what’s up with the fancy pots and pans they have at the hardware store. I learn where to sit and stare out a window drinking chai. Where to bring my dog. Where there’s a light breeze in the afternoon. So much to track. But mostly, trying to get down the basics, get my bearings. And it makes me more aware of who and how I want to be as I go about my dailiness: picking up mail from my glass-front drawer at the 1930’s post office, walking Pumpkin across a wooden bridge in the park, getting bread at our new favorite bakery, the one that only fits two customers at a time.

Everything is new. We order at a Mexican restaurant and my husband says, “These are real sopes!” Because the ones we’ve been eating all these years are, it turns out, imposters. These have a thick handmade base that holds a pyramid of toppings, ending in finely chopped lettuce, salsa and queso fresco. Like a tostada but tiny and soft instead of crunchy. This is happiness.

And this is who I want to be: a person who cares about the day, who stops to talk to the cashier, who carries a wisp of hope for the world. A wispy little wisp some days. But all the same. I am trying to notice things. Like the mist that rests on the tree line in the evenings, or the hawks making their wide arc over the dry fields.

Then I watch the news because I am not trying to be in the dark. Push me, pull me. Back and forth. How much can we, as a world, make something new? How can we surprise ourselves with something better than what we have? Through the window of the cafe is a wall of ivy, blowing a little in the wind. It’s easy to fall in love again––with greenery, with the sound of the espresso machine blaring in the background, and music I can hardly hear the lyrics to, but that sounds like home.

Well, I can hardly believe it but here I am looking out the car passenger side window at whole new worlds, learning new street names, the names of unfamiliar trees and flowers. Even though I grew up near here for a time, spent my early childhood years in Mill Valley, about an hour south of the wildness of West Sonoma County. And I am bewildered, a little, by my––and my husband’s––new scenery, but also by our willingness to make a sudden change after over three decades in Santa Cruz.

But the thing is this: nothing is stagnant. All the parts keep moving around on the board. Our beloved small town has gotten a lot bigger and is clogged with traffic and new builds. And anyway, we are less apt to go out at night and more likely to likely to stay in with our dog, Pumpkin. And Armando’s job started crumbling under the weight of this current moment in terms of funding for social services. Why not move somewhere smaller with less of a carnival going on each night and more crickets and warm evenings and country roads we don’t know yet.

So, that’s what we did. Moved in a month. It was heinous. That’s the only word I can think of. Even though we didn’t do the literal heavy lifting, a month filling boxes and putting away nearly everything you own is still a month without much leisure, and one with a lot of neck pain and sore arms. Unless you’ve already gone full minimalist with is not how anyone with hundreds of books and an obsession with ceramics can describe themselves. No indeed. So that stuff’s in storage and we’re in in a temporary furnished place trying out bakeries and backroads and eating ice cream and sitting down to work at our desks and settling into something like a routine. Thank god!!

And this is a very down home note just to let you know what’s going on now that I have a place to write and a spare moment to catch you up. And I think what I want to say about all this madness is that I’m grateful to be on a new adventure and that I love the way it’s slowed me down (everything is a little slower here) and made me want to spend more time just looking around and listening to the sounds at night and learning the names of what grows.

Yours,

Danusha

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Some years ago I was in conversation with the poet and essayist Ross Gay. I remember reflecting that he writes about the “roughness of joy,” a phrase I had not thought of until that moment and which he received in his affable, and affirmative way. “Yes! That,” or some such exclamation. And since then, I’ve had many an occasion to think about how joy can be accompanied by roughness. Like right now in so many parts of the world, including the US, where  the tenderness of human life is held, again and again in the balance, along with so many of our deepest values. Where every day we wake to some other unimaginable unfoldment. And yet, we must still do days, and do them in a way that is not bound up entirely in hopelessness or anger or grief. I think a lot about days since they are the main increment I can manage. Not more, for sure. A day. Nice and round as a boiled egg. 

In fact, I have a list for day management! And I am going to allow you into my private lair for a moment to see how I bring joy to roughness. Your list would look different. Or similar. And don’t think I have the time for these things every day! I wish. I am just glad when I am able to land on a few of them and thereby replenish my quickly depleted stores of peace of mind, calm, and general well-being. 

At the end of the day, I look back and see which of the following I’ve spent time with. This is just a sample, there are more. 

Did I:

Spend some time in nature, whether at the harbor, the dog park, in the forest. Or maybe the garden, pruning roses, watering. 

Bake something. Anything. Green tea cookies, a packet of Trader Joe’s Blondies (so good!) And yes, baking is somehow different from cooking. Cooking is essential. Baking is only for joy.

Hang out with my dog (the answer is always yes, so that one’s easy) Dogs need a lot of things: Food, walks, brushing, bathing, playing with (in our case) a stuffed bunny. These things take time and energy away from worry and trouble.

Get enough sleep. So much goes into this as anyone over thirty knows. Sleep becomes increasingly elusive for most of us. Odd. Interrupted. Almost frightening when you’ve fallen out of its graces. To this end I make sure to make my bed with comfortable layers, drink a mineral supplement before bed, and not watch anything violent or disturbing such as––Oh I don’t know—the news!

Take a moment to drink a cup of tea. Like, really drink a cup of tea. Stop everything and savor. This, to me, is one of the first and most essential signs of civilization.

Write! That is, of course, one of the biggest ones. Some of the roughest joy I ever found was writing in a small notebook perched over my baby’s head while holding him in my arms the hospital. A feat of balance, but It kept me sane in the darkest days. 

When we practice our art, whatever it is, we also become more of ourselves. We gain territory, expand. What is your art? It could be parenting, painting, tending your business, your poems, your plants.

So I will leave you with that as I venture north to teach at Pacific University’s MFA program til the end of the month. I know we'll be so immersed, I’ll barely lift my head from the bubble we’ll be living in: poems, poems and poems!  But I am remembering how many times poetry has saved me. Baking a loaf of bread has saved me. Talking to a friend. I think of my list as a list from times of fullness, but also, and maybe more importantly, for times of emptiness. A list to get through days with some joy. Rough as it may be.

What saves you? Let’s build a collective list!

And if you’d like to know more of what I’m up to and offering these days in terms of writing classes and community, go to www.litfieldwriters.com and get on our mailing list! We’re filling up our summer class and closing in on the founding members in our Litfield community between now and July 1st. I’ll be on the road as I said—but looking forward to reconnecting soon. One way or another.

Still Life with Fruits, by Emilie Preyer

When I was a kid I loved watching Mork and Mindy. Robin Williams as Mork in full-on 70’s regalia and rainbow suspenders, Pam Dawber as Mindy explaining Earth to her new alien acquaintance. All of that. But mostly, Mork from Ork’s weekly check in with his home planet. He’d describe the take-aways from his most recent learning experiences (i.e. problems) and his supervisor, Orson, would listen, often with wry disappointment.

And now, in my head, I have my own imaginary check in. Probably more than weekly. A place where I go to examine my day or week, or more and see what it is I’m trying to figure out. And usually, when I realize something important, it’s something I’ve realized before, but forgotten. Which is frustrating. I suppose that’s one reason people get tattoos, but I am not, as I like to say, a “body modifier.” I kind of wish I were because I love the idea of printing important reminders on your own flesh so you can’t just lose them the way you would a set of keys.

So how else to keep our hard-earned wisdom? I am trying to write mine down, either like this, or in a poem, on my phone. Wherever I can manage. But so often, those notes mean little compared to an inner, felt sense of what matters and why. The souls is a slippery thing, and very exact in its measures. At least, so far as I can tell. It likes nouns: gate, tulip, grape, elbow, mollusk, arch, flame. The things that draw us to the world of the moment. And isn’t every moment a world? Look at a baby discovering their own feet. The pure thrill of having toes. Who could imagine something more surprising?

And it––the soul–– likes that we live in moments, and cares how. That is the most I can figure out. When I remember to remember, through all the dailiness of laundry, and emails and deadlines and worry about the horrors of world. Through the sorrow of the past, collectively and my own. Through sudden floods and tornado warnings. Through earthquakes and illness. Through all of that––if I can pick a few flowers and put them in a vase. If I can talk to an old friend on the phone. If I can make a soup. If I can curl up with my beloved as I fall asleep. Then, just maybe I am living, at least pertly, in time, rather than only on time. Being inside it instead of racing through it.

I say this from the darkest place I know. I say this as someone who has waited for the worst to happen, then watched it happen. I say this to my younger self who could not imagine outliving a brother, a son. Then did. I say this to the self who still struggles to find a solid place to hold onto. “Don’t hold on,” I tell her. And, if only for a moment––a moment that feels like a small implosion––I put down the weight of that carrying, drop my shoulders and I’m free, unencumbered, alive in time.

And for more about what I’m up to at this time or ny other, go to www.litfieldwriters.com

The Goldfish Window. Childe Hassam, 1916

So lately what I’m doing is making a list––an actual list––of the things I want to experience more of. As in, what I want more of for myself, but also for the world. For example: I would like to have more roses in my life. I grow some roses in pots (we rent our place in Santa Cruz), and there are lots of other roses in the garden. I look at roses at the garden center, put cut roses in vases around the house. Roses, roses, roses. The Lady of Shalott, The Lady Gardener, The Poet’s Wife. A minor antidote to the general madness and cruelty we are seeing so much of. But still. I want more roses for all of us, and more time to think about what brings us joy.

I walk down to the ocean and think: more ocean, more beach. It’s so good to see the world doing what it does, as in making beauty. The seagulls duck and float on the wind. The sand forms in mounds and whorls around the tide line. Seaweed makes a kind of abstract, sinewy art, a purple, chartreuse muddle that attracts the dog to go and sniff its wonders.

I spend time with writers and think: more of this. More spending time talking about poems. About the music writing is. About the oddities of the mind. About line breaks and syntax and surprise.

And then I want time on my own to read and think about the long history of cultivating flowers. About the way fungi communicate underground across a great distance. About the mountain lions hunting in the dark hills.

I want things. I want to experience things. I remember, years ago, when I had a baby who was in the hospital a lot, it was hard to want anything. Anything other than my baby healthy and out of the hospital. Once, I remember thinking I wanted a pair of cowboy boots and that felt good, but bad at the same time. How dare I want anything else. And now that the world is showing us its underbelly––the violence, the greed. All the things. I can feel the same way about wanting.

Except too many years have passed and too few are left, in any given life. I have realized wanting is powerful. And I want time. Time to write, to walk through the woods, to eat a slow brunch, my dog in my lap, my husband across the table. I want to sip a cool hibiscus iced tea made with lemon and honey. I want to savor everything I can.

And I want to savor it with others who are savoring alongside me. I want to write more and to learn about the natural world. So many of us want the same things: to reconnect to life through simplicity and awe. To make something meaningful and beautiful. To stay in a place of curiosity and wonder.

And I have a new venture in which I am creating more of all of the above. I want to tell you about my new venture––but this is a post about wanting and I want you to think about making a list of your wants, too. Yes. You can think about beauty and joy and making. Even now. In fact, tending what we want to experience more of is a good way to keep our souls alert and awake. And, while we’re at it, the soul of the world, too.

For more about the new venture, go to: www.Litfieldwriters.com

And for more of your own joy, go to a window or just look up at the sky from wherever you are for a moment. Really look. And take it in.

In these days when here in the US we are revisiting so much around what we value as a society, I’ve been thinking about why we make art, how it shapes us. I just came back from Santa Fe, New Mexico where so much seems to be about making. There is a hill dedicated to museums, a street full of galleries, and a style of architecture that defines the entire area, a style rooted in a long history of indigenous dwellings. Santa Fe has existed for over four hundred years post-colonization and was already the site of a Tanoan Indian village long before then. A long time to cultivate beauty and ways of being.

And right now, with funding for the arts imperiled, and the NEA withdrawing grants to artists around the country––dance troupes, art enrichment for school children, poetry projects––all the kinds of things these grants are made to support, we’re in a moment of remembering why art matters.

To me, the act of making art is one of the ways in which human beings create reciprocity. We are given the worlds as it is, with all its challenges and moments of grace, all its sorrows and beauty, and, in return, we can offer our making. We can take hours to interpret an arrangement of leaves and flowers and offer that to others. We can slow time in a poem, make a mirror of our decades of lived experience. We can sing, and, like a woman I once met, attract a pod of whales to come and listen. The world is filled with wonders, and the soul of art allows us to make an offering to wonder. When I think about the process of writing a poem, I often think of this quote by Emily Brontë, from Wuthering Heights:

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”

Indeed. The mind alters when making. We are asked to see the world anew, to observe it as it is, but also to wonder, and that wondering can lead us into possibility. And, as Albert Einstein said:

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day.”

I hope we will keep reminding each other to attend to mystery, to beauty. I hope we will keep reminding ourselves, and that we will build a world that remembers art is an opportunity to be more of ourselves and to give beauty to a world of beauty, a world that gives us so much every day.

Diorama, Sante Fe Museum of Internation Folk Art

Image of a diorama from the Santa Fe International Museum of Folk Art

“Raise your hand if you used to think most things in your life would truly get resolved,” I heard myself saying to an audience at a reading recently. Hands went up. We laughed. Not that nothing gets resolved. I mean, sometimes I have a false charge on my bank statement and get it removed. Satisfying and irritating at the same time. But most of the big things linger. Anyone who’s a had a romantic relationship that’s ended knows this. Most leave a trace. Even if you’d never want to be with that person again, you might have regrets, or a feeling of what you wish might have gone differently. People and things that make an impression make us pay attention to the story enough that we contemplate possible outcomes.

I thought about how in music there’s a tonic note, the one that makes the melody feel complete, resolved. According to Google, “the tonic is the fundamental or home note of a key or scale, serving as the primary point of stability and resolution. It's the first note in the scale and often the note the music will end on. The tonic is considered the most important note in a key and is the name of the scale itself.”

And yet, we so seldom experience its equivalent here in the wilds of actual life. Things begin. They end. Sometimes chaotically. Especially our lives. I wrote a poem about this some years ago, inspired the woman I mention in the first stanza. Here it is:

Corpse Pose

Lying on the floor, I think of a woman I know

whose ailing father came to her house to die,

but kept on living. He’d putter around the house,

fix the refrigerator, tinker with the water heater,

patch the peeling plaster in the kitchen.

And though he suffered—was in pain—there always

seemed to be something else to do. Dad, she said,

after months of hearing him complain,

why don’t you try lying down? Which did the trick.

He took to bed and soon he was gone.

I’d always imagined the end a symphony—

a crescendo, the conductor’s arms raised

in that elegant, final pause. But now I see

how little gets resolved. The ceiling leaks,

the novel sits in a drawer, unfinished. And desire,

that constant companion, keeps tossing us

another bone. Like when a woman

told my friend, who was on his deathbed,

that she’d always had a crush on him.

Me, too, he said, (and after a pause),

funny we should mention it now.

True stories! Both of them. The woman with the dying father and the woman with a crush. Somehow, both struck me as funny, in a slightly twisted way. The near-joke of suggesting that a dying person lie down to accelerate the process, followed by the controlled understatement of the other dying man’s observation. (I should mention here that he was English, so that you get the full sense of tone) Awkward, funny, deeply ironic. How simple things are. Or should be. And yet we complicate our lives beyond the most basic impulses, lose sight of the truth that is right in front of us.

When I asked the listeners the question about resolution, I riffed a bit and found myself saying, “Maybe there is no tonic note. We can strive to become the tonic note ourselves. That’s the closest we get.” And instead of feeling sad, I felt hopeful. At least it’s something I can practice. I can’t stop someone from yelling at me, say, but I can take a deep breath. I can’t finish everything in my to do box every day, but I can check off a few items, have a bath and call it a night, then look back over my life and see its ragged edges, knowing they’re just about as ragged as they should be.

www.danushalameris.com for upcoming classes

I thought, in the name of reflecting on this bigger question about revision, I‘d have us look at a draft of one of my poems I found in a filing box this past month where it has been sitting for some years. It’s the first draft of the poem, Small Kindnesses,” which I wrote in 2017.

Let’s take a look together, and then I will point out the changes I made before the final draft.

Can I say I just love the torn edge of the notebook paper? Probably the art student/stationary geek in me, but I love to see that. Here is how that section reads in the final poem:

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile

at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress

to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

So, first of all, I can see that I started out in a very similar way, making minor changes in style and wording. For example, I changed, “people will pull in their legs so as not to trip you,” to, “people pull in their legs to let you by.” Less awkward, which is certainly one of the main things I look for on a first pass at editing.

In the next bit, the part about people saying “bless you” when someone sneezes, I notice that the reference to death is absent. Instead, it says “in public,” another unnecessary phrase. I don’t remember how I edited that part, but I know I tend to go back and look for the shadow that is underneath whatever I’m writing about. In this case, the phrase bless you carried the shadow of the plague, and so I put that in. On a side note, I wrote this before the Covid 19 pandemic and so that reference was not a nod to the pandemic we lived through soon after.

I changed “Mostly we don’t want to hurt each other,” to “Mostly we don’t want to harm each other.” Not sure why, but I suppose hurt has a more physical connotation and harm a more general one. At least in my thinking. And maybe it’s also a little more difficult to embrace. Sure–––we don’t want to hurt each other physically. But could it be true that for the most part, we don’t want to cause harm? The world is––and was then––divided enough to make this a place I needed to pause.

Then I see some adding of what I refer to as texture: I added lemons and the kind of soup the waitress was serving and described the car that stopped. Someone later mentioned to me that the poem is full of Americana: a diner, a red pickup, clam chowder. And though that wasn’t intentional, it’s true, and I like that about the poem. It’s often the accidents we feel most pleased with because we had nothing much to do with them! At least not consciously.

Did I mention the time between the first and final draft was a couple of hours? I should mention that because often drafts are spread out over years. This was not that kind of process. I’m almost embarrassed to say I posted the poem on social media when I wrote it as a message to my friends–––and then I kept editing the post!!! First and last time I wrote a poem that way, but there you have it. It was in better shape than this draft when I posted it. The stuff about gravity and God was already out, and the simplified version was in place. I remember handing it to my husband, Armando, to read and he said he liked it but wasn’t sure about the hat bit at the end. I said, “I know what you mean,” but kept it anyways.

We have so little of each other, now. So far

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

In any given life, so much can benefit from revision. We revise where we live, who we spend time with, what we do with our time. Sometimes all of the above. And on the page, as in life, we might benefit from reconsidering what we value and how to be as true to ourselves as we can be, even when that truth is a little quirkily, at the edge of sentimental, or flat-out strange. That’s the great adventure after all: being our fullest selves in the midst of all the other voices and pressures we face. And every time we sit down to write we have another opportunity to do just that.

I hope this was a fun walk through the park of the poem and my process of rewriting it. Let me know if you‘d like to know more about how I revise––– or anything else you might like to hear about my writing process. I had fun reminiscing. Wishing you writing that brings you the news of your deeper life and helps hold you true to it.

Til next time!

Danusha

And as always, if you’d like to know more about upcoming classes, go to www.danushalameris.com

The thing about a poem is it asks us to slow down. For the time it takes to read it, yes, but also to move through time in a way that’s different from that to which we’ve probably become accustomed. When I read a poem I like, I am savoring. I am savoring the language, the turns, the small moments of surprise and recognition. I am savoring the way it opens up the world and makes it new. When, in “Fungus on Fallen Alder at Lookout Creek,” Ellen Bass describes the color of the fungus’ scalloped edge as:

ivory, then a tweedy russet,
then mouse gray, a crescent
of celadon velvet, a streak of sleek seal brown,
a dark arc of copper, then butter,
then celadon again, again butter, again
copper and on into the center, striped thinner
and thinner to the green, green moss-furry heart.

…I am beside myself. I didn’t know so much opulence, so much extravagant beauty could exist on the edge of a fungus, that, as Bass tells us, will soon be washed away in the next winter storm. Butter, copper, velvet. A green, moss-furry heart. Sumptuous is the word I’m looking for, a word I’ve never before associated with a fungus, but now I do. Not only in the slowed-down moment of reading the poem, but also in the years since. Impossible not to see the thin stripes as a velvet flounce of a skirt’s hem, as she describes it earlier in the poem.

It's good to be in the world. At least so much of the time. In the actual moments of it. Especially the moments of the body: the deep looking, the studied seeing, the moments we catch, on the wind, a whiff a flower we can almost name.

A good poem invites us back into the world and rewards us with fresh seeing. Often, we write to find our way back to ourselves. When I think of how to replenish myself in these difficult days for our world, I think of some lines from my poem, “Stone,” written many years ago.

Isn’t this what the mystics meant

when they spoke of forsaking the world? Not to turn our backs to it,

only to its elaborate plots, its complicated pleasures—

in favor of the pine’s long shadow, the slow song of the grass.

Or, as it were, the ruffled edge of a fungus growing on a fallen alder tree. May you find fresh pleasures in the ordinary. And poems to take you there.

Note: Bass’s poem is from her book, Indigo, and mine is from Bonfire Opera

Craft? What is it. Sounds like raft, something that might carry us across the sea. And even though I know it means in poetry world––line breaks, metaphor, syntax, and so forth––I have come to see it as a kind of vessel, one that carries me into new territory of myself, and of the world. Crafting a poem has the potential to change me, or at least the way I see something, even if only in the most microscopic way. It came up today when I was visiting the lovely Laurie Wagner’s writing community and talking about how we know when a poem is finished. While I have a mental checklist I might go down–––looking at form, line length/breaks, volta, etc.––asking myself what’s working and what isn’t, I am just as aware of asking myself: has this poem changed me, yet?

Horace said “No Surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” a sentiment echoed thousands of years later by Robert Frost. I would add, “No change in the writer, no change in the reader.” And isn’t that what we’re really wanting? To be altered in some way?

When we are working on a poem, we have the potential to craft ourselves. It was William Butler Yeats who said:

The friends that have it I do wrong
Whenever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.

There is a certain satisfaction on writing about something I fear or dislike until I am almost persuaded into a state of liking. Or of writing a poem about a mistake I made until I can touch the hem of self-forgiveness. Or maybe writing about hopelessness until it turns into something in the neighborhood of hope. We are all facing things (and need I say especially now?) that are difficult and that ask us to find our way to something near acceptance, or even survival.

I love these lines from Jane Hirshfield’s poem, “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

So plainly and perfectly said. The world asks more of us and we give it. It is asking that even now. And I find myself reaching for lines like these that may have carried one poet to deeper understanding and acceptance, to carry me there as well.

If you’d like to learn more about my upcoming classes go to: www.danushalameris.com

And for classes by other writers: www.litfieldwriters.com

Well, I’m back home and in the saddle after ten-day residency in the Pacific Northwest. Seaside, Oregon, winter home of the Pacific University MFA Program, where I have the privilege of working with poets as they make their way through a two-year study, ending with a thesis project that resembles a manuscript. It’s a full two years, packed with reading lists and first drafts, filed with attempts to say, once again, the unsayable. I see students going through all the winding paths of the writing labyrinth: self-doubt to discovery, from taking copious notes to letting go into the process, abandoning the rules and structures to move toward something new and inexplicable.

It's a pleasure to see and to relive as I watch them. It’s also a comfort to know there is a kind of pattern to it. For example, when I see a poet feeling particularly insecure about—even truly terrible about their work––it’s often because they’re in the middle of a breakthrough. I’m not sure why it’s that way, but that’s how it is. Maybe because a breakthrough means we’re no longer standing on familiar ground. Everything feels unfamiliar and uncertain. And usually they’re surprised to hear my diagnosis because they just think they’ve lost the ability to write. Why does progress so often feel like a step back? Or even include a step back. I remember that from working at a preschool in my twenties. As soon as a kid gained a new skill, they’d regress in another arena. We’re funny creatures. Two steps forward, one step back.

And so, sometimes when I’m aiming for a breakthrough on purpose, I try and see how I can lose my bearings a bit, see the world in an unfamiliar way. One of the ways I do that on the page is by playing with scale. Seeing the enormous as small, the small as giant. Anything to disorient myself into a new point of view.

Demodex Folliculorum (this lives on your face : )

And I think we need that now more than ever. New ways of seeing ourselves in the context of the whole: the history of humanity, our place in the solar system, in the long parade of the human and more than human worlds. We need wonder. And, perhaps, it needs us. Needs us to remember there is magic in the every day, in our potential, in the long arc of our story.

Now mind you, we need many other things, too, in these challenging times, but I believe one of the first things we can do is move with wonder, move with grace. With attention.

And for those of you who feel moved to come on a journey into the cosmos (micro and macro) with me, I hope you’ll join me for a class I’m teaching in March called Small Worlds, Infinite Universe: Seeing Through the Lens of Scale.

More info here: https://danusha-lameris.mykajabi.com/store

Sundays, online and recorded, as usual.

And whether of not you come along for the class, I hope you’re gentle with your own steps ahead and back. And that we may all hold not some hope for the world to move forward with us. A step at a time.

Yours,

Danusha

One of the things that has always amazed me is how humans made boats out of carved trees and set out to the vast, unruly sea, following the stars. How could they trust the stars to carry them across such an unknown expanse and especially in the dark? And what about traveling by day when the stars were not visible. They had only a compass to go by. A small thing, possible to hold in the palm of the hand, with a wand that wavered, pointed true north.

I don’t know how we travel through our lives. We are always in some kind of darkness. The unknown sea surrounds us. What to study in college to where to live, who to marry. Whether or not to have kids. Who to trust with your most vulnerable self. What medical treatment to accept, if any. Never mind what to eat and where to live. North. East. South. West. Oh, the abundance of choices. I have no idea how we do it.

I have tried it all. Making charts and plans. Winging it. Back to charting. And so forth. It seems to be a daily–––or at least weekly––necessity, this assessing. Is this working for me? Am I happy? What would I change if I could change something?

Napoleon Bonaparte said, “Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.” Yes! This: the difficulty and also the importance. We who have choice are fortunate. Privileged.

And yet, no one has total choice. Things happen we cannot control. Our lives are hemmed in and defined by so many variables in any given moment.

Nelson Mandela said, “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” Well, amen to that. We want, at least, to chart a path we care about.

More and more I am coming up with my own rubric. Some combination of good old-fashioned logic, and a drive toward more freedom, more joy, and more expression. The thing about stars is that they emit light. I try to hone in on the things that emit light for me: Writing has been that for me in the arena of vocation. A dog, in the arena of animals. A husband in the arena of relationship. (And specifically, the current dog and husband iterations, I might add ; )

But I also have a growing sense that life itself has a say in the matter, in the project of charting. If I had to say, I’d say it leans toward growth. Likes challenge. Not only happiness as we ourselves might define it. But the joy that comes with climbing a mountain, standing up and speaking in front of an audience, starting a non-profit, daring to reach out and make new friends. Things that may push us to our limits. Life seems to like that. And by life I mean us. All of us. We seem to thrive from attempting things we didn’t think we could do. Even the dog, (to return to a favorite subject) likes when we set up obstacles for her to overcome. Hurdles. Hidden toys. New stairs up to the couch.

So here’s to taking a moment to look back at all the things we’ve done that maybe felt impossible a year or two––or decade––ago. And also to take some time to be bold, sit down with a notebook and pen, imagine what we might do next.

And if you’re up for more writing, check out my upcoming classes at www.danushalameris.com. One more spot in my 12 person class for February. And another, larger webinar, coming soon! Meanwhile, happy writing.

Well, what days we live in. The news is rough and has been rough, something that plays out in so many ways. I’ll get through this first part quickly: It’s four days after the election and I just experienced the first round of post-election hate speech, a Zoom bomber repeating an epithet I don’t need to name here. Only to say that certain factions feel emboldened in their hatred. I was struck by how badly I wanted the tirade to end, but also by how the language of belittling rolled over me somehow, and back into the soil, ready to be broken down into humus, feed plants, become new. At least that was what came to me. I could see it cycling back into the ecosystem. My host, who stopped what was happening while I logged off, then back onto the call, was lovely and also apologetic. “No need,” I said, “We all know the world we’re living in.”

I felt mostly unscathed. But even more than that, I felt the rightness of coming together and sharing poems, now and always. But especially now. The group stayed the course, sharing some of their own work at the open mic, or work by poets they admired. The poet Lana Hechtman Ayers read Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Shoulders,” which I will share with you here.

Shoulders

Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

(from Red Suitcase)

And I saw how we were sheltering each other with words, how sharing poems is like building a house together that we can live in. Same with art. Same with music. Same with planting a garden. Same with so many things.

What do you do that builds a kind of house? Who do you want to share it with? Who builds a house that offers you solace and warmth?

I don’t ask lightly. I ask because our joy depends on it. Yours and mine. And because tending each other and tending our deep joy is a part of survival. Not just ours as individuals, but the world’s.

So thank you for all the things you do to make a space for each other, to honor each other, to carry forth some small light and build a house around it. We need you.

And that twelve-year-old me can’t help but pine to get back to the classroom, back to the rickety seats and smell of chalk dust. Even though that’s a lost world. Even though I don’t really want to go all the way back there. But I DO want to be in class still, and to be immersed in some subject I adore. Like poetry, for example. And, especially now, I want to spend the fall with like-minded friends who love what I love. Friends who may listen to the news, but then want to attend to the threads that connect us all, those deeper ties.

I am excited to say that I will be doing exactly that! Poet and memoirist Maggie Smith and I will be co-teaching an online class in October. We’ll meet every Sunday from 4-5:30 Pacific Time (7-8:30 Eastern), exploring what it is to write poems that celebrate life as it is.

We love a poem of praise, but love it best when it nods—or bows—to difficulty. We want the poem to mirror our real lives: the beauty and wonder, yes, but also the difficulty and loss. 

Together we’ll spend four online sessions exploring poems that ferry us across rough seas, a lantern in hand. Each Sunday will include a craft discussion of some of our favorite poems, a Q&A period, and an in-class writing session. Participants will receive packets of the poems and prompts we feature in class. Together we’ll develop new strategies we can apply to existing drafts and to brand-new work, and we’ll build creative momentum to carry forward into our own writing practices.

Get unstuck. Gather in community. And join us!

We look forward to seeing you there!

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