Welcome to Fleeting Temples

How I Got Here

Dear Reader,

I am grateful to have this little bit of real estate in which to share with you. I hope this will be a place where I can offer a window into my process as a poet, and into the genesis of some of the writing. And more importantly, a place for you, too, to stop a moment and listen, ear to the ground, to what your life is telling you.

I was that kid who, at seven, announced to my mother that I was going to be a writer. (I also told her that I was only going to wear sarees…: ) I was at least partly right! But the actual path was much more convoluted than I expected. In college, I studied Art History, thinking maybe I could combine a love of art with a gallery/museum paycheck. Then, I found I was jealous of everyone who got to make the art (!!!), so I studied painting. Somewhere in there I got into an AP writing class, but the teacher (a renowned poet) left mid-semester to hang out with jazz musicians. OK, they included Miles Davis. But still…that put me off the scent of writing poetry for some time.

Then, I found a writing workshop right across town in the home of poet Ellen Bass and signed up for that while I kept painting. Meanwhile I had a baby, a son with mysterious chromosomes, who would never walk, talk, or eat on his own, who had the biggest, brownest eyes I’d ever seen. Lovely as he was, I was now

a stay-at-home mom of a child with intense medical needs. I kept writing, sometimes on little pads of paper in the halls of the hospital when he was in the ICU, post-seizure.

None of this is what I had pictured when I’d said I’d be a writer. Or a mother, for that matter. Somehow, we imagine things in their Platonic form, some ideal that hovers above, or behind, the actual human life. But it was the actual experience of being a flawed human in a flawed and challenging life that led me back to writing. What was I trying to find? I’m not sure. I suppose, like everyone, I wanted to make sense of things I wanted to know why the things I dreamt of went so differently from how I imagined. Let’s bear in mind that I’m from California, land of Creative Visualization, of being able to manifest what you want.

My marriage dissolved. I lost my home, and then my brother, who had always been one of my closest friends, had a mental break. Within a few years, he would die by suicide. I need not tell you I was near dizzy from the series of losses, that I was pushed about as far as I could go. But I want to say the pen has been faithful. Paper has been steadfast. Ink, too, has been plentiful. While I have not been able to control the world around me, I have been able to write about it. To put things down in a language that is elastic and malleable. To move words around on a surface, making new meanings. That now, even though I know how it sounds, I have to say I would not change the story. It has too much texture to it, too many rough places and smooth. Too much hidden beauty to ever want to erase it all.

So, wherever you are, I bless you and the paper (or screen) on which you place your own, imperfect life. On which you offer your own brokenness. I am so grateful we get to do this together, to make this mosaic of shards. What a lucky and unexpected life.

A moment from tonight’s beach walk…thank you for walking with me.