More of a saint than we knew

Click the headline above to read the Time article about what might be Mother Teresa's greatest act of devotion: the unwavering offering of her life, love and service to the work of God long decades after any sense of His love or presence graced her life. As if her work was not already demanding enough, God took away the perks. Despite the deep anguish of her loss she remained faithful to the end, to her calling and to the One who called, and countless people have been blessed by her life. Are still being blessed. What a counterweight to so much that parades as faith in American "bless me" spirituality. Well done, Saint of the Gutters, well done.

Seasons turning

Only yesterday the girls were dismissed at noon for another heat day. Their school has no A/C so when temperatures hit the high 90's, as they have for the last two weeks, school lets out early. But this morning I noticed the leaves already turning. I nursed these blooms through the beastly heat of summer but they won't last too much longer and my colorful sanctuary where I enjoy coffee after the girls have left for school and before the day kicks into high gear will abandon me til spring. I hope the tomatoes I planted late from seeds I picked up at Target's dollar aisle yield a few rounds before the cold comes. They'll go well with my basil, the first joyous thing I planted.

Happy Birthdays

Sunday was a day for birthdays: mine, my 102 year old grandad and, apparently, our new cat. Hayley typeset this by herself on the computer, hand illustrated it and then posted it on the kitchen door after she determined Libbles needed a celebration, too. Perhaps we have another burgeoning graphic designer in the family.

Another article on Wayne's Work!

Today's Missourian features a great article on Wayne and his work. Click the headline above for the link to the online version.

We've been adopted

Must be a sign of acclimation: finding yourself stunned when the creature that emerges from your bushes is not a deer, fox, owl, coyote, turkey, turtle, snake, raccoon or rabbit, but an ordinary kitty cat. Our neighbors are all dog people and I don't think I've seen a cat since we moved to Missouri. I was surprised at how surprised I was to see one wander up--as surprised as spotting a buck crossing Shepherd Ave. in Houston.

Our agreement with the girls was this: no pets for the first year, then we'll think about it. Minature donkeys, sheep, fish, birds, dogs and guinea pigs have all been mentioned as candidates. The only animals not under consideration were cats as I'm extremely allergic to them. Although my kids might prefer to trade me in for one that is not currently an option. So, here we are, waaaay over one year later and no pet in sight. The excuse of summer travel has expired. And then here comes kitty, right to our door. She ran away when she saw me, then paused and reconsidered. I slowly coaxed her back and up the stairs of the deck to where I stood. She was very thin so I told her to wait while I ran in the house and rummaged for something to feed her, some Clifford cereal which she devoured despite it's affiliation with a big, red dog. She then inhaled the tuna I remembered in the pantry which may be the reason she's remained here ever since. Here's the cool thing: she's one of those cats that are like dogs--affectionate as a puppy. A catdog. She likes people. She's an outdoor cat so if I wash my hands after I pet her, no harm done. She's perfect for us. Where did she come from? I suspect someone got really tired of waiting for mom and dad to deliver and decided to go over our heads. I certainly hope it's not the last time.

Reentry

Although mid-Missouri is not mentioned in Beldon Lane's "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes; Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality", one of the books I picked up from Eighth Day Books at the Glen, upon my return from 80 degree Santa Fe to a car reading 108, I had to wonder which landscape is fiercer. That, the fact I'd inadvertently parked in the most expensive short-term lot when I left resulting in parking fees rivaling my plane ticket and the dead car battery that greeted me on arrival seemed a fitting re-entry into the fierce landscape I now call home. The desert was a walk in the park.

But between the lost luggage on the front end and the dead battery on the back end, the week at the Glen was immensely rewarding. Having attended the year before for the first time, I had the pleasure of arriving to some now familiar faces. There were 5 of us who returned from Scott Cairns' workshop last year and though none of us were in the same workshop this time, we caught up with each other at the various events and around the bountiful cafeteria tables of St. John's College. Scott, my workshop leader last year and recent new neighbor in Columbia, was back again with his family, as well as his brother, sister-in-law and nephew who, the last morning over breakfast, appointed me an honorary member of the Cairns clan, dubbing me Fiona, and privileging me to all future family reunions.

The workshop I attended this time was led by Daniel Tobin of Emerson College from my old stomping grounds in Boston. 14 first time Glen attendees of various levels of experience contributed to one of the best workshop environments I've had the pleasure to experience. There was a great spirit of camaraderie and encouragement alongside meaningful critique. Dan's wife Christine Casson, also a poet at Emerson with her first book "After the First World" coming out this January from Star Cloud Press, did not attend the workshop but joined our class after Dan's Wednesday night reading for a post-reading gabfest which surveyed everything from the X-files to Coney Island to the Monkees. She's one of those people you feel like you've known forever after a conversation or two. I hope Dan and Christine are back next year but regardless, I count them new friends and plan to keep in touch.


Just days before I left for Santa Fe, my former (and first) boss out of college called from Massachusetts. He's since given up his design firm to become a full time photographer and wanted to send me an invite to some of his upcoming shows. When he learned I was bound for Santa Fe, he insisted I contact HIS first boss, then at Polaroid and now back home in Santa Fe and running the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, which I did and received a personal guided tour of a fabulous collection of antique and contemporary Spanish religious art. The museum is part of Museum Hill, in walking distance from the campus I stayed at. Another one of those treasured little serendipities of life.


On our day off I opted to forgo a return to Taos and Chimayo for something a bit more off the beaten path. At events like this I become so over stimulated by the plethora of input: from landscape to conversations to book browsing to seminars that I can't wind down to sleep or rest and end up blathering on maniacally like a character stuck in a Dostoevsky novel. So Kristina from my workshop who also craved some quiet and I headed to Bandelier National Monument and spent most of the car ride and the ensuing hike in much needed silence.

Although we'd decided to hike alone, it was hard to avoid each other on the one main trail so we ended up walking along together much of the way. Good thing, too, as my worst phobic nightmare greeted me on arrival in the park: along with the park map, the ranger handed me a flyer warning of RECENT BEAR ACTIVITY. And where was the bear activity? On the one main trail, at the Alcove House at the end of the trail, and the picnic area. Which left no area where the bear activity had NOT been. A stop in the bathroom before setting out featured posted color copies of recent digital photos of the "blonde" brown bear. My bear phobia had germinated in just such a way years ago in the dark of night in a ranger station in Yosemite. As I waited for my friends to sign up for our back country camping passes, I perused the gruesome series of posters lining the perimeter of the station: cars peeled apart like sardine cans and campsites devastated by bear attacks in oversized technicolor. I never camped with the same abandon again. But I was determined to take my hike, even alone. I put on my I-pod to distract myself then worried I would not hear a bear approach. I sped up if I saw hikers ahead and slowed down if I heard them behind me, closing the gap between me and other bearmeat choices. I figured a crowd lowered my odds and I proceeded to visit the native ruins.

The circle back to Santa Fe brought us through the town of Jemez, featuring Victorian hot springs, indoor hotsprings, outdoor hotsprings and dilapidated hot springs. We had coffee next to the hot springs shown above and shoved off down the road only to pass streams of parked cars at the Jemez pueblo. Hoping we'd stumbled upon a pueblo dance, we tentatively parked and made our way down the dusty road where we encountered Dan and Cristine who gave us the thumbs up--we were not trespassing but this was, indeed, a corn dance. We stood in blazing sun and wondered at the stamina of the dozens of costumed dancers who'd been performing for hours in the hot sun and at what the various shells, skins and colored pastes that adorned them signified. Then we wandered the booths that stretched on street after street, selling wares and foods not unlike the stands you'd see at any American carnival or fair.

That night, Jeffrey and Anne Overstreet hosted their traditional "Thomas Parker Society" gathering in which each attendee brings something, anything, to read. I missed the beginning (again) but got to hear quite an impressive sampling of what people have been working on in their various genres as well as the first chapter of Jeffrey's own first and long awaited novel, "Auralia's Colors."

Other highlights include the final evenings' concerts by Pierce Pettis and Over the Rhine, my cache of books from Eighth Day Books (poetry by Daniel Tobin, classmate Ned Balbo, Scott Cairns and B.H. Fairchild, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty, and the aforementioned The Solace of Fierce Landscapes), a trip to Trader Joe's (and 2 dollar tote bag), FANTABULOUS tacos from Maria's (I can still taste the salsa), Santa Fe Hemp where I bought a (hemp!) jacket for half price, the Tea House on Canyon Road which features a maize of luscious indoor and outdoor spots to plunk, a Michelle Bloom CD, hanging out in Cairnsville, reuniting with Bob, Jeff and Anne, Nicole and Tara from last year's workshop. Seeing again the faces that remind me we're a community: Mark Wiggs, Mike Capps, Julie Mullins and Greg Wolfe of Image, Lil Copan of Paraclete Press, Ginger Geyer, Luci Shaw, Leslie Leyland Fields, Barry Moser. Meeting SPU's MFA grads (and delivering a graduation gift from mutual friends to) Nancy Nordenson and Meg Sefton who I "met" through Stacy Barton (though I have yet to "meet" her in the flesh.)

Again, I'm forever grateful I was able to attend, that there is such a thing to attend. A week in the desert can change everything. I think that's the point.

The Glen again

This time last year I flew from our brand spanking new home in Rocheport, MO to Santa Fe, NM to participate in an arts workshop offered by the folks who publish Image Journal. I’d signed up to take a poetry workshop with Scott Cairns who I then discovered to be my new neighbor back in Missouri. It was a great experience. That the conference, known as the Glen, is held on the grounds of St. John’s College in Santa Fe is no small part of the reason I signed on for a repeat performance. Since my first visit there as a college freshman, New Mexico has been my single favorite place out of some pretty good competition.

Anticipating a big dose of the splendor of my coveted open spaces, particularly the desert spectacle in and around Santa Fe, I dove into Rebecca Solnit’s “wanderlust” as I flew from St. Louis to Dallas to Amarillo to Albuquerque, the landscape beneath me morphing from green treed hills and rivers to softer swells of fields ribboned with streams of asphalt to gridded flat lands to mountains pinched skyward in a landscape whirled in vivid blues and ochres, dotted with sage and tufts of deep green. I first read Solnit a year ago after picking up “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” while in Taos on our workshop’s free day. No one I’ve come across has so eloquently articulated the lure of open spaces, the particular ache and yearning induced by uncluttered skies and an endless horizon. I picked up another one of her books prior to this trip to whet my appetite (as if it needed whetting) for the vistas to come. Wanderlust focuses on walking, on what propelling yourself through a landscape on foot engenders for body and soul, and the physical narrative walking creates. The body moving through time in space is “ a mode of making the world as well as being in it.” And where better to do that than a desert landscape “stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor, like in the blues?”

As visions of the desert danced in my head I realized part of my attraction to such a landscape. And I mean the empty desert where no imprint of the human has intruded--no stores or roads or radio towers. To enter an unaltered desert landscape is to plunge into timelessness. Mountains evoke the ancient and immutable in their grandeur and immensity yet they color with the seasons; they leaf and flower, they snow and melt, they evidence time passing. Alterations in the desert landscape are subtle, change is minute and therefore the inexorable passage of time is not perpetually obvious. You arrive to find the world standing still. That stillness beneath a vast theatrical expanse of lightplay soothe and smooth the jangly, staticy, crinkled bits of the soul.

Such was my pondering as my flight was delayed, my luggage lost and my chances of arriving for the beginning of the conference shot. Once again I found myself in a strange deja vu of last year’s arrival: late, frazzled, and sporting an extreme case of the jangles. I got to my room luggageless and in the dark where I spent a mostly sleepless night, cold, uncomfortable in binding clothes and worried I’d oversleep because the battery on my alarm had run out of juice and it’s charger was in my luggage. As the sun rose this morning I stood on the road opposite the dorm in the chilly morning air, the sky to the west lightening though the sun had not yet breached the mountain opposite me, waiting to flag down the car that would eventually deliver my bag. My shadow stretched 50 feet westward across the road as the sun crested the hill and the desert slowly awoke. It’s just as I left it: swept, expansive, shimmering. And just aching to be walked.

Scenes from an Opening

Last evening saw a huge turnout for the opening at PS Gallery. Wayne's work was greatly received and it was a special thrill to hang out near his work and eavesdrop. It was a lively crowd, peppered with lots of the friends we've met over the last year in Columbia. A proud night.

Having a blast in MO

It's been a great month since school let out, filled with friends old and new. Some we drove over a thousand miles to see, some drove twice that distance to see us, and some live right here in town. And on the fourth our yard was filled with the lot of them as we shot off fireworks worthy of a small city. It was quite the Rockwellian occasion: our table laden with burgers, hot dogs, potato salad, watermelon, fragrant homebaked rosemary bread, chocolate cake and red, white and blueberry starspangled shortbread; kids catching frogs, sunfish, perch and bass in our pond; friend meeting neighbor; chigger meeting ankle before the sky above us ruptured in sound and color.
The day before we canoed the Missouri River (finally) between Rocheport and Huntsdale with longtime friends from Massachusetts. The river is amazingly undeveloped and we were the sole partakers of its wild beauty. Apart from the I-70 bridge we floated under (to the sounds of roaring 18 wheelers' envious horn blasts) there was no evidence of civilization. It was not hard to imagine ourselves viewing the banks and bluffs we passed through the lens of Lewis and Clark or the native Americans whose heiroglyphics are still visible on the rock face. A brush (literally) with poison ivy was defused by a rinse in a nearby waterfall after we scrambled up a rocky bank to investigate a cave. Happily smeared with Missouri dirt, we stopped for a supper of bread and cheese atop a scenic bluff and a round of ice cream cones at the Rocheport General Store. As the sun lowered over the hills, we headed home with tired limbs, full tummies and fuller hearts. Welcome to our chunk of Missouri.

The road home

"He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home."
-Johann von Goethe

At some point on any journey you reach a place, even if you are traveling to the far side of the globe, when you realize that upon the next mile you'll no longer be moving away from but moving toward, that you're headed back to where you came from. Some years ago, after weeks of drifting westward from where we'd set out from Houston with a tent, sleeping bags and a cooler in my hatchback, my friend Sherry and I eventually hit the coast of California where we reckoned that apart from hiring a boat and heading for Hawaii, our continued travels could only lead us back toward where we'd started. Home.
When I was younger, before I had a home and family of my own, I loved to leave and never looked back. I never got homesick. I remember traveling with another friend who could only be away for so long before the comforts and familiarity of home called her to return, something incomprehensible to me at the time. I still thrill at the thought of setting off to somewhere new and unexplored, of leaving the known behind to encounter the great whatever. Every journey is a starting over, a new script being written as you go and anticipation for whatever may unfold before the curtain comes down.
Once I had my own family home morphed into something more than merely a place I was obliged to return to. Home became a tiny kingdom, a benevolent realm in which love, need, desire and support were mutually given and received. My presence or absence, its length and contours, mattered. Home no longer represented tedium from which to escape (OK, yes, on occasion family too requires its own escape, if only to gain perspective from which to newly appreciate it) but a place of grounding, history, purpose and hope. Flight from home is exhilarating; knowing a nest awaits your return, built of your feathers, is stunningly heartbreaking, in the best way.
On this return trip, after a two week visit to Texas, I was coming back to a place that is becoming, one year later, home. But with each mile that brought me closer to this spot in the middle of Missouri, I realized home is much more than the place where your key fits the front door lock. It's the people who are waiting with hearts wide open you when you walk in the door.

With apologies to all things green

Some folks I know rue the century of their births and wish they'd been hatched in another, more exotic era. I know more than one person who longs to have lived among the petticoats and railroads of the nineteenth century and others who'd have chosen to be deposited somewhere European in the age of chivalry or upon the isles of the ancient philosophers. With the acknowledgement that every century dispenses its fair share of bloodshed and atrocities, plagues and tyrants, I'm quite happy to have been born of the twentieth century: the century of highways and radio. I often wonder, as I did yesterday while landscapes morphed from hills to plains and favorite songs on my ipod provided a custom "the hills are alive" soundtrack as my gas guzzling car sped west, at what deep pleasure I would have missed had I lived before the advent of cars and highways on which to fly them. I have crisscrossed the country at various times in my life, alone and untethered to anything but the road rolling out before me in all manner of exotic locales. It was in my car that I fell in love with the expanse that is America. In what prior century could a woman safely and freely devour thousands of whatever miles she chose, ingesting mountains, beaches, prairies and badlands for merely the cost of the gas in her car? I find supreme pleasure in speed and wind resistance. Good: bikes, skates, parasailing. Better: cars, sailboats, waterskis, snowskis, snowmobiles, atvs, motorcycles, horseback. But a road trip offers the longest dose of wind in your face as well as an altered sense of proportion and distance, and ongoing discovery. The road has taught me much about myself, my place in time, the opportunities I take for granted and what it took to achieve them.

The pleasure of the open road remains but is tinted now with perpetual guilt amassed from what unnecessary travel costs the environment to the direction of world events involving fuel. Who knows what curtailment of optional travel might arise in this twenty-first century due to gas prices, gas shortages, global warming, terrorism, etc. Hitting the road whenever you feel like it might one day become the very thing that provokes someone in a distant time to grow misty for a century they can only wish they'd inhabited.

My poem on Verse Daily!

Click the link above and read my poem "Something in my eye" in The Southern Review.

When strangling children is not in your job description

Did you hear the one about the eight Buddhist monks who were two full days into building a sand painting on the floor of Union Station in Kansas City as part of a yearlong tour to raise money for their monastery when an unattended toddler wandered past the ropes and did a stomp dance all over the painting, completely destroying it? We did when we brought our girls to see Union Station this weekend. We arrived in the massive lobby with our heads in the air admiring the architectural details and light play of the structure soaring way above our heads. We wandered over to see what was engaging the crowd near the post office. A group of monks were just finishing the redo of their intricate sand mandala which, I was told, represented compassion. The painting is created by pouring brightly colored sand into a metal funnel called a chakbu which is then rubbed gently with another stick in order to guide the application of the sand. It's a very slow process. As soon as the painting is finished it is destroyed. We happened to walk up just as the finishing lines were being added. At 2 pm a ceremony began in which the monks chanted, bowed, prayed and went through a number of mysterious motions such as unspooling and draping diaphonus white fabric over the shoulder of one and intermittently banging symbols and blowing horns. I found a birds' eye view on the second floor from which to watch so, unfortunately, I could not hear the monks address the crowd. The ceremony went on for 45 minutes but it seemed much longer as my perch was directly over the air conditioning vent and my fingers slowly became frostbitten. They ceremony seemed to cresendo multiple times and I gave up trying to figure out when we'd reached the culmination of events. Finally, one of the monks reached to the center and plucked up a fingerful of sand. From there the destruction quickly commenced. In moments the design was a pile of putty colored sand which was swept from the table, destined for home gardens or the Missouri River. In the end it seemed the monks' destruction process only reinterated toddler's: nothing is permanent. The toddler just performed it a lot less ceremonially.
Click the post title to see the toddler's sand dance.

Get em while they're hot

The current issues of The Southern Review and versal contain some recent poems of mine. TSR is available at many bookstores in the US but versal is out of Amsterdam and not as readily available. However, either one can be ordered online. TSR is filled with top quality poetry, fiction, essays and book reviews. This issue includes the poem "Among the trumpets" by a favorite poet of mine-Margo Berdeshevsky. I've long admired her work and am pleased to find myself two doors down from her in this issue. versal is an annual pub and features avant garde poetry and artwork from writers in many countries. I'm working on having a full manuscript ready by fall. Stay tuned.

Another Houston Cool Item

I met my good friend Deeanne Gist just before her first book, A Bride Most Begrudging, was published and went on to become a bestseller and to win the Christy Award for Best Romance 2006 (the Christian equivalent of the Academy Awards). She was finishing book two at the time, The Measure of a Lady, which has just been nominated for both The Christy Award Best Romance 2007 and the RITA (Romance Writers of America) Best Inspirational 2007. Deeanne joined our writers group at Taft as she was beginning book three, Courting Trouble (as if this woman needed help!) I had the great delight of witnessing a master story teller weave her spell. Plot, characters and dialogue seemed to spill effortlessly from Deeanne's keyboard week after week until she held a(nother) finished manuscript in her hands. I am thrilled for Deeanne and imagine Courting Trouble and its spunky and irresistable heroine Essie will bring even greater accolades to a very deserving author. Thanks for the ride Deeanne!

Hot Town Cool City--Houston tonight on PBS

Absense has certainly made this heart grow fonder, and many of the spots featured on this film will tell you why. Click this post title for the link to the show's website and more info on some of Houston's best loved places, many of which I spent more than my fair share of time at. It's almost exactly a year since we departed and I'd happily drive 900 miles back for one more afternoon of reading, writing, habanero pepper chicken salad and iced hazelnut in the courtyard at Brasil (the unmarked and unrivaled insider favorite cafe at Westheimer and Dunlavy where poet Mark Doty is interviewed on this program.) Shown above: Brasil, the art car parade, the Water Wall, Allen Parkway and the city.

Spring and a flood