In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Today in class I shared with my students the article “The Possibilities and Perils of Writing Poems aboutVisual Art” [Writer's Chronicle 39: 2007].  The article was written to academics, or at least, to writers who take their work very seriously, and discusses the exchange or interchange between art and the viewer writing about the experience (poets, specifically).  The article uses lofty terminology to discuss language and how people are stirred (changed) by art.

Some of my students were very off put by this.  They thought the article over rot, too analytical, and that some things are impossible to talk about (such as how one is moved by an art piece) and therefore not worth discussing. Speaking about the unutterable and how it feels to be moved by art ruins the moment, one student said. There is no way to speak about the experience so why try.

Because I like the article it made me think about why I appreciate this kind of talk about art and writing.  Why do I find the poet’s grappling for words to explain her experience compelling?   What does it mean to be found by art?  What do we mean by unutterable and should we try for the words?  What is with me and my fascination with words? Then it hit me.  It’s the Bible’s fault!

It’s to my advantage as a writer that I’ve spent many hours grappling with “God’s words.”  How could I expect not to be a concentrated reader of, well, anything that tries to say something profound or true.

As a child I was taught that scripture is a fixed point.  Black and white.  A hook by the door you could hang your life on.  Sure it was confusing.  It was a mystery, but older men had figured out the puzzle and written Sunday school curriculum to explain it to younger people (enter:  the flannel graph board).

Some of it was to be taken literally.  Yes, the water did turn to blood.  Yes, there was a flood that lasted 40 days and 40 nights.  Yes, a real fish ate Jonah. And some of it was purely figurative–When Jesus says “anyone who enters me, he will be saved” he means that as a figure of speech.  No one was crawling into Jesus.  He also meant “he and she” when he said, “he.”  Though, sometimes when the Bible says “man” it just means “man.”  How slippery.

Then there are the literal stories that are also figurative.  For example, the Garden of Eden is symbolic for our relationship with God, but also a literal place in time and history.

What the Bible says must never change and therefore adding to the Bible is a sin. You don’t go creative with God’s words.  That is treacherous and makes interpretation a sticky buisness.

At the same time, spoken correctly and at the right time, a quote of scripture has the potential of sending evil back to Hell.   Memorization is the key.  Words become very powerful, but not just any words, the exact words.

Though Bible stories, histories, and common interpretations are thought to be fixed points like stars in the sky, they do not remain static within the reader.  It was told to me that reading the Bible every day would change me, whether I was seeking change or not.

Words, then, are transformational.

This was the same terminology I was using this morning when speaking about “good” art.  That you cannot help but be changed by it even if you do not understand it.  Though, some understanding helps, for sure. My own terminology for experiencing art comes from the language of my religious experience.  This is not unique to me, but I’m taking credit for it.

How does the Bible make me a Poet:

I have learned from my years of studying “the Word” that you cannot trust “words.”  I know that sounds horrible, but it I’m being honest. I find words slippery and treacherous, in that they can redeem and banish.  I distrust much of what has been taught to be the “fixed points” in the Bible.  They seem to be more “fixed”  points, either culturally fixed and/or politically fixed.  The slippery nature of words in/out of context.

How then do I approach the Bible if I am so distrusting:

Very tentatively.  My eye scans for the Truth shimmering underneath the surface.  I try to see the unutterable, and if not see it then feel it, and sometimes I even attempt to Write what finds me in the interchange.

I imagine my past self smelling like dial soap and cigarette smoke.  I was so unawares and in the middle. Between my church persona and the self I was inventing.  I didn’t think about it much (which 17 year old does) and instead devoted my energy, mind, and body to “having fun.”  And that I did, in a precarious sort of way.

And unlike me, Cad was steadfast.  He knew who he was, a cockroach.  He was funny and like I said before, something shiny.  I know it is a word that doesn’t describe much, but it was his distinctive and pervasive quality or character, if you will.  His atmosphere.  His big toothed grin.  But there was more underneath his charming seediness.  He was sad, defeated, and suicidal.  I felt for him, and then like a silly girl, fell for him.

I had many notions of being a “Christian,” that were challenged in my time spent on his broken down couch inside his bare walled, one bedroom house.  He use to laugh at me when I said that you can tell if a girl is a virgin by the way she carries herself or how in church that night someone asked me to rebuke the devil.  He disliked me a bit, though, when I referred to myself as being “in rebellion.”  He never fully trusted me after that.  Something to do with how could I consider being myself “in rebellion” if I’m being myself.   Then I must not be someone like him, but more on vacation, on tour.

As if I was on a bus.  The tour guide on the intercom voice breaking through static, stating:

“If you look to your left, you can see the underbelly of the town.  The white house with the VW van parked in front of the camo netting hanging by the porch–here resides the town loser, drunk and heroin addict.  He lives alone and flirts with crime.  He is going nowhere.”

Did I mention he was a heroin addict?  No, well that came too, and with that, many deadbeat friends, but that was a different life lesson.

The  charm is what I’m about right now and here’s what I learned from Cad:

Honesty.  Cad was so honest it made me uncomfortable.  Honest about how he was horny.  Honest about why he liked me and how he wasn’t attracted to me.  Honest about his loneliness and addiction. I had never met someone so raw.  It changed how I talked to people.  It changed how I was honest with the less attractive elements of myself –my inner cockroach.

And how God is love.   No matter how strung out, ugly, smelly, cockroach-like we are.  God does not smash us with a big boot or fumigate the street.  Well, perhaps that’s because you can’t kill a cockroach?    It is because I loved one that I know God loves cockroaches.  God laughs at their jokes, hangs out on their broken down couches, and stares with them at their blank walls of existence.

Cad also taught me that you can’t tell someone’s virginity by the way they walk and that a lot of things I was taught about purity was silly, marmie stuff.  Sure, he wanted to get into my pants, but he was right too.  A bunch of self-righteous mambo jumbo.

He broke down my preconceptions and that freed me to walk down his porch into my life, and become someone more open-minded, a bit blunter, and a lot more impatient with self-righteous bullshit.

That is not to say I wasn’t in danger of being an addict myself, becoming pregnant with an addict’s unwanted child, or dying from an overdose.  I’m looking back at our relationship for how it became an opportunity for growth.  I do count myself blessed to have not ended up nowhere.

* He was a cad and I imagine still is a cad, wherever he may be, but he changed my point of view in numerous ways.  Therefore, I most endearingly, with all the affection in me, call him, Cad.

He wasn’t fleeing from his past but trying to catch his meaning.

Clean for a dirty man.

Here’s the points, or my point, whatever:  You must make inspiration.  It will not happen often and you’re lucky if it happens after you hit the 21 birthday landmark (the one many of us don’t remember, well) or after you’re introduced to the time-suckage networking site “Facebook.”

So make it happen, people:

(the following points are not my own, but I’ve added my own flavor.  Soon to hit grocery stands all over the states ”Sharla Spice” it ain’t everything nice, or something)

1)  Read a good book and you’re bound to want to write (read Twilight and well…)

2)  Turn up the music and again,  make sure that it’s inspirational.  None of this woman hating, egotistical crud — that’s for the club. Try, Ella Fitzgerald.

3) Observe some people.  A park bench is a good view on the world, so is a bench outside of a supermarket.  Just don’t stalk someone and get yourself arrested.  Not unless you think you may want to write a story like that.  Be mindful, cops do not enjoy when you are writing down the rights they are reading to you.  ”Ma’am, I don’t care if it is for your novel.”

4) You may want to pry yourself off the couch, put on some clean pants and shoes, then hit the outdoors.  ”The great outdoors is inspiration in waiting,” and so forth.  I find a walk is a good way to clean the mind, work off .08% of the chocolate I ate, and a way to cool down from the fight I just picked with my husband.  Go outdoors, you vampire-loving people.

5)  Mental discipline.  Okay, Writer’s Digest just lost me with the word “discipline.”  No worries.  They’re just trying to say the word “meditation” in a more trendy, interesting way.  Meditation: that’s like not doing anything, right?  I can do that.  I would like to add to their mediation list that baking bread is a great meditation because you can think about nothing and make something to walk off later (see: 4).

5 a)  I’d like to add “play acting,” part of this list.  Writer’s Digest says meditating as your character helps, but I think that “play acting” as your character is even better.  For a whole day you can be the protagonist (i.e. spunky orphan Annie) and the next day you can be your antagonist (drunk Ms. Hannigen).  You may want to forewarn your boss and spouse.

6) Be spiritual.  Good luck “being” this.  I think this is a stupid point.  We are spiritual beings.  They might as well remind you to open and close your eyes periodically so they don’t dry out.

7) Be committed.  Gosh this is a hard one (no sarcasm meant).  I bet if I read on they’ll say something about how having a prescription for Writers Digest helps keep one….nope, something about the library but no plug for the magazine.  Good job, Frank White (the author to whom I am now giving credit). Notice how I totally avoided talking about commitment.

I came across this comic by fellow blogger Inkygirl and thought, “Yep. That’s about right.”

Still, it is satisfying to sit in the right arrangement.  There’s balance, aesthetics, and convenience. What an accomplishment.

A good omen about this year?  Yep.

I have pushed a lot of goals, desires, and failures around in my life. Sometimes it feels (rightly so) that I am going in circles. But this year, I hope it all falls into some place that feels right. I hope that I can finally forgive myself for not being all those ‘ideas’ I wanted to be at 30. I hope that I can find room to write, time for creativity, space for family, and a vision of a different/good future. New year resolutions for 2010 (Drum roll, please):

1) be less hard on myself.

2) take care.

Comparatively, ten years ago……

I was living in Roseburg, OR.  On New Years Eve I rented Gone With The Wind because I had never seen it and I thought it was a good metaphor (I’m into those, if you couldn’t tell) for the year past.  I couldn’t go out because I was only 20 and my baby son was asleep in the next room.   I, instead, stayed indoors watching the movie and drinking champagne with some nervous/tentative drinkers, i.e. my parents.

It was worth celebrating that year–I had made it. I had turned 20, in my first year of college, living at my parents’, and was raising my son (year 1), alone. Someone, please, poor me a drink!

I’m not sure what my New Years resolution was that year but I can bet you dollars to donuts it had to do with losing weight. Ten years later, I weigh the same amount as I did then, but I’m not down on myself because I have another 1 year old asleep upstairs and I’ve quit smoking.  But, I digress.

I have a picture from that New Years.  I am sitting on the couch with plaid flannel pajama bottoms.  I have short hair and I am holding my sleepy, very grumpy baby in my lap, forcing him to wave at the camera.   I like the photo because I look really young, happy, and optimistic.  I didn’t know it then, but great things would happen in my life. I did finish school and went even further than I imagined.  I did find love, a good good good man, who helps arrange living room furniture, and we did get married.  And now, I have another little person and new family adventures ahead.  There were hard things too, such as, poor love interests, disappointing moves, counterintuative mistakes, parenting no-no’s, and closed doors when I wanted them, more than anything, to open.  I will remember the hard things only to remember the good that came from living through the poor arrangements. Because sometimes, it takes a lot of work to find what looks/feels/is organic.

I wish, whoever you are, a very good new year.

It is that kind of book.

Remember the old stereotype of the Feminist woman in the workplace: unmarried, childless, and a man-eater to boot.  She burned her bra in a protest, wore pants not nylons, and she didn’t take guff from no man.

Today’s Feminist stereotype chooses both career and motherhood, climbing the workforce ladder and balancing family duties with the dexterity of a tightrope walker.  Here’s a new stereotype for the Feminist woman: she wears a bra with breast feeding panels.

As with all stereotypes, there’s limitations to both these ideas, but it is interesting how they’ve changed over the years.  I, on the other hand, never imagined that I would have children, but here I am with two of them.

When I was a little girl I would pretend that I was all grown up, living in the city, and renting a room from an eccentric family.  The eccentric family wasn’t a hard pretend.  On laundry day I would take my laundry basket into my room, shut the door, and imagine living life on my own terms.  No children. Just houseplants.  Sometimes I even had a boyfriend, but it always ended with me breaking his heart.  I really enjoyed the idea of independence and solitude.

I don’t regret having kids at all–even when I had my son at nineteen-years-old and was raising him as a single parent.  Some people called him a mistake, or at least, getting pregnant at nineteen a mistake.  Inside those ideas I found a challenge, and in my attempt not to fulfill a sad expectation, I enrolled in school and set my standards high.

I’ve learned a lot growing up with my son.  As his mother I’ve learned to be less self-destructive, more ambitious, and how to keep centered.  I credit my son for teaching me about the irony in life, how to rest in the gray, how to question what I’ve been told about myself as a woman, and how to find potential in what other’s would say was a “less than ideal situation.”  Let’s be honest; life is usually less than ideal.

Still statistically, we were both screwed.

From a typical viewpoint our future didn’t look promising.  I was most likely to pop out a few more kids, live on welfare for the rest of my life, or at least, take on a passionless job.  I probably wasn’t going to go to college and most likely would marry the first cad who showed me interest.  Statistically, my son was going to be a latch key kid, drop out of high school, struggle with authority, abuse drugs and commit suicide.  The cards were stacked.

I decided that none of these realities were going to happen.  I never wanted him to hear me say that “I would’ve…. if only I hadn’t gotten pregnant.” In turn, motherhood made me a better person.  I’m a far cry from who I was at nineteen.

Where with my son I was concerned about the future, squeezing through the gaps of misunderstandings, never making excuses, and carving room for us–with my daughter I’m waking up to simplicity.  I am now married and quite a bit older.  I spend a whole lot less time proving myself to the world how capable I am, or how smart.  I can rest in the present; it is delicious if I am awake to it.  Life feels calmer and  nuanced in beauty.  I can stare with her at leaf on the ground, treasure the moments of “nothing” as we read a book, and I feel more at peace with parenting.  Perhaps this is because this is my second time around.  After all, the first kid has turned out rather well.  More than well.  He’s funny, smart, and well adjusted.  And my greatest accomplishment, he’s happy.  How did that happen?  I count my blessings, cross my heart, and hope I do well this time too.

Still the cards are stacked against her.

She is “just a girl.” There’s many stereotypes she’ll have to try on, out grow, and deconstruct.  I hope she’ll never find them constraining, because they are rarely liberating.  Just like the stereotype of the Feminist (both of old and of today) have limitations, she’ll have to weigh what she wants with what she’s willing to sacrifice.  I’ll do my best to encourage her on her path.  Well, as long as it is an edifying path–one where she remains honest and ethical. Even if this means she wants only a houseplant and no kids of her own.

And Isn’t that what we want for our kids–the ability to define their own future?  No matter their gender.  No matter the politics of the day.  No matter how the cards stack and sway.