SpoFest Featured Reader!

Happy New Year friends,

I will be one of the featured readers on Tuesday, February 7 from 6-8:30 on SpoFest. Join us through Facebook or via Zoom for an evening of poetry. Not only will you experience superb poetry, but there'll also be raffles, Q & A, open mic (perhaps you'll share?), and book giveaways!

I hope to see you there,

Mary

Here's a poem from my farming days to whet your appetite:

tomato tar

in my stained hands

cupped like a chalice

I hold a tomato blush toned

heart shaped

harvesting

in the high tunnel

where vines trellis

tall then cascade

down the other side

I work for a farmer

fond of obscure varieties:

Green Zebra striping into

chartreuse and lime when ripe

Garden Peach, a fuzzy yellow

ping pong ball

Chocolate Chestnut

which tastes like neither

nor smells like tomato

and how are tomatoes fruit

like peaches

that dribble juice

down my chin

but not like blackberries

which don’t blacken my fingers

but stain them

red instead

if it does not match the

color

shape

smell

I expect

how do I

recognize it

this heart shaped one

construction paper pink

like a Valentine

nothing like

the chambered muscle

pulsing in my chest

cupped in white ribs

a different sort of chalice

what does either

have to do

with love

but I am not

writing a love

poem

besides, how does

the accretion of yellow

dust from tomatoes

tar my hands

then cascade

green in water

which is

oh so

clear

the Sness of a thing

I am not T shaped. I am S. But I have spent most of my life hammering my Sness into Tness because I believed T to be good, S not.

No one criticizes S for not having the sharp angles of a T or expects S curves from T. Besides, S and T serve different functions and aren’t interchangeable. No one hates either for not being like the other.

But many of us hate winter because it’s unlike fall, spring, or summer. I did. I dismissed winter for not having the attributes I defined as pleasing or beautiful: long sun filled warm days with caressing breezes. Winter is cold, dark, the wind is biting, and the sky stays grey for days.

I even hated winter trees. Their starkness made me uncomfortable. I wanted fall colors, spring blooms or verdant summer leaves. They were S and only T was good.

It was around the time I began recovering from bulimia that it occurred to me maybe winter trees carry a different beauty. Branches are sturdy bones. Nests hidden during other seasons reveal themselves. The textures and patterns of bark, again overlooked in other seasons, become apparent. And then there is the ceaseless magic of snow clothing naked branches.

As I began to embrace my Sness, I could embrace the Sness of winter. Luckily around this same time, I had a boss who insisted we walk during meetings. Outside. Regardless of weather. I had no idea people spent time outside when it was below 50. I noticed new things: the crisp scent of cold air, the slant of winter sun, scat and paw prints in snow, the poignant foliage of wintering plants. How leafless trees allow sunlight and warmth to reach us. How invigorated I felt during and after our frigid walks.

Here’s another way to look at it. When getting to know Joan, I didn’t compare her to my friend Martha. I got to know Joan on Joan’s terms. How could I value Joan’s Joanness if I was measuring her against Martha’s Marthaness?

Maybe winter distresses many of us because we are meant to hibernate, do different work, wear different fabrics, and even eat different foods but we mostly do the same things, eat the same foods, and wear the same fabrics year-round, living largely in denial of natural rhythms. 24/7/365 artificial uniformity is so normalized— like a season superimposed on Earth’s seasons—that perhaps we detest winter because it chafes under the unrealistic expectations placed upon it.

Learning to value winter for its winteriness feels like spiritual practice. What can I learn from experiencing a season as it is, without judgement? Without comparison? Will that inform how I embrace the seasons within myself and others? It is like getting to know a distillation of self. Here is the rawness of being without accoutrements. Here is the self that weathers what comes, the self that hibernates, hunkering down into a way of being until it is time to be elsewise. Here is the truth of our own rhythms.

Appreciating winter is also a gratitude practice because we’re invited into valuing our specific here and now, the particular longitude and latitude we inhabit. The Midwest allows us to experience a broad spectrum of weather. Not just T and S, but an entire weather alphabet. What happens to us as individuals and as community if we practice valuing what we want to discount, revile, or dismiss? What treasures will surface if we are curious instead of resistant, longing for something else? Winter is also an opportunity to trust, anticipate and savor rhythms not of one’s making or superimposed by capitalism or a Protestant work ethic; rhythms ancient and wild and orderly and purposeful and with more wisdom than narrow human ideas of what is pleasing or beautiful or worthwhile.

But this appreciation didn’t happen overnight. Embracing something you once loathed, whether it's a person, one’s body or a season, takes curiosity. Takes time. Time spent getting to know the Sness.

livin' the dream

I’ve spent a lifetime journaling. Of course I wanted to preserve happy and momentous occasions. But I largely reconstructed events from every which angle, seeking to understand why. Why did this befall me? Why did he, she, they treat me that way? Laying sentences like bricks to erect monuments to insult and injury, I made meticulous memorials of trauma and drama. Shrines built from it should have, or should not have happened this way or that; I should have been, or should not have been this or that. I realize, as I sit down to rebuild the latest drama with one of my daughters, that I don’t want to make an altar from our conflict. I glance at my notebooks shelved in chronological order reaching back decades. Suddenly I understand why Roger Housden burned 25 years’ worth of journals before embarking on his new life. An inventory of woe, an homage to suffering, cannot serve one’s dreams.

Hours after our drama, a writer friend offhandedly commented that in one’s imagination, one can be and do anything. In fact, as I write this, another non-coincidence shows up through a Dove chocolate:

And, a day later, I watched an IG reel on quantum entanglement: we co-create our lives through thoughts, beliefs, perspectives, and actions. These affirmations from seemingly disconnected instances are not random or disconnected. The biomachinery of existence responds to our intention and focus.

Before my daughter and I reconciled, I took an evening walk to reflect and plan for our conversation. Habit tried to drag me into the familiar construction of hurt, judgements, and ultimatums hurled, as though I needed to cobble yet another story on that narrow tower. Instead, I focused on my vision for relationship with my daughters. What would feel honoring and respectful and joyful? Clouds obscured night sky and it was quiet, breezeless. In a way, the stillness around and greyness above felt like an empty stage, a blank canvass. What will I sculpt? What will I paint? The words joy, gratitude, respect, and boundaries warbled like birdsong through me on the way home.

We entered conversation tentatively. I could feel the undertow of conflicting perspectives and unresolved feelings swirl, threatening to drown the song I had been singing. but I decided to give dreams more weight than wounds. I held fast to my vision of joy, gratitude, respect, and boundaries for our relationship.

Rather than being interred in spiral mausoleums, what I have experienced is raw material for my imagination. What a gift that is. Everything in life is sculptor's clay, painter's palette, a playwright's stage props. What can be created from such abundance? What are my dreams? For relationship? For vocation? What are my aspirations for how I spend my days, hours, and minutes? For each moment? What is my vision for the world and what is my dream role in it? What do I yearn to construct in the notebooks to come? That’s what I want to write.