Giving thanks for the greatest days of our lives

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     Thanksgiving weekend we wound through towns with names from my childhood on the road to the old family cottage – Betsie, Beulah, Benzie, Mesick -- on our drive north to “the Cape Cod of the Midwest": northwest Michigan. The childhood cottage was the lake place my great grandfather and great-uncle built, of the hoity toities from Chicago, the ones with money who I was sure I should have been born among. Had there been some mistake? I was the youngest of the born-again Baptist minister’s family, all ten of us. We must have been a visual diversion when descending upon the Congregational Assembly at Crystal Lake just a mile from Lake Michigan, tumbling out of the old fifties Woody wagon, carrying brown paper bags from the trailer bursting with clothes and groceries, then changing into hand-me-down cotton bathing suits and running to the beach. How I loved the smell of fusty leaves around the white painted porch and its slamming wood screen door, then the hot asphalt road I skimmed across barefoot to the fine white sand edging the lapis blue lake, and at last digging my fingers down beneath hot sand to cool clay, clawing it into my fist, then sculpting bowls to be lined up to dry in the sun in preparation for some imagined feast.

     So when we drove up this Thanksgiving weekend to a lake inn down the road from that old glory of a place, with foot-thick birches and old wooden porches, I was five again, smelling lake water lapping the firm white beach. I was walking the lane through deep oak woods and a tunnel of white cottages to Lake Michigan where we’d watch the sun set. Back at the cottage before bed, with sore sunburned skin, I’d sit on my fifteen-year-old sister’s lap during family devotions in warm lamp light and learn to read by following her fingertip guiding my eyes over the black print on thin Bible paper in passages Dad picked. We ten sat in wicker sofas and chairs around the unlit fireplace, my long-legged sisters and brothers shifting and rearranging the cushions, while they imagined the other cottage teenagers dancing at the rec hall.

     This year’s Thanksgiving weekend was an anniversary ball to celebrate my nephew’s wedding to a brilliant woman who survived breast cancer last year. In a little black dress and heels I sat on the edge of the dance floor watching two dozen kids dance with abandon. Others joined me sitting there between dances, observing the Bacchanalia of movement, sweat and wildness of the three-to-twenty-year-olds. We reminisced back to our own quiet and sober wedding celebrations, utterly devoid of wine, song or dance in the basements of Baptist churches. How far we’ve come, we said, how free we are now, sculpting memories of dance and lining them up like clay vessels to be filled with the wine of wedding after wedding, then dashing them to pieces in the fireplace with joyful abandon, until the next wild-heart celebration.

     Just then four-year-old Greta hoofed by yelling, “This is the greatest day of my life . . .” above the speakers blaring Cake’s “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” as her cousins pulled her back into their line dance.

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A Note of Thanks

To my Blog Friends on Thanksgiving ~

In the rare hush over America
when Thanksgiving closes out November,
when Democrats and Republicans shelve their squeaky horns,
and early commercial Christmas crooners mute their carols,
in this silence when the sibilance of our familial

kissing and embracing,
back slapping and handshaking,
head bowing and glass raising

whispers sighs and murmurs of thanks,

I want to say thank you to You.

You shine your flashlight on aspects of life
and the world that no one else illuminates.
You help me think. You teach me your ways,
and you listen to mine.
I learn about music, art, biographies, history, culture, travel, films, books
all through your inimitable voices.
You write wild and wise stories and poems.
You show nature surrounding you through luminous photographs.
You let me see your grandchildren, and I pretend to hold them.
When I am afraid, you give me tips!
We play, you make me laugh!
You teach me to cook!
When you get sick, I pray.
When we’re happy, we’re happy together.
When we’re sad, ours is a chorus of weeping.

Thank you, my friends, for what you bring to this place,
which is not held captive in screeny web boxes,
but suffuses and inspires my heart-mind.
Yes, you're here, in my heart,
which is full and fat, and still hungry for more.
Soon it will have to lie on its side
like the 200-pound pumpkin Don grew!

I will be away for a few days.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Little One

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Little One

my own thoughted crumb,

what will you be?

seated, windowed, bound and papered
here

like me?

or full-sailed, wind-carried, faraway and

wild

like the constant, bumping sea?

light in my window, ink

on my page, you are mine,

but remember

as I say this

I set you free

~ Ruth M.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

I was going to leave it there, this post. But I just read something by Robert Frost that echoes this small poem of mine. "Little One" could be about a poem, or a future grandchild. Which? Who knows, and that is the surprise of it. Which brings me to Frost.

I've had Robert Frost on my mind. The reason? Because this week marks the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (November 22, 1963), an event I always think of as Thanksgiving approaches. I often associate JFK with the image of 86-year-old Robert Frost in black and white at the JFK inaugural lectern January 20, 1961 (I was four), that bitterly cold day when he couldn't read the words of the poem he'd hand written for the inauguration, so instead he recited another from memory. (Read both the dedication poem he intended to read, but couldn't because of poor eyesight, and the poem he actually recited that cold day, "The Gift Outright," here.)

In 1939, Frost wrote an essay about writing poems titled The Figure a Poem Makes. I hadn't read it before today, after finishing my small poem, above. I agree completely with his claim, that a poem must reveal itself, that you can't know at the outset of writing what it will become. You can read the entire essay The Figure a Poem Makes here. Below I will quote passages that resonated for me today:

quotes from The Figure a Poem Makes, by Robert Frost

~ If it is a wild tune, it is a poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. 

~ It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

~ No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. 

~ The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.

~ I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. 

~ Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. 

~ For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

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Painting: Clouds and Water, by Arthur Dove

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What came into my head when I saw a pair of panties lying on the sidewalk

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I emerged from the parking structure into the dove gray morning of campus. Gold leaves and black branches of the beech tree behind the white sycamore pulled my eyes toward the bell tower. All within sight was earthy, even the old red brick buildings and gray sidewalks, winding like streams among oaks and maples. But there, within a few feet of me, rumpled on the sidewalk near the stairs of my building, was something arresting in the muted November landscape. When I got to it, I could see that it was a pair of woman’s panties -- cotton, white, and huddled, like a bunny shivering in the wind.

Those underpants lay there unattached, like the ones I didn’t need in the hospital, tucked into my bag in the birthing room when I was in labor for my first child. You don’t need anything between your bare perspiring skin and that thread-bare cotton gown, which is only a pretense of modesty, helping you feel less exposed, but open in the back and tied at the neck. With my feet in stirrups, legs V’ed for the doctor to check my dilation, which was taking forever to get from 2 to 4, let alone the pushing goal of 10, in walked a cohort of interns and their instructing doctor, with me and my birth canal a specimen for instruction on their teaching couch. I felt my spirit climb the wall to the ceiling as if to an observation balcony behind glass, looking down at a woman’s body being examined by my doctor and five strangers whose faces I blocked out in my dissipating fog of modesty. And I was afraid, not knowing what it was going to feel like to push a baby out of me, but wanting desperately to get it out.

The panties lay there on the sidewalk as if they had mischievously tumbled from a laundry basket, clean and white, flirting and wanting to get back in the dirt. Or maybe they had fallen from my Marks & Spencer shopping bag onto the sidewalk on King’s Road in London where I bought underwear a week after a bomb blew up a double-decker bus at Tavistock Square, a block from the dorm where my students lived. A two-foot-wide ribbon of red metal was peeled, and stuck out from the bus’s side like an artery from a neck, while feet, legs, arms, shoes, and other items of clothing were blown from people’s bodies into the air along with the top of the bus.

The woman’s panties lay there on the sidewalk in a soft fleshy pile, like the ones clutched by Lois, our friends’ daughter who was abducted from our Pasadena shopping mall, on the escalator down to the parking garage under Lord & Taylor. At gunpoint the young men made her take them to her car and drive to the abandoned dry aqueduct where they entered her, again and again, in the same V place where her infant daughter had entered the world from the opposite direction a couple of years before. When they were done they shot her in the head and left her to lie with her remaining hours gazing at the yellow-orange Royal Ann cherry of a sun as it slipped from the sky behind hazy Los Angeles, her panties twisted in her fist.

I crouched down and touched the white cotton panties, ready to pick them up, then turned my head to find a trash bin close. I was embarrassed that they were there, out in the open. Students were walking toward me from every direction on their way to class. I panicked, not wanting them to think the fallen panties were mine, though I felt utterly as if they were mine, as if they were every woman’s. I abandoned them there suddenly and dashed up the stairs of my building, as if some unknown, unholy terror was at my heels, and I was afraid, or unable, to defend what belonged to me.

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Thank you: a warm, cozy house

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Next week Thursday my country celebrates thank you. No fireworks. No pink hearts or leprechauns.
No gift buying. In the holiday year, Thanksgiving remains a warm, cozy house with flickering lamp and candle light, with leaves of bittersweet orange and tawny saffron spread on the table. The smells and tastes that hum from the kitchen as we glide and bump around each other jockeying for space to chop, blend with the mixer, stuff the turkey, or watch the Lions play football whisper warmth, and love, and thank you. I rejoice. I simply rejoice.

It's a time when words are hard to find, because either they feel clichéd, or we don't know how to be grateful for the tragedies of existence, while also being thankful for what we hold dear. The words of my dear friend and former boss Ed ring in my ears when I asked him how to thank someone who had written a powerfully supportive recommendation letter for me, for my current job. Wise Ed said, "Sometimes there is nothing more valuable than a simple, heartfelt, thank you."

In the gliding and bumping heart prep for Thanksgiving week, I'd like to share THE DOG-EARED PAGE from the hard copy November issue of The Sun, which touches me, and perhaps will also meet your heart. (I don't believe THE DOG-EARED PAGE can be found in the online edition.) The text below about Merwin is copied directly from The Sun.

Thanks

by W.S. Merwin

New York City-born poet William Stanley Merwin has written more than thirty books of poetry, translation, and prose. A Buddhist and environmentalist, he often addresses humankind's separation from nature in his work. His writing has received two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, and in 2010, at the age of eighty-two, Merwin was appointed the Library of Congress's Poet Laureate. Since the late 1970s he has lived in Hawaii on a former pineapple plantation that he has restored to its original rain-forest state. "Thanks" was first published in The Rain in the Trees by W. S. Merwin, copyright 1988 by W. S. Merwin. 

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

standing by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

talking our feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities

growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

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mud, branch and sky

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I said in my untethered donkey post a few days ago that I am the author and authority of my life. What arrogance! Was it arrogance? Was I setting myself up for a heavenly lightning trident to spear me into humility, pinned to this red leather chair, writhing in ego pain? I do see myself on a throne, Leo that I am. It is a perch somewhere between heaven and earth, close enough to drop to the mud and claw for wormy sapphires and garlic, and open to the empty sky above for ascending into perspective taking. . . .

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree. 

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars. 

    ~ T.S. Eliot, from Four Quartets

Where are scars reconciled among stars? How can I find that centering, bedded axle-tree?

I can’t control the circumstances and authorities that tell me what to do. Students ask for advice, I must answer. I have to pay bills and make deposits to cover them, which means Don and I have to earn a paycheck. I brake for stoplights. I make food for us and our hungry bellies. I can’t just tell it all to go take a hike. Well, I could, but where would we be?

So what am I the authority of? I am the authority of my attitude. Like a bird who drops to the earth for thistle seeds, bugs, worms and juniper berries, I, too, keep hunting for body and soul food. Like a bird who carries scraps to her perch for a nest, I transport words and ideas from literature, art, music, world events and relationships -- especially relationships -- to this branch in me where I weave the nest of my soul. And like a bird, I dash up to the expanse of air above to see what it all looks like below. This is a continuous cycle. Dig in the earth. Carry to the perch. Rise above on air currents in an open space of sky. Back to the ground. Up to the nest. Fly to the sky. It is that rising above where I scan, reflect, and rewrite my mindset, remembering that life is not all mud and toil, or just nesting, or only flight above the touch, labor and pain of life.

In the nest, something gets created in the cycle. I find that I don’t, and can’t, create something inspired and fresh (ideas, writing) if I am only stuck in the mud of duties and stress, nor can I create something of value if I am only in the sky of my heart-mind. Beauty and new life are born in the nest when the air pulled down from above in arcs of flight meets the mud from my claws, in the nest embedded in the axle-tree. Whoooshh -- thwapp -- piing! . . . sapphires and garlic.

GO WITH MUDDY FEET

When you hear dirty story

         wash your ears

When you see ugly stuff

         wash your eyes.

When you get bad thoughts

         wash your mind.

                           and

Keep your feet muddy.

    ~ Nanao Sakaki

Here's a twig I gathered from my husband last week: Did you know that birds sound different from each other in flight? Have you heard a parakeet flap its wings? Loud! Have you heard an owl flap into flight? Silent. Their feathers have different textures of softness, as my dear Susie discovered when she rescued an injured barred owl from the side of the road and felt her silky-soft downy feathers, so unlike her chickens' feathers. Glide and scout, silently on a thermal. 

seven

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Seven is the number of wholeness and completion. This week we complete seven whole years living on this little farm. I've filled pages at this blog with farm joys since our second winter here. Today I'm planting wee memory haiku in the soil, like crocus bulbs. I was going to plant seven, but an eighth nudged its way in. Let's say the eighth is for the year ahead.

1shopping for a country house

here’s the driveway, stop!

tree embrace. seduced.

you’re ours, they whisper

2winter modesty

nothing but lace above

white sheet below

bare arms, chilly

3Pleiades orgy

cold night, hot tub

lucky man

one woman, and her seven sisters

4laundry joy

sun and wind call:
to Lake Michigan!
she replies, I'm coming!
as she hoists her sails

5how do you do?

let me introduce myself

come outside

I'm nature

6pendulous

heavily they fall

bounce in the grass

soften

7farm wedding

August rain
waters plum vows
100 people become one

8pharoah’s dichotemy

seven years

abundant leanness, or lean abundance

wet sky, dry sky

does it matter?

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Note: Image of the Pleiades found here.-

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Who left the gate open?

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This is the first time in four and a half years of blogging that I woke up this morning without a post drafted, ready to publish. I post something every three days or so, and in all this time, often I have had two or three topics ready to fly. So, what of this presentation of emptiness? I dunno.

Give me a couple of minutes, I’ll come up with something. Either a topic to write about, or a reason I am without a topic.

Wait for it.

You could very legitimately ask, If I have nothing to say, why post anything?

OK there is something I’ve been wondering about lately.

Many of my favorite bloggers have enabled comment moderation. I wonder why? There was a short time I was getting spammed like crazy, so I added the word verification feature. That seemed to take care of it. No more spam.

When I publish a comment at a friend’s blog who has enabled comment moderation, off my words fly like a butterfly, never to be caught again. Sometimes when I really like something I wrote, I copy and paste it into a Word document first so I can look at it again while I wait for my friend to publish the comment to their blog. This is a good safety net, since I have written a long comment many times, only to have it gobbled by Internet interference. I might have spent fifteen minutes writing that comment, and pfft! Waiting for my comment to get published after blog author approval can take an hour, a few hours, a day, and sometimes a couple of days, depending on the blogger. I tell you one thing, it’s a way to get me to go back to that post, something I don’t always have time to do after posting a comment. A lot of the people who have this feature enabled also respond to comments, so that is a nice reward for the waiting and checking on my part.

Maybe requiring blog author approval of comments is one last ditch effort to have control over something. There isn’t much left in that category.

So enough maundering. Isn’t that a great word? That’s my new favorite word. It means to talk in a random, foolish, or meaningless way. I have a friend who taught me that word who is anything but random, foolish or meaningless.

All this gets me thinking about authorship, and authority.

In my English department there is an awful lot of plagiarism by students. Would you be surprised to hear that some reports show that up to 70% of college students admitted to plagiarizing at some point in their college career? And did you know that it’s considered plagiarism even if a student does it unknowingly?

OK, here’s my last wandering, lumbering, untethered donkey thought on this open-the-gate-and-let-the-animals-graze-freely blog post kind of day.

What is authority? After growing up in a home where parents ruled and kids weren’t consulted much, I am happy to report that at age 54, after much tugging and tucking, I am the author, and the authority, of my life.

It’s dark outside. A truck just drove by, I heard the sigh. It’s the 9th of November, 12:25AM. In a few hours I’ll get up and drink coffee, eat oatmeal, and get ready for work. I can’t stop the clock ticking, but I can decide what to wear, maybe a skirt and tights before it gets cold outside. The sun will rise, no matter what I do. I can’t find the picture I really want to load with this post. I must sort and file my photos. They’re out of control.

I'm not used to this free donkey wandering, but this felt kind of good. Now I'll wander over to the comment box and see if anything wild, random or unruly happens. Eee-haw!

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End of Life: a villanelle

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My mom passed away in 1997. She was a pastor's wife, servant of God, mom of eight, church pianist, director of the church music program, Bible teacher, and a counselor to many. Because of living in and for the church, her life was a performance. She felt she had to be perfect, set a spotless example of behavior and attitude, and never cause anyone to "stumble". (I'm sure my dad and the congregation thought so too.) Because of this I believe that she was not free, though I think she was fulfilled and truly a very happy person with a vivacious personality. Picture her in high school on stage as Jo in Little Women getting the letter in the mail when her book was published, raising the letter in triumph, glee, and a little bit of feminine tomboy Wheee! She remained that jubilant girl her entire life, almost.

After my dad died in 1995, and Mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I wrote this poem. As her mind and life slipped away, I hoped and dreamed of an opening into freedom for her, maybe in another dimension, perhaps after death. I wondered what her life would be like if she was free to fail, or to do anything she wanted?

The form of this poem is a villanelle, which starts with a tercet (a three-line stanza), the first and third lines of which establish the refrain. As these lines are repeated, their tone, meaning and intensity build through the poem. I chose this form with its fairly strict pentameter and rhyme, and its refrain (like a hymn) for this woman who had dedicated her life to God and his laws and then at the end of life, lapsed into the tormented repetitions of one who has lost her memory and mental footing. There are links below the poem to find out more about the interesting poetic form called villanelle, including some famous poems of this form.

End of Life

Villanelle to my mother, who has submitted

to the forms of others her whole life

After the applause evaporates to nothing,

years from now when dust protects the stage,

you will take a bow, your roses trailing

crooked stems, those old sonatas failing,

yet your mind will muster and engage.

After the applause evaporates to nothing,

over seats prodigiously enchanting,

frail, with bones diminished due to age,

you will take a bow, your roses trailing

thorny courses down your arms and nailing

telegrams upon your palms with rage.

After the applause evaporates, to nothing

will your face upturn, to no forbidding

voice assent, too near, the door of the cage.

You will take a bow, your roses trailing

bird-size heads, their life no longer jailing

them within their small equipage.

After the applause evaporates to nothing

you will take a bow, your roses trailing.

~ Ruth M., 1995

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

To see how the structure of the villanelle works, go here. To read four beautiful and well known examples of villanelles by Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Edward Arlington Robinson, go here. To hear Dylan Thomas recite "Do not go gentle into that good night" in his lush, melodic voice, go here.

If you write poetry, but you haven't tried writing a villanelle, it can be a gratifying challenge!
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I was the cornstalk!

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My name is Ruth, and this is my testimonial.

After exposing my fears to you yesterday, you gathered around me like midwives around a woman in labor. My presentation this morning was short, more like 15 minutes than the allotted 5. (They told me to take all the time I needed.) It was not an important presentation in the grand scheme. It was an update, just informational, not meant to be inspirational or profound. But it weighed on me, and so I told you about it. Here are the things I have to say to you:

I was the cornstalk. What I mean is, I visualized the stillness of the broom corn in yesterday's photo as I went in and hung up my coat and laid out my handouts. I didn't take coffee or fruit until after I was done. (I got to present first, isn't that great! I got it over with and then could relax.) Being the cornstalk, I was still and didn't rush. This is the most important lesson I learned from the broom corn: DON'T RUSH. 

What strikes me now, and did as I left the meeting, walked to my car with my box of handouts, buckled my seatbelt and drove across campus to my office, is that this here blog world is real and precious. I went from an anxious, jittery woman yesterday (and many days previously) to a Zen cat, like my Bishop in the photo here. See how she observes and takes in the world. She squirms around in leaves. She stalks her prey and takes her sweet time. She lies under the broom corn and lets me take her picture. You all helped me get there, you commenters and well wishers. I took up the fibers of your offerings and wrapped myself in them, like a mantle.

I was relaxed. I made them laugh. I covered everything (without notes!). And here's the other thing I thought of about the people in the audience I was to address, while getting ready this morning at home: Like them, love them, believe in them. I did, and I think they felt it. I know I did.

Thank you. I feel incredibly moved at how I was transformed, with your help. I will not forget this the next time I am afraid or anxious.
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What am I afraid of?

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When Bonnie at Original Art Studio asked in her interview what I am afraid of, I recall telling her that I am not afraid of anything. But I realize that is not really true, though I thought it was at the time. I try to be honest with myself, you, and most of all with Bonnie. (She's a psychotherapist.)

I have to get up in front of people and give a presentation in the morning. It's all of five minutes, no multimedia. Just a short explanation of the new curriculum in my department to the university's advisors who are interested. But I'd much rather stand, silent, like a tree or a corn stalk. From how wordy I am at this blog you might think I would like to talk in front of people. Well I do like talking to one person at a time, and listening to them talk back. So what makes me nervous about getting up there and holding fifty people captive, with their wide eyes and expectant faces? It's like flying on a plane. I get nervous about being up there in the air without anything beneath me except, well, air, and the hard ground far below. I'm not afraid of dying, not a bit. I think I'm being honest about that. It's not that I am ready to die. I want to live long enough to hold my future grandbabies and look into their eyes within minutes or hours of their entry into the light of the world. I want to hear what they have to tell me just then, so soon out of the core, before we and all the world around them make them unlearn it. I do want to live long enough for that. But fear of the plane crashing is not about being afraid of death. Sometimes I'm afraid of the plane going down because of the few minutes I would be conscious of what's coming. I am afraid of fear. When I watch a scary movie, I love the suspense. But I refuse to watch them, because I am afraid of the fear I spent most of my life feeling, a constant bogey man hovering behind me, every second of my life when I was alone in the dark, until just a very few years ago, when my spiritual journey helped me to release the concept of demons into the ether. The fear of standing and speaking in front of a large audience, the fear of the plane crashing, the fear of invisible demons . . . these are all fears of something that isn't quite real, of something mysterious, something I can't know. Will my plane go down? Are there ghosts sitting in the darkness watching me? Will my brain freeze and gibberish stutter out of my mouth in the morning? I don't know. I can't know. But if I take hold of the fear of fear and accept that all these things are possible, and ask, What's the worst that can happen? . . . there is a good amount of relief.

Isn't this broom corn peaceful, just standing there, under clouds that arrange themselves like white foamy waves on the surface of a deep, mysterious and sometimes turbulent sea?

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