life these days

I'm not teaching this week; we have "summer break" for a week. I start a new part-time job on Thursday, waiting tables at a neat restaurant a couple of blocks away called Slims. The guy who owns it, Patrick, lives around the block. He uses a lot next to his house to grow salad greens, watercress, and other vegetables for the restaurant. It's slow food, communal tables, byob. I haven't waited tables for years, and I never thought I would do it again, but it is just part-time, one or two nights a week. I'm looking forward to it--good food and hopefully meeting new people.

On the gardening front, my garden is doing well. The raised beds aren't doing as well as the beds I dug out of the soil--go figure. The raised beds are filled with purchased material--peat, vermiculite, and compost--whereas the ground beds are native dirt and a little compost. The soil is black and fertile. So far, corn's growing, as are beans, squash (three sisters!), tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, basil, and more.

This next part is heavy--read if you dare. I wrote it a couple of weeks ago.

A friend from high school let me know a couple of weeks ago that someone we went to high school with committed suicide. I didn't know him well; he was a year ahead of me and more of an acquaintance. We traveled in the same social circles but were never close. I remember him as being kind of quiet, a little overweight, and a nice guy. I remember him having short brown hair and wearing jeans and faded blue t-shirts. I found out about this soon after I'd finished writing an essay about religion. All of it, along with events in my own life, got me thinking about the purpose of life. Was there really any purpose at all? If so, recently I haven't been able to tell. Why? The sheer number of people on the planet. My own disappointments. Things haven't turned out like I'd wanted them to. If something was "supposed" to happen, I didn't think it had. It is all linked in with the idea of God and fate--fate which I don't believe in, God, which I question at times. But there are definite benefits to believing in a higher power.

I just read a book called A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne. It defines poverty and gives resources for working with students in poverty--which many of the students that I teach are. She defines poverty as "the extent to which an individual does without resources," and those resources include financial, emotional, mental, spiritual, etc. She defines spiritual resources as

the belief that help can be obtained from a higher power, that there is a
purpose for living, and that worth and love are gifts from God. This is a
powerful resource because the individual does not see him/herself as hopeless and
useless, but rather as capable and having worth and value.

And then I thought about something else I'd read recently:

Indeed, it is only since the Enlightenment that faith has been defined as
intellectual submission to a creed. Hitherto, faith had been seen as a virtue
rather than a prerequisite. It meant trust, and was used in rather the same way
as when we say that we have faith in a person or an ideal. Faith was thus a
carefully cultivated conviction that, despite all the tragic and dispiriting
evidence to the contrary, our lives did have some ultimate meaning and value.
You could not possibly arrive at faith in this sense before you had lived a
religious life. Faith was thus the fruit of spirituality, not something that you
had to have at the start of your quest.--- from Karen Armstrong's introduction to Every Eye Beholds You, as reprinted in The Sun.

So, it seems to stand that people have a tendency to lose faith but at the same time need to believe in something. Not all people, but many do, me included, otherwise I wonder why we are doing everything. To continue:

I always imagined my adult life to be very exiting. I would travel the world. I would write a best selling book. I would write for National Geographic, traveling to the remote regions of the Amazon rain forest to document the discovery of new medicinal plants. I would sit at outdoor cafes in Italy. I may or may not get married. I would have children, which I have had. I would climb mountains, which I've climbed some. I would have a beautiful house with a white couch, Oriental rugs, bookcases full of books, and original art on the walls. Now I'm only or already in my early thirties and life is okay, not what I had expected it to be, but not that bad either. Depending on when you ask me.

Zac and I have talked about the meaning of life. A year and a half ago, when I was feeling more optimistic, we were talking on the phone. He asked me what's the purpose of life? I said, to be happy and do something good for the world. And I believed it.

Now, a year and a half later, cynical, I no longer believed that. Do something good for the world? How can you even define that? I got to thinking that there was really no reason to do all of this, the striving and the being "I am." Zac and I began talking about it recently, birthed by the suicide and the religion essay. He said he'd figured it out, Life. It's to survive.

I said that's lame. He said I was just disagreeing because he's saying it.

But if it is just to survive, then why?

I don't remember his answer. But eventually, I came to thinking that life's goal is to live. Life begets life, no matter the cost. Life assaults and triumphs in all forms. It grows up through the cracks in the sidewalk. It reproduces even when it has no means to or resources to. Life can't help itself. It climbs up the sides of buildings. We assault it with nonlife but it keeps on. Life won't stop living. Somewhere, in that will to life is God, or some super life or life force.

Depression stops life. It can and does lead to suicide; indirectly it leads to a lack of reproduction. If we add value and say that life is good--that that trademarked slogan but with a double meaning.

Life wants to be alive. Even if it sucks to be a rat or in jail or in a cubicle, but the majority of beings don't off themselves, which differentiates us from the other animals. Perhaps life can't figure itself out.

I'm not the sunniest person. I tend to be more melancholy. So when I heard about the suicide It jarred me, even though I haven't thought about him in years. Because thinking that life is for nothing is not too far from a walk off the plank. So while I was walking, thinking of his death, and looking at the plants and the crazy people, at the people with jobs and hobbies, I thought this is life. It makes more sense--mentally and emotionally--to believe that there is a reason, even if that reason is the mystery.

yoga

I posted this, removed it because it's pretty personal, and decided to post it again.

I've been doing yoga for ten years now. I've taken breaks but have always stuck with it. For the last six months, I haven't done much. I've done a little bit on my own, but that isn't the same as doing it with a group and being pushed a bit by a teacher. The thing about yoga is that it is so simple: pay attention to your breathing. If you can watch your breath for the whole session then you are really getting somewhere. I don't, but I try.

I went to a new place here in Cincinnati. In Wilmington, I had found a couple of great teachers that I loved. One in particular taught at the Y and she always had full classes. She provided a mix of spiritual teachings and attention to the poses. Here in Cinci, I hadn't found good teachers, either too easy, too out there (vaginal exercises), too regimented (ashtanga, ashtanga, and more ashtanga), or boring. I tried a new place out this evening. It is a store front shop with just one room. The teacher was good and I felt like I was back in the yoga groove again. It was just challenging enough, but not too demanding. I needed it and will be back.

Lately, I've been living in the past, thinking back to life in Wilmington a lot. I really miss living there. For the first two years that I lived there, I didn't like it, but now, I feel such an attachment to the place. I miss my friends, the beach, the dirty brown Cape Fear River, my old house, Silas's friends, live oaks, the smallness of the town. I miss the old downtown with its big Southern belle houses. When I left Wilmington, I was sad. I thought I would get over it, after all, it was a neighborhood and neighbors that I missed. I didn't miss my job. I came up here to be with the man that I love. But, there is a small truth: love isn't everything. I knew I would miss him if I stayed there, but I knew that I would miss that town deeply. I grew roots there and made connections. I knew a lot of people.

Lately, I've been living in the past and have been sad about it, sad about trying to start over again in a city I don't love. I miss the south. I miss going to the beach at night. The thing about these kinds of feelings is that they aren't socially acceptable to voice. After a while, you technically should stop missing some other place. You should learn how to at least accept a new place. I haven't found my place here yet, and honestly, I'm not sure I want to. So, I've been sad lately, not all the time, but I am definitely missing a sense of unfounded joy-joy about nothing, joy that comes from just being alive. That joy isn't constant but without little glimpses of it..... I read somewhere that humans are animals that are overly prone to despair.

At yoga tonight, I set my intention to feel joy. Throughout the session I didn't exactly feel joyous, but I felt good. I felt sad when I did hip openers, and I've heard that the hips is where a lot of deep-seated emotions reside. During those moments, my mind turned back to moments in Wilmington: the streets, riding bikes with Silas through our old neighborhood. But then, doing yoga brought me a deep sense of peace too, just meditating and listening to music and smelling incense. So, tonight I decided I need to do more yoga because it has been an integral part of all of the good parts of my life. Also: take country drives and bike rides, listen to bluegrass music and Krishna Das, cook dinner.

So, I'm trying to stay in the moment and with the good things here, but not push all those feelings of longing for my old home away and acting like those feelings don't matter--because they do. The years I spent with Silas in Wilmington were good ones. I did my share of complaining about the intense heat, the sprawl, the crowds, the gigantic roaches, but we did have a lot of memories.

When we first moved to Dock Street in Wilmington, we got there a month before school started for both of us--kindergarten for Silas and graduate school for me. We spent that first month reading Harry Potter aloud. First, I would try to go jogging early in the morning before it got too hot and take Silas with me, trying to get him to go along. We never got very far. Then, we would come back, eat breakfast, and sit on the porch until it got too hot while we read Harry Potter. I got into the book too. Then sometimes we would go to the beach, sometimes not. Early on, I felt obligated to go all of the time, but later I went just sometimes. Other good times: all of the times that Silas's best friend Ben slept over, or when he played with kids from the neighborhood, coming in and out of our house and their house, running up and down the street. That's what a childhood should be like.

Riding the ferry to Southport, just doing nothing but sitting in the air conditioned house in the summer, walking downtown at night along the river, walking to the creek near our house, seeing an alligator in that creek, sneaking over to the paintball field, body surfing, learning how to surf on a board, and there were others. Mostly, it was the everyday stuff. It was also stressful. I went to school and worked one or more jobs. Sometimes I had barely enough energy to put a frozen meal--veggie corndogs and fries--in the oven.

Most of all, I miss my old house. I moved there two years after moving to Wilmington. It was perfect, a small bungalow built in the '30s or '40s in a neighborhood full of other little bungalows, most of them fixed up, given the overheated real estate climate in Wilmington. The neighborhood had mature trees and a park. We had a big backyard with a deck, and all of the rooms had their own character. It was the best place I have ever lived. It was expensive, too much really, but worth it.

Looking back, it is easy to make things sound better than they were. But when leaving, I truly knew I would miss Wilmington, or rather miss my neighborhood and house. I felt like I shouldn't get so attached to one place, but I did.So now I am here, trying, futilely it seems, to fit myself into another place, in with other people, in another household. I got rid of a lot of my things when I left Wilmington and a lot of my stuff is still in the garage and I am living in a house full of my boyfriend's and his daughter's things. He says its no big deal, but it is. I don't feel that sense of home, of my home, and I really miss that. He's been good about trying to make me feel comfortable here, but it isn't the same and hasn't quite worked yet. I'd lived on my own for so long with Silas and that feels right to me. To make everything even worse, Silas is with his dad for the summer. The extra time is too much time. I don't feel the same way for my boyfriend's daughter as I do for Silas, nor should I.

Last night I thought that my cat, Fannie, was missing. I hadn't seen her all day and thought that maybe she got out of the house or died in the basement, etc. While I was looking for her, I was imagining her gone and thinking that she was. The point is, I miss my old life. Maybe sometime this will feel like my old life. I'm toying with the idea of going back.Doing yoga should help though. Just that one thing.

Lately I've been thinking about two things: teaching and communities in decline. I'm teaching composition this month and the theme of the course is community. I've asked students to choose any communities that they are involved with, and to write about those communities. The latest assignment is to address a problem in the community and propose a workable solution.

About teaching: the students I work with are predominantly poor, unprepared, and have many personal issues that contribute to a difficulty making it to school. Not all, but many. Out of a class of thirty students, about 12-15 are dedicated. The rest try or don't try, but regardless, they don't come to class very often and have many excuses. In teaching Composition, I've been reading about how to teach it, and about language in general. Many of my students are black and the language that they speak is very different than the language that they "should" write in. It isn't easy for them. The majority of my students are adults. Even the younger students already have children or have a child or two on the way. One woman is 25, and is the single mother to four children, something I have a hard time understanding. Many are deeply devoted to their churches.

Some of them are extremely ambitious; some of them are there for the financial aid money. Some are bright. There is a girl in my class who is perhaps the most natural writer I have ever seen. Her prose is effortless. I am impressed by the ones who had been in gangs or even in prison for dealing drugs and are now turning their lives around. I don't have a point exactly. The experience of teaching at this college has been eye opening for me. I've been working with people I have been largely removed from for the majority of my life, even though you could say I am or have been one of them.

One issue that we as a class have been dealing with and I have been trying to understand as well is why the inner city is the way it is. Living in Cincinnati is a new experience. There is a large inner city full of older houses in disrepair, vacant buildings, and poverty. Wilmington had its moments and there was a definite line based on race and class, but the scale was much smaller. Here, and perhaps in many Midwestern cities, such as St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, and others, the people who can go, go, and the people who can't, stay. The more affluent move to the suburbs here. We live in the city, but we send our kids to an expensive private school. The schools are mostly failing, and there are not a lot of options. The private school is full of white kids.

But what do we do with these dying urban landscapes? Or do we do anything? How do you deal with systemic poverty? Trying to deal with a problem like this by building community centers or new housing doesn't seem to be the solution. One of my most ambitious, intelligent students says you have to change people on the inside. I said I look forward to hearing about how that can happen. In class yesterday we talked about the wars on poverty, drugs, and terror. The majority of the class came to the conclusion that you can't do much about all three, especially poverty. It will always be around, and it is even worse on a global scale.

Again, I'm not sure what my point is.

Today I read an article in the New York Times about Flint, Michigan and how the city is shrinking. Yesterday I heard on NPR about schools closing in St. Louis and Detroit because there aren't enough students. Now, I'm thinking about ghost towns and a whole swath of the country that may become mostly abandoned.

Many years ago, I wrote a really short story/poem about future evolution and what the world will become when we aren't here, or when we become something else. Vines would take over, mold and moss would cover everything. We would slowly evolve into what we are now: the senses and a loss of physical presence. Animals would burrow in the basements of our homes.

rewriting

If we were hobos on a train we would look into the faces of the other hobos and there would be this knowing: We all left for one reason or another, no use trying to explain, we know why we left.—Carey Tennis, Since You Asked,

 

Thinking of hobos somehow calms me. It makes me want to watch He’s Not There again, just to see the beginning, when the young Bob Dylan, played by an even younger black boy, hops the train and rides and talks, all the while the green landscape passes beside him. What I like is seeing the fields passing outside, the knowing that it is midsummer.

 

In me there is this longing that I always return to in words, whenever I write anything autobiographical I go back to midsummer, to some eastern or southern landscape. I go back to tall grass in a field, to chicory on a fencerow, to Queen Ann’s lace. These memories, if that is what they are, always fill me with a sense of longing that I’ve never been able to displace. I’ve written it again and again. It was Ebeth and David’s house, I believe. Friends of my mother’s who lived out in an old white house out in the country, somewhere in Kentucky. Around their house stood fields and beyond that woods. Inside, the house was falling down, old and dilapidated. There were quilts hanging on the walls. They had two young daughters, about me and my sisters’ ages, one of whom’s name was Jocelyn. There was a baby pool. David did some sort of work, gardening or farming. Ebeth tended to the house.  We spent the night. We ate black bean tacos with goat cheese. She was thin and they were living close to the land, and in poverty.

 

But the them wasn’t and isn’t important. It is that memory of walking in the dirt, of tall grass and those common weeds. I could go back there but there would be no reason to. Maybe it is the house that I was meant to live in, the place where I’m meant to be. But being and living shouldn’t be a puzzle, something you have to spend your life and your money, and the treads on your tires, trying to figure out. But somehow, it is difficult to escape that notion of “where you are supposed to be.” That that certain place does exist, and it exists in a way that you may never find it and in reality, you shouldn’t spend your whole life searching for.

 

I try to put my finger on it. I rewrite it over and over again. 

I have a new associated blog that contains only links to published work. I am sending links to it to people that I would like to work for/with as examples of my work. The leading post is a little goofy, as it is a link to an article about a sewer upgrade. But you've got to do what you've got to do sometimes. As for this blog, well, we'll see. So visit the other one that you can view via my profile and let me know what you think. It is purely professional.

done gone

Life always goes to seed if we let it. Here in the South especially, when we let things go mildew creeps in, its black spotted arms riding up your legs, vines, and not just kutzu, big, fat green vines come out of the ground an inch wide already, growing a foot a day with thick, wet spikes, ready to wrap around your chain links. They grow so quickly that if you touch them you get wet, puncture their membranes and you’ll find no substance, just pale green water held up by slipshod cell walls. They take you down to seed with undying roots, that no matter how often you cut them they come back. It is the fairy ring by the bus stop. It is the speck of rotten wood in the floorboard. It is what those of you who live in the cold have no idea about. You don’t know the constant onslaught of life that we fight. You don’t know what kind of shape we’re in when we give into it. You don’t see the insects, the way a sweet potato vine can invade the entire front yard, the way crab grass creeps along the sidewalks, and the way the vinyl turns greed with algae and mold.

But you do know this: something about these days has brought us back. Has made small houses and simple sidewalks seem somehow sufficient. You don’t know this but it has carried us down, removing the power of motivational thinking from our grasp and led us into a collective low, a sleep we’ve all been hoping for.


I’ve wanted to use this quote for ages. Ever since I first read it and upon remembering it later and buying a used copy of the book, The Way of Herbs by Michael Tierra. He writes in the introduction, “It seems that after a while, when people realize that they are alone and nothing will eat them, they begin the often destructive process of letting down their societal inhibitions; then we find the tendency of country folk to spend their free time drinking, getting high and ultimately making themselves sick. Through such ignorance we miss the incredible lesson that nature has to teach us, the lesson of how to just be.”

Back to Kaintuck

My rant is over. Who can keep that up when researching classic country music? I'm writing an article about country tribute musicians here in Wilmington and thus, to get a feel for the story, I'm listening to a lot of old country. Hear this:

Rock Island Line by Johnny Horton
Truck Drivin Man by Buck Owens
White Lightnin by Waylon Jennings

Yup, I am learning to differentiate between the Nashville Sound and the Bakersfield Sound. I'm learning why people have liked country music, because I never did get it. And I've found this out from a source: everybody's had their heart broken and somebody's always doing somebody wrong, therefore country music will always have an allure. I'm not sure if that's true or not. I've had my heart broken and I didn't turn to country music. Whatever.

Meanwhile, I'm in my office, listening to country music and occasionally getting up to dance around and sing really badly into my fake microphone.

a rant

okay, I'm making a pot of pinto beans in the Crock Pot. Could it get much worse than this?

I actually like beans and cornbread, but still, the dish has its connotations: Depression Era-poor Southerner, going back into the hills, or in this case, the swamp, to grow beans and corn and wait out the economic downturn. Or stay back there in the hills, eating cornbread, forever. Maybe taking up growing your own tobacco and smoking it in your own hand-carved pipe. And going barefoot when your shoes wear out. And hiding under a false name.

Seriously. I'm feeling a major economic bummer. That is made even worse by the bailout of all these big banks and companies that were doing the wrong thing to begin with. I will admit that I am not economically savvy, but I have some sense. A few years ago, people knew that they shouldn't take out mortgages for more than they could afford. And the banks that were dealing them out were gambling on borrowed money. And everyone knew it would crash, and it has. Surprise! And now, because of all of these mistakes by people who really should have known better and investment bankers who were making loads of cash, the taxpayers, us, have to bail them out.

I know I'm not allowed to say this but here goes: It's just not fair. When you do the right thing and people who don't get their debt erased. Again--I don't know the details. I got a C minus in Economics in college. I'm more right-brained than left brained. But I do know what gambling is and I do know that you shouldn't borrow more than you can afford to. The government is throwing so much money around right now; its scary. I know that a global financial crisis would be bad, but still. When I, and so many people that I know, are working hard and are struggling with the usual litany (gas prices, food, etc), when small business owners are making less, when I'm working as an adjunct professor for too little money for too much work, then it feels like a jab to hear something about the government taking over bad loans and considering lowering the amount that people owe on their mortgages. I didn't take out a loan I couldn't afford, so what then?

I don't want a bailout (student loans? can that be considered bad debt that someone will come take off my hands?), but I would love for people to get in line and recognize and act out this all important concept: personal responsibility.

Okay. Rant over.

"Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, forget about your worries and your strife, I mean the bare necessities are mother nature's recipes for just the bare necessities of life"
song from the Jungle Book.