Rituals

Rituals

I don’t understand rituals.  I don’t get the need for them or the pleasure received from them.  Somehow I feel cheated.   Maybe a better word would be puzzled.   Does that make me non-spiritual if I don’t feel the spiritual ritual? Does that make me non-patriotic if I don’t feel the patriotic ceremony?

 Why don’t I feel the need or not recognize the need for an outward expression of an inward conclusion?    Is it that I have cut my living, my life, so close to the emotional bone that I am unable to experience the centering that is anticipated with the repetition of ritual?

 

I can see the peace and settling that comes to those who use ritual.  They see it for the symbol that it is and feel its power.   It is evident that it gives them strength.  Yet I don’t feel a connection with rituals.   

Could it be that I do have rituals and ceremony in my life I just don’t recognize them as such because they are mine?  Is such a simple thing as always putting your left sock on first, a ritual?  Does it bring steadiness, peace to you?  Maybe it  does, maybe it gives you a feeling of control over your day.   If that is the case then the use of ritual to stabilize our lives is not only the big gesture but the small and everyday gesture.  The always wearing Mom’s ring on your pointing finger and the making sure you give three good-bye kisses not two or four are rituals as important as saying “I do” at the end of a wedding ceremony.

Are these then our unconscious rituals that we use incessantly to keep us centered and connected?  If that is so, then I do have rituals that guide me, they are my personal, comfortable, unconscious ones.

 

Does this mean that conscious rituals are a learned behavior and by repetition of the act and the conviction the power of the ritual is felt?   Is that the secret of the ritual?

Diana, for the Poplar Grove Muse  

People Like Us- a movie review

     PEOPLE LIKE US is under the radar. It’s just a little movie but with recognizable actors. Unadvertised, no media blitz for this modest film, but what a bittersweet tale of family ties, secrets and betrayal. We need more small movies like this low-key tale of redemption. The movie is based loosely on writer/director Alex Kurtzman’s real life story that brings a heads up quality to the action.

     The tale begins with a RAIN MAN like scene of a fast taking businessman, Sam (Chris Pine). He is making things happen at various goods production factories where non-selling items are remarketed to make some sort of monetary return on poor performers. Unfortunately his expired soup explodes in an unrefrigerated train on its way to potential Mexican buyers. While negotiating around his boss's less than happy ultimatum on these losing results, he keeps declining his mother’s unusual cell phone interruptions.

      Upon returning to his NY home, his paramour, the understanding but no fool Olivia Wilde tells him the sad news of his dad's death. Sam tries to invent many reasons not to attend the funeral in LA but finally he arrives at his mother’s (Michelle Pfeiffer) home intentionally late enough to miss the service only to be greeted with a well-deserved slap on the face.

     The father’s lawyer later tells him that Sam is bequeathed only the record producing father's LP collection. At the same time, he is given his Dad’s shaving kit filled with  $150,000 and a note to deliver it to a name and address with an added sentence to "watch over them".

     It now gets messy. Sam discovers, at this address, a beautiful although skanky-ish  single mother Frankie ( Elizabeth Banks) and her prepubescent  borderline JD son (Michael Hall D'Addari). Sam learns (while following the young woman conveniently to her neighborhood AA meeting) of her fury at her non-existence by reading aloud her exclusion from her/ their father’s obituary. It gets complicated as Chris Pine ensconces himself in their lives while never claiming his identity. 

     Bar scenes with his not yet acknowledged half-sister reveal parts of her life with their common Dad while Sam’s independent interactions with the 11 ‘in years almost 25 in sophistication’ nephew whose love of music matches Sam’s, links them genetically to the dead father/grandfather. The mutual anger of his half sister's desertion by their father by age 8 as well as Sam’s own rage at a father never being there for him culminating with no inheritance swim over the two siblings. The story meanders with interspersed confrontations with his mother and her overdue admittance that she insisted the egocentric rock music producer husband/father chose between the two families.

     Genetically similar distancing skills and irresponsible tendencies include using ‘the system’ for their own selfish benefit permeate the brother and sister’s interactions. The undercurrent of incest between the two until the truth is told is always present but happily chaste, for the audience's sake. The siblings need unconditional love more than romantic love anyway.

     As one can imagine in a Hollywood movie, everyone comes out ok in the end but this reviewer was left with a sadness of parental poor choices and secrets soiling the next generation for many years if not an entire lifetime.

     It’s worth seeing but it will not be. There are too many heavily advertised movies this summer and many with 3 D enticements. But some night at home around 10:15pm or 2 am as your remote lingers on the title; watch it and you will be in for an unexpected treat. Or plunk down the cash now at AMC or eventually Netflix.  It might make some of us happy we grew up in the homes we did or remind others of us that secrets seldom serve the righteous and typically each player suffers as a result.

carole

..excerpts from The Girl Swinging Into The Sky...a work in progress.

--December 1994
It is almost Christmas.  I started writing poetry yesterday.  I am keeping it hidden, in my own binder so no one looks at it.  I made a blue binder and painted the front with all the paints that I had and then made a collage on the back.  Mostly of band pictures, musicians that I like and some outer space stuff.  The first poems were easy to write, like they were already there.  I think I am going to number them and see how many I can write.  

Dad deleted all my writing I had on the computer.  But first he read it all.  He called mom on the car phone on our way to Metamora for the women’s holiday shopping trip.   I could tell something was wrong when she picked up, mom’s face frowned really hard, and then she glared at me and said,

“Okay I’ll tell her.”

“Your father found your writing” she said.

It felt like the blood in my body turned cold.  Mom only uses the word father when there is something bad about to happen.

“And he saw that you talked about drugs,”

I also talked about how I hated them.  I wonder if he saw that.  It was hard to walk around Christmas town and shop all day with the women and know that I was really in trouble when I got home.  I don’t know how mad dad is going to be, or if he will just not talk to me for a while.  

--February 1995
Mom was crying in the doorway of the den.  Something was wrong with her.  Dad was sitting in his recliner facing the tv.

She saw me,

“Your father has been asked to leave the soccer club.”

Dad didn’t say anything, he turned the TV volume up.

“Everything is falling apart, this is our whole life, and now it is gone!”

Mom started breathing heavy.

“Don’t you even care, Dave?”

Dad flipped to another station.

“Am , I the only one in this family who cares?”

“Who is going to be our coach?”  I ask.

“It was that stupid Rick Mann, who reported your father, I know it.”

Mom put her fingers in her mouth and started pacing.

“Who’s going to be our coach?”

“Your father never liked Rick Mann, he should have cut Jenny from the team.”

She put her arms in the air and walked in a circle.  I went to the fridge and found the ½ full soda can from lunch, walked through the sitting room back upstairs.  Eric was playing world wrestling federation in the Nintendo room.  I went to my room, shut and locked the door.

--March 1995

“I found a new team for you to play on.”

Mom was waiting for me on the porch when I got off the bus.  I sat in the wicker chair next to her.  

“It will just be until you can try out for Dynamo, but their tryouts for next season aren’t until May so until then, I found a team for you.”

She was holding the cordless phone and staring at me.

“What team?”

“It is an all boys team in Perry and the coach’s name is Len, they said they will take you right away, you don’t have to try out.”

“If it is all boys how come I am going to play on it?”

“Because you are better than all the girl players in that county, they have a terrible soccer program.”

She continued,

“I told them where you were from and they said they’d take you right away and then I said that I would bring you over to practice tomorrow night, your first game is this Saturday.”

Allison 07/02/12

Blackberry Picking

From a fast write during a summer writing workshop...

There was a vast woods behind my house and through the woods ran a long trail which we called the Indian Trail. Whether Indians really used it or not is unknown to me. I always imagine they did.  The woods was a bountiful place for playing.  When you followed that trail for a quarter of a mile or so it came out in field filled with blackberries.

In summer when the blackberries were out—early august or so, it was expected that you grab a bucket, make your way down the trail and pick as many as you could.  Because the briars were thick and the bugs were everywhere you generally had to put on shoes (something I rarely did in the summer) and long pants and long sleeved shirts.  I hated that.  It was so hot already.  But mother insisted that we get as many blackberries as we could before the birds or the other neighbors did.  Come to think of it, no one else was out there except us. 

Those were the day when property was not marked by no trespassing signs.  People could just go into fields and pick.  I have no idea who owned that land.  It has since been taken over by developers—those berries long gone under the blade of a backhoe.  But there we went…covered from head to toe, out into the evening hours when the sun was lower but the bugs were worse.  I can remember wading into brambles over my head, crouching down unable to move because every movement caught my hands and face and arms,  Scratching thin trickles of blood across my shins and ankles.  Bees buzzing in my ears, dragonflies as they whipped by my head.  I hated doing this.  Hated the heat and the scratch and the bugs.  Swatting, swiping, sweat trickling down my cheek.  Plunk after plunk of berries in the can.  Fill, filling, full.  Feeling victorious when I stumble across a pocket of rich ripe black fruit.  Trying to get them all without getting stuck. Reaching the highest ones, some eaten already by bees and birds.  Tracking back, down the Indian Trail, once spilling a whole bucket on the ground and frantically picking up the moist hot fruit in my hands.

Back home mother would give us big dishes of fruit doused in sugar, back when sugar was good for you, and we ate them and scraped seeds out of our teeth; she made ice cream with blackberries and blackberry pies.

I hated the expectation that I would go.  Hated  the heat and the work. Hated the bugs and the buzzing, always the buzzing, hated the thin trickle of sweat and that threatened feeling I had surrounded by brambles, no way in or out.  I loved the sweet fruit and the way it made my mother remember her childhood.  The way that made her happy in a way other things could not.

But now, like many things from summer, I wish I could go back. Wish I could turn the earth back over and grow the patch again.  Pick some blackberries one more time.

--Amy for the PGM

Where The Treasured Thing Hides

Note: When I arrived in Western Scotland in May of this year, I learned that birders come from far and wide to seek a bird called the Corncrake.  This plain brown creature has a distinctive rattling call, not unlike the sound a cricket makes on a summer evening, but in shorter bursts, raspy, a much- amplified echo in the air. You can hear it from far away.  Up on the high hill.  Under the yellow broom plant, in the sea grass.  Over there. No, there!   It's a dry, head-turning, percussive holler you hear as you walk along…”hey…HEY!”  When you turn to look, the bird is seldom seen.  There are people with fancy cameras and telescopic lenses all over the place on Mull and Iona, seeking the elusive Corncrake. 

Journal excerpt:  On Iona May, 2012

This listening is not first-time listening although I hear things for the first time.  A Corncrake, elusive bird, a little like a percussion instrument anyone can play (think Guiro… a small dry stick raked across a hollow wooden cylinder) It comes from the bush, the iris bog, from behind the stone wall, and is suddenly gone –or Craking up the hillside driving the birders mad.  The name alone makes me grin. 

This is not the first time I’ve heard lapping waves against rock…the distant laughter of children, church bells that might just as soon be a call to dinner.  Home call for so many, those bells, I suppose. Pipes rattle in the walls, footsteps creak overhead, baa and caw filter through my open window—most of these noises familiar enough, but all together here and now in this new context, they sound a brand new song. 

What brought me to Iona was the reverberation of this homing song in someone else’s heart and her conviction that I should hear it too.  We’ve got to take a writing circle there, Rebekah said in so many words.  And thus began a two year journey of manifestation that lead me here today.   

This next stage journey-beginning is, for me, about tuning my ears as much as my eyes, my nose, mind, and heart to the familiar wrapped in the unfamiliar.  Where the rock that pushes up to warm in the sun is as old as rock gets, where waves lap, gulls cry, sheep graze under the wash drying on the laundry line in the white cottage gardens, and invisible footsteps mark the spot where holy and hungry have walked together for centuries asking questions.  Looking for something.

This is where the murmurings of the heart play corncrake games; where the path to finding my words…true heart, soul home, new inspiration, requires the skill and patience of a birder who listens, waits, watches then follows.  Listens and follows.  Watching for movement underneath and over top of things.  Listening again.  Following the sound to where the treasured thing hides. 

Journeys are like this: Corncrake quests – a bit disorienting, destabilizing, and challenging to the daily status quo. I watch the birders traipse up and down the island following a yearning that won’t let go.  My particular yearning is still searching for a name.  It asks questions like “Why am I not happier?” “Where can there be more ease and flow in my life and in the world?”  “What needs attention so I can pay better attention?”  Simple enough, eh?

The writing part of this journey will help. May I be brave enough and curious enough to persevere.   The quest is in the questions.   The Corncrake calls. 

BLR 6/18/12

The Apple of His Eye

I had planned on writing about Iona for this blog post, but my dad kept tapping on my shoulder and appearing in my dreams. He passed away January 15, 2012. Initially, I was in relief mode because he had suffered horribly for two years and was no longer the big, strong dad I had known all of my life, but grief changes its face constantly and loves to catch you off guard.  It also sometimes puzzles you. I’ve known for a few months that I was really starting to miss him, but that didn’t feel like the whole story. I couldn’t quite name exactly how I was missing him.

I have been reading Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies and when I got to the chapter titled “Dad”, this amazing writer took her metaphorical hammer and hit me between the eyes. On this material plane I am no longer the apple of any one’s eye.  I am no longer daddy’s little girl. (He used to love it when I played a song by that name on the piano.) For as long as I can remember, I’ve walked around knowing that there was one person who thought I was beyond wonderful, who was proud of the woman I’d become, who loved me unconditionally. That’s the hole in my life.  The ache that I suspect will never go away.  It’s not a sharp pain, more like the headache that threatens when the barometric pressure is changing.

I can’t write about my relationship with my dad without bringing in my mother, because she did her best to destroy my relationship with him. I look just like him. My DNA is imprinted with his patience, his impish sense of humor, his love of family and his sense of right and wrong.  He was also my protector and tried his best to deflect my mother’s constant disapproval of me. That wasn’t always easy and I’m sure he paid a high price for it. If he did, he never said a word to me about it. He never said one bad thing about her as I was growing up. There are things I know I did that hurt him because my mother had such an influential grip on me. When I grew up and got away from her, he and I talked about those things. He understood and let go of it, most likely because he was the one of the few people on earth who understood the slyness of her toxicity.

He influenced how I parent my son. I learned from him the importance of honoring your child as the person they truly are, to always be there without intrusiveness and to love without strings.

Everywhere I turn there are reminders that Father’s Day is coming up. He loved getting cards from me, especially on a dad’s special day. Last year on Father’s Day he was in the hospital suffering from sepsis and unable to shave himself. I went out and got him an electric shaver. You’d have thought I bought him a new car. He was still telling me how much he liked it at Christmas time. It was something that made his life a little easier. This year I don’t think I can let the day pass without buying him a card. I will simply write Dad on the envelope, as I always did, and just drop it in the mailbox. I truly believe he will receive it. Love you, Dad.

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

Viva La Gubar

I have just come from a truly remarkable event, an evening program of the IU Writers' Conference featuring Professor Emerita Susan Gubar reading from her new book, "Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer," alongside her oncologist, Romanian poet Daniela Matei, reading from her collection “The Way Back Machine.” 

I worked briefly with Susan Gubar on projects that ended abruptly with her cancer diagnosis late in 2008. Since that time I have marveled at her deep humanity and insightfulness (both too often, in my experience, absent in people of great brilliance) and grieved her illness and the devastating experiences it inflicted upon her.

So, both personally, and as a writer and sometime academic, tonight was a joyful occasion, a reading from a searching memoir of cancer treatment into remission, and a celebration of the resilience of a beloved teacher and critic.

Susan Gubar (I understand her students call her, lovingly, “La Gubar”) is as gracious a human being as I have met.  She apparently only agreed to appear if her oncologist read alongside her, and Dr. Matei opened the reading. Her long title poem, read in English translation, evoked a nearly medieval childhood in the village of Sibiu under Ceaușescu's Communist dictatorship.  Another, “Bloom,” spoke out of the freighted emotional territory of her oncology practice. Later in the program,  in response to an audience question about the poetry circle she met with under surveillance at university, she read an arresting poem, “Sex on the Tape Recorder,” narrating the sounds of a sexual encounter in her now-husband’s bugged dorm room under the recorded surveillance of secret police. 

Gubar offered a brief meditation on the exigencies of memoir and illness narratives. She questioned the “ethicality” of memoir, focusing on the potential violation of others’ privacy in any narrated event and observing that “certain information is not just only your information.” She was above all concerned with not hurting the feelings of well-intentioned participants in her medical odyssey. She moved on to explore the “constructedness of memoir,” citing the difficulties of conveying the tedium of treatment without replicating it, the challenges of describing physical horrors without horrifying an audience (she took license from Roland Barthes’ quip that "when written, the word shit doesn't smell”), and the demands of trade press publishing and its rigorous privileging of “happily ever after” narratives. Gubar also shared her ideas on the role of art in both memoir and her own grueling experience, as well as her personal  and publication-directed struggle for moments of lightening and affirmation in her memoir, as in her life. 

For Gubar, reading and writing have been a lifeline in sickness and in treatment; she referenced the art of Frieda Kahlo and the poetry of Emily Dickenson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gerard Manly Hopkins, and Philip Larkin as offering incisive explorations of mortality.

A veteran of too many literary departmental and job talks, I was especially gratified by Professor Gubar’s elegant and gracious deflection of the obligatory monologuing, self-referential non-question question posed by an elderly male colleague during the final audience discussion. She was poised, humane, and generous in redirecting the event away from a dreary self-reflexive exercise (an impulse her work and teaching have always modeled constructive alternatives to) toward a well-earned celebration of art and life. As an eternally-recovering English graduate student, a cancer survivor, an admirer of “La Gubar,” and a human being, I can’t get enough of authentic, generous, humane celebrations of art and life. 

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse