A Kind of Despair

 

A Kind of Despair

Kathy MacDonald

I am surfing online
When I’m sideswiped by
A poetry forum board.

Poems
with titles like
“I see God Standing in Stout Grove”
and
“The Man Next Door According to His Pockets.”

Critiques
with comments like
“this poem makes its inquiry via complicated linguistic turns”
and
“to invoke the ghost of Ginsberg is to invite a perilous comparison”.

A kind of despair washes over me.
I, who write poems with titles like
“As If”
and
“Snapshots”
will never be among the chosen.

It hurts to swim through all these stanzas.

So I stop.
And write a poem.

The only answer I have found
to despair.

 

 

Sea Glass Thoughts

Sea Glass Thoughts

Yellow and pink sea glass shards. Not pure sea glass, not quite frosted smooth enough – but beautiful to me. Their undersides reveal them to have been plates at one time – I imagine candy dishes. Filled with bonbons. Sitting on a side table of a grandmother, who waits for her grandchildren to come visit. Love laid out in a candy dish. An offering of sweetness, from her to them, without a word.

Love offerings everywhere; and me unable to hold them all. I think that is why I cried when I was on the island, where I found these two pieces, pink and yellow. Rare colors, but not on this beach. Not on this beach where my eyes could not miss the treasure. Had I brought buckets, I could not have emptied the sands of its sea glass treasures. It felt like too much; I felt like a child dropped in the middle of Disney World with no restrictions. Why did I feel a rising anxiety, after I felt excited and happy?

I wouldn’t make the right choices. I would miss a spectacular something that was right there at my finger tips. Whatever I chose, they would not be the best ones. Even if somebody offered me my heart’s desire, I wouldn’t be wise enough, or smart enough, or have enough vision, to reach out and grab it. Instead, I would remain blind to it. Leave it on the beach for someone else to find and take it. I would lose, forever, my one chance at happiness.

My meditation practice teaches me to be aware of those feelings, to let them flow through me, bringing my attention to them. The discomfort. The sadness. The confusion. Waiting to see if they had anything to show me.

And this is what I learned on that day. I bring myself to any experience. When I took a breath, asked God to help me choose, trusted that whatever I filled my pockets with would be enough ~ it was.

I see now, that had I left that day with only these two pieces, yellow and pink, it would have been enough. Enough because I saw and appreciated them. Because I imagined a story for them. Because I cared enough to pick them out of the sand and rocks. This addict is finally understanding, in every moment, in every breath, life offers itself like the sea glass on a beach. No hurries. No worries. An abundance of blessings designed to build my trust. I need never feel empty again. When yellow and pink glass from broken plates, makes me happy, surely the happiness rests inside of me, not outside?

I know most of us, right now, no matter what is happening in our lives, have more blessings than buckets to hold them. A grateful heart is what opens our eyes to the treasure lying at our feet.

What I Didn’t Tell You Then

I wrote this piece in response to a Nancy Slonim-Aronie “Writing From the Heart” prompt, and read it on her radio show (Lime Radio). My daughter doesn’t always love to be the subject of my work, but I am hoping that someday, when she struggles with her own daughter, she will know I understand, in the way I now understand my own mother’s faithfulness to the calling.

What I Didn’t Tell You Then

What I didn’t tell you then, Maggie, when you asked me, “Did you ever even want to BE a mother?” when I wouldn’t drive you to a friend’s house, was this….only every day of my life for the last twenty-seven years. Actually, maybe longer than that. Maybe back when I was a child, and I watched a baby cousin sleeping, like a doll, in a make-shift cradle – a bureau drawer emptied out and placed on the floor. The baby desire started early and fierce in me. At twenty-two, I already hungered to begin, and feared that, if I was unable to get pregnant, my heart would break. I ached to get started. Your father knew we should wait, buy a house, save from our two paychecks.

Our first Christmas in that white cape house, he gave me a gift of a mint green baby sweater and hat, for the baby he promised we would have. A promise and a balm to soothe. I cried. It was the sweetest present I had ever received, until I held your brother Matthew, one month old, in a red Santa suit, the following Christmas.

What I didn’t tell you then was this Maggie. My entire life has willingly, passionately, whole-heartedly been devoted to being a mother. If I didn’t say that, when you spat out your adolescent accusation – it was only that the sting of your doubt silenced me for a bit. But now, to answer your question – did I ever even want to be a mother? Only with every cell of my being for as long as I can remember. Even on days like this.

 

White Simplicity ~ A Winter’s Poem

White Simplicity

After prayer, candlelight and tears

I pick up my pen

to begin again this business of being fully human,

indentured servant that I am.

No option for parole.

My Jailer this day feels cruel,

except for the gift of snow spilling from the sky

onto the bare branches of trees

and grass

covering everything with white simplicity.

And if I have no answers

to my God’s complexity

I have this hope.

To be blanketed, for a morning

in His peace

where all questions can be put to sleep

in white simplicity.

Why I Write ~ Containing Chaos, Creating Meaning

I’m kind of a mess. I don’t say this in a self-pitying way, nor do I believe, as I once did, that I need to fix those parts of me that are complicated and contradictory. But ask anyone who loves me; I can be unwieldy to hold. Not only for loved ones, but even for myself. Like the colored mosaics in a kaleidoscope, tumbling, turning into ever shifting patterns, I am never quite settled. Inclined to morph at the slightest touch. Beautiful maybe, perhaps intriguing and fun, but frustrating if you expect consistency, constancy.

Working on the assumption, however, that God doesn’t make any mistakes, I must accept that God was going for the tossed and tumbled kaleidoscope effect. “Oh, yes, this one”, He might have said, “Expressive. Dramatic. Moody. Sensitive. Funny. Maternal. Critical. Philosophical. I’ll mix equal parts tender compassion with cut to the bone honesty, throw in a fair amount of vanity, a pinch of arrogance, and a yearning for the Divine. This will be fun to watch.” And then, before moving on to the next person, did He stop to think, “What to give her as a compass to find her way back home to herself and Me? Of course, writing!”

Writing is my spiritual practice. It is both prayer and the answer to prayer. Praying with clasped hands leaves me lonely in the silence. Meditating on the mat leaves me relaxed, or asleep, but not enlightened. Talking with friends can make the knots in my mind tighter. Writing is the only way I can get to my essential truth. It is the way I work with the chaos of creative mind, not against it. I don’t empty my mind by counting my breaths. Instead, I write, permitting every thought and feeling to spill recklessly onto the page. Then, like scanning the sand for shells, driftwood or sea glass, I can choose what to keep as treasure, what can be regarded as dross and tossed back into the sea.

Diving right into the mess, I surface with illuminations, poems, stories. Twisting my way, pen on paper, through the labyrinth of my own misunderstanding, I untangle emotions, tell secrets, have a good laugh. Each mosaic inside of me can now be held, line by line. The messy, confused, heartbroken. The enraged, afraid, conflicted. The tender, loving, wise.

The writing mirrors my soul’s reflection the way a kaleidoscope fits and refits shards of light and dark, warm and cool, symmetry and chaos. I am the kaleidoscope that holds beauty within, if I will only stop to peek.

Inside is sensuality and desire. Curiosity and surprise. Sorrow and grief. Confusion and hilarity. Inside is a dreamer who wants to play with images, ideas, imagination. She wants to be free to go back into a summer day when she was four, and the clover was purple, return, and lose herself in the rustle of autumn leaves outside her window. She requires attention to stay alive. When I don’t carve out time to write, I may look to the world like I am present and accounted for, wearing all the proper garments of responsibility, but Kathy is missing in action.

Writing, I am fully present, steeped in soul like a tea bag brewing in a mug of hot water. I find I like this woman who is an artist. Her quirky mind, her courage at facing the tough questions. I love how she celebrates the beauty of her loved ones, the beauty of the world. How she can craft words to make people laugh and cry and feel loved. Kathy, the writer, is the finest gift I have to offer. I’ve been less than a perfect wife, mother, daughter, friend. But the writing is my innocence on the page. My desire to do better. My willingness to try again. The writing is my devotion to Love.

I Write for Joy

I believe in Unicorns. I imagine I might wake one midsummer evening, and there outside my bedroom window, on a lawn illuminated by moonlight, will be fairies playing in the dew drenched grass, and a Unicorn resting under my beech tree. For if my soul, hidden deep in the forest of my psyche for endless nights, can now be coaxed out onto a blank, white sheet of paper for all to see, taking shape as the words form on the page, why couldn’t I come face to face with a Unicorn?

Two years ago, after dancing around my writing gift for years, I joined a writers’ group, made a commitment to show up each week with writing, and waited to see if I had anything to say.

Every word in every story, poem, essay that I wrote for my own joy, was an incantation in the spell to coax my soul to come out and play. “Come,” I was writing, “rest under a moonlit tree with me. Let’s talk. It’s been such a long time; and I’ve yearned for you all these years.” Neither souls, nor Unicorns, show themselves without a measure of faith, stillness and gentle persuading. And neither can be rushed.

In order to call my soul back to me, I had to be free to write for the love of the writing itself. Free to play on the page, like children play in the summer, with no agenda. Free to follow an inspiration from making a lemonade stand, to catching fireflies, to playing a game of dodge ball. I dabbled in poetry – five lines at first, and then fifteen, and then forty. I experimented with point of view; did a little fox-trot with fiction. Wrote a few pieces of memoir, dropped that and went back to poetry. Creativity felt like a bottomless well, and every week I brought new pieces of my soul discoveries to share with my group.

I wrote for the joy of it, and caught sight of my soul. Since coming into contact with something as numinous as soul, why couldn’t I believe that a Unicorn might rest in the clover carpet of my backyard? For what is it but a miracle to discover that the very thing you have been yearning for all of your life, was inside of you, waiting to be courted? Inside, and accessible at all times, through the incantations of your words? Joy

A Halloween Story

When Witches Wear Leather

“You want to leave”, Dawna the psychic said to me, before I had time to sit in the chair for my tarot reading. I was at a psychic house party, the New Age answer to Mary Kay. It was my turn to be astounded.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Kathy”

“Kathy, you want to leave.” What the hell did that mean? I wanted to leave the room? The party? My life?

“You want to leave your job”, she said. “You’re sick of it and want to make a change”.

Well, sure, okay. I’m a stay-at-home Mom with only one child left at home, a freshman in high school. I’m sick of helping with homework, and I’m sick of trying to scream above the Ipod she has permanently wired to her ears, but I wouldn’t say I want to change my job. More like I want to retire in four years to a house on the Cape.

Dawna shuffled a grimy, tattered deck of tarot cards and fanned them out on the table for me to pick twelve. I tried to concentrate as I chose the cards in synchronicity with “Unseen Forces that were working to support me in illuminating my path.” I had read that on Tarot.com in preparation for tonight. True, Dawna didn’t have the fashion sense you would hope to find in a woman who taps into the wisdom of the ages on a regular basis. She wore tight leather pants over ample hips and a panther print spandex top scooped low to showcase six inches of rawhide cleavage from tanning booths. Chubby little feet were squished into Frederick’s of Hollywood’s stilettos. I liked her hair though, scrunchy, over processed blond curls. Bouncy. Like her boobs, that were probably purchased with proceeds from wine soaked suburban housewives like the ones in the other room. Her eyes were spooky, black, to match her pants. They kept staring at me trying to get information. I could hear my grandfather, God rest his soul, in my ear. “Don’t say yes or no, or shake your head. Psychics are just con-artists, you know, who use hints you give them, to get a read on you.” Dawna was getting nothing on me. She was going to work for her $40.00.

Non-stop she kept up a stream of questions. How many children did I have? What did I do for a living? I wanted to say, “Hey, you’re the psychic, aren’t you supposed to tell me?”

Dawna tapped the deck and told me to put my left hand on it and to make a wish. I closed my eyes and wished that I could have boobs like hers. She flipped the cards over, spread them in a confusing configuration, and started rapid fire questions.

“You have a daughter in college?”

“No” I said.

“This is your daughter,” she said, tapping a card with a female sorceress. “Do you have a daughter? How many children do you have?” she said.

“I have a daughter, but she is in high school.”

“Well,” she said, as if I were an idiot. “She’s going to college! That’s her! That’s a Yes!”

It was? It reminded me of my daughter’s “yeses” when I ask if she has finished her homework and she says, “Yes, except for my essay and studying for Marine Biology.”

Then we moved on to my sons. She peppered me with questions so fast that I forgot my grandfather’s advice. I not only told her I had two sons, but their ages, where they lived, and what they were doing right now. She told me one of my sons would live out of state. Now here’s a psychic willing to go out on a limb, I thought.

Next up was my husband. “There are health issues with your husband. He is under too much stress. Where does he work? What does he do?” I spilled enough information for her to steal his identity. The cards got stuck on his health issue three times, until I was afraid that he might not see February. When I get home, I thought, I will beg him to quit his job, and I will moonlight as a psychic to save his life.

After a few more tidbits of information, including a reference to the Bahamas, and a house surrounded by water, Dawna announced my reading was done. I handed over $40.00 in unmarked bills. Dawna handed me her business card in case I needed emergency guidance. It read, “ Clueless? Call me. Bring cash.” Back in the dining room, the other guests were warming themselves at the dessert table and sharing their spine-chilling brushes with the supernatural. What could I share? I did a mental review. What did she even tell me? When I came into the party I knew how many children I had and that my husband was stressed from his job. Oh, yeah, I didn’t know I was going to the Bahamas. That was good news I guess. I slid my fork into a $40.00 piece of Death By Chocolate cheesecake, washed it down with a glass of wine, and numbed my psychic pain.

 

 

No One Gets In To See The Wizard

Mary Englebreit, a delightful whimsical artist, has a drawing that represents an artist at work, with a sign on her door. “No one gets in to see the Wizard. No way. No how. Yes, this means YOU!” I smiled the first time I saw it, and think of it often when I realize what is required to carve out creative time in my life. Sometimes, a guard at the door.

You must be that guard. You are the one in charge of protecting your artistic life – no one else. You are the one who must say, “There, there Darling…it’s time for you to be with your writing, dreaming, painting, jewelry, sea glass. Come with me. Everybody can wait. Yes, they’ll whine and wail and scratch horribly at the door. That’s okay. That’s to be expected at first. It is not a dictate to answer the howlings, hoping to settle them all in under their blankies so that you can earn ten minutes of peace. Go decisively. Tell them when they can expect to see you again (or not) and go!

Once they see they cannot coax you back until YOU are ready, they will move away from the door. Like puppies, they will find some new trail to follow. Find a different hand with a bisquit. You, if you don’t peek behind the door to check on the quiet, will have your time and space to create, heal, dream, breathe, imagine, walk, paint, nap, write, wonder, pray, meditate, dance, laugh, cry. You will have a little romance time with yourself.

And when you return, refreshed, enlightened, happy ~ they ~ with yips of delight ~ will be glad for your return. But be sure to mention you’ll be leaving again soon, and often.”

A Small Offering

Art is about re-imagining and re-inventing in many ways the details of your life. I wrote the first line of this poem while collecting sea glass at a friend’s beach. There was the joy of finding a pink piece tucked among the rocks ~ and then the awareness that I was the one who had to re-imagine it from trash to treasure in order to experience it as a gift. This poem is a working out of that theme.

 

Everything Can Be Re-Imagined

Everything can be re-imagined.

Magazine images

morphed into collage

marrying advertisers’ invitations

to psyche’s invocations.

 

Everything can be re-imagined.

Trash glass tossed off a ship

morphing into mermaid’s tears

marrying tumbled disregard

to imagination’s response.

 

 

Childhood’s primary colored

finger-painted canvases

mature

with sable bristled brush strokes

delineating texture, detail, layers

of complexity that were not in the original.

 

A father, not a god, but a broken hearted man

whose only kindred spirits were Duke Ellington

and Count Basie ~

friends that would lull him to fitful sleep

on the living room floor.

 

Everything can be re-imagined

and will be, if you are even

the least bit inclined towards forgiveness.

I think this is what my minister,

a recovering alcoholic,

was telling me

when I was afraid to unwrap wounds

that were no longer bleeding

through the bandages.

 

He told me the story of himself, as a boy,

finding his mother dead

on her bed from the bottle.

“You will keep revisiting certain things that happened to you

your entire life.”

 

Which part of his desire to serve and seek,

and which part of his desire for alcohol and adultery

is credited to a woman whose instinct to drink

was greater than her instinct to protect?

 

Everything can be re-imagined

and must be,

in order to remain a strong, central character

in the story you will never shake.

Poets know this

and artists

and sometimes men

who are not gods.

 

 

Kathy MacDonald

October 9^th, 2007

 

Honoring the Work

I have “dabbled” in writing and poetry for quite a lot of years now. More than four decades if you count my early diaries ~ but if not, at least since my children were born. I started out writing humorous stories about the gap between my cherished fantasies of mothering , and the reality of the zany, ridiculous, sometimes bone weary life I was living. And I wrote journals for each of my children. Occasionally, a poem would pop out. I would share it with my mother, a friend or two, or nobody. Maybe I would just save it into a file I called “creative writing.” The file grew, although sporadically.

Two years ago, I joined a writer’s group. I wanted to write more. I didn’t know what that would look like; or if I had much to say beyond my mothering commentaries, but my 40’s had given me more confidence, and I thought, “What the hell.” I didn’t know whether I would ever be published, or even if free lance writing was something I was interested in. I just wanted to challenge myself to write in a more disciplined, committed, vulnerable way. I was a woman who used to say I would rather walk naked down the street, than show my writing to strangers. But the 40’s for me, were about making sure I didn’t have any unwrapped gifts in the way of hidden talents. Whatever I may have mistakenly dropped by the side of the road on the way to adulthood, I wanted back.

So, I became the newest member and a regular contributor to an established writer’s group, offering up my work for edits and reviews. I was celebrated when I brought new writing in. Not only was I having more fun than I knew was possible “playing on the page”, but the weekly dose of the camaraderie of other writers sharing their work, was taking me deeper into my own voice. Humorous pieces turned into serious essays turned into poetry.

And so, my “body of work” grew, but only in my computer files. It didn’t seem concrete. Without hard copies to hold on to, it was easy to forget just how productive I have been. Just how very much of a writer I have become ~ one piece at a time.

So, this week I have started honoring the work. Starting with my poetry, I am polishing every one, printing out a copy on good quality paper, slipping it into a page protector, and putting it in a new black binder. Fifteen so far, and counting to fifty-four. Each page feels like a luxury. All together in their glossy plastic sleeves, they make me feel proud. I did this. These are my words, my work, something I made out of nothing but the raw materials of my life, mixed with the cement of my heart and soul.

I am going to continue until I have hard copies, in binders, of all my writing. It is time to get my work out of the computer, and into a state where I can see, and touch, and feel the heft of what I have accomplished. I don’t know yet if my work will ever get out into the world. But I know it certainly cannot if I won’t start the process of honoring it. I must be the first to say, I believe this is a fine piece of work. I believe I have something to share.

For today, I’m happy getting it into binders. What do you have that needs attention? I encourage you to find your own work, and treat it with the same love and care you treat family photos, or your children’s school papers. Always, always, as creative people, let us honor the work.