A Year of Standing Still

New Zealand IX: Leaving

2012-02-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

Punakaiki

The wild, pristine beauty of the South Island captured my soul. We wound up a rugged, lush green coast splashed with red and orange flowers, split by ribbons of water rushing down to Tasman Sea below us. We were headed for Millerton, an abandoned and sparsely resettled mining town where we spent a week in the home of a friend of a friend who was on holiday. We drove from there up and down the west coast to the small towns of Greymouth and Westport, sometimes camping on the beach in our van. My favorite spot of all was Punakaiki, where the sea had, over millennia, worn a huge, square hole in the rock wall below us.

There were places I wanted to visit more than any others and which we never reached—Milford Sound, the majestic fjord; Invercargill for it’s desolation and its name; Christchurch for all its stone buildings looking as I thought Oxford in England must. Central to our comings and goings were arrangements for Irene’s marriage to Lawson and their subsequent successful visit to Immigration. Irene and Lawson were a great match, reveling in the story they cooked up of having met years before when Irene was truly married to an American-Canadian, and having fallen in love when they met again in California after both had divorced.

After three weeks on the South Island, we wended our way back north, making a detour to Rotorua to soak in its famous hot springs. Then back to Earthspirit, where we continued our daily lives and awaited Glen’s arrival from San Francisco so he and I could make a final visit to Immigration (we had done our first step at the NZ Consulate in SF).

Had I predicted, I would have given best odds to the deep connection Glen and I shared, rather than the superficial meeting between Lawson and Irene, as far as immigration success would go. But depth in a relationship also brings with it complications, and complication happened between us just weeks before Glen and I were to finalize my papers. In retrospect, seen through the big-picture lens, I know that New Zealand was the wrong place at the wrong time in my life. There were other lessons I needed and other people with whom I would work them out.

Thus, after ten months in this beautiful land where we had been shown great kindness, we packed the few things we owned—most of which were baby paraphernalia—and flew back to the Bay Area, where we took up life in a tiny apartment on Shattuck Avenue, just over the Berkeley line in Oakland, between McKinney’s Fish Pan and Flint’s Barbecue, which turned out to be a midpoint on the roach highway.

I’ve never regretted living in New Zealand, but there are regrets associated with it. One is that Glen and I were only able to resolve our differences by letter and also after his death, when his spirit seemed very close for several days. Another is the places I didn’t see—the ones already named and an area on the North Island called Coromandel, populated by many artists and writers. I still have New Zealand friends—three of the women from Earthspirit and Kevin, who divides his time between Aotearoa and San Francisco, and I treasure those friendships. Two of the women visited us when we lived in Cuba, NM. Arafelle and her daughter came twice to California, and we watched for whales together in Big Sur. A couple of summers ago, one of the women visited her sister in the Q, and it was like old times when we joined in work projects in my backyard and spent long hours getting reacquainted. The little girl for whom I read The Secret Garden, now a grown woman, plans to visit in the fall. I see Kevin almost once a year, and he has visited us here.

From time to time, I see pictures on Facebook and am flooded with memories of a period that was both complex and simple, beautiful and difficult. Occasionally I have the pleasure of watching New Zealand films, like Whale Rider or, more recently, Bride Flight, and I’m filled with nostalgia for a place I could have loved, had circumstances been right. But I do believe in a larger purpose that is often beyond my understanding. That purpose included a brief sojourn with all its memories and imprints and the wonderful gift of Cheyenne, who is by birth a New Zealand citizen.

Standing-Still Pilgrimage

2012-02-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

Occasionally the words from a teabag tag or a fortune cookie offer a modicum of wisdom. When that happens, I place the paper bit in the space between my old mirror and it’s dark oak frame. A fortune that, not surprisingly, went up there some time ago reads: Sometimes traveling to a new place leads to great transformation. Sometimes the trip doesn’t have to be to a place that far away.

Last month after I wrote “THE END” to the novel I’ve been working on and after a deeply meaningful visit from Tucson friends Kristen and Paolo, I felt at loose ends. The loss of that intense engagement left me feeling somewhat depressed. I felt the need for a retreat and started surfing for places within my 60-mile radius and my budget. None seemed to fit, so I started looking at hotels close to home and ended up for a 2-night stay at a one-bedroom suite hotel that is a mere .7 miles from home. With a small, full kitchen, lots of light, paint in my colors (gold, rust, and dusky green), lovely Southwest photos on the walls, comfortable furniture and offering 2 meals a day as part of the very reasonable cost, it met my needs perfectly. You know it’s good when you feel like you could move in permanently. I spent the days and evenings walking, reading and writing. The result after 2 days was that I knew the next direction for my writing. So travel to a new place was indeed accompanied by transformation. I committed myself to this kind of nourishment as often as possible.

When my IRS return came, I decided to celebrate with a 3-night stay, and here I sit in the good, firm armchair, beside a large window, looking out at a stately, white-bark sycamore and a magnificent view of the Sandia Mountains. This retreat has turned out differently from the last, a reminder that , as they’re fond of saying in Southeast Asia, “Same, same, but different.” Of value to me, though, just as last time, are the fresh insights that have come with getting away to a place that is not my usual place and having none of the distractions of daily life. I woke yesterday morning with the knowledge of how I need to prioritize my writing tasks in the days that lie ahead, and this was very liberating.

More than a year ago I started creating a labyrinth in my back yard, but I did not get very far with it. This morning it came to me that a labyrinth is a way of doing pilgrimage while staying in one place. I’m still dreaming of walking the Camino in Spain, but in the meantime, I can return to building my backyard labyrinth, and even start walking it, creating the pathway, while it is in process. When projects like this stop, it's because I feel I must devote my earliest, my best time to my writing, but I’ve learned recently that really I can write at any time of the day or night. So I’m thinking now of setting aside labyrinth-making time early in the morning, especially now that the weather is warming up.

Of course the true pilgrimage while standing still is the inner one, which can take place anywhere, anytime; but sometimes you can give the inner movement a jumpstart, as the fortune cookie so wisely said, by traveling to a new place—even if it’s literally or figuratively in your own backyard.

New Zealand VIII: Tessa's Path Crosses Ours on Her Way off the Planet

2012-02-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

When Cheyenne was three months old, we made a trip to New Zealand’s South Island in our bright yellow Mitsubishi van. The South Island was even more astonishing in its variety and splendor than the North Island. Here was almost every terrain imaginable—sandy beaches, kiwi fruit vineyards, waves crashing against high cliffs, bush, desert, mountains, glaciers, fjords.

One visit took us to Golden Bay, where the beaches are truly golden. We spent time with a couple who have since turned their spacious bungalow and lush garden into a successful B & B. Our friend, Kiwi-San Franciscan Kevin joined us there, and he had an especially meaningful story to tell.

Back in Berkeley, Kevin and I had shared the home-care of Tessa, a woman in her nineties, a veritable character who had pioneered in the Sacramento Valley early in the 20^th century. Kevin told us that Tessa had died on the morning of Cheyenne’s birth. I had always sensed that Tessa’s passing would coincide with something significant in my life, but I had not considered this. Tessa was a woman memorable for her colorful expressions, feistiness from her wheelchair, and her prescience. In many ways our time together was spent in preparation for her death.

Tessa’s story continued to haunt and inspire me, and I wrote a narrative poem about that time. The poem was published in Rockhurst Review. Later, Cheyenne performed it at as a dramatic reading and won a prize for it. Here it is, the tale of a remarkable, funny and serious woman in her last days:

Death Angel

I let myself into the house where she lies in bed,

waiting for me to lift her, bone-thin, into the wheelchair,

put on her bed jacket and slippers,

watch her wash, cook her oats.

“I had a dream,” she says right off.

“Tell me then.”

“It’s bad luck to tell you before breakfast.”

I could see it on her mind, though,

while she washed her face,

combed her little wisps of thin, gray hair.

I could see it on her mind while she lifted the first spoon of oats to

her mouth.

“This food is colder than an orphanage door,” she tells me.

“And I cain’t chew it with my heathen teeth.

They look like tombstones.”

They do, too, sitting in the jar, waiting to be brushed.

“Why don’t you ever eat with me?”

“I eat at home before I come.”

“Good thing, too. You’d eat me out of house and home, you fat

thing. I got no fat left. Bones. Look at me.

All bones, these arms. Nothing left but bones and veins.

And yours. So round and firm.

Mine used to be like that.

And skinny legs. Look at ‘em. Skinny.

I’ll never be fat again.

Is there even an ounce of fat left on my back?”

She leans forward in the chair for me to inspect.

Lifting her is easy.

I take her to the bathroom to brush the teeth in the jar.

The ones that look like tombstones.

She starts coughing and can’t stop. When finally she does, she says,

“Coughin’ like…like…like what? Like a cow.”

She looks up and grins at me.

“Do cows cough?”

“Yes! And horses. You never heard a cow cough?

Cough like they’re coughin’ down a barrel.”

She gives her teeth a nonchalant swipe with the

brush now and then, but it’s talk she wants.

She answers a question I didn’t ask:

“Yes, horses brush their teeth.

Take a mouthful of water and slosh it around

and spit it back into the trough. Then they drink it. Dirty.”

Her eyes gleam.

“Aren’t you ever going to let me do anything wrong?” she asks.

“How about if you don’t brush your teeth tonight?”

She nods, satisfied.

I wheel her out to the porch, bring out a chair for myself.

I lay out a dress of hers for mending.

“Don’t bother with that. Just talk to me.”

“Tell me about your dream.”

She looks startled then proceeds.

“There was this big snake came into my room last night.

It talked to me.” She opens and closes her mouth

to show me the talking snake.

“What did it say?”

“It came to tell me it wasn’t going to hurt me.

Didn’t try to climb up on the bed with me. It wasn’t poisonous.

Told me so itself.”

“What color was it?”

“Gray. With spots.”

Came to tell her it wasn’t going to hurt her.

Came in the dark.

She doesn’t like the dark.

“Oooh,” she says

when we come to a tree-shaded piece of sidewalk.

“Look in there’’—like it’s a dark tunnel she’s looking down.

I come back at night to make her dinner.

Her face is smeared with grease when I come in.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Butter. I just ate me a spoonful of butter.”

She smacks her lips and looks at me slyly.

Waits for me to scold her.

While she eats applesauce and peas and mashed potatoes,

she says, “I don’t want you to leave tonight.”

She says it more than once.

“What do you want me to do?”

I think she’s going to ask me to stay the night.

“Sing me to sleep.”

I undress her and turn out the light, sit on the edge of the bed and

sing, “Children of the Hevenly Father, Safely in his bosom gather.”

She opens her eyes to say, “It’s just like Daddy used to sing.

He was a first tenor in the church choir.”

“It’s one of my favorites.”

“It must’ve been one of his, too, ‘cause he sang it all the time.

I’ll close my eyes now.”

I go on to sing from my childhood,

“When Peace Like a River” and “Amazing Grace.”

I hear her regular breathing, smooth her covers,

let myself out and lock the door.

Next morning, she wants the Yellow Pages.

“I can’t remember the name of those undertakers,” she says.

They’re somehow more human than Thorne’s.

I don’t want to use Thorne’s. I’ll remember the name if I hear it.”

I read off the names from the Yellow Pages.

“Somehow I didn’t think there were so many of them,” she says.

Then, Ellis-Olsen!” She pounces on the name. “That’s them.

Put that away now. I’m not ready for them yet.”

She giggles.

The gray, spotted snake comes for her

on the morning of my daughter’s birth.

New Zealand VII: Living on Women’s Land

2012-02-07T09:16:00.000-07:00

Later life in Fiona

Settling into Fiona took much more time than any other settling-in had done in my many moves. It wasn’t because we had more stuff; we actually had very little. But I sat in the big beanbag in the middle of the floor, baby in arm, and next to me stood a pile of things that needed to find homes. They stood there for three weeks, and I began to realize how much Cheyenne was going to change the rhythm of my life, slowing it way down.

Although we had our separate dwelling, at Earthspirit we were part of a community, and I loved it. These women knew how to work together and how to play together. One of our first work projects was to dig a sump hole that we would fill with gravel, so our sink would no longer have to drain into a bucket. We also had to lay pipe at a downward slope under the house and into the ground. We all worked, listening for Cheyenne napping in the house, having a Heineken in mid-afternoon to quench our thirst. We had chores that benefited the community—weeding the garden, mowing kaikuia (a wiry, weedy grass that is similar, I think to kudzu in the South of the US). We volunteered for other tasks; for example, Arafelle and I rebuilt the compost bins, using wood from the tip (garbage dump). We employed the 4-wheel-drive, yellow Mitsubishi van Irene and I ended up buying to pull a huge log up out of the stream after a major rainstorm—that was one we worked on with much laughter, struggle and slipping in the mud, accompanied by engineering advice from all.

Our own chores, aside from cooking, cleaning, and baby care centered on nappies (diapers). Since I was getting up in the middle of the night to nurse Cheyenne, Irene took on the nappy washing, which meant carrying bucket after bucket of water up from the stream, pouring it into the boiler, waiting while the boiler heated, running it into the wringer washer, and hanging it on the extra clotheslines we strung outside Fiona. As often as not, the diapers received an extra rinse(s) of rainwater, so we had to be sure washing was done with plenty of clean diapers still left to allow for extra drying time.

If someone had an idea for social time, there we were, a ready-made group of players. We joined in a fantasy adventure game, a sort of feminist Dungeons and Dragons. We sat around and listened to music and told stories. We crossed the stream to use the sauna and swung on a rope from the bank into the cold, running stream. On American Thanksgiving, one of the women who was American and a German woman, went up into the bush and caught a wild turkey by hand. I stuffed and roasted the bird, which ended up being very stringy, and we added the fixings, substituting kumara for sweet potatoes. We piled into the Morris Mini to go to Jill’s Christmas school concert (program), where the children sang a New Zealand version of 12 Days of Christmas, in which the partridge in a pear tree becomes a pukeko in a ponga tree. We went on beach picnics with the women and by ourselves. It was a good time, a rich time, but there was something always niggling at me, more than just my usual restlessness. Soon, though, we would see the most of New Zealand we were going to see, as we would travel to the South Island for Irene to meet and marry yet another friend of Glen's, so she could get stay permission.

Loving the Q II: Bachechi and Alameda Open Spaces

2012-02-03T19:08:00.000-07:00

In my last post about loving the Q, I wrote about the Gutierrez-Hubbell House, which is on several acres of protected open space. This past weekend, I visited a new open space, the Bachechi and an older one adjacent to it, the Alameda. Having grown up rurally in Navajo Country and in the small town of Gallup, I realize that one of the reasons I’ve had difficulty liking Albuquerque is that I am surrounded by urban sprawl. Yet, if I make a little effort (and, unfortunately, increase my carbon footprint) I can be surrounded by a cottonwood forest, pine-covered mountains, or a channel lined with willow canes and shaded by magnificent cottonwoods.

On Sunday afternoon, I met my friend Beth at Bachechi. It’s newness is apparent in the carefully spaced plantings, and we did not get to the corner containing an old pecan orchard. Instead, we crossed the western acequia and walked the paved Bosque trail for awhile, departing onto a dirt path that led to the Rio Grande. It was heartening to see the river flowing deeper than usual, although this meant that the recent warm weather is probably causing an early snow-pack melt.

Upon our return to Bachechi, I suggested crossing under the Alameda Boulevard bridge to see what lay on the other side, in the Alameda Open Space. This turned out to be the happiest decision of the day. We entered a path that I can only describe as magical. Below us on our left, was the wide, gently flowing acequia, with water so clear that we could easily see the stones lining its bottom, and graced by swimming mallards. Stands of willow thickly bordered the trail above the acequia and lent their pungent scent to the air. On the right were fenced yards of North Valley homes, ranging from mansions to tiny houses and garden sheds, many built of adobe. The yards held gardens, vineyards, grazing fields, horses, and dogs of every persuasion. And regal cottonwood trees. What lent the trail such magic was the near tunnel-like feel created by the willows on one side and the variety of fences giving glimpses into life as rural as it gets in a city of 700,000. The trail drew us on, so that 3 hours went by swiftly. At the very end of our walk we were blessed by four silver-gray sandhill cranes taking one conscious step after another, single file like, Buddhists nuns in walking meditation.

Later, on my way home, perhaps because I’ve been exploring walking trails, as I crossed several more, I was especially cognizant of them, thinking that I could do a lot of walking here before I had covered them all. I felt a burst of affection then for the Q, for my city’s commitment to more spaces where we can enjoy walking, bicycling, horseback-riding and learning about and caring for nature. I made a commitment to walking more of them.

New Zealand VI

2012-01-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

Back in Auckland there was a lot to do to get ready for the baby and for the move to Earthspirit, to the house called Fiona. A little more about the amenities Fiona had and did not have: In New Zealand, a very common source of water in the home is rainwater, of which there is an abundance. Collected from the galvanized roof, the water is filtered into a holding tank on stilts and from there piped into the house. Fiona had such a system, which ran water to a tap in the kitchen sink. The woman who’d built the house had installed a 50-gallon drum filled with gravel to trap any solids that might go down the drain, but this had stopped functioning as a drain, so the kitchen sink emptied into a bucket that had to be carried out periodically. That was the extent of the indoor plumbing, and the water had one temperature setting—cold. There was no cookstove, but there was electricity. There was a small woodstove in the center of the single room with its sleeping loft. The walls were plank-and-batten construction with a kind of tarpaper on the inside, but there was no other insulation, not such a problem in a mildly subtropical climate, although we would learn that we definitely needed to use the woodstove in winter.

Because we would be using cloth diapers, we had to come up with a system for washing them. First order of business--buying plenty of them—4 or 5 dozen. I went back to scouring the classifieds for what everyone called a copper. Most coppers were no longer made of copper and are simply a very large pot, aluminum in our case (about the size of a standard washing machine tub), housed in a white cube that makes it look like a washing machine. There is an electric element that turns on when the copper's plugged in, and it can heat the water to boiling; therefore, it’s also known as a boiler. There was also a spigot to which we could attach a hose that would run out to the wringer washer (another purchase) we placed on Fiona’s front deck. With the convenience of the hose, we only had to carry water in buckets from the stream and not between the boiler and the washer. We agreed that we would buy an electric stove, and that the price of the stove would be deducted from the first month’s rent. I love scavenging and thinking about alternative living systems, so I thoroughly enjoyed these projects.

Sometime in September, the Earthspirits came down to Auckland. They had a van and took some of the big items back up to Northland after our visit. They also agreed to come down for us and one more big item after the baby was born, since we wouldn’t be transporting her on the motorcycle (although we have since observed people in Cambodia do that and much more on motorcycles all the time—anther story).

Preparations done, our money at last released from the big bad bank in Denmark, we entered the waiting game. Every birthing story is both different and the same, and I won’t go into detail here. Suffice it to say, I went into labor on October 26, 1985, the first day of New Zealand’s Labor Day weekend. Veronika came to the house in mid afternoon and gave me the best news—the doctor who’d done my prenatal care was on holiday, and his substitute was the woman doctor I’d wanted in the first place. By nightfall a tremendous, unseasonal rainstorm raged around us, forcing the doctor to arrive in her bulky sheepskin jacket. At 1:10 a.m., our baby girl joined us in the candlelit, woodstove-heated room on Vermont Street, Ponsonby, Auckland, New Zealand. Veronika’s first words were, “Aren’t you beautiful!” Words that naturally delighted my mother's heart.

First days, on the mattress where she was born

Our friend Warrick, who, with his partner David, had loaned us money when we were in dire straits, had said, “If you want a special child, you must give it a special name.” His son’s name was Romily, meaning “Little Man” in Romany. It’s an old saw that the gender of the baby you will have is the one you couldn’t find a name for. In our case, it was true. I’d had the name Judah Aslan picked for months for a boy, and it was only a few days before the birth that “Cheyenne” popped off the page of a book I was reading. The funny thing was, when I suggested it to Irene, she got excited and said it was a name she’d long ago thought of for a child, boy or girl. I’d wanted Willow as a middle name, but after the intense rainstorm that heralded Cheyenne onto the planet, and after Irene’s conversation with her father Jan, who was back in Denmark, we decided on Rainstorm instead. To honor Jan, we followed a Scandinavian tradition, giving her the surname “Jansdatter.” Cheyenne Rainstorm Jansdatter, now a named human being, a Kiwi and a Dutch-American-Dane.

Loving the Q: Gutierrez-Hubbell House

2012-01-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

I am still looking for the volunteer option that fits me, and one possibility I’m exploring is the Bernalillo County Open Space program. I know I’d like to be an active part of preserving our open spaces, but I want to be as sure as possible that I will sustain my involvement. There’s been little enough continuity in my life, never mind letting others down by leaving when it suited me.

In pursuit of the open-space idea, I sent an e-mail query. Every organization I’ve contacted so far has been eager for volunteer energy. In this case, I was especially interested in the naturalist program the open space offers. This is a program to which one applies, and the actual classes don’t start until summer. However, the director was quick to mention that the Gutierrez-Hubbell House always needs volunteers. I thought I wanted to be outdoors, so I hadn’t given much thought to this New Mexico preservation site. However, my Saturday out-and-about was coming up, and I thought there couldn’t be a better way to decide if I might help out there, at least until the naturalist program was available.

Two things about the house intrigued me—its age, having been constructed in New Mexico’s territorial days, and the name Hubbell, which I’d never associated with Albuquerque. I took the long, slow way twenty some miles into the Q’s South Valley, first driving through the Martineztown barrio, then the long winding trip down Isleta Boulevard, which is part of the original El Camino Real, the oldest continuously used roadway in North America. Today, Isleta Boulevard is my kind of street with its very funky mix of weedy open spaces, gracious old haciendas and tiny frame-and-stucco houses, llanteras, custom-auto paint places, hole-in-the-wall cafes, fields where horses graze, strip malls, mosaic-tiled bus stops, old churches, a Canossian Sisters Retreat Center, and my personal favorite—a long, narrow 50s-style pink and silver trailer with attached porch, all hoisted atop a conventional (sort of) building.

Front View

I arrived at the Gutierrez-Hubbell House a little before it opened at 10 a.m., so I took a walk on the half-mile trail that surrounds open fields and a large, winter-latent, organic garden and runs along an acequia built in the 1600s. Construction on the Gutierrez-Hubbell House, began in 1830. The house, besides being a family residence, has served as a trading post, stagecoach stop and post office. The hacienda’s adobe has walls 28 inches thick and 10-foot high ceilings with viga beams. It had fallen into extreme disrepair, when the Pajarito Village Neighborhood Association rescued it from a developer who wanted to turn it into a restaurant and build trophy homes around it. Bernalillo Country now owns it, and it is managed and served by a coalition of organizations.

I learned that the Hubbell name is connected to my point of reference for it—the trading post on the Navajo Reservation in Ganado, AZ, now part of the National Parks system and which I’ve visited numerous times. Julianita Gutierrez, a New Mexican, married James Hubbell, a retired soldier from New England. Julianita owned a huge tract of land in Albuquerque’s South Valley, and their son Lorenzo had purchased the Ganado trading post in 1878. It was a true pleasure on Saturday morning, to meet the house’s warm and enthusiastic manager, Beva Sanchez-Padilla, and Carol Chapman, a direct Hubbell descendent I had a long conversation with Carol about the hacienda, the land, and the family history. She has been very active in the restoration and conservation of the home and still volunteers as a tour guide. She also told me, near to tears, about the Albuquerque and New England branches of the family meeting up with the Navajo side of the family (descendents of Lorenzo’s) at a barbeque in Ganado, after nearly a century of not knowing one another. I could tell her that I had met one of those Navajo Hubbells.

Close-up of adobe plaster with embedded straw bits

All in all, it was a satisfying morning, spent loving a very old part of the Q, new to me. I plan to attend some of the gardening workshops and other activities at the Gutierrez-Hubbell House and to volunteer my services in setting up or in whatever other capacity I can be used there. My writer’s heart was also moved when Carol and Beva told me that someone still needs to write a book about the place. Hmmm. Too many writing projects already on my plate, I fear.

NewZealand V: Northland

2012-01-21T08:50:00.000-07:00

On the road again, me 7.5 months pregnant

In my generation, Wendy and Richard must have been popular kids names in New Zealand. In our little circle, I got to know 3 of each. Longsuffering Wendy’s boyfriend’s sister was named Wendy, and she was married to Richard. As New Zealand’s least urbanized region, still today with fewer than 1 person per kilometer, Northland was as likely an area as any for us to explore as a potential place to settle rurally. It happened that Wendy and Richard lived there, about 12 miles south of the northernmost town of any size, Kaitaia. With our loan from David and Warrick, we were able to pack our saddle bags, climb onto the Maxim and head on up. It was a relief to get out of the city and be thinking about where we might actually live.

Wendy and Richard knew us only through Longsuffering Wendy’s introduction, and they opened arms and home wide to us. Their owner-built wood home was situated on a hillside and surrounded by bush (NZ English for the sub-tropical jungle with its many varieties of trees and ferns, including the ponga or fern tree. Their home boasted the kinds of things I’d been reading and dreaming about since the early seventies, when so many Americans joined the back-to-the-land movement—among them a composting toilet and huge woodstove with a sidecar for heating water for home use. Below the home were paddocks (NZ English: fenced fields) where they raised cattle, husbanding them from one section of paddock to another to keep them from overgrazing. There was a small barn for a milk cow, and Wendy gave us milking lessons. Besides farming the cleared land Wendy and Richard were in the habit of painstakingly planting native trees each year to restore acres and acres of bush that had once been cleared.

They were fascinated by handcrafts from all over the world and practiced traditional Maori carving and the weaving of flax leaves into kite (pronounced kee’-tay), all shapes and sizes of baskets and bags. They were deeply interested in Maoritanga (Maori culture), too. I listened to their unabashed absorption as non-Maori and it began to penetrate my psyche that I had landed myself in yet another land in which white people had conquered brown people, this time by conscious choice. I started to feel a growing uneasiness, which had been there before, but until I had more concrete awareness, I had pushed it aside. I wondered if I would really be able to settle here. Years earlier, when I first moved to Copenhagen, Irene tried to assuage my white guilt by reminding me that every group of people has, at one time or another conquered others, that it seems to be part of the human condition. Nevertheless, feelings of foreignness, of unwelcome reared up in me. I wouldn’t allow myself to really explore Maoritanga, which would ordinarily have been of great interest to me.

Wendy and Richard were wonderful hosts, driving us around to various plots of land they knew to be for sale, taking us out to Ahipara Bay to dig for the tiny white shellfish called pipis, and, most importantly, introducing us to the the Earthspirits. These women were their next-door neighbors, women on women’s land. Meeting them had been part of the raison d’etre for visting Wendy and Richard in the first place. The 10 acres that were Earthspirit had 3 permanent dwellings, a housetruck and a caravan (NZ English: travel trailer). One of the dwellings was empty, and the women were eager to rent it. We ate dinner with the 5 permanent human residents—4 women and an 8-year-old girl. There were also horses, dogs and chooks (NZ English: hens). There was a large circular herb garden, which brought in part of the women’s income, a big veggie garden and a banana grove. A stream ran through the land, right behind the empty house, and across from it, up against the bush was a sauna and an outhouse with a stained glass window and open doorway looking onto the bush. At that spot, the valley looked and felt like a huge green bowl.

The empty house, named Fiona, was post-and-beam construction, made of naturally aging wood. After touring the land and the house, we broke bread with the women and talked over what it would mean for us to rent Fiona from them. The women were feminist separatists, very opposite from what I am. I feel that part of my lifework is to celebrate diversity within unity, so I didn’t know if I could live there permanently, although buying Fiona eventually would have been an option. I respected the women’s choice to live separately; it just wasn’t my path. We did decide that after the baby was born, we would join this community, at least temporarily. How long we could stay depended in part on whether I gave birth to a boy or girl. We looked into the possibility of moving up before the birth, but there was no midwife available for a homebirth that far out in the country.

Before heading back to Auckland, we rode the Maxim to the very tip of the North Island, Cape Reinga overlooking Spirits Bay, the place where Maori tradition says that the spirits of the dead depart the Earth. It was a gorgeous drive through green fields, and the view from the cape was stunning. On the last morning of our visit, we said goodbye to Wendy, Richard, and their son Rory at the cow barn then went over to Earthspirit once more to suss out (NZ English: take stock of) what we would need to purchase in Auckland to make the move to Fiona.

New Zealand IV

2012-01-17T13:40:00.001-07:00

To those readers awaiting more about New Zealand, my apologies for the hiatus, as I felt compelled to describe my wonderful day on the Q, then to reprint the New Years eve column that appeared in the Gallup Independent and took time off to enjoy guests over the MLK holiday weekend. Now, back to New Zealand. But first a flashback to Berkeley. I knew from the start that I wanted a homebirth, regardless of the country, and in one of those brown shingle Berkeley bungalows, we found a lovely pair of midwives to begin our prenatal care, even though we all knew they would not be involved in the birthing. Much later, I would reconnect with one of these midwives in a significant parenting moment.

Midwife Veronika after the fact

On a sunny morning in Auckland, I made a pot of herbal tea and awaited the arrival of our Kiwi midwife. When I opened the door to her, I felt that Veronika Muller personified New Zealand. She wore her blond hair avant-garde spiky while carrying an old fashioned, bulky, brown leather briefcase—the blend of progressive and traditional. I poured tea, and Veronika began to describe the process we would follow. To my surprise, she would not be providing prenatal care. For that we would be required to visit a doctor’s surgery (New Zealand English for doctor’s office). She recommended a woman she thought I’d like. Home births by midwives were supported by the New Zealand healthcare system, but the system required a physician for prenatal care and to be in attendance for the birth, even though the midwife would do the birthing.

I showed Veronika the prenatal vitamins I’d been taking and received a pleasant surprise. At that time, there was very little positive I felt I could say about my home country; after all, aside from many other things to not like, Ronald Reagan was then on the throne. I didn’t really think there could be anything that was better in the US than in New Zealand, but Veronika was very impressed with my vitamins, which were soon to run out. “You won’t find anything this complete here,” she said. She recommended that when I got a New Zealand multi-vitamin, I supplement with Floradix, a liquid herb and iron tonic from Switzerland. She wanted me to start massaging my nipples with vitamin E oil and sunning them to avoid painful cracking when I started nursing. She also asked me to drink milk, to which I’ve had an aversion since childhood in Navajo Country because fresh milk was so often unavailable. We compromised, and down at Victoria Market we bought cases of Westbrae soy milk in individual packets.

I was disappointed when I rang the doctor’s surgery and learned that she was booked for deliveries when I was due around mid-October, the 17^th to be exact. She recommended a male colleague, and we tooled out to his surgery on the Maxim. Mostly I remember the roundabout we traversed for each visit, the waiting room filled with mums and babies of mixed ethnic backgrounds. The doc was nice enough, though I really wasn’t looking forward to having him come to the house and supervise the birth. He gave me a chart on which I was to keep track of the baby’s movements several times a day, and I was to call immediately if movement ceased.

Our plans were to live rurally after the baby was born, so we were eager to explore our options. However, as mentioned previously, we were having difficulty accessing cash from our bank in Denmark. Enter Warrick and David, a gay couple and our saviors, who lived in nearby Grey Lynn, more friends of Glen’s. Barely knowing us, they loaned us money to get by on until we could straighten things out—such amazing faith and hospitality—let us sit up in their dining room, so we could call businesses in Copenhagen at 3 a.m., and trusted us to pay the considerable long-distance fees when we could. They also introduced us to the yoga center where the leader was of the same lineage as our yoga and meditation teacher in Sweden. Eventually we had to engage a Danish lawyer, and eventually, the bad man at Jyske Bank released our funds, thanks to Advokat Manfred Petersen and Irene's vociferous persistence.

Taking us back to New Zealand beginnings:

Long-suffering Wendy in her kitchen

Irene, Glen & me at SFO

New Zealand in perspective

A Different Kind of Resolution

2012-01-10T15:30:00.001-07:00

This column was previously published by the Gallup Independent on Saturday, December 31, and is reprinted here by permission.

It’s the time of year when most people consider, even if they don’t make, resolutions. According to one poll, the top ten resolutions are: lose weight; be happy; save money; fall in love; get a job; read more; eat, drink, learn or try something new; quit smoking; take a photo every day for a year; and run a marathon. Number one, losing weight, outweighed number two, being happy, almost two to one. The poll results are not a big surprise.

These resolutions all have one thing in common. They are about doing something to improve oneself—well, possibly not the one about taking a photo every day for a year. But even that, we could argue, is about improving oneself by sticking with something for a whole year, making a commitment.

I have nothing against self-improvement, but when I look at the many problems our world faces today, I wonder if self-improvement isn’t another way of making life all about me, if it isn’t possibly even self-centered. This year, I want to make a resolution that is about making the world a better place rather than making me a better person. It’s not that I can’t use improvement. Not by a long shot.

Many magazines, at this time of the year, feature people who have made a difference in the world. There’s Lily Yeh, who heals broken communities through communal art-making in places like Palestine and Rwanda. Nipun Mehta started projects based on peer-to-peer generosity. In one project, people who eat at his restaurants pay, not for their own meal, but for the next patron’s. He calls this a gift economy. Henry Red Cloud started Lakota Solar Enterprises, bringing affordable, green energy to the Northern Plains. To date, he has trained 84 people who have gotten jobs in the solar industry, putting a dent in the staggering unemployment across Indian Country. Alison Smith, a housewife, was successful in helping to change the election laws in Maine. Now candidates who have raised enough $5-contributions receive state money to compete in elections, taking corporate money out of the mix.

If you are determined to improve yourself, there may be no better way to do it than improving the world around you. The paradox is that, when we do something to make things better around us, we are made better in the process. I discovered this truth several years ago when I had a roommate I found irritating and sometimes obnoxious. I wasn’t in a position to avoid her by moving. I decided one day to make a gift for her. I began to embroider things she loved onto a shirt, until a strip across the front told the multi-colored story of a journey. That very personal gift changed my relationship with my roommate. Miraculously, the things she did failed to irritate me. I started to enjoy her and her foibles. I even found her delightful and charming some of the time.

I hadn’t set out to change my perceptions or feelings about my roommate, nor did I focus on that while I stitched away. I did think about her, and I cared about her as I thought about what might please her. However, I think it was the act of giving that changed me. Perhaps it was important that the gift took time and energy from me, that it wasn’t just something I picked up in a shop. My roommate didn’t change much, if at all. She didn’t need to change; I did. I needed to be a more loving, accepting person, able to delight in another’s humanness.

As I read about what others have done to make our world a better place, I’m inspired to think of what my resolution will be this year. I look at organizations those people have created and ask whether I could become involved in some way. I check out volunteer opportunities available in my own community, and see whether there might be a match. I think about my own neighborhood, where I wave to people and have a quick chat with a couple of them but don’t know anyone well. What if I made a small gift for each household once a month? Would I know them better at the end of the year? What if I organized a block party in the summer? What could happen? Gift economist Nipun Mehta says, “Just do the small act of kindness for the person in front of you, right now. Small acts may or may not change the world, but they definitely change you.”

Promises, Promises

2012-01-08T14:48:00.000-07:00

The moon’s promises, what good are they?

~ from The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon by Nancy Willard

In my last post, “New Zealand III” (1/6/12), I did something I had heretofore resisted: I promised, or at the very least, implied, the topic of my next post—our exploratory trip to Northland in New Zealand with photos. Two things happened to cause me to renege on that promise—the first constitutes special events of yesterday. Second, I realized that, since I’m writing about NZ in roughly chronological order, there are a few things I should cover before the trip to Northland—but soon, and just know that it was a trip of great significance, worthy of a few posts, I should imagine.

So, back to yesterday. A couple of weeks before Christmas, Cheyenne, who is back living with me under the post-college, revolving-door policy, mentioned that she almost wished I were working again because she never gets to spend time alone in the house for more than a couple of hours. Never mind that her current job would put her on the same work schedule as mine anyway. I decided upon a Christmas gift for her that would benefit us both, as the best gifts often do. I promised to be away from the house from 9-5 one day per weekend. How that benefits me is that I have a very difficult time getting myself out of the house for anything but necessities. In other words, when I’m not moving house or traveling, I’m a home-body. Hmmm.

Yesterday was the first day I gave the gift. It was a bit like traveling without leaving the city. I had to decide what I wanted to take with me, in what bags, how I would store them out of sight when I forayed from the truck, etc.

I made a loose plan to spend most of my time in the two parts of Albuquerque I love the best—the Heuning Highland and Downtown neighborhoods. I always feel so happy in those parts of town, which are among the oldest, and I feel I could explore them without ever getting tired of them.

I ran a few errands, which included a trip to my second favorite thrift store, always a pleasure. My unexpected finds: a brand new navy blue fleece blanket to use when I write in my Lazy Girl chair and a large, hand-painted plate with a running blue kitty opposite a leaping plaid bunny to hang in my kitchen after it’s painted (sometime soon, I hope). After that I stopped in at the Daily Grind for a mug of steaming Breakfast Blend tea.

Caddy-corner across the street stands the Historic Albuquerque High School. The first of five dark brick buildings in a neo-gothic style and surrounding a large courtyard was built in 1914. The last was built in 1943. When the new Albuquerque High School was built in 1974, these buildings were abandoned for decades until developers redesigned them into loft condos and apartments, generating renewal in the entire neighborhood. I’ve always been curious about the buildings, and called the manager of one to schedule an apartment tour. As I sat sipping my tea, I saw a sign across the street that some of the other buildings would be offering a tour in half an hour. A significant part of my unplanned day turned into what Julia Cameron calls in The Artist’s Way, an Artist’s Date. Artist’s Dates have been the most difficult for this homebody to commit to as I’ve generally followed other components of the book’s plan, and this sort of thing is what I was hoping for when I made that gift to Cheyenne and myself.

Between showings of the two separate buildings, I took leisurely walks around two neighborhoods and ate my snack of an Arkansas Black apple and nuts. The apartments turned out to be exactly the kind of space I’d like to live in, which was really no surprise. High ceilings, hardwood floors, granite countertops, enormous wood-framed windows. The surprise was that I could afford them. That set me dreaming and scheming. But what was I thinking? I’m not going anywhere. Not until September of this year. No, no, no. Only dreaming.

After my second tour, I spent a couple of hours in the Albuquerque Main Library, which is housed downtown. Larger than any of the seventeen branches, because of it’s location it serves a big segment of the Q’s homeless or near-homeless population. It’s the only one of the many branches I’ve visited that posts security guards at the entrance. I felt grateful to be a nomad only for the day.

Hunger overtook me around 3:30, and I stopped in at the locally owned Flying Star for a Mediterranean Nosh plate—hummus, tomato and cucumber slices and plenty of tasty olives. I substituted extra cucumbers for the pita bread and enjoyed reading while I ate—the novel my nephew Josh sent me—Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada by Cuban author Zoé Valdés.

After my early supper I still had time for another walk, this time in the neighborhood I walked at lunch when I worked at Washington Middle School, the oldest middle school in the Q. It’s a neighborhood of delightfully mixed architecture—gracious old midwestern-style houses with broad front porches; flat-roofed, pueblo-imitation stucco with vigas; three-story, high-density new apartments with barely a foot between buildings; fifties-era modern structures, both high-rise and single-story. There is old clutter, gentrification, hominess, and downright run-down-ness—my kind of neighborhood exactly.

With the winter sun nearly setting, I got into my beloved truck and trundled through one of Albuquerque’s oldest neighborhoods, the barrio of Martineztown, another “best” in my opinion. Back at home, Cheyenne seemed happy to hear about my day and to have enjoyed a peaceful day sleeping and watching movies. All-told, a success.

New Zealand III

2012-01-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

A few years back, when I was still a counselor at Washington Middle School in Albuquerque, one of the social workers and a good friend, Martha, and I ran a girls’ group together. The group members had in common that their parents or caretakers, and sometimes they, had been born in Mexico. I had noticed that these girls were all struggling with living between the two cultures. Their caretakers had strict, old-country expectations and parenting methods but often had to rely on the girls to negotiate US culture for them. These students were often confused and sometimes made self-destructive choices because of being caught in the middle without guidance they could really relate to. Our group ended up being the best group I’d held in my long career.

Boys, romance and marriage were frequent topics, and one day one of the girls asked if I was married. No. Had I ever been married? I explained that I once married a man from New Zealand so he could get a green card in the US and so I could immigrate to New Zealand. Many students in our school had immigrated illegally, probably some of the girls in that group. “But, Miss,” one said immediately, “isn’t that illegal?”

My reply was, in essence, that I felt I was practicing civil disobedience. I said I didn’t believe that countries should have boundaries or rules about who could live there and who couldn’t, who could come in and who could leave. I also said, and I believe this, that someday, likely not during my lifetime, humans will be able to freely move around the world where and when we want to. If I’d been completely honest, of course, I would also have said that I broke the law for my own convenience. My students probably put that together based on their own vast experience with la migra.

I’ve also observed that when governments disenfranchise certain of their citizens, said governments open the door to illegal actions on the part of those citizens. Several years after our move to New Zealand, Irene and I could have married in Denmark and would have chosen to live there. Today, we would still not be able to marry in the US, except in a few states, and such a marriage would not be recognized by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. I’m not sure why it’s called a service, really.

This bit of information as to our immigration strategy will become relevant later in the New Zealand saga. Meanwhile, this stage of the story finds us down at the shipping docks in Auckland because we’d received word that our Yamaha 650 motorcycle, which we’d shipped from San Francisco, had arrived. On the dock, crowbar and hammer in hand, I, roundly pregnant, pried apart the packing crate. One of the dock workers thought shipping a Yamaha was foolish, “It’s like carrying coals to Newcastle,” he said. The thing is, Irene is only about 5’ tall, and the Yamaha Maxim was a bike that could have a 650-capacity and still allow a shorty to touch the ground with ease. Besides, the bike was paid-for and well-maintained. One of our roommates, Terry, was pleased to carry off all that crate wood for his bach (beach house). The bike allowed us to make our first forays outside Auckland. Coming up—our exploratory trip to Northland. And photos of us on the bike.

New Zealand II

2012-01-02T14:32:00.000-07:00

One of the advantages of moving often is that you gain great facility at quickly learning a new community. When I moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2004 to study creative writing at Western Michigan University, on my first day in town I got a library card in the system that had been named Best Library in the US and visited the impressionist exhibit at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Within my first week, I located a cooperative where I could order range-fed, organic meat and poultry, became a member of the Peoples Food Co-op, bought locally grown blueberries at the magnificent Farmer’s Market and joined the Citizens Federal Credit Union. When I told a professor’s wife about the meat-buying co-op, she asked, “How did you get connected so fast?” “Just move a lot,” would’ve been my answer.

So as Irene and I settled into our temporary digs at Wendy’s in Ponsonby, we set about getting connected. Both Irene and I were good at this. She at age 18 had made world travel her life’s work and had lived in, among other places, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Cuba, Jamaica, Canada and the United States.

Our primary task was to prepare for the advent of a baby. We started our quest at The Women’s Bookshop, conveniently located on Ponsonby Road. There I made the mistake of asking if there was a restroom. The proprietors gave me a blank look and finally said there was a sofa upstairs where I could have a lie-down if I needed one. Bathroom was even more puzzling—surely I didn’t expect them to provide me with a tub or shower! At last I hit upon toilet, which got the desired results. After availing myself of said facilities, we asked about midwives and home births in Auckland, and this met with immediate success. Back at home we called the midwifery association, and made an appointment. A Veronica Muller would visit us at the house on Vermont Street.

Victoria Park Market

We soon discovered Victoria Park Market, an open-air mall with a natural foods grocery, restaurants and boutiques. We walked up and down Karangahape Road, known to the locals as K Road. There were lots of secondhand stores where we found plenty of used baby clothes, many of them handmade. I bought several yards of flannel in one of them and used Wendy’s machine to sew crib sheets and nightgowns. If we kept going on K Road, we ended up in downtown Auckland, where we found a coffee house we especially liked. Of course, I eschewed coffee, but they had teas and juices, too. The best fish and chips place, where the wares were wrapped in newspaper, was in Grey Lynn, a neighborhood adjacent to Ponsonby. Local papers helped us find a used crib and baby bath. We weren’t sure where we’d be settling but hoped it would be someplace rural, in which case, we’d need a vehicle. Perusing the papers I found makes totally unfamiliar to me—Vauxhall, Ford Anglia (which will be immediately familiar to Harry Potter fans), Zephyr and Morris. I had to be educated, not only on makes but on models, too. Zephyr happened to be a girl’s name I favored, but our friends on Vermont Street quickly nixed that as a car name.

Walking the streets of Auckland brought with it hazards for this American. I had to be on the constant alert for vehicles turning the "wrong" way from the "wrong" direction. New Zealand follows the UK practice of driving on the left, so everything seemed backwards. Drivers did not look out for pedestrians, so it was up to us to stay safe. It was rather scary at times, and I hadn't even started driving yet.

We learned that most people had their savings accounts in the Post Office, not in banks, and we soon wished that was where our savings were. We had a good-sized account in the international department in a prominent Danish bank. There were no limitations on when we could withdraw funds, but our personal banker, whom we came to dislike intensely, refused to release funds when we requested them. Thus began our first major obstacle in New Zealand and the reason that Wendy became a long-suffering friend.

New Year's Poem

2012-01-01T16:05:00.000-07:00

My friend Harriet sent me this poem by Do Hyun Choe in honor of the New Year:

Stillness is what creates love,

Movement is what creates life,

To be still

And still moving—

That is everything.

It also honors what I am discovering about standing still—that it can foster inner movement. I told my friend Alice yesterday that maybe I’ve never been happier in my life than I am right now.

It doesn’t mean I don’t dream of outer movement happening once again. I didn’t think I was making a bucket list, but as I talked to Alice of the places and people I dream of exploring 2013, I realized perhaps I am: the Azores; Copenhagen (again, of course); maybe Greenland; Santiago de Compostela; the Trans-Siberian Railway and co-translating work by native Siberians with my friend Olga, Beijing; Cambodia (again); Singapore or Hong Kong; and maybe once again New Zealand. More about New Zealand next time.

Thank you, Harriet.

New Zealand by Request

2011-12-29T08:59:00.001-07:00

“The Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa,” Glen told me early on. “It means the Land of the Long White Cloud.” Glen and Kevin, both Kiwis, saw Irene and me off to Aotearoa at the San Francisco International Airport in July, 1985. Glen shouted his last words before we boarded, “Tell Wendy I want you to have some kumara right away. Aroha!”

Wendy was a long-time friend of Glen’s who became a long-suffering friend of ours. We went to New Zealand in 1985, planning to immigrate. I was in the last month of pregnancy allowed for plane travel—six months. Since Irene was from Denmark and I from the US, we’d decided on a compromise country. In the network of travelers from our years in San Francisco, we knew several Kiwis who had described New Zealand as a place of pristine natural beauty, in many ways old fashioned but simultaneously progressive in politics and art.

As hospitable as we had heard New Zealand was, I was shocked when two customs agents boarded the plane on the tarmac in Auckland and proceeded to deluge us with spray from aerosol cans. Since I was pregnant, I was quite worried. What was in the cans? Pesticide? Insecticide? Why were they spraying us? As an agricultural island country, New Zealand is quite determined to keep foreign pests out of their little domain. At the time, I asked what the spray was, but I no longer remember, other than that it had something to do with pests and agriculture. It did not, however, seem welcoming.

After clearing customs and leaving a feathered crown in quarantine to make sure it was not hosting any miniscule bugs, we piled our luggage into a cab and requested that we be taken to Ponsonby, Wendy’s neighborhood. I turned to look out the rear window and saw a full rainbow behind us. I savored the rainbow as a symbol of promise, but perhaps I should have noted that it lay behind us, not before us. Under light drizzle, July being winter in mildly subtropical Auckland, we arrived on Vermont Street.

I referred to Wendy earlier as long-suffering because we intended to stay with her and her household of three other adults only briefly. More about that later. Glen had prepared his friends well for our advent, and besides Wendy, there were a few others waiting to meet the Danish and American travelers, proposed immigrants. Wendy directed us to a room furnished with a woodstove and a double mattress on the floor. It was painted a fashionable glossy dark green and had French doors that opened onto a deck facing Wendy’s considerable garden. We started the afternoon, not with kumara, but a cuppa, a cuppa being a cup of tea.

Great Ponsonby, shown here, is actually a B & B
but is typical of Ponsonby bungalows.

After tea and a visit, we went for our first of many walks. The houses in Ponsonby looked to be comfortable bungalows with corrugated metal roofs, and many were fronted by verandas. Storefronts, too, had verandas that made them look like something from the 1920s American South, or at least my image of it. That evening for tea, New Zealand English for supper, we ate, among other things, the fabled baby kumara. The size of fingerling potatoes with pink skin, they were a real, melt-in-your-mouth treat, and I knew why Glen was so insistently fond of them. After dinner we had pudding, New Zealand English for dessert, which was not what Americans call pudding but an apple cobbler.

This first installment about my New Zealand experience was requested by Kiwi Kevin, who said he might actually leave a comment if I wrote about New Zealand. Here it is, Kevin, with more to come. Please do comment!

The Urge to Build II

2011-12-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

Review: Nomadic Furniture: D-I-Y Projects That Are Lightweight and Light on the Environment. James Hennessey and Victor Papanek. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd, 2008. $ 29.99.

Nomadic Furniture first came out in 1973, and by 1974, I owned the volume with its brown and gold cover, its funky line drawings and handwritten lettering. I was living with Lorraine then, in a little two-bedroom house in the shade of very tall elm trees in Albuquerque’s North Valley. It was a special house with a large circular window framed by bamboo bushes, two circular fireplaces fronted by a brick-floored conversation pit, a giant, polished, split-cedar-log wet bar under skylight, aged barn siding on some interior walls, green and white Mexican tiles in the kitchen. A special house deserved special furniture, and I was already then a confirmed nomad, so what book might better satisfy both my urge to build and my nomadic soul than Nomadic Furniture?

A holiday money gift this winter prompted me to spend on one of my favorite things: books. And some bit of nostalgia, no doubt, prompted me to look up Nomadic Furniture. I discovered that, not only had a second volume, Nomadic Furniture 2, been written a year later, but that in 2008, the two books were issued in a single book with a white and blue cover. This represented a difficult choice. The initial nostalgia was still operating, and I was drawn to that warm, brown and gold cover of yore. On the other hand, I’d never seen the second volume, and I was curious. So I ordered this 2008 combo. I haven’t been disappointed. The drawings, B & W photos, and hand lettering are all there, presenting their charming 70s ambience, and Nomadic Furniture 2 is very much influenced by co-author Victor Papanek’s time spent in my favorite city in the world—none other than Copenhagen.

Paging through the book takes me on a trip back in time. Somewhat to my surprise, I realized that I used and/or adapted several ideas from the book in that special house. I made a low-slung couch from plywood and foam cushions I covered in a soft rust-colored fabric. I made our California King bed (a size I’d never heard of before this book). I made the mattress by laminating three different densities of foam together. This, too, was laid on a plain plywood frame. My desk was the classic door placed upon two filing cabinets—the style I still use today. Our kitchen table was a recovered telephone spool. If you’ve ever tried to move one of those, you know they’re nomadic only in the sense that they’re recycled and at the time, at least, free. They are very solid. Besides that homemade couch, we used fold-up directors’ chairs, as suggested by Hennessey and Papanek, for seating.

As seen on the covers of the two books, the authors were big into various living cubes—entertainment cubes, bedroom-office cubes. These captured my imagination, and I always wanted to build one. In fact, thinking of these cubes, was what inspired me to look for the book on a second round. Now I’m wondering if I might not build a cube somewhere in this house, if I might not jettison some of my more stable furniture in exchange for a nomadic piece here or there. A while back I wrote about my urge to build. Maybe it’ll be one of these cubes. At any rate, the two volumes in one are definitely fun. They pack a serious message about being light on the environment. And they do what I love—think creatively, divergently. The book also got Cheyenne’s attention. She paged through while tolerating my historical rave about the book and the projects it generated. Her comment was, “It doesn’t really give directions on how to build things.” Maybe that is just what I like most about it—it’s a book of ideas that stimulates further ideas.

Canceling Escape Routes

2011-12-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

Before I ever had a child, a colleague of mine once told me that when she was first a parent, she had spanked her girls. One day, after a spanking, she felt so terrible that she made a decision never to spank them again. She knew her decision meant she would have to find another means of discipline. And she did.

She inspired me with her story, and I made a decision right then that I would never spank any children I might have. I never have, either, and like my friend, I knew I would have to find other ways to guide my daughter. I’ve always tried to use natural and logical consequences.

Within days of making the decision to stand still, it happened several times, predictably, that I thought of places I might move to or rambling lifestyles I could take up. Almost immediately I remembered, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m staying here. This is it. Early on, I remembered my colleague’s story, and I realized, I have to find another way. When I feel dissatisfied with something, instead of thinking of moving away from the dissatisfaction, I need to either accept it or fix it, and embrace it in the process.

Here are some of the challenges and the ways I’ve tried to anchor myself in spite of them:

• Too windy in the Q: I can put up with almost anything for 10 minutes, so do 3 10-minute walks instead of one 30-minute one; walk in the mall; exercise at home.

Strip Mall City

• Don’t like the strip-mall appearance of my part of the Q: Take myself to some of the neighborhoods I love and hang out or take a walk there.

• Too hot in the summer: Get out early; when this year is over; take a vacation in a cool spot, as long as I have the resources for that.

This whole thing of standing still and taking notice of my surroundings, embracing them, has begun to have an effect. Lately, I often experience surprising tenderness for my city with the quirky name. I’ve started to appreciate the beautiful, the inane and the mundane because I’ve closed the escape routes—the wonderful libraries; the woman walking into the library looking cranky or worried, then noticing I’m smiling and I’ve said good morning, and she smiles too, in surprise; the tree with at least 4 and 20 black birds (ravens) roosting on it; the overdone Christmas lights on people’s houses and lawns that just tickle me; my beautiful tongue-and-groove ceiling; the laciness of the black tree limbs against the evening sky; the back roads of this town with all their funky charm; the wonderful KUNM public radio station. Yeah, I’m loving the Q with great tenderness.

Synchronicity

2011-12-18T09:39:00.002-07:00

When I did the post-purchase walk-through of my house on Indiana Street, the former owner said, “Yeah, this house is built like a bunker. It’s not going anywhere.” It is a simple cinder block rectangle. What it lacks in charm, it makes up for in solidity. The house is the essence of physical stability. It is my housing opposite. A yurt would probably fit me better.

I’ve discussed selling this house multiple times with the realtor who sold it to me, and once I actually listed it. I left it one time for a year to go back to grad school and rented it out for what was supposed to be at least three years. I was back in one, to the great irritation of my tenants.

Lately, when I’ve thought about selling the house, I’ve found myself saying, “I don’t think my destiny with this house is finished.” I don’t know what that destiny is, but maybe the house with its solid character has something to teach me.

Having a solid house when I need to learn about standing still is an instance of synchronicity. Earlier this fall I was moving some soil from my front yard to the back. I’d loaded my wheelbarrow before I realized the tire was flat. I didn’t want to shovel it all back out again, and I didn’t want to go look for the tire pump just then. So I struggled and strained to move the wheelbarrow across the chunky gravel and into the backyard. The weight on the flattened tire was so bad that I left a trail of black tread on all the cement surfaces.

What I didn’t realize was that my arches were straining against my sandal straps. The next day, walking, my main form of exercise, caused excruciating pain all across that part of my foot. And the pain lasted for a few weeks. Grudgingly, I realized that if I wanted healing, I had to get exercise some other way. I immediately thought of some dynamic yoga poses that involve standing still while moving the upper body or while lying down, such as the dynamic plough pose and the triangle poses.

From there, I thought of the opportunity that this would give me in the bigger picture—how I could still be dynamic while standing still. I take pleasure in life’s synchronous lessons, supporting me in this journey.

Review: THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999)

2011-12-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

It seems that the Western world has been fascinated with road trips at least since Gilgamesh set out to find Utnapishtim and Abraham made his journey from Ur to Canaan. Road trip movies are virtually countless, and many of them are pretty silly. Among the gems is The Straight Story, starring Richard Farnsworth and Sissy Spacek with a cameo appearance by Harry Dean Stanton. The film garnered Farnsworth a posthumous Academy Award nomination and won 12 awards.

I never saw the piece when it was in theaters and never before this week on DVD. I think I expected it to be overly sentimental, which it certainly could have been. Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old who can no longer drive because of poor eyesight and uses two canes to hobble around. He decides he needs to travel 300 miles across Iowa to see his estranged brother (Stanton), who has sustained a stroke. He makes the trip riding a 1966 John Deere lawnmower, towing a hand-built wooden trailer in which he camps each night. The trip takes more than five weeks. His anchor across the miles is his speech-impaired, possibly savant-syndrome daughter (Spacek).

Of course, the journey, as are most road trips, is fraught with obstacles, but what fills the story with meaning is the human encounters, beginning with a pregnant teenaged girl, who is running away from home. Straight does with her what he does throughout the story, asks questions, listens. tells relevant stories, and leaves the conclusions to his listeners and to the audience. Throughout, he is understated, compassionate, wise, and honest to a humble fault about his own shortcomings. He is as capable of receiving as he is of giving. The ending, which could have been maudlin, is, like Farnsworth’s performance, beautifully understated.

Until I traversed Iowa several times when Cheyenne attended college in Nebraska, I thought of it as a muddy, flat home to cornfields and hogs, and parts of it certainly are that. I learned, however, that other pieces of Iowa contain rolling hills dotted with wildflowers in spring and clad in gorgeous foliage in autumn. The movie does justice to the beauty of Iowa, treating viewers to turning trees, stunning sunsets and star-filled night skies.

There must be many reasons we are so enamored of road trips. The call to adventure, of course, is one of them. Perhaps most profound is the road trip as metaphor for life’s journey—the people we encounter on our way, the sharing that is possible, the obstacles overcome, the help we receive, the lessons we take with us, the beauty with which life gifts us. At this time of year, I nearly always set aside time to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, and I never fail to cry at the ending, when George Bailey realizes what an impact his life has had on the people, not only of Bedford Falls, but by extension, as far away as the Pacific theater of WWII. The Straight Story is another, much more subtle presentation of how much we matter to the people we meet in small and large ways, and it is exceptionally touching because it is based on a true story.

Dream Journeys

2011-12-09T15:27:00.000-07:00

Since standing still represents something of a conflict for me, I found it interesting that last night the theme of journey cropped up in three distinct dreams. In all of them, I traveled with other people: my father who has been dead for nearly four years with Briana showing up later on; Rose Fasthorse Nofchissey, her sister Lydia Fasthorse, and a young woman I didn’t know; in the third dream, Victoria Rakowski.

In brief, these are the dreams, not necessarily in order, which I no longer remember:

First: My father (who was young) and I were in a truck. We stopped on the road behind a stake truck loaded with hay bales and Mexican immigrants. Their truck couldn’t go, so we helped out by loading the hay into our truck and delivering it for them. The place we came to was a kind of adobe gallery/retreat, and the gallery was filled with recycle art. It looked like my friend Briana’s art. Suddenly she was there, and we held retreat together.

Second: Rose, Lydia, the young woman and I were on a road trip in a 1950s coupe. The young woman may have been one of their daughters. We wrapped ourselves in warm, colorful Pendleton blankets. As we rode, we talked of spiritual journey and the paths we had taken over time. We explained things to each other and we also seemed to speak for the benefit of the young woman.

Third: Victoria Rakowski and I were on a cruise ship. There was an announcement that the ship would be docking somewhere, and no food would be served for a period of time. Vicki and I got ourselves into a conference room where there was a good spread of food, and we started loading up on cheeses and full-corn rye bread of the kind we’ve both enjoyed eating in Copenhagen. If you know Vicki, it seems totally fitting that this is what we would do.

Don’t worry; I’m not going to make a habit of regaling blog-readers with my dreams. But these struck me powerfully in several ways. The journey theme, of course, all in one night, is obvious. But I’ve been taught that feelings in dreams may be more important than meaning, which is what we are usually drawn to going after. A feeling of love, connectedness, and community pervaded all the dreams. Each dream also contained an element of nourishment—hay for animals, beautiful art and retreat for eyes and souls, delicious food while the ship stood still, and spiritual nourishment on the road trip with Rose and Lydia.

These are the kind of dreams and feelings that stay with me and for which I am deeply grateful.

My Hometown

2011-12-05T11:23:00.000-07:00

Before Thanksgiving my friend Monica started posting each day on Facebook three things she’s grateful for. She inspired me to do the same, and it’s been spreading slowly to others. The practice hasn’t gone viral yet, but I’d sure like it to. Because, as I posted one day, it’s hard to be angry, mean, violent or depressed when you’re listing things you’re grateful for. That idea isn’t original with me; it came from my 12-Step Program, where we called it having an Attitude of Gratitude. I think if we all did this, we could change the world faster than any world leader can.

What I’ve been noticing is that coming up with those three things every day does not end when I’ve posted them. I’m aware of little and big things all day long that I’m grateful for. And I find that I’m happier. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

Besides finding things I’m glad of, I also try to find a way to reframe the things I’m not so pleased with. This is not meant as an empty Pollyanna exercise, although I do think Pollyanna has gotten some bad press. It’s meant to help me truly see possibility in adversity. As another thinker, Kak Sri, wrote, “Gratitude is an art of painting an adversity into a lovely picture.” A few days ago, the entire Southwest was swept by roaring winds, and I hate the wind. It makes my sinuses ache, among other nastinesses. However, because I was trying to transform the experience into one I could be grateful for, I found myself genuinely thankful that the wind blows the seeds hither and thither, supporting a bounty of biodiversity.

Today I inwardly expressed thanks for the arrival of snow, and in my mind I said, Thanks for the snow that has come to my hometown. My hometown in that instant was not Teec Nos Pos or Gallup. I was calling Albuquerque my hometown. It’s a phrase I’ve never, ever applied to Albuquerque. It just goes to show where gratitude has taken me—on an unexpected, transformative journey to the heart of where I am. I give thanks for that today.

People over Place

2011-12-02T08:00:00.002-07:00

Yesterday morning the wind howled mightily through the Q. At times I thought a train was roaring through my house. It was definitely not weather for walking in. Not for this chica. So I hied myself to the mall, which is almost across the street from me. The mall is ever my last resort for walking. It’s closed in, stuffy, and hot. There used to be tall trees growing throughout, but someone decided last year to cut them down. The maintenance man assigned to do it told me the ones who made the decision were Republicans, and we shared a laugh. At this time of year, all the commercialism of Christmas is on display, and it seems so hollow.

Nevertheless, a closed-in space was what I desired yesterday, and the powers that be, whether Republican, Democrat or unaffiliated, have graciously decreed that the mall shall open at 6 a.m. for walkers. On a day like yesterday, that’s a gift. The shops don’t open until 10, so the people you see are walkers, mostly retirees, and some maintenance people. Depending on what time you get there, there may be some shopkeepers setting up. But not all the glaring fluorescents have been turned on, so there’s a pleasant half-light throughout, and there is a sort of camaraderie among the walkers. Most often musak is playing, but I had on my iPod, and songs like Peter Tosh’s “Creation” took me back to the lush bush high above the Tasmanian Sea on the South Island of New Zealand, where I first heard it. I was jammin’, dancing my walk.

I love smiling at people I don’t know, when they don’t expect it because I love to see their faces light up. It’s such a rush. And I realized that something is shifting for me, something I’ve hoped to transform as I stand still in Albuquerque. The place I don’t care for, the mall, is less important than the people I meet or pass, the momentary connections we share through eyes, through smiles, once in awhile through a word. Walking the mall may become a more frequent activity for me, especially as winter sets in. December definitely came in like a lion yesterday.

LISTEN TO PETER TOSH'S "CREATION."

Rootedness and Edge-dwellers

2011-11-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

It could seem like a truism or just a metaphor, but my garden is part of what roots me here. When I go away, Cheyenne valiantly waters the greens, exactly as I’ve laid out my instructions on paper. But in New Mexico, the task does require gallantry because of the hot, dry air. Every time I’m tempted to travel, I think of what it could mean for my garden, and I am loathe to abandon it, even to Cheyenne’s stellar efforts. So it is that the literal roots of my garden help to hold me here.

When I have taken yoga courses in rural Sweden, one of the karma yoga tasks has been to work in the gardens. One fall I was harvesting parsnips, an onerous job, as they are nearly the only vegetable I dislike—intensely. It’s all about an almost daily diet of parsnips at mission boarding school. Someone must have donated a whole truckload of the detestable things.

Anyway, as I plucked the long, white produce from the earth, I noticed that the ones growing on the edges of the field were scrawny, even stunted, compared with the ones that grew behind them. It occurred to me that the ones on the perimeter served as a sort of protective barrier to the elements, giving the inner ones a better chance of thriving.

This observation led me to think that those of us humans who live on the edges of society, whether by consignment or choice or a combination of those, may serve the same function. We frequently do not enjoy the same protections that those in the inner circle take for granted, as we brave the elements that come our way. Because I declined to taste both the parsnips grown on the outer edge and the ones from the center, I couldn’t tell, but I wondered if the scrawny ones might not also, by virtue of their exposure to the elements, be tougher than the more protected ones. Certainly, we outsiders of society have often been made stronger by the winds of adversity. As Viktor Frankl said, quoting Nietzsche, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Temptation

2011-11-27T19:53:00.002-07:00

No, it’s not the name of some 50s perfume. It is the urge that catches me unawares, so I forget that I am standing still this year. Then I remember and see the trigger for what it is—just that, a trigger. Something the other day, made me think again of El Camino de Santiago de Compostela, how I’ve read about it, dreamed of walking it. Then the next night, I picked up a magazine, flipped one page, and there was an article by Martin Sheen about his journey on the Camino and about the movie he and his son Emilio Estévez have made, The Way. I thought, I have to go. It’s a sign. And maybe I do have to go, but not now. Not this year and not in 2012. Nevertheless, I took myself to a website that advises the best way to get to the starting place in Roncesvalles and what to take with you so you are neither overloaded nor stranded. If I wait until 2013, the crowds that The Way could generate may have thinned out. It will be the year I turn 65, and that could be an auspicious year to go. But no, not now. Now I am standing still. This year I can practice by doing those hikes within a 60-mile radius of Albuquerque. Albuquerque, my home.

My rewards credit card is (big surprise) a travel-related card. And it sends out offers, seductions I’ve come to think of them. Caribbean cruises, only $40 per night. The boat is about to sail, and the prices are slashed because they want to fill the ship. I’ve never been on a cruise. I’d like to visit Jamaica, the Bahamas. Why not? Because I’m standing still.

My friend Monica is having a New Years party in Tucson, and I’m invited. Tucson in December? Best time to go. My last trip to Tucson still has my taste buds jumping and my heart wide open to the love I felt there.

There will be a farewell potluck, a gathering of friends of my friend Roger. I could have had my ticket paid. I could have justified it, too, I think. But I need to stay here. I need to honor my commitment to being here now. Writing those words reminds me that this is all about being present. So, as with the people in Tucson, I will be with the friends in the Bay Area in spirit. And spirit is large; it contains multitudes.

Yesterday I had the great fun of purchasing a gift card for Baresso, the locally owned Copenhagen coffee bars, for a friend’s upcoming birthday. She’s hard to buy for, and I know this card is something she’ll love, and she’ll be so surprised when it arrives in her postbox. The thrill of surprising her, puzzling through the ins and outs of online ordering in Danish—a whole new internet vocabulary—is all part of the joy. And then I thought of all the times we’ve sat in Baresso with our lattés—the café on Amagerbrogade on the little island of Amager; the one on Nørrebrogade where Middle Eastern greengrocers and halal butchers have their shops; Kongens Nytorv near where Hans Christian Andersen had his narrow little apartment in Nyhavn; Arnold Busck Bookstore on Købmagergade; the bar on Rådhuspladsen in the shadow of Copenhagen’s City Hall—where haven’t Irene and I drunk Baresso coffee? All the sights and sounds of Copenhagen come rushing in on me. I think of Copenhagen at Christmastime—the long, dark hours that cannot dampen the buzz, where someone wishes you Glædelig Jul in every shop you enter. The Copenhagen Boy Choir, sponsored by Prince Consort Henrik, singing in the cathedral on Christmas Eve. For just a moment, I think I shall hop a plane—Scandinavian Airlines, SAS, where they serve you whole kernel rye bread and French rolls, not on a tray covered with plastic, but from a basket with tongs for you to pick what you want.

There is a level of comfort, though, in having made this commitment to stand still in Albuquerque for a moment of my life. I don’t really have to make any decisions about these temptations, because I made a single one back in September. I don’t have to plan, order tickets, or work out how the house and my little garden will be cared for. None of that. Life is simpler this way, and simplicity promotes contentment.

The Frenetic Nature of Moving

2011-11-25T13:01:00.003-07:00

One of the very endearing habits of my late friend, Roger McMillan, was how he put people together who would otherwise never have known each other, whether virtually or in reality. Michael Garsva is one of the people I’ve gotten to know electronically through Roger. I heard stories about his home in Stinson Beach, and I followed with great interest his trek earlier this year up Mt. Kilimanjaro, complete with many photographs. Michael and I are age mates, it turns out, and we’ve both moved a great deal. Now Michael is doing what I’m doing in some sense, planning to stand still for a year in Hawaii. Unlike me, he chose a place he loves, whereas I am working on learning to love the place where I am.

Shortly before Roger died, Michael sent him an e-mail that describes in detail the frenetic way that a move takes over one’s life, even when the move may have a one-year time limit attached. The description left me out of breath with a virtual stitch in my side, and so I share it here with thanks for Michael for permission:

I was running hard trying to finish the house, getting all of my stuff out and into storage and cleaned enough to be able to pass on to the tenant, Chris, before I left. I had been working 16-20 hr days. My plane was leaving at 09:05 Wednesday morning. I was determined to be on it. I was up at 4 getting the last of the stuff to take to Hawaii into the suitcases. Yes, I am taking my good cooking/cutting knives, no, not in carry-on. No, not the shaving cream, no room. Besides, I can buy it there. Yes, those books! No, not that one, I will get it on the Kindle, etc... Running up and down the stairs putting things in the shed. Things that I won't see for at least a year, maybe ever... Just barely getting the last of the clothing, tools and ever so important mementos of life into the suitcase or shed...depending.... by the time the taxi drove up to the front of the house at the pre-arranged time of 05:30. Almost out of breath from running. I filled the cab with 3 fat suitcases (one of which cost me an extra $125—even in 1st class) and my sweating self. Did I lock the doors? Turn off most of the lights? Make it presentable enough? Probably not.

I am in the cab with 3 heavy bags containing what I will live with for the next year. I am finally sitting still after what feels like weeks of being on a dead run. I know I didn't clean well enough. I did get the big things done right though. New carpeting, upstairs and down, including the stairs, propane tank in, propane line to the fireplace in, fireplace insert in for warmth and great ambiance, yard completely landscaped, fence torn down, rebuilt up, on the road, office room completely caulked and repainted and so much more. I am still buzzing with keeping sometimes three different crews working as well as me. Oh, and how can I forget the damn papers? It took forever to sort and keep or delete four file cabinets worth. I did learn what I will never need to keep anyway. Ticket? Passport? Keys to the Hawaii apartment? Got 'em.

I had printed out my boarding pass with the indulgence of upgrade to 1st class 24 hours earlier.

The taxi left me off at the Manzanita Park & Ride so I could pick up the airporter. I had timed it well. The airporter arrived 7 minutes later. Getting the luggage stowed under the bus, one of my larger bags ripped a seam, end-to-end. My treasures started pouring out. The bus driver was totally uninterested. I was barely able to scoop it all up, jam it into what was left of the bag and get it into the belly of the bus.

Arriving at the airport, I dragged my stuff out on to the sidewalk. I went in to the Hawaii Airlines ticket counter, explained my suitcase predicament after showing them my 1st class ticket. They scurried out, bundled up my broken bag, taped it up, put it all in a big plastic airline bag, labeled it “first class priority” and that was the last I saw of it until I hit Honolulu.

When I arrived in Honolulu, Sue picked me up, looking good in her shiny gold 430sc convertible, with the top down. Two hours later I was swimming in that water I had dreamed of, was mesmerized by all of those times running, painting, sweating and packing.

Four days later, I am getting my feet on the ground. Back where I want to be. Its warm and sweet. Life is good.

Armchair Travels III

2011-11-23T14:22:00.001-07:00

In the 90s, I went by double-decker bus from Copenhagen to London to see sites associated with Arthurian legend. The bus trip, unlike most bus trips, was quite luxurious. We left Copenhagen in the late afternoon and stopped after dark at a rest area in northern Germany to brush our teeth and perform whatever ablutions we had time for before the bus started up again. Back on the bus, the drivers had been busy turning the upstairs seats into bunks. Therein lay the luxury—to lie down and sleep in comfort as the bus trundled through the rest of Germany and Holland. We breakfasted cafeteria style in Belgium, then rolled on to Calais for the crossing to Dover by ferry.

In London, I quickly learned that the following day, when I’d planned on a rail trip to Bath, a transport strike was on. Punting, as any good traveler would, I booked my Piccadilly hotel for an extra night, and took myself to the British Museum to view artifacts from Celtic and Roman times. While watching the news that evening, I found out that Glastonbury, where Arthur and Guinevere were once rumored to have been buried, would be hosting its annual rock festival during my intended visit, and that upwards of 80,000 people were expected to attend. I have nothing against rock festivals, but I had envisioned a contemplative visit to the Chalice Well and the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey with a quiet climb up the famous tor. I considered not going, but due to the strike, I’d already had to give up my trip to Tintagel, the Cornwall site of Arthur’s reputed birth. So I decided to wend my way toward Bradford upon Avon, which seemed an appropriate place to stay during the rest of my journey, as it had once been on the route medieval pilgrims took to Glastonbury.

The following day I took the train to Bath. Of course, I couldn’t help thinking of the Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I went to a travel aid station and signed up for a B & B in Bradford then explored Bath on foot for a few hours, stopping for tea with scones and clotted Devon cream and afterwards hopping a train for Bradford. At first I came to regret my choice to stay there. It was a bit out of the way, as I learned after booking that I would have to take the train back into Bath before heading to my true destinations—Glastonbury on the morrow and the Avebury stone circle the following day. It turned out to be important after all, that I stayed there. A plus was that each trip from Bradford to Bath included a view of one of the enormous prehistoric white chalk horses engraved on a green hillside.

That evening, I ate under spreading trees at an inn beside the Avon. Afterwards I decided to take the narrow walk up a hill overlooking the village to the St. Mary Chapel. It was at this chapel that pilgrims stayed on their way to Glastonbury. The chapel was closed, but there was a lovely little garden, where I sat on a stone wall, viewing the village and the plains beyond. I was still in doubt about going to Glastonbury, but as I ruminated on it, I remembered scenes from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon, the Arthurian myth told from the viewpoint of the women in the story, Morgaine and Gwynhefar. I recalled the magic of Viviane, and Morgaine, priestesses of the Goddess, raising their arms to call down the mists that transformed Glastonbury into the parallel world that was Avalon. I thought, if Viviane and Morgaine could raise and lower those mists, I could raise and lower metaphorical mists to shut out the rock concert and have my hoped for quiet time.

When I reached Glastonbury the next day, I laughed to myself over the fact that the rock concert was actually 10 miles outside Glastonbury and had no effect on my visit whatsoever. It was thanks to an earlier armchair visit through the mists of Avalon and time spent in the garden of the St. Mary Chapel, that I had made my decision to continue my pilgrimage. In the abbey, regardless of whether or not Arthur and Guinevere were ever buried there, I had a profound sense of presence and also Presence as I sat in the now ruined but still majestic space. It was one of those life-altering experiences, fraught with obstacles pilgrimages so often are, but with a treasure to be had at the end.

Have you ever made a pilgrimage, whether sacred or secular?

Armchair Travels II

2011-11-21T13:08:00.001-07:00

Other books, too, take me back to New Zealand. My favorite is Patricia Grace’s Potiki, perhaps because with such beauty and grace, she takes me through rural Maori life, the mystical and magical of the great carvings on the marai, the Maori sacred communal space, and because in this story the disenfranchised triumph, though not without sacrifice. Darker, but lyrically gorgeous is Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, which won the 1985 Booker Prize after first being turned down by major publishers.

Cheyenne was born in New Zealand, and in a trunk out in the storage shed, we have a stack of books that represent bits of Maoritanga. Patricia Grace’s The Kuia and the Spider brings me to the clear blue water at Mangonui where Cheyenne first put her baby toes into the Salt Mother. In the story, the world of spiders joins the world of humans in an argument between the kuia and an 8-legged grandmother about whose grandchildren are best. In Taniwha, the world of the mythical joins with the world of humans. The children’s books take me back to the pole house named Fiona at Earthspirit. As the kuia weaves her kit of flax, I wander the stream bed, my baby in a yellow corduroy carrier on my front. I sing her lullabies and show her the pink-fingerling roots of the willows running through the creek. Flax plants that remind me of the yuccas back home surround us.

Most recently, I discovered the Chocoholic Mysteries, which take place in a southwest Michigan town called Warner Pier, loosely based on Douglas-Saugatuck. All the other towns are real—Holland, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, and the stories are replete with the Dutch names of folks who really people that area. My relationship with this part of Michigan goes back generations—to my Grandpa Johannes Kruis born right after the family got off the boat from the Netherlands and Grandma Cora Staal Kruis, whose family owned Staal Buick in Grand Rapids. I have traversed the roads between New Mexico and southwest Michigan all my life—on family vacations when my father smoked fragrant cigars to stay awake on the road. Later I went on my own to attend Calvin College, which represented major culture shock and could only be countenanced for two years. Finally, when I had already tasted of many cultures, I went again, this time to study creative writing in Kalamazoo. In college, the gray-skied winters overwhelmed me, but this time of year, right around Thanksgiving, I’ll take the gray skies just to see the rust, gold, crimson, and orange trees and the misted green fields. I revel in a bit of Dutch-American culture and history, seeing all those many-voweled Dutch names on businesses—Knooihuizen, Donkersloot, Van Slooten, Schuitema, Vander Laan. Most of all I enjoy the family of my brother Bob who has settled there, somewhat by default. The Chocoholic Mysteries are not thrillers. They belong more to that cozy genre that I suppose could be called “chick” mysteries. But when I’m in the mood for a bit southwest Michigan nostalgia, there are several I haven’t yet read.

What places have you visited or revisited by armchair travel?

Armchair Travels I

2011-11-19T09:42:00.001-07:00

One of my pleasures as I establish myself in Albuquerque is to revisit old haunts in the books I read. Generally it doesn’t happen by intention, making it all the more pleasurable because of the surprise element. Just last week, my friend Jean mentioned that her Scottsdale book group, Crime and Coffee, was reading Robert Dugoni. Dugoni writes thrillers, many of them courtroom dramas, which I love for their logic and strategy. The writer is based in the Pacific Northwest, and so are some of the books I’ve read so far. My mother grew up in Everett, 30 miles outside Seattle, and we visited some summers, digging clams on the Mukilteo beach in Puget Sound and picking abundant strawberries and raspberries to the amazement of my high desert soul. When I read Dugoni, I see the streets of small-town Everett, delight in the names my mother used to say: Snoqualmie Falls, Mt. Rainier and Cle Elum. I recall her mentioning with affection the red-barked madrone trees, though she was a woman not usually attuned to nature. I remember the ferry boat trip my brother Brian and I took to Orca Island, one of the San Juans, and the lush green of ferns and moss there. I remember attending a bilingual education conference in Seattle with Gloria and seeing the vibrant colors of produce and fish at Pike Place Market.

Less than a month ago, I discovered Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, which takes place in seventies and eighties San Francisco, except for the most recent, contemporary Michael Tolliver Lives. It takes me back in time and place—not only to the Russian Hill apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, but to the Castro, the Sunset, North Beach—all neighborhoods I have loved and wandered. More than that, Maupin gives us people who create family and community out of need and generosity. In many ways, he is telling my story from those days.

If I want a taste of Copenhagen, I can once again pull out Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Smilla’s apartment and little Isaiah’s are right in Christianshavn, where I live with Irene in when I’m in Copenhagen. I see the canals and pleasure boats and the houseboats I envy, the great Knippelsbro, the bridge I’ve walked from the Danish parliament to Christianshavn countless times, the bridge that splits and rises so tall ships may sail out to sea or into harbor. In Smilla there is also taste for the tongue—for one in the sensual scene where the mechanic makes Smilla the best cappuccino you ever drank.

After Copenhagen, my favorite city in Denmark is Helsingør, known to the English-speaking world as Elsinore. Of course, it’s Hamlet that takes me there. Kronborg Castle, thought by many scholars to be Hamlet’s setting, stands on the verge of Øre Sound between Denmark and Sweden in all its creamy-gold limestone splendor with its verdigris turrets and roofs. I love this place, have come often to sit in the sun-splashed or rain-shined courtyard. I imagine young Shakespeare there, or the tortured Prince of Denmark. Once, my artist friend Tina got a group of women together to sketch our images of the castle. Afterwards we went to her home, made falafels, drank wine together, and did what women do best—talked. In August players produce Hamlet on the castle walls. I’ve never been able to attend because I had to return to my school job. But one day, I will get out of my armchair and see the ghost on the parapet wall for myself. That’s a promise, life permitting.

Rita Golden Gelman’s travels in Tales of a Female Nomad took her to more than one place I’ve visited and others I’ve wanted to. The one that brought me the greatest pleasure was her stay in New Zealand or, in Maori, Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud. I never made it to Coromandel, where she stayed, though I wanted to. But her love affair with mussels brought back memories of digging for pipis on the sandy beach north of Kaitaia, where we lived. When she remarks about the differences between New Zealand and US English, I smile and think of other words and of the experiences they evoke. I remember long strolls up and down Karangahape Road, into thrift stores buying baby clothes for Cheyenne. I think again of our midwife Veronica with her spiky hair. And I remember the many people, friends of friends of friends, who welcomed us into their homes wherever we went, from Millerton to Kaitaia, from Auckland to Golden Bay. I’ve been to no place friendlier, holding greater pristine natural beauty than Aotearoa.

The Urge to Build

2011-11-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

Sometime in my teens, when I should’ve been old enough to know better, I made a plan to run away from home. Perhaps a measure of my maturity was the fact that I didn’t plan to go so far away that I couldn’t continue to attend my school. In fact, I was going to move down into the arroyo behind our house in Gallup. That was a measure of immaturity, as arroyos are known to turn into mad rushing torrents during the summer monsoons of the Southwest. In my defense, this was in the upper wider portion of the arroyo, less prone to flooding.

There was a depression in one wall of the arroyo, a potential cave, and my dream was to collect shoe boxes in which I could let the sun bake adobe bricks I would make from the dirt I dug out to deepen the cave. I would then use the bricks to build a wall in front of the cave to make the home I was going to run away to.

Not exactly your typical high school dream, but that was the beginning of my urge to build a dwelling place using alternative materials. Since then, there have been many iterations, which included fantasies of livable tree houses, a hand-built houseboat (never mind that I live in a desert), a 60-square-foot cob house, a hogan, an Earthship, a housetruck for having cake and eating it too, a yurt, a straw bale house, a home built of bottles, aluminum cans and mortar. The list is practically inexhaustible.

Of course, wanting to build has its conflicts with wanting to roam, unless I come back again to that fixed-point idea. One of the appeals of staying where I am is that I may actually have time (and money because it costs lots of money to keep moving) to build something here on this lot on this street in this town. I could turn the two north rooms of the little yellow block house into a small apartment. I could build that tree house. I can finish building the labyrinth I started a year ago. I can do small household projects, like tiling the threshold to my yoga room.

Just last night Cheyenne informed me that the shelf I reinstalled this summer is buckling. Again. That’s a building project I dread tackling, given that I have to anchor it better to cinder blocks. And now that it’s buckling, should I take it out (it’s a wire shelf), and replace it with all wood and a pipe for hanging clothes? Life seems to be offering me plenty of building projects, and if I’m daunted by a mere shelf, what was I thinking? Build a whole dwelling place? I’m not always the most realistic of women—to wit my adobe cave dwelling in that Gallup arroyo.

Have you ever had an urge to build?How have you satisfied it, if indeed you have. Are you still dreaming of building?

What I Am Loving in Albuquerque Today

2011-11-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

The wind blowing one shower after another of dried elm leaves onto my roof—every smattering sounding like a hundred raindrops.

My little garden putting forth shoots and plants. The peas are going crazy, and I think it is such a miracle what comes from a tiny seed, that the seed has in it all the information needed to put out its own kind of stem, leaf and fruit.

The earthy smell of compost as I open the bins to see if they need water in this dry land. I see the happy red worms doing their work, then close and rotate the bins.

The crunch of leaves underfoot when I hang clothes on the line and open the spigots on the rain barrels. The fresh smell of the clothes when I bring them in, piling them in the wicker basket that is more than twenty-six years old and still serving me well.

The heat pouring out from this ancient furnace that has been so faithful and will be gone after next week. It’s time for a new one.

The big sky, fiery at the horizon.

Driving in silence except for the purr of my pickup’s motor under clouds split by night sky—from the North Valley, through Old Town and on Indian School after a potluck and book talk with friends who are becoming my community in this place.

Coming home to pumpkins and gourds I have set upon my porch beside the tall grasses and to the little bronze Japanese rabbits sitting on the stump, gazing at the moon with two of my neighbor’s red Maple leaves caught between them.

Autumn in my little yellow block home. My home.

O Lost and by the Wind Grieved

2011-11-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

This post’s title is part of the most famous line from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, for many years my number one favorite book, sucker for poignancy that I am. It was also Thomas Wolfe who wrote that the true wanderer must have a fixed place to wander from. As I mentioned in a comment here, I have never had that fixed place, and perhaps what I am doing in this year is making this house on this street in this town my fixed place, so that I can be come what Wolfe would limn a true wanderer.

When we are very small, we are taught that each snowflake is different from all other snowflakes. Furthermore, we learn that each human being is unique from all others. So, too, we each have a unique journey before us and, as the poet Rumi said, a life work that only we can fulfill.

A part of my journey as a roamer has been the clear and definite closing of doors, both literal and metaphorical, to many places where I have attempted to put down roots. Teec Nos Pos, which I have loved more than any other, represents my deepest loss of place. Even before I realized that, as a white person, I could never make TNP my permanent home, I received signals indicating that that chapter of my life was finished. A year after we moved away from TNP, the rambling adobe missionary house burned to the ground. Less than a year after that, the stone trading post, where we walked once a week to get mail and spend a nickel on candy, also burned down. A few years after that, the Depression Era stone-and-pine-viga Bureau of Indian Affairs School where I attended second grade was razed in favor of a large cinder block complex on the hill above it. Later still, the tiny white clapboard chapel where my father joyfully preached his sermons was moved out of the valley, and a much larger, nondescript building took its place. Some of it could be called progress. Some of it may have been a message to white missionaries and traders. All of it became a message to me: you are to wander in this lifetime; this place is finished for you.

It has happened again and again, but never with such complete finality as in TNP. The big square house where we lived in Shiprock also burned, though much later, as did the house in beautiful, mountainside Toadlena. In Tohlakai the old chapel still stands but is no longer in use; there’s a new one, near the highway, better heated but less charming. In Denmark, Irene’s and my first apartment on Vodroffstværegade was torn down and replaced by a modern complex. While this sort of thing happens often in the US, it’s a rare occurrence in Denmark. There, buildings are constantly refurbished and maintained, so there are still people living in 15^th century structures. When I lived in California, I made a trip for closure to Albuquerque after a precipitous move from here. I drove by the counseling center where I’d opened my first practice. Huge dump trucks were hauling off carpets, sheetrock, and slabs of roofing. A parking lot would take its place. Talk about closure!

What does it all mean? My artist and poet friend, Gloria Emerson, who is Navajo, wrote after her first visit to this blog: “Just took a quick visit to your rich blog...I'll return in time and comment. What stories. Hadn’t thought much of the TCKids. Hmm. And your drive to roam...mine, too. I thought that for me, it was because we roamed down from the Bering Straits...perhaps Mongolia, can't decide if my genetic history went south along the Athabaskan coastlines (California) or perhaps I hung out with Tlingits and then curved down around in a long half circle to Wal-Mart. I keep making that long-ago trip, only now it’s from Bloomfield to Cuba to San Ysidro. I never think of it as a character blight. I think of people who are happily sedentary as strange.”

I have to thank Gloria for this perspective, because as I look back over these signals from the Universe, I have to wonder if I have been thinking of my roaming habits as a character blight—less that, I think, and more just a discomfort with my restlessness—and whether I’m being told that part of my lot in this life is to wander. But can I possibly do it from a fixed point? I do believe, if I’m interpreting correctly, that I’m receiving signals that, like it or not, I may have a destiny with this house on this street in this town.

Albuquerque V: Community

2011-11-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

My friend Diane moved here from Massachusetts. Unlike me, in the six times I’ve moved back into this city (there must be a destiny here between the city and me), Diane wanted to live here. But after she got here, she went through a period of mover’s regret. She felt what I’ve felt, that Albuquerque was soulless. Over time, that changed for her, because she discovered that she was able to create community here in a way that she hadn’t in New England. She said that this is what constitutes the soul of Albuquerque for her, this community she has formed around herself.

When I was young, I had ready-made community in the church, the mission and among the Native people who surrounded us. This wasn’t always a comfortable patchwork community for many reasons, but it was mine. It was religious, spiritual, social and cultural, embracing several cultures; and it was completely interwoven with family. When I gave up that community, it represented the biggest loss of my life. At the same time, I was paradoxically freed. Sometimes that freedom, though, left me feeling like an untethered astronaut, adrift in the cosmos.

For several years after I left my community of origin, I found ways to create new ones. Early on, I was very active in the lesbian and gay communities, which were going strong in Albuquerque in the 70s. Also, because my partner was African American, I partook of that community. And I was very active in Navajo bilingual-bicultural education, which formed an extension of what I had known in my early life. Later I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. For the most part, I lost touch with the Native people I’d known, worked, and shared so much with. But I developed relationships in a thriving counterculture—artists, writers, recyclers, edge-dwellers, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, 12-Steppers, old hippies. Leaving them represented a second great loss. During my Bay Area time, I left for Denmark and returned, left for New Zealand and returned. In Denmark, my community was made up of Irene’s friends and family and people I met in the Scandinavian Yoga and Meditation School and Ashram. In New Zealand, it was the women of Earthspirit who were ready workmates and playmates. Later I lived in the mountain town of Cuba, New Mexico and slowly, there too, I cobbled together community—fellow educators, artists (always), writers, spiritual seekers, and once again Native Americans. At one time I studied creative writing for a year at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. There I became part of a ready-made community of students and professors, all of us living the writing life, making word art and teaching writing to others.

With the passing of the 70s, though, I have not been able to find or make community in Albuquerque. I have satisfied myself, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, with my global network of friends. And in many ways this suits the writing life, which takes precedence over all else, so that it is easy to become a virtual hermit. But in the end, it is not enough. I come back to Diane’s assertion that the community she has created here makes up the soul of Albuquerque. She is content to be here now. I’m trying to follow her example, to send down roots. I make more of an effort to nurture the friendships I have here. I have applied to volunteer in situations that are different from places I’ve worked, for organizations that will put me in touch with the pulse, perhaps even the soul, of the city in fresh new ways. I wave to my neighbors and exchange a few words. They see me walk the neighborhood all the time and we start to know each other. Never mind that I have lived here for 10 years. It’s happening. The people are the soul of the place. I have too long favored place over people.

Nevertheless, one tribute to Albuquerque the place today—the Sandia Mountains are a fairyland of powdered sugar and gingerbread, topped by downflowing whipped cream clouds. In this I revel.

Always Moving

2011-11-05T11:48:00.000-06:00

It’s often said that we begin to die on the day that we are born. So in that sense, we are always moving toward that end place. My emergency trip to the Bay Area was to say farewell to a very dear friend who had only a few days left to live and who did make his final transition yesterday. It is important to me to honor him and his well-lived life here, because he could serve as an example to us all.

I met Roger McMillan 23 years ago, when he and his wife Margaux walked into my office at Cambodian New Generation, the refugee agency where, among other positions I held, I was the volunteer coordinator. I always tried to make a good match between volunteers and clients, and in Roger’s case, I was the most successful I ever was. He maintained ties with “his” family and their extended family until the day before his death. A newly retired science teacher when I met him, Roger continued to tutor immigrants and community college students. He mentored immigrants, always interested in exposing them to American culture—taking them to baseball games and operas, sending them by plane to his sister’s home in Michigan for Thanksgiving, taking them on road trips. They gave back to him in turn, as he said, a hundred fold. Roger also paid my ticket when I traveled to Cambodia to interview my friend Wayne at Wat Opot Children’s Community for one of the books I’m working on.

Believing that people should be able to see or hear their eulogy before they go, I wrote the following to honor Roger and sent it to him. I also told him that I was changing the name of the science teacher in my current YA novel, Too Soon the Thunder, from Ivarsson to McMillan, in his honor.

Some things I will miss, now you are gone:

Your insatiable curiosity about people, cultures and places

Your ever-fertile thoughts about how you can

Expose an immigrant to American culture

Contribute to the lives of those around you

Taste yet one more bite of life

Share a book

Those surprise packages that come in the mail unannounced or preceded by just a hint

Your laugh

Your perverse sense of humor

Your erudition

Your compassion

Your talent for networking, putting together the most likely and unlikely folks

The offering of a quiet retreat in the brown shingle cottage in the woods

The bi-monthly visual, literate, and musical reminders of all your activities and the books you’re

devouring

Those calls or e-mails coming out of nowhere, assuming that I know something you don’t know

Those good-humored attempts to convert me to atheism

Your constant support of me as a writer

The way you make a friend of everyone who crosses your path

How you, in your last days on Earth are arranging the gift of your car to the young and cheerful

immigrant who has served you well, making a hearing aid appointment for him, sending a large check to your housecleaner of many years, buying the longed-for wheel rims for your Cambodian “grandson” and adding tires for safety

I will miss all these and more signs of your love of people, of life and the generosity with which

you have engaged it for all the years I have known you, and long before I came on the scene.

I am grateful that your life was spared on that runway in Korea, in that ocean folly there, and in

the several other close calls you have had.

I am grateful for that day you and your funny, smart lady walked into my office and into my life at

Cambodian New Generation twenty-three years ago.

Really, most of all, Roger, I will miss YOU, this good man, this kind of man.

Traveling Again

2011-10-30T17:22:00.000-06:00

This blog post finds me in the San Francisco Bay Area. I know that I have ventured far outside my 60-mile Albuquerque radius. But this was an emergency trip that fell under the category of exceptions laid out when I began my year of standing still.

Being back in the Bay Area, even on an emergency, always brings back so many memories, most of them good. The diversity of this place never grows old: I was not tempted for a moment, on the 1-hour BART trip to pull out a book. Instead, I delighted in watching the Vietnamese teen couple enjoy one another’s company, still able to speak their native language; the Chinese woman who knitted three or four rows on a scarf and got off at the exit closest to Chinatown; the African American father and his twin daughters of kindergarten age, who waved and shouted good-bye to the entire car; the Hispanic woman coming from a Mission Street market with her teen daughter and daughter’s friend. With the latter I exchanged a few words and got offered a piece of candy, just that quickly.

The trip did get off to a rocky start. I realized shortly after arriving at the ABQ airport that I’d forgotten my laptop charger. The ground crew in ABQ forgot to tag the bag I had to check at the door of the plane because of small overhead bins, so there was some doubt as to where the bag might end up. An unintended seat change by the agent in the Q put me in a bulkhead seat, which is not my preferred seating arrangement. On take-off from Phoenix, my temporary crown was removed by the gum I was chewing to avoid ear stuffiness. And then things began to get better. My bag was the third on the carousel, and I was a happy camper. I remembered why I love traveling—all the experiences, the opportunities for letting go of things I can’t control, the people I meet or just enjoy observing.

Adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK) II

2011-10-26T09:53:00.000-06:00

I’ve been watching three PBS series on Netflix, hosted and produced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The first were African American Lives I and I; the third was American Lives. In the first two, the famed historian traces uses stories, photographs and documents to trace the genealogies of famous African Americans and one not famous one. The famous ones include Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, Whoopi Goldberg, Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, Maya Angelou, Chris Rock, Gates himself, and many others. Almost all African American records end in slavery, because the goal of slave owners was to abolish individual and family identity and ties to place of origin, in order to wield power. However, Gates was able to trace these people’s roots further back to the areas and/or tribes they probably came from, through DNA testing. He learned to his surprise and some discomfort that he, the head of Harvard’s African American Studies Department, has a genetic makeup that is half European, mostly Irish.

The third series looks at the genealogies and genetic backgrounds of a racial spectrum of famous Americans, among them Yo Yo Ma, Louise Erdrich, Malcolm Gladwell (who I was surprised to learn is half Jamaican), Kristi Yamaguchi, Meryl Streep, and Mike Nichols.

The stories and the process, including trips to Ireland, West Africa, and China, were utterly fascinating and have moved me to have my own DNA tested, mostly because I want to check out my suspicions that I have some Sephardic Jewish ancestors. Perhaps most interesting to me was the fact that Louise Erdrich was the only one of Gates’ thirty-four guests who refused DNA testing. She said that she had asked her extended family about it, and they had said that it was “not yours to give (the DNA contained in her spit, I guess).” For anyone who doesn’t know, Erdrich is a part Ojibway-part German novelist.

As an Adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK) who is still trying to get a grasp on my own identity, I was especially interested in what Erdrich had to say in her appealingly soft, earnest voice on the subject: “Identity is a very complicated mixture of what you grew up with and what you find out about yourself.” I grew up within four cultures: 1) Dutch-American, 2) Calvinist, 3) missionary and 4) Navajo. That represents Erdrich’s What I Grew Up With half. What I Found Out About Myself includes much far more than What I Grew Up With—elements that that cause the sum of the parts to be greater than the whole. So I’m back to the quintessential adolescent question: Who am I? At present the identity I can claim without doubt is that of an Adult Third Culture Kid (ATCK). But that lively, ever curious adolescent in me is still determined to tease it apart and come up with something more satisfying than that.

Incidentally, I do highly recommend the PBS series.

Aspiring to Ordinariness

2011-10-22T09:50:00.000-06:00

The late poet, Lucille Clifton, wrote in “The Thirty-Eighth Year”:

i had expected more than this.

i had not expected to be

an ordinary woman.

I have thought of these lines often when I’ve felt disappointed with what I have or have not accomplished thus far. I’m not so sure any more that I need be disappointed. As I pursue this journey of standing still, I believe I may be aspiring to exactly that: ordinariness, to being an ordinary woman.

In Buddhism it is called the Middle Way, and in 12-Step Programs we used to remind each other not to seek the extreme highs or even perversely delight in swinging from the heights to the depths, to indulge in the drama. Take the Middle Way. It’s not so exciting, but it has the simple power to draw you back from the brink of insanity where you’ve been living.

Moving and traveling have, in some ways, represented the seeking of highs and lows. There’s an adrenalin rush in transition—all the frenetic activity of arranging gas and lights, job, schooling for the child, and housing in the new place; finding boxes, a real challenge in the days of trash compactors, (once I moved everything in paper bags to the amusement of the friend with the pickup); making lists and more lists and still more lists; packing; saying good-byes and planning to stay in touch, knowing you now have one more set of friends in one more far-flung place on the globe; leaving the old place better than when you found it, having given to it, repaired it, cleaned it; delighting in your spatial sense when you are able to utilize every cubic inch of that van.

But last night, I began to think of standing still and becoming what I am, an ordinary woman. It started with thinking about myself as a writer of books. People say that to be a writer you must have a sizeable ego—to believe you have something worth saying and to withstand the many rejections and criticisms that will assuredly come your way. I confess to having thought of being a writer as something that sets me apart, makes me somehow special. And last night, thinking about being an ordinary woman, I thought, No. Writing is just my job, like any other job. A job I must come to every day, some days do it badly, some days do it in a way that pleases me, if no one else. I am no more or less ordinary than anyone else because of this job.

Being an ordinary woman is also to make a really good spaghetti sauce one evening; to watch the magic of a tiny seed putting forth green and help it along; to clip the toenails of an old woman who can no longer bend that far; to write a good sentence or two; to put pumpkins and gourds on my front porch; to teach a teen to read; to once in a while save a life; to make tea for my daughter; to read a good book and sometimes a trashy one; to be grateful every time I pay a bill. I’m learning to be content with being an ordinary woman.

The person who has influenced me more than any other, except perhaps my daughter, is one of the most gifted women I know. She is also humble but by no means self-deprecating. Her humility has sometimes taken away my breath with its beauty. It’s that kind of ordinary I’d like someday to be, even if only for moments at a time.

Read the entire poem, The Thirty-Eighth Year

Read an excellent 1999 interview with Lucille Clifton from Poets and Writers Magazine

Bosque Melancholy

2011-10-20T09:43:00.000-06:00

It was not long from dusk when I entered the Bosque on Tuesday. The cottonwoods were half gold, half green, and the sky’s blue was fading toward darkness. Before reaching the forest, I stopped to snap a photo of cottonwood leaves in the process of turning, and a cyclist passed me shouting, “Cheese!” and grinning back over her shoulder. A blond lab came, half wet, up out of the acequia to meet its human companions, and I asked if it had had a good swim. The dog shook itself and the humans smiled. Everyone I met had a smile or a word, as I crossed the wide irrigation channel on the wooden footbridge and set foot on the asphalt path. We all seemed to be enjoying some of these last days and hours of the transition season.

Transition, especially the autumn one where nature is returning to herself to bring quiet, rest, and fertility that will be put to use in the spring, is my favorite season. This morning I felt nostalgic and sad, and it is partly the season of leave-taking, partly all the memories of Copenhagen I’ve been reading about and of San Francisco in the seventies and eighties, which I’ve been reading about in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series.

The cottonwoods lifted their heads in splendid blended beauty—rosy gold, yellow gold, lemony gold, a green that seemed to have gone back to its springtime shade. Some are so grand they would need four people to embrace their majestic trunks, others so slim, I could have led them onto the dance floor all for myself. The salt cedar tamarisks have exchanged their dusky pink feathers for rusty orange, and the silver leaves of the Russian olives are going gray. There are some few clumps of fall wildflowers—purple asters, yellow prairie cornflowers, and the chamisas are in bloom. Scarlet Virginia creepers drape shawl-like over dark green cedars and cottonwoods. I could not hear the river, and twilight was on it’s way, so I would not go deeper into the forest then. Later. I wonder if next week the green will be mostly gone from the cottonwoods. I will find out.

I walked back up Candelaria Road toward my truck and thought of John Milton’s “Il Penseroso,” thought that I knew how he must have been feeling when he wrote:

And may at last my weary age

Find out the peacefull hermitage,

The Hairy Gown and Mossy Cell,

Where I may sit and rightly spell

Of every Star that Heav’n doth shew,

And every Herb that sips the dew;

Till old experience do attain

To somthing like Prophetic strain.

These pleasures Melancholy give,

And I with thee will choose to live.

Copenhagen VII: Bath Houses

2011-10-18T12:28:00.000-06:00

The Last Public Bath House

In the apartment on Vodroffstværgade, we took bird-baths in the kitchen sink. When that no longer sufficed, we packed clean clothes, towels, and shampoo into plastic bags, slung them on our bicycle handles, and were off to one of the city’s public bath houses. It was the same in our next apartment on Fredrik VII’s Gade. There the nearest bath establishment was one street over on Sjællandsgade. Apartments have modernized with the times, and the Sjællandsgade bath house in the Nørrebro quarter was the last city-sponsored one left; it closed in October 2010, to wide protest, although it no longer had enough visits to keep it going.

I was so afraid of being thought an ugly American that, quite apart from my determination to prove Irene’s friends wrong about my ability to learn Danish, I quizzed Irene before the first few trips to the bath house as to protocol—Are there lockers? Yes. How do I ask for soap, since we didn’t pack any? You don’t have to ask. The ladies give it to you when you pay. Is the sauna included in the shower? Yes. Everything’s included.

Most of the time, when we lived on Vodroffstværgade, we used Vesterbrosvømehallen, which had an Olympic swimming pool attached. The “ladies” were definitely ladies—blue hair under nets, starched white uniforms that could have stood with or without the ladies in them, wooden clogs. The ladies were as sharp as prison matrons, and if I hadn’t already been afraid of making some faux pas that would betray my national origin, they would have ensured my uneasiness.

I bought a punch card good for ten baths and one of the ladies handed me a yellow sponge impregnated with soap and having a scrubber as rough as the lady herself on one side. I also got a numbered key on a thick rubber band. I had memorized how to say, “Jeg har selv et håndklæde,” (I have my own towel), but of course my accent betrayed me anyway.

Christiania's Bath House

I love a dry sauna, and bone-baking represented pure luxury that well made up for having no bathing facilities at home. The Vesterbro bath house was in a modern red brick building, and the spotless shower stalls were sleekly tiled. Turkish and Pakistani women and children, wrinkled old white women wearing shower caps, and the working poor like Irene and me, came for showers, a swim and a sauna. In the showers, which were open, we saw mothers insert their toddlers into little plastic basins, listened to laughter and splashing water, and in the sauna we kibitzed. If you wanted a tub bath, you had to learn how to ask for it and pay extra. Then one of the ladies would clop into a tiny tiled room and start up a roaring hot bath for you. Twenty minutes in they shouted a warning, and you had to be toweled and clothed when 30 minutes were up.

Inside the Christiania Bath House

One of my favorite bath houses was the funky one in the Free City of Christiania, which at that time was open to anyone. As of my last visit, it remains open, but only to Christiania residents. The long, low yellow brick building, like all the other buildings in the immediate vicinity had once been part of a military installation. Christiania bath house clientele resembled old San Francisco hippies. The bath house had one large, cement-floored room with showers and a huge stainless steel vat that served as a cold plunge. Adjacent was a long, narrow sauna room that could hold about twenty people. Everything was co-ed and open to all ages. People brought in bay tree branches, dipped them in large wooden buckets, and sprayed water on the hot stones and each other to raise clouds of fragrant steam. Afterwards, weak from heat and hunger, we could stop in at Månefiskeren Café, one of Christiania’s most popular eating establishments with its sign bearing a whimsical fisherman straddling a crescent moon.

Many Copenhageners, and I as an adoptive Københavner, mourn the loss of the bygone public bath houses, a cultural institution that brought people of all ages and ethnicities out of their houses and into a social milieu unlike any other. I’m grateful it was still around when I lived there, for it let me see a piece of Danish life that, 30 years later, no longer exists except in the Free City.

Albuquerque IV: Strategy Review

2011-10-16T15:36:00.001-06:00

Whenever Irene calls and leaves a message, she begins with, “Copenhagen calling.” Last time we talked, I told her I had bought my Urban Garden, and she got quite excited. “I think you’re really settling in, now that you’ve made this decision to stay there where you are.” People who know both of us often say that they can’t imagine how we ever got together because we’re so different. “I know opposites attract,” they say, “but there must be a limit to how opposite you can be.”

Despite our differences, which are many, we do also share similarities of history, among them the tendency to roam. With five and a half years and many more countries on me, Irene put wandering behind her twenty-one years ago and settled into a Lejebo apartment beside a canal in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn quarter. I think she’s been watching and waiting ever since to see me do the same—settle down.

Yesterday, after several sessions of shoveling earth, peat, and compost into my 8 x 2 Urban Garden, I finally planted my winter seeds. It was a fine, warm day, reaching above 80º F under a brilliant blue sky. I put in the last layer of peat, added YumYum organic fertilizer and compost tea and plenty of water from my green watering can, then marked the plot into sixteen squares with white twine. I planted 4 romaine lettuces, 4 Swiss chards, 8 bok choys, 8 dino kales, 16 sweet pea bushes and 16 snap pea bushes, 48 carrots and 18 purple-top turnips, following the planting guide in Square Foot Gardening. I remember how, when I lived at Earthspirit, women’s land on New Zealand’s North Island, we harvested the chard (which they call silver beet) and lettuce leaf-by-leaf for the freshest salads ever. Now keeping everything moist enough will be the biggest task.

Planting my garden reminded me of my list of strategies for loving Albuquerque. First on the list were home and yard improvements that I had postponed pending a decision to stay here. Certainly, getting my fingers down into the home earth is pleasurably grounding. My compost bins are thriving and sweet smelling. I also built a new towel shelf in the bathroom. One of my neighbors is discarding a large number of lava rocks and bricks, and I have scored them for my nearly free high desert landscaping, so I’ll be loading and unloading those this week. Doing these tasks does make me feel that I am here to stay.

I haven’t really accomplished anything else from my list of strategies. I’ve decided to take the exploration of neighborhoods off the list, because I already know well the Albuquerque neighborhoods I love. It is my own neighborhood I need to engage with. I’m working on it. I’m committing to a walk in the Bosque this week. The Bosque is the cottonwood forest that grows along the Rio Grande. This is my favorite time of year to visit there, as the giant trees lift their golden crowns up against the intensely blue sky. Yellow-gold is my favorite color and crisp air my favorite temperature. Despite the fact that I haven’t tried many of my strategies, I am feeling a calm and peacefulness about being here, settling into the rightness of it.

Third Culture Kids I: What Is a TCK?

2011-10-14T13:07:00.000-06:00

In 1957, the year that I was first sent to mission boarding school at age eight, the late sociologist, Ruth Useem, coined a name for children who are raised for a significant amount of time during their developmental years in culture(s) other than their parents’ culture. She called us Third Culture Kids (TCKs). Since 1957, this population has been researched considerably, and the concept has been refined and recognized to embody many and varied complexities.

David Pollock, coauthor of Third Culture Kids: Growing up Among Worlds, has written an amplified definition of a TCK:

... a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture. The TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.

The last clause, “the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background”, is what delineates Third Culture, since culture by definition references a group of people who share common experiences, rituals, and ways of being in the world. TCKs may be children of military parents, corporate business people, missionaries, foreign service officers, technical aid workers, educators, media representatives, and more. In addition, I would say that Native American children who were raised for much of each year away from their home cultures in boarding schools, might consider themselves TCKs. I have many adult Navajo friends who still grapple, as I do, though from a different vantage point, with where they belong.

Growing up in Navajo Country was an incredibly rich experience, giving me a whole different way of looking at the world and a different way of being in the world than I might otherwise have had. I’m constantly grateful for the life I was given. And, if Erik Erikson was right, when he posited that establishing identity is the developmental task of the teen years, I’m way behind the curve on that one. I’ve come to accept that I may never exactly know who I am, except possibly in relationship to other TCKs. One characteristic of Adult TCKs (ATCKs) is that we often exhibit a delayed adolescence.

Monday, October 10, represented the official celebration of Columbus Day in the US. The day brings some of my confusion as a TCK into sharp relief. I fully support the idea that Columbus Day be abolished and exchanged for First Nations Day. In many ways I wish my ancestors had never boarded those ships that brought them from Holland to America, and I’ve tried to return, as I wrote earlier. I worked for many years in Navajo Bilingual Bicultural Education, in part to turn back the tide of destruction that my parents and other missionaries participated in. At the same time, I long to return to live in the place that feels like home but where I don’t belong—Teec Nos Pos. I feel that I understand the anger my Navajo friends express about the genocide, literal and cultural, that they’ve experienced. I also feel intensely, especially when I’m with my Navajo friends, my relatedness to the group that perpetrated the genocide. It’s not a comfortable place to be, and I can’t do away with it. Like so many of the social dilemmas of our time, I want to be part of the healing, given that this is where we all are now and given that healing is assuredly needed. I want to focus on our shared humanity without negating the fact that damage has been done and that reconciliation is needed. I puzzle often and deeply over what sort of role I might play.

Apropos a year of standing still, another characteristic of ATCKs is restlessness. Hmmm. I wonder if 64 moves by age 57 could be an example. Of course, especially based on reader comments, I know that wanderlust can have many other causes. I think being a Third Culture Kid may be the cause of mine.

Are you afflicted (or blessed) with wanderlust? What do you think caused it, if anything? Are you a TCK or an ATCK? What’s your experience of that? Below is the official TCK website:

http://www.tckworld.com

Teec Nos Pos I: Where Is Home?

2011-10-11T10:35:00.000-06:00

A young immigrant spoke movingly on Youth Radio awhile back about the home she’d left in Mexico and her new one in Seattle. After a recent visit to her old country, seeing the changes that had taken place over the years, she ended by saying something like, “I know now that neither of those places is home. Home is a memory.”

On Facebook, I list my hometown as Teec Nos Pos, because that is the place that feels most like home to me. Yet, when I visit there, 54 years after living there, I clearly no longer belong there. Sometimes I have to look at old photos to reassure myself that I really did live there once.

Yes, I lived there. Once.

The place I think of as home really is a memory that lies 30 miles west of the town of Shiprock, New Mexico, 8 miles from where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. And in my memory the place can only be reached by the slow traversal over dirt road punctuated by river rocks the size of cantaloupes. The road winds among mesas, over arroyos and streambeds, away from that great volcanic plug for which the town of Shiprock is named and down into a small box valley.

At one end of the valley lies the blue-black hump of the Carrizo Mountains. The valley’s south wall is a long ridge of golden sandstone atop earth that is striped gray, melon-pink, verdigris and mauve. At the spot nearest to where we lived, the ridge rises into a great mound topped by the monolithic stone guardians of the valley. The mound is known as the Three Monkeys, and indeed, the foremost block looks like a giant ape upon a throne. Below the ridge is an arroyo whose bottom is clean, cream-colored sand. Huge cottonwoods grow in the bed, some of them almost parallel to the ground so they can be straddled and ridden like sturdy horses. Willow switches grow there, too, and in winter the cold turns them brittle maroon. The north wall of the valley is really one slope of a broad plateau that extends farther than my young years knew. The slope was covered in piñon and juniper, salt weed and rabbit brush, and one small oak tree that then seemed very large. To me that wall was a hill, and from the top of that hill on summer nights my lullabies rose—summer ceremonies with measured drumbeats and ululating chants I heard as I drifted off and whenever I woke during the night.

Teec Nos Pos, is the place I think of as the heart of Navajo Country. It is the place where I have perhaps left the largest chunk of my own heart. The Navajos named the valley T’iis Názbas, which has been variously translated “Cottonwood Growing in a Circle”, “Trees in a Circle”, and “Cottonwood Circle”. I like “A Circle of Trees” myself. When I was a child no one could tell me why it had this circular tree name—whether because of a gnarled old cottonwood or something like a fairy ring of cottonwoods. White people spelled it the way it appears on maps today—Teec Nos Pos.

Today I can visit Teec Nos Pos, just like anyone else. People who live there, other than the ones I know, who are very few today, will not recognize me as someone who once woke up and went to sleep there day in and day out. I am simply a visitor. That fact serves to remind me that, as a white woman, I am a visitor wherever I am in this country. In a sense, I am now a trapped visitor, because I cannot return to that Unforeseen Homeland. I have tried. I have written to the government of the Netherlands to see if my Dutch ancestry would allow me to return. Perhaps I could try making of it a political issue. I have also tried to immigrate to Denmark, and once upon a time I tried in New Zealand, but I felt uncomfortable about that attempt because there, too, I would have been a visitor in Maori Country.

Teec Nos Pos, is definitely only home in my memory. The adobe house we lived in, the tiny white clapboard chapel where my father preached and held prayer meetings, the stone and pine Bureau of Indian Affairs school I attended, the old trading post where we bought nickel candy bars, the abandoned CCC barracks where we kept chickens—all are gone. These many vanished buildings symbolize the fact that I no longer belong here, perhaps never really did. They are also symbolic of what is perhaps the overarching dilemma of the Third Culture Kid (TCK). More to come about that in another episode.

Have you left your heart or a piece of it somewhere, and it is now clear that you are only to be a visitor there? How did you experience that?

I love getting your comments. If you are an e-mail subscriber and try to comment by replying to the e-mail version, your comment ends up in an ethereal pit. If you click on the link that is the title of the post, it will take you to the blog (where you can see photos, too), and you can actually leave a comment. I will relish each one!

Making Home

2011-10-09T13:21:00.000-06:00

Pretty much, I write every day, but sometimes I feel the need for a complete break from being a scrivener. Occasionally, I think I need a break, then writing turns compelling, and the break is over. My writing day nearly always starts with 3 pages of journaling. On Friday, I had already journaled when I decided to take respite.

As I made a list of things I would do instead of pounding the keys, I saw that it was going to be a clean-up sort of day: moving the bags of compost and garden soil out of the truck and into the back yard; taking glass and cardboard recycling to the recycle dumpsters; adding to and tending the compost; emptying indoor trash; taking the things I’d meant for a yard sale to Goodwill, thus creating space in my office. I also went to the library, where I was delighted to a see a display of books celebrating GLBT month and appropriated a couple of them (temporarily, of course). I also picked up the books I had on hold, Converso, a novel about a crypto-Jewish family in New Mexico, and Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Your Own.

Yellow Block House Window

As I worked my way through my list, I thought, There’s nothing like household chores to make me feel really grounded in this place, at-home. I remembered an insight I had when Irene and I camped on the beach outside Rethymnon on Crete in 1983. We’d unrolled our sleeping bags onto a plastic ground cover on the sand and folded up our Helly Hansen rain ponchos and laid them the foot ends. No tent for us; we would use our ponchos as covers from dew or rain. I scoured our corner of the beach for large stones, placing them around the campsite as sort-of walls. Outside the walls, we chained our touring bikes to a gnarled tree, which became the garage. I distributed our panniers strategically for easy removal of items we might need and covered them with more plastic, weighted by smaller stones. I unfolded our 2-gallon water container and strolled to the nearby hotel where Irene and I’d sat on the veranda to share a bottle of golden Retsina earlier. The hoteliers were thus happy to have me fill our jug. I found a leafy branch for sweeping our front porch. Irene had leaned up a against a small boulder, perfectly content to let me putter, and I didn’t particularly want any help from her. The awareness dawned that one way I’ve thrived through so many moves is that wherever I’ve landed, I’ve quickly created home.

I’ve never lived any place where I didn’t come to love my living space. I might not care for the neighborhood or the city, but inside my walls, real or imaginary, I feel contentment and pleasure in the home I have made. There were: the apartment on Shattuck between McKinney’s Fishpan and Flint’s Barbeque, dead-center on the roach highway and furnished with things we could transport from the Ashby Flea Market on Cheyenne’s stroller; the servants quarters upstairs from a carriage house in downtown Albuquerque with it’s yard-long clawfoot tub under slanted eaves; la casita, the little trailer with its stucco add-on, nestled at the foot of the Nacimiento Range; the first home I owned in Albuquerque’s North Valley, with its circular window, circular fireplace, conversation pit, and polished cedar wet bar; my current yellow block rectangle. All of these became home as I “embodied” them, a term I’ve lovingly borrowed from my friend Briana, who, with her man Peter, is most talented at embodying a space.

Painting by Danish friend Tina Kragh Rusfort

A synonym for embody is incarnate, to give flesh to something. I think also it must be to breathe spirit into it by opening it to others and sometimes closing it off for solitude; to place into it those things that give one sensual pleasure, the paintings and rugs and comforter covers and hand-woven baskets and furniture made of wood; to cook nourishing food and eat it both alone and with others on plates of pleasing colors; to sleep and dream; to listen to music and dance and make yoga and meditate; to look out at the gold and crimson leaves; to hear rain on the new roof and be warm and dry inside. All these things embody a home, and one day, living there, I realize, I love this place, even this one that seemed at first unlovable.

Cheyenne's Wall

Albuquerque After Rain

2011-10-05T11:21:00.001-06:00

When it first comes here, to the high desert, even before the first drops fall, the air is filled with the intense scent of long-dry earth being washed clean once more. Then the sage and rabbit brush and even the cottonwoods enfold us in their half-sweet pungency.

Afterwards, rain pours out of rooftop canales, slapping cement below. Brown water rushes madly, swirls, eddies its way to the curbside drains and downward to the Rio Grande, once grand but here and now a tame and shallow bath. The street I walk along is quiet, except for splashing cars a block away.

Birds rejoice after storm-imposed silence. The veil of dust is gone from the trees, so each single leaf is visible to the naked eye and shining now in the cleansed light. Sometimes Albuquerque looks to me as though it has neon signs for trees, but rain reminds me to really look, and I see a Ponderosa pine, six stories tall, sycamores with their funny balls looking like prickly beige Christmas decorations waiting for color, cedars and Russian olives with their narrow silver-gray leaves. The rain has helped the rabbit brush put forth its yellow blooms. The Sandia Mountains, top-lit, show off a carpet of rusty scrub oak, and lower down the deep green conifers contrast with granite that looks white this evening instead of its usual bluish-beige.

Folks from across the US and around the world know of Santa Fe and sometimes Taos, and those are the charming places where human constructions match their natural surrounds, the places people want to visit. Albuquerque, the ungainly stepsister, is just a transit hall, a truck stop on the way. But I say Santa Fe has its pretensions, and I do not really care so much for it, despite the esthetic of earthy adobes nestled among the piñon and juniper. There is something genuine, if also tawdry about Albuquerque, the place where I live, and after rain, it’s not so bad at all. Neil Young, in his song “Albuquerque”, found this place a refuge from the expectations of more glamorous places. Just maybe, I’m finding it to be that, too.

Listen to Neil Young's "Albuquerque"

Language School

2011-10-03T11:45:00.005-06:00

Irene knew I wanted to learn Danish. She and several other Danes discouraged it. They said, “Why do you want to learn Danish? Only 5 million people in the whole world speak it, so it’s not a useful language. And everyone here between 6 and 60 speaks English. You don’t need it to get along here.” Despite her less than encouraging words, as a good guide, and supportive friend, Irene took me to the offices of Studieskolen and helped me sign up for a Danish language class during my first week in Copenhagen.

The man who registered me couldn’t resist getting in a little language lesson right then and there. He picked one of the more abstruse points of the language to acquaint me with, or more likely, to show me what an impossible task lay ahead—the ins and outs of Danish articles. “You will find,” he said, “that when an article is used before a noun, it is indefinite. When it is attached to the end of the noun, it is definite.” He gave the example of en have, meaning ‘a garden,’ and haven, meaning ‘the garden.’ Then he chortled and said, “We also have two different articles, en and et. Haven, as I already told you, means ‘the garden’. On the other hand, havet means ‘the sea.’ You’ll never get that unless you memorize every noun. It makes no sense. There’s no way of telling which is which.” Clearly, he found his language’s hopelessness for foreigners quite funny.

My classroom was in the central part of Copenhagen on Nørregade, right next to Sømods candy factory. Down in the street, as I parked Dyveke, I enjoyed a good, syrupy smell. I had my first alphabet pronunciation lesson when I used the German pronunciation of where I came from—Ooh Ess Ah. Nej. No. Ooh Ess Ay. Every morning from eight to twelve, I passed the tantalizing Sømods and climbed three flights up to a room with a long table to produce canned responses to canned questions.

After three weeks, I decided I’d had enough. “I’m living here. I’m going to learn Danish on the streets,” I told folks. Irene’s Redstocking Feminist friends, Mette and Ingegerd, were scornful. They’d scorned my desire to learn Danish in the first place, and now they said, “Well, if you quit school, you’ll never learn it,” and they were quite self-satisfied in their pronouncement. Contrary to their intentions, that motivated me more than any encouragement might have.

I turned everyone into my teacher. When I went to the greengrocer to buy an eggplant, I asked, “Er det et aubergine eller en aubergine?” Is it et eggplant or en eggplant, I bravely attempted to what the Studieskolen registrar had told me I would never comprehend. Whenever I went to purchase something new, from day one, I insisted on using whatever Danish I possessed. Before I left the apartment, I quizzed Irene on phrases and words I would need. Pedaling away on Dyveke, I practiced until I reached my destination, then stumbled out with it, listening carefully to get the bare gist of the reply.

Danes say of themselves that they speak Danish as if their mouths are full of potatoes. Certainly, very few words are pronounced the way they appear in print. For example, meget, meaning ‘much,’ is pronounced something like ‘mahl,” light on the ‘l’. In Copenhagen, that is. In Odense, from whence Hans Christian Andersen hailed, it’s pronounced something like ‘might.” Irene’s friends, Ingegerd and Jenny, and her sister Ulla, became my best teachers because they could translate the mashed potatoes into rigsdansk or the Queen’s Danish, helping me understand what the word really was and get down with Danish grammar.

Irene would seldom speak Danish at home, unless I directly asked her for help. Two good things came of this. There was one place where I could relax from language learning, so I could still love the process. Second, research indicates that important learning takes place during down time, when one is not actively pursuing what is being learned. I realized that it wasn’t that Irene didn’t want me to learn, but speaking someone’s second language with them when it’s your first language, especially when they’re learning, can be exhausting. We both needed that relaxed time at home. Today, we code switch back and forth between English and Danish whenever we’re together.

Several earlier experiences helped me learn Danish. College German assisted with vocabulary and word order. I had studied Old English in college, too, and we all know about those Vikings wreaking havoc in England in the early days, so there was a good deal of overlap there. My study of linguistics didn’t hurt, either. Somewhat to my surprise, even my extensive knowledge of the King James Bible contributed. For example, in that text, God bade people to behave in certain ways. In Danish one would bede for the butter to be passed. To develop literacy, I read gossip magazines about the royals and children’s books, my first being Astrid Lindgren’s Mio Min Mio, (Mio My Mio).

And so it happened that a year later I went to a dinner party at Jenny’s house. It was a birthday dinner for her son Jan who would become the father of my daughter, Cheyenne Jansdatter (can you figure out the origin of her surname?). We sat there enjoying frikadeller, Danish meatballs, and I as I filled myself with Jenny’s unparalleled cooking, I realized I understood virtually everything that was being said. Danish streets and homes had become my language school and thenceforth ruined me for any formal language learning.

What experiences have you had with learning a second (or more) language? Or not learning one?

I would love to get your comments. One reader had difficulty figuring out how to leave one, so if you're having that kind of trouble, here's what you do: Beneath each post there is a link entitled "0 Comments" or "4 Comments," whatever the case may be. Click on that, and a box will appear for you to leave a comment.

A New Page: Poetry Page

2011-10-02T14:27:00.000-06:00

I'm inaugurating a new page on this blog--Poetry Page. The first poet to be published there is Tani Arness, whose poetry reading I wrote about in the post entitled "100,000 Poets for Change" on 9/25/11. Her two poems are " Not a Political Poem" and "Make a Wish". It was Tani's poetry that first inspired this page. Please click on "Poetry Page" on the right side of this page to check out her poems.

Denmark: Land of Bicycles

2011-10-01T12:12:00.001-06:00

Before ever I lived in Denmark, I saw a movie about the WWII Danish Resistance Movement. The only scene I remember, and will never forget (dementia excepted) is one where a huge flock of bicyclists, upon signal, abruptly turned 180º, confounding the German soldiers who were up to no good. As I inserted myself into Danish life, I knew how accurate a portrayal that was. Babies ride on bicycle seats in front of or behind their parents as soon as they can sit up, often a baby and a toddler both on one bike. Three-year-olds begin riding tiny bicycles while their parents hold on to a handle from their own bicycles. Parents use a broomstick inserted upright behind the seat to guide children who’ve almost achieved riding independence. Bicycles are used to transport furniture, food, and featherbeds. Chimney sweeps and other tradespeople have large frames welded to the fronts of their black bicycles. When I lived in Copenhagen, Prime Minister Anker Jørgensen rode his bicycle to Folketinget (parliament) every day.

It’s no surprise, then, that Irene introduced me on my first day in Copenhagen to the bicycle she had obtained for me. I think that Irene’s years of traveling had much to do with her intuitive sense of how to guide me through the important facets of Danish life, and it was her great generosity prompted her to put into action what she intuited. I could never have asked for a better guide.

My bicycle had once belonged to Irene, passed on to her sister Ulla, and was then reclaimed for me. Its paint was chipped red-orange, and when we took a bicycle repair class together, the instructor informed us that it was probably of 1940s vintage, definitely a collectible. The style is still in use today and is known as a bedstemorcycle (grandmother bicycle). A bedstemorcycle is the most comfortable bike you could ever hope for, because you ride completely upright and relaxed. My bike got her personal name after I started housecleaning. One of my first clients was Dyveke Reumert, the feisty daughter of the famous (in Denmark, at least) actor Poul Reumert. In her seventies, Dyveke lost no time telling me her pedigree. I named the bicycle after her.

I was a bit timid on the bicycle at first. After all, I had learned to ride the bike I shared with my brother Rick, the one we called Amigo, the Golden Palomino (even though it was red and black), on the dirt road in the valley that was Teec Nos Pos, at the heart of Navajo Country. So riding in a world-class metropolis was a little daunting at first. However, Copenhagen is arranged for bicyclists, with raised paths separate from automobile and pedestrian traffic. Many intersections even have miniature traffic lights just for the bicycle paths. People learning to drive cars must learn a plethora of rules covering their interactions with cyclists. And, as Danes are fond of saying, “Denmark is made for bicycles—flat as a pancake.”

It was Denmark’s flatness that made me think in the beginning that I could never feel passionate about this little green land. No mountains, no wild spaces. But I did slowly, inexorably fall in love with it, and now I suffer the fate of people who know two home countries—always having one foot in each and always longing for the one where I am not.

We did not only ride our bikes in Copenhagen. We took them on the train to Skagen, the town at the very tip of Jylland (Jutland) where the East Sea and North Sea meet in what looks like a fauxhawk on the water. There we rode among dunes with sparse sea grass and ochre-colored cottages. We took them on a plane to Crete where we cycled up and down mountainsides. There I learned that a map showing three mountains in the center of an island does not reflect the fact that the whole island is made up of mountains. We rode bikes through the forests of North Sjælland (Zealand) up to Helsingør (Elsinore) to see Hamlet’s Castle, Kronborg. And I rode mine most days up and down Gammel Kongevej to my housecleaning jobs. There I learned I could ride through rain, snow, sleet or wind, just like everyone else.

Do you have a bicycle story to share? When and where did you learn to ride? What’s the best or worst trip you ever took by bike? Or a story about visiting Denmark?

Intentional Loving

2011-09-29T09:28:00.001-06:00

Once upon a time in Sholem Asch’s world lived Golda and Tevye, who grew to love each other. That they had grown into love was more by default than by intention. Much of the process involved giving to one another. Golda sings about how she bore and cared for Tevye’s children, mended his socks and cooked for him. She supplies these facts as evidence of her love, as in, “Why are you even asking?”

In my experience it can be the giving, maybe even always is the giving, that nurtures the growth of love. There have been times in my travels when I found myself in close contact with people who were hard for me to like or love. I had a roommate when I lived in one the many dwellings I inhabited in Berkeley, whom I found irritating and sometimes obnoxious, pretty much daily. I decided to make a gift for her. I asked for one of her shirts, and I began to embroider onto it things she loved and things I loved, until a strip across the front told a multi-colored story of a journey. I called the story “Woyaya” after the song written by Sol Amarfio of the Afro-Caribbean band Osibisa and popularized by Art Garfunkel. I pinned the lyrics to the shirt:

We are going

Heaven knows where we are going

We’ll know we’re there

We will get there

Heaven knows how we will get there

We know we will

It will be hard we know

And the road will be muddy and rough

But we’ll get there

Heaven knows how we will get there

We know we will...

Embroidering such a personal tale (and it has not escaped my notice that it was about a journey) on that shirt changed my relationship with my roommate. Miraculously the things she did failed to irritate me. I started to enjoy her and her foibles. I even found her delightful and charming some of the time. I hadn’t set out to change my perceptions or feelings, nor did I focus on that while I stitched away. I did think about her, and I cared about her through thinking about what might please her. However, I think it was simply the act of giving that changed me. Perhaps it was important that the gift took time and energy from me, that it wasn’t just something I picked up in a shop. I’m pretty sure my roommate didn’t change much, if at all. She didn’t need to; I did.

Recalling that experience made me think that one way I could change my relationship with Albuquerque would be to give something to my city. More than any of the other strategies for embarking upon intentional loving, this one excites me. It opens up possibilities. Will I give some kind of service? While walking my neighborhood this morning, I thought I could carry around a trash bag every day, adopt the streets I walk and do some cleanup. Or, I’ve had an urge to write poetry lately. I could write poems to, for, and about my town. I could embroider a shirt for Albuquerque. Stranger things have been done. I love just thinking about what I may be able to give this town with the funny name.

Do you have or have you had a difficult relationship with a person, animal, or place? Have you had an experience that you can share about how you transformed it, or how it was transformed for you? Please do consider sharing. I love to get comments.

P.S. Don’t assume, if I make a gift for you that it’s because I don’t like or love you!

Listen to Art Garfunkel's version of Woyaya

First Copenhagen Morning

2011-09-27T09:28:00.000-06:00

The apartment Irene took me to belonged to her younger brother, who had decided to live with his girlfriend, so it was being loaned to us indefinitely. We entered a five-story building whose bricks had once been yellow but were now soot-stained, so only a few light patches showed through. Our address was Vodroffstværegade 15, 3 tv, 1909 København F, Danmark. That address was perhaps the first noticeable difference between this European country and the US, and I would be trolling for differences from then on. The first difference, aside from the additions to my alphabet, was that the house number came after the street name. The numeral three indicated our floor, which was actually four stories up from the street, since what Americans would number the first floor, is called Stue floor, and first floor is what we would call second. The letters “tv” stand for til venstre, which means “to the left.” An apartment floor can have three apartments—“to the left”, “to the right”, and “in the middle”. 1909 was akin to the US zip code, København the Danish spelling of the city and meaning “Market Harbor”, F indicating Fredriksberg, our quarter of the city, and Danmark being the Danish spelling of the country. I’ve always found it amusing how every language seems to find it necessary to make up their own spellings and pronunciations of other lands, languages and places.

The most noticeable difference inside the apartment was that the bathroom was literally a tiny closet, large enough only for a toilet and one’s knees to extend out toward the wall in front of her. To wash your hands, you needed to travel back down the hall to the kitchen sink. And the kitchen sink was used for tooth brushing, washing up the body, washing up the dishes, and preparing food.

The fact that there was no real bathroom was an indication of the age of the apartment building and the fact that it stood on the working class edge of the upper class quarter of Fredriksberg. Another block or two, and our address would have been København V for the working class neighborhood of Vesterbro. I would discover that not having a full bathroom meant that I would have the great pleasure of discovering the still-alive institution of the city bath houses. More about that later.

I appreciated other differences—the furniture and light fixtures that were uniquely Scandinavian—integrally blending functionality with esthetic. Light fixtures—for example, the kitchen light above the clean-lined, bright red table, with extendable leaves—was a simple, flatish, green glass cone, suspended from the ceiling by a thick, smooth white electric cord. The function was there for all to see; yet it was also esthetically pleasing.

I turned thirty-four on my first morning in Copenhagen. I woke very early because of jet lag. It was late May, and already the long Scandinavian daylight had begun. Irene must have given me a set of keys the day before, because I let myself out of the apartment and began to walk around the neighborhood. Bright, warm sunlight filtered down in patches onto the narrow streets lined by densely placed row apartments. I was the only human being out on that Sunday morning. As best I could, I read street signs, took in the unfamiliar lines and shapes of apartments and courtyards. We were close to a main artery, Gammel Kongevej (Old Kings Way), and I tried to figure out from notices and wares in the windows what sorts of shops were near us.

It must have been around 6 in the morning because soon I began to hear church bells tolling from all over the city, like an antiphonal choir. Not many people attend services in the many cathedral-sized churches, but the bells continue to call the faithful few to worship.

Back in the apartment, I began my Danish lessons, asking how to pronounce Gammel Kongevej and what it meant. We had coffee the thermocan, an ever-present commodity. With it we ate dark, full-grain pumpernickel bread spread with butter and topped by fragrant slabs of white Danbo cheese decorated with cloverleaf-shaped slices of sweet red pepper.

100,000 Poets for Change

2011-09-25T10:31:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was International 100,000 Poets for Change Day. More poets than that held readings for change around the globe. I made it part of my commitment to participate in the place where I live by attending what was variously billed as a Poets’ Picnic and an Arts and Music Fest. To get there, I had to drive seven miles outside the Albuquerque city limits to the village of Tijeras in Tijeras Canyon.

In Spanish, Tijeras means scissors, and there are two canyons that come together here like the blades of a pair of scissors. The canyon walls are dark brown granite, densely covered in piñon and ponderosa. The canyon floor is filled with cottonwoods, just beginning to turn to gold. The village was preceded by the Tijeras Indian Pueblo, now in ruins, and became a Hispanic village in the 19^th century. Today, it is also home to many artists and writers.

The poets’ venue was a magical grove of mixed trees in the yard of Just Imagine Gallery and Coffee House. The perimeter held booths where local artisans displayed jewelry, glass hangings, paper wares, books and t-shirts. In the center was a performance space for poetry readings and live music.

I especially went to hear my friend, Tani Arness, read. Her first poem, whose title I may get a little wrong, as I am not an auditory learner, was “I Am Not a Political Poet.” It was a richly paradoxical paean to the politics of life with a commitment in the end to the stance of loving. Tani and I share a background of growing up in Protestant Fundamentalism and recovery from that. The poem that touched me most deeply was one about the stark incongruities of that life and the dashed hopes of a twelve-year-old girl. I laughed and sighed as she spoke for herself, for me, and so many like us. I’ve heard Tani read before, and this time I came away knowing, more than ever, what an extraordinary poet she is.

Afterwards, I asked if taking myself out into my community helped me embed more deeply here. I think it’s too soon to tell, but I know I need to keep doing this—going places, being with people here instead of there.

The Unforeseen Homeland

2011-09-23T08:18:00.000-06:00

It was as if I was already in flight. My friend Briana had driven her old white Volvo, nearly gray, up into the Berkeley Hills to take me and my Army surplus duffel to the little Oakland Airport. It seemed the car had taken wings as we careened toward the shimmering San Francisco Bay. There was a little party to see me off—besides Briana there were Rudi and Susan and their twins whose birth I’d attended four years earlier.

The flight to Amsterdam was a charter, cheap tickets gotten through the student travel agency at UC Berkeley. The flight attendants were Dutch, and they said everything over the loudspeaker in Dutch and in English. I reveled in sounds of the tongue my parents and others in my Dutch-American, immigrant community spoke. I looked at Dutch magazines and used my college German and what I knew of the language itself to decipher words and phrases.

When the plane touched down in Amsterdam, I burst into completely unexpected tears. It wasn’t as if I were returning to a land I’d left under duress. But growing up, we always heard that we were Dutch, not Dutch American. And I thought of myself, even though I only knew a smattering of Dutch words (my parents had used Dutch as their secret language) as Dutch. My feelings of belonging were affirmed in the arrival hall of Schiphol Airport. There was a large sign announcing Rode Kruis, meaning Red Cross. At the time my surname was Kruis, and there stood my name—in print in big, bold, red letters. Oh yes, I had surely come home.

I didn’t feel so much that way sitting on the shuttle bus that took me from the airport to the center of Amsterdam where I would catch the train to Copenhagen. At every breath I choked on the smoke from cigarettes, even though I was a smoker at the time. So this is Europe, I thought.

I wandered around a square in the center of Amsterdam, looking up at buildings, discerning the difference between this place and the US. I sat on the edge of an enormous fountain and a dark young man, probably from a Middle Eastern country, offered me a hash cigarette, not at all what my immigrant grandmother would have expected from this holiest of lands her family had reluctantly left because they were down to eating tulip bulbs to escape starvation. In extreme naiveté I shared the cigarette, and now I imagine the things that could have happened to me, trusting as I was.

I boarded the train for Copenhagen in the evening. As it sidled through the suburbs, my eyes inhaled the sights, and I began to draw conclusions about the unforeseen homeland. What I remember now is row after row of blond brick houses with red tile roofs and white lace curtains at every window. They still have lace curtains, I thought. This is Holland, the land I come from.

In the Hamburg rail yard there was much backing, shifting, bumping and clanging, and with some trepidation I found a conductor to ask if I should be getting off here and changing trains, but the answer was no. After all the back-and-forth, we groaned into the Hamburg Central Station, and a single passenger entered my compartment. A short, balding man, probably a little further into his thirties than I was, he was a sports journalist from Yugoslavia. He was on his way to Copenhagen to cover a soccer match. We ascertained all this in German because he spoke no English, and I definitely did not and do not speak Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian or whatever Slavic languages he might have spoken. We managed to carry on a conversation for the next six hours in the language that would completely elude me, as it slid out of that place in the brain labeled Foreign Language, to be replaced by the Danish I was learning.

We pulled into Copenhagen’s Hovedbanegård, a fantastical enclosed space of curved iron beams and skylights that sifted soft gray morning light over heavy locomotives and teeming humanity. I stepped down, sailor-like with my olive-green duffel over my shoulder, seeking the only face I knew in all of Denmark. There she was, standing by a little white kiosk that sold last-minute snacks and drinks to embarking passengers. A short woman with broad cheek bones spread with freckles, gray-green Asian-shaped eyes, and tufts of hennaed hair poking out from under a little round straw hat with a roll brim. Years later our daughter would refer to her as her elf mother.