A Eulogy, A Celebration

Today I received in the mail my late husband's letters and scientific treatises on ethno-botany and the shamanic implications of the plants' hallucinations, by a professor he had grown up with and wrote to.My late husband was a genius.He was also schizophrenic.He was quiet about it. He had no social skills even before the schizophrenia exhibited itself.But he was fascinating to listen to.It came upon him as a late teen and it frightened him. He knew so much and shared what he knew and amazed people.Then people came to notice something was wrong. Finally his father. His father was not a sensitive man, or a kind man, but he was also a scientist.
When my not-yet-husband graduated high school and went out on his own, he actually was able to get a job at the post office,which was a very good thing, because when the illness became full blown, his income put him at a high rank on the SSI,or disability, list for a big check each month. Even then, I read in these letters, there was often not enough $ for food the whole month and he ate at church dinners for the homeless. I have been reading a time capsule:it is so painful.The photograph at the top of the entry is one I have treasured:I have just given birth to our son.My husband's face was so full of love and awe. I treasure the photo, wanted to share it, because so many people have misconceptions about schizophrenia and think that the ill person is always "out of it". My husband was often very clear and brilliant.When word salad popped out of his mouth, it made us giggle.It also frightened him. I did what I could to assure him. It frightened me as well, but not as much as the violence.

I spent all that rainy day in bed with these letters, essays, listening to the storm, listening to the ghostly sobs of a boy who very few people understood. I was reading a foreign language. I had a dictionary of madness compiled by myself through time, but it was incomplete, the grammar only went so far and emotional dangling participles often confused a concept. My poor boy couldn't even speak sometimes and it frightened him into deeper terror and a broken spirit for a time.

In reading these letters, essays, I piled on more woolen clothes, I shivered with compassion and fierceness: why didn't they notice sooner. Why'd they expect thank you notes every time his family sent him $100, a $20 bill. Madness does not understand thank you notes. Madness writes operas of gratitude, but it is rare they get through the mouth to the givers' ear. Schizophrenics don't have stamps very often. The govt. doesn't send money enough to pay the rent. When I had to leave with the baby, (listen, I had no choice.)he had to eat at the local catholic church which served meals Monday through Saturday. What do the mad do on Sunday? He moved into town after burning his/our cabin down around himself, scarring himself terribly. That what they do. They are not good cooks I think. He was in the burn unit for months.

Madness is rude, violent, it cries in yr arms when you are soo tired from going out in the forest to collect firewood, cleaning out the wood stove, hauling water to the garden...madness doesn't know any better. He didn't know he should be doing it instead of me; he was lost in a barrage of shouting, whispering voices of command. I tried to let that not make a difference.But I was young. In reading these papers I felt so bad for all the places I failed. I'm sorry I can't hold him now, right now, and tell him, I discovered the alchemical process by which to"kiss and make it better". But I haven't discovered it yet. I've only grown old enough to discover compassion and patience.

I've read Lisie's Story by Stephen King. I know the violence first hand of madness. But I had to leave. He would steal my clothes, my shoes, every time he caught me trying.

At first there were nights I found myself suddenly awake in my own studio flat 150 miles away in Berkeley again, (where we'd met years before when i was still a teen), just out of dream-time, a baby in arms, or strapped across my chest or along side my shoulders, my side of ribs, barefoot, wearing a holey T shirt, nothing below, just young downy legs splattered with tattoos and mud, a cold butt because it's the beginning of February, but there's no moon and therefore no shadows..I am walking, walking, down a dirt road with crooked fences on each side and that startling bird sound that mimics a wild cat...I am getting away, away, as far as I can, I am fast-walking. I am crying. I am missing him already. I am crazed in my own way, but not enough to stay.This child is the sanity which allows me to disappear.

I raised two sons to who I also had to say, I don't know how to make it better, but let's cuddle and when they were older and told me they were too big to cuddle, I'd say, " let's make cookies, let's go out in the valley and I'll let you drive that long stretch where no cars come"..anything to make them feel better, as if I were making up for the inability to cure mental illness, give my oldest boy, the genius son, back his genius father. I am hoping that's what happens when I give him these papers after I've copied them for the professor: I hope he hears the Good Father who always stopped before the violence came out to the baby. Except once. And that once is why I had to leave. You don't shake babies, even if they are crying for hours.It's a dangerous practice to push that little brain pan around inside that still soft cranium. I guess what his own violent and cruel father taught him was that violence works as a fear tactic on women and babies: they were for taking out yr own frustration out on. What he didn't know was I grew up on that. I knew all about that first hand from one parent and her husband. I am no stranger to violence. I tried to teach my sons that violence is no answer, and they being sane, know this is true. My sons are beautiful, intelligent, gentle and fierce in their own sane ways. There is so much to be grateful for, as I grieve the loss of one less genius in a world full of idiots, angry monsters with guns and wars to fight. He played dulcimer when it got too hard to hear me over the head-voices. My late husband knew in his heart that violence was wrong, but the voices in his head were louder than the beating of his own heart.Those voices took over like robotic monsters inside his skull so he couldn't hear his heart sing.He longed to hear the Gloria of his own heart, his paen to God and the Universe inside each tiny wild flower, fingers splashing across dulcimer strings singing latin botanica as if poetry. I wished I wasn't the only one who could hear the joy as he played and grinned at me over the instrument. I wished the whole world could hear the beauty of his heart and head, all healthy and happy, a married man, a father, a learned scholar, living in a shiny clean cabin where the only shadows were made by candles as the evening deepened into night.
Good night John, sweet dreams and G-d Bless.

The Rapture of Creativity

The Rapture of Creativity ***     May 20, 2010

The show at the Willits Art Center is comprised of three artists, two Painters and something I am not sure of, that looks like paper machied bottles and I am not interested in them by any means. They remind me vaguely of an elementary class project. But the paintings!
These two artists have caught the everyday chores of washing cracked plates and stacking them slant-wise in a home-made wooden dish drainer, painted flowers in a vase I felt I could smell lush all over my skin, a woman sunning herself in color...These paintings held our County, our way of living, our muse the same way the Poets long ago translated Mendocino County into syllables and consonants and breath that make the vowel sounds of water from ocean to creek that disappears in July or August.

The only thing missing in the completion of Mendocino County's own unique language is in the music arena. Raggae and Celtic tunes belong to their own islands. The Farmer's Market Band and Redbud are the closest, so far, to capturing the sound of Mendocino County that is slowly and sometimes at the speed of lightening, creating our own heartbeat. What Tamson Donner and Caroline Hawley have done with paint is by no means lost in translation. Their work is the song of the land and the song of 'country living' that doesn't mean C and W. Those paintings are 'just home' and I am grateful I was allowed the honor of seeing it, almost crawling into the different canvases and making myself, well, at home....the only thing missing was a turned down radio back in some room playing tunes I had never heard before,except in Redbud and at the Market; never heard outside my own d.n.a. , never listened to in the heart's beat where the drums mix in with the bass and the low notes on the concertina. I long for Mendonesia to have their own music, their own angelic hipster sound, as Kerouac would say,and 'with a trace of Country Joe and the Fish for sweet sloppiness mixed in a kinda Fair Port Convention and all the poets giving their words. It's a dream I've had since moved here almost 43 years. But my friends say let the musicians sound like they want. YOU like the sound you just described. What I want to say is a mixture of all those components of music mixed with each others' themes,would be our sound, because we have different background. It's a circus up here, I tell ya.

Mother's Day Presence

I don't know what Mother's Day represents in Scotland or England, but here in America the holiday began as a peace movement, which tickles me no end. I began a peace movement here in our small town in the early eighties called Willits Working For Peace and we still stand every Friday night in front of our hospital holding candles when it's dark and hands when it's summer. We have silk screened banners that say Peace in different languages and all but the english one are in tatters. It's time to make new ones. We have a main banner that lists the troop deaths of both sides and it is a clarion for peace. Here is what I paraphrased from Google about Mother's Day

The earliest activity for Mother's Day was the meeting of mothers whose sons had died in the Civil War. There were several celebrations in 1870 and 1880, but none achieved resonance beyond the local level. In 1868 Ann Jarvis created a committee to establish a "Mother's Friendship Day" whose purpose "was to re-unite families that had been divided during the Civil War" and she wanted to extend it into an annual memorial for mothers, but she died in 1905 before she saw her dream realized. Her daughter Anna Marie Jarvis, following the death of her mother on May 9, 1905, with the help of a Philadelphia merchant called John Wanamaker began making a celebration for peace coupled with honoring mothers at the time. A small service was held May 12 1907. Anna Marie campaigned for Mother's day to become a national day and later, am international holiday.

Julia Ward Howe made a day of celebration called Mother's Day for Peace in 1872. I feel like I've belonged to a group of women pushing for peace for a long time. I first became aware of a peace movement when I was fifteen in 1972. The Viet Nam conflict would end very soon and as young people, my friends and I became aware of the troubles in Bangladesh, in Ireland, wanting to do something to make these wars, conflicts, killing and starving of people go away. I became a member of a peace group and while I left Southern California soon after graduating high school early for Berkeley, I stayed dedicated to working for peace and moving to Berkeley when I was eighteen made that easier where there were many dedicated groups already.

I didn't know the connection between peace groups and mother's day until a few years ago. I had raised my sons with the belief that mother's day was just a hallmark greeting card holiday. If I had known then, when they were young that it was really part of the peace movement, I would have had more opportunity to share my peace beliefs with them and train them to think "Peace" instead of, "a day to buy mother a present ". Also, when they were young neither son understood
why I occasionally practiced civil disobedience and went to jail for my beliefs. I would have had a better chance to talk to them if I had had the knowledge to tie mother's day in with demonstrating for peace. Nils has created his own small group of 20 something and high school students to demonstrate in Willits while the adults stand in front of the hospital with our candles and peace banners.

For mother's day this year, Nils came over and worked on my blog writing down complete instructions on how to put photographs on posts. I only hope this techno-moron can follow his directions. He and his lady came over in the late afternoon as I stood watering the vegetable greens garden and we had a lovely talk about all that I just wrote about. Earlier in the afternoon my daughter-in-law came over with a miniature rose plant. If any of you have read Rumer Godden books, receiving this small rose is reminiscent of her book "An Episode of Sparrows" which I first read when I was eleven and now, having my own copy, have read over and over. Kate is such a loving young woman and doesn't just give a gift she wants to give, but something she knows the receiver would want. And she's uncanny in her choices. My day was wonderful beginning with church and ending with mucking in the garden when everyone went home.
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I tried after Nils left to put a photo of my garden to go with this post, and of course it wouldn't work even though i followed all the instructions he wrote down. sigh...

The FleaMarket

I spent the last two days at a craft fair-flea market selling my wares, which this time consisted of small ikons on two by three inch canvases, nature-themed; and dioramas in old cigar boxes. One I truly love and didn't sell has a nest and eggs that never hatched, small bits of poetry, and a porcelan doll's head the same size as a redstart's egg. I put the whole nest of the redstart and two eggs in the box, then, I found amongst my broken jewelry a gold-toned leaf about two inches long and I pinned that into the nest as if it it were wind-blown. Last year I pressed and dried a lot of feverfew and so I entwined a number of these into the nest as well. I have a series of antique bird studies and I color copied them all, so the redstart is standing on her nest and then I found in a dictionary from the late 1800s, a study of the cukoo bird and the story of how the cukoo always kicks an egg out of another bird's nest and lays one of her own in its place, so I placed the doll's head which is egg-shaped and so delicate and faintly colored, with the other eggs and it looked just like I meant it to. All the cigar boxes have slots for a wooden cover and I took them out and had them replaced with glass.

My foxglove dropped so much seed last year that I couldn't harvest and it's coming up , so I've troweled them up into four by four pots and sold them for fifty cents. I wish my son would come over and teach me how to put photographs on my blog, so I could show you all this talk. It's so beautiful, all these images...

I traded a larger ikon of a study on Wallace Stevens' poem "Ten Ways of Looking At A Blackbird" for an apron with appliques on it and a quilt from the thirties with very few torn squares.The woman wanted to do the trade so very much, I could tell she hadn't much money. It's pattern was the postage stamp. I hope I can fix them. I wish I could send it to my mother, it's something she would adore, but that's one of the grievances of being an orphan.

Listening to vendors and customers around me barter was a show. I have never done that before.
I laughed with my neighbor vendor about it and she said, "I love it; the customer loves it and it makes the day go." So when I was all packed up and my husband was putting my things in the back of the truck, I took five dollars and walked the faire. I hadn't had time before. I was determined to learn how to barter and I did! A woman had an antique lace collar with white thin thin gloves that had a thin line of brilliantines up the center of the back of the hand and they fit, but both items are stained. Now, I'm an expert at getting stains out, using a lot of old fashioned remedies, depending on what the stain looks like, so she wanted $5 and I didn't want to pay five plus do all the work and besides, I only had five, I wanted to play awhile. So I pointed out the stains and I said, "How about three?" She went for it. Success on my first attempt. Then I found a brass cigarette case which are excellent for making small handmade books in and the woman wanted a dollar, but it was definately too much, so I just walked away. She said before I got far, she would take fifty cents. Sold! This is fun I thought to myself. The final thing I bought was a small plastic (boo) baggie of broken jewelry which is what i like the best. And then I was out of money. The jewelry guy said, "I just undersold my daughter stuff, she's gonna kill me." I replied, "Yeah, but yr doin' her work" and he said back, "Yeah, while she's gone to get me a cup of coffee." That one I felt a little off about, but I had already made the deal, and maybe that's his way of working, to play Eoyore...

It was a strange day of hot and cold and windy. One poor man had two small wardrobes standing up and one sold for a hundred dollars and the wind knocked it backward, breaking it terribly. The woman wanted her money back. Of course he gave it to her. It was too battered to think it could be fixed. What a shame when history and hand-crafted work is destroyed in an instant.

I was glad to come home. Each day I only made fifty or sixty dollars and we need so much more. But at least my check from the college library came for the poetry reading. That hundred ducats shall come in mighty handy. I hate worrying about money. I'd rather be like the lilies and neither toil nor spin and NOT WORRY. We're down to twenty lbs of short grain brown rice, though I have about 20 packs of rice noodles. Discovering how to cook Thai which is a rice based culture has made having Celiac's a whole lot easier. I think after church tomorrow I will take a very long nap to make up for having to get up at six two mornings in a row and haul ass down in the truck to the sale lot. It's a rough way to make a living when yr as beat up as my body is, though I'm not complaining. I'm not! I'd much rather do this hunt and peck than go back to teaching, which I loved, but just couldn't take in the long hours any more with this body.

In a week or two I think I read in Sacramento and that will be a good help as well. Well, I've talked myself into feeling better and now to b-e-d.

Found Writing in Large Satchel of Papers

Last night I stumbled through the raked, but not yet taken away maple leaves and so when I rolled my bike through them, there was a sodden crunch to the journey. I love Autumn, with all its inconveniences. As I stand out on the back porch drinking a cup of homegrown herbal tea after my long ride, I hear the last of the geese overhead flying south away from our harsh winter.

I imagine them standing on the steps of Mayan temples and chanting the prayers of summer through their beaks. I imagine them making long string of feathers in the channels of water that wind through jungles and each feather is etched with the name of a minor god who speaks the name of the One God with pleasure and delight.

All this comes onto the backsides of my eyelids as I listen to the wind blow through the maples, as if they were strange reeds in those waterways. And I too listen with pleasure and delight, as if there will never be another thing to do. And right now, there is nothing else to do when the darkness falls and the star-pricked night is a blanket we cover ourselves up with.

For there is no denying it is Autumn and it is too cold to do anything in the evenings after the clocks change except lie under that blanket and find new ways to fashion love, new ways to braid our hair together like a Chinese puzzle we cannot escape from until Spring opens up her head crocus-style, fortune-cookie style and gives us a little hallelujah of sunshine.

First Day of Summer

True to calendar, the first day of summer has finally brought us warmish windy weather. Everyone is happy but me. I wanted there to be some cool spring-ish days that would make me feel like a slightly ruffled petticoat in the wind. I wanted to lie on the church lawn and find animals in the clouds, moles poking their noses outta the earth so whipped by large hands and rose-shaped snouts, that it was loamy and ready to receive seed the way some earth and seed mingle together like a pat of butter in a bowl of hot cereal.

I've brought eight foot tall foxglove stalks into the house to put in three foot vases, six foot tiger lilies on stalks in as well. The caboose is over-whelmed with flowers as if it were a funeral, but it's beautiful. Now, I'm not Tinkerbelle, but neither am I the dancing hippos in the Fantasia, and I carefully got in bed holding my laptop with one hand, so I could relax after working all day and ker-rash! the bed Daniel just rebuilt collapsed underneath me! I thought it was me, but he hadn't screwed the slats down to the main bottom frame of the bed and some extracurricular wriggling had loosened the boards from the main place and they just slid off their place and down onto the floor. Happy Solstice!