My Tree Called Life

Last week, I had the immense and heart-piercing privilege of taking part in the launch party for My Tree Called Life: Writing and Living Through Serious Illness, a book published by Turning Point of Kansas City that I edited. The anthology brings together the writings of close to 30 writes living with serious illness — cancer, parkinson’s disease, brain injuries, diabetes and more — whether they are the one diagnosed with the disease or a close caregiver. The writings people contributed come from writing workshops I’d led at Turning Point over the last three years, all designed to help people express whatever life was showing them about who they are and what they’re living through.

The book was a true labor of love, and I send great gratitude to Cathy Pendleton, who coordinates adult programming at Turning Point, and also many others on staff there who did such an extraordinary job in helping us put all these strong words into publication. I also am continually inspired by the writing of the workshop participants who proved what Pat Schneider has written in many of her books: when we write in our own words, it’s powerful. Finally, Turning Point itself is an amazing organization which provides all kinds of services for people — from babes in arms to elders — when facing serious illness. Turning Point: A Center for Hope and Healing offers extensive programming for children and adults — classes in cultivating resiliency, knitting, yoga, writing, mindful movement, nutrition, relaxation, Chinese medicine and Jin shin Jyutsu.

Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction I wrote to My Tree Called Life:

Because we write against the backdrop of caregiving for fragile parents 24/7, not knowing if the dopamine will allow for easy walking today, bone scans and heart procedures, scared children or distant siblings, friends who help and friends too busy or frightened to show up, and the vast uncertainty of living with serious illness, attendance can shift radically week to week. Sometimes it’s hard to write more than a few words, and sometimes it’s hard to stop writing. Always, however, we find deep value in simply witnessing one another, witnessing our own words. Words of truth, sometimes words of hope and always words of life.

When I get home that night, my husband asks me how it went, and when I tell him, he says, “Doesn’t it hit on all your own cancer issues to do this work?” He thinks it might depress me, but no, it does the opposite. Maybe some of this has to do with what the woman said about how her dying helps the ones of us not so actively at the end of our lives (or so, we think) cultivate perspective, give up sweating the small stuff so much. But I suspect it has more to do with the courage I witness, week after week, in all the workshops I do: the way that people are willing to take great risks in what stories they write and tell; how the veneer of what we think keeps us safe is gone in such workshops, and what really matters is unearthing meaning – clearing the obstacles out of the way, including fear and doubt, insecurity and low confidence, to create something simply to feel more alive in the process of creation.

It also has something to do with the stories I hear and the stories I witness – the woman facing advanced diabetes opening the sugar-free chocolates another participant brings us one week when we’re having someone’s death-by-chocolate prize cake.

The man who reads a poem he wrote to his wife, who just went through breast cancer treatment, about how strong she is, crying throughout his reading and through his reading of everything he wrote while reminding us, “Hey, I’m an engineer! I never cry, and in this workshop, I can’t stop.”

The woman who’s balanced her precarious life around extreme chemo for five years says the most encouraging and insightful things about the writing of others in the group. When I ask her what the class is like for her, she writes me about how she noticed many surprises in how she ended each story or poem she wrote, “I don’t believe we were writing toward specific endings. They just happened serendipitously and wonderfully.” She reads me one of her favorite endings, “Every fiber of me begs to wake up—to wake up, electric, stunned, and newly alive.”

In such an ending, I hear a beginning: how to begin to live life far more alive, far more immersed in the energy of being here and now. Of course the writing the participants do leaves behind legacies for their family and friends: inside glimpses of how they saw and loved the world. But it also continuously shows those of us in the class that living with serious illness doesn’t mean losing yourself; on the contrary, living with such challenges can – through the magic of writing and speaking stories and images into being – bring us home, even at the turning points of our lives, to who we always were. With the publication of this book, we now share our homecoming with you in hopes of these words helping you find your own way through life’s turning points.

Photos of people by Joann Lesh (who is reading in one and hanging out with me in another). The book’s beautiful cover painting is by Lorelle Mennel, who participated in the Turning Popint class, “Living Your Question Now: Finding One’s Joy Through Painting.” You can purchase a copy of the book at Turning Point’s website.

The Light Gets In: Leonard Cohen in Concert

Monday night I experienced three hours of sitting in a state of pure musical prayer at one of the best concerts of my life: Leonard Cohen plus eight world-class musicians performing at the gorgeous Midland Theater in Kansas City. Despite so many songs of having our hearts ripped open and the existing coming demise of politics and society, I felt such kindness and compassion, such presence and humor, such grace from the man who said in one of his songs, “I’m just a little Jew rewriting the bible.”

One of the moments that pierced me the most deeply was when Cohen sang “Anthem,” and particularly the chorus, “Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There’s a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in” after he told us, “So much of the world is plunged into darkness and chaos.” I found myself crying in the cheap seats from which Leonard was the size of my thumb, but I could still hear most of his words and see all his gestures: the lifting of his hat when he bowed, the way he waltzed across the stage, the continual return to his knees to pour his song into the mic as he sang.

Both Ken and I were blown away by the musicians, particularly the Webb Sisters, musical sisters from England who, when they did a solo for “If it is Thy Will” that sounded like the most lyrical bells in the world ringing. Sharon Robinson, another singer and one of Leonard’s collaborators on many songs, also did a dazzling solo.

He did many standards we loved: “Suzanne” with just a guitar and his voice as he stood alone on the stage; “Bird on a Wire” that landed in me a whole new way; “So Long, Marianne,” which sounded a deep goodbye between him and us in one of the many encores; and the gorgeous “Dance Me to the End of Time” and “Hallelujah.” But I also experienced some songs that I somehow missed below — particularly the hauntingly beautiful “The Gypsy Wife,” which I still hear as I drive around Lawrence.

If you missed the concert, so sorry — at 75 years old, it’s probable he won’t be here again (but who knows?). Yet you can buy the CD “Live in London,” recorded in ‘08, which has most of this concert on it. Play it in a dark room, sit in a comfortable chair and relax, and turn the volume up high. Let Leonard show you how much beauty and peace, meaning and astonishment you can enter into with all of his timeless music.

Dragonflies & Inky Darkness in My Baby Rides the Shortbus

I’m very happy to announce that a very important new book, featuring one of my essays, is now out: My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities, edited by Yantra Bertilli, Jennifer Silverman, and Sarah Talbot, features essays on raising kids with a variety of physical and emotional, visual and invisible, disabilities. “This is the most important book I’ve read in years,” writes Ariel Gore, author of The Mother Trip, who recommends this book for anyone, whether “subject or ally.” The anthology covers topics such as navigating acronyms and diagnoses, finding respect and support, balancing family needs when one child has a disability, and all kinds of resources.

My essay, contributed with permission of my son, Daniel, who was diagnosed with a mild case of Asperger’s Syndrome and some typical ADHD when he in second grade, is called “Dragonflies and Inky Blackness: Raising a Child with Asperger’s Syndrome.” I’m including an excerpt from the essay below,a nd if you’re interested in getting a copy of this book for yourself or others who would benefit from it, please see the book’s blog or order a copy on Amazon.

From “Dragonflies and Inky Blackness”:

Metaphors are ways to contain the uncontainable. Symbols to hold what cannot be held, like fear or hope contained in darkness and dragonflies. Illusions, but what other way can we get close to the center of what’s real?

It’s like the myriad of names for god in Judaism — all ways to circle around what cannot be touched.

I remember Daniel at age nine: he sits at the kitchen table, and over his pasta, tells us he’s convinced the universe does actually end at some point, that spaces curves into this ending. So there is an end, but he doesn’t know what’s there. He just knows all things curve into the future, into endings and infinity at once. And he can hold both the endings and infinity in his head at once.

Like dragonflies in the inky blackness. Like Daniel in this world.

Such as Small World After All

When I went to the World’s Fair at age five — back when it was in New York City — I was dazzled especially by one display: a ride into darkness that opened up to light panoramas of dolls dressed in clothing from dozens of countries, all singing in various languages, “It’s a Small World After All.” Maybe it was how the dolls were illuminated in the darkness, or how there were dozens of them. Maybe it was their little Flamenco or Native American or Mongolian costumes, but for whatever reason, that display stayed with me as the most amazing thing I had seen up to that point in my life.

I can almost hear those possessed dolls singing in the background these days, given the unworldly and right-in-this-world small worldness of late. Here are a few:

When my visiting German daughter, Gesa, here for a month as an exchange student, met a friend, Sally, who graciously offered her horses for Gesa to ride last month (Gesa is a great lover of horses, and a daily rider of her own horse back home), it turned out that one of Sally’s horses and Gesa’s horse had the same grandfather horse. Not only were the horses the same breed, but the same immediate family, and of course, we then discovered a well-traveled Lubeck (near Gesa’s home), Germany and Kansas route, filled by several horse lovers and breeders who all knew each other (the woman who owned the stable where Sally’s horses live also knows Gesa’s uncle).

Last week, when going out to dinner before my reading at Eighth Day Books in Wichita, I was lucky enough to be joined by my friends, Victoria and Kurt, and my cousin-in-law Dennis. We looked over the menus of Pha Hot — great Vietnamese restaurant by the way — waiting for my son, Daniel, to join us with one of his professors who was also joining us. Then Daniel and his philosophy and physics professor Don came in, and it turned out that Don, Victoria and Kurt were good friends, and attended the same Orthodox Church, and the owner of the bookstore where I was reading was Don’s godfather. “You know Daniel?” Don asked Victoria. “I saw him be born,” Victoria answered. Dennis also knew the folks in the Orthodox community.

Now I’m in Ames, Iowa, sitting in a comfortable bed, surrounded with blankets, and looking out at the deep woods surrounding this CSA (community sustainable agriculture) farm and guest house. Turns out the owners know people I know in Lawrence who do CSA and market garden work, are well-acquainted with the bioregional movement, and subscribe to Permaculture Activist, where I recently had an article.

While I’m a lot older than five, and those dolls seem more demonic than charming now when I picture them, I can still hear them singing in my mind, little lit-up surprises that you find in the dark when you turn a corner.

Write from Your Life: N. Scott Momaday

When we introduce ourselves to someone new, we often say what we do, where we live, or who we’re related to. N. Scott Momaday, a Native American writer from Oklahoma, gives us another way to consider our identity. Momaday, who was born in Lawton on the Kiowa Reservation, is a Pulitzer-prize winning writer whose novel House Made of Dawn led to the breakthrough of Native American literature into mainstream literature. His other books include On the Way to Rainy Mountain, Angle of Geese and Other Poems, Gourd Dancer, In the Presence of the Sun, and In the Bear’s House. He was featured in many documentaries, including Ken Burns and Stephen Ives’ The West for his masterful retelling of Kiowa history and legend, served as Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush in 2007.

Momaday shows us in his writing new ways to understand who we are and where we live

The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee

I am a feather on the bright sky

I am the blue horse that runs in the plain

I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water

I am the shadow that follows a child

I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows

I am an eagle playing with the wind

I am a cluster of bright beads

I am the farthest star

I am the cold of the dawn

I am the roaring of the rain

I am the glitter on the crust of the snow

I am the long track of the moon in a lake

I am a flame of four colors

I am a deer standing away in the dusk

I am a field of sumac and pomme blanche

I am an angle of geese in the winter sky

I am the hunger of a young wolf

I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive

I stand in good relation to the Gods

I stand in good relation to the earth

I stand in good relation to everything that is beautiful…

You see, I am alive, I am alive

For this month’s writing exercise, please put aside thoughts of grammar, spelling or making sense momentarily and start writing your own description of who you are, beginning with the words, “I am…” to open each line, and then reaching for the images that convey what you’ve witnessed in your life and in the land and sky around you. Aim for what’s real to you, whether it be small or large. You may not feel like you’re the feather on the bright sky, but maybe you’re the dust over the just-plowed field, the dragonfly hovering above the butterfy bush, the nicked pick-up truck door, the loud music playing at the gas station, the easy chair in the basement. You may also be the canopy of stars on a winter night or the collective memories of all your grandparents.

Whoever you are, let your words convey the link between you and the land and sky, you and your relations by landing on specific images as you write. This is also a writing exercise you can add to over time, perhaps sprinking in a few new images of who you are each season or each year on your birthday. Writing in this way – adding as you go along – is another way to say to the world, “I am alive. I am alive.”

Continental Bioregional Congress: A Love Letter

Hello everyone,

Getting set up in coffee shops to do my normal Goddard and workshops and readings and other arranging work, I can barely imagine what to say to friends about where I’ve been except, “in a parallel universe.” The congress itself is something out of our mainstream American, or even alternative American construct of time and space. What happened there? I’m not sure although I have some hope that telling you about it will help me know more. Where were we? In some place constant and occasional, ancient and ahead of its time, ceremonial and ordinary, Tennessee and beyond Tennessee. In many ways, the road trip to the congress — all 10 hours of driving plus numerous stops — meant tunneling into the world in the center of the earth, and now we’re out again, back to the surface, and I have to say I’m just a little heartbroken to be apart from the congress and all of you who were there (as well as all of you who have been there and simply must be there next time and haven’t yet been there but will be there in the future).

There were all the normal congress rhythms and patterns: the plenaries that delighted some and make others want to jump from their skins; the workshops some loved and found the highlight of their time and others found took us away from our time together; the dancing and singing; the food, which was tasty, but jeez, I seriously missed butter; the long talks heart to heart; the smiles across the circles; the sitting
together, knee to knee, to resolve conflicts and speak from the soul, dropping all defenses; the new friends who felt like old family; the old friends who felt like twin or triple souls; the weather with its too-much rain at times and too-seldom sunshine. Having now been to eight of the ten congresses, I kept more keenly attuned to the patterns — the way no one knows what we’re doing so much at first, and how it takes
several times to really arrive at congress together; the anxieties and what-am-I-doing-here moments; the nights it’s hard to sleep because of all the thrill until exhaustion overtakes excitement; and the collective
happiness that settles on us, or grabs us wildly to leap out of our chairs and salsa dance even if we don’t know how.

The congress is my home — I know it when I’m there, and especially when I’m not anymore. The circle if the room where I live best. Hearing each person speak — whether in the opening circle when we crowded into the big room, lopsided and earnest, saying our names and where we were from, or later in the spiral of the women’s circle, when we spoke about being a woman, living as a woman’s body at this age — shows me who we really are together, and who I am apart: a part of the circle.

The highlights, which our carload of Ken, me, Natalie (17), Gesa (German student living with us now, 16) and Forest (14), named while driving across Missouri, are what you might expect:

* Latin Night with the amazing dancing and treats, the music and pulse, the beauty and vitality. Arnold, Roberto and Maria doing a salsa dance skit with finesse and beauty until Juan-Tomas tangoed in to steal away Maria.

* The party on the last night with the driving music, and also the gang of fairies who descended upon us from some place two hours away, complete with accordion and tutus, to sing, dance, and slip down the
slide of the playground (part of where the dance was) in full-beards and layers of white tull.

* The men’s and women’s circles: the men’s circle, around the fire, that went on for hours; the women’s circle, inside, with our chairs in a circle, oldest on the end and youngest in the center; both circles
making for the kind of connection that for days afterwards, I kept grabbing the younger women who blew my mind with their articulate hearts and heavy load of passion and possibility, asking them to tell me their
names again, hugging them and telling them to come stay with us sometime when they’re were traveling through Kansas.

* Some of the plenaries when everyone laughed together, when we crossed over to some common and complex understanding as one, when barriers dissolved and we saw ourselves as being in congress together continually, this meeting a continuation of one that began in ‘84 and will never end, I hope.

* A circle of those of us who served on the coordinating council — the congress between the congresses — for the last four years, early evening, our chairs and bodies as close as possible, tears and joy, pride and release, and when we stood up, holding each other close, and could barely stop kissing each other. Thank you, Bob, Liora, Mary, Richard, Ken, Laura, Juan-Tomas.

* Late nights in the house we rented with our extended family, speaking English, Spanish, German (although most of us only understood English), and laughing over something that happened or would happen.

* Cultural Sharing night when Natalie sang “Bewitched” and — what was his name? — played the most amazing finger-piano-type instruments and sang hauntingly piercing tunes — and then Alberto presented a dazzling — for its scope and depth — slide show on LaCaravana (nomadic guerilla theater troupe that spent 13 years spreading bioregionalism through the arts througout Central and South America).

* The close moments with new and old loved ones — I put my hand on so many people’s chests, it seemed, to feel their hearts — in the rain or by the fire, in the midst of drumming or in the wind that poured through the trees.

* Hanging out often with Stephen Gaskin who kept reappearing because, as he said, he “wanted to soak in the energy of the Mexicans,” and who kept reminding Laura Kuri and me that we were his Ninja Muses because when he first arrived, looking just a little confused, Laura and I leapt up and hugged him, and stood — one of us on each side of him — during the opening circle, telling him we would protect him as Ninja Muses.

* The moment we arrived, and there was Curtis in apron and big smile. The moment we left, and there was Leonora — incredible Venezuelan singer and activist, coming to the car window to kiss us goodbye in the
still-dark morning light.

* Gary’s healing hands and voice, and how many of us did he work on throughout the congress? I hardly saw him not doing massage, energy healing or prayer for/with someone.

* Bea’s artful presentation about Thomas Berry at the memorial service held one afternoon. David Haenke throwing his head back and belting out the most gorgeous song for Thomas Berry, and soon after, David and Alberto pressing their foreheads together, crying over the loss of this great and enduring spirit, our own dream of the earth.

* Alberto telling the story of how LaCaravana went for 13 years all over South America, and instead of money, they used art because, as Alberto said, sometimes there’s no ATM machine, but there’s always art, and art works as a credit card wherever you go.

* Biko drumming us in parade to begin the arts and education day of the bioregional curriculum session, and at the end, drumming us outside to dance among the trees while Odin drummed alongside him. When the first song was done, and Odin started to walk back to the building, Biko called out, “Where do you think you’re going?” while we watched, laughing. Odin came back, and they played more of the most astonishing drumming, grabbing our heart beats and making us dance and pulse with life.

* Walking back to the house one afternoon, the whitish horse watching me as I watched him, the sky still damp and beginning to lighten in orange at its edges, the air delicious.

* Natalie returning from a day walking trails with the girls and young women, telling me that she tried to just take it all in — the breathing earth — and it amazed her to see what she had never seen before. Pat,
the physician’s assistant who helped run the kitchen, making a house call to help Forest, who was sick much of the congress, and then spending ample time helping us find an open pharmacy. Gesa laughing –
her whole face glowing — at the dinner table with Alberto, Laura and Fabio.

* The beautiful site committee and how much they did to make it all work: Greg, Jennifer, Susan, Alayne, Biko, Roberta, and (forgive me, I can’t remember all the names) so many others: THANK YOU!

* Long talks with Patricia, Stephanie, Laura, Fabio, Greg, Stephen, Bea, David in the road, Alberto on the fly, Juan-Tomas as we walked in the dark with Natalie one night, and so many others. I miss and love you — and really everyone — now so much.

Back from the congress, I’m still at the congress. We carry this with us, a kind of birthright, a dance as old as our breath; a body full of contradictions and questions, naive then seasoned understandings, misunderstandings and eventual clearings, old hurts and new healings, and above all, something that transcends how we live in the non-ceremonial world and shows us how to bring the village we make
together — even just a fraction more — into wherever we land. Wherever we are next — in the Northwest or Canada or Ohio or wherever else — I can barely wait.

love to all,
Caryn

Pictures (from top): the congress; the woods at the Farm; Juan-Tomas, Bob, Stephanie, Andy, Albert; Natalie and Nyela (Sadie’s baby); Laura and Helen (from Mexico); Natalie as cat; the fairies arrive on All Species Night; more All Species (note the porcupine); Bea and me; Gesa; Mark, Richard and the bioregional quilt (started in ‘84, quilted by the men); Fabio and Laura with Stephen Gaskin; Ken, Curtis and others; David and Alberto; Leonor from Venezuela; Stephanie and me; the welcome tent; Gary working on Alberto.

Before Molly Was Nanny: Photos from 1930’s Brooklyn

A few days ago, I got the most amazing photos via email from my mother, who received them from a second cousin she recently reconnected with, via facebook. Strangely enough, this social networking brought to my screen images vitally important to me from a time long before even televisions, let alone computers. The photos were of my grandparents, taken sometime in the 1930s, long before my grandmother Molly descended into debilitating mental illness, very likely rocket-fueled by a number of tragedies. The sadnesses that overtook her life included the loss of her first child, Irwin, to pneumonia, and the loss of all her brothers and sisters back in Poland to the Holocaust.

For my childhood, I new my grandmother — who we called Nanny — as wickedly funny but also prone to intense criticism of others in the family (lucky for me, I was usually excluded by virtue of being a beloved grandchild) and long stretches in mental hospitals when her manic depression got the best of her. I also knew Papa, my grandfather, much as he appears in these photos: loving, calm, steady, quiet but holding the family together.

Irwin died at age six, several years before my aunt and then my mother were born, but now I get to see as a well-loved and happy boy the great-uncle I never knew. Moreover, I have the immense pleasure to seeing Nanny back when she was Molly, a young mother, smiling and holding her son’s hand while her husband held her (and to his right, his Irwin’s aunt). The woman I only knew as a old woman with a flair for driving my parents crazy and entertaining me by occasionally pretending to be a gorilla is young again, not so crazy yet, and not yet so sad and wounded. I see here who she was just a decade or so after she came to this country from Poland, brought here by her sister Ida, and determined to make a life for herself, and in these photos, happily occupying that life.

Write from Your Life: Naomi Shahib Nye

Listen to the podcast on High Plains Public Radio!

If you catch those magazines by the cash register of most supermarkets – the ones spouting gossip and unflattering pictures of celebrities, it will surely seem that quality is as underrated in modern culture and yet as important as kindness. Yet kindness is like air we breathe: invisible but essential. Few writers capture the power of kindness as much as Naomi Shahab Nye, a Texas poet, writer, anthropologist and educator.

Born in 1952 in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother, Nye lived in Jordan, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, where she studied world religions at Trinity University. Her books includeYou and Yours, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Fuel, Red Suitcase, and Hugging the Jukebox. She’s also written several books for young readers and a collection of essays, and has garnered many awards worldwide for her writing.

High Plains poet William Stafford says of Nye, “Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”

His comments particularly apply to her poem, “Kindness,” which looks up from the bottom of loss and sends the deepest song of encouragement into the smallest acts we perform and witness in others. With tenderness and knowing, Nye shows us not just what kindness really is, but how to pay attention to our lives in ways that cultivate greater kindness all our days. Here’s her poem, “Kindness”:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and

purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

it is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you every where

like a shadow or a friend.

For this month’s writing exercise, please put aside thoughts of grammar, spelling or making sense momentarily and, using Nye’s poem as your guide, kindly write of the smallest moments in your life or in the lives of those you love when you’ve known true kindness. You could even start with a list of such moments – such as a pie a friend brings you after a hard loss, an embrodiered pillow case your grandmother passed onto you, a hand a stranger holds out when you stumble at the post office. You can then fashion your list into a poem or write the story of any item on your list.

Fall Falling

It’s a muted year, probably because of the excessive rain, but it’s still beautiful: everything saturated with yellow and gold, brown at the edges and green at the center. Last night, walking in the mist toward the car with neon illuminating the street, I remembered this was the first night of all when I felt that familiar wind, a little cooler than the summer breezes or blasts. All directions I look, I see the green fading tom something else, the gatherings of birds aiming themselves south, the litter of leaves. Welcome, fall! May you come however you will, but show us how much beauty there is in these wabi-sabi moments when we witness passing memory and memories past.

Reading to a Large Audience

Last night, I read poetry for about 45 minutes to over 120 kind people who left the lush night air to sit in an auditorium at Pittsburg State University. Having just read to very small groups, I was a little surprised (I was hoping maybe I’d have 20), but delighted. Men and women, students and faculty, international students and long time residents listened as I read from each of my four poetry books. I felt a real kinship as I looked into the eyes of people — a young Indian woman, a dark-haired pony-tailed man, another man with a thick white beard, some of the astonishingly good students I had met with earlier in Laura Lee Washburn’s poetry writing seminar. I was also thrilled to see my uncle and aunt-in-laws from Joplin, Missouri, who made the trip. Not only was I was treated to this audience, but we were all treated — thanks to the PSU English Department — to a reception afterwards that even featured a sheet cake that said, “Welcome Poet Laureate.” On my way out with a box of leftover books in hand, two young women from China held the door open for me. One said, “You know, we couldn’t understand all the words, but we really liked your poetry.” The other told me, “With poetry, it’s not the language so much it’s written in because you can feel it,” as she placed her hand on her heart. I couldn’t agree more.

Special thanks to Laura Lee for organizing everything. And I also want to give a shout-out to one of the best literary magazines in Kansas, Little Balkans Review. Thank you to all who keep that going.