Back to black coffee
Not lighting a cigarette
But remembering
* * *
New zazen cushion
Arrived by yesterday’s mail
Right knee still hurts
* * *
Thick snow falling down
Mixed with cherry blossom petals
Lit up from below
The banging of the rain on the tent fly awakens me at four A.M., and I lie in the sleeping bag rehearsing my requests for help to drag the kayak from the beach, for a truck, for the boat from Lund. Better than asking to be rescued by the Coast Guard or leaving Jan in the lurch. I pack my gear, haul it to the lodge, watch the cold drops bounce in the hot tub, listen to the wind on the way to the Sanctuary. Before breakfast, Laurel and Brenda look worried and I say I wont be kayaking, and they say very good. Down in the chatroom I check the weather report again: rain only till mid afternoon. Outside, the wind has died down. The water is pockmarked but flat. At breakfast, I state my second change of plans and Ruth announces that they’ll see me off from the porch not the beach. Grateful again for the heavy-duty windbreaker, I carry my gear and a packed lunch down to the shore past a gaggle of honking Canadian geese and walk back to the lodge for a group portrait. Ruth asks me to call her when I arrive in Lund and she will let the others know. I feel cleansed, buoyant and protected.
Alone on the wide beach in the misty rain, I load the kayak with slow deliberation, making sure hatches are tightly sealed and the sprayskirt suspenders are properly hitched to keep out water from above and below. I pour a libation from my drinking bottle onto the sand and then perform a Japanese bow to land and sea. Finally afloat and rudder down, I swivel the kayak to face the lodge and wave my paddle overhead. In reply there’s a high-pitched roar.
As I glide toward the southern point of Twin Islands, drops of rain go plick-plack and raise tiny domed towers in the center of widening circular ripples. The paddling has an easy rhythm controlled by the same muscles that held my posture erect while sitting. Nothing I’ve written has been as successful as my sojourn’s staged conclusion, but every minute of the trip has felt adventurous, and I depart with the hope that I’ve earned the teacher’s approval. Looking westward toward the gray expanse of sea and sky between Cortes and Hernando, I fantasize turning right ninety degrees and heading off into the great beyond.
The rain subsides during the crossing to Hernando, where I stop at a cove to pee and eat lunch. Out from the lee of the island afterwards, the waves pick up, but not enough to discourage me from heading straight across the open water toward Major Rock rather than trying to take the longer route hugging the shores of Hernando and Savary. I get within striking distance of the Ragged Islands so quickly that I expect to be in Lund two hours earlier than planned, but then I find that for twenty minutes I’ve made no progress at all. The sun has come out and the tide and wind must have shifted. I paddle hard to reach the protection of the narrow channel between the first two Raggeds, passing the point that Jan and I and the children and grandchildren have camped on over the years. There’s some shelter here, but it still takes the time and effort I originally estimated to reach my destination. I call and leave messages about safe arrival for Jan, Peter and Ruth, return the kayak, and head to the Lund Pub for a beer and a hamburger.
I arrive at the Sanctuary on time. Martha’s the only one there. After the hour of sitting and walking meditation our conversation continues. I mention that it was a real-estate agent publicizing cheap rural property in the Georgia Straight newspaper that drew us and many of our neighbors from far-away places to settle in the Powell River area forty years ago. She asks why we left, and I say a sense that after nine years, the time was ripe for me to return to the active life of career development and public engagement from which I had withdrawn into a rural retreat. Also that this personal feeling provided an answer to the research question which had kept my doctoral dissertation in English Literature unfinished: why, in literary tradition, is the pastoral setting associated with youth and old age while middle age is associated with the city.
“Interesting,” she says, “that corresponds to my own experience. I left Cortes to marry and live for many years in Chicago, before returning here. It reminds me of a great class I audited at Harvard as an undergraduate by a professor¦what was his name…”
” Erik Erikson,” I exclaim, “the author of Childhood and Society. He’s the one whose ideas about stages of the life cycle guided my research. I still have his wonderful response to a fan letter I wrote him in 1967.”
“I’d like to read your dissertation,” she says.
“It’s online, Google ‘Youth against Age’.”
Before breakfast I call Jan, who is driving Claire to Santa Maria today for a biopsy of the cyst on her ovary. I thank her for handling all this alone while I’m away.
The morning workshop begins with announcements. At 2 p.m. there will be a memorial service in the sanctuary for Christine, a friend of Ruth, Kate and Martha who was active in their Vancouver Zen Center, and for Anna, an Islander who recently succumbed to cancer. We’re invited to join and include names of our recently departed. Tonight after dinner, Ruth will host a little farewell wine and cheese party in her Hollyhock living quarters. Tomorrow after breakfast, we’ll gather at the beach to see Steven off, since he needs to start paddling back to Lund before our final session.
Kate introduces the day’s theme of Metta, the Buddhist directive of Compassion or Lovingkindness for all living creatures. To prepare, it’s traditional to ask forgiveness of others, offer forgiveness to others and offer foregiveness to oneself, with appropriate variations of three utterances:
There are many ways I have hurt, betrayed or abandoned others, knowingly or unknowingly, through greed, aversion, or ignorance.
I ask your forgiveness.
I open my heart to receive your forgiveness.
Now comes the expression of Lovingkindness itself, through an utterance like this:
May you be free from harm
May you be well in body and mind
May you be happy.
She guides us in Metta meditation, which applies the blessing to a sequence of recipients: first, the self, then a friend or benefactor, then a person to whom one has no emotional reaction, then a “difficult” person”someone by whom one feels aggrieved or irritated”then to all four as equals, and finally, through an expandable set of steps, to all sentient creatures. The sequence is then followed in reverse order, concluding with the expression of lovingkindness to oneself. Kate’s subdued enthusiasm for this practice in ethics complements the quiet righteousness of the poems she read two nights before. After four days together, I can apply these categories to fellow participants in the retreat. It works.
Ruth says that the practice in developing empathy, opening the heart, dissolving the barriers between self and the world honed for thousands of years in Buddhist tradition is indispensable for writers, facilitating imaginative access to others from the inside. Our prompt is to select one of the people from our Metta meditation and to write from that person’s point of view.
At first I’m at a loss. I’ve never been observant enough to record the details that would allow me to imagine another person’s story. But I did have that disarming flash a couple of days ago about the teacher’s momentary succumbing to Doubt, probably only my own projection, but neverthess concrete and vivid. And Ruth is the person I chose in the Metta meditation as “friend or benefactor.” I wished her relief from any fatigue she might be experiencing while giving so much of herself to our small circle of students. Perhaps I could use that session as the framework for doing this assignment. There’s just enough time now to get started, but I’ll come back to it later.
Next prompt is to adopt the point of view of a child, using simple sentences and vocabulary: “a time when you were sad, a lie you told, a time when you were too big or too small, a time when you got wet or dirty.”
O shoot, it’s grandpa again. I wish my mom would pick me up at school, like Max’s and Kevin’s. Now he’s going to ask me questions about the spelling test and tell me to talk louder and take me to Trader Joe’s for a healthy snack before karate. I don’t want him to see me taking off my boxers and putting on the cup. I really hope she isn’t late so we have to put off dinner and everybody gets cranky. Or even worse we hold hands around the table and start without her.
It still feels forced, but I’m starting to enjoy this task, and occasionally images and words take off on their own.
Another prompt. “You’re an old man in a supermarket shopping. Don’t mention your wife’s recent death, but evoke it indirectly.”
Howard steered his cart carefully up to the checkstand. It was full of frozen dinners that reminded him of their meals: Turkey and mashed potatoes, steak and broccoli, spaghetti and meatballs. From the overwhelming selection, he’d limited himself to the ones marked “Von’s Club Special, save 30%”.
At lunch I meet with Kate in a personal consult about meditation. I learn a little about her history as an anti Vietnam war exile from New Jersey, her work as a hospice chaplain in Vancouver, and her recent move to the fringes of the city where she and her husband have established a community zendo in their home. I tell her about my attending this workshop as a kind of revival effort to infuse more intention into my meditation routine and of my enjoyment of longer and more directed practice under her and Martha’s guidance. She asks if there is a Zen community near me and I say yes, and I know several people who belong, but I’ve steered clear of any institutional religion since adolescence. She says nothing, and then I hear myself say that I think I’ll get in touch with them upon my return.
Before the afternoon memorial service, I work on the point-of-view exercise. As with the dying person’s monologue yesterday, my effort to summon up detail leads to irony. Invading another person’s mind uncovers the difference between what they’re projecting and what I can imagine they’re feeling. At least that’s a way you can engage the reader, find the juiciness, even if you have to make it up. But it gets morally risky. Empathy can be spying and stalking, like a hunter knowing one’s prey. Invention can be forgery.
In the sanctuary at 2:00, Ruth, Kate and Martha sit wearing little rectangular bibs around their necks, Kate and Martha in black robes. Also attending are fellow workshop participants, Carol and Fran. The carefully orchestrated ritual begins with silent meditation and is followed by a fifteen-minute monotone chant we read from a single page of transliterated syllables, their sounds from the pre-Sanskrit language of Pali, their meaning lost centuries ago. Names of the recently departed are incorporated: Christine, Anna, then Carol’s mother, and my mother-in-law Ruth. Afterwards we speak in tribute to the dead. From what is said about Anna, I recognize a person I never met, but whose name was often mentioned by Larry C., the man whose Vancouver home Jan and I lived in while looking for land in 1970. He too now lives on the Island, a friend of Ruth and Martha’s. He was sitting in the first row at the reading two nights before.
After the service I call Jan again. She says this morning’s exploratory surgery turned more serious. The whole ovary had to be removed and sent to pathology. Claire will spend three days in the hospital recovering. The doctor thinks its benign, but further conclusions await the lab report in two weeks.
My last workshop session starts at 5:00. Just time to share our reworked point-of-view sketches. Laura reads a long rollicking account of two sisters from a remote Alberta farm getting intiated into the Banff party scene during high school summer jobs. What an ear! Carol narrates her childhood experience of riding in the backseat of the car with her mother singing a tragic folksong. What a memory! I read my piece.
Day three. Getting tired. Trying dutifully, but this afternoon I’m losing incandescence. Is it these baggy pants? This dirty hair? We’re at the place where the startup wonder wanes, and they hanker to do their own work. Three hours of workshop in the morning. Those avid consults while I’m supposed to be eating, and now more lecture. All prepared. For only six people, sometimes five. Babysitter’s wages. Maybe tonight will spark it up. Right now the rat in the wall’s more interesting than synaesthesia.
There’s some laughter and a request to read it again, which I do. Then silence.
I finish dinner early and linger in the bookstore planning to catch Ruth and apologize for the intrusiveness of my sketch, but hoping she’ll say she liked it. She exits the lodge and approaches me as I walk toward her in the garden. She speaks first and says that she was really hurt by what I wrote. Not for herself, but because of what the other members of the workshop must have felt when she laughed and seemed to accept my characterization of her thoughts about them. It was so far off that when I read it aloud she didnt get it, and by the time the connection registered, it was too late to reassure them that she’s really loved doing this workshop and deeply respects the people in it.
I’m flooded with shame. I’d meant to be a diligent student. And I’d meant to be a compassionate colleague. But instead I played a cruel trick on the person I held in highest esteem. I’m amazed at her concern that they, not she, could be hurt. I try to explain: getting into another’s point of view as a writer was very tough for me. Being a teacher myself allowed me to imagine that situation. I was looking for the juice, following directions, trying to be sympathetic and also to be special.
She says yes, she understands. It’s her problem. I’m warmed and relieved by her hug of forgiveness, but still confused by my own motives.
Ruth’s room in the guest house is abuzz when I arrive. People are setting out cheese and crackers, opening bottles of wine, and fussing to get a large monitor hooked up to her laptop. This is the occasion to roll out the weblog she’s been adding to while we were writing in Kiakum. Accessible by password only to us participants, it’s an archive of the lecture notes, prompts, and citations that she and Kate have assembled in preparation, and it will contain work that we’ve produced while here and any links we can recommend. She clicks links to my website, to her own blog, Ozekiland, to the huge Everydayzen.org site she moderates for her teacher Norman Fischer. I drink my first glass of alcohol in a week.
She talks about her upcoming ordination as Zen priest by Norman and brings out a large piece of black needlework she’s about to finish as part of her preparation: Buddha’s robe, fourteen thousand tiny even stitches. Her head will be shaved. A couple of weeks later she and Kate will be led by Norman on a tour of Zen monasteries in Japan.
I empty my glass the second time. Outside the wind has come up in the treetops. I think about kayaking back tomorrow. For the last three days, storms have been predicted. Several of the women express worry. I assure them that if necessary I’ll get someone from Hollyhock to take me and the kayak by truck ten miles down the road to the sheltered harbor in Cortes Bay and call the Lund Water Taxi to come out and pick me up.
In her welcome talk, Dana mentioned that group meditation is available every day from 6:00 to 7:00 A.M in the Sanctuary for all Hollyhock visitors. This morning for the first time I feel ready to attend, but I arrive late. From a distance I see a candle burning on the porch. Inside under the dome sit Brenda, a fellow workshop participant, and the leader, a trim gray-haired woman in black workout garb. During our workshop sessions I’ve felt shy of looking at other people meditating. Now, as I settle on a cushion, the sight of her body’s perfect alertness and repose clicks me into emulation.
I’m aroused from stillness by two tolls of a small bell. Brenda and I follow suit when the leader stands up. With eyes open but blank, she moves slowly around the circle of cushions and speaks in a hypnotic monotone: “In walking meditation, we take a deep breath and lift the left foot from the heel first and place the toe in front of the right foot. We exhale while placing weight on it. We inhale while lifting the right foot and placing it in front of the left and exhale while placing weight on the it. We make our breathing and walking into a smooth continuous motion.” After a few awkward missteps I’m able to relax into the rhythm, observing my body’s method of locomotion, reminded of learning the flow in paddling a kayak.
After several circuits, she rings the bell once, signaling the end of the hour. At first, I find it difficult to talk but not to bow. I greet Brenda, apologize for being late and thank the leader for a powerful experience. Her face changes, features animate, eyes sparkle. I introduce myself and I tell her that Zen practice is new to me after several decades of doing TM, but that my wife is a member of S.F. Zen Center and goes to its Tassajara California monastery for annual retreats. Her name is Martha, she says. She was once cook at Tassajara, is a shareholder in Hollyhock, lives on her adjacent property, sells real estate on the island. She likes to conduct these sittings to balance the pace and stress of her daily life.
Back in Kiakum, our workshop resumes. The theme is emotion. Kate defines it as turbulence, the opposite of stillness, impermanence. In meditation, she says, we cultivate the ability to become intimate with intense emotions, experience them and let them pass. We become mindful of the modulations of the mind and how they are grounded in modulations of the body. We find release from their sway, a spacious place to work with them.
Ruth says that such mindfulness also allows us to write about emotions, find words to create characters with life and intensity. I don’t know about characters. For now, I’m only interested in finding the words to articulate and understand my own experience. That’s been a sanity saver for me since I started journaling in the ˜60’s and a way of validating my travels in retirement.
Kate says traditional Buddhism classifies the emotions as Five Hindrances to meditation, all of which cause suffering. First is Desire, a craving for the pleasure of the senses, or for that which is not in our possession; second is Aversion or ill-will, feelings of malice directed toward others, Third is Sloth and Torpor, resulting in procrastination, laziness, and half-hearted action, Fourth is Restlessness or agitation, which manifests as impatience and lack of concentration. Fifth is Doubt or loss of trust in one’s endeavor. Each has its traditional antidote. For Desire, it’s contemplating the necessity of impermanence. For Aversion, it’s kindness and forgiveness. For Sloth, it’s sufficient rest and curiosity. For Restlessness, it’s strengthening the powers of concentration and relaxation. For Doubt, it’s riding out the mood, finding external sources of inspiration and regularity of habits.
These formulations of the Five Hindrances and their cures help release me from some of the agitation I’ve felt on this trip: anxiety and exultation about the sea voyage, nostalgia in returning to Lund, excitement from exposure to new ideas, hero worship of a teacher, the succession of challenge, frustration, triumph and disappointment attendant upon writing.
I’m intrigued with the two-part definition of Desire, the emotion by which I’m most driven and threatened, but not satisfied by it or the brief description of the cure. Despite its power to humiliate and harm, I believe the dangerous energy of desire can, with luck, be funneled into positive expressions: conjugal love, creative inspiration, self-sacrifice.
Ruth assigns the first exercise as writing about and from an emotion we’ve felt. We’re to depict its manifestation in the body, without naming it, to show, not tell. Her prompts: “A time when I was wrong or bad, someone you were afraid of, a birth, a lie you told or believed.” I select the first, about guilt, stemming from lust and betrayal.
1962, age 20. I was heading from Stuttgart, my ancestral home town, to Paris on an old Lambretta I’d bought second-hand in London at the beginning of the summer. I’d said goodbye to Darleeen a couple of weeks before because the revulsion I experienced in hearing her talk started outweighing the attraction of her beautiful body. Now I wished I hadn’t. I was rutting and lonely. On the big roadmap I noticed that one possible route lay through Besancon, where Leah, my former girlfriend, was living as an exchange student for a year. During most of our sophomore year, we’d been soulmates and intellectual companions. Fellow children of Holocaust survivors, we read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and cried together at the movie Hiroshima Mon Amour. We’d exchanged virginities on New Years Eve while my mother and father were out of town and we’d weathered a horrifying pregnancy scare, but I felt entrapped by her baleful gaze and sombre temperament, and extricated myself from the relationship with no explanation. I knew she still loved me.
Next we’re to rewrite it in third person present tense.
He’s riding from Stuttgart to Paris on an old motorscooter after saying goodbye to the girl he’d met at the language school in Grenoble and convinced to run away with him to the Riviera. She was 16, achingly beautiful, agonizingly dumb. After a gorgeous week and a half of wandering in Provence and Savoie, he’d left her at the train station in Geneva to return to her mother in Rome. They’d had nothing to talk about. Now, after three weeks by himself, he’s desperate with loneliness and desire. On the map, he notices that Besancon, the University town where his former girlfriend is an exchange student, lies in his path.
Finally we’re to tell the same incident from the other person’s point of view, using “you,” and introducing something made up. Not what I signed up for. I’ve written many memoirs in first person and one in third, but this is a frightening leap.
You stole my heart at Camp Moonbeam, Nature Steve, the summer after freshman year. All the girls were after you then and you were after them, but in the Fall, I’m the one that stuck. We talked of books and films and our heritage of the Holocaust. We went to see “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” and cried together afterwards. We wrote letters every day, and at Christmas break, when I came back to New York, we agreed to spend New Years Eve together at your house while your parents were on vacation.
Ruth says we’re now getting beyond cleaving to our own truths, we’re moving out into the world, from self-exploration to an act of generosity. She tells us the story of her own experience, one shared by many authors of fiction, when characters take on a life of their own and escape control of the author, who becomes a kind of medium. This is what happened a third of the way through her composition of All Over Creation. One day, the protagonist Yumi (“You-me”) started speaking in her own voice and forced her to rewrite everything that preceded.
In the next exercise, we’re again to take another person’s point of view and add some dialogue. The prompts: “an argument or a fight, a memorable kiss, the first person I hated, a separation or parting.”
The last alternative reminds me of parting from S…. , which I wrote about in my journal during the airplane trip from San Luis Obispo to Lund, trying to convey some of the pathos of the occasion and my affection for her.
The day before my departure for Canada, I went to say goodbye to Diana. In the rickety old house with 12-foot ceilings and no right angles, she lay on a high bed surrounded by white flowers, a white comforter and pillows and little sleeping dogs. After three years of struggle with painful, disfiguring disease and treatments, she’d reached the final stage. Her arms were literally skin and bones, the hair that she’d always died and thickened was sparse and wispy, but as she turned her head toward my greeting, her eyes were clear and radiant, her smoker’s skin smooth and moist as a baby’s, her smile at hearing my farewell, beatific.
I knew her as “The English Maid,” the rose-ringed logo on her van. My wife had hired her to clean her office and the rest of the house once a week when she moved her law practise home. Diana had long ago been a model and actress in London, and she spoke with a tony accent in a beautiful stage voice as she cleaned the toilets and carried out the trash. She was a serious breeder of Yorkshire Terriers and traded orderly service at the veterinary clinic next door for free rent. She repeatedly resisted her children’s urging to join them in L.A. or Japan, instead preferring a succession of mysterious young men as roommates.
I’d thought repeatedly of what I wanted to say as last words, the task an ultimate challenge for expression, but also a ritual courtesy, since such occasions have been frequent lately. I told Diana she’d had a powerful impact on me, that her combination of humility and elegance and of reserve and sympathy gave me inspiring examples of how to construct a coherent life braced with paradox.
She couldnt speak because of a recent tracheotomy, but she whispered something about loving our babies and held me with a gaze I finally had to avert. Eyes wet, I touched her cheek and kissed her hand and left the room. In the parlor I marvelled about her looks and energy with her daughter-in-law, who told me that Diana was producing the perfect Hollywood departure scene, sharing her joy and beauty with many visitors who filled the house with love. When she asked her mother-in-law this morning how she was doing, Diana had said, “I’m in heaven.”
For the exercise I try to imagine the same encounter from her point of view.
“Steven Marx is here to see you,” she says.
I might not have remembered who that is, but Jan was here yesterday to bring Tai to say goodbye. How I loved that little bitch, who bore me eighteen puppies over just three years. I went all the way to Ireland to bring her back to breed with Timmie and hated to let her go the first time, when she couldnt get along with the whole gang here, and then I got to have her back in exchange for Star, one of the first litter she had at Marx’s house who sweet little Ian couldn’t let go. And when Star died a year later from chewing a copper wire behind Jan’s desk, down where the cobwebs always gather, they wouldnt have another dog¦until I called and told them I had to give up all my babies and they took her back again.
This writing produces mixed feelings. I’m relieved that I’ve found a way to complete the assignment, pleased that, for ten minutes at least, I was able to adopt a new persona and gain a different perspective that contrasts my solemn and self-centered tribute to her engagement with the dogs and details of housekeeping. But I also feel guilty. This appropriation of the woman’s deathbed consciousness isn’t answerable to her or her memory, to those who knew her, or to the actual truth of the situation, which has been reduced to mere stimulus and raw material for my imaginative processing. Ruth tells us that on the eve of her first novel’s going to press, she decided to adopt the name pseudonym Ozeki to hide her family name in consideration of her father, who might be embarrassed if his friends and relatives found resemblances between incidents in the book and what they knew about his life. I take a further liberty to rename my character.
In the lodge before dinner I plan to test the camera again to see if after another day’s drying on the mantle has allowed it to function. It’s gone missing and a thorough search by the staff cant locate it. Could even this place harbor a thief?
This flattened trail gives softly to my tread
As cedar trunks suck water from below
Two hundred feet high where new shoots are spread
And, pointing to the sun, tough top tips grow.
With winks of shade and light the slovenly bush
From off the beaten path calls me to turn
I stomp on brittle twigs and logs of mush
I stroke slow swaying fronds of unfurled fern.
Up and down the dance of feed and kill
To music of the robin, jay and gnat
Warble, squawk and buzz. Then all is still
Till shattered by woodpeckers’ rattatat.
Summoned to return, as from a dream
My offering left: a sparkling golden stream.
“You get what you pay for,”
My momma used to say.
But shopping for bargains
Was how she spent her day.
Another early awakening next to the big cedar, a soak under a pink sunrise above the sea, a sitting in Kiakum. The pastoral of solitude: Marvell, Wordsworth, Thoreau.
Before breakfast I call Jan to hear news and report in. She says, “you went for that workshop like an arrow to a target.”
The theme of the morning session is awakening the senses. Kate guides the group meditation. “Move your attention now from posture and breathing to sound: sounds of the body, the room, the outdoors, the silence surrounding the outdoors, and then back step-by-step to the body.” Then we write:
Breathing quiet after settling, throb of heartbeat in the temples, the room silent, distant woodpecker rattles outside, then speakers on inside my head: a buzz, like soft, high pitched crickets, steady current, ringing. Spare me from tinnitus.
Kate says that the senses are the gates to awakening and being present; meditation is about awakening, being present. We can train ourselves to extend that presence and awareness to the rest of the world.
Ruth says that the sense gates are the interpenetration of the self and the world. Breathing involves taking in and putting out to the world; so does writing. Open the sense gates; ground yourself. Move from meditation into writing; when you’re confused or tight while writing, move back into meditation. Sound is essential to writing. Read what you write aloud to make sure it works. Sound bridges the gap between what I think I said and what I really said.
I’m stirred by the teacher’s presence, flickering between girl and wise woman.
The next exercise: let the memory of a sound be the trigger of what you write. Make a list of sounds, choose the most vivid, try to recall it, its beginning, middle and end, the effect on your heart rate. My list: chanting on acid in 1970, her cry, “So Strong,” Appleton Creek Waterfalls, chainsaw and falling tree. The writing:
He pulled the ripcord on the old Homelite. It sputtered and fizzled. Once again, this time harder, still nothing. “Flooded,” he said the to the child from the city who wanted to help with firewood. He pushed back the choke and waited. Then he yanked again. Now the roar filled his ears with pleasure: the fury of a lion he held in submission with bare hands.
Not enough time to tell the rest of the story: his directing her to take the weight off a branch he was sawing from below, the bar lifting as the branch fell, the moving chain touching her soft forearm, the scar still there.
Ruth lectures now from a three-hole binder with typed notes for each session separated by dividers. “If you get bogged down or bored with where the writing is going, stage an intervention. Say ‘What I really want to say is¦’.” Not my problem, I just want to get back to the writing. She moves on to an explanation of synaesthesia, a way to make sensations sound fresher and reads us a poem by Donald Lawler, “With Amy, Listening to the forest.” Very appropriate, but I’m thinking about how to convert my little four elements project into a sonnet. Her talk is interrupted several times by the noise of a rat rapping in the wall. I feel unsettled by the sense that she is struggling to stay in character, no longer priestess but vulnerable colleague. This frees me from a thrall but heightens my empathy. I recall the flush of fatherly love I experienced for her two novels’ pained protagonists.
The next exercise is to go back outdoors and this time write in situ. I’m relieved. My own immediate task is to plausibly describe the growing ends of cedar branches, the destination of water sucked up from roots in the ground. There’s a large boulder just outside Kiakum surrounded by saplings. I scramble up it and find what I’m looking for, “tough top tips.” I sit on the rock and start arranging the sentences on my yellow pad into quatrains, discarding material, redoing lines from the rhyme end backward.
The hours after lunch are unscheduled. I walk to the Sanctuary back behind the orchard.
From the outside it looks like an awkwardly designed set for a hobbit house, but the interior space feels sacred. The thick walls are contoured white plaster, the window frames and beams irregular unmilled wood. The light descends from a transparent cupola at the top of a dome that’s both circular and tilted, creating two focal points–one at the center, the other at an altar extending from the perimeter wall, above which a small window opens on dense forest. I’m here alone. A dozen round pillows and mats are arranged in a circle on the carpeted stone floor. I sit on one for half an hour. This is how it’s supposed to feel.
I walk back through the blooming orchard to the library in the lodge and grapple with the sonnet. By three p.m. it’s finished, the couplet almost writing itself, and in the last minute, an epigram popping out of nowhere. A voice inside says “These could be published!” With beating heart, I walk downstairs and see Ruth in the dining room still in a consult with another workshop member. I imagine she must by now really need a break. Nevertheless I wait until she heads back to her quarters and thrust the yellow pad in her way. She reads the poem and asks me for a copy to post on the workshop website she’s in the process of assembling. Placing my arm around her shoulder, I declare “You’re my inspiration.” She makes her escape, and as I walk down the path to the shore, I’m stopped by the fragrance of wild roses.
I could paddle back to Lund now, I tell myself, trophies in hand. As a reward, I’ll break my five-day computer fast. In the basement of the lodge is an ugly cinderblock cubicle known as the Chat Room. It’s equipped with a few older machines and high speed internet. When I enter, a woman on one of them asks for my help. She can’t download a Word document that she tells me contains some divorce papers that she came here to try to get away from. After I succeed she strokes my arm. I log in to my blog’s posting page and copy out the sonnet, but when I press “publish,” the machine crashes.
I arrive early in Kiakum for our workshop and find Ruth and Kate conferring about their presentation at the upcoming evening program that’s been advertised all over the island. The session begins with reading the products of our afternoon’s labors. The response to my sonnet is muted. The topic moves to publication strategies. Ruth says that blogging is easy to do and a good idea, and that these days self-publishing in hard copy with a company like Lulu or Trafford no longer has the stigma it used to. She reads “Berryman,” a tribute to the suicidal alcoholic poet written by his healthy disciple W.S. Merwin.
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips ¦I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’tyou can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write.
After dinner, Kiakum fills with “Islanders,” the residents of Cortes. Some settled here when we did in Lund, during the late sixties and early seventies. Others are later immigrants of succeeding generations. A number are Hollyhock staff. They seem like invaders to the space we’ve claimed for two days, but of course we are the outsiders and Ruth is more theirs than ours”a celebrity member of a remote community of artists, environmental activists, and back-to-the-landers, akin to the one I belong to peripherally over on the mainland.
Ruth appears energized by the crowd that packs the room. She and Kate are introduced by Dana along with the editor of the island’s arts and ecology magazine, Howl, who thanks her for contributing a poem headlined in the current issue. They explain the format of our workshop and lead everyone in a meditation. Dressed in her monk’s robe, Kate reads some of her own poems”reminiscences of an alienated childhood in New Jersey and elegies for a lost sister”and Ruth presents a section of her powerful essay on Writing and Death that I’d read twice before arriving. The audience is invited to participate in a writing exercise of the kind that we’ve been doing, and most people seem deeply engaged, but I’m pleased that my appointed partner wants to talk about kayaking instead.