Roots and Writing

Roots bone and BTMIt matters where my words take root.

I will write anywhere inspiration hits—on a street corner, in the bathroom or while riding (not driving) in a car. I regularly slip off to Alivar Coffeehouse a few blocks away to do a bit of editing or play with an idea. But when I’m writing about big topics dear to my heart, I need a fertile place where my words can take root.

Big Topics at Midnight was born on the road between Portland Library’s Writing Room, Suena’s Coffee Shop and my home desk. But she took root for six years in a bedroom-turned-writing-studio within Rosegate Condominium #18, where blue walls are covered with art and photographs, my laptop perches on a Value Village desk, a candle flickers at my side and the courtyard’s tulip magnolia moves gently in the wind outside my window.

When I first started writing, I was part of a small group of friends scattered across the country who dreamed about bold experiments in community and economic justice. One of those ideas manifested in the co-ownership of Condo #18 as a place of “Hospice-tality.”

Hospice-tality. Hospice and Hospitality. A welcoming condo that intentionally holds places/times of death, either physical dying or, more often, the crumbling of relationships, dreams, habits and assumptions—in a container of love and community. Jan came to calm her anxiety while simultaneously looking a job. Sally came after a beloved relationship shattered. Nothing like grief to water our souls—and my words—and send our roots down deep.

Our group’s dreams for justice, healing and community wove their way into the pages of Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself. As I dove into my past, I realized that some of my cherished memories needed to be grieved and buried.

For example, my pride in Midland High School’s ease of integration crashed when I realized that it had taken fourteen years and the threat of a federal lawsuit before the community obeyed Brown vs. Board of Education’s ruling. In addition, I was horrified to realize that the way desegregation was implemented abruptly closed Carver High School, robbing the black community of a beloved gathering place and bringing an end to decades of school traditions. Meanwhile, my historically white school’s “Midland Bulldogs” remained strong and vibrant. Condo 18 held me while I ranted at the system and mourned all I hadn’t noticed for so long.

In Condo 18, with pen and paper, I also awoke to a lifelong distrust of my innate feminine, intuitive wisdom and how I, along with much of America, had exalted an intellectual, strategic masculine approach as “the best way to do things.”  I dusted off these newly discovered roots and began to notice how they had grounded my work even before I noticed them.

Sitting at the computer looking out my office window, I struggled with the ways that “Money [had] Made Howard [and me] Stupid.”* Waking up to life as it was around class, gender and race disoriented me. I was grateful to be writing in Condo 18, a community space born from a shared commitment, one created to align heart and actions.

Including actions around economics. Money, I’d discovered, sometimes had prickly and convoluted roots.

Money was part of the rich soil of the Condo 18 experiment, as we sought to grow a new economic paradigm. Each of us who stepped into the experiment donated 10% of our savings, knowing that we would be equal owners even though our invested amounts were vastly different. Extra money was donated to other organizations or people doing exciting new projects rooted in economic justice. When it is time to sell Condo 18, the money will flow out into the world in some creative way.

From outside my window, the tulip magnolia waves to me. I wave back.  She’s doing her work and I’m doing mine. I sit alone at the computer to write, but even here my solitude is held in community. In addition to the co-owners, members of my creative community have also filled my writing studio: Jen Violi, content editor/friend/word genius extraordinaire, Khara Scott-Bey, intuitive illustrator who drew the perfect image for each chapter and Ann Eames, copy editor/master at putting my spelling, grammar and tense quirks into finished words. My writing studio is full even when I am alone.

Just as Condo 18 itself pushes the edges of the cultural notion of independent ownership, my book doesn’t fit into “normal” categories either. It is a Social Change Memoir. Not pushing-the-blocks-around sort of social change, but root level change of the personal, institutional, national and global. Not just my memoir, but also the personal stories of many of my ancestors, the moon, Hectate and the Eight-eyed Steam Girl. Condo 18 and Big Topics at Midnight shoot down roots that refuse to be contained.

Big Topics. Big Change. Big awakenings. Writing Big Topics at Midnight demanded Big support. When the winds blew and threatened to knock me down, my roots held me firm.

I return to my desk, put my hands on the keyboard, plant my feet on the wooden floor and let the words flow. Condo 18 is the ground that supports my writing journey.

It matters where my words take root, and this is ground I can trust.

* A chapter in my book Big Topics at Midnight, page 241.

A Circle of Wisdom #3: Water Speaks

Water spoke to me. In 2005, standing on my family’s ancestral land in North Carolina and deep in my imagination, I felt the gathering of rocks and plants, moon and water, people and animals. Each had come from ages past to share their wisdom with me.

Rainstorm

I first hear the drops at a distance. A gentle dance of water on leaves. Rain begins to fall from the sky, one puffy white cloud in an otherwise clear expanse. I laugh. For the past week I have been hurrying around trying to avoid the rain in North Carolina. Hurry to put up my tent before the rain starts, hurry to take it down so it stays dry, wait to drive until after the storm passes. I acted as if rain was some sort of enemy. Here, sitting around this council fire, the rain again finds me. This time I relax back and let the drops splash on my warm skin, a welcome relief from the heat.

A voice comes with the splashing of the drops as they land in the clay pot at the edge of our circle. “I am water. Most of this earth is water. You plants and animals are mostly water, just like me. Long, long ago the waters gathered together and splashed on this barren land. From my undulating womb was birthed the beginning of all of life on this small planet. The water that flows through your veins, bathes your tissues, flows over the earth, and falls from the sky is the same water that was present in Life’s birthing. Water that was, water that is, water that always will be.

 In and out of the skies, the oceans and your bodies; I long to be on the move.  Washing, cleansing, bathing, freshening.

Water is one of the primary gifts that brings life on this little planet. My free flowing was intended to wash on everyone, without cost.

In recent years I am being robbed of my gift to the world. Now in too many places I am dirty and dangerous before I even touch the ground. Far too often I am filled with poisons by the time I flow into the river, killing the very life that I am entrusted to surround and nourish. Even in the wildness of the ocean, I too often carry the death of spilled oil, toxins and garbage along my waves. Instead of providing life-giving water I am too often forced to carry contamination. Now many of my raindrops are tears of grief.

In the end, I will survive. If this abuse continues, you humans and many of you plants and animals may die out. 

You have forgotten. How you treat me, waters of the earth and waters of your bodies, is how you treat yourself. How you see me is how you see yourself.  We are not separate. We all flow from the sacred heart to be of service to all of life. All of creation joins my plea to you humans; open your eyes and see anew with gratitude the gift that flows from the beginning to the end. Step into the river, into the living water, as part of the family of life. I want to flow abundantly and again offer life to all.”

Silence returns to the circle, broken only by a short burst before the rain ends. Long after the rain has stopped, drops continue to fall from the forest leaves. The trees know how to relish a good rain for a long time.

This writing is excerpted from “A Circle of Wisdom” that flowed from an experience near my family’s ancestral land in North Carolina and the depths of my imagination. I’ll share parts of the wisdom I “heard”—from water, rocks, plants and animals—in this blog series.

A Circle of Wisdom #2: Rocks Speak

Brenda Wills, photographer
Brenda Wills, photographer

Rocks spoke to me. Standing on my family’s ancestral land in North Carolina in 2006 and deep in my imagination, I felt the gathering of rocks and plants, moon and water, people and animals. Each had come from ages past to share their wisdom with me.

A rock near the fire begins to vibrate and a dull glow shines from within. This rock, a mixture of quartz, sulphur, and basalt, begins to speak, “We remember. Some of us remember the molten lava that spewed liquid rocks from the center of the newborn earth. Others of us hold the memory of the ages pressed into our layers. We have experienced the power of creation and fire at the heart of the world. 

We have seen much and have been deep within this land for billions of years. Some of us are strong, some soft and pliable. Each of us offering what is needed, in function, beauty and healing.

Animals, without knowing it, come to the place where we are resting to receive our healing power. Plants grow in different ways in different places due to our energy from deep within the earth. Humans over the thousands of years have made use of us and been grateful for our varied gifts.”

A strong voice interrupts,  “Gold here. Humans singled me out and have been particularly grateful for me. But this honor too often led to greed rather than respect … with earth breaking results.

 Near here, in Dahlonega, GA, white settlers found me. That was the final impetus to remove the Cherokee from this valuable land.”

Mining by white men’s companies started immediately. In time, mining technology sped up our extraction so money could flow quicker. High-pressure water was turned on the land washing away tons of earth and snapping trees like twigs. The earth was gashed and ripped away as my veins were laid bare. A few men become rich and the rest of us died a little more.

Lust for us declined when oil and gas became valued above all else, including life. Whenever minerals, rocks or crystals are quickly extracted from this earth, the land is slashed and the tailings discarded. The gashes are horrifying.”  The earth beneath my feet shutters with the memory. Gold is silent again.

The rock in our midst continues,  “But the tragedy is that the full gift of us minerals, rocks and crystals is usually overlooked today. We are treated as irrelevant hunks of earth.

It is too often forgotten that we who touch the Earth’s core, streak through the mountains, and lie in wait under the prairies have so much to offer. 

We have been taken and used. We helped a few get rich or build things. Meanwhile the earth lies with her wounds ignored and our healing energy is considered primitive nonsense.

You know and use my quartz in your instruments, but her energetic ability to help support harmony between you humans and the universe is ignored. Many have figured out how to use us for building things but few humans around the world remember how to listen to rocks, crystals and minerals anymore. This forgetting comes just at a point where our memory and our power are most needed by you. 

 Listen.  You are sitting on a firm foundation.  We hold the memory of creation. We can help guide the way and heal you. Listen and receive. It is time to come home to us, the rocks of the earth.”

In a few months, Howard and I are traveling to the Grand Canyon the wild, red rocks of Utah. Something happens to me when I stand on ancient rocks. I can more easily slip out of my mind, and into the now. I hear the wisdom of the rocks that spoke at the Council of Wisdom that gathered in my imagination, the rocks that adorn my writing space and the rocks that hide or loom hight all around the world around me.

This writing is excerpted from “A Circle of Wisdom” that flowed from an experience near my family’s ancestral land in North Carolina and the depths of my imagination. I’ll share parts of the wisdom I “heard”—from water, rocks, plants and animals—in this blog series.

A Circle of Wisdom: The Moon Speaks

Full MoonI spent a hot and stormy night in Franklin, North Carolina in 2006. In the sweltering afternoon before the storm, I walked from the center of town, down the hill beside the road busy with traffic, past the auto shop and the Carpet store, across from the Hot Spot gas station. Nestled in this unlikely place was a big, grassy area mound at least twice my height and as big as my living room.

Later that night in the midst of the storm, an unexpected council began to gather seen only by the eyes of my heart. Over the next month, the fullness of the council came to me and spoke. Despite our different “languages” we communicated without difficulty.

The plump full moon spoke first from her far off perch.

Millions of years ago, something wild and filled with Love pulsed through the vast empty space. At just the right moment all of the elements floating in the abyss were irresistibly pulled together into a giant fireball. The explosion consumed everything and filled all that was. This sacred fire burned for nearly a million years. From this fiery beginning billions and billions of galaxies formed, including ours. On your planet swirled the perfect combination of elements warmed by the sun, and a wild diversity of life was birthed. Stardust is woven into everything, into you and into me. While the primeval soup of the universe churned, this planet and everything on it was pulled together through the attraction of gravity.  Throughout it all a voice full of delight cried out, ‘It is GOOD, it is VERY GOOD!”

            All is held together by a dance of attraction. This includes my round body, the rocks, the earth and each of your bodies. There is a pull within our atoms, our molecules and your living cells that keeps us all dancing together. In that way, in a way of mystery beyond all telling of it, this entire universe is held together by attraction. You can call it gravity, if you prefer. Call it whatever you want. 

In truth, we are held together by Love.

All of us, from rocks, to trees, to me, to you humans, we have all that we need. We are and we live, and that is enough. You humans, set in the middle of this ever-creating cosmos, have something additional.  You were given the ability to witness and reflect on the beauty and mystery and glory of creation. That is a great gift, but not an easy one.  It would be impossible for you to carry the responsibility of witnessing the beauty and shouldering the crucial stewardship alone. But you were never meant to do it alone. The Love at the center of it all guides the way.  The rest of creation is ready to help. 

If you humans will only ask and listen.”

Moon is quiet for a moment. We all know that humans have so rarely asked or listened, especially in the last few hundred years. All around us creation groans in sighs too deep for words.

Soon Moon continues, “This sky that looks bright under the sun’s rays by day and dark with twinkles by night is the powerful Mother of all. The Mother cosmos exploded in birth when touched with the Loving divine. Earth, and all of you in this council gathered around the fire, are filled with all that is needed for abundant life. It is an exquisite gift to all sisters and brothers of creation.

Don’t forget. We are all one family, part of a vast universe held together with Love.” 

I shiver in amazement at the breadth and wildness of my cosmic home. I have spent most of my life trying to shrink the universe into something small and manageable. I had pictured the world like a small globe, the universe something I could hold in my hand.

It was easier that way.

It was also a lie.

… It is now January 2014. In these times when it feels like so much is crashing around us, it is good for me to remember the deeper truth–we are all held together by Love.

This writing is excerpted from “A Circle of Wisdom” that flowed from an experience near my family’s ancestral land in North Carolina and the depths of my imagination. I’ll share parts of the wisdom I “heard”—from water, rocks, plants and animals—in this blog series.

Fracking

How do I begin to write about something as overwhelming as fracking?

I have good reasons why I’ve been silent on paper so far. Swamped with Big Topics at Midnight and opening Big Topics Conversations. Overwhelmed whenever I remember that right now rock formations are being fractured through blasts of chemical-laden water in order to free up trapped natural gas and oil. Troubled that this is happening in gas wells where I own a .01562501 royalty interest.

What am I to do with a paradox that wide?

Sell it and walk away, clean? Just like I could give away all of my family money and walk away, clean?

What is “clean”?

If I sell it, the practice will still continue and I will still be who I am. I won’t be absolved from responsibility. One way that money has made my thinking stupid* over the years is that part of me wants to escape from my complicity in a system I disagree with by pushing away my family financial legacy. I’ve tried to do the same thing with the privilege I receive merely because my skin is white. But I am still the same me.

Don’t get me wrong. I have sold stocks and mutual funds that aren’t in alignment with my values. But something more is required here.

I first heard about fracking in 2006 when I was visiting my grandfather’s ranch on a pilgrimage back to my homeland of Texas (where I am now a partial owner of the “mineral rights” but not “surface rights”). The journey was one part of a larger pilgrimage into my ancestral history to Germany, North Carolina, Texas and, now, Oregon during the writing of Big Topics at Midnight. I set out on those trips when I realized I’d spent far too much of my life trying to cut out parts of myself that embarrassed me. Knowing that I need all of me to live the life I was born to live, I returned to the land of my family hoping to find clarity, healing and right action.

On the ranch seven years ago, I knew nothing of the actual geological impact of this drilling practice. Nevertheless, it felt to me as if fracking was cutting out huge holes in the body of Mother Earth while spewing toxic chemicals into our farmland and drinking water. As far as I could tell, fracking waste would be added to nuclear waste, piling up for future generations to deal with.

It didn’t make sense to me.

Gas prices are currently low. If we frack now, what will happen when high prices tempt us?

Is there no end to what humans will do to make money and exert control over the natural world? This is an escalating conquest that we won’t win.

My work is to explore and participate in the shifting of Big Topics like money, gender, race, power, justice, generational healing and soul. These topics are at the core, like the magma at the center of the Earth. Hot, molten topics. How we are in them—personally as well as in families, communities, organizations, systems, nationally, globally—is the underpinning of our decision making and values. My focus is rightly there.

Yet I can’t ignore fracking. It is hurting our shared homeland. In addition, it is part of the flow of money that pays my bills, funded the writing and now marketing of Big Topics at Midnight, finances my travels to open these conversations and is the source of my financial support of three organizations dear to my heart—Be Present, Inc., Wisdom & Money, and Community Wholeness Venture.

My work continues. Fracking continues. There are only so many hours in a day. I continue my spiritual practice of standing in partnership with a diversity of people right in the midst of the deep gaps that cut through our world.

Giving words to this hot topic is the next step on my journey.  I’m listening for guidance about the following step.

* I play with the ways that “Money Made [my husband] Howard Stupid” in Big Topics at Midnight, page 241 after he made that comment about himself. From time to time, money has indeed made Howard’s and my thinking stupid.  The important thing is how we work with that before it translates into stupid actions.

Two Peas in a Pod

Lychee Tree
Lychee Tree

People assumed that Big Topics at Midnight would want to have her picture taken beside an exotic umbrella drink with the Hawaiian ocean in the background. That may still happen, but I soon discovered that she was much more interested in being photographed while leaning against trees.

Like Mother, like daughter.

Neither one of us is a tree hugger. We are tree leaners. Energy begins to flow when the back of our hearts connects with these magnificent creations with their roots deep into the ground and branches that reach for the heavens.

She and I have another connection to trees: our profound gratitude for the paper that comes from the gift of a tree’s body. We know that some prefer technology and pontificate on the ecological benefits of reading things on computers and “printing” books on the screen. The two of us don’t argue with the logic, but little compares with the sensuous feel of a book with paper pages—a gift from the heartwood.

Since I often tired of sitting endless hours at a computer screen, editing and playing with her when she was a wee book-in-process, the stages of her gestation were printed on page after page for me to edit. I bet Big Topics at Midnight is grateful that I continued to work on her story so she wasn’t presented to the world in any of the multiple drafts that were left behind…

Leaning is our way of saying Thank You to the trees around us, for their beauty when standing firmly planted in the Earth and their beauty as a piece of paper.

Banyon Tree
Banyon Tree
100 year old Mango Tree
100 year old Mango Tree
Monkeypod Tree
Monkeypod Tree

Moon: Memoir #3

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????As I wrote Big Topics at Midnight, the moon waxed and waned across the pages. She was silently shinning over events in the lives of my family:

My grandmother six generations back, the newly widowed Barbara, sat with her newborn and noted with gratitude, Mary Lou and the little sliver of a moon shinin’ outside my window call me back to life. (pg 21)

Elizabeth, my grandmother five generations back, reflected on the night her life turned around, Under the moonless sky filled with twinklin’ stars, my heart broke open like the ice on Tennessee mountain rivers come spring. (pg 181)

Looking up at the moon, I find myself within a universe wider than I can imagine.  For me, as for Barbara and Elizabeth in their stories, Lady Moon brings the fullness of the universe close to our hearts, setting life’s crises and joys within the cosmic time frame.

My book reflects that sometimes the moon was a metaphor for far away places or life beyond death:

Great-Great-Grandmother Joanna stayed in the family homeland of Belgium when her infant grandson John and his parents emigrated to the US. As she waved and cried, She knew that soon my parents and I would sail out of her life to a place so far away it might as well be the moon. (pg 16)

John and I are now free to Tango on the clouds, tap on the stars, and turn cartwheels on the moon, recalls Grandmother Ann as she and her husband dance across the heavenly skies after their deaths.  (pg 343)

Since the moon has a front row seat to comings and goings here on Earth, I started listening to what she might say for herself. I figured she had a unique perspective that she’d be willing to share:

You, like me, can reflect light effortlessly. Without urgency, moon told to me as I held my newborn Laura in my arms.  (pg 98)

One night Moon, taking to those who gathered on a North Carolina Cherokee mound in my imagination, said … In that way, in a mystery beyond all telling, this entire universe is held together by attraction. You can call it gravity if you prefer. Call it whatever you want. (pg 294)

Lady Moon is beautiful and, like a women, moves through her cycle each month. We all watch our one moon rising and falling, from fat and round to a thin crescent, each night that she shows her face. She rises over my life as she rose over my ancestors nearer the dawn of time and will rise over generations yet unborn. The moon is a reminder of the unity we share across geography and time.

Listen closely to that “woman in the moon” tonight.

This is third in a series (following Getting Naked and Nature) about the diversity of the “memoirs” held within Big Topics at Midnight.

Nature: Memoir #2

TreeFor much of my life I agreed with Shakespeare that “all the world’s a stage,” a backdrop scene for life. Our house was built on the earth, and roads were the means to explore places near and far.  For me, real life happened mostly indoors.

My language for natural activity included reading, writing, visiting with friends, planning, organizing, creating, and studying. Definitely not hiking or sports or camping. As a child I didn’t want to stop reading Gone with the Wind and get out of the car to see the Grand Canyon. I didn’t like to sweat. I didn’t like it to be hot…or cold. Living on the edge, pushing my limits, happened in the areas of thought, spirit and creativity, not on the side of a mountain.

One year into the writing of Big Topics at Midnight, I was still repeating my well-worn description of myself saying, “I like nature through a window.”

Needless to say, it was quite a surprise when I was clear that I was to return to the land of my North Carolina ancestors. Having no clue what to do once I was standing on that land (now owned by others), I asked Ann Linnea, a woman at home in the wild, what I should do once I got there.

Her answer was simple: “Don’t try to do anything. Just look around, find a tree, and lean back against her trunk. Listen with an open heart. Then you’ll know.”

I started leaning against trees in my neighborhood in preparation for the pilgrimage and haven’t stopped. Pausing for a few moments, back against the prickly bark, my body relaxes as I feel my deep connection to this earthly home with her wild and diverse nature.

In the last six years, I’ve regularly leaned against trees. Plants and animals, sun and rain, air and soil help me keep perspective that I am a woman of Earth as well as Spirit.  Memories have returned about a favorite tree from almost every place I’ve lived—the Mimosa in Abilene, Texas; the Elm in Midland, Texas; the Blue Spruce in Klamath Falls, Oregon; the Tulip Magnolia outside my writing office. Obviously, I was more connected than I’d thought.

I can’t write a memoir for the Earth, but her story intertwines mine. I am deeply grateful to have wakened to the bigger perspective that nature on this third planet from our sun has offered me all of my life.

This is second in a series (following Getting Naked) about the diversity of the “memoirs” held within Big Topics at Midnight.

Whale Blows, then Dives Deep

The moment my eyes open

the old story—

inflated, puffed up and glowing—

shatters.

I sit with a heart full of dread

grief

sorrow

the ache pours out my eyes and belly.

I want to rush ahead.

How can I fix it?

Make it OK again?

Make this ache go away?

Escape merely tightens the clinch,

lets it all decay underground again.

One option is all that remains—

wait, sit in the ache.

Slowly

morning light returns.

The big picture emerges from the shadows.

The moment spreads across time and space.

A blue whale blows then dives deep down

into the abyss of the Monterey Bay,

making me remember

the present moment held in the middle of eternity.

What Cannot be Found at Home

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When we surround ourselves with people just like ourselves, our world shrinks. Our options narrow.

Though life felt manageable when the world was tucked into my hands, too much was left out. I wanted a more spacious home, a world that stretched around the globe and across the generations.

On that expansive journey, I stepped outside of the confines of my white-skinned neighborhood and the American Dream of climbing the traditional ladder of success. I heard stories from perspectives I’d never considered. I saw injustice and compassion that had always been present outside of my field of vision. I discovered that wealth didn’t have to be soulless, that diversity enriched my life and that abundance could take on many forms.

This is the topic I explored in my latest YouTube video, posted on my website.

How big would you like your world to be?