Category: Memoir

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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.

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Getting Naked: Memoir #1

Nancy at desk #2+I’m not fond of taking my clothes off in public. St. Francis did it when he renounced his father’s lifestyle and business and ran off into the wilderness. But I’m no saint.

And yet I felt led to write one of the most revealing of books—a memoir. Not just one memoir, like a normal person should write. But multiple, parallel memoirs: personal, family/ancestral, “my people” (white skin, wealthy, Christian, woman, American, and Texan) and even the moon has her say. Most of these push the definition of memoir, yet all come from my experience and find their “voice” through me. All of these “memoirs” speak with an eye to supporting change from the personal to the global levels.

It was a writing task, to be sure. I’ve always written, but writing a book required lots of learning and relearning the craft of words as well as putting myself at the mercy of great editors. Nevertheless, learning how to write a book was the easy part.

Diving back into the nooks and crannies of my life and the world around me was the demanding part. I looked at things I thought were true about myself and the world around me.  I was humbled to see how often I was POSITIVE, yet wrong.

Standing in the light, wide awake and seeing things for the first time, was demanding.  Sometimes I hid under my mother’s blue afghan. Often I doubted I was up to the task of learning and change. In the end, however, I surrendered, naked as a baby.

That process continues every day.

In her exploration of the fairy tale “Vasalisa the Wise” from Women who Run with the Wolves (page 108), Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about these demands of living an conscious life:

“… watching and comprehending of the negative forces and imbalances both inward and outward. Secondly, it causes striving in the gathering up of will in order to do something about what one sees, be it for good, or balance, or to allow something to die.

“… we clearly see all sides of ourselves and others, both the disfigured and the divine and all conditions in between.

“Yet, with this light the miracles of deep beauty in the world and in humans come to consciousness. With this penetrating light one can see past the bad action to the good heart, one can espy the sweet spirit crushed beneath hatred, one can understand much instead of being perplexed only.”

In the end, getting naked through a memoir was the only structure I found powerful enough to dive deeply into race, class and gender in order to support the great turning that is so needed in our world today.

I’d love to hear your bare stories too. Too much is at stake for us to continue to hide beneath layers and layers of silence.

First in a series of five blogs about memoir.

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A Year With Big Topics at Midnight

Reading with full moonBig Topics at Midnight and I stepped out into the world together under last August’s Blue Moon in Portland, Oregon. Yesterday, the two of us juggled justice, soul and our world with thirty amazing people in Littleton, Massachusetts, on the afternoon of June’s full moon. In between these two events, we’ve been opening conversations together in Redwood City, Atlanta, Oakland, Portland, Washington DC, Eastern Shore Virginia, Burlingame, Newport, Toronto, New York City –sixteen different events in seven US states and one Canadian province.

After seven years of the intimacy of writing, where the book and I were hard to separate, Big Topics at Midnight was born into the world. She didn’t feel like a baby, more like a teenager who had her own thoughts and her own life but still wanted me to stick around, not too close but always ready to pay for her adventures.

The only trouble was that I knew more about writing than I did about marketing. Websites and blogs, YouTubes and interviews, Facebook and Ebooks, reviews and events… the list of things to learn seemed endless while time had very demanding limits. I’ve felt incompetent more times than I care to admit, only to have it shift to amazement that I could learn more than I ever thought possible.

The first few months of our outside-my-writing-studio-work were filled with a critical question—what am I trying to do with Big Topics at Midnight? Is my focus selling books? Am I opening conversations?

I am obviously trying to sell books. I didn’t order 1,000 all for myself. Since a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the books is split between three organizations dear to my heart—Be Present, Inc., Harvest Time and Community Wholeness Venture—I want to sell as many books as possible.

My primary interest, however, is to open the conversations. A few of the questions that have guided these “book events” are as follows:

How might waking up to your own heart radically transform your life?

How might waking up to injustice bring you to the front lines of this ripe moment in history?

Before us: ancestors. After us: generations yet unborn. How is your life impacted by a context that wide?

Parents warned us to avoid hot topics in polite conversation. Now, our silence is harming our earth, relationships and souls. Are you ready to speak?

The world churns as the old ways crumble. In the midst of it all, we long for justice and our hearts yearn to guide the way. Are you ready to exploring life lived in the midst of such a wide paradox?

The Spirit of giving? Simple.  The process of giving? Complicated. Justice demands thoughtful attention.

These book events were are offered to facilitate people jumping from my story into their own lives. My hope was that we’d catch a glimpse of how together we can wake up and live more boldly, knowing that everyone, even our enemies, is our neighbor. Our ancestors at our back and generations yet unborn are encouraging us, calling us, pushing us into the dance of life that is just and filled with soul right in the middle of the gaps that divide us.

None of us has to do it all.  Workaholism and striving for perfection are part of the problem. The divisions are deep.  Hard work is involved, but so is delight and joy.  Generations yet unborn are waiting for us all to fully engage in the dance of life.

Last July was spent with final editing and waiting.  With the book at Sheridan Printers, I had a month to contemplate what lay ahead. Now I return to a month of slowing down and listening deeply. What does the upcoming year hold for Big Topics and me?

I don’t know.  But I am eager to find out.

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Thank you Dad

I always wanted to please my Dad. But he wasn’t much of a little kid person, and I was full of life and questions and energy. I also wanted to please.  It wouldn’t have taken much from Dad to shut me down–a short shout and I would quickly learn what behaviors to avoid around him. I did my “be careful what I say and do around Dad so he won’t get upset with me” dance  until I was in my mid 20. 

Mom and Dad had come up to see Howard and I just after I’d sent out a family letter saying that we were considering joining the Peace Corps or returning to graduate school.  Mom went to battle trying to convince us that the Peace Corp would be a stupid thing to do.  Dad listened most of the evening, then said the words that sparked our new relationship. Nine years later, after Mom died, Dad’s and my relationship deepened even more.

Thank you Dad.  In your eighty years of living and in your three weeks of dying, you gave me profound gifts.

Ed Mathys, age 57, 1979*

On that night in Boise as you shared your dreams and ideas, I glimpsed a pattern. Men in our family have loved strong women, and then tried to tame them again and again.

In Boise, I realized I’m done trying to be in charge.

Sue can march into wars if she’d like. Not me.

Why did I think life was a contest? That I’d shine brighter if you faded and became quiet like me? If I step back in time I see you were a normal three-year-old, growing up. Not a threat, just full of life.

If I could do it again … Actually, I did. Twenty-two years after I squelched you, I supported your desire to do something wild.

It’s never too late. When you heard my heart, the healing began.

Excerpted from Big Topics at Midnight, page 73, 74.

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It All Depends on My Perspective

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. This morning, the remainder of nine book-related events before the end of June set off my internal alarm system, waking me before dawn.

Sitting in the Mercy Retreat Center chapel a few hours later, my perception shifted.

How many people have the privilege of returning to places, people and organizations that have been the source of a lifetime of wake-up calls and gentle support?

I walked that trip in my head and on paper during the writing of Big Topics at Midnight. Pouring over diaries, journals and little tidbits tucked into dark corners of my memory gave me a new perspective on my life and Life in general. Now I am physically returning to the places and relationships where these moments occurred.

Yesterday I was with twenty-two others here at Mercy Center as we explored wake-up calls that have filled our bones and flowed from the Spirit.  Most came because they’d heard about my event through Mercy Center—much as I was drawn to some of the events I’d attended here for the last twenty-nine years. But some were important people in my life; Pam, my first spiritual director; Bill and Peter, pastor and priest; Kate, an old friend; Ann and Paul, part of a now-ended Harvest Time circle; Holly and Bill, newer friends.

This morning I got an email from Andrea at the Presentation Prayer Center in Fargo, North Dakota where I will be doing a couple of events in October. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I traveled across town almost every week for the seven years we lived in Fargo to gather there for my covenant group’s meeting, a class or spiritual direction.

Following unexpected guidance while writing my book, I discovered the power of returning to the land where important things had happened—both ancestral and personal. I now realize that my book travels are the next step of that pilgrimage.

What had felt overwhelming is also a grace-filled gift. An “overly full calendar” holds the opportunity to be in places and with people who have been part of my formation while also meeting new acquaintances and having the transformative conversations I long for.

My heart overflows with gratitude. I feel like the luckiest person on the planet.

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Story as Wake-Up Call

Outside, the stars twinkled. Inside, the sanctuary was dark. In the back aisle near the church doors, we heard the quick striking of flint and steel and flame burst forth as the charcoal fire was lit.  Incense and smoke billowed. Words I’ve heard every Easter Vigil, were spoken, “On this most holy night, in which our Lord Jesus passed over from death to life, the Church invites her members, dispersed throughout the world, to gather in vigil and prayer.”  The large Pascal candle was lit, and soon the flame was shared from person to person until the whole sanctuary was aglow.

This was part of the big story, a central spiritual story of my faith tradition, held within the Episcopal liturgy. These sacred stories are shared over and over again until they work themselves into our bones.

Easter morning I slipped on the stairs and jammed my right knee, flaring up a forty-five year old injury from my short stint in a junior high school ballet class. Hobbling around on a day of resurrection seemed like a strange way to participate in the celebration, but it was the best I could muster.

Life is a weaving of stories. Mine. Yours. Sacred stories. Daily stories. From past to future, cosmic to global to intimate. From the mouths of strangers to enemies to beloved partners. Stories keep our edges supple and remind us who we are and whose we are.

I’ve been playing with technology and stories that emerged from my book, Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself.  Today, on Easter Monday, I am announcing the addition of my first YouTube video on the home page of my website.  It is the first of five. The words are excerpted from an audio interview, with the images by book illustrator Khara Scott-Bey and a variety of photographs.

Enjoy. And continue to tell your stories.  Our future depends on it.

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I Couldn’t Do It

I couldn’t follow their advice.

Yet the question kept coming, “Who is the target audience for your book and for your book events and workshops?” I was told it would be primarily middle-aged women like me. Probably white like me too.

Something inside me yelled, “NO.” That narrowness of audience would perpetuate the very problem I was working so hard to address.

If story is to have the power to change the world, it needs to be shared across the lines that have divided us—gender, skin color, class, religion and age, to name a few. How else are we going to know about a diversity of experiences in the reality of our world today if we don’t share our story, and listen to others’ stories, as broadly as possible?

It might be true that women would be more comfortable reading my book or engaging in conversations about it. Rather than an intellectual and at-a-distance analysis, I dove into creativity, play, other voices and deeply personal sharing. I had no interest in throwing out intellect and logic—that is found in my work also—but I was passionate about the need for us all to use a wide variety of tools and ways of knowing. Our off-balance world was built on the foundation of white patriarchy,  and it needs diversity if we are to survive, much less thrive.

My intended audience for Big Topics at Midnight is human beings on the planet today. Likewise, I want to read and listen and dance with a wide diversity of other people’s stories. We each hold a piece of the truth that is needed for the great turning.

Today I came back to what I always knew—this book was written for people. My lack of a narrow target audience may not help me to sell Big Topics at Midnight, but it is true to my heart and mind, and that is the only rulebook I want to follow.

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Not at Memoir

I didn’t want to write a memoir! I tried every other form I could, yet each one fell short. Stubbornly, I kept searching for anything-but-memoir.

I knew that an academic exploration of the big topics couldn’t bring the level of transformation I was seeking. I also knew that some of my experiences would be needed to illustrate my point. But surely, I told myself, essays sprinkled with a few stories would be enough.

In the end, memoir was the only structure strong enough to carry all that is held in Big Topics at Midnight. Ironically, it wasn’t just one memoir—my ancestors showed up wanted their stories included too.

Memoir kept my exploration personal. No generalities or “people should” or finger pointing. I had to keep diving back into my own life to wake up again and again to what I saw and didn’t see, what belief I assumed was true that was, in fact, true and what wasn’t. Little details of memories gave huge information—for instance noticing that the fact we had called our black maid “Mary” and not “Mrs. Henderson” said volumes from the lips of a good little girl who ALWAYS called adults by Mr. or Mz. (Texas slang for Mrs. or Miss.)

The more I saw of my life and my assumptions, and the more feelings that got stirred up, the more I had to stop and do my own inner work to bring my actions in line with my heart and values. I had to change.

I had to learn new tools to do this demanding work. I am skilled in the methods affirmed by school and home—logic, rational thought and hard work. Those were helpful, but proved woefully inadequate for the task of waking up to the ways race, class and gender had become tangled and divisive in my own mind and in the world around me. And the old ways were definitely inadequate in helping me to access my intuitive wisdom, learning to listen to my body, the earth under my feet, creativity or Spirit. I had to re-remember the more feminine ways of knowing that I had long ago judged as weak and tried to shove to the side.

Sometimes the very things I fight are the most valuable. When will I ever learn?

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The Knife and Incompetence

I felt like I’d been under the surgeon’s knife while simultaneously serving as the surgical nurse without adequate training. I preferred feeling competent, in charge and in no need of deep surgery.

Big Topics at Midnight and I were separate, but I hadn’t yet been able to let her have the teen-aged freedom she’d prefer. The mother bear in me roared when she faced the knife.

Part of me knew that the reconstructive operation required to transform this richly formatted and illustrated book/baby into an ebook was an opportunity to offer it in a form that would delight many readers. Yet part of me wailed and fought every step of the way. I didn’t know how to participate in the process, and I hated feeling like an incompetent mother.

I couldn’t even figure out what questions to ask to get the full sweep of what I needed to change. Yes, I could include illustrations but they must be in-line (translated to mean without text wrapping around the photographs). Each drawing had to be a certain size (i.e. removed, “pixel” and “dpi” requirements followed, then reinserted in the text). I could have illustrations or photographs, but not too many (130 illustrations and over 50 photographs was WAY over the limit). I was free to use two different standard fonts (of course, mine weren’t standard, and it turned out using only one font was best). Not to mention issues with block quotes and…

Some of this angst felt familiar. Waking up to rules of the game that were different than I’d learned along the way. Letting go of how I believed a book “ought” to look. Struggling to find ease with the disorienting process of continually learning something new.

I thrashed. I complained. I tossed and turned in the night. But I learned, once again, to keep walking anyway. Finding people to help along the way. Trusting the guidance that came. Releasing regret that I didn’t know this or that earlier, that I could have saved time or money or frustration if only I’d known ____ sooner. Remembering that feeling incompetent wasn’t the end of the world.

Big Topics at Midnight, the book with wild diversity in art, words, layout and fonts is still available, untouched by the surgeon’s knife. Big Topics at Midnight, the ebook with wild technological options of adjusting font size and format while holding a library of books tucked in your backpack, will soon be available.

Waking up is not for the faint of heart, whether around the big topics or computer details or simply getting out of bed and walking into a day filled both with mystery and the known.

As the sun rises on this nearly completed ebook project, I remember—despite the knife and feeling like an idiot, it’s been an amazing journey. And Big Topics at Midnight can stand strong without my help.

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Celebration at the Gate

The blue moon and Big Topics at Midnight came out within twelve hours of each other.

In the middle of the reading last Thursday night, one of the friends who had gathered to celebrate the official coming out of Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself pointed out a large window in St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church’s parish hall and called our attention to the bright full moon. In a room filled with old and new friends, family, the palpable spirits of my parents, grandparents and other ancestors and friends who couldn’t physically make it to the party, my life’s story was connected to the far away moon. It seemed fitting.

August 30, 2012 was a gateway moment for me and Big Topics at Midnight. Seven years of writing and editing, and two months of printing and preparing my website and beginning my blog were officially over. That part of my journey with Big Topics has closed. Finished. Done.

For years, I dreaded the next phase, commonly called marketing. I have had no experience in this aspect of promoting a book. Resource books packed full of ideas about getting my book out into the world were, and still are, overwhelming.

Then I began to remember. Every step of the way, I’d been guided, supported and excited about what was unfolding. Sometimes it was historical research, such as finding more information about the general that led my ancestor Jacob into war in 1775—where, who and why they fought. Sometimes it was my own shame that boiled and bubbled and had to be navigated before I could continue to write. Sometimes it was a paragraph that started when an opening line came to me first thing in the morning and flowed for hours before I could stop to get my first cup of tea. I trusted that the marketing and promotion phase of the book would unfold in the same way.

And now this phase is beginning to open up with ease. I know I want to work primarily through networks of friends and organizations. The path ahead is getting clearer. Good thing, because I’m already on it.

Signing Big Topics at Midnight for Ron, my brother-in-law

I may still be in the dark about all the steps I need to take in the upcoming months and years. And the Earth is trembling by the crumbling of unsustainable and unjust economies and structures. Here at this gate, it is midnight.

And yet the night sky also holds the moon and the stars. Civilization’s flickering lights can block the light of the cosmos from our sight, but the light remains that the darkness cannot overcome.

Spirit and Earth. Moon and a book. Personal and global. Big Topics at Midnight is the story of one small life—mine—and, as you remember and tell your story, we can support each other as we wake up and walk together. Shared stories hold transformative power strong enough to change the world.

I am on the other side of the gate now. My book is no longer exclusively mine. She has a life of her own. I have some remaining responsibilities,  big ones, but we are on a different journey now. Ideas are bubbling. People are stepping in to help show the way. The next part of this grand adventure has begun.

Thank you. Help. Amen.