For the past few years I've been working on a collection of essays that explore spirituality and the power of place to bridge the gap between worlds visible and invisible. I haven't written much about this kind of thing online, but it's a huge part of who I am and what I do.
I'd been thinking about how to share pieces of this with you when serendipity showed up. Helen, of the oh-so-lovely website Dixon Hill, asked me to contribute to "Changing Places," a guest post series about the power of place to change us. I was thrilled to contribute.
I'm being a bit facetious in the title of this post when I call my place-based, spiritual-seeker writing my "real" writing, because that implies that the other writing I do (here and elsewhere) isn't real, and that's not true at all. I put pieces of myself into everything I write. I care about all of it, and it's all real. It's just that this other stuff -- the stuff I haven't shared much online -- sits at the center of my being. It's not exactly more real than other things I write, but it definitely reaches higher and deeper, and requires more of me than anything else I've been working on. And then there's that part where I intend the collected essays to be published as a book, which is a more solid, "real" goal, I suppose.
My writing for this collection has languished in the past year. I have a handful of essays that are complete, which I've sent out into the world to look for homes in literary journals. But I haven't been writing new material for the collection. The book has been struggling to show me what it wants to be. Or, perhaps more accurately, I've been struggling to hear what it's telling me and to follow where it wants to go. But I had an epiphany while working on the snippet that I share for Helen's "Changing Places," and I'm feeling re-energized. I suddenly saw the project in a new light, and the puzzle pieces that have been floating around hazy and confused finally clicked into place so that I could make sense of them.
(The book has a title. Shall I tell it to you? Okay. For All We Learned, The Sea) (It comes from a song by Dar Williams.)
For my "Changing Places" guest post I wrote about my experience in the Scottish Highlands more than a decade ago.
New Year's, 1999. Four Americans living in the U.K. We gathered in Edinburgh, celebrated Hogmanay, and headed north.
Night drops early there in winter. From the backseat of the car I peered out the cold glass at dark-on-dark. Sections of the horizon deepened like giant, mounded cutouts into another realm. We had reached the high land. I listened to what I could not see: an ancient song thrumming in the octaves below my breath. (Keep reading....)
The green light of hospital rooms. The green light of hope.
Harmony.
A pool of water.
** ** **
These are the notes I made in the semi-dark two Fridays ago while sitting in the aisle seat of Row F, Orchestra Center, close enough to Ben Folds and his grand piano that he could have nearly heard me whisper in a moment of quiet between songs.
Earlier in the week I'd heard that Mr. Folds would be in town to play a one-night gig with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. On the day of the concert, four hours before curtain, with no one available to go with me, I called the box office, on a whim. (No, not a whim. What's deeper than on-a-whim but less intent than on-a-mission?)
The box office lady tells me that there's a single aisle seat six rows back from the stage, would I like it?
I would.
Three hours later and I'm in that aisle seat. Orchestra gets settled. Lights dim. Conductor walks on stage. Applause. Orchestra starts to play something sweeping, like the dramatic opening of an old movie. Thirty seconds into it Ben Folds lopes jauntily out from stage right. Thunderous applause. Hoots, hollers, whoops and cheers.
{What must it be like to be a rockstar? To have people cheer at your presence before you ever strike a note? Is it a rush? Is it lonely? Overwhelming? Empowering? All of the above?}
Ben waves at the crowd on his beeline to piano, center stage. He and the conductor exchange a look, the orchestra softens just a bit, and Ben plunges into "Zak and Sara" with its fast rollicking vamping piano-power-chords. The air electric. The crowd thrilled. More clapping and whoops of joy. Everyone knows this song.
An admission: I don't know this song. In fact, I don't know a lot of Ben Folds' music. I'm not what you'd call a diehard fan. I've basically liked whichever of his songs I might have heard on the radio over the years, and I enjoyed him as a judge on the reality show "The Sing-Off." But I can't sing along with most of the songs he plays this night. I didn't even know the name of "Zak and Sara" until I looked it up today. In addition to my list of impressions, I made notes of keywords from all the songs so I could figure out the set list later.
I don't know why I needed to be able to recreate the set list. I don't even know why I needed to go to this concert. I don't know why I spent $85 on a ticket to go by myself to see a musician that I knew only marginally. I just knew that I like the symphony, I like orchestral pop, and I knew that Ben Folds' music makes me feel something real and true. And I needed that.
Those fireworks of joy I mentioned above: Those were the words I jotted down to describe "Zak and Sara." The music started and I couldn't stop smiling. The sound -- and the emotion -- was big. Epic, even. Now, after listening to the lyrics of "Zak and Sara," I'm not even sure if it's a happy song, but I grinned the whole way through it -- and through much of the concert. I grinned like a maniac. You would have thought I'd been waiting for this concert my whole life.
The piano and the orchestra didn't always mesh perfectly. Sometimes the sound was messy. Sometimes it was harmonious. It didn't really matter. I delighted in the gorgeous spectacle of it all. The crowed loved Ben's jokes and judicious use of curse words. Judging by the look on the face of a grey-haired gentleman playing first violin, not everyone in the orchestra felt the same way. That made me grin all the more.
I don't know why I'm telling you any of this. I'm trying to find the meaning in the experience, to make sense of it. But the meaning was just there in the experience; I don't need to make something of it. Still, this is what I try to do as a writer. I look for the meaning so I can figure out how to tell you about it, so you can have the experience alongside me in rewind.
I want to tell you how much I love it when musicians invite the audience to sing along, even going so far as to give us a refrain in three-part harmony. I want you to experience how fun it is when a man in the third row shouts "Rock this bitch!", which, as I learned, is code at a Ben Folds' concert for making up a song on the spot -- and Ben proceeds to do just that, instructing the orchestra what to play, coaxing out a clarinet solo. I want you to stand up with me for the second encore, when Ben comes back on stage sans orchestra and rocks out on the piano with hundreds of audience members as his back-up singers, all of us standing and singing and joining in the glorious spectacle. And when Ben sings "You better watch out, 'cause I'm gonna say ___" and then drops out, you'll quickly learn just what judicious curse word fills in the blank, and you'll shout it along with the rest of the audience.
If you watch the video below or do a search on YouTube, you'll discover, as I did, that Ben's done this show before. Or rather, he's done some version of it before: the dramatic entrance, the piano pounding, the storytelling, the audience participation. He didn't dream this up for this one show. I suppose you could let this dampen the magic of the experience, but it shouldn't. Because there we all were -- the audience, Ben, the backup singers on stage left, the conductor, the orchestra -- all of us doing it for each other, for this one night.
If Ben had been listening, and if I had whispered something from Row F, I could have said Thank you, or Can I sing with you?, or Rock on!
I have an essay up on Numéro Cinq Magazine, which is run by author Douglas Glover.
Take a little peek into my local world (and mind).
You try to tell people what it’s like living here, but you’re not sure you know. You’ve lived here nearly your whole life, and you’re numb to this place. You have to push yourself to see it.
You tell people that this small town, situated thirty-five miles southeast of Pittsburgh, is the last bastion of suburbia before the routes go rural. You live in a thirty-year-old subdivision of single family homes and townhouses. One way in, same way out. (Keep reading...)
Thirty-six years and I've barely inhabited my body, but a bruised tailbone pulls one's attention down into the seat of a self. My body. My tailbone. Nerves and pain at the base of my spine, a flinch and quick "eesh" of air sucked in through teeth every time I sat or stood or shifted.
I fell because I was roller skating. Lured onto wheels by the siren song of Roller Derby. I fell because I was trying to be brave. I fell because I was tired of being so careful in my everyday living.
I've never played an organized sport, never been one to willingly break a sweat, and I've never liked the saying, "No pain no gain."
Thirty-six years, and what do I know of this body?
I don't engage in physically high-risk activities. At most, my lifetime accumulation of injuries have been minor: Skinned knees, paper cuts, bruises (sometimes in strange places) that I can't recall causing. A slip and fall on ice. The worst of anything has been my ankles, each one severely sprained multiple times, starting with a fall in eighth grade gym class. A torn ligament in college, a stupid (sober) fall running around campus before graduation. Never broken a bone, but friends would (do) call me clumsy, accident prone.
It's not a label I think much about. It just is. Until it's something else.
Advil and ice helped the pain, but there wasn't anything I could take to fight off the confusion and fear that burbled up with each dull ache and stab.
I wrestled with the tension that vibrates between between pride and shame. So proud of myself for getting on skates, for falling and getting back up. So proud! And so ashamed for taking a risk and getting hurt. I hid my guilt behind a thin veneer of bravado and practical pronouncements: "It's not so bad. There's not much you can do for a bruised tailbone except rest it." That week was uncomfortable, not just for my backside, but for my inner compass. I was learning to look at the world through a new lens, the lens of I took a risk and got hurt, but that doesn't mean I'm stupid or bad or irresponsible.
This was a new way of being in the world. If you played sports as a child, you may not understand this. If you are accustomed to taking physical risks, you may not comprehend. But if all your life you've been bundled up in...
Play it safe Be careful Take it easy
...then you may understand this. You may comprehend the profound nature of this shift.
All my life I've been afraid of getting hurt. All my life this tension between desire and fear.
No sex before marriage. No sky diving. No driving too fast or without a seat belt. No drugs. No excessive drinking. No. No. No.
I've bubble wrapped myself in worry.
The day I stepped outside of that soft bunting, the bubble burst. An epiphany of the obvious: Sometimes people do things for fun that can hurt them. And this is not wrong. This is an acceptable way of being in the world.
At age 36 I was learning what most 10-year-olds know. Kids who play sports learn these lessons about their bodies, their limits, their capabilities at a young age. They learn how to get hurt and how to heal. How to get hurt again and still not fear. Here I was, approaching (or perhaps already at) middle age, navigating, for the first time, this new way of being in the world. This new way of being in my body. This new way of being me. This new way of being. This new way. This.
It is winter. Ravens are standing on a pile of bones -- black typeface on white paper picking an idea clean. It's what I do each time I sit down to write. What else are we to do with our obsessions? Do they feed us? Or are we simply scavenging our memories for one gleaming image to tell the truth of what is hunting us?
~Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Thursday, June 7, 2012 at 2:17PM 
For the past few years I've been working on a collection of essays that explore spirituality and the power of place to bridge the gap between worlds visible and invisible. I haven't written much about this kind of thing online, but it's a huge part of who I am and what I do.
