Friday and the job-free blues are hitting. We saw Grey Gardens last night, not the famous documentary, but the feature film, HBO version, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. Incredible performances by both women. Chilling. Courageous on their parts to get so deeply under the skin of these disturbed women, and to do it without judgment.

I slept badly and dreamed of--I don't know what I dreamed, exactly. It doesn't take much to swamp my little canoe. The movie showed how the mother's agoraphobia and passivity infected her daughter, and how the two lived out their lives together in a folie a deux. Maybe, maybe, maybe if the daughter had been able to separate--if she had found some kind of magic combination of support and tough love--she might have been able to make a life for herself. But she didn't. And probably couldn't. Although interestingly, she lived a few decades after her mother died and she did finally travel a bit, and even performed, which had been her girlhood dream.

The scenes of the old crumbling decaying mansion were frightening. C started teasing me about my own tendencies to ignore mess and let things go. I am one of those women who can walk in a room and not see dirt--I know this trait is more common among guys, but there are some of us ladies who are like this. I've been living with a slightly cracked car windshield for months and months now, just haven't gotten around to getting it fixed. There are coats that need buttons sewn back on, and bags of books waiting to be donated to the Library, as well as other bags standing around waiting to go to Goodwill. But everyone's life is like this--isn't it? Where's the line between laxness and depression and total stinking madness with 3,000 feral cats and raccoons crawling in through the busted windows and pissing and shitting everywhere? Or, conversely, Between a need for order and OCD?

I remember my 90-year-old grandmother, when we finally moved her out of her apartment, the two-bedroom rent-controlled place in Brooklyn she had lived in for 60 years. The place was so full of antiques and bars of soap that had never been used, candlesticks still in their original boxes, gloves, ditto, frayed velvet couches, knick-knacks and keepsakes and trinkets and treasures. And she was crying and crying about it all, the crushing sense of overwhelm she felt at her incapacity to deal with all her useless precious possessions.

But really the place was stuffed to the brim with loneliness. even the air molecules were fat with it.

I never want to be like that.

I fear what isolation does to a person. Neither Big Edie nor Little Edie ever worked. They came from a class background where women didn't expect to. (Which makes Jackie Onassis' decision to get a job in the publishing industry all the more remarkable, when you think about it.) They were functionally helpless and hardly left that house.

I have worked--a lot--but haven't had a regular job in years. Since the economic downturn poets-in-the-schools work has virtually disappeared, except for some very little pools. It's sort of like that scene in the movie "Fantasia" where the drinking holes for the dinosaurs are drying up because the climate is changing, and then all the dinosaurs die. Except in this case I guess the weaker, more short-sighted dinosaurs die, and the smart dinosaurs figure out how to get day jobs or grants or some other gig that keeps them going.

I have always thought of myself as a resourceful person--I found my first apartment when i was eighteen, and I've had many different jobs, but lately this element of doubt has crept in--can I rise to the demands of our brave new tech-driven world? Do I even want to? Yes, I'm on Facebook and all that and here I am, blogging, but there's a part of me that just wants to go off in a mud hut and chant my poems to the wind. I understand the word "work" in such a literal, primitive way. "Work" to me is washing a sink full of dishes. Making a pot of chili to feed twenty people. Setting off in the morning with a satchel stuffed with lesson plans and driving for an hour and teaching four classes and returning with the same satchel stuffed with a hundred student poems.

I miss Fetzer right now. Not the food--although the food was wonderful--or the gracious grounds. But the being-together with a bunch of other people who do this crazy creative thing as a main thing in their lives. I miss that community of peers. We never really got down to talking economics--Fetzer wanted the creative conversations to be about love and compassion and suffering, trivial stuff like that. But a big question for an artist is how do you support yourself and/or find support? Not just financial--although that's a very big question--but also structural. How do you build a supportive structure into your own writing day?

I came back from Fetzer last week determined to work more on the play. Instead I was hijacked by some poems and spent hours and hours yesterday fussing over the arrangement and re-arrangement of thirty-five lines. I also wrote a short introduction for a book of essays. I also spent some hours weeding--the weeds are up to my hips, I swear, I've never seen anything like it. Grass is cracking the asphalt in the driveway and the porch steps and threatening to take over the house entirely. This wet wet wild weather has yielded a harvest of bunch-grass and wild-ass Mexican purple sage, peppermint and fig leaves and peach blossoms and guava branches and feral cats. Everything swaying and proliferating. C has his camera out constantly, trying to capture it all.

Fetzer was extraordinary. I'm still not exactly sure how I got to be invited, but there I was with Lauren Artress, the Episcopalian priest of Grace Cathedral in SF and leader of labyrinth journeys in Chartres, and Jennifer Louden, the "comfort queen", and Naseem Rakha, author of The Crying Tree, a book about forgiveness and the death penalty, and Michael Jones, a wonderful Canadian pianist and philosopher, and Paulus Berensohn a potter/poet/philosopher/child of God--I kept wanting to call him "Bacchus" instead of Paulus, which he said was a great compliment; and Kurtis Lamkin the poet and kora player, and Diane Seuss a great poet and distant relative of Dr. Seuss, and and and...

And we didn't have to teach, we didn't have to lead anything. We just had to hang out and talk, have "creative conversations," with each other (Fetzer's term), and be wined and dined. oh! and write too (almost forgot.) Which I did, although not as much as I'd intended. I do feel like the time "seeded" me for future writing. There was tons o' wine flowing freely in the evenings--I thought it was a lot, and then someone from Wing It! pointed out that the Fetzer money comes from their wineries in California--doh!

I didn't drink much because the last time I really indulged--a glass and a half--was Passover, and I inflicted Me and Bobby McGee at top volume on a bunch of lovely Jewish lesbians who had done nothing, really nothing to deserve it. So I thought I'd spare my new friends that experience until they'd had more of a chance to become old(er) friends. Instead I tried to revise The Recruiter (more on that later), and hiked in the woods, and hung out with people, and drank in the beauty.

Michigan in the spring is lovely. Flowering ornamental cherry trees, so stuffed with deep pinkness they look like prom gowns with corsages pinned all over them. There was a lake with deer. Kalamazoo, who knew? there is a lively. close-knit community of poets and writers out there.

I came to the retreat with the intention of tearing The Recruiter down to its bones, disassembling it and putting it all together again--in three days. I had read Suzan-Lori Parks' account of how she wrote Topdog/Underdog in three days--at least a draft of it--and I was determined to follow her example. Didn't happen. I did get some work done on it that I think was good, but the thing feels now as if I'd taken a big greasy engine apart in my living room. I have all these screws and bolts and thingummies and do-hickeys rolling around underfoot and not a clue as to what I'm going to do with them, how I'm going to put the behemoth back together. (Kurtis did tell me a story just as he was about to leave which I think I can use in the piece. And I got the insight that I have to allow humor to be a part of this story. War isn't funny. But people are, and my other plays are funny. There's no reason for this not to be.)

It took me until the retreat was almost over to realize that the point of the week wasn't so much to produce--although I am so very very attached to production--but to have the experience . Okay, it took me a while to get it; I'm slow. Also insecure. What I appreciated most was the chance to make friends with whom I could talk about the writing process as a peer--as well as all the other processes that make our lives. We were also all interviewed on videotape, presumably for Fetzer's archives--and I think they will send me a copy of my interview which I'll share here or on my web site when I get it.

Got back Friday night and Saturday night performed with Wing It! in our show Big Fat Lies. It was a great show! What a rich and juicy topic, just rife with possibilities. Because of course all performing is a "lie" in some ways--performers routinely go on stage feeling tired, stressed, nervous, or whatever, and step into the limelight and become more than they were a minute ago, offstage. Is this a lie, or is it what we'd call "transformation?" How do the "lies" in art serve the purpose of larger truths?

Today--rain, again, surprising for this late in the season, but not unwelcome. Last night I went to read to Carla at bedtime. But first there was parrot-wrangling--her bird, Ronnie (sex indeterminate) was not in the mood to go to bed. Five peanuts and several arm-nips later I tricked him/her into the cage and got the door shut. Then went in and read Billy Collins' latest, Ballistics (Carla's choice). His quiet whimsical, undramatic, but poignant voice was just right for the occasion. How many of the words we poets write are worthy of this kind of purpose?

Packing for Michigan. Seems like I just did this. Wrapping hair conditioner bottle in plastic bag so it doesn't leak all over my clothes. Wrapping bottle of contact lens fluid, ditto. Yoga pants, grown-up pants, nice shirt, light shirt, T-shirt, warm shirt. A couple of copies of my books to give or trade. Big red journal, little black journal, plenty of pens, socks, underwear. I know I'm forgetting something. Earrings. Deodorant. Toothbrush. Socks. Something light to read on the plane...

Whoosh! Do you ever have those weeks of things coming together, times when you can actually see and feel confluence, synchronicity, the divine pattern in the way things constellate? I'm in one of those windows right now. Don't know how long it will last--my life has been like that song by Ferron "Ain't Life a Brook," whose chorus goes, "It comes together and it comes apart." Right now is a moment of it coming together. No doubt it will all come apart in another moment, only to reconfigure anew.

We've had house-guests for the last few days, my friend Suzanne and her youngest daughter who is entering U.C. Berkeley in the fall. They were here for a student-parent orientation, and stayed with us. Suzanne is married to my friend Ted who was a VISTA volunteer with me back in 1981-82. Ted worked with Cubans, I worked with Haitians; we lived in separate tiny stiflingly hot houses with roommates and shared (and still share) a kind of Conan the Barbarian sensibility. When he slept over my house we would drag a mattress into the backyard (this was hard-core inner city Miami) and sleep under the stars. When I slept over his house I would lay down a sleeping bag on the floor between him and his roommate Jeremy, while they played a furious game of catch with a small hard rubber ball which always landed perilously close to my head. This was done to help cure me of my insomnia, which Ted also felt would be ameliorated if only I would take up drinking.

Ted is a big bluff New Englander whose family settled Connecticut. I also remember skinny-dipping with him on Miami Beach, within sight of the big fancy tourist hotels, and I remember him doing cannon ball dives from the third floor balcony of another tiny stifling VISTA apartment. We all lived on $75.00 a week, and ate a lot of rice and beans. You can't afford much in the way of entertainment on that kind of salary, so we just hung out and talked for hours. He drove a VW bug that was held together with spit and chewing gum.

So now it's almost thirty years later and Ted married a wonderful grounded funny woman who can hold her own with him, and they have three amazing kids. Suzanne is a nurse, and their whole family has been raised with service work, building homes through Habitat for Humanity. Their oldest daughter has a relationship with an orphanage in Uganda where she has worked several different stints, and their youngest daughter wants to be a doctor with Doctors Without Borders.

I've been in communication with Whirlwind Wheelchairs, and after I dropped Suzanne and their daughter off at the airport I drove out to SFSU to meet with people there and see if I could find a way to go to Haiti with them. As the 8-all would say, "Signs are promising." I met some great people who work in the office, and we talked about how I could serve in several capacities, as interpreter, and as a journalist. I connected with a physical therapist who is planning on going over there this summer; she wants me to tutor her in Creole. It all felt very "meant to be", in the way things do sometimes, where you can just feel the door opening.

I had had a big crazy idea a little while back about bringing Interplayers to Haiti and doing some playing and dancing and healing with survivors, especially kids. When I met the founder of Whirlwind Wheelchairs, who has been in a chair himself, for decades, I felt embarrassed to even mention it to him, as the "office" where we met was filled with different wheelchairs, from every era, and smelled of axle grease like an auto shop. I thought his emphasis was all technical, and that my idea about dance was way too hippie fou-fou. But when I mentioned Axis dance Company and Megan, who is a member of Wing It! who has worked with Axis for years, his face lit up and he said, "She was my teacher." He himself danced with Axis for a year.

It was one of those great moments when I could feel the connections circling round. He hadn't been involved with Axis for years, but he still had a glow when he talked about it. And of course no one who ever meets Megan can help but be transformed by the experience. She is so radiant that everyone always falls in love with her. He and his assistant started talking about my diea as if it were feasible, as if it were going to happen. they said I should start thinking about some other Interplayers to bring. Immediately I thought of Masankho, who only sleeps four hours a night, lives on airplanes, eats whatever is put in front of him, communicates through dance and the drum, and is generally the most adaptable adept leader I know, and of Enver, my Turkman brother, who would be such a joy to work with.

I need physically hardy, low-maintenance colleagues who travel well, and can improvise in intense situations. Both those guys fit the bill. I'll see if there are any women who would like to go also; a French-speaker would be good. But I can share a room with either of those guys and feel as comfortable as with a girlfriend. We're family.

They asked me what I would charge for this and I felt abashed and said my plane fare over and food and board. Then afterward I thought, Wait a minute. I've hardly earned any money this year. I need to start figuring out how to get myself subsidized. I have to get some kind of sponsor or something.

Meanwhile the other thing that's happening is a very tiny theatre group in New York --not in the heart of the city but about half an hour outside of it--is interested in Glitter and Spew and Hot Water. Nothing's definite yet, but I think I'll get at least a staged reading and maybe a small production out of it. The artistic director loves both plays. Again, the financial end of it is liable to be slim to none. I'll be very lucky if I get plane fare out of it. But this is the way things start to happen.

I talked over all of this with Christopher, and his response was completely supportive: "Go for it! I'm happy for you." I was so touched, especially as, if the situation were reversed, I might be feeling clingy and scared in his shoes. And I know that if/when I go to Haiti he'll be concerned for me. But he'll also be excited and interested. Truthfully, one of our issues has been that he's much more independent than I am. I am, as my friend Susan says, "a recovering barnacle." Only I'm not sure that I'm actually in recovery or not. Sometimes I wished for a partner who was more barnacle-like himself so we could nest in and be all inseparable and joned at the hp the way Alan and I were during the first years of our relationship.

But Christopher's response shows me how good I've got it to be with a partner who can handle being on his own (with the cat of course), and who has his own interests and passions separate from me. That gives me so much freedom, and for the first time in a while I feel like I have a good project on which to exercise it. I'll need his help in becoming a better photographer before I go, and perhaps in future we can collaborate on photo-journalistic assignments--in places where the health and sanitary conditions are more stable. He has to be a little more careful about his health than I do.

"You're tough," he encouraged me as we lay on separate couches and talked. "You can handle yourself." Precious words. Exactly what I needed to hear.

And I hope he's right. Although if this trip to Haiti happens, it won't be because of any of my vaunted "toughness" or braggadocio. It will be in the spirit of something bigger than me that is drawing these disparate elements together through me for some larger purpose. I myself am a big frazzled marshmallow who was challenged finding the parking garage. But I do appreciate his vote of confidence. And I believe with all my heart in the power of improvisation.

This is a photo of me and Lisa Jones, author of the wonderful book, Broken. (Buy it!! Buy ten copies!!) Note the matching hairstyles and glasses, the beautiful aging hippie look. This photo was taken by an Irish poet.

Now I'm back from Denver. Yes, it was fun. Yes, I brought too many clothes (but a girl has to have choices.) Yes, it was overwhelming just to be around so many writers and so many books and magazines.

I'm sure that all the writers there, including people more famous and connected than me, were all probably feeling some version of the same overwhelm. You can just imagine how much Prozac and Ambien run-off was being flushed down those public restroom toilets. Oh and don't forget the Xanax.

There was a huge room with tables and tables and tables and tables for all the litmags and publishers. It contained more reading material than a hundred compulsive print-aholics could consume in a hundred lifetimes. And yet and still the books and poems and essays and plays keep coming. More more more more more. Fiction, poetry, non-fiction (memoirs were HUGE this year, every other panel was about some aspect of memoir. Which makes me glad that I'm not writing one. It seems like there are enough out there. And there's so much more money to be made in poetry).

Unlike 2001, I managed to keep some sense of perspective about the whole thing. Okay, I'm a tiny puny drop in a gigantic ocean. It's a little ego-deflating to contemplate that fact, but also a relief. I stand back and watch all the young, beautiful, brilliant, anxious writers scrambling after university jobs and grants in this bad economy and struggling to balance career and family and-- I take a deep breath. I'm not going to get one of those university jobs. I hope one of these days, someone dumps a little grant money on my head, but that's not going to create or destroy my happiness either. I'm just here. I'll just keep writing and sending things out and living. Nobody owes me anything. I've already had tremendous luck to be published in The Sun, to have two books to my name. Even though I want more--and I always want more, it's my nature--my cup already runneth over.

The SUN reading on Saturday was well-attended considering it was the fourth day of the conference and everyone was pretty well saturated by that point. Ellen Bass, Frances Lefkowitz, Steve Almond, Krista Bremer and Sy Safransky, and I all read--and everyone was terrific! This is noteworthy because more often than not poetry readings can be dreadful, but in this one the audience was fully engaged the whole time, laughing and sighing and applauding. I didn't sell as many books as I would have liked--selling books at AWP is like trying to sell snow cones in Antarctica--but I sold a couple, and I managed to zip up my suitcase despite the swag I'd picked up in the form of free journals and newsletters.

Frances (author of the forthcoming memoir To Have Not) and I had a great time rooming together, very easy, like old friends, and I met some writers whom I had known only from afar and reconnected with some colleagues that I only see every few years, like Cheryl Strayed (author of a wonderful novel called Torch, and a forthcoming memoir, which I think is called Wild), and Leslea Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies and millions of other books.

I met Lisa Jones in person, the woman who wrote the wonderful memoir Broken, about her time on an Arapaho reservation in Wyoming, with a remarkable Native American healer. We hung out companionably, again like old friends. There is something about other writers (especially women writers) that feels instantly familiar and intimate to me. We share many of the same characteristics of strong self-will and assertion coupled with almost equally strong self-doubt and tendencies to despair. Those women also know the manic-depressive cycle that writing puts one through, from excitement to desolation and back again, and how the rhythm of the work itself sustains you while the dreams of grandeur predictably elate and then disappoint you. We can communicate in a quick shorthand about the process because we've all been through our own version of it.

The best workshop that I went to was one on the 10-minute play, which is apparently the play most likely to get produced these days (in festivals, along with other 10-minute plays). I have long resisted this form because ten minutes doesn't seem like enough time to do anything interesting or meaningful onstage, but this workshop/panel persuaded me otherwise, and now I have some good ideas for 10-minute plays to write.

At another panel, I heard a young successful woman writer explain that she had made a rule always to have thirty pieces out at all times. that meant either five stories at six different magazines each or thirty different stories at thirty different magazines, or--I don't know. But she was serious as a heart attack and she was making a living (and had two small children!) so i thouhgt, I could do better in terms of having things out. the only problem is that it takes so long for my poems to find their final right form--years and years sometimes.

Another good workshop was called "Scars on my Heart", a presentation by Milspeaks, an organization that helps military people do creative writing in order to express the experiences they've had and heal from PTSD as well as offer the non-military world a glimpse into their world. I'm not a crier, but during the reading of poems by children whose parents were serving (or in some cases had died), I found tears rolling down my cheeks uncontrollably. Also when a retired Vietnam veteran read about things that had happened forty years ago--his voice shaking and sometimes cracking in contrast to his erect military bearing. The more I read and listen, the more I realize how much I have to learn about the stories of men and women at war. And talking to Sy and Frances about what we are willing to reveal versus what feels unspeakable to us, helped me understand better my own connection to violence and why I feel so compelled to write about it.

The Sun people had dinner together--I saw my beloved Angela and her husband Brent--and caught up a little. It was chilly, for the record, and I decided in the end to go with my somewhat dorky Land's End jacket because it is both warm and lightweight, but unfortunately not very hip or stylish. However I don't think anyone but me gave a hoot about what I looked like which is another great consolation of getting older.

Now I'm home, we have had the Church of the New York Times this morning which we worship with coffee and eggs and toast. Out-of-town friends are staying in the guest room and other friends are coming to dinner; I've got a big pot of chili on. It's raining again, a big soaking rain. Good for the depleted reservoirs--they must be rising by now--and the happy green hills, not so much fun to drive around in. I'm grateful to stay home and read and write.

Okay, I'm still here on this site. In fact I'm packing for Denver tomorrow, for the AWP conference. Christopher thinks I am a cool calm and collected traveler but this is not true. It's a myth I have perpetrated on him which in his naivete he bought. Actually it's not so much the traveling I'm nervous about as the prospect of what awaits me when I get there--50,000 writers. An aquarium full of killer whales would be less anxiety provoking. I just printed out the schedule and there are fifteen pages a day of workshops, panels, readings, parties, keynote addresses, etc. That makes forty five pages for all three days I'm there, which is the length of a one-act play.

I am a Libra. Forty-five pages of choices is completely overwhelming to me. I would be much more comfortable with three choices a day. And to have someone assigned to lead me around by the hand and sit with me at meals, and tell me what I should do next.

Of course I am also obsessing about what to wear. It's freezing in Denver right now--literally. Snow and sleet and all that. So do I bring my huge puffy down coat? What happens the next day when the temperatures climb into the fities and then the sixties? Will it be too big and bulky to carry home? I am traveling with about 25 copies of my books. What if I don't sell any and I buy or people give me copies of their own books, and then I have no room in my suitcase for my coat?

I'll have to walk from the hotel to the conference center where the thing is being held. Will it be snowy and slushy out? Should I bring my boots? I can't walk around in boots all day with plantar fasciitis. I need to wear either my sneakers, which might make me feel like a pathetic dork, or my ortho-Merrill's, which might be too flimsy and cold.

I don't want to blow this opportunity, but I'm not sure exactly why I'm going either. I don't have an MFA. I'm not in contention for the academic jobs, which are getting cut now anyway. And I wouldn't leave my house or my husband to take an appointment in Kansas or wherever even if one were offered to me. I might get to sell some books at the SUN reading. And I'll be on a panel with other SUN writers. Which is a good thing professionally. I don't mind reading--I love reading. It's just the milling around in a place that would make Grand central Station look de-populated that scares me.

I like people. Just in manageable numbers. It seems crazy to me to get 50,000 highly sensitive writer-types in one area together at one time. has anyone thought this through? There could be emotional meltdowns, relapses into dangerous addictions, extra-marital affairs, suicide attempts, drunk dialing, and worse. This conference grows exponentially every year. I went nine years ago after my first book came out, and I thought it was too big then.

Christopher is on Spring break, and so we had a quick overnight getaway to a hot springs place that was the scene of our first weekend away when we were dating. The smell of sulphur, the lovely sight of relaxed naked people (I'm a voyeur, I admit it), hills lush as green velvet after the rains, trees on fire with spring--red-tipped, green-tipped, pink. Buds, branches, blossoms, and some still bare and witchy. We passed grazing sheep, goats, cows and horses, bare-twigged almond orchards, and walnit groves. Ate mlunch in a little hole in the wall place in a town of 3,000 people--Esparto. There was a boar's head--a real one--mounted high on the wall.

I started reading Lit by Mary Karr. It's good--of course it's good--but I confess I'm a little weary of addiction memoirs. She's one of the best writers around and if anyone can enliven this subject it's her, but I'm just tired of reading about people with their head in the toilet. I understand, I feel your pain, I too have wasted way too much time on destructive behavior. Now let's just say, okay, we did bad things, and get on to doing better things and write about that. Maybe I need to read Greg Mortensen's Three Cups of Tea instead right now.

Easter Sunday I went into the city, in a deep downpour, to attend a reading of Beckett by Jean Anouilh in my friend Stuart's apartment. I love being around all these drama nerds--and he has actor friends who are fantastic--and reading a piece of great literature together. When I got home, we put the movie Becket onto the Netflix queue along with Man for All Seasons and The Lion in Winter. I am getting my English history this way, in bits and pieces, through plays--a dubious way to get it, since playwrights are known for manipulating facts to suit their dramatic purposes.

As we hiked along a muddy lane at the hot springs place I told Christopher that the English countryside is magical. It's no coincidence that this is the country that has given birth to stories like Lord of the Rings, and the Narnia series and Harry Potter. You just expect a talking rabbit or something to pop up from behind a bush or a hedge. At the risk of sounding like some of the people I make fun of, there's an energy you can feel coming from the land itself.

"Yes," said Christopher. "And those talking rabbits are more attracted to some people than to others."

"Namely?"

"Poets are known to be talking rabbit magnets. That's all."

He brought his camera, of which he is much enamored, and I brought my small one and we took a lot of pictures of trees, bushes, flowers, rocks, and each other. I hope at least some of them come out. It's real Ansel Adams country where we were--the trees were beautifully gnarled and twisted like that--but you need to be Ansel Adams in order to capture them.

Okay, forgive me, but I've been obsessing over names. What's in a name? Everything and nothing. Especially for a writer, whose job it is to give new names to things, or to arrange the names of what is already there so as to peek behind the labels.

When I was a child, my parents had one of those What To Name Your Baby books. I pored over it until it was dog-eared. I named and renamed each of my twelve imaginary children, six boys and six girls. Sometimes, I regret to report, I gave them all names that started with "J" a la that reality show TV family who have 300 children and are still hoping for more pregnancies. In my own defense I will just say that i was ten years old at the time and not even menstruating yet, so I wasn't much of a threat to the planet's overpopulation problem. As soon as I hit Junior High I wised up.

Anyway, I have been thinking about The Blind Side and how sadly appropriate that name was. And how the Sandra Bullock thing is sobering not just because of the men-can-be-such-faithless-dogs-sometimes-and-why-do-smart-women-fall-for-them, but also, just along the lines of anything can and does happen. You think your life is going in one direction, but you were wrong--in an instant it all comes undone. A car accident, a bad diagnosis, a marriage, a divorce. Shit happens.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the title to Love Shack, which was conceived early and stuck, but has never seemed quite right. For one thing as everyone and their brother have pointed out to me, it's the title of a B-52s song. I am so out of it I didn't know that song. Everyone else does though, and from what I understand, that's not necessarily a good thing.

So I've been thinking of what to call the book, and thinking about renaming this blog, because face it, I've been blogging under this name for four and a half years and four hundred and one entries. That's a lot. That's enough.

I thought about Judith-Kate Friedman, a singer-songwriter-activist I know, who calls her production company Patience & Adventure. That's a great name. I wish I had thought of that. I meditated this morning and the names that came floating to me were Clarity & Mischief. I was a little uncertain about the mischief thing, because that can get you into trouble. Mischief can sometimes be malicious, but I do have more than a little Coyote in my nature. And "mischief" makes me think of my ten-year-old nephew with the perpetually dancing brown eyes. Eli is a little entrepreneur and my sister reports that he has set up his first lemonade stand of the season. For fifty cents, you can buy a cup of his elixir, and for an additional quarter you get the "secret recipe." But, Emily reports, he makes it from a mix!! She doesn't know what, if any, the secret ingredient is.

I thought that was hilarious, but when I proposed Clarity & Mischief to Christopher he didn't like it that much. What about "Heroically Annoying"? he asked. Now this is a shameless bid for recognition of his own wit as last night we listened to KPFA while we were doing the dishes. (This was Christopher's idea because he loves Music from the Hearts of Space and Joe Frank--I personally boycott KPFA until they get rid of that whiny creep Dennis Bernstein.)

Anyway, we were waiting for Joe Frank, and there was an earnest young polyamorous woman on explaining how she was a "love warrior," how she loved everyone and everything, how she was going to bring peace on earth by making love with everyone and so on, blah blah blah. I know this is what saints do and where we all aspire in the end, but this lady had such a tone of self-righteousness in her voice that I was torn between laughter and smashing the radio. I said to C, "She's just so full of her own self-importance, she's so self-righteous, she's so KPFA, she's so so so..."

"Heroically annoying," he supplied. Exactly. But not for my blog title.

So then I thought of some overblown titles myself: Divine Fool, which was the name of the very short-lived press Alan and I started a century ago, and which I love because how can you not love the divine fool? And then God help me I thought of the Divine Feminine, which is what I actually worship, but you can't say that, it sounds way too pretentious. In fact, scratch anything with Divine in the title, that is heroically annoying right there.

Then one thing led to another, and I started fooling around with my poem Manifesto, and added the line, "Luck at the eleventh hour." And that seemed right. It reminds me of a book title by Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute which leaped off a bargain table in Harvard Square into my hand thirty-five years ago. I bought that book just because of its title, and met one of my all-time favorite writers.

So I like "Luck at the eleventh hour," both as a title for the new book and as the new blog. I'll start it up within a day or two. It's the full moon, it's Passover, it seems auspicious.

Carla was wonderful, composed, engaged, and fully present, speaking with the help of a microphone as her voice is weaker now, but still clear. In the midst of her presentation she paused and said, "I can hear the sound of the babies"--there were a lot of young babies present that night--"and their parents soothing them, and the sound of Megan's respirator." Megan is another young woman who is dying of ALS. "And all of those things are life. It's like a symphony," Carla said. And she herself has gone from being a lover of poems to being the poem itself.

Later she went on to quote Rumi, "In the slaughterhouse of love/They kill only the best." She recited the whole poem from memory--it is in what Kim Rosen would call the fourth chamber of her heart. Maclen was there and he acted seamlessly as her voice, taking questions and being charming, informative and thoughtful. It's as if she has transferred all her considerable powers of articulateness and wit and grace over to him, and young as he is, he has picked up the mantle.

Meanwhile, the tiny little flame-tips of green on the tips of the fig tree branches have opened into delectable fans, the color of the inside leaves of Romaine lettuce, a tender light green. And little tiny hard green fig fruits have also appeared--when did that happen?

And we finally finally have a health care bill, not a perfect one, but a huge step nonetheless. Why did it take so long and so much fighting? Was it because it galls the Republican "base" so much that Obama is a competent president? A black man, in strong alliance with some powerful women (Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi) and a gay man (Barney Frank)? Is that what has made these senseless attacks so vituperative?

That's one hypothesis put forward by Frank Rich of the New York Times today at any rate. I can't think of any other reason to be so vociferously hateful about a President trying to take care of uninsured vulnerable people who live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and can't see a doctor when they need one. I just don't get it.

Meanwhile, I confess, I've been following the story about Sandra Bullock's marriage imploding. Okay, I know this is not about serious literature, but maybe it is--bear with me. I know other beautiful strong generous talented admirable women whose faithless partners betrayed them. I have also been betrayed. It is one of the most insidious forms of pain; you grieve as if for a death, but you are also wracked with self-doubt--why didn't I see this coming? What's wrong with me that this happened? How will I be able to recognize it in the future? How can I protect myself?

(And of course the answer is you can't. You can't protect yourself and still stay open to love. You have to open to the possibility of getting hurt, even that badly, all over again. The only thing you can do is build up your arsenal of self-love, and love your friends and family and animals and the world as hard as you can in the meantime.)

I can't help thinking of the title of her movie The Blind Side. How she herself was blindsided while making it--the metaphorical resonance of that is just too much. You couldn't make this shit up. (We saw The Blind Side the other night. Bullock was very good--I wouldn't have given her the Oscar for it, but she is immensely appealing. The movie was disturbing, though. The young black man was like a formless piece of dough who could be molded to the desires and needs of the white family. There was something more than a little quease-inducing about the way he was valued for his football talent and not really given the chance to be a whole person. And there were virtually no functional black adults in the film--they were all drug addicts and poor and hopeless. The only people with any wholeness and power and strength were white. Yuck!)

I don't know what this latest infidelity scandal has to do with anything, really, except that the cruelty of the way people can and do hurt their intimate partners is breathtaking. I have cried a river and carried on about men who wandered off to sleep with other women after a few months of dating, men who technically owed me nothing. Now I realize they did me a huge favor by showing their true colors early and allowing me to cut my losses and move on. And my losses were nothing compared to what they cost the women who married these grown-up babies and took care of them for years.

In its own way, I think this story has the proportions of a kind of female Shakespearian tragedy: the need for self-protection vs. the need for love. The need to be able to trust vs. the very real disincentives for doing so. This is the story of so many brilliant women. It has been telling itself for centuries. Maybe the problem is not only with men and women, but with marriage and monogamy. Maybe the majority of people--the majority of men anyway--aren't cut out for it, and shouldn't do it. Because you've got to wonder, looking at James, at Tiger Woods, at Bill Clinton, at John Edwards--why did these guys even get married in the first place? Was it for image? For fantasy? What did they imagine they were agreeing to when they took their vows? Were they thinking anything at all?

I'm immersing myself in Sappho these days--rereading her through the eyes of Willis Barnstone's translations. I love her opening prayer to Aphrodite. I want to memorize it. I'm borrowing words and phrases from her and using her as a 2700-years dead collaborator. It's wonderful and a little scary. She has so much power, her words just burn on the page.

And I'm continuing to slowly add layers to the essay on war and violence. Once I'm done with it I'll send it out and turn again to the play.

More cultural things: We saw Humpday, which is a hilarious, sweet, brilliant little film. Rent it! The actors improvised the wonderful dialogue themselves. I'd be interested in following anything director Lynn Sheldrake does. Her approach is fresh, innovative, relaxed, intuitive. And the results are so dead-center honest.

I went yesterday and saw my friend Colleen Tane Nakamoto's show "Soft Tissue" (along with four other solo women performance artists of color.) I've been following her one-woman show for four years watching it get better, deeper, richer, more powerful as she grows along with the material. I've been privileged to have a front-row seat to observe the blossoming of art and artist. Yesterday's version was the most realized yet. And the process continues.

I also just finished reading Nina Wise's book A Big Happy Free Unusual Life or whatever it's called--wonderful book. Just confirms stuff I already know, but I got a couple of good ideas for teaching writing from it.

I also read a memoir Falling by John Taylor who is married to Jeannette Walls who wrote the bestselling book The Glass Castle. Taylor's book is about the demise of his first marriage. He's a good writer as far as description goes--I copied out the opening paragraphs to several of his chapters in order to use them when teaching essay writing--but as a narrator, he comes across as selfish, bigoted, arrogant and unlikeable. I think that's interesting--flies in the face of what we're taught in creating memoir, that we should always make ourselves out to be an appealing narrator. And of course most writers, like most people, want folks to like us. But you know, when you tell the truth, you run the risk of people not liking you. And from the way Taylor presented his side of the story of his marriage in his book, I conclude that I don't like him. But he can really describe a New York neighborhood.

I did feel like I liked Jeannette Walls, very much, after I read her book and google-stalked her, so what does that say? Another brilliant woman with another less-perspicacious man? Or maybe he is better than his book would suggest.

It is the calm before the storm right now--a lazy Sunday morning with Christopher, the cat and The Times. Trixie always tries to steal food off his plate, and sometimes has to be locked away in the kitchen so that he can finish his toast. I am enjoying this peaceful weekend because it will be disrupted soon enough: I'll teach a weekend workshop in Pleasanton, and then go to the conference in Colorado, and then come home and then go to the writer's retreat in Michigan, and then come home and go to another conference in Massachusetts.

And all the while, a trip to Haiti--a long trip, three weeks at the very least, and more I hope-- is simmering on the stove of the possible. I have feelers out to two non-profits, both of which are possibilities. I'm much more excited about the idea of being in Haiti again and doing something, however small, that could be helpful, than in going to all these writing conferences.

And a propos of The Blind Side again, I'm thinking of changing the name of this blog. I named it after my book which just came out this past September. It took years of sending it out before it finally became reality. Now I'm feeling superstitious about the power of a name. At its best See How We Almost Fly suggests not getting off the ground, not soaring. At its worst, maybe crashing, which, since I'm about to fly around the country in the next few months, is a little scary. The poetry manuscript I'm sending out now is called Love Shack. Maybe I should change my blog name to that...

My friend the incomparable Carla Zilbersmith will be giving a talk about living in gratitude even under totally crap circumstances on Tuesday night the 23rd from 6:30pm - 8:30pm at the Novato Seventh-day Adventist Church, 495 San Marin Drive, Novato, CA. You can email ANightOfGratitude@gmail.com to reserve tickets. If you live in the Bay Area and can go, you should; Carla is not to be missed!

Last night Christopher and I talked about Beethoven while we ate dinner and listened to a CD of his Pathetique and some other works. When Christopher was sixteen he taught himself the Pathetique using sheet music and a recording, practicing over and over. It's a fiendishly difficult piece. There are portions where the pianist's fingers go by in a hummingbird blur. Where did Beethoven get the courage to strike out in such a moody, personal, naked, wild direction that was so different from what had come before? And where did Christopher get the chutzpah to think he could teach it to himself?

"It's the kind of thing only a sixteen-year-old would be insane enough to attempt!" he laughed. "Not at fifty. At fifty you think, 'I'll just do something a bit easier. This thing is going to make my head explode.'"

I am so madly in love with that sixteen-year-old who would go out on a limb for Beethoven. Who had so much passion inside him that no lesser piece of music would do. It reminds me of what I have been re-living as I edit the transcription of the Kim Rosen interview: how, memorizing the work of a genius, learning it by heart, unites your mind with that genius mind. Kim does it by learning great poems by heart. Christopher did it by learning Beethoven.

When I was in my early twenties I lived for six months with dozens of Shakespeare sonnets inside of me because I was in a production called Crooked Eclipses, a theatrical meditation of Shakespeare sonnets. Walking two miles to work over the freezing Mass Ave. bridge in the dead of winter, or shopping at the grocery store, or hauling my wash to the laundromat, lines from the sonnets would arise spontaneously into my consciousness. I miss those days. Most of the sonnets I knew then have frayed away in the past three (!) decades, but the one that is in the fourth chamber of my heart, as Kim puts it, is "Let us not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediment." I have that one till death do us part. The others I greet as old friends when I encounter them here and there.

I have jokingly said to my students that you need to have a bit of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) in order to be a writer. I actually think this is true of the artist temperament in general. The same glitch in my brain that had me addicted to Web Sudoku, is the same quirk that keeps me knitting like a madwoman for hours on end, is the same mechanism that allows me to obsessively move words around for days on a poem is the same thing that now gets me to the piano to practice.

It took a while to kick in with the piano, mostly because I didn't have enough of a vocabulary to make it worthwhile. And even now all I can do is Louie Louie and a piece of Randy Newman. But it's enough--I begin to sense how music is a huge puzzle and even if I just have a few pieces in my hand, I can turn them over and play with them and I'm itching to possess the next one. Christopher has regaled me with music theory, most of which goes in one ear and out the other, but some of it is sticking. What I love most is using this other part of my brain, the non-verbal part, muscle memory and instinct rather than the sentence-making vocabulary-chewing part I generally dwell in.

I have printed out the lyrics to "Hallelujah"--Gerry asked me what I thought the words meant and I said "No idea," some combination of Leonard Cohen's erotic-Biblical-spiritual shtick--but they are beautiful.

The other night we had some excitement in the neighborhood--seven, count them, seven cop cars on the street outside our house, and a helicopter with searchlight beams circling overhead while a voice on a loudspeaker ordered someone inside the house across the street to "Come out with your hands up." We had been watching The Fog of War--sue me, I felt bad for Robert McNamara. I know that had I been old enough to understand what was going on during the Vietnam Era I would have hated him. I remember the anguish and horror of that war, the daily casualty count in the newspapers, the scenes of napalmed children howling in pain on the evening news.

What I saw in the film though was a man in anguish about the possibility of nuclear war, haunted by how close we came on more than one occasion. One could argue that knowing what he knew he could have and should have done more to stop Johnson from escalating the war in Vietnam--but Johnson was a stubborn man and hindsight is always 20/20. Maybe it's because I'm older, maybe because I still love Obama despite the fact that he seems bent on escalating our military involvement in Afghanistan which I think is a terrible mistake--but I can now hold the concept of fundamentally decent people making bad decisions which result in horrible things happening.

So anyway, there we were pondering the paradox of McNamara's character; meanwhile on the street, a posse of cops were focused on our neighbors. We stepped out on our porch to see what was happening. The mother came out eventually. It was a cold night--I had my down coat on--and she was dressed in a tank top and shorts.

They told her to walk backwards with her hands up, towards the cop car. Talking and arguing. She seemed to be saying, "My son is in the house!" I wondered which son it was. I remember her older son from when he was a teen age boy who would offer to cut our lawn. Her younger son has sickle cell anemia, is small for his age and developmentally delayed.

Another neighbor across the way came out and stood on their fire escape, wrapped up against the cold, silently bearing witness. I knew this family. There was an uncle who had done time in San Quentin who threatened to burn down my house because I wouldn't give him ten dollars once when he rang my bell in the middle of the night. That was one of the reasons why I stopped hanging around with the children, who are all grown up now anyway, with children of their own.

The mother waved at us and called "Hi neighbor!" I think she was glad to have witnesses, in case a Rodney King incident of police brutality developed--which it didn't. At least not that we saw, not that night. After about twenty minutes of standing around, a little blustering on the bullhorns, some cars tried to make their way up the street and were blocked by the phalanx of police. Then, slowly, the mother was let go back into her house (at first they were going to take her away in the cop car and I wondered for what? Child abuse? Or was it a drug bust? There are a lot of drug busts in our neighborhood.)

Then the cop cars left finally, and we turned back to McNamara and the sixties and the seventies and the Vietnam War.

Trixie has recovered remarkably quickly from her feminine operation. When you compare the time it takes for a woman to heal from a hysterectomy...she's already leaping up after her toy and scrambling over the couches and hiding in the cupboard, less than 48 hours post-surgery. Of course it helps that she's not even one year old yet.

The day is bright and clear and beautiful, the buds on the fig tree are just beginning, like green flames, the peach tree is beginning to flower. Pink blossoms everywhere. Scotch broom not out in full yet in the hills, but it will be soon. Weeds are waist high in the back yard, and no matter how many I pull, ten thousand more grow.

My ideas are like the weeds. I want to teach Shakespeare sonnets in prison, I want to go to Haiti, I'm trying to coordinate poetry at this middle school although my contact is not calling me back, I'm writing new poems for another book and there's another draft yet of the play to do. And upcoming trips: the AWP conference in Denver (a little scary), the Fetzer Institute thing in Michigan (I have no idea what it will be like, but I'm intrigued), the SUN conference in Massachusetts in May. (fun!)

Christopher is patiently teaching me piano, and now that I have mastered Louie Louie, we have moved on to Randy Newman. I'm learning one of my favorite songs, You Can Leave Your Hat On. It has a very repetitive right hand, and a left hand that consists of two or three phrases. I've learned one phrase on the left hand so far which I can play while Christopher does the right hand. I'll progress to the full left hand and then learn the other hand and put them both together.

Something wonderful happens when I am concentrating hard on the music; my brain shuts off. You can't exactly "think" the melody and the rhythm at the same time, everything's happening so fast. You just get it into your muscle memory and trust that and feel it. After a long day focusing on the keyboard it's the best medicine in the world. Gerry is burning a CD for me with k.d. lang's version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah on it so I can learn that too. The lyrics to that song kill me.

Okay, not that it matters, but I am psyched that The Hurt Locker won best picture and that Kathryn Bigelow won best director, a breakthrough for women in one of the more male-dominated industries. I'm psyched because of all the movies I saw (and I didn't see every picture that was nominated) The Hurt Locker was by far the best. It had real content, it made me feel a range of emotions, some of which surprised me, it put me in the shoes and hearts and bodies of characters whose circumstances are very different from my own. It felt true on an emotional, spiritual and physical level. It brought the war home.

And of course it was technically challenging--without calling attention to itself. I didn't think, "Wow, how did she get all those explosives to go off in that way?" I was so deep inside the reality of the film I wanted to dive under the seat in front of me to avoid flying shrapnel.

And I am proud as hell that a woman pulled this off.

Of the nominated films I saw "Avatar" (beautiful visual effects but the story was...problematic,) Up in the Air, (some very nice moments, and I liked the idea of the story--I liked the structure but the plot had some holes in it that bothered me, and I didn't think it was Oscar-worthy), District 9, (this one was good, they should have a separate award for cheekiest upstart made on a shoestring, plus it was probably the most creative, well-thought-out idea with great metaphorical and political resonance.) Last and least was Inglorious Basterds, (hated it hated it hated it and Quentin Tarantino you do not have permission to use the Holocaust as a prop to jack off to your own disturbed fantasies.)

I plan to see Precious and Up! and Crazy Heart, and maybe The Blind Side as well, if not in theatres then on Netflix.

Meanwhile I got to interview a veteran, an acquaintance of Christopher's, for my play The Recruiter, and I'm up to my eyeballs in a new essay. I dreamed the other night that the third book of poems, Love Shack, got accepted for publication. Wouldn't that be great, if it only took a year or two to get it published instead of eight?

Last night I dreamed I had a sexual affair with another woman, and rode a motorcycle out to a meeting in order to tryst with her. When I woke up and told Christopher about it, he had three questions: Were you wearing a helmet? (No.) What kind of sex did you have? (Subtext: can I watch? No.) And: what kind of motorcycle was it? (How should I know?)

Such is life at the old homestead.

We figured out that Trixie's peeing the bed might have something to do with the fact that she is furiously and seriously in heat. She humps the floor, Christopher's leg when he stands there mixing cat food, his shoes, anything she can get her little furry body around. She hunches up her back and assumes the position at random moments throughout the day. We can hear Whiny, the big gray tomcat, prowling and yowling out in the yard. I swear they can smell each other through the walls.

So yesterday Christopher brought her in to have her lady parts fixed and right now he's picking her up, poor thing. I still have mixed feelings about what we've done, making her tame and domesticated and dependent on us--and now neutered. On the one hand, being a feral cat in an urban neighborhood is no picnic. I've seen many dead cats on our street over the years, hit by passing cars. It's cold and wet out this winter, and there are a lot of pit bulls, crazy drivers, kids on skateboards, and other scary things. Plus I have no idea how they eat if not for people like Christopher who feed them.

On the other hand she often perches on the back of the sofa looking out the front picture window at the street, as cats do, and I wonder if she is missing her lost freedom. And while there is no percentage in letting her answer nature's call and produce a new litter of feral babies, it also seems cruel to cut off such an essential part of her being. But maybe I am just projecting here. Maybe I am grieving my own fertility and my own lost wildness.

For the last two days we've been hosting one of my oldest friends and her almost-eleven-year-old son. She remembers dinners with my family when we all lived at home, she remembers my mother when my mother could walk, when my mother was a force to be reckoned with, and she remembers me when I was a thirteen-year-old bundle of insecurity and originality, my head a frizzy dandelion full of dreams.

I hate it that they are referring to the Chilean people who are so desperate for food and water that they are breaking into stores as "looters." A looter in my mind is someone who takes advantage of a catastrophe to steal video games, or fancy electronic gizmos or high-end luxury clothing or something else non-essential. If people are hungry and thirsty and supplies are not being distributed to them, then that's not looting, that's survival. What if some of those people have young children or elderly or sick relatives and they are trying to get food and water for them?

Christopher has been sick for the past two or three days. I made him a big pot of chicken soup with elephant garlic, fresh dill, fresh ginger, carrots, onions, sea salt and the juice of a few limes. I am sure that this will cure the dead. He's been drinking it, as well as reading a memoir by a physicist who became obsessed with the idea of time traveling.

I just finished reading a witty play by my friend Stuart, a drama about the goddess hera set as an English drawing room comedy. I'm beginning to reread Aline Kaminsky-Crumb's autobiography Need More Love. She's the wife of cartoonist R. Crumb, and a brilliant cartoonist in her own right. Her book is plainly-written, funny, poignant and ultimately inspiring because she's a little bull terrier (is that even a real breed?) By that I mean, she's not afraid to be mouthy, gauche, ambitious, lazy, horny, sensual, greedy, determined, and everything else. She completely owns her shadow--maybe even over-owns it. And she is persistent. I find her brave and inspiring.

In other news, our recently-adopted formerly feral kitten Trixie peed the bed the other night. Yes, that would be our bed, the king-size human one. She jumped onto the end of it in the wee (pun intended) hours of the morning, did her thing and jumped off so softly I never heard or felt a thing. In the morning there was this suspiciously-shaped stain down at the bottom of the comforter that smelled muskily of kitty-pee. I rubbed baking soda into it, we soaked it in the sink and I think we got it all out.

Now, the question: why did she do it? As far as I know, cats are fastidious. They only do this kind of thing when they are, you should excuse the expression, pissed. But she's got the life of Riley here. Four square meals a day, kitty toys to play with and tons of stroking and attention. What is going on? Does she miss the great outdoors, the backyard with its rain and snails and tall weeds and her family to play with and fight with? Is her situation as an indoor cat privileged or tragic or both? And how much do cat psychiatrist cost? Oy.

Right now I am taking a tiny break from writing up a "Letter of Interest" about the Haiti idea for my friend Enver who works for an international refugee organization. I've never written a Letter of Interest before and don't know what one is exactly, so I'm just stumbling along, doing my best.

I wrote the following letter to some friends and collaborators at Interplay (www.interplay.org; www.bodywisdom.org) today:

I look at the New York Times online every morning and the other day there was a picture of a young Haitian woman who had had one leg amputated. The caption said she had been a professional dancer. There are many such new amputees in Haiti now, thousands and thousands of them.

And I started thinking... about how Interplay knows a lot about dancing with physical limitations. How great would it be if a group of Interplayers were to go to Haiti, perhaps bringing prostheses and other supplies to make life easier for a disabled person? What if we were to dance and play with survivors of the earthquake, especially amputees, especially children?

When I was in Haiti years ago, disabled people were carried around on their friends' or relatives' backs, or sometimes they were pulled in little rickety wooden carts. I don't think I saw anyone in a wheelchair the whole time I was there. I wonder if anyone is working on super-affordable low-tech equipment for the thousands of newly-disabled people there? I'm sure someone is, but who?

I don't think this is an idea for right now. Right now the needs there are for food, water, and housing. I am thinking a year or a year and a half from now. I would like to go over earlier, maybe with Habitat for Humanity, or maybe with the Haitian support organization that exists here in the Bay Area (I forget their name, they spoke at my synagogue the other week.) I think I could act as a liason and scout out contacts to see if this idea would be even feasible.

I stayed in Haiti for two weeks back in the early eighties with a friend. We traveled on the Tab-Tab's (local trucks which are used to transport people, and are usually loaded to the gills and running on unpaved, rocky mountain roads,) and rented rooms with mud walls and cots and a toilet down the hall for about two dollars a night.

I don't know what exists there now, but my sense is that things have not improved in recent years, and the earthquake destroyed a lot of living spaces. So whoever wanted to go would have to be pretty hardy and up for sleeping conditions that might resemble camping more than a hotel stay. There could also be a health threat from multi-drug resistant TB, since the main hospital where TB patients were housed collapsed and many of the patients who could walk simply left without taking their full course of meds. That is a real danger. (Read Tracy Kidder's excellent book Mountains Beyond Mountains for more on TB and AIDS in Haiti, and on Dr. Paul Farmer.) It would be a more rugged experience than our trip to Malawi, although the plane trip would be a lot shorter.

I wouldn't want to bring a large group, just a couple of very strong, very flexible Interplayers who had skills in rhythm, dance, music, and healing. I'm fluent in Creole and could provide translation services plus the other stuff I do; including storytelling facilitation. Once upon a time I used to know some Haitian folk songs--my students taught me--it's been so long I've forgotten, but I'm sure it would come back.

I know Interplay and Body Wisdom are pretty broke right now and my personal financial picture isn't that strong either. Thanks to all the cutbacks in education, I'm more under-employed than usual. That's why I was thinking a grant might be a good thing.

So...anyone else interested in this idea? Wanna brainstorm? Wanna jump on the bandwagon? Feel free to forward this email to whomever you think might be interested in collaborating. As I said, this is for 2011 or 2012, not this year. But great things could come out of it.

Love,
Alison

Woke up way too early--before 5--and couldn't get back to sleep so here I am, all coffee-d up and pretty tired, at my desk. I swam three-quarters of a mile yesterday, at 6:00 p.m. You'd think that would make for a good long sleep, but sometimes exercise too close to bedtime has the opposite effect. I'm not losing any weight from this either, because I'm still eating sugar--but my shoulders are looking muy buff.

Yesterday I drove an hour through the pouring rain to interview Kim Rosen, the author of Saved By A Poem. It was so worth it! We spoke deeply about the role that poetry plays in different cultures, how learning poems by heart can align people physically, emotionally, and spiritually, the origins of poetic language, poetry and Bernie Madoff, dreams of poetry-diplomacy, poetry in Kenya with Maasi tribespeople, poetry in Ireland, in Uruguay, poetry at the Superdome in New Orleans a month after Katrina and so much more.

Even though editors at The Sun were somewhat lukewarm on this topic when I first proposed it, I think they will love it when the interview is typed up. At least I hope they will. I loved our conversation, and I felt lucky to be part of it. The best part of being an artist for me is the conversations you get to have before during after and through the art. And the connections and the relationships that grow out of it.

Today: send Love Shack to the remaining small presses on my list, buy apples and beer, write introduction to the interview while it is still fresh in my mind, take a nap. And the rain goes on...

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the phrase "inner work"? It's a term one hears a lot around the Bay Area, usually in a thinly-masked judgmental way, such as "he or she is or isn't doing their inner work." As if the person pronouncing this diagnosis could know what was going on inside another human being!

Or, "If you are doing your inner work, you'll be okay when the big earthquake hits/you receive a terrible diagnosis/your pet/parent/lover dies/leaves." (This, by the way, is bullshit. No matter how much you meditate or eat tofu or visualize little green people, or whatever it is you do, dying is still scary, losing things is still painful, and people leaving you still sucks. Even for the Dalai Lama, who, I think we can all agree, is someone who has Done His Work--for many lifetimes. You don't get out of being human. Not if you were born in a body.)

I hate, hate, hate this expressions, which is almost a byword on the lips of most of my dear sweet super-conscious friends. When I hear someone talk about "inner work" I want to reach for the Ding Dongs and beer--and I don't even like beer! I want to watch World Wrestling Federation on TV. I want to go disrupt a seance.

Fuck "inner work." Just live your life and be as kind as you can. Reflection? Sure. Seeing where you are the author of your own problems? Bring it on. Apologizing when you've fucked up and hurt somebody? Absolutely. People have been doing this stuff all along. It's nothing fancy. It used to not be called "inner work." It used to be called "being a mensch", or, more negatively, "trying not to be too big of an asshole."

This is the philosophy I subscribe to. Try not to be too big of an asshole. If you make a mistake, apologize as quickly as possible, and make amends wherever you can. Repeat as often as necessary. That's it. The rest is commentary.

Calling your life "inner work" implies some kind of special spiritual heavy lifting that only the initiated few are special enough to participate in. There's something self-serving in it, as the implication is always that the person talking about "inner work" is of course doing it. It's like giving yourself a gold star. It implies that the guy who goes to work and comes home and watches a ball game and loves his family and is reasonably nice most of the time is somehow lacking. And that the New Age self-appointed prophet whose ethics and relationships are a mess has some kind of corner on integrity because they sit on a meditation cushion, or collect crystals, or get their chart done.

Personally, I'd rather hang out with the woman who picks up garbage at the side of the road than any "inner work" guru. I'd rather hang out with an eight-year-old. Or a gerbil. Or a pine tree, or a feral cat.

We went to hear Eve Ensler speak last night, at a benefit for KPFA. She was completely inspiring--in fact, she was not just inspiring, she embodied inspiration altogether. What a privilege to witness someone who is really in service to an energy greater than herself, a servant of the Divine Feminine. As she puts it, "Vaginas took me over and had their way with me." Now she is devoting her life to ending violence against women.

She speaks out ceaselessly about the rapes and torture going on in the Congo--rape as a weapon of war, and also about the wars women wage against our own bodies because we have been so deeply inculcated with unattainable images of perfection. (For more information on this, if you go to nytimes.com and type Nicholas Kristof into the search engine, he has reported extensively on this. Or go to the Huffington Post and search out Eve Ensler.)

I got to meet her for a minute backstage and she is also really pretty! She is in her late fifties but her skin is fresh and rosy like a young girls'--she glows. And she was totally present and warm and gracious even though there were hundreds of people lined up waiting for her to sign their books.

I was pleased and touched that Christopher accompanied me to hear her speak. There were a handful of men in the audience, but of course it was very estrogen-heavy. There were a bunch of girls from Berkeley High who had been involved in a production of The Vagina Monologues there--certainly no one was doing that kind of theatre when I was in high school! Ensler spoke about giving up security, or the illusion of security. I find her inspiring and terrifying. The terror is like the terror of standing at the edge of a high mountain. Part of me wants to jump off and fly the way she does, the other part clings to home.

Her latest book is called I Am An Emotional Creature. It is a poetic defense and support of girls, and their emotional lives. Their (our) passion, depth, empathy and intensity. Many of us have had to learn to tone these things down as we grew into adult women. Some of us (me) have even learned to shut them off. Yet I certainly was a tearful, passionate, boisterous, humorous and intense girl in my day. And somewhere that girl lives on inside of me.

I wish to report on the status of the kitty names in our family. We are adopting Trixie (yes, Christopher won that one.) Her little black sister is My Sharona. Her big white and black sister is True Dee (Trudie, for Gertrude Stein--I wanted Trudie and Trixie, get it?) and the mother cat is named True Dat--homage to The Wire. The father cat, who is enormous, is named Tiny, and the other male cat who prowls around and may have fathered some of the other strays is Whiny, because he yowls all the time.

It's true that I lived here for ten years before Christopher and there were feral cats the whole time but I didn't take much note of them, because despite the fifty cans of cat food which I lugged home from Trader Joe's the other week, I am still officially Not A Cat Person. But I have to admit Trixie is very cute, with her tiger coat and white diamond chest. And to see her cuddling in Christopher's arms and hear her purr and witness his joy is to see true love in action.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Seven hours in an underground office in S.F. yesterday at a training to learn to interview other people involved in the artist-in-the-schools biz. I'm interested in this study, which will gather data from artists, principals of schools, program directors and use it to hopefully validate the contributions resident artists make, improve working conditions for us and perhaps institute a credentialing process for our profession.

I think many poets and artists in the schools are like me, somewhat anarchic spirits who have a hard time fitting in to institutions. (Of course most human beings have a hard time fitting into institutions so I don't know what makes us so special...)

I do know that while I can be very dogged in pursuing goals and staying the course, I have "spurt energy" when it comes to hard work. That is I can be very intense, learn a lot, work hard, go all out on one day--and then I can't get out of bed the next. I wish I were not like this. I admire people who can pour it on, day after day after day. But after seven hours in said basement room and then another four or so hours at Interplayce, I found that the car was driving itself back home. luckily it knows how to get there. I ate some salad at 10 p.m. with Christopher and crashed into bed, beat, winded spent.

Picnic today at the marina. Yellow wildflowers covering the hills and all kinds of people out flying kites. Little kids furiously pedaling their bikes and trikes, chihuahuas and poodles, mutts and Labradors, sheepdogs, retrievers, Huskies and pit bulls sniffing out the ground squirrels and the gophers and being tugged away from the owls' special protected area. The sun came out and burned off the fog and folks were in t-shirts and tank tops. The kite-seller sold kites from his truck, and we lugged a picnic under a tree and ate overlooking the water.

When we were first dating, before we'd even had any sleep-overs, we had a series of picnics by Lake Merritt. We'd meet early on Sunday mornings by the Grand Lake movie Theater. C would be carrying a shopping bag with a thermos of steaming hot coffee, half 'n half, cheese, salami, hard-boiled eggs. I'd bring good bread and fruit and dark chocolate. We'd sit on a bench and eat and people-watch and then walk around the lake, talking. That was our courtship. After he moved in with me it was easier just to spend Sunday mornings with The New York Times spread all over the living room floor, but today we resurrected the old ritual.

I don't like the obligatory holiday thing and both of us were preoccupied and not in a mood for present-buying or receiving, so that was our present to each other; just a sweet picnic and the luxury of time. That's enough. Also, I gave him a challenge. He's recently fallen in love with photography and I suggested he take a picture a day for a year. I said I would try to write a poem a day for the same amount of time--starting now.

I read somewhere that e.e. cummings wrote a poem a day for fourteen years. I have no idea if that's true or not. I know Robert Bly did something similar, and of course William Stafford was famous for getting up at 4 a.m. and writing poems every day while the sun rose. The idea of making a commitment like that scares me which is why I think I should do it.

So I offer this Valentine's day dare to anyone who wants it: do the thing you love every day for a year, whether it's yoga practice, making a picture, writing a poem, singing a song, or whatever your thing is. Just do it every day. See how that shapes your year.

And I found this poem by Andrea Gibson today on the Huffington Post. Enjoy!

Say Yes

when two violins are placed in a room

if a chord on one violin is struck

the other violin will sound the note

if this is your definition of hope

this is for you

the ones who know how powerful we are

who know we can sound the music in the people around us

simply by playing our own strings

for the ones who sing life into broken wings

open their chests and offer their breath

as wind on a still day when nothing seems to be moving

spare those intent on proving god is dead

for you when your fingers are red

from clutching your heart

so it will beat faster

for the time you mastered the art of giving yourself for the sake of someone else

for the ones who have felt what it is to crush the lies

and lift truth so high the steeples bow to the sky

this is for you

this is also for the people who wake early to watch flowers bloom

who notice the moon at noon on a day when the world

has slapped them in the face with its lack of light

for the mothers who feed their children first

and thirst for nothing when they're full

this is for women

and for the men who taught me only women bleed with the moon

but there are men who cry when women bleed

men who bleed from women's wounds

and this is for that moon

on the nights she seems hung by a noose

for the people who cut her loose

and for the people still waiting for the rope to burn
about to learn they have scissors in their hands

this is for the man who showed me

the hardest thing about having nothing

is having nothing to give

who said the only reason to live is to give ourselves away

so this is for the day we'll quit or jobs and work for something real

we'll feel for sunshine in the shadows
look for sunrays in the shade

this is for the people who rattle the cage that slave wage built

and for the ones who didn't know the filth until tonight

but right now are beginning songs that sound something like
people turning their porch lights on and calling the homeless back home

this is for all the shit we own

and for the day we'll learn how much we have

when we learn to give that shit away

this is for doubt becoming faith

for falling from grace and climbing back up

for trading our silver platters for something that matters
like the gold that shines from our hands when we hold each other

this is for the grandmother who walked a thousand miles on broken glass
to find that single patch of grass to plant a family tree

where the fruit would grow to laugh

for the ones who know the math of war

has always been subtraction

so they live like an action of addition

for you when you give like every star is wishing on you

and for the people still wishing on stars

this is for you too

this is for the times you went through hell so someone else wouldn't have to

for the time you taught a 14 year old girl she was powerful

this is for the time you taught a 14 year old boy he was beautiful

for the radical anarchist asking a republican to dance

cause what's the chance of everyone moving from right to left

if the only moves they see are NBC and CBS
this is for the no becoming yes

for scars becoming breath

for saying i love you to people who will never say it to us

for scraping away the rust and remembering how to shine

for the dime you gave away when you didn't have a penny

for the many beautiful things we do

for every song we've ever sung

for refusing to believe in miracles

because miracles are the impossible coming true
and everything is possible

this is for the possibility that guides us

and for the possibilities still waiting to sing

and spread their wings inside us

cause tonight saturn is on his knees

proposing with all of his ten thousand rings

that whatever song we've been singing we sing even more
the world needs us right now more than it ever has before

pull all your strings

play every chord

if you're writing letters to the prisoners

start tearing down the bars

if you're handing our flashlights in the dark

start handing our stars

never go a second hushing the percussion of your heart

play loud

play like you know the clouds have left too many people cold and broken

and you're their last chance for sun

play like there's no time for hoping brighter days will come

play like the apocalypse is only 4...3...2

but you have a drum in your chest that could save us

you have a song like a breath that could raise us
like the sunrise into a dark sky that cries to be blue
play like you know we won't survive if you don't
but we will if you do
play like saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that we give every single breath
this is for saying-yes

this is for saying-yes

--Andrea Gibson