Gaia Community: romanlily's Blog

You Can't Have It All

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:03:16 -0000

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.

-- Barbara Ras

film vs. digital: photographic ping-pong

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:21:51 -0000

I just got back a roll of film that I shot in Tennessee and Virginia last month, on my photo shoot with the Appalachian home repair group. I used my digital camera for 97% of the shots I took that week -- but I borrowed a beautiful Yashica medium-format camera from a friend and brought it along in the hopes of shooting some film (you'll find a photo of this beautiful twin lens camera here).

I only shot one roll of film, and even that one roll was damaged when I accidentally popped the back door of the camera open and exposed half of the roll (oops!). But still, I'm glad I brought the camera with me.

Revisiting the world of film was a total pleasure. I've been shooting with a digital camera almost exclusively since 2004. A huge part of digital photography's appeal is its speed and flexibility. But a big trade-off with digital is the frenetic pace that sometimes seeps into the production of images. Since you aren't burning through any raw materials with a digital camera, you can just shoot shoot shoot! You don't even need to pause to advance the roll of film through the camera! But for me, something important often gets lost in the process.

The Yashica I borrowed has a damaged light meter, so composing images with it was especially time-consuming. Each time I wanted to take a shot, I would use the light meter in my digital camera, then transfer the settings to the Yashica.

The ground glass of the Yashica casts back a mirrored reflection of the scene before you. This sounds like it wouldn't be a big deal -- but I'm amazed by how long it took me to set up shots. But in a way, both of these "shortcomings" in the Yashica just added to the pleasure of composing shots with it.

I'm seeing now that a conversation between film and digital cameras may be just what I need to maintain a happy relationship with photography for the rest of my life. The clarity and responsiveness of digital, the meditative quality of film... both approaches to photography are delightful in their own way.

I must admit that I can't remember the name of the man in the photo above... he was a client of the organization I worked with, who did free home repair for the rural poor in southern Appalachia. He didn't speak much when I asked him if I could take his photo, just gave the slightest nod and grunt to let me know I had his permission. He was the first "model" I shot with the Yashica. He was wearing a big red foam trucker had that said GOD IS GOOD ALL OF THE TIME. I'm glad I had black and white film in the camera at the time. The color equivalent of the same scene would have been very, very different.

creativity, memory and the quest for the poem

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:24:52 -0000

Here is a bit of blogging about how my creative process works.

It's an unnecessarily long story, but it has a happy ending.

Last night I came home from a day at a client's office, mulling over what I might take as my photo of the day. I've been taking and posting a photo a day for the better part of two years over on my Flickr site. I love the practice, not necessarily because it results in lots of groundbreaking photos, but because it keeps me engaged daily in paying attention to the world around me.

Cleaning out a dresser drawer a few days before, I'd come across an old white cotton nightgown, which I'd wadded up carelessly and shoved into the drawer a couple of years before. The nightgown had some history. It had been with me through my marriage, divorce, and subsequent relationship -- the one that just ended. It's still a pretty little gown. I thought about how I might pay some kind of tribute to it by taking a photo of it.

I also found myself thinking about the nightgown as a kind of ghost, or a silent witness of a past life. I find it interesting to consider the emotional history of a simple piece of clothing, the thought of it being present at many important events in your life.

I started to ruminate about how to set up the photo. I liked the idea of hanging the nightgown in a tree. Sometimes taking a phototographic subject out of its usual context yields an interesting image. I started to ruminate over what words might accompany the photo of the nightgown (adding a bit of text to each photo is usually as delightful as taking the actual photo).

I went outside with the nightgown and hung it in the branches of a huge magnolia tree down the block. The photo isn't remarkable and doesn't accomplish much -- I think of it as a pencil sketch of a better future photo -- but it's a functional, somewhat interesting daily photo. (There's an element of practicality about this photo-of-the-day thing. You have a limited amount of time to work with.)

Bonus tip: if you ever want to feel like a complete loon, get out an old nightgown and hang it in the tree in a public area and watch townspeople eyeing you suspiciously as they walk by.

Back in my apartment, I looked at the photos of the gown in the tree. Suddenly I remembered a few random lines from a lovely poem I had encountered years previous in the pages of The New Yorker. (They have always published such wonderful poetry.) The poem I remembered was about grief, and the act of being still and acknowledging the transitions of life. I had photocopied the poem many years ago and read it several times and then sort of forgot about it. But suddenly I was sure that the poem would be a perfect partner for the photo of the nightgown. I remembered a bit in the poem about a student putting her head down on her desk and feeling her breath on her arms. I remembered the final line: "There should be a mourner."

I Googled that phrase six ways to Sunday, and found nothing.

(Incidentally, this is one of the more terrible feelings I personally encounter in my day-to-day living. To know a poem is out there in the world, to remember a few scattered pieces of it, and to not know quite how to get my hands on it.... the agony!)

I looked around a little bit online and found a different poem about grief that I really liked. I bookmarked that one and decided to use it with the photo of the nightgown on Flickr.

Meanwhile, I was getting downright irritated by my inability to manifest the original poem I sought. I decided to get away from the computer and go grocery shopping.

Walking around at the grocery store broke some part of my memory loose. I remembered the poet's name. Ruth Fainlight!

Back at home, I got back on Google. A search showed that the poem I sought was published in the January 18, 1993 issue of The New Yorker. That sounded exactly right. The poem itself was not online, but I saw the first line in an abstract of the poem on The New Yorker site:

I put my head on my arms on my desk

That was it!

I put my shoes on again and walked with extreme purpose to the public library a block away. They may not have hard copies of that issue, but I knew they had microfiche. It's been a long time since a photographic journey led me to the depths of the public library's archives.

When I opened the appropriate drawer with the New Yorker archives, I was crestfallen to see that there was a perfect little gap in the neatly organized boxes of microfiche. A perfect little gap where the 1993 reel of The New Yorker should have been -- but wasn't.

I approached a research librarian. I wondered if research librarians secretly adore tasks like mine. The librarian I spoke to gave chase enthusiastically, but was unable to locate the microfiche or any more information on the poem.

I was dejected. I walked back home, shoulders slumped. I posted a sad little note on Twitter about my adventure, the missing New Yorker reel.

Sam, a friend in New York, saw my post. He posted a reply to me:

You're just looking for the poem text? I have the DVD archive.

Sam had the DVD archive of The New Yorker! Every page of every issue from February 1925 through April 2007! A few hours later, there was an email from Sam with the poem attached. Mystery solved.

Now all I have to do is come up with a photo that's worthy of the poem.

Here is "The Mourner" by Ruth Fainlight. Thank you, Sam.

I put my head on my arms on my desk
to weep, and the smell and heat of my breath
remind me of afternoons at school
when the teacher made us stop our noise
and running around, and take a rest.

Not since then, except in love's
embrace, have the damp intensities
of my own body and feelings so
combined. My pain is this particular
odor, this primeval climate.

The teacher talked about an endless
age of fire and flood and earthquake,
everything changing, life-forms dying
and being born. In all the confusion
and turmoil, there should be a mourner.

broken keys

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:46:36 -0000

It's been a long, long, long string of days. My boyfriend and I split up a week ago. Seven days later, I'm continuing to process all the layers of our parting.

We had 3 years together, and they were pretty good years. I think we both struggled throughout our courtship to make sense of some fairly significant incompatibilities. It's hard to say how present I was in the relationship; my journals from our time together are brimming with angst over this or that perceived contradiction in our togetherness. We deeply appreciated and enjoyed each other, but at the same time, neither of us could ever silence the incessant voice always churning in the background: Is this really the right person for me? (Implied follow-up question: Is there even such a thing as "the right person for me"? I don't really think there is.)

I don't know what to think about romantic love these days. Part of me is very tired of even attempting to engage in meaningful romantic relationships. Simple togetherness is often a lot of work. Not to mention the breaking up, which is absolutely crushing. I don't want to comment here on how wrecked I was when he and I finally parted last week. Even though I knew it was right -- even though our conversations about the split were completely full of tenderness and care -- even though it had been coming for a long time. Breakups -- even very good breakups -- hurt terribly.

I can say that our time together was full of useful lessons for me. I emerge with a clearer sense of myself, and a renewed interest in telling the truth about who I am.

Just the same, I'm not sure I'm going to be volunteering that truth anytime soon. After summer comes fall, and after fall comes winter. I'm starting to think that an isolated trapper's cabin in the middle of the frozen north sounds pretty good right about now.

She & Him

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:42:34 -0000

I went to see a performance by She & Him last night. She & Him is a hip little musical duo consisting of actress Zooey Deschanel and indie musician M. Ward. My affection for M. Ward's music began on the day in 2005 when I heard his song "Vincent O'Brien" for the first time:

He only sings when he's sad
But he's sad all the time
So he sings the whole night through
Yes, he sings in the day time, too

I seriously adore this man.

She & Him sing sweet 3-minute love songs with simple little rhymes. Their music is unthreatening, completely nonpolitical, wholesome and solidly American. It's nothing you've never heard before, but it's very easy on the ears. I hear a hybrid of the Carter Family, Linda Rondstadt, and even early Diana Ross in their songs. Lots of doo-wops and handclaps going on in the background.

We got to the club a little after the opening band had started their set. I figured we'd find plenty of seating, but instead were stunned by the huge crowd already forming at the foot of the stage. We were lucky to score a few remote chairs in the balcony. After a long wait, She & Him took to the stage. The crowd -- sell-out capacity -- went bonkers.

This morning I'm thinking about why these 3-minute candy-coated pop songs whipped a deeply urban audience into such a froth. Behold the opening lyrics to one of their sweet little numbers:

I was takin' a walk
When I saw you pass by
I saw you lookin' my way
So I thought I'd give you a try

Halfway through the performance of this toe-tapping tune, I turned to my neighbor and said, "These guys are the opposite of Radiohead."

Maybe we all want some relief from being so unfailingly serious all the time. Maybe we're tired of thinking about how we're all in debt up to our elbows. About how we've depleted our nation's natural resources. About how the country is balanced on the edge of some impressive long-term problems that aren't going to be fixed in this generation, or the next one...

This morning I wake up and poke around on the web. The NYTimes has an article called "10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List." It's today's most e-mailed article.

The title amuses me. Though I hate to admit it, I certainly have a Worry List, a string of carefully nurtured anxieties. When I am sleeping poorly or eating poorly or dealing with bad energy or generally wishing to heap suffering on myself, I have a list of favorite super-scary thoughts I turn to. You know, the stuff about dying alone, destroying the polar ice caps, contributing even more of my own trash to that massive Texas-sized island of plastic floating somewhere in the Pacific. That kind of thing.

Maybe the crowd was there last night hoping to get some distance from that endless drone of worrybot voices. If the worrybot voices lead me to nothing useful, nothing but the rat wheel of anxiety, then they're useless. Frankly, this is precisely where the music of Radiohead takes me.

I'm happy She & Him were able to get us into a different place last night. It was a great, great concert. Today I'm turning up the pop music and doing the handclaps right here at my desk. Radiohead can take the day off.

my old Kentucky home

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:18:53 -0000

I'm just getting back in the swing of things after being out of town all week. The smell of clean sheets on my bed has never been more lovely.

I spent the weekend in southern Appalachia -- Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky. I was there to shoot photos and do grip work on a video project for an organization (Appalachia Service Project) that does home repair for poor families in the area.

I saw some things this week that shocked me. The poverty in this part of the world is just unbelievable.

We met a woman in Evarts, Virginia who lived with seven children in a one-room home (shown above). That sounds like such a cliché. It sounds like a set-up for a joke on a Jay Leno monologue. But these were real people. And I saw that one room they had lived in (remarkably clean, I have to say). The home repair client was building a two-room addition for her family so they could have more space.

We met a couple in Harlan, Kentucky whose roof was falling in. Ray was jobless and suffered from emphysema (naturally, this didn't keep him from smoking incessantly. I shook my finger at him for that). Judy harvested green tomatoes and turnips from their garden and fried them up for the work crew who was putting a new roof on the house. They were absolutely wonderful. The photo I took of her in her kitchen with the fried green tomatoes is one of my favorites from the trip. Maybe I'll share that later.

We met another family in Harlan, Kentucky who lived in a tiny trailer. The mom and dad were in their early 20s and they had four children. The children rambled happily around the yard in bare feet, completely ignorant of the broken glass and random auto parts littering the ground, completely ignorant of the raw sewage draining into the yard from their home.

It was heartbreaking. I can't believe people in this country live this way. Our producer, who has traveled to many poor parts of the world in Albania, Cuba, Ukraine, etc., said he had never seen poverty like this.

The redemptive part about the week was meeting some of the individuals doing the home repairs for these families. More than half the volunteers for the organization are youth group members from churches in Alabama, Connecticut, Maryland, and North Carolina. Many of these kids come from very privileged families. To see poverty like this probably rattled them as deeply as it rattled me. Some of these kids have been coming to serve for 3 or 4 summers now, and they keep in touch with the families they've served in previous summers. It warmed me to see how much affection these children had for the families they served.

It may sound strange to say -- but it was one of the best weeks I've had in a long time. Using my camera to try to capture some of what I saw was incredibly challenging and rewarding. I also learned somethings along the way about the nuts and bolts of video work. I really hope that the photos I took and the video we captured will go a long way toward furthering the organization's work, and pull in lots of donations that will help the hundreds of families in this area who need assistance.

solstice fire

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:16:08 -0000

I'm growing to truly enjoy the act of taking stock once every quarter and burning old baggage, usually on the date of the solstice or equinox, and usually in the company of my dear friends Halal and Fabulous Slice. The practice of burning old junk in the fire feels much like the rituals that dotted the year at the Orthodox church I used to attend. I always found some comfort in the rituals of confession, fasting and feasting in the church, and in these quarterly fires, I think I've found the rituals I want to carry with me into the future. The solstice or equinox is a beautiful opportunity to take stock, to look at the path life is taking, to appreciate what's working, let go of what's not working.

Fabulous was out of town on Friday, but Halal and her husband offered to carry on the tradition. They built the fire on their lovely back porch. By the time I arrived with Tom, the woods behind their house were glowing with fireflies and dusky light.

The fire was hot. I dropped some of good stuff into it. Wishes and desires and old junk to release back to the universe. Halal read some beautiful reflections on the passing of the season of growth. She served a glass of wine to each of us, and we sipped it slowly while watching the fire burn down.

I made my first move toward incorporating my freelance graphic design business this week, after a couple of years of deliberating about the whethers and whens. The legal requirements of the corporation I'm creating suggest that I should appoint a board of directors and hold quarterly board meetings. Sipping the wine in the glow of the fire, I suddenly realized that I was right in the middle of a lot of wisdom. Hmmm, maybe the solstice and equinox gatherings are the perfect time to hold board meetings. Hmmm, maybe Fabulous and Halal and some other wise friends would make excellent board members.

Truthfully, I have no idea how serious I need to get with the board meeting requirement. But if I am to take it seriously, I can think of no better board members than those whose company I enjoyed on Friday night by the light of the fire.

blissed out

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:45:11 -0000

I went to my favorite yoga class today for the first time in several months.

The teacher of this class has been teaching this Sunday afternoon yoga class for years now. I first wandered into her class at the local YMCA some time in 2001, when my view of the world was pretty narrow. At the time, I was interested in yoga from a purely physical perspective. I remember scoffing quietly to myself when she briefly touched on the concept of chakras during one class. Not very yogic, I know.

Over the years I've come to see her as a woman of rather profound wisdom. She practices wicca and subtly weaves a pagan philosophy into her teaching. It's always understated and, I must say, rather intriguing. But it's not just her spiritual view of the universe that I have grown to admire. It's also the fact that she fought a valiant battle with some very nasty cancer around '03-'04, and now practices yoga with a titanium hip due to complications from the cancer treatment.

She has an amazing spirit and imparts a powerful joy as she teaches, despite all the terrible stuff she's been through.

So, as usual, today in the first half of class, we did all kinds of challenging poses. I'm not very good at these poses, but that's another story for another time. And then for second half of this class we went into savasana.

I've read stories over the years from yogis and spiritual teachers about reaching a place of bliss in deep meditation. I don't know quite what others in the class went through today, but I can say that I experienced a profound deepening and settling deep inside during the savasana segment.

I did 20 or 30 minutes of deep breathing. I only followed part of Kathy's instructions during the meditation -- for the most part, I was riding my own wave. When I slowly came out of the pose at the end of class, I felt like I was waking up after eight hours of deep and refreshing sleep. The calm and groundedness I felt in that moment has stayed with me all afternoon.

Kind of wonderful, really.

(Side note: I'm glad to be writing about this now because it's reminding me to take some ibuprofen before bed tonight. I may be feeling all enlightened right now, but I know that my muscles are going to be wickedly sore tomorrow.)

anniversary thoughts

Sat, 03 May 2008 00:28:41 -0000

Tomorrow is my 34th birthday. Am I reaching the age in which I should no longer publicly admit my age? List-making seems to come naturally at these times, when I am a bit more reflective than usual. Here are some lists I scratched out today.

Things I'm realizing that I would kind of love to do, but that I will probably never do:
- Introduce a son or daughter of mine to all of the poetry that I love. Sharing my love of poetry would undoubtedly be a splendid part of having a child. But this alone is not a good enough reason to have a child.
- Own a luxurious beachfront home. The kind you see in movies, with huge decks and stunning views of the water.
- Become a really, really, really good cook. Have killer knife skills, know how to make legitimate sauces, be able to just "throw something together" in the kitchen, etc.
- Design artwork for postage stamps.

Things I'm realizing that I would kind of love to do, and that are still within the realm of possibility:
- Adopt a happy dog or cat (or both) from the Humane Society. Give them really great names. Take the dog for walks through the graveyard.
- Learn how to make pottery on a wheel.
- Buy and become extremely conversant with a really delicious high-quality film camera (e.g., Bronica, Hasselblad, Leica, etc.).
- Visit the Philip Johnson Glass House in Connecticut.
- Plan and grow a flower garden.
- Live in a smaller, quieter city with a smaller, quieter lifestyle.
- Own a beautiful home with tons of natural light that would double as a photography studio/art gallery.
- Go on an extended walking tour of some other continent or country.
- Take a long vacation in Ireland.
- Produce the best and most creative work of my life.

I'm proud of some of the things I've done since my past birthday. Here are some things that I'm glad I did:
- Freed myself from the clutches of a dreadful dead-end job at a massive soul-eating corporation.
- Went on a women's retreat that really opened up my thinking about who I am and what I want.
- Had a photo selected for a juried photography exhibit.
- Landed a freelance contract that is allowing me to do good work that I care about.
- Climbed Mt. LeConte in NC (...and barely lived to tell the story).
- Stepped up to receive some really great teaching. I've been gobbling up Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth. This feels like a significant development.

Here's hoping 34 is half as happy as 33 was. I'm a very blessed woman.

pleasures of the past 48 hours

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:11:31 -0000

On Friday I drove down to north Florida for a rendezvous with my friend Kathy. Kathy and I were sisters-in-law until 2005, when my marriage to her brother hit the skids. Despite the divorce, she and I remained close through the entire process and are still very close.

We met in a little town in north Florida, with the plan to do some kayaking on the Suwanee River.

What I loved:

-- Meeting the owner of the B&B where we stayed. A retired schoolteacher, she moved alone from Arizona to Florida two years ago to purchase the B&B and fulfill her lifelong dream of living in a beautiful Victorian home. Growing up, she was not close to her father, who was a military man and a notorious philanderer. He was never present in her life in any meaningful way. Doing a search on the internet a few years ago, she discovered that her father had had many "wives" -- and that she now had 14 (!) half-brothers or half-sisters scattered across the country. She made an effort to reconnect with some of these siblings and discovered that they had been searching for her for a long time. A lonely retiree found a brand new family. Her half-brother Phil jumped at the chance to leave New Jersey and live with her at the B&B. He helps her with maintenance around the home. They seem like two happy soul mates who discovered each other at a critical time in their lives. (The thought that a person might have a family out there searching and praying for them is completely fascinating to me.)
-- Renting kayaks and paddling with Kathy down 4 or 5 miles of the Suwanee River. I'm not much of a water bug, but I loved this adventure. The water in the river is very smooth and quiet. It was so peaceful, floating along and listening to the birds call out from above. I hope to go for a kayak trip again very soon.
-- Talking with Kathy about every subject under the sun.
-- Going with Kathy for a long meandering drive through scenic country back roads to find a restaurant for dinner.
-- Finally meandering our way up to Valdosta, hungry and tired and ready to eat something. The first restaurant we tried was completely booked, so we wandered on. We discovered an utterly charming coffeeshop/bookstore associated with a wonderful Episcopal congregation that meets downtown. Browsed their invigorating religion/spirituality section while grazing happily on our sandwiches. Kathy picked up a gorgeous collection of Hafiz poetry, and I discovered a very delightful photography book. What a lucky stroke that we were turned away at the first restaurant.

Feeling sunburned, tired, happy and thankful for friendship.

photography dreams

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:44:49 -0000

My camera has been very quiet lately. It's not like last year, when I carried my camera around with me constantly and shot something every day. That was surprisingly hard work, and surprisingly rewarding. It's probably just a matter of time before I get back into that discipline, because I miss it.

Even though my camera hasn't been seeing much action lately, my subconscious and conscious brain have been thinking constantly about photography. This is how I know that photography is more than just a hobby with me. I think about it all the time. And I dream about it constantly.

Usually when I dream about photography, I'm behind the camera, taking amazing photos. I'm almost always shooting people. It's usually some wonderful portrait of some wonderful person in magnificent light. I wake up from these dreams with a profound sense of loss -- oh, man, I bet those photos were going to turn out great! But I never get to see them.

Two nights ago I had a different kind of photography dream. In the dream, I saw a handful of photos displayed on a wall. The display was unique. The prints were arranged in an unusual way, in a way I've never seen in real life. It suggested a visual storyline, a sequence of events, kind of like an old-fashioned film strip.

It was really intriguing. There was more to the dream than that. I'd say more, but I don't want to (a) give away the idea I got from the dream, and/or (b) conclude that the dream was completely silly.

I woke up from the dream. Drowsily, I told my boyfriend about what I had seen. I wanted to tell him about it right away so I could test-drive the idea that the dream had presented. Sometimes dreams that seem deeply significant on waking just melt away when you have fully entered the day's consciousness. But the more I talked about the dream, the more it seemed to hold up. I got into the day, kept thinking about it and put down some notes in my journal about what I had seen.

Will this dream ever amount to anything? I have no idea. But I am tempted to try to take some photos around it. The kind of photos I would have to take would be different than what I usually do. But I am intrigued enough to try it. I've thought about the idea enough over the past couple of days that attempting to take the photos I saw in the dream feels like a wonderful answer to my subconscious. An expression that I am ready for what it would like to say next.

When do you feel most accomplished?

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:52:51 -0000

Lately I've felt very accomplished at work.

My primary client is a small company that employs only 5 people. Each of us are called on to serve multiple roles. My role often involves navigating tricky relationships with clients or vendors, thinking ahead, anticipating problems, and asking the questions that will help us complete our job and thrill the client.

I've done this kind of work for years, but for some reason, doing it in this context, for this tiny company, I have felt a deep sense of satisfaction. In this group, I'm often the only one who knows what questions to ask and how to get the answers I want. After foundering around in various jobs over the years, the sense of accomplishment I get from applying my expertise to our clients' projects is really quite pleasant.

rivers and tides and the great work

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:19:45 -0000

Last Christmas, my friend Kathy gave me a copy of the documentary Rivers and Tides, about the work of Scottish environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to get around to watching it. I'm so glad I finally did.

At first blush, this documentary is 90 minutes of footage of a man playing with sticks, snow and rocks. Beneath the surface, this is a very compelling and beautiful story of a man who has found his life's work making beautiful sculptures from the elements. His work is designed to be ephemeral -- he'll spend a day or two or three developing a piece of art, only to see it melt, thaw or be carried out with the tide.

His work offers a window into the transcendent in nature and illustrates the extreme fragility of the world around us.

Something about this documentary touched some pretty deep chords in me. After sitting down somewhat skeptically and watching the documentary with just one eye over the first ten or fifteen minutes, I got completely drawn in. There is so much that I admire about what this man is doing. I rewound certain parts and watched them again and again. I got out the second DVD and watched a bunch of the additional footage, the kind that certifies your standing as a bona fide fan. And I had to stop halfway into the video and get out my journal and write:

"Here's a guy who is basically doing pure art. He's working in deep connection to a landscape and he seems to be working for no particular audience. The elements are so pure. Water, sun, earth. He is doing it to achieve a greater understanding of the transience of life. It's not about scoring xyz gallery or spinning his grant application in the right way with the right phrases. It is about pleasure, learning and beauty."

Over the past couple of years I have noticed the increasing volume of drumbeats in my head. The drumbeats calling me to The Great Work. This Goldsworthy video was another wakeup call.

I'm not even sure what I mean by The Great Work, and I feel more than a bit foolish talking about it here. But the idea isn't going away, so it's probably time to try to poke at it some more.

What it's not:
This is not about spraypainting my name ("Class of '92!!!!") on the caves of Lascaux. This is not some Salieri-esque dream of immortality. I don't wish to be famous or rich. I don't care about making some mark on the artistic world that will never fade away.

What it is:
It's a desire to create something larger and more honest and more direct. It's a desire to bring more truth to the table. It's what Mike Scott was getting at when he wrote a song called "The Big Music" for The Waterboys 20 years ago:

I have heard the big music
And I'll never be the same
Something so pure
just called my name

Why fill your life with hundreds of your dumb snapshots when you can take three or four or just one really good photo. I think that we have the opportunity to speak more truth, we should.

(For me, "truth" is still a word that has a lot of sticky Christian tentacles attached to it. Certain Christian groups talk about the world's "truth" and about Jesus's "Truth," and about how the only enduring Truth is that found in Jesus Christ. I don't believe that anymore, and I'm trying to reclaim the concept from the church. Truth is turning out to be something much more beautiful and powerful and startling and life-giving than I was ever able to see before.)

In all of its breathlessness and recklessness, Annie Dillard's Living With Weasels grabbed me by the scruff of my neck about fifteen years ago and it still hasn't let go:

"We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't 'attack' anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot part you. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles."

What's the fiercest storm you've weathered?

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:49:59 -0000

My fiercest storm was probably the period between my 22nd and 23rd year.

I had just graduated from college and moved back home. I had no money, so I moved back into my old childhood bedroom in my parents' house. My mother's relentless cheerfulness grated on me constantly. I had broken up with a boyfriend that I really liked in order to move back home. This boyfriend didn't fit my parents' vision for their daughter, but I had really liked him. I didn't know what I wanted to do professionally. I was facing an enormous amount of debt from my student loans. I have never felt so lost and groundless in my entire life.

Eventually, I found a tiny little job. I started making payments on my loans. I saved up some money and moved into a shabby but cute little apartment. Things improved slowly. Today the student loans are settled, I have a job I enjoy, and I feel a huge amount of compassion for myself during that time.

it's working

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:54:30 -0000

Sunday morning, glorious spring weather outside, Lizz Wright's soothing voice keeping me company...

It's working. Life is working. I spend so much time stretching and yearning toward that future time when things will be right, when the pieces will click into place, when I'll feel right about x, y or z. And I have to admit, this moment is what that looks like. Life is goooood.

Sure, there are dirty dishes in the sink and I'm wearing my bedroom slippers and my left knee hurts a little. But I can see that this is what the picture looks like when life is good. I'm making a note here so that I can remember later how accessible it is.

My Dr. Oz-inspired plan for self care is working. It's working better than I thought it would. I haven't scored a perfect row of check marks each day for flawless behavior, but I'm sticking with my daily list of things to do. Tweaking the plan here and there when needed. Generally, I find I have more energy, I require less sleep, my moods are more stable, and I just feel better overall. I've been vigilant about getting a 30 minute walk/jog in every day. On weekends I stretch them out a little, making up new routes along neighborhood roads I've never explored, taking the long way home.

The word of the year I selected for 2008 was "nourish." That is turning out to be a perfect choice.

The issue of self-trust is at the core of my desire to take care of myself. Since I live on my own, there's no one looking over my shoulder making sure I'm eating my veggies, taking my vitamins, getting quality sleep. When I eat badly and behave badly, I'm the only one who knows it. The result of consistent bad behavior and poor choices is an erosion of my ability to trust myself to take care of me. And this is not a good thing.

Meeting my body daily in an attitude of appreciation and care is paying some massive dividends. The most rewarding payoff is learning to trust my ability to take care of myself. I feel like a downright grown-up lately, and I mean that in the best possible way.

an a-ha moment

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:28:29 -0000

So here is what happened this evening when I got home from work.

I noticed that the saucer magnolia tree in the back yard is blooming. This tree seems to produce amazing flowers each spring. It's at the height of its blooming cycle this weekend. And since it's been raining all day here in Atlanta, the huge petals of the flowers were glazed with water. Mmmmm. I am powerless over the downright prettiness of a rain-glazed saucer magnolia blossom. So I got out my camera and shot a few dozen pictures of the saucer blooms.

Then I thought I'd take a walk down the block to shoot some photos of the pretty flowering quince that was exploding into color last time I visited with it. I found the quince, shot a few photos, didn't quite get what I was looking for, and started heading for home.

A huge yellow forsythia bush was in bloom along the route home. Forsythia has an beautifully vivid yellow color, but I find that as shrubs, they often look leggy and weedy and sort of scraggly. I shot a few traditional-looking photos of the forsythia and wasn't particularly thrilled. I was about to move on when I had the idea to lower the camera so it was parallel to the ground, and fire the shutter up into the branches of the plant without looking through the viewfinder.

I love what happened next. The sky was really bright, and I wasn't properly adjusting the exposure, so the photos ended up really overexposed. But the flowers have this otherworldly elegance. Most of the skinny branches and brambles got blown out in the overexposure, and what's left is sort of exotic and pretty and entirely unlike my traditional view of the forsythia. Cool.

I find myself liking these photos more and more as I keep looking at them. They seem to capture the feeling of spring for me. And I love that they came about organically and spontaneously, on a stroll when I had only the most casual agenda, and was basically in no hurry to do anything productive, just out smelling the rain-dampened air and seeing what there is to see.

tax refunds for dummies

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:21:40 -0000

Today I discovered the up-side of living in poverty: receiving a tax refund!

All right, I don't really live in poverty. I'm doing OK. But I'd been bracing myself for weeks and weeks for this morning's meeting with my accountant. Last year I owed a HUGE amount in taxes, and I pessimistically figured it would be the same this year.

But here's what's different:
1. I made less money this year.
2. I got a different accountant this year. (When in doubt, break up with the fancy accountant with the plush Peachtree Street offices. Choose the accountant with strong libertarian leanings and a modest office in the suburbs.)

I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I owe the state a grand total of $6. And I will actually receive a small refund from the feds. Wow!

I'm not sure why I gave this tax issue so much significance in my life over the past couple of months. As I sit here in the aftermath, I see that I have been spending a lot of energy caring for and feeding this giant ball of worry.

It's a joy to see that regardless of my diligent efforts to prepare for (and possibly create) disaster, the universe generally does a lovely job of taking care of me.

-- Oh, and the photo above was taken yesterday on a stroll through Atlanta's idyllic Lullwater Park. The tangled shadows cast by tall trees on green grass and asphalt is an ongoing obsession with me.

Simone Weil on beauty

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:00:09 -0000

I discovered this quote recently on caterina.net (a spiffy blog I've been reading since the dark ages of the internet). I'm posting it here mostly because I like this quote, would like to think about it some more, and generally don't want to forget it:

"Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers its own existence. We do not desire something else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not know in the least what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance.

The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. ... It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at."

--Simone Weil

old tapes

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:28:11 -0000

At some point during the day today I got triggered into an intense wave of money worries.

These cycles of money anxiety come and go with me like monsoon season in tropical climates. And every time I think I've graduated from feeling swamped by money fear, something happens that hooks me back into that raw feeling of not enough money never enough money need more money must have more money.

The tapes that the rat part of my brain pulls out and broadcasts over my internal megaphone are, of course, pretty old and primitive. I never had a lot of money growing up. My father was (is) a pastor and though we had a stable middle-class life, money was always a source of stress for my parents.

I remember an afternoon when I was about ten. My mother told me that she had figured out a way to feed me and my two brothers for $3 a day. She was thrilled.

Last summer, when I left my super-stable, super-boring, soul-crushing job, I was making the best salary I've ever made, and on a comfortable trajectory to still more money. When I left, I had a comfortable cushion of cash in the bank.

I'm getting by now, paying my bills, but I'm still not making what I used to be making. And I've been slowly eating away at that cushion in the bank.

I guess I can trace the origins of today's wave of anxiety to a conversation I had this afternoon with a professional contact. John is a video editor/producer who is a full-time freelancer like I am. He said two or three things that set me off (though he certainly was not trying to upset me).

First he mentioned that now is a great time to be looking into buying a house. Depressed housing market, great deals for buyers.

I can see clearly that I have everything I need right here in my peaceful little apartment. I don't need a house at all. In fact, I worry that it would be overwhelming (I actively enjoy the freedom of not worrying about flooded basements and leaky roofs right now). But a home of my own is still one of those things that holds itself aloft and seems to taunt me at times like this.

John also mentioned that he manages to avoid worrying about money because he and his wife have a nice cushion of savings in the bank. Naturally, that made me start worrying again about my cushion. My cushion my cushion my precioussss!

Neither of his casual comments were made in judgment or unkindness, at all. I just picked them up and decided they would be useful in the broadcast of the old primitive money tapes.

Here is what the tapes say:

- "I am one bad break away from disaster. One car accident or medical expense would probably wipe me out."
- "I will probably never own a home of my own."
- "I will probably never go to France to visit Amy and take lots of beautiful photos."

From here, it devolves:
- "Heck, I will probably never be able to afford a new pair of shoes again."
- "People in Uganda don't have anything. I'm so selfish for wanting more money."

And none of it is useful or helpful.

I have a long way to go in learning to live peacefully with the money I have and the money I don't have. So much of it is still rooted in my unconscious brain. Still dressed in ill-fitting child's clothing.

At the same time, I do want to find a way to make more. I believe that that is reasonable and appropriate. It's both amusing and annoying to me that I'm working much harder and more skillfully now than I ever did at the cushy desk job, but I'm making less.

Suddenly I'm reminded of a bit I read in Christine Kane's blog last week: Rain falls, money comes.

I love that mantra. I'd like to post it somewhere visible in my home. I can see that clinging tightly to my rigid ideas about absolute financial security is nothing more than a great way to tear myself up inside.

This conversation about money is really important. It's always surprising that something as mundane and necessary as money can be such a profound spiritual teacher. I want to keep bringing loving mindfulness and consciousness to my thoughts about my finances.

Stealth self-improvement

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:19:04 -0000

So I'm sitting here at the end of the week and reflecting a bit more on the adventures of January and February (so far). I'm thinking that maybe my year hasn't been as pitiful as I'd originally thought.

2008 has begun by offering me some amazing opportunities for reconciliation and closure. The pattern feels very clear to me. Just one invitation after another. It feels like loose bits of widely scattered energy are being collected and lovingly returned to me.

First there was the opportunity to say goodbye to my grandmother. That was big one. Though there was never any ill will between us, I had felt guilty about not seeing her for a while. So I got back in the game and showed up at her house to visit. Even though it was hard to see her. Even though parts of it were icky. We had two good visits in the two weeks before she died.

Second was the opportunity to ask for help from a group of old friends at the church I used to attend with my then-husband. When I decided to file for divorce in 2005, I left behind a group of women at the church to whom I had been deeply connected. We had served, prayed and worshiped together for a few years. When I left, I didn't come back to say goodbye. I just fled, carrying a lot of shame and guilt with me. Well, this week I got back in touch with some of those women. A dear friend has been dealing with a complicated pregnancy and was asked by her doctors to be on bed rest. In order to keep her off her feet and to have regular dinners brought to the family, I contacted their circle of friends. And that circle included some of those women that I had left behind when I stopped going to church.

I will admit that I was a little worried about getting back in touch with some of these folks. There is just no smooth way to re-introduce yourself after being AWOL for three years.

So I took a few deep breaths and started dialing the phone. "Hi, this is Romanlily. You and I used to go to church together when I was married to Jeff. Remember me?"

Fortunately, everyone I spoke to was very warm. Everybody gladly signed up to bring meals to the family. Nobody lectured me on my loose morals. Nobody called me a skank. Nobody yelled at me. One woman that I had been particularly close to asked if she could talk to me a little about why I left and what I had been through in the past three years. We had a truly authentic and open conversation about it. Then she said, "I just wanted to know a little about your journey, because I have continued to pray for you over these years. In fact, I will continue to pray for you every day for the rest of my life."

Talk about humbling.

The third opportunity for closure came yesterday, at my grandmother's memorial service. I had not been to my parents' church since one particularly horrifying visit in spring 2005, when I was separating from my husband but not really able to talk about it to anyone yet. I had come to the church alone that day, and everyone had asked where my husband was, and I didn't know how to tell them. I remember literally fleeing the building in tears. It is one of my worst memories of that time.

But I went back yesterday, of course, for my grandmother's memorial. This time I was accompanied by my wonderful boyfriend, who probably understood better than I did what an emotionally loaded experience the afternoon would be for me.

I got to hug a lot of people that I hadn't seen in years. And if anybody was disgusted by my decision to come back to church with my boyfriend in tow, they didn't let on.

One woman at this church has always had an unusual ability to discern what's going on with me. I remember the day in 1999 when I bumped into her at my parents' church. She looked me up and down and said, "You look good. It looks like marriage agrees with you." I recorded her comment in my journal that night, delighted to have "arrived" as a happily married woman.

Yesterday, this same woman approached me and gave me a hug. We talked for a bit and she studied me thoughtfully. Then she said, "You look good. You look like you've been really living into your life lately." What a compliment that was. I thanked her and told her how much her words have meant to me over the years.

Man. What gives? I try to be a lazy bum, a useless layabout, and look what happens. The Universe conspires to do wonderful things. I feel deeply grateful for these opportunities. I am very clear on the fact that I did not initiate any of them. They gently sought me out.

From where I'm sitting, this feels like a profound first chapter in what I believe will be a completely wonderful year.