Published Essays and Poems by Portia Brockway
Essays:
A Yogini from ConceptionToo Much Hype and Too Little Healing? New Age Marketing Explodes
A Case for the Public Display of Affection as Deep Ecology
Paradise Lost: Spain in a Nutshell
Honoring Creativity and Conscience
Poems:
The following is an autobiographical essay by Portia Brockway about her life experience with yoga. It was published in Yoga International and Spirit of Change magazines.
One afternoon before I was born, my mother and father were watching TV. They
happened upon a show on which India's Prime Minister Pandit Nehru was discussing the affairs of the day with Aldous Huxley, author of Doors of
Perception and father figure to be for the sixties'counterculture. The year
was 1956. The subject of yoga came up. My father had never heard of yoga before, but what Nehru and Huxley said fascinated him. He turned to my mother
and asked her what yoga was. She said that she didn't know; why didn't he get a book on it?
So, during lunch hour at his job as an advertising executive on Madison Avenue in New York City, my father found a book on hatha yoga called Yoga for
Perfect Health by Alain. I still have it on my shelf. He brought it home and
tried out the poses and breathing exercises. While practicing he started having strange internal experiences, like sensing his chakras (wheels of
energy centered along the spinal column) and seeing a light in the area of
his third eye. The book said that it was advisable to find a teacher, so he called one yoga center and ended up dialing another number "by mistake". The
man who answered the phone, Sachindra Majumdar, has been his teacher for the past 40 years.
Somewhere in the midst of all this I was born. From infancy, I was exposed to Darien Connecticut's success-based culture as well as the wafting smoke of
amber kasturi incense in the early morning, ragas playing on the phonograph
on Saturday mornings, and, most importantly, Daddy meditating at 5:30 every morning and practicing his yoga poses on the sun porch.
I remember his straight back, bare in the summer, as he sat cross-legged in the lotus position early every morning. Sitting, and yet something more. I
sensed the space around him charged with presence. So my doors of perception
opened at quite a young age, or perhaps I should say they never closed. My
father spoke little about philosophy. He never called himself a member of any religion, nor is he. Yet there was a philosophy, or a way of life, that went
along with the meditation and the poses. It was a philosophy of loving and acting responsibly, of not harming others. It was felt and acted out through
caring intention.
Daddy first taught me hatha yoga poses when I was two or three. The one I remember best is the bow, because he commented that I was very good at it!
The shape that emerges in this pose resembles that of a bow drawn to pierce
its arrow's intention. Here I found joy in yoga.
As I grew older, my brother came along. Jay was born with a mild form of cerebral palsy. My father taught my brother yoga to help with his balance and
coordination. We brought him in to New York City on Saturday afternoons to learn from Mr. Majumdar, putt-putting into the city in our 1964 Saab. Jay
took his lesson nearby while Daddy and I strolled through the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Over the years I was not always a willing yoga student. While vacationing in the Virgin Islands I remember preferring to snorkel for treasure among the
sands and coral reefs rather than to practice with my father and brother. But
Daddy was strict about me practicing because it provided camaraderie for Jay. And for the most part I enjoyed it.
The years slipped by and my father continued his practice while Jay and I were otherwise diverted. I began practicing again in the eighties, when I was
in my twenties. Yoga helped me to deal with the stresses and strains of whatever job I was unhappily holding at the time. I was never satisfied
working for others. I found conventional workplaces dysfunctional: death traps for my creative spirit. They exhausted me.
Finally, in the early nineties, I decided to trade in my misery and my enviable wages to try to become a happy yoga teacher. With healthy doses of
both encouragement and skepticism from friends and family, I took a part-time job as a data-entry operator. I found a lovely chapel in Harvard Square in
Cambridge, Massachusetts in which to instruct a group of 15 students grandfathered to me by the Nityananda ashram moving out of town to Oregon.
Not since I was a child sharing my father's immersion in meditation have I met peace as frequently as I do now.
I have joked over the years that perhaps I was conceived in a yogic state. The Indian sacred text the Bhagavad Gita says it is a great honor to be born
into the family of a yogi. But to me, yoga is not some holy ordeal outside the realm of ordinary experience. It is the process of joining the ordinary
with the extraordinary during our daily life. Awareness gradually brings us understanding and relief: breath to thought to silence, joy to laughter to
sadness to tears. Nothing is left out. Yoga is a tool for bringing all of life into full view.
I do not feel as though I must perfect the poses. I simply choose to do them to the best of my current ability for the purpose of repose and clear
response.
I neither have nor seek a guru. I feel that I have the guidance I need from within. Yet I do have a spiritual lineage. From me to my father to Mr.
Majumdar to his guru, Swami Sivananda, my lineage flows back to Sri Ramakrishna, who did no hatha
(physical) yoga at all. He was a bhakti yogi.
He experienced many religions, including worshiping God with and without form. He said that just as people prefer different foods according to their
distinct constitutions, so each personality gains the most from a spiritual path that suits their unique inclinations.
Ramakrishna's goal was simple. It was to know God, or Brahman, the source of all life, as one's most intimate companion. Each individual is free to choose
how to best perceive and approach Brahman. Ramakrishna worshiped Brahman's manifestation in the form of Kali, the great black goddess of creation and
destruction, whom he knew as his own mother. When asked if he wanted to do something, he would frequently reply, "I must ask Mother". He
meant no earthly mother, but Kali herself.
Although I am intrigued by Kali in her fierce beauty, it is my father's example that inspires me. I remember the sun porch best; the early morning
sunlight streaming in through nine windows riding three turns of 90 degrees,
the sweet scent of incense curling around me in the next room; the striped rug, the clay incense pot, the black piano behind him on which he played
"Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" to us kids. I see my father standing six feet (a great height to little me), long-limbed. He is standing on a single
long leg in the dancer's pose, the other ankle looped back, held by one long arm, the other arm angling upward to the dawn sky, touching space
Previously published in Reaching Out with Yoga magazine in their Fall 2000 issue.
When I was a little girl, my American father taught me the principles and practices of yoga. Its seed has grown into my tree of life, governing my moral and ethical considerations, my physical practice, and the ways in which I serve, contemplate and learn.
My father's teacher was an Indian yogi. Sachindra Majumdar taught him one-on-one, as a parent would raise his child. Majumdar's guru, Swami Shivananda, taught Majumdar one-on-one. Shivananda's guru, Sri Ramakrishna taught one-on-one, according to individual temperament and constitution. This is the traditional way of passing on yoga.
Today, in the West, the teaching of yoga has altered seismically. Today thousands of yoga instructors are introducing millions of consumers to the basics of awareness, knowledge and bliss. Now we have large classes, for example 80 students and one instructor to a group. More often than not, only hatha yoga is taught. The instructor may have only a recent acquaintance with this physical practice of yoga, and know next to nothing of yoga as a world view. Even if s/he is well versed in the science of yoga, her students may be interested in only the physical practice, most often for exercise or to relieve stress.
Regardless of the student's initial aim, the practice of yoga repairs our inner as well as our outer bodies. It releases us from great fear. It dissolves our feelings of separation from self and other. It floods us with a sense of well being and unconditional love.
Yoga opens the heart, and the mind follows, flexible as the wind. As we begin to lose our self centeredness we notice what is happening around us. We naturally feel the urge to help. When we see the elevator operator and her big smile, we may feel the desire to vote to improve our corporation's employee benefits plan. We may send our surplus clothing to the hurricane victims despite having little time to get to the post office. We dare to care for others because we are daring to care for ourselves.
So, without knowing why, we may devote ourselves to an inner breath/song/life force that answers our daily pains and sorrows. Our sensuous experience encourages our minds to re-enter our bodies. Here we may find joy.
We need to find a balance between Eastern and Western approaches. Just as Western ingenuity and determination draws India out of economic subsistence through techno-industry into a position of leadership in the 21st century, India's ancient science of yoga redirects the West. Yoga guides us inward, to recognize our vulnerability on a planet whose cycles have been thrown off kilter through humanity's unconscious greed.
Will this rebalancing of energies save our planet? I do not have the big answers. But I do believe that basic yoga instruction from an amateur is better than no yoga instruction, because I know that yoga itself is the teacher. I thank yoga for taking root here today in the West. Through its practice, casual or profound, we are now finding an East/West way of being. Jai all Yogis and Yoginis, Jai! East and West are shaking hands.
Prenatal Yoga Delivers
By Portia Brockway
The following essay is part of an article published in Spirit of Change magazine's May/June 2001 issue.
The practice of yoga during pregnancy is perhaps the most helpful exercise a woman with child can undertake. It is slow, strong and gentle. It prepares the woman's body and breath to open as it will need to open during labor and childbirth. Yogic techniques of breath, movement, sound, and visualization provide a confident basis for smooth passage through this most powerful of life experiences.
Imagine being in labor. For months in yoga class you have been practicing deep abdominal breathing, rocking the baby forward on each inhale and hugging your child close with each exhale. Now, in the labor room, your mind wants to run away from the pain of contractions in your belly, yet over the months you have disciplined yourself to stay with the sensations. Now, internally bonded with your soon-to-be-born child, you send a "welcome to the outer world farewell to the inner world" message to your child. You may draw a circle of golden light around your baby on the inhale then send light through your baby like nectar through a sieve on the exhale. This is the power of yoga: to witness, to be with even the most painful of situations.
The mother-to-be prepares herself with yoga exercises and breathing to endure contractions, to exert in pushing, and to relax. The ability to relax between contractions is a saving grace. Rest in between keeps strength and focus at the ready for when she needs it the most. Most prenatal yoga classes have a relaxation period that cultivates calm. Here visualization techniques help to acquaint her with the growing child within. For example she may practice a color meditation, traveling the colors of the spectrum from red to purple then white, starting at the base of the spine and moving up through specified locations on the spine to the crown of the head. In yoga, these locations are called chakras from the Sanskrit word "wheel" and are associated with distinct sensations or states of consciousness. A mother-to-be may note that her baby attunes to a particular color during this experience by feeling the baby's movement within her or sensing the baby's emotional response.
There are both colors and sounds associated with each chakra location. Perhaps in a grounded, open-pelvis squat, the practicing mother may invert the process. She may sound tones down along the chakras, descending from the crown of the head to the base of the spine. Beginning with om at the forehead to "ham" at the throat, "yam" at the heart, "ram" at the midsection, "vam" at the lower belly, she finally arrives at "lam", the sound place where the baby's head will first emerge into father, grandmother, doulah, midwife or doctor's receiving hands, then onto mother's breast, to hear that loving heart beat once again. These sounds and colors of the chakras may be used to relax and open the body progressively to release the baby out.
In India it used to be said (and perhaps still is) that the mother could sense the baby's sex by the third month of pregnancy. The practice of yoga encourages the mother to trust her intuitions, to acknowledge and release her fears, to express through her body what words cannot say. She may, during moments of deep relaxation after an invigorating yoga session feel her baby communicate with her, reassure her, share the untold bliss that only a fully-supported being in an edgeless womb of a universe can experience - with her. For even preverbal love is a two-way street.
Previously published in Spirit of Change Magazine in their September/October 1999 issue.
All my life I have struggled with fatness. Baby fat, teenage fat, grownup fat. It comes and it goes. Fat itself is not so bad. It's how we torture ourselves about its pinchability, its rolls, the way it slows us down and makes our thighs rub or our shorts ride up. Oh fat and the shame of it!
There is little point in asking why. Polynesians thought it was the greatest. Fat princesses were a prize. In earlier colonial times fat meant prosperity. Scrawniness ascribed the dearth of society, poverty.
Yet fat means hunger, and it is our souls that are hungry, so we feed our faces because we can get at them more easily than massaging the woes of the deep interior heart.
Fat, we think, means that we must exercise; we must starve out those subcutaneous layers, rich and laden with sin. We must become light as air and open as space, leaping like gazelles all about town, and showing bone-protruding skin at the midriff to prove it. Fat. How we hate it. Or is it a guise for something else that we hate?
Do we hate that our mothers were too busy, or too drunken, or too shattered by depression to come and hold us? Do we hate how our fathers were never fathered themselves, so didn't know how to share, in a look, in a touch, in the winsome sadness in their eyes, that they knew how you felt? Did you hate how they could not come and hold you, for they were too busy grasping at prosperity? Did you swear that you could take care of yourself all by yourself and never need another? And now you are fat? Do you wonder?
How can we no longer be the fatted calf, the sacrifice? How can we reach a sense of satisfaction with ourselves as we are? Yoga, in its gentler forms, speaks a subtle language that fills the heart with luxury. It is a dance that allows us to feel graceful no matter what we weigh. It is a rest that reassures us that we truly have been exhausted, and with good reason. Yoga is a path to balance, through a heart beating regularly and rhythmically, through lungs breathing clean and fresh and in synchronization with the body's stretching.
I cannot say that yoga has relieved me of my discomfort with the "extra" folds and fleshiness of my body. I cannot say that I feel as comfortable with it as without it. I can say though that yoga has transformed me into a person whom people can love easily. And that the joyous mystery which I exude is not only healing my yoga students. It is healing me.
My practice of yoga gives me a sense of safety in the world. The poses inform me of happiness. I am gradually losing my anxiety and its concomitant need to run away into an oblivion created by rich food eaten immoderately. Through yoga I may choose to lose my plush armor, simply living in the present, knowing that each moment gives me more than enough.
Too Much Hype and Too Little Healing?
New Age Marketing Explodes
Published in Journal of Family Life's November 1996 issue.
A few months ago I was invited to teach a yoga class at the Boston Whole Health Expo, the biggest holistic event of the year in New England. On the morning of the event, I went over to the Park Plaza Hotel in downtown Boston across from the main exhibition hall and set up my teaching space in the Georgian Room. A row of lackluster chandeliers loomed above the musty plush. George Washington was stationed at the head of the huge room, not far from a roaring closed-air vent. Feeling energized and alive despite the setting, I welcomed in about a dozen students and led them through a gentle beginner's sequence. At the end, however, most left without saying "Thank you" or even " Good-bye". I was shocked. Normally, I receive personal responses from everyone when I teach to small groups in an intimate chapel, whose arching windows and ceiling create a sense of peaceful community. We share the profound process of yoga as a healing tool.
Yet here at the Expo, I was astounded by the level of disassociated rushing about from event to event. I began to get an uneasy feeling about the whole thing.
After my class, I went with two friends across the street to the old armory called the Castle. Here, holistic vendors staked out their territories in booth-and-aisle trade show format. It was around 11 AM. The show was just warming up. I met a few nice women at an aura booth. One of them took a picture of my electromagnetic radiation with a special camera, and another interpreted it. She said I was very calm with lots of blue and violet tones; I must meditate a lot.
The three of us split up to cruise. Body and energy workers with patients laid out flat on their tables cleansed souls for all to see. It was strange to see such personal processes as full-body massage or laying on of hands publicly displayed. On the one hand it seemed garish, almost circus-like. Abra cadabra, before your very eyes, poof, the malady is relieved! And yet I sensed deep sincerity among many of the practitioners. Some came out into the aisle and tried to hustle us in to receive their touch. Part of me felt drawn to treatment. Yet clearly this was not the ideal place. By now, hundreds of people were pouring into the football-field sized hall. The massiveness of the event was overwhelming. Rising decibel levels began to ricochet like gunfire off the old ammo repository's hard walls.
As I reencountered my friend Ben in the center of the great room, he suggested that I receive Shakti magnetic healing. My awareness coalesced as the practitioner manipulated space on and near my back, head and chest. I felt more focused afterwards.
I bumped into my other friend, Yahara. She led me to a booth selling essences channeled into fluid-filled vials via psychic mediums. Yahara said that the people selling them were aggressive and that she would run interference so that I could enjoy the experience. Instructed to hold any from among several hundred vials, I selected "Cosmic Immunity". I felt as though I had just been introduced to a pleasant, calm person. Then I picked up "Prosperity and Abundance". Wow! It was like being immersed in a pool of warm, fragrant water. I felt as through I was receiving healing and communion. But how? And how could such benign experiences be promoted by such pushy human beings? The sales people were zeroing in on my bodyguard. In the nick of time Yahara and I tore off to the next thing. Incongruity was the name of the day.
I was ready to take a break. We tried out lower back supports that help you sit up straight. These simple squaring devices pleasurably prevent slumping by means of wide bands looping around the lower back and then around each knee, where they clip together. Ben found us there and tried one out too. We were having a pretty good time when we were asked to move on if we weren't going to make a purchase. Disappointed to leave the only place in this vast expanse where three friends could sit together, we split up again.
Things were getting crazy. It became necessary to squeeze past people in order to move. More restricted by the minute, I decided to get off the main thoroughfare by receiving a Reiki treatment. I sat down on a folding chair with my back to a soft-featured woman who was going to channel universal life force into me. She began by barely touching me, first on the shoulders and then at the crown of the head. I felt a conduit opening through the crown of my head. But I was also aware of a shrill-voiced woman and an off-duty Reiki practitioner in front of me. The Reiki agent of spacious serenity kept unconsciously jabbing my foot with his as he swayed and bellowed. I kicked him back. Fury began to mount in me.
I left the Reiki treatment pulsing with anger instead of vibrating with awareness. I had a few minutes to wait until rendezvous time. I went over to a booth marketing heated cedar boxes you sit in. They looked just like small saunas and were warm inside. Ben and I had tried one out earlier. I told the salesperson of my interest in having one of his saunas for my home. He exclaimed that his device was not a sauna. Sitting in saunas, he declared, was like cooking in an oven. Hostility rose in me. I left, saying good-bye mid sentence.
I returned to the area where my friends and I had agreed to meet. I sat by a wall bracing myself against the passing onslaught. The noise level had skyrocketed. Frenzy was building everywhere, including in me. I wanted out! Just then, Pierre, a sensitive man I've known slightly for years saw me and, as he walked by, patted my head. It was just right and calmed me until my friends arrived. We escaped out into a late November grayness.
We went to our car and sat silently for a while. We were all stunned by the commercialism of the event and the sheer numbers of groping souls looking for healing, for community, for what? Being one of those seekers myself, I realized why I had left feeling so deprived. It was clear that one cannot receive healing amid pandemonium. Can our world really settle into balanced communities while commercialism runs amok? Can a global village structure exist without technology? Can technology exist without commercialism? These were big questions I did not know the answers to. I felt baffled by the day.
Later that afternoon, we went to a Native American celebration at the newly-acquired Spontaneous Celebrations house in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. Walking in we felt a marked shift in mood. The people tending admission at the door were relaxed and friendly. When told the admission was seven dollars, Yahara said that it was too expensive for her, so they charged us five dollars. I immediately felt valued and respected as an individual, not as a commodity. What a relief! There were children everywhere. The place smelled good. Beans and rice and vegetarian empanadas were being doled out in generous portions from the kitchen. We went up a spiral stairway, sat down, and took in a Central American Mayo-Yaqui music group on stage.
I felt the tension melt from my body. We had walked into a community. People knew each other. Watched-over children pranced over the wide wooden floorboards. I started to recover from the Whole Health Madhouse.
Waiting for we knew not what, we watched a dozen children of many nationalities sliding around together on mats in front of us. After a bit, the assembled group of about one hundred, many of whom clearly knew each other, were settled in. we were entertained by a musical performance of the Huehvetl family from Columbia. They played in ancient Native style with stones on stones, sticks on logs, tappings on ceramic jugs and whistlings through soft-toned wind instruments. The performing family's children danced with vigor the act of slaying a deer, and that of sowing and harvesting a crop.
After the performance, with the day almost done, we headed out. As we approached the car, we noticed that someone had blocked us in. I began to feel resentment at the insensitivity of that person who had blocked us in, especially at a small community event. I went in and asked if we could please be assisted. To my relief the woman at the admissions desk knew and had given permission to the individual who blocked us. He was notified and immediately accommodated us by moving his car. The solution was quick and simple. Yahara brought me home.
In retrospect I have mixed responses to the Whole Health Expo. I do think that the Whole Health Expos serve a purpose in today's world. It is a valuable networking tool for people who are new to the ideas of community and holistic health. Here, they can meet practitioners and other holistic health professionals. They can get an idea of what the various disciplines offer. Seekers, if they are perceptive, can sort the wheat from the chaff and meet individuals who may meet their needs.
On the other hand, people with no previous exposure to holistic health may be turned off by the mayhem and end their investigation of holistic practices forever. Smaller, more regular events held under the sky in pleasant weather, or at least in a homier environment than a yawning ammunitions depot, would nurture their interest.
Also, treatments may have more of an effect than a sensible skeptic fresh off the street might imagine. A massive expo may be too hectic an environment for the vulnerability that healing requires. Opening ourselves to infusions of chaos can be worse than saving such experiences for a later, quieter time.
But the quality and intentions of practitioners vary. Holistic practitioners are like people in any other service industry: some of them are in it primarily for the money. Others want to help and think that they are capable of it, but get so overwrought that they cannot.
You may meet someone truly wonderful. Some of our world's most gifted healers make themselves available to others through such expos. These are people well worth knowing and paying well to serve you.
My heart went out to all the people who came groping for inner peace, and instead found noisy commercialism. I wonder if the overloading effect of mass marketing serves holism's purpose. Perhaps healing happens only when we receive it on a small scale. Is small not only beautiful but also necessary?
Yet look at how may people want to find a better way. The Whole Health Expo exploded with interest as well as commercialism. Can our worlds of commercialism and community stop colliding and begin to dovetail? We want to, and we are finding out.
Published by Spirit of Change Magazine in their January/February 1999 issue.
drawing by Kitt Little Turtle
My schedule and my partners don't agree. So when we do find a window of time when we can spend a whole day together, we grab it. And so we did one lousy day during hurricane season. We had planned on hiking in the woods near Rockport, Massachusetts but it was raining, and nothing gets me sick faster than wet feet. So we headed for the semi-shelter of the town's artist community, on the tip of a peninsula at the end of the train line. On the train out we watched the wind sway the trees. It felt good to get away.
The coastal waters were rough. Walking into Rockport we could smell the same ocean we live two miles from in the city but whose scent is cut off by toxic fumes, from cars'to cigarettes'. The sea smell was worth the wet feet.
We climbed down steep steps to the beach near the town center, inundated with waves roaring in from a hurricane out at sea. Ben hopped from rock to rock amid the wash. I stayed back, trying to keep my feet from getting any wetter. It didn't work. We went to a sea side store and got me some nubbly socks to don within my wet sneakers. From the store's bay window seat, we watched the crested waves push shoreward. We felt drawn back out to its powerful grace.
We walked toward the ocean over a concrete pier that ended in jagged rocks; Ben hopped out, dancing over sharp rocks to taste her edge, the ocean goddess. She could have tripped him and pulled him in, but she knows he is my anchor, and I, a Piscean fish child of hers, am under her care and tutelage. So she preserved Ben, the Capricornian billygoat who calls me to walk the Earth with him.
But misfortune did not leave us behind that day. Stepping back onto land, we came upon a strange scene: a red-headed man holding a young gull onto the hood of a car.
"Will you help?" he asked, seething. I said that we would, but thinking "I wish I weren't here." The bird struggled, a barbed hook spiking out from its throat feathers. A fisherman's hook had missed its mark but now offered death to a less sumptuous prey. Its body was entangled in the fishing wire.
I forgot my wet feet. The bird darted its head about-face to jab at the red head's freckled hand grasping its neck - animal battling animal. The gull's tongue lolled as helplessly as a splayed minnow from the side of its beak. Its dumb eyes screamed, "I want out of yo9ur hands, man." As I stepped behind Ben with the hope that I would be given the safer task, the man showed him how to hold the bird's neck and head in place.
"If that bird gets loose, it'll die", he growled threateningly.
Ben clasped the head still with instant skill. I also did as I was told. I grasped the creature's torso, soft as angel's wings. When the bird raised its wings to attempt escape, I pressed them in, and breathed with it as I would one of my yoga students, cooing, calming it.
How were we going to free the bird from its plight? The man brought a wire cutter to snip and unravel plastic string from the webbed claws, the orange legs, the spotted feathers. He then de-barbed the hook and drew it out. I expected a call of victory but all I heard were the red head's angry words, "Just let it loose. Maybe it will live. I see this all the time. When will it end?" He walked away. So did we, after seeing the bird was afraid to fly with us there. We let it alone. We had bothered it enough.
We went back into the city, me sniveling, both of us cold and damp. My mourning was lost amid the Formica echo in the café where we sat eating canned soup. I forced Ben to listen to my helpless feelings on our world - one choked by less-than-caring human traps. The day had fulfilled the darkness I had sought to escape. Ordinarily I am an optimistic individual but what about the rest of the world? Will my individual acts towards creating a better world bring us clean fishing grounds with seagull-friendly fishhooks?
I find some solace in the hundredth monkey story, The baby monkey learns to wash its sandy potato in the sea, making it more savory eating. Its mother learns the trick from her child. More and more members of the tribe learn to wash their potatoes until, at the hundredth monkey, it becomes a craze. The whole tribe begins washing their sandy potatoes in the sea, as do members of other monkey tribes on other shores of other seas.
One by one, we make change, giving others the courage and insight to do the same. When Margaret Mead was asked if she thought a few peoples'efforts could change the world, she said that she knew of no other way. So I journey on, doing what I can to unravel the pain, to debarb clever hooks, to rub dry and warm with nubbly socks the wet feet of this world. After all, I know how wet feet feel.
A Case for the Public Display of Affection as Deep Ecology
Published in Spirit of Change Magazine in May/June 1996, and in Journal of Family Life magazine Volume 4, Number 1, 1998.
He was tired and we were riding Boston's Green Line subway. He laid his head in my lap and slept. I rested my arms on him and felt warm. Who could mind? We were simply resting and easing our bodies and minds together, and yet I felt somewhat on guard around the taboo of expressing intimacy publicly.
No one commented until three or four high-school-to-collegiates came on board. There were no words from them, a few sounds, sweet, slightly sexual, then simply sweet. Ben slept, we rested, the boys chattered and cajoled. We reached Park Street. The boys checked Ben's handsome, walking-man face as we rose to go. So did I. My inhibitions had been assuaged for the moment; we had shared non-sexual physical contact in public without reproach.
We changed subway trains and rode on to our destination. On return we stood balancing on the shifting metal plates of the roundabout between subway cars. As we lazily- susaned they erupted in violent rat-a-tat-tats. We stepped off at the first opportunity toward a single seat. We shared, me perching my body on the red and gold downy hair of his strong runner's legs. We were reminiscing, projecting, flitting. We landed on the first grader's sing-song game, "Hands, fingers, knees and toes, knees and to-o-o-oes, eyes and ears and mouth and nose, hands, fingers, knees and toes, knees and toes"!
Our song washed through the clatter of conversations. An older woman across the way, a secretary perhaps or a school teacher, glanced, and glanced again. At first, when she had seen me perched side saddle on his lap she had looked a tad reproachful. Now she smiled for it. So did we.
Not everyone is pleased with the public expression of warmth and humanity, yet people of tribal societies have done this for millennia. These acts of human affection are, for me, experiments in becoming true to myself.
A few days later, we went to see a movie at the Coolidge Corner Theater. We were standing by the brick wall where ticket holders wait. Lines, lines, lines. I wanted to go 3-D. I suggested a stretch against the burn sienna outdoor wall by the theater.
The stretch was one I had learned from a pregnancy book to relax the shoulders by bringing the upper body horizontal and pressing outstretched arms against a wall. Then we did a runner's stretch. He touched his head to his knee. I couldn't reach mine. He congratulated me on having the journey ahead. I showed him a graceful ballerina barre bend. The door opened and we flowed into the movie house. Others had been watching our stretches, no doubt. As we passed into the theater we felt like leaders into wholer ways of waiting.
Finally, the mango story. We had bought it at the World's Fair in Central Square for a buck from a batik-gowned African American woman. We picnicked on a quiet embankment behind City Hall. We were crooned to by the swishing scents of unnamed tree flowers, cascaded by tiny cool splashes falling from their tilted cups, and cradled by our own resting bodies. We felt contented.
Our world at the moment was resilient. We had, unwittingly, through our affection, fallen into Eden, not out, into the center of the way, into the eye of the storm, into a blessed if seemingly temporary eternity, calm and brilliant.
We reached for the mango, deep finger-press ripe under its black-mottled yellow skin. The smell was sweet and mellow. We walked toward Harvard Square, Ben's hand full with its fecundity, dessert for us to eat while awaiting his bus. Along a side street in the Square he plucked off the button and sucked. He held it to my mouth. I squeezed and swallowed sweetness.
Ben missed his bus. We sat in JFK Park under the shade. He tore the skin and fed me. I fed him and we devoured the opened fruit. We savored the sensations that came through the fruit, the grass, the trees, us. We felt a supple grace arising through our interaction with a flowering, living Earth.
We were yielding to the great web of sheer process. Our diversions were goal-less, uninhibited by any required outcome. We felt like children who haven't yet been trained out of play. We felt like what I imagine people of our world's tribal societies may feel, people governed by the larger cyles of time, never obligated, responsible only to nature. Our public acts of open play, rest and shared sustenance felt healthy. We felt connected to the past, when more of the world happened around family and friends. Taking the time to enjoy openly, we may have helped to pivot the madness of a world flying faster and faster into a slower, more joyful realm.
Published in Harvard Divinity School's The Nave , Nov. 27 - Dec. 3 2000
I watch from my favorite spot in class, the top back row of the Sperry Room, next to a young man with his laptop computer. I notice, by the sound of his fingers tapping on the keyboard, that he enters nuggets of information at the same time that I do into my notebook. Twice a week the seventy of us take notes on the meaning of Judaism as seen through study of its rituals and holy days. Perhaps some of us hope that this learning will transform into wisdom, ready to spread like so much honey onto the unleavened bread of suffering.
At the beginning of the term, many students seemed intimidated by the course material. At first just a few raised their hands. Now, many voices ponder aloud their understanding of the Jewish holidays as comprehended through scripture and scholarly study. Pacing at the blackboard, Professor Levenson analyzes what we have covered in our reading. He illuminates often-convoluted source material through practical examples conveyed with a sense of humor.
For example, we are asked to describe the nature of the Song of Songs, the poetic scripture associated with Passover. Students answer that it is erotic, about sex, that it regards courtship and marriage. Of course we are interested. Then he asks us how this describes the relationship between the Israelites and God. That is a harder question to answer, but now we are engaged, and willing.
We try, we often fail, we are offered reasons to laugh. It is a cyclical process, interpolating feeling with thought, much like the interpolation of moon and sun cycles in the Jewish calendar. Twice a week here in Judaism, The Liturgical Year, we discover particular and universal meaning. With it, we may determine how to celebrate eternity in each day.
Published in Journal for Living (formerly Journal of Family Life), Number 25
I kept dropping, every few months, into illness. Not a cold or a MACK-truck flu, but heaviness. Plunked down like human lead onto my bed, I was laid low with low-grade fever and emotional sensitivity that caused any remotely insensitive contact to send me into tears.
At first it happened infrequently, and I could take days off from work, to rest, to catch up on magazine reading. Later, after weeks in bed I would wonder if the illness would ever end. I could have lain there forever and not really minded, but I was self-employed and had the rent to pay. I had to hoist up my void-of-energy body to teach yoga, and to feed myself the high fat foods that my body craved.
I knew that I had to find a way, if not to my former self, to a more balanced state. I did not have a technical understanding of what was wrong, but I had a strong intuition of what felt right.
I started biweekly acupuncture. I did not know whether or not it helped. But it was affordable and my acupuncturist cried with me as I wept uncontrollably, telling her my lucid dreams, which I remembered when I could not remember the names of long time students standing before me during classes.
I did not know what was happening. After two years, and multiple visits to my health plan to treat this recurring illness for which all tests returned negative, I returned once again to my doctor and got angry. I told her that I could not just spend the rest of my life in bed recovering from viruses that kept recurring. What was making me sick? "Can't you give this a name?", I asked. At this point she gave me a referral to a specialist, who diagnosed me with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).
I was relieved to at least have a name for my malady. Alternative treatment was recommended by the physician. I continued with acupuncture and yoga. I began to receive shiatsu for free in return for being a case study in a class analysis of illness and treatment. Aya, a young Japanese woman with Samurai ancestors treated me with respect, humor and acute finger pressure weekly for six months. Each time she came to my home I placed on the floor a soft-covered mat sewn for me by my mother. She palpated my belly organs to ascertain the treatment for the day.
I enlisted a Rolfer for a ten session treatment in order to release injury-based muscular tension and the emotions trapped therein. This deep tissue bodywork realigns musculature. I would perhaps never be even, he said, because of the results of injury, but I could arrive at a state of balance in my body. I enjoyed the bodywork, where he worked so deeply that he brought me to the edge of pain but not into it. I told him that he could do that to me all day. I didn't know whether it was healing my CFS but it gave me deep release.
And, finally, I went to visit BJ, a Chinese herbalist, at his office in the rear of his herbal apothecary, E Shan Tang, or "One Good Thing a Day", where amber-colored drawers were filled with medicinal herbs. All the available reading material in the waiting area was in Asian script. B.J. greeted me with a bow. Stepping back into his office behind a mirrored window, he would lay a fresh tissue on a wrist cushion and proceed to take my pulses. He would tell me to lead a good life. Did I have a boyfriend? Was he kind to me? Did I have a pet? He advised me to cry and release my sadness. He drew Chinese characters vertically down onto a per-visit-sectioned sheet of paper. In my vague CFS awareness, I would take the prescription over to the wide wooden dispensary counter, where dried herbs would be weighed out for me.
Once home, I boiled the herbs with water, then strained out the leaves, sticks and flowers and drank the bitter brew twice a day. I did not know what these herbs were, and indeed many of them only have Chinese names, but I was deeply revitalized by their healing properties. Within 3 to 4 days I was back on my feet and functioning.
Now, over a year since my last episode of CFS, I am still recovering. My struggle is not over. I am still unusually sensitive to all forms of stimulation. I am in therapy to release pent-up emotions, which may have been a factor in my suppressed immune system. I have shed the first 5 of the 20 pounds I gained during so much time spent in bed.
But I survived the worst part: people not believing that I was sick, hinting that they thought that I was merely depressed, and why not cheer up. I survived having no energy. I survived not being able to think straight. I survived weeping in public.
I owe my recovery to yoga, my acupuncturist, my shiatsu practitioner, my rolfer, my herbalist, and to myself for trusting them. I give myself credit for showing up for treatment, no matter what the effort.
I thank my allopathic doctors for the name, CFS, and for confirming that alternative health was my best choice for recovery.
I am grateful to my alternative health care practitioners for our relationships of trust and integrity. They helped me steady and balance, like a pendulum swinging more evenly toward a healthier, holistically-balanced future.
Paradises Lost: Spain in a Nutshell
Published in Cambridge TAB and Chronicle in April 2002.
It was Christmas weekend and I was in my eighth day of solitary fasting and retreat at a secluded mountain cabin. My partner Ben had come to fetch me back from the plane of the infinite to the straining and striving of everyday life. He asked me as I lay by the glowing pot-bellied stove where I would go if I could travel to anyplace in Europe. "Spain", I said. "Good, me too!," he responded. "My parents gave us a trip to Europe for my birthday!" I felt joy at the generosity of the gift. With our simple lifestyles we would have been hard pressed to travel on our own.
A year later we boarded our flight to Andalusia to see Southern Spain's Muslim and Catholic art and architecture. I was in for a big culture shock.
As a blazing Cantabrigian, owner of my own business, a self-confident individual in general, I was about to be put in my Spanish place, as an oddity and an outsider. First, in terms of dress, I strive for a funky chic presentation, which includes loose clothes and bright colors, lots of slap dash, scarves, unusual articles that I have acquired over the years. In Spain, the young women dress in tight clothes and constantly have men in tow (even though their birth rate is one of the lowest in Europe). The older women are often black-clad matrons, and excel at the evil eye. I have never felt like such an out-and-out outcast in all my days. Even when Ben and I wore traditional Spanish ponchos made in the Grazalema area (which Spaniards don't), we were laughed at. My only saving grace was a hand-woven ruana that I had brought along, which was indeed similar to the eveningwear of local women.
Our second huge problem inside of our little American bubble was the language barrier. Ben and I are roughly equal in terms of our Spanish fluency, but Andalusia is such a paternalistic society that the men, who are generally the proprieters, insisted on speaking with him. As the entrepreneur in our relationship, I found myself in the unlikely position of being pushed into the background. Under the circumstances, especially since this was "Ben's" trip, I decided to let him take over. This resulted in few opportunities to hone my Spanish-speaking abilities, which, I discovered, were much worse than I had thought.
Our days were spent getting lost, walking, driving or speaking in circles. At one point about half way through our trip I wondered if I was going nuts because of the utter closedness of almost everyone toward us, until, when asking directions for the zillionth time that day, we encountered a lovely Colombian woman who was gracious and conversational. I thank the Lord for that brief encounter.
And speaking of the Lord, my greatest joy in Spain was viewing the Muslim art and architecture at the many alcazars (Muslim fortresses), and the Catholic churches and their artwork. Over those 22 days, I took 30 rolls of film, largely of Sevilla's Alcazar and Catedral, which were breathtaking,...and also representative of the greed and conquest that accompanies organized religion. A good example is the Giralda in Sevilla, the minaret of the mosque, built between 1184 and 1198 at the height of Almohad power, perhaps Spain's most perfect Islamic building. It was originally the tower from which the Muslim caller would send out the five-times-a-day prayers to the community. The Catholics placed a bronze weathervane representing Faith atop the Giralda, and filled the caller's place with multitudinous bells that clang vociferously.
Since Spain's tourist business profits from these Muslim sites as attractions, this very Catholic country is working extensively and successfully to restore the Islamic art. It is their prize if not their joy to show the Islamic paradise lost. And without romanticizing the Islamic culture as any better than the Catholic one, I have to say that the pure geometric forms of Islamic architecture in fortresses and places of worship thrilled me from every angle.
I left Spain feeling conflicted about whether or not I would return. If I go back, to see the Alhambra, Grazalema, and some of the sites we rushed through in our three weeks, I would bring a different wardrobe. I would study my Spanish and Arabic with local language genius Lee Riethmiller for six months not six days. And I would help Ben more with negotiations, if necessary, by whispers in his ear.
Ultimately, I felt cowed by a culture that resounds in sameness, like the same Burberry-check scarf that thousands of people wore everywhere we went. I also found in Spain an ancient beauty that does not exist in the States. I would go back. I would revel. I would probably not conquer the heart of the Spanish people but I would at least learn how to avoid their guffaws and evil eyes. I would not drink and smoke with them, since I don't smoke or drink, but I would again stand in awe of the beauty of two of God's paradises lost.
Upon our return, Ben and I took a walk up to the Hi-Rise Bakery on Concord Ave. As we enjoyed our breakfast, with espresso coffee nowhere near as good as Spain's, I saw three empowered Cantabrigian women laughing and talking together, perhaps a psychotherapist, a landscape architect, and a personal coach, all very comfortable with themselves and each other, brimming with self worth. I knew then that I was back in the home where I am loved and respected, where I belong. I will go away again, maybe even to Spain, but, coasting into Logan will be my greatest joy of all, for Cambridge is my contemporary Paradise.
Previously published in Journal of Family Life's Volume 3/4 1997 issue and in the book, Breathe - a compilation of essays and poetry organized by Robbie Reich.
Myron Sharaf, my therapist twice a week for a year, died this past May. He is best known as a student, disciple, patient, colleague, and the definitive biographer of Wilhelm Reich. Psychologist Reich was initially one of Sigmund Freud's protégés, but later split off from him. Reich's endorsement of the use of sexual energy as a tool in psychological healing was too far afield from Freud's approach. Its basis has won out in today's combined "body-mind" therapies. The dark horse won.
The third floor of Myron Sharaf's house in Newton, Massachusetts was set aside for us ailing souls. The airy haven was studded with flowering plants offered by his wife Giselle, including lone blooms leaping forth in the midst of winter. Giselle's gardens, in both their wide garret and back yard sanctums were as wild as cultivated entities could be. They drew you in like a magnet, only to send you searching for an ambiguous center. Myron was not so different. I sometimes called him "Curly" because of his profound yet convoluted thought processes.
You may wonder why anyone would seek clarity through a multi-circuited mind like Myron's. I think that it was because through Myron's personal suffering he developed a kindness toward our suffering. He could acknowledge self-destructive behaviors of all sorts in us because they had surfaced in him, and he had explored them in himself. He didn't necessarily know how to help us out better than the next therapist, except for one exquisite tool: love. He used love as his guiding force, referring to his way of providing for others as "love therapy".
This does not mean that he made love to us physically, as his mentor, Reich had done with some of his patients, including Myron's first wife. But Myron did allow for physical contact. I sometimes pressed my chest to his back to console and relieve the empty hole of loneliness that ached there. It helped more than all the talking in the world.
When I arrived at Myron's I always sat down cross-legged on the futon on the floor as he faced me from his padded wicker chair. We talked of whatever I needed to go over at the time, including my career ideas, one of which was teaching yoga. Myron considered the idea a dark horse, but it won.
My strongest verbal memory of Myron is of telling him of my anger that he was so unhealthy. I asked how a man who exercised little and smoked a great deal could help me to develop my mental, emotional and physical prowess to its optimum. He accepted my anger and gave no excuse.
Most of my memories of being with Myron are not of talking. They are physical: of my diving into a shoulder roll from standing, springing directly back up, incredulous that someone fearful of gymnastics had performed this feat; of slipping a shiny horse chestnut into his hand before his successful heart bypass surgery; of yelling and hitting a tennis racket against big pillows at his urging, and feeling ludicrous; of lying as he shook me.
Myron was a good therapist for me because of his acceptance of the body in the healing process. Watching my dark horse win - I am a yoga teacher - as he had watched Reich's, he saw that success was not the answer for me. The key he modeled was loving, that indefinable quality of being that is nothing we can think of, but the one experience we can know totally.
Graced with intellectual brilliance, Myron Sharaf let go of boundaries enough so that his love could touch us where we needed to be touched, in the way that we needed to be touched, without harming us. What more could a "patient" ask?
Honoring Creativity and Conscience
This may have been published in both the TAB and Chronicle, probably in 2002.
Some yesterdays are more memorable than others, and winning a poetry award in a town as crammed full of genius as Cambridge is no small feat. On this past Sunday, March 10, 31 awards were given out by comedian Jimmy Tingle in a ceremony honoring not only creativity but conscience.
On the note of pure creative force, we recognized two institutions of our Cambridge culture, Yale grad Brotha Blue and Billy Barnum, P.T.'s grand nephew. Through them we indulged ourselves in our unspoken emotions. When he received the Best Storyteller award, Brotha Blue said of his personal truth, wife Ruth, "I look in your eyes and I see God" as a huge lapis lazuli butterfly flapped at his heart center. His neighbor contender and fellow victor, Billy Barnum, winner of Best Street Performer, ended his mime and recitation with the words "deep cup of my dreaming...fills you full of brimming tears that taste like wine".
Just-entering-puberty Emmet Carvello Quinn recited without notes his Post Modern winner, "Prometheus Never Was", as though night were falling out of the sky, brighter than any Fourth of July, questioning the status quo of myth and rite.
A minimalist piece from Peter Desmond, one of our town's finest drolls, titled "Philologist" (about reading the dictionary), won Erotic Poem Male; its punch line sent the house into reels of laughter. His "Villanelle, April 15", about taxes and death, won Traditional Poem in a quieter fashion.
Not surprisingly, the Cambridge Poetry Awards afternoon was also used as a forum for talk of prisons, prisoners, the lack of prison education, and its repercussions. Members of the troupe ¡Presente! -- Gary Hicks, Richard Cambridge and Regie Gibson -- came onstage to honor and speak of political prisoners, like Leonard Peltier and Murnia, along with lesser knowns, who, in the U.S., are hidden from public awareness by collusion between the media and the government. The word ¡Presente! is used by our Latin American brothers and sisters to honor the dead and the missing, to put flesh on their dry bones and bring them into the rooms where we labor and live. ¡Presente!'s earlier incarnation, Singing with the Enemy, received the Best Performance Troupe award for their show, ¡Embargo!, which traveled from 1997 - 2000 to raise awareness about the United States' 40-year blockade of Cuba.
Jimmy Tingle, whom I had unknowingly written off as a mere jokester, spun such piercing political commentary that we were blinded by each roaring bolt of truth that he tossed. He filled our bellies and our understanding with its laughing fire.
Then this sort of grumpy -looking older guy tromped up to get two awards, for Humorous Poet Male and Spoken Word Male. Jack McCarthy was soon followed onto the stage by sylph-like sister of shout, slammer Rachel Hyman, who won the Spoken Word Female award. Rachel acknowledged Jack, her mentor, for pressing her on into herself to give forth words from the well. Send down that dipper, Rachel! And thank you, Jack!
The proud smile of another young person, Iyeoka Okoawo, showed a rare-and-well-deserved self-confidence as she scored two for herself, in the categories of Hip-Hop Poet Female and Performance Poet of the Year. Then she accepted the Spoken Word CD award on behalf of her Some Nights colleagues and their CD, "Black-out Boston".
And speaking of blacking out, I nearly did at the truth spoken by gentle father, Askia Touré, winner of a Cambridge Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award. He reminds us with one evocative dimple, round eyes, and a sharp sword dividing truth from falsehood that we are not yet free. We must honor the democratic process with the strength of those who have struggled before us, like Miles Davis and Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington, both eulogized in Touré's eloquent poetry.
It's not enough to say all this. It's not enough to know something and not live it. The Cambridge Poetry Awards remind us that great souls get busy, live with eyes open.
I feel pity for the angels,
who can caress our sadness
but not feel it themselves,
who yearn
to be born with a shriek
through the womb,
not just mute
through our imaginations.
I hear that the angels
are trapped in a sphere
outside of life and death,
that they cannot heal
their soul wounds there.
But perhaps if they
fall in love with a human heart....
they may tumble
onto our plane
and become one of us.
Meanwhile
the angel
grants my wish
for a parking space,
hopes I will call more often
so he can give and give
until the floodgates pour open
and he crashes down onto this lonely Earth.
And searches for me to help him.
Dancing knives steal
buses in the sky
that veer, bank,
plunge, collide into shards and shrapnel
twin trade towers;
collapse with uncanny force
the misfortune 5,000
that shared this seismic vista,
leaving a gaping hole
in America's heart
for the people
who entered
on that eleventh hour day
into our skyline pocketbook.
I watch the epicenter
quiver, drop, disappear
into a dump of asbestos-singed steel
as though it is one huge special effect,
but it is not, I am told, over and over again.
On the first day
feisty firefighters
pop out alive
here and there
from protected pockets,
climbing from voids
in the collective grave.
What were red
rescue trucks
now stand silent,
ashen placards
for fingered love notes.
Photos of young beauties
or old folks
of every race
and religion
are pasted side by side
along city wall sanctuaries;
they beseech us
with smiles that crescendo
alongside aging flowers:
5,000 missing friends.
One world, many lights out.
The empty cavern
of my heart is numb,
except in yoga practice
where horror rises.
Whole humans
fled, leapt,
flaming,
flailing,
from high above,
exploded
on impact
into dismembered limbs, heads, feet
scattered about,
avoided by the gazes of those who escaped
Spirits
too quickly yanked
from burning bodies
grasp upward
around me at night.
Still baying desperation,
they show me so I will
shower cooling condolences,
share easeful comfort.
I send prayers.
On the second day
I hear that one whole corpse
landed in the rubble sitting upright,
legs and arms crossed as though still at the morning cup.
I am grateful that TV omits the graphics.
On this third day
after the futility of hate
is so boldly displayed
I wear pale blue
to remind us
of periwinkle flowers.
I invite Venus's clear vision
as she finds a way,
creeps through her agony
to offer fair myrtle.
In a small sidebar
on the front page of the paper
we are told
that a man receives
a new heart.
I lie down
in the garden snow
feeling below me
cabbage heads
rotting back into the earth.
I lie
in my tattered mink coat.
Round about me
a few unpulled weeds
champion perpetuity.
The people inside the house
are doing what people always do.
Wouldn't they like to lie
in the snow just as well?
Published by Poetry Motel in their Wallpaper series, Winter 2000 - 2001
Newspaper guy pushes Spare Change toward passing hands.
He hopes the paper he hawks will be grabbed over and over, with money flying at him like in a whirlwind.
He hasn't woken up enough yet to say, with his accustomed force, "lovely lady"
to all who of that sex pass, adding, of course, creative
variations on the theme.
Whether we choose to listen or not,
his greetings acknowledge
that we each belong to a race of radiant beings
all with glows causing loveliness.
Is this good feeling worth a dollar?
Published in Spare Change October 2000 issue
He stinks.
Just bought a meal-sized box
of Rice Krispies.
Where does he go for the milk?
Where does he sit down to eat his meal?
Would I want to join him at his table?
Where is his family?
What happened to the village that would have cared for him?
Published in Spare Change October 2000 issue
Lost in the dream
of how I am that day
I see the fat homeless
pretty one, the title I have for her,
parking her stout being out by
the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Mass Ave and Holyoke,
you know the woman I mean, the one by
Yen
Ching.
She is always so cheerful as I
walk away "God bless!" or "Have a nice day!" with
bird song in her voice.
I always avoid her,
walk
over on the far side of the subway grate, not knowing
what to do or say.
Embarrassed,
awake to my quandary,
and to her asking presence.
She seems OK with my walking away.
Am I?
Previously published by Ibbeston Street Press in their September 2000 issue
Poet's End
Nominated for "Outstanding Female Love Poem", Cambridge Poetry
Awards
In the end
I would like
my home to be
as interesting
as Pablo Neruda's,
full of earthly phantasms:
impossible and useless,
boldly speaking out.
And I would like my face
as it grows old
to be a poet's,
like Neruda's was,
the seamless
unfolding through creases.
Neruda's poetry mirrors
Chile's blue mountain caps,
melts frozen dogma
into fast rivers
that gush our tears
past the vast anchor riveted
into his sea grass lawn.
Our causes rush
past the young eagle
who roosts
on a living tree
that holds a government sign
"casa cerrada, no se visita".
The rivers torrent
even through the estuary,
past our poet's home
out into the solitary sea,
where his mood is ever fixed
by the rhythm and blow
of an unsubmergeable sky,
like his voice, a slow canticle of light.
Pablo unrumples our grief;
holds open a bastion gate
for us to enter the mirrorless sky.
That's why we love him.
And I would like
to deliver letters
to Pablo Neruda
like El Postino,
cycling on his one-speed
up from along the sea.
He wonders if he will ever
learn to love.
He went into the apothecary
for some sheepskin condoms
and bought a prayer rug
in the Medina
on which to lay
the desert whore
of his dreams.
She performed a belly dance
that sent the contents
of the water towers
into tsunami.
At her daily devotion
she mesmerized
the faux guides
who hassled tourists
as a ruse
while pick-pocketing them.
She tricked the crooks
with her eyes
into instant obsession,
turned their wrath into pleas.
The man with the sheepskin condoms
and the prayer rug
knew that she might give him
the love madness through his loins,
but he couldn't stop her
no matter how much he groped
the void between touches.
She peeled off
the soft sheep.
His screams were heard
echoing from the Mosque
five times each day
until AIDS took him down
to grovel, then be still,
in the desert cave.
Published in Spare Change News 2005
It all began with a smile
in the garden.
Ranger Mona
cultivates paisley
garden threads
at Longfellow's.
Clay bricks shape a hollow hearth,
hold Club Passim's campfires.
Musicians blow the hour glass.
Down to the center
of our universe
at Seven Stars
eleven crystal balls
sway a spirit pouch.
Marc of the golden fingers
reminds us of our pain,
charges a buck for Spare Change.
At Out of the Blue we muse
with Priestess and Hammer Man.
Relieve me, Middle East
with feta cheese
on peppers and mint.
The Laughing Horse says
"Feel my muscles!"
-- five inches across.
Peter the Cosmic Moose
leads me with heavy horns over
to his hand-stitched manse
on Brookline Ave;
the silver sliver moon
revolves us
into the sex dungeon next door.
Do you want a whipping, hog-tied?
Griffins grin
at the sight
of fresh meat.
Gothics spit
pomegranate seeds.
Moribunds stir sex pot,
handcuff up after hot dance:
pit
pat
pit pat
patted,
leather crop sizzles touch;
white banshees mount metropolis.
Barnum and Thal
chime cap and bell mimes,
bless us silently:
"Hoolah, hoo hoo lah, hoo lah hay".
CC blathers beer bubbles into young blondes' ears.
Boedecker flirts cold toes on face of coffee maid.
Hoo la la. Hoo la lay.
George the architect leans
on Chogyam Rinpoche in '76,
acts big
under the overarching Yard Gate.
A troupe of ballerinas
lick Rivera's cello
outside Plough and Stars.
And we follow them
at midnight, jig back
to the home
of the great commander.
Vance sweats and sings
in his orange bathrobe
to his lady's longing neck
of blue-eyed kids
with kinky hair.
Hurrahs twelve circles deep
roll into the flames.
As my eyelids droop
the night owl whispers,
"Who, who is good for a few more?"
"Tomorrow at noon"
I promise
I'll be back
to rekindle
the campfire.
Published in The Alewife 2005
Yoga in Harvard Square
Since 1993