One Day I Will Sing on Stage

Last night at 7:15 pm in front of my very own blue house, Jen Hajj (from CA) and Dave Hawkins (from OH) set up mikes and amplifiers to sing to our neighbors, themselves and the mosquitoes. Jen's soprano notes rose high and sweet on the topics of birds and friendship. Dave has a more surly personality, with stories of drinking and history and the drama of daughters and granddaughters who break your heart in a good way.

We were maybe 25 sprawled over a quarter acre and I wondered if it was worth their time. Maybe they would be twiddling their thumbs or practicing or they just know that singing is about each person, and finding the one that connects with their mission, their gift, their energy. Dave's 50 years shows in his 7 albums, grammy nominations, itune sales and his regular pitch for support.

My sons and I lay in bed, then each kept saying, "I can't see, I can't see," and we had to sit up and look down from the bedroom window until the last song ended. I believe they would have gone all night if we had let them, but it became to dark to see.

When it was quiet, my son said, "You go to lessons, right?" When I nodded he said, "You want to sing like them when you grow up," and I said, "I hope so!" I want to sing out loud to the night, but do I have the skill to bear my soul and ask for attention. They wanted us to know their history, to agree with their choices, for us to know them intimately, and somehow we did, without even knowing their names. I don't know if I can believe people will listen to my stories for as long as the audience did, about raptor bird obsessions and song writing classes and drunk audiences at football games, but I imagine I will try.

My story is. . . I was a lonely child, fighting for food with my six siblings. My school lunches were dry homemade brown bread peanut butter sandwiches with a gushy apple that I almost threw up as I tried to get down. When I met my husband, he appeared as loyal and grounded and he participated with me in my story. As I consider options, write, sing, run a marathon, build a community house, help with my dad's wedding, apply to MFA's, teach, parent, or sit on my hands, I sense myself grabbing onto things to find safety, while also longing for an extreme adventure.

I am challenged in the daily tasks to find meaning in folding laundry or scrubbing the bathtub. I live with people, I am responsible to meet basic needs, but I care most about my family being showered with God's love/knowing. I watch my friends adventure in the city or backcountry and though I pretend they are crazy, I envy their determination to live on some edge, where they must fully focus on the task ahead. In this season, wanting those adventures in nature and urban living become distractions (though later, I hope to lead others their), as my task is that of being where I am and listening to the rain. I am the observer of kids changing heights, their facial expressions, their words, their daily epiphanies about themselves and the world and I want them to experience God within the spaces we dwell, be content within their own skin, not matter what the circumstances are elsewhere.

So we lay down and listen to sounds, laughs, and then run circles up our hill around the raspberries and back down, imagining ourselves to be dinosaurs and lions. We take pauses to ponder the head sized hornet's nest just past our front porch, that we have played under for months, without seeing, knowing that someone has sprayed it for us, and its inhabitants are dead. Maybe I will write a song about the hornets, or the music or the kids, or maybe the Blue Heron that soared just out out of our reach, showcasing it's long slender neck.

I Need You

On a recent camping trip in Sleeping Bear Dunes, I noticed several times that kids close to my 5 year olds age would stop and stare at him and his friends in a tranced or longing way. Then they would move closer or head off, but for a moment, you could tell they wanted to connect.

On Tuesday night as I ran down Park Ave past a fastish looking woman, I did the same thing. I eyed her, almost turned to go along with her and thought of how I might find out who she was so I could ask her to run with me. I eye neighbors, church visitors and want to know their stories. I stroke my boys forearms and cheeks when they lay down to sleep and want to hear their day's stories, what they are thinking about, believing and hoping for and always wish I could engage them better.

My best friend decided to live on a boat again, and she made the comment that we would not have much time to talk after her move. She is in a great place, heading to Haystack, writing amazing stories, getting responses from literary journals and now taking a leap of faith as she literally casts off! She doesn't have many minutes on her cell plan or consistent reception and I panic inwardly knowing I can't spontaneously access her.

I also realize as I sit in the library to write on a Sunday afternoon that I only write when people send me off. An hour ago my husband said, "Why don't you go off and write now?" I said, "ok," and here I am. On Monday the babysitter comes and I write. I rarely work in the early morning or late at night and wonder if I need to focus or accept that this is how it is right now.

I seek external direction for the internal work of studying human change. Now I look at impending Fall, my boys both signed up for their first ever schools, and I turn my gaze to anything that might prod me on (or distract me from losing time with them). I read about the program InsideOut, teaching writing to kids in Detroit and long for the task, I comb through Eastern's Creative Writing Classes and want to be in conversation with students. I notice my neighbors and consider a Community Bible study on relationships, art and Jesus. I pray that God will lead me into the right spaces; that my ears will crane towards what is lasting.

The Process of Becoming Alive

There is something profound in reading stories you have read before but seeing them as a changed person. To read To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye as a child makes me think of possibility and as an adult, I feel a bit more regret, envy, or fear, that I have missed an important moment.

Sitting at my coffee shop table there is a poem that I keep reading, thinking that with each new look, it will give me the answer. Here it is (no author is quoted):

If we wait to foil

A BANK ROBBERY

or rescue someone ties on the railroad tracks
We will never be a hero. We probably won't

even come across a cat stuck in a tree. As
long as we sit at the bus stop waiting for

OUR GREAT MOMENT

we will miss our real chance at the heroic.
the infinite number of tiny, daily acts

inspired by the great. Our actions may seem
insignificant, but their results will grow

and multiply.
They are radical: they are

A SMOLDERING FIRE.

My best friends are off on new adventures. One is taking the long road to Alabama and camping along the way. Another is literally living on a sailboat, without a real plan for how long or whereto, just being there. My sailor talks through wind and water and I feel life is happening inside her and I want to be there.

My family and close friends went camping in Sleeping Bear Dunes, climbing and swimming and sitting around a fire and it was good. One one hike up Pyramid Point, most of our crew decided to climb down a steep slope to touch the water. The way down was easy, but the scaling the dune back took many over an hour. They sat down white faced on top and we all felt the relief of their being ok. As I sat watching and half wishing I had experienced the struggle, the water looked liquid glass agave. Like God was hovering just below the surface. I consider how He met people on mountain tops and wrestled them in the valleys of the Bible and I wait and wonder where he is in with me.

My impulse is to jump into a new class at Eastern, work as a creative writing teacher with InsideOut in Detroit and trying to complete a publishable novel in a week.

Instead I write my three morning pages about my dad's upcoming wedding, my neighborhood, and how I want to be, in my own skin. All the while I know that I'm not going to make it to the mountains of NH, or cruise (sail) the coast of Maine, but I am still me, without doing anything. That in this next two weeks, people are coming to me and that I will write and each day watch for God showing up in my life.

Woman Downstairs

After sitting with the book, The Woman Upstairs for a week, I am struck by how much I don't want to re-write that story in my life. People ask how it ends (spoiler alert), and the reality is that it ends with her flying into a rage, the thing the reader is doing from the beginning. The main character Nora is telling a story in hindsight, I suppose a cautionary tail, but it is hard to know why she would want to even relive it. The hard part is wishing the end would be the beginning of the story about the enlightened Nora. I realize this is the author's point, that I am supposed to feel rage and to do something about it, but what? What does the downstairs girl do with herself?

Now in re-connecting with My Name Is Asher Lev, one of my all-time favorites, it begins with a confession of his own journey to making art. In the first paragraph you hear Asher confess that he defies all understanding in his making art. It is inspiring. I want to want something and fight for it and make it happen. Today that looks like me writing on a Saturday morning. I paid a babysitter to come and managed a lot of internal and external conflict around being selfish with my time. I am back here. I have to do this to feel ok with everything else.

So what next. A story. A word. narcissism? commitment? endurance?  NO, or a bigger YES. Art. Artist. Musician. ME? Them? Us? I imagined myself as a famous artist at my show, putting a box over my head or a mask on my face and watching people watch me, like I am empty, because I can do that. I can choose to engage or not and need to work hardest at just listening and not attempting to play a role.

Where is my joy?
How do I rest?
What matters in this moment?
For me, it is listening to the trees and fighting for my relationships with God.

Strumming on my Day

As I learn to strum and pick at my guitar strings, letters and notes that sound on or off depending on me, not their tension, I am struck by how acquard my arm feels stretched over the fat body. I cut my nails and forget my pick and then half hold it, as I give into my fears of sounding bad. Occassionally it will all feel easy and I sing out a few lines, but mostly it feels like I go slow fast, stop, figure out where I am, begin again. Playing with my teacher, he listens, looks and makes motions, suggests I tap my toe, and even attempts to add in base chords and sing the harmony, "so as give a sense for what is possible," he says.

This week I tried to change my strings and broke the lowest two E and A, snapped the little plastic peg, with the bottom half wedged in the hole. I tried for half a day to dig it out, taking some wood with me before I got my fist in and pushed from within. After all that snapping, I tried to tune the thing and couldn't remember which notes went with which string. After that, I headed to another lesson without practicing, like I used to as a kid for violin (and which I do every Saturday when I show up to run, without having run any days since last Saturday).

The thing is that I can't keep away, despite my shortcomings. I must play on. Last week I went in to Oz Music, all keyed up from leading music at kids camp and running around trying to make myself fit, and after 30 minutes of fumbling with chords and words, I walked out rejuvenated. All my heavy breathing and tensed up shoulders were forgotten. 

This is true of my entire life. I love to play music, and I'm bad at tapping my toe to get a rythme, but I want to try, want to get into a groove, so that I can be where ever I am. It is the drum beat of waking up with an understanding about the day. A sip of Roos coffee, children eating, a playing out of the knowns, so I don't wander through a maze of indecisions.

What do I do every day?
Wonder what to do until it is sprung upon me by some crisis or request?
YES, sigh.

So I am hoping to change this. I  am so glad for moments when I arrive somewhere, like a camp site, a guitar lesson, my writing desk and the plan is clear, the survival items are taken care of, and I can just be in the space.

I suppose for some this means a plan for cleaning and cooking and managing the corners of closets, which sounds defeating to me. I imagine the kids having their clothes set up for them to find. A bowl of fruit they can access, the five meals that we rotate through. Somehow I am not there yet. I do the massive clean my house and then let it go for months, until a wave of guilt or an influx of guests convince me to take action.

I keep thinking all the efforts of living in society are somehow labeled as "adult," and I am still a child waiting to be told my schedule. This is why I tend to be swayed by the people who knock at my door. I need to develop the parental sense to look for what is enduring over my gravitation towards quick reactions.