Summer Deluge

We’re between thunderstorms on the Row. It’s The Deluge here in southeast South Dakota. The two main roads I take into Little Town have been intermittently closed, each precariously balanced between growing lakes – great fields of corn or soybeans flooded by the escaped James and Vermillion rivers. Trees, flowers, pasture, lawn, weeds…the Row’s greenery is lush, tropical, growing at an alarming rainforest rate.

 

The constant wetness has also resulted in record-breaking clouds of mosquitos, which my friend K swears are the size of helicopters. The flooded pond out by the meditation tower, the dense plum thickets, and the tall wet grass of the south 40 make ideal ‘skeeto nurseries. We try to live as organically as possible (we take out small loans every time we buy organic dog & cat food for the kids), but we can’t go outside right now without showering in DEET first. Ray wears a mosquito-net hat just to get to his car in the morning. When I envisioned Ray and I in our rural retreat – sipping juleps under the market umbrella, prayer flags billowing in the soft summer breeze, peacocks in all their puffery atop the rail fence – I didn’t quite see the full-body mosquito armor. I’m almost desperate enough to spray the yard. Almost.

I made a mozzarella-basil salad for the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder dinner last night – thirteen women, an amazing buffet of potluck dishes, a little singing, and lots of wine & coffee. What a gift, to have this community of strong, intelligent, hilarious women. We celebrated our friend C’s presence a year or so after her double-lung transplant (still, after all she’s been through, the most positive, life-affirming person I know). We celebrated our friend M’s engagement (and her Liz Taylor rock) to a kindhearted man who adores her. We celebrated the lovely blending of women’s voices, when friends G & L and I sang an old Jesse Winchester song that turned into a singalong. We celebrated 30-year friendships and younger women coming “into the fold” with each semi-monthly dinner. Why, the sheer continuity of it all makes me break out in an ear-splitting, quavering version of “The Circle of Life” from the Lion King! (Thank heaven we don’t have neighbors.)

I started a new blog last week – meditations on meditation. It’s a way for me to hold onto the feeling of “rightness” I had at Shambhala, and to keep myself going back to the cushion for daily practice. It’s a pretty boring blog unless you’re interested in meditation, but you’re welcome to check it out at www.pomheart.blogspot.com.

Today, the heat and unbearable humidity of the past couple of days broke, so I checked on my batch of Merlot, finished a video script for Ad Agency, pulled a few weeds, and got most of the Row mowed. Mowing out on the trails, I found a fresh varmint hole, maybe 10" across, and I figure that's why we haven't seen more peachicks. So I did what any proud plainswoman with an ounce of ingenuity (and no gun or poison) would do; I dumped half a jar of pickled jalapenos down the hole. Sure, you're laughing now...but just you wait till Sham-wow guy's doing my infomercials and I'm chillin' in the lap of luxury. Won't be so funny then, will it...

Life in a petting zoo...

It’s Father’s Day on the Row, Summer Solstice tomorrow. It’s been an incredibly wet spring so far, and it looks like more rain today. Our gardens are thriving, though we humans could use a bit more sun. By the time it’s dry enough to mow, we’ll need a jungle brush-clearer to do it.


Our two adult male peacocks are still rattling their train feathers in showy displays and vibrating primary wing feathers like castanets, in spite of the fact that the four adult hens are long past breeding for the season. Four peahens nested this year; two have already made appearances in the yard with four chicks each (bringing our “those crazy peacock people” flock count up to 24), and the other two hens should be showing up any day, toddlers in tow. The young girls completely ignore the old geezers’ parading. Four yearling males are also fanning and strutting and mid-air sparring, but the hens won’t even roll their eyes at the hapless boys until next spring, when the hooligans finally get their first long trains.

 
We took on a new Row resident this spring. Our son’s cat, Rickie Lee, came to live on the farm after she turned up her nose at a new brand of kitty litter, then at litter boxes in general. So she’s learning to be an outdoor cat, although she spends a good deal of time curled up on the rug by the back door. If she sees us peeking out the window, wild meowing ensues, and each trip outside means an extended kitty-petting session on the patio. We’d rather she had a home where she could be an indoor cat again, re-learning her lost litter box skills and curling up in someone’s lap in the evening, but she can’t be an inside cat here, because we also live with… 

Stella Faye and Polly Hester. Stella, the African Grey, is 12 this year, and Polly, the Lilac Crown Amazon, is around 17 we think. Stella keeps us entertained with long unintelligible conversations in a perfectly mimicked Ray tone & inflection, punctuated with laughs, coughs, sneezes, and occasional microwave beeps. She calls for water when her dish runs low. Polly doesn’t speak English, but she’s picked up a few parroty-English – penglish – sounds. She adores Ray. If I give Polly an almond, she’ll drop it, then call incessantly till Ray comes with another one.

Meanwhile, our two canine companions, 2-year-old Schnoodle Yogi, and rescued 9-year-old Aussie Jada, are obsessing over the new kitty on the porch. Yogi, in his obnoxious schnauzerly way, nips at the patient kitty, trying to get her to play. Jada desperately, compulsively, tries to herd Rickie onto the porch ledge.

So life is good at the Row petting zoo, although we may have to start holding fundraisers to keep the peas in corn (bad veggie humor). Stella could sing the Popeye theme…Yogi could do Schnauzer spins…I could sew little sequined gowns for the peahens…

A Meditation on Meditation

I’ve played with meditation for a few decades, since my 20’s, but always half-heartedly, and always with a vaporous, quasi-spiritual, otherworldly desire – until recently. My friend G and I got back last week from a 3-day “Learn to Meditate” retreat at the Shambhala Mountain Center near Fort Collins, CO, and the experience changed my thinking about and approach to the practice of meditation.

On the first day, we were given practical advice for dealing with the altitude (we were at about 8000 feet). Then we were taught a good sitting posture, fairly comfortable from the start even for stiff middle-aged westerners. We tried it out that first night with a brief (10-minute) sitting meditation, but mostly, we were introduced to the intention of shamatha (Shambhala) meditation – to focus attention on the breath. That’s it. No mantras, no contemplating the nature of the universe, no Buddhist dogma, no reaching out for alternate realities – just the practice of keeping one’s attention on the breath. And not thinking about the breath – just experiencing it, being aware of it, in the present moment, as it’s happening.

Shambhala, according to their center in Minneapolis, “incorporates the teachings of the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, with the Shambhala vision of living an uplifted life, fully engaged with the world. According to the Shambhala tradition, there is inherent goodness and sanity in all human beings. This potential can be recognized and developed through…meditation. Its simplest form is rooted in the sitting practice of meditation where one works with the breath. We call this mindfulness/awareness meditation. Developing mindfulness cultivates a mind that rests calmly, and developing awareness cultivates a mind that sees clearly."

Over the course of the next day and half, we practiced sitting and walking meditations several times a day, interspersed with shamatha yoga postures, talks, and readings from Shambhala spiritual leader Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s book, Turning the Mind Into an Ally. 

The highlight of the weekend was a 20-minute hike up the mountain to the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya. Stupas are traditionally memorials to great teachers and their teachings, as well as reliquaries (safekeeping for relics, usually bones, of such teachers). The Great Stupa is the only one in North America, and it’s a breathtaking 3-story work of art, both inside and out, with carved statues, marble pomegranates and lotus blossoms in the floors, gilded wall carvings. We got to do a walking meditation around the outside of the Stupa and a sitting meditation inside, in front of a 30-foot golden Buddha. And later, when G and I walked back up and no one was around, I sang in the Stupa, where the notes echoed and hung in the air of that amazing circular space.

Over the years, I’ve spent time around the Catholic church, Presbyterian church, and the Holy Order of Mans (a 70’s San Fran-based group with communities in Omaha and Lincoln, NE). I’ve studied and taught as literature the sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.  Though I’ve never found a spiritual “home” in any one tradition, I’ve always felt that meditation is the key to unlocking direct experience – to knowing. And I believe that no matter what goes on out here in the world, it will ultimately be meaningless without some attention to my own spiritual center. So I’m grateful that I was able to give myself the gift of this retreat.

I know I’ve only peeked through the Shambhala/Buddhism door, and that the mansion goes on forever. But what I love about Buddhism is its philosophy of non-judgmental, compassionate detachment. Detachment isn’t cold ambivalence or indifference – it’s loving and objective. And what draws me to the Shambhala meditation practice is its practical, non-dogmatic “this is a path, not a destination” approach. So I’ve made a little meditation shrine of my own, and I’m delighting in my daily practice. Interestingly (maybe only to me), it’s not a big leap from meditation to poetry – poetry is a practiced craft, not a product. Likewise, meditation is not the answer – not the finished poem. But it is, I believe, the heart of good, hard work that for the present, at least, is moving me forward.

Pre-Roadtrip Prep

I’m re-doing the henna on my hands and packing today. My friend G and I are leaving tomorrow on a road trip. We’re headed across Nebraska, down through Cheyenne, WY, and into Colorado northwest of Fort Collins, CO, where we’ll spend three glorious days at 8000 ft at a meditation retreat. ‘Cause that’s what stalwart prairie people do – henna their hands and go on meditation retreats.

We’re planning to tent it one night going out, and one or two nights coming back. We don’t know where – we’re winging it, and that’s about as carefree as we get at our age. In the olden days, in spite of Grandma’s warnings about clean underwear, my road trip packing would include a gee-tar, an extra broom skirt and halter top, a bag of sunflower seeds, and a bottle of Boone’s Farm. But I’m middle-aged now. Fear and Caution are my sad and constant companions. So my dining room table is covered with stuff to take along, anticipating every possible contingency.

I have quite a list of things to get done before I go, too. I started my first batch of homemade wine Monday, with the help of Miss V., my WS (wine sponsor). It’ll make six gallons of “that damn Merlot” (if you haven’t seen Sideways yet, and you ever drink wine, see it now). In vintner parlay, my bung is bubbling. That sounds obscene, I know, but it means the yeast is doing its thing. I made this batch from a kit, learning the ropes as I work my way toward wine made from our wild plums. Before I leave in the morning, I’ll need to instruct Ray to watch my bung bubble while I’m gone.

I have a meeting in the Big City today, gearing up for some summer copywriting work for the ad agency I used to work for. Ad agency folks have an unusual kind of dark collective humor that I’ve really missed, so I’m excited to get back at it for a while. Then I’ll run errands in the City to pick up the first-aid kit necessities I’m missing and a “thief” for testing my wine once I get back.

Then I’ll clean parrot cages, water plants, feed outside birds, peacocks and barn cats, weed, mulch, and pack, pack, pack. By the time I get everything done, drive to Colorado, unload, we’re comfy on our meditation cushions, and I’m in the throes of caffeine withdrawal, I’m just hoping I can stay awake long enough to meditate…

(pics of teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and the Great Stupa of Darmakaya from www.shambhalamountain.org)

Pathological Nesting

I come from a long line of serious nesters. Not hoarders, not collectors, not agoraphobes. Nesters. My home is lined from top to bottom with shiny, downy, or odd found objects. I have baby teeth, baby hair, notes to the tooth fairy, graduation tassels, love notes, chunks of rock, single earrings and other treasures stowed in every conceivable cubbyhole. I’m like a European magpie or bowerbird, dragging interesting stuff back to my nest and weaving the tidbits into the warp & weft. Unlike my feathered cousins, I don’t adorn my nest as part of a mating ritual (though, come to think of it, Ray does love the eclectic hippie-museum-esque décor, so maybe…). I do it mostly because each object is like a snapshot of a moment in my 50+ years. My grandma, my mom, me, and now my daughter…we’re not happy unless we’re living in one gigantic scrapbook.

So after an amazing little thunderstorm plowed its way through the Row a few nights ago, I felt compelled to check on the Row’s other nesters – my kindred spirits. Walking the yard, I found a little pin-feathered mourning dove, which I scooped up and put in the crook of a pine tree bough, out of the wind and the puppy path. (It’s an old wives’ tale that mother birds will “smell” human touch and abandon handled young; most birds have a terrible sense of smell, and if the baby’s strong enough to chirp and the mom can hear it, she’ll try to keep feeding it, wherever it is.) The swallow nests are tucked up under the greenhouse eaves, so they were all okay, and the pigeons have their comfy barn. I don’t know where the bats roost, or I would have checked on them, too.

Two chipping sparrows have built a nest in a bird feeder I neglected to close tight. The nest is a work of art, lined with twigs, leaves, and brushed-out dog and human hair we put out for them. The 65 mpg gusts had blown the plastic side off the birdfeeder, but the nest inside is so tightly constructed that it kept its shape. A baby was on the ground, though, so I popped him back in the nest.

A peahen, Isetta (formerly Ike) is sitting on eight eggs in the middle of a flower garden, as if we planted it just for her. Another peahen managed to work the grate off a window well and has at least 3 eggs in it now. Two more hens are nesting somewhere out in the pasture grass. In bad weather, the hens hunker down around their eggs, tuck their heads to avoid the worst of the rain, wind or hail, and sit tight. Even in the most driving thunderstorm, I doubt the eggs even get damp. So Isetta was wet but fine, and window well hen’s nest is safe under an eave on the most protected side of the house.

One interesting facet of powerful genetic nestiness is a reluctance to leave home. My friend G and I are hitting the road next week for a meditation retreat in Colorado. And though I adore road trips, and though flying off means evolution & adventure, it also means leaving the nest. So I’m comforting myself by remembering that Ray is as much a nester as I am and will tend things with great love & care, and by imagining all the amazing Rocky Mountain treasures I’ll find, to work into the nooks & crannies of our Big Nest on the prairie.

City Mouse, Country Mouse

I chopped off all my hair recently, partly to foil the wood ticks (the down-side of our south-40 walking trail), and partly to prove to myself that I’m still a sophisticated, unflappable, urbane city girl. I mean, I grew up in Omaha, right? I went to three different high schools….I slept in the grass at Memorial Park amid all-night rallies or parties…I took city busses through the projects to get to the downtown bank where I worked…I zoomed around in my 1971 VW bug (with a moon roof and maple leaves airbrushed on the hood…suh-weet) like a NASCAR queen...I was car-hopping at A & W the night the pimp in the orange and green suit drove through the plate glass storefront, for Pete's sake.

But I don’t think my haircut's fooling anyone, least of all me. Last weekend, when Ray and I took a road trip to Minneapolis/St. Paul to hang for a couple of days with Ray’s son, it became instantly clear that we’re now almost completely pasture-ized (not to be corn-fused with pasteurized, which involves boiling, and which, on summer prairie days, might also fit).

Because we now live by the moon & stars here on the Row, making us constitutionally unable to hurry, we ambled up county and state highways and crawled onto the Cities beltway at rush hour on Friday. Oh. Dear. God. I’m pretty sure we both stopped breathing several times. By the time we made it to the hotel parking lot, we both needed (a) a cigarette; (b) a shot of whisky; and (c) a defibrillator. Then, as soon as we checked in and dropped off our stuff, it was time to back onto the deathway…er…beltway to go to Jesse’s. My hands remain white and curved, claw-like, as if still gripping a car doorframe.

Another sign of my de-citification? As we ran hither & yon around the Cities for the next couple of days, I realized that the quirky fashion statements I made in my youth have devolved into barely audible, mostly beige, whispers. I am a pasty prairie wallflower compared to the City-folk and their penchant for le couture horreur. Like the middle-aged man with the bad bleach-blonde perm and the seriously skin-tight hotpants and cowboy boots (and that was ALL he had on), or the boy with the dreads and the tea saucers in his ear lobes, or the guy dressed like Jack Sparrow for no apparent reason, or the girl in all yellow except for her purple tights, into which she’d torn several large holes (prairie people are too steeped in Lutheran/Catholic guilt to intentionally damage something). I even caught myself, for a split second, trying to figure out what sort of fashion statement the clerk in the Tibet Shop was making – the Tibetan monk clerk.

Ray and I also discovered that we’re not so much countrified as we are country-fried. But one can eat out in the city every night with nary a meal that’s chicken-fried, breaded & boiled in oil, super-sized or slathered in mayo. In the big city, we indulged Cuban grilled plantain with black beans and rice; Mexican tacos al pastor and horchata; Thai som dtam salad and green curry chicken; and Chinese noodle and bok choy soup. I loaded up on supplies at United Noodle, a huge Asian market, which will henceforth be known as The United Church of the Divine Noodle, and where I will worship each time I go to the Cities.

I might have been feeling just a twinge of my old city instincts by the time we had to head back home. But a sure sign of our progressive prairieness was our collective sigh pulling into the Row yard, with peacocks trumpeting, dandelions exploding, and that beautiful prairie darkness (except for the gazillion solar lights in our gardens). So I’m glad to be home again. I’m almost done knitting another pair of fingerless gloves, and today I’m tattooing my gnarled hands with henna, then later this afternoon I’ll sip wine on the patio to set the henna in the sun while I watch the peas’ courtship shenanigans, listen to the orioles, and toss a tennis ball for the dogs. Something about the bustle, flashes of color, and anonymity of the city still calls to me, but gimme a straw hat and call me Flannery…the city just can’t beat this calm, this space, this hermitage. Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

Mother's Day Meditations

It’s Mother’s Day on Uncannery Row, and motherhood abounds. The peahens are playing hard-to-get with honking, fanning, thrumming peacocks, who’ve divided up the acreage into tiny little kingdoms. A house sparrow has taken over a wooden bird feeder, stuffing it full of leaves and peafowl down in which to lay her first clutch of eggs. The swallows are constructing their muddy teacup nests under greenhouse eaves. We have a new female cat, Rickie Lee, who’s taken over the pyramid building and calls each night for food & scratches. She’s my son’s cat, who at 5 or 6 years refuses to be litterbox trained, so she’s come home to Mama’s House of Permanent Retirement here on the farm. Even the hen & chicks are spreading out in profound fecundity across the flower garden.

I’m so grateful, this day and every day, to have been raised in a home with both my mother and grandmother. Though in occasional dark moments I brood over growing up essentially fatherless, I know that at least one result of my femalecentric upbringing is a sense of my own sufficiency and ability. Another result is that I have the mothering instincts of a lioness—hurt my offspring, and I’ll eat you. This intense parenting gene can be burdensome to others, because I have a natural tendency to [s]mother my husband, friends, co-workers, students, mail carrier, UPS guy and complete strangers. The upside is that in spite of my many, many mistakes, I was (and am…you can’t shake that gene) a dedicated and ever-present parent. And the most amazing thing has happened now that two of our four children have children of their own—they’re incredibly devoted, conscientious parents themselves.

I’d also like to say a word today about step-parenting, which slips through the Mother’s Day cracks. Maybe because of the lioness gene, I never felt differently about Ray’s son than I did about my own. Though intellectually I know I’m not his mom, and I have no urge to dethrone his mom, emotionally and instinctually, he’s one of my cubs; I scold, cajole, comfort, support and box his ears when I have to, as I do all the kids. We tend to think of step-parents as once-removed somehow, but that’s just symantics when a kid needs a bandaid and a hug.

So here’s my Mother’s Day poem, a poem about continuity, with gratitude for moms, step-moms, adoptive moms, foster moms, surrogate moms—we’re all part of the same flea-bitten pride…

INVOCATION

If you were any more alive in me, Mother,

my heart would burst, split open

like a ripe peach soaked in holy water.

Whisper from every corner of this clapboard

cathedral, Our Lady of Perpetual Chores,

your small and powerful prayers:

    white coral bells 
    itsy bitsy spider 
    battle hymn of the republic

Chant caramel pudding and corn casserole

recipes, ancient sacred texts handed down

from your own mother, that dark marble saint

atop the bell tower, one arm wrapped around

a gilded laundry basket, a silver pressure cooker

cradled in the other. Her heart, too, burst open.

Keep me, I ask, in your blessing of trying, failing,

laughing about failure. Grant me the grace

of history, repeated mistakes, promises.

Look down on me with love when they raise you

to the bell tower, at the way I sing your praises

off-key, from behind my daughter’s stove.