Eastern Washington

The Chosen Life

I knew before moving to Eastern Washington that the land—by which I mean the soil, the air, the water, the flora and the fauna—as well as many of the people here, including native people, had suffered and were still suffering deeply.

The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues.

I knew this side of the state had taken in or had foisted on it some of the worst industries imaginable, from personal and industrial waste to toxic waste.

I knew unthinkable things were being done to animals in one of the country’s largest meat processing plants, that its walls housed extreme suffering.

The river was being poisoned. I knew that. I knew the ground was contaminated by the radioactive slurry left behind and improperly stored at the Hanford Site and that the ground water was also contaminated.

I knew all this and I came here not in spite of these realities but because of them. I’d been living in the Seattle Bubble for too long, going about my daily business without issues such as these entering my consciousness, let alone being at the forefront of my consciousness. I led a relatively easy life, one in which I believed that if I earned a certain salary every year, if I had a certain type of living situation, if I had this or that material object, then I could extend my sense of happiness indefinitely.

But I always knew that was no life, and that the “happiness” I sought out, relied on and through which I defined myself was as flimsy as the plastic cover that stretches over a swimming pool in the winter months. It was easy to break through that “happiness” and fall into the depths, into frigid water that could kill.

I lived for something more. I craved something more. I wanted to connect in a deeper way with the world. I tried to bring that about—to create some kind of transformation—in my writing. I attempted to write myself and those I loved into spaces of myth and healing. Writing poems also altered my consciousness temporarily by giving me the feeling, the fleeting feeling, of transcendence.

The poems were only clues, though. I realize that now. They were clues and little addictions. You can’t live from the high of one poem to the next any more than you can say you are living on a higher plane because you chain smoke cigarettes all day. The poems have to come from life, a life fully and deeply lived. Even then, they are still only clues. Yet they might become enough of a trail to keep you headed in the right direction, which is toward a life in which you place your faith in something and then act from that position—in the interest of other, of community, of the infinite within and without.

Moving to Eastern Washington was the best decision my husband and I have made in our adults lives, other than finding our way to one another in 1995. Coming here set me on a path whose end I cannot see, but I do know it’s a long journey—a life’s journey and one worth taking. It is here that I have learned true love in all senses of the word, including a true love of place. Though this place is not my home, the land has welcomed me and taken me in. It has led me down its paths and back roads, so I could see its scars and wounds. I have seen those wounds up close, and I worry that they are fatal. I worry that the land I have come to know and cherish is dying, and that is a grief I cannot tolerate.

I have no choice but to act. I must act in any and every way possible on behalf of both the land and the people. I must commit my life to this. And the poems will never tell the whole story. They will only be clues to the life I have chosen, the one I am leading.

Cold Sun

The cold sun of fall woke me early. I’m thankful for that. Sometimes I believe I can do more waking than sleeping. Other times I admit the truth: More goes on in my life when I sleep than when I am awake.

Unbridled joy is just that: untamed, messy, imperfect. It falls. It gets up. This is how I learn from an eight pound dog.

I have a small window, not in the main bedroom but in a closet whose door I keep ajar because I like to see some of what’s in there, but not everything. I like to see the bookcase, the yellow one, and the clear containers full of poems (mine, those of friends and strangers). I accumulated the paper back when the world was paper, when I thought thin sheets organized alphabetically could help me tame, or at least take part in, the world.

The window is positioned high on the wall, right below the home’s eave. It’s only purpose, I believe, was to let cool air in before there was air conditioning. Now it’s stuck shut, like most of the windows in the home. It didn’t do anything all summer, didn’t seem to do anything. But two days ago, when the cold sun of fall was created anew this season, the small window, the small high window, took its opportunity and caught that light. The sun is lower now. Low and clear. The eave can’t hold light back, and so it comes in, thanks to the window—not in a stream but as a single rectangle, a slot, which lands on my face, framing my eyes. The rest of the room remains in relative darkness.

There couldn’t be a more direct wake-up call. So I woke. What was I supposed to do? I can’t remember last night’s dreams. That must mean things are going OK. The dreams come—lucid dreams, night terrors, false awakenings, the half-dreams of hypnagogia, out-of-body dreams in which my dream self hovers over me threatening to float through the wall and stay on the other side forever, long long endless long dreams in which I obsessively play out scenes from my life—when things are not going OK.

We can’t wipe someone off with a towel in this poem. It’s so boring, I tell the children at Farm Labor Homes. Poems are fun, exciting, they don’t do what we expect them to do. I watch as a look floods their eyes the way ink does when it’s injected into water. A crazy look. “Chicken noodle soup,” one of the kids exclaims, jumping out of her seat. The others lean into the table, waiting for my reaction, expectant.

They get it, they get it, I think, relieved. Yes, I squeal. Now that’s more like it. I complete the line of the poem we are writing together: And then the girl who fell / in mud gets wiped off with / chicken noodle soup.

They all laugh. They laugh and laugh and beg to write another poem. I tell them that they made this, emphasizing the word “they.” It’s a poem and they made it. I try to tell them how important this moment is, but they are too busy laughing and grabbing the poem so they can read it again.

My chihuahua was overcome last night, as she sometimes is, with what I can only interpret as joy. She ran as fast as she could through the living and dining rooms, making the same lazy circle around the seating. Every time she hit the wood floors, she fell: hip into floor, side against floor, legs behind her, crisscrossed. Her nails made a “schrwish schrwish schrwish schrwihsch” that would have frightened someone who didn’t know what was going on. “Schrwish schrwish thump.” “Schrwish schrwish thump.” The thumps are the falling, obviously.

I love how my dog slips, and how she gets back up, her joy intact. Unbridled joy is just that: untamed, messy, imperfect. It falls. It gets up.

This is how I learn from an eight pound dog.

I remember my dream, the one I had last night. He and I lived in a basement apartment that had never been fully converted. Concrete walls painted red. Low ceilings. No real plumbing, only a drain in the middle of the space into which everything—bath water, kitchen sink—flowed.

What happened next? He left. We had just moved in when he moved out. Left me there. Took everything. I didn’t have a bed. I would lie on the floor each night and think about how we used to lie in the bed together, with sheets and pillows and a gentle breeze coming from somewhere. Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t living in a house; I was living in a cell and always had been, even when he was with me.

I wanted my home. I mean my mother’s home. I cursed him for not letting me move into it when I had the chance. What I really wanted was her. I went outside, dug in the dirt. I was looking for her, meant to bring her back the way one might bring a radish back from the garden.

Then he appeared. He held me and I screamed.

I just looked outside. Evidence of first frost—a thin semi-frozen mat over grass. Sun and window woke me early to see this.

All summer I thought the summer sun was clear. It wasn’t. It was overdoing it, trying to impress. Fall sun. That’s where the real light is at. When you have sun without heat, you’ve got something special.

I don’t live alone, though we all live alone in some ways. I live with a man who is a great love, a great love who moves inside the great love of the world.

Two Selves

I meditated for a couple of hours this morning after reading selections from Essential Zen. At first, there was mostly open space in the meditation, punctuated by thoughts I noticed as they made their way in and out of my mind. If I were to compare this particular meditation to a landscape, it would be the scrubby terrain of Eastern Washington, where there’s not much to speak of, not much to notice, until—suddenly—a tree. And so you notice the tree, then move on.

I am now coming to understand that self and other are both inside me. They are both self.

The thoughts that slid past like trees included not taking more than I need, not expecting more than I should, and living in harmony with all the sentience surrounding me.

Then I had another level of experience, not thought-based but rather image-based. In the image, I split off from myself, so that I was two selves. The first self was able to simply be who I am, to feel comfortable and free in my existence. The second self was like the first in all ways, with one distinct difference: She was conscious of herself. This led her to go around apologizing for the first self’s behavior, to loathe the first self—even as she was, in fact, identical to the first self. This means the second self was also engaged in self-loathing.

Self and other have always played a strong role in my life, my thinking and my writing. I never really understood the draw to this duality until I learned I was dyslexic. Dyslexia is not just about reading text—it’s about reading the world. In my opinion, experts and advocates are so focused (with good reason) on teaching dyslexic children and adults to read that they don’t spend enough time focusing on the unique, often dualistic, world those who are dyslexic inhabit off the page.

Dyslexics can perceive the world as differently as we perceive written language. Just as the dyslexic can misread a passage, in turn creating an entirely new text from that passage, we can also read the world in multiple ways, with multiple orientations—some of which others might never perceive or understand. On top of this, we also learn to adopt different minds and bodies depending on the situation. We learn early that we have to be the quiet child, the focused child, the still child—at school, in social situations and often at home as well. But we retain our essence, that other self who never leaves us and is always by our side.

I am now coming to understand that self and other are both inside me. They are both self. Just as self and other are both outside me. They are both other. When I think of self and other, I might be thinking of that duality I carry within, or I might be thinking of the dualities that others, in their own ways, carry within them. But I am not always, and I suspect I am rarely, thinking about self and other in the traditional sense of there being a single, inflexible, fixed self and then everything that falls outside that single, inflexible, fixed self.

As I learn to better attend to the self and other I carry inside me, I hope my second self will be more at ease with my first self, and vice versa. Both might learn to understand and respect their respective self/other. In this process, I might come to meet those I once called “other” in a new light, inside the deepening understanding that everything—and in that I include everyone—I label as other really has something to do with me and cannot be disconnected from me, nor me from everything.

To turn on anyone else in judgment, to create a wall between them and me, will come to seem as unreasonable as the self-betrayal illustrated in today’s meditation. I wish I’d had closure on that image, but instead the scene grew fuzzy and dissipated, my two selves across the room from one another, the first sitting on the ground playing, the second scowling and crossing her arms.

As the image moved farther away, my two selves began to resemble trees. I think now about the idea of souls inhabiting trees until they find atonement. Maybe in some other reality that’s where my selves are: inside trees, waiting.

This is what I sit with, what I pay attention to. I am not sure which of my selves is writing this post, or if both selves are working together. For now, I (whoever the communicating “I” is) embrace them both, love them both and hope they will both learn to embrace and love the world in all its non-otherness.