Writing

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.

Attention

The word attention gets a lot of play in the context of aspiration. We seem to want to individually and collectively achieve an unflappable state of “paying attention,” often joining the term with other aspirations, such as mindfulness, gratitude and intention.

I don’t like to call my forms of attention a ‘deficit,’ because that implies a lack, a less than.

Attention also happens to be a charged, and even controversial, word in many respects. An example that comes to the forefront is the way it’s been used in the diagnosis of children and adults who are deemed to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD seems to be one form of attention we want people to steer clear of, regardless of their age.

As I did some journaling around the question of attention today, the word “choice” appeared over and over. “Is the attention my choice,” I wrote in the upper-right corner of a hot-pink lined page. I also wrote “forced or given” coupled—just below the words—with the heaviest underline my Pilot Precise Grip Extra Fine tip could muster.

Many people who are dyslexic have differences in attention when compared with the norm. Some of us carry the dual diagnosis of dyslexia and ADHD. As an accompaniment to my recent dyslexia diagnosis, I have a provisional diagnosis of ADHD with overfocus, which means I can (and often do) go hours on end working away at something that’s captured my attention.

I also am able to take in a great deal of information all at once, and the sensory input / processing / synthesizing can sometimes be overwhelming, even draining. I actually find this aspect of my attention quite useful, however, as I pull seemingly disparate elements into my writing, in particular my poetry.

I don’t like to call my forms of attention a “deficit,” because that implies a lack, a less than, a “should aspire to be something else”—something feathering the perimeter of what’s considered normal. Instead, I like to refer to my dominant forms of attention as “focused attention” (notice I’ve dropped the “over-” prefix) and “wide,” or “roaming,” attention.

That’s where I am at with it right now, that is. Next year, or even next week, I might conceive of my attention in a new way.

I think “choice” and “force” come up for me when considering what attention is, and how it makes me feel, because I am often asked to perceive the world like other people: to think like them, to feel like them, to work like them, to learn and discover and believe like them. In short, I am asked to have forms of attention that are, or at least seem, congruous with theirs. I feel as if I am being asked to enter into a foreign way of paying attention at the expense of my own ways.

Given my ways of paying attention, my definition of attention will most likely differ from that of others. I don’t necessarily want to change the fundamental ways in which I filter and experience the world. I will probably never aspire to living in a way that depends on focused, central-task attention which neither verges on being “too invested” on the central task nor allows too many “tangential” elements in that could threaten that central task.

Still, my core definition of attention might have something in common with other people’s: something to do with noticing, with letting in, with experiencing, with using all “57 or so” senses in any encounter. Something to do with letting others in, letting the self in, letting mystery in, letting awe in.

My definition also includes staying with something, whatever that something happens to be at the moment, in the connection and expansion of moments: focusing like a camera lens on what’s in front of us, behind us, under us and above us. Focusing on each other and on ourselves.

In a nutshell, my definition of attention, then, seems to center on two seemingly contrary elements: focusing and letting in. I guess that’s in precise alignment with the focused and roaming forms of attention I’ve been blessed with and sometimes challenged by. Fancy that.

The Larger Body

Over the course of my lifetime, I have learned and re-learned the lesson of what it feels like to be treated like trash, like something disposable. I am trying to do something with that feeling and its attendant grief. I find myself falling into the misguided desire to turn this feeling, which I need to simply sit with, into doing something productive.

I entered my teen and adult years absolutely terrified everyone was going to leave me.

I have this terrible, sinking feeling that we’ve learned to see one another as commodities. That we pick people the way we might select a bar of soap or a box of cookies and that we then expect perfection from the experience. If someone doesn’t live up to the expectation imposed on a commodity—providing exactly what they want, nothing more or less or unexpected—then we cast them aside, ignore them, degrade them, tell some lie that’s akin to “It’s not you, it’s me” and move on to any of the other 6 billion human commodities this world has to choose from.

Today, I’ve officially lost one of the deepest, most meaningful friendships I have ever had in my life, one that was years in the making. Not to death or a big move that’s created physical distance. Not to a huge blowout or anything I can easily look to for an explanation. There have been smaller losses, too, which serve to counterpoint the real loss, the central loss, the way rivulets feed into a stream.

If I were to make a map of losses, each loss constituting one circle drawn on a sheet of paper, they would be as plentiful as lily pads at Juanita Beach Park in the middle of summer, or as balloons at a privileged child’s birthday party. I could skip over the circles with my index and middle finger in feigned play that masks the pain. I could skip all the way back to the largest circle of all, a loss I didn’t expect to survive: that of my father.

But he died, he died, I tell myself. He didn’t choose to leave. Others have chosen, the way they might, without giving it a second thought, move on from a Facebook profile, or unsubscribe from an RSS feed.

Because I lost my father so young, I entered my teen and adult years absolutely terrified everyone was going to leave me. So I left them before they could go. I got the hell out of there while the getting was good. I dated people and broke it off. I even married one person and broke it off. At transition points—such as graduation from high school and college—I was the one who never wrote my friends at their new addresses, the one who never called, the one who dropped postcards I received into the recycling bin and later, if pressed, said, “You sent a card? I don’t think I got it.” I was also the one who did not speak to my mother for nine months before she died.

I’ve learned the hard way that this way—the way of leaving, of getting out, of protecting myself against what I think might happen if I stay (abandonment, death)—is not the way. I’ve spent half my life learning this lesson. I’ve also learned another lesson, which is to hold onto those I love. To just hold on. As I’ve learned this lesson, I’ve also learned to say words like “I love you” and “I care for you” and “I am here for you.”

I realize that I now have an even bigger lesson to learn, which is that I must stay with this stance and attitude, one of holding on, even as others are still caught in a mode of letting go, including letting go of me. I won’t go back to letting go first in order to protect myself. If I care for you, I care for you. If I love you, I love you. If I am there for you, I am there for you. I can’t control how anyone else behaves, and I can’t make their choices for them. I can only control my own behavior and choices. I won’t turn away from others out of fear of being rejected, even if that means there are times when I will, in fact, experience rejection, not just worry it’s coming.

Perhaps I am not trash after all. I’d rather think of myself as recyclable material. My love, my devotion, my desire to connect—these are aspects of my character that cannot be thrown away, not by anyone. They remain, even through the hurt and suffering, and they continue to have a place in the world. In this way, they continue to help me find my way.

Making Room for Attention

I shouldn’t have to do this for attention—sequester myself in the bedroom with my laptop. But that’s precisely what I’m doing. When I’m home alone, following my day as it unfolds, I can pay attention in the proper way, reaching an almost meditative state and in fact moving in and out of formal meditation several times.

I will make my way to him the way a narrative always makes its way to the next shift in plot.

The weekends change all that. For two days, there’s a noticeable shift in energy as another person, namely my husband, moves through the house with me. Though he’s literally sharing the same space as me, we are not in the same space. That is to say he hasn’t reached a point in his life where introspection seems not only healthy but necessary.

He’s not doing anything disruptive, mind you. Our energies simply aren’t in alignment. I can feel that fact when I’m in the same room with him. Susan Zwinger, a poet and writer of place, says there are “57 or so” ways we get information into our bodies. Our senses, according to Zwinger, include electromagnetism, barometric pressure, humidity and temperature (to which, as a former Seattle dweller, I would definitely add light, or lack thereof). Zwinger challenges the writers she works with to move beyond the five conventionally recognized senses and incorporate the entire suite of senses into their lives and work.

I don’t know what I am picking up on, exactly, that has sent me into my own room today, where I can write and think and pay attention without feeling divided between where I’m currently at and where my husband’s currently at. Part of me wants to drop everything and go to him, enter into his way of being, which is largely about doing things in the world, not being in the world.

For now, I continue to sit here, staring out my window at two blooming shrubs whose genus I don’t even know. Zwinger would advise me to find out what the shrubs are, to push for specificity with regard to any element that enters my writing. As she says, you will never invite readers into your story without concrete details, ones they can relate to.

“Write for the person who has never been off the canyon,” she advises.

Zwinger also says journaling is “the mind made visible.” I don’t journal, exactly, other than keeping lists. Nothing like Zwinger’s artful Technicolor notebooks whose pages are filled with facts, drawings, watercolors, clippings and other information she calls on when she sits down to work on her books.

I do write, however. I have no idea if writing makes my mind visible, to me or anyone else. I like to think writing is a way of planting a marker, like a kairn, one that signals, “On this small and seemingly insignificant day, I was here. I took part. I belonged to the world.” Increasingly, I hope my writing also lets people in—either into my life or into some aspect of their own lives.

Now the sun is moving through the room, sneaking up on my feet. My dog sits next to me. She’s a faithful companion when I write. When I’m not writing, her new thing is running up to me from across the room, licking my ankle once, and then running away. I have no idea what that’s about. Maybe it’s her kairn, her way of noting that she’s here, she’s taking part, she belongs. Maybe it’s her way of saying a repeated thank you to me for saving her life.

At some point, I will leave my room. A feeling will stir inside me, like a little storm that passes through a small, nameless town on a summer day. Who knows which of my 57 senses will trigger the stirring. It will not only move through me, but also move me: I will rise from my desk and pull the bedroom door toward my body, just enough to see my husband sitting in a chair we call “Mr. Comfy.” He might be coding on his laptop or even asleep, his legs propped up on the oversized ottoman, Mr. Comfy leaning so far back it looks like it’s about to careen into the living room wall.

I will make my way to him the way a narrative always makes its way to the next shift in plot. I might brush my hand on his cheek, or do nothing but watch him. That’s when he will be included in my practice of attention. In that moment, we will breathe in, one shared breath, the whole world breathing with us—both the parts we can name and the parts that, at least for now, remain nameless.

Lame Skills and Dreams and Being and Doing (and My Dog, Hayden)

I am sitting here, staring at my screen. My dog, Hayden, snores at my feet in her puppy bed, which we call her butt nest. The term is a misnomer, of course, since her entire body is in the nest, not just her butt, and since it’s technically not a nest.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between doing and being.

I don’t know. Maybe it qualifies as a nest. I suddenly realize I don’t know the actual definition of “nest.”

I’ll have to look that up.

Later.

I feel like I should write something, since I am here at the computer and all. I can’t go anywhere anyway. Hayden just had surgery, her second procedure in three weeks. I have to watch her until she feels better and gets over her predictable but still unpleasant post-op constipation.

I’ve never cheered for poop the way I’ve cheered for poop with this dog. I’ve been cheering all day to no avail. In response, she looks up at me and wags her tail, as if her very existence is worthy of applause—which it is. She doesn’t have to do anything for me to sing her praises.

I also feel like I should write something because I am a writer, or at least consider myself a writer. I certainly don’t consider myself someone who stares idly at the computer all day, fingers curved over the keyboard as if on the cusp of writing, without actually doing any writing.

But the thing is, I don’t know what to write. And when I don’t know what to write, I usually begin aimlessly and somehow end up with a five thousand-word essay on some unexpected thing that wells up in the not-knowing-what-to-write moment.

I don’t have time for a five thousand-word essay today. That’s not true. I have time. I have nothing but time. Time and love and capacity. That’s all I have and all I will ever have. Even on my deathbed, I will have time. Just not a whole lot of it. But technically I will still have some of it. I hope I will have love and capacity then, too. We’ll see.

I just don’t feel like writing and writing and writing, namely because that necessitates proofing and proofing and proofing. Proofing is not fun, especially when you’re proofing your own work, and you’re dyslexic.

Don’t get me wrong: I proofread like a champ. If there were an Olympic event for proofreading, I would take at least the bronze medal, maybe the gold. I have consistently out-proofed every candidate on every editing test I’ve taken for editorial positions. I even find unintentional mistakes in people’s tests, scads of them. At a large publishing company I worked for, one that produced more than ninety magazines and had an editorial staff in the zillions, I was recognized by the group’s managing editor as the best proofreader he’d seen in his decade with the company.

My ability to proofread is, apparently, only outpaced by my ability to brag about my ability to proofread. It’s not even that hot of a skill. Why can’t I be the best planker or illusionist or dog whisperer? Why can’t I invent some awesome new bobby pin-based hairstyle-enhancing device that sells millions? Or a self-folding handkerchief? Heck, a self-folding everything-that-is-meant-to-be-folded!

Can you imagine throwing your sheets, towels, kitchen rags and the like—even your undies—on your bed or linen table after they’ve been washed and dried, and all of them FOLDING THEMSELVES while you kick back and sip on some tasty pomegranate juice? Can you IMAGINE that? I can. But I can’t do anything beyond the imagining. That’s because my skill lies in the area of proofreading.

PROOFREADING! It’s like reading, only it’s a specific type of reading of a specific type of document, with specific symbols and notes for the printer and whatnot—which 90 percent of writers, editors, designers and printers don’t even know anymore! (If there even are printers involved, which there aren’t when it comes to digital publishing. There often aren’t other writers or editors, either. So who exactly are my symbols and notes for?)

What the hell? My whole world is caving in right here, right now as I contemplate the boringness of my skill coupled with the outdatedness of it. My ability to proofread is like a beige argyle sweater vest for men or a brick of tofu sold the mid-’80s at The Earth Natural Foods in Norman, Oklahoma. (Mid-80s tofu, for those who don’t know, don’t remember or weren’t alive in the mid-80s, was so bland it possessed a nasty nontaste aftertaste. At least the kind sold in Oklahoma.)

I mean, PROOFREADING? That’s what I have to work with, to show off about? That’s a bragging FAIL.

The problem with proofing my own work is that I like to publish my writing as soon as I’ve written it. (None of that waiting around to see if the work is “quality”—that’s not how I roll.) My tight production schedule gives me very little time to go through the entire editorial process before putting the work out there. Sure, this is a self-imposed schedule. I could give myself overnight or something instead, or as much time as I want.

But no. Once it’s written, it must go live ASAP. That’s my compulsion derangement style.

Now Hayden is looking up at me, with that look that tells me she trusts me completely.

Why is it that almost all the dogs and children I’ve met have trusted me implicitly, while few of the adult humans I’ve met have exhibited the same level of trust?

I dreamed last night that someone I care about, a poet, was living behind a crack house in a hole he’d dug in the earth and covered with a rock. One day, he pushed the rock aside, left the hole and fell in love.

He and the woman he loved rented a studio apartment a few blocks away from the crack house. He bought a folding cot that resembled a hospital bed. She said it was hideous. He said the metal frame could be painted bright blue and that the color would really liven up the space. She told him to get rid of it.

Dejected, he ran off, leaving the cot behind.

Nobody could find him. Weeks passed. I knew where he’d gone. Back to the hole.

I made my way behind the crack house and started shifting rocks until I found him under one, lying next to Charles Bukowski. The soil was carved to fit their bodies perfectly, earthen molds designed to accept them and only them.

They were high. Each had a glassy look. Each was close to anger, but the drugs in their systems prevented them from reaching anger, the way water at the edge of a lake is prevented by various forces from reaching the land just beyond its reach.

“This is what people mean when they talk about being blissed out—this look that is so close to rage but does not permit rage,” I thought.

I pulled my friend up into the world and took him back to the woman he loved.

He never wrote another poem, but he became famous for living under a rock behind a crack house with Charles Bukowski. He was all over YouTube spouting off about Žižek. Everyone loved him, even more than they loved Žižek.

He kept taking drugs. He took up smoking and drinking and abusing. He spray-painted hideous folding cots in bright colors and people called them works of art and put them in museums and bid on them at auctions.

When he walked down the street, long lines formed behind him, like the tail of a comet. This pleased him, but not as much as having the love of the woman he loved. And he had that, finally. He finally had that. And cots galore.

What I’ve been thinking about lately is the difference between doing and being. I find myself shifting into the realm of being, as opposed to doing.

Not that being and doing are mutually exclusive. Not at all. But for me, doing has always been the driving force, with the idea that being comes from doing and not the other way around.

I am inside of being right now, and inside of becoming. From this position, the doing will reveal itself, what I am meant to do—assuming there is anything I am meant to do that my being does not accomplish.

Ultimately, I want to not have to do anything for me to sing my own praises. Once I can do that, I can go back to doing, if that’s what I want to do.

It’s all very confusing. I am confused by it. I am sitting inside that confusion. I am petting it. I am trying to make the confusion feel so comfortable with me, and to feel so comfortable with it, that it rolls over and lets me lightly touch its stomach, its paws, its long, graceful arms. I want it to trust me implicitly, as I am learning to trust it.

Confusion. Confusion. That’s not what it is. Not at all. Not that, not that. There’s the pesky trap of language again, and the trap of culture that led me to the trap of language. Confusion is like the hideous cot before it’s been painted a bright color. What I feel is something else: the hideous cot after being painted the bright color.

Uncertainty. That’s what it is. I am sitting with this uncertainty.

Right here. I am right here.

I have a writer’s dog, there’s no doubt about it. She’s sleeping with one eye, watching me with the other. The click of the keys under the direction of my fingers seems to calm her. He ears are up. Her breathing slow and steady.

I don’t think she’d rather be anywhere than where she is right now, beside her writer. Her writer who loves her.

The Problem with Labels

I’ve been thinking a lot about this label of “overfocused” ADHD. I’ve gotten some feedback from advocates and specialists in this area who say they aren’t convinced of my diagnosis. While they agree that I have the qualities described in overfocused ADHD, these experts also note that there are politics involved in framing those qualities as “symptoms.”

Pharmaceutical companies are more concerned about patents than patients.

In their view, many people with dyslexia have these qualities, as well as almost everyone with high intelligence. (Their words, not mine, but I am also not going to pussyfoot around the fact that I am highly intelligent. That would be disingenuous nonsense.) One person pointed out that schools for gifted children see these qualities in their students and begin designing curriculum around those students as early as kindergarten.

In short, what’s seen as a disability by some is seen as an ability by others, as a characteristic to be accepted and harnessed, not obliterated through medication, negative reinforcement, or both.

I’ve also been stumbling a bit over the juxtaposition of the word “overfocused” against the words “attention deficit.” That feels like an oxymoron. Some descriptions of overfocused ADHD say that this subtype is not so much a lack of attention but too much attention and that the medicines typically used to treat ADHD won’t work on the overfocused variant because they will make the focus more intense, including aspects such as worry and rumination, which can in turn make the person with high focus feel worse.

How can you have “too much” attention and still be called “inattentive,” I’ve been wondering. Is there not a better term to describe the qualities of the person who can maintain focus for hours on end? For the mind that can execute a task in this manner? For this level of productivity? Why is this type of ADHD lumped in with ADHD at all? Simply because attention is concerned in some way?

Does the metacategory of ADHD even exist? Or is forcing disparate attention-based qualities under one overarching category an example of rigid adherence to a hierarchical construct, one that might wrap things up in a tidy framework but that ultimately says nothing in actuality about how these qualities are, or are not, related.

I would not have been able to be a music performance major if I had not been highly focused. That educational path requires four hours of practice each day, along with another three hours or so of practice in ensembles and in one-on-one study with your professor. That’s seven hours, at least, of intense focus in both mind and body, seven days a week. (Musicians get no days off, especially not flutists, otherwise the embouchure will fail.) You could easily categorize every single person in a conservatory as having overfocused ADHD, especially compared with the dawdling, low-grade focus many (neuro)typical jobs demand, with two days off each week.

Likewise, as a dyslexic English major, I would not have been able to consume all the novels, plays, poetry collections, essays, theoretical works and other reading materials required without high focus. Yes, it might have taken me four times as long to get through those materials, but high focus allowed me to do so. (As a dyslexic person, the qualities described as overfocused ADHD have allowed me to do everything that I do, and that’s been the case for decades.)

Furthermore, do graduate programs not require outright intense focus? What about those that involve research and lab work? My editorial work has largely been in the field of science and medicine. I believe every scientist and researcher I’ve worked with over the past decade and a half would easily qualify as having overfocused ADHD. One of those researchers even tried to recruit me into the field of biology not too long ago, perhaps because she could see I had a focus similar to her and her colleagues, as well as a mind that dissects ideas in the same way as them. (I tried to explain to her that I dissect language and concepts, not frogs, but she didn’t really get it. For her, talking about biology was so close to doing it, that I might as well have been doing it.)

And who says what’s too much attention, what’s not enough attention, where attention should be directed and, conversely, where it should not be directed? These, too, are political questions. What is championed is almost always what any given culture deems important. That is, what is deemed important is culturally constructed, not immutable. Even what we try to eliminate is important, though, because without those aspects of culture—those fringe aspects produced by the minority as opposed to the majority—culture would fold in on itself.

I suppose my concern is that the words “deficit” and “disorder” are part of this label. That’s the case because those lobbying for these clusters of qualities to be seen as a pathology needed (and still need) that framing in order to secure funding, build alliances and justify treatment options. In short, our health care and educational frameworks are built on, responsive to, and supportive of pathology.

Because medicine is involved in this, big money is involved, and big pharma is involved. I don’t really trust big pharma to define me and my life, or anyone’s life, given that their objectives often run contrary to those involving human welfare, human safety and human expression. Money colors everything, even making medicines unavailable to the masses because pharmaceutical companies are more concerned about patents than patients, therefore only the world’s relatively privileged can afford to get their hands on those medicines.

I’ll close by quoting from the book I recently reviewed, Thomas Armstrong’s Neuodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and Other Brain Differences:

One of the great disadvantages of the term ‘ADHD’ is that it speaks of a deficit in attention. Children (and adults) labeled ADHD are actually very good at paying attention. They excel in paying attention to what they’re not supposed to be paying attention to! This is called ‘incidental attention’ and is another trait of the creative person.

He continues:

People labeled with ADHD are also very good at paying attention to what interests them. Many parents have written to me saying that their ADHD-diagnosed kids will spend hours focused on building with Legos, dancing, operating video games, or engaging in other absorbing tasks. Unfortunately, the ADHD community has also taken this admirable trait and turned it into a negative. They call it ‘hyperfocus’ and consider it to be yet another ‘warning sign’ of attention deficit. But the ability to focus the mind for hours on a single topic has been considered for centuries to be the trait of an exceptional mind (otherwise, why do so many cultures and religious traditions cultivate the ability to concentrate?).

And here’s the last excerpt I will share:

The fact of the matter is that children and adults with ADHD have a different attentional style than neurotypical individuals. They have a ‘roaming’ attention that can notice many different things in a short period of time and a ‘homing’ attention that can fasten onto one thing of great interest and stay with it for a long period of time. It does a great disservice to those diagnosed with ADHD to say that they have a deficit in attention, when they are acutally good at two different forms of attention and have problems primarily with one other form, sometimes referred to as ‘central-task’ attention, where sustained attention must be paid to routine (and often boring) events that have often been externally imposed.

She Just Doesn’t See

I want to talk about touch, how it’s the only sense I fully trust. When I doubt my ears, my eyes, or both, I find the world with my fingers, skin and lips.

I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear.

I work puzzles by going over the edges of one piece with my forefinger and thumb as I hunt for the matching piece on the table. My eyes pick out the inverse of what my fingers feel, as if my hands and eyes together are what someone else’s eyes are without assistance from a secondary sense.

I have routinely felt my way over a new lover’s body with my face, chest and tongue. It was nearly always a sensual experience. But it was also a sensual experience—a way of learning, through touch, if this was a person I wanted in my life. I’ve even used my eyelashes to find out what my ears and eyes could not tell me about a partner.

For more than a decade, I felt my way through music. I started by opening the faux velvet-lined case of my new flute and running my fingers over its perfect, machine-made nickel keys. It took me days to bring the mouthpiece to my lower lip. Taking the instrument in with my fingertips was all I wanted or needed during those first encounters.

I am convinced, now, that I could have kept playing the flute if the notes had not been named after letters of the alphabet. I believe this connection caused my visual dyslexia to leak into my fingers, tangling them up like the piece of driftwood my father proudly displayed in our front flowerbed. I would play the note I had come to know as “E,” and my fingers would try to play the note I had come to know as “F,” most likely because capital E and capital F look very similar.

I made it a long way with music despite my dyslexia, most likely because touch was involved. When I relaxed my mind enough, to the extent that I felt I was no longer in my body, the notes became what they were: whole and pure sounds that represented, but could not be extracted from, the universe—sounds unadulterated by our arbitrary assignation to them of letters or our perverted desire to pull them apart the way a curious child might want to pull the wings off a living dragonfly.

I loved music enough to take it as far as I could. And now I know why, in the end, I had to set it aside. There was nothing more I could do. No matter how much I practiced or how hard I tried, I was never going to have perfect, or even relative, pitch—and I was never going to get my fingers right 100 percent of the time.

(When creating music, you only have one chance to position your fingers and mouth. If you miss that synchronicity, you sound the wrong note—or a disastrously shrill noise that lies between notes and is not unlike the wheeze I imagine being emitted by a bird shot in the throat. Composing with words is much more forgiving because you can backtrack and change mistakes or, when speaking, you can pause—and it’s OK because there’s no tempo or conductor or orchestra mercilessly driving you forward.)

There was also the matter of listening, of hearing. I was unable to separate chords into individual tones, a requirement of my ear training classes. I was also unable to hear any tonal progressions, save for the perfect fourth and minor second, the former popularized by “Here Comes the Bride,” the latter by the theme song for “Jaws.” Even with this imprinting, there were days when the perfect fourth and minor second were beyond me. I couldn’t hear them in my head, let alone give them voice.

While I feel a renewed sense of mourning with regard to my loss of music, knowing it was my dyslexia that held me back, I also feel more indebted to music than ever. I am certain that when I set music aside and gravitated to writing and literature, I recruited the musical pathways in my brain to handle all the reading, writing, speaking, and other visual and auditory processing my new interests demanded. I believe my ability to hear the rhythm and tonality of texts is an outgrowth of my language pathways taking up residence in my musical pathways. Sure, it’s a little awkward, kind of like steering a ship along a set of railroad tracks, but it’s working for me. Somehow, it’s been working for decades, without my even knowing that my ship was, in fact, on a set of railroad tracks, and that those tracks were not submerged in water.

In some ways, my heart wants to break where music is concerned. Look what it did for me. Look what it gave me, asking nothing in return. All so that, one day, I would be able to speak. And write. And keep speaking and writing. And to keep singing my tone-deaf song, my ugly little song that feels more precious than ever to me, the imperfect song that connects me back to my mother as if she and I are two diminished seventh chords standing side by side on a treble clef.

And there she is. I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear from Anthony’s department store, humming “The Girl from Ipanema”:

Tall and tan and young and lovely, / The girl from Ipanema goes walking, And when she passes / I smile, but she doesn’t see, / She just doesn’t see, No she doesn’t see

And I see my mother now. And I sing for my mother now. And I write for her now. And now her voice is my voice. And now I know her mind—one that always put the cereal in the refrigerator, that couldn’t balance the checkbook, that never wrote anything by hand, that loved to talk but not to read.

And I have her mind. And I am not sorry. And if I could reach out and touch her, I would. I would hold her hand and tell her it’s OK that she gave me this wiring, and I would sing her a lullaby and urge her to rest, just rest, and to please not worry about me anymore.

Until I Return Home

You travel on until you return home; you live on until you return to earth.

— Ethiopian Proverb

I want to tell you about the land in Oklahoma, how it was often impenetrable, how it did not rain for days that stretched into months, until adults started using the word “drought.” I did not know what the word meant, but I knew it did not sound good and nobody looked happy when they said it, therefore it could not be a word that stood for something good.

I want to tell you that we lived without water the way some live without light, that we took this as normal, that water was rationed, and that my father, being a god, had men drill deep into the land until they hit water. The water would become ours and we would call it well water and say it came from our very own well. I would tell my parched schoolmates that I had a well, welled up with satisfaction at having something they did not have because their fathers were not gods like mine. Mine had made something of nothing and refused to let nature dictate our family’s circumstances.

I want to tell you how my father, with his own hands and his nitrogen fertilizers, used our well water to grow a lush area of green that encircled our house. And then the earth was softer, and then I could drive my index finger down into it after parting the thick mat of grass. And somewhere along the line, I learned the word “aerate,” though my father pronounced it with nearly three syllables, not two. He leaned into the first syllable the way I had seen him lean into his tiller when he was preparing the garden for planting. I did not feel I was hurting the soil when I pushed my finger into it; I felt I was aerating it—which seemed to be a word akin to the word healing.

I want to tell you how I ached for the land farther south in Oklahoma, how I watched and watched every time we drove down I-35, trying to find the precise point where the soil turned from brown to rust red.

I want to tell you how much harder this soil was, the soil both my parents came from, and how dry. And when it cracked, it split open in shapes like the lines on the backs of my father’s hands, the same shapes I now see in my own hands. And I always felt sorry for the cracked soil because I could see how the shapes fit together and wanted to be together, not apart.

I want to tell you that my family warned me about this red soil, how it clung and refused to come out, even in the wash. But with time, I wanted it to cover me, to mark me as its own, a sign that I was from Oklahoma the way my parents were from Oklahoma. Near Buncombe Creek, I entered the water of Lake Texoma and let it leave a layer of rust on my suit and skin when I emerged. “Here, here,” the residue seemed to say. “Here is where you belong.”

I want to tell you that I gave myself over to that soil repeatedly, and that I made a pact to never leave it. I want to tell you that it hurts every day to know I will never set foot in my father’s yard again, let alone lie alongside the soil using my hands to care for it. And I will never give myself to the iron-rich soil that spreads over the southern part of the state, not in the same way. How could I? I have had other places in my blood, on my body. I have other lands in my future, not yet explored. Still, I long for my home, for my earth. I long to return.

Viscosity

I wake with a wad of hair in my mouth, thinking about perception: its power in defining how we feel about situations and about people; its power in defining how we are perceived by people and how we come across in situations.

I slept hard. I dreamed hard. In one dream, a group of friends and I were asked to pass up and over a large mountain by way of an asphalt path. On the other side was knowledge. The scene was like an apocalyptic version of The Wizard of Oz. Instead of boulders, trees and greenery, we were surrounded by dark, featureless land, save for the mountain we were on. Instead of a yellow brick road, we walked on a path made from the sticky black material found in crude petroleum.

I have a relative who is a petroleum engineer. When I was a child, he gave me two glass bottles filled with oil. One represented the good oil. It was light, almost golden. The other represented the bad oil. It was dark, like blackstrap molasses. He explained what you could do with each type of oil, what they were good for. As he took a drag off his Marlboro, he explained how we wouldn’t have anything without oil, not even roads. Not even Vaseline. It’s in everything, he told me.

It was then that I perceived oil was a miracle, our miracle. We depended on it; society depended on it.

What this relative doesn’t know is how I would hold those bottles after he was gone, tip the liquid this way and that, judging the viscosity of each by how sluggish their movement was. One moved more like my father, darting quickly at any stimulation or in the face of any problem. The other moved more like my mother, who was slow to respond, slow to rise, slow to move across the room, often without pants on. She was also slow to dress.

How could I not marvel at something this relative gave me—these beautiful representations of the world we lived in and walked on and smeared on our chapped faces and the bottoms of babies. These beautiful representations of what, quite literally, allowed us all to move through the world, to float over it. To hover, to speed, to glide, to ride. Our family could not have had our days at the lake without oil. My mother could not have elongated her body on the speedboat for my father’s snapshots if we hadn’t had the gas to ride into the lake’s middle, where water and surrounding land could frame her.

Nothing on that lake was bad. It is the only place my family was a family. That boat was the only place where I had no fear, and saw no suffering. Until we caught a fish. Then the boat was all suffering. I saw something close to love on that boat, torn free from abuse, addiction and pain. In this way, my family depended on oil. We would not have existed as any kind of recognizable unit without it—both the oil needed to get us to the lake by way of car and the oil needed to suspend us above it by boat.

The bottles were marked with the name of my relative’s company, as well as drilling information. They were objects that stood as placeholders for who this relative was in the world, what he did. But they weren’t just that. For me, they represented love. He loved me enough to think of me, and to bring these bottles that represented him home to me. I could look at the bottles and remember who he was, and where he was, in the world. That he was out there, somewhere much safer than my home, and that he loved me, and that the roads I rode on were a way of being connected to him. Someday I, too, would be out there in the world, safe, perhaps loving someone who was trapped somewhere unsafe.

I started reading the labels of products I used, hoping to find “petrolatum” listed, just as he’d taught me to do. Every time I found that word, I would smile, having found another point of connection to him and his love.

The other day, I was with my partner at a poetry reading. The reading took place in an art gallery. There was a human art installation as part of the current show. I felt happy and safe in the space, and I was enjoying being out with my partner. Then I realized one of the women in the art installation—who was dressed in a costume and wearing a wig—is a poet with whom there is a history, and a deep dislike.

I was no longer in the same space. My heart began to race, I felt nauseated. I was ashamed to be there, didn’t want to be there anymore. The rest of the night was extremely uncomfortable. But what had changed? It’s not like this woman walked into the room, and I could argue that her appearance had palpably changed the room’s “vibe.” She had been there all along.

All that changed was my perception. Nothing else. This proved to me the power of perception and what it can do to our minds and bodies. If I could be happy in that space not knowing the woman was also there, I have the potential to be happy even when my perception shifts. But potential is only potential until it is realized.

Perceptions can change markedly over a lifetime, even if the actualities behind them do no shifting. The question is, what do we do with our shifting perceptions? How do we handle them? The relative who works in petroleum must have some reaction to a world whose relationship to oil is increasingly being called into question and in which more and more oil alternatives are being developed, even here in the oil-hungry United States, whose move to alternative fuels and technologies is as slow as a highly viscous crude oil.

As my relative moves along more and more paths over the globe looking for oil, does he still seethe when people make comments about its dangers and destructions, both to human life and the planet? Does he still rail against those who say we are running out of oil, defiantly stating that we will never run out?

My perceptions have changed during my own lifetime. I no longer believe a family is a family because of how it functions on a boat on a lake on the border between Texas and Oklahoma, aptly called Lake Texoma. What we are as a family depends on how we relate to one another every day—and includes what happens when nobody else is there to bear witness or keep our behaviors in check.

In the dream last night, the one where my friends and I were instructed to walk up over the mountain on our way to finding knowledge, I veered from the group and our issued instructions. I walked down and down to the base of the mountain. Around the back, it was open. The way it had been opened up, the mountain resembled a woman’s stomach and thighs. The opening resembled her partially gutted pelvis. It/she glowed red inside, as if the cavity was filled with blood.

I realized the red color was the glow of a giant fire. All around the base of the mountain were piles of trash and environmental waste. Some men were feeding refuse into the fire while other men stoked the flames. I asked one of them where the trash had come from. He gave no answer but instead told me that this was the real seat of knowledge, not the destination the path above the mountain led to, where the group and I were being steered.

Here is where you can learn everything about us, he said. Right here. He continued shoveling waste into the giant burning pelvis.

Suddenly someone appeared and yanked me back up to the path. When I rejoined the group, I tried to explain what I’d seen. They didn’t believe me. It’s just a mountain, they said. What are you talking about, they asked.

But my perception had been changed, and there was no changing it back. Wherever we were going, it had nothing to do with knowledge. We needed to go down, down.

my relative saw The Wizard of Oz, it was on a black-and-white TV. But something magical happened, he says. At the point where the movie turns from black and white to color, it did so on the television. For years, he insisted the movie turned to color, despite the fact that it was technically impossible for that to have happened.

Perception is everything. Perception is everything.

—

There are on average 2,600 oil spills per year. On average, 726 million gallons of oil are spilled annually. As of July 19, 2010, between 90 million and 170 million gallons of crude oil have been released into the Gulf as a result of the 2010 BP oil spill. But those are just numbers. I should say something about water, what it means to the body. I should say something about the body, how it yields to oil, succumbs.

First published at Poets for Living Waters.