Monthly Archives: June 2010

I recently was interviewed by Katharine Hansen’s excellent blog, A Storied Career, on the transformative power of our stories, making a living through the language arts, and how Transformative Language Arts has helped people create careers doing work they love and helping their communities find and share stories. Check the interview out, and read other interviews, articles and amazing insights on this site, which explores the intersection of various aspects of storytelling, including writing, blogging, and speaking stories for individuals, organizations, communities, careers and callings.

Kathy Hansen’s Blog to explore traditional and postmodern forms/uses of storytelling.

Here’s an essay I recently wrote on writing as a spiritual practice, posted at the very fine The Spirit of  a Woman website. The website is full of stories that inspire and question, open us up to possibilities and help us see where we’ve traveled.

When I first experienced my first Kansas summer about 30 years ago, I immediately understood why people would often say that living here builds character. Sometimes, and actually more often than not, there’s a stretch of days that melts into weeks of intense heat, loosened only a few degrees after sundown that drives most of us to the couch with ice water, the air-conditioner and the fan on full-blast and urge to stay very still for a long time. Yet summer is also when we experience some of the most vivid sightings in our neighborhoods, particularly in June when the poppies open up, piercing the greenery and pasteled buds aplenty to show us what screaming red-orange can do when it explodes into blossom. The wicked witch of the west had it all wrong when she said of Dorothy and her friends crossing to the Wizard of Oz’s castle, “Poppies can put them to sleep.” Quite the contrary, poppies wake us up with, to paraphrase poet Mary Oliver, their orange flares.

It’s fitting to feature this poem from Oliver not just because of the poppies but because last month she made her first trip to Kansas to read at the University of Kansas’s Hall Center. Well into her 70s, and positively the best-selling poet in America, Oliver is known for writing about the flora and fauna in such ways that help us experience the earth and sky anew. She’s also known for her wit. When speaking to us last month, she said, “I finally made it to Kansas, but I had to land in Missouri to get here.”

Here’s what she has to say about a flower as vibrant as she is:

Poppies
Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night

Reading this poem, I’m struck by how she describes being “washing and washed/ in the river/ of earthly delight,” and how, while describing the fire, light and heat of the poppies, she also describes how everything eventually drowns “in the indigos of darkness.” Contrasting light and dark, she tells us of the “deep, blue night” but also the lights that comes regardless, a miracle of redemption and holiness, but especially of happiness.

In thinking about poppies and the wild light and piercing colors of summer, write about a moment that something you saw — poppies, a thunderhead at sunset, the way the cottonwood leaves clanged in the quick breeze — was an invitation to happiness for you. Or you might even make a list of all the invitations to happiness you receive right outside your front door, from the fireflies stitching the sky tonight to the mourning doves echoing above the poppies in the next morning’s first light.

My friend and writer Diane Silver has just interviewed me for her blog, In Praise of Goodness. This blog is part of a year-long project Diane just started, “365 days to answer an impossible question,” as she calls it. She has started posting every day, beginning this June, on ways to see, question, understand, explore whatever any of us mean by goodness. She’s also bravely interviewing all sorts of people, and although I was the first, there will be many others, including multitudes who hold very different perspective and live very different life stories than Diane. In fact, she has one post called “The Preacher, the Store Owner, the Sufi and the White Power Guy” about who she plans to talk with during the year.

Why is she doing this? As she writes, “I’m doing this because I suspect that goodness – or its lack – may be the central issue of our day, and I want to test this hypothesis. Are war, terrorism, economic collapse, poverty, environmental catastrophe, bigotry, oppression, hatred, crime and a multitude of other human ills the result of an absence of goodness? Is there a patch of evil in the human heart, head and/or soul that keeps us from doing right? If so, what is the cure? How the heck do we as individuals and a society attain this holy grail of goodness?”

I encourage any of us concerned with goodness, that is, any of us with a heartbeat, to visit her site, and consider following her tweets and blogs daily. It’s a good thing!