Tag Archives: Goddard College

Dwelling in Uncertainty & Snow: Everyday Magic, Day 504

Posted on February 24, 2012 | 2 Comments

The view from my office on the cusp of the incoming storm

The view from my computer of two napping mandalas

When is it most difficult to dwell in uncertainty? When you’re exhausted and ready to be home and then, weather intervenes …..or not. It’s hard to tell what will happen now that a winter storm warning has been issued for the part of Vermont I and the airport are in when the warning extends until Saturday morning. All I know is that the snow is coming. It could be a few inches or well over a foot. It could turn to rain or, worst scenario, freezing rain and ice. The weather is iffy enough that the campus has just announced that the residency is officially over now so if people need to leave early to out-race the storm, they can…..that is, if they drive or have other means of getting from here to there.

Not having my own private plane, I’m here, like many others, and I’m thinking about this state of not-knowing. I looked to solace by re-reading Pema Chodron, my favorite writer on the shaky and unpredictable wiles of the life force:

Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground be-neath us suddenly disappears. We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment —over and over again

The view of a campus wondering just how much snow will come

And there’s nothing like the weather outside the window or within our own bodies to bring us back to the present moment and also face-to-face to whatever habitual ruts we dive ourselves into when the going gets tough and keeps the tough from going. “Learning to stay,” as Pema Chodron writes, is about opening ourselves to the wild groundlessness of whatever ground we’re inhabiting which, in my case, is some hilly forests surrounding a small campus, all of it staring up expectantly to the sky for what will come next.

But while life is a series of travels through and dwellings in uncertainty, you could also say it’s a cabaret, especially here at Goddard where, despite the residency being over, a bunch of students are right now down the hall painting their faces, cross-dressing, rehearsing dance numbers and banging on drums in preparation for the unofficial cabaret, which begins in seven minutes. The snow may be coming, the program for tomorrow may be cancelled but the show, at least, must go on.

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A Museum for the Particularly Curious: Everyday Magic, Day 503

Posted on February 23, 2012 | Comments Off

The Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in St. Johnsbury, Vermont is a place for the curious, eccentric and more-than-easily amused. So that’s where my students and I went for our field trip today, over hill and dale for 27 miles east until we arrived at the museum, which is like a museum piece itself with its monster-sized red bricks and garlanded stone lions.

Step from one display to another, and you’ll see three-inch long Chinese slippers for women, mummified dog legs, snow flake prints contrasting what happens between -14 degrees and 30 degrees, and miniature Victorian living rooms. There are also birds: many, many, many birds, taxidermized within an inch of their deaths, and gleaming in their display cases that sort them out by continent.

Nothing blows the mind as much, however, as the bug art. We’re talking about 10,592 colorful beetles arranged into stars, a portrait of Lincoln and quilt-like art. Or this design composed of thousands and thousands of butterfly wings. “Where did people find the time to do this?” one of my students asked. But the greatest fun was watching some of our Goddardites look at the art, read the description, and then yell out, “Whoa!” when they realized just what (and who) went into each portrait.

A lot also went into the stuffed animals, some of great size and texture. The bears — polar, grizzly and the like — greet you upon arrival. Besides being greatly imposing and obviously dead. they’re just gigantic talismans of the wild, reminding us of what’s beyond our usual view. Here, you can look closely at the size of claws (huge) and the composition of Indigo Bunting feathers (vivid). There was also a gorgeous gallery featuring photos of lightning over varied landscapes, and a giant globe that, if you touched the controls, you would turn into Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, or the Earth at night, during hurricane system, if and when the water levels rise, and in ancient maps.

By the time we finished padding around upstairs and down, around the corners and down the halls, I felt refreshed by the unusual and unusual juxtapositions. Kind of like what we study, explore and investigate here: like with unlike, and between the fields and traditions, all kinds of sparks that make for greater warmth and light in the world.

 

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Readying Myself to Roll: Everyday Magic, Day 497

Posted on February 11, 2012 | 2 Comments

The cat packs herself for the trip

Come Monday morning, I head down the magic rabbit hole between my home in a house on the prairie in Kansas to my home in a dorm room in Vermont. I’ve been doing this for 17 years, twice a year or more readying myself to roll east, via a car ride to the airport, two plane rides with layover hopefully long enough to eat lunch while not running through an airport, and taxi ride to campus. As usual, when I pack, my animals gather ’round, telling me with their don’t-leave-me animal eyes that I shouldn’t leave them. They often sleep next to or on top of suitcases, piles of clothes or books heading east, letting out mournful cries when I reposition them.

In the week before I go and week after I get back, I feel as if I’m in both places at once, and I have trouble upon waking each morning distinguishing whether I’m dreaming Kansas in Vermont or dreaming Vermont in Kansas. It’s a bittersweet sensation, and crazily enough, I tend to worry about missing one place while in the other place while I’m still in the one place I’ll be leaving soon. Yet I think this kind of ludicrous, pre-emptive longing is part and parcel of finding home in

Failing to fit into the suitcase, the dog, feeling quite dejected, lies down beside it.

more than one place.

At the same time, I carry each place in me no matter where I am. I am a Kansan who happens to live in Vermont for 10-12 days two or more times each year. I have a rich and beautiful life in both places, and thanks to phone calls, skype, email, facebook and more, I’m in touch with the people from both lives all in a day’s work.

So I sit here in Kansas with Vermont in my pocket, readying for doing the opposite when I emerge from that rabbi hole come Monday afternoon. Then I will remind myself, like I always do, that it’s the same sky holding together my real and dream lives.

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At the Cusp Between Worlds: Everyday Magic, Day 385

Posted on August 12, 2011 | 4 Comments

I’ve been away from this blog for a few days, swallowed whole by the residency in the usual alternative reality known as Goddard College’s process. Where have I been in this reality? I’m not sure, but I know it included many meetings, talks with students laughing and occasionally crying in my office, beautiful songs filling the haybarn, trails through the woods and between people in the cafeteria, and laughing hard enough to cry and fall over. Whatever happened, I have two songs I keep singing, “Volare!,” which Kirsten sang, inviting us to sing the chorus with her at cabaret last night, and, for better or worse, “This is the song that never ends” from Sesame Street. It’s a wicked combination.

There’s been a lot of humidity and humility, a big thunder bolt (or two), many rehearsals for “Riverdance,” which some of us faculty performed quite badly (and proud of it) with the real Riverdance dancers projected behind us. There’s been a crazy amount of seitan prepared in new ways, and the hunt for the good cookie. There’s been walks to the post office, falling in love with the horses and their baby horses, and frequent searches of the schedule for where to go next. There’s also been a lot of love, long talks about how to truly change ourselves and the world, solace in the moonlight walking back to the dorm, and occasional good pizza.

Right now here, and in 20 minutes, a taxi crossing back over. I carry this world in the one I return to, traveling, traveling, traveling, but not, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, looking for something (what could it be). Instead I’m traveling with that something inside me.

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Secrets of the Faculty Dorm: Everyday Magic, Day 383

Posted on August 6, 2011 | 1 Comment

I would tell you, but then I would have to kill you…..or seek your word you won’t breathe a word to everyone, which I guess I’m doing because here I go. In the faculty dorm at Goddard during residencies, we come alive late at night in the living room, wine glasses filled and emptied, hummus and chips put out and ravaged, fruit or chocolate passed around, and half of us on our laptops or iPads partially working but mostly visiting.

What happens? Sometimes we tell jokes, bad ones, not remembering or caring if we’ve told or heard them before, like last night. Some jokes involve parrots, and that’s all I can say. Sometimes we talk about vicious bird attacks, such as the one-eyed falcon that drowned a rare white-faced ibis in a pond before a bunch of photo-taking school children. Sometimes we talk about where our previous students have gone, graduated or otherwise or puzzle over present ones. Often we plan cabaret acts, most of which never come to fruition, that involve “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Irish dancing, skits with Grandma Jim, and most of all, variations of waterless synchronized swimming. We often repeat our stories (over and over and over again…) of what happened when one of us started here or how the faculty women’s dorm was integrated to include men. We can finish each other’s sentences on these stories and just about imitate one another gestures and pauses. We eat a lot of Japanese treats and occasional bagels from Montreal.

Mostly we laugh and try to make each other laugh, which is easy because we are experts in being easily amused. And that’s the happiest secret of all.

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Living My Dream to Be a Tina Turner Backup Dancer: Everyday Magic, Day 265

Posted on April 13, 2011 | 2 Comments

A few nights ago, I was upstairs in Dewey Dorm at Goddard College with a bunch of new fast friends (fellow faculty), watching a video of Tina Turner and her exquisite back-up dancers singing “Proud Mary.”

“Okay, here’s our part,” I called out as the dancers and Tina did those perfect big twirls and then the “do do do do do do do do DO DO DO” bowing down and back up. “Just follow along,” one of us urged, and we tried. Truly.

But after a few twirls, a flood of do do do’s and shimmey down and up, none of us within a mile of being in synch, I had to grab onto the wall to keep from collapsing. “How do they do that?” I asked Tina and her dancers. “And in heels, no less!”

Diana, Marilou, Maike & Me: Almost Tina Turner Backup Singers

Obviously, it was another time and place, they would have won Olympic medals for shimmeying and twirling (had the Olympics been wise enough to have a Tina Turner division), and they were kinda sorta way younger than the four of us — Marilou, Sui Yee, Diana and me — laughing so hard we could barely catch our breaths as we set up the video to do it again.

Now why were we doing this, you might ask? We were rehearsing to perform as the Packettes (Goddard students do five packets of work during a semester) after being introduced by Study Plan (Goddard students first write a study plan at the residency, outlining their packets). The performance itself was magical — Diana is the best Tina Turner I’ve ever seen on the stage of the haybarn (I love it when she says, “We faculty never do anything nice and easy. We do it nice and rough”). And we let it rip when it was the do do do do time in the song, giving it all we had, and even almost moving in synch.

Now that I’m landed back in Kansas, I send big hugs to my fellow Packetteers, who let me live out the dream of being a Tina Turner back-up dancer, and I bow down (while singing do do do do do do) to all Tina Turner’s back-up dancers, and to the goddess herself. Long may she roll.

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Driving Nowhere In The Dark: Everyday Magic, Day 260

Posted on April 7, 2011 | Comments Off

When I say I drove nowhere in the dark last night, I’m not talking metaphorically, or at least not just. I got in the car, thinking I should do west and turn whenever, and see if I wanted to go anywhere. In the end, I just drove for an hour through Berlin, Barre and into a small town I didn’t catch the name of. I followed a curvy road that hugged the  mountain then stretched alongside a vast valley of snow. I went higher and higher, a little worried the slim road would end, and did, in fact, have to make some 360 degree turns to go the other way.

I have no idea where I went.

Playing E. Street Radio full-blast, Bruce Springsteen singing a slightly warped version of “Born to Run” recorded from before he got the timing down and got famous, I drove. The darkness cleaned out my mind. The speed dropped away my thoughts. The music erased where I was in time.

Eventually, I found a familiar road, a turn into the obvious way back to Goddard, and I took it, the crescent moon riding side saddle the whole time.

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Winter Wonderland At Work Across The Dreamtime: Everyday Magic, Day 254

Posted on April 1, 2011 | 1 Comment

The snow’s job is to fall steady and thick all night and all day. The sky’s job is to let it. Meanwhile, my job is to talk with BFA students about pacing novels composed of vignettes, the holy work of writing the truth, poetic forms comprising a play and helping Vets tell their stories. My job is to sit in a small circle of faculty and students talking about writing about race, what transformation through writing means anyway, and who the “we” is in a particular poem and in our lives.

All around the trees hold a thin layer of branching snow, the sky turns dim on the eastern edge, and the buildings inhale heat. Downstairs, people line up for dinner, and down the hall, someone laughs and different voices say, “Got you,” “I love you,” and “Where did you say that was?”

My mind ambles closer to where my body has landed, in a freshly-painted room of pale green before two winter’s full of falling snow, across the dream time between my two homes. I simply remind myself to breathe, feel the fatigue and dizzy swish of having landed in a surprise, and follow the line of my limbs to what comes next.

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I Don’t Think We’re In Kansas Anymore, Toto….Or Are We?: Everyday Magic, Day 253

Posted on March 31, 2011 | 2 Comments

The call came at 4 p.m. yesterday: would I jump on a plane today and come back to Vermont to teach in Goddard’s BFA in Creative Writing program for a week? I stared at the phone in disbelief for a while. It’s almost spring in Kansas, the skies are supposed to clear and the temperatures on the rise, and Vermont? Wasn’t I just there five weeks ago?

Sometimes a gal has to make a crazy-fast decision with her gut, but in my case, there were opposing forces involved. My inner worker bee said, “Go!” My inner take-good-care bee said, “No!” I let them negotiate as I called several friends and Ken, talking out loud with these good witnesses. Eventually, the bees buzzed a solution: Go but take good care. Rest and replenish. Rent my own car and take little road trips up solitary mountain roads (when they’re not covered with mud and snow). A few more calls, some fast manuvers on the computer, and it was arranged.

The plane flight — could that be a relaxing venture…..ever? I tried to breathe slowly, inhale aromatherapy oils and read trashy magazines while chanting little lullabies. Despite the aerobic workout at the Detroit airport when I had to run non-stop for 20 minutes from Gate A28 to C17 to leap onto the little puddle-jumper to Vermont, it was actually somewhat serene.

The rental car turned out to have 182,999 less miles on it than my car at home, and a sunroof and XF radio, so I drove happily, switching between Springsteen, Indigo Girls, Showtunes, 40s Music and BBC news.

Now that I’ve arrived — unpacked and readying myself for a dinner (that I didn’t have to cook, thank you very much) — I’m just starting to stop the spinning of whether it was the right choice to go. Last night, after all was arranged, I had a pang of regret, not wanting to leave my beloved home. But once I turned into the Goddard parking lot, the sun illuminating everything so that even the mud glowed silver, I realized I was home here too. This sense of home is so familar that when I stopped at supermarket on the way here, a woman I didn’t know but who looked like someone in Lawrence walked up to me and said, “Can you believe it’s supposed to snow again?”

I smiled at her and said, “No, it’s just crazy, isn’t it?”

I don’t know in my soul if I’m in Vermont or Kansas, or where the heck Toto is, but I know home when I feel it.

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Suspended Animation in Cleveland: Everyday Magic, Days 217-218

Posted on February 25, 2011 | Comments Off

Cleveland, nothing against you, but I don’t really know you, and sitting in this airport for hours isn’t helping the matter.  I’ve watched the little chain restaurants and bookstores roll down their doors and lock their gates while I’ve surfed weather, road conditions and Continental Airline sites in the quest for home: Will a plane arrive here to take those of us sitting patiently at gate C29 home? Will the wild and big snow falling in Kansas City prevent us from landing safely? Once landed, will Ken be able to drive safely on snow-packed roads to get me or is a surrealistic night in an airport motel my destiny?

This whole travel twirl began fast and by surprise. I woke this morning thinking, “Sure would be nice to go home today instead of tomorrow, and I bet I could pack my suitcase in 10 minutes.” This wasn’t because I don’t love my job, fellow faculty and students but simply because of homesickness. I walked to the community building to meet with students, only to have sudden slips of paper delivered to me: our residency — which was to end tomorrow after meetings, workshops, and our cabaret — was ending today because a large snow storm was racing toward Vermont. In 16 years of teaching at Goddard, this was a first for me, and after my meeting with students and 40 minutes on the phone with a lovely airline representative named Lauren, who is now my new best friend, I was booked to fly out today.

Fast forward to ten hours later: It’s 10:55 p.m., and my plane was delayed three hours because of a technical glitch. Behind me in Vermont, snow. Ahead of me in Missouri and Kansas, snow. Between it all is here and now, watching weary travelers disembark the tiny plane I’m about to board, wishing above all else, for safety for all and somewhere at the end of this rainbow of snow, a good night’s sleep, maybe even (I hope) in my own sweet bed.

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