The Green Wave

July 25, 2010

Mothers & Thunder

Filed under: Celebration, Music, People, Storytelling — kate @ 12:21 pm

I got to play a concert up in Portland this week as part of Lynne Cullen’s Seanchai Nights series at Bull Feeney’s Pub.  I love that room with its round stage, tall windows, and Irish quotes painted high on the buttery yellow walls.  It seems like the people who come are always ready to sing and to laugh and to dive down into the stories with me.  I love them, and this time was no exception!  I met a great young family with three kids who looked like wizards (the youngest of them is building a harp and learning Gaelic), a bevy of storytellers, an old friend I hadn’t seen in at least 20 years, and a crowd of spirited party girls, among others.  One of my first employers (for baby-sitting, window-washing, and cocktail-party-tray-passing) was also present, and remembered that I used to sit on the hill behind her house and read poetry.

But this visit was made even more special by the appearance of a special guest and her entourage:  my mother and her friends.  They filled an entire long table, and they sang and smiled throughout, and warmed me to the core.  And to see my mother there among them, laughing at my antics and learning to sing those Irish words – well, that is a treasure to me.  This is a rare occurrence.  In fact, it has only happened once before when I hosted a party to celebrate the release of The Harp-Boat.  And yes, even at my age, it matters to me very much that my mother likes what I do, that she sees the value of what I offer.  And that night, she did.

Sometimes, everything goes right.

That blessed night, there was a strapping lad at the bar who gallantly carried the piano up those winding stairs.

The traffic cop softened and tore up the ticket he was writing for me.

The room filled up and every chair hosted someone lovable.

And just at the right moment in one story, just when I said, “She sat up in bed and said, ‘Lord, God, what is that noise?’” the thunder boomed over the sea behind me.  Thunder & lightning as collaborators = amazing!

And my mother came.  Did I mention my mother came?

A wonderful night.  Lucky, grateful, amazed, delighted, inspired me.

July 11, 2010

Thank you, Arthur.

Filed under: People, Spirit — kate @ 12:58 pm

You know, I need mermaids in the world.

I need talking trees.  I need foxes that transform at dusk.  I need enchanted apples.

Though he is wicked, I need Blue Beard.

I require the 13th fairy, meddlesome as she is.

I cannot do without the white deer that flashes through the darkening trees.

Selkies and sea-witches are a necessity.

The moon who recognizes me as a sister and a friend?  Absolutely essential.

And I need company in these requirements, and help seeing my world in its most beloved shapes.

This week, I’ve been reading Amanda Adam’s lovely book, The Mermaid’s Tale.  She’s a wonderful writer and she’s done all of us mermaid-lovers a great service by including reproductions of some of the most splendid fairy-tale art ever created.  There we find Arthur Rackham’s beguiling mermaid, sitting atop what looks like a huge carp while the blue-grey sea boils around her and meteors blaze down behind her.  She is a dangerous beauty, stirring up the storm in her own heart and by extension putting sailors into peril.

I stared at that picture for such a long time, just as I once stared at the sea-witch in my childhood copy of Hans Christian Anderson’s tales.

The longer I looked, the more I thought, “Thank you, Arthur.”  I felt increasingly grateful that Arthur Rackham bothered to portray what other people would deem so much pish-posh but which I myself find essential.  And the same goes for Edmund Dulac, William Morris, Kay Nielsen, Aubrey Beardsley…  All of these artists looked away from the smokestacks and the scandals, from the drab and the mundane.  They followed their own tastes and visions and loves, and they gave us a world that glows with enchantment, with promise, and yes, with beautiful peril.

The real world.

Yes, friends.  This beauty IS the real world – or a part of it that awaits our gaze.  Yes, smokestacks and drab scenes are part of the world, but while some people insist – yes, insist as though their lives depended on it – that this is the ONLY world, I cannot agree.  There is ugliness and cruelty, but always close by, there is beauty and kindness.

We make the world with our thoughts and especially with our habits of thought.  This week, looking at fairytale art, I felt grateful that Rackham and Dulac and their fellow artists used their thoughts to create a world of singing queens and trooping fairies, of banners flying over castles under twilit skies.

And I realized, almost with a start, that I am doing the same thing.  I am giving voice and space to the real world as I see it when I make a poem or song, when I write my novel or even when I give a lecture and share my loves and enthusiasms, my particular way of making meaning.  As much as I need Arthur and all of his visions, it struck me that someone in this world might require me and my visions.  Just thinking such a thought is like drinking from the Well at the End of the World, feeling all of my strength and courage return.

And friend, that goes for you, too, and for everyone we know.  It’s our world while we live in it.  We are the ones who can stir up the seas and endow every star with a freight of wishes.  We are the ones who can sing, talk, write, meditate on, engage with, summon, enlarge:  beauty, love, truth, honesty, honor, and possibility.

We are making this world, so let’s make it everything we love best.

To enchantment!

June 13, 2010

That Look

Filed under: Irish, Music, People, Spirit — kate @ 1:01 pm

Yesterday I played four mini-concerts of songs & stories for kids at the Worcester Irish Music Festival.  Despite the rain, there were still spirited crowds splashing through the puddles, gathering under the tents, and bellying up to the bars.  Inside the hall, the kids were wild and lovable, ready for stories and dancing.  I gave them a bit of both, telling some of my favorite tales and then, when a few kids could not contain the urge to run, just playing a jig on the whistle and watching with delight as they ran round and round in a circle on the dance-floor.

I love encouraging everyone to sing and so taught a fair number of chorus songs.  One of them was “Soldier, Soldier” – a great song in which the young maid asks the young man to marry her but he protests because he lacks the right clothes for a wedding.  The kids yell out what they think he needs – usually things like “a hat!” or “socks!” but yesterday that included “a visor” (by one little boy wearing, yes, a green visor which he deemed essential equipment) and the crowd favorite:  “Boxers!”

One little girl, Grace, participated in this song-game with a special intensity that I recognized right away.  She watched me like a hawk, she clapped along, she quickly learned the words – ALL of them, too, and not just the choruses – and when I asked her to sing, she jumped in feet-first with a blend of passion and enthusiasm that inflamed my heart with a protective tenderness.  As the Irish say, Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile, “One beetle recognizes another,” and I recognized her:  Singer.

I asked Katie O’Neill, a splendid singer and one of the festival organizers, if she’d noticed Grace.  “Oh, yes,” she said.  “She’s hooked.”

Later, I met her parents and told them what we’d noticed.  They were delighted and proud and not too surprised, which is wonderful.  They really see her, thank heavens, and I bet they’ll give her every chance to do what she loves.

I don’t have children, a choice I’ve thought and re-thought hundreds of times.  Sometimes this choice seems to leave me out of life’s largest motions and movements, its greatest dramas and joys and sorrows.  Sometimes I accuse myself of terrible things because of this – of laziness or cowardice, to name just two things (though I should say that I did try for a time; the trouble is, you can always try harder, take more extreme measures, or adopt, and in the end, I decided against those things).  Other times I feel proud to have stayed true to myself despite the huge weight of general expectations, the subtle and not-so-subtle pressure by well-meaning people, their questioning and bewilderment.

But when I see a girl like Grace taking wing, or any young singer, poet, writer, or creator, I feel that I do have a place in the greater Family.  My job is recognizing “that look” and helping a little to inflame those passions, that self-trust, that questing, beautiful spirit.

In Committed, Liz Gilbert gives childless women a brilliant and self-respecting name, “The Auntie Brigade.”  The Aunties of the world provide those extras that can make a difference – the extra attention, books, time, treats, and love that help young people (and everyone, for that matter!) to thrive.  I love that, and I’d like to go one better and remove the gender filter because this idea pertains to childless men, too (even though they don’t bear the same stigma we do).  After all, the great Merlin didn’t have a son, but he taught Arthur everything he knew about magic.

We seasoned creators are the same, I think.  When we look at a crowd and see the one face that is enraptured, something very essential in us wants to foster that spark.  When we do, even for a moment, even just by recognizing “that look,” we foster it in ourselves all over again.  The living line of singer-to-singer, creator-to-creator is nourished, and we get to witness the great hope of another person coming into her magic.

I’m wishing you a magic life, Grace, and all the pleasure and power of your own magic.  Sing out, Singer!

May 30, 2010

Emily & Eternity

Filed under: Poetry, Spirit, Writing — kate @ 1:24 pm

You’re a busy creator and you spend your days making things (songs, stories, poems, essays…) that fill you with passionate excitement and purpose.  When you wake in the morning, your thoughts fly to your latest projects.  You are eager to get to the piano, the page, the harp, the stage, the laptop, the studio.  When you are away from your creating, when you are trapped in a meeting, when you are passing from one place to another, you can still find the energy of your making within you.  It burns and shimmers and warms you.  It’s the most delicious secret, the most powerful source of fuel, pride, happiness, and hope.

But there are questions sometimes, aren’t there?

In weary or fearful moments, you become susceptible to doubt.  Someone’s voice disturbs the peace in your mind and asks:

Who cares about all this creating?

How much did you earn from that song/story/poem/essay/performance?  Oh!  Only that?

What does all of this creating do for the world?  For you?  For anyone?

Who do you think you are?

And then it sneers:

No one will remember any of this when you die.

This week my dear friend Lauren and I made the pilgrimage out to Amherst to visit the Dickinson Homestead.  We were very fortunate to meet up with an eloquent and knowledgeable young tour-guide who gave us an hour of poetry, humor, inspiration, conjecture, and stories.  We were both deeply moved by her presentation and by Emily’s commitment to her own art.  Emily decided early on that she was a creator, that her greatest pleasure and purpose on earth was thinking and catching the “mint” of inspiration as it fell all around her.  She penned some 2000 poems in her lifetime, and one year, when she was 32, she wrote a poem almost every day.  Despite some discouragement and her own disinclination to market her work for publication, she never wavered in her creating.  She seems also to have had great faith in her own genius and to have seen herself as part of a large and vibrant world of creators.  I loved seeing portraits of two of her heroes, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on her bedroom wall.

And yet, when she died, all of those poems – all of that fiercely and joyfully lived life – nearly vanished into a parlor fire when her relatives found themselves uncertain what to do with her legacy.  In the end, her sister Lavinia prevailed upon their brother’s lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, to edit and publish the poems (which was a herculean task, given all the alternatives Emily penned in the margins).  Emily died in 1886 but a complete edition of her work didn’t appear until 1955.  It really is nothing short of a miracle that we know about her, that her work survived, that caring people took an interest and recognized her gift.

Just considering how near we were to NOT knowing Emily, this genius creator, left us both dizzy and somewhat shaken.

And that necessarily raised the question of our own work.  Will any of it endure?  And leaving aside the issue of whether or not it belongs in the same category as Emily’s genius, how do we reconcile ourselves with the great possibility that all of this joyful, busy, intense creating might not survive in this life, much less the eternity that lies beyond it?

I have no easy or comforting answers to these questions.

Neither did Emily, I imagine.  Like us, she created amid immense question marks.  She never knew that she would one day be mentioned in the same breath with the writers she most admired.  She never knew that people all over the world would devour her words, argue over them, find solace in them, feel a kinship with her through them.  She didn’t know that those 2000 poems would live beyond her.

But she wrote them anyway.

And thank heavens that she did!  That’s the central point of all of this:  she DID write them, giving them a chance to survive and to reach us, to strengthen and delight us.  If we are all making this world together – and I truly believe we are – Emily did her part.  She made her peace with eternity by creating in the present.  And even if these poems had been consigned to the flames, she still would have done her part not just for us and for all creators but for herself.  Just that – choosing to spend a life making poems – is a powerful declaration of freedom that reverberates even now.  She spent her days making poems and wisely let eternity take care of itself.

Thank you, Emily.  You help me answer that snide voice:

I don’t have to know where any of this is leading.  I don’t have to be famous or earn high fees or win critical acclaim.  I don’t have to do anything.

But I choose to create today, and I choose to believe that it matters.

And now, back to the shadows with you, sneering one.  I’ve got a poem to write!

May 25, 2010

Something else for the Dark Blue Place

Filed under: Uncategorized — kate @ 11:00 pm

Today I discovered another way to shift the gloom of the dark blue place:

SING

as loud as you can, holding the notes as long as you can.

You cannot feel despair or anxiety and sing at the same time.

So sing as long, as loud, as fearlessly as you possibly can.

Don’t stop until the dark blue lightens.

May 13, 2010

Don’t leave anything blank

Filed under: Uncategorized — kate @ 8:03 pm

Last night my students labored over 10-pages of Irish exam, packed with verb conjugations, prepositions, noun plurals, conversations, proverbs, and important questions like:  An itheann tú sushi? Do you eat sushi?

The cardinal-rule of exam-taking in my classes is to take a shot at everything.  I am the Queen of Partial Credit, so it just makes sense to guess rather than to leave things blank.  And I love to see my students act boldly, to make an attempt, and to succeed – even partially!

The same is true of music & life.  Let’s leave no blanks, friends.  Let’s hazard a guess on every score.  Let’s squeak out something – a song, a quatrain, a vase, a sketch, a love affair.  Let’s not let the fear of being wrong freeze us to our chairs.  There are far worse things than being wrong:  being dead but technically alive, I think, would be the worst of all.

We are far better than we think we are.  We know more, are capable of more, are more impressive and powerful than we ever dreamed.   Recently I said of one friend, “If he just knew how cool he was, he’d be AMAZING!”

That is true of you and me, too.

And while I may be the Queen of Partial Credit, life itself is the Goddess of Partial Credit.  Wrong answers still reward us.  Passionate failures teach and spur us.  Just showing up earns us an easy ten points.

So lets fill in every blank – preferably with a pen dipped in star dust, a joyful purple crayon, or even finger paints dipped out of a jar marked HOPE.

May 2, 2010

Tarbell Days

Filed under: Uncategorized — kate @ 12:01 pm

We really could celebrate anything. Imagine: Festival of the First Snow, or Cupcake Day, or Commemoration of Our First Kiss. We could make a lovely fuss about strawberry picking or Emily Dickinson’s birthday or the full moon. Or fireflies. Or the first kayak run of the season. Or the last kayak run of the season. Or the Blessing of a New Piano. I love to think of all the cakes, the banners, the fireworks, the champagne, the hugs and kisses and congratulations. Anything we love or that has special meaning for us is game!

Yesterday I got to take part in one such celebration in West Groton at The Clover Farm Market, one of my favorite places to get a sandwich, buy a bottle of wine, munch a Squannacookie, or chat with Jan, the owner. Jan is the coolest – artsy, friendly, welcoming, and a brilliant cook to boot.  For a long time, she has dreamed of drawing attention to Edmund C. Tarbell, a 19th century luminary of West Groton who became one of the best-known and respected of the American Impressionist painters.  To that end, Jan and my friends Nancy Beaudette and Christine Hatch, worked with local businesses to organize Tarbell Days, a week-long festival that commemorated Tarbell’s beautiful paintings and also the beauty, spirit, and neighborliness of West Groton.  What a menu of fun they arranged, too!  Outdoor painting, a photography contest, children’s activities, a wine tasting, and even a man carving a canoe paddle down the road at the Nashoba Paddler (which is a great way to taste the delights of kayaking if you don’t have your own boat, by the way).  The festival culminated yesterday with music all day and into the evening, not only at the Market but also at the nearby Groton Nursery and Garden Center.

I just love how inclusive this is.  Jan’s dream bore fruit in so many ways.  We were educated about Edmund C. Tarbell whose art inspires us to even more deeply enjoy our beautiful area AND to look carefully for inspiration in everyday life (where he seemed to find it regularly – everything from children eating breakfast to watching his own sons and daughters on horseback in the woods).  We were brought together with our neighbors and friends in the warmest, most casual way.  Here are two of my friends listening to another friend, Louis Arnold, a guitar master and exquisite musician:

Carolyn and Margie listening to Louis Arnold

The Clover Farm Market and other local businesses got a little surge of attention and business.  And we felt great pride and delight in our neighborhood, in the talents and ingenuity and spark of our friends and neighbors and even our ancestors here.

All of this can come from the simple desire to celebrate, to make a little fuss, to throw a party, to bestow honor, to cook up some fun.  So hats off to Jan, Nancy, Chris, Pat at the Garden Center, and everyone at the Paddler, and to everyone who threw such a marvelous party for all of us.  I feel inspired to follow your example!  Here’s me below singing a May Day song, happy to be alive and celebrating art, friends, love, and the first of May:

Kate laughing at the Clover Farm Market

April 18, 2010

Joyful Omnivores

Filed under: Uncategorized — kate @ 12:30 pm

Recently I’ve watched a few episodes of “Planet Earth” and “Life”, and I must say: I’m mesmerized. The beauty, the wildness, the eye-popping ingenuity and diversity of life on this planet – all of this is just riveting to me. Both series let us peek into the dining halls and boudoirs of other species, and we see that animals, plants, insects, birds, and fish lead lives every bit as complex and meaningful as ours. Here we see their ability to improvise, to solve problems, to adapt, to create, to share humor, to express love. All of the old truisms about what is unique about us as human beings – humor, love, tool-use, problem-solving, so-called “higher thinking” – break down in the face of such evidence. I’m happy to see that wall crumble. Living as one creature in a world of fascinating, busy, gorgeous, brilliant creatures, makes me feel somehow more at home.

One example of creaturely genius is the multitude of things we all eat and how we catch, grow, kill, trap, outsmart, discover, and otherwise happen upon those things. I watched in amazement as hammerheads dove into shimmering spirals of shoaling fish, or bearded vultures threw down bones from dizzying heights to crack them open and get at the protein-rich marrow inside.

That got me thinking about my own nourishment – and particularly of all the things that feed the Kate that creates. Recently, that creature has dined well.

I attended the Unicorn Writing Conference last weekend, and there I gobbled up a smorgasbord of practical advice about publishing as well as inspiration for new poems and stories. I must say, too, that my fellow diners were delightful, and if I ever needed any confirmation that someone, somewhere, is writing a book on pretty much any subject you can think of, I got that here!

This past week, a new friend sent me a poem written by her 8-year-old son in hopes that I might be able to set it to music. Delicious task! And as it turned out, deeply nourishing both because his poem was astonishing and visionary, and because the process of making a musical setting for it brought me back into alignment with the deepest joy I know.

I’m snacking on all kinds of yummy things lately:

  • short stories by Eleanor Farjeon
  • a book on shamanism (with fascinating information about the Shipibo people of Peru and their ability to “weave” music)
  • poems by Padraig Colm
  • a disk of harp music checked out of the library

And I recognize that like any other creature, I’m always on the look out for opportunities to feed myself.  I’ll eat anything if it is tasty and nourishing to that part of me that makes poems and songs and stories.  And so much is!  As I learned watching “Life,” one creature’s parasite is another creature’s four-star meal – and so it is with creators.  Somebody’s throw-away line overheard in a cafe can find new life in a poem.  One person’s poem sparks another person’s essay.  A sculpture can grow up out of broken and discarded bits – even the broken and discarded parts of ourselves.

I’m embracing the life of a joyful omnivore; perhaps you are, too? If we’re canny and creative, if we’re creaturely and courageous, we can eat well anywhere we go.  It’s all food.  It’s up to the best parts of us to make it delicious.

April 4, 2010

The Step Between Shore & Ship

Filed under: Pleasures, Spirit — kate @ 10:39 am

Yesterday I donned my faithful red wellies and set off down our street, pulling my kayak along behind me on its wheeled dolly like some huge rubber duckie on a string. It’s a quarter mile or so to my put-in place. Neighbors have gotten used to seeing me parading up the road with my woven hat, boat, and wellies – and also the huge smile on my face that says I’m about to surrender to one of life’s sweetest pleasures.

But before that blissful moment arrives there is necessarily some awkwardness and even, on occasion, some mess.

First I must slide the boat down over the tar slip and nudge it through the rocks which stick up more or less depending on how much rain or sun we’ve had. Once the kayak is afloat I decide how much of myself I’m willing to soak. Most times I can stand with one foot in the water while swinging the other one into the boat, taking a breath and then sitting down carefully with only a little rocking and spillage; then I hold the wet foot out of the boat at a comic angle and shake it a few times to dry it off a little before folding it into place.

Other days when the water is too high or I lose my footing, I more or less fall into the boat and go out on the lake with wet knees and a soaked lap.

I don’t mind, of course.

The joy of exploring, of encountering the sunlight so directly, of paddling right into the wind and feeling the boat respond to every single thing – all of this is worth any little awkwardness in the transition from being an earth-creature to being a water-creature.

Knowing the pleasures ahead makes it easier to be brave. But what about those times when we don’t know if what lies ahead will be worth it? What about the many journeys into the unknown we all make in this life?

Well, at least it helps to know that the changes may be awkward. And it helps me to know that they’re also funny sometimes. And finally, it helps to remember that being stuck with your leg in the air and your lap full of water means that you are in it, as the Irish say: you exist, you are alive, you are a vital piece of energy struggling into a new form. Funny that is, yes – and noble, too.

And so worth it.

March 28, 2010

Waiting on the Light

Filed under: Uncategorized — kate @ 10:19 pm

I’m intoxicated by the changing light, heartened by it, buoyed up on the extra minutes and last moments of slanting golden light. My friend Nick Roosevelt is offering a retreat in May all about the light that different spiritual traditions can cast in our lives, and the beautiful possibilities of tasting some of those traditions and experimenting with a blend of them. I’ll be there to talk about the nature-based spirituality of the Celtic tradition and to perform a concert of songs and tales on Saturday night. I’ll also be drinking up the time with Swami Dayananda, whom I adore, and learning from her and the Quakers about the questions and practices at the heart of their worship. I attended a version of this retreat last year at the Summer Solstice and felt changed and enriched by it.

Here is a flier for the event with Nick’s contact information in case you’d like to attend. The pdf may be a bit slow to load but you could consider it a practice-run for “waiting on the light”!

Waiting on the Light

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