37days

She had me at "cow town"

Oh, my.

I love to shop on Etsy. Real artists making art. I've made a conscious commitment to buy handmade.

My dream is to create a small shop at 37day.net that will include only handmade objects that relate to my blog and book (did I mention I've written a book?), so in service to that vision, I've been exploring Etsy to find artists whose work I love, then asking if they are interested in creating 37days art. (Are you interested? Please provide a link to your work in the comments!)

One day last week, I found beautiful tiles with words on them. My very favorite color. I wrote to ask.

Rachel wrote back. Turns out, that the very day I wrote to her was Day 37 of a big life change. She was struck by the synchronicity. So was I. Said she'd love to create some prototypes of tiles with the six practices for intentional living that are outlined in LIFE IS A VERB.

When she sent the photos of them, I burst into tears.

There is something about seeing art made from your words that defies description. I felt that way, too, when all the amazing art flowed in from readers around the world to illustrate the book.

I loved the tiles. Wanted to tile my kitchen so I'd see the six practices every morning when I wake up and stumble in there to make coffee. Wanted to tile my shower so I could meditate on them in the steam. Wanted to create a path of them in my garden. Wanted to carry them all in my handbag so when people irritate me as they are wont to do sometimes AND ESPECIALLY THIS WEEK FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON IS THERE A PLANET IN RETROGRADE?, I could reach in and feel the outline of the words and calm myself right down. I sent the photographs to Mr Brilliant:

"It must feel pretty good seeing your words incised in something (that isn't a tombstone). AND HEY:  speaking of tombstones, looks like she lives in the city where Oliver Loving is buried--remembered, Goodnight-Loving Trail? It was the promise Charlie G made to Oliver to carry his rotting corpse back to TX that inspired old Larry to write Lonesome Dove. So Oliver's trail ended there--she could probably drive there in 15 minutes and put a pebble on his grave if she was so inclined. Your potter lives a few miles from where the trail began for one of your favorite books. Pretty poetic. You should share with her--its a good story."

I think Larry McMurtry's novel, Lonesome Dove, is a Great American Novel. In fact, Mr Brilliant is working on a book about the series of McMurtry novels that are connected to Lonesome Dove. That's how much we like it.

I sent his story to the potter. "Yes!" she wrote back. "We DO live near where Charlie Goodnight is buried - at the Greenwood Cemetery - AND we live off of Greenwood Road. AND Lonesome Dove is one of OUR favorite books too - at LEAST once a year, we get out our Lonesome Dove CD set and watch the entire thing yet again.  We know it by heart. AND -  MY husband's name is Larry.  SO many parallels.  It is Synchronicity and  Serendipity."

She continued: "When I first read the book, Lonesome Dove, I was trail riding about once a month, living in Austin, and I grieved for an entire month when I finished it.  For Gus, AND for the book itself, that it was over.  I was so profoundly moved by that story and completely taken and emotionally involved with all of the  very colorful characters - of course, especially Gus McCrae.  And now I live here - at least 20 years later."

Synchronicity and Serendipity. Her beautiful Life is a Verb tiles will be available for sale (either individually or in a set of 6) soon in the 37 days shop. Do you like them as much as I do?

Unplug the phone

The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating. - Cesar Chavez

I was in my early 20s, in graduate school studying literature (mainly American) and art history (mainly the figure of the artist in fiction). There’s a huge employment market for people who have studied the figure of the artist in fiction, of course. My thesis was entitled “The Solids of Uccello: Near Recognitions of Reality in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions." It was a heady time, indeed. I was studying in an English Department then ranked first in the nation, in a school known as Mr Jefferson’s University that until 1970, just twelve years before, had been an all-male bastion.

The competition was fierce in the English department, though I didn’t realize just how fierce for quite some time. I thought it was all about the love of literature—and it was, in large part, but with an undercurrent of beating the other M.A. students for the few, precious slots in the Ph.D. program. It was particularly competitive if you happened to be a woman (though I didn’t know that either), because many longtime professors there still weren’t sure if going co-ed had been such a good idea after all.

There was only one tenured female professor in the department who, in a memorable conversation, told me that she had suffered deeply to get there and her intention was not to help other women by making it easier for them, but to ensure that every other woman suffered as much as she did so they would understand and appreciate the journey.

Evidently you cannot help without torturing the ones who follow you, I thought. I, myself, would rather sweep a path for them, show them the landscape, be—as Sun Tzu says in The Art of War--a local guide.

Friends like these you do not need, I thought as I sat across from this woman. “Is this what Walker Percy had in mind when he wrote about ‘handing one another along?’ I asked sweetly. Having studied his work in her class, it was a fully appropriate question, I thought. She was less amused.

One American literature professor stood out for me—I took many classes with him during my time at Mr Jefferson’s University—smart, demanding, a man who knew how to teach—in an institution that, frankly, put more emphasis on research and publishing than teaching. But this professor was a shining light, sure to get tenure. I loved his classes—funny, hard, smart. I would use the word “brilliant,” but you and I both know that word is taken.

I did well there, made all As my first year, and was named a DuPont Scholar that January. I noticed a difference in how the old guard treated me afterwards, as if I had emerged from the swamp of first year to become a Real Possibility for the Ph.D. program. It was a culture built on achievement and a department in which—quite literally—a “B” was equal to a “D” and even an “A-“ was nothing to write home about.

Those were heady days. My best friend there, Ken, used to crack me up with his Marlon Brando “On the Waterfront” impersonation: “I could-a been a critical theorist,” he would wail as we worked on papers that very nearly sucked all the life out of Melville and Eliot and Yeats.

My biggest learning there began on the evening of February 28, 1983, the night of the last M*A*S*H episode. I lived in Tucker Dorm at the time and those of us in the dorm had planned a party in the basement to watch the two-hour finale together.

Just as the episode started, my roommate ran down the stairs.

“Patti, your professor is on the phone.”

Poets explore infinite inwardness

A Table in the Wilderness       

I draw a window
and a man sitting inside it.

I draw a bird in flight above the lintel.

That's my picture of thinking.

If I put a woman there instead
of the man, it's a picture of speaking.

If I draw a second bird
in the woman's lap, it’s ministering.

A third flying below her feet.
Now it's singing.

Or erase the birds
make ivy branching
around the woman's ankles, clinging
to her knees, and it becomes remembering.

You'll have to find your own
pictures, whoever you are,
whatever your need.

As for me, many small hands
issuing from a waterfall
means silence
mothered me.

The hours hung like fruit in night's tree
means when I close my eyes
and look inside me,

a thousand open eyes
span the moment of my waking.

Meanwhile, the clock
adding a grain to a grain
and not getting bigger,

subtracting a day from a day
and never having less, means the honey

lies awake all night
inside the honeycomb
wondering who its parents are.

And even my death isn't my death
unless it's the unfathomed brow
of a nameless face.

Even my name isn't my name
except the bees assemble

a table to grant a stranger
light and moment in a wilderness
of Who? Where?

-Li-Young Lee

My thanks to Angie for introducing me to the poetry of Li-Young Lee.

[image from here]

Poets take us out on the bridge

With thanks to the poet, another poem you'll find in Life is a Verb:

Undressing the Muse

When Sonny Rollins walked onto that bridge
to play his saxophone to the wind
he was stepping off the stage
and into the woodshed.
It wasn’t a failure of nerve, of course,
nor was it only a deepening
of his craft. He was breaking
a voice apart
and refashioning it.
He was undressing his muse.

That’s what I want now:
less stage, more bridge
(the wind steady and relentless)
and room to go about
the private business of becoming—
nothing more, not a single iota less—
who I am meant to be.

-Sebastian Matthews

Maybe that's what we all need--less stage, more bridge, less audience and more wind, less show and more self. The room to go about becoming who we are meant to be. Sonny Rollins dropped out of the jazz scene for three years in 1959 and went out to play on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York. For three years he played on that bridge. Not playing for applause. Not playing for success. Not playing even to be heard, except from the inside out. Breaking apart his voice and refashioning it. Sometimes for 15 or 16 hours at a time.

Perhaps that's what we need to do. Go out on a bridge, alone, for three years. Not writing for page views or links, but writing to break our voices apart and put them back together as they were meant to be. Not writing for acclaim, but for purpose, intention, direction. Where "writing" is replaced with "knitting" or "sewing" or "painting" or "baking" or "parenting" or "loving"--your art form of choice.

With my wonderful friend Tony who was visiting from South Africa, I heard writer Junot Diaz curse speak this past Friday at a local college, just days after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his new novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Having just read his widely-acclaimed book of short stories, Drown, in the Bridging Differences Book Group I host at a local bookshop, I was intrigued to hear him read.

It took him 11 years after Drown to write Oscar Wao--why? Because he was perfecting his craft? Getting an MFA in writing? Learning how to use adjectives to greater effect? Dissecting the etymologies of the profanities he likes so much? Figuring out once and for all what the subjunctive case is? No, and no again.

"It wasn't about craft," he said. "I had to work on my humanity before I could work on the book. I had to become a better person before I could become a better writer. That's what took so long. The shortages in our compassion show up in our work all over the place," he explained. "I had to be a better human first."

"We all have a blind spot," Diaz continued. "And the funny thing is that our blind spots are exactly the same size and shape as we are." He smiled. "We are not as cute or as human as we think we are."

Like Sonny Rollins, like Junot Diaz, like poet Sebastian Matthews, perhaps we have to work on ourselves before we can work on our craft. Let's go play on a bridge. Let's refashion our voice, a more human voice. Let's play to the wind.

Poets help us inch forward

A Measuring Worm

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Constantly (for a lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.

It's as if he sent
By a sort of a semaphore
Dark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn't know it,
He will soon have wings,

And I, too, don't know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.

-Richard Wilbur

Maybe on the darkest of days, we are actually inching along a brilliant pink flower, but are on that part of the journey that holds the flower together, the black under hang of one petal beneath another, dark enough that we can no longer see the pink unless we continue inching along. And suddenly we emerge into sunlight, onto bright pink again, inching toward that center sun. We, too, will soon have wings. This is where trusting the journey means everything.

[Thanks to Stefan "Bob" Rennix for pointing me to this poem.]

Poets teach us that darkness is a gift

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. -Stephen Mallarme

This one is for Trudy.

Before you read today's poem, I want you to do something for me. I want you to find a small box in your house or office, something with a lid. Perhaps even something you love--a trinket made by a child or given to you by your grandmother or that you bought in Sri Lanka that time you went to Pita Kotte. Or a shoe box or the little plastic container that strawberries come in. All are equally valid and good and right. I'll wait right here while you find it. I'll even wait while you eat all the strawberries so you can use their box.

Now that you have the box, I want you to write one word on a tiny slip of paper. That word is Trudy.

I want you to fold up that tiny slip of paper and put it in your box with a prayer, a mojo, a lighting of a candle, a dance, a bite from a Twinkie, whatever you do to make wishes come true, do it. Every day for a month at 9:00 a.m. wherever you are, if you don't mind, take out Trudy's name and read it silently to yourself, moving your lips as you read. Then tuck it away again. We're going to will this woman healthy again, yes we are. And we can do it. You know we can.

Thanks to my friend Jodi for introducing me to the concept of a god box. That's what you've just created for Trudy. You can put other generous wishes and dreams and needs in there, too. I'll see you tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. Let's have faith in the darkness, in the night.

A poem from one of my very favorite poets, for Trudy:

You Darkness

You darkness from which I come,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence out the world,
for the fire makes a circle
for everyone
so that no one sees you anymore.

But darkness holds it all:
the shape and the flame,
the animal and myself,
how it holds them,
all powers, all sight -

and it is possible: its great strength
is breaking into my body.

I have faith in the night.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Poets teach us to look with our own eyes

Poetry should...should strike the reader as a working of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. -John Keats

We are a nation of seekers. We look outside ourselves for salvation, for what our perspective should be, for how and what to think, when turning the looking glass inward would better serve us.

Another Billy, a different one, one who probably didn't care to be called Billy, tells us so. I love his work, too. He will visit us again this month, I'm quite sure. For now, know that you are your own best muse. Treat yourself like one. Trust yourself to your own way of looking at things.

When I met my muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.

-William Stafford 

I think the Keats quote at the start of this post is exactly it. We see in poetry an expression of what we feel, and we recognize it, almost as a remembrance.

Women give up their light - Mileva Marić

A hip hip hooray out to little Albert Einstein on his birthday today. As he knows better than anyone, age is relative (har-de-har-har).

So let’s send a shout out to the man whose name is synonymous with genius. And let’s remind him that he owes his first wife, Mileva Marić, an apology, a life back.

When Mileva Marić turned 15, her father got special permission for her to take classes at an all-male prep school. She earned the highest grades in both math and physics, and started studying medicine in 1896. Soon after, she became only the fifth woman to be accepted at the prestigious Zurich Polytechnic, later known as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). That’s all to say that she was one smart cookie.

One of her classmates was Albert Einstein. Seventeen years old, he was just a boy. She was 21. He called her Dollie. She called him Johnny. Einstein’s parents opposed the relationship because she was too old, too bookish, disabled from birth because of a displaced hip, a Serb, and not Jewish.

Her grades started suffering and Mileva failed her final exams. Shortly after, she became pregnant. In the first of a lifelong series of horribleness, Einstein began to make excuses not to see her. Mileva gave birth to a daughter, Lieserl, and there is no record of Albert ever going to see the child. A year later, they were married, but when Mileva joined Albert in Bern to be married, the child was no longer with her. Either she died or was given up for adoption—no one knows.

Einstein’s most incredible year of work—1905—came during his marriage to Mileva, a woman about whom not much was known until the later publication of love letters between the two in which Einstein talks about “our work” and “our theory” and praises her intelligence. The argument still rages—did Mileva substantively contribute to his work? Did she actually do the math for him, as some say? Did she give up her life for him? As Mileva wrote to her friend, Helene, “…all that fame does not leave a lot of time for a wife. But what can be done, one person gets the pearl and the other just gets the shell?"

Join me at the Summer Institute...

Each summer for more than a decade, I've traveled to gorgeous Portland, Oregon, to teach at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication. Culture Camp, we call it.

Faculty and students from around the world create a fantastic residential community, on the Reed College campus, centered around cross-cultural, diversity, and other issues. I've been so fortunate to create and teach workshops with amazing colleagues from around the world at the Institute. More than that, I've been blessed to have participants in my classes who have taught me so much more than I could ever teach them.

This summer, I'll teach two five-day courses at the Summer Institute and would love to invite you to join me there, if not for one of my classes, then for one of the other amazing slate of workshops planned for this summer.

From July 14-18, I'll teach a course on experiential learning with my business and creative partner, David Robinson. From July 21-25, my amazing colleague Kichiro Hayashi will travel from Japan to teach a course with me on storytelling.

It is a magical gathering. We might even do some drumming or krumping. Come, join us.

Women do science - Rosalind Franklin

I'm afraid we always used to adopt--let's say, a patronizing attitude towards her. - Francis Crick

A man who would later become a friend wrote a book in the early 1980s called Women in the Workplace: A Man's Perspective, in which he posited the idea that men and women are different. “THEY ARE NOT!” I yelled in protest, too young to understand that noticing difference need not imply making a judgment. We were aboard a ship where we were attending a conference in the middle of the ocean, on deck, arguing, my 25-year-old self to his 50-year-old self.

Lloyd smiled knowingly from his vantage point of years (which, of course, irritated me even more). “I want you to notice what happens in a boardroom or meeting when a new project is announced,” he said quietly. “When the boss asks, ‘who can do this?’ all the men’s arms will shoot up immediately, and many of the women—who are likely far more capable—will sit and think to themselves, ‘well, I think I could do it, if I just studied some more or learned some more or had a chance to think through it more.’”

I’ve watched what he predicted play out in every organization I’ve worked in or with in the two decades since that day he and I first met. In part, that’s the story of Rosalind Franklin.

Her death certificate read, simply: "A Research Scientist, Spinster, Daughter of Ellis Arthur Franklin, a Banker,” when she died in 1958 at the tender age of thirty-seven.

Let’s leave “spinster” alone for the moment, as tempting as it is not to, and focus on the opening phrase, “A Research Scientist.”

Indeed.

If by “research scientist,” we mean “a scientist by the merits of whose groundbreaking work Watson and Crick were able to catapult themselves to the Pantheon of DNA and a Nobel Prize,” then, yes, she was a research scientist.