Little Big Birds

There are few places on this earth where the names of towns carry the weight of abandonless hope.  Here in Montana, Wisdom, Opportunity, Sunburst and even Big Timber conjure up the sense of our internal West.  The idea that life is elsewhere and that elsewhere is where you have arrived.  There's even the main street of Helena, that illustrates this perfectly: Last Chance Gulch.  History claims four men from Georgia had travelled all over Western Montana in search of gold, finding nothing, they decided to take one last chance on a small stream which runs down the main street of this state's capitol.  And sure enough, they found gold.

On a late October day, I found myself in need of some hope too.  So I took myself on a one day road trip.  A solo road trip.  When the mountains aren't snow-ski ready and trails drench with cold mud, the warmth of a car seems almost like a vacation.  Rolodexing through my mind for things I enjoy, I decided to head to Helena to see the Holter Art Museum, but maybe also because Boulder Hot Springs is just a mere 30 more miles away.  The day was grey, washed out by intermittent rain squalls, but with sudden bursts of golden sun.  The larch gleamed.  My car played and re-played Cat Power's latest CD, Sun.  And when I arrived in Helena, all I wanted to do was take photos of sky, afternoon light on brick and get lost in the fact I could stand in front of a de Kooning brought out on a train from New York by a family who wanted to ranch.  It was titled Woman and full of the same muddled mustard of the late October larch I had passed for over a hundred miles.

I had not been on a solo road trip in over five years, the last being when I drove into Missoula with my car full, two bikes and a cat, late one Tuesday night just a week before Halloween.  Ironically, it had been almost five years to the date, so my solo road trip to see art and soak, was a bit of an anniversary.  But what was I celebrating, really?  Independence, which really wasn't what I wanted at 38.  Freedom, which is thrilling and all my married friends with toddlers tell me how lucky I am, but after a divorce, I've learned it pays a heavy price.  As I let my body float and watch the last of the light fade into the Continental Divide, I settled on a word to celebrate: hope.  

But hope is tricky.  Sure, we recall hope was also in Pandora's box, which according to myth contained all the evils of the world.  Despair, grief and anger to name a few seemed to have scrunched themselves tightly in the corner wrapped with hope until they were all released.  And here's the thing: When you go in search of hope, the odd part is, you have to have enough of it already to believe there is more.  As if hope is gold for the soul.  But furthermore, you cannot believe hope is only one-sided, either just evil or just good.  Again, tricky.  So why would I want to celebrate hope, if it isn't something to have or hold?

While I was floating in the pool, I watched the late autumn clouds move quickly across the sky.  A couple maybe in their 60's perhaps not married, but close, sat in the pool holding their bodies up in the water with neon colored noodles.  They spoke of the election.  They had different opinions.  But they listened to each other, carefully.  The spoke of music. Music they liked to play passionately.  They didn't interrupt each other and enough laughter surfaced between them to keep their conversation light, but intimate.  

I went and dressed and poured myself a cup of coffee from my thermos.  Still hot.  I sat in my car and kept waiting for some shade of loneliness to set in, a full day not talking to anyone, I thought some sense of dusk would rise to elude me.  But it didn't.  And I didn't want it.  I wanted to see the day in more than one shade.  Simply, I had hope that I could keep the darkness on the outside of the car while I headed west for Missoula.  And for the most part I did, until I merged along the same stretch of road I recalled coming back on late one June after eloping, so full of hope and future.  I let the memory pass.  Not with tears, nor with anger, or remorse, not even a whiff of judgement or a shadow of pure loss.  Nope.  I just let it pass.  Because hope, thankfully, isn't something to hold, but to understand as impermanent.  

As Emily Dickinson claimed, "Hope" is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ and never stops--at all--.  As if hope can come and go, can fly to leave or arrive, but regardless of direction, the bird continually sings.  It is not the bird we need, but the knowing of the song.  And maybe, our hearts are the little big birds full of noise we can choose to hear as song.  Enjoy.  Another revised poem/ song

Hymn of the Pigeon

She finds a pigeon, dead

on her way home.  She's drunk,

swears the stars can lead her

to her front door.

Feet curled, taut with it's eyes gone, 

laying outside a drug store.

She picks up the still body

covered in gravel and warm.

Cupping the chest, she feels

an echo of a pulse, a pebble skipped

into a shallow pool.  Finds a box,

and nestles the blind bird with rosemary,

not knowing what to do with anything

born-again.  She feeds it oatmeal,

drops of water and waits

for it to do something.  Fly,

coo or shit, but it just rocks

back and forth like this boy

with dark glasses she watched

on a bus, who sang in perfect pitch.

Now she hears the song

of a meadowlark, far from her home

in fields of burnt grass, without

asking the world its name.

A Nun in a Truck

Every week Sister Maria would drive a pick-up truck to campus for English lessons.  The campus was Northern Michigan University, snug on the shores of Lake Superior where winter came strong in late October and stayed as long as it wanted.  But as for the English lessons, Sister Maria didn't really need them having been educated in Latin, French and English since age four in a convent in Thailand.  Not only did Sister Maria speak nervously perfect English and flawless quiet French, she could belt the harmonica while playing the guitar and it wasn't just hymnals.  Her collective favorites included Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and The Beatles.  Blackbird was one of her favorites sang while taking breaks between studying for her TOEFL test and saying prayers for other students who had colds and sore throats. 

In that small class of English as a Second Language students that semester, Sister Maria wasn't the only nun.  Sister Juliana who hailed from Korea was also a very active and eager member who as you might have guessed it, also religiously did her homework.  Sister Juliana, who had once run a hospital in Seoul, yes that's right, ran a hospital, was both educated in Eastern Medicine as well as had gone to Medical School.  Needless to say, the textbooks geared towards apathetic teenagers learning English for the hopes of finding some cultural social exchange during a holiday in New York City a hopeful job in London, seemed well, dated and not quite applicable. Try telling nuns to pretend they are at a bar, "just small talk you know, speak casually."  Small talk in the minds of those who dedicate their lives to poverty and wear wedding rings bound in holy matrimony to God, well, small talk is hard to convincingly model.  So I had to adapt a lot of exercises to seem not only relevant, but also relatable.

But truth be known, I may have helped these women increase their TOEFL scores and gave them endless exercises on the present perfect, but really, they taught me more than I could have asked for that semester.  It was late fall and I had been riding my mountain bike into the golden dales around the Upper Peninsula where autumn color rusted out the grey sky.  Spent late afternoons riding after teaching in towns named Negaunee, Ishpeming and as far as the Keewanaw.  Pushing my body to memorize trails, to ride faster and sometimes more reckless that I would ever tell the nuns or anyone for that matter.  Fond memories of that semester include riding into the night with a headlamp as if the cold air pressured your lungs as if you were riding under water into the cold, the cold off Superior Lake which for those who know, don't ever forget it's power.  It's terrible cold beauty.

And one late October day, I was riding with a group of friends, mostly males younger than myself by a decade.  Sure, call me stupid or just determined.  If you want to get really good at a sport, ride with people better and stronger and spend your time watching what they do and always keep up.  Which I could apply to the nuns that semester as well.  If you want to ask challenging questions of your own self, spend some time with a group of Asian nuns who have not only dedicated their lives to Christianity, but culturally and interpersonally understand Buddhism well.  Want to spend some time working your head around the terrible beauties of your soul? Hang out with a South Korean Nun who reads people's energies, palms and looks into your retinas for answers from her readings of both the Bible and the Buddha.  

And so one day, I came to class with a broken left ring finger.  I had been on a mountain bike ride and navigated through a rocky knoll and fell.  Brushed off the gravel and dirt to see my finger deformed and without hesitation tried to set the finger back.  Later having gone for x-rays and to find nothing broken, the pain would still not subside.  At first, the nuns shook their heads, "Why so busy on your bike Emilee?" To which I told them that it was my way of prayer, but a bit more active than sitting in a pew.  I prefer to sweat out my existential questions.  But the pain in my finger did not go away even after almost two months.

I was rubbing my finger during break one day and Sister Juliana came over.  She sat down very close so as no one could hear her and said, "Emily, your finger has been broken long before you fell on bicycle" (Don't worry we worked on the definite article and prepositions a lot).  She continued, "Emily, I see you.  Your left finger is connected to your heart.  And your heart has been broken for very long time.  Long before.  You need to feed your heart Emiliee, you need to give food, meat, some power, you know, Emilee, yes?"  But really, I didn't.  Our break was up and Sister Juliana shook her head, not in frustration, but rather due to a loss in translation. "No worries, tomorrow I bring."

And sure enough, the next day, Sister Juliana brought in what we might consider a Bento box of some fresh venison.  "Only 24 hours old, killed by the man who fixes lightbulbs, male deer, more power Emilee. You must eat it today. Must only cook three minutes, each side." After our lesson, I put the Bento box in my bag and peddled home as I always did, up 3rd street, up and towards the wind that is always in my mind and felt on my face off of that Great Lake.  My cat meowing, the wood floor echoed from my steps and my absence.  My cat jumped on the counter and then shook his head as I uncovered the dark steak under perfectly folded wax paper, drips of blood and even a few wisps of hair.  My cat jumped away. Cast iron pan readied with a bit of olive oil and my eyes on my wrist watch.  I seared the steak as followed and placed on a white plate and watched the color bleed.  Watched as for the first time I sat with the smell of something more alive than butchered.  More beating than bled.  

I'd love to tell you I ate that steak with wild abandon.  Love to tell you I walked out of that kitchen, steak in my stomach and myself placed in this world.  Heart set back in place like my crooked finger.  Love to tell you I went back to Sister Juliana with clear retinas and a new sense of self clarity that only being in the wilderness can give you.  Sure, no matter how much I had felt like a deer in the woods, riding all hours and temperatures, had walked those woods alone and unafraid, no matter the good nun's intension, I didn't feel different.  I wanted to, wanted to tell Sister Juliana she was right.  But I cannot.  I cannot lie as much as I wish I could.  Spend enough time in the wilderness and with the spirit of nuns, and your soul is about as beveled as any glass window will ever be.  You are forced, open.  I sat with that venison and the smell forcing myself to chew.  Chewed it all. And nothing changed.

Or so I thought.  It didn't happen the next day, or even the next month and I cannot fully tell you it happened the following year either.  But I can tell you now, now after all these years and broken layers of my heart later, something has changed.  I can feed myself.  Sure, it might not always be or need to be venison, might just be an apple with cheese standing in my galleyed kitchen or a bowl of salmon chowder at a table by myself, or a pear and sausage pie for someone I love, regardless of the meal, I make something.  I make sure I am fed.  And as my good friend says, who is not a nun, but has the resident status of soulful understanding as someone holy would say, "And so you learn to mother yourself, when you are broken, feed yourself like a mother would." And so Sister Juliana you were right.  

Here's a revised version of a poem, 
nun sponsored with love. 

Atrium

I stopped believing in birds for awhile.  
A nun said my heart was broken, before
I started dating.  Even a sparrow
in an unlocked cage waits to start singing.
To mimic off-key is song, but not song
of yourself.  Before the cross of Romans,
men followed the flight of swallows 
to build temples as nests for their gods.  
But I cannot live in city gardens, more poppy 
along train tracks in Poland.  To field yourself
in countries where orchard is season, is to rejoice 
the potato as pigeon.  Use your tongue as dove.  
Divorce yourself from the body 
as burden.  You're an atrium of love.


















  

Underwear as Super Powers

During the summer of 1979, I wore two articles of clothing.  One being a green one-piece swimsuit and the other a coveted and often garbed outside in the garden or woods, two-piece Wonder Woman Underoo set.  I recall wearing those blue star specked underpants and red with golden emblem undershirt with such sure pride in knowing I possessed super strength.  So sure that when my cousin, my same age came to visit, we were going to practice our underwear driven powers.

My cousin Tim owned Superman Underoos which made our collective abilities in my mind, insurmountably superior.  We ran on fallen tress, jumped off steep hills to roll and find ourselves unscathed, hardly scratched and fully and supremely powerful.  Until we found a pile of concrete blocks.  I remember yelling as I picked up a piece of broken block, "Tim, use your super-strength and break this block with your x-ray vision," as I hurled it at his head.

Needless to say, Tim's x-ray vision, super-breath and boy of steel strength jammed as the rock came at thankfully a five year-old's speed towards his head.  Tears, blood and six stitches at the hospital later, I still recall saying to my mother in full earnestness, "But we both had our super powers, I thought Tim was going to blow up the rock, I swear."  I swore I was Wonder Woman.  I had no idea my "powers" could also include actually hurting someone.  Thought my underwear was just a vehicle to the power I possessed.  Maybe this is what Victoria Secret tries to tap into the female minds of once Underoos wearers?

Thankfully, Tim still talks to me, doesn't have any visual scars and finds this story only a fragment of a funny memory.  But during a recent reading of Rob Brezsney's Free Will Astrology, I was reminded of the idea of super powers again.

If it were in my power, I'd help you identify the new feelings you have not yet been able to understand.

I would infuse you with the strength you would need to shed the worn-out delusions that are obstructing your connection to far more interesting truths.  And I would free you from any compulsion you have to live up to expectations that are not in alignment with your highest ideals.  Alas, I can't make any of these things happen all by myself.  So I hope you will rise to the occasion and perform these heroic feats under your own power. 

Okay, sure, perhaps you might think of astrology as being about as believable as a five-year old using their underwear as a means to tap into "super strength".  But maybe it doesn't matter.  Maybe all we need to know is that believing makes it so.  And what we believe is our power.

Let's look at Wonder Woman for example.  According to William Moulton Marston, the creator of  Wonder Woman, she represented, "a distinctly feminist role model whose mission was to bring the Amazon ideals of love, peace, and sexual equality to a world torn by the hatred of men." She does this by her own super powers which include, superhuman strength and speed, limited telepathy, profound scientific knowledge and the ability to speak every language known to man and beyond.  She is even fluent in caveman and Martian. (Seriously, I cannot make this up, just google it.)  But what I find most fascinating about Wonder Woman besides her fashion sense, are her bulletproof bracelets and her lasso of truth.  The fact she can make people be truthful seems far more powerful than bangles of fire.

This past summer when all of Missoula was covered in a layer of smoke for six weeks, I desired some sort of super powers to make the smoke go away.  Instead I went to some dark places in my head.  A lot of people had a hard time.  Imagine waking up everyday and thinking you are on a set for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Your dreams are filled with ash and opening the window you're filled with the scent of burnt toast. Thankfully during week four of the smoke, we left the valleyed city for a weekend in Glacier Park.  Truth be known, I had hoped to drive north and find ourselves literally crossing into a world of blue clear air.  We kept driving and driving and even to the entry of the Park there was a faint hint of smoke, the taste still heavy in the air.  Thankfully, we were determined to climb and this photo is taken from almost the top of Allen Mountain.  Truth be known, I never doubted getting to the top, but knew I needed some internal powers to make it there.  Ironically, Wonder Woman underoos are not sold in adult sizes or I would have worn them that day.

But that day climbing Allen Mountain as I did on that same summer day when I hurled concrete, I used strength I didn't think I had.  We all posses super powers.  It's just not something we wear in the form of a bangle or cape.  It's believing in the strengths we already have.  But here's the hard part, our strengths are also our greatest weakness.  Our strength to be able to hurt someone can be as strong as our ability to love.  You don't need a lasso of truth to figure that out nor do you need the right underwear.  It is just putting action toward making your ideals, real instead of imaginary.  Sometimes just one word at a time.

Here's a new poem.
Enjoy.

Volleyball in Hell

Charon carts you across to a gym,
concrete congested with the pang
of body odor trapped under polyester.
Positioned under a net, forced to play
volleyball with a group of semi-professional
Evangelists who you only disappoint. Charon,
now gym teacher, blows a whistle
with your every move, fouling out
your life, your now un-life where you didn't bring
any skills suited to win.  You, who never high-fived,
never arrived triumphant to a high school
locker room.  Your god didn't ass-slap
or pick sides.  More architect burdened
by the arc of a butterfly, built sky
to net stars and you, junior varsity
who forgot their shoes.  Perfectly unimproved.

Carl Benner Doesn't Talk Much

Carl Benner doesn't talk much.  Carl, who I have known since age four as my good friend's dad, spent years walking to and from their home to the hospital at all hours of the day and night.  Carl was a vascular surgeon and in the mind of a four year-old that meant when you played the board game Life and landed on being a doctor, you made the most money.  But in reality, Carl was rarely home and when he was he was usually really quiet.  It wasn't until later in life that I had the fortunate opportunity to talk with Carl.

One summer I had been going to the hospital everyday to check on a good friend of mine, George a 99 year-old man, who was dying.  I had no idea what to do other than go and sit and when he would wake remind him of where he was and sometimes who he was.  Needless to say, I don't think I was very helpful. Perhaps when you get that old the last place you want to be is in a hospital and if you are, you hope you came as someone else.   But for two weeks straight, I went everyday after a writing job I had at a local magazine.  All day working on articles about wood ducks and accessible walking trails, late afternoons at the hospital drinking water out of paper cups and trying to ignore the smell as much George was trying to forget where he was.

I recall going to my childhood friend's house after one of these visits, but only to find Carl.  And maybe it was because I had been in the awkward silent hospital for hours next to a dying man that when I saw Carl, I wanted to talk.  Or maybe it was because I wanted to talk to someone who would tell me what I was supposed to do in a hospital: bring music, cribbage, read the Wall Street Journal or make soup.  I just hadn't been around anyone lying out their last days in a hospital bed and I wanted to make sure I was helpful.  Carl laughed.  He told me that's there is nothing right or wrong to do other than to comfort someone, which seems about what you are supposed to do when someone is just as alive as they are dying.  Makes sense.  But Carl also said, "You know Emily, people walk around all their lives thinking there is this great wall between life and death, but really, really it's just a thin line.  And you or I or anyone can cross it at any time."

I've been thinking about that line a lot lately.  No, not so much in the existential sense, but about the idea of lines we build in ourselves.  Lines people draw against you, lines you draw against someone else, lines or walls we build to have as some social worker told me on a chair lift once, "healthy boundaries lead healthy lives."  We see chalked-drawn lines in political ads, debates, arguments, wars, and as you might have guessed it, lines we create in the process of a divorce.  Again, just try to google that idea.  You can google the ideas of anger and retribution with better results than you will with regret.  A lot of break up songs have lyrics of loss and sadness, but not so much on forgiveness and far more rarely can you find a song that isn't a hymnal about forgiving yourself.  Or as my sister has referred to this stage of loss, "yeah, that's the country western song stage of divorce, when everything feels like an absolute."  And maybe for some people, lines or absolutes are part of the process of loss for something you cannot ever have back.

The photo at the top is from Moon Lake in Glacier Park and I adore the reflection of the mountain and snow in the water.  It's hard to differentiate between reflection and mountain.  Hard to see a clear line between.  And this is where I am today.  Maybe you are too in this early autumn air between the warm sun and the cooling coming of winter.  Seasons help with the abstract concepts of the heart.  They remind us of how real change takes so much time and how lines are really useless. And autumn is such a thin line between golden leaves and winter whites.  But when we can sit with it, just sit with the inbetweens maybe then can we become present, and maybe that thin line Carl told me about, isn't so scary, but more like a gift.

Here is another old poem, but one I hope you enjoy about sometimes the best thing you can do for another, including yourself, is just sit with it.

Enjoy.


Men in Parks

In Kielce, I was mugged
by a man who wore eyeliner.
With three teeth,
he told me I was beautiful.

Here, most men in parks smell
of foul meat, wash their faces
in beer and piss
standing up.

They curse Mary,
their mothers and call out
to Cyclops or buses
they never get on.

One night, I passed a bus
stop and heard a man crying
Przeprazam, Przeprazam,
Polish for sorry.

I just sat with him in the snow
and never once tried
to say anything. I just nodded,
and mouthed the word with him.

Storm Troopers Coming out of the Woods

My sister met a man who dresses up as a Storm Trooper for birthday parties in a Kroger parking lot.  Yup, just like that.  Just like that the highlight of a toddler's birthday went from cake in the shape of a hammer to a group of adult men, who might work for a local insurance company or maybe at a tech lab, but in their free time: they run out of the woods dressed as storm troopers.  She told me she's debating about hiring Darth Vader for an extra fifty bucks.  I asked if there were any Ewoks.  Sadly, there are not.  And no, none of these men will reenact any of the battle scenes.  Not even as you might hope, Darth Vader verses Obi-Wan Kenobi.

And really, I cannot stop thinking about how these men will drive, not in costume but perhaps all four in a Honda Civic, up to my sister's new home, nestled in hills and woods outside of Nashville, to "gear up" and hide until they are given a cue to descend upon the backyard of birthday goers and well, do their storm trooper thing.  Which personally is unclear.  All I know is I am so enamored by these men because personally, for the last year, all I want to do is hide in some costume.

You see when you get a divorce there is a list, a long list of things, you cannot google.  You cannot google all the things that keep you wanting to hide, but you can google hiring Storm Troopers for a toddler birthday party.  You can google pretty much anything these days and the odd thing is while you are typing in your request such as how to move on..You might get how to move on Sims 3, which I really have no idea what Sims 1 let alond 3.  But you don't really care because as soon as you type in any words in regards to divorce, depression, forgiveness, living in the same town as your ex, etc. you realize you might as well, move on.

And so you do for while.  You move on, you wear your own storm trooper costume of sorts, very well-organized outfits, you make sure you have a good hair cut, you eat breakfast, do daily sit-ups, borrow weights from a friend and you even try dating because well you've moved on.  But while you are on your first date, the lovely-handsome man across the table asks you for a piece of paper to deposit his gum.  You look in your purse which is the purse you haven't used since the court date and all you have for paper is the receipt you paid for your lawyer.  And to which you say, here why don't you use this?  Extending your shaky hand with the paper, he puts his gum out and you fold the paper and put it back in your purse.  Because really, you've moved on.

There are countless ways you've moved on such as falling in love with the quiet of your immaculate apartment.  While you dust a closet of your new "home" which you fondly refer to as junior dorm, you find a small magnet once used for poetry and it is a simple word, me.  You cannot ignore the irony and again you look at the now very clean closet and think, not really that bad of a place to hide.  But you cannot.  You have a job.  A good job where you teach people how to cook, where people feel so at ease with you that they ask you questions in front of other people listening and knives in their hands, Emily Walter, you've changed your name, did you get married? But you tell them no, I got divorced with such confidence and ease to ensure no one, especially the person who asked the question, feels awkward.  Because remember, you've moved on.

Despite your amazing ability to look good everyday, your apartment to look like an Anthropologie catalog, your dedication to eating well and having friends over for dinner parties and your painful choice to break up with that incredibly handsome and kind man who spat out his gum and who you broke up with because you needed to "deal" with yourself.  You tell yourself you're really doing all the "right things".  But remember you cannot google this.  You cannot google what is right or wrong or the fact that you have metaphorically and now literally dusted yourself up.  And what is harder, you've dusted up the idea of yourself in the quiet, clean and morally right parts of you in a dust bin you took while storming out of your once home.  At the moment, you cannot storm anything.  Now, you are falling apart.  Really you cannot move.  There's no on or off switch to falling apart really.  And again, don't even try to google it.

Sure, you've memorized all the five stages of grief, you can google that, but no where and no one can tell you how to sit with grief.  Sure, you've read almost every Buddhist book the lovely woman who washes dishes at work has given you on loss.  You've read When Things Fall Apart given to you by the loving and kind woman who has an organic orchard and has been divorced, twice.  People who understand give you so much.  But you have to sit with it.  Just you.  And this is what no one tells you.  This is the part of loss that you cannot get out of nor hide from or costume yourself no matter how badly you want to make it look like something else.  Even if you want to refer to yourself as a divorcee because it sounds French.  You and only you get to sit with loss until you start to write a new story.

And so, middleWest which I started years ago as a way to get back into writing regularly, to share recipes and poems and insights is back on Wednesdays (in the middle of the week seems logical, right?) It is still about the idea of being in the middle of your life as a means to explore your dreams you still want to reach.  I am just well, writing from a different angle than before.  

And of course a(n old) poem, I couldn't resist:

Placing Her

There's no mirror in the sea.  I google 
my name to see if I exist and surf
the waterless cities like Cash and Hoople
to find eighteen version of myself.
I live in New Jersey and scream Wagner
at trains.  Sometimes rooster brag
in my fourth floor walk up.
The best version of myself teaches preschoolers
to bend forks after nap time.  I believe this
reduces crime.  I want to call myself, ask,
do you believe in the myth of Emily Walter?
Forget about the nightmares of Katherine Hepburn.
Forget about your mother as Katherine Hepburn
alone in her underwear.  I am more than 
glass and less than the sea.  I don't look like
either of them in a dress.

Every Sailor needs A Sea

When the snow falls between the hours of December and January, a new year turns. Just like that. A sleep later and you will need to remember to write the date differently, to remember you will turn a year older and to remember that winter has just begun in a sea of white. The second hand moves to the pulse of snow falling outside your window.

Luckily this past new year as the clock arched it's way to midnight, I was standing in an American Legion Bar in Libby, Montana. We, my husband, our friend Ian and his girlfriend, Kassi, all had weak drinks in plastic cups to cheer as the country western band kept playing a slow Merle Haggard. The whole scene of aged couples--women with newly coiffed hair and men with worn cowboy hats danced with belt buckle to sequined top in a twirl like a long poem songed on a worn-out dance floor. We cheered as the neon clock clicked to midnight. We welcomed our luck having set sail out from a winter storm and landed in a warm north western Montana bar.

The next day we moved slow to put our layers onto ski. Our destination was a ski hill, Turner Mountain, which none of us had ever been to and some of us had never even heard of. The night previously as Ian and my husband, Greg, checked into the hotel the owner said, "you guys know what you are doing goin up there to Turner? It's like.." And he used his right hand, angled at a pitch of 90 degrees. "It's well, it's pretty steep."

As we slowly made our way up to the mountain on a crisp clear January 1st morning, we were headed into an area referred to as The Yaak. I have no idea why The Yaak is called this for no animals of the sort live there at least that I know of, but in a way, the name suits the place: mountainous, northern pitch of snow and wilderness. The winding road was densely forested on either side and that morning we weren't too anxious to get anywhere. We went slow. We climbed west in the minivan, but as we looked up to the rising mountains out of the trees we could see a lone ski lift, slowly moving chairs into the clouds. Or so it seemed. We couldn't believe our luck. Again.

We finally reached the parking lot and realized we had all spent our cash the night before and wondered if we could use our cards. Kassi and I headed into the lodge where a modest wood stove pumped heat and a kiosk of sorts had one person behind an aged cash register. The lodge had views of the Cabinet mountains and a few skiers were sitting on long school lunch room tables drinking cocoa from white styrofoam cups. I couldn't decide if we had landed in paradise or a part of the eighties? Some odd whimsical world where the new year was a clock turning back, back and back. I half expected a yak to walk up and want to be fed.

But when the kid behind the kiosk said, "yeah, we take cards." He pulled out what I used to use at my mom's clothing store back in the early 80's for credit cards, a boat anchor of what you could barely call a machine. We signed our carbon copies, gathered our tickets and went out to ski. The day was bright and bold. Beginning our new year in a place we all felt we could have been before. Not a place we had passed in our youth or a place we would have placed as some distanced memory. A place we would want to return to over and over again. The kind of place where you visit before you fall asleep and all you see is bright light from a numb sun. Crystaled light glittering off waves of white. Smiles from your lover in silence backdrop. Memory of your private sea you keep for nights of restlessness.

And that day was endless. We skied all day into the sun, into the leeward drifts, through the glades of open trees and open to what the new year had in store for all of us. We put our faces to the sun as the slow lift brought us up to the top. We just kept saying how amazing our luck had been to find such a place. As if we had found some place we had always wanted to go, but didn't know had exisited before. A place to turn over a year and feel the westering in our lungs as we looked at mountains and clear air.

For many a new year arrives with fog from the night before and a mirror of resolutions. January first arrives with the resolute intention to mark change, newness as if we begin to do push-ups for our brain--to muscle out the old voices and actions we might have grown comfortable with, but know are no longer healthy. But really, in January? In the beginning of the wintering, the new tide of snow that just begins to rise. January really isn't the time for abrupt change. It is a time of quiet reflection of wintering and feeling placed.

For years, I have kept a piece of paper my father gave me that hangs next to my desk. Sent to me in a lone envelope. It's a quote from Emily Dickinson from a letter she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1862.

The Sailor cannot see the North,
but knows the Needle can.

And for years, I kept thinking the needle was something outside of me-some device or some thing. I believed in the metaphor, the meaning, and of course the messenger, but I questioned what was my needle? What mechanics did I have in me to be set in the right direction. Maybe it seems a bit odd, but that day, that first day of January as we rode up into the sky of what seemed like the end of Montana and maybe the end of this earth and into some other world, I had this feeling of direction. I felt placed in a cloud of snow. The needle came to me not some apparatus, but rather a deepening of faith in what I cannot always see, but know is there.

Simply, the needle is awareness in being present...whatever we do to help us be, here. And this is my wish to you, to do what you need to do to be present. To be here even if you cannot see where you are as a place of purpose, know and trust that the needle can. Every sailor needs a sea. Every person needs faith that they also contain a needle in them. And really, north is not the only direction worth heading towards.

So whatever it is skiing, reading, cooking, sailing or singing may you do it with earnestness and faith. May you all feel placed. Happy New Year.

Enjoy the poem.

Earnest Ode

When the sailors are sick of seal fat and salt,

the captain leaves his men like urchins, sails

with a carpenter to South Georgia Island

to climb a mountain in Wellingtons.

Boots suited to plant hydrangeas in the spring

mud of London. He crawls up a glacier of rock,

ice hinged on the South pole. Spring never arrives here

with signs of dirt. It unbuckles from the island of ice

the captain staggered over with twenty-seven men

and the cook’s cat, Mrs. Chippy, the only one left for dead.

Another hunches over his typewriter, thumbs

his beard and tries to write from a spit of marsh

land in Florida. His night sweats smell of hotel

sheets in Cuba, where he never writes or sleeps.

So he returns to the Keys, stales the day

with his six-toed cat, Diego. Sure, there’s gazelle

heads, the tiger from Bengal, but he doesn’t like to look

at cats. He likes to say the word nada, Our nada

who art in nada and sees his father

as an old man on a bridge, somewhere with snow.

And yet, it’s the puppet that gets us.

More monster than man, muppets live together

on one street, where all animals speak.

Unlike Mt. Olympus, muppets don’t travel

much. They teach us to share, like the one

who lives with his partner in a small apartment.

He ruffles Bert’s hair, buys him pajamas,

and writes him songs he sings in the bath,

keeps the door open enough, so Bert will hear

Yes, I'd like to visit the moon
But I don't think I'd like to live there
Though I'd like to look down at the earth from above
I would miss all the places and people I love.

Santa wears a Speedo and swims with Carp

I must confess, I have not tried Christmas carp. Yes in many countries in Eastern Europe the Christmas Eve meal, usually a thirteen course feast, celebrates the prized carp. Now for anyone who may think I have mis-translated the celebratory fish as perhaps salmon or even sol. Nope. Carp.

The winter of 1999 in Europe came in epic proportions of cold, snow and relentless storms. I was living in Kielce, Poland just over an hour north of Krakow in the rolling dales which claim to have the cleanest air in the country as well as being coined the "knife city." Luckily, I rarely saw anything more than men crying in public and pissing while they walked in circles in snowed parks. But what I vividly recall that winter were the women bundled in multiple head scarves, slowly walking from their homes to the city center where a large vat of cold water kept a collection of carp. Not your typical lobster tank with glass, rather more like a large metal garbage container with a step ladder. A man stood with a shovel and a large net, to break the occasional ice that would form a film above the sleepy slow carp, to scoop for pointing bare-fingered babcias.

Most days like others in the city, I walked to work. That week before Christmas it was like a repeated scene, a woman pointing, a man breaking some ice and scooping out a slow fat carp, weighing it and then wrapping it in plastic. The women would lug their wriggling fish back to their home for their annual Christmas Eve clubbing and then eating a celebration of fried fish.

As I confessed, I never had Christmas carp. I went home to Michigan that Christmas. But that last week of school, I finally broke down and asked my students, "so why carp?" They looked at me, all of them from the six to 17 year-olds, as if I had asked them Why Santa? Now, you have to remember, one must be very careful in asking about traditions in a foreign country for you might be asked to defend your own publicly noted "tradtions". Take for instance our gun laws and obesity. All of my students said with blank faces, carp is for luck. "Emilika, fried carp is neeca, really. Ees looki. You know, good fortune. Happy days. Luck in the future."

Now, don't get me wrong I have seen a lot of carp in my days. But nothing that seemed festive or even edible. The carp of my youth were alien fish in the bottom of Lake Michigan gorging on garbage and too often surfaced showing odd bulbous tumors. They seemed like the last fish, perhaps more like a dare really to ingest and perhaps not anything to celebrate, rather to feel sorry for. But really, how would you defend the Thanksgiving turkey when for all that we all know the poor Pilgrims really ate shellfish and nut meats. Hell, maybe they even ate carp?

I've been lucky to have lived in many different countries over the holidays from eating what seems a bit easier to ingest, panatone in Italy, fried cheese in Slovakia and even recall, shrimp on a barbie in Australia. But it is truly the time I spent in Poland, I cherish the most. Because the carp just seem like a metaphor. To search out a carp, kill it in your bathtub and serve it for family and friends seems more about having some kind of faith. Some faith in appreciating what you already might have and not what you hope to get.

So this holiday I tried to make goodies with what I already had around the house. Here's a recipe for Bourbon Pecans. They could be considered a holiday treat. However, when you try these you will be inventing your own private holiday to make more. This recipe is from the Los Angeles Times and feel free to spice it up some more for your own taste.

Bourbon Pecans

1/2 cup top-quality bourbon
1 pound pecan halves
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon angostura bitters
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon finely ground black pepper

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
2. Simmer the bourbon in a small saucepan over medium heat until it's reduced by a quarter, just a few minutes.
3. Blanch the pecans in boiling water for one minute, then drain.
4. Combine the bourbon, oil, Worcestershire, bitters and sugar in a large bowl.
5. Add the hot pecans and toss. Let stand for ten minutes.
6. Spread the pecans in a single layer on a large baking sheet.
7. Bake until the nuts are crisp and the liquid has evaporated, 30 to 40 minutes, stirring every ten minutes.
8. Turn the nuts into a clean large bowl.
9. Combine the cumin, cayenne, salt and pepper in a small bowl.
10. Toss with the nuts and serve.

YIELDS: about 4 1/2 cups