My Inner Ninja, Part I: The Sacred

Continued from January 17, 2012 post

The wolverine appears when I am far from my center, when I am not writing. Or maybe the wolverine is always here, and it is only my distance from the sacred that is creative expression that heightens my awareness of and vulnerability to his power, his potential for threat.

In the dream, a woman walked past our house. She pushed a baby in a stroller. Knotted around the handle was a short leash belonging to black Terrier who trotted just in front of the stroller. By this time, Henry and I were back in our yard, silent and still, just taking in the sunset. The wolverine crouched behind the berm, visible to us, but hidden to anyone outside our yard. The Terrier sniffed the air and growled and that’s when the wolverine lunged from behind the berm and landed at the woman’s feet. His hair and tail stood on end. The woman screamed. The baby cried. The Terrier lunged back at the wolverine, jerking at the end of his leash.

“It’s okay,” I told the woman. “He doesn’t attack. He’s just scary.”

That’s when the wolverine turned on me, baring his teeth, crouching low on his haunches as he circled around me. The woman disappeared. Henry was still in the yard, but he had turned his attention to the garden. He didn’t see us. I was afraid to yell, to upset the wolverine.

I woke up.

There is something of the sacred in my daily writing practice, something I had been missing when I had that dream. Like the dream Michelle who fumbled her way through mass, who felt unworthy and unprepared to hold the body of Christ or drink from His cup, I was frightened to pick up a pen, to open the Vessels folder and find that I could no longer relate to a place where I once felt at home. And rather than face that fear by writing or even reading my work, I allowed the shadows and murmurs that are always at play beneath the surface of my writing to inhabit my subconscious, where they took physical form in my dream.

I didn’t need Henry the woman or the Terrier to step between the wolverine and me. I just needed to feel close to my story again.

Next Week: My Inner Ninja, Part II: The Moves

My Inner Ninja, A Prologue

The night before last I dreamt that a shadow crept across our yard as Henry and I walked home from an evening mass that had taken place in an old warehouse. We had arrived late to the service, when the only place to sit or stand comfortably was at the front of the makeshift church. To get there, we had to walk up the narrow center aisle, which was crowded with other latecomers and a grumpy altar server who admonished me when I bumped into her serving tray. No sooner had we reached the front than a handsome gray haired woman pointed at Henry and me and motioned for us to follow her. The altar was in the center of the room, and the half dozen of us who had been chosen, along with the priest, the woman, and an altar boy formed a circle around it. It was time for communion, and we were to serve as Eucharistic ministers, a duty I once performed faithfully at student mass in the basement of St. Paul’s Church in Cambridge and, after college, as a Jesuit Volunteer at St. Martin’s parish in Belize City. But more than a decade had passed since I had last handled the body and blood of Christ, and I felt I should say something to the priest or the handsome woman, or at least make eye contact with Henry so that we could slip away together. But when I looked to Henry, he was standing in front of the priest, who was slipping a white robe, embroidered like a huipíl, over Henry’s head. There was one robe for each of us, and I was next.

That part of the dream ended before the priest got to me, before he set the host on my upturned palm and handed me the chalice from which to drink. And then Henry and I were walking home through a park that does not exist in our neighborhood (or perhaps even in our city), with acres of grass and a paved, curved, well lighted path cutting a diagonal from one corner of the park to its opposite. Our land, which in the dream had transformed from Atrisco dirt to the same lush grass carpeting the park, lay at the end of the path in a shallow valley created by a berm at the park’s edge. An expansive cottonwood marked our boundary. I was about to ask Henry what he thought of the mass, the robes, something I’d never before been asked to wear as a Eucharistic minister. That’s when the shadow passed over the cottonwood trunk and disappeared behind the berm.

“The wolverine,” I said.

Henry nodded. It wasn’t the first time the creature had come to us. I don’t know when he first appeared or why, but I understood—we both did—that he was and always would be part of our lives. He made me nervous, but I knew that fearing him was a choice. He had never bared his teeth or so much as growled at us. When he came, I sensed his presence on the perimeter of our property, just beyond my peripheral vision, and so long as I made no sudden movements, he stayed there. When he left, I knew in my body because I could once again breathe deeply.

Next Week: My Inner Ninja

Ambush

My writing coach, Demetria Martinez and I met yesterday for the first time in months. She patiently sat on her couch as I caught her up on my life since we last saw each other in July or August. I confessed that I had made very few visits to the studio to write, so few that I referred to these writing sessions as “visits,” rather than work or daily practice. I had one good week in December when I made it to the casita two, maybe three days in a row. Then the kids went on break. Then it was Christmas. Then our family drove to Deming to ring in the New Year with twenty other Oteros. And still the kids were on vacation, so we hosted a play date: seven kids, six hours. The day they went back to school, I worked in Santa Fe. The next day I facilitated a staff retreat for a local nonprofit. Then Henry and I hosted a slumber party on Friday night to celebrate P.’s birthday. Four ten-year-old girls slept on mattresses and the fold out couch in our living room. The last left at four o’clock the next afternoon. We made crepes on Sunday morning with Henry’s family and visited neighbors on Sunday afternoon.

So you would think that by Monday morning I’d be dying to get back in the studio, back to the quiet, back to the short stories I am developing, and back to Vessels, the project so many of you helped me push to a deeper level at this time last year. I used to get to my desk at nine in the morning. Now ten feels better. Once Henry drives the kids to school, I need about an hour to transition from making lunches/cleaning faces/checking backpack mode to solitary mode. I told myself I’d get to the casita by ten. But there was one more load of laundry to put in the dryer. And I was hungry. And P. asked me to save the game of Monopoly we started on Sunday night. I made it to my car by ten o’clock and started down Bridge for the five-minute trip to Riverside Drive. I took a detour at Isleta, cruised down and up La Vega, and caught Riverside on the south end, all the while listening to Dave Davies’s interview with Susan Orlean about her latest book, Rin Tin Tin – The Life and the Legend on Fresh Air. (Did you know that Rin Tin Tin nearly won the first Oscar for Best Actor in 1927? Or that the German Shepherd bit most of his co-stars?)

Once I reached the casita, I sat in the driveway, the engine off, but the radio still on. I checked email and Facebook from my iPhone. Nothing had changed since I’d last checked thirty minutes earlier. Finally a voice inside me said, “You know you’ll feel like crap if you don’t write, so you might as well go inside.” The casita looked the same as always—Suzanne’s paints and brushes arranged on a work table in the living room, her work-in-progress on an easel, morning light held behind the kitchen shades. I plugged in my laptop, turned off my ringer, and set my timer for 45 minutes. I worked on short story I drafted almost ten years ago, but never finished. It was crap. But when the alarm sounded, marking the start of my mandatory 15-minute stretch/potty/breathe-fresh-air break, I thought of how I would get Jesse to dinner at his half-sister’s house in Los Angeles, even though they hadn’t spoken in six years (the secret: green chile); and I knew I would write another 45 minutes after the break.

The story is a way back into the book, and as I work on it I remember that a story is like a chapter, and if I can give this story life and meaning, then I can do the same with my book.

Demetria said that my challenge this year is not about time, but about confidence. I was reminded of news reports in the early days of the current recession, how the problem was not that the economy sucked, but that consumers were suffering from a lack of confidence. More than three years later, most of us would agree that the economy sucks. As she spoke, I worried that my writing was like the economy, that months of on-again, off-again writing had ruined it, and that when my confidence rebounds, I will only find that my writing isn’t worth my confidence.

This kind of thinking is not helpful. I wrote last week about ambush, surprise attacks from those I trust. This week I am reminded that the worst ambush is the one that comes from inside my head.

Next Week: Training my Inner Ninja

Flake, Part III: El Viento

Little evidence remains of the late November windstorm that ripped off four panels of our fence and destroyed a tent in our side yard. Friends remounted three of the four panels. (The fourth is beyond repair and needs to be replaced.) The Valle Encantado farm crew threw out the shredded tent and restacked the vegetable boxes and flats that the wind had scattered about the yard.

Christmas afternoon, while Henry and the kids ran a quick errand, I walked the half acre on which our house sits, something I enjoy doing because it’s good to feel our dirt under my feet, to hear the neighbor’s geese honk, to open the back gate and step along the ditch. By the playhouse, I found two plastic storage bin lids we were keeping on the porch by the office side door until we could find their corresponding containers. The wind had blasted a hole in the bin that once held them.

Princesa and Oso, the German Shepherd and Golden Retriever next door, cried as I approached the fence separating our two lots. They were probably outside in their little pen when the windstorm hit. They are south valley dogs. Like the dogs I knew in Deming when I was a kid, they don’t get much more than food or water. If they go in the house at all, they don’t sleep on dog beds at their owner’s feet. I try to pet them when I walk the arugula and cucumber beds in that corner of the yard. But Christmas afternoon, their cries unnerved me. I wanted to stick my hand through the chain link fence and pet their noses like K. and P. do, but I worried they would bite me. Oso tried to pull herself up on top of the doghouse. Princesa leapt along the fence. They were desperate. They needed too much.

I wrote in Flake, Part II about the people in my life who make me feel small. What hurts in those instances is not my shrinking, not exactly. It’s the feeling I would have if I were stuck out in that windstorm with Oso and Princesa, knowing that I can howl and bark and whimper all I want; and the wind won’t stop. Or maybe it will. It’s knowing that the wind is indifferent toward me, that nothing I do or say alters its course or its ferocity. Those people who make me feel small are like that windstorm. I can shake my fist as they shred a tent or rip my fence off its hinges; but my fist shaking does not change them. And their raging is not about me.

The trauma in my life has been about ambush, the attack that comes when I least expect it. The Dodge Ram Charger that slammed into my Taurus. The angry phone call that Sunday evening. The cough that was cancer in my grandmother’s lungs, that killed her from fall to winter. The sixth grade girl I worshipped, who told me as I drank water from the stone fountain on the Chaparral school playground, the secret that was rupturing my family. The older boy, or maybe he was a man, in my friend’s bedroom, who said he would show me a neat trick if I promised not to tell anyone.

Sometimes I am Oso and Princesa. Sometimes I am the person on the other side of the fence, the person who can choose to engage or not. The person who doesn’t need the dogs nearly as much as the dogs need her. The one who even fears the dogs a little because I recognize something of them in me.

Next Week: Ambush

Descanso

Thank you, readers, for your patience over the last several weeks of surprise Wednesday and Thursday posts (read: missed Tuesday posts). I am taking a two-week break from “Vessel” to breathe deeply after an intense fall and early winter and to prepare for an exciting and busy 2012 (which includes a semester long pilot of El Otro Lado in the schools, my directorial debut during Women & Creativity, and a recommitment to my writing life).

Please enjoy some behind-the-scenes photos from The Vortex Theatre’s production of “The House of the Spirits,” based on Isabel Allende’s novel and written by Caridad Svich.

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Photos by Alan Mitchell Photography, Alicia Lueras Maldonado, Beatriz Villegas, Henry Rael, Mario Moreno, and Michelle Otero.

Flake, Part II: The Big and Small of It

Last week I wrote about feeling like a flake despite the evidence suggesting the contrary. I was writing from the middle of a funk. When I am in the funk, I have a hard time remembering that this has happened before. I have a hard time remembering that it will pass. When I am in the funk, all I want is to get out of it, and when I can’t find a quick exit, I want to know what triggered the funk so I can avoid it in the future.

I can’t pinpoint when the cloud moved over me. I do know that since the wedding, I’ve been trying to catch my breath, to bask in the love that surrounded Henry and me and continues to hold us; but rehearsals, performances, meetings, deadlines, and the stuff of day-to-day life in a house with two little ones have kept me running. I put on my wedding dress one last time this morning before sending it off for cleaning and preservation, stepped into my sexy red peep toe pumps, and walked around our bedroom. I took a picture of myself in the mirror. Then I took off the dress and lay it on our bed. I’m a little sad I won’t get to wear it again.

I felt big the last time I wore that dress. I like feeling big, solid, pumped full of the love in my life and confident that I am stepping toward something good.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the people in my life who make me feel small. There aren’t many. I choose my friends well, and I am pretty good about protecting myself from those who need to stand on me in order to look taller. But fate is a funny thing, and every few years it presents me with the opportunity to engage the funk on a deeper level because the funk only invades my soul when I feel small.

Next week: Flake, Part III: El Viento

Flake

I’ve been a flake.

More than 1000 emails have piled up in my inbox.

Last week I missed an appointment because I forgot it was Tuesday. I didn’t forget that the meeting was Tuesday, but that Tuesday was Tuesday.

After my immediate post-wedding burst of energy, in which I sent out a dozen thank you cards and arranged a get-together for the food team, I have yet to formally thank our other wedding guests. (Etiquette grants a one-year grace period from the wedding date, but still, I hope we don’t take that long.)

Our Christmas tree still sits in a box in the shed. I haven’t bought a single gift, and when I think of shopping, I want to curl up under the Pendleton blanket Henry and I received as a wedding gift (thank you card not yet sent) and nap until my responsibilities vanish, or until so much time passes that those on the receiving end forget that I owe a card or phone call or email or invoice.

And yet, anyone looking from the outside (outside my head) would describe the last several weeks as a time of great creativity and productivity.

I am playing four characters in The Vortex Theatre’s production of “The House of the Spirits” by Cardiad Svich, directed by Valli Rivera. The rehearsal process was intense, fifteen hours a week, Monday through Thursday nights and Saturday afternoons. We’ve had nine shows; six more to go. My theatre experience in Albuquerque has been limited to one-weekend or one-night runs, so I’ve had to pace myself, to grow into Nívea the mother and Tránsito the whore, not to mention the woman in the campo and the woman in the city.

Last week I facilitated a storytelling workshop at a statewide convening of Kellogg Foundation grantees, incredible people working to ensure that New Mexico’s most vulnerable children are healthy, well educated, and economically secure. Attendees in my workshop wrote “I am From” poems, heartfelt poems that spanned from Puerto Rico to El Paso to the Midwest to Russia, from enchiladas to sweet peaches to Wonder Bread. The workshop and subsequent small and large group conversations affirmed my belief that stories can save us, that there is a meaningful way to engage in community and it begins with a simple act of listening.

I made sourdough stuffing and pumpkin cookies for our Thanksgiving feast. Henry and I hosted a pirate party for K.’s birthday party, complete with a plank, a pirate flag (one of the few decorative touches to remain standing in our yard after last week’s windstorm), and a treasure hunt.

Thanks to Chrissie Orr and The Academy for the Love of Learning, I am now officially one of eight El Otro Lado teaching artists. Each of us has partnered with a Santa Fe Public Schools classroom teacher to bring this art and storytelling workshop to students from elementary through high school. Beginning in January, I’ll visit Sonya Gunther’s junior and senior English classes at Capital High, and together, she and I will educare, or draw out these young people by sharing with them tools to tell their stories.

So why do I feel like a flake?

Tune in next week.

Thanksgiving, in brief

“The House of the Spirits” opened last weekend to rave reviews.

P. and K. are on vacation. I am also on a vacation of sorts; now that the show has opened, I get weeknights off. So last night, rather than having to run off to rehearsal, I was treated to P.’s homemade tortillas (thanks to a gift of masa preparada from Nana) and a new hairdo from both kiddos. Tonight we made pumpkin cookies and more tortillas.

I am thankful for simple things: home-cooked food, downtime, yellow leaves blanketing the yard, the smell of nutmeg, masa, mi familia, Henry, P., K., our home, so much love.

See you next week. Have a great Thanksgiving!

Nesting

More and more, I want to be close to home. I want to cook. I don’t want to drive to the grocery store, and I find myself picking up more at my weekly stops so I don’t have to leave the house. I want a fire in the wood stove. I want to clean the office and put up curtains and hang all the cool artwork Henry and I received as wedding gifts. (Thank you, talented friends!) I want to learn to can. And I’m wishing I’d paid attention when my mom tried to teach me to sew when I was in sixth grade.

Ten flats of green tomatoes are stacked against the wall on my side of the office. At first I complained about the space they were taking up (though it’s minor compared to the chandeliers, Christmas lights, and other wedding items we have yet to give away, sell, or store); but now I like knowing that I can eat a tomato anytime I want. The Valle Encantado farm crew sells them as they ripen, but our family gets to pick what we like. There’s something decadent about eating a fresh, organic tomato, grown within blocks of my house even as the temperature drops and smoke rises from our chimney.

This is a time of looking up to follow the call of sandhill cranes, of brisk walks with P. and K. to the park at the end of our street, of cooking soup, and drinking hot tea. It is also a time of late rehearsals, a lingering sore throat, and the return of the heat rash I thought I had eradicated before the wedding. But more on that next week.

I have spent the last several days with a short story I started over a year ago. I had completed the story enough to give it a beginning, middle, and end, but not the beginning, middle, and end the story deserves. So I returned to the casita and wrote another draft—26 pages, 8,413 words. It feels good to be back in this space, dedicating an hour or two a day to writing, building up the muscle I lost those weeks and months of checking off the endless tasks listed in my wedding journal.

I’ve had a hard time keeping up with the blog the last several weeks. Thank you, reader, for your patience. I am here, nesting.

Unbridled, Part IV: And the Sun Will Sing

¡Gracias!

Marit Rawley and The White World team surpassed our Kickstarter goal by more than four hundred dollars! A huge thanks to everyone who donated and helped spread the word. To read all about Marit and the project, please visit my special October 20 post.

In preparation for filming, we will perform a multimedia stage production of The White World as part of Women & Creativity, a month long celebration of women in the arts, sponsored by The National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC). Mark your calendars for March 23-25, 2012, Wells Fargo Theatre, NHCC, Friday and Saturday at 8:00 PM, Sunday at 2:00 PM. Between now and then, check out The White World blog for regular updates on the project.

Flores, El Otoño y El Sol

Most Chicano kids from New Mexico grew up with abuelos or tíos who taught them life lessons through dichos.

Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres.

Entre el dicho y el hecho hay un gran trecho.

Amor de lejos, amor de pendejos. (This one surfaced when I was seventeen years old and fell in love with a boy from northern New Mexico. Years later while in Chihuahua for a summer language immersion project, that love long behind me, I learned another version from my Chihuahuan host mother: Amor de lejos, felices los cuatro.)*

Gary Glazner founded the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project (APP) in 2004. The goal was simple: to read classic poems to Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, poems that they might have learned as children. What began with Gary visiting Sierra Vista Assisted Retirement Community in Santa Fe as a project of New Mexico Literary Arts, has evolved into a nationwide program with affiliates in a number of states and Germany. I’ve worked with Gary and APP since 2009, when the project was looking for Spanish-speaking poets in New Mexico. Since then, I have translated William Blake’s The Tyger into Spanish, sung Las Mañanitas and De Colores, and acted out Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s The Eagle, but one of my favorite aspects of preparing for and delivering an APP workshop is finding the perfect dicho to go along with a particular theme.

Last Wednesday was Día de los Muertos and the coldest day so far this fall. It was my third visit to The Cottages. Grumpier Old Men played on the big screen television in the rec room. As staff members retrieved residents from their rooms, I introduced myself one by one to the half-dozen people sitting on couches and recliners, their laps covered with wool blankets. Mary was sleeping when I arrived, but she opened her eyes just as I approached her. When I told her why I was visiting, she said, “I used to write poetry. I don’t know how much help I’ll be today, though. I don’t remember much.”

I recited  Purple Cow by Gelette Burgess, followed by some group and individual call and response. Then we moved on to the dicho. Mucha flor en primavera, buen otoño nos espera. In English: Many flowers in the spring, a good autumn will bring. I moved around the circle, inviting each person to repeat each line after me. Many flowers in the spring. Many flowers in the spring. A good autumn will bring. A good autumn will bring. I crouched next to Mary and offered her my hand. Many flowers in the spring. She held my fingers. A good autumn will bring.

“Do I make something up now?” she asked.

“If you’d like to,” I said, “or you can say the lines with me.”

Many flowers in the spring.

She closed her eyes tight.

A good autumn will bring.

Then she opened her eyes, looked right at me, and said, “And the sun will sing.”

*Tune in next week for translations.