Accepting Life's Mysteries

My new flock of seven-month-old hens eating chickweed from my backyard and scratch grains. Photo by John Ewing, Jan 22, 2013.

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JOURNAL EXCERPTS FROM CHANGE OF LIFE (9/1990)

Note: In the summer of 1990 I went to Kostroma, Russia, with my son Tim, for the first time to begin a series of writer exchanges with the Writers’ Organization there.  I was also in process of turning my small publishing company, Carolina Wren Press, over to others.  I spent time in France, Finland, a week in Russia, then Wales, and finally, in Devon.  JH

September 5 (Chagford, Devon): The older I get, the more mysterious life is to me.  And the less I need to understand the mysteries.  I just need to know what to believe and what to do.  Deeper than that and simpler, I need only to know who to be.  It’s clear to me that I am being who I am supposed to be (“willing to be myself” as Kierkegaard puts it), and though I wrestle with the beliefs as these seize hold of my consciousness, I have learned that any deeply planted, compelling urgency had better be obeyed.  This tends to land me on the boundary of conventional behavior or on the other side of that boundary...

From that summer, when I was twenty-one, I have been fascinated by the falling of light through leaves.  When light illumines them, how different they are!  When a breeze moves the leaves slightly, a given leaf will move from shade into sun and back again.  Most of the time our lives are in shade.  But who we are only comes close to our consciousness when light hits us, illumines and, in effect, feeds us.  Feeds us and claims us.  We belong to the light.  We are most ourselves in moments when we are in a heightened state of awareness, when ordinary reality (life in the shade) is at a little distance.  We always return to ordinary reality, but we’re changed.  Multiply that by hundreds of experiences of illumination–thousands probably–when I have felt whole, healed, ecstatic, clear, at my best, everything of a piece, everything making sense inside me and outside me, and you get a feeling for what has led me to my current state of outrageous conviction.

On one level, this love for M. doesn’t imply any acts.  It’s simply an awareness that I’ve been in a light that has fed me, valued me, changed me.  I’m in shade now–my days are quietly ordinary.  But a powerful memory is now at work inside me in the same way that sun continues to have its effect even on a plant in the shade, once photosynthesis has begun.  The memory, even when I’m not directly thinking about it, continues to work...

M. and I were completely at ease with each other.  I trusted him.  He trusted me.  If I disagreed with him–about, say, worshiping women, it was easy to say so.  I realized quickly and early–in the first hours together–that he had grasped quickly who I was, what I was like, my inner reality or substance, my dependability.  Yes, he knew he could trust me.  He knew I was like he was.  All of a piece inside.  Having conflicts, yes, but having inner sources of strength to draw on.  Not staying in despair.  Yes, two Kierkegaardian souls, willing to be ourselves. ..

I wonder if all the communication difficulties–language, distance, telephoning not reliable, the context of suspicion and fear and distrust that had, until recently, been so strong between our two countries–perhaps enhanced our forming such a deep bond so quickly...

I’m glad I don’t have to explain the rejoicing of our souls in each other’s presence.  What happened was like a happy honeysuckle vine thrusting its pink and yellow trumpets forward.  It was good.  Every question had an answer.  Whatever he said, it was easy for me to reply, and he wove garlands with my words.  We were happy in each other’s presence as if we had always been there.  We have.  As surely as these green hills have always been here.  It was like when the clouds are blown away and you can see even the fields on the farthest hills glow green, and sun inhabits and exults in the whole visible, created world.  It was like that.  That serene.  Clear.  Easy.  Right.  Beautiful.  It doesn’t have to be anything else either, and yet its conscious existence now in our souls engenders more.  It’s that more which I embrace confidently and without knowledge.  I recognize necessity when It answers my knocks at last.

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This is part of a short selection of diary excerpts from September, 1990.  Part II next week!  Judy Hogan

A Warrior Spirit

This is Aleksei Belikh, a nationally recognized Russian painter, with whom I have a close friendship.  The Russian Golden Autumn is behind him.  I believe that the key issues of our 21st century are to see other people, all others, as fellow human beings and to save our home, our planet, from further pollution, so we can all continue to live here and thrive.

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In celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, I post this essay by a new friend, Gary T. Tyson.  We can all take in this message and do better at taking care of each other and our planet.

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A Warrior Spirit

By Gary T. Tyson, Sanford, NC

A few days ago, I attended a game that my 7th grader was playing basketball in.  She had taken a hard foul and had rolled her ankle.  She limped off to the sidelines.  I could tell she was about to cry.  As the principal was going to get her some ice, I walked down to the court where she had propped her foot up on a chair.  She had tears in her eyes, and I searched for the right words to say to her.  I simply stated, “Baby, you got to be a warrior.  Don’t let your opponents see you cry.”  Those two statements caused her to reach down deep and pull herself back together.  You see, even at her tender age, she understood that warrior spirit.

  

I want to speak briefly about a warrior spirit that each of us has in us.  First of all, what is a warrior spirit?  Webster’s Dictionary defines a “Warrior” as “A person engaged in some struggle or conflict.”  As I think back to some past warriors of our day, the great Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to my mind.  I read about when he was getting ready to disobey a state injunction that Birmingham, Alabama, had erected to stop their marching.  He was very troubled.  He knew that the way the injunction read, if he or anyone else violated the injunction, the law said they could be held indefinitely.  This troubled Martin because he knew that a long prison term for him could cause the Civil Rights Movement to buckle to its knees.  I imagine, as he was filled with doubt and confusion, he thought about “The Parable of the Good Samaritan,” that man who helped the man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.  I believe he asked himself : not “How long will I have to stay in jail?” but “What will happen to my people if I give up and let this injunction turn us around?”  That warrior spirit kicked in, and he put on his work uniform (khaki shirt and khaki pants) and told his closest confidants, “Let’s go march.” 

   

Today, my friends, this type of spirit is one that we must have.  President Obama is leading the charge to try to level the playing field.  But any time you try to level the playing field, the folks who benefitted from the uneven playing field are going to fight tooth and nail to keep that from happening.  Many of these folks are the folks who employ people.   I believe, over the next few years, we are going to see less jobs being created because many of these folks would rather go out of business than share a real piece of the pie of opportunity and treasure.  Many of these folks who have benefitted from this unlevel playing field are in the Halls of Congress and the Chambers of the Senate.  So, in many ways, the President can only do so much to level the playing field.  It’s going to take a concerted effort of the voters to vote in the leaders who have our best interests at heart.  

I had the opportunity to speak recently to a local ex-professional boxer.  I asked him what it takes to be a warrior.  He said that he respects a man who fights even if he loses.  He said he doesn’t respect a fighter who grows feathers and runs.  He stated a warrior never, ever gives up.  He said a warrior has got to be determined to fight one more round even if he gets hurt.  He stated that a warrior will fight to the end and never retreat and never surrender.  

My friends, this is a warrior spirit.  I believe this warrior spirit has got to be a part of our charge forward.  We must charge forward with the feverish determination that we will not, we cannot be, turned around.  We must tell our enemy, “You can’t hate us back to the days when we accepted inferiority.  You can’t hate us back to days when we went to the back of the bus.”  Yes, we still have that warrior spirit that entered the veins of many African Americans over 50 years ago.  Yes, today we still stand here, gladiators for justice.  

But where do we go from here?  Do we still have that “HOPE” that our President so eloquently spoke about in 2008?  Do we still believe in the “CHANGE” that we were so greatly anticipating in 2008?  I believe the answer to this most timely question has no immediate, clear answer.  But I do believe we need to take a look at what we are hoping for and what change we are looking for.  

I read an article by a young black sister recently that spoke about dreaming.  She stated she was tired of dreaming.  She stated it was time to wake up.  She stated we dream on our backs, eyes shut to the world.  She stated dreams carry us away, but when we wake up from the dream, we’re right back in the same spot where we lay down.  I concur that it’s time to stop dreaming and start executing a well-thought-out plan of action.

   

Dreams are kind of like hope.  Both are non-aggressive in their very nature.  The true warrior spirit has dreams and hope running through its veins.  But along with that, a warrior spirit has an acute need to take action.  A warrior spirit doesn’t believe in waking up from a dream and continuing to lie there.                            

Mental and Physical Poison

Judy's iris in April 2011, with the greening of the earth

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Who says we don’t know what we’re doing when we write, whether it’s ancient Greek drama or modern mysteries?  Socrates asked Sophocles what he was doing in his plays, and Sophocles said he had no idea.  That would be consciously.

When an experienced writer sets pen to paper, she will write about what matters to her.  She may intend something light and humorous, but if her core beliefs are serious, they will be obvious to a reader, if not immediately to her.

I wrote my first mystery in 1991, at the age of fifty-four.  I hadn’t had any classes in how to write a crime novel.  No one told me how to do it, but I’d been reading the Golden Age authors like Josephine Tey, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Marjorie Allingham.  I plotted out who would be killed and by whom.  I invented my amateur detective, a mid-fifties poet, based loosely on me.  I set it in a bed and breakfast in a village on the coast of Wales.  My American amateur falls in love with a Welsh Detective Inspector.  I didn’t plan to take up any serious issues.  I do that in my poetry.  This was to be for fun.  

Looking back, however, I see the serious issues all right: the lingering hatred of the Germans after World War II, or as my landlady character calls them, “the Prussians,” and behind that, the Holocaust that also still haunts both Europe and America.

As I went along, writing new mysteries, the cultural issues that concerned me came more and more to the fore.  When I wrote my sixth novel, Killer Frost, which takes place in a Southern historically black college, with Penny Weaver teaching remedial classes in reading and writing to students, by and large, ill-prepared for college, I was very clear that I wanted to expose some harsh and tragic realities about the education of young African Americans, particularly those coming out of our inner cities, from Florida to New Jersey.

Killer Frost, which my reader friend said was my most political novel, was a Malice Domestic finalist.  I had been trying to publish the earlier books, but since this one was a finalist, and the first five had not been, I decided to work on getting it into print and six months later, I had a contract with Mainly Murder Press in Connecticut.  I had tried agents.  A few years ago being a finalist meant it was easy to get an agent, but not this time, or perhaps agents were wary of my taking up an issue like black education.

I myself had been a small press editor and publisher, and I was comfortable with that route to publication.  I was able to participate in the cover design and in the editing.  Most of the promotion falls on me, but I know that happens across the board now.  I’ve grown comfortable over the years with selling my own book.

Killer Frost debuted September 1, 2012, and I set up readings and signings around central North Carolina, did pre-sales and guest blogs.  As sales money comes in and gives me a cushion, I’ll set up more readings both in North Carolina and in other parts of the country where I have family or friends I can stay with.

One day I hope to get the first five novels into print and e-book format, as well as the five mysteries I’ve written in the series since Killer Frost.  When you debut as a mystery author at seventy-five, you can’t sit around.

Standing back, I see what I didn’t originally, that my books take up the issues I see as our new century’s most important: taking care of our planet so that we don’t pollute ourselves out of a home and learning to see all members of the family of man as equally valuable and important.  We have to stop making sub-groups out of human beings, which poisons our minds.  Differences enrich us and are to be cherished.  Our beautiful planet will feed and house us if we do our best to take good care of the earth, air, and water.

Killer Frost Review and Reader Comments IV

Judy with tomatoes, summer 2009, in garden.

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Here is the second review Killer Frost has had.  Thank you, Carolyn Mulford.  You can also find it on her website http://carolynmulford.com

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Jan. 3, 2013

Book review

Writing Teachers Will Relate to Mystery’s Setting

Anyone who has taught a basic English or creative writing course will recognize some of the characters and situations in Killer Frost, a debut mystery by Judy Hogan. 

Most of the book takes place at a financially and academically distressed historically black college in North Carolina. An idealistic untenured professor wars against the  administration to bring ill-prepared but determined students up to standard and to give gifted ones a chance to soar. He brings in Penny Weaver, a dedicated white writer/teacher, to take over both the remedial and the creative writing classes.

Hogan obviously knows both groups of students well, and some of her best scenes involve teaching rather than detecting. Finding the killer takes second place to rescuing the students from poor teaching, bad conditions, and the burnt-out and corrupt staff.  The victims’ behavior had given faculty and students reasons to want to murder them. 

The major subplot revolves around Penny’s disconcerting attraction to the professor who hired her (both are happily married). A more effective subplot involves her difficult relationship with her single-mother daughter. 

Some of the numerous characters in Killer Frost live on the page. Unfortunately some students get lost in the classroom, and neighbors overpopulate Penny’s diverse community. Most talk too much and act too little—until the fast-paced climactic scene, which ends with a satisfying twist.

Killer Frost, by Judy Hogan, Mainly Murder Press, 2012, 244 pp., $15.95 in paperback and $2.99 in e-book; ISBN: 978-0-9836823-8-7. For more information about the writer, her work, and where to buy the book, go to http://judyhogan.home.mindspring.com.

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Here are some new reader comments.  Always welcome!

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KILLER FROST READER RESPONSES–IV. 

From gifted writer Mindi Meltz (in an email 12-23-14): Great book! I just finished.  I’ve never read a mystery before.  Aside from the fact that the topic was very important and original and your treatment of it was so complex and sensitive, I really liked the ending.  Endings are important to me, and I feel like authors struggle with them; many books disappoint me at the end.  I liked that you didn’t provide any easy solutions to the many societal issues you brought up in the book–in fact, in a way, you didn’t offer any complete solutions–which is realistic and also inspires the reader to do more thinking on his/her own, while at the same time you didn’t leave the reader with a feeling of despair or “there is no solution” (which I feel is done too often in endings).  Instead there was a feeling of warmth, tenderness and admiration for both the kids who fight against impossible odds and the adults who fight for them...  It’s wonderful that you took on such a tough and meaningful topic.

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From Natalya Ilyina, my Russian friend and teacher of literature at Kostroma University (in an email 12-24-12): I’ve read your novel and find that the theme is urgent here as well.  I dare say that no writer has ever tackled the problem with respect to education from the point of view you find necessary.  I think that it’s even more important than the detective part of the novel.  I congratulate you on the new niche in literature you have discovered.  Good luck! 

[Note: As a result of reading Killer Frost, Natalya, who is Chair of the Literature Department at Kostroma University invited me to a conference in April 2013, honoring their playwright Ostrovsky, but also taking up the subject of secondary and college/university education.  I can’t go, but I’ve offered to write a paper.]

My Chapbook Beaver Soul Will Be Published

Mikhail Bazankov's Cover Drawing for the Russian Beaver Soul

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Not long ago I learned to my delight that my book of poems Beaver Soul will be published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press of Kentucky.  Beaver Soul was written in 1992, the early part along the Haw River in Saxapahaw, on what I called my poetry rock near a beaver dam.  The second part was written in Russia, where I spent two months, July and August, that year, the first month in two Houses for Creativity, Peredelkino, near Moscow, and Komarovo, near St. Petersburg, and the second month in the Kostroma region, in Sharya, then in the Mezha District, in the village of Gorka, and later in Kostroma.  The final poem in the book was written in Devon, near the River Teign, where I was able to spend another month.

The Kostroma Writers’ Organization published Beaver Soul [Bobrinaya Dusha] in Russian translation in 1997.  I had wanted to see it published in English, so finally 21 years after it was written, it will come out in English.  I’m going to give you my Russian editor’s preface and the first poem, to give you a feeling for the book.  It will sell for $12, and if you order ahead of time [Details when I know them], it’s only $2 postage.  Welcome to the world of Beaver Soul.

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Russian Editor’s Preface A Smile from Across the Ocean

When he smiles, a person causes kindness to come into being for himself and for others.  People say that a smile helps us be happy.  I’m thinking about this, having received an interesting photograph and trying to see across the ocean a face not yet known to me, using my imagination to fill in what her character is like, what her situation in life is, and it seems to me that somewhere once before I’ve seen this woman from America.  I can hear her voice in the lines of her letter, her speech which brings with it a long ago melody, maybe from the last century.  Just now, on that continent lying on the opposite side of the water, in the state of North Carolina, it’s a different time of day.  Probably Mrs. Judy Hogan is thinking about her children.  There are three of them, already adults now, living in different cities and her responsibilities as a mother haven’t decreased, although in her letters sent to Kostroma, she doesn’t often mention them.  Even once I thought: if my mama composed such long letters, she would definitely have mentioned each one of her eleven children, which one she was happy about, which one she’d reprimanded, which one she worried about, feeling in her heart that all was not okay.  If you will, she wouldn’t have considered or worried her head about journeys, or if so, it would, for her, have been better to visit her grandchildren.  I will think about this again later on when meeting with the mother of Judy Hogan, who is a famous mountain climber.

But Judy’s smile and her confessions about another life and other interests, suggest that there is another psychology, another understanding of the idea of being human.  “When I was young, I was very serious, but, as my life has gone on, I have learned to laugh more and more.  I think my own struggles and my difficulties and troubles have tended to mean I had to laugh more and more.”

A person is always more important and better than other people realize, than what the people immediately around him know, and he himself doesn’t know everything about himself, if he doesn’t manage to break out from a conventional way of life, if he doesn’t take into account, doesn’t realize all his possibilities, and, because of that, he isn’t even able to say what the chief thing about him is.  Obviously, my new acquaintance’s varied activities and communications with others helped her to be self-confident and to feel emancipated.  The letters and books of Judy Hogan share her character, her artistic taste, her organizing ability, attract attention to her reflections about creativity, conceptions of what it is to be a human being enjoying all the signs of freedom and independence, her methods of working with people of different ages interested in creative writing.

The letters, books, collections of poetry of Judy Hogan, and the manuscript of poems only just now appearing to the author of these notes, strengthened his interest and involved him thoroughly in a conversation about “eternal questions,” about creativity, about masters of world literature.  We were tactful and patient, we didn’t have to reproach one another for not understanding or not agreeing as to the value of the authoritative works of the last and present centuries.  We had apparently already mastered the idea in the words of Pushkin from his article on Radishchev: “there is no ability to persuade in slander, and, where there is no love, there is no truth.”  Now I know: in our joyful conversations about “the gift” that is given to others and about how, in getting closer to the truth through getting acquainted with the loved thing, which breaks through in the love for one’s fellow countrymen, we influenced each other.

The distance, the lack of time, and the language barrier slowed down our communication by letter.  But literature ennobled it and made it more complex.  It gave us the possibility to push farther our understanding, the stories about these subjects in our letters, and it determined the orientation of our discussions.  It opened the perspective and inclined us to realistic thoughts of a project for cultural ties between the sister cities.  Now it’s impossible to mention all the subjects of our letter dialogues across the ocean.  Of course, we didn’t neglect to mention Chekhov, Turgenev, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Bunin, Akhmatova, Esenin, Tsvetaeva.  It turned out that we spoke only of those who are already well known in America, but now she’s probably also oriented to some other authors, because I reminded her of them.

She comforted us, she gave us hope, both in the idea that there are still people with the capacity for reading and understanding Pushkin and who are striving to know some Russian writers besides those famous in America.  There appeared in the dialogue that we had aspirations which united us, in which neither the ocean, nor the language barrier, nor our different styles of life were able to be hindrances.  Judy Hogan agrees with me in this.

So we “closed ranks” in everything, in our individual lives and our past, and what was thought by others, in different decades, in different centuries, on the different shores of the ocean and on different sides of the earth, in villages and cities, in various forms of society.  From one family home we are drawn invisibly to go to another.

Judy’s as free as the sun (she has written about this in her poems).  She confirms:  “We are changed, and we give ourselves up to the joy of living, to the attractive stars.  In the darkness the fireflies are drawn toward the light and they open places where we feel even more at home.”

Mikhail Bazankov

Editor for the Kostroma Writers Organization publication, 1997

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THIS RIVER 6 January 6, 1991

Memories are like fish: they rarely break

the surface.  The trick is remembering

they’re there, more active where there’s no air,

where they least appear to move.  The beavers,

too, do more than shows.  I watch for signs

of their nocturnal labors, hold the bites

of wood and bark in my hands, distinguish

the pale orange of fresh wood from the grey

look that follows rain; think I see their

prints.  Definitely deer have passed this

way, and raccoon.  The beaver eludes me

like the fish do–so much so that, when

I did once see her swimming near shore,

it took me days to believe my eyes.

Love is like this.  Lulled among

our memories, it rarely shows itself,

and then we don’t believe what we’ve seen.

Belief.  In the absence of those chance flips

in the air.  Belief.  In the secret life of

the beaver to which she devotes her whole

intelligence in order to preserve her life,

her livelihood, and the lodge where her

children grow fat and strong; the lodge she

has hidden so well that I am baffled: I

can’t read the signs, tell whether the old

lodges are newly inhabited; I think not.

Probably she has a new nest; has outwitted

me; has not only safety on her mind, but

longevity.  She has learned from the river

winds how to fool the eye, how to blind the

heart that isn’t pure and able to believe

what it has seen.  The truth is always there:

it’s in the way the current follows the

river bed, however dammed and held back that

flowing is.  And the beaver’s life leaves

proofs a trusting heart has no trouble taking

for evidence: a few fresh chips of wood,

and she knows the whole story.  So she can build

a world on one sentence she almost didn’t 

hear, which it took her months to believe.

The life of the river birds is known to her,

too.  When they flap off, she knows by

their not having warned the other inhabitants,

that she is recognized, and that, after she

has settled on her chosen stone and begun

to trace the current of the poem across

the page, that they will swing back in

to their favorite fishing shallows soundlessly,

keeping her form in mind, but not thinking

of her; their keen eyes more on the motion

of the water which implies fish are moving

their way.  She always has wanted proofs:

she has been so demanding, she frightened those

who loved her away.  She would force their secrets

from them in order to have what she needed:

their pledge.  Now she understands that she

must not drag the river for proofs;

that every day the river is new for her.

That her memories are not by any means inert, but

feed and grow large, and sometimes, when she

least expects it, leap for pure joy into an

air so foreign to them, and risky, but ultimately

so attractive in its quiescence, because

it asks nothing, is simply there, responsive

to the wind’s tricks and the sun’s showing off,

yet not fooled by either.  Her intelligence

is mobile and ingenious and, like the air, it

buoys up the creature or the man who breathes it

deeply even into his very soul.  It holds the

river smells–mud and old sticks, dead

fish and new eggs, the gradual salting by those

particles worn off rocks and swept from earth.

Water, mud, and air: they are our universe.

Without them we can’t live, much less invent

our lives.  For Life learns to hide herself

not just for safety, but for the pleasure

of those leaps into the welcoming embrace of

air, so soft today, and comforting; as knowing

as old trees that it is wise to surrender

willingly to the teeth of the beaver, to allow

oneself to be as erotically alive as are

the fish, snug in their muddy beds.

Comforts Beyond Your Present Imagining

Zinnias in Penelope Vase, August 2011.

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The Telling That Changes Everything XXX. October 14, 2012

For Beatrice and Sharon

To flourish, we allow the mind to

empty, the feelings to experience

hunger.  Then the words and the love 

rush in.  –The Telling That Changes Everything V.

To live well, 

to stay our whole life course and make

our final homeward journey, we have 

only one choice: to pay close attention

to the world within and the world without.

The grain of the universe doesn’t destroy

us unless we let it.

–The Telling That Changes Everything XI.

It took you

seventy-five years to touch this home

truth?  Be grateful you stepped ashore,

however wounded in soul and body.

Comforts beyond your present

imagining lie straight ahead. 

–The Telling That Changes Everything XIII.

The awful, awesome nature of Life!

So much vibrancy and fight in every 

living being.  Without it we die and

make food for a new world rising 

unbidden from our ashes.  No need

to fail before our time of full aliveness,

before knowing that the fate we knew

years ago has reached its ripening.

We are who we longed to be.  Our words 

have the potency to change how other

people see the world.  I knew words 

were the most powerful weapon there

is.  Bombs destroy.  Words transform.

Corporate greed reduces, dehumanizes.

A writer’s vision heals, engenders 

belief in people who feel trapped in

mind-numbing despair.  A children’s

book reminds us: “there is enough

for all.”**  Be known as one who

gives and receives.  Lewis Hyde

called it “the gift-giving circle.”

You may call it Love, or God.

Deeply planted in us lives our Hope.

Do not crush that first flower.  Feed

it, water, nurture, enjoy.  Stop to see

the leaves of the self-heal plant that

finds its place in grass and weeds 

along a busy road.  Notice the 

exuberant sweet potato vines that

overwhelmed even the most obnoxious

weeds.  Then, when you rise to your

full height, believe all those prophetic

words you wrote for years and years.

When you see that your faith in 

yourself was not misbegotten, that

other people see and love what 

your Muse commanded you to tell

as best you knew how, then stand

tall, give to your writing, to your

readers, your creatures and plants,

your best self–everything good

that you can conceive.  If cruelty

comes against you, then fight with

the truth sword you now know how

to wield.  Defend your life and 

your words to the end of Time.

** Rabbit Hill

Splitting Open the Whole World

My Christmas Cactus in the Kitchen Window--Blooming Now.

Photo from 2011.  Light in winter.

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The Telling That Changes Everything XXVII. September 2, 2012

You see, the ecstasy the true self experiences is outside time, and it’s contagious.

–The Telling That Changes Everything II. 

How does one human being help hold back

the woes of desolation and dismay that

descend, despite our best efforts?  By belief

that the More in our human nature’s still 

there, will always be there if we stay 

attuned to that deeper, wiser chord we

have the ears to hear, the vision to 

recognize and obey; that leads us into our 

own imagined promised land either 

before or after we die.  

–The Telling That Changes Everything XVII.

When Susan came to interview me

and pressed me to know where my 

drive came from, I told her it started

early.  By age twenty-seven I knew my

destiny was to do something important.

Vague enough then and sometimes

forgotten–yet, like a hard pebble of

truth inside me, I couldn’t entirely forget.

It kept me on this path I later called

my leyline: doing what I must do,

while I have life and limb.  At age

fifty-four I wanted to fulfill Muriel

Ruykheyser’s dictum: “If one woman

told the whole truth about her life,

the world would split open.”  I worked 

for truth and justice here and abroad, 

wanted people who are different

to overcome their fears and hostilities.

I saw how my words became catalysts

and changed things, though I was often

castigated: “trouble-maker;” hated,

feared, avoided.  I turned to my books:

I’d send their arrows of truth zinging

out into the wider world.  I, a catalyst,

have been giving birth to books, also

catalysts, which carry their passionately

winged words into other minds.  

Some of my arrows may come right

back and wound me.  That’s inevitable

when you once begin the work of

splitting open the whole world.