Doing Right by the House

Remodeling the laundry room

Two weeks ago my husband and I showed our house to a potential buyer, a referral from one of our studio guests. Our house isn't on the market yet; we're not done remodeling, but that didn't bother her. She had remodeled four houses with her husband over the years before he died, and in months of looking for a home on our island, she hadn't found anything she liked.

Then she saw our house. She truly appreciated the choices we made, understood our efforts to stay true to the 1950's design using currently available products, and said several times that we'd “done right by the house.” She also told us about several homes she toured that hadn’t been done right by—a wall of windows boarded up in one case.

Staging our living room

It was this awareness of doing right by the house that struck with me. It’s not a phrase my husband and I have used ourselves, but it’s been our intention for this house that we live in, the project house we are working on now, and the homes we will renovate in the future.

Doing right by the house is also an attitude not everyone shares, something my husband and have begun to realize as we expand our interactions with others in the business of home renovation. For some lenders and investors, flipping homes is about making a quick buck; expediency and price are motivating factors, not what a house “deserves” in order to maintain the integrity of design.

The room divider and hardwood floors original to our house

The woman left our home with plans to buy it. Late last night, we heard it wouldn’t work out, but it was a wonderful experience showing it to her. Not the usual circumstance for sellers who are asked to disappear from the house while strangers tromp around with agents and look at forms to tell them what they need to know about the house. There was a human connection: we shared bits of our story, and she hers. We all wanted to do right by each other and this house.

I was disappointed when I found out. I cried for a few minutes. I wrote in my journal. Not because I don’t think our house will sell on the MLS, but because it would’ve have been so easy to write up a contract with her and know something, one solid thing, about our future.

I had no idea when I titled my blog This or Something Better two and a half years ago, that the title phrase would be an ongoing operating principle and mantra. But it has grounded me when I get preoccupied wondering what’s going to happen next. I don't know and not knowing, which used to terrify me, has become familiar, an ongoing opportunity to live out my faith in a way that goes beyond words and proclamations, it strips away everything that isn’t essential.

“I don’t blame her at all,” my husband said reacting to the news about the buyer.

“Me either,” I said, “It would just be nice to know one thing about our lives.”

“I know one thing,” he said. “I love you.”

“And that’s the most important thing,” I answered.

Here's a Tip: Join a Writing Group

Here’s a tip: if you want to be buoyed, affirmed, celebrated, and connected to the creative spirit as well as those in your midst, join a writing group. And I don’t mean a critique group. Join a group (like an Amherst Writer’s and Artists AWA workshop, or one based on their principles) where you open a journal, or the lid to a laptop, or prop up your tablet, and write whatever comes to mind and heart in a room full of other people who are doing that exact thing, a place where no one is set apart, no one is exempt from being vulnerable.

Leave the dishes in the sink and the children with a sitter. Let your fingers fly or your hand sweep across the page for twenty or thirty minutes, as you write whatever comes without censoring. Listen to the comforting tap of other keyboards, the scratch of other pens, the occasional cough, the quiet tears, Kleenex shedding from the box, tearing of a tea pouch, the hum of central heat, as you would listen to the wind or expressway drone or your refrigerator hum after midnight.

And then, once the bell has rung or the leader's voice has summoned you to stop writing, look up from your spiral-bound notebook, patterned journal, metal and plastic electronics, and feel the vibration in the room. Smile at your radiant companions, all of you blinking and slick from sliding in and out of another dimension.

When the convener asks, “Who would like to share?” sit back, take a deep breath, and have the audacity to read those fresh-formed words aloud. When you’ve finished and the room is silent, stop your voice and hands from shaking, and listen to the response:

No judgment, no criticism, no mention of what is weak or confusing, no judgment about subject matter or language. Instead, you receive only positive responses: what is strong, what is memorable. Your voice is honored. Your words are heard and held in complete confidence (you will never hear your writing discussed in the supermarket or church parking lot). The focus is on the writing, not you; the story, not your life; the poem, not your circumstances (in the AWA method, we assume everything is fiction unless the writer tells us differently).

Whether the words are fiction or non, they are brave and honest and true, and the room is filled with wisdom and humor and original expressions and the dazzling raw power of first thoughts and drafts. You have the great privilege and gift of listening to stunning writing by the best and most humble writers you will ever meet. Stories and poems that may never be printed in a book or a blog, words that might only be uttered just this once before they’re safely tucked to sleep.

There is more light in the world because you have brought what matters to this table: your authentic self. 

The Day Has Arrived

I was thirty-seven when I first began writing something other than newsletters, press releases, and minutes for government and church meetings. I enrolled in a UC Extension class and wrote clunky anguished poetry and made my husband and closest friends read every labored word I wrote.

In response my dear husband bought me a bookmark emblazoned with "one day you will write a book" by Ashley Rice.

At the time I never thought that I'd write a book. I never thought I would see any of my words published. I thought the only people who would read my writing were those in my family and the half-dozen strangers in my first writing group where we met at Jumpin' Java, circulated copies fresh from our printers, and fortified ourselves for criticism with coffee and baked goods.

That was fifteen years ago, and it turns out the bookmark my husband gave me—a bookmark I kept tacked on the bulletin board in my office until we moved two years ago—was prophetic. I did write a book.

It wasn't what I set out to do. What I set out to do was write one poem at a time.

Inspired by talks at the Academy for Spiritual Formation, the hospitality of a clergywomen's retreat, the vision and mission of the United Methodist Church and my role in the Conference, the natural world around me, the writing groups I have been a part of, conversations with loved ones and my prayer partner, I took up a pen to respond, following one thought, one feeling, one impulse, through the warren of my mind and set it on paper, smearing ink (the curse of left-handedness) while I scrawled in a cheap college-ruled notebook.

Since then, the poems have been typed and revised, and many many remain, as they should, inside little electronic folders with titles like Spiritual Poems, Relationship Poems, Nature Poems, Short Poems, satisfying my organized left-brain that allows the creative right-brain its messy romps. 

Today I celebrate the publication of Burnt Offerings not because I'll become famous (which I won't) or because having a book in the world allows me to legitimately claim the title writer (which it doesn't). I celebrate like a senior in her last days of high school, pouring over the yearbook on the quad with her friends, pointing to photos, laughing and exclaiming, remembering what she's been a part of and being slightly startled at the way it's been captured on paper.

What Burnt Offerings will be for you who choose to read it, I cannot say. But it is my hope that the poems will gesture for you to come close and sit down. May they call forth your own memories and longings.

In an ideal world, I would become the book fairy and slide a copy under your pillow while you sleep tonight. The best I can do in this world, is let you know that if you purchase a paperback copy from my publisher, you'll get the ebook version at no charge.

Two Years and Counting

I can't recall exactly where I've heard it, but it seems to come up a lot in conversation, this idea that it takes two years to feel at home in a new community. And maybe I'm paying particular attention to that folk wisdom as my husband and I entered this new year as two year residents on this island.

I know settling in can be done faster, and I think particularly of military families with children in school, and clergy in the United Methodist churches, finding themselves appointed for year-long stints in locations they didn't choose. They jump into their jobs and into community building; they don't have time to "waste."

It's different moving to a community you've selected based on intuition and feel without a particular role or position. In that way it's more like retiring, moving to a place you think you'll feel comfortable. I laugh now at my own naiveté, thinking that when my husband and I moved 900 miles from our friends and family, we would live largely the same life we did in California, just a bit more enlightened in a new location.

In California we had an unground doughboy swimming pool. I did a lot of floating reading.

I learned to knit and felt in California. An interstate hobby.

We hosted most of the family gatherings in California.

Maybe because we are surrounded by familiar furniture and dishes and pets the new didn't feel stark and glaringly unfamiliar, it felt welcoming, richness to uncover, beauty to explore. And yet, since we chose to remodel a home with our own two (four) hands, those two (four) hands needed to spend most of their time in our home running drills, wielding crowbars, rolling paint, sawing trim, drawing plans.

The pets are happy as long as someone's in bed somewhere.

We didn't invite strangers to dinner when remodeling, does anyone? We got used to climbing over boxes and building materials stacked in the dining room, and our old friends and family didn't think twice, but the neighbor's we just met? We were reluctant to find out.

Would you entertain in this disarray? We ate out.

When your home and its renovation (as well as looking for a job) becomes your job, you don't sign up for dance lessons or yoga classes. You don't take up a new hobby and join the amateur astronomy club or become a wooden boat aficionado.

But that's not a permanent state. When unemployment benefits ran out, we could call ourselves entrepreneurs instead of out-of-work. My husband began making contacts and connections in the construction trades working side-by-side with those he hired. I volunteered to help with a church event (and was put in charge of organizing it). We began to have responsibilities outside our home, deadlines and projects that didn't always involve each other.

Ready for his first day at the project house.

The two-year mark was approaching and we had places to be and people to meet.... My husband has become a real estate investor and employer, with all the joys and headaches that come along with running a business and dealing with county regulations. A contractor is finishing up the to-do list on our home remodel, and freed from those daily responsibilities (and from weed pulling in the winter) I find myself organizing a church event, having my first book released, and leading my first series of spiritual writing workshops in Washington, all within one week of each other.

What happens next is open for exploration, but our gifts and talents have been uncorked, and wherever we go, it's clear we're meant to use them.

On the theme of using our gifts and talents,  invite you to listen to my latest poem "Full Ablaze" on my website.

Let your light shine!

I also invite you to spread the word about my book of poetry, Burnt Offerings, which is out on Tuesday, January 14, at electiopublishing.com.

Shaped

Burnt Offerings, my book of poetry, will be released next week. It's a book fifteen years in the making, the poems arising from my participation years ago in a UC Extension writing class, then clergywomen's retreats, the Academy for Spiritual Formation, and lately the Amherst style writing group I participate in.

In those situations I have gathered with a group of like-minded people to learn and grow and express the longing of our hearts. I am away from my home and all responsibilities that exist outside those rooms and retreat centers. At retreat centers I show up to prepared meals, sleep in my small cell, shower in a communal bathroom, bundle up my sheets and towels when I leave and drop them in a laundry shoot.

In the writing group, someone else keeps time, someone else holds space and guides responses. In those settings I am fully present. There I write with pen and paper. There I nearly always choose poetry.

At home, I write alone. I am distracted by phone calls and UPS deliveries, by the dryer's buzz and oven timer, by cats who jump in my lap, sit on my keyboard, sail my paperwork to the floor with their flicking tails. I write with a computer, constantly editing as I write, the quick availability of technology interrupting my forward progress. At home I nearly always write in prose.

Interesting how I am shaped by those environments. When I think back to college I remember the debates over "nature versus nurture" and I think about my life wondering how much of what happened is me responding to the settings and their content and context, and how much was simply due to my natural bent.

I probably won't come up with a definitive answer, but it's interesting to speculate, and that's what I do in my poem "Shaped."  Enjoy listening and thinking about your own shaping.

The view from Skyview Observatory Columbia Center Seattle

Things That Are Beautiful

The year is waning and as I prepare for the new year, Iv'e packed most of my library in boxes (labeled this time by categories literary journals, Calvin and Hobbes, Do-it-Yourself, fiction) in preparation for our next move, which is an intention more than a reality at this moment. If I want to read more, I'll need to write more. We have also disconnected our cable TV, but with so many other ways to deliver programming, I doubt I'll notice.

Anyway, I'll be too engrossed to find out how to watch Top Chef online. For the next nine days I am hosting my soul sister Tarah, a painter (her painting Black Over Fire will grace the cover of my new book) and campus interfaith director in Florida. Together we will visit the local art museum, and the Olympic Mountains, and drink tea and have long conversations. I will read her my poetry, and we will welcome in 2014, riding the ferry at midnight and watching fireworks explode above Seattle's Space Needle.

In the hour she's been here we've already been celebrating the many ways life is good and the growth that comes from the hard work of letting go of expectations, of embracing the unknown, of living out of the gifts we have been given to share with the world, and of noticing the beauty that is poured out upon us if we turn from our busy-ness and look with love on our surroundings.

In that spirit, I share with you another poem in my Metaphor Monday series written in the tradition of Sei Shonagan, an eleventh century Japanese writer whose Pillow Book contained many lists. Here is mine: "Things That Are Beautiful."

Becoming Blackfish

As I am becoming acquainted with this region I now call home, I'm learning about unique communities of mammals other than humans, in particular Orcas, also known as killer whales.

I had seen them twice whale watching off the San Juan Islands, once in the late 1990s with my young daughters, and again in 2007 on a weekend cruise with my husband aboard the David B (see his photos on YouTube), and those experiences were breathtaking, even though I knew little to nothing about the orcas. Watching these majestic creatures swim and hearing them breathe moves something in me––and thousands of others who venture to the seas and shores to look for whales––connecting us to our animal nature, instilling wonder and awe, gratitude and recognition.

Three orcas came to me in a dream just weeks after we moved to our new home with it's peek-a-boo view of the water. In my dream, they swam in the bay near my house (too shallow for them to come in waking life), they breached and waved their pectoral fins, welcoming me to their home, and beckoned me to join them.

A year ago my husband and I saw them on a ferry crossing from Bainbridge Island to Seattle, and I recalled the dream and began to learn about the whales in earnest. This is some of what I now know:

The Salish Sea extends from the Puget Sound into Canada and is home to two distinct communities of Orcas. The Northern whales' home is in Canada, while Puget Sound is home to the Southern Resident killer whales. The Northern whales are threatened, the Southern whales are endangered, due to pollution and overfishing and other human created troubles. There are fewer than 200 total resident orcas in the Salish Sea. Both communities of whales leave their residence and swim great distances to locate chinook salmon, their sole food source.

Within the larger communities, there are smaller families called pods, and even smaller family groups, with unique dialects that have been studied and recorded using underwater hydrophones. The families live together their entire lives. "Granny," the matriarch of the Southern Residents is believed to be 102 years old. Many whales live into their 80s, but no babies were born into the pods this year.

The area is also regularly visited by Transient killer whales also known as Bigg's whales, that eat mammals like seals and sea lions. My dear friend had the privilege of watching them two days ago for hours just yards from shore. Here is her photo:

Male transient orca off President Point, Kingston WA Dec. 13.

I learned all of this from The Orca Network  a nonprofit based on Whidbey Island that is devoted to education about and preservation of the whales. The Orca Network posts whale sightings from people all over the region, who spot them from parks, ferries, public roads, and private boats. I've been able to drop what I was doing and head to viewing spots on Bainbridge island, once to watch dozens of resident whales swim by at a fast pace and a great distance, the other to watch transients feed and play within half a mile of shore.

Through the Orca Network I also discovered the nonfiction book Death at Seaworld by David Kirby published last summer and the documentary Blackfish which came out this summer and has also aired on CNN. To borrow a biblical cliche, the scales have fallen from my eyes. Like millions of people, I have seen whales perform at MarineWorld (in Palos Verdes, Redwood City, and Vallejo) and SeaWorld (in San Diego and Orlando). I believed what I was told: that "fin flop" was normal, that the whales were happy and healthy, like trained dogs.

Even with well-intentioned trainers, they truly are prisoners, ripped from their families in the wild (in sad fact, the Russians have just captured wild whales to put on display for the winter Olympics), or bred and raised in unnatural and unhealthy circumstances in captivity. No wild whale spends most of its life at the surface of a tiny concrete pool. No wild whale mother refuses to nurse her baby, or attacks her offspring. No wild whale's fin rests on it's back, it slices out of the water erect.

It is heartbreaking to read and watch what humans have done physically and spiritually to these intelligent, social, apex animals.

I feel called to repent: I will not patronize any marine facility that keeps captive orcas. And I also must help, somehow.

Right now, I'm short on cash, but long on good will. What I can give are my words and my intentions: this blog post, a poem–Becoming Blackfish–that you can read here and download and listen to on my website.  I also pledge 10% of my author royalties from my forthcoming book Burnt Offerings to the Orca Network.

Perhaps this is what the whales meant when they invited me to join them.