Poem: After the Block Party

After the Block Party

A boat floats across the harbor
its light a single, mournful candle
as the sad growl of a motorcycle
fades  in the distance

Lovers walk away from me
Hands and eyes reach out
in the disembodied dark
dancing barefoot on bare floor
as intention and energy
bare their white teeth

You are dancing two feet away
But I am pulled and pushed
Into the Shiva circling of your arms
I am dancing past the boundary 
of my own skin 
tentative as the breath of surf

A sudden slap of wave,
and your eyes are on mine
beseeching, burning
pulling me out and in
the surf drawing its breath
the urgent growl of a motorcycle
thundering past

I love my loneliness
staring out at the ocean
with predatory eyes
that miss nothing

I am far away from the party-goers
dancing in the ambulance light

I am a searchlight pulsing over the horizon
Deeply seeking the other side
the mournful connection
--a single candle
--a light in the harbor
--a ghost, a mist, the scent of decay

This is the ocean
This is where I live
--a twist of driftwood an empty limb
--a white suggestion of birch tree
--a drowned forest primeval

The mournful candle of your eyes
glowing over the black water
slowly turning away

8/19/2012

Poem: Dancing with Middle-Aged Women In Clunky Shoes

I love dancing
with middle-aged women
in clunky shoes

with cropped hair and gaudy belts
festooning hips
with broken-in torsos, generous breasts

not afraid to take up space
arms akimbo
maenad bravado

who dare the men to join in
swim the estrogen-rich waters
with these sleek smiling sharks

not timid maidens in pinched jeans
watching us, wide-eyed
staring at their elegant footware

not the young bucks with stiff hips
and determinedly heterosexual beers
waving in the air

those are not the powerhouses
who dominate the dance floor-
sprung from empty nests
hungry for the spotlight

with crow's feet shameless
dancing around firey eyes

shaking what god gave 'em
putting us all to shame

Empathy, Energy, Attachment and Addiction

I have been pondering the role that empathy has in my sickness and my recovery, in disintegration and rejuvenation.

I was in Salem at a yoga studio and in the lobby there were these black-and-glossy business cards advertising an energy worker, a healer, an “empath..” A colorful glowing lotus formed on part of the card, the other showed a figure radiating a globe of light from the head and a cross-like beam of light over the heart. What is this? Is this an empath? Some kind of being of light offering healing and insight to the multitudes? Some kind of strip-mall yoga-studio Jesus?

Being an empath for me has never been pretty. Imagine your psyche is a toothbrush and the emotional residue and energy of everyone around you is the bathroom at Grand Central Station. It means you crave the energy around parties but the wrong kind of energy can drain you. This article was the closest I've come to telling the truth about growing up empathic.

I find myself dancing around this subject. Let others talk about Mirror neurons, the neurological approach to inter-connectedness. Still others will illustrate the impact that the human response to collective compassion has upon our personal spiritual awareness and our fate as a nation, as in the brilliant film “I AM”

Those approaches are fine for others, but I want to tease out these problems of energy, empathy, attachment and addiction through the best way I know how: telling a story. I am inspired by Anais Nin, the intrepid fore-runner of the blog with the diaries she published in her own lifetime. She said she was not as concerned with facts, figures, names and dates as with the “inner journey.” She would say it is ok to dance with your topic, to tease out its secrets, to make it reveal itself to you slowly simply by engaging it in easy conversation and gracious smiles.

So I want to tell you the story of a young girl. The Biblical meaning of her name meant “bitter sorrow, bitter tears” and it also was the Sanskrit word describing the illusion of all things Perhaps being named for sorrow and illusion makes a woman more than a woman, but some kind of avatar of desire. Something akin to La Belle Damme Sans Merci, the faery temptress created by John Keats and visualized by many Pre-Raphaelite artists.


There are many images of this favorite topic of Pre-Raphaelite artists, but this one emphasizes the arresting and entangling nature of her appearance of helplessness, her beseeching eyes, her clutching hands. Around him her hair entwines, a serpent vine, red of course. And this girl, this archetype, this empath, this vampire, was a red head, with moon-drenched skin and heavy crimson tresses, a stem-like waist and a bosom designed to tempt men of any age. She confessed to me she felt disconnected from her body, whose extreme curves not even Fredrick's of Hollywood could accommodate. She compared herself to a bicycle, a thing to be used for a purpose and put down. We have all met self-hating beauty queens. We have all, like the poet John Keats, stumbled upon faery temptreses in the woods.

But in this one moment all these things converged. She danced with fireflies in the July woods. She called herself a healer and pulled in energy from everyone around her to accomplish extraordinary things. When my husband had injured himself she decided she would heal him. Strangely, after she was done with this “healing”, I had a splitting headache. It did not take me long to identify what had happened. She depended too much on the kindness of strangers. She didn't expect what she pulled in to push back. I told her that there was a very fine line between an empath, a healer, and a psychic vampire. I gave her a hematite bracelet, the metal of earth, cold iron to ground the fey. It burns, she said. It's working, I said.

Like Anais Nin I understand that those you charm into your circle, those friends and lovers called seemingly out of nowhere, are the ones who most strongly mirror aspects of yourself, shadows you cringe from or secret sunlight you long for. I could see the shadow in her. I could see the danger inherent in the desire to save her from herself but it was as if somehow I knew that she had some lesson to teach me, perhaps much more than I could teach her. So there is this part of me, the fey temptress, the vampire muse, the dark side of the empath. I am very much aware that she exists but only as one aspect.

There are those who believe that extreme attunement to another's emotions and thoughts is codependency, brought on by a dysfunctional upbringing where emotional expression and self-hood were not encouraged. There are parallels between empathy in the sense of disconnection from self, overwhelmed by people, places and things. I've even explored the concepts of love and sex addiction, where one person becomes the “drug of choice” and attachment seems to alter the brain like a hallucinogen.

When I was younger, I was bullied in school. I took refuge in the vast collection of science fiction novels that were left in moldering grocery bags by my uncle in my grandparents' basement, I soon developed the idea that my emotional experience was different than the other children. As a teenager, I discovered “Star Trek”, and decided I would adopt (for the sake of my sanity) a Vulcan-like attitude of detachment towards other people. I would often declare the usual dramas of other adolescents as “illogical.” My own internal chaos was depicted in the stories I wrote and the characters I created, who got to experience all the emotion I was denied. Of course, I would argue with geek logic, the Vulcans, like Mr. Spock, suppressed all emotion. They were telepathic. Society with that much awareness of underlying emotion from others would be chaos.

Yet despite my attempt to detach, inevitable someone with bright, shining emotions would draw me in. The most brilliant “colors” were anger and pain. It is not that I was deliberately martyring myself, it was that I was helplessly winging my way towards the brightest fire in the stark night of emotional emptiness I had created to feel safe. I needed someone to be larger than life, to become inescapable and inevitable. Is it the perception of pain on that visceral level that makes empaths become healers, or else shut out the world? Is it the shutting down that causes the “acting out?” Can an unaware empath, caught in the ebb and flow of emotion, turn into a psychic vampire?

There is no manual for empaths, or how to survive growing up with this hypersensitivity in an often chaotic environment. We often have to learn by trial and error, like the children of repressed parents piece together their own sex education program through sections of romance novels and murmurs on the bus. I was at a party, feeling woosy, melted into the carpet, when someone took me outside and said, “You're an empath, aren't you?”

I nodded in confused agreement, not certain what that admission implied. He then proceeded to tell me how many people at that party were on various chemical substances, and that the entire room was an energetic swamp of of psychedelic ooze. Empaths are the cheapest of cheap dates, having the ability (or liability) of riding the coat-tails of someone else's high. It isn't always voluntary, as mind-altering drugs can trigger telepathic-like experiences where I could become energetically bonded to someone in an altered state and remain connected to them even after the drug had worn off. Sometimes when someone's aura is full of holes, it is not uncommon for an empath to fall in. These are the pitfalls of having such thin, malleable boundaries. That is why we are prone to addictions and obsessions as well as compulsion and creativity.

The best use of this ability, this gift or this curse, is through art. Like this video of Anais Nin, where she describes the women who were her heroes, women who did not demand their freedom, but created it. I envision a salon of healers and artists, witches and wanderers, dark and light dreamers. I envision a place where we can explore our edges and our roots, find fertile soil for our ideas. I envision where energy is shared, like food or love, like ideas and inspiration. If I am a vampire, let me be the voracious artist-muse that Anais Nin was. Let me blend the pain and pleasure, the masculine and feminine, the unconscious and the magician's tools of art. If I must constantly cycle energy in order to feel alive, then this is the way. This is the world I want to create for myself and my tribe.

The Power of Naming: Diagnosis and Destiny

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. “
--Anais Nin

I have been preparing to launch this Blog again. Like so many other people I know--spiritual seekers and personal-growth devotees, witches and healers and mothers and lovers—2012 was an expansive and terrifying fast-forward into the so-called New Paradigm.

In addition to the breakup that happened in the beginning of the year in March, a breakdown followed in August. It seems somehow linked to the sacrifice of my words at Lammas... when I threw unsent letters on the fire. When I sang to myself “I am dancing/In the Whirlwind/I am dancing/On the thorns/ I am dancing/with the fire/I am dying/I am born.” Words were one of the things I had to lose or let go of for a while. Maybe that is the real reason I put down this blog.

Just recently, a friend gave me a book “In Case of Spiritual Emergency: Moving Successfully Through Your Awakening” by Catherine G Lucas

So now, with Mercury in Retrograde muddling up communications in the mundane world but fast-tracking intuition, I launch into this enterprise with biblio-mancy and turn to a page in the middle of the book:

“Jung has to deal with fear, fear of losing his mind, “the fear of death, which spread like poison everywhere in my body, and just plain fear:

“You dread the depths; it should horrify you, since the way of what is to come leads through it. You must endure the tempation of fear and doubt and at the same time acknowledge to the bone that your fear is justified and your doubt is reasonable....I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I fear, yes, even more, that I must love what horrifies me.”

My spiritual emergency, my breakdown, my moment of crisis happened this Summer when I could not stop my thoughts. Such a simple thing, thoughts. Poets love to gambol through a mine-field of thoughts and images, ranting Ginsbergs, transcendental Whitmans, spastic slammers and mystic Beats. I wanted to be Hafiz spinning in dissolution, losing myself in God. I was for a period of time so inspired that I had moments where I lost time writing. When this started happening at work, when I could not make the words go away when I wanted to, I began to fear for my sanity. Distracted, crying, tormented by something as seemingly innocuous as the white noise of our new building's ventilation system, I finally realized there was a dark side to this dervish dance. I thought of the poets who did not make it- I thought of Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath-- I knew I did not want to end up with my head in an oven.


A flippant thought, perhaps, just another metaphor (poets eat death for breakfast, so why should I be afraid of a thought?) Why not dance with the muse, with the Red Shoes, until she tired of me and moved on to some other soul to devour? Why should I be afraid of pain, when it was my lifeblood, my destiny, my identity? Yet it persisted, this sense that I could not stop-- my thoughts, my dervish spinning, my tragic manic love stories. I could not stop falling in love. In the course of two months I had fallen in love with married men, with a voice over the phone, with a collision with a distant friend—but it was not love or lust at all it was fear-- my own darkness and despair personified. I could not land in my own skin. I only felt safe dancing, in community, at friend's houses, in the incestuous Nirvana online.

So one day, after a crying jag that did not stop, I left work early, and called the psychiatric emergency number on the back of my therapist's business card. They referred me to a small office in Salem, MA, where I talked to a woman about getting the help I needed. After 7 years successfully navigating depression without drugs, I wanted something to take the edge off. She told me that I had the option of going into an outpatient mental health program at Beverly hospital. They would give me medication, start me right away so I wouldn't have to wait a month for it to take affect. I could attend 12-Step like classes, participate in group therapy, and if I did well I could go back to work in a week.

At first I wanted to protest. I just had one bad day. For the most part, I was holding my shit together. I was terrified of being considered a wimp, a cop-out, a failure at living the life I had chosen for myself. Then I called my Mom, who has struggled with another member of our family who is troubled by mental illness. She was compassionate. She asked me, do I need this? I said I had a week more vacation days this year than I had last. She said use them. She encouraged me not to be ashamed. So I submitted myself to the system, to be analyzed, my poetry and my preoccupations with identity, relationship, and loss turned into a diagnosis of major depression (not really a big surprise there) and a secondary diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder .

I had gone into this program in a spirit of surrender, hitting my personal rock-bottom like they say in 12-Step program recovery. I knew that something more than depression was going on, suspecting that I might have slipped into a bipolar manic episode since I had not been sleeping and I couldn't stand to be alone in my apartment. I was prepared to humble myself, but I was not prepared to hear something about myself that seemed so derogatory, such a sentence of doom.

So little is really known about borderline personality disorder. Hollywood has made cartoon monsters out of those who suffer this disease. My friends mocked me when I try to describe what this has been for me. Come on, they suggested, you've never slashed an ex's car tires. You don't boil bunnies. I remember in my teens seeing “Fatal Attraction” and crying for hours. Before Glen Close's character was revealed to be a killer, I deeply identified with her. I remember seeing the scene where she collapses listening the opera to “Madame Butterfly” and feeling deep empathy for her. It disturbed me, how everyone else cheered when she met her end, a suburban housewife's avenging Fury, a modern Wicked Witch of the West, like my hero, Morgan-Le-Fey.) Did I know then some kind of kinship with that kind of intensity, that kind of self-torment in the name of desire?

There power in naming. We know this as writers, as magic workers-- to name a thing a thing is to begin to understand it. To name a thing is to bring it out of the void, out of the unknown and terrifying into known and seen. To name a fear is to begin to find the courage to face it. This July, when I renewed my commitment to my Wiccan path, I asked my priestess-teacher to give me a name. Ok, she said, but is it something you want to keep or want to work through, want to move past? I said give me a name that is a challenge. So I take on this diagnosis of the doctors, who presume to know me and measure and assess me after a few mere hours of discussion, as something to move past. I take this definition as an opportunity to start from scratch and redefine myself, to know where I am going by knowing where I have been and where I am.

When I read that one of the characteristics of BDP is “idealization and demonization” of a loved one, I shrugged and I said, that doesn't sound like a disorder, that sounds like poetry. It is true, that like many women poets, I shroud my dependency and fears of attachment and abandonment in the language of myth and metaphor. I have always compared lovers to mythological characters, to angels and demons, mysterious strangers, the ultimate Other. I have always needed a dark and a light muse to inspire me and yes, obsess me. The fact that I hold my wrath, my rage, my Fury inside, only releasing it through the rarefied pain of art, doesn't lessen its reality.

So seeking answers I read the book "The Buddha and the Borderline", a memoir of a woman who started an advocacy program for BPD. The author Kiera Van Gelder turns to Buddhism and its concepts of non-attachment to find a spiritual answer to her suffering. She undergoes therapy, and turns her focus on rallying for support for fellow sufferers who have been stigmatized and misunderstood. I found a lot of resonance in her story, although fortunately I have never had a suicide attempt (though many passive suicidal thoughts wrapped up in the language of poetry and obsessive journal writing). I have never had to stay overnight in a hospital. I used the book to find, as they say in 12-step groups, “Experience, Strength and Hope.” I used her experiment, suggested by her doctor, of not sleeping with her new love interest for three months, as an opportunity to really look at my struggles with sexual compulsion, rage, dependency, fear of need and attachment—clinging to image and obsession as a focus when the world starts to dissolve around me in a whirlwind of thought and fear.

Looking back at my journals (there are 20 years of scribblings in various notebooks of so many shapes and sizes) I find that I had some innate understand of my own condition when I wrote describing myself as a kind of Incredible Hulk, mild-mannered and meek until the beast of Need were aroused by the immanent fear of attachment. “Don't make me need you” I might say, “You wouldn't like me when I am needy”.... Fear of attachment, fear of abandonment, dancing in frenzied circles, with broken feet, on thorns, on broken glass. The only hope I believed I had was to draw completely inward, never speaking of these experiences. If I loved you, you were guaranteed to never see all of me, lest you run away in terror. From my earliest explorations into relationship, I knew this. “I'm in love with you”, I once confessed to a boy-writer whose words I worshiped, “but don't take it as a threat.”

What I have learned from personal growth work is that there is no possibility for intimacy without authenticity. If you do not know me—if I will not let you see me—there is no possibility for you to love me. There is no possibility for me to love you, merely create an artistic fetish object out of your image, carrying out secret rituals of emotional bloodletting before my hidden idol. From an early age, I feared there is no possibility of love at all, merely compulsion, predator and prey, false bonds of guilt and habit or the free-fall excitement of desire. And whenever one of I hear one of the Shalom Mountain Principles and Skills of Loving, which says “Love is a response to Need, “ I still cringe inside.

Yet a wellspring of hope has come from this experience. During the summer when I had my fall from grace, I had a friend come and spend time with me after each day of the Day Program. It was early afternoon August, Gloucester at her most glorious. We walked on the Boulevard. We listened to each other's stories, crying and cheering on each other's growth. Her nurturing, deeply embodied presence and passion walked beside me, laughing, shining with a desire for life—to swim, to dance, to risk herself in love. At the end of the day, we stood with our feet in the water, gazing out over the harbor, watching the sky change. Sometimes we talked, about Mary Oliver and other poetry, about God and Goddess, about our secret crushes, and sometimes just stood in companionable silence, breathing in the beauty and the presence of the Summer afternoon.

On this snowy-rainy-dreary February day, I can look across the street and see that same ocean, but not the same ocean. I can remember the eternity of those afternoons, when the insights and exhaustion of the half-day of classes on self-awareness and ineffective behavior patterns would dissolve into rocks and water under our feet, and wondrous colors and and shimmering pageantry of clouds overhead. I can remember and breathe in that gratitude, write and re-experience that awakening, knowing its depths. And I can feel inspired to tell my real story, begin to reach out into the world and share my truth, share my experience, strength and hope, hope my dark journey can light a stranger's way.

Poem: The Kindness of Ipswich Graveyards

The Kindness of Ipswich Graveyards

I love the kindness
of Ipswich graveyards

From inside the apartment
it looks cold
but the Gloucester fog
is soft against my cheek
grey as the down of
dandelions

the ones we picked in the graveyard
and I blew with all my breath laughing
do I make a wish?
I asked you
You wish,
you said,
that my neighbor has a taste
for dandelion salad

and with just a hint of guilt
I watch those fluffy invaders
float into a stranger's yard

But I came here for
kindness
so I shook it off and
followed you

your ponderous gait
your Mayflower name
into the unique New England serenity
of trees and green and stone

I followed you
when I wanted to sprint to the top of the hill

but I was here for
kindness
so I stayed with you on the ground
bending over the markers

to you
it was a hotbed of
Hollywood gossip
Come here to the edge-
Let me show where the sinners are buried
markers with no name
facing away from holy ground


I noticed the wings
under the skull of the
mortal angel
and I wanted to run my fingers over the grooves
between the teeth and wings
capture it between paper and charcoal

but you told me rubbing graves
erodes the stones
and only historians have that right

and I was here to do no harm
so a picture
had to be immortality enough

Then I heard you laugh
coming up short at a stone

with just a date and a finger pointing up
“Well” you said smugly
"He knows exactly where he's going"

I crept closer to take a picture
12 years
I saw imprinted on the stone

How kind I thought
How kind to die at 12 years old
knowing exactly where you are going

To meet the grinning angel
unafraid
enveloped in soft grey mist
as innocent and
delicious
as dandelions

Crush

Crush. What is a crush? We throw around these words so haphazardly. And yet I feel the truth of it. Dragonflies dance, landing effortlessly in the palm of my hand. My instinct is to close the hand, grasp, much like a two-year-old when you try to take away a toy. But this instinct will crush the delicate beloved thing. Instead I bless it, and let it fly away. And in its absence the air around me shimmers with sharp and sparkling grace. Grace with the shadow of terror in it, like stepping down into the green glow of sunlight through the woods. You never know what is down the path. Our ancestors believed there was a realm of Fae we could pass through unawares. The universe was riddled with sinkholes outside reality. Or perhaps we are now just too sheltered and limited by what we call reality. A crush is where desire and fantasy dance on the wing. Where discovery and fear hold hands and venture into the wilderness. So often I have felt lead butterflies in the gut. So often I have been cut by the sharp wings that fly around me, shattered dream-glass in the whirlwind. I made a choice to play first and not pay first. It is not a choice of selfishness but self-direction. Love when it comes for me often comes with a terrible price. I love and I love and I leave myself behind, beached on the shore while my emotions sweep me off to sea. I sense in this stranger another ocean to open and meet mine. In what bed of vastness can two oceans meet, one filled with sand and moonlight and the lonely song of the coyote the other with cold and bracken and passion and inevitability? I want to dance myself raw in the Sufi spin of transcendental longing. I want to know what the poets know. I want to feel what holds up the world and keeps it spinning in space. And I want to whirl with it. But this dervish dancer threw out her back. Just moving is awkward, especially shifting from sitting to standing to lying down. This gross physical reminder of the limits of my body brings my egret-spirit back down to the ground. I know when I have been dancing too fast and too hard. I know when I drop like a top after gravity has had its way. And this is the time when knives slip in the hand, when blood shocks us out of the dream world of summer drops us back into our limited bodies says remember winter remember age remember your fears are there waiting for you like abandoned clothing after your swim. Stretch, says the older-wisdom. Breathe, be still, you are not on fire, not dying, even though the summer is growing long in the tooth. You will not blow away with the first wind of autumn. And I know my crush will not crush me. I speak the truth that is my fancy. A stranger's voice in the dark speaking to me with familiar words. As if we have been students in the same graduating class, sitting in the same room listening to the same lecture just never having the opportunity of meeting. Every lover, says the Buddha, and every enemy is yourself. Thank you goddess for this bright shard of the mosaic of beauty. I will not be crushed by the force of the ocean. I will not destroy this delicate serendipity that has entrusted itself to me. More later, Blessed be

Poem: Celtic Reconstruction

Since I saw your eyes again I've been living in the woods Even at the edge of the ocean I've been staring at the river in melancholy serenity with the sun on my shoulders and Sandy Denny songs in my head An Arthurian tragedy you and me and she on that rock by the quarry with music and sunlight with the strangers crying for song Since I saw your little girl and she held your hand and she reached for mine and we were three again--linked through time charmed by wild innocence I offered her my wings of glitter and chicken wire but she said no and floated away with my soul under her delicate feet And I am still floating 500 miles and nigh one whole moon away from that moment when I saw your eyes again when my heart cracked open when the world was not the same Sitting by a river at my lunch break with reflections of factories in the lazy green water in the blast zone between past and future Writing you something I cannot call a love letter Still there is passion in my pen Still you have made me a poet again Called me from exile in my crystal caves Set fire under the cauldron of soul stirred it to roil and roll with vision And I hear your music in the wind whipping the flags to frenzy And I am swallowed by a wave without sense or momentum And once these elements fueled a great industry rivers powered mills and love milled poetry from incandescent longing And I wait for the day when I will see you again sit at your table share bread and brew and salt with your wife and daughter Remember our innocence its shimmer of sunlight and pain on rocks and water my throat swelling open with the words to a forgotten song