Category: Behind the Stories: Inspirations and Encounters

Happy Feet: Celebrating Four Years of Barefoot Running

Four summers ago I was staying in in the same eccentric roadside motel in Maine where I am now, and I’d brought  Chris McDougall’s Born to Run as my vacation reading material. I loved everything about the book—the colorful characters who take part in ultra-marathons , the Tarahumara runners, the settings from Leadville CO to the depths of Copper Canyon in Mexico, and of course I was fascinated by the research. Having spent much of my working life in either the fitness industry or in various colleges’ departments of Health Sciences, I paid close attention to the information on the development of the modern running shoe and on the mechanics of barefoot running. I had to try it.

I’ve never run on pavement except in my few races, even when I wore conventional shoes. I always ran trails and parks. This motel has a huge lawn all around it, a green perimeter bigger than quarter-mile track. One day I ran in my conventional, cushioned running shoes, and the next day I ran barefoot. Born to run? Born again! I didn’t want to stop. This lawn was the perfect place to run with no shoes at all. Most places have too much in the way of thorns, rocks, sticks or dog poop for me to want to run skin-to-earth, but this was a cool green carpet all the way. I knew better than to do my usual distance with this new technique, but my soul wanted to. Flying on the rebound from that soft landing reminded me of the way I felt back when I was a ballet dancer, taking off in a soaring leap or a springy allegro, wearing only those pliable slippers.

When I got home I invested in Vibram five fingers, and I soon felt like I’d gotten a new right knee. After running in the old cushioned shoes with a heel strike, my right kneecap used to stick so badly for thirty minutes or so that I could hardly go upstairs. Barefoot, no sticking. Because of that I couldn’t bring myself to transition as slowly as I should have, so I earned sore calf muscles and a cramp in my flexor hallucis longus (a big toe muscle) that I could feel all the way up the back of my lower leg. The scene in Shaman’s Blues where Mae overdoes her first two barefoot runs, with a cascade of consequences, was informed by that experience. I didn’t cramp my legs as severely as she does, but then I didn’t go to Santa Fe Bandstand and dance for hours afterward. The worst thing that’s happened to me running in my barefoot shoes has been stepping a big thorn that reminded me to update my tetanus shot. Compared to the sticky patella or the sprained ankles from falling off those old high-heeled marshmallows, an occasional thorn isn’t bad at all.

I celebrated my barefoot running anniversary today with four miles of mindlessly blissful laps around the grass. I did go dancing afterward, but with four years of training my legs and feet are up to it. Cap’n Frank Bedell and the Torpedoes were playing at Schooner Landing in Damariscotta. People of all ages, locals and tourists, partied to great old rock’n’roll on the pier with a view of the Damariscotta river and the boats on the blue water. I danced with happy feet.

 

A Strange Beauty

New Mexico Magazine has recently been featuring items from its archives on its back pages. This poem from the June 1953 issue was resurrected in the June 2014 issue. There are lines in this poem that ring so true I wish I’d written them and others that sound forced or stilted to me. I’m sharing the whole thing so the gems can shine in their setting.

 

Where Whisper the Rocks

 

“Which state is your favorite?” the man asked

            “New Mexico …”

Sharp-clipped the answer came, and positive.

“Which part?”

            “The Southern part, the desert.”

As sharp the syllables, as positive as before.

“I love it. The Northern part, too—

That stretch, now, from Santa Fe to Taos,

The Sangre de Cristos, the Cimarrons—

There’s beauty and grandeur there—

But the desert …

That part from El Paso to Lordsburg,

And up to Santa Rita where

Prays the Kneeling Nun at nature’s rocky altar …

I’ve never known wherein lies its allure

Except that it takes hold of man

Like the spirit of the one woman he cannot do without.

A strange beauty the desert has

And a harshness that’s soft as love itself

To the heart that feels it …

            Yes, I’ll take the desert, friend

            And I’ll take it in New Mexico

            Where Whisper the rocks themselves,

            ‘Vaya con Dios, amigo.’”

By Sam Lesky. New Mexico Magazine Vol. 92, issue 6, p. 72

 

The words that grabbed me are these:

“… it takes hold of man

Like the spirit of the one woman he cannot do without.

A strange beauty the desert has

And a harshness that’s soft as love itself

To the heart that feels it …”

It takes hold of a woman, too.

Here’s a picture of the rock formation the poet refers to

http://www.pbase.com/aw11mr2/image/87186372

A Comic Digression

 

This satirical doggerel was originally posted in a discussion on Goodreads. I received a request to post it where it was easier to link to it, so here it is:

 

The Author’s Patter Song

 

(With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan)

 

I am the very model of a modern indie authoress.

My editor is excellent, my formatting is not a mess.

I’ve hired top professionals for proofreading and cover art ,

And hope that that I will join the ranks of authors who discovered are.

 

I don’t engage with trolls or drive-by one-stars on the internet.

I’ve never said so far a thing on Goodreads that I might regret.

Real readers wrote my good reviews not sock puppets or family.

I hope this will promote me since I must not do it spammily.

 

I can’t afford for Foreword or for Kirkus to approve me

And if I were to push hard would-be readers would remove me

From their to-read lists, and so I keep my self-promotion minimal.

With marketing so subtle that it borders on subliminal.

 

I’ll hang on with obduracy and get discovered anyway.

To languish in obscurity would be a terrible cliché.

But …

I’m at the very bottom of the Amazon best seller list

Where almost every other model modern indie author is.

Crystals and Waterfalls

I just returned from a visit with friends in Asheville North Carolina, the spiritual twin of Santa Fe, the wet green version of the City Different. Like Santa Fe, Asheville is set in mountains, and has more eccentrics and creative people per square foot than other cities its size. I loved it.

 

As well as the company of the warm, loving people who welcomed me into their home, I had the pleasure of hiking in mountains full of waterfalls. I had no idea there could be so many in one place. Some are roaring, towering torrents, while another flows across a slope of rock in such a way that water forms patterns like shells made of lace. The sound of each fall is unique, a song as hypnotic as the ocean.

 

My friends’ five-month-old baby seemed to go into a bliss state in the woods. Indoors, he can fuss like a champion, like any baby, but on the trails he was in nirvana for mile after mile. Even when it rained, he either slept, or licked raindrops off his carrier. His parents take him hiking a lot. I like to think this is giving him a nature-mind, an affinity for the shapes of trees, the sound of waterfalls and the smell of earth.

 

We visited one of the local “gemstone mines.” I know there are real mines with emeralds and other precious and semi-precious stones in the North Carolina mountains, but this was more of a game, where you can sift a bucket of dirt tray by tray and see what shows up. Strangely, it was more fun than seeing crystals on shelves and shopping. I like mystery and suspense. When I got home, of course I looked up the healing properties of my new acquisitions.

 

I just finished writing my short story prequel for the Mae Martin series, set during her childhood in her native North Carolina mountains. It was good to visit my protagonist’s roots and be reminded of all its details, from waterfalls to emeralds to hot boiled peanuts, and to be around people who talk like her. I’ll have to take her back there in one of the later books. It’s an extraordinary place.

 

Rainbow Falls: http://www.romanticasheville.com/rainbow_falls.htm

 

Writing about Readers, and a Writer’s Reading

I like to think about what my characters read, even if I don’t mention it in a book. Do they read fiction? Self-help? Science? Biographies? Magazines? Newspapers? Poetry? It helps me see them offstage, and then I can bring that material onstage if I need it. A friend who read The Calling said she was struck by the magazines Mae sees lying on the coffee table in one of the last scenes in Tylerton, when Hubert’s reading reminds Mae of the complex person he is. My friend subscribes to The American Prospect, and seeing it on that table along with Runner’s World and Car and Driver told her a lot about Hubert.

My magazines and scholarly journals started piling up while I was reading four books at once: two works of literary fiction, one genre novel, and one nonfiction book. (I’m down to two books now, almost done with one of them.) In spite of all this reading, I feel intellectually unplugged without the magazines, out of touch with the worlds of nature, history, politics, culture and science that I’d usually be reading about. The only periodical I’ve kept up with is the weekly Santa Fe Reporter, and I’ve only been reading a few major stories in each issue. I normally read everything cover to cover.

Do I need to know how to survive a kayaking disaster? No, but I read the “Survive” articles in Sierra anyway. I read recipes in New Mexico Magazine I have no intention of cooking, and research in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine on therapies I may never use, as well more applicable articles on yoga and meditation. In IDEA Fitness Journal I read about new workout programs I might or might not ever teach. All this material finds its place somewhere in my life, enriching my knowledge, making me think,  helping me understand others’ lives, or showing up in my books.

For example, I learned about the Arts in Medicine program at the UNM Hospital through New Mexico Magazine. I wasn’t looking for this information, but volunteering with Music in Medicine was a perfect fit for Jamie’s talents, character and personal history. It became part of his background in Shaman’s Blues. I found an article on voodoo as a healing tradition in Alternative Therapies that I’m using in depth for one of my works in progress. The Reporter plays a role in Shaman’s Blues, as Mae gets acquainted with Santa Fe.

I owe it to my protagonist as well as myself to get caught up on my magazines. Mae Martin would not get behind on IDEA Fitness Journal. I need to be current with what she’s reading.

Writers—what do your characters read? Readers, do you notice if a character does or doesn’t read?

“You want me to get my hands dirty?”

The boy’s bird-watching father had left him to his own devices. While his dad strolled around the park peering up through binoculars, the robust little lad, five or six years old, hung on the railing of the bridge over the stream, shouting at various bits of trash floating past as if cheering drivers in a NASCAR race. “Water bottle! Look at the milk jug go!”

Milk jug. I realized that an annoying piece of plastic litter I couldn’t reach earlier had dislodged from a spot further upstream. This park, my usual running place while I’m in Virginia, has wildflowers, blue herons, hawks, cardinals, kingfishers, and huge sweet-gum trees that seem to grow from one massive root network at the edge of the water, but the amount of trash flowing below them is a persistent detraction from my inner peace. I stopped my post-run stretching and went downstream and explained to the boy that I was going to try to pick up all the stuff he’d been watching.

He followed me to one of the sweet gum trees that grows out over the stream, and watched me lie down on its mossy trunk to fish the jug out with a stick. Having found a whole nest of other floating detritus, I asked him to hold the jug for me so it wouldn’t blow way while I got the other stuff out.            “Yuck,” he said, grasping the slimy handle. “What’s all that green stuff?”

“Algae. It looks yucky but it’s more natural in the water than the garbage.” Of course, there’s the whole issue of nutrient pollution from farm runoff, but that’s a lot for a kid to comprehend.

I didn’t know what the chances were that he could come to see these familiar objects in the wrong place to be just as icky as green slime, but it was close to Earth Day at the time so I tried to explain. While I hauled out a few water bottles and plastic dip-tobacco containers, I told him how it all ends up in the ocean and can choke fish and birds, sparing the details of how the oceans’ garbage patches attract dioxins and other toxic contaminants. A little sad news might be enough to make a kid care, but not a whole depressing dump of it.

One of the water bottles I’d pulled out blew away. And then the boy dropped the milk jug back into the water, apparently on purpose.

I used my best kindly-teacher voice. “I thought you were going to hold onto that for me.”

He looked at me in bewilderment. “You want me to get my hands dirty?”

“Yes. We’re getting our hands dirty so bad things won’t happen. We can wash our hands, but we can’t wash the ocean.”

“Why not?”

“There are patches of trash in it as big as the state of Texas. Once it’s all in there, there’s so much, it’s hard to get out.” I got up and collected my heap of garbage. “Thanks for helping me.” After all, he’d tried, if only for a few seconds before the slime got to him.

I put the plastic, too contaminated to recycle, into the garbage can, wiped my hands in the grass and resumed my stretch. The boy hung on the rail again, shouting at something new in his imaginary play. Though I didn’t succeed in making him understand what I was doing and why, confusion is fertile ground for learning. Maybe he asked father some questions later. I hope so. His father might care. After all, the man loves birds.

As I left the park, this encounter got me thinking. There are a lot of ways in which I don’t get my hands dirty enough.

I admire the people who do. In The Calling I created a character, Mae’s mother-in-law Sallie Ridley, who gets involved in local politics. She’s abrasive and opinionated in her attempts to change the world, but she tries. I’ve had a few readers say that they both agree with her and dislike her at the same time. As an organic farmer and aspiring mayor, Sallie gets her hands dirty both ways, and by this I don’t mean political corruption, but just digging in and doing the ground-level, local work.

I only dip into politics at the edges—knock on doors, make phone calls, and I’m uncomfortable the whole time I do it. My personality and campaigning don’t fit easily. After the last presidential campaign, I had a discussion with a freshman seminar about voting and degrees of involvement. One student in the class had not voted and had not cared who won. One student had volunteered for the candidate opposing the one I worked for. No one else had been involved other than voting, and they were amazed that we had dared to volunteer. “Aren’t people mean to you, or rude?”

Neither of us had encountered such behavior. Face to face people didn’t act the way they do online. They were polite when they said no. No slammed doors, no insults, many friendly responses. I’m not a confrontational person, so I’m glad my political activities were met with such civility. Even writing this blog post feels bold to me, compared to writing about my usual topics, and all I’m talking about is litter. That’s hardly controversial. No one likes litter.

And I suspect no one likes picking it up, either.

The TED talk linked below is powerful. It’s a few years old but unfortunately, not outdated.

http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic

The background (as I recall it from an article I read a while back):  Charles Moore, the owner of a California cabinet-making business, had come into an inheritance and had chosen an early retirement. He meant to enjoy it by sailing, but as he took a challenging and seldom used course across the Pacific, he kept running into so much trash he changed his life’s course, and started the Algalita Foundation, to work on the well-being of the oceans. He is credited with discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After I watched this, I could never forget the effects of trash in the waters. If everyone were to pick up three pieces of plastic every day, we could keep a lot of litter out of the ocean, without even getting our hands very dirty.

Foxx meets Pigg: Random Observations on the Odd

An author’s name cited in a student’s paper jumped out at me as if it somehow didn’t belong in an academic context. Pigg. Names like Pigg and Hogg beg to belong to characters like the “rude mechanicals” in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, not Ph.D. psychologists.

Speaking of Bottom, a friend whose last name was Butt (I’m not making this up) married a man with the surname Broadass. They decided not to hyphenate.

I saw the name Ole Aass on an old gravestone in the cemetery of a simple white Norwegian Lutheran church in the town of Norge, Virginia. The setting was serene, spiritual, and idyllic but for a moment all I could think of was how his name would have looked in the phone book if he’d lived in a later century.

I’ve used some of my favorite off-beat names in my books. My protagonist Mae’s maternal grandmother was an Outlaw, a wonderful North Carolina moniker that is both realistic for the region and reflects the way some people treat Mae because of traits she gets from that Outlaw grandmother.

Strange coincidences can happen around names. I have two students with an unusual first name—I’ll change it to Cordelia to protect their privacy. One has the last name Casto, the other is Castorina. There are eight sections of this class and yet they both ended up in this section, sitting next to each other. They still find it weird.

A young man who took my yoga class a few years ago got an e-mail addressed to someone with the same name. I’ll call him Chase Merryman, a name about as odd as his real name. That other person must have had a dot or dash in his e-mail address which this fellow did not. The intended recipient Chase Merryman was being offered a job interview for an editorial position with a sailing magazine based in Australia. The wrong Chase Merryman was qualified for it. He answered the e-mail, explained the mistake, but added his resume nonetheless. He got invited for an interview.

The classic synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence. The Chase Merryman story is a good example. The instance of the two Cordelias is not. Only the synchronicity gives me an idea for a story. The Wrong Chase Merryman makes a pretty good title. I have the start of a plot I can work with—only the ending won’t be as simple as what happened in real life. (He didn’t end up taking the job, but he had a great trip to Australia.) When you read the story, whenever I get it written, know that it was based on fact. Strange coincidences can really happen.

So can strange names. Maybe Dr. Pigg and Ole Aass have places in some writer’s future work. If I come across them, I’ll wonder—did the author read this blog, or was that a coincidence?

 

Bat Medicine: Spiritual Encounters with the Natural World

This post is an expansion of my review of Dwellings on Goodreads.

 

I began re-reading Linda Hogan’s book of essays Dwellings and Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman at the same time. This pairing of readings couldn’t be more dissimilar in style, content and purpose. I finished the latter book quickly, but took my time with the first. It’s too beautiful to hurry through.

Poet and novelist Hogan, a member of the Chickasaw tribe, writes of the spirituality inherent in the natural world. Her insights into the relationships between living creatures and our own souls is anchored in places and in specific experiences—with hot springs in a cave, or at work at a bird sanctuary. She doesn’t write about animals or earth in general, but this piece of earth, this particular sunflower, this colony of mud-building bees. When she cites other writers, often scientists, she finds passages so beautiful they flow into her own essays like the breath of the same breeze. Her topics range from wolves, to the Amazon rainforest, to the life cycle of water and rock, to the deeper meaning of ape language experiments, and more.

These essays wake the reader up to the aliveness of every moment, as the author hears the song of corn, or discovers the liquid, graceful, wing-wrapped mating of two bats she rescued from their fall back into hibernation in sudden spring chill. “I put them in a warm corner outside, nestled safe in dry leaves and straw. I looked at them several times a day. Their fur, in the springtime, was misted with dewy rain. They mated for three days in the moldering leaves and fertile earth, moving together … then apart, like reflections on a mirror, a four-chambered black heart beating inside the closed tissue of wings.”

In addition to this subtle observation of their beauty, she sees the bats from a Native spiritual perspective. “The bat people are said to live in the first circle of holiness. Thus, they are intermediaries between our world and the next. Hearing the chants of all life around them, they are listeners who pass on the language and songs of many things to human beings who need wisdom, healing and guidance in our lives, we who forget where we stand in the world.”

This forgetting where we stand is Hogan’s theme. We need to heal ourselves back into what she refers to in her novel Power as “the real human beings”. If you love language, you will love this book, and you may come away from it loving every living creature, every crack in a rock, every sound when the wind blows, as if you had never seen and heard and known them before. I hope you will, like I did, love this book so much you want to read it again and again.

Harner’s book is almost the opposite of Hogan’s. An anthropologist turned shamanic trainer, he does his best to distill the essence of shamanism into a kind of how-to book for modern people. After an introductory chapter in which he tells of his studies with the Jivaro tribe, he intentionally presents shamanism divested of culture, land, language and tradition. Even the animals are not real creatures that walk the earth and breathe and live their lives, but animal spirits, guardians and guides for humans, and plants are also their spirit essence, for use in healing humans.

His citations are dense and thickly strewn, sometimes without any background on the culture or lives of people he is citing. That, however, is his point. This is shamanism as modern medicine, a world-wide range of healing traditions pared down to their “active ingredients.” Shamans from Australia to North America use quartz crystals, drums, rattle and dances. Shamans all over the world take journeys to find knowledge, and have power relationships with animal spirits. He turns these elements into a kind of recipe for being a shaman. Maybe it works for some people, but for me the best parts of this book are the direct quotations from real shamans such as the “sucking doctor” Essie Parrish, rather than the parts about modern Americans “dancing their animals.”

Compared to my experience of traditional ceremonies, or even to running outdoors, or dreaming, neo-shamanism feels incomplete, but then I wasn’t reading with the intention of putting it into practice. I had read the book before, and gone to a workshop with Harner at an alternative therapies conference years ago, and already knew I wasn’t going to use this for spiritual guidance. It was research for novel in which one character is a teacher of neo-shamanism—not based on Harner himself, only on the kind of practice that he teaches—and I needed to refresh my recollections.

 

I dreamed once that I turned into a bat. In this form I flew though the dome of an art gallery and then descended to the bottom floor as the blue outline of bat, a bat made of twilight sky. In Truth or Consequences, I like to walk down to the Rio Grande at that low blue time of evening in the summer and let the bats surround me at the edge of the little wetland where redwing blackbirds sing by day. While the bats dance for bugs, I can stand in the midst of them and they swoop close without ever touching me, perfectly aware in their busy flight, flawless pilots of their world of sound. To me the animals themselves feel more sacred than a journey to find my “power animal.” This bat immersion is the bat medicine I need.

The Smell of Books: Aromatherapy

In my freshman honors seminar on current health issues, a discussion of the impacts of screen time on sleep and stress digressed into a discussion of paper. My eighteen year old students all declared a liking for paper. They found the increasing tendency of professors, myself included, to put all assignments and syllabi online and to accept all “papers” only though an online course management system frustrating. These students want to read as much they can on paper. They say they understand it better. Some also need to write outlines and first drafts by hand. Computers are for revisions, for them, not for creativity. They like the tactile quality of paper, the way it looks when you read outdoors, the peaceful energy of holding a book, and the smell of bookstores.

Their sense of community and happiness when they shared this last thing fascinated me. The smell of books in second hand bookstores and libraries, as well as the smell of new books, is a kind of aromatherapy for them. It takes them into the world of quiet pages where all the stress and intrusion of electronics stops.

How often have you heard that young people are overly attached to their phones and live by technology? This group liked places and events where they had to be phone-free, whether it was going to church, or spending two weeks at a camp where phones weren’t allowed, or simply turning the phone off and settling down with a paper book.

I just packed up five paperbacks of Shaman’s Blues to ship to winners in my Goodreads giveaway. It was somehow special to see each book and wrap it up. The love of paper is alive and well. When I gave away the same novel as an e-book on Booklikes twelve people entered. When I gave away the paperback on Goodreads, close to eight hundred people entered. That could have to do with the price difference—a free paperback feels freer—but it might also have to do with the smell.

For a lot of people, paper is alive in some way that plastic is not. Perhaps the energy essence of a tree comes through in its reincarnation as words. I read e-books and paper books, but I only read the paper ones in bed.