December 17, 2010
Bob’s Java Hut
Snowglobe City, USA

Writing is about honoring and reflecting upon life as it is, right now.  As one of my students said this morning, life is about learning to accept what is, even if it isn’t always what we want.  We may not want to stuff ourselves into bulky clothes and sit in a butt-clenchingly cold car with the defrost roaring, but it is what it is.

Despite the cold, despite the darkness, winter holds its own magic.  Hot coco and glittering snowfalls.  Branches of trees reaching up to the pale blue sky.  Holiday lights and white sky nights.  Rosy cheeks.  First snows.  Building snowmen and forts.  Skating on frozen lakes.  Winter solstice.  Glow-in-the-dark-snow on full moon nights.  Cozy nights gathering friends, drinking wine next to the fireplace. Books and candles and baths.  The camaraderie of helping neighbors and strangers get their cars unstuck after a snowstorm.  Sweating while cross country skiing in 14 degree weather, city skyline in view.

When I was a kid, the season meant snowball fights at the bus stop.  Thawing my frozen feet by the radiator after delivering the weekend Star Tribune.  Building a snow fort the length of my driveway.  Flying off jumps at Peppermint Hill.  My Aunt Jill’s house at Christmas Eve stuffed with family, food, and adventures with my cousins.  Falling asleep in church at Midnight Mass.   Warming houses at ice skating rinks.  Yelling “Happy New Year” from the noise of the house into the quiet winter night.  Sucking on icicles.

As Lucy and Oliver grow, I can live those moments again through their eyes—riding down the hill  in the backyard on their sleds, frozen cheeks and runny noses, daring each other to stick their tongue on a metal pole.  Leaving cookies and milk for Santa.  “Conversations” between the nutcrackers.  Reading the Polar Express.  Getting our tree at the Minneapolis Farmer’s Market under Highway 94.  Bonfires in the back yard.  Spotting cardinals, bright red against the almost-colorless landscape.  Taking the #7 bus to the Holidazzle parade—Lucy enchanted by the Princess and the Pea float, Oliver overcoming his fear of the witch on the bike behind the Wizard of Oz float.

Seasonal celebrations and traditions bring simple joy into our lives.  With our children, we can begin to rediscover and create seasonal celebration and traditions in this romantic snowglobe city.

Writing Exercise:

What are some of your childhood memories of this wintery season?  When you write, try to be as concrete as possible with your details, using all of the senses of your memory –what you saw, what you heard, what you ate, how you felt.  What holiday rituals and celebrations did you enjoy?  What holiday rituals and celebrations do you want to begin in your family?

December 10, 2010
Common Roots Cafe
Minneapolis

Disclaimer: I am not a poet. Never taken a poetry class, unless you count a poetry unit in high school.  So take my definition with a grain of salt:  Poetry is attention to the daily, ordinary moments in our lives. In other words, this very life we live is poetry.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.  ~Joseph Joubert

This is why I write.  To harness the poetry in the ordinary.  To acknowledge and honor the divine, the weird, and the beautiful that exist every day, everywhere.

The following is the poetry in my day so far:

Here I sit, my egg (done “hockey puck-hard”) and cheese sandwich with tomato on a sesame bagel gone, my taste buds calling for more.  10:59.  Almost done with my mug of green tea.  I’ll rifle around in my bag for $.50 for a coffee refill.  If I only have a nickle and a penny, and I’m desperate, I’ll let those two coins clink into the little “refill” box and only pour half a cup. My socks are bunched up around my heels in my boots.  My stomach is sort of folding over my skinny jeans–it’s either PMS or all of the spritz cookies and wine I consumed last night at our annual wreath making party, though I didn’t make a wreath–I made a “kissing ball.” Greg and I decided it was so good, I should call it my “feel ‘em up ball.”

The defrost in our big, loud, old truck doesn’t work so well, but since I was almost late for work, I drove down the street peering through the little circle of window that wasn’t covered with crystalline frost, hoping that by the time I got to the highway, the circle would grow big enough without me being a big, loud, danger on the road.  However, I didn’t get but two blocks away before I noticed a state trooper driving behind me.  So I pulled over like a responsible driver, and since we didn’t have an ice scraper in the truck (though it’s December in Minnesota), I grabbed a mini-DV case and scraped the frost off the windshield.

It was 19 degrees outside.  I looked at the temp gauge in the truck after seeing a kid wearing a Russian-style hat and a red T-shirt.  He was so tough he didn’t notice the air billowing out of his mouth with every breath.  I was hoping he’d really drive the point home and make a snow angel.

I teach in a little, cell-like room in the center of an urban high school each Friday morning.  When I pass through the nursery on the way to class, I can see my students’ faces in their little babies.  I light a candle and burn nag champa to bring a little ambiance to the room.  I feel very honored to sit at a big square table with these teen moms and write about our lives.  Every morning before I teach, I pray to God to give me the words that they need to hear.  Sometimes when they share their writing or their thoughts, I have to blink away tears before they roll down my cheeks.

I hate the word “blog.”

On the way here, when I come to write this blog (yuck), I called Paul’s cell phone to check on Oliver, who was sick last night.  He didn’t answer, so I called again and again and tried to push out worried thoughts, like, “He’s not answering because he’s on his way to the hospital.”  Then Paul called me back two minutes later and I said, “It’s about time,” and he laughed and said, “Geez Janna.”

My friend Tony is coming here to meet me for a coffee.  I’ll have to rifle around for that $.50.  I’ve known Tony since high school when I used to walk back and forth along the path at Lake Harriet with my friend Sarah on Friday nights when we had nothing to do.  When I first met him, he was driving a big brown truck.  The first words he said to me were, “What the @&% are you looking at?”  One time, after we had become friends, he pinned me down and was threatening me with a drool of spit–he’d let it grow long out of his mouth and then suck it back up.  I was yelling at him to get the hell off me.  He thought he was so funny.  Then the drool grew too long to suck back up and it fell on my face.  With my fury came Herculean strength and I threw him off me.  He was sorry.  I didn’t speak to him for what felt like weeks anyway.

But the truth is, he saved my life.  He entered into my life at a time when I needed someone who I could just talk to and be myself around.   I used to sit on the counter of Olson’s Dairy where he worked and eat loads of candy and talk about how crazy my parents were.

Now decades later, we are still friends.

All of these things–these jumbled-up, inconsequential, ordinary moments–are what make a life.  And it’s the ordinary that becomes the poetry of our lives.

Breathe-in experience,
breathe-out poetry.
~Muriel Rukeyser

Writing Exercise: Write about your day–all of the things, the little, inconsequential things–that you have noticed today.  Be aware of how life filters through the senses, what you see, what you hear, what you feel, what you smell.  This is an exercise in heightening awareness.

December 3, 2010
French Meadow Bakery

I just ate a tremendous plate of huevos.  Well, most of it.  I think they use a full carton of eggs per dish.  Note to all who come to French Meadow Bakery and order the huevos: Split the order.  Such nice spice in the chili, I can feel the blood in my cheeks.  I’m looking out the front window at the uninspiring landscape of crusty, patchy snow and a flat white sky.  I keep seeing the #4 bus go by with the advertisement for Second Harvest Heartland (which received four stars by Charity Navigator, by the way) that says, “Food or Medicine,” and then something like “Some people have to choose.”  I think it would be great if more revenue was donated than was collected during holiday season.  Warning, I’m about to proselytize (first time I’ve ever written that word, by the way.  I had to look up how to spell it.): I was inspired by an article in this month’s “Whole Living” magazine (though Martha drives me nuts and I’d rather not support her empire) by Catherine Newman about called “The Greatest Gift,”  which was basically about people who decided to change their lives and move their focus and energy toward charitable giving.

You may have seen fireworks exploding from a home in north Minneapolis the night I read it while taking a bath.  I was ignited.  It was one of those articles that alters your very chemistry for the rest of your life. Anyway, back to proselytizing.  I think, if we have it, we should give it away.  Paul gets worried when I talk like this.  He doesn’t worry about me running up our credit cards on clothes–we’re more in danger of me giving our money away. Especially after reading the article.

In it, Newman mentions that the Hebrew word for “charity” is justice.  I think that was the sentence that hit me with the most gusto.  Justice.  I sit here in this life I get to live, with my two healthy children and awesome husband and warm home and food and health and education and an inspiring job and clothes and multiple pairs of boots and nice snowpants, and on and on and on.  And sometimes, possibly due to my upbringing or whatever, I fear for the other shoe that is going to come stomping down on all of my lucky blessings.  Because that is what they are.  This life could have been anything–I could have been born somewhere in Nepal and sold into sexual slavery in Calcutta because my family had nothing.  I could have been a mother in Ethiopia that holds her starving child in her arms, helpless, surrounded by dry, cracked earth.  I could have been born into poverty or abuse and be on the street with a cardboard sign saying, “Desperate.  Need help.”

But no.  I got this life.  Where I get to sit in the French Meadow Bakery, listening to some jazzy music in the speakers, drinking my Fair Trade coffee, writing this on my laptop.  I am lucky.  Damn lucky.  And yes, I’ve worked hard to get in this place.  Yes, I’ve endured quite a bit of trauma in my lifetime.  And still.

Justice.

And if I can’t give to help someone else out, then I can give to help myself out.  Research has been widely published and confirmed that one of the best anti-depressants is to give.  Just give. Give a smile.  Give a wave.  Give patience.  Give blood.  Give your neighbor a loaf of bread.  Withold judgment and give the benefit of the doubt.  Give compassion.  Give time.  Give money without letting skepticism paralzye you (well, how much of this is really going to the people in need?).  Don’t worry about it.  Do your research if that makes you feel better about the whole thing and give.

This is a culture of greed and fear.  When we open our hands and give, we also let go of the fear that we are clenching in our fists–the fear of not having enough, fear of losing what we have. Reminds me of a sentence I read yesterday somewhere:

“You will never have enough of what you don’t need.”

This is your food for thought.  I didn’t know I was going to write this until that #4 bus drove by.  My fingers dancing along my keyboard, this is where I find myself.  Sometimes I like to think my hand is led in my writing.  Maybe you were led here.  Who knows.  (But I do know that the Save the Children catalogue of gifts is very inspiring.)

Writing Exercise: Begin by taking five minutes to write down all that you are grateful for.  Bring yourself and your mind to a state of gratitude where you can realize how abundant your life really is.  Even the small things, like, “I am grateful for a hot shower.”  Once you are there, feeling fat and happy, leave a little space and write in big huge letters, “How can I give?”  And let your pen do the talking.  Do you have a talent that you can share with others in your local community center once a week?  Do you have clothes in your closet, even the expensive ones that you never wear, that you can bag up and bring to the ARC?  Do you have a compliment to give but are too shy to give it?  Give it anyway.  Do you have blood?  Give it.  Do you have a friend that needs someone to listen?  Give her or him your ear. There is no greater reward than looking back on a life where you have shined your precious light into the darkness.  Simply luminous.

Figure out what is meaningful to you and find a way to give.  It feels so energizing, so wonderful, and so very just.  Give, give, give.  Give until you grow wings and levitate above your lucky self.  Give ’til it doesn’t hurt.