We played in my grandmother’s pool, its shimmering blue, the ripples, her arms sweeping the water. She moved slowly, her eyes closed, her face glistening in the June sun, turning toward breath and splash. The trick to staying safe was coming up rarely for air, keeping my mouth submerged, and breathing unperceptively through the nose.

“Polo,” I said, and she lurched for me.

I’ve always been ambivalent about being seen and heard. Growing up, I learned to survive not just by moving like a crocodile. Common to many of us from families where rage rules and secrets breed like burying hornets, I turned my body into wallpaper, or the tall ryegrass of summer, or blue pool water.

And part of me has always wanted to be seen. As the youngest of six, in a family of athletic, smart, and beautiful siblings, I wanted nothing more than to stand out, to hear from my battle-weary mother, “I am so proud of you.” In our family, calling attention to yourself in action or acquisition, like driving an expensive car, is considered showy. For showy, you will be chastised.

Those complicated instincts play out whenever I do anything public. Because I started in grad school thirty years ago forcing myself to read my poems in public, I’m not as scared anymore, generally, but outside of readings, I feel a deep menacing buzz in my gut when I call attention to myself.

The way I can talk myself into things like publishing a blog is the same way I was able to push myself past oxygen-deprivation when rowing: I will risk nearly every fear or pain for the sake of others, like the other 7 girls on a crew. During this time of COVID, when I hit upon the idea of offering a public writing and meditation practice for writers across the country and from other countries, I was both terrified and elated. Here was something I could do to help people connect with each other and their own creativity during a devastating time. And since it was a phone call, I wouldn’t be seen. And since I was doing little more than picking a poem, a prompt from it, and weaving imagery into that prompt in a meditation, I found a way not to be heard much.

But it became a lot more than I had imagined. Most days seventy people from fourteen states and three countries joined, held each other in silence, let poetry feed their art-hungry bodies, and showered each other with love and gratitude and good wishes when they left the call.

What I learned I’d like to share even though I know I’ll be learning from this experience for a long time to come:

–people crave routine, especially in times of chaos;

–a simple process (a call, a 5-minute meditation, 20 minutes silence, one poem) can make a practice easy;

–strangers, even in silence, can create a sacred and inspiring space, can offer comfort and continuity;

— meditation (calming, cleansing, activating) provides the perfect container for creativity, opens the gates as the Gateless Method describes;

–anonymous does not necessarily mean impersonal;

–poetry opens a safety net for everyone;

–the most relevant poems are not often the ones we’ve heard over and over;

–you never know how you’re going to be of service.

Many people thanked me for those 9am calls, and sometimes they would ask, “Do you realize what you’ve done?” Because I got so much out of the calls, I felt like I was serving myself and, therefore, didn’t need thanks.

By the end of the 42 days, I did not break into a full sweat by the end of each call the way I had the first two weeks. There was no Marco-Polo, nothing that might lunge at me if I made a sound. I learned to trust myself in the meditations as long as I knew where I wanted to aim the metaphors, the imagination. The poems by Li-Young Lee and Lucille Clifton and Ada Limon became the song I heard when I closed my eyes. Because so many people reached out, I think the realization that these calls were helpful has sunk in. I’ve copied off the email and cards people sent and scotch-taped them into my journal so that those kind words can remind me what we created together.

Thank you, everyone, who held the space on those calls, for sending your voice into the world, for your action through writing, centering your body, and allowing creative energy to rise in the world where danger has dismantled so much. You are creating something we will again hold.

~~

Maybe you’d like to work together? Here are some salons and workshops I’m leading soon:

—From Freewriting to Form: Tips for Revision, Thursday, May 7, 4-5:30pm, $40-$60, sliding scale

—Weekly Drop-in Salon, starting Thursday, May 14, 4-6pm, PST, $15/session

—Compose Free Virtual Writing Conference, May 16, 10am to 2pm. My workshop will focus on tension in any line: “In/tense: What Gives a Line its Oomph,” FREE

—Guts & Trust: What You Need to Write Your Root, a workshop through Westport Writers Workshop, June 22-26, 12-2pm, PST. Register through their site. Click HERE. $420

Please contact me if I can answer any questions or if you’d like to sign up: dangpoet—at–gmail.com.

This morning I let the words flow through me. I let my hands sway with the rhythm of the them. Something powerful inside me seemed to connect with something so much bigger than me and my fears. During the meditation, two juncos, the size of sparrows, black, white and gray, leapt into the branches outside my window, a male and female pair, poised and alert.

Once when I was walking my dog through a meadow up here in Mosier, Oregon, the edge of dry country in the Columbia River Gorge, I was surrounded by a flock of juncos, maybe forty of them, and I stopped. The bushes swayed with them. All around me they trilled like ringing telephones. For a few moments I felt I was a part of that flock.

I had no idea that writing together every morning on this conference call, this group writing, would be so powerful. All I knew was that I wanted to help somehow, help people stave off fear and loneliness this virus has caused, connect the powerful creative energy of writers. Fifteen years ago I used to volunteer for a Red Cross disaster team. When my pager went off in the middle of the night, I’d slip into a red-and-white vest. With disaster kits thrown in the trunk and magnetic Red Cross decals slapped on the side of my car, I drove to an apartment fire when the flashing fire truck lights were still pulsing like some flying saucer. For four years I responded to fires, hurricanes, and floods with the Red Cross. I can’t do that anymore.

In the writing workshops and salons I lead, when writers are hunched over their laptops or notebooks, when I hear our pens scratching the paper or the click of our keyboards, I feel something sacred happen, the way we leave our bodies, or maybe move into our bodies, or become more deeply animal. Over and over again, I’ve felt writers connect to something so much bigger than ourselves when we create, and I thought that’s what I can do: make a space for people to create.

Suzanne Kingsbury with her Gateless Method has shown me how to love this way. She’s taught so many writers how to trust our creativity, embrace the spirit within. And in a really practical way, she’s shown me what tools to use to connect online, how to lead a guided meditation, and how to help writers feel safe enough to open up to our creative genius.

Writing Together, a daily meditation and writing practice, has launched. We’re four days into this experiment. I’ve never done anything like this: start something, offer it publicly, invite people across the internet to write. Before the first day, I didn’t sleep. I was drenched with sweat and shaking, and because the group writing is by phone, not video, no one could see how wrecked I was.

Fifty-five people from 6 states and 2 countries came the first day. People said their names and where they were from. I led a guided meditation for 5 minutes and moved into the prompt I had pulled from the poem I had chosen as the closing. Everyone wrote for 20 minutes. After those 20 minutes, I asked people to breathe, and then, I read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.” Today 69 people called from 14 states and 4 countries. Today a woman in Singapore asked to play the recordings of each session and write with people in Asia/Australia.

Perhaps the best part comes when we say goodbye. Beautiful voices sing their thank-yous and goodbyes and be-wells, and we are one voice, the high, sweet song of kindness. We are a flock. And I think we’re helping each other carry on and feel a little less alone.

For upcoming online workshops and salons I’m offering, please go to kategraywrites.com and click on WORK WITH ME, or look on the calendar. I’d love to work with you.

When I study the pictures of the Stonewall riots of 1969, I see how tired the gorgeous black trans woman looks. She’s holding up the skirt of her white percale gown so she doesn’t trip in her stiletto heels. Her shoulders hold back the scoop neck bustline, her matching earrings dangling. Her lips, with a light glossy lipstick, are pursed, not smiling, not saying anything. She looks like she may be pulling her arm away from the undercover cop, leading her to the paddy wagon, his thick fingers on her silky, bulging bicep. She looks so tired of this routine, always the transsexuals, the transvestites, the cross dressers arrested first, paraded down the street, shoved into the wagon, paraded in the police station. She stares straight ahead.

In the black-and-white pictures of the riots, I mostly see young men, their hair a little shaggy, their shirts buttoned only part way up. They wear jeans or white bell-bottoms, tennis shoes. Some cock back their arms to throw stones or bricks or whatever they can find. One young man in particular, his hair falling over one eye, could be my cousin, his sinewy neck, his slender nose, the brown hair streaked with blond in the summer. He looks like he’s waiting for the right moment to strike a cop. But that cousin was only 8 years old in 1969, a year younger than I was, and he died when we were in our thirties. Perhaps I want to see him young again, standing up, on the edge of fighting as he often was when we were kids. I want to tell him, “Go ahead,” but it’s easy to cheer someone on to do something I’m not willing to do myself.

It’s the picture of the young white woman, her hair completely drenched with sweat, that shames me. She’s surrounded by cops, each white, each with a thick mustache, and she’s careening forward. A cop holds her on one side, another cop is reaching for her, another cop is holding another cop back, and she’s stretching her arm in front of her, her hand extended, wrist flipped up, the gesture for STOP, her mouth open in an O. Maybe she’s saying, Whoa. I don’t know, but the cop she’s trying to stop, his face is about a foot from her hand, and he looks tired. He’s looking at her. One cop looks at that lead cop, about to say something. One cop looks at the young woman, and one cop looks directly at the camera. His gaze is slack, like he’s in-between fear and anger, pausing between what he wants to do and what he has to do.

I would not have been that young woman. With bottles and bricks flying around me, with cops in riot gear, billy sticks hitting backs, with pushing and yelling and cops running down men, grabbing their shirts and spinning them to the ground, pinning them in neck locks, hitting them, I would have run. I would have gotten the hell out of there.

What if they had all been like me?

When is it time to say no? When is it time to risk your body, the pain of being hit, your head split, the pavement scraping you, your hands wrenched behind your back, the bite of handcuffs, a smelly jail cell, then protracted legal battles, the charges part of your permanent record? I can’t stand that I would have left that young woman yelling at the cops surrounding her, or that elegant black woman in the paddy wagon, her makeup thick and smooth, the hours she lay in curlers, or maybe just slid on the perfect wig. I still see her looking at me, her gaze to the side of the photographer, the way she doesn’t look someone like me (like the photographer, doing nothing) in the eye because she doesn’t want to see their shame, their inaction, their silence. She’s that respectful.

When is it time to put your body on the line?

I don’t want it to be soon. I think it might be soon.

Kate’s UPCOMING EVENTS (please let me know if you’re interested…)

ONLINE WRITING SALONS

1) Sunday evenings, 5-7pm, PCT, 8 meetings: Sept, 15, Sept. 22, Sept. 29, Oct. 13, Oct. 20, Oct. 27, Nov. 3, Nov. 10

2) Monday afternoons, 1-3pm, PCT, 8 meetings: Sept. 16, Sept. 23, Sept. 30, Oct. 14, Oct. 21, Oct. 28, Nov. 4, Nov. 11

Please join me for an Online Writing Salon using the Gateless Method. We’ll meet on your computer, using Zoom. (No need to get the app.) I’ll start each session with a prompt which may be text or image or music or motion. Then, we’ll write for as long as we can (perhaps 30 minutes) in order to leave time for all 10 people to read if they want. The session has 8 meetings, but not continuously. Please see the calendar.

This writing salon is a safe environment for writers to generate work, to clear their palates, to find their voice. If you have any questions about the format, the technology, the writing, please feel free to contact me. I encourage writers to sign up before the first session (the middle of September), or wait until the next session starts. I also hope to build a community and hope all participants will sign up for the whole session. ($200, payable through PayPal). Limited to 10 writers.

3) NEW: Online Salon for Poets

Tuesday evenings, 5-7pm, PCT. 5 meetings: Oct. 22, Oct. 29, Nov. 5, Nov. 12, Nov. 19.

This special Online Writing Salon for poets using the Gateless Method will offer generative writing and feedback on previous writing. We’ll meet, using Zoom. I’ll start each session with a prompt which may be text or image or music or motion. Then, we’ll write for about 10 minutes. Then, each poet will read her new work, receive feedback, and read a work that she has written beforehand and receive feedback on that as well. The session has 5 meetings. Please see the calendar. This writing salon is a safe environment for writers to generate work, find their voice, and shine light on what is working across their work. ($200, payable through PayPal).

WORKSHOPS

The Poet’s Toolkit: 3 tools

Honor your tender and fierce heart. Add tools to your poetry toolkit.

1) Monday, October 7, 6-8pm, PCT: You’ll start with SOUND, how your words can change your reader’s body. No experience necessary. You’ll write and share in a tremendously safe environment, using the Gateless Method. This online workshop will give you practical ways to distinguish this writing form from others, practice in applying the tool, and the light to show you how brilliantly you shine.

This workshop is completely online. You’ll meet at the same time, synchronously, write together online, and discuss online. You’ll laugh and learn together. (The cost is $60-$80, sliding scale.)

2) Tuesday, October 15, 6-8pm, PCT: The second will focus on LINE/BREAKS. You’ll explore the tension needed to hold a line, how linebreaks help breath and meaning, how the shape can enhance the subtle movement of thought. (The cost is $60-$80, sliding scale.)

3) Wednesday, October 23, 6-8pm, PCT: the third will focus on FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE/IMAGERY. You’ll explore the ways you can connect unlike things and reveal your unique sensibility through those leaps. In the metaphoric realm, you express the inexpressible. (The cost is $60-$80, sliding scale.)

All held online.

If you sign up for all three, you receive a discount: $150.

Limited to 10 participants.

RETREAT

NEW: The Writer’s Refuge

Saturday, September 28, 10am to 4pm, Mosier, OR

Experience writing in the wind and oak forest of the Gorge. Listen to the stories and poetry inside you, and find this safe haven to write with others.

During this retreat, you’ll experience the Gateless Method and its radical nurturing: guided meditation, shoulder massage, prompts, boundless writing, and rigorously positive feedback.

Come to this house in Mosier (5 miles east of Hood River, and 7 miles north of the town). Limited enrollment to 6 women. Lunch will be served to you. Experience the view of the mountains, the river in the distance, the lichen-covered scrub oak. Let loose your writing. No experience necessary. The cost is $120, lunch included.

But here’s the thing: how I get through trauma is by writing about it. Especially a shitty thing like my 13-year-old dog dying from a brain tumor four days after she showed the first signs. (Oops.)

It’s hard for me to process something without writing about it. My fingers itch to type out what happened those four days and, better yet, all those 13 years. I’m not trying to make readers cry; I’m trying to stop my own crying.

Writing doesn’t heal things; it shifts things. By writing something down, you move it from your heart to your hand, and that distance is often enough to do something else with the feelings. Distance doesn’t seal a wound, but circulating air helps. It’s what I’ve done to cope with abuse, addiction, loneliness, you name it. I’ve kept a journal since high school, and writing Julia Cameron’s morning pages helped me develop a practice of laying everything down on the page.

When I go to write about something really painful, I need at least two things: The first thing I need is to subvert my ability to compartmentalize. Shutting things in mental boxes has been my coping mechanism since I was a kid and different men did bad things to me. I looked away, kept quiet. I figured something was wrong with me because bad things kept happening. I was so good at shutting feelings away that I didn’t remember those things until I was 28 and felt what I thought was safe for the first time in my life.

The way to break down the compartment walls is to soften, to create the condition for vulnerability to rise. For me, that means playing acoustic music that breaks my heart open, like R. Carlos Nakai’s Canyon Trilogy. It can mean lighting incense and bowing to Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, and spinning my prayer-wheel, sending prayers to the starving people in Yemen or the caravan of asylum-seekers walking to the U.S.

Recently, a powerful teacher, Nina Hart, reminded me of Brené Brown’s work, and I watched her TedTalk, Listening to Shame. In it, Brown said:

–vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change
–the critic comes in as shame and tells you you’re never good enough and who do you think you are
–and the antidote to shame is empathy.

When the prayer-wheel in my hand turns, I feel the vulnerability of my privilege to be kneeling in a warm, dry room and able to spin a prayer-wheel in a hand that works, and I have to keep that awareness from turning to shame in the short distance from my alter to my desk. Shame can shut me down in an instant and tell me I’m not good enough to write, and who do I think I am… I have to hold on to that vulnerability so that I have the courage to write what hurts.

And in writing this post, I’ve just realized that I’ve been praying for years to Kwan Yin, the Buddhist Goddess, who empties a vial of compassion into the ocean. She is the queen of empathy. No wonder. I’ve had to pour compassion and empathy over myself to quell my shame in order to write.

The second thing that helps me when I write the hard things is a constraint. (I know that sounds like I’m contradicting step one.) The sonnet form is a wonderful one; all that math, the 5 iambic feet, 14 lines, helps create the necessary distance on my emotions so I can put words to them. Pain that is overwhelming can knock out your ability to find words. That’s what trauma does. Using different parts of the brain can help you access the linguistic centers. And there are simpler constraints like using only certain vowel sounds. Or letting the sounds of words drive the sense as I’ve done so often in the novel I’m writing.

I guess the thing about writing what’s in your heart is doing what you have to do in order to get the feelings out so you can deal with them. In this case, what I’ve decided to do, instead of writing about my dog who just died, is fold cranes.

Inside every crane I’m writing something I love and miss about my dog, like her floppy ears, the way she poked me with her nose to wake me up in the morning. And here’s the smaller constraint: I’m going to fold 13 strings of 13 cranes, 1 for each year she lived. I’m hanging the cranes on the railing on our deck near where she died with her head on my hand. The winter rains will batter the cranes, fray the thread I use, but if the cranes separate, they may fly, like the prayers in my prayer-wheel, like the feelings that are messy that I try desperately to order. I want my fingers to make pretty things, and in that way, I’ll create something like a poem, an elegy for a dog I’m not sure how to be without.

So, what can you do but grab your wrench and screwdriver and crawl under the table, because you’re writing, after all. And what can your dogs do, but help?

You think you might be able to manage your 50-pound Portuguese Water Dog, but pretty soon he’s flopping on you while your senior dog lowers her ears and wants to get into the pile but supervises, instead.

And even though you were writing about Sylvia Plath and reading her massive collection of letters that shows a girl who laughs, you think maybe part of writing is giving into laughter.

Because writing is like that. Tricky. Unpredictable. And even

though you wanted to fix the squeak, even though you made an effort to do that, what you did instead was find something core in you, an insuppressible joy.

You did crawl under the table, tighten the bolts, find a screw to fit the hole where one fell out. You did return to Sylvia.

And you wrote with greater clarity, words coming from a different place, not the one concerned with that annoying noise your elbows made on the table.

For a great look at writing, read Brain Pickings’ summary of Jeanette Winterson’s tips. You know her writing, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

For a workshop with laughter and learning, please join Kate Carroll de Gutes and me for a writing workshop:

Explore Point of View and Voice. What the heck are they? Are they different? Should you seek medical attention if you find them in your writing? Part generative writing, part instruction, this workshop will help clarify these writing elements. And you’ll laugh. Guaranteed.

When: Wednesday, Oct. 24, 6-8pm

Where: Multnomah Friends Meeting, 4312 SE Stark St, Portland, OR 97215, Room 23

How much: $80-100 sliding scale

To reserve your spot, contact the taller Kate at dangpoet@gmail.com

If you don’t know Kate, you should. She’ll change your life with her laughter, with her writing. Kate Carroll de Gutes lives in Portland, Oregon in a house with lots of light, wood floors, and a view of the best bridge in the city.  In the evenings, she sits at her great-grandparents’ quarter-sawn oak table and writes long-hand about grief, the drama of perimenopause and dating, riding bikes, and the joys and challenges of authentic living.  Also, she apparently uses a lot of compound nouns.

Won’t you join us?

I don’t know why I’m telling you this except all those birdsongs have been echoing inside me for hours. My old dog and I walked home, and after she ate her dinner, I shut the door to write this. The sky is now more charcoal than blue-gray, and I am writing to remake my body because my body turned gasp and babble, cackle and swagger.

At the end of January, when the alarm went off at 4:30 in the morning, I was in that type of sleep that rarely happens anymore, the feather-streaming sleep. When I walked outside and left my dog curled in her double-decker bed, the dark was warm against my cheeks. I walked under the streetlights, past my neighbors’ dark houses to the same bluff, the Willamette flowing below, the west hills in the distance, the clouds masking the super blood blue moon. I thought other people would be out, but I saw no one.

I continued along the bluff, checked the horizon for clouds breaking, white-rimmed ripping, to let out a glimpse of red, but there was only night, corpulent and full. Where the path turned to forest, I turned back. Then, in the deep of cedars, a drum started thumping. A man started chanting, his words a monotone under a monochromatic sky, where a moon we couldn’t see was setting, a moon eclipsed by the planet we were standing on, a moon turned blood-colored for more than an hour.

Only once have I seen land where I was standing eclipse another land. Twenty years ago, a team of us set out at night to climb Mt. Hood. The light was blue-dark. For hours our boots crunched up the steep slope, elevation making each breath hurt, making the stars so bright we turned off our headlamps. Our packs bent us, but we raised our eyes to the peak. At dawn, the sun began to rise behind us. On the valley floor, where we had left our dogs, our training, our separateness, we saw the pink pyramid of Mt. Hood rise on a purple landscape.

I’m writing this because something inside me is connecting without words. What does it mean to set out to witness the workings of the universe? Maybe it is to know with your body. When I say I am writing this to remake my body, I mean that I am writing with a sense of belonging, a knowing that is not of me, but through me.

I’m telling you this because you may recognize the baby-gurgle of an eagle’s cry before the word, eagle, occurs to you. You may know the river flows at night when you can’t see it. You know the white tip of your dog’s tail flutters when she hears your voice before you enter a room. You belong to the snow-capped mountain that lies behind the charcoal clouds. You belong. Call it trust.

I learned this term last June when my brothers and sisters returned for a family reunion to our hometown and found that the house we grew up in, the one where many awful things happened, was open. Someone had bought the place and was gutting it, stripping the second floor down to the studs, rebuilding it in order to flip it. Our house had burned in 1966, when I was six, and I had been inside only once since then.

On the second floor when we walked in, there were no walls, only the studs, like the ribcage of a deer carcass, and one bathtub in what used to be the bathroom my sister and I shared. In that bathtub our father did bad things to us. When my brothers and sisters walked into each room, we told stories, not as awful as that memory, and tried to remember how our mother’s desk faced the windows in her room, where her chaise-lounge was at an angle, how the front staircase used to curve. In the hall, I noticed a burnt beam bolted to a newer one, the newer one still fresh, with a solitary bead of sap, golden, hard, catching the summer light. One of my sisters said, “Look. They sistered in the new beam right into the burnt one.”

And that’s what this year has been: the beauty in the spark, joy in the face of destruction.

The sparks I’ve seen ignite into beauty have been stories, read and written. This year I’ve written in a prison, in libraries, a Friends’ Meeting place, pear orchards in blossom, online, in person, in coffee shops, restaurants, a pub, an American Legion hall, bookstores, church halls, retreat centers, a friend’s dining room, college campuses, a yoga retreat center in Tennessee, a writing center in Westport, CT, a music camp in Port Orchard, WA, a logging camp turned into an environmental learning center outside of Ashland. I’ve written by myself in cottages, cabins, planes, ferries, trains, busses, and cars, on the beach, in the forest, and along rivers. I’ve heard people read in reading series like Get Nervous, Unchaste, Incite, Burnt Tongue, VoiceCatcher, Grief Rites, Plonk, War Stories, book launches, panels on strong women characters, on trauma and disaster relief, on memoir. I’ve taken classes and given classes. And I’ve heard the same thing in every place, in every story, in every voice:

We hurt.

We hunger.

We have to have each other.

At the beginning of this year, millions of women all over the world marched together. In Belgium, Pakistan, Kenya, Sydney, Seattle, on the light rail my partner and I rode to the Portland march, women and girls in pussy hats threw joy in the face of destruction. This year we’ve heard the #Me,too stories and the bell tolling for sexual predators. Last week Addie Zinone, who was preyed upon by Matt Lauer in her twenties, told her story to empower and validate the other women who have come forward but cannot appear publicly. She said, “I want to put a face and a story to these women’s accusations because I’m seeing that they’re being doubted and I have to validate their claims.” Addie sistered in. Last week Senator Kirsten Gillebrand of NY called for a Senate investigation into the President’s sexual misconduct after the dozen women came forward again to condemn the President. She sistered in. Last week African-American women in Alabama sistered in, got out the vote, and ousted a pedophile who might have won a seat in the Senate.

This year I lost a sister-in-law who challenged my siblings when they thought that I would get AIDS, thought I was going to hell when I first came out as a lesbian. She stood up for me. And she stood up for more than me when she named her daughter after Lillian Hellman, when she marched for reproductive rights, when she advocated for kids who fell through the cracks in the CT education system. From her I have gained a niece who is a tree with deep roots, who is a beam of light.

In every writing group this year, I’ve witnessed brave acts: women writing stories that they read with relief and shame and fear choking them, wracking them, their stories landing in the hands of the other women in the group, landing like a gift, like a jewelry box opening to a dancing ballerina.

This year so much has burned: millions of acres of forests, the freedom to enter the U.S., relationships between our country and the world. But we will bolt the charred wood inside so many things we value to new beams, ones wet with the memory of how they grew. We are such sisters. We are strong with the joy of each other. We laugh. We weep. We are hungry for the stories in each other, in our bodies, the body of stories strong enough to walk out into the cold and dark, to greet the light returning.

Please write your story, read your story out loud, find women to share the load with you. Sister in.

Today the winds will break the measuring instruments on the west coast of Florida, a crane may fall on Naples, and too many people are without stars.

On the third day in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the 9th day after Katrina broke the wind meter, if you were displaced, you could get money from the Red Cross, but you had to know where to go. The lines started forming at the little Red Cross office at 3am, and since everyone seemed to own a gun in that state, the police arrived, too. When those of us assigned to the office got there at 6am, police cruisers were flashing their lights and cuffing desperate men who were out of money and food for their children. One of my co-workers said, “Let’s not put on our vests just yet,” and police escorted us through the backdoor.

We heard every story. That was our job. We filled out a packet of forms, and listened to the next. One older man I’ll never forget. His eyes full of cataracts, he kept smoothing down his shirt, the one he had worn since the storm, the only one he now owned. He told me that his wife was diabetic, and they didn’t want to go, everything they had, everything they needed like medication and the machinery was in that house, and the water rose so fast, and they had to swim for it, both of them in their eighties, and he lost his glasses, but he kept ahold of her hand, and the Red Cross gave her insulin, and he looked over my head because he couldn’t see my eyes, 9 days without seeing, and he was here, and he was in the shelter, and he felt lucky. His wife nodded.

The cameras on CNN are blurry with water and shaking, and they go out often. Irma’s hitting now. A fury worse than Katrina’s. And I’m in my house in Portland, OR, my house that doesn’t shake in the wind, a house that is not the first house I’ve owned, is not my only house, and most likely will never flood.

In the shelter for 4,000, we were in the direct path of Rita. And when we saw that white eye, like a cataract in a sea, move toward us on the enormous screens that so many families carted with them into the shelters, their savings accounts, the four of us went to the Red Cross Human Resource person who said, “Get out. Get out now or you won’t get out for weeks.” So, we sat in the orange seats high in the convention center and all four of us dialed and dialed. At three weeks into the disaster, there were 10,000 volunteers, and we couldn’t get through to the Red Cross travel agency. When one of us did get through, we passed the phone down the line. My flight home originally was scheduled for the exact hour that Rita was supposed to hit Houston, and we all got earlier flights. The only reason we got out was because we did not turn in the car we were given to get there and were supposed to turn in. We called it the stealth car because we hid it in plain sight, and we packed it with 6 volunteers and left before the highways were jammed with people trying to escape, that is, the people who could get to cars, the people who had them or knew people who had them.

The people in trailers, in subsidized housing, the people who can’t pay for a bus ticket, who can’t walk, who can’t see, those are the ones who will be lost. One woman told me she lived on the first floor of subsidized housing in her first bed ever. She was older than I was, and she kept saying, it was the wind what scared her. Everything was gone, and when the people made fun of the forms, when they smiled at me and found ways to make me smile, I learned they couldn’t read, and I read them everything they needed. I learned what I needed to write on the forms so they could get as much money as possible.

In the twelve years since Katrina, I’ve eaten eggs almost every breakfast. For the three weeks I was in the shelter, I didn’t eat an egg. With so much flooding, the chickens were wiped out.

Unless you’ve been in a disaster you don’t think of these things.

Irma is still battering Florida as I write this. The wind didn’t break the gauges the way they did in New Orleans, but Irma’s storm surge tore through two stories of everywhere. That means parking garages, trailers, ranch houses, subsidized housing, prisons, banks, hospitals, and libraries. Maybe Florida learned from Louisiana and didn’t store records, like birth certificates in basements. Maybe Florida didn’t open the jails and let inmates out the way Louisiana did, sex offenders released into shelters with children.

When I see the pictures of convention centers and high school gyms packed with people in orange seats in the stadiums, I can’t help but think of the convention center I was in, and how people set up compounds by piling clothes into shopping carts and stacked boxes and TVs to make some sort of privacy, normalcy. Women held up towels to shield girls when they changed their clothes.

How does someone emerge from water like that? How does someone find a star to guide them when all they see is mud or their belongings in a shopping cart?

In the Pacific Northwest, we speak water: landslide, flood, mold, watermark, salmon, sturgeon, waterfall, sneaker wave, tsunami, and now we’re learning fire: drought, burn ban, scorch, fire break, burn-out, ash, fuel, plume, suppression, evacuation. Fires rage across the state. Today the Eagle Creek Fire, started by a teenager tossing fireworks down a gorge, is 7% contained, consuming 31,000 acres, the iconic waterfalls that brought me to Oregon. On the second day the wind made the fire leap 16 miles in 9 hours. A horse cannot escape fire that fast.

When the winds subside in Hurricane Irma, people will line up for everything: bathrooms, trays of overcooked food, showers, electrical outlets to charge phones, computers to register their missing family members, confessionals. They will not eat fresh fruit. They will not drink milk. And they will not receive credit cards from the Red Cross because the country, as it did in Katrina, will not have enough plastic made to make the cards. We had to wait. In Katrina, we waited with people who were desperate for money, for gas although the pumps were empty, for medications, and no one told us when the cards would come because they didn’t know. The credit card companies had to get the factories to make the cards, and those factories were under water. With millions of people in Florida needing help, I doubt there will not be enough plastic for them, either.

The clients, that’s what we called them, always knew more than we, the volunteers, knew, and one day during the third week, the shelter was packed. FEMA checks were arriving. We had a riot. The National Guard had already been called in. These were men and women called back from Iraq, from serving in the war, soldiers whose houses were flooded, and they were called to guard Americans from harming Americans in the shelter. They were disoriented, grief-stricken, and angry. On September 11, the National Guard personnel were going to do a brief ceremony to honor the victims of 9/11, and another volunteer said, “Don’t be crazy” when I said I was going to go. He said, “Think about it. They’re going to fire their guns, and what’s the sound of guns going to do to someone just back from war?” I didn’t go. Nothing bad happened, but we had war-weary soldiers guarding displaced, dispirited people who had lost everything, who owned guns, who had no money, and who were tired of lines and wanted their $2,000 checks from FEMA. We had a riot.

In the shelter, we had 3 Sarah Jones. And Sarah A. Jones, a woman in her 60s, shook her head when she passed me after the riot and people settled into lines. I asked what was wrong, and she said another Sarah Jones had stolen her check.

And then, there was an older woman, maybe in her 90s, who refused to give her address when she was picking up her check. She told me, “Baby, I’m getting money. Why would I want to let my good-for-nothing grandchildren know where I live? Besides, my house is gone.” She tucked her check into her bra and walked away. A lot of people didn’t want to be found after the disaster.

The first days I was there, families were frantic to find each other. A man, whose day job was sweeping streets in New Orleans, had single-handedly set up a computer lab with donated desktops. We figured out how to register people in the Red Cross database.

One of the most amazing moments of my life started with a friend of the man who created the computer lab. She called me, Smiley, because I smiled a lot, because my heart was breaking and that’s how I coped, because I was born to pay attention to people’s stories, and she told me that her son had been in jail and was being released on parole, and she knew where he was being held but hadn’t heard from him, so I started calling down the list of social service agencies, and no one was picking up. But then Catholic Charities did, and somehow someone there knew the priest that visited that correctional facility, and I called that priest, and he knew that boy, and he would try to find the boy. And that evening, when we were able to give another inmate the microphone for the PA system, this huge guy we couldn’t find clothes for, who sang gospel all day long, earphones connected to a Walkman a volunteer gave him, his face dripping with the fervor, and he sang praise, and I was standing in the middle of the main floor where his voice echoed in the convention hall where we couldn’t see the sky, and men and women rose to their feet, children quieted down, and women sang harmony. The man sang over the loudspeaker, “Jesus,” and I was standing with tears running down my cheek, and my phone rang, and it was the priest who had the boy on the line, and I was standing next to his mother and handed her the phone, and after she hung up, we cried in each other’s arms.

That’s the moment I hold on to.

I hope there are moments for those people in shelters all over Florida, in the shelters where they will eat boxed cereal and powdered milk for breakfast, where they will have to guard their towels and clothes when they take showers, where they will have to wait for government money that will be too little, where they will have to find the paperwork that says they exist, they were born, they paid taxes because by the third week after a disaster, almost every claim is fraud.

I hope there are people looking for their relatives in shelters. I hope there are neighbors bringing fresh food to each other. I hope no one will be too busy, move on to the next disaster, to forget that each person needs a star, something to guide them, to hold on to.

When I was a kid, we didn’t use sunscreen. On the contrary, my friends smeared baby oil on their faces, covered cardboard panels with aluminum foil, and turned their faces into silver sunflowers. I didn’t do that, but what I did was just as bad: I rowed. For hours and hours I exposed myself to sunlight and its reflection. And for my whole life, I’ve sat in the sun with only SPF 15 on when I knew better. Cavalier. “Skin cancer happens to old people,” I told myself. Doh.

It’s no wonder I have actinic keratosis. They start as little flaky spots that don’t go away. The treatment at first is to burn them off with liquid nitrogen, spot by spot. But the doctor said there were too many she could see and too many she couldn’t.

When people saw my skin that looked like acid melted it, they reacted in many ways. The hardest was the little girl in the airport who cried and ran for her mother. Smiling and saying, “It’s okay,” didn’t help. Go figure. When I told people what was going on, most referred to their grandparent doing “the peel.” (Old people get skin cancer.) The kindest was the response by two different men, one a homeless man, another an ex-con, I think, who said, “Be well,” and looked me in the eye. The people who might have had the least kindness shown to them showed me the greatest.

Kindness takes many forms. And taking care of my body may be one of the kindest acts I can do. Just recently I’ve learned about ACEs, the Adverse Childhood Experiences survey. Kaiser and the CDC conducted a massive study and linked childhood trauma to adult diseases. They came up with 10 questions to measure how rough a childhood was, and basically, the rougher the childhood, the higher the risk is for an adult to get diabetes, heart disease, cancer, lung disease (even if you don’t smoke), broken bones, stroke, and more. It does not link skin cancer with childhood trauma, I’m glad to say. And the study does not take into account elements of resilience and other positive factors in childhood. But my score was high, too high.

What I’m learning is that knowing how to protect myself from disease and actually doing what I know I should do (wear hats and SPF 30+), taking steps to understand my childhood and the effects of it (usually by writing poems and stories), and finding ways to strengthen my lungs, gut, and heart are forms of kindness that flow backwards and forwards, heal actively and retroactively. They are offerings, intentional acts of kindness for the many kindnesses I have been shown. Please be kind to yourself. Please. Be well.

Cheryl and I snowshoed into our place in Mosier this week, and we heard and saw eagles near our house. That’s really unusual. Facing the valley in front of us, I saw 2 or 3 an hour soar over the pines and oak. On Wednesday I decided to find what drew them to our particular creek/valley. On my snowshoes I headed for their cries, that high-pitched gurgling, like a baby’s. Near us the Dry Creek, which runs half the year (thus the name), cuts a little gorge, and I figured that would make a perfect spot for coyotes to drive deer. When I looked over the edge, I didn’t see carnage, but I did see a mature bald take flight, turn abruptly, fly off. I was close. The smell around me was musky, not the cold of the snow or the pines. I was very close. Then, a raven berated me, loud, harsh. I headed straight for its tree. Every 10 feet or so, I stopped and listened. I was expecting to see a bright pink mess in the snow. A huge immature bald startled me, took off from the top of a dead pine right in front of me, brown on brown. Immatures don’t like leaving a good thing.

At the base of that tree, under the cover of living pine boughs, I found what the clamor was about. It wasn’t pretty. It was difficult to identify what the animal was, and the snow around it was slick but not pink. In me reeled a prayer for that little animal, a gratitude for feeding so many other animals, a sorrow for what it endured. And I ducked under those boughs and could barely breathe for the horror and sadness and awe in my throat.

There’s something in you, something clamoring, and sometimes when you find it, it’s hard to bear. It can feed you and others. But it’s hard.

Thank you for doing this work together. Thank you for trusting this process of writing, of Gateless writing. 

our haven for the week

This spring find the clamor in you. Spend 5 days writing on retreat in the stunning Hood River valley, April 18-23. You’ll stay in an incredible house, eat gorgeous meals, write all day, Sarah Byrden, another Gateless teacher, and I will guide you back to your bodies. You’ll find what’s inside you together, walk into it and out of it. Click HERE for more. Click HERE to write me.

You’ll return to yourselves. You’ll fly.